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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and welcome to a special bonus episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. We're on summer break right now, so there are no new normal podcasts appearing in August, so I thought it would be a good chance to do something special and a little bit unexpected, and have on a unique guest, if I may put it like that, namely my identical twin brother, Glenn Adamson. I thought this would be interesting because he, although he's not a philosopher, works in areas that are philosophically interesting, as I hope you'll be convinced, and also you'll all have the exciting challenge of trying to tell the difference between our two voices. So say hello, Glenn. Hi there. This is Glenn, and it's a pleasure to be on the podcast with you, Peter. We're actually recording this on our birthday, which of course is the same day, so happy birthday, Glenn. Happy birthday, Peter. Thank you very much. This is not a gag. I mean, this is not me doing two people. He's really a different person. Maybe we should say something at the same time so people believe each other. So let's both say at the same time, happy birthday. One, two, three. Happy birthday. Okay, so now you believe us? Good. So, Glenn, tell the listeners who you are apart from being my identical twin brother. Well, first let me say what a big fan I am of the podcast, Peter. Oh, thank you very much. I guess you could say I'm a museum curator, first and foremost trained as an art historian, and I have a particular interest in the history and theory of craft. So my work tends to be around issues of skilled making of one type or another, and I've looked at that in a lot of different situations, including things you might expect like furniture making or ceramics, but also things like fine art practice. So what does it mean to craft a sculpture or craft a painting, craft a piece of architecture? So a lot of what I do is try to chase the idea of craft around and culture and see where it actually lives and what people think about it. And he's too modest to say this, but he's also astonishingly good looking. Oh, yeah. That's part of what you bring to the table. Right. So I thought, obviously you've written a lot about craft over the years, but I thought we could maybe concentrate on what you talked about in your most recent book. So maybe just tell us the title of that and then we'll get into what the book is about. Sure. So the book is called Fewer, Better Things, The Hidden Wisdom of Objects. And it's a book that tells some personal stories actually from our family history, including particularly the story of our grandfather who grew up on a farm in Kansas. And he would be a great example of someone who knew a lot about the things in his life. He knew how to make ice cream from scratch. He knew how to build or mend a fence. He knew how to milk a cow. He knew how to fix a motorcycle or a tractor. I was really struck growing up watching him, you know, carve wood by hand or listen to him talk about his job as an aircraft engineer. In fact, he had a business card that said Arthur Adamson Wood Carvings and Jet Engines Made to Order. And it's that kind of person that I talk about in the book. So really it's an effort to get across the value that people who have a lot of knowledge and understanding of the physical world around us have. You might say it's a kind of passive knowledge, which, as you say, may be a kind of philosophically interesting idea. Actually, I guess a lot of people might think of this as the antithesis of being a philosopher, because philosophers are usually supposed to dwell in the abstract realm of pure thought. How could someone like me have possibly come from the same family as someone as our grandfather, because he was so handy and practical and kind of down to earth? But you think that there's something philosophically interesting about the practice of making things with your hands? I think there's even something very interesting about the fact that I think about craft all the time and you think about philosophy, because they're kind of opposite sides of the same coin. So the fact that both of us ended up having these primary interests in our career, I think that itself is kind of striking. But yes, in the book, I talk a lot about the concept of material intelligence. Even a minute ago, I used the word tacit, so tacit knowledge, for example. It's the kind of intelligence that somebody has, you might say, in their hands or in an embodied way. So knowing how to plane a board or knowing how to throw a pot at a wheel or knowing exactly what viscosity of acrylic paint you want to make a particular mark on a particular painting, those kinds of things are very, very difficult to put into language. But I still think that they deserve to be seen as a kind of intelligence and a kind of knowledge. Does it make a big difference that you're actually dealing with material? Because I was thinking that, for example, if I'm writing a podcast script, there's a lot of the same things going on, right? So I'm interacting with maybe language, I'm trying to put words together. And just as a craftsperson might not be able to spell out in great detail for you exactly why they're doing everything they're doing. I might not be able to explain to you why I think this joke works in a podcast. Okay, a lot of the time the jokes don't work. I know that. But when it does work, I might not be able to explain why it's just sort of funny, or whether a sentence is put together well or something. That's sort of like a craft type activity, isn't it? Even though there's no matter involved? Yes. And in fact, people often do use the word craft as a kind of metaphor. For example, people will talk about the craft of poetry. Or a well-crafted sentence. Well-crafted sentence. I've always been of the feeling though that material that's external to your body and external to language exerts a kind of friction and a kind of specificity on your creative work or the execution of an idea that is quite different to language. And so one example to kind of bear that out would be that any specific board of Walnut will have a slightly different set of qualities to any other board, which is quite different from the word walnut or the word wood. So I feel like material intelligence often has to do with a kind of adaptability and this infinitely rich, flexible capability of dealing with the stuff that you're trying to shape, give shape to. And this is an expertise you can only acquire by actually dealing with material of that kind over and over and over. This is one of the most interesting things about it is to think about the way that you acquire material intelligence and just parenthetically I'll point out that in general we seem to have a lot less material intelligence floating around in the culture than we used to. So on the farm where our grandfather was raised in Kansas he wasn't unusual in having all of these abilities, you know the ice cream and the fence and the cow and the motorcycle, he would have almost been expected to be able to do all those things. Whereas today I think that kind of general material intelligence is quite rare. We actually have a lot of specific material intelligence in our culture. So engineers who have a very, very deep relationship to a particular material, for example, or even people who make food for a living, so they know an awful lot about cooking chicken, an awful lot about making a sauce. What we seem to have less of is a general material intelligence can be applied to all sorts of different purposes. And I feel like that's a problem partly because it tends to make people underestimate the degree to which they have a lot in common with other people and other walks of life. So I think of that general material intelligence, a kind of literacy and objects as being like a social connective tissue that we are in danger of losing because of the increasing dependency that we have on technology. And that brings me back to this question of how you get trained in material intelligence, because you really cannot do it just by reading about it. And arguably you can't do it even just by watching a video that shows you how to plan that board or how to make that ice cream from scratch. You have to do it and then you have to do it again and again and again with your own body. And so when people say tacit or embodied knowledge, that's really what they mean. They mean that something that's been instilled in you, muscle and bone through your own direct experience, which is what makes it so very particular, not only particular to the materials, planning walnut as opposed to planning ebony as opposed to planning elm and what that feels like and how you need to work the tool, but also what's particular to your own body and what works for you, how you're going to stand the particular gestures you're going to make. So it's very, very rich, very complicated. And as I say, I think also self evidently a kind of knowledge. But it's still something that someone else can help you to acquire. If you have a classic relationship between the master and the apprentice, the apprentice is trying to plane the walnut or indeed the ebony. I didn't know you could play an ebony, actually. Amazing what you can plane when you're trying to plane the walnut and the master is standing over you and saying things like not so hard or slower or whatever and guiding you. But you still basically have to do it yourself or hold the tool like this or here's how I do it. So try it this way and then maybe you'll do it that way. Maybe you won't. And that's precisely the kind of situation that we probably don't have as much in our culture as we used to. So we don't have guilds. We don't have those traditional master apprentice relationships. We don't have farms where people observe and participate in those kinds of making. That I was describing. And so in general, we're more and more distanced from the world around us. So I always like to use the example of a chair. So maybe a lot of the listeners right now are sitting down and it might be interesting for them to think about how much they actually know about the object they're sitting in, what materials it was made from, how were those materials worked, where was it made, who made it, because material intelligence also has this kind of social imprint. And so, again, if you don't understand how something was made or who made it or what their lives were like, what kind of ethical responsibility can you have to your material environment? And obviously that has environmental implications and implications about other people's labor. So there's a kind of political dimension to this as well. It's not just knowing how to plan that board. It's also understanding what that means in a larger context. OK, because I was really wondering, what would you say if somebody objected to you? Well, OK, I don't know how to plan a board and I can't make a chair, but who cares? I don't need to know things like that because they make them very well at factories. I can go to IKEA. This podcast, by the way, not brought to you by IKEA, but I can go to IKEA. Other furniture shops are available and I can just buy these things. I don't need to know all this. And the reason why we don't have material intelligence anymore is that we don't need it because we've kind of outgrown that phase of human history. And you would say what to that? Yeah. And in fact, I'm no ace crafts person myself. So I'm certainly not sitting here saying that everybody needs to know how to make everything in their environment. In fact, I think, again, if listeners will just look around the room where that wherever they are or if they're in a car around that car interior, I would suggest that very, very few people could make everything within eyeshot of any one person at any given time. So it's not a matter of total knowledge in the sense of being able to make those things, but it's rather a matter of curiosity and awareness that, first of all, things are difficult to make and there are specific conditions in which they are made. And also the openness to the idea of material intelligence as a kind of material, sorry, as a kind of intelligence that we should value, which again has a kind of political dimension to it. So the idea that philosophy professors and manual laborers should be seen as different to one another and the level and importance of knowledge that they have rather than thinking that the professor has knowledge and the manual laborer doesn't. Actually, this thing about could you make everything in your life? There's a story that makes its way into a platonic dialogue. There was this sophist named Hippias. I think that's right. That is Hippias. And it's mentioned that he showed up at the Olympic Games and everything on his body he had made himself. So he'd made his own clothing. He'd made his own sandals. He'd made his own belt. And that was this is in ancient Greece. Right. And that was already thought to be a very remarkable thing to have done to have mastered all of these crafts sufficiently that he could even just kit himself out in a full wardrobe. So even then, that wasn't possible. Never mind now. Right. When the repertoire of materiality was much simpler, even at that point, it was past the horizon of human capability. I've been very interested to learn, in fact, from you, Peter, about Plato's thoughts on these questions, which is not something I had known about. But he apparently puts quite a high value on the concept of techni, which is one of these words that's hard to translate from the Greek, I guess. But you could say it's a rough equivalent to our word craft. Yeah, that's how people usually translate. Yeah. Art or craft. Right. So, for example, our word architect comes from master. Or technical. Yeah. Or technical. Yeah. So, you know, there is a place for craft, at least in ancient philosophy, where it's accorded a very high value. And our sense that craft might be a kind of lower calling or lower vocation than something that a lawyer or doctor or philosopher might do. That seems to me to be of relatively recent vintage. I would actually myself date it to the late 18th, early 19th century and the onset of industrialism, because I think it's only once you have the machine and the picture that making something by hand starts to seem somewhat ineffective or inadequate. So it's only by juxtaposition or contrast with industrial production, mass production, that craft starts to acquire all of these qualities that we tend to attribute to it. So, for example, traditionalism or smallness of scale, inefficiencies, slowness, but also, of course, positive characteristics like high quality or luxury production, humane qualities like the kind of warmth of hand-worked wood. The uniqueness of the item. Exactly. Because if it's handmade, there's only one. Yeah, exactly. Which, of course, relates again to questions of value, luxury production. But I'm also very opposed to the idea that having a high level of respect for material intelligence needs to mean that you spend more money on things. So, for example, I used the title, Fewer, Better Things in my book title. And that might sound like I mean, you should just buy things at Hermes once a year. But that's not what I mean. And I also like to use the example of, you know, let's say you're walking along the beach with a child and the child picks one stone up off the beach and hands it to you. And then you take it home in your pocket and you put it in a special place. And you always remember that day with that child because of that one stone. That to me would be a great example of what I'm talking about, even though it wasn't even made by that child. The child infused it in that moment with value. Gifts are often like that. Relics are often like that. And in a way, handmade artifacts are like that, too, because they have that single connection, that single moment of meaning that's put into them by a person. So my message, I guess, would be to say that it would be great if we all had lives that were filled with objects that were more like that rather than the kind of impersonal IKEA generated detritus that we actually seem to have all around us. Right. And now I'm starting to be worried we're going to be sued by IKEA. Taking their name in vain. Yeah, hopefully they're not listening. Let me go back to something we've been talking about a couple of times. And it actually relates to what you said about Plato, which is that craft is a kind of knowledge or that material intelligence is a kind of knowledge, because this is not the kind of knowledge philosophers usually think about. There's a whole branch of philosophy called epistemology. We've covered a lot of epistemological topics in the podcast. And usually epistemology is about knowledge that I would say takes propositional form. In other words, roughly speaking, there's a sentence you believe the sentence is true and then it counts as knowledge. If your reasons for believing that the sentence are true are good enough reasons that it amounts to knowledge. That's a very kind of rough outline. But the point is that knowledge would be propositional basically because you could spell it out in words. And we've already said that in the case of something like knowing how to shape a piece of wood into a straight board, there's something that transcends or escapes language. Right. Because you can't really just tell someone how to do it in words even. And it's also maybe not just a matter of having beliefs like it's you. It's I mean, you might also believe it's better to use this kind of tool, but a lot of it is knowing how to do something rather than knowing that something is the case or knowing that something is true. So do you think that is even appropriate to use the word knowledge in this case? I mean, I guess you do because you keep saying it. But why do you think that that counts as a kind of knowledge if it's not propositional? So we're talking about knowing how versus knowing that. So I know that this board is straight. That's knowledge. But in some sense, knowing how to plan it would not be. So I guess I would say two things to that. One is that I think it's such a common sense use of the word knowledge to include that kind of capability or skill that if we don't include it in our conception of knowledge, then we've probably gone wrong somewhere. So I would say maybe the the burden of proof there would be on the person who wants to hold to a very strict propositional definition of knowledge. But maybe a more convincing argument would be to say that the knowing how and the knowing that aren't actually separable from one another. So, in fact, if you are planning a board, there's going to be a moment when you look at it in a raking light to see if there's any high spots or low spots. And that is to some extent an embodied skill where you know what would like that should look like because you've done it a lot. And you also know what is going to happen if you run that plane across it again. And it's probably not something you're thinking through logically or consciously in the sense that you would a proposition. But there's also a sort of standard external fact finding process that's going on there. So I know that this board is not playing correctly yet in the same way that I know that you are bald. And by the way, so am I. So there's a way in which in craft processes, knowing how and knowing that are always bound up in one another in a manner that would be very difficult to disentangle. And I would imagine that that's probably true in other contexts of knowledge as well. Yeah, like playing piano, let's say, or surgery. Right. These are in fact are kind of craft material processes as well as though although we don't think of them as crafts. Yeah, exactly. I think music, athleticism, again, cooking, these are all kind of craft material processes like cooking. These are all things that seem quite close to craftsmanship. Surgery is another thing people often mention. I tend to think that the crafts are activities in which there's something left behind. So the reason you don't think of making furniture and playing basketball as being quite the same is because after the basketball game is over, it's over. Same with a violin performance. So it's something quite specific in the idea of making a chair and then having it sit there as the evidence of your work. And there's a lot that flows from that. So just to take one, to me, interesting example, you might notice that most of the things around you are symmetrical and wonder why that is. And one answer that has been given is that, well, people are symmetrical. So that means we like symmetrical things. But a much more convincing argument is that a symmetrical object is already a check on craft skill because if the left side and the right side match and it wasn't made in a rotational process on a lathe, for example, in a potter's wheel, but was actually just made by hand, then you know that the person who made it knew what they were doing because only somebody that knows what they're doing can make the left side and the right side match. And that probably is the reason that so many objects in our lives are symmetrical. So that's a good example of the way that an object that has been made, once it actually goes out into the world, has a kind of recursive relationship to the act of making. And you don't really have the same thing as that in basketball or Beethoven concertos. The participants in this conversation are also symmetrical. Yes, exactly. On our couch. Maybe, maybe too many twin jokes. Okay. So I think there might be this kind of philosophical prejudice against this idea. There's this thinking of material intelligence or craft as a knowledge in this way. But I'm struck by, to go back to Plato one more time, I'm struck by the fact that he actually treats technic craft as a kind of paradigm for knowledge. And a lot of the time in the Socratic dialogues, you get the impression that what Socrates is suggesting is that we need to find a craft or technic for virtue or ethics like living in the world that is more or less like the technic that say a carpenter has. So what he wants to do is acquire expertise in life that would work a lot like the way that a carpenter's expertise. Works. And I think there's a team also in Aristotle that picks up on that as well, because he talks about ethics being a kind of negotiation with this bewilderingly complex world where you have to react to each situation in the right way. And the situations are infinitely variable. And also the you as an agent will have certain features that distinguish you from other agents. And actually, this is something I was thinking might apply to the craft case, because like if I'm planing a piece of wood, it's not just what the wood is like. It's also what my body is like. How strong am I? How tall am I? Right. And Aristotle thinks that this, he actually says that this means that ethics is not a very exact science. So you can't, the philosopher can't come along and say, here's exactly how you're going to have to behave in all cases. Rather, all the philosopher, the ethicist can do is give you a kind of general description of what virtue is going to be like and how virtue works, how you can be educated into virtue. But the specific action you take in a specific situation is always going to be somehow something that the virtuous person has to discern in each case, which sounds a lot like what you've been saying about craft. Right. Actually, it's an ability to navigate material often that we're talking about when we talk about craft. And it is interesting to hear you talk about this because I think philosophy often has a bad rap among people who think a lot about craft because they assume that philosophy sort of has it in for physical embodied knowledge. And a great example of that would be the Cartesian mind-body split, which we're all looking forward to hearing about on your podcast soon. Yeah, I'll get there. So often people in my field will take that as a kind of prejudicial structure where the mind is held to be higher than the body. It's exalted above the body in some way, which I think is not probably a satisfactory reading of what Descartes was thinking about. We'll find out. Right. I realize there's a complicated story there, but I think that in general it would be much better to fold material intelligence or similar related topics within the domain of philosophical curiosity rather than to think of embodied knowledge as somehow opposed to philosophical knowledge. You know, I think you can draw that conclusion because of this idea that embodied knowledge is tacit. But in fact, I think that you can perfectly adequately philosophize about tacit understanding. There's another theme in Aristotle actually that in fact, I think if I were going to point a finger at a bad guy here, I would probably pick Aristotle and not Descartes, despite the parallel I just drew to ethics. Because when he talks about knowledge in his work on epistemology, he says that knowledge in the strict sense has to be general and universal. So exactly the opposite of what you've been saying. And in the Aristotelian tradition, therefore, there's this very strong tendency in ancient and medieval philosophy to say that knowledge is always about abstracting or getting away from the particular. And so then to come along and say, well, here's this kind of knowledge, which is all about having a kind of sense for the particular, which in for an Aristotelian would actually always have to do with matter, right? Because it's matter that makes things particular in Aristotelianism, at least that's the usual story. So their idea that knowledge is abstract, universal, general, necessary, not contingent and tied to these particular one off cases, that is a really strong push to think that knowledge isn't like craft. Knowledge is something propositional, it's something general, it's abstract, right? So that's a very Aristotelian way of thinking about knowledge, which I think you're challenging. But of course, other philosophers have challenged it. So even in Islamic philosophy, which is the field that I work on in my day job, so to speak, or part of my day job, there are philosophers who came along and suggested that there might be kinds of knowledge, which involve the direct confrontation between the knower and an individual thing. So like just eyesight. So if I'm looking at you and seeing how handsome you are, I'm using my vision to know that you're handsome. And I don't need to abstract there and come up with some kind of universal thought about beauty or handsomeness and apply it to you. I just see you. Right. And another example, which is really relevant here, I think actually, is the relationship that you have to your own body, right? You just feel yourself in space, right? Which is in a lot of ways like what you're talking about, the kind of feel that you have for a material like wood. So the ability to play on the board would not be not totally unlike feeling pain, for example, you would just know it and it would be present to you. Right. Or even I was thinking, I guess, more like it would be knowing where your arm is. Or the knowing how to throw a ball or maybe the ball is not a good example because there's another object. But say knowing how to perform a dance move or even knowing where you are in the dance move. Right. That kind of intimate awareness you have for your body convinced some philosophers. So, for example, this 12th century Persian philosopher named Sukhrodi, he thought that that was the paradigm of knowledge, this immediate confrontation you have with yourself. That would be, for him, a paradigm of knowledge. And he admitted that you could have abstract universal knowledge as well. But for him, that was a kind of secondary, lesser form of knowledge. That's a very anti-Aristotelian point of view. And if we might leap ahead by 2000 or 1000 years to the present, you can also see how very attractive this idea of knowledge is, something that is very, very specific and localized, particular might be. You might even associate it with the local food movement or the idea that you should try to live on the resources within a 12 or 20 mile radius from where you live because of its environmental benefits. And without getting into the big topic of right wing politics in the last few years and this kind of nativism that we have seen too deeply, I do think there's certainly merit to thinking about socially embedded and physically embedded knowledge as being more worthy of respect. And again, that gets back to these issues of labor as well, because, again, if you think of people who are in manufacturing or other so-called menial trades, big scare quotes around the word menial, if you were to think of those as being simply a different form of knowledge rather than a lower form of knowledge to so-called white collar trades, I think that would already make a huge positive contribution to the way in which our public discourse seems to unfold. So, you know, this idea that knowledge is local to each person's experience and it is experiential in that way. And that craft might also be a paradigm for that, particularly in the sense that craft is something you acquire over many years of experience. So it's really people's lives that you're talking about as well as their livelihoods. I think that kind of move seems to me very urgent at the moment. So that's, in fact, one of the main reasons I wrote the book. And I suppose that you're not mostly talking to philosophers in the book. Do you think that what you want people to take away from all this, would it be maybe that everyone should maybe learn how to do something that's a craft? Would that help? Or I think it would be helpful if only to, you know, instill people a little bit of a little bit of humility around the issue of material intelligence, because when you do try your hand at something, you realize not only how difficult that thing is, but how difficult lots of other things might be as well. But it's also, again, it's a kind of curiosity that I'm trying to encourage. You know, reading a book is not the same as going into the workshop, in fact. So it's more that I want people to see material intelligence as being this big, wide enveloping continuum which has within it, yes, potters and furniture makers and weavers, but also scientists, also philosophers, also engineers, also children. You know, I actually think children have a very intuitive relationship to their own material intelligence. In some ways, I think we might train it out of them in a lot of cases. So it's really an inherent human faculty that I'm trying to describe, the same human faculty that Plato was trying to describe. And all I'm saying is we should have more instinctive respect for it. And I guess that pretty much everyone has this in some spheres already. So really what they maybe need to do is not so much grow, learn or craft, although that might be a good idea to. But realize that, for example, they're good at cutting onions and that thing that they're good at, cutting onions actually could be could appear in a lot of other parts of their life too and in other people's lives. Exactly. OK, well, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. It's been a huge pleasure and we will resume normal service in September when both the series on Byzantine philosophy and the series on Africana philosophy will return. So I'll talk to you then. Thanks very much.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and this is a special bonus episode to give you all something to listen to while the podcast is on summer break. As some of you may have seen, I have a book coming out. Not another installment of the book series based on the podcast, you can get all six of those from Oxford University Press, and there are more on the way, but a volume called Don't Think for Yourself, Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy. It brings together a lot of the things I learned while I wrote the podcast on medieval philosophy in the Islamic, Latin, Christian, and Byzantine cultures, and adds some ideas from my other research. All of that is brought to bear on an issue that has become increasingly urgent in recent history, how should we form beliefs on the basis of expert authoritative testimony? The book will be published by University of Notre Dame Press and will appear in October 2022. You can pre-order it from their website, undpress.nd.edu, and get a 20% discount if you use the order code 14FF20. That's 14F as in fabulous book, F as in fantastic present for any gift-giving occasion, 20. To whet your appetite, I've recorded the first chapter, which you're about to hear. It introduces a central concept in the book, Taqid, which means the uncritical acceptance of ideas based on authority. In the rest of the book, I look at lots of other medieval ideas about belief and authority, for instance, the contest between Plato and Aristotle as authoritative authors, the attempts of women authors to establish themselves as authoritative, and the use of philosophy in interreligious debates. Again, you can get the book from Notre Dame University Press. It's called Don't Think for Yourself, Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy. As always, thanks to everyone out there for listening, and if you get the book, then thanks for reading. Chapter 1, Taqlid, Authority and the Intellectual Elite in the Islamic World I live in Europe, where people usually ride bicycles, and recently I was riding with my wife through Munich. We came to an intersection. Ahead of me, my wife slowed down, checking for oncoming cars, then went across. It suddenly struck me that it would be perfectly reasonable for me to follow her across the intersection without bothering to look whether it was safe. After all, my wife is reliable and has good judgment, both in general and when it comes to the rules of the road. Indeed, whereas I am a frequently distracted philosopher, she's a normal person, so when it comes to this kind of thing I tend to trust her more than I trust myself, and she would hardly be crossing if a car was coming, so why not ride straight across, trusting her implicitly as I do? I would quite literally be staking my life on the assumption that she made the right decision, but this was a bet that, I realized, I would quite happily make. Then I looked for traffic anyway, just to be on the safe side, but it got me thinking about how we make decisions and form beliefs, and the fact that we often do so simply by accepting the judgment of other people whom we take to be authoritative. I've been thinking about this for a while anyway, because this very issue lies at the heart of many of our current political controversies. We are increasingly warned against taking our beliefs from sources that were previously considered authoritative. Yesterday's paper of record is today deemed fake news. Well-credentialed scientists with expertise in vaccinations or climate change are greeted with distrust. Michael Gove, responding to economists' gloomy predictions of Britain leaving the EU, ventured that, People in this country have had enough of experts. Part of the problem is that many political issues are so vast in their complexity and scope that they defy the ability of individual people to form beliefs in a way that seems irresponsible. How many of us understand enough about the atmosphere to have a reasonably informed personal opinion about climate change, never mind being in a position to critically evaluate what climatologists might say? On this and many other issues, we are apparently in the politically and epistemologically uncomfortable position of choosing whose opinions we should blindly accept. What I want to show in this book is that we can learn something about blind acceptance and how to avoid it from a surprising source, medieval philosophy. Surprising because medieval philosophers have a reputation for forming their beliefs in the most uncritical of ways, bound as they were by authority, locked into inflexible world views by their theological commitments, and threatened with institutional sanction, or worse, if they dared to step out of line. I will implicitly challenge such assumptions in this book, but that is not so novel. No expert in the field would today accept this description of the medieval mindset as slavish and merely imitative. My main point will be a different one, namely that medieval philosophers engage in explicit and productive reflection on this very question of when and how one might responsibly form one's beliefs based on authority. I am going to cover quite a lot of territory, both chronologically and geographically. I will highlight authors and texts from the end of late antiquity, in the 5th century or so, down to the European Renaissance, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with occasional forays even later than that. The scope of the book will thus cover what one leading scholar of the field, John Maronbong, likes to call the Long Middle Ages. Furthermore, I am going to look at three distinct, yet closely interconnected medieval cultures. Some of what I will say concerns Latin Christendom, which is the more familiar terrain for many readers, but I will also talk about intellectuals in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, and in the culture to which most of my own research has been directed, the Islamic world. There will be Christians there, too, as well as Jews. But in this first chapter, I want to focus on a concept that has its original home within Islam itself, and more specifically in methodological debates that raged between Muslim scholars of law and theology. These scholars did us the favor of finding a single word to describe the phenomenon I am interested in, taqlid. This word is often translated as imitation, uncritical acceptance of authority, or blind following. It comes from a verb, kalada, meaning to gird or hang something upon the neck, for instance a necklace placed on a sacrificial animal. Fairly early in the Islamic legal tradition, perhaps in Iraq, around the end of the 8th century, it came to be used for reaching judgments on the basis of someone else's authority. Someone who practices taqlid, in Arabic a mukalid, has not personally reflected as to whether the judgment in question can be grounded in the sources of Islamic law, namely the Quran and the hadith, or collected reports of the sayings and deeds of the prophet. Such reflection is called ichtihad, meaning effortful exertion. It relates to the well-known Arabic word chihad. And someone who performs ichtihad is a mujtahid. This terminology was, as I say, first used in legal contexts, but it quickly became important for theologians, too, who began to debate the very question I have just been raising. Is it alright to form one's beliefs, notably one's religious beliefs, just by following apparently reliable authority, hence by engaging in taqlid? Or do we have a responsibility to perform ichtihad? As we might put it, should we really try to think for ourselves? In addition to suggesting that medieval Muslim thinkers had useful insights about this question, I want to suggest an even more surprising historical thesis. Some readers may already have been thinking, when I mentioned the typical prejudices about medieval thinkers, that these prejudices would not apply to at least a handful of philosophers from the Islamic world. These were figures I like to think of as the Aristotelian avant-garde, men like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, who thought that all important beliefs could be established by pure reason. They accepted the religious teachings of Islam, but emphasized that these teachings were ratified and ultimately explained by Aristotelian philosophy. For them, religion was really just a less technical presentation of fundamental philosophical truths, in a form that could be appreciated by non-philosophers. With this, the Aristotelian avant-garde espoused a rationalism more radical than we find in practically any thinker of medieval Christendom in either the Greek or Latin spheres. In Arabic, these Aristotelians were often referred to as falāsifah, from fāsifah, which is of course just a loanword from Greek based on philosophia. Some have exalted the falāsifah as the only true philosophers in the Islamic world, and perhaps in any medieval culture, precisely on the grounds of their unabashed rationalism. But ironically, the elitist rationalism of the falāsifah was itself an inheritance from the Islamic legal and theological tradition, or so I shall argue. It was by transposing the legal and theological concepts of ijtihad and taqlīd to the context of Aristotelian philosophy that the falāsifah were able to articulate their own self-conception as independent thinkers who followed reason wherever it might lead. Let us return then to the debate over taqlīd within Islamic law and theology. Perhaps the most important figure in the beginning of this debate is Ash-Shafi'i, the founding figure of one of the four major schools of Islamic law. Ash-Shafi'i is well known for his endorsement of rational method in law, which would allow for standardization of legal practice across the enormous Islamic empire. With this, he ushered in a new phase of jurisprudence, in which the judgment of a class of trained experts would replace more informal legal customs which might differ from one place to another. A well-known example of the methods he proposed is analogy, where the ruling in a clear case is transferred to an unclear case, because the second case is relevantly similar to the first. For instance, if wine is explicitly forbidden, by analogy, whiskey is also forbidden because it is intoxicating just like wine. Ijtihad could include the use of analogical reasoning, but should not be identified with this or any other particular rational method. It is the use of any such method to arrive at an independently derived legal opinion rather than uncritically accepting the judgment of others, which of course is taqlīd. Ash-Shafi'i himself does not always use the term taqlīd in a pejorative sense. It is good and proper to be a muqallid when it comes to following the Prophet and his companions. But he thought that any jurist worthy of the name should be willing and able to perform ijtihad, which he deemed necessary because earlier legal scholars had often disagreed or simply offered decisions without any accompanying basis. As Ahmad al-Shamsi has written, whatever reasoning prompted such earlier opinions was a black box and could not be a basis for further jurisprudence. Ash-Shafi'i's followers were even more forthright in their critique of taqlīd, which for them came to have an exclusively negative connotation. This forced them to explain how they could indeed be followers of Ash-Shafi'i himself, a rather ironic project that calls to mind the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which Brian instructs his deluded followers, you've got to think for yourselves, you're all individuals, at which point they all shout, yes, we are all individuals. The Shafi'is dealt with the problem by either restating and hence in effect personally endorsing their master's own legal reasoning to get around the black box problem or improving on that reasoning by offering corrections to what Ash-Shafi'i had said or further evidence to support his findings. This set a rationalist standard for jurisprudential reasoning. A qualified jurist is one who can supply an evidential argument or proof, in Arabic hudja, for each decision. In contrast to this, taqlīd was defined already in the early 10th century as kubu'l kalbila hudja, accepting a position without proof. There was a famous debate among scholars of Islamic law as to how widely and for how long independent reasoning, or ijtihad, was practiced by jurists. It used to be a common place to say that, relatively soon after the time of Ash-Shafi'i and other school founders, jurists simply stopped bothering with ijtihad and contended themselves with good old-fashioned uncritical taqlīd. But a now classic article by Wal Halak argued that the so-called gate of ijtihad was never closed, if this means that legal scholars at some point entirely withdrew from personal reflection. To the contrary, we find even later jurists saying, for instance, that it is not possible for an age to be devoid of a mujtahid. Simply as a practical matter, independent reflection was needed to deal with new questions, such as the permissibility of using coffee and tobacco, much discussed by jurists of the Ottoman Empire. It has, however, been argued that ijtihad was applied in exceptional cases by exceptional figures, and that most jurists since the Middle Ages restricted themselves to studying and following the tradition. The mujtahid would be a bold and even iconoclastic figure, one who effectively sought to play the role of a new founder like Ash-Shafi'i. In light of this, Sherman Jackson has suggested that we simply think of taqlīd as a form of legal precedent, dropping more pejorative translations that have to do with blind obedience. We don't need to wade into the historical debate over the frequency and historical lifespan of ijtihad. For our purposes, it is enough to note that in the Sunni traditions, it was common to recognize a hierarchy of more and less advanced legal scholars. At the top was the pure mujtahid, who worked out a legal reasoning for his decision based directly on revealed sources. At the bottom was the pure mukalid. This was the jurist who simply memorized previous decisions and reapplied them. The same status was occupied by ordinary people, often called al-awām, literally the common people, and similar in force to the ancient Greek phrase huwā pālōy. The Arabic term al-jumhūr has the same meaning. As that implies, we are dealing here with a straightforward epistemic elitism. The legal scholar who performs ijtihad has real knowledge, whereas the ordinary person or taqlīd-bound judge is doomed to ignorance or, more optimistically, mere opinion. The elitism stands even when we take into account that jurists recognized other levels between the pure mujtahid and the pure mukalid. For instance, one might perform what was called ijtihad within a school, or affiliated ijtihad, that is, reasoning within the dictates and principles of one's legal tradition. Another way that common believers might avoid slavish passivity was through a minimal form of ijtihad called following. This did not involve requesting a full rationale for a judgment, but simply meant pressing jurists to confirm that they were indeed basing their judgments in valid sources of religious law and not personal opinion. The Shiite legal tradition, meanwhile, attacked the epistemic elitism of the mainstream Sunni schools for being, in a sense, not elitist enough. For the Shia, Islamic law cannot be properly applied without the guidance of the inspired imams who descend from the family of the prophet through his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. What was for them unconstrained legal reasoning, as practiced by Ash-Shafi'i and other Sunni jurists, resulted in mere opinion, not knowledge. Yet as Shiite legal thought developed, it also made a place for ijtihad, of course within the guidelines laid down by the imams. So we find Shiite scholars too, contrasting the knowledgeable scholar with the typical believer who may, and indeed should, engage in taqlid. As one such scholar put it, it is incumbent on the ordinary person to act by taqlid if he is incapable of ijtihad. Intellectuals who engaged in rational Islamic theology, or kalam, were concerned with, and often formally trained in, Islamic law. So it is no surprise that these debates concerning the permissibility of taqlid found their way into theological discussions. I don't have space here to tell this whole story, any more than I have told the whole story of taqlid in Islamic jurisprudence, but it can at least be mentioned that the early thinkers we usually group under the heading of Mu'athazilism generally took themselves to be carrying out a religious obligation to engage in speculative inquiry. This was the view of the leading thinkers of the Basra school among the Mu'athazilites like Abu Ali al-Jabaiy and his son Abu Hashim al-Jabaiy. It is reported of them that they held the following, We know of a dispute between Abu Hashim and another Mu'athazilite theologian, Abu al-Qasim al-Barkhi, known as al-Qaabi. Unusually within this tradition, al-Qaabi held that ordinary believers who engaged in taqlid were doing just what they should. He distinguished between, on the one hand, an elite of theologians who had the capacity and therefore the obligation to pursue knowledge of God through speculative inquiry, and on the other hand, those who are morally obligated to apply taqlid and conjecture. These are the lay people, the slaves, and many women. This is of course simply the familiar elitism of the jurists applied to the subject matter of theology. The more demanding attitude of the Mu'athazilites, who wanted all believers to engage in what we might call an ijtihad of theological reflection, was taken up by the most famous critic of Mu'athazilism, al-Ash'ari. He and his followers, the Ash'arites, are sometimes thought of as being less rationalist than the Mu'athazilites. There is some reason for that, because of such teachings as their divine command theory of ethics, which they opposed to the Mu'athazilite view that humans can work out their moral obligations through pure rational reflection. But on the subject of taqlid, the Ash'arites are remarkably rationalist too. Already in al-Ash'ari himself, we have the idea that the Qur'an contains clear proofs and arguments that establish God's existence and his omnipotence over all created things, and that prove the genuineness of Muhammad's prophecy and the obligation to follow his example. As Richard Frank has written, al-Ash'ari assumes that, The reasoned arguments are probative and complete on the grounds of theoretical reason alone. For, if they are not so, then the Prophet's claim to authority cannot be reasonably accepted. Taking up this approach, later Ash'arites cite the Qur'anic verse, Most of them do not know the truth, so they turn away, as a command to avoid taqlid. One theologian said that the verse, shows that to accept taqlid is wrong, and that one must carry out the proofs and demonstrations, so that those who practice taqlid lack knowledge because they turn away from reasoning. Frank has argued that in their strictures against taqlid, the main concern of the Ash'arites was that believers should be free of uncertainty. A muqallid might not be an unbeliever, but is a believer in only a qualified sense, because their convictions might be overturned by doubts that occur to them or put to them by scatics. In the absence of secure proofs, they will inevitably be vulnerable to this eventuality. Frank is clearly right about this. For instance, he cites a report concerning the Ash'arite theologian al-Isfara'ini, who said that commoners are of two types. One consists of people who are not wholly lacking in a kind of reasoning, even if it is imperfect in its expression and its grounding. Such people are truly believers, and in the proper sense, have knowledge. The second consists of people who are completely unenlightened in this respect, and have no real knowledge. Rather, since they believe through taqlid, their belief lacks integrity, and not one of them is free of uncertainty and doubt. However, I suspect that the Ash'arites also had a further concern, which is a specific case of what philosophers now call epistemic luck. Believers whose convictions are formed by taqlid will only be right if they happen to follow reliable authority, and this will only be the case if they happen to follow authority that is in fact reliable. Thus, a report on another theologian, Abu al-Qasim al-Ansari, has him saying that those who lack knowledge have only belief founded on conjecture and opinion. If they are right in what they believe, they believe by an unreflected acquiescence to the truth, and if they fail to grasp the truth, they are in error and deviate from the truth. We saw that the jurists qualified their legal elitism by distinguishing between levels of taqlid, with one or more middle positions between outright taqlid and fully independent ijtihad. The Ash'arites did much the same in the theological context. One of their foremost theologians, Al-Juwaini, said that ordinary believers have knowledge in an extended sense if they have a sufficiently strong feeling of certainty in their faith. He worried that demanding full-blown rational inquiry from them is imposing an obligation that cannot be fulfilled so that they are required only to have correct belief that is free from doubt and uncertainty, and they are not required to know. Not required to know, that is, in the strict and proper sense of the knowledge attained by an expert theologian, such as Al-Juwaini himself. Another qualification that, again, as in the legal case, leaves the elitism standing, is that the community as a whole must include select individuals who perform inquiry. In effect, the theologian is doing the epistemic work for everyone else, just as there need to be some mujtahids in law without every Muslim having to perform ijtihad. The ideas I've just surveyed appear early in the history of Islamic theology and are echoed in the following centuries. Here my discussion is necessarily even sketchier, but allow me to refer to just three later theologians who took strikingly critical positions toward taqlid. I first want to mention the Persian thinker, a Duwani, who talked about his own journey from taqlid to ijtihad. I said to myself, O soul which has these beliefs, do you take them to be true and accurate on the basis of intellect or pure taqlid? My soul replied, Even though they are taqlid, still they arise from something true and from the discernment of intellect. By way of proof, the soul added, When it comes to my beliefs, I am the muqallid of someone who is my mujtahid, and all his beliefs are true, since they arose through the discernment of intellect, therefore my beliefs are all true. Even though this proof has been constructed in a perfect arrangement, still when I placed the argument on the scales of intellect, it had no weight. So I debated with myself anew and asked my soul, What do you believe about the truth of the mujtahid? Could it be that there is an error among his beliefs or not? My soul chose the first option. So I said to it, On that assumption, the major premise of the proof which you built to prove your beliefs is false. For whoever errs cannot be given confidence such that all his beliefs are certain to be true and accurate. And this argument has as its conclusion that not all the beliefs of the muqallid are true. Furthermore, if the aforementioned assumption of the proof were true, then it would follow that the beliefs of the muqallid of every religion and creed would be true by the same reasoning, and then the soul could not respond. Notice that Dawani here invokes the consideration I just mentioned, that taqlid exposes believers to epistemic luck. If you are not yourself engaging in ijtihad, you just have to hope that the sources of your taqlid beliefs knew what they were doing. This is vividly supplemented by the final point that adherents of religions other than Islam could happily retain their false beliefs by depending on taqlid, with no less justification than the Muslim muqallid. Around the same time in the Islamic West, or Maqreb, we find the Moroccan scholar Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Sanusi taking an even stronger line against taqlid. He lays down a blanket ban against it, even for ordinary believers. This universalist view has been discussed in a recent book by Khalid al-Ruwaihib, who explains that for a Sanusi, every Muslim must master the basics of Ash'arite theology. Everyone has the responsibility to engage in inquiry so as to reach certainty, and those who do not do this are unbelievers. When a Sanusi demands certainty, he's asking for more than the subjective feeling of confidence that a juwani had in mind, which could give the ordinary believer knowledge in an extended sense. As I've pointed out elsewhere, theologians who allowed taqlid to the non-expert were depending not only on that feeling of certainty, but also on the tacit assumption that the non-expert Muslim has indeed gotten epistemically lucky. The sources of belief he happens to follow are indeed reliable, so his beliefs wind up being true. As a juwani observed, had this ordinary Muslim been born a Christian or Jew, he or she would have had false beliefs instead. You can see why that would not be enough for a Sanusi. He wants believers to do more than feel confident in believing something that is, fortunately for them, in fact true. Believers must go through arguments that establish the truth of their beliefs. Their feeling of certainty must be earned and well justified. Sanusi was an extremely influential figure, whose works were received among other places in sub-Saharan Africa. One short work of his is still taught in modern day Nigeria, and in the centuries after his death there were commentaries written on his works in Fulfide. The esteem in which he was held is exemplified in one story circulating about him, a member of his circle found himself unable to cook meat because mere acquaintance with a Sanusi made fire ineffective, the point being that his associates were guaranteed to avoid burning in hell. His intellectual legacy included teachings on Taqlid by African scholars, such as the 17th century Fulani theologian Muhammad al-Wali al-Maliki, based in what is now the country of Chad. Like a Sanusi, he held that there is a universal responsibility laid upon all Muslims to avoid Taqlid, and become acquainted with argumentative proofs for their beliefs about God. As Dorit van Dellen has pointed out, this general demand was, in a way, an attempt to assert the standing and importance of the scholarly elite. Scholars should provide guidance to common believers by showing them, for instance, that the Quran contains proofs of God's existence and omnipotence. Van Dellen tells the story of a West African town called Sijilmasa, where ordinary citizens were quizzed to see whether they could answer philosophical questions about the oneness of God. In that sort of context, theologians would have as reliable a function in society as the driving instructors, without whose help you aren't going to get your license. This is an important point. As was noted by early followers of Ash-Shafi'i, avoiding Taqlid does not imply that you actually do everything on your own, with no help. It is consistent with taking advice, what was in a legal context called consultation, so long as the person who receives the advice understands the reasoning according to which the decision has been reached. In this sense, even theologians who took the universalist view that all Muslims should ground their belief in rational understanding typically had a very elitist position. When the early Mu'tazilites, al-Ash'ari and his followers, a Sanusi or Muhammad al-Wali, said that every believer should do a bit of theology, that is what they meant, a bit of theology, enough to give them a secure, well-justified confidence in the fundamentals of their religion. As expert theologians, these same figures would have seen themselves as occupying a much higher level of rational understanding. And that goes double for theologians who in a more condescending fashion advised that ordinary believers avoid independent inquiry entirely. One theologian who had this sort of view was the great Ash'arite theologian, philosopher, and mystic al-Ghazali. He was a student of al-Jawaini who, to quote Richard Frank again, held that, Real knowledge is the property of a small elite, who are capable, on the basis of their own insight and ability, of independently working out the rational demonstrations of the truth of their belief against any conceivable difficulty or counterargument. Along the same lines, al-Ghazali reserved inquiry for the few, and prescribed pure taqlid for the many. In yet another version of that hierarchy we saw in the context of Islamic jurisprudence, he distinguished between true scholars who have knowledge and genuine certainty, theologians who attain some rational understanding but still accept many things in religion on the basis of authority, and ordinary people who never get past taqlid. He did concede that some few might rationally grasp the basic principles of Islam on the strength of convincing arguments found in the Qur'an, as already proposed by al-Ash'ari, but generally al-Ghazali thought it was not a good idea for most people to indulge in speculation. In fact, he wrote an entire work that was dedicated to discouraging common folk from engaging in theology. Its pursuit would as likely lead them astray as bring them to better understanding. As Frank Briffel has written for al-Ghazali, In the case of the ordinary people, taqlid is not only tolerated but welcomed, since an acquaintance with independent thinking would run the risk of having this group of people fall into unbelief. In al-Ghazali's most famous work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he aims the weapons of the taqlid debate on an unexpected target, the falasifa. These self-styled philosophers claim to be outdoing the theologians in the use of reason, as we'll see in a moment, but for al-Ghazali they were just engaging in taqlid with different sources. Instead of blindly following a legal scholar, theologian, or even a prophet, they chose to follow Aristotle. Here we have an example of being epistemically unlucky. Just as ordinary Muslims have epistemic luck insofar as their taqlid leads them to embrace genuine truths unreflectively, so philosophers accept whatever the Aristotelians say on the basis of their authority and wind up embracing falsehoods instead. In particular, they come to hold three beliefs that qualify as outright unbelief, that the universe is eternal, that God knows universals and not particulars, and that the afterlife is purely immaterial with no resurrection of the body. This is the charge sheet laid against the falasifa in the incoherence. Actually only the first of these three teachings, the eternity of the universe, is explicitly present in Aristotle. The second one about God's knowledge is distinctive of Avicenna, though based on Aristotelian premises. The third can also be ascribed to Avicenna, but is really a more general platonic commitment pervasive in philosophy starting with late antiquity, but no matter. Al-Ghazali's point, and his accusation, is that the falasifa cannot prove these things. How could they, since they are false? So they have been led to believe them through taqlid, rather than a reliable reasoning process. Anticipating a Dawani's point that taqlid can explain the religious beliefs of non-Muslims, Al-Ghazali even compares the philosophers' convictions to the way that Jews and Christians accept the religious faith of their parents. If Al-Ghazali is the most famous critic of the falasifa, then a Verroese would be the most famous critic of Al-Ghazali. In several works, including his pointedly titled Incoherence of the Incoherence, as well as his decisive treatise, he rebuts Al-Ghazali and along the way asserts an epistemic hierarchy that mirrors and seeks to replace the hierarchies we've seen in Muslim jurists and theologians. In doing so, he is taking up an earlier rationalist theory of philosophical supremacy, offered a couple of centuries earlier by Al-Farabi. As explained in a recent study by Feri al-Buhafa, Al-Farabi's book of religion argues that Islamic law is subordinated to philosophy, in particular to ethics. As Buhafa puts it, Al-Farabi requires merely that the jurist hold correct beliefs and possess the virtues of his religion. The jurist's role is to accept the judgments laid down by the religion's founder and his successors, if any. In the case of Islam, these would be the Prophet Muhammad and the four rightly guided caliphs, and then to apply these judgments to new or unclear cases, thus dealing with particulars rather than reaching universal determinations about human conduct. Similarly, the theologian is someone who deals with theoretical issues at the level of mere beliefs without having true understanding. In both the practical and theoretical spheres, such understanding is reserved for philosophy, which provides knowledge at the level of necessary and universal proof, which is dignified with the title Demonstration in Arabic Burahān. Al-Farabi thus states that all the excellent laws fall under the universals of practical philosophy, while the theoretical beliefs in a religion have their demonstrations in theoretical philosophy. Al-Farabi assumes that very few people will be in a position to understand these issues at a philosophical, that is, demonstrative level. So most adherents to a religion will have to embrace it at the level of mere belief, just like the jurists and theologians. Al-Farabi introduces an influential way of thinking about this contrast, derived from the Aristotelian logical tradition. Whereas philosophers grasp things at the level of demonstration, everyone else grasps them at the level of dialectic and rhetoric. To put it in another way, philosophers are in possession of proofs constructed in accordance with the strictures laid down in Aristotle's posterior analytics, and normal people hold their religious convictions having been persuaded by the sort of discourse analyzed in Aristotle's topics and rhetoric. As Al-Farabi puts it, dialectic provides strongly held opinion concerning the things for which demonstration provides certainty, or most of them. Rhetoric persuades about most of the things that are not such as to be demonstrated or the subject of dialectical inquiry. The excellent religion does not, then, belong only to philosophers, or to those who are in a position to understand things that are only discussed in a philosophical way. Rather, most of those who are taught and instructed in the beliefs of the religion, and accept its prescribed actions, are not in that position, whether this is by nature or because they are too busy for it. These people are not unable to understand commonly accepted or merely persuasive things. Here, commonly accepted, in Arabic, ma'shoor, is a technical term corresponding to the Greek endoxon. Endoxic propositions are those that are acceptable for use in dialectical arguments, as explained in Aristotle's topics. They are acceptable because they are held by just about everyone, or by those reputed for wisdom. Only when we seek demonstration do we insist on premises that are in fact, and without doubt, true. So for Al-Farabi, ordinary believers do not have certain knowledge, but this is alright, so long as they have epistemic luck. If the beliefs they accept through persuasion or acceptance of commonly held views are those of an excellent religion, they will have good opinions, and will perform good actions. The label ignorance is thus reserved for those unlucky enough to adhere to a false religion. The same idea is expressed in the title of one of Al-Farabi's better known works, which sets out a philosophical cosmology, anthropology, and political philosophy under the heading Principles of the Beliefs of the Inhabitants of the Excellent City. In other words, philosophy offers the true demonstrative basis for things that members of a successful religious and political community believe without proof. It should be obvious how close this whole line of thought is to the ideas about Taqneed and Ijtihad held among jurists and theologians. For Al-Farabi, the equivalent of the mujtahid, who thinks for himself and can give good reasons for his judgments, is the philosopher, who has grasped true conclusions by means of demonstrative arguments. Everyone else is engaged in some form of taqneed, following commonly accepted ideas or, at best, engaging in some kind of merely dialectical inquiry on the grounds of religious beliefs that are taken for granted. This would be the status of theologians, for instance. The only distinctively religious figures not subject to taqneed are the original lawgiver or prophet and his successors, but they are the exception that proves the rule, because these figures possess understanding at a philosophical level, in addition to the religious function they play. In the case of the prophet, perfect intellectual understanding is fused with a capacity to represent philosophical truths in a rhetorically persuasive way that will successfully induce taqneed in his religious followers, this being the function of revelation. Al-Farabi thus accepts wholesale the epistemic hierarchy of the elite Islamic scholars, albeit with new labels drawn from the Aristotelian tradition. But he denies that the scholars of Islamic law and theology are the true elite, who are capable of engaging in independent reasoning. That status is reserved for the philosophers. For a more elaborate statement of this philosophical version of epistemic elitism, we can turn to Imrosht, called in Latin and English, averroes. As a practicing Muslim jurist, he was certainly well acquainted with ideas about ijtihad and taqlid. In fact, his own grandfather, also named Imrosht, explicitly set down a hierarchy of scholars within the Maliki legal school, in three groups. First are those who practice taqlid of Malek and his followers by just memorizing and repeating their opinions. Second are those who accept Malek's authority and can determine what is consistent with the school's teachings, but still cannot issue rulings on novel cases. This corresponds to what we already saw under the heading of ijtihad within a school. Third are the elite, who understand legal methods and can issue novel opinions. In a legal treatise of his own, the famous decisive treatise, Iverroes takes up the question of the status of philosophy in Islam. He boldly argues that philosophy is not just permitted, but actually obligatory for those who are in a position to pursue it, those who are not, in Al-Farabi's words, prevented by nature or because they are too busy for it. With equal boldness, Iverroes goes on to contend that it is the philosophers who are in the best position to understand the true meaning of the Quranic revelation. They alone have independent access to the truth through demonstrative reasoning. Since the Qur'an is true, and truth does not contradict truth, their demonstrated conclusions can be used as a kind of check or constraint on possible interpretations of scripture. These aspects of the decisive treatise are well known. Less commonly discussed is the parallel Iverroes draws between law and philosophy. He is here a jurist writing for other jurists, so it makes sense for him to argue along the following lines. If the study of jurisprudence is licit or even encouraged within Islam, then philosophy is as well. For example, one cannot argue against philosophical activity on the grounds that it is and is an innovation because the prophet's immediate followers did not pursue it. After all, those early followers did not do jurisprudence either, and no one infers from this that jurists are doing anything un-Islamic. Indeed, the scriptural support for studying the law would provide even stronger support for studying philosophy. As he says, When the jurist deduces from God's statement, may he be exalted, reflect you who have vision, the obligation to know juridical argument, how much more worthy and appropriate is it for someone who understands God to deduce from this verse the obligation to know intellectual argument. Among these parallels between law and philosophy, the most important for our purposes is that the philosopher is, like the independently-minded jurist, entitled to engage in independent reflection. Iverroes cites a famous hadith, often brangished by defenders of legal ijtihad, to the effect that the jurist who engages in ijtihad and reaches an independent judgment is rewarded twice if the judgment is correct and once if he gets it wrong. Iverroes then adds, But which judge is greater than the one who makes judgments about being? This judge is, of course, the philosopher. Following the lead of Al-Farabi, Iverroes sets up an Aristotelian version of the legal hierarchy recognized by his own grandfather and other jurists. At the top are those who engage in demonstration, then those of the dialectical class who work with non-demonstrative arguments, and finally ordinary people who just believe by being persuaded through a combination of rhetoric and dialectic. These people simply believe what they are told, either because it has been put to them in a powerfully convincing way, Iverroes has in mind here the power of rhetoric, or because it is commonly accepted. Again, a commonly accepted proposition is one that everyone espouses or one that is taught by reputable scholars. As Iverroes explains in his paraphrased commentary of Aristotle's topics, The dialectical premise is an accepted statement. It may be accepted by all, for instance the statement that God exists, or accepted by most people without being rejected by the rest, or accepted by the scholars and the philosophers without being rejected by the masses. What of the dialectical middle class, the class between ordinary folk who simply accept things by taqlid and the philosophers who engage in ijtihad and are satisfied only by demonstrations? Standardly one is told that for Iverroes the dialecticians are the mutukalimun, practitioners of theology or kalam. He does say in a closely related work, the exposition of the methods used in arguments concerning religious doctrines, that the most adequate rank of the art of kalam is dialectical, not demonstrative, wisdom. But in fact he tends to think that the theologians of his own culture, like Alhazali and other Asherites, are failed dialecticians. This is because they do not argue as they should from commonly accepted premises, but instead proceed on the basis of highly controversial and abstruse assumptions when they do things like proving the existence of God. As a result, their arguments are, as Iverroes says, Fitting neither for the scholars nor for the many. There should in principle be theologians who carry out useful tasks like defending the faith using non-demonstrative arguments, but Iverroes sees his own society as unfortunately including only two kinds of people who behave as they should, the ordinary person who takes everything on trust, and the philosopher who is a kind of Aristotelian Mujtahid. There is a lot we can learn from these debates apart from the need to situate the teachings of the Falasifa within wider Islamic culture. For one thing, we can now see how ambitious, even unrealistic, it would be to have a blanket ban on taqlid. Iverroes' unvarnished elitism is of course rather unattractive. He envisions a tiny handful of knowledgeable experts surrounded by a huge mass of blind believers, a conception typical among the Falasifa and also finding many adherents among theologians and jurists. It may have seemed more plausible in a time when most people were not even literate, and when half the population, the female half, was in any case typically assumed to be incapable of serious scholarly reflection, even if women did belong to the social and economic elite. Still, unattractive or not, the elitist position was not put forward without good reason. If the alternative to taqlid is to figure out everything for yourself, then how many people will be in a position to avoid taqlid? You might be an expert in particle physics, economics, the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of philosophy, but you're unlikely to have expertise in all four. Even if you were, there would still be plenty of other fields where you would lack even rudimentary understanding. We might therefore propose that ichtihad should be limited to only the most important issues, or that as a community we should engage in division of labor. Again, the Islamic juridical tradition anticipated both moves. Those universalists who spoke out against taqlid wanted all believers to understand just a few central religious topics, not particle physics or Shakespeare. When it came to more advanced legal reasoning, it was also admitted that a jurist might be an expert mujtahid in one area of the law, but an obedient mukhalid in another, just as today, divorce lawyers are not usually criminal attorneys as well. But there are aspects of the Islamic legal tradition that should make us wary of even localized ichtihad. A point forcefully put by defenders of legal precedent was that individual judgment, even when practiced by trained experts, is liable to go astray. A much-discussed example was the case of arriving in a city and wanting to know which direction to pray so as to face Mecca. Would it really make sense to work this out for oneself, rather than just adopting the local practice followed by thousands of people? As one jurist put it, it is extremely unlikely that they could have made a mistake that could be rectified by the reasoning of one person. And indeed, the perils of ichtihad are plain to see. In the Islamic tradition, it has often been fundamentalists who adopted a universalist posture and polemicized against taqlid. Proceeding from the plausible assumption that individual believers are responsible for their own piety, these fundamentalists have rejected the edifice of legal and religious learning, in favor of returning to a direct engagement with the revelation and evidence about the Prophet and the earliest generations of Muslims. Ethistatically speaking, this is the equivalent of political movements in the United States, or Europe, that encourage their followers to abandon traditional news sources, academic opinion, and the like. The more sweeping the rejection of taqlid, the worse the results. It's what Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones have in common with Salafi Islamists. A more refined approach to the problem of taqlid would not require it being a mujtahid for each and every topic we care about, or, if this is too difficult, instead blindly following the nearest authority at hand, thus surrendering to the vagaries of epistemic luck. What we need is a better account of how to form one's own views while realizing that one is dependent on the expertise and authority of other people. As the historian Mary Beard recently observed, the recognition of complexity and difficulty is not an admission of defeat, it is treating a complex problem with the respect it deserves. Doing this well means depending on authority in an intelligent and discerning way, which is a big part of being a responsible believer and responsible citizen.
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+ Thanks very much everyone for coming to this installment of the podcast live here at King's College London as part of the Arts and Humanities Festival. And I'm very grateful for you to showing up to hear me talk about my podcast and to give you an example of the kind of thing that I'm doing in the podcast. The podcast is something that I've been doing for about a year. It started in October 2010 and since it's a weekly podcast and since I skipped August, it's now published about 50 episodes. Actually 51, the 51st episode just went up on Sunday. And the idea of the project is to cover the entire history of philosophy without any gaps, that's sort of the slogan. So I want to say a little bit about what that means and the motivation of the project. And then like I said, I want to give you an example. First, just out of curiosity, how many of you actually listen to the podcast? So for the benefit of people listening to the later recorded version of this, there's about I would say maybe four or five hundred people here. And they all raise their hands. Right, so at the beginning of the podcast, obviously, I started with the very earliest philosophers, so the Presocratics. And then I moved on to the only person you can really move on to from the Presocratics, namely Socrates, almost by definition. That was supposed to be funny. Presocratics, Socrates, no? You have to laugh audibly, or the people listening to the recording. Thank you. Thank you. Please laugh audibly at all the jokes. And then obviously Plato and Aristotle, and just now I'm moving on to what happens in philosophy after Aristotle in the Hellenistic period. The podcast that just went up this past Sunday kind of illustrates what I'm trying to do in the whole project. And the point of the without any gaps slogan, which is that if you're studying philosophy, say in an undergraduate curriculum, like the undergraduate curriculum at King's. Then normally you would kind of visit the highlights, sort of like going around Europe and only visiting Paris, Berlin and London. And actually at King's we're unusual in that we offer modules on a very wide range of topics in the history of philosophy. But even at King's you can't study absolutely everything in the history of philosophy because there's just too much to cover. Whereas with a podcast, especially a weekly podcast, so it can cover a lot of ground very quickly. I thought I would be able to deal with basically the entire history of philosophy without leaving anything out. So this 51st episode that just came up is a good example of this. It deals with the immediate followers and students of Plato and Aristotle, the so-called Old Academy and Theophrastus. The Old Academy is basically a way of referring to these two philosophers, Spusippus and Xenocrates. And these are three people that I assume none of you would ever have heard of. Had anyone heard of these people before they got to that episode of the podcast maybe? One person. But she's cheating because she's a PhD student in philosophy. So that doesn't count. So these are clearly not household names. But not only are they interesting in their own right, but I think that if you leave out these minor figures, clearly you're going to miss something about the development of philosophy. So if you take, for example, a philosopher who's much, much later, like St. Thomas Aquinas, he's 13th century AD. Plato and Aristotle are 4th century BC. So if, as would often be the case, you're doing the history of philosophy, say as a student or as a casual reader or something, if you skip from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, and actually of course you might skip even further than that, you might skip to Descartes, but suppose that you skip to Aquinas. You just skipped over the better part of 2000 years. And to understand where Aquinas is coming from, you have to remember that he's not immediately right after Aristotle. So he's not immediately engaged with the works of Aristotle. He is engaged with the works of Aristotle, but as mediated by almost 2000 years of philosophical history, including, for example, the history of Platonism, which means the whole medieval history of the reception of Platonism, late antique Platonism, and then you can't understand late antique Platonism without understanding the immediate followers of Plato. So there's a sense in which to understand what a giant like Aquinas was doing, you have to understand what minor figures like Spusippus and Sinocrates were up to. So that's the idea of the project. In terms of scope, the idea is to sort of go through without leaving anything out. But there's also another kind of motivation, which is maybe in terms of breadth. So I tend to have a very generous, broad understanding of what philosophy is. And I think that to understand the history of philosophy, but also philosophy today, you need to pay attention to fields that we would now consider non-philosophical, and even fields that were considered non-philosophical at the time. It's kind of a truism, everybody knows this, that knows anything about the history of philosophy, that ancient and medieval philosophers considered disciplines that for us are not philosophy to be part of philosophy. So for example, physics or chemistry, the study of how one element changes into another, these are topics covered in the works of Aristotle, so they count as philosophy. And they would have been considered as a type of philosophy, natural philosophy, until very recently. But even such disciplines as mathematics and astronomy and medicine, which is something I'll be getting onto later in this talk, have always been intimately related with philosophy. Here at King's we actually have projects looking at the relationship between philosophy and medicine. And there have always been very fruitful interchanges between the physical sciences and philosophy. So this is something that goes way, way back, all the way through the history of philosophy. Later in this talk I'm going to be discussing the contribution that the most important person in the history of medicine, I would say Galen, who lived in the second century AD, made to the philosophical discussion of void, which is what I'm going to be talking about for most of the time. So one of the other goals of the podcast then is to look at the relationship between philosophy and some of these other disciplines, something I've already done a little bit because when I was going through the pre-Socratic material, I spent one episode talking about the Hippocratic corpus and how Hippocrates or the works ascribed to Hippocrates relate to ancient philosophy. And in later episodes I'll be doing that again with medicine, also with areas like rhetoric and astronomy and mathematics. Now obviously this project to cover the entire history of philosophy is not something I could sort of distill into a one hour lecture. So what I wanted to do is come up with a topic that would allow me to display some of the motives of the podcast in one nice little package. And I guess this fits into the theme of the Arts and Humanities Festival in that it basically means I want to tell you a little story. And the story is the story of an idea. The idea is the idea of nothing. So that's why the talk is called A Brief History of Nothing. And of course this is a cheap gag, right, because the slogan of the podcast is without any gaps. And as anyone who listens to the podcasts regularly or even casually knows, I cannot resist a cheap gag. So I sort of thought of the gag and then I wrote the whole talk to go around it, which is pretty much how I operate. So what I'm going to be trying to do is take you through the history of philosophical discussions about void. So what we might think of as empty space. Although as I'll be saying in a second, the first ancient philosophers and even some of the late ancient philosophers didn't necessarily conceive of void as empty space. And I'm going to try to follow this problem or topic, the topic of void, all the way from the pre-Socratics up to the 10th century AD in the work of a philosopher who I'm actually working on at the moment whose name is Abu Bakr Razi. And he lived in Iran and Iraq, like I say, in the 10th century AD. So this lecture is going to take us from before Plato and Aristotle, so from the 5th century BC all the way up to the 10th century AD. So one and a half thousand years. Ready? Are you excited? Yeah. So, maybe the first thing to say about the topic of void is that the Greek word for it is tōkennon, so the empty. And that already maybe shows you the way that they're thinking about it. They're thinking about it as a kind of area or we might say space where there's nothing in it. And our kind of default assumption that space is mostly empty is certainly not one that was universally shared by ancient philosophers or for that matter medieval philosophers. It's a very, or comparatively, recent phenomenon that philosophers and scientists think that void should be integrated into our picture of the natural world. And in fact, probably the very first time that anyone starts to discuss this topic of void or the empty is from the point of view of someone who's trying to say that it's not a real phenomenon. It's kind of hard to say that void doesn't exist, right? Because the whole point of void is that it's nothing. So to say that it doesn't exist sounds kind of paradoxical, which will be important in a moment. But just bear with me if I say that void doesn't exist, according to some of these philosophers. And in fact, it turns out to be a majority view among ancient and medieval philosophers that there's no such thing as void or that void doesn't exist. There are no empty spaces anywhere in the cosmos. Although there are exceptions, as we'll see. So the first person to take this up, as far as I know, is a philosopher named Melissa. So how many of you have heard of Melissa? Hmm. Not a household name. That's kind of depressing, actually, since all 500 of you have supposedly been listening to my podcast and I have covered Melissa's already. He's one of the followers of Parmenides, which makes him a so-called Eliatic. Parmenides of Elia, hence Eliatic, is the father of metaphysics, sometimes people say, and is well known for the view that being is one. There's no differentiation and no such thing as non-being. And it immediately follows from that. You might think that there's no such thing as the empty, right, because the empty would be a kind of non-being. This is made explicit by his student, Melissa, who is actually trying to argue for something much more surprising than the view that there's no such thing as void. He's trying to show you that there's no such thing as motion. And the reason for this is that he's a follower of Parmenides. Parmenides has taught that there's no such thing as differentiation or non-being or change, because they think of change as something that involves going from having a property to not having a property, which is a kind of non-being. So he says, look, the only way that something could move is if there was emptiness around it, because otherwise it will be blocked. So imagine if everything around you was completely full, kind of packed tight like the tube in rush hour. So suppose that everything is full. So suppose, as it were, that the air, suppose it's made of particles, suppose the air particles are completely packed together like cubes stacked against each other with no spaces between them. Well, given that the air on the far side of it will be pushed up against the walls, it seems obvious that you won't be able to move, right? So the only way you can move is if there's some emptiness, but of course there can't be any emptiness, because emptiness is a kind of non-being, and to say that non-being exists is clearly a contradiction. So this is his argument against emotion, and notice that it invokes as an assumption the impossibility of void. This shows, I think, that at least for some people in the ancient world, the very idea of void is kind of clearly absurd, because to assert the so-called existence of void is to assert that non-being exists, which doesn't make any sense. It's just a self-contradiction. Now, obviously matters did not rest there, and there's a kind of immediate reaction to the Eliatic philosophy on the part of some more famous people named the Atomists, well not named the Atomists, named things like Democritus. So have you all heard of Democritus? Yes? Alright. So Democritus, along with another philosopher named Leukippus, pioneers this new atomistic philosophy. And you could almost think of what they're doing as grasping the nettle of Melissa's argument. So they say, well look, if you look around you at the world, clearly there is motion, so if Melissa's is right that there needs to be emptiness in order for there to be motion, then so be it. So be it. There's emptiness. There's void. The idea that non-being's existence is contradictory is just something we'll have to kind of ignore or work around in order to preserve the obvious fact that motion does genuinely exist. And so notice that we in a way have a choice here between two apparently absurd assertions. One is the claim that motion doesn't exist, and the other is the claim that non-being exists. So either there's no such thing as motion, or there's such a thing as void. Now we in the modern world have no problem with this, because we also agree with the Atomists that bodies are made of particles moving around in empty space or void. But clearly this is something that they were having a lot of trouble with at the time, so they thought it was a really challenging idea. And to a large extent what was radical about Atomism was not just their contention that bodies were made of uncuttable parts, that's what the Greek word atoma means, is uncuttable. What was radical about their view was also that space, although that's not a word they use, can be empty. Now the reason that we have a different conception of void than the ancient Atomists is in part precisely because we have this notion of space, which they don't. So they're really stuck with calling it the empty non-being and things like that. Maybe the first notion of space starts to be articulated in ancient philosophy by Plato, who's also the first to do many other important things. And he takes up the topic of space in a dialogue called the Timaeus, which is very, very influential and becomes a kind of standard text for people interested in natural philosophy for many centuries to come. And in the Timaeus, he says that the natural world arises when a kind of god, who he calls the demiurge or craftsman, imposes form or determination on something that Plato calls the receptacle. And at one point he compares the receptacle to space. So one thought that you might have, and that later philosophers as we'll see did have, is that the receptacle could be sort of empty space. But that doesn't seem to be quite what Plato has in mind because he thinks that what the demiurge really does is to impose geometrical shape on the receptacle. And the result of that is that you start to be able to build bodies. So for him, bodies at their atomic level or their particular level are made up of things like pyramids and cubes. So for example, he says the element of fire is made of tiny, tiny little pyramids which are themselves made up of little triangles. So the triangular faces of the pyramid. And he even says, for example, that the reason fire can burn things is because it's got very sharp angles. Because the tips of the pyramid have more acute angles than other three-dimensional shapes. Whereas, for example, Earth is made of cubes. Now he's not committed to the view that there's void. And in fact, the idea that you could get bodies just by imposing shape on the receptacle, I think tends to suggest that whatever the receptacle is, it's not just empty space. Because it's not clear why imposing shapes on empty space would give you faces of three-dimensional objects. But Aristotle, who's very critical of Plato's views in the Timaeus, points out that Plato maybe accidentally winds up being committed to void. Because if you shove together things like pyramids and optihedrons and cubes, so the kind of three-dimensional shapes that Plato is envisioning. Obviously they don't nestle up against each other nicely so that they all fit with no spaces in between. They'll be more like a bunch of dice in a box which are all kind of lying on top of each other at angles. And Aristotle then says, well, clearly there will be spaces in between the three-dimensional geometrical shapes. And so you'll wind up with void. And so Aristotle then identifies criticisms of Plato that Plato is committed to void when maybe Plato didn't mean to be committed to void. Of course that's only a telling criticism if there's no such thing as void. And Aristotle is one of the majority of ancient philosophers who does think that there's no such thing as void. So in fact, what he thinks is that the cosmos is a sphere, this is what Plato thinks as well by the way, with the outermost heavens surrounding more planetary spheres that have the moving planets seated upon them, and in the middle of the earth where we live. Now you might naturally think, well if the whole cosmos is a sphere, then there must be something outside the sphere, right? So that's got to be empty space. And that is an objection that some people raised against Aristotle. So one of the classic arguments was, if I go to the edge of the cosmos and stick out my arm, then if I'm right at the edge, either I'll be able to stick out my arm, so there must be some empty space for me to stick out my arm into, or there must be something outside the cosmos that's stopping me from sticking out my arm. In which case I wasn't at the edge of the cosmos after all, because there's more stuff outside it to block my arm from moving into this so-called space. So Aristotle's actually committed to the view that there's nothing outside the cosmos, not even empty space. So you might say, there isn't even non-being outside the cosmos, that's how much nothing there is outside the cosmos. There's not even nothing, as it were. So he has various arguments against the possibility of void, of which I think the most clever is this. And I leave to you as a homework assignment to figure out why this argument is wrong. So, answers on a postcard. Here's the argument. Things move hither and yon at various speeds. So imagine a stone drop through the air, or imagine a stone drop through water. Now clearly the speed that the stone falls is going to be inversely proportional to the density of the medium. In other words, it will fall faster in air than water. So the thinner the stuff it's moving through, the less dense the stuff it's moving through, the faster the object will move. Right? Everyone buys this? Yes? They're all nodding, listeners. Well void has a density of zero. So the speed of something in void would be infinite. Whoops. Clearly things can't move infinitely fast. If there was a void, they would move infinitely fast, therefore there's no such thing as void. Isn't that a great argument? I love that argument. Because it's so plausible and so wrong. One of the best things about history of philosophy, right? It's sort of wrong arguments that sound right. And that's certainly one of them. At least I think it's one of them. So that's one of the arguments he makes against the possibility of void. Now obviously though Aristotle doesn't want to assert the Eliatic doctrine that there's no such thing as motion. So he has to explain how there can be such a thing as motion, even though there's no emptiness to move around in. So what he does is, he says that body is not atomic, it's continuous, but it can vary in density. So what he would say is that the air around me is full, so there's no gaps or empty space in the air around me. So if I move my hand through the air, then what I'm doing is not taking advantage of emptiness that's scattered in amongst the air particles. So that I can sort of scatter the air particles as I move my hand. Rather, what's happening is that I'm pushing the air and moving it somewhere else. And he even has a theory that the reason why things continue to move through air, for example, if you fire an arrow through air. He thinks that what happens is that the point of the arrow pushes away the air from in front of it. And the air is kind of cycled back to the back of the arrow and that pushes it on from behind. So that the arrow is literally pushing itself through the air by using the air that it's passing through as a kind of pushing mechanism. Which is also very clever, although it does raise the question why things don't fly through the air forever once they're fired. And he can't really explain that because he doesn't have the notion of momentum. But the notion of momentum would be the topic for another lecture. So I won't get into that any further. But anyway, Aristotle does realize that he needs to explain why Melissa's is wrong. And why motion is possible even in a world with no void. And he makes these attempts to explain it. So really what that sets up for the rest of the ancient tradition is a kind of opposition between some philosophers who are atomists. So they think that bodies are made of uncuttable atoms at the bottom. So if you cut and cut and cut a body, you'll get to a smallest particle that can't be cut anymore. They're the atomists, right? Atomists just mean something uncuttable. And these atomists think that the atoms move around in void. So this is not only the ancient atomists but also the Epicureans who think this. So there's those people on the one hand, people who believe in atoms and void. And on the other hand, there are people who don't believe in void and think that if you keep dividing bodies, you can keep dividing as much as you want. So if you have a sharp enough knife, you can cut any body no matter how small in half. That's Aristotle's view. So he thinks that bodies are continuous, not atomic. And he denies the existence of void. And most philosophers fall into one or the other of these categories. The exception is the Stoics. The Stoics are Aristotelians in the sense that they think that body is continuous. So they reject the Epicureans' atomism and say that you can cut bodies indefinitely small. But on the other hand, they want to say that there is void, just not here. So what they say is that the cosmos is finitely big, just like Aristotle said, so it's spherical. And then they're the ones who use this sticking out the argument. So they say, look, there has to be space or void outside the cosmos. In part because they think that the cosmos actually gets bigger and smaller for various reasons. So they think there's a cosmic cycle where the cosmos kind of implodes into flame and gets much bigger. And then it reduces back to its current configuration. And of course that would be impossible unless there was empty space around the cosmos for it to explode into. So what that means is that they are committed to a continuous physics rather than an atomist physics. But also the existence of void. And in fact they agree with the Epicureans that void is infinite. So you could go off to your left if you like and just keep going. And for them eventually you would have reached the edge of the cosmos. And then in theory at least you could just keep going and you'd go through more and more empty space. And you would never run out of the empty space because there's an infinity of void surrounding the cosmos. Interestingly, even in the peripatetic, in other words the Aristotelian tradition, there are some figures who think that void is something you could contemplate. So in particular yet another non household named Strato. I'd be very impressed with. Has even our PhD student heard of Strato? Yes she has. She's too good. She's heard of everybody. But okay, for the rest of you. Strato was the leader of the Aristotelian school after Theophrastus who's Aristotle's immediate successor. And he had some very innovative ideas about physics. And in particular he at least flirted with the possibility that void exists. So this goes to show you how much room for argument there was in the ancient world between people who accepted the existence of void and people who didn't accept the existence of void. And this is where we kind of get to the main event. So the main event and the thing I kind of really wanted to talk about. I know I've been talking for half an hour. But it's only now that I'm getting to what I really wanted to talk about. Are you excited? Excited all over again. It's like the beginning of the talk. But better because it's half over. Okay, so Strato seems to have been an influence on a doctor named, ready? Erasistratus. And if you don't think that one of the problems with doing a podcast on the history of philosophy is that you have to say words like Erasistratus without stumbling over them. Then you're wrong. So Erasistratus was a doctor who worked in the city of Alexandria on the coast of Egypt. Or what we now call Egypt. And he has a kind of mechanist understanding of the human body. So he thinks that he can explain anatomical features of the body. By the way, some of this, just to warn you, is going to get kind of nasty and gross. And I know that you're glad. Even if you pretend you're not. So he has a kind of mechanist understanding of human anatomy. And he wants to explain why things move around inside the body by invoking the kind of mechanical processes that we could also see, for example, in machines. And one of the processes that he wants to invoke is what's sometimes called by the Latin name of horovacui. Which means something like abhorrence of vacuum. So the thought here is not necessarily that void ever actually exists or comes about inside the body. But rather that in order to prevent a void from forming, things will move around in various ways. So for example, if you have a vessel full of water and you evacuate the water by, for example, drilling a hole in the bottom. Then air will rush in from above in order to fill the space. Because a void has to be prevented from forming. So it's almost like nature is a referee who will step in and shift things around at all costs to make sure that no void can form. And that's why we never experience it. So that's why it never happens that you empty a jug of wine or water and look in the jug and see. Not that you can see this. But see that there's void in the jug rather than air. So how would you use this to explain anatomical phenomena? Well here's an example. He says that when you breathe in, everyone breathe in with me. It's like a yoga class. Did you notice that when you did that your chest expanded? So when you breathe in your lungs get bigger. This is why according to Eris Isrides you take in air when you breathe. So your chest cavity expands, the lungs get bigger and air has to be drawn in because otherwise a vacuum would form. Because the air that was filling your lungs when your lungs were small wouldn't be sufficient to fill the lungs once they're big. So when you breathe in it's actually this mechanism of avoiding the vacuum that prevents a void from forming in your lungs and thus draws in air and allows you to breathe. Another example is that he thought the reason why the bladder takes in urine from the urinary tract. This is the gross part by the way. So when your bladder is evacuated, and we all know how that happens because we're all adults here. What that means is that more urine has to be drawn in from behind from the urinary tract because otherwise a void would form inside the bladder. Another example, he thinks that air is pushed from the heart through all the blood vessels. So he has this view that Galen criticizes and in fact mocks which is that your blood vessels are not full of blood but rather full of air. An obvious objection to this, which any of us could think of, is if I cut one of my blood vessels I don't hear pssshhhh. What happens is that blood spurts out. But Eris Isrides in fact seems to have claimed, according to Galen, that in fact although you don't hear a kind of hissing. It is in fact the case that air is escaping from your blood vessels and that blood is then pulled in from the surrounding body in order to prevent a void from forming and then the blood leaks out. So the first thing to come out of your blood vessel if it's punctured is air. Because he thinks that your entire circulatory system is designed to move air around your body. So that's why the lungs are connected to the heart. The reason you see blood is simply because blood gets sucked into the picture in order to stop a void from forming. So that brings us to Galen. Galen is really the source of our information about Eris Isrides's view. He brings up Eris Isrides in order to criticize him and as I say even to make fun of him. So one of the things he says which I quite like is that on Eris Isrides's theory if you punctured a blood vessel in your arm all the air should drain out of your body in one go. Because it's all connected. So you would just crumple to the floor having been completely evacuated of air or pneuma as they call it, breath. And you would literally die just from having a small puncture in one of your blood vessels. And that's clearly not the case. Similarly he wants to argue against Eris Isrides's view about the bladder. And the way that he does this is by invoking a kind of natural power which is something that Galen is quite keen on. So his view is something like this. The bladder doesn't draw in urine to prevent a void from forming. It draws in urine because the bladder is just the kind of organ that has a natural power for attracting urine from the kidneys. So there's urine forming in the urinary tract and the bladder pulls it in because it has a natural power for attraction of urine. And he thinks that without these natural powers of attraction and also repulsion and there are some others you would not be able to explain human anatomy. One way of thinking about this is that he's using a kind of idea that also turns up in Aristotle which is that the natures of things have to be understood in terms of their purposes. So for example the purpose of an oak tree is to grow big and tall, make acorns, drop the acorns and thus create more oak trees. The purpose of the bladder is to attract urine and then expel it from the body to prevent a harmful build up of urine. So he thinks of the body as a well designed, for lack of a better word, organism. Where every organ has a specific role which is given to it by nature. Who he thinks of as a kind of providential, almost divine force. And he doesn't like Eris Sistratus' view because it invokes these kind of mindless, purposeless, mechanical forces to explain things like the bladder and breathing and so on. Rather than these natural powers of attraction. So you might think that Galen then would have no use at all for this whole principle of avoiding the formation of a void. But in fact there are contexts where he says, well actually Eris Sistratus is right for example, that the lungs work like a bellows and that they draw in air to prevent void from forming. So he's quite happy with that as long as he can also say that the lungs have the natural purpose of furthering the process of breathing. As long as he can say that blood has such and such a purpose, the bladder has such and such a purpose. So he wants to hold on to the idea that the body and everything in it is, to use a technical term, teleological. In other words, it has a goal or a purpose. And once he's secured that by arguing in various ways against Eris Sistratus and other anti-teleological views. He's then happy to say as a kind of caveat, oh yeah but there is also this phenomenon that if a void would form somewhere, then nature will kind of step in and prevent it from happening. So like Eris Sistratus, he thinks that any situation where void seems in danger of occurring will somehow be thwarted by the sloshing around of fluids or other bodies in order to fill whatever space is being evacuated. And he gives an example of this which is sucking up dirty water or sandy water through a straw basically or a cylinder. And he says that what happens if you do this is that since the water can move more easily than the sand, you'll draw mostly water out of the mixture. So if you imagine sort of putting a straw into a fish tank that's got sand in the bottom and sucking through it, you'll get some nasty water. But at least you won't get any sand in your mouth. And that's some comfort. So he does agree that, he seems to agree at least that nature will usually act in such a way as to prevent void from forming. But there's another context in which he discussed the topic of void. And this complicates matters considerably. And this is going to take us, and here I am going to make a bit of a jump because Galen is 2nd century AD and I'm going to have to jump 8 centuries to the 10th century AD to explain this. Okay, so he wrote a work called On Demonstration. And the reason why the 10th century Arabic tradition is relevant here is that the Greek version of On Demonstration is lost. And we only know about it through later reports. Some of which are in later Greek authors, as I'll say in a second. And some of which are in Arabic texts, like texts by this guy, Arazi, who's one of the main sources for our knowledge of Galen's work on demonstration. So this is kind of unfortunate actually, especially for us philosophers. Because I think probably if everything Galen had written was still surviving, one of the two or three most interesting texts from our point of view would have been this lost work on demonstration. And the little that we do know about it is sufficient to show us that it was really, really interesting. And it also was very influential, especially actually in the Arabic tradition where philosophers who were interested in medicine took their cue from Galen's ideas about demonstration to form their epistemology. So what was this work? Well, as the title sort of implies, it was about demonstration. And what Galen was saying was that there are certain standards of proof that we need to meet in order to take ourselves to have demonstrated something. And basically, it looks like at least a lot of this work was devoted to showing that other philosophers and maybe other doctors had given arguments which they thought were convincing, but which aren't demonstrative. In other words, they fall short of these standards of proof. And Galen was basically telling them off for not being sufficiently rigorous in their argumentation. Now, we do know from several sources that Galen discussed the topic of void in this work on demonstration. And the reason we know about this is from both the Greek and the Arabic tradition. So on the Greek side, we have two later commentators on Aristotle who in their physics commentaries, when they're talking about what Aristotle said about the void, say, oh yeah, and there's this guy Galen who you've heard of. He's a doctor. And in his work on demonstration, he said the following thing about void. And the two philosophers I have in mind here, just in case you're curious, are Themistius and Simplicius. So two ancient, late ancient commentators on Aristotle. So both of them tell us that according to Galen, void must be possible because if you imagine a full vessel, like a vessel that's full of water, for example, or wine. And then you imagine that the fluid is drained out of it without anything rushing in to fill it. Then there would obviously be emptiness and nothing but emptiness inside the vessel. And thus there would be void. So void does exist. Right? That seems to be the argument. That's at least the way Themistius and Simplicius presented. And Themistius and Simplicius say, well that's a rubbish argument because you actually haven't made it happen. Right? So in fact what would happen is if you prevented air from coming in as the fluid was draining out, the walls of the vessel would collapse. And in fact you can see this happen. So for example if you have a wine skin, right, that's only open at one end, and you force the wine out, then what you'll get is a collapsed wine skin. You won't get a wine skin that's empty, and sort of full of emptiness if you see what I mean. So you won't get wine skin that looks like it's inflated but has nothing inside. What will happen is the walls of the wine skin will get closer and closer until they touch. So there won't be any empty space inside the wine skin. And in fact nature will just not allow this to happen. You can never have an empty vessel. This is of course interesting in that this is precisely the point that Erisistratus had been invoking over and over in his anatomy. And precisely the point that Galen also invokes in his anatomical works. Right? Because remember that Galen, although he wants to stress that anatomy works through these natural goal-oriented processes, he does want to say that in some context things move around in such and such a way in order to avoid a void from forming. So this is very hard to explain. Right? Because we seem to have Galen saying exactly what Themistius and Simplicius say he should be saying in other works which are not lost. And then in this lost work on demonstration he's saying, no, no, a void could occur if the vessel didn't become full of something else. I think what Galen was probably saying here was not that void might actually occur, but rather that void is conceptually possible. So he's trying to explain to you that this old Eliatic idea that emptiness is a kind of non-being and that it would be absurd for non-being to exist. I think he's trying to explain to you that that's just a wrong-headed idea because clearly it's conceivable that void could form. Just imagine this case. Imagine the case where you have a full vessel which is emptied where nothing else comes in. What you've just imagined is a void. That doesn't mean it ever happens. It just means that it sort of could happen in principle. Now that would be a very natural thing for him to be doing in on demonstration. Because remember that on demonstration is always attacking other people for giving arguments that aren't demonstrative. So I think, I'm speculating here, that I think what he must have been doing is attacking someone who argued against the possibility of void. And he said, look, you haven't proven that void cannot occur because it's conceptually possible. That doesn't prove that it ever happens. But it proves that it's not logically or physically or metaphysically impossible. You can argue maybe about what kind of impossibility is at stake here. He's just saying that it's conceivable that void could occur. But again, that doesn't commit him to the view that it ever happens. So that's the Greek side of on demonstration. Now things get even more complicated. And I'm coming to the end. Because I'm now finally getting to the 10th century. It gets more complicated when we look at an Arabic source. This is a work with the self explanatory title, Doubts about Galen. Shukuk alla jalinus. By this philosopher, Razi. And Razi is basically doing to Galen what Galen had done to other philosophers in his on demonstration. Actually in this work, the Doubts about Galen, he says this is one of the best books that's ever been written. It's maybe Galen's greatest work. In fact he says this is sort of the best book you can read along with the Quran. Is this work on demonstration by Galen. So he really really likes it. But he also thinks there are mistakes in it. And he's taking his cue from Galen's on demonstration by being really critical towards Galen himself. And he says at the beginning, hey this is exactly what Galen tells us to do. Galen attacks his own predecessors with irreverent sarcasm. And so I'm going to do the same thing to Galen even though I'm a huge fan of Galen's. Galen would have wanted it this way. So as he's sort of kicking Galen in the head as Galen lies prostrate on the floor. He's saying, Galen told me to do this. That's sort of the tone of the work. So he eventually gets around to this topic of void. And he quotes on demonstration and what on demonstration has to say about void. But sadly he doesn't seem to agree with Themistius and Simplicius about what Galen said about void. Instead he said this. And this text is on your handout. He's characterizing Galen's position. And he says, Galen said void is not sensible but without showing whether or not it exists. When discussing this he went on to say that air is a body that rules out the existence of void. But then how could he first claim that one cannot know whether void is existent or not. After he showed that air is a body he supported his claim that void does not exist in the interstices. That's another difficult word to say. Void does not exist in the interstices. In other words the gaps of the air. With the fact that the plunger cannot enter the syringe as long as the hole at its orifice is not open. So here's what he's saying. Imagine a hypodermic needle. And imagine that the needle is blocked. So you can't sort of spritz anything out of it. And the plunger is back and there's nothing but air inside the needle. Obviously they didn't have hypodermic needles but they had similar syringe like constructions. So you try to force the plunger in and it won't go anywhere. So Galen says look this proves that there's no void in the air. There's no emptiness kind of scattered in amongst the air in the syringe. Because if there were you could push the plunger in until all the air was packed tight. So you could sort of exploit the emptiness inside the normal air. By pushing until all the air particles were forced together and there was no void left. And then the stopper of the or the plunger of the syringe was finally stopped. But you should be able to push it in to some extent. But instead you can't push it in at all. This by the way is interesting right? Because we believe that there's void in air. And yet we can observe the same phenomenon. Namely that if you have a hypodermic needle full of air and the needle is blocked. You can push pretty much as hard as you want. And you won't be able to push the air out. Or you won't be able to push the air together inside the needle. And Razi makes an interesting objection to this. Which is that there is void in the air. Because he was a believer in void. Although that's a whole other story. And the reason why you can't push the plunger in is that the face of the plunger is just too broad. So it can't exploit the tiny tiny little gaps in the air. It can't move around the particles in the air because it's just a big face. So it just pushes against what's effectively a wall of air. Because it can't sort of insert itself into the tiny little gaps in amongst the air particles. Okay, but what we're really interested in at least for the moment. Is what Galen was trying to say about void in on demonstration. Or at least that's what I'm interested in. Are you interested in it too? Do you want to know what I think? We now have all the evidence that I have. So the first thing I want to say about this is that it's very puzzling. So we have not only all the stuff about Erisistratus and whatever. Let's ignore that for the moment. Just think about what happened in on demonstration. Which is lost. So we can't see the original discussion. We have Simplicius and Themistius, the Greek commentators telling us that Galen argued that you can have void. All you need to do is imagine an emptied vessel that has nothing flowing back into it. And then we have Razi saying that Galen argued with this syringe example. That there is no void in air. Right? So on the one hand he was arguing that void is possible. And then the other he was arguing that it's not possible. This seems very, very puzzling. Well the first thing to say about this is that if you think about the purposes of on demonstration. It may be that in on demonstration he was completely neutral about whether void exists or not. Because on demonstration is basically a critical work. He is attacking other people's views. And he may well have attacked people who did believe in void. And then people who didn't believe in void. Or the other way around. Without asserting a view of his own. He may have been just trying to show that both sides lacked full demonstrative rock solid proofs for their position. That would be totally consistent with what else we know about this work on demonstration. And in fact if you look back at the passage that I quoted from Razi. You'll see that Razi is saying that Galen was claiming that you cannot know whether void is existent or not. So that actually gives us some independent evidence that, I mean Razi had read on demonstration. Which we haven't. And he is telling us that Galen's position in on demonstration was actually that you can't tell whether void exists or not. So that I think gives support to the possibility that Galen was arguing against both sides. So he is saying the anti-void camp has this problem about the emptied vessel. Where you can imagine it staying completely empty. And the pro-void camp has this problem about the syringe. They both got a problem therefore neither side is demonstrative. And I think some support for that thought can be found elsewhere in the extant, the surviving works of Galen. Because there is a passage, a great passage actually where he says. The thing about philosophers as opposed to doctors like me. Is that philosophers waste a lot of their time arguing about issues that cannot be resolved. And he gives us an example of this. The question does void exist outside the cosmos? So the Stoics think as I said that void does exist outside the cosmos. Aristotle thinks that void doesn't exist outside the cosmos. And Galen's response to both parties is, well do you have a way of going to look and see? You know, is there a bus where we can buy tickets to the edge of the cosmos? Because if not, I don't think we are going to be able to resolve this issue. And maybe we should sort of crack on with you know, healing people's illnesses and other useful things like that. Like I have been doing. So he has this nice kind of diatribe against philosophical authors. Who are sort of pie in the sky airy fairy time wasters. As opposed to him, Galen, who only does philosophy when it is actually useful. And when the questions can be answered with verifiable sense experience. I think that is why in this passage from Razi he says that void is not sensible. In other words it can't be perceived by the senses. I think the reason he was saying that there is because he wanted to say, well look we just don't have any sense experience to tell us whether void exists or not. So who knows? Now having said that, that then seems to be in tension with this syringe example. Because it looks like he then went on to say, but look void doesn't exist because here is an example. If it existed then you could push the plunger in. And Razi in fact tells him off for contradicting himself here. He says first you say we can't know whether void exists or not. And then you give us this syringe example with the plunger. Which suggests that we can know that void doesn't exist. But I think Razi was just very tendentiously willfully ignoring the nature of Galen's discussion. Because I think what Galen was trying to do was just show that there were arguments on both sides of the question. And that should again make us doubt our ability to resolve the question of whether there is void or not. But one last possibility that I think we could entertain is that if we think back to the context of the medical works. And the discussion about anatomy, the argument with Erisistris. It looks like maybe Galen was committed to the view that you don't ever have actual void occurring inside the body. Like in your lungs or your bladder or whatever. So he agrees with Erisistris about that. But of course that leaves it completely open whether there might be void somewhere else like outside the cosmos. Because that wouldn't be an important thing to consider when we are doing anatomy. So as a doctor he might really care whether there is void for example in the air in your lungs. Because if there were void in the air in your lungs then you wouldn't be able to use this idea that the lungs are like bellows. So they get bigger and they have to suck in air to fill the space otherwise a void would form. Because if there was void sort of scattered in amongst the air particles then the particles could just spread out to fill the lungs. And you wouldn't need to have any air come in from the outside. So it may be that he wasn't just sort of saying, oh a pox on both your houses we can't solve this void thing. Maybe he was trying to say with the syringe example that you can show that there is no void inside air or other actual bodies around us. But then he was trying to say with the empty vessel example that for all we know there could be void outside the cosmos or whatever is conceivable. So you can't have void inside bodies as it were like little bits of void. But you could have lots and lots of void if you wanted like emptiness. And just to leave you with one last thought. That philosopher that I've been talking about, Razi, in fact thought precisely this. So he says that God creates the world with the help of what he calls the soul in empty space. Or actually he calls it place. And he says that this kind of empty place is like the vessel into which God puts the world. He calls it absolute place. And says that in order for there to be somewhere for God to put the world there has to be place eternally and infinitely just like God. So he says that empty place or absolute place is one of the principles of the universe and thus is in a sense on a par with God. And for this and other reasons other people rather than calling him Razi just called him the heretic. And he's the guy I'm mostly working on these days. And part of the reason I'm working on him is that he stands at the end of this whole tradition that I'm interested in. So he and Galen show us that to study the history of philosophy you need not only to look at all these smaller figures. I mean you can see that I've mentioned many many people in this lecture who you might never have heard of before or who you might not know very much about. But they're part of the story of void from the ancient world into the medieval world. And they also illustrate the other point I was trying to make which is that to study the history of philosophy you need to look at other disciplines like medicine. Because Galen and Razi if you ask them both like what is your job they wouldn't have said philosopher they would have said doctor. So this hopefully was giving you an example of what I mean by doing the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thanks for coming.
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+ This week, something rather surprising happened. Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. A year ago, most observers were still thinking of this as a very remote prospect, more a cause for amusement than realistic political expectation. It's a sobering moment for me as an American citizen and for the half of my podcast audience who live in the States, as well as for other listeners who will inevitably be affected by this upheaval in world politics. It seems like a good moment to ask whether the history of philosophy has anything to say about an event like this. Is everything we've been discussing over these hundreds of episodes of merely abstract and academic interest, or can ideas from long ago somehow help us to think about current events? There are lots of ways to answer that question, but one of the most obvious would be to consider the value of democracy itself. Typically progressive people tend to see 2016 as a year that revealed deep flaws in Western democratic political systems. Not only was Donald Trump elected, but the British narrowly voted to leave the EU in a referendum held earlier in the year. Progressives see these two decisions as not just wrong, but deeply foolish. And Trump supporters might have reason to worry too. Their man has just become President, but he got beat in the popular vote. Millions more Americans wanted him to lose than to win. If not for the vagaries of the electoral college system, Hillary Clinton would have just been inaugurated whereas Trump supporters would have preferred to see her in jail, at least those who gleefully chanted, lock her up. So they hardly have reason to celebrate the wisdom of the electorate either. Besides, even leaving aside this divisive event, we can easily think of other alarming election results from around the world in recent years. Like the Islamist parties winning polls in the Middle East, for instance. So here we are getting close to what looks like a good philosophical question. Is democracy the right way of making political decisions? Good question or not, though, this is a hard question for us to take really seriously. Whatever our misgivings about recent events may be, even the most pessimistic will probably agree with Winston Churchill's famous remark that, democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. In the same speech, Churchill said that, no one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. The fact that it occasionally produces what we might consider to be the wrong result is simply to be expected and is no reason for us to give up on the whole project. But there is a more fruitful and interesting question we might ask ourselves. Under which conditions is democracy most likely to produce good results and avoid bad ones? How should democratic voters approach their rights and responsibilities if they want their societies to flourish? Obviously, these are matters that modern day political philosophers discuss all the time, and I am far from pretending to be an expert in modern day political philosophy. But having read up quite a bit on the history of political philosophy, not least while working on the podcast, a few relevant thoughts do occur to me. I start from the obvious place, which is Plato's critique of democracy in the republic. As long-time listeners will recall, perhaps with difficulties since it was a while ago that I covered this, Plato was convinced that the ideal state would be ruled by philosophers, by which he meant men and women, with a secure grasp on truth and the good. He portrays democracy as being far removed from this ideal, in fact as the worst kind of political constitution apart from outright tyranny. We should be careful not to assume that Plato was talking about democracy as we think of it today. For instance, he says explicitly in the republic that in the kind of democracy he has in mind, state offices are assigned by random lot, as they in fact were in ancient Athens. Also, whereas we mostly forget the original meaning of the word democracy, Plato certainly does not. For him and for any ancient Greek it means rule by the demos, or people, which means the common run of citizens as opposed to an elite. Plato's assumption is that the demos is obviously not going to be knowledgeable about the truth and the good. Instead, the people will have a wide range of different views about these matters. So in sharp contrast to the unified, coherent, and virtuous state he has described in the republic, the democratic state pursues all manner of different goals and spurious ideals. For this reason, Plato says that democracy is in a way beautiful, like a cloth with many colors, but it is nearly the antithesis of what he thinks we should aim for in political life. How could we answer these worries from our modern perspective? The most obvious I think would be to question his pessimism about the wisdom of the people. Actually, you don't need to be a modern to question that. The next episode in the podcast will look at a medieval thinker named Marsilius of Padua, whose pioneering political work The Defender of the Peace includes the observation that the people as a whole are always better judges than a few wise counselors. Majority decisions are decisions made on the basis of the widest possible range of experience. This by the way is also why in the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the most powerful and reliable card to play is not phoning your expert friend, but polling the studio audience. If you're ever on the show, save that one until you really need it. Yet Plato would probably want to remind us of another passage from his Republic. It is a parable about a boat, where all the passengers want to have a turn acting as captain. All the while, a skilled navigator is on the boat, but he is spurned and ignored by the rest of the people on board. Plato is making a good point. If there is someone in your society who does have expert knowledge concerning a vital issue, then it seems foolish to ignore that person and just ask the audience. This is especially true if the question is a very difficult and complex one, or one that previous experience doesn't help much to answer. Take a couple of current examples. Climate change and the British decision to leave the European Union. There is an objective answer to the question how dangerous climate change is and whether it is caused by humans. These are not matters of opinion, they are matters of fact. And there is an objective fact about what will happen to the British economy if it pulls out of the EU. Sadly, these aren't questions we are in a good position to answer using nothing but common sense and previous experience, because we're talking here about hideously complex phenomena and about prospects for the future. They are paradigm cases where it would be sensible to defer to experts, or at least take their views very seriously. Yet, to take just one example of the reverse sentiment, the Eurosceptic Michael Gove batted away the dire warnings being issued against Brexit with the remark, People in this country have had enough of experts. Less famously, he also said, I'm not asking the British people to trust me, I'm asking them to trust themselves. I'm not quite with Plato. I think that there is a deep reserve of wisdom in the citizenry and that democracy is admirable and advisable because it exploits that resource. But neither am I with Gove. I also think that voters in democracies should take seriously the views of well-trained experts. This sounds like a truism, so why do so many voters these days, to say nothing of Michael Gove, seem to disagree? One point frequently made recently is that there has been a leveling of the field of debate. Now anyone can go onto social media and propound their own ideas, no matter how ill-informed, and we can all find online sources that confirm what we already wanted to believe. That is surely part of the explanation, but I suspect a deeper reason may be the conflation of the expert with the member of the so-called elite. Of course it's true that, for instance, climate scientists and specialists in economics, to say nothing of historians of philosophy and, come to think of it, Michael Gove, are the elite, in the sense that they tend to be highly educated and economically comfortable to say nothing of predominantly white and male. For this reason, it would indeed be unwise to discount the possibility of bias on the part of the experts. But neither, I think, should laypeople take themselves to have as much insight into an issue like global warming as those who have done PhDs, done experiments, and published research papers in the field. Is it possible, then, to take heed of the advice of experts without just bowing to their authority, effectively outsourcing to the expert elite our responsibility to make up our own minds? As we saw in the podcast, this was an issue discussed intensively in the Islamic world. It went under the heading of what was called taqlid, meaning uncritical acceptance of authority. A standard view was that the scholarly class, the so-called ulema, should never engage in taqlid, whereas this is perfectly acceptable for the common run of people. On this view, it is part of being the member of an elite that one has the right and responsibility to think for oneself. That is an attitude we can find throughout the history of philosophy. In most periods, philosophy itself has been the most elite of practices, with the philosophers congratulating themselves for thinking deeply about issues others just take for granted. On the other hand, some theologians in the Islamic world insisted that every Muslim should take responsibility for his or her own beliefs. Even Muslims who are not scholars should at least work out that God's existence can be proved, for example. In this spirit, and in light of the fact that we live in societies with higher education and literacy rates than those enjoyed by medieval Islamic societies, we could argue that no citizen should engage in outright taqlid. It's not just the philosophers and scholars who should make up their own mind, it's everybody. But avoiding taqlid never meant working out everything from scratch all on your own. It might mean doing that some of the time, but just as often, it meant training yourself to be a good judge of expertise. To put it another way, you can avoid uncritical acceptance of authority by engaging in critical acceptance of authority. Applying this line of thought to climate science, for example, we could conclude that our responsibility as citizens is not to go get a PhD in meteorology before taking the issue into account in our vote. It is to engage in a rational assessment as to which views about the climate are most trustworthy and then follow the guidance offered by those views. Conversely, we should be suspicious of things we just happen to find on the internet, and we should be very suspicious of the politician who tries to convince us that everything is simple, that experts can safely be dismissed as a mere pressure group, that gut feeling is the first and last word on the important political issues of the day. Aristotle might approve of this approach, not just because he too adopted a critical but usually respectful attitude towards prior authorities, but also because it is a kind of middle view of the sort he often boasted of adopting. On the one hand, we should trust in our own rational abilities and use them to assess other people's opinions. On the other hand, we shouldn't trust in our abilities so much that we make up our own minds about complex problems without any help. There's another way in which the history of philosophy might push us towards this sort of confident modesty. If this podcast has shown us anything, it's that valuable ideas are to be found in many, perhaps in all, places, cultures, and times. Sure, we've looked at plenty of dead white European men, the sort of figures always included in surveys of the history of philosophy, but we've also found sophisticated philosophical ideas in ancient India, in the medieval and early modern Islamic world, in works by women who defied the oppressive conditions of the pre-modern world to earn their rightful place in our history of human thought. Learning about the history of philosophy should make us less impressed by our own moment in history and the culture of our own social group. It should make us open to ideas from other times and also from other kinds of people. The history of philosophy teaches us, in fact, that the more different these other people are from us, the more likely they are to have come up with ideas that we ourselves could never have invented. But if this is a kind of modesty, it is indeed a kind of confident modesty, in that we must still trust ourselves to understand and discover such truths when we search for them. We should be humble enough to open our eyes, trusting that if we do, we are capable of seeing. In this way, the history of philosophy itself offers a welcome correction to some of the pernicious political trends of our times. No one who is arrogant about their own viewpoint on the world, to the point that they are willfully ignorant, or disrespectful of other kinds of people, can be a good historian of philosophy. The history of philosophy demands that we believe in the value of human reason wherever it is found. This is an attitude we can also live by when we are not doing history of philosophy, and it's an attitude we should expect and demand from our political leaders. In times like these, philosophy, open-mindedness, and thoughtfulness are surely not enough by themselves, but they may be more important than ever.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Welcome to the first episode, Everything is Full of Gods, in which I'll introduce the podcast and tell you about the first Greek philosopher, Thales. In this series of podcasts, I'll be telling the whole history of philosophy without any gaps. In time, I hope we'll cover pretty much every figure in ancient medieval and modern philosophy. Not only the greats, like Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant, but also philosophers who may not be as famous, but who had their own part to play in the history of philosophy. Later on in this episode, I'll be turning to Thales of Miletus. He may not be a household name, but he was the very first ancient Greek philosopher. And in addition to being first, he had some rather attractive ideas, for instance that magnets have souls. But we philosophers like to define our terms before we begin, so let me start by explaining what I mean when I say, telling the whole history of philosophy. Let's start with the word whole. The episodes to come deal with philosophy in the classical Greek world, beginning with the pre-Socratics and then moving on, naturally enough, to Socrates, then Plato and Aristotle. But the series has a far wider scope than that. The ambition is really to tackle the whole history of philosophy. That includes not just philosophy in Europe, but also philosophy in the Islamic world, a subject dear to my own heart since it is one of my main areas of research in my day job as a philosophy professor. All European philosophy reacts, however indirectly, to the philosophy of the Greeks, and that is true of philosophy in the Islamic world too. But there are cultures where philosophy has risen independently of any Hellenic heritage, notably India, China, and Africa, all of which I hope to cover in due course. To take account of those traditions, I'm releasing episodes on a separate feed. To find it, just search for the podcast series on the history of philosophy in India. Or go to the podcast website, where you'll find all the episodes in one place, along with suggestions for further reading, timelines with the dates of all the philosophers I discuss, and the opportunity to comment on the series. Again, the website is www.historyofphilosophy.net. And by the way, if you would like to have a written version of the series, then you don't have to sit by your computer typing away feverishly as you transcribe what I'm saying. Edited and updated versions of the scripts are appearing as a series of books available from Oxford University Press, titled A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. That phrase, without any gaps, is the slogan of the podcast. It means several things, starting with the attention I'll pay to philosophy beyond Europe. I will also be making a special effort to cover female philosophers, who are often excluded from the history of philosophy. Another gap to be filled is the role of disciplines related to philosophy, but often ignored in university classes and books on the history of philosophy. For nearly all of that history, sciences like medicine and astronomy, and also developments in literature or the arts, related intimately to what philosophers were doing. In antiquity, there was no hard and fast distinction between the physical sciences and philosophy. So you'll find episodes in the series to come on topics like ancient mathematics and medicine, on astrology and alchemy, on optics and cosmology, and on poets like Rumi or Dante, who drew on philosophical ideas and contributed ideas of their own. But the phrase without any gaps means above all one last thing, that I will not be skipping from highlight to highlight the way a lot of university courses on history of philosophy have to do, where one jumps straight from, say, Aristotle to Descartes, leaving out a couple of thousand years in between. Rather, I want to tell a continuous story, so you can see how each thinker builds on those who came earlier, but also strikes out in new directions. That brings us to the word history. Obviously, the history of philosophy isn't quite like other areas of history. This series isn't going to be mostly about events, when and why they happened, and which important people were involved. Nor is it the sort of history that paints a picture of another time, maybe by focusing on people who weren't so important, peasants instead of potentates. But on the other hand, the historian of philosophy can't ignore these things. We're going to see that political, social, and religious forces had a lot to do with the way philosophy progressed, and even the fact that philosophy could happen at all. It's an obvious but easily overlooked fact, philosophy only occurs in a society that can produce philosophers. Usually this is meant that philosophy happens not too far away from wealth and power. It's naive to think that philosophy can happen without economic and political support, even if it's also cynical to think that philosophy is never anything more than an expression of political and economic power. And of course, for the period we'll be studying, historical forces didn't only help to determine who the philosophers were and what they thought, they also determined whether and how their ideas reached us. For most of the time between the ancient Greeks and ourselves, it was extremely laborious, and therefore expensive, to transmit philosophical writings. They had to be copied by hand. We know about Greek and Latin ancient philosophy only thanks to manuscripts written in the medieval period, a manuscript being, as the word literally says, a text that is handwritten. Many periods of philosophical activity were sparked by massive efforts to translate philosophical texts into a new language. As we'll be seeing, philosophy in the Islamic world arose in large part because of the translation of Greek scientific texts into Arabic, and this all cost money. Just as much as at other times and places, this holds true of 6th century BC Greece, which is where our story begins. What was it that allowed philosophy to start there and then? Well, the first thing to realize is that Greek philosophy actually didn't start in Greece. It started in the territory called Ionia, on the western coast of present-day Turkey. This is where you get to if you start in Greece, and go around or across the Aegean Sea towards the east, which is exactly what Greek-speaking peoples had done well before the 6th century BC. The ancient Greek historians tell us that in about 1100 BC, in response to an invasion of mainland Greece by a people they called the Dorians, many inhabitants of mainland Greece crossed over to Ionia. The very name, Ionia, comes from a legendary leader of the colonists, Ion. These migrants set up a number of colonies, some of which became extremely successful. One of the earliest colonies was Miletus, the city where philosophy would in due course be born. It was founded by a group who came from around Athens, the future home of Plato and Aristotle, and one of the few places in mainland Greece not to fall to the Dorians. At least that's what the ancient historians tell us, and the claim is supported by similarities between the Ionian dialect and the dialect they spoke near Athens, called Attic Greek – Attica being the area surrounding Athens. By the time of Thales and his successors, Miletus was a rich and successful city. Just like Australia in the 19th century, Miletus went from colony to independent economic power on the back of sheep. Their wool was exported across the Mediterranean. Miletus and other Ionian cities became wealthy enough to found colonies of their own, as far away as Italy, but also around the Black Sea, which was an area of strength for the Milesians in particular. Miletus was fairly far south in Ionia, and their location and success as traders meant that someone living in Miletus could easily be exposed to ideas and people from further inland to the east and from Egypt. So it's always been tempting to say that Thales and the other Milesian thinkers got some of their ideas from Eastern or Egyptian traditions. For instance, Thales was famous for having predicted a solar eclipse in 585 BC, and if he really did that, he may have been using Babylonian astronomical tables to pull off the trick. There's also some evidence that Thales went to Egypt in person. And by the way, in case you're worried that I've already left a gap by failing to discuss philosophy in ancient Egypt, you can stop worrying. The plan is to discuss this on future episodes devoted to philosophy in the cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. Miletus, in any event, was a good place to be in the early 6th century BC if you wanted to become the first ever philosopher. But even Miletus wasn't the sort of town where you could just relax and gaze at the stars trying to figure out when the next eclipse might be coming along. It would be a while before a Greek author would describe full-time contemplation as anything like an ideal or desirable life. At this point, Aristotle makes particularly good reading for us philosophers. He explains that we are not, contrary to appearances, just leeching off society when we sit around reading books and having ideas. To the contrary, we are the highest achievers, the ones who realize human potential most fully. But a life of pure speculation was not Thales's style anyway, or so it would seem. He was no detached contemplator, more of an all-purpose wise man. In fact, he was named as one of these so-called Seven Sages of the early period of Greece. Another one of the seven whose name is still remembered nowadays is Solon, who set down many of the laws governing Athens. Thales's political engagement is best shown by a report that he urged a political union between all the Ionian cities so that they could resist their neighbors to the east, a policy which, had it been adopted, might have enabled the cities to remain independent for longer than they did. In fact, only a few decades after the time of Thales, Miletus and other Ionian cities fell under the dominion of the Persians. More fun, and also showing a practical turn of mind, is the story about Thales and the olive presses. Supposedly, Thales's knowledge of weather conditions enabled him to predict a bumper crop of olives in the coming season. He went around and cornered the market on olive presses so that he could make a fortune when the predicted crop came in and everyone needed to turn their olives into oil. A less pragmatic Thales appears in a story told by Plato, which has Thales walking along looking at the sky and falling into a well because he isn't watching where he's going. Conveniently for the anecdote, there's a servant woman on hand to laugh at him, underscoring the point that philosophers don't notice the world at their feet because they're so busy looking at the sky. Since I myself have been known to smash my toe into a stone step while trying to go into a house and read a book at the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for the Thales who fell down a well. But the evidence we have suggests we should instead imagine Thales as a well-rounded fellow, engaged with the world around him as well as with the nature of the world as a whole. What kind of evidence do we have about him then? Thales and the other earliest Greek thinkers are called the pre-Socratics, even though as we'll see, some of them actually lived at about the same time as Socrates. For all of these figures, our knowledge is really based on nothing more than tantalizing scraps. People who work in the field call these scraps fragments, but even this makes the situation sound better than it usually is. What we've actually got is works by later ancient authors, or rather copies of copies of works by later ancient authors, who tell us something about, say, Thales or Heraclitus. Occasionally we're in luck, and they quote the early Greek thinkers verbatim, or even better say they are going to quote them verbatim and then do so. Some of the pre-Socratics wrote in poetic verse, which has meter, which of course makes it much easier to tell if it's a direct quote. But often what we've got is a much later thinker telling us what an early thinker thought, and we have to decide for ourselves how close this might be to the original wording or idea. Technically, these paraphrase reports are called testimonies, rather than fragments, but it isn't always easy to tell the difference. Even if you are lucky enough to have an authentic fragment, it isn't necessarily obvious where the useful information starts and stops. One of our richest sources for the pre-Socratics is Aristotle, and he has a tendency to mix reports of what they thought with educated guesses about what else they must have thought, and why they thought what they thought. Furthermore, he's almost always forcing the pre-Socratics into the framework of his own theories, trying to make his predecessors look like they were groping towards the sublime insights of Aristotle himself. The problem is illustrated by that story about Thales falling into a well. It's a nice story, but maybe a little too nice. It sounds like an amusing anecdote that's been assigned to Thales because he's a famous philosopher, the way witty remarks get ascribed to Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker even though they didn't say them. In the case of Thales, the problem is particularly acute, and I should admit before we go any further that almost nothing can be said about him for sure, but we'll do the best with what we've got. Some of the things I've already mentioned give a flavor of one major dimension of his achievements. He was a scientist in something like the sense we would use the term. If we know anything about him for certain, it's that he was interested in astronomy. The story about the olive presses also shows that Thales had expertise in what we would call the physical sciences, or at least had a reputation for having that expertise, and this is confirmed by other evidence. There's another story about him diverting a river into two branches so that it would be possible to cross it, because each of the two branches would be shallower than a single river. However, if not exactly proof that he was a deep thinker. Thales apparently didn't write whole treatises on what we would consider philosophical subjects. He may in fact have written nothing at all, though some sources tell us that he did write a book about navigation at sea. All of this is typical of early Greek philosophy, and in fact of philosophy right up until the modern period. As I've already said, the tendency to separate philosophy from what we call science is a recent phenomenon, and certainly not one most Greek thinkers would have recognized. So, whatever he may or may not have written, this is one reason to say Thales was the first philosopher. He was the first person to gain a reputation for the sort of independent analysis of nature we describe as scientific. Often Thales and the other pre-Socratics are described as being rational, a departure from the presumably irrational culture that went before them. But this is not a very useful way of looking at it. The main texts we have to illustrate Greek cultural beliefs before the time of Thales are the works of Homer and Hesiod. The pre-Socratics would have seen Homer's Iliad and Odyssey as the greatest touchstones of Greek culture. In the ancient Greek world, they played the sort of role that the Bible did in medieval Europe and that Shakespeare does for us, or used to when people knew their Shakespeare. Clearly, the Iliad and Odyssey aren't philosophical texts, but neither is Homer irrational. The Iliad is, among other things, a reflection on the sources and consequences of, as it says in the first line, the wrath of Achilles. Indeed, you could argue that Homer has a greater insight into cause and effect in the human sphere than most pre-Socratics have into the cause and effect of the world around us. The fact that Homer often invokes the agency of a god or goddess to explain what is happening in the Trojan War or in Odysseus's long voyage home only counts as irrational if you think that it's irrational to believe in the gods. Closer to the aim of pre-Socratic philosophy is Hesiod's Theogony, a poem setting out stories about the origins and natures of the gods, probably in part by collecting previous material. Some of this looks more or less explicitly cosmological in a way that is not too distant from the kind of pre-Socratic theories we'll be talking about over the coming episodes. Hesiod even equates his gods and goddesses to his cosmological principles. To give just one example, the Greek word uranos means heaven and is also the name of a god in Hesiod. So, again, it's hard to make a good case for Hesiod being irrational. He's laying out a theology, and that theology is meant to be consistent and explain something, or even explain everything, as the whole universe is shown to be the production of fundamental divine forces. I think a better way of understanding what was distinctive about the pre-Socratics is that their views were at least implicitly grounded in arguments. This to me is the difference between early Greek philosophy and other early Greek cultural productions. We mostly have too little evidence about Thales to reconstruct the arguments that gave rise to his views, but Aristotle was probably right to try to reconstruct arguments of some sort or other. We can follow his example by turning finally to Thales's few attested philosophical claims. The best known is that he thought that water was really, really important. That's a little unclear unfortunately in what way, exactly, he thought water was important. Aristotle tells us that Thales believed the world floats upon water, like a piece of wood. Here we seem to have a cosmological view that would be at home in a non-philosophical religious or theological tradition. The heaven, as even Homer says, is like a dome above us, and the world is a desk floating upon the sea under that dome. However, Aristotle tells us something else about Thales and water. He thought that water was a cosmic principle. Earlier, Thales may well have been anticipating arguments that would be made by his immediate successors. As we'll see in the coming episodes, various pre-Socratics thought that the materials of the world were formed out of the condensation or rarefaction of other ingredients. So perhaps Thales, observing the importance of water for life in plants, animals, and humans, or the earthy residue left after water evaporates into air, decided that in the first instance everything comes from water. Now, probably you're not thinking, my God, he's right, everything does come from water. But if Thales got to his water principle in this kind of way, then at least it would show him giving a novel explanation of the cosmos and using a process of argument to get to that explanation. Whether, as Aristotle implies, Thales also thought everything is literally made of water seems more doubtful. To think this, he would have to have believed that even something like rock, which seems eminently dry and solid, in fact consisted of water. And there's no reason to believe he thought that, even if an explanation like this would be given not much later by another philosopher from the same city, Anaximenes. Another philosophical claim ascribed to Thales is that a magnet has a soul, and so does amber, because when you rub amber it attracts things just as a magnet does. This is in fact due to static electricity. What sense can we make of this? Well, Aristotle tells us about Thales and the magnet in the process of asserting that all philosophers associate soul with motion. Aristotle may be right to say that Thales was already onto this point. There must be soul in a magnet, otherwise it could not initiate the motion that pulls it and a piece of iron towards one another. Aristotle tells us also that, according to Thales, all things are full of gods. This is a classic bit of pre-Socratic philosophy, philosophy in the form of a catchphrase. As we'll see, Heraclitus is the master at this style of philosophy. But let's take seriously the claim that all things are full of gods, by putting it together with the other idea about magnets. What you get is a nice little argument which would go something like this. Everything is full of gods, and Thales will show you this using the example of the magnet. It seems to be lifeless, but it must have soul because it can initiate motion. So by extension, you should at least be open to the idea that everything has soul, which is divine. That's obviously doing a lot of Thales's work for him by combining two fragments and filling in the gaps. But that, as I hope you'll come to agree over the coming episodes, is what makes the pre-Socratic so much fun. We'll go on next time to discuss Thales's successors in Miletus, though wonderfully named Anaximander and Anaximenes. Then in the third episode, we'll have another chance to think about the rival claims of philosophy in Greek religion when we get to the provocative ideas of Xenophanes. So if you like philosophers that have X's in their names, then you'll love the next two episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Infinity and Beyond, the Philosophy of Anaximander and Anaximenes. In our first episode, we had a look at the very first pre-Socratic philosopher, Thales of Miletus. This episode, I'll be talking about two more philosophers from the city of Miletus, Anaximander and Anaximenes. We know a bit more about them than we do about Thales, but don't get your hopes up too high. Our evidence about them is pretty thin. I mentioned last time how amazing it is that information about these earliest Greek philosophers has reached us at all. Maybe it's worth dwelling on this just a bit longer. As I said last time, these guys lived in the 6th century BC. To give you some idea how long ago that is, let's take someone else who lived a long time ago, Charlemagne, the conqueror who founded the Holy Roman Empire. He was born in the mid-8th century AD, which is early in the medieval period, but that still puts him slightly closer to us in time than to the birth date of Thales. What I'm trying to say here is, this stuff is really, really old. Even for ancient philosophers like Aristotle, Thales and his immediate successors were far enough in the past that it was hard to know much about them. So, we should really marvel that we, more than two millennia after Aristotle, know anything about the earliest Greek philosophers at all. Even if Aristotle wasn't necessarily all that well-informed about the first pre-Socratics, he's still one of our most important sources of information about them. The other main source is Aristotle's student Theophrastus, who made it his business to collect and interpret bits of information about the history of philosophy up until his time. This is the sort of thing Aristotle and his followers loved to do. They were great collectors of information, and threw themselves into it pretty zealously, whether they were dissecting shellfish or trying to piece together the ideas of someone like Anaximander. But unfortunately, there are a couple of pitfalls for us here. First, Theophrastus's discussion of the pre-Socratics are themselves mostly lost. So, we're usually dependent on yet later Greek authors who are telling us their version of what Theophrastus said. Second, what Theophrastus said, and what Aristotle said, for that matter, was often put in terms of their own ideas and vocabulary. Like I said last time, it can be hard to disentangle ancient interpretations of pre-Socratic ideas from those ideas themselves. When you add the further layer of interpretation and distortion introduced by the authors who are repackaging Theophrastus's information, the task of reconstructing pre-Socratic thought begins to look pretty daunting. Despite all this, as I say, we do know more about Anaximander and Anaximenes than we do about Thales. They both lived in Miletus, the same town as Thales, and they presumably associated with one another. The tradition claims that Anaximander was actually Thales's student, and Anaximenes was then Anaximander's student. But we don't need to take this too seriously, because ancient authors loved to construct chains of teacher-student relationships, whether they existed or not. All you really need to know, if you can keep the name straight, is that Anaximander was just a bit younger than Thales, and that Anaximenes was the generation after that. So, let's tackle Anaximander first. Like Thales, he could claim some expertise in physical science. He's credited with setting up a device like a sundial in Sparta, back in mainland Greece. Remember that Miletus is on the western coast of what is nowadays Turkey, so it's notable that he would have traveled from there as far as Sparta. Another scientific achievement was his production of a map which showed, we are told, both the earth and the sea. This would have been an appropriate activity for someone from Miletus, which, as I said last time, was a vibrant economic center with trading connections all over the Mediterranean and up into the Black Sea area. Anaximander is best known for saying that the principle of all things is what he called the infinite. The Greek word here is aparon, which means literally, that which has no limit. Several different English words have been used to translate this, not only infinite, but also boundless, unlimited, or indefinite. These different translations bring out different connotations which really do apply to Anaximander's principle. He did apparently think that the aparon was infinitely big, in other words that it stretched out in space indefinitely far, and surrounds the cosmos in which we live. And we also know that he thought it was eternal, so infinite in time as well as space. On the other hand, Theophrastus thought it was important to contrast Anaximander through Thales by saying that whereas Thales' principle was water, Anaximander's principle was nothing in particular, it was, in other words, indefinite, having no one nature. Rather, Anaximander said, things with definite nature like air or fire were, as he put it, separated out from the aparon. This takes us to a rather exciting moment, which is the opportunity to quote the first substantial surviving fragment from pre-Socratic philosophy. It was reported by Theophrastus and then preserved by Simplicius, who was a 6th century AD commentator on Aristotle. Ready? Here it is. Things come to be and are destroyed, Anaximander said, quote, according to necessity, for they mete out penalty and retribution to one another for injustice according to the ordering of time, unquote. After citing this, Simplicius adds that Anaximander was expressing himself rather poetically, even though he did write in prose and not verse. The fragment isn't a lot to work with, and in fact, it's not even certain how it is supposed to relate to the principle called the infinite or indefinite. But taking up the idea of separating off, what interpreters tend to think is that the different substances separated out of the aparon generate and destroy each other, and that over the long haul, this process balances out so as to restore what Anaximander calls justice. The idea about the ordering of time might suggest that this all happens according to some kind of cycle, which is a popular idea in early Greek thought and found also in Hesiod. We can make this a bit more concrete by looking at further evidence about Anaximander, which again comes ultimately from Theophrastus. This evidence bears on the way Anaximander thought the world around us was formed, and in particular how the sky and heavenly bodies come about. He said that through a process, which is unfortunately rather obscure, a ball of fire came to exist around the air surrounding the earth. This ball of fire surrounded the air, Anaximander said, like bark surrounding a tree. The flame then burst apart into rings or circles, which were again enveloped in some kind of air or mist. Round holes in the mist allow us to see the circles of fire, but only partially. And these circular glimpses of the fire are the heavenly bodies. The moon waxes and wanes, because the holes in the mist are opening and closing. Now this, I think you'll agree, is all pretty cool. To convey it properly, I'd need a bigger special effects budget, but how does it relate to the business about the infinite and things being separated, paying retribution to one another, and all that? Well, the report I've just been describing starts by saying that in Anaximander's scheme, something separates hot and cold out from the eternal. The eternal is presumably his first principle, the aperon. The cold part is probably the air or mist, and the hot part is obviously going to be the fire. Notice how they then interact with each other, the mist first being hugged tight by the fire like the bark of a tree, and then shrouding the rings of flame out in the heavens. All of this suggests that Anaximander was fascinated by the opposed forces we see in nature around us. These countervailing forces, which are things like mist and flame, with opposing characteristics, are what pay retribution to one another. The infinite is indefinite, it has no characteristics that could be opposed, but it is somehow the source of what enters into opposition. And because it is infinite, in the sense of being inexhaustible, the process of mutual opposition will never cease. This theme of constant and dynamic opposition, which takes place against the background of an underlying unity, is one of the most enduring features of pre-Socratic philosophy. We'll find it most strikingly later on in Heraclitus, but the same idea will appear too in Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Even Aristotle will try to explain nature in terms of opposition and unity. Also typically pre-Socratic is the attempt to explain something huge and complicated, in fact the whole cosmos, by invoking fundamental constituents and forces. Actually, the ambitions of the theory may go even further. Some evidence suggests that Anaximander had in mind more than just our cosmos. Theophrastus tells us that, in Anaximander's theory, it wasn't just stuffs like air and fire that are separated out from the infinite, but also whole worlds. If this is not entirely misleading, and something it is, then this could mean either an infinite number of worlds like our own, scattered out through the infinity, or it could mean an unending series of cycles for our own cosmos, one after the other. Both ideas would, again, have resonances with later pre-Socratic thought. The notion that at least our own cosmos does operate in cycles is supported by a bit of testimony which says that Anaximander believed our world is drying out, the seas gradually retreating as the sun heats them and turns the moisture into wind. Maybe the idea here is that we live within a part of the cosmic cycle where heat is gradually overwhelming what is cold and moist, a 6th century BC version of global warming. The idea that things were wetter in the distant past would go well with another scrap of information which preserves what is probably Anaximander's most memorable idea, apart from the infinite principle. He claimed that the first animals were gestated inside moisture and then broke out of it as if through the bark of a tree. He seems to have had a thing about bark one can't help noticing. He also suggested that man couldn't originally have been the way he is now, since the first generation of children would not have survived. Way too helpless. Rather, they were formed inside of fish and full-grown adults burst out of them. This shouldn't be taken as some kind of proto-theory of evolution, because there's no idea here that fish gradually become more and more human over many generations. Rather, it looks more like an attempt to take the idea of Thales that all things come from water or moisture and flesh it out, if you'll pardon a pun. But overall, it looks like Anaximander had a more abstract approach, one is tempted to say a more philosophical approach, than Thales did. His infinite is a conceptual leap and seems to be derived from pure argument rather than empirical observation. Some have seen another impressively philosophical approach in his explanation of why the earth stays where it does. He thought the earth is like a squat cylinder, shaped like a drum, and we live on the flat upper surface. Aristotle tells us that Anaximander then wondered why this cylindrical earth doesn't move around. The reason, he decided, is that the earth is right in the middle of the cosmos, so no direction would be a more appropriate way for it to move than any other. This is interesting because it shows Anaximander demanding that there be a good reason for the earth to move in a particular direction, if it is going to move. The mere equivalence of all the directions it could move is enough to keep it in place. We might have expected things to develop further in this way, getting more abstract and more conceptual. Indeed, they will when we get to Heraclitus in a few weeks. However, the very next thinker on our itinerary is Anaximenes, who seems to go in the other direction. He agreed with Anaximander that the principle of everything is infinite, but he was happy to go ahead and identify it with a particular substance, not water this time, but air. It would, however, be wrong to think that Anaximenes was just ignoring his similarly named predecessor, and retrenching to a view like that of Thales. His philosophy actually builds on Anaximander's in at least one important way, by explaining how the different stuffs that make up the cosmos are generated one out of another. Now, why does he start with air and not fire, the thinnest stuff, or, for that matter, rocks, the densest stuff? Three reasons, I'd guess. First, the sources suggest that Anaximenes was impressed by the fluidity of air. So, perhaps he selected air as his principle because he wanted to emphasize the dynamism of the natural world, like Anaximander with his constantly opposed forces. Second, a related point, just like Anaximander's Epiron, Anaximenes' air is that from which other things are separated out. The nice thing about air, at least on his theory, is that you can either thin it out and make fire, or thicken it and make cold things, like water and earth. It is an in-between kind of stuff, and so can be the principle for both hot and cold things. Third, there's the fact that air is invisible, unlike fire, clouds, seas, and rocks. So, if there is some infinite unbounded substance surrounding us in all directions, it must be air. Otherwise, we'd be able to see it. Like Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes wanted to explain the whole cosmos in terms of these basic constituents. He said that the earth we live on is shaped like a disk. It forms by the aforementioned process of thickening air, and then rides on the air that is still in its original state. The obvious comparison is to a Frisbee, even though none of the books I've read about pre-Socratic philosophy are frivolous enough to draw that particular analogy. Anyway, his earth is held up by the air the way Thales' earth floats in water like a piece of wood. That similarity is not likely to be a coincidence. Certainly here, Anaximenes was closer to Thales than to Anaximander, since he agreed with the earlier thinker both about the disk-like shape of the earth and the need for it to be borne up by something. He furthermore said that the stars, planets, sun, and moon are made of fire. In a lovely image, Anaximenes apparently compared them to fiery leaves which are floating up in the airy, boundless heaven. In a more amusing image, he said that they rotate around the disk of the earth like a felt hat being spun around on somebody's head. Anaximenes also had something to say about the soul. Unsurprisingly, he said that the soul is made of his favourite stuff, air, which in this case is breath. This idea of the soul as breath, or in Greek pneuma, that's where we get the word pneumatic, is going to have a long career in later ancient philosophy. It makes a certain amount of sense, given that if an animal stops breathing, it stops living. This also allows Anaximenes to make a comparison between the human body and the body of the cosmos. Both are sustained by the most fundamental substance, namely air. Again, this is an idea with a long afterlife. Right down through the medieval period, it will be popular to say that the human is a little version of the physical cosmos, literally a microcosm. Though some doubt that Anaximander was making this point, I find it plausible to believe that he already has something like the idea of man as a microcosm. Before too long, Heraclitus will set out a very similar theory, according to which both the soul of man and the principle of the universe are made of the same stuff, in his case fire. Remember that Thales too said that magnets have a soul, possibly because he wanted to argue that the whole physical cosmos is permeated by soul, just like we are. So, during the early generations of presocratic philosophy, this parallel between man and the cosmos seems to have been, if you'll pardon another pun, in the air. I want to conclude this podcast by mentioning a feature shared by both Anaximander's Infinite and Anaximenes' air. Both philosophers claim that their principles are divine. Anaximander adds that the infinite, as he puts it, steers everything. It's not quite clear how it could do so, perhaps by enforcing the reciprocal justice between the things separated out of it. But it is important to realize that these early Greek thinkers were not giving up entirely on the notion of the divine. Anaximenes, in fact, is reported to have said that there are gods, just as Greek religion taught, but that these gods too came from air. What we see here is a subtle, but nonetheless pivotally important, feature of presocratic philosophy. These are thinkers who want to hold on to a sense of religious awe in the face of the dynamically changing cosmos they describe. They are not discarding religion, but rather throwing down a challenge to previous conceptions of the divine. The way they do this is fairly nuanced, but things are about to get a lot less subtle with the next philosopher we'll talk about, Xenophanes. He staged a direct attack on the conception of the gods that we find in Homer and Hesiod, and in so doing began an opposition, or at least a very tense relationship, between Greek religion and Greek philosophy that will persist right through Plato and Aristotle. We'll learn more about him on next week's episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Created in Our Image – Xenophanes against Greek Religion In Homer's Iliad, there's a rather steamy bit in which Hera decides to seduce her husband, Zeus. The reason Hera wants to do this is that she's backing the Greek invaders against the Trojans, and Zeus is on the Trojan side. So, in order to help the Greeks, she needs to get Zeus to stop paying attention for a while. And a surefire way to get a man's attention is to seduce him, right? So, with a little help from Aphrodite and the god Sleep, whom she bribes by promising to let him marry one of the divine graces, she persuades Zeus to lie with her, after which he falls into a deep post-coital snooze. While he's asleep, Hector, the Trojan's mightiest warrior, is badly wounded. Zeus, as you can imagine, is really annoyed when he wakes up. He says to Hera, in the translation of Martin Hammond, Impossible creature! It is surely your vile scheming that has put godlike Hector out of the battle, and panicked his army. You may soon be the first to feel the benefit of your troublesome mischief when I flog you with blows of the whip. Now, you may find it odd to think that the ancient Greeks told stories like this about the gods, the very same gods that they sacrificed to, prayed to, built temples to. But there are plenty of stories like this. For example, according to Hesiod, Zeus' father Cronus cut off the genitals of his own father, Ouranos, with a sickle, and then, Cronus' mother threw them in the water. It was out of the resulting froth that Aphrodite was born. In another tale, Aphrodite and Ares get caught committing adultery. The Greeks found it possible to recount such stories while still finding their gods worthy of worship. Their understanding of the gods found full expression in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. For the Greeks, these poems were something close to sacred texts. So, the philosophers of ancient Greece couldn't avoid engaging with Homer and Hesiod, any more than the philosophers of medieval Europe could have avoided engaging with the Bible. Greek philosophers, however, took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in medieval Europe, and none more so than the subject of today's episode, Xenophanes. But let's start with a brief look at the gods in Homer, or rather, in one of the two poems ascribed to him, the Iliad. Last time, I was complaining about how little we know about the prezocratic, well, we know even less about Homer. In fact, there isn't even agreement about whether the two poems are the work of a single person as opposed to compilations that emerged over the course of generations. The Iliad, as you probably know already, is the story of the Trojan War, in which the Greeks, led by Agamemnon, lay siege to Troy in order to recover the beautiful Helen, you know, of her face is so beautiful it launched a thousand ships fame. The thousand ships her face launched were the ones carrying the Greeks to Troy. The Iliad covers only a little bit of the Trojan War. As it says in its opening lines, it focuses on the wrath of Achilles, the story of how Achilles is offended and refuses to fight, leading to a stalemate between the two armies, until his anger is roused and he comes out and kills Hector, the Trojan's main hero. Although the climax is a duel between Hector and Achilles, there are many heroes on both sides, including, on the Greek side, Odysseus, whose voyage home will be the subject of the Odyssey. There are also many side characters who aren't mighty heroes, even an occasional commoner or woman. The aged Priam also gets a good part, as a grieving father, after Achilles slays his son Hector and drags him around the city pulled by a chariot. But aside from the heroes, the main characters are the gods. The gods are involved whenever anything significant happens to the human characters. We've already had an example of this. Homer shows us that Hera needs to distract Zeus by getting him to go to sleep so that she can arrange for Hector to be wounded without Zeus's interference. The overall effect of this, from a philosophical point of view, is that Homer's gods are the explanations of last resort, or even of first resort. Nothing can happen without the gods being involved. At the very least, they need to allow humans to act. More often, it seems like human agency is just an extension of divine agency. When the warriors are brave, it's because the gods have put courage into their hearts. When they retreat, it's the gods who have drained away their willingness to fight. On the one hand, this makes the humans seem like mere playthings of the gods. But on the other hand, the Homeric gods are a lot like humans, and not even particularly well-behaved humans. They get angry, they quarrel, they deceive and seduce one another. So one might look at it from the other point of view and say that the human sphere has been extended to include the ultimate explanatory principles, namely the gods. This is one reason that that recent film version of The Trojan War, that one with Brad Pitt playing Achilles, was so disappointing, at least for those of us who were curious to see Homer's poem put on the big screen. By taking the gods out of the picture, the filmmakers eliminated the prime movers of Homer's story. Now let's turn to the other main text which tells us about Greek religion before the pre-Socratics, what you might call pre-pre-Socratic belief about the gods. This is by a farmer named Hesiod from the island of Boiotia, off the coast of mainland Greece. Hesiod wrote a poem called Works and Days, which has a lot to say about farming, as well as the gods, though Hesiod also finds time to complain about his lazy jerk of a brother. But the more important text for us is his Theogony, which as its title says, is a poem about the generation or birth of the gods. After a long opening prayer to the Muses, Hesiod tells us that the first of all things to come into being was the god Chaos, who seems to represent some kind of void or gaffe between the earth and the underworld. Then comes Gaia. Gaia is the earth, and she gives birth to the god Ouranos, which means heaven. They mate to produce a whole generation of gods, including Zeus' father, Cronos. This is a theme commonly found in other early religions, the mating of the earth and heaven, which produces other cosmic principles. So far this sounds a bit like some of what we've seen in the pre-Socratics. Thales says everything comes from water, Anaximenes says it all comes from air, Hesiod says it all comes from chaos and earth. Of course, in Hesiod's story the cosmic principles are gods, but still he's giving you a cosmology. Still, there are some big differences between Hesiod and the early philosophers of Miletus. Like the pre-Socratics, Hesiod is trying to explain things, but the things he tries to explain tend to be rather different. For instance, he tells a story in which Prometheus tricks Zeus into taking the bones and skins of an animal, rather than the meat. This is supposed to explain why the Greeks sacrifice animals to the gods, but are allowed to eat the meat rather than offering up the whole animal. And this, incidentally, is a common refrain in Homer. The gods are often pleased or annoyed with our heroes, because they do or don't sacrifice properly. But in general, Homer is much more interested in the human sphere than Hesiod is, at least in the Theogony. That makes the Theogony a more vivid comparison and contrast to our early pre-Socratic philosophers. Another important difference between Hesiod and the pre-Socratics is that Hesiod isn't arguing, even implicitly. Instead, he's declaiming, telling an epic tale that will convince with its power and instill awe as well as belief. Despite this, his gods turn out to be very much like the gods of Homer. They trick each other, they sleep with each other, they get angry, they fight wars. This might strike us as distinctly unphilosophical. But we should remember that all Greek philosophers from Thales to the Neoplatonists in the 5th century AD, more than a thousand years later, knew their Homer and Hesiod inside out. These poems are definitive works of not only religion, but also literature and history in the Greek world. They are a shared culture which binds together Greek civilization. Unsurprisingly, Plato and Aristotle often quote from both Homer and Hesiod, and they're happy to ascribe various philosophical doctrines to these great poets. For instance, in a dialogue called the Theaetetus, Plato associates Homer with Heraclitus' doctrine that everything is constantly changing. Aristotle, meanwhile, is always pleased if he can quote a line of Homer to illustrate a certain view. It shows that wise people tend to take the view seriously, Homer being the ultimate example of a wise person. This way of treating the poets is a little bit disconcerting. Did Plato and Aristotle really not know the difference between poetry and philosophy? As we'll see in later episodes, they certainly did, and in fact Plato has quite an axe to grind with Homer. But they were open to the idea that Homer or Hesiod might be addressing some of the same issues as the ones philosophers tackle, even if not in exactly the same way. It's really this that makes it possible for there to be a clash between the philosophers and the poets. If Homer had only talked about the wrath of Achilles and Odysseus' journey home, if Hesiod had only talked about farming and his useless brother, then Xenophanes would have had no complaints. The reason he went after the poets is that they dealt with a further subject on which Xenophanes had very firm views, namely the gods. Xenophanes was a poet himself, albeit not an author of epic verse. His philosophical fragments are in poetic meter, and our longest fragments from him are elegies. Sometimes he would probably have performed at banquets. He lived a long time. In one fragment he says that at the time of writing his poem, he's 92 years old. This plus the fact that it's hard to know when he was born means that he could have been a contemporary of several philosophers we haven't yet discussed, including Heraclitus, who criticized Xenophanes by name. But basically we're looking at a man who lived most of his long life in the 6th century BC. We do know where he was from, Colophon, a coastal city in Asia Minor on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey. It's a bit further north up the coast from Miletus where Thales and Aximander and Anaximides lived. Xenophanes seems to have travelled extensively. He went west as far as Sicily. Some later sources tell us that he went to Elea in mainland Italy, but they might have invented this because they want us to connect Xenophanes with Parmenides who was from Elea. Xenophanes represents a new development in pre-Socratic philosophy, because he's the first explicitly to attack the authority of the poets. Of course the Milesians, the subjects of our first two episodes, were departing from the poets also by replacing the gods with more complicated physical accounts of the cosmos. But Xenophanes was the first to really lay into Homer and Hesiod. One of his complaints was something I've already mentioned. The poets say scandalous things about the gods, telling stories of their adultery, their theft, their mutual deception. These gods aren't just like humans, they are all too human. And no wonder, says Xenophanes in another couple of fragments, because the conception we have of the gods is really a projection of human nature. The poets describe the gods as being born from parents, just like humans. They wear clothes, they talk. In fact, points out Xenophanes, it isn't just the poets. The Ethiopians think that the gods have black skin, like people from Ethiopia, whereas the fair-haired people from Thrace think that the gods have, you guessed it, fair hair. In what may be the first joke in the history of philosophy, albeit a joke with a serious message, Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses. At first, this seems to be the sort of thing a sceptical atheist of modern times might say. We didn't create man in his image, we create god in our image. But Xenophanes was no atheist. Rather, he was motivated by respect for the gods, and thought it appalling to say that they engaged in adultery and theft, or even wearing clothes. Even in one of his non-philosophical poems, he said poets should devote pious hymns to the gods, and not speak of war or the clash between giants and titans, a favourite theme of mythic poetry. So part of Xenophanes' point was plain old moral outrage. Depicting Kronos castrating his father isn't appropriately reverential, it's just not sending a good message to all the kids out there. But he also has his own positive conception of god, which he thinks would be consistent with divinity and appropriately reverential. Xenophanes seems to have come up with this conception by reversing the approach of Homer and Hesiod. These gods won't be like humans, instead he'll be as much unlike humans as possible, and better in every way. Unlike us, god needs nothing, despite what the poets would have you believe. So you can stop sacrificing those animals, he doesn't need them. God doesn't move at all, there's nowhere he needs to go, and maybe he doesn't even have a body. On the other hand, like the Homeric and Hesiodic gods, he's very powerful. In fact, he can shake everything just by thinking, as Xenophanes puts it. This phrase echoes his nemesis Homer, who says in the Iliad that Zeus shakes Olympus. Another fragment of Xenophanes says that god sees, thinks, and hears as a whole. In other words, he does nothing but think and perceive. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Xenophanes says that God is one among gods and men, incomparable to mortals in body or thought. This fragment is a little confusing. God is one among gods? Is he saying that there's only one god? Or one god who's greater than all the other gods? If it's the former, then Xenophanes is abandoning not only the anthropomorphic conception of the gods we find in the poets, but even the idea that there are many gods. We might see this as another move in the direction of simplicity, as we found in the Milesians. They each had their single principle, be it water, air, or the infinite, and Xenophanes has his one god. So what about all the things that the poets explained by referring to their many gods? Here a nice example is what Xenophanes said about the rainbow. The Greeks had a goddess named Isis who was identified with the rainbow. Total rubbish, says Xenophanes. A rainbow is nothing but a cloud with some colours in it. As for the sun, it is not a god called Helios, it is a bunch of fire that has been gathered together. Here we can see Xenophanes extending the ideas of his Milesian predecessors as a way of replacing the poetic worldview. It's almost irresistible to call his new approach scientific, because it refers to physical stuff like clouds and fire, rather than gods and goddesses. But again like the Milesians, he has not gotten rid of religious sentiment. If anything, he's saying that proper respect for the divine should lead us to adopt his conception of a single god who does nothing but think, and has nothing in common with us, apart from the ability to think. But why is god thinking and not moving, or any of the other things we do? Maybe because thinking is the one thing humans can do that is worthy of god. But even here, Xenophanes insists that god is nothing like us, he is incomparable to us in both body and in thought. You'll notice for instance that we can't shake all things just by thinking about it. You can only imagine what Xenophanes' contemporaries might have thought about all this. Where does this arrogant dude from Ionia get off telling us everything we believe about our cherished gods is silly? And certainly Xenophanes, as I've presented him so far, seems if not arrogant, then at least blessed with tremendous self-confidence, shall we say. He's taking on the poets, the biggest target around. But other fragments give a different impression. In these fragments, he shows that he has a cautious and maybe even skeptical attitude towards what humans, including himself, can know. He says that no one really knows about the gods and other things he is telling us about. Rather, even if you are lucky enough to believe the truth, you won't know. This is just as revolutionary as his ideas about god. He's distinguishing between believing something and really knowing it, a distinction which will be tremendously important down the line when we get to Plato, for example. In fact, this is important for philosophy in general. What is philosophy if it isn't the attempt to sort out what we can know from what we merely believe? But it's not clear exactly what Xenophanes is saying here. What are the things no one can ever know? Well, he's claiming that at least the nature of god, or the gods, is beyond human grasp. In another fragment, in which it looks like he's talking about his own teachings, he says, let these things be believed as being like the truth. So where's that tremendous self-confidence now? It seems to have been replaced by a deep modesty about human powers of understanding. The best any of us can do is to find the most plausible and appropriate beliefs. But that doesn't stop Xenophanes from being pretty tough on people who fall short of these most plausible and appropriate beliefs, especially on a topic as important as the divine. We don't know, maybe, that god thinks and can shake all things by thinking, but we should believe it. Or as we sure as heck shouldn't believe, that god commits adultery. These themes from Xenophanes are going to reverberate throughout pre-Socratic philosophy and also in Plato and Aristotle. Other pre-Socratics will also distinguish between what we can merely believe and what we actually know, but they'll tend to be a lot more confident about their own views than Xenophanes was. We'll also keep seeing a kind of rivalry between the philosophers and the poets. That's true of Heraclitus, for instance, who we'll get to in two weeks' time. Heraclitus insults Hesiod and Xenophanes in the same breath, saying, they both show us that learning many things doesn't make you intelligent. Ouch. But first we'll be turning to another philosopher who Heraclitus insults in that same passage. This next philosopher will be one whose relationship to traditional Greek religion was much friendlier than Xenophanes'. Actually, he wasn't so much a friend of the gods as a close family member, because this next philosopher was supposedly the son of Apollo, or perhaps the son of Hermes. He could be in two places at the same time. He could see the future. He didn't eat beans, and his thigh was made of gold. Yes, it's Pythagoras, the topic of next week's episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, The Man with the Golden Thigh, Pythagoras. Philosophers have always loved mathematics. It's not hard to see why. One of the things philosophers are most interested in is knowledge. Indeed, as we found last time, one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Xenophanes, already made a contrast between really having knowledge of the truth and having mere beliefs. And, if you're looking for a nice, solid example of knowledge, mathematics is just about the best example there is. You don't merely believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4, you actually know it. Or, at least, this is what most people think, that mathematics is a kind of gold standard against which other supposed examples of knowledge can be measured. This way of looking at mathematics goes back to Greek philosophy, but mathematics itself goes back even further. I'm not just talking about counting or adding simple sums here. For instance, the Babylonians and Egyptians were accomplished in the sorts of mathematics required for land measurement and astronomy. We saw already that Thales, the first pre-Socratic philosopher, did some astronomy, and that he may have got some of his astronomical knowledge from the Egyptians. Pythagoras too, according to legend, travelled to Egypt, and may have picked up some knowledge of mathematics there. So mathematics is older than philosophy, but the two have been close companions ever since philosophy came on the scene. Plato is famous for emphasizing the links between philosophy and mathematics. Supposedly he had a sign over the entrance to his academy, reading "...let no one enter who has not studied mathematics." His student Aristotle often treats mathematics as that gold standard of knowledge, and we can find similar attitudes much later in Greek philosophy. For instance, Galen, the great doctor of the 2nd century AD, once fended off an attack of skeptical doubts by taking refuge in the certainties of mathematics. His contemporary, the equally great astronomer Ptolemy, says that among the theoretical sciences, mathematics is the only really certain discipline. But long before Galen and Ptolemy, in fact pretty long before Plato and Aristotle, there was Pythagoras. Just about everyone has heard of Pythagoras, if only because of the Pythagorean theorem. I may as well break the news straight off that there's no good evidence that Pythagoras himself discovered the Pythagorean theorem. It was however known to his followers, the Pythagoreans. Actually, that sort of sets the tone for the rest of this discussion. We know a great deal about the tradition of Pythagoreanism, which takes its name from Pythagoras, but we know hardly anything about the man himself. Among the pre-Socratics, all of whom are surrounded by a good deal of misinformation and legend, he stands out as the one figure who is more myth than man. But what a myth. He's credited with being the first to fuse philosophy with mathematics, with being a worker of miracles, being divine or semi-divine, the son of a god. The beliefs ascribed to him range from arcane metaphysical and religious ideas, for instance reincarnation, to homely ethical teachings, for instance that you shouldn't eat beans or meat. Typically there are other ancient texts that say he did eat meat. But before we get carried away with the myth, and don't worry, we'll be getting carried away shortly, since the myth is much too good to pass over in silence, let's start with what we do know about the man. We've seen that the early pre-Socratics were from the coast of Asia Minor, in modern day Turkey. Last week's subject, Xenophanes, was from there but travelled west. The same is true of Pythagoras. We have good evidence that he was from Samos, an island off the Ionian coast, but he too travelled across the Mediterranean, possibly having left his birthplace because he didn't see eye to eye with a local tyrant. The place he's most associated with is therefore not Samos, but Croton, a city in southern Italy. In fact, ancient authors like to give him credit for founding a distinctive philosophical tradition, the so-called Italian school of philosophy. Here, it might be worth mentioning again that Sicily, Italy, and other parts of the western Mediterranean had been settled by Greek colonists in the centuries previous to the emergence of the pre-Socratics. The Greeks held on in southern Italy for quite a long time, until the Romans finally pushed them out of this area which they called Magna Graecia. Pythagoras himself would have lived there in the 6th century BC, about two centuries after the settlement of Croton in the late 8th century. But getting really clear about his dates is no easy matter. We know that both Xenophanes and Heraclitus refer to him by name, so he's a rough contemporary of these thinkers, and that's good enough for our purposes. So, there's Pythagoras in southern Italy, not discovering the Pythagorean theorem. Another thing he was not doing is writing books. In fact, it's rather striking that Pythagoras and Socrates are arguably the most famous philosophers prior to Plato and Aristotle, and yet neither of them wrote anything. Maybe they're so famous precisely because they never wrote anything. Socrates, like Pythagoras, became a literary character, a vessel for the ideas and imaginings of other people. And, while we like to think we have a reasonably vivid and accurate idea of the real Socrates, thanks to Plato and other authors like the historian Xenophon, in the case of Pythagoras, we are really just sifting through legends and myths. Not only is Pythagoras quite a bit earlier than Socrates, but his way of doing philosophy, if he did philosophy at all, was a lot less public than Socrates. Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated. Okay, maybe that code of silence is just another legend, but the fact remains that we have very little idea of what Pythagoras himself said or thought, not only because of a lack of reliable evidence, but because the stray bits of reliable evidence often seem to be deliberately obscure. To make things worse, these bits of reliable evidence are buried under an avalanche of more dubious evidence from people who thought of themselves as Pythagoreans. This tradition of Pythagoreanism is one of the most durable in ancient Greek philosophy. It begins, obviously enough, with Pythagoras himself and his immediate followers. There was then a reasonably well-defined Pythagorean movement in the 5th century BC, and in the 4th century Plato had associates and students who took up Pythagorean ideas. Aristotle found this phenomenon interesting enough that he wrote a book about Pythagoras and his followers, but unfortunately this is lost. In any case, it's really the 5th century BC Pythagoreans, after Pythagoras himself was dead, but before Plato comes along, who should get the credit for fusing philosophy with mathematics. Ideas like the harmony of the spheres, the notion that the proportions of the celestial bodies are arranged according to some kind of musical ordering, probably emerged in this period. Still, all ancient authors assumed that Pythagoras himself had an intense interest in mathematics, and we may as well go along with this, while remembering that his interests may have been more religious or symbolic than technical. The ancient authors who talk about early Pythagoreanism build up a probably fictitious contrast between two types of followers of the divine Pythagoras. There are the ones who are interested in the religious and ethical precepts that he laid down, the so-called akousmata, and then there are the math geeks. It's in the ethical precepts that we get the instruction, for instance, not to eat beans or meat. Oh, and don't ever touch a white rooster. And did I mention don't bury corpses wearing woollen clothing? These rules are hard for us to explain, and they weren't much easier for the ancients. Various symbolic explanations are given by later authors who are well-disposed towards Pythagoreanism. As for the math geeks, these are the Pythagoreans who really interest Plato and Aristotle. They get mentioned in Aristotle's existing works as well as his lost work on the Pythagoreans, which, since it's lost, like I said, we know only in fragments. These were thinkers who went so far as to say that things in the physical universe are somehow made of numbers. Aristotle claims to find this idea barely comprehensible, but if we're feeling generous, we might want to see here an anticipation of the modern idea that mathematical concepts are at the foundations of physics. We'll see in a later episode that in one of his dialogues, Plato suggests that the elements of physical objects are literally made of triangles which come together to form solid shapes. That is the sort of idea that the Pythagoreans inspired, even if it isn't something that they thought of themselves. Even the mathematically inclined Pythagoreans, the math geeks, had a deeply symbolic, maybe even mystical understanding of number. These were people like Philolaus, from Pythagoras's adopted home Croton. Philolaus and other Pythagoreans made genuine advances in mathematics, but they also used to say things like this, two and three symbolically represent woman and man, so five is the number of marriage, because it is two plus three. A particularly important number for them was ten, which among other things is the sum of the first four numbers, in other words one plus two plus three plus four equals ten. Aristotle in fact tells us that the Pythagoreans thought there must be a heavenly body which is always hidden from us, the so-called counter-earth, because the visible heavenly bodies including the sun and moon counted nine, but there must be ten of them, because ten is the most important number. After Aristotle and Plato's immediate followers, the Pythagoreans fade away a bit, but they make a big comeback in the first century BC. At this point we begin to see a powerful tendency to combine Plato's ideas with Pythagorean ideas like number symbolism. This tendency lives on until the end of pagan Greek philosophy, with the tradition we nowadays refer to as Neoplatonism. We call the late ancient philosophers of the 3rd to 6th centuries AD Neoplatonists because they were followers of Plato, but also had a lot of new ideas, which modern scholars do not find in Plato, hence the Neo in Neoplatonism. For them, one of the biggest influences was the tradition of Pythagoras whom they saw as an ultimate source of Plato's own ideas. Thus Pythagoras, one of the very earliest Greek thinkers, became one of the most important authorities and intellectual heroes of the Greek thinkers in late antiquity a full millennium later. One of the Neoplatonists who most admired Pythagoras was Eamblichus, who lived in the 3rd to 4th century AD. We'll get to him as a philosopher in his own right eventually, though it will be a while, at the rate we're going. I mention him now because he wrote a work called On the Pythagorean Way of Life, which shows the way Pythagoras was perceived by that much later period of Greek philosophy. By Eamblichus' day, the legend of Pythagoras has blossomed so that he is seen as the definitive sage, able to work miracles, and apparently inexhaustible in his wisdom. Eamblichus mentions many miraculous events, some of which were already reported much earlier, for instance by Aristotle. For example, Pythagoras is said to have had a thigh made of gold, which he once exhibited at Olympia. He's able to see the future, for instance by predicting an earthquake. He can talk to animals and even give them instructions. Eamblichus has him confronting a bear who had been attacking people in the local area and persuading the bear to mind its manners. And if that's not enough to impress you, he can also talk to geographical features. Eamblichus tells us that he was once greeted by a river. This sort of thing may strike us as somewhat amusing now, but it had a serious purpose at its time. It's been suggested that the Pythagoras legend was emphasized by authors like Eamblichus because they lived in a time when their pagan religious beliefs were under pressure from the rapid spread of Christianity. For a Platonist pagan like Eamblichus, or his teacher Porphyry, who wrote venomous attacks on the Christians, Pythagoras could serve as an ideal holy man to rival Jesus. His piety and religious teachings are emphasized throughout, and we hear Pythagoras' advice about how to behave towards the gods and their temples. For instance, he says you should never visit a temple unless it is the primary reason for your journey. Just stopping off at a temple on the way to somewhere else is inappropriate, even if you're walking right by one. On the other hand, Eamblichus most definitely sees Pythagoras as a philosopher. He sees him in fact as THE philosopher, the founder of Eamblichus' own intellectual tradition, and even the first man to call himself a philosophos, which means lover of wisdom, sophia being the Greek word for wisdom. On this account, Pythagoras was the first to make the love of wisdom into a way of life. As we might expect, Eamblichus also emphasizes Pythagoras' connections with the mathematics, especially music. From very early on in the Pythagorean tradition, music and mathematics were intimately related. And no wonder, because the relationships between notes are just examples of mathematical ratios. In fact, you would make a Greek lyre by stretching numerous strings at the same tension. The different lengths of the strings gives you the different notes. Eamblichus tells a picturesque story, in which Pythagoras hits upon this insight when he's walking by a blacksmith's shop and hears the hammer beating against the metal, ringing out at different tones. Pythagoras then goes home and experiments with stretching strings on weights to get the different musical ratios, such as the octave. Eamblichus adds the exceedingly implausible idea that Pythagoras actually invented a whole range of musical instruments. The Pythagoreans believed that the musical harmonies had some kind of affinity with and effect on the human soul. Another feat ascribed to Pythagoras, and one you can try at home, is using different kinds of music to induce different emotional states. Eamblichus tells how Pythagoras once managed to calm down a ragingly drunk man just by having someone play the right sort of music on a set of pipes. The idea that the soul and its states would somehow resonate to music, if you will, chimes with the idea that the soul itself might be a kind of harmony. Plato and Aristotle both discuss this Pythagorean idea, and the theory may seem to us strikingly plausible in its way. On this view, the soul is not some entity separate from the body, but is rather the attunement or proportion that keeps the body in functioning order. Just like a lyre will play badly, or not at all, if its strings are taken out of the correct harmonic tension, so a body will become defective, for instance, ill, or just die if its attunement is disrupted. But there's something of a puzzle here. Although in a sense, it isn't surprising to see that music and mathematics obsess Pythagorean, setting forth this sort of theory about the soul, it is almost certainly not the theory of soul Pythagoras adopted. For according to Pythagoras, the soul can leave one body and go on to reside in other bodies, including the bodies of animals. In other words, Pythagoras believed in reincarnation. Part of his legend is that unlike the rest of us, he was able to remember who he had been in his former lives. For example, he was the chap who killed Patroclus, the bosom companion of Achilles in the Trojan War. But again, there's more here than just legend. You might remember my saying last time that Xenophanes refers to Pythagoras by name. He says that Pythagoras once heard a puppy whining as it was beaten, and cried out, stop, for I recognize that its voice belongs to a friend of mine. This is a little joke at Pythagoras's expense, but one that only makes sense if he was already known to believe in reincarnation. Perhaps you're not convinced that this counts as philosophy. I guess if you met someone at a party who was convinced that she used to be Marie Antoinette, and then after a trip to the guillotine was a giraffe, you wouldn't think, aha, a philosopher. But this theory of reincarnation at least relates to, and maybe even inaugurates, a philosophical theory with a grand lineage, dualism. Dualism is simply the view that the soul and the body are two distinct things. Many dualists draw the further inference that one can therefore exist without the other. This is implied by reincarnation, the soul survives the death of one body, namely Marie Antoinette's, before entering the next, namely that of a giraffe. Perhaps Pythagoras's view was even stronger, that the soul and the body are completely different metaphysical entities. They would be more different than, say, your nose and my nose. These are distinct things, and one can exist without the other, but they are the same sort of thing. By contrast, according to most Pythagoreans in ancient philosophy, the soul and the body are utterly different sorts of thing. The soul is immaterial, and probably indestructible. The body is material, and will inevitably be destroyed. This view is what philosophers usually mean when they use the word dualism, and it will be defended by many famous philosophers. Plato and Descartes, especially, leap to mind here. There's some reason to think that Plato had Pythagoreanism in mind when he developed his particular version of dualism, so we've taken a big step in the direction of understanding Plato's background, or at least the background of one major theme in his philosophy. And now, if you'll pardon the pun, we've come full circle, back to the Pythagorean's interest in things like circles, numbers, shapes, and all the other objects studied in mathematics. It's no coincidence, I think, that Pythagoreanism is associated both with dualist theories about the soul, and with an emphasis on mathematics. The soul postulated by the dualist has a great deal in common with numbers. Both are abstract, immaterial entities, and look like they will always exist, assuming they exist at all. How are you going to kill an immaterial soul, or assassinate the number seven? One reason Platonism and Pythagoreanism were able to combine together so easily is that both Plato and the followers of Pythagoras were interested in these stable, immaterial objects. They wanted to get away from the messiness of physical objects with the way they constantly change and they're being subject to an infinite number of various features. That certainly isn't the only idea that drives Plato, but it seems to be one of the most important, and it is even more important for later thinkers who see Pythagoras as the inventor of Platonic philosophy like our friend Iamblichus. In all this, the Pythagorean tradition is very different from what we'll be looking at next, the philosophy of Heraclitus. His interest in the phenomenon of change is nearly as famous as Pythagoras' obsession with mathematics, and in one of his many rather mysterious remarks he says the things he values most are those things he can see, hear, and learn about. He was, in other words, a man for the concrete. Yet he was also a man with a taste for riddles and paradoxes. His memorable, but puzzling one-liners epitomize the fragmentary, suggestive sort of philosophy we get from the pre-Socratics. His remark that you can't step into the same river twice is only the most famous example. So go with the flow, and join me for Heraclitus next week on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Old Man River, the Puzzles and Paradoxes of Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus is, you might say, the ultimate pre-Socratic. He brings together many of the features we associate with Greek philosophy before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came along. For instance, most of the thinkers we've looked at in previous episodes wanted to reduce the whole cosmos to one fundamental principle. Thales chooses water, Anaximenes chooses air, and Anaximander has his more abstract principle, the unlimited. Heraclitus, too, has his basic element, namely fire. Another example, these thinkers also wanted to explain change and opposition, and once Heraclitus comes along, their forays in this direction seem like a mere prologue to his theory of the unity of opposites. But of course, the most basic thing about the pre-Socratics is that we read only fragments of their thought. We're left with intriguing quotations and paraphrases from later authors. But Heraclitus actually wrote in fragments. Heraclitus' body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s. It consists mostly of one-liners. Heraclitus did apparently write a book. Like most of the pre-Socratics, he's credited with having written a work called On Nature. That title doesn't mean he was a natural scientist, or that he was only a natural scientist. The Greek word for nature is phusis, which is where we get the word physics, but when it was used by these early thinkers, it could have a very broad meaning. Nature was just everything there was, and that was the topic of the book Heraclitus wrote. In it, he reportedly dealt with the cosmos itself, political questions, and the gods. We have fragments on all these topics, but with one major exception, the fragments we have from Heraclitus don't look like excerpts from a book, really. They look, as I say, more like one-liners, like philosophical riddles. For example, the road up and down is one and the same, or to paraphrase slightly, sea water, healthy for fish, unhealthy for men. Or how about this one, nature knows how to hide. Or, the most famous of all, you can't step into the same river twice. So, it is with good reason that the ancients referred to him as the Riddler, or Heraclitus the Obscure. He didn't make himself popular with the sort of philosophy in his hometown of Ephesus, which inevitably was yet another city in Ionia, like Meletus, Colophon, and Samos, where our philosophers have come from so far. Unlike his contemporaries in the 6th century BC, Pythagoras and Xenophanes, Heraclitus didn't travel to the west. It seems he was quite happy to stay in the east and provoke people into deep thought, or just plain annoyance, with his riddles. As I said, there is a notable exception to this way of philosophizing, namely a fragment which is apparently the start of his book. In this opening passage, the key word is logos. This is, unfortunately, a word that is always difficult to translate in Greek philosophical texts. In this case, it's even harder. Logos basically means word, but it expands to mean many other things too, like account and reason, or even proportion or measure. It's where we get all those English words that end in "-ology", so, for example, theology is giving an account, a logos, of God, theos, and anthropology is giving an account, a logos, of man, anthropos. So, quite an important word. And it's here in Heraclitus that it first becomes really crucial in philosophical Greek. At the beginning of his book, Heraclitus tells us that the logos he speaks of is something nobody understands, even once they've heard it. People go on through life blissfully unaware of the logos, even though evidence of it is staring them in the face. Which is a shame, because the logos Heraclitus is trying to get you to listen to is one that he claims explains absolutely everything, and here he uses that word nature or phusis. So this will be an account of everything there is. What was contained in this account? Another fragment from early in the book, which has the familiar one-liner form, says, Hearing not me, but the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one. A lot of ink has been spilled over this sentence. For one thing, why is he distinguishing between listening to the logos and hearing him, Heraclitus? Isn't this his account, his logos? Maybe the idea is, we shouldn't believe this because he's saying it, but because it's true. Some people have offered other explanations. For example, that logos doesn't really mean a count here, meaning the views being put forward in Heraclitus' book, but rather the proportion that binds together all things so that they turn out to be one. On the other hand, this logos needs to be something you can hear or listen to. Actually, I suspect Heraclitus, who liked to play around with the double meanings of Greek words, may have had several different aspects of the word logos in mind when he wrote this. What about the other part of this fragment, that we should agree all things are one? This is pretty exciting, because it makes Heraclitus the first philosopher to endorse what is called monism, the idea that everything is, in some sense, a unity. Here, Heraclitus is anticipating the theory of Parmenides. Parmenides, as we'll see, thought that unity is all there is, and he accordingly rejected our experience of the world that tells us there are many things. Heraclitus wasn't going this far, though. In fact, it's typical of him that he says that all things, plural, things, are one. His idea isn't that reality is one and not multiple. His idea is that reality is both a multiplicity and a unity. Heraclitus stresses the unity here, because he thinks this is the aspect of reality that tends to escape us. We go through life not hearing the logos, because our limited vision only takes in one little bit of the world at a time. Heraclitus' philosophy is designed to teach us to see all of nature, everything there is, as one unified whole, but a whole which includes many different things. And that brings us to Heraclitus' core idea, which is the so-called unity of opposites. We've already seen examples of this idea in some of Heraclitus' one-liner riddles. For example, sea water poisons humans, but fish need it to live. It's the same water, but it has opposite properties. A similar one says that donkeys prefer garbage to gold. The gold is valuable for us, and garbage has no value for us, but for the donkey, things are the other way around. The most classic example is when Heraclitus says the road up is the road down. His point here is not incidentally that whether it is the road up or the road down depends on your perspective, namely whether you are headed to the peak of the mountain or to the foothills. Instead, his point is that the same thing really is the road up and it really is the road down at the same time. The gold really is both valuable and worthless as is the garbage. The only point about perspective here is that people's perspective limits them to grasping only one of the opposed aspects of each thing. Again, they're not listening to that logos. With their limited understanding, they're only aware that they can buy things with gold, need to avoid drinking sea water, and are walking uphill. Of course, not everything in the world so obviously unites opposites in this way, but Heraclitus has something else up his sleeve to persuade you. This is the thing he's most famous for, his attention to the phenomenon of change. One of his nicest sayings is about a popular beverage drunk by the ancient Greeks made of wine, barley, and cheese. He said that this barley drink falls apart when it is not stirred. For an example we're more familiar with, think about a salad vinaigrette, how you have to stir it and then pour it over the salad before the oil separates from the vinegar. The nature of the drink or the dressing depends on the fact that it is in motion or changing. Like the vinaigrette, the unity of the world consists in what Heraclitus called a constant war or strife between all things. Maybe we see here why Heraclitus decided to express his philosophy in these mysterious fragmentary riddles. The truth he was trying to express was itself paradoxical, that stability resides precisely in change, that unity resides precisely in opposition. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I've read about Heraclitus, or I've studied him in college or whatever, and what I seem to recall is that Heraclitus says that everything is always changing and that there is no stability, no unity. Heraclitus, in short, thought that everything is in flux. This version of Heraclitus is epitomized in his most famous statement, you can't step into the same river twice. The world is like the river. It doesn't persist but is constantly flowing. There is only change and nothing ever remains the same from one moment to the next. One nice thing about this interpretation of Heraclitus is that it provides a clear contrast to Parmenides, who thinks that change is an illusion. He thinks this, as we'll see, because all things are one. For change to happen, one thing would need to become something else, and there is nothing else. So, we'd have Heraclitus the change guy and Parmenides the stability guy, nice and easy to remember. Now I'm all for making things easy to remember. So, remember this. The flux interpretation of Heraclitus is wrong, and it's all Plato's fault. It's Plato, in his dialogue the Theaetetus, who sets up this neat opposition between the unity theory of Parmenides and the radical flux theory of Heraclitus. He may have been doing so honestly. We know of people who lived in Plato's day who styled themselves as followers of Heraclitus, and they did apparently believe in this flux doctrine. One of them was Cratylus, a philosopher after whom Plato actually named a dialogue. Cratylus is famous for having held that it's impossible to name anything, because whatever you try to name is always changing. Instead, you can only point with your finger at the so-called things that are melting one into another. Rather wittily, he tried to outdo Heraclitus by saying that you can't even step into the same river once. But this supposed improvement shows how badly Cratylus, and perhaps as a result Plato, understood Heraclitus, because Heraclitus did believe that there was one in the same river on different occasions. We can see this from a different version of the famous saying, which, from its language and point, seems more likely to be what Heraclitus actually said, or maybe he said both. In this version, he said, Different waters flow over those who step into the same rivers. It is the same river on different occasions, but with different bits of water each time. This illustrates the point we've been talking about, the unity of opposites. Just like the gold is both valuable and worthless, the river is both the same and different. So if he did think that all things were constantly changing and in flux, he also thought that they remained the same and stable throughout change. This would explain his making war or strife a kind of universal principle, but it would leave standing his idea that all things are one. In fact, it explains why he thinks all things are one. It's perhaps because he was so impressed by change and destruction that Heraclitus chose fire for the fundamental element of his cosmology. In another fragment he says, All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things, like gold for goods and goods for gold. His idea here is in part that fire will consume things and actually turn them into itself. Think of a small blaze engulfing a whole forest and seemingly transforming it into flame until it is all used up and the conflagration dies out. But Heraclitus thinks it can go the other way too, with fire being turned into water and earth. In fact, he sees a fundamental opposition between fire and water. One is transformed into the other, though, like Anaximenes' air, which can become the other elements. We can find a parallel to Heraclitus' image of paying out fire, like gold, in Anaximander's idea that all things pay retribution to one another, if you remember that from episode 2. Same basic thought, even if Heraclitus uses an economic analogy instead of a legal one. Another reason that Heraclitus emphasized fire was, it seems, that he was very impressed by the heavenly bodies and wanted to give them a primary place in his cosmology. He said that the sun, moon, planets, and stars are actually bowls full of fire turned towards us so that we're looking into the bowls. In a nice image, he suggested that the reason the moon waxes and wanes each month is because that bowl is slowly turning, so we can only see some of the fire from the side. Thus, Heraclitus, despite his obvious interest in the fundamental principles of things, continues the Presocratic's interest in specific phenomena of the natural world, and especially the stars. As we've seen, this goes back to Thales with his expertise in astronomy. And their interest in the stars isn't so surprising. After all, these philosophers lived in a time before electricity, and hence before light pollution. If you walked outside at night, even within the walls of a big city like Athens, you would see a stunning night's sky, with more stars than most Europeans ever get to see nowadays. If anything in the world of the ancient Greeks cried out for explanation, it was the heavens. So, overturn bowls of fire. Why not? Another area of Heraclitus' philosophy where fire plays a major role is his theory of the human soul. Actually, he thinks that the human soul is just made of fire. When we die, it is because our souls have turned into water. The most fiery souls, Heraclitus calls them drier souls, are the ones which are wisest. And here's my favorite thing Heraclitus said, we can explain the pathetic behavior of drunk people by the fact that their souls are moist, presumably from the wine they've been drinking. This idea that the soul is made of fire makes more sense than you might at first think. After all, when humans and other animals are alive, they are warm, and it's easy to notice that they cool down fast as soon as they die. Heraclitus won't be the last Greek thinker to suggest that the soul has some fiery aspect. He adds, and again this is something later philosophers will agree with, that our breath is closely related to the soul, suggesting even that we take fire in from the cosmos by breathing it in along with the air. This shows that his conception of fire is not just flame, such as you'd see in a fireplace or a candle. It's a more abstract conception of some dry, warm, fast-moving stuff that is the most exalted substance in the universe. Notice also how he makes both the stars and our souls fiery, and thus suggests that we share a nature with the divine, heavenly world. A final aspect of Heraclitus' thought is one that doesn't usually get much emphasis. I mentioned that later sources have him writing on politics, though a mischievous ancient anecdote claims that Heraclitus was approached by the people of his city of Ephesus and asked to write a set of laws for them, as Solon did for Athens. He declined, saying he'd rather play with the town's children. That's actually rather charming, but unfortunately it's not a story with much plausibility. In any case, we don't have a great deal of his political thought, but what we do have emphasizes obedience to the laws of the city. One should protect them as one protects the walls in a siege. He also says that human laws are given sustenance by the laws of the god. Whether this reference to law should be connected to Heraclitus' logos and the unity of opposites is not clear, but it's tempting to think that these are the absolute rules of justice which our human laws imitate. Here we see Heraclitus building a strong connection between different parts of philosophy, and this is typical of the pre-Socratics, who explore areas of philosophy that we now distinguish as if they were all more or less one interconnected inquiry. It was really Aristotle who first got into the business of distinguishing the branches of philosophy. Nowadays it's common, even expected, that a professional philosopher might work only on ethics, for example, or only on the philosophy of mind. Heraclitus, though, had something to say about every philosophical subject, and the different things he had to say all tied together. In this, Heraclitus anticipates the systematic interests of Plato and Aristotle, who, for instance, connect the question of what it is to be a human being to the question of how humans should conduct themselves. In other words, for them, ethics and the study of human nature are intimately related. It's not a little ironic, that as far as we can tell it was Heraclitus, a riddler with his ready-made fragments, who really first began to indulge in this systematic way of doing philosophy. So now I have an announcement. If all goes according to plan, next week's episode will feature our first guest here on the History of Philosophy podcast. We'll be joined by my colleague Professor M. M. McCabe to talk some more about Heraclitus. This will be one of the first of several interviews, which will I hope be a regular offering on the podcast, and will allow us to go into greater depth on some topics. So, it will be in two weeks that we get to another philosopher, and one who outdoes Heraclitus when it comes to being systematic. I mean, of course, Parmenides. He offers us not one, but two systems. The true system, which tells you that everything you think you knew was wrong, and the system which consists of mere opinion, but is still pretty different from what you thought you knew. Parmenides has much more in common with Heraclitus than Plato would have us believe, but there's little doubt that, with him, we are really stepping into a new era of philosophy, which we might call the era of metaphysics. It's an era which still hasn't ended. So, be sure to listen to the Logos, not of Heraclitus, but of M. M. McCabe, and then of Parmenides, next week and the week after, on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, and welcome to the History of Philosophy podcast, supported by King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today we have a very special episode for the very first time. We're going to have a guest on the History of Philosophy, and our guest is Professor Emma McCabe, my colleague here at King's College London. Hi, Peter. Lovely to have you here, Emma. Very nice to be here. Absolutely. Today we're going to be talking about Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher. Could you just remind us quickly who he is? Heraclitus from Ephesus, 6th century BC, pre-Socratic philosopher, maybe the guy who changed the face of it all. Right. So that is actually the first thing I wanted to ask you. I wanted to ask you whether you think Heraclitus really represents something new in the history of pre-Socratic philosophy, or whether he sort of just carries on what the Milesians had been doing, so Thales and Aximander, these guys. So sometimes people represent him as just being one in a line, so you've got eeny, meeny, miny, moe choice of what you're going to use as your material principle. So Thales says water, and Aximander says the indefinite, and Anaximenes says air, and Heraclitus kind of runs out of things to say, so he says fire. Earth is no good after all because it's inert, so you need something that's kind of active. And a lot of the time that's how it's represented, but it seems to me that that's a mistake to see Heraclitus as only doing. Maybe he's partly doing that, but what he's doing is something much more radical, which is to make us think about how we think about these questions. So you might understand the Milesians as just thinking about what the principles are, but what Heraclitus is trying to get us to do is to think about how we should do the thinking itself. So maybe that relates to something else I wanted to ask you, which is the way that he seems to do philosophy. So most of the evidence that we have about Heraclitus' philosophy is in the form of what in the last podcast I was calling one-liners, so these aphorisms. And I guess someone might read these aphorisms and think, well, that can't be philosophy because it's just one sentence at a time. How could that be philosophy? Right. Okay, so supposing you think about the aphorism, the road up and down is one and the same. So you might think, oh, well, what this is supposed to be is a metaphor for some general theory that he's supposed to be enunciating. So it kind of encapsulates whatever it is he's trying to say. You might think that that, and a lot of people do indeed think that that's what he's doing, in which case you might see him as being entirely continuous with his predecessors, just says a lot more things. The aphorisms then would just be aphorisms. But it seems to me that that underestimates the paradoxical element of the aphorisms and the very complex way in which Heraclitus actually writes. So it seems to me that there's a great deal more to be said about it than that. I think it's much more argumentative. So you might think that when he says the road up and the road down are one and the same, it's just supposed to be a doctrine, and the doctrine would be something like everything is one or something like that. Right, you might think that, and I think a lot of people do think that. But supposing you imagine not just somebody announcing that as a philosophical principle, but supposing he thinks quite hard when he says whatever it is he says about his audience, so you can see that all the time, that the very careful way in which it's written makes it clear that he's thinking about how people read it. When you think about what his predecessors said, you can see that it actually wouldn't matter how they put it. If somebody's going to say, everything's made of water, for example, you can say that in all sorts of different ways and it means pretty much the same thing. When somebody says, this logos being one and the same, everybody behaves as if they don't understand it, it looks as though what he's trying to do is to make us think about the actual words in which he says what he says. If that's right, then maybe he's much more interested than his predecessors were in the effect of what he's saying on his audience. So could you maybe illustrate this? So let's just take as an example his most famous fragment, this thing about the river. So you can't step into the same river twice or however it's put. So how would that work as an argument as opposed to just an aphorism? The received wisdom is that there's only one river paradox, but in fact there are several and one might be able to reconstruct something that looks much more like an argument if you suppose that we don't have to eliminate any of them. So supposing somebody comes into the room and says, okay, and you're sitting there and he says, well, you can't step into the same river twice and you go, yeah, I can. Look, I did it yesterday. I can do it again tomorrow. And Heraclitus says it again, you can't step into the same river twice. And you think about it a little bit and you say to yourself, hum, hum, well, maybe he's right. And Heraclitus confirms what you say by saying, well, to those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow, he says in another fragment. At that point you might find yourself saying, oh, well, yeah, maybe I can't step into the same river twice. And you then end up feeling kind of anxious about whether there are any rivers out there. Then he might say, again, you can't step into the same river twice because in the same rivers different and different waters flow. And you understand that actually it is the same river because you couldn't say that unless it was the same river, but it's a different river because of the different waters. Now what have you understood? Well, you haven't understood anything particularly about rivers, but you've understood quite a lot about the way in which the qualification same river and the qualification different waters work. Okay, that's really interesting. So I guess the question that arises there, well, maybe there's a couple of questions. One is, is this supposed to be a general message to us about the nature of reality if it's not just about rivers? And if it is supposed to be a general message, then is he sort of cheating because he picks these examples, right? There's the river, there's the road up and the road down, there's the sea water which is poisonous and healthy. So is he just cheating by picking these examples or do you think that he can legitimately infer some general thesis about reality from this sort of argument? Right, so it might be that you think about the sea water fragment. The sea water is poisonous and healthy, poisonous for men and healthy for fishes. You might think that this is supposed to be an inference from perhaps from the fact that sea water is poisonous for men and healthy for fishes to the claim that sea water is somehow or other both poisonous and healthy, which looks kind of worrying. And then it might be that he draws an inference from that that everything behaves like that. And as you say, it may be that he's using specialised examples to make a general point and he can't justify the general point from those specialised examples. But you could turn it on its head. You could suppose that what he imagines is that you say something to yourself like, oh crikey, sea water is poisonous and healthy. That worries me because it's a contradiction just like the road up and down. What happens when I stand on the road and the up and down is one and the same, which way do I go? That kind of anxiety. So that the very practicality of the examples makes it seem that once again, if he's speaking to an audience, the audience might go, oh goodness, I'm really in trouble here. And then what Heraclitus does is say, no, no, no, no, don't worry because sea water is poisonous for men, but healthy for fishes. So you might think that what he's observing there is not so much some kind of awful conglomeration of reality, but something about the way we think about reality. So something about how we think, for example, about problems of the metaphysical and logical problems of contradiction. What is it for sea water both to be poisonous and healthy? What is it for a road both to be up and down? So that's, I think, interesting because that would give him something in common with Parmenides, who also says that Parmenides will be the subject of next week's podcast. And Parmenides also says that most people's way of thinking about the world is beset by contradictions and his philosophy will come along and resolve it. And so if you're right, actually, Heraclitus and Parmenides, who are usually contrasted to each other, turn out to be doing something rather similar. I think that's right. And I think that if that's right, you might think that Parmenides is actually referring to Heraclitus on one or two occasions, that he's asking us to think about what Heraclitus seems to have said. Supposing you think about it in those terms, you might then say, well, what Heraclitus is trying to make us see is that we don't need to worry about contradictions because you can always unravel them. You can always say poisonous for men and healthy for fishes up from this end and down from the other end. But he was often understood to be doing the reverse and it may be that that was upsetting Parmenides. So some of the tradition, Aristotle in particular, and maybe Plato too, has Heraclitus asserting that contradictions turn up without qualification. So think about the sea water again. I suggested that he might work on his audience by putting, sea water is poisonous and healthy. Audience goes, oh, crikey, can't bear it, help, help. And then Heraclitus helps them by saying poisonous for men, healthy for fishes. It might work the other way round. Supposing somebody comes along and says, oh, funny thing about sea water, you know, it's poisonous for men and healthy for fishes. And Heraclitus might then draw the inference, as sometimes he was thought to do, that sea water is contradictory. And so that the law of non-contradiction, as Aristotle suggested, might be somehow or other in its qualified form being denied by Heraclitus. Right. So I guess the question then, if you were thinking about the way Plato and Aristotle talk about Heraclitus, and especially Plato, is that whether you go from the contradiction to the resolution of the contradiction or the other way around, it still doesn't sound like he's obsessed with change. So one thing I'm wondering is why in Plato do we get this idea that Heraclitus is all about what's sometimes called flux, so this kind of radical change where nothing is ever the same from moment to moment. Because what you're talking about sounds more like contradictory principles that are true of the same thing at the same time. Right. There's an extra question there in the interpretation of Plato, because some versions, some interpretations of what Plato says has Plato saying that Heraclitus was interested in contradiction, not change, and that change is just an aspect of contradiction rather than the other way around. So that's a possibility. A different possibility is that of course Heraclitus leaves these things open. So if I'm right about the way that he uses paradox, he uses paradox by getting his audience to respond to what he said. But if he's going to do that, then he does it by leaving them open, by saying, by just, to go back to what you said about aphorisms, by saying, well, you can't step into the same river twice, dot, dot, dot, and then all the work is being done by the audience. If that's right, then he can hardly complain if the audience interprets him in lots of different ways. And it's certainly true that there are lots and lots of fragments in Heraclitus that make one think that he does suppose that things are changing all the time. Whether they're changing radically all the time, so fast that we, as Plato complains, we can't ever even talk about them, seems to me to be unlikely. It doesn't seem to me that that is what Heraclitus' line is on change. He's much more, there are fragments, if I'm just going to look at a fragment now. So the obvious example is fragment 31, where he seems to be talking about cosmic change, and he talks about Earth changing into sea and being measured to the same logos. Now it's very interesting that he uses the same word there, logos, as the word that he uses to introduce his whole theory. Something is going on in the play that he's making between different senses of logos or different ways in which we might think about logos in different fragments that he's launching at us. So that goes back to something you were saying before about him actually thinking carefully about the way that he's presenting his own philosophy. Exactly. So we're supposed to attend to the exact words that he's using. I think that's right. I think that's right. So for example, there are three logos fragments one might think of. The first one where he says, this logos is always like this, but nobody pays any attention to it. So it looks as though what he's describing is what he's saying. The second one is fragment 31 where he's talking about what seems to be a regular and balanced way in which the changes between Earth and water are somehow or other managed or measured. The third one, brilliant fragment, says going after the limits of soul, you wouldn't find them even although you went along every road. Such a deep logos does it have? So you can use logos for what one might say about souls, what one might say about oneself and never being able to reach the end of it. And then there's this other one, the logos that he describes that nobody's ever going to find out about. And then somehow or other, there's something that organises the measure of cosmic change. Now between those, it can't be an accident. First that he's asking us to think about how he writes. Second that he's using the same word in all of those contexts to make us think about whether what we're looking at here is something inexhaustible as it would be in the case of soul or something that somehow or other properly balanced and measured and well organised. It's not terribly clear which of it, which of those we're supposed to think or maybe we're supposed to think both. Maybe we're supposed to end up by saying, well on the one hand and on the other. And the burden is put on the reader or the audience. So to go back to your question about what makes this philosophy, for my money, that's what makes it philosophy. That it's got this dialectical quality that means that you can't read Heraclitus without engaging with him or if you don't engage with him then there's no point in reading it as it were. So what makes it philosophy is not just that it's arguments but that it's arguments with somebody, namely the person reading it. Yes, exactly. That's nice. Exactly. I like that. And I think that's where construing him as a cosmologist comes into difficulties because that represents him as being somehow or other an objective set of views and that's not quite how it works it seems to me. So before we conclude I wanted to ask you about one other thing because you're the only person I know personally who has changed the text of a Heraclitian fragment. So could you tell us about the fragment and the text that you changed? I'm going to tell you about fragment 125. Fragment 125, the received version of fragment 125, it's about a disgusting Greek drink. The disgusting Greek drink is called a posseit, it sounds kind of a good thing but it's actually rather nasty. It's oil and wine and sometimes cheese and bits of old grain. Yum. And the point about it is it's a bit like salad dressing so you have to shake it in order to make it stick together. So the received version of the fragment goes like this and the posseit separates if it's not stirred. So people I think have been excessively taken over by images of James Bond when they think about this. So the idea is that it's the sort of object that you have to keep shaking it otherwise it falls to pieces. The Greek of the fragment goes like this, και λοκυκεών διίσταται μα κύνουμονος. So that's how it looks. Now I think that that's a kind of, that's not nearly as interesting as it could be because the two central verbs are a verb about standing still and its opposite, a verb about moving. And the way that the received opinion has it, the standing still bit has been changed into something that's translated as separates by the addition of a prefix to the verb. Then in order to fix that you have to put a negative in front of the moving bit so you get the posseit separates if it's not moving. So my suggestion is get rid of the prefix on the standing still bit and get rid of negative and you have the posseit stand still when it's moving. So just like the question about rivers it's a paradox about identity but it's really a posseit only when it's moving. So it's really standing still as a posseit only when it's moving. So that's my emendation. Brilliant. So that shows us that very appropriately the texts of Heraclitus themselves are changing all the time. Absolutely. No, I hope that's finished changing now. Well thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. I hope you'll come back in a future episode to talk about Plato and then you can prove that it's possible to step into the same podcast twice. Thanks very much, Emma. And next week I will be returning to the usual format and talking about Parmenides. Talk to you then.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liverhume Trust. Today's episode, The Road Less Travelled, Parmenides, the Father of Metaphysics. The subject of today's episode is arguably the greatest pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides. Since he is often described as the father of metaphysics, I thought I might start out by saying a bit about what metaphysics is. Philosophers tend to see their discipline as being divided up into several related sub-disciplines. Of course there are the parts of philosophy that tell us what to do, ethics and political philosophy. Both the word ethics and the word political come from Greek. In ancient Greek, ethos means custom or character, and politikē means, well, political, because polis means city. The other two main areas of philosophy are epistemology and metaphysics, and guess where these words come from? Yes, ancient Greek. Epistemology is from episteme, meaning knowledge, and so epistemology is the study of knowledge. For instance, epistemologists want to know what the difference is between knowledge and mere belief, or whether it is possible to know anything at all. Metaphysics is a bit stranger in its etymology. It really means after physics, and many later ancient and medieval philosophers took it that metaphysics is quite literally the discipline one studies after studying physics. You graduate from studying the physical world to studying the metaphysical world of immaterial things like God. Another possible derivation for the word is that Aristotle's book on metaphysics came to be called that because it was studied or just placed on the shelf after his books about physics. In any case, the science of metaphysics is first explicitly marked out by Aristotle and his book of that title, even though it's not a title he gave it. Aristotle calls metaphysics first philosophy, first not because it is the first one you would study, but because it is the most fundamental philosophical inquiry. He tells us that what metaphysics studies is being. In other words, it studies whatever there is, insofar as it is. This means that many of the traditional problems of philosophy are metaphysical problems. Does God exist? Does the human soul exist? Does anything exist apart from physical bodies? Other topics, like the problem of free will, are usually taken to belong to metaphysics even if they also relate to ethics. Parmenides then was the first philosopher who we can say had a clear interest in metaphysics, the study of being, the study of what exists. Certainly, we do find metaphysical ideas in some of the pre-Socratics we've already covered, especially Xenophanes with his criticism of the traditional Greek gods. Partially for that reason, some ancient authors try to convince us that Xenophanes was Parmenides' teacher. Even though this is possible chronologically, we probably shouldn't take it too seriously, since the ancients were always trying to say that every famous philosopher was the student of some other famous philosopher. Of course, Socrates really was Plato's teacher, and Plato really was Aristotle's teacher, and that sort of undermines the point I'm trying to make here, so maybe I'll just say this is the exception that proves the rule, whatever that means, and move on. I just referred to chronology, and that brings us to another thing about Parmenides, which is that he is the first philosopher we'll discuss who was active in the 5th century BC rather than the 6th century BC. Plato wrote a dialogue which depicts an older Parmenides meeting a young Socrates in Athens. That, again, is probably something we shouldn't take too seriously, but unless Plato is really messing with the chronology, it means that Parmenides would have been a teenager when the 5th century began. The 5th century was going to be a time of upheaval for the Greeks, what with the Persians trying to invade mainland Greece on more than one occasion, and the two alliances led by Athens and Sparta facing off in the Peloponnesian War, which raged towards the end of the century. But it was going to be a good time for Greek philosophy and science. Not only did this century see the mature careers of both Parmenides and Socrates, but it was also the period when the Pythagoreans built up their mathematical systems, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, when Greek medicine really started to get going, and when Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists developed the ambitious cosmologies which will be occupying us over several episodes in the not-too-distant future. This century of philosophy ended with a bang one year late, when Socrates was put to death by the Athenians in 399 BC. By the way, that's a good date to remember, if you're the kind of person who likes to remember dates. 399 BC, the death of Socrates. Given the chaos and war that was gripping mainland Greece, and the domination of Ionia by client kings of the Persians, it's perhaps unsurprising that in the 5th century BC a lot of the philosophical action is further west, in Italy and Sicily, although even these places were dragged into the conflict between Athens and Sparta in the later part of the century. Parmenides and his pupil Zeno were from Elea in Italy, and as we've already seen Italy was also strongly associated with the Pythagoreans. Empedocles was born and active in Sicily. Anaxagoras admittedly is an exception, since he was from Ionia, like most of the philosophers we've looked at thus far. From there, Anaxagoras came to Socrates' city, Athens. In any case, Parmenides was securely identified with his city of Elea, and his followers were often called the Eliatics. When Plato created a character in one of his dialogues to represent the Parmenidean approach to philosophy, he called him the Eliatic stranger. But it's hard to get much stranger than the original philosophy of Parmenides himself. Indeed, it's very striking that when metaphysics really gets going in the hexameter of Hoem written by Parmenides, the first thing it offers is a radical revision of everything you and I think about reality. According to Parmenides, everything that exists is one. Nothing ever changes or moves. Multiplicity of every sort is an illusion, whether it be the multiplicity of different objects, different colours, or different events happening at different times. All this is shown in his poem with a relentless chain of argument, which proceeds on the basis of pure reason rather than observations about the world around us. In this first half of his poem, Parmenides is the original armchair philosopher. He thinks that he can establish the nature of all reality with a purely abstract argument. In this he makes an interesting contrast to Heraclitus, who in some of his fragments emphasizes that he is using his eyes and ears to observe the world and to learn the laws that govern that world. But Parmenides and Heraclitus do agree about one thing. Everyone else apart from them is completely confused, unaware of the nature of reality. Pre-Socratics were rarely short on self-confidence. Perhaps because Parmenides knows that what he has to say is rather flabbergasting, he begins his poem by assuming the trappings of divine revelation. He tells us that he rode a chariot in the company of young maidens up to the gates leading to the paths of night and day. The goddess Justice is persuaded by these maidens to allow Parmenides to ride his chariot on through, and then the goddess congratulates him for finding his way to a road that mortals do not travel. She tells him he will learn two things, first, the truth, and second, the mere opinions of mortal men. These correspond to the two halves of the poem that follows. In the first half we are given the so-called Way of Truth, Parmenides's arguments for the unity of being. In the second part, the so-called Way of Opinion, we get a cosmology very similar to what we find in the earlier Pre-Socratics from Ionia. I'm going to concentrate on the Way of Truth, since that's the famous and more exciting bit, but first let me say something about this division of the poem into two halves. I've been talking about Parmenides as the father of metaphysics, but with this division we can also see him making a major contribution to epistemology. You might remember that Xenophanes already distinguished between mere belief and genuine knowledge. But Parmenides goes much further here by devoting half his poem to knowledge and half to belief. What's interesting is that he spends so much time on the mere beliefs. The second part of the poem, which dealt with cosmology and other issues in natural science, is not preserved as completely as the first part, but it was clearly quite extensive and, as far as we can tell, was offered with serious intent. Parmenides seems to be setting out the beliefs that one should adopt if one isn't capable of grasping the more fundamental underlying truth of the unity of being. We have a fragment which apparently formed a transition from the Way of Truth to the Way of Opinion, and in that fragment he warns us that the Way of Opinion is not to be trusted, it is not as firmly grounded as the Way of Truth. It is still, though, the second best way, because, according to Parmenides, it is the most plausible explanation of things like the heavenly bodies, the human body, these being the sort of topics he tackled in the Way of Opinion. In the Way of Truth, rational argument has shown us that things like heavenly bodies and the human body are mere illusions, yet Parmenides seems to think it is worthwhile to give an account of them. He seems to tell us, if you are going to reject my way of truth and believe something false, then at least leave the falsehoods I offer in the way of opinion. The primary message of Parmenides's poem, though, is that we should not trust the senses, but follow philosophical argument wherever it leads. Let's follow it, then, down the path less travelled, the way of truth. Parmenides begins by making a distinction between two possible paths of inquiry, either is and must be, or isn't and can't be. The second path is rejected, because it involves trying to think about what is not, but non-being is not something we can think or speak about meaningfully. There's actually a third path, mentioned a little later on, which is even worse. According to this path, we say both is and is not. This has the same problem that we would need to grasp non-being, but in addition leads to a contradiction, both is and is not. Parmenides says this is the path most people try to follow, and this is why most people are totally confused. Actually, they're worse than confused, they are unwittingly engaged in self-contradiction. It's at about this point that most readers begin to suspect that they haven't the foggiest notion what Parmenides is talking about. Is and must be? Isn't and can't be? What is and what isn't? In the Greek there is no explicit subject for the verb is, it just floats free. Usually though, the idea is that we can apply his argument to anything we like. Take a giraffe. Either the giraffe is, in which case we can think and speak about it, or there is no giraffe, in which case Parmenides is right that it's at least difficult to understand how we could think or speak about it. He seems right again, when he says that the worst approach would be to say that the giraffe both is and is not. Thus, the path recommended to us is the path no one has yet taken, until Parmenides passes through those gates, to allow only being, while completely avoiding any attempt to think about or refer to non-being. Once we head off down this path, we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory. For starters, Parmenides points out that being cannot begin to be. After all, it would have to start being after there is no being, but non-being is something we promise not to contemplate. Nor can being be destroyed, for the same reason. It would have to change into non-being. Parmenides infers from this that change is in fact impossible. If there were change, whatever changes would have to go from non-being to being, or being to non-being. Since in either direction we would have the involvement of non-being, this is impossible. Now I know what you're thinking. Not all change involves creation and destruction. I can change a giraffe without killing it, for example by painting it blue, if I could get it to hold still for long enough. So that's a change that doesn't involve non-being. Parmenides, though, would beg to differ. Either because the blue of the painted giraffe replaces the non-being of blue in the giraffe, or what amounts to the same thing, because the blue giraffe comes to be after there is no blue giraffe. The same kind of argument will work for any supposed change, or even any supposed difference between one thing and another. To contrast our blue giraffe to a giraffe that is not blue, we would need to use the banned concept of non-being. So we can think of this as an argument for the unity of being over time. Being isn't one thing at one time and another thing at a later time, because it can't change. And furthermore, being must have unity at any one given time, because if there were variety in it, then one part of it would be different from another. And we just saw that you need to think of non-being to grasp the notion of difference. Parmenides gives a further argument for the unity of being at one and the same time. He points out that if being were divided up, it would need to have gaps or divisions in it. These gaps or divisions would, of course, consist of non-being, because they are different from being. So being is also continuous. Any part of it will be just the same as any other part. Now obviously it's starting to sound like Parmenides is not talking about giraffes, and not only because they were thin on the ground in ancient Italy. In fact, it's almost impossible to imagine this being that Parmenides is talking about until he compares it to a sphere. He says that it is spherical, because it must have some kind of limit or determination. This is maybe the most puzzling passage in the way of truth, against the admittedly strong competition offered by every other passage in the way of truth. For one thing, if being is a sphere, won't there be non-being outside the sphere, the non-being we aren't allowed to think or speak of? For this and other reasons, some interpreters want to see this idea that being is spherical as a kind of metaphor. Maybe the idea is to emphasize that it is determinate because we can think and reason and talk about it successfully. But he may mean it more literally, and be thinking that it is a sphere because it must be some shape, and the sphere is the most perfect shape. Shades of Pythagoreanism here, perhaps? In any case, he does go on to argue that being is perfect, and here his argument is a bit easier to follow. Being must be perfect, because if it were not, it would lack something that it could have, and in that case it would contain some kind of non-being, namely the absence of whatever is lacking. Well, let's take stock. The passages I've just discussed represent the core argument of Parmenides's way of truth, which has come down to us pretty much in its entirety. This is, incidentally, thanks to a commentator on Aristotle named Simplicius, who wrote a good thousand years later. He remarked that Parmenides's poem was hard to get hold of in his day, so that it was worth copying out at length into his commentary. He's also a major source for the other pre-Socratics, so let's take a moment to be thankful to good old Simplicius. In any case, we have these extensive fragments from the way of truth, and what they show is that Parmenides was offering a rational deduction. He starts from a basic principle, that you can have is, but you can't have is not, and then proceeds to explore the consequences, whatever they might be. Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering rational explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, trusting the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears. This is not to say that Parmenides is the first pre-Socratic to offer arguments. In the episode of Thales, I suggested that even he may already have had arguments for his views on water and the claim that everything is full of gods, and last week's guest M.M. McCabe convinced me, at least, that Heraclitus' fragments are implicitly arguments aimed at his readers. Nonetheless, Parmenides does represent something new. He tries to settle an abstract philosophical issue, the nature of being itself, with an explicit and complex deductive argument. But as you might expect, not many people have been persuaded by Parmenides' argument that all reality is nothing but a single unchanging sphere. On the other hand, plenty of philosophers since Parmenides have, knowingly or not, given arguments that are reminiscent of his way of truth. For instance, the argument for the perfection of being reappears in the medieval period as a way of trying to understand the perfection of God. And certainly Plato and Aristotle take Parmenides very seriously. Aristotle, for instance, devotes considerable energy to explaining how change is after all possible despite Parmenides' point that it would involve non-being. Closer to Parmenides himself were his immediate followers, the Eliadics. They worked hard to defend the astonishing conclusions of their master. It was in pursuit of this aim that Zeno of Elea developed the most brilliant set of paradoxes in ancient philosophy. Zeno's paradoxes try to undermine the possibility of change and multiplicity, making good on Parmenides' claim that no one can contemplate non-being without ending in self-contradiction. These paradoxes will be, and certainly will not not be, our main subject next week, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, You Can't Get There From Here! The Eliatic Philosophy of Zeno and Melissaus. Imagine you're standing at the baseline of a tennis court. That's the line at the back, where you serve from. It's time to change sides, so you're about to walk straight across to the other end of the court. You set off undertaking a journey of almost 24 metres, the length of a regulation court. It doesn't seem particularly daunting. When you get halfway, of course, there will be a net blocking your path, but you figure you'll cope with that problem when you get to it. Maybe you can leap over it jauntily, the way tennis players used to do at the end of the match. But, before you get to the net, which looms some 12 metres in the distance, you'll be arriving at the line drawn halfway across your side of the court. As those of you who are tennis experts know, this is called the service line. At that point, you will have completed a quarter of your trip, having walked about 6 metres. But of course to do that, you first got to get halfway to the service line. You need to walk 3 metres forward. And of course to do that, you've got to walk half of those 3 metres. It's starting to look a bit more daunting now, isn't it? In fact, now that you think about it, there is quite literally an infinite number of things you need to do to walk to the far side of the court. To get to any point, you will need to travel halfway to that point, and halfway to that halfway point, and so on. There's no end to the halfway points you'll need to visit. You better bring a packed lunch. This thought experiment, obviously without the tennis court, was invented by a man named Zeno of Elea, who was born in the early 5th century BC. He was the associate and student of Parmenides, who we looked at last week. Along with Melissa of Samos, Zeno was the most important follower of Parmenides. Zeno is renowned for the paradoxes he invented in support of Parmenides' theory that being cannot change or be more than one. The word paradox is another one of these English words that comes from ancient Greek. Para means, in this case, against, and doxa means belief, so if something is para doxon, it is contrary to our beliefs. Zeno's paradox of the halfway points, usually called the stadium or dichotomy paradox, is paradoxical in this sense. It shows you that it's impossible to move, and yet, of course, you still believe you can move. In fact, you move all the time. It's at this point that you need to do some philosophy. Paradoxes are a great way to introduce people to philosophy, because they force us to think hard about things we normally take for granted. There are many kinds of paradoxes in philosophy, for instance, moral paradoxes. There are two burning buildings in front of you, and one is your mother, and the other, several innocent children. You can only save the occupants of one building, what should you do? Then there are paradoxes about time and space. For instance, you hop in a time machine, go back, and stop yourself from being born. But then, how did you exist in order to go back in time in the first place? This of course is the basis of that philosophical classic, the film Back to the Future, the only case I know of where the philosophy of time comes together with a DeLorean. There are also logical paradoxes, for instance, the barber's paradox. Imagine a barber who shaves every man in the village who doesn't shave himself. Does the barber shave himself or not? Or the liar's paradox. If I say, what I'm now saying is a lie, is that a lie or not? And so on. Obviously, different paradoxes call for different kinds of solutions. You might say that burning building and other such moral puzzles are not really paradoxes, it's just there's no right answer. The world sometimes lands us with tragic situations that cannot be resolved morally. In the case of Back to the Future, we might simply say that such paradoxes show time travel to be impossible. Similarly, we might say that the barber in the logical paradox just can't exist. In each case, the paradox forces us to stop and think about the subject at hand, whether it be walking across tennis courts, the nature of time, or moral dilemmas. But we have to assume that the paradox is meant to be resolved in one way or another. Hardly anyone wants to say that it both is and is not possible to walk across the tennis court, or that the sentence, this is a lie, is both true and false. When people think about the dichotomy paradox, they naturally enough assume that the task is to spot the error in Zeno's reasoning. This approach assumes that the philosopher's job is to defend common sense against the paradox. Since we clearly do walk across tennis courts, there must be a mistake somewhere. Of course, this is a perfectly reasonable response, but it isn't what Zeno was hoping for. What he wanted to do, as a follower of Parmenides, was to show that motion really is impossible. Parmenides, as we saw last week, had argued that all motion and change are impossible, because they would involve non-being in some way. Parmenides argued positively, starting out from first principles, in particular that one can speak and think only about being, but never non-being. From this principle, he establishes that being is unchanging and eternal, a perfectly balanced sphere. Zeno takes a different approach, which is more destructive. With his dichotomy paradox, he tries to show us that the concept of motion is itself beset by contradiction. That this was Zeno's method is confirmed by Plato, who makes Zeno a character in a dialogue starring, and named after, Parmenides. In Plato's Parmenides, he shows Socrates discussing Zeno's book with Zeno himself. Socrates asks whether he has understood the goal of Zeno's book rightly, to show that belief in change and multiplicity leads inevitably to self-contradiction. Exactly right, says Zeno. There is some uncertainty about how Zeno's book was structured, and whether all the paradoxes ascribed to him were contained in this one book. But we know that he did produce a whole series of paradoxical arguments, some of which were apparently paired together. For instance, he used one argument to show that if things are many, then things are finite, and then he had another argument to show that if things are many, then things are infinite. Taking the two arguments together, we can conclude that if things are many, they must be both finite and infinite, which is a contradiction. Thus things are not many, instead being is one, just as Parmenides taught. We have information about a number of Zeno's paradoxes. Some are rather complicated, so I'll discuss only a few of them, especially since I'm already almost halfway through this podcast. Zeno, I refute you thus. First let's return to the dichotomy paradox. Here it is again, without the tennis court. Whenever you move from A to B, you have to move to C, the point halfway between A and B. To do that, you have to move to D, the point halfway between A and C, and so on. There will be an infinite number of such points, meaning that to move from A to B, you have to perform an infinite number of tasks, which is impossible. Or to put it as Aristotle does when he relates the paradox, you have to come into contact with infinitely many things, namely the halfway points. But why is this impossible? It's either because you only have a finite time to visit all these points, or simply because no one can do an infinite number of things. Another of Zeno's paradoxes makes pretty much the same point. We imagine Achilles racing a tortoise, with the tortoise getting a head start. The much faster Achilles tries to catch up, but every time he reaches the point where the tortoise just was, the tortoise has moved on at least a little bit further. And when Achilles reaches that new position, the tortoise has moved on again. Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, no matter how fast he runs. Can we refute Zeno, other than by getting up and walking away, and thus proving that motion is possible after all? It's often thought that somehow modern mathematics, and especially our modern notions of infinity, have solved the dichotomy paradox. The idea would be, I guess, that we now have no problem in accepting that the series 1 half, 1 quarter, 1 eighth, 1 sixteenth, and so on, just adds up to 1. In fact, we might say that the number represented by that series just is 1. So that's how the distance is covered. But this is really no solution. After all, Zeno's paradox relies precisely on this fact, that the whole distance is equal to the sum of the infinite series. That's not to say that Zeno's understanding of infinity is the same as ours, but this may not be the decisive issue. The question is not only about mathematics, but about time and space. Certainly, we can now mathematically model the idea of dividing up a space or a motion into infinitely small parts. But Zeno's paradox isn't only about a mathematical model. It's about time, space, and motion. His question to us will be, okay, you've got your mathematical model, but how does it relate to what is really going on? Aristotle offers what I think is a more relevant response to Zeno. He says that one can divide the time needed to move from A to B right along with the distance from A to B. For instance, if it takes you 20 seconds to get from A to B, it will take you 10 seconds to get halfway there, 5 seconds to get a quarter of the way there, and so on. It's simply a mistake on Zeno's part to think that one needs an infinite amount of time to visit this infinite number of points, because the divisions will apply to both the time and the distance. This response, though, assumes that Zeno was worried about the motion taking an infinite amount of time, which isn't obvious. As I said, his point might be that it is impossible to perform an infinite number of partial motions, in the finite amount of time it takes to perform the whole motion. In that case, Aristotle's response does not really solve the paradox. This mention of time brings us to another brilliant argument of Zeno's, the paradox of the arrow. Here we consider an arrow in mid-flight on its way from archer to target. Now, consider how things are with this arrow at any one moment during the flight. Imagine it captured by a stop-motion camera. In this freeze-frame moment, it isn't moving at all, because at least a little time has to pass for anything to move. As Zeno says, it is at rest, because it is, as he says, against something equal. What he means by this is I suppose something like this. At this instant, the arrow is exactly aligned with the bit of space it is occupying, so it is at rest with respect to that space. Of course, this will be true for any instant during the flight of the arrow. This then is the paradox. At any instant during the arrow's flight, it seems to be hovering motionless in the air, yet over the whole time of its flight, the arrow apparently moves from bow to target. Again, we naturally assume that there's something wrong with the way Zeno has described the situation. This is how Aristotle reacted. He complains that time is not made up of instants, which he calls nows, that have no duration. Rather, if you divide time, you have to divide it into periods of time, maybe very short periods like a millionth of a second, but even a millionth of a second takes some time to elapse, and the arrow will move a little while that little time passes. Of course Zeno would just disagree. He would say that if motion cannot happen now, it cannot happen at all. And this is the intended conclusion. As a follower of Parmenides, he simply doesn't believe that anything can move. Not all of Zeno's paradoxes though concern motion. Some have to do with our even more basic assumption that there is more than one thing in the world. Remember, Parmenides claimed that all being is unchanging, eternal, continuous, and one. This would mean, for instance, that you and I are the same thing, unless neither of us exists at all, which is pretty hard to believe either way. But Zeno's paradoxes try to persuade us that if we assume that more than one thing exists the results are just as bad. For instance, he tried to show that between any two distinct things, there must be an infinity of other things. As with the dichotomy and the arrow, we need to speculate about exactly how this argument should work, but I think the idea was something like this. Imagine you've got two objects, call them A and B. Well, they must be separated from one another, because they aren't just one continuous object, so there must be some third object C, which is separating A and B. But now, why is C distinct from A on the one hand and B on the other hand? There must be some fourth thing separating A and C, and a fifth thing separating C and B. As with the dichotomy, we can repeat this argument over and over. The only way to escape is to give some explanation of how two things can be touching each other directly without being a single object because they form a continuous body. Of course, one could try to give such an explanation. Again, Aristotle is the first to try. He devotes a whole discussion to what it means for two distinct things to be in contact. In a way, Aristotle's response is a tribute to the fruitfulness of Zeno's paradoxes. Even if they do not really tempt us to believe that all being is one, they do force us to ponder the nature of such things as motion, time, and physical contact. This is why philosophers still find his paradoxes useful. Like Aristotle, they can formulate their positive ideas about motion and so on by explaining how Zeno's paradoxes should be resolved. We find a rather different approach to Parmenides' legacy in the other great eliatic of the 5th century BC, Melissa of Samos. Sharp-eared listeners will remember that Samos is also the island that gave us Pythagoras, in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Ionia. So when we call Melissa an eliatic, we mean that he followed the philosophy of Parmenides of Elia, not that he was from Elia. Unlike Pythagoras, Melissa's played a major role in the history of Samos. The historian and philosopher Plutarch tells us that Melissa led his people in a naval battle against the Athenians, and won handsomely. This battle was fought around the middle of the 5th century BC, which probably means that Melissa was, like Zeno, a generation younger than Parmenides. He may have been younger still than Zeno. In any case, his philosophy is clearly an attempt to develop and defend Parmenides, but not without departing from the master on some points. Melissa follows the method of Parmenides, rather than Zeno. That is, he argues positively that all being is unchanging and one, instead of inventing paradoxes to undermine motion and multiplicity. Like Parmenides, he starts from the idea that being cannot have started. To do that, it would have to come from non-being, which is absurd. He now applies this point to space as well as time. Whereas Parmenides had said, apparently quite seriously, that being is spherical in shape, Melissa denies that being has any limits at all. After all, if it had limits, there would have to be non-being beyond those limits, and there is no such thing as non-being. Thus he calls being unlimited or infinite. It's the revenge of Anaximander's principle, the aperon. These developments of Parmenides' ideas show that the Eliatic philosophy wasn't just a static, received doctrine. Rather, the theory of unchanging being itself changed, and was taken in different directions by Zeno and Melissa's, even at the price of contradicting the teachings of Father Parmenides. Another one of Melissa's ideas, though, would no doubt have delighted Parmenides. This is his argument against the possibility of motion. Again, he starts by ruling out non-being. In this case, the sort of non-being he discusses is emptiness. There cannot be a place with nothing in it, again because there is no such thing as nothing. To put it another way, void is impossible. Now Melissa's points out that, if there is no void, then that will make motion impossible. After all, there will be no empty place for anything to move into. The whole of being will be like a train compartment, packed so tightly that no one can budge, a familiar experience to those of you who, like me, live in London. In the wake of this argument of Melissa's, anyone who wants to defend the common sense idea that motion does exist has two possible responses. One would be to agree that there is no void, but insist that there is motion anyway. Whenever one thing moves, something else is displaced. Imagine the people on the train compartment shuffling along, perhaps with difficulty, each moving into the space of their neighbour in front while they give up their place to the person behind. This was Aristotle's view. The other response would be to say that, except in the London Underground at rush hour, no place is totally full. There is indeed void. These move around in this emptiness, banging into each other. That is more or less what we think today. Of course, we now know that outer space is empty, or mostly empty. But also, every physical body down here on earth turns out to consist of more empty space than full space, or at least that's what I was told in high school. Atoms and molecules exist in the void. What I wasn't told in high school is that this conception is a very old one. It was first conceived in response to the Eliatics, and perhaps especially in reaction to Melissa's. It was developed by the ancient atomists, Leucippus and Democritus. They are the pre-Socratic thinkers who seem to come closest to the scientific doctrines we actually accept nowadays. But unsurprisingly, the atomic theory of these ancient atomists was very different from modern atomic theory. Ancient atomism, like the Eliatic philosophy of Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissa's, was founded more on conceptual analysis than empirical investigation. But it's no less interesting for that. So join me next time for the atomists on the history of philosophy, with void, but without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, The Final Cut – The Atomic Theory of Leucippus and Democritus. If you stop a historian of philosophy in the street and ask him or her to name one idea from prezocratic philosophy that turns out actually to be true, the answer you're most likely to get is atomism. We've looked at some pretty extravagant theories in this series of podcasts. We started with Thales telling us that the principle of everything is water and that magnets have souls, and last week Zeno was trying to persuade us that it's impossible to walk across a tennis court. After all this, it's comforting to come across an idea that looks familiar – that all bodies are made of particles, so tiny they are invisible to the naked eye, and that the interaction of these particles explains the phenomena we see in the visible world around us. The particles are, of course, atoms. And hopefully you've listened to enough of these podcasts to guess where the word atoms comes from. Yes, it's ancient Greek. Tomene means to cut, and atoma means quite literally, uncuttables. In other words, atoms are things that cannot be divided into smaller parts, not because you don't have a sharp enough knife, but because they are by their nature indivisible. But here we've gone no further than the word atoms and already discovered a big difference between ancient atomism and the atomism of modern science. The atoms of modern science are misnamed. They do have parts which can be divided from one another. Atoms can nowadays be split, with callous disregard to etymology. Furthermore, the parts of these modern atoms, namely protons, neutrons, and electrons, are themselves made up of smaller particles, all those gluons and quarks and whatnot. The particles of the modern scientists, then, are a pretty poor excuse for atoms. Maybe someday the scientists will tell us that there is some smallest or most fundamental particle, or a whole bunch of such particles, which really are indivisible. If they do tell us this, and maybe they already have because quite frankly I haven't been paying much attention, then these most fundamental particles will be comparable to Greek atoms. Of course, the ancient atomists also arrived at their theory in a very different way than modern science has done. No chemical experiments, no periodic table. Instead, the atomism put forward by the 5th century BCE thinkers, Le Kippis and Democritus, was reached by a process of abstract reasoning. Here, a useful starting point is provided by Zeno's paradoxes. As we saw last week, Zeno pointed out problems that result from assuming that distances, or bodies, can be divided up infinitely. You take a nice familiar object like a tennis court or a giraffe, and you start cutting. Divide it in half, divide the half in half, divide the resulting quarter in half, and so on. Zeno exploited the assumption that there seems to be no end to this process. The distance, or the body, turns out to be in some sense infinite, and once infinity is on the scene, paradoxes are not far away. The atomists stop Zeno in his tracks, by assuming that if one keeps dividing and dividing, one will eventually hit bedrock. The giraffe, the tennis court, and all other things are made of atoms, uncuttables. Once you've reached the atoms, you're like a film director, sending a movie to be shown in theaters. You've made the final cut. This is only one half of the atomist's picture of the cosmos. The other half, however, doesn't exist. It's the nothingness in which the atoms move around, in other words, vacuum or void. Here, the atomists were reacting to an argument of Melissaus, another follower of Parmenides, who we talked about last week. Just to remind you, he argued that motion is impossible, because for something to move, it must move into an empty place, but empty place is nothing, and there's no such thing as nothing. The atomists reversed the train of thought. Since we can plainly see that motion is possible, there must be such a thing as nothingness into which things are moving. This nothingness is the void. Now we need to be careful here. It's tempting for us to imagine that the atomists have a conception of three-dimensional space, and that they are saying that this space can be either full, in which case we have an atom, or empty, in which case we have void. But our evidence doesn't show them working with any third notion like space, which is independent of both being and non-being. Instead, they are making a direct reply to Eliotic philosophy. In addition to being, they say, we will have non-being. Being consists of atoms, non-being consists of void, and the atoms move into the void, presumably replacing non-being with being, as they do so, exactly what never happens, according to Parmenides and friends. This direct philosophical link to Eliotic thought is well attested in our sources, for instance in Aristotle, so we have good reason to expect a historical connection between the atomists and the Eliatics. As usual, the ancient tradition wants every famous philosopher to be the student of some other ancient philosopher, and duly makes Lachippus an associate of Parmenides or of Zeno. We don't need to believe this, but it is no doubt true that Lachippus was well acquainted with the Eliotic tradition begun by Parmenides. However, he was probably responding mostly to Zeno, and especially to Melissaus, rather than directly to Parmenides. The later Democritus, then, seems to have taken his atomism directly from Lachippus. Both of them lived in the 5th century BC, but with Democritus we're really getting to the point where it's misleading to talk about these early philosophers as pre-Socratics. Democritus was in fact an almost exact contemporary of Socrates. One source claims that he was one year older than Socrates, which is cutting it pretty close if you want to qualify as a pre-Socratic. We don't know much about the biography of either Lachippus or Democritus, unfortunately. There's even uncertainty about where Lachippus was from. I find it rather suspicious that his home city is reported to be either Miletus or Aelia, in other words, one of the two cities most famous for pre-Socratic philosophy. Sounds to me like an educated or maybe not so educated guess. Things are a bit better with Democritus, since we can at least name a home city for him, namely Abdera in Thrace on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. As far as their philosophy goes, it's not easy to say where Lachippus stops and Democritus starts. In the ancient sources, many of the atomist doctrines are just ascribed indiscriminately to both of them. Democritus's interest seems to have been wider, though, and for him, we have fragments on ethics as well as atomism. Another thing that seems to be special about Democritus, and which I'll come back to, is that he draws strikingly sceptical conclusions from his atomic theory. Here it's tempting to make a connection to Protagoras, the relativist or sceptical sophist, who, like Democritus, hailed from the city of Abdera. We'll be getting to him and his fellow sophists in a few more episodes. But for now, let's get back to those atoms. If I ask you to imagine an atom, I suspect you'll think of a smooth round sphere like a ball bearing. These microscopic ball bearings would bang around, colliding off each other and gathering together to make larger bodies. If that's the image in your head, it isn't far wrong. For the atomists, larger bodies are indeed made of atoms, and atoms do both collide and get collected together. But it turns out that they don't really look like microscopic ball bearings, or rather, only some of them do. There are in fact atoms of every possible shape. Some have hooks, some are curved one way and some another so that they can get tangled together and fit snugly into one another if they encounter another atom of the right sort. Different types of larger, visible bodies are made from atoms of various shapes and sizes. For instance, Aristotle tells us that for the atomists, the soul consists of particularly smooth, round atoms which can flow around through the body. These are those ball-bearing like atoms you were just visualizing, and they can collect to form a soul, but not necessarily the rest of the body that houses this soul. There are an infinite number of atoms. This is crucially important for the atomists and shows again how they are responding to the eliatics and especially, melissis. For melissis, being was one and infinite, for the atomists, being is many and infinite. The difference, as I mentioned already, is that the atomists have integrated void, or non-being, into their world picture. Void separates out being into many things, and these things are infinite. But why do the atoms have to be infinite? Couldn't there be, say, exactly 10 million atoms bouncing around in an infinite emptiness? In answer to this, the ancient atomists could invoke a rule which is sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason. It states that there has to be some good reason or explanation for each feature of the universe. In the present case, atoms must be infinite because there is no reason why there would be any particular finite number of them. Sure, there could be exactly 10 million atoms, but then why not 10 million and 1 atoms? The atomists could give the same kind of argument to show why the atoms must have every conceivable shape. Why would they be only spherical, or only come in, say, 10 varieties? Rather, they will have every shape that atoms could have because there is no reason why any possible shape should be lacking, especially given that there are an infinite number of atoms. Since the atoms are of different sizes, it seems that by the same reasoning there should be atoms of every size, including ones just big enough to see, and still others much bigger than that. There is some uncertainty in the sources here, with some saying that all atoms are invisible to the naked eye, and others suggesting that the atomists thought that there were atoms big enough to be visible, just not in our part of the universe. But I tend to think that Leucippus and Democritus just assumed that atoms must be smaller than we can see. In fact, they could give a good account of this if they wanted to. They explained vision in terms of sheets or films of atoms being shed from the outer layer of visible bodies, which pass through the air and enter our eyes so as to interact with the atoms that make up our soul. Obviously a single atom can't throw off a sheet of atoms that are part of it, so if there were such a huge atom, there's no way we could see it anyway. Of course, it could still collide with us. I quite like the idea that someday an invisible atom the size of an elephant could come hurtling towards us from outer space. In the unlikely event of such an emergency, do not try to deal with the atom by cutting it in half. Fortunately, the cosmology presented by Leucippus and Democritus makes it clear that enormous atoms are not going to be found around here if they exist at all. They have a nice explanation of how our cosmos formed out of the atoms. There have always been atoms, and they have always been colliding with one another. The atoms don't just bounce off one another, they also get entangled, partially because of their shapes like I said, but also because the atoms have a tendency to gather together with other atoms of similar size and shape. This might explain why the soul is able to hold together as a single conglomeration, rather than having all its smooth atoms just go ricocheting off into the void. At the level of the whole cosmos, what happens is that huge groups of atoms start to swirl around in a kind of vortex. The heavier and bigger atoms tend to bunch towards the middle, and the lighter atoms tend to move to the outside. The former make up the earthy and moist bodies of the earthly world, while the latter turn into the fiery heavens. And there's more. In fact, infinitely more. It turns out that there isn't only one cosmos. After all, look around. Does the visible cosmos look like it has an infinite number of atoms in it? No. There must be a vast number of atoms making up the earth, and all the plants, animals, mountains, and so on on its surface, and yet another vast number making up the heavens, but vast plus vast still equals a finite number. Besides which, to invoke that principle again, there's no good reason why there should be only one cosmos. Instead, the atomists said, and this is pretty daring, they said there are an infinite number of worlds. Those worlds exhibit every possible combination of atoms. One way of understanding this is that every way that the world could be actually exists out there somewhere. There would be worlds that are very different, maybe worlds made entirely out of cheddar cheese without a cracker in sight, and still other worlds with only small differences, like worlds where giraffes have wings, but everything else is the same. This theory is truly mind-bending, and the atomists don't seem to have explored its implications as fully as we might have hoped. But perhaps we should rein in our imagination just a bit, because there may be a cosmic vortex in all those other worlds too. This would result in many worlds which are a lot like ours, at least in the sense that there is an earth-like body in the middle, with fiery heavens surrounding it. We seem to have gotten quite far from Parmenides now, even though the theory started out by simply modifying the Eliatic system to allow for non-being and to allow multiple beings instead of a single unchanging one. But notice that each atom in itself is similar to the Eliatic single being. Okay, they move, but they are indivisible, unchanging, and eternal. And there's something else about the atomists, or at least Democritus, that may remind us of Parmenides. You might remember that in his poem, Parmenides distinguished between the way of truth and the way of opinion. His radical metaphysics of one being is the way of truth. It is the hidden reality that we fail to grasp because we are caught up with the appearances of the world. Democritus does something similar, which is at first rather surprising. You might think that he's out to defend common sense against the Eliatics. Giraffes and tennis courts do exist, and he can explain why with his atomic theory, right? But instead, Democritus took a more skeptical line because he was impressed by the fact that the underlying reality of atoms and void is not evident to our senses. Thus, he criticized the senses, saying in effect that things in the phenomenal world—the giraffes and tennis courts—are unreal because what is really real is the atomic universe we can't see. He put this in a famous aphorism, by convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour, but really atoms and void. In a less famous fragment he says, perhaps echoing Xenophanes and Heraclitus, that no one knows anything, and instead we make do with belief. His position, then, is that things may appear to us to be sweet, and so on, but that is only an appearance. The atomic interactions explain why things seem sweet to us, but the sweetness isn't real. It's the atomic interactions that are real. Here Democritus has hit upon a perennial issue in philosophy. Scientific theories often tell us that the world is very different than it seems at first. This has always been the case, as we've seen with the inventive and surprising theories of the pre-Socratics. The invisible world of quantum particles in modern physics is no less bizarre, probably even more bizarre, than the theories the pre-Socratics came up with. And in both cases, one might ask whether the scientific theories replace the phenomenal world with another world, grasp through more specialized methods, or whether the phenomenal world is retained while also getting explained by the scientific theory. In other words, should we say that giraffes are not real because really all that exists are the atoms that make up the giraffes, or should we say that giraffes are real precisely because they are made up of atoms? Democritus takes the first option. He thinks that science banishes our familiar everyday reality rather than securing our familiar reality by explaining it. We can see why if we go back to the different approaches used in ancient atomism and in modern physics. Modern physics, despite the mind-boggling world of atomic and subatomic particles it offers us, is still in a way an extension of our everyday experience. The tools of physics, chemistry, and so on are much more powerful than our eyes and ears, but that just means that they enhance our experience of the world. The microscope and telescope are good examples. When you use them, you are still seeing, but you are seeing things much smaller or more distant than the naked eye could see unaided. And even the most outlandish features of the quantum universe are in principle observable, albeit indirectly so. Ancient atomism is not like this at all. The atomist continued in the tradition of Parmenides and his followers by applying pure reason to the task of deducing what the world must be like. Democritus makes this very clear when he contrasts the deliverances of the mind to the deliverances of the senses. Mind tells us about the atomic theory, and thus undermines what the senses tell us, even though sensible reality is supposed to be grounded in events at the atomic level. We can find this deference to the mind elsewhere in Greek philosophy too. You might remember that Xenophanes said that his god thinks. Later on, Aristotle will say that mind is the divine element in us, and that god himself is nothing but a separate mind. But no Greek philosopher pays greater tribute to mind than another thinker who tried to preserve the reality around us from the results of Parmenides' arguments. This was Anaxagoras. In the philosophy of Anaxagoras, mind takes central stage not only as an instrument for discovering truth, but as the fundamental principle which steers the universe itself. Meanwhile, his account of the bodies in that universe is no less radical and philosophically interesting than the atomic theory. So, join me next week for Anaxagoras on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Mind Over Mixture, Anaxagoras. In a dialogue called The Phaedo, Plato shows us the last conversation of Socrates. It will end when Socrates drinks the hemlock and bravely prepares to meet whatever the afterlife may hold for him. But first, he indulges in a bit of autobiography, telling his friends, soon to be his mourners, about his early philosophical explorations. In this story he gives a central role to Anaxagoras. Socrates says he came across Anaxagoras' book, which could apparently be picked up cheap in Athens toward the end of the 5th century BC. At first, he found the book promising. Anaxagoras offered an account of how the cosmos is produced and ordered by mind, which, Socrates assumed, meant that Anaxagoras would go on to explain why everything in the world is for the best. Instead, the book turned out to consist largely of crude physical explanations, invoking things like the hot and the cold, the rarified and the dense. Disappointed, Socrates went off on his own way and, at least according to Plato, invented the theory of forms. In a later episode, we'll look at this dialogue in its own right. But I wanted to start with it today, because I think the passage captures so well a kind of duality in Anaxagoras' philosophy. On the one hand, there is his exalted mind, the purest and most subtle of things, which plays a central role in forming the cosmos. On the other hand, there is his fascination with physical processes, and, above all, his startling theory of universal mixture. Everything is in everything, according to Anaxagoras, except for mind. Anyone trying to come to grips with Anaxagoras should try to do what Socrates wasn't able to, that is, they should try to understand not only how the theory of mind and the theory of mixed physical substances, but also how mind and the physical substances themselves interact. It's not surprising that Anaxagoras' book could be found in Athens in Socrates' day, because Anaxagoras' philosophical activity was spent in Athens. In fact, he was the most notable philosopher of Athens until Socrates came along. We always think of Athens as the capital city of Greek philosophy, but as you may have noticed, so far none of the philosophers we've looked at came from Athens or spent a significant part of their lives there. Anaxagoras was the first to do so, and he is thus something of a one-man symbol for the transfer of philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He was from Klasomenai on the Ionian coast, and he continued some of the traditions of Ionian philosophy going back to the Milesians in the 6th century BC. Despite this, it was in Athens that he seems to have done his philosophy, and it was in Athens that he became associated with the great statesman Pericles. As the leading politician of the democracy of Athens in the middle of the 5th century, Pericles helped to build the empire that would face off against Sparta in the Peloponnesian War starting in 431 BC. But Pericles' career mostly coincided with the more peaceful period of increasing Athenian strength after the wars with Persia but before the disastrous conflict with the Spartans. It's appropriate that Pericles should have consorted with a philosopher of Anaxagoras' stature, given that it was under his leadership that Athens developed into a preeminent power and thus a center for philosophical speculation and other cultural activities. This was the environment in which Socrates was formed. Anaxagoras has something else in common with Socrates apart from his association with Athens. Like Socrates, he was put on trial for being insufficiently reverential towards the gods. He didn't wind up drinking hemlock, but instead just left town, which is safer. Unfortunately, we don't know much about the trial, but it may have resulted from his political connections. Then again, his theory of the cosmic mind is not much like traditional Greek religion, so it may have been, as they say, a fair cop when he was accused of impiety. That's not to say that Anaxagoras' mind is anything less than divine. At least, it sure sounds like he is talking about God or a God when he describes mind. He says that it is infinite and controls everything that lives. This may put us in mind of Sinophanes' version of God, or even Heraclitus' version of fire. It seems to me that when Socrates started to read Anaxagoras' book, this was probably also the impression that he formed. Mind was going to be a powerful, perhaps even all-powerful, god who planned and designed everything so that it would be as good as it can possibly be. He then became disappointed when Anaxagoras didn't invoke mind constantly, but appealed to various material processes instead. But I think this was a bit unfair on Socrates' part. There's a grand tradition in both philosophy and religion of invoking God or the gods to explain the fact that the world looks so well-designed. Think about how the sun moves in just the right way to give us the seasons, so that we can plant and harvest food to keep ourselves alive. Think of the giraffe with its long neck, just the thing for reaching those tasty leaves in the trees. Think even of how much it hurts when you step on something sharp. Sure, you don't feel grateful when it happens, but if not for the pain, you'd be a lot less careful in the future, and you'd probably wind up with cuts all over your feet, and then where would you be? So even the bad things in life seemed designed to make life better. Socrates assumed that this is roughly where Anaxagoras was heading when he put mind in charge of the cosmos. There may have been something like this thought in Anaxagoras' mind, but the evidence we have suggests that he actually had other fish to fry. For one thing, the fragment that tells us about mind controlling things says that it controls living things, so maybe giraffes and people who can step on rocks, but not the rocks that the people are stepping on. His idea seems to be not that mind is responsible for how well-designed things are, but for the special abilities of things like people, animals, and maybe plants. He says that of the things that have mind, some have a greater share, and some a lesser share. Presumably humans have more than dogs, and dogs have more than insects. Perhaps some humans have more than others. Now, none of this sounds anything like the Creator God we know from religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Anaxagoras' mind is not there to explain why everything is designed as well as possible, but to explain why some things can think, see, and so on, whereas others can't. We humans get a healthy portion of mind, rocks don't get any. In short, it sounds more like Anaxagoras' mind is an ingredient, or a power, which is distributed unequally throughout the universe. But if mind is an ingredient, then it is a very special ingredient. Anaxagoras reserves a unique place for it when he explains how the world is put together. And this takes us to his other most famous idea, universal mixture. Before the cosmos was formed, Anaxagoras says, there was nothing but mind and another infinite substance, in which all other things were mixed together. However, there were, in amongst this mixture, what he calls seeds. These seeds were the beginnings of later distinctive substances like, for example, air or water. Only mind stands outside this mixture. It must be over and above the things it is going to control, so it alone is, as he says, unmixed. Furthermore, mind has the important job of kicking off the formation of the cosmos. It somehow initiates a cosmic rotation, in which the infinite mixture of stuff starts to spin around. As the rotation goes on, the seeds of lighter things are sifted out towards the edges and become air and the fiery stuff of the heavens, while the seeds of moist and dense things stay towards the middle. At some point, some large stones go spinning out of the central portion and become the visible heavenly bodies like the sun and moon, burning white with heat. So far this sounds a lot like what we've found in the earlier Ionian philosophers. In particular, we already saw in Anaximenes the idea that the bodies in the middle of the cosmos where we are collect there because they are dense, whereas air and fire are rarefied and light. It's almost as if Anaxagoras has put this together with Xenophanes's God, who just by thinking shakes all things. But Anaxagoras is adding something of his own as well. Even though the seeds are separated out by the rotation that mind sets in motion, nothing apart from mind is ever completely separated. Instead, as he puts it in his most famous slogan, everything is in everything. The oceans may look to us like they are made only of water, but actually they also contain things other than water, for instance air and fire. In fact, all things contain all other kinds of thing. So, when soul singers from the 1970s to the present have informed us that everything is everything, they were broadly speaking in agreement with Anaxagoras. As far as I'm concerned, that alone makes it worth trying to understand what he was up to with this theory. As usual, Aristotle has an explanation of what Anaxagoras was up to, and as occasionally happens, Aristotle's explanation may actually be right this time. He puts Anaxagoras's theory squarely in the context of the Parmenidean denial of change. You might remember that for Parmenides and his followers, motion and change were impossible, because for anything to come into being, it would have to come from non-being, but there is no non-being. Aristotle suggests that Anaxagoras accepted part of this reasoning. He agreed that nothing could come from absolute non-being, and yet, like the atomists, he refused to accept that nothing ever really changes or moves. The atomists go one direction here, and Anaxagoras goes the other. For the atomists, in one sense there is no change, because all the atoms are eternal, they never come to be and are never destroyed. So nothing comes to be from non-being, but the atoms can come together in different configurations which underlie the world we see around us. Anaxagoras rather ingeniously suggests instead that absolute change is not required because everything is already everything else. He gave the example of food. You eat a loaf of bread with a hunk of cheese on it, and this manages to restore the flesh, bone, and blood in your body. Clearly there must be flesh, bone, and blood in the bread and cheese. After all, there's nowhere else for it to come from. And there's another contrast between Anaxagoras and the atomists. He's happy to accept, in the face of Zeno's paradoxes, that you can take any material body and divide it, divide it again, and so on and so on, infinitely. But every portion of that body, no matter how small, will still contain all things. Even the tiniest particle of cheese has some bone in it. Anaxagoras then would have us believe that every single material object, or part of an object, no matter how small or large, contains all the ingredients that make up the universe. You cannot separate out any one ingredient to get, say, pure and unmixed bone or flesh. As we saw, only mind is ever unmixed. Rather, what you get if you start cutting up cheese is smaller and smaller bits of cheese, which still contain all the other ingredients. It's not mind you that the cheese can be turned into bone. The idea is that there is already bone in the cheese, and in everything else. Now, this raises a couple of obvious questions. First of all, will any of us ever want to eat cheese again? Second, if all the ingredients are in every portion of everything, why doesn't everything look the same? It should all be one homogeneous mass with no differentiation between cheese and bone or anything else. The answer to this is fairly easy. Even if all ingredients are present in a given chunk of the world, they might be present in different proportions. A chunk of earth, for instance, has all the ingredients in it, but the earth in the chunk predominates all the other ingredients. We might say that there are trace elements of other things like water and fire in the earth. Similarly, there are trace elements of flesh, blood, and bone in the cheese. The process of digestion pulls these trace elements together to build up our body, which is made of portions, which likewise have all ingredients, but are predominantly flesh or predominantly bone. Apparently, this sort of predominance has always been present because there were seeds of things already in the infinite mass that mind began to rotate. These seeds were portions which were already predominantly cold or hot or whatever. Of course, it had to be like this if the rotation begun by mind was going to achieve anything. After all, the hot bits can hardly get spun out towards the edges if no one bit is hotter than any other bit. Another thing we might wonder is what exactly is the list of the ingredients? Is it really the case that everything is in everything? Do we really want to say that inside every particle of a giraffe there is just a hint of Eiffel Tower, and vice versa? Here we've reached a somewhat controversial area of Anaxagoras' philosophy. Some have thought that he was working with a fairly short list of ingredients, which in fact don't look much like ingredients at all. These would be things like hot, cold, rare, and dense. If this is his theory, it isn't quite as surprising as it first seemed. His point would only be that nothing is so hot that it has no admixture of cold or vice versa. Rather, there would be a kind of continuum between hot and cold, and similarly for other basic oppositions, like perhaps moist and dry. We might envision this by imagining a measurement scale with no top or bottom, no absolute zero in the case of temperature. He instead explains it in the more concrete terms of a physical mixture. This would be in keeping with other prezocratic philosophers, and even some later thinkers like Aristotle, who speak of things like the hot and the cold as kinds of stuff rather than measurable properties. But others find this version of Anaxagoras harder to swallow than bony cheese. Some ancient authors, including Aristotle and others who could probably have read Anaxagoras' own writings, seem happy to speak of things like bone and flesh among the ingredients that are always present. On the other hand, there's no reason to think that the ingredients included more complicated things like plants, animals, and humans, to say nothing of man-made things like tables and the Eiffel Tower. Rather, he seems to have had in mind the simplest materials out of which such things are made. In the case of the Eiffel Tower, this would be metal. In the case of a giraffe, it would be good old bone, flesh, and blood. I might add that Anaxagoras could afford to be relaxed about the list of ingredients if he wanted to. He could say to us, I've given you the theory of universal mixture, which is my breakthrough insight. We'd need a detailed investigation to find out what the basic constituents of the universe are, but my theory could turn out to be true, whatever those exact ingredients turn out to be. In this spirit, we might note that, even though there is no bone in cheese, there is calcium in cheese, and bone is partly made of calcium. See, not so crazy after all. With this theory, Anaxagoras put on the table a philosophical problem which was going to worry philosophers for many generations to come. This is the problem of mixture. It's not something that leaps to mind nowadays when we think about pressing philosophical difficulties. Does God exist? What is the nature of consciousness? Sure. But what is it for one thing to be mixed with another? Not so much. Yet, this problem was at the heart of ancient attempts to understand the nature of material objects. If we don't worry about the problem anymore, it's because one answer to the question eventually carried the day. We now think that when two things like water and wine get mixed together, what is actually happening is not so much mixture, as a very complicated jumbling together. There are wine particles and water particles, and these particles don't literally fuse, they just get juxtaposed. This is, of course, precisely the answer that the ancient atomists would have given, and at least to this extent, they were right. Anaxagoras was proposing a different sort of answer which would turn out to be more popular among ancient philosophers like Aristotle and the Stoics. According to this second answer, it is indeed possible for one body to be completely mixed with another. In fact, the Stoics said it was possible for a single drop of wine to mix with the entire ocean, so that every portion of the ocean no matter how small would have some of the wine in it. No one apart from Anaxagoras went so far as to say that absolutely every type of body can be found absolutely everywhere, but his fundamental intuition about mixture is perfectly reasonable. After all, we see wine mixed with water, and the two seem to suffuse one another completely. Why not think this is happening, as it were, all the way down, including in portions of the mixture too small to see? Once you've gotten to that point, you need to accept Anaxagoras's idea that one ingredient can predominate over another, even if the two ingredients are mixed with one another through and through. Obviously, in the ocean mixed with a wine drop, water is predominant, even though wine is present absolutely everywhere in the water. Anaxagoras then brings together many of the themes we have seen in other pre-Socratic philosophers, and he is a kind of bridge to Socrates and post-Socratic philosophy as well. With Anaxagoras, we have brought philosophy to Athens, seen another response to Parmenides, and also been reminded of the grand cosmic theories of the Milesians. Along with the Eliatics and the Atomists, Anaxagoras exemplifies the ambitious system building that we find in 5th century BC philosophy up until Socrates, and even during Socrates's own lifetime, for instance with the development of Leucippus's atomism at the hands of Democritus. But there's one major pre-Socratic from the 5th century who we haven't examined yet, Empedocles. There are some signs that Anaxagoras was responding to Empedocles rather than the other way around, even though Anaxagoras seems to have been born slightly earlier. Aristotle is constantly presenting the two of them together, comparing their two cosmic schemes in various ways. Like Anaxagoras, Empedocles was very influential, responsible for systematizing the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. He was also a wonderfully over-the-top wise man in the style of Pythagoras. He claimed to be an incarnate god, capable of working miraculous healing, and he supposedly died by hurling himself into a volcano. That's Empedocles, a philosopher who knew how to make an exit, next week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, All You Need Is Love, and Five Other Things, Empedocles. Today I want to start by telling you something about what you would have held in your hands if you'd picked up a work of ancient philosophy. I mentioned last week that Socrates was, according to Plato, able to buy a copy of a book written by Anaxagoras, but the word book conjures up the wrong image. What Socrates would have read was not a stack of pages fit between two covers. It would have been written on a long scroll. You would unroll the book as you read it, and the writing would be in vertical columns which you would read from left to right. There would have been no punctuation, no separation between words, and no difference between capital and lowercase letters. All these things were invented later. The book would have been made of either papyrus, which is an Egyptian invention, a writing surface made from plants, or from parchment, which is made from animal skins. The first philosophers we'll talk about who had the opportunity to write on paper will be the medieval thinkers in the Islamic world, who benefited from the import of paper manufacturing from China in the 8th century AD. And of course, whether they were on papyrus, parchment, or paper, all ancient and medieval philosophical works had to be written and copied out by hand. The reason I mention this at the beginning of today's episode is to help you picture an exciting event which occurred about 20 years ago in the library of the French city of Strasbourg. A scholar named Alain Martins was examining some scraps of papyrus which had been lying around in this library for quite some time, when he made a discovery. These bits of papyrus had verses of a poem on it. The poem was written by Empedocles. This could be verified because some of the verses matched fragments of Empedocles known from other sources. Thus in the year 1990, the extant remains of Empedocles got a bit bigger. In ancient philosophy, that's about as exciting as it gets. Quite frankly, my heart rate is elevated right now just talking about it. Thanks in part to the Strasbourg fragments, we have a surprisingly large amount of evidence for the writings of Empedocles. So you might think that, whereas with other prezocratics we've been having to work hard to fill in the gaps, we would have a really firm understanding of Empedocles' philosophy. We should be so lucky. In fact, Empedocles is at least as controversial among scholars of early Greek philosophy as any of the thinkers we've looked at, maybe because all that evidence just gives the historians more to argue about. Even without this relative abundance of evidence, Empedocles would be hard to resist. He combines the religious mystique of Pythagoras, the pithy inscrutability of Heraclitus, and the cosmic vision of Anaxagoras. Let's start with the religious mystique. Empedocles informs us, modestly enough, that he is a god, who is decorated with wreaths wherever he goes, worshipped by the people, who beg him to bestow prophecy and healing upon them. Diogenes Laertius, a later ancient author who preserves a lot of juicy biographical material about Empedocles and other philosophers, claims that Empedocles did indeed make quite an impression. In part, this was because of the miracles he performed, not unlike Pythagoras. He raised a woman from the dead and cured one city of the plague. Then there was the way he looked, affecting long flowing hair and a purple robe and wearing distinctive bronze-soled shoes. Those shoes appear in the most famous bit of Diogenes' report. This has Empedocles dying by throwing himself into a volcano in order to vanish without a trace and thus prove that he had become a god. The trick was discovered, though, when his bronze sandal was discovered on the edge of the volcano's mouth. You've gotta love this stuff, even though as usual with Diogenes, we're in the realm of legend rather than biography. Even Diogenes, certainly not the most critical of historians, reports also a more sober story that Empedocles simply went off to the Peloponnese and was never heard from again. But there's a grain of truth in the volcano story, which is the volcano named Mount Etna in Sicily, and Sicily really is where Empedocles was from. To be more specific, he hailed from Akragas on the southwestern coast of Sicily. His proximity to Italy, where Pythagoreanism was enforced during the 5th century BC, may help explain the distinct Pythagorean flavor of some of his ideas, including his boast about his divinity. Among his doctrines, the most obviously Pythagorean element is his belief in reincarnation. You might remember that the followers of Pythagoras believed that after death, we return as other people and as animals. Empedocles apparently was able to confirm this from personal experience. He tells us in one fragment that he has been a boy, a girl, a bird, and a fish, even a bush. One can't help asking oneself what it is like to remember being a bush, but let's pass over this and move on. In another fragment, he describes the father who raises up his own son in prayer before brutally slaying the child, heedless of his screams. The idea being that the son has previously died and been reincarnated as an animal who is being sacrificed on the altar. Like the Pythagoreans, Empedocles figures that if reincarnation is possible, you'd better not eat meat. You might wind up eating your family. What's really remarkable though is the chilling vividness with which Empedocles imagines this gory scene. It's one of the only two images from pre-Socratic philosophy that would be right at home in a horror movie. The other one is also from Empedocles and we'll get to it in a minute. The power of Empedocles' imagery is in part due to the way he wrote, namely in hexameter poetry, following the lead of Parmenides. Parmenides looms large over Empedocles' philosophy, as it does for all the philosophers we've been talking about in recent episodes. As with the Adamists and Anaxagoras, one of the main worries for Empedocles is how change is possible, despite the arguments that Parmenides and his followers gave for the impossibility of change. We've seen that in their own ways, the Adamists and Anaxagoras sort of agreed with the Eliatics that absolute change cannot happen. Nothing comes to be from complete and utter non-being. Rather, what happens is that the things which already exist, whether this means Anaxagoras' infinite mixture of everything with everything, or the atomist's infinity of unchanging atoms, alter or recombine in different ways. This is Empedocles' solution too. He says, echoing Parmenides, that in a way nothing ever changes. The basic building blocks of the cosmos, which Empedocles called roots, but which Aristotle and later philosophers will call elements, are always the same. They just get separated and combined in different ways, and this yields the universe we see around us. The roots, or elements, are air, earth, fire, and water. Even people who have never really encountered ancient Greek philosophy know about these four elements. You might hear people talk about them when discussing astrology, for instance. Well, Empedocles was the first person to establish these as the basic ingredients of the world. Mind you, he doesn't always just call them air, earth, fire, and water. That would be too straightforward for his style. Instead, he uses the names of gods to refer to them. For instance, in one fragment, water is the goddess Nestis, and fire the god Hephaestus. These, combined in certain proportions with earth, result in bone. He even gives a numerical analysis, which sounds like something a bartender would say when describing a mixed drink. Four of eight parts are fire, and two are of water. Empedocles himself gives a more artistic analogy. To those who doubt that the world, in all its complexity, could emerge from only these four roots, he points out that painters can fashion images of all things from just a few pigments. Of course, we're more than likely to think Empedocles is onto something here. Varied and complex things can indeed come out of only a few basic elements, just think of the periodic table. What we'll want to know next, though, is how and why the elements come together in the way that they do. The analogy of the painter suggests that someone is controlling this process. As it turns out, there are two someones, or two somethings, in charge. Empedocles calls them love and strife. These two principles, which we might think of as cosmic forces, are ultimately responsible for the formation of plants, animals, stars, the whole cosmos, out of the four roots. They play something like the role that mind plays in the cosmology of Anaxagoras, except that, of course, in Anaxagoras, mind has no other force opposing it. The fact that Empedocles has two principles gives him the opportunity to put forward a grandiose and influential idea, his theory of cosmic cycles. According to this theory, there's a kind of waxing and waning in the power of both love and strife. When love is completely dominant, all the four elements are mixed together in total peace and harmony. Empedocles describes the cosmos in this condition as a sphere, which might remind us of the spherical one being in Parmenides. Unlike Parmenides's being, though, this sphere is going to change. As strife begins to exert its influence, the elements are sifted out from one another. Ultimately, the elements become completely separate so that all the fire is gathered together, all the water gathered together somewhere else, and the same for air and earth. Obviously, when the cosmos is dominated totally by love or by strife, there will be no people, animals, or plants. It's only when we are somewhere in between these moments of total domination that things get really interesting. Here's where we run into one of the difficulties that Empedocles scholars enjoy arguing about. Is the idea that a cosmos like ours would be produced as we go from total love to total strife, or vice versa? Or does it happen twice, so to speak, so that you get fish, giraffes, people, and everything else whenever you are somewhere in between total love and total strife, whichever direction things are going? I guess we don't need to decide this in our modest little podcast, but for what it's worth, I suspect that Empedocles thinks that the apparent order and harmony in our cosmos shows that love is still exerting significant influence. This brings us to the second image in Empedocles that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie. It's one thing to say that somehow, plants, animals, and people arise from the four elements is quite another to explain how this happens. Empedocles, true to form, has quite a bold theory about this. He says that animals emerge in stages. At first, you don't get whole animals, but only individual limbs and organs. In what is surely a contender for his most fantastic fragment, he describes the situation as follows, quote, here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders unattached, and eyes strayed alone in need of foreheads. Unquote. I take that translation from the Kirk, Raven, and Schofield volume on pre-Socratic philosophy, by the way, an invaluable book which I've been using a lot as I've written these episodes. Mostly, I've done my own translations, but I think you'll agree that this translation cannot be improved upon. Anyway, here you have these eyeballs cruising around, occasionally bumping into a shoulderless arm. The eyes can't apologize, they have no lips. Now, the next thing that happens is that the limbs come together, but they do so in an apparently random fashion, which produces, as he says, things that look like they come from dreams. The dreams must be nightmares, I guess, though I don't remember having too many nightmares where I saw shoulderless arms sporting eyes. Next, things progress still further, and you get whole animals. But these aren't necessarily the animals we know and love. Since they come together randomly, the results can still be monstrous. Aristotle quotes Empedocles' example of an ox with the face of a man. But these monsters, said Empedocles, always die out, and still die now when they are occasionally born. They perish, he says, because they are unsuitable. It's only in a fourth phase that we get animals which are able to reproduce. Now, I know what you're thinking. Holy cow, or rather, holy man-faced ox, Empedocles invented the theory of evolution. At least, that's what a lot of people have thought. Now, I don't want to take anything away from Empedocles' audacious theory, but I do want to point out that it does not really anticipate the theory of evolution. To have a theory like Darwin's, you need to have the idea that species carry on by means of inherited features, and the idea that inherited features are selected because they make the animal or plant more likely to survive. Empedocles has neither of these ideas. Reproduction comes in only the final stage when the suitable animals, namely the ones we have now, have been produced. Fitness for survival is what makes reproduction possible, not the other way around. Without an explanation of inherited features, Empedocles cannot really tell us why it is the so-called suitable animals that survive. Perhaps it's true that the man-faced ox will die a quick death, whereas the ox-faced ox will prosper and get to mate with the other ox-faced oxen. Not quite sure why that should be. Maybe the lady beasts find the man-faced ox a turnoff, but let's just grant it to Empedocles for the sake of argument. Still, though, why does the ox-faced ox produce an animal that looks just like it? This cannot be explained by appealing merely to chance. Like the other pre-Socratics, Empedocles was genuinely fascinated by the physical world around him. And maybe more than any other pre-Socratic, though this could also just be because we have more evidence for Empedocles, he tried to explain the things around us in light of his cosmic theory. For instance, the eye. In one complicated fragment, the eye is said to be fashioned by Aphrodite and put together very much like a lantern which shields a fire from the wind. The fire of the eye is surrounded by water, but never doused, because of the membranes that separate the flame from the moisture. Vision is possible because of tiny pores that allow fine material to pass through, so that the membrane around the fire inside the eye is like a kind of screen, both protecting it and letting it interact with the world outside. But why does there need to be fire in the eye? The reason is that Empedocles thinks that colors are fiery, and only fire can be affected by something fiery. This principle that in sensation only like can affect like is one we will revisit when we get to Aristotle's theory of the soul. But for now, I want to emphasize something else, which is the careful way Empedocles has thought about the eye. You might even say dissected the eye, maybe literally, when we think about those membranes. Remember, Empedocles claimed that everywhere he went, people flocked around him asking to be healed. Maybe this wasn't just part of his magical wise man act, because there are other ancient authors who tell us about Empedocles's expertise in medicine. But was there really medicine at this early period in ancient Greece? You bet there was. In fact, ancient medicine and ancient philosophy were in constant interaction since at least the 5th century BC, if not earlier. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was a near contemporary of Plato's, and Hippocrates was already able to draw in generations worth of ideas about the human body, including the sort of things we find in Empedocles. Of course, these days we don't think of medicine as being a part of philosophy, and even in ancient Greece and Rome, medical doctors were considered to be something of a separate profession. But as we'll see in a couple of episodes from now, you can't understand the history of Greek medicine without talking about philosophy, and vice versa. In two weeks then, we'll be discussing the Hippocratic Corpus and its relation to philosophy. But before that, we'll have another exciting guest. Next time, I'll be interviewing one of the world's leading scholars of pre-Socratic thought as a fitting culmination to the episodes on the pre-Socratics so far. In fact, he's one of the authors of that invaluable volume of translation and commentary on pre-Socratic philosophy I just mentioned earlier in this podcast. There may be four elements, but there's only one, Malcolm Schofield. So join me for an interview with him next week on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, and welcome to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today I have another guest to interview, and we're going to be talking about the pre-Socratics. My guest this week is Professor Malcolm Schofield of Cambridge University. Hi, Malcolm. Thank you for coming. Pleasure. So, we've already covered a lot of the pre-Socratics, or really all the pre-Socratics, in previous episodes, so this episode is just kind of to wrap things up. And I thought I might start by asking you a little bit about the very first pre-Socratics, the myelisions. So, one question that arises here, I suppose, is what do the myelisions all have in common? So if we think about Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, do you think that there's one feature or several features which binds them together and makes them a kind of school of pre-Socratic philosophy? Well, I think there are two or three features that unite them. Perhaps start with Thales and Anaximander. One thing that is reported about Thales is that he was an enormously inventive, practical person. And he's supposed, for example, to have used elementary mathematics, elementary geometry, to make calculations, and indeed to have accurately more or less predicted an eclipse. Anaximander, likewise, seems to have been keen on inventing gadgets, and he too is interested in the mathematical. He's said to have been the first Greek ever to draw a map of the world. It seems to have been a primitive map constructed with compasses. So the world is round, or the earth is round, and the Mediterranean's at the center, and you've got Europe above and Africa below, and Asia on the right, at least so it seems. So that's one thing. They were people who had, if you like, a sort of technological cast of mind. One thing that seems to be true of them is that they were trying to generate an explanation of how the physical cosmos is the way it is that was couched entirely in naturalistic terms. The whole array of gods and goddesses, the fates, the mythology of the underworld, and so forth that you find in the epic poets Homer and Hesiod, and you find in them as a framework for explanation of why the cosmos is. That's all gone. And would you say that that's what really differentiates the pre-Socratic philosophers from other cultural productions, as it were, that happened before the pre-Socratics and during the pre-Socratics' own lifetimes, that they were more naturalistic? Well, of course, in their own lifetime we have very little other contemporary Greek material. There is the material from the Near East and from Egypt and so forth, and yes, what we have of Babylonian Egyptian narratives are much more, if you like, theistic, explicitly theistic. Not that Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes didn't believe in deities. They clearly did, but their deities are more like, to use a much later phrase, the god of other philosophers than the traditional pantheon or the traditional polytheism that you find throughout the Mediterranean and Near East in this period. And it's really Xenophanes who really brings that point across most clearly. Yes, Xenophanes is a fascinating character. He's also someone who works on what is now the eastern seaboard of Turkey, as they all did. His home city, Colophon, was only a few kilometers away from Miletus, where the Milesians worked. And he stands in a very interesting relationship to the Milesians. He was clearly knowledgeable about natural philosophy. Indeed, some of the most interesting things we know about physical speculation from this period is Xenophanes. For example, he seems to have been aware of what fossil evidence might be. The shellfish. The shellfish, yes. The bay leaf. And to construct on that the theory about the way that the earth is gradually drying out. And that maps on to some concerns that are documented for Anaximander. And he certainly has physical explanations of why the earth is as it is, why the heavens are as they are, and so on. In some ways it doesn't seem as sophisticated as we can document for the Milesians. And there's a question as to whether there was an element of satire in it. Xenophanes said, well, everything's made of clouds. And that is not unlike the physical explanations in terms of heat and moisture and so forth that the Milesians invoked. But you can't help suspecting that he perhaps had his tongue in his cheek a bit. But Xenophanes is interesting because he is explicitly concerned with theology. And indeed he seems to operate in a different mode from the Milesians. Those of the Milesians who wrote anything, and it seems almost certain that Anaximander and Anaximenes did write books. They wrote their books as narratives in prose of how the world began and how it developed. In Xenophanes' case he writes verse. In fact he's a poetic performer who travels, as he says, the Greek world. Indeed after his early years he seems to have moved to the west of Greece to south Italy mainly. To perform at banquets, is it right? To perform at banquets. And indeed we have some of the poems he wrote about what a proper banquet should be like and what the right religious ritual should be, what the right songs you could sing are. And he seems to be very much against elaborate meat sacrifices and songs of gods and giants battling against each other. But he has, very interestingly, a critique of traditional theology. Homer and Hesiod are accused of anthropomorphism and indeed of attributing to gods the worst features of humankind. And he develops this critique by a sort of counterfactual line of thought. He says if lions could draw their gods then they would draw lion-faced gods, just as the Ethiopians draw the devised gods who have black faces and snub-nosed. That issue about the kind of text that they produce of books as opposed to poetry brings me to something else I was going to ask you, which is, do you think we can say very much about who the pre-Socratics thought they were talking to? I mean, Xenophanes may have been performing at banquets at least some of the time, but for example Heraclitus or even the poem of Parmenides, or for that matter the Milesians, do you think there's any sign that could tell us who they were talking to and who they expected to be able to read their books? Or do we just have to guess about that? Well, like so much to do with the pre-Socratics it is mostly guesswork, I think. There is quite a lot of reason to think that Thales in particular was a public figure. I mean, he's supposed to have generated ideas for a conference of all the Greek states on the eastern seaboard to make common cause together against the Persian overlord. To Woodrow Wilson of pre-Socratic philosophy. You could say so, yes. And so I think that Thales had a public role and I'm quite sure that he would talk authoritatively to anybody who wanted to listen to him. So I don't think we have to think that he was writing only for a small coterie of intellectuals. An axiomander is harder to say, but Greek cities weren't very big places and so I think that even though there seemed to have been a kind of school developed of Miletus, we mustn't think of it as a university, I think. We must think much more in terms of public intellectuals. And that means that actually the pre-Socratics may have been operating in a mode maybe more like Socrates, actually speaking to people in the marketplace as it were, and maybe some of Heraclitus's riddles or aphorisms were actually presented to people in that kind of more oral context. It's hard to think that Heraclitus wasn't primarily someone who was operating through oral discourse, not primarily on papal papyrus or whatever it was. I mean, clearly there was a book, but his thoughts do seem phrased in the kind of way that oral utterances are phrased. And similarly, well, anybody who writes a poem, you have to assume that they're writing it for delivery, even Parmenides, I think. So even Parmenides would have been performing the way of truth? Well, again, Parmenides is, I mean, the evidence about Parmenides and his pupil, sidekick Zeno, in Aelia in South Italy, being public figures is quite good. And so I think that the Parmenides poem must be a distillation of his teaching. But it's hard to think that he simply retired to his study alone one day after not talking to anybody for years, writing it down, and then shutting the book and leaving it somewhere and going off somewhere else. It's not really credible, I think. And in fact, in Plato's Parmenides, it looks like the dialogue begins just as Zeno has finished reciting from his book, doesn't it? And so I read you that, and what the book is about. That's right. I mean, it's a narrative that can't possibly literally be true, but what it testifies to is the kind of way in which ideas were spread. People would come and read from their books. And of course, Parmenides is a nice example for us of a philosopher who seems actually to have had disciples. So there's Zeno, obviously, and there's also Melissa's, and the two of them seem to have been extending Parmenides' philosophy or defending it in some way. That's right. I mean, it's quite hard to understand the relationship of Zeno and Melissa's philosophically, that's to say, to Parmenides. And Zeno is often portrayed as a sort of sophist. And Melissa's, there's been some interesting work recently that suggests that maybe Melissa's, some of his arguments are designed to provoke rather than to, as a word, communicate metaphysical truths that we were simply meant to take on board and accept. And whether that's true or not, with respect to Zeno and Melissa's, it's very hard to think of them as, except as operating in a milieu in which people were arguing with each other all the time. And they were sort of adopting a Parmenides-type position. Is that the idea? That's right. That's right. And I mean, it's, and the thought is, if this is the right way to think of them, trying to provoke others to thought in what you might describe as a Socratic sort of way. That's interesting because when I interviewed Emma McCabe in a previous episode about Heraclitus, this is exactly what she said about him, that a lot of these aphorisms, which seem almost like jokes or one-liners, are actually implicit invitations to engage in some kind of dialogue with him. Well, that is absolutely right. I mean, take a famous fragment of Heraclitus, which I'm actually going to, I think, make the opening sally when I give the presidential lecture to the Hellenic Society next summer. The saying goes like this, I own, I own means something like human life is a child. Playing around, playing drafts, a child is the kingdom. Now what on earth he meant, who knows? But it was for sure that he meant us to puzzle about it. It's supposed to be provocative, and it is. It certainly is. So if we can go back to the philosophers who come in the wake of Parmenides, do you think it would be too simplistic to see the generation or two now leading up to the time of Socrates, so not really pre-Socratics anymore, but even Socrates' contemporaries, do you think it would be too simplistic to think of them as just different attempts to find a way to defend pluralism against Parmenides? So you've got the atomists, you've got Anaxagoras, you've got Empedocles, and they all have multiple principles, either an infinity of atoms or four elements or whatever it might be, a mixture of all things with each other. Are these all just different ways to outwit Parmenides and avoid his kind of total monism? Well I think we probably have to tell a slightly different story with respect to each of them, because I think one thing that our conversation has been bringing out is what an extraordinary diversity of views and approaches to abstract thought these thinkers engage in, we find in these thinkers. And so I think there's something broadly correct in the suggestion that, well they used to be called the post-Parmenidean pluralists rather alliteratively, and post-Parmenidean encapsulated the idea that you've just articulated, that in one way or another they're trying to save pluralism from Parmenidean monism and the arguments that Parmenides deployed. But I do think there are differences, if we take, and one of the differences is actually the evidence. The evidence we have for the atomists is in some ways a lot more plentiful than for the others, but it's also more indirect. And in other words we have very few fragments of the physical system of Eucapus and Democritus. And the reports that we have by later writers about the atomists are absolutely explicit that they were offering in a way a version of Parmenideanism. They were saying well Parmenides is absolutely right, that reality is single and it's homogeneous and it's full of, that reality is a full reality, there are no gaps in it. The only variation they really make is to say but there is not being as well, which they then talk of as void, the empty. And from that they can generate their whole theory. They're not actually in the sources represented so much as pluralists, as dualists. Dualists who say there has to be both reality, if you like, and unreality. And it's through a complex interchange between these that you get the diversity that we find in the sensible world. And then atomism could almost just be Parmenidean philosophy where you disagree with Zeno and say that it is possible for being to be separated from other beings so that one atom is separate from another atom by non-being. That's right. And you get an atomistic universe. But they're very keen to insist that the reality that's, as it were, divorced from reality in this way is a single reality. That's the sense in which the sources represent them as dualists rather than a dualism between being and non-being rather than pluralists. It's interesting, isn't it, that the way we periodize this period, because we call them all pre-Socratics, as if the really fundamental thing that happens in Greek philosophy is Socrates coming along and changing the game somehow. We could maybe talk instead about pre-Parmenideans and post-Parmenideans. But is there any sense in which it's legitimate to think of Socrates as having changed philosophies so that all the pre-Socratics in some sense form a single tradition which Socrates brings to an end, maybe by being more interested in ethics than natural philosophy, for example? Well, I think that these very sharp divisions are always a bit dangerous because it's quite clear that somebody like Heraclitus had a strong ethical strain in his teaching. And even Democritus has ethical practices. But Democritus, that relates to another of your points, namely that Democritus is actually quite a bit younger than Socrates. He's probably 30 years younger than Socrates. Would be surprised to be told he was a pre-Socratic. That's right. So yes, I think Socrates, well, famously Cicero said Socrates called philosophy down from the heavens and brought it into our homes. That's true in a couple of ways, I think. One is the focus on ethics, but also, if you like, the focus on homeliness. Because I think what's absolutely different about Socrates from any of these previous people is the way that Socrates' conversations seem to begin with the purely everyday. I mean, the Republic, for example, the beginning of the Republic famously begins with a conversation between him and the old man Cephalus. And it's a polite conversation. He asks questions that we don't ordinarily ask in polite conversations. Oh well, how's the sex life, old boy? And Cephalus says, well, I'm rather glad not to have got any of that. And how are you feeling about the prospect of death? Well, he's not afraid of death because he says, I've paid my debts and I've always told the truth. And Socrates then engineers that into a conversation about justice. So is that what you think living a just life means that you won't be subject to post-mortem punishment adds up to? Now, I don't think there is any sense with any of the previous people that we've been talking about that there was this kind of ordinary life dimension to philosophy as they saw it. And this was something that later writers about Socrates emphasized. You find this in Xenophon, for example, you find it in Plutarch, but they emphasize this, if you like, demotic side to Socrates' way of doing philosophy. All comers, any subject whatsoever can be turned into a philosophical subject. Well thank you very much, Malcolm, for coming and bringing the free Socratics into the homes of the listeners. Next week I'll be talking about the Hippocratic Corpus and in a few weeks we'll be getting to Socrates himself. But for now I'll just thank Malcolm one more time. Well thank you, I've enjoyed it very much. And I hope you'll listen next week again to the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liverhume Trust. Today's episode? Good Humour Men – Early Greek Medicine and Ancient Philosophy. First of all, do no harm. This fundamental precept of medical ethics goes back to the man known as the father of medicine, Hippocrates of Kos. Well, more or less. The phrase is found in a work called the Epidemics, a fascinating text which gives detailed medical observations about outbreaks of disease in the ancient world. It instructs the medical practitioner to help, or at least not to harm. And this phrase has come down to us along with the idea that doctors should take an oath. Even today, we talk about doctors taking their Hippocratic oath, and in fact we do have an ancient Greek text called the oath, which like the epidemics, is ascribed to Hippocrates. These are just two of the more than 60 writings ascribed to Hippocrates in antiquity. We now call them the Hippocratic Corpus. But the way Hippocrates relates to this body of texts is a bit like the way Homer relates to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hippocrates certainly did exist, in fact we're more sure of this than we are that Homer existed. But we can't say which if any parts of the Corpus Hippocrates wrote. Not only did Hippocrates exist, but he became famous very quickly. It's because of his fame that all these writings about medicine were attached to his name. Plato and Aristotle already refer to him as a preeminent doctor. Plato also says that he accepted students for a fee, and taught them medicine. As with most pre-Socratics, we don't have a firm idea of when Hippocrates lived, though of course he must have been on the scene in time for Plato to have referred to him. For our purposes, it's enough to say that he was younger than Socrates, perhaps a rough contemporary of Plato's. Was he the father of medicine? Definitely, in the sense that the Hippocratic Corpus, that is, the work supposedly written by Hippocrates, represent our first really important medical literature from the Greeks. As we'll see in a minute, there is plenty of evidence that there was medical activity before Hippocrates, or perhaps we should say before even the earliest works from his Corpus were written, but it's in the Hippocratic Corpus that we have our earliest surviving treatises on medicine. They discuss everything from the way a doctor should behave, as in the oath, to theories about the causes of disease, to the techniques that the doctor should use to cure and prevent diseases. Now, I know what you're thinking. This is a podcast about the history of philosophy, so why am I talking about medicine? Well, as I said at the end of the episode about Empedocles, philosophy and medicine were very closely related in the Greek world. In part, this is just an example of something I've mentioned before, that philosophy and science in general were very closely related in the Greek world. But medicine makes a particularly good example, because it was a preoccupation of so many philosophically-minded authors, and because we can actually trace the impact of philosophy on medical ideas. Medicine and philosophy in the Greek world went hand in hand, especially in the generations leading up to the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the same period that gave rise to the understanding of medicine enshrined in the Hippocratic Corpus. Medicine, in the sense of a technical expertise claimed by certain experts, goes way back in the Greek world, in fact pretty much as far as our evidence does. In the Iliad, Homer depicts the gods' healing wounds, and also includes two human characters who are both soldiers and healers. They learned their art of medicine from their father, Asclepius. In Homer, Asclepius seems to be a human, albeit one whose father was a centaur. Later on in Greek history, though, Asclepius will be seen as a god of medicine. So this is one way that medicine is like philosophy. The seeds of a tradition are already planted in the Homeric poems. Another striking parallel is that Greek medicine is associated with the same region of the Greek world that gave birth to philosophy, the far eastern Mediterranean. Hippocrates hailed from the island of Kos, off the coast of Ionia, where the Milesians and Heraclitus devised the first philosophical thoughts. It's revealing that, even though the dialect of Greek spoken in Kos was Doric, the kind of Greek they spoke in Sparta, for instance, the Hippocratic Corpus is written entirely in the Ionic dialect. So that's another hint of the connections between Hippocratic medicine and Presocratic philosophy. We can also point to the attitude that Hippocratic authors take towards religion. As with Presocratic philosophy, it's commonly said that Greek medicine distanced itself from religion and thus became scientific and rational, but also as with Presocratic philosophy, the situation is actually a bit more complicated. An interesting case here would be a Hippocratic work on epilepsy, which the Greeks called the Sacred Disease. Epilepsy was thought to be sent by the gods, and sometimes to involve inspired visions on the part of the epileptic person, hence the Sacred Disease. But the author of the Hippocratic treatise titled The Sacred Disease doesn't have much time for this notion. He explains that epilepsy, like other diseases, has natural causes. It isn't a curse, or for that matter a blessing, that comes willy-nilly from the gods. He makes fun of people who claim that certain kinds of epileptic fits are caused by certain gods. Instead, he says, epilepsy is no more sacred than any other disease. But, he goes on to add that epilepsy is no less sacred than any other disease. In a sense, all diseases are sacred because they are brought about in our bodies by natural forces like the winds or the sun, and these forces are themselves divine. He concludes with an aphorism worthy of Heraclitus, "...all diseases are divine, and all are human." If anything, the author is claiming to be more pious than those who blame epilepsy on the gods. Respect for the gods doesn't mean thinking that they intervene randomly in human life to strike certain people down with an illness. It means seeing all of nature as divine, or as having a divine source. This might remind us of Xenophanes, who attacked Homer and Hesiod for making the gods too much like humans, with human emotions and irrationality. Xenophanes, like the author of the Sacred Disease, saw rationality as the correct religious attitude, not as a complete departure from religion. In fact, Greek medicine was closely related to religious practice. There were elaborate cults which involved asking the gods for healing. An example would be the cult of Asclepius, which was introduced in Athens in the late 5th century BC. At this point Asclepius is seen as a god. He has a dedicated temple with a staff of priests, who are apparently also doctors. When you're sick, you go sleep in or near the temple. If you are favored by the god you will have a dream, during which the god will either heal you, or give you instructions on how to be cured. Asclepius's cult became strongly associated with Hippocrates' island of Kos, and a large temple was built there in his honor. In the ancient world, there was a legend that Hippocrates learned his medical wisdom by reading the walls of the temple, but this is impossible for chronological reasons. Still, there's every reason to think that Hippocrates himself, and the sort of doctors who wrote and read the Hippocratic treatises, would have accepted the religious practices around disease. At the same time, they sought to bring human understanding to bear on the causes and cures of those diseases. As one Hippocratic author says, "'Prayer is good, but in addition to calling on the gods, one should lend a hand.'" So religion was one part of the world that generated Hippocratic medicine. But a still bigger influence came from pre-Socratic philosophical and scientific ideas. In previous episodes, we've seen philosophers making claims that border on the medical, for instance Heraclitus saying that drunkenness relates to being moist, or Anaxagoras explaining nutrition with his theory of universal mixture. Remember how your body is restored by cheese because there's bone and flesh in the cheese? But for medicine in the proper sense, Empedocles was the most important of the famous pre-Socratics. He claimed that wherever he went, people asked him to cure them, and also that he had knowledge of drugs. These medical interests are borne out by other fragments. I mentioned last time that for Empedocles, everything is made up of the four elements air, earth, fire, and water. I also mentioned that he gave an analysis of bone, as well as a detailed description of the structure of the eye. In both cases, he explains how these body parts arise out of the four elements, and for Empedocles, blood and flesh are made of nearly equal proportions of the four elements. That makes blood and flesh something like an ideal physical stuff from Empedocles' point of view. The medical application for this idea is obvious. If you're sick, it's because your proportions are out of whack. We find another thinker, the much more obscure Philistion of Locri, making precisely this point. Locri is at the tip of the Italian boot, so not far from Empedocles' home in Sicily, and he takes up Empedocles' four element theory. Philistion says that since your body is made up of those four elements – fire, air, earth, and water – we get sick because some of the elements dominate so that our bodies become too hot, cold, dry, or wet. The trick is to get these qualities into balance. What Philistion says is based on Empedocles' theory, but it also has some common sense plausibility. Just think of what it's like when you have a fever. The idea will be applied for centuries and centuries to come. For instance, Hippocratic doctors already made extensive use of drugs, and this sort of theory, in its general outlines, if not in its details, could provide a theoretical basis for how the drugs worked. As the medical tradition carries on, theories about pharmacology tend to explain that the ingredients in the drugs will adjust the heat, cold, moisture, or dryness of your body. The same thing goes for another major area of ancient medicine – diet. If you consulted a doctor in the ancient world, whether in 4th century Greece or a millennium later in the late Roman Empire, the doctor would almost certainly give you advice about what to eat, how much exercise to get, and so on. The advice was based on long observation and on trial and error. But, if you pushed the doctor to give a theoretical explanation for why these things worked, they would most likely say something involving Empedocles' 4-element theory. Empedocles gave more to medicine than this general theory, though. I just mentioned that he was a big believer in blood, with its perfectly balanced proportions. He also put a lot of emphasis on breath. The Greek word for breath is pneuma, which is where we get words like pneumatic. A long testimony in Aristotle explains that according to Empedocles, there's a kind of interplay between breath and blood. There are passages through the flesh of our bodies which fill with blood and then with air, in alternation. To judge from other authors like Philistion, the point of this was apparently that taking in air keeps the innate heat of our bodies more moderate. Again, it's all about proportion and balance. Another pre-Socratic philosopher who was fascinated by breath was Diogenes of Apollonia. He isn't going to quite rate his own episode. Even ancient authors tended to see him as somewhat derivative of other thinkers. His big thing was the principle of air, which seems to be a throwback to good old Anaximenes, the Milesian philosopher we looked at way back in episode 2. Diogenes was more influenced by Anaxagoras than Empedocles, and identified his airy principle with the cosmic mind of Anaxagoras. Air is an intelligent principle flooding the universe, and it becomes the other elements when it changes in density. As a proof of this, he points to the fact that the intelligent beings of the cosmos, namely we humans and other animals, live by taking in air as we breathe. Dying is, quite literally, running out of breath, and being intelligent is basically a matter of having more air in your physical makeup, so that he explains the fact that plants can't think in terms of their not taking in and retaining air. Again, there are medical, or at least anatomical, applications. For instance, he has a theory of reproduction, which I'll describe delicately, since this is a family podcast. The basic idea is that the human seed produced by men is blood which has been thinned and made foamy by mixing with, you guessed it, air. He even made observations about the network of blood vessels which were supposed to support this theory. Diogenes was not a major thinker, but his idea that there is a close association between life and breath or pneuma is almost irresistible, at least once someone else has thought of it. After all, it can't be a coincidence that living people breathe and dead ones don't, right? Many later thinkers will go further, and say that the soul itself is made of some kind of breath, which pervades the body and perhaps even circulates through what we now know to be blood vessels or nerves. These theories will get quite sophisticated. For instance, the second century AD doctor Galen, the most important figure in the entire history of medicine, distinguished several different types of pneuma which animate the body. I'm not saying we should try to trace all this directly back to Diogenes of Apollonia or to Anaximenes, but certainly the foundations of the idea were laid by the pre-Socratics. Now, these sorts of theoretical considerations were certainly not the main concern of the authors of the Hippocratic corpus. The treatises cover a range of issues, from medical ethics to drugs, gynecology, you name it. One text called On Ancient Medicine actually defends what it considers to be traditional medicine against these newfangled theories which invoke hot, dry, cold, and wet. In fact, the author of On Ancient Medicine refers explicitly to Empedocles. Instead of these simplistic theories, the Hippocratic author says, we must follow the teachings of the medical tradition which are gleaned from long and careful experience. Medicine is a large and complex body of knowledge which is especially required in order to prescribe the correct diet for each patient. The author thus anticipates arguments in the late ancient world where we will find Galen criticizing rival schools for saying that medicine is easy and simple to learn on the basis of a few theoretical principles. To quote another famous Hippocratic saying, life is short, but the art is long. And yet, the Hippocratic corpus does recognize certain theoretical principles. Of course, given that the various Hippocratic treatises aren't all by the same person, the theoretical basis can change from one text to another. But something we find in a lot of the Hippocratic material is that idea that what makes our bodies healthy is the same thing that preserves the cosmos as a whole, balance and proportion. In particular, the Hippocratics talk about the well-balanced proportion of bodily humours, meaning the various fluids in the body. You may well have heard of the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The parallel with the four elements is not a coincidence, and the humours could likewise be associated with the elemental properties – heat, cold, and so on. This version of the four-humour theory was in the process of developing at the time the Hippocratic corpus was produced. So, we don't find the corpus consistently referring to these as the canonical four humours, but we do often find the idea of keeping the humours in balance, that is, whichever humours are recognized in a given treatise. The humours are already starting to be associated with specific diseases. The best example is melancholy. The word melancholy comes from the Greek words for black and bile. The meanings of the English words sanguine and phlegmatic also refer to humours recognized by ancient and medieval thinkers. Sanguine is an allusion to blood and phlegmatic to, well, phlegm. The fact that these English words refer to personality traits and not diseases shows that the tradition extended the humoral theory to explain not just disease, but a wide range of human behaviour. Some of the notorious practices we associate with medieval medicine, like bloodletting, can also be explained as an attempt to restore balance to the body by draining out one humour that has become excessive. Hippocratic doctors did practice bloodletting as well as cupping, which is where you make a small incision and place a heated glass over it. When the glass cools, this creates negative pressure inside the glass, which draws out the blood. But the Hippocratic authors caution us to use such techniques sparingly. In general, they show an admirable reluctance to engage in what we would now call invasive procedures. They knew that their art had serious limits. The oath has the doctor promise to avoid using the knife, though the idea here may just be that surgery should be left to real specialists, whereas the oath was for doctors who were what we might call general practitioners. It's possible to look back at Hippocratic practices and see many attractive features that make an interesting contrast to modern medicine. For instance, there is not only their reluctance to intervene, but also their attention to preventative medicine, especially in the form of dietary advice. There is the Hippocratic insistence that medicine is an art and not a set of rules to be applied automatically, so that the doctor must learn to size up each patient as an individual case. There is the commitment to Holism, which is mentioned as a signature doctrine of Hippocrates by none other than Plato. Hippocrates taught that one should treat the whole body, not just the one part of the body where we find an ailment. But before I start to sound like Prince Charles, let's leave to one side the implications of Hippocratic practices for modern medicine and ask instead where all this leaves us in terms of early Greek philosophy. For one thing, it reminds us that the Presocratics applied their general theories to very specific problems. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, they saw the body as a microcosm, a little version of the whole universe. The rules that apply to the cosmos apply to the human body as well, an idea which is used to explain even things like respiration and the ingredients of blood and bone. Something else we've learned is that the Presocratics managed to influence their culture more broadly. They didn't see philosophy as a narrow, cloistered discipline, and their breadth of vision meant that they could influence authors with other interests, like these doctors, who took Presocratic ideas seriously and put them to use. This integration of philosophy into wider Greek culture is only going to become more important as we turn our attention to the big three, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In fact, before we get to Socrates in two weeks, I want to spend one more episode on this wider cultural context. Next week, I'll be looking at a group of thinkers who fascinate and infuriate in equal measure. Plato will make them a foil for Socrates and for true philosophy. He will make their very name synonymous with dubious, devious argument. Yet among these same authors, we'll find the roots of some fundamental philosophical ideas, such as relativism. Who are these many-faced, slippery characters? If you haven't already guessed, you'll just have to tune in next week to find out, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode? Making the weaker argument the stronger – the sophists. The word sophist is, nowadays, a term of abuse. If you call someone a sophist, you're accusing them of using bad arguments, arguments which are deceptively plausible, but in fact, totally bogus. Worse still, sophistry is arguing badly on purpose, trying to pull the wool over people's eyes by weaving a web of confusing and misleading words. How can this be, given that the word sophist derives from the Greek word for wisdom, sophia? The word sophistes, or sophist, originally meant something like a wise man. So how did it come to have these fraudulent associations, to the point that a sophist is almost the reverse of a wise person, someone who was out to undermine the search for wisdom? As usual, the culprits are Plato and Aristotle, who very successfully tarred the Greek sophist with the brush of duplicity and underhandedness. For them, and hence for us, sophistry means using rhetorical techniques to induce persuasion without regard to truth, or using argumentative tricks to embarrass an opponent. Aristotle even wrote a work called The Sophistical Refutations, in which he warns the reader about the sophist's tricks, teaching us how to diagnose and avoid their chicanery. But despite their poor reputation, the sophist made a major contribution to the history of philosophy. This isn't to say that they were philosophers, exactly, though they did put forward ideas which we might see as philosophical. It's more that their impact on Socrates, and especially Plato, was enormous. A truly great philosopher benefits from a truly provocative opponent. There's no greater philosopher than Plato, and he got the most provocative opponent he could have asked for, in the shape of the sophists. It's interesting to note that, whereas only one Platonic dialogue came to be titled with the name of a pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides, Plato wrote dialogues named after four of the most important sophists, Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Euthydemus. Another dialogue is called simply The Sophist. In it, the characters try to define the word sophist, and discover that the sophist is, even in this sense, difficult to pin down. Sophists play a major role in several other dialogues, including what I personally consider to be Plato's two greatest dialogues, The Republic and The Theaetetus. In short, Plato was obsessed with the sophists, and he returned to them again and again, treating them with a mixture of humor, fascination, dismay, and disdain. So, to understand Plato, we need to understand the sophists. And to understand the sophists, we need to understand a little bit about Athens in the 5th century BC. We've actually been talking about the 5th century for numerous episodes now, because pre-Socratics like Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Eliatics, and the Atomists were all working in this period. But I haven't said much yet about the historical situation. There would be a lot to say, since this is the most eventful century of ancient Greek history. But, to make a very long story very short, in the first part of the century the Greeks faced down the threat of invasion from the Persians in 480 and 479 BC. In the wake of this famous victory, Athens stepped to the forefront of power in the Greek world. As we've seen already, much of the Mediterranean Sea was an arena for Greek power, which extended itself through the establishment of colonies stretching from the Black Sea region to modern-day Turkey to Italy and Sicily. Athens' dominant position in the middle of the 5th century was based on their dominance of the sea. As the greatest maritime power, they could intimidate other Greek cities and grow extremely rich. They formed an alliance with other city-states, in theory for defensive purposes called the Delian League. The name comes from the island of Delos, where the treasury of the League was kept before it was moved to Athens. Ultimately, Athens' overweening power provoked a backlash from an alliance of city-states led by Sparta. This was the Peloponnesian War, a protracted conflict which finally led to the breaking of Athenian hegemony in 404 BC. In terms of rhetoric, and to a considerable extent in terms of real politics, democracy was at the core of the Athenian domination of the Greek world in the middle of the 5th century. Athens preferred to ally itself with other democratic city-states, and liked to contrast itself to non-democratic Sparta. Even Athens' naval power may have been linked to its democratic institutions. You needed a lot of people to row the Greek boats called triremes, whereas the Greek hoplite army, which fought on land, was made up of richer citizens who can afford the armor and weapons. So, it's plausible to think that Athens' investment in naval power went hand in hand with their democratic practices. I'll leave it to the proper historians to evaluate this idea. The main point is that Athens was indeed democratic, albeit in a way rather different than we recognize. For one thing, of course, this was a democracy of male citizens, excluding women and slaves. Citizens representing the various territories in and around Athens would form a decision-making assembly. Membership of this, and the holding of other political offices, was decided by lot, but the randomly appointed assembly was then empowered to choose certain directly elected officials including the military leaders. It was this mechanism which allowed individual men to achieve and retain lasting political power, even in Athens with its lottery-based democratic system. In the middle of the 5th century, Athens was ruled above all by one man, Pericles. He led Athens through years of peace and then into the Peloponnesian War, which began in 431 BC, two years before Pericles died in 429. Pericles is important for us because he is associated with both philosophers and sophists. From among the philosophers, he's connected especially with Anaxagoras, who seems to have been a kind of mentor for Pericles. You might remember this from the episode on Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras' trial for impiety, which I also mentioned briefly, may well have been in part due to his political associations as well as his genuinely challenging beliefs. For instance, he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies, and most Athenians would have found this scandalous. From among the sophists, Pericles is associated especially with Protagoras. He appointed Protagoras to write the laws for an Athenian colony in southern Italy. Like several other major sophists, Protagoras wasn't from Athens, but rather from Abdera, which also gave us Democritus the atomist. Protagoras and other sophists naturally flocked to Athens because of its wealth and political dominance. Several of the sophists went to Athens on political embassies from their native cities, and these trips would have given them an opportunity to ply their trade. Athens was the perfect place to be a sophist. The city's elite was flush with cash, an attractive proposition for sophists who could apparently command a startlingly large fee for their services. Just as important was Athens' democratic constitution. In this regime, persuasion was the key to political power. If you wanted to advance an Athenian society and become an influential gentleman, you needed to be able to speak well in order to sway the assembly. This is what the sophists taught their students to do, to speak persuasively on any topic. The skills they offered could also be of great use in the law courts, where similarly, what was needed was a facility for convincing an audience. According to Plato, this is what sophistry was all about, teaching persuasive techniques for an exorbitant fee. And there's plenty of other evidence that they did teach their students to speak persuasively, both in public and in private, at length or in the cut and thrust of debate, on any and all topics. But we can also see the sophists in a more positive light. They were a part of the more general flowering of Greek culture in the 5th century BC, which, let's remember, produced great historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, great artists like the sculptor Phidias, and great playwrights like Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The sophists contributed to this culture, pioneering in the literary analysis of Homer and other texts, and reaching a new sophistication in the use of language. That was especially true of a sophist named Protacus. His specialty was carefully distinguishing the meanings of words. For example, Plato depicts him insisting that in order to be civil, one should debate, but not argue. Plato also mentions that Protacus was a teacher of Socrates. In one dialogue, Socrates says that he could unfortunately only afford to attend Protacus's cheap one drachma lecture, and so missed out on the full version, which cost 50 drachmas. There's some fun being had at Protacus's expense here, but Socrates's constant search to define what virtue is, what courage is, and so on could be seen as a development of the linguistic precision urged by Protacus. Beyond language and rhetoric, we know that the sophists were active in a wide variety of fields, including mathematics, for example. The best example of the sophist as an all-around wise man was Hippias. Plato has some fun with him, too. He tells us that Hippias once attended the Olympic Games, having personally made everything he brought with him. He wove his own clothing, cobbled his own shoes, even made the rings he wore on his fingers. And of course he brought speeches, ready to talk on any subject. He was, in short, an expert in all human wisdom, as he announced proudly to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. So it would be wrong to think that the sophists were narrowly concerned with the practice of persuasive speech-making. Still, from a philosophical point of view, the sophists' most relevant ideas all relate somehow to the value of persuasion. They were not dispassionate seekers of truth, but advocates and wordsmiths, more akin to political advisors or spin doctors than to academic researchers. At their most radical, the sophists could occasionally be moved to suggest that there is no absolute truth to be found, and that persuasion is all we have. This idea is associated especially with the greatest of the sophists, Protagoras. Like other major sophists, he received a high fee for his services, and in return, he claimed to teach something of enormous value. If you wanted to know how to make a convincing speech, he could certainly help. But he offered more. He offered virtue. Our most substantial piece of evidence for Protagoras' teaching on these matters is, unfortunately, in Plato's dialogue, the Protagoras. The reason I say this is unfortunate is that Plato was a genius of world-shattering proportions, and therefore thoroughly unreliable. He used historical figures as characters, and did with them whatever his artistry demanded. We can't trust Plato to give us the straight story on Socrates or Protagoras any more than we can trust Shakespeare to give us the straight story on the English kings. Still, most people think that the so-called great speech put into Protagoras' mouth by Plato probably represents the real Protagoras' attitudes reasonably well. In this speech, Protagoras portrays political virtue as a gift from gods to men, which is shared out equally to all. That is, everyone can partake of virtue, unlike more specialized skills like flute playing. It's for this reason, says Protagoras, that we punish people when they fall short of what virtue would demand. On the other hand, not everyone is equally virtuous, and this is where Protagoras comes in. He, after all, is able to teach people how to be more virtuous than they are by nature. I'm so confident was Protagoras that he would accept as payment whatever his students felt that the tuition was worth. On this note, I can't resist repeating the following anecdote, even if it has the whiff of legend about it. A pupil of Protagoras refused to pay him, and they were to meet in court to settle the matter. Protagoras said the pupil should simply cough up the fee in advance. After all, the student would either win or lose his case. If he lost, he'd have to pay the fee. But if he won, he would thereby prove that Protagoras had earned his fee by teaching the student to argue effectively in court, so he should pay either way. But if you remember just one thing about Protagoras, don't remember that story. Remember his famous remark that, quote, Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not. In this brief statement, we have the roots of an ancient and, to many, disturbing philosophical tradition, relativism. This is how Plato understood Protagoras. He was saying that each man judges what is true for him, but no one is in a position to judge what is true for anyone else. On this interpretation, Protagoras was saying that truth is always something's being true for someone, so that it could be true for me, that the wind is cold, and true for you, that the wind is warm. There is no such thing as the way the wind really is in itself. There is only the way things seem to us. On the face of it, this doctrine looks hard to square with Protagoras' claim to be a teacher of virtue. After all, if virtue is for me whatever I think it is, then why do I need Protagoras to teach me about it? In another dialogue, the Theaetetus, Protagoras gives his answer, virtue is really what is advantageous to me. What Protagoras teaches me is not what would be best absolutely, but what would be best for me, meaning from my point of view. This assimilation of virtue to what is advantageous is a key tenet of the Sophists, and a somewhat different version of it shows up repeatedly in Plato. In a dialogue called the Gorgias, Socrates battles against the claim that virtue is the advantage not of just anybody, but of those who are naturally stronger. Another Sophist named Thrasymachus defends the same idea in the first book of Plato's Republic. Here we have an application of Protagoras' position to the sphere of morality. If there is no absolute truth, then there is nothing but advantage, and by rights what should happen is that the strongest people should get the best rewards. But why think the strongest people should get more than the weak? In fact, how can the Sophists even use the word should if they reject absolute morality? Here the Sophists could turn to a distinction they like to draw between custom and nature. It is only by custom that there are social rules and laws of justice, and these laws may or may not reflect the natural order of things. It's natural for the strong to dominate the weak, whereas it is a mere custom for the weak to band together and restrict the power of the strong. Thrasymachus and other radical Sophists saw themselves as speaking up for nature, and unmasking morality as nothing but social convention. Protagoras himself probably drew more benign conclusions from his man is the measure doctrine. For Protagoras, the point was to educate people so as to make their lives seem better, that is, more advantageous. If he could make your life seem better to you, then would you really care whether there was anything real behind the seeming? He was willing to bet his fee that you wouldn't. Furthermore, Protagoras had ways of showing that you aren't going to get at reality, even if you insist on trying. He was a pioneer in the paradigmaticly-sophistic activity of making arguments on both sides of an argument. We have a later text by an anonymous Sophist called simply Double Arguments, which shows how to argue on both sides of several philosophical issues, for instance whether there is any difference between justice and injustice. There's a disturbing implication here. If one can always argue with equal plausibility on both sides of any debate, then arguing won't get us to the truth. We're simply going to be persuaded by whichever argument is presented more effectively. The Sophists were duly renowned for claiming that they could make the weaker argument the stronger. This boast was the sort of thing that made Plato shudder, but it makes a certain amount of sense. After all, you don't need an expensive lawyer or Sophist to help you win a court case when you're clearly innocent. You need one when it looks pretty certain that you're guilty. That brings us to another great Sophist, Gorgias. Like Pericles, Gorgias is associated with pre-Socratic philosophy. He came from Sicily, and it seems that he was influenced by his fellow Sicilian Empedocles. Gorgias, like Protagoras, was more interested in persuasion than philosophy. Unlike Protagoras, however, Gorgias went out of his way to deny that he could teach virtue. And in fact, he stressed the moral neutrality of his art of rhetoric. In the dialogue named after Gorgias, Plato has him say that rhetoric is a bit like boxing. If a trainer teaches someone to box, and he goes out and beats people up, this isn't the trainer's fault. Similarly, if Gorgias teaches a politician to argue effectively, then it's not his fault if the politician uses his newfound power for evil instead of good. On the other hand, Gorgias emphasizes that the ability he teaches is a lot more potent than boxing. For an expert rhetorician, like himself, can speak persuasively on any topic. He is the one who can persuade the patient to take medicine, even when the doctor can't. We might distrust Plato here. Isn't he just trotting out his favourite accusation, that the Sophists were abandoning knowledge for the sake of persuasion? Well, yes. But we do have another source where Gorgias speaks about the almost magical power of rhetoric. He wrote a display speech, which happily survives today, showing how he would defend the notorious Helen, who allowed herself to be seduced and thus triggered the Trojan War. The central part of the speech argues that if Helen was persuaded to go off to Troy, then she was helpless to resist. Persuasive speech, says Gorgias, is like a drug. If a skilled user of words really wants you to do something, you're going to do it, as surely as if someone were to come along and use physical force on you. As with other Sophists, there was more to Gorgias than this. He wrote an equally fascinating, if very weird, text which we also have. This work, called On Not Being, is a mind-bending parody of the Eliatic philosophers. Whereas Parmenides and company showed that being is one and unchanging, Gorgias argues, with a series of absurdly complicated proofs, that there is no such thing as either being or non-being, and that if there were being or non-being, we could neither know about it nor say anything about it. While this was surely intended at least partly as a mockery of Parmenides or his followers, Gorgias doubtless had a serious point too. Like Protagoras, Gorgias was pulling the rug out from under philosophers with their ambitious theories of underlying reality. If there's no reality to get at, and in fact no unreality either, as Gorgias argues in On Non-Being, then we're left only with the way things seem to us. This kind of world, of course, suits the Sophist, who operates always at the level of seeming, of plausibility and persuasion. You can now begin to understand why Plato found the Sophist so alarming. The Sophist outlook was, as it were, the diametrical opposite of Platonism. But of course, before there was Platonism, there was Socrates. Because Socrates is now seen as a martyred saint of philosophy, we find it obvious to cast him in the role of the Sophist's greatest adversary. Plato too puts Socrates in this role. So it may come as a surprise to discover that at least one other contemporary, who knew more about both Socrates and the Sophist than we do, saw little distinction between them. He just lumped Socrates in with the Sophists. This was the comic poet Aristophanes. He will be one of our main sources next week as we start to look at Socrates, but without seeing him through the lens of Plato's dialogues. Instead, we will be examining the portrayal of Socrates in two other authors, Aristophanes and the historian Xenophon. That's Socrates without Plato, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liverhume Trust. Today's episode, Socrates without Plato – The Portrayals of Aristophanes and Xenophon. Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything. With no book to his name, Socrates owes his renown to the impression he made on the people he met face to face, and above all, to the fact that one of those people was Plato. It is mostly through the dialogues of Plato that Socrates lives on today. In those dialogues, Socrates appears as one of the great literary characters of the ancient world. Humorous, ironic, thoughtful, courageous, seductive, outrageous, and remarkably ugly. His personality stays relatively consistent through the many dialogues in which he appears, but there are also shifts of emphasis and doctrine. It is clear that Plato admired Socrates greatly, yet this did not stop him from using Socrates for his own purposes. And in my opinion, at least, we should never take Plato as a straightforward witness as regards the historical Socrates. That's one reason why, before I get into the Platonic depiction of Socrates, I want to devote an episode to Socrates without Plato. In particular, I want to talk about the way Socrates was portrayed by two very different authors from Athens, who, like Plato, couldn't resist using him in their literary productions. Most of us start by picturing Socrates at his end, the philosopher sitting calmly in his jail cell, cheerfully draining a poisonous brew of hemlock after being sentenced to death by a jury of his peers. The trial may have been politically motivated. It happened in 399 BC, several years after Athens had capitulated to Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War. In 404 BC, the same year that the war ended, Athens was taken over by a group of thirty oligarchs or tyrants. One of these tyrants was Critias, an associate of Socrates. A more famous friend of Socrates was Alcibiades, a man as good-looking as Socrates was ugly, talented and ambitious in equal measure. Alcibiades was, to say the least, a controversial figure. He had been exiled from Athens after a scandal involving the defacement of religious statues, and he'd subsequently switched sides, more than once, in the long war between Sparta and Athens. So it's possible that the citizens of Athens had Socrates executed in part because he had unpleasant and anti-democratic friends. On the other hand, we know that Socrates refused an order from the thirty tyrants when he was told to arrest someone unjustly. And in fact, if anyone was ever his own man, it was Socrates. It's rather difficult to imagine him promoting any one political faction in Athens. As we'll see next week, Plato makes it clear that Socrates was quite capable of annoying people all on his own. So maybe the citizens of Athens just got fed up with him. Both Plato and Xenophon portray Socrates as constantly in conversation with both friends and more hostile interlocutors such as the Sophists. The classic image of Socrates, enshrined in more than one painting and sculpture, may show him taking the hemlock, but a better image to hold in your mind is of Socrates in the marketplace, a group of young men gathered around him discussing the nature of virtue. His young friends were not exempt from the razor-sharp edge of Socrates' wit. Xenophon and Plato both show friends and foes alike being cut down to size. The classic Socratic approach is of course to ask questions. What is virtue? What makes a good leader? Do you really think you're justified in what you're doing? Once you answer his first question, you're done for. Socrates will expose the thoughtlessness of your assumptions. He'll show you that you quite literally don't know what you are talking about. But this isn't to say that Socrates did nothing else in his life. In fact, he'd fought against the Spartans and was involved in several battles including a major loss at the Battle of Delium in 424 BC. In one dialogue, Plato has Alcibiades tell of Socrates' amazing performance in battle and on military campaign generally. He was, says Alcibiades, so imposing in his fearlessness that no one from the enemy army wanted to come anywhere near him. Of course we're very used to this sort of admiring portrait of Socrates as an almost superhuman hero and martyr of philosophy. Yet the earliest portrayal of Socrates shows him as anything but heroic. It was written by the comic poet Aristophanes, a younger contemporary of Socrates who died in 385 BC. Aristophanes was the greatest writer of comedy in Athens and makes Socrates an important character in a play called The Clouds. Anyone who found out that they were to feature in a play by Aristophanes would have known that they were in for some rough handling. His plays are full of brilliant wordplay and political satire. In them one can find deep and powerful protest against war and injustice, but on the other hand the plays are also brimming with toilet humor and sex gags, and The Clouds is certainly no exception. Aristophanes was a great poet, but a comic poet, and he never forgot his central task of getting his audience to laugh. And for good reason. Aristophanes was quite literally competing for the approval of the audience. At the Festival of the God Dionysius in Athens each year, celebrated over several days, numerous plays would be performed. Aristophanes's productions were pitted against those of other playwrights. He won the prize several times, albeit not with The Clouds, which was voted third and last in the year 423 BC. Aristophanes's ignominious defeat on this occasion would no doubt have allowed Socrates a wry smile, if it weren't for the fact that Socrates was surely above such pettiness. Indeed, above is precisely where Aristophanes puts Socrates. He called for Socrates to enter on a kind of crane normally used in other plays for depicting gods and heroes in the sky looking down on the action of the drama. Socrates quite literally has his head in the clouds. He explains to the main character, one Strepsiades, that he is engaged in meteorology, which in Greek meant study of things in the sky generally, and not just weather. Strepsiades is there to get Socrates and the other philosophers he consorts with to teach him how to win arguments. He wants to be able to make speeches and wield bewildering wordplay in order to get out of some financial debts that are pressing down on him. Socrates assures Strepsiades that he can teach him arguments to prove any point, and along the way teaches him to give up belief in the traditional Greek gods and to worship the clouds instead. These clouds are played by the chorus of the play. Also along the way, as I say, is a healthy serving of those toilet and sex jokes. All this is something of a shock, not just because we don't normally associate Socrates with this sort of lowbrow frivolity, but also because Aristophanes is making it crystal clear that he thinks Socrates is a sophist. Surely this is wrong? As we'll see, both Xenophon and Plato show Socrates clashing repeatedly with sophists. But of course sophists could and did clash with one another. So Aristophanes evidently saw little distinction between Socrates and his sophisticated contemporaries. After all, both Socrates and the sophists left their opponents dazed by raining down arguments on them, and both traded in fine attention to the meanings of words. Of course, we want to insist that Socrates' motives were different, pure and virtuous, but that seems to have been lost on Aristophanes. Plato, too, by the way, more than once suggests that Socrates was widely seen as a sophist. In one dialogue, he describes a kind of noble sophistry which eliminates false belief, rather than encouraging it. It seems clear that Plato has Socrates in mind here. But to less subtle observers, the most obvious difference between Socrates and the sophists would have been his poverty. Unlike them, he never asked a fee from his associates. He considered them to be his friends. Whereas Xenophon and Plato emphasize this and think it puts clear water between Socrates and the sophists, for Aristophanes, it's just more material for jokes. He has great fun with Socrates' voluntary indigence, his barefooted ragtag appearance. Still more confusing is that Aristophanes uses Socrates to represent not only the sophists, but also the pre-Socratic philosophers. This Socrates' fascination with meteorology is a case in point, and the worship of clouds is evidently designed as a dayget philosophers who thought that air was a divine principle, like Diogenes of Apollonia. This too is directly contradicted by Plato and Xenophon, who go out of their way to stress that Socrates did not engage in physical sciences, except perhaps early in his career. His interest was virtue, not clouds. Again, Aristophanes was not interested in these fine distinctions. For him, Socrates was useful because he was a very visible and notorious character to put in a play. It's even been speculated that Socrates was chosen in part because he was so ugly. His protruding eyes and snug nose would have made him an ideal person to put on the Greek stage, where all characters wore masks, and historical figures would have had masks designed as caricatures of the real people. Still, it's telling that Aristophanes selected Socrates, of all people, to stand in for the whole movement of sophists and philosophers in Athens in the late 5th century. For Aristophanes, and no doubt for most of his audience, Socrates was just one more intellectual who peddled the same impious sophistry as all the others. The fact that Aristophanes depicts Socrates as rejecting the gods makes it hard to laugh at the clouds, at least if you know why Socrates was put to death a quarter century later. One charge leveled at him was that he invented new gods, the other was that he corrupted the youth. When Aristophanes showed him on stage, telling Strepsiades that the traditional gods don't even exist, he was, presumably unwittingly, helping to prepare the case for the prosecution. By contrast, our other witness Xenophon was out to defend Socrates. He defended him posthumously, because by the time Xenophon wrote Socrates had been dead for some years. Xenophon was a close contemporary of Plato, born one year before Plato in 429 BC. Like Alcibiades, Xenophon was exiled from Athens, and spent many years away from his home, before finally returning to spend the last decade of his life there. Xenophon actually left Athens voluntarily before being exiled in Absentia, and his choice to leave was a fateful one. Socrates advised him to think twice before doing it, but he went anyway. He left to join an attempt to overthrow the ruler of Persia, working as a mercenary among a large cohort of Greek soldiers. When this failed, he underwent a harrowing journey as the leader of the Greeks, trying to bring back as many as possible alive to Greece. He later wrote a record of this experience, his most famous work, the Anabasis, which means going up, in other words, going back to Greece. In addition to this tale of adventure, and some other broadly historical works, Xenophon wrote several pieces about Socrates. Sometimes he was imitating his fellow Socratic admirer Plato. For instance, he wrote a dramatization of a drinking party or symposium, like the Symposium of Plato, with Socrates sitting and discussing love with other men. His longest Socratic work, the Memoirs of Socrates, is also reminiscent of Plato, with Socrates shown in discussion with a succession of characters, most of whom get put firmly in their place. And again like Plato, he wrote an apology of Socrates, describing what Socrates said at the trial where he was condemned to death. Yet Xenophon's Socrates is very different from Plato's. As Xenophon tells us, his primary motivation is not to exploit the philosophical potential of Socrates as a character, as Plato did, but to vindicate Socrates and his way of life, and in particular, to undermine the accusations that had been made against Socrates in that fatal trial. As I said, these accusations were basically twofold. Socrates departed from traditional religion, and he corrupted the youth. Where Aristophanes stoked these slanders for humorous effect, Xenophon strenuously rejects both. For him, Socrates was a paragon of virtue, albeit one who few, if any, people could hope to imitate. He duly emphasizes Socrates' piety. Rather than rejecting the gods, his Socrates goes on at length about divine providence and says that we must be grateful to the gods who take care of us by designing us and the world around us so well. Xenophon also emphasizes Socrates' hotline to God. This was Socrates' famous divine sign, something also mentioned more than once by Plato. Socrates could not see the future exactly, but he claimed that the gods would warn him to avoid certain activities when he began to undertake them. For instance, he did not prepare a defense speech for his apology, because when he was about to write it, the divine sign warned him off. As Xenophon stresses, the moral of the story here seems to be that it was better for Socrates to die. Certainly Xenophon agrees with Plato that Socrates did nothing to avoid death once he'd been brought on trial. Far from it. In fact, he went out of his way to outrage and offend the jurors in his impromptu defense speech. In both versions, but especially that of Xenophon, Socrates is stunningly arrogant. Xenophon shows him bragging about his perfect virtue, modesty not ranking very high among the character traits valued by the Greeks. He also shows Socrates claiming to be specially favored by the gods, in particular, because of the divine sign. As Xenophon himself says, this was the last thing Socrates should have said if he wanted to save his skin, because the jury was outraged, either with incredulity or envy, at Socrates's special favor from the gods. But Socrates was, it would seem, not trying to save his skin. He was trying to die as he had lived, with perfect and uncompromising virtue. That brings us to the second accusation, Socrates's supposed corruption of the youth. Xenophon has Socrates argue that this could hardly be the case, because he was always perfectly virtuous, and so should serve as a good, not a bad, example for his young friends. If these boys' fathers objected to Socrates hanging about with their sons in the marketplace, it was no doubt due again to envy. The fathers were not well pleased that the boys sought education at the feet of Socrates, rather than with them. But what would such boys have seen in Socrates? He was, after all, ugly, poor, and apt to mete out biting criticism to anyone unlucky enough to pass by. That last habit was no doubt part of the attraction, though. These young men liked learning to catch out their elders. Xenophon, in a scene hardly designed to solidify our admiration of Socrates, shows Alcibiades imitating Socrates's argumentative style as he deftly refutes the great statesman Pericles. This is no doubt fictional, but there's also no doubt that Socrates's young friends did imitate him, mightily annoying a good many powerful men in the process. Socrates was also seductive for these young men because they could admire his sort of virtue. His virtue was in essence independence and freedom. He was poor not because he had to be, but because he knew that an utterly destitute man can paradoxically be more self-sufficient than a man who has to worry about his wealth and his hangers-on. For Socrates, the greatest slaves were tyrants, who had many enemies but also friends who might turn on them. As for the sophists, they were nothing but whores who sold their supposed wisdom for cash. Socrates took no money for the wisdom he dispensed, and secured something more valuable—friendship. Beholden to no one, Socrates was his own man, and he followed the dictates of no one apart from his divine sign. A young Athenian gentleman could see much to admire here. Socrates's total freedom was precisely what they sought—freedom and self-sufficiency—even though they planned to pursue this goal through a political life. They might not follow Socrates's path because it was too ascetic, too self-denying, but they could see the point of it. And Socrates knew how to play on the ambitions of such men. In one scene Xenophon shows us how Socrates could use the desire of a young man for honour and political success by showing him that knowledge is the only sure route to these ends. Socrates is being quite cunning here, because for him of course honour and political success were nothing to be prized. For him it is knowledge itself which is valuable. Success as a political leader is something he dangles as bait to get his young friend to pursue what Socrates offers. Xenophon agrees with Plato that Socrates did indeed teach that knowledge is the most important thing in life, and that knowledge is in fact virtue itself. This idea will be explored in much greater depth by Plato, but Xenophon gets across the basic point. To do anything virtuously is to do it well, and to act well means to act with knowledge. Again, Xenophon Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point. He says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one's doctor. We don't let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic. Here Xenophon doesn't sound much different from the Plato of the Republic. But in many other respects, Xenophon gives us a very different Socrates from the one we find in Plato. As we'll see next time, in Plato Socrates makes a big deal of proclaiming his own ignorance. Plato's Socrates is puzzled when the oracle at Delphi pronounces him the wisest man in Athens because he knows that he knows nothing, so how can he be wise? By contrast, Socrates in Xenophon is swaggering with confidence in his own perfection. He tells the jury at his trial that the oracle at Delphi proclaimed him to be the wisest and most free of men, but in Xenophon's telling, this comes as no surprise, it simply confirms what Socrates knew all along, which is that he is the most virtuous man walking the earth. He does add, modestly, that the oracle stopped short of calling him a god. Instead of claiming ignorance, Xenophon Socrates feels free to dispense advice on a wide range of topics. Often, Xenophon puts rather banal ethical advice into the philosopher's mouth. We see him chastising a man for being unable to bear his hectoring mother. Just remember, says Socrates, that she means well. We see him telling a man that spending time with beautiful women is as dangerous as somersaulting through knives. We see him telling off a man who complains that the drinking water in his house is too cold. After all, Socrates points out, it's better for taking baths, and the slaves don't complain about the water. Do you really want to be more choosy than one of your slaves? In such passages, Socrates seems more like an advice columnist than a philosopher. It's hard to escape the conclusion that Xenophon is using Socrates as a mouthpiece, just as Plato does, but putting much less interesting ideas into his mouth. Yet, we should not underestimate Xenophon, or Aristophanes for that matter. They both made careful choices in their use of Socrates, and made this most extraordinary of men subordinate to their own authorial purposes. Aristophanes gives us valuable insight into the late 5th century perception, not just of Socrates, but of the whole intellectual blossoming of that period, the sophist, the philosophers, and Socrates as the ugly face of the whole phenomenon. Xenophon, meanwhile, manages to capture many of the themes that will be associated with Socrates by Plato, and for centuries thereafter. Some of the ideas I've highlighted, for instance the ideal of self-sufficiency, and the focus on virtue as the only thing worth having, will be carried on by the philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period, especially the Stoics and the Cynics. We should give Xenophon credit for already seeing these aspects of Socrates. If it wasn't for Plato, we might see his record of Socrates as a milestone text in the history of philosophy. But that's a bit like saying that if Shakespeare hadn't written Romeo and Juliet, then Westside's story would be the classic tale of doomed lovers. Our Socrates is inevitably the Socrates we find in Plato, and next week we'll examine his life on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode? Method Man – Plato's Socrates. Anyone who has spent time in a classroom, whether as a teacher or a student, has probably encountered the Socratic method. It means, of course, teaching someone by asking them questions. Perhaps leading questions, but questions nonetheless. When practiced rigorously, the Socratic method requires that the teacher never say anything apart from questions. This can descend into parody pretty quickly. The student asks for the dates Plato was born and died, and instead of saying that he was born in 427 BC and died in 347 BC, the teacher says, well, when do you think he was born and died? But practiced in moderation, the Socratic method is an excellent way to teach. It forces the students to figure things out for themselves, rather than passively sitting there waiting to be filled with knowledge as if teaching were like pouring wine into the empty vessels that are the student's heads. Socrates was of course a prominent user of the Socratic method, if not its inventor. According to Plato, he had a very good reason for using the method, namely that he had no wisdom of his own to impart anyway. Socrates claimed to be ignorant about the things he was out to discover. The reason he gave for cornering the good people of Athens in the marketplace, and pestering them to tell him what courage or piety or virtue in general might be, was that he himself really didn't know what courage or piety or virtue is. He was desperate to find someone who could help him answer these most important questions, and that became the basis for many of Plato's dialogues. In Plato's Laiches, Socrates asks military men to explain what courage is. In the Euthyphro, he asks a man who is prosecuting his father for murder to explain what piety is. After all, anyone who would prosecute his own father for murder must be pretty confident in their moral judgment. Socrates likes to ask questions more than he likes to answer them. In the Mino, for instance, Socrates is asked whether virtue can be taught, and replies that he can't rightly say because he doesn't even know what virtue is, so he can hardly know whether it could be taught. But perhaps Mino would be willing to help him out, by first saying what virtue is. When faced with Socrates's questions, Mino and the other interlocutors say what they think about virtue, and Socrates gently or not so gently shows them that they have no idea what they're talking about. They contradict themselves, get into logical muddles, and wind up seeing that their ideas lead to outlandish and unbelievable results. Socrates ends up disappointed, and the interlocutors go away, perhaps angry, certainly puzzled, and with any luck, realizing that they don't know quite as much as they thought. This is the classic version of Plato's Socrates as he emerges from a whole series of works which are often called the Socratic Dialogues. These dialogues were probably written early in Plato's career, and many people have thought that they are a faithful record of the real historical Socrates, perhaps even reports of actual discussions Socrates had. As I've said in previous episodes, I'm pretty skeptical about this. I think that from day one Plato was using Socrates for his own philosophical purposes, and that there's not much use in trying to extricate a portrait of the historical Socrates from some supposedly reliable Socratic dialogues. Besides, why should we try to do this anyway, when the Platonic Socrates is so interesting? We can watch as Plato develops Socrates as a character, in dialogue after dialogue, confronting him with various other characters, many of them also based on real people, like generals, poets, sophists, young lovers, scoundrels, politicians, and in the case of the Republic, even Plato's own brothers. Of course, these portraits must have been inspired by the people who are being portrayed. Any resemblance to persons living or dead was not merely coincidental. But as students of the history of philosophy, what we are really interested in is what Plato did with the characters, not how close his versions were to the real people. The best place to start if we want to understand Plato's Socrates is a dialogue called the Apology. As I mentioned last time, Xenophon also wrote a Socratic Apology, and these were not the only two men writing Socratic literature around this time. Socrates had many admirers, and quite a few sought to rehabilitate his reputation after he was executed by the people of Athens in 399 BC. At that time Plato was 28 years old. In his Apology, he has Socrates mention that he, Plato, was there in attendance at the trial. We shouldn't leap to the conclusion, though, that the Apology is therefore an accurate record of what Socrates said. After all, in another dialogue, the Phaedo, we are told that Plato was sick and couldn't be present at Socrates' deathbed, but this didn't stop Plato from telling us what was supposedly said in Socrates' final hour. Nor are these the only two dialogues set in the days leading up to Socrates' death. In fact, many dialogues are set in these days. Between the Apology, in which we see Socrates' trial, and the Phaedo, in which we see his death, there is the Crito, in which Socrates' friend Crito unsuccessfully tries to persuade Socrates to save his own life by escaping and fleeing Athens. The Euthyphro, which I already mentioned, is also set in the days leading up to the trial, as are several more dialogues. By setting so many dialogues in this short time frame, Plato makes sure we don't lose sight of the high stakes we play for when we do philosophy. Socrates is trying to discover how best to live, and he's doing it even as he has only hours left to do any living. But let's return to the Apology, which as I say is a good way of approaching Plato's take on Socrates. The first thing to say is that in it, Socrates is anything but apologetic. It consists mostly of a defense speech, though he does engage in some typically Socratic cross-examination of one of his accusers. The speech he gives isn't so full of swaggering arrogance as the one Xenophon wrote, but Plato's Socrates certainly makes little effort to ingratiate himself with his jurors. He does begin by making one real Apology, namely that he is a poor public speaker. But this, of course, is a classic ploy used by good public speakers, and Socrates goes on to offer a tour-de-force of argument, after claiming to be incompetent in rhetoric. But Plato's point isn't really to show Socrates trying to soften up the jury, it's to dispel the widespread notion that Socrates was a sophist. Socrates alludes directly to Aristophanes' play The Clouds, which as you'll remember from last time portrayed Socrates both as a sophist and as a kind of composite pre-Socratic philosopher. Given the way he highlights the clouds here in the Apology, it seems that Plato blamed Aristophanes for helping to create Socrates' ultimately lethal reputation. Like Xenophon, Plato has Socrates demolish the official accusations against him, that he rejects the gods and corrupts the youth. But there is less focus on these specific charges here than in Xenophon. In Plato's version, Socrates' main theme is the story of how he made himself so unpopular in Athens. The story goes like this. As also reported by Xenophon, Socrates' friend Hierophon went to the oracle at Delphi. What the oracle tells Hierophon in Plato's version is that there was no man wiser than Socrates. Socrates is stunned at the oracle's pronouncement, because he knows that he is not really wise at all. Such wisdom as he has is only human wisdom, the nature of which he doesn't really explain. But he lacks what would be really valuable, namely divine wisdom. This would be absolutely certain knowledge of the most important things, such as virtue. Characteristically, Socrates reacts to this by testing the oracle's claim, much as he might test the claims made by a man he talks to in the marketplace. But of course he can't go and cross-examine the oracle. Instead, he tests it by trying to find someone in Athens who is wiser than he is. He goes to the obvious candidates, the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen. He finds that they do know some limited things. For instance, the carpenters know how to make things out of wood. But none of these people possess true wisdom, the knowledge of the most important things that Socrates is after. What's worse, they get carried away with a little understanding they do possess, and assume that they must have true wisdom in addition to their little bit of expertise. Their false pretensions of wisdom far outweigh the value of whatever it is they do know. The poets, for instance, claim all sorts of exalted insight, whereas actually, they can't even explain the poems they wrote themselves. Socrates gradually realizes that what the oracle at Delphi meant was that he is the wisest of men not because he is so wise, but because he at least knows that he is not wise. His condition is something we have come to call Socratic ignorance. This ignorance is, paradoxically, a kind of knowledge. It is knowing that one does not know. So now we have a context for understanding what goes on in other Socratic dialogues. In questioning people from all walks of life, Socrates is giving them a chance to show that they do know, for instance, what courage or piety is. Maybe he'll finally strike lucky, and find the man or woman who refutes the Delphic oracle by being wiser than Socrates. But if that doesn't happen, at least Socrates will reduce the interlocutor to a state of Socratic ignorance. He is doing them a great favor, really. He is disabusing them of the impression that they know things they don't really know. As Socrates says in the Apology, he's like a fly who buzzes around a horse annoying it, but in this case the annoyance is helpful and productive. Even though he can't do what some sophists like Protagoras claim to do, namely teach you how to live, he can at least show you that you do not yet know how to live. That will put you in the same boat as Socrates, still looking for wisdom, but until he's purged you of your false pretension of wisdom, you won't even bother looking. Socrates firmly believes, then, that he's been doing the Athenians an important service. After he's found guilty, he is asked what sentence he proposes for himself, and he suggests that he should receive free meals at state expense for the rest of his life. Here it's hard to avoid the impression that Socrates is deliberately goading the Athenians into putting him to death, yet Plato's Socrates does genuinely seem to believe that he ought to be rewarded by the Athenians he has served so faithfully. On the other hand, the question of what Socrates believes is a bit tricky. Alongside Socratic ignorance, another of his trademarks is Socratic irony. For instance, surely when Socrates tries to get a definition of piety from Euthyphro, a man who is about to prosecute his own father for murdering a slave, this is meant ironically? That is, Socrates knows full well that Euthyphro hasn't the foggiest idea what piety is, as shown by the fact that he's in the midst of doing something completely impious in hauling his father before a court. Similarly, Socrates would know that Laihes the general has no clue what courage is, that Mino cannot define virtue. There's nothing to be gained from asking them, really, except to show them that they are ignorant. But it's far too easy to take just about anything Socrates says as being ironic. No doubt experience has taught him that as a rule you don't get a good answer when you ask Athenian citizens to define the virtues, but this doesn't mean he expects to get nothing out of the process for himself. More than once in the Platonic dialogues, Socrates makes an impassioned plea that we never stop inquiring into these questions, and he himself never gets tired of doing so. When accused of always saying the same things, he says yes and about the same subjects. Though reducing people to Socratic ignorance is a genuine public service, Socrates also does it out of self-interest, because he believes that through this constant inquiry he has some hope of reaching true wisdom. We might think, though, that this project of Socrates is a bit odd. Why would anyone think that looking for a definition of virtue is a good way of becoming virtuous? Socrates seems to be after the wrong sort of thing. You could know what football is without being able to play it. Couldn't you likewise know what virtue is without automatically being virtuous? But Socrates would disagree. One of his fundamental assumptions is that anyone who knows what is good will choose it. Why would anyone deliberately choose what is bad? That sounds plausible. But we do think, don't we, that people deliberately choose things, even though they are bad. Maybe even because they are bad, given the perversity of human nature? But for Socrates, this idea was absurd. For him, something's being good obviously implies that it is worth choosing. So for someone to think that something is good is for them to think it worth choosing. To put it another way, it's incoherent to imagine someone thinking, oh, this is good, but goodness doesn't really do much for me. I'm going with what's bad instead. This Socratic position, which he argues for in several dialogues, is usually summed up in the phrase, no one does wrong willingly. If I always want to do what is good, then my doing bad can only be the result of incomplete information. If I steal or kill, I must think stealing or killing is good, when really it is bad. This gets us closer to understanding Socrates' strange way of conducting his search for the virtuous life. For him, vice and wrongdoing are always the result of ignorance, not the benign Socratic ignorance of knowing one doesn't know, but the really dangerous insidious kind of ignorance, where you are utterly convinced you know what is good, but actually you have no idea. Without naming names, you might be able to think of politicians who have displayed this kind of ignorance, and see that Socrates has a point. The next step is obvious. If vice is ignorance, then virtue can only be knowledge. This is why in seeking knowledge of virtue, Socrates can take himself to be seeking virtue itself. He argues for this in other ways too. For example, he points out that anything good or beneficial will be useless, or even harmful, if used without knowledge. Consider medicine. Use it with the guidance of a knowledgeable doctor, and it can save your life. Use it without such guidance, and you'll be lucky to survive the experience. That's why there's such a thing as prescription drugs. The same point applies to anything we might take to be good. For instance, money. Money is very handy, we all agree on that, but only if it is used wisely. If you use money the wrong way, you can do immense harm to yourself and others. Or take health, which looks like an uncontroversially good thing. But is the health of a brutal tyrant really good? No, because the tyrant uses his continued vigor to oppress and exploit the people. In every case, the apparently good thing becomes good only when you add wisdom. So virtue is knowledge or wisdom, and Socrates says that he lacks knowledge and wisdom. He merely knows that he knows nothing. So should we conclude from this that Socrates is not virtuous? In a sense, probably so. If he were already virtuous, presumably Socrates could stop rushing about Athens, asking people to help him find out what virtue is. But his special Socratic brand of ignorance gives him an important advantage over his peers. He at least knows that his beliefs about virtue are deeply fallible. And there's no reason to deny that he does have beliefs about virtue. Perhaps this is what he means by the human wisdom he mentions in the Apology. For example, he believed it was wrong to arrest an innocent man at the behest of the thirty tyrants, and believed it was right to fight bravely against the Spartans at Delium. In fact, for all his efforts to show people that they lack a general understanding of virtue, he's often quite happy to accept their beliefs about particular cases of virtue. For instance, when Mino says that virtue is for a woman, tending the home well and being obedient, Socrates doesn't criticize Mino for being a sexist. He simply insists that Mino gives him a definition of virtue, and not just examples. What the interlocutors lack when it comes to virtue is the big picture. They lack general and consistent knowledge about virtue, even if they often get it right on particular occasions. Plato's Socrates, and Plato himself, worried that such people would also get it wrong on particular occasions, precisely because they lack this general and consistent knowledge. When the chips are down, you want to follow the person who has knowledge, not the person who has some true beliefs. So again, we can ask, why doesn't Socrates make mistakes too, since he too lacks such wisdom? Well, he has another advantage, his divine sign. Plato confirms Xenophon's report that Socrates could hear a divine voice, which would speak up and warn him against those actions which he should not undertake. Socrates then was given a way to cheat his way to virtue. His true beliefs, tempered by the modesty of Socratic ignorance, were augmented by a divine sign, which pointed him towards virtue, or at least away from vice. He was not only the wisest man in Athens, he was also the most blessed. No wonder that Plato took him as the hero for most of his dialogues, especially since this was a man who loved conversation. And as a writer of dialogues, conversation was Plato's business too. Which brings us neatly to one of the central puzzles about Plato himself, one which will occupy our attention soon. The puzzle is, why did Plato write dialogues? Whereas Socrates wrote nothing, Plato wrote nothing in his own voice. He gave us no treatises or discourses declaiming his theories. Instead, he gave us a series of conversations. We'll start to look at those conversations in two weeks when we finally get to Plato. But first, we'll have another conversation of our own, with my colleague Raefel Wolf, who will help us further to examine this most examined of lives. That's Raefel Wolf on Socrates, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode will be an interview with my colleague here at King's, Rafal Wolf. Thanks for coming Rafal to talk on the podcast. Very good to be here Peter, thank you. Our topic today is Socrates and I thought that we could probably concentrate on Socrates as he's presented in Plato, since that will give us plenty to talk about. So I was wondering whether you could start by sort of describing how Socrates appears in Plato's dialogues. Sure, he's a complicated figure but I think the way that he's probably best characterised is the way he characterises himself in the Apology. He's a gadfly, there's a famous image in the Apology where he compares himself to a gadfly who's coming and sitting on the large but lazy horse of Athens and buzzing and biting and stinging to provoke it into living a better life. And I think a lot of that imagery can be seen in the way that Plato portrays Socrates in many of the dialogues. Probably the main but not the only way he's presented is going around buttonholing people, asking them if they can tell him what various virtues are because Socrates, who doesn't? Socrates wants to know how to be virtuous and he thinks that there are various people who might just, with a bit of luck, be able to tell him. He asks them what virtue is and they are unable to tell him by and large and the reason they're unable to tell him is that when they attempt to tell Socrates what virtue is, he asks them a whole series of questions which seek to demonstrate that they don't know what they're talking about. So Socrates is by and large portrayed by Plato as a very annoying figure who is constantly showing people up for an ignorance which they didn't think they possessed or at least don't like having revealed because these are by and large public contexts, there are often people around. So he's an annoying provocative figure who really is trying, I think, pretty much to carry out the mission he describes in the Apology and I think it's important that he's shown as this annoying figure. I think maybe this is something we can talk about but he's not at all sanitized by Plato. I think most fair-minded readers get the impression that this would be a pretty difficult person to deal with. The kind of person you'd cross the street to avoid. Absolutely, yes, and I think a few of his interlocutors might have wished they'd done that but yeah. And is it your impression that Plato's portrayal of Socrates is closely based on the historical Socrates? I mean this is one of the big questions about Plato. This is one of the big questions. I suppose to the extent, I mean if you compare it, I mean Aristophanes, we've got the three sort of main bits of evidence for Socrates. Unfortunately as is well known, Socrates himself did not write anything and that's why you get this so-called problem of Socrates. Who was this guy? He doesn't tell us because he didn't leave any writings behind. So we have Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes. Aristophanes is a comic poet so you've got, although he was the closest contemporary, so in principle his is the sort of best evidence we have. But it's a satire, it's a parody and it's very difficult for us at this distance of time to unwind from that and get to the real Socrates. And then you have Plato and Xenophon who are both followers of Socrates to some extent. And Plato's Socrates is, as I say, a very provocative, annoying figure. Xenophon's Socrates is much duller. I say, I mean I'm a little biased in this, but I am going to give Plato the sort of plaudits for perhaps coming closest to representing the real Socrates for the following reason. I think again any fair-minded person who reads Plato's portrayal can see why this guy might have been executed for causing trouble. Those weren't the official charges but that's what it amounts to. If you read Xenophon it's much harder to see why anybody would have worried about this figure being dangerous enough to put on trial for corrupting the young. Because he sometimes seems more like a slightly sarcastic agony aunt or something like that. Yes exactly, exactly. And nobody's going to make a big deal about that. I think one thing I'd like to add though that's important here, in a way it sort of opens up the question again. We've awarded Plato the gold medal for sort of accurate portrayal but I think there's an important qualification because I don't want to sort of leave Xenophon too far behind. Because it seems to me that one thing that's as clear as anything can be about Socrates is that he was a very good teacher. I think he adopted a rather different attitude to people who weren't sort of in his circle and to people who had pretensions to knowledge. But people who sort of followed him, I think like any good teacher he was different depending on who he had in front of him. And Plato was obviously a very brilliant guy. And Xenophon, I tend to say obviously wasn't. I love Xenophon by the way. He had other gifts. He had other gifts as they say. And I think it's very natural that Socrates should be at his most provocative when dealing with a sort of budding genius like Plato. Because that's what a good teacher does. The more brilliant the student, the more you're going to challenge them. And just be a little quieter perhaps when it's someone like Xenophon who's in front of you. So I think the problem of Socrates might just be he was a good teacher and maybe that's not such a problem. So I guess one of the other questions that arises both in Xenophon and in Plato is that as annoying as he might be presented as being, he's also being held up as admirable. Yes. And for me one of the questions about the way Plato uses Socrates is whether he in some sense is being held up to us as someone to imitate. So is he a moral exemplar or is he almost some sui generis kind of person who you could never be like. And so he was a kind of supernatural phenomenon even. He has this divine sign for example. And then we wouldn't be supposed to imitate him. And it seems to me that there's maybe a tension in Plato. Would you agree with that. Yeah I think I mean in fact I think I'd probably move towards the latter that he's sui generis. He's often he's often described when he sometimes describes himself this way and certainly he's described by others as to use the Greek word atopos which means in English something like strange or peculiar literally it means somebody who doesn't have a place. And I think it's I think he is being portrayed as somebody who's more than merely human doesn't really belong on this earth but isn't isn't quite divine either. I mean he has too many flaws to be here to be a god. And I think we're I think we're supposed to think there's a famous I mean the ending of the Fido which is Plato's dialogue describing the death of Socrates right at the end of the Fido. He's praised by those present as the best man of his time. And I'm sure Plato thought that but I also think he was a sort of a deeply flawed characters as well and strange enough that we're not really supposed to imitate him. So why would you say he's flawed is it partially because of what you mentioned before that when he actually confronts people they don't ever get anywhere so they don't find out what they're supposed to be looking for. I think partly that I think again it's hard and I'm sure this is deliberate on Plato's part. It's a mistake that I think interpreters still often make which is to say oh those stupid interlocutors how could they have been so stupid as to get into such a muddle. And it's almost sort of poor old Socrates having to deal with these guys. Well not not really these guys these guys are OK. I want to say they're not they're not stupid they're being confronted by the sharpest intellect of their day usually without warning. And I think that their annoyance is supposed to be transmitted to us as something that one would almost be bound to feel. We should feel annoyed on their behalf. I mean we have the great benefit. Exactly we have the great benefit of being at several times removed from their encounters. Firstly we're reading a written encounter. Secondly we're you know two and a half thousand years on and we sort of we sort of know who Socrates is. And I think you know we're being invited to consider this Watson or portrayal. And if you were a Greek reader maybe part of the effect that the dialogue should have on you the first time you read it is that when the interlocutor says well here's what I think piety is or whatever you think yeah that sounds right. Exactly. And then Socrates crushes the definition. Exactly not. Now I think the genius of I mean just to talk about Plato in a way rather than Socrates but the genius of Plato is to get us engaged but precisely because of that critical distance. So in other words it's a it's an amazing thing he does. I think he he both makes us feel sympathy for the interlocutor as we should I think. And at the same time that little bit of distance means that we can properly get we can be sort of outraged by Socrates but not in such a way that we want to sort of run away which a lot of the interlocutors do as soon as they can but to respond and to engage. I think that's what Plato wants us to do and I think that's what Socrates wanted to do but actually is portrayed as not being that successful at doing it. I don't think the famous fair minded reader I don't think honestly thinks that when one of these typical interlocutors goes away they're going to start examining themselves and being self-critical. I think in that regard there's there's some serious failure that we're that Plato shows us as well. And what about other dimensions of Socrates's character so it's not just that he questions people. There are other salient features of this guy. So for example he's poor. He goes around barefoot. And so on and so forth. He's a very distinctive guy both in Aristophanes and Cenophon and some of these features are picked up in Plato. Do you think that Plato is encouraging us to imitate Socrates at that level the way maybe philosophers like the cynics did later on. I suspect I think two maybe two separate things here. I think probably probably not actually. I think there's a there's a sort of separate question about what these very distinctive traits are supposed to mean. I think just to add a couple of others he seemed to be remarkably resilient. He's portrayed in the symposium as being able to withstand extremes of heat and cold and to out drink everybody else at the party without getting always useful skill to have in these situations. I think one thing this is a little sort of hobby horse of mine so I'll get it in while I can. People I think this is part of scholars attempts to sort of sanitize and indeed sanctify Socrates. I think that aspect of him the poverty the sort of resilience that people end up often portraying him as a kind of ascetic figure as somebody who's turned away from the physical world who has a sort of commitment to not engaging with it. And I think that's that's a mistake. I mean I think Socrates is a much more earthy character than that. You know to give but a couple of examples you know he's he's married he has children he has he's 70 when he's on trial he has a young son. So he's and this is this is a man who's not unlike I suspect Plato is probably the ascetic but we can't can't really tell. But unlike Plato Socrates as portrayed is certainly not somebody who withdraws from the physical world. I think he's somebody who couldn't care less about it one way or the other. You know he goes to the symposium he has dinner he drinks and you can't say about him until he's drunk he drinks until anybody else would be drunk. This is somebody who's perfectly happy to indulge in physical pleasures. I think the crucial thing about Socrates and where he's probably genuinely was genuinely different from a lot of his contemporaries is he didn't place any particular value on these activities. He's a human being. So he does what human beings do he eats and drinks he doesn't have any sort of ideological fetish about not about abstention. He's not an abstainer but he's somebody who manages perfectly well or would manage perfectly well without any of this stuff. So again I think he's an earthy figure and he's more he's both earthy and ironically all the more unworldly because he lives with all this stuff. But at the same time he's indifferent to it. And in fact if he thinks that what's really valuable in life is virtue and knowledge which may or not may or not be the same thing right. Then he might think that it was just as much a mistake to value for example hunger or avoiding food exact as to value food. Exactly. I think it's exactly that. That exactly that would be somebody who by that very attitude was putting far too much emphasis on the physical. Or Socrates thinks no it doesn't matter one way or the other. You might say it's a dangerous attitude. I mean perhaps again one of the I'm not sure about this to be honest but I think you know it's there's a I must recount there's a famous wonderful story in the symposium where Alcibiades one of both I think one of Socrates great loves and also Socrates one of Alcibiades great loves. So there's a there's a real sort of mutual love affair there a particularly peculiar kind it being Socrates but Alcibiades in the symposium tells the story of how he attempted to seduce Socrates. He got Socrates into bed and Socrates just lay there all night and didn't Alcibiades being the most handsome charming man of his of his age and nothing happened. Now it seems to me that an ascetic doesn't get into bed literally with Alcibiades. Somebody like Socrates who is indifferent gets into bed doesn't feel like sex doesn't have sex but he's not he's not living in a cave avoiding all such temptation. He's putting himself right in right in harm's way and his uniqueness is that he can you know he can resist it without without really any effort. It's not it's not it's not a sort of quasi Christian effortful resisting of temptation. He doesn't put much value on it in the end and so it's easy for him to lie next to Alcibiades and nothing happens. Alcibiades hates it but that's another story. That's what you get when you're dating Socrates. Yes you have been warned. And the thing that he does value of course is virtue. He's always trying to find out what virtue is both in general as for example in the Meno and the particular virtues so justice, piety, courage and so on. And he seems to think that virtue is or has a lot to do with knowledge. Do you think he's making the stronger version of the claim that virtue is just the same thing as knowledge. Do you think he's as it were consistent across Plato's dialogues in holding that. I suspect that he does think that. I think he certainly let. I mean deal with the first thing first I think he certainly thinks that knowledge is necessary for virtue that if you don't know what virtue is you can't be virtuous or at least which I think comes to the same thing. You can't be reliably virtuous. So is that the knowledge that's relevant. Is it because you said knowing what the virtue is. Yeah as opposed to because you might think well yeah OK courage is knowing what to do in a battle. Yes but that's different from knowing what courage is. Right. So he seems to have a I would say that he does seem to have a fairly one might say intellectualized view of what knowledge is. And he says I mean there's a there's a there's a good example in in the Euthyphro. I mean he you know sometimes Socrates sort of tells us why he thinks what he does more than we give him credit for. And there's a there's a there's a bit in the Euthyphro where he says look Euthyphro tell me what piety is because Euthyphro is a bit of a self appointed expert on the gods. So Socrates thinks aha here's somebody who'll tell me what piety is. Tell me what piety is. And here's how he explains why he wants to know he says to Euthyphro so that I can tell which things are pious and which aren't. So the idea is that without a proper definition of piety you can't reliably tell what is pious from what is not pious whether in his own words and deeds or in somebody else's. And I think actually that's not a that's a pretty tenable view it's a controversial view by all means but it's not a it's not a crazy view. I think he's very keen on the idea of getting things reliably right and that means being reliably able to tell one thing from another. So almost like a scientist might have a test for whether a certain substance is present. That's right. Absolutely. I mean it is there's no question it is a very intellectualized version of virtue and I think I mean courage is always going to be a good a good one because he you know courage we tend to think is sort of all about really all about doing whatever needs to be done at the time. But I think I think I mean this is a little bit speculative I think Socrates would reject the idea that somebody who just happens to end up doing the right thing by let's say a kind of instinct I mean knowledge in that sense you've got a good instinct for what counts as the courageous thing to do. I think he'd say that's not really truly courageous because it's kind of luck. Yeah. Yeah. But even if I believe Socrates that knowledge is necessary for virtue. Yeah. It's pretty hard to believe that it's sufficient for virtue right. So if I had this test so I know what courage is and I apply the test I say well this act action is courageous it passes the test. That's not going to be enough to get me to do the right action is it. No this is this is this is one of the most controversial areas of Socrates what Socrates seems to advocate which is that if you know that something is good or right you will inevitably do it. I think that's something he does think and I even think that and I think I think if he didn't think that it would actually be much harder to explain the sheer emphasis on knowledge. I mean I mean if it's a mere necessary condition there are other important conditions as well. You think he'd sort of bang on about about them but he doesn't. The fact is he's always talking about knowledge and I think I mean there's there's a particularly famous text which at the end of the protagonist where he argues explicitly I'm going to qualify this in a minute I'm going to start off by saying because it's Socrates everything has to be qualified eventually. He seems at least to be arguing explicitly for the thesis that what's known as accuracy or weakness of will is impossible. To put that more positively he's arguing for the thesis that nothing can come between somebody's knowledge of what the right thing to do is and they're doing it. For example it's impossible to be waylaid by pleasure. So if you think the right thing to do is is go and do some exercise then the pleasure of sitting watching TV isn't going to distract you. If you genuinely know that exercise is the best thing to do you're going to you're going to do it. He has a very ingenious argument at the end of the protagonist in favor of that thesis. The complication is I mean there's several complications but one is that he seems to base his argument on the idea that hedonism is true. In other words the idea that what is good is nothing other than pleasure. So the pleasant and the good are one and the same thing. He argues that basically if that's true then the idea that you could know what's best but do something else because you're as he puts it overcome by pleasure is absurd. You'd simply if pleasure just is the good you'd be doing the best thing anyway. Being overcome by pleasure is just being quote overcome by the good. In other words being overcome by what is in fact the best action if you're ahead in this. And the reason this is this is complicated is it Socrates is very rude about pleasure in other places. To cut a long story short I mean here is what I think is the is the sort of gist of this. I think he does advocate the controversial thesis that knowledge is sufficient for right action. But I also think that the argument he uses and this is classic Socrates is not actually primarily I think it's a really important point is not primarily about him advocating his own point of view or even arguing for his own point of view using premises that he himself believes in. I think all the time he's doing what he says in the apology he does which is he's testing people. And just to again briefly put that in a bit of context in the protagonist he's arguing against protagonist and what he ends up the upshot of this argument is not simply the conclusion that you can't act against your knowledge of what's best but it's to show protagonist that his thesis which is that courage at least to take your example Peter that courage at least is not something that simply reducible to knowledge is false. So actually what that argument to the protagonist serves is to show that protagonist his own beliefs are confused and that he needs to go away and try and sort out his beliefs and get them in better shape. So I think I'm still inclined to say that this is something Socrates believes that he wouldn't be banging on about it so much if he didn't believe it but that his primary task is not to advocate a particular point of view but to get the people he's talking to to sort out there to show them first that their beliefs are confused and therefore they need to sort them out and hopefully get a better grasp on these issues themselves. That's what he's about. And so maybe that gives us a nice segue into Plato because if Socrates was always concerned with responding to the person in front of him it would make sense that his great student Plato writes in dialogues is only showing us people confronting each other. Absolutely absolutely. Yes. I mean I think that there are I mean I think we should give a bit of a bit of a head time to to perhaps the slightly less combative Socrates. I mean in a dialogue like the Fido or the Republic when he's talking to people who don't have the kind of absurdly misguided pretensions to knowledge that somebody like Euthyphra or maybe even Protagoras has he seems to be firstly less sort of interested in humiliating them and showing them up to put it bluntly. And secondly again on the surface more interested in arguing for a particular point of view. Even then though I think it's complicated I mean the Fido where he does seem to sort of give us a whole range of arguments about to prove that the soul is immortal. Not clear whether he's really trying to persuade his interlocutors that that's the case as something that he himself believes. So again it's not I mean I think he does believe it but again I think the extraordinary thing about Socrates is that he's he's probably in that sense more concerned with motivating the interlocutors to think that there's something worthwhile about the kind of life that he lives than to really sort of persuade somebody else of something that he himself believes. I think one of the really peculiar things about Socrates is that he's and this is something that Alcibiades accuses him of I think rightly that you never quite know what Socrates himself believes and I think he's not interested in ultimately and particularly in telling us what he believes. And if there's anything there's one thing he's really passionately convinced of is simply that we should go on inquiring and never give up. Exactly exactly. And in that spirit I would like to invite our listeners to keep listening next week when I get to the first Plato episode the first of many Plato episodes. For now I'd like to thank you Rafeel for coming on the podcast and sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you very much indeed.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Find us online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, In Dialogue, the life and writings of Plato. As faithful listeners will know by now, the earliest Greek philosophers were called the Presocratics. This time-honoured expression shows the extent to which Socrates is seen as the pivotal figure in the history of Greek philosophy. Yet some of Socrates' predecessors could claim to represent a turning point. How about Xenophanes with his rational skepticism towards traditional religion? Or Heraclitus, arguably the first man to be primarily a philosopher rather than an all-around polymath and scientist? And what about Parmenides, the first thinker to pursue a path of pure rational argument and the inventor of metaphysics? Of course, as Malcolm Schofield suggested in my interview with him, Socrates did add the new idea that philosophy is really about how to live. That conviction is not so popular nowadays, but was shared by all ancient philosophers after Socrates. Still, if Socrates is a transitional figure in Greek thought, it's maybe not so much because of his ideas, but rather because without Socrates, there would be no Plato. In fact, while I yield to no one in my admiration for Socrates and the Presocratics, I'm willing to say that it's with Plato that philosophy really gets going. The philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. This has become such a cliché that I thought I'd get it out of the way right at the start of my first podcast on Plato. But cliché or no, Whitehead had a point. Philosophy did not begin or end with Plato, but it did come of age with Plato. Many central issues of philosophy are found for the first time in Plato, such as the nature of language or the immortality of the soul. But Plato wasn't only a philosophical genius, he was also a literary genius. The Greeks admired him as one of the foremost stylists of Attic Greek, and even in translation he is one of the philosophers who is most pleasurable to read. In the Platonic dialogues we can find everything we expect from great literature. Suspense, humour, foreshadowing, symbolism, subtle allusions to other texts, and of course, memorable characters. Socrates is Plato's most enduring literary creation, but Plato was a brilliant mimic, able to produce scintillating parodies of historical figures like Protagoras and Aristophanes. In many cases his mimicry is so compelling that it becomes almost impossible to imagine the historical person separately from the Platonic portrayal. As we've seen, that's certainly the case with Socrates. As for Plato himself, he remains elusive. He is removed from us not only by almost two and a half millennia, but also by his choice to write dialogues. I've mentioned before that in one of those dialogues, the Phaedo, a character remarks that Plato was not present at Socrates's death because he was ill. This passage reminds us that Plato is in a way absent in every dialogue. Plato never made himself a character in one of his dialogues, and he never wrote philosophy in anything other than dialogue form. He does not speak to us directly, which leaves us wondering which if any of the ideas expressed by Plato's characters represent his own views. In many cases it's almost irresistible to think that Plato is using one or another character as the mouthpiece for his own ideas. But just take the case of Plato's most famous doctrine, the theory of forms. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find passages in Plato's dialogues where this theory is expounded and defended. In fact, one of the few explicit discussions of the forms is immediately followed by a powerful and unanswered series of objections to Plato's own theory. More on this in later episodes. For now I want to say a little bit more about the man himself. Who was this elusive genius I've been describing in such rapturous terms? Well let's start with some basics. Born in 427 BC and dying in 347 BC, Plato hailed from Athens. Indeed, he could supposedly count among his ancestors the great lawgiver of Athens, Solon. The central event in Plato's own life was, we can safely assume, his encounter with Socrates, when he was still a young man. Socrates was put to death in 399 BC, when Plato was almost 30 years old. But Socrates must have made a big impression on the young Plato, enough for Plato to make Socrates the main character in most of his dialogues. After Socrates's death, Plato spent time away from Athens in southern Italy, where he could have encountered Pythagorean ideas, a further source of inspiration. But one shouldn't exaggerate the importance of this, I think. Plato's dialogues show that he had a wide knowledge of most of the pre-Socratics. He was especially interested in Heraclitus and Parmenides, who were at least as important for him as Pythagoras. An ancient tradition tries to convince us that Plato is really an inheritor of higher Pythagorean truths, but in fact Pythagoreanism was only one of the many strands of Greek philosophy up until Plato's time, and Plato wove his cloth from all the strands he could find. After his foreign travels, Plato returned to Athens and set himself up as the head of a philosophical school. The school was situated in a grove outside the city, the Akademia, named in honor of a mythical Greek hero. This of course is where we get our word, academy. Plato and his colleagues engaged not only in the pursuits we would think of as properly philosophical, but also practiced dialectical reasoning and argument, classification and division, and mathematics. You may have heard the legend that a sign at the entrance to the academy said, let no man enter who has not studied geometry, and indeed it's clear from the dialogues themselves that Plato had a deep interest in mathematics. He also had colleagues who did serious mathematical research, in particular Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher. Another contemporary was Isocrates, not to be confused with Socrates. Isocrates was a brilliant rhetorician, and heir to the sophistical tradition Socrates had confronted in the 5th century. As we'll be seeing, Plato devotes a lot of attention to the question of rhetoric, and Isocrates may be one of his targets. But of course Plato's most famous contemporary apart from Socrates will be his own student Aristotle, who learned his trade at the academy before setting up his own rival school after Plato's death. As with other famous ancient philosophers, we can get some further information about Plato from a collection of biographies written by an author of the early 3rd century AD, Diogenes Laertius. Diogenes tells us that the name Plato was actually a nickname. It relates to the Greek platus, which means broad or wide. Supposedly Plato got his name because he was so well built, being an accomplished wrestler. Alternatively, Diogenes adds, it may have been because of the breadth of Plato's knowledge, or more mundanely because Plato had a wide forehead. Whatever the reason for the nickname, we should be grateful to whoever came up with it. Plato's real name was Aristocles, and it would be mighty confusing if the two leading ancient thinkers were called Aristocles and Aristotle. In terms of Plato's biography, the most important information in Diogenes concerns Plato's three visits to Syracuse in Sicily. We also have some letters, supposedly written by Plato himself, which discuss Plato's involvement in Sicilian politics. To make this long story fairly short, Plato went to Syracuse for the first time in the 380s BC when he was about 40 years old. Diogenes tells us that while he was there Plato criticized the way that the tyrant Dionysius was running his city. The tyrant became irate, as tyrants tend to do. He was tempted to have Plato put to death, but settled for having him sold into slavery. Plato was eventually ransomed and able to return to Athens. But he returned to Syracuse to meet with the tyrant's son and namesake, Dionysius, when the young man inherited his father's position. Plato hoped to persuade this young tyrant to adopt philosophy and rule with justice and by the laws rather than through violence and fear. Unfortunately this trip too was a failure. Plato and a friend of his named Dion were sent packing. Plato made a third and final trip to Syracuse for the sake of getting the tyrant Dionysius to look more favorably on his friend Dion. Yet again Plato's mission failed. In due course the exiled Dion returned to Sicily with an invading army. Dion deposed Dionysius, but was murdered. The whole sorry tale provides a striking example of a philosopher trying and failing to exert influence in real-world politics. I suppose some readers have found some amusement in Plato's ineffectual idealism, his hope of turning the young Dionysius into one of the philosopher kings from the Republic. But I'm always happy to speak up for Plato, so I say we should commend him for trying to put his theories into practice rather than just sitting around in the academy writing dialogues and doing mathematics. The most famous passage in Plato's letters discusses the younger tyrant Dionysius. It appears in the so-called seventh letter, which, like the other letters, may not be by Plato. The passage discusses a rumor that the young tyrant Dionysius tried his hand at writing some philosophy. The letter's author says that if Dionysius did write such a book then you can be sure that that book was not based on teachings that Plato delivered to him in Syracuse. Any good philosopher knows that philosophy is not a body of doctrines which can be laid out by a teacher, so as to be ingested and then written out by the student. True philosophy consists in a discussion between teacher and pupil, and the insights one achieves in this way cannot just be stated in so many words. The author of the seventh letter gives a kind of metaphysical argument for this. Words are distant echoes or images of true reality, so that it is impossible to capture reality perfectly in language. Still worse is putting one's thoughts into writing rather than live speech, since the written words will inevitably be vulnerable to distortion and misunderstanding. As the real Plato says in one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, written words cannot defend themselves, the way we can defend ourselves in conversation. Many readers are tempted to connect this passage in the seventh letter to the fact that Plato wrote dialogues instead of treatises full of doctrines. As I've said, Plato never speaks to us in his own voice. He is not one of the characters, he is the intelligence that lurks unseen behind the characters. Why did he write philosophy in this way? Diogenes, in his biography of Plato, says that Plato invented the use of dialogue form in writing philosophy, and he seems to be right about this. Perhaps some earlier philosophers like Parmenides' student Zeno had written in the form of opposed arguments, but Plato was original in using the form of dramatically realistic, literary dialogues with vivid characters taken from real life. The seventh letter, if it really is by Plato, would help to explain this choice. The letter suggests that Plato didn't think it was possible to state philosophical truth in a book, hence his preference for dialogues over didactic treatises. Alternatively, Plato may have thought that, although it is possible to state philosophical truth in theory, in practice he was unable to do so. Perhaps he was always working through his ideas and never reached a doctrine that satisfied him. Then again, maybe Plato was perfectly confident of his insights, but worried about the vulnerability of words, especially written words. As we just saw, in face-to-face discussion one can explain oneself, respond to criticism, clear up confusions, and so on, but written words are like orphans at the mercy of the reader who comes along and finds them. In any case, it seems plausible that for Plato, philosophy occurs above all in discussions, not written works. When he did put pen to papyrus, he sought to recreate this context on the page. I think we can go further if we consider what it is like to read a Platonic dialogue. The dialogues are entertaining, but they can also be frustrating. Why are the people talking to Socrates, his interlocutors, letting him get away with apparently bad arguments? Why aren't they asking him to explain certain points more fully? Above all, why do so many dialogues end in a frustrating impasse, with Socrates and his interlocutors agreeing that they haven't achieved any insight into the topic at hand? These stalemate endings no doubt relate to Socrates' admission of ignorance. He knows only that he does not know. But Plato isn't telling us to settle for ignorance, even Socratic ignorance. When the participants in the dialogue overlook important objections or fail to explore seemingly obvious avenues of inquiry, we are meant to notice. He wants his readers to engage actively with his dialogues. The reader should be alert to spot those overlooked alternatives, to see that some solutions are only being hinted at. You might say that the written text is one partner in a further dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the text. This also would help to explain why Plato's dialogues are so literary. By this I mean not only that they are beautifully written, though they frequently are, but that Plato deploys a full arsenal of allusions, metaphors, and cross-references such as we might expect from a novelist or playwright. This again invites the reader to think about the subtext as well as the surface meaning of the dialogue. The dramatic bits of stage-setting that surround Plato's philosophical arguments are as important as the arguments themselves. He might for instance show us his characters exhibiting or not exhibiting a virtue like courage in the very way that they pursue a philosophical discussion about virtue. Similarly, Plato set dialogues about piety and respect for the law within days of Socrates' execution. We should read these dialogues with Socrates' fate in mind. And in general, we should read Plato both as literature and as philosophy. Having said all this, I don't think that there is a single general explanation for why Plato wrote dialogues. He seems to have seen many possible advantages in the dialogue form, and to have exploited different advantages in different works. Consider a short dialogue like the Euthyphro, in which the title character is shown by Socrates to be unable to define piety. This and other so-called Socratic dialogues are very different from the much longer and more complex Republic, which still uses Socrates as the main character, but in a more didactic mode, as he lays out theories about knowledge, forms, the soul, and politics. Both dialogues are intensely literary, with strong and memorable characters in addition to their philosophical content. But it would be foolish to assume that the Republic is simply a much longer attempt to do the sort of thing Plato was trying to do in the Euthyphro. So we shouldn't ask only why Plato wrote dialogues, but also how he used the dialogue form for different effects. This brings us to the more basic issue of how many dialogues there are. Collections of Plato's works go back to the first century AD, when a man named Thrasyllus produced an edition of the dialogues. His edition divided 35 dialogues plus the Platonic letters as a final text into nine groups of four. These were the works Thrasyllus himself thought were really by Plato. But we nowadays accept only between 25 or 30 dialogues as being authentic. Several of the dialogues, like the Platonic letters, are of uncertain authenticity, and others are agreed by everyone to be forgeries. Also, Thrasyllus's division of the dialogues into groups of four has been abandoned. Instead, scholars now usually group the dialogues into early, middle, and late. According to this division, Plato began writing his dialogues in the shadow of Socrates's execution. The dialogues he wrote in this early period adhered more or less closely to Socrates's actual practice and discussion. As I've mentioned, they usually end with an impasse. In Greek the word is aporia, where everyone in the dialogue agrees that they can't answer the question at hand. The Euthyphro is an example. The question of the dialogue is, what is piety? Some suggestions are made and shot down, and Socrates and Euthyphro part company without having successfully defined piety. These are the early, or Socratic, dialogues. Then comes the middle period, during which Plato wrote more ambitious, longer works and moved away from representing typical Socratic encounters. The Republic, Plato's best-known dialogue, is the main work of this period. Finally, there are the late works. We know that a hugely long and, most readers tend to feel, hugely boring work called the Laws was not yet completed when Plato died, so this was his very last work. Other late works tend to be more technical and less dramatic in their setting. Often there is one lead character who controls the discussion by taking advantage of an interlocutor who doesn't give him much trouble. In many dialogues of this later period, Plato removes Socrates from center stage and allows other characters to take the leading roles. Now how true is this story about the three periods of Plato's career? Well, some dialogues refer forwards or backwards to others, which is a hint of relative chronology. Some scholars have also analyzed Plato's evolving writing style to put the various dialogues in order. These indications tend to confirm a very rough version of the scheme I just described. So we can say with some confidence that, for example, most of the so-called Socratic dialogues are earlier than the Republic. Still, there is no general agreement about the exact chronological order of the dialogues. And even if we did know the order in which the dialogues were written, it's not clear what this would mean for our understanding of Plato's ideas. Even if we accept the idea that Plato's views evolved over time, that doesn't mean the evolution was a simple one. Plato was a self-critical philosopher and liked to explore the same problems from numerous angles. No doubt he did change his mind to consider objections to ideas he'd discussed earlier and so on, but there are no simple trajectories along which Plato's mind traveled over the course of his career. A much better way to read Plato is one dialogue at a time. Every dialogue is a world unto itself and should be considered on its own before bringing it into relation with other dialogues. This is true not only of a long, famous dialogue such as the Republic, but also of shorter and lesser-known dialogues. Next time I'll be introducing Plato further by considering two such dialogues. These two works are not on the reading list of many undergraduate courses, but will introduce us to many of the themes that are central to Plato's writings—his humor, his rivalry with the sophists, his fascination with the erotic, his puzzlement over the nature of knowledge. I won't yet reveal which dialogues I have in mind, but here's a hint. In one dialogue Socrates squares off against a pair of pugilistic brothers, and in the other he tries to cure a young man's headache. That's two unloved dialogues. This week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Know Thyself, two unloved Platonic dialogues. Here in the UK there's this radio show called Desert Island Discs. They invite famous people on, and ask them to say which music they'd want to have with them if they knew they were going to be stranded on a desert island. At the end, the guests also get to say which book they'd want to have with them, not counting the Bible and Shakespeare. Now this is something I've never understood. Surely the answer is painfully obvious. If you were going to have only one book on a desert island, why would you consider taking anything other than the collected works of Plato? My copy of the collected dialogues is 1,745 pages long, not counting the index. That's enough to keep you company through many a lonely desert island night. If you were trapped on a desert island, and started reading Plato's dialogues one after another, I predict you'd be impressed at how deep his back catalogue is. Once you look past Plato's greatest hits, like the Republic and the Phaedo, you'd find plenty of other dialogues that are not just worth reading, but reading a few dozen times. You might as well, after all, since you're stuck on a desert island. In this episode I'm going to look at two such dialogues, the Carmadese and the Euthydemus. These aren't famous works, but they show Plato at his best, or close to his best. First then, the Carmadese. Like most of Plato's dialogues, the Carmadese is named after one of the main characters who appears in it. In the dialogue, Socrates tells the story of how he first met Carmadese, a young man of charm and devastating good looks. In fact the whole dialogue is narrated by Socrates, so that, as we read it, it's as if we were sitting around with him in the marketplace listening to the story. He tells us that, at the time of his meeting with Carmadese, he himself has just returned from a military campaign. Everyone wants to hear news of the war, but Socrates quickly shifts the conversation to his two favourite subjects. How is philosophy doing in Athens, and are there any promising young men around? One older man who is present, Critias, says that, Socrates is in luck, here comes the most beautiful youth in Athens, his cousin Carmadese. Carmadese enters, with other men fawning over him because of his good looks, a situation which Plato exploits for some slapstick comedy. Everyone wants to sit next to the enticing young Carmadese, and there's such a struggle to make space for him on a long bench that the guy at the end falls onto the floor. Socrates wins the contest for Carmadese's attention with a trick suggested by Critias. Carmadese, it would seem, has been having headaches. Socrates pretends to know the cure, a certain leaf. But to cure the headache, it turns out you need to cure the whole body, a reference to the holistic medical theories of the Hippocratic doctors we looked at a few episodes back. Not only that, but you need to make sure that the soul is healthy in order to cure the body. And we're off and running with a philosophical discussion, intended to discover whether or not Carmadese has the virtue the Greeks called sophrosune, usually translated as temperance or moderation. If so, his soul is healthy, and we can proceed to curing his body. But how can we find out whether Carmadese has this virtue without knowing its definition? Perhaps Carmadese would like to help by defining sophrosune. The attempt to find a definition occupies their attention for the rest of the dialogue. So far so typically Socratic, with a bit of slapstick thrown in. But hang on a moment, keen-eared listeners will recall that I've mentioned Critias in a previous episode. He was a relative of Plato's and a leader of the Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy just at the end of the 5th century BC. And you'll never guess who was another member of the Thirty Tyrants. Yes, Carmadese. It's rather unclear what Plato himself thought about the episode of the Thirty Tyrants. As we'll see in a later episode, he was no enthusiastic supporter of the restored Athenian democracy that executed his teacher Socrates. But obviously when we read the Carmadese, we need to bear in mind the controversial histories of these two characters. What Plato has done here is a bit like an author of today, staging a philosophical conversation about say, international law, and casting George W. Bush and Tony Blair as leading characters. Immediately, we see that Plato's choice to write in dialogue gives him the opportunity to produce literary effects we don't expect from philosophy. When Socrates asks whether Carmadese is as beautiful in soul as he is in body, we are supposed to know how the real Carmadese turned out, and that affects the way we read the arguments. Of course, within the dramatic setting, Socrates doesn't know what will become of either Critias or Carmadese. Plato does have Critias behave in a rather bad-tempered way throughout the dialogue. But Carmadese is as charming as he is beautiful. For instance, Socrates asks him point blank whether he has this virtue of temperance, and Carmadese replies that it would be boastful to say yes, but he would bring shame on himself if he said no. This shows quick wit, while neatly sidestepping the question of his virtue. We readers, however, know how Carmadese will turn out. Carmadese will become the follower of the tyrant Critias, not the philosopher Socrates. And all of this is more than a literary game. It adds resonance to the dialogue's fundamental question, which is not so much what is temperance, but how can we know whether someone is temperate, and how can we know whether we ourselves are temperate. Here we arrive at one of Plato's favorite themes, knowledge of others and knowledge of ourselves. The theme becomes explicit after some more Platonic theatre. Young Carmadese suggests that temperance is doing one's own business. Socrates finds this perplexing. Is he saying that everyone should make their own shoes? No no, says Carmadese, that's not what he means. But on the other hand, he isn't quite sure what he does mean. It emerges that this is a definition of temperance he heard from his older relative Critias, who was annoyed at having his cherished definition refuted by Socrates. Taking over the conversation, Critias says that obviously, the definition means that temperance is doing one's business in the sense of doing what one should, in other words doing good things. Knowingly, or unknowingly, asks Socrates. For instance, if I help a man without knowing whether it will benefit him, is this temperance? No no, says Critias, that's not what I mean. Really what I mean is the same thing as a famous slogan that appeared as an inscription at the Oracle of Delphi, and yes, that is the same Oracle that proclaimed the wisdom of Socrates. You've all heard the oracular inscription, even if you don't know where it comes from. It read, gnothi sei a ton, know thyself. So there's my definition, announces Critias, temperance is self-knowledge. He exudes confidence throughout all this, acting as if it's Socrates who is fumbling along, even though it's he, Critias, who leaps from one attempted definition to another, as if they were all obviously the same. As ever, Socrates is patient and calm, albeit perplexed. He just wants to understand, if only there is something worth understanding. He doesn't quite get what it would mean to have self-knowledge. Medicine is knowledge of health, and house-building is knowledge of building houses. What is self-knowledge knowledge of? Here Critias makes a surprising move. He says that temperance, or self-knowledge, is knowledge of knowledge. This leaves Socrates more confused than ever. There's no such thing as vision which sees vision, or hearing that hears hearing. How could there be knowledge that knows knowledge? At this point, Critias is ready to admit that he, too, is perplexed. Plato gives us a nice image for this perplexity. He has Socrates say that just as a man who yawns tends to make everyone else around him yawn, so one man's confusion tends to infect others with confusion. As always with Plato, there's more here than literary bi-play. With the surprising shifts in discussion, he's managed to transform the dialogue from a jocular discussion of temperance into something rather different. The dialogue now becomes an inquiry into the nature and usefulness of knowledge. Nowadays we would say that the dialogue has gone from dealing with ethics to dealing with epistemology, the study of knowledge. In particular, we're now wondering what it means to have knowledge of knowledge. What would this amount to? On the one hand, as Socrates points out, it seems that if I know something, I should know that I know it. For instance, if I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, I must also know that I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4. In fact, you might even suspect this is a good test of whether I know something. If I'm not sure whether or not I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, isn't that enough reason to say that I don't know that 2 plus 2 equals 4? On the other hand, as Socrates also points out, it's hard to see what good it does to know that I know. If I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that's good enough for all practical purposes. When would I ever need to know that I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4? Thus we have something of a paradox. On the one hand, knowledge of knowledge seems to be absolutely essential. On the other hand, knowledge of knowledge seems empty and useless. If this all seems too abstract, consider instead the case where I am trying to figure out whether somebody else has knowledge. Suppose for instance I'm trying to decide whether to let someone give me open heart surgery. Suddenly, it's looking pretty urgent to decide whether the would-be surgeon knows what he's doing. If at all possible, I'd like to know for sure whether or not he knows. So now, knowledge of knowledge looks vital. But to know for sure whether or not the would-be surgeon is qualified, I need to have some grasp of medicine myself. Really, I need to be a qualified surgeon. Otherwise, I'll have to take other people's advice to find out whether the would-be surgeon knows what he's doing. I might get lucky and get good advice, but I won't know that the would-be surgeon is knowledgeable. To know that, I would need the same kind of knowledge the surgeon hopefully has. I need to know about surgery. What I don't need is some further knowledge which is about knowledge. So from this perspective too, knowledge of knowledge looks essential and useless, but from different points of view. Once Socrates and Critias have banged their head against this problem for a while, the dialogue ends in a stalemate without any agreement as to what temperance, or for that matter self-knowledge, really is. But it would be wrong to say that they and we have learned nothing. At the very least, we've been presented with numerous possible routes for further inquiry. Some of what has been said looks extremely Socratic. In particular, Socrates might agree with Critias that temperance, and all the other virtues, are kinds of knowledge. This allows Plato to use one of his favourite tricks. He diverts the discussion away from virtue toward a more general inquiry into the nature of knowledge. As I said, we go from talking ethics to talking epistemology. On the other hand, Socrates thinks that virtue is the same thing as knowledge, so perhaps this is no diversion at all. Plato is simply working through the implications of this Socratic thesis. If virtue is knowledge, then discussion of virtue and discussion of knowledge are one and the same. Socratician ethics are nowadays taught and studied as separate parts of philosophy, but if Socrates is right and virtue is knowledge, then this firm separation is a big mistake. We can find similar ideas in another unloved Platonic dialogue, the Euthydemus. As with the Carmades, the dialogue is narrated by Socrates. This time we know who he's telling the story to, his good friend Crito, who in another dialogue named after him, is shown trying to persuade Socrates to flee Athens before he is executed. In that dialogue, Socrates refuses to escape, saying that he has a duty to obey the laws even when they put him to death unjustly. Are we meant to think about this episode when we read the Euthydemus? Should we think perhaps about Socrates's trial, and the charge against him that he corrupted the youth? This would be appropriate because as in the Carmades, the Euthydemus shows Socrates struggling to exert influence over a young man. In this case, the beautiful young man Socrates speaks to is named Clinius. In the Carmades, Socrates seemed to be competing with Critias to see who would manage to exert influence over the young Carmades. The same sort of thing happens here in the Euthydemus, but this time Socrates's opponents are more fearsome than the rather doltish Critias. They are two Sophists, brothers named Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. The two brothers it emerges used to make a living as experts in the martial arts. They could teach you to fight wearing armor, to lead men into battle, to devise strategies in war. But they've diversified since then and become specialists in verbal instead of physical violence. They boast that they can teach wisdom and virtue, but what they actually do is bamboozle people with their bewildering wordplay and arguments. Socrates asks for a demonstration. He wants them to use their amazing wisdom to persuade Clinius to become a philosopher and a seeker of virtue. No problem, they say, and then the Sophistical fireworks begin. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take it in turns to refute poor Clinius. They ask him questions and show that whichever answer Clinius gives, he will wind up contradicting himself. For instance, who is it who learns, wise people or ignorant people? Presumably wise people, and Clinius says so. But the brothers point out that wise people already have knowledge, so they don't need to learn. So, it must be the ignorant people, Clinius says. Wrong again. The ignorant students in any group are precisely the ones who don't learn, otherwise they would hardly be ignorant. Socrates takes all this to be mere tomfoolery, and chastises the brothers for not being serious. He offers to show what he means by persuading Clinius to develop an interest in philosophy. He questions Clinius in such a way as to lead him to the classic Socratic conclusion that anything that seems to be good—money, food, power, health—turns out to be good only if you use it with knowledge. You remember this point, money is useful, but only if you use it on things that will be good for you, and this requires knowledge. Socrates hopes that with this good example, the sophistical brothers will buckle down and lead Clinius to wisdom rather than to bewilderment. Instead, they reach back into their bag of tricks. A typical argument goes like this. The brothers ask you whether you know anything at all. Sure, you say, there are some things I know. So if you're knowing, say, the brothers, then you must know everything, otherwise you'd be knowing and not knowing at the same time, which is a contradiction. Now, I know what you're thinking. This is a stupid argument. It's perfectly possible to know one thing, for instance, how to tie your shoes, while not knowing another thing, for instance, how to look after a giraffe. But the brothers insist on leaving out these qualifications. That's cheating, they complain, and they ought to know, because they put themselves in charge of setting the rules of debate. And so it goes. For instance, the brothers argue that if you have a dog, then the dog is yours. If the dog has puppies, then he's a father, and if the dog is yours and he's a father, then the dog is your father. Again, it isn't terribly difficult to see that this is a bad argument, though spelling out in detail where the mistakes are made would require some subtlety. Perhaps Plato's goal here is partly to train the reader to see what goes wrong in such fallacious arguments. But that isn't the only fish he's out to fry. Some of the arguments made by the brothers have deep philosophical implications. This is a dialogue in which fundamental questions of metaphysics and epistemology underlie apparent silliness. To give just one example, the brothers argue that it's impossible for two people to contradict one another. If you say that the horse is white, and I say that the horse is black, then we can only be talking about two different things. You're talking about a white horse, and I'm talking about a black horse. If you're right and there is no black horse, then I'm not talking about anything at all, so I'm saying nothing. And how can I contradict you without saying anything? This argument too seems trivial and silly at first, until we reflect that the brothers sound a lot like Parmenides. If you remember, he too said that it is impossible to think about or speak of that which does not exist. The Sophists are exploiting this thought for their own nefarious purposes, to show that it is impossible even to disagree. The Euthydemist, then, does have a serious philosophical bite. To a large extent it is a reflection on the nature of knowledge just like the Carmedes. Indeed, many of the puzzles that arise here in an apparently frivolous way return in other dialogues and are considered at greater length. One example is the question about whether it is the wise or the ignorant who learn. This is remarkably similar to Minos' paradox, a staple of every undergraduate course on Plato. Equally fundamental to the Euthydemus is the question of how we should treat other people in philosophical argument. The point of philosophical argument is not winning at all costs, like these verbally pugilistic Sophists do, it is to seek wisdom. This makes the dialogue another attempt to show us that Aristophanes was wrong. Socrates is no Sophist. He wants to lead young men like Clanius to virtue and wisdom rather than to perplexity. On the other hand Plato's Socrates leads young men into perplexity too. Of course Socrates looks good compared to the Sophist brothers, but don't the Carmedes and the Euthydemus also shed light on the limitations of Socrates? In both dialogues, Socrates has a chance to influence a young man and make him virtuous. We know he fails with Carmedes, and things don't go very well with Clanius either. This leads us to wonder, can talking to Socrates really make a young man virtuous? That is a question to which Plato returns again and again, and never more so than in the dialogues we'll discuss in the next two episodes. In two weeks we'll get to that staple of every undergraduate course, Minos' paradox, and discuss Plato's most famous contribution to epistemology, the theory of recollection. But first we'll turn to one of my favorite dialogues, the Gorgias, in which Socrates takes on an opponent even more disturbing than the paradox-mongers of the Euthydemus. Next week it's a battle of the heavyweights, Socrates versus Calicles, on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Virtue meets its match, Plato's Gorgias. Ancient philosophers spent a lot of time arguing about the nature of the good life. One of their most abiding themes was the question of how to live. In particular, they usually wanted to show us that the best way to live is to be virtuous. But why be virtuous? You could instead follow the example of, say, Archelaus, the king of Macedon, who seized power by killing several of his family members including his own seven-year-old half-brother, whom he tossed into a well and drowned. Okay, that might sound a bit radical, but can we really be sure that Archelaus made the wrong choice? He may have had blood on his hands, but those hands held the reins of power in a mighty state. And let's be honest, we've all performed the odd misdeed to get what we want, so why not go for broke and perform these most outrageous injustices if it will allow us to fulfill our desires? Not just today, but for the rest of our lives, exercising absolute power as a tyrant. This is a central question posed in Plato's dialogues, and never with more urgency than in his early masterpiece, the Gorgias. We've already met the namesake of the dialogue in an earlier episode about the Sophists. Gorgias was a teacher of rhetoric, and as you might recall from that episode, the author of several works which still survive today, and which show off his way with words as well as his conviction that words have an almost irresistible power. You might also remember that Plato, in dialogue after dialogue, pits Socrates against opponents who are Sophists and teachers of rhetoric. We already saw an example last week in Plato's Euthydemus, and the verbal sparring there is typical of these encounters, which frequently seem more like competitions than dispassionate discussions of truth. In the Gorgias, Socrates trades verbal blows not only with Gorgias himself, but also with two of Gorgias' followers, Polis and Callicles. Even though the dialogue came to be named after Gorgias, it is Callicles who cuts the most memorable figure as a passionate defender of immorality. In no dialogue does Socrates, the champion of virtue, meet up with a more formidable opponent. Last week we saw how Plato's Carmades poses as an inquiry into virtue, but turns out to be an inquiry into knowledge. We'll see another example of that platonic trick next week when we look at the Meno. But in the Gorgias something like the reverse happens. Socrates says he wants to discover what rhetoric is, but he winds up mounting a defense of the virtuous life. When the action begins, Socrates and his friend Hierophant are meeting up with Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians, Polis and Callicles. Whereas Polis and Callicles are relative beginners in rhetoric, Gorgias is already accepted as a master. He is just given a display speech and is an honored guest at Callicles' house. Socrates wants to hear what the famous Gorgias has to say, but not in the form of a finely wrought speech. Instead, Socrates wants, well, what he always wants. He wants to have a conversation about virtue. Happily, Gorgias boasts that he can speak with unequalled brevity if called upon to do so. He is just as good at the cut and thrust of debate as he is at delivering long, ornate speeches. This belongs to his expertise, his art. Socrates proceeds to lock horns with him over this very question. What is the art which Gorgias claims to have mastered and to be able to teach? The art, of course, is rhetoric. But what's rhetoric, exactly? Carpenters make things out of wood, doctors make us healthy, what do rhetoricians do? According to Gorgias, rhetoric is an art having to do with speech. Not just any old speech, but speech about, as he says, the greatest of human concerns. The man who has mastered rhetoric can go into the court or the public council and get his audience to believe whatever he likes. In short, the art of rhetoric is the art of speech which is persuasive. In fact, very persuasive. As we saw in an earlier episode, the real historical Gorgias in his defense speech of Helen argued that if Helen was persuaded to go to Troy using words, then she was in effect compelled to go, just as surely as if she'd been dragged there by force. Against a truly effective speaker, there is no defense. The Gorgias presented by Plato would agree with this. He tells Socrates that if a doctor and a rhetorician debate in front of an audience about how best to cure a patient, the audience will agree with the rhetorician and not the doctor. He gives examples to prove his point. For instance, it was the great orator Pericles who persuaded the Athenians to build a defensive wall, not a bunch of stonemasons who are experts in wall building. So if you teach someone rhetoric, you have in effect given them a powerful weapon. Thus armed, a man can control his city. He can literally get away with murder by killing someone and then using honeyed words to get himself acquitted of the charge. He could also, as we've just seen, persuade someone to ignore the advice of a doctor. But as we saw in the episode on the Sophist, Gorgias argues that we shouldn't blame the teacher in a case like this. We should blame the student, who misuses the art for evil instead of good. A teacher of rhetoric is like a teacher of boxing. Sure, he's taught his students to beat people up, but it's not his fault if the students go off and use their newfound prowess to clobber their friends or parents. Socrates is surprised at all this. Surely Gorgias can also teach people how to be good? In which case the student certainly will not go off and use their rhetorical superpowers for evil instead of good. This is a crucial moment in the dialogue. Gorgias, perhaps embarrassed to say he can't tell someone the difference between good and evil, agrees with Socrates that he could teach goodness as well as rhetoric. Plato is probably playing fast and loose here. The claim to teach virtue is strongly associated with some Sophists like Protagoras, but the historical Gorgias apparently did not make any such claim. Evidence from other sources has him claiming to teach only rhetoric and not virtue. Plato has, it seems, had his fictional Gorgias say something the real Gorgias was careful not to say. In doing so, the fictional Gorgias has left himself open to a series of Socratic punches. Later on in the dialogue, Socrates makes the rather cheap but nonetheless amusing point that Sophists are always complaining that their students cheat them by not paying their fees, which is odd, given that the Sophists have taught these same students to be good. But there's a deeper problem with Gorgias' position. He said that the whole point of rhetoric is to make a speaker persuasive whether or not they know what they are talking about. The rhetorician will be more persuasive than the doctor on the matter of health, for instance. But it's the doctor who can tell you what would really be good to do about that nagging cough. The rhetorician has no idea. Similarly, if it's a matter of reaching a decision in the democratic assembly of Athens, the rhetorician can persuade the assembly to do whatever he wants them to do, but this art of persuasion will not give the rhetorician any insight into what the assembly really should do. Unless that is, rhetoric turns out after all to be a knowledge of good and evil, of justice and injustice. In that case, it really would be the knowledge of the greatest of human concerns, as Gorgias has boasted. But Gorgias has described rhetoric as producing persuasion in the absence of knowledge. Rhetoric is starting to look like the art of convincing people to make mistakes. Once Socrates gets this far, Gorgias' supporter Polis can no longer restrain himself. He interrupts and demands that Socrates say what he thinks rhetoric is. Socrates explains to Polis that as far as he's concerned, rhetoric isn't really an art at all. It's more like a know-how or a knack. He compares it, and I'll warn you in advance that this next bit may make you hungry, he compares it to knowing how to make pastries. If you ask people to vote on who they'd rather have feeding them, they'll take the pastry chef over the dietitian any time. The pastry chef offers croissants, including those nice ones with the almond filling, whereas the dietitian tells you to eat raw carrots. I don't know about you, but I'm going with the pastry chef. Rhetoric is the same. The rhetorician can flatter and please an audience, but he can't tell the audience what is really good for them. At this point, Polis is incredulous. Socrates is making rhetoric sound like some mean kind of trickery when actually we all know it is majestic in its power. A really good rhetorician will rule in his city, as Pericles and Themistocles did in Athens. He can have his enemies put to death, can do whatever he likes whenever he likes. The art of rhetoric, in other words, confers the sort of power held by a tyrant like Archelaus, the Macedonian king I mentioned at the start of this episode. Polis gives Archelaus as an example of the sort of untrammeled domination he has in mind. And who cares whether rhetoric can tell us what we should really do if it gives us this kind of absolute power? The appeal of the rhetorician, his sail pitch, if you will, is obvious. If you're a young Athenian gentleman who hopes to grow into a position of eminence and prestige, and pretty much all young Athenian gentlemen wanted this, then you should hire a rhetorician. Socrates is not impressed. He insists that without knowledge and wisdom, the rhetoricians may put to death whoever they want, but that doesn't mean they are really powerful. True power is being able to do what is really good for you. If a tyrant or a rhetorician, blundering in his ignorance, uses his so-called power to put to death those who try to give him good advice, then he is actually harming himself as well as his city. Again, Polis scoffs. As if Socrates wouldn't gladly assume the power of life and death if it was handed to him. Socrates replies that for him, the power to put someone to death unjustly is no power at all. In fact, he'd far rather be put to death unjustly himself than put someone else to death without good reason. Here we've come to one of Socrates' most famous doctrines, that it is better to suffer wrongdoing than to do wrong oneself. A man like Archelaus may seem to Polis to be the happiest man in Macedonia, but in fact he is the most miserable, and certainly more miserable than a man who is, for instance, unjustly tortured to death. Better to be tortured to death unjustly than to order that this torture be carried out. Now, I know what you're thinking, it's the same thing that Polis is thinking, namely that Socrates can hardly be serious. Would anyone really prefer to be put to death unjustly than to do wrong himself? Well yes, actually, Socrates for one was fairly cheerful about being put to death unjustly. Not that Socrates wanted to be put to death, but it was a matter of relative indifference to him, whereas he put the highest possible value on his own virtue. But does Socrates have an argument for this attitude, or does he just want to lead by example? He's Socrates, of course he has an argument. And here it is. He gets Polis to agree that justice is a good thing, and injustice a bad thing. But things are good either because they are pleasant, or because they are beneficial, or both. Justice is not much fun, as we all know, all that telling the truth and paying back our debts. So, if justice is a good thing, it can't be because it's pleasant, it must be because it's beneficial. With unjust things it will be the opposite, since they're bad, they must be either unpleasant or harmful, or both. Obviously, being an unjust tyrant isn't unpleasant, in fact it's a non-stop orgy of pleasure, what with all the feasting and chuckling as one devises new and innovative ways to put one's enemies to death. So if injustice is a bad thing, it can only be because it's harmful. If we combine this with the point Socrates made against Gorgias earlier, we get the classically Socratic position on virtue. Virtue is knowing how to get what is really good, so it leads us to whatever is most beneficial. People who lack virtue are those who quite literally don't know what is good for them, and who are thus apt to choose what is harmful for them. Of course the more vicious you are, the worse it will be for you to have the political power Pola so admires, because you will use this so-called power to inflict ever greater harm on yourself. This Socratic position looks pretty convincing, at least from a certain point of view. When we consider monstrous tyrants like Caligula, we don't think of them as happy people, they destroy themselves as well as their people with outsized appetites and poor judgement. Without power and wealth, Caligula would just have been an oversexed thug. But as emperor he was in a position to inflict huge damage on everyone nearby, and no one was nearer to Caligula than Caligula himself. Or if you prefer think of a more down to earth example like a drug addict. A drug addict will be worse off if he has more money, because he will use the money to buy drugs that harm him. On the other hand, there's something that might disturb us about Socrates' defense of virtue. Do we really think that we should be virtuous because it will benefit us? This seems strangely self-centered. We might even want to insist that virtue is admirable precisely because virtuous people are willing to sacrifice their own good for the good of others. We don't think that Mother Teresa was admirable because she had such a good understanding of what was good for Mother Teresa. We think she was admirable because to her, the welfare of the poor was at least as important as her own welfare. So one could perhaps admit that Socrates has mounted a good defense of virtue, but accuse him of failing to defend altruism. In fact, he hasn't even tried to defend altruism. Maybe this is because he's trying to persuade the self-centered Polis that virtue is the right choice. He's appealing to what Polis would find persuasive. But as we'll see in future episodes, Socrates was not the only ancient philosopher to put forward a strikingly egocentric argument for the life of virtue. Be that as it may, the next attack to come at Socrates is not from this direction at all. Instead, when the bell rings for round three, Socrates finds himself facing an even more radical opponent, Calicles. Calicles accuses Socrates of exploiting the feelings of shame felt by both Gorgias and Polis. It was shame which led Gorgias to make the tactical mistake of saying he could teach his students virtue. And it was shame that led Polis to make the crucial concession that justice is a good thing and injustice a bad thing. In fact, Calicles says, Polis should have said the exact opposite. It is justice which is bad and injustice good. Justice is merely the set of conventional rules that society uses to keep the strongest people in line. The law of nature says the opposite. The strongest person should get the greatest rewards. What would these rewards consist in? Not the glow of self-righteous justice that Socrates so admires, but rather what is naturally rather than conventionally good, namely power and pleasure. Calicles thinks, then, that justice is nothing but a trick for getting the strong to surrender their natural right to seize as much pleasure as they can handle. Socrates rightly recognizes that Calicles is raising a serious challenge, one more difficult to defeat than anything Polis has said. Calicles' speech, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to the critique of morality made by no less a figure than Nietzsche. However, Socrates focuses on an aspect of Calicles' view that is not particularly Nietzschean, namely its hedonism. The word hedonism comes from the Greek word hedonē, meaning pleasure, so hedonism is the view that pleasure is the good. Socrates thinks that the life Calicles describes in which every desire is constantly being satisfied sounds more like a life of slavery than mastery. To explain why, he presents a kind of allegory which he takes from certain Sicilian or Italian wise men. This may be an allusion to Empedocles or to the Pythagorean tradition more generally. To simplify slightly, the allegory compares the soul to a jar, like the earthen jars used for holding water and wine in ancient Greece. The hedonistic seeker of pleasures is a man whose jar is full of leaks, so that water rushes out of the jar even as he's desperately pouring it in. The temperate person, by contrast, is like a man with a sealed and watertight jar, which never loses any of its contents. The allegory represents a fundamental flaw of hedonism, which is that pleasure seeking is an endless task. As soon as you've sated yourself at one banquet, you start getting hungry again. As the next day dawns, you have to worry about your next banquet, and the more it takes to satisfy you, the harder it is to get hold of the next round of pleasures. Far better to content oneself with as little as possible so that one is spared the trouble. Calicles sticks to his guns, insisting that he'd rather be someone whose jar is full of holes, so that the water can flow out rapidly and he can fill it with new pleasures. He admires the life of insatiable appetite, even when Socrates tries to show him that there is just as much pain involved in such a life as pleasure. The life of the sealed jars, as far as Calicles is concerned, may as well be the life of a stone. As their argument goes on, it becomes clear that Calicles and Socrates are not going to reach agreement. In fact, they share so little common ground, and Calicles is such an intemperate conversational partner, that, by the end, Socrates is reduced to performing both sides of the discussion. Calicles refuses to speak, and Socrates both asks the questions and answers them. As you might expect, Socrates finds himself to be remarkably cooperative. With this memorable scene, I believe Plato is drawing our attention not just to the impossibility of reasoning with a radical hedonist like Calicles, but also the limitations of Socrates and his art of refutation. Socrates can get no purchase with Calicles because he and Calicles share no common ground. Whereas Polis was ready to admit, out of shame or genuine conviction, that justice is good and injustice bad, Calicles is loathe to concede any premise that Socrates could use to refute him. When he does make such a concession, he invariably takes it back later in the argument. No doubt Plato expects us to prefer the Socratic life of virtue to the Caliklean life of unrestrained hedonism, but Plato also worries that it could be difficult, or impossible, to refute a consistent immoralist. Socrates fails to land a knockout blow in this bout with the arch-immoralist Calicles, but is this failure due to his limitations as a moral teacher, or is something lacking on the part of Calicles, the intended student? This issue will arise again as we turn to an even more famous dialogue and inquiry into the nature of learning itself. In Plato's Meno, we will meet another disciple of Gorgias and make the surprising discovery that what seems to be learning is actually recollecting what we knew before we were even born. So, please remember to tune in for the Meno, next week on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode? We don't need no education. Plato's Meno. Here on the History of Philosophy podcast, we're proud of our listening audience. You the listeners are obviously distinguished by your good taste in podcasts and your interest in the great ideas that animate the history of philosophy itself. An informal survey has shown that you are slightly above average height and good looking in a mysterious, thoughtful kind of way. You are kind to children and animals, and gladly give up your seat to pregnant ladies and the elderly on public transport. You are, in short, a wonderful specimen of humanity, and we can hardly say how glad we are to have you tuning in. But being philosophers, we have to wonder, how did you get this way? How did you get so darn virtuous? Were you born like this? Did you inherit it from your parents, so that virtue comes to you naturally, the way it comes naturally to dogs to turn around in circles for no reason before they lie down? If not, then somebody must have taught you to be virtuous. But how would that work? Is virtue even the sort of thing that can be taught? This very question begins Plato's dialogue, the Meno, one of his most popular and most frequently studied writings. If you've taken an undergraduate course which touched on Plato, chances are pretty good that you were asked to read the Meno, and for good reason. It's not terribly long, it's kind of funny, and it's got at the center of it a memorable scene and a memorable theory about learning. At the risk of giving away the punchline, the theory is that we don't ever actually learn at all. Rather, when we seem to be learning, we are in fact remembering, or recollecting. We are recollecting knowledge not from some point earlier in our lives, but rather from a time before our lives began. Before we were born, we knew everything that can be known, and the apparent process of learning is just a way of jogging the memory to give us access to this knowledge. It's an eloquent proof of Plato's genius, that a dialogue with this fairly zany-sounding theory right in the middle of it has made it onto practically every undergraduate philosophy syllabus in the English-speaking world. When I teach Greek philosophy to first-year students at King's, I build the Plato part of the course around this dialogue. So what is this much-studied dialogue, the Meno, about? It presents itself as a dialogue about virtue. The main characters are Socrates, who is, as usual, ready to shoot down ill-considered answers to philosophical questions, and an interlocutor, Meno. There are also guest appearances by a slave boy and Aenitis, one of the men responsible for Socrates being put on trial and executed. But it's Meno who gives most of the ill-considered answers. He also kicks off the dialogue by asking this question I've been talking about, can virtue be taught? Socrates responds predictably by protesting that he can't say whether virtue is teachable because he doesn't know what virtue is. Perhaps Meno can help him out by giving him a definition of virtue, and then they'll be able to figure out together whether it's teachable. You don't have to have read too many of Plato's Socratic dialogues to know what's coming. Meno will propose some definitions of virtue, Socrates will show that the definitions aren't good ones, and in the end they'll be stuck in puzzlement, what in Greek was called aporia, which means something like an impasse or unsolved problem. This in fact is exactly what happens in the first part of the dialogue. Meno is confident that he can say what virtue is because he is a student of the sophist Gorgias, whom we've seen in previous episodes. Meno recites a version of what he's heard from Gorgias, saying that each kind of person has their own kind of virtue. For instance, the virtue of a man is to be capable in politics, whereas the virtue of a woman is to look after the house. Women's liberation was still a few millennia in the future, although as we'll see when we get to the Republic, Plato was ahead of the curve on this topic, as on so many others. Socrates objects to Meno's answer, complaining that this isn't a definition of virtue but rather a list of the types of virtue, what we want to know is what do all the types have in common. This along with several other exchanges between Socrates and Meno in this part of the dialogue, asks us to focus on the question of what would be a good definition. That's typical of the dialogue as a whole. We think we are going to get a discussion of virtue, and to some extent we do, but we get something perhaps more important, namely a reflection on what it would be to know about virtue. Would knowing what virtue is be the same thing as giving a good definition of virtue? If so, what are good definitions like? They aren't just lists, like the one Meno gave. They also aren't circular, like another definition Meno attempts when he says that virtue is getting good things in a just way. But justice is a virtue, so he's effectively saying that virtue is getting good things virtuously. Not very helpful. Notice that these points would apply not just to virtue, but to anything we might want to define. If I am asked to define podcast, it's not much use if I give you a list of podcasts you can download, or if I say that it's something you can download using podcast-catching software. Neither answer would be a proper definition. So, what Socrates and Meno are discussing has implications well beyond just the question of what virtue might be. This is particularly clear when Socrates gives Meno a model of the kind of definition he wants by offering a definition of geometrical figure, which is not an ethical concept. Just as we've seen in previous episodes, Plato uses a discussion of ethics as an opportunity to get into a discussion of knowledge. After several failed attempts to define virtue, Meno admits that he's stumped. He offers an analogy for what Socrates is doing to him. He says that, whereas before talking to Socrates, he felt very confident in discussing virtue, he's now been paralyzed, like someone who's been stung by a stingray. This paralysis is the condition of aporia, or puzzlement, that I mentioned earlier. Socrates remarks that the analogy only applies to him if he's like a stingray who paralyzes himself, since he too is empuzlement about what virtue might be. At this point, one could imagine the dialogue ending. It would be a much shorter dialogue and a much less interesting one, but it would conform to our expectations of a Socratic dialogue. Socrates meets a confident interlocutor, refutes him, the two are puzzled, the end. But in the case of the Meno, the most interesting part of the dialogue is yet to come. It begins when Meno poses a challenge against the possibility of inquiring into what virtue is, indeed against the possibility of inquiring into anything. The challenge is what we now call Meno's paradox. It goes like this. Either you know something, or you don't. If you know it, you don't need to inquire into it, since you already know it. If you don't know it, then you do need to inquire into it, but how can you? After all, you don't know what it is. So how will you go about searching for it, and how will you recognize it if you do come across it? Now, there seems to be an obvious way to steer between the two horns of this dilemma. The paradox assumes that you either know something so well that you don't need to learn any more about it, or you know absolutely nothing at all. But in fact, neither of these is usually the case. After all, I know a fair amount about Buster Keaton. I know that he was a silent film actor, that he made several of the greatest films in cinematic history like his masterpiece The General, that he is famous for not showing emotional reactions in his films and was therefore nicknamed the Great Stone Face. So I'm not completely ignorant about Buster Keaton. But do I know everything about him, so that there's no need for further inquiry? I haven't even seen all his films, because I haven't bothered to sit through all the talkies he appeared in after his time as a silent film comedian. And I certainly don't know, for instance, what his shoe size was, though judging from the shoes he wears in his movies, it was well into the high figures. So that might be a solution to the paradox. We can know something partially in addition to knowing it completely or not at all. But does that really help? After all, you might ask how we ever got to know anything partially in the first place. Basically we start out not knowing anything. And then we are impaled on the second horn of the dilemma, where we know nothing and have no basis for inquiry. So there is still a problem here. How in short do we get started when we are trying to get knowledge? Perhaps for this reason, Socrates does not try to give the solution I just suggested. He does something more surprising. He tells a kind of religious myth, which he says he's heard from some priests and priestesses. According to this myth, our souls are immortal. They will always exist, and they always have existed. Before our current earthly lives, our souls have already existed for an endless time, and during this endless time, they have learned all there is to know. Thus, we are never in the position of knowing nothing. On the contrary, we always know everything. It's just that we've forgotten most, if not all, the things we knew in our previous existence. It follows that when we seem to be learning new knowledge, we are in fact only being reminded of things we already knew. Now I know what you're thinking. As promised, that does sound pretty zany. Mino isn't immediately convinced either, so Socrates proceeds to demonstrate his theory. In one of the more famous scenes in the Platonic dialogues, he summons a slave boy, whose only intellectual qualification is that he knows Greek. Socrates takes the slave boy through a discussion of a geometrical problem, namely finding the length of the side of a square whose area is 8. He gets the boy to guess, and then to see that his guesses are wrong. This induces puzzlement in the boy, the stingray effect. Then Socrates gets the boy to see the right answer, namely that the side of a square of area 8 is the same length as the diagonal of a square whose area is 4. The nifty part is that he does all this only by means of asking questions. It's the most famous example of the famous Socratic method, teaching by asking questions instead of directly imparting information. Though people often complain that Socrates is asking leading questions throughout the scene, it's true enough that he never asserts anything. The slave boy has to figure it out for himself, albeit with the help of Socrates prompting him. Since the boy is able to get to the right answer in this way, without being given the answer from the outside, Socrates concludes that he must have had the knowledge in him all along, just waiting to be brought out by expert questioning. This slave boy sequence ends the presentation of the so-called theory of recollection, probably Plato's most famous doctrine apart from the theory of forms. It's not clear how strongly Plato is committed to the doctrine, though. For one thing, he doesn't exactly work it into every dialogue he writes. It turns up here in the Meno, and occasionally elsewhere, especially in his dialogue The Phaedo, as we'll see in a later episode. Some people, maybe slightly embarrassed by the religious trappings of the doctrine, don't want to take the mythic story about the soul very seriously. They think that Plato is just trying to set out what we would now call a theory of innate knowledge. In other words, he's saying that humans are born with a great deal of knowledge already built in, so to speak. Theories of innateness are still current in contemporary philosophy, for instance in Noam Chomsky's theories about how babies learn language. A lot of linguistic structure, according to him, is already hard-wired into our brains from birth. So this way of understanding Plato could help to show that he is relevant to our philosophical concerns today. Now I'm the last to deny that Plato is relevant. For example, in a minute we'll see that this very dialogue, the Meno, introduces a distinction that is still fundamental in philosophy today, the distinction between knowledge and true belief. But I don't really think it's right to take the theory of recollection as metaphorically expressing a theory of innateness. For one thing, in The Phaedo the recollection theory is introduced specifically to argue for the immortality of the soul. So at least in that dialogue, the whole point would be ruined unless the theory really does require the souls existing before we were born. If the theory really asks us to buy into an immortal soul which knows everything and pre-existed our birth, we might wonder whether there is some other, less extravagant way of solving Meno's paradox. Let's go back to a suggestion I made earlier when I was talking about Buster Keaton, that it's possible to have partial knowledge instead of complete knowledge. We saw that that doesn't really help because you need to explain where the partial knowledge comes from. But let's try another solution of the same kind. Could there be some other state which falls between ignorance and knowledge? So, for example, could I fall short of knowing what virtue is, while still doing better than total ignorance of virtue? Plato sees that the answer is yes, I could have mere beliefs about virtue. And if those beliefs were true, then that would be better than ignorance, but not as good as certain knowledge. We might even think that Meno himself fits the bill here. He has true beliefs about virtue, for instance that justice is a virtue, but he doesn't know what virtue is. Socrates introduces this idea at the end of the slave boy scene when he says that his questioning has brought out only true beliefs from the boy, but not yet knowledge. To have knowledge, the boy would have to be questioned many times and in different ways. Now it might be our turn to be a bit puzzled. What exactly is the difference between true belief and knowledge? Actually, if I've got true belief, why do I need knowledge? Suppose I have a true belief about who will win tomorrow's horse race. That is just as good a way to win my bet as if I knew the winner for sure. But you might disagree. You might say that if I knew for sure, I'd put down more money on my horse than if I only had a true belief. That seems wrong though. After all, people can be incredibly confident in their beliefs without having knowledge. Plato as usual sees this point, and deals with it later in the dialogue. He has Mino raise exactly the puzzle I just mentioned, namely that true belief is just as good as knowledge. Socrates agrees that it seems like a puzzle, giving the example of knowing how to get to another Greek city called Larissa. If I have a true belief about the right way to get there, that will get me there just as well as knowledge. But then he seems to change his mind, and decides that true belief really is inferior to knowledge. The problem with true belief is that it isn't grounded in a good reason for the belief. Like I just said, it's our ability to give a good reason, and not our degree of confidence, that makes our true beliefs into knowledge. In another famous image, Socrates compares true beliefs to magical statues which run away unless tied down. In the same way, our true beliefs are unreliable unless they are tied down by finding the reason for their truth. One aspect of this unreliability is that people who only have true belief and not knowledge may be unable to impart the truth to other people. That's suggested at least by some further reflections in the Mino on the subject of whether virtue can be taught. That was, after all, the initial question of the dialogue, and it remains important throughout. In between the slave boy scene and the discussion of true belief, Mino and Socrates speculate that virtue would be teachable if it were a kind of knowledge. This rings some Socratic bells. As we've seen in previous episodes, Socrates was notorious for thinking that virtue is knowledge. But if virtue were knowledge and were thus teachable, shouldn't there be people around who teach it? This is the cue for the entrance of Anitis. As I said earlier, he is one of the men who had Socrates indicted for corrupting the youth and introducing novel gods. In this scene, we get a glimpse of why he might have done so. Socrates asks Anitis whether he supposes that there are people who can teach virtue. The obvious candidates are the Sophists. As we saw in another episode, some Sophists claim to teach virtue in return for money. But Anitis has nothing but scorn for the Sophists. He says one is better off asking any Athenian citizen if one wants to learn virtue. Socrates counters by reeling off a whole list of famous Athenian statesmen, like Pericles, who were clearly virtuous, but had vicious sons. If being virtuous makes you able to teach virtue, wouldn't these men have taught virtue to their own sons? That's enough to make Anitis furious. He makes the none-too-subtle parting remark that Socrates should watch his step, since the city is apt to mistreat him if he doesn't mind his manners. But this, of course, is no answer to Socrates' latest puzzle. If virtue is knowledge, as Socrates typically claims, then why are there no teachers of it? Here, true belief might come to the rescue. The virtuous men might be the ones who have true beliefs about what to do, rather than knowledge. Socrates even suggests that such men are given their beliefs by divine dispensation, given that they haven't done the philosophical work required to ground their beliefs in good reason, or whatever it is that makes a true belief knowledge. Now, here in the Meno, Plato doesn't say in any further detail what you would have to do to turn true beliefs into knowledge. But we should give him credit for discovering a problem that still obsesses philosophers today. He's right that true belief is not the same thing as knowledge. After all, suppose I just believe anything anyone tells me. That would get me a lot of true beliefs, but also a lot of false ones. And it seems obvious that none of the beliefs I got this way would count as knowledge. On the other hand, it seems equally obvious that true belief has some close relation to knowledge. If I know something, then I must believe it, and it must be true. The question is then what you need to add to true belief in order to make knowledge. This question dominates the Platonic work we'll be looking at next, a dialogue that takes up the problems of the Meno and carries them a good deal further. So don't forget to tune in for Plato's Theaetetus next week on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I know because the caged bird sings, Plato's Theaetetus. Those of you who spend time with children will know that between the adults and the children of this world, a war is raging. Skirmishes in this war are fought across the land, every morning, and both sides use all the weapons at their disposal, tantrums, the silent treatment, withheld treats, even in extreme cases, the naughty step. I am speaking of course about the question of how warmly to dress. The children's perspective on this issue is well entrenched. It is not nearly as cold outside as you parents would claim, and we aren't going to wear that winter coat, though we may be willing to consider a light sweater. The parent's point of view is equally firm. You'll catch your death of cold. Now, I guess that most of the people listening to this podcast are above the age of 12, and so naturally favour the adult perspective. There is, we quite naturally think, a fact of the matter about how cold it is outside. Just look at the thermometer. Yet the children can turn to us and say, but I don't feel cold, so for me it isn't cold. And they've got a point, albeit a point which is undermined slightly when they start shivering, even as they're insisting on how warm it is. The point is that it is for each person to say how cold the air feels to them. You might even say that, whatever the temperature may be, the air's being cold is nothing more than the air's seeming cold to each of us. This prompts an unsettling thought. It's not implausible that the air is really neither cold nor hot in itself, but is cold for you and warm for me. I grew up in Boston, so I'm made of tougher stuff than you are. And we can think of other cases. Most of us have been in disputes about whether a certain piece of clothing is blue or green, and maybe it is just green for one person, blue for someone else. Thus, the unsettling thought, what is everything like this? Suppose that there is no truth apart from the way things seem to each person. Things may be warm for me, cold for you, blue for me, green for you, good for me, bad for you, while having none of these features in themselves. In that case, nothing is true absolutely. Rather, truth is relative. Something might be true for me and false for you, but neither false nor true in itself. This relativist theory of truth is one that still arises in contemporary philosophy, but it has its roots in the dialogues of Plato. In particular, it is explored in my very favourite platonic dialogue, the Theaetetus. In a few previous episodes, I've mentioned the word epistemology, which means the study of knowledge, because the ancient Greek word for knowledge or understanding was episteme. We saw last week that Plato's Meno has quite a bit to say about epistemology, and we found interesting epistemological ideas already in the pre-Socratics, but the first work to devote itself fully to epistemology is the Theaetetus. It explores some of the ideas of the Meno but goes well beyond them, investigating not only this relativist theory of truth, but also the question of how false judgement is possible and how knowledge relates to belief. The main characters are our old friend Socrates, Theodorus, a mathematician, and a young man who is a mathematician like Theodorus and profoundly ugly like Socrates. He shares Socrates' protruding eyes and snubbed nose. This is Theaetetus, one of the most admirable characters ever to engage with Socrates in Plato's dialogues. Despite his youth, he shows much more commitment to the philosophical search than the older Theodorus. He offers several attempts at saying what knowledge might be. As we have come to expect in Socratic dialogues, each attempt is refuted, but he doesn't lose heart, and we learn a great deal about knowledge in the course of the dialogue even if the characters fail to produce a definition of knowledge that satisfies them. Theaetetus' first attempt is to say that knowledge is perception. The word for perception here is isthesis, which incidentally is where we get the word aesthetics. It can mean sense perception, that is vision, hearing, smell, and so on, or more broadly any kind of perception, including the perception of things with the mind. Especially if we take it in this broader sense Theaetetus' definition looks plausible, we know something when we perceive it. Or perhaps one might say, we know when we grasp that something is the case. But Socrates shows that Theaetetus' definition could be taken in a more unsettling way. If knowledge is perception, then whatever seems to me to be the case must actually be the case for me. Here he gives the same example I used a moment ago. The wind seems warm to me and cold to you, so I perceive the wind as warm and you perceive it as cold. If perception is knowledge, then that means that I know the wind is warm and you know it is cold. How could this be? Well, only if truth is relative. It's true for me that the wind is warm, and true for you that it is cold, but there is no such thing as the wind's being truly warm or cold in itself relative to no perceiver. After all, knowledge is nothing but perception. Socrates adds that, in putting forward such a view, Theaetetus would be more in good company. In particular, this relativistic theory of truth was asserted by the great sophist Protagoras. As we saw in our previous episode on the sophists, Protagoras was famous for saying, man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, of the things that are not that they are not. Like Theaetetus' definition of knowledge as perception, this man is the measure doctrine could be taken in a lot of different ways. But Socrates wants us to take both claims as boiling down to relativism about truth. If I am the measure of whether the wind is warm, then there is nothing more to the wind's being warm than it's being warm for me and not cold for me. The way things seem to me determines the way the wind is and isn't for me. But wait, there's more. Socrates adds that Theaetetus and Protagoras have another heavy hitter on their side, namely the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. You might remember that when I talked about Heraclitus, I said that Plato portrays his illustrious predecessor as believing in a doctrine of total flux. That is, everything is constantly changing in every respect and there is no stability in us or the world around us. The Theaetetus isn't the only dialogue where Plato ascribes this view to Heraclitus, though it is the most famous example. But why does the flux doctrine go along with relativism about truth? This is a slightly complicated question, but the basic answer is that if protagorean relativism is true, then the things in the world around us will have no stable natures from moment to moment. They will only be whatever they seem to be to various perceivers and this is changing all the time, according to Heraclitus as he's presented here. So, on this view, it would turn out that nothing is cold and nothing is warm. Rather, everything is always changing in every way. Actually, it might be even worse than this. If we say that what is changing from warm to cold or vice versa is both warm and cold, then the air will always be both warm and cold. It was with this in mind that Aristotle later accused Heraclitus of denying the principle of non-contradiction. These radical consequences of the flux doctrine give us plenty of reason for rejecting it, and if buying into the relativist theory of truth means buying into the flux theory, then maybe we'll give up on relativism as well. But protagoras will try to persuade us that the relativist theory isn't as implausible as it seems. If you're interested in which things are good, then obviously what you're interested in is which things are good for you. What would it even mean for something to be good but not for you or for anyone in particular? This perhaps connects the theory Plato is considering to the real historical protagoras. He claimed to teach virtue, and may have supposed this was possible because the good is the advantageous, and that he could teach you how to get things you would consider to be advantageous, like political power. Whether protagoras really held the radical epistemological theory that Plato ascribes to him here in the Theaetetus is of course another matter, but let's leave that aside, and also leave aside the problems about flux and just consider the problem of how to refute someone who adopts the relativist position on truth. Now I know what you're thinking. This will be easy. Just point to a thermometer, which tells us an objective fact about how cold the air is, but not so fast. Firstly, protagoras can agree with your kids that whatever the thermometer says, it's up to each of us to say whether it is cold or warm for us. Secondly, he can point out that the thermometer is itself something you perceive. If it seems to you that the thermometer reads say 30 degrees, then it's true for you that the thermometer reads 30 degrees. It's true for you simply because you perceive it to be the case. To insist on there being an absolute truth about the reading of the thermometer is just to assume that there is a truth independent of any perceiver, and that's what protagoras denies. Man is the measure of all things, right? But Socrates has a couple of other tricks up his sleeve. He starts with abuse. Wouldn't it be just as true to say that a pig or a baboon is the measure of all things? Abuse is always satisfying of course, but this argument doesn't carry much weight. Fortunately, he has more philosophically satisfying points to make too. For instance, on this man is the measure doctrine, there'd be no point consulting experts. Why pay to go to the doctor if you are just as good a measure as the doctor is? If it seems to you that taking aspirin will cure that nasty bout of appendicitis, then it's true for you. This sounds like a theory that will reduce the life expectancy of its adherents, reason enough to reject it. Closely related is an objection about predicting the future. If I expect to recover from my illness, then it will be true for me that I will recover. If it then later seems to me that I'm still sick, then it will seem to me that I have not recovered, and so it will be true for me that I didn't recover. It's hard to see how both of these could be the case. But Socrates' most interesting objection illustrates a classic, perennially useful philosophical maneuver. Whenever you're presented with a bold new theory, especially a skeptical theory, ask whether the theory could be true on its own terms. For example, if someone says that nothing is true, you can ask him whether this claim is itself true. Or if someone says that language is meaningless, you can ask him how he is able to convey this idea in a sentence. In the same way, Socrates suggests that Protagoras' relativism doctrine is self-refuting. For, even if Protagoras agrees with the doctrine, Socrates does not. Thus it will be true for Socrates that Protagoras' doctrine is false. Indeed, since this follows from Protagoras' doctrine, it will even be true for Protagoras that for Socrates the doctrine is false. Thus, Protagoras is bound by his own doctrine to admit that his doctrine is false. But maybe this trick is a bit too tricky. Even if Protagoras has to admit that the doctrine is false for Socrates, he doesn't have to admit that it's false in itself, or really false. Remember, according to him, there's no such thing as something's just really being false or true. There's only something's being false or true to you, to me, to Socrates. Before we get any dizzier, let's leave relativism behind and move on to another major theme of this dialogue, the possibility of false belief. This theme arises when Theaetetus accepts that knowledge is not, after all, perception, and makes another suggestion. Perhaps knowledge is having a true belief. After all, when I know something, I have a belief about it, and obviously it can't be a false belief, so why not say I know something when I have a true belief about it? All well and good, says Socrates. But if we want to uphold this definition, we need to understand how it could be that some beliefs are true, and others false. And here we will run afoul of those pesky sophists again. Some sophists suggested that it is impossible to say or believe anything false, in which case everything is just a matter of persuasion. This challenge appears in several Platonic dialogues. We've already seen it arising in the Euthydemus, but the Theaetetus is again probably the most famous case. The argument here for the sophistical view is rather reminiscent of Minos' paradox, which we looked at last time. It goes like this. Either I know something or I don't. If I know about it then I won't make a mistake about it, thanks to my knowledge. But if I don't know about it then I can't think about it, so I won't be able to make a mistake then either. In other words, I'll have either perfect knowledge of each thing, or no knowledge of it at all, and in neither case will I get things wrong. So it's impossible to make a mistake, to believe anything false. As with Minos' paradox, it looks like the way out is to say that there is some middle ground where I know or grasp something well enough to make a mistake about it, but not so well that I am immune to error. Socrates presents two analogies to suggest how this could work. First he says, imagine that your memory is like a wax tablet, the kind they used to write on in ancient Greece. When you perceive something, that's like a stamp making an impression in the wax of your mind. Some people have tough, dirty wax and are slow on the uptake, others have fluid wax and get impressions quickly, but lose them just as fast. Others have wax which is ideally suited, easily stamped, but also good at holding the impressions. Quite a nice image of how memory works, really. Okay, so now for false judgement. That would happen when there is a mismatch between something you perceive and an existing impression in the wax of your memory. For instance, I think I am watching a silent film starring Buster Keaton, but actually I'm confused. That lovable fellow on the screen is in fact Charlie Chaplin, and I'm matching the visual image to the wrong stamped impression in my wax tablet. As Socrates says, it's like putting your right foot into your left shoe. Notice that this solves the sophisticated dilemma. I can make a mistake about something because in a way I know it, and in a way I don't. I know who Buster Keaton is because I must have got acquainted with him to have an impression of him in my memory, but this doesn't guarantee that I'll be error-free in identifying people as Buster Keaton. This is a compelling analogy and for once the proposal isn't exactly rejected in the dialogue. Rather, the characters realize that even if it works for cases of mistaken identity and perception, there are many cases of false judgement where it will not help. For instance, what is going on when I add 7 and 5 and get 11? There's nothing here about impressions being made on our memory by perception, and yet I've still made a mistake. So Socrates produces another image in place of the wax tablet. Imagine, he says, that your soul is like an aviary, a bird cage, with lots of birds flying around in it, each of which represents a piece of knowledge. Whenever you've learned something, you've acquired a bird and put it into your aviary. What happens when you add 5 to 7 and get 11 is that you reach into your aviary and pull out the 11 bird instead of the 12 bird. Again, your knowledge of 11 actually enables you to make the mistake, the way your knowledge of Buster Keaton enabled you to mistake Charlie Chaplin for him. But Socrates and Theaetetus decide that this model too is problematic. It means that when you make a mistake, it is precisely by virtue of knowing that you get things wrong. It is paradoxically because of your knowledge of 11 that you are able to have a false belief about 5 plus 7. The indefatigable Theaetetus has another suggestion though. What if your aviary contains birds representing ignorance as well as birds representing knowledge? Then when you make a mistake, you've just grabbed the wrong kind of bird. But that ruins the whole point, which was to explain how we can know something just enough to make a mistake about it without knowing it so well that we are immune to error. So, where does all that leave us? Right back where we started, without a general account of false belief, but still thinking that maybe knowledge is the same thing as true belief. Ah, but it isn't, says Socrates. Just consider the case of a jury. They might be persuaded by some fancy lawyer that a certain man is innocent of a crime. And the man really is innocent. But we wouldn't say that the jury knows, since they only believe this because the lawyer was slick enough to persuade them. Thus, they have a true belief, but not knowledge. So much for that definition. Yet, Theaetetus still feels, and today's epistemologists tend to agree, that knowledge must have something to do with true belief. Maybe knowledge is true belief plus something else as well. Something the jurors are lacking, but which you would have if you were, say, an eyewitness at the murder, and know that the accused man is innocent. It's no easy task to say what that would be. As I say, modern day epistemologists are still struggling with the question of how knowledge relates to true belief. In so doing, they are taking up a challenge first thrown down here in Theaetetus. For the rest of the dialogue, Socrates and Theaetetus explore the possibility that some kind of rational account, a logos, that favorite word of Heraclitus, is what you'd need to add to true belief to render it into knowledge. As we expect by now, they don't manage to make this work, and yet we do learn a bit more about knowledge, in particular, how it does and does not relate to giving an account of yourself when you believe something. This last part of the dialogue is sufficiently complicated that giving an account of it would be no easy matter, and I'm just about out of time anyway, so I'll close there for now. But Plato's attitude towards belief and knowledge will continue to take center stage in the next few episodes. In two weeks, I'll finally be looking at Plato's theory of forms, and trying to discover whether postulating forms could help us understand what knowledge is. But next time, we'll have a return appearance by my colleague M.M. McCabe, who will chat with me about Plato's views on knowledge. So, don't make the mistake of missing next week's episode on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be another interview with my colleague here at King's, Professor M.M. McCabe. Hi, M.M. Hi, Peter. Today, we're going to be talking about Plato's views on knowledge, which is a topic I've been looking at in several recent episodes. I was wondering whether you could tell me, for example, whether Plato thinks that I could know the fact that I'm sitting in a chair right now talking to you. Is that the kind of thing he thinks I could know? I think a lot of people would say that he thinks you can't know something like that because a lot of people believe that on Plato's account, knowledge is determined by what it's of, so that you can only know when you have objects of a particular specified kind. I'm not sure that that tells the right story. I'm not sure that it tells the story about why knowledge should be anything much that we care about, in particular, why we should associate knowledge with virtue if we can't think of knowledge as having as its objects the sort of ordinary mundane things like sitting in a chair. But I think there is a problem for him with the idea that knowledge could be of something on its own, like, here I am sitting in my chair. So there are two separate questions here, it seems to me. One of them is whether one thinks about knowledge in these strictly delimited ways that contemporary philosophy thinks about it, so that you might think of knowledge in terms of I know that, some true proposition, and I know it because I'm justified in believing it, and so on and so forth, or whether, in fact, knowledge is something broader and wider than that. And would that mean that if I know anything, then it means that I know some other things as well, so I couldn't just know one thing at a time, for example, that I'm sitting in a chair? I think Plato thinks that. I think it's not that he thinks that knowledge is only direct access to some rarefied objects, for example. I think that he thinks that knowledge has to be somehow or other systematic. There are two outstanding reasons for that. One of them is that he thinks that knowledge is connected with explanation. You don't know that something is true unless you know why it's true. So at least to know one thing, you've got to know one other thing. Namely why the first thing is true. Namely why the first thing is true. So you've got to know, as soon as you know something, you know two things. And in fact, then that spreads out to a whole series of... Is there a certain thing I would know, namely the fact that I know it? Exactly. So there are two conditions, I think. One of them is a condition on how what we know is structured. The other is an internal condition on how we know that we know, how it is that we think about our own epistemic condition. And it seems to me, at any rate, that those twin conditions on knowledge for him determine how we understand what he thinks knowledge is. And they make sense then of a lot of the other connections that he makes between knowledge and virtue. Right, which we'll get onto in a second. But I first just want to think about that a little bit more. One result of what you just said, I guess, is that I couldn't ever know something without knowing that I know it. Exactly. So what that would mean is, if I can't know something without knowing that I know it, then I guess if I asked him, well, Plato, tell me what it's like to know something, he would say, if you have to ask me, then you've already failed. There are two ways of understanding what you just asked me, though, aren't there? One of them is whether I can give you an account of what it feels like to know something, which is one question, which maybe your response would be the right one to that. Well, you know, if you don't know, if you've got to ask, you ain't never going to know. But I think there's another way of thinking about it, which is that huge amounts, huge swathes of the arguments in the dialogues that seem to end in a poria, in impasse, are actually about what it is to know. They're about what the conditions are that would allow us to explain something or that would allow us to understand what it is for us to know something. And that happens into, again, these twin conditions keep turning up. So if you think about the Euthyphro, for example, the Euthyphro doesn't only tell us about the conditions for understanding piety or the conditions for explaining what piety is, but they allow us to generalise it to explaining what courage is, what all sorts of other things are. So part of the endeavour in the dialogues themselves, even although the dialogues come to no resolution of the question in hand, a great deal of the work gets done in the discussion between the characters about what it is they're trying to do. And that discussion is about, is partly about this condition on knowledge of explanation, condition that we need to be able to say why something is so, what it is for something to be pious or brave or whatever. At the same time there's a whole series of other themes, particularly in the Socratic dialogues, but they turn up over and over again about what the internal conditions of knowledge are, what it is to know that you know. And somebody might say, well that's just trivial, what it is to know. Of course, when you know, you know that you know. You get that for free. Right. And Socrates is not interested in that. Socrates is much more interested in thinking about how knowledge makes a difference to our psychological constituency. And I mean psychological in a quite strict sense. I don't mean psychological in anything that might be separable from accounts of knowledge, but it's an internal condition on what knowledge should be like. And is this why virtue and knowledge are so closely related? Because, I mean, what you just said seems to imply that for me to have knowledge would be for my soul to become a certain way. And my soul's being a certain way sounds like being virtuous. Is that right? I think that's where the connection gets forged. It's not clear which direction it comes from, that if he starts out by thinking about virtue he ends up thinking about knowledge all the other way around. But it's certainly true. It always seems like he goes back and forth. Well I think that's probably right. And that you understand the connection between virtue and knowledge because virtue, like knowledge, is a state of soul. To what extent do you think that he's just working out the implications of something Socrates seems to have thought, which is that virtue is knowledge? For example, if I'm courageous, that means that I know what to do in battles. Or maybe it means that I know what courage is. For example, I can give a definition of courage. Do you think that Plato is just exploring that Socratic idea? Or is there something, as it were, distinctively Platonic here, which isn't Socratic? I think the former, a large amount of Plato's investigation into knowledge is dominated by Socrates all the way through to the Theaetetus and perhaps beyond. So I think it is Socratic. And I think it's also right to think of it as an exploration because it's not clear that he's got, as it were, a view that's lurking behind everything he says, but rather that he's trying to work out how to make the proper connections between virtue and knowledge in such a way as not to trivialise either. I think that's... but there's an overriding condition that somehow or other this is going to explain, whatever we say about the relation to virtue and knowledge, is going to explain the claim that he makes, for example, in the Euthydemus that the one thing that's good is wisdom. Now that's a very, very high claim. What he actually means is the one thing that's good itself by itself, actually in the context of the argument there. But that's an enormously strong claim. So we need... it works as a kind of challenge. It says, well, all right, so if that's what you think is one way of understanding the relation between virtue and knowledge, you'd better be able to say something pretty interesting, both about what virtue is and about what knowledge is, let alone about the connection between the two. So when we started off talking about this, I gave a kind of trivial example. I know that I'm sitting in this chair talking to you, and clearly Plato thinks that knowledge is something more advanced than that. Now it's starting to sound like knowledge is incredibly advanced, so I have to be a kind of perfect philosophical sage, maybe in order to know anything. Is this one reason... well, I guess maybe there's two questions here. One is, does Plato think that? And the other question is, is that why Plato is so worried about this problem of how you get started? So for example, in Minow's paradox, the problem seems to be, if I start out in a position of complete ignorance, how will I get to knowledge? You might think it should be very easy, right? If I'm sitting here, then it's easy for me to come to know that I'm sitting here. But if he thinks that knowledge is this incredibly high-level attainment, so it means being virtuous, then you can see how it would be pretty hard for me to get from being this ordinary schmo to being this sage, and it's hard to know how I would even get started. I think maybe there are three things that one can... three directions one can go from that thought. One of them is, why is he so worried about starting? How does the worry about starting connect with the worry about finishing? Because you might think that the starting question is about a completely different conception of knowledge than the question about whether I have to be a fully-fledged sage in order ever to be a knower at all. The third question goes back to your first question to me, which is about scope. If there's a very high condition on knowledge, so it might be like being a sage, what's it got to do with sitting in a chair? Is it that I can only really know sage-y sorts of things? Do I have to have grand things, or can I know boring things? And it seems to me that there, again, the connection between virtue is very important, because we need to be able to figure out what context virtue is in, as well as what context knowledge is in. So if virtue is about living a life, and it's connected with knowledge, then the knowledge that it's connected with will have to be about not just sage-y things, but boring things like ordinary moral questions, and ordinary practical questions as well. For example, how do I get to Larissa, this other Greek city that's mentioned in the video? Right. I mean, there are examples in Plato of these currently just facts of the matter. So there's how do I get to Larissa in the Theaetetus, there's whether this man is actually guilty of the crime on the jury. Right. So the question there is whether there are low conditions on those kinds of claims. Supposing there is a fact of the matter about where Larissa is, or whether the bloke did whatever dreadful thing he's supposed to have done. How much is it enough to add to make that into knowledge? And the question arises over and over again. And there are times when it looks as if he supposes that we can add something moderately low-key to the question, but at other times it looks as though he thinks that no addition is enough without having all the additions. It looks as though he thinks that coming up with a proper account of why the thing that we believe is true is true engages us with being able to say why everything is true. So once you start to think about it like that, it's slightly misleading because contemporary discussions about knowledge turn on questions about individual propositions and whether you can account for them as being true. So if they're beliefs and they're true, what kinds of justification would allow you to think that they're knowledge? I don't think Plato's dealing with it in those terms. I think he is thinking much more comprehensively, not so much about justification as about explanation. And he supposes that explanation is much more global than anything that we might think looks like justification. So knowledge will be holistic on that account. And is that where the forms, the famous theory of forms will come in? I haven't really talked about that in the podcast yet, but if what you just said is right, that he thinks that to know anything gets you off on this process of thinking about explanation, that thinking about explanation in some way would change your soul so that you'd become virtuous and that explanations kind of all hang together. One reason you might think that the explanations all hang together and think that the things that you wind up knowing are structured and harmonious in just the way that your virtuous soul is structured and harmonious, one reason to think that would be if what you're knowing is these other objects, which are the forms, which are themselves all structured and interrelated. I haven't really gotten into the forms in the podcast yet, but I think it still might be worth wondering whether we can say all these things without wheeling the forms on, or whether it's as it were an epistemology which you can embrace without also embracing the theory of forms. I think you probably could. I want to come back to the thing you just said about virtue and the state of soul, so leave that on one side for a second. It seems to me that you could perfectly easily say something about knowledge such that you only know when you know all there is to know without being committed to something about transcendent entities that constitute the explanations of the things that you know, which is one way of thinking about the theory of forms. On the other hand, I think it's important to remember that one of the conditions that Plato seems to put on all of these accounts of knowledge is that what knowledge is about is something that's real. Whatever it is he thinks counts as real. So you don't have to believe in the theory of forms, but you have to be a realist about whatever the object is. I think you have to be a realist. But then that comes back to the question about virtue, it seems to me. So put it like this. One might think that, well, knowledge under those conditions is just a huge expertise. It's just a most enormous kind of science that includes any possible science that you might care to think of. Whenever there's a new science, because you're a knower, you know that science as well. There are some jokey arguments about that. You've talked about the Euthydemus, and there are some jokey arguments about this in the Euthydemus. If that's how one thinks about it, if one thinks about knowledge as this just overarching super skill, and an overarching super skill that's directed at reality, you might then think that what it would be to be virtuous is something rather kind of dismal, because what knowledge will then allow you to do is sort of calculate it. So if knowledge looks like that, it looks like a calculating skill, and you'll be able to tell what's the right thing to do on any given occasion. Of course, what that leaves out of account is that you'll also be able to tell what the wrong thing is to do on any given occasion. And there's nothing, there's no account internal to that super skill account of knowledge that gives you an account of why you would behave in any particular way. So if the connection between knowledge and virtue looks like that, so it makes it look as though virtue and knowledge are connected, because knowledge allows you to figure out what the good things are in life, it's already tendentious about what makes you care about the good things. Or it's limited, because it supposes that the only things you care about are good for you. So you can see that it would give you an account of how you get, how you maximise your pleasures, for example, and he's got an argument in the protagonist that offers that, offers an account of how that would work. But it's a very dismal account of morality. It's also a very dismal account of knowledge, because actually it fails to register the thing we were talking about earlier on. It gives you a knowledge that's determined very much by its objects, but nothing about the state of soul that knowledge, it looks as though he thinks knowledge is. So we go back to Minos paradox. Minos paradox requires that knowing involves knowing that you know. It looks as though that's a strong condition. Socrates' account of how he knows that he knows nothing is again a strong condition on self-knowledge. So what's the connection then between self-knowledge and virtue? What would it be to be virtuous? Why wouldn't that be just vicious? Why couldn't it be, as it were, the obverse? I'm really good at getting what I want, and what I want is bad, for example. Exactly. So what he needs to be able to show is first of all that knowledge is itself a good state of soul, and second of all that that good state of soul counts as what we would think of as virtue. It seems to me like what you just said implies that on the side of the soul, as it were, there's this connection between being good and all the things that you know. So the fact that you know what you know and that you know you know what you know is basically what it is to be virtuous for Plato. And so there's no way of sort of pulling apart the contents of knowledge and the goodness of knowledge. They really amount to the same thing. And in fact in the theory of forms it looks like he has something like the same view. So you've got all these forms, but then as we'll see in the Republic, he has the form of the good, as it were, explaining the goodness of all the forms. And so even if you were right earlier to say that, as it were, the epistemology floats free of the theory of forms so that you could have this very strong platonic theory of knowledge without embracing the theory of forms, is it still going to be true that this relationship between the goodness of the whole system and the elements of the system is kind of paralleled both in the soul, on the knowledge side, and in the forms on the object side? Do you think that's fair? Well I think it's certainly one way of answering the hanging question about what makes it more of a virtue that knowledge gives you, or that knowledge constitutes, rather than vice or just jolly prudence. Right. I'm just good at getting pleasure. Really, really good at getting pleasure. I mean that kind of thing. And it looks as though... So I agree that there's one paradigm of that would be that what knowledge is of is held together by the good, so the knowledge itself must be held together by the good. That looks a bit gerrymandered, you might think. Oh, cripes, I haven't fitted in enough stuff about goodness, so I better sort of have a form of the good. And so I think there's more to it than that, and I think that maybe one of the ways of coming at this is to think a little bit about virtue itself, and to think about... So if you think about contemporary virtue theory, this isn't as much of a red herring as it sounds, one of the things that interests contemporary virtue theorists is the location of value. And what Plato wants to insist on, I think, in connecting virtue and knowledge, and in having knowledge look like this self-knowing holistic system, is that the value resides in the knower, in the agent. It's not that you pick it up from bits of pleasure here, there, and everywhere. Something about value is held together by the agent, by the person who's doing the knowing. Now that sounds a bit kind of wild and woolly. It fits with the claim that wisdom is the only good itself by itself. It's a little bit more uneasy in its fit with the theory of forms. And speaking of the theory of forms, that's what I'll be talking about next episode, and for a few episodes after that, next episode I'll be talking about Plato's Phaedo, so please tune in for that. But for now, I'll just thank Emma McCabe for appearing again on the podcast. Thank you very much.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Famous Last Words, Plato's Phaedo. When a swan is about to die, it sings. It sings more beautifully than it ever has before, for it belongs to the god Apollo, and has the gift of prophecy. So the swan knows it will die, and sings with joy, because it is finally about to join its divine master. Or so it least says Socrates, who likewise dedicated himself to Apollo, and met death with hope rather than reluctance. He says as much to his friends, who gather around him in prison, in Plato's dialogue the Phaedo. It dramatizes Socrates' swan song, his final philosophical discussion, and his death upon cheerfully drinking down the hemlock. The Phaedo is a great work of literature, whose portrayal of bravery, even eagerness, in the phase of death, has inspired readers from the ancient world down to the present. From a philosophical point of view, too, it is one of Plato's greatest dialogues, in part because it is the first dialogue to set out the theory of forms. The theory of forms is usually taken to be Plato's most important doctrine, so some listeners may have been wondering how many episodes I was going to get through without mentioning it. But as it turns out, forms are not mentioned explicitly in all, or even most, of Plato's dialogues. They are absent from the dialogues we've looked at so far, like the Gorgias, Mino, and Theaetetus. And even in the Phaedo, the main topic of the dialogue is not forms, but the immortality of soul. This is a matter of some concern to Socrates, since each page of the dialogue is bringing him closer to his death scene. In what must be a swipe at Aristophanes, Plato has Socrates say that even a comic poet wouldn't blame him for irrelevant prattling when he takes up this topic at this time and place. It's typical of the way Plato handles the topic of forms, that even here in one of the handful of dialogues where they are discussed directly, they play only a supporting role. So let's start not from forms, but from this question of the soul's immortality. One might suppose that the first order of business would be to establish that we do have a soul. But Socrates and his friends simply take this for granted. Indeed, they seem to presuppose some kind of dualism as a basis for their discussion. By dualism, I mean just that they assume that the soul is one thing and the body another. But this is not to say that they assume that the soul is incorporeal or immaterial. Socrates suggests at one point that his friends may think our souls are like smoke that could blow away upon death. And even if the soul is immaterial, it might depend on the body for its existence, so that Socrates' soul will vanish when he drinks the hemlock. As one of his friends suggests, soul could be like the harmony of a tuned string instrument which would not be a body but would be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed. Socrates' task, then, is to show that the soul is not just distinct from the body, but is capable of surviving independently from the body. Along the way, he will show that it is indeed immaterial, invisible, all the things we expect a Platonic dualist to believe about the soul. So how should we prove this? To use a rather lame joke that Plato himself seems to find amusing, you will all recollect that in the Meno, Socrates has argued that when we seem to be learning, we are actually recollecting things we knew before we were born. After the characters remind each other about this idea, remind, get it? They realize that it implies that the soul existed before the body did. So obviously the soul can exist without the body, since it used to do so. Furthermore, the soul must be akin to the things it knew before birth. This is the cue for the forms to make their entrance. What we knew before birth, and now recollect, are things like the beautiful itself and the equal itself, or as we would usually put it when talking about Plato, the form of beauty and the form of equal. These are not physical objects, but the natures in which beautiful or equal physical objects partake. So, we already have another way to show the soul's independence of body, the so-called affinity argument. According to this argument, the soul must be akin to these things it knows, the forms. And since these things are eternal and immaterial, the soul too is eternal and immaterial. Notice again that these arguments are intended to prove the soul's immortality, not the existence of forms. In fact, it looks like we are just assuming the existence of forms to prove that the soul is immortal. So is the theory of forms something Plato wants us to take for granted, like the distinction between soul and body? And how does he expect us to know what these forms are like? It would be pretty disappointing if Plato gave us no reason to believe in them, and no explanation of what they are. But wait, there's more. Plato invites us to think more carefully about how recollection of forms would actually work. It might be helpful to consider other cases of being reminded. So imagine being reminded of your best friend. As Socrates points out, you could be reminded of him or her by something which is nothing like your friend, like a piece of their clothing, say. Alternatively, you could be reminded by something which is like the friend, say, a painting of the friend. In this second kind of case, it's natural to compare the two things. For instance, you will judge whether or not the painting is a good likeness of your friend. It's here that Socrates makes a really interesting point about forms. He suggests that when you see two equal sticks and are reminded of the form of equal, it is like seeing a portrait, which is in an imperfect likeness of your friend. The sticks do resemble the form of equal, because they are equal to one another, but they're also unlike the form because in some other way they are unequal. It's not totally clear what Socrates means here, but to me the most persuasive reading is this. Imagine two equally long sticks, and a third longer one next to them. The stick on the left is equal to the stick in the middle, and vice versa. But both are unequal to the stick on the right, which is longer than them. Thus, sticks number one and two, the one on the left and in the middle, are both equal and unequal, unlike the form, which is only equal. As a student of mine put it to me earlier this year, the form is equal, and the sticks are equal, but some equal things are more equal than others. This sort of example crops up in other Platonic dialogues too. For instance, Helen. You remember her from the Iliad, the one whose face was so good at ship launching. She is beautiful compared to other human women, but not beautiful compared to a goddess. She is thus both beautiful and not beautiful. Or take the example of repaying a debt. This is normally good. Suppose for instance you borrowed an axe from a friend and are going to return it. That sounds good, but suppose your friend has gone insane, and is now an axe murderer, wondering where he might be able to find an axe. These two examples, by the way, crop up in the Cradulus and Republic respectively. We'll be looking at both dialogues in later episodes. People in the Plato business have a nice bit of terminology to describe these cases. Com-presence of opposites. The basic idea is that the things in the world around us often have contradictory features, which especially emerge when we are comparing one thing to another. Things may be in one respect equal, in another unequal, in one respect beautiful, in another not beautiful, in one respect good, in another bad. Plato is convinced that our knowledge of things like equality and beauty is not just directed towards equal sticks and beautiful women, or for that matter beautiful sticks and equal women. Rather, equality itself and beauty itself must be somehow separate from the sticks and the women, and we must be judging the sticks and the women by looking to an absolute standard of equality and beauty. When we do this, the forms are the standard by which we judge. So this, along with the theory of recollection, introduces a further reason to believe in forms. They are standards of judgment and thus play a crucial role in our knowledge. But wait, there's still more. Because forms do not only play a role in Plato's theory of knowledge, his epistemology, they also play a role in his metaphysics, or to be more specific, his understanding of causation. His idea here is that the form of equal somehow causes equal things, like sticks, to be equal, while the form of beauty causes Helen to be beautiful. Socrates presents this idea in a kind of intellectual autobiography. I mentioned this passage in an earlier episode because in it, Socrates criticizes the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras. As you might remember, Socrates was disappointed that Anaxagoras invoked mind as if he would show that the universe follows a rational design, but then retreated into merely physical explanations. As Socrates says, this would be like his saying that he is sitting in jail because his bones and muscles are in jail, instead of saying that he is sitting there because he decided not to run away when he was offered the chance to do so. The examples show that for Plato, we need to satisfy very strict criteria in identifying the correct cause for anything. Whether we try to explain the cosmos, or why Socrates is sitting in jail, we should select a cause which must give rise to the effect we're trying to explain. The presence of the true cause shouldn't be compatible with other possible outcomes. So for instance, Anaxagoras' famous vortex seems on the face of it to be compatible with a badly designed chaotic world, as well as with the good world we see around us, and Socrates' bones and muscles would be involved in both running away and staying put. Another example. It would be wrong to say that one man is taller than another by a head, because it's also possible to be smaller by a head, so invoking the head doesn't explain being taller any more than it would explain being smaller. And by the way, there's another problem with invoking the head as a cause of tallness. The head itself is small. And Socrates finds it ridiculous to say that something small could be the cause of tallness. Plato is making a very strict demand here. To oversimplify a bit, the demand boils down to the following. The cause of, say, largeness should not be small, nor should it be able to cause smallness. The cause of equality should not be unequal, and should never cause inequality. And so on. Now, forms seem to satisfy this demand admirably. If things are equal precisely because they resemble the form of equal, it stands to reason both that the form of equal is not going to be unequal, and that the form of equal never causes anything to be unequal. But if the form of equal doesn't cause things to be unequal, what does? Well, maybe there's a form of unequal, too. Or maybe things are just unequal because they fail to be perfectly like the form of equal, the way your friend's portrait isn't perfectly like your friend. The same kind of logic will work for other forms. The form of beauty is not ugly, and cannot cause ugliness. Ugliness must be caused either by another form, the form of ugly, or by a simple failure to resemble the form of beauty. Notice one implication of what Plato is saying here. It sounds like he's saying not just that each form excludes its opposite, for instance, the form of equal is not unequal, but also that each form exemplifies itself, for instance, the form of equal would itself be equal, the form of beauty would itself be beautiful. This may sound reasonable enough, but we might worry that the form of large, for instance, can't really be large, since it's immaterial. And as we'll see, this assumption that each form exemplifies itself is going to cause trouble for Plato in another dialogue. These forms may satisfy Plato's demands for proper causation, but isn't this, well, cheating? Is it really informative to be told that the cause for Helen's being beautiful is the form of beauty? Plato is sensitive to this objection and has Socrates admit that when we invoke forms, we are giving what he calls safe, but simple-minded causes. Although it's safe to say that beauty makes Helen beautiful, it doesn't really seem to take us very far. On the other hand, it may take us further than we might think. Remember that the forms are not just causes, but are also the objects of our knowledge. So someone who knew the form of beauty would know exactly what it means to be beautiful. They would, after all, understand the nature of beauty itself. So they would be able to explain exactly what it is for Helen to be beautiful, and perhaps also why Helen is not beautiful compared to a goddess. Socrates also recognizes that sometimes we can give what he calls a clever cause in addition to a safe and simple-minded cause. For instance, if we want to know what has made something cold, we might play safe and say, the form of cold. But a more clever answer would be to say, snow. After all, snow satisfies the demands Plato has laid down. It is cold without being hot, and it cannot make anything hot. It is, therefore, just as good a cause of coldness as a form would be. We might still have some worries here, though. For instance, the form of cold will be involved every time something is cold. It's always okay or safe to invoke the form of cold as a cause of things being cold. But snow is not involved every time things are made cold. Sometimes the clever cause of coldness might be ice, or liquid nitrogen, or an insufficiently generous Valentine's Day present. So although the forms may be safe and simple-minded causes, they will be better than at least some clever causes because of their universal application. Now I know what you're thinking. I've been blathering on about forms for quite a while now. What happened to the immortality of the soul, which I was insisting was the main topic of this dialogue? Well, it turns out that what we've just been talking about is directly relevant to this topic. After all, what is the soul if it is not a cause of being alive? But if it is a proper cause that satisfies Plato's demands, then the soul will have to be only alive, not dead, just the way that, in order for snow to be a cause of cold, it has to be only cold and not hot. If this is right, then the soul can no more be dead than the number three could be even. The soul will have to be permanently alive by its very nature. This line of argument allows Socrates to ward off an objection which has been troubling him and his friends. Even if we say that the soul can survive the body's death, how do we know it won't wear out eventually? It might be like a weaver has worn out many cloaks. Just as the weaver survives while one cloak after another becomes threadbare and has to be discarded, so the soul might survive for a long time, wearing out one body after another. But eventually the weaver will die wearing his last cloak. Similarly, the soul may die after it leaves its last of many bodies. Happily, Socrates is now able to refute this. As a proper cause of life, the soul is by nature immune to death. Notice again how Socrates is assuming that the soul is distinct from the body, and then asking what this distinct soul is like. He doesn't really pay any attention to the possibility that he may die with his body, because he is nothing other than his body, which is the possibility that worries many of us nowadays. Instead, he worries that the soul itself may be a mortal being, which could die a second death along with the death of the body. Upon reflection, though, Socrates decides he does not need to worry after all. All the arguments at his disposal point towards the conclusion that his soul will live on. He might, of course, worry instead that his soul will live on but go to some horrible fate. Here again, though, Socrates is an optimist. He believes that he will be joining good divine masters, and if there are any other humans in the afterlife, they too will be good. If there is anything to fear, it is that we might come back into worse bodies after escaping from our current human bodies. But Socrates suggests that we are likely to receive the bodies we deserve. Violent people will get the bodies of wolves, orderly people will come back as well-organized insects like bees. And Socrates? He doesn't make a prediction, but I like to think that next time around, he was a swan. Before I close let me just say a little bit more about the theory of forms and the soul. As I've explained in this episode, forms help Plato with at least three interconnected problems. First, they give him appropriate objects of knowledge. When we recollect, it will be forms we are recollecting. Second, forms are free of the compresence of opposites. The equal things we experience are both equal and unequal, but the form of equal is not unequal in any way. Third, forms will be proper and universal causes of features like equality and beauty. That's a lot of philosophical payoff, but it still doesn't exhaust the usefulness of forms. For instance, in other dialogues Plato suggests that things in the physical world are constantly changing. Forms allow him to say that some things at least are stable and unchanging, a way of avoiding the total flux doctrine he ascribes to Heraclitus. He also invokes forms to explain the meanings of words, as we'll see in a future episode. It's easy to assume that Plato thought up his theory of forms and then engineered these puzzles so that the forms could be the solutions. But if we look at the way he actually uses forms, in the Phaedo and elsewhere, we see that he usually goes in the other direction. Plato was plagued by a whole range of philosophical problems, and he repeatedly found that forms could help him solve those problems. He was driven by the need to solve philosophical difficulties, not the desire to defend a doctrine for its own sake. Indeed, as we'll see in another episode in the future, no one has attacked the theory of forms more severely than Plato himself. And finally, back to the soul. To state an obvious but important fact, the soul whose fate is in question here is supposed to be not just a part of Socrates, but Socrates himself. At the end of the dialogue, his friends ask how they should bury him, and Socrates laughs, saying that they will do well to catch him. In other words, Socrates is not the body they will bury, but rather his soul. Now, the Phaedo, and especially its affinity argument, seem to suggest that the soul is a lot like a form. So if Socrates is his soul, he will be immaterial, indivisible, incorporeal, immortal. But doesn't our experience show that we, or our souls, are riven by conflict? That we are anything but simple, and are instead a mass of conflicting desires, experiences, and ideas? The Phaedo does not seem to recognize this fact, but Plato will make up for this omission in what is usually regarded as his greatest work, the Republic. There, Plato has Socrates argue that our souls are complex entities, capable of both internal conflict and internal harmony. Any and the soul would be nothing less than justice. The topic of the Republic as a whole, end of next week's episode on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Soul and the City, Plato's political philosophy. One of the most famous scenes in the history of the Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides presents a dialogue between the representatives of Athens and the people of a small island called Melos. The Athenians are embroiled in their long-running war against Sparta and its allies. The Melians have preserved their neutrality in this war, but now, the Athenians want to persuade the people of Melos to join the fight against the Spartan alliance. When the Melians ask why they should do this, the Athenians admit that they can offer no principled reason. Instead, they point out that they are powerful, whereas the Melians are weak. Their argument is simple, join us or be smashed. The Melians opted not to join Athens and were duly smashed. The men of the island were massacred, the women and children sold into slavery, and the island made into an Athenian colony. As Thucydides has the Athenians observe, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Actually, this traditional translation of Thucydides's famous aphorism is not particularly accurate, but in any translation, the scene shows Athens giving Melos a brutal lesson in realpolitik. Thucydides has his own reasons for putting this speech into the mouths of the Athenians, because it helps him develop his great theme of Athenian arrogance and expansionism. On his telling, the Athenians reap what they sow when they lose the Peloponnesian War. This shook the political institutions of Athens to their foundations. As I've mentioned in a previous episode, in the wake of the defeat, the democratic constitution of Athens was overthrown by a cabal of men, the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the tyrants were removed and the democracy restored, the good people of Athens indulged in some civic spring cleaning, including the trial and execution of Socrates. Thucydides is our most important source for reconstructing the confrontation between democratic Athens and the oligarchic city of Sparta, but the events of the late 5th century have echoes in other ancient Greek writings, such as the plays of our old friend Aristophanes. Those echoes can also be heard in a dialogue that is usually regarded as the founding text of political philosophy and the greatest work of Plato, the Republic. The Republic is a work of extraordinary complexity and length. It takes in not only political philosophy, but also moral psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to think of an area of philosophy not explored in the Republic. I'm going to devote two podcasts to it, but I could easily do ten podcasts, one for each book, and still leave out a lot. In this first episode I'll deal with the Republic's central idea, the structure of the ideal city, and the parallel Plato draws between the city and the human soul. We get a taste of the themes of the Republic on its very first page. Socrates is the narrator, and tells us of an encounter he had at the time of the festival of the goddess Bendis. He has seen a religious procession and is returning to Athens, when he's intercepted by a group led by one Polemarchus. In a darkly amusing passage which resonates with Thucydides's Melian dialogue, Polemarchus invites Socrates and his friend Glaucon to come home for some hospitality. He points out that if Socrates doesn't want to come he can be forced to do so, since Polemarchus's companions outnumber Socrates and Glaucon. Polemarchus's group is physically stronger, so it's inevitable that they will get what they want, one way or another. Already in this opening sequence Plato has made us think about the role of strength and compulsion in human affairs, a central issue throughout the Republic. Socrates agrees to go quietly, and winds up back at Polemarchus's house. Among the people gathered there three are particularly important. There is Thrasymachus, a sophist, who locks horns with Socrates in this first book, and there are Glaucon and Adeimantus, who will be the main interlocutors for Socrates for the remaining nine books of the Republic. These two characters just happen to be the brothers of Plato. The discussions Socrates has with Thrasymachus and then with Glaucon and Adeimantus are about the nature of justice. Thrasymachus holds a view much like the one defended by Calicles in Plato's dialogue the Gorgias. On this view, justice is simply whatever benefits the strong. Thrasymachus admires the man who is bold enough to commit any number of so-called injustices, to take what he can get, to become a tyrant and enslave his enemies. Real justice is, if you will, for the strong to do what they can, and for the weak to suffer what they must. Thrasymachus admits that this is not what people usually mean by justice. But for him, the popular understanding is a perversion. The so-called justice, admired in Athens and other Greek cities, is the reverse of what is really just. Common conceptions of justice help the weak rather than the strong, because they keep the strong in line and allow the weak a share in decision-making. Socrates proceeds to refute Thrasymachus in his inimitable fashion. He tries to show Thrasymachus that political rule must look to the benefit of the ruled, not that of the ruler, just as the art of shepherding looks to the benefit of sheep, not shepherds. After this dialogue between Socrates and Thrasymachus, Book 1 of the Republic comes to an end. When Book 2 opens, Glaucon and Adeimantus complain that Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus has left them unsatisfied. They would like to be convinced once and for all that justice really is better than injustice. People claim to admire justice, but is this what they believe in their heart of hearts? Glaucon does a good job of playing devil's advocate here. First, he suggests thinking of justice as a kind of tacit agreement between people not to harm each other. We would all gladly be cruel to one another, to take what we can and make others suffer what they must, but we agree not to, because a situation in which everyone is trying to harm everyone winds up being bad for most people most of the time. This is reminiscent of later accounts of morality or political institutions, which we now call contract theories. If all goes well, this series of podcasts will eventually reach the most famous such theory in the work of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, you know of nasty brutish and short fame. But unlike Hobbes, Glaucon backs up his contract theory with a mythical story in which a farmer discovers a ring that turns him invisible. Using the ring, the farmer manages to kill the local king, seduce his wife, and become a tyrant. And let's face it, says Glaucon, we would all do the same if we were given a ring of invisibility. I note that Hobbes would seem to be an exception to this rule. But hobbits aside, the example of the ring is supposed to show that people don't really value justice, because if they could get away with it, their actions would prove that they think injustice is more advantageous. This then is the task set for Socrates in the Republic, to show Plato's brothers, and of course us, the readers, that justice is more choice-worthy than injustice. For Socrates, the hard-nosed real politic which sacrifices justice for the sake of expediency, as the Athenians did at Milos, betrays a crass misunderstanding of our real interests. This will be true at the level of the city, as well as the level of the individual person. Socrates introduces this parallel between soul and city, by suggesting that, if we wanted to read some words that were written in small letters, we would be happy of the opportunity to look at the same words written elsewhere in much larger letters. In the same way, he suggests, we can learn about justice in the soul of an individual by studying justice in the city. Here you might complain that Socrates is simply assuming that there is a parallel between city and soul. Shouldn't he be arguing for this if it's going to be so important? Well, we do in fact talk about justice at both the level of society and of the individual. Unless we're using the word justice in two completely unrelated ways, Socrates must be right that political justice and individual justice do have something in common. Besides, the proof is in the pudding. If Socrates can discover parallel features and structures in both the soul and the city, then his strategy will show itself to be a good one. So let's look at justice at the political level. We can start with the very word political. It relates to the ancient Greek word polis, which means city or city-state. As you may know or already have noticed from my allusions to classical Greek history, the political units of the ancient world were cities, like Athens and Sparta, not countries like Greece or Italy. But a polis was a city in a rather broad sense of the word. Athens, for instance, was a polis which dominated the area called Attica, and its democratic constitution allowed for the sharing of political power among the citizens of this whole area. Often the various cities banded together in alliances, like those which clashed in the Peloponnesian War, or cooperated to repulse the invasions of the Persians. They also came together to celebrate the Olympic Games, to sponsor and worship at religious centers like Delphi. Such cooperative or competitive activities certainly had a political aspect. Still, when both Plato and Aristotle talk about political constitutions, they normally have in mind the workings of a polis, a single city. They do, of course, talk also of the Greeks, but this has to do with cultural affinity, for instance common language and religious practices, and not an overarching political unity. Now, if you wanted to figure out the most just possible way of running a city, how would you do it? An obvious strategy would be to choose an existing city which seems to do well, and modeling your theory on that city. Or you might learn from the mistakes of cities that do badly. But this is not how Plato does it. In this way he is very unlike an author like Thucydides. As a historian, Thucydides does convey ideas about how cities should be run, how wars should be prosecuted. But he does this by artfully framing actual history, for instance by showing us the consequences of the swaggering imperialism of Athens. Aristotle, as we'll see in a later episode, characteristically takes a middle road. He presents general observations about political structures, yet frequently refers to the ways actual Greek cities are run. In the Republic, by contrast, Plato has Socrates start with a blank slate, designing an ideal city from scratch. The lessons for real cities like Athens remain implicit. For instance, when democracy is criticized in Book 8 of the Republic, we aren't invited to focus on actual events in Athens or in other democratic cities. Socrates' first attempt to describe an ideal city is strikingly modest. The best city would be fairly small, a cooperative, one might almost say communitarian group of farmers, craftsmen, and traders. They eat a restricted, vegetarian diet, wear simple clothing, and live in peace. Glaucon immediately objects that this sounds more like a city of pigs than a city of men. He wouldn't have enjoyed living in a 1960s hippie commune. Glaucon's objection here changes everything. Socrates says that if the city is to afford luxuries it will need to expand, to develop a powerful military for taking and protecting more land than it strictly needs. This is the origin of the infamous class system of Plato's Republic, since it sets up a division of the city into two types of people, the guardian soldiers and the laborers. The guardians will rule over the craftsmen, and their rule will, as we'll see in a minute, be absolute and unquestioned. This aspect of the Republic has come in for its share of criticism. Famously, the philosopher Karl Popper accused Plato of being an enemy of what he called the open society, and saw the Republic as a founding text of totalitarianism. Now, I don't want to be an apologist for Plato. Actually, I take that back. I do want to be an apologist for Plato. Part of my defense would be that the introduction of a ruling class is explicitly marked by Socrates as being a departure from the true ideal, which is his more simple, agrarian community. The city which includes luxuries is, as he says, fevered, rather than truly healthy. As the next several books of the Republic unfold, we are given much more detail about this feverish version of the ideal city. The guardian class takes center stage. We get a lengthy discussion of the education that will turn the guardians into a patriotic and disciplined fighting machine. In the course of their education, it becomes necessary to separate out this higher class into two subclasses. There will be the true guardians who actually rule the city because of their natural gift for self-control. And then there will be the helpers or auxiliaries, who will serve as a fearsome army for defending the city. So in the end the city Socrates is describing winds up with three classes, not two. There are the true guardians, who do the ruling, then the auxiliaries, who do the fighting, then the craftsmen, who do everything else. It's paramount that the right citizens are placed into the right classes. To make this possible, sexual relations between the citizens are highly regulated. People are assigned by a rigged lottery to mate with carefully selected partners. The guardians have no private property, but share all things in common, even children, who are taken away from their mothers at birth and raised by the whole community of guardians so that they form one big happy family. Now I know what you're thinking, this all sounds pretty wacky. Sharing children? Assigning people to mate with each other by lot? It's hard to take all this seriously as a real set of policies. Plato's audience would probably have agreed, and would have been particularly shocked by the proposal that there should be women in the guardian class. Women were treated as far less than equal to men in Greece as a whole, and got a particularly bad deal in Athens. But Plato has Socrates argue explicitly that even if women are not actually equal to men, they should be capable of performing all the same roles in society. Of course for us this is admirable and forward thinking, but Socrates's proposals for the sexual politics of the ideal city do have some disturbing resonances for us too. These days eugenics doesn't exactly have a good name. But Socrates is adamant that without such firm control over the class system and the reproductive arrangements that sustain it, the city is bound to degenerate. He invents a mythic story which will be fed to the citizens of the city, the so-called noble lie. According to this noble lie, the citizens of the city all have an admixture of metal in their blood. The true guardians have gold in them, the auxiliaries silver and the craftsmen bronze and iron. This will persuade them to see the importance of staying within their own class, or doing their own, as Socrates puts it. The justice of this just city consists in fact in the various classes doing what they are meant to do, with the guardians ruling, the auxiliaries fighting, and the craftsmen obeying. Here admittedly you can see why Popper and others might have caught a whiff of totalitarianism in the Republic. But interestingly, Socrates himself sees the ideal city as unsustainable, since he supposes that the eugenic lottery will inevitably fall short of perfection, and the classes will get mixed up after all. That then is a sketch of Socrates' just city. But what about the just soul? Can we really, as Socrates suggests, understand justice in the city as a larger image of justice in the soul? Socrates argues in the fourth book of the Republic that we can. He points out that, like the city, the soul must have more than one aspect, for the soul can be in harmony or in tension with itself. Consider for instance your desire to drink a beer. Your desire for the beer might be very strong, but you might exercise self-control, and refrain from the beer, for instance if you are going to drive later or need to study for an exam. This shows that the soul is not simple but has several aspects which can struggle against one another. Socrates argues that like the city, the soul has three aspects, reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason is the highest aspect which is directed towards truth, spirit is directed towards honor, and with this aspect of our soul we are able to feel such emotions as anger and courage. Appetite, finally, is the set of drives we possess for things such as food, drink, and sex. Justice in the soul, then, is more or less exactly like justice in the city. It is for the three parts of the soul to do what they should. For the ruling part, which is reason in the soul, and the guardians in the city, to rule, with the assistance of the spirit, or the auxiliaries, over the lowest part, namely appetite or the craftsman. Finally, if this is how justice looks in the city and the soul, what about injustice? What happens when a city or a soul degenerates and becomes worse? Plato extends the analogy between soul and city when he comes to consider the degenerate cases. He has Socrates tell us two stories in parallel. In one story we get a sequence of individual men, worse sons born to better fathers. In another story, worse political arrangements arise from better ones. For instance, the best arrangement after the ideal city is a so-called Timocracy in which the city is dedicated to honor and victory. This is basically the ideal city shorn of its true rulers and guided solely by soldiers who long to distinguish themselves on the battlefield. From this arises an oligarchy, a city of the rich, then democracy, the city ruled by the common people. By the way, all these English words come from ancient Greek. Democracy comes from the Greek words for honor and rule, while oligarchy means rule by the few, and democracy means rule by the people, the demos. Finally, Socrates tells us that the natural next step from democracy is tyranny, which is ruled by a single vicious man. On the soul side, there are individual personality types, as we might call them, which correspond to these cities. There is the Timocratic man who wants nothing but honor, the oligarchic man who wants wealth, the democratic man who wants freedom. Worst of all is the tyrannical man whose lust for power ironically winds up enslaving him to his own desires. Just as it's natural for, say, an oligarchic city to degenerate into a democratic one, it's natural for a father with an oligarchic character to have a son who goes bad and who develops a democratic character. We may find it shocking that Plato sees democracy as the second worst form of government. For him, only tyranny, ruled by the worst of all possible rulers, is worse than democracy. There's little doubt that Plato is here registering his dissatisfaction with the performance of democratic Athens. They did, after all, execute Socrates. On the other hand, his critique of democracy is rather nuanced. When the people, the demos, are in charge, there is total freedom for all. So all desires can be satisfied, every lifestyle is approved. It's a wide open society, and its chaotic ethical pluralism is far removed from the adamantine laws of Socrates' ideal city. We might retort that these are in fact the very things we appreciate in democracy. And Plato agrees that democracy is attractive, despite being defective. He has Socrates say that this is the most beautiful constitution, like a many-colored garment in its variety. Also disturbing is his suggestion that tyrannies naturally arise from democracies. Here Plato may again have been thinking of the experience of Athens, and the seizure of the city by the Thirty Tyrants in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. His reflections on the relation between democracy and tyranny stand as a warning to all of us who live in democracies today, even if we don't agree that democracy is already about as bad as it gets. Suppose though that we did agree that there is a better way to go than democracy. Suppose we liked the sound of Plato's ideal city and wanted to create one. What would be our first step? What kind of people would we need to select for our true guardians? I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say that those of us who do philosophy for a living are going to like Plato's answer. We'll find out why next week, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Ain't No Sunshine, the cave allegory of Plato's Republic. When we last left our hero Socrates midway through the Republic, he had finished describing the city of perfect justice. In this city, there would be three classes of citizens, the true Guardians, the auxiliary soldiers and the craftsmen. The Guardians would rule, just as reason rules in the best soul. The other parties to the discussion, Glaucon and Adeimantus, have accepted not only this, but some astonishing proposals, such as the communal sharing of property and children amongst the Guardians, and the acceptance that women too can be Guardians. Now Socrates promises a final, yet more astonishing claim. He wants to show how the ideal city could, at least in principle, actually come into existence. It could only happen, says Socrates, if the rulers of the city were philosophers. It's fitting that this most notorious idea in the Republic is illustrated with some of the most famous passages in the Platonic dialogues. These include what must be the most popular image in all of ancient philosophy, the allegory of the cave. Also found in this stretch of the Republic are two more well-known images, the divided line and the comparison between the sun and the form of the good. Clearly this part of the Republic would feature heavily in any compilation of Plato's greatest hits. And it's no surprise that he's reaching for his best material here, since the view Socrates is presenting is both crucial and, let's face it, hard to swallow. Socrates himself draws attention to this, saying that he expects to be drowned by a wave of objections or plain old ridicule when he says that philosophers should rule. After all, philosophers, then as now, were hardly seen as potential politicians. Admittedly, we've seen philosophers occasionally coming into contact with political power, for instance Anaxagoras associating with Pericles, or Plato himself going to Syracuse. But more typically, philosophers were seen as amusing, detached intellectuals, just as they are today. Think back to Aristophanes' portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds, and you'll get the idea. So when Socrates produces the cave allegory and these other famous images, he is trying to explain why the philosophers should rule in the city. But he's also trying to explain why in our own far-from-ideal societies the proposal seems absurd. To understand his argument, we should remember that Socrates is thinking of a successful philosopher. This will be a man or woman who has achieved knowledge, not someone who, like Socrates himself, knows only that he knows nothing. Indeed, Socrates tells us who the philosopher is by telling us what knowledge is, and how it compares to belief and ignorance. Knowledge and belief, he says, are both powers, and powers are distinguished by their objects. For instance, sight is the power that concerns visible things, whereas hearing is the power that concerns audible things. So if knowledge and belief are powers, what are their objects? According to Socrates, knowledge is the power that concerns what is, whereas belief is the power that concerns both what is and what is not. Ignorance, meanwhile, only concerns itself with what is not. So what does that mean? Knowledge concerns what is, belief what is and is not. It's apt to remind us of the beginning of Parmenides' poem. And like the poem, this bit of the Republic has provoked puzzlement and comment in equal measure. The most common way of understanding the passage, and one which became popular among Platonists in later antiquity, is that the objects of knowledge are a completely different level or realm of reality, the forms. The forms are separate from physical things in the world around us. These physical items are in turn the things that are and are not, the objects of belief. But why should I admit that a physical thing like a giraffe both is and is not? In fact, what would that even mean? It's not easy to say, though the later ancient Platonists do have a few suggestions. For instance, they connected this idea to the Heraclitian flux theory. Since physical objects are constantly changing, always going from being one thing to being something else, they both are and are not. If you don't like that, you might prefer a more recent interpretation. Socrates means to say that knowledge only is, in the sense that it is always true, whereas belief can be either true or false, and thus concerns both what is and what is not. Ignorance, of course, concerned only what is not, because it is always false. However we should understand Socrates here, it's clear that the philosophers are a very unusual group. Whereas many people love beautiful sights and sounds, for instance, only the philosophers concern themselves with, and love, beauty itself. But does this really sound like a qualification for the job of political ruler? If anything, it seems like the philosopher would have nothing to say about the messy world of politics, with its conflicts and compromises. The philosopher's head will be squarely in the clouds, as Aristophanes said. For Socrates, though, nothing could be further from the truth. After all, the whole point of the Republic is to establish a city governed by perfect justice, so the ruler will have to be the person who grasps the nature of justice. In the first of the series of famous images which now come thick and fast, Socrates describes the situation of a typical Greek city as being like the situation on board a ship. There's a rather stupid ship owner, who represents the people of the city. A crowd of sailors, representing typical politicians and sophists, tries to persuade the ship owner to let them steer the ship, using persuasion, drugs, and wine, or whatever else comes to hand. But the one person on the ship who actually understands navigation, who can steer by the stars, understand the weather, and so on, is disdained by everyone else on board as useless. This is the man who should by rights be the captain, just as the philosopher should by rights be the ruler in the city. So what exactly does the philosopher know which qualifies him or her for political rule, the way the art of navigation qualifies the true captain to steer the ship? Well, clearly justice itself, and apparently beauty itself as well. In short, the philosopher knows about the forms, as we know and love them from an earlier Platonic dialogue, the Phaedo. But now Plato has Socrates say something he didn't say in the Phaedo. Yes, there are forms of justice, beauty, and so on. But there's something even more important, the form of the good. Knowledge of the good will be a kind of capstone to the philosopher's wisdom, because without knowing the nature of goodness, the philosopher will not understand what is good about all the other forms. And here comes another famous image. Socrates compares the form of the good to the sun. Just as the sun makes the visible objects around us visible to sight, so the form of the good renders the other forms intelligible to the soul. Indeed, just as the sun gives growth and nourishment to the things in nature, the form of the good gives being itself to the things known by the soul. In a phrase which will reverberate in centuries to come, the form of the good is said to be beyond being in dignity and power, a kind of super form which gives other forms their goodness and intelligibility. Now I know what you're thinking, and fortunately Glaucon is thinking the same thing. He presses Socrates to explain what in the world he's talking about with this image of the sun. Socrates is happy to oblige, and in his explanation he provides the two final images in this middle part of the republic, the divided line and the allegory of the cave. The image of the divided line is supposed to help us understand this idea that the sun and the form of the good are first causes or principles. The sun, as I said, both makes things visible and helps make the things exist in the first place. In the same way, the good is a kind of first principle for forms. The form of justice could not be what it is without being good, and neither could the form of beauty. So grasping the good will be a kind of key that unlocks for us the understanding of all the forms. It seems to stand as the highest principle in a kind of hierarchy presiding over the forms. The physical things around us in the visible world partake of these forms and thus can be thought of as images of the forms. And at the very bottom of the scale of reality there are images of these images, for instance shadows or reflections of physical things. So to illustrate the theory Socrates asks us to imagine a line cut into two unequal parts, with each part subdivided in the same ratio into two unequal segments. So we have a line with four segments. The lowest segment represents those mere images of physical objects, the shadows and reflections. The next segment represents the physical objects themselves, the things that non-philosophers take to be really real, like giraffes, rocks, and the Eiffel Tower. These two segments together symbolize the whole visible realm. The second, longer part of the line represents what we can know rather than what we can see. It likewise is subdivided into two segments. Here we are expecting Socrates to say that the two higher segments are supposed to stand for the forms and then, at the very top, the form of the good. This isn't quite what he says though. Instead, he says that the first segment represents what he calls hypotheses. These are things we know on the basis of some other, more fundamental principle. Then the final, longest segment of the line represents those fundamental principles, the truths on which all other truths are founded. Socrates gives the example of geometry, but we might be more comfortable with something like a logical or arithmetical system. You have your fundamental axioms, and from these follows the truth of the whole system. But that way of putting it is somewhat misleading, because for Socrates the basic principle will not be something we simply postulate, like an axiom in mathematics. It will be something certainly and unshakably true. This then is the role played by the form of the good. An object of completely certain knowledge in its own right, it grounds all our knowledge and makes that knowledge come out true. And that finally brings us to the cave. Unlike the rather abstract image of the line, the allegory of the cave is extremely concrete. We are to imagine a group of prisoners, chained at the bottom of a cave. Behind them is a wall, and beyond that, a fire. There are more people just behind the wall, carrying puppets. Thanks to the firelight, these puppets cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The unfortunate prisoners can see nothing but these shadows, and hear nothing but the echoing noises made by the puppeteers. They are radically removed from reality, because they see nothing but shadows of things that aren't even real, namely the puppets. They very seriously engage in completely pointless games, competing to predict and identify the shadows. Of course, the disturbing message is that we are like the chained prisoners, and that the apparently crucial political debates and public affairs of our societies are like the meaningless shadow games played by the prisoners. Now Socrates asks us to imagine what would happen if a prisoner were set free. Wrenched away from their familiar reality of shadows, they would only go kicking and screaming if someone dragged them out into the sunlight. But once they were pulled from the cave, after recovering from their dazzlement, they would finally see reality for what it is. As you've already guessed, this freed prisoner represents the philosopher. Just as the philosopher grasped the forms, using the form of the good as a principle, so the freed prisoner sees the real things outside the cave by the light of the sun. And this explains why philosophers seem useless and otherworldly in our corrupt societies. The philosopher has no interest in the shadow games and secondhand images of normal folk. Meanwhile, these normal folk have no hope of understanding the true reality the philosopher has witnessed. So the prospect for achieving justice in the real world would seem to be rather bleak. We prisoners duped in our world of images will never welcome the philosopher as a ruler. Indeed, Socrates admits that just about the only way a philosopher could get to rule a real city would be by a stroke of great fortune, whereby a philosophically minded person is born to a king and inherits his throne. This isn't very likely of course, but Socrates is happy if he can just suggest a way that the ideal city could come about in principle. But there's another problem. What's in it for the true philosophers? It's clear they would have no interest in descending back into the darkness of the cave. Why plunge again into the cave of shadows when they could stay out in the sunlight? Socrates tackles this problem squarely, admitting that it is not really in the philosopher's interest to rule. But they're not selfish, and they must see that the demand of justice is for them to take command of the city if at all possible. And so it is with regret, but a feeling of duty, that the philosophers of the republic, the true guardians, would become philosopher kings. Ironically, it is those who care nothing for power who should truly hold power. And is it me, or does Plato have a point here? The Allegory of the Cave is one of the most powerful passages in the Platonic Corpus. And at the political level its meaning is clear. It tells us that the philosopher should rule, and also explains the apparent cluelessness of philosophers in defective societies. Speaking as a philosopher who does tend to appear clueless, I can only agree wholeheartedly with that last bit. But what about the other philosophical implications of the allegory? There are two common misconceptions about the cave, which I'd like to clear up before concluding this episode. The first misconception is that the cave allegory commits Plato to some kind of radical separation between our world and the world of forms. This is a widespread assumption about Plato, that he believes in a kind of separate heaven of forms and urges us to ignore the physical world entirely in favor of that other, immaterial world. Aristotle in fact often criticized Plato for holding that the forms are radically separate from the things around us. But if the shadowy cave world is separate from the sunny world outside, it isn't radically separate. You can go from one to the other, after all, as the philosopher does. And remember that the shadows that the prisoners see are shadows of puppets, and the puppets are puppets of the things outside the cave. That shows that there is some kind of connection between the shadows and the real things outside. The shadows are second-hand images of reality, but they are still images of reality. Perhaps then Plato's point is not so much to stress that there are two utterly different realms of objects, physical pseudo-realities on the one hand and real forms on the other. Instead, the point might be to describe two different ways of seeing one and the same reality. We can grasp that reality by means of transitory ill-considered beliefs, or with solid, certified knowledge. Usually, we make do with truths that are mixed generously with falsehoods. But the philosopher's approach demands truth and nothing but the truth. So the radical contrast or separation Plato is making is not so much between two realms, one heavenly and immaterial, the other shadowy and physical, as it is a contrast between knowledge and mere belief. A second misconception about the cave allegory is that Plato is endorsing some kind of mysticism. On this interpretation, the philosopher would grasp truth and reality in a kind of flash of insight upon leaving the cave. The result will be an understanding so deep, so otherworldly, that the philosopher simply cannot explain it to the benighted prisoners down in the cave. It is a knowledge which cannot be put into words. Now admittedly, the idea of turning the eye of the soul from ignorance towards some kind of luminous knowledge does appear in the later Platonic tradition. But when Plato himself talks about turning away from the shadows, he describes an arduous process of education, not a divine flash of revelation. First, the freed prisoner must climb the steep path out of the cave. And even when he escapes, it is not so much the sun that he sees as the things in the world illuminated by the light of the sun. As my colleague M.M. McCabe is fond of pointing out, seeing can be an active, analytical process, more like examining or looking than a flash of insight. And there are good reasons to think that this is what happens when the philosopher escapes from the cave. Think back to the divided line. As we saw, this image tells us that knowledge has a specific kind of structure, according to which first principles guarantee the truth of the rest of the things we know. This is what Plato calls dialectic. Dialectic means the process of making hypotheses, and then discovering the principles that would support those hypotheses as they do in geometry. This doesn't sound particularly mystical. Plato presents knowledge as a complex, analytical process. It also seems that the fruits of such a process could be put into words. When the philosopher goes back into the cave, he's not able to convert the prisoners to the truth just by talking to them, but this isn't because he has nothing to say, that his knowledge is inexpressible or mystical. It's simply because the prisoners would never be able to understand or be convinced by the philosopher's account until they themselves engage in dialectic. Some listeners might be suspicious of the points I've been making towards the end of this episode. They may feel that I'm making Plato less, well, platonic. Surely the whole point of Platonism is that it is an otherworldly philosophy, that there is a separate realm of forms which can be grasped only by direct intuition? Well, Karl Marx famously said that he wasn't a Marxist. And if this is what Platonism is, then for my money, Plato was no Platonist. If you're not convinced yet, please reserve judgment until next week. We'll be looking at the opening section of a dialogue called The Parmenides. There, Plato boldly uses Father Parmenides himself as a spokesman, and puts into his mouth a series of devastating objections to the theory of forms. What is there called the greatest difficulty for the theory highlights the dangers of making the forms radically separate from our world. So at least by the time he wrote The Parmenides, Plato saw that there were potentially devastating objections against this kind of Platonism with its totally separate world of forms. Join me then for the first great critic of Platonism, Plato, next week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Second Thoughts, Plato's Parmenides and the Forms. Back in episode 18, when I talked about Plato's life and writings, I mentioned that one of the more contentious issues regarding the Platonic dialogues is their chronology. Most scholars accept a broad division of the dialogues into three periods, early, middle, and late, with the so-called Socratic dialogues falling into the early period, the great masterpiece that is the Republic dominating the middle period, and more technical works emerging in the late period, including the one I'm going to be talking about in this episode, the Parmenides. But scholars disagree about the exact order of the dialogues, and about more fundamental issues. How much did Plato's philosophical views change during his career? If his views did change, then in what direction, and on what topics? It's no easy matter to answer these questions. Some think that Plato pretty much never changed his mind or developed new ideas, but was rather setting out a systematic body of doctrines throughout his career, revealing them bit by bit or examining them from different angles in different dialogues. This is how Plato's corpus was seen by most ancient Platonists, but I find this implausible, and would be rather disappointed if it were true. I don't claim to know how geniuses like Plato think, but I'm guessing that they reconsider and develop their ideas quite a lot. In any case, the dialogues themselves provide ample evidence that Plato did reconsider his ideas with a critical eye. This was no simple process, where he set out a doctrine in one dialogue, and then rejected it in a later dialogue. Rather, he refined his ideas and subjected himself to the kind of searching criticism Socrates would mete out to his fellow Athenians in the marketplace. There's no better example than the beginning of Plato's Parmenides. In this dialogue, we see an aged Parmenides, yes, that Parmenides, at the height of his powers, visiting Athens in the company of his friend Zeno. How they managed to travel from Elea to Athens in defiance of Zeno's paradoxes of motion is not recorded. I guess they just went halfway, and then the rest of the way. At any rate, when the dialogue's action begins, Zeno has just finished reading from his book containing those paradoxes. His audience includes a youthful Socrates. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, this juxtaposition of an aged Parmenides, a younger Zeno, and a much younger Socrates helps us establish the relative chronology of the three philosophers, even if we shouldn't take too seriously the idea that the three of them actually met in Athens. Socrates talks to Zeno about the purpose of his paradoxical arguments, which is, of course, to defend Parmenides' claim that all things are in fact one, by showing that if things in the world are many, then they are riven by contradiction. For instance, Zeno tries to show that they would be both similar to each other and dissimilar to each other. Socrates says that this isn't particularly surprising. Of course the things around us are similar in some respects and dissimilar in others. What would be really surprising would be if similarity itself were dissimilar, or if dissimilarity itself were similar. Socrates dismisses the idea that things are one and not many, as Parmenides and Zeno want us to believe. Instead, we should admit that they are both one and many, but we should also hold on to the idea that there is oneness itself and manyness itself. As we saw in Plato's Phaedo, these separate absolute forms would exclude their opposites so that oneness itself could never be many, nor could manyness itself ever be one. As I put it in that earlier episode, forms are immune to the compresence of opposites. But a particular object like a man can partake of opposites at the same time. He is, for instance, both one and many, one man with many body parts. Far from being offended at this demolition of his theory, Parmenides is impressed by the young Socrates, and presses him to say more about these absolute entities like oneness itself and similarity itself. Socrates elaborates, and in so doing produces one of the very few clear explanations of the theory of forms in Plato's dialogues. He posits forms because they are immune from the compresence of opposites, like I just said, but also because the one form can explain why many things share in some character. For example, giraffes, elephants, and skyscrapers will all be large by sharing in a form, namely largeness itself. The forms are separate from the things that partake of them, yet they somehow explain the presence of shared characters in the things that participate in them. So the form of largeness somehow explains or causes the giraffes being large, the elephants being large, and so on. As I say, this is an unusually clear account of the forms. Still, it's basically the theory as we know it from works like The Phaedo and The Republic. In fact, Socrates even mentions the example of sticks and stones, which ensures that we think of The Phaedo. Since we tend to think of this as Plato's signature doctrine, what happens next is a bit of a surprise. Plato allows the more experienced Parmenides to pose a series of problems for the theory of forms, which the inexperienced Socrates is unable to solve. Not only is the theory of forms coming in for some rough treatment here, but we're seeing Parmenides do to Socrates exactly what Socrates usually does to other people, refuting him by asking him questions. At the end of this episode, I'll come back to the question of why Plato might do this, but first let's look at the problems, which come thick and fast in just a few pages of text. Parmenides' first series of questions is a kind of warm-up to the main event. He asks Socrates, basically, which things have forms. Socrates is eager to posit forms like similarity itself and oneness itself and also forms for justice, beauty, and goodness. But what about, say, man or fire? Is there a form of man, a form of fire? Socrates isn't too sure about this. So it looks like the jury is still very much out on the form of giraffe, for those of you who are following this series of podcasts, mostly to find out about the metaphysics of giraffes. And Socrates is downright reluctant to admit forms for things like hair and dirt, maybe because they are too degraded to have forms or because they are mere parts or byproducts of other things. Here Parmenides has touched on a fundamental question about the forms, if not exactly a challenge to the theory as a whole. Suppose there are forms. Well, then how do we find out which things have forms? An obvious question that arises here, though it is not mentioned in the Parmenides, is whether man-made things have forms. Is there a form for chairs, for cars, or space shuttles? Well, maybe not for space shuttles, but in the dialogue Cratylus, which we'll be looking at soon, Socrates seems to talk about a form for the kind of shuttle that is used in weaving. And the Republic speaks about a form of bed. So Plato was certainly open to the idea that there could be forms for man-made things. Here though, Socrates is treating even natural things like man and fire as doubtful cases. So presumably man-made artifacts would be still more doubtful. But as I say, this is just a prelude to more trenchant criticisms. Parmenides chastises Socrates for being particularly worried about cases like hair and dirt, suggesting that this is just a sign of youthful embarrassment. Then he throws down his first fundamental challenge to the theory as a whole. Socrates has talked about things sharing in or partaking in the forms. But how should we understand this? Would each large thing have a piece of the large itself, so that the large itself is split up into many pieces, giving us a bunch of larges, which, paradoxically, would each be small compared to the large itself? Or would the large itself be in each large thing as a whole and thus be separate from itself, because the large that is in the giraffe is not in the same place as the large that is in the skyscraper? Socrates makes a nifty suggestion, which is that the form could be present in its participants the way that the same day is present in many places at the same time. Cheating slightly, Parmenides changes the example. Would it be like a sail, spread out over many people? But in that case, only one part of the sail would be over each person, so we're back to the same problem. Socrates is stumped, but his puzzlement is just beginning. Parmenides next raises the most famous objection in this part of the Parmenides, which Aristotle calls the third man argument. Here in Plato, the example is not man, but largeness again. Here's how it goes. Socrates says we should posit a form every time we see many things which share the same character. So, for instance, we posit the form of largeness to explain the largeness of all the large things. But hang on a minute, isn't the form of largeness itself large? If so, there's another, slightly more extensive group of large things, namely the large things that partake in the form plus the form of largeness itself. So we should posit another, second form of largeness to explain the fact that these things, the large items plus the first form of largeness, are all large. And we can keep going, because there's yet another distinct set of large things, consisting of the large items, the first form of largeness, and the second form of largeness. This means we'll need yet another form of largeness, and so on. We will need an infinite number of forms of largeness, not just one, and the same argument will go for any form we choose. This is the most famous criticism Plato poses to his own theory, but it's not immediately clear why it is so damaging. What if Socrates just said, okay, fine with me, there are an infinite number of forms of largeness. It's not like we'll run out of places to put them, given that, large or not, they are immaterial. The problem, I think, is that Socrates has placed so much emphasis on the idea that each form is one. The whole point was to posit one thing, which explains the common character shared by many things, the one largeness which is set over all the other large things. If there turned out to be indefinitely many forms of largeness, then that would be the exact opposite of what Socrates set out to accomplish. Far from being one, the forms of largeness would be at least as many, if not more so, than their participants. So Socrates needs to answer the criticism. How could he do so? Well, I know what you're thinking. It looks like the damage is done because Socrates admits that the form of largeness is itself large. If he just denied this, then he'd be fine. He doesn't need a second form of largeness to explain why both the large things and the first form are large if the first form of largeness isn't large after all. But it is awkward for him to deny that the form of largeness is large. He's made a really big deal about the fact that the form of largeness is not small, whereas its participants are both large and small. It would be rather surprising to find out that, oh, by the way, the form of largeness is not large, either. Worse, he is inclined to think that the things that partake of a form somehow resemble or imitate that form. If the form of largeness isn't large, then in what sense do other large things resemble it? On the other hand, even without Parmenides' criticism, we might have good reasons for rejecting the idea that the form of largeness is large. Forms are, as I just mentioned, immaterial, so how could a form be large? But if Socrates is tempted to deny that the form of largeness is large, he doesn't do so explicitly. Instead, he changes tack and proposes a surprising interpretation of his own theory. What if forms were not separately existing items in their own right, but just thoughts? He doesn't explain how exactly this would solve the regress problem Parmenides has posed, but maybe it's a way for him to do what I just suggested, to deny that the form of largeness is large. The form would just be a thought in my mind, and obviously a thought can't be large, so no infinite series would be generated. Unfortunately for Socrates, Parmenides makes short work of the suggestion, by pointing out that a thought has to be a thought about something. It will be a thought about the single character that is shared by all the things that are, say, large. This single character, not our thought about it, will be the form, largeness itself, and this must be outside our minds. Socrates agrees and quickly gives up his proposal. He really wants to say that forms are, as he puts it, paradigms that exist in nature, while other things resemble them and are likenesses of them. Oh dear, we're back to the same conception of forms which triggered the third man argument, where we say that they are independent of our minds, separate from the things that partake of them, and somehow similar to the things that partake of them. So Socrates has it coming to him, when Parmenides produces another argument to show that we'll wind up with an infinite regress of forms. This new version has a clever and important twist. Parmenides focuses on Socrates' claim that the form will be similar to the things that partake in it. For instance, large things are like the form of largeness. Doesn't this mean that we need to invoke a second form, the form of similarity, to explain the fact that large things are similar to the form of largeness? Well that seems harmless enough. But now a new regress is looming. We're admitting that each form has its own character. For instance, the form of largeness is large, and the form of similarity is similar. But then, if the large things and the form of largeness are all similar to one another, and if the form of similarity is also similar, then all these items, the large things, the form of largeness, and the form of similarity, share in being similar. Of course, we will need a second form of similarity to explain this, and so on. This time, we get an infinite series of forms, but this time the forms are forms of similarity, rather than of largeness. This is a devilishly clever argument and really gets down to brass tacks by focusing on Socrates' failure to explain in any detail how the form is related to the things that partake of it. But if that's the frying pan, here comes the fire. Parmenides next poses what he describes as the greatest difficulty for the theory of forms. In this final objection, he points out that if the forms are separate, then although they might relate to one another, they won't relate to us, or to the things around us. Parmenides' example is that a human master is the master of a human slave, not of the form of slavery. And the form of mastery itself is not master of some particular slave. If it has mastery over anything, it must be mastery over another form, the form of slavery. So we have two completely disconnected realms, the forms and the things that we're supposed to participate in them. The consequences are disastrous, as Parmenides points out. Socrates wanted the forms to be objects of our knowledge, but knowledge is a connection or a relation, just like mastery or slavery. So if nothing in our world can relate to the world of the forms, then we can't have knowledge of the forms. This greatest difficulty ends the battery of objections against the theory of forms. Socrates is unable to fend them off, which might make us think that Plato sees the objections as unbeatable and is giving up on his theory of forms. But think again, because Parmenides immediately tells Socrates that these objections must be overcome. We need somehow to explain how things can share features like largeness. If we don't, it will be impossible even to carry on talking to one another, presumably because we won't be able to say things like, the giraffe and the elephant are both large. On our next trip to the zoo, we will all be reduced to awkward silence. Now of course, the fact that Plato thinks these objections must be answerable doesn't mean he already has figured out the answers. A famous scholar of Plato's dialogues, Gregory Vlastos, called this part of the Parmenides a, record of honest perplexity. But there are, I think, signs that Plato is optimistic that the objections can be defeated, and perhaps even that sufficiently careful readers can manage this by themselves. Parmenides suggests several times that a more experienced defender of the theory than the youthful Socrates could, with difficulty, answer the objections. And there are a few fairly obvious missteps by Socrates, for instance when he allows Parmenides to cheat by substituting the unfavourable example of a sale for the more illuminating example of the day. Notice also how the series of objections seems to be carefully structured. Parmenides starts by asking what sorts of forms exist, and then moves on to progressively more crucial issues. The first and second objections focus on how a form can be one, the third on its real separate existence outside our minds, the fourth and fifth on the question of how the forms relate to their participants. So the objections form an implicit roadmap, laying out the requirements for a successful theory of forms. Each form must be one, it must be independent of our minds, it must be enough unlike its participants that it is separate, but not so unlike them that the forms become another world unconnected to ours. All of this suggests that Plato is not rejecting the theory of forms, but inviting the reader to consider how it might be refined. In other dialogues, which were probably written in this same later period, he suggests refinements in a more explicit way. One of the questions which has been raised in this first part of the Parmenides is how the forms relate to one another, as well as to their participants. Socrates remarks early on that one goal for his theory would be to explain how things like similarity and dissimilarity, motion and rest, manyness and oneness could be interrelated and distinguished. Precisely this task is tackled in another formidable late work of Plato's, the Sophist. It's a difficult enough dialogue that I hesitate to delve into it on my own. Instead, I'm going to call on the help of an expert on the Sophist who just happens to work right here in London. So join me for a conversation with Fiona Lee about Plato's evolving metaphysics and the Sophist next week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Library and Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Plato's Sophist with Fiona Lee, who is a lecturer in philosophy at University College London and who's done a lot of work on this dialogue. Hi, Fi. Hi, Peter. Thank you for appearing on the podcast. You're welcome. Before we get into the Sophist itself, I wanted to start by asking you to say just a little about the theory of forms. If you had to summarize Plato's theory, if it is a theory, in dialogues other than the Sophists, so maybe the Phaedo, the Republic, what would you say? What's the point? I would say that forms are that which explains things having properties that they have. So if there are lots of things that are beautiful, a beautiful dress, a beautiful day, a beautiful city, all of those things are beautiful Plato things because the form of beauty makes them beautiful. So it's an explanation and a cause for all the things being what they are, having properties that they have. That answer obviously focuses us on a metaphysical or causal role of the forms, but I guess they're also supposed to have an epistemological role as well, right? Right. If you can discover the thing that explains in what sense all beautiful things are beautiful and indeed explains them being beautiful, then Plato thinks you've discovered something that looks like the definition of beauty so that if you express it, put it in linguistic terms, you've discovered the definition of beauty, for instance, and that obviously plays an epistemological role. And then you could maybe use that to check whether your opinions about things being beautiful were in fact true or not and maybe even come to know which things are beautiful. Because if something satisfies the definition, it's beautiful. Okay, so the primary object of knowledge, if you like, would be the form of beauty, but that then allows you to check your beliefs about other things being beautiful and perhaps come to knowledge. That's debated, of course, by people. I guess the weird thing about this though is that it seems like the causal role of the forms could come apart from that idea that we're checking why things count as having certain characteristics like beauty. I mean, why think that the thing that causes something to be beautiful is going to be the object that's defined by defining the word beautiful? I mean, why couldn't, for example, why couldn't the thing that causes things to be beautiful be, say, a goddess of beauty? And then the definition of this goddess obviously wouldn't be a definition of the concept or the word beauty. Right, so it's obvious that you could pull apart a definition, an abstract definition, from a cause. And indeed in contemporary philosophy, that's what people do. But for whatever reason, Plato seemed to think that his forms were causes. And certainly if you find something that is the cause of something by being the nature, itself being the nature of beauty, and if you think that acts as a cause, it's certainly going to follow that. If you discover that thing, you'll discover what it is that all the beautiful things have in common because they satisfy that definition. So if the form of beauty just is whatever is the real thing out there in the world, Plato thinks forms are real, if the form just is that real thing out in the world that embodies somehow the nature of the property beauty, then that's going to serve an epistemological function. So something can serve both functions, or at least it's coherent or plausible for Plato to have thought that something can serve both functions or fill both roles. But it's also the case and very clear that he may not have gone for something so big and bold that he could have thought the causal role comes apart from the epistemological role. It just seems clear from the dialogues that he didn't. Right, so maybe it would even be fair to say that the point of the theory of forms is just to claim that when you get hold of a definition of beautiful or beauty, that what you've gotten hold of is the cause of things being beautiful. Would that be a fair way to just summarize the theory? The point of the theory of forms. Yeah, sure, why not? The point of the theory of forms. It could be. Okay, I'll take that for now. Let's go along to the sophist. This is not a dialogue I haven't discussed yet. So maybe you could just kind of tell us what happens, who are the characters, what's the point of the discussion? So the main character, often thought to be Plato's mouthpiece in the dialogue, is unnamed. So it's a mystery guy from a city called Elia outside Athens. So the stranger, as he's often referred to, the stranger from Elia is the main speaker. He's talking to Theotetus. He's a young man, Theotetus, and he's talking to Theotetus according to the fiction of the dialogue the day after Theotetus has been talking to Socrates in the dialogue called Theotetus. So this takes place the very next day, apparently. Theotetus has been talking with the stranger prior to the dialogue's opening, and they run into Theodorus and Socrates. There are some other people there, but they're the two people who speak throughout the dialogue for the most part are the Eliatic stranger and Theotetus. And presumably it's important that the stranger is from the city where Parmenides is from, so the Eliatic philosophy is Parmenides' philosophy. Absolutely. So Parmenides' philosophy is referred to and brought up many times in the dialogue. The main point of the dialogue is to say just what a sophist is. So I don't know if your listeners know much about sophists. Yeah, I do have done an episode on the sophists. Right. So they want to try and define what a sophist is and whether or not a sophist is different from a philosopher on the one hand and a statesman on the other, or if all three names are names for the one thing, or if they're separate. And the stranger says that he can say whether or not they're the same or separate, and he thinks they're separate. But going through the explanation is a long process, and he'd like to do it by a question and answer session with a compliant interlocutor. So he doesn't want to just give a speech where he's the only one talking. He wants to proceed by questions and answers, but he wants someone who's only going to let him know if he really doesn't follow what he's saying. He doesn't want someone to be challenging him at every point along the way. Or that's how I read that bit. He's happy to ask extremely leading questions and just have the person say yes all the time. Unlike Socrates, maybe? Right. Well, he doesn't just ask questions. He puts forward views the whole way through, and it's as if he wants the interlocutor to only interrupt him when he's really not understanding what's being proposed. There's a lot of positive doctrine, I guess it's called, often, presented in the dialogue. I guess some people think that Plato is here moving away from the idea of dramatizing Socratic discussions even though he's holding on to the question and answer format. The questioning is not being done by Socrates, and the questioning seems to be rather different because the person doing the questioning really has an agenda and a theory that he wants to push. Right. So Socrates famously didn't put forward his own beliefs or state doctrine for consideration. Whereas the Iliadic stranger makes various proposals, so he's not just questioning the views that somebody else holds. In fact, we don't find out very much about the views that Theaetetus has in the Sophist. He puts forward his own views, and the question he puts to Theaetetus is more or less along the lines of, isn't that so, don't you agree? It's interesting, isn't it? Because in Theaetetus, Theaetetus is actually allowed to come up with all the theories of what knowledge is, and then these are considered one after another. Right. So in the Theaetetus, Theaetetus really does submit all the proposals that they consider. The Iliadic stranger, or the stranger in the Sophist, puts forward practically all the views they consider. Theaetetus learns along the way, and occasionally he says, for instance, oh, I know the answer to that one, and he draws on what's been said earlier to propose something, because he's a bright young man. The clever kid in class. Right, exactly. But mainly it's the stranger's proposals. And the purpose of the dialogue ostensibly is to define what sophistry is, what a sophist is, and they attempt to do this following the so-called method of collection and division as the stranger proposes that they do. And the method is one whereby you take a very general class of things, and then you divide them according to differentia, and you keep performing these divisions on the classes, the ever smaller classes, until you find the very thing that you're looking for. So the example that the stranger gives to make the method clear is the quest to find out a definition of angling, what a fly fisherman is, basically. And he starts off by dividing all the different sorts of hunting until he gets down to the very small group of angling. And he always divides into two classes, and picks one or the other, and then subdivides that into two more classes. Until you get to a definition which is basically just a list of the divisions that have been accepted. Correct, correct. And it's not always the case that the two divisions, the two classes that are isolated in the divisions are named. Sometimes he says, oh, and this is a nameless thing. But we know what it is. Okay. And then they do this with the sophist, actually, several times, and they come up with different alternative definitions, right? Right. And some of these ask us to consider the sophist as being a maker of images, which is connected to the idea of falsehood. And that brings us to the most important and famous part of the sophist, which I guess is what we should probably spend the rest of the time discussing. That brings us to this famous problem, which is raised sort of around the middle of the sophist, and the problem of non-being, which seems very appropriate given that, as we said, the Strangers from Elea, the city of Parmenides, seems to relate to something in Parmenides, some kind of Parmenidean problem of non-being. So can you explain what the problem basically is? As it's introduced in the dialogue, the problem of non-being comes up because they want to say that falsehood is real. So the sophist has been isolated as somebody who sells falsehoods for money, sells images for money. Falsehoods can be dangerous because he's not advertising them as such. So at this point in the dialogue, the Stranger says, but wait, the sophist would deny there's any such thing as falsehood, because to say what falsehood is involves introducing the concept of non-being. And Parmenides, where I come from, has said that there's no such thing as non-being. We can't think or talk about non-being. So falsehood is either saying what is when in fact it is not, or saying what is not when in fact it is, as they say in the dialogue. So falsehood involves not being. What is non-being? And the Stranger decides that what he has to do is explain that not being is, and in what sense, not being is. Which sounds contradictory. Right, it sounds really contradictory. So what's the problem with not being anyway? Parmenides might have had a particular problem with non-being, and there's no real comment on that in the sophist, so I'm going to leave that aside in answering the question. But if your concern is falsehood, as Plato's concern was in the sophist, you might think that the problem of non-being concerns states of affairs that don't obtain. Could you give me an example? So you might say that it's a lovely day outside today in London. It actually is. She's not making that up. It's really a lovely day for once. So you might say, it's not raining. And that's a true statement, right, today. It's a true statement. And it's true because outside it's a lovely day. But you might say it's true because outside it's not the case that it's raining. So a negative state of affairs is the state of affairs in which it's raining, which is a state of affairs that isn't true, that doesn't obtain. So the idea would be the reason that it's not raining is that the thing that isn't, namely the raining, is out there, as it were. And so we have something that isn't that is. And that's the puzzle? Possibly. Maybe I'll try and explain it more clearly. The problem of non-being could be thought of as either a state of affairs which is inherently negative, so the state of affairs in which it's not raining, somehow being real. And that's strange because, in fact, when you think about the state of affairs that does obtain, there's nothing to do with rain. There's just blue skies. So the negative aspect of that is said, perhaps, to be manifesting itself somehow. But it's hard to understand how that's the case. Or it could be in the case of falsehood, if I say it is raining, that I've expressed a state of affairs in my false statement that it's raining that fails to obtain. So you might think that the problem of non-being is a problem because it involves the notion of these states of affairs that are negative, somehow, that don't obtain. And really all there is out in the world is the states of affairs that do obtain. In other words, the way things really are. There's no way things aren't out there in the world because the world is just everything that is the case, to quote Wittgenstein. So there are only positive states of affairs. Right, okay. So that's the problem. If that's the problem, at least as Plato sees it, is it too nasty if I just ask you what the solution is? Well, so for Plato, the problem is also a metaphysical one. If he thinks, as I take him to think, that different things have properties in virtue of participating in forms, then everything that is the case is the case because various things are participating in forms. That's the explanation on a metaphysical level of all the positive states of affairs. And it's not clear how he can explain negative states of affairs. Is it that if somebody is ugly rather than being beautiful, is there a form of ugliness and that they're participating in that? Is Plato going to have to countenance lots and lots of negative forms? And you might have something, you might have a property that isn't a property which has an opposite. So you might have the idea of largeness that has the opposite property, smallness, but you also might have the idea of equality. So if you're conceiving of measurements, Plato might need to postulate lots and lots of forms to account for all the positive states of affairs, all the ways that things really are. You also might think that he could say or might want to say that things fail to participate in a form, but a failure to participate is a strange thing to explain. He's already faced with the difficulty of explaining what participation is. So a failure to participate could be a difficult thing to explain. Would it be fair to say then that it's like he started out in, say, the Phaedo or other dialogues like that, maybe the Republic, by trying to explain how it comes to be that certain things are true? For example, that Helen is beautiful or that the stick is equal to that stick or whatever it is. And he's kind of got a nice theory of truth, namely that these truths come about because of participation in forms, and then he thinks, okay, next step would be trying to explain falsehood, especially since there were these sophists running around saying that it was impossible to say anything false. So it's a kind of pressing problem for him dialectically as well as philosophically. Right, that's how I see it. So that's maybe a more deep understanding of why the problem is a problem for Plato, but it still doesn't sound like a solution. No. So he wants to explain how falsehoods are possible and how negative predications generally are true or can be true by way of analysing positive states of affairs. So Theaetetus is flying is an example from the dialogue. So Theaetetus is sitting down opposite the stranger from Elliot during their conversation. So they consider the statement, the logos, Theaetetus is flying. And it's a false statement. So the analysis, as I understand it, though this is controversial, people understand this differently. The analysis that Plato offers is that Theaetetus is participating in some forms and he's participating in directly or indirectly difference from other things. So we explain Theaetetus' flying being false because what's happening is that he's participating in sitting, so Theaetetus sits. And that sitting, either, people say that either sitting itself, the form, participates in difference in relation to flying, or that Theaetetus, as well as participating in sitting, or perhaps because he participates in sitting, thereby participates in difference from all the things that are participating in flying. So there are two different, I guess, well there are other interpretations as well, but they're two fairly prominent ones. And however you cut it, the solution has something to do with saying that all the work of negation is being done by the form of difference. And there's a form of difference and a form of the same. So I guess that idea there would be that if you're sitting and I'm sitting, which in fact we are, then we both participate in the form of sameness as well as the form of sitting, and that's why the two of us resemble each other in this respect, so that we're both sitting. Is that right? It could be. I think that's really difficult. The reason that I say it's difficult is that we don't get such cases in the dialogue. Where we do have cases of things participating in difference and sameness are cases of forms participating in difference and sameness. So we don't have a lengthy or complete or detailed analysis in the dialogue of any non-forms, so you and I are not forms, any non-form subjects participating in sameness, or difference in fact. And I guess that's really one of the breakthroughs, or possible breakthroughs of the Sophists, that Plato starts to think about not just things like me participating in forms, or Styx or Stones participating in forms, but forms participating in forms, so that he's able to say that one form participates in difference by being different from another form. Exactly. And there are five forms that he focuses on, right? Namely, being, motion, rest, sameness, and difference. Correct. Right. The greatest kinds. The greatest kinds. It might be a breakthrough if we actually need to think about forms sharing in one another, but why do I need to think about forms sharing in or participating in one another? Why isn't it enough to think about Styx and Stones and Helen participating in forms? Right. So you might want to, if you're Plato, you might want to analyze or consider forms as things that have properties on their own. It could be the case that in the past, if you were Plato, you worried that forms couldn't have properties in their own right, or if they had properties in their own right, that other problems, such as the third man problem, might arise from the Parmenides. We looked at that last time. So it could just be the case that Plato wants to get clear about whether or not forms, which are the embodiment of properties, the sorts of things that if we discovered, we've discovered a definition of some property, the very nature of a property, that he wants to get clear on whether or not properties can have properties, whether second order properties are possible. And that's one way of looking at the dialogue, and some people have thought that that's what he's doing. So if you think that the form of motion might be a numerically distinct form from the form of rest, and indeed the Eliotic Stranger argues that it is, you might think that it follows from that that it's got to have the property of being different from the form of rest. But then it follows that the form of motion would have to participate in the form of difference in relation to the form of rest, just like anything else, just as you participate in the form of difference from being different from the chair or from me. And Plato might have thought that that was a potentially difficult thing to say or potentially problematic thing to say, because then forms would have properties in a perfectly ordinary way, just as other things have properties. But for whatever reason, by the time he gets to the Sophist, he is prepared to say that forms participate in one another or can participate in one another. Not all forms participate in one another. So it seems to be the logical forms that forms participate in. So the five greatest kinds in the Sophist anyway all share in the form of sameness. So they're all the same as themselves. They're all self-identical. And they're all different from other forms, right? So they all share in difference. There's an implication, there are passages which suggest that all forms share in being. Certainly motion and rest share in being explicitly. But the implication is that all forms share in being. But no forms are said to share in motion or in rest, in fact, in the dialogue. We're almost out of time. But let me ask you just one last question, which is a little bit speculative. Do you think that part of what Plato is after here is to give philosophy something to do? Because if you just say, well, OK, so there's these beautiful objects. They participate in beauty. That's why they're beautiful. But that's not really philosophy. Philosophy is not just observing that beauty makes beautiful things beautiful, because that's said to be a safe and simple-minded solution in the Phaedo. But here's maybe a really tough question. Think of all of the important concepts that you need in order to understand the world. Now go figure out how they relate to one another. So in other words, figure out how the forms participate in one another. Is there some possibility that he's saying that that's what dialectic is in his special philosophical sense, or that that's what the philosopher would do? Or do you think that's just kind of crazy? Well, no, there's actually a passage in the dialogue where he says that working out the interrelations between the greatest kinds is dialectic, and that that's precisely what the philosopher does. So whether it's working out the logical relations between the concepts, or whether it's working out what follows the entailments of the relations between the objects, given the world that we have in front of us, is an interesting question. And I guess maybe poses a problem as to whether the philosopher is not very interested in the physical world around us, because now he's going to be spending all his time thinking about how forms relate to each other, or is thinking about how forms relate to each other just a way of thinking about the things around us? So I think what you said earlier about truth and falsehood is relevant here. So if in the past Plato was concerned to give a metaphysical analysis of the states of affairs that make our statements true, then of course he's going to be concerned with giving a parallel analysis or an equally satisfactory analysis of the kinds of states of affairs that make statements false, or make negative statements true. And if the relations between forms are a necessary component of that, then he's definitely concerned with the world, because he's concerned with how our statements can be true and false about the world. He's concerned with making sense of the idea that Theotides sits is true and Theotides flies is false from a metaphysical point of view. So he wants to provide a metaphysical account that can explain the phenomena and make our statements, explain how our statements about the phenomena can be true. And speaking of statements about phenomena being true, next time I'll actually be looking at a whole dialogue of Plato about language and how language refers to the world, namely the Cratylus. So please join me for that next time, but for now I'll just thank Fiona very much for appearing on the show. You're welcome. And please join me next time for The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? What's in a name? Plato's Cratylus In these podcasts I've made a big deal of saying that Plato dealt with nearly all the topics philosophers have thought about ever since. I suppose even sympathetic listeners will have the suspicion, though, that there are some significant issues in contemporary philosophy that don't arise in Plato. So what might these be? Well, here's an obvious thought. Since the work of the great logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege in the 19th century, philosophers in the analytic tradition have been extremely interested in language. This seems in fact to be a distinctive feature of 20th century philosophy in general, a fascination with language and problems about language. So how about philosophy of language, then? Is this an area where Plato has little to tell us, or just yet another area where Plato is a pioneering genius? You may not be surprised to hear that it's the latter. Plato may have been the first person to do philosophy of language, and he certainly authored the earliest work on the topic, a dialogue called the Cratylus. Of course, this dialogue doesn't tackle all or even most of the problems dealt with in contemporary philosophy of language, but it does tackle one of the most central problems – how do words have meaning? Maybe I'd better explain what the problem is before looking at how Plato deals with it. If I utter a random string of syllables, like Gibaldog tankferder, that doesn't mean anything. In some sense I haven't even said anything, I haven't produced a piece of language, so I haven't managed to communicate. But if I say a word like frege, or philosophy, then I do communicate, at least to people who know what these words mean. So what exactly is the difference? How do some strings of noises, or symbols in the case of written language, come to have meaning while others don't? To answer this question is to explain how words get their power to communicate, and thus to establish something fundamental about what language is. Nowadays one popular theory about how words come to have meaning is that someone has to stipulate that a given sound or set of symbols will from now on represent some particular item. The most obvious example is naming. When a baby is on the way, the parents confer with one another, and, after overcoming bitter disagreement, of the sort which makes each of them wonder if their partner is going to be mature enough to raise a child, an agreement is reached. The baby gets a name. Mama and Papa Frege dubbed their child Gottlob. Maybe they should have thought about that one a bit more. And thus stipulated that this word would refer to the infant logician. So here's a theory about how names, and words in general, get their meaning. It happens through an act of arbitrary dubbing. As it turns out, this is one of the theories that Plato considers in The Cratylus. Sharp-eared listeners may remember that I mentioned the name Cratylus way back in episode 5 when I was talking about Heraclitus. No doubt you're all saving the older podcast episodes for your own children and grandchildren to listen to someday. But to save you the trouble of digging out episode 5, I'll remind you that Cratylus was a radical follower of Heraclitus. He's the one who said, you can't even step into the same river once, and that you can't talk about things, because they keep changing. You can only point at them with your finger. He's one of the three main characters in this dialogue. The others are Socrates and a man named Hermogenes. When the dialogue begins, Hermogenes and Cratylus have already been arguing about words and how they get their meanings. Hermogenes adopts the theory of arbitrary dubbing. For him, people can use whatever sound they want and associate any meaning with it, and then it's just a matter of usage and convention as to whether that association sticks. Cratylus disagrees. He has been arguing that words have their meaning by nature. So what we have here is a nice example of the opposition we saw the Sophists making between convention and nature. And the question of the dialogue is simply, do words have their meanings by convention or by nature? It's clear to us why words might have their meaning by convention, but what about nature? Cratylus's position becomes clearer as the dialogue goes along, and we also start to understand how his view that words are by nature would relate to his notorious Heraclitianism. Cratylus thinks that everything has a correct or a true name. If you don't use the right word for something, you haven't named it at all, so it turns out that you haven't even said anything. This suits Cratylus perfectly, because he wants it to turn out that you can't say anything false. He agrees with the Protagorean relativists and Heraclitians of Plato's Theaetetus, which I discussed back in episode 22. At least he agrees with them to the extent that he thinks there is no such thing as falsehood, but he's giving a reason different from the reasons we get in the Theaetetus. His reason is that to use language is nothing but uttering the right word or expression for what you are thinking about. Cratylus goes so far as to say that if you use the wrong word for something, you haven't actually used a word at all. A word in the proper sense is just the expression, which means what you want to say. So on his view, there is no such thing as using language falsely. That then is the dispute Socrates enters into at the beginning of the dialogue. Does each thing have a word for it which is correct by nature, or can anything be called by whatever word we want just by convention? Socrates starts by arguing against Hermogenes, who defends the conventional view. Socrates says that words are man-made items like tools, and like tools they have a function. Used as a hammer is for banging in nails, so a word is for meaning a certain thing. This seems plausible, but it suggests that you can't use just any sound to mean anything you want, just as you can't bang in nails using tapioca pudding. But if it's clear what makes some things suitable for banging nails and others not so suitable, it's not so clear what would make some sounds suitable for being words and others not. Socrates has an answer ready. He says that the right word for something should somehow reveal its nature. This he says is what the great poet Homer must have thought. He quotes passages where Homer says that a river, for instance, has one name used by the gods and another name used by humans. So Homer must have believed that the gods are using a true name, one might say the real name, which expresses an insight that mere humans lack. But can Socrates provide any examples? Why, he's glad you asked! He now launches into a long series of etymologies of Greek words, trying to show in each case that the word in question perfectly expresses the thing to which it refers. He gives etymologies for the names of the gods, features of the natural world like the moon, ethical virtues, and so on. To give you just a flavor of this, he suggests that the hero in Homer's Iliad, Hector, is called Hector because in Greek hektor can mean one who holds, and hektor is the protector and ruler, thus the holder or possessor, of Troy. Or take the word theos, which means god. This is where we get the word theology, for instance. Socrates says this relates to the Greek verb thein, which means to run, because the ones who devised the name thought that the heavens were divine and the heavens are always running their course above us. Speaking of which, one of my favorite etymologies is of the Greek word for heaven, also the name of a god, Ouranos. Socrates suggests that this comes from the phrase horo ta ano, which means looking at things above. Socrates' etymologies are ingenious, but rather fanciful and often extremely far-fetched. Some readers have wondered how seriously we are meant to take the whole exercise. Socrates says several times that he is in the grip of a divine inspiration, which is why he's able to produce all these brilliant etymologies. But could that be Plato signaling us to take this with a grain of salt, since he elsewhere contrasts divine inspiration with the possession of true knowledge? Or maybe the whole thing is a kind of joke, a parody of something the Sophists did. The Sophists are indeed mentioned several times in a rather teasing way, but it's not very plausible to say that the whole thing is just a joke. For one thing, Plato has clearly put a lot of effort into this. For another, he has Socrates label a few selected etymologies as less serious. This suggests that the others mentioned are more serious. More plausible, I think, would be to say that Plato is competing with other authors who offered etymologies. Perhaps he's displaying his ingenuity and ability to suggest clever derivations for Greek terms. But even so, he may think that there are serious philosophical reasons for producing such derivations. What might that be? Well, we already know the answer. If Socrates is right that the correct words reveal the natures of things, then we could discover the natures of things by producing etymologies of their correct names. The analysis of names would turn out to be a way of doing philosophy. But there are several problems. Firstly, Socrates admits that some words have crept into Greek from foreign languages, so no etymology is possible in these cases. More worrying, he assumes that the Greek of his own day is corrupted. In the Greeks spoken in the 5th century BC, the original correct word may have been altered significantly. Letters or even whole syllables may have been added or subtracted, as when pronunciation changes to make a word easier to say. So in some cases, he suggests that we need to eliminate letters from a Greek word to discover its correct etymology. This obviously makes it even easier to let one's etymological fancy run wild. But before we run wild, an even worse problem might give us pause. If I etymologize the word for god by saying that it's based on the word for run, then why is the word for run necessarily a correct word? It looks like each word's meaning is simply a function of the meanings of the words on which it is based. So what makes any of those words natural, or revelatory of the natures of things? To stop this regress, Socrates suggests that there is a way that words could be real, natural representations or likenesses of the things they refer to. This is, basically, onomatopoeia. If I may indulge in a little etymology of my own, this word onomatopoeia comes from, wait for it, ancient Greek. And the first part, onoma, is the Greek term I've been translating in this episode as word. Sometimes people translate onoma as name rather than word, but that might be misleading since Socrates is happy to refer to a common noun, or even a verb, as an onoma. At any rate, onomatopoeia is of course when a word literally sounds like what it means, for example words like bang, splash, or tweet. Socrates' suggestion, then, is that all real or natural words are onomatopoeic. This seems hard to believe, but Socrates argues that if we take the idea seriously, we'll see that when words were originally bestowed upon things, the people who bestowed them were expressing certain ideas about the natures of things and crafting words to match. These ancestors of ours, it would seem, were Heraclitians. They used certain letters to suggest that things are constantly changing. For instance, Socrates says, the Greek letter rho is supposed to signify rapid change because the tongue vibrates when pronouncing it. The letter lambda is supposed to represent gliding or flowing. Now Socrates gives examples of how this onomatopoeic code was used to build words expressing a Heraclitian theory. To give a very basic example, the very word for flow or flux in Greek begins with a rho, which signifies change. Then after using onomatopoeia as a starting point, these Heraclitian ancestors built further words etymologically. For instance, the Greek word for wisdom itself, phronesis, is supposed to relate to a Greek word for motion, phora. Thus Greek, or rather the carefully designed ancestor language of Greek, contains within it a kind of secret philosophical theory, namely that it is the nature of things to be in constant change. Now I know what you're thinking, since when is Plato a Heraclitian? Is he really having Socrates claim that the wise ancestors who devised the original true version of Greek were flux theorists like the ones he attacks in the Theaetetus? Well yes and no. Socrates does seem convinced that these ancestors had Heraclitian ideas, but he also points out that it is one thing to discover a philosophical theory encoded in our language, and another thing to decide whether that theory is true. Perhaps the ancestors were Heraclitians, but then perhaps they were wrong. And that brings us to Socrates' refutation of the Heraclitian in the room, Cratylus. So far Socrates has been refuting Hermogenes' theory that language is entirely conventional. Now he points out against Cratylus that language cannot be entirely natural either. The account he's just presented was very much to Cratylus' taste, but it allows for things like the corruption of words. As we saw, sometimes a letter might be added to or removed from a word to make it easier to say. When this happens, people are still able to use the word to communicate, to express meaning. So it can't be the case that only the true, natural words function as words. There must also be a role for convention. Socrates thus takes a sort of middle view between Hermogenes and Cratylus. Words have their meanings by both nature and convention. So it's no surprise that he also rejects the most radical idea of Cratylus, namely that it's impossible to speak falsely because a real word or string of words must successfully mean the thing it is about. Socrates has already suggested, with his idea about onomatopoeia, that words are likenesses of the things they mean. So they're a bit like paintings, they're representations. But if I hold up a painting of say, Buster Keaton, and say it's a painting of Charlie Chaplin, then there is a mismatch between the painting and the thing that is supposedly represented. I've got the wrong silent movie comedian. Similarly, it must be possible for me to apply a word to the wrong thing. The falsehood occurs because of a mismatch between the representation and what it is meant to represent. Notice how Socrates here uses the idea that words are likenesses of things, which fits perfectly into Cratylus's own theory that words are by nature, to undermine Cratylus's more radical claim that falsehood is impossible. Notice also that Plato is here returning to the question, familiar from the Theaetetus, of how falsehood is possible, and coming up with an answer a lot like the one we saw there. Just as in the Theaetetus, Socrates talked about imprints in wax which are mismatched with objects of perception, so here he treats words as representations mismatched with the things they are supposed to represent. In taking a middle view between the naturalism of Cratylus and the conventionalism of Hermogenes, Socrates tries to preserve two possible functions of language. On the one hand, we use language simply to communicate our intentions. For this purpose, convention seems to be enough. If I stipulate that this baby with the logical twinkle in his eye is to be called Gottlob Frege, and the right people get the message, then that will be his name. But on the other hand, Socrates is sympathetic to the hope that words can do something more ambitious. They can reveal the natures of things. This takes us back to the flux theory of the ancestors who devised the original words for things. As I said earlier, even if this does turn out to be the theory encoded in our language, that wouldn't show that the theory is true. To discover whether the theory is true, we need to do something other than analyzing the words that have been assigned to the things around us, we need to decide whether the principles that guided that process were the right ones. As it turns out, Herakleitianism is rejected. The dialogue ends with a reassertion of what I'm tempted to call good old fashioned Platonism. Perhaps the ancestors were flux theorists, but if so then our language is devised on false principles. For the right philosophical theory, which we can use to correct the assumptions built into our language, is not a theory of radical change, but a theory of stability. I have a dream, Socrates says. In my dream, it seems to me that there may be beauty itself, goodness itself, and so on. And surely beauty itself is always the way it is and not constantly changing. And then won't such things be the objects of true knowledge? Here Plato does what he famously fails to do in the Theaetetus. He affirms the theory of forms, or something like it, as a preferable alternative to the flux theory of Heraclitus and his followers. So at the end of the Cratylus, Plato seems for a change to actually talk like a Platonist. If we read the whole dialogue again with this ending in mind, we might even convince ourselves that there is room for a true language, albeit perhaps not ancient Greek, whose words express Platonic forms rather than a world of change and flux. If philosophy could be done by linguistic analysis, it would have to analyze just such a language. But if this was Plato's dream, he never tried to turn it into a reality. He did write a dialogue about the world around us, how it came to be, and how it relates to the forms. But this dialogue does not proceed by analyzing the Greek language or any other language. And it admits that the theory it presents is a tentative one, only a likely story, as its main character says. In this story, the world is revealed as the work of a divine craftsman, made as an image of the forms. As in the closing pages of the Cratylus, Platonism is alive and well in this next dialogue we'll be looking at, the Timaeus. But the Platonism in the Timaeus is combined with some new and rather unexpected ideas. I don't want to give too much away, but let me just ask you this. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and wondered if you might be made of triangles? If so, then next week's episode is for you, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Likely Story, Plato's Timaeus. Imagine if you will that you're a medieval monk in a well-stocked library. It's the 11th century AD. One day you go to the shelf where Plato's writings are kept and find there a single volume. You open it and begin to read. You aren't going to be reading the Republic, because it hasn't been translated into Latin. Nor are you reading the Phaedo or the Mino, neither of which will be available in Latin until the middle of the 12th century. The Platonic Corpus has fortunately been preserved and studied in the Greek-speaking medieval Byzantine Empire. Its rediscovery in Western Europe, where Latin is still the language of scholars, will help spark the Renaissance. But that's still centuries away. So what you are reading represents the complete works of Plato as they are known in your time and place, an incomplete Latin translation of a single dialogue, the Timaeus. Although Plato is hardly more than a name to you, the themes of this work will interest you greatly as you leaf through its pages. For it is in the Timaeus that Plato presents his thoughts on the creation of the world and the providential order of the universe, topics that are close to your heart, since you are a medieval monk. In the Timaeus, you discover what Plato has to say about God. But Plato's God is rather different than the God of medieval monks. We can tell this already from the way Plato refers to him. Although it is made clear that we are dealing with a god, Plato also calls him a craftsman, in Greek demiurgos. This so-called demiurge has two things in common with human craftsmen which make him unlike God as he is usually understood in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Firstly, the demiurge is working from a set of plans. Just as a house builder might follow architectural drawings, so the demiurge looks to the forms. He seeks to create an imitation of these forms, and this imitation is the physical universe. Secondly, the demiurge does not create from absolute nothingness. Instead, he fashions the universe in a kind of receptacle, without which he would have nowhere to put anything. Thus the demiurge, unlike the god of the revealed religions, cooperates with two further, apparently distinct principles in fashioning the universe, the forms he uses as patterns, and the receptacle in which the world is born. As Plato puts it, if the demiurge is the father of the universe, then the receptacle is its mother. The Timaeus is a dialogue, of course, so in addition to these cosmic characters, there is also a small cast of dramatic characters. These consist of Socrates and three others. In fact, Socrates counts the others in the very first sentence of the dialogue, which literally begins, 1, 2, 3. Plato is, as he sometimes likes to do, alluding to a major theme of a dialogue in its opening words. As we'll see, this dialogue is going to have a great deal to say about mathematics, and Plato marks this by putting numbers quite literally at the front of the Timaeus. By the way, the best example of this Platonic trick is the Republic, which begins with Socrates saying, I went down to the Piraeus, that is, the port near Athens. It cannot be unintentional that the dialogue with the cave allegory in it begins with someone saying, I went down. In fact, when our action begins in the Timaeus, it turns out that the Republic is very much on our minds. Socrates begins the Timaeus by summarizing a discussion he and his colleagues have had on the previous day. What he says sounds suspiciously like the content of the Republic. So this little group has already heard a depiction of the ideal city. This dialogue, the Timaeus, will fill out the picture, but paint on an even larger canvas. In the Republic, we had an extended parallel between the soul and the city. Now a further parallel is drawn between the city and the entire universe. We will be shown the ideal order that reigns in the universe as a whole, and not just in one city. First, though, we are shown a picture of that ideal city in action. Socrates' associate Critias, our friend from the Carmades if you remember that from episode 19, tells a story that the great Athenian statesman Solon supposedly heard in Egypt. Once upon a time, Solon was told, Athens faced down an invasion from a mighty foreign land. No, it's not the story about Persia again. This ancient invasion came from a land which lay in the other direction from Persia, out in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, the continent of Atlantis. This myth of Atlantis is taken up again in a second dialogue, the Critias, a companion piece to the Timaeus which is very rarely read nowadays, never mind in the Middle Ages. After this prefatory material, we arrive at the account of Timaeus. He is introduced as a philosopher and astronomer, and once he starts talking, he hardly shuts up for the rest of the dialogue. In fact this platonic dialogue consists mostly of a monologue, delivered by Timaeus. One might suspect that Plato has gotten tired of dialogues, and decided to sit down and write a didactic theoretical treatise for a change. He's finally going to stop playing dramatic games, and tell us like it is. But that impression is undermined to some extent by Timaeus' own description of his speech. Because of the very nature of the topic, he announces that he will only be able to present, as he puts it, a likely story or plausible account. The reason for his limited ambition is that he will be dealing with the physical cosmos. It is, he says, a realm of change and becoming, and thus is susceptible only to opinion. apply only to the world of true being, the forms. As I said last time, old-fashioned Platonism seems to be alive and well here in the Timaeus. Something else that is alive and well is the physical universe itself. Timaeus begins his account by saying that the demiurge, being good, wanted to create the best universe possible. He thus decided that the universe should itself be a living being with a soul, and should imitate, insofar as is possible, the form of living being. To put it another way, the universe turns out to be an animal that is designed as a copy of the form of animal. Timaeus assumes that the universe is a sphere, because the sphere is the most perfect shape. He says it is made of the four elements we know from the prezocratic philosopher Empedocles, fire, air, water, and earth. He gives a kind of argument for this. If the universe is to be visible, there must be fire, and if it is to be tangible, there must be earth. But the universe would not be perfectly bonded together if it did not contain proportions between these two extremes of fire and earth. So for the sake of a kind of mathematical completeness, the demiurge includes air and water in between these two elements. Plato is here assuming something that will become familiar in Aristotle and most other ancient thinkers. The four elements mix together but tend towards being arranged in layers, with heavy, solid earth settling at the midpoint of the spherical universe, light, subtle fire dominating at the periphery, and water and air in between. What we now think of as the planet earth is located at the very centre of the universe, with the heavens rotating around it. All of this, of course, is in keeping with everyday experience, which is just what we would expect from Timaeus' likely story. We see that flame flickers upwards in air, that clods of earth and stones sink in water and fall down through air. As for the heavenly bodies, they cannot be observed up close, but Timaeus says that they too are compounded out of the elements. He adds that their regular motions create time, like a cosmic clock. The heavens are the most divine parts of the universe, but the universe as a whole is divine, a god made by the greater god, who is the demiurge. The way Timaeus reasons throughout this section may strike us as an odd mixture. On the one hand, he appeals to empirical observation, as I said, the ideas about the elements are supposed to explain what we see around us. On the other hand, he invokes mathematical symbolism, such as we might expect from a Pythagorean. One example is his idea that air and water must exist in order that there be some proportion bonding together fire and earth. The mathematics becomes even more dominant as Timaeus goes along, particularly in a very complicated passage about the creation of soul by the demiurge. This is explained by means of a detailed analysis of geometrical ratios, with the demiurge seeking to create an ideally proportionate mixture which will constitute the soul. The demiurge then weaves this well-proportioned soul with the body of the cosmos to create a living sphere, as perfect an animal as can exist in the physical realm. This animal, as I say, is the universe in which we live. But how do we come to live in the universe? Did the demiurge create us? No, he does what all good executives do, he delegates. In a characteristically inscrutable little passage, Plato has Timaeus endorse the ancient myths about the generation of the gods, more or less as we know them from Homer and Hesiod. We should, he says, simply take at face value the accounts of the gods that have been handed down to us, even without proof. Thus, we can go ahead and believe that there are a family of gods on hand to help the demiurge, who include Kronos, Zeus, Hera, and so on. Unlike the demiurge, these gods are actually born from one another, just as Hesiod says. If this passage could be read by Xenophanes, the pre-Socratic who revelled in criticizing the epic poets, we might imagine him either sighing in frustration, or alternatively indulging in a conspiratorial smile, if he assumed that Plato is not serious and is being ironic in endorsing the traditional Greek gods. But as usual, Plato is keeping his cards close to his chest. It is in any event these lesser gods who do the dirty work of fashioning the human body. The demiurge takes care of separating out portions of soul, but his helper gods design and make our bodies out of the four elements, making our heads roughly spherical in imitation of the sphere that is the universe. The only reason we need our bodies from the neck down, as it turns out, is so that our heads don't roll around and get stuck in ditches. Again, you have to wonder whether Plato is kidding, but again, the whole account is delivered with an apparently straight face. Timaeus also explained how human eyesight works, and at some length. I will probably return to the mechanics of Platonic optics in a future episode. For now, let me just mention that Timaeus praises eyesight as the most important of the senses, because it allows us to see the regular motions of the heavenly bodies. We should aspire to imitate these revolutions in the motions of our own souls. This then is Timaeus' description of how the demiurge and his helper gods fashion the universe and the humans living within it. But Timaeus isn't done. He has so far left out an important part of the story, the receptacle. The receptacle is none of the objects that surround us, but is rather what contains those things. We cannot observe it directly. We know it exists only because there must be some matrix or spatial arena in which things move and change into one another. And things certainly do change, for instance when water evaporates and turns into air. Plato sounds a bit like a Heraclitean here, as he has Timaeus describe the physical world as a realm of constant change and flux. Without the receptacle, there would be no stability at all in the region here around us below the orderly and unchanging heavens. The receptacle itself is unchanging, but featureless. Timaeus compares it to the odorless fluid to which people add further sense when they are making perfume. So it can only be grasped indirectly by what Timaeus calls bastard reasoning. Thus Plato has added a third rung to his metaphysical ladder. In dialogues like the Phaedo and the Republic, we were acquainted with two kinds of metaphysical items, the unchanging forms and the changing things that participate in them. Now we are given what Timaeus calls a third kind, namely the receptacle in which these participating things can exist. Timaeus brings in the receptacle in order to illustrate how the universe is the product not only of divine intellect, but also what he calls necessity. The demiurge and helper gods are constrained in certain ways as they fashion the universe. For instance, objects in the universe must take up space since they are made in the spatial realm of the receptacle. This means that they can collide and interfere with one another. There are other, more subtle limitations too. Timaeus gives the example of the human skull, which turns out to be itself a kind of compromise. If it were thinner, our brains could be larger and we would be more intelligent, but if it were thicker it would provide better protection. Its present thickness is thus the product of necessity. The gods do the best they can with the materials that are physically possible. The example of the skull comes quite a bit later in the dialogue, towards the end of Timaeus' attempt to analyse the physical world, taking into account not only the demiurge wisdom but also the constraints imposed by necessity. As this part of the likely account takes shape, it's one shape in particular that dominates the discussion, triangles. Of course Plato loved geometry, remember the legend that a sign on the academy said that only those who had studied geometry should enter, and his passion for the subject is never more evident than here in the Timaeus. We are told that the four elements are not strictly speaking elements in the sense of being the most basic constituents of bodies. Instead, just as our bodies are made up of fire, air, water, and earth, so those elemental bodies are made of triangles. To be precise, the four elements are made out of two different kinds of triangles. Earth is made up of one kind, triangles with one right angle and two further equal angles, so we'd say the angles are 90, 45, and 45 degrees. If you fuse together two such triangles, you get a square, and if you fuse six squares along their edges, you get a cube. This explains the solidity of earth. At what we might call the molecular level, it is made of microscopic cubes that are packed together. All the other elements are made of little triangles, each of which is half of an equilateral triangle. Once they join as equilateral triangles, these can in turn be combined to form the surfaces of various three-dimensional shapes. Those of you who were paying attention in geometry class when you were kids know that these shapes are called polyhedra. If you've ever wondered why five such polyhedra, the Q, pyramid, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron are called the platonic solids, then now you know. These are the five solids mentioned in this part of the Timaeus. Next, Plato invokes the geometrical features of the solids to explain physical phenomena. We already saw that the solidity of cubes explains the solidity of earth, which is made of cubes. Likewise, fire consists of tiny pyramids, and the sharp points of these pyramids explains the cutting and destructive nature of fire. Another advantage of this account is in explaining how fire, air, and water can turn into one another. The three-dimensional molecules, the polyhedra, are broken up into their triangular atoms, and these triangles then reform, so that one platonic solid arises from another. Incidentally, earth, being made of that other kind of triangle, cannot change into the other elements, a view which Aristotle will go on to reject. Taking off from this likely account of the elements in terms of geometrical atomism, Timaeus goes on to discuss why some things are hard and others soft, some heavy and some light, some rough or smooth, why things have colour and taste, and why the human body is put together the way it is. In one significant passage, he assigns the three parts of the soul familiar from the Republic to parts of the body. Reason is located in the brain, spirit in the heart, and appetite in the liver. This too is something that Aristotle will go on to reject. Indeed, a debate will rage for centuries as to whether the rational and perceiving part of our soul is associated with the brain or the heart. As we'll see in a much later episode, it was the 2nd century AD doctor Galen who put this debate to rest and convinced everyone that they are thinking with their brains and not their hearts. But rather than getting into the details of this physical account, I want to conclude by stepping back and thinking about the cosmology of the Timaeus. Plato's cosmic recipe might remind us of the pre-Socratics. The ingredients of his physical universe include four elements, this ingredient is borrowed from Empedocles, a divine mind, that's a healthy portion of Anaxagoras, to produce a world in constant change, there's a dash of Heraclitus, which is fundamentally mathematical, a dusting of Pythagoreanism. But as always, it would be a mistake to reduce Plato to his sources. The Timaeus provides us with an ambitious and novel account of the universe and its making. It shows a deep commitment to the idea that the universe is providentially ordered. Though Plato doesn't use any phrase like the best of all possible worlds, he does stress that the demiurge is not envious and wants to make this world as good and beautiful as possible. On the other hand, there are limitations on that possibility. The triangles out of which the elements arise are, Timaeus tells us, the most beautiful and perfect shapes, but the very fact that the elements are made of shapes has to do with the nature of the receptacle, and in general, the demiurge's choices are limited by physical necessity. This is not the untrammeled creative activity of the Christian god worshipped by medieval monks. Rather, the universe is the work of a divine craftsman who, as I've said, has no choice about which blueprints to use and who is restricted as regards his materials. Another equally profound difference is this. The god of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is a personal deity. He rewards and he punishes. He grows angry. He loves his creatures. The demiurge does none of these things. He may be providential and even generous, but in making the universe his attitude is more like aesthetic taste than love. Indeed, there is a good Platonic reason why the demiurge cannot love us. The demiurge is divine and perfect and needs nothing. And in other dialogues, Plato shows us that love is always bound up with need, with unfulfilled desire, with a longing for a beauty which we strive to possess but do not have. The dialogues in which Plato discusses friendship and love are some of the most beautiful he wrote. Works like The Phaedrus and Symposium show him at the height of his power as he fuses philosophical insight with literary sophistication. So make a date with me for next week when I'll discuss Plato's erotic dialogues here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Wings of Desire, Plato's Erotic Dialogues. The past, as they say, is a foreign country. And ancient Greece can often seem to be a very foreign country indeed. Some aspects of Greek culture do find echoes in our own, even if the echoes are distant ones. There aren't really any sophists nowadays, but there are spin doctors. The Presocratics did Philosophy of Nature and we do science. Euripidean tragedy and Aristophanic comedy are very distant ancestors of modern theatre, and so on. In this episode though, I'll be looking at Plato's reaction to a Greek cultural practice that really has no parallel in our own, pederasty. Nowadays, sexual liaisons between adult men and young boys are not merely illegal, but among the most repugnant moral crimes that can be committed. But in ancient Greece, such liaisons played an accepted role in civil life. These pederastic relationships were seen as a way of educating young men in the ways of the polis. And I do mean young men, boys really. Ideally, the younger partner would be in the bloom of youth, before the first growth of their beard. This boy was called the beloved, while the lover was the older man. Notice the implication that the attraction was not necessarily mutual. It was assumed that the older lover would take physical pleasure in their partnering, whereas the boy would not. Boys who seemed to enjoy this side of the relationship were considered shameless, and a beloved youngster was supposed to show his decency by playing hard to get before finally giving in to the blandishments of the lover. Now I know what you're thinking. What's in it for the boy if he isn't expected to get any physical pleasure out of it? Of course, at the stage of courtship there's the pleasure of being flattered and pursued, something Plato exploits for humorous effect in several dialogues. Remember the guy falling off the end of the bench in the Carmadise. But as I say, the main benefit for the beloved was that the lover would provide a special kind of education. For the boy, pederasty was an introduction into the ways of grown-up society, along with political connections and experience. Thus, pederasty was linked to political life, and for the young man the erotic relationship could be a step on the political ladder. He would give his body to the older man in return. This is, perhaps, why he was expected to put up at least a show of resistance, to mask this underlying exchange of benefits which could, to an uncharitable observer, look like prostitution. Plato was just such an uncharitable observer. He allows his characters to speak in very blunt terms about the benefits the beloved and the lover expect when they embark on an erotic relationship. Nor is he above exploiting these relationships for humorous effect, as I've just mentioned. So it's easy to assume that Plato's attitude towards this practice was one of stern disapproval. We now talk of platonic relationships and platonic love, meaning loving relationships that don't involve sex. This gives the impression that Plato was the Nancy Reagan of the erotic. His advice to us is, just say no. But in fact, Plato's interest in the erotic as a whole, and in these pederastic relationships in particular, was complex and multifaceted. A number of his dialogues feature erotic themes, sometimes in the form of the dramatic setting as in the Carmadines, and sometimes in passing, as when Socrates teases Mino, saying that as a good-looking young man, Mino is always fishing for compliments. But there are two dialogues that are especially important when it comes to his treatment of eros, the Greek word for sexual or passionate love. These happen to be two of his greatest dialogues, the symposium and the fidris. The symposium is, naturally enough, set at a symposium, or drinking party, an occasion where Greek men would gather in the evenings to lie down, drink wine, and entertain one another with song or conversation. Further entertainment would be provided by flute girls, who were often available for the men's physical enjoyment. In Plato's dialogue with the symposium, the atmosphere is at first quite sedate, since many of those present have already been drinking heavily the night before. Instead of getting drunk, they opt to give speeches in praise of love or eros. At the end of the dialogue, the party gets a lot wilder with the entrance of Alcibiades, a beautiful young man who gives a speech in praise of Socrates instead of love. Plato's masterstroke here is to have a series of characters give a series of speeches about love. This allows him to look at eros from a variety of viewpoints while showing off his ability to mimic a variety of voices. The two most famous voices are given the two best speeches. These are the voices of Aristophanes and Socrates. But even before we get to them, we are presented with a range of ideas about love. Fidris, the namesake of the other dialogue I'll be discussing in a moment, describes love as a god who brings great blessings. Another character called Pausanias goes one better, insisting that there are two gods called love, one of whom is preferable to the other. The lover enthralled to the lower, common love is indiscriminate and jumps at any chance for sexual gratification, whereas the higher, heavenly love leads its possessor to show loyalty to his beloved. This idea that love can manifest itself as crass desire fulfillment or as an exalted pursuit also appears in the Fidris, as we'll see shortly. After Pausanias things are brought down to earth a bit by Erechsimichus, who is a doctor. Like the pre-Socratic Empedocles, he sees love as a force that pervades the cosmos. He's particularly interested in its effects on the human body, where love is manifested as the body's harmony and health. This is a reminder for us that in Plato's time, medical ideas had already penetrated into philosophy, and vice versa. But as I say, things really get going with the speech of Aristophanes, a brilliant and funny explanation of erotic attraction by way of a myth. Aristophanes explains that originally, humans were joined in pairs, some with two male halves, some with two female halves, some literally androgynous, that is, combining a male and a female half. These creatures had eight legs and two heads, and could move by somersaulting along the ground. Their speed and strength allowed them to challenge the gods. Mighty Zeus put a stop to this by splitting each of them in half, dividing them into the humans we now see. This explains our desperation for sexual union, we are literally trying to reunite with our missing half. It also explains why, to put it in modern terms, some people are homosexual and others heterosexual. Men who love men are split from a man-man pairing, whereas those who love women are split from an androgynous pairing. Aristophanes hastens to point out that men who love men are more manly, since they derive from a composite creature which was entirely male. Aristophanes' myth befits the comic poet Plato has chosen to deliver it. For instance, Aristophanes concludes by threatening that if we do not respect love and the other gods, Zeus may split us up again, dividing the left side of our bodies from the right side, sawn in half between the nostrils. Plato also has Aristophanes constantly protest that he's being serious, which gives us to understand that the rest of the company is laughing at the images he conjures up. Yet the myth makes a serious point too, namely that erotic love is a desire for union in the strongest possible sense. We are, according to the myth, incomplete, and we desire to possess our other halves again. As Aristophanes says, if a god were to appear to two lovers and offer to rivet them together so that they could never be parted, they would say that this is their heart's desire. Again, the way this is put has comic overtones, but one shouldn't underestimate the idea that love is really a desire to possess, and in some sense even become identical with, the beloved. Even in the book of Genesis, it says that man and wife become one flesh when they are united in marriage. Socrates, though, is having none of this. In typical fashion, he sets out not just to give a speech in praise of love, but to disprove the ideas of love that have come before him. A beautiful young poet named Agathon has spoken following Aristophanes, and praised Eros again as a beautiful and wondrous god. Socrates refutes him, first in a short discussion with Agathon, and then by means of his own speech. Of course, Socrates doesn't really like to give speeches, as he says at the beginning of the Apology. Instead, he claims to be recounting a discussion he had with a wise female philosopher named Deotima. Deotima's speech casts doubt on Agathon's idea that love is a beautiful god, and on Aristophanes's idea that love is a yearning for possession and union. Deotima admits that love is a divine being, a demigod if not a god. But she objects to Agathon's effusive praise of Eros. After all, what is love but desire for what is beautiful? And if I desire something then obviously I don't have it. So, if Eros is a divine being, he can't be beautiful and wondrous. Rather, he is poor, rough, and barefoot, seeking desperately after a beauty and wisdom that he never attains. Sound like anyone we know? It seems Socrates is, through Deotima, engaging in a little bit of self-portraiture. But if love is a longing for what one doesn't have, then why doesn't Socrates or Deotima agree with Aristophanes that it is a yearning for union with our missing half? Deotima alludes to Aristophanes's idea directly, and disagrees with him too. She says that if I desire something, that can't be simply because it is a part of me, but because I consider it to be good. After all, she points out, I'm happy to amputate a limb if it's infected. Love, then, is not about possession. It is about seeking what is beautiful, what is good. No prizes for guessing where this is going. If I am after what is beautiful, then it will be a mistake to satisfy myself with beautiful bodies. Rather, I should seek after beauty itself, the form of beauty. This is just what Deotima goes on to say. Our desire for beauty is a desire to, as she says, give birth in the beautiful, to transcend our limitations and finitude by seeking immortality. This is why people seek to produce children, as a way of living on after their deaths. But this is a poor sort of immortality, just as the beauty of body is a poor sort of beauty. So it is a rather debased expression of love if the lover contends himself with the beauty of boys' bodies. A true seeker of beauty will realize that it is not just this one boy's body that is beautiful, but other bodies too, and from there will rise to admire the beauty of souls. This kind of lover will wish to educate his beloved and not just sleep with him. In praising this sort of impulse, Deotima seems to give qualified Platonic approval to the pederastic practices of his culture, at least insofar as they revolved around education of the young and not physical consummation. But this is not yet the highest rung on the ladder of love. Ultimately, the lover's interest in the education of souls will lead him to pursue beautiful laws in order to improve as many souls as possible. Thus a figure like Solon, the lawmaker of Athens, is revealed to be an advanced practitioner of the erotic arts. Even Solon though has not ascended the ladder to the top. The lover who graduates to the highest step is the one who seeks after and arrives at beauty itself, what Deotima calls the great sea of beauty. This lover achieves immortality not by giving birth to children or by writing laws for a city, but by grasping unchanging immortal truths, the nature of beauty itself. According to Deotima then, all the other loves she has described are merely defective versions of philosophy, for the true love is love of wisdom, and this is of course nothing other than philosophy. Once it reaches this exalted height, the dialogue is brought crashing back down to the context of a drinking party by the arrival of Alcibiades. Garland did with flowers, and more than a little drunk, he gives a raucous speech in praise of Socrates rather than Eros. This is the speech that was mentioned by Raphal Wolf in my interview of him back in episode 17. It's the most powerful evocation of Socrates in the dialogues, but today our theme is love, and not this particular lover of wisdom. So I'll move on now to Plato's other great dialogue about Eros, the Phaedrus. Like the symposium, the Phaedrus matches an erotic setting to its erotic themes. Here we encounter Socrates in nature, outside the city walls of Athens, a rarity for Socrates who prefers to stay in the city where he can discuss philosophy. A discussion ensues nonetheless, as Socrates is also encountered by the beautiful young Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus flirt in this bucolic setting, and in a dramatic device not too dissimilar to that of the symposium, trade speeches on the subject of love. More specifically, the speeches concern the question of what kind of older man a boy should agree to gratify. Should he prefer a lover who is really in love with him, or one who is not? One way to phrase this central question of the Phaedrus is this. Is a lover also a friend? Does love really make a man provide benefits for his beloved, or does it rather give him reason to harm the beloved? Socrates suggests it may be the latter. After all, the lover doesn't want to encounter resistance, he wants the boy to give in. So it's in his interest for the boy to be weak. He wants the boy to be dependent on him. Any advantage the boy has, for instance wealth, will make the boy more independent, so he will scheme to harm, not benefit, the young object of his desires. To this one can add that the lover will abandon the boy as soon as the boy's good looks fade, as soon as that beard starts to grow in earnest. A non-lover, by contrast, will be motivated not by physical lust, but by goodwill and friendship. So the boy should give his body not to the besotted lover, but to an older man who is merely a friend. At this point, Socrates's divine sign speaks up. You might remember this supernatural signal that warns him when he is about to do something wrong. Socrates recants immediately, and gives another speech arguing in the other direction. The boy should after all gratify the lover, not the non-lover. To explain why, Socrates offers one of the most famous images in Plato. Our souls, he says, are like a team of winged horses being steered by a charioteer. There are two horses, one noble and obedient, the other vicious and wild. The charioteer must try to steer a straight path with these flying steeds, keeping the bad horse under control. If he succeeds, he may be able to stick just his head up into the realm beyond the heavens, where the gods process in their own chariots. There the soul may behold justice, temperance, and knowledge. In short, it is able to see the forms. But the bad horse drags some souls down to earth, and these souls lose their wings as they are joined to an earthly body. It seems obvious that this image reflects the theory of soul we saw in the Republic. The wild horse represents the desiring soul, which tries to defy reason, and the good horse stands for the honor-loving spirit, which can help soul to subdue desire. The charioteer, of course, symbolizes our rational soul. The theory of recollection also seems to be making an appearance, since Socrates talks about the fallen souls as having forgotten what they beheld above the heavens. It's nice to see familiar Platonic themes turning up in this evocative setting, but what does any of it have to do with love? Well, Socrates explains that when we see beauty, for instance the beauty of a boy, our soul is reminded of the beauty it saw above. Some souls yield to the seduction of physical beauty and seek physical gratification, but the better souls are prompted to grow their wings again. This is a painful process and the soul does not understand what is happening to it, which is why falling in love is so agonizing and bewildering. The boy is, then, used as a kind of prompt for the recollection of beauty, a more emotionally intense version of the kind of prompting we were told about in the Phaedo, where equal sticks and stones led us to recollect the form of equal. The boy too is eventually drawn into this erotic yearning. Like the lover, the boy's passionate side, represented by the bad horse of his soul's chariot, may lead him to give in to crude physical union, but if the good horses prevail, the two will remain chaste and engage in what turns out to be a truer and more lasting union, the shared pleasures of philosophy. In a way it isn't surprising that Plato sees philosophy as a manifestation of love. After all, the Greek word philosophia does literally mean the love of wisdom. This etymology has nothing to do with eros, it is rather related to the word philia. That's a word with a broad application. For instance, the relationship between parents and their children is one of philia, and sexual love or eros is compatible with philia too. I'll follow common practice and use the English word friendship as a translation. Which might make us realize that there's something rather unsatisfying about the account of love we've found in Plato so far. Some have complained that in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Plato gives an account of love which is completely divorced from friendship. The scholar Gregory Vlastos accused Plato of a failure of moral imagination here, insofar as the Symposium in particular doesn't give a successful account of interpersonal love. Instead, Plato presents erotic relationships as mere occasions for ascending to beauty itself and the other forms. If this is right, then one beautiful person will do just as well as any other, the same way that any two equal sticks will serve equally well to remind me of the form of equal. But this is to assume that Plato was in fact trying to give an account of interpersonal love in Diotima's speech. Perhaps this issue just wasn't on Plato's agenda in the Symposium. This doesn't mean he would have nothing to say on the subject. And that he did have something to say is clear from a less famous work called the Lysis. The Lysis is a more typical Socratic dialogue. Socrates and some young interlocutors try to define something and fail in their attempt. In this case, the term to be defined is philia, or friendship. The dialogue is shorter than the Symposium and lacks its mythic and literary power, but it is worth reading nonetheless. Talking to yet another beautiful boy, the Lysis of the title, Socrates wonders whether it's true that birds of a feather really flock together. That is, do friendships spring up between people who are alike or unalike? After presenting objections against both options, Socrates decides that all friendship is based on a love for some kind of good. If I am your friend, it must be because of your goodness and it must be for your sake that I am your friend. This is an idea about friendship that we'll be seeing again when we get to Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics. As usual, Plato is ahead of the game, and he does seem to be showing an interest in interpersonal love. It is my friend's goodness, not goodness in general, or the form of goodness, that serves as the basis for our friendship and the friendly feeling I bear towards my friend is for his sake. But even here, Plato makes sure to integrate philosophy into his account of love. If I am a philosopher, it is because I bear this relation of philia towards wisdom, seeking after this great good which I am so far lacking. So, Plato seems deeply committed to the idea that philosophy is really a kind of love, a longing and passion for wisdom. It's easy to miss this passionate aspect of philosophy when we are in the midst of some technical argument about metaphysics or epistemology, but Plato makes sure we don't miss the point by using the powerful mythic imagery of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, all those heavenly chariots, soul-sprouting feathers, gods and demigods. These are only two of the dialogues in which Plato uses myth as a vehicle for expressing and reinforcing philosophical ideas. In fact, many of the dialogues we've already looked at like The Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic feature elaborate myths which I've left out of consideration so far in these podcasts. That would be doing Plato a disservice. So, in two weeks in the final episode I'll be devoting to Plato, I will look at his use of myth and consider his attitude towards myth and towards literature more generally. But first, I'd like to look a bit more at these wonderful dialogues I was discussing today. Unfortunately, I happen to have a friend who has written extensively on Plato's erotic dialogues. So, join me in the next two episodes, first an interview with Frisbee Sheffield about Platonic love, and then a look at Plato and literature, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Plato's erotic dialogues and I have with me the ideal guest, my colleague Frisbee Sheffield, who has published one book and edited another about Plato's symposium. Hi Frisbee. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming on the show. This show is supposed to be about Plato's erotic dialogue, so can you remind us which works we're actually talking about when we talk about the erotic dialogues of Plato? Yes, it's a good question, which dialogues of Plato's are erotic, an answer to which to some extent depends on what one means by erotic. Typically what is meant is that these are dialogues that are about eros, roughly passionate desire. It had a strong sexual sense, the term eros, though it was broader in scope and could be used of desire, say for food or war. So it was really used to designate any intense desire. A more specific notion that's often implied by the term erotic dialogues are those dialogues concerned with erotic relationships between an older man and a younger boy. These sort of pederastic relationships were not uncommon amongst certain social circles, amongst Athenian elites. Typically an older man would seek sexual favors in exchange for some sort of social and political training. And that sort of educational aspect goes some way towards explaining Plato's interest in these kinds of erotic relationships. Were these relationships frowned upon by other people? Is it something that everyone acknowledged as a kind of acceptable relationship between an older man and a younger boy? I think that we don't have a broad spectrum of social evidence for this. In some of Aristophanes' plays, he associates these kinds of relationships which often took place at Greek symposia, such as the one Plato writes about here, with people that had sort of Spartan sympathies in particular and certainly talks about them as if they operated in these specific elite social circles. So that doesn't give us a sense that they were necessarily widespread across the culture as a whole. But it's not something that was generally perceived to be shameful, for example? No. It was a well-entrenched social phenomenon, at least in Athens. Yes, but it was heavily regulated. There were certain rules of engagement that one had to subscribe to for these relationships to be seen as socially acceptable. Right. But as you're saying, eros can mean passionate or very intense love for a wide range of things, so not only young boys but other kinds of people and even things. Yes. Now, there's something kind of strange about that, I think, because if you're saying that the paradigm instance of eros in Plato's dialogues is a sexual relationship between an older man and a boy, then why do we have this expression, platonic love or platonic friendship in English? Because that basically means love or friendship without any romance or without sex. So is there any basis for that in Plato's own dialogues, or is that just a kind of misconception? Yes. Well, firstly, I wouldn't want to say that these sexual relationships were a paradigm case for Plato if by that we mean the sort of ideal case. What I meant was that these erotic, pedorastic relationships were an important context in Plato's day for the moral education of the young, you might say. And so Plato was naturally quite interested in them. I think that the common conception of platonic love as a relationship devoid of any sort of sexual activity certainly has something in it, because for Plato, purely sexual relationships would be certainly something that I think he would have thought of as quite shameful and certainly pretty low-grade relationships. You need a relationship where all you want is sex. A relationship where all you want is sex, exactly. I think in order to understand the reason for that, we have to understand something about how he conceives of the nature and the aims of Eros. One of the things that is quite clear from the symposium is that he talks about Eros as a desire that aims at happiness, at eudaimonia, happiness or flourishing. It's often translated as. Given that that is the aim of Eros, he thinks that simply having a relationship in which constant sexual intercourse, for example, is the aim, is a pretty poor way in which to achieve human flourishing. That's the sort of activity that we get described in Aristophanes' speech, for example. He thinks that the best kind of erotic relationship will be one in which the partners have an eye on what is really good for the other person, what will really cause them to flourish and make them happy. That means for Plato that they will focus on the soul of the other person and how it can achieve its characteristic excellence, which is wisdom. Yes, it will be a relatively chaste relationship one imagines. That maybe explains why Plato might think that both relationships involving sex and relationships not involving sex could be examples of Eros. Something you've already said is that Eros could also be applied even to objects. You could have Eros for war, like you said, or maybe wine and things like that. That I take it is a perfectly reasonable way of using the Greek word Eros. Should that tempt us to think that the word Eros just doesn't mean love or something like that? How could I have the same relationship towards wine that I have towards, say, my wife? Yes. Well, I think if we think about Eros as referring really to any sort of intense or passionate desire, then we can at least begin to get a sense of why Plato considers such radically different objects in the symposium, for example, to be objects of Eros. Things like, for example, beautiful bodies, beautiful laws and practices, and even a form, an ideal, intelligible object. That goes some way towards explaining that, that there are many different objects that people experience intense desires for. I suppose one might object to that, though, that when we talk about, for example, loving wine, it's perfectly reasonable in English as well as apparently in Greek to say, oh, I love wine, that that's some kind of metaphor. And insofar as Plato is really taking it seriously as a philosopher that I could both love wine and love my wife, that seems to imply some kind of really alarming attitude towards my wife, that I think of her sort of the way I think about wine. And that's not what we want, is it? I think an objection that thinks about Eros as some kind of metaphor in such a way that when we say that we have Eros for laws and practices or intelligible objects, that we're not really having the same desire that we, properly speaking, have for persons, would for Plato be to get things entirely the wrong way round. He's to assume that a sexual interpersonal relationship is the primary and paradigm case and that all other cases are somehow derivative from that. And that's just not, doesn't seem to be how Plato conceives of the phenomenon of Eros. Rather, Socrates is considering sexual interpersonal cases of Eros, those cases with which we're all relatively familiar, that sort of basic phenomenon. He's considering that within a wider framework when he asks the question, what do we aim at in this kind of desire? Or what we're sort of groping towards in that kind of desire is a desire for happiness. That's the real aim of this desire. And the desire for happiness is a desire that can be manifested in many different activities in life. And we can have, we can think that the desire for happiness is something that's satisfied in interpersonal relationships, or we can think that the desire for happiness is something that's satisfied in intellectual activity, for example. And it's no mere metaphor there if we appreciate Socrates' point that Eros, for him, is a phenomenon of sort of desire and action in quite general terms. So I guess the idea might be that if you really had love for wine, that might imply that you believe that your fulfillment could be had by drinking wine. Exactly. And that's a possible attitude towards wine, although presumably not one that Plato would endorse. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So that makes Plato actually sound like he has a very appealing view. So he would recognize lots of different desires and attitudes as being Eros. And then he would say, we have here a desire for fulfillment and the fulfillment would be provided by different objects. Yes. And then he would say some of these objects will actually give you happiness and others won't. Now, there's this kind of traditional worry that goes back at least as far as a scholar named Gregory of Lastos, as I mentioned in the previous episode, that since Plato thinks that what will really give you happiness and fulfillment is the forms or knowledge of the forms, actually one of the things he's telling you is that you shouldn't seek fulfillment in interpersonal relationships. So it's kind of obvious that wine is not going to make you happy. And he's saying in some sense that interpersonal relationships or other people would be like wine, whereas what you really want is forms. So you should be moving away from wine and towards the forms. But that would also mean you should be moving away from other people towards the forms. Is that what he thinks? Yes. I think that if we take it that the aim of Eros for Plato is happiness and flourishing, then that helps to blunt the force of objections like Vlastos's objection that Plato is urging us to move away from interpersonal relationships. Because many of us would surely agree that finding fulfillment in an erotic interpersonal relationship and seeing that as the proper end of human flourishing, by which for Plato is meant some goal around which a flourishing human life can be constructed. I think if we really take that point in mind, then we would think that yes, it is a rather limited view of the possibilities for human aspiration and happiness if we see interpersonal relationships as the end of that. It's actually maybe the view Aristophanes describes in the symposium, right? So your goal in life is to find your other half and kind of stick to each other, and then you're done. Nothing more to achieve, nothing more to make you happy than that. Yes, and in a sense Aristophanes' speech shows us that these lovers get some kind of temporary respite, but whether they really achieve happiness and fulfillment is not at all clear. Certainly in the original Homeric story on which Aristophanes draws there, I don't think that Ares and Aphrodite seem to get much respite from their activity. It seems more like an obsession that they can't quite shake off rather than an actual portrayal of happiness as such. Yes, if we take that point on board, then I think Socrates' move away from individuals as proper objects of the desire for happiness is really a laudable one. It's not something that I think we should find objectionable, and I think if people approach the symposium and just read the famous ascent passage, i.e. the passage in which Socrates urges this move from individuals and laws and practices and so on towards the form, if they read that passage in the larger context of the account, then I think perhaps people will stop seeing it as presenting an objectionable theory. So maybe though there's another objection you could pose to Plato though, which is that although perhaps having an interpersonal relationship maybe isn't all there is to life, it doesn't seem like knowing the forms could be either. So it seems to be this kind of radically intellectualist, almost nutty version of what it would be to be happy. So what it would be to be happy is to know what beauty is. Is there anything we can say to make that more plausible, or is Plato just sort of nutty in this respect? I think probably there is some element of nuttiness in the theory, but if we were trying to render it more plausible, I think one way we can start thinking about it is to think that Socrates is looking for some kind of object that can satisfy our desire for happiness. So how can we think about how he's construing happiness in that ascent passage, the passage where he's leading us towards the form? One way to think about it is to consider him as examining the desire for wisdom as a desire that's proper to happiness. And I think rather than thinking in terms of how can an object make us happy, this intelligible object, the form of beauty, we should think in terms of how can the activity of contemplating the form, how can the generation of wisdom, which is the goal achieved at the end of the ascent, how can that contribute to or constitute happiness for Socrates? I think that's a helpful question to ask about the ascent passage. And I suppose it doesn't imply that you would be, as it were, sitting on a mountaintop just contemplating a form, because if you grasped the form of justice or beauty, it might actually inform, no pun intended, the other things that you're doing in life. Absolutely. And I don't think there's anything to suggest at the top of the ascent that one will just be in a cave and that other objects are excluded from one's interest. If you're right that the ascent passage in the symposium is really about how to be happy rather than about, strictly speaking, the nature of an interpersonal relationship, does that mean that Plato just doesn't have a view on that? I mean, is this something that he talks about in the erotic dialogues or anywhere else, say, what the nature of friendship is or the nature of interpersonal love, the way Aristotle does, for example? I think that, firstly, there is material in the symposium about interpersonal relationships. When Socrates and Diotima are sort of summing up the ascent passage, it said that there is a way to go about the correct love of boys. And I take it that what's meant there is that when one engages in sort of pederastic relationships of the sort that Plato is interested in in the symposium, these sort of educational relationships, one needs to have some sense of the sort of proper grounds and nature of human happiness. So part of what the ascent passage is doing is articulating what Socrates takes to be, the proper nature and goals of a pederastic relationship. So pederastic interpersonal relationships provide the context for the discussion of the ascent. All I was trying to suggest is that they're not its focus. So in that respect, I don't think Plato has lost sight of interpersonal relationship. However, that's not to say that he's provided an account of them, of course. And although there's a lot of suggestive material in the symposium that indicates that Socrates did have interpersonal relationships with people like Alcibiades, for example, there isn't much theoretical reflection on the nature of those relationships. For that, I think we would be better off turning to the Phaedrus, which is Plato's other so-called erotic dialogue, i.e. a dialogue that's concerned with these sorts of pederastic relationships and talks about Eros. And in that dialogue, he talks about philia relationships. And philia relationships were slightly different from erotic relationships, i.e. relationships in which Eros played a stronger role. Philia is usually translated as friendship, right? Exactly, yes. And these friendship relationships could, of course, arise out of pederastic erotic relationships. And that's exactly the context for the discussion in the Phaedrus that Plato does, I think, articulate a variety of philia relationships, i.e. these friendship relationships, within the context of a discussion of these erotic pederastic relationships. And I think it's within that discussion that he gives us some sense of how an Eros for wisdom of the sort that he described in great detail in the symposium is compatible with a love for other persons, that is a friendship, a philia relationship. I guess that from everything you've said, it sounds like the erotic dialogues connect to a lot of very big themes in Plato. For example, what you were just saying about friendship seems to connect to his views on virtue, because it's about something like how to treat others and how to have relationships. But on the other hand, something like the ascent passage looks like it has to do with the theory of forms. So would you say that the erotic dialogues kind of stand on their own, say the Phaedrus in the symposium, maybe the Lycis, as a detachable part of Plato's corpus? Or did they tell us a lot of things we needed to know in order to understand something like the Republic properly? Yes, I think they're hugely informative for understanding Plato's ethics. And probably in two main ways. So firstly, Plato's account of Eros in the symposium can be seen as part of a more general trend in the Platonic dialogues, where Plato is interested in not just how people behave in certain ways, what they do, but what sort of character they develop and desires for Plato, and having desires for the right sorts of things in particular, being properly orientated towards things of genuine value, is for Plato part of developing the right kind of character, becoming the right kind of virtuous agent. So I think his account of Eros is an important part of Plato's conception of virtue ethics, as we conceive of it. And secondly, I think the account in the Phaedrus, the more interpersonal aspect of Plato's discussion of Eros and Philea, love in these two different senses, we might say, helps us to understand the way in which other people play a role in Platonic ethics. Because it's often said, for example, about dialogues like the Republic, that his approach to virtue and the good life is very agent-centered, that the focus is very much on the state of the agent's soul. You, for example, have raised that question with reference to the symposium that at the top of the ascent, really the focus is on the agent himself understanding wisdom and achieving happiness. So what happens then to interpersonal relationships? And I think if we understand the which account that's developed in the Phaedrus, then we can see that Plato does in fact have a much less otherworldly conception of happiness than might be indicated if we just read, for example, the digression in the Theaetetus or the focus on the forms in the symposium and even in the Republic, that Plato does think that interpersonal relationships have a role to play in the good life. So it would have been a gap if I left out the erotic dialogues. Yes, I think it would have been a big gap. Okay, well in that case I'm glad I included it with both of these episodes. But before we stop, I want to just ask you one other thing about the symposium, because there's this thing in it right at the end that's always puzzled me. It says that Socrates and the other people present stay up all night drinking. And one of the things that they're discussing is that Socrates is claiming that the same people who are able to write good tragedy should also be able to write good comedy. Is that right? Yes. What is that all about? I mean, why would you end the dialogue about Eros with that point? Yes, I think that that puzzle is so tantalising and takes us to the heart of Socrates' account of the nature of Eros. So the puzzle there is he seems to be arguing to Aristophanes, the comic poet, and Agatha, the tragic poet, that the same qualities are required to write both tragedy and comedy. And I think perhaps one way we can understand the force of that is to consider Socrates as thinking about what qualities are required for somebody to think properly about Eros. And I think people have long noticed that the symposium is a dialogue with many tragic elements and with many comic elements in it. Plato here exemplifies the very principle that Socrates is arguing for at the end. Okay, so to return to the theme of Eros, why is this pertinent to a discussion of Eros? Well when Socrates is describing the nature of Eros, he says that Eros is derived from Poros and Paneer. These are his sort of mythical parents and he has aspects of his personality that are derived from both. So from his mother he's very needy and lacks resources and from his father he's this much more elevated character. His father dines with the gods and he's very resourceful. And I think we can see Eros as exemplifying in that respect the two qualities that are central to tragedy and comedy. Central to comedy is some notion of the foul and what's lowly about mortal life. And central to tragedy is thinking about what's spudam and what's sort of lofty and elevated about human life. And it's really Eros, human aspiration, human awareness of deficiency and our ability to transcend that deficiency. That's something that's captured by Plato's account of Eros here. And that's something for which Plato needs to combine elements from both comedy to capture the lowly aspect of our nature and tragedy. Brilliant, thank you, that's really helpful. Especially because as it happens that creates a nice transition to the next episode because next time I'm going to be talking about Plato's views on myth and also poetry. So that will be the topic for next week's episode but for now I'll thank Frisbee Sheffield very much for appearing on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time for Plato's views on myth and poetry on the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Last Judgments, Plato, Poetry, and Myth. In this series of podcasts I've dealt at least in passing with three bodies of ancient Greek literature. Obviously there is the philosophical and scientific literature, which has been the main focus. Then there is history, as written by Xenophon, Thucydides, and others, figures I've had cause to mention a few times. And then there is poetry. Way back in episode 2, I discussed how Xenophanes attacked the poets Homer and Hesiod for their inadequately reverential treatment of the gods. We also saw that other pre-Socratics like the great Parmenides wrote their philosophy in poetic form, and that the comic poet Aristophanes is an important source for the historical Socrates. But the poets, whether epic, tragic, or comic, haven't come up much since I reached Plato. Some of you may have been thinking that this was something of an omission, even, dare I say, a gap. After all, Plato is famous for attacking the poets in his greatest work, the Republic. Like Xenophanes, he criticized the way that the gods are represented in Homer and Hesiod. But Plato's diatribe against the poets goes far beyond anything we find in the fragments of Xenophanes. He proposes a program of censorship for his ideal republic, mentioning specific verses which should be banned. Later in the Republic, he attacks the poets of ancient tragedy and comedy, and warns that, unless the poets, or their adherents, can show us that poetry is beneficial to society, they too will be excluded. Plato's notoriously hostile attitude towards the poets is puzzling, when you think about it. No Greek author could write without being in the shadow of the poets, and Plato was far from an exception to this rule. Throughout his dialogues, including the Republic, he frequently alludes to both Homer and Hesiod, he quotes other poets too like Simonides and Pindar, and that's only the explicit quotations, there are plenty of other more implicit references that Plato's readers would certainly have noticed given the immense importance of poetry in aristocratic Greek society. Indeed, a whole book was recently published studying Plato's use of Hesiod. Plato's use of this material was, like everything with Plato, complicated, sometimes disapproving, more often appropriating poetic remarks for his own purposes. Then too there is the fact that Plato was himself producing great literature in the Republic and his other dialogues. Of course, the dialogues aren't poems, but as we'll see, some of his objections against poetry would seem equally applicable to his own dialogues. But perhaps the most striking puzzle is this, Plato's objections to the mythic, epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod did not stop him from composing some epic myths of his own. Several of the dialogues I've discussed include long myths of Plato's own invention. The Thedo, the Gorgias, and the Republic all include such a myth at or near their conclusion. In the Republic, the myth of Ur comes close on the heels of Plato's attack on imitative poetry in the tenth and final book. We've seen myths or mythic elements in other dialogues too, like the story of the winged horses and chariot from the Phaedrus, or the cosmic story of the Timaeus, which is designated by Plato several times as a mythos. The word mythos is the origin of our word myth, and though it can mean something like a story or tale, the Timaeus has more than a little in common with the myths we find in other dialogues. So what was Plato up to here? Was he trying to have his cake and eat it too, excoriating the myths of others, even as he devised replacement myths? In fact, was this some kind of cynical gamesmanship on his part? Was he trying to eliminate the competition, rubbishing other literary artists to make space for a new Platonic philosophical artistry? There may be some truth in that. Just think of the way he handles Aristophanes as a character in the symposium, putting a brilliantly funny speech into his mouth to show that anything Aristophanes can do, Plato can do too. He does something similar with the Sophists, by writing highly rhetorical speeches voiced by characters like Protagoras. But there's more going on here than just artistic competition. To see why, we need to consider Plato's objections to the poets, and then look at what he tries to achieve in his own myths. Plato criticizes the poets twice in the Republic, first in books 2 and 3, where his complaints are mostly about the epic poets Homer and Hesiod, then again in book 10, where he takes aim at the tragedy and comedy of the Greek theatre. From our point of view, these two bodies of literature don't seem to have much in common apart from the fact that they were written in verse, and you might worry that I'm playing fast and loose by treating the two things together. But I'm in good company. Plato does the same thing, going freely from a discussion of epic poetry to mention theatre, and vice versa. He even calls Homer a tragidian at one point. And his most fundamental complaint applies to both genres. The complaint is that the poets are engaging in mimesis, or imitation. For instance, in the Iliad, Homer not only speaks in his own voice when narrating events, but also in the voices of his many characters, from Agamemnon to Achilles, from Helen to Priam. There are a couple of reasons why he doesn't like this imitative dimension of poetry. For one thing, the poet is able to slip insidious teachings into the minds of his listeners. He can have Achilles insult the gods, as Homer does, and describe the gods themselves acting and saying things that are unworthy of divinity. Many of the banned verses mentioned in the Republic are banned because they instill false beliefs about the gods. Xenophanes would be proud. Plato is particularly emphatic on this point because he's describing the educational arrangements in the ideal city. He has Socrates argue that such teachings about the gods are especially dangerous for the young, since they are impressionable and will be corrupted easily. Hence, the censorship, one of the points which has led some modern readers to detect totalitarian tendencies in the Republic. And it isn't only false beliefs about the gods that need to be expurgated. It's also passages where the poets depict heroes as being overly emotional or dishonest. Our young citizens are going to admire these characters, so they must never be shown being anything other than completely noble. When people nowadays complain about athletes failing to set a good example for young fans, they have something like this in mind. Plato extends his censorship program to music, and for good reason. Greek epic poetry and theatre were performed with music, so that Plato thinks of poetry and music as two sides of a single phenomenon. He eliminates certain musical modes, rhythms, and even instruments from the ideal city, because they induce emotions that are corruptive for society, for instance sorrow or uncontrolled passion. One of the banned instruments, by the way, is the double flute or aulos. This is the instrument you hear at the beginning and end of this podcast. Sorry about that, Plato. It's not just epic poetry and flutes that incite the wrong emotions in us. In Book 10 Plato has Socrates criticise Greek theatre for giving its audiences license to express emotions in a way they would normally find shameful. It was common for audiences at a Greek tragedy to wail and weep at the sight of the pitiable events on the stage. Plato finds this repugnant, and no less so the uncouth laughter provoked by Aristophanes and the other comic poets. To these complaints about the educational effects of poetry, Plato adds another objection. We saw in earlier episodes that he accuses the sophists of inducing persuasion without knowledge. Gorgias can convince someone to take their medicine better than a doctor could, but Gorgias doesn't know which medicine it would be good to take. Similarly, the poets are aiming at pleasure and not knowledge. Their expertise is solely in imitation, and an expert in imitation is precisely someone who can reproduce the appearance of something without needing to understand its true nature. He compares this to painting. A painter can paint a convincing picture of a table, but to build one you need to go to the man who actually knows what he's doing, namely a carpenter. As Plato points out, images and imitations are easy to have. Just carry around a mirror and you can make reproductions of anything you want. But the mirror images will be mere imitations, like those we find in painting and poetry. Now I know what you're thinking. Isn't Plato himself liable to all these accusations he's laying at the door of the poets? After all, Plato never writes in anything other than imitation. Even Homer, as Plato points out himself, sometimes gives us straight narration, but Plato doesn't even do that. If there is narration in the dialogues, it's because a character is narrating, and hence imitating, a previous conversation. Indeed, Socrates narrates the whole republic in just this way. In dialogue after dialogue, Plato imitates specific, historical people by making them characters, and he certainly shows us people behaving badly. Just think of Calicles in the Gorgias, or Thrasymachus in the Republic itself. Why isn't he practicing what he preaches? This is a difficult question, but here are two thoughts. First, remember that Plato isn't writing literature for an audience in the ideal society, or for children. He's aiming his dialogues at readers who are intimately familiar with the poetry that he is attacking. Preserving these readers from the insidious influence of the poets is no longer an option. Rather, Plato must try to counteract that influence, and he is not above fighting fire with fire. Thus, he imitates vicious characters as well as good ones, giving voice to Calicles as well as Socrates. A second, related point is this. Because we are not children, Plato wants and expects us to reflect on what we are reading. We are not just going to imitate any of these characters mindlessly, because the dialogues so obviously demand that we think about which characters are really worth emulating. Will we adopt the virtuous life recommended by Socrates, or the vicious one praised by Calicles? No one can read the Gorgias without being forced to reflect on this choice. In writing the dialogues then, Plato was in a sense writing literature that would have an effect opposite to that of Greek theatre, at least as he saw it. The dialogues demand active engagement rather than passivity, rational reflection rather than unleashed emotion. But if that's how we should explain Plato's use of imitation, how will we explain his use of myth? To decide, we'll obviously need to look at what he actually says in these myths. It's conspicuous that three of the most prominent, the myths in the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic, all have to do with our fate in the afterlife. In each case we are told that after the death of their bodies, souls are sorted out into two groups. One group is rewarded for virtue by going to a higher, more beautiful realm, while the other group is sent down into the depths, and experiences torment commensurate with their vice. Take the Phaedo first. Here Plato has Socrates spend his last minutes of life telling his friends that they are in fact living in a kind of hollow space, clustered around the Mediterranean Sea, like frogs around the edge of a pond. In fact, all humans in this life live in lower realms, below the blessed altitudes reached by those who are rewarded in the afterlife. That's where you want to wind up after you die. But it isn't the only possible destination. Below the quite literally depressed region where we live our bodily existence, there is an underworld which is described in some detail, full of underground rivers and lakes. This is where all but the most virtuous souls wind up. The run-of-the-mill wrongdoers are punished on the banks of a lake fed by the river Achiron, but the more evil souls are thrown into Tartarus, and some never escape. For a more detailed vision of the frightening prospects that await vicious souls in the afterlife we can turn to the closing myth of the Gorgias. As in the Phaedo, souls are dispatched to different fates depending on their behaviour in their earthly life. Each soul stands before a judge, and stands naked. More than naked, in fact, since the soul has been stripped even of its body. Socrates who relates the myth points out that in our earthly life people can mislead their judges with fine appearances, fancy clothes, and beautiful bodies. In the afterlife, though, the judges will see us as we really are, with our souls bearing the marks of every evil we have committed. As you might remember, this dialogue, the Gorgias, offers a sustained criticism of Gorgias and other sophists who used rhetoric in the law courts, and it seems clear that this is a final put-down being woven into the myth. In this myth, as in the Phaedo, there are two possibilities in the afterlife. Those of us who have lived well will be sent by their judges to a kind of paradise, the so-called Isles of the Blessed, while sinners are again dispatched to Tartarus to experience appropriate punishments. The myths of the Phaedo and the Gorgias are powerfully written and provide a climax for their respective dialogues. But some philosophically-minded readers, the ones who don't just skip the myths entirely, might find the myths disturbing. Not because of the message being delivered, which is the same message as Socrates' philosophical arguments that we should devote our lives to virtue. The disturbing thing is that the myths give us the wrong kind of reason to devote our lives to virtue. Should we really be virtuous just to avoid being tortured and Tartarus? In the Gorgias, Socrates has been arguing strenuously that virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment. He's shown us that it is bad for us to engage in vice, and that this is so without any prospect of punishment after we die. The tyrant is already the most miserable creature on this earth. Isn't it a failure of nerve on Plato's part to insist that this tyrant must be the most miserable creature in the afterlife as well? It's almost as if he doesn't have the courage of his convictions, or he expects us readers to fail in our courage. This problem appears again, and more explicitly, in the Republic. As you'll remember, this masterpiece of Plato is devoted to showing that justice is advantageous and hence choice-worthy. Justice is the harmony of the soul, thanks to its parts, working together as they should. So, like the Gorgias, the Republic contends that the virtuous man is happiest of all men, even if he lacks honour and pleasure, whereas the vicious tyrant is the unhappiest of all men, because his soul is dominated by lust for power and enjoyment. After nine books' worth of argument to this effect, Plato again produces a myth of the afterlife, the most detailed yet. It's called the Myth of Ur, because the main character in the myth is a man named Ur, that's spelled E-R. I guess his family were known for hesitating. Ur was killed in a war and, when he was just about to be buried, he miraculously woke up, telling of the afterlife as he had just been able to see it. According to Socrates, Ur saw two sets of gates, each with an exit and an entrance. One set leads to the heavens, the others to the underworld. As in the other myths, those who are virtuous are allowed to go up into a kind of paradise, while the vicious are damned to many years of captivity below. The worst miscreants never return to this world but are tormented forever. But all other souls return back through the exits from heaven and the underworld. They then go on a journey and are granted a vision of the entire cosmos, a set of nested spheres rotating on an axis, like the spindle of a spinning wheel. The three divine fates are present and enforce a kind of lottery for choosing the souls' next lives on earth. Each soul is randomly assigned a lot, like the number you get while you're waiting for service at a store. This determines the order in which the souls will choose their next lives. And this choice is a momentous one. For instance, Ur sees the first soul eagerly snatch up the life of a powerful tyrant, only to discover that this tyrant will wind up eating his own children. He sees certain mythical figures choose more carefully. For instance, Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey, chooses last but is content with the life he finds available, a quiet life with no trouble. Some souls choose to return as animals, others as men. Perhaps disturbingly, it would seem that the broad outlines of your life, for instance, whether you will wind up eating your own kids, are already settled by this choice of lives. Thus, one reason to pursue philosophy in this present life is that we will choose wisely when the next opportunity comes. It's stressed that, since our fates stem from this original choice of lives, the gods are not to blame if our lives are poorly selected. As it says in the myth, virtue has no master, and the virtuous soul will make the right choice. So that's the myth of Ur, my favourite Platonic myth, actually. But it does potentially raise the same objection as the Gorgias myth. Why is Plato suddenly telling us to be good or else? Instead of telling us that we should be good, quite literally, for goodness sake, because it is better, more advantageous for us to be good than to be bad. Such worries were already expressed in the ancient world. An Epicurean philosopher named Colates accused Plato of hypocrisy on the basis that in the Republic, after having criticized the poets for their use of myths, Plato went on to offer his own myth for the sake of frightening the reader into adopting more virtuous ways. Can this objection be overcome? Well, remember that in all these dialogues, the myth comes at the end. In the Republic, Socrates explicitly says that virtue is its own reward, but that in addition to this, we should expect things to go well for the virtuous man, usually even in this life, and certainly in the next. So the myths add something even for someone convinced of Socrates' philosophical arguments. They reassure us that, even if virtue is its own reward, it's not the only reward the virtuous person can expect. The charge of hypocrisy can also be avoided if we remember that Plato attacks the poets not just for using myth, but for using myth as a vehicle for falsehood rather than truth. By writing his own myths which teach true beliefs about how to live and about the gods, Plato is in effect saying to Homer and Hesiod, this my friends is how you do it. I should hasten to add though that the various myths may have various purposes, just as Plato exploits the dialogue formed differently in different dialogues. For instance, some of the myths, like those of the Phaedo and the Republic, combine a vision of how the earth and cosmos are constructed, with a vision of how the gods have arranged things to encourage virtue. Here we should recall the Timaeus, which, as we saw, compares the rightly ordered city to the rightly ordered universe, described in the long speech of Timaeus, which is explicitly labeled as a myth. That may be a good note on which to leave Plato, as we see him at the height of his ambition. In the myth of Ur and the Timaeus, he combines an interest in justice and virtue with an interest in the cosmos and in science. He combines philosophical teaching and argument with the literary power of myth. In short, he does it all. It's not for nothing that Whitehead described the entire history of philosophy as a set of footnotes to Plato. After Plato, what else remained to be done? Well, according to at least one student of Plato's, there was still room for improvement. This student will turn out to be the one philosopher who can rival Plato's claim to be the greatest thinker of antiquity, if not of all time. His ideas will be not merely influential, but the basis of all philosophy and science for most of the next two millennia. So join me next week when we can say, let the footnotes begin, with the life and works of Aristotle, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Mr. Know-It-All, Aristotle's Life and Works. In 2005, the BBC had a competition in which people were invited to vote for the greatest philosopher of all time. About 30,000 people voted, and the eventual winner was Karl Marx. Yeah, I know. Anyway, while this competition was going on, I mentioned it to a colleague of mine who was also a historian of philosophy. He said, what a strange idea. I asked him why he thought it was strange, and after a moment's consideration, he said, well, to begin with, the answer is so obviously Aristotle. I laughed and said the competition wasn't to name the most influential philosopher of all time, but the greatest philosopher of all time. He said, oh, I see, but still, the answer is so obviously Aristotle. That conversation is a telling one, I think. It's not so much that my colleague was a partisan of Aristotle, who, in case you're wondering, only came ninth in the poll. It's more my initial reaction to his puzzlement. Greatest philosopher of all time? That's a matter of taste. But most influential philosopher of all time? At least in the Western tradition, there is a clear victor in the race for this title, Aristotle. Although his works did not dominate the philosophical scene in the centuries immediately following his death, once they caught on, they caught on in a big way. For well over a thousand years, Aristotle was not just the most influential and significant philosopher, he was philosophy. And the study of philosophy was often simply the study of Aristotle's works and the tradition of commentary on those works. In medieval times, it was possible simply to say, the philosopher, and everyone would know who you meant. Only after the Renaissance would Aristotle's total dominance of philosophy and science be questioned. And even since then, Aristotle has never gone away. Current views in contemporary metaphysics, and especially ethics, are explicitly presented as little more than expansions on Aristotle's ideas. Because Aristotle's works were seen as definitive of philosophy, the areas he saw fit to explore became the chief philosophical disciplines in Western thought. And he saw fit to explore an amazingly wide range of areas. Until quite recently, people used the word philosophy to cover a much broader range of disciplines and topics than we nowadays have in mind when we say philosophy. Study of the world we see around us could be called natural philosophy well into the modern period. So for Aristotle and his heirs, philosophy would include topics like cosmology, chemistry, and biology, just as much as it includes ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. And here's the thing. Aristotle is more often than not the very first person to write a work explicitly dedicated to each of these areas. The Presocratics and Plato certainly touched on many of the topics taken up by Aristotle, but Aristotle dominated the Western tradition in part because he produced works that focused explicitly on separate, more or less well-defined disciplines. What Aristotle left to his successors was not just a bunch of ideas and arguments, but a curriculum of study. Even today, many departments at a typical university will have names which correspond to titles or topics of books by Aristotle. Physics, psychology, zoology, literature, politics. Now I know what you're thinking. In previous episodes, haven't I been saying that the history of philosophy is just a set of to Plato? Certainly Plato is the one thinker who could rival Aristotle for the claim of most influential philosopher. But Plato's claim would depend heavily on the indirect influence he exercised through his greatest student. Aristotle came to study at Plato's academy as a young man. Born in 384 BC, he hailed from a town called Stagira, which is situated in northeastern Greece in an area called Chalcidice. His father Nicomachus was a doctor at the royal court of Macedon. Although Aristotle is not thought of as a medical thinker, he certainly inherited his father's scientific turn of mind, and contributed greatly to the history of medicine as well as the history of philosophy. Aristotle eventually had a son, who was also named Nicomachus, hence the title of one of Aristotle's best-known works, the Nicomachean Ethics. He came to Athens at the age of 17, where he had the chance to study with Plato. I'll be talking a bit more about the academy in a later episode devoted to Plato's and Aristotle's students. For now, suffice to say that Aristotle would have had a rigorous training in dialectical analysis and argument at Plato's feet, training which he would, in due course, use against the master. Diogenes Laertius, as always a source of entertaining but presumably fallacious details, tells us that Plato said of Aristotle, he kicked us away the way ponies do to their mothers upon being born. In one of Aristotle's own works, he excuses himself for attacking Platonic theories with the famous remark that we must honor truth above our friends. But, as we'll be seeing in some detail, the relationship between Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy is a complicated and subtle one. Certainly Aristotle was no more a slavish follower of Plato than Plato had been a slavish follower of his own teacher, Socrates. But Aristotle was at the academy for some twenty years, so that there was more than enough opportunity for him to ingest and consider the ideas of Plato and other colleagues in Athens. It would be better to think of him as self-consciously and critically engaging with Plato rather than simply setting out to reject or attack him. After Plato's death in 347, Aristotle traveled with one of those colleagues, Xenocrates, to stay at the pleasure of a ruler in Asia Minor called Hermaeus. He later traveled to the island of Lesbos, where he encountered another philosopher and colleague Theophrastus. We'll be covering both Xenocrates and Theophrastus in that later episode on the students. But, with all due respect to Theophrastus, he was not Aristotle's greatest student. Any BBC poll would award that prize to a young man who was educated by Aristotle soon after the stay in Lesbos, a young man who would later be known as Alexander the Great. Alexander is to the history of conquering what Aristotle is to the history of philosophy. His armies not only swept through mainland Greece, but also eastwards through Persia and ultimately as far as India. Alexander conquered the entire known world and then just kept going. He was revered as a god and set the standard for imperial rulers of the future, so that no less a figure than Augustus Caesar was eager to invite comparison with Alexander. He managed all that despite living only until the age of 32. This just goes to show you what you can accomplish if you have the right philosophy teacher. Of course, I'm no Aristotle, so listening to this podcast will not necessarily enable you to conquer the known world and beyond, but if you stick with me for enough episodes, you might be ready to tackle a small town. In any case, Aristotle finally came back to Athens in 335 BC, at which point he set up a rival school, the Lyceum. Diogenes preserves an ancient account that Aristotle was annoyed to be passed over as head of the academy in favour of his old travelling companion, Sinocrates. But whatever his reasons, the Lyceum became a second centre of learning. Supposedly philosophical discussions would take place while walking back and forth, which gave rise to the nickname of Aristotle's school, the peripatetics, that is, those who walk around. If you read about the history of ancient and medieval thought, you'll come across this expression peripatetic. It simply means whatever has to do with Aristotle's teaching and the tradition of his followers. After all that walking around, Aristotle had a chance to do some running, when feelings of anger flared up against Macedon in Athens subsequent to Alexander's death in 323 BC. Another famous story claims that Aristotle said he was leaving to stop Athens from once again sinning against philosophy, referring of course to the execution of Socrates. After this flight from Athens, Aristotle relocated to the island of Uboia, where he died in 322 BC. Ancient sources fancifully suggest that he may have killed himself by poison, thus imitating Socrates's swan song after all. I quite like one wildly implausible variation on this found in the ancient sources, namely that his suicide was prompted by despair after he was unable to understand why the tide rises and falls. So much for Aristotle's life, now for his works. Diogenes and several other authors preserve lists of his books, and these show that a great deal has been lost to us. To give only one example, Aristotle and his students compiled no fewer than 158 political constitutions in order to study all the ways that cities can be run. Of these texts, only the constitution of Athens has survived. So Aristotle's surviving corpus, despite its considerable size, represents only a fraction of what he originally wrote. Indeed, it would seem that our remaining corpus is one-sided. Aristotle apparently wrote two kinds of works. On the one hand, there were so-called exoteric writings. Aristotle refers to these himself, so there is no doubt that they existed. Quite what they were like and what they contained is a bit more mysterious. Ancient authors remark that Aristotle wrote very stylishly, and this, as anyone who has studied some Aristotle can tell you, doesn't exactly seem an apt description of the existing writings. So these exoteric writings, which were for a wider circulation, may have imitated Plato by fusing literary art with philosophical insight. But, apart from some fragments, what remains to us are the so-called esoteric writings. These are not esoteric in the sense that they contain some kind of obscure or secret teaching. Aristotle can be obscure, but it's not because he's trying to hide the truth from the reader. Rather, the esoteric works were apparently intended to be read in a school setting rather than for public distribution. The obscurity of the text may be partially explained by this fact. If these works were for Aristotle's students, he may have been able to take a good deal for granted. It's frequently suggested that the works as we have them now are actually nothing more than lecture notes, which Aristotle would expand into proper discourses when he taught. Although this is a widespread assumption about Aristotle's writings, I don't find it very satisfactory. For all their density and elusiveness, Aristotle's writings are often carefully constructed. This is true not only of the structure of whole works or individual books within a work, but also at the level of individual paragraphs and sentences. Furthermore, some of Aristotle's writings are much more clipped and concise than others. Whereas parts of his metaphysics are so dense that they can scarcely be understood at all, a work like the Nicomachean Ethics is a comparatively good read. So, I find the lecture note theory insufficient to capture the variation and craft of Aristotle's extant writings, although the works must have been tied to some pedagogical setting. I've just mentioned two of Aristotle's more famous works, The Ethics and The Metaphysics. Alongside his treatise On the Soul, his Physics, his Politics, and his Logical Treatises, these would constitute Theoristotelian writings that are most commonly studied in philosophy courses around the world. They will form the main focus of the episodes I'll devote to Aristotle in these podcasts. But I will also be looking at some other treatises of Aristotle that aren't usually included in philosophical overviews. For instance, I'll tackle Aristotle's biological works, by which I mean the several texts he devoted to the subject of animals. I'll look beyond Aristotle's physics in considering his understanding of the natural world, and this will take us to treatises like On the Heavens. And, I'll even touch on Aristotle's literary theory, as expressed in another of his most influential writings, The Poetics. Again, it's worth emphasizing that most of the works I've just mentioned are the very first treatises devoted to whatever subject they take up. The exception is his Physics. The Presocratics tended to call their books On Nature, and this is what Physics means, because the Greek word for nature is phusis. But even here, Aristotle was the first to say explicitly what it means to do physics or natural philosophy. We can say the same about other disciplines. On the Soul is the first systematic discussion of the soul's nature, the politics the first systematic discussion of political philosophy, the animal works the first systematic discussion of zoology, and so on. Of course, Plato too had dealt with such topics. The Republic covers the soul, politics, and literature, for instance. But Plato wove those various themes together in his dialogues. The later tradition found Aristotle's explicitly thematic treatises, with the topic conveniently identified in the titles, a more useful basis for formulating a philosophical curriculum. Because Aristotle likes to identify his subject matter and deal with it systematically, it's easy to assume that reading him will be a straightforward matter. Whereas Plato gives us the interplay of characters, Aristotle speaks to us in his own voice. And in these esoteric works, literary flair seldom gets in the way of the relentless march of distinctions and arguments. In this sense, Aristotle can seem to be the first person to write philosophy as it is now frequently written, a methodical investigation into some topic, prizing clarity and precision. But as it turns out, Aristotle's works call for delicate exegesis no less than Plato's dialogues do. Part of the reason is that, as I have mentioned, his exposition can be compressed and dense. But there is a deeper and more interesting reason, which can be summed up in a single word, dialectic. As so often, this word comes to us from ancient Greek. Plato uses the term dialectikē as having a rather exalted meaning. In the Sophist, as mentioned in my interview with Fiona Lee, dialectic is the study of how the forms interrelate, and in the Republic, it is associated with the higher segments of the divided line. One might, without too much oversimplification, suggest that for Plato, dialectic is simply the process by which philosophers achieve knowledge. Aristotle gives the term dialectic a different sense. For him, dialectic is simply argument that proceeds from agreed premises. For instance, suppose you and I are arguing about who was the greatest silent film comedian. I ask you to agree that Buster Keaton's The General is the greatest ever silent comedy film. You concede the point, and on the strength of this, I lead you to see that as the maker of this film, Keaton must be the greatest silent comedian. But my argument is only as strong as its initial premise. If you disagree about The General, and insist that Charlie Chaplin's The Kid is even better, my argument will be ineffective. If you think about it, nearly all argumentative discussion works like this. A topic for debate is identified, and the parties to the discussion try to find some point of agreement as a basis for further argument. If no point of agreement is found, then no argument is possible. Arguing without agreed premises isn't rational disputation, it's just posturing and shouting. Here I refer you to the political debating shows one sees on television nowadays. Because he had a deep interest in the practice of rational debate, Aristotle tried to formalize the rules and strategies of such debate in a work we call the topics. He calls the practice dialectic. In the topics, Aristotle explains that dialectic can be of immense use in philosophy. Just like any other rational discussion, philosophical inquiry needs to proceed on the basis of some agreed initial premises. Aristotle suggests that the premises we should adopt as starting points in philosophy are the views that are either widely accepted or accepted by the wise, by which he means earlier philosophical thinkers, poets, and other authorities. He calls these the endoxa, which we might translate as reputable opinions. True to his word, Aristotle usually writes dialectically. Especially characteristic is his habit of starting out a work by appealing to a range of endoxa. For instance, the first book of his work On the Soul begins by surveying previous opinions about the soul. The first book of the physics begins by surveying previous opinions about nature and its principles. This is why, as I mentioned in the very first podcast, Aristotle is such a rich source of information about the pre-Socratics. It can be disconcerting sometimes to notice that Aristotle lumps Plato in together with the pre-Socratics, as if he was just one more earlier philosopher, without giving him due credit for making a quantum leap ahead in the history of philosophy. It's clear from these endoxic surveys that, for Aristotle, the history of Greek philosophy looks like this. First there are the pre-Aristotelians who include Plato, and then there is Aristotle. Aristotle presents himself as the man to sort out all the issues the pre-Aristotelians spoke about. Towards this end he finds it especially useful to find endoxa that clash with one another so that he can weigh up their relative merits and see in what sense they might be true. He doesn't necessarily assume that the endoxa are true. When he mentions Parmenides in the physics, he doesn't go on to say that in a sense Parmenides was right to deny the existence of motion. But usually he finds that reputable opinions are a good stab at the truth. They are true in a way, or from a certain point of view, but they don't capture the truth in a rigorous and perspicuous fashion. All this can make it a complex business to read Aristotle. He is usually contrasting various opinions and considering their merits, speaking first on one side of a question, then on another side, and sometimes on yet a third side. Aristotle's own answer to any question tends to be, in a way yes, in a way no. He loves to present his own ideas as compromises between more extreme views. Thus, Aristotle's works, despite their lack of literary style, do retain something of the flavour of Platonic dialogues. We are shown a clash of views, with Aristotle remaining tantalisingly out of sight, a referee who may get involved at any moment to decide the issue, but who wants to let each side have its chance to speak. Among the things Aristotle learned from Plato, then, was a fascination with philosophical method. But he went beyond Plato in one respect, by making philosophical argumentation an object of explicit study in its own right. I've just mentioned the topics where Aristotle does not just show us dialectical discussions, as Plato did, but actually explores the nature of dialectic. This is only one of numerous works that Aristotle devoted to the rules of engagement in philosophical and non-philosophical argument. It was in the context of these works that he made one of his many lasting contributions to the history of philosophy. To put it bluntly, Aristotle invented logic. We now take it for granted that philosophy involves, and even presupposes, logic. On the strength of this invention alone, Aristotle really deserves to finish higher than ninth place in the list of all-time greats. The inevitable conclusion is that you should join me for a discussion of Aristotle's logical works next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Philosopher's Toolkit, Aristotle's Logical Works. A few episodes back I asked you to imagine that you were a medieval monk, reading Plato's Timaeus. That was good practice for what I'd like you to do now. Imagine instead that you're a 5th century AD student of philosophy. You have come to the great centre of learning that is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Don't forget to visit the lighthouse, I hear it's wonderful. You already have a good education under your belt, you are literate and have studied some rhetoric, and now you are going to try to master philosophy. What's the first thing you will study? Of course it will be Aristotle. As we'll see eventually, in the late ancient world, even Platonists introduced their students to philosophy through Aristotle, saving Plato's texts for more advanced research. But what Aristotle will you begin with? Nowadays, a course on Aristotle might start with his ethics or his physics. But, as a late ancient student, you will be taught that there is only one place to begin doing philosophy, logic. In fact, you will spend quite a while digesting Aristotle's logical works. Many students will never progress any further into more advanced topics. The designers of the late ancient curriculum were onto something when they prescribed a foundation in logic for their students. Logic deals with the rules of rational argument, and obviously philosophy is nothing if not a kind of rational argument. So, there is good reason to think that the study of logic is fundamental to the study of philosophy as a whole. But your late antique philosophy professor will also be teaching you that logic is not, strictly speaking, a part of philosophy. Only the foolish Stoics would call it that. As well-trained Aristotelians, you will be considering logic instead as an instrument for philosophy, a tool which is deployed in the various disciplines that really are parts of philosophy, like physics, ethics, and metaphysics. For this reason, you refer to Aristotle's works on logic collectively as the organon, a Greek word which means tool or instrument. In late antiquity, the organon was seen as including no fewer than eight works, namely categories, on interpretation, prior analytics, posterior analytics, topics, and, to top it off, the rhetoric and the poetics. Nowadays, we find it strange to think of the rhetoric or poetics as works on logic. They seem to have been tossed in for lack of anywhere better to place them in the Aristotelian system. So, for us, Aristotle's logical writings, still sometimes called the organon, would at most be the other six works. But thinking of all of these works as logical would mean taking a very broad view of logic. I already discussed the topics last time. It doesn't deal with logic as we understand it, but rather with the rules of dialectical debate, where premises are assumed for the sake of argument or because they are acceptable for some other reason. As for the Sophistical Refutations, you might guess from its title what goes on there. Aristotle uncovers the tricks and ambiguities used by the sophists to produce misleading arguments. This is, one might say, the study of anti-logic, the study of intentionally bad arguments, like the ones displayed in Plato's Euthydemus. That leaves us with four more logical works by Aristotle, the ones I will be discussing in this and the next episode. The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics. So, are these the works where he really discusses logic? Well, not really. It is only the prior analytics that deals with logic in something like our sense, by analyzing the forms of arguments separate from their content. For instance, it's in this work that Aristotle will discuss the fact that it is fine to argue from every A is B and every B is C to the conclusion every A is C. While you're working out whether that sounds right, I'll retrace my steps a bit and start where the late ancient philosophy classes did with the categories, not the prior analytics. So, what is the categories about? That turns out to be a difficult and much discussed question. Let's start with the title. It relates to the Greek verb katé goren, which means to blame or to accuse, but which Aristotle uses with the meaning to predicate, that is, to say one thing about another thing. So, on the face of it, it looks like the categories might be about things that can be said about or ascribed to other things. That's still a bit vague, but does seem to fit the content of this work reasonably well. What we get first is a few short chapters making points about words that are predicated, for instance the difference between synonyms and homonyms. The second chapter makes a fundamental distinction between two kinds of predicates, one of the most important distinctions in Aristotle, in fact. We'll be using it many times in podcasts to come. The distinction is between what is said of something and what is present in it. That's how Aristotle puts the point here, but the usual way of putting the contrast is to say that some features of things are essential and others accidental. A feature or predicate is said of something or essential to that thing if it has to do with the very nature of the thing in question. For instance, it is essential to a giraffe that it be a giraffe, that it be an animal, and that it have any other features that are required for membership in the exclusive club that is the species of giraffes. All other features are accidental, or present in, things. So, for instance, if the giraffe is painted blue, blueness is accidental to it or present in it. If the giraffe is a particularly fine example of its species, then its glossy coat and unusually erect posture will also be accidental to it, because it could get sick, lose the glossy coat and the good posture, but still be a giraffe. In fact, this is a test you can use to decide whether Aristotle would count a given feature or predicate as being essential or accidental. If you can change a feature of something without destroying that thing, then the feature must be accidental. After these preliminaries, the categories gets on to the thing that it is most famous for. It gives a list of ten so-called categories, which here means types of things that can be predicated. There are ten categories. If you know them, you can say it along with me. Ready? Substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and being acted upon. So what exactly is this list listing? Well, maybe something like this. If you think about all the features that can be predicated of something, you'll see that they will fall into these ten types. Let's have an example, shall we? Consider our friend, the silent film comedian Buster Keaton. Firstly, he is a human. That's a predication in the category of substance, because it tells you what sort of thing he is. All his essential features will arise from his being this sort of substance, and the only way he can lose these essential features is to stop being a human, in other words to die, which I'm sad to report Buster Keaton did do in 1966. It was only then that he stopped being, for instance, alive, rational, embodied, and so on. These were the things that were essential to him. But Buster had lots of features that are not essential. For instance, his feet were big, and that's an accidental feature which falls under the category of quantity. He was silent, which falls under quality. He lived in California, which falls under place. He made films, that's the category of action, and in these films he got smacked in the face and thrown out of windows. That would be very much in the category of being acted on. This whole project of classifying predicates into 10 classes is not something Aristotle necessarily thought up on his own. Scholars believe that it originated in the context of Plato's Academy, where Aristotle studied for many years. You can imagine how this might have gone. They'd send a student to the front of the class, tell him to stop fidgeting, and everyone else would call out descriptive words, which would be divided up into 10 classes. They wanted to make sure that they had a category for every predicate they could think of. Obviously I'm pretty much making this up, except that we do know that the Academy was mad about classification and logical exercises of this sort. I can't resist mentioning here the famous anecdote about another philosopher, Diogenes the Cynic, who was going to make for a very entertaining podcast before too long. Upon hearing the Academy's definition of man as two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes showed up with a plucked chicken and said, here is Plato's man. I'm tempted to make a joke of my own here, maybe something about this leaving Plato in a foul mood. But I think it would be better to go back to Aristotle's logical works. I will leave the categories for now, but return to it in a few episodes when I come to talk about Aristotle's metaphysics, because when he deals with the category of substance, Aristotle makes a number of points that bear on metaphysics. Indeed, even to some ancient readers it seemed problematic to pigeonhole the categories as dealing only with logic or language, since it does have this metaphysical content as well. Of course it's no surprise that Aristotle would make some metaphysical remarks while discussing substance, and in general he seems happy to make wide-ranging points about each of the categories. He says especially interesting things about the category of relation, and we may return to that subject somewhere down the line, for instance when we talk about the innovative theories of relation developed in medieval philosophy. For now, though, we've got two more logical works to cover. Next we'll tackle On Interpretation. Again, this does not quite seem to be a work on logic in our sense, rather it looks more like a contribution to the philosophy of language. You might remember that this is an area Plato explored in his dialogue The Cratylus, which considered whether words have significance by nature or convention. Aristotle flatly declares at the beginning of On Interpretation that the conventional answer is correct. Names are conventional symbols, and Aristotle says something interesting about what they symbolize. You might think that the sound Buster Keaton would simply represent Buster Keaton, and it does, but in the first instance Aristotle thinks it represents a thought in my soul. He says that there is a chain of representation in fact. If I write down a word, that represents the word as spoken, so that verbal language is more fundamental than written language. The spoken name in turn represents the thought, and it is the thought which represents the thing out in the world. All this is something else that will inspire some innovative philosophy in the medieval period. But Aristotle is only warming up to his main theme, which is the study of sentences that assert or deny something. For instance, I might assert that Buster Keaton is human, or deny that Buster Keaton is a giraffe. This is a point that does have clear relevance for logic, especially Aristotle's logic. His logic is sometimes called categorical, because he is always focusing on statements that relate a predicate to a subject. Remember, the verb kazugur-in means to predicate. He makes another distinction that will be crucial down the line, by making the point that some predications are universal and others are particular. So I could say all humans are alive, or I could say Buster Keaton is alive. Aristotle uses this distinction to look at the question of which sentences are directly opposed to which. He says that one statement is contradictory of another, if it is an exact negation of it, and as he points out, it's a matter of some subtlety to determine this. For instance, the contradictory of all humans are white is not all humans are not white, but rather some human is not white. The reason this is important and useful is that for every pair of contradictories, one and only one can be true. So in the example I just gave, either there is at least one non-white human, or all humans are white. It has to be one or the other. I know what you're thinking, what if there are no humans at all? I'll be dealing with that question in the next episode, so in the meantime I have to ask you to be patient and assume for the sake of argument that there are in fact humans. This point about contradictory statements leads Aristotle into the most famous part of On Interpretation. He's told us that for any pair of contradictory statements, one will be true and the other false. But this leads to a problem. What if the statements we're considering are about the future? To take Aristotle's example, what if I say, there will be a sea battle tomorrow? This has a contradictory, namely, there will not be a sea battle tomorrow. So according to Aristotle's rule, one of these is true and the other false. But here comes the problem. Suppose it's true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. In that case worries Aristotle, it is already fixed or settled that the sea battle will occur. It looks like it is too late for anyone to do anything about it. The admirals may confer about strategy, consult the weather forecasts, and so on, all the while thinking it is not yet decided, but in fact it must already be inevitable that there will be a sea battle because the statement that there will be a sea battle is already true. Aristotle finds this troubling, warning that if the argument is right, there will be no point in deliberating about any course of action. The future is already written, as it were. Everything that happens, happens necessarily. Aristotle offers a solution to the problem, but unfortunately it's rather unclear what the solution is meant to be. On the most popular interpretation, he says that these statements about the future are in fact neither true nor false, so he makes an exception to his rule about contradictories in this one case. But there is reason to find that unsatisfying. If we're surveying the wrecked ships in the Thames estuary tomorrow, and you turn to me and say, see I told you there'd be a sea battle, it would be implausible for me to say, no, you weren't right because when you said that it wasn't true, at least not yet. That, at any rate, is the most famous part of On interpretation, and it clearly relates to what we think of as logic, but the core of Aristotle's logic is presented in the Prior Analytics. The ancient interpreters saw these texts I've been discussing as forming a sequence. The categories would talk about individual terms, the words that would fall into the ten categories. Then On interpretation talks about words put together into statements. Now, the Prior Analytics will talk about sentences put together into arguments. This story is too simple, especially when it comes to the categories, but it's true enough that the Prior Analytics studies conjunctions of sentences to form arguments. In particular, what it studies is the arguments Aristotle calls by the Greek word syllogismos. This, of course, is where we get our word syllogism. For Aristotle, a syllogism is an argument with two premises and a conclusion. Of course, there has to be one term which appears in both premises, since otherwise you can't conclude anything. So, a typical syllogism might go like this. All mammals are animals, some mammals are giraffes, therefore some animals are giraffes. When Aristotle tells us in the Prior Analytics that this kind of argument is successful, he doesn't just give an example, like I just did. Instead, he uses variables. For the argument I just gave, it will go like this. All a is b, some a is c, therefore some b is c. It's easy to underestimate the importance of this. For us, nothing could be more natural than using letters or symbols as variables when discussing the logical form of an argument. But someone had to invent this, and the someone who invented it was Aristotle. This deceptively simple little device is arguably what enabled Aristotle to invent logic, because it allowed him to consider various argument forms abstractly and to state very rigorously how one argument relates to another. That is just what he goes on to do in the Prior Analytics. But at first glance, he's only handling a rather small range of arguments. As I say, he only looks at these two premise arguments he calls syllogisms. And in fact, he only looks at syllogisms where one thing is being asserted or denied of another thing. So the types of premises he considers are all a is b, some a is b, no a is b, and some a is not b. Putting in examples instead of variables, then, all giraffes are animals, some giraffes are animals, no giraffes are animals, and some giraffes are not animals. Aristotle then exhaustively considers all the possible ways that such premises can be combined and proves that some will immediately produce a conclusion. These syllogisms he calls complete. Others need some argument to show that they do produce a conclusion, and still others are unproductive. Aristotle's meticulous discussion of these syllogisms is one of his greatest achievements. It set the stage for more than 2,000 years of logic, which would be done largely within the framework envisioned in the Prior Analytics. In fact, it was only with Gottlob Frege in the 19th century that logic finally departed from this Aristotelian paradigm. Amazingly, though, this isn't the only thing Aristotle tries to do in the Prior Analytics. For one thing, he's conscious of something I've mentioned, which is that he seems to be looking at a rather restricted range of argument types. So, he attempts to show that all productive arguments can be reduced to his syllogisms. He's actually not right about this, as will be pointed out by the Stoics, themselves great contributors to the history of logic. He also spends a good deal of the Prior Analytics discussing the fact that the premises and conclusion of an argument can be either possible or necessary. So, for instance, suppose I say giraffes are necessarily mammals, and all mammals nurse their young. Does that show me that giraffes necessarily nurse their young? Is the necessity transferred from the premises to the conclusion? This is an area where Aristotle's ideas about logic are rather different from the ideas that philosophers have today. For instance, he thought that if a statement is necessarily true, it must always be true, which seems fair enough. But he also thought that you can go the other way, that if something is always true, then it is necessarily true. This isn't nearly so obvious. For instance, I don't have a sister, and in the absence of some startling news from my parents, I am never going to have a sister. But is it necessarily true that I don't have a sister? It doesn't seem so. Next time, we'll be looking further at Aristotle's ideas about necessity as we examine what Aristotle had to say about knowledge. That will bring us from the Prior Analytics to its sequel, the predictably titled Posterior Analytics. There, we'll discover that, for Aristotle, our knowledge must concern things that are necessarily true, which means things that are always true. If you find this hard to believe, then the only logical conclusion is that you should join me again next week for Aristotle's epistemology, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Principled Stand, Aristotle's Epistemology. All men by nature desire to know. This is the opening line of Aristotle's metaphysics. It expresses his conviction that the thirst for knowledge is not something limited to full-time thinkers like himself. It's something we all share. But the fact that everybody wants something doesn't mean that everybody gets it. After all, most of us would like to live forever, but no one has managed that yet. I myself hope to achieve immortality. I may need to, if I'm going to cover the whole history of philosophy in these podcasts. Surely, in the case of knowledge, though, everyone does get what they want, at least to some extent. Everybody knows quite a few things. You, for instance, know that you are listening to a podcast right now. You know that the podcast is about Aristotle. You know what you had for breakfast. And I do hope you had a good breakfast, since, as you also know, it's the most important meal of the day. But what allows you to say that you know any of these things? What, in fact, is knowledge? As I've mentioned before, this is the core question of the area of philosophy called epistemology, the study of knowledge. Epistemology recognizes a basic distinction between knowledge and mere belief. Clearly, these are different. If I know something, then it seems I must also believe it. To know you're listening to a podcast, you must at least believe you're listening to a podcast. But the reverse is not true. I optimistically believe that Arsenal will win the English Football League next year, but sadly, I do not know this. But if we can believe things without knowing them, then what's the difference? Well, it can't just be that knowledge involves truth, whereas belief doesn't. Admittedly, there are false beliefs, but there are also true beliefs, which don't count as knowledge. If Arsenal does turn out to win the league, that won't mean that my belief was in fact knowledge. It was more like a lucky guess or wishful thinking, or perhaps even a well-informed prediction, but not knowledge. As we've seen, Plato was the first philosopher to distinguish clearly between knowledge and true belief. He does so in the Meno, the Theaetetus, and other dialogues, and his characters have little trouble showing that there is indeed a distinction to be made here. But it is more difficult to say what turns a belief into knowledge. The Meno suggests that some kind of causal account might do the trick, but fails to provide details. Some interpreters think that Plato gave up on the project in the Republic, that in this dialogue, knowledge is seen not as true belief plus something, but instead as the grasp of a completely separate kind of object, namely the forms. In episode 26, I suggested some reasons to doubt this interpretation, but on any interpretation of the Republic, it looks as though knowledge, and in particular, knowledge of really important things like justice, the good, and so on, is reserved for a small elite. The rest of us make do with belief, while the philosophers use dialectic to achieve true knowledge. On this issue, as on many others, Aristotle has paid close attention to Plato. In his treatment of knowledge he reacts to Plato and finds quite a lot to agree with, even if he also openly disagrees with his master on occasion. Aristotle not only accepts the fundamental distinction between knowledge and belief, he also, like Plato, sees knowledge as a formidable accomplishment, one achieved by the elite and only with great difficulty. We learn this from a work with the rather unenticing title Posterior Analytics. You may remember from last time that Aristotle's groundbreaking work in logic is presented in a treatise called the Prior Analytics. What it is prior to is the Posterior Analytics. Both works are complicated and undertake a variety of projects, but if you wanted a one-sentence summary of both analytics, you could do worse than to say the following. First, in the Prior Analytics, Aristotle explains the rules governing valid arguments. Then in the Posterior Analytics, he explains which valid arguments are sufficient to provide knowledge. Okay, that was two sentences. So the Posterior Analytics is, among other things, the closest thing to an Aristotelian treatise on epistemology. It asks, what are the conditions that have to be satisfied if we are to take ourselves as knowing something? The short version of Aristotle's answer is that you know something when you have demonstrated it. This immediately helps us to see what the Posterior Analytics has to do with the Prior Analytics. Demonstrations are valid arguments, so we need to know the rules of argument before we can say what a demonstration is. In fact, a good way to think about demonstrations, as Aristotle conceives them, is that they are the best kind of valid arguments. But this brings us to the long version of Aristotle's answer. Not just any old valid argument will be demonstrative and thus provide knowledge. Aristotle thinks that there is a whole series of criteria that need to be satisfied to achieve demonstration, like a series of boxes that need to be ticked. Looking at these criteria will take us through the rest of this episode and expose just how demanding Aristotle's epistemology turns out to be. Let's first remind ourselves of what a valid argument looks like according to Aristotle. It's going to be an argument with two premises which have a term in common. These premises will, together, yield a conclusion. Such an argument is called a syllogism, and Aristotle thinks that all productive arguments can be reduced to certain types of syllogism. So demonstrations will definitely be syllogisms, but which ones? Aristotle's fundamental idea here is that if you are going to demonstrate something then you need to explain it. So the syllogisms that are demonstrative will be the ones that are explanatory. For instance, I might notice that giraffes have long necks. As a giraffeologist, I now ask myself, gosh, why do giraffes have long necks? What I'm looking for is an argument that will explain this feature of the noble animal that is the giraffe. Now, I know what you're thinking. If I've noticed that giraffes have long necks, I already know it, I don't need to demonstrate it. What Aristotle is after is some kind of systematic, well-founded, we might even say scientific understanding of things like the fact that giraffes have long necks. Indeed, it's been proposed that understanding would be a better translation of the Greek episteme than knowledge, at least in this context. This leads us then to the first important box that needs to be ticked. A demonstrative syllogism needs to be not only a valid argument, but also genuinely explanatory. It has to show me not just that the conclusion is the case, but why the conclusion is the case. In our example, an appropriate syllogism might be something like this. Giraffes are land animals that eat leaves off tall trees. Land animals that eat leaves off tall trees have long necks, therefore giraffes have long necks. Aristotle will point to the feature that links the two premises, he calls this the middle term, and say that in a demonstration, the middle term helps to explain the conclusion. Giraffes have long necks because they are land animals that eat leaves off tall trees. So, are we done? Will any valid argument that explains something in this way count as a demonstration? Well, no. Aristotle adds several more criteria, and the next one I want to mention is a bit more surprising. His idea is that if we are really going to have understanding, what we are after is not an explanation of just one particular thing, but of a whole class of things. Knowledge or understanding must be universal. It will have to do with general features of the world around me. This means that if I'm looking at a particular giraffe, let's say her name is Hiawatha, then it doesn't count as a demonstration if I say that Hiawatha has a long neck because she eats leaves off tall trees. This is true alright, but it isn't an example of episteme, that is, knowledge or understanding. Rather, if I really understand Hiawatha's having a long neck, it's because I've realized that she's a giraffe, and understand that her long neck is just one instance of a universal feature that belongs to all giraffes. This connects to something I mentioned last time, the distinction between accidental and essential features. To remind you how this works, the essential features of something are the features the thing has by its very nature. I can't be human without being rational, so rationality is essential to me, whereas my baldness is accidental to me because I don't need to be bald to be human. In fact, I used to be human without being bald, but let's not get any further into that painful subject. So a giraffe, we're supposing, can't be a giraffe without having a long neck and without eating leaves off tall trees. These features are essential to it. Obviously, the universality criterion is relevant here. The essential features of a thing will be shared with all other members of its kind. If it is essential to Hiawatha that she has a long neck, then all other giraffes must have long necks too. So here's another box to be ticked. The premises of a demonstrative argument must mention essential features of the things that they are explaining. This is a point worth dwelling on for a moment. Aristotle is claiming that there simply isn't any such thing as knowledge or understanding, in the proper sense, of accidental features, meaning features that are exceptional among a given class. If Hiawatha has a broken toe, for instance, this will not interest the Aristotelian giraffeologist, because in general giraffes don't have broken toes. Aristotle accordingly has a strong tendency to relegate accidental or unusual things to his list of things not to worry about very much. Insofar as we're doing science, we aren't going to worry about the accidental features of things. This makes Aristotle very different from modern-day scientists. Of course, they do look for regular laws or patterns in nature, as Aristotle recommends, but they are also interested in surprising exceptions, in events or features that threaten to falsify their general theories. By contrast, Aristotle encourages us to ignore such exceptions and to study only the generalities of nature. If a giraffe is born without spots or with only three legs, that won't be worthy of study, it will just be ignored as unnatural. Nonetheless, what Aristotle calls knowledge or understanding is closely related to what we call science. Indeed, our word science comes from the Latin scientia, which was used to translate Aristotle's term episteme. Some even say that the posterior analytics is Aristotle's treatise on the philosophy of science. This makes sense given his criteria for demonstration, which focus on generality and systematicity. I have called it a work on epistemology more generally, but really there's not much difference between Aristotelian epistemology and Aristotelian philosophy of science. He uses the word episteme not just for biology and so on, but also for disciplines like mathematics and metaphysics. For him, all of these are sciences, that is, branches of knowledge. It is in this broader sense that the posterior analytics sets out a scientific program. According to the program, science gets hold of explanations, which are universal and are based on the essential features of things. If Aristotle's criteria are demanding, it is because he is telling us how to achieve full understanding of the world around us, how to become scientists, if you will. But he's still not done. Go back to the fact that you can only know something if it is true. Aristotle draws a rather surprising conclusion from this simple observation. He says that if the things I know cannot be false, then they are necessarily true. When I demonstrate something, not only will I have premises and a conclusion which deal with universal and essential features of things, but I will have premises and conclusions that are always guaranteed to be true. Thus, I can know or understand why giraffes have long necks because giraffes must necessarily have long necks, a giraffe with a short neck is impossible, and because it's always the case that giraffes have long necks. The first part there stands to reason. If long necks are an essential feature of giraffes, then of course a giraffe can't have a short neck, because if it does it won't be a giraffe anymore. But we're not likely to agree with the always part, because we don't think that giraffes have always existed. We think they evolved so that once upon a time, the world had to struggle along without giraffes. Even more depressingly, we anticipate that one day giraffes will probably be extinct. Aristotle will have none of this. For him, all species are eternal. They'd better be, because all knowledge is of eternal truths, so if giraffes didn't always exist, there could be no demonstrative knowledge of them. Couldn't we try saying something slightly different here? We could say, bad news Aristotle, you're wrong about giraffes always existing, but here's something that's always true. If something is a giraffe, then it has a long neck. That could be true even when there are no giraffes. Aristotle might be grateful for the suggestion, but it is not how he thinks about the situation. In his logic, it seems to be assumed that A is B can only be true if there is at least one A. So a statement like, giraffes have long necks will for him be false if there are no giraffes. He doesn't explore the strategy I just suggested, which might be more to the taste of a modern logician. You might remember that this issue came up last time, when I said that for Aristotle, either all humans are white, or there is at least one non-white human. And I promised to come back to the question of what happens if there are no humans. Well, I've come back to the question. And for Aristotle the answer is that there are always humans, and if there weren't, if there were no humans, then there would be no true propositions about humans being white or non-white. Let's take stock. We started by saying that Aristotle believes that knowledge or understanding is produced through demonstration, and that demonstration is going to be a kind of valid argument. We've now spent a lot of time looking at the boxes that need to be ticked to turn a valid argument into a demonstrative argument, and we've discovered that to be demonstrative an argument has to be explanatory, universal, and eternally necessary, dealing with the essential features of the things concerned. Surely we're finally done, right? Well yes and no. These do pretty well exhaust the special features of demonstrations, but there is still another worry we might have. Aristotle is keenly aware that my knowledge of a conclusion will only be as good as my knowledge of the premises I use to generate it. For instance, go back to my giraffe example one more time. Suppose I demonstrate that giraffes have long necks on the basis that they eat leaves off tall trees, but I don't understand why they eat leaves off tall trees. Now it looks like I don't understand why they have long necks either. My understanding of the conclusion in the demonstration can only be as good as my understanding of the premises, so those too stand in need of demonstration. Perhaps you can already spot the problem that is looming here. If each demonstration depends on further demonstrations for its premises, then won't I be sucked into a regress of explanation? If I understand giraffes' necks because I understand their eating habits, then I must understand their eating habits on the basis of something else, like maybe the structure of their stomachs. But then there must be something else that makes me understand their stomachs, and so on. There will be no stop to the chain of demonstrations. Aristotle raises this problem explicitly and declares that, like all good things, the demonstrative chain must come to an end. It can't just go on in an endless regress, and neither can it be circular. If I wind up explaining giraffes' necks via their eating habits, and their eating habits via their stomachs, I'd better not explain their stomachs on the basis of the kind of necks they have. So the regress must end, but how? Aristotle answers the question at the very end of the posterior analytics. He says that any demonstrative argument will ultimately derive from what he calls a first principle, and that our grasp of first principles must be even more certain and solid than our grasp of the things we demonstrate via those principles. Aristotle is what we nowadays call a foundationalist. He grounds all knowledge on some fundamental, certain truths. These are, of course, not themselves demonstrated. So how do we know them? Aristotle raises but dismisses as absurd the idea that we know these things already, but are unaware of them—obviously an allusion to Plato's theory of recollection. Instead, we get hold of fundamental principles through the most modest of means using a faculty possessed even by animals—sensation. It is through sensation, says Aristotle, that we arrive at a grasp of the universal features of things, but only after repeated experiences. In a striking analogy, he suggests that this is like a group of soldiers who is in retreat, who turn again to fight so that their formation is restored. Each soldier that turns seems to represent an individual experience, and when everything clicks as it were, their phalanx snapping back into line, the shields in a neat row again, that is like getting the universal into our minds. Here Aristotle seems to reveal himself as some kind of empiricist, since he traces our knowledge back to sense experience. He even uses a term which is often translated as induction—the Greek word is epagogue. But Aristotle is no David Hume. His brand of empiricism is not tinged by skepticism. He has a serene confidence that our minds are perfectly fitted to receive universal necessary truths just by examining the world around us. There's a further difference between Aristotle and modern empiricists like Hume. Even though Aristotle appeals to sense experience to stop the regress of demonstration, he isn't relentlessly committed to the idea that all our knowledge somehow depends on sensation. That term I just mentioned, epagogue, also appears in Aristotle to describe the careful consideration of commonly held or reputable opinions. This goes back to something I mentioned in the first episode on Aristotle. His practice as a philosopher is to begin from what already seems plausible, even if these appearances may ultimately be overthrown. Next time, I want to reconsider that feature of Aristotle's philosophy in light of the theory of knowledge I've just discussed in this episode. For some help, I'll be turning to a reputable authority of my own, Hugh Benson, an expert on Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian methodology. So don't miss what should be a wonderful demonstration of knowledge next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Hugh Benson, who is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a visiting research fellow here at King's. Hi Hugh. Hi Peter. And I should point out that Hugh is in London this semester with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which also funds this podcast. So thank you, Leverhulme Trust. Yes, thank you. Hugh, I wanted to talk to you in this interview about Aristotelian method, which I suppose raises the question of what we would mean by a method. What do you think philosophical method means in the context of ancient thinkers like, say, Aristotle or Socrates and Plato? Yeah, I think that's a really good question to start with because I don't think we think much about method anymore, about philosophical method. And one of the things that I really like about Plato and Aristotle is they did devote so much time to the nature of philosophical method. I suppose I enjoy thinking about what I'm doing more than doing it, and fortunately they did it and thought about what they were doing. But I think because they are concerned with method, I think there are some distinctive features about their concern. One of those distinctive features, I think, is that even though they recognize that there are a variety of philosophical activities, they thought of philosophy as primarily the search for knowledge or wisdom. And so for them, the philosophical method was really the method of acquiring knowledge or searching for knowledge. And so we might call it philosophical inquiry. And the other distinctive feature is perhaps as a result of that, that they saw philosophy as a search for knowledge, that they didn't think of philosophical inquiry as distinct from other forms of inquiry, like scientific inquiry or other sorts of inquiry. They thought of philosophical inquiry as the search for knowledge, maybe knowledge in all caps or robust knowledge or understanding. But knowledge, as Aristotle sometimes calls it, knowledge haplos, full stop. And so that's what they were concerned about. And then when one looks at Aristotle, one sees that he has a variety of methods in mind when he's talking about philosophical inquiry. In the posterior analytics, which I know you've talked about already, he seems to talk about demonstration as a potential method of inquiry. In the topics, he seems to talk about dialectic as a method of inquiry. At the end of the posterior analytics and then throughout various treatises, he talks about induction or apagogue, some kind of method based on the senses as a method of philosophical inquiry. And then in the metaphysics, especially and also in other places, he talks about the aporetic method, a method that's sort of based on going through the puzzles on a given subject matter. Because the word aporea means puzzle or problem. That's right. And actually, it's sort of centered in Socratic philosophy, as many of your podcasts mention. So speaking of Socrates, one thing I wanted to ask you is, if we're thinking about inquiry, I guess an obvious place to begin thinking about inquiry is how does an inquiry begin? And Socrates, or at least Plato's version of Socrates, seems to have thought that this was a really difficult puzzle, that if you don't know anything, then you might be paralyzed and unable to begin. Do you think that that's actually a good puzzle? Is that a good place to start from when we're thinking about inquiry? I'm not sure I think it is. I think certainly Plato and Aristotle were worried about beginnings. The Greek for that is probably archae, and archae and archae, the singular, the plural and singular, are all over Aristotle and Plato's talks about method. In fact, I think one of the ways that Aristotle distinguishes between those methods that I mentioned earlier is by distinguishing between the different starting points of the method. I think Aristotle was aware of Minos' paradox. He refers to it in the poster analytics, although I think he's actually worried about a different problem there than actual paradox. And part of Minos' paradox is indeed how do we begin. But I think we have to be careful in focusing on beginnings with Aristotle and Plato. We need to be careful that we don't take them to be some sort of Cartesian foundationalist, and that they're looking for infallibly certain foundations to begin with. I think instead, their worry about beginnings has to do with a worry about devising a kind of systematic, reliable method of inquiry. And one way I think about this is a picture, I have this image of playing catch with a golden retriever. When you play catch with a golden retriever, you throw the ball out in the field, the golden retriever sees the ball, comes right back, tails wagging, it's flourishing in the Aristotelian terms of flourishing. Life couldn't be any better for the golden retriever. But if you're like me in a little perverse, at some point you will trick the dog and either not throw the ball and make it think you have or throw it when it's not looking. We vault on it. And my experience with a golden retriever is the golden retriever just goes through this mad search in the field, completely random. And I suppose people who know about this will tell me that there's a method to that madness. But from my perspective, it just looks mad. What Aristotle and Plato's concerns about beginnings have to do with is making sure that we don't behave like golden retrievers in our search for knowledge. When we don't know where it is, what they're concerned with doing is giving us some place to start and some procedure to follow. It won't be an algorithm, it won't guarantee success, but it'll be reliable and systematic and repeatable. Okay, so the bar is not set as high as Descartes would set it because the idea isn't to start from something that's absolutely indubitable, but the bar is set higher than just looking around at random. That's right. And that's why we need a method. Okay, so if Aristotle thinks then that that is a good puzzle and that we do need a method in order to get started, what does he think is the answer? What's the right method to use or does it depend on what I'm inquiring into? Well, I don't think it quite depends on what we're inquiring into, although it might, but I think at a certain level of generality it doesn't. Aristotle distinguishes, I think, between two different starting points. He talks about some as being more knowable in nature and some as being more knowable to us. It's not really clear what that distinction amounts to. It might be an ontological and epistemological distinction, but it can't just be an ontological and epistemological distinction because Aristotle seems to think that both those kinds of principles are involved in philosophical inquiry. And in fact, we can sort of now look back at those four methods. If you think of demonstration, the starting points of demonstration are demonstration is a kind of deductive system and its first principles for Aristotle have these really special properties. They're true, they're primary, they're immediate, they're better known, they're prior, they're explanatory, they're necessary. Those all look like something that's knowable in nature. Those look like Aristotelian first principles in the sort of strong sense of first principles, and that's what distinguishes demonstration from some of these other methods. Induction, for example, its beginnings, its starting points or first principles look more like sensations or perception. Aristotle has an account of how one arrives at, looks like he thinks, how one arrives at demonstrative first principles in the last chapter of the second book of the posterior analytics. Dialectic, too, looks like it might be a way to first principles, those first principles of demonstration, but its starting points are things like endoxa, which it's difficult to know exactly what that means, but a fairly reasonable translation might be reputable opinions, maybe even sort of the common sense. And then the other method that I mentioned, the aporetic method, you might think that's a way of getting at those demonstrative first principles through a kind of starting point with puzzles and aporia, ways of getting at how to resolve those puzzles are ways of getting at the first principles of demonstration. So if you think in terms of starting points, you see a kind of structure, at least insofar as Aristotle has all these methods in mind, that you begin, you can think of part of the method as an acquisition of knowledge of theorems. And that method is demonstration, and the starting points of that demonstration are these first principles, these things more knowable in nature. And then there's another method, which may include both induction, dialectic, and the aporetic method for getting at the knowledge of those first principles. So it's sort of the starting points of starting points, so to speak. And we might, if we think of all those together, that the sort of starting points of that method, you might think of as sort of phenomena. And then the question is what to include in those. And phenomena means the way things seem to us or something like that. Okay. So actually that makes it sound like if we're talking about these four things as methods, demonstration is a method in a rather different sense because the other three, so you've got dialectic, which is a consideration of reputable opinion, you've got sensation or some kind of empirical research, and you've got the consideration of puzzles. And those three would all kind of work in parallel to each other or something and would get us up, as it were, to first principles. And then once we have the first principles, we could use those to engage in this fourth kind of method, which is demonstration. And so as Aristotle says, Plato was right to ask whether we're on our way to the principles or on our way from the principles because that makes all the difference. Right. Does that mean then that demonstration is a method or philosophical method in a very different sense from the other three so that we should sort of see the other three in one category and then demonstration in another category? Well, we might. I don't think it does. You might think that demonstration is more algorithmic than the other three methods. The other three methods may require more judgment. There's less guarantee you'll get to what you're looking for. But I'm not sure that demonstration is all that algorithmic either, as any of us know who try to do proofs in geometry or logic. There's a lot of judge... There aren't algorithms one can just follow and be certain that one will get the result. So I think they both take judgment. They both sort of sides of this method require procedures and recommendations on where to begin and how to follow the procedure once you begin there. And I mean, it's certainly the case that there are differences too. I don't want to deny that. But I think Aristotle thinks that, for example, the work that geometers are doing... Some are trying to uncover the first principles of geometry, but some are trying to derive the theorems from those first principles. And I think Aristotle would think they're both engaged in the acquisition of knowledge, new knowledge. And so, I mean, there are different procedures, to be sure, but they're both philosophical methods of inquiry. And so it depends on... I guess it depends on what you think matters in making a method different. Maybe one way of thinking about it would be that all four of these are parts of one big overall method. It should be the Aristotelian method. I guess one thing that people often think about Plato and Aristotle is that Plato wanted us to kind of turn our attention away from the physical things around us. And whether that's true or not is a matter of debate. But then they would say, if you look at what Aristotle does, it's exactly the reverse. So he's out there, he's dissecting animals, he's looking at the world around him, so he's some kind of empiricist. But it seems to follow from what you just said that if he's an empiricist, it's in a way that's modified by the fact that he has these other methods, because for him, turnings to sensation is just one of three ways to get to first principles, and there's also dialectic and the apparatic method. So do you think that it really doesn't make that much sense to call Aristotle an empiricist as a result? Well, I think Jonathan Barnes calls empiricism or empiricist a slippery word. And I think he's right about that. I think it depends on what one means by an empiricist. If what you mean is Aristotle spends a lot of time and energy talking about the role of the evidence of the senses in knowledge acquisition, I think that's certainly true. He devotes a lot of attention in the treatises to how sensation or perception plays a role in knowledge acquisition, much more than Plato, I think, even though I think Plato thought the evidence of the senses did play a role in knowledge acquisition. Aristotle seems to at least be filling that out in considerable more detail. He also finds fault with people who don't seem to pay enough attention to the senses a lot in Aristotle, that is, in the treatises. So I think he certainly, in the sense of devoting attention to the evidence of the senses, Aristotle is more of an empiricist than Plato in that sense, for sure. But I think you're right in terms of asking what the role of the evidence of the senses is in the method of inquiry. The differences between Plato and Aristotle aren't quite as great as they're often made out to be. I think part of it is to underestimate the value of the evidence of the senses for Plato, but it's also, I think, to overestimate the value of the senses for Aristotle, because as you say, dialectic doesn't seem... it's not incompatible with the evidence of the senses, but it doesn't seem to place a great amount of weight on the evidence of the senses. Maybe it goes back to something you said earlier, which is that he talks about trying to be true to the phenomena, and for him that doesn't just mean things that you can see or experience, the way someone like Hume or Locke might think of experience. It could also mean things people say, things people do, things people tend to think about these subjects, and he tends to think about sense experience as being somehow in parallel with that kind of information, and it kind of all goes into one big batch of phenomena which we can use to generate inquiry. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, so that all sounds very good, and in a way it makes Aristotle sound like he's got a very plausible way of moving forward from an initial position of apparent ignorance. Do you think this is something that he actually does in his treatises? I mean, it's one thing to tell us how he thinks we should go about doing philosophy, and it's another to actually write some philosophy and use the method that he's described. That's, I think, a really good question. It's a question that a lot of scholarship by an Aristotelian method has been devoted to, I think, especially in recent times, and in fact, I think that tension between what Aristotle does in his treatises and what he says about method has led to an argument that has the result that demonstration isn't a method of inquiry, and the argument goes roughly like this. That demonstration is a sort of axiomatic proof theoretic method based on axioms or definitions or first principles. The second premise is we don't get much of that in the treatises. We do get some, and people who want to defend demonstration have found more of it in the treatises than those who don't want to defend demonstration, but we certainly don't get most of it when one looks at the metaphysics as a whole or de anima as a whole or Nicomachean ethics as a whole. It sure doesn't look like it doesn't look like you put elements. So we don't seem to get that in the treatises, but then the third premise is, but the treatises are supposed to be examples of philosophical inquiry. So the conclusion is then demonstration must not be a method of philosophical inquiry. It must be some sort of method of displaying the completed results of philosophical inquiry or something like that. Now I'm not particularly persuaded by that argument in part because I don't think the third premise that the treatises are meant to be examples of philosophical inquiry is obviously true. But what I do think is really valuable about that argument is it points to two things that we have to keep in mind when we think about Aristotelian method. One, we have to take very seriously the question, what is it that Aristotle is trying to do in his treatises? Is he engaged in philosophical inquiry? Is he modeling philosophical inquiry? Is he displaying the results of philosophical inquiry? What's he trying to do in those treatises? And the second thing that argument brings out that's essential is that however we answer that, it's important, and to some extent I think this wasn't recognized as it should have been earlier, it's important to accommodate what Aristotle says about his method with what he actually does, and not to keep those two things distinct as it's sort of easy to do if one just focuses on what he says. And why is that important? Is it because if he says that he's going to do it one way and then he does it another way, that would just be kind of philosophically unsatisfying? Or would it show that we must have the wrong idea about the treatises, so maybe they're just for teaching purposes or something and not for inquiry purposes, and that's why they don't match up? What exactly would be the worry? Well I think the worry is that we'd expect Aristotle to be, I'm not sure what the word that I want here, to be genuine so to speak, not to describe a method that he's not willing to practice, I mean not to sort of recommend to us here's a way of engaging an inquiry and yet he goes off and does something else, he's got sort of a secret method back in his office that he uses. So I think that's part of it. I don't think, and in fact this is the point about worrying about the third premise, it's not obvious to me that what we have to do is accommodate what Aristotle says about his method with what he does in the treatises. What we have to do is accommodate what Aristotle says about method with what he does in terms of philosophical inquiry, then the question is, is how do you figure out what it is that Aristotle's doing in engaging an inquiry? It may be in the treatises, probably is in some treatises, not in others, that sort of thing, but that's a sort of separate question. When is Aristotle engaging in philosophical inquiry? And that, when he is, that better match up to what he says about philosophical inquiry. Right, so there could be sort of an account of what the inquiry should look like, then there's the inquiry which maybe happened off the page, and then there's the treatise. You might think about something like the history of animals, which doesn't look like he's actually telling you about his inquiries, it looks more like he's telling you the results of his inquiries. If you think of dissection as a method of inquiry, he's not engaging in dissection. When he sits down to write the treatise. For one thing it's too messy. Right, he's engaging in the results of that method. Right. Last question, how optimistic do you think Aristotle is about all this? I mean, he's got an inquiry method, or he's maybe got several methods of inquiry, and he certainly seems to think that he himself has made a lot of progress, for example compared to his predecessors, including Plato. Do you think that he thinks, well, most people could do this if they gave it a shot and were as reflective about it as I have been, and if they follow my advice, do you think that he thinks this is something only the elite could do, him and maybe a few favored students, and do you think that he thinks this may be a slightly separate issue, do you think he thinks there's a lot more to do still, or do you think he's pretty much polished it off and that philosophy is completed with him? I mean, so how optimistic is he both on the side of how easy this is to do and how much has already been accomplished by the time he's dead, let's say? There's a certain amount of conceit in Aristotle for sure, and there are moments in the treatises where you get the feeling that he actually thinks he's pretty much finished it all, but I think most of the time he doesn't feel that way, he thinks there's a lot of work to be done. He certainly thinks that it's very hard to do, I think he agrees with Plato that it's a long and difficult road to acquire this knowledge. I think what really distinguishes Aristotle from Plato in a way that's connected to this question of pessimism is that Aristotle seems much more interested in sort of the intermediate states than Plato is. Plato has a view that robust knowledge is so valuable that he just doesn't much care about things that fail to be robust knowledge. Aristotle devotes a lot of attention to identifying and distinguishing in even being willing to call those cognitive states knowledge, short of the robust knowledge that he fails to have but he thinks that can be acquired. So you get distinctions in Aristotle between knowledge that and knowledge why, between universal knowledge and particular knowledge, between knowing something universally and knowing it haplos or full stop. And all of that I think is part of Aristotle's common sense. Plato is sort of willing to bite the bullet and say, I know we talk about Benson having knowledge but he doesn't have robust knowledge so whatever he has just doesn't really matter. Aristotle's willing to let me have a little knowledge even though he would agree with their, we would all agree I fail to have robust knowledge. Certainly in Plato's terms. And speaking of Plato's robust philosophy and Aristotle's maybe more modest ambitions, next time I'm going to be looking at Aristotle's views on substance and I'll talk a little bit about how they might compare to Plato's more ambitious theory of metaphysics and substance. But for now I'd just like to thank you Benson very much for coming on. Well thanks for having me. And join me next time for Aristotle on substance, next time on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Down to Earth, Aristotle on Substance. A few years ago I had the chance to visit the Vatican Museum. Apparently being pope gives you good opportunities to collect art, because the Vatican houses a number of very impressive objects. The thing I most wanted to see was Raphael's painting The School of Athens, which depicts several of the philosophers we have looked at in this series of podcasts. In the centre, of course, are Plato and Aristotle. I've used that part of the painting on the podcast website for this episode, in fact. Anyway, I was very excited to see this work in person, so you can imagine how I felt when we came into the room to find it walled off from view, as it was undergoing restoration. I'm a trained philosopher, so my reason should be in charge of my soul, making me immune to such disappointments. But sadly, this would be one of the areas where my philosophical training has been inadequate, so I glared petulantly at the plywood blocking my view, until finally my companions dragged me off to see some chapel with a decorated ceiling, which I'm sorry to say did not feature either Plato or Aristotle. In the painting that I didn't get to see, Raphael depicts Plato pointing up towards the heavens, an apparent allusion to his theory of forms. Aristotle, meanwhile, is painted holding his hand flat to the ground. Usually this is seen as representing a traditional contrast drawn between Plato and Aristotle. Whereas Plato seems to encourage us to turn away from the world, towards an ideal realm, Aristotle is interested in the here and now. He's the sort of man who devotes many hours to biological pursuits, he delights in dissecting fish to see how their organs are arranged. His natural philosophy looks carefully at the mechanisms of moving bodies, developing theories that will remain dominant until Galileo. In his ethics, he praises a life of virtuous practical action, rather than seeing political engagement as something one would rather avoid, as Plato did in the Republic. Now, I know what you're thinking. Whenever Peter mentions one of these traditional contrasts, he always goes on to say that it's too simple, and that the standard view is a misconception. I have to plead guilty, at least in the present instance. We've already seen that Plato was very interested in the natural world too, as we can see especially from his dialogue The Timaeus. And, as we'll see later, Aristotle's ethics present a life of pure contemplation as superior even to the life of practical virtue. The relationship between Plato and Aristotle is rarely a simple one, a point I'll be exploring in these episodes on Aristotle and again when I reach late antiquity. Still, there is at least one topic where it seems that we can draw a fundamental contrast between Plato and Aristotle, the topic of substance. I didn't use the word substance in discussing Plato because it isn't a technical term he uses. In fact, Plato in general is much less fond of technical terminology than Aristotle, and frequently has his characters say that terminology is not important, so long as the philosophical ideas are clear. For Aristotle, though, substance is a technical term. The Greek word is ουσια, which is simply a form of the Greek verb to be. So, substance, in this context, means something rather straightforward, it is simply that which is. And, of course, this is a topic on which Plato does have plenty to say. You may remember that in both the Republic and the Timaeus, Plato describes forms as the objects of knowledge, and as things that truly are, whereas things that participate in forms are objects of opinion, they both are and are not. Aristotle thinks that Plato is deeply wrong about this. There are two mistakes being made, in fact. For one thing, Aristotle denies that there are forms. For another, he believes that concrete, sensible objects around us, things like me, a giraffe, or the Eiffel Tower, are good candidates for being the most real beings that there are. These points appear in a variety of Aristotelian works. It's in his Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle makes the famous remark that truth is to be honoured above our friends, as a prelude to his strenuous rejection of Plato's idea that there is a form of the good. But the two texts that are most important for setting out Aristotle's views on substance are the categories, which we've already looked at a bit in the episode on his logic, and, unsurprisingly, the metaphysics. When we set out to piece together an account of substance on the basis of these two works, we quickly discovered that Aristotle's ideas on this score seem to have changed. The categories account of substance is much simpler than the one we find in the metaphysics, though they are not necessarily inconsistent. Let's begin, then, with the categories. The reason substance even arises here is that substance, ouzia, is the first of the ten categories. As you might remember, the categories seem to be the most general classes of predicate. In other words, if you list terms that can be ascribed to things, you discover that they fall into ten types, or, at least, that's what the categories ask us to believe. The reason that substance is the first category to be mentioned is that it is so basic. Here, we would be dealing with ascriptions like, Socrates is a man, or, Hiawatha is a giraffe. Predications of substance tell you what kind of being you are dealing with, so that these predications are more fundamental than the others. Before something can be white, or tall, or walking, or in a room, it must first be some kind of being, like a man, for instance. Here, we have already arrived at a difference between Aristotle and Plato. From Aristotle's point of view, things like individual men and giraffes are basic, because they are the subjects of predication. If I want to ascribe humanity, or whiteness, or tallness to something, then I need something to which I can ascribe it, and this will be a substance, like the individual man Socrates or the individual giraffe Hiawatha. Thus, individual items in the world around us are, as Aristotle puts it, primary beings, rather than derivative beings, as Plato suggests. Where Plato thinks of beautiful things as caused by beauty itself, Aristotle holds that without beautiful things, there is no such thing as beauty. Plato might fall back to his point about the compresence of opposites, insisting that individual substances can be both equal and unequal, or both beautiful and ugly, in relation to other things. So how can they be primary? Aristotle will say, actually that proves my point. Substances are indeed primary because they are the bearers of predication. And if you check my list of categories, you'll see that one type of predicate is relation. He also subverts Plato's idea that true beings are unchanging, by insisting that one reason individual substances are primary is precisely that they undergo change. When there is a change from short to tall, it is some individual substance that is first short and then tall, like our giraffe Hiawatha growing from childhood up to her full majestic adult height. The capacity for change goes hand in hand with being a subject of predication. So these particular beings that we can actually see around us are what Aristotle here in the categories calls primary substances. He also recognizes what he calls secondary substances. These are things like species and genera. A species is a basic class of entity like human or giraffe. A genus is a wider class which includes numerous species, like for instance animal, which embraces both human and giraffe. These things are secondary, says Aristotle, because they are predicated of individuals. The species human is predicated of particular humans. Again, the particulars are doing all the metaphysical work here. Just as it is beautiful things that guarantee and explain the presence of beauty in the world, so it is the fact that there are individual humans that ensures that there is a species of human. Thus the categories, at least at first glance, seems to present a metaphysical picture that is more or less faithful to our experience. Forget the radically revisionary ideas of Heraclitus with his unity of opposites, Parmenides with his one being, and Plato with his forms. Aristotle says that the basic bits of reality are particular things you can touch and interact with. But you can't really see them. But is this just a matter of taste, or does Aristotle have good arguments for why his metaphysical picture is the right one? We've just seen that Aristotle believes that being a subject of predication, and being capable of change, will make things good candidates for being genuine substances. But Plato isn't likely to accept these criteria, so what can Aristotle say that might convince Plato? Well, he says several things that look a little familiar from Plato's own self-criticism in the dialogue Parmenides. For instance, he complains that if forms are really separate from things, then they won't be able to causally influence them. This is reminiscent of the argument Plato calls the greatest difficulty in his Parmenides. Aristotle also takes advantage of some of his own technical distinctions to force unappealing choices on Plato. For instance, he's produced this contrast between particular things like Socrates, and universal things like human and the genus animal. And, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, he's managed to capture Plato's intuition that knowledge deals with general features of the world by agreeing that knowledge must be universal in scope. But since universals are dependent on particulars, it is still going to be things like Socrates that make our knowledge of humanity possible. Here it's worth repeating the point that, for Aristotle, there must always be individual men, so that there will be something for universal truths about men to be true about. Now Aristotle can ask Plato, are these forms of yours supposed to be universal or particular? They seem in fact to be an uneasy compromise between the two, for they are each supposed to be one substance like a particular, yet they are also supposed to explain general features of the world like goodness, beauty, equality, and so on. Aristotle also produces more specific criticisms. For instance, in his Ethics, he argues that Plato's doctrine of the form of the good is incoherent. There are just too many ways that things can be good, as Aristotle says, good is said in many ways. So there is no one notion or idea of good for the form to embody. Now, that locution, said in many ways, appears elsewhere too, and never more prominently than in The Metaphysics. The Metaphysics is perhaps Aristotle's most complex and difficult work, and I'm going to have to come back to it in later episodes, for instance when I talk about God. It encompasses a number of different topics and problems, and in fact it is far from clear whether it was intended as a single work, or was rather assembled after Aristotle's death as a collection of originally separate texts. But to the extent that The Metaphysics is a unity, it is because it envisions a single science devoted to nothing less than being. Aristotle never calls this science metaphysics, speaking instead of first philosophy. One fundamental thesis of this science of first philosophy is that being, like goodness, is said in many ways. We've already seen an example of this in the categories discussion of substance. Remember, the word substance is in Greek just a form of the verb to be. So, when Aristotle talks about primary and secondary substance, really what he is saying is that there are two kinds of beings, one of which is more fundamental than the other. Hiawatha is primary, and the species giraffe is secondary, because particulars are more fundamental than species. Similarly, Hiawatha is a more fundamental being than the accidental properties she has, like her skin color, height, or that twinkle she gets in her eye when she sees a good-looking male giraffe. Accidents are beings, and the substances in which they adhere are beings, but the latter beings are more primary. By the time we get to The Metaphysics, Aristotle has made a further distinction which complicates his understanding of substance. This is the distinction between matter and form. To understand this, we need to return to the question of change. I mentioned earlier that he sees individuals as primary because they can undergo change, as when Hiawatha gets taller. In such a case, a substance goes from having one predicate to having another predicate. But what about when a change is substantial rather than accidental? What do we say, that is, when the change in question is that a giraffe is born, or tragically, dies? Giving a complete answer to this question would mean wading into some rather deep waters, since it would involve dealing with Aristotle's theory of soul, and that's a podcast for another day. For now, though, we can say this. Aristotle is sympathetic to Parmenides' rule that there can be no generation from nothing, and no destruction into nothing. On the other hand, he thinks it is obvious that Parmenides' ultimate conclusions are wrong. Things clearly do change, whether accidentally or in respect of their substance. We can explain this if we assume that every change involves two components. On the one hand, there is something that changes, and this will always be some nature or property. This Aristotle calls form. On the other hand, there is something that undergoes the change and takes on the new property. This Aristotle calls matter. The clearest illustrations are man-made artifacts. A table, for instance, is made by taking some pre-existing matter, for instance wood, and imposing the form of a table upon it. The wood persists through the change, but acquires a new shape. The centrality of this sort of example is suggested by the fact that Aristotle's word for matter is simply the Greek word for wood, namely houle. But the same analysis goes for other kinds of change, whether or not they involve wood, and whether they are substantial or accidental changes. When Hiawatha was born, form was imposed on some pre-existing matter, namely blood or whatever stuff was in the mother's womb that took on the new form of giraffe. Then when Hiawatha grows, she takes on the new form of being tall, and she is like matter for this new form of tallness. We'll have a chance to look at these ideas again next time. For now, I just want to consider a problem they pose for Aristotle's theory of substance. In the categories, things looked relatively simple. The most fundamental sort of being was a particular substance, like Socrates or Hiawatha. These substances have and various features, which are the predicates that fall under the ten categories. But now, with our new distinction between matter and form, we can analyze the situation further. There is still the substance with its features, for instance Socrates, who is a man, and who is in the marketplace badgering hapless Athenians, but the substance itself is further divided into matter and form. Socrates is, as Aristotle will now say, a composite of matter and form, just as a table is a composite of wood and the shape of a table. Hence the problem. In light of this further analysis, should we still say that Socrates, the composite individual, is a being of the most fundamental kind, a primary substance? Or should we instead say that his matter is the primary substance, or perhaps that form is primary substance? This is one of the questions considered by Aristotle in the difficult middle section of his metaphysics. He is still convinced that primary substance will be something of this world. He is no closer to accepting Plato's theory of separate forms. But he now needs to nuance and reconsider the category's theory of substance in light of his matter-form distinction. He could stick to his guns and insist that it is the whole particular that is primary substance. This answer has much to recommend it. A particular man or giraffe can exist independently of other things, for instance, and it's still going to be the case that universal generalities about men are made true by individual men. For instance, it is because each particular man is necessarily an animal that we can universally affirm that man is a species falling under the genus Animal. Also, the particular is still a subject of predication. Socrates has a snub nose, Hiawatha is tall. But hang on, Aristotle now thinks. Maybe snub-nosedness is predicated of Socrates and tallness of Hiawatha. But within Socrates and Hiawatha, don't we have predication of another kind? In each case, a form, whether human or giraffe, is predicated of matter. And this seems to be more basic than accidental features that can be lost, for instance if Socrates goes to a plastic surgeon and has his nose de-snubbed. By contrast, the only way to remove the human form from Socrates's matter is to do what the Athenians in fact did do, kill him. Thus, if we're looking for a fundamental subject of predication, it looks as though we should say matter is primary substance. On the other hand, form has its own claims to be the most fundamental kind of being. Aristotle shares with Plato the intuition that being should be intelligible, and it is through having determination of a certain kind, that is, form, that things are intelligible. This puts Aristotle in a bind, which he attempts to resolve in a formidably complicated discussion in the metaphysics. This discussion is indeed difficult, and I'm starting to run short on time, so if you at least see the problem Aristotle is facing, I'd be quite happy with that. But I'll close by gesturing towards his answer. Aristotle declares that if we are looking for the being of something, what we are after might be called its essence. It is this that we are grasping when we grasp what a thing is. This will certainly not be its matter. There's a lot more to being human than having flesh and bones. Rather, the essence of Socrates will be in a sense the same as Socrates, because each thing must be the same as its own being. Yet Aristotle also finds it plausible and in the end more compelling to associate essence with form. The essence of Socrates is simply what it is to be human, and this will be very close or identical to the form of human. To really understand what Aristotle means here we would of course need to read the metaphysics carefully, and that's something I'd obviously encourage you to do. Indeed, in general I hope these podcasts will encourage you not just to listen to me, but to go and read Plato, Aristotle, and all the other philosophers I discuss, since I'm only scratching the surface. But before profiting from the metaphysics, you'll need to add a few more weapons to your arsenal of Aristotelian philosophical concepts. Most obviously you will need to know more about change, matter, and form. You also need to think about form as it appears in Aristotle's favorite kind of substances, namely living things, whether plants, animals, or humans. These will furnish us with topics for several more episodes. We'll start next week with form and matter, which turn out to be only two of four types of cause recognized by Aristotle. With that under our belts, we'll be substantially better off in trying to understand the rest of Aristotle's philosophy. So there are plenty of reasons for you to join me next time for Aristotle's four causes, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Form and Function, Aristotle's Four Causes. If you're listening to this, you must own, or at least have access to, a computer. Maybe you're looking at it right now, as you listen to this online. But if you're anything like me, there is a lot that you don't understand about your computer. For me, computers might as well be magical devices. I turn it on, and it starts to glow, giving me powers I do not possess by nature, like the ability to download podcasts and to watch amusing videos about cats on YouTube. But of course, some people do understand computers, the ones who design, study, build, and repair them. These people are in a good position to answer all kinds of questions about computers. We might describe them as computer scientists. Some of them indeed describe themselves this way. The more that someone understands about computers, the more claim they would have to possess the science of computers. For all his achievements, Aristotle was of course not a computer scientist. This was a man whose prodigious accomplishments were achieved without the benefit of Wikipedia or amusing videos about cats. Actually, that may have been an advantage. But if Aristotle were shown a computer, he would agree that there must be some kind of science or knowledge for computers, what he would call the episteme of computers. For him, this would amount to being able to give causal explanations of computers and the things they can do. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, his theory of knowledge assumes that having episteme means being able to give such explanations by means of a demonstration. The goal is to understand not just that something is the case, but why something is the case. Aristotle is thus very interested in what sorts of causal accounts we can give. Is there any systematic way of dividing up the kinds of explanation that can feature in demonstrations? To put this in a less technical way, Aristotle wants to know how many different kinds of answer are there to why questions. Given the title of this episode, it's a bit late for me to leave you in suspense, so I'll just say right off that, according to Aristotle, there are four kinds of cause or explanation, material, formal, efficient, and final. These English terms are drawn not from Greek, but from Latin translations of Aristotle's Greek. For instance, efficient relates to the Latin verb efficio, which means do or bring about. Thus, the efficient cause is the one that brings something about. For instance, the carpenter who builds a table is the efficient cause of the table. Similarly, the word final relates to the Latin word for end or purpose, a final cause being a purpose or goal. Aristotle often uses less technical expressions for his four causes, as when he refers to the category of final cause as that for the sake of which. Aristotle sets out his four kinds of cause in the third chapter of the second book of the Physics. Perhaps the easiest of the four to understand is the material cause. This is just whatever something is made of. Aristotle gives the example of a statue being made of bronze. The next kind of cause is formal. The form will be whatever gives something its definition or determination. Aristotle's example is that the form of the octave is the ratio of 2 to 1. What he has in mind is the strings on a stringed instrument. If you have two strings at the same tension, one of which is exactly half as long as the other, the notes they give when struck will be one octave apart. Third is the efficient cause, which brings something to be by imposing form on the matter. Aristotle provides the example of the father being the cause for his child. The final type of cause is, appropriately enough, the final type of cause. Final causes are purposes. Aristotle's example is that health is the final cause of taking a walk or of administering medicine. With all due respect to Aristotle, these examples are less helpful than they might be. In particular, it isn't so helpful when he illustrates formal cause with the example of the octave. And it would be nice to have him enumerate causes of all four types for one and the same thing, so let's try to do that using the example I started with at the beginning of this episode, a computer. If we can apply the four causes to a computer, that would testify to the perennial utility of Aristotle's scheme. Unfortunately what I know about computers could fit onto a 1980s floppy disk, but I'll do my best. Let's warm up with the material cause, which is easy enough. The matter of a computer is whatever it is made of, like plastic and silicon. The formal cause will be the structure of the computer, roughly speaking the way that the matter is arranged in order to yield a computer. So this might include things like being a certain shape, having the circuit set out in a certain order, the pattern of keys in the keyboard, and so on. But the true form of the computer is going to consist only of the structural elements it needs to be a computer. The fact that the G key is right in the middle of the keyboard will only be incidental because the G key could be moved elsewhere on the keyboard without rendering the device nonfunctional. To use terminology I introduced last time, the formal cause of a computer is what gives the computer its essential properties, the features it must have if it is to be a computer. So the placement of the G key is not vital, but the computer must be able to process information for instance. Its ability to do this will derive from its arrangement or form. This is why Aristotle says, in the physics and elsewhere, that the form of a thing is closely related to its essence. As for the efficient cause, this too is easy to name. It is the person who built the computer, just as the father is the efficient cause of the child. In general, it looks like an efficient cause is whatever comes along and does something, so that something else comes to be. This immediately raises the prospect that eternal things, things that have always existed, cannot have efficient causes. It may not seem that important a point, but philosophers will wrestle with this implication of Aristotle's theory for many centuries in the late ancient and medieval periods, so stay tuned for that. Incidentally, you might worry that your computer wasn't put together by just one mechanic with a screwdriver. Won't the efficient cause be a whole team of people, or perhaps machines in a factory? Well why not? Aristotle would be happy to admit that many entities sometimes come together to form an efficient cause. Imagine for instance a battalion of soldiers pushing their boat out to sea, perhaps one of the ships launched by Helen's beautiful face. They are jointly the efficient cause of the boat's movement into the water. As for the final cause, in the example I just gave, the purpose of launching the ship would be to retrieve Helen from Troy, and the purpose of the computer of course is to watch amusing videos about cats on YouTube. And more generally to process and store information. Notice that the final cause is intimately related to the formal cause. The form of a computer is basically whatever allows it to achieve its purpose. This is exactly what we would expect of course. It amounts to saying that the design of the computer enables it to do what it was designed for. For a full explanation, we can add in the efficient and final cause. An efficient cause, for instance a human, comes along and formulates a purpose to be achieved, and that's the final cause. This agent then selects some appropriate materials, the material cause, and imposes upon them the form suitable to the task. To give a more Aristotelian example than the computer, a carpenter might impose the form of a table on some wood in order to have something to eat off. The carpenter is the efficient cause, the shape and structure of the table is the formal cause, the wood is the material cause, and having something to eat off is the final cause. Now I know what you're thinking. Are these all really causes? Of the four types Aristotle has named, there is really only one we'd normally describe as a cause, namely efficient cause. For us, causes are pushers and pullers. They are whatever makes something happen, whatever introduces a change in the world. But Aristotle will say, hang on a minute, you might remember from the last episode that to explain change we need both matter and form. The matter is whatever persists through the change and the form is whatever is added to or subtracted from the matter. For instance, when a rock is heated, the rock is the matter and heat is the new form. When wood becomes a table, the wood is the matter that remains and the form of table is added. So if it's change you're interested in, you will need to agree that matter and form are vital. Moreover, Aristotle can point out that matter and form remain on the scene even after the efficient cause has done its job. The carpenter leaves the workshop and goes to sleep, or perhaps even dies, but the wood is still shaped as a table. You might retort, okay Aristotle, I grant that it is useful to invoke matter and form when discussing change, but that doesn't make matter and form causes. The cause is the carpenter, or more generally the efficient cause, the thing which brought about the change. We don't need to talk about causes for a table that is standing still in a quiet workshop. But Aristotle will remind you what we started out trying to do. We were trying to learn how many kinds of answer there are for why questions. Efficient causes do fit the bill. Why is there a table here? Because the carpenter built it. But how about why does this table have sharp corners? Because the top is square, an answer in terms of formal cause. Or why is this table flammable? Because it's made of wood, an answer that invokes material cause. Aristotle wants us to see that we can't understand or explain things without invoking their form and matter as well as their efficient causes. Talking about pushers and pullers will only get you so far. Since you have struggled against Aristotle for this long, you're clearly not easy to please. So even now, you will probably want to draw a line in the sand. You're the efficient cause, the sand is the material cause, line is the formal cause, sorry, once you get going it's hard to stop. So you'll want to say, okay Aristotle, I'll grant you three of your four causes. The carpenter, the wood, the shape of the table, those are all real things out in the world. They have, so to speak, metaphysical respectability. So it's fine to point to them as kinds of cause. But what about the fourth type, the final cause? There are no purposes or goals floating around free in the world. The carpenter might have a goal in mind when he builds the table, like to eat off of it or to make money by selling it, but if this is a cause, it's a cause in a very different sense. We can see this, you will insist, if we think about the difference between a table or a computer on the one hand and something like a giraffe on the other hand. Giraffes too have efficient causes, namely their giraffe fathers. And they have form and matter, as we saw in the last episode. But they do not have final causes. There is no goal or purpose to a giraffe, lovely though she may be. This is a big difference between man-made things and natural things, and the reason for the difference is that the goal of a man-made thing is imposed by the human who makes it. So we don't need to take final causes seriously in the same way as the other three kinds. Even if it is useful to talk about them when we're discussing carpentry and the like, final causes just aren't real. Here we've arrived at a notorious aspect of Aristotle's conception of nature. When you say that giraffes don't have purposes, have no final causes, he will firmly disagree. How can you say that a giraffe has no final cause, he will argue, when even the parts of giraffes clearly do have final causes? Aristotle needs only to mention the giraffe's famous neck, which has the purpose of allowing her to eat leaves off tall trees. Or maybe not, I've seen it claimed that the long necks are actually for fighting other giraffes, but I'm a philosopher, so I'm not going to let a few silly facts get in the way of a good example. In fact, if we look through the animal kingdom, we see example after example of animals that are amazingly fit for purpose. The frog with eyes that can look around while the rest of it stays underwater, the lizard whose skin is the same color as its environment, and so on. How can we explain this, Aristotle will ask, without saying that there are really final causes in nature? The parts of animals perform certain functions such as camouflage, reaching leaves, and watching for enemies. These functions contribute to the overall function of each animal, which is simply to flourish and reproduce so that its species is preserved through the generations. The same goes for plants, and of course, for humans, who likewise have bewilderingly complex bodies that can only be explained by admitting the presence of final causation. If I may introduce a technical term, we can therefore say that Aristotle's conception of nature is teleological. This word comes from the Greek telos, which means end or purpose. To say that nature is teleological is simply to claim that nature involves final causation. Here you will be tempted to smile indulgently and say that Aristotle's teleology was plausible in its day, but has ultimately been shown wrong by the theory of evolution. Since Darwin, we know that functional aspects of animals have nothing to do with some kind of natural final causation. They are rather the result of a long process whereby certain features are selected for inheritance depending on whether or not they are conducive to survival. The apparent design we see in nature is merely apparent. It is actually nothing but randomness constrained by the mechanisms of survival pressure and genetic inheritance. Poor Aristotle, of course, knew nothing of this, so his teleological theory is, quite literally, antiquated. But things are a bit more complicated. Aristotle did know of an attempt to explain natural phenomena by an appeal to chance rather than teleology. This is something we've seen already in the episode on the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. To remind you, Empedocles believed that separate parts of animals arose first by chance, and then came together, randomly, to produce whole animals, with the suitable animals managing to reproduce. No one today can read the ancient report of this theory without thinking of evolution, and as it happens, the ancient report is found in this very same book of the physics. Aristotle presents Empedocles' theory as a challenge to his own, so he is well aware that one could try to explain nature through randomness, rather than final causation. Aristotle rejects the theory, for the following reason. For Empedocles, everything in the natural world is to be explained by chance. For instance, teeth would just happen to spring up in such a way that they are suitably arranged for grinding and tearing food. But this is simply a misunderstanding of what chance is. When I say that something is a chance or lucky event, this means that it is unusual precisely because it might have been intentional, but is not. Aristotle gives the example of looking for someone because I am collecting money for a feast, and then happening to run into him in the marketplace. Lucky me, I didn't go to the marketplace to find him, but I found him anyway. The result is as if intended, but not intended. Another example would be if a rock just happens to fall off a cliff at the right time to kill my enemy. Again, lucky for me. But if this is what chance or luck means, it is only intelligible against a background of things that really are intentional. What happens for the most part is that purposes are pursued and achieved, final causes do their work. Occasionally, but only occasionally, a desirable result is achieved without being pursued, without any final cause being involved, and that is what we call chance or luck. How then could everything in nature be like this, since the whole point of luck is to be exceptional, whereas nature is just what almost always happens? Aristotle's response to Empedocles is, I think, a reasonably effective one, if only because Empedocles has not spelled out the mechanisms by which random processes could yield uniform and predictable processes. At least on Aristotle's telling, Empedocles has said nothing about genetic inheritance and next to nothing about survival pressures. So oddly, Aristotle may have the better of this particular argument, even if Empedocles was closer to being right. But once we add the machinery of modern genetics and evolutionary theory, it seems that we really can dispense with final causes. Here, some scholars still attempt a last-ditch defense of Aristotle, by adopting a less metaphysically loaded reading of his teleology. On this reading, Aristotle would not insist that final causes are metaphysically real, rather he would say that they are required for us in making sense of nature. Whereas matter, form, and efficient causes are actually out there in the world, final causes would have a merely heuristic function. They would help us to explain what we see, without being a real part of what we see. This brings us back to where we started, which was Aristotle's quest to find explanations, to answer why questions, to produce demonstrative syllogisms and hence, knowledge. On the less metaphysical reading, Aristotle wants to say only that we can't avoid talking of function and purpose when we investigate nature. This makes his account rather plausible. While accepting evolutionary theory, we still happily speak of giraffes needing long necks in order to reach trees, and chameleons changing color in order to avoid being eaten. Perhaps that phrase in order to simply cannot be eliminated from our scientific language, and perhaps this is all Aristotle needs, the claim that final causes would appear in proper scientific explanations. This strikes me as a clever defense of Aristotle, though I suspect that he did have a more metaphysically committed understanding of final causes. We can reserve final judgment for a few weeks, since I will be devoting a future episode to Aristotle's views about animals. But animals are only one part of the natural world around us, and Aristotle has plenty to tell us about the natural world as a whole, not least in this work we've been discussing, the physics. Thus far, we've only scratched its surface. So naturally, you'll want to join me next time, as I take a look at Aristotle on nature and the cosmos, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Let's Get Physical, Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. Simplicity, they say, is a virtue. But is it really? I guess it depends what you're trying to accomplish. Producing a piece of minimalist art? Then simplicity should be your watchword. But designing a baroque church? Not so much. Scientists seem to side with the minimalist artists and not the baroque architects. As we can see from modern attempts to produce a unified theory of physics, scientists often seek to provide the simplest possible explanations of the world around us. If you can reduce the number of principles or concepts needed to account for what you see around you, that seems to count as a scientific advance, even if the simpler explanation doesn't, for instance, allow you to predict things with any greater accuracy. We seem instinctively to feel that explanations of nature should be simple, and that if we can restrict ourselves to a smaller number of explanatory factors, we must be getting closer to the underlying reality. Whatever you make of this feature of science, it has clearly been around for a long time, indeed for as long as there has been anything we can plausibly call science. If you cast your mind back to the first presocratics, you may recall that they sought to explain all natural phenomena in terms of a single principle, which might be water according to Thales, air according to Anaximenes, or the more obscure infinite of Anaximander. These Milesian thinkers are often called material monists because of their attempt to derive the whole natural world from a single original matter. The search for simplicity reached its climax with Parmenides, for whom everything is one and complexity is not just a theoretical blemish, but an illusion. When Aristotle sets out to do natural philosophy in his work, the Physics, he adopts his characteristic method of surveying previous views, and what he finds is that nearly all his predecessors sought to explain the natural world in terms of a small number of principles. The Milesian religions and Parmenides, as we just saw, get the number of principles all the way down to one. Empedocles doesn't get quite that far, since he invokes two opposed principles, love and strife, and it would be fairer to say that he has six, since there are also his four elements. Those who don't go for a small number of principles tend to go all the way in the other direction and say that there are an infinity of principles, which might be an infinity of atoms or the infinite seeds in the mixture of anaxagoras. In discussing this material, Aristotle does us the favour of preserving a lot of information about the pre-Socratics. Later commentaries on his Physics preserve further information. But Aristotle is not telling us all this out of mere historical interest. In fact, he risks distorting the views of his predecessors because he forces those views into a scheme which will allow his own ideas to emerge more clearly. In this case, the scheme pivots around this question of how many principles there are for nature. This is bound to be a misleading question to put to the pre-Socratics. Is Parmenides's one really a principle in the same sense as air, according to Anaximenes, or the infinite atoms of Democritus? Surely not. And the principles Aristotle will invoke are principles in yet another sense. Yet Aristotle has put his finger on something. His scheme reveals that the drive towards simplification was already a light motif of early Greek thought. Another characteristically Aristotelian thing to say would be, fine then, go ahead and strive for simplicity, but be careful not to oversimplify. This is, after all, the man who built a whole ethical theory around the golden mean. He will want to pursue simplicity, but within moderation. He argues that theories based on only a single principle are too simple. If you have only one thing, it cannot interact with anything else, so it will remain inert. This, of course, is exactly what Parmenides had in mind, that reality consists of an unchanging single being. Aristotle pauses to refute this idea, but remarks that the discussion doesn't really belong to natural philosophy as such. Parmenides's theory says that the natural world is an illusion, whereas natural philosophy should assume that the natural world does exist, and then attempt to understand it. Aristotle also faults two principle theories for being too simple. If we have only two contrary principles, they will just cancel each other out. No, what we need, says Aristotle, is three principles. A principle to be worked on, and then two other principles to work on the first one. Putting it this way makes his idea seem rather abstract, but we've already seen in a previous episode how he would spell it out. The key notion is going to be change. Parmenides and his followers claimed that change would mean that being emerges from non-being, as if by magic. Aristotle agrees that this sort of absolute coming to be from nothing is impossible, but this isn't the right way of understanding change. Rather, there is change when something that already exists gains a new feature, or loses a feature it already had. Aristotle illustrates with the example of a man becoming musical. Here the man undergoes the change, he is the subject of the change. He first lacks a form when he is not musical, and then gains a form, namely musical. So we have three principles, the subject of change, the absence of form, and form. Just the right number of principles, simple enough, but not too simple. This brings us to another key piece of Aristotelian terminology. You'll be hearing a lot of it from now on, so I hope you like it. Aristotle is going to say that if a man can acquire the form musical, then he is potentially musical. Once he acquires the form and is musical, the man is actually musical. The Greek word for potentiality is dunamis, which is where we get our word dynamic. It means power or capacity. Actuality meanwhile translates entelikia, which roughly means completeness, or alternatively energeia, which is of course where we get our word energy. Aristotle wields this pair of concepts, potentiality and actuality, as a basic weapon in his philosophical arsenal. He finds that perennial, and not-so-perennial, philosophical problems can be answered by distinguishing the potential from the actual. For instance, the distinction allows him to solve Parmenides's challenge against the possibility of change. He can say that change does not require that nothing becomes something or that something becomes nothing. Rather, one thing that is potentially something else becomes actually that other thing. For instance, a cold rock that is potentially hot is heated and becomes actually hot. Simple, right? Now, I know what you're thinking. What does any of this have to do with natural philosophy? That's supposed to be the subject of the physics, right? Indeed, and this is the last etymology I'll trouble you with today, the very word physics comes from the Greek word for nature, namely phusis. Why does Aristotle start out a general investigation of nature by talking about change? The answer is revealed when we get to Book 2 of the physics, where Aristotle attempts to give a definition of nature. According to his definition, nature is a principle of change. So, we won't be able to understand nature or the natural world without understanding change. To see why, consider the difference between a man-made object and a natural object. In honour of those heroes of simplicity, the minimalist artists of the 1960s, let's take as our example of a man-made thing a steel cube. And let's contrast this to, oh, a giraffe. Well, they're clearly very different. About the only thing they have in common is that they are sometimes put on public display and greet their audiences with cool indifference. Steel cubes don't, for instance, eat leaves off trees. In fact, to be honest, they don't do much of anything. Even their shape is imposed upon them from the outside by a minimalist artist, or more likely, the artist's team of assistants. If the cube changes, the change is forced upon it. For instance, it will move when people pick it up and bring it to a museum, perhaps wondering why minimalist artwork has to be maximally heavy. How different is the giraffe, which begins as a fetus in its mother and naturally transforms into a baby giraffe, then moves itself around to get at plants which nourish it, enabling it to grow into an adult? Aristotle, pondering this sort of contrast, decides that the key difference between the man-made and the natural is that the natural things can move and change themselves. Even when they are at rest, without changing or moving, for instance when giraffes go to sleep, it is their nature which explains this and not some force from outside. Aristotle gives us a vivid example to push the point home. If you take a wooden bed and bury it, and it sprouts up as a plant, what you'll see growing is a sapling, not another bed. The nature of the wood or the tree remains even though it is forced into the shape of a bed. Similarly, the minimalist steel cube may have some natural tendencies, as we'll see in a moment Aristotle would think that it does, but it is not natural for it to be cube-shaped or to be in a museum, since these features are imposed from outside. Hence Aristotle understands phusis, or nature, as an internal principle of motion and rest. Aristotle's conception of nature means that, for him, physics is in one way strikingly like modern physics, and in another way strikingly different. It is strikingly similar because he thinks that physics, or natural philosophy, should investigate motion. Motion is of course one of the things we all studied as teenagers in physics class, rolling balls down ramps and learning about acceleration, and so on. Of course, spatial motion is only one kind of change, but it is an important kind, and Aristotle has a tendency to see spatial motion as just one of the kinds of change that natural philosophy can investigate. It also investigates processes like heating and cooling, changing color, and so on. Really, any change that things do naturally will come under the heading of Aristotelian natural philosophy. All this seems reasonably relevant to physics as we conceive it nowadays. Yet Aristotle's physics is also unlike modern physics, because it puts so much emphasis on innate tendencies towards motion and rest. Now that we can build machines that seem able to move themselves, Aristotle's distinction between the artificial and the natural might seem in danger of breaking down. And anyway, do all natural things really have an innate tendency to change? This may seem plausible when it comes to giraffes and the like, since they do have an internal principle of motion. They can stand up and gallop across the savanna in search of succulent acacia leaves. But what about things like rocks and clouds? These are not alive, but surely they are natural. And they don't have an internal principle of motion and rest. Here, Aristotle definitely parts ways from our modern physicist. For him, a rock does indeed have an internal principle of motion. Just drop one to see it in action. First, get your foot out of the way, because that rock is going to go straight down. Whereas we would think of this as the rocks falling due to gravity, Aristotle, who lived about two millennia too early to discuss the fine points of falling bodies with Isaac Newton, thought that the rock falls due to its natural tendency to move down. To explain this, we need to glance at how Aristotle believes the natural world as a whole is structured. I'll be looking more at his cosmology in a future episode, so for now I'll just lay out the basics. For Aristotle, as for Plato before him, the earth is at the center of a spherical universe, and is tiny in comparison to the heavenly bodies that surround it. The realm below the heavens, where we live, is made of the four elements familiar from Empedocles—fire, air, water, and earth. Unlike Plato, Aristotle thinks that the heavens are made not from particularly pure versions of the four elements, but rather from a fifth element, sometimes called aether. The fifth element is not, as a science fiction movie from the 1990s would have you believe, a young lady with bright red hair, but rather a transparent, indestructible material. This material makes up the spheres carrying the visible heavenly bodies in their circular orbits around the earth. As for the four lower elements, they move not in circles, but rather in straight lines—down in the case of earth and water, towards the midpoint of the universe, and up, away from the midpoint in the case of air and fire. This is why rocks and raindrops fall, but bubbles of air move upwards in water, and flames flicker upwards in air. These motions are natural to the four elements. So Aristotle can say that the falling rock does indeed have an internal principle of motion. Due to its earthy nature, it has a tendency to move towards the center of the universe if nothing gets in its way. That minimalist steel cube is much the same. It's made of metal, and metal is obviously an earthy kind of material. As you'll discover if you drop the steel cube while carrying it, it has a very powerful tendency to move downwards. Like I said, mind your foot. Even though the steel cube is man-made, it retains natural tendencies, as do all man-made items, like the bed that sends up shoots when it is buried. Thus motion and change are central notions in Aristotle's physics, indeed definitive of what it is for something to have a nature. This means that Aristotle has good reason to provide a careful analysis of motion and change, which is exactly what he goes on to do in the physics. In fact, part of the physics was called in the later tradition, the books on motion. He relies heavily on his distinction between potentiality and actuality. For Aristotle, any change is going to be a transition from potentiality to actuality. This will be true of both spatial motion and change more generally. If I go from London to Paris, then on the way, I gradually actualize my potentiality for going to Paris. If it is the middle of summer, so that Paris heats up and, as it is wont to do, sizzles, then its potentiality for heat is actualized. A striking feature about change, which becomes obvious once we start thinking in terms of potentiality and actuality, is that changing inherently involves a degree of incompleteness. When I am on the way from London to Paris, I have partially, but not completely, actualized my potential for moving towards Paris. At the very moment where I reach Paris, my potentiality is fully actualized, because I am actually in Paris. As soon as that happens, the change is over, it is complete. Likewise, something that is potentially hot is partially actualized as it is heated and fully actual once it is hot. This is one reason why Aristotle uses that word entelacheia, or completeness, for the form or actuality that is reached in change. Another resonance of entelacheia would be with the related word telos, which we met last time when I explained the term teleology. As we saw, telos means purpose or end, and we can think of the end state of a change as the completion, fulfillment, and purpose of the process of change. Every change is identified by the end state towards which it is directed. Hence, if I am on my way from London to Rome by way of Paris, my journey is incomplete when I reach Paris. I am still in a state of potentiality, whereas my goal is reached if I intended only to get as far as Paris. A side benefit of this analysis is that it allows Aristotle to understand something which has remained central in the study of physics—time. Here, he engages in the simplifying tactic so popular among scientists. He defines time in terms of change, so that he reduces the question of time's reality to the less contentious reality of change. Plato too connects time to motion. He says in the Timaeus that time is produced by the movement of the heavens. It's no surprise that both philosophers see motion and time as having an intimate connection. If you try to envision time passing, you will likely imagine some change or motion, such as a clock's hand sweeping around its face. Aristotle endorses this way of understanding time, and in fact, proposes that time is simply the measure of motion and rest. So, for him, our conception of time is entirely dependent on our awareness of change and potential change. Most obviously, as Plato emphasizes, we measure days via the motion of the sun around the earth. But Aristotle doesn't link time exclusively to heavenly motion. Any motion can be measured by time, for instance when someone moves 100 meters in 10 seconds. As you might recall, this was the basis for Aristotle's response to Zeno's dichotomy paradox, according to which we can never move because we'd first need to move half of the distance. Aristotle answers that it does not take an infinite time to move a finite distance. Zeno is right that the distance is infinitely divisible, but time is infinitely divisible in the same way. Rather than moving through an infinite number of divisions, we move over the whole distance which can be divided up however we like. The time is divided along with the motion, which only stands to reason, since it measures the motion. But no matter how we divide the distance and the time, we will still have a finite total amount of time and of distance. In episode 38, we saw that Aristotle considers particular beings, like Socrates and Hiawatha the giraffe, to be primary substances, the basic building blocks of reality. So it isn't surprising that he makes time ultimately dependent on these substances. Time exists because it is a measure of the changes that primary substances undergo, whether these substances are the massive spheres of the heavens as they rotate, or tiny fleas as they leap. Aristotle has something similar to say about place. Rather than setting forth a concept of absolute space, as Newton will do, Aristotle contends himself with the notion of place as the limit surrounding a particular body. My place is simply the border where the air around me is touching me. Like Aristotelian time, Aristotelian place is entirely dependent on the particular objects that he calls substances. This feature of Aristotle's physics is comforting in a way. He does not postulate metaphysically mysterious things like absolute time and space, but contends himself with the familiar substances that surround us. Time and place emerge only as phenomena dependent on these substances. But this does not mean that his physical theories are just commonsensical, or that they are immune to objections. For instance, could there be an empty place, a void? How would that work, if place is just where a body is surrounded by another body? As for time, we might worry that, if it is a measure of motion, then it will only exist when someone does the measuring. Couldn't time pass without measuring, indeed without there being any motion that could be measured? To look at these and related puzzles, we're going to need more space and time than this episode provided. So, I will be revisiting these issues in an interview with a very special guest, one of the world's leading scholars of Aristotle, Richard Sarabji. Don't miss my interview with him about Aristotle's physics next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Richard Sarabji, who is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King's and an honorary fellow at Wolfson College. We'll be talking about Aristotle's physical theories, in particular his views on time and eternity. Hi Richard, thanks for joining me. Hi Peter. I thought I might start by asking you about time. Aristotle defines time as the measure of motion in respect of before and after. Can you explain what that means exactly? Well, I think that Aristotle prefers to define time as the number of motion in respect of before and after, but by number he means something special. He means what's countable. In full, I think he means that time is the countable, instantaneous stages of a motion. That would be the first part. Number of motion means countable, instantaneous stages of a motion. What about in respect of before and after? Well, he means in respect of what's spatially before and spatially after in the motion. Just two points. He means number, to go into the definition, rather than measure, because measure introduces an extra idea. When you are measuring, you need evenly spaced instantaneous stages. So that's a special case of being countable. But to have time, you have time whenever there are countable instantaneous stages of a motion, regardless of whether they're evenly spaced. So though he does also say that time is the measure of motion, I don't agree with those people who think that that's the actual definition. I think the actual definition is number in the sense of the countable instantaneous stages of a motion. And then you're thinking of these stages as some before and some after. Now, you might think that that was circular because doesn't before and after bring in the idea of time when we're trying to define time. That would be bad. Yes, that would be bad. Now he thinks he gets out of it because he says, look, he means spatially before and spatially after. He's talking about one point being before another point in the motion. So if I get up and walk across the room, he means that the beginning I'm at the left side of the room and then I'm in the middle of the room and I'm at the right side of the room. Exactly, exactly. But there is a snag. I'm not sure that he has avoided giving a circular definition of time, presupposing the idea of time within the definition because you rightly said left and middle. And terms like left and middle clearly don't bring back in time. But why do we call the left hand side the before? It's because it's what the motion reaches in time before it reaches the middle. So I'm afraid that he probably has got himself into a circle even though he's trying to avoid it. Not a stupid circle, but I think he hasn't quite succeeded in avoiding it. Could it somehow depend on the idea that since this motion is a motion from left to right, the very nature or definition of the motion that we're considering brings with it the notion of priority. So if it's a motion from left to right rather than a motion from right to left, then the motion has an inbuilt priority and posteriority which time could then sort of map onto. But is left and right doing any of the work here to explain why we think in terms of priority and posteriority or is it rather that it's because we've always got in our minds that the motion has earlier in time reached the left hand side or reached the right hand side. So that we've really got the time in our minds rather than the leftness or rightness in our minds when we talk about priority. So that it would actually wind up being circular. So that it would wind up being circular. I guess the other thing that's maybe worth saying here is that although he does tend to talk about it in terms of spatial motion, this account is surely supposed to apply to other kinds of changes too, right? So if something becomes cold or changes color. Absolutely. Absolutely. Motion will be very useful in the end because with the stars moving around us, it provides a wonderful celestial clock. But you're quite right, of course, that other changes can be counted. The before and after stages of growing cold could be counted as well. Right. Well, we'll get onto the stars in a moment. But first, I wanted to ask you something else about this definition of time as a number. If time is a number, this is what makes it measurable, presumably. Now, you would think that that would mean that Aristotle could hold the following. If there's a motion and the motion has some kind of number, then there will be time whether or not anyone measures it. And yet he sometimes seems to talk as if the only way there can be time is if there is some soul or mind to do the measuring. Do you think he's really committed to that? So do you think that he believes that there would be no time without someone to do the measuring of time? Unfortunately, he does explicitly say that. And I think that it is a mistake, but not a stupid mistake at all because it's due to a very difficult question, which in various contexts he tackles four times. What he's got in mind is this, that if there were no conscious beings at all in the universe, then there would be no possibility of counting. And from that he infers that there wouldn't be anything countable and so there wouldn't be any time. It's not a stupid idea because the idea would work for certain other concepts. But I think what he's overlooked, and he overlooks it more than once, is the difference between an ability and an opportunity. What I think he should have realized is that if there were no conscious beings in the universe, there would be no opportunity for counting. But there still might be something which had the ability to be counted. Just the way that a visible thing could be visible even if there's no one around to see it. That's true. But take another example where his way of looking at it would I think be comparatively plausible. Supposing we all became immune to mosquito bites. All the animals in the world became immune and none of them got malaria or any other disease from mosquito bites. Now, would mosquito bites still be lethal? You see lethal, lethal is a word. It implies an ability on the part of mosquitoes to kill. But in their case, their ability seems to depend very much on something about their victims, doesn't it? Change the victims, make the victims immune, and they've lost their lethalness. So Aristotle is not making a stupid mistake. It's very difficult to work this out. The difference between lethality and accountability. We don't want to say in this case, oh no, but the mosquitoes are still lethal. It's just that there's no opportunity for them to kill. No, that's the wrong answer. Aristotle's view is absolutely right for a concept like lethal. So it's really quite surprising that it doesn't work so easily for visible, to take for example, the one that concerns us, for countable. With countable, I still insist we want to say not that there wouldn't be anything in a world without consciousness that was countable, merely that there wouldn't be any opportunity of counting. Something else I wanted to ask you about time is that Aristotle has this view about time, which is that time is infinite. And not only does he think that time is infinite, but he thinks that the cosmos has always existed, the universe in which we live, which is a sphere with these astral bodies surrounding the earth, which is in the middle. And he also thinks that the way that this cosmos is constructed is permanent. So he not only thinks that time is infinite, but he thinks that the cosmos is eternal, and has always been pretty much the way it is now. For example, all the species of animals are eternal as well. For example, there have always been mosquitoes, according to him, if there are mosquitoes now. Why does he think this? I mean, it seems like a very bold thing to think, and it's not the sort of thing that he could have just looked around and observed. So what kinds of reasons does he give for believing this? Well, first, just a smaller point for the present purpose. Why does he think that there's always been a universe? Well, he thinks that motion, and therefore matter, and also time, couldn't possibly have had a beginning, because if it suddenly began, you would need to have some triggering motion before the beginning to cause that supposed beginning. Some force would have to come closer, or change in some way, in order to bring about this supposed beginning of motion. So there couldn't be a beginning of motion. Because whatever first motion was supposed to happen would have to be kicked off by a previous motion. Would have to be kicked off by a prior motion. So it wouldn't be first after all. So it wouldn't be first after all, right. But now, your main question was about the animals always having been the same. Now there were, and you've discussed this, I think, at least two people in the early phase of Greek philosophy who did talk about the change that has occurred to species of animals. First, in the 200 years before Athens became the center of philosophy, when we had just individuals doing philosophy all over the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world, first we had Anaximander very early on in the 6th century before our era, saying that humans had originally been inside fish and that other animals had come out of mud. And then more importantly, we had in the 5th century BC, Empedocles saying that there was natural selection, that there had been a certain kind of evolution, and he very clearly expresses the idea of natural selection. Why at least did Aristotle not notice that? Natural selection had been invented already by Empedocles. Well, I guess it can't then be that he assumes that animals are, or that animal species are eternal just because nothing else has occurred to him. The alternative is actually on the table. Exactly. Empedocles' great discovery of the idea of natural selection left out a very important element which Darwin introduced, which meant that Aristotle could easily refute Empedocles' version and he didn't anticipate Darwin's counterargument. Empedocles unfortunately suggested that there were chance mutations, but he made the mistake of not thinking of these as originally isolated and then becoming widespread because they were favorable. He didn't think of that Darwinian idea. He thought that these chance mutations occurred everywhere at the same time, in lots and lots of examples. Now that's not what Darwin suggested. So it's like all the fish would get legs at the same time. Exactly. That would be the chance mutation and then they, right, then natural selection would favor them. Well Aristotle was able to refute Empedocles on that point because Empedocles had got it wrong because Aristotle has a most brilliant analysis of what chance is or he was thinking really of coincidences and he made it part of the definition of coincidence and of chance, that it's something unusual, that it's something that's not normal. So because Empedocles had coupled his wonderful discovery of natural selection with a serious mistake about the nature of chance or coincidence as something that could initially be very widespread Aristotle dismissed him and therefore he didn't see that there was any good reason. He was perfectly well of a reason because he replied to Empedocles, but he didn't see there was a good reason for supposing that the species had changed. Right. Now actually Aristotle thinks something even stronger than this, right, because not only does he think that the cosmos as a whole and the species are eternal, but he also thinks that anything that is eternally present or eternally the case is necessary. So this sort of makes sense, right, because if one plus one equals two and if that's necessarily true then it has to always be true. But you wouldn't think that the reverse would be the case. You wouldn't think that something that's eternal has to be necessary. For example, I don't have a sister, I've never had a sister, it doesn't look like I'm ever going to have a sister, so it's eternally the case that I don't have a sister. But you would have thought it was possible that I could have had a sister, it just didn't work out that way. So I guess I want to say that Aristotle looks right to suppose that something that's necessary would be eternal, but the reverse doesn't seem to be right. So can you explain why he thinks that, why the eternal should be necessary? Yes, he doesn't think that absolutely generally the eternal is necessary because he carefully gives an example of how if my old cloak never gets cut up in the whole of eternal time, it's necessary that it never gets cut up. He denies that. It's only with things which are themselves eternal, unlike my cloak, that if they in the whole of eternal time never have something happen to them, then it's necessary that that thing never happens. It's only with eternal subjects that he applies this principle. And here's where we'd come back to the stars, right? Because the stars are supposed to be eternally revolving around the earth, and therefore their motion is necessary. Exactly. Yes, exactly. That's a very good example. There are temptations to think this way. A lot of people, if you ask them nowadays about the monkeys randomly typewriting on a typewriter, as the example was originally, let's say, their word processing. The common idea is that if you took monkeys, let them be eternally existing monkeys on an eternally existing word processor. If they went on randomly typing for eternal time, they would eventually have to write out the works of Shakespeare. A lot of people think that's true, but it isn't actually true at all. Let's take something which Aristotle thought to be eternal, the physical universe. Now perhaps the physical universe will never contain in itself a golden mountain. Well now, a golden mountain seems to be possible in various ways. For one thing, it seems to be a perfectly coherent, conceivable idea, unless when we understood the physics better, there's some contradiction we haven't noticed. But there doesn't seem to be any conceptual problem with a mountain made of gold. Not so far as I know. Also, as far as I know, it would be physically possible. I don't know anything about the forces connected with the number of protons that you have in a gold atom that would make it impossible to have it mashed up into a mountain. Let's suppose for a moment that it's both conceptually possible and even physically possible. Well, all right. Now on this mistaken view, which I'm afraid Aristotle does accept, given that in his view the universe lost eternally, then since at least in two ways a golden mountain is possible, a golden mountain will have to be actual at some time or other. And yet that looks completely implausible. And so it is mistaken. But once again, the mistakes of a great philosopher are not stupid mistakes. In fact, as I've illustrated with the monkeys on the typewriter, they appeal to people nowadays when they first think about it. Let me ask you one last question, which is also about this idea that the world has always existed and always will exist. That seems to be just a commitment to the idea that the world is in a sense infinite. It's temporally infinite. It's as it were infinite in both directions, the past and the future. Aristotle seems to think that, and yet he thinks something else, which is that the cosmos is finite spatially. He thinks it's a sphere, that the heavens end with an outermost sphere. We live in the center of the sphere on the planet Earth, which for him isn't a planet. It's just this unmoving thing at the center. Why does he think that the cosmos is bounded spatially but not bounded temporally? In other words, why is it finitely small in size but infinitely big in time? Well, about time, we've already talked. The reason why he thinks time couldn't have had a beginning was the point about the supposed beginning would have needed an earlier motion to kick it off. But why does he treat space differently then? Why does he think that space is finite? Well, his answer is not the most obvious one, though it's understandable the most obvious one had been given before his time by Pythagorean. If you think there's an edge of the universe, well, could you stick your hand out when you got there? If you can't, there must be something beyond stopping you, so there's something beyond after all. But if you can, there's empty space beyond. But Aristotle doesn't use that. He knows of it, but he doesn't use it. So just to clarify that for a second, maybe it's worth stressing that not only does Aristotle think that the cosmos is finitely sized, he also thinks there's no empty space around it, there's no void around it. It's just all there is is a finite magnitude. Absolutely. Yes, thank you. Well, he gives a different sort of answer as his main answer. He says that it's necessary that the stars and the matter which carries the stars moves around in a circle. After all, it eternally moves around in a circle around us. Of course, this is long before Copernicus said that it's we who are moving and not the stars which are moving around us. It's we who are spinning on our axis. It was a long time. There was a Greek bit after Aristotle who thought that, and it had been canvassed even before Aristotle's times in one form or another. But he took the normal view of that it is the stars which are circling around us and that they've done so eternally. And we've also seen that he thinks what happens eternally happens of necessity. Now, if they of necessity move and move in a circle, they can't fly off at attention. They can't fly off at attention, and therefore they couldn't ever be received at some point beyond the furthermost star because they couldn't fly out there. Not even little bits of them could fly out there. That would be flying off at attention. They're confined to a circle. And then once again, he makes his mistake about the difference between capacity and opportunity because he says that when we talk of place, and we might put it in terms of space, we mean by that something which can receive matter. But if the furthermost stars are confined to moving in a circle and cannot fly off at attention, then matter cannot fly out in order to get received. So it's almost like saying that there can be no empty space outside the universe because an empty space or place is just something where something could be. And if nothing can be there, then there's no space. That's right. But it's once again not distinguishing between ability and opportunity. There might be something out there, empty space, I would say, which is defined as having the ability to receive matter. All that follows from the fact that matter can't fly off at attention and get received beyond the furthermost star is that there'll never be an opportunity for matter to be received out there. But that doesn't stop there being something out there which has the ability to receive matter. And so I'm afraid, not for stupid reasons, but once again his pioneering philosophy has got it wrong. Well unfortunately, unlike Aristotle's Cosmos, this podcast is finite at the beginning and end and we've now reached the end. So I'd like to thank you, Richard, very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for asking me, Peter. And I'll invite the listeners to join me again next week for more on Aristotle on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Soul Power, Aristotle's De Anima. Are you comfortable on that sofa? I want you to relax. This is a safe space. Nothing that's said within these walls will leave the room. You aren't being judged. I'm here to help. So shall we start at the beginning? Tell me a little bit about your mother. Yes, today on the History of Philosophy, we're doing psychology. But actually, don't start to unburden yourself, especially if you're listening to this while on public transport. Because we're actually going to be doing Aristotelian psychology, which has less to do with uncovering your true character and the traumatic experiences of your childhood, and more to do with uncovering the true nature and experiences of the soul. This is as it should be. As you won't be surprised to learn, the word psychology comes from ancient Greek. The Greek word συέη means soul, so psychology is simply the study of the soul. And the very first work devoted to psychology is of course Aristotle's On the Soul, commonly known by its Latin title De Anima. With all due respect to James Brown, it is really Aristotle who deserves the title Godfather of Soul. Now I know what you're thinking. Aristotle's De Anima, the first work on the soul? What about Plato? He wrote the Phaedo, after all, which not only depicts the last moments of Socrates's life, but also proves the soul's immortality, not just once, but numerous times. Surely that counts as an earlier work on psychology? Well, yes, what I mean is not that the De Anima is the first work to focus on the soul, but that it is the first work to attempt a general, systematic discussion of soul. As we saw when we looked at the Phaedo, Plato simply assumes the distinction between soul and body, and he examines the capacities and properties of the human soul only in passing, since the main topic of the dialogue is to prove the soul's immortality. By contrast, Aristotle mentions the soul's immortality only in passing, but he discusses just about every other possible question regarding the soul, starting with the question of just what we mean by tsuke, or soul. It's worth dwelling on this question. As in the physics, the work we looked at over the last few episodes, Aristotle begins his discussion here in the De Anima by surveying previous views on the topic at hand. And it's clear that in this case, one of his objectives is to determine just what topic is at hand. He looks to his predecessors to formulate a kind of checklist of questions that a theory of soul should answer. The pre-Aristotelians, including Plato, generally presume that soul is somehow distinct from body, so this is one question, how does soul relate to body? Then, there is the question of why we are positing a soul in the first place. What is the soul supposed to do? What does it even mean to say that something has a soul? Perhaps most obviously, soul is meant to explain life. Aristotle is thus comfortable ascribing soul to anything that is alive, which means that for him, not only humans, but also animals, and even plants, have souls. This is going to be important for Aristotle, because if there are plant souls, animal souls, and human souls, then souls can be very different from one another. My soul is going to have something in common with the soul of a sunflower, because both are souls, but equally, my soul and the sunflower's soul will be different. They will differ in terms of what abilities they confer on the living being. Sunflowers don't do much. They take in nutrition, they turn towards the sun, they grow, and with all due respect to sunflowers, that pretty much exhausts their repertoire. I, by contrast, can do all these things. If you're ever in London and the weather is unusually good, you can swing by and watch me turn towards the sun. I'm really good at it. But I can do many other things in addition, such as see, talk, move from place to place, and on good days, think about Aristotle. Considering his predecessors, Aristotle finds that soul has indeed been associated with just this sort of range of capacities. In particular, he finds that soul is associated with motion and with perception. He takes both of these in a rather broad sense. When the sunflower takes in nutrition, that counts as motion. This is the way the sunflower displays its internal principle of change, which, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, is its nature. But plants do not perceive, at least according to Aristotle. For that, we need to rise a level up the food chain to animals, who are capable not only of sense perception, but also of motion from one place to another. These are linked, Aristotle believes, because the animal needs perception to find its food, and needs the capacity for motion to go after that food. Again, we see his commitment to the idea that nature has to do with internal principles of change, and of course also his commitment to teleology, the idea that everything that is natural to a plant or an animal will serve the purpose of its flourishing. If it is natural to sunflowers to turn towards the sun, and for giraffes to trot towards acacia trees, this must be because these behaviours contribute to their well-being. Another thing Aristotle learns from his survey of previous views is that there are two extremes to be avoided in thinking about how soul relates to the body. At one extreme are strongly dualist theories of soul. According to these theories, the soul is an entirely different entity from the body. The two just happen to co-exist, as it were. This would apply to Plato's immaterialist theory of soul, but also materialist views like those espoused by the atomists, where soul is made up of particularly round, fast-moving atoms located within the atomic compound that is the animal. It is, as it were, a body within the body. The problem with these dualist views is that they dissolve the unity of the living being, making it hard to see why the soul's relation to body is intimate, rather than casual. As Aristotle says when criticizing the atomist theory, why can't the soul just flow out of the body and wander away? At the other extreme, there is the view that soul is nothing more than a certain harmony or arrangement of the body. This idea is criticized also in Plato's Phaedo, and Aristotle agrees with the criticisms. The soul must be able to exert causal influence on the body, for instance by initiating motion. It's hard to see how this could happen if the soul were a harmony any more than the tuning of the strings on a guitar can make the guitar play by itself. This leaves Aristotle right where he likes to be, occupying the middle ground. On his view, the soul will not be just another body, as the atomists proposed, but neither it will be some separate entity with a merely accidental connection to the body as Plato seems to hold in the Phaedo. To reach a compromised position, Aristotle reaches for his favorite distinction between actuality and potentiality. As we saw in a previous episode, he uses this distinction to account for change and motion. When James Brown slides across the stage doing his signature dance move, he actualizes his potentiality for dancing. But this distinction isn't yet refined enough to provide the basis for Aristotle's psychology. We need to make a further distinction between two kinds of potentiality. On the one hand, there is the kind of potentiality exercised when James Brown suddenly starts to dance. On the other hand, there is the kind of potentiality he possessed as a child, before he even knew how to dance. As a child, what James Brown had was the ability to acquire an ability, or, to put it in Aristotle's terms, the potentiality for acquiring a potentiality. Aristotle thus distinguishes between what he calls first potentiality and what he calls second potentiality. First potentiality is the ability to gain an ability, second potentiality is the ability you already have. The insight here is that second potentiality is itself a kind of actuality, even though it isn't necessarily active at any given moment. When James Brown is backstage getting ready for the show, he's actually able to dance, but he isn't actually dancing. So we can also call second potentiality the actual ability, first actuality, to contrast it to the second or full actuality that occurs when we actually exercise our abilities. Aristotle gives a similar example, which suffers from its failure to involve James Brown, but makes the same point. You have the child who can learn mathematics, who is in first potentiality, the mathematician who is not doing mathematics, for instance because he is asleep, and this is second potentiality, which is the same thing as first actuality, and then there is the mathematician actually doing mathematics. This is second actuality, as actual as it gets. You may already be able to guess what all this has to do with the soul. We already saw that plants, animals, and humans all have souls, but of different kinds. The difference in kind is bound up with a difference in abilities. Plant souls enable plants to engage in nutrition and reproduction, but nothing else. Animal souls bestow upon their possessors the power to perceive and to move around, and human souls bring the capacity for thought. In his survey of previous views on the soul, Aristotle has already given us to understand that soul is defined in terms of such capacities. That was in Book I of the Deianima, and it has carefully prepared the way for his definition of soul in Book II. The soul, he says, is the first actuality of a living body. It is first actuality, or if you prefer, second potentiality, because having a soul is simply having a range of actual capacities or abilities. Which abilities you get depends on which kind of soul you have. If you are a sunflower, your soul will help you to live and produce more sunflowers. But if you are James Brown, you have the most complex and multifaceted kind of soul there is. You can live, perceive, think, and of course, dance. No wonder they called him Soul Brother Number One. Let's pause for a moment to compare Aristotle's idea here to the ideas put forward by contemporary philosophers of mind. Philosophy of mind is devoted in part to discussing the question of how mental phenomena relate to physical phenomena. Like Aristotle, most contemporary philosophers are suspicious of extreme answers to this question. Only a few would say that we could entirely abolish talk of the mental, so that proper science would need no concepts of desires, thoughts, or intentions. Equally, very few want to say with Plato and Descartes that the mind is a separate substance which is only casually related to the body. So today's philosophers of mind tend to occupy the middle ground, along with Aristotle. And there are almost as many ways of doing that as there are philosophers of mind. However, we should note a major difference between these philosophers and Aristotle, which is easy to overlook. Aristotle's theory is not in fact a theory of mind, it is a theory of soul. For him, the soul explains mental events like seeing, desiring, and thinking, but it also explains functions like digestion, reproduction, and growth. It is obvious to him that plants have souls, whereas it is equally obvious to us that plants do not have minds. In short, what Aristotle talks about in the Deonema is a principle of life, not a principle of mental life, which we usually call consciousness. This complicates any attempt to situate him relative to the contemporary debate. Having defined soul as a kind of actual capacity or set of capacities, it is clear what Aristotle needs to do next. He needs to examine the various kinds of psychological capacities in turn, giving a philosophical account of them in ascending order of nobility. This is exactly what he does, more or less covering nutrition and sense perception in the rest of Book II, and the higher cognitive powers of thinking and imagination in Book III. The remarks about thinking are among the most influential, but also controversial, passages Aristotle wrote, and I am going to return to them in a future episode. For now, I want to concentrate on nutrition and sense perception. In both cases, Aristotle refers us back to another issue he has covered in the survey of his predecessors. There, he told us that there was a dispute among the pre-Socratic thinkers, regarding the question of how one thing can affect another thing. Some philosophers, Aristotle says, believed that in order for causal interaction to occur between two things, they must be dissimilar. For instance, if something cold is going to be acted on so that it changes, it will need to be acted on by something hot. But other thinkers insisted that two things must share some nature if they are to interact. For instance, Empedocles thought that the sense organs need to be made of all four elements, so that they can sense all four elements. Thus, we have a classic dialectical opposition, the sort of opposition Aristotle delights in dissolving by showing that there is, as Tony Blair argued, a third way. In this case, the third way is provided by the increasingly familiar contrast between potentiality and actuality. Thanks to Aristotle, we know that when one thing heats another, this can occur because something potentially hot encounters something else that is actually hot. For instance, a cold rock is brought near to a fire. The actually hot fire actualizes the potential heat of the rock. This solves the presocratic puzzle, because the rock is in a way like the fire and in a way unlike it. It is like the fire because it is hot in a way, that is, potentially hot, and unlike the fire because it is not hot in another way, that is, it is actually cold. The point seems simple, but, unlike the third way of Tony Blair, pays massive dividends, once we get to the topics of nutrition and sensation. With regard to nutrition, Aristotle can explain that food nourishes us because it is potentially the sort of stuff our bodies are made of. You may remember that Anaxagoras thought there must be flesh and bone in cheese, because when we eat it, our flesh and bone are restored and even increased. As usual, Aristotle can take the slightly patronizing attitude that this theory is a good try, but not quite right. Instead, what we should say is that there is no flesh and bone actually in the cheese, but the cheese is potentially flesh and bone. And anything that is alive, whether plant, animal, or human, will have a nutritive power, which simply is the power to actualize that potentiality. Just as the fire heats the rock, so the cheese-eating animal turns the cheese into flesh and restores itself. The same kind of story can be told regarding sense perception. Consider what happens when you see. When you are not seeing, like if you're asleep or your eyes are closed, you are of course potentially seeing. You just need to wake up to open your eyes, and if those eyes are in good working order, you'll see whatever is in front of you. Again, you might be able to guess what Aristotle will say. Just as the actually hot fire actualizes the potentially hot rock, so the actual colors and shapes of the objects in front of your eyes will actualize the potentiality of your vision. Aristotle takes this rather literally. He says that if you see, for instance, a red apple, your vision goes from being potentially red to being actually red. The redness of the apple simply activates the potential redness of sight, and when that happens you see red. I just said that Aristotle takes this rather literally, but there is in fact a debate about just how literally. Some scholars, most prominently my guest from last week, Richard Sarabji, have proposed that the physical organ, the eye itself, literally turns red. This is encouraged by the fact that Aristotle says that the fluid in the eye must be in itself colorless, since otherwise it would not be able to take on all the colors that we see. Other interpreters, sometimes called spiritualists, think that the eye or vision becomes red when we see red, but not in a literal physical sense. Rather, for vision to become red is simply for us to have the experience of seeing red. This all has interesting consequences for lining up Aristotle with contemporary philosophy of mind, since on Sarabji's reading the eyes turning red would be identical with seeing red. That is, my eye fluid turned red, and I saw red, would be two different descriptions of the same event. This sort of account is prominent among philosophers of mind nowadays. But however literally we take Aristotle's theory, it is clear that sensation is, for him, nothing but the actualization of a capacity on the part of the animal, or human, that engages in perception. If we go back to Aristotle's definition of soul, this makes perfect sense. What you get by having a soul is, as we said, a whole range of capacities which will be actualized or not depending on your circumstances. Some functions will be actual pretty much all the time, for instance the power to breathe and produce the warmth needed to keep you at body temperature. These things go on even while you sleep. But most other functions shut down while you sleep. In terms of actual activity, sleeping people who aren't dreaming are much like plants. But even sleeping people have the capacity to do a wide range of things, from moving, to seeing and hearing, to thinking. Just shake them so they wake up, and they will manifest some or all of these capacities almost immediately, for instance the capacity to be annoyed that one has just been woken up for no good reason. Part of what Aristotle's de onima has done, then, is to sketch out the principles for a much larger project, which we could call biology. Aristotelian biology would study all living organisms, whether plant, animal, or human. In this project, Aristotle's ideas about nature and psychology would come together. He would explore in detail his teleological idea that all natural beings have purposes which they naturally pursue, and his idea that each living thing has a different kind of soul, which brings with it a specific range of capacities. After all, it isn't only the case that plants, animals, and humans have different capacities, so do different kinds of plants, like sunflowers as opposed to Venus flytraps, and different animals, like giraffes as opposed to gorillas. From this point of view, the de onima can be seen as simply the first step in the direction of a systematic biology in which the full range of living organisms would be explored and explained on Aristotelian principles. Did Aristotle undertake such a project? You bet your life he did, as we'll see next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Classified Information, Aristotle's Biology. A short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines a Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. This fictional work suggests a division of animals into fourteen kinds, namely, those that belong to the emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, and those that from a long way off look like flies. I don't know if this joke is partially meant to be at Aristotle's expense, but if not, it could have been. Aristotle is the father of animal classification. When we talk about the animal kingdoms being divided by genus and species, we are not only engaging in an Aristotelian project, but using Aristotelian terminology to pursue that project. The word genus comes from the Greek genos, Aristotle's name for a broad type within which a division is made. Animals were not the only thing Aristotle classified. As I mentioned in a previous episode, he and his students collected and categorized political constitutions of city-states. Even when he presents presocratic views, Aristotle shows his classifying instincts. You might remember how, in the physics, he divides up his predecessors in terms of how many principles they postulate to explain nature. He learned the practice of division from his master Plato. In two dialogues, The Sophist and Statesman, Plato has his characters try to reach definitions by dividing larger kinds into smaller kinds. It is emphasized that the divisions need to be made at the natural joints, rather than chopping at random like a bad butcher. This is the idea Borges is playing with. His imaginary celestial emporium reminds us just how many ways there are of dividing things up, and so invites us to ask whether classification is always arbitrary. But if you do think that there is a right way to divide, as Plato and Aristotle did, then a philosophical task awaits. We can understand the world by classifying the things in that world. We will sort out the frogs from the toads, and also the bullfrogs from the tree frogs. If we do the dividing right, and do it completely, we will get a comprehensive and accurate inventory of things in the world. Furthermore, we will understand how those things relate to one another. We will see that bullfrogs are closely related to tree frogs, since both are frogs, that frogs in general are related to salamanders, since both are amphibians, and that frogs are loosely related to giraffes, since both are animals. Aristotle already outlines a project of this kind in his logical works, suggesting that a definition will set out a general kind, a genus, like animal, and then divide off a more specific kind or species, like man, by saying what makes this type of animal special. Man will be the kind of animal that is rational, for instance. But there is more to philosophical understanding than mere classification. For Aristotle, as for Plato, true understanding or knowledge will require giving a causal account. In the animal world, the relevant causes will typically be final causes, that is, the purposes of things. For instance, we may distinguish between two species of bird on the basis of the shape of their beaks. This isn't yet an explanation, each type of bird has been isolated, but we don't yet have understanding. We understand when we come to see that, for instance, some beaks are designed to strain food out of pond water, while others are designed to pluck insects out of trees. This will be at least part of what it is to understand the difference between a duck and a woodpecker. A more detailed analysis might help explain the difference between different types of duck or different types of woodpecker. Again, understanding would come when we see what purposes the distinguishing features would serve. Aristotle's motto here is, nature does nothing in vain. Whatever makes each species special must serve a purpose, and help the members of that species to flourish. This whole train of thought is reflected in Aristotle's writings about animals, his zoological works. Along with a few smaller treatises, the main three texts are the history of animals, the parts of animals, and the generation of animals. These are sizable treatises. Altogether, zoology takes up more than a quarter of Aristotle's extant writings. The history of animals, in particular, is a massive, sprawling survey of information. In the title, the word history reflects the Greek historia, which just means an account laying out the results of an inquiry. Though Aristotle has included a good deal of hearsay, some of which he would have done better to ignore, the inquiry was undertaken largely by himself. After Plato's death and his departure from the academy, but before he founded his own school, the Lyceum, Aristotle travelled in the eastern Mediterranean. He had a particularly productive time on the island of Lesbos, where he undertook extensive scientific investigations. He studied marine animals with particular intensity and made some genuinely impressive discoveries. For instance, he was the first to note that whales and dolphins are not kinds of fish. Aristotle didn't just look at animals, though. He actually dissected them. He is able to talk in detail about the internal organs of animals, comparing different species, and talking about the variation in their reproductive systems, digestive organs, and so on. He urges us not to spurn the task of close observation and dissection, but to get our hands dirty. This, just as much as the study of the divine, heavenly bodies, provides an insight into the astonishingly well-designed world around us. Aristotle, in fact, says that astronomy and biology provide equal pleasure. The stars are nobler than terrestrial animals, but we have little access to them, something he compares to catching only a glimpse of one's beloved. The history of animals, all ten books of it, can seem a barely organized miscellany of facts. In a single chapter, it tells us that tortoises eat marjoram to avoid being poisoned after eating vipers, speaks of a man who could predict the weather by closely observing hedgehogs, and mentions that the marten likes honey and has genital organs that can be turned into a powder for medicine. One hopes the marten is given some honey first in compensation. But a more sensitive reading, one Aristotle suggests himself, would see the history of animals as a preparatory work for the parts of animals. On this reading, the history presents the observations that allow us to divide up the animal world into its types. Aristotle's fascination with certain details betrays this. By picking out the distinctive features of say the marten or tortoise, Aristotle prepares the way for scientific understanding. The parts of animals then supplies that understanding, by explaining the purposes of these distinctive features which serve to distinguish one species from another. Since nature does nothing in vain, any feature natural to a species will contribute to the proper functioning of the animals in that species. The eating of the marjoram, the shape of the birds' beaks, and so on, will all be hypothetically necessary, as Aristotle puts it. If the tortoise is to avoid being poisoned, it must eat marjoram. If the duck is to strain food from pond water, it needs a mouth that acts like a sieve, and so on. Aristotle's careful dissection of animals and their parts was motivated by this quest to understand these functions, like someone taking apart a car and trying to decide what each part is designed to do. Aristotle also records observations about plants, which seem to have been a specialty of his associate Theophrastus, who sojourned with him in Lesbos and wrote a work dedicated to plants. But Aristotle had a particular interest in animals. And no wonder. Animals are the most highly functional entities in Aristotle's functional, and hierarchical, world. At the bottom of his hierarchy are the familiar four elements, air, earth, fire, and water. These can all transform into one another cyclically, as Aristotle argues in another work called On Generation and Corruption. Here he's disagreeing with Plato, who believed that earth could not become any of the other elements. When the elements combine, they form basic constituents which are the same through and through, things like blood and bodily humours. These then combine again to form the more complicated parts of animals. It is really here that biological purposiveness enters into the equation. An organ like a liver or hand can only be understood within the context of the animal's functioning. As Aristotle says, an eye removed from its socket is an eye in name only. Of course, for all his careful observation, Aristotle did not always arrive at the right answers. He got things badly wrong when it came to the major organs of the body. For him, one of the most important principles in biology is what he calls vital heat. This isn't so crazy. After all, living animals tend to be warm and to cool down fast when they die. Relying on this idea, Aristotle believed that the heart's function was to spread vital heat through the body, and to serve as the centre of motion and sensation. For him, the brain was little more than a refrigeration device for regulating vital heat, and breathing in air plays the same kind of role, to balance out the heat generated in the heart. You might believe that you can tell you are thinking with your brain, and that it is just obvious that your thoughts and sensory experiences are, as it were, happening in your head, but this is clearly not true. Aristotle, and the Stoics after him, thought that the heart was the controlling organ of the body, the seat of motion and sensation. As for thinking, Aristotle denied that this is done with any bodily organ at all, as we'll discuss in a later episode. Just as vital to Aristotle's biology is the question of how new animals are formed. Here too, he was a keen observer, even keeping a careful record of the development of chicks by looking inside eggs at different stages of incubation. If you're curious about which came first, the chicken or the egg, I direct you to History of Animals Book 6 Chapter 3. The preservation of species is of tremendous importance for Aristotle, because he believes that when we are dividing up animals and understanding their functions, we are learning about eternal, necessary features of the world. The celestial bodies rotate around the earth eternally, but chickens, tortoises, and humans cannot live forever, as the celestial bodies do. They are not made of the indestructible fifth element that exists out there in the heavens. So the only way that species can be eternal is through reproduction. Thanks to reproduction and the permanence of species it makes possible, zoology is a fit subject for the Aristotelian scientist, who is interested only in necessary and eternal truths. This brings us to the third major zoological work, the generation of animals. As in parts of animals, Aristotle here deals with purposiveness. As it develops, a chick embryo is relentlessly pursuing its final cause, which is to be born as a chick which can grow into a mature chicken. But to explain the mechanics of reproduction, Aristotle has recourse to two other kinds of cause, form and matter. His basic idea is that the female human or animal provides the material for the fetus, namely menstrual fluid, while the male provides form through his seed. The seed contains certain motions which transmit the form to the blood and set up a chain of developments in the matter that lead to the formation of a fetus. Again, heat is the chief physical mechanism here. Human seed causes the matter to be heated in just the right way that the blood is concocted into a human embryo, and not the embryo of say, a giraffe. Mechanics aside, it's worth noticing how Aristotle here diverges from Plato. Forget the single transcendent form of man, a man is caused by nothing more or less exalted than another man, namely his father, in cooperation with the cosmos which provides the context in which nature unfolds. As Aristotle famously puts it, man is generated by man and the sun. Now I know what you're thinking. Things cannot be quite this simple. After all, humans resemble their parents and grandparents more than they resemble other members of the species. So the father must transmit more than the basic form of human or horse, he must also transmit say, the property of having a snub or aquiline nose. Furthermore, people also resemble their mothers. So the mother cannot, after all, be providing just a substrate of matter, with the male seed doing all of the work of transmitting form. Realizing this, Aristotle not only allows that the motions in the father's seed bring along the father's idiosyncratic features, but also admits that there must already be highly specific potentialities in the woman's menstrual fluid. These can emerge as the embryo is formed, so that you might inherit your mother's brown eyes despite having a blue-eyed father. Finally, Aristotle seems to allow for new features to arise in the child, to explain features that are apparently possessed by none of the child's immediate forebears. This raises the intriguing possibility that Aristotle could have allowed for the possibility of something like evolution. After all, if you can be blue-eyed when your parents have brown eyes, then why can't species themselves change from generation to generation? Make enough incremental changes across the generations, and you can turn apes into humans, as Darwin taught us. Aristotle clearly rejects this, but why? I suspect that Aristotle simply didn't consider it physically possible within the mechanics of reproduction for variations to arise that would lead to an actual change in species. To explain why, he might point to the cosmic cycle itself. If events here in our lower world are causally connected with the regular, eternal motions of the heavens, then it is no surprise that the events are always more or less the same. This in broad outline is Aristotle's account of how species are propagated. But there's a rather large exception we still haven't considered. Aristotle believed that some animals are generated without parents, that is, spontaneously generated. Usually, this is explained by referring to the appearance of maggots and worms in rotting flesh. Failing to notice any insects laying eggs in the flesh, Aristotle and others leapt to the conclusion that such creatures can generate spontaneously. That is part of the story, but Aristotle was also drawing an inference from his dissection work. He looked at a variety of species without finding any reproductive organs, and inferred that these species must arise spontaneously. This is the sort of mistake that can lead modern readers to regard Aristotle with amused condescension. But in a way, I think we should congratulate him on his intellectual honesty. Within his system, spontaneous generation is clearly a problem. It is a major exception to his theory that form is passed on to offspring by parents. So it's to his credit that he gave serious thought to an apparently unavoidable fact of observation, especially given the lowliness of many apparent products of spontaneous generation. Aristotle wasn't going to let a nice theory, or the fact that maggots are disgusting, distract him from his scientific integrity. Briefly, his account of spontaneous generation is that some external heat source, like the sun, does the work of setting off motions in suitably prepared matter, the work that would normally be done by generative seed. This happens when a bubble of warm liquid is somehow enclosed so that vital heat cannot escape, and an animal is more or less randomly formed. It's worth emphasizing that many types of animals are only generated in this fashion. This is surprising, given Aristotle's insistence against Empedocles in the physics, that natural things cannot be the result of chance and spontaneity, as we saw a few episodes back. In light of this, how can Aristotle say that there are eternal species that are propagated by chance? The solution, perhaps, is to say that the particular time and place of spontaneous generation is a matter of chance. This is a striking difference from normal generation, where animals and humans very intentionally set about the process of reproduction, perhaps after dinner and a movie. In the case of a spontaneously generated worm, it just so happens that the right kind of bubble is heated in the right way. But in another sense, this is anything but random. Whenever such a bubble is so heated, the result will be a worm, and it's entirely predictable that this will happen on a regular basis, even if we cannot predict where or when. Finally, we should admit a similar tension that arises frequently for Aristotle. He wants to say that nature does nothing in vain, that the world around us is full of form and purpose, yet we frequently see nature fail. Human and animal babies are born with deformities. Human whole species sometimes seem defective, as for instance, moles, which have underdeveloped eyes below their skin, a fact Aristotle observes and discusses with some interest. In general, Aristotle is not too concerned when nature falls short. Nature does nothing in vain, but it also acts only for the most part, and the fact that animals and plants are made of matter means that form can always be thwarted. We care more, of course, when humans are defective. On this point, Aristotle seems to depart from his usual optimism. He thinks the human race is in fact made up largely of defective types, including women and so-called natural slaves, but also plenty of free male citizens who are vicious when they should be virtuous, boorish when they should be pursuing the pleasures of knowledge. Aristotle needs to account for this, and tell us how to make sure we fall into the relatively small class of those humans who do fulfill their purpose. It is this task that he takes up in what may be his most enduring work, the Nicomachean Ethics, and in its sequel, The Politics. These are the texts we will be looking at in the next episodes of the podcast. But podcasts are also occasionally short of perfect, and the series is unfortunately now going to illustrate that point by going on hiatus for a few weeks. For the month of August I'm going to take a break so I can write more episodes, gearing up for the next year, which will finish off Aristotle, and then cover Hellenistic philosophy and one of my main areas of interest, Neoplatonism. I hope this break will provide an opportunity for listeners to catch up on episodes they haven't heard yet. Before I go, I'd like to thank my production assistant Rory O'Connell, who has done a wonderful job this year editing the episodes. I'm also grateful for audio advice from Andreas Lahmer and to Stefan Hagel for permission to use the music which begins and ends each podcast. Above all, of course, I'm grateful to you for listening, and I hope you'll make the right choice and listen again when I return on September 5th with Aristotle's Ethics, here on The History of Philosophy, with a break during August, but without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Goldilocks Theory, Aristotle's Ethics. There's this new branch of social science which calls itself happiness studies. I read about it in a magazine article, which related some of the surprising findings made in this field. For instance, it turns out that people who win the lottery are no happier than people who don't, and that, while being poor doesn't make you unhappy, living amongst people who are richer than you does make you unhappy. Now I know what you're thinking. How do they figure out how happy these people are? Well, it's simple. They ask. For instance, they've asked lottery winners and other people to say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy they are, and discover that the average answers are about the same. Lessons from this research are even being applied to government policy. For instance, it's useful to know, if you are running a society, that income equality may make people happier than absolute increases in wealth. Whenever I read something along these lines, I like to ask myself, what would Aristotle make of this? Would he endorse this new and exciting field of happiness studies? I guess Aristotle would say the same thing he always says, yes and no. He would certainly agree that happiness is worth studying, and even that it is of paramount importance, and the right goal to have in mind when designing a society. But he would also have a reservation, I think. He would raise a quizzical eyebrow at the suggestion that we can find out how happy people are just by asking them. Not only are people poor judges about what will make them happy, as the happiness scientists have shown by studying lottery winners, people are even poor judges about whether they are already happy, or so Aristotle thinks. Here then we have a subject of paramount importance, on which people tend to get badly confused. Looks like a job for a philosopher. Aristotle takes up the challenge in one of his best known works, the Nicomachean Ethics. This is actually one of three works he wrote on ethics, along with the Eudemian Ethics and another, rarely studied text called the Magna Moralia. The Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics share a large section in common, and there is a debate about how they relate to one another, which was written first, and so on. I'll focus on the Nicomachean Ethics, named after Aristotle's son Nicomachus, since that's by far the most commonly studied Aristotelian ethical treatise. It is quite a long work and takes in not only ethical virtue, but also the idea of voluntary action, theoretical virtue, friendship, pleasure, and the superiority of the philosophical life. As with Plato's Republic, I will be devoting two episodes to it, without even scratching the surface. As always, you should take this podcast as an invitation to go read the text for yourself, or to re-read it if you've already had the pleasure. Aristotle begins the Ethics with the surprising announcement that we are here embarking on what he calls political philosophy. The Ethics is thus explicitly linked to another work called the Politics, which I'll reach in a few episodes. His idea is that the political theorist's aim is to figure out what will make the whole community happy. To do that, we need first to understand the happiness of individual people. The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia, which already gives us a clue as to why Aristotle believes that people can be wrong about how happy they are. The word eudaimonia relates to the word daimon, a kind of spirit or minor divinity, like the guardian spirit that whispered in Socrates' ear whenever he was about to do something wrong. For this reason, eudaimonia has the connotation of blessedness, rather than mere cheerfulness. Thus for Aristotle, happiness consists in living a life that is blessed, a life that right-thinking people would admire and wish to lead themselves. If someone thinks they are happy simply because they are rich or famous, then they are wrong. This isn't the sort of life one should rightly admire. But why not? Couldn't we just say, to each his own, letting everyone decide how happy they are on a scale of 1-10? Aristotle thinks not, because there are good reasons to dismiss certain lifestyles as falling short of happiness. Take the goals I just mentioned, being rich and being famous. If you think wealth will make you happy, Aristotle cautions, you're wrong. After all, when you pursue wealth, what you really want is not wealth, it's what wealth can buy. As Socrates already pointed out, wealth is no good to you without an understanding of what to do with it. Even without the benefit of empirical happiness studies, Aristotle knew that a lottery win will not make you happy all by itself. To think that it could is a crass conceptual error, confusing the end we strive for with a means towards that end. Happiness, by contrast, could never be the means to anything. As Aristotle points out, it is the most final end we have. There is no further purpose for which we wish to be happy. Aristotle levels a similar criticism at the life of fame, or, to put it in a more Greek way, a life of honour. Many Greeks would probably have endorsed this as the most choice-worthy life, a life centred around political success, military conquest, and lasting reputation. Aristotle's own student, Alexander the Great, was perhaps the happiest person in the ancient world, if happiness and honour are the same thing. And like Plato, who deals with this topic extensively in the Republic, Aristotle is well aware of the allure of honour among his readers. But he sets it alongside wealth as a misguided goal to pursue, because honour as such is not good enough. We care why we are honoured. If a bunch of low-life criminals admire me for my successful thievery, that is no reason to think that I am really leading a good life. Nor would we wish to be honoured falsely for things we didn't actually do. So if I am seeking honour, what I must really be seeking is some kind of life that would be worth honouring. In that case, the honour seems to be secondary. What I am really after is the good life that rightfully earns me the admiration of others. Again, I think we have to admire Aristotle. His argument strikes me as persuasive, and seems to get to the heart of, for instance, the problem with contemporary celebrity culture. There is indeed something empty and absurd about being famous just for being famous. But a big question is left hanging. If what I want is a life that would rightly be honoured, what would such a life look like? Aristotle, adopting an argument found towards the beginning of Plato's Republic, suggests that we can discover the answer if we think about what human beings are for. What is our purpose? What are we, as it were, designed to do? If we do have some purpose, then surely the good life will be the life in which that purpose is fulfilled to the greatest extent possible. Just as being a good flute player will consist in playing the flute well, so being a good human will consist in doing whatever humans are supposed to do, and performing that function well. But hang on a second. Why should we think that humans in general have a purpose or function? Aristotle answers that question with a question of his own. How could it be that the parts of my body, like my eyes, have a function, without my having a function? This would be as if my car were made of functional parts, and yet had no overall purpose. Aristotle's train of thought here runs along tracks laid in his philosophy of nature. Remember that for Aristotle, all animals, plants, even simple things like the four elements, are pursuing some kind of goal. The goal of a plant is to grow to maturity and reproduce. The goal of a stone is to move downwards towards the center of the universe. If Aristotle believes that even these things have purposes, it's no surprise that he should think humans do too. This is not to say that Aristotle actually invokes any heavy-duty theory of nature or metaphysical considerations here in the ethics, but the considerations would be available if we pressed him on the point. So for the sake of argument, let's grant him that humans do have a purpose. How then can we tell what the purpose of humans will be? It can't be merely being alive or having sensation, because these things are shared in common with plants and animals. If there is a human function, it must be characteristic of humans, it must be the performance of the activity that belongs to us alone. What could this be? There's only one possible answer, it must be the use of reason, for it is rationality that distinguishes us from plants and animals. This is Aristotle's so-called function argument, which provides the foundation for the rest of his ethics. Given its importance, we're likely to feel that he should be working harder to convince us. Aristotle seems to think we'll find it immediately plausible, not only that humans do have a function, but also that our function will reside in whichever activity is unique to us. The upshot is that we cannot disentangle the question of what we humans are from the question of what we ought to be. As I've said, this is unsurprising, given Aristotle's conviction that every natural thing has a purpose, but it means that he is starting from a very different place than most modern ethicists. Perhaps the most notorious problem in ethics nowadays is the so-called is-ought gap, pointed out by David Hume. The problem is that we have, on the one hand, a factual description of the world and the things in it, and on the other hand, a set of notions about right and wrong. A description about how things are does not by itself give us an account of how things ought to be. For instance, we can observe that some actions cause pain and suffering, without thereby showing that those actions are wrong. To do that, we'd need to explain why pain and suffering are bad, why they ought not to happen. And yet, it looks like whatever we can observe about the world just gives us factual description, so where do we get morality from? It's an intractable enough problem that it has led some to ethical skepticism, but for Aristotle, it's a problem that never arises. For him, there is no way to describe the way things are without using concepts like purpose and function. These concepts are, as philosophers say nowadays, normative – in other words, they already imply value judgments. To put it more plainly, Aristotle thinks that saying what a giraffe is involves saying something about what a good giraffe would be like, and the same goes for humans. Finally, then, we have a fix on the happy life. It will be a life of reason, because that will be the kind of life that allows humans to achieve their distinctive excellence. We can now see why Aristotle thinks you can be wrong about whether you are happy. Your happiness is determined not by how you feel about yourself, but by how well you are using your rationality. Now though, we're tempted to ask what any of this has to do with ethics. When we imagine ourselves using reason, we're more apt to imagine ourselves, say, doing mathematics than, say, helping old ladies across the street. And if we think about people who are ethically defective, we don't think they are failing in respect of rationality. In short, Aristotle has to tell us what reason has to do with virtue, and what failures of reason have to do with vice. He has a very good story to tell here, and I'll get to it in just a moment. But first, I want to point out that for Aristotle, the excellent use of reason would include things like mathematics. He devotes a whole section of the ethics to excellence in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. He sees understanding, in effect, as a kind of non-practical virtue. Indeed, at the risk of giving away Aristotle's punchline, it will turn out that the life of theoretical inquiry is actually the happiest life of all. For now though, Aristotle is trying to build a picture of human life in which rationality is fully exploited, including rationality in the practical sphere. Virtue arises insofar as the practical sphere is an opportunity to use our reason. But the practical sphere is the sphere in which we form preferences and perform actions, so virtue will be using reason to form the right preferences and to perform the right actions. On this point, Aristotle is admirably modest. He concedes that the range of practical situations we face is effectively infinite. There is no hard and fast set of ethical rules that can be applied to every case that might arise. Rather, practical rationality is, for Aristotle, the ability to confront each situation as it comes and to choose the right course of action in every case. This could be something as humble as choosing the right amount to eat at each meal time – the virtue of temperance – or choosing to fight on a battlefield – the virtue of courage. Of course, it would be disappointing if all we could say is that virtuous action is the action that would be chosen by the virtuous person. So Aristotle adds a more general observation, perhaps the most famous idea in his ethics – that the virtuous action will lie at the mean between two extremes. This is what a friend of mine likes to call the Goldilocks theory. Virtue is when you choose and enjoy what is not too much, not too little, but just right. Each kind of virtue is a mean between some excessive tendency and a tendency towards deficiency. For instance, temperance is the mean between gluttony and being overly abstemious. Courage is the mean between recklessness and cowardice. Generosity is the mean between stinginess and prodigality, and so on. Of course, this isn't to say that you should literally engage in everything in moderation. You can't do just the right amount of incest or unprovoked murder. These actions shouldn't be done at all, which perhaps poses a problem for Aristotle, unless he can convince us that such actions are excesses in relation to some other type of action which should be done in moderation. For instance, incest might be an excessive use of one's sexual capacities. Sex, unlike incest, is something that should be pursued moderately. Though that sounds reasonable, this part of the ethics is bound to remind us that we are reading an author from a very different culture. Consider how his definition of virtue as a mean would relate to Judeo-Christian morality. The Christian saints were not engaging in chastity, faith, and humility to a moderate degree, but rather striving towards perfect chastity, faith, and humility. If incest is excessive sexuality, then chastity must be deficient sexuality, so not a virtue at all on Aristotle's theory. A nice example of Aristotle's cultural otherness here is his discussion of the man who has greatness of soul. The rather wonderful Greek word is megalosuchos. The great-souled person is perfectly virtuous, is well aware of his virtue, and acts accordingly, behaving with great dignity and seeing himself as significantly superior to those around him. Here we see that Aristotle's ethical exemplar is closer to Achilles than to Mother Teresa. Aristotle would of course admit that you can be overly prideful, but the great-souled man has earned his massive self-esteem by being massively virtuous. A normal person who behaves like Achilles isn't being virtuous, he's being an arrogant twerp. Neither though should Achilles act like a normal person. That would be to rate his own virtue too low. How then do we achieve virtue? This has already been marked as a political question. Aristotle thinks that people who do not grow up in healthy societies have effectively no chance of becoming virtuous. So a complete answer would mean looking at Aristotle's political philosophy. But in the ethics, he already explains why our social upbringing is so important. Virtue is achieved by habituation. The very word ethics shows this, as Aristotle points out. It comes from the Greek εθος, which means habit or custom. Thus, we already develop the virtues when we are children. Parents chastise their kids for being insufficiently bold or truthful, and this inculcates in them a habit towards courage and honesty. On this point, it's traditional to draw a contrast between Aristotle and Socrates. As you'll remember, Socrates apparently thought that virtue involved some sort of intellectual knowledge, so that virtuous people must be able to give a definition of virtue. For Aristotle, this picture is far too intellectualist. As we've seen, he certainly believes that ethical action requires some kind of cognitive process. It is rational excellence, after all. But Aristotelian virtue is more like a kind of rational discernment or perception, in which I rely on my training to find the right response to any given circumstance. Again, the variation between circumstances means that no abstract definition or account can guarantee that I choose rightly. Ultimately, it's down to my ingrained habit, which not only enables me to make the right choice, but also means that I will want to make the right choice. I will take pleasure in doing what is right, since it is what I am used to. It is second nature. The difference between the virtuous excellent man and the vicious defective man is largely the result of training. The virtuous man enjoys, and chooses, the mean between extremes as a matter of course, whereas the vicious man enjoys the wrong things and has ingrained habits for making the wrong choices. Aristotle's picture is rather compelling. He's described virtue as something which brings us enjoyment and allows us to achieve our own personal excellence. My goal, as an ethical agent, is to do what I am meant to do, and do it well. Aristotle compares this to athletic pursuits, observing that we award admiration to those who actually perform virtuous deeds, just as at the Olympics, they give prizes to those who compete and win, not just those who are most fit and beautiful. This makes virtue sound really worth having, and it's obvious why it is in our interest to have it. Virtue makes us the best humans we can be. But doesn't this sort of ethical athleticism leave something out, something that is fundamental to ethics? What about treating others well for their sake? Should I really be generous, help my friends, have healthy relationships with my loved ones, all in order to pursue my own personal excellence? Aristotle makes it sound like other people are mere tools for me to use in attaining perfection. This is a problem we'll look at next time, as I turn to Aristotle's theory of friendship and consider in greater depth how the Aristotelian virtuous man uses and enjoys both the things and the people around him. So join me for that, my friends, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Second Self, Aristotle on Pleasure and Friendship. When you think of the good things in life, what springs to mind? Perhaps a nice meal, a glass of fine wine, pleasant conversation with friends. Or maybe you're less high-minded and will go straight for sex, fast cars, and cold hard cash. But as we saw last time, Aristotle identifies the good life as the life of reason and virtue. So would he purse his lips in stern disapproval at us, as we pursue those pleasant dinners, not to mention the sex, cars, and money? Or does he leave a place for such things in his consideration of happiness? While a modern reader of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics is apt to come away with the impression that Aristotle is quite grumpy about this whole pleasure thing. Towards the beginning of the ethics, he mentions the life devoted to pleasure and dismisses it with a snort of derision. This is a life for cattle, not humans, he says. So it's surprising to discover that many ancient readers of the ethics thought of Aristotle as a defender of the comfortable life. He wasn't as objectionable as the crassly hedonist Epicureans, but for these critics, he still fell short of the full moral rigor one would expect from a proper philosopher. The critics were comparing Aristotle to Stoic and Platonist ethical thinkers, for whom only virtue is valuable and all else is intrinsically worthless. We've seen a view like this already in the mouth of Socrates, who argued that such things as wealth and power benefit their possessors only if they are joined to wisdom and virtue. We've seen Plato, too, arguing that a virtuous man is happy even if he is hated by society and subjected to injustices and torments. Aristotle, as so often, is happy to occupy the middle ground. On the one hand, he rejects hedonism. Though pleasure has its place in the good life, it is not the primary goal of the good life. But on the other hand, he adopts the common-sense judgment that someone who is, say, tortured to death after his family has been murdered by an unjust tyrant, is not happy, no matter how virtuous he is. Of course, he knew that he was disagreeing with his master Plato here, but as he says in the Ethics, we must honour truth above our friends. And as we saw last time, the truth about the good life is that it must be admirable and enviable for right-minded men. Unless we're Stoics or Platonists, we will probably agree with Aristotle that virtue is no guarantee of happiness, even if it is the best route to happiness. But this forces Aristotle to admit that our happiness is to some extent out of our own control. A tyrant can always come along and destroy our lives. In fact, Aristotle even finds it plausible that our happiness can retroactively be destroyed after our deaths, if our close friends and descendants have horrors visited upon them. This is a reminder that for Aristotle, being happy is more like being blessed than being content. There's another reason why Aristotle includes so-called external goods in the happy life, that is, goods like wealth, health, and family, in addition to virtue. He believes that virtues must be exercised to be worth anything. You'll have no opportunity to be generous if you have no money, or to be loyal if you have no friends, so the virtuous man needs a measure of material success just to make use of his virtue. On this point, Socrates might agree with Aristotle. Socrates, as portrayed by Plato at least, did allow that wealth and power would be valuable so long as it is in the hands of a wise and virtuous man, who would use them to do good. It's just that wealth and power have no value, and can even be harmful, in the absence of wisdom and virtue. Silvio Berlusconi, I'm looking at you. Still, there's no doubt that Socrates and Aristotle differ in their emphasis, with Aristotle happy to accept the importance of external goods, and Socrates constantly pointing out their intrinsic uselessness. Those Stoic and Platonist critics sided with Socrates, but, again, I suspect we're liable to find Aristotle's view attractive. Another attractive feature of Aristotle's ideas about happiness is something I already mentioned last time. For Aristotle, virtue itself is pleasurable to the virtuous man. This is because he is habituated to perform virtuous actions. He's used to them, to the point that they come naturally to him. However fearful it might be for him to stand bravely in battle, it would be even more painful for him to run away. He is courageous, and would find it excruciating, unbearable, to flee from a battle when he should not. He will also find it unpleasant to overeat at a banquet, whereas a moderate repast will be just what he likes best. Well, I say this view is attractive, but maybe you'll disagree. Maybe you'll say that if virtue is really to be admirable, it should be tough going. We should have to grit our teeth and do the right thing, not because we enjoy it, but because it is the right thing. It's traditional here to draw a contrast between Aristotle and a much later philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Whereas Aristotle thinks that enjoyment of virtue is a sure sign of virtuous character, Kant insists that morality really has nothing to do with enjoyment. It's not that Kant necessarily wants you to find moral duty unpleasant, that would be rather perverse, but certainly for Kant, if you help an old lady across the street just because you get a kick out of it, this doesn't count as a properly moral act. In a way, you're just lucky. You happen to be a person who enjoys helping old ladies rather than stealing their purses. The right reason for helping the old lady is that it is your duty, and any enjoyment you take in this is morally irrelevant, even if it is a nice bonus. Now, it must be said that Kant has a point. Aristotle's theory of virtue depends heavily on the idea of habituation. You become virtuous by being trained in virtue as you grow up. This means that if you don't get the right upbringing, you will not take enjoyment in the right things, and so you will not be virtuous. Thus Aristotle is vulnerable to what is sometimes called the problem of moral luck. That is, our ethical condition should not be a matter of happenstance, it should be up to us to control. Aristotle has a reply ready. He will say that there are indeed people who manage to do the right thing against their ingrained habit and inclination. These are people with encratea, which means something like self-control. Outwardly, the self-controlled man and the virtuous man seem very similar. They both will stand fast in battle, eat moderately at table, help the old lady across the street. The difference is that whereas the virtuous man enjoys doing these things and does it out of habit, the self-controlled man would rather run away in battle, eat like a pig, and ignore the old lady. Yet, he does the right thing because he knows that's what he's supposed to do. Now Aristotle will ask his usual question. Who would we admire more, and who would we rather be? I guess it's clear that we'd rather be the virtuous man, but the question of whom we admire more is trickier. When I think about this, I find myself changing my mind depending on the example. Someone who has to exert self-control to avoid snatching old lady's purses seems to me less admirable than someone who would never consider doing any such thing. But someone who fights bravely in battle even as every fibre of his being tells him to run, or someone who has to exert willpower to stay on their diet and eat moderately seems to me more admirable than people who do these same things naturally and with enjoyment. So it's not clear to me who has the better of this dispute between Aristotle and Kant. Of course Aristotle recognizes that not everyone does the right thing, so he identifies two other character types in addition to the virtuous and self-controlled men. Hardly opposed to the virtuous man is the vicious man, who does bad things the way the virtuous man does good things. He naturally, and out of habit, runs away from battles, snatches purses, and gobbles up cakes. He's not very interesting, really. His only use is to serve as a bad example. More fascinating is the bad twin of the self-controlled man, the weak-willed man. Aristotle calls this condition of weak will akrasia, often translated as incontinence. Someone with this defect of character knows what he should do, unlike the vicious man, but he is unable to do it because he is overcome by his desires and the prospect of pleasure or avoiding pain. Akrasia is precisely the phenomenon that Socrates claimed was impossible when he said that no one does wrong willingly. If you recall, his reasoning went like this. When we make choices, what we are doing is trying to choose what is good or what is best. So there is something self-defeating, even contradictory, about consciously choosing what is bad. It is tantamount to thinking, I reckon the best thing to do is this bad thing. Aristotle explicitly refers to Socrates and admits that he has levelled a powerful challenge against the possibility of akrasia. But again, defending a more commonsensical position, he says that akrasia obviously does exist, the question is how. Aristotle suggests that Socrates is right in a way, because the akratic man is indeed suffering from a failure of reasoning. He knows, for instance, that this cake is unhealthy and that he shouldn't eat unhealthy things. But the prospect of the delicious cake makes him temporarily unable to make use of this knowledge, so he pops it into his mouth. In this case, I am less persuaded by Aristotle. He must be right that akrasia genuinely exists, but I'm not sure he's right that akrasia resides in some kind of thoughtlessness and being swept away by pleasure. No doubt that does happen, but I would say people sometimes consciously in full awareness do things they know are bad. If that really does happen, it is clearly not what Aristotle is trying to explain in his theory of akrasia. We've seen then that Aristotle thinks the good life includes quite a lot of pleasure, and for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the total absence of pleasurable goods apart from virtue, like wealth and family, will destroy our happiness. For another, we'll need such things just in order to exercise our virtue. And finally, virtue itself will bring us pleasure as we exercise it. The good life is starting to look pretty pleasant after all. But now, I know what you're thinking. Why can't Aristotle just go ahead and be a hedonist? Why can't he say that the best life is simply the most pleasant life, perhaps by insisting that the virtuous man is the one who gets the most pleasure out of his activities? In that case, he was wrong to dismiss the life of pleasure as a life fit for cows. Far from it. It is actually a life fit for the best, most admirable man among us. And in short, is the happy life. And so we should organize our lives around the pursuit of pleasure. Aristotle does come back to the topic of pleasure later in the Ethics, and when he does so he makes it clear why he is not a hedonist. For him, devoting one's life to pleasure is not only a mistake, it is downright incoherent. To see why, we need to think a bit about the nature of pleasure itself. Pleasure always involves enjoying some activity, whether it is eating, driving a fast car, or simply feeling at peace with yourself. So pleasure is a kind of secondary phenomenon, which comes along on top of some primary activity or experience. This seemingly innocuous fact spells doom for the hedonist. It means that, when we ask whether a certain pleasure is worth pursuing, the answer will always depend on the activity to which the pleasure is attached. If you take pleasure in doing mathematics, and also in eating cake, then the question of which pleasure is more worthwhile will depend on whether mathematics or cake is intrinsically better. This allows Aristotle to insist that even if pleasure in itself is always good, it is to be avoided when it accompanies an activity which is bad. Again, notice how he has staked out a compromise position. He's not denying that pleasure is good, and neither is he saying that it is THE good. Rather, it is in itself a good thing, and sometimes accompanies other good things, but sometimes it arises from bad things, and this makes all the difference. The hedonist might try responding that we should try to maximize pleasure, that is, choose between pleasures not on the basis of their associated activities, but on the basis of what is most pleasant. To this, Aristotle might say that there is no reason to suppose that we are able to compare, say, the pleasure of mathematics and the pleasure of cake. Nonetheless, you might well have to choose, for instance if you were invited both to a birthday party and a mathematics seminar. And then, Aristotle will insist that the choice should not depend on the quantity of pleasure each activity would provide, but on which activity is more worthwhile. Which activity will do more to contribute to my overall well-being and flourishing. As appealing as all this sounds, there is still a problem lurking. I mentioned it at the end of the last episode. Aristotle's ethics seems to be all about my own personal flourishing and excellence. I am trying to achieve happiness, and the way to do it is to engage in the activities distinctive to me as a human, the use of reason, in both the practical and theoretical spheres. It's an ethical theory that is demanding, that calls us to achievement and great deeds, be they political, military, or, best of all, philosophical. But isn't it also, well, a little selfish? What if my friends and family get in the way of my excellence? Of course, Aristotle has said that no one can be happy without friends and family, and perhaps I need them around to exercise some of my virtues like generosity and loyalty, but surely these are the wrong reasons to value my loved ones. I shouldn't be keeping them around for my own benefit. If anything, I should be seeking to promote their good above my own. Aristotle's answer comes in Books VIII and IX of the Ethics, which are devoted to friendship. The Greek term, which I already mentioned when discussing Plato's erotic dialogues, is philia. It's worth emphasizing that two out of the ten books of the Ethics are about this topic. Clearly, this is something Aristotle took seriously, though I don't think it is necessarily because he felt that ethics needs to be other-regarding rather than self-regarding. His ethical theory is fundamentally eudaimonist, meaning that it seeks to ground ethics in the eudaimonia, or happiness, of the ethical agent rather than in some kind of responsibilities or duties the agent owes to other people. But Aristotle definitely thought the virtuous person would have friends. In fact, he thought something much stronger than this, he thought that in the strict and proper sense, only the virtuous person can have friends. According to Aristotle, there are three kinds of relationship that we count as friendships. Some friends spend time together simply because it is useful to both parties. These utility friendships may be long-lasting and deeply valued. Think for instance of two business partners who might work together for their whole career and help to make one another rich and successful. But such relationships are also vulnerable to circumstance. If you and I are friends in this way, I may just drop you like a hot potato as soon as your usefulness ends. Similar are friendships of pleasure, which are predicated on some shared activity the friends enjoy. The drinking buddy is the ultimate example of this. Again, the friendship is based on something incidental to the actual friend, and this makes the friendship vulnerable. Suppose I give up drinking. I'll give up my drinking buddies too. Although these two kinds of friendship are in a sense defective, we can nonetheless call them friendship because of their resemblance to true friendship. This sort of friendship is grounded not in something incidental to the friend, like their usefulness or shared pleasures, but rather in the character of the friend. If I am really and truly friends with you, it must be because I admire and value your character and you admire and value my character. This is why, in a sense, only virtuous people can really be friends, because they are the only ones who really have admirable and valuable characters. In the ideal case, the two friends will be equal in virtue. Inequality, for Aristotle, is inimical to friendship, and he comments rather unpleasantly that this is why men can't be friends with women, even with their wives, because women are intrinsically inferior. It also explains, as he says in a striking passage, why we cannot be friends with God. So Aristotle can explain why virtuous people are not selfish egotists. They may not cherish the worth of all other humans. Indeed, it sounds like they will have little but scorn for most people, an impression we'll see confirmed when we get to Aristotle's thoughts about slavery in a future episode. But other people who are more or less virtuous will be valued by the virtuous person, and for their own sakes. In the ideal case of virtue-friendship, Aristotle even says that the virtuous man considers the friend a second self and will consider his deeds to be effectively his own. This again is a noble idea, though one might worry that it collapses back into egotism after all. If in an ideal virtue-friendship my friend is for all intents and purposes another me, doesn't that show that virtue is really selfish? It is all about me, me, me, and there are as many mes as I have virtuous friends. The problem becomes even more pressing when we get to the notorious end of the ethics, in which Aristotle suddenly announces that the best life is not after all a matter of political activity, but rather a life devoted to philosophical contemplation. Where does this leave interpersonal relationships, or for that matter virtuous practical activity? This is just one topic I'll be looking at next time with someone who is far better than a second me, in fact a leading expert on Aristotelian ethics. So be a pal, and join me for an interview with Dominic Scott next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Aristotle's ethics with Dominic Scott, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, an emeritus fellow at Clerich College, Cambridge, and a visiting professor at UCL here in London. Hi Dominic, thanks for coming on. Hi, thank you for having me. Perhaps we can start by discussing the audience Aristotle has in mind when he writes the Nicomachean Ethics, which is the text we'll be talking about. What sort of person does he have in mind as an ideal audience member or maybe a reader? And what does he think he can assume about his audience, would you say? This issue is interesting is quite controversial. Because when people talk about ethics in ancient philosophy, they often start with very famous exchanges between Socrates and people like Thrasymachus or Calicles, who were demanding to know why anyone should be just. They were speaking from outside ethics, if you like, so sometimes called the immoralist. So there's a challenge which Plato is clearly trying to meet. When you get to Aristotle, things seem to be very different. So to answer your question, the one of the qualifications for being a member of the audience is that you already think you should be moral, to put it in our terms. As he puts it, you have to be well brought up. So you already have a sense that the virtues of justice and temperance are choice worthy for themselves, they're something noble. So he actually seems to be excluding anyone who doesn't already have that kind of upbringing. Does that mean that he actually wouldn't even have anything to say to Calicles or Thrasymachus? Or would he just have to produce some other kind of considerations that don't appear in the ethics? I think that what we have in the ethics is certainly not geared towards Canophes or Thrasymachus. But if Aristotle was required for some reason to say something to them, he certainly would have something to say. And we can speculate about what that would be by extrapolating from his ethics. For instance, to give you a specific example, there's one point in the discussion of friendship when he says, I think one reason for being virtuous is that you will thereby have a greater chance to develop friendships. If you're unvirtuous, untrustworthy, you won't have any friends. Now that's something you could address directly to Thrasymachus or Canophes. Indeed, that's exactly what Socrates says to Canophes in the Gorgias. So you could take what Aristotle says in the Nyco-Machean Ethics and repackage it so that it would be suitable for an immoralist like Canophes. I suppose this question about his intended audience actually raises another question, which is, as it were, what are the other Aristotelian texts we're supposed to have read before the ethics? So if I'm supposed to be moral or think the morality is important when I walk in to hear these lectures on the ethics, am I also supposed to have read some other things that Aristotle wrote or some other lectures that he's given? Again, this is a matter of some controversy. There's quite a well-known and I would say initially plausible reading which sees the ethics as part of a big Aristotelian system. So if you read the function argument of the Nyco-Machean Ethics, you hear about human beings having some natural or characteristic activity, what he in Greek uses the word ergon, and that the human good is a matter of fulfilling this function. Now that sounds as if it is continuous with the ideas you have, say, in the physics, especially but two of the physics, about any organism, any living thing having a final cause, which could be construed as some activity, it's kind of geared up to do. And when it's performing this specific kind of activity, then it's flourishing. So you could say that the Nyco-Machean Ethics is like a continuation of the theory of nature you have in the physics. Some people say Aristotle's theory of the human good is like a theory of human flourishing, almost a biological approach to ethics. And in turn, you could base the physics on his metaphysics. And there are certainly points in the Nyco-Machean Ethics where he refers to his other writings as a point he refers to his epistemological writing in the posterior analytics. However, I'm not so sure that the Nyco-Machean Ethics is meant to be read as sort of volume six of the Aristotelian corpus. I didn't mention this before, but there's another qualification on who his audience is. It's not just these people must be well brought up, they must also be experienced. He excludes the young from turning up to his lectures. That's slightly shocking for us because most of us who teach Aristotle tend to teach it to 20 or 21 year olds. Oops, oops, definitely. But we have to earn our money some way. Aristotle, I think is talking to an audience who are relatively mature, who are interested in entering politics, and who will eventually be involved in legislation. And because he's talking in this very practical way, I think that he deliberately resists getting drawn into elaborate philosophical cross references. At one point, this is in Book One, Chapter Seven, he says, well, imagine the difference between a carpenter and a geometer. Both of them talk about right angles, but in different ways. The carpenter, so that he can make something or do something. The geometer talks about right angles for the sake of knowledge, to discover the truth. So the geometer has an interest in being as precise and exact as possible. But the carpenter needn't be as precise or exact as the geometer, there's no point, it would actually slow him down and stop him doing his job. Aristotle makes that analogy because he wants to say, so too in the case of ethics, our job is practical, we're eventually going to try and make our lives better or make the lives of our citizens better. And yes, we need to talk about human nature and human psychology as part of that. But we don't need to go to the same level of depth or into the same level of detail as you would if you were writing a work on psychology, a work on metaphysics. Actually it's sort of like the answer you gave me about responding to Callicles and Thrasymachus. Maybe the idea is, well, if you pushed him on the theoretical underpinnings of his ethics, he would have something to say, he could refer you to the physics, he could say, look, I've got this teleological conception of nature, everything has got a final cause, blah, blah, blah. But he doesn't need to in this case, because it's not really the purpose that is at stake in the ethics. Is that right? Yes, that's right. But I think we should also bear in mind that what Aristotle in the ethics might have thought didn't need too much argument. For instance, he doesn't argue very hard for the claim that human beings have a natural function. That we might question. So a modern Aristotelian couldn't take that for granted, because nowadays, in the light of Darwin's natural selection, views about human beings having a natural function or an essence are deeply controversial. So I think in Aristotle's time, perhaps he felt he could get away with being rather quick about certain claims about human nature. Whereas now, anyone wanting to revive Aristotelian philosophy would have to work a lot harder so that they would have good reason, even good practical reason to refer in their ethics to metaphysics. And in fact, this is exactly what they do, right? So they, people in this so-called virtue ethics tradition, this kind of neo-Aristotelian ethical tradition, try to come up with either some more elaborate metaphysical story or often a non-metaphysical story, which would produce a basis for a broadly Aristotelian ethics. Yes, and I think it's quite legitimate in modern Aristotelian ethics to do that. I just think the slight mistake people make is assuming that Aristotle himself was doing that, i.e. presenting his ethics as not just continuous with his physics, but relying on it and requiring the reader of the ethics to go back to the metaphysics. I think he's, there are points he says, look, you could look into this matter in more detail with more precision, but it would be surplus to our requirements to do so. I guess there is another Aristotelian work though that's definitely relevant for the ethics, which is not something you've read or heard already, but something you're going to do next, namely Aristotle's Politics, right? And I haven't covered that text yet in the podcast, but you already mentioned that there are signs in the ethics itself that this is aimed at an audience of would-be politicians. And in fact, he mentions at the beginning of the ethics that what you're about to read in the ethics itself is some kind of contribution to political philosophy. Can you help us kind of make sense of that? What is political about the Nicomachean ethics? One point to start with, it's not often made, but Aristotle, as far as we know, does not call the Nicomachean ethics, ethics. The title we have may be by him, but it may equally be a late editor. In the work itself, he does not refer to it as a work of ethics. He refers to it always as a work of politics, which is quite striking. And as you've just pointed out, one explanation for that is right at the beginning, he says that he is talking to a group of people who are interested in the betterment of their citizens. This is in Book 1, Chapter 2. He says, it's great to use a conception of the human good to improve your own life, but to do it for an entire city or a state is much nobler. And it seems as if the point of the work is to give us some kind of definition of the human good or eudaimonia or happiness, so that we can take that conception and use it to mould the lives of our citizens. So in that sense, the work is political. And at the end of the work, the very last chapter, he returns to this idea that someone who's interested in improving the lives of their citizens needs to have read the ethics. At the end of the work, in the very last chapter, he says, well, now we've talked about human happiness and associative topics. Are we finished? And he says, no, we have as our goal not knowledge, but action. And he starts talking about how you actually make people better citizens, better human beings, and you need education. And in order to have education, he thinks you need legislation, you actually have to have laws setting out what the educational programme should be. So in order to study legislation, we have to launch into another work. And he in the very last chapter of the ethics, in fact, the very last paragraph, he tells us what the next project would be. And it sounds a bit like a list of contents of the politics. In other words, what we have in the Nyco-Mikian Ethics may be volume one of a two volume work, whose second volume is what we call the politics. But the point is that the volume one is telling us in outline and some detail what the human good is. Volume two is getting down to the details of how you go about realising that, what is the best kind of constitution to promote human virtue, and what kind of education you should have. And you definitely get that in the last two books of the politics, that's to say, an account of education. Right. I guess this obviously invites us, though, to look for more specific cases in the ethics where Aristotle has some particular political end or context in mind. And one that strikes me might be his discussion of the voluntary end of responsibility, because One of the things he says in that discussion is that you might be interested in responsibility for the purposes of legislation or in courts, because you might want to lay down the conditions under which somebody could be held responsible for doing something. Would you say that that's a case where in the ethics he actually is specifically thinking of some kind of political or legislative function of the discussion? Yes, I think so. He does indeed say, just as he's about to discuss the voluntary, as it's called, that this will be very useful for legislators thinking about punishment, and I think also rewards. But in general, the sense in which an icon in ethics is political is that the politician needs to have an outline of human happiness. Human happiness involves activity in accordance with virtue. So to give more detail to the outline of human happiness, we have to know more about virtue. And it turns out that the virtuous person acts voluntarily, so we have to know more about virtue, just as the virtuous person experiences pleasure on the whole when they act virtuously, so we must know more about pleasure. And indeed, when Aristotle talks about pleasure, he says this will be something useful for political science, because pleasure is such an important part of human life. And in that case, the whole question of the voluntary and of responsibility would kind of connect both to what you might think of as narrowly ethical questions about virtue and also to the more political context. Exactly, yeah. But maybe that just proves your point, which I guess is that you can't really pry the two things apart, because anything that you could say about private virtue, as it were, the ethical situation of one person at a time, will have knock-on consequences for political questions. Exactly, yes. That's what I've really been saying, that Aristotle has, I suppose, what nowadays we might call a paternalist concept of political philosophy, that the political leader really is out to, I would say, impose, but perhaps develop a very specific conception of virtue within the citizens of the state. I should add one qualification. We've been talking about the Nicomachean Ethics. There's another Aristotelian work, of course, the Eudemian Ethics, and there's some controversy about when that was written, a fairly standard line. It was an earlier work and less mature work than the Nicomachean Ethics. The people have disputed that. But when you look at the Eudemian Ethics, I think it's right to say that is not packaged as a work of political science. So I want to stress that Aristotle could have written a lot of the Nicomachean Ethics and packaged it as a work about individual morality or ethics. And perhaps that's what we have in the Eudemian Ethics. So that a lot of the topics, or perhaps almost all the topics of the Nicomachean Ethics, could be read as a contribution to one's individual life, as a developing Udom and one's individual life. So I imagine he took the Eudemian Ethics and then repackaged it and rethought it now as part one of a grand political treatise. And he, as you were saying, puts education really at the centre of this project. And the reason for this is that he thinks that ethical virtue is a matter of habituation, so that if I somehow set up my city in such a way that people will be raised to be habituated, preferring and enjoying the right kinds of activities, then they'll become virtuous. So yes, the material on education, which comes beginning of Book Two and again at this last chapter of the whole work, really brings out this political dimension of the work. But something that I guess is maybe a little bit puzzling about that is that on the one hand he talks about habituation quite a bit, and that sounds kind of plausible. So it sounds right that virtue might be a matter of habitually choosing and preferring the right things. But he just told us in the function argument in Book One that virtue is a matter of using reason correctly. And I guess at first blush one might think that there was a problem there, because I might have the habit of brushing my teeth after I eat every meal, but that's not a use of reason. I mean, maybe I could reason about that. I might think, oh, it's better for me to do that. I'll avoid tooth decay. But I might have just been raised to do it and might be doing it completely thoughtlessly. Whereas Aristotle seems to think that if it's going to count as a virtuous action, it has to involve my using rationality. So can you cultivate that? I mean, is that really plausible? There's a problem about this word habituation that, at least to me initially, it sounds like unreflective habit forming, like brushing your teeth. Now, in Greek, the word is ethesmos, which is linked to the word ethos of character. So it's about whatever process it is that forms your character. And I think that when Aristotle talks about habituation, he's not thinking of a process that will just produce these knee jerk habits. For instance, he says, you know, if you continually perform the actions that a virtuous person would perform, standing fast against danger is what the courageous person does. So imagine that you are perhaps initially forced or made by legislators or your parents to stand up to dangers. You keep doing that, even if it goes against the grain initially. And what happens over time? Well, his point is not really that you will just as a knee jerk reaction stand up to dangers. Something more interesting happens. He thinks you actually come to see the intrinsic value of such actions, fighting for a good cause, standing up to danger, even facing death. By continually pushing yourself and putting yourself in the face of danger, you will, and he doesn't explain how this happens, but he thinks you will come to have some intellectual insight into the intrinsic worth of those actions. Same with giving your money to people in need. Initially, if you do it as a child or a teenager, you may feel it going against the grain, you'll feel conflicted and you're being forced to do it. But over time, you will start to value doing that for its own sake. And you will even start to take pleasure in it. So the results of habituation are actually intellectual. You come to appreciate something you didn't see before. So it's like with artistic or aesthetic appreciation, by continually exposing yourself to beauty, you might come to appreciate something you didn't before. So in that sense, I think habituation achieves something intellectual rather than merely what we would call habitual. Well, that question about intellectual achievement really takes me on to the last thing I wanted to ask you, which is about what happens in the last book of the Nicomachean Ethics. This is one of the big, most debated issues about the ethics, because there he rather suddenly, I would say, tells us that the best life is the life of theoretical contemplation. And it's certainly clear that that's a use of reason. And there would maybe be a continuity with what's gone before, if what you're saying is right, that even practical virtue involves some kind of intellectual achievement. But a lot of people have seen a tension or even a rupture between, as it were, the first nine books of the ethics, which seemed to be all about practical virtue, and then this bit at the end where suddenly we're told to go off and basically do philosophy. Do you see a big tension there? Or do you think that it's more something that he's been preparing the way for the whole time? I think you're right. He has been preparing the way for it. But I have to admit, when you read the opening of Book 10, Chapter 7, it can sound a bit of a shock. He seems to be saying that eudaimonia just is the activity of contemplation. And you think, well, if that's the case, why in our book devoted to eudaimonia has he spent so much time, almost nine books, talking about aspects of a practical life? That just doesn't seem to make sense. So I think that you have to sort of trace back and reread the work quite carefully. One thing is to note in the function argument. At the end of it, he says, I haven't got the text in front of me, so I may be misquoting, but he says something like, the human good will be activity in accordance with virtue, or if there are several virtues in accordance with the best and the most perfect or complete. We're not quite sure how to translate the Greek word there. Now that's in Book 1, Chapter 7. So he seems to be saying, eudaimonia is activity in accordance with the best thing in us. In Book 6, Chapter 7, he talks about contemplation and the virtue of what he calls wisdom, or sophia, which is the virtue not of practical insight or understanding, which is Phronesis, but the virtue of someone who understands facts about the cosmos, perhaps mathematics, and so on. And he does seem to talk of that as something superior to practical wisdom. He certainly says the objects of this scientific wisdom are the most noble objects in the cosmos. So we've already got a hint, at the very least, that contemplative wisdom is something superior to merely human wisdom, which is practical reason or Phronesis. So you put that together with the claim in Book 1, Chapter 7, that eudaimonia is activity in accordance with the best virtue in us, and you get the conclusion that seems to follow in Book 10, that eudaimonia is contemplative activity. However, there's a qualification here. What he actually says in 10, Chapter 7, is perfect eudaimonia is contemplative activity. And my own take, and I have to signal this is controversial, is that what he actually does in Book 10 is to say there are two kinds of eudaimonia. There's the perfect kind and the secondary kind. The perfect kind is the kind that gods enjoy, which is the activity of theoretical contemplation. And the secondary kind is distinctively anthropic or human. It involves practical reason. It involves the emotions which are bound up with our bodily nature. Having an emotional anger actually involves getting heated or something literally. So there's a cluster of virtues which are the best thing in our human nature. And living according to that is human eudaimonia, secondary eudaimonia. And living in accordance with contemplation is living the life of the gods. That's the highest, most perfect kind of eudaimonia. So I think that there's nothing inconsistent with what he says at the end. He has been preparing the way, at least if you reread it in the way I'm suggesting. And ultimately he thinks we should enjoy both kinds of eudaimonia. Though there is a problem that if one kind of eudaimonia is superior to the other, why not devote all your energies to that and neglect the human kind of eudaimonia and neglect human virtues such as generosity and courage. But I think he's trying to resist that conclusion and say we should celebrate all aspects of our nature, both divine and human, and live a life of both kinds of eudaimonia. Right, well that actually gives us a perfect transition to the topic of the next podcast, which will be Aristotle's views on the mind and also God. But for now I'll just thank Dominic Scott very much for coming on the show. Thank you very much for having me. And please join me next time for Aristotle on mind and God, on the history of philosophy, without any gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, God Only Knows, Aristotle on Mind and God. How can you tell if someone is a philosopher? There are a number of potential clues. Does this person like to argue? Do they have a habit of staring off silently into the middle distance? Do their grooming and hygiene leave something to be desired? Chances are, you're in luck, you've found yourself a philosopher. But an almost surefire test is this. Tell them that you yourself are a philosopher. If you are dealing with a normal person, they'll say something like, gosh, so what do you do all day? But if you're talking to a philosopher, they will ask you what area of philosophy you work in. Professionals know that philosophy has many branches and that no one these days is a philosopher in the sense Aristotle was, a pursuer of all the knowledge that mankind can hope to possess. In the English-speaking world, the philosophers you meet at parties will often say, when asked what area of philosophy they do, that they are philosophers of mind. Not that philosophers of mind go to many parties. They are much too busy debating issues like the nature of consciousness, the relation of our minds to our bodies, and the philosophical relevance of empirical research in brain science and psychology. This is cutting-edge stuff, but, like most if not all areas of philosophy, it has ancient roots. Aristotle was arguably the inventor of the philosophy of mind, just as he was the inventor of logic, biology, and numerous other disciplines. Now I know what you're thinking. When I was talking about his work the De Anima, didn't I say that it is a mistake to confuse soul, as Aristotle understands it, with the topic considered by today's philosophers of mind? Didn't I say that Aristotle's soul is the explanation for all our vital functions, including nutrition, motion, and sensation, as well as thought? Well, yes, and it's true enough that when Aristotle talks about the relation between soul and body, this is not the same as when Descartes, or a modern-day philosopher, talks of the mind-body relationship. Yet Aristotle does provide an account of thinking in the third book of the De Anima. Here, he takes up the topic of mind, not in the sense of all our experiences or of consciousness, what philosophers now call mental phenomena, but rather mind in the sense of intellect. The Greek word for intellect is nous. It refers here specifically to the capacity by which we achieve knowledge. Aristotle considers this to be an exalted, even divine capacity which distinguishes humans from lower animals. When he concludes his ethics by suggesting that a life of contemplation is the best life for humans, he means that our greatest happiness would be achieved through the exercise of intellect. And yet Aristotle sees close ties between intellect and the lower functions of sensation and imagination. We already saw that at the end of the posterior analytics, he claims that sensation is the basis for the first principles of demonstrative knowledge, and he calls the state of grasping those principles by the same word, nous, or intellect. Here in the De Anima, meanwhile, Aristotle draws a close parallel between intellect and sensation. As we've seen, he understands sensation as the actualization of a potentiality. If your eyes function properly, then even when you are not seeing anything, you are potentially seeing red. You have the capacity to see red. When you are confronted with a red apple, that capacity is realized. Your sight becomes not just potentially red, but actually red, which is just to say that you see red. The same kind of story can be told for the intellect. Your intellect is a capacity you have thanks to your possession of a human soul. When it is actualized, what you do is think. But what Aristotle seems to mean by thinking here is something rather special. He doesn't mean thinking about what you'll have for dinner, say, or trying to remember where you left your keys. He means having a grasp of essences or forms out in the world. When you think in this way, about giraffes, you actually grasp the nature of giraffe, just as vision actually grasps the redness of an apple. So we might think of intellect as relating to natures the way vision relates to colors. There is at least one big difference between thinking and seeing, though. Unlike vision and the other senses, intellect uses no bodily organ. It is realized through our souls, but not through any part of our body. It's no surprise that Aristotle fails to identify the brain as the seat of intellect. For him, the brain is basically just a refrigeration unit designed to balance the heat stemming from our heart. It is the heart that serves as the command center. For instance, it is the ultimate seat of sensation. But we don't use it to think, nor do we use any other part of the body. Aristotle's argument for this begins from the observation that you can think about anything. Everything is a possible object of intellect. And intellect thinks by actually taking on the form of what it thinks about. This means that if it were seated in an organ that were, for instance, hot, it would always be thinking about heat, because it would always be actually hot. But this is clearly not the case. Rather, in its basic state, intellect is only potentially everything. So it cannot have a bodily organ, given that every organ already has many actual features. This argument probably won't be keeping my colleagues who do philosophy of mind up at nights. They would already be puzzled by the idea that thinking is taking on a form. And even granting this to Aristotle, surely the sense in which the intellect takes on a form could be different from the sense in which a bodily organ has that form. Still, the argument does underscore Aristotle's commitment to an idea that will have far-reaching historical impact, namely that our minds become identical in form to whatever we think about. He's also being consistent with what he's said about sensation. During Vision, for instance, he remarked that the fluid in the eye must have no colour, since otherwise we would always be seeing that colour. Rather, it must be transparent, it's potentially all colours. In the same way, the intellect is potentially everything. The idea that we think without using a bodily organ gives us a hint as to why Aristotle believes that intellect is something divine. As he says in The Ethics, the life of the mind is not so much the best life for us, but a life which is, if anything, too good for mere humans. Really, it belongs to God. This isn't just a figure of speech. As we can see if we turn to works other than the de onima, Aristotle in fact portrays God as a pure intellect. To piece together his account, we need to return to his cosmology as it is laid out in the physics and another treatise called On the Heavens. In these writings, Aristotle describes the cosmos as spherical in form made up of many nested spheres. At the edge is the outermost sphere, in which are embedded the so-called fixed stars, the ones that, when seen from Earth, appear to rise and set every night and to move together. Other stars can be seen to change position from night to night wandering against the background of these fixed stars. These are the so-called planets. The word planet comes from the Greek verb meaning to wander. The planets are embedded in further spheres nested inside the outermost sphere of fixed stars. Our lower realm is beneath these heavenly spheres at the center of the cosmos. It is made up of the four elements which are mixed together to produce the Earth, the seas, the sky, and all the plants, animals, and other substances we see around us. It would seem that the celestial motion is somehow responsible for the mixture of these elements. And the celestial motion can be traced back to the motion of the outermost sphere, for it is the daily rotation of this sphere that accounts for most of what we see in the night sky. The wandering of the planets is due to slight changes in their rotation, introduced by the various motions of the spheres upon which they are seated. But basically the planetary spheres likewise go around once per day, carried around by the outermost sphere. And by the way, on this story, the Sun and the Moon count as planets. Thus, if we want to ask what ultimately explains all motion, all generation, and destruction in our cosmos, we need to find the cause of the motion of the outermost sphere. It will be this mover that sets in chain the complex series of celestial rotations that mix up the four elements to yield the environment we live in. When giraffes lope across the savanna, that motion can be traced, very indirectly, back to the single, simple rotation of the outermost sphere. I think I'm not giving anything away if I now say that the cause of this rotation is God. But why think that this motion, or any celestial motion, has any cause at all? Why not just say that the motion is a brute fact about the cosmos? This question presents itself with particular force in light of Aristotle's belief that the world is eternal, a central claim in both the physics and on the heavens. As I discussed in my interview with Richard Sarabji, Aristotle is convinced that the world has not only always existed, but has always looked much as it does now, with the same heavenly rotations, the same animal and plant species. Although Aristotle does want to find a place for God in his cosmology, his God is not a creator. So, again, why think that the heavens need any explanatory principle? Aristotle gives several answers here, though perhaps the basic underlying idea is simply that the internal, heavenly motion cannot just happen to be the way it is, but must have a cause. This would bring the heavens within Aristotle's general conception of nature, where nothing is unexplained and everything has a purpose. But he wants to establish exactly what this cause will be like, so he gives the following argument. The motion of the heaven is eternal and thus in a sense infinite. But nothing finite can have enough power to perform an infinite motion. Imagine trying to run a car forever on a finite amount of fuel. However efficient the car is, it will run out of fuel eventually. Now the heavens are finite, since they are bodies of enormous but nonetheless limited size. So they cannot have the power to move eternally under their own steam. They need an external mover. Obviously this mover cannot have a body, since if it did it too would be limited, finite. So the external mover is immaterial. At the risk of complicating matters, I should say that Aristotle's argument will apply to each individual heavenly sphere. There is not only the outermost heaven, but also all of the planetary spheres. And actually it's even worse, since Aristotle, following the astronomical theory produced in Plato's Academy by men like Eudoxus, believed that each planetary motion must be explained as a combination of several simple rotations. This explains why the planet moves in a wandering path across the sky from night to night. Aristotle seems to have improved upon the mathematicians here by positing several actual physical spheres for each required planetary motion, with further spheres to counteract those motions to prevent them from being passed on to lower planets. Eudoxus and others had simply observed that combining enough circular motions would yield the right mathematical calculation for expressing, say, the motion of Venus, but they postulated no physical mechanism. Aristotle instead assumes that there are real physical spheres, and to account for the planetary motions we see, we will need several dozen of them, each of which needs its own immaterial mover. So God is not, for Aristotle, utterly unique. He is simply the greatest and most important of the bodiless celestial movers. As Aristotle says, earlier thinkers had a vague intuition of this truth when they spoke of many gods. There are indeed numerous divine beings, but they are not the squabbling family of Hesiod and Homer. Aristotle follows the lead of Xenophanes and Plato by scrubbing the gods clean of almost all human features. They are simply separate, immaterial substances, and they cause the various heavenly spheres to move. So far, so good, except that it's hard to see how immaterial beings can make spheres move smoothly, not presumably by getting out and pushing. Aristotle does have an answer to this question, which he gives in the 12th book of his Metaphysics. Here, Aristotle presents his theory of the divine as an improvement on Plato. He has captured something of what Plato wanted to do with his theory of forms by tracing physical phenomena back to immaterial causes. But whereas the forms, according to Aristotle at least, can't really explain anything, Aristotle's celestial movers will give rise to simple, circular motions which go on to cause everything else. Aristotle is no doubt right that it is a mystery how the form of large causes things to be large, but his story will only count as an improvement if he can tell us how God moves the outermost heaven, and how the other divine movers move their spheres. When Aristotle answers this question, he winds up admitting that the divine does after all have something in common with humans, for the sole activity of the divine movers turns out to be a distinctively human activity, thinking. These movers are nothing but separate intellects, and the spheres move in imitation of their eternal thinking by performing eternal circular motions. So Aristotle describes God as a kind of final cause, saying that it moves the outermost heaven the way that the beloved moves the lover, just as the pretty girl at the dance makes the boys shuffle shyly towards her without doing anything herself, God can, without moving, cause other things to move, out of their aspiration to be like the divine. Here again, we have an idea that will inspire centuries of philosophers, and it isn't hard to see why. For Jewish, Christian, and Muslim readers, the notion that God is the final object of love and desire in the universe was, if you'll pardon the pun, highly attractive. Still though, has Aristotle really given us a story about why God and the other movers are thinking? Why couldn't they be doing something else? Granted, he has argued that they are immaterial, and the activity that we perform without using any part of our body is thinking. This seems to have been enough to make Aristotle leap to his conclusion. God is immaterial, and he must be doing something. When we do something immaterial, we are thinking, therefore God thinks. This simply assumes, rather than arguing, that there is only one kind of immaterial activity. But there are a few things Aristotle could say in his defence. He might insist that it is needlessly complicated to presuppose further immaterial kinds of activity. If we know of one already, namely thinking, why postulate another one? Moreover, he might argue that thinking simply is immaterial activity, that the two are one and the same. After all, what is it for us to think apart from possessing form immaterially? So if God is doing something and is immaterial, it follows more or less from Aristotle's definition of thinking that God is thinking. Even if we grant this, we'll want to know at least one more thing. What is God thinking about? Aristotle responds that, since we're talking about God, we need to allow him to think about the best possible object. There are some things that it would be better not to think about at all. God is clearly not thinking about where he left his keys. In fact, if God is going to think about the absolutely best thing, there's only one candidate—himself. God will be, as Aristotle famously puts it, thought thinking about thought, sometimes paraphrased as thought thinking itself. This phrase is famous, but also a bit disturbing. Are we being presented with a divine navel-gazer? A God who does nothing day after day for all eternity, but think about himself? This sounds disappointing. After all, if God is nothing but an intellect who thinks himself, then the only thing he can think about is, what, the fact that he's thinking about himself? Sounds not only self-absorbed, but rather pointless. Some interpreters assume that for Aristotle, God thinks about everything but indirectly. Since he is the cause of the first celestial motion, which leads to all the other motions, he could grasp all things as implications of his own causal influence. But Aristotle certainly doesn't say this explicitly, and actually I don't think he was too worried about the content of divine thought. I think he just meant to say that whatever God thinks about, God must be permanently self-aware. Just as we, at our best moments, consciously reflect on our own knowledge, and what is philosophy if not such conscious self-reflection, so God permanently thinks of himself as thinking about whatever else it is that he thinks about. The extent of his knowledge regarding other things may be left as an open question. At any rate, it's clear that Aristotle seriously intends us to regard this first celestial mover, the so-called prime mover, as worthy of respect and perhaps even something like worship. I'm not saying that he wants us to go to the temple of Zeus and sacrifice animals to the prime mover, but he does end his discussion of God in the metaphysics with an unusually rhetorical passage identifying the prime mover as the ultimate source of order in our cosmos. It not only causes the motion of the outermost heaven, but also somehow coordinates all the other motions. Quoting a line from Homer, Aristotle finishes with a flourish, saying, The rule of many is not good. Let there be one ruler. He seems to be hinting that his God is not just perfect but also providential. Again, authors in future generations will take note and take advantage, weaving Aristotle's theology together with the teachings of revealed religion. Aristotle's God is very much a god of the philosophers, in every sense of that phrase. The most appropriate type of worship is no doubt what Aristotle himself does, to contemplate God through reasoned argument. And God is himself a kind of philosopher, but better, a pure intellect who always thinks, always thinks about his thinking, and never has to go to sleep. God thus provides a standard for all other things to imitate. The heavens imitate his thinking by their unending celestial rotations, even plants and animals imitate the divine through reproduction, which allows them to attain a kind of immortality of their own. Their species will live on endlessly, although the individuals die. As for us, we can imitate God by doing philosophy. If this all leads Aristotle's readers to infer that Aristotle is the most godlike man they know, that would probably be okay with him. But there is another way for us to imitate God. God is the ruler of all things, who brings order and harmony. We can do something similar in our practical affairs. By setting up sound systems of governance in our cities, we humans can imitate the order of the universe, an idea already endorsed by Plato in The Republic and the Timaeus. What systems would produce the best possible order? To find out, we'll need to turn to another Aristotelian treatise, which is in no small part a response to The Republic, and which handles its political proposals just as roughly as the metaphysics handles Plato's theory of forms. But I'm sure Plato wouldn't mind your electing to join me next time for Aristotle's Political Philosophy here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Constitutional Conventions, Aristotle's Political Philosophy. No one is likely to confuse Aristotle with Oscar Wilde. He is not exactly known for his wit or fine style. If you're looking for snappy aphorisms in Greek philosophy, you're better off with Heraclitus, author of epigrams like The Road Up Is The Road Down, or even the Oracle of Delphi, where one could read the immortal advice, Know Thyself. And yet, Aristotle did produce his fair share of memorable quotations. There is his insistence that nature does nothing in vain, his observation in the metaphysics that being is said in many ways. In the Ethics, explaining that happiness is a whole life of virtue, and not just virtue exercised for a brief time, he observes that one swallow does not make a summer. But perhaps Aristotle's most famous phrase appears in his work The Politics, when he describes man as a political animal. At one level, this is simply an empirical observation. Humans have a natural tendency to gather together into groups, not only families, but also smaller communities on the order of villages, and ultimately cities. As I have mentioned before, the word politics relates to the Greek word for city, polis. Aristotle, like Plato before him, considers the city-state or polis to be the natural and maximum size for a political community. Of course, both were aware that larger political unions were possible. They knew of the Persian Empire, and closer to home, pan-Mediterranean groups like the Delian League, led by Athens. But when Aristotle talks about political arrangements, he has in mind not the modern nation-state, or for that matter, empires or leagues of nations, he is thinking about cities. Of course, if it is natural for humans to gather together into cities, then calling man a political animal is not merely descriptive. Remember, nature does nothing in vain. So if humans naturally gather together, there must be a good reason for it. Thus, a central question of Aristotle's politics is, what is the city for? The answer to this question should structure our political philosophy. We should also remember that at the beginning of his ethics, Aristotle claimed to be embarking on political philosophy. His ethics and his politics are explicitly presented as connected works. So it is no surprise that for Aristotle, the goal of the city is closely related to the proper goal of the individual. In the ethics, Aristotle told us that happiness is pursued through a life of reason and virtue. In the politics, he will tell us how political affairs can be arranged to facilitate such a life. An appealing consequence of this is that, for Aristotle, the point of political affairs is to promote the good life of all its citizens. A government does not exist for the benefit of those who govern, but for the whole community. Thus, when he classifies the different possible types of political constitution, he contrasts three legitimate types to their perversions. The legitimate types play the role a political constitution is meant to play. They are kingship, aristocracy, and what Aristotle calls constitutional government. Confusingly, he uses the Greek word polytheia both for this third system and for the general concept of a constitution, which applies to all three types. The difference between the three is basically the number of people involved in governing the city. A king rules by himself, aristocrats as a small group of elites, and in a constitutional government the many rule for the good of the city. But in each case we have a genuine political constitution insofar as the purpose in view is the good of the whole community. The three constitutional types become perverted when the rulers look instead to their own good. King's leadership becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and constitutional government becomes democracy. As when we discuss Plato's Republic, we are apt to be disturbed at seeing democracy classed as a perversion. But what Aristotle means by democracy is a situation where the largest group in the city, who are usually the poorer citizens, simply wield power for their own advantage. Unlike tyranny, or oligarchy, this involves seeking the benefit of a large number of people, but it is unjust in precisely the way that tyranny or oligarchy is unjust. One group of citizens has simply got power over the others, and is using that power to take whatever it can get. Aristotle didn't need to read Karl Marx to develop an acute sensitivity to the possibility of class conflict. In fact, the idea that the rich and the poor are locked in a struggle for power is prominent in his politics, and not unreasonably, because the tension between these two classes had led to internal conflict in many Greek states. This condition was referred to as stasis, a kind of debilitating civil struggle in which a city turns against itself, rather than devoting its energies to making its citizens happy. So far, so good. It sounds like we would quite like Aristotle advising our own political leaders, which, incidentally, is exactly what he is out to do in the politics. He says many times that he wants this work to be useful for the hands-on task of legislating. On the other hand, as in the ethics, he stresses that practical philosophy must allow for the infinite variety of the situations we face. There can be no universal rules that would allow us to stipulate detailed laws that should apply to all cities. Variations in population, geography, and other factors make this impossible. But still, should we try to arrange a seat in the cabinet for Aristotle, or at least someone who has made a careful study of his politics? If any presidents or prime ministers are listening and would like some advice, I could probably fit that into my schedule. But hang on a minute, there are aspects of Aristotle's politics that will strike us as a bit less charming. I've said that he encourages the city to look after the welfare of all its citizens, but I didn't tell you who counts as a citizen. Aristotle devotes some attention to the issue of what it means to be a citizen and concludes that a citizen is someone who is actively involved with political affairs. Not all citizens will necessarily be running the city at any given time, but they may rotate into official duties and must at least participate in the political process. Thus, in a tyranny, nobody in the city apart from the tyrant is truly a citizen, by Aristotle's definition. Only the tyrant has a say in the running of the city, and the tyrant's welfare is pursued to the exclusion of everybody else. So, men must pass a high standard in order to qualify as citizens. They must be ready to help govern, and they can qualify because of their nobility, their wealth, or their virtue, depending on the constitution. For instance, an aristocracy puts a lot of emphasis on nobility and wealth. But no matter what constitution we are talking about, Aristotle assumes that it will be men alone who can pass the standard and be citizens. Plato had argued in the Republic that women can perform all the same activities as men, even if not equally, and that there must therefore be women guardians and rulers in the ideal city. Aristotle has already said in his ethics that men and women cannot share perfect friendship, because women are inferior to men. Now, in the politics he goes further, saying that the rational power in women lacks control or authority. Women need men to tell them what to do, since they are by nature unable to regulate their own affairs properly, never mind the affairs of the city. Obviously this is not Aristotle's finest hour, but wait, it gets even worse. In this same part of the politics, the opening book, in fact, he launches into his notorious discussion of slavery. As you probably know, slavery was a pervasive phenomenon in the ancient world. It was very common for warfare to involve the enslavement of conquered peoples, and a wealthy Greek or Roman household would typically include slaves who did menial, and even not-so-menial, tasks. In Aristotle's account of slavery, we see the downside of his fidelity to common opinion and empirical research. He seems to think that, since slavery is such a widespread phenomenon, it must be explained philosophically, and his explanation sounds uncomfortably like a defense of the indefensible. Even this, though, is perhaps letting him off too lightly. After all, Aristotle is willing to reject received opinion when it suits him, and he is aware that rejecting slavery is an option because he mentions a view held by some others, according to which all slavery is unnatural. But he has no truck with this ancient abolitionism, and instead adopts what he no doubt sees as one of his characteristically moderate middle positions. He argues that some people are what he calls natural slaves, and that it is not only permissible to enslave such people, but actually the right thing to do. A natural slave is, as he puts it, a living tool, and is in an even worse condition than a free woman when it comes to conducting his own life. It is good for the slave to be owned, just as it is good for a woman to be dominated by her husband or father. On the bright side, this does lead Aristotle to criticize some Greek practices of enslavement. It is wrong, on his view, to enslave those who are not natural slaves. So putting whole Greek cities into bondage after victory in war is definitely not acceptable, given that many who live in that city will not be natural slaves. These are people whose souls make them fit to be citizens participating in a political community, not mere tools of other men. Plato made a similar point in the Republic, exhorting the Greeks to stop enslaving one another but also saying that those outside the fold of Greek society, so-called barbarians, were fit for enslavement. Aristotle agrees, remarking for instance that everyone who lives in Asia is a natural slave. He connects this to climate, in a way familiar from the Hippocratic corpus. There too it is said that one's character is affected by one's environment. It just so happens, according to Aristotle, that the climate of Greece is perfectly temperate, so that the Greeks tend not to be naturally slavish. It follows that barbarians cannot really engage in proper political arrangements since they do not have the souls one would need to engage successfully in such arrangements. And indeed, he says bluntly that among the barbarians no one is a natural ruler. Their cities are communities of slaves. Clearly, this is Aristotle at his most repellent. Still, it's worth noting that his views on women and slavery hang together with more attractive views he holds on other topics. For instance, in his Ethics he has argued that the happy life is a life lived in accordance with reason, a conclusion many find plausible. Aristotle's ideas about women and slavery are simply a corollary of this, given the empirical claim that such people are not fully endowed with reason. Such people will be better off if someone who is fully rational takes charge of them. When Aristotle comes to discuss his vision of the ideal political arrangement, we find the same ideas in play. He doesn't really get around to this until Book 7 out of the 8 books of the Politics. The last two books are almost like a miniature version of the Republic, a work Aristotle has been engaging with explicitly throughout the whole of the Politics. He agrees with very few of Plato's recommendations, but does take over the Republic's agenda of topics. He not only discusses defective types of city and the situation of women, but also the nature of the ideal city and how education would work in such a city. On these topics, Aristotle again makes clear that he is writing for real legislators. One can imagine him thinking of a reader who is for instance charged with drafting a legal code or settling a colony somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. Here you might recall that, according to legend, Heraclitus was asked to write laws for his home city of Ephesus, and the great sophist Protagoras was appointed by Pericles to legislate for a new colony. So, Aristotle provides plenty of detail, despite his strictures about universal pronouncements in the practical sphere. For instance, he recommends that the city have easy access to the sea, and that it should build defensive walls. Regarding political arrangements, in the ideal case there will be a group of excellent men who serve as citizens and share in governing the city. They will attempt to create the conditions needed to achieve a happy life. For instance, the citizens should have plenty of leisure, not least to engage in philosophy, though these same citizens may also need to serve as soldiers, much as Plato had recommended. Now Aristotle is sounding fairly reasonable again, except that we must remember that, as in the Republic, this ruling class will depend on the presence of many laborers and farmers to keep the city going. And of course there will be slaves and women as well, who will be excluded from the benefits provided by the ideal city. That's the optimal solution, but it isn't how things usually go. Aristotle prides himself on being a realist. One gets the sense that he finds Plato's exclusively utopian project faintly ridiculous, however much he also indulges in a description of the best possible city at the end of the politics. Before getting to the ideal case, he spent a lot of time discussing politics in the real world. If we are interested in understanding the political dynamics that prevail now, perhaps with a view to improving legislation, rather than starting from scratch, we will want to study the cities that already exist. I've mentioned before the ancient report that Aristotle and his students collected a large number of real constitutions for cities, and he is clearly drawing on this material, as he alludes frequently to how they do things down in Sparta or Carthage. From this mass of information, Aristotle concludes that the basic types of constitution are the ones already mentioned, kingship, aristocracy, and constitutional government, with the constant threat that these may turn into the perverted versions which look to the interests of the rulers rather than the community. Since Aristotle assumes that his ideal city is usually going to remain just that, an ideal, he also describes the best arrangement that will be practical in usual circumstances. This brings us back to the opposition between rich and poor. In a pure aristocracy or oligarchy, the rich and well-born run the show. In a pure democracy or constitutional government, it is the majority of the free men, who are usually less wealthy, who call the shots. Aristotle sees both arrangements as excessive. He reminds us that for the individual person, virtue is a mean between extremes, as he showed in the Ethics. The same will be true at the level of the city. What we want is an arrangement that serves the interests of both the rich few and the poorer majority. So how can we achieve this intermediary solution which Aristotle calls a mixed state? Aristotle's recommendation will sound familiar to anyone who follows British or American politics, empower the middle class. The citizens who are neither rich nor poor, but in the middle, should occupy the most influential roles in the city. Of course, one might wonder why the middle class is necessarily going to look to the benefit of all the citizens. Certainly nowadays, some worry that the middle class might impose heavy taxes on the rich, or withhold much-needed support from the poor. But Aristotle seems to assume that the interests of the middle class will naturally form a kind of compromise between the interests of the rich and the poor. Of course, this might not happen in every case, but it's not implausible that the interests of this class would overlap with the interests of both rich and poor. Now I know what you're thinking. What about Alexander the Great? Aristotle was the tutor of the greatest conqueror of the ancient world, a man who was revered as a god in his own lifetime and taken as a model of leadership by kings and emperors for centuries to come. Yet this advice about the middle class sounds like it could have been written by Tony Blair. If we were hoping Aristotle would allude specifically to the Macedonian royal family, we will go away from the politics disappointed. But he does say something relevant to such a remarkable political animal as Alexander. In the midst of his discussion of the various political arrangements, he pauses to consider a case where a small group, or single man, possesses excellence that outstrips the rest of the city put together. If such a superhuman ruler were to appear, Aristotle thinks, the right thing would be for everybody simply to submit to him. Objecting to this would be like objecting to the rule of Zeus. Clearly, this is, to put it mildly, an exceptional circumstance. But it does highlight an assumption Aristotle has been making throughout. Political power is naturally apportioned to those whose gifts make them fit to wield it. At one level, this is a neutral observation. The reason democracies arise is that the majority are formidable when they work together, simply in virtue of being so numerous. The reason oligarchies arise is that wealth is a source of political strength. But Aristotle is also saying that this is how things ought to be. If a man is excellent, he should help run the city. And if a whole group brings military or economic strength to the table, it's only right that they should wield a corresponding degree of power. As with Plato, Aristotle's political ideas spring from deep convictions about justice. But he does not have in mind anything like our modern idea of human rights. He's happy to shut women and natural slaves out of political life because they cannot contribute anything. The justice he has in mind has more to do with reciprocation. Those who make the city strong should have a say in the decision-making. In Aristotle's political philosophy, excellence is both the source of political legitimacy and the fruit of the polis. The more excellent men live in a city, the better the city will be run, and the more we can call the city a success. Its purpose was, after all, to produce excellent men, men who are happy according to the standards of his Nicomachean ethics. This is why his ideal city is simply a city of excellent citizens supported by an underclass of women and laborers who cannot achieve excellence but whose lives are improved by living under good rulers. This condition serves as the final end of all cities, the ideal towards which real legislators should work. But, as I've said, Aristotle thinks of himself as a realist. He wants to provide not only rational argument about political affairs but also the tools for persuading people to change their beliefs. He recognizes that less-than-perfect reasoning, and also emotion, play a major role in our practical lives and in any real city. This interest in political and social affairs is expressed not only in the politics but also to other famous works, the rhetoric and the poetics. I hope I can persuade you to join me for a discussion of both, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stage Directions – Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. So, you've heard of Aesop, right? The Greek guy with all the fables involving animals? It turns out that Aristotle is one of the earliest sources to mention him. He relates the following anecdote. Aesop was in the island city-state of Samos, home of Pythagoras, pleading the case of a city leader who was accused of exploiting his position for money. Aesop, of course, had a fable ready for just this occasion. It seems there was this fox who was trapped in a hole by a river. Fleas started sucking his blood, and the poor fox had no defence. Then a hedgehog happened by, and offered to scatter the fleas away. No thanks, said the fox. The fleas are all full of my blood. If you chase them away, other fleas will just come and they'll still be hungry. In the same way, concluded Aesop, my client is already rich, so you may as well leave him alone, better than replacing him with a poorer man who would have reason to steal more of your money. Now that, my friends, is rhetoric. Aristotle tells the story to illustrate the use of fables, just one of many techniques he explains in his work, The Rhetoric. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle takes up the themes we saw Plato exploring in dialogues like the Gorgias. In the ancient Greek world, and especially in democratic Athens, public speaking was one of the most important skills an educated gentleman could possess. It was a path to political power, and would also come in handy if you were ever involved in a court case. So, already before Plato, as we saw when we looked at the Sophists, numerous authors had turned their attention to the skills and techniques needed to persuade an audience. Gorgias was only one such author. Many others are mentioned in Aristotle's rhetoric. So, this is one area where Aristotle was no pioneer. He may have been the first to write about logic and zoology, the first to write a systematic treatise on the soul, and so on. But, when he turned his attention to rhetoric, he was adding one more volume to a shelf full of treatises on the subject. Of course, when Aristotle can't claim to be a pioneer, he does the next best thing, he complains that everyone who has come before him got it all wrong. In this case, he blames previous rhetoricians for covering only part of the subject. They mostly tell you how to whip up emotion in an audience. This is an important rhetorical technique. As we'll see, Aristotle too discusses it in some depth. But, the rhetoricians have missed out something even more important, namely the classification and study of what Aristotle calls enthememes. These are arguments that are designed not to prove a proposition, but simply to persuade an audience. Aristotle's greatest contribution to the study of rhetoric will be a classification of these enthememes, or persuasive arguments. Incidentally, I should mention that Aristotle's criticism of his predecessors has led some scholars to worry about the rhetoric as it has come down to us. Can this beginning part, where he chastises authors of rhetorical textbooks for concentrating on emotion, really belong to the same original work as the careful discussion of emotion that comes later on? Another problem is that the third and final book of the rhetoric suddenly adds a long discussion of style and metaphor, which doesn't seem to be part of the plan envisioned in books 1 and 2. So, as with works like the Metaphysics, there is concern that our rhetoric is not a text composed by Aristotle so much as a later compilation of Aristotelian material. I won't get into this any further, except to say that I don't see the point about emotions as very problematic. The criticism of the predecessors is not that they focus on emotions, but that they focus only on emotions, which is only one of several topics a good study of rhetoric would include. Because Aristotle puts enthememes, not emotion, at the center of his story, he sees rhetoric as a discipline that is closely related to logic. In his logical works, Aristotle discussed demonstrative arguments, which prove things with complete certainty, and also dialectical arguments, which argue from agreed premises. Now, in the rhetoric, he tackles another kind of argument, arguments that are persuasive. Along with these enthememes, the good rhetorician needs to be able to use examples. The fable used by Aesop is an example, not an enthymeme. Aristotle compares the use of examples to the use of induction in the proper philosophical sciences. Someone doing zoology might observe common features of pigeons and chickens, and reach a better understanding of birds through induction. Similarly, Aesop asks his audience to think that someone who is already sated is less likely to do us harm, whether that someone is a blood-sucking flea or a blood-sucking politician. But it's the enthememes that tend to provoke the most interest among philosophical readers of the rhetoric. What does it mean for an argument to be merely persuasive? Well, it's easy to see why enthememe differs from demonstration. A demonstrative argument must be based ultimately on first principles, deal with universal necessities, and so on—all the constraints we met back in episode 36. By contrast, Aristotle actually discourages the rhetorician from building a long chain of inferences to reach his conclusion, since this will just confuse the audience. And a rhetorician will deal with some particular decision or case, not universal necessities. It's harder, though, to see the difference between enthememes and dialectical arguments. A dialectical argument is one based on merely agreed premises. You might agree the premises just for the sake of argument, but more typically we choose premises that are reputable and widely acceptable, so-called endoxa, whether or not they are definitely true. An enthememe does something very similar by appealing to premises that the audience will find compelling, whether these are true or not. Perhaps the right way to think about this is that an enthememe is just a type or class of dialectical argument. After all, in rhetoric, we do not just choose any old reputable premises, we argue on the basis of what will persuade the specific audience before us. Aristotle tells us, for instance, what young people or old people are apt to find convincing, to help us tailor our arguments to our target audience. Also, dialectical arguments can concern any topic, even abstract ones like metaphysics or the soul. Enthememes, by contrast, deal with practical questions. Thus, Aristotle says that rhetoric is akin to ethics or political philosophy as well as logic. Just as in ethics, we use reason to deal with a specific practical situation, so in rhetoric we try to adapt our arguments to the case we are arguing and the audience that confronts us. Since rhetoric, like ethics, is concerned with the infinitely variable practicalities of individual cases, Aristotle cannot offer us ready-made arguments that will work in every context. Instead, as in ethics, he offers us rules of thumb, strategies that tend to be useful in many contexts. He calls these by the Greek word topoi, which means places. The word probably comes from a memory trick used to recall all the various rhetorical tropes. You might imagine yourself walking around Athens and associate each type of enthememe with a place in the city. Aristotle discusses this trick in another text called on memory. Dialectic in general uses this same technique of remembering argument types, which can be filled out with detail to be applied to the case at hand. This is why Aristotle's work on dialectic is called the topics. If you've been wondering about that since the first Aristotle episode, then I'm sorry for leaving you in suspense for so long. In the case of rhetoric, the so-called topoi would include things like invoking precedent, itemizing the possible results of a proposed course of action to show that all are unwelcome, using wordplay based on the names of the people involved in a case, or appealing to the audience's base desires if the opponent has appealed to their noble desires, and vice versa. So there are many types of rhetorical argument. But overall, there are only three kinds of rhetoric because there were three contexts in ancient Greek society that called for rhetorical speech. First, you might speak in a court setting, whether in a lawsuit or a criminal case. Second, there were more explicitly political contexts, as when you are trying to persuade the Athenian assembly to make some decision. Third and finally, you might speak in praise or blame of a specific person, for instance in a funeral oration. Aristotle calls the types of rhetoric corresponding to these contexts, forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. In none of the three types would you restrict yourself to enthymemes. Audiences get bored with strings of unbroken argument. Rather, you would scatter them through your speech, along with examples and other material, for instance a narrative of how a crime was committed when you are prosecuting a court case. Whatever the topic, what you're aiming at is not to prove your case beyond all doubt, though that would of course be great if you could do it. Rather, you're just trying to show that your case is the more likely one. Aristotle's discussion of forensic oratory doesn't use the standard innocent until proven guilty. It's more like, he's probably guilty, and that's good enough for us. So you might defend your client by saying, would he start a fight with that other man as he's accused of doing? My client is small, and small men don't usually start fights with bigger men. Or you might, you know, say something about a fox and a hedgehog. In addition to tipping the balance of probability with arguments and examples, you have two other tools at your disposal. It's very important to get the audience to think that you, the speaker, are credible. So Aristotle gives advice on how to make oneself seem virtuous and trustworthy before an audience. The other tool is that good old standby whipping up emotion. This leads Aristotle to give his most in-depth discussion of the emotions in Book II of the Rhetoric. What he's really interested in here, as so often, is underlying causes. What is it that makes people angry or induces them to feel pity? He shows himself a keen student of human psychology, observing for instance that we get angry when we are insulted, and we get angrier if the insult comes from a friend than from an enemy. A knowledge of these causes will help us provoke an audience into pity, fear, anger, and so on, in order to bring that audience onto our side when making speeches. Now, I know what you're thinking. Isn't it pretty underhanded to persuade someone by manipulating their emotions? In fact, why isn't Aristotle being just a bit more judgmental here? Pretty much everything I've described him saying could have been said by a sophist. You can imagine Aristotle's old teacher Plato sitting in the corner listening in tight-lipped annoyance as Aristotle teaches us how to argue on both sides of any argument, just as Gorgias and Protagoras did, and how to appeal to the audience's emotions as well as their reason. But of course Aristotle isn't claiming, with Gorgias and Protagoras, that rhetoric is the greatest of human arts. For him, rhetoric is a necessary tool in Greek society and thus one worth understanding, but, unlike demonstration and even dialectic, it does not help discover the truth. On the bright side, Aristotle claims that those who argue for the truth tend to be more persuasive, all else being equal. Still, a rhetorician will argue whatever case it falls to him to defend, and the more skilled he is, the better the chance of his winning. In this respect, it seems Gorgias was right to compare rhetoric to boxing. It is a technique that can be used in both good causes and bad. This doesn't mean, however, that any device used to persuade people counts as rhetoric. Aristotle mentions a number of arguments which seem to be enthymemes but don't qualify because they are downright fallacious. Enthymemes merely persuade rather than proving something to their audience, but that doesn't mean that they are allowed to be invalid. Rhetoric may not be philosophy, but, like philosophy, and boxing for that matter, it does have rules. The rhetoric has a number of things in common with one final Aristotelian work I want to look at, the Poetics. Like the rhetoric, the Poetics seems incomplete since it famously lacks a discussion of comedy and deals mostly with tragedy. Again, like the rhetoric, it deals with the style and structure of a whole type of discourse and grapples with the topic of human emotion. Finally, it too has a political context. This is less obvious with the Poetics than with the rhetoric, but remember that Plato's discussion of poetry came in his political masterwork, the Republic. Aristotle himself discusses music, which for the Greeks is closely linked to poetry, in the final book of his politics. His purpose there is to discuss education, and it's interesting to note that along the way he mentions one of the most famous ideas expressed in the Poetics, that poetry can give rise to a kind of purging, in Greek katharsis. In fact, Aristotle doesn't say nearly as much about katharsis as you might expect, given how famous the idea is. If anything, he says more, though still not much, while dealing with education in the politics. The political and educational purposes of poetry remain mostly tacit in the Poetics. The work falls most neatly into the area of philosophy we call aesthetics. What Aristotle is out to do in most of the Poetics, or at least the part that has come down to us, is to tell us what makes a beautiful or pleasing poem. He tells us at the outset that there are various types of poetry, just as he mentions different types of rhetoric in his work on that topic. Aristotle's habit of providing classifications is on display here, as is his interest in the purposes and structures of things. For most of the surviving Poetics, he discusses the purposes and structures of tragedy, though a brief discussion of epic poetry features at the end. If you were to summarize Aristotle's attitude towards tragedy in five words, you would say, he knows what he likes. He has firm views on what makes for good tragedy, and he names names, expressing admiration for Euripides, while in the epic context he's a big fan of Homer. He defends both of them against would-be literary critics, while complaining about other authors. Euripides delivers what a good tragedian should. His works purge the audience of emotions such as pity and fear. As it happens, Aristotle also discussed pity in the rhetoric. There, he told us that a pitiable story is one that we can imagine happening to ourselves. He's thinking along these lines in the Poetics, when he tells us that the tragic poet should not depict a bad man striking good fortune, or bad fortune befalling a man so excellent that we cannot relate to him. Nor should they show a bad man getting the bad fortune he deserves, since this won't be met with sympathy. It's comedy that properly deals with bad people. Tragedy is a grander enterprise, and should depict people who are better than average. A decent but basically normal man, Aristotle's famous tragic hero, should have some dramatic turn of fortune for the worse, by means of a reversal or sudden discovery. This unleashes the torrent of pity and fear in the audience which will purge them of their emotions, and thus give them pleasure. This then is the purpose of tragedy, what we've learned to call its final cause. And, as we've also learned, formal causes are tailored to serve final causes. Just as the form or structure of a giraffe serves its biological purposes, so the form of a tragedy should relentlessly serve the aim of generating pity and fear. For Aristotle, this is achieved not so much by depicting characters or spectacles of such-and-such a sort. He wouldn't be impressed by method actors or special effects. He instead lays all his emphasis on plot, and insists that a good plot has a unity of action which proceeds in a plausible and straightforward way towards the moment of reversal or discovery. He enumerates the parts of a tragedy and argues that they need to form a unified whole, just as the parts of a giraffe do. This notion was influential much later, when playwrights in modern Europe expanded on it to include the idea that a play should be unified in terms of time and place as well, rather than changing the setting from scene to scene. This idea doesn't arise in Aristotle, but it's not too far from the spirit of his poetics. The implicit and occasionally explicit conversation partner throughout the poetics is, of course, Plato. Aristotle never has the Republic far from his thoughts as he writes, and one can read the poetics as a subtle response to the aesthetic theory of that dialogue. One of the most striking differences is also one of the most basic. Where Plato complains that poetry is an imitative art, and thus an art removed from reality, Aristotle observes more cheerfully that imitation, or mimesis, is naturally pleasing to all men. Our delight in imitation goes hand in hand with our delight in learning. The reason we enjoy poetry is that all men desire to know, as Aristotle says at the beginning of his metaphysics. Here Aristotle seems to turn on its head a challenge made to Socrates in the Republic, when Glaucon says that people who enjoy things like the theater, the so-called lovers of sights and sounds, are like philosophers in their desire to learn. Socrates responds with a rigorous distinction between philosophers who seek knowledge of what is and these sight lovers who are content with what both is and is not. Aristotle seems to be more relaxed about this. He's happy to see both impulses as part of the same natural human tendency. This is only one of innumerable cases in his writings where Aristotle engages closely with Plato. He doesn't just vaguely allude to Platonist ideas, he writes with specific dialogues, even specific passages in mind. He apparently expects his reader to know Plato well, since he often responds to the dialogues without bothering to say explicitly that he is doing so. Of course, Aristotle is usually thought of as an anti-Platonist. As I've said before, he excuses himself for attacking Plato with the famous remark that truth is dearer than our friends. But this doesn't do justice to the subtlety of Aristotle's relationship to his master. That's the topic I'm going to look at next week in a very special interview which will mark the 50th episode of the podcast. So please join me, and not one, but two friends to get at the truth about Aristotle's attitudes towards Plato here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be a very special one. To celebrate the 50th episode of the podcast, I'm going to be doing a conversation with my two colleagues in Greek philosophy here at King's College. So I'd like to welcome M.M. McCabe and Raphal Wolf to the podcast. And the topic we're going to be looking at today is Aristotle's response to Plato. And I guess that a lot of us were brought up with a kind of cliched idea about how Aristotle reacts to Plato, namely quite negatively. So Plato basically comes up in the works of Aristotle as a target or someone who has theories that need to be demolished. And I think that something the three of us agree about is that that's much too simple a way of thinking about it. So Raphal, could you maybe start us off by saying why there might be a more positive picture of the way Aristotle reacts to Plato? Yeah. There was, I mean, the view that Aristotle is basically trying to sort of blow the plate out of the water, to put it technically, is quite a, was quite an influential one, I think still is in some people's minds. But I think maybe one of the ways to think about why that might not be quite right is perhaps to think about Aristotle's own methodology. And he's very, in certain places, at least very explicit about this. And one of the things Aristotle seems really interested in is preserving as many views as possible, both, to use the cliched phrase, among the many and among the wise. So he tends to think that if human beings generally have a certain view about something, there's going to be a grain of truth in that view. He has a very positive view, basically, about what other people's beliefs are going to be like and are going to be worth taking notice of. So if you actually read the methodology, he doesn't say, my job is to show how all these other blokes are wrong and how I'm right. He says, my job is to account for as many of the other views that are out there as I can, both in terms of views that human beings seem to hold generally, as far as he's concerned. So that's the many. And also views that, you know, clever people who've spent a lot of time thinking about the issues, the whys, you'd expect them to be somewhere near the truth, given that they're really clever and spent all this time on it. So actually, if you start with Aristotle's own professed methodology, it would be very surprising if what came out the other end was something like this really great guy, Plato. And there's no question, Aristotle thinks, you know, he was a student of Plato, you know, he was a great guy, that he'd end up saying Plato got it all wrong. Now that's not a knockdown argument, but it's a way, I think, of equipping ourselves to have a look at what Aristotle then says a bit more specifically in the light of his own methodology. And that might suggest that we wouldn't be getting a demolition of Plato. We'd be getting something at least much more nuanced from somebody who seems to think that there's always going to be some measure of truth in what wise people have to say. I guess, though, the question then would be whether Plato is just one more wise person or whether Plato has a special status for Aristotle. In fact, sometimes Aristotle does list various views of various predecessors, and it's sometimes almost alarming the way he lists a bunch of pre-Socratics and then Plato, as if Plato was just, as I put it on other occasions, the last pre-Aristotelian. And Plato, therefore, would be kind of on a par with, say, Parmenides and Heraclitus, as if he'd never met Plato. So does Plato have a special status among the wise for Aristotle, do we think? Yes. Yes, I think he does, but I think maybe one needs to go one step further from what Raphal said in thinking about what it is he hopes to get from the many and the wise. Certainly, I agree with how you characterize it, but there's a bit more that he thinks he's going to get, which is that somehow or other they're all seeking to explain the right things. And the coordination of the views of the many and the wise isn't just assembling the maximal set of truths. It's about seeing how they explain each other. It's about seeing how we might relate them to each other in such a way that they might be explanatory. And sometimes it's Aristotle who does the explaining, but sometimes the relation is genuinely dialectical between him and Plato in a way that he's imagining them engaged on a kind of discussion of a topic rather than dealing with whether some particular view is true. And it seems to me that one of the things that's often underestimated in reading Aristotle's – in thinking about Aristotle's relation to Plato is how comprehensively dialectical it is and how what he's engaging with is not something like an individual thesis or an individual proposal of Plato's, but whole swathes of Platonic argument that he's trying to engage with. And the reason for that is that what he's seeking to do is to explain what's true rather than just enumerate what's true. And I think that's perhaps what explains – that there are two kinds of contexts, one of them in which he says something like, you know, X said this and Y said that and Plato said this other thing and here's what I think. But there are other occasions where he's deeply engaged without saying necessarily that it's Plato he's engaged with, with particular texts and dialogues and swathes of argument. And maybe that what he's dealing with are arguments that were around in the academy, but in fact I think the textual details show up much more that what he's doing is tying what he says to particular dialogues rather than particular – But not necessarily by naming them explicitly, right? Exactly. I don't even think the more explicit he is when he names Plato, the less carefully he's engaging with him. We might think that. We might – Or certainly he often engages carefully with Plato without naming him explicitly. But it seems to me that that one argument would be that the reason that that happens is that it's not Plato he's talking to, but academic arguments. But I think maybe what we need not to underestimate is that the dialogues were things that people are reading. So it isn't a kind of arcane thing. If he's referring to some argument in the Phaedo and uses a word that you find in the Phaedo that doesn't appear elsewhere, people would notice in a way that it's much harder for us to pick it up. But once you see this pattern there, it seems to me it's much more pervasive than we might have thought. So by reading Plato very, very carefully, all we're getting ourselves to do is recreate the frame of mind that Aristotle's readers may be intended to have. Something like that, yes. On the other hand, he does sometimes mention Plato explicitly. So maybe we can look at a few famous cases where this happens. And for me, one of the most striking examples is when in the first book of the Ethics, Aristotle explicitly brings up Plato's idea of the form of the good. And he seems to be interested in refuting it. And I guess the way that a lot of people read the Ethics is that he kind of refutes it to get it out of the way, and then he moves on with his own theory. But M.M., I know you think that it's a little bit more complicated than that. Yeah. Roughly what I think is that he uses the engagement with Plato in order to set up what he needs to be able to say in Ethics Book 1, Chapter 7, about function. So this is the so-called function argument where he explains that the good life or happiness for humans would be using reason well because reason is what's specific to us. Right. And I think two separate things happen. The first thing is that he says, well, these accounts of what goodness is, the accounts that you find in the Republic, in Republic Book 6, you might say, that suppose that goodness is something like a uniform property that things have a share in so that things are more or less good, but they're not good in different ways. And Aristotle says this is just a mistake. So Aristotle's argument is, if you like, that goodness is not a property but a qualifier. So he makes his argument that you can understand goodness in terms of function or in terms of contribution to some end or in terms of outcome or input or any of the other things that one might think of in terms of how goodness arranges itself in our lives, that you can only do that if you understand something about the underlying metaphysical structure of the world itself. And he can't make that point in the first instance, it seems to me, without there being something that he's denying, because it's a very complex point to make. And so you make the argument about multiplicity of the good only against the background of its being uniform. So that's the first thing he does. Then, it seems to me, he lifts and deals with a whole lot of arguments that you find in the richer recesses of the Republic to come up with something that actually Plato himself might have agreed with, which is a much more subject-orientated kind of goodness. There's an interesting moment in, I think it's in Chapter 6 of Book 1, and I'm sure this is deliberate, where you're reading about the sort of irreducible plurality of the notion of goodness or however you want to put it, and Aristotle's insistence on this. And then he sort of suddenly, as it were, pauses and says, it's a lovely bit of thinking out loud, which I'm sure is done very deliberately, he says, yes, but all that having been said, you would have thought there's more than just a sort of accidental arbitrary relationship between all these different things that are good. To use a bit of Aristotle, Aristotelian terminology, you'd have thought it's more than just homonomy when you talk about a good sailor or a good meal or whatever variety of ways of kinds of things you might want to label good. So he has this kind of platonic thought, and he says, well, actually, that's quite a reasonable point, but because we're doing ethics, not metaphysics, we're not going to think about that right now. Now, that, to me, he knows that somebody's going to be reading this, and I think the natural reaction of somebody reading this is to say, well, hang on, I want to know what the answer's going to be. And the answer to this question is, I think Aristotle often does this. He often sort of raises a point that seems absolutely crucial, says he's not going to talk about it, but I wonder if that in itself is a kind of dialect. Another trick he learned from Plato. Another trick he learned from Plato, yes. So I think it's just that point where you think Plato's got something going for him, that Aristotle is stopping and making us think about it. So I think there's more going on, even in something like that, than just, well, that's a sort of footnote or a parenthesis. No, on the contrary, when you stop and kind of make a bit of a ceremony about it, you're getting your reader to think, actually, this might be a question you really need to think about in this. Yeah, that's really interesting, because in the way that you two both set it up, I mean, at first it sounded like Plato was just one alternative. So the alternative where you say, well, everything is good in the same way, and everything is good because it participates in the form of the good, so it should all share this property of goodness. And then we're going to have a different view, which is the multiplicity of good. The only thing that a good horse has in common with a good knife is that just as a knife cuts well, a horse runs well or does whatever horses are supposed to do. But as you just said, I mean, Plato doesn't have that first overly simplistic view of the good. And in fact, the example of the knife that cuts well is from the republic. And so you might think that the function argument itself is listed from the republic. You might then think that supposing somebody is reading it and says, well, hang on a minute. Supposing some ancient person who's got the republic in their blood is reading it and makes exactly that response. And then they say, well, hang on a minute. You know, actually now I think about it. The republic doesn't really espouse this view of the good anyway. By the time you get to the beat in the republic when we are talking about the sun, where the form of the good is construed in this ultra-realistic way, we're also talking about the cave. We're talking about how it is that somebody learns to be wise. Well, what else is that than their learning somehow or other in ways that Aristotle himself goes on in Book Two to talk about, learning how to be who they are as best they possibly can. So it seems to me that if you're absolutely right that this would get picked up, that this isn't a… Plato's just the representation of the stuff about ideas is just the springboard and the rest is a proper engagement. I guess the weird thing then is that that's the place where he says, basically, I'm about to attack Plato, but it's okay that I'm doing this because truth is dearer than our friends, the famous slogan. And now I'm wondering if that's kind of a misleading thing for him to say there, because that certainly makes it sound as if Plato's just going to play the role of a target. So is it even more complicated that he kind of tries to act as if Plato's the target, but in fact he knows, and maybe he knows that you know if you know you're Plato, that there's something more subtle going on? Well, it might be that he thinks that some of this Plato would go along with, but some of what he wants to say about the actual realism of goodness he wants to deny. So part of the challenge then that's posed to Plato is whether he can have Platonism and Aristotelianism at once. And Aristotle is saying, we don't need that bit, or we don't need the stuff about the form of the good, we just need the stuff about human function. Give me Republic Book One with the function stuff and forget about Republic Book Six. Maybe to put that even, I think that's absolutely right, maybe to put it even more strongly, you might, going back to the methodology, you might think that what, for example, that maybe what Aristotle thinks Plato's got crucially and importantly right, is there something to be said about the structure of goodness and the relation between goodness and individual goods. And he may have thought that that's, so people would be unnecessarily deterred from seeing that crucial point by all the sort of realistic metaphysical apparatus, let's say that that is Plato's apparatus, and that actually what he might take himself to be doing, you know, without wanting to put it too patronising, though I don't think Aristotle would particularly mind it, would be to rescue the truth in Plato. And I mean if you think about it, otherwise it's a very odd thing to say, well it's a very odd dichotomy, and again I suspect it's sort of deliberate. When somebody says, look, we care about our friends but we care more about the truth than our friends, you might think, you know, caring about the truth and caring about your friends might actually sort of go hand in hand. There's no reason to think that the fact that these, firstly the fact that these people are your friends in the first place must be for some good reason when it's used, and I wanted to get into Aristotle's theory of friendship, but you know you imagine the reason why Aristotle might have been friends with these guys in the first place, was that he rather appreciated the kinds of things they were up to. And then I think, thinking about the methodology of saving as many of the views of the many and the wise as you can, he's trying to do it, and the criticism is a necessary bit of rescuing of what's actually true and important about the theory. Well let's look at another example, and this is going to be a case where Aristotle seems to be engaging with Plato, but without mentioning him explicitly, and this is another example that we've talked about in the past, so maybe you can start off with this M.M. It's about a particular topic about sensation which is basically being able to perceive what are called common sensibles by Aristotle. So can you explain that and explain where it might come from in Plato? Because this isn't really something I've covered in the podcast on either side. So the idea is that when you perceive, you perceive the things that are proper to the senses in question, so you see colour, you hear sound, you taste savour. Actually there are other things that we might think go on when you perceive, for example that you perceive that some particular thing is both savoury and hard, so when something's got two sensible properties, so that there's something in common between those two properties, and building on that then, there are other properties which are just common, like being or moving or... Or shape, which you can see and touch. Shape and all sorts of things, and in fact, although this isn't what Aristotle insists on, being an object would count as a common, I take it. The expression common is something that Aristotle takes directly from Plato's Theaetetus. In Plato's Theaetetus, the same kinds of arguments are mounted against somebody who insists that knowledge is perception, and the argument against them is that perception only gives you the special sensibles and doesn't give you what they have in common. So the contrast itself is set up by Plato and it could be represented in that context as allowing you to perceive raw data belonging to each particular special sense. And then all the rest is done kind of by your mind. It's done by judgment or assessment or whatever it is, so that I get the input from the raw data, and then on top of that, I do thinking about those things in order to be able to say, oh, it's an object that's got two properties, or this object is moving where moving is a common property. The argument that Aristotle mounts in the De Anima where he's talking about this is extremely attenuated. It comes really quickly and it's not at all clear where all the antecedents of the argument are coming from. And it seems to me that just as a matter of the way the thing is set up, one can't imagine it being other than allusive to the argument of the theaetetus and some of the examples are the same and the language is the same. So what one sees there is Aristotle using a text of Plato that imagines his audience to be familiar with and disagreeing with it because Aristotle's argument is that all of this is perception, which gives Aristotle a completely different account of what perception looks like. I think that's right. I think one thing to say about that is that, genuinely no pun intended, there's a commonality there as well. One way to think about that might be that, again, in terms of perhaps a rather old-fashioned way of thinking about Plato versus Aristotle, that Aristotle comes up with this idea of an object as what's kind of fundamental about ontology. What are the basic things out there in the world where they're objects? Whereas Plato, because he bangs on about forms all the time, you've got the form of justice and the form of this and the form of that, that Plato maybe can't account for or doesn't even have a notion of an object. Now it seems to me that the crucial thing that's happening in the Theaetetus is that we've got maybe the invention of the object. We suddenly have, now I don't want to beg any questions about what Plato was up to before that, but we have this moment where it seems really important to him that we don't just have a quality there and a quality there, and we're a bundle of qualities. We have this crucial idea that they're unified in some way, and he's thinking about how that can be so and how we can be aware that that's so. And again, it seems to me that Aristotle, yes, as M.M. said, he's starting from something that he thinks is right, and it's from that basis that he said, and I think I agree with M.M., that there's a genuine dispute about what the answer to how you get hold of the unity of the object is. So the idea is that Plato thinks you do it with your mind. So it's with your mind that you realize that it's the same thing that's both blue and hard or whatever, whereas Aristotle thinks you can just see that or sense it rather. You can use your powers of sensation to discern that it's the same object. And that ends up, when you think about it, as a really deep dispute about what the mechanics of perception are, because Plato can have a view of perception that's really, as I put it raw, that's really kind of basic. All that's happening is some input from the outside world to the special sense organs. But Aristotle in modifying that, and I think Raphael's right, modifying it in order... I mean, some of what's going on here is a kind of bringing down from the heavens the metaphysics. So underlying all of this stuff is something like a metaphysical difference between them. But the metaphysical difference isn't, oh, Plato believes in forms and Aristotle believes in objects of the physical world. It is much more that they are disagreeing about how we know the world. The world just here. Perhaps relatively little disagreement about what the world is that we're trying to get, rather than this historical idea of, you know, Plato thinks the real world is somewhere else and Aristotle doesn't. It's a question about different forms of apparatus for getting at a world which we're relatively speaking, perhaps agreed on its nature. I mean, that's not a contentious thing to say. I think that I completely agree with that. And I think that if one thinks about it, maybe one of the spins off from this way of thinking about the relation to Aristotle and Plato is actually a revision of what we should be thinking about Plato. That Aristotle, if this is right, then Aristotle is treating Plato not as an airy-fairy man who's only interested in forms and sort of sitting under the trees outside the cave going tra la tra la, gosh, it's the form of the good. That's not, Aristotle, I think rightly, sees that Plato is just as interested in this here and now and that what we can see in seeing Aristotle's dispute with Plato, disputes with Plato, is just that. That Plato isn't a Platonist in the way that he's often represented to be. Actually, there's something in Aristotle's epistemology that I think is a similar response to Plato, which connects to what you were just saying about sensation a minute ago, because Plato has bequeathed to Aristotle and indeed the rest of us this problem about basically how do you get started. So if you don't know anything, then how are you ever going to build up any knowledge? This is Minos paradox, which Aristotle explicitly mentions at the beginning of the posterior analytics. But I think his real solution doesn't come until the end of the posterior analytics, where he alludes to the paradox but without mentioning it explicitly. And his solution, I think, is really to point to sensation. And he says, how do we start from nothing and get to the principles on which knowledge is built? We use the same capacity that is possessed even by non-human animals, namely sensation, which I think is supposed to kind of shock you a little bit, especially if you're a Platonist. So forget all this stuff about being an immortal soul before you fell into the body, blah, blah, blah. All you need to do is understand that sensation is rich enough and thick enough that there's content in there that you can use as a basis for deriving principles. And once you've got the principles, you're off and running. So I guess the interesting thing about that is that the problem comes from Plato. And to some extent the ultimate epistemology looks a lot like Plato's, because you still have some kind of idea where there's knowledge being based on fundamental principles past which you should not try to get. But he thinks that the way that you can derive the principles from your experience is just from the experience, whereas Plato seems to have a real problem about that in the Phaedo. He seems to deny that you could, for example, derive the idea of equality just by looking at equal objects in the world around you. So he seems to be much more optimistic about the role of sensation in coming to knowledge, despite having kind of the same expectations about what knowledge would look like. So it seems to me that it falls into the same pattern as the other two cases that we've thought about, doesn't it? Because what you find is the sort of nitty-gritty of the philosophical stuff that's going on, and there's quite a lot of agreement about how we can think about sensation, where the dispute may be whether it's sensation or thought that does it, but not about the world in which we do it. And one of the things that you get in these Aristotelian passages, in all three of the Aristotelian passages that we've talked about, is Aristotle just dispensing with the sort of frills and furbelows that a lot of people think just are what Plato is, and this shows you that it isn't, that they are what Plato is. So you don't need to say that in order for Plato to be a proper Plato, he's got to have a theory of recollection. We'd better not think that, it seems to me, because that is falsified by its non-appearance, for example, in the Great Epistemology of the Republic. And one of the things that you might think of Aristotle as doing in posterior analytics, BETA 19, in the last chapter of posterior analytics, is actually getting rid of that bit. We don't need to think about remembering it from some airy-fairy time before, but still there's a question about how perception will generate the principles. And as you suggest, Peter, it seems to me that if you put the posterior analytics together with the de Anima, you can see how perception has become in this discussion with Plato, that he's having, without the frills and the furbelows, rich and interesting. And again, what's interesting, and one of the interesting things about that is, I mean, without wishing to get into vexed questions of Aristotelian chronology, I mean, he may think by the time he's written, by the time he's writing the posterior analytics, he's sort of, he's earned the right, I mean, I think one of the things that puzzled people, including me, about the last chapter of the posterior analytics, where sort of perception rise to the rescue is, I think you read that actual, I mean, this may be something about how Aristotle writes his works, but you read the text and you think, yeah, wait a minute, you're saying that, Aristotle, but haven't you already shown me how perception of all things can do that? Well, go and look at the de Anima, go and look at the debate with Plato that happens there, and you'll understand how this debate with Plato is actually managing to sort of get going. Absolutely, and that explains then, in the last chapter of the posterior analytics, there's this really kind of awkward metaphor, oh well, the perceptions sort of stand together like a little army, and then they're not routed, but they stand firm and then we get the principles. Well, you better not base your theory of principles on a pretty flimsy metaphor, because there's no kind given in that passage of what it is for a perception to stand together and poke their swords at the enemy coming along and stop running away and all of that. But you're quite right, that if what we've got there is something that builds on the really interesting, complex theory of how perception is complex that you get in the de Anima, then he's got it. And the metaphor then is not so much a failure as an invitation to go to something else. In fact, something that I once, I wrote something about this chapter and pointed out that the metaphor about the phalanx of troops that at first is coherent then breaks apart because they're starting to retreat and then reforms sounds a lot more like Plato's epistemology in the theory of recollection than it does like Aristotle's, because Plato's idea is you have it, you lose it, and then you have it again, like the phalanx, whereas Aristotle's epistemology is you don't have it, but then you do, which doesn't sound at all like the phalanx. And I think that's part of what we're trying to deny is happening, that you are, I mean, I'm not overly fond of this phrase, but it's a phrase that certain scholars use about Plato's epistemology because he thinks that knowledge must be based on knowledge. And that does imply a kind of, there was a phase when you had knowledge, then it all went wrong in ways that it's not always clear Plato knows how to explain, but then it can all come good again if you do the right things and talk to Socrates and so on. Actually structurally, again, it seems to me that Aristotle ends up without the heavy metaphysical apparatus in quite a similar position. Still thinking that knowledge is based on knowledge. I think that's right. Well, before we wrap this up, I just wanted to maybe step back from these particular examples and think about this as a broader issue. I guess one thing that's emerged from this conversation is that whatever Aristotle thinks of when he thinks of Plato, he doesn't think of it as a body of doctrine. It sounds more like he thinks of it as the way we think about it, which is a bunch of dialogues and maybe specific passages and specific dialogues. But he is reading Plato rather than just thinking, oh, well, we all know what Plato thinks. And again, it seems odd that he tends to do that more when he's not mentioning Plato than when he is. In fact, when he mentions Plato explicitly, sometimes he mentions things that Plato doesn't say in the dialogues. I mean, picking up something that M.M. said earlier about that one reason for the less specific he is about who he's referring to, the more there's real engagement with Plato, is this project of finding out how all the bits fit together in Plato. And then I take it Aristotle is trying to... Aristotle does not have... in one sense, he doesn't have a system in the sense that he's building something and he thinks that all the pieces are in the right place and that that's where he's finished. I don't think that's true and I don't think the way he does philosophy indicates that. But he's systematic in the sense that he thinks that the bits of your philosophy had better fit together. They'd better be coherent. And that the sort of endless project is trying to make sure that that's what they do. And that actually, in that sense, the less specific you are in referring to Plato, the more that might be an indication of the fact that you're seeing... Yes, you're seeing the individual dialogues, but you're actually not sort of stopping there. And your earlier question is that Plato was, when all is said and done, a bloke with some thoughts, which in some way or other he tried to express in dialogues. We only have the dialogues and I think one of the things that's emerged from what we've been saying is that's kind of all, pretty much all we need. There's some stuff we haven't talked about, but pretty much all we need to figure out what Aristotle's doing with Plato. But that after all, it's a perfectly proper project, particularly if this is somebody who you were taught by and you personally to try and think about how all the bits of the thought fit together. But I don't think this is... I agree with that, but I don't think this runs... What I'm about to say runs counter to this, but supposing you also think that one of the things about the dialogues is they're open-ended. Open-ended is too strong, but is that they're supposed to be much more challenging than they are dogmatics, so that they're supposed to show you ways of thinking about... They're not skeptical, but they're supposed to get you when you read to engage in philosophical inquiry. Well, if that's right about Plato and Aristotle was his pupil, well, for sure Aristotle will have learned that too. So it may be that actually he's just doing what he was taught, that that... I mean, this again turns itself on its head into an interpretation of what we should think about Plato. If Aristotle treats Plato like this, maybe that's how he was taught to treat him. And how we should treat him too. Well, speaking of students of Plato, that's going to be the focus next time on the podcast, because I'm moving on from Aristotle, but not very far. And I'm going to be looking next time, in fact, at the students of Plato and of Aristotle. But before concluding, I just want to thank Raphal very much for coming on again. Thanks for listening. And M.M. for coming on again. Thanks. Please join just me, sadly, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Next Generation, the followers of Plato and Aristotle. As I believe I may have mentioned at some point, this series of podcasts aims to cover the history of philosophy without any gaps. We've just finished Aristotle, and it's right about here that there would normally be a gap. In an undergraduate philosophy course, you might reasonably expect to jump from Aristotle to perhaps Descartes, leaping over about 2,000 years of history in the process. A more enlightened approach might include looking at Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, still omitting the better part of two millennia. Better still would be to skip only as far as Plotinus or Augustine in late antiquity. Of course it's fair enough to be selective in designing a philosophy curriculum, and to concentrate on the household names. But given that we have the luxury of going at our own pace with these podcasts, I'm not going to skip ahead at all. Rather, I'm going to devote a good number of episodes to the philosophical movements which began already in the lifetime of Aristotle, and which dominated the Hellenistic period. There are some household names here, too. The Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics. But to continue our story with these Hellenistic schools would still be to leave something out. One of the most striking and puzzling features of Hellenistic philosophy is that Plato and Aristotle play a relatively small role. Though the Stoics and others did respond to them, it took a few hundred years for their influence to become dominant. Still, Plato and Aristotle had established schools with physical property to keep them going and groups of disciples to carry on their work. It's this immediate legacy that I want to consider in today's episode, first looking at the so-called Old Academy, Plato's two immediate successors, Spusippus and Seidocrates, not to be confused with the presocratic thinker Xenophanes. Then I'll be checking in at the Lyceum, to see how Aristotle's school got on without Aristotle. Here, the main personality to discuss is Theophrastus. I know what you've all been thinking. Sure, Aristotle shows an impressively encyclopedic range, inquiring into everything from logic to animals to the rules of good poetry, but hey, what about plants? Well, Theophrastus is just the man to fill that particular gap. Before we look at the roots of Aristotelianism with Theophrastus, though, let's look at the brief blossoming of hardcore Platonism in the wake of Plato's death. I've just mentioned that Plato's immediate successors as heads of the academy, Spusippus and Seinocrates, are often referred to under the rubric of the Old Academy. This is in contrast to the so-called New Academy, who came after them. The New Academy took their cue from a rather different Plato than the one who inspired Spusippus and Seinocrates. New academics were skeptics. They were particularly impressed by Plato's early Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates raises philosophical questions, refutes whatever answers are offered, and draws things to a close with an expression of puzzlement. Spusippus and Seinocrates were instead inspired by the Plato whose mathematical, logical, and metaphysical speculations are on display in dialogues like the Timaeus and Sophist. This brand of Platonism would go out of fashion for a few centuries, only to return with a vengeance in the Roman Empire. When I say that the Old Academy took its cue from the more technical dialogues of Plato, I'm actually leaving something out. But then Plato left it out too. It would seem that Spusippus and Seinocrates were trying to develop ideas which had been discussed in Plato's academy, but which either were omitted from the dialogues or were referred to only very obliquely. These ideas are sometimes called by the somewhat histrionic phrase, unwritten doctrines. Since even the most intrepid historian of philosophy can't read unwritten doctrines, we have to rely on indirect sources of information about this aspect of Plato's teaching. This means, above all, relying on Aristotle. He's our main source for some of the ideas Plato apparently didn't see fit to share with us in his dialogues. He's also our main source for the way that Spusippus and Seinocrates carried on those ideas. So it's a bit unfortunate that Aristotle thought the unwritten doctrines were ludicrous and barely worth taking seriously. Imagine Donald Trump trying to explain the principles of Marxism, and you'll get a pretty close idea of Aristotle's trustworthiness as a reporter on this particular topic. The most famous story about Plato's unwritten doctrines, though, is found not in Aristotle, but in later authors beginning with Aristotle's student Aristoxenus, who nonetheless is just reporting what Aristotle told him. At any rate, the story goes that Plato offered to give a public lecture on the topic of the good. An audience turned up, expecting to hear about how to acquire happiness, perhaps by way of wealth, health, and other such goods. Instead, they got a long lecture on mathematics, and went away totally bemused. This rather depressing story suggests that even if Plato had written down his unwritten doctrines, we still might not be able to figure out what he was talking about. But if it has any basis in truth, it shows that Plato believed mathematics to be at the core of philosophy, including what we would think of as ethics, inquiry into the nature of the good. Though we don't find this story about the lecture on the good in Aristotle's own works, we do find him explaining, or at least making fun of, Plato's ideas about numbers and how they relate to his theory of forms. The theory, as Aristotle tells it, is complicated and mysterious. Many Plato scholars are happy to ignore it, preferring the literary riches of the real Plato's dialogues to the off-putting abstractions Aristotle puts in Plato's mouth. Others think they can find traces of the so-called unwritten doctrines in the dialogues. Either way, we can't understand the old academy without saying at least a little bit about this theory, so here goes. Plato seems to have been taking up ideas from the mathematics-obsessed Pythagoreans. He was particularly interested in the production of numbers from two principles, a principle of unity and a principle of multiplicity. Plato apparently called the second principle the great and small. The idea was that you could get numbers by imposing some limit or unity on a continuum. Imagine a musical scale, for instance, remembering that for the Greeks, music and mathematics were intimately related. What you have is a range of sounds, which become musical notes only when certain limits or intervals are imposed. Similarly, numbers would emerge from the interaction of unity and multiplicity. In the old academy, this was sometimes understood in frankly sexual terms. Simplicity is a male principle, multiplicity a female principle, and from their copulation are born the numbers. And you thought Pythagorean metaphysics was dull. Aristotle further tells us that Spusippus and Xenocrates took up these ideas of Plato and tried to work them out in detail. An anecdote about Xenocrates relates that he asked a would-be student whether he knew anything about geometry or astronomy. The aspiring philosopher admitted that he did not. Xenocrates sent him away saying, you give me no handles for philosophy. This is to be put in the same box as the legend about the sign posted outside the academy. Only those who have studied geometry should enter. Whether or not there's any truth in these stories, the successors of Plato certainly agreed with the sentiment. They put forward their Pythagoreanizing version of Platonism in the setting of Plato's academy, whose headship Spusippus inherited upon Plato's death in 347 BC. Spusippus was Plato's nephew, so this was keeping the business in the family. Xenocrates took it over next in 339, supposedly to the annoyance of Aristotle, who in a fit of pique set up the rival Lyceum. Here I should remind you that the academy was named after a grove or park, the Akademos, outside the walls of Athens. Plato seems to have acquired a house near the grove, which was public property. He and his associates would have pursued philosophy both in the pleasant surroundings of the public grove and in the private household. By all accounts, they spent a lot of their time on mathematics. Aristotle is again our source for certain astronomical theories developed in the academy, for instance by Plato's associate Eudoxus, who devised mathematical models of the planetary motions we see in the night sky. In the dialogues, Plato recommends astronomy as a stepping stone towards philosophy, and that was certainly put into practice in the academy. Another favorite activity was classification and division. In an earlier episode, we've already heard the story about Diogenes the Cynic, mocking the academy's definition of man as featherless biped. He turned up with a plucked chicken and said, here is Plato's man. He wasn't the only one who was amused. A comic author named Epikrates depicts academic philosophers sitting around trying to decide whether the pumpkin is a vegetable, a tree, or a kind of grass. In fact, this is a feature of the academy that is written in the dialogues, for instance in the sophist, with its method of collection and division. Plato's successors too wrote treatises on logical method. Spusippus supposedly said that unless you can enumerate all the ways one thing differs from another, you lack knowledge about both things. But like everything else they wrote, these treatises on division and classification are lost. This is why we're dependent on Aristotle's rather tendentious testimony. He mostly focuses on their theory of first principles, which was based on Plato's theory about unity and multiplicity. Aristotle tells us that Spusippus derived a series of further principles from these two basic foundations. For Spusippus, the one, or monad, interacts with multiplicity, the so-called dyad, to generate numbers, and then geometrical figures, like triangles for instance. The soul of the world then builds a physical universe on the basis of these geometrical figures. That sounds pretty weird, but you might remember that Plato's Timaeus does talk about a world soul, and offers a geometrical analysis of the four elements, saying that fire, air, earth and water are made up of atomic shapes formed from triangles. So the weirdness, both written and unwritten, already started with Plato. Aristotle's big complaint about Spusippus is that his system is episodic. In other words, all these levels, the principles of number, the numbers, the figures, and then bodies, seem to be more or less independent, like the layers in a sandwich that threatens to fall apart when you try to eat it. He also presents Spusippus as if he eliminates Plato's forms, and replaces them with numbers. But this is probably a distortion. Rather Spusippus was in some way identifying forms with numbers, or perhaps with the principles that generate numbers. Aristotle isn't much more impressed by Sinocrates, but he does imply that Sinocrates made more of an effort to tie the levels of his system together. Sinocrates again has a monad and dyad as generating first principles. Below this, he envisions three levels of reality, forms, mathematical entities, and the bodies you can actually see. He thinks of the mathematical entities as a kind of middle level, which can tie together the forms and the bodies. Again, he puts the soul at this middle level, and even says that soul itself is a moving number. It brings the motion of life and the structure associated with number. This all sounds pretty abstract, and if you're being ungenerous, not even very philosophical. It suggests that the old academy was taking a good idea way too far, the good idea being the Pythagorean and Platonic conviction that reality has an underlying mathematical structure. But the old academy's ideas had staying power. In particular, the idea that reality derives from a single principle of unity will become fundamental in the Platonism of late antiquity, and from there it will go on to influence religious ideas about God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In those traditions, there was constant debate about whether this single first principle is beyond our understanding, or comprehensible as the first of causes. Spusippus and Xenocrates anticipate this debate. Spusippus is reported to have said that the principle of unity is beyond even goodness and being. In future episodes, we will see that later authors make a similar claim, for a variety of reasons. Spusippus' reason is that since the principle is the source of these things, it cannot partake of them. Xenocrates, by contrast, said the monad was a kind of divine mind, like Aristotle's god perhaps. Maybe he even wanted Plato's forms to be ideas in this godlike intellect. Here then, at the infancy of Platonism, we have one of the most fundamental tensions that will occupy our attention when we reach late ancient and medieval philosophy. Is God, the first principle, so transcendent that He surpasses our concepts and our language? Or is He sort of like us, but better, a mind that can think about everything instead of only a few things at a time? It should also be said that Spusippus and Xenocrates did not spend all their time worrying about numbers and gods. They also had things to say on the subject of ethics. There's a great story about Xenocrates going with Plato and Spusippus to the court of the tyrant Dionysius in Syracuse. You might remember from my episode on Plato's biography that this association turned out badly. On some accounts Plato barely escaped with his life. Supposedly, Dionysius threatened to execute Plato, and the faithful Xenocrates stepped forward and said, only after you cut off my head first. But before these unpleasant scenes everyone had been getting along famously. Clearly if you invite philosophers to your court you need to host a drinking contest, and this is what Dionysius did. Xenocrates drank everyone else under the table and was awarded a gold laurel wreath. Displaying his disdain for material wealth, he left the gold wreath on the head of a statue of Hermes in the city. This disdain for the things valued by most of us is confirmed by the little we know about the ethics of the old academy. It seems that they didn't care much for pleasure. Xenocrates encourages us to look after both the soul and the body, but more especially the soul, which he says is our daimon or guardian spirit. Before him, Spusippus recommends a life in accordance with nature, which is as free as possible from trouble and disturbance. This means steering clear of pleasure as well as pain. As we'll see soon, these ideas of living naturally and achieving a quiet undisturbed existence are commonplace in Hellenistic philosophy, and it's interesting to see them turning up in Plato's immediate successors. Soon we'll see Hellenistic philosophers fighting over the role of pleasure in the good life and pleasure's relation to virtue. This was already a hot topic in the academy. It's not only Spusippus and Xenocrates who raised the issue, but also that astronomical whiz kid Eudoxus. Eudoxus, according to Aristotle's ethics, was willing to accept that pleasure is, in fact, the good. One argument he gave was that pain is clearly bad. Since pleasure is the opposite of pain, it must be good. Spusippus refuted this. He admitted that pain is bad, but that doesn't mean pleasure is good. If happiness lies in a quiet, neutral life, then it could be a golden mean between the two extremes of pain and pleasure, both of which would be bad. Plato's successors then tackled a fairly wide range of topics, carrying on the logical, metaphysical, and ethical activities of the academy. Over at the Lyceum, they were also keeping the flame alive. In this case, we have the advantage that the torch was handed to a man whose writings are partially preserved today. This was Theophrastus, whom we already met as a partner in Aristotle's biological investigations on the island of Lesbos. In fact, Theophrastus hailed from the city of Ephesus on Lesbos. Perhaps there was something of a division of labor here, because Theophrastus developed an expertise in plants to rival Aristotle's zoological prowess. His surviving writings about plants are valuable evidence of ancient ideas about botany, classifying plants into their types in true Aristotelian manner. Another work, On Stones, does a similar classificatory and descriptive job for the mineral world. Theophrastus seems to have been concerned to fill out and complete Aristotle's natural philosophy, by explaining features of the inanimate world and minor topics Aristotle had left unexplained. For instance, he wrote about the causes of dizziness and sweat. His master had not left only a body of texts, but implicitly a whole research program that could be pursued by his students. Not that those students followed Aristotle slavishly. Theophrastus is known to have raised some challenges to Aristotle's definition of place, for example. His combination of fidelity and creativity is on display in his most important surviving work, usually called the metaphysics. Here, Theophrastus creatively fuses together ideas from Aristotle's physics and his metaphysics to explain the principles of the universe, for instance, how God influences our cosmos through heavenly motion. Although he is weaving a tapestry out of Aristotelian threads, Theophrastus introduces a naughty problem here and there. He generally accepts Aristotle's teleology, the view that nature does nothing in vain, but he wonders what the purpose of some natural phenomena might be, for instance, why men have nipples or why deer lose their antlers. Aristotelianism did not die with Theophrastus. His successor, Strato, was another specialist, in this case concentrating on physical theories rather than empirical research like Theophrastus. There was also Eudemus, who may have edited Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, hence the name, and whose area of expertise was mathematics. Aristoxenus, the fellow I mentioned who relays the story about Plato's lecture on the good, wrote about music. But all these figures died by the first half of the third century BC. We have to wait until the end of the first century, around the time of Cicero and the demise of the Roman Republic, for a resurgence of Aristotelianism. Even then, though, Aristotle's immediate successors were not forgotten. Theophrastus imitated his master by writing down a good deal of information about earlier Greek philosophical ideas. So later reports on the Presocratics frequently draw on works by Theophrastus. In fact, he may be the most important conduit for Presocratic philosophy apart from Aristotle himself. Really important was his critical discussion of pre-Eristotelian theories of sensation, which we know through a later adaptation of the Theophrastian text. Clearly, the old academy and the early Peripatetics do not represent anything like a high point of ancient thought. These were minor thinkers who carried on the work of the two greats, Plato and Aristotle. History has passed a severe judgment on them insofar as their texts are mostly lost. But what we do know suggests what might have been had ancient philosophy settled immediately into the pattern that would eventually prevail in late antiquity. A few centuries ahead, Platonism will contend with, and ultimately be reconciled with, Aristotelianism. Platonists will write commentaries on Aristotle, sometimes attacking him, but usually just expounding and explaining him. The two traditions will make common cause against shared enemies. In order for all that to happen, perhaps, the Platonists and Aristotelians needed some enemies worth uniting against. And the intervening few centuries will certainly provide that, as several new philosophical schools arise in the period we call the Hellenistic age. Some Hellenistic philosophers will endorse hedonism, while others reject pleasure as a matter of complete indifference. Some will develop new logical techniques, and set out an epistemology so ambitious it would make even Plato blush, while others find they have to reserve judgment since they are unable to believe anything at all. Next time, there will be something for everyone, as I introduce the Hellenistic schools, here on the History of Philosophy, with new intro music to go with a new period of philosophy, but without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the League of Human Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fighting over Socrates, the Hellenistic Schools. Socrates, as I pointed out when discussing him, has a strong claim to be the most influential philosopher who never wrote anything. It was not only Plato who wrote Socratic literature, using Socrates as a character and depicting his combative inquiries into ethical topics. There was also Plato's contemporary, the soldier and historian Xenophon, who, as we've seen, wrote stylized reminiscences of Socrates and his conversations. But neither Plato nor Xenophon qualify as Socratic in the stronger sense of living a lifestyle inspired by the gadfly of Athens. They may have talked the Socratic talk, but they didn't walk the Socratic walk, which would have meant going barefoot, hanging around in the marketplace, accosting passers-by, and demanding that they account for their claims to knowledge. Plato and Xenophon were certainly inspired by Socrates, but they did not seek to imitate him. Indeed, writing about Socrates was a way of failing to imitate him, given that Socrates didn't write anything. But perhaps this is a rather superficial idea of what it would mean to follow Socrates's example. Surely, Socrates wasn't just asking us to throw away our shoes and be rude to pedestrians. He wanted us to reflect seriously on the most important matters, such as virtue. And this is certainly something Plato and Xenophon did. We might further ask, though, whether Plato, Xenophon, or Aristotle for that matter arrived at distinctively Socratic conclusions regarding these most important matters. To be truly Socratic is not merely to choose poverty, and not merely to ask certain types of questions, but to give certain answers to those questions—that virtue is knowledge, for instance, or that all value derives from virtue and wisdom. Thus, being Socratic could mean different things to different admirers. There was the lifestyle, with its defiant exhibition of self-sufficiency, there was the relentless questioning, and then there was the core of Socratic doctrine, if that is not too grand a word for the philosophical ideas we associate with Socrates. So it's no surprise that when we turn our attention to ancient philosophy after Plato, Aristotle, and their immediate associates, we find that Socrates had followers of many types. There were some men who, as far as we know, were content simply to hang out with Socrates. Faithful companions, if not disciples, like Critobulus or Apollodorus. These men have left no trace of independent philosophical ideas. But at least they showed up at Socrates' execution, which is more than we can say for Plato, who, as I mentioned before, tells us in the Phaedo that he was ill. Of greater interest to us was a movement which imitated the Socratic lifestyle, and also reflected on the meaning of this lifestyle. These were the cynics, perhaps the most outrageous group of philosophers to emerge in the ancient world. They did choose poverty and make cutting remarks to the townspeople, accusing them of hypocrisy and insufficient interest in virtue. No doubt the good citizens of Athens and other ancient cities regretted this particular form of allegiance to Socrates. Having gone to the trouble of putting the man to death, it must have been annoying to find a whole school of philosophers keeping the man's habits alive. But the cynics were devoted to Socrates' philosophical ideals, and not only his habits. They were convinced, perhaps in part by Socrates' arguments, and in part by the example he had set in his own life, that virtue is not only its own reward, but the only reward worth having. A similar outlook was adopted by the Stoics. They were a more successful school than the cynics in terms of their historical impact and dominance of the philosophical scene. But the early Stoics were influenced by the cynics, and followed them by seeing Socrates as an ethical exemplar and insisting on the primacy of virtue and wisdom. As we'll see in due course, they admitted that some things other than virtue, like physical health and safety, possess a lesser kind of value. But for them, the goal of the philosophical life, indeed the only rational goal for anyone's life, was virtue and wisdom alone. On the other hand, the Stoics did not follow the cynics in adopting Socrates' way of life. If Stoicism had required voluntary poverty and antisocial behavior, it would hardly have been possible for a Stoic philosopher to be emperor of the Roman Empire, yet this is precisely what happened with Marcus Aurelius. Another group of philosophers in the period following Plato and Aristotle fastened on to yet a different aspect of Socrates, his incessant questioning. These philosophers, whom we call the skeptics, adopted a permanent pose of, well, skepticism, greeting the claims of other philosophers with deft counterarguments without proposing positive views of their own. Subskeptics went so far as to adopt what you might call negative views of their own. Where Socrates admitted to know only that he knew nothing, these radical skeptics claimed to know only that nobody can know anything. Other skeptics, the more interesting ones, for my money, followed Socrates' example more closely by remaining open to argument, always willing in principle to be shown that some philosophical claim is well-grounded, but always able to pick holes in each positive argument as it came along. A final philosophical tradition in this period has, like Stoicism, become a household name, Epicureanism. Unlike the other groups I've just been discussing, the Epicureans do not seem particularly Socratic. With their atomism, which seems to hark back to pre-Socratic theories such as those expressed by Democritus and Leucippus, and their hedonism, that is, their view that pleasure is the good, they in fact seem almost deliberately anti-Socratic. But this may be misleading. Even Plato presents Socrates on one occasion as assuming that pleasure is the good, in his dialogue The Protagoras. Epicurean hedonism was basically a careful consideration of what Socrates suggests in that dialogue, namely that if pleasure is the good, then wisdom will be paramount, since it will give us the ability to measure and calculate what will provide us with the most pleasure over our lives. These four schools, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans, are the main philosophical traditions of what we call the Hellenistic period. This is often defined as the time beginning with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, and ending wherever the historian you're talking to decides it should end, one popular choice being the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. By that time we enter the period in which the Mediterranean basin, and beyond, is completely dominated by the Roman Empire, first under Augustus Caesar, and then under a series of emperors, some good, some bad, and one a Stoic philosopher. With the slow collapse of the Roman hegemony in the 5th and 6th centuries AD will come the end of what is usually thought of as ancient philosophy. It's worth dwelling on that chronological fact for a moment. Plato and Aristotle wrote in the 4th century BC. When Aristotle died in 322, ancient philosophy had been going for a couple of centuries. Aristotle was already able to refer to early pre-Socratic thinkers like the Milesians as the ancients, and yet ancient philosophy was only just beginning. The better part of a millennium would pass before ancient philosophy drew to a close, and late antique philosophy was passed on to medieval thinkers in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have enough on our plate for a good number of episodes, just dealing with the Hellenistic schools and their legacy during the Roman Empire. In the rest of this first introductory episode, I'll first sketch a bit of the historical context in which those schools operated, then say something about why I am calling them schools, and finally return to the question of the Hellenistic response to Socrates, to his student Plato, and to his student's student Aristotle. First then the historical context. I just said that the Hellenistic period is traditionally dated from the death of Alexander, and with good reason, given the shattering sequence of events leading from his death. From his base in Macedonia, Alexander had built upon the conquest of his father Philip, to conquer mainland Greece, and then to push east through Asia Minor, Persia, and all the way to modern-day India. He and his armies left the indelible marks of Greek culture wherever they went. But even if Alexander's personality and military prowess could have served to unify such a vast terrain as a single, lasting empire, his untimely demise at a young age ended that possibility. After a contentious face-off between several of his lieutenants, his domain was fractured into three more or less stable units, which continued for a few centuries until the Romans became a new, almost unchallenged power. These units were, first, the remnants of Macedonian power, which continued to dominate mainland Greece and the Balkans, second, the Ptolemaic dynasty in the fertile and rich land of Egypt, and third, the eastern power of the Seleucids, named for Seleucos, a commander in Alexander's army who was able to consolidate power in the eastern provinces following Alexander's death. During the Hellenistic period, the dynasty of Seleucos ruled over a vast territory stretching eastwards from modern-day Iraq through Persia and central Asia. I have to say that I'm rather glad that these podcasts are devoted to the history of philosophy, and not plain old history, because the Hellenistic dynasties can be a bit confusing. Particularly annoying is that almost all the rulers of Egypt were named Ptolemy, unless they were women, in which case there was a good chance they'd be named Cleopatra. The famous Cleopatra was in fact Cleopatra VII. Similarly confusing patterns of dynastic naming held sway in the Macedonian and Seleucid empires too. The names of these rulers are recognizably Greek, one sign of a vital outcome of Alexander's conquests, namely the spreading of Greek language and culture throughout the areas he had conquered. For instance, the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt spoke Greek, not Egyptian, and the famous library they founded at Alexandria was principally intended for storing Greek works and doing research in Greek. In the last days of the Hellenistic period, as the Roman Republic was about to complete its transition to a vast empire ruled by a single man rather than a senate, the great lawyer, rhetorician, and philosopher Cicero visited Greece. For him, this meant traveling to a place that retained dominance culturally despite its loss of political relevance. Cicero knew Greek, and it was this that allowed him to learn and write about Hellenistic philosophy. In his own writings, he often refers to the fact that he is having to find Latin expressions to correspond to Greek technical terms. Although Lucretius, the greatest Epicurean apart from Epicurus, was a poet who wrote in Latin, the greatest skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, wrote in Greek. In due course, Neoplatonism would become the main philosophical school in late antiquity. It was founded by Plotinus, a man who hailed from Egypt and lived in Rome, but wrote in Greek. So Hellenistic philosophical schools spanned cultural, political, and linguistic divides, but each of them, even as its characteristic doctrines developed, retained a reasonable degree of unity and continuity. Hellenistic philosophers were willing, indeed eager, to identify themselves as card-carrying Stoics, Epicureans, and so on. This is my reason for calling these groups schools. The schools built allegiance over generations, in part by devoting themselves to the authority of their founders. In the case of the Stoics, this meant giving an authoritative position to Zeno of Citium. For the skeptics, the founding father was Pyro, Sextus Empiricus calls himself not a skeptic but a Pyronist. Meanwhile, the cynics looked back to Diogenes of Sinope, and in the case of the Epicureans, it was of course Epicurus. Those of the Hellenistic schools always honored the memory and teachings of their founders. Even though the greatest early Stoic was certainly Chrysippus, not Zeno, and even though it was Chrysippus who systematized the teachings that all Stoics would defend for centuries, it was Zeno who was admired as the school founder, and all self-proclaimed Stoics had at least to pay lip service to the truth of his pronouncements. Unfortunately, though, we do not have any of Zeno's works, nor do we have any extant writings of Chrysippus, though not for lack of effort on his part, since he wrote hundreds of them. Indeed, if Socrates is the most influential ancient thinker who wrote nothing, Chrysippus is surely the most important ancient philosopher for whom we have no surviving writings. I tend to think, in fact, that if a sizable number of his works had survived, he would be a household name, studied in philosophy departments around the world, and seen as one of the top four ancient philosophers along with Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. But that's just a hunch. As it is, with the early Stoics we do not have the luxury of referring to extensive surviving writings, as is possible with the great names I just mentioned. Instead, we have to consult later authors who report on their views. This means that with Hellenistic philosophy, we are to some extent returning to the situation we faced with pre-Socratic thinkers. Our knowledge is indirect, often fragmentary, or in the form of summaries or testimonies about what these philosophers thought. On the bright side, that information is more extensive than in the case of the pre-Socratics. This is due in no small part to a man I just mentioned, Cicero. He wrote a series of treatises, in Latin, of course, where he summarized and argued on behalf of the various Hellenistic schools, that is, the skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. He didn't see the cynics as worthy of this sort of attention. He himself tended towards the skeptical persuasion, but this didn't stop him from providing elaborate and apparently fairly accurate accounts of how Stoics and Epicureans might defend their doctrines. Many authors who lived under the Roman Empire also preserve evidence about the Hellenistic schools. This includes Christian writers who were refuting Stoic ideas or adapting them for their own purposes. From the same period, we even have important original works of Stoic philosophy. These were composed by the so-called Roman Stoics, not only Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but also Epictetus, perhaps the greatest Stoic apart from Chrysippus, who has left a significant body of writings, in Greek, thanks to one of his students. For the Epicureans, we not only have the great poem On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which expounds and defends the school doctrines in Latin verse. This was written before the fall of the Republic. We also have several extant works and sayings of Epicurus himself. We owe this to our old friend, the biographer Diogenes Laertius, who saw fit to quote entire letters of Epicurus in his Lives of the Philosophers. For early skepticism, things are much as with early Stoics. We know the tradition solely through fragments and testimonies. But many of these are found in the works of the greatest representative of the skeptical school Sextus Empiricus. He lived well after the end of the Hellenistic period, in the second century A.D., when Aristotelianism and Platonism were already returning to become dominant forces. Still, between Sextus, Cicero, and some other authors, we're well served with information about the development of the skeptical philosophy. Now I know what you're thinking. How is it that I've been talking about philosophy directly after Plato and Aristotle and have said essentially nothing about Platonism and Aristotelianism? I just mentioned that they managed a resurgence by the second century A.D., and in fact this began at least a century earlier. But what was going on in the intervening 300 years or so? After all, Aristotle had been the teacher of Alexander, so you'd think that Aristotelian philosophy would have been ruling the roost following Alexander's conquests. But in fact, Aristotle was not in vogue during the Hellenistic period. An ancient tale claims that his works were essentially lost at this time, literally buried underground until being rediscovered. This is surely an exaggeration, as we'll discuss in a later episode. And Aristotle may have exerted influence on specific points of doctrine among the Hellenistic schools. But this influence was minor. For the first few hundred years, there was no sign that philosophy would in due course become nearly synonymous with the teachings of Aristotle, something that occurred only in late antiquity, and even more so, the medieval period. With Plato, things were a bit different. The Stoics responded thoughtfully to the dialogues, and especially to the Timaeus, which was a major influence on them. More obviously, the Platonic Academy itself continued as a force in the Hellenistic period. But the brief burst of Pythagorean theory we discussed last time was a false dawn for metaphysical Platonism. In the Hellenistic period, academic philosophy turns out to mean skepticism, and around 400 A.D., St. Augustine could still attack skepticism in a work entitled Against the Academicians. That may seem odd. We don't normally think of Plato as a skeptic. But imagine if you restricted your Platonic readings to the dialogues now considered early, also called the Socratic dialogues. These invariably pose a philosophical question, usually about the nature of some virtue like piety or courage, and then reach an inconclusive impasse at the end. The skeptics looked to these Socratic dialogues when they made their negative brand of philosophy into the school position of the Platonic Academy. And as we've seen, they were happy to embrace Socrates as a model philosopher, always questioning, admitting to know nothing, he could plausibly be seen as a skeptic before there was such a thing as skepticism. As these Hellenistic schools competed to be the true heirs of Socrates, they adopted a broadly Socratic stance on the fundamental purpose of philosophy. We do find these thinkers speculating about logic, the universe, and the divine, but for all of them, philosophy centrally concerned the question of how to live. Ethics became a central preoccupation in the Hellenistic period, as it had been for Socrates. The Hellenistic schools also shared a devotion to Socrates' ideal of self-control and self-sufficiency. They had bitter disagreements, of course. The Stoics cared nothing for pleasure where the Epicureans put it at the core of their ethics, and the skeptics sought to undermine the teachings of all other schools. Yet all the schools, even the skeptics, promised that their adherents would achieve what was called ataraxia, freedom from disturbance. Other philosophical questions were often explicitly marked as worthy of consideration only insofar as they would help lead to that ethical goal, and for good reason. These schools shared very little apart from the notion that ataraxia goes hand in hand with eudaimonia, or, to say that in English, the notion that happiness requires freedom from disturbance. Among the Hellenistic schools, none went so far in the pursuit of self-sufficiency and imitation of Socrates as the cynics. Famous for their shocking behavior, whether it was living in wine jars or having sex in public, the cynics were social critics who stood outside the society they criticized, and heirs to the Socratic practice of pestering their fellow-citizens into philosophical reflection. Plato supposedly remarked that the greatest of the cynics, Diogenes, was like a Socrates gone mad. The countercultural exploits and barbed remarks of Diogenes make him one of the most entertaining figures in ancient philosophy, at least at this distance. A direct encounter with him in the marketplace would have been far from entertaining. But was there more to Diogenes than just a series of amusing and titillating anecdotes? Did cynicism have any plausible claim to carry on the legacy of Socrates? Without skipping any of the good anecdotes, we'll try to answer these questions next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Beware of the Philosopher, the Cynics. In 1967, a philosophical manifesto was put before the American public. It exhorted them to focus on the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, to forget about their worries, their strife. Rather, they should make do with the bare necessities, Mother Nature's recipes, which this philosopher promised would bring the bare necessities of life. The philosopher was, of course, Baloo the Bear, and his musical advice appeared in Disney's animated film, The Jungle Book. I don't know whether Baloo studied ancient philosophy. If so, he probably did not put much effort into it given his general approach to life, but if he did, he must have recognized a kindred spirit when the class got to Diogenes of Sinope. Diogenes was not a bear, though. He was a dog. The Greek word for dog is kouon, and Diogenes and his philosophers were called the cynics in honor of this animal, not an admired beast in the Greek world. But Diogenes wasn't seeking anyone's admiration. He lived the life of, well, a stray dog, choosing to beg for scraps and bark at anyone who he thought might deserve it. This most canine of thinkers set forth a teaching that has much in common with Baloo's song. The cynics, too, taught that one should make do with the bare necessities, and live in accordance with nature. In their case, this meant not plucking fruit from the jungle trees, but subsisting on a modest diet of lentils, owning nothing but a staff and leather pouch, and living in improvised shelter like Diogenes's famous earthen jar. This dropout lifestyle served the goal also recommended by Baloo, to be without worry or strife. In common with other Hellenistic schools, the cynics' highest aim was freedom from disturbance and imperturbability, in Greek ataraxia and apatheia. The cynics' radical methods for avoiding disturbance made some suspect that they might well be disturbed. Plato, as I mentioned last time, supposedly called Diogenes, Socrates gone mad. That's a tip-off that Diogenes was not, strictly speaking, a Hellenistic figure. He was already a noted personality, if not in Plato's day, then at the latest in Aristotle's day. Aristotle refers to Diogenes, and even calls him the dog. The cynics should not be seen as a post-Aristotelian phenomenon, but as a post-Socratic movement. Even before Diogenes, there was Antisthenes. He began his career by studying with the sophist Gorgias, but he gave up rhetoric, and burned his own writings upon encountering Socrates. He features as a kind of Socratic extremist in the writings of Xenophon and Diogenes Laertius, the author of the biographical compilation Lives of the Philosophers, not to be confused with Diogenes the Cynic. Antisthenes was not just a Socratic, he was a proto-cynic. He wore his poverty like a badge of honor, claiming it was true wealth. He said it is better to be insane than to feel pleasure. As we'll see, the rejection of wealth and pleasure is a hallmark of cynicism. Antisthenes also pioneered the Cynic practice of mocking the pretensions of his society. Sneering at the Athenians' boast to descend from men who were born from the earth, he said that the same is true of snails and insects. He also suggested they should meet in their democratic assembly and pass a resolution declaring that donkeys are horses. After all, they are not afraid to declare fools wise enough to serve as generals. According to Diogenes Laertius, he already sported the classic Cynic outfit, carrying nothing but a staff and small bag, and wearing nothing but an unkempt beard and a thin cloak, which he would simply fold over for an extra layer of warmth in the winter. On this and other points, one has to wonder to what extent the stories and details of Diogenes the Cynic, and the Cynics in general, are being applied retrospectively to Antisthenes. But our stories about Diogenes come from the same sources, and are no doubt largely fictional, so it's hard to be sure. In fact, we can't even be sure where the name Cynics comes from. It may refer not to dog-like habits, but to Antisthenes' use of the gymnasium in Athens reserved for non-citizens, which was called the kinosarges. However large a role Antisthenes had in inspiring the philosophy and name of the Cynics, it is Diogenes of Sinope who embodied Cynicism in the ancient imagination. I won't be able to pack all the wonderful anecdotes about him into this episode, but I'll mention the highlights, and talk about their philosophical meaning. We may as well start with the most famous. It seems that Alexander the Great heard of this famous philosopher Diogenes, and sought him out. He found the Cynic sage sunning himself on the wine jar that was his home. Standing over him, Alexander said, What favor can I offer you? Diogenes replied, Get out of my sun. According to another tale, Alexander said that if he were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes. In combination, these two legends speak volumes about Diogenes. He is indigent and has nothing, yet he is completely self-sufficient. The greatest ruler of the ancient world can offer him nothing, because nature, in this case sunlight, is all he needs. His wisdom consists precisely in not wanting what he doesn't need. Alexander's supposed admiration of Diogenes is equally telling. Even wealthy powerful men could admire the Cynics, because they enjoyed a kind of independence, freedom and self-mastery that could otherwise be achieved only through great effort, if at all. As one Stoic philosopher remarked, Cynicism is a shortcut to virtue. Hence the timeless appeal of Diogenes and his followers, which reaches as far as Friedrich Nietzsche, who remarked that Cynicism is the highest one can reach on earth. By late antiquity, Diogenes already became more fiction than fact. A whole tradition of Cynic literature developed, with him in the starring role. Even in Arabic medieval literature, there were compilations of edifying and amusing anecdotes about this philosopher who lived in a jar, although through a historical confusion, it was often Socrates who featured in these tales. As for the real Diogenes, we cannot say much for sure about his biography. He was certainly from Sinope on the coast of the Black Sea, and his father apparently worked minting coins for the city. For obscure reasons, Diogenes' father defaced the coins. In another version of the tale, it is Diogenes himself who ruined the coins. This became a symbol for the Cynic movement, defacing the currency, that is, attacking social convention. It helps here that in Greek the word for coins, nomisma, sounds like the word for custom, nomos. Rather amazingly, by the way, archaeologists have in fact found defaced coins from Sinope dated to the mid-4th century. In any case, Diogenes was forced to leave his home city. He didn't regret this, saying, Exile made me a philosopher. A probably fanciful but typically entertaining story has him being enslaved on his travels. He was put on the block to be auctioned and said he should be sold to someone who needed a master. It's hard to pinpoint Diogenes' geographical movements, but several stories, including the encounter with Alexander the Great, put him in Corinth. Others put him in Athens, where he would have taken up the challenge to live like Socrates, much as Antisthenes had done. Predictably, ancient sources make Diogenes a student of Antisthenes, as usual making every famous philosopher the student of another famous philosopher. Wherever he lived, Diogenes became a law unto himself. He asserted the right to behave and speak however he liked. He called freedom of speech the greatest possession of man, and used this freedom to rail against the hypocrisy of his fellow Greeks. A famous story has him turning up at the market in broad daylight with a lantern, explaining that he was looking for a human being. In case the townsfolk weren't sufficiently offended, when asked where in Greece one could find good men, he replied, Men nowhere, but boys in Sparta. What was it about his fellow Greeks that provoked Diogenes' disdain? One answer is that they failed to embrace poverty and the total freedom and self-sufficiency that paradoxically came with it. If exile made him a philosopher, it was because exile gave him the priceless gift of poverty. Diogenes Laertius quotes our friend Theophrastus, saying that Diogenes the Cynic embraced his lifestyle upon observing a mouse and realizing that this humble creature makes do with nothing. A similar story has him already living as a cynic, owning little more than his pouch, stick and a cup for drinking. Seeing a little boy drinking from cupped hands, he threw away the cup, so as not to be outdone in frugality by a child. Diogenes applied these severe attitudes to others as well as himself. Once he was invited into a rich man's fabulous house. He looked around at the opulent furnishings and then spat in the owner's face. He then explained to the shocked man that everything else in the house was too nice to spit on. There are plenty of other anecdotes about Diogenes' scorn for literal as well as metaphorical currency. He said that gold is a pale color because it is afraid, so many men are plotting against it. He also said that the love of money is the mother city of evils, anticipating a famous passage in the Gospels. Like Antisthenes, he regarded himself as wealthy in his poverty. Now I know what you're thinking. Why didn't Antisthenes and Diogenes die of starvation? Abusing rich citizens is fun, but it is pretty low in calories, so how did they make a living? The answer, at least in Diogenes' case, seems to be that he begged. This may seem more than a little hypocritical, given the cynic claims of self-sufficiency, but Diogenes defended his right to other people's property with a satirical syllogism. All things belong to the gods, the wise are friends of the gods, friends share everything, so all things belong to the wise. His life as a beggar, of course, gave rise to some further choice anecdotes. Harassing a man who was slow to give him any money, he said, I'm asking for a handout, not funeral expenses, and here's one I really like, he was seen begging from statues and explained that he was just practicing being rejected. This being ancient Greece, those statues were religious in nature, which brings us to another feature of the cynic's antisocial attitudes. Nothing was closer to the heart of Greek society than religion, and the cynics followed in the footsteps of thinkers like Sinophanes and Plato by criticizing popular religious beliefs. Antisthenes met a priest who bragged that religious initiates like himself would be rewarded splendidly in the afterlife. Antisthenes replied, why don't you die then? Diogenes observed a temple thief who had been caught by the temple's officers and said, big thieves carrying off a little thief. Seeing offerings at another temple left in thanks by people who had survived storms at sea, he pointed out that there would be many more offerings if they'd instead been left by the ones who didn't survive. None of this is necessarily to say, though, that the cynics were atheists. The satirical syllogism I mentioned implies that the gods do exist, and it seems more in keeping with the cynic approach to say that they rejected false conceptions of the divine but not the divine itself, just as they rejected false conceptions of freedom and wealth but not true freedom or true wealth. So far we've seen the cynics putting forward ideas in a radical way, but how radical were the ideas themselves? Other philosophers wouldn't be shocked to hear that wealth is worthless. Aristotle allows a place for wealth in the good life but only as an instrument for virtue, and Socrates had already lived a life that combined virtue with poverty. I just pointed out that other philosophers had already distanced themselves from popular religion too. The cynics seem more genuinely radical, though, when it comes to the topic of pleasure. While Plato and Aristotle were not hedonists, they stopped short of denying the goodness of pleasure altogether. A philosophy that demands we give up all pleasure seemed to them too demanding. The trick was to show that although pleasure is not the good, the best life is nonetheless pleasant because it contains the pleasures of virtue or contemplation. The cynics were having none of this. About the closest we find to an endorsement of pleasure is the observation, ascribed to Diogenes, that refraining from pleasure is itself pleasant. That's just a standard cynic paradox, you might think, but he seems to have practiced what he preached. Finding a sweet amidst his humble breakfast, Diogenes tossed it away, crying, Away with the tyrant! And we've already seen that Antisthenes said that madness is preferable to pleasure. In place of pleasure, the cynics promoted a life of toil, what in Greek is called ponos. This does not seem to mean actual physical work, Diogenes lived by begging, not by doing manual labor. Rather, it means deliberately choosing a hard life, for instance wearing only that thin cloak and going barefoot in winter. So are the cynics telling us that pleasure is not merely different from the good, but actually bad? That would be going further even than other anti-hedonistic philosophers like the Stoics, who considered pleasure neither good nor bad in itself. And it would put them in the surprising company of some students of Plato, who excluded pleasure from the good life altogether. But the cynic ethical stance is not best understood in terms of what it rejected. Yes, they mocked social norms, they refused to seek pleasure, and I suspect they weren't too keen on good old-fashioned personal hygiene either. But this was all in the service of a positive ethical code, which can be summed up in one word, nature. It's interesting here to compare the cynics to Aristotle. For Aristotle, the good life for humans was also determined by nature, but he thought that we perfect our nature only through extraordinary excellence through the exploitation of our full potential, and that this sometimes occurred through social engagement. The cynics disagreed. They saw society as unnatural, and acted accordingly by flaunting social norms. They equated virtue with a natural existence like that lived by dogs. Wealth and even adequate clothing was a barrier to this natural lifestyle. We're told that Diogenes attempted to eat raw meat in an attempt to get in touch with his inner dog. This explains an otherwise paradoxical feature of the cynic lifestyle. While disdaining pleasure, they satisfied natural urges whenever and wherever they felt like it. For instance, Diogenes was asked why he was eating in the middle of the marketplace, and said, that's where I got hungry. Notoriously, he also gratified himself sexually in public, and when challenged, replied with the immortal line, I only wish I could get rid of hunger by rubbing my belly. Or think back to the famous encounter between Alexander the Great and Diogenes. What Diogenes is doing there is not, for instance, slamming his head into his wine jar to make sure his life is as unpleasant as possible. Rather, he's enjoying the lovely sunshine. So it seems the cynics weren't against pleasure as such. They were against pleasures that are not provided by nature. If pleasure can be had with no effort, then go right ahead, just as dogs do. But don't make your happiness dependent on pleasures that are more difficult to acquire. This brings us back to the cynics' quest to avoid disturbance. By refusing to desire anything that nature cannot provide, the cynics made themselves effectively invulnerable, or as close as any human can be to that ideal. Thus Diogenes proclaimed that philosophy prepares you for any turn of fortune, and makes you rich despite possessing no money. Many contemporaries no doubt collected and read tales of the cynics, because they were titillating and entertaining. But those who took cynicism seriously enough to convert to the lifestyle, walking the barefoot walk as well as talking the bare-faced talk, were attracted not just by the humor, but by the promise of self-sufficiency. An excellent example is the cynic who comes along just after Diogenes, Crates. Though most of the best lines are ascribed to Antistines and Diogenes, there is no better summary of the cynic creed than the one provided by Crates. Philosophy is a quart of beans and to care for nothing. In pursuit of this ideal he gave away his property, living a life of ostentatious poverty and asceticism like Diogenes before him. On the subject of sex, for instance, he had this to say, hunger puts an end to lust. If not, time does. But if you can't use these, use a rope. That's what I call tough love. But Crates's toughness didn't prevent him from finding love. In a relationship much celebrated in the ancient literature, a well-born woman named Hipparchia married him and joined in the cynic lifestyle. Notoriously, they followed Diogenes's example of public self-pleasuring by having sex with each other right out in the open. If you're thinking that the debauched Greeks wouldn't have been shocked by this, think again. They were shocked. And that was the point. Socrates tried to convert men to virtue by arguing with them, the cynics led by example, giving up on wealth and coming up with ever more outrageous ways to critique the society around them. Eventually though, cynics turned to written works in an effort to spread their message. Diogenes may not have written anything, just as Socrates had not, but Crates probably did put pen to paper. One title ascribed to him is In Praise of Lentil Soup, the cynic's favorite humble meal. As we move forward into the third century BC, we find writers composing cynic diatribes, trying to capture the savage wit of Diogenes in works that were called serio-comic. Two major figures here were Bion and Menippus, whose satirical style was influential on Roman literature. Indeed, one thing cynicism has in common with the other schools I'm considering in these episodes on Hellenistic philosophy is that it passed from Greek into Roman society and survived well into the imperial age. Many Roman authors complained that the self-styled cynics of their day were hypocrites. In Roman society, cynicism apparently became a kind of fashionable, or anti-fashionable, stance rather than a living philosophical tradition. Nonetheless, we know that there were self-identified cynic philosophers brave and principled enough to speak truth to power. The philosopher Demetrius refused a gift from that most ungifted of emperors, Caligula. And when the emperor Nero established an opulent bathhouse, Demetrius said that those who bathed there were making themselves dirty. Among other philosophers in the Roman era, attitudes towards the cynics were mixed. Cicero found their shameful behavior appalling, but Epictetus, Seneca, and other Stoics offered the cynics at least grudging respect. Many forgave the cynics their dropout lifestyle and their shocking exhibitionism, because they at least had the good grace to disdain pleasure. The Epicureans had a far more socially acceptable lifestyle and were much more philosophically sophisticated, yet few representatives of other schools showed anything but scorn for them, in part because they were hedonists. As we'll be seeing in episodes to come, pleasure was rarely far from the center of attention in the Hellenistic period, and it was sometimes put at the center of the good life as well as the center of attention. We'll be getting to the hedonist Epicurus and wandering around his garden in a couple of episodes, but first I want to look at a less celebrated group of pleasure lovers, who combined their hedonism with stunningly innovative claims about knowledge. I know you'll enjoy hearing about the Cyrenaics next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Livercombe Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Instant Gratification, the Cyrenaics. About 200 years before the birth of Christ, a historian named Hippoebotus sat down at his desk to write about the nine philosophical schools he considered most important. He included the usual suspects, Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, but at least three of the nine names are rather unfamiliar today, the Cyrenaics, the Anakarians, and the Theodorans. Don't panic, I won't have to devote the next three episodes to these obscure groups, because as it turns out, the Anakarians and Theodorans were simply developments within the larger tradition known as the Cyrenaics. Not that this tradition was very large. The Cyrenaics had already fizzled out by the time of Hippoebotus, and they would be on nobody's list of the most influential ancient philosophical movements, but they're worth discussing nonetheless. Along with the Cynics, they present us with a helpful introduction to the main debates of Hellenistic philosophy. They took up rather extreme positions within those debates, and did what philosophers tend to do when they're defending extreme positions, they came up with innovative and provocative ways of defending their corner. And there's one other reason I want to cover them, so that next time someone asks you what your favorite Hellenistic philosophical school is, you can impress the heck out of them by saying, oh, I've always had a soft spot for the Cyrenaics. Of course, a crowd will soon gather round and hang on your every word as you explain the ideas of the Cyrenaics, but as usual in this early period of Hellenistic philosophy, it's not so easy to say what those ideas were. As with the Cynics, our evidence for the Cyrenaics consists of reports and anecdotes rather than preserved philosophical treatises. Actually, the comparison with the Cynics is an apt one. The Cyrenaics were committed hedonists, whereas the Cynics chose a life of deliberate hardship, but they share the same goal, namely total freedom, and the same road to that goal, namely following nature. They even have a good deal in common historically. Ancient sources have Cyrenaics and Cynics studying with one another, and like the Cynics, the Cyrenaics could trace their lineage to an associate of Socrates. With the Cyrenaics, we see yet another variation on the theme of Socratic ethics. Where the Cynics could look back to the Socratic follower Antisthenes, the Cyrenaics claimed to carry on the ideas of another Socratic, Aristippus. If you're starting to get annoyed by the fact that all these names, Cynics and Cyrenaics, Antisthenes and Aristippus, sound rather alike, then I have bad news for you. It turns out that this follower of Socrates named Aristippus is the grandfather of the man who really developed Cyrenaic philosophy in all its glory. The name of this grandson? Aristippus. So we need to distinguish between the grandfather Aristippus the older, who was a companion of Socrates, and the grandson Aristippus the younger, who was really the brains of the family firm. The reason we call them Cyrenaics is that Aristippus the older hailed originally from a town in modern-day Libya called Cairini. He was known as an associate of Socrates, and is already mentioned by Xenophon as a character in his Socratic memoirs. Xenophon presents Aristippus the older as defending his hedonistic lifestyle, as Socrates urges him to adopt a life of greater self-control. In due course, Aristippus the older became famous for his hedonism, or perhaps I should say infamous. Just as many tales were inspired by the poverty and wisecracking of Diogenes the Cynic, so Aristippus is the hero of plentiful one-sentence short stories, each of which could be entitled pleasure is my business. These anecdotes typically feature Aristippus at a feast or visiting prostitutes. For instance, we hear of him telling a student that the problem with visiting a whorehouse isn't going in, but being unable to come back out. In another tale, a woman of loose morals accuses him of getting her pregnant. Aristippus tells her, you're like someone who walks through a thicket and blames one particular thorn for scratching her. Other stories have him demanding money from his students in stark contrast to Socrates, who was well known for asking nothing but friendship. For example, a father brought his son to be taught by Aristippus, who said that the price of instruction was 500 drachmas. The father said, for that much money I could buy a slave, and Aristippus replied, go ahead, then you'll have two. Now, I know what you're thinking. This guy isn't a philosopher, he's a debauched jerk who recycles bee material from the better known act of Diogenes the Cynic. Certainly, the ancient sources do give us that impression. In fact, they sometimes even credit the same one-liners to both Aristippus and Diogenes. But reading more carefully, we can see that Aristippus the older put some thought into his hedonism. We're told that he practiced self-discipline of a kind. He did grab any pleasure that came by, but by the same token, he was able to find pleasure in any circumstance. That story with the whorehouse, where he tells the student you need to be able to come back out, shows that he valued a limited kind of self-control. He emphasized the need to be satisfied with the pleasures one can have right now, and claimed that this life would be easiest, most pleasant, and most free. So there is indeed a lot Aristippus the elder has in common with Diogenes and the other Cynics. He was clearly more interested than the Cynics in luxurious pleasure and wealth, unless we discount these aspects of the evidence as scurrilous rumors. And he put pleasure front and center in his theory of the best life, which the Cynics certainly didn't do. But like them, he accepted the satisfaction of momentary desire as a natural way to live, and strove to live free and unencumbered by social convention. To be honest, though, Aristippus the older by himself would not really merit a place in our history of philosophy. It's Aristippus the younger who devised these signature philosophical theories we know as Cyrenaicism. Still central to his philosophical outlook is hedonism, the claim that pleasure is the good. He also inherits from his grandfather the idea that we should be interested in present pleasures. This forms a contrast to the Epicureans. As we'll see in a couple of episodes, Epicurus and his followers were hedonists who valued long-term planning. For them, pleasure-seeking is not a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment thing, but a strategic way of life which involves careful training, foregoing present pleasures for the sake of future ones and to avoid future pains, and also the enjoyment of remembering past pleasure and anticipating future pleasure. None of that for Aristippus the younger. For him, your life is only as good as what you are experiencing in the present moment. This brings us to something unusual and surprising about Aristippus the younger. Almost all ancient philosophers follow the lead of Plato and Aristotle in trying to identify the best life as the happy life. As I said when I talked about Aristotle, they are eudaimonist, meaning that they center their ethics on the goal of happiness, or eudaimonia. For the Stoics and Plato, at least in some of his moods, wisdom and virtue guarantee happiness. So, for them, wisdom and virtue are the good, at least as far as ethics are concerned. Aristotle is a bit harder to pin down. He makes virtues central to happiness, but leaves room for other goods like friends, family, and even material comfort, and winds up endorsing a life of contemplation. But all agree that when we do ethics we are trying to figure out what will make us happy. Of course, a hedonist can think this too. The Epicureans were hedonists precisely because they thought the life with the most pleasure is the happy and good life. The Cyrenaics are the odd men out. They aren't particularly interested in happiness. They are too focused on the here and now to worry about what would be best over a whole life. Why does Aristippus the Younger take this unusual view? We have to speculate, but my guess is that he saw the pressure a hedonist would feel if he started to admit the need for planning and calculation. In his dialogue The Protagoras, Plato has Socrates point out that a successful hedonist will need what he calls an art of measurement for deciding what will give him the most pleasure. This looks like a step on the slippery slope towards identifying the good with wisdom and rationality, and ultimately whatever reason commends to us, virtue for instance. Aristippus though wants to stick to the idea that the good is whatever feels good. He's not interested in memories of past pleasures or anticipations of future ones. After all, such pleasures don't even exist for us right now. What exists for us is whatever is affecting us right now. Aristippus talks about this as a kind of motion. Pleasure he defines as a smooth motion, and pain as a rough motion. In one of the many nautical metaphors that are scattered throughout ancient philosophy, he compares pain to a storm at sea, pleasure to a favouring wind, and the absence of both pain and pleasure to complete calm. But why does Aristippus identify pleasure with the good in the first place? It's as if he started out knowing he was going to defend the hedonism of present pleasures, and dispensed with anything that would get in the way, happiness, wisdom, memory, hope. In philosophy, holding to a position at all costs like this is not usually considered good form. So is this just misplaced filial devotion to granddad, or does the younger Aristippus have an argument to give on the older's behalf? He does, and it's an interesting one, not least because it was used by a range of hedonistic philosophers around this time, and also by their opponents. Sometimes called the cradle argument, the line of thought goes that from earliest childhood, all humans seek pleasure. Eudoxus, a mathematician and hedonist member of Plato's Academy, who we've met on more than one occasion, apparently gave an argument like this, invoking the fact that all animals strive constantly after pleasure. We'll see it used again in defense of pleasure soon, when we get to Epicurus, and later we'll see the Stoics use the idea that ethics can be grounded in the instinctive, natural responses of children and animals. You might think that the cradle argument is one even a child could see through. Just because animals and human infants seek pleasure no matter what doesn't mean that we mature adult humans should do it. You might even think that it's a sign of maturity to forgo pleasure for the sake of nobler ideals. But the cradle argument has more force if you admit, as many ancient philosophers did, that nature determines what is best for humans. Just think back to Aristotle's function argument, for example. Even today, many people assume that if something is unnatural, it must be unacceptable. The link between nature and ethical goodness is clearly an intuition that runs deep. And there's more. The Cyrenaics' emphasis on present pleasure helps them secure a goal they share not only with the cynics but with other Hellenistic schools, ataraxia, or the lack of disturbance. They take their cue from Aristippus the older, who announced that he sought the easiest and most pleasant life. The man who has pleasure right now and is satisfied by that has no anxiety about the future and no regrets about the past. Aristippus the younger supported this radical idea about the supreme importance of present pleasures by putting forward equally radical ideas about human knowledge. He started from the apparently innocent observation that I can only experience the way I am being affected by the things around me. So, for instance, if I see something white, that thing affects me by making me feel like I'm seeing white. Aristippus emphasized the passivity of this process by saying that if I seem to see something white then I am being whitened. The later author Plutarch makes fun of this by suggesting that for the Cyrenaics, if I seem to see a wall or a horse, then I am walled or horsed. But probably Aristippus spoke only of simpler experiences like seeing a color or tasting sweetness or sourness. This is a side issue though. The main point is that our experience consists in nothing but being affected in various ways. And of course things might affect you in one way and me in another way. For instance, if you are ill, everything may taste bitter to you. In that case, honey will, so to speak, embitter you, whereas it will sweeten me because I am healthy. Of course, common sense would say that if honey tastes sweet to me and bitter to you, then that is because my tasting ability is working properly and yours isn't. After all, honey really is sweet. If you think it's bitter, then that's your fault, not the honey's fault, and certainly not my fault. But the Cyrenaics think common sense needs some correction. Aristippus will remind us that we only experience the various ways the honey is affecting each of us. Those experiences are not something we can share. I can never take part in your experience of the honey any more than I can genuinely feel your pain when someone hits you in the face. All this is bound to remind us of the position Plato ascribes to the sophist Protagoras in the dialogue called Theaetetus. That was way back in episode 22, so perhaps I'd better remind you. Protagoras says that there is no absolute truth about, for instance, whether a certain wind is cold or warm. If it feels cold to you, it is cold for you, and if it feels warm to me, it is warm for me. In general, all truths are true only relative to the way things seem to somebody or somebody else. Perhaps there's no more than a family resemblance between Protagoras' relativism and the theory of the Cyrenaics. The Cyrenaics seem to have focused exclusively on basic sensory experiences, like whether something is sweet or white, whereas Protagoras, as Plato presents him, was at least as interested in judgments about things like justice and the beneficial. But as with Protagoras, modern readers can't help seeing the Cyrenaic position as an exciting premonition of later, radical views. Were these guys adopting a skeptical view about knowledge in general? Were they like Descartes, raising a doubt even about whether there are any external objects out there in the world that we seem to see around us? Well, I don't think so. Certainly, there is a skeptical flavor to their view, since they suspend judgment about whether the honey is in itself really sweet or bitter, and so on. But there's no suggestion that they suspended judgment about whether the honey exists at all. What they're after is rather an ethical point, namely that nothing is, or could be, important for me apart from the way things seem to me. This of course goes hand in hand with their hedonism. If my awareness of life, the universe, and everything boils down to how things seem to me right now, then it only stands to reason that present pleasure and pain are going to be of paramount importance. Now, you might argue that things right now can seem unjust, or unfair, or beautiful to us. That would give us a lot of other things to care about apart from present pleasure. But some interpreters think that Aristippus added one more piece to the puzzle. He may have said that all the experiences we have are in fact pleasures or pains. So if something tastes sweet, that is a kind of pleasure. If bitter, that is a kind of pain. If it is not even slightly pleasant or slightly painful, we will have no experience at all. It will be like something so bland that it has no taste. This explains why the Cyrenaics compare the state in which there is neither pleasure nor pain to a calm sea where there is no wind at all. Let's take stock. We've been looking at the views of Aristippus the Younger, and we've seen that for him, what exists for me is what I am experiencing right now, which is perhaps nothing apart from various pleasures and pains. No wonder that the only good to be had in life is the pleasure I can have right now, while the only bad thing is pain I am having now. This picture is consistent and uncompromising, but it wasn't a huge success. The philosophy of Epicurus pushed the Cyrenaics into a distant second place in the competition to be the most influential hedonistic school. Still, Aristippus the Younger did have his followers, which is why that historian I mentioned at the beginning of this episode lists several branches of the Cyrenaic school. These branches developed Aristippus' ideas in three different directions. An obvious way to defend the Cyrenaic theory was to make limited concessions, so as to render it more plausible. This seems to have been the strategy of one Anichares, who still insisted that pleasure is the good, but took a broader view of pleasure. Whereas Aristippus, both older and younger, seemed to have concentrated on basic physical pleasure, Anichares pointed out that honor and friendship are also pleasant. This more user-friendly version of the theory is in stark contrast to a second development at the hands of a thinker named Theodorus. He had no time for Anichares' socially domesticated version of Aristippus' ideas, yet he also thought little of physical pleasure. This is surprising, from a man who is associated with the Cyrenaic school, but he held on to another central theme of their thought, namely self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Thus he rejected the need for friendship and social ties with our fellow citizens. We seem to be heading in a fairly depressing direction here, and that impression is confirmed by a third strand of the tradition. A philosopher named Hegesius accepted the hedonism and skeptical epistemology of Aristippus the Younger. But like an obscure Greek version of Schopenhauer, Hegesius taught that we cannot expect life to be more pleasant than painful. The best we can do is to avoid pain as much as possible. This crushingly pessimistic outlook won Hegesius the memorable nickname death persuader. This was a philosopher who could literally drive you to suicide. With that, Cyrenaicism itself seems to have died out, and perhaps deservedly so, a theory which puts pleasure at the heart of the good life really shouldn't be this unpleasant. Still, the Cyrenaics are an unusually fascinating footnote in the history of philosophy, remarkable especially for their innovative ideas about human experience and for the contrasts they offer with their great rivals, the Epicureans. Many ancient philosophers regarded the Epicureans and their hedonism with scorn, but Epicurus was one of the most subtle thinkers of antiquity. Like Aristippus the Younger, he showed how hedonism might lead us to a careful and moderate lifestyle and set great store in the value of friendship and wisdom. But like Aristippus, he defended his hedonistic ethics by branching out into other areas of philosophy, including epistemology and physics, where he revived ideas pioneered among the pre-Socratics. In the next episode, I'll be looking at the empiricism, the atomism, and the personality of Epicurus, a man who was happy with the simple pleasures in life, a bit of bread and water, good friends, and a pleasant garden. We'll begin to harvest the fruits of his philosophy next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Constant Gardener, Epicurus and His Principles. Do you like a nice garden? Do you enjoy the company of friends? Do you believe the world is made of tiny particles, which you call atoms? Do you trust the evidence of your senses? Do you find politics tiresome and raise a skeptical eyebrow at those who live in fear of God? If your answer to these questions is yes, you might want to consider becoming an Epicurean. Membership has its advantages. This is a philosophy which is devoted to pleasure, though to be honest, you might be disappointed about that bit when you read the fine print. And while I'm being honest, I should warn you that it won't all be garden parties. There will be a regime of memorization and training to carry out. Oh, and if you do decide to sign up, then you'll want to clear a date each year to celebrate the birthday of your school's founder, Epicurus. Among the founders of the Hellenistic schools, Epicurus is the man we know best. We have only fragments and anecdotes to tell us about the founder of Stoicism, Zeno, and the first skeptic, Pyro. But for Epicurus, we have several extant writings, as well as a collection of memorable sayings intended to summarize his key teachings. We can thank our old friend Diogenes Laertius for preserving three letters of Epicurus, which deal respectively with his ideas about physics, cosmology, and ethics. Four more letters, including one addressed to Epicurus' mother, and some further sayings, have been preserved by another Diogenes. Yes, I'm aware that along with Diogenes the Cynic, this makes three men named Diogenes that I've mentioned in the last few episodes. Sorry about that. This latest entry in our ever-expanding Diogenes collection is Diogenes of Oinoanda, who like Diogenes Laertius lived a good half-millennium after Epicurus. Diogenes of Oinoanda was himself an Epicurean who paid to have teachings and texts of the school written up as a stone inscription, which has been discovered in modern-day Turkey. That shows something about the longevity of Epicurus' teachings. In letters to his friends and in pithy aphorisms, he encapsulated his doctrines in a way that was easy to study and memorize, and he explicitly encouraged his adherents to take advantage. This did the trick. Unlike his fellow hedonist Aristippus the Younger, who we looked at last time, Epicurus launched a philosophical school that would still be alive and well in the Roman Empire. The first century BC, the period which saw the fall of Rome's Republic, was also graced by Lucretius, whose magisterial poem On the Nature of Things set Epicureanism into verse. Maybe this was Aristippus' problem, he didn't have a good enough poet working for him. We'll look at Lucretius in a future episode. For now, and for the next couple of episodes, I want to concentrate on Epicurus himself and try to understand how his philosophy fits together. Like Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus had a sophisticated project, which had something to say on just about every area of philosophy, ranging from ethics to physics to the gods. Again, like Plato and Aristotle, Epicurus set forth his system in Athens. This was not his home city. In 341 BC, six years after Aristotle died, he was born on the island of Samos. And yes, that's the same Samos that produced Pythagoras. If you're still not impressed, the same island was the home of Aristarchus, a younger contemporary of Epicurus who was the first to propose that the earth goes around the sun, instead of the other way around. This part of the podcast was brought to you by the Samos Tourist Board. Epicurus moved to Athens in about 307 BC. Here he acquired a garden, which he could use as a base for his school. Significantly, this was located outside the city walls of Athens, which seems like a geographical shorthand for the Epicureans' lack of interest in political engagement. The Aristotelian ideal of practical, even heroic, action was not a flower tended in Epicurus' garden. Instead, this school was going to devote itself to a pleasant life of quiet philosophical discussion. That may give a false impression, though, because the Epicureans could be tenacious in defense of both the theories and the memory of their founder. The school would not have survived and prospered for hundreds of years had it not been willing to engage in polemics against other schools, and to foster loyalty by treating Epicurus himself as a literally divine figure. This is why they celebrated his birthday every year. The success of Epicureanism as a social enterprise is shown by that expensive inscription sponsored by Diogenes of Oenuanda. Not many philosophers have people paying to have letters they wrote to mom carved painstakingly into rock several centuries after they die. The success of Epicureanism as a philosophical enterprise, meanwhile, is shown by the fact that modern-day historians of philosophy find it worth dissecting every sentence of the precious remaining writings of Epicurus. So let's start to look at those writings, beginning with one of the letters preserved by Diogenes Laertius in his biographical collection, The Lives of the Philosophers. This letter is addressed to one of Epicurus' disciples, a man named Herodotus. The same name, but not the same guy as the famous historian. These Greeks clearly didn't have enough names to go around. Epicurus uses this letter to set out his physical theory, an atomic theory which harks back to the atomism of the pre-Socratic Democritus, but introduces some significant differences, as we'll see. In expounding this theory, Epicurus incidentally touches on another theme, which is where I want to begin—his ideas about human knowledge. Epicurus is an empiricist. He believes that sensation is the ground and source of all our knowledge. One of his collected sayings tells us that if we do not trust in sensation, we will have no standard against which to judge our beliefs. Epicurus is here raising, for the first time, a question that will dominate Hellenistic philosophy—what is the criterion of knowledge, which he calls the kanon, or measuring stick? His answer to the question is that all our knowledge ultimately derives from sensation and must be measured against it. This isn't to say that Epicurus is unwilling to go beyond the senses. After all, you can't see individual atoms, yet he confidently puts forth an atomist physical theory. But, he insists that claims about what is unclear to the senses need to be checked against sensation. He also uses analogies drawn for sensation for things that are not evident to the senses. Now, I know what you're thinking. Why should we put our trust in the senses? The answer is simple, according to Epicurus. They cannot be wrong. Your senses are infallible guides to the way that the external world is interacting with your body. Of course, this doesn't guarantee that you can avoid false beliefs. A classic Epicurean example is a square tower that looks round from a distance. Gazing at the tower, you might well form the belief that the tower is round. You'd be wrong, but this isn't the fault of sensation. That really is how square towers look from far away. If you see the world through rose-colored glasses, everything will look rosy. Again, sensation is not failing here. Rather, your experience shows you exactly what it should show you, given that you are wearing those glasses. Epicurus insists upon this point, worrying that if the senses are allowed to be false in some cases, there will be no end to our uncertainty. If they are always true, the senses can provide that yardstick against which we test all our beliefs. So we can discover that some beliefs are false, for instance, by walking closer to the tower and seeing that it is in fact square, but we can never discover the falsehood of the sensation itself, which gives rise to the belief. Sensation also gives rise to something more basic than belief. This is what Epicurus calls a preconception. The Greek word is prolepsis, one of the many technical terms Epicurus coined for expounding his theories. His idea is that sense experience gives us a range of rough and ready notions we can apply to the world. Our preconception of a giraffe might be animal that lives on the savannah, with spots and a long neck. This isn't a definition of giraffe, but it's enough to help you identify giraffes and start thinking about them more carefully. Preconceptions can form a basis for doing philosophy and a kind of check on the philosophical theories we develop. If we wind up giving a theory which violates our preconceptions, that will cast doubt upon the theory. Even more important is what Epicurus calls a common conception. This is a preconception that just about everyone shares, for instance that the gods are happy. These common conceptions are important because everyone will agree to them. They provide not just a starting point for philosophy, but an uncontroversial starting point. With this theory of preconceptions, Epicurus seems to respond to the problem Plato identified in his dialogue the Mino. As we saw, Mino's paradox shows that inquiry is impossible because we either know about the object of our search, or we don't. If we already know, there will be no point in inquiring, but if we do not, then how should we start trying to inquire? Epicurus' solution is not to invoke forgotten knowledge which is already in us when we are born, as Plato has Socrates suggest in the dialogues Mino and Phaedo. Instead, he proposes that by remembering our sense experiences, we build up preconceptions. These won't qualify as rock-solid knowledge, of the kind Plato was seeking, but they are good enough to get us going. Like Plato's category of true belief, they offer a kind of halfway house between certain knowledge and total ignorance. When we begin to inquire, we need not start from nothing. We can see these epistemological ideas put into practice in Epicurus' letter to Herodotus, as he defends his new version of the atomic theory. In setting out the theory, he's venturing into the territory of what he calls the unclear, or non-evident, so he needs to make sure that he stays true to sensation. First, he observes that nothing can be absolutely destroyed or generated. He agrees with Parmenides and his Eliatic followers that there is no such thing as a passage from being to non-being, or vice versa. If being could be reduced to absolute non-being, then being would disappear bit by bit until it is all gone. But look around, and you'll see that the world is still very much here. The basic building blocks of the world, then, cannot be utterly destroyed or made from nothing. On the other hand, Epicurus insists against Parmenides that the world does involve change. Again, look around. We see that there are bodies and that they are changing and moving all the time. To explain how this can happen, Epicurus makes a far-reaching theoretical point, which also seems to be grounded in sense experience. If a body moves, then it must move into an empty space, a place where there is no body. So we need to say that the world includes both body and empty space. This will be void, already a feature of Democritian atomism, albeit defended with a more careful methodology. We can imagine Aristotle turning in his fairly fresh grave, complaining that Epicurus' careful methodology hasn't stopped him from assuming what he should be proving. As we saw, Aristotle rejected the idea of void. He thought instead that the world is, as it were, full. Every time something moves, something else has to get out of the way. I push air out of the way as I walk, and it must flow around me and occupy the space I was just in, so that no space is left empty. Epicurus disagrees. He thinks that if the world were really full, nothing would be able to move, just as in a tin packed full of sardines, no sardine has any wiggle room. A world without void would be like the one Parmenides envisioned, static and unchanging. That may sound convincing, but it looks like Epicurus is assuming something Aristotle would not grant, namely that bodies must be unyielding. We could capture the disagreement by saying that Aristotle's conception of body allows it to be rather fluid, so that it can shift around to accommodate motion, whereas Epicurus assumes that all body must be equally solid and resistant, unlike void, which is completely unresistant and intangible. Notice that we are still talking only about bodies and void without claiming that bodies are made of atoms. But that's going to change now, which will annoy our ghostly Aristotle further, since he was a severe critic of atomism. For Aristotle, it is at least in theory possible to divide any body and divide again as many times as you like. This is what we sometimes call a continuous theory of body. No part of the body is too small to be cut. To be an atomist, at least in the ancient sense, is just to reject this idea that body is continuous. As we saw when discussing Democritus, the Greek word atamon means uncuttable, so atoms are simply parts of bodies that cannot be physically divided. Epicurus arrives at his atoms by considering something like Zeno's dichotomy paradox. If we allow every body to be infinitely divisible, every body will be made of infinitely many parts. But each bodily part must still have some size, so every body will be infinitely big. To prevent this absurd consequence, Epicurus embraces atomism. But this is going to be an improved atomism which benefits from being able to respond to anti-atomist criticisms like those presented by Aristotle. One challenge is to explain atomic motion. How can an atom be indivisible, argued the critics, if they are to move? Imagine an atom crossing a line. As it is doing so, the front part of the atom will be past the line, while the back part is not yet past the line. Oops. It looks like the indivisible atom is divisible after all. Or if you don't like that argument, how about this one? Imagine an atom being touched on either side, perhaps by two other atoms. Then it is being touched on its right part and on its left part, so it has two parts. It can be divided after all. Again, oops. Not so fast, says Epicurus. I didn't say that atoms are conceptually indivisible, only that they are physically indivisible. Atoms themselves are made of parts, just like bodies, but these parts cannot be physically separated from one another. He calls them minima, or minimal parts. These literally subatomic parts are quite simply the smallest possible size that there is. You cannot conceive of anything smaller. They do not have a left half and a right half, for instance. Also, when an atom moves, this will always mean that at least one minimal part has moved completely. You will never have a minimal part being only halfway over a line. Either the part is all the way over, or it hasn't crossed the line yet. Just think how much goal-mouth controversy they could avoid if they used minimal parts as soccer balls. Again, in support of his idea, Epicurus resorts to sensation. Having been born before the invention of soccer, he refers instead to the minimum body that we can see. Something like a tiny particle of dust has no visible parts, yet if enough dust motes come together, you have a pile of dust. In the same way, minimum parts have no sides or further sub-parts, but they can come together in some special way to form whole atoms. And come together they do, forming atoms of many shapes and sizes. How many shapes and sizes, you ask? Inconceivably many, says Epicurus. He doesn't admit what Democritus may have, namely that there are single atoms big enough to see. But there are all sorts of configurations of atoms, and as Democritus taught us, an infinite number of atoms. These come together to form larger bodies when they get caught in clusters, vibrating as they bounce back and forth, since atoms never stop moving in the void, but only change direction when they collide into one another. These complex bodies come together to form a whole cosmos. In fact, this happens many times. There will be inconceivably many worlds with all sorts of configurations scattered through the void, which is also infinite in all directions. This then is Epicurus' universe, an inconceivably large void, which lasts for infinite time and has infinitely many atoms, moving and colliding within it, forming bodies and whole cosmic systems scattered through unending emptiness. It's a breathtaking conception, albeit one largely familiar from his atomist predecessors. But Epicurus, unlike those predecessors, is fastidious about objections drawn from sensation. One objection is quite basic. When you drop something, why does it fall? Aristotle had explained this by saying that the heavy elements, earth and water, naturally seek a place towards the centre of the universe. But Epicurus' universe has no centre. So instead, he again improves on Democritus by proposing that all atoms have weight. Left to their own devices, they fall. The universe has an up and a down, even though it has no centre. This seems to suggest that when things are dropped in Australia, things should fall towards the sky. As far as I know, that doesn't happen, but Australian listeners can correct me if I'm wrong. That would explain how kangaroos jump so well. Leaving that aside, though, let's consider another objection. This one is from Aristotle. He observed that when things move, they go slower if they are moving through a denser medium. For instance, you move faster through air than water, and through water faster than mud. So, if you were moving through void, which has no density, you should move infinitely fast. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Oops. Epicurus responds by holding simply that atoms all move at the same speed. You'll never guess how fast. Yes, inconceivably fast. Lucretius argues that this speed must be even faster than sunlight. After all, sunlight should be slowed down by collisions with the atoms that make up the air it is shining through, whereas an uninterrupted atomic motion will encounter nothing at all. The way Epicurus anticipates and responds to such objections shows how he is using sense experience to build his theory. He not only takes sensation as his starting point, he also uses sensation to check his theory, as he promised. If your theory cannot explain why things fall, then your theory needs work. On the other hand, Epicurus is happy to stick with a theory so long as it is consistent with sensation, in the sense of not being disproven. We want to believe things that are supported by sensation and avoid believing what is counter-witnessed, as he puts it. For instance, we might go up to the round-looking tower and realize that it is in fact square. Epicurus is not really in the Platonic and Aristotelian game of seeking certainty. Some degree of support and the lack of counter-witnessing is enough for him. He sometimes makes this explicit, especially when discussing less crucial points than the fundamentals of atomic theory. For instance, he allows several alternative theories to stand as being equally acceptable in cosmological contexts. This is not because he's lazy, it's because certainty about physics is not the goal of Epicurean philosophy. Rather, the goal is an ethical one. It is happiness, which he identifies with the absence of disturbance. And I have to confess that it would disturb me if you didn't join me for the next episode. Epicurus on pleasure and happiness, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Am I Bothered? Epicurean Ethics. Cynics, Stoics, skeptics, and Epicureans. We all talk about them, whether or not we are interested in the history of philosophy. The names have entered into our everyday language. A politician can cynically manipulate an election result, then show Stoic resolve when he loses anyway, because he was skeptical about whether he'd enjoy holding office. If he'd rather enjoy the good things in life, in particular, fine food and drink, then we might describe him as an Epicurean. For us, an Epicurean is not just someone who enjoys pleasure, after all, who doesn't, but someone who has refined taste in their pleasures. Epicurus, though, would have been surprised to discover his name being associated with the life of a gourmet. He encourages us to be ready to enjoy the simple delights of plain bread and water. Clearly, the modern use of the word Epicureanism is not the best guide to the philosophy of Epicurus. His philosophy certainly did not center around the search for refined pleasure. Yet it's true enough that he was a hedonist. This is another word that might confuse us. It comes from the ancient Greek word for pleasure, hedonē. Nowadays, we use hedonist to refer to someone who is unrestrained in their pursuit of pleasure. But although Epicurus was a hedonist, he certainly did not recommend the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Rather, he was a hedonist in the sense of someone who believes that pleasure is the good, the sole criterion we should use in determining the right way to live, the right choices to make, the right actions to perform. As we navigate our way through life, pleasure is the only star we need to steer by. But this does not imply lack of restraint or a thoughtless embrace of every pleasure that comes our way. On the contrary, Epicurus teaches that the most pleasant life is a life of moderation, discipline, and careful planning. In this, Epicureanism makes a contrast with the Cyrenaic teaching of Aristippus the Younger. The Epicureans and Cyrenaics shared a commitment to hedonism, so of course they were bitter rivals. There's nothing worse than an opponent who is uncomfortably close to agreeing with you. As we saw two episodes ago, the Cyrenaics valued only present pleasures. By contrast, Epicurus thinks that the memory of past pleasure and anticipation of future pleasure can make the wise man happy even when he is undergoing extreme pain. There is no more vivid example than Epicurus himself. We know of a letter he wrote to a friend from his deathbed as he is suffering agonizing pain from the illness that killed him. He writes that this is the happiest day of his life because he thinks back on pleasant conversations he has had in the past with his friend. Now, I know what you're thinking, this sounds too good to be true. But it is nothing less than what Epicurus would expect of himself and of us. His ethical teaching is not just a theory, it is a proposed way of life which is intended to make us all but invulnerable to changes of circumstance. The goal of his philosophy is to show us how we can avoid disturbance even in the face of, say, an excruciating illness. As you might remember, this was the objective of the Cynics and Cyrenaics as well, the sort of self-sufficiency that would make us all but invulnerable to turns of fortune. We'll see in due course that the same goal motivated Stoic ethics. Even skeptics claimed that their agnostic philosophy led to ataraxia, or lack of disturbance. But if this is the common destination, the Hellenistic schools travel different roads to get there. For the Epicureans, the recommended path was to memorize and internalize a teaching that maximized pleasure over a whole life rather than at the present moment. On his deathbed, Epicurus showed how a thorough training in these precepts could allow him to overcome even great physical torment. This was a possibility the Cyrenaics denied, on the basis that present physical pain would be far stronger than any memory or hope. Perhaps as Epicurus lay dying, he allowed himself to take a bit of added pleasure in proving his opponents wrong once and for all. Of course, invulnerability like this doesn't come cheap. It requires discipline, and Epicureans would claim to be more disciplined than their fellow hedonists, the Cyrenaics. Aristippus and the other Cyrenaics demand of us that we be satisfied with whatever pleasure we feel right now. The main strategy they offer for the future is imagining possible sufferings before we undergo them so that we can steel ourselves against them. The Epicureans dismissed this as ineffective, and offered more demanding instructions for how to be happy over a whole life. We are not just trying to enjoy our current situation, like the Cyrenaics. This means we should often forego a current pleasure because of the pain it will bring later. Obvious examples include overeating and getting drunk. These might be fun here and now. In fact, let's face it, they are fun here and now. But we will regret it later when we have stomach aches and hangovers. Epicurus also cautions us against indulging in sex, at least in part because however pleasant sex might be, having children leads to more than enough worry and trouble to overwhelm that initial pleasure. The hedonistic calculation favors chastity over family life, as far as Epicurus is concerned. For the same reason, Epicureans avoided engagement in day-to-day political life when possible because the anxiety involved would outweigh the pleasure politics can provide. Of course, these same Epicureans might be willing to seek office to prevent personal disruption and worry. If the city of Athens had suddenly tried to evict Epicurus and his friends from their garden, they would presumably have been willing to confront this threat in the political arena. But in general, politics is a fool's game, being a source of anxiety rather than pleasure. It may seem to offer great pleasure. The successful politician may be acclaimed by the crowd or see statues raised in his honor and get pleasure as a result. But the Epicureans discourage us from pursuing such pleasures, labeling them as unnatural. Unnatural pleasures are poisoned chalices, guaranteed to yield more pain than pleasure in the long run. Instead, Epicurus tells us, we should look to nature itself to learn which pleasures are worth pursuing. This is another point of agreement with the cynics and Cyrenaics. In fact, in a work comparing the various Hellenistic schools, Cicero tells us that Epicurus deployed an argument also used by the Cyrenaics in support of hedonism. According to this argument, even animals and children seek pleasant feelings. This instinct is so deeply rooted in our nature that we cannot conceive of any good apart from pleasant feeling. Epicurus can improve on the Cyrenaics' use of this argument in light of his epistemology. As we saw last time, he sees sensation as the measuring stick of all belief. So, he declares that there is no need to argue for the goodness of pleasure. Any creature endowed with sensation, the capacity to have feelings, will seek out pleasure. The example of small children and animals is intended to illustrate this point, that nature itself calls us to identify pleasure with the good. But nature does not call us to seek statues or cheering crowds, the way it tells us to eat when we are hungry, to drink when we are thirsty. It is only these natural desires that we ought to satisfy. Fulfilling natural desires and being satisfied with that degree of fulfillment is the surest road to lack of disturbance. As Epicurus says, again echoing cynic and Cyrenaic ideas, natural pleasure is easy to obtain since it is always ready to hand. Furthermore, these pleasures can be as intense as any others. When we are genuinely in need of food and drink, plain bread and water are so thoroughly enjoyable that nothing could improve upon them. Epicurus' praise of natural and necessary pleasures, the pleasures we really need if we are to avoid pain, has led many to believe that he is that most paradoxical of philosophers, an ascetic hedonist. In his letter on ethics, written to a friend named Menoichias, Epicurus memorably says that when he encourages us to pursue pleasure, he does not mean the pleasure of boys, women, and fish, that is pederasty, sex, and fine food. Such passages encourage the idea that Epicurus wants us to avoid luxurious pleasures at all costs, steering clear of anything nicer than the most basic necessities. After all, he might say, luxury is always going to be more trouble than it's worth. But this seems wrong. Epicurus is not Diogenes the Cynic, after all. He is deeply convinced that pleasure is good, indeed the good. It would be inconsistent for him to avoid a pleasure if he could have it without incurring a pain that would outweigh that pleasure. A preferable interpretation to my mind is that Epicurus wants us to train ourselves to be happy with a moderate, even minimal, array of pleasures. We need to be ready to live happily on bread and water, in case circumstances offer us nothing more. Furthermore, we should not undergo great stress or exert ourselves painfully to get luxuries. That would be counterproductive. Nonetheless, the Epicurean will still enjoy luxuries if they come along and are easy to procure. On this point, I agree with my colleague Raefel Wolf, who wrote an article on this question and offered an illuminating example, which I'm now going to steal. If an Epicurean were getting on a plane, and the airline offered to bump him up to first class, would he accept? The answer is yes. First class is more pleasant than economy, and in this case, will cost him nothing in terms of worry or pain. The only exception would be if the Epicurean knew that it would pain him on future flights to sit in economy, having tasted the delights of first class. But a well-trained Epicurean would not have this problem, since he has many times rehearsed the teachings which remind him that natural and necessary pleasure is enough. So, a critic of Epicurus will need to do better than just insult him for being a debauched and mindless pleasure seeker. To that accusation, Epicurus will say, I believe you have Aristippus the Younger in mind. My hedonism is thoughtful, and requires me to resist pleasure just as often as I partake in it. Can the critic do better? He can if he has read his Plato. In several dialogues, including The Republic, Plato has his characters mount an anti-hedonistic argument that goes something like this. Imagine that you're thirsty. This clearly is painful, which we can agree is a bad thing. Fortunately, there's a solution. Go drink something. Drinking is pleasant, precisely because it restores the body to its balanced state. But as soon as the painful condition of thirst is gone, so is the pleasure. It's not nice to keep drinking when you aren't thirsty anymore. If all pleasure is like this, the hedonist is in trouble. The best we can do is break even with the pain of thirst being balanced out by the pleasure of drinking. When we are done experiencing pain, the pleasure will be gone too, and soon enough the pain will start anew as we grow thirsty again. So, a life devoted to this sort of pleasure is doomed to failure, because you can never come out ahead, like someone who can't save money because they only earn enough to pay off the debts they are constantly accruing. In The Gorgias, Plato memorably compares someone in this situation to a man continually trying to fill a leaky jar. Epicurus answers this critique of the hedonist life, but in doing so he is forced to make his most controversial and least convincing ethical claim. Firstly, he thinks that when I am having pleasure, that precludes feeling pain, so I am not still pained by thirst as I am drinking. This isn't enough though, if it turns out that every pleasure I have is balanced out by a prior or future pain. What he needs to do is show that I can do better than break even. Here comes the controversial part. Epicurus claims that when I am no longer in pain, that will in itself constitute the greatest possible pleasure. As he says in one of the pithy remarks he offered for his students' self-training, the cry of the flesh is to be neither hungry nor thirsty nor cold. Someone who is without these and expects to be free of them in the future rivals the god Zeus for happiness. Later authors tell us that Epicurus developed some newfangled terminology in explaining this idea. The terms don't appear in his extant works, but Epicurus did have a fondness for coining technical expressions, and they are well attested in our sources. He distinguished, we are told, between two kinds of pleasure, kinetic and static. The difference is that a kinetic pleasure involves some kind of change or process. The word kinetic comes from the Greek kinesis, which means motion or change. A static pleasure, by contrast, is stable and does not involve any process of transition. Paradigmatic examples of kinetic pleasures would be things like eating, drinking, and sex. These are, of course, the pleasures considered in Plato's anti-hedonistic argument. Epicurus outflanks Plato by insisting that the state in which pain has been eliminated is not merely neutral, a brief and bland respite before the next round of pain and kinetic pleasure begin. Instead, this pain-free state is pleasant, indeed so pleasant that nothing could improve upon it. This does answer Plato and significantly fleshes out our picture of the ideal Epicurean life. It is a life of moderation, intended to minimize the fluctuations of pain and kinetic pleasure, and to maximize the time we spend in the serene, static pleasure that comes with the elimination of all suffering. This helps explain why we should only value natural and necessary pleasures. If we allow the absence of fine dining or honour to upset us, even slightly, we risk missing out on the supreme pleasure that is lack of pain. It also enables Epicurus to combine his two preferred answers to the question of what constitutes the happy life. On the one hand, there is pleasure. On the other, there is ataraxia, the lack of disturbance. It turns out, on his theory of static pleasure, that these are actually one and the same, since lack of pain and disturbance just is static pleasure, the best pleasure there is. This is a brilliant move on Epicurus's part. Unfortunately, it is at best controversial and at worst wildly implausible. Later critics such as Cicero scornfully reject the claim that the mere absence of pain is the best pleasure we can have. To some extent, this comes down to a clash of differing intuitions. Plato assumes that the absence of pain is compatible with the absence of pleasure, and that someone who is merely free of pain may feel nothing at all, whether good or bad. By contrast, Epicurus thinks the same state would be one of utter bliss. He does, however, make sure to head off one possible objection. An opponent might say that even someone who is free of pain would have reason to seek out additional kinetic pleasure. For instance, if I am in this blissful state and someone offers me an almond croissant, I may well say yes, even without being hungry just because they taste good. Epicurus doesn't deny this, but insists that when I eat the croissant, I am not actually making my life more pleasant, I am simply adding variety. Someone who managed to go through life without pain, but without almond croissants, would still be as happy as Zeus. But as we saw with luxuries in general, I might have reason to eat the almond croissant even if it doesn't increase my share of happiness. From what I've said so far, you might think that the right lifestyle for the Epicurean would be one of isolated moderation, minimizing contact with other people and their projects. We already saw that family life is a potential source of disturbance. But what about these friends who were the recipients of Epicurus' letters? Okay, one of his letters was to his mother, and he was pretty much stuck with her, and vice versa. Fortunately for him, his advice to avoid having children came too late to help her. But what about the other friends and those who spent time with Epicurus in his garden? Aren't such engagements a potential source of pain, to be avoided at all costs? Far from it. Epicurus in fact claims that there is quite literally nothing that can safeguard our happiness so well as friendship. For one thing, friendship and companionable conversation is itself one of the greatest pleasures we can have. It's no accident that it was a memory of this kind of pleasure that consoled Epicurus on his deathbed. Also, Epicurus realizes that even someone who is neither hungry nor thirsty nor cold might still worry about where their next meal is coming from, or how they will stay warm when winter comes. Remember, to attain a life like that of Zeus, we also need to expect that we will avoid pain in the future, the reverse of the Cyrenaic idea of rehearsing the likelihood of future suffering. Friends are the greatest boon we can have in this respect, the ultimate insurance policy. Friends do each other good, and know that they can call upon each other for help in the future. If I have many friends, I know I will never need to go hungry, because if it comes to it, I can get a meal at a friend's house. Thus, friendship, says Epicurus, has its roots in mutual benefit. This means not so much the actual benefits we give one another, as our confidence that more benefit is available later on if we need it. So friendship is, on two counts, crucial for the happy life. It is itself a great source of pleasure, and it helps protect us against disturbance, including the disturbance of worrying about tomorrow. This seems to make Epicurus vulnerable to an objection I raised when looking at Aristotle's theory of friendship. Shouldn't we value our friends for a reason other than our own happiness? Epicurus has made it sound like my friends are mere instruments for avoiding disturbance. He might be able to explain why I would undergo pains for the sake of friends, in order to build up mutual confidence of future beneficial behaviour, but this all ultimately boils down to I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. It looks to be a depressingly selfish view of friendship. Some interpreters find grounds for optimism though. They suggest that there is a two-level strategy here. In general, I want to have friends because it benefits me, but in order to achieve that, I must genuinely cherish some individual people as friends. All well and good, you might say, but ultimately there is at least one threat that no friends and no amount of moderate living can protect me from. No matter how much you are enjoying this episode of the podcast, your enjoyment is diminished by the knowledge that it will end soon. And so it is with life. I can never truly be free of anxiety and disturbance, because I am going to die someday. This, you might think, is the real problem with not being Zeus. He gets to be immortal, and we don't. And speaking of Zeus, shouldn't I also worry that the gods might inflict all kinds of torment on me in the afterlife? If you thought all that hunger and thirst was bad, wait until you get to Tartarus. If you're not worried about this, then you need to listen back to the episode about Plato's myths. As usual, though, Epicurus is way ahead of us. He has detailed arguments for why we should fear neither death nor the gods. I fear, however, that if you want to hear those arguments, you'll have to join me next time, on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lieberman Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Nothing to Fear, Epicureans on Death and the Gods. It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens. So says Woody Allen. But I don't believe him about not being afraid to die. For one thing, this is the same guy who said, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying. For another thing, let's face it, we're all afraid to die. I can remember being about 15 years old, and having a sudden crushing realization in English class that one day I would cease to exist. An intimation of utter nothingness. Not black emptiness, but genuine nothingness, non-existence. Then the bell rang and we went to lunch. Some day, of course, the bell really will ring for me, for you, for everyone. We hope to go peacefully in our sleep at an advanced age, but one way or another we will all go to find out whether Socrates was right to argue in the Phaedo that death is mere separation of the soul from the body, or rather total oblivion. Either way, I'm not looking forward to it. Epicurus believed that the purpose of philosophy was to relieve human suffering. He remarked in fact that a philosopher who provides no therapy against this is just wasting words. As a hedonist, he naturally took physical pain to be an important form of suffering and offered advice on how to avoid it. But mental pain is worse than physical pain, just as the pleasure that lies in the absence of all pain is better than the volatile physical pleasures of sex, food, and drink. If Epicureanism has a chief aim, it is to dispel mental anguish, anxiety, and fear. Thus, the Epicureans summarize their teacher's message as follows. The gods are not to be feared, nor is death. Pleasure is ready to hand, and pain readily endured. This is the so-called tetra-pharmacon, or fourfold remedy, quoted by authors like the first century AD Epicurean author Philodemus. It's significant that it is described as a remedy. For Epicurus, ethics is like a medical regime, but for the soul rather than the body. And it is the soul we need to discuss if we're to understand Epicurus's arguments against fearing the gods and death. The importance of these two sources of anxiety is clear from the fact that they make up the first half of the tetra-pharmacon. We've already seen how Epicurus would defend the other two bits of reassurance, that we can always find pleasure and always overcome pain. Just think again of his ability to master agony on his deathbed by thinking of pleasant times spent with friends. But death and God? Those are harder nuts to crack, and the theory of pleasure won't suffice by itself. Instead, as I say, we'll need to look at what Epicurus has to say about the soul. If you were to guess what he might say, you'd have a good chance of getting it right on the first try. You already know that Epicurus is a materialist who believes that the world consists entirely of atoms and void. So you won't be surprised to discover that he thinks the soul is a material thing made of atoms. But not just any atoms. Epicurus, like other philosophers including Aristotle and the Stoics, believes that the soul is like warm air. Sometimes soul is associated with pneuma, which is Greek for breath. This is, of course, where we get words like pneumatic. This makes a certain amount of sense. We need to keep breathing to live, and so long as we live, we are warm. Epicurus, of course, puts an atomic spin on the theory. He says in one of his letters that the soul is made of atoms that resemble hot air or wind. It also contains other atoms of a very special sort, even finer than the atoms of wind. This makes the soul uniquely capable of producing sensation. Because this complex of warm, windy, and special atoms is so fine and subtle, it can be dispersed into every part of the body, which is why every part of us is able to feel pain, pleasure, and other physical sensations. But for the same reason, the soul cannot survive outside the body. Epicurus believes that such a fine network of atoms would simply disperse if extracted from the body. Equally important for Epicurus' purposes is that even if the soul could survive apart from the body, it would not be able to have any sensory experience. Sensation requires not just a soul, not just a body, but a mingling of the two. Our soul and body are, Epicurus says, affected along with one another. The reason this is important is that it helps to show why we should not fear death. We'll come back to this in a moment, but for now I'll just mention the main upshot of the theory, which is that upon death my soul will cease to exist. Even if my soul could survive, though, it would be unable to experience pain or anything else. Thus, it is doubly pointless to fear painful experiences after death. Woody Allen can rest easy. As it turns out, he won't be there once he dies. Unfortunately, this will only comfort Woody Allen if he believes that his soul is really made of fine atoms distributed throughout his body. But what if the Socrates of the Phaedo was right? What if we each have an immortal, perhaps immaterial, soul which will allow us to go to Tartarus or wherever evil souls are sent to be punished for their sins? Clearly, this is ruled out by Epicurus' atomic theory. But, as he points out, the theory does include something immaterial or incorporeal void. As we saw, Epicurus understands void not just as empty space, but as that which cannot physically interact with other things. There's an important lesson there. If something is not material, it cannot affect or be affected by anything else. So, the Platonist material soul, if there were one, would no more be able to have bad experiences than a patch of empty space. It would be causally cut off from everything, including anything that could hurt it. I sense, though, that you're still nervous about this whole death thing. Perhaps I can, with Epicurus' help, offer you further reassurance. Let's think a bit more about what it means to have a sensory experience. This must be some kind of physical interaction. That much is clear from our everyday experience, given that we need to touch or be placed near things in order to sense them. Plus, as we just saw, without physical interaction, nothing can be affected, and having sensation is surely a way of being affected. So, consider vision, for instance. What must be happening here is that visual images are coming to our eyes from the things we see. These images, the Greek word is eidola, must be made of atoms, because, well, everything is made of atoms. When the images strike our eyes, the presence of soul atoms in the eyes allows us to register that impact as a visual experience, and so on with the other senses. This analysis can be extended to cover apparently non-sensory experiences, like when we imagine something. This, too, must have some physical cause. The Evocurean poet Lucretius suggests that if we imagine a centaur, for instance, it will be because an image of a horse has gotten tangled together with one of a man. We are able to receive these tangled images, too. A similar explanation can be provided for dreams, and in short, all our experiences, even imaginary ones, are somehow grounded in a physical interaction with the atomic world around us. You may find some of the details there unconvincing, but you have to admit that this particular dose of Epicurus' medicine does do what it says on the label. It is a theory of sensation, and experience in general, that makes it impossible for a disembodied or immaterial soul to experience anything, whether painful or otherwise. In fact, this theory of soul and sensation looks like it was designed precisely with that outcome in mind. It is a theory designed to dispel the fear of death, not a theory designed to settle once and for all the nature of the soul. As far as Epicurus is concerned, so long as his theory is consistent with experience, and so long as it achieves the aim of removing fear, he can say, mission accomplished. His mission is to remove fear, after all. And one can consider his whole psychological theory as just an elaborate argument against the fear of death. The Epicureans didn't stop there, though. Lucretius devoted the entire third book of his poem, On the Nature of Things, to arguments against fearing death. It's been counted that he offers 33 of them, enough to supply you with an argument a day for a whole month, with a couple left over if you're feeling particularly nervous. The most fundamental point, however, is that we will no longer exist after death. Why should you be afraid of a situation where you will no longer be present? Lucretius presents a powerful version of this idea, often called his symmetry argument. It asks you to compare the time after your death to the time before your birth. In one case, you will no longer exist, in the other you did not yet exist. But the two situations are the same insofar as you aren't there. You see nothing fearful and remember nothing awful about the time before you were born, so neither should you fear or expect anything awful in the time after death. Lucretius admits that in theory the atoms that make up your soul could one day re-form to make another soul, especially given the infinity of future time available. But, by the same token, they could have formed a soul in the distant past, yet we remember nothing of that. So he thinks I can assume that there will be no continuity of experience between me and a possible future person who has the same soul atoms. Even if my soul is there, I won't be there. In a couple of weeks I'll be interviewing a leading expert on Epicureanism who has written extensively on the arguments against fearing death, so I don't want to dwell on it for too much longer in this episode. But I should at least mention an obvious possible objection. You might argue that it is not really painful experiences or torment after death that I fear. As I said, when I was 15, what really got to me was the sheer idea of not existing anymore. Isn't that worth fearing? The Epicureans say no, for the same reason that it isn't worth looking forward to. If it is neither painful nor pleasant, it is neither to be feared nor hoped for. The only possible reason to fear it is that I will miss out on the pleasures I could have if I were to live longer. But Epicurus and Lucretius rule out even this basis for anxiety. Not only is it self-defeating—I shouldn't ruin the time I do have by worrying about how long it will last—it is also to misunderstand the nature of pleasure. As we saw last time, Epicurus thinks that the painless state, which he calls static pleasure, is already the most blissful condition for man. Someone who has achieved this state needs no improvement, whether by stuffing more kinetic pleasures into his life or by prolonging that life. The whole point of static pleasure is that one wants for nothing, and that includes not wanting things you can't have, like immortality. As Epicurus puts it, when it comes to death, we all live in a city with no defensive walls. The only way to defeat this enemy is not to fear it at all. Let's suppose that we've come this far with Epicurus. We've signed up to the atomism, we've trained ourselves to be content with modest pleasures, though we'll be glad to partake of luxurious pleasures should they come along, we've made good friends to give us security against bad fortune, and we've stopped fearing death. Serenity beckons as we sit in the garden, chatting and memorizing the master's precepts. Unfortunately, there's one last thing to worry about—the gods. If there are gods, and they are anywhere near as temperamental as Homer makes them seem in the Iliad, we in fact have a great deal to worry about. These are mighty, terrifying beings who need to be propitiated lest they should, well, do really bad stuff to us. In this life, they might bring it about that we and our friends are subjected to all manner of torment. If I may allude briefly to a different ancient culture, I refer you to a jolly little tale called the Book of Job, which shows what a god with a vivid imagination can inflict on us if he really sets his mind to it. And that's nothing compared to what the gods might do to us in the afterlife. All that stuff about atoms and sensation is well and good, but I'm off to the temple to sacrifice to Athena just in case. As it turns out, Epicurus would not discourage us from going off to make those sacrifices. Epicureans generally did not avoid participating in traditional religious ritual, but this was not because they feared what the gods might do if they failed to participate. Epicurus teaches that the gods are no more to be feared than death. He asks us to consider what he calls our preconception of a god. As you might remember from episode 55, preconceptions are rough-and-ready notions that we derive from sensation and memory. In this case, our basic idea of a god is a being who is supremely blessed and everlasting. Everyone, or at least just about everyone Epicurus knew about, accepts the existence of gods, so there is no point denying their existence. And yet most people have ridiculous ideas about the gods, ideas incompatible with the basic preconception of what it is to be divine. For instance, they think the gods fight with each other, get angry, and so on. This is clearly incompatible with their blessedness, especially from Epicurus' point of view. Remember, this is a guy who thinks that blessedness consists in being entirely untroubled. Clearly, then, the gods will not be bothered about whether we sacrifice to them. Indeed, they will not be troubled about us at all. They will show us neither favor nor displeasure, since even paying attention to the petty actions of humans would compromise their beatific calm. Epicurus also points out that the world is full of evils, which is hardly compatible with the idea that the gods are exercising providence over us. Rather than blaming evils on these blessed divinities, we should simply accept that the gods are not getting their hands dirty by trying to arrange the world around us. Epicurus seems to be radicalizing the theological critique delivered by Plato, and, before him, by the pre-Socratic Xenophanes. Both of them complain that traditional ideas about gods were degrading to the majesty of the divine. Epicurus agrees, but he goes further by effectively removing them from any interaction with us or the world we live in. Now, I know what you're thinking. If the gods are this remote, why believe that they exist at all? At first blush, Epicurus' answer is a simple one. We should believe in them because we have a preconception about them, as we just saw. But how can we have a preconception of them if we've never had direct experience of a god? My preconception of giraffes is meant to arise from seeing giraffes, but I don't remember ever seeing a god. Remember, though, that Epicurus extends his account of sensation to include things like imaginary and dream images. In the same way, he supposes that our preconception of the gods arises from images we have received. He allows us to picture them as outsized humans, very much like us, because this would be the most dignified form to assign to them. The later Epicurean Philodemus even suggests that the gods must speak Greek, because it is the best language. This account has led some interpreters to think that, in his heart of hearts, Epicurus was indeed an atheist. This image of god as a big human, who has all the best features I can think of, sounds dangerously like a fiction. It might arise through the same sort of process that gives me images of centaurs. I've seen big things like giraffes, and I've seen humans, so I can combine the concepts to get the idea of god as a big human. Perhaps, then, gods are no more real than centaurs. Neither Epicurus nor his followers come out and say that they are atheists, but you'd hardly expect them to. As it was, their opponents were already accusing them of adopting a view that might as well be atheistic, since the Epicurean gods are utterly uninvolved with us. Without trying to settle the issue, I will just remind you that the point of his theology is the same as that of his psychology, to dispel anxiety. The question is not whether there are gods, but whether we should be afraid of them. They might be fictional, or real and unconcerned with us, either way, there is nothing to fear. Epicurus has another reason to hold on to the preconception of the divine, which is that the gods represent an ethical ideal to which we can aspire. Remember his provocative statement that someone who lacks all pain and expects to stay that way lives a life like that of Zeus. This shows how useful it is to have a conception of god. It is the conception of a being who is utterly free of anxiety and suffering. In other words, Epicurus agrees with Plato that our goal should be likeness to god, insofar as is possible for us. As a rule, the possibility is unfortunately rather remote. Humans do by nature seek the good, namely pleasure. That much is crucial to the Epicurean cradle argument, which we looked at last time. But we show little wisdom in the way we pursue pleasure, often bringing pain upon ourselves even while seeking pleasure, for instance by overeating or dating exciting people we know will break our hearts in the end. Worse still is our tendency to dwell on upsetting fears, thus ruining our chances of attaining and keeping the godlike state of static pleasure. This is why Epicurus offers therapy for those fears, trying to argue us out of our anxieties. Admirable though this may be, it might be thought a waste of time. Sure, sometimes a false belief can make me afraid, but that isn't how it always works. I, for instance, am not crazy about flying. I know perfectly well that the plane is exceedingly unlikely to crash, that the car ride to the airport was probably more dangerous than the flight, and so on, yet my palms still sweat at the slightest sign of turbulence. It's no good trying to convince me the plane is almost certainly not going to crash. I already know that, but I'm scared nonetheless. So it is with fear more generally. Even if I came to accept the Epicurean arguments against fearing death and the gods, I might still be afraid. But, to their credit, the Epicureans understood the difficulty of extinguishing fear. Epicurus himself did not merely write down arguments, he encouraged his followers to repeat them and think of them daily. Later Epicureans came up with their own ways of delivering the master's message in ever more effective ways. There is no better example than Lucretius, who set down the message in Latin verse. The beauty of the poetry, says Lucretius, is intended to help people ingest the philosophical contents, as one smears honey on the rim of a cup to get a child to take his medicine. We'll be concentrating on his honeyed words next time. Join me then for another dose of Epicureanism, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lieberhulm Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Reaping the Harvest, Lucretius. It began in the early afternoon in August. From far away it was visible as a towering cloud of smoke, which resembled an enormous spreading pine tree. Closer observers were almost immediately buried in ash and battered by falling stones, killed almost without warning. That was in the nearest city, Pompeii. A bit further away, in Herculaneum, they had time to evacuate, but they did not run far enough. That night a blast of hot wind tore through their city, killing anyone left in it and many hundreds who had taken shelter along the coast. This was, of course, the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Pliny the Younger is our eyewitness. He himself was further away still than Herculaneum, and lived to write letters about the event to the historian Tacitus. In them he describes the darkness falling, not, as he says, the darkness of a moonless night, but utter blackness, as in a shut room where the lights are snuffed out. Ash and fragments of stone fell like rain, as everyone near him panicked, some clinging to the hope that the gods would save them, but most abandoning their faith and despairing in the face of this apocalypse. It would have been no consolation to the victims to learn that there is, for historians of philosophy, a significant silver lining to this particular dark cloud. Like any respectable Roman town, Herculaneum had respectable citizens who lived in respectable villas. In one of these was a library, containing roll upon roll of papyrus. These books were charred into solid blocks and left buried under meters of ash and rock, where they would be discovered almost 2,000 years later. In the 18th century, archaeologists dug out the papyrus rolls and began to peel them apart. Now they can be read with advanced scanners without damaging them physically. The most sensational find among these Herculaneum papyri was a collection of books on Epicureanism. It seems to have been assembled by an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. Thanks to Mount Vesuvius, we have the charred remains of many works by Philodemus and, even more excitingly, the otherwise lost work on nature by Epicurus himself. If you'll pardon the pun, this find speaks volumes about the influence of Epicureanism. Of course the texts, fragmentary though they may be after their ordeal, are a rich source of information about Epicurean thought, but their mere presence in an aristocratic library of a Roman town is itself telling. We've already seen that as late as the 2nd century AD the Epicurean enthusiast Diogenes of Oinoanda had letters of Epicurus and other teachings of the school inscribed in stone in modern-day Turkey. Herculaneum shows us that Epicureanism had already made incursions into the upper crust of Roman society by the 1st century BC. This is confirmed by Cicero, who lived in the same century. He was no Epicurean, but he wrote philosophical dialogues, pitting the teachings of various schools against one another. For him, Epicureanism is one of the main traditions, one to be set against the Stoics and skeptics. Indeed, all the main Hellenistic schools managed the transition from Greek to Latin philosophical literature. This is especially true of the Stoics, who, as we'll be seeing in episodes to come, had a kind of rebirth in the world of the Roman Empire. Epicureanism had its greatest flourishing earlier, here in the 1st century BC, around the time that Rome itself made a transition from a republic, controlled by the aristocratic senate, to an empire. This is the age of Caesar, of Cleopatra, and of Cicero himself, no mean player on the political stage. In addition to the extensive information Cicero provides in his dialogues about Epicurean teaching in his day, he also alludes in one letter to a man who we must recognize, with all due respect to Philodemus, as the greatest representative of Epicureanism after Epicurus himself, the poet Lucretius. In 54 BC, Cicero writes in approving terms of Lucretius, and a few decades later, the poet Virgil works a verse of praise for Lucretius into his Georgics, so Lucretius was known to his contemporaries. Sadly, as a historical figure at least, he is barely known to us. We do know that he wrote one of the great works of Latin literature, and one of the greatest attempts to render philosophy into verse. This is De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things. It does what its title says. Lucretius expounds the nature of things, from the atomic structure of the universe, to the mechanics of lightning and magnetism, from the fear of death, to sexual ethics. The poem seems to be based closely on Epicurus' work On Nature, as we can see by comparison with the burnt remains of that work found in Herculaneum. But Lucretius did not just write an expanded poetic version of Epicurus' Greek treatise on physics. He wrote an expanded poetic version of this Greek treatise in Latin. Like his contemporary Cicero, Lucretius works directly with Greek texts and attempts to convey ideas from those texts in a new tongue. Both he and Cicero apologize more than once for their inability to render Greek philosophical terms perfectly in Latin. The Epicurean Philodemus and Cicero both made the pilgrimage to Athens, the home of philosophy, and studied with masters there. To be a lover of wisdom in Roman society was, at least in this period, to be a lover of things Greek. In particular, the Greek who Lucretius loves is Epicurus. Of the six books in On the Nature of Things, four start with extravagant praise for Epicurus, who is hemmed quite literally as a god. Never mind that in this very poem, Lucretius says that the gods have nothing to do with us but rather exist far away from us in the infinite void. Lucretius is entirely open about the fact that he is following Epicurus and setting his ideas down in Latin verse. The six books of the poem take us through the high points of the Epicurean theory, including atomism, the centrality of pleasure, and the absurdity of fearing death or the gods. Lucretius says, as I mentioned last time, that his poem aims to present this teaching in a more pleasing way, like smearing honey on the rim of a cupful of medicine before giving it to a child. His avowed aim is to convert the reader to the received wisdom of Epicurus, the reader being in the first instance an aristocrat named Memmius, the addressee of the poem. Does Lucretius bring anything to Epicureanism beyond his ability to put it into difficult but beautiful Latin hexameter verse? He does indeed, and I would insist that the literary achievement is inseparable from the philosophical achievement. Perhaps Lucretius' greatest strength is the ability to conjure powerful and plausible images for Epicurus' ideas. He compares the quick moving atoms of the soul to poppy seeds, the constantly moving atoms within an apparently unmoving body to the mad fracas of a battlefield seen from a distance as an unmoving blur. In one of my favorite passages, he is trying to persuade us that atoms have many, subtly different shapes. To illustrate, he mentions a slaughtered calf, whose mother cow is forlorn in her grief. She is described in loving detail, searching for her lost offspring, scanning the ground for its beloved hoofprints, carrying nothing for other calves, though they all look the same to us humans. In the same way, atoms with different shapes seem interchangeable until we carefully consider the point. As it happens, Lucretius is going to go on to say that every shape of atom occurs an infinite number of times in the universe, which pretty much undercuts his point. But when the point is made with that much style, one hardly cares. Similarly powerful is the end of the poem. Lucretius is trying to explain the causes of disease. He unleashes a terrifying description of the classical plague of Athens, inspired by the historian Thucydides. Here Lucretius seems to want us to see what Pliny says the victims of Mount Vesuvius realized as they thought they would die. The gods do not care about us. We are on our own. Now I know what you're thinking. This is all well and good, but are there any new ideas here? Yes and no. Some ideas absent from the remaining writings of Epicurus do turn up, but it is usually assumed that whatever is unprecedented in Lucretius is taken from the lost parts of Epicurus' writings. A minor example would be the account Lucretius offers for magnetism. Invoking the atomic theory, he suggests that the magnet sends out a powerful stream of particles towards nearby metal. These push aside the air between the magnet and the metal, creating a space dominated by void. But air is pressing on the magnet and metal from all other directions, so they lurch towards each other into the space between them, which provides less resistance. More important would be a distinction he introduces within the Epicurean theory of soul. He draws a contrast between two aspects of soul. With his newfangled Latin, he calls these two aspects animus, sometimes translated mind, and anima, sometimes translated as spirit. The ruling part of the soul is the mind or animus and is seated in the chest, as Aristotle and the Stoics taught. The spirit, or anima, is dispersed through the whole body. You can keep living without parts of your spirit, as we can see from the fact that people survive when limbs are amputated. But your life literally depends on the continued presence of the mind. It is our commanding faculty and initiates our emotions. Still, it should be noted that Lucretius' animus is not really a mind in our sense, or indeed in Aristotle's sense. Lucretius illustrates its powers mostly through examples of emotion, rather than, say, intellectual activity or consciousness. This brings us to a fundamental issue, one already discussed by Epicurus. It is one of the running themes of Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, and will occupy our attention in many episodes to come, because philosophers of all traditions will feel the need to say something about it. Lucretius is one of the first to give the issue a technical name, libera voluntas, meaning free volition or free will. He draws our attention to a fundamental difference between creatures that can exercise free volition and other things like inanimate objects. With his flair for vivid examples, he describes what happens at the start of a horse race. When all the horses are allowed to charge ahead, there is the briefest of moments before they move. We might think instead of the few hundredths of a second between the starting gun and the sprinters leaping out of the blocks. This is unlike, say, one rock hitting another. The rock that gets hit doesn't pause before reacting, it just moves. That is because it is not moving itself, it is being moved by something else. Plato and Aristotle already drew attention to the capacity of animate beings to move themselves, but the Epicureans may have been the first to worry about the conditions under which this was possible. In particular, they worried that if everything in the universe happens as a matter of necessity, the world unfolding inevitably from the past to the present, then nothing would have a power of free volition. And they should worry. After all, their physics describes the world as the result of atomic collisions, each of which seems to be like one rock hitting another. This suggests that the difference between the horse and the rock is only apparent. Perhaps it takes a while for the chain reaction to produce a visible result in the horse, but it is still just a bunch of collisions, an inevitable chain of cause and effect. To put it another way, given the immutable laws of physics, the distribution and motion of atoms right now will make everything in the future utterly inevitable and necessary. It was apparently to avoid this that the Epicureans posited what they called a klinamen, or swerve. The idea is not found in our extant evidence for Epicurus, though it does seem to have been his idea. Lucretius discusses it in some detail. According to this notorious doctrine, atoms do not in fact always fall straight down, as I suggested a few episodes ago. That's mostly what happens, but occasionally an atom will apparently randomly shift slightly sideways. Lucretius gives two reasons for thinking this. One is that if all atoms only fell down, then the world would never arise because the atoms would never start to collide with one another. They would be like raindrops, hurtling next to each other in the void, all at the same speed. But this is probably not the real reason. After all, the Epicurean world is eternal, so there need never have been a moment where the atoms were not already colliding and moving in all directions. So they don't need to start colliding. The real motivation for the swerve is probably the second reason, avoiding the consequence that everything is necessary. Now one needs to be careful here. The mere presence of randomness in a physical system doesn't really help explain the power of choice. If what I am worried about is whether I am in control of my own actions, or whether my actions are instead induced by atomic motions, of which I am not even aware, then the swerve is no comfort at all. It will just turn out that the atomic motions that determine my action are sometimes random, rather than deterministic. But who cares about that? The point is to put me in control, not to have my actions ultimately trace back to random things out of my control. For this reason, it would be nice if the Epicureans were not saying, for instance, that each choice I make actually involves a swerving atom. Instead, they are just saying that the universe contains indeterminism. This is simply intended to show that human actions are not necessary and inevitable events, since there are no necessary and inevitable events in an indeterministic world. One reading of Lucretius on the swerve would support this. He doesn't seem to say that choices are swerves, or vice versa. Rather, he draws an analogy. Just as atoms can move by themselves when they swerve, so we can move by ourselves when we make choices. Nonetheless, it seems clear that any choice I make, any action I perform, must involve atomic motions, whether swerving or not. After all, there is nothing in the world apart from atoms in a void. This might lead us to say that choices, along with anything else you might care to name, are not real, except insofar as they are identical with atoms and their motions. That may be a consequence that the pre-Socratic Democritus drew from his atomism. He said, According to this fragment, Democritus apparently wanted to eliminate the properties we actually experience, like taste and colour, or at least treat them as merely conventional. An adequate scientific account of the universe could dispense with talk of such properties. You might think the Epicureans would follow suit, being atomists themselves, but instead they stoutly resist Democritus's sentiment, insisting that all these properties are absolutely real, though they may depend on atomic motions. This will go for human choices just as much as for colours and tastes. In another area of their philosophy, though, the Epicureans were happy to embrace a different kind of conventionalism. They did so in order to explain human society and language, a theme Lucretius takes up in the fifth book of his poem. With characteristically vibrant images, Lucretius gives a wholly naturalistic account of the origins of human political arrangements. Earlier in the book, he has already explained how animals arose, giving a theory reminiscent of the prezocratic philosopher Empedocles. As with Empedocles, Lucretius is often given credit for anticipating Darwinian evolutionary theory. He has explained that animals first arose through random atomic entanglements and propagated insofar as they were fit to survive. For instance, animals with no generative organs could not produce children, and died after one generation. In much the same way, human society grows out of a long and painful process. In the beginning, as Lucretius vividly describes, humans were in a kind of state of nature. Only once they developed the rudiments of trust and cooperation could they advance beyond the most primitive condition in which each man fights for his own survival. It was at this same time that humans first developed language. Lucretius too was simply a conventional advance on natural tendencies. Primitive man would naturally have communicated by grunts and gestures, something Lucretius illustrates by pointing out that children too young to talk articulately just point at whatever they want. Animals too can communicate with rudimentary noises, as we can see from the different noises made by dogs when they are angry, frightened, or caring for their pups. are simply a more refined use of the same capacity. So far so good, but next Lucretius qualifies the optimistic account of progress he's been giving so far. Once language and human cooperation are on the scene, the next step is the development of cities, of political rule, and of money. This is the breeding ground for the unnecessary desires against which the wise Epicurus warned. In the struggle to satisfy these desires, society begins to slide back into violence. A kind of second social contract is needed to restore order, and this explains the imposition of the laws that govern our society today. One wonders what Lucretius might have made of the civil wars that tore apart Roman society in this first century BC. A sign, perhaps, that society was preparing to backslide, having failed to heed Epicurus' warning that honor and power are poison chalices. It's almost a cliché to note that Epicureanism appeared in Greek society, and then reappeared in Roman society, at times of great upheaval. The post-Aristotelian Hellenistic schools emerged just after Alexander the Great achieved domination over Greece. The confident independence of city-states like Athens and Sparta, so recently centres of empire, was upset for good. From this point on, the political situation of the Greek cities was usually just a matter of which foreign power was calling the shots. The Macedonians? The Romans? Either way, an intelligent aristocrat was bound to seek out a philosophy of reassurance, both against the uncertainty of his circumstances, and against his newfound impotence. Likewise, in the first century BC, the Roman Republic fell, tearing power, if not wealth and noble lineage, from the hands of the senatorial class. Was Epicureanism successful because it could offer reassurance in times of upheaval? If so, it's appropriate that Lucretius' poem caused some upheaval of its own, when it was rediscovered in the early fifteenth century, after going unread and nearly being lost in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Once unearthed, On the Nature of Things inspired such heavyweights as Machiavelli, who copied it out by hand, Gassendi, who adopted many of its doctrines, and Montaigne, who quotes it frequently in his essays. With any luck, we'll get to them all eventually. In the more immediate future, we will be turning to the main course in our feast of Hellenistic philosophy, the Stoics. Before that, though, we will indulge in one last Epicurean pleasure, an interview with one of the leading scholars of Epicurus and his legacy. I hope you'll still have enough appetite for this topic to join me as I talk to James Warren next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Epicurus and Epicureanism with James Warren of Cambridge University. Hi James. Hi there. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. Can you just start by reminding listeners who Epicurus was and maybe what his primary philosophical views were? Okay. Well, Epicurus is one of the first philosophers of what tends to be called the Hellenistic period. So in philosophical terms, that's the period of philosophers immediately after Aristotle up until the first century BC. But he's there right at the beginning, so we're talking about the end of the fourth, the beginning of the third century BC. He was born on the island of Samos to Athenian parents, so he was an Athenian citizen. And he spent some time in Athens in his youth, did quite a bit of travelling and perhaps picked up various philosophical ideas as he travelled around. But we know that by around 306, 307 BC, he'd settled again in Athens. He'd bought himself a plot of land, the garden that we call it, and he set up a philosophical school there and attracted various people who would come and spend time and think and talk philosophy there. Those philosophical ideas that they were talking about were centred on, I suppose, two main claims. His first claim was an ethical claim which said that the good life is the life of the greatest pleasure, which sounds like a great idea, but he had a very unusual idea of what the greatest pleasure involves. His second idea, for which he's perhaps famous, is the idea that the world and all of its workings can be explained by reference to it being composed out of atoms moving in the void, which wasn't a new idea by Epicurus' time, but he had various refinements that he would offer to what had been the atomist thesis of his pre-Socratic predecessors, and also tried to systematise the methodology in which you go about working out claims about natural processes. Can I ask you about that, actually? Yes. These are quite bold claims, especially the claim about everything being made of atoms moving around in the void. Crazy idea, yes. Crazy idea, yes. Couldn't possibly be true. How does he think that we could know this? Because you don't see it happening in front of you. No, of course, and he also is a staunch empiricist, so he says, for example, all information you get from the senses is true. So there is, you're quite right, some gap between the way the world appears to us through our senses and this idea that really the world is composed out of these tiny pieces of indivisible matter whirling around. Well, we're fortunate, actually, in that from the Epicurean school we do have various complete texts, like the first book of Lucretius's great poem on nature, Epicurus's own works and summaries of them, which set out what we can imagine to be their own systematic way of moving from what they took to be pretty obvious claims about how the world is to these more interesting claims about what the world is at base, if you like. So they start off with the idea that our senses immediately declare to us that they're our bodies. We bump into them all the time. It's pretty difficult to avoid the idea that there are things around us that resist us. That does seem fair enough. Right. So that's the one claim. Tie that to the idea also that they think must be the case, that nothing really ever just pops into existence out of nothing. Nothing disappears out of existence into nothing. Now, again, this isn't news by their time. It's been around for a good 200 years or so. Sounds a bit like Parmenides. Absolutely. So that's one of the first explicit arguments for this thesis. So if you put that together plus the idea that these bodies that we do bump into around us, they do seem to be able to change. Sometimes they disappear and they might grow. So you might see a tree growing out of the ground. That tree might get chopped down. You put it on the fire and in a way it seems to disappear. So the claim must be given that we agree that nothing really does ever come into existence out of nothing or disappear out of existence into nothing, but there are bodies, well, the idea must be that those things that we do perceive around us aren't the fundamental bodies. So these perceived cases of coming to be and passing away must in fact be some kind of rearrangement of some other sorts of things that we don't directly perceive. And these things can't themselves be subject to the kinds of changes and comings to be and passing away that the perceptible bodies are. Because otherwise you get a regress. And eventually everything gets worn away into nothingness again, which we've agreed we can't have. Do you think that that is really very much different from the kind of atomism that you got in the wake of Parmenides and the Eliatics? Good question. We do know, because our sources tell us, and Epicurus makes this clear at various times, that he certainly introduced some things that he claimed were innovative in comparison with his atomist predecessors. A lot depends, I suppose, on what you take those predecessors' reasons for holding their atomism to be. So if we're confident that in Epicurus' case the atomism is grounded in a kind of empirical consideration of how best to explain the phenomena that we observe around us, that might well be different from the reasons for which Democritus and Leucippus espoused their atomism. They may well have been thinking more in terms of a reaction to Parmenides or to various Eliatic thinkers. So it wasn't so much a concern to explain the observed phenomenal world in their part as a way of dealing as best they could with this Eliatic challenge in a way that didn't require them to give up on the idea of natural science entirely. In which case, original atomism might be, here's how there could be many things. The only thing they'd be trying to preserve about our experience is the observation that there are many things. And that there is some degree of change, because we often focus on atoms, of course, but I think the void is equally important. That's perhaps as surprising a claim as the idea that there are atoms. That's the really surprising thing, right? There's non-being all around you. And that was a very radical claim. But they support it, well the Epicureans we know, support it by the idea that if there weren't something like the void, then nothing could move, because everything would be full and squashed together and there'd be no, as it were, elbow room for any movement to happen. But we do perceive motion, say the Epicureans. That's another one of their ideas that you just have to rely on the truth of that kind of sense impression. Okay, so that's one of the two claims you mentioned at the beginning, that's the atomism. What about the other claim, the hedonism? Hedonism, yes. So, hedonism covers quite a variety of different approaches to the good life. But what they all have in common is the idea that ultimately we should pursue the most pleasant life possible. And the most pleasant life possible is the best life possible. Does their hedonism relate to their atomism? Or are these just two separate parts of their philosophy such that you could have one without the other? Well, you certainly can have one without the other. There were hedonists, ancient hedonists, who weren't atomists. And ancient atomists who weren't hedonists. Absolutely. And I think atomism's got some truth to it, and I'm not sure I'm committed to hedonism because of it. So, I don't think they directly follow from one another. On the other hand, you might say that there's a sort of association in the following way. That attendant upon the idea that the world is basically composed out of these atoms and void, the Epicureans also think that that's all you need to explain how the world is the way it is. In the sense both of how it came to be, the way that we see it, with such a multitude of various things in it, and colours and shapes and all the rest of it. But also, that's all you need to explain, how it continues to function in the way that we see it functioning, natural regularities and so on. So they don't feel they need also to suggest that there is, for example, any interventionist divine creator or regulator of the world. They also don't feel the need to posit the existence of transcendent universals or objective moral values of the kind that Plato introduces. So if you have a worldview like that, where do you start looking for value in the world? You start by considering what human nature is as you find it. And I think that's really where their hedonism springs from. They have a view that says humans naturally are averse to pain and attracted to pleasure. Is it also connected to this epistemological stance you mentioned earlier that you should trust in the senses, what the senses tell you is true, and presumably the senses tell you that pleasurable things are good things and painful things are bad things, or is that too simplistic? Well that's more or less what they do say, in fact, that there are, just as your sense impressions, what your senses tell you are truthful about the way the world appears, where the world looks or sounds and so on. Also, your reactions of pleasure and pain are reliable indicators of what's to be avoided and what's to be pursued. So if something generates pain in you, that's an undeniable sign that it is in some way a bad thing. Now they don't, of course, they then have rather sophisticated ideas about the fact that sometimes something that causes you pain could in the long run produce greater pleasure. And something pleasurable could produce pain in the long run, like overfitting. Absolutely. But of course that's just an analogue for their idea that just because your senses are reliably reporting the way the world appears to them at the time, you shouldn't necessarily form the opinion that that's just how the world is. The fact that their hedonism is supposed to go along with this kind of empiricist attitude seems to me like it might be in some tension with one of the things Epicurus is most notorious for saying, which is that the greatest pleasure would just be the absence of pain. Yes. Because you would think the absence of pain is not something that you could sense, right? In which case, how could it be the greatest pleasure? Well I think there are two claims there. One is the idea, can I sense the absence of pain? Well maybe I do have a constant awareness of what kind of state I'm in. If you just assume that you have something that you might call proprioception, you can feel how your body is, you can feel whether you're sick or whether you're doing okay, then perhaps indeed we do have some constant awareness of how we are. Where you might think it contravenes their empiricist stance is the following. I'm sitting here, I don't feel like I'm in any particular pain right now. I'm feeling pretty good too. Yes, it's nice. Although I have various things I ought to be doing, I don't feel I'm in any kind of mental distress either really. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I can imagine things that could be happening right now that would make how I'm feeling right now more pleasant than I am currently in. There's room for improvement. Exactly. Even though you're being interviewed for my podcast. Well which is a wonderful thing, but nevertheless, even so, I can imagine things that might just improve that just a little bit. So if that's a plausible empirical thought, then indeed they do have some work to do persuading me that really the state of being pain-free is as good as it gets. And how would they do that? Well I suppose they might say that I'm not really as pain-free as I think I am right now. If I were to think about, well aren't I sort of worried that I've got that paper I should have finished by now and I should have paid that bill that's waiting for me at home and so on. There are various mental anxieties that are there if I think about it that suggest that I'm not as pain-free as I thought, in fact. They also might run an argument that says something like the following, and I'm not sure it's a very plausible argument. What is pain? Well pain's a kind of deficiency of your lack. That seems to be a regular ancient thought that you can find that already back in Plato. So what's pleasure? Well pleasure is the removal of that lack. Now when you say the removal of a lack you can mean two things. You can mean the process of removing that. So for example if I'm thirsty, why is it nice to have a cold drink? Well for example that might be removing the lack that is my thirst, the painful lack that is my thirst. Well why is it nice to remove that pain of thirst? Well perhaps it's because being free from thirst is in fact what's really nice. So I feel good as I'm removing that pain because the state of being free from pain is indeed pleasant. You could almost say that's the point of pleasurable processes is to get to this state. Right. You're not in pain. Right. But of course there are pretty familiar claims that say pleasure indeed looks towards that state but it finishes as soon as that state is intended. And then it's over. That's what Plato thought. Absolutely, yeah. Can I ask you one other thing about their hedonism which is that it always strikes me that these guys being ancient Greeks and Romans should believe in things like the value of heroism in both Greek and Roman society, fighting bravely on a battlefield for example, or the example of say Achilles would be really ethically important. And it's not clear to me how an Epicurean could say that someone who goes off and fights bravely in battle is trying to maximize their pleasure at all, never mind if the ultimate pleasure would be achieving this state of the absence of pain. So is there anything that they could say to encourage us to, for example, be political leaders or great warriors or any of the other things that were so valued in the ancient world? Not really. And I don't think they would even try, in fact. That's why they just sat around in their garden. Well they sat around in their garden because, well, why would anyone want to be a political leader is the question. What would the point of that be? Well, perhaps it's because you want to wield power. Well, why would you want to wield power? Perhaps you think wielding power is a good thing. Does wielding power mean you live a pain-free life? Surely not. In fact, the pursuit and the possession of power can cause all sorts of anxieties and so on. Similarly, military valour, something like that. Why would anyone prize that, as it were, for itself? Once you've bought the Epicurean idea that human nature strives to be free from pain, free from distress, anything that gets in the way of you achieving that is indeed not worth pursuing. So they counsel people just to give up desiring political ambitions, to give up desiring those kinds of honours. Do you think then that there's a contrast between Epicurus and philosophers like, say, Aristotle, in that the Epicureans seem to be perfectly happy to just subvert the ethical norms of their culture, whereas Aristotle, at least most of the time, seems to be trying to explain to you in a more rigorous way why the ethical things you think are basically true? Yes. I think in one way the Epicureans are pessimistic about the chances of common colours and cultural norms having got their values correct. So they often talk about the values and beliefs that people acquire just by knocking around in society as a kind of illness, that they cause pain and they infect others. So I watch an advert and it tells me that I should aspire to buy a new gadget or something. This makes me anxious because I don't yet have this gadget and it means I need to save up to buy this gadget. Maybe that's why you're slightly anxious while we're recording this podcast. This is true because I'm looking at that recording device. It's lovely. But the Epicureans say, look, would that really make your life pain-free? Better, and the more efficient and clearly the sensible thing to do, is not to try and remove the pain of that desire by desperately striving to achieve and acquire the thing, but just to stop wanting it in the first place. It's much cheaper overall. Speaking of sources of distress, I wanted to move on to asking you about something you've written quite a bit about, which is the fear of death, which apparently is the biggest fear that you can have and thus the biggest source of distress. The Epicureans are notorious for thinking that death is nothing to fear. They have several arguments for this, but could you maybe tell us at least one of the arguments they give and talk about whether it's a good argument or not? Okay. Okay. Well, they think, yes, you're quite right. They think that the fear of death is something that affects a large majority of people, and they think it's a painful fear. Like other kinds of fears, it causes you distress directly, and also the fear of death indirectly causes you to strive to be recognised after your death for your achievements and things like that. So all these things that get in the way of you living the proper Epicurean life. But fortunately, death isn't something we should worry about. Why not? Well, we, like the rest of the world, are composed out of atoms moving in the void. So when we die, there isn't such a thing as a non-physical, immortal soul that hangs around somewhere. So our death is the absolute end of our existence. That seems like it should make me more worried, not less worried. But why? What would you be worried about? Are you worried, they say. They ask, are you worried that after your death you might experience pain? You might experience the loss of various things. And presumably not if I'm going to see this existing. Absolutely. So partly because they think the only bad thing is pain, given that you can't experience any pain after you've died, because there's no you to do any experiencing of pain, then the period after your death can't be something that's bad for you. Now some people might say, that's not really what I fear when I fear death, that the Epicureans have misunderstood what it is to fear death, if they think that someone fears death because they think the period after the end of their life is going to be bad for them. Instead, you might say, people fear death because they are worried about their life being finite. They're worried that their life is going to come to an end. Well, the Epicureans have a reason for thinking that's not something to worry about either, because they think that there's no reason to want your life to go on forever and ever and ever. Why would you think a longer life is a better life? Certainly an infinitely long life. Why would that be better than a finitely long life? Wouldn't it be because I could have more pleasure? Maybe infinitely a large amount of pleasure. Yes, that's one thing you might say, but by more pleasure what do you mean? Do you mean more pleasurable experiences? What if it just meant I get to spend more minutes and hours in this state of pain-free bliss? Good question. Well, the answer they try here is that this state of pain-free bliss isn't made any more pain-free the longer it lasts. And the only way a state can be better is by being less painful. And given that ten years of being pain-free is no more pain-free than five years of being pain-free, those ten years of being pain-free aren't better than five years of being pain-free. And in fact ten years of being pain-free isn't even better than ten seconds of being pain-free. Well, that would seem to follow too. Doesn't it seem like that's just wrong and so there must be something wrong with their analysis of that blissful state in the first place? Because at least it looks like you'd want to say that there are two things that make this state good, one being the absence of pain and the other the duration. And then the longer it would last the better it would be. I think you would want to say that actually. And I think here they begin to look like they're on pretty shaky ground. One other thing I guess you could say against this argument that I won't exist after death so it's nothing to me is that I'm not so much worried about what will happen to me after I die and maybe I'm also not even worried about my life being finite. What if what I'm worried about is leaving my loved ones? And that seems like it should be something Epicurus should take really seriously because famously he was very emphatic about the value of friendship. Yes, so the question now is what does that mean you're worried about leaving your loved ones? Lucretius for example imagines someone saying well it's as if when I've died I'll be hanging around watching them get on with their lives without me around. And he thinks there's something sort of self contradictory about that thought. You're imagining yourself being there but being absent. If that's the sense in which you think you're going to fear death because you're going to miss your loved ones then he thinks you've failed to grasp really what it means to be dead. Maybe a better way of putting the objection then would be similar to what I just said about the blissful state lasting longer that I put a value on all the hours and days and months that I get to spend with my loved ones and so the loss of even a single day that I could spend say with my wife or my daughters would be a significant loss to me and something that I should genuinely regret. Is there anything they can say against that thought? They would try certainly to say that we shouldn't be worried about these sorts of things perhaps returning again to their claim that these sorts of things just aren't made better by their lasting longer. Just like they said about the state of being pain free. Because what we're not comparing is five years of you living with your family and enjoying family life and then five years of you continuing to live but being absent versus ten years of you living happily with your family. We're imagining five years of happy family life and then that's it, full stop, versus ten years and then that's it, full stop. So there isn't as it were this five year of deprivation between those two possibilities. Can I have one last go of the question before we start since it's such an impl- it would be great if the argument was right so we should be really clear about whether it works. One other thing that I think might be a problem for them is that Epicurus puts a lot of emphasis on the benefit of remembering and also expecting pleasures and it seems like if we're thinking about expecting pleasures and if I can really make my life better by hoping for or expecting a pleasure then surely it could be a matter of regret to me to know or expect the absence of pleasures. Doesn't that seem to make sense? Well it depends again what you mean by expecting the absence of pleasure. If what you mean is imagining the world after your death when you're not there, is that what you mean by expecting an absence of pleasure? Well I guess what I mean is that if, suppose that I imagine that thirty years from now I'll be having a pleasure as long as I don't die. Right. The expectation of the pleasure that I'm having now is supposed to make my life a little better according to Epicurus, right? Yes, yes. Thus if the pleasure isn't going to happen because I do die then wouldn't finding out the fact that I'm not going to get that pleasure make my life worse? Worse now when you're expecting it? Yeah. Or would he just say, well if you find yourself thinking that way then don't think about it because it would make your life more painful? Well he would probably say that. What he doesn't have is, I think what you're pointing towards is the sort of claim that Plato gets into some hot water within the Philebus by claiming that some of these kinds of pleasures of expectation should be thought of as false if they turn out not really to be grounded. Epicurus doesn't go there. Of course he doesn't say you should be reckless with your life. Now you realise that death isn't going to be bad for you. It doesn't mean you can take up all sorts of extraordinarily dangerous sports and so on because hey if I hit a wall that's fine. He says the wise man will take care of his health and so on. It's just he recognises that there is an inevitability to the fact that he is a mortal and that's okay. That doesn't of itself rob the positive experience that he does have of allowing him to be living a good life at this time. And just as it's inevitable that our lives will come to an end, so it's inevitable that this episode of the podcast will come to an end which is happening right now. First I'd like to thank James Warren for coming on the show. It's a pleasure. And second I'd like to invite you to join me again next week when I will be moving along to the Stoics. Thanks James. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Walking on Eggshells, the Stoics on Logic. When they invent time travel, I bet the first thing they will do is go back to ancient Athens to meet Socrates and tour the Acropolis. I also bet they will be disappointed. They'll probably forget to bring someone who can speak ancient Greek, so they won't get much out of Socrates. As for the sculptures and buildings, they will be surprised and a bit appalled to find that these things were all painted in bright, even gaudy colors. For us, classical sculpture is pristine and white, marble made flesh. But that's just because the paint has worn off. Downtown, they'll find more paintings in a space adjoining the Agora, or marketplace. It was a long-covered colonnade for walking to and fro called the stoa poikile, the painted porch, for the murals that decorated it. If the time travelers get their coordinates slightly wrong, and arrive a few decades after the death of Socrates, they'll still get to meet some philosophers if they venture to this public porch, because the stoa was not only the name of a porch, it was also the name of the greatest Hellenistic philosophical school, named after its favorite hangout. The early stoa, better known to us as the Stoics, sought to follow Socrates' example in many things, including his habit of doing philosophy in the middle of urban life. Their porch makes a striking contrast to the garden, academy, and lyceum. Whereas Epicurus, Plato, and Aristotle set up shop on the fringes of Athens, the Stoics planted themselves next to the marketplace. Like Socrates, they wanted to engage with their fellow citizens and make demands of them. Epicurus' philosophy is an invitation, a seduction, a promise. Pursue a moderate life of pleasure, he says, and learn to escape all disturbance. In the hands of the Stoics, philosophy is instead an accusation, a gauntlet thrown down. Those who fail to seek and obtain wisdom are not just missing out on a great good, they are irrational. They are, the Stoics went so far as to say, insane. Of course, Epicurus too disapproved of the way most other Greeks lived, but he was willing to meet them halfway. In pursuing pleasure, they had the right basic idea, it was just that their strategy for getting pleasure was all wrong. The Stoics were far more radical. Pleasure, along with honor and all the other things non-philosophers value, are actually valueless. Socrates had it right, seek wisdom or live a life of folly, a life befitting slaves. Now, I know what you're thinking. Isn't this an attitude towards philosophy and a way of imitating Socrates that we've already seen, with the Cynics? Why, yes it is, and that's no accident. The founder of the Stoic school, Zeno of Kitium, supposedly studied with the Cynic philosopher, Kratis. You might remember him as the successor of Diogenes the Cynic, the one who joined with Hipparchia in a Cynic marriage. To study with Kratis, Zeno first had to make the journey from Kitium, in Cyprus, to Athens. I mentioned in the last episode that 1st century BC philosophers like Cicero and Philodemus the Epicurean were still making the pilgrimage to Athens, and the city remained a center of philosophy for centuries after that. In the ancient world, Athens was to philosophy what Las Vegas is to gambling. The phenomenon was already well entrenched in the early Hellenistic period, with all the main Stoics turning up in Athens, even though they were born elsewhere. The ancient sources tell us that Zeno started his philosophical career as an admirer of Socrates and a follower of Kratis. We get the usual round-up of anecdotes about him, some of them describing how Kratis tried to school him in the Cynic lifestyle, for instance by making him carry a pot of lentils with him wherever he went. There is some independence evidence for this link to Cynicism. Zeno wrote a work called The Republic, known only through later reports. Despite its platonic title, Zeno's Republic apparently defended a broadly Cynic political program. It proposed abolishing many of the social conventions Diogenes the Cynic had rejected. Currency was to be not merely defaced, but eliminated. No temples were to be built to the gods. Traditional education was deemed worthless, and all other men should be taken as our fellows, joining in a community on the basis of virtue, rather than kinship. Zeno's utopian ideas were not retained as a core of the Stoic manifesto, but his uncompromising ethical stance certainly was. However, this is only one aspect of Stoicism, and doesn't come close to capturing the full breadth of their philosophical vision. The Stoics were pioneers in just about every area of philosophy and married their ethical absolutism to careful technical analysis. Because he was the school founder, Zeno's authority and status as a moral exemplar was unquestioned by all card-carrying Stoics. Many of their signature doctrines can be traced to him. But it was only with Zeno's successors that Stoicism matured into a system that would dominate ancient philosophy well into the age of the Roman Empire. After Zeno's death in 262 B.C., the headship of the school was taken over by a man named Cleanthes. Thirty years later he was succeeded by Chrysippus, who served as school head from 232 until his death in 206 B.C. It is to Chrysippus that we owe the subtle and rigorous systematization of Stoicism, without which it would never have become the greatest of the Hellenistic schools. Unfortunately, not a single one of Chrysippus' works, and he wrote well over a hundred of them, has survived to us today. Instead, the reports of his ideas are often found in hostile authors like Galen, early Christian authors, and members of rival schools. Nor is it always easy to pry apart the specifically Chrysippan material from general reports about Stoic doctrine. Still, the evidence at our disposal shows that Chrysippus was probably the most sophisticated and influential ancient philosopher to work between Aristotle and Plotinus. Sorry, Epicurus. He excelled in the cut and thrust of inter-school debate, and, for this sake, sharpened Stoic doctrines and techniques of argument. Until we reach the predominantly ethical approach of Stoics like Epictetus in the age of the Roman Empire, Stoicism centers around the teachings of Chrysippus. Nonetheless, the Stoics were admirably willing to make adjustments to their doctrines in response to internal and external debate. To understand the technical proficiency that Chrysippus brought to Stoicism, we need to consider a further historical influence from the age of Zeno. This, remember, was the generation or two after Aristotle, roughly the same time that Epicurus was putting forth his hedonistic ideas in competition with the more unrestrained pleasure principle of the Cyrenaics. At this time, cynicism too was a going concern, an influence on young Zeno, as we just saw. The Platonic Academy and Aristotle's followers were also active. So, this was a time of great intellectual ferment, with the early schools all engaging with one another in mutual criticism and polemic. A minor player in this period, but one important for our story, is Diodorus Cronus. Ancient sources make Diodorus the lead thinker of the dialectical school, specialists in logic and technical arguments. On several issues, it would seem that Diodorus and his followers goaded the Stoics, and especially Chrysippus, into careful reflection on argument forms, fallacies, and so on. The Stoics were thus provoked to develop some of their most subtle philosophical ideas, much as the Sophists had provoked Plato and Aristotle. It was in part thanks to fruitful competition with the dialectical school that the Stoics achieved so much in logic. The Stoics placed great value in logic, considering it to be one of the three main parts of philosophy along with physics and ethics. Taking their lead from Zeno, who was always good for a vivid metaphor, the Stoics compared the three parts of philosophy to an egg. Logic is the shell, physics the egg white, and ethics the egg yolk. Another version switches physics and ethics around, but logic is still the shell. There are other metaphors given too. Logic is a wall around a field, the trees in the field are physics, and the fruit is ethics. This threefold division might seem to leave some things out, like philosophy of mind and metaphysics, but the tripartite scheme is as much a declaration of what the Stoics do not do as a statement of what they do. The omission of any metaphysics distinct from physics is deliberate. The Stoics are materialists. Their theory of mind too is to be found in their physics. Part of the point of the metaphors though is that the three parts of philosophy are closely connected. Thus they also compare philosophy to a living body. Logic is the bones, ethics the flesh, and physics the soul. Later on, Aristotelians insisted that philosophical disciplines had to be taken in a strict order and that one should start with logic, meaning, Aristotle's logical works. The Stoics disagreed. For them, philosophy was an organic unity, and a question raised in ethics could lead you to physics or logic, and vice versa. Ultimately, wisdom consists in mastery of all three parts. Expertise in only one would not merely be inadequate, it would be impossible, because the three are so closely intertwined. The Aristotelians objected to the very claim that logic is a part of philosophy. As we already saw, for the Aristotelians, logic is something a bit less exalted than a part of philosophy. It is rather an instrument. This is why they called those logical works of Aristotle the organon, meaning tool or instrument. To refute the Stoic view, they pointed out that a logical argument form is empty until it is, so to speak, filled out with specific terms. The logician tells you that it is valid to argue, all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C. But you aren't doing philosophy until you substitute some words for those letters. Throw in giraffe for A, ruminant for B, and plant-eaters for C, and then you're in business. To be specific, the business of biology. You've just given a demonstration explaining why giraffes eat plants. More generally, we can say that for the Aristotelians, logic was not yet a part of philosophy because it could not on its own give us knowledge. It only gives us an understanding of the argument forms, which can be used to obtain knowledge. Now, the Stoics were certainly no slouches when it came to considering argument schemes, but their understanding of logic included much more than this. For them, logic embraced analysis of language and rhetoric. They also realized that logical points are not always philosophically innocent, as the Aristotelians pretend. For instance, their understanding of the logical notion of possibility is intimately connected with their physics. In fact, the Aristotelians had a similarly wide-ranging conception of logic. Remember that they too wound up counting rhetoric as part of the logical curriculum, and that Aristotle's posterior analytics—a work on philosophy of science or epistemology—was seen by them as the capstone of the organon. In light of this, I tend to think the Stoics had the better of this particular debate. The disagreement between Stoic and Aristotelian logic is deeper than this, though. When the Stoics actually start doing logic proper, they take a very different approach to what we find in Aristotle's prior analytics. As we saw, Aristotle's logic is a theory of predication. It examines the relationships we can draw between claims like A is B and some B is not C. The Stoics, by contrast, tend to give examples involving claims like, It is day! or This man walks. They call these simple assertions and say that they are complete because they can be either true or false. An incomplete assertion would be, for instance, This man. You have to add something further, like, Walks or hosts a podcast or is devastatingly handsome, to get something that can be true, or, you know, false. The next step is to think about how simple assertions can combine into more complex assertions. There are basically three ways to connect them. If, or, and, and. You wouldn't think that these three little words would cause controversy, but they do. The troublemaker is that word if. Suppose I link two irrelevant statements with if and then. For instance, if giraffes are animals, then Socrates died of hemlock. Is that true? Or, I might include a false statement like this, If giraffes fly, then Socrates died of hemlock. Not so obvious what to say, Today's logicians and some ancient ones tend to think that if-then statements are true, just so long as they do not infer something false from something true. Suppose I say, If Socrates died of hemlock, then giraffes fly. That has to be wrong. After all, Socrates did die of hemlock, but giraffes don't fly, any more than pigs do. But the other way around looks fine, at least harmless. Since giraffes never fly, there's no harm in saying that if they did, Socrates would die of hemlock, or for that matter, not die of hemlock. But this was not satisfactory to some ancient logicians, for instance our new friend, Diodorus Cronus. And one is tempted to agree with him. Surely the point of asserting if X then Y is to claim that X and Y have some kind of connection. Diodorus gets closer to this by adding another requirement, it can never be the case that X is true and Y is false. This helps him rule out the truth of assertions like, If chickens are birds, then Socrates died of hemlock, because there was a time when chickens were birds, but Socrates had not yet died of hemlock. Chrysippus basically agrees with Diodorus, but goes further. He and other Stoics speak of a coherence between the two parts of an if-then statement. I am only allowed to infer Y from X if the truth of X somehow rules out the falsehood of Y. For instance, suppose it is always true that penguins are birds, and that giraffes are ruminants. Still, it is not true to say, If penguins are birds, then giraffes are ruminants, because the fact that penguins are birds has nothing to do with giraffes. Here we catch a glimpse of how Chrysippus sees logic as relating to physics. The relation Chrysippus is describing sounds like a causal relation. Given the cause, the effect must follow. Once we sort out these issues about complex assertions, we're ready to build some arguments. These will involve at least two assertions, and of those, at least one will need to be complex. So, a standard Stoic argument might be, If it is day, then it is light. It is day, so it is light. Just as Aristotle itemized syllogistic forms and considered whether or not they count as valid, so Chrysippus identified five argument forms which he called indemonstrable. In other words, they are obviously valid arguments. The example I just gave, the one about daylight, would be the first indemonstrable, which has the form, If the first, then the second, but the first, so the second. This looks a bit like what we find in Aristotle. Logic is the study of arguments, so you begin by considering parts of assertions like, This man, or, Walks. Then you see how they combine into complete assertions, like, This man walks. Finally, you work on combining the assertions into argument forms, like, If this man walks, then he moves. This man walks, therefore, he moves. But, the differences with Aristotle are more striking. The Stoics do not lay particular stress on predication, and in fact, they are downright uncomfortable with the kind of predication that Aristotle considered most important. If you remember, these were universal predications, like, All giraffes are ruminants. The Stoics would be happier to put this differently and say, If something is a giraffe, it is a ruminant. In this case, with their rephrasing, the Stoics are registering their unwillingness to countenance universal entities. For them, everything that exists is material, so there is no such thing as a universal form or species, giraffe. There are only individual giraffes. Again, we see that logical points can have serious philosophical consequences. The Stoic view puts clear water between them and Plato, with his theory of forms, and also Aristotle, who tends to think that universal features of the world have some degree of reality. Let's end with a few logical puzzles. These were a favorite topic for Chrysippus, who wrote entire books about single paradoxes and puzzles, including the famous Liar and Psorites paradoxes. I've mentioned the Liar paradox before. It consists simply in a statement like what I'm now saying is false. If it's true, it's false. If it's false, it's true. Great paradox. As per the Psorites, the title comes from the Greek psoros, which means heap. The puzzle is this. You are asked whether one grain of sand constitutes a heap. Well, obviously not. How about two grains? Still not a heap. Your opponent keeps going, three, four, five, until you admit that we now have a heap. As soon as you do that, they say, you're telling me adding one grain of sand turns it into a heap? It's absurd to suppose that adding or subtracting only one grain would make a decisive difference. Yet, at some point, a heap must come into existence. So where do you draw the line? I'm going to leave you in suspense and wait until next time to tell you Chrysippus's solution. For now, I'll consider another logical puzzle he confronted, which introduces a major topic in Stoicism—modality. In other words, the concepts of necessity, possibility, and impossibility. Again, Diodorus Cronus provided the provocation with something called the ruling or master argument. The idea seems to have been this. Let's suppose I never get to be a ruler, for instance, the president of a country. It seems like I could be a president, even if I never am a president, but Diodorus argues otherwise. He exploits the fact that everything about the past seems to be necessary. After all, it's too late to do anything about the past. We cannot, for instance, change the fact that Socrates died of hemlock, so Socrates having died of hemlock is necessary. Now if, as we supposed, I will never rule, then it must have been true already in the past that I will never rule, but then this must be a necessary truth. After all, everything about the past is necessary. So, if it was already true yesterday, or a hundred years ago, that I will never be president, then a ship has already sailed. It is impossible for me to be president. This argument, and other arguments from the dialectical school, yield an unnerving result, namely that if something will never happen, then it cannot happen. Other deterministic arguments tried to show something even stronger, namely that each thing must happen at the time that it happens. Aristotle already confronted this prospect in his famous sea battle argument, and also in a passage from his metaphysics. There, he discusses a group he calls the Megarians, who claimed that everything that actually happens must happen. Chrysippus, like Aristotle, found these consequences troubling, so he proposed a novel conception of possibility and necessity. For Chrysippus, something is possible so long as it is not in itself impossible, and furthermore is not prevented from happening. Thus, many things that could happen do not happen. I don't have a sister, but I could have had one, because my parents were able to produce female children, and nothing intervened from the outside to stop them. But other things that never happen are impossible. Firstly, things that are in themselves impossible, like me lifting a skyscraper. Secondly, things that could occur in themselves, but are prevented from occurring. The classic example is a piece of wood at the bottom of the ocean, which in itself could burn, but is hindered from burning by being permanently under water. Chrysippus' interest in puzzles like the liar, sorieties, and master arguments was not mere idle speculation. We already saw that the dispute over conditional assertions connects to Stoic physics, because causation is a conditional relation. If I watch a Buster Keaton movie, I will laugh. The same goes for the dispute over modality. Chrysippus and other Stoics were causal determinists. They thought that true causes inevitably give rise to their effects, and that all things arise in this way. But they were not logical determinists or fatalists. They still wanted to distinguish between possible and necessary truths. We'll see why in a couple of episodes. As for the liar and the sorieties, Chrysippus needed to solve these two. This results from his epistemology, which envisions the possibility of an infallible sage who always knows the right answer, or knows that there is no right answer. This would be a kind of super-philosopher who never makes mistakes. It's among the most ambitious and sophisticated epistemological theories of the ancient world. Clearly, then, it would be a mistake for you to miss the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Nobody's Perfect, the Stoics on Knowledge. When we last left our hero Chrysippus, he was grappling with two formidable opponents, the Sorites paradox and the Lyre paradox. To remind you, the Sorites goes like this. I ask you whether one grain of sand is a heap of sand. You say no, so I ask about two grains then three, and so on. As soon as you admit that the threshold has been reached so that we finally have a heap of sand, I say, that's ridiculous. Adding one grain of sand can't turn the amount into a heap. A variation, which touches on a sensitive spot for me personally, asks you to imagine plucking hairs off a man's head one at a time until he becomes bald. It's absurd to suppose that one hair could make the difference, yet he surely becomes bald at some point. It's a cute little paradox, but does it rise to the exalted level of being philosophy? As it turns out, this puzzle, and others like it, provoke a lot of excitement among philosophers nowadays. They raise the issue of vagueness. There are certain concepts which seem to have no sharp boundaries, like bald and heap, as the puzzle illustrates. Those are, if you'll pardon the expression, particularly clear cases of vagueness, but they are far from the only ones. Think, for instance, about evolution. Apes turn slowly into humans generation by generation. Is it any easier to say which generation separates ape from human than it is to say which strand of hair separates hirsute from bald? Probably not. So human seems to be a vague term, and presumably all our other biological concepts are too. Concepts of man-made things, like tables and airplanes, look even more obviously vague, likewise for colors and other qualities like thin and fat. The more you think about it, the vaguer the world seems. Philosophers can hardly avoid being interested in this once they've noticed it, and have tried to develop more precise notions of vagueness, hence the fascination of the Ceraites paradox. Chrysippus was apparently the first to feel this fascination. He wrote entire treatises on the paradox, and, thus, has some claim to be the first philosopher to deal with the topic of vagueness. Sadly, these works are lost. We know only from later reports that his way out of the paradox was this—simply fall silent before it becomes unclear whether the sand is a heap. If things start being unclear at about twenty-five grains, then, when you are asked about the twentieth grain of sand, just say nothing at all. Refuse to be drawn on the issue. Now, despite occasional claims to the contrary, this does not seem to constitute a solution to the Ceraites paradox. It's only a strategy for approaching the dialectical game the paradox envisions. In order to avoid falling into an absurdity, Chrysippus advises you to just keep your mouth shut. As Cicero says in reporting the strategy, you will be like a chariot driver pulling up his horses before running off a cliff. Notice that Chrysippus tells us not to be silent the first time we are unsure, but before we start to be unsure. His goal is purely defensive. He just wants to help us avoid saying something false or something absurd—for instance, that twenty-four grains of sand isn't a heap, but twenty-five grains is a heap. This may strike us as a bit disappointing. We were hoping to learn something about the problem of vagueness, but Chrysippus's advice seems to be simply, don't go there. The liar paradox also prompted him to write a whole series of lost treatises, and again, his aim was apparently to prevent any contradiction or absurdity from arising in the first place. As far as we can tell, his solution was to claim that a statement like, I now truly say that I am speaking falsely, is not a genuine proposition, though it appears to be one. It's just not the sort of thing that can be true or false. But why should Chrysippus have devoted so much energy to these paradoxes, especially if he was satisfied with a defense that would fall short of a solution? Surely the puzzles appealed to his natural gift for logical analysis. But just as surely, he had a broader philosophical project in mind. As I said last time, he inherited from Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, an ambitious theory of knowledge. This theory envisioned the possibility of a perfect sage who would never make a mistake. That's not to say that Zeno himself was such a sage, or that he knew where to find one. The Stoics sought only to defend the theoretical possibility of the sage. They weren't committed to the idea that there actually are or ever have been any. What's the point, then? Of course, it's a philosophical one. Without the possibility of faultless rationality, there is no standard against which we can measure ourselves. One of the main dramas of Hellenistic philosophy was the opposition between the Stoic's extreme optimism and ancient skepticism. The ancient skeptics, as we'll be seeing in later episodes, argued that all candidates for knowledge seemed to involve some uncertainty. The battle lines were drawn. The Stoics claimed that certainty is possible, the skeptics that it is not, or more modestly that as far as we can tell, it is never achieved. Here we need to be careful, though. The Stoics were not saying that we can be certain about everything or that the sage would know everything. Rather, they were saying that the sage would have certain knowledge in some cases and that he would be able to tell the difference between certainty and doubt. In cases of doubt, he would refrain from making any judgment at all. This explains Chrysippus' answer to the Serites paradox. That's a classic case where doubt is thrust upon you. Chrysippus' response, and the sage's response, would be to fall silent to avoid committing oneself. The idea of suspending judgment is also at the heart of the skeptical project. Indeed, we can sum up the difference between the two schools by saying that the Stoics thought we should suspend judgment when we are not certain. The skeptics agreed, but added that as far as we can tell, certainty is never available, so we should always suspend judgment. All this means that Stoic epistemology revolves around the task of showing that we can have certainty. In this, the Stoics are returning to a project dear to the hearts of Plato and Aristotle. They want to distinguish between true knowledge or understanding and mere opinion. The Stoics lay it on pretty thick when it comes to making this distinction. Those who have opinion and not knowledge only get at the truth by being lucky. After all, they lack certainty, so they could just as well have been wrong. So the Stoics compare them to insane people. Or perhaps I should say the Stoics compare us and themselves, anyone who is not a sage, to insane people. This may itself sound a bit crazy. And actually, the Stoics do think some non-sages are better than others. Those who, like the Stoics themselves, are at least trying to achieve certainty are better than those who let their beliefs run out of control, endorsing any thought that comes to mind. Where, then, is our certainty going to come from? Like the Epicureans, the Stoics point to sensation. All our knowledge is ultimately grounded in our sensory experiences, since it is the senses that give us access to the physical world around us. This is unsurprising given that, again like the Epicureans, the Stoics believe that only physical bodies exist. They call the sensory impact of bodies on us impressions. An impression would be the way things seem to be to you. For instance, if you walk into the kitchen and smell coffee, you're having an impression that coffee has been brewed. As we've seen, the Epicureans express total confidence in such sensory experiences. They think that all sensations are true, even if we put the wrong interpretation on those sensations. The Stoics are more skeptical, if you'll pardon the term. They would say that some impressions are true, but some are false. Perhaps the kitchen smells that way because someone spilled the coffee grounds on the floor. Part of the debate here concerns the question of what sensation is telling us. For the Stoics, your experience makes it seem to you true that coffee has been brewed. For the Epicureans, it presents only the smell of coffee. It is you who adds the delightful, but possibly false, inference that coffee actually awaits you. Of course, the Stoics are not saying that you, or much less the sage, are forced by your senses to believe that there is coffee in the pot. But, they analyze the mistake differently. For them, you have from your sense of smell the impression that there is coffee, but it is up to you whether to assent to that impression. You could reject the impression, for instance because you also see spilled coffee grounds on the floor. Or, you could do what the sage does, and suspend judgment until you are absolutely sure, for instance because you have actually poured the coffee and tasted it so that you know it really is coffee. Now, I know what you're thinking. If some sensory impressions are false, then how can sensation provide certainty? The answer is simple. Though some impressions are false, some are true, and some are so obviously true that they could not be false. The Stoics call these special experiences cognitive impressions. These are the impressions in which we securely grasp something. That metaphor of grasping lies behind the Greek used by the first Stoics, phantasia cataleptice. This grasping word catalepsis was translated into Latin by Cicero using the word cognitio, which is why we call them cognitive impressions. I mention this in part because ancient languages are cool, and in part because the word cognitive might otherwise mislead you. The point is not that other impressions have nothing to do with thinking or cognition, but that other impressions are such that they might be false. A cognitive impression is rock-solid and can serve as the basis for certain knowledge more generally. Zeno gave a vivid analogy to illustrate this theory. He held out his open palm and said that this represents the mere impression, the way things seem to you. Then he put his fingertips together and said that this is assent. It is agreeing that things really are that way. Next, he formed his fingers into a fist and said that this was the cognitive impression. The fist indicates that one has a firm grasp so that one is assenting to something that must be true. Finally, he placed his other hand over his fist and said that this represents knowledge. Notice that the cognitive impression is not yet knowledge. It is rather the basis for knowledge. We achieve knowledge only when we are systematic, when we combine together many rational impressions into a global understanding of the world. To understand that understanding, we need to retrace our steps. Go back to the most basic stage, the impression. Our entire experience is made up of impressions. The exact manner in which we receive them was a matter of debate among the early Stoics. Taking a leaf from Plato's Theaetetus, the earliest heads of the school, Zeno and Cleanthes, argued that the impressions are really like imprints made in wax. Chrysippus disagreed, pointing out that we can receive and retain many impressions all at the same time, something impossible in the case of wax. Still, all the Stoics were committed to the idea that impressions have some physical realization. After all, according to them, nothing nonphysical exists. Next is the stage of ascent. The Stoics believe that this capacity for ascent is already a great gift, something that differentiates us adult humans from animals and small children. It is, you might say, the core of rationality. A beast can experience that the world seems a certain way, but only a mature human can take a critical stance regarding the world and say to himself or herself, well, things may seem this way, but I'm not so sure. Ideally, the human will remain self-consciously unsure unless there is certainty, which arises only through a cognitive impression. It is not only sages who can have such impressions. According to the Stoics, even children have such impressions. Your impression that you are listening to a podcast right now might count as such an impression. There's no way you could be wrong about this. Or, if you don't like that example, then your impression that it is daylight when you walk outside and the sun is shining. You just can't be wrong about that. However, it is possible to improve oneself in this respect. The Stoics speak of the cognitive impression as being technical or artistic, by which they mean that our knowledge and beliefs inform the way we have experience. I look at someone and see that they have a yellowish complexion. The doctor looks at the same person and sees someone who has jaundice and quite likely a liver disease. Thus, we can expect that with increasing wisdom comes an increase in the extent and detail of our cognitive impressions. By the same token, knowledge helps us relate cognitive impressions to one another. Or, we might even say that knowledge just is grasping the interrelation of cognitive impressions. To do this, one makes use of what the Stoics call preconceptions. For the Epicureans, the word meant rough and ready concepts, but for the Stoics it means the reliable beliefs that arise for all humans through careful observation of the world. This allows us to put our impressions within a more general framework. The sage, of course, is the one whose framework is beyond reproach. He has maximized his opportunity for having cognitive impressions informed by expertise, and is always careful not to leap to conclusions in cases of even slight uncertainty. It is, I think you'll agree, a nice theory, but the ancient skeptics pointed out its potentially fatal flaw. A house is only as strong as its foundations, and for the Stoics, knowledge is built upon the foundation of cognitive impressions. The skeptics showed up with the dynamite for exploding that foundation. They pointed out that any impression, no matter how apparently reliable, will be indistinguishable from some possible misleading impression. Suppose you see your best friend standing before you in good lighting conditions. You will have no hesitation in assenting to the impression that your friend stands before you, but isn't it just possible that your friend has an identical twin? Your friend has kept this twin a secret from you, or they were separated at birth, so your friend doesn't even know this twin exists. Okay, the possibility is remote, but it cannot be totally ruled out, so there is some possibility that you are seeing not your friend, but your friend's twin. The skeptics say that this problem is general and inescapable. There is no impression so convincing that it eliminates all possibility of error. Faced with this, the Stoics could have gone two ways. One would be to say that cognitive impressions do lead us to the truth so that we are guaranteed to be correct in assenting to them, but that perhaps we do not know which impressions are cognitive. This would be, to put it in modern jargon, an externalist solution. From outside the situation of the person judging, we would say the person did have knowledge because they were assenting to an impression that couldn't be wrong. But the Stoics seem to have been what are nowadays called internalists. They insisted that the person judging must not only be free from the possibility of error, but must know that they are free from the possibility of error, from the inside as it were. So, against the skeptics, they claim that cognitive impressions are distinct, having a special quality that marks them out as utterly reliable. It's clear why they must insist on this. They want to preserve the possibility of the ideal sage who never makes a mistake. It shouldn't be just a matter of luck that the sage always gets things right. Rather, he gets things right because he knows that he is assenting only two cognitive impressions, which are always reliable. In other cases, the sage will play it safe and suspend judgment. He will, that is, avoid assenting to impressions where there is room for doubt. Of course, the skeptics say that this will mean never assenting to any impressions, since there is always room for doubt. A lovely, though no doubt apocryphal, story about a Stoic named Spherus illustrates the difficulty facing the Stoics. While the guest of a royal court, Spherus was served wax pomegranates as a practical joke. When he tried to eat one, the king mocked him for assenting to a false impression. But Spherus replied that he had assented only to the impression that it was reasonable to suppose these were pomegranates. It would also be reasonable to touch on one last question regarding Stoic views about belief and assertion. Suppose I say, this giraffe is a majestic beast. How do we account for the fact that this string of English words, or any string of words, connects with the world around us? It's the most fundamental issue in the philosophy of language, and the Stoics were sufficiently worried about it to devise one of their most original doctrines, the idea of lekhta, or sayables. Remember, the Stoics were materialists. They think that nothing really exists apart from bodies. When I say, this giraffe is a majestic beast, the only relevant body here seems to be the giraffe. But clearly, my sentence doesn't say or mean the giraffe itself. I can touch a giraffe, but I cannot say it. Rather, the Stoics suggest, there is something called a lekton, the sayable, which I have latched onto with my utterance. These sayables form a kind of bridge between language and the world, between the noises coming out of my mouth and the giraffe herself. It would be easy to suppose that sayables are something like thoughts in my mind, but this seems not to be the case. After all, there are many sayable things that neither I, nor anyone else, has said or will say. So, these sayables would seem to be part of the furniture of the world, as it were. But how can this be, given the Stoics' rigorous commitment to materialism? Sayables are not bodies, after all. The Stoics realize this, and see a similar problem in other cases, for instance time and void. These things seem to be required for any complete philosophical understanding of the world, yet they are not bodies. Thus, the Stoics admit that sayables and time and void are some things, but not that they are really real. Or, as they put it with a further bit of technical terminology, they subsist without actually existing. Given the Stoics' materialist credentials, this may seem a surprising concession regarding entities that they themselves refer to as incorporeals. After all, they make a big deal of rejecting such immaterial entities as platonic forms, which for them absolutely do not exist. The difference is that sayables, time, and void are needed to make sense of the physical world around us, whereas forms could never help with this task. They are meant to be causes, but, as the Stoics stress, nothing can be a cause for bodies without itself being corporeal. So, what sorts of causes they accept? What is their understanding of the cosmos and our place within it? Any body who wants to find out should join me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, We Didn't Start the Fire, The Stoics on Nature. This, in the translation of the indispensable long and subtly reader entitled The Hellenistic Philosophers, is the beginning of a hymn to Zeus written by the Stoic Cleanthes. Cleanthes, as you might remember, was the successor of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and the predecessor of the great Chrysippus. It shows us that a pious attitude towards the divine was at the heart of early Stoicism, and this may come as a surprise. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Stoicism will know that, like the Epicureans, they were materialists. They insisted that what really exists is what can act on something, or be acted upon by something else. And this, for them, means bodies. Thus, they agree with Aristotle in dismissing Platonic forms as a fantasy. How could something like the form of large actually make anything large? You make things large by, for instance, in inflating them with air, or stretching them with your hands. Whatever changes we see are caused by the interaction of bodies. Aristotle had likewise complained that Plato's forms could not accomplish anything, but the Stoics are going further than he did. After all, Aristotle did invoke an immaterial God as the primary cause of his cosmos. Yet the Stoics too included God in their vision of the cosmos. In fact, they quite literally included God in the cosmos, seeing him as a physical being that pervades all things. Here they again mention their idea, which, incidentally and ironically, is borrowed from Plato, that what exists is what can act or be acted upon. In general, they see God as the active cause in the universe, and speak of matter as the passive cause that is acted upon. But this is a slippery distinction, because in fact God is never apart from matter. The acting cause is never apart from what it acts upon. Instead, God and matter are both physical principles which in their permanent and mutual interaction form the body of the cosmos. Thus, the Stoics are willing to call their God nature, rather than seeing the divine as something supernatural, as might be suggested by Aristotle. Indeed, later in the history of philosophy, there will be a long tradition of seeing the title of Aristotle's metaphysics as appropriate precisely because it studies that which is after or beyond nature, namely God. By contrast, the Stoic God is immanent, physically interwoven through all bodily things, and so through everything that exists. But if he is physical, what kind of physical thing is he? Here the Stoics reach back into the pre-Socratic past for inspiration, making common cause with, of all people, Heraclitus. He had portrayed God as a fire, or as a thunderbolt that steers all things, an idea that appears in our quote from Cleanthes' hymn. Following Heraclitus, Stoics too describe God as having a fiery nature, although God is not to be imagined simply as a flame, such as you see rising from the wick of a candle. The sense in which God is fire is more that he is physically subtle and active. He is also unlike earthly fire in that his activity is not blind or mindless. To the contrary, the Stoics call God a designing fire, and also a craftsman or demiurge, echoing the name given to God in Plato's Timaeus. He does not just pervade the cosmos, but wisely and artfully builds it from within, as if the carpenter's designing skill were inside wood and able to make it into a table. For this reason, the Stoics point to the apparent design of the world around us as a proof of God's existence. This kind of proof, often called a design argument, was certainly on the table, if you'll pardon the expression, in Plato's Timaeus, and in the works of Aristotle. But the Stoics make it very explicit, claiming that it is just obvious that there is a pervading principle of wisdom in the world. In a weird and striking image, Zeno said that rejecting the existence of such a principle would be like encountering a tree that grows flutes that play tunes, and then denying that there is a principle of music in the tree. Another Stoic analogy says that if we saw a model of the heavens, we would never question that it was made by an artisan. Thus, how can we doubt that a wise artisan made the real heavens? The Stoics see every feature of the cosmos as the result of divine wisdom and purpose, claiming that all things are as good as they could possibly be, and devoted to the fulfillment of God's plan. Often, God's plan coincides with our own. My favorite detail from Stoic design arguments comes when they claim that pigs are clearly designed by providence to be food for man, because their flesh is naturally salty. Now I know what you're thinking. God is a principle of order and activity, but is imminent within the body of the cosmos. Doesn't this sound less like a god and more like a soul? Doesn't it in fact sound a bit like the so-called world soul of Plato's Timaeus? To this I say, good point, and thank you for paying such close attention. The Platonic world soul is of course immaterial, but in other respects it is indeed comparable to the Stoic god, which is likewise woven together with the body of the cosmos. In fact, one could see Stoic theology as itself woven together, taking both the world soul and the divine craftsman of Plato's Timaeus and combining them into one single principle. It would seem that this is not a coincidence. The early Stoics were carefully reacting to Plato, borrowing from him, even as they rejected some of his ideas, not least the ideas or forms themselves. That was incompatible with their materialism, but the comparison of god to a craftsman, the analogy between the cosmos and the living thing, the notion that providence and wisdom are visible in the design of the universe, all these things were taken over from the Timaeus and given a distinctively Stoic materialist spin. Quiantes says in his hymn that we alone among earthly beings bear a likeness to god, which looks like another Platonic allusion to the dialogue Theaetetus and its suggestion that mankind's purpose is to achieve likeness to god. Of course, as materialists, when the Stoics say this they must mean that the soul is a physical thing, which somehow resembles the divine nature that physically pervades all things. Our souls can be thought of as portions of this divine nature, and they give to our body what god gives to the world, order and a principle of activity. The human soul is also, like god, fiery. Starting with Chrysippus it is identified with a kind of warm breath, in Greek pneuma. Thanks to this breath, living animals possess a vital heat that spreads along with the soul through the body, just as god the designing fire spreads through the cosmos. The Stoics naturally locate the center of the soul where we find the center of heat, namely, as Aristotle too had said, the heart. It is here, not in the brain, that we find the soul's so-called hegemonicon, or commanding faculty. Of course, the Stoics knew that their materialist understanding of soul would be no less contentious than their materialist portrayal of god, so they argued for it. One proof they offered was that children resemble their parents in character as well as in appearance. Parents produce their children through a physical process, so how could our character dispositions be inherited if the soul were not somehow physical? They also describe the way that the soul physically acts upon and within the body. Taking their cue from respiration, they imagine the soul as a kind of breath that is moving both inward and outward in the body, holding the body together in a balanced state of tension. Actually, something like this is true even for lifeless things such as rocks, which also have a so-called tenor. This is what holds a rock together as a single thing and makes it distinct from the other objects around it. But humans have a much more exalted sort of unity, which gives them the god-like capacity for reason and intelligence. Here the Stoics run into a problem. They are saying that god and the soul are physical things which spread all the way through other physical things, namely the cosmos and the ensouled body. But how is this possible? It seems to presuppose something absurd, namely that two physical objects can be in the same place at the same time. If only this were true, it would solve all our housing problems. But unfortunately, each physical object seems jealously to guard its own space. Some kind of force is needed to push it out of its place to make room for something else. When I pour wine into a glass, for instance, the air in the glass is pushed out of the way. So it seems that god cannot be everywhere in the cosmos because there is no room. The cosmos would have to get out of the way. But, the Stoics can now ask, what happens when wine is poured into water? In that case, the wine does not push the water aside. Rather, it mixes together with the water, so that the two are both together in the same place. Similarly, the Stoics want to say, god is thoroughly mixed together with the body of the cosmos, and your soul is mixed together with your body. This theory of mixture provoked a good deal of discussion and derision in the ancient world. Of course, some philosophers, like the atomists, thought that there is no total mixture, only the juxtaposition of particles, jumbled together only the way that pebbles or beans might be. Chrysippus, author of the Stoic view on this issue, did of course agree that mixture can happen by juxtaposition, but he insisted that two things can be in the same place at the same time, if they are suitable for this more thorough kind of mixture, like wine and water. Opponents retorted that, in that case, any body could be stretched to be coextensive with any other body, no matter how large. A drop of wine could be mixed into the entire ocean, and would be stretched across the whole ocean a little bit of that drop in every drop of water. A gorier version, suggested by the sceptic Archesilaus, pointed out that if Chrysippus were right, a single leg that rotted in the ocean could become big enough for two fleets of ships to fight in, since the decomposed leg would spread throughout the entire sea. If this was supposed to scare Chrysippus, it didn't work. He insisted that a drop of wine can in principle exist throughout the sea. His opponents, of course, continued to feel that he didn't have a leg to stand on. The Stoic god, then, is not only a source of all order and activity, which steers all things like Heraclitus' thunderbolt, but is also present within all things. He could hardly be more unlike the Epicurean gods, who are envisioned as uninvolved, remote entities living in detached bliss. The Stoic god, by contrast, is about as involved as he could be. Indeed, Stoic physics in general is diametrically opposed to Epicureanism. Instead of unmixed atoms colliding at random, we have divisible and intermixing bodies woven together by a providential rationality. A more subtle contrast for the Stoics would be Aristotle. Of course, his god, like a Platonic form, is an immaterial cause, something the Stoics reject out of hand. But the Stoics agree with Aristotle, and most other ancient philosophers, in thinking of the cosmos as spherical, with the more divine heavens surrounding an earthly realm. They accept a system of four elements, air, earth, fire, and water, and, like Aristotle, assume that these are continuous, in other words they can be divided and divided again, indefinitely, without ever reaching atoms, that is, indivisible parts. Thus, the Stoics find much to agree with in Aristotle's physics. Regarding the past and future, though, they do not see eye to eye. Aristotle believes that the cosmos is eternal, and has always been organized more or less as we see now. For the Stoics, though, the world order we experience is only one chapter in an ongoing story. Long ago, the cosmos consisted of nothing but divine fire, a pure fusion of God with matter, in which all was wisdom and there was no evil. Our world emerged from this state when the fire condensed into the other elements and, as in many a pre-Socratic cosmology, transformed into the earth below and the heavens above. Also familiar from pre-Socratic philosophy, even if it is an idea that turns up too in some Platonic dialogues, is the idea that our world undergoes cycles. The Stoics believe the cosmos will revert to its original state, in a so-called conflagration, when it will be consumed in fire and be reduced, or rather increased, to nothing but fire. I say increased because the Stoic theory takes account of the fact that the elements vary in density. When fire transforms into water or earth, it takes up much less space, and the reverse, of course, is also true. This means that when the cosmos is in a state of conflagration, it will take up vastly more room than it does when it has partially condensed into its current form. To make this possible, the Stoics posit that our cosmos is surrounded by an infinite emptiness, a void. Here again, it's useful to compare them to the Epicureans and to Aristotle. Aristotle rejects the possibility of void entirely. For him, the cosmos is a finite sphere surrounded by nothing at all, not even empty void. Epicurus instead goes for an infinite void, the emptiness in which atoms can move and collide, combining into indefinitely many worlds. Like Aristotle, the Stoics recognize only one cosmos, our cosmos. But, they say it is able to expand in volume because there is plenty of room around it, since they also recognize infinite void, like the Epicureans. Against Aristotle and whoever else doubts that the cosmos is surrounded by void, the Stoics ask what will happen if someone standing at the very edge extends his arm. If he can stretch his arm out past the edge of the cosmos, there is empty space around it. If he can't, there must be something outside the cosmos blocking his motion. So, if the cosmos really does have an edge with nothing beyond it, then nothing must be conceived as void. When the Stoics combine their cosmic cycle with their respect for divine providence, they come to an unnerving conclusion. God designs the whole world with maximal wisdom. Presumably then, when the world has been consumed in fire and reborn, we can expect God to make the same choices again. Every cosmic cycle, in other words, will be exactly the same. This is the idea of eternal recurrence, also famously discussed by Nietzsche. It is not merely an idle cosmological speculation, but is intended to make us weigh up each choice as if it will be repeated infinitely many times. That, at least, was the message Nietzsche drew from the idea of recurrence. Marcus Aurelius, too, saw it as ethically important, but for a rather different reason. It puts things in a great deal of perspective. For instance, why should I be afraid to choose an honourable death over cowardly safety if my life will be repeated in infinity of times so that I will live forever either way? To draw this sort of moral, of course, Marcus and other Stoics need to believe that it will literally be me who exists again and again in cycle after cycle of the world. Some Stoics denied this under pressure from their critics, but it seems that the original Stoic view here was that the very same Socrates will exist in every world cycle, will drink hemlock in every cycle, and so on. It has even been suggested that time for the Stoics is therefore circular. If this is right, the Stoics see the future not as an infinite series of repeated events that are exactly alike, but as a loop of literally identical events happening over and over again. This may be captured in the image of time as an unwinding rope, which Cicero uses to describe the Stoic theory. But how, we might now ask, can Marcus Aurelius, or any other Stoic, speak of choosing whether or not we choose with eternal recurrence in mind? If God so orders the world as to achieve the best and most rational results, and if our actions too fall within that ordering, then can we really be said to choose our actions? Are we not rather puppets of divine causation? The Stoics might, like later philosophers, have sought to reconcile divine providence with the idea that our actions are uncaused by God, or by anything else, but they went in the other direction. They embraced the notion that all things are caused, including human actions. They were, in a word, determinists, convinced that all events, including human choices and actions, arise out of unbreakable chains of prior events, a web of cause and effect that is inescapable and the product of divine wisdom. As I've said in previous episodes, the Stoics saw all parts of philosophy as interconnected, and we've here arrived at a connection between physics and ethics. In fact, we already saw that the physical doctrine of eternal recurrence had a practical significance. Determinism, though, has further-reaching consequences for ethics. The thought that all things are fated to occur as they do by divine providence might fill us with a deep peace, leading us to accept even the most horrifying events with equanimity. We might, that is, take what we have come to call a Stoic attitude towards misfortune and suffering. What happens is inevitable, so there's no point getting upset about it. Moreover, it is preordained by God, and getting upset would just be to show our all-too-human incomprehension of his greater plan. On the other hand, this same thought might itself strike you as pretty upsetting. It seems to depict us as mere pawns moved by irresistible divine will in a cosmic chess game, albeit a game of chess that happens over and over, with a big fire breaking out at the end. So is nothing to put it, as the Stoics and other philosophers of the period put it, up to us? It's up to you to find out, by joining me next time as I look at Stoic ethics and determinism on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Like a Rolling Stone – Stoic Ethics I'd like you to imagine that you're walking along a railway line. You're just out for a stroll listening to some philosophy podcasts on a portable audio device of your choosing. Suddenly, your blood runs cold. An innocent child is playing on the rails, and a train is bearing down on it at great speed, too fast to slow down in time. Without a thought for your own safety, you rush forward instinctively, snatch the child in your arms and leap aside with seconds to spare. The train hurtles obliviously onward, but onlookers have witnessed your brave act. You are hailed as a hero in the local community, and use the brief weeks of fame to encourage your admiring public to listen to this great podcast you've been enjoying lately. It's a story with a happy ending. But does it have an unhappily confused middle section? We spoke of your bravery, the heroism of your split-second decision to save the child. But we also said you acted instinctively, without pausing to weigh up the costs and benefits of your perilous undertaking. If this is right, why should we give you credit for what you have done? You acted, we might say, automatically, and your dash towards the child was no less inevitable than the oncoming rush of the train. You are, it would seem, just the kind of person who reacts that way in these child-threatened-by-train situations. Sure, it's lucky for the child that you happened to be there, but it's not as if you had any choice in the matter. You didn't pause to choose, and if you had had time to pause, you wouldn't seriously have considered letting the child be crushed anyway. How can we reasonably praise you and write admiring newspaper articles about your bravery, given that in this situation that confronted you, you quite literally could not have done otherwise? In these podcasts, I've been trying not to derail things by introducing too many technical terms, all those words ending in "-ism." But in this case, the train of our thought will have trouble leaving the station without a couple of terms like these in our trunk. Sorry if this metaphor is speeding out of control. So, two "-isms," determinism and compatibilism. Determinism is the idea that everything that happens is, wait for it, determined. All things are unavoidable, or, if you prefer, everything that can happen does happen. Why might you think that? Well, there are various reasons. We already saw one kind of determinism in discussing Aristotle's infamous sea-battle argument, according to which the truth of propositions about the future makes future events inevitable. Another kind is what you might call causal determinism, the view that causes necessitate their effects, and that everything is caused. If this is true, then there is an unbreakable chain of cause and effect stretching back into the past, which guarantees both that the present could not have been otherwise, and that there is only one possible future. As we saw last time, the Stoics accepted this view of the world. Determinism deepens the problem of your heroics and the train. We said that if it was impossible for you to do anything other than what you did, then it's hard to see why you should get any credit for it. Similarly, if I cannot help, say, pushing you in front of an oncoming train, if I literally cannot do anything else, then how can I really be blamed? In short, if determinism is true, how can anyone be morally responsible for anything? That brings us to our second ism, compatibilism. This is simply the view that freedom, or moral responsibility, or something along these lines, is, after all, compatible with determinism. In other words, a compatibilist thinks that even in a deterministic world, people should still be praised and blamed for what they do, not as a convenient fiction, but because, as the Stoics put it, their actions really are up to them. Again, this is an ism accepted by the Stoics. The early Stoic Chrysippus in particular devoted careful attention to the question of how actions can be up to us, even if those actions are fated to happen by inevitable chains of cause and effect, which are carrying out the irresistible providence of God. It's worth emphasizing that Chrysippus and the other Stoics are really serious about this. For them, fate is, like these podcasts, without any gaps. You cannot escape it in even the tiniest detail. So the idea is not simply that, for instance, whatever Oedipus does, he will wind up killing his father and marrying his mother, just as the prophecy says. The idea is that even the actions Oedipus takes along the way to that outcome are also fated. Fate determines not only Oedipus's patricide, his excessive mother-love, and his poking out his own eyes, but also which eye he will poke out first, which clothespin he will use to do it, and what he will have had for breakfast on the fateful day. For the Stoics, every day is fateful, as is every action, no matter how trivial. And yet, as I say, they insist that Oedipus's actions are up to him. It is up to him what to have for breakfast to murder the man at the crossroads to take out his eyes. This might seem to you a paradox, but it's worth exploring how the Stoics defended their position, not least because many philosophers nowadays also endorse compatibilism. Chrysippus should probably be credited with the first sophisticated defence of this ism. In essence, he argued that it will be up to an agent how to act, so long as the action flows from the desires and character of that agent. If you push a cylinder, he said, it will roll in a straight line. If you push a cone, it will roll in a circle. Likewise, the same situation will provoke different reactions in different men. Oedipus's murder of his father was in large part due to the pride and temper of Oedipus himself. A meaker man would not have committed murder at the crossroads. It is precisely in this sense that it was up to Oedipus whether or not to kill, and the same goes for all the actions for which we are morally responsible. If an event is not up to me in this way, then on the Stoic view I am not responsible for it. If I threw Chrysippus out a window and he landed on a man and killed him, Chrysippus would insist that this murder was not up to him, and that he should not be blamed for it. He would also insist that the actions that are up to us are not, strictly speaking, necessary. As we saw a couple of episodes back, Chrysippus held that possibility is basically a matter of what a thing is capable of, but that possibility can be removed by external forces. It's possible for a piece of wood to burn, even if it doesn't burn. But if the wood is at the bottom of the sea, the water eliminates this possibility. We can now see what he was after. With this definition in hand, Chrysippus can say that it is possible for me to perform an action or not, so long as it is something I am physically capable of. Normally, it is possible for me to walk or refrain from walking, but if I am tied to my chair, then it is no longer up to me whether I walk or not, and no one can blame me for not going to put out the garbage. This nifty interweaving of logic and ethics is entirely characteristic of Chrysippus and of the Stoics generally. It means that they can have their cake and eat it, holding on to both determinism and contingency in the world. But make no mistake, everything you do is still necessary in a different sense in that it is made inevitable by the causal chains of fate. The later Platonist author Plotinus complained that the Stoic view makes humans out to be little more than stones being rolled along, rather ironic in light of Chrysippus' analogy of the cylinder and cone. Though the Stoics would admit that we are guaranteed to do whatever divine fate decrees for us, they point out that part of what is fated is our own internal attitude and character, which in itself helps to explain the things we do. As Zeno and Chrysippus put it, we are like a dog tied to a rolling cart. It is up to us whether to go along with the dictates of fate cheerfully or with much whining and resistance, but we will go along either way. The sage is the man who always goes along cheerfully. As you'll remember, the sage is an ideal figure who never makes any mistakes so perfect is his wisdom. This is as true in the ethical sphere as in the sphere of non-ethical judgments. In fact, it is ethical judgments the Stoics had especially in mind when they argued for the possibility of this perfect sage. Whatever the world throws at the Stoic sage, he will react appropriately, in terms of both belief and action. Only the sage is truly virtuous according to the Stoics because true virtue means being not just fairly reliable, but infallible in acting well. Furthermore, the Stoics follow Socrates in claiming that nothing but wisdom and virtue is truly valuable. They adopt the Socratic point that things like wealth, health, and political power are just as capable of aiding evil as furthering goodness. In fact, they seem to go even further than Socrates did. Socrates, at least as Plato presents him, said that wealth, health, and so on are indeed good but only when used wisely. The Stoics, in a slight but crucial change, insist that wealth, health, and so on always remain indifferent, neither good nor bad. Any good that attaches to them is derived only from virtue, and they have no value in themselves. Here I think we can detect a family resemblance between Stoicism and Cynicism. This is not surprising when we recall that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, supposedly associated with the Cynic philosopher, Kratis. The Cynic philosopher's faith in himself as utterly self-reliant, clothed only in virtue, finds an echo in this Stoic idea that all is indifferent save for virtue itself. Now I know what you're thinking. Why weren't the Stoics living in wine jars and living like dogs like the Cynics did? Good point, but I haven't told you the whole story yet. The Stoics agree with the Cynics that everything apart from virtue and wisdom is indifferent, having no genuine intrinsic value. Yet for them all indifference are not created equal. Some are to be preferred, others not. Health is a good example. It is not intrinsically good because it fails the test Plato applied to causes in his Phaedo. A really good thing would not give rise to what is bad. And health clearly can help cause bad things, as for instance when health belongs to a tyrant. Nonetheless, the Stoics argue, it is still eminently reasonable to prefer health to illness, all else being equal. So the sage will choose health, he will prefer it, unless this choice would run afoul of the demands of virtue. This position led to a rupture within early Stoicism. Chrysippus held to the theory of preferred indifference, and this would become the standard Stoic position. But his contemporary, Aristo of Chios, insisted that an indifferent should really be indifferent. If health is not good, then one cannot reasonably prefer it. Chrysippus, according to Aristo, was smuggling in a lesser kind of intrinsic value for health. It is indeed good, it's just that its goodness can be trumped by the goodness of virtue. That sounds like a powerful objection. But before we become dissident Stoics like Aristo, we should reflect that Chrysippus has an equally powerful counterargument. He can say that something is only really good if it is required for our happiness. And health simply isn't required. How could it be if we will sometimes be happier by deliberately avoiding health, as when we volunteer for a suicidal military expedition to save our city? If you'd prefer a more up-to-date example, but not too up-to-date, consider yourself going to a silent film festival. You'd prefer to see a Buster Keaton movie, but none is playing. Still, you won't let this ruin the festival for you. You'll be content to see a Charlie Chaplin picture, and equally happy with the festival as a whole. The Stoic sage is able to retain his implacable attachment to happiness, because he understands that all is for the best, since it is ruled by Providence, and because he unerringly knows what he should do in each situation. But now we might worry that the Stoics are telling us very little about what the sage would in fact do. They've told us he will prefer some indifferent things, like health, but we can't be exactly sure when he would give up on these preferred items. If the Stoics' advice boils down to, do whatever the ideal sage would do, that will be pretty disappointing, given that none of us have ever met an ideal sage, nor are we likely to. But wait, there's more. Remember that, for the Stoics, nature is in some sense identical with God. It is not so surprising, then, to discover that the Stoics find another point of agreement with the cynics, saying that the good and happy life is the life lived in accordance with nature. In a more rare moment of agreement with the Epicureans, the Stoics make reference to the behavior of animals and small children in explaining this idea. Even such irrational beings, they say, have a sense of what is appropriate for them. The Greek word for appropriate is oikeion, and relates to the Greek word for home. When a baby nozzles after milk, or a lion tears into its prey, it is, we might say, right at home, looking to acquire what is appropriate for it. We go astray by turning away from what is natural and appropriate, for instance by desiring that statues be built in our honor. Of course, if this is to be a basis for ethics, we will need to inquire more deeply into our natures, but at least we can now understand how it is that the sage achieves such perfect ethical judgment. He knows his own nature, and the nature of other things, of the cosmos itself. His beliefs, his desires, are thus aligned with the providential divine order. There's more than a hint of Aristotle here, insofar as the Stoics ground their understanding of ethics in nature. A healthy dose of Plato can be detected as well. Remember the providential ordering deity of the Tamiya. But something else divides the Stoics from Aristotle and from Plato, at least in some of his moods. This is their insistence that only the ideal sage is virtuous. They pull no punches here, claiming that a non-sage can perform no virtuous actions. After all, someone who is not a sage is, by definition, not virtuous. This lands them with yet another problem. Being a sage requires total perfection, immunity to falsehood in belief, and weakness in action. That doesn't really look like an attainable goal. If the world is divided into fools and sages, it looks as if I'm bound to remain a fool, in which case I may as well have a good time. I can't have virtue, so perhaps I should settle for good old-fashioned pleasure. Pass the wine and call in the flute girls. Or if I hesitate to become a debauched libertine, I could seek a more refined type of hedonism by leaving the Stoic porch and calling in at Epicurus' garden. So clearly the Stoics need to say something to explain why some fools are better than others and how I could make progress toward sagehood. For this reason, they developed the notion of befitting actions, in Greek katheikonta. Respecting one's parents, for instance, or paying a debt is befitting. In general, a person who performs such actions is better than one who doesn't, even if they are not sages and do not perform the actions out of genuine virtue. That doesn't mean you should do these actions in every circumstance. To borrow an example from Plato, if someone lends me an axe and then goes insane, that's a debt I probably shouldn't repay. But in general, the strategy of choosing befitting actions allows us to achieve a kind of second-best virtue. Not the unerring perfection of the sage, but the dutiful and occasionally misplaced rectitude of the upstanding citizen. As Stoicism developed, increasing attention was also paid to the question of how we can improve ourselves, even if becoming sages is a distant prospect at best. Panatius, a Stoic of the 2nd century BC, seems to have paid particular attention to this issue. Seneca quotes him responding to the question of whether a sage would ever fall in love. The answer given by Panatius is, in effect, who knows, but for non-sages like you and me, it's probably not such a great idea. Panatius urges you to reflect on your own character and seek out a walk of life that will suit you. This already seems a big step away from the nearly cynic attitudes of early Stoics like Zeno and Chrysippus, for whom the main point seemed to be that ethics is an all-or-nothing game. But a more tolerant attitude towards those who are merely making progress fits well with Chrysippus' stance in his argument with Aristo. As we saw, Aristo thought that the unique value of virtue meant that nothing else was even worth valuing. When Chrysippus sides with what looks like common sense, and allows us to prefer things like health over things like illness, he's vindicating a judgment even we fools can share. With these obvious and undeniable preferences, all of us seem to have some instinctual awareness of what is natural, an instinct that, as the Stoics emphasized, we can observe even in animals and children. Another beautiful example of later Stoic reflection on the question of moral progress comes from Hierocles, who lived in the 2nd to 1st centuries BC, and who, incidentally, laid great emphasis on the fact that animals do seem to understand what is appropriate to them. For instance, he pointed out that horned animals instinctively understand how to use these natural weapons. But the best bit of Hierocles is the one where he explains to us how we can make ourselves better people. Everyone, he says, naturally places value on himself. Imagine yourself, then, within a small circle, and then extend it to encompass your friends and family, drawing them within the circle of value. Even better would be to draw your circle around your fellow citizens. But best of all is to draw it around all humans out to the furthest foreigner. This arresting image of moral development leaves slightly unclear whether we are meant to see ourselves as actually united with others in some way, or simply to include them within our sphere of affections. But whatever the point, Hierocles is showing how Stoic ideas about nature and appropriateness can be the basis for a powerful, even uplifting, ethical attitude. In this, Hierocles was setting a trend that would continue into the Roman Empire. The development of Stoicism sees the school turning ever more towards ethical concerns, ethical development, and concrete reflection on what Stoicism means for us in our everyday lives. The later so-called Roman Stoics show that this is a philosophy with something to say to all of us, whether slave or emperor. We'll be looking at three of the Roman Stoics very soon, but first I want to do some reflecting of our own on the question of how we got from the early Stoicism of Zeno and Chrysippus to the later Stoicism of the Empire. For this, there's no more appropriate person than a man who did as much as anyone to put Stoicism, and Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, within the circle of historian's interest. So join me for an interview with David Sedley on the development of the Stoic school next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the development of Stoicism with David Sedley, Lawrence Professor of Ancient Philosophy and a Fellow of Christ College at the University of Cambridge. Hi David, thanks for coming on. Hi Peter, glad to be here. Well, we're going to be talking about Stoicism now, and this is obviously one of the schools of Hellenistic philosophy, which I've been covering in the podcast. One of the striking things about Hellenistic philosophy is that it develops into several different schools – Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism. But in the case of Stoicism, it seems that they differ from each other, so there's disagreement within the school, at least in terms of emphasis and, to some extent, in terms of doctrine. So what actually allows us to say that this is a single school as opposed to just a bunch of different people who we retrospectively call Stoics? Right, well that's actually quite a complex question, because there are certain features which we think of as characteristic of the Stoics which they in fact share with all the schools in their own day. One example is that by contrast with Plato, for whom the ultimate reality is at an immaterial and transcendent level, the Stoics think that fundamentally what there is is body, and they've got that in common with a few adjustments with the Epicureans, it's not really in dispute. So that's not a defining feature, or if you like it's a defining feature of the age rather than of the school. Then equally, and you were implying this in your question, there are some things on which the Stoics didn't even agree with each other. For example, some Stoics thought that the world ended in a periodic conflagration and started again. There are other Stoics- Everything turns into fire. Exactly, everything. That's right. There are other Stoics who denied that. So there were points which weren't really at stake when it came to school membership or school orthodoxy. But there were defining points of agreement. There were points on which you really had to sign on the dotted line if you're going to be a Stoic. And let's just think of some of those. Well, in physics, to be a Stoic was to believe that the world is a supremely rational, good, and indeed divine organism. That is a theory held by no other school at the time, and it's a point on which there's no significant disagreement. Even though that is something they would agree with Plato about, for instance. That's right indeed. In a sense, it's a development out of their reading of Plato's time here. So it's not entirely a novel doctrine. But in their day, they proclaim that position and they're in direct opposition to the Epicureans who take the absolute opposite position. The world is unorganized or self-organizing, but irrationally structured collection of atoms, any values are ones which have come out of it in an unplanned way. So one of the ways that their belief in the rationality of the world marks them off as a distinctive school is that it puts them in perfect antithesis to the main rival school, the Epicureans. In epistemology, all Stoics agreed that there is a kind of infallible grasp, which they call the cognitive or cataleptic impression. Although there were many variations on how that could best be defended against skeptical attacks, it remained an article of faith. And most important of all, and this really was the defining feature for any Stoic, in ethics, you could not be a Stoic without holding that only one thing is good, namely virtue. And so-called good, conventional goods like wealth and health, are in fact morally indifferent. They don't make your life any better or happier when you've got them. Although, according to most Stoics, there are still reasons for pursuing them, but these instrumental reasons rather than ways of actually fulfilling your own goal. So that really is ultimately in all ages, the indispensable component of Stoicism. The last example is an interesting one, I think, because there's kind of the overarching view, which is that only virtue is good, and you're not allowed to disagree about that, as it were, if you want to be a card-carrying Stoic. But you are allowed to disagree about the status of the indifference. Some Stoics think there are preferred indifference and some don't, although the standard view is that there are preferred indifference. That's right. Having preferred indifference, saying that there are prudential reasons for pursuing wealth and health, is a way of making the Stoic look quite awkwardly, pretty much like anybody else. The Stoic holds down a job, goes to the doctor, and generally pursues normal family values. So there were, admittedly, one or two Stoics, but only in the first generation, who disagreed on that and took the more extreme line, that there's literally no preferably of health over disease. It depends entirely on what you do with them. You might lead a much better life ill than somebody else could lead healthy. So that initially was a point of disagreement. But one of the things that may emerge as we go on is that actually there was more free thought in the first generation of the school than there was in subsequent generations. Is that partially because there develops some kind of feeling of allegiance to the school's founders, you know? I think it is. It's a pattern you see not just in the Stoic, but in all, at any rate, most of the major philosophical schools. There's a huge difference between the first generation, when the doctrine is forming, and subsequent generations. So in the first generation, let's take Plato's school, the Academy. We have pretty good evidence that Plato's leading colleagues, who included, by the way, Aristotle, disagreed with him pretty fundamentally on issues like are their forms. But it was after Plato's death that his thought became canonized. Once the founder of the school is dead, followers in subsequent generations feel a commitment to studying his text, interpreting it in the best possible light, and developing his ideas. That happened in the Academy. It happened in the Epicurean school. And it happened in the Stoic. So we've got lots of evidence that first generation Stoics disagreed on many issues, including the one you mentioned, because in particular, one leading Stoic, probably in his own day as important as Zeno, nor called Aristo of Chios, did defend the view you mentioned that there's literally no difference of value between so-called indifference. And he was a very independent thinker. It was only after Zeno's death that it became quite clear that Zeno had really won. And he was written by the winners, so subsequent generations really made Zeno the fountainhead of Stoicism. It might very well have gone the other way. It might have been the Aristonians. I guess one thing that's unusual, though, about the Stoics is that even though they have this allegiance to a school founder like the Platonists and the Epicureans, in the case of the Stoics, we actually credit someone else with systematizing Stoicism in its full glory, namely Chrysippus. So to what extent is the core of Stoic doctrine really Zeno's work, and to what extent is it, as it were, Chrysippus's interpretation of Zeno? I know that's a pretty difficult question given the set of the sources. It's difficult, but it's the key question. Well, there's no doubt—I don't think anybody disputes that Chrysippus was the person who really turned Stoicism into the major philosophy of the age, as it was, as it came to be, partly because Chrysippus wrote a huge amount, 705 scrolls, his works were said to amount to. All of which are lost. All of which are lost. A huge tragedy of ancient philosophy. Well, there was an eminent scholar, F.M. Cornford, who said that if the excavators of Herculaneum were to turn up the entire 705 scrolls of Chrysippus, any student would gladly swap them for one scroll of Heraclitus. But I think this has caused shock in more recent generations, and I don't think many of us would accept that. These included many, many works on logic, and although Chrysippus didn't invent Stoic logic out of nothing, he was clearly the person who turned it into a major logical system, one which could actually rival Aristotelian logic. It's a different kind of logic based on relations between propositions rather than individual terms, but it has won enormous admiration in recent generations since it's been reconstructed. So there's no doubt that Chrysippus was the major figure, and you could repeat that point for other areas of philosophy too. But still, we just need to ask the question, how did this relate to Zeno's original input? And I think the answer is roughly as follows, that Zeno didn't write a lot, and he wrote with more flair than rigor. So there was lots of daring stuff in Zeno's writings, but he hadn't really worked out the system in a very rigorous way. Once Zeno was dead, his successor Cleanthes, and then subsequent Stoics, including Chrysippus, the next Stoic head, had the task of debating exactly what the meaning of Zeno's philosophy was. Now they never, as far as we know, said Zeno got this bit wrong. It was a primary assumption that Zeno got it right. In this respect, philosophical schools are a little bit more like religious movements than we tend to think the philosophy department ought to be. Zeno must have been right, but there was a lot of scope for reinterpreting what he'd said, and there were many debates between Cleanthes and Chrysippus as to what was actually the right way to interpret Zeno. But although they're cast in these terms, which are more reminiscent of biblical scholarship perhaps than of philosophy as we know it, they did turn into very valuable philosophical debates. So just to give you one example, the unity of virtue. This was a thesis which in one form or another had been held by every major philosopher since Socrates, it would seem. If you've got one virtue, you've got all of them. Now what did Zeno say about this? Well he said that any virtue you like is just wisdom in a certain relation. So courage is wisdom in the face of danger, justice is wisdom in the face of matters of distribution and so on. Now what did that mean? Well according to Cleanthes, that meant that there's really only one virtue, namely wisdom, and when you put it into this situation, it's called courage, when you put it into that situation, it's called justice. Oh no, said Chrysippus, he doesn't have to mean that. What he really means is that there are several different kinds of wisdom and each of them specializes in one area of conduct. Perfectly legitimate debate and I think probably it was Chrysippus' view that it eventually prevailed. But the terms in which it was cast were what did Zeno really mean? That was the way the games played. But when they talk about that, is what they're doing more of an exegetical task or is it more like this is the true view so it must be the one Zeno had because they have a principle of charity or fidelity to their school founders so whatever the truth is must be what Zeno said. It's not quite as bad as that because that would mean they could have meant anything they liked for Zeno. They had to go by the letter of the text. Many important questions Zeno had simply left open in the sense that he hadn't texted and fully determined it. Sometimes Zeno had sensed something quite explicit that there was no way they could get out of and they were left with a defending. And sometimes that caused embarrassment. The most embarrassing case is that in Zeno's own day, medical opinion tended to favor the view that the rational mind is in the chest rather than the head. And Zeno was so confident of this that he produced a syllogism to prove it. Where your voice comes from is where reason is. Your voice comes from your chest so reason is in your chest. Well okay. QED. QED. Unfortunately, within a generation or two, medical science had proved that was false and that actually the rational mind was in the head. But even after that, even the most scientific of Stoics felt committed to defending Zeno's view against all the medical evidence. So it could have its downside, but again, this is reminiscent of Biblical literalism. There are many analogies which fall outside the history of philosophy as we understand it. QED. And I guess that one of the ways that Stoics developed the ideas of their founder is not merely in internal debate about the meaning of Zeno's words and writings, but also external debate, and particularly with the skeptics. So that skeptical attack on Stoic position seems to have had a lot of influence on the way that Stoicism itself develops. QED. That's right. I mean, earlier I mentioned the Epicureans as the natural enemy, but there was another enemy as well. And what you refer to as the skeptics, indeed they are often referred to as the skeptics, but I think one should actually use that word with some care. Later on, starting in the first or possibly second century AD, there was a school which actually called itself the skeptics, Hoi Skeptikoi, and that was another name for the Pyranists. They were quite independent movement. What we talk about as skeptics in the Hellenistic period are not people who call themselves by that name. The word skeptic is a lowercase s, and it's just our word skeptic means somebody who subjects every proposition to systematic doubt. The people we call the skeptics with a lowercase s in the Hellenistic period are in fact the academics. Now, who are the academics? Well, they are the school of Plato. The school founded by Plato started out, as I've already said, trying to develop Platonic doctrine out of a close study of Plato's dialogues. But in the early to mid third century BC, there was a complete change of direction ahead of the academy called Arcesilaus took the view, which many of us would share actually, that the real spirit of Plato's dialogues doesn't lie in the doctrines you can extract from them. It lies in the way that Socrates is shown challenging every philosophical conceit that he's presented with. And this is what we should be doing as philosophers, said these new academics. We should be challenging every claim to certainty. And so a systematic attack on stoic convictions was started in the academy. And over the next two centuries, that's what philosophical debate was largely about. It was academic attacks on stoicism, stoic responses, trying to patch up the doctrines, and then further set of moves by the academics. And this picture of inter-school debate and the entrenchment of positions among the schools, I think is nicely symbolized for us by this famous story of the embassy of the philosophers to Rome in 155 BC. So can you sort of tell us about that? Yes, it does illustrate the point in a way. Of course, it's a famous occasion because it marks a transition as philosophy moves out of the Greek world and into the Roman world. The event was that the Athenians had been subjected to an enormous fine for the sacking of aropas. And they were fined 500 talents. This was a huge sum. And they had the idea of sending to Rome to appeal against this fine to the Senate, none other than the three heads of the major philosophical schools, the head of the stoa, the head of the academy, and the head of the peripatetic school. They didn't send an Epicurean, and this is probably because the Epicureans were notoriously anti-political. So the three heads of schools went off as ambassadors. They did a pretty good job. They got the fine reduced from 500 to 100 talents. But they also did something with much greater historical significance while they were there. They took the opportunity to gather Roman audiences and present their philosophical wares to them, although it wasn't literally true that no philosopher had ever been in Rome before. This was the first time philosophers had a real impact. And Carniades, who was the great head of the academy, the skeptical school at this time, really shocked his Roman audience by doing the following. One day he gathered an audience and launched a passionate defense of justice. The audience goes away satisfied. Next day he calls another meeting and makes a speech denouncing justice. Well, the Romans really had no idea what to make of this. No doubt this was part of his skeptical methodology, which is, as many of us believe about all the best philosophical problems, there's a great deal to be said on both sides. That's what makes them good philosophical problems. This was, I think, was Carniades' idea, and it's also his way of promoting suspension of judgment. So Carniades perhaps had the greatest shock value, but Diogenes of Babylon, who was the head of the stoa at the time, had a terrifically positive impact as well. And you do get the feeling that it's really from that day that stoicism kind of enters the Roman intellectual bloodstream. Sort of like the Beatles going to America and kicking off rock and roll. Exactly so. So what happened then in the following generations? As you said, this event symbolizes the transition of the Hellenistic schools into the Roman world. Is there, in fact, an immediate kind of knock-on effect where stoicism and the other schools develop within Roman society? Not an immediate effect, but an educational trend, first of all. Romans sending their sons to Greece to be educated, willing to want to include philosophy in the education. Roman politicians and other kinds of dynasts and generals like to have a philosopher, usually a stoic, in their own household as a kind of personal advisor. And we see that again and again. Cicero, though he himself belonged to the academy, in fact, he had a resident stoic. Augustus, the future emperor, had a stoic called Athenodorus in his household. And the way it culminates is that you end up in the second century AD with a Roman emperor who is his own philosophical advisor. Marcus Aurelius actually wrote a book, which we still have, called To Himself, where he acts as if you were the stoic counselor to the emperor because he has both roles. Right, so we're heading towards this period which is sometimes referred to as Roman stoicism with Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. But there are major stoics in the period and the time running up to Cicero as well, right? So what's distinctive about stoicism of that period, sometimes called middle stoicism? Yes, we do have this term middle stoicism. Do you like that? I don't like it very much, but I am sometimes forced to use it. There were two stoics in particular who earned this label, Panitius, who was head of the school until 110 BC, the time of his death, and his pupil, Posidonius, who never became head of the school in Athens. Indeed, this Athenian school had more or less finished that date. But he moved to Rhodes, the island of Rhodes, where he ran a very successful school. This was part of the decentralization of philosophy away from Athens. Now there are ways in which these two are different. In many ways, the amount of variety they bring to stoicism is no different from the sort of differences that had been rife in the school before that. But one thing that's very well known about them is that they took a new and very close look at the writings of Plato. They really tried to bring Plato into the Stoic fold in a way that nobody had done before. This wasn't a radical break, however, because even before Panitius, his predecessor Antipater, had written a book arguing that all the major stoic theses were ones that they shared with Plato. The idea of forming an alliance with Plato was already present in the school. But Panitis took that further, and Posidonius took it a very long way. Indeed, there's one famous, or some would say notorious, fact about Posidonius, which is that he actually abandoned Chrysippus's main thesis in psychology and replaced it with a Platonic one. Now what was this? Well, according to Chrysippus, and he claimed that he was developing the views of Zeno here, that the passions, strong emotive states, are in fact intellectual states, they're states of judgement. So let's say you're celebrating a lottery win, you're jumping for joy, you're doing things that lottery winners do, spraying champagne over everybody. This either is, or is a function of, the belief that having a lot of money is a good thing, which is false, and also that this kind of behaviour is appropriate to somebody who's had that happen to them. Chrysippus had an impressive and very successful psychological theory of that kind, which could be derived ultimately, especially from Socrates, who had been himself a great intellectualist. But Posidonius took the view that this was quite inadequate, because actually the emotions don't always keep pace with our judgement. So it may be a year down the road, the lottery winner still thinks it was a good thing to win the lottery, but he no longer feels elated. So the emotion has some degree of psychological independence. There were various illustrations of that kind to show that it's much better to treat emotion and reason as having some degree of separation. And so, what did Posidonius do? He reverted to Plato's theory. Plato had, in the Republic and also in the Timaeus, introduced the idea that the soul in fact has three parts, two of which are non-rational. And Posidonius reverted to that Platonic doctrine. So it sounds like one thing that marks this period of Stoicism, then, is a kind of syncretism, maybe even an aggressive move against other schools, where you try to claim that all of their insights can kind of fit under the teaching of your own school. Is that part of the motivation for what they're doing? I don't think it's a case of aggression, but rather of forming an alliance. And syncretism can be seen as a kind of alliance. I like the word syncretism better than another one that's sometimes used, eclecticism. Eclecticism is a kind of mix-and-match idea that you just might pick ideas at random and put them together. Actually, the kind of move Posidonius was making in bringing Plato back into the Stoic fold was a kind of dynasty building. It's to do with philosophical ancestry and pedigree, because the question Stoics had to ask is, who was our founder? Whose ideas are we trying to develop? And the usual, certainly the earliest, I think the favorite one was Socrates. Socrates was the one person who was known to have lived a genuinely philosophical life. Stoicism, more than anything else, is an attempt to discover the theories that will enable us all to be like Socrates. So when early Stoics, where we say that they had an interest in Plato, well, what this really means is two things. One is they're reading Plato in order to find out about Socrates. And another is, as came up a little bit earlier, that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, had started in the academy. So he actually absorbed quite a lot of the ideas from the Timaeus, and these became part of Stoicism, whether or not the Stoics recognized their Platonic pedigree. Now, what Posidonius was doing was going one step further than this. His idea was that it's Plato himself we should be reading, but not because Plato is the ultimate authority. You can go further back to find the ultimate authority. When Plato described the tripartite soul with its irrational parts in the Timaeus, Timaeus, his main speaker, was a Pythagorean. And actually, the reason why Plato is important is that we can get back to that very ancient or august authority, Pythagoras, sixth century BC, no surviving writings, if he ever wrote anything at all. The only way you could find out his views was by going through people you believe to have been influenced by him, and Plato was a conduit for that. So it's part of the game of creating an old and august philosophical pedigree. To some extent, that carries on through to the so-called Roman Stoics. In other words, the Stoics who work after the fall of the Republic, right? Because Seneca takes Plato as a kind of inspiration. There's been some discussion about Socrates' influence on Epictetus and so on. So well, I guess two questions. One is whether that's right, and the other is if that is right, then is there anything really distinctive about these later Roman Stoics, or do they take Stoicism in a new direction at all, or do they just kind of keep doing what Posidonius had been doing? Well, the answer to that is going to be quite a complicated one. Certainly Platonism is in the background to Seneca's writing. But I think the figure of Socrates is the more important one. These Roman writers, although they had some kind of interest in other areas of Stoicism, their greatest contribution to philosophy was undoubtedly ethical. Stoic ethical writing was the area in which it continued to have influence even after the demise of Stoicism. Others like Epictetus, Seneca, and even Cicero, whose Deifices is a kind of Stoic work, they were writing the best treatises on practical ethics that anybody wrote in antiquity, and this was not something that the Platonists were good at. So even when Stoicism disappeared, as it more or less did in second century AD, Stoic ethical writing, for example, the Handbook of Epictetus, they survive as part of Platonism. The Platonists recognized that Stoicism had this unique contribution to make in practical ethics. Now, where did that come from? Well, more than anything else from their own particular evaluation of Socrates. So Socrates remains an extremely important figure. And just let me give you one illustration. The Romans had a tradition of honorable suicide, and the great Roman Stoic hero, the younger Cato, committed a very Stoic and very Socratic suicide during the Civil War because he was preserving his integrity, and it seemed to him better to die than to accept Caesar's pardon. And in the buildup to his suicide, there were two things he did. One is he discoursed on the theme, only the wise man is free, and your ability to commit suicide is your ultimate guarantee of freedom to the Stoic. That's a very Roman use of Stoicism, and it becomes very prevalent. They didn't call it suicide. What they called it is a rational exit from life. And what that means is the reason you're free is that you can always choose to die rather than accept a compromise with a tyrant, for example, or perform some immoral act. That may involve suicide or it may involve simply not avoiding the death that's coming to you anyway. So that's the guarantee of freedom. Now, the other thing that Cato did on this occasion, and this is the second thing I was going to mention, is that he spent his last hours reading and rereading Plato's description of Socrates' death. So here's the point, that choosing your own moment to die and preserving your integrity by doing so is really a Socratic contribution. It's how Socrates had died. He didn't commit suicide, but he did rationally choose his moment to depart from life. Three of which were just about out of time, so we'll have to make a rational exit from this podcast. But I'd like to thank David Sedley very much for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. And next time we will start to look at these Roman Stoics, starting with Seneca. So please join me for that next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Anger Management, Seneca. Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso was a powerful man. He was born into the senatorial class of Roman society, and in the year 7 BC served as consul with his friend, the future emperor Tiberius. He also had a really bad temper. Two soldiers under his command were given leave, and one returned without the other. Piso leapt to the conclusion that the missing man had been murdered by the one who returned, and ordered his execution. A censurian was tasked to carry out the grim deed, but at the last moment the absent soldier turned up, and the execution was halted. When Piso learned of this, he was not relieved, but furious. His rash judgment had been exposed, his order countermanded without his authority. He announced that there would now be three executions. The first soldier would still die, as planned, as would the censurian, for failing to kill him, and also the soldier who was late in returning, since the whole thing was his fault. If only Piso had lived a couple of generations later, he could have found some good advice on curbing that temper in the works of Seneca. Seneca was born in Roman-controlled Spain between 4 and 1 BC, not long after Piso's consulship and right in the middle of the long rule of Augustus Caesar. Seneca came too late to meet such figures as Cato, Julius Caesar, and Cicero, but he tells stories about them in his works. In the writings of Seneca, we can see that the Roman aristocracy was still digesting the seismic shift from a republic controlled by the Senate to an empire controlled by a single man, first Augustus, then his successor emperors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and, of course, Nero. Nero is of particular importance for our story, because Seneca served as an advisor to the young emperor. One of his philosophical works, On Mercy, stands as a written record of his attempts to moderate Nero's immoderate tendencies. That project was ultimately a failure, and Seneca paid for this failure with his life. Though Seneca remains an admired philosopher, his legacy is inevitably tarnished by his association with Nero. Before he moved on to fiddling while Rome burned, Nero had his own mother Agrippina assassinated in 59 AD. Presumably Seneca, being a paragon of unyielding virtue and valuing his life far less than his integrity, risked certain death by publicly denouncing Nero? Sadly, no. What he actually did was write a speech for the emperor to help him recover from this PR disaster. Clearly, this was not Seneca's finest hour. If he was motivated by the desire to exert some degree of beneficial influence on Nero, then his plan failed. In 65 AD, Nero accused Seneca of conspiring to assassinate him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide. This fatal command was not, incidentally, Seneca's first experience of the harsh realities of Roman politics. In 41 AD, in the reign of Claudius, he had been exiled to Corsica. A philosophical work of consolation addressed to Seneca's mother Helvia advises her on how to cope with this setback. Thus, Seneca was very much a philosopher in politics, to borrow the title of one of the more important studies of the man. In fact, his legacy goes beyond politics and philosophy. His philosophical writings are themselves a major landmark of Latin literature, and he also wrote dramas, of which eight tragedies survive. But as philosophers, what interests us is Seneca's stoicism. He is the first of three great figures to work in the imperial period, known collectively as the Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. They will be occupying our attention in the next several episodes. Of the three, Seneca was the only one to write philosophy in Latin, and it has been well remarked that Seneca obviously thinks in Latin, even if he is heir to ideas from the Greek tradition. Nonetheless, his philosophical works, especially a series of letters and so-called dialogues, display tendencies shared by all three Roman Stoics. He largely turns his back on the logical and metaphysical questions that fascinated the much earlier Chrysippus, and focuses relentlessly on the question of how to live. Seneca is at his most powerful when he dissects human weakness and advises us on how to rise above that weakness. His philosophical works are almost always addressed to a real recipient, whether it be his mother or one of his aristocratic friends. Yet, reading him, we ourselves are cajoled, chastised, and exhorted to take up a life of virtue. If not the perfect virtue of the ideal Stoic sage, then at least a life better than the one we are leading now. This is not to say that Seneca has abandoned more technical aspects of the Stoic system. The claim that an ideal sage is possible was itself a rather sophisticated notion, which presupposed the possibility of perfect and unfailing knowledge. Perhaps because he was not subject to constant harassment by skeptical philosophers, as Chrysippus and other early Stoics were, Seneca says little by way of defending the possibility of a perfect sage, but he does presuppose it. Still, there is a change of emphasis in Seneca, if not a change of doctrine. Chrysippus had worried about, for instance, how the sage would preserve his infallibility when confronted with paradoxes and illusions. Seneca is more interested in how real people, who are not sages, can improve themselves. Similarly, he alludes to Stoic determinism, but not in order to tinker with Chrysippus' theory of possibility and necessity. Instead, he urges us to reflect on the ethical significance of the Stoic idea that we live in a world where all things are fated, steered by a providential god. We can see even his most non-ethical philosophical work, The Natural Questions, in this light. On its face, a lengthy study of such phenomena as earthquakes and comets, this text is also an exploration of the divine forces that shape the cosmos, and of humans' relatively modest place within that cosmos. It's not earth-shattering to discover that Seneca's views on ethics have had more staying power than his account of earthquakes. Much of the advice he gives is genuinely useful, even for those of us who are not card-carrying Stoics. If you want to read a powerful discussion of how to make the most of your limited time on earth, you can hardly do better than Seneca's dialogue on the shortness of life. He reminds us that everything we do is a use of a scarce resource, namely time, and argues that even the briefest life will have been worth living if the time was used well. His writing is powerful because of his rhetorically charged style, his eye for vivid detail, and memorable anecdote. For instance, in this work on the shortness of life, he mentions a virtuous man named Julius Canus, condemned to death by Caligula. When they came to his prison to execute him, he was found playing a game with his guard, and as they dragged him off, he said to the centurion, You're my witness that I was ahead by one piece. If he could face his immediate and certain execution with such tranquility, why should we be bothered by the prospect that we will die some day? In this passage and many others, Seneca tries to help us make progress towards total freedom from disturbance, the goal of Roman Stoicism just as it had been for earlier Stoics. One of Seneca's most important philosophical contributions is his analysis of the chief threat to our tranquility, emotion. The Stoics had always argued that we should strive to avoid being controlled by our emotions. They use the Greek word pathos for emotion and related experiences, and this word emphasizes the passivity of emotion. To get angry or sad or frightened is to be affected somehow. The corresponding Latin term used by Seneca, ad factus, preserves this connotation. Seneca follows the traditional Stoic view, holding that emotion means surrendering one's self-determination and being controlled by what is outside us. No emotion fits this pattern better than anger, which is perhaps why Seneca devoted a lengthy and fascinating dialogue to the topic. In On Anger, Seneca offers up a particularly memorable range of anecdotes to illustrate his point, including the tale of Piso I mentioned at the start of this episode. Caligula features here, and in other works, as the vicious man par excellence, a kind of anti-sage. We hear of him inviting a man to dinner and then complaining loudly that the man's wife is lousy in bed. On another occasion, Caligula leads a man to think that he is being forced to drink the blood of his own son. At the other end of the spectrum are Seneca's heroes. Among the Romans, he has greatest admiration for Cato the Younger, whose noble suicide ended a noble life. He killed himself when Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman Republic, which prompts Seneca to a typically graceful aphorism, Freedom did not live after Cato, nor Cato after freedom. Seneca praises him as the closest thing we know to a perfect sage, at one point comparing him favorably to Hercules and Ulysses. Plato appears in a similarly glowing light. Seneca relates that Plato once began to strike a slave in anger, but mastered himself just in time. He let the slave go untouched, but stayed still, his hand remaining in the air poised to strike. Hours later a student of Plato's came upon him and was amazed to find him still in this awkward position. Plato explained that he was punishing an angry man. Seneca adds a second tale with a similar moral, in which Plato tells Spusippus to whip a disobedient slave because Plato is angry and one should never punish while angry. Now, I know what you're thinking. Doesn't anger often lead us to punish those who ought to be punished? And isn't it right to get angry some of the time? Suppose a tyrant comes and unjustly murders my family. Would it really be virtuous to react to this without a trace of anger? Seneca confronts these objections squarely. Like the other Senecan works called dialogues, On Anger is addressed to a specific recipient, and Seneca repeatedly imagines this recipient posing objections. Seneca's own view emerges as he replies to these objections. Of course, in On Anger, the most pressing objection is that anger can be appropriate and beneficial. If this is right, the virtuous man will get angry. As Aristotle might put it, he will get angry on the right occasions for the right reasons and in the right way. Seneca indeed refers to Aristotle here, as well as Aristotle's colleague Theophrastus. He quotes them as believing that anger is an inevitable part of human life and that we should aim for moderation in anger, as in all things. Seneca responds by painting a vivid picture of what it is like when we get angry. He points out to us the physical symptoms—flushed cheeks, rapid breathing, contorted facial expressions. These outward signs betray the violence of the inner emotional state. Anger, by its very nature, causes us to lose control over ourselves. Seneca compares the loss of one's temper to running off a cliff. Once you do lose control, it's too late to turn back. The idea of moderate anger is a contradiction in terms. That would mean anger under the restraining influence of reason, but anger is precisely a state in which reason is no longer exercising restraint. Hence another Seneca aphorism. Other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. To the objection that anger sometimes leads us to punish those who should be punished, Seneca replies that one should punish out of a desire to do justice, not for the sake of retaliation or revenge. If justice motivates us, we will have every chance of imposing just punishments, whereas if anger is our motive, we will wind up acting like Pisa. Aristotle would no doubt complain that Seneca's view sounds almost inhuman. He could insist that the tendency to become angry is natural, and that everything natural has some purpose. Certainly, Aristotle would see a man who never grew angry for any reason as cold or impassive. Such a man would fall short of moderation just as the easily angered man exceeds it. Neither man would be virtuous. To some extent, Seneca can avoid this result by insisting that anger is in itself excessive, because it is a loss of reason. On his behalf, I'd add that the way we talk about anger supports his view. We're given to saying things like, I totally lost it. But what about the point that anger is in some sense natural? Seneca can handle this objection too, by offering an interesting modification of previous stoic views on the emotions. To see his point, it may help to consider a perfect sage confronted with some outrage. Perhaps he is slapped suddenly in the street. Perhaps the tyrant murders his family. Perhaps someone says within his earshot that Buster Keaton's films are not all they are cracked up to be. We know that the sage will not actually be disturbed by this. His reason will remain in control and prevent him from lashing out in an undisciplined way. But that does not mean that he can avoid a natural, all-too-human initial reaction. He may flush, for instance, or his heart may start to beat more quickly. The story of Plato raising his hand to strike a slave and then stopping himself is a vivid example, though Seneca would probably say that a true sage would not even get as far as raising his hand or curling his fingers into a fist. Instead, he may simply twitch. Such instinctive, natural, and unavoidable reactions are called by Seneca first motions. Such motions accompany the initial impression we receive from our surroundings, for instance, that we have just been insulted, or, even worse, that Buster Keaton has been insulted. The sage cannot avoid them, but he will stop himself from endorsing these impressions in a second motion, an act of reason which judges that the impression is in fact true. This may then give rise to a third motion, in which reason loses control and we give in to anger. Here, Seneca is adhering to a long-standing Stoic idea about emotions, which is that they are ultimately grounded in reason. Emotional reactions, contrary to appearances, are judgments. Just as we might look at honey and get the impression that we see something sweet, so we might hear a man belittling the silent films of Buster Keaton and get the impression that if the man likes sound so much we should give him a sound beating. But we have the ability to withhold our consent to these impressions. We might realize that the jar seems to contain honey but actually could contain vinegar. We might see that the right thing to do would be to buy the uncultured buffoon a ticket to an open-air screening of Keaton's masterpiece, The General. What Seneca adds to this picture is a sensitivity to the involuntary reactions we initially have along with the impression, the twitching, the flushing cheeks, and also a vivid portrait of what it is like when reason loses control. There has been some discussion of how Seneca's view relates to that of an earlier Stoic named Poseidonius. According to some evidence found mostly in Galen, Poseidonius adopted a complex psychology according to which the soul has both a rational and an irrational aspect. This evidence has been questioned, but if Galen presents Poseidonius accurately, he must have been taking his cue from Plato. As we saw back in episode 25, Plato's Republic, too, posited both rational and irrational soul, and taught that justice in the soul is mastering the irrational part with the rational part. Some have suspected that Seneca has a similar idea, but I agree with those who see him as sticking to the traditional Stoic view. The soul is rational through and through, so our emotional reactions must involve some kind of judgment, an assent to the way things seem to us. It is precisely for this reason that it feels so alienating when our reason does judge that we should retaliate or exact revenge. Then anger takes over, and we lose control. This loss of control is what Seneca always wants us to avoid, whether it is occasioned by anger, pleasure, luxury, or grief. He exhorts us to face not only insult, but all turns of fortune, with as much serenity as we can manage. While the goal may seem modest, Seneca presents it as downright heroic. As he says at one point, in facing misfortune bravely, we perform a deed that even God cannot manage, since God never undergoes misfortune. Seneca adds a good deal of practical advice. For instance, he would approve of the widespread strategy of counting to ten when we get angry, since he too recommends waiting to act when we feel the flush of rage upon us. As for more general lifestyle advice, Seneca has told us that peace and tranquility are the highest possible achievement. So it is unsurprising to find that he's sympathetic to the idea of withdrawing from public life. It's clear that, for Seneca, the best life is a life of quiet study, and not a life of money-making or political achievement. In the moving work addressed to his mother on the occasion of his exile, he advises her to find comfort in this kind of life. At the same time, Seneca's own life shows us that he was willing to become politically involved—indeed, sometimes too willing. Seneca was pulled in two directions—towards the duty to engage with his fellow humans and the drive to seek wisdom through private contemplation. Here he's in good company. Plato too wrestled with the question of why the philosopher would return to the cave after beholding the real things in the sunlight outside. And the most famous tension in Aristotle is that between the life of practical virtue and the life of contemplation. Seneca concludes that it is fine to retreat from the pressures and stresses of public life so long as the retreat is an orderly one. But in a sense, Seneca's virtuous man will be engaged in a kind of retreat no matter what he does. He achieves lack of disturbance and total self-mastery by exercising his reason and yielding to nothing else, whether it is emotion, misfortune, or temptation. This is the hallmark of Roman Stoicism—not just an interest in ethics, but a relentless focus on our interior life, our reason and judgment. The power of Seneca's teaching lies in the promise that, with patience and practice, we can reshape ourselves so that we really are under our own control. But this requires us to renounce our obsessions with things that are not under our control. A final Senecan aphorism sums it up. We should not try to arrange what is up to fortune while neglecting what is up to us. This sentiment brings us to our next Roman Stoic, whose philosophy pivots around this notion that our interior life, and nothing else, is truly up to us. He is perhaps the greatest figure in the history of Stoicism apart from Chrysippus. Nonetheless, I'll try not to get upset if you unwisely fail to join me next time for Epictetus here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, You Can Chain My Leg, Epictetus. Man is condemned to be free. So said Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. And perhaps only a French existentialist could think that we are condemned to be free. It's the kind of thing that would occur to you as you sit in a Parisian café on a rainy afternoon smoking unfiltered cigarettes and feeling the enormity of existence settle upon your shoulders as you gaze in ineffable, inexplicable horror at the glass of beer sitting on the table in front of you. But doesn't Sartre have a point? If we are truly free, free even in chains, as the saying goes, then we are also responsible for what we do. This was Sartre's point, or part of his point. We are irreducibly, unavoidably free and thus cannot escape responsibility, cannot blame anyone or anything else for our failings, our impure thoughts, our misguided intentions. We are, in this sense, always on our own. It is a terrifying thought and one that can, paradoxically, be paralyzing. Towards the end of his enticingly titled novel, Nausea, Sartre has his main character stop in the street, alone, contemplating the infinity of choices available to him. He realizes that his life until now does not determine his next action, and this radical freedom strikes him as being like death. It's the sort of thought that can make you sick to your stomach. Of course, Sartre was not the first philosopher to worry about freedom of the will. It's one of the oldest philosophical topics, so much so that we tend to assume it goes back before the dawn of philosophy. Surely humankind has always felt itself free, and speculated about the nature of this freedom? Perhaps this is true in some sense, but in fact the notion of free will is a fairly late arrival in the philosophical record. We saw it briefly in Lucretius, but it emerges with clarity only in late antiquity, in part because talking about free will requires first having the idea, and vocabulary, of having a will in the first place. A favorite game of scholars is to look for the first philosopher who asserts that we do have a will, whatever that might mean, and that this will is free, whatever that might mean. A favorite answer in this game is the greatest of the Roman Stoics, a man who knew what it meant to be in chains, Epictetus. Though we call him one of the Roman Stoics, Epictetus was not born in Rome, nor did he conduct his teaching there. He was born into slavery in 55 AD in Phrygia. This region in modern-day Turkey was under Roman domination, but as in much of the eastern part of the empire the local language was Greek. From there he did go to Rome, in the service of a master named Epaphroditus, who was associated with the emperor Nero. During his time there Epictetus encountered a great Stoic teacher named Musonius Rufus, an influential figure whose works are unfortunately lost to us. Rufus was one of the few men to impress Epictetus during his lifetime. For the most part, he reserved his admiration for his two favorite role models, Diogenes the Scenic and, inevitably, Socrates. Epictetus modeled his teaching style on that of Socrates, posing provocative questions in lively exchanges that are preserved with remarkable vividness in his writings. Epictetus also followed Socrates in not writing anything himself. What we have instead are records of conversations and diatribes that took place in Epictetus's school, which he set up in Nicopolis in western Greece after he was freed from slavery. For these texts we must thank a student of Epictetus who was also a historian, Arrian. He compiled these so-called discourses, an extensive collection of Epictetus's conversations in which his aggressive but intoxically persuasive philosophical style is on full display. A much briefer second work is called the Handbook, in Greek enchiridion, that is, something that fits comfortably into one's hand. It is more like a greatest hits collection, often in the form of aphorisms or short paragraphs that can be easily remembered and reviewed for the purposes of ethical training. Indeed, it is ethics that occupies central stage in these records of the thought of Epictetus, and his philosophy focuses on ethics more than the other areas of Stoic doctrine, logic and physics. It's clear from the discourses themselves that Epictetus did teach logic at his school, and that many of his students came to him expecting to learn the ideas and technical tools associated with the greatest of the early Stoics, Chrysippus. But Epictetus has mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he believes that one should indeed study logic. He even gives a brief proof of this, to the effect that anyone who contends that logic is useless will need to argue for its uselessness, but arguing successfully for this, or any other, claim means arguing logically. Usually though, Epictetus brings up technical issues like logic in order to chastise his students for concentrating on these things instead of seeking to become better men. In one typical passage, he advises a student who wants to learn about Chrysippus's solution to the liar paradox that he should go hang himself, unless he also wants to become good. This isn't the only passage where he suggests that one of his listeners should go kill himself. He also constantly addresses his students as slaves, an ironic allusion to his own lowly origins, and a pointed reminder that until the students achieve virtue, they are the true slaves. Epictetus makes the same point by lamenting that his students are not really interested in being Stoics, never mind Cynics, a vocation that Epictetus describes as nearly unattainable for most men. A true Stoic or Cynic is a philosopher with complete self-control, who values what is really valuable, who chooses in accordance with reason and nothing else. Given that even the people who have sought out Epictetus are, by his estimation, enslaved to their base desires, vain ambitions, and prideful self-delusions, the learning curve is bound to be a steep one. This brings us back to Epictetus's most important contribution to the history of Stoicism, indeed to the history of philosophy in general, his conception of choice, or the will. For this, he uses the Greek word prohiresis, which means deliberately choosing or preferring something. It's a word that had already been used by Aristotle in his account of voluntary action. Epictetus makes prohiresis the core of his ethical theory. Though this theory is definitely innovative, it is built on foundations laid by earlier Stoics. As we've seen, the Stoics described most of the things people value and esteem as being, in fact, indifferent. Such things as pleasure, reputation, wealth, and even health lack any intrinsic value. Only virtue, which guides the correct use of such things, is genuinely good and worth pursuing in itself. Epictetus adapts the theory by arguing that our virtue really consists in the right use of prohiresis, that is, choosing rightly. For example, money is in itself without value, but it acquires value when we choose to use it correctly. Epictetus has a powerful argument for this point, which again relates to earlier Stoic ideas. The Stoics had always rejected certain things as valueless because of their vulnerability – wealth can be lost, beauty fades, family members and friends die. But virtue and knowledge are stable and invulnerable once achieved, and within our power to pursue and attain. These things are, as the Stoics had always said, up to us. Epictetus goes further by pointing out that it is really our power of choice, and only our power of choice, that is up to us. For instance, I can choose to go to the zoo to visit the giraffes, and that choice is up to me. But it is not up to me whether I succeed in reaching the zoo and seeing the giraffes. There may be too much traffic, the giraffes may have tragically succumbed to a virus, or a giraffe-hating tyrant may send his thugs to imprison me before I get there. Ultimately, I can completely control only the choices I make, the intentions I form. The situations to which I respond, and my degree of success in responding to them, can never be fully up to me. Of course, I may have all kinds of reasons, or apparent reasons, to choose one thing rather than another. A tyrant may attempt to compel me to obey him by imprisoning me, or saying he will execute me. In one of the most celebrated passages of his discourses, Epictetus imagines precisely this case. He envisions the tyrant threatening to chain us up, and says we may respond, you can chain my leg, but you cannot chain my power of choice. Even my body is, on this way of thinking, a dispensable external thing. If the tyrant says he will throw me in prison, I can say, no, you will throw only my body in prison. If he says he will cut off my head, I can shrug and say, whoever said that my head cannot be cut off? The true philosopher, as we have seen, is the one who values nothing that is not up to him, and it is not up to me whether my body is in prison, whether I am decapitated. What is up to me is my choice. Nothing, whether the allure of the giraffe enclosure, or the command of a tyrant, the promise of pleasure, or the threat of pain, can force me to choose. Epictetus draws a parallel here between our power of choice and our power of assent. Just as no power on earth can force me to believe something that seems to me false, so no power can compel my choice. Now I know what you're thinking. Epictetus has told us that our choices are up to us, and that the value of our lives consists only in using this power of choice well. He hasn't, though, told us what it means to use choice well. This seems especially puzzling if everything other than choice is indifferent. If it is really a matter of complete indifference, whether I am rich or poor, healthy or sick, slave or emperor, then what difference does it make what I choose? In fact, how am I to avoid the despair of one of Sartre's existential heroes? If nothing outside of my power of choice is worth pursuing, then life itself begins to look meaningless. Fortunately, Epictetus does give us some further guidance. Like other Stoics, he endorses the goal of living in accordance with nature, and believes that we can use our reason to discern what is natural and what unnatural. In a passage I can't help admiring, he complains about men who shave their beards, since they are going against nature. The point is not as trivial as it sounds. In the ancient world, a beard was often the symbol of a philosopher. This incidentally is why the emperor Hadrian, a great fan of Greek culture, decided to start going unshaven, to the alarm of his fellow Roman aristocrats. Epictetus also speaks of what he calls primary duties, the natural duties that fall to us in virtue of our family relationships, for instance. Two memorable passages in the discourses concern the attitude a father should take towards his children. In one, a father has come to Epictetus and told how he fled from his own house out of dismay when his child was sick. Epictetus firmly instructs the man that this was an unnatural act, even if it seems to have been a manifestation of his paternal love. On the other hand, in what may be the most chilling single passage in all of ancient philosophy, Epictetus asks what harm it could do to whisper daily in the ear of your child, tomorrow you will die. In so doing, you remind yourself that the child is not given to you forever, and you prepare yourself for the child's possible death. The two passages together capture the demanding ethics of Epictetus. We must never shirk from our duty, but neither should we allow ourselves to place value on things in an unreasonable way. If a child dies, we should be prepared to reflect that all humans die. Just as no one ever told you that your head cannot be cut off, no one ever said your child is immortal. Besides, if it is the will of God that your child dies sooner rather than later, then it would be impious and irrational to object. Epictetus gives plenty of other concrete advice, much of which can speak to us today, though some is charmingly redolent of specifically Roman social practices. For instance, it was common for less wealthy Romans to become clients of rich citizens and to visit their houses daily, to shake them down for money in exchange for support. When asked whether this is appropriate behavior, Epictetus responds that it depends. If you are the kind of person who begs for money, then it is appropriate. You have to choose whether you are that kind of person. Everyone must know at what price they sell their self-respect. This is typical Epictetus, reminding his listeners of what they already know deep down. Notice incidentally that in this and many other cases, we do not need to add anything to the theory of choice in order to know what is the right choice. Debasing oneself to get money is something we can learn to avoid simply by reflecting that money, unlike choice, is indifferent. We can sum up Epictetus' view then by saying that what is external to our choice is indifferent, but the way we use these external things is not. Rather, it makes all the difference. Just as I must, as the Stoics put it, make good use of impressions by knowing when to assent to the way things seem and when to suspect I am being misled, so I must use my power of choice to make good use of external things. It might seem paradoxical that it could matter so much how I use things that have no intrinsic value. Epictetus does not shy away from this paradox. He compares our lives to a ball game. There is nothing more to being a good player than knowing how to use the ball skillfully, even though it doesn't actually matter whether the ball winds up in the goal or not. Another way of thinking about this is one borrowed from Socrates. Although money, health, and so on have no intrinsic value, they gain value in relation to choice so long as the choice is virtuous. In a wonderful passage, Epictetus compares virtue to the magic wand of Hermes. Epictetus is a wand that can turn everything to gold. In the same way, virtue changes everything it touches into something good. In common with many other ancient philosophers, Epictetus has an ethical theory so demanding that it is hard to imagine how one might ever live up to it. But if anything characterizes Roman Stoicism, it is attention to the problem of how we make progress towards the goal of perfect virtue. Epictetus does, like the early Stoics, emphasize the gulf separating vice from virtue, but he is not satisfied with the early Stoics' pessimistic claim that everyone who lacks perfect virtue is wholly ignorant and may as well be insane. For one thing, he expresses a remarkably tolerant attitude towards those who are not even trying to attain virtue. He suggests that those who cannot be converted to philosophy should be treated the way we treat children. We humor them, cheerfully clapping along with them when they celebrate and patting them on the head when they are upset. As usual, Socrates is his exemplar. Epictetus alludes to the end of Plato's Phaedo, where Socrates first chastises his philosophical companions for lamenting his death, then expresses apparently sincere gratitude for the guard who is nobly weeping over the execution. In a way, Epictetus is even tolerant of wrongdoers. He sees them not as targets for vengeance, but objects of pity. Again, following Socrates, he assumes that wrongdoing comes from a kind of ignorance of the true good. An evil man is just an ignorant man, and putting an ignorant man to death is akin to executing someone for being blind in death. Besides, if you find yourself angered by wrongdoing, it is often because you share the values of the wrongdoer. Suppose someone steals your money. If you cannot face this with calm composure, it can only be because, like the thief, you think the money is well worth having. Instead, you should remember that the money was never yours in the first place. Only your choice is truly yours, because it is the only thing that cannot be taken from you. Thus Epictetus reserves his harsh judgments for those who say they want to become good. They are the only people who have any chance of benefiting from his tough love. And because the ethical teaching he offers is so rigorous, only the most rigorous of regimes has any chance of succeeding. He also tells us to be on guard against cultivating a show of virtue, so that we can show off how virtuous we are. As an example of the kind of training that might work, he likes the following suggestion. On a hot day, when you are extremely thirsty, take a mouthful of cold water, then spit it out, and tell no one what you have done. As you might expect, not everyone who comes to Epictetus for help is able to benefit from this sort of advice. As we've seen, he complains that his students are hypocrites, and several times in the discourses, he's shown refusing to engage with his listeners because he thinks they will be unable to benefit. At one point, he imagines a frustrated visitor to his philosophical school going away and complaining, I met Epictetus, and it was like talking to a stone. This may itself be a cunning strategy. Epictetus mentions that his own teacher, Rufus, was in the habit of harshly sending people away simply to test their determination to learn from him. When would-be students fail to learn from Rufus or Epictetus, the blame does not rest with the teachers? But let's suppose that you, being a better sort of person, have gone to see Epictetus, or read the discourses, or perhaps just listened to a podcast about him, and you're now persuaded that you should value nothing but your own power of choice, and accept the will of God, always ready to give back immediately whatever has been given to you, whether it is wealth, family, or life itself. Will you instantly become a perfectly wise sage? Of course not. Like the Epicureans, the Stoics, and especially the Roman Stoics, put great stress on therapeutic training, a lifelong journey of self-discipline. Epictetus is recorded in the discourses as advising his students to review their Stoic principles daily. That his words did not fall entirely on deaf ears is shown by the next great Roman Stoic, a man who wrote down ideas influenced by Epictetus in a daily ritual of self-examination. Yet, in terms of his biography, our next thinker could hardly have been more different from Epictetus. Epictetus was a slave, whereas this philosopher was quite literally master of everything he surveyed. He was, in fact, the most politically powerful philosopher who has ever walked the earth. He was Marcus Aurelius, and he'll be the topic of a royally entertaining podcast next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Philosopher King – Marcus Aurelius. A few years back, a philosopher named Tom Morris published a book called What if Aristotle Ran General Motors? It's a cute title, isn't it? But I have a question that blows it out of the water. What if a Stoic philosopher ran the Roman Empire? I mean, with all due respect to General Motors, they only make cars, whereas the Roman Empire was, well, the Roman Empire. Also, my scenario has a significant advantage, namely that it isn't hypothetical. A Stoic philosopher did run the Roman Empire. He reigned, first jointly and then on his own, for twenty years. He was praised by contemporaries and later Roman historians for his moderate lifestyle and justice, and considered the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. He faced numerous threats to the Empire, including a massive plague and wars with the Parthians and with German tribes. He also had to cope with the death of most of his children. His name was Marcus Aurelius. Marcus was born during the reign of the third good emperor, Hadrian, of wall-building fame. He was not in a direct line of succession to the imperial throne, but then neither was anyone else. Hadrian adopted as his official heir the future emperor Antoninus Pius, who, in turn, at Hadrian's request, adopted Marcus. This, by the way, was something of a pattern among the Five Good Emperors. The first of them, Nerva, had adopted his successor Trajan, of column fame, and Trajan in turn adopted Hadrian. The success of these good emperors was no coincidence. Each was hand-picked in a far more meritocratic system than would hold sway in the declining years of the Roman Empire. Some would argue that that decline began because of Marcus's one big mistake. Instead of choosing and adopting an heir, he allowed his natural son to succeed him. That son was Commodus, and if people talked about the Five Bad Emperors, Commodus would definitely be on the list. He was bad enough that, in the movie Gladiator, the happy ending consists in Commodus getting killed by Russell Crowe. But, apart from his megalomaniac son, Marcus had plenty to crow about. He ascended to the throne in 161 AD. He immediately displayed both confidence and intelligence, anticipating the later realization that multiple emperors would be needed to rule over a territory as vast as the Empire, he nominated a man named Lucius Verus to rule with him as co-Emperor. Marcus would be sole Emperor only as of 169 when Verus died, probably from the so-called Antonine Plague. This disease, which may have been smallpox, was only one of several existential threats to menace the Empire during the reign of Marcus. Like many emperors, he spent his years on the throne rushing from one military engagement to another. He waged war against the Parthians, these were the heirs to the Persians who posed an almost constant danger to the east of the Romans, just as the Persians had posed a threat to the ancient Greeks. Marcus also campaigned against numerous groups of Germanic barbarians along the Danube River. These wars were still going on when Marcus died in 180 AD. It was here on the frontier that Marcus supposedly composed a set of notes to himself, appropriately entitled simply, To Himself, and commonly referred to as The Meditations. It is a work of great power and influence, a literary legacy that just about makes up for the political legacy of bequeathing the purple robes of imperial power to Commodus. A note attached to the end of the first book informs us that the Meditations were written among the Quadi, a Germanic tribe. If we believe this note as opposed to dismissing it as a later scribal invention, then we must imagine Marcus late in life, retiring each night from his military endeavors, sitting down to collect his thoughts, and writing a series of admonitions aimed squarely at his own soul. He used Stoic ideas to combat his own fears, vanity, and irritability. No doubt the Meditations were also intended for a wider readership, but they are more than plausible as a work of self-examination and philosophical therapy. Some would doubt that anything much was personally at stake for Marcus when he wrote The Meditations. The historian Mary Beard has commented that if we scour the Meditations for signs of Marcus's inner conflicts, we might as well be looking for the evidence of psychic turmoil in the essay of a modern philosophy undergraduate. No doubt The Meditations does fit into a genre of ancient writing, in which philosophical themes were woven into an ostentatious display of self-conscious virtue. If we wish to read a radical reimagining of this genre, we should turn not to these Meditations, but to the Confessions of St. Augustine. Yet there are signs that Marcus is speaking genuinely for himself and to himself, not just trying to impress a learned readership with his erudition and integrity. For instance, he makes frequent reference to the stresses and annoyances of life at the top. At one point, he writes, never let anyone hear you complaining about court life again, including yourself. At another point, he compares the court to his stepmother and casts philosophy in the role of mother. Contemporary reports of Marcus's character lend some credence to the idea that he was more a lover of books than a lover of power, and he was described even in the ancient world as a philosopher-king. No less an observer than Julian the Apostate, the other philosopher-emperor of late antiquity, admired Marcus greatly. So, while we should not necessarily look to Marcus for innovations in Stoic doctrine, I think we may take The Meditations as a deeply felt application of that doctrine to an extraordinary life. The Meditations are divided into 12 books, the first of which could easily have been entitled How I Got to Be Such a Great Guy. Not that Marcus would ever allow such an immodest thought to go unchallenged in his own mind. He gives the credit for such virtue and wisdom as he possesses to a long list of teachers and relations. His adoptive father and predecessor as emperor, Antoninus Pius, receives particular praise for his comprehensive virtue, praise which culminates by comparing Antoninus to no less a figure than Socrates. But most of Marcus' influences were teachers. Nothing but the best would do for the young emperor-to-be, and the leading intellectuals of Rome were brought into his aristocratic home to school him in grammar, rhetoric, and, of course, philosophy. One of these was the Stoic Rusticus, who exposed Marcus to the work of Epictetus. For this alone we should join Marcus in being grateful to Rusticus. Bringing Epictetus to the attention of the future emperor was akin to giving Charlie Parker his first saxophone. The various teachers in Marcus' formative years taught him various lessons, but the Meditations is, above all, a set of variations on themes found in Epictetus. Of course, Epictetus himself had drawn on the earlier Stoic tradition, so that Marcus is also the inheritor of the ethics of Chrysippus and other early Stoics. Thus, his main theme, to which he returns again and again, is the importance of controlling his own judgments and desires. By putting Marcus on the throne, fate has presented him with wealth and access to limitless pleasures, but also with plentiful enemies. Marcus thus faced an unusually challenging set of temptations and opportunities for anger. Yet his fundamental advice to himself could be applied by anyone. When the world provokes you into a reaction, think first whether the reaction is the right one. Does a man offend your pride? Remember that he will be dead soon, as will you. Are you wrapped in the purple robes of unchallenged power? Remember that they are just rags dyed in ink. Are you consumed with desire for a woman? Do not pray that God will give her to you. Pray rather to be relieved of your lust. In one of my favorite passages, he recommends a method for confronting misfortune. Do not lament the misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of person who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you. Marcus describes this process of self-discipline and rational reflection as an art of living. It is an art, he says, more akin to wrestling than to dancing, because it requires that we always be on our guard. Now, I know what you're thinking. This advice could be inspired by practically any ancient ethical theory. Plato wanted us to subordinate desire to reason, Aristotle thought virtue is, in large part, a matter of using reason to steer our desires, and even the Epicureans thought hedonism means using reason to choose carefully between the pleasures that present themselves. The Stoics had no monopoly on the view that reason should rule over desire. And, in fact, Marcus sometimes sounds almost like a Platonist when he considers the role of reason in our lives. He describes the body as an instrument of the soul, which is the true man, and compares our rational capacity to the pilot of a ship, an image which recalls passages in both Plato's Republic and Aristotle's De Anima. Yet Marcus's Stoic allegiances are clear, and not only from the fact that the philosophy teachers he mentions in his intellectual autobiography were Stoics. For one thing, his picture of rationality is very Stoic. It's not just a matter of having the right beliefs and acting on them, but a matter of controlling our assent to the impressions the world presents to us. Marcus doesn't put the point in these technical terms, but it is certainly his picture of ethical action. Tellingly, he claims that banishing the belief that you have been treated wrongly is sufficient to banish the anger that would follow from such treatment. Thus, we have a fairly standard Stoic picture of human ethical life. An impression presents itself, we assent to it, or refrain from assenting, and our emotional reactions proceed accordingly. Another Stoic thread woven into the cloth of the meditations is the idea of fate. Indeed, Marcus compares his own life to a thread in fate's web, and reminds himself that his thread will unspool in a way that is for the best, since it is part of that divine web that is woven through the universe. When Marcus considers his own little patch of that web, he often emphasizes the fleeting, ephemeral nature of his life and everything it contains. As I've said, his remedy against feeling insulted is to remember the imminent death of everyone concerned, and that's a typical thought. He applies it to fame and honor. Why seek the approval of others when they will soon enough be dead? He applies it to misfortunes and suffering. Everything we undergo will be over soon, seen from the perspective of eternity. Of course, it takes a certain kind of person to take that amount of perspective on their own situation. Perhaps only a Stoic sage could go through life thinking of his own affairs as a mere speck in the great scheme of things. But Marcus reflects also on the more positive aspects of any upheaval we may face. Everything natural, he tells himself, depends upon change. For instance, we could gain no nourishment from food without its changing. When he compares the world to a flowing river, it's hard to escape the thought that Marcus is thinking not of the stable, providential universe of Stoicism, but the unstable, flux-ridden cosmos of Heraclitus, or rather of Heraclitus as portrayed by Plato. Remember, though, that from its earliest days, Stoicism had claimed Heraclitus as an intellectual ancestor. Although Marcus emphasizes the theme of constant change more than your average Stoic, it is an emphasis that fits into the school's philosophical lineage. Much the same could be said for Marcus' attitude towards Socrates. As we've seen in previous episodes, the Stoics joined other schools in claiming to be the heirs of Socrates. Epictetus, in particular, seems to have taken Socrates as a primary inspiration. This tendency is somewhat less prominent in Marcus, but it is evident nonetheless. In one passage, he remarks that Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Pompey, perhaps the three greatest political heroes Marcus could have named, led lives inferior to those of Socrates, Heraclitus, and Diogenes the Scenic. But elsewhere, with typical focus on inner life rather than outward seeming, Marcus reserves judgment about Socrates. We know only Socrates' words and actions, not the state of his soul. He was famous for facing his death without fear, but Socrates alone could know whether there was fear in his heart after all. So, Marcus has his philosophical heroes, and they are more or less the usual Stoic suspects. Yet he also quotes Plato with approval several times in the Meditations. Indeed, some entries consist of nothing but quotations from Plato and other authors. Clearly, these were passages Marcus found particularly helpful or powerful. The closest thing to a criticism of Plato is when Marcus tells himself that he can be satisfied with small successes rather than expecting to achieve perfection as envisioned in Plato's Republic. But even this seems more like characteristic acceptance of circumstances than a deep objection to Plato's idealism. More generally, the way Marcus uses philosophical authorities seems to be of a piece with his ethical outlook. He takes each authority in turn, accepts what he finds reasonable, and doesn't worry too much about points of disagreement. The best example of this is his handling of the Epicureans. One would think that Marcus, being a Stoic, would find little to value in this school. And, indeed, one of his favorite motifs is an anti-Epicurean one. He reminds himself numerous times that the world must be either a random jumble of atoms, as Epicurus claimed, or providentially ordered. Since Marcus finds the Epicurean alternative absurd, this leaves him only with the remaining hypothesis that the world is indeed guided by a sure divine hand. Yet, aside from this, Marcus usually mentions Epicurus and his school in order to agree with them. He apparently finds only one topic where he can agree with them, but it's a big one—the fear of death. Or, rather, the topic of not fearing death. At one point, he gives the Epicureans a rather backhanded compliment. Even these hedonists could avoid fearing death, reflects Marcus, so surely I can too. But elsewhere, he gives apparently unalloyed praise to Epicurus for the brave way that he met his end, and he also repeats the Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us because when we cease to exist, we will no longer have any sensation. Marcus constantly returns to this topic of death, which is one of the things that makes him distinctive in the Stoic tradition. It's as if he is trying to show that Stoicism can rise to this challenge, just as Lucretius and other Epicureans had done. Perhaps there were also personal considerations in play here. They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, and as emperor Marcus didn't have to pay any taxes, which left him only death to worry about. And, if it's true that the meditations were written during his final campaigns along the Danube, Marcus was not far from death himself as he wrote them. In any case, he was plagued by poor health throughout his life and saw four of his children die, so even earlier he would have had plenty of reason to reflect on his own death and on death in general. Of course, the considerations he uses to combat anxiety and grief in other areas of life apply here, too. Thus, he points out that if all natural things are fleeting, it would be irrational to object to our own end. Or, that death, too, is part of the divine plan that governs the universe wisely. Or, that in the great scheme of things, it matters little whether we die today or decades from now. In fact, one of his more striking pieces of advice about death is this. Imagine that you will die today. Assuming that you don't in fact die, you will be able to look on every day from now on as an unexpected gift. Marcus also urges us to see death, along with aging and other apparently regrettable aspects of life, as part of a natural cycle. As we've seen, he thinks that all things change, but he also thinks that they change in ever-repeating ways. At the most global level, there is the stoic idea that all events in the universe will recur in future world cycles. Marcus alludes once to this notion, but usually he has a more humble idea of cycles in mind, for instance the stages of life from youth to old age. He even applies this to his own situation as emperor, reflecting that his own court will be like a repeat performance of a play staged earlier in the courts of Alexander, Hadrian, and other rulers. It's characteristic of Marcus to show awareness of a technical stoic notion like world cycles, but constantly to draw attention back to the ethical situation that he faces himself. For instance, he mentions that his soul is nothing but a vapor exhaled from the blood, not because he wants to set out some theory of human nature, but to remind himself not to take praise too seriously. His suggestion that he is merely acting out the part of emperor, a part played by others before him, is equally characteristic. This gets us to what, for my money, is the heart of Marcus's achievement as a philosopher. If Marcus anticipates Shakespeare in considering all the world to be a stage, he also anticipates Shakespeare's greatest character, Hamlet, by withdrawing into a rich inner mental life that is no longer fully identified with the role that he plays. This interiority did not paralyze Marcus as it does Hamlet. The Parthians and others could testify to this, having suffered the slings and arrows of Marcus's legions. But Marcus would agree with Hamlet that there's nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. He was a man of action who did not identify himself with his actions, but rather with his thoughts. In theory, at least, Marcus considers it a matter of no importance that he plays out the role of emperor rather than the role of a farmer. Marcus himself is not the character he plays outwardly, but the soul that lives inwardly. Just as much as the emperor, the farmer has a soul that can make peace with divine fate or wage futile combat against it. This is why the Meditations is a work that can speak to anyone, even if it was written by an emperor for his own benefit. What Marcus offers us is a crash course in therapy for the soul, and this therapy asks us to withdraw into an invulnerable detached self, what Marcus calls his inner citadel. The philosophical basis for this is already present in Epictetus, but Marcus articulates the interiority of Roman Stoicism with unmatched directness and, usually, with stylish charm, rather than the withering wit of Epictetus. It is appropriate that Marcus should offer such effective medicine for the soul, given that he employed the greatest doctor of his age, indeed of just about any age, Galen. A towering figure in the history of medicine, and no midget in the history of philosophy, Galen was employed as doctor to Marcus and to his son Commodus. I mention this simply because in a few episodes down the line, we'll be taking a look at Galen and the relation between ancient medicine and ancient philosophy. But first, there is a final major Hellenistic school to look at, the skeptics. In two weeks, we'll be retracing our steps and returning to the days of Aristotle to look at the man credited with being the first skeptic, Pyro of Elis. First, though, I want to linger here in the Roman imperial period and consider the whole contribution of Roman Stoicism. So, join me for an interview with John Sellers, an expert in the Stoic art of living, next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the Roman Stoics with Dr. John Sellers, who is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England. Hi, John, thanks for coming. Hi, Peter. Right, well, on the podcast so far, I've already devoted episodes to the three main Roman Stoics, namely Seneca Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and that's really who we're mostly going to be talking about. Would you say that these three figures represent a widespread enthusiasm for Stoicism in this early period of the Roman Empire? Well, I think there was a wide interest in Stoicism in that period, and those three figures are the three we most associate with that period, because we have substantial texts for them. But there are a number of other Roman Stoics, minor figures that we know a little less about, that we might also mention to kind of flesh out the picture of Roman interest in Stoicism at that time. So if we go back a little earlier to the first century BC, a very famous Roman, Cato the Younger, an associate of Cicero, was a very keen advocate of Stoicism, and the later Roman Stoics are great admirers of him as a figure. And around the turn of the millennium, we have information about a school of Stoicism based in Rome, run by a philosopher called Quintus Sextius, two of whose pupils went on to teach Seneca. And a little later, we have another Roman Stoic, Musonius Rufus, an Etruscan aristocrat who lectured on Stoicism in Rome and whose lectures Epictetus attended. So there are quite a few other Roman Stoics in this period, and what's interesting about some of these figures, some of the lesser-known figures, Cato, Sextius, and Musonius, is that they were all very traditional Roman figures who were admirers of the traditional Roman values of sort of courage and heroism and austerity and these sorts of things. And there's a sense in which Stoicism chimed with those traditional Roman values in a way that seems to have made it very attractive to a Roman audience in particular. More so than, say, the Epicurean tradition, right? Because the Epicureans aren't going to tell you to go out and be heroic and be engaged in politics, for example. That's right. Although, here's something quite interesting happens. We have quite a lot of information about Epicureanism flourishing in a Roman context slightly earlier, so in the first century BC. We can think of Lucretius, of course. We can think of Philodemus and other Epicurean philosophers associated with him in the Herculaneum. And I believe the earliest Latin philosophical text is an Epicurean text predating Lucretius. So we have this group of Romans interested in Epicureanism as well in a slightly earlier period. What might be going on then? Well, I mean, this is slightly speculative, but perhaps in the first century BC, under the Roman Republic, where those traditional Roman values were very strong, people were perhaps attracted to Epicureanism as offering some kind of alternative. In the first century AD, when we find Epictetus and Seneca, and the Roman Empire is really establishing itself, and we have the decadence of Nero and a very different kind of cultural context, it may well be that suddenly Stoicism started to see a lot more attractive as it harked back to a traditional set of values that perhaps people were beginning to feel were slightly lost. And in fact that would just make this interest in Stoicism a manifestation of a broader cultural phenomenon in the early empire, which is people moaning about how much better things were in the Republic before everything became so debauched with the imperial period coming in. Absolutely. I mean, you could imagine a very austere society finding discussion about pleasure being something part of a good life to be very attractive, and you can imagine in a society in which pleasure is out of control, a lot of very noble discussion about virtue suddenly seeming very attractive. And perhaps another feature as well is with the decline of a sense of active engagement in politics, when you have an emperor who decides everything. A philosophy that tries to accommodate individuals in a world in which they don't really have any control over what's going on. Stoicism presents its readers, particularly the Roman Stoic authors present their readers, a deterministic world in which the individual has no control over, and which they have to try to find the best way to survive within. And that's kind of mirrored perhaps by the political situation in the first century AD. That's interesting because I think cliché, but maybe a true cliché about Neoplatonism, which is the next big movement to come along starting in the third century, is that when the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the crisis years in getting into the later imperial period, maybe people went for Neoplatonism because it was this otherworldly philosophy to escape the bad things that were happening in the political arena. That's right. I mean, the great anomaly in all of this, of course, is Marcus Aurelius, who as emperor of the known world has all the power he could possibly want. And yet in the meditations we find him complaining might be too strong a word, but reflecting on all of the burdens and responsibilities that he has, and the fact that his role means that he actually doesn't have the power that he would like, that one might like, because he himself is constrained by a world that's basically out of his control. The role that he's in, although seemingly giving him unlimited power, creates a whole set of duties and burdens, and he's as powerless as the rest of us. Right. Well, I think everything you've said so far tends to support a general view that's taken about the Roman Stoics, which is that they focus a great deal on ethics and practical philosophy, maybe to the exclusion of the other areas of Stoic philosophy, which traditionally would be logic and physics as well as ethics. To what extent is that true? Is that a real departure in the Roman Stoics from earlier Stoicism? Well, I think that's a really interesting question and a really big one. I mean, as you say, the earlier Stoics, Chrysippus and the others that we know about, clearly wrote a lot about physics and logic in a very technical, theoretical way that we would easily recognize today as philosophy. And the Roman Stoics aren't quite so interested in addressing those topics in the same way. But it's not entirely clear to me that they're particularly interested in addressing ethical theory in quite the same way either. What we find in our three Roman authors isn't ethical theory in the way that we might expect the earlier Stoics like Chrysippus to have written or like we find in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We find something quite different. I mean, let me give you an example. So Epictetus in the Discourses, which as your listeners will know were written down by one of his pupils as a series of lecture notes, we find him addressing ethical issues, but we don't find him doing ethics in the sense of giving us a series of arguments about why virtue is valuable, why we should and shouldn't do this or that. We find him trying to put ethical theory into practice, trying to extrapolate out the practical consequences of what it would be like to follow Stoic ethics. But he doesn't just do it with ethics, he also does it with physics and with logic. So there are a number of chapters in the Discourses where Epictetus talks directly about logic. He'll talk about why it's important that we don't neglect logic, that logic is essential. There's a very entertaining exchange with one of his students, a student who's obviously tempted towards cynicism, who says, well, why are we bothering with all this theory altogether if we want the good life? Let's just get on with practical precepts. Why do we have to do our logic exercises? And Epictetus chides him for this and says, well, how on earth do you think you're going to be able to live rationally and think straight and analyze all of the situations in which you find yourself in in your daily life if you haven't done your logic? It's a good message for all these undergraduates out there who are grieved at having to take introductory logic today. Absolutely. Philosophy courses. Absolutely. So Epictetus is as concerned with logic as he is with ethics, I would say, and physics also in terms of his reflections about fate and about the providential order of nature. But in each case, he's not doing ethical theory or logical theory. He's doing something quite different. So to sum up, I think I'd want to say that our three Roman Stoic authors are perhaps more concerned with something we might call practical philosophy rather than emphasizing ethics at the expense of physics or logic. And that would mean something like not just setting out a theory and explaining why it's preferable to other theories, but almost assuming the Stoic theory and then asking what would it be like to take that really seriously and live like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a sense in which the theories that found the philosophical schools that are popular in this period have already been established. If you're an Epicurean, you read Epicurus and you either find it attractive or you don't and you might make some tweaks. But broadly speaking, if you've made the existential decision to become an Epicurean, you buy the theory and the same for the Stoics. So once you've, if you like, done your philosophical shopping around, you've looked at the different schools that are available, you've picked the one that you think is most plausible, then the big question is, how do I put this into practice, given that I've already decided that I think it's very attractive? I think that chimes really well with some things Epictetus says in the Discourses because he's often complaining about people who say they want to be Stoics but aren't really walking the walk, as it were. Absolutely. It chimes with something else, which is a phrase that we find in Marcus, which is the idea that philosophy is what he calls an art of living, which also happens to be the title of a book that you wrote about Roman Stoicism, available in all good bookstores. So can you tell us what this phrase means, the art of living? What does it mean to be pursuing philosophy as an art of living? Yes. I mean, we find this phrase in, I think, all three of our Roman Stoic authors. But interestingly, we also find it in the fragments for the earlier Stoics as well. So we also find Chrysippus in a fragment, also referring to an art of living. In order to flesh out this idea, I'd like to make two connections with medicine. And both of these ideas will involve us thinking back to Socrates for a moment. So Socrates, in the Apology and in some of the other early Platonic dialogues, draws an analogy between philosophy and various other arts and crafts. And in particular, medicine crops up again and again. And the kind of bland way of putting it is that medicine is an art or craft that looks after the body, and philosophy is the art or craft that looks after the soul. And Socrates, of course, in the Apology, exhorts people to take care of their souls or take care of themselves, conceived as their soul. And that's one part of the idea that philosophy might be an art of living, an art of taking care of the soul. And by transforming one's soul, you transform how you live, because your soul contains all of the values and judgments that shape how you act and interact with the world. Now that sounds a bit glib. And to a kind of a modern hardline analytic philosopher, it sounds like some kind of chicken soup for the soul idea that isn't particularly attractive. And if that same modern philosopher would go into a bookstore and see the meditations of Marcus Aurelius in the mind, body, spirit section of the bookstore, that would just confirm all of their prejudices. Now, I want to kind of challenge that prejudice and say, well, what actually would taking care of one's soul involve? Now, I take it it would involve learning how to think rationally, learning how to analyze one's beliefs, doing all the things that Socrates encourages people to do in the Apology, to examine one's assumptions and preconceptions and the beliefs that we inherit from the wider culture around us. And for the Stoics in particular, and for our later Stoics in Epictetus and in Marcus Aurelius, we see this very clearly. It also involves analyzing our perceptions or impressions to test them, to see whether they're accurate or reliable or not. So the art of taking care of one's soul, philosophy, basically involves logic, again, and epistemology. So it's something very rigorous, it's something very tough, it's something that has this Socratic ancestry, and it's not just something slightly glib that we might want to dismiss as not really philosophy in the modern sense. So that's one big part, I think, of what The Art of Living is about. The second element that I've written about in my book that you mentioned really is, well, how does that help us to understand our late Stoic authors? I mean, I take it that all of the texts that we have from our three Stoics are slightly unusual as philosophical texts. They're not treatise in the way that we find treatise written by Aristotle or the way that we assume that the early Stoics wrote treatise, presumably not that dissimilar to Aristotle's. They're doing something slightly different. And again, as I touched on a moment ago, it'd be very easy for a modern philosopher to encounter a book like Marcus' Meditations and not really think that's a philosophical text. Now, the argument that I flesh out in the book is, well, if philosophy is like medicine, then maybe the way that we develop skill in philosophy is also analogous to the way in which someone might learn medicine and become a doctor. And the ancient accounts we have of learning the techné, learning the art or craft of medicine, is that it involves two distinct stages. So your doctor will go to medical school, he'll learn all the theory, he'll sit in class, he'll master all of the technical theoretical details, but on its own that's not enough. He's then got to go into hospital and engage in a long practical training to show that he can actually put all of that theoretical knowledge into practice and do it well and successfully. And we want our doctors to be trained both after a long apprenticeship in the hospital under close supervision and not when they've just come out of the classroom. Now, my thought is that, well, maybe this is what is going on with these slightly unusual texts that we get from our late Roman Stoics. The Meditations that Marcus writes are perhaps his attempt to engage in that kind of philosophical apprenticeship after he's done the theoretical work so that he can digest all of the philosophical ideas that he's already learned so that he can transform himself and put the philosophy into practice. And maybe it's inevitable that you have to, as it were, be an apprentice to yourself because it's such a demanding theory that you're supposed to be constantly monitoring how well you're doing so there can't be a teacher following you around to see whether you're behaving like a Stoic. You actually have to be checking yourself all the time to see whether you're managing it. Absolutely. I mean, this picks up an idea that, again, we find with Socrates in the Apology that only each individual can take care of their own souls, and for very obvious reasons. If what you're doing is trying to test your impressions and to examine your beliefs, you have privileged access to that world and no one else does. It seems to me, though, that this really brings up an objection, which is that the ethical demands that the Roman Stoics are placing on themselves and also on us are just too demanding. They're too rigorous. You said before that it's a very tough, rigorous regime in terms of learning how to become a Stoic, but also what they're expecting us to do as Stoics seems to be extremely demanding. Do you think that that's a general problem with their view? Well, I mean, I agree with you. That's very much a broad view of these Roman Stoic authors, that they are very demanding. I mean, I suppose I would want to qualify that with a couple of thoughts. One would be to say that I don't think the Roman Stoics are any more demanding than the earlier Stoics. It's just that the types of text we have are concerned with really fleshing out the practical consequences of believing the doctrine. So we can read a theoretical account of early Stoic ethics and say, that makes perfect sense. Only virtue has value. Nothing else is indifferent. And then when we see Epictetus cash that out and say, well, if you really believe that, these are the consequences. Even your children and your close family members have no real value, if only virtue has value. So I'm not sure if the late Roman Stoics are much more demanding than the earlier Stoics would have been. They just make it plain how demanding Stoicism as a whole is. And secondly, I mean, I would say again to touch on Socrates. I take it the Socrates we find in the Apology is offering a pretty demanding ethical model for us. And what I find quite interesting is that while most of us might not be inclined to take the hemlock for the sake of philosophy, we can still admire the portrait of Socrates that we get of Socrates without thinking that we're necessarily going to go that extra mile. I don't see any reason why we can't read the late Roman Stoics in the same spirit, that they are demanding, but we needn't dismiss them because they're demanding. We can still gain a lot from them. Sure. But I suppose that if someone says to me, well, here's this ethical ideal, I don't necessarily expect you to live up to it all the time, but you should be shooting for this. It still seems to me that if that ethical ideal involves, for example, not thinking that my children have intrinsic value, that would be a deal breaker. So it seems like that in itself shows that the ideal that they're presenting me with has some kind of fatal flaw. Sure. And when we do encounter those sorts of passages in Epictetus in particular, they seem very harsh and very demanding. And as someone who's gained a baby boy in the last 12 months, I've had to read these passages with a fresh pair of eyes, so to speak. But if we take those thoughts within the context of Stoic ethics as a whole, I think we can soften them a little bit. So for instance, the Stoics will also argue that it's natural and so right and proper for us to have a certain affinity for other human beings in general, and in particular to our close family members around us. This is a natural part of human nature. And so if we read those comments that Epictetus makes within the context of the wider Stoic theory, that I take it he is presupposing, we've got no evidence to say that he's rejecting a lot of that other theory, then we can, if you like, soften the perspective if we read him in context. And perhaps it's worth briefly mentioning another Stoic text from this period that deals precisely with this notion of a sense of affinity with other human beings from a period by Hierocles, a text called the Elements of Ethics, which interestingly comes from this period, is another Stoic text, but isn't like our three Roman Stoic authors in the sense that it is just a theoretical treatise. And that tells us something interesting as well. It tells us that Stoics in this period were still continuing that tradition of writing theoretical philosophical texts that we assume the early Stoics were writing too. Right. Going back to that issue about valuing one's children, or thinking that they have intrinsic value, I guess a lot of what they're thinking about is how should you respond if your child dies, which of course would have been a very common occurrence at that period. And what they're saying is that whatever attitude you take towards your child should be consistent with the thought that your happiness could somehow survive the death of a child. And so in this sense, they're actually doing something a little bit like what the Epicureans do, which is they're trying to persuade you to have an attitude towards death, which is rational and which allows you to have a successful life despite the fact of death, both your own death and the death of those you love. Absolutely. Although I would say that it's even broader than that. I mean, if we wanted to try to characterise what the Roman Stoics are doing in a single idea, I would want to say that it's something like training us to cope with all external events that nature throws at us, whether it be the death of a loved one, the death of a child, any other unwanted external event that might come our way. There's a sense in which our Roman Stoic texts are trying to train us to cope with any eventuality and in particular, to try to buy the claim that all of those unwanted events that happen, A, don't really hurt us because it's our virtue that's the only thing that's really important to us and that's inside us, that's safe, that's secure, no matter what happens to us externally. And secondly, or B, I should say, B, that these external events that happen to us are the product of a providential ordering within nature and therefore part of some wider rational plan. Before I let you go, I should ask you about something else that you've worked on quite a bit, which is the reception of Stoicism not immediately following the Stoics, so in later antiquity, but much, much later in the early modern period. And I guess that they were actually very influential in that period, despite having been very non-influential throughout the entire Middle Ages. Could you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. I mean, I've looked at the reception of Stoicism in the 16th and 17th centuries and it's very interesting to see what happens in this period. Obviously, this is just after the Renaissance where a huge number of ancient texts have been rediscovered and are in circulation again for the first time after a very long gap. And we really find two distinct stages in the reception of Stoicism, which touches very neatly with what we've been saying about our Roman Stoics. The first stage is the reception and reading of the Roman Stoic authors, in particular the reading of Seneca, but also Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And what we find is this period, of course, Christian readers reading Roman Stoic authors and finding discussion of virtue, a very austere ethic that rejects material wealth, that talks about God's will and providence, and a whole series of things that seem quite attractive superficially to a Christian reader. So we see the Roman Stoic authors embraced in the 16th century. We see Erasmus and Calvin both edit texts by Seneca, for instance. But then something really interesting happens. As scholars start to do more work on ancient texts and gather together all of the fragments for the earlier Stoics and start to get a clearer picture of the Stoic philosophical system as a whole, people begin to realize that in fact there's a rigorous determinism at play within Stoic philosophy, a determinism that seemingly denies the freedom of will, that denies the possibility of miracles, that identifies God's will with a natural order of causes within nature. And suddenly this doesn't look very attractive to a Christian reader at all. So we see the Stoics transform from pious theists in the 16th century to notorious atheists by the early 18th century. And that mirrors a shift from reading our Roman Stoic authors to trying to reconstruct the details of the early Stoic system. And the key figure in all of this is a humanist in the late 16th century called Eustace Lipsius. And he's an interesting figure because he stands right in the middle of this transformation. On the one hand, we might say he's a pious theist, he edits the text of Seneca and admires Seneca enormously, but then he's the first person to gather together all of the fragments for the Stoic system and therefore inadvertently lays the foundations for the later atheistic reading by giving people all of the information they need to find out what the early Stoics really believed, which was a thoroughgoing naturalism, materialism and determinism. So he would have been horrified by the consequences of his work, I suspect. The dangers of scholarship. That's right. And I guess it's maybe worth noting here that it's not only the Stoics, but all three of the main Hellenistic schools, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the skeptics were influential during this period. That's right. So of course, in the Middle Ages, it's Aristotle, who dominates as an ancient philosophical influence. And then in the Renaissance, Plato becomes very important. And then in the early modern period, particularly in the 17th century, we see a revival of interest in all three of the Hellenistic schools. So as well as the Stoics, we have a revival of interest in Epicurus associated with Gassendi. And the skeptics, the rediscovery of the texts of sexist, empiricists are a huge influence on Montaigne, and then Descartes, and of course, Hume. So skepticism, in a sense, as the third of the Hellenistic schools, really shaped the development of early modern philosophy. And as it happens, that will be the next topic I'll be covering on the series of podcasts. For now, I'll thank John very much for coming on. Thank you for inviting me. And I will invite you to join me next time for the skeptics here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Beyond Belief, Pyro and Skepticism. There are a few philosophical issues that are so deep, so troubling, that they make movies about them. I don't mean intellectual European films, I mean proper movies, with special effects budgets. Hollywood has made blockbusters about free will and future truth, for instance. I have in mind the Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report, whose theme comes straight from the deterministic argument in Aristotle's On Interpretation. The nature of time itself is another obvious case. I need only mention Back to the Future, to say nothing of Back to the Future Part 2 and Back to the Future Part 3. But maybe the most cinema-friendly topic in philosophy is skepticism. The skeptic asks how we can be sure that we know what we think we know. Perhaps we are prey to systematic falsehood in our beliefs, because we are, say, being used as living batteries in an energy farm built by intelligent machines, while our brains are, for reasons that remain poorly explained, entertained with a virtual reality called the Matrix. It's gotten to the point where it is obligatory, when discussing skepticism in philosophy classes, to mention this movie, The Matrix, though not so much Matrix Parts 2 and 3, because they were rubbish. It's a real time saver, actually. If you're trying to give an argument for skepticism, you just have to point out that Keanu Reeves didn't know he was in the Matrix, and if he couldn't figure it out, what chance do the rest of us have? Really, though, any movie that features a dream sequence in which the characters or audience believe that the dream is real is touching on the theme of skepticism. This is one of the oldest tricks in the movie-making book. It goes back at least as far as Buster Keaton's wonderful silent movie, Sherlock Jr., in which a film projectionist falls asleep and dreams of himself as a character in a movie. Keaton already realized that the question of what is real, and how we can know what is real, relates naturally to cinema, because cinema is itself an alternate version of reality. In this episode, though, I want to discuss not so much an alternate version of reality as an alternate version of skepticism. The skepticism of the ancient world influenced modern skepticism, and continues to fascinate philosophers who work in this area, but it is not the same thing as modern skepticism. The father of modern skepticism was Descartes, who proposed radical doubt as a stepping stone towards reaching conclusions that could not be doubted. In his Meditations, Descartes subjects all of his beliefs to skeptical attack. In fact, he raises the question of how he knows he isn't dreaming, and also proposes a scenario not unlike The Matrix, in which a malicious demon is filling him with false beliefs. The reason Descartes does this is that he wants to see which beliefs, if any, are immune to doubt. He decides that there are some, as we'll see when we get to Descartes, in, oh, five years or something. After Descartes, skepticism has usually taken roughly this form. We consider beliefs of various kinds, and ask whether they can be doubted, and if so, what that means about the status of those beliefs. For instance, you may be listening to this while cooking dinner or jogging, and you may think you know you're cooking dinner or jogging. But in fact, you cannot know such things, since just maybe you are in The Matrix, waiting to be freed from the confusion by Laurence Fishburne. The ancient skeptics had a very different approach. We can see this already by considering the name, skeptics. As you won't be surprised to learn, this word comes from ancient Greek. Skeptikos means someone who is inquiring or searching. The ancient skeptic, then, is not testing his beliefs against some kind of radical, or inducing scenario, like The Matrix or Descartes' evil demon. He is, rather, someone who is sharing in a process of philosophical inquiry. He's not raising radical or systematic doubt as a general issue, but rather inquiring into the success of other believers, especially other philosophers, like the Stoics. The skeptic is struck by the objections that face each attempt to determine the truth of things. He finds that incompatible theories seem to have more or less equally good arguments on their side. He also finds that the theories of other philosophers fall short of the standards of proof suggested by those very same philosophers. In short, he always finds room for doubt. Nonetheless, he remains, in theory at least, committed to the positive enterprise of seeking truth. Upon finding that various proposals about the nature of things are doubtful, he does not give up the search. But given that the search has so far failed to turn up a victorious candidate for truth, he does suspend judgment. This idea of suspending judgment is at the core of ancient skepticism, whereas it plays no role in Cartesian skepticism. The Greek word for the suspension of judgment, epoche, became something of a standard around which the skeptical tradition could rally. Which is not to say that only the skeptics were interested in suspension of judgment. As we saw when looking at the Stoic theory of knowledge back in episode 60, early Stoics like Zeno and Chrysippus thought that the perfect wise man, or sage, would suspend judgment rather than assenting to impressions which were in any way doubtful. But the skeptics pointed out that the Stoics' own standards for knowledge were set so high that they made knowledge unattainable. All impressions leave room for doubt. Thus, the wise man would always suspend judgment. Here we have another striking difference between ancient and modern skepticism. Since we now usually think of skepticism as a challenge to be overcome, if at all possible, we do not think about skepticism as a stable philosophical posture, a way of living one's life. But, in common with the other Hellenistic schools, the skeptics put forth a picture of the ideal sage and of a life that would be free of disturbance. This is perhaps the most surprising feature of ancient skepticism. It was presented as a recipe for happiness. To some extent, this is symptomatic of the competition between the skeptics and other philosophical groups. Since rival schools like the Stoics and the Epicureans had an account of the sage and of the happy life, the skeptics needed to say something on these same topics too. But it was not merely a dialectical afterthought, as we can see by turning to the man who is usually recognized as the first skeptic, Pyro of Elis. Pyro was born in the 360s BC and died in the 270s, making him roughly a generation younger than Aristotle and a generation older than Epicurus. He was an admired figure in his home of Elis, the northwest corner of the southern part of mainland Greece. Like Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic, he wrote nothing. Our understanding of him as a personality relies on the reports of his followers and other ancient recorders of the history of philosophy. Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers, an important source for so many Hellenistic thinkers, preserves a report on Pyro. Apart from that, the most important information derives ultimately from Pyro's student Taimon, who was a great supporter of Pyro and his skeptical approach to philosophy. That skepticism found an irreverent embodiment in a work of Taimon's called the Silloi or Paradis. It was other philosophers who were the butt of the jokes. It's not entirely clear how much of the philosophical stance we associate with Pyro was in fact Pyro's, and how much was invented by Taimon. But it was Pyro, not Taimon, who in due course was honored as the founder of a skeptical tradition. As we'll be seeing, beginning in the first century BC and carrying on into the period of the Roman Empire, there were skeptics who proudly styled themselves as Pyronists. Although Pyro is thus credited with beginning something new, his skeptical attitude did not come from nowhere. One hypothesis about his inspiration already excited ancient authors who wrote about Pyro. In the 320s BC, Pyro participated in the military campaign of Alexander the Great, which meant traveling as far away as India. There, we are told, Pyro encountered Indian wise men who may have been a source for skeptical ideas. This idea is not without merit, given that skepticism did play a role in classical Indian philosophy. On the other hand, there were antecedents for Pyro's views in Greek philosophy. Pyro himself seems to have acknowledged Democritus as an important predecessor. As we've seen, after setting forth his atomic theory, Democritus drew skeptical conclusions from it, declaring that perceptible qualities like sweetness and color are merely conventions, since in reality there is nothing but atoms and void. In general, Pyro, or at least his faithful follower Taimon, treated other philosophers with scorn, but Democritus was respected for his anticipation of skepticism. Another Presocratic who received a degree of admiration was Xenophanes, perhaps because of his irreverence concerning traditional Greek ideas about the gods. It must also be said that, possible influence from India notwithstanding, Pyro's image and way of life fits comfortably into the age of Diogenes the Cynic, Epicurus, and Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. Like them, and like Socrates, Pyro cultivated the persona of an imperturbable sage. He did not shrink from fearful situations like storms at sea, and was happy to stoop to performing menial tasks like washing pigs. Nor did physical pain bother him. A typical legend has him undergoing the horrors of ancient surgery without so much as flinching. Supposedly, in describing his own way of life, he used that most central technical term of Hellenistic ethics, ataraxia, or lack of disturbance. Thus, Pyro claimed to have achieved the Holy Grail pursued by almost all the philosophers of his day. Like Diogenes the Cynic, he managed this without taking the trouble to devise a complex philosophical theory, such as Epicurus and Zeno offered. Far from it. Pyro's indifference to danger and pain was the supposed consequence of his lack of beliefs and commitments. Now, I know what you're thinking. Why would a life without belief be a life of calm, a life free of trouble? One might just as easily suppose it would be a life consumed with worry. If I don't have firm beliefs about the world around me, won't I face each new situation in a state of ignorance and confusion? Aren't the Stoics right to think that it is knowledge and understanding that yield confidence and serenity? Well, I tend to agree with you, but it isn't obvious that Pyro is wrong about this. Let's consider again those tales of Pyro's indifference to circumstances. For instance, his ability to undergo excruciating pain without registering any dismay would, perhaps, be explained by the fact that he does not believe pain is a bad thing. His cheerfulness about performing menial tasks would derive from the absence of beliefs about which activities are unworthy. Pyro's life is, in fact, very like that of the Stoic sage. The happiness of the Stoic sage, too, is immune to pain and conventional feelings of shame, because his positive commitments lie elsewhere. He believes that only virtue is worth having, and has a solid theory about the nature of virtue. Pyro doesn't have those positive beliefs, of course, but he doesn't need them. All he needs to do is avoid having beliefs that would give rise to disturbance. And, of course, he has no such beliefs, since he has no beliefs at all. Of course, if Pyro is to be anything other than one more example of an indomitable Hellenistic wise man, he needs to give us some kind of philosophical rationale for the skeptical attitude that yields autoraxia. For this, we have to rely principally on a single piece of evidence, which reaches us through a philological version of the children's game of telephone, or Chinese whispers. The report is found in the 4th century AD Christian theologian Eusebius, hardly a promising place to find details about the ideas of a 4th century BC skeptic, but beggars can't be choosers. Eusebius is relating an account about Pyro, preserved by an earlier Aristotelian philosopher, who in turn was taking his information from Pyro's follower Taimon. And don't forget that what we can read would be manuscripts that are only copies, or copies of copies, of the text Eusebius himself wrote. Do you suppose that scholars just might have proposed amending the Greek text in such a way as fundamentally to change the logic of the whole passage? Why, of course they have. Such are the delights of trying to reconstruct early Hellenistic philosophy. Still, we have some reason to think that the passage tells us something fairly reliable about Pyro, or at least about Taimon's understanding of Pyro, which is about as much as we can hope for. Plus, it's really interesting. So let's see what it says. The report tells us that things in themselves are neither one way nor another. They are indifferent, impossible to measure or to judge. Our perceptions and beliefs render neither truth nor falsehood. Thus, we should remain without belief, inclining neither this way nor that, as a result of which we will avoid making any assertions and, finally, achieve ataraxia, freedom from disturbance. Since Pyro himself attained this freedom, he is presumably a reliable guide to the method, and this at least claims to be his own description of the method. The passage is, in short, exactly what we were looking for. Unfortunately, it's not easy to understand. We can start with the basic observation that Pyro is telling us to avoid opinion, or belief. The word he uses, doxa, is the same word that Plato and Aristotle use to describe the state of mind in which one takes something to be true while lacking knowledge in the proper sense. In Plato's classic formulation, belief lies between ignorance and knowledge. Of course, Plato and Aristotle urge us to shun ignorance and not to be satisfied with true belief. Rather, we should push on until we achieve knowledge and understanding of the way things are. But this, Pyro claims, is impossible. Things in themselves are neither one way nor another. Unfortunately, the passage contains no defense of this alarming statement, but we've seen the sentiment before. Think, for instance, of Protagoras in Plato's Theaetetus, saying that if the wind feels cold for you and warm for me, then there is no truth of the matter about whether the wind is warm or cold in itself. All truth is relative to an observer. Or, think of Democritus again, saying that the perceptible features of things are only a matter of custom, because in reality they are atoms and void. Pyro's reference to perception, in addition to belief, suggests that he also had in mind examples like this. The moral of the skeptical story is that Plato and Aristotle were wrong. Belief is not inadequate because it falls short of knowledge. Rather, it goes too far. To have a belief presupposes that we are able to determine the nature of things, but this is impossible. Thus we should, to put the point in Plato's terms, content ourselves with ignorance rather than striving for true belief, never mind full-scale knowledge. It's obvious that the skeptic must be ignorant in a sense, given that ignorant just means lacking knowledge, and the skeptic is someone who accepts that knowledge has not been attained, either by himself or by anyone else, as far as he can tell. Yet, it's equally obvious that the skeptic's ignorance is special. It will not involve having false beliefs, of course, since he will have no beliefs at all. Rather, it is a mature, self-conscious, and blissful form of ignorance, in which he suspends all belief, and in this way achieves peace of mind. There are several difficulties that remain, though. I'll mention two of them. The first is that Pyro seems in our passage to be laying down a bold philosophical thesis, namely that the natures of things cannot be determined. Now, Pyro isn't doubting the existence of the things around us. He apparently didn't raise Descartes-style worries about whether there is a wind. He only suggested that there is no fact of the matter about whether the wind is warm or cold. But that's not the problem. In fact, it's just another difference between ancient and modern skepticism. Ancient skeptics in general did not raise worries about whether external things are really out there. They only raised problems for attempts to determine the natures of those things. The problem is rather that, at least on the interpretation I've just given, Pyro asserted confidently that the natures of things are unknowable. That sounds very like a belief, or even a proposed bit of knowledge. He seems to be completely convinced that things cannot be determined, which is why we should refrain from belief. But this conviction is itself a belief. Later skeptics, as we'll see, are more careful here, and say only that they suspend judgment about whether the natures of things might be knowable. Some modern scholars, by the way, interpret the Eusebius passage in such a way that Pyro too avoids committing himself to the intrinsic unknowability of things. For our purposes, perhaps we should just suspend judgment about his real view. The second problem I want to mention is also one that confronted the later skeptics. We've understood Pyro to be saying that he can do without any beliefs at all. In fact, to be saying that his freedom from disturbance is achieved by giving up on the whole enterprise of forming beliefs. This, he has discovered, is the happy life. But not only does this life sound less than happy, it doesn't even sound possible. To give just one example, how am I supposed to avoid starving to death if I suspend judgment about which items in my environment are edible? This sort of worry infected the biographical reports about Pyro, so that we are told fanciful legends about his students following him around, stopping him at the last minute from walking out in front of oncoming wagons, or stepping off cliffs. The idea that Pyro actually behaved like the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, blinded by his lack of beliefs rather than by real blindness, is clearly silly. But a serious point underlies the stories, namely that life without belief seems downright impossible, at least for humans. Perhaps Pyro agreed. In one anecdote, he is frightened by a dog, and reacts, betraying his belief that the dog is dangerous. After regaining his composure, he remarks that it is difficult to divest oneself of one's humanity. But the evidence at our disposal concerning Pyro does not really allow us to say with confidence how he would have solved these problems, or indeed whether he tried to solve them. Fortunately, the skeptical tradition is only just starting. Soon enough, there will come a new group of thinkers who avoid commitment, belief, and assertion, and who respond to the two problems I've just raised. First, that skepticism is itself a kind of commitment, and second, that one cannot live without belief. These new skeptics arise within Plato's Academy, of all places. One can easily imagine Plato, to say nothing of his immediate successors, Bucepus and Xenocrates, spinning in their graves at the thought of their Academy being run by skeptics. But the skeptics could claim Platonic legitimacy. They looked not to Democritus nor to Pyro. Rather, like so many other Hellenistic thinkers, their idol was Socrates. After all, Socrates did claim to know only that he knew nothing. The skeptics of the new Academy are going to wonder if they know even that much. I'm in no doubt that you'll want to join me to hear all about them, next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Know-Nothing Party, The Skeptical Academy. Everybody loves a good rivalry. Ali vs. Foreman, the Montagues vs. the Capulets, Gryffindor vs. Slytherin. And the history of philosophy too has its rivalries. Think of Plato vs. the Sophists, the Rationalists vs. the Empiricists, or Nietzsche vs. God. Few philosophical rivalries, though, have been as central to their era as the rivalry between the Stoics and the Skeptics, a dispute which ran for generations from the early Hellenistic period down to the time of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar set Rome on the path towards empire by assuming the role of dictator in the middle of the first century BC. One of his critics was the great orator, lawyer, and intellectual Cicero. Cicero wrote works on his career, especially during moments of enforced political inactivity, such as the one that resulted from Caesar's ascendancy. When Cicero looked back at the history of philosophy as it had developed since Plato, he saw this dispute between Skeptics and Stoics as one of primary importance, on a par with arguments about the nature of pleasure in the good life and the question of the nature of the gods. He wrote treatises on all of these subjects, devoting a work called the Academica to the topic of skepticism. It is one of our main sources for skepticism in the Hellenistic period. But why would Cicero call a work on skepticism Academica? The answer is simple, if to us surprising. In the generations leading up to Cicero's day, Plato's Academy in Athens had become synonymous with the skeptical approach to philosophy. That certainly would have surprised the first heads of the Academy following Plato's death. As we saw in episode 51, Spusippus and Xenocrates were anything but skeptics. They promoted a bold interpretation of the cosmology and metaphysics of Plato. The next scholarch, or head of the Academy, was a man named Polemo, who shifted things to the terrain of ethics but continued to set forth what he took to be Platonic doctrine. These successors to Plato would probably be broadly happy with the way Plato is usually taught in universities these days. The Platonic dialogues are presumed to contain certain doctrines, and the task of the faithful interpreter is to discover, and perhaps elaborate upon, those doctrines. Then, in about 268 BC, everything changed. The headship of the Academy passed to a philosopher named Arcesilaus. Any doctrine-loving Platonists still frequenting the Academy would have felt like meat lovers whose favorite restaurant is suddenly taken over by militant vegetarians. It was an end to the steady diet of arguments claiming to establish metaphysical and ethical truths. Arguments were certainly still on the menu at Arcesilaus' Academy, but this was, to borrow the ancient phrase, a new Academy, and it had new arguments, arguments that aimed to destroy rather than build theories. This may seem a shocking direction for the Academy to take, but as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, the skeptics could point to Socrates for institutional legitimacy. They could remind us of Socrates' claims of ignorance, and also of the fact that Plato let so many of his dialogues end in a kind of impasse or aporia, where the characters have failed to find the object of their search. Still, it wasn't the doctrinal Platonism of the old Academy, or the suggestions of positive doctrine in Plato himself, that were targeted by Arcesilaus. Rather, his great opponent and rival was Stoicism, or, to make things personal, his contemporary Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic tradition. Their rivalry was continued by the leading successors of both the Stoa and the Academy. On the doctrinal, Stoic side was the great Chrysippus, who was well matched on the skeptical academic side by Carnaides, alluding to the remark that without Chrysippus there would be no Stoa, Carnaides added, and without Chrysippus there would be no me. He was the Muhammad Ali to Chrysippus' George Foreman, and his cherished aim was to deliver a knockout blow to the Stoic's claim that certain knowledge is possible. Skepticism and Stoicism could have been designed specifically as opposing philosophies, and in fact, to a large extent they were. Some of Chrysippus' improvements on Zeno were directly in response to skeptical attack, and the skeptics of the Academy often seemed to have had little more on their minds than undermining the Stoics. This is perhaps just what we'd expect, since the skeptics professed no doctrines of their own. What they brought to the table was not a rival theory, like that of the Epicureans, but an arsenal of dialectical weaponry designed to undercut and cast doubt upon the Stoic position. They were willing to fight on any ground, from logic to physics to ethics, but at the core of the dispute, inevitably, was the nature of knowledge itself. We've been over Stoic epistemology back in episode 60, but since that was a ways back, I should quickly remind you. Zeno, followed by Chrysippus and the other Stoics, claimed to have discovered the criterion of truth, a yardstick by which to sort possibly false beliefs from definitely true beliefs. With such beliefs in hand, we can work our way towards the systematic understanding that the Stoics honor with the name of episteme, knowledge or understanding. For the Stoics, the criterion of truth is what they call a cognitive impression, that is, an impression about how things are that corresponds to how things are, and that cannot be misleading. The Stoics add that a truly wise man will never assent to non-cognitive impressions, though he may accept that some such impressions are more reasonable than others, and act accordingly. For instance, if it seems to the wise man that a tiger is leaping from a nearby tree to attack him, he will not wait to assess the lighting conditions and the possibility of practical jokes, he will just take cover. Still, he will not necessarily form the positive belief that there is a tiger, unless he is satisfied that the impression of the tiger is indeed cognitive. If circumstances leave room for doubt, he will suspend judgment. It's perhaps already clear from this why the Stoics are ideal opponents for the skeptics. For one thing, the Stoics are emphatic that certainty is possible, and they insist that wisdom requires certainty. In this respect, the Epicureans, for instance, would make less satisfying enemies. Epicurus, as we saw, is happy to accept theories, so long as they are not ruled out by our evidence, and so long as they lead to freedom from disturbance. Although he did insist on the truth of all sensations, something the skeptics could enjoy refuting, Epicurus was not really in the absolute certainty game. For another thing, the Stoics themselves deploy the idea of suspending judgment, which happens to be the centerpiece of the skeptical strategy. The Stoics have very high standards for belief. If there is any doubt, they counsel us to suspend judgment and withhold our assent. The Stoics were almost asking for someone to come along and tell them that, according to these standards, no one should ever believe anything. And this, of course, is precisely what Arcesilaus came along and told them. He argued, as we saw when discussing the Stoics, that in principle any impression, no matter how vivid and apparently unproblematic, could be indistinguishable from another impression that leads us into error. The possibility of error may be remote, but if it is present, then the Stoics must admit that the impression in question is not cognitive. This highlights a difference between the skepticism of Arcesilaus and the skepticism we usually encounter in contemporary philosophy. Nowadays, skeptics concentrate on the question of knowledge and wonder whether we can even get to the state where we know something, and perhaps know that we know it. Arcesilaus is applying the brakes at a much earlier stage. He's raising a doubt as to whether we should ever even believe something, never mind take ourselves to know it. This is clearly a much more fundamental skeptical strategy. When Descartes worries that perhaps his beliefs are fed to him by an evil demon, that does not lead him to think that he might need to stop having beliefs. He just worries that the beliefs he has, and will continue having, may not constitute knowledge. Of course, this move on Arcesilaus's part gains most of its plausibility from the stringent requirements that the Stoics have placed on belief. It is the Stoics, not Arcesilaus, who proposed suspending judgment when the criterion of truth is not satisfied. This leads us into the central question about Arcesilaus, one that will also arise with his successor Carnaides. To what extent are their conclusions merely dialectical, that is, merely offered in the context of arguing against the Stoics? And to what extent are they paradoxically beliefs that the skeptics themselves hold? Consider the conclusion of Arcesilaus's argument against Zeno. He shows that the wise man will always suspend judgment, exactly what a skeptic should believe. But hang on, a skeptic shouldn't believe anything, should he? And he certainly shouldn't believe that one should have no beliefs, since that would be a contradiction. Here, the dialectical reading can come to the rescue. On this reading, Arcesilaus is not endorsing the view that no one should ever have beliefs. He's only saying that if we were to adopt the Stoic standard for belief, no one should ever have beliefs. Since he himself would not adopt that Stoic standard, so neither would he be laying down prohibition on belief as a belief he himself holds. Indeed, what Arcesilaus should do, to be consistent, is suspend judgment about whether the Stoic criterion of truth is the right one. In fact, he should also suspend judgment about whether there are indeed cognitive impressions. He's not himself committed on any of these points. He's merely arguing that the Stoics are wrong to commit themselves by defending such ambitious standards for belief and by insisting that there are cognitive impressions, when in fact all these things are unclear. It's a matter of controversy whether this is the right way to understand Arcesilaus. It doesn't help that neither he nor Carnaides wrote any works, leaving us with only indirect evidence as to their oral teaching. But certainly some interpreters, including the greatest ancient skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, did not adopt the dialectical reading. He, in effect, accused the new academy of dogmatism, that is, of holding a commitment or doctrine. This is the meaning of the Greek word dogma, often used in the context of political decisions or later tenets of theology. Of course, Arcesilaus would be a dogmatist of an unusual sort, a negative dogmatist, whose doctrine is precisely that one should have no doctrines. But this was still enough to damn him in the eyes of Sextus for being insufficiently skeptical. A thoroughgoing skepticism would be skeptical even regarding the question of whether one can have knowledge, and the question of whether one should have beliefs. Of course, that is a difficult position to understand, and we'll have to do some work to wrap our minds around it when we get to Sextus. For now, though, let's look at another problem faced by Arcesilaus aside from this charge of self-refutation and negative dogmatism. This is the so-called apraxia, or inactivity, objection. According to the objection, the skeptic cannot do anything at all if he lacks beliefs. Consider, for instance, the action of going to the zoo to see the giraffes. To leave the house, get on environmentally friendly public transport, and reach the giraffes will require a whole series of beliefs, for instance, that this bus does go to the zoo, that the map does show the location of the giraffe enclosure, and so on. An utter lack of belief seems to doom us to an utter lack of visits to see the giraffes, a prospect none of us would wish to contemplate. And the same argument goes, of course, for any action you care to name. Arcesilaus dealt with the objection by once again exploiting weapons unwittingly placed into his hands by the Stoics. As we saw with the attacking tiger example, the Stoics think that the sage will on occasion follow impressions which strike him as reasonable, without necessarily giving these impressions his full assent. Now Arcesilaus himself can pounce, and say that what goes for attacking tigers will work just as well for visiting giraffes. The skeptic will take certain things as reasonable, and this will be enough to allow him to act, without ever forming settled beliefs. This response is typical of Arcesilaus, in that it works within the Stoic system he is attacking. Again, it is hard to tell whether he's being dialectical, or giving us his own position. Notice though that if it is his own position, it would give him an escape to the previous problem about self-refutation. He can say that he does not actually believe that one should never form beliefs. He's actually not sure about this. Still, given the arguments that undermine any possible criterion of truth, it does strike him as reasonable that one should never form beliefs, so he never does. Now, I know what you're thinking. What exactly is the difference between believing something and taking it to be reasonable? Of course, that's a problem for Zeno's Stoics, too, but it seems more pressing for Arcesilaus than for Zeno, since his whole stance is now turning on this distinction. So it's no surprise that the next head of the skeptical academy, Carnaides, devoted considerable attention to this question of how the skeptics' actions are guided. Using different terminology, he said that certain impressions strike us as pithanon. The word means persuasive or plausible. Like Arcesilaus, he suggests that these impressions will be used as a practical guide by the skeptic. But he went further, observing that the standards we use will differ depending on how high the stakes are. In the normal course of affairs, one bit of evidence will suffice. For instance, if I'm looking for the giraffes, I'll just ask another zoo visitor and follow their directions. But what if it is really important if, say, I need to be at the giraffe enclosure in five minutes to pay a ransom to the giraffe nappers who are demanding one million dollars for the safe return of Hiawatha? Then I will want to make extra sure. Similarly, Carnaides suggests that our caution will vary in accordance with the importance of the matter at hand, and that in really crucial situations, I will not, for instance, merely look several times, but also consider the lighting conditions, whether anyone might be trying to deceive me, and so on. In short, when the chips are down, I'll do all the things the stoic sage would do to make sure he's having a cognitive impression. Only when these tests are passed will I pronounce myself persuaded. But the arguments against the stoic position are still taken as decisive, so even in these circumstances I will not take myself to be certain. I will not delude myself into believing that my impressions really are cognitive, meaning that they could not possibly be false. There is always room for doubt. Carnaides presents us with a conundrum. On the one hand, there is this Carnaides I've just been describing, who seems happy to allow us to take ourselves to be pretty sure about things for all intents and purposes, even if the stoic criterion of truth remains unsatisfied. On the other hand, there is the Carnaides who showed up in Rome during the embassy of philosophers in 155 BC, as mentioned by David Sedley in my interview with him. On that occasion, Carnaides scandalized his audience by arguing in favor of justice, and then on the next day arguing just as persuasively against everything he'd said in the first speech. This kind of logical, scorched-earth campaign hadn't been seen since the days of the sophists. That sound you hear might be Plato slapping his forehead with disbelief, as a head of his academy shows that it is possible to argue with equal plausibility on both sides of the most important issues we face. On the other hand, as I've said, Socrates too was pretty good at arguing people to a standstill. The real question is what Carnaides wanted the audience to learn from his display. Even the most intimate associates of Carnaides already felt the difficulty of determining his exact view. His follower, Cleitomachus, who took over as scholar of the academy in 127 BC, set forth a dialectical reading like the one we considered for Arcesilaus. Cleitomachus frankly admitted that Carnaides was impossible to understand fully. This was intended not as a criticism, but as an expression of his admiration for Carnaides, whose skepticism was of a depth that simply could not be fathomed. Nonetheless, he was confident that Carnaides was a thoroughgoing skeptic who argued for global suspension of belief, and who presented his practical criterion of plausibility only within the context of disputing with the Stoics. But other followers of Carnaides, who had also studied at the feet of the master, disagreed. For them, Carnaides had indeed been suggesting that we can allow ourselves belief of a sort, assenting to impressions which strike us as plausible, while of course stressing that this kind of belief is always fallible. The leading proponent of this reading was another student of Carnaides, Philo of Larissa. For some skeptics, Philo's stance was all too moderate. To mark the difference between the hard-headed skepticism that dispensed with all belief, and the half-hearted skepticism light of Philo, they took up a new figurehead. This new figurehead was also the oldest figurehead available, Pyro. Returning to this earliest of the skeptics, they rejected the skeptical academy as a fall from grace, and initiated the last phase of ancient skepticism, calling it pyranism. It was this form of skepticism that was embraced by Sextus Empiricus in the 2nd century AD. He will finally supply us with a leading skeptic who wrote extensively, and whose writings are preserved to this day. The subtle defense Sextus provides for the non-doctrine of Pyrronian skepticism ranks among the great achievements of later ancient philosophy, and we'll be discussing it in a few episodes. But first, we need to stay in the 1st century BC, and with Philo of Larissa. His importance is to some extent a function of geography. Carnaides had visited Rome, but Philo of Larissa actually moved there. He made a huge impression, not least on Cicero, whose own fairly mild-mannered brand of academic skepticism is derived chiefly from encountering Philo. Cicero also details for us one more heated rivalry between Philo and his student Antiochus. Both of them claimed to be members of the academy, but Antiochus broke with the new academy and embraced dogmatism, setting out a kind of grand synthesis which found common ground between the Stoics, Plato, and even Aristotle. Antiochus was displeased when Philo, newly arrived in Rome, published books setting out his moderate skepticism. His rebuttal of those books constituted nothing less than a contest for the soul of the academy. It was these contentious events that set the stage for Cicero's composition of the academica, which, as I have said, is only one of numerous Ciceroian works indispensable to our understanding of Hellenistic philosophy. And, of course, it's fascinating to see Cicero, a famous player on the stage of Roman politics, turn his hand to philosophy. But does Cicero have anything to offer the historian of philosophy, apart from his famous name and a wealth of otherwise lost information? For our podcast, this question is anything but academic, so we'll try to answer it next time, on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Rhetorical Questions, Cicero. Julius Caesar was a man who was used to getting his own way. So when another man, Quintus Ligarius, took sides against Caesar in a war in Africa, he had him hauled into court so that Ligarius could be executed. This seemed a foregone conclusion. Caesar had already seized unchallenged power as dictator for life over the Romans. But Caesar had not reckoned with the defense council, who was a man of considerable eloquence. The defense council launched into a speech in exoneration of Ligarius, which we can still read today. The speech admitted that Ligarius was on the ground in Africa, but argued strenuously that he had done nothing to oppose Caesar's will. As the speech continued, Caesar began to shake with anger, outraged that the outcome was being thrown into doubt by this upstart lawyer. In the end, Ligarius was acquitted. As for Caesar, on this occasion, he came, he saw, and he was conquered. The name of the upstart lawyer was, of course, Marcus Tullius Cicero. He was one of the greatest minds of Rome in that or any age, and wielded one of its most silver tongues. Cicero was born in 106 BC near Rome into the equestrian class, but his career was built more on talent than on any exalted family background. He served as both questor and consul, and well before his defense of Ligarius he had made a name for himself as the most brilliant legal orator Roman society had to offer. Perhaps the peak of his rhetorical achievements was a set of speeches denouncing a man named Catiline for conspiring to overthrow the Republic. These speeches, and the many other oratorical displays of Cicero that survive today, stand as a monument of good Latin style. For many readers, such as St. Augustine, Ciceroan Latin has been more or less synonymous with good Latin. But Cicero was more than an orator and politician, otherwise we would hardly be devoting an episode to him in this series of podcasts. He was also a philosopher. Indeed, without the philosophical writings of Cicero, there would have been much less to say over the last dozen episodes. Along with Diogenes Laertius, Cicero is the most important source to preserve the ideas of the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptical Academy. He is also the chief source for several major thinkers of his own time. Cicero's own philosophical stance was the outcome of a critical reflection on the teachings of these thinkers. He tells us that only the weak-minded will adhere to a philosophical position out of devotion to a school, rather than out of this sort of independent reflection. Though his writings on philosophy show that Cicero found much to admire in Stoicism, it was the skeptical position that won his heart. This is why I am discussing him here, as we continue to follow the developing story of ancient skepticism. Cicero lived at just the right time to think hard about the relative merits of the Hellenistic schools. The first century BC was a crucial time for the infusion of Greek ideas into Roman society. A series of wars gave Rome secure dominion over Greece, but during the upheaval of these leaders, many well-educated Greeks sought refuge in the embrace of Rome. One of these was the leading academic skeptic, Philo of Larissa, and Cicero studied with him. Cicero was a broad-minded man, though, and also opened his house to a Stoic philosopher named Diodotus. If Rome offered a home away from home to such philosophers as Philo and Diodotus, Athens offered something equally compelling to such Romans as Cicero. It was the home of philosophy. Cicero made the pilgrimage there when he was in his twenties. At Athens, he was able to study with Epicurean philosophers, but more crucial for Cicero's intellectual development was the opportunity to study at the feet of Antiochus of Ascalon. We're fortunate that Cicero had this opportunity, because Antiochus seems to have been one of the most interesting and influential thinkers of the first century BC, and without Cicero's testimony, we would know very little about him. Antiochus, like Cicero himself, was a disciple of Philo of Larissa. But Cicero reports that Antiochus broke angrily with the teachings of Philo when Antiochus received a copy of books Philo had written in Rome. Upon reading them, he was stunned, and at first could hardly believe that Philo was really their author. But once he overcame his skepticism, he disowned Philo and challenged him with a diametrically opposed view on the main philosophical issues of the day and on the history of philosophy itself. You'll remember from last time that Philo was a member of the so-called New Academy, who seems to have softened the skeptical teaching. He held the academic line against the Stoics, insisting that we can never be sure that our impressions are true. But even if absolute certainty remains out of reach, one can still commit oneself and follow plausible belief. This was a new kind of skeptical attitude which allowed its adherents to assent to their impressions. Philo may even have held that when we assent to what is plausible, and it turns out that we are right, this counts as knowledge, albeit a weaker kind of knowledge than the one envisioned by the Stoics. Suppose your friend asks you to name a kind of ruminant animal, apart from the giraffe. Your friend is an avid podcast listener and is sick to death of giraffes. You answer, goats, and you're right, goats are indeed ruminants. Even while being very confident about this, you might admit that you could be wrong. There was that embarrassing incident last month when you identified the spider monkey as an arachnid. Philo says that we must be satisfied with such true judgments that leave open the possibility of error. That is as good as it gets, because no one can have total certainty about anything, not even about whether goats share the exalted company of giraffes and other ruminants by having four stomachs. Antiochus was probably not upset by the fact that Philo had no stomach for defending a stronger skeptical position. As we'll see in a moment, Antiochus himself wanted to adopt an even less skeptical position. Rather, I suspect, what really got his goat was Philo's claim about their shared philosophical heritage. For Philo, the whole tradition of the academy was unified. Socrates and Plato had already adopted the stance recommended by the new academy, embraced what seems most like the truth while realizing that we lack total certainty. Socrates knew only that he knew nothing, as we know from Plato's dialogues, but this didn't stop him from assenting to many beliefs, for instance that it is good to pursue wisdom and virtue. As Cicero puts it, they call the skeptical academy new, but it seems old to me. Against this, Antiochus defended an alternative history. For him, the new academy had opened a schism in the fundamentally unified philosophy of the ancients. Antiochus anticipates the direction Platonist philosophy would take in subsequent generations by adopting a syncretic approach. What I mean by this is that he admires a range of philosophers and philosophical traditions and carefully harmonizes them into a single overall position. He traces his lineage above all to Plato and Aristotle, but also believes that the early Stoics were part of the family. When presenting Antiochus's position, Cicero says that for him, the Stoics were basically just following Plato and Aristotle and changing the terminology. For all of these thinkers, knowledge is possible, knowledge is needed in order to make virtue possible, and virtue guarantees happiness. Without knowledge of what is good, we cannot be good people, and good people are happy people. By focusing especially on these issues of knowledge and on ethical concerns, Antiochus makes a reasonable case for a historical claim that may strike us as preposterous. We certainly do not see Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as occupying the same philosophical position, but Antiochus is contrasting these admired figures to the new academy, who think knowledge is impossible, and to the Epicureans, who think that happiness lies in pleasure and not virtue. By comparison, he sees the differences between Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism as relatively minor. For instance, he notes that Aristotle rejected the existence of Platonic forms, but he thinks this pales in significance compared to Aristotle's loyalty on the questions of virtue and knowledge. Now, I know what you're thinking. This episode is about Cicero, so why do I keep going on about Philo and Antiochus? It isn't only because Cicero is our primary source of information about the dispute, it's also because the dispute was crucial to Cicero's own philosophical viewpoint. After some ruminating of his own, Cicero decided that Philo had the better of the argument. In his own philosophical works, he adopts the quintessentially skeptical practice of exploring arguments from all the philosophical schools. He's explicit about following this strategy, saying that he discusses philosophy in utromque partem, on both sides of every dispute. For instance, Cicero's work on the nature of the gods pits an Epicurean spokesman and a Stoic spokesman against a new academic critic named Cotta. The adherents of the two dogmatic schools are given ample space to defend their respective theological views. Indeed, one of the three books of the work is devoted entirely to the exposition of the Stoic theory. But then Cotta demolishes each position, leaving the reader where Cicero too finds himself, in a state of well-considered doubt. Along the way, of course, we learn valuable information about the Hellenistic schools, and this work on the nature of the gods remains one of our most important sources for Stoic and Epicurean theology. But Cicero is more than just a source to be mined for information about other thinkers. Even when writing philosophy, Cicero is still a rhetorician, and many times he insists that good philosophy should be stylistically appealing. He criticizes other contemporary thinkers for their poor style—he seems to have in mind especially Epicurean authors, which is ironic given that he was a contemporary of the great Epicurean poet Lucretius. When Cicero follows Antiochus, in taking Plato and Aristotle as his heroes, he emphasizes not only their dialectical approach to philosophy, but also their rhetorical craft. Aristotle is praised for his inquiries into rhetoric, and Plato appears repeatedly as a master of language as well as thought. For Cicero, Plato is, as he has a Stoic spokesman put it, almost a god of philosophers. This point is underscored even when Cicero is praising others—for instance, when he says that Aristotle is the best philosopher, apart from the obvious exception of Plato, the greatest of all. Cicero paid homage to his Greek exemplars not only by discussing their ideas, but also by translating them into Latin. He undertook a Latin translation of Plato's Timaeus, though he didn't manage to complete it. His own works are festooned with translations of passages from Greek, especially Plato. Cicero rightly prides himself not only on his facility with Latin, but also on his ability to render Greek accurately and in good style. He frequently draws attention to the difficulty of translating Greek technical terms, and briefly discusses the merits of alternative Latin versions. For instance, he suggests perturbatio, disorder, rather than a word meaning disease, to capture the Stoic term pathos. In some cases, Cicero's decisions have prevailed down to the current day. For instance, he translates the Greek poiotetes into Latin as qualitates, and we follow him in translating this word as qualities. Menaca claims that the Latin word essentia, the root of our English word essence, was invented by Cicero to correspond to the Greek usia. Cicero's love of Greek and rhetorical prowess were not the only features of his personal history to make themselves felt in his histories of philosophy. In fact, the question of why Cicero wrote so much about philosophy can be answered only by looking a bit more at his life story. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that he was no fan of Julius Caesar, and the feeling was mutual. He was forced to leave Rome under the first triumvirate when Rome was ruled by Caesar together with Crassus and Pompey. Cicero was able to return in 57 BC, but his renewed opposition meant that when Caesar assumed the dictatorship, Cicero was effectively excluded from politics. This left him with some time on his hands, for which we can be grateful. Most of Cicero's philosophical works were written in the mid-forties BC, while he was cast into the political wilderness. During this time, he was also struck by personal tragedy. His beloved daughter died in childbirth in 45 BC. Thus, a key theme of Hellenistic philosophy had a deep resonance for Cicero. Can philosophy offer us consolation in the face of suffering? Skeptical leanings notwithstanding, Cicero answers this question with a fairly resounding yes in one of his greatest philosophical writings, the Tusculan Disputations. Despite the title, this is not a set of arguments about elephants, but rather a dialogue set in Tusculum where Cicero owned a villa, which included two exercise areas named the Academy and the Lyceum. The dialogue is between two unnamed characters who are considering philosophical arguments on subjects like the fear of death, whether the sage would ever feel distress, and whether we should attempt to eliminate all emotions. Cicero repeats his officially academic stance, declaring that he always follows what seems persuasive, rather than seeking certainty. But aside from this caveat, he supports a strikingly stoic viewpoint. Epicurus is praised for saying that all pain can be mastered, but the praise is damningly faint. Cicero adds that it is hard to see how a hedonist can consistently give such advice. This is typical of his attitudes towards the Epicureans, and also the Aristotelians. Rather disappointingly, Cicero seems to follow the line of other Hellenistic schools in reducing Aristotelian ethics to the claim that external goods, like wealth and health, are intrinsically valuable. Cicero has little patience with this, seeing it as soft-minded. It is unsurprising, then, that he prefers the Stoics, whom he sees as the most tough-minded philosophers and thus as the rightful heirs of the ethical teachings of Socrates and Plato. Like them, the Stoics insist that perfect virtue and wisdom guarantee happiness. Cicero finds this idea to be persuasive, if not certain, and also a potential source of great comfort. He thus agrees with the Stoics that philosophy is the art of healing the soul, as medicine is the art of healing the body. This isn't to say that he hesitates to borrow ideas from schools other than the Stoics. Even the Cyrenaics—remember them?—are commended for their useful advice about anticipating pain so that the pain is less hard to bear when it arrives. Nor are Cicero's favorite Hellenistic dogmatists, the Stoics, above criticism. He complains about their pedantry on more than one occasion, and finds the all-or-nothing ethical theory of the early Stoics too simplistic. In a wonderful rhetorical turn, he writes, Nonetheless, in the Tusculans, Cicero could often pass for a Stoic himself, as when he argues that emotions like anger have no place in the good life. In such passages, Cicero evokes the somewhat later Stoic Seneca, rather than earlier academic skeptics like Arcesilaus. Cicero seems to take sides in other philosophical disputes too. We've already mentioned his work on the nature of the gods. It is pretty rude about the Epicureans, but ends with a qualified endorsement of Stoic theology. He says it seems to be a closer likeness of truth. Another Stoic-inspired work is called De Officiis, roughly On Befitting Actions, since Cicero uses the Latin word officium to translate the Greek katheikon. As you'll remember, Stoics use this word to refer to befitting actions performed by non-sages. Cicero's treatise on the topic draws extensively on the teachings of the Stoic philosopher Panatius, with whom Cicero had a chance to study when he visited the city of Rhodes. So it was thanks to Cicero that these philosophical teachings from Rhodes were led to Rome. Yet another work that argues positively for various philosophical claims is an early treatise with the familiar-sounding title De Republica. Although there is clearly an allusion to Plato's Republic here, we should also not miss the resonance with the Roman Republic itself. Cicero was a lifelong advocate of the traditional Roman model, according to which power is placed in the hands of an aristocratic legislative body, the Senate. He followed Plato and Aristotle in distrusting democracy, because the people are not likely to deliberate effectively. But he was equally opposed to the sort of autocratic rule exercised by Caesar. For Cicero, a legitimate state gets its legitimacy from the fact that it rules in the interests of the people, who have transferred rights and freedom to the aristocratic legislatures for the sake of furthering these interests. Incidentally, like Plato's Republic, Cicero's work ends with a kind of mythic narrative that integrates cosmology into the fabric of a treatise on politics. In Cicero's version, the famous Roman general Scipio Africanus appears to his grandson in a dream vision. This work was later the subject of an influential commentary by an author named Macrobius. We may come back to it at some point. On the whole, then, Cicero sets forth a good deal of positive philosophical doctrine, which is not exactly what you'd expect from a self-confessed academic. Though there have been suspicions that Cicero's devotion to the academic viewpoint wavered, I think we should rather remember that he was a follower of Philo of Larissa. Philo encourages us to follow what is plausible or persuasive, and this is what Cicero does. He often says explicitly, when preferring one view to another, that it is being preferred only as more persuasive and not as definitely true. Hence that last purposefully noncommittal line of his work on the gods, which says not that the Stoic view is true, but that it seems to Cicero a closer likeness of truth. Of course, Cicero was able to make persuasive doctrines even more persuasive by setting them forth in his highly crafted Latin. Indeed, if we had to point to Cicero's chief philosophical contribution, it would be his role in ushering Greek philosophical ideas into Latin. He points to this himself, remarking at one point that in his works, philosophy is being born in the Latin tongue. Philo's brand of academic skepticism would not outlive Cicero, its most famous exponent. In fact, as we'll see before long, skepticism will soon take a more radical turn in reaction against Philo. Cicero's welcoming of Greek philosophy into Latin prose was a far more lasting achievement. No less an author than Augustine would look back to Cicero as a major source, even discussing the topic of skepticism in a title called Contra Academikos, that is, Against the Academics. So it would be worth our while, before moving on to look at later skepticism, to stay here in Cicero's villa for another episode. For some edifying discussion about Cicero's philosophical allegiances and contribution, I'll be turning once more to my colleague, Raphael Wolf. I hope you'll be persuaded to join us both next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Cicero with my colleague here at King's, Raphal Wolf. Hi, Raphal. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Pleasure. Well, we're going to be talking about Cicero, as I just said, and he has always been of interest to historians of philosophy, but I guess more usually because of what he tells us about other philosophers. But you're actually writing a book about Cicero, so I suppose you must think that he's worth studying in his own right. Why do you think that? Well, I do think that, and hopefully it'll be a more interesting book as a result. I think I'm not alone in thinking that. I think I'd like to say a little bit maybe about how one sort of gets to this stage of thinking of Cicero as a philosophical author who's worth reading in his own right. I mean, he's unquestionably a very, very important source for earlier Greek philosophical thinking, particularly the Hellenistic age, and partly because of the accident of history that we don't have. We have virtually nothing that the founders of Stoicism and even Epicurus wrote themselves. So the fact that Cicero took himself to be transmitting this material for a Roman audience, we might come back to sort of that aspect later, but that has given, that has made him probably an even more important figure for the history philosophy than he himself might have recognized. So in a way, it's no surprise that scholars have spent a lot of time, as it were, looking at Cicero and using Cicero for the purpose of finding out what previous important thinkers thought. But I think we've now come to the stage where it's almost, and I think this is a good thing, it's almost sort of disreputable to simply regard Cicero as just a useful source for other thinkers, though he undoubtedly is that. I think more and more scholars are recognizing that the way he writes, the way he constructs his philosophical works indicates that there's much more going on than the sort of simple transmission of other people's ideas. So I think I'm trying to sort of just take that idea forward a little bit. Is one reason why he's now thought to be more interesting that he's himself coming out of a certain tradition within Hellenistic philosophy, namely the skeptical tradition? Yes, I think so. I think that's certainly one aspect of it. And the sort of particular brand of skepticism, I mean, I think one of the interesting questions about Cicero is it's actually quite hard, and this is sort of one of the things I want to sort of claim about him, that it's actually quite hard to pin him down. I think that in some ways, and I'll try not to talk about Plato too much in this particular attempt, as I always am, but in some ways you can look at him a little bit like one might look at Plato as somebody who's actually quite elusive. There's a sort of rather kind of, I think, naive reading of Cicero where, for example, if you look at some of the things he has to say about the Epicureans, it looks like straightforward he thinks they're rubbish to not to put too fine a point on it. And I think there's much more going on than that. I think he actually doesn't want to tell us what to think about the philosophers that he discusses. And I think the skepticism is one feature of that. So I think I'll say for present purposes, and I don't think it's too inaccurate, that he did, if he sort of nailed his colours to any mast, it was the mast of what's known as academic skepticism, which unlike the other kind of skepticism, Peronian skepticism, Peronian skepticism, again, I won't go on too much about the different types, but Peronian skepticism basically kind of says, anything you can say in favour of position, you can say an equal amount against and what we do is suspend judgment. And basically, we ultimately don't take any notice of these philosophical theories. The academic skepticism is much more interesting, I think, in this regard. It certainly doesn't think you can have certain knowledge. So every position that either you or anybody else might uphold is fallible, subject to revision and correction. But on the other hand, academic skeptics do think that certain positions are more plausible, probable than other positions. And what that means in sort of Cicero's context, when he's talking about previous thinkers is that he can do things, he doesn't have to dismiss them and say, well, you know, there's nothing more we can say for than against. So forget about even trying to engage with these guys ultimately, he can say, he can make assessments, he can make critical judgments, he can compare one philosophical school with another and actually he can express a view about one versus another. But I think he, that also means the fallibility of skepticism also allows him to, as it were, leave it to the reader to make their judgments because all judgments are fallible. He actually says sometimes that it's very important to reflect for yourself on the validity of philosophical arguments rather than just following a school because it's the school to which you adhere. So what you're suggesting is that it's not merely that he did that himself, but that he's trying to make it possible for you to do that by writing his works in such a way as to present the views before you. Exactly. I think that one of the ways he does this is by writing sometimes in, for example, dialogue form. So he has, I mean, we're maybe going to talk a bit more about one specific work later, the ethical work called On Ends, De Finibus. And that's written as kind of a series of dialogues that an Epicurean spokesman makes the case for Epicureanism, Cicero then gives a critical response. Then the same happens for Stoicism and then the same happens for the theory of Antiochus, which is a slightly more obscure theory. But it's the same pattern that a spokesman for Antiochus' philosophy makes the case for it and then Cicero makes the case against. And I think it's sort of crucial that we're not just supposed to think well. And it's actually very, when you think about it, it's actually very hard to just think, well, there's some determinate thing that Cicero wants us to take away from that. It's not that he ends up saying, well, Stoicism is the right philosophy or Epicureanism is. He says basically they've all got something to be said for them. I think it's important to realize that. Maybe I'll just, if I could just give a little quote perhaps, because this is, I mean, because we've been talking a lot about what I think Cicero is up to. It's worth saying that Cicero himself gives us some fairly good indications what he is up to. So here's a little quote from the prologue of On Ends. And this is what he says about what he thinks he's doing. And this is a translation you endorse, presumably because this is your translation. This is a translation. Yes, it is. So of course, being a skeptic myself, I endorse nothing even in my own translation. But for present purposes, here's what he says. If he'd written in English, he'd have said the following. This is part of my translation of the prologue of On Ends. And he says, he says, what of it if I do not perform the task of a translator, but preserve the views of those whom I consider sound while contributing my own judgment and order of composition? Now that, I think that means we have to take very seriously the idea that Cicero isn't simply blandly presenting predecessors' views and leaving it at that. If you think about how much scope the idea of contributing one's own judgment and indeed one's own structure, he talks about order of composition, then I think you're going to owe Cicero the idea that there's a much more critical and complex engagement with his predecessors going on than a simple transmission of ideas. So let's talk a little bit more about this work, On Ends. Maybe you could say a little bit more first about what is it about. So you've said it's an ethical work, but it's called On Ends. It's called On Ends, yes. What are the ends in question? Well, the ends in question are basically the goals that one should pursue in order to live a good life. So it's concerned with, to use a sort of slightly less obscure phrase than an end, it's concerned with the highest human good or goods. So basically the sort of fundamental goods that a good life is constituted from. And there are a series of different positions. So the Epicureans think that pleasure is the highest good and therefore that's what should be one's end and what the good life consists in. The Stoics think it's virtue. Antiochus, again, a bit more difficult to pin down, but seems to think it's sort of virtue but a bit of a mix of other more sort of worldly goods, if you like, as well. So that's the basic structure of the work. It's a discussion of the different views about the highest human good that different philosophical schools propounded. And it does come out in this that he has a lot less time for the Epicureans. I mean, there's a parallel actually. So in On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero presents the Stoic view, he presents the Epicurean view, and he has a skeptical mouthpiece criticized both. And it's very clear that the Stoic view is thought to be more sophisticated and interesting than the Epicurean view. And the same sort of thing happens here, doesn't it? I think probably ultimately, again, as a skeptic, he's allowed to make comparative adjustments. He's allowed to think that one theory is more plausible than another. And I think it would be sort of taking things a bit too far for me to suggest that if you'd ask Cicero, you know, stoicism or Epicureanism, you know, give me a one word answer. I think it would be stoicism. And I think he's not ultimately a great fan of Epicureanism. But I think it's more complex than that, both because, you know, if you remember what he says in the prologue, he says, and I think this sometimes, you know, people don't quite take proper account of this. He says, I'm going to put before you the views of those I consider sound. Now that's actually an, it sounds fairly bland, but when you think about it, it's actually not entirely straightforward to then square that with the idea that he's going to talk about a view he just considers rubbish. I mean, he could have said something like, and I think this is also something he believes, but it's terribly influential and pernicious and many Romans, including his best friend Atticus were Epicurean. So he has a kind of, there's a kind of personal issue at stake for him. But he doesn't say that. He says views I consider sound. And I think if one starts looking maybe at some of the detail of what he says, it's not clear that the epic that Epicureanism is just getting straightforwardly lambasted. And I think that the other point to make is sort of, again, regardless of Cicero's own view, I think it's terribly important that, again, the sort of the way he structures on ends and some of the other works in a particular kind of complex way. For him, the most important thing is not what he thinks. And he's not trying to get us to think anything in particular. He's trying to present the views in a way that will make us, as it were, be good skeptics and engage with these views and think them through for ourselves. And I think that's probably what's happening with Epicureanism. I guess this goes together with something you've already mentioned, which is that it's written as a dialogue. Yes. And you said that you think that's important. What effect does it have on ends that it is written as a dialogue? Well, I think, I suppose first thing to say, it's not quite the sort of cut and thrust of a Socratic dialogue. It's not sort of question and answer back and forth. It's more like a sort of exchange of speeches. Nonetheless, I think it does make it harder for us to say that either the view that's being propounded or the view that's being criticised is what we're supposed to take away and think is true. And there's actually a more, the complexity goes beyond the fact that they're dialogues. I mean, firstly, of course, it's a series of dialogues. Secondly, remember this guy Cicero who's written this prologue, right? I don't want to go on too much of the problem. The prologue is a really interesting indication of the complexity of the way he's writing. So there's a prologue and then there are three separate dialogues within that, as we've already said, and the dialogues are all set at times earlier than the prologue and they're all set at times different from one another. Now I think if you think about what that means, first thing it means is that one's not necessarily, so when Cicero, the guy taking part in the dialogue as it were within the work is saying nasty things about, if indeed that's what he's doing, but let's say he's saying nasty things about Epicureanism, certainly doesn't follow automatically from that, that the guy who's writing at a different time the prologue will have identical views. Why should he? He's a sceptic. He's inquiring. It's not, it's similarly not clear that the Cicero who pops up to critique the Epicureans will have exactly the same outlook as the Cicero who pops up to critique the Stoics or Antichrist because it's a different time. So in all these ways I think he's incurring us not to think there's something there that we're supposed to just read off. And that's another difference from Plato because, I mean, it's not just the fact that the speeches are longer in Cicero's dialogues, but Plato famously never makes himself a character in his dialogues, whereas Cicero does. Yes, yes he does. And I think, I mean, I think it would be probably too kind of me to deny that there's a bit of ego there. I think Cicero is anxious among other things, but I think this is another reason to take him very seriously, to sort of promote himself as somebody who's doing something important here. So I think that's kind of one reason. And yes, indeed, certainly on ends, he is the respondent in every case and he's kind of, you know, you can't get away from his presence. That having been said, I think he was famous and he knew he was famous. And I think ironically, actually, that kind of helps because he's, you know, he's a skeptic. He's, as much as one can pin him down, he's a sort of self-proclaimed skeptic. And I think in that sense, the fact that you actually have someone identified as a skeptical figure is helpful because it gives a certain signal to the reader about the right approach to reading these dialogues. I mean, Plato is in a way harder because you can't even say, although it's very tempting to say, you can't even exactly say, well, Plato wants us to take a skeptical attitude. He's not there and we don't know. And of course, that has its own interest from an interpretive point of view. But I think Cicero is there and he's there as a skeptical presence and he's there to tell us that that's how we should approach this. Do you think that there's anything in On Ends that we could say is actually original with Cicero? So presumably since he's a skeptic, not original ethical theories, but for example, original criticisms of Epicureanism or Stoicism? Yeah, I would say so. And I mean, I think firstly, he's just, you know, he's a very intelligent guy. And I think as a matter of fact, a lot of what he has to say in critique can't necessarily be tracked down to other sources. And he's actually very worthwhile reading in its own right. But I think there are, so certainly, yes, I think, although I neither I think I nor he would want to claim he's an original thinker in the way that the philosophers he's discussing are, I think he's well worth reading just if you want to see intelligently aimed. And I think in a number of cases, non-derivative criticism of philosophers. But I think there are some very specific Cicero-ian angles that actually are particularly sort of characteristic of him. And I think one we might want to talk about is the fact that he's writing as a Roman. And again, going back to the prologue, which I think is kind of terribly important to assess what's happening in the work like on ends. The thing he's kind of obsesses about in the prologue is whether and he tries to defend the idea that trying to do Greek philosophy in Latin is a worthwhile task. So he's setting before us this. And of course, again, I think on one level, it's a very straightforward defense that he feels he needs to run because there are clearly Romans, perhaps somewhat ironically, who think that, as it were, Latin isn't really a very appropriate language for the subtleties of Greek philosophy. And Cicero is very keen to say, you're wrong. At some point, I think a little hyperbolically, he says Latin is better for writing philosophy in Greek. So don't give me this stuff about the Greeks. On the other hand, I think the fact that he's obsessing about this is it gives us some kind of indication that he thinks in various ways it's important that he's a Roman engaging with Greek philosophy and that some of the ways in which he goes about critiquing the Epicureans and the Stoics is very much from the perspective of a Roman. I think there are probably some quite interesting things to. He's part of that because he thinks that, for example, the Epicurean ethical theory would make it very hard to uphold traditional Roman values of integrity and bravery and political engagement and so on. Very, very, very, very much so. And it's very noteworthy that a lot of, I mean, throughout the work, but perhaps particularly pointedly with the Epicureans, a lot of the strategy is to say, look, Epicureans simply doesn't fit. This is what a surface reading would tell you. I think there's probably more to be said, but at first glance, it looks like a lot of the critique of Epicureanism consists in rolling out various, to use the Latin phrase exemplar, various sort of examples of great Roman figures and the values they upheld. And to say to Torquatus, who's this Epicurean, who's actually the scion of a very noble Roman family, but he's an Epicurean. And to say to Torquatus, look, your ancestors couldn't possibly have done what they did within a system of Epicurean values. Now, you might want to say, oh, well, that's just Cicero being a sort of blustering Roman. And again, there's probably a grain of truth in that. I think in a number of ways, it's more interesting than that. I mean, firstly, just think about Cicero's background. Cicero was not a traditional patrician Roman. He's what's known as a Novus homo, a new man, somebody who didn't, who basically reached the top of the political tree without belonging to one of the great traditional Roman families. He's not a military man. He's a great admirer of Greek culture. Now, and again, he knows that the reader knows this, apart from the fact that he often talks about it explicitly himself anyway, which immediately suggests he's perhaps not going to be a straightforward upholder of Roman values, that there are going to be more interesting things to be said than that. And I think, I mean, just sort of for starters, you might ask, well, why exactly is it a critique of a philosophical theory to say it doesn't fit in with my values? I mean, why not say so much the worse for my values? You might think that's a very odd way of saying that. That was sort of the Epicurean's point, wasn't it? That people might have the wrong values. Exactly. And I think all the ancient schools were to some extent determinately being radically revisionary and saying, you know, now then the question is, is Cicero just sort of obtuse to that idea or is he in a rather subtle way making a little bit more of it? And I think, I mean, one and I think there are lots of things to say about that. I think one thing to say is that there's a facet, again, just to give a tiny little quote, because I think this is this is really quite important when you're thinking about how Cicero thinks about the relationship between Roman values and the Greek ethical systems that he's that he's discussing. He's talking about, again, the Epicureans. This is from Book Two of On Ends. And he says and he's again on the surface being rather critical of the Epicurean habit of, which was actually, we might think, one of the rather enlightened things about Epicureanism. They praise women and sort of, as it were, female virtues. And Cicero seems to get into a bit of a huff about this and says, let us leave that to the Greeks. I'm now quoting from my translation. We are indebted to them for philosophy, he says, interestingly enough, and for all higher and for all higher learning. But there are things that they may do which we should not. Now, OK, there's now again, one way to read that is to say Romans write Greek theories, which are inconsistent with Roman values. Wrong. That's not what he says. He actually says the Greeks can do things which we may not. He's not saying he's not saying we're objectively right. And those guys are, he's just said, you know, we owe them sort of. So, again, it's a much more nuanced statement. And I think, sort of as it were, the upshot of all this. Is that there's actually a serious ethical point about whether ethical theories should be universal or whether the idea that. A sort of successful ethics has to grow out of things like local traditions and local cultures and local values. Is actually the only realistic way of. Doing ethics now, that would still mean that there's a in a certain sense, a critique of epicureanism, but it's a much more it's a much more subtle one. It's a critique that says, look, maybe it's fine for a different kind of society, but it's not OK for us. Not because it's objectively better or worse, but because. You know, there are things we may do that other guys may not because we have our own traditions and backgrounds and values. And it's a more interesting kind of critique than one might think, just a blustering Roman who thinks Romans are right. I mean, he clearly doesn't think that Romans are right about everything. It's more interesting than that. It's particularly interesting, I think, because in the Pyronian skeptical tradition, one of the tropes that they use for undermining ethical theories is to say, well, in other cultures, they do it differently. So they'll say, oh, well, there are cultures where people have sex in public. Yes. And we wouldn't do that. Right. Which should get you to suspend judgments about whether it's OK to have sex in public. But it sounds like you're implying that his academic skepticism inspired by Philo of Larissa would be more along the lines of saying, well, for us, since we're in our culture, we shouldn't have sex in public. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think that's absolutely right, Peter. And I think it's the difference between indeed saying both, you know, both theories are wrong or both theories shouldn't be taken seriously because they're different and saying both theories are right, because that's what a good ethical theory does. It's something that has to grow out of local traditions and values. Would it be both theories are right, though, or is it more like both theories are acceptable for the people who find them plausible? Absolutely. Absolutely. I was going to say that I think, as it were, the the the methodology of skepticism actually fits that view of the relation of ethical theories to particular cultures very well. And yes, I suppose one should never quite use the word right, even about an academic skeptic plausible and part of that plausibility, part of what determines what's plausible for you is, of course, going to be your background beliefs and values. And that just seems to be a kind of sensible way to think about how ethics actually works in the real world. Cicero is concerned, if nothing else, with the real world. He's certainly a Roman in that in that regard. Well, next time, I'm going to actually be moving on to the next great skeptic, namely the ultimate Pyronian sextus empiricus. And you would certainly be right to join me for that. But for now, I'll thank Ravel Wulf very much for joining me. And I hope you will join me for sextus empiricus next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Healthy Skepticism, Sextus Empiricus. People have a lot of respect for doctors. Along with philosophy professors, they rank among the most admired members of our society. We turn to them in our hour of need, seeking not just basic competence, but total commitments, confidence, and self-assurance. You do not want to find hesitancy and uncertainty lurking in the facial expression of your doctor, any more than you want to hear it in the voice of the pilot making announcements as your plane goes through turbulence. So, it's ironic that the greatest of all the ancient skeptics was a doctor. He is known to us as Sextus Empiricus, and the Empiricus part refers to his membership in the Empiricist School of Medicine, a fact that I'll be returning to at the end of this podcast. Apart from that, we know little about him. Even his dates are, appropriately enough, uncertain, but he is thought to have lived in the 2nd century AD. That puts him a couple of centuries later than the last representatives of skepticism we've considered, the followers of Carnaides, like Philo of Larissa, and of course Cicero, lived in the 1st century BC. Their age was one of transition. The center of philosophical activity was moving from war-torn Athens to Rome, the center of political power moving from the hands of the Senate to those of a single ruler, Julius Caesar as dictator, followed by Augustus as princeps, and a line of emperors after that, including, of course, Marcus Aurelius, who, like Sextus, lived in the 2nd century. At this time, Aristotelianism and Platonism are beginning to make a comeback. Soon they will supplant the Hellenistic schools, Neoplatonism will take center stage, absorbing a lot of Aristotle, some Stoicism, not very much at all from Epicureanism, and little more from the skeptics. Thus, Sextus was, no doubt unwittingly, writing the last chapter of skepticism when he set out the arguments of his school. But he would not have let this bother him, because Sextus had mastered the art of not being bothered by anything. Ataraxia, the avoidance of disturbance, had been associated with skepticism since Pyro. Pyro lived some 500 years before Sextus, but Sextus took him as a role model and as the founder of the skeptical outlook, which he called Pyronism. His most frequently read work is a summary of the teaching, The Outlines of Pyronism. We have several other treatises which approach specific philosophical and scientific topics from a skeptical point of view. These may all have belonged originally to a single work. Because the skeptical approach more or less died out with Sextus, his writings were not very influential in subsequent centuries. Only when they were rediscovered in the 16th century did they make a sensation, inspiring pro- and anti-skeptical philosophical discussions in early modern philosophers ranging from Gassendi to Hume. Sextus does not originate the label of Pyronism. For that, we need to go back to the 1st century BC. If you recall, Philo of Larissa had endorsed a moderate or mitigated skepticism which recommended assenting to beliefs but realizing that this assent is fallible. Like radicals forming a new political party after their colleagues have moved towards the center ground, some skeptics found this moderate stance insufficiently, well, skeptical. The leading critic was Anessidimus, who complained that disputes among members of the academy boiled down to stoics arguing with stoics. The new party he founded was the Pyronists, and its platform was the banishment of belief. The long-dead pyro was taken as a namesake because he seemed to represent this more uncompromising sort of skepticism. This was a kind of back-to-basics rhetoric, attempting to undo the softening concessions made by the skeptical academy. Of course, the Pyronists, like the skeptical academy, would spend a good deal of their effort trying to undermine dogmatic views like those of the stoics. But Anessidimus also went on the offensive, devising one of the most characteristic features of Pyronian skepticism, the modes. A quick way to describe the modes would be to say that they are arguments to show that everything must remain unclear and uncertain, but that wouldn't be quite right. Sextus is clear that such a sweeping claim would in itself be a kind of doctrine, albeit a negative one, so it would count as dogmatism. Rather, the modes are like a toolkit for raising doubts concerning some given belief, or a whole type of beliefs. I don't have time to go through all ten modes, but I'll look at a few to give you an idea. The first mode refers to animals, and points out that since animals vary widely in terms of their physical makeup, they are likely to perceive things in very different ways. For instance, some kinds of insects find perfume repellent, which undermines the belief that it smells pleasant. While presenting this mode, Sextus argues against rejecting the impressions of irrational animals by suggesting that dogs, for instance, not only have sharper sense perceptions than we do, but are also capable of reasoning—an unusual idea in the context of ancient philosophy. Other modes turn on the variation between people. For instance, a healthy person may find honey sweet while an ill person will think it bitter, or variations between groups of people. Sextus delights in mentioning foreign cultural attitudes as a way of undermining his readers' ethical beliefs. Memorably, he claims, more than once, that in India, people have sex in public. Now, of course, neither Anessidimus nor Sextus was trying to show that perfume really is repellent, or that it is okay to have sex in public. Rather, the point is that with these modes, one can raise a doubt concerning just about any belief. This step is crucial, because unless an initial doubt can be raised, the skeptic's dogmatist opponents will say that there is no reason to suspend judgment. Now, I know what you're thinking. Just because a doubt has been raised doesn't mean we will immediately suspend judgment. And you're right. The ten modes are only an initial tool, which must be complemented by a further set of five modes, attributed to another skeptic named Agrippa. These modes are worth looking at carefully, because they form a genuinely formidable challenge to the possibility of rational belief. The five modes pick up where the ten modes left off. The first of the five is the mode of dispute, meaning that we point out a disagreement about whatever belief we are considering. Bees don't like perfume, for instance, but we do. The Stoics think pleasure is valueless, the Epicureans see it as the good. Most of us think motion exists, but Parmenides denies it. To this, we can add the fourth mode of relativity, that perceptions and judgments are relative to those who make them. These two modes basically do the same work as Anasidimos's ten modes, by raising initial doubt. The remaining three modes move in for the kill. Now that a dispute has been raised, how can either party to the dispute hope to settle it? Not by simply insisting that they are right, that would be begging the question, merely hypothesizing that their side of the argument is the correct one. We rule this out, which is called the mode of hypothesis. Suppose, for instance, that we are arguing over who is the greatest silent movie comedian, Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. If you say Chaplin, but refuse to give me any reasons for your view, this mode shows why I should not be convinced. But suppose you do give reasons. You might say, for instance, that Chaplin is more famous than Keaton. But why should I agree that being more famous means being greater? You might just insist without further rationale that fame decides the issue, but this too is debatable. So you might try to defend your appeal to Chaplin's fame on the basis of a further claim, for instance that that many people can't be wrong. But the problem is already obvious. This new claim will also be open to dispute. As the mode of regress says, there is no point appealing to an unending string of debatable points. At some point, to block off further debate, you'll have to just stop giving further reasons. At that point, you'll just be insisting that you're right, which we already saw will not work. The only other option is to argue in a circle, which brings us to the final mode, the reciprocal mode. If you say that Chaplin is greater because he's more famous, and more famous because he's greater, then you've made no case at all. You've just led me around in a circle. The upshot of this is twofold. First, as far as we can tell, every belief is debatable. Second, all disputes seem to be balanced, with neither party able to strike a knockout blow against the other. Things are left in the condition Sextus calls isothenia, in other words, a counterbalancing of views which seems incapable of resolution. It's important to note that Sextus really means the dispute is balanced. It isn't that one side of the argument seems more persuasive, yet there is some doubt remaining. That would leave open the moderate skeptical solution of endorsing the more persuasive side while being aware that one lacks certainty. Rather, the modes are meant to show that every belief involves a dispute where neither side has an advantage over the other. We suspend judgment because of the stalemate that arises once one has applied the modes. This skeptical strategy can be applied in a very general way, or a very specific way. We can apply it not just to silent comedians or the taste of honey, but also, for instance, sense perceptions in general. That seems to be the drift of Anesodemus's first mode, since it suggests that animals have systematically different sense experiences. Sextus tries to get the same result by opposing the senses to the mind itself. Previous philosophers like Democritus and Epicurus had worried about the possibility that sensation and the mind could disagree, for instance if the mind tells us that things are made of atoms and the senses do not. Sextus exploits this, pointing out that this fundamental dispute can immediately cast doubt on all our perceptions and all our thoughts. By way of example, he cites Anaxagoras, who said that the mind knows that snow is made of water. Since water is black, the senses are refuted by the mind, which realizes that snow is in fact black and not white. It's at this point that Ataraxia enters the picture. We began investigating because we were bothered by the status of some belief. We knew that it was disputable and wanted to discover the truth of the matter. It bothered us, perhaps, not to be able to prove that snow is white, that perfume is pleasant, that having sex in public is very uncool. You might think that the result of the skeptical process would be further frustration, but the Pyrenees claim that to the contrary, the suspension of judgment yields freedom from disturbance, the very goal we began with achieved through means we did not expect. Sextus compares this to the case of a painter who was trying to render the foam on the mouth of an exhausted horse. He tried repeatedly to get the effect he wanted, failing each time. Finally, he gave up and threw his sponge at the painting in despair. Lo and behold, the sponge left behind a perfect image of foam around the horse's mouth. It's a nice image, but in one respect misleading. Whereas the painter has given up in frustration, the skeptic, at least according to Sextus, has not given up investigating. Remember that the word skeptic means inquirer. True to this etymology, Sextus says that, whereas the dogmatists have their doctrines, and the skeptical academy has decided that inquiry is fruitless, he and his fellow Pyrenees are the ones who are still searching. Their undisturbed state is a relaxation that follows upon suspension of judgment. Despite the modes, it most certainly does not result from the discovery that all disputes are irrevocably undecidable. That, again, would be a dogma, a settled belief or doctrine, an indulgence a Pyronian will never allow himself. This brings us to the most difficult aspect of Sextus's skepticism, the question of whether he can really avoid having beliefs and whether he really wishes to do so. As with Pyro and the skeptical academy, there are two reasons to think Sextus may need to accept some form of assent or belief. First, there is his commitment to skepticism itself. Doesn't Sextus, for instance, believe that disputes are equally balanced, that it is right to suspend judgment, that Ataraxia results from suspension of judgment? Second, there is the objection that the skeptic will need beliefs just to get through life. Sextus solves both problems in the same way. He says that the Pyronian skeptic always suspends belief, but cannot help having things appear to him in a certain way. Thus, for instance, it seems to him that a given dispute is equally balanced, just as it seems to him that honey is sweet. The skeptic does not commit himself to any truth regarding these matters, but he does follow appearances. This is why he spreads honey on his toast, finds a private room when he's feeling romantic, and suspends judgment after applying the modes. This, of course, may seem to be moderate skepticism by another name. What is the difference between following an appearance and forming a belief? Isn't Sextus recommending a weak form of assent, as Philo of Larissa had done? He would insist otherwise. For one thing, Sextus promises that the skeptic remains genuinely open-minded about every issue he considers. He does not judge it more persuasive or convincing that the honey is sweet, he has absolutely no view on that matter whatsoever, because he has suspended judgment. If he spreads honey and not motor oil on his toast, this is done out of a passive surrender to the way things appear, rather than by actively forming a belief or actively assenting to the appearance. The skeptic yields to the appearances, letting them guide him through the world, but he remains detached from these appearances so far as their truth is concerned, refusing to commit himself even to the relative likelihood or plausibility of each appearance. This applies to the skeptical arguments themselves. Sextus compares them to a purgative drug which is evacuated from the body along with whatever the drug is meant to purge. Thus, for instance, the skeptic is not committed to the claim that there is no criterion of truth, or that the modes of Agrippa show that no dispute can be resolved. Rather, the skeptic's arguments merely make it seem to him that disputes are unresolved, and he acquiesces in this result. When the skeptic says, for instance, that things seem to be no more one way than another way, Sextus describes this as an announcement or report of how things strike the skeptic. It is not a statement of what is true about these things, but rather a kind of autobiographical observation. I looked into this matter, and things seemed to be unresolved. At least on the interpretation I've just given, then, Sextus does try to avoid belief and assent entirely. I should admit that there are rival interpretations. For instance, it has been suggested that Sextus must admit to having beliefs at least about how things seem to him. He would not believe that Buster Keaton is a genius, or that honey is sweet, but would believe that Keaton seems to him to be a genius, and that honey appears sweet. After all, Sextus himself must be an authoritative judge of how things seem to him. There's no room for doubt here. Another proposal would land Sextus with an even wider range of beliefs. On this interpretation, the Pyronian skeptic is not applying skepticism to all topics, but only the technical issues considered by other philosophers. Thus, for instance, he would believe that honey is sweet, but not believe that it is in the nature of honey to be sweet, since natures are something posited by philosophers rather than normal people. I myself don't adopt that reading. I think it presupposes a sharp division between philosophical and everyday beliefs that is simply not recognized by Sextus, or for that matter by other ancient philosophers. Still, Sextus does present himself as being on the side of the common man. The skeptic's passivity in the face of impressions means that he'll just go along with the way things seem, and thus lead an outwardly normal life. This will include, for instance, the prevailing cultural norms. If the Pyronian lives in India, he'll cheerfully have sex in public. If in Greece, he'll go to the temple to sacrifice to the gods, even though, of course, he suspends judgment about whether gods exist. He will also follow appearances that arise by nature. For instance, he will eat when he feels hungry, and something seems to him edible, and so on. And he will even follow the practices of technical skills, going through the motions of being a blacksmith, or indeed a doctor, but always without belief. At the beginning of this episode, I said that it was ironic that Sextus, the greatest of skeptics, was a doctor, given that we look to doctors for certainty and confidence, but here, in good Pyronian spirit, is a countervailing thought. Medicine is an inexact art, and rarely provides certainty. This is true still today, but ancient medicine was, of course, an even more uncertain enterprise. Good doctors then knew their limits. They emphasized that medicine deals in probabilities, that its rules apply only inexactly to different patients, with all their variety, and so on. From this point of view, it may seem appropriate that Sextus was a doctor. It's also appropriate that he presents skepticism as a kind of therapy or cure. Like Epicureanism, Sextus's philosophy is a means of dispelling disturbance. Someone who is not bothered by a topic of inquiry has no need to embark upon the skeptic path. Hence Sextus's comparison of the skeptical arguments to purgative drugs. Similarly, he explains why skeptics often pile up arguments on both sides of a dispute without any apparent regard to the strength of those arguments. The aim is to cure by leading the audience to suspend belief and achieve ataraxia. For some audiences, a bad argument can be just as effective as a good one, and the skeptic chooses the effective arguments as a doctor would choose a drug for the patient before him. Still, one can't help but find a tension between Sextus's philosophy and his medical profession. Medicine may deal in probabilities, but as we've seen, Sextus would not assent even to what seems probable. As Sextus himself notes, there was a school of doctors who seemed fairly skeptical. They were called the Methodists, and their treatment followed a simple set of appearances. But Sextus was not a Methodist, he was an empiricist, that is, a member of a medical tradition which laid great emphasis on past observation while shunning theories about underlying causes like those devised by the so-called rationalist school. Sextus explicitly says that empiricism does not quite fit with skepticism. We can only be puzzled by this, given that he is known to have been an empiricist doctor. In a couple of episodes, we'll have an opportunity to look further at these movements in ancient medicine and how they interacted with philosophy. First, though, since we've now reached the end of our series of episodes on the Hellenistic schools, it's time for an interview that will let us finish on a high note. For this purpose, the ideal thing would be to turn to a world-leading expert on Hellenistic philosophy. But have I managed to secure an interview with such an expert? And if so, who might it be? You won't have to wait long to find out, if you join me next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Tony Long, Professor of Classics and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Berkeley. Hi Tony, thanks for coming. Hi Peter. So, what we're going to be talking about in this interview will be the self in Hellenistic philosophy as a kind of crowning moment for this whole series of episodes on Hellenistic philosophy. Can you begin by telling us just what you mean by the self in this context? The best way to start, I think, is from the Greek word pysche, psyche, which has given rise to our word psychology. To go back to the very beginning of our recorded literary history, in the poems of Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, psyche is what leaves the body when the person dies. Empathy in the Homeric poems is something like a ghost, except that the ghost that survives the death of the body is what we might call an ex-person. The reason I bring this up is because self, I think, in the Greek context that we're going to talk about, is primarily thought of as something like the person, the character, rather than the fully embodied human being. It's an aspect of the human being, what we might call the mental, the moral, the psychological aspect of a human being. Just as I might say, John is an amazingly strong character, but did you know that he's been terrible asthmatic all his life? When we draw distinctions between body and mind, self is going to figure on the mind side. Would you say that for most speakers of Greek, the word suhe would have meant something more like that and something less like soul, which is how it's usually translated in, say, Plato and Aristotle? Yeah. The problem with soul, of course, in English is that we don't really have a contemporary use for soul. We talk about soul music. We can still use old expressions like keeping body and soul together, but in everyday life, soul has really vanished. When I was a student, I was asked to write a paper on suke in Plato without using the word soul, which was quite a good exercise. I would say that in traditional Greek, and that philosophers inherit this, the idea that there are body predicates, we could say, to do with physique and stature and weight and so forth, and there are what we might call mental predicates to do with intelligence and personality, and those figure on the side of suke. I guess that in the context of Hellenistic philosophy, that contrast might be somewhat problematic because, of course, the Epicureans and Stoics are materialists. Right. Thus, they wouldn't think that there was, or at least it might seem that they wouldn't think there was a distinction to be drawn there between the mental and the physical. Would they handle that problem by saying, well, by the physical, we don't necessarily mean the body, there might be the soul which is physical and also the body which is physical? Yes, that is a possible problem that one might have if one was a very strong materialist, physicalist. One might say all there ever is to a human being are physical states, but even, I think, the strongest materialist is going to have to recognize that we need in everyday life to distinguish between things like feelings, which are, say, emotions on the one hand, and pains and pleasures which are physical on the other hand. So I think we're not going to ever be able to get away with some sort of distinction as such between body and mind, body and soul. And what do the Hellenistic schools then bring to the conception of self that we don't already find in Plato and Aristotle? Good. I'll just say a word about what I do think we find in Plato and Aristotle because I think that tends to push the discussion in a certain direction. In the early dialogues of Plato, where Socrates, of course, is the principal character, we find Socrates, for instance, in Plato's Apology, telling the Athenians that he's God's gift to the city because the city needs someone to tell them that what's much more important than making money and looking after their reputation is caring for justice, and he says there, and caring for the soul more than the body. So I'm using the word soul, the word psuke. This has been picked up by the modern philosopher Michel Foucault in what he called, with a rather literal translation of the Plato, care of the self. So to get now to the Hellenistics, I think what's happening in Hellenistic philosophy, perhaps partly because the political structures of ancient Greece have ceased to be as effective for people's sense of their own identity, perhaps a certain sense in which people are being thrown back upon, to break the question, is themselves. The philosophers pick up on that by getting into very detailed analysis of what kind of state of soul, mind, spirit, whatever we want to translate this word, is going to make for the happiest, the most effective life. And one of the things that they put a lot of emphasis on would be the idea of being autonomous, having control over yourself. Absolutely. Another way to try to look at analysis of the self is to think of the self as that with which you identify. A very famous modern book by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called Sources of the Self. When you study this book, what you find Taylor is really talking about is self in the sense of what makes my life worthwhile? What could I say at the end of my life I'd been here for? What would I be willing to live or die for? So the net sense identifying with, the Hellenistic philosophers are very concerned about coming up with what they see as a valid value system and anchoring the self to a certain set of values. It's interesting that they share that approach given that they have such radically different ideas of what's valuable. So the Epicureans are hedonists, obviously. They think that what will bring them happiness is maximizing pleasure, whereas the Stoics think that pleasure doesn't matter at all really, and that the only thing that matters is virtue. But you're saying that they share some kind of commitment to an idea of the self, which is really the same idea in both Stoicism and Epicureanism? Well, of course, Peter, you're totally right in drawing very sharp contrast between the officially hedonistic Epicureans and the Stoics who officially maintain that pleasure is entirely unimportant to the quality of a life. But when you probe more deeply into these two philosophies, you're going to find quite a lot of features that they have in common, which I think are very relevant to the question we're exploring, the question of the kind of selfhood that will make for a successful and happy life. And Epicureans are going to agree just as strongly as Stoics that a life which was not grounded in some sort of valid and truthful understanding of the nature of things is going to be an impoverished life, that we need, in other words, to have something we can call a rational life, a life which is grounded upon some defensible system of values, and also a life in which we feel we are in control of where we're going. So to give an example from the Epicurean system, while the Epicureans, of course, insist that nothing is per se good except pleasure and nothing is per se bad except pain, they have a very radical way of trying to analyze what kind of pleasures and what kind of pains are the things we should be concerned about. And what we typically think of as a hedonistic life, a voluptuary life, or an Epicurean life in the way the word Epicurean has come down through our own culture, is quite the reverse of the very austere life that Epicurus himself advocated. As you remember, he said that if he had, I think it was a bit of cheese and bread, he would feel he was having as much as a feast. I mean, the crucial feature here for the Epicurean being to control one's desires and maximize one's autonomy in that way. And I guess that because they're hedonists, the reason why they would place value on self-mastery and autonomy and self-control couldn't be that these things are intrinsically worth pursuing. It must be because they think that self-mastery will prevent you from undergoing pain, for example. So if you're in control of your own life, then, for example, you might not need to worry about what will happen to you because you're in control. And so it's a way of forestalling pain rather than putting the value on self-mastery as such. Do you think that's fair? Yeah. The official bottom line would be exactly as you say. I'm not sure in the last resort where the Epicureans are entirely consistent. There are two areas, I think, where critics have perhaps said that they're really pushing the limit here as far as hedonism is concerned. One is over the theory of friendship because the Epicureans seem to say that what we need friends for in the first instance is our own self-advantage. Friendship begins with utility. But friendship, according to some Epicureans, can then flower into something which is valuable for its own sake, even to the point that an Epicurean is prepared to die for his own friend. Actually then, if you think about the Stoics, there's a problem maybe in Stoicism as well, something I haven't really talked about much in the podcast so far, which is how the Stoics think they should relate to other people. Because in the Stoics, especially I guess the Roman Stoics, you have this great emphasis on the idea of the agents' autonomy and their independence. Yet the Stoics also seem to want to say that it's important for us to have relationships with other people, and not merely because it would be vicious to treat other people wrong, but also because there's some actual value to the relationships we have with other people. Is that right? Yes. Well, I think that's a very important point in this regard. He's perhaps, of all the Stoics who survive, the one who has the deepest and most interesting things to say about friendship. On the one hand, and this picks up on your first point, the Stoics are very concerned to insist that if you can truly live the Stoic way of life, all your unreasonable desires are going to be satisfied. You are self-contained. You're self-sufficient. You won't be having to look over your shoulder all the time to think about things you're missing out on. For instance, he says that the wise man, wise man being the Stoic ideal, even on a desert island would be completely happy. Does that mean that he wouldn't prefer to have friends? No, it doesn't mean that he wouldn't prefer to have friends. He would prefer to have friends not because he needs them, but because if he has the opportunity to have them, then the friend and his own virtues would somehow set up a kind of symphony. It's as if friendship is a requirement of Stoicism, not in the sense that you need a friend in order to fulfill wants that you have. But the true Stoic life is a sociable life. This would be, I think, true of all ancient philosophies. We might want to consider about Plotinus here, it might be somewhat different. But Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, Aristotelians are all very much more concerned, I think, than modern moral philosophers are, where the typical question is, what's the right action? Much more concerned with what would make mine a fulfilled life. I guess that you just mentioned Aristotle, and I guess that there's an interesting possible contrast between the Stoics and Aristotle here. You just said that the Stoics would encourage us to have friends because we could set up some kind of symphony of virtuous action. That sounds a lot like Aristotle. But on the other hand, it's hard to imagine Aristotle saying, well, look, in the last analysis, friends are indifferent, but we should prefer them the way that we should prefer health. So the Stoics are really just going to say that a friend is a preferred indifferent, the way that money or health might be? No. The material we have on Stoic friendship suggests that true friendship is actually a good, even in the strict Stoic sense. The strict Stoic sense is that the only things that can be strictly good are virtues and things that are related to virtue. So virtuous character. And a true friend for a Stoic would have to be another person with a virtuous – if you yourself had a virtuous character, how wonderful that would be – your friend would also, to be a true friend, would also need to have a virtuous character. And in that sense, they say that friends are external goods. And I wonder what that could mean because surely all goods for a Stoic are strictly internal. Well, I think it means that they're external in a very literal sense. You and I are external to one another. In that sense, the friend is an external good. But to be a good friend, he has to have the same kind of virtues that you have. And so this comes back to my symphony point. There's going to be a kind of congruity of minds. And the notion is that a true friend – and this would go across all, I think, the schools – a true friend will be someone who can benefit you, not in the sense that you need them to, say, augment your bank balance, but benefit you in a much deeper sense that you can feel your gaining in amity and other psychological goods from friendship. And it's only virtuous friends who could therefore help each other because virtue is the only – virtue intrinsically is something that is beneficial to you. Maybe we could extend that to look at something else I haven't talked about a lot in the podcast, which is political philosophy in the Hellenistic period. Certainly in Aristotle, there seems to be a very close connection between friendship and political union. Now the Epicureans, famously, aren't very much in favor of political engagement. So maybe we could focus on the Stoics. How would they extend this idea of virtuous friendship into the idea of political union or political action? Or would they not do that? Yes, I think they would extend it. People often, I think, misunderstand the Stoics because the Stoics were rather in the habit of trying to divide the world into two categories of persons – the truly virtuous and the non-virtuous. And then they got into paradoxes because they said, well, perhaps there never have been any truly virtuous people, so everybody is non-virtuous. And so then if you say, well, the only true friends can be virtuous friends, there are no friends. Yes, there are texts which put things in an extreme way like that, but I think this is meant to be challenging rather than the end of the story. And so there can be gradations of friendship, just as in Aristotle. Aristotle talks about utility friends, pleasure friends, and virtue friends. So the Stoics would agree that just ordinary people can have friendships of a certain kind. And no doubt what would make those friendships, true friendships, would be in some sense approximating to the ideal friendships. And in this sense, political friendships would be perhaps a lower form of friendship, but they would be certainly a necessary thing for society to work at all. They have to be social groups and bondings between people. And in fact, the Stoics even sometimes talk about being citizens of the universe. Yes, absolutely. So that to some extent there must be a feeling of union with not just all other humans but with everything. Oh, absolutely. But it just tails off so that if I'm an Athenian, I should have a greater feeling of union with other Athenians than I do to people from outside Athens. And ultimately, and again, this of course is again a very different way from looking at how we relate to things than, say, Christianity. To say you're a friend of God would perhaps almost seem impious in traditional Christianity, whereas that comes as a very natural thing to the Stoics. Does this actually have any concrete political ramifications? I guess what I mean by that is does it tell us what a Stoic-minded politician would actually do or does it just say, well, when you're in political affairs, bear in mind that you have this kinship to other people? Good question. An answer I can give in some depth, I think, by reference to Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius, as many of your listeners may know, was himself of course not only the most powerful figure in the Roman world in the second century of our era, but he was also a really committed Stoic. And we have his own reflections on what it was to be a ruler and a Stoic ruler. And of all the ancient Stoics, he is the one who emphasizes what he calls one's social or political nature. Aristotle had already said that human beings are political animals, meaning political not in the sense that they want to get into Parliament or something like that, but politicos in the Greek sense, being a member of a polis. And it's fascinating, I think, therefore, that the Roman emperor, who probably in many ways was an incredibly lonely figure, was at the same time someone who had this intense feeling, not of being bonded in the friends of hail fellow well-met sense to other people, but that this is his role. His role is to be sociable to people, finding out the best, what would be in their interests. So in this sense, I think of all ancient philosophies, Marcus Aurelius perhaps would come closest to someone we might think of as a truly benevolent person. The 19th century English essayist Matthew Arnold described Marcus Aurelius as perhaps the noblest figure in literature, and then went on, I think, rather to spoil it by saying if only he could have had the benefit of Christianity, how much better he'd even off. An idea that would not have appealed to Marcus himself. No, indeed. Indeed it didn't. One other thing that springs to mind here is that if you are committed to this idea of kinship with all other humans, you might think that one particular ancient institution, namely slavery, is something that is pretty questionable. Yes. Stoics, of course, have an interesting way of looking at this. Well, both schools do. I mean, let's just start with the simplest, mention the Epicureans. Epicurus, of course, founded his school as a garden community, and then after his death, other such communities spread up in the Mediterranean world. One of the interesting things about those communities was that they admitted women and slaves as it were as full members of those communities. In the case of Stoicism, Stoics liked to take traditional words like slave or wise or foolish and give them a special kind of coloring. Stoics wanted to say that anybody who is not trying or is not succeeding in being a Stoic is actually a slave. It doesn't matter. They could be the freest and wealthiest person in the world if they are not in control of their desires. If they're enthralled to needs and other impulses, then in that sense, they're self-enslaved. That way, the chattel slave could be a free man and the non-chattel slave could be a slave. The emperor could be a slave. Exactly. In fact, Epictetus often addresses his hearers as slaves. Yes. This goes right back, I think. The origin of that is already Socratic, or at least Plato's Socrates in the Gorgias, where the tyrant is supposed to be the least free of men. Before we finish, I should try to get the last of the main Hellenistic traditions in, namely the skeptics. I guess you might think that the skeptics would have very little to say on this topic of the self because they don't have anything positive to say about any topic just by the nature of their philosophical persuasion. But it seems to me there is a question here because the skeptics in a way are, you might say, alienated from themselves. They're walking around acting like normal people, seeming to have beliefs, and yet they claim not to have any beliefs. So do you think that the skeptics in a way have a problem with some kind of dissonance or tension within the self? It might appear that way. The question, I think, is quite complicated because when we say that the skeptic has no beliefs, then there's a question precisely of what we mean by a belief. The skeptic ideal is a life without belief, but in a rather special sense. The skeptic doesn't think that he is in a position or she is in a position to get to anything like the ultimate nature of things. In that sense, we should suspend judgment about, say, is there such a thing as the real good or is there such a thing as the real bad? In a way, the Plato would say that there was, probably the Stoics too. So what are we left with? We're still left, according to the skeptics, with certain inalienable feelings, what they call pathe. We can do nothing about those. If you say, well, I want to rationalize my feelings, I think the skeptic will say, well, you just have to go along with your feelings. In that sense, these can be a guide to living. You drink when you're thirsty. You feel cold in the snow. But you don't say feeling cold in the snow is good or bad. You don't say drinking when you're thirsty is good or bad. It's just something you do. So in that sense, the skeptic may seem to be following in their instincts, what we might call our instincts, rather than trying to live a rational life. The Stoics often say that the pathe, these feelings or emotions that we have, are not part of ourselves. They're something external. They're something that we stand in judgment over. Are the skeptics then objecting to that and suggesting that we should identify more with our feelings? Or are they accepting the idea that we have this detachment with respect to our feelings, but that there's nothing else for us to do other than just let these things affect us and be at their mercy? OK, good. Let's start with your point about the Stoics. The Stoics, I think, have a slightly more complicated view than that might have suggested, seemingly that even the most committed and successful Stoic will still start if there's an earthquake or feel cold in the snow. There's nothing he can do about that. There's just an irreducible physical reaction. What the Stoic will try to avoid doing is then simply committing a judgment to those feelings without reflection. That's where Stoic rationality comes in. The Stoic won't think that there's anything rational about having these feelings. Indeed, it will then be irrational on the Stoic's part just to let your judgment go along with those feelings. I think there's an interesting question here about the skeptics. A skeptic perhaps cannot officially claim to be following reason, because if he were, then you'd have to ask him to define what reason is. On the other hand, in the sense in which I think the skeptic does think of himself as being almost hyper-rational, in the sense that what is irrational for the skeptic is to think that you know things when you don't know them. In that sense, the skeptic's suspension of judgment is quite an arduous thing. It's not actually, perhaps I'm a bit misleading before when I said it would amount to simply going along with your feelings. Because after all, you might hear, let's say you've gone to listen to a Stoic professor this morning, and he was pretty good. Then you listen to an Epicurean professor this afternoon, and he was pretty good. Which way do you go? The skeptic way is to then try to distance yourself from both these positions by coming up with counterarguments, and in that way suspending your judgment. What's that going to leave you with? Ideally, it will leave you with perhaps a mental blank at the level of theory, but all the normal human reactions. Then there's a little bit more to be said about that, because skeptics recognize that how we react and behave in the world very much depends upon our own culture. In certain cultures, the seemingly natural thing to do will be X, and otherwise it would be not X. So you sort of, when in Rome, go along with the Roman way. That may sound a little bit evasive, and I think there's a lot more we could say about that, but that's the official line. We follow the guidance of our feelings and our cultures. The upshot of that then is that what you were saying at the very beginning, that Hellenistic philosophy is committed to the idea that we're trying to care for the self, is something that the skeptics would go along with as well. Yes, I think so. Yes, they might have a bit of a problem about saying what the self is, but then I think we still have that ourselves. Right. Good point. Yes. Well, speaking of taking care of people, next time my topic is going to be medicine and ancient philosophy, but for now I'll just thank Professor Long for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Peter, for having me. And join me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Joy of Sects, Ancient Medicine and Philosophy. The ancient Egyptian practice of mummification was a lengthy and complex one, which took many weeks. The first step in the process was naturally making extra sure the person to be mummified was dead. Then the process of embalming began, which meant removing the body's internal organs. The abdomen would be emptied through an incision while the brain was extracted through the nose. Afterwards, these organs would be wrapped in bandages and popped into jars to be placed in the tomb with the mummified body. Now, I know what you're thinking. Yuck. It's a fair point, and one with which the ancient Greeks would have agreed. In classical Greek civilization, there was a firm taboo against the dissection of human bodies. Thus, Aristotle, for instance, did not extend his program of anatomical investigations, past fish and other animals, to include humans. Of course, battlefield injuries and so on occasionally provided a glimpse into the secret recesses of human bodies, but Greek science included no systematic investigation of human anatomy. Until, that is, the third century B.C. At the beginning of this century, ancient science as a whole received one of its greatest boons. You may recall from the episode that introduced Hellenistic philosophy that after Alexander the Great, the Greek-speaking world was split into three powers, the Seleucids in the east, the Macedonians in Greece and the Balkans, and the Ptolemies in Egypt. In about 300 B.C., Ptolemy I chose Alexandria as the site for an ambitious project, a library, which would gather together all the writings that could be found on all topics, and a so-called museum. The name refers to the muses in whose honor and with whose guidance activities in the museum would be conducted. Scholars and scientists would receive free lodging in the museum, along with a place to do research to collaborate and investigate. Alexandria thus became a center for intellectual inquiry, and it remained so until late antiquity. It was here, perhaps in the museum itself, that the first anatomical dissections of human bodies were carried out. We have no texts reporting on these dissections at first hand, but from later authors we know that the two main anatomists were named Herophilus and Erisistratus. It's an interesting question why these two boldly cut where no one had cut before. Certainly the protection of the Ptolemies themselves was a factor, and it's often speculated that the long-standing practice of organ removal in Egyptian funeral practices may have provided a precedent. If you can have your loved one's brain pulled out through their nostrils for the sake of a religious burial, it is perhaps less unthinkable to dismantle strangers in the name of science. But Herophilus and Erisistratus were culturally Hellenic, not Egyptian, and they would certainly not have been involved in any such local religious practices. Indeed, there is some ancient evidence that they left out that crucial first step in the mummification process, the part where you make sure the person is dead. Later authors tell us, with breathless dismay, that these Alexandrian anatomists dissected criminals who had been condemned to death while they were still alive. Whether or not this is true, there's no doubt that the doctors of Alexandria took a great leap forward in the understanding of the human body and of medicine as a whole. Perhaps the most dramatic advance was the discovery of the nervous system, and the realization that this system is distinct from the system of blood vessels. This showed that there are two major networks spread throughout the human body, one branching from the brain and spinal cord, the other branching from the heart. And that raised questions of far-reaching, and indeed philosophical, importance. How did these systems relate to other phenomena, like breathing and the motion of the muscles? What did these discoveries mean for our conception of human nature itself? If we have an immaterial soul, could we now give a more detailed account relating soul to these physical structures? Or should the human body be understood as a bewilderingly complex machine? After all, it has parts that function like everyday instruments already used by the ancients. The lungs, as Erisistratus pointed out, could be compared to a blacksmith's bellows, while the liver and bladder seemed to function like filters or strainers. The discoveries at Alexandria thus posed a challenge to philosophers, who would need to accommodate the new anatomy within the philosophical school traditions they followed. But of course, a conversation between medicine and philosophy had already been going on for centuries. Plato already mentions Hippocrates, whose supposed writings were incidentally probably gathered for the first time at the Library of Alexandria. We saw in a much earlier episode that the Hippocratic works are themselves of great philosophical interest. Plato and Aristotle may not have gone in for human dissection, but both had things to say about human anatomy and other medical topics. The influence went the other way also. Aristotle, in particular, made a great impact on medical authors. For instance, Diocles of Caristus was a near-contemporary of Aristotle who emphasized the importance of the four humours, blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile. Following on suggestions in the Hippocratic corpus, Diocles understood health as a balance of these humours. While we don't find this elaborate humoral theory in Aristotle himself, he alludes to similar ideas. For example, when he describes people of a certain character as melancholic, the word comes from the Greek for black bile. Another figure influenced by Aristotle was Praxagoras, who provides a link to our Alexandrian investigators because he was the teacher of Herophilus. He made an influential, though incorrect, contribution to anatomy by defending a theory about the blood vessels and how they relate to respiration. For Praxagoras, the veins are full of blood, but the arteries are filled with breath, in Greek, pneuma. This is still the position we find in Aristotelis, and to some extent it goes back to Aristotle, who had emphasized pneuma as a kind of physical life force that pervades and sustains the body. Even in later authors, like Galen, who realized that the arteries contain blood, just like the veins, pneuma remains a vital substance, in every sense of the word vital. It becomes standard to assume that the nerves are allowing us to control our bodies through pneuma that passes along hollow channels within the nerves. Of course, to get to that theory, the Greeks first needed to discover nerves in the first place. Particularly important in this story is Herophilus, whose bad record regarding the humane treatment of criminals is balanced by his contributions in medical research. How he stands overall is perhaps a question we can set aside for a few years until we've reached John Stuart Mill and covered utilitarianism. It was he, Herophilus, not Mill, who distinguished between the sensory and motor nervous systems. His work survives in the very terminology of modern anatomy. For instance, he christened one part of our body the pineal gland because of its resemblance to a pinecone. Both he and his master Praxagoras also pioneered in medical diagnosis by laying great emphasis on the pulse. Much later in the Roman Empire, Galen still valued the pulse as one of the most important diagnostic indicators. Also important is the fact that Herophilus wrote on women's medicine in a treatise describing what makes someone a good midwife. Ancient medicine is one of the richest traditions for classical discussions of women, and, again, we see much later figures like Galen writing extensively on gynecology. Of course, anatomy and gynecology were only two strands in the ancient medical tradition. In the Hellenistic period, we also see authors contributing to pharmacology by transmitting lists of naturally occurring substances and recipes. These form the basis for many centuries of writing about drugs. There's another connection here to the Aristotelians, since drugs were often made of plants, and Aristotle's student Theophrastus literally wrote the book on that subject. Also important throughout classical medicine was the idea that doctors should not only heal the sick and wounded, but help the healthy to stay healthy by prescribing the right diet and exercise regime. All of which raises a pressing question. Whether the goal is healing the sick, or preserving health, how should doctors go about discovering the right therapies? This question provoked one of the most interesting debates in the ancient philosophy of science. Different doctors had very different ideas about how we make progress in our knowledge of medicine, and these ideas often interacted with, and were inspired by, more general philosophical discussions of knowledge. We know about these debates largely thanks to a figure I've mentioned several times already, Galen. He lived in the 2nd century AD, quite a bit later than the early scientists of Alexandria, but he can provide us with at least one thing that figures like Aristotelius and Herophilus do not. Extensively surviving writings about medicine. And when I say extensive, I mean it. You could start reading Galen right now and not finish until you are ready to be mummified yourself. He is the ancient Greek writer for whom we have the largest surviving body of work, despite the fact that a number of writings have been lost. He was astoundingly prolific, and is the source for most of what we know about pre-Galenic medicine. As with Aristotle, who is a similarly important source for the pre-Zakratics, this is something of a mixed blessing. Both Galen and Aristotle hardly ever report earlier thinkers' ideas without trying to score some point of their own. This makes their testimony unreliable and biased, but no less valuable, given that it is sometimes the only information we have. One of the debates that fascinated Galen was this one I've just mentioned, concerning what one might call medical epistemology. How is it that doctors discover their treatments? In several works on this subject, Galen describes three major so-called sects, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the Methodists. Two weeks ago, we already met an empiricist, the great skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus. As I mentioned, the empiricus part refers to the fact that he was an empiricist doctor. He was a rough contemporary of Galen, but the empiricist sect went back much further than either of them. It was founded in the mid-third century BC by a student of Herophilus named Philinus, who was followed by another doctor, Serapion. As their name implies, these empiricists believed that the source of our medical knowledge is experience, in Greek empyrea. Though it may seem obvious that experience should play an important role in developing medical theories, the empiricists put the point in a way that was controversial indeed. They claimed that we need only use experience, and that in fact no theory is required. Opposed to them were the so-called rationalists, sometimes referred to as dogmatists. They did not necessarily reject the importance of experience entirely, but insisted that any doctor worthy of the title would also have an understanding of the underlying causes of illness and health. The humoral account, already mentioned, would be a classic case of a rationalist theory. A disease like melancholy, for instance, would be explained by an excess of black bile, which could be treated by combating that imbalance. Since black bile is cold, one might apply warming drugs in hopes of a cure. At first blush, it seems that the rationalists and empiricists would thus have offered very different treatments. But Galen explicitly says that they did not. Rather, they would prescribe the same drugs and other treatments, recommend the same kind of diet, and so on. The disagreement rather concerned method and justification. The empiricists would thus recommend the same drug, not because it is warming and thus counterbalances the cold of black bile, but simply because in our experience, people who have presented these sorts of symptoms tended to recover after ingesting this drug. So, whereas the rationalists point to hidden causes and underlying principles, the empiricists stick to what is readily observable, or as they put it, evidence. They try to match symptoms that are evident to the senses with remedies that have been observed to relieve those symptoms in the past. The rationalists complain that it is hard to see, in that case, how anyone could ever make any progress in medicine. In fact, there seems to be a paradox lurking here. We are just following what our predecessors did, but how did they arrive at the remedies they found effective? The empiricists offered several answers to this question. For one thing, useful therapies can be discovered by good luck. Also, one may have a sudden inspiration or hunch about something that could work, and try it out. If it is successful, it can be tried again in the future, and may ultimately prove itself a reliable therapy. Finally, the empiricists speak of a method they call transition to the similar. For instance, we may observe that it helps to apply cold to a thigh which is red and swollen, we might then naturally apply cold to a red and swollen arm. The empiricists' disdain for rationalist theories may seem, from our perspective, to have been well-founded. After all, rationalist explanations, such as the humoral theory, were not in fact true. On the other hand, the empiricists rejected much of what we would recognize as good scientific practice. For instance, they denied the need for anatomical research, repeating their mantra that one should attend to what is evident, which does not include things hidden inside the body. Rather optimistically, they suggested that anything useful to be learned about anatomy had probably already been discovered. We now think of natural sciences, like medicine, as empirical, but this first group of thinkers to use the name empiricists were not interested in discovering underlying causes, as we assume science should do. Indeed, there is a family resemblance between medical empiricism and ancient skepticism. Galen compares the empiricists to the original skeptic, Pyro, and I don't need to repeat yet again that Sextus was an empiricist doctor. For the same reasons, the empiricists stand in contrast to the pioneers of Alexandria. For instance, Eris Sistertus once weighed a bird, stopped feeding it for some time, then weighed it again, along with the excrement it had produced in the meantime. He found that this total weight at the end was less than the bird's original weight, showing that some matter had been lost through invisible emanations from the bird's body. This was careful observation, but in the service of a rationalist theory about causes. Galen agreed with Eris Sistertus and the rationalists that a good doctor should understand the underlying causes of things. For Galen, this often meant attending to the purposes of nature. He followed Aristotle in believing that natural things, like bodily organs, have goal-directed functions. In a lengthy work called On Natural Faculties, Galen argued against Eris Sistertus that bodily organs do not work like mechanical parts—filters, bellows, and pumps—but have innate powers, for instance the power to digest food or expel waste. Another treatise, On the Usefulness of the Parts, extols the well-designed functioning of all bodily organs. When we study the hidden causes of health and disease, Galen argued, we are uncovering the exquisite design of nature itself. For him, nature is itself a sort of craftsman, and in this respect like the divine craftsman, or demiurge, described by his hero Plato in the dialogue Timaeus. Galen also accepts other distinctively rationalist ideas, for instance the humoral theory, never missing a chance to remind us that this theory goes back to his other hero Hippocrates. On the other hand, Galen wants to emphasize that he is not simply a rationalist. A good doctor must also pay close attention to experience, both the findings of others and what one can discover for oneself. Thus, he suggests that the best method is a kind of fusion of the rationalist and empiricist approaches. By contrast, he finds nothing to value in a third sect of doctors, the Methodists. We're particularly unfortunate in being so dependent on Galen for our knowledge of this sect. He can barely mention the Methodists without resorting immediately to mockery and invective, so his evidence is even more biased than usual. Still, it is clear that the method of the Methodists did make a difference with respect to their actual medical practice. To understand why, we need to turn to the grandfather of this third sect, Asclepiodes. He came to Rome from his home Bithynia in modern-day Turkey in the late 2nd century BC. Like Greek philosophers who turned up in Rome at about this time, he had a great impact. An admirer of Asclepiodes was a court doctor under Augustus, for instance. His medical theory is reminiscent of ancient atomism and resonates with Epicurean descriptions of the human body, such as we find in Lucretius. For Asclepiodes, the body is made up of tiny particles. Disease results when these particles cluster in such a way as to block appropriate motions in the body or scatter so that things flow too freely. Other authors followed Asclepiodes in thinking that this theory was preferable to the four-humor idea of the Hippocratic and Aristotelian traditions. In particular, two figures of the 1st century BC, Themeson and Thessalus, adopted the ideas of Asclepiodes in a radically simplified form. This was Methodism. According to the Methodists, all bodily disorders come about because of one of three conditions, either a blockage, a flux, or a mixture of blockage and flux. They identified a limited number of certain so-called commonalities, specific types of blockages or fluxes that were revealed by evident signs like inflammation or a leaking of fluid like pus or phlegm. Because the range of commonalities they recognized was relatively small, they thought it was easy to remember both them and the appropriate remedy in each case. Gellin is outraged to report that the Methodists believed anyone can learn to be a doctor in just a few months. Reversing a famous Hippocratic aphorism, they declared that life is long, but the art is short. One of the things that most annoys Gellin about Methodism is their refusal to offer medical therapies that are tailored to each patient. Gellin was, after all, a doctor for the rich and powerful. I've mentioned previously that he attended Marcus Aurelius and his son, and part of his professional self-image was that his patients would receive a kind of bespoke treatment, one just right for their bodily condition, their location, the season of the year, and so on. This is another idea he finds in Hippocrates, in such texts as Ayres, Waters, Places, which studies the effect of one's environment on one's health. It was embraced by both rationalists and empiricists, who would have taken account of a patient's circumstances in considering which previous experiences would be relevant to them. Only the Methodists had neither time for, nor interest in, such niceties. Perhaps the everyday medicine dispensed on the streets and in the houses of Roman society was more like what the Methodists offered than what Gellin could promise, but Gellin would triumph as far as the future of medical literature was concerned. One reason his works are so voluminously preserved is that he was so cherished by later doctors. Gellin was almost synonymous with medicine in the medieval Greek, Latin, and Arabic traditions, like Aristotle with philosophy. And for good reason. Gellin not only fused together the methods of the various sects into a more sophisticated hybrid, but drew connections between medicine and philosophy in a way that was unprecedented. He was also a master of medical techniques, such as pharmacology, surgery, and dissection. These skills enabled him to prove once and for all that the Stoics and Aristotelians were wrong. Our soul's ruling faculty is not in the heart, but in the brain. How did he do this, and where exactly does he fit in the ancient philosophical tradition? To find out, I'll be interviewing one of the world's leading experts on philosophy in Gellin. It would make me sick if you missed my discussion with Jim Hankinson. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liberhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Jim Hankinson, who is a professor of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas at Austin. And today we're going to be talking about Galen. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much for inviting me. Perhaps we could just start by talking a little bit about who Galen was and his personality, which was rather interesting. Yes, I suppose it was. We know quite a lot about Galen because he wrote voluminously and wrote a great deal about himself, always in a flattering light, as autobiographers typically will. He was born in 129 AD and died sometime early in the third century at the age of probably about 85. We don't know precisely when he died, but that's almost certainly when he did. He had a very long and enormously productive life. Roughly 10% of all that survives in Greek from classical and later times up to early medieval times is in fact the writings of Galen. Far more of Galen survives than anybody else. And a great deal has been lost. And there are a number of reasons for both of those facts. He was born in Asia Minor. He came from a relatively wealthy family, had a conventional upper class education, which involved him travelling to various places and studying with leading philosophers of his time. First of all, in Pergamon, where he was born, and then in Smyrna, and then in Alexandria, which was still a major centre of learning, particularly of medical learning. He moved to Rome for the first time in his early 30s, stayed there for three years, went back home, we're not quite sure why, although there's evidence that he left Rome in rather a hurry, and returned to Rome at the age of nearly 40, and he stayed there, as far as we know, for the rest of his life. He moved in elevated circles. He became, first of all, one of the official physicians to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius' son Commodus, and then a physician to the Emperor himself. And he records numerous successful cures of Rome's upper crust in the 160s and 170s. And unfortunately Commodus survived his medical care. Yes, yes, yes, history has some reason to regret that, I think. Galen is notably quiet about Commodus. He says very, very little about him anywhere in his surviving writings, which suggests that he wanted to really rather push that association under the rug for fairly obvious reasons. Yeah, you can't blame him for that. No, you can't. But we're going to be talking today not so much about his relationship to these historical figures, but about Galen and philosophy. I guess Galen might be rather surprised to be included in a series of podcasts on the history of philosophy, because obviously he's not thought of as a philosopher. He's thought of as this giant in the history of medicine. And in fact, it's not just that he doesn't say anything about philosophy. He's sometimes really explicitly skeptical about philosophy, so he talks about topics like the nature of the soul or the nature of God, and says that he has nothing to say about these issues, or he hasn't gotten together a kind of dogmatic position about them. Why do you think he was so skeptical about those issues, and do you think that he would sort of mind being treated as a philosopher in some sense? Oh, I don't think he would have minded at all. In fact, I think he would have welcomed it. I think for rather the same reasons that Galileo insisted on being given the title court philosopher when he moved to Florence in 1610. But no, he certainly did think of himself as a philosopher. He wrote two books about his own books, in one of which he categorises the books that he wrote into a variety of different categories, some purely medical. But a great many of them are explicitly concerned with philosophers and philosophical questions, not least logic, in which he was extremely interested and quite influential, but also works on Plato's moral philosophy, for instance, which haven't survived. And he certainly did think of himself as a philosopher. He wrote a very short piece, which does survive, called The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher. And he means that quite literally. He thinks that unless you cultivate the philosophical skills of logic, physics in the sense of natural science and ethics, you can't hope to become a successful practical or theoretical doctor. And let's say he takes that very seriously. But you're right, of course, that he does evince considerable scepticism about what he would certainly have thought of as speculative metaphysics. Indeed, he uses the term theoretical, theoretique, to mean something rather like speculative in the derogatory sense. These are certain sorts of questions, as you mentioned, the nature of God, not God's existence. He's perfectly convinced that the universe is run by a benevolent deity. And certainly not the soul's existence, which of course is a matter of triviality in Greek. But questions as to what these things actually are, their substance or essence, Galen thinks those questions can't reasonably hope for a solution which is of a sort that meets his relatively rigorous criteria. So his scepticism, if you want to put it that way about metaphysical questions, is derived from a serious methodological commitment, which can be expressed in roughly the following way. Galen is certainly not averse to theoretical constructions in science and in medicine and so on, but he's absolutely convinced that for them to have any hope of validity, they have to be answerable to what Quine would have called the tribunal of experience. That's to say, they have to be empirically testable. And his main reason for rejecting what he takes to be hopelessly speculative metaphysics is there's just no way of answering the question empirically. And one of the questions that he relegates to this no man's land of speculative metaphysics is the question much debated among ancient philosophers as to whether there's a void, and in particular, whether there's a void outside the ordinary structure of the universe, which is a view held by the Stoics. And Galen says, well, there's no way you can tell that unless you send somebody to the edge of the universe and they take a look at it. And until you can do that, you might as well just stop talking about these things. You have to apply for funding. Exactly, yes. That's exactly right. So there are a number of questions which he just thinks are empirically unanswerable. And because empirically unanswerable, uninteresting. I guess that would make sense of the fact that although he doesn't have views about the metaphysical nature of the soul, for example, he does have views about the soul insofar as the soul is empirically detectable. So he has another work called something like that, the powers of the soul are dependent on the mixtures of the body. That's right. And I guess his idea there would be, although you can't tell for sure what the soul is by looking at people or animals, you can tell that what the soul does somehow depends on the body because, for example, when people get drunk, you can see that it affects their psychological capacities. Is that basically the idea? Yes, well, that's one of his key examples, of course. The impact of various psychotropics. And also, even more generally, he thinks that the sort of diet, the sort of regimen you adopt, has an effect on, for instance, how bad-tempered you might be. He thinks this is determinable. And as a result of that, at the very least, he's committed to the view that certain mental attributes are at the very least influenced by and may possibly be reducible to in some sense, although he's very careful not to express any firm view on that, to physiological features of the body, roughly speaking, your internal makeup, the makeup that he conceptualises in terms of the four humours, which are typologically linked with the four elements of Greek four-element theory and with the four basic qualities, hot, cold, wet and dry, which all looks pretty theoretical and in a certain sense it is. But Galen himself is quite convinced that he had good empirical grounds for supposing that this was in fact the case and that psychological properties were dependent upon or at the very least heavily influenced by states of physiology. And when he says that the best doctor has to be a philosopher, is that because it's as a philosopher that you find out things like the four-element theory and that that underlies what the doctor is doing? So is that the content of philosophy? Yes, that's certainly the reason why he thinks you have to know a good deal about physics, about natural philosophy. He does think that you can be a successful practising doctor with, roughly speaking, empirical knowledge. But he thinks you can't really understand what's going on and hence hope to make advances both in theoretical understanding and by extension in treatment unless you have a thorough understanding of the physical basis of the body and hence of what can go wrong with it. So that is the reason why he thinks that you need to have a background in physics. He thinks you need to have logic for two reasons, so that you can understand consequence, in other words, so that you can recognise and construct valid arguments. And also, equally importantly, perhaps more importantly, so that you can unmask the falsehoods of the charlatans. Of which there were plenty, according to him. Of which almost everybody other than him was guilty of, according to Goethe. And finally, ethics, he says, in a rather splendid passage, that you can't possibly hope to make any serious advance in matters like this unless you're extremely hardworking, industrious, he uses the word philoponos. And you can't have that virtue if your life is devoted to pleasures of various sorts. If you are overly addicted, as he puts it, to food, drink and sex. So you need to have the philosophical virtue of ethical restraint in order to have enough time to actually do a decent job of things. Maybe we could then move on to one of the advances he did make, which concerns human anatomy and in fact animal anatomy more generally. I think this is maybe his greatest achievement in medicine, although maybe you'll disagree with me about that. And this is his demonstration that what the Stoics had called the ruling faculty, so the part of your soul that is in charge of, say, your movements, your thoughts, your desires, things like that, that that's seated in the brain rather than the heart. So can you talk a bit about how he showed this? Well, yes, and I think you're right to say that. That's certainly one and probably the greatest of all of his achievements and a lasting one of that. Of course, this has been a longstanding dispute, both among doctors and among philosophers, as to the location of the ruling faculty, as you say, the seat of consciousness and the part that's responsible for voluntary motions and things of that sort. Of course, Galen is by no means the first person to say that it rests in the brain, it's already there in Plato, or at least the rational soul is there in Plato. And he thought Hippocrates thought so as well. And he thought Hippocrates thought so too. And, of course, the Hippocratic question is a major question. You mean who wrote the Hippocratic treatise? Who wrote the Hippocratic treatise is whether any of them are attributable to a historical Hippocrates or not. Galen had very strong views about that. He wrote extensive commentaries on Hippocrates. He saw himself as being the true heir to Hippocrates. And of course, partly as a result of his own predilections, he picks and chooses among the texts that survived under Hippocrates' name and says, well, this one clearly can't be genuine because it has the wrong views and so on. So he does choose texts of Hippocrates which do lean towards, and in some cases actively endorse encephalocentrism, the idea that the brain is the seat of the ruling faculty. So of course Aristotle famously had thought that the heart was, as indeed did the stoics. Now, the crucial interim discovery here was made in Alexandria in the third century BC by a great doctor called Herophilus who was the first to distinguish between the motor and the sensory nervous system on the basis of detailed anatomical investigation and probably also vivisection and very likely human vivisection too. And that's of course an enormous breakthrough and Herophilus was committed to the view that the brain was the center of these things. So Galen isn't an innovator in that sense, but in his first visit to Rome when he was trying to make a name for himself, he undertook a series of extremely high profile public demonstrations of animal vivisection in which he undertook to show various things by means of careful sectioning of the spinal cord and ligation and severing of various parts of the nervous system. He was able to show, for instance, that various sorts of paralysis were induced by different sections in the spinal column. And most vividly of all, and this is a story he recounts on more than one occasion, Galen was responsible for the discovery of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, that's the nerve that innervates the voice box, and showed by means of a very careful experiment where you lay open the nerve in the neck and are able to pinch it off. If you pinch it off, the animal that you're working on, typically an unfortunate pig, Galen says pigs are very good for this sort of thing because they have very loud voices and what's more, their expressions don't show pain so it's not as upsetting to the audience as using monkeys is, for instance. But it's upsetting to the pig. It's pretty upsetting to the pig as well as one could tell. And you just pinch off this very tiny nerve and suddenly the pig stops screaming and then you let it go again and it starts screaming. And of course that shows something, Galen thought quite rightly, very striking about neural transmission. But most importantly, he thought that, and this is part of and part of course of the empirical side of the demonstration of the centrality of the brain. He could also show simply by dissection that the nervous system starts from and ramifies from the cortex. But it branches out and he uses the imagery of branching and branching of trees and so on. And he just thinks that it's obvious that what something ramifies from is going to be the centre of control of that system, if there is one. So that's roughly why he thinks he's got something more than a viable hypothesis, why he thinks he's got something close to a demonstration or a proof. And he uses the language of demonstration. And of course all of that obeys the empirical structures that you were talking about before. Exactly, yes. There is something kind of more complicated here though, right, which is that as a follower of Plato, he recognizes a three-part soul. So there's the rational soul, there's the spirited soul, and there's the appetitive or desiring soul. He doesn't think that all three of those faculties or parts of the soul are seated in the brain, does he? No, he doesn't. He adopts a version of Plato's tripartite view of the soul. So he thinks that, as you say, the spirited part is located in the heart. And in some sense the appetites are centralized in the liver, although he doesn't think of the liver as being, for instance, an alternative seat of consciousness. It's not that when you feel hungry and you recognize the fact that you feel hungry, that's all going on in the liver. There's something going on in the liver, roughly speaking the basic nutritive drive. It's being registered as a conscious fact in the brain. Now his reasons for thinking this, these are quite interesting too. In the course of a long work called On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, in which he tries to show both that Plato and Hippocrates had gotten things pretty much right about all important things, and hence were in agreement with one another, he allows explicitly that he doesn't have a proof of the same degree of convincingness for the location of the appetites in the liver as he does for the location of the central voluntary control that's on in the brain. Because he can't show on the basis of telling experiments and interventions that you can intercept, as it were, the appropriate messages. If I squeeze my liver, I start being hungry. Well, the equivalent would be doing something with the system of veins, which of course you can do all sorts of things with, but they don't seem to have any direct effect on whether the animal's hungry or not. Or angry. Well, that would be the arterial system, of course, from the heart. So he's well aware that he's on much shakier ground there, which I think does him some credit. He doesn't make the evidently false claim that he can demonstrate in some sense that the liver is responsible for desires. He takes a rather more roundabout route, and it would take too long to go into how he tries to do it. But I think it's intriguing in the sense that one sort of axiom, which I vaguely alluded to in connection with the nervous system, is the idea that if some organ is the origin of a ramifying system, then there's reason to suppose that it is in some sense in control of what goes on in that system. And he knew on the basis of his very extensive and detailed anatomical knowledge that the system of veins, as opposed to arteries, really does look as though it branches out from the liver, from the vena cava and so on. And equally, the arterial system branches out from the aorta and appears to start in the heart. But you've got the pulmonary system and so on, which is a bit of an issue, but in general, that's the way things look. And for this reason, he thought of these as being two separate systems, each being responsible for the transmission of different sorts of stuff into the body. And in particular, the venous system is responsible for the transmission of metabolized nutrition. That's really what it does. And that's the sense in which, the fundamental sense in which he thinks that the liver is the location of desires, because it's the liver, as it were, that responds to the need for nutrition and for pushing nutrition around. So it's almost a kind of behavioral criterion, if you like. Of course, he's taking desire for food and drink as being some kind of primary example. Exactly, yes. And fundamentally somatic, even though, of course, they have, as I mentioned before, obviously, conscious correlates. You know you feel hungry and things like that. I guess one thing that really struck Galen in all of these experiments and investigations is how cunningly put together animal bodies and human bodies are. And so he became very convinced that animals and maybe also plants and other things in the world, but certainly the things he was dealing with as a doctor, were what we might say are teleologically put together. In other words, they seem to be purposive, they seem to be put together with some kind of final end in mind. And this is interesting because although he thought of himself as a follower of Plato and Hippocrates, here we seem to have a really important point of agreement between him and Aristotle. So can you say something about how his teleological commitments relate to Aristotle's philosophy of nature? Yes, Galen was a great admirer of Aristotle. He thinks that he's one of the great men of the past, although seriously and culpably mistaken about the cardiac location of mental activity and so on. Although, as he says, it's not really Aristotle's fault because they haven't done enough anatomy then to really know these things. It's people nowadays saying that sort of thing. He says they were completely stoics and of course, peripatetics as well. Aristotelians have been quite a large number around at the time. These people are just being willfully ignorant, he thinks. Yes, the relationship with Aristotle's teleology is, I think, quite interesting because, as I say, he's a great admirer of Aristotle. He quotes extensively from Aristotle's biology, in particular, parts of animals, as you might expect, which is a text about, among other things, the teleological organisation of animal structures. And so in detail, if you like, the detailed structure of Galen's teleological account of biological structures is very Aristotelian, although he goes a good deal further than Aristotle in some quite interesting ways. I may say something about that in a moment. But the overall inspiration is platonic because Galen is quite convinced that the universe is under the control of, and indeed the structural result of, direct intervention by a creator god who he calls in obvious imitation of Plato, the demiurge, the artisan creator god. And of course, there's no trace of that whatsoever in Aristotle. And his reasons for thinking that are basically design argument reasons. And he thinks that, and of course this is a view that was held in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, that the more closely you look at the structures of things, the more obvious it is that these can't be the result of chance or can't be the result of some kind of strange agglomeration of useful characteristics because the more closely you look, the more finely tuned the mechanisms seem to be. So he's a Platonist in that sense, but as I say the fine structure is very much Aristotelian with additions. But since he's committed to the view that there is a creator god of enormous intelligence and benevolence, he's much more concerned than Aristotle is to try and give an adaptive answer to the question why certain structures are in the body. So when Aristotle of course famously and very usefully will say sometimes, well a particular organ isn't there for any reason at all, it's just a material consequence of other things which do have teleological purposes, Galen's inclined to think that that can't be the case. No serious craftsman would have done that kind of thing. So something like hair for example. Exactly yes. He produces a teleological account of why it's a very good thing to have eyelashes. Among other things, eyebrows stop the sweat dripping into your eyes which is a good thing and eyelashes stop small insects flying in. And he also argues that it's clearly right and clearly beneficial and clearly teleologically well organised for men to have facial hair but women not to. And that's because women work indoors so they don't need protection from the elements in the same way. And he also says having a large and impressive beard would lend an undue air of augustness to the female physiognomy, something that would not be in accord with their essentially frivolous solace. So beards make one look dignified. Dignified and frivolous. This might be an appropriate time to tell the listeners that both Jim and I have beards. Yes indeed. And I'm pretty sure Galen must have had one too. He wouldn't have said that. He wouldn't have said that, yes. Exactly. One last question just quickly because we're running out of time. I think one interesting thing about Galen is that he lives at a time where there's a lot going on in the history of Platonism and he seems to be very unusual as a Platonist. So while other people are coming up with these highly metaphysical, highly speculative versions of Platonism, he has this what you might think of as a down to earth kind of Platonism which draws more on the Timaeus arguably than other dialogues of Plato but certainly draws on the Republic as well. And also tries to weave together Plato with Hippocrates. So is there anything you can say to explain that? Is it just because he was a doctor and so he came at Plato from a kind of medical direction rather than a speculative metaphysical direction? Well I think it's partly that. I think he does tell us something about his philosophical education. As I said earlier he went to, he studied with leading representatives of all the major schools, Stoic, Epicurean, Aristotelian and Platonist and found all of them wanting in some degree. Found them in particular all to be too closely wedded to the doctrines of the master. And in a number of places he says I belong to no sect. I'm not a sectarian. And indeed you shouldn't be a sectarian because it's a sort of servile attitude to take. That's not to say that the great men of the past haven't said things that were right. But you shouldn't just suppose that they were right because they were said by great men of the past. And so he's in that sense he's a sort of eclectic. He thinks, I mean he finds on occasion things to be said in favour of some Stoic views. In particular on logic although only up to a point. He's almost universally dismissive of Epicureanism because he thinks atomism is a non-starter as a physical doctrine. And he doesn't like their rejection of teleology. He doesn't like their rejection of teleology either. So I think he is, he's certainly not a representative Platonist. And it's certainly a mistake in a sense to label him I think as a Platonist if by that you think of something like an orthodox middle Platonist of the early imperial period. Something like Alcinimus or something like that. Precisely because of the strict rejection of speculation. And because he's not interested in system building in the way that the Platonists of the time and of course succeeding centuries were almost obsessively interested in building a system that will somehow include everything within it in some grand structural scheme. Galen's not interested in that at all. I mean as we've said he does think that the universe is under the control of a providential god but he thinks that that's empirically determinable. And he doesn't think you can say anything much more about god than that. God's substance is going to be a mystery. Just in the same way as the, as you started out by saying the substance or essence or real nature if you like of the soul is also a mystery. He thinks that it's clearly materially affectable. For that reason it's quite likely to be material but he thinks you can't rule out the Platonist view. That the rational soul is immaterial and immortal. He just thinks you can't establish it either. And so you might as well not bother. And in fact these are precisely the other figures I'm going to be getting onto in the next episode. But first let me thank Jim very much for coming on and showing us that the best ancient doctor was also a philosopher. And please join me next time on the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Caesarian Section, Philosophy in the Roman Empire. In the very first episode of this podcast, I pointed out that relatively wealthy societies have always been the fertile soil in which philosophy has flourished. It's no accident that pre-Socratic philosophy first emerged in the affluent trading cities of Ionia, or that Athens became the centre for philosophical activity only after becoming the centre of a Mediterranean empire. A bit of social disruption may not be an insurmountable obstacle, and can even be helpfully provocative. Just think of Plato's engagement with the political events leading up to the death of Socrates. But clearly some degree of stability is also needed to ensure that some members of the society can become not just literate, but well-read, and have the leisure to devote their lives to reflection and study. So you might expect that philosophy did pretty well in the Roman Empire. By the time of Augustus Caesar, who began his reign in 27 BC and died in 14 AD, the Romans already held sway not only over all of Italy, but also modern-day France and Spain, parts of Germany, Greece, Asia Minor, and the fertile lands of Northern Africa. With some boundary changes, for instance the addition of a remote island the Romans called Britannia, the empire was able first to thrive, and then at least to survive, for centuries to come. While Athens remained strongly associated with philosophy, Rome itself played host to many a philosopher, including those who spoke and wrote in Greek. For instance, we'll find the most important late-ancient philosopher Plotinus living there in the 3rd century AD. A third philosophical center was Alexandria on the coast of Egypt, founded by its namesake Alexander the Great, then built up into a cultural hub under the Ptolemies during the Hellenistic Age. It was still important for philosophy as late as the 6th century. Plotinus, incidentally, came originally from Egypt, a reminder that philosophers who used Greek came from all over the Eastern Empire and not only from mainland Greece. In fact, a good number of philosophers, such as the important Platonist thinker Iamblichus, hailed from Syria. Philosophy would still be a going concern in Syria even after the fall of the Western Empire. As late as the 9th century, Muslim patrons seeking translators to render Greek philosophical works into Arabic could draw on the expertise of Christians of Syrian extraction. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In fact, we were already ahead of ourselves before this episode even started. Here I am introducing philosophy in the Roman Empire, but we've already looked at several figures who wrote in the Imperial Age, including most obviously the so-called Roman Stoics. It's hard to miss the fact that they lived after the fall of the Republic, given that one of them, Marcus Aurelius, was actually an emperor. Other Imperial Age figures we've examined include Marcus's doctor Galen and the greatest of the skeptics Sextus Empiricus, who, like Marcus and Galen, lived in the 2nd century AD. I have to admit that dates have never been my strong point, but in this case, the chronological confusion is not really my fault. Splitting philosophy into historical periods is always a tricky and somewhat arbitrary business, and this case is no exception. The so-called Hellenistic schools survived very nicely until well after the Hellenistic period, pretty much however one chooses to define that period. Thus we have Stoics, skeptics, and Epicureans still defending their school's doctrines, or lack of doctrines, well into the time of the Roman Empire. Conversely, the most distinctive philosophical feature of late antiquity begins already in the 1st century BC, the Renaissance and ultimate fusion of dogmatic Platonism and Aristotelianism. During the Hellenistic period, Aristotle had a few adherents, but he was not a dominant figure. The Platonic Academy, meanwhile, adopted a skeptical bent. Once Aristotelianism and dogmatic Platonism came back into vogue, there was a kind of free-for-all, in which five or even six distinct schools had some claim on the best minds of the early empire. From the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD, Aristotle began a comeback that would eventually see him crowned as the chief philosopher by all medieval traditions. Platonism also emerged as a force to be reckoned with. At this time, the philosopher, historian, and literary stylist Plutarch was able to declare himself a proud adherent of the Academy. By this, he certainly did not mean that he was a skeptic, but rather that he adopted the sort of Pythagoreanizing Platonism which had first been seen among Plato's immediate followers. Nonetheless, during this transitional period of the early empire, which is sometimes referred to as the post-Hellenistic age of philosophy, the Hellenistic schools were still going strong. I've already reminded you about proponents of Stoicism and skepticism in these centuries, and can further remind you of Diogenes of Oinoanda, the Epicurean. You may also recall that a sixth group, the Cynics, were still on hand to mock the pretensions of emperors like Nero and Caligula. Hand in hand with this proliferation of schools went an institutionalization of those schools. As David Sedley mentioned in my interview with him, as early as 155 BC an embassy of Greek philosophers was sent to Rome for political purposes. They represented three separate schools, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Aristotelianism. In a later echo of this idea that the schools could have official spokesmen, our right royal friend Marcus Aurelius established four chairs of philosophy in Athens. For him, the four chief schools were, of course, Stoicism, and then Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Epicureanism. Rich patrons and political rulers continued to influence the way philosophy was practiced right down to the last days of the Western Empire. We know that Plotinus benefited from association with wealthy Roman aristocrats, for instance. These aristocrats typically sent their kids out to be educated, especially in grammar and rhetoric, a practice that influenced the development of philosophy. The case of Philo of Alexandria is illustrative. An aristocratic Hellenized Jew of the first century AD, Philo received an education that included the study of grammar, geometry, and the great Greek poets. St. Augustine, growing up in the second half of the fourth century AD, underwent a Latin version of this curriculum and almost wound up as a rhetoric teacher himself. The Christian Neoplatonist, John Philoponus, was sneeringly called the Grammarion by his arch-enemy, Simplicius, because he was a teacher of grammar. This same school structure would serve philosophy well in the imperial age. Like Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus before him, Plotinus set up a philosophical school. Later, there were important schools of Platonists in both Alexandria and Athens. But what the rich and powerful give, they can take away. The Christian emperor Justinian shut down the school of Athens in 529 AD, an act which has come to symbolize the dying of pagan philosophy in the late empire. Because so much philosophy in the later ancient period was done in a school setting, we must always read the works of this period with pedagogy in mind. Some of Plotinus's treatises were written in direct response to issues raised by students in his school. In fact, the most voluminous body of philosophical writing in late antiquity had an explicit educational purpose. These were the commentaries devoted to the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle, sometimes little more than records of school lectures expounding the texts of these two great masters. Here's a jaw-dropping statistic for you. By word count, about half of the entire surviving corpus of Greek philosophical writings consists of late ancient commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. More generally, in terms of sheer quantity, most surviving philosophical literature in Greek was written not in classical antiquity, but in late antiquity, the period of the later Roman Empire. Some of these works were written about one thousand years after Plato and Aristotle. Those were one thousand years during which texts could disappear, the fate of the writings of the pre-Socratics and of early Stoics like Chrysippus, for instance. This disappearance was not mere accident, a case of too many libraries going out of business or catching fire. Rather, it is a sign of evolving intellectual tastes. Until very recently, the preservation of any writing was a costly and time-consuming business. Texts needed to be copied in order to be disseminated, and this was of particular importance when there were shifts in the technology of the book. In late antiquity, there was a shift from the papyrus roll to the codex, much more like our modern-day book, with leaves of paper, folded, sewn together, and placed between two covers. Plato never leafed through pages. He rolled and unrolled. But by the time the scribes of the Byzantine Empire were copying out the earliest manuscripts of Plato that have survived until today, scrolls were an outmoded technology. The codex was the only game in town. Styles of writing, too, underwent transitions, with a major shift in the 9th century AD from writing in uncials, which is like writing all in capital letters, to writing in minuscule, which is more like a lower-case cursive script. Texts could easily be lost when these shifts in writing technology and practice occurred. A book written in an outdated script was like the vinyl records in your attic, supplanted first by cassette tapes, then by CDs. With every change, someone needed to make a deliberate choice to copy out a text by hand in the new style. So, as texts were passed down from generation to generation, decisions were implicitly made about which works were worth copying. This means that the philosophical tastes of late antiquity and the Byzantine period were a filter through which Greek literature had to pass to reach us. The same is true of medieval European tastes and ancient Latin literature. It's no accident that the works of Platonists and Aristotelians have survived better than the works of Stoics and Epicureans. After all, Aristotelian Platonists were the ones who decided what would survive. Of course, this too needs explanation. We just saw that in the second century AD, Stoicism and Epicureanism were honored with official chairs in Athens. So how did it come about that these two schools faded away whereas Platonism and Aristotelianism rose into the ascendancy? If you were to lay the blame at the feet of one man, it would have to be Plotinus. Writing in the third century AD, he defended a Platonist system that would become the dominant philosophy of late antiquity. This system went on to be a pervasive influence on medieval philosophy in both Arabic and Latin. Scholars distinguished this system from what came before by calling it Neoplatonism. Not everyone likes the term, but we're pretty much stuck with it, so I'm going to go ahead and speak freely of Neoplatonism and Neoplatonists in episodes to come, but with the following caveats. First, it's important always to remember that ancient Platonists called themselves just that, Platonists, and never Neoplatonists, this term having been invented only in the modern age. Second, it's not as if Plotinus came out of nowhere. There were Platonists before him, as we'll see starting in the next episode. Really, there is a continuous development of dogmatic Platonism starting in the first century BC. Third, and along the same lines, it's not as if Neoplatonists after Plotinus just agreed with him about everything. In fact, they often mention him to disagree with him, and there are many differences between his thought and what we'd find in, say, a Neoplatonist commentator in sixth century Alexandria. Still, it remains the case that Neoplatonism, in all its variety, ruled the roost in late antiquity. But I still haven't really explained why it succeeded at the expense of the other schools. To some extent, it simply absorbed its rivals. There is a good deal of Stoic cosmology and ethics woven into the fabric of Neoplatonism. This co-opting strategy had been used already by Plotinus before Plotinus, but he perfected it. Much the same can be said about Aristotelianism. Plotinus's attitude towards Aristotle is a matter of some controversy, but there's little doubt that he managed to integrate a number of Aristotelian ideas into his philosophy, even as he criticized Aristotle explicitly on other points. We'll have ample opportunity to observe Neoplatonists expressing these mixed emotions towards Aristotle, but it was always at least a love-hate relationship, and not infrequently a love-love relationship. For Neoplatonists, the usual goal was not to refute Aristotle, but to show how Aristotle could be harmonized with Plato. As for Epicureanism and skepticism, these schools really do vanish from the scene in late antiquity. Neoplatonists find them useful only as opponents to be defeated, and often seem to think that Epicureanism in particular is barely worth refuting. There are plausible historical explanations for this. With the dogmatic shift in Platonism, the skeptics lacked a sufficient institutional basis, such as the academy. Their anti-belief program had in any case been compromised in the days of the early empire, provoking a backlash by the more stringent skeptics who called themselves Pyronists. But Pyronism would not be influential again until the early modern period, when it appealed to authors of no less astanding than David Hume. Similarly, Epicureanism never regained the heights of devotion and articulacy we find in Lucretius, and it was universally rejected in the later imperial age. This outcome was certainly unpredictable from the standpoint of the 2nd century AD, when we have inscriptions of Epicurus being erected in Turkey and an endowed chair for the school in Athens. So what happened? In the case of both skepticism and Epicureanism, the answer may be that late antiquity was no time to be anti-religious. The skeptics suspended belief about the nature of the gods, along with everything else. The Epicureans did admit the existence of the gods, but immediately added that these gods have nothing to do with us, so we need not fear them. There was no place for such views in the religious ferment of the later empire, when paganism struggled to retain its cultural standing in the face of a new faith, Christianity. It was put forth with a vehemence and sudden success that was disconcerting, and sometimes terrifying, to its opponents. Adherents of traditional religion could not help seeing the Christians as disruptive fanatics. Pagan religious beliefs had always allowed for a degree of ecumenical inclusivism. Egyptian and Greek gods were identified with the traditional gods of the Italian peninsula, or simply added to the pantheon. By contrast, Jews and Christians made claims to exclusive possession of the truth. As monotheists, they simply would not play well with others. This led to violent conflict between Jews and Romans, and to even more violent conflict between Romans and Christians. The Christians began, of course, as victims of persecution, being fed to lions and that sort of thing, but over a period of several centuries, Christianity steadily gained power and influence, and then, finally, imperium. In the early 4th century, Constantine changed the Roman Empire into a Christian Empire, and his successors mostly adopted the new faith. We'll be coming to an exception in due course, it turns out that this exceptional emperor was a Neoplatonist philosopher. Of course, the traditional cults and beliefs did not die out overnight. In fact, most of the significant philosophers of late antiquity were still pagans. I already mentioned that Christian hostility towards paganism could still affect the philosophical scene in 529 AD, when Justinian closed the school in Athens. I've also mentioned the bitter dispute between John Philoponus and Simplicius, a dispute not unrelated to the fact that Philoponus was a Christian and Simplicius a pagan. In short, then, this was a period when philosophy was closely allied to religious belief. It was only to be expected that, in such an environment, Epicureanism and skepticism would drift into near oblivion. Harder to expect was the success of Neoplatonism in co-opting, or being co-opted by, one last tradition, Christianity itself. Since before Plotinus, dogmatic Platonism had been a deeply religious enterprise. Plutarch, who we met a few minutes back, devoted numerous works to philosophical discussions of religious topics, such as the nature of demons or oracles. Iamblichus, the Neoplatonist who hailed from Syria, put pagan religious belief at the very center of his philosophy, and was followed in this by generations of passionately religious Platonists. They modified the system pioneered by Plotinus, making room for the multiplicity of gods and semi-divine entities recognized in late antique paganism. So it would seem that any marriage between Neoplatonism and Christianity was bound to be a stormy one. Nonetheless, despite the occasional marital squabble, Christians found in Neoplatonism a partner worth loving and honoring, if not obeying. This, too, calls out for an explanation. Part of the credit should, again, go to that man Plotinus. He was certainly no Christian, but his Neoplatonism was a fairly austere affair, metaphysically speaking. As we shall see, he posited a single first principle called the One, who bears a striking resemblance to the monotheistic god of the revealed religions. This resemblance made it possible for Neoplatonism to be purged of its more baroque pagan structures, yielding a metaphysical picture that would be found attractive in 9th century Baghdad in 11th century Constantinople. Indeed, it was possible for the tradition of commentary on Aristotle to pass from pagans to Christians almost without skipping a beat. Pagan teachers taught Christian students, and these students passed on the Neoplatonic reading of Aristotle to subsequent generations. We find the same practices of teaching and commenting on Aristotle not only in the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, but also among Christians writing in Syriac and Arabic up until the time of Islam. There is another reason that the monotheistic religions were able to absorb this strand of the ancient philosophical tradition. They had a lot of practice. Christians and Jews had been appropriating ideas from Greek philosophy since the time of Jesus of Nazareth. A somewhat older contemporary of Jesus, and like him a Jew, was Philo of Alexandria, who should be credited as the first representative of these faiths to engage seriously with Greek philosophy. Among Christians, the earliest church fathers were likewise deeply influenced by Platonism and Stoicism. Indeed, even St. Paul seems to have been influenced by the philosophical ideas that penetrated the worldview of antiquity. For this reason, the coming episodes will need to trace two parallel and intersecting stories within the history of philosophy—not only the resurgence and triumph of Plato and Aristotle among pagan thinkers, but also the appropriation of the pagan intellectual heritage among Jews and Christians. This leads us to another difficulty, not unlike the problem of demarcating Hellenistic from later ancient philosophy. When does late ancient philosophy end and medieval philosophy begin? Nowadays, figures like Augustine and Boethius are frequently taught in the context of classes on medieval philosophy. But these were indisputably men of late antiquity. Augustine lived from the 4th to the 5th centuries and Boethius from the 5th to the 6th. Their worldview was shaped not just by the Bible, by controversies over grace and the nature of the Trinity, but also by Plotinus and Aristotle. Thus, the history of philosophy in Western Europe is difficult to split into discrete periods, ancient versus medieval. The same goes, of course, for the plain old history of Western Europe. Feudal structures of land ownership started to emerge already in late antiquity, as a strong imperial center disintegrated amongst civil war and barbarian raids. Perhaps this instability was one more factor that contributed to the popularity of Neoplatonism. It is, as we'll see, a philosophy that urges us to turn away from our bodily existence and towards a more perfect, stable realm. But before we get to Neoplatonism, we need first to look at its roots in the earlier so-called post-Hellenistic period. As Rome made its transition from republic to empire, admirers of Plato turned their back on skepticism. This meant a return to the Pythagorean obsession with number and the confident metaphysical speculations of the old academy. This is not to say that the immediate followers of Plato, Xenocrates and Spusippus, who we looked at in episode 51, were treated as unimpeachable authorities. For these early imperial Platonists, only Plato was beyond criticism, and it was possible to heap scorn on old academic interpretations of the master. These thinkers are sometimes called the Middle Platonists, because they come after the ancient Platonic tradition of the old academy and before the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. But this somewhat dismissive label masks their pivotal role in ancient thought. Middle Platonism paved the way for much of what would be new in Neoplatonism, and we count among the Middle Platonists two of the greatest philosophers of the age, Plutarch and Philo of Alexandria. So, join me next time to see Platonism rediscover its form, or rather forms, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Middlemen, the Platonic Revival. If your handwriting is anything like mine, then even you may not be able to read what you have written. Certain letters in particular may be easily confused. A lowercase b and a lowercase k, for instance. If I wrote out the name of my favourite silent film comedian in lowercase, you might read it and wonder why you've never heard of this Custer Beaton, if he's supposed to be so great. And I'm not alone. You'll remember my saying last time that Greek manuscripts made a transition from being written in capital letters to being written in miniscule letters, and in some types of miniscule script, the Greek letter beta, or b, looks similar to the kappa, or k. It turns out that a potential confusion between these two letters is at the heart of one of the niftiest philological controversies in ancient philosophy. At question is the name of the man who wrote a book called the Didascalicos, or Handbook, a guide to the philosophy of Plato. He probably wrote it in the 2nd century AD. As for his name, a 9th century manuscript, the earliest that preserves this text, tells us that he was called Alkinoos. Here's the nifty part. We know of no Platonist from this period called Alkinoos, but we do know of a thinker named Albinos. So, in 1879, a German scholar ingeniously suggested that our Alkinoos could be a scribe's mistaken version of Albinos, the Greek letter kappa replaced with the letter beta. The suggested correction would banish Alkinoos from the scene, leaving the already familiar Albinos as the author of the Didascalicos. But a century later in the 1970s, another scholar pointed out that, even in manuscripts that are written in minuscule, the heading with the title and author's name is written in nice bold capitals, and no one is going to confuse a capital K with a capital B. So, it's now widely accepted that we are stuck with Alkinoos. But why is it of such capital importance to find out who wrote the Didascalicos? Well, it is one of the few complete texts to survive from a philosophical movement in the early Roman Empire which re-established Platonism as a force to be reckoned with. Before them came the skeptical Academy, after them the dominant tradition of Neo-Platonism inaugurated by Plotinus, and these guys were in the middle. Thus, they have come to be called the middle Platonists. The very name shows the lack of esteem they have received from historians of philosophy. If the whole history of philosophy is footnotes to Plato, they can sometimes seem like a footnote to one of the footnotes, mere transitional figures whose ideas are often preserved only inadequately in fragments and testimonies found in later authors. But in this episode, I want to give a little love to the middle Platonists. They set the basic agenda for the Platonism of later antiquity, defending doctrinal Platonism at a time when skepticism was still a going concern, and when Stoics and Aristotelians provided serious competition. This period of the Platonist tradition also gave us two figures who have left extensive surviving writings, Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch. Because of their importance, I will be devoting an episode to each of them, but first I want to look at the movement as a whole. In terms of chronology, we're basically talking about the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the heyday of the Roman Empire. But the action begins already with two thinkers of the 1st century BC. We've looked at one of them already, Antiochus of Ascalon. When we discussed Cicero, back in episode 71, we saw that Antiochus rejected the new academy's skeptical reading of Socrates and Plato. For him, the Platonic dialogues were a rich source of positive doctrines, which he saw as being fundamentally in agreement with Aristotle and the Stoics. He also admired still earlier figures like Pythagoras, but he did not put Pythagoras front and center in his history of philosophy. For that, we need to turn to a second, slightly later philosopher of the 1st century BC, Eudorus of Alexandria. He was apparently not the first dogmatic Pythagorean of this era. Cicero mentions a man with the rather wonderful name of Publius Nigidius Figulus, who would have been a generation older. Cicero credits Figulus with reviving the tradition of Pythagoreanism which had fallen into oblivion in its Italian homeland. Sadly, we know nothing more than this about him, but further evidence of Pythagorean activity comes from texts that pass themselves off as writings by antique authorities. The most interesting of these pretends to be a treatise by Timaeus, the main character of Plato's dialogue of that name. There is debate about how early these Pythagorean texts were written. With Eudorus, at least we have a name, a place, and a rough time for his activity, but we don't know much about him either. None of his writings survive, and we have little information about his personality. Eudorus adopted something like Antiochus' idea of a unified tradition centered on Plato's writings. But unlike Antiochus, he did not claim that all non-skeptical philosophers were basically in agreement with one another. Rather than embracing Aristotle as a mostly faithful student of Plato, Eudorus criticized points in Aristotle's logical work The Categories. He also differed from Antiochus in that he did not make Plato the fount of all philosophical wisdom. Instead, he saw Pythagoras as the primary figure. For instance, Plato's famous exhortation that mankind should seek likeness to God was said by Eudorus to be lifted straight from Pythagoras. Plato supposedly merely added the caveat that we should seek such assimilation to God only insofar as is possible for mankind. In keeping with this, Eudorus had a rather selective approach to reading Plato's dialogues, emphasizing passages and themes that could be made to harmonize with Pythagoreanism as he understood it. Particularly important was Eudorus' scheme of first principles. With some changes of detail, this scheme appears in nearly all the middle Platonists and it will be revised to become the core of Plotinus' metaphysics in the third century. To understand what Eudorus was after, we need to put ourselves in a Pythagorean frame of mind. This, of course, means thinking about numbers. As we saw long ago when we looked at Pythagoras and his first followers, Pythagorean philosophy sees numbers as fundamental to reality as a whole. This isn't a crazy thought. You don't need modern science to tell you that the physical world displays mathematical regularities, from the revolutions of the heavens to the fingers on our hands. And already in the ancient world, mathematics was taken as a paradigm of certain knowledge. It's invoked, for instance, in Aristotle's posterior analytics when he is explaining what he means by demonstrative understanding. But there is a bit of a problem with numbers. There are an awful lot of them. I don't know if you've tried counting them, but if you have, I assume you gave up at some point, or you would still be at it. Ancient philosophers, of course, realized that there are an infinity of numbers. Usually, they regarded infinity as something that we cannot know. The infinite has no limit, and its indefiniteness threatens to elude human understanding. So, paradoxically, numbers appear in antiquity both as a paradigm object of knowledge and as something that is potentially unknowable. Eudorus and other Pythagoreans squared this circle by following Plato's immediate successors, the old academy. They had proposed that indefinitely many numbers can be derived from only two basic principles, the so-called monad and dyad. These are, respectively, the principles of unity and multiplicity. Picking up on terminology used by Plato himself, these two principles are also sometimes referred to as limit and the unlimited. Whatever they are called, the picture remains basically the same. We have a source of oneness and a source of manyness. When these two principles come together, an ordered but infinite series is produced. The monad, or limit, bestows no ability and order, the dyad gives the series its unbounded multiplicity. This is also how the old academy explained the mathematical structure of things. From the monad and dyad, they generated not just numbers but forms, geometrical figures, bodies, in short, everything. Their theory may seem obscure, but at its root is a fairly straightforward idea, that the properties and determinations of things are produced by imposing a limit or order on something indefinite. Unity or limitation is furthermore seen as a source of goodness and beauty, since the goodness of each thing will consist in its having correct order and proper proportion. Take the very Pythagorean example of a string on a musical instrument, like a guitar or a Greek lyre. To produce notes you have to strike or pluck strings of specific lengths. One can apply the same idea to colors and even to three-dimensional shapes. A cube, for instance, is space enclosed by the limits that are its sides. And remember that in Plato's Timaeus, the fundamental elements are argued to consist of geometrical atoms. Earth, for instance, is made up of cubes at the atomic level. Examples like these show why Pythagorean Platonists from the old academy onwards portrayed the universe as an ordered ladder of mathematical structures and harmonies, in which all things are made, and made to be good, from a mating of unity with indefinite multiplicity. Eudorus added a rung to this metaphysical ladder. Perhaps he was disturbed by the idea that an opposition between two principles should be fundamental. After all, Plato's Republic envisions a single form of the good, which has no partner. So Eudorus insisted that above the primordial generative couple, monad and dyad, there should be an even higher principle. Over the next centuries, Platonists will call it by several names, not only the good, but also the father, and even God. But most often, it will take the name Eudorus gave it, the One. This is a big step in the direction of Neoplatonism. Plotinus, too, will posit a single One above all things, a source of goodness, order, and unity for everything else. Other Neoplatonists will follow him in this, and agree that the fundamental principle of unity is also the fundamental principle of goodness. In other words, the One is the good. Though Eudorus had a major role in the development of this idea, he was not Plotinus' most immediate source. That distinction instead goes to Numenius, a Platonist of the mid-2nd century AD. The works of Numenius were read in Plotinus' school, and in fact Plotinus' critics claimed that he plagiarized his philosophy from Numenius. Since we have far less evidence for Numenius than for Plotinus, it's hard to know how justified that accusation may have been. But certainly, Numenius would have been a direct inspiration for the doctrine of a highest One, or good. He also anticipated Plotinus in writing about this One with a flair for evocative imagery, which was sorely lacking in most middle Platonists, as far as we can tell. In one fragment, Numenius compares the philosopher who fleetingly grasps the good to a lookout who glimpses a one-man boat floating far out upon the endless ocean. With Eudorus and Numenius, we ourselves fleetingly glimpse a problem faced by middle and neo-Platonists alike. If the principle of goodness is identical with the principle of unity, wouldn't it be better if no multiplicity were produced by the One? Why can't it just remain alone, serenely unproductive and perfect? This is arguably the central difficulty of late ancient Platonism. I raise it now because Eudorus and Numenius seem to have adopted the two obvious but incompatible solutions. For Eudorus, the highest One is the principle of all things, including the monad and dyad. It is, thus, a single supreme cause for everything. Numenius doesn't like this idea. He doesn't see how a principle of multiplicity like the dyad can come from a principle of unity. So, he says that both monad and dyad are fundamental. His system reduces all things to an opposed pair, rather than a single source. This allows him to sidestep the problem of how one gives rise to many, but if God has an opposite, an enemy if you will, does that make the universe a kind of battleground in which unity struggles to overcome a source of multiplicity that is its equal? As we'll be seeing, that was precisely the view taken by a religious group called the Gnostics. Plotinus was occasionally tempted by this idea, but ultimately rejected it, and along with it, the dualist elements found in Numenius and some other middle Platonists. With Numenius, we've taken our story up to the 2nd century AD, and that's where I want to stay for the rest of this episode. This means returning to our friend Alcinous with a K. As I've said, his Didascalicos was a guide to reading, or perhaps teaching, the works of Plato. It moves swiftly through the main features of Plato's philosophy, depending especially on the Timaeus, but drawing on a range of dialogues. Alcinous takes it for granted that the dialogues are a source of positive doctrines, and has no time for the skeptical approach to Plato or Socrates. Indeed, he doesn't even mention it. Other middle Platonists were not so tactful. Numenius, for instance, wrote a polemical work called On the Divergence of the Academy from Plato. For middle Platonists, as for Antiochus, Plato was what the skeptics would have called a dogmatist. In some cases, middle Platonists also agreed with Antiochus in presenting all the non-skeptical classical philosophers as a unified tradition. Alcinous is an example. Of course, he takes Plato to be the greatest of philosophers, but his greatness includes his having supposedly thought of Aristotle's and the Stoics' ideas before they had a chance to do so themselves. Alcinous would have us believe that all of Aristotelian and Stoic logic is already contained in the dialogues, a point he proves by the rather dubious expedient of pointing out that arguments presented by Platonic characters have various logical structures. Of course, it's one thing to use an argument of the form, if A, then B, but A, therefore B, and another thing entirely to do what the Stoics did, isolating the argument form in its own right and calling it a hypothetical syllogism. Alcinous was willing, indeed eager, to overlook this distinction. Similarly, Alcinous casually ascribes to Plato some very Stoic-sounding ideas about the importance of resisting emotion. All in all, his strategy is to kill the rival schools with kindness. Their best insights are quietly incorporated into a Platonist system and claimed to be the discoveries of Plato, while other features of their thought are just as quietly dropped. This strategy, so reminiscent of Antiochus, was not universally adopted by the middle Platonists. We already saw that Eudorus attacked Aristotle's categories. This seems to have been something of a favorite pastime for Platonists in the early Roman Empire. Two obscure philosophers named Lucius and Nicostratus are known only for their criticisms of the categories. They may have been Platonists attacking Aristotle out of school rivalry. A more important figure was Atticus, the leading Platonist in the city of Athens towards the end of the 2nd century AD. We have an extensive report of his withering criticisms of Aristotle, especially on ethical topics. As we've seen in previous episodes, the Stoics reacted harshly to Aristotle's admission that external goods, like health and wealth, might make some difference to our happiness. Atticus, too, seizes on the point. He complains that it makes our happiness depend on chance rather than virtue, as if Aristotle had built his whole ethical theory around the importance of external goods. Of course, the divine Plato would never make such a mistake. For him, virtue guarantees happiness, and nothing else matters. Although our Platonists tend to agree with the Stoics about virtue and happiness, they take exception to other features of Stoicism. It almost goes without saying that they reject Stoic materialism. As Platonists, they in fact see immaterial principles like Platonic forms as being more real than physical objects. But actually, they have a bit of a problem with these forms. Whatever one makes of the forms, there are clearly going to be a lot of them. So how do they relate to the highest source of unity that sits at the top of their metaphysical hierarchy? Many middle Platonists simply make the many forms ideas in the mind of a single god. Problem solved. More difficult for them is the question of what to do with the Stoic teaching on Providence and fate. They enthusiastically agree with the Stoics that the physical world is governed by divine providence, but they find the Stoics' determinism repellent. They therefore develop a cunning theory according to which divine providence is exercised over the physical world only by bestowing general laws and order on that world. Individual events within the physical world, such as those due to human choice, are not caused by fate, but they do fall under its jurisdiction. What this means is that fate establishes laws of cause and effect that can be triggered by human choice. Consider good old Oedipus Rex. The laws of fate do not force him to kill a king at the crossroads and marry the dead man's queen, but they do ensure that once Oedipus has taken these actions, the rest of the story will unfold with its unstoppable logic, until Oedipus has discovered the horrible truth and taken his own eyes out. At that point, Oedipus has quite literally met his fate. Again, these features of middle Platonism set the stage for Neoplatonism. Plotinus, too, deals with the rival schools, especially Aristotelians and Stoics, by criticizing them loudly while accepting many of their ideas quietly. He, too, attacks the categories and Aristotle's stance on external goods, yet accepts important principles of Aristotelian metaphysics and psychology. Likewise, he absorbs Stoic ideas about universal providence but rejects their determinism. Above all, he simply assumes, as the middle Platonists had assumed before him, that Plato is a dogmatic philosopher whose theories can be extracted from the dialogues. Though we do not know much about how Plato was read in Plotinus's school, we can already see that in middle Platonism there was a trend towards organizing the Platonic material along doctrinal or pedagogical lines. The first attempt to arrange Plato's dialogues was by a Platonist named Thrasyllus. He grouped them into sets of four, and reasonably enough, he sometimes let himself be guided by their dramatic order. So, he suggested starting with the four dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, which tell the story of Socrates's trial, imprisonment, and execution. Our friend Albinus, with a B, found this superficial. He instead began with dialogues that would provide an ethical orientation for beginning students. However the dialogues were organized, it's clear that for all these Platonists they were something akin to sacred texts. In late antiquity, Plato's adherents often called him divine and they were not kidding. They believed that the dialogues contained inspired and superhuman truths. The same truths had been taught by Pythagoras, but Plato elaborated them in a substantial body of texts that could become the object of teaching and commentary. Of course, Plato's dialogues were not the only writings to be held in reverence in the ancient world. There were many pagan religious texts, and paganism was starting to get stiff competition from Judaism and Christianity. Sometimes the traditions mingled together. Already in the early 1st century AD, we find middle Platonist doctrines showing up in the rather unexpected context of Jewish philosophy and theology. This remarkable combination was the work of an equally remarkable man. Though he is often described as a Platonist, he wrote commentaries not on the dialogues, but on the books of Moses. He will give us our first chance to see Greek philosophy interacting with the Abrahamic religions. I hope you won't choose next week to make an exodus away from the podcast, since if you do, you will miss Philo of Alexandria, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To the Lighthouse, Philo of Alexandria. Here's the story of a man named Noah, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living all together, but they were not alone. In fact, they were surrounded by an extended family and two of every creature that crawls upon the earth and flies in the sky, having delivered them from certain destruction in an arc that had been built to precise specifications. After making landfall, Noah showed where his priorities lay by immediately planting vines, turning the grapes into wine, and getting drunk. The youngest of his sons saw him in this sorry state and fetched the other two, who respectively covered up their naked father. Once Noah sobered up and awoke, he was furious with the youngest son who had seen him so exposed. He cursed this son's son, his own grandson, Canaan, condemning him and his descendants to servitude. As you know, this rather sorry tale appears in the Bible, in fact almost at the very beginning of the Bible, in the ninth chapter of Genesis. Whether you are a believer or not, you have to wonder what is it doing there? Why would the Bible tell us that Noah, savior of mankind and animal kind to boot, got senselessly drunk and was shamefully exposed in front of his sons? It's a problem not unlike one we've seen before. You'll remember that some ancient readers were shocked by stories in which colorful misdeeds were ascribed to the Greek gods. Some, like Xenophanes and Plato, rejected these stories. Others assumed that the myths had a less obvious and more instructive meaning. Giving the awkward bits a less awkward interpretation was sometimes called theropaia muthon, the healing of myths. By the time of the middle Platonists, interpretive healing had frequently been applied to Homer and other revered texts of the Hellenic tradition. In the mid-first century A.D., an author named Cornutus set down a compilation of such readings. He drew especially from the Stoics, who used allegory and etymology to uncover the messages that lay hidden in sacred tales of the gods. You may recall that, in his dialogue The Cratylus, Plato too used etymology to extract a philosophical meaning from the names of gods. Inspired partially by this Platonic precedent, later ancient Platonists were eager to see philosophical content in Homer and Hesiod and would use any means necessary to find it. Nor did they ignore the Jewish scriptures. We are told that one of the greatest Platonists of the early Empire, Numenius, asked, what is Plato but Moses, speaking in Attic Greek? Later Platonists like Porphyry, who had nothing but disdain and hostility for the Christians, showed considerable interest in Judaism, treating the ancient faith and its ancient scriptures with respect. But to see allegorical interpretation in full sail, being applied not only to the Ark and to Noah's being four sheets to the wind, but to the Jewish Bible in general, we need to turn to the subject of today's episode. He hailed from Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great and made it into a leading center for philosophy and science by the Ptolemies of Egypt. His name was Philo, not to be confused with the new academic skeptic Philo of Larissa. This Philo of Alexandria is sometimes called Philo Judaeus because he was a Jew. His works consist mostly of exegesis of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch or Torah, which were taken to be the writings of Moses himself. Philo's approach to this sacred text was inspired in part by philosophical allegories like the ones I've just mentioned and in part by previous Jewish commentary. But Philo's handling of the Mosaic teaching is unprecedented. He was not out simply to heal the text by explaining away potentially embarrassing episodes, nor was philosophy just a tool to be used occasionally in reading scripture. Rather, he took Moses to be the source of all true philosophy. Pythagoras was a follower of Moses and Plato a follower of Pythagoras, so that Platonism was a key to unlock the message of Moses. This gave Philo license to go further than Stoic or Platonist interpreters had gone with Homer or any other text. He saw every passage in the Torah as conveying philosophical instruction, usually detectable only by means of allegory. Philo's approach would live on as a powerful tool for doing philosophy within the context of revealed religion. The idea that a text like the Bible or Quran can implicitly contain philosophical teachings is common to the Jewish Philo, the Christian Augustine, and the Muslim of Aroes. We're at the start of something big here. But let's not get distracted from telling the history of Philo without any gaps. He was born towards the end of the first century BC and died in approximately 45 AD, making him a contemporary of Seneca and of Jesus. In Philo, we find a marriage of Hellenistic philosophy and the Jewish faith, and there was no more appropriate place to hold the wedding than Alexandria, on the northern coast of Egypt. It boasted not only the library founded by the Ptolemies and a lighthouse that was literally a wonder of the ancient world, but also the largest Jewish population in Egypt. This community was part of the Hellenistic diaspora, that is, the relocation of many Jews to lands other than Israel and within the Greek-speaking Mediterranean. To understand how Philo's community came to be here, we need to take a brief look at the history of the Jewish people. The primary evidence for their early history is, of course, the Hebrew Bible itself. It tells us that Moses led the Jews out of persecution in Egypt and that they settled in the land once promised to Abraham around the city of King David, Jerusalem. It was here that David's son Solomon built the first temple in the mid-10th century BC. The temple was understood to be the house of God. Within this house was the Holy of Holies, a chamber that remained empty apart from the ark containing the tablets upon which were inscribed God's covenant with the Jewish people. The Bible tells us of Moses, David, and Solomon, and then continues the story with the books of the prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel who lived in the 8th to 6th centuries BC. They bring us up to the time of the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers, and also of a traumatic event in the history of Judaism, an invasion by the Babylonians who deported many Jews and destroyed the first temple of Jerusalem in 586 BC. The period of Judaism in which Philo lived is sometimes called Second Temple Judaism. It is the age beginning with the rebuilding of the temple in 515 BC and ending in 70 AD, a generation after Philo's death, when it was destroyed by the Romans amidst a massacre of rebellious Jews. Both temples were the locus of sacrificial rites, the home of the high priest, and ultimately, as I've said, the house of God. It would not be too dramatic to describe it as the center of the Jewish world. Jews of the diaspora like Philo faced the difficult question of what it meant to be a Jew in a foreign land, without access to the temple. After the second temple was destroyed, all Jews would face the same question no matter where they lived. Even before then, the fortunes of the temple and the Jews more generally were usually determined by more powerful political actors. The second temple could be built only once the Persians defeated the Babylonians and ushered in an age of relative peace for the Jews living in and around Jerusalem. But this situation, along with pretty much every other situation, was changed by Alexander the Great. He conquered the Near East in 332 BC, ten years before his death. At first tossed back and forth between two of the empires that arose following Alexander's death, the region eventually fell under the sway of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. This meant that Jerusalem was governed by the same power as the city of Alexandria, a magnet for people of numerous cultures. Hence, the large Jewish population in Philo's time, when control over Egypt had been seized by Rome. A dynamic of cultural confrontation and cooperation between Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians continued as before, except that now the political prize to be won was above all the favor of the Romans. Philo is a perfect example. He tells us that he went on an embassy to plead the case of the Jews of Alexandria before the Emperor Caligula in the late 30s AD. The mission was a reaction to anti-Jewish violence that had erupted in the city among the Hellenic citizens who considered themselves to be the true Alexandrians. We should not be misled by this. The Jewish community may have had strained relations with their Hellenic neighbors, but Philo himself wrote in Greek and even read his Bible in Greek. His version of the Bible is called the Seventy, in Latin Septuagint, an allusion to the 72 scholars who were held to have translated it into Greek. These scholars were said to be divinely inspired, so that Philo assumed his Greek Bible could be read as the Word of God and not a second-hand version of that word in a new language. Indeed, he invoked the inspiration of the translators in claiming that every passage had been translated with fidelity to the individual words, the surface meaning, and the inner meaning of the Hebrew text. If you've ever tried to translate from one language to another, you'll agree that divine intervention is the least that would be required to explain such a feat. The Septuagint is in fact not quite the same as the Hebrew Bible, differing in order and including additional material. In fact, it is closer to what the Christians would come to call the Old Testament. But for Philo, the Bible was, in any case, above all the five books of the Torah, and his philosophy is mostly presented as an exegesis of the revelation of Moses. He wrote three series of works expounding the Torah. One set out problems about the text with suggested solutions. Another provided a verse-by-verse commentary on Genesis, explaining both the superficial and allegorical meaning of each verse. A third expounded a more thematic exposition of the law. At the head of this three-fold series is one of his most philosophically interesting treatises, On the Creation of the World, which deals with the opening sections of Genesis. Here, Philo takes on the task of squaring the biblical creation story with Plato's Timaeus, the dialogue in which Plato set out his own creation story. To some extent, Philo's task is an easy one. When he sums up the principal doctrines underlying the Genesis account, his list could apply to Plato with equal plausibility. God exists, God is one, He created the world, this world too is only one, and God exercises providence over it. Plato says all these things explicitly in the Timaeus, albeit that he describes the divine Maker as a craftsman, or demiurge, who employs helpers called younger gods. But, a closer look reveals tensions in Philo's attempt to reconcile Plato with Moses. Like Plato's Timaeus, Philo compares the creator to a human designer, specifically an architect who builds a city in accordance with pre-existing plans. These plans are, of course, the Platonic forms. But Plato says that the demiurge looks to the forms and builds the world as an image of those forms. Philo draws a different message from the opening of Genesis. He takes it to refer to a creation of an intelligible world of forms, this is the creation of the first day, with the physical world being fashioned only later in the Genesis story. As if he is aware that readers will suspect that philosophy is being sneakily imported into scripture here, Philo remarks defensively, this is the doctrine of Moses, not mine. With this seemingly subtle shift, Philo has made a dramatic move in the direction of reconciling Plato with Judaism. Whereas Plato seems to suppose that the demiurge is an eternal principle distinct from the forms, Philo asserts the utter primacy of the single creator and locates the forms as ideas in this creator's mind. We'll find a similar position in Plotinus, who explicitly rejected the idea that forms are outside the divine intellect and that this intellect looks towards them like a pre-existing cosmic blueprint. In another anticipation of later Platonic doctrine, Philo uses the Greek word logos to describe the forms insofar as they serve as God's instruments in making the world. Logos is one of the most difficult terms to translate in ancient Greek philosophy, but here it means something like rational principle. Philo is taking a leaf not just from Plato, but from the Stoics, who likewise use the word logos for a divine providential order that pervades the cosmos. The difference is that for the Stoics, the logos was simply identical to God. For Philo, it is God's ideas, which God creates as a first step towards creating the physical universe that will exist by the end of the six days. That mention of six days would make any self-respecting middle Platonist sit up and take notice. As you'll remember from last time, Platonists of this era fused the teachings of the dialogues with the number theories of Pythagoreanism, and Philo is certainly no exception. He does not see the six days of creation as a literal reference to time. Rather, the numbers assigned to each day have an allegorical or symbolic value. For instance, animals are said to be created on the fifth day because sensation is the distinctive feature of animals, and there are five senses. The whole creation is said to take six days in order to convey the perfection of this creation. This is because six is a perfect number—that is, a number equal to the sum of its divisors apart from itself, in this case one, two, and three. The next perfect number, in case you're curious, is 28, and after that you need to wait a while for the third one to come along. We might find it preposterous that this sort of numerology could be a key for understanding the Bible. Philo would respond that it would be truly preposterous to imagine God literally spending six days creating the universe. Surely God created all things at once. Nonetheless, Philo did accept that the physical universe came into existence at some definite time. He wrote another treatise on the topic of the universe's eternity, summarizing arguments for and against that eternity in what may be an echo of the strategy the academic skeptics had used to reach suspension of judgment. In our version of the text, only the pro-eternity arguments survive, which is ironic given that Philo would have ultimately sided with the anti-eternity camp. So, in Genesis, Philo finds metaphysical doctrines about issues like God's creative act and the status of the forms. Yet he places at least equal weight on questions of ethics. For him, the Torah exhorts us to turn away from the pleasures of the body and towards virtue, which for Philo means faithfulness to God. Moses, as the source of all philosophy, was the greatest teacher of this message, but he was not its only teacher. Indeed, precisely because Moses was the source of all philosophy, Hellenic philosophers can be treated as collaborators in the task of interpreting Moses. In particular, Philo admires the Hellenic philosophers who champion rationality and virtue over pleasure. He would agree with Cicero and Antiochus that the heroes of Greek ethical thought are Plato and the thinkers taken to be his followers, namely Aristotle and the Stoics. Philo's discussions of ethics would thus give any faithful podcast listener a strong sense of déjà vu. He reproduces Stoic lists of the virtues, Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, even the imagery of Plato's Phaedrus in which the soul must grow wings to return to its heavenly home. The difference is, of course, that Philo weaves these ideas into an exegesis of the Bible. The Paradise of Adam and Eve signifies virtue, and their fall is surrendered to pleasure, represented by the serpent. Philo understands Eve, too, as a symbol of seductive pleasure, a negative and reductive view of women that is partially compensated by more positive allegories of other women in the Pentateuch. Philo's focus on ethics continues past the stories of creation and the Garden of Eden to include episodes such as Noah's Drunkenness. Philo takes that passage as an opportunity to produce another set of arguments for and against a philosophical thesis, in this case the Stoic-sounding question of whether the wise man would ever get drunk. Predictably, he sees the story as a warning against indulging in the pleasures of the body, but he has a more arresting and less Stoic point to make, that there is a higher intellectual kind of intoxication as well. Those who attain wisdom and knowledge of God may seem drunk to the uninitiated because they are transported out of themselves. Although I have been talking, as if metaphysics and ethics represent two distinct themes in Philo's exegetical works, in fact he would insist that they are intimately related. The Jewish law itself, which is imposed upon the people of God in order to bring them away from the lures of pleasure and to their Lord, is a kind of mirror image of the providential law that governs the cosmos. For instance, the dietary laws of Judaism are intended to induce self-control. Their aim is not just ritual purity, but also ethical purity. Our goal is to regain what was lost in the fall from paradise, namely perfect participation in God's ideas. Philo's Platonism is again on display in his thinking about the fall. The physical creation is by its very nature subject to change and flux, so that the fall is seen as a metaphysical necessity. But as a Jew, he understands the fall and journey towards redemption in a more historical context, with Moses showing his people the way back to God through his leadership of the Jews and of course, through the Torah itself. Philo is then more than just another Platonist who happened to be Jewish. Certainly he gives us an invaluable insight into the way that Platonism was being practiced in Alexandria at that time. He fills out an otherwise sketchy picture based mostly on our indirect knowledge of Eudorus of Alexandria, who was only a little earlier than Philo. This is, after all, why I've put Philo here alongside other episodes on Middle Platonism. But Philo is no less significant for the history of Judaism and even Christianity. His works were read enthusiastically by Christian church fathers, who preserved and engaged with Philo's allegorical expositions of the Bible. It is fitting that his ideas had such an ecumenical reception. He showed a way towards resolving the interpretive, metaphysical, and ethical dilemmas posed by every revealed text, whether Torah, Bible, or Quran. These dilemmas will become increasingly crucial as late antiquity wears on and Christianity supplants traditional Greek and Roman religion. For now, though, we're only in the early days of the Empire, and pagan Platonism still has a lot of life left in it. Next time, we'll be looking at an author who, like Philo, often presented his philosophy in the form of an interpretation of religious symbols and beliefs. But he was neither Jew nor Christian. In fact, he was a priest at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. You know yourself that you should join me to hear about Plutarch, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Delphic Utterances, Plutarch. This episode is brought to you by the letter E. We'll be discussing topics like evil, eternity, eclecticism, and ethics. But I'd like to begin with the letter E itself, or rather the Greek letter epsilon. It would seem that at the temple of Apollo in Delphi, the ancient Greeks had placed not only statues and inscriptions, such as the famous know thyself and also nothing in excess. They also had models of the letter epsilon, named ei in Greek, fashioned out of materials like wood and bronze, which they left to honor Apollo. Why, you might ask, would they do such a thing? By the age of the early Roman Empire, the answer to this question was lost in the mists of time, and the Greeks themselves could only speculate about the origins of the practice. Among the inquiring minds was a man who had more reason than most to speculate. He was a priest at Delphi, and his name was Plutarch. Plutarch hailed from Chironaea, not far from Delphi and Boiotia, a region in mainland Greece. He was born in 45 A.D. and died in 125. In that time he traveled widely in Greece and beyond, winning friends among the aristocracy of the Roman Empire and even, apparently, being granted Roman citizenship. But he retained a deep attachment to his home, where he was a man of considerable standing. He could trace his family to the archaic heroes of Boiotia. Plutarch was more than an aristocratic priest, though. He was also the author of a huge body of writing. A mere list of the titles makes for interesting reading, and survives as a document called the Lamprius catalog. The catalog lists many works that are, like the motive for devoting the letter e to Apollo, lost to posterity. Still, plenty of Plutarch's output survives. He remains one of the most valuable ancient sources for Greek and Roman history. But for our purposes, his philosophical writings are the main attraction. Many of these have a dialogue form, in imitation of Plutarch's most revered authority, Plato. Plutarch's dialogues include a work called On the E at Delphi. It presents a philosophical conversation set within a dramatic frame, where a character recounts a conversation he heard. The structure is like that of Plato's Symposium, where a similar frame narrative introduces a series of speeches, setting out different viewpoints on a common theme. Here, the issue is not love, as it was in the Symposium, but those mysterious e's at Delphi. Various characters present different theories about the epsilon, in what Plutarch would consider to be ascending order of insight. Thus, we begin with a fairly banal, merely historical explanation, premised on the fact that epsilon was used in Greek to write the number 5, being the fifth letter of the alphabet, just like e in English. According to this story, the epsilon represents five wise men of Greece, the so-called seven sages minus two interlopers who should not have been included in this august company. Before long, though, we are into more philosophical territory. A second speaker takes the epsilon to mean the Greek word for if, also pronounced ei. This speaker wants to highlight the importance of logic, which studies conditional statements of the form if x, then y. A third speaker takes us into Pythagorean territory, preferring to interpret the epsilon as the number 5, and then waxing enthusiastic about its numerological significance. Just as Socrates provides the climax of the Symposium by telling of his philosophical instruction at the feet of Diatima, so here Plutarch gives the final word to his teacher, Ammonius. I should warn you that the name Ammonius is to late antique philosophy what the name Diogenes was to Hellenistic philosophy. The teacher of the great Plotinus was also an Ammonius, as was the head of a school of commentators in late ancient Alexandria. All three of these men were Platonists, all were teachers of more famous men, and all are known mostly indirectly through these more renowned students. Have I mentioned that ancient Platonists believed in reincarnation? I'm just saying. Anyway, when this Ammonius, the teacher of Plutarch, gives his explanation of the epsilon, he begins by distancing himself from the Pythagorean speech about the number 5. Not because he doesn't approve of numerology. To the contrary, his worry is that this explanation would minimize the importance of a different number for Apollo, namely 7. Instead, Ammonius reminds his listeners that the syllable e in Greek can also be a verb. It means you are, and this, he suggests, is the key to understanding the e at Delphi. It is an address to the God. It is appropriate to say you are to the God, because God exists at the level of being, whereas things in our physical realm are subject to becoming. This may remind us of the God in the Hebrew Bible saying, I am that I am, but the contrast between being and becoming is taken straight from the Timaeus. That Platonic dialogue may not be on every reading list today, but Plutarch, and apparently his teacher Ammonius before him, saw the Timaeus as a particularly important Platonic work. As we'll see, Plutarch had controversial things to say about it, but all Platonists of this period would agree with Ammonius that the divine is unchanging and eternal, whereas bodily things are subject to constant flux. Since we are not gods, we dwell in an inferior, ever-changing region. Ammonius concludes, therefore, that the e at Delphi is a kind of partner to the famous Delphic inscription, Know thyself. In saying, ei, you are, we declare to the God that he is exalted beyond our realm, and when the inscription reminds us to know ourselves, it means we should never forget our more lowly station. This combination of bold metaphysics and modesty about human nature and what it can achieve is entirely characteristic of Plutarch himself. He embodies the gradual transition from the skepticism of the Hellenistic academy to Platonic dogmatism, that is, the embrace of positive philosophical doctrines. He is not shy in putting forth theories about the nature of the gods, the intelligible world, the cosmos, and the nature of man. As with other so-called middle Platonists, Plutarch sees such theories as the doctrinal core of Plato's dialogues. Yet, Plutarch will occasionally caution us that he is merely saying what he finds probable, an echo of the academic skeptic Philo of Larissa. Plutarch's caution has a rather different and more metaphysical basis. If reality is divine and immaterial, then material creatures like us should not expect to understand it fully. I remarked in a recent episode that with the rise of dogmatic Platonism the skeptical approach of Philo, Sextus, and so on seems to have died out. That is basically right, but the epistemological modesty of the skeptics does live on in later Platonists like Plutarch, who frequently emphasize that humans cannot grasp divine realities completely. Modesty notwithstanding, Plutarch had no hesitation in nailing his colors to the mast of Platonism. He attacked the theories of other schools, in a treatise Against Colites, an Epicurean philosopher, and in another work called On Stoic Contradictions. He is, in fact, a major source of information about these Hellenistic traditions. Here there's an obvious comparison to Cicero, who likewise preserved precious data about philosophical movements even as he criticized them. But, again like Cicero, Plutarch didn't let his school allegiances stop him from fraternizing with representatives of the other traditions. His own student, Favarinus, had Aristotelian leanings, and Plutarch also consorted with Stoics and Epicureans. Nor is he above drawing on the ideas of Aristotle, especially in ethics. Plutarch's openness to various strands of Greek thought has led some interpreters to describe him as an eclectic, but if this is so, it is only in the original sense of the word eclectic, someone who is deliberately choosing from a range of sources. Plutarch did draw on various sources, but he unambiguously saw the results as good Platonism. Indeed, Plutarch waded into the question of the history of the Academy itself, which had sparked such controversy between Antiochus and Philo of Larissa. From the catalogue of his works, we know that Plutarch wrote a treatise entitled On the Difference Between the Pyranists and New Academics. It is lost, but was presumably intended to show that the skeptical Academy had been within the fold of the Platonic tradition, whereas the more radical Pyranists were no longer part of the family. This goes well with the qualified skeptical attitude Plutarch voices in his own works. But the most obviously Platonist feature of his written legacy is his explicit engagement with Plato's writings. We have a set of brief Platonic questions, in which he resolves difficulties that arise in interpreting the dialogues. More interesting still is a work called On the Generation of Sol in the Timaeus. With this text, we arrive at core issues of late ancient Platonism, indeed, of Platonism in any age. If you are a Platonist, then you believe that the physical world is only an image, an effect, of perfect divine entities. But if this is so, you have to wonder why the world is so far short of perfect. In fact, without wishing to get too depressed about it, we can't help noticing that the world is full not only of moral evil, but also misfortune, deformation of natural things, death, and ugliness. How is it that perfect causes produce such imperfect results? Also, you might wonder about how exactly the causes relate to their results. Do they give rise to them automatically? Or do they choose a first moment to start making the physical universe exist? As we'll be seeing, these are questions that will disturb Platonists for many generations to come. In fact, they will still concern late medieval thinkers whose relationship to Plato is a good deal more indirect than the one Plutarch could enjoy. So Plutarch was making some opening moves in what would be a long-running debate, and those moves are grounded in a careful reading of Plato. His first big claim concerns the question of the world's imperfection. He comes to that question indirectly, though, since his immediate ambition is to solve an apparent contradiction between two of Plato's dialogues. In the Phaedrus, Plato gave a famous proof that the soul is ungenerated and eternal on the basis that it is self-moving. But in the Timaeus, Plato said explicitly that the soul of the entire cosmos is created by a craftsman god or demiurge. So which is it? Is the soul generated or not? Plutarch eliminates the difficulty by saying that Plato had in mind two different souls. There is one ungenerated eternal soul, which is not fashioned by the demiurge. Because it is not the product of a wise and perfect creator, it is irrational, associated with the disordered motions that dominate matter before the demiurge comes along and fashions a well-ordered world. Part of this ordering process is the demiurge's creation of another, rational soul for the entire universe. This is the soul that is said to be generated in the Timaeus. Problem solved. In a roundabout way, Plutarch has answered our first question. The universe is imperfect because it is produced not only by a perfectly wise god, but also by a disorderly soul. It is a joint production, like a work of carpentry made by the master carpenter in cooperation with a particularly incompetent apprentice. Later Platonists will be nervous about the dualism this account ushers into our understanding of the soul. We have not only the good, rational soul, but also an irrational, perhaps even evil, soul. So we'll see them making alternative suggestions about the source of imperfection in the universe. Plutarch already anticipates one of these later ideas, which is to make matter itself the culprit. But he rejects this solution, because matter is purely passive. Without an irrational soul causing trouble, matter would give no more resistance to the demiurge and rational soul than perfectly pliant wood would hinder a carpenter. Besides, Plutarch can point out that Plato himself is committed to a kind of dualism of the soul. As we know, Plato argues that the human soul has a highest rational part and lower irrational parts. For Plutarch, this duality in the human soul merely reflects the duality of soul in general. We share the imperfection of the universe we live in. Yet, we have the option of identifying ourselves chiefly with our rational part, and thus approaching the perfection of the gods. Plutarch's second controversial point in his essay about the Taimias is already implicit in what I've said. The physical universe has not been here forever. Again, Plutarch can point to evidence in Plato for this. At one point, the Taimias says that the universe is generated and has a beginning. Plutarch, along with another philosopher named Atticus, whom we met a couple of episodes back, was notorious among later Platonists for taking this at face value as denying the eternity of the world. Both Plutarch and Atticus took Plato to say that the world was created out of pre-existing matter through the intervention of the demiurge. Plutarch asserted this not only as the correct reading of Plato, but also as the truth. If the world were eternal, we would lose one of the greatest proofs of the power and existence of the gods, namely the divine creation of the universe. Yet, Plutarch's position would turn out to be a minority one among late antique Platonists. Another Platonist named Calvinus Taurus, somewhat later than Plutarch, pointed out that the word generated could mean a variety of things. When Taimias says the universe is generated, he might mean simply that it is subject to generation, in the sense of constant change. Or, he might mean that it has a cause. Much later, we find Neo-Platonists like Proclus seizing gratefully on this point. It helped vindicate their reading of the Taimias as upholding the eternity of the universe, and thus, the orthodox Platonist understanding of how the gods relate to that universe. It's a shame, in a way, that Plutarch came to be associated so strongly with the non-eternity of the world in the minds of Neo-Platonists like Proclus. For he was a thinker very much to Proclus's taste, in that he devoted great effort to marrying pagan philosophical beliefs to Platonist philosophy. We've already seen one instance, the E at Delphi. Another fine example is his essay on the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. This fascinating text is among the earliest recountings of any such myth, invaluable for the light it sheds on Egyptian religion and Greek attitudes towards that religion. Plutarch bears witness to the interpenetration of pagan belief systems in this period, with the deities of Greece, Rome, and Egypt being united in a common pantheon, or being identified with one another. As Plutarch himself puts it, the gods are common to all men, even if they have different names, just as the sun and moon are the same for all, but are named differently in different languages. Still, he brings a distinctively philosophical sensibility to the myth by seeing the main characters as representing cosmological and metaphysical principles. The Egyptian myth recounted by Plutarch pits a wicked character named Typhon against two heroic lovers, Isis and Osiris. Osiris is at one point torn to pieces so that poor Isis is forced to try to reassemble his body. For Plutarch, these characters personify physical features of the cosmos. Osiris represents life-giving moisture, Isis is nature, and their child, Horus, is the world itself. The evil Typhon, meanwhile, stands for the drought that threatens life. At a higher level, Osiris can be taken to represent the demiurge, with Typhon representing the irrational soul we discussed a moment ago. Plutarch is unapologetic about the dualist tendencies of this reading, which would have appalled a thinker like Proclus, for whom all things must come from a single principle that is purely good. As Plutarch himself points out, his dualist view instead has something in common with earlier thinkers, like Empedocles with his dual principles of love and strife, and even the Zoroastrian tradition. I don't want you to go away with the impression that Plutarch spent all his time thinking about gods and metaphysics, though. In fact, many of his writings are devoted to ethics, often on very specific points. There are entire works on talkativeness, on coping with exile, on undue curiosity. This was not so much moral philosophy as moralizing, with the advice columnist style of the works reminding us of similar texts by Seneca, who, as you might remember, also discuss the appropriate reaction to exile. Like Seneca, Plutarch writes for fellow aristocrats. Unlike Seneca, he is not too demanding. He does not set himself the task of replacing their value system with a new, more philosophical one. Rather, he aims to give useful advice and a bit of perspective on their everyday problems. Plutarch's Platonist psychology could have led him in radical directions, for instance to an utter rejection of wealth and bodily health as valueless. But he tends to lean more towards the Aristotelians here, accepting that external goods do have their place in a happy life lived in accordance with nature. Plutarch's most famous works are ethical writings of a different kind. These are his Parallel Lives, which recount the biographies of Greek and Roman figures. The project begins with Romulus and Theseus, the legendary founders of Rome and Athens, and goes on through other pairings like Alexander and Julius Caesar. The importance of these works for our knowledge of ancient history is beyond dispute, but Plutarch intended them as studies of moral character, and used character to structure the lives. For instance, one of Alexander's successors, Demetrius, is paired with Mark Antony, two famous hedonists. But it wasn't only the ethical purpose underlying Plutarch's lives that made them appealing for later readers. There was also his eye for the telling detail. For instance, Caesar is shown passing by a remote Alpine village, remarking that he'd rather be first in this backwater than second in Rome. Occasionally, Plutarch even shows a sense of humor. In one of his ethical treatises, when stressing the importance of looking on the bright side of things, he gives the following example. If you want to hit a dog with a stone and strike your mother-in-law instead, this isn't so bad either. If the overt theme of the histories is an ethical one, its implicit theme is the relation of Greece to Rome. Plutarch wrote in old-fashioned Attic Greek, already a classicist, though he lived in the classical world. He was a Hellenic patriot, and attacked the great historian Herodotus for daring to paint the Greeks in an unattractive light. For Plutarch, Athens was especially admirable not only for its philosophy, but also for its great military achievements. Yet his world was a thoroughly Roman one. The Romans were now the unchallenged rulers of Greece and the lands beyond, and for all his devotion to play to Plato and to pagan religion, Plutarch's cultural attitudes are more like those of Seneca than of any ancient Athenian. In the second century AD, men like Plutarch were already looking back to the glories of a Hellenic past. But Greek philosophy had plenty of life left in it yet. In fact, before we reach the third century and Plotinus, we need to look at other developments in and around the first and second centuries AD. I'd like to check in with the Aristotelians to see how they are getting along, for instance, but it would not be in excess to spend one more episode on the early imperial Platonists, especially when we have the chance to consult a living oracle of late ancient Platonism. So, join me for an interview with Jan Opsomer next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Libra Hume Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about middle-platonism and Plutarch, with one of the world's leading experts on these topics, Professor Jan Oppsheimer of the Catholic University in Leuven. Hi, Jan. Hi, Peter. Thanks for being here. So, to talk about middle-platonism, which is a school of philosophy that seems to be marked by very extravagant metaphysical views, very strong, you might say dogmatic metaphysical views, I guess the place to start would be to ask how we got here. So, why is it that you start with this skeptical academic version of Platonism, you have these philosophers who think that you can't know anything, and you wind up with people who have these very strong metaphysical views? Well, that's very hard to tell. Maybe it's even impossible to give an explanation why this is happening. What we see happening is that the end of the Hellenistic period, thinkers were becoming more interested in the ancient wisdom tradition. One example of that is a number of texts by anonymous authors that were attributed to ancient Pythagoreans. We call them pseudepigraphic texts. Those people were interested in a theory of principles in a kind of dogmatic way. Other people were interested in Egyptian rites and mysteries or Phoenician mythology, and they were interested in taking these texts to be authorities on the gods, on nature, on the world. So did they think that Plato was sort of lumped in with that kind of tradition? So there's the Egyptians, there's the Phoenicians, and there's Plato. Same difference. Well, Plato has a very special place in this world view, because many people apparently were of the opinion that Plato somehow was a synthesis of most of these traditions, and was the one who expressed most completely and most clearly the ancient wisdom found in different traditions. But it was basically seen as one single tradition, with Plato as one of the main proponents. What you also see at the same time is a systemization of philosophy. So maybe as a result of the revival of Aristotelianism, but it's difficult to tell what is cause and effect, but maybe as a result of that, Platonists started to want to have a philosophy that was as systematic as Aristotle's philosophy seemed to be, or as Stoic philosophy certainly was, at least in the form given to it by Chrysippus. Platonists started then to develop systems of their own. You see various attempts, so maybe it's misleading to speak of a-middle-Platonic schools. I see more divergent attempts to create systems, and that leads to very different systems in middle-Platonic times. But before we get into the differences between them, what would you say, if you look generally at all these so-called middle-Platonists, what would you say are the main areas of philosophy where they put forward their views? Obviously they have views about principles, that's something you've already mentioned. So is that the main thing? I think the main thing is indeed to have a system, and a system has to start with principles. So you build your system starting from a theory of principles that you trace back to ancient times, to Plato, to reports on unwritten doctrines by Plato, doxographic reports from Plato, to what you think you know about ancient or old Pythagoreans, and then you build your system starting from those principles. An important area will be ontology and metaphysics. But since it is a system, also ethics will be included, logic will be included, so all the areas of philosophy that have been developed in classical and Hellenistic times. Do they take their cue from Plato in this respect, would you say? I mean, are they trying to say something about every aspect of Plato's dialogues, in which case they would really cover the whole gamut of philosophical topics? They certainly try to. But they are also very aware of the tradition of philosophy since Plato. And then there is a curious phenomenon that they want to attribute all the discoveries that were made later to Plato himself, as if Plato had already the complete knowledge that was to be discovered only later. He's a synthesis of all the wisdom before him and all the wisdom after him as well. Indeed, yes. Quite a good trick. Let's take as an example Eudorus of Alexandria, who flourished in the late first century B.C. or thereabouts. He seems to be maybe the first Platonist to have the kinds of doctrines we associate with middle Platonism. His predecessor Antiochus already seems to have adopted kind of dogmatic views, but not these Pythagoreanizing views that derive everything from mathematical or pseudo-mathematical principles. Is that right, first of all? Would you say that's fair? I think that is correct. So Eudorus is the first one of whom we know that he developed the system based on theory of principles. Although probably contemporaneous with Eudorus, you have all these pseudo-epigraphic texts. We don't know exactly when they were written, but maybe they were written before him. So the advantage of Eudorus is we've got a name to put to the system. Exactly, yes. And how does the system look? I mean, if you were to sketch it out in a few words, what is the basic idea? So if he's deriving everything from principles, what are the principles and how do things get derived from these principles? Well, we don't know that much about him. We know that he had a view that there was a monad and a diet, but there was also a principle above the monad. And he doesn't really explain how the monad is related to that higher principle. He just says it's there. And this would be God, presumably. Well, all of these principles would be God, probably. Okay. But you can then... You were starting to talk about a supreme God and other gods. And that's also an interesting feature in Mino Platonism. Well, I guess what I was really curious about, I mean, if you have a supreme God, people probably have an idea what a supreme God would be like, roughly speaking. It would also be a creator of the world. Right. Maybe the demiurge from Plato's Timaeus could be associated with this entity. But I don't think people will find it very easy to think about the monad and the dyad as principles of everything, whatever that even means, monad and dyad. This is something I talked about a little bit in a previous episode, but can you sort of have a go at trying to explain how it would make sense to think about monad and dyad as two principles that would generate everything else? But let me first say that what you indeed see is that these principles, who then become identified with gods, become more and more abstract, and that you will find the traditional gods in different middle Platonic systems at lower levels of the ontological hierarchy. So monad and dyad are both Poseidon and Hera, or whatever. Absolutely. But you also see that those middle Platonists who do not do this and who keep their god identical with the first principle were later much more popular with, for instance, church fathers. I'm thinking of Plutarch. Now how does the monad and the dyad work? Well, the monad is, if we forget about the very first principle, because apparently Eudorus also seems to have two systems, or refers that there are two ways of seeing this, one way is to say that the monad and the dyad are the first principles, another way is to say there is even a higher principle. But let's just take monad and dyad. Monad is perfectly one and Unitarian principle. It doesn't need anything. It is just what it is. And that's also why it is sterile. It's difficult to see how it could want to do anything, because it's perfect as it is. It's also difficult to imagine that it would be capable of doing anything else, because it has no relation to anything exterior to it, unless you also accept a counter-principle, the dyad. And the dyad is then the principle of indeterminacy that can be determined or limited by the action of the one or the monad on it. But these are also systems that we know from, maybe from the old academy or from Plato's unwritten doctrines, what we know of it. One thing that can be generated by monad and dyad are numbers. You have a principle of indeterminacy when the one makes, or the monad makes cuts in this indeterminate something. Like making cuts along a number line, let's say. For instance, the monad then will make cuts on this indeterminate line and thereby produce numbers. So the first entities produced by the monad and dyad would be thought of as numbers naturally. And those are forms, maybe? The common forms? Well, there are platonic systems where people indeed identify these numbers with forms, and there is some support for that in the reports on the unwritten doctrines. That brings me on to the next thing I was going to ask, which is to what extent this is a distortion of Plato's dialogues. They're presenting themselves as Platonists, explicitly, right? They say that they are followers of Plato. And yet, I mean, I devoted quite a few episodes of this podcast to Plato, and I didn't say anything like that. So where did this all come from? Is it really more going back to the old academy, the immediate followers of Plato, like specifices and zoonocrates? Or is it more something that can actually be found in Plato himself? This is a very difficult question. On the one hand, there are some indications in the dialogues, but you wouldn't get anything like these systems from the dialogues directly if you didn't also have reports on unwritten doctrines in Aristotle, in some other authors, reports about these old academics, Spiocippus and Xenocrates, mainly, Polymo to some extent. You put all of this together, and you make a system out of it. That's what these people did. And they're not really faithful to Plato to the extent that they try to make a dogmatic system out of Plato. I think you said you wrote somewhere dogmatism doesn't seem to have been Plato's thing. Well, there is a dogmatic side to Plato, but at heart Plato wasn't a dogmatist, I think. He writes dialogues. He doesn't speak in his own voice. There are interlocutors, and the way of writing is also to some extent apparatic. Some of the dialogues are called apparatic dialogues, but even in the dialogues, in those dialogues that seem to give you more substantial teaching or content, there is always a caution on Plato's side. Do you think that someone like Eudorus or Alcinoius, the author of the Didascalicos, do you think that they actually were close readers of Plato? Were they sort of fishing out ideas that they could fit into a system, or do you imagine them actually carefully reading a dialogue? We do have this early text, which is a commentary on the Theaetetus, which maybe represents some kind of middle Platonist teaching. That's something that's always kind of puzzled me about the middle Platonists, whether they were just trying to set out systems that they could say were anchored in the dialogues in some way, or that they actually were carefully reading through each dialogue. And I guess the question reoccurs for the Neo-Platonists, but what would you say about the middle Platonists? Well, it's very hard to treat them as one consistent group. If you're talking about the commentator on the Theaetetus, by the way, we don't know exactly when this commentary was written, but in post-Hellenistic times, let's say, there are certain aspects of the text to which he pays great attention, and he's very careful in looking at various terminologies used by Plato. A text like Alcinoius, in my view, is itself more of a summary. It's not the text of an author who in that text himself looks carefully at a text, but he gathers information probably mostly from other authors, and some of them really looked at the text of Plato. But what you see is they have a rather small selection of key passages that they're interested in, and they are studied very closely. So what most authors in middle Platonic times forgot about was the dialogical nature of Plato's philosophy. The exceptions may be Plutarch, his teacher Ammonius, and maybe also Numenius. We have reasons to believe that he also wrote in dialogical form, but at least for Plutarch, it is clear that he took dialogue to be essential to doing philosophy. That's great, because he's exactly the next person I wanted to ask you about, and I think we could maybe spend the rest of our time talking about him. What's me? I bet. This is one of your favorite authors. Plutarch is a very important figure in this tradition, not least because we have lots of texts from him, and we have a wide variety of texts ranging from these metaphysical issues all the way down to something that is almost more comparable to advice columns, so something that's been called practical ethical work. Do you think that Plutarch is an unusual person in this tradition? He's obviously unusual in the sense that we have a lot of texts, whereas we usually have just fragments for the others. But is he fairly representative of the so-called middle Platonism beyond that fact? It's again very hard to tell exactly because we don't have many texts by these other authors. One could even think we have just gaps without philosophy in many cases. Good. But one could think that Plutarch has an exceptional position, because he is one of the few people who, as I said before, pays attention to this apparatic, dialogical aspect of Plato's philosophy, at the same time develops a dogmatic system and a system that somehow underlies his more practical ethical writings. So with him we have an author of whom we have many texts, not all of them, but a large amount of texts, and they show a great philosophical consistency, I would say, and pay attention to all these different aspects. So the Pythagorean tradition is part of it, the academic in the sense of skeptical academic tradition, so the Hellenistic tradition of Archisilaus and Carnades and Philo of Larissa is part of this. He also knew a lot about other schools, about peripatetics and about the Stoics especially, about the Epicureans, and somehow all of these traditions come together in his work and he does something interesting with it. He's obviously a very complicated author and someone for whom we have a lot of evidence, so I guess it's not going to be easy to kind of sum him up in just a few words, but what would you say are the most distinctive aspects, starting with the metaphysics of his philosophy? He obviously also has a monad and a dyad theory, but I guess what's most famous about him, to the extent that there's anything famous here, is his so-called dualism. So he seems to have the idea that the world is an arena in which goodness and evil are kind of duking it out for mastery. Can you say something about that? Yes. He has two principles from which he starts, the one on the dyad, though they don't seem to play a central role in his system. And at the level of principles, they do not stand for good and evil. It's only in this world that we get the battle between good and evil, not on the level of principles. For Plutarch, what is really central is theology, the reverence you should have for the gods, the piety you should have, and he believes there is a first god who is at the same time the demiurge and who created the world. The first thing created by the demiurge is the world soul. And soul, in a sense, both world soul and individual human souls, is what is central to Plutarch's philosophy, I would say. The gods are important. We know a few things about the gods. We don't know many theoretical things about them, but we know that they are good and that they are providential and that they have created the world and that they are stronger than evil. What we don't find in Plutarch is extensive speculation on how god is related to the forms, what the forms really are, what role they play in creating the world, except for the very general idea that the world is created after their image. But if the world is created after the image of these good gods, then where does evil come from? Well, that's a very good question. God may have created the world, according to Plutarch, but he didn't create the ingredients from which he started. And this is a theory that is particular to Plutarch, I think. Plutarch believes that not only is there a pre-cosmic material substrate for the world, he also thinks there is a pre-cosmic psychic substrate for the world. So there is a pre-cosmic soul that receives order from the demiurge. It becomes a well-ordered soul and that is what Plutarch calls the creation of a cosmic soul. But the influence of this ancient, in itself irrational soul, is the spiritual, is still there in this world. And this is what creates disorder and evil. Does that have any connection to the things he says when he talks about ethical topics? I mean, even down to these very practical works, is there some kind of echo of this dualistic vision? Very much so. Very much so. Because it is essential for Plutarch's practical works that we should think of our souls as having a dual nature. We have on the one part the residue of this irrational soul, which at the same time is also the vital principle and the principle that gives us energy. And on the other hand, the rationality bestowed upon the soul by the demiurge as part or image of the demiurge himself. And it is very important for Plutarch to be aware and to remain aware of that fact, of that duality in ourselves. So most of his ethical works insist exactly on this, that we should be aware of the irrational, inherently evil aspect of our nature. And here I suppose there really is a connection to something Plato genuinely says in some of his dialogues. For example, in the Republic you do definitely have the idea that there is a rational part of the soul and that the goal of ethics is for the rational part of the soul to be in charge of the irrational part and to control. Exactly. And in this respect, Plutarch's great opponents are the Stoics, who thought that the virtue of the soul consisted of being entirely rational, apathos, without any pathe, and according to Plutarch, it is completely unrealistic to have that as a goal, because human souls cannot get rid of their irrational part. So the best you can do is to keep it under control, to check it. And that's what he tries to show in his ethical works, how you do that. Can you give me an example of how Plutarch's ethical thought works in practice? Let's take one of my favorite works, How to Tell the Flatterer from the Front. In the society Plutarch was living in, rich people had the problem that they were surrounded by flatterers. They played to the irrational part of their souls. So it is very important for those people to remain aware of the fact that they have this irrational soul, and if they don't, they're lost, because they will always listen to the flatterers, because, as Plutarch says, everyone is its own greatest flatterer. He takes this quote from Plato, actually. You've already mentioned a couple of times that the Platonists appropriated ideas from other schools. For example, let's concentrate on the Aristotelians. You mentioned that Aristotelianism was also undergoing a revival around this time, and something that strikes me a lot about these guys, so for example, the De De Schalicos, they say things like, oh, Aristotle's logic is already there in the Platonic dialogues. They seem to have had this real tendency to father on Plato everything that they didn't actually want to reject. Do you think that's a fair characterization of what they're all doing, even people like Plutarch? Indeed. It's also interesting to ask the question, what enabled Plutarch to do this? And I think the new academic legacy plays an important role in this. The skeptical legacy, especially in the kind of fallibilism that we find in the last phase of the new academy, the one of Philo of Larissa. Because it allows you, if you accept that your knowledge is fallible, it allows you to provisionally accept theories, to regard them as true, while knowing that they could be false, and while you have to keep an open mind and be willing to revise your doctrines when it's necessary. But this attitude allows them to accept, for instance, peripatetic doctrine, and even stoic doctrine in some cases. Great. Well, that actually provides me with an ideal transition to the topic of the next podcast, which will in fact be precisely this revival of Aristotelianism between Hellenistic philosophy and the rise of Neoplatonism in the works of Plotinus in the third century. But first I'll thank Jan Albsummer very much for coming on the show. Thanks. Well, you're welcome, Peter. And please join me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Lost and Found, Aristotelianism after Aristotle. There seems to be a deep-seated human need to collect the things we like. A real James Joyce enthusiast will own not just a volume of Joyce's short stories and a copy of Ulysses, but also Finnegan's Wake. Indeed, the enthusiast may even go so far as attempting to read Finnegan's Wake. In music, the true fan is not the one who listens to a greatest hits album over and over but who owns a copy of every album the band released, perhaps on several formats. The more obscure output is treasured the most. The classical music buff who can discourse on the fine points of obscure orchestral recordings from the 1950s, or the Led Zeppelin fan who insists that their greatest album is Presence and who collects bootleg recordings of live performances. We even have a word for this sort of behavior, completest. I myself suffer from this malady. I own not only all of Buster Keaton's silent movies, but even copies of some of the films he made after the advent of sound. I have been known on more than one occasion to explain to the uninitiated that the James Brown album you really want to get is the little-known In the Jungle Groove. It's really good. I also confess to a weakness for books about philosophy. I traced this tendency to a moment shortly after I got my first academic position when a student told me he could tell I was new because my shelves were so empty. On the bright side, at least I am trying to collect philosophy books after the invention of printing. Before then, enthusiasts had to track down everything their favorite author wrote and pay to have copies written out by hand. The Renaissance marks the high point of this sort of behavior, but it already existed in the ancient world. The most ostentatious example being the Library at Alexandria, where the Ptolemies of Egypt applied the completest principle to all ancient literature. Of course, handmade copies of texts nearly always contain errors made by scribes. Many would also be damaged in some way. So ancient and medieval readers already did what classical scholars now do, getting hold of multiple manuscripts and comparing them to one another in order to have the best chance of reading what the author originally wrote. The procedure I've just described was challenging, but for ancients it represented the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the author's works might simply be lost. Surviving texts were often in a chaotic or error-strewn state and needed to be reorganized and corrected. This brings us to the works of Aristotle and one of the most famous tales about ancient textual transmission. Strabo, who lived in the first centuries BC and AD and was author of a famous work on geography, tells us a complicated story about what happened to Aristotle's private collection of books after his death. Supposedly, Aristotle left his books to his follower Theophrastus. A student of the Aristotelian school named Nilius inherited the books along with the rest of Theophrastus' library. They passed to Nilius' family, who hid them in an underground trench to stop them from being seized and placed in the library at Pergamum. In these harmful conditions, the books were damaged, and when they were finally sold to another man named Apellicon, he made matters worse by making copies that were full of errors. With Apellicon, the books came to Athens, where they were seized after all by the Roman general Sulla, who conquered the city in 84 BC. The story's happy ending has the books coming back to Rome with Sulla. This narrative is detailed, and for a story about a collection of books, pretty exciting, what with the underground trench and Sulla's wartime exploits. As Strabo implies, it would also explain what seems to us a puzzling feature of early Hellenistic philosophy. The early Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics failed to engage much with Aristotle's works, which we now see as a high point of Greek intellectual achievement. And yet Aristotle re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the first century BC. Indeed, the book's arrival in Rome did come shortly before a burst of activity centering on Aristotle. No wonder Strabo would have us think, his thought had been lost, but now it was found. The story has, however, received a skeptical reaction from some modern scholars, especially Jonathan Barnes. He pointed out that the temporary loss of Aristotle's own books would not explain much unless it was the only copy available, which seems a dubious assumption. Barnes also doubted another long-held assumption. Once the Aristotelian works came to Rome, they had to be brought together and re-edited, especially if they were in such a bad state. On the traditional story, this was the work of the original Aristotle completist, a man named Andronicus. Andronicus hailed from Rhodes, but apparently worked in both Athens and Rome. Supposedly, he got hold of these ancient texts of Aristotle and produced a groundbreaking edition like a collected works. Some have supposed that Andronicus edited and organized the Aristotelian writings more or less in the form that we have them today. But Barnes pointed out problems with this assumption. For instance, later ancient authors rarely speak of Andronicus as an authority on textual questions concerning Aristotle. Admittedly, the Neoplatonist Porphyry compares his edition of the works of his master Plotinus to the collection assembled by Andronicus. But Porphyry took major liberties with Plotinus's works, for instance cutting a single treatise into multiple parts and scattering these parts out of order through his edition. So this parallel is not very encouraging. On the other hand, it lends plausibility to the idea that Andronicus would do something really nutty, like for instance taking a pile of unrelated texts and putting them together as if they were a single work by Aristotle. This is where textual history can have serious philosophical implications. Of all the works of Aristotle, the one with the most controversial textual history is the metaphysics. Many experts today regard it as a mere stitching together of originally unrelated texts, some of which may not even be by Aristotle. In the late ancient and medieval world, though, the metaphysics was seen very differently, as having a careful structure which leads to a climax in the 12th book where Aristotle discusses God. Aristotle's whole philosophy will look very different if you think he intended this theological material to be read alongside the rest of the metaphysics, where we find discussions of topics like the principle of non-contradiction and the nature of physical substances. So a lot is riding on the editorial work Andronicus may or may not have done. Indeed, one can go further. Although Aristotle never uses the word metaphysics, this branch of philosophy has ever since antiquity been taken to include more or less what is covered in the Aristotelian work of that name. If it was Andronicus who assembled unrelated texts to create the metaphysics as we have it today, then he should get much of the credit, or blame, for deciding what is and is not included in the discipline of metaphysics itself. Whatever the extent of his editorial activity, Andronicus certainly represents a surge of interest in Aristotle in the first century BC. To the extent that he was read in the preceding centuries, it was often the so-called exoteric works that attracted attention. These were written by Aristotle for an audience beyond his students and colleagues. Ironically, these originally more widely circulated writings are lost today, apart from fragments. Supposedly, they were models of elegant Greek composition, a fact that will amaze anyone who has spent time perusing the rather technical and difficult works we now have. These surviving writings are from among Aristotle's so-called esoteric treatises. The term means not that they were full of mystical or occult teachings, but only that they were intended to be read within his school, the Lyceum. It took a long while before they would reach a wider reading public, even after Andronicus and the resurgence of Aristotelianism. For instance, Seneca and Plutarch, in the first and second centuries AD, still don't seem to know these texts well. Even admirers of Aristotle, like Cicero for instance, admitted that the esoteric treatises were very difficult. Aristotle's partisans sometimes claimed that he had purposefully written in such an obscure way, perhaps as a way of training the reader to think. One might even draw a comparison between Aristotle's obscurity and Plato's use of the dialogue form, which forces the reader to reflect on what the characters are saying. But whether their challenging nature was intentional or not, Aristotle's texts clearly called out for explanation and interpretation. Andronicus and others answered that call. Since podcasts had not yet been invented, the Aristotelians, also known as the Peripatetics, did the next best thing. They wrote commentaries. This would before long become one of the chief vehicles for philosophical reflection in antiquity. Pagan philosophers commented on Aristotle, on Plato, even on Hesiod and works of pagan religion like the Chaldean oracles. Jews and Christians set forth their ideas in commentaries on the Bible. Our earliest surviving commentary on Aristotle is by an author named Aspasius, who worked in the first half of the second century AD. It covers parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which is slightly surprising because the ethics did not loom as large in ancient discussions of Aristotle as it does today. More than a century before Aspasius, heeded debate already surrounded a different, much shorter, and superficially less interesting text, the categories. Here again, at least a bit of credit should go to Andronicus. Even if he didn't produce a complete edition of Aristotle's works, he at least authored a catalogue of those works. This implied an order of reading and also involved his making decisions about which treatises were authentic. He argued that one logical work, On Interpretation, was not in fact by Aristotle. This was because it contains a cross-reference to Aristotle's On the Soul, and Andronicus couldn't find anything in On the Soul that seemed relevant to the passage. Later ancient authors found that reasoning rather flimsy, but they were greatly influenced by two other decisions made by Andronicus. First, he defended the use of the title still given to the treatise today, categories, which means predications. Second, he placed the categories at the head of Aristotle's logical works. For centuries to come, the categories would serve as an introduction to logic, and thus, given that logic was the first thing studied in late antiquity, an introduction to philosophy as a whole. Even as it assumed this prominent place, the categories was causing controversy. As you'll remember, the work sets out a division into ten classes, substance, quality, quality, place, time, and so on. But it isn't clear what this division is meant to divide. The categories begins with brief reflections on language, for instance the phenomenon of words that are used equivocally, as when both a person and a picture of a person are both called man, and the difference between simple expressions like man and compound expressions like man runs. This suggests that the ten classes covered in the categories are supposed to be a list of types of linguistic expressions. Stoic critics pounced on this, complaining that the categories is woefully inadequate compared to the sophisticated distinctions they had been making in their philosophy of language. The charge was answered by a student of Andronicus named Boethius of Sidon, not to be confused with the later, much more famous Christian philosopher Boethius. Boethius diffused the Stoic challenge by lowering the stakes a bit. The categories, he said, was never intended to be a complete analysis of language. Rather, the ten classes are only types of predicates, and divide linguistic expressions insofar as they relate to things out in the world. Stoic distinctions like the one between literal and metaphorical uses of language would have no place here. So naturally Aristotle doesn't mention them. Rather, he distinguishes between substance terms like man or giraffe, quality terms like black or elegant, quantity terms like two cubits tall, and so on. Aristotle is interested only in terms that reveal the furniture of the world, so to speak, the substances that populate it, and the properties these substances possess. Andronicus himself had a similar outlook. For him, the terms that Aristotle was studying in the categories carve nature at the joints, to use a metaphor that goes back to Plato. The right division of words goes hand in hand with the right division of things out in the world. This early defense of Aristotle was gratefully adopted by later commentators on the categories, who also confronted another question that may already have been explored by Andronicus and Boethius. If the categories classifies words insofar as they relate to things, then how does Aristotle think that this relationship works? The later commentators consider two possible views. The first is simple. Terms refer directly to objects or their properties. Thus, the term giraffe would immediately signify such things as Hiawatha the giraffe munching on hay in the zoo enclosure. The idea is simple, but it raises some puzzles. For instance, if I utter a word without knowing what it means, will the word still refer to the thing? This problem could be dealt with by a different proposal, inspired by Aristotle's remarks about language at the beginning of his On Interpretation. On this suggestion, words refer to things only through the intermediary of thoughts. When I say giraffe, this is meant to signify, in the first instance, my thought, which is a thought about giraffes. It is the thought that relates to the giraffe directly. Though the debate between these two positions is known to us from later commentators, it's likely that the positions go back to our early peripatetics. The three-part theory, which makes thoughts an intermediary between words and things, is ascribed in some sources to Boethus. The two-part theory, meanwhile, would fit with what we know about Andronicus. Remember, he didn't think that On Interpretation was even by Aristotle, so he may well have adopted a simpler theory of reference that didn't make use of its remarks about how thoughts relate to language. Andronicus, Boethus, and other peripatetics were no doubt interested in the categories partly because questions of language and logic had received so much attention from other Hellenistic schools, especially the Stoics. In this age of philosophical allegiances, they had to show that their man could compete on territory that had been claimed by their rivals. This brings us back to the ethics. As we've seen, Hellenistic philosophers frequently mention Aristotle only to dismiss his ethical theory as insufficiently rigorous. Authors of the first centuries BC and AD, like Cicero and Seneca, still tend to reduce Aristotle's subtle and elaborate ethical reflections to two fundamental ideas, both of which provide a contrast to Stoicism. The emotions should be moderated rather than eliminated, as the Stoics recommended, and external things like health and wealth do play a role in the good life, whereas the Stoics saw them as indifferent. This is obviously not an adequate summary of Aristotelian ethics, but the Aristotelians still needed to respond, especially on the issue of external goods. They did so by meeting the Stoics halfway. They admitted that virtue suffices for happiness, but said that the supremely happy man would be the man who has it all, both virtue and external goods. In the second century, Aspasius, author of that earliest surviving commentary, is still fighting this battle. He defends the idea that virtue involves moderating emotions like anger, and argues that external goods too are intimately related to virtue. Part of being virtuous is doing noble things, and, as he memorably remarks, someone whose father was a male prostitute is not going to have many opportunities to do noble things. Here, he resists the temptation to stoicize Aristotle. Elsewhere, he passes over a chance to Platonize him. Aristotle had said at the end of the ethics that a life of contemplation is the highest possible for man. Scientists who were fond of Aristotle later seized on this to insist that Aristotle ultimately shared their conception of happiness as residing in nothing but intellectual fulfillment. But Aspasius firmly locates human happiness in a life that involves both virtuous practical action and intellectual contemplation, the battlefield and the senate as well as the lecture room. On the other hand, he clearly knows his Plato. He alludes to the tripartite soul of the Republic and Timaeus, and, in one interesting passage, meditates on Socrates' habit of being ironic. Here in Aspasius we can detect the prospect of an alliance between peripatetics and Platonists. This will come to fruition eventually in Neo-Platonism, above all thanks to Porphyry, who I mentioned a few minutes ago as the faithful student and editor of Plotinus. Porphyry was first and foremost a Platonist, so his approach to Aristotle was more friendly takeover than straightforward allegiance. But his was only the most influential answer to the long-running question whether Platonists and Aristotelians should be making common cause against other schools, or instead seeing each other as targets for refutation. The Platonists had taken a variety of approaches. In the wake of Antiochus' presentation of the ancient thinkers as one big happy family, some Platonists, like Alcinous, tried to show that Aristotle was just making explicit what was already implicit in Plato's dialogues. By contrast, Atticus issued scathing attacks on Aristotle's ethics, effectively erecting a big sign saying, this way to happiness, no external goods or pleasure required, all copies of the Nicomachean Ethics to be left outside. The Peripatetics too were unsure whether to engage in appropriation or polemic. Several summaries of Aristotelian doctrine derive from this period, and they tend to fuse Aristotle's teachings with those of other schools, especially the Stoics. And I've just mentioned the Irenic overtures we find in Aspasius. The earlier Boethius, though, seems to have been a strong critic of Plato. We have indirect evidence for a set of arguments he wrote against Plato's Phaedo and its defense of the soul's immortality. Admittedly, these are difficult to interpret. It is not even clear whether they derive from the Peripatetic Boethius of Sidon, or a Stoic thinker who annoyingly was also named Boethius, and who even more annoyingly also came from Sidon. Whichever Boethius wrote the arguments, though, he was no fool. For instance, he has a good objection to the crowning argument in the Phaedo that the soul is essentially alive and therefore not susceptible to death, the way that the number three is essentially odd and thus not susceptible to being even. Boethius says that the soul may well be essentially alive, but really we are worried that the soul will cease to exist completely, not that it will continue to exist but be dead, and if it does cease to exist it will lose even its essential properties. The philosophy of late antiquity will show that opposition to Plato was not essential to Aristotelianism. It could survive, even thrive, within a Platonist worldview. Thanks to Porphyry, the Platonists had their way with Aristotle, all the while promising to respect him in the morning. But before the dawn of this grand harmonizing vision there was still time for the Peripatetics to enjoy one last shining moment. It came in the work of a man who certainly considered himself a faithful Peripatetic, and not a Platonist, even if he borrowed from Plato now and again, and wound up serving as an indispensable guide for centuries of Platonists who wanted to understand Aristotle. An outstanding philosopher like Aristotle deserves an outstanding commentator, and in Alexander of Aphrodisias he got just that. So never mind Alexander the Great, join me instead for the Great Alexander, next time on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Not Written in Stone, Alexander of Aphrodisias. People like me tend to complain about how much of the culture of antiquity has been lost, but really we should be thankful that so many ancient Greek and Latin writings still exist. After all, ancient texts reach us only through centuries of copying by later scholars. Really rarely can we read the actual documents the ancients themselves produced. There are exceptions, though. Papyrus rolls have been preserved by the dry sands of Egypt and the odd volcanic explosion. And when the ancients really wanted their words to last, they quite literally wrote them in stone. Inscriptions on stone tablets were erected already by the ancient Greeks to announce new laws or agreements between cities, as part of funeral rites or in religious contexts. The Romans followed suit, as in the so-called res gestae, or things accomplished, which detailed the achievements of Augustus Caesar and which survives in copies in far-flung parts of the empire. Surviving inscriptions are among the richest sources exploited by classical historians. Normally, they don't play such a big role in the study of ancient philosophy. Although we did see Epicurean philosophy being preserved in an inscription of the second century AD, in general the cut and thrust of philosophical argument seems badly suited to the cut and thrust of chisel in stone. Yet occasionally an ancient inscription will provide us with a vivid glimpse into the lives of philosophers, if not their ideas. It happened in 2001, when they unearthed a tablet from the ancient city of Aphrodisias in modern-day Turkey. Standing a bit more than a meter tall, it is a son's dedication for the statue of his father. Son and father have the same name, Aurelius Alexandros, and both are given the same epithet, philosophos. But the son claims an additional title. He also calls himself diadokos, which means successor. This indicates that the younger Alexandros, known to us today as Alexander of Aphrodisias, was head of the Aristotelian philosophical school. The inscription thus confirms other evidence, showing that Alexander held one of the chairs of philosophy set up in Athens by the emperor Marcus Aurelius. That other evidence comes from another dedication. This one at the beginning of one of Alexander's philosophical writings, a diatribe against the Stoic teaching on fate. Alexander addresses the work to another father-son pair, the emperors Septimus Severus and Caracalla. This helpfully dates the work, and thus Alexander's career, to around 200 AD. In attacking the Stoics, Alexander was of course engaging in the time-honored practice of inter-school debate. In this respect, he seems to have one foot still in the Hellenistic era with its competing intellectual rivalries. But with his other foot, Alexander was kick-starting another genre, one that will dominate the philosophical scene in the centuries to come, the commentary. Alexander was the greatest ancient commentator on Aristotle. He was recognized as such by his successors. Like the earlier philosophers we looked at last time, like Andronicus and Aspasius, Alexander was a confirmed peripatetic, devoted to interpreting, analyzing, and expounding the thought of Aristotle. But this didn't stop Platonists from respecting Alexander and using his works. His writings were studied in the school of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, and Platonist commentators on Aristotle frequently quote Alexander's interpretations. Alexander's standing as the foremost authority on Aristotle outlived Late Antiquity. He was still an important source for Byzantine philosophy, and in the Islamic world his works were translated into Arabic alongside Aristotle. Indeed, several of Alexander's writings are lost in Greek but preserved in Arabic. As late as the 12th century, the greatest medieval commentator on Aristotle, the Muslim Averroes, would work Alexander's interpretations into the fabric of his own. Averroes' commentaries were then translated into Latin and used by medieval Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, who thus knew not only the name of Alexander but the details of Alexander's exegesis. For the Platonists of Late Antiquity, and for medieval authors writing in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, philosophy frequently meant reading Aristotle and reading Aristotle frequently meant reading Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most reliable guide to his thought. Philosophy was carried on in commentary form for many centuries, but that form changed from time to time and author to author. The works being explained might be epitomized, summarized to make them briefer and, hopefully, clearer. They might be made the subject of a running paraphrase that could serve as a kind of explanatory guide through the text. Or, the commentator might isolate certain puzzles or questions arising from Aristotle's teachings. We have a whole series of such treatments from Alexander's school which pose and solve difficulties within the peripatetic system. But Alexander was above all known for his full commentaries, which would quote an entire treatise by Aristotle one bit at a time, with lengthy explanations of each bit. Just so you can impress your friends with your knowledge of late antique commentary practice, I'll tell you that each quoted bit of text is called a lemma. As the commentators refined their approach, they would often begin the interpretation of each lemma with a so-called theoria, meaning that they would explain the overall gist of Aristotle's remarks. They would then move on to the lexis, a phrase-by-phrase or word-by-word analysis of what Aristotle was saying. It also became standard to preface the entire commentary with a discussion of certain standard questions, for instance the meaning of the title of the Aristotelian work, any possible doubts about authenticity, its overall intention and topic, and so on. Alexander's approach is not yet quite so elaborately standardized, but his commentaries, a number of which still survive thanks to those Byzantine copyists, were lemmatized, that is, in the form of quotations of Aristotle's text interspersed with extensive explanation. The format is telling. Every sentence in Aristotle was treated with great care and attention. Platonist commentators might allow themselves the thought that Aristotle made an occasional mistake, especially when he dared to criticize Plato. But Alexander's goal was to explain and justify Aristotle in lavish detail, raising difficulties only so that they could be solved. While this might sound more like apologetics than philosophy, sophistication and even creativity was required to make Aristotle's words come out true. Especially given a further assumption made by Alexander and later commentators, namely that Aristotle was always consistent and never changed his mind. Commentators rarely strove to be original, but they usually managed it anyway, using great ingenuity to make Aristotle agree with himself and to defend the results. Of course, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. This is why we find Alexander writing the polemical treatise I mentioned earlier, On Fate. Although it is not a commentary, it's a good chance to see how Alexander does philosophy. He promises only to present Aristotle's position on the topic of fate, but offers a theory of fate that certainly does not appear in Aristotle's original writings. He also turns the tools of Hellenistic philosophy to his own advantage. He begins by agreeing with the Stoics that fate does exist. This can hardly be doubted, he says, because all of us share a so-called common conception that some things are indeed fated. The phrase common conception is Hellenistic terminology, but Alexander does not hesitate to use it. First though, he reaches for a tried and trusted Aristotelian distinction, the four types of cause. Fate is, after all, a cause, for the things that are fated, so what type of cause is it? Clearly not form or matter, nor is it a final cause, a purpose. That leaves only the agent or efficient cause. But there are different sorts of efficient cause too. Whereas natural things, like fire, act automatically, human agents act through deliberation, choosing one course of action rather than another. Fate seems to be more like fire, in this respect. It brings about things inevitably and necessarily. Fate, then, must be a natural efficient cause. After all, Aristotle recognizes that nature is a necessary and eternal constancy in the universe. It is due to nature that mother giraffes give rise to baby giraffes, not baby monkeys. Nature also ensures that the existence of giraffes is, thank goodness, a necessary and permanent feature of the world around us. Fate is meant to be permanent, eternal, and necessary, so what could be more obvious than to identify fate with nature? Another work of Alexander's, which survives only in Arabic, deals with the related problem of divine providence, and thus sheds further light on our problem. Alexander claims that God's providential care over our world extends to causing the regularities of nature. This leaves plenty of room for things that God did not intend, like evil human actions and the occasional corruption of nature in the form of illness, deformity, and the like. So, to sum up, fate is nature, which acts generally in our world, thanks to the gift of divine providence, but unlike the Stoics version of fate, nature is subject to accidental exceptions. This account preserves both fate and providence, and lets God off the hook for all the bad things that happen. Alexander 2, Stoics 0. And yet doubts linger. The whole point of fate, we might think, is that it is universal in scope, and includes everything. It is, to use a joke I've used before but am not too proud to use again, without any gaps. Alexander simply rejects this idea. For him, many things occur without being determined by nature. Human actions are one example, as we've already seen. He also raises the issue of lucky, or chance, events. Again, following discussions of the topic in Aristotle, he explains that an event is lucky if it is the sort of thing someone might intend to happen, but which does not come about intentionally. For instance, if I go to dig in my garden to plant a pumpkin patch and discover a buried treasure, then my discovery is lucky, because it is accidental to the digging. Normally, when I dig, I don't strike it rich, and it wasn't actually my intention to find treasure. Whereas if I'd been following a treasure map and dug up a treasure, this would not count as lucky. In that case, getting treasure would be the expected result of digging, rather than accidental. The moral of this story is that nature, which produces its results in an expected and regular way, cannot include lucky, chance events, any more than it can include freely chosen human actions. So, neither of these is fated. Although Alexander pays a good deal of attention to this topic of chance, it is the need to preserve human choice that is really decisive. He complains that the Stoics would give fate the responsibility for all things and leave nothing up to us. Taking his cue from Aristotle, as usual, he points out that no one deliberates about things they think are unavoidable. So, if everything is necessary, then deliberation is always meaningless. Chrysippus and other Stoics had already given an answer to this objection, namely that deliberation is co-fated along with the action you will take. When you deliberate, this does affect the result, but the deliberation itself is fated, and the same is true if you fail to deliberate. Alexander would still claim an advantage here, though. As an Aristotelian, he has a nice plausible account of what makes an action up to us, namely that our rational deliberation chooses from among genuinely possible alternatives. Unlike the inscription he placed on his father's statue, our future actions are not written in stone. While we might find this position attractive, it seems Alexander has said little that would persuade a Stoic reader. Certainly, they wouldn't agree that human actions and luck are exempt from the workings of fate. For them, God's designs for the universe are all-encompassing and cannot be thwarted. To my mind, this raises the question of what Alexander is trying to achieve. I assume the idea is not just to irritate the Stoics, to see if he can get them to forget their Seneca and show some anger. More likely, he is addressing himself to the neutral reader. It's more a sales pitch for Aristotelianism than a sober critique of Stoicism. On the other hand, Alexander has a problem the Stoics do not. Remember that Aristotle had put great emphasis on the role of ethical character. When virtuous people see an opportunity for virtue, they have the tendency, the ability, and the desire to take it, and, similarly for vicious people, and opportunities for vice. Doesn't this mean that character will determine our actions just as surely as Stoic fate would? Alexander sees the problem, but points out that even if a person is determined by his character to be virtuous, this doesn't settle which virtuous action he will perform. One virtuous person might choose to erect a statue to honor his father, while another instead devotes his energies to, say, writing and presenting a podcast. Furthermore, we are responsible for our character itself, because our previous actions helped to form that character in the first place. It was our choices earlier in life that made us generous or greedy, courageous or cowardly, sensitive or, like Buster Keaton and the statue of Alexander's father, stone-faced. Alexander carved out his philosophical positions not only in response to opponents like the Stoics, but upon the platform laid by earlier Aristotelians. Without the work of predecessors like Andronicus, Boethus, and Aspasius, we can hardly imagine Alexander's massive project of commentary. Still, he didn't hesitate to criticize his peripatetic predecessors. You may remember Boethus of Sidon, who, probably, criticized Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul. He seems to have been keen to avoid Platonism in other areas, too. Where Plato had supposed that the forms that give things their natures are separate and transcendent, Boethus proposed seeing all forms as mere qualities of the matter they inhabit. The form of Hiawatha the giraffe, for instance, would be nothing more than Hiawatha's matter having a giraffe quality. This suggests that the form-matter relationship is a rather casual one, like the relationship between a wall and the color it happens to be painted. For Alexander, this was going too far. The form of giraffe doesn't relate to the giraffe's body in this casual or accidental way, as white is present in a wall. Rather, the form makes Hiawatha what she is, namely a giraffe. This sort of form is, as Aristotle himself had proposed in his metaphysics, the substance of the animal. A qualitative form, like white in a wall, is a mere accident. In other words, the whiteness plays no role in making the wall a wall. This is why it remains a wall if it is painted green. Boethus's theory makes it impossible to distinguish between these two cases. Still, his heart was in the right place in rejecting Platonism. Alexander was no fan of Platonic forms either, and would have said that the substantial forms recognized by Aristotle render Platonic forms unnecessary. Since plant and animal species are eternal, forms like sunflower or giraffe are permanent features of the world, even though these forms only ever exist in particular flowers and particular giraffes. So these forms provide a basis for universal and necessary human knowledge. All this relates back to what Alexander said about fate and divine providence. What really matters philosophically, and what really matters to God, is that natural kinds of things like sunflowers, giraffes, and so on are always present in the world. Fate ensures that this happens through the natural propagation of species. But the particular details don't matter. God wants there to be giraffes, but doesn't care, or even notice, what Hiawatha has for lunch. As humans, we have a less lofty perspective, bound up as we are with the world of particulars. I mean, I don't know about you, but I certainly do care what I am going to have for lunch. This is why deliberation and rational choice is unique to humans. God doesn't need to deliberate, because there's nothing for Him to decide. There are necessarily and eternally giraffes, and this is guaranteed by God's necessarily and eternally causing the heavens to move. Heavenly motion indirectly brings about the production of giraffes, and of course all the other less impressive animals, like goats and of course humans. Like many philosophers, Alexander was actually more interested in humans than he was in giraffes. He wrote several treatises addressing the topic of the soul, and of course the human soul was of particular importance. His comments about the soul were disturbing to some later readers, because he made soul depend heavily on the composition of the body. Again, there is an anti-Platonism here, which had been running through the Aristotelian tradition for generations. Galen claims that Andronicus simply identified the proportionate mixtures of the body with the soul. As with his reaction to Boethius on the topic of form, Alexander shows himself a bit more circumspect, and naturally so given Aristotle's claim that the soul is the form of the body. In light of this, Alexander was bound to accept the substantiality of soul. As we just saw, the form of a giraffe is a substance, and the form of the giraffe is nothing other than its soul. But it's also consistent for him to depict this soul as heavily dependent on the body, a real substance that can only exist within matter. On Alexander's reading of Aristotle, there doesn't seem to be much prospect of life after the death of the body. Nor was there much life in Aristotelianism after the death of Alexander. Sure, the next generations, indeed the next centuries, of philosophers will consider Aristotle a leading authority. But Alexander is the last significant thinker of antiquity to consider himself a peripatetic and not a Platonist. Platonist commentators would use his expert analysis of the writings of Aristotle, but always within a broader Platonist project. The closest we get to an exception is a man who wrote more than a century later, in the mid-fourth century A.D. He was not a philosopher of Alexander's stature, but he did focus on expounding Aristotle with only occasional signs of a further allegiance to Plato. His name was Themistius. He'll give us a chance to discuss a question that was left hanging by what I've just said about soul. Although Aristotle says that the soul is the form of the body, he also claims that the human intellect needs no bodily organ. Might this offer the prospect of a more dualist take on Aristotle? Perhaps even an afterlife that is more real than being immortalized in a statue? Themistius will also give us a window into a broader cultural phenomenon, because he was a rhetorician as well as a philosopher. In late antiquity, rhetoric was as closely intertwined with philosophy as mathematics or medicine. So, whether you're interested in the human soul or the soul of wit, you'll want to join me for Themistius, Rhetoric and Philosophy, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Levergume Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Silver Tongues in Golden Mouths, Rhetoric and Ancient Philosophy. It was December 1981, with New Year's Eve just around the corner, and Busy B. Starsky was at the microphone. He was enthusiastically laying down some rather simplistic rhymes over a beat. His main theme was that everyone should party. Then fellow hip-hop performer Cool Mo D leapt onto the stage. Cool Mo D proceeded to demolish poor Busy B with a torrent of rhyming improvised invective, accusing him of lacking lyrical imagination, of stealing rhymes from other rappers, and of generally being really lame. A typical passage, which I quote mostly because of its unusual lack of obscenities, went like this, In a battle like this you know you'd lose Between me and you, who do you think they'll choose? If you think it's you, I got bad news, cause when you hear your name you're gonna hear some booze. Okay it's not T.S. Elliott. But Cool Mo D's tongue was quick and poisonous enough to make this a legendary humiliation for Busy B, and a pioneering moment in the development of freestyling battle rap, in which MCs throw rhymed insults at one another. As Cool Mo D put it on one of his albums, he considered rapping as a competitive sport. In the ancient world, too, there were performers who competed at improvised verbal pyrotechnics. They did not rap to a beat, but they could help defendants beat a rap. They were rhetoricians, and they were at home in the law courts as well as legislative bodies or even before the emperor himself. The art of public persuasion already played a role in classical Greek philosophy, Plato contending with the sophists, and Aristotle devoting a treatise to rhetoric. But it also helped to shape the philosophical scene in late antiquity. And no wonder. Rhetoric was part of the standard educational curriculum for the young men, and occasionally women, who might go on to learn and write about philosophy. If your parents could afford to educate you at all, you would be packed off at an early age to learn to read and write. Many did not progress beyond this stage of basic literacy. Those who did would study grammar to become properly lettered. The Greek word gramata, in fact, means letters, or the alphabet. For the ancients, this discipline included what we think of as grammar, but much more besides. It meant learning to appreciate the classics of Greek or Latin literature. Young students would be taught to read aloud properly with poetic meter, about the historical allusions and difficult vocabulary used by Homer and other authors, about etymology, and so on. Again, some students would stop there, but those who progressed would study rhetoric. Studying grammar and then rhetoric, especially with the right teachers, was a way to climb the social ladder. Students paid handsomely to learn from well-respected and influential masters, who reciprocated by greasing the wheels of power to their students' advantage. Having learned at the feet of an outstanding teacher was a status symbol, even if one didn't exploit the connection for direct favors. In towns like Athens, which retained a reputation as centers of learning, teachers of rhetoric could draw well-paying students from all over the Roman world. An outstanding witness to the place of rhetoric in the educational affairs of the Roman Empire is Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, known to you and me as Quintilian. Born in 35 AD, he was a rough contemporary of Seneca, and in fact both men hailed from Spain in the western reaches of the Empire. Quintilian came to Rome where, eventually in 88 AD, he was appointed holder of the chair of Latin rhetoric, established by the emperor Vespasian. This chair was not unique. In a previous episode I mentioned the chairs of philosophy established at Athens by Marcus Aurelius, and he also created chairs of rhetoric there. Such prestigious posts brought wealth and political influence. Quintilian profited greatly from his silver tongue, rising to the rank of consul under Domitian. But he did not present rhetoric as a pathway to wealth and power. Rather, he saw education as a path to moral excellence. A teacher of rhetoric needs not just mastery of his art, but also mastery of his self, a paragon not only of persuasion, but also of virtue. Quintilian's enormous treatise Institutio Oratoria would become a classic treatment on both rhetoric and educational theory for later generations down to the Renaissance. In the 14th century the Italian humanist Petrarch wrote a letter to the long-dead Quintilian. It is not recorded whether Quintilian wrote back, but given his way with words you wouldn't put it past him. Of course, most of Quintilian's Institutio deals with rhetoric itself—how to assemble material for a persuasive speech, the art of memory, indispensable to those living before the age of the teleprompter, the use of gesture, correct pronunciation, and so on. But tellingly, it begins with two books on the education of the youngsters who are to grow into perfect orators. He starts at the beginning, giving advice even on the selection of nurses for babes in arms, like a modern writer explaining how to improve a newborn child's chances of getting into a top university. Regarding grammar, he defends the practice of packing young men off to public school, where they can test themselves against their peers and be given public praise or corrective abuse. Marcus Aurelius would disagree. In his Meditations, he expresses gratitude that he was homeschooled. Quintilian and Marcus share something else, though—a deep debt to the Greeks. Marcus actually wrote in Greek, and though Quintilian didn't go that far, his discussions of grammar and rhetoric show the extensive influence of Greek authors. He even draws on the great stoic Chrysippus' lost work on pedagogy. Still, Quintilian speaks in terms of a canon of literary classics in Latin, featuring such authors as Livy and, above all, Cicero. Cicero too had written instructional works on rhetoric, and his style was seen by Quintilian as the best model for young men to learn to imitate. When Quintilian speaks about solicisms or the inappropriate use of foreign words, he bends over backwards to explain away passages where Cicero seems guilty of such lapses. Quintilian's own educational theory is rather appealing. He does want the student to learn by imitation, but only in order to achieve independence, like a bird leaving the nest. Ultimately, the teacher's goal is that the student should need no further teaching. The type of education envisioned by Quintilian was remarkably durable throughout late antiquity. As emperors rose and fell, as barbarians invaded and were repulsed, or not, the children of the well-heeled and the upwardly mobile were put through their paces by grammarians and rhetoricians. Three hundred years after the time of Quintilian, Augustine speaks of his father scraping together money to send him for a first-rate education in Carthage. There, he received a training in rhetoric, as is evident on every page of his voluminous writings. What students learned was not only a set of skills, but a set of cultural references, which identified them as members of the educated classes. Then, as today, education could involve not only intellectual and ethical formation, but also religious belief. After all, you can't read Homer carefully without thinking about the traditional Greek gods. Thus, education became a weapon in the culture war between paganism and Christianity, something we'll examine in future episodes. Nonetheless, the curriculum remained remarkably stable through the transition from paganism to Christianity. Because grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy belonged to the same educational culture, it was inevitable that these disciplines would influence one another. Besides, grammar and rhetoric raise many philosophical issues. Perhaps that's clearer in the case of rhetoric. Its aim of instilling belief brings it into close contact with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with justification and knowledge. It's no accident that when Plato wants an example of a group of people who believe something true without knowing it, he gives the case of a jury persuaded to convict a genuinely guilty man. Less obvious, at first glance, is the connection between grammar and philosophy. But, given that we express our knowledge of the world in language, philosophers have always suspected that understanding language helps us understand the world. For instance, ancient authors compared Aristotle's idea of a species, like giraffe, to the grammarian's common noun. By this they meant a name that was shared by many things, in contrast to a proper noun, like Hiawatha or Socrates. This topic of the parts of speech turns out to be an unexpectedly rich source of connections between ancient grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. The ancient grammarians recognized numerous parts of speech. A typical list includes noun, verb, pronoun, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and article. That was problematic for philosophers, and especially for Platonists. Their man Plato had in the sophist given a theory of language that recognized only two parts of speech, noun and verb. In the second century, we find Plutarch defending this on the basis that these are the only indispensable parts. The rest are just for stylistic variety, like seasoning on our food, as he puts it. Years later, the Christian philosopher and translator Boethius is still fighting what seems to us a losing battle, trying to show that all the other parts of speech are somehow improper parts or can be reduced to noun and verb. It's interesting that even the more expansive list of the grammarians didn't include adjectives. The ancients needed some time to wrap their mind around the idea of an adjective. Even once the category was identified, the adjective was understood as a noun that needs another noun to complete it. This shows that their idea of a noun was rather different from ours. The relevant Greek word onoma can mean name as well as noun, and it is natural to think of a word like white as the name of, say, the color of a piece of paper. Again, philosophical issues are looming. Aristotle uses this very example to illustrate his idea of an accidental feature that subsists in a substance. But rhetoric, too, influenced the theory of adjectives. It seems that the adjective, sometimes called a quality or epithet, was made a distinct grammatical category in part to account for the terms of praise and blame that rhetoricians practiced applying in their speeches. One Latin grammatical text tells us that a so-called epithet is simply a word used to praise or censure someone in terms of their soul, body, or their external circumstances. Not coincidentally, that threefold distinction of soul, body, and externals itself comes from Platonist discussions of the virtues. It's no wonder that Plato and Platonism keep coming up in discussions of grammar and rhetoric. Plato was, after all, a literary classic. He was widely praised as a great stylist of Attic Greek, a dialect that was fetishized in the imperial age when the great rhetorician Aelius Aristides could praise Attic as the only type of Greek that possesses both dignity and charm. Philosophers like Plutarch followed suit, cultivating an interest in antique Attic vocabulary and style. Even the doctor Galen, also in the second century, wrote philological works on the differences between Greek dialects. Previously, I've explained the victory of Platonism over the Hellenistic schools by mentioning how Platonism co-opted those schools and lent itself to religious belief. But another significant factor was that well-educated people considered Plato to be part of their canon. For the Romans, just as for us, effortlessly quoting authors like Homer or Plato was a way to establish one's breeding and refinement. A standard technique was to allude to what was already ancient Greek literature, but without identifying the source. The reader is flattered by the assumption that they, too, are in the know. Another way to prove one's refinement was to go hear philosophers lecture. Hypocritical or superficial devotion to philosophy became an obvious target of satire. The star example is Lucian, a rhetorician of the second century AD who wrote stinging parodies of the philosophy of his day. In his work The Negrinus, a philosophical tourist waxes enthusiastic about his recent visit abroad, where he sat at the feet of a Platonist master. The comedy comes in part from the fact that the tourist's philosophical adventure has left his character entirely unchanged. For him, philosophy is nothing but an exquisite performance. It makes no demands on him to become more virtuous. Here, Lucian has put his finger on a sore spot. Cultivated Romans studied Greek literature in the context of an education that included philosophy, but when philosophy threatened to subvert the values of this cultivated elite, they were unmoved. Many an aristocrat swooned at stylish speeches showing that money and reputation are valueless, and then returned to the forum in search of wealth and fame. All these trends culminated at the high point of the Roman Empire from the first century to the early third century AD. It was an age of sophists. The word sophist is familiar to us from 5th century BC Athens, but it re-emerged in 3rd century AD Athens, where a man named Philostratus devised the expression second-sophistic to describe the movement covered in his treatise The Lives of the Sophists. The rehabilitation of the term sophist signified the rehabilitation of eloquence for its own sake. In this period, rhetoricians devised showpiece speeches about historical topics, just as the sophists of classical antiquity had done. Gorgias had written a speech in defense of Helen. The great sophist Dio of Prusa went him one better with a speech proving that, whatever Homer might say, Troy was never sacked in the Trojan War. This man Dio was also called Christostom, meaning golden mouth. Like modern-day hip-hop artists, sophists like Dio could wield the silver tongues in their golden mouths without preparation, speaking extemporaneously, often on a topic given to them by the audience. Ever ready to mock his peers, the satirist Lucian found humor in the reliance of rhetoricians on pre-prepared tropes, exaggerated gestures, and dramatic facial expressions. But hey, it worked. Ancient sources tell us of rhetoricians so admired that their adherents affected the same style of clothing, or could be induced to violent weeping by the mere mention of the orator's name. The Second Sophistic is now taken seriously by classicists and historians, but it used to be seen as a sign of the decadence of the empire. Some contemporaries tended to agree. We already find Seneca in the first century complaining about those who value style over substance, and in the second century, the heyday of the Second Sophistic, Plutarch is banging the same drum. Such serious-minded men were bound to be exasperated by the self-conscious playfulness of rhetoric in this period. My favorite example comes from somewhat later in antiquity. Before he became a bishop, the fourth- to fifth-century author Cinesius wrote a treatise in praise of baldness. On behalf of the follically challenged, I extend my thanks to him. Nor was philosophy immune to the witty use of eloquence and self-aware appropriation. The sophists loved to rework themes from Plato, producing pastiches or retellings of the Ring of Gyges story from the Republic or the speeches on love in the Symposium. But for a true fusion of philosophy and rhetoric, we need to turn to a man who lived in the fourth century after the time of the Second Sophistic, Themistius. Like Quintilian, he rose to eminence thanks to his gift of gab. Eighteen surviving speeches document his relations with a series of emperors. Some speeches were declaimed to the emperors in person, others were written when he served as an emissary. Despite being a pagan, Themistius received his first imperial patronage under the Christian Constantius II, and he showed nimble political skills as well as a nimble tongue to retain an influential position under subsequent emperors, ultimately entering the Senate and helping to decide who else would be allowed to sit in this august, albeit now largely powerless, body. Ironically, the stridently pagan and philosophically-minded emperor Julian was more cool towards Themistius, perhaps because he did not share the Christian emperor's need for a pagan court philosopher to demonstrate ecumenical and intellectual broad-mindedness. Themistius in any case often argued for peaceful coexistence between pagans and Christians, something certainly not on the cards under Julian. In his speeches, Themistius drew on sophists and rhetoricians like Dio of the Golden Mouth and Aelius Aristides, but he also emphasized his philosophical credentials, pointedly wearing the simple cloak of a philosopher at court, and presenting himself as a man bound to tell truth to power, since philosophers always tell the truth, honest. The credentials were genuine. He wrote numerous commentaries on the works of Aristotle, though actually commentaries is perhaps too grand a word. They are more like running paraphrases, easier and clearer versions of difficult Aristotelian texts. Meanwhile, Themistius quietly indicated points of harmony between Aristotle and Plato. In this, he was typical of the philosophy of his age, when Neoplatonism was already harmonizing the thought of these two giants. But his overall philosophical outlook was closer to that of the great peripatetic commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias than to that of later Neoplatonist commentators. Yet Themistius sometimes disagreed with Alexander's interpretations. The best example is his treatment of Aristotle's remarks on the intellect. Themistius especially wanted to sort out one of the most contentious and tantalizing passages in all of Aristotle, the fifth chapter of the third book of On the Soul. In the previous chapter, Aristotle has explained that the human intellect is a kind of potentiality for receiving intelligible forms, just as eyesight is a potentiality for receiving visual forms. Now, in chapter 5, Aristotle says that if there is potential intellect, there must also be an intellect that is always actual. This will be, as he says, a maker intellect, which is comparable to light and always thinking. This intellect alone is separate and eternal. The chapter has always fascinated and frustrated in equal measure. The only thing that is clear about the passage is that it's very important. Down to the present day, there is no real agreement about the identity of the maker intellect Aristotle is describing. In at least one work, Alexander argued that it should be identified with God himself, given that God is always thinking, separate and eternal. But Themistius was convinced that Aristotle must be describing an aspect of the human mind. For him, the universal maker intellect is, as he puts it, what it is to be me. It facilitates the inception of my thoughts, which are actual forms in my mind, just as light makes it possible to see visible objects. The choice between these two interpretations is one of far-reaching importance. On Alexander's view, it looks as if the human mind is just another power belonging to the embodied person. There is little reason to expect that we will survive the death of our bodies. For Themistius, though, we each are above all to be identified with the maker intellect. When Aristotle says that this is eternal, he is promising us a shared immortality. Themistius attained another kind of immortality, too, because his paraphrases of Aristotle were valued for many centuries. His rhetorical gifts were likewise cherished. The Christian theologian Gregory Nazanzius called him the King of Words. In his own day, as we've seen, even emperors found it politically expedient to have a man of his pedigree around. A surviving letter from Constantius to Themistius shows how keen the emperor was to present himself as a guardian of philosophy and the classical heritage more generally. But speeches and court intellectuals could only take an emperor so far. What they really needed was evidence of divine favor. A crushing military victory was always helpful, but failing that, the closest thing to a divine vote of confidence was often found in astrology. Emperors kept astrologers at court to help them make decisions and had their horoscopes published because of the widespread ancient belief that the stars signified the will of the gods. What does this have to do with philosophy? For now, heaven only knows, but the signs are good that we'll find out next time when we look at astronomy and astrology on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Sky Writing, Astronomy, Astrology, and Philosophy. What would it take for you to look at yourself in the mirror and think that you really ought to be the most powerful person in the known world? Perhaps you are fired by civic duty, a desire to help the people. Perhaps you've got connections. Your dad was the most powerful person in the world, and one likes to keep these things in the family. Or maybe you're just a megalomaniac who thinks untrammeled power over humankind is no less than you deserve. In the Roman era, a large number of people were led by such reasons to think that they ought to don the purple and become emperor. To be fair, some more or less had power thrust upon them, but most seized it eagerly with both hands, and often with an army as well. Occasionally, things got really out of control, as in 69 AD, also known as the Year of the Four Emperors. This, obviously, was a point in history when it didn't take much to make men see themselves as potential emperors. One of that year's four claimants, whose name was Otho, made a daring grab for power which included the brutal murder of his predecessor, Galba. Otho lasted only three months, but he did have an excellent reason to see himself upon the throne. Some astrologers told him he would be emperor. I guess they didn't mention the part about only lasting three months. Now, if you opened your newspaper today, turned to your horoscope, and read that this is a good week to declare yourself President of the United States, you presumably wouldn't drop everything and start writing your first State of the Union address. But the Romans took astrology more seriously than most of us do nowadays. Astrology had already played a role in imperial politics before Otho's day. Consider the following tale of two friends who went to consult an astrologer. The first friend was named Agrippa, and the astrologer prophesied that he was destined for an almost unimaginable greatness, a true prophecy given that Agrippa went on to win the battle of Actium and serve as the most powerful lieutenant of the great Augustus Caesar. After this, Agrippa's friend was reluctant even to hear his own fortune, which would obviously be far less auspicious. But when he finally gave his time of birth and the calculations had been done, the astrologer didn't even bother to utter a prediction. He simply fell at the man's feet, for this second man, named Octavian, would go on to be Augustus Caesar. That story is a legend, of course, but Augustus really did use astrology as part of his imperial image. He had his horoscope made public, and his star sign of Capricorn is found on surviving coins minted in his reign. What astrology could help give, astrology could also threaten to take away. Emperors often worried that astrologers or other diviners would declare that someone else was destined for power, undermining their authority. Ancient historians tell numerous anecdotes in which someone receives the dubious benefit of such a prophecy, and shortly thereafter, a death sentence from the capital intended to thwart the prediction. Social edicts were sometimes passed against the use of astrology to predict death, not coincidentally this occurred late in Augustus' reign, or against any use of astrology. Of course, there's not much point outlawing or censoring something no one takes seriously. Such laws are part of the abundant evidence that, along with magic and forms of divination, like reading the entrails of animals, astrology was a well-established part of the ancient worldview. So, for most philosophers, the possibility of successful astrological prediction, along with the power of magical spells, amulets, and so on, counted as what Aristotle would call an endoxon, a commonly held belief that could supply a starting point for philosophical reflection. If you think about it, it would be a pretty poor philosopher who, living in a society where astrology was widely accepted as genuinely efficacious, would just shrug and decide not to think about it. If the stars really do indicate future events, this stands in need of explanation. Astrology was particularly interesting for philosophers because, unlike magic or reading entrails, it was inextricably linked to a major branch of philosophy, namely cosmology. We have seen before that the heavens were a source of a continuing fascination for ancient thinkers. It is a major theme among pre-Socratics – you might remember Heraclitus' claim that the sun and moon are bowls of fire – and in Plato's Timaeus. Aristotle wrote an entire treatise called On the Heavens. These philosophers predated the widespread belief in astrology in the Mediterranean basin, which seems to have begun only after Alexander's conquests and the exchange of ideas between the Greek and Babylonian worlds. But by the 2nd century AD, it was possible – one might almost say inevitable – for the leading ancient expert in astronomical theory to write also about astrology. This author was Claudius Ptolemy. His mathematically sophisticated presentation of the heavenly system lived on for centuries, especially in a work we call the Almagest. Its name contains a hint of its historical influence. Originally, called the mathematical systematic treatise, it was often referred to simply as He Megiste, the Great Treatise. This passed directly into Arabic as Al-Majuzi, and the beginning of the English title Almagest simply retains the definite article Al from the Arabic. I can't resist mentioning that a similar etymology underlies the word alchemy, which comes from an Arabic transliteration of the Greek hemiye, the same word that underlies our word chemistry. Ptolemy didn't write about alchemy, but he did compose an extensive work on astrology, simply called the Four Books or Tetra Biblos. He thus embodies a more general ancient phenomenon, the intimate connection of practices we now usually consider disreputable with intellectual disciplines that live on in our universities. Alchemists availed themselves of Aristotelian chemistry, that is, the theories of elemental transformation he set forth in works like On Generation and Corruption. Magic could be explained using ideas from Stoic and Platonist physics, in particular the idea that the whole cosmos is like a single organism. The parts of the universe relate like parts of a body, so that they are capable of being jointly affected, in Greek sympatheia, another word that lives on in English as sympathy. This same idea was used by the Stoics to explain astrology, while authors like Ptolemy borrowed heavily from Aristotle's four-element theory and his cosmology. We might expect that astrology would be a good match for Stoicism. After all, the Stoics were determinists who believed that the natural order is an inevitable unfolding of divine providence. The possibility of foretelling future events fits nicely with this theory, but as it turns out, the Stoics were slow to embrace it with any enthusiasm. One passage in Cicero does suggest that the early Stoic Chrysippus accepted the following example of a conditional statement, If someone is born at the rising of the dog star, he will not die at sea. But again according to Cicero, Diogenes of Babylon, the Stoic representative in the famous embassy of philosophers to Rome in 155 BC, allowed only limited efficacy to astrology. Things really got going only with Poseidonius, a Stoic who was known to Cicero personally and is mentioned in Cicero's work on divination. Poseidonius seems to have accepted astrology and other forms of divination as a welcome confirmation of the Stoic determinist theory. His interest in the topic may relate to his famous construction of a model of the heavens, an armillary sphere. Despite this, it was the Aristotelian cosmic theory that appealed to the later Ptolemy and that would go on to be assumed by philosophically inclined astrologers and astrologically inclined philosophers even into the Arabic tradition. As you'll recall, Aristotle assumed, as did nearly all ancient cosmologists, that the earth sits at the center of a spherical cosmos. At the edge of the cosmos is the sphere of the so-called fixed stars. Since the earth is assumed to be unmoving, this sphere is taken to be revolving swiftly around the earth once per day. In this outermost sphere and our earthly world are more transparent spheres, in which the visible planets are embedded. From night to night, they change their position against the revolving background of the fixed stars. Now in fact, the earth is of course tilted on its axis and it is not only spinning around once per day, but also traveling around the sun once per year, give or take a leap day now and again. This means that the sun seems, if you suppose the earth to be unmoving, also to be moving relative to the fixed stars, describing a motion along a circle that is at an angle to the celestial equator. This motion of course takes one full year to be completed, and the inclined path the sun travels is called the ecliptic. The angle of the ecliptic was credited with the change of seasons. The sun's path does slip very slightly from year to year, a phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes. This is in fact due to the wobble of the earth spinning on its axis. Ptolemy said the effect was only about one degree per century. The fact that ancient astrologers were aware of such a subtle change shows how observations and measurements were being made over the course not only of years, but of generations. A more obvious phenomenon, which can be seen even within a single year, is that the planets do not look like they travel stately circles around the earth. After all, they are in fact moving in elliptical orbits around the sun, just as the earth is. Rather, from the point of view of the earthbound observer, they sometimes appear to stop and go backwards. So it's patently obvious that the planets, including the sun and moon, are not moving in perfect circles around the earth. This was a problem for anyone who, like Aristotle, believed that the planets are seated in rotating spheres. He had to introduce multiple movers for each sphere to explain the irregular motions of the planets. A later expedient was the epicycle. The planet sits upon a much smaller rotating sphere embedded within the sphere rotating around the earth. The planet is like a dot on a spinning marble which is inside a big rotating glass sphere. This lesser spinning motion explains why the planet sometimes appears to move backwards. Another device was the eccentric sphere. A planet-bearing sphere could have a center other than the midpoint of the universe, something impossible to reconcile with the physical picture of nested celestial spheres. As is clear from such attempted corrections, it was vital to Aristotle and Ptolemy that the heavens remain a world of perfect circles. The non-circular motions observed had to be explained as the product of multiple interacting circular motions. This provided a contrast between heavenly bodies and the four elements in the world here below the heavens, air, earth, fire, and water, which have rectilinear motions. The light elements, air and fire, move up, and the heavy elements, water and earth, move down. In other words, the light elements move away from the heavy elements towards the midpoint of the universe. This gives Aristotle a basis for his claim that the heavens are made of an entirely different kind of substance, the so-called fifth element, which is eternal and indestructible. Ptolemy appreciates the exalted status this implies for the study of the stars. At the beginning of his Almagest, he argues that there is no greater theoretical discipline. He agrees with Aristotle that theology must study the ultimate mover of the heavens, which is divine. Sadly, a full understanding of this first cause of motion exceeds the grasp of humankind. Meanwhile, natural philosophy, which considers the world of four elements below the sphere of the moon, deals with things subject to constant change. So, these disciplines are imperfect. Theology, because no adequate comprehension is possible, physics, because there can be no stable understanding of unstable things. By contrast, when we consider the heavens on the basis of their motions, we are doing mathematics, a study that combines feasibility with perfectly stable objects of knowledge. As Goldilocks might say, not too ambitious, not too modest, but just right. Ptolemy strikes a Platonic note by adding that the study of the stars will bring our souls into a kind of order that imitates the perfect order of the heavens. The same point was made in that favorite dialogue of the late ancient world, the Timaeus. But none of this gets us from the science explored in the Almagest, which we would call astronomy, to the much more ambitious and contentious practice of astrology. Astrologers used horoscopes to predict the fates of individuals, and they also pronounced on the outcomes of more particular events, advising on everything from the best time to take a journey to the result of illnesses to the winners of chariot races. How is this possible? Here we can borrow from Tony Long, our interview guest from a few weeks ago, who has written of the difference between hard and soft astrology. Hard astrology claims that astral bodies actually cause things to happen, down here in our world. Soft astrology says that the stars merely signify future events without causing them, making prediction possible for those who know how to read this sort of sky writing. As we've seen, the Aristotelian Alexander of Aphrodisias balked at the idea that the stars cause everything to happen down here. For the stars, with their perfect and eternal motions, partake of divinity. And, let's face it, a lot of what happens down here is really unfortunate. The wrong people become emperors, children refuse to finish their supper, the giraffe enclosure just happens to be shut the day we visit the zoo. To put the blame for such things on the stars would be blasphemous. Astrology was criticized more directly by representatives of other philosophical schools. The inscriptions of Diogenes of Oneonta include an attack on astrology, unsurprising given the Epicureans' dislike of Stoic determinism. Sextus Empiricus and other skeptics likewise refuted astrology. They too were opposed to Stoicism, and, of course, ancient skeptics were in the business of refuting pretty much everything anyway. An amusing anti-astrological argument was offered by the early academic skeptic Carnaides. If time of birth determined one's fate, then everyone who dies in a huge battle must have been born at the same time. As Christianity came to dominate late antiquity, astrology itself became increasingly embattled. Authors of no less standing than Augustine tried to refute it. For instance, he used what was by his day a very old argument not unlike that of Carnaides. If the moment of birth decides one's fate, then identical twins should have the same fate, but this isn't true. The much earlier Christian thinker Origen seems to have admitted soft astrology. The stars do signify future events without causing them. Having held out this concession to astrology, he snatched it away by denying that humans are able to read these signs. But even for Christians, things were not always so clear-cut. Origen thought he had to admit that stars serve as signs because of a passage in the book of Genesis, and there were other religious reasons to allow that stars do serve as messengers from God. Just think of the star shining over Bethlehem at Jesus' birth, a story which has been seen as the Christian equivalent of Augustus using his horoscope to support his political legitimacy. Of course, philosophy could be used not only to critique astrology but to support it. A remarkable example is the poem called Astronomica by an otherwise unknown author named Manilius. Taking inspiration from Lucretius and, perhaps, from the Stoic Poseidonius, Manilius put complex mathematical accounts of the heavens into torturously difficult Latin verse. This is the first complete theoretical work on astrology to survive from antiquity, and it almost went lost, barely surviving through the medieval period, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. Far more influential was our new friend Ptolemy, who not only adopted a broadly Aristotelian cosmology in the Almagest, but also called on the resources of Aristotelian physics in his astrological work the Tetra Biblos. Aristotelian cosmology had always faced the difficulty of explaining how the heavens exercise influence on the earthly realm. You don't have to believe in astrology to wonder about this. The sun and moon have evident effects on the seasons and tides, and, in fact, astrologers presented their theories as a mere extension of this kind of phenomenon. But Aristotle denied that the sun is hot. So how does it warm us? He flirted with the possibility of invoking friction, but this makes little sense, given that the sun's sphere is separated from our atmosphere by the impenetrable and presumably heat-proof sphere containing the moon. Ptolemy did not really solve this problem either, but simply associated various planets with certain elemental properties. The sun was of course heating, albeit not hot, while the moon causes moisture, hence the tides, and so on for other planets. Like other astrologers, he linked such properties to more obviously metaphorical ones, claiming, for instance, that the moon is feminine and the sun masculine. As standard in ancient astrology, he also made the effects of planets depend on their location in the zodiac, their relative position to other planets, and so on. While this may all make Ptolemy sound like an unashamed hard astrologist, he hedges his bets by insisting that astrology deals only with probabilities. The stars do cause, but in so complex a way that we cannot be sure of our forecasts. Thus, he compares astrology to medicine. Both are beneficial to mankind, but neither offers absolute certainty. We can find similarly nuanced views among critics of astrology. A century after Ptolemy, Plotinus took a great interest in astrology, devoting a treatise to the topic and discussing it at length in other treatises. Like Alexander, Plotinus worries about making the divine stars causes of evils, and about the deterministic implications of astrology. So he sometimes seems to deny the stars any causal role at all, at one point sarcastically comparing this suggestion to the idea that birds make future events occur, an allusion to the ancient practice of divination based on the flight of birds. On the other hand, he explicitly speaks of the stars as a kind of writing that signifies the future. This makes his view seem like a clear case of soft astrology. In fact, though, his position is more nuanced than that. In one of many borrowings from Stoicism, Plotinus accepts that the universe is bound together by a kind of sympathy. This gives him a physical basis for allowing some causal influence from the stars upon our world. His considered view does allow this, but only to some extent. For instance, the positions of the stars at the time of our birth may influence our ethical dispositions, but they do not predetermine our actions. This is not only because the stars are only part of a more complex cosmic causal system, but also because our souls are immune to influence from mere bodies, even divine heavenly bodies. We'll see why once we turn our attention to more fundamental aspects of his philosophy. But, as a good Plotinus, Plotinus would encourage us to prepare for this by getting a solid grounding in mathematics. So, next time, I'll be looking at ancient mathematics and its philosophical significance. I know I can count on you to join me for an interview with an expert on this topic, Serafina Cuomo, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liberhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about ancient mathematics with Serafina Cuomo, who is a reader in Roman history at Birkbeck College in London. Hi, Serafina. Hello, Peter. Thanks for coming on. I'd like to start by asking you a very basic question. What did the ancients understand by mathematics? Obviously, it would have included arithmetic and geometry, both of which are words that come from Greek, in fact. What else would it have included? It would have included a lot of other things that we don't necessarily consider to be mathematics today. Like everything, it depended on whom you asked. For some people, mathematics could really be taken to concern knowledge in general. So someone who was a mathematic horse was someone who was interested in learning about pretty much everything. But more specifically, alongside arithmetic and geometry, which you would expect, I think that many ancient Greeks and perhaps Romans would have included astronomy, music, perhaps even things like astrology. In fact, in late antiquity, the word mathematicos often defined an astrologer rather than just a mathematician in general. And on the Roman side, the word geometris often indicated a land surveyor rather than just a geometrician. So even the usage of the words connected to mathematics covered a much wider range than today. That mention of land surveying brings up something else, which is that although if I just say the word mathematics, I guess that listeners will have in their mind something very abstract, the sort of things they did in high school maybe, ancient mathematics would have included or at least related to a lot of very practical disciplines and enterprises like land surveying and maybe engineering and so on. So could you say something about that? Yeah, definitely. In fact, a lot of authors report the story that perhaps is familiar about the origin of geometry. Geometry means land measurement. And they say that it started in Egypt. When the Nile flooded, it was difficult to recognise, remember where your plot of land ended and someone else's plot of land started. So geometry was invented so that people after the Nile floods could find where their piece of land was again. The very origin of mathematics and geometry was seen as practical. It's still a matter for debate to which extent sophisticated, we could say, mathematics was used in things like building machines, architecture and other applied sciences. But we definitely have a lot of textual evidence and in some cases archaeological evidence to indicate that mathematics wasn't just an abstract pursuit, but it was seen as something that had to do with everyday life. And they were capable of really astonishing feats of engineering as well. Yeah, definitely. Perhaps one of the best areas to look at is that of military engineering and what they could do with catapults. We're lucky in that when it comes to catapults, we both have good textual sources and a lot of archaeological remains. Enthusiasts, alongside with scholars, and obviously there can be scholarly enthusiasts and enthusiastic scholars, today have engaged in reconstructing ancient catapults on the basis of ancient evidence using materials that could have been used at the time and so on. And they've verified that they could build catapults which could shoot both accurately and powerfully. Really no less a mathematical person than Archimedes was known for his work on war engines. There's something about a hook that he built that comes down and grabs boats and lifts them into the water and then drops them back down and destroys them, right? Yes, yes. Archimedes in antiquity may almost have been more famous for his military devices than for his mathematical achievements in the field of pure geometry. He held the Romans at bay for two years when they were laying siege to his city and they only managed to defeat Syracuse, Archimedes' city, through deceit because someone betrayed the Syracusans. So Archimedes was a very good example of someone who could do both very abstract, sophisticated, advanced geometry and build machines which were all the more accurate and effective because of their mathematical foundations. Obviously then mathematics covers a very wide terrain. So what exactly is it that unifies this together into one discipline? I mean if we talk about ancient mathematics, what's the overarching notion involved here? That's a very difficult question. So I'm just going to throw a couple of things at you rather than give an answer. My first guess would be that mathematics, the various disciplines that constituted mathematics, were unified by the idea of number. The ancients were aware that there are limitations to what mathematics can do. So they were aware that even though number is involved in all the various disciplines, you can't for instance measure everything perfectly. Sometimes numbers can only express a certain proportion or a certain multitude up to a certain point. So number insofar as it underlies arithmetic, geometry, and in the form of proportions, it underlies a lot of building, both building machines and building houses. Number would be a good candidate for a unifying principle for all these disciplines. Okay, well then that raises the question I guess of what numbers are. So I'll ask you another very difficult question. What did the ancients think that numbers are? I think it's clear from our evidence that numbers for the ancients were much more concrete than perhaps the idea of number we have today. Some ancients, philosophers in particular, Plato comes to mind, probably had a more abstract idea of number as something that is not necessarily attached to an object but can be detached and then studied in its own right. But I think your average Greek or Roman in the street often thought of number as something that is totally concrete. When they counted, they counted with pebbles or tokens on a counting board or on an abacus. In a sense that's what numbers were for them, concrete objects that you could manipulate and touch. In some forms of mathematical notation in classical Greece, you don't just have a sign for five, say, the sign for five embeds another little sign that indicates this is five coins of a certain denomination. So it seems to me that if one had to start answering that question and we could devote a whole series just to that, one of the things to bear in mind is that most people probably would have thought that numbers were concrete, real, to do with objects rather than abstract. Does that relate to something that at least is often said about Greek mathematics, which is that they have a kind of spatial understanding of number in the sense that they think of numbers as geometrical, so like square numbers and so on. We might think of square numbers as just an example, so the area of a square is going to be the square of the side. But did they actually think about, and I guess now I'm asking more about people who were doing mathematical advanced research, did they actually think that numbers were spatial extensions sometimes, or is that an oversimplification? I think that's a good description of what is going on in some authors. It's interesting, for instance, that the Pythagoreans are attributed views that fit with what you're saying. Or later mathematicians, whom we could call neo-Pythagoreans, such as Nicomachus, especially spent a lot of time talking about square numbers and cube numbers and even pentagonal numbers, so visualising numbers in geometrical shapes. It's a way, if you like, going back to our previous question, it's a way of establishing a unifying principle, which is number. So if there is a connection between the two, you've also found a way of unifying arithmetic and geometry. It's also probably significant that even in Euclid's Elements, in the books devoted to arithmetic, there are diagrams. Numbers are represented by line segments. Speaking of Euclid, something else I wanted to ask you is about mathematics and methodology. So I guess that one reason that mathematics was seen as philosophically important by ancient philosophers is that it gives you a model for how to build knowledge, and obviously Euclid's Elements would be a really good example of that. Could you just tell us something about how Euclid's Elements works methodologically, first of all, and then maybe tell us to what extent that's representative of ancient mathematics? Yes, probably most people will know this. My generation, I won't reveal all the time, but my generation and people older than me actually studied Euclid's Elements when they did mathematics at school. Euclid's starts from undemonstrated premises. So book one of Euclid's Elements contains definitions, postulates and common notions, which are also known as axioms. None of these propositions is demonstrated. You have to accept them in order to carry on. Definitions are things like what a line is, what a point is, and so on. Postulates are more complex statements that you are asked to accept, at least for the time being. The most famous one is probably postulate number five about parallel lines. And not accepting that postulate leads then to the creation of non-Euclidean geometries. Common notions are things that seem self-evident, such as if you add equals to equals, then equals will result. On the basis of that, Euclid then builds a whole edifice of geometry, which is axiomatic in that it starts from this undemonstrated premises and deductive in that it goes from general principles to particular specific results, specifically on the triangle constructed in the diagram is laid out in front of you. So these proofs are not just about a specific triangle whose sides are three, four and five but about any right-angled triangle. In that sense it is deductive. Euclid didn't invent this method. We find something that looks a lot like it in, for instance, Aristotle's posterior analytics. A lot of ink has been spent discussing what the connection is between Euclid and, say, previous philosophy. The method is used definitely after him. We find a similar method in Archimedes, we find it in Apollonius, to the point where some historians of mathematics identify a whole tradition of mathematics in the line of Euclid, and the big names that belong to it are Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius. I'm interested in something you mentioned there, which is that when you're trying to prove something you draw a diagram. How do you get the universality bit? So if I draw a diagram and I show you that what I'm arguing for works with the triangle that I've just drawn, for example, how is it that I'm allowed to infer that it will work for any triangle? Why couldn't someone just say, well, right, but you didn't show it for acute triangles, so now draw me an acute triangle and do the same, or do a similar demonstration with that? Well, in fact, sometimes we do find cases like that, not in Euclid so much, but in later geometers. What you describe, which is a kind of analysis of sub-cases, is one of the features of late ancient geometry. Euclid doesn't have that unless there is an actual need to provide a different proposition for a different kind of triangle. In a sense, the diagram is an opportunity for the reader to go and do another diagram and verify that it works. But in itself, the proposition works precisely because even if you draw a different kind of triangle, which is not, you know, whose sides are not 3, 4, 5, as long as it's right angle, you'll see that the proposition still works. And I guess that the way that the text actually works is it describes a diagram, right? And then there are many, in fact, infinitely many triangles you could draw that would satisfy the diagram. Yes. And the thought is, well, the proof will work for any triangle that you can draw on these instructions. Exactly. But does he ever explicitly say that, though? I mean, does he call attention to what he's doing in terms of the methodology and why it's a proof? Not really. Euclid, unlike other mathematicians, never steps out of the text and gives us a statement about what he's doing. We'd like it to have that with, for instance, Archimedes, Apollonius to some extent, but the authorial voice of Euclid is completely absent, to the point where some scholars think that there was no Euclid. Oh, he's like Homer. He's like Homer, yeah. So the work almost came together, and there were later additions and accretions, which we know there were, but as an individual, Euclid actually remains quite opaque. Which is one reason it's hard to place him relative to, say, influences from the philosophical tradition, I assume. Yes. What about the principles, the definitions and the postulates and so on? If these are just given to us and not demonstrated, I guess the thought might be, these are obviously true, or the thought might be, if you thought these were true, then you should accept the following things which will follow from them. And I guess that, given you just said that Euclid doesn't really reflect explicitly on his method, maybe we don't know what he had in mind, but do later mathematicians talk about the status of these starting points and why you should accept them? They do. One very interesting case in point is, again, a late ancient author called Proclus. Many people wouldn't even say that Proclus was a mathematician. He's more famous for being a philosopher. But he wrote one of our most extensive commentaries on Book One of the Elements, and he goes at enormous lengths to discuss exactly what status every bit in Euclid's Book One. Exactly what he does with Plato when he comments on Plato. But before getting into Proclus, who I'll be covering in a later episode anyway, let's talk a little bit about Roman mathematics. What happens in the transition of mathematics from the Greek world to the Roman world? Obviously, I guess that Roman scholars and intellectuals would have been reading Greek and engaging with the Greek tradition, so the two things would be very closely connected. So what kind of changes do we have once we get into the Roman period? The usual story about the transition from Greek to Roman mathematics is that the Greeks were more theoretical, more philosophically inclined, more abstract in their way of thinking, and that was reflected in their mathematics, where we find works which we could describe as pure geometry. On the other hand, the Romans were pragmatic, practical, concrete, and so that's reflected in their mathematics, which is mostly about measuring land, counting taxes, and so on. The usual story is founded on some pieces of evidence. One can think, for instance, of some phrases in Cicero. Cicero himself says that the Greeks were praising pure geometry, whereas the Romans were more interested in calculation and measurement. And Cicero obviously was a key figure in the appropriation of Greek knowledge, including philosophy, on the part of the Romans. I think, however, that we should try and go beyond the usual story, and I'd like to point to a few facts. One is that several Greek mathematicians actually operated within the Greco-Roman world. We could mention Ptolemy, we could mention Diophantus, obviously all the late ancient mathematicians, hero of Alexandria. We know that they were as aware of the presence of the Romans as the Romans must have been of them. That's definitely true in the case of hero of Alexandria. The second thing to bear in mind is that the Greeks didn't just have pure geometry, they also had practical mathematics. The fact that we identify them more with one tradition of mathematics is to some extent a reflection of the view that Cicero espouses and that has become very, very influential centuries after, even down to our day. So the Roman view then was that the Greeks are more abstract, they're more interested in theory, and the Romans are kind of down to earth. They're more interested in getting things done and winning wars and building things. Yeah, I wouldn't even say the Romans view, we could just say Cicero's view, but to the extent to which that was shared by several Romans, yes. Obviously, I don't need to cash out the political implications of all that. It's kind of convenient to have the Greeks in this abstract head in the clouds position and the Romans in the dominant politically powerful position. The fact that this is not necessarily a reflection of what was going on could be seen in the very figure of Archimedes. Actually, that brings up something that I think in a way has been running through a lot of what we've said, which is that mathematics often seems to have this connection to political power. So we've talked about using mathematics in warfare, we've talked about using it to measure land, and presumably the government, for lack of a better word, is in charge of figuring out whose measurement is correct. And we might also think about, for example, the use of mathematics in voting in Athenian democracy and so on. And it almost sounds like ancient mathematics needs to be understood as a kind of tool or even weapon that was used by certain people in society to gain a political advantage over other people. Or is that too radical a proposal? No, I think the reasoning is radical at all. Insofar as mathematics is connected to ideas of accuracy, fairness, transparency even, we find it as a thread running through political discourse. One way of looking at this, for instance, which is what I'm working on at the moment, is looking at accounts. You mean like bookkeeping? Like bookkeeping, but accounts that were sometimes inscribed on stone and displayed in public places. The fact that this was done obviously sent a certain message about accountability. If you're ready to publish your accounts, that also means that you're not afraid of people going through them to see if you've embezzled money. So it sends a message about transparency, good government, fairness and so on. And it's a practice that we find possibly in its strongest form in 5th and 4th century BC Athens, supposedly the cradle of democracy. It's very interesting that in the Roman Republic, for instance, generals who won big victories and were awarded the triumph had to display the account for the campaign during the triumphal procession. That's a practice that ends with the empire also because generals really no longer are allowed triumphs. Only the emperor has to be seen as the triumphant one. One of the last forms of public accounts we find in Rome is probably in the big bilingual inscription set in various copies all over the empire by the Emperor Augustus, the Res Gestae inscription, where he details all the things that is done and all the money that is spent out of his own pocket is came to add. And at the end, in some version, there was an account adding up the money and giving you a sum total that represented Augustus' generosity in a very concrete form. If I could maybe finish by asking you about something rather different, which is about Pythagoreanism. So it's obviously a big issue, but I'm just about to get to Neoplatonism. And I've already been talking in previous episodes about how the so-called middle Platonists fused Pythagorean ideas about mathematics with Platonist philosophy. So I was just curious whether you could say something about whether Pythagorean philosophers and mathematicians actually contributed anything to the history of mathematics. So someone like Nicomachus, who you mentioned earlier, would he have been a really serious mathematician who proved new things in mathematics? Or were they just fooling around with numbers? It all depends on your definition of mathematician and of serious mathematician. I'm not sure that Nicomachus proved new things. There is a theorem that goes under the name of Theorem of Nicomachus. But to be honest, I was looking again today. He states the theorem. We call it a theorem, but he doesn't prove it. What's the theorem? All the terms in the odd places in a series in double or triple ratio are squares. So if you take the series in double ratio, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on, all the series in triple ratio, 1, 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, and so on, all the numbers in odd places are squares. And you can verify that, but it doesn't give us a proof. So was he a serious mathematician? I think he was. He spends a lot of time to tell us how important mathematics is, how mathematics is the key to everything, how numbers, in the form sometimes of squares, cubic pentagonal numbers, can even help us understand geometrical figures and so on. So his contribution and that of Pythagoreanism in general is, I think, this strong belief that mathematics is the key to understanding reality. If it's true that Plato in the time years was being Pythagorean, and you look at the influence that the time uses had on the key figures in the scientific revolution, such as Galilei, then you see where the true importance of the Pythagoreans for mathematics and science really is. And Plato, of course, says that we should get into philosophy by doing mathematics, so I'm sure he'd be very pleased that we spent this episode doing mathematics before getting to Neo-Platonism. Thanks, Serafina, very much for coming on. And I hope you'll join me next time when I'll start to look at the works of Plotinus, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, A God is My Co-Pilot, The Life and Works of Plotinus. We seem to expect that a great life should have a great ending. Hence the fascination of famous last words, deathbed remarks that show wit or insight, or simply sum up the personality of the one who utters them. The best ones are probably apocryphal, like the one attributed to Oscar Wilde, Either That Wallpaper Goes or I Do, and Goethe's supposed dying request for More Light. But apparently the great physicist Richard Feynman really did say, I'd hate to die twice, it's so boring. As in so much else, the ancients set a high standard for the rest of history with their last words. It's hard to see past Julius Caesar's Et tu, Brute, for the top entry in this competition, but Socrates's We Owe a Cock to Asclepius should get an honorable mention. And then there's the dying remark of the greatest philosopher of late antiquity, Plotinus. He said to a friend who was sitting with him, Try to bring back the God in us to the God in the universe. As if that wasn't good enough, a snake appeared and wriggled out through a hole in the wall, just as Plotinus shuffled off his mortal coil. The year of his death was 270 AD, and the place was Campania, a region in Italy to the south of Rome. Plotinus had come to Rome to open a philosophical school. Whether he meant to or not, he also opened a new chapter in the history of philosophy. A good case can be made for seeing Plotinus as the most influential Western philosopher of all time, apart from Plato and Aristotle themselves. The case would go like this. Plotinus is recognized as the founder of the tradition we call Neoplatonism. He fused together the doctrines he claimed to find in Plato with many of Aristotle's ideas along with a healthy dose of Stoicism. The resulting mixture proved appealing, to put it mildly. It would be embraced by pagans and also Christians of Byzantium and Western Europe, by Christians, Jews, and Muslims who lived in the Islamic world and wrote in Syriac, in Arabic, in Persian, in Hebrew. Within decades of Plotinus' death, Augustine drank deeply from the Neoplatonic stream. A millennium after Plotinus lived, Thomas Aquinas would do the same. Neoplatonism would become, if anything, even more dominant in the Renaissance, finally being chased away from center stage in the early modern period. Western philosophy began about two and a half thousand years ago with the prezecratics, and for about half that time, from the 3rd to the 15th centuries AD, philosophy was, to a significant extent, dominated by Neoplatonism. The achievement is so significant that it remains impressive even once we register a few caveats. For one thing, Plotinus never set out to create a new philosophical system. As I've said before, he and other late ancient Platonists called themselves just that, Platonists, not Neoplatonists, a term devised by modern scholars and originally used in a rather dismissive fashion. We should also recognize that the new Platonism of Plotinus was not as new as is sometimes thought. Having covered the previous centuries of philosophy without any gaps, we know that thinkers in those centuries, especially the so-called middle Platonists, anticipated Plotinus's ideas to a great extent. So much so that, as I've also mentioned before, Plotinus's detractors accused him of plagiarizing from the earlier Platonist Numenius. For these reasons, the Platonists who came after Plotinus did not see him as representing a break with the earlier tradition any more than Plotinus saw himself this way. Neoplatonists, like Iamblichus and Proclus, respected Plotinus deeply, but they saw him as only one particularly significant link in a chain of Platonist authorities. When they mention him by name, it is often to criticize him. Finally, we should bear in mind that, especially in the medieval period, Neoplatonism could travel without the original texts of Plotinus in tow. Most Latin medieval thinkers had no access to his writings. In Arabic, his texts were only partially available in a translation that was incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle. We ourselves are more fortunate. We can read everything Plotinus wrote. For this, we must thank Plotinus's student Porphyry, who produced an edition of the writings. He gave the individual treatises titles, which they had lacked before, and called the entire thing Ennieds, meaning nines. This is because he had grouped the treatises into six sets of nine. Porphyry was as much a sucker for numbers and their deeper symbolism as the next Platonist, so naturally, the possibility of arranging his master's philosophy in this format was irresistible. In fact, he cheated a bit to get the 6x9 result, taking longer works and splitting them up into several treatises, in one case dividing a treatise in the middle of a sentence. The most striking example is a lengthy work by Plotinus known nowadays by the German nickname Großschrift, which sounds like it means disgusting treatise, but actually just means big treatise. Porphyry not only divided it into four separate pieces, but he separated them and put them out of order in various sections of the Ennieds. The moral of this story is, if one of your students offers to edit your collected writings, ask to see the planned table of contents first. Still, we should, as I say, be grateful to Porphyry not only because he preserved Plotinus's writings for posterity, but also because he wrote a kind of introduction which was attached to the editions and was transmitted in manuscripts of the Ennieds. This introduction combined a biography of Plotinus with an explanation of how the Ennieds were put together, along with a few tributes to Plotinus by contemporaries. This so-called life of Plotinus is absolutely packed with memorable anecdotes and fascinating windows into the activities of Plotinus's school, and in its way is as invaluable a document for the birth of Neoplatonism as any of Plotinus's own treatises. In writing the Life, Porphyry has two great themes. First, Plotinus was a really wonderful guy. Second, Porphyry is a pretty wonderful guy too. Porphyry rarely misses a chance to let the Life reflect well on himself. The scholar Gillian Clark has remarked that the phrase I, Porphyry recurs in the Life so often that it is unintentionally comic. In particular, Porphyry wants to leave the reader with the strong impression that he, Porphyry, is Plotinus's most cherished and important disciple. For instance, he lets it drop that Plotinus's best works were those written after he, Porphyry, joined the school, and that some of these were written in direct response to probing questions raised by him, Porphyry. He has some competition here from another disciple of Plotinus named Amelius. This might explain why Porphyry starts the Life with the following anecdote. Amelius wanted to have Plotinus sit for a painted or sculpted portrait. Plotinus said, Amelius responded by inviting a painter to attend sessions at the school until he'd memorized Plotinus's face, and with further input from Amelius, a portrait was made anyway. It's a good story, and one which highlights Plotinus's consistency in adhering to Platonist principles. Also, it just happens to put Amelius in a slightly bad light. You can imagine Porphyry watching the whole thing unfold thinking, oh man, if I ever write a biography of our master Plotinus, I'm definitely starting with this. He also mentions that a set of copies of Plotinus's works prepared by Amelius produced complaints, though Porphyry does excuse Amelius by saying that Plotinus's way of writing was just rather unusual, which is true enough, as anyone who has read him in Greek can attest. Compounding this difficulty, as he, Porphyry, tells us, was the fact that Plotinus had bad eyesight and therefore never read over what he had written. Again, the story evokes a slightly otherworldly Platonist sage, more acute in mind than in sensation, while incidentally excusing Porphyry for any deficiencies in his own addition. But perhaps I'm putting Porphyry himself in an unfairly bad light. He does have nice things to say about Amelius, too, and my hunch is that their relationship was more one of friendly competition than serious rivalry. For instance, we know Plotinus was said to have plagiarized from Numenius because Porphyry quotes from Amelius's refutation of this accusation. Porphyry even tells a story that puts him in a worse light than Amelius. When he first came to Plotinus's school, he still adhered to doctrines he'd learned from his previous teacher, Longinus. Porphyry and Longinus were convinced that the Platonic forms are outside the divine intellect, beheld as a kind of external blueprint in accordance with which God makes the world. Plotinus assigned to Amelius the task of converting Porphyry to the school's doctrine. As we'll see, this was that the forms are rather ideas in a divine mind. After an exchange of written arguments with Amelius, Porphyry finally gave in and converted to Plotinus's teaching on the matter. Porphyry's life of Plotinus already raises several key themes of Plotinus's philosophy. For instance, in his writings, Plotinus frequently seems torn about the value of the physical world. As a Platonist, his fundamental ethical teaching is to turn away from the things of the body and pursue the life of the mind, which, for him, discovering one's true self. The point is made by numerous anecdotes, including the story about the painting. Elsewhere in the life, Porphyry tells how Plotinus was able to continue contemplating intelligible things, even while having a conversation. Other anecdotes connect this spiritual perfection of Plotinus to late ancient religious beliefs. In one, a magician hostile to Plotinus tries to cast a curse on him, but Plotinus's soul is so powerful that the spell rebounds and afflicts the magician instead. In another, Plotinus is invited by a friend to a summoning of his guardian's spirit. When the spirit appears, the priest announces that Plotinus's guardian is no mere minor demon, as expected, but a full-blown god. The god, however, disappears because the friend is frightened or jealous, and strangles the ritual birds he is holding. From these stories, we get a strong sense of Plotinus as an otherworldly figure who barely deigns to notice his own body who dwells more with the gods than with the rest of us. Yet, Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was a man of this world as well as the divine world. He attracted students from all over the Mediterranean. Porphyry was from Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, and other students came from Egypt, like Plotinus himself, from Arabia, from Palestine. In Rome, Plotinus moved in aristocratic circles, and was entrusted with guardianship over orphans from among the elite. Even the emperor Gallienus was a fan, and through his good offices, Plotinus hatched a plan to found a new city called Platonopolis, which would be ruled in accordance with Plato's proposed legal system. This doesn't sound like a man with no time for the physical world around him. Some of Porphyry's more picturesque anecdotes would lead to the same conclusion. For instance, when he, Porphyry, fell into a bout of suicidal depression, Plotinus recommended that he should go abroad to a better climate, and this indeed cured him. On another occasion, Plotinus was told of a theft in a rich household. He had all the slaves lined up, eyeballed them, and picked out the culprit on sight. I can't resist mentioning that a very similar scene occurs in Buster Keaton's wonderful film Sherlock Jr. Well, maybe I could have resisted, I don't know, because I didn't try. Plotinus was clearly much better than I am at resisting temptation. He was abstemious and refused to consume animal products, even in medicines. But he obviously had the ability to pay heed to the welfare of the people around him, and even went out of his way to do so, as with the scheme for Platonopolis. Some interpreters have felt that Plotinus' philosophy gives us little or no reason to strive for practical virtue. His way of life shows, however, that it gave him reason enough. Still, there's no doubt that Plotinus devoted his life to philosophy. We learn one startling detail about Plotinus' childhood from Porphyry, that he still wanted to be breastfed at the age of eight. But mostly, the life story concerns his philosophical development. He was from Egypt, and came to Alexandria in search of a teacher. There, he met Ammonius Sacchus, about whom we unfortunately know very little. If you're keeping count, this is the second of the three Ammonioi I mentioned back in the Plutarch episode. Even Plotinus' decision to join a military expedition led by the Emperor Gordian is explained by Porphyry as stemming from Plotinus' desire to travel east, where he might encounter the wisdom of Persia and India. Whether he learned anything there that actually influenced his thought is an interesting question. The most careful examination I've seen suggests, somewhat disappointingly, that there is no strong evidence of influence on Plotinus from Indian philosophy. Plotinus had influences enough to deal with, of course. As I said, he brought together themes not only from Plato, but also the Stoics and Aristotle. Porphyry tells us that Aristotle's metaphysics is distilled in the Enneads, and that the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias were read in Plotinus' school. But, obviously, Plotinus' main inheritance was from the Platonist tradition. Like the so-called Middle Platonists, Plotinus especially favoured certain dialogues, and certain passages in those dialogues. For him, the crucial texts were metaphysically rich dialogues like the Parmenides, the Timaeus, and the middle part of the Republic. Certain bits of the Philebus and Theaetetus also made a big impression. By contrast, one could read the whole Enneads without being reminded of so-called Socratic dialogues like the Euthyphro. Still, Plato was read carefully in Plotinus' circle, and a handful of treatises in the Enneads are little more than direct commentaries on a passage from Plato. On the basis of his favourite Platonic passages, and the interpretations of Plato that came to him from earlier Platonists like Numenius, Plotinus devised the system that would remain the core of pagan Neoplatonism for generations to come. This system takes the form of a hierarchy, in which a highest principle gives rise to a second principle, which in turn gives rise to a third. All three of these principles transcend the physical world, yet Plotinus describes them with vivid analogies drawn from the physical world. They are like shining lights, overflowing fountains, burning flames, or, in one fantastic passage, a sphere with many faces. At the top, we have a first cause, which is more or less familiar from the middle Platonists. This source of all things is the One, which is identified with the Good. It is comparable to a brilliant light, which gives rise to a secondary light like a ray shines out of the Sun. This secondary principle is called by Plotinus, nous, or intellect. I mentioned just before that Porphyry at first was unconvinced by Plotinus' central insight about the intellect, namely that it should be identified with the forms, which are its own ideas. This intellect is very like Aristotle's God, a pure mind that does nothing but think, albeit that this intellect is not the first cause, but secondary to the One. After the intellect comes soul, the principle of life and order for the physical cosmos. Its function is to bring images of the forms into matter, which results in the making of physical things. Customarily, nature, or the physical world, is treated as the fourth rung in Plotinus' metaphysical ladder, giving us the sequence One Intellect-Soul-Nature. But in fact, Plotinus is reluctant to concede genuine being or existence to the things in the material or natural world. At one point, he tells us that everything matter says is a lie, and as this suggests, bodies are for him more illusion than reality. Hence, his remark to Aemilius that his own body is only an image of his true self. He would disagree with Hamlet, who was frustrated that his too-too-solid flesh refused to melt and resolve into a dew. For Plotinus, our bodies are only seemingly solid, since they are in continual flux, making a constant retreat into non-being. At this level of reality, or apparent reality, Plotinus is a Heraclitian. So, to a considerable extent, Plotinus' metaphysical picture consists only of one intellect and soul. As we'll see, though, he does have the difficulty of explaining why we have matter to receive the fleeting images of the forms that yield bodies. The consequences of all this are momentous, and not only for metaphysics. For example, in epistemology. Even the sketch of the system I've just given shows that for Plotinus, genuine knowledge must involve access to the intellect and its forms, rather than pertaining to the bodily world. Or, in aesthetics, all order and beauty in our realm is a mere shadow of the true order and beauty in that realm of forms. Or, in ethics, it would seem that the attention we pay to the physical world is misguided, quite literally much ado about nothing, to continue the Shakespearean theme. What we ought to do is concern ourselves with the sources of value that transcend our image world, the forms in nous, and ultimately the good itself, from which all things have emanated. It is also by turning away from our material world that we can hope to discover our true selves, since we are not our bodies, but our souls. Indeed, we are only the highest, thinking part of our souls, the part that is furthest removed from the bodies. Now, you can see why some have thought Plotinus would be unable to give us any reasons for a practical virtue. Why wasn't the time he spent caring for orphans and planning cities just wasted, since it was a distraction from the really crucial task of contemplating the higher realities? Indeed, why even write the Enneads themselves, which are after all a way for Plotinus to reach out to the students and other readers around him, instead of reaching for the stars of his otherworldly heaven? This is a puzzle I'm going to defer solving for a couple of weeks, because first I want to look at the even more fundamental puzzles that arise at the top of Plotinus's hierarchy. What was Plotinus's justification for positing a single, utterly simple principle as the source of all things? How, if at all, can we conceive of such an entity? How should we understand it to relate to the other principles that come after it? These are perhaps the most difficult and elusive aspects of Plotinus's thought. Does he have a persuasive account to give regarding these highest levels of his system? There's only one way to find out, and that's by joining me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and your listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Simplicity Itself – Plotinus on the One and Intellect. Here's a trivia question you won't hear at any pub quiz night. What do armies, houses, sunflowers, and giraffes have in common? Things painted by Van Gogh, perhaps? No, he inexplicably failed to capture the noble giraffe in any of his artworks, and I don't believe he was particularly keen on armies either. The right answer is that all these things are mentioned at the beginning of Plotinus's treatise on the One, which was placed at the very end of the Enneads by his student and editor Porphyry. Actually, he doesn't mention sunflowers or giraffes by name, speaking instead generally of plants and animals, but I think we all know at least which animal he had in mind. He mentions these things because of something else they have in common – they are all one. Without unity, an army would just be a bunch of people standing around with an alarming amount of weaponry. And nothing can be a giraffe without being one giraffe. Indeed, to qualify as a thing of any kind is to be one thing. Unity is a condition of being. On the other hand, not everything possesses unity to the same degree. Though you might say that each army is one army, just as much as each sunflower is one sunflower, armies clearly have less unity than sunflowers. Like all plants and animals, the bodies of sunflowers and giraffes are animated by an internal principle of life. This explains their ability to nourish themselves, to turn towards the sun, or lope gracefully towards tasty acacia leaves. By contrast, things like armies and houses have unity imposed upon them by generals or house builders. Aristotle would say that such things have their unity accidentally and from outside, whereas living organisms have an innate, essential unity. Plotinus would agree, and infer a general metaphysical principle. The more unity something has, the more reality it has, and vice versa. An army is less of a being than a sunflower, even if it is considerably more dangerous than a sunflower. Plotinus points out in this same passage that good conditions like health and beauty are also cases of unity. What is health, other than the cooperative ordering of the body's parts, while illness is the result of these parts coming into conflict with one another? What is beauty but a kind of harmony, and what is harmony but a kind of unity? The same is true even for the human soul, at least according to Plato. It has parts, and the virtuous soul is the soul that achieves harmony and unity through the unchallenged mastery of its rational part. Or, consider, finally, the entire cosmos. Arguably, science has now exposed the physical universe as something of a chaotic mess, though some think that there is a divine plan behind the apparent chaos. But in antiquity, almost everyone, with the notable exception of the Epicureans, considered the universe to be well ordered and unified. Plato compared it to a single animal, and Aristotle finished his inquiry into how God moves the heavens by quoting Homer, The rule of many is not good. Let there be one ruler. These considerations lead Plotinus to an inescapable conclusion. If we are looking for the source of all things, we should be looking for a source of unity that is itself maximally one. It will also be the source of goodness, beauty, harmony, and order. It will be that from which all else derives and towards which all things strive to return in whatever way they can. Plotinus calls it the one or the good. Long-time listeners will know, however, that these ideas do not derive from Plotinus the way all things are meant to derive from the one. Looking back as far as Parmenides, we have the idea of reducing reality to a principle of unity. Plato introduces a form of the good in the Republic, and makes it the source of intelligibility and value for all other forms. We then come even closer to Plotinus's conception in the old academy and middle Platonists who try various ways of putting a principle of unity at the top of their metaphysical systems. Plotinus recognizes all these intellectual debts, especially the ones to Parmenides and Plato. It is telling, though, that he does not begin this treatise on the one by surveying previous opinions, as Aristotle might have done. Instead, he starts with armies and houses, sunflowers and giraffes. Similarly, he says in another treatise on the topic of the one, that we should start our inquiry not with the ultimate principle, but by thinking about ourselves. This is part of what distinguishes Plotinus from his predecessors among the so-called middle Platonists, at least as far as we can tell given how incompletely we know them. Plotinus does offer detailed expositions of Platonic dialogues, and he does occasionally save time by assuming the truth of Platonic metaphysics so he can focus on the finer points. But his natural mode is dialectical. He probes problems, seeking to persuade and carry the reader with him, not just to lay out preconceived doctrine. And so here, with the one, he asks us to begin by reflecting on familiar things and on ourselves, and tries to show us that we must keep on pushing with our inquiry until we find an utterly unified first principle. Of course, such a principle would be incorporeal. Bodies have many parts and also change over time, so they are multiple in at least two ways. The soul is immaterial, and thus has a higher kind of unity, but it too has parts, as Plato already established by pointing to the all-too-familiar phenomenon of inward psychic conflict. The soul also changes over time. Even the soul's thinking involves change, as it passes from one idea to the next. But here's another thought. Couldn't the first principle be a mind? Not the human soul, perhaps, but an immaterial intellect that would grasp its knowledge all at once and never do anything else. The suggestion was certainly an option for Plotinus. After all, Aristotle's God is precisely this, a pure intellect that always thinks upon itself. More recently, Platonists like Philo of Alexandria had understood Platonic forms to be ideas in the mind of God, the cause of all things. Plotinus thinks this proposal is on the right track. He agrees that forms are ideas in a divine mind or intellect, in Greek nous. He just doesn't think that this intellect is the first principle, because it falls short of total unity. It's here that we start to see just how radical is Plotinus' understanding of the One. So radical, in fact, that it's not clear that he, or anyone else, can understand the One. After all, the forms were always supposed to be the objects that ground all our knowledge. They just are what is knowable, what is intelligible. To make them ideas in a divine intellect, but then say that the One is beyond that intellect, seems to imply that the One cannot be known. For the most part, Plotinus accepts this conclusion. Occasionally, he will try to push the boundaries of what language and philosophy can offer, but his usual line is that the One is ineffable, that is, beyond anything we can say or think. To say or think anything about it would be to turn it into a multiplicity. For instance, although Plotinus treats this principle as both the One and the Good, if I say something like, the One is good, then I seem to be applying a property to something that has the property. So I'd have two things, the One and its goodness, which are at least conceptually distinct. But the whole point of the One is that it is beyond all multiplicity. There remains the possibility that the One is accessible to us, but not through language or thought. If we are to reach the One, it would seem that we could only do so by achieving complete unity with it. Porphyry tells us in the biography of his master that Plotinus managed to do this only four times during their time together. In Plotinus' writings, there are allusions to these experiences which one can only call mystical. Perhaps the most evocative is the last sentence of one treatise where Plotinus has asked how we are to reach this origin of all things. He answers his own question with the words, a filet panta, take away everything. But the prospect of henosis or unification with the One does not play a central role in the Enneads, and tends, in my opinion, to loom larger than it should in discussions of his philosophy. His more important philosophical claim, and more important legacy for later thinkers, is his insistence on the One's transcendence above intellect and the forms. This result is paradoxical. Remember, we were looking for ever more intense examples of unity because we observed that unity is correlated with reality, intelligibility, and order. But we've ended up by positing a principle beyond intelligibility and order. More paradoxically still, the One is in a sense even beyond reality. Plotinus understands intellect to be the paradigm of being and the forms as the manifold expression of all the sorts of being that there are. The form of giraffe is just what it is to be a giraffe, and the form of sunflower is the being of sunflowers. Thus, Plotinus chooses, as one of his favorite lines from Plato, a remark Socrates makes about the form of the good in the Republic. The good is said to be, Beyond being in majesty and power. Plotinus takes Plato to mean that the good or one is in fact not a form, after all, but transcendent above the realm of forms and thus beyond being. The extremes to which Plotinus has led us are apt to make us wonder whether we should have followed him this far. Perhaps we should have stopped with intellect and its forms, as Philo of Alexandria did. But that would be to overlook Plotinus's subtle analysis of how intellect falls short of absolute unity. For one thing, even if it is thinking about all the forms at once without ever passing from one form to another, it will still be thinking about many forms. Indeed, there are presumably an indefinitely large number of forms, a result that will follow quickly if we accept that there are forms of numbers. So, intellect displays an indefinite multiplicity because of the objects of its thought. Plotinus also points out that if the forms are internal to the intellect, it will be thinking about itself when it thinks about them. It is, then, both that which is thinking and that which is being thought. As both subject and object of thought, it has a kind of duality that the truly first principle must lack. Plotinus sums up these findings by calling the intellect a hen pola, a one many. It has a very impressive degree of unity, being not only immaterial but unchanging and identical with the objects of its own thought. Indeed, it is the most unified thing that can be conceived. But the very fact that it can be conceived, and that it conceives itself, shows us that it is not utterly one and is thus not first. If you still wanted to resist this conclusion, you might offer the following alternative. What if the forms were not inside the intellect, as Plotinus is claiming, but distinct from it? Then it could be a simple mind that looks to forms that are safely outside it, where they would not compromise its oneness. Plato actually says in the Timaeus that God looks to the forms when designing the world, and some Platonists had taken this to mean that the forms are independent of the divine mind. In fact, as we saw briefly last time, this was the view Porphyry held when he turned up at Plotinus' school. He had been taught it from his earlier instructor, a man named Longinus, who was better known for his linguistic and textual expertise than his philosophical sophistication. Porphyry stuck to Longinus' position tenaciously and gave in to Plotinus' view only after a debate with his fellow student Amelius. We are not told what the decisive point in this debate may have been, but in his writings, Plotinus offers a powerful reason to think that intellect is identical with its objects rather than looking to forms as a kind of external blueprint. His argument looks similar to one given by Sextus Empiricus, a rare borrowing from the sceptical tradition. The argument begins from the point that whatever grasps an external object has only a representation of that object. For instance, when we see a giraffe cantering across the savannah, the giraffe is not actually in our eye or our eyesight. Rather, we are getting a visual image of the giraffe. But when images are involved, there is always a risk of error. A further principle is needed to provide some kind of guarantee, to come along and ratify that the image is accurate. Thus reason frequently corrects the images offered to it by sensation, judging perhaps that that shimmering object just behind the giraffe is not a pool of water as it seems to be, but rather a mirage. It is no problem that sensation works like this, but at the level of intellect, it would be a disaster. After all, intellect was supposed to be the paradigmatic case of knowledge, so how could it need yet a further principle to tell it that its intellect is true? We are in danger of an infinite regress with each kind of cognition needing another kind of cognition to reassure it that it is really getting things right. By insisting that the forms are inside the intellect, Plotinus avoids this problem. Intellect knows that its knowledge is knowledge because what it knows is nothing other than itself. Now, doing philosophy is like taking care of small children. No sooner have you solved one problem than the next problem is looming into view, and we wouldn't have it any other way. In this case, Plotinus's success in proving the multiplicity of intellect leaves us with the puzzle of how the one could possibly have produced something of this sort. The one is supposedly the source of all things, but if it is utterly and completely one, how does it generate something multiple? Later authors, wondering about this aspect of Neoplatonism, invoke the so-called ex uno unum principle, from one thing you only get one thing. And although Plotinus doesn't explicitly endorse a principle along these lines, he clearly sees it as an important challenge to explain how multiplicity can arise from unity. Unlike Neil Armstrong, he doesn't try to accomplish this giant leap in just one step. Instead, the production of nous from the one is a two-stage process. First, the simple one allows an equally simple second principle to go forth from itself. This second principle, which will become the intellect, then turns back upon its source like a child looking towards its father. In an almost tragic turn of events, it finds that it cannot grasp its father, that would compromise the one's transcendence. Instead, it does the next best thing, grasping itself, and making itself an image of the one. As it does so, it generates the forms as its own ideas in a single act of intellection that imitates the total simplicity of the one. The puzzling thing here, if there's only one puzzling thing, is why this should give rise to the forms. Plotinus says at one point, the one is all things and no one of them, which I take to mean that the one has the power to generate everything that comes after it, though it remains distinct from everything it generates. Only once intellect begins to think about itself does it become clear what these things will be. One might further wonder why it is that we get just the forms that emerge and not some other forms. Why is there a form of giraffe and no form of unicorn? Perhaps our questions are simply wrongheaded though. Intellect knows whatever there is to know, and this does not include unicorn because there's no such thing as a unicorn. This is a matter of necessity. It's not as if it is deciding to think about giraffe but giving unicorn a miss, even though it could have thought about that too. At this level of the Plutinian universe, everything that happens is inevitable. That, of course, brings us to yet another problem. Even if we accept this rather mysterious story about how intellect is produced by the one, we might be reluctant to accept the idea that it proceeds from the one necessarily. As I mentioned last time, Plotinus uses a variety of metaphors to describe the way intellect cascades forth from the one. The one is like an overflowing fountain or a shining light. He uses the same language of emanation to speak of the production of soul, subsequently many philosophers and theologians will complain that this makes the divine principles automatic causes. If the one gives rise to intellect necessarily, then it is like fire, mindlessly giving off heat. If you conceive of the first principle as a generous god, freely giving a gratuitous gift when he creates the universe, Plotinus's conception is bound to be disappointing. In fact, doubly so. Not only does the one cause its effects necessarily, but it causes most of its effects indirectly. Strictly speaking, it gives rise only to the inchoate subject of thought that will become intellect when it generates the forms within itself. Soul is then produced by intellect, not the one, and the one has only a very distant and mediated relationship to the physical universe. This looks to be a far cry from the voluntary creation of all things envisioned in the Bible and Quran. And yet, Plotinus devoted an ambitious treatise to the freedom of the first principle. He begins, of course, from the nature of human freedom, asking what it means for something to be, as the Stoics like to put it, up to us. He answers that our actions are up to us when we are masters of ourselves, rather than being pulled this way and that by external forces. Of course, he considers the desires and needs that derive from bodily existence to be forces external to our souls. The One, by contrast, has no such competing demands on its attention, and is influenced by nothing outside itself. Strictly speaking, we cannot say that it masters itself, because that would introduce the same kind of duality as would arise if it were to think about itself, but we can still say that it is free, in the negative sense that nothing is exercising compulsion upon it. Ironically, then, Plotinus's conception of freedom does not look that far from what we find in the Stoics, despite their materialism, and, in fact, among philosophers nowadays, with similar inclinations. For him, freedom is simply the power to do what one wishes, without hindrance or compulsion exercised by anything else. Again, strictly speaking, we cannot say that the One wishes to do anything, but this treatise is notable for Plotinus's willingness to speak more positively about the One than usual, often adding the caveat hoyon, so to speak, or as if. Thus, we can say that the One is free because it is as if it can act by doing whatever it wants, so to speak. We souls, existing at a much lower level of Plotinus's scheme, can only strive towards the same kind of untrammeled freedom of action. We achieve this above all by, what else, doing philosophy. Indeed, although Plotinus is perhaps most famous for his ideas about the One, he devotes much more attention to the soul, investigating its powers, the dangers of its relation to the body, and its relationship to the higher principles of intellect and the One. Plotinus optimistically, and controversially, suggests that our true selves are always in touch with the intellect and its forms, whether we know it or not. As long as you don't lose touch with the podcast, you'll find out why next time, as we look at Plotinus on soul, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Horizon – Plotinus on the Soul. Wouldn't it be fun to invite an assortment of ancient philosophers to a screening of The Wizard of Oz? Just picture the scene. The Stoics would be muttering critically about the Tin Man's deplorable desire to get in touch with his emotions, and pointing out that if the scarecrow wants to be clever, he should wish for a heart and not a brain. Aristotle would be sitting at the back, taking notes on the winged monkeys for his zoological writings. Galen and the anatomists of Alexandria would tap their toes as the cowardly lion launches into their favorite tune, If I Only Had the Nerve. Thales would feel vindicated by the fact that the heroes win the day by using a bucket of water. Meanwhile, the Pythagoreans would be trying to get everyone to be quiet. And Plotinus? I think his favorite scene would come at the end, when Dorothy says, and I quote, If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. Dorothy's observation might well remind Plotinus of something he says in one of his own treatises, one might be unaware that one has something, holding on to it more powerfully than if one did know. He is describing the way that the human soul relates to the things it has seen in the intelligible realm, the realm of the forms. Following Plato, he believes that the soul is eternal and has seen the wondrous beauty and truth of this realm before it came to be in a body. Yet the embodied soul retains a memory of these realities, and Plotinus here suggests that the deeply buried memory of the forms is possessed more intensely than anything the soul is consciously aware of. Thanks to your soul's relationship to a body, it is aware of an almost unceasing stream of sensory phenomena, the whirlwind of colors, motions, and sounds that reach it through the eyes and the ears. It's easy for the soul to be distracted by these fleeting impressions. In its most debased condition, the soul may become so confused as actually to identify itself with the body, but Plotinus believes that even people in this condition have within them the power to remember what they have seen in the world of the intellect. In fact, on this score, Plotinus is more optimistic than almost any other late ancient Platonist. Not only does he believe that we can find traces of the intelligible within ourselves, he is convinced that we never depart completely from the intelligible world. The soul remains in part undescended, in other words, still actively contemplating the forms even while it is ensconced in a material body. He knows that this idea is controversial and even paradoxical, at one point introducing it with the phrase, if we may dare to present our own opinion. After all, as later Platonists like Iamblichus and Proclus pointed out, it's hard to see how it could be that I am even now engaging in an intellectual vision of the forms without my being aware of it. But Plotinus is, among other things, a pioneer in the philosophy of awareness. For him, the soul's challenge is not to achieve union, or contact, with the intelligible forms. Rather, the soul needs to realize that it is already always in contact with those forms. Characteristically, he offers an analogy drawn from everyday experience, when you are concentrating on reading a book, you are not aware that you are reading. Nor does the brave man fighting in battle consciously think that he is being courageous. The surprisingly Platonian, Wizard of Oz, incidentally makes the same point. The cowardly lion does not realize he is brave, nor is the tin man aware of his own compassion. Plotinus showed his own compassion by writing the Enneads. They are many things, a running engagement on themes and passages in Plato and later thinkers, a conversation with imaginary opponents and his own students, technical treatises suffused with powerful and even poetic imagery. But above all, they constitute an act of charity on Plotinus's part. He has already identified with his true intellectual self. Porphyry tells us that he could continue to commune with intellect even during a conversation. So he already has his heart's desire and stands to gain nothing personally from straining his bad eyesight to write the treatises collected as the Enneads. Much as the One and the Intellect spontaneously give rise to the good things that come after them, Plotinus wrote anyway, as an exhortation for his students and readers. The soul is the only part of Plotinus's universe that could need such an exhortation. The One, of course, reigns in its supreme and silent singularity. The Intellect permanently thinks about the forms that are its ideas. Below the soul there is the mindless indefiniteness of matter, something we'll discuss next time. But the soul, uniquely, is torn between two possibilities. As Plotinus says, it is on the horizon of the bodily and the intelligible. The point of philosophy is to turn our attention upwards, away from our bodies, and towards the immaterial causes that are more real than any body. Plotinus wants to wake us up, to tell us that there's no place like home, and that we have never left it. Of course, Plotinus was well aware of philosophical rivals who denied the reality of forms or a world of intellect, who even denied the immateriality of the soul itself. He finds it hard to take the Epicureans seriously, so his main opponents here are the Stoics. Despite being cleverer than any scarecrow, they were convinced that they, or their souls, were nothing but material objects. Plotinus is happy to set up Stoic materialism as a straw man to be knocked down, and also directs his fire at Aristotle's claim that the soul is the form of the body. Against such views, Plotinus argues in a variety of ways for soul's independence as an incorporeal substance. As so often, he focuses on unity. The body has separate parts, whereas the soul does not. For one thing, the soul can grasp immaterial objects of thought, and Plotinus fails to see how something with separate parts could grasp something that has no parts. He draws a similar conclusion from the soul's awareness of what is happening in the body. After all, it is not as if we have one soul in our finger to perceive things that happen to the finger, and another soul in some other part of the body. Rather, the soul is a unified locus of awareness for the entire body. He dismisses Stoic attempts to explain this via some kind of chain reaction of physical signals through the body to a so-called ruling faculty seated in the heart. If that were the case, there would be only an indirect perception of what happens in the finger, whereas Plotinus wants to insist that the soul is wholly and immediately aware of each bodily experience. On the other hand, when he gives his own theory of perception, he insists that the soul cannot actually be affected by anything that happens in the body. Rather, the single soul makes a discrimination or judgment on the basis of material events that happen in the sense organs. Rather ironically, given Plotinus' scorn for Stoic materialism, the philosopher who comes closest to anticipating his ideas about the self is probably the Stoic Epictetus. Stoics had long held that the rational part of each person stands in judgment over the impressions of sense experience, and in Stoic ethics, especially in Epictetus, who had lived only a few generations before Plotinus, we find the idea that the true self is the reasoning aspect of the person and that wisdom consists in valuing this true self rather than apparent bodily goods like wealth, food, pleasurable experience, or even physical health. Plotinus endorses these Stoic ideas but draws more radical conclusions. In the treatise that Porphyry placed at the very beginning of the Enneads, Plotinus asks who we are, thus tackling the question of the self more directly than any philosopher had done before. As we would by now expect, he concludes that our true self is the higher aspect of soul that engages in Intellection, and not the self of bodily experience. In a remarkable final paragraph, though, Plotinus wonders who it is that is inquiring into the identity of the self. Is that really us? There is a paradox lurking here. If the real me is the me who is always contemplating the forms, then whose attention needs to be turned to the forms? Apparently not my own attention, since I am really only my intellectual self. Whether the lower incidental part of me knows it or not. As always in Plotinus, the solution lies in unity. I should be trying not just to figure out which part of me is the real me, but to make all of me into a single self-aware being. That means continuing to have bodily experiences, but to recognize these experiences for the incidental, fleeting, valueless things that they are, and also to understand how they relate to my higher self. So, Plotinus can also say that my self is that which becomes aware of both its higher and its lower nature. The goal is to integrate and unify these two aspects, by doing some philosophy and thus obeying the Delphic command, Know thyself. Does this mean that the soul has no nature of its own, by which it is distinguished from both body and intellect? Or is it nothing but a center of attention that can look up or down? For all his talk of soul as existing on a horizon, Plotinus does think that some activities exist properly at the level of soul. Above all, the activity of discursive reasoning, in Greek dionoia. He sharply distinguishes this kind of thinking from the Intellect or noesis that we find in the case of Intellect or noose. Whereas noose grasps all possible objects of knowledge all at once, it is characteristic of soul to think first about one thing, then about something else. Those of us who find it hard to think about even one thing at a time may find this impressive enough, but for Plotinus the soul's reasoning activity is a mere image of the perfect thinking of intellect. Still, we shouldn't be too discouraged. Soul is still thinking about the same things as Intellect, albeit in a more laborious and partial way. We can thus consider the soul's discursive thought to be a kind of unfolding or piecemeal spelling out of the undivided complete knowledge possessed by Intellect. The fact that soul re-enacts the activity of Intellect in a lesser, more divided way has far-reaching consequences in Plotinus' philosophy. For one thing, it allows him to give a novel theory of time, and to explain how time relates to eternity. As so often in late ancient Platonism, the touchstone text here is Plato's Timaeus. There, we learn that time comes about along with the orderly motions of the heavens in the physical cosmos, whereas eternity is appropriate to immaterial beings like the forms and divine craftsmen. Plato also has Timaeus say that time is the moving image of eternity. With his distinction between the all-at-once activity of Intellect and the one-thing-after-another activity of soul, Plotinus is able to explain Plato's remarks as follows. Eternity is, as he says, the life of Intellect. It is simply a name for the way that forms are all simultaneously and permanently grasped in the Intellect's contemplation. Time is, correspondingly, the life of soul. Since we are souls, we have an intimate experience of time as we go through our sequential thought processes. To say that our thinking is discursive is, indeed, just to say that it happens in time. As I said, we think at one time about one thing, and then at another time about something else. Suppose you are following a philosophical argument. You consider each premise in turn, and then see that a conclusion follows from these premises. Or consider the more homely example of listening to this podcast. You aren't thinking about the ideas I'm trying to explain all at once, but one idea after another. First, you pondered the Wizard of Oz. Then, you contemplated the undescended soul. And now, you're wondering what to have for dinner, because you've stopped paying attention. Because this kind of thinking is an image or unfolding of the Intellect's comprehension, Plotinus can say that Plato was right, time is indeed an image of eternity. So, for Plotinus, eternity is not simply unending time. On this new theory, if you pledge to love someone forever, you aren't strictly speaking pledging to love them eternally. You're only promising to love them at every moment in the future. Plotinian eternity, by contrast, doesn't mean at every moment, whether past, present, or future. It means timelessness. Plotinus's theory itself achieved a kind of timelessness, being embraced by many generations of philosophers in Neoplatonism and beyond. Christian thinkers like Boethius and Aquinas, will gladly agree that God is beyond time and has his knowledge all at once. Though Plotinus's idea of eternity was thus very influential, the way he tries to convey the idea can be puzzling. Though he will say that the notions of before and after do not apply to the eternal Intellect, he still applies words like always to it, and at one point even says that it always was and always will be. This sounds like he is using temporal concepts for eternity after all, though he does immediately warn us that the words he is using are misleading. A further problem is that he thinks the soul and physical universe must be everlasting, that is, infinite in past and future time. He thinks this will make them the best possible image of eternity. But it's hard to see why that should be so. If eternity really means the absence of duration, why should infinite duration be a more faithful image of eternity than temporary duration? Indeed, how could any kind of duration be an image of something that totally lacks duration? And there's yet another puzzle here regarding souls' relationship to Intellect. He keeps telling us that as souls our goal is to realize our connection to Intellect, but insofar as we are consciously thinking like the Intellect, our thinking is eternal and timeless. How then does it get lost and regained? Perhaps for this reason, Plotinus actually de-emphasizes the Platonic theory of recollection. Plato's idea that when the soul grasps forms, it remembers something it used to have but has temporarily forgotten doesn't fit very well with Plotinus' claim that an intellectual grasp of forms must be timeless. This brings us to a further consequence of Plotinus' contrast between Intellect and soul. Since Intellect is the realm of forms, it must be recognized as an ultimate cause of the physical universe. But it does not relate to the universe directly. Rather, it uses the soul like an assistant, which is responsible for putting images of the forms into material bodies. To understand how this works, we need to think about two closely connected contrasts that are central in Plotinus' system—internal and external activity, and precession and reversion. Plotinus illustrates the first contrast with the example of fire. A flame has its essential internal activity of burning and being hot, but it also has an external activity, the influence it has on other things, by warming them up. In just the same way, the soul has an internal and an external activity. Internally, it engages in its special kind of discursive thinking about the forms. But externally, it bestows these very same forms on physical objects insofar as it is able. Plotinus does not understand these two activities as being intention, as if the soul would be distracted from thinking about giraffes by the task of actually making physical giraffes. Rather, the external activity is an automatic result of the internal activity, and the result will always be weaker, just as fire causes a warmth that is weaker than its own heat. That brings us on to precession and reversion. Given the theory of double activity, each level in Plotinus' system is automatically going to give forth some kind of effect. In Neoplatonic jargon, this automatic causation is called precession. Even the one, despite its transcendence, seems to obey this model. It remains simple and inviolate in itself, which is a kind of internal activity, but it also emanates an external effect which becomes intellect. When we were looking at that process last time, we said that intellect generates the forms when it turns back towards its source. This moment of turning back is reversion. Everything in Plotinus' system reverts back to its cause, apart from the one itself, since it has no cause. Soul looks to its intellectual father, just as intellect looks to the one. If precession is leaving home, reversion is coming back and asking mom to do your laundry. But inevitably, we wind up doing the laundry ourselves, and not as well either. We mix the dark and the light fabrics. Intellect doesn't quite get back to the one, and has to perform an activity of its own, internally contemplating the many forms, and externally giving rise to soul. Similarly, the soul reverts on noose, and the result is its internal discursive thinking and its external, processive ordering of the physical universe. In both cases, the activities fall short of the higher perfection found at the level of the causes, and give rise to a lower external effect. Now, when Plotinus talks about the soul ordering the physical universe, he doesn't primarily have in mind souls like yours or mine. Our souls are partial, or individual, and relate specifically to one body. Again, following Plato's Timaeus, Plotinus believes that the entire cosmos has a single soul, the so-called world soul. It is this soul that is responsible for arranging things that seem to have no soul, or barely any soul, things like plants and rocks. But Plotinus insists that even rocks are animated by the world soul, observing that this is why minerals grow within the earth. The world soul, in combination with the many partial souls present in humans and animals, ensures that the forms in intellect are represented at the level of bodies. The details of this process are somewhat obscure. One of the thornier problems in Plotinus is whether individual humans, or any other kind of individual, exists at the level of noose. In other words, does the intellect contain a form of Socrates, and another form of Buster Keaton, or only the form of man, which is imitated by many images in this world? Plotinus wrote a whole treatise on this question, but his considered opinion remains difficult to nail down. What is more certain is that when the forms get their physical images, the result is far inferior to the original. The form of man is indivisible, eternal, and perfect, whereas even Buster Keaton was nothing of the sort, never mind the rest of us. This can in part be explained by the fact that the things we see in our world are mere images, made by a soul instead of being grasped through perfect intellectual contemplation. But this can't be a full explanation. Plotinus believes that the world soul too is a sort of divinity, and that it exercises providence in arranging the universe. So how does it come about that the cosmos is so rife with evil, with suffering and ugliness? The Wicked Witch of the West put it best, what a world, what a world. Plotinus rose to this challenge with an explanation of evil so powerful that it will echo down through later antiquity and medieval times. So it matters a lot whether you join me next time as I look at Plotinus on evil on the history of philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Decorated Corpse – Plotinus on Matter and Evil. Are you a pessimistic sort of person? When you look at a glass that has been filled to the halfway point with water, do you think, water? Is that the best they can offer me? When life gives you lemons, do you make lemonade, but then refuse to drink it, realizing you would have preferred the water after all? Among the seven dwarfs in Snow White, do you most identify with Grumpy? Most of the dwarfs seem to have no sophisticated views about the world, contenting themselves with sneezing or sleeping. Let's face it, Dopey more or less sets the tone. Happy is an exception, but he is clearly deluding himself. At least Grumpy has the courage to face the world as it is. It's a world of wicked stepmothers, of poisonous apples with worms in them. Grumpy knows that life can be a nightmare, and that Prince Charming is not coming to wake us up. The undeniable fact that the world around us is full of suffering and evil has always presented a challenge to philosophers of a more optimistic bent. In contemporary philosophy, it is most familiar in the form of the so-called problem of evil. Actually, there are several problems of evil, only two of which really feature in philosophy nowadays. The more dramatic of the two is called the logical problem of evil, and claims that there is a straightforward contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God. The thought is that a God who was perfectly good would want to avoid any evil that he knew about and could avoid, but the God we're considering knows everything, and can do anything, so there can't be any evil that escapes his notice or his power. Yet, we see that there is evil. Thus, God, at least as described, doesn't exist. Since the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems to fit the description—perfectly good, omniscient, and omnipotent—the logical problem of evil accuses adherents of these faiths of a rather fundamental error. They believe both that God exists and that evil exists, but this is impossible. I tend to think that philosophers of religion have succeeded in answering this version of the problem of evil. Remember, the problem is supposedly that there is no possible way that such a God and evil could coexist. But this seems wrong. God might well have reasons for tolerating the existence of evil, despite his perfect goodness. The standard reason offered is that if God wanted to give us free will, he might allow evil to exist as a consequence of this freedom. That doesn't end the debate, of course, because we might think that God, being all-knowing and all-powerful, could find a way to create free creatures without evil ever resulting. Here, the debate gets slightly complex, but suffice to say that with the logical version of the problem, the burden lies on the anti-theist to show that the theist's beliefs are actually contradictory, or impossible—quite a high standard to reach. Thus, the popularity of a second version, the so-called evidential problem of evil. On this version, we admit that God theoretically might allow evil to exist, but we say that the amount and type of evil we actually see in the world makes it very unlikely that there is a perfect God. The evidence at our disposal seems to include pointless evils that a perfect God would have eliminated. Here, the burden of argument between theist and anti-theist is much more evenly distributed. Of course, one could devote a whole podcast to these issues—perhaps someday I will—but for the moment I want to concentrate on a third problem of evil. This, at least in my view, is the version that was of interest to Plotinus and the centuries of philosophers who followed in his wake. I would call it the metaphysical problem of evil. It goes like this. Plotinus, and many a thinker after him, believed that all things derive from a first principle which is perfectly good. Indeed, he called his first principle not only the one, but also the good. But how can anything evil derive from something that is purely good? This would be like if the form of horse caused some things not to be horses, or if water made things dry. So, Plotinus' problem of evil is really a problem about causation. We need to explain how evil effects can arise from good causes. Actually, even that's not quite right. Plotinus isn't exclusively, or for that matter mostly, concerned with moral evil. The Greek word he uses, kakon, means bad in a broader sense, and for Plotinus it describes any defective state, such as illness or deformity. In fact, his most common example of something bad is not intentional evil, but ugliness. So, what he really wants to explain is how there can be anything bad in a world derived from good causes. His basic answer, paradoxical though it may seem, is that this cannot happen, and so there is nothing bad in the world. This is in part because the causes of Plotinus' universe are not merely abstract causes, like Plato's forms seem to be. They are benevolent, providential gods. One of his most powerful treatises, split into two by porphyry and placed at the beginning of the third Ennead along with a briefer work on fate, is devoted to the subject of providence. Here, Plotinus develops the optimistic worldviews of the Stoics, insisting that misfortunes and evils are beneficial and good when seen from the wider divine perspective. For instance, in one rather chilling passage, Plotinus speculates that men who rape women will be reincarnated as women who are themselves raped. On the other hand, he rejects the Stoic conviction that all events are determined by an irresistible divine providence. When I was discussing Stoic determinism back in episode 63, I mentioned that Plotinus says that determinism makes humans like stones that have been set rolling. Plotinus thinks that this mistake goes hand in hand with another Stoic error, namely their understanding of humans as entirely material beings. For Plotinus, our ability to transcend determination by physical causes is due to the immateriality of our souls. Since they cannot be affected by mere bodies, we are guaranteed independence and self-determination, so long, that is, as we do not fall under the sway of our bodies, succumbing to the lure of pleasure and bodily needs. Freedom, for Plotinus, means identifying ourselves with our immaterial and ultimately our intellectual selves. This may seem rather puzzling, insofar as Plotinus seems to be telling us that we will be free if, and only if, we make this choice and no other choice. But for Plotinus, freedom is not about being able to choose between one thing and another. After all, as we saw two episodes ago, he considers the one to be free, even though the one necessarily and eternally causes its effects without selecting this from a menu of options. Rather, for Plotinus, an action is up to us if we are the cause determining the action. This can never happen to the one since no cause can affect it. We, by contrast, can be enslaved by the body, but only if we let it enslave us. Of course, these Stoic-flavored meditations on providence and self-determination do little to persuade us that evil does not exist. At best, they show merely that evils are woven into the fabric of a cosmic tapestry that is, on the whole, good. But Plotinus has a more decisive card to play. Of course, he does admit that bad things happen, but there is no such thing as badness. Strictly speaking, it has no being. Rather, badness, or if you prefer evil, is always a mere lack or deficiency which is found within something that has some degree of goodness. To put it another way, badness is when something fails to be as good as it ought to be. But something that was not good in any way at all simply could not exist. The giraffe may be sick and cantankerous, and these are deficiencies. A healthy, playfully cooperative giraffe would be better, but the giraffe still has its life, its ability to move, to see. These capacities, however impaired they may be, remain good, and if they were all stripped away, there would be no giraffe. And likewise for any case of imperfection you care to name, including the central example of moral evil. When the evil queen tries to poison Snow White, this is a failure of her rationality or self-control. But without her crafty mind and her basic ability to act, she could do nothing, evil or otherwise. Indeed, as Plotinus points out, evils are most dangerous precisely when they are combined with perfections or goods, like great intelligence or strength. The more that goods are eliminated, the less potent the bad becomes. And when good is entirely eliminated, the bad is eliminated along with it. Evils are, then, the holes in the Swiss cheese of the universe. They are not things in their own right that the divine causes have brought into being. No, they are precisely cases where the divine causes have not brought something into being, or rather, brought less into being than we might have hoped. Thus, there is no accusation to place at the doorstep of the gods. They have not made evils because evils are not the sort of thing that can be made. This is, I would say, a breathtakingly clever and original solution to the metaphysical problem of evil. It was recognized as such by many subsequent philosophers, notably St. Augustine. He adopted the Plutinian theory of evil and passed it on to the medieval tradition where it became a standard part of the argumentation used to absolve God of responsibility for evil. Still, one might feel that Plotinus's theory is itself lacking something. Even if we grant that evils are not beings in their own right, but mere deficiencies, isn't there still a puzzle as to why the effects of perfect causes should be imperfect and deficient at all? Plotinus would admit that there is, but he has a final card to play, an explanation for why the images of forms we find in this world are not as perfect as the forms themselves. In a way, the answer is obvious. Since deficiency is found not in the intelligible world but only in the material world, the culprit must be matter. Our sick giraffe is like a wobbly table made by an expert carpenter working with poor quality wood. This idea that matter is somehow incapable of receiving form perfectly has a certain plausibility. It's clear that a material object will differ from an intelligible paradigm in some ways. Even the best giraffe or table in our world will have parts, will occupy space, and be subject to change over time. None of these things apply to the form of giraffe or the form of table, and for Plotinus they already constitute a falling away from perfection. Remember that he sees a close connection between unity and goodness, so for him, just having parts and changing from one moment to the next is already a way of being worse than the form. Still, we might think it possible for each material object to be the best possible material version of its form. All giraffes would be equally healthy and elegant, all tables equally well-made, all humans equally virtuous. Why doesn't this happen? It looks like Plotinus's theory needs matter to be resistant to perfection, somehow recalcitrant and prone to undermining unity and proportion. That would be hard to understand from the perspective of someone like Aristotle who thinks of matter as nothing but potentiality for form. For an Aristotelian, the whole point of matter is to become perfected in various ways. But Plotinus rejects this rather positive idea of matter and goes so far as to describe matter as a sort of non-being. This is the core of his solution because it shows why matter is intimately involved with badness, which was, as we saw, also a kind of non-being. It also explains why a material universe must involve failures to receive form and being. Plotinus insists that matter cannot, as Aristotle claimed, be actualized or perfected. Rather, it remains inert and unaffected, even as higher causes try to give it form. The result is a radical rethinking of the physical world around us. Bodies may seem to us solid and real, but they are only a conjunction of matter, which is in itself nothing at all, with incorporeal images that are weak imitations of the forms. Our worldly experience is of these mere images, flickering through the darkness of matter without actually turning the matter into anything real. Plotinus compares the images to reflections in a mirror, or ghosts, and, in a wonderful turn of phrase, describes matter as a decorated corpse. The images are often beautiful, because they are, after all, imitations of the perfect forms in the intellect, but Plotinus compares the situation to a prisoner who has been bound in chains of gold. Thus, Plotinus' theory is often summarized as the claim that matter and evil are the same thing, but it would be more accurate to say that matter is the principle of evils. In itself, matter is nothing at all, whereas any given case of badness or evil is a specific deficiency that results when the death, darkness, and indeterminacy of matter undermines the reception of a specific form in a specific body. All this seems to be aimed at explaining natural evils, like illness and deformation, rather than the evil found within us humans. In fact, you might suppose that Plotinus will have a hard time explaining that. If humans are really immaterial souls, how can they be subject to the deficiency and imperfection caused by matter? The answer is indirectly. Matter is still the cause of human weakness, because, as we've seen, for a soul, weakness is nothing but turning towards bodies and away from its true intelligible home. This might look rather inadequate. Does Plotinus really have nothing to say about human evil and goodness, apart from telling us to stop paying attention to bodies? Remember that this is the man who took care of orphans and tried to found a city governed by Platonic theories of justice, so events in our world were clearly not a matter of indifference to him. And he can, I think, explain how and why humans can be practically virtuous in terms of the theory of matter and evil we've been discussing. Even though matter can never be redeemed by the imitations of form that appear in it, it's obviously better for form to be imitated as fully as possible. So, just as it's preferable that a giraffe be healthy rather than sick, it's preferable that we act virtuously rather than viciously. Indeed, the wise man's virtuous actions will be a natural result of his wisdom. Because the wise man grasps the form of justice, for instance, he will almost automatically seek to instantiate justice in the material realm. There still lurks a paradox here in that wise people would really prefer to spend all their time contemplating the intelligible forms, but Plotinus's view is that our embodied condition just doesn't allow that. In one of my favorite passages in the Enneads, he says that a man who fights bravely in a war is like Hippocrates healing a sick person. Hippocrates would prefer that the patient weren't ill in the first place, and the brave man would likewise prefer that his city didn't need to be defended, but given that there is illness, that the city is besieged by the enemy, the appropriate action follows naturally from the brave man's virtue or the doctor's skill. But we can't give Plotinus's theory of evil a clean bill of health just yet. He's done all this work to explain how matter undermines the reception of goodness and seduces the soul away from its true calling, but now we seem forced to ask, where did matter come from? After all, if the chain of emanated principles had gone from the one to intellect, then to soul, and then just stopped, we wouldn't have all these problems. Of course, the question of where matter comes from is a slightly odd one, given that matter is non-being. Rather than saying that some cause brought about all this nothingness, Plotinus might, and sometimes does, just compare it to the way light must eventually give out, leaving darkness where the power of the light source can no longer reach. But he also suggests that matter should somehow derive from higher principles. His considered view on this is a matter of debate. Some interpreters think that for Plotinus, matter is the product of soul, simply the last in the chain of direct emanations. On this reading, the soul is too weak to originate anything with a causal power of its own, so it makes inert, dead matter instead. Another possibility is that matter emerges from the intellect itself. But whatever the mechanism, it's clear what Plotinus absolutely wants to avoid, the idea that matter is an independent, evil principle that would counterbalance the first principle Plotinus calls the one or the good. We already saw that Plutarch was tempted by this sort of dualist theory, which posits an evil principle that undermines all the good work done by the gods in our world. But when Plotinus thinks about dualism, he has in mind another opponent, the Gnostics. They were a religious sect with an elaborate, moralizing cosmological theory that could well be compared to that of Plotinus himself. We are fortunate in knowing a good deal about them, thanks especially to 20th century discoveries of manuscripts in Egypt. These texts, preserved in the Coptic language, tell us that the physical universe is the product of an ignorant and erring divinity, and that only an elite few souls are chosen to escape from cycles of rebirth in the prison of bodies. We know that works by Gnostic authors were read in the circle of Plotinus, and Porphyry actually entitled one of the treatises in the Enneads, Against the Gnostics. A second title given to this treatise by Porphyry is revealing, Against those who say that the maker of the universe and the universe are evil. On this score, Porphyry understood well the teachings of his master. Plotinus may have made matter the source of evil, but he was adamantly opposed to the idea that the physical cosmos as a whole is evil, or that it would be better if it did not exist. His praise of the divine providence that governs this cosmos was just as passionate as his insistence that we should identify ourselves with the highest intellectual part of our souls. His conviction that we do have such a part, and that all of us do, not only an elect few, as the Gnostics claimed, is another sign of Plotinus' deep optimism. He saw the physical world as imperfect in its parts, but perfect as a whole, as a danger to souls, but a danger that souls can defeat. So it is no surprise that he devoted several treatises to the arrangement of the physical universe, which will be well worth our attention in a final episode on Plotinus, so I'm optimistic that you'll choose to join me and an expert on those treatises, James Wilberding, for a discussion of Plotinus on nature. That will be the next episode, but I'm afraid you'll need to wait before hearing it. As last year I am going to be taking a month off during the summer. Not only do I need to write some more episodes, but I'm also going to be moving to a new position as professor of philosophy at the LMU in Munich. I will be continuing the podcast as normal from there, and still in English. For now, I'd like to thank Neoplatonism expert and podcast editor extraordinaire Faye Edwards for her help this year, as well as Stefan Hagel, whose music has continued to feature at the start and end of each episode. I'm also very grateful to the many scholars who have appeared as interview guests, and above all to you for listening. For now, I'll say auf wiedersehen until I return in one month from Munich, mit der Geschichte der Philosophie, One Lücken.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today I'll be doing an interview with Professor James Wilberding of the University of Bochum. Hi James. Hello. And today we're going to be talking about nature in Neoplatonism and especially in Plotinus and his student Porphyry. Maybe you could start by just talking a little bit about the issue in general, because people have a tendency to think of the Neoplatonists as being not very interested in natural philosophy. Why do they think that and to what extent is that true? Well maybe we should start by defining what natural philosophy actually is. And there's a lot to it, but I think we can capture the nature of natural philosophy just by saying something like it's the science of explaining motion and change in the sensible world. So that's going to encompass all sorts of things like celestial motions, elemental motions and elemental change, biological motions and changes including embryology. So this is something that you can see Aristotle doing, you can see Plato doing, and the Neoplatonists are interested in this too. But for them of course they have a special sort of approach to it, which is to explain these sensible motions and sensible changes as expressions of intelligible principles, so that these forms are actually at work in the sensible world. So you're right, it's generally said that the Neoplatonists aren't interested in this sort of thing. In fact in the big history of philosophy by Tzeller, this German academic, when you get to the section where he's describing Plotinus' natural philosophy, the subtitle is, Plotinus doesn't have a natural philosophy. I think at one point on the page it even says, Plotinus isn't interested in nature. Which is just... That would be one of the shorter sections in the book. Yeah, no, and it's outrageous really. But there's a reason people say this sort of thing, and that is unlike say Aristotle and Galen, who is also a Platonist, these were people who were doing empirical research, dissecting bodies, looking at the anatomy and drawing conclusions about that and bringing that into their philosophy. The Neoplatonists weren't doing any kind of comparable empirical research. And coupled with that is the fact that that's often pointed to, the Neoplatonists were often very focused on texts and on their textual tradition. So they're reading Plato, they're reading Aristotle, and by that I don't mean to suggest that they're just doing interpretation, because they were very concerned to show that Plato and to some extent Aristotle, what they were saying is true. And that often caused them to take these texts as springboards, one might say, to do their own philosophy, but under the rubric of interpreting a text. So there's all sorts of new developments that they get into. And that could also lead one to think, well, they're just sort of armchair philosophers who aren't interested in the sensible world at all. And in addition to that, one might say, even though they're interested in texts, and even though Aristotle wrote all of these biological texts, the Neoplatonists don't really spend much time on these biological texts. There's no commentary on his biological treatises. And that's going to be another thing that drives people to this conclusion. But I would be quick to point out, I think, that Plotinus and the Neoplatonists are very interested in the sensible world. And you can see that, for example, in how they developed Plato's theory of forms. Right. So let's turn to Plotinus, who's usually credited with being the founder of Neoplatonism. What does he think about, first of all, the natural world as a whole? I mean, how is it set up according to him? Right. So in many ways, it's very similar to Aristotle's. So you have an everlasting universe, which is a sphere with the Earth at its center. But it's very different from Aristotle's in several ways. So for one, obviously, Plotinus, as a Platonist, is following Plato and thinking of the sensible world as a living thing, as a composite of body and soul. And that's something that Aristotle never really says. Moreover, although Aristotle and Plotinus both think that the universe is everlasting, they have very different approaches to arguing for this conclusion. So Aristotle says, he argues from the nature of the constitution of the heavens. And he says there's this fifth body that doesn't have any contrary properties. And destruction is always caused by a contrary property. Therefore, this fifth body of the heavens is never going to be destroyed. Is the so-called ether, right? Yeah, this is the ether. And so that's going to be one argument for the everlastingness of the heavens and thus of the universe. And the other would be, say, arguing that motion can have no beginning and no end. So if there's motion at all, which there obviously is, then the universe must be everlasting. So those are Aristotle's arguments. But Plotinus has a different approach. He has these hypostases, which I'm guessing you covered in a previous podcast. Right, and several previous episodes, actually. OK, great. So you have this metaphysics of precession and reversion, starting from these principles, which, and it's difficult to talk about this, but we might say these principles always have existed and always will exist. It's a bit more difficult than that, as you've probably mentioned. But the idea is that the sensible cosmos is just a necessary product of these higher principles. So the sensible cosmos always has to exist. So that's it. Plotinus' standard argument for the everlastingness of the heavens. Just to make sure we get that point across, so the idea is that the physical cosmos necessarily flows forth from these higher principles the way light does from a light source or water from a fountain. So you can't have them without a physical cosmos. So it's basically nothing about the cosmos in its own right that would keep it in existence. It's the fact that it's caused by something that's always exercising causality. I think that's right. And that's maybe distinct from some of the things that happens with the hypostases, because if we say, well, the soul is a necessary emanation of the intellect, that's not quite right, because there's this moment of reversion where the soul is in some sense creating itself. But you don't really get that with the sensible cosmos. But that depends on how one thinks of nature and nature's relation to the sensible cosmos, which I guess we'll probably have time to get to eventually, I would think. But before we get to what he thinks about nature as a principle, I know that he wrote a treatise actually on this question about whether the cosmos is eternal, and you've written a translation and commentary on this treatise. So you would be the ideal person to tell us about it. So tell us about it. Perhaps, yeah. We'll see. Right, so like I said, Plotinus has these arguments that he provides in all sorts of treatises, so throughout his career for the everlastingness of the heavens. But to his credit, he kind of puzzles over this question of whether the sensible universe is always numerically identical. So whether it's the same sensible universe or whether it's more like Theseus' ship, that parts are being replaced and ultimately maybe we have a different sensible universe. And it's interesting that he puzzles over this question, because you could think he's already committed to this idea that the sensible universe is a composite of body and soul. So this question about the deochronic identities, the identity through time with the sensible universe, is very similar to our concerns about personal identity through time. And often people just are willing to say, well, the soul is identical through time, and that suffices. So why isn't Plotinus worried about them? Why isn't Plotinus satisfied by just saying that the soul is identical through time? The idea then would be that someone might worry, well, why am I the same person now as I was when I was five years old, because there's none of the same stuff in my body? Exactly. And then you might expect Plotinus to say, Plotinus of all people, should be the guy to say, well, you have the same soul, so who cares if your body has changed? And you're saying that that's not his answer, at least in the case of the cosmos. That's right, yeah. So he acknowledges that there's this fundamental thing about the sensible world, which is that everything's in flux. And just as in the case of you and me, we're losing parts, we consume food to regain these parts, but what we see is there isn't quite the harmony that we need to live forever, for the body and the soul to be joined forever. So Plotinus's concern seems to be that any time there's flux, that shows that the body and the soul aren't really having the kind of harmony that can last forever. So for him, it's not sufficient to just appeal to the soul, because as long as there's flux, he's concerned that maybe the body and soul will come apart, in which case maybe we would have cycles of a universe, something like the Stoics, perhaps, that it's there, and then it ceases, and then it starts again. And in fact, that is what happens to humans, right? So they lose a body, then their soul goes into a new body later on. Exactly. So we have this reincarnation or transmigration theory. Why doesn't that happen to the cosmos, then? Yeah, well, he argues that, similar to Aristotle, that the heavens are the thing that aren't subject to flux. And he's a bit of two minds about Aristotle's solution, because Aristotle, as he sees it, just posited this fifth body that solved all of these problems. And he didn't really think that that was well supported. And this is interesting, because this is also the constitution of the heavens question, it's one of the questions where Plato and Aristotle seriously disagree. Aristotle says the fifth body, Plato says it's mostly fire, but all four elements are there. And so this is an interesting sort of test to see how Neoplatonists deal with this sort of question, because generally, they like to bring them together. But in this particular case, Plotinus, for example, says, well, Aristotle isn't justified, I'm going to follow Plato. And indeed, one might say he has good reasons for doing so, because Aristotle maybe hasn't really proven that there's this fifth body. Okay, but that still seems like it doesn't answer the question, because now if he said that the heavens don't consist of a fifth element, which is indestructible, but rather of the four sublunary elements, it seems like the heavens, too, should be destroyed, just like our bodies are destroyed. Right. So the easy answer is off the table, namely Aristotle's. So he sticks to Plato's idea that all four elements are there. But again, he uses this as an opportunity to really investigate the constitution of the heavens. And he pushes Plato's answer in Aristotle's direction, and he ends up saying, well, yeah, it's mostly fire, but there's a very different kind of fire in the heavens. And this fire is almost immaterial, which means it's going to allow itself to create a kind of, to engage in a kind of harmonious relationship with soul, such that there won't be any flux, which is actually, he's in a good position, he's on good footing anyway, because it doesn't look like there's flux from the heavens, unlike in the sensible world. So really, he's just trying to support that through some kind of theory of the material of the heavens. It's almost like he thinks the heavens are some kind of intermediary or compromise between intelligible things and physical things, right? They're permanence and almost immaterial, but they're physical and are visible, for example, the way that sublunary bodies are. Yeah, that's right. And I think that's actually maybe more true than a lot of people want to admit. I mean, what we saw, for instance, in Aristotle is you have this sensible world, and then you have these heavens, which are always moving and in some sense, you know, divine. And then beyond that, beyond the heavens, you get this unmoved mover. And it's the same with Plotinus, actually. You have the sensible world, which is subject to flux, and then you have the heavens, which are divine in some sense. And just beyond that, you seem to get something like the intellect. Okay, so he has a good kind of physical story, we might say, about why the world is everlasting. On the other hand, he does have this world soul, and yet he also invokes nature as a principle. And in fact, he wrote a whole treatise about nature. What's then the relationship between the world soul and nature? Right. So the world soul is distinct from the hypostasis soul, insofar as the hypostasis soul is completely in the intelligible world, we might say. But the world soul is engaged in the sensible world. And what Plotinus does is basically say, well, the world soul, similar to, say, human souls, consists of two parts, we might say. And there's going to be the part that is actively at work in the sensible world and in matter, and that's nature, the lower part. But he also reserves an upper part of the world soul that remains in the intelligible world. So in some sense, nature is just the lower part of the world soul. It's almost like another bridging principle then from the intelligible to the physical realm, right? Because it has a foot in both realms, as it were. That's right, yeah. That's interesting. So what kinds of things does he use nature to explain as opposed to the world soul? I mean, that's a question. To what extent the world soul is responsible for explaining anything directly and not by means of nature. It seems that nature is the one that's really doing the work in the natural world. And I think it's pretty much explaining almost everything, one might say. I mean, again, I mentioned at the start that there's this interesting biological development in the theory of forms. So for example, well, it's actually not even clear in Plato whether there's a form of human being. Young Socrates in the Parmenides seems to have his doubts. Maybe in the Timaeus there is one. But even in the Timaeus, Plato describes how these generated gods construct the human body. And it's not clear that they're doing this because they have knowledge of the form of human being, for example. They just seem to be troubleshooting and trying to come up with a good plan for a human being. In Plotinus, the theory of forms takes a decidedly biological turn. So there are forms for all sorts of living things, humans, dogs, oxen, presumably even snakes, even plants there are forms of. And what happens with these forms is as they're handed down, so they start in intellect, they're handed down to soul. And ultimately they're handed down to nature, which is at work in the sensible world. And at each time they're handed down, they become more pluralized and more particularized, such that by the time you get to the level of nature, you don't have the form of human being. You have a whole variety of forms corresponding to all. So for example, in the case of a human being, all of the parts of the human body. And these are going to be the things that actually do the work in the sensible world and create the human body. And it's almost like all the humans who ever exist are kind of unfolding of the possible content of the form of man or something. That's right. Yeah. So at one point, Plotinus investigates this idea of whether there are forms of individuals. And this is of course a very controversial question that he engages with. But I think the soundest reading of his response to that question is to say, at the level of nature, there is this form of Socrates, say, insofar as at the level of nature, you're going to have a principle of his snub nose and his bulging eyes and all of these other features. But then all of these together, even if we count all of these principles together as the form of Socrates, this is just one possibility within the form of human being. So the idea is, well, how many human beings would it take to instantiate the form of human beings? His answer seems to be a lot. Loads. Yeah, loads. So as many as fit into the great year, is what he says. The great year being how long it takes for all the heavenly bodies to realign to their starting position. Right. Exactly. Okay. I guess one thing that's become very clear from all this then is that the Neoplatonist, or at least Plotinus, he is interested in the physical world, but he always approaches these questions about natural philosophy with the principles of his general philosophy in mind. For example, the idea that there are intermediaries between higher things and lower things and that you have a kind of gradual emanation of multiplicity from a more unified set of principles. I want to turn now to his student Porphyry and talk about one other text, which again you've worked on. And this is a text about embryology, in other words, the nature and generation of the human fetus. And I guess this is a rather surprising thing to find a Neoplatonist working on. Can you tell us a little bit about the prehistory of this and maybe why he would have been interested in it? Right. So I don't actually think it's a very surprising thing for a Neoplatonist to be interested in. The embryology was always a top-off in ancient philosophy, and you can find the very earliest philosophers working on it and the very latest philosophers working on it. I suppose one of the issues, which is, I mean, there were a number of issues that were central, but one that maybe we could focus on is whether just the man provides a seed for the embryo, or whether both parents are, so whether there's a female seed. And there are lots of arguments on both sides, but maybe one of the strongest arguments on each side would be for the two-seed theory. If you have two seeds, you can easily explain why the offspring sometimes resembles the mother, because you have these formal principles provided by the seed. The problem with the two-seed theory, though, is if you say that the mother has a seed, then the man seems superfluous. And that, among other things, is what led Aristotle to say that there's in fact only one seed. And it's interesting, because if one follows this early tradition, one can find medical philosophers and physicians always sort of asserting the two-seed theory. So Hippocrates and Galen are both on the two-seed side. But Aristotle is a strong proponent of the one-seed theory, and all of the Neoplatonists just follow Aristotle. When you say that the man would be superfluous, do you mean the woman could literally get pregnant just by herself, or do you mean that the man wouldn't do anything to explain the presence of a human being? I think I meant, in some sense, the former. Of course, all that really means is that more explanation is needed as to why this female seed is not sufficient to create an offspring all by itself. So what happens then is, even with the two-seed theorists, say Galen, you get this female seed, but it's still inferior in some sense to the male seed, because it can't be self-sufficient. And Porphyry goes for the one-seed theory. Right. And this is interesting, and this maybe goes back to this question that we started with as to why people don't view Neoplatonists as actually being interested in the empirical tradition, because not only does Porphyry follow Aristotle's one-seed theory, he doesn't even really think of this as a problem. He doesn't even investigate the two-seed theory, unlike, say, Aristotle, who argues extensively for the one-seed theory, and unlike Galen, who argues extensively against Aristotle. Porphyry just assumes it as if it were obvious. And he doesn't really seem to engage with any texts of Galen, and he does sort of cite some Hippocrates, but not much. That's interesting. So these are very obvious things for him to have been looking at if he's thinking about embryology. Right. And he just goes straight back to Aristotle the whole time? Yeah, although he's not really focusing on texts of Aristotle either. Like I said, it's not clear that they had access to all of the biological texts of Aristotle. But he does sort of take the starting point of the one-seed theory, and thus he's confronted with this problem of explaining maternal resemblance, which all one-seed theorists are. So what does he think the woman contributes to the process of forming the embryo then? Yeah, exactly. So he needs to account for maternal resemblance in some other way, and he has an ingenious way of explaining this. So basically, he sees embryology as, as I would put it, a kind of empirical instantiation of precession and reversion. So the emission of the seed is a form of precession, in that the father is creating an image of himself, and through these form principles that are contained in the seed. But as we see with reversion, something needs to, it needs to somehow come back to its source. And it can't go back to the male, because the male is no longer in the picture. So it has to basically revert to the female. So what Porphyry says is that there's no female seed, but the seed reverts and, as it were, is actualized by the mother's soul. And this is what's going to account for the maternal resemblance. And what's interesting here is he has another piece of evidence on his side, which we wouldn't really perhaps today regard as a piece of evidence, but there's this phenomenon that's often called idioplasty. Have you heard of this? It's funny from you. Right. And so a famous, so basically the phenomenon of idioplasty is this, and this was, I should emphasize at the start, this was widely agreed to obtain in antiquity, and even way past antiquity. And maybe we should also reassure listeners that this is not true, so the prospect that you're about to hold out. Right, so don't try this at home, basically. But the view was that whatever the mother, and curiously it's only just the mother, whatever the mother is looking at, and in some cases thinking of, at the moment of conception, this will have a very visible impact on the appearance of the offspring. So Seranus gives a very unfortunate example of a mother who looked at a monkey while having intercourse and ended up with a monkey-like offspring. Oh dear. Yes. So this is, as I said, it's a phenomenon which is a very real explanations in ancient embryology. And Porphyry seems uniquely positioned to explain it. And his explanation is, well, this just shows not only that the mother is influencing the form, the appearance of the offspring, but that she's not doing it through seed. She has to be doing it through her soul. Right. Actually, you could almost say that he's got a more feminist take on embryology than Aristotle because he actually has the woman doing quite a lot, doesn't he? Exactly. In fact, he twice refers to the female as the demiurge of the offspring, where Aristotle had reserved that term exclusively for the male. And does he have in mind the divine craftsman of the Timaeus there, who's called the demiurge? Or does he just mean that it has some kind of making function? Demiurge means craftsman, right? Exactly. So demiurge means craftsman. I'm not sure he's explicitly trying to make a link to the Timaeus, but I think anytime you use that word, anytime a Neoplatonist used that word, of course he's aware that the demiurge is in the picture. And speaking of explicitly making links, I'll now encourage you to listen again next time when I will be looking at Porphyry more generally. But for now, I'd like to thank James very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Peter.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson of the LMU in Munich. You're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, still brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, King of Animals, Porphyry. Never underestimate the importance of a good introduction. As you may have noticed, I've been trying to begin each episode of this podcast series with an attention-grabbing example or anecdote which may be of dubious relevance to the actual topic, but highlights a central theme of the episode. And today's offering will be no exception, as I begin by paying tribute to a man who made an entire career out of introductions. His name was Danny Ray. He performed a crucial role in one of the best stage shows of all time. As the main act prepared to hit the stage, Danny Ray would warm up the audience by telling them that they were about to witness an artist who would make their liver quiver, their bladder and their knees freeze. Godfather of soul, King of soul, soul brother number one all over the world, James Brown. At the end of the show, Danny would return to escort James Brown off the stage while draping a cape over his shoulders, which Brown would then cast aside repeatedly to return to the microphone for one last verse. The Danny Ray of ancient philosophy was named Porphyry. Actually, this was a nickname. It means purple in Greek, and he was called after this royal color because his real name meant king, albeit not King of soul. Not only did Porphyry write the Life of Plotinus as an introduction for his edition of Plotinus's writings, which he organized as the Enneads, he also wrote a short little treatise with the wonderfully imaginative title Introduction, in Greek, ezegeogae. In due course it would become Porphyry's most influential and famous work, in fact what I think must be the most frequently read philosophical treatise of late antiquity. In just a few pages, Porphyry deftly sketched some of the basics of Aristotle's logic as he understood it. He focused on the notions that came to be called the five Porphyrian words or expressions, genus, species, specific difference, accident, and property. Drawing especially on Aristotle's topics, Porphyry is here offering an alternative, and perhaps more general, classification of predicates than the one we find in Aristotle's categories. In other words, every term we use to describe something will fall into one of these five types. The most familiar are genus and species, and I suppose listeners will be disappointed if I don't illustrate with the contrast between animal and giraffe. What marks out a species from its genus is its specific difference. For instance, if among animals, humans and humans alone are rational, something Porphyry elsewhere questions, as we'll see shortly, then rationality can serve as a specific difference for the genus of animal. Of course, every individual falls under a unique genus and species, and will have many of its features by virtue of belonging to that genus and species. Thus, Hiawatha will be alive and capable of sensation because she is an animal, and be vegetarian, and have a long neck because she's a giraffe. But individual members of the same species will also differ from one another. The features that distinguish them are called by Aristotle accidents, so Porphyry adds this to his list. The fifth class is the trickiest, the property or proper accident. This is a feature possessed by all members of a species, which is nonetheless accidental to them rather than essential. The usual example is humans' ability to laugh. Every human can laugh, yet we can imagine a human that can't laugh, and see that he or she would still be a human. Indeed, Buster Keaton's on-screen persona seems to depict just such a creature. Lurking just offstage, like James Brown during Danny Ray's introduction, are various metaphysical questions. Porphyry declines to investigate them in his introduction precisely because it is meant to be introductory. Elsewhere, though, he suggests that any individual is simply a unique collection of distinguishing features that fall under the five kinds of predicate. Each of its features may be shared by many other individuals, but no individual will have all the same features, so each individual can be understood as nothing more than the union of those features. Other questions are raised in the introduction without being answered. Should universals like genera and species be counted among the things that really exist? If so, how do they exist? Are they immaterial? If so, are they independent and separate from the individuals that fall under the universal? This series of questions without answers was one reason for the popularity of the introduction. Later authors who were commenting on it had a chance to give their own solutions to the so-called problem of universals. The introduction was used to teach many generations of students, and thus commented upon by later Platonists who wrote in Greek. Once it was translated into Latin and Arabic, it received new commentaries in those languages. When the 9th century Muslim philosopher al-Kindi attacked the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, he structured his criticism around concepts taken from Porphyry's introduction, explaining that this was a text so familiar to his opponents that all of them could be expected to own a copy. Back in the episode on Alexander of Aphrodisias, I explained that he was used for centuries as a guide to Aristotle. But Porphyry went him one better. His introduction was actually incorporated into the group of Aristotle's logical writings, the so-called Organon. Ironically then, nearly all late ancient and medieval students of Aristotle began to study him by reading something written by a Platonist. Porphyry himself would probably have been bemused to learn that his vast body of writings would be overshadowed by the little introduction he devoted to Aristotle's logic. Still, he would have been quite pleased to play such a central role in the integration of Platonism and Aristotelianism. If the introduction was his most influential work, his most influential idea was that Plato and Aristotle are fundamentally in harmony. Actually, this idea goes back earlier, even to the so-called middle Platonists before Plotinus. Generations after Porphyry, a Platonist by the name of Hierocles claimed that the harmony idea should above all be credited to Plotinus's teacher, Ammonius Sacchus. And Porphyry himself says in his Life of Plotinus that his master's writings are full of Aristotelian ideas, which is true enough. Still, Porphyry played a crucial role in adopting Aristotle on behalf of the Platonist family. He was the first Platonist to write commentaries on Aristotle, and proposed a way of reconciling these two greatest philosophical authorities. For Porphyry, Plato was the more advanced thinker, a philosopher who teaches about divinity and the highest causes. Aristotle, by contrast, tells us mostly about the world of nature, about living things, about bodies at rest and in motion, and about human thought and language as it relates to this physical realm. By demoting Aristotle himself to a relatively introductory level, Porphyry made his work safe for Platonists to study. And study them they did, to the point that they wound up producing more commentaries on Aristotle than on the more exalted Platonic dialogues. Porphyry's own extensive commentaries on both Plato and Aristotle are mostly lost, but we know a fair amount about them because they were used and quoted, sometimes without attribution, in other surviving Greek commentaries. For Boethius, a Christian philosopher who wrote in Latin and served as a conduit for ancient ideas to the medieval world, Porphyry was the most important source for understanding Aristotle's logic, even more important than Alexander. This is another irony, given that Porphyry was also known for his critique of the religion which he considered the greatest abomination of his age, Christianity. He was not the first pagan philosopher to attack the Christians. In the second century, an author named Celsus had raised objections that are preserved in a refutation by the Church Father Origen. We'll return to this in a future episode. Like Celsus's anti-Christian writing, Porphyry's criticisms of Christianity are known only in the form of quotations, especially amongst Christians like Augustine who were stung into a response. It isn't even clear whether Porphyry wrote a single large work called Against the Christians, or whether later authors are quoting from a range of texts in which Porphyry complained about what he saw as a new and irrational faith. Porphyry turned the interpretive skills he had sharpened, reading Plato and Aristotle, against the Bible. He complained about the implausibilities of the supposed revelation, for instance Jonah's survival in the belly of a whale, and the forced allegorical readings offered by Christians. Again ironically, given that the Jewish Philo of Alexandria was a great pioneer of this sort of interpretation, Porphyry shows himself much more respectful towards Judaism, which he respects as a venerable faith. What bothers him about the Christians is not just their lack of ancient pedigree, though. It is also the unjustified nature of their beliefs. He uses the word alogos, meaning irrational, to describe these beliefs. This raises the intriguing possibility that Porphyry may have thought less of Christians than he did of animals. His characteristic blend of an independent mind and respect for ancient authority is on full display in his most fascinating work entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food. It is a lengthy and impassioned plea for vegetarianism addressed to a colleague named Firmus Castricius. Firmus was a wealthy admirer of Plotinus, mentioned in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. Given the good taste Firmus showed in attaching himself to this Platonist group, Porphyry is distraught and disappointed that Firmus has given up on vegetarianism and acquired another taste, for meat. On Abstinence is intended to show Firmus the error of his new meat-eating ways, and of course to convert other readers to abstinence. Porphyry is not in fact the first ancient philosopher to recommend vegetarianism. This diet had long been associated with Pythagoreans and the presocratic thinker Empedocles, both of whom are mentioned by Porphyry. He also draws extensively on a work about animals by the more recent Plutarch. We know from Porphyry's own Life of Plotinus that Plotinus, too, was a vegetarian. But there is no other surviving ancient treatise that explores the topic so fully. Porphyry not only argues for vegetarianism, but also presents the anti-vegetarian arguments of Epicureans, Stoics, and Aristotelians before going on to refute them. Porphyry's main reason for not eating meat is that it tastes good. Following his master Plotinus, he believes that our true selves are intellectual souls. Anything that ties the soul to the body is counterproductive, since it hinders our ability to focus on the things of the mind, and nothing ties the soul to the body more powerfully than pleasure. It is, as Porphyry says, like a nail that attaches us to our bodies, which he compares to mere garments made of skin. And, by the way, it isn't only the pleasure that is problematic. For curing meat, he says, is difficult and often expensive, a point that held rather more weight in the ancient world than it would today. Far better is to partake of light and simple foods, whatever comes easily to hand, and to eat just enough to keep ourselves alive and in good health. For all his disdain for the body, Porphyry considers it wrong to kill oneself, though we know, again from the Life of Plotinus, that he was once tempted to do so. Because this is Porphyry's main argument against eating meat, he recommends vegetarianism only for those people who are actually trying to concentrate on intellectual activity, rather than their embodied lives. At one point, he explicitly says that he is addressing his arguments only to philosophers, and not to soldiers, craftsmen, or politicians. Such people are not trying to free their soul from the distractions of the body so that they can concentrate on intellectual contemplation. So, why should they restrict themselves to eating plants? That may make Porphyry's treatise seem disappointing for modern-day vegetarians, who typically want as many people as possible to abstain from meat, and not just an intellectual elite. It's also worth noting that so far, Porphyry's reasons for vegetarianism would also rule out, say, driving out of one's way to pick up a tub of organic artisanal hummus. Food that is hard to procure and dangerously tasty can be vegetarian, after all, and Porphyry would think that putting effort into and enjoying such foods would be another way of tying oneself to one's body. From what we have seen so far, he seems to be focusing on meat especially because it was such a luxury item in the ancient world. But to eat meat, of course, you have to kill a sentient being. Although this does not seem to be Porphyry's primary reason for vegetarianism, it is something he discusses at length in his responses to other philosophers. His main opponents here are the Stoics, who argued that it cannot be unjust to kill animals because they simply do not figure into considerations of justice. Why not? Well, on the Stoic theory, rational beings like us can have a relationship involving justice only with other rational beings, but animals are not rational, which means that they are too much unlike us for them to fall within the scope of justice. Porphyry responds by arguing that animals are rational just like humans are, albeit not to the same extent. Porphyry admits that in them reason is blurry, but they are capable of some kind of reasoning, which on the Stoic theory means we do have obligations of justice to them. Porphyry follows Stoic ideas about rationality when trying to prove this. In fact, I've been convinced by my PhD student Faye Edwards that Porphyry may not really believe that animals are rational in any sense a Platonist would recognize. Rather, this whole discussion of animal rationality is simply a way of undermining the Stoics by using their own philosophical principles against them. The Stoic view of reason turns on that difficult Greek word logos. As we've seen before, logos can mean word, account, reason, and several other things. The Stoics thus say that what they call the outer logos is a sign of the so-called inner logos. The inner logos is the process of reasoning that goes on in the soul, while outer logos is spoken speech. The fact that humans use language is proof that they are rational. To defeat the Stoics, then, Porphyry need only argue that non-human animals also have language. He rises to this task with great gusto, relating numerous fabulous tales. These include the case of a Pythagorean sage who understood the chirping of a swallow when it told its fellow birds about a load of grain that had been spilled outside of town. Porphyry himself finds this story difficult to swallow, but is able to tell of a language-using partridge that he owned himself. Besides, it's quite obvious that animals like dogs can understand what humans say, and they seem to communicate well enough with one another, too. If we cannot understand what they are saying, remarks Porphyry, then so what? We don't understand the Persians or Scythians, either, but we don't go around eating them. Porphyry then goes on to argue that whether or not they have language, the outer logos, they clearly have inner logos. This is proven by the clever things they do, like building nests and avoiding traps, and also by the fact that even sense perception is useless if one cannot use reason to interpret it. This claim is proven by the observation borrowed from the Aristotelian philosopher Strato, that we may be unaware of what we are seeing or hearing if we are too lost in thought. Since animals quite obviously use their senses, they must also be using reason. All of this gives Porphyry a problem that doesn't worry too many vegetarians nowadays. If we aren't going to eat meat, how will we sacrifice to the gods? Here I need to explain that it was a standard pagan religious ritual to sacrifice an animal on an altar, roast it for the gods, and then feast upon it. This practice is already described in the Iliad, in fact. But Porphyry argues that in the grand scheme of things it is a relatively new-fangled religious practice. Originally, the gods were offered not animals, but the first fruits of crops, and people began to sacrifice animals only when a famine or a war made this impossible. He draws on his Platonist conception of the divine to argue that the highest gods would not want animal sacrifice anyway. For one thing, the gods are perfectly just, and so they would be appalled by any offering that involved unjustly killing something. But in any case, the whole idea is misconceived, since the gods are immaterial and beyond the reach of physical offerings. What we should give them is not the life of an animal, or even the fruits of our crops, but rather philosophical thoughts. If there are superhuman entities that enjoy the ritual, they must be evil, vaporous demons who fatten themselves on the smoke of the roasting flesh. Porphyry furthermore points out that even if we did need to sacrifice animals to the gods, there would be no need to go on to eat the animals. He reminds us that in some cultures, people engage in human sacrifice without necessarily eating the victims. Porphyry's entreaty to his friend Fermus blends these sorts of religious reflections with arguments that would be at home in any discussion about vegetarianism today. At the core of his diatribe with the Stoics is the question of what animals share with us, and whether the common ground is enough to mean that they deserve our moral concern. Porphyry's vegetarianism may be motivated chiefly by his distaste for bodily things, which seems extreme even for a late ancient Platonist, but he should still get credit for exposing the weakness of ancient attempts to draw a clear line between humans, who deserve justice, and animals, who are served for dinner. Whether or not we are vegetarians, we will probably agree that Porphyry was on the right track in seeking to blur this line. Unfortunately, On Abstinence had nothing like the historical influence of Porphyry's introduction to Aristotle's logic, and it is only recently that it has come to receive its due acclaim. A more immediate reaction was provoked by Porphyry's coolly rational attitude towards antique religious belief. We just saw that he dismissed the need for sacrificing animals to the gods. This was not his only critical discussion of pagan ritual. He also wrote in rather skeptical terms about the religious practice of theurgy, in which pagans used physical objects to contact the gods. Again, Porphyry's disdain for bodily things seems to have made him wonder how such practices could possibly be efficacious. An answer came from a man who would go in the other direction, from the highly rationalist Plotinus and Porphyry, by integrating pagan belief fully into Platonism. In doing so, he set the tone for the rest of late ancient pagan Platonism. So, I hope you won't mind sacrificing another 20 minutes of your time next week, when I'll be looking at Iamblichus, on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Pythagorean Theorems, Iamblichus. Before he became the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire, Julian the Apostate was a philosophy student, so don't ever let anyone tell you that studying philosophy isn't a good career move. One of Julian's teachers particularly impressed him with the following anecdote. It seems that a philosopher named Maximus invited this teacher to attend a ritual at the temple of the goddess Hecate. Incense was burned, a hymn was chanted. As Maximus performed these rites, the statue of the goddess that presided over the temple seemed to come to life. It smiled, and then laughed. At Maximus's command, torches held in the statue's hands burst spontaneously into flame. Julian's teacher regarded all this as mere trickery, but Julian himself reacted differently. He left town to travel to the city of Ephesus, where he might sit at the feet of this wonder-working philosopher. About a decade later, Julian would take the purple, and for a brief time, the religious and philosophical ideas of pagans like Maximus would become the basis for imperial policy. It was a last chance for Christians to be persecuted, and for the old gods to be venerated as divine patrons of Rome. However much he may have impressed Julian, Maximus was a mere footnote in the history of pagan Neoplatonism. His ideas, to the extent that we know about them, closely followed those of a far more influential thinker who was also much admired by Julian, Iamblichus. By the time of his death in 325, a few years before the birth of Julian, Iamblichus had set the tone for all subsequent pagan Platonists. It was the spirit of Iamblichus, more than Plotinus, that presided in both Athens and in Alexandria, the two main centers of Platonist philosophy in late antiquity. His philosophy was resolutely pagan. He introduced complex, even baroque, modifications to the simpler system of Plotinus, in order to make room for the many divinities recognized in pagan worship. He argued for the efficacy, indeed the absolute necessity, of the practice of theurgy, ritual activities that allow the gods and goddesses to reveal themselves in our world, as Hecate did at the behest of Maximus. Soon, the light of pagan philosophy would be extinguished by the new wind of Christianity that was blowing with ever greater force across the Mediterranean, but for a couple of centuries it sputtered on, fed mostly by the fuel of Iamblichus's particularly pious brand of pagan Platonism. Iamblichus hailed from Syria and the city now called Qinn-e-Srin. He was well-born and could supposedly trace his family back to royal forebears. Syria would have been a place of upheaval during his childhood. When he was born it was Roman territory, but the Persians invaded and rampaged through the area in the year 256. Any trauma he may have experienced has left no traces in his writings, though it is often said that Neoplatonic philosophy offered an escape from the uncertain world of late antiquity and it doesn't get much more uncertain than having Persians suddenly invade your country. Iamblichus eventually set up a school in Apamea, also in Syria, so that he is strongly associated with this eastern province of the empire. However, he may have traveled abroad to study with his fellow Syrian, Porphyry. Just as Socrates had taught Plato and Plato-Aristotle, so Plotinus taught Porphyry and Porphyry Iamblichus. And just like Aristotle, Iamblichus reacted critically to the writings of his teacher and of his teacher's teacher. As we have seen, the idea that Plotinus founded a new tradition called Neoplatonism is itself built on rather shaky foundations. He reacted, often critically, to previous Platonists without seeing himself as initiating a new philosophical movement. In fact, Iamblichus changed Platonism just as much as Plotinus had done. Perhaps most important was his advice about how to study Platonic philosophy. Iamblichus laid down an order of reading for Plato's works, which included twelve dialogues, beginning with those he took to focus on ethics, the Alcibiades as a kind of introduction to Plato and then the Gorgias and Phaedo. The student should then graduate to theoretical philosophy, covering philosophy of language with the Cratylus, theory of knowledge with the Theaetetus, and so on. The last dialogues to be studied were the Timaeus and the Parmenides, which, for Iamblichus, contained the whole of Plato's thought, the Timaeus teaching us about nature and the Parmenides about theology. But all the dialogues could be mined for insights about the gods. The Middle Platonists, Plotinus and Porphyry, were certainly pagan believers, who referred to their metaphysical principles not only as intellect or the One, but also as gods. And they would have agreed with Iamblichus that the dialogues taught their readers about theology. But with Iamblichus, we have something new. No longer is pagan religion simplified and rationalized as a philosophical system. Rather, there is a perfect fit between the systematic and the sacred. Iamblichus multiplies transcendent entities by invoking complex rules of causation. What was a single level in Plotinus, like intellect, will be divided and then subdivided into many intellective gods that play different metaphysical roles. This results especially from Iamblichus' principle that between two causes that have different natures, we must postulate another cause that shares features of both. For instance, he assumes that if we have immaterial gods who transcend the cosmos, and also the physical cosmos itself, there must be a kind of entity which shares aspects of both. These will be the stars, or heavenly gods, which share in both the divine nature of the immaterial gods and the physical nature of bodies. For Iamblichus, this provides a philosophical rationale for ascribing divinity to the heavens, a welcome result given that pagan religion involved worshipping the planets and stars. Iamblichus refers to these additional mediating entities as means, the way that 3 is the mean term between 1 and 5. The use of mathematical language is no accident. Taking a leaf from the middle Platonists, Iamblichus sees Plato as a venerable branch growing from even more ancient roots. Like Plutarch and others, he assumes that a primordial wisdom has been passed down not only in Greek culture, but also in Egypt and further east. Within Hellenic literature, he sees Pythagoras as the foremost figure and as a forerunner of Plato's teachings. Thus, Iamblichus would describe himself as a Pythagorean as much as a Platonist. Listeners with exceptionally good memories may recall that I mentioned Iamblichus all the way back in episode 4 as a source for legends about Pythagoras speaking to bears, having a thigh made of gold, and so on. In that episode, I also promised to get to Iamblichus one day. Sorry for the long wait. Iamblichus so esteemed Pythagoras that he wrote an enormous series of Pythagorean books, including the Surviving Life of Pythagoras, which I was using in that episode, and Treatises on the Philosophical Significance of Mathematics. Being a Pythagorean, Iamblichus believed that mathematics, no less than the Platonic dialogues, could be mined for insight about transcendent divinities. But in keeping with his idea of an ancient wisdom received by many cultures, he looked beyond Plato and Pythagoras. As we saw when looking at Plutarch, Hellenic pagans were happy to absorb Egyptian gods into their pantheon, and even to identify certain Egyptian gods with certain Greco-Roman divinities. So, naturally, Iamblichus identified Egypt as a source of great insight. This particular tributary of the stream of antique knowledge flowed above all through the body of works ascribed to thrice-great Hermes, a divinity who was both the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. They record Hermes's own education from a character named Poimandres, and the lessons he gives to his own disciples, including the god Asclepius. The text reads more like a sacred or mystical work than a philosophical treatise, but it resonates strongly with Platonist philosophical doctrine. For instance, the opening passage of the first book tells of an intellective first god who gives rise to a logos, a word or reason. We've already seen this idea in Platonists like Philo of Alexandria. That's no coincidence since the text emerged contemporaneously with Middle Platonism. What Iamblichus saw as an inspired and ancient source of Platonic truths was in fact itself derived from the Platonist tradition. The same goes for an equally important source used by Iamblichus, the Chaldean oracles, named for their supposed origin in the eastern land of Chaldea. Produced in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, the oracles present a visionary description of the universe and its causes. In this system, the transcendent causes of Platonist metaphysics are personified as divine characters. A first mind and a secondary intellect are referred to as father gods, with the soul being associated with Hecate, the same goddess who obligingly smiled and laughed for the philosopher Maximus. Of course, Iamblichus could have found this kind of metaphysical system, with or without the mythical trappings in any number of Platonist texts. The reason he constantly alludes to the oracles and the works of Hermes is that their supposed pedigree proved the venerable and sacred roots of Pythagorean and Platonic teaching. Later Neoplatonists will invoke the antiquity of pagan belief and its supposed appearance in Egyptian and Eastern cultures as a proof of its superiority over the far younger faith of the Christians. Furthermore, these texts provided the pagans with scriptures that could compete with the Bible. But Iamblichus, unlike his master Porphyry, was not unduly concerned by the Christians. He worried more about newfangled innovations among his fellow pagans. They should turn to texts like the oracles to learn the authentic ritual practices. Even when Iamblichus gave his attention to more mundane philosophical topics, he kept his eyes turned towards the gods. As a student of Porphyry, he knew better than to neglect his Aristotle, and like Porphyry, he was particularly interested in the logical works. He wrote a commentary on Aristotle's categories, now lost but known indirectly through later commentators. His ideas here make an interesting contrast to both Porphyry and Plotinus. For Porphyry, the categories was relevant only to physical things, and analyzed certain terms in our language insofar as they applied to such things—a useful, albeit limited, ambition. Plotinus, by contrast, had extensively attacked the categories, trying to expose them as an inadequate attempt to classify reality. Plotinus preferred the set of concepts called the greatest kinds in Plato's dialogue the Sophist, which we discussed a while back in an interview with Fiona Lee. These five kinds—being, rest, motion, sameness, and difference—are the true anatomy of reality, used by Plotinus to describe the intelligible world of intellect. In a characteristically bold move, Iamblichus instead gave a so-called intellectual interpretation of Aristotle's categories. Rejecting Porphyry's peacemaking suggestion that the categories were limited to the humble things of the physical cosmos, Iamblichus insisted that all ten categories could be applied also to the intelligible divine world. I'll mention just one example of how this worked. In discussing the category of substance, Aristotle said that substances alone can change in their properties. For instance, a giraffe can go from being hungry to being not hungry, whereas non-substantial properties like the giraffe's hunger are incapable of this. Iamblichus has no quarrel with Aristotle's claim, but as always he wants us to raise our minds to a higher level. Intelligible substance, he says, is like this too. The difference is that it can have two contrary properties at the same time. Ironically, he gives the very example Plotinus had used. Intellect partakes of the greatest kinds of the sophist, so that it is both moving and at rest, both the same as and different from itself. And likewise for all the categories, each of which applies to physical things in one way and to the intelligible in another, more exalted way. Iamblichus' critical attitude towards Plotinus is even more obvious when he turns to one of Plotinus' most distinctive doctrines, the undescended soul. As you'll remember, Plotinus believed that every soul remains connected to the intelligible realm at all times. Even now, as you listen to this podcast, some part of you is communing with the forms. It's a cheerful proposal, but Iamblichus is having none of it, and subsequent Platonists unanimously side with him against Plotinus. He raises obvious objections, for instance that if we are already connected to intellect all the time, and if intellectual contemplation is the ultimate fulfillment and happiness for mankind, then we are all always fulfilled and happy, whether we know it or not. This is not only rather weird, but means that there is no reason for us to try to improve ourselves through philosophy. After all, we're already perfectly happy. Iamblichus makes other objections that are more distinctively, well, Iamblichian. Because he has populated his metaphysical hierarchy with many more kinds of entity than Plotinus, he does not believe that the human soul is continuous with pure intellect. There are not only lower divinities, like the heavenly gods we've already mentioned, but also lesser supernatural beings like demons and heroes, better than humans but worse than gods. Again, Iamblichus postulates these beings to ensure that philosophical doctrine and pagan religious belief match perfectly, but he also has a more principled reason. Heroes and demons are possible kinds of beings, and if they didn't exist, then their absence would leave a kind of gap in the metaphysical scheme. Iamblichus's mean terms provide continuity between different levels of the scheme, a point that also applies to the soul itself. It is quintessentially a mean between the bodily and the immaterial. Whereas Plotinus often seems to make the soul nothing but a subject of attention, turned either up towards intellect or down towards body, Iamblichus emphatically gives soul its own distinctive nature. His verdict is that Plotinus's optimism led him to violate this nature by putting the soul beyond its proper station. This of course leaves us with a problem. If we are not always already in touch with intellect, how can we make contact? The problem is especially pressing for Iamblichus since he is so insistent that the intelligible things are not just forms, but gods. If we cannot access the intelligible, there will be not just philosophical frustration, but dire religious consequences. Iamblichus's answer is that we reach the gods through the ritual practices described in the Chaldean oracles and admired by Julian, the practices of theurgy. Literally theurgy means god-making. It applies to a wide range of exercises and undertakings including the animation of statues described at the beginning of this episode. Divination of various kinds was also theurgic, as were such religious customs as the chanting of hymns and apparently meaningless words of power, the sacrifice of animals, the use of artifacts like sacred stones, and so on. Iamblichus was forced to defend the efficacy and integrity of theurgy, and hence of religion as he understood it, against questions posed by his own master, Porphyry. We saw last time how Porphyry was led by his inquisitive and somewhat skeptical instincts to reject animal sacrifice. He also wrote a more general work questioning the tenets of theurgy. Adopting a tone rather like that of Plato, criticizing the Homeric myths, Porphyry complained that many theurgic practices seem inappropriate to the gods. In some rituals, for instance, one would utter obscenities or display effigies of the male genital organs. At other times, the theurgist might aim commands or threats at the gods. Above all, Porphyry could not see how the physical actions of theurgy could affect the transcendent and immaterial gods. In reply, Iamblichus composed a work usually called On Mysteries, the title given to the treatise by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who also translated it into Latin. I hereby promise to get to Ficino someday, too. It will be another long wait. In On Mysteries, Iamblichus responds to Porphyry that we are not forcing the gods to do anything with our theurgic practices. Rather, the gods are present everywhere at all times in the cosmos. The ritual just allows their presence and influence to become manifest. The apparently obscene and repellent practices noted by Porphyry are merely symbolic and, when interpreted rightly, need offend nobody. The ritual sacrifice is indeed inappropriate to the highest, purely immaterial gods, but it is effective for communing with the gods within the cosmos, those heavenly divinities again. In addition to fending off these objections, Iamblichus makes a spirited case, pun intended, on behalf of the religious practices. It is theurgy and theurgy alone that allows us to communicate with the intelligible gods. When Porphyry objects that the theurgist seems to be trying to pull the gods down to his own physical level, Iamblichus replies, no, the theurgist is trying to purify his own soul, and the souls of others, so that they may rise up to the gods. This is a shocking claim. Platonists, beginning with Plato himself, had always been trying to achieve likeness to God, to borrow the famous phrase used in Plato's Theaetetus. But from Aristotle down to Plotinus, it had always been understood that the path to this goal was philosophy. Iamblichus is the first Platonist to seriously question this rather smug philosophical claim. At one point, he sarcastically remarks that Porphyry is slipping away into philosophy, which makes philosophy sound distinctly second-rate in comparison to the sacred activities of the theurgist. This aspect of On Mysteries has alarmed some readers. The great scholar E.R. Dodds called the work a manifesto of irrationalism, and even some historians of philosophy who have great respect for Plotinus get impatient with the religious and ritualistic proclivities of Iamblichus and subsequent pagan neoflatanists. But we should note that Iamblichus's argument for the necessity of theurgy is itself philosophical. He bases himself ultimately on an idea familiar even from Aristotle, that every possible kind of being must be expressed in reality. It is anything but irrational for Iamblichus to follow this to its logical conclusion by positing mean terms between different kinds of entities so that the entire fullness of being will be realized. One consequence is that human souls must occupy a much lower rank than the exalted gods of the intellectual realm and have a distinctive activity that falls far short of divine intellectual activity, whatever Plotinus might think. Iamblichus seems to make an exception for certain so-called pure souls. They occupy yet another mean between normal human souls and the gods. These pure souls belong to men like Pythagoras and Plato who have been granted a direct insight into the gods. But for the rest of us, theurgy is indispensable. It is the only way for a soul to transcend its own limitations by availing itself of divine assistance. Thus, the real goals of theurgy are purification and assent, not making the statues smile or divining the future. If Iamblichus did use theurgy to predict future events, he may have discovered the good news that he had managed to set the agenda for the last generations of pagan philosophers in antiquity. The bad news was that these would indeed be the last generations. Christianity was on the rise, and pagan thinkers would be increasingly embattled. The next great Plotinus thinker we'll consider refers in one work to the destruction of his home, and it has been speculated that it may have been wrecked by Christians in anti-pagan violence. We can't be sure about this, which shows that nowadays we can't even tell the past, never mind telling the future. Nonetheless, I'll risk predicting that you'll want to join me as I look at Proclus, next time on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Platonic Successor, Proclus. In Athens, at the foot of the Acropolis, lies an archaeological site that was discovered at the end of the 19th century. It was a villa from late antiquity near the holy sites of Dionysius and the healing god Asclepius. The ruins contain, among other things, a statue of the goddess Isis and the remains of a sacrificed piglet. In the 1950s, it was suggested that the site could be none other than the house of Proclus. Born in Constantinople in the year 412 AD, Proclus came to Athens, distinguished himself as a great philosopher and practitioner of pagan ritual, and ultimately became head of the Platonic school. He was thus known as the Platonic successor, one of the last thinkers in the golden chain that expounded and defended Platonism in late antique Athens. Just as you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, apparently you can't forge new links in a golden chain without slaughtering a few piglets. We know more about Proclus than we have any right to, thanks to a surviving biography of the great man by Proclus's own successor, Proclus. Marinus's life of Proclus is more hagiography than biography, a portrait of not just a philosopher but a sage, a man of deep piety and uncompromising virtues. Marinus organizes the story of Proclus's life in accordance with the levels of virtue recognized by the Platonists, namely physical, ethical, political, purificatory, theoretical, and theurgic. Thus we are told first of Proclus's handsome features and robust constitution – he was sick only twice in a life of 75 years – then of his ethical excellence, and so on. It's telling that Marinus relates the peak of his virtue to theurgy. As we saw last time when we looked at Iamblichus, theurgy is the set of practices by which one could communicate with the traditional Greek gods. And, as we'll see this time, Proclus agrees with Iamblichus that perfection in theurgy brings a happiness even greater than the happiness reached through philosophical wisdom. Marinus gives us many examples of Proclus's remarkable gift in this direction, telling for instance of how he brought about a miraculous cure by praying to Asclepius and how he was able to foretell the future. Most scholars, though, have valued Proclus more for what he tells us about the past. We certainly do not have all of Proclus's works, but those that survive are packed with information about his own Platonic heritage. Much of what I was able to tell you about the so-called middle Platonists, and even later thinkers like Iamblichus, is taken from reports found in Proclus. This means that Proclus suffers from the same syndrome that afflicts Cicero and will afflict the somewhat later commentator Simplicius. He has been valued as a treasure trove of data about other thinkers, but not treasured much himself. Even those who do take an interest in Proclus's own philosophy must admit that his ideas seem to be drawn largely from his immediate predecessors. Proclus was taught by Plutarch of Athens, not to be confused with the earlier Plutarch I covered in Episode 80. This second Plutarch used the wealth of his family to resurrect the Platonic Academy in Athens. A second teacher seems to have had an even greater impact. This was Cyrianus, Proclus's predecessor as the head of the school. His relationship to Proclus was so close that Proclus arranged to be buried next to his master in a shared tomb. Proclus's philosophy, especially in his commentaries on Plato, was based closely on that of Cyrianus. To some extent, the sophisticated systematization of Platonic thought we find in Proclus is really the work of his teacher. The details of Proclus's reliance on Cyrianus are obscure, given that Cyrianus's own works are mostly lost. We do have numerous reports of his views in Proclus and others, as well as a surviving commentary on parts of Aristotle's metaphysics. Here, Cyrianus dispenses with the idea we've seen in Platonists like Porphyry, that Aristotle and Plato are basically in harmony. Cyrianus concentrates all his attention on places in the metaphysics where Aristotle criticizes Plato. He admires Aristotle, but when Aristotle criticizes Platonic and Pythagorean ideas, Cyrianus responds with sarcasm and refutation. Especially though, we must turn to Proclus, to see what sort of Platonism was embraced in this revived Athenian school. Pride of place must go to the works dealing directly with Plato, and especially Proclus's vast, though incomplete, commentaries on the Timaeus and Parmenides. Another commentary was devoted to the Alcibiades, today an obscure dialogue whose authenticity is uncertain, but in Proclus's day, seen as the ideal introduction for beginning students because of its ethical orientation. Proclus also wrote a set of essays on the Republic, and a commentary on Plato's exploration of names, the Cratylus. Another enormous treatise on Plato is not a commentary, this is the Platonic Theology, which interprets the dialogues as a monument of pagan religious belief. Another commentary by Proclus is devoted to Euclid's elements, and he found time to compose a group of treatises on the theme of divine providence and several hymns to the gods. There are some further works besides, but I'll just mention the Elements of Theology, which imitates the axiomatic structure of Euclid's elements, laying down principles and building up a systematic exploration of Proclus's metaphysics. Because of its relative brevity and clear expository style, Proclus's Elements has always been his most popular text. This is a bit unfortunate, given that Proclus himself would no doubt have seen the works on Plato as his greatest philosophical contribution. Still, the Elements does helpfully set out the principles according to which Proclus's system is organized. Perhaps the most important of these is a rule he shares with this podcast, there should be no gaps. He has taken over the idea that goes back through Plotinus to the Platonus of the early Empire. All of reality arises from a simple principle, the One, whose effects become more and more multiple as they unfold. Broadly speaking, he also accepts Plotinus's scheme, according to which the One is followed by a world of intellect and Platonic forms. This is followed by soul, and finally, the physical universe. Proclus, however, would say that this description paints with the broadest of strokes. He seeks to ensure the continuity by eliminating any possibility of gaps between the levels of the hierarchy. For that, we need more rules, and Proclus provides them. Most notoriously, he uses triadic, or threefold, structures to introduce complexity at every level. To use a joke that is not original with me, Proclus demands that forms be filled out in triplicate. This is an idea that goes back to Iamblichus, but it is only in the works of Proclus that we see this system presented in all its glory. Let's take as an example the world of mind, or intellect. Proclus, of course, follows Plotinus, and for that matter Aristotle, in thinking that intellect is something divine. He also agrees with Plotinus that intellect cannot be the first principle, because it is not simple. Even if it is thinking about itself, it will be in a sense two, because it is both the thing that is thinking and the thing that is being thought. But for Proclus, this means we cannot speak of only one divine intellect. Rather, what is doing the thinking, the intellect, should be distinguished from what is being thought about, the intelligible. And there should be many gods of each kind. So, Proclus says that there are two orders of gods, the intelligible gods, which are higher than the intellect of gods. But this still isn't enough, because it seems to leave a gap or discontinuity between the intelligible and the intellective, as if Plotinus's single intellect had been divided in half and each half populated by many divinities. Proclus solves the problem by saying that there is a third rank of gods in between, the gods that are both intelligible and intellective. They form a kind of link between the other two ranks of gods. Together, the three ranks of gods form a triadic structure, with two extremes and a linking term in the middle. Such structures are to be found all over his system. Thus Proclus not only provides a philosophical system that is admirably without any gaps, but also establishes the existence of a great many divine principles. And he's going to need these. He associates the levels of his rather baroque philosophical system with a bewildering range of traditional Greek gods, demigods, heroes, and demons. Because Proclus is so keen to avoid gaps, he is bound to worry about the generation of intelligible and intellective things from the One. As we've already seen, a perennial difficulty for Neoplatonism was the question of how many things derive from an utterly simple first principle. Actually, I hate to say this, but don't we really want a gap here? If the first principle is to be truly transcendent, it should have nothing in common with what comes after it, and thus we might worry not even a causal connection with these things. After all, causes seem to share features with their effects. It is because fire is hot that it heats things up. For this reason, Proclus admits that causation would compromise the lofty majesty of the One. So, he suggests that there should be a principle of unity lower than the highest one, which gets its hands dirty, so to speak, by bestowing oneness on everything else. This second one is called limit, following a bit of terminology from Plato's dialogue the Philebus. It has a partner, which naturally enough is called the unlimited. Again, this terminology is from the Philebus, but the two principles are clearly related to the monad and dyad of the Pythagorean tradition. The basic idea here is that limit and unlimited cooperate at every level of reality. For instance, the unity of a soul, or a body, can be traced ultimately to the influence of limit. But the multiplicity of the same things, for instance the fact that they have parts, or are subject to time rather than being timeless, is explained ultimately by the unlimited. Meanwhile, the One itself is above even limit and unlimited, serenely untouched by any causal relationships. We humans find ourselves at some distance from the exalted realms of unity and divinity I've just been describing. Proclus believes that our attitude towards those principles should be one of reverence and worship, not just philosophical analysis. Still, it's clear that philosophical analysis is relevant. He thinks that one can establish the existence of things like, say, gods that are both intellective and intelligible by appealing to laws of reason. The identification of these divinities with Greek gods, however, is possible only because of the revealed and inspired teachings found in holy texts. These include Plato's dialogues, but also the writings so cherished by Iamblichus such as the Chaldean Oracles. It's still common for people to argue about whether Proclus was primarily a faithful devotee of a revealed religion, or a rigorous reasoner. The truth is that he was both—he saw a perfect marriage between the dictates of thought and the dictates of traditional pagan religion. Proclus thinks that religious teachings are necessary for us in part because of the limitations on what human souls can know. Like Iamblichus, he rejects Plotinus's idea that some part of our soul is undescended, permanently connected to the divine intellect. At best, our soul sometimes receives an illumination from above, to be specific from the intellect of gods, the lowest of the three ranks in the divine realm of mind. But the normal workings of the human soul, even at its best, are not like the workings of divine intellects. We think in time, and discursively, making distinctions and grasping simple ideas by means of complicated proofs. Rather unexpectedly, Proclus's clearest explanation of this process appears in his commentary on Euclid's Elements. Given the context, he focuses especially on geometry, but some of what he says would hold for the soul's knowledge more generally. If you cast your mind back to Plato, you'll remember that in some dialogues, he makes our knowledge depend on a so-called recollection of things the soul already knows, but has forgotten it knows. Proclus builds this into a sophisticated theory according to which the soul always has within it images of the forms in the divine intellectual world. When we think, for instance, by doing a geometrical proof, we are unfolding these images that are innate within us. He calls this process projection, and gives as an example the use of the imagination to build diagrams in geometrical proofs. For instance, all our knowledge of triangles is ultimately derived from the simple form of triangle understood by the intellect of gods. Unfortunately, we can't just think really hard and instantly grasp everything there is to know about triangles. This is why, unlike Zeus, we have to take geometry classes. But, when we sit in class proving the Pythagorean theorem, we are not, as Plotinus might have it, drawing on a permanent, direct connection to the mind of Zeus or any other divine intellect. Rather, we are coming to understand explicitly what is already inborn within us. So, when the oracle at Delphi tells you, know thyself, this means, in part, that you should have paid more attention in seventh grade math class. The fact that the forms are in us illustrates yet another general rule of Proclus's metaphysics. Modifying Anaxagoras's famous proclamation that everything is in everything, Proclus says that all things are in all things but appropriately. For instance, the forms are in our souls, but in a way appropriate for souls. This rule comes with a caveat, though. The higher a principle is, the further down the chain of beings it will reach. Thus, limit and unlimited, being at the very top of the hierarchy, reach down all the way to physical bodies. Since the divine intellects are lower in the chain, they don't reach as far. Their influence is seen in souls, but not in mere physical objects. This explains why souls can think, but rocks cannot. But if the world around us is suffused with divinity and governed by providence, as it must be, since the highest gods are in this world but appropriately, then why does the world seem to leave so much room for improvement? The working of providence seems amply proven by the existence of creatures as exquisite and well-designed as giraffes, to take a completely random example. But what should we say about the suffering of a giraffe caught in a brush fire and burned to death, or about an illness which strikes down an entire herd? As we saw, Plotinus had an answer to such questions. He pointed to matter as the culprit, identifying it as the principle of evil and also as utter non-being, so that specific cases of evil are understood as mere privations or instances of non-being, like holes in Swiss cheese. We also saw that in giving this solution, Plotinus came dangerously close to the position of the Gnostics, who saw matter as an independent entity opposed to the good. Proclus, in fact, thinks Plotinus's Swiss cheese solution plunges him into the bubbling fondue of Gnostic dualism, so he rejects the idea that matter is a principle of evils. Where then do evils come from, given the rule of providence over our cosmos? Proclus addresses this problem in three treatises, two on the subject of providence and one called On the Existence of Evils. The title is a good clue to his conviction that evils do exist, and cannot be understood merely as privations of goodness. But he denies that there is just one source of evil. Matter is certainly not the principle of evil, as Plotinus claimed, because it derives from good principles, indeed, from the good itself. We can also see that matter participates in goodness from the fact that it provides the potential for good things to come about. The cosmos as a whole is not only good, but divine, and it is made from matter. Instead, evils arise from a whole range of sources. They result from the fact that physical things are able to come into conflict, something that cannot occur in the more unified, simpler intelligible realm populated by immaterial gods. In fact, evil depends on good things and the pursuit of good things in order to exist. For instance, fire is a good thing, an indispensable source of warmth and light, and giraffes are obviously good things. Yet it is precisely when these two good things come together in the same place in the savanna that an evil arises, the poor giraffe is caught in a raging inferno. Thus Proclus says that evil has parupostasis, that is, a parasitic existence, an existence alongside and dependent on things that are good. Though this is a new suggestion for how evil might fit into a Platonist metaphysics, Proclus also depends on traditional arguments found in the Stoics and in Plotinus to hold that from the cosmic perspective, all things are for the best. And no wonder. As we have already learned, the physical universe is full of divinity. But divinity does not emerge equally in all places and all times. This is why we need to pray, and perform other rituals that invite the divine to make itself more fully manifest in our world. Here, Proclus is taking his lead from Iamblichus, who as we saw, had integrated the pagan practices known as Theurgy into his philosophical worldview. For Proclus, as for Iamblichus, Theurgy is in fact a higher means of access to the divine than philosophy. This is because philosophy will at its best elevate us only to an understanding of the forms in the lowest rank of gods, the intellect of gods. The more exalted divinities are beyond the reach of soul, which means that if we want to make contact with them, we must beseech them to come to us. We have a written record of how Proclus did so in the form of numerous hymns he wrote to gods like Athena. The writing of such hymns was connected to his eager participation in pagan rites and aimed at purifying himself for a union with God higher than anything philosophical argument could offer. Marinus tells us that the gods did come to Proclus. After Christians removed the statue of Athena from the Parthenon, she appeared to him in a dream and asked him to prepare his house, for she wished to dwell with him. This anecdote fits nicely with what has been discovered in the house that may have belonged to Proclus. Remember the sacrificed piglet. Proclus wove together many threads of the Greek tradition. He brought out the underlying logic of the metaphysical system embraced by his master Cyrianus and by Eamblichus, providing the most explicit and elaborate account of late ancient Platonism that survives today. He also claimed to be the heir to a much more ancient philosophical tradition. Like Eamblichus, he saw Pythagoras and Plato as singing from the same hymn sheet. According to the biography of Marinus, Proclus announced that he was himself the reincarnation of an earlier Pythagorean philosopher and mathematician, Nicomachus of Gerasa. But Proclus' deepest commitment was to the pagan religious beliefs that were so threatened by the increasingly confident and powerful Christians. This was an age when pagan temples were being converted into churches, when statues were being ripped from their sacred homes. The last pagan philosophers of antiquity faced the bleak prospect that their faith might die out altogether, a shadow that hangs over many texts from the last generations of Greek Platonists. This will be our topic in a few weeks. But first I'd like to pause to consult the closest thing available to oracles of Neoplatonism. This will help me round out our picture of pagan philosophy in late antiquity. Next week, I'll be addressing a topic we haven't examined much, ancient aesthetics, including Neoplatonic aesthetics, with a leading expert on this topic. The week after that, a second interview will reveal more about the Pythagorean strand in Neoplatonism, and also the Neoplatonic contribution to political philosophy. So please sacrifice some time to join me in discussion, first with Anne Sheppard, and then with Dominic O'Mara, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about ancient aesthetics with Anne Shepherd, who is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. Hi Anne, thanks for coming. So I'd like to start by asking you about ancient aesthetics in general. The word aesthetics actually comes from a Greek word, aesthesis, which means perception or something like that. And I guess that raises the question of whether the notion of aesthetics itself also comes from the ancient Greeks. Did they actually recognize an area of philosophy that they thought of as aesthetics? Half under that name, there's actually quite a lot of dispute about this. Some people would say that it's anachronistic to talk about ancient aesthetics. Other people disagree. I think what you do find, I mean, aesthetics in modern philosophical discipline covers both philosophical questions about the arts and philosophical questions about beauty. And those are all questions that are addressed by ancient philosophers, but very often in other contexts. So in context they do with morality or education or indeed metaphysics, rather than on their own. And do they think of those things as somehow relating to each other then? Or if they're thinking about, say, education, would they think, well, that's one thing, and then say this question about metaphysics is something completely different? Because for example, Plato in the Republic, he does seem to bring these things together more or less, doesn't he? Yes, that's true. I suppose that's partly because Plato is bringing everything together, so he's considering education in the context of metaphysics. But yes, that's true. And it's also true that although, well, although it's often said that the ancient Greeks didn't have a concept of fine art, and I think that's to do with the role of the arts in ancient society, that visual art, for example, things like statues were in temples to be worshipped. They weren't actually sitting in a museum. Drama was part of a religious festival. People weren't thinking of it as something for kind of leisure time activity in the way that we do. So there's quite deep-seated reasons, I think, for why they don't think of the arts as being separate. At the same time, somebody like Plato draws analogies between poetry and painting on the one hand and painting and sculpture on the other quite readily. So does Aristotle. There's a long-running comparison into non-philosophical writing about poetry that compares poetry to painting. So there's certainly some tendency to put what we call the arts together, but then they're not necessarily considered in relation to beauty. Those are sometimes sort of separate questions. Well, do you actually, do you think that it's even right to think about ancient aesthetics primarily as about beauty? Because as I mentioned, aesthetics relates to the word aesthetic. Right, indeed. Hence, you might think that it means something like the study of things we can perceive from some certain point of view. Indeed you might. I mean, I suppose you could argue that it's to do with pleasure just in perceiving things, as it were, just in, if you like, surface perceptions, and then that involves not only beauty but charm, ugliness, other kinds of what we would now call aesthetic qualities, just thinking about things as you perceive them rather than in any other way. Do you think that in the culture more broadly, they actually would have seen something like a dramatic performance and something like a sculpture as belonging even to the same realm of activity? Because you mentioned that, at least the philosophers do draw analogies between, say, a sculpture and a poem. Is that something the philosophers are bringing in that they've noticed? Or is that something that's actually true to the way ancient Greeks thought about what we would call their artistic productions? I don't think it's just the philosophers, because as I mentioned, there is this comparison between poetry and painting, which is supposed to go back to the 6th-century BC poet Simonides. So there's some indication that poets themselves are thinking like that. I suppose one of the problems is that if you say, well, what were the people who made the sculptures or the people who painted the paintings thinking, that we don't know, because we don't have reflections written by the sculptors or the painters on what they were doing. By Phidias didn't write a treatise. Here's what I was thinking. So, you know, unlike the great Renaissance artists or something who wrote quite a lot about what they thought they were doing and the way they thought about what they were doing. And what about music? Or, well, maybe we should use the Greek word here, which is mousike. And that includes, I guess, what we would think of as music or some kinds of music, that seems to be broader and it seems to have something to do with education. Is that right? Yes. I mean, I didn't mention music when I was talking earlier, but I mean, the Greek word mousike, from which the English word music comes, is originally the art to do with the muses. Actually, maybe that's where you should look for some kind of unity about the art, because I think the idea developed later, but there's a tendency to different muses were associated with different art, so different with different kinds of poetry and one specifically with music and so on. But the word mousike certainly as it's used by Plato tends to cover both poetry and music. And if you look at something like Tom Griffith's translation of the Republic, the stuff about poetry and music and education, he actually translates mousike by poetry and music. And a lot of what Plato has to say about the use of poetry in education, where he's actually very, he wants to censor it, he wants to restrict the amount of poetry that his guardians in the ideal state are going to be exposed to when they're growing up. He also then quite explicitly wants to apply that to music. And one of his concerns is about the emotional effect of poetry. And he has exactly the same concerns, yeah, exactly the same concerns or parallel concerns about the effect of music on the emotions. To specific instruments and specific rhythms and so on. That's right, that's right. He doesn't like the music of the Aulos for instance, kind of flute because he thinks that that's all jastic and whereas he prefers instruments and rhythms which are modes which are going to inculcate the right kind of emotions, make people warlike and this kind of thing. I mean, one of the reasons why music doesn't really get considered separately is again, I think to do with the way the arts were practicing in antiquity, in the sense that there doesn't seem to have been instrumental music on its own. It was either an accompaniment to poetry. So a lot of poetry was actually being sung to the la for instance, or an accompaniment to drama, or indeed used in a religious context. So coming back then to the business about the statues and the temples and the religious context, music was also used for some kind of therapy in a religious setting. That comes out in what Aristotle has to say in the politics about music. In that case, why is it that both Plato and Aristotle so strongly connect music to education? Is it just because they assume that as children grow up, they'll be exposed to the great poems and also music at the same time? I think so. Yes, yes, I think so. I think it's because the two things go together. Right, and so then their worry would be that if children hear a certain kind of music, it will make them more violent. That's right. It's almost like people worry about video games. Yes, yes. It's like people are worrying about video games. It's like people are worrying about rock concerts. I mean the kind of concern that Plato has about the emotional effects of music are much more comparable, I think, to the kinds of concerns from time, again, depending on what's popular at the time, but people have about the effects of rock concerts on the young. It's much more that than the kind of concerns you might have about what happens if you go to a concert listening to classical music. Right. He does have this other concern, though, which is about what he calls mimesis, which means imitation. And this seems to bring us to another very strong current in Greek thinking about art, which is that art typically or maybe always is supposed to be an imitation of something else and often an imitation of nature. So in the last book of the Republic, he has this complaint that art is often only giving you a copy of something that's already a copy because, of course, the real thing would be the form. Do you think that it would be fair to say that in general in ancient Greek aesthetics, they have a tendency to think about art insofar as they think about art generally at all, that they have a tendency just to think about it as a kind of imitation? Well, the notion of imitation is very pervasive, certainly, but not everybody used it in the way Plato does. I mean, I think Plato in Republic Book Ten is rather deliberately making it sound very much like basic copying. He's got a very famous image about the painter being like somebody who's just holding up a mirror, which gets both the idea that it's just a copy and also the idea that what you're getting is something inferior, something which is just like a reflection, a mirror. So not really in three dimensions in the way that the thing in the physical world is. So that's Plato putting a particularly derogatory spin on it. But the idea can be used in quite other ways. If you look at Aristotle in the Poetics talking about tragedy as being the imitation of an action, it's actually quite puzzling in a way. But I think that's related to another thing that Aristotle says, which is a very famous claim that poetry is more universal than history. He's somehow getting at the idea that, well, he's talking particularly about tragedy, he's getting somehow getting at the idea that a tragic drama is, as we might say, conveying universal truths. And that's all tied up with the way he's using the notion of imitation. And people often want to translate it by representation because they feel that the English word imitation is too much of, if you like, the platonic downgrading of it. So yes, ancient thinking about art is very dominated by the notion of mimesis, imitational representation, but they use it very flexibly. And I think the fact that Plato's use of it in Republic is a very well-known one, in a way tends to obscure our understanding of some of the other uses of it. Right. So that sometimes it could be a more positive idea. And I guess even in Plato, right, because in the Timaeus, he says that the entire cosmos is a work of art created by someone he calls a craftsman, a demiurge. And I guess that also is an imitation, right? Because it's supposed to be an imitation of the form of living being, as he says. And do you think that then means that there is an opportunity there, at least for Platonists, to think about nature itself as an aesthetic object or something that's beautiful, because it's been created by God, for example? Yes, yes. I mean, again, in a sense, it's all tied up with tensions in Plato's metaphysics, isn't it, about the relationship between the particulars and the forms, because very often he'll talk as though the forms are what's really real and the particulars are just inferior. But on the other hand, insofar as the particulars are copies of the forms, they're copies of something that's supremely valuable. And so that gives the particulars themselves a kind of value. And that's the way he's developing it. I take it in the Timaeus, with this notion that the physical world is a copy of some kind of divine blueprint. Right. Well, that is, now that we're starting to talk about Platonism, that brings us on to something that you and I both love very deeply, which is Neoflatanism. And ultimately, I want to ask you about Proclus. But first, maybe we can stop in with Plotinus, because he actually wrote a whole treatise on beauty. What does Plotinus bring to the ancient discussion of aesthetics, would you say? Well, I mean, one way of looking at it is that indeed, he's developing just the kind of themes in Plato that we've been talking about. His treatise on beauty links up very closely with Plato's symposium, where you get the idea that beauty in the physical world can be of value because it spurs us on to eventually now having an understanding of the form of beauty. And that idea is developed by Plotinus in his treatise on beauty, but developed then into a theory of where beauty in the physical world comes from, emphasizing the fact that it comes from, as he understands it, the world of platonic forms. It's not simply something to do with the way things are arranged. So he's very critical of the Stoic idea that beauty is simply to do with symmetry of parts. He says, no, it isn't that, it comes from somewhere outside the physical world. The other way in which he's developing Platonist aesthetics links up with the ideas we were talking about, about imitation, and also with his theory of beauty. Because, and again, it's not new in Plotinus, you find it in some earlier Platonists, you find it in Cicero and in Seneca, but he's picking up an idea that was around in the middle Platonic period, that rather than just copying an object in the physical world, an artist is actually having some kind of, if you like, direct access to the Platonic forms and copying that. So this in a way is another way, a Platonist way, of making Aristotle's point about poetry and universal truths, or if you like, paintings. I mean, let's say we might say a portrait isn't just a copy of somebody because it's somehow getting something about the person's personality or something like that. So it's a Platonist way, if you like, of expressing that kind of idea, and it links up with Plotinus' view of beauty, because beauty also for Plotinus is something which comes from the world of forms, the world beyond the world of sense experience and physical reality. Does that mean that an artist might be conceived of as doing something that's almost like philosophy, so the artist is trying to get back to the form in some way? I suppose so, yes. So in that case, presumably philosophy is still better than art, right? Sorry to all you artists out there. So why is philosophy better than art? Is it because the artist comes back down and does something in the sensible world? Is that the problem? Yes. And I think also, again, in a very Platonist kind of way, the philosopher can articulate what he's saying, the philosopher understands what he's doing. I mean, one of, to go back to Plato, one of the points he's always making about art is that they don't really have knowledge, they don't really understand what they're doing or why they're doing it. Platonists probably wouldn't want to push that point quite as hard, but I think that idea is still there. And so it's the philosopher who can, as I say, articulate an understanding of what he's doing in a way that the artist can't. And of course Plato says that even about poetry. So even artists who work in words don't understand what they're doing. Yes, yes, yes. Despite my comment about people reflecting on what they're doing, Plato doesn't set any store about that. Yeah, right. I guess the part of what's going on here is Platonist's idea that if every level of reality is an image of the higher level of reality, so our world is an image of maybe the ideas in the world soul and the world soul is an image of noose and the noose is an image of the one, that will beauty always just be kind of another way of talking about the expression of the higher thing and the lower thing? Yes, yes. But I think there's also the idea that it's a particularly, because beauty fascinates us because of the charm that it exerts over us, because it attracts us, it's then a particularly powerful or particularly effective way in which we can come to grasp the effect of the higher thing on the lower thing. Right. I guess, I mean, in the sense he wants to say, I guess that beauty is like goodness, right? Because goodness is also just the effect of the higher and the lower. But presumably he doesn't want to say that beauty and goodness are just the same thing. No, he doesn't. I mean, this is where in his treatise on beauty, it's a bit confusing, because he seems at moments almost to be saying that, but at the end of the day, he doesn't want to say that, because well, I mean, one way of explaining that is to, in terms of his system, where goodness comes out from the one at the very top of the system, beauty doesn't quite belong out there. Beauty belongs in the intelligent world with the forms. And I think his ideas that beauty is that were the first, the first image, the first representation of goodness, rather than being identical with it. Well, that's maybe all worth bearing in mind now as we finally turn to Proclus, someone you've written a lot about. And maybe we can stay with this topic of poetry first, because Proclus has a problem, which I guess a lot of Platonists had, which is that he really, really loves Plato, of course, but he also really, really loves Homer. So when he gets to these bits of the Republic that you were talking about before, where Plato criticizes Homer, he's basically got one of his great heroes criticizing another great hero. So how does he handle that? Well, he's got quite an ingenious solution to the problem, which is to pick up both on the sort of ideas from Plotinus that we've been talking about, and also on what Plato has to say about art being my meatic or imitative in the last book of the Republic and Republic 10. Because Proclus has a theory that there are different types of poetry. And in particular, I think the key thing, he's got three types, but the key thing is distinction between the highest type, which is inspired poetry, and the lowest type, which is imitative or my meatic poetry. So he wants to say that all that's going on in the last book of the Republic is Plato is criticizing my meatic poetry and that you don't get very much of that in Homer. Most of Homer is inspired poetry. And inspired poetry is poetry that reflects the highest metaphysical realities, still sort of imitative, but imitating, again, this is where the notion of my meatic becomes very flexible, imitating something not directly, but in a symbolic kind of way. And again, picking up on the idea you find in Plotinus that the artist is imitating platonic forms. In Proclus, as I know you explained in the podcast about Proclus, you have this explosion of the intelligible world and description of all the different entities within it as different divinities. That then opens the way for Proclus to say that, particularly in the bits of Homer about the gods, he's not talking about gods fighting each other or having sex with each other or anything shocking like that. This is in fact a symbolic or allegorical way of talking about something which is going on indeed among his gods at the highest levels of his metaphysical system, and that all of this is a product of inspiration, so it's all okay. Possibly doesn't mean that you should just be giving it to children uncensored, because you have to understand, you have to be, to use the language of the mysteries, you have to be initiated into the mysteries in order to understand it. But once you do understand, then you realize that actually it's inspired and it's not quite as valuable as Plato, but it's still very, very valuable. Would that mean that actually something like Homer is only appropriate for people who are really quite advanced, like philosophers who have some chance of understanding the theological underpinnings of it? I think that would be the implication. I mean, he doesn't spell that out. He doesn't, he concentrates on arguing that most of Homer is inspired in this very particular way that I've been trying to explain, and so not vulnerable to Plato's criticism. He doesn't quite spell out the educational implications, but I think that would have to be what it would imply. So he could probably live with the idea then that the poet should, as it were, be kicked out of the ideal city, because most of the people in the ideal city won't be philosophers, so they shouldn't be listened to. I guess. I mean, the fact is he says remarkably little about the ideal city, even though he wrote a whole series of essays about the republic, there's very little discussion of the political side of the republic. It's much more about the psychology and the metaphysics. It strikes me actually that one similar thing that happens in later Neoplatonism is that when Aristotle criticizes Plato, some Neoplatonists respond to that by criticizing Aristotle right back, but they have a tendency instead to say, well, what Aristotle's doing here is correcting a possible misinterpretation of Plato. It sounds like Proclus is doing the same thing with Plato's criticism of Homer. Yes, I think that's a very good analogy, because there's a kind of underlying desire to say that all the great authorities really agree, and that for Proclus doesn't just mean the philosophical authorities, it doesn't just mean Plato and Aristotle, though he does want to say that. It doesn't just, but it also includes other authoritative figures in his culture, and Homer is very much one. Before we stop, I wanted to ask you about one other thing, which you mentioned way back at the beginning of our conversation, which is the fact that a lot of what we would think of as artworks from ancient culture, the things that stand around in museums now, were actually religious artifacts, for example, statues that they might put up in temples. So Proclus, it was interesting to think about what Proclus would say about that, because on the one hand, since he's a Neoplatonist, he's not a big fan of the physical world, probably, but on the other hand, he must think that these statues would be yet another way of bringing us back to the divine. So what kind of views does he have about these sorts of artworks? Well, he does indeed put things together in the way that you suggested, and statues play a particularly important role in theology, which, again, I know you've mentioned in the podcast about Proclus. One of the main rights of theology seems to be in the strange business of animating statues, but that wasn't just, we might think that's like a magic trick, it wasn't a magic trick. They thought of it as a way of actually bringing the god to dwell in the statue, and so helping us to come into contact with the divine. And again, that does tie up with Plotinus' way, though Plotinus doesn't go into theology, it ties up with Plotinus' way of talking about statues and the activity of the sculptor as being somehow representing or imitating the Platonic form. Proclus thinks that too, he used the example of the statue of Zeus by the great sculptor Phidias as being, actually interestingly, he says that Phidias was imitating Zeus as depicted in Homer, and then Homer is inspired, so it's, you know, ultimately a correct understanding of the nature of Zeus. But for Proclus that isn't just a comment about the statue as a work of art, he also says statues have this very particular role in in theology. It's very central to what he's doing, in a way, it's very central to his whole religious way of looking at things. But one of the frustrating things, well possibly frustrating things, about the way that something like Proclus talks about the theogies, you get lots of theory, you get very little of actually how to do it. So if you wanted to find out from Proclus, you know, what to do for a theogie, right, you, there's not very much at all. Right, well speaking of the practical dimension of neoflatanism, next time I'm actually going to be doing another interview on neoplatonism with Dominique O'Mara, and we'll be talking about practical philosophy and neoplatonism, in particular political philosophy, and also what the neoplatonists thought about mathematics. But for now I'll thank Anne very much for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me. And please join me next time when I will be in discussion with Dominique O'Mara here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Dominic O'Mara, who is emeritus professor of philosophy from the University of Freiburg in Switzerland. Hi, Dominic, thanks for coming on. Hi, Peter. The topic that we're going to be discussing today is Neoplatonism, and in particular, two topics you've written about in books called Platonopolis and Pythagoras Revived. So we'll start with political philosophy, which was the topic of this book, Platonopolis. And I guess the obvious thing to ask you about that is were Neoplatonists even interested in political philosophy, because there's a kind of cliched idea that this is just something they paid no attention to? Well, the conventional image that you find about, you find all Neoplatonist philosophers is that they're not interested in the physical world, they're not interested in their bodies, they're not interested in social life, they're only interested in getting away from all that stuff and transcending this physical world, transcending ordinary human society, and reaching some kind of union with some transcendent divinity, which they call the One. And they're so keen on doing this that they try to get away from any engagement in ordinary human relations or any involvement with ordinary life. And this seems to entail, according to the conventional view, that they take no interest in what it means to live well in ordinary life, how to organize one's daily existence in the world with other people. But I guess that would be a pretty strange phenomenon, right? If these Platonists, who call themselves Platonists, weren't interested in political philosophy. After all, Plato wrote maybe the greatest work ever on political philosophy, which is the Republic. He also wrote other works on political philosophy, for example, a late work called The Laws, which people don't read much anymore, but it's there. So were they interested in those works, or did they just ignore them? Yes, well, this is absolutely true. You would think that if they really did interest themselves in Plato, and if they thought that Plato was, so to speak, the philosopher, then they would be aware of this dimension of Plato. The reason people have thought that the later Neoplatonists were not interested in this side of Plato was I think because there is this idea that they're almost like monks, or they're almost like saints. There's some sort of confusion between, let's say, Christian ideas about asceticism and getting away from the world, going into the desert, and philosophers of the same period as these Christian ascetics. But in fact, of course, there were all of these texts of Plato, which they were interested in, in which they read. And I think there's also a philosophical error involved in thinking that making this world less important and taking less interest in this world, and thinking that what is more important is some other world, that this necessarily involves no interest in politics. In fact, I think putting less emphasis in daily life in this world is itself, so to speak, a political gesture and involves a political theory. And so you might say that there is also a political philosophy or an attitude to this world which suggests that our present life, our daily life, is not the best life, does not entail, logically so to speak, that you have no political theory. I guess I can see how that would work in ethics, because if you thought the things of this world were not important, then, for example, you might put less emphasis on physical pleasure or getting money, for instance. But how does it work out as a political gesture? Yes. Maybe another thing I should say is that political philosophy in antiquity is not like modern political philosophy. And if you look at people like Plato and Aristotle, they consider that the polis, or the city, or the community, is in fact a sort of unethical community, or a community in which you can realize the good, in which you can reach virtue. So it's quite different from a modern political perspective. So if we're talking about the Neoplatonists, I think we need to put them in the context of ancient political philosophy and the conception of political philosophy that you find in Plato and Aristotle. In other words, we live with others in order to attain virtue and in order to attain happiness. And this is quite different from modern conceptions. And the Neoplatonists thought also like this, that community, living with people, is a way of reaching virtue, and it is a way of reaching happiness in some way. And the purpose of political philosophy is to give us the knowledge required to realize happiness. And so political affairs, getting your political regime in the right order, would in a sense be the first step, or at least an early step, on the way to some kind of fulfilled wisdom and happiness. Is that right? Exactly. The big difference, you might say, is that the Neoplatonists didn't think that human happiness could be fully attained, completely attained, in ordinary daily life, in the ordinary social situation, and that it could only be attained in a higher life. But they also thought that a step towards this higher life was living well, living virtuously, and in a certain sense living quite happily in your ordinary life, in your ordinary material life, in your ordinary social relations. And so they introduced the idea of political happiness. And the idea of political happiness is the idea of a happiness which is, so to speak, an image or an anticipation or preparation for a higher happiness, which would be the happiness of this transcendent life, this life of intellect, in fact. Would they think if I attained the life of intellect, the true happiness, that the political happiness could just fall away, so that it's a kind of step on a ladder towards true happiness, but one that I could discard once I got off the ladder? Yes. Well, I like to think of this in two ways. You might say the political happiness and virtues are living well with other people in your material existence is a necessary step for reaching a higher kind of happiness, the happiness of pure mind. But that's just one phase, so to speak. The other phase is the phase of supposing that you've reached higher perfection and higher happiness, you're still living in this world, you still have a body, you still have people around you, you still live with them. And in fact, to the extent that you live with other people and you live a material existence, a corporeal existence, you still require, so to speak, political happiness, even if you have theoretical happiness. So in fact, political happiness leads to theoretical happiness, but if you have theoretical happiness, you still need political happiness to the extent that you live in a body with other people all around you. Right. That's really interesting. Maybe we could talk about how that plays out in specific neo-platonic thinkers. The obvious place to start would be Plotinus, because he's usually reckoned as the founder of neo-platonism. And I guess that political philosophy is certainly not what leaps to mind when most people think of Plotinus. What is there to say about Plotinus and political philosophy? I think, for reasons maybe we'll be able to go into later on, Plotinus is probably less interested than his successors in political philosophy. And we hear about him that he wanted to found a city called Platanopolis, and this was to be a city outside Rome, and he was to live there according to Plato's laws with probably friends and colleagues. And this project of founding a philosophical city, so to speak, according to Plato's laws, was not realized. The Roman emperor wouldn't give him the money. The endowment. The endowment, yes. But it is an interesting story, and I think we shouldn't neglect the fact that it is to be a city organized according to Plato's laws. We don't know whether that means that it would be a city organized according to Plato's Republic or according to Plato's laws, the book. We don't know that, but I think it's a mistake to pretend that he didn't have an interest in founding what would be a good human society, so to speak. And does that have any reflection in the Enneads, his own writings? I think it does. I think he talks now and then about how we should lead our lives. He's mostly interested in, you might say, your personal life and in your family life and in living with the people who are near you or around you. And he uses for describing these relationships, the relationships within yourself and with the people who are close to you. He uses, in fact, the model of Plato's Republic where you need to develop a sort of balanced life in which your emotions, your desires are rationally conducted and conducted in such a way that they don't, so to speak, take over the function that is proper to reason. So he does talk about it, but he seems to think of it primarily as a matter of living a balanced life yourself and living well with others. He also seems to think, he does mention at one point the idea that if you have reached theoretical wisdom, you may want to use this theoretical wisdom to translate it, so to speak, for the benefit of the people around you in improving social relationships. And there he does, this is a text and treat it says, and he had 6.9, there he does use the idea of the philosopher who descends into the cave, which you find in Plato's Republic. And speaking of the Republic, I guess we could move along to Proclus, because Proclus wrote a commentary on the Republic, or at least a set of essays on the Republic, and we would expect that that should tell us something about his political philosophy. What does it tell us? Well, in fact, you might say, if I can add a few things, the Republic is a little more present in Plotinus than one might imagine, and there are actually more references to Plato's Republic than are listed in the standard editions. Yamlokos himself was interested in Plato's Republic and interpreted it and uses it, quotes it quite extensively. And so when Proclus gets to conflict with Plato, he says, well, if you're into commenting on Plato's Republic, this is not something new. But at least we have these texts from Proclus and we don't have earlier texts which are lost. So at least in Proclus we can see what a later Neoplatonist would do with Plato's Republic. Now, why was Proclus interested in Plato's Republic? Well, he was interested in Plato's laws and he read the Politicus also, Plato's statesman. And it seems to be in the context of an interest in what is called political virtue in Plotinus and in Proclus. That is how the virtue of living well, as I have described it, in your terrestrial existence, in your material existence, in your social relationships with others, and to cultivate these political virtues, which are the virtues that Plato defines in the Republic. Proclus read Plato's Gorgias and also Plato's Republic and Plato's laws. These were the texts in which you could find information about political virtue and how to develop it. And you think that wasn't unusual that they would have been studying the Republic and the laws in his class? Or was it not in a classroom context? Was it something he was just doing on his own for his own interest? Or do we not know that? I think we can say that Proclus was a brilliant student and that he read as a brilliant student, a very industrious student, a serious student, he read as much as he could of Plato. And so he didn't content himself with a sort of a minimalistic course in readings in Plato. He read everything and he read the Republic and he read the laws. And it's probable that his better students, when he became a teacher, also were not content with the minimum course. And they also read these texts. And I imagine he wrote on Plato's Republic for these better students. And what sort of themes most interest him about the political philosophy of the Republic? What does he do with the text? Well, he's interested in a number of questions. There are a number of essays. And some of these questions are questions which are still very much discussed in Plato's studies. For example, he discusses a question at the beginning of his set of essays on the Republic as to what the Republic is about. Today there's some discussion as to whether it's really about politics or is it not more about ethics or about psychology perhaps. And Proclus discusses this question and I think has a very good way of balancing out the political and the ethical dimensions of Plato's Republic. There's another essay which I find very interesting in which he talks about Plato's idea of the philosopher Queens. And he has an interesting theory about this. He takes it quite seriously. If you think that neo-Platonists are not interested in politics, you will have a little problem with explaining why Proclus talks about philosopher Queens. And he's in favor of the idea presumably that women could be philosophers and be rulers. Absolutely. But he has a refined theory because people notice that in Plato's laws the women don't get the same, so to speak, equality. They don't have the same power in Plato's laws as they have in Plato's Republic. Women don't become rulers in Plato's laws. And so there's a problem in Plato what you do with the fact that in the Republic women can be rulers as well as men, but in Plato's laws they can't. They have a somewhat lower place. And Proclus deals with this question and his solution is to say that Plato's laws take account more of human nature. And so Plato's laws introduces things like a certain amount of inequality between the citizens, introduces the idea of private property, introduces also a certain subordination of women. This seems to have to do, you might say, with the realities of human nature. Whereas in the Republic, Plato excludes private property, excludes family life, insists on absolute equality, at least as regards to the rulers of society. And there women are no different from men, at least as far as their qualifications to rule is concerned. So Proclus regards the ideal city of Plato's Republic as an, so to speak, absolute ideal, an absolute ideal of equality, justice, harmony. But he regards Plato's laws as a, so to speak, second degree ideal. Which makes concessions to... Which makes certain concessions, exactly. And so we make some concessions to the fact that humans tend to want to have some private property. And they tend to want to have families. And then of course the concession also, and this is maybe a typically Greek concession, that maybe women, so to speak, take second place. But this, you might say, is Proclus's attempt to make sense of Plato's political philosophy in respect to the difference between an absolute ideal and the given, so to speak, the given of human nature and what might be not a reality we could realize, but an ideal for reality we could realize. Speaking of ideals, I wanted to move on to talk a little bit about Pythagoreanism in this later period of Neoplatonism. Let me ask you therefore about Pythagoras, who was perceived as a kind of ideal exemplar, both in ethics and I guess even as a political figure in later Neoplatonism. And I suppose the person to start with here would be Iamblichus, who wrote a long work on Pythagoras. So could you tell us about that and what Iamblichus did with Pythagoreanism and how he kind of reintegrated that into the history of Platonism? Yes. In a way, continuing on what we've been talking about, Iamblichus interprets Plato's Republic as being a depiction of a Pythagorean community. It's a famous Pythagorean saying that everything is shared between friends, koinata, philon. And so this idea of sharing everything, not having anything, not having any private property, for Iamblichus is clearly, so to speak, the characteristic of a Pythagorean community. So he understood the ideal state of the Republic as in fact a Pythagorean community. That phrase that everything is in common between friends is actually quoted in the Republic, right? Yes, yes. But it's an interesting take on the Republic to think of maybe that Plato might indeed have been thinking of a Pythagorean community in the Republic. At least that's Iamblichus' theory. Iamblichus is a great fabricator of a history of philosophy, which is in fact itself a philosophical statement. And so he tries to say that in fact Plato is not the source of all knowledge, he's not the philosopher, in fact Plato is himself dependent on Pythagoras, and that the real Greek source of philosophy is Pythagoras. This means that anything that's true and good, and Plato is in fact a Pythagorean. And Iamblichus, probably in polemics with Plotinus and Porphyry, tried to claim, so to speak, that his philosophy, the Pythagorean philosophy, was in fact far older than the Platonism that was represented by Plotinus and Porphyry. It was a kind of a war between them as to the Platonic heritage. Who was the true heir to Plato? Iamblichus claiming that he was the true heir to Plato because in fact Plato was Pythagorean. Iamblichus in his major work on Pythagoreanism talks about the mathematical sciences and how they lead to knowledge of divine first principles. But he seems to be mostly interested in arithmetic in this big work, of which we only have the first half. Proclus, who was much inspired by Iamblichus, however, gave more attention to geometry than to arithmetic and he seemed to think that in geometry we have an exemplary mathematical science as regards scientific method, as regards good rational method in general. And this may be the reason why Proclus, rather than talking about arithmetic, concentrated on geometry and wrote a commentary on Euclid's Elements. So you might say it's as a consequence of Iamblichus's interest in Pythagoreanism that you ended up with Proclus writing on Euclid. And this commentary on Euclid is quite fascinating because he tries to develop a sort of philosophical method of reasoning on the basis of Euclid's book in order to interpret Euclid's procedures. And so there's quite a lot about how science is constituted, what its first principles are, how you develop arguments, what kind of arguments there are, what are the parts of arguments, and all of this is developed on the basis of an interpretation of Euclid. And it's an interpretation, you might say, of the procedure of mathematical science, but with the purpose of training the mind for thinking about deeper things or more fundamental things about first principles, you practice mathematical science, and in particular geometry, as a way of getting ready, so to speak, to reach first principles with the scientific method. However, the fact that Proclus was interested in Euclid is of great significance for the history of mathematics and for science, because when a Latin translation of it was published by a mathematician, Barozzi, in the Renaissance, the Renaissance mathematicians and philosophers were absolutely fascinated in this book. They read Proclus' commentary on Euclid, and many of the methodological issues which they discussed were discussed as a result of their reading of Proclus' book. And this goes as far as Galileo, who was involved in discussions with other mathematicians of his period around issues that arose from reading Proclus' book. And of course, when Kepler got to publishing his book on the harmony of the world, he used big passages from Proclus' commentary on Euclid to talk about his astronomy. So in fact, what Iamblichus has started, so to speak, was to have considerable consequences for the history of philosophy, the history of mathematics, including Renaissance period. I suppose that the Pythagoreanism, both in Iamblichus and Proclus, who I think follows Iamblichus in this regard, shows up in maybe two ways. One is philosophical methodology, and the other is their metaphysics, which is highly mathematical. So to start with the first of those issues, what signs do we see in Iamblichus or Proclus or both that they are thinking of philosophy as a mathematical or quasi-mathematical enterprise? Can I go back a little bit? Yeah, please. Sorry. One thing I'd like to add is that Iamblichus wrote this big work, which is kind of his work, in which he tries to prove this propaganda of his, that in fact true Platonism is Pythagoreanism. And in it there's a Pythagorean Life. It's the first volume of this big work on Pythagoreanism. And in there you find a sort of picture of Pythagoras, which we still use, a major source for knowledge about Pythagoras. But it's a picture, you might say, that is also a statement of what philosophy should be or what an ideal philosopher would be in Iamblichus' time. And so if you read it like that, then you find that Pythagoras is involved in politics. He gives political advice, he's a political thinker, and he invents constitutions, and his school, of course, is very much politically involved. You could read this text again as an illustration of a vision of the philosopher that Iamblichus himself would subscribe to. But of course in this life of Pythagoras, or Pythagorean Life, that Iamblichus wrote, there is not just a facet of Pythagoras as a political philosopher, there's also the facet of Pythagoras as a mathematical philosopher. And in fact the two sides are there together, as they are in Iamblichus himself. So in the following books of this big synthesis of Pythagoreanism, which he wrote, which I think is not a collection of real evidence on ancient Pythagoreanism, but an expression more of his program, so to speak, to make a Pythagorean Platonism, you find that this aspect of Pythagoras, Pythagoras as a philosopher of number, is in fact developed very much so that philosophy turns out to be primarily mathematical science, and then the science that mathematics leads to, the science of transcendent causes, metaphysics or dialectic as Plato calls it. And they would even have seen some of the entities that you get up to study in the higher realms of philosophy as either quasi-mathematical or as actually numbers. I think this taking seriously of the idea of the importance of number and of mathematics in general is important in Iamblichus and in his successes because they actually try to fill out this program. We have this idea that everything is number or we can understand everything through number, but how do you carry this out in detail in scientific investigations? And that's actually what Iamblichus tries to do. It's actually very significant. And I think even more significant is that he seems to think that mathematical science provides us with the formulation of what rigorous scientific thinking is. And this means that mathematical concepts of order start to permeate all of the philosophical sciences in Iamblichus. Mathematical order, the order of numbers or the order of geometrical figures, provide the structures for understanding metaphysical order, the order of first causes, and also physical order, the order of things in this world. Would that mean, for example, that if you had, say, a procession of gods, of neo-platonic divine entities, that they would be considered to be analogous to numbers, so they would process in a kind of numerical fashion? Is that the sort of thing he has in mind? Exactly. So if you're a later neo-platonist involved in trying to save all of the old Greek gods and save all of these lovely stories about the birth of the gods in Homer and Aesiot, and it's kind of a mess if you want to sort it out, then all you do is you sort of take mathematical structures and you fit them into these structures, or mathematical structures, the order of numbers and the relationships between numbers, or the order of geometrical figures and the relationship between geometrical figures, provide you, so to speak, a skeleton on which you can hang all of these bits, so to speak, of old Greek religion. So the mathematisation of philosophy in Iamblichus has very important consequences for the turning of the Greek pantheon into a sort of a philosophically meaningful structure. Right. Well, that actually gives me a perfect transition to the topic of the next episode, which will in fact be the relationship between pagan neo-platonic philosophy and the emerging religion of Christianity in late antiquity. So please join me for that next time, but for now I'll thank Dominic O'Mara very much. Thank you. And join me again next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Tale of Two Cities, The Last Pagan Philosophers I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you have never sacrificed an animal to Zeus. If I'm right that you haven't, some of the credit should go to an anonymous Persian infantryman. In the year 363, this unknown soldier thrust a spear through the unarmored abdomen of the Roman emperor we call Julian the Apostate. As so often in history, if things had gone differently, the consequences could have been enormous. Had Julian not ventured into a rash campaign against the Persians, had he not rushed into battle without pulling on his armor, he might have lived. And had he lived, he might have gotten further with his project of weakening Christianity's hold on the Roman Empire, of resurrecting the pagan rituals and rededicating the temples. But as always in history, things did not go differently. Julian was mortally wounded and died sometime later. He was 32 years old and had ruled the empire for less than two years. Julian was, like Marcus Aurelius before him, a philosopher as well as an emperor. But Julian was no Stoic. He was a Platonist, and his philosophy went hand in hand with belief in the existence and power of the traditional gods. Julian was a great admirer of Iamblichus and a great believer in the pagan ritual practices known as Theurgy. Above all, he was a great opponent of Christianity. After surviving a political massacre of most of his close family, Julian was raised a Christian. But he converted to the path of paganism, hence his nickname the Apostate, applied by Christian authors who condemned him for renouncing the true faith. Julian was a scholar by temperament, and even while emperor, wrote philosophically informed works justifying his pagan worldview. This worldview informed the decisions he made during his short reign. Most notorious was his declaration that Christians would be banned from teaching throughout the empire. This was intended to block the Christians' access to the educational institutions that were so fundamental to the lifestyle of the late antique elite classes. But Julian could offer a plausible rationale, too. How could Christians teach the great works of antiquity such as Homer and Hesiod if they rejected the gods named in those texts? Julian also employed less obvious ways of undermining the Christians, for instance by making it easier for sectarian disputes to fester within the new faith. The emperor's death put an end to this short-lived experiment in pagan traditionalism. Julian was certainly not the last ancient admirer of Iamblichus, but he was the last man who could hope single-handedly to restore Iamblichus' gods to their position of undisputed honor. After Julian, pagan philosophy continued to come into conflict with Christianity, but from now on it would be the Christians who wielded imperial authority. The story of how that authority was used against Platonist philosophers is a tale of two cities, Athens and Alexandria. Both had long been centers of intellectual activity. Athens had gone through rough times in the Roman era, but its prestige as the home of Plato and Aristotle could still attract intellectual tourists, including Julian himself. As for Alexandria, it was not only the home of the famous library, but had been a center of Platonism in the early Roman Empire. So, it's no surprise that these were the cities that boasted the two most important philosophical schools of late antiquity. It has been argued that the two schools had distinct intellectual identities, with the school of Athens upholding the fervently religious Platonism of Iamblichus, and Alexandria concentrating on Aristotle and adopting a style of Platonism that reached back to the middle Platonists. But this distinction has come in for some searching criticism. The two schools were bound by student-teacher relationships, and even family ties. And if the Alexandrians failed to embrace Iamblichus' pagan enthusiasm very loudly, this was likely for political reasons. There was reason for caution in both places, but the group in Athens paid too little heed to the warning signs. The Athenian school was founded by the Plutarch I mentioned when we looked at Proclus. Again, he is not to be confused with the middle Platonist Plutarch. This later Plutarch had enough wealth and social standing to put the school on a firm footing, and it fared well through several generations. Proclus and his beloved master, Sirianus, were heads of the school during this time. But the institution was closed down by imperial edict in the year 529, when the head was a man named Damaschius. He and his associates were forced to seek asylum in the Persian Empire, though they did return after a short stay there. The golden chain of Platonist teachers and students had been broken, and it would not be reforged in the city of Athens. The closing of the school was a blow aimed directly at the philosophy inspired by Iamblichus and taught by men like Proclus and Damaschius. In fact, Damaschius thought Proclus insufficiently loyal to Iamblichus and frequently criticized him. But the Christians who appealed to the emperor Justinian to close the school would not have been interested in pagan disputes over fine points of metaphysics. Justinian was persuaded by Christian informers that the Platonists were illegally practicing divination, which became the excuse for shutting the school down. It did not come without warning. A century earlier, the other city of Platonists, Alexandria, had seen the most famous act of Christian violence against a pagan philosopher, the brutal murder of Hypatia in 415 AD. You may have noticed that just about every philosopher to feature in this podcast series has been a man. The one exception that springs to mind is the Cynic philosopher, Hyparchia. In his Republic, Plato had scandalously suggested that his ideal city would include female, as well as male, philosophers. But this had mostly remained theory rather than practice until the time of the Roman Empire. The Stoic Muzonius Rufus argued that since women possessed the same sorts of virtues as men, and are likewise rational, they should be educated, and should study philosophy. And many women in Roman society, especially of course aristocratic women, were educated and did study philosophy. We've already seen that Plotinus' circle of patrons and friends included women, and when we get to the ancient Christians, we'll see women again changing the course of philosophy, albeit that their contributions are always recorded by men. Women like Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, participated in philosophical discussions. She appears in Augustine's dialogues, like a latter-day Christian version of Socrates' teacher Diatima from Plato's Symposium. But whereas women like Monica exercised their influence within private Christian communities, Hypatia actually taught at a philosophical school. Both she and her father Theon were specialists in mathematics. In fact, Damascus, writing about Hypatia, sniffed that she was not only a woman rather than a man, but more a mathematician than a philosopher. This unattractive comment has some truth in it, because her real interest was probably in astronomy rather than Platonist philosophy. This would fit well with the fact that her father Theon wrote commentaries on the works of Ptolemy, and with the content of letters written to her by her student, the Christian Synesius. Synesius would not have been Hypatia's only student who was a Christian, and in fact it seems that Hypatia was far from being an anti-Christian pagan, like Julian the Apostate. Her death was mostly a matter of being in the wrong city at the wrong time. She was slain by a mob who were partisans of the bishop Cyril of Alexandria after she was accused of witchcraft. Hypatia's treatment was not the only case of violence against a pagan Platonist of Alexandria. A man named Hierocles was active there in the middle of the 5th century. He wrote a work Substantial Reports About Witch Survive on the topic of Providence, and a commentary on a collection of Pythagorean sayings called the Golden Verses. Hierocles was summoned before a Christian court, perhaps because he practiced theurgy. Here, he was beaten bloody. But he had the courage to scoop up some of his own blood and flick it at the judge, along with a choice quote from Homer's Odyssey, Here, Cyclops, drink this wine, now that you have eaten human flesh. This story, the closure of the school of Athens, and the death of Hypatia, suggests a context of unrelieved suppression and even savagery against pagans. But it's been suggested that Hypatia's shocking murder actually made it easier for a pagan school to arise in the following century, because many citizens were appalled by this killing of an innocent woman. When it did arise, the school was gathered around a man with a name that will sound familiar, Ammonius. This third ancient Platonist named Ammonius followed the lead of Hypatia in having both Christian and pagan students. In fact, Demaschius bitterly criticized Ammonius for making a deal with the local Christian authorities, which may explain the absence of references to theurgy and other typically-Yamblikian themes in the works of his school. His prudent approach was continued by the last pagan head of the Alexandrian school, whose name was Olympia Doris. He was clearly seeking peaceful coexistence with the Christians when, in his commentaries, he suggested that his audience might prefer to interpret the various divine entities of the Neoplatonic system as attributes of a single god. Mostly steering clear of more controversial subjects, the school concentrated on something both pagans and Christians could appreciate, Aristotle's logic. This may seem surprising, given that Ammonius and his students were committed Platonists, but the pedagogical setting of their work is crucial. Following Porphyry, they saw Aristotle as being fundamentally in harmony with Plato. And, as Platonists, they assumed that the works of Aristotle were more appropriate as an introduction to philosophy. The dialogues of the divine Plato were reserved for more advanced study. Thus, their school commentaries tend to focus on Aristotle, since it was his texts that were above all being taught in lectures for students. Just as there are more books printed every year on basic geometry than on advanced topology, so the ancients wrote more commentaries on Aristotle than on Plato, and more on the introductory subject of logic than on advanced disciplines like metaphysics. If this also helped the pagan teachers to avoid alienating Christian students and angering Christian bishops, so much the better. This also meant that the activities of the school could be carried on much as before by Christian Platonists. After Olympiodorus, the tradition of commentary on Aristotle was continued by his Christian students, one of whom sported the wonderful name David the Invincible. By this time, Christianity itself was invincible. There was no need to shut down the school of Alexandria by imperial edict, as had been done in Athens. In the 5th century, the Christians had beaten pagans like Hierocles, in the 6th century, they simply joined them. Olympiodorus's Christian students did not even hesitate to write down his ideas about Plato's dialogues, just as Ammonius's students had recorded his lectures. These student notes are the commentaries that survive today. Both Damascus and Olympiodorus taught Plato by following the instructions of the Iamblichus and beginning with dialogues they saw as introductory and ethical. But even these supposedly introductory, more ethical dialogues were quietly given of religious interpretation by the Neo-Platonists. For instance, the Phaedo, the dialogue that depicts Socrates's death and his final conversation about the soul's immortality, was taken to concern not just immortality, but the purification of our souls. Demaschius and Olympiodorus took seriously this dialogue's remark that philosophy can be understood as a kind of preparation for death. We're lucky enough to have commentaries, or at least sets of notes, on the Phaedo by both Damascus and Olympiodorus. Their approaches are strikingly different. Where Olympiodorus faithfully follows earlier Platonists, especially Proclus, Damascus rarely misses an opportunity to strike off in new directions. Indeed, he goes out of his way to reject the interpretations of Proclus and Iamblichus, which, by the way, are known to us mostly because they are quoted in these later commentaries. Yet, the goal of all these Neo-Platonists is the same, not only to interpret Plato, but also to vindicate him. They are still aware of attacks by long-dead opponents of Plato, such as the Aristotelian philosopher Strato. They quote these criticisms and rebut them forcefully. But ironically, they often use Aristotelian concepts in doing so. A good example is Damascus's handling of one rather unpersuasive argument in the Phaedo, which tries to prove the immortality of Sol. The argument is that everything comes in cycles from its opposite. For instance, justice comes from what is unjust and vice versa. This means that what goes from life to death should come back to life again. Thus, the death that befalls us at the end of our present life is only a temporary condition, which will be followed by another life in the future. Damascus does two things to show that this argument might be better than it looks. First, he readily admits that the argument is too weak to prove the Sol's immortality all by itself, as Iamblichus had claimed with his characteristic enthusiasm. For Damascus, Socrates's goal is only to show that the Sol will go through many lifetimes while admitting that it may run out of steam eventually. That possibility will be ruled out by different arguments, which come later in the Phaedo. A second way that Damascus lowers the stakes is to claim that Socrates is simply assuming that death is a condition the Sol can be in, rather than sheer non-existence for the Sol. For Sol to be dead, on this assumption, is merely for it to be separate from body. Damascus remarks that the Sol is thus a substance that acquires the accidents of being alive and dead, that is, connected to and then separate from the body. I think we should give Damascus some credit here. He's right, I would say, that in the Phaedo, Socrates just assumes that Sol and body are two different things, and that death is nothing more than the separation of Sol from body. And maybe the argument from opposites is merely supposed to persuade us that what gets separated is liable to be joined again. Perhaps Sol will not get the very same body back, but it will be connected again to some body or other, just as what is hot is liable to get cold, and vice versa. Also, we should admire, or at least notice, how Damascus effortlessly draws on Aristotle in defending Plato. The idea of a substance that survives through the alternation of accidents is pure Aristotelianism, after all. The novelty resides in his applying that idea to the Sol, and using it to explain the limited goals of Plato's argument. Damascus's most famous work is not this commentary on the Phaedo, but a long and complex treatise called On Principles. Here, Damascus grapples with the system handed down to him from Iamblichus and Proclus. He does not follow them slavishly. Rather, he raises, and then resolves, problems that arise within this late Neoplatonic system. His most important contribution comes towards the beginning of the work, when he tackles the difficult problem of the first principle itself. As we've seen, Platonists since even before Plotinus had argued that all things come from a transcendent source of unity, the One. It is meant to be utterly transcendent above the things it produces, a divinity beyond other divinities. And yet, it is still supposedly producing these things. It is somehow a cause for them. But how can this be, asks Damascus. In general, causes are related to their effects, and share characteristics with them. For instance, fire is hot, and gives heat to the things it affects. But if this first principle relates to, and shares characteristics with, the things it produces, then won't this compromise its transcendence? Though Proclus had raised the same worry, as we saw, Damascus accuses him and other Neoplatonic predecessors of trying to have their cake and eat it too. They insist that the One is completely removed from all things, and above all description, because it is so exalted. But in the next breath, they add that the One is intimately connected to all things, because it is the ultimate source of unity. Damascus decides to blow out the candles on this cake, and let darkness fall. If we are going to have a transcendent first principle, we should accept that it really is beyond all description. Drawing inspiration from Iamblichus, Damascus calls it simply the ineffable, cautioning us that even this name is misleading, because the first principle cannot even be said to be ineffable. He distinguishes this ineffable from the One, which we can describe to some extent simply by calling it One. However, even this One should not come into relation with anything else by giving it unity. Damascus instead envisions, following the ineffable, a highest One that is aloof from all things, remaining secluded in its utter unity, and only then, a second, lower One that actually bestows unity on everything. Thus, where Proclus had a single first principle called the One, Damascus winds up with three, the ineffable, the highest One, and the lower One from which unity streams forth to other things. Even fans of Neoplatonism may feel that things have gotten out of hand here. Surely, the whole point of the One is that there is, well, only one of them. But cast your mind back, if you will, to the middle Platonists. We saw that before Plotinus, figures like Numenius suggested that there should be two versions of the first principle, already called the One. The point of this was precisely that there should be a completely unified, transcendent principle, and then another god who would carry out the role of the divine craftsman of Plato's Timaeus. This is the One who gets his hands dirty by actually relating to the rest of the universe. Plotinus reacted by identifying the lower One with a universal intellect. Damascus, following Iamblichus, has effectively undone Plotinus' good work and re-established the middle-Platonic distinction between the types of principle. One that is exalted, one that condescends to cause other things. But he goes the middle Platonists one better, if you'll pardon the pun, by positing the ineffable even beyond the more exalted One. It would have been interesting to see the next move in this metaphysical chess game. But there was no next move, because paganism itself was swept off the board, leaving only the bishops. Demaschius was the last author to engage in the extravagant metaphysical speculation of late Neoplatonism. This is not to say that Neoplatonism itself died after Demaschius, far from it. But after him, Neoplatonism was domesticated within the revealed monotheistic religions. No longer would conceptual distinctions be drawn ever more sharply so as to accommodate the various divinities of traditional Greek religion. The pagans were now on the run, in the most literal of senses. This is shown poignantly by the career of a man who studied with Demaschius in Athens and with Ammonius in Alexandria. His name was Simplicius. He fled to Persia in the entourage of Demaschius, and his works allude to the difficult situation facing pagan philosophy in Athens. Some of his commentaries on Aristotle may even have been written in Persian exile. Wherever they were written, we should be thankful to Simplicius for his labors. These were commentaries unprecedented in their size and detail. He used them as an opportunity to record not only the ideas of previous commentators, especially Alexander of Aphrodisias, but also texts of early Greek thinkers mentioned by Aristotle. To provide context for Aristotle's discussion, Simplicius went to the trouble of copying these out in his commentary, often verbatim. Without Simplicius, we would know much less of Parmenides, for instance, and also lack many fragments from other Presocratic philosophers. This was not mere pedantic completism on Simplicius's part. His commentaries, scholarly and dry though they may be, are haunted by the sense that the pagan heritage is fading out of history. His writings are a candle lit against what he sees as the encroaching darkness of Christianity. Simplicius constantly seeks to show the unity and power of pagan Greek thought, and is thus one of the foremost defenders of the idea that Plato and Aristotle were fundamentally in agreement on all significant points of doctrine. He goes further by insisting that the Presocratics too were in harmony with these doctrines. Even Stoic philosophers could be embraced within the pagan philosophical family. Though Simplicius would have had no sympathy with Stoic materialism, he devoted a commentary to the Handbook of Epictetus, portraying it as a useful text for introductory ethics. It has been suggested that Epictetus's advice on greeting tyranny with fortitude struck a chord with Simplicius living under the shadow of the Christian emperor Justinian. Whether or not this is true, Simplicius's writings were clearly motivated by the hope of keeping alive the unified tradition of pagan philosophy. Naturally, then, Simplicius was horrified when a fellow student of Ammonius, a Christian Philoponus, had the temerity to criticize a fundamental tenet of Aristotelian philosophy. So horrified was he that he took the trouble to quote Philoponus's arguments at great length, much as he'd done with the texts of Presocratics and others. In this case, he wrote down the arguments not to preserve them, but to expose their stupidity. This turns out to have been a mistake. Modern scholars have found Philoponus's arguments not stupid, but amongst the cleverest bits of philosophy in late antiquity. The quotations are thus typically taken out of context and read without Simplicius's sarcastic and hostile rebuttal. Let this be a lesson. If you are ever attacking someone in print, don't do them the favor of carefully recording everything they said. What issue was at stake in this heated debate, sparked by Aristotle but stoked by the fires of pagan Christian conflict? You won't have to wait an eternity to find out, but only until the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, For a Limited Time Only, John Philoponos. Modern day scientists estimate that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. That's a very long time. You could watch every movie Buster Keaton made, even the talkies, and still be left with about 13.69999 billion years to kill. In fact, given 13.7 billion years, I could probably just about finish this series of podcasts on the history of philosophy. Well, if I pick up the pace a bit. And yet, as staggeringly large as this amount of time may be, it is as nothing compared to the age of the universe according to Aristotle. You could double it, triple it, or for that matter multiply it by one billion and get no closer. For Aristotle, the universe has already existed for an infinitely long time and will never stop existing. Moreover, the universe has always been pretty much the way it is now. It has always been spherical, with an outer sphere of fixed stars at the edge containing more nested spheres with planets seated upon them, and at the center, the region of air, earth, fire, and water inhabited by humans, plants, and animals, all of which are likewise eternal in species. Aristotle's commitment to an eternal universe was so emphatic that no ancient philosopher seriously questioned it. Convenient doubts about Aristotle's confidence would be raised only later by medieval thinkers like Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. So for ancient thinkers, the question was rather, what about Plato? Some middle Platonists, notably Plutarch and Atticus, read Plato's dialogue Timaeus as endorsing a beginning in time for the universe, and were happy to say that on this point Plato was right and Aristotle wrong. But from Plotinus onwards, Platonists took this to be a misreading of Plato. Some, like Porphyry and other commentators on Aristotle, might have been motivated by their desire to make Aristotle agree with Plato whenever possible. But they had other reasons. If the physical universe is a necessary effect of transcendent causes, which give rise to it like shining lights or overflowing fountains, how could the universe be anything other than eternal? Thus all the figures we call Neo-Platonists accepted its eternity and also believed that, in doing so, they were in agreement with both Plato and Aristotle. Until that is, the year 529, when a Neo-Platonist named John Philoponus wrote a massive work arguing that the universe is not eternal and that Plato knew it. The treatise was called Against Proclus, reasonably enough given that it demolished a series of pro-eternity arguments collected by Proclus. The arguments given by Proclus drew not only on Aristotle's physical theories, but also on Platonist interpretations of Plato's Timaeus. For instance, in his first argument, Proclus argued that the world results from its creator's goodness or generosity, something implied in the Timaeus which says that the divine craftsman is not envious. Since the creator is permanently generous, the results of his generosity must likewise be permanent. Otherwise, the creator would change, suddenly acquiring the necessary generosity or ability to create which had previously been lacking. This was only the first of 18 arguments, which Philoponus refuted at immense length. Each of Proclus's arguments is set out in about a page or two, whereas the English translation of Philoponus's Against Proclus runs to four volumes. But wait, there's more. In another treatise called Against Aristotle, he tore into the arguments for eternity found in Aristotle's works The Physics and On the Heavens. The original version is lost but extensively preserved by the commentator Simplicius, who did to Philoponus what Philoponus had done to Proclus, quoting his opponent in order to refute him. Simplicius was not well pleased about Philoponus's temerity in attacking the great Aristotle. He compares his labors to the task of Hercules, who had to clean horse manure out of the largest stables in Greece. He uses various terms of abuse for Philoponus, but especially delights in calling him the grammarian. This is probably meant to call attention to the fact that Philoponus never headed a philosophical school and pursued a career on a lower rung of the educational curriculum. Yet this grammarian is now recognized as one of the most innovative philosophers of his era. His critique of Aristotle takes much of its power from his expertise in the texts he is attacking. Philoponus, like Simplicius himself, had studied at the feet of Ammonius in the city of Alexandria, though apparently not at the same time, since Simplicius claims never to have met his antagonist in person. And like Simplicius, Philoponus wrote a number of commentaries on Aristotle. Of these, some are apparently faithful recordings of the lectures of Ammonius. Others report on these lectures while occasionally weaving in Philoponus's own innovative ideas. And in fact, Philoponus continued to comment on Aristotle after he began his campaign against the eternity of the universe. What was his motivation? Certainly, he insists that Plato rejected the world's eternity. For many Platonists, that might have been reason enough to disagree with Aristotle, but not for Philoponus. In Against Proclus, he says that although Plato happens to have been right on this point, it is the truth that matters and not Plato's authority. He then provocatively lists a whole series of claims found in Plato that are just plain wrong. For some of these, Philoponus draws on his expertise in another field, medicine. Philoponus did not reject eternity because he was a Platonist, then. He rejected it because he was a Christian. Indeed, this may be the explanation of his nickname, Philoponus. It means lover of work, and given its length, Against Proclus alone would earn him that role. James Brown may have been the hardest working man in show business, but Philoponus was definitely the hardest working man in the eternity business. Still, the nickname probably has a quite different explanation. The term Philoponoi referred to certain Christians who had no clerical role but supported the cause of the faith and often agitated against the pagans in Alexandria. Our John Philoponus may have been a member of this group. We saw last time that pagan teachers like Ammonius frequently had Christian students, and that this relationship was fraught but often respectful. In Alexandria especially, pagans went out of their way to find common ground with Christians. To the examples I mentioned last time, we can add that Ammonius himself, who wrote a whole work to show that for Aristotle, God was a cause not just of motion, but of the very being of the universe, a thesis that was of course also dear to the Christians. It is likely no coincidence that Philoponus chose to break ranks in 529, the very year in which the Platonist school of Athens was closed down by an imperial edict. Perhaps he was bidding for the headship of Alexandria? If so, Philoponus failed. He was passed over for the pagan Olympiodorus. But Philoponus didn't need to be the school head to know his Aristotle thoroughly. This is the difference between Philoponus and other Christians who attacked the Neoplatonists on this same issue. In particular, two Christians from the city of Gaza named Aeneas and Zacharias had already written about the eternity debate. Particularly fascinating is Zacharias's work, a dialogue featuring as one of the main characters none other than Ammonius. In the dialogue, Ammonius is reduced to silence by a series of anti-eternity arguments. But in fact, though both of these Gazan thinkers had been taught by Neoplatonists, the arguments they mount fall far short of Philoponus's sophistication. Because the pagans offered numerous arguments for eternity, Philoponus has to fight on many fronts. Some of their arguments relied on features of the universe we see around us. Though Proclus does use arguments of this kind, they are mostly found in Aristotle. For instance, he had argued for eternity on the basis that the heavenly bodies must be made out of an ungenerated and incorruptible substance. The pagans also thought they could show that divine principles must give rise to an eternal universe. We already saw one such argument, Proclus's first proof which invokes God's generosity. And in general, Proclus is the main opponent when it comes to metaphysical or theological arguments for eternity. Aristotle, by contrast, is the main target when it comes to physics and the nature of the heavens. First then, let's see how Philoponus takes on Aristotle's physical arguments for the world's eternity. As I say, these invoked the unique characteristics of the heavenly bodies to show that these are bodies that can be neither generated nor destroyed. Aristotle thought this could be proved from the fact that the heavens move in a circle, unlike air, fire, earth, and water, which move in straight lines, either away from or towards the midpoint of the universe. The thing about circular motion, Aristotle observed, is that it has no contrary. For one motion is contrary to another if it begins where the other motion stops and stops where the other begins. But a circular motion starts and stops in the same place. If you walk in a circle, no matter how big or how small, you will always wind up where you started, something familiar to anyone who has ever gotten lost in a forest. Furthermore, things are always destroyed by their contraries. Thus, if the heavens move in circles, as they evidently do, they have no contraries and thus cannot be destroyed. This is ingenious, albeit perhaps not the most convincing bit of philosophy ever to flow from Aristotle's pen. Philoponus makes short work of it, pointing out that the contrary we are interested in here is not a motion in a contrary direction, but the complete absence of motion. What we are asking, in other words, is not whether the heavens can move a different way, like fire being forced to move down instead of up, but whether the heavens can come from, and be reduced to, non-existence. And here we get to the real core of Philoponus's disagreement with Aristotle. As we saw what seems like an eternity ago, Aristotle wrestled with the question of how to explain change without saying that things pop into existence from nothing or get destroyed into nothing. He agreed with pre-Socratics like Parmenides that such absolute change is impossible. Instead, he offered his analysis of matter and form. In any change, a surviving subject, the matter, gains or loses some feature, the form. For instance, if a stone becomes hot, nothing comes suddenly into existence or vanishes, a continuously existing stone simply gains a new property, namely heat. Philoponus wants instead to insist that God can create something from nothing. He cleverly adds that even in the kinds of change recognized by Aristotle, something does come into being from nothing, namely the new property that is gained. That is, even if a hot stone comes to be from something else, namely a cold stone, the heat that appears in the stone comes to exist after not existing. But Philoponus is only getting warmed up. So far, he's questioned a long-standing assumption of Greek philosophy that nothing comes to be from nothing. Now, he wants to question a newer assumption of Neoplatonists that Plato and Aristotle pretty much agree about everything. He points out that according to Plato's Timaeus, the heavens are not made of a special fifth kind of matter, as Aristotle thinks, but out of pure versions of the elements we find down in our world, predominantly fire. This brings us back to his other work of refutation, Against Proclus. There, Philoponus spends a lot of time on interpretive questions concerning Plato's dialogues, especially the Timaeus. He wants to show that Proclus was wrong not only about the world's eternity, but also in his interpretation of Plato. Proclus insisted that a divine cause, like the demiurge or the forms, cannot begin to produce their effects after not doing so. Philoponus retorts that this would make the causes somehow dependent on their own effects. Proclus, after all, seems to be saying that the causes are incapable of existing without producing those effects. And here, we've come to the real core of his disagreement with Proclus. Philoponus objects to the idea that God is forced to create a universe at all, that he produces what comes after him unnecessarily, as Neoplatonists have been saying since Plotinus. This explains Philoponus's relentless attention to the eternity question. He is trying to safeguard the idea that God freely bestows existence on a universe that would otherwise not exist. That underlies another typically clever move where he turns to his own advantage a passage in Plato that, at first, looks better for Proclus. Plato has the divine craftsman promise that the universe will never pass out of existence once it has been made. So, the universe is eternal, after all, at least in the future. But now Philoponus pounces. If the universe must exist at all times, past, present, and future, what is the point of having God promise not to destroy it? The passage confirms that for Plato, it is up to God how long the universe will exist. But in that case, mightn't God have decided, perhaps for reasons beyond our grasp, to create an eternal cosmos rather than one that begins to exist? To put it another way, if God can do anything, it looks like the universe might be eternal, or it might not. It's up to God. Here, though, Philoponus points out that God cannot do anything impossible, and it is indeed impossible that the universe has already existed eternally. His chief argument for this claim is as powerful as it is simple. If the universe were eternal, it would already have existed for an infinite time. But, an infinite time cannot ever finish elapsing, so we could never have reached the present moment. Here, he can yet again turn his enemies' weapons against them, because Aristotle himself said that infinity cannot be traversed or completed. This is why Aristotle was worried about Zeno's dichotomy paradox—remember the tennis court example. Zeno suggested that every motion, in fact, consists of an infinity of sub-motions. To this, Aristotle replies that a motion, or a distance, or a time, is only potentially divisible into infinity. You can cut it up as fine as you want, but you will never actually get an infinity of parts. Philoponus, thus, needs only to say that an eternal pastime would give us an actual infinity and not only a potential one. Even worse, it would be an actual infinity that is getting bigger all the time. The world has already existed for an infinite number of years, and each January, that infinite number grows by one. Since Aristotle rejected the possibility of actual infinities, or the idea that infinity could be increased, these look like devastating objections. Simplicius, however, responds that past eternity is in fact only potentially infinite. An actual infinity is one which is simultaneously present in its entirety—for instance, an infinite number of divisions that are actually made in a motion or a line. But past eternity is not like this, since the times and things of the past no longer exist. This debate, appropriately, is going to go on and on, finding echoes especially among philosophers in the Islamic world, some of whom adopt Philoponus's arguments, with others repeating Simplicius's replies. As for Philoponus, by the time he was done with the eternity debate, he had thoroughly undermined Aristotle's system of natural philosophy. This led him to make other adjustments to that system, of which I'm going to mention just the most momentous. In fact, it concerns the issue of momentum. What causes a moving object, like a thrown javelin, to continue moving? When you are in the act of throwing the javelin, and your hand is still in contact with it, obviously your hand is causing the javelin to move. But once it leaves your hand, it seems to be moving without being caused to move, at least until it lands on the ground some distance away. To avoid admitting that the javelin's motion is indeed uncaused, Aristotle devised the following ingenious, albeit totally false, theory. As it leaves your hand, the javelin is pushing air out of the way. The air needs to go somewhere, so it pushes back around the javelin until it winds up pushing the javelin from behind. After all, as the javelin continues flying forward, the space just behind it is available for the displaced air to rush in. Weirdly then, the javelin powers its own motion by shoving air back around itself and using this air as a kind of engine. The only reason the javelin can't continue flying indefinitely in this way is that the air resists being moved around. Hence, the javelin will fall back to the ground after a certain distance. In a related argument, Aristotle observed that the less resistance a moving thing encounters, the more easily and more quickly it will move. If this is right, then in a void, which offers no resistance at all, every motion should be infinitely fast. From this, Aristotle concludes that void is impossible. Philoponus is not impressed by these arguments and offers a new theory, which has been compared to the modern theory of impetus. In fact, Galileo will mention him by name in his own writings on motion. For Philoponus, things do not move because of any displaced air. He mocks Aristotle's theory by asking why armies don't launch javelins at their enemies using bellows to create gusts of wind. Rather, when you throw a javelin, you impress into the javelin a certain amount of power for moving. The javelin will move until the power runs out. All that air can do is get in the way. This means that motion could in fact occur in a void. If you threw a javelin in a void, it would go further than it does in air because there is no resistance, but it would still stop because you have not imparted to it an infinite power to move. This is not to say that Philoponus thinks that void really exists. In fact, he denies that it does. He just wants to insist that void is theoretically possible, and that motion would work just fine, in fact better, in a void than through mediums that offer resistance. Philoponus's innovative theory of impetus turns out to relate to his views on eternity. Since he rejects Aristotle's idea that the elements and heavens eternally move in straight lines and circles by nature, he needs to explain how it is that they do move. His answer is that God Himself imparts to these bodies whatever power they have. Thus, He makes all motion depend on God, as Aristotle had done, but in a much more direct way. God gives each thing its motion by giving it existence and a certain power to move. Though the universe has not always existed, Philoponus probably agrees with Plato that it will exist forever into the future. This is not because it has the natural capacity to be eternal, as Aristotle claims, but to the contrary, because God overrides the physical universe's natural tendency to corrupt. He gives it an unnatural, infinite power to continue existing and moving. In Philoponus, we have a man deeply engaged with the pagan philosophical tradition, especially the tradition of commentary on Aristotle and Plato. This is why I placed him here, as part of our examination of that tradition. But, as we have seen, his philosophy was motivated partially by his Christianity. He wasn't the only one. There were many philosophically-minded Christians in antiquity, and they will keep us busy for a good number of episodes. Before we leave the pagans, though, I'd like to look more deeply at Philoponus and the other commentators on Aristotle who produce the largest body of surviving philosophical writing in the ancient world. I'll be joined by a guest who knows better than anybody how large that body of commentaries is, since he's been instrumental in getting most of it translated into English. I hope this gives you an impetus to join me next time for an interview with Richard Sorabji here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the ancient commentators on Aristotle with Richard Sarabji, who is an emeritus professor of philosophy at King's and an honorary fellow at Wolfson College. Hi, Richard, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's very nice to be back, Peter. You're a particularly appropriate person, maybe the most appropriate person I could have, to talk about the ancient commentators, because for many years you've been running a translation series, The Ancient Commentators Project, at King's, which I think is just about to produce its hundredth volume, is that right? That's right. Can you start maybe by telling us how you got the idea for this very ambitious project and how it came to fruition? Well, when I was a very young lecturer in my first job in America at Cornell University, I said to an older colleague, Norman Kretzmann, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have a translation of the ancient commentators on Aristotle? I was very ignorant in those days. I merely thought it would be so useful for understanding Aristotle, which was true. I didn't realize how interesting they were in their own right. And 20 years later, Kretzmann was chairman of the committee, which was deciding on grants for translation projects for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the main American government federal fund for funding humanities. And he asked his committee, when they'd done their year's work and selections, what would be the ideal application we'd like to see? And every member of the committee suggested something. He suggested the ancient commentators on Aristotle. And they all voted for that as the number one choice. So it came about that I was asked whether I would do that, although I'd have to apply. And I said no. Why did you say no? Well, I said, look, I want to write my own books on various subjects in the history of philosophy. And how would I ever have time to do anything except this? And then I said, look, I'll show you that it's impossible. And I wrote to 50 colleagues and said, this would be impossible, wouldn't it? All over the world. Well, I got back 49 out of 50 saying, no, you must do it. And 13 of them said, furthermore, I've actually drafted a translation of something that only I thought nobody would be interested. Would you like to see it? So you were stuck? Well, I was almost stuck. I wasn't quite stuck yet because I said, yes, but look, even so, I said, I wouldn't do it without having research assistance, because I still worried that I wanted to write other things as well. So that was worked out. But even after that, I had to write the proposal and it had to be checked by 58 referees, because that was their rules in those days. And there was one more snag before it finished. Well, what was the snag then? Just before the final deadline, the NEH contacted me and said, there's been a difficulty. The most distinguished scholar of ancient philosophy at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton has expressed his very strong disapproval of your project. He has said, it is quite impossible to get this fellow, Sirabji, to translate or organize translating the commentators before the text has been improved. And you refused to grant to my very best pupil for editing just one volume or rather two volumes, a two volume work in this series. Well, if you're not going to improve the Greek text first by re-editing it, you shouldn't be paying anybody to translate it. So I said, oh, that's fine. And I was nearby in Princeton at the time. So I went round to the Institute of Advanced Studies and knocked on the door of this great man. And I said, you don't know me, but I'd like to talk because I think we've got a great opportunity. It seems to me this is a chance to say to the National Endowment for the Humanities that both of our projects should be funded, the re-editing and the translating, on the condition that both parties exchange all their information. Don't you think that would be a good idea? And happily, this great man was delighted with the proposal and wrote to the National Endowment to back it. And so that's how we got to where we are today. That's right. You said that one of your original motivations for this whole project and for reading the commentators more generally is that they can help us to understand Aristotle. And I guess that that has also come to fruition. So can you give us a few examples of where they've helped you to understand Aristotle better? Yes. Well, I've got a paper just published this week about five lines of Aristotle and what the commentators said about those lines, lines which they took to be giving Aristotle's view of the meaning of nouns and verbs. It relates to modern questions about whether we have representations in ourselves when we mean something, and if so, whether those representations are likenesses or symbols. Aristotle mentions both likenesses and symbols in these five lines. And you realise when you read the commentators, you have to be very, very careful if you want to see what Aristotle meant. He starts by saying that names and verbs are symbols of thoughts, except that he doesn't put it quite so simply because he uses a roundabout phrase, what is in names and verbs? And instead of thoughts, he says experiences. But that's how the commentators take it. Names and verbs are symbols of thoughts. And he says equally, sounds are symbols of thoughts, not of things. You might have thought they were symbols of things. No, they're symbols of thoughts. And then he says that these thoughts are likenesses of things. So likenesses have now come in. Now, it's very interesting to figure out why he switched from symbols to likenesses. Symbols of thoughts, likenesses of things, but it's the thoughts that are likenesses of things. Why, the commentators ask. And so many other questions are raised. Aristotle goes on to say that thoughts and things are the same for all, although languages differ from each other. Are thoughts and things the same for all? What if people have different concepts or imperfect concepts? All these things have to be discussed by the commentators. And finally, one very interesting thing that happened was that one of the commentators, Porphyry, says that there are three types of names and verbs that are being discussed in this passage. There are written names and verbs. There are spoken names and verbs. And then there's a special mentalese, in other words, a mental language, which isn't the same as a spoken sound at all and isn't the same as a written mark at all. There's a special mental name, mental verb, an idea that's been reinvented by Jerry Fodor in modern philosophy. Now, you see how much they get just out of five lines and how much they make us think about what Aristotle meant. So, would that be, for example, someone talking silently in their minds in Greek, or is the idea that mentalese would be the same for anybody no matter what language they're speaking? Or can we not tell? It would be the same for everybody no matter what language they would speak in. And it would have linguistic structure, but it wouldn't be any particular language then? That's right. That's right. Well, most of these commentators, including Porphyry, who you just mentioned, are of course Neoplatonists. And I suppose that that might lead us to expect that their interpretations of Aristotle would in some ways be quite distorted, or are their interpretations of Aristotle just more interesting because they're reading him from a Neopatonic point of view? They are more interesting for that reason. One thing is that they wanted to make Aristotle agree with Plato. Eventually, that was in order to get Christians off their back who were saying, you pagans all contradict each other. They were saying, no, no, no, all pagan philosophers agree with each other. Consequently, they had to change Aristotle, transform Aristotle, to make him more like Plato. And they interpreted him as believing in a creator god, which I don't think is true in any straightforward way, and as believing in an immortal individual human soul. You find the creator god idea in Ammonius, you find the immortal individual human soul in Themistius, at least as Thomas Aquinas interpreted Themistius. So Aristotle's being assimilated to Plato, but Plato is also being reinterpreted to assimilate him to Aristotle. Because Aristotle complained about Plato, look here, Plato, you believe in transcendent forms which explain things and cause things in the universe. It's the form of justice which causes examples of justice in the physical world. What Aristotle complained is, look, your form of justice is a universal. It's not a particular instance of justice. It's justice taken universally. Now universals aren't the sort of thing that can be causes. Well under pressure, these Neoplatonists reinterpreted Plato and they said, oh, well, Plato never meant, perhaps they were right or perhaps they were wrong, Plato never meant the forms to be universals. That was just a mistake to think that. He only meant that they were causes. And they're perfectly good causes. So Aristotle got Platonized and Plato got Aristotleized. And that was very important. In that case, I would actually say that they've got a better reading of Plato as a result, because at least I would say that it's wrong to conceive of Platonic forms as universals. I don't know if you agree with me about that. It seems to me that the universal particular contrast is something that comes in with Aristotle and not something that we would necessarily want to foist on Plato. Well, I absolutely agree with you that it's Aristotle who insists on this interpretation of Plato. I'm agnostic about what Plato actually thought, but yours is a perfectly reasonable interpretation. You've just been talking about the fact that they're very keen to show the harmony between Plato and Aristotle, I guess, especially beginning with Porphyry. But something else that they're keen to do is show the harmony of Aristotle with Aristotle, because they don't think that he ever changes his mind. And so within a given work and also across the entire Aristotelian writings, they want Aristotle to be consistent. And that means, I guess, that they need to, for example, try to relate works on logic to works in physics or metaphysics. So could you say something about how they do that? So how they read Aristotle through Aristotle, so to speak? Yes, I could take an example from the greatest of the commentators in the Aristotelian school before the Neoplatonists started up, Alexandre of Aphrodisias. He was defending Aristotle against his rivals, the Stoics. He tended to say either the Stoics are completely wrong or else, well, the Stoics are right, but they're just repeating what Aristotle had already said. One thing the Stoics believed in was that history would repeat itself exactly, and that you and I would return in the next cycle of the universe, and we'd be giving this podcast with no memory of having done it an infinite number of times before. There's something to look forward to. I agree. Except we'd have no memory. And what Alexandre did was, in order to attack this theory, which is something we classify, I think, as metaphysics, using a term taken from Aristotle himself, about what constitutes the same person. That's the area in which this subject arises. But he takes a remark from Aristotle's physics. Aristotle is talking about motions, and he takes the example of walking, and he says in the physics that you don't have one and the same walk unless it's the same walker, and it's uninterrupted, so it's all happening in one continuous bit of time. And then, Alexandre applies that to this metaphysical question. He says the Stoics must be wrong that it could be you and me, exactly the same people, who recur in the next cycle of the universe, because just as with walking, after an interruption, it's going to be a different walk, so also with you and me, it's going to be a different pair of people doing the podcast in the next cycle of the universe, because there's been an interruption. Here he's applying something that Aristotle said within the context of physics and the idea of motion or change to a metaphysical question in order to attack the rivals of the Aristotelians, the Stoics. So what Alexandre is responding to then is that even if the same events seem to be occurring in another cycle of the universe, at best we'd only have two people who look very like Richard and Peter sitting here in a place that looks very like this room doing this interview, is that right? That's right. There might be even exact similarity, but exact similarity does not amount to numerical identity, to use Aristotle's term. That example seems to me to illustrate something that's really interesting about the commentators, which is that not only are they trying to explain what Aristotle is saying, but they're also using Aristotelian materials to say new things, so in this case something that Aristotle would never have had a reason to say, because of course he was before the Stoics, so he didn't need to respond to the Stoic idea of eternal recurrence. How common is that? Are there other cases where the commentators basically just have ideas that they've developed of their own and they smuggle them into the context of writing a commentary on Aristotle? Yes, yes they do. Now a very good example is the idea of qualities moving discontinuously. By and large Aristotle thought that the physical universe was continuous. Motion is continuous, all change is continuous, space is continuous, time is continuous, but he allowed occasional exceptions. For example, light can fill the whole of visible space in an instant without having to travel bit by bit. It does it in a single leap, or a pond can freeze over all at one instant, not a little bit at a time. So he allows these exceptional leaps, that's in his work on sense perception, not very widely read necessarily. Now this was taken up by a later Greek, the skeptical philosopher Sextus, and he uses the idea of leaps in a different context to answer the paradox raised by a very early Greek philosopher, the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea. Zeno had said that wherever you're sitting listening to this, you won't be able to leave the place you're in because if you're sitting in a room well then to get to the door you'd first have to go halfway, then half the remaining distance, then half the remaining distance, an infinite number of half distances. How could you complete going right through an infinite number of half distances? What Sextus suggested, or pointed out, was that this would be solved if motion could occur discontinuously in little leaps by your disappearing from one spot and reappearing microscopically further along in exactly the way that happens on a cinema screen. If motion was cinematographic in that way and discontinuous, then we could complete the journey to the door in a finite number of steps, the last step being one of these disappearances and reappearances further on a leap. And now, finally, the last of our Athenian commentators, Damascus, says this would also solve another of Aristotle's problems because Aristotle raised a paradox and didn't tell us exactly how to answer it. Perhaps time is unreal because none of its parts exist. The past is gone, it doesn't exist any longer. The future hasn't yet come, so it doesn't exist yet. The present, you might say, yes, but how big is the present? The present must be size-less because if you say it lasts for five minutes, no, some of that five minutes will belong to the future and some will belong to the past without remainder. The present is merely a size-less point, a size-less instant, a mere demarcation point between the past and the future. Alexander actually called it an imaginary point. Well, in that case, if it's only a size-less point, it's not going to be a part of time because adding up size-less points doesn't build up even five minutes worth of time. Now, this would be answered, says Damascus, if we imagine that not only motion but also time goes forward and leaps. And he thought it would be quite plausible that it did so because if motion goes in discontinuous leaps and the motions of a clock, especially the celestial clock of the stars that go around us, if that progresses in leaps, isn't it quite plausible that time might progress in leaps? And that would solve Aristotle's problem about none of the parts of time being in existence. At around the same time as Damascus, there's something else I think that's really fascinating about the history of commentaries on Aristotle, which is that suddenly you start to get commentators who are Christians, not only Philoponus but also the less-known Elias and David, for example, and then the tradition of commentary on Aristotle continues on into the Byzantine tradition, also into the Syriac tradition. So if we stay with late antiquity, or the very end of late antiquity for a moment, to what extent is everything you're describing still the case with these Christian commentators? Does it make a difference when the commentators start to be Christians rather than pagans? Well, in the case of Philoponus in the 6th century, it did make a very big difference, but for a special reason which didn't apply to other Christians at that time. Philoponus started off as the primary editor of the seminars of the pagan philosopher Ammonius. Ammonius was head of the school of philosophy in Alexandria for a very long period at the end of the 5th century and beginning of the 6th. He taught Philoponus, and he was a very brilliant commentator on Aristotle, and the Christian fathers wanted him to do that teaching. Now, Philoponus not only attended his seminars but also edited at least four of them in the form of a book and wrote a total of seven commentaries, all of them in the style of Ammonius. So these were very, very precise commentaries going word by word, looking at the meaning of the doctrine and looking at the exact wording of the text. But he was all along a Christian, and he all along, in my view, was hinting from time to time that he didn't entirely agree with Ammonius, but his main job, just as Ammonius his main job, was to explain what Aristotle meant. Now, in 529 there was a sudden turnabout, and Philoponus started outright attacks on the pagan philosophers. And these attacks were the first attacks that could really worry the pagan philosophers because he had such an insightful and exact knowledge of what they thought. He'd gained it from all those years he spent with Ammonius, studying under Ammonius, and then editing Ammonius. So he knew what the Neoplatonists thought, and he knew what Aristotle thought incredibly well. And that meant that he was far better than any other Christians of that age at attacking them because he was extremely clever. And so in that one case, it made a huge difference when a Christian was a commentator on Aristotle. In other ways, when they stopped having pagan lecturers in Alexandria, and they'd long since from 529 onwards stopped having them in Athens because the Christian emperor closed the Athenian school then, it had bad results. No further teaching in Athens so far as we know. And teaching in Alexandria, but over a much more limited curriculum. And we have to wait quite a long time till the end of the 12th century before we get the Latin medieval thinkers beginning to write their own commentaries on Aristotle, or Latin translations being made of the Greek commentators. Well, there is a rather curious thing, and that is that at a much earlier date, the Christian whom I regard as perhaps the most brilliant of all the Christians who studied Greek philosophy before Philoponus, a Christian called Origen, had a wonderful knowledge of Greek philosophy, including of Aristotle. He drew attention to a passage which even now, not many scholars have paid much attention to in a work of Aristotle on generation and corruption. A passage where Aristotle uses the idea of the form of an individual organism, for example a plant, and says something very unusual about it. This form is not something universal, like the defining characteristics of that sort of plant. But it's not the ordinary perceptual form, which is a particular form that you receive when you're perceiving the plant. No, it's a form which he compares with an elastic tube. It's an elastic tube which preserves the structure of the plant or other organism, despite the fact that there's different matter flowing through it all the time, and it may be growing or it may be shrinking. And so what Aristotle is saying is that what gives identity to an individual organism is form in this very unusual sense of something like an elastic tube, which gives it its unique numerical identity over time, even though the matter doesn't remain identical, but is changing numerically as well as in size and so on. Now Origen takes this up in order to explain how it could be for a Christian the very same body that we get back in the resurrection, even though all the matter may have been divided by other beings in the food chain, including other humans. That's how the resurrection could work. It's impossible to ask for the same matter to be there. All that we need is the same form in this special sense. Now he knew Aristotle very well, but the point I want to make is that as well as knowing Aristotle, he also wrote commentaries on the Bible. And he devised these commentaries in very much the same style as several centuries later would be used by Proclus, by Ammonius, and by members later on in Ammonius' school in Alexandria. He started off by asking a set of questions, very like the questions with which Proclus and Ammonius and members of Ammonius' school prefaced their commentaries. How come that commentaries on the Bible by this earlier Christian from the third century Origen were so like much later Greek pagan commentaries on Aristotle? Well, all I can say is that Origen and Plotinus, it's thought by many people, had the same teacher in Alexandria, a man called Ammonius Saccus, of whom we know very little, but who certainly inspired Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, and may have inspired Origen. That is one possible source from which the idea of how to write commentaries passed down both tracks. Well, thank you very much. That actually gives me a wonderful transition to the next major topic I'm going to be looking at in this series of podcasts, namely Late Ancient Christian Philosophy. For now, I'll thank Richard very much for coming on. It's been very enjoyable. Thank you very much, Peter. And I'd like to invite all the listeners to join me pretty soon for Late Ancient Christian Philosophy. But first, next time will be the hundredth episode of the podcast. And to celebrate that, I'll be having on two more guests who will be talking to me about the relationship between ancient philosophy and ancient culture more generally. So please join me for that next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. This is the hundredth episode of the podcast, and to celebrate I'll be interviewing two colleagues of mine from London, Mike Trapp, who is Professor of Greek Literature and Thought at King's College London. Hi, Mike. Hi. And Dr. Caroline Humphress, who is a reader at the Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Birkbeck College London. Hello, Caroline. Hi, there. Thanks to both of you for coming on the podcast. I thought I would start by asking you, Mike, something about the general cultural attitude towards philosophers and philosophical texts in antiquity. Okay. Well, I think the first thing to say is that attitudes were very interestingly mixed. There are a number of different currents in play. To a large extent, general attitudes to philosophy through the period we're talking about were strongly positive. Philosophy was part of the cultural heritage. Philosophical texts, the great works of the fourth century BC in particular, were classics, not just of philosophy, but of good Greek writing. They were the kind of texts you learned how to speak, how to write, how to express yourself across a huge range, not just in philosophical material. So there's a strong sense that philosophy and philosophers are acknowledged as firmly embedded in the good things of culture, what counts as high culture. And yet at the same time, there was also considerable scope for skepticism, the kind of claims that philosophy and philosophers make on their own behalf. And after all, think about it, they're claiming to be repositories of ultimate insight into the structure of reality, how to communicate, how to live your life. I mean, this is religion with a capital R, science with a capital S, and lifestyle guidance all rolled up together. And that very claim to that kind of status opens the way to all sorts of expressions of skepticism. Can these guys really be all they're cracking themselves up to be? The first point you mentioned about how philosophers were often paradigms of stylistic perfection, I guess that applies to a rather narrow range of philosophers, doesn't it? So in particular Plato. So people didn't think Aristotle, or at least the exoteric works of Aristotle that we know were perfections in terms of style, right? Yeah, Plato is clearly the giant, but it is broader than that. And Aristotle does get a look in because what people were reading of Aristotle is not what we now read. It's the exoteric works, the ones that we now haven't got, works like the Prolepticus Non-Philosophy, which were masterpieces of Greek style, so to some of the works of Theophrastus. So it's not a terribly narrow canon. There's a big body of material there that people are working from. In that case, how wide was the knowledge of philosophical texts actually spread throughout what we're sort of generally calling ancient cultures? Does it mean that anyone with an aristocratic upbringing would have read some Plato? Would that be going too far? That might be going slightly too far, but really not very much too far, because these are classics of the heritage. I think you get a strong sense that anybody who wants to count themselves as a cultivated person has got to be able to recognize the names and to some extent the doctrines. You've got to be able, at the very least, to keep your end up in polite conversation when it turns to matters of the intellect. At dinner parties, as it were. Symposia. Right. Okay, so that's very interesting, but it seems like it would apply only to people who are reading Greek and speaking Greek with each other, because once we have a transition to the Roman Empire, you would think that dinner parties would be in Latin, and one doesn't imagine them quoting Plato to each other in Greek at Latin speaking dinner parties, or did they do that as well? Well, they would, but the key factor here is that if we're thinking about the educated elite, the educated elite from the first century BC onwards is bilingual. They read their Greek as well as their Latin. Yes, there does remain an asymmetry. People don't write first order philosophy very much in Latin. It takes a long time for Latin to become a philosophical language, but Latin speakers are also characteristically Greek speakers as well, so they have access to the primary material. And were there also Latin philosophical works that became classics in the same way that texts like Plato were classics? So I'm thinking, for example, of Cicero. I mean, in late antiquity, people who are talking about rhetoric and they're thinking about Latin texts, say Quintilian, for example, will give Cicero as a kind of standard text that you're supposed to know. And if you know your Cicero really well, then the implication seems to be that you would know something about Hellenistic philosophy. Yeah, Cicero is a classic in his core business as orator and as rhetorical theorist. He doesn't ever acquire the status of philosophical classic, I guess, because his works are so obviously works of reporting, they're not works of original thought. He is summarizing and passing on. And I think this is the situation for the vast majority of Latin philosophical writing through the late Republic and the early Empire. It is, whatever its other qualities, it is also derivative in terms of its content. You get moments of things that start to look like first order philosophizing in Seneca, but they are only moments. Well, Seneca brings me on to something I wanted to ask Caroline about, which is something more specific. And this is the impact of Stoicism on ancient culture and a very specific aspect of ancient culture, which is Roman law. Because I was thinking that one difference between the Greek attitudes toward philosophy and reception of philosophy and Roman attitudes and reception of philosophy might be that the Romans are known for having this very sophisticated legal system. And I guess that there's a kind of widespread assumption or belief that the Roman legal system was deeply influenced by Stoicism. So is that even true? Okay, so if we start with the wide context first, I think it's certainly true to say that both ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and philosophical schools had very distinctive ideas about law and justice. And you're absolutely right that Stoicism in particular has been connected with the Roman juristic science. And that sort of brings us to one contrast in the legal sphere between the ancient Greek world and the Roman world. Because of course, the ancient Greeks had their speech writers, their legal individuals who would go into court and would argue just like the Romans did. But it was the Romans who had that juristic class of individuals. So that class seems to have risen to a predominance in the late Republic. Originally the Roman jurists were very highly educated. So we're talking about quite elite individuals who had had the sort of intellectual formation that Michael just mentioned. And it used to be thought quite widely, especially 19th century scholars working from backgrounds of Hegelian idealism, that Stoicism was taken as a philosophy and was transmitted into these Roman juristic ideas. I think today that's questioned more and more. There are certainly philosophical ideas that you can see in Roman juristic texts. I'm thinking of things like ideas about natural reason, about natural law, what the Roman jurists refer to as the jus gentium, the idea that there are certain types of law which are shared by all peoples across the globe. Ideas about private property, about marital fidelity, filial piety. But the problem is that we can't really say that any of those particular ideas in Roman jurisprudential texts definitely come from Stoic principles or Neoplatonic principles. Very difficult to make that link. I could give you one concrete example of the way in which a second century AD jurist thought. That's second century AD Gaius, who wrote a very famous text called The Institutes. And he gives this example of adult guardianship of women. He says that was peculiar to the Romans, that the guardianship of minors, so children who don't have full rational capacity, can be found in all nations. It's part of natural reasoning that children need their legal capacity to be supplemented. But he says that this is not true for women. So why do the Romans do it when it's not part of natural reasoning? And ultimately, Gaius says, well, you know what, it doesn't really make a difference whether it's part of natural reasoning or not, because it's part of Roman civil law. So we all have to do it anyway. So there we have an example of Gaius using a philosophical type of reasoning, reaching a position which should then logically cause him to question Roman civil law. But because he's a Roman lawyer, he jettisons the natural reasoning and sticks with the civil law. And is that because precedent has more importance for him than some kind of independent standard of how the law should have been written in the first place? Yeah, I think it also comes from the idea that the Roman jurists had of themselves as being professionals. So I know that's a tricky term, and we shouldn't perhaps push it too far because it has all kinds of modern associations. But these Roman jurists from the late Republic onwards, I think, are quite conscious of themselves as a class. So, you know, they thought of themselves as in conversation with each other in their Roman jurisprudential writings. So Gaius is not going to jettison that, you know, the rest of the thinking that he's engaging with when he writes his institutes within that legal context in favor of something which we would perhaps call a more philosophical attitude. And I guess maybe the implication of that is that when these philosophical ideas sneak into legal texts, it's not because these jurists consider themselves to be something like philosophers of law, but because philosophy is in the groundwater of the education that they've had, for example. Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. So, you know, we shouldn't go away thinking that, you know, the Roman jurists don't talk about Roman philosophers or Greek philosophers because they do, but just occasionally, they refer to abstract philosophical ideas, and some of them refer quite concretely to philosophers. So, Marcion, the third century jurist, cites Chrysippus by name in his definition of law. So he says that law is the ruler of divine and human affairs. It's what enables men to distinguish good from evil, just from unjust, etc., etc. So there you have an example of a third century jurist looking to philosophy for some kind of philosophy of law definition. But what you don't find was a jurist like Marcion then going on to write a treatise on the philosophy of law. It's a sort of self-contained little part of his text, and he then moves into talking about law properly. Another problem, of course, with looking at the jurisprudential tradition is that most of our textual material comes from the sixth century digest of the Emperor Justinian. So you have a sixth century Byzantine emperor cutting all of the various texts of these ancient jurists up into little pieces and then literally pasting them together. So it's very difficult to see what kinds of reasoning and dialectic arguments the jurists were actually making themselves because we don't have the extant texts. We only have them as transmitted in this early sixth century corpus. So it's sort of like working on early Stoics or pre-Socratics in the sense that you're trying to reconstruct what they said from these later reports. Yeah, absolutely. And it also creates all sorts of problems. So there's a very famous example in Justinian's Institutes where natural law is said to be the law observed by all nations, and it's said to have been appointed by a divine providence, which always remains firm and immutable. So you'll have scholars arguing whether the divine providence which established natural law is the Christian divine providence because that text comes from a sixth century context, or whether it's a Stoic divine providence because the text is based on the second century text of Gaius' Institutes. So the textual transmission of the Roman jurisprudential writings makes a huge difference to the kinds of, you know, Stoic philosophy spotting that scholars have done in the past. And of course, Stoic ideas about providence were very influential on Christian ideas of providence anyway, which makes it even more murky. Absolutely. I guess one possible place to look at the possible impact of philosophy on law, or maybe just the philosophical relevance and interest of ancient law, would be the way that the law treats different types of people, by which I guess I mean women, children, slaves, as opposed to free men, as opposed to citizens, and so on. And I take it that there were these distinctions made in legal texts. A lot of philosophy, I think, especially in late antiquity, seems to lose interest in that to some extent. So you don't find, for example, extensive discussion of the role of women in society in Plotinus, the way that you do in Plato. So that's one of the themes from Plato that he doesn't really pick up. How much does ancient law tell us about the way that these people were different kinds of people were treated and conceived of? So again, I think it's useful to just widen out the parameters first before we then narrow them down again. So if we're thinking ancient law in general, and if we start to think about the advocates in the courtroom and the way in which arguments were actually made in a legal and forensic context, then I think there we can see quite a big impact of philosophical ideas. There's a famous quotation by Augustine writing in the early fifth century, complaining about how judges in the Roman Empire are more keen on, you know, wise cracks from Chrysippus, you know, and introducing ideas from Plato than they are in actually listening to the cases. I suppose again, that's, you know, judges trying to show their cultural background. But if we look at the jurists, then they have very set distinctions in terms of how you should divide society up and how legally how we should think about the rights and obligations which individuals owe each other. So the first main distinction that we get overall in juristic literature is that between slave and free, so that's a huge distinction. Then the distinction between citizen and non-citizens, of course, you would also get the distinction between being a citizen of Rome, or being a citizen of some other city. Then you have the distinction between what the Roman jurists called those who were sui urus, those who were in their own power and could actually go into a courtroom and could sue and be sued, and individuals who are dependent on the power of another. Now, I think that tells us a great deal about the setup of Roman society and culture because it gets us to this institution of the Roman paterfamilias, that kind of incredible power which the male head of a household had in Roman society. And that's something I think you could trace through philosophical debate as much as you can trace through Roman juristic principles and literature and also in Roman statute legislation too. Something that just occurred to me now is that sometimes you see people comparing the later Neoplatonic system where you have a single first principle all the way at the top whose power then sort of descends cascading down through the levels. People have compared that sometimes to the relationship between the emperor and the rest of society. And I wonder whether it also maybe echoes this more domestic setting of the paterfamilias, this sort of single principle of power and authority who then orders and governs everything else. Yeah, absolutely. So I think in lots of late antique, whether we call it philosophical or theological or philosophical and theological thought, that kind of top-down model of power cascading and descending is incredibly important. But we shouldn't also go away thinking that that's in fact just ties in exactly with reality. Because I mentioned before Gaius about the guardianship of adult women. In actual fact, if we look at papyri from Egypt and actual court cases, women had a lot more power and a lot more ability to manage their own property, run businesses and do things. Then you would think from looking at works of political thought or works of the jurists. And actually to go back to the example of Plotinus, although it's true that he doesn't thematize the role of women in his philosophical works, we know that he had basically intellectual companions or friends who were women. And that's something that continues right down through Neoplatonism, I think. And actually, I wanted to ask you about that, Mike. So there are these figures of Hypatia is probably the most famous example. But there are other bits of evidence that we have of women actually participating in very high level intellectual discussion. Augustine's mother, Monica, would be another example. And I'm wondering on the basis of that, whether we could think about philosophy as a way for the disempowered of ancient society to get access, if not actually to something like political power, then at least to this more advanced kind of intellectual activities. So I guess not only women, but also slaves, right? Epictetus was a slave. Well, as far as participation of women is concerned, it's certainly true that one gets a lot of what seemed like very positive noises in philosophical texts of the first and second century AD. One thinks, I guess, of Musonius Rufus on female education, on what Plutarch has to say about the structure of the good marriage. Positive noises about the desirability of educating women, though always only up to a position of continued subordination of some kind, and not necessarily educating them in advanced philosophy. I think, in general, we probably have to be a bit cautious of the notion that philosophy is somehow blazing a trail. Because if you look at the larger records of participation in cultural activity more general, you can find the examples from earlier on. I mean, you've got people like the Elegist, Sopeckia, who is playing the boys' game from a female vantage point, and there's nothing philosophical about that, but she's able to do it. So it's actually, maybe, sorry to interrupt, but I guess that suggests that it's the other way around. So it's the fact that at least aristocratic women had found ways to participate more or less fully in society. Yeah, and philosophy can come in as part of that side of activities. When it comes to slaves, I think I'd want to urge the same sort of caution about attributing too much to philosophy. The star case, clearly, as you mentioned, is Epictetus, who was of servile origin, allegedly born a slave, and certainly on his own testimony already receiving philosophical instruction from Musonius Rufus while still a slave. But he's a freed man before he actually sets up as a teacher in his own right when he leaves Rome and goes off to Nicopolis. And if you then look at the people who are coming to his lectures, coming to be harangued by him about their various personal failings, they are all members of the elite. So it really doesn't look as if Epictetus builds on his own servile origins to try and open things out. In general, would it be right to say that these educational establishments, philosophical schools, but also schools of grammar, rhetoric, these would have been freed men teaching other freed men without exception, is that right? Freed or free. Yeah, freed or freed men, yeah. Yeah, yes. We have to remember that you need a pretty comfortable lifestyle and level of resources to be a player in this game in the first place. Yeah, Augustine actually talks about his father sort of scraping the money together to send him off to a first-rate rhetorical education. There's a wonderful story in Eunapius, The Lives of the Philosophers and the Sophists from the fourth century about the rhetorician Proheresis who goes off to study in Athens and apparently was so poor that he could only share his clothes with a fellow student. So one of them had to stay in bed while the other one went to lectures. And then they traded clothes when he got home. It's thought of as being such an extreme, incredible example that it's worthy of showcasing as far as Eunapius is concerned. I think it's the exception that proves the rule. Yeah, that example may speak to some grad students who are out there listening, sadly. So I guess at the other extreme, we might want to think about these literary figures who are really aristocratic, I guess, for the most part, and are weaving philosophy into the fabric of texts that may or may not seem to be explicitly philosophical works. And actually, there's a couple of people to mention here who you've worked on a great deal, one of whom is Maximus. So can you tell us a little bit about him? I wish I could. We know pathetically little about his life and times. He is supposed to have delivered a course of lectures in Rome in the reign of the Emperor of Commodus, so around about 190 AD. But beyond that, we have very little biographical information. What you have to do is to look at the style of the work and ask who would want this kind of material? What are the conditions that make it possible in the first place? And it seems to me that you need to be looking in two directions. First of all, the rooting of philosophy in general culture, the fact that philosophical texts and a certain level of knowledge of philosophical doctrine is absolutely, irremovably part of what it means to be a cultivated man, in Greek terms, a pepi de omenos, somebody who has been educated. You have to know about this stuff. You can't neglect it. And your own personal style as a writer and a communicator will in part have been formed by reading philosophical classics and imitating them in your own verbal productions. So from that side of things, there's absolutely no problem about people bringing philosophical material into what we might think of as works of literature, because philosophical classics are by this stage classics of literature, and we're dealing with a culture that writes its modern literature out of the literature of the past, stylistically in terms of contents. So that's on the one side. On the other side, I think it also helps to think of philosophy again as something that everybody needs to know about to be able to present themselves as members of the educated elite. So there is a demand for philosophical material. People want to have it flowing around them to give them that polish and that degree of knowledge that they need for their own social status. So there's a kind of custom demand. People want texts, orations, works of literature that will have some level of philosophical content but will not commit them too deeply to the thing itself. So it's almost like it's to help them feel clever and to catch all the illusions without necessarily making them think they should give away all their money or something really radical. That's very definitely the story I'd want to tell about Maximus. Not quite the same about Plutarch. Well, at least it's been argued that Plutarch's ethical works, his so-called practical ethical works, are very much intended to help you kind of take philosophical perspective on your life without necessarily radically undermining the values of aristocratic Greek and Roman society. And that runs across not only the works collected in what we now call the moralia, the ethical treatises, but also the parallel lives, these lives of great heroes of Greek and Roman politics and military achievements whose lives Plutarch puts under the microscope in order to provide material for moral reflection. How should one handle the situations of one's life? How can one learn lessons for one's own practice by comparing and contrasting how broadly comparable people have played comparable hands in life? So there is a serious project there and it's one that can be combined with a life that is not the life of a card-carrying philosopher. So the message about Alexander the Great is not, oh, he should have become Diogenes the Cynic, right? It's that Alexander the Great was a great moral exemplar of his own kind. Uninstructive moral exemplar. He's not somebody one can straightforwardly follow in the footsteps of. But if you think hard about his life and think comparatively about his life, you compare him with Julius Caesar, then there are all sorts of useful lessons that you can learn and to apply to your own life. So Caroline, do you think that that suggests a kind of depressing conclusion about philosophical works and philosophical tradition in antiquity that by at least this time of late antiquity, they had found a way to kind of defuse it and take away the potential of philosophy to undermine aristocratic values? I was just thinking actually as Mike was speaking about Augustine, who in so many ways is the kind of philosophical overachiever. The guy who doesn't so much defuse philosophy is infuse it with all kinds of theological virtues which are going to hold such importance later on into the Middle Ages as well. And I was thinking in particular of the very famous story that he tells in the Confessions. So age 19, Augustine, the aspiring politico who's gone off to Rome to study, you know, wants to make it big, wants to become a rhetorician. And he says that in the course of the usual study, he comes across Cicero's Hortensius, which is a kind of pro-progenetic introduction to philosophy. So Augustine, and this is the Augustine from many, many years later commenting on the early young self, he says that he sees the Hortensius, he read it and it completely revolutionized him. It took him another 15 years or so to really act on that revolutionary sentiment. But if we take him at his word, then reading Cicero's Hortensius planted the seed of an idea which would subsequently lead him towards, you know, setting all of that secular ambition to one side, leaving Rome, traveling back to North Africa, becoming a Christian bishop, becoming a Christian monk. So I think that in that transition, you know, Christians reading philosophy and, you know, wondering what to do with it once they become Christian, some of the radicalness of ancient philosophy does get retained. And just looking forward again, when Augustine comes to write his very famous work on the Trinity, so you couldn't get possibly a more technical treatment of Christian theology. In Book 14, he goes back again to Cicero's Hortensius, and I'll just read you one of the quotations that he gives. So this is Augustine quoting from Cicero's Hortensius in Book 14 of On the Trinity. When we reflect day and night and sharpen our understanding, which is the cutting edge of the mind, and take care that it is never blunted, that is when we live in philosophy, there is great hope for us. And I think that sense of living in or living through philosophy, philosophy as a way of life, is very much transposed into ideas about Christianity as the true philosophy, as many Christians would subsequently argue, but also that Christianity is in itself not just theology, not just doctrine and thinking about God, but actually a way of life in the same way that ancient philosophical movements were, or at least comparable to them. It's really interesting. Maybe the thought here could be that Christianity was encouraging the same kind of radical critique of earthly life that at least some philosophical traditions had been making for centuries. So not only cynicism, but also stoicism to some extent, even though they're materialists and the Platonists. Definitely. Although again, I would have to echo Mike's point that, you know, there is certainly that radical element in early Christianity, but by the time you get to the fourth and fifth centuries, you still have bishops who own huge swathes of properties, they still own slaves, they still have their symposia where their parishioners come round and they discuss philosophical ideas, but now they may also link them into Holy Scripture. So I think we again, we shouldn't be too idealistic about this, but I don't think those that sort of idea is necessarily lost from the earlier period. Yes, I find this whole question of how radical philosophy is vis-à-vis conventional values, the accepted ways of doing things. Certainly the notion that philosophy is something you convert to is written into pagan philosophy. It's something that is there for Christianity to appropriate. But at the same time, there are all sorts of ways in which people turn out to be able to have their cake and eat it, to show knowledge of, even show some degree of allegiance to philosophical values without it very much changing what they do, the ways they actually live. Sometimes this is deliberate and legislated for. There's a lovely declaration of Seneca talking about how the person of philosophical commitment ought to relate to society around him, where he says, let's make it so that everything is absolutely the same on the outside, it's just inside that the difference will be. And that this seems, maybe this is unfair, but something that seems to go particularly with stoicism, this strategy for having your cake and eating it, saying that you are where it really matters, your core value is completely different, but the outside observer will almost never notice any difference in you. You would think that wouldn't be possible with Christianity to be an inner Christian and an outer non-Christian. But I guess it's possible to be an inner Christian and an outer rich guy. Well, that situation is going to change as the status of Christianity in the Empire shifts. I still think there's also a lot up for grabs, as it were, because what we tend to think of as late antique Christianity is very much been formed by what we call patristic texts. So these kind of fairly, sometimes quite elite individuals writing sermons and treatises. And I think increasingly what's becoming clear is that these bishops mostly have in their heads a very set idea of what it means to be a Christian, that you should give up your property, you should behave in certain ways, you should live according to the gospel. But the mass of their parishioners, the people who actually come to church, who may well include people who aren't even Christian, have very different ideas. So for example, if you have a patron who invites you to meet him in a temple and you're a Christian, is it necessarily a problem to go and fulfill your obligations to your patron by meeting him in the temple if you're a Christian? So it's about bishops trying to say, actually, Christianity should outstrip and outrank all your other social obligations. And I think to a lot of non-Christian overachievers, this simply wasn't clear. They thought it was enough to be a Christian to have had the sign of the cross on their forehead possibly to have been baptized. And maybe to go to church at Easter. If we're thinking about the situation earlier on, in terms of philosophy, there is always going to be some tension or some possibility of alternative strategies and how you play points where apparently normal social values conflict with or are in some kind of tension with philosophical values and different people are going to negotiate this in different ways. You've got Epicurean withdrawal, you've got cynic anti-civilized behavior, though we really don't know how much of that actually went on. But also, you can find quieter moments where forms of tension are being felt around. So a favorite example of this for me comes in one of Plutarch's treatises called Advice to a Politician, where he's giving a whole string of wise counsels to a younger man who is about to enter not the politics of the empire, but the local politics of his own hometown. How are you going to manage your own career and your own influence on your fellow citizens as you gradually rise to positions of local political influence and control? And what's interesting to me is that Plutarch is in a very quiet way, but a very determined way, trying to give all this a philosophical cast. He is trying to persuade you ultimately that you will only realize the brief as a top politician if you are also a philosopher. And this leads him to points where he will say things like, you don't actually need the conventional signs of public approval. I know people like not just to be applauded and not just be thought well of by their citizen assemblies, but they rarely like the wreaths and the statues, the physical embodiments of your status, your honor, your timé as a politician, but you don't need that. That's not important. Now from a philosophical point of view, that makes perfect sense because the externals don't matter. They don't have any bearing on you or anybody else's happiness. But if you look at that same situation from the point of view of the less philosophical member of a local elite, the physical monuments, the tokens, the things that will embody your reputation to posterity are absolutely crucially important. Yet here is somebody purporting to give advice to any and every local politician saying, forget about the wreaths, forget about the statues. That's not what matters. You wonder how that went down. So actually, I'll be coming on in the podcast soon to precisely these patristic texts and so on that we were just talking about. But before closing today, I wanted to look ahead a little bit further than that to the medieval period, just to think a little bit about how these philosophy versus culture issues look in a period where the kind of fairly relaxed prosperity and, you know, do I want a wreath and a statue doesn't seem to be a very medieval concern. So when things, so to speak, fell apart, how much continuity do we have in terms of all these dynamics we've been talking about? I think the question of continuity, it can be treated in different ways. So we can think about continuity of ideas and transmission of texts, or we could think about continuity and inheritances of actual institutions and the kinds of social and cultural things that we've been talking about. There is a bit of a temptation, I think, to see the Middle Ages, you know, the late antique period is the kind of really important standard bearers or baton carriers in a philosophical intellectual relay race. So you have Augustine who gets the baton from Plotinus who inherited it from Plato and Augustine then passes it on in turn to Boethius in sixth century, Ostrogothic Italy, and Boethius hands it on to Aquinas and, you know, and on it goes. And I think that's an it's an interesting kind of way of thinking about ideas and texts. And I do think ideas and texts can leap contexts. But if we're thinking institutionally, I suppose the big thing for the medieval West has to be the institutional Christian church. So the fact that, you know, once the Empire, the Roman Empire falls in the West, you do still have bishops whose jurisdiction is based on that civic model, that they're exercising both what we would call secular and spiritual functions. I mean, that's hugely important for the medieval West. Of course, it's also important for Byzantium. And it's important in different ways to differing effects for Islam in the seventh century. Several ways that institutions which get inherited and which completely revolutionized day to day lives are things like festivals and the way in which we divide up the calendar. So the notion of saints days, certain days for certain types of activity. And of course, that's also something I think that has ancient philosophical and cultural inheritance, but it's really established in late antiquity. Perhaps the biggest shift, though, is that very famous one where, you know, you move from the classical what scholars sometimes call the politics of perfection, the notion that the civic arena, civic life is actually somewhere where humans can flourish, that we can become the best that we can be by living together within, you know, certain types of civic organizations. And of course, Augustine, again, and other Christian thinkers are really going to question that classical legacy. So politics for Augustine, as he states quite bluntly, is the result of sin. It's sinful in itself. You can't establish good order, but politicians can help you minimize disorder. And I think that tension between what medieval scholars call political Augustinianism and the rediscovered Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages is an important legacy that late antiquity does give to medieval philosophical and political thinking. Well, before I get on to all this great medieval stuff, I still have a lot of late antiquity to look at. And in fact, next time I'll be starting to look at Christian philosophy in late antiquity with the earliest church fathers. For now, I'll thank Mike Trapp. Thank you. And Caroline Humphries. Thank you very much. For coming on the podcast. And please join me next time for the Church Fathers on the history of philosophy without any gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Father Figures. Introduction to Ancient Christian Philosophy. As a historian of philosophy, it's somewhat embarrassing for me to admit this, but I'm pretty bad with dates. I don't meet the dried fruits or romantic encounters, though to be honest neither of those was ever my forte either. I mean when things happened, when famous people were born, and for that matter, birthdays and anniversaries. So I'm always grateful when a historical figure has a really memorable birth or death date. The best example has to be Al-Ghazali, the great Muslim philosopher and theologian, who did people like me the favor of dying in the year 1111. You might say he should get no credit for this noble service, since this is the date of the Christian calendar, but in the Muslim calendar he passed away in the almost equally memorable year 505. What a professional. Of course, if we do stick with the Christian calendar, no one has a more memorable year of birth than Jesus of Nazareth himself, namely zero. That's about as round a number as you can ask for. As for the precise day of birth, even I can remember that Christ was born on Christmas. Sadly, scholars reckon that the historical Jesus was probably not in fact born on Christmas in 0 AD, but in the last few years BC, which last time I checked was supposed to stand for before Christ. Nor was the year 0 AD a sudden turning point in the history of philosophy. Some of the developments we've already examined spanned the first centuries BC and AD, such as the emergence of middle Platonism and the rebirth of Aristotelianism. The Roman Stoics come along beginning in the following decades. Seneca, for example, lived in the first half of the first century AD. The birth of Jesus and of a faith which accepted him as a messiah had no immediate impact on the history of philosophy, but in due course it would have an impact exceeded by no other single historical event. This impact already began in the ancient world, so much so that I'm going to be devoting more than a dozen episodes to ancient Christian thought. You may be surprised to hear this. When we think of Christianity in relation to philosophy we are likely first to think of medieval philosophy in Europe, and then perhaps modern-day philosophy of religion. Antique Christian philosophy does offer one household name, Augustine. He was exceptional in his genius and his influence, but far from the only philosophically sophisticated Christian author. Even a casual study of Christianity in this period will acquaint you with great theologians like Tertullian, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. The earliest Christian thinkers are collectively referred to as church fathers. Most of them were educated in the ancient rhetorical curriculum I described back in episode 84. This is clear from every page of their writing. It's just as clear that they were steeped in the Hellenic philosophical tradition. They knew their Plato, their Aristotelian logic, and the teachings of the Stoics. Some who lived in later antiquity even knew their Proclus. Those who wrote in Latin also responded to authors like Lucretius and especially Cicero, a major influence on Augustine. There isn't really any room for doubt, then, that the Christian fathers made extensive use of philosophical ideas, but I suspect some listeners may be skeptical as to whether they made any contributions to philosophy. Did they have ideas of their own, ideas of philosophical and not just religious and historical interest? Starting with this episode, I hope to convince you that they did. Let's first look briefly at the historical context. By the end of antiquity, Christianity will be consumed by refined and complex theological debates. But the very earliest Christians would have been nonplussed, if not stunned, to learn of the disputes that lay ahead. In the first century AD, we do not yet find bishops gathering in cities to dispute the technicalities of the Trinity or Platonic and Stoic doctrine being used to refute heretics. Some scholars have claimed to detect echoes of the philosophical tradition in the Bible itself, even in the teachings of Jesus, who since antiquity has been compared to Socrates. Ancient Christians preferred to detect an influence in the other direction. Unlike me, they were very good with dates and pointed out that Moses came long before the Hellenic philosophers. Thus, he could be recognized as an influence on their thought. Still, early Christian groups were not philosophical schools, like the Neoplatonic enclaves of Athens and Alexandria. Nor were they committed to the passionate defense of dogma. Rather, they were communities who lived in expectation of an imminent final reckoning with God, and lived in hope, thanks to the mediation offered in the person of Jesus Christ. These communities were bound together by the practices of sharing bread and wine in the Eucharist, baptism, and group prayer. One doesn't get the sense that they were engaged in intense scrutiny of sacred texts. Indeed, which books were to be included in the New Testament would remain a disputed issue up until the fourth century. Though the New Faith was not yet associated with Greek philosophy, it was associated with the Greek language. Of course, the books of the New Testament are in Greek, not Hebrew, and the religion was spread around the empire by Greek-speaking missionaries, like St. Paul. Even in Rome, many early Christians were Greek speakers. This helps to explain why philosophy was later able to penetrate into Christianity, and vice versa. Much ink has been spilled over the question of Christianity's Hellenic nature, and its contrast to the Jewish culture out of which this New Faith grew. It has been a controversial issue since antiquity, given that the boundary between Judaism and Christianity was at first rather blurry. One key point of differentiation was that Christians did not demand circumcision. It has been suggested that for them, baptism occupied the role played by this ritual in Judaism. Christian writers of antiquity instead speak of circumcision as a metaphor, symbolizing, for instance, the way the faithful should renounce the things of the body. Before long, Christian theologians began to accuse their opponents of Judaizing. If the line between Jew and Christian was blurry, the divide between Christian and pagan was clear to see. Christians were distinguished by their ethical beliefs, especially their praise of chastity. pagans had traditionally admired moderation and self-control, but without renouncing such basic human functions as sexuality. Along with the Jews, the Christians were also distinguished by their refusal to accept the traditional pantheon of Greco-Roman gods. We've seen that the traditional pantheon was rather porous and flexible, able to accommodate divinities from Egypt and other cultures. So the Judeo-Christian insistence on a single, true god struck pagans as not just wrongheaded, but bizarre and needlessly provocative. They duly accused Christians of being atheists. This sounds rather strange to our ears, but the great church father, Justin Martyr, admitted that he and his co-religionists were indeed atheists as far as the gods of Rome were concerned. Justin's name is a clue to another major feature of ancient Christian life. His honorific title, Martyr, refers to his death at the hands of the Romans in 165 AD. The reigning emperor? The philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Marcus' fabled Stoic restraint didn't extend to putting up with Christians, and he was far from unique among emperors in this respect. Some were more tolerant towards Christians than others, but for two centuries the new faith faced the constant threat of persecution, even if actual persecution was more occasional and sporadic than we tend to believe. Often, Christian writers seemed almost to revel in the danger of their precarious position. The church father Ignatius promised he would be glad to serve as wheat to be ground up by the teeth of wild animals yielding flour for the bread of Christ. Origen, the greatest of the early Greek fathers, wrote a letter to a friend urging him to greet his probable impending martyrdom with eagerness rather than reluctance. You can see why he wrote a letter, they don't make greeting cards for occasions like this. Some felt it necessary to caution their fellow Christians against deliberately inviting martyrdom. There's a fine line between dying in the name of faith and using faith as an excuse for suicide. The Romans had what they considered to be good reason for the persecutions. When not throwing the Christians to the lions, they threw various accusations at the Christians. They called the Christians cannibals, because their ritual involved claiming to eat the body of Christ, and they at least pretended to think that the Christians' gatherings concluded with sexual orgies. But the already mentioned charge of atheism was the key complaint. The survival of the empire was believed to depend on the favor of the gods, and here were people who not only refused to sacrifice at the temples, but who rejected the gods' very existence. As antiquity wore on, the emperors themselves were credited with being gods. Christians of course denied this also, which was reason enough for the persecutions. These persecutions would end only once the emperors themselves became Christians, the first to do was of course Constantine. Which brings us to another date worth remembering, 306 AD, the year that Constantine became emperor in the west of the empire. In 305 the emperor Diocletian had relinquished power after a reign that saw particularly enthusiastic persecution of Christians. Famously, Constantine consolidated his rule over the empire at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312 AD, since you ask. Just as famously, he supposedly had a vision before the battle which encouraged him to support the Christians. Whether this vision actually occurred, what he might have seen, what, if any, role it played in his benevolence towards Christianity and when exactly he himself converted, are all matters debated by historians. We historians of philosophy can leave these issues aside though, and simply note that after Constantine the empire would be ruled by Christians, with the notable exception of Julian the Apostate, whom we covered a few episodes back. This made it possible for Christianity to thrive, to grow from an oppressed community to a major institutional force within the empire. Free of persecution by pagans, the Christians wasted little time in turning upon one another, as they engaged in doctrinal disputes with increasing fervor. As we'll be seeing, already in the 2nd century AD, figures like Justin were using their rhetorical and philosophical skills to uphold what they took to be orthodoxy and to refute what they took to be heresy. But the institutionalization of Christianity provided a new context and new impetus for such disputes. Already within the reign of Constantine, doctrinal clashes were causing headaches for the emperor. He was the first, but far from the last, secular ruler to attempt a peaceful resolution of the heated theological debates. In due course, disagreements over such issues as the Trinity and the Incarnation would lead to street violence, would inspire insurrection against emperors of the East, and would provoke the leading intellectuals of the empire to write massive works of mutual refutation. This brings us back to philosophy. As I've said, there is plenty of evidence that the Church Fathers were influenced by the Hellenic philosophical tradition. Here, one need look no further than Augustine, who before his conversion took a large step towards Christianity thanks to his reading of what he calls the Books of the Platonists, by which he probably means Latin versions of Plotinus and Porphyry. They showed him how he could understand God to be an immaterial cause, something he had previously found hard to accept. Of course, Augustine was an exceptional man, but in this respect not all that exceptional. Clement of Alexandria and Origen, two great Church Fathers who wrote in Greek, were steeped in Hellenic culture generally, and Hellenic philosophy in particular. This is not to say that all Christian thinkers embraced philosophy in a warm embrace. All three of the theologians I've just mentioned criticize the pagan philosophers in various ways. Other theologians like the Latin Church Father Tertullian were actively hostile, as they exalted the Gospel over the works of Plato and Aristotle. Despite this, Christian writings should be seen as being part of the ancient philosophical tradition. To be honest, this is not a widely shared view. Rarely would you find papers on the Church Fathers in ancient philosophy periodicals, and they are not usually taught in university philosophy courses. Instead, the study of the Fathers, often called Patristics, usually falls within the purview of theology or religious studies departments. Christian Augustine, who, for my money, is one of the greatest philosophers who has ever lived, receives attention from historians of philosophy mostly in connection with the study of medieval thought, despite having died already in 430 AD. My impression, however, is that scholars of ancient philosophy are already getting increasingly interested in the Church Fathers, attracted by the sophistication of these texts and the opportunity for finding new topics to investigate. Let me give you a few reasons why they would be right to do so. Firstly, there is the attitude of the ancient Christians themselves. Admittedly, some, like Tertullian, did complain bitterly about pagan philosophy and even identify it as a source of heresy within Christianity. But others sought to appropriate the word philosophy for the new religion. Justin speaks of Christianity as the true philosophy, Clement of philosophy as a stepping stone towards the truth of the Gospels. We've already seen how it served this purpose in Augustine's case. And in fact, it would be surprising if the Fathers had not attempted to appropriate philosophy for their own purposes. The Fathers were well-educated and wrote for a well-educated audience. They wanted to show this audience that their faith was equal, or rather superior, to intellectually refined pagan systems like Stoicism and Platonism. Their pagan opponents understood the danger of allowing Christianity to draw on classical education. This is why the pagan Emperor Julian banned Christians from teaching rhetoric. As for the Christians, they were not slow to point out that philosophy means the love of wisdom, and depends on reason, in Greek logos. If Jesus was quite literally the incarnation of divine wisdom and logos, what could be more philosophical than Christianity? There is more to this point than mere wordplay. The Christians recognized that philosophers had always been pursuing truth, and sometimes praised them for this. But the philosophers were doomed to fail, at least in part, since perfect truth is given to man only in the Bible and in the person of Christ. Divine revelation, then, finally offered what philosophers had been trying to achieve with the power of human reason alone. Does this mean though that our theologians were not philosophers after all? They swore allegiance precisely to revelation as a source of truth, and not to rational argument. But consider Origen's On Principles, perhaps the greatest work of Christian philosophy in antiquity outside the works of Augustine. At the very beginning, he lists several doctrinal points that are not up for serious debate because they are established beyond doubt by Scripture. These include the existence and oneness of God, the begetting of the Son by the Father, the incarnation of the Son in Christ, and so on. But Origen immediately goes on to emphasize how much still remains open for debate. What is the nature of the soul, and how does it relate to the body? What exactly does it mean to say that the Father begets the Son? What if anything existed before God created the world? These are just a few of the questions Origen goes on to investigate. In doing so, he usually proceeds by giving philosophical arguments which are only afterward shown to be consonant with the Scriptures. Often, it must be said, the supposed demonstration of agreement between his conclusions and scriptural authority is the least convincing part of Origen's presentation. It's natural that the Church Fathers should have proceeded in this way. The Scriptures were, apart from the odd textual dispute, common ground between them and their theological opponents. Certainly, theologians did not hesitate to hurl Biblical proof texts at one another, but those texts were already well known to the other side, who could reply by quoting their own favorite passages. So it was common in such debates to appeal to the neutral ground of rational argument, sometimes including explicit use of logic and other tools of Hellenic philosophy. Philosophy was thus a weapon that could be used to combat heresy, to defeat rival theological theories, and, as in Origen, an instrument that could solve difficulties not settled unambiguously by Scripture. As a result of all this, we can indeed find innovative philosophical ideas in ancient Christian texts, ideas that should be of interest even to the most confirmed atheist. I will mention three. First, there is the issue of causation. The most hotly debated theological issue of late antiquity was the interrelation of the Trinitarian persons. All agreed that the Father begets the Son. But how to understand this divine relation of begetting? Presumably, it should have something in common with the case where a human father begets a human son. This calls for a careful analysis of the causal relationship between human fathers and human sons, and an equally careful consideration of how the divine case might differ from the human case. Nor would even that be enough. After all, the Christians believe that God causes the world to exist, but they are at pains to deny that God relates to the created world the way that the Father relates to the So, any satisfactory position on the Trinity needed to compare and contrast three causal relations—between God and world, between divine father and divine son, and between human father and human son. It's no wonder that Church Fathers offer some of the most sophisticated discussions of causation to be found in antiquity. This leads us to a second issue, the special kind of causation involved in freely chosen action. We have seen that ancient philosophers, including Stoics and Platonists, thought carefully about the sense in which human actions are free. Christian authors responded to these discussions, above all to the notion of an autonomous will or power of choice, such as we find it in the Stoic Epictetus. But they take this notion much further, exploring the conditions under which a will may be said to be free. They also discuss how moral responsibility attaches to the will. Again, the context of this discussion is usually a theological debate. For instance, Augustine's teaching on the will is developed partially in order to show that humans cannot merit salvation without divine grace. But the Christian's ideas about freedom and the will lived on even once those debates had faded into history. Today, even non-Christians find themselves with powerful intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility that resonate more with Augustine than with, say, Aristotle or Plato. Thirdly, ancient Christians were fascinated by language, by both its power and its limitations. The need to interpret Scripture forced them to reflect on the way that language both conveys and conceals meaning. Sometimes implicitly, and often explicitly, they set forth new ideas about what we would call hermeneutics, the interpretation of texts. This topic had been explored by pagan philosophers and by grammarians and rhetoricians who were commenting on Homer and other classical authors. But Christians recognized with new force the possibility that a given text may be subject to an indefinite range of interpretations. This was perhaps especially true of the divine, revealed text of Scripture, but the interpretive theories developed by Augustine and others are applicable to language more generally. Ancient Christians also worried about how language could describe God, including passages in Scripture that describe him in terms that clearly could not be taken in their literal or surface meaning. As we'll see, this issue leads the mysterious thinker known as the Pseudo-Dionysius to an unprecedented investigation of the limitations of language. This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of areas where church fathers say things of novel philosophical interest. One could easily add more examples, such as the nature of the soul or the metaphysical relation of parts to wholes, another issue that arose in the Trinitarian debate. Also central to their writings was the problem of whether God's knowledge of the future leads to determinism, a version of a problem we first saw in Aristotle's logic. Philosophically, then, we have good reason to spend a few episodes in the company of the ancient Christians. Historically, their importance is even more obvious. One cannot understand medieval philosophy without first looking at ancient Christianity. That goes not just for the medieval age in Europe, but also the Byzantine tradition and even philosophy in the Islamic world. So I hope you'll make a date to join me next time as I begin to look in more detail at the Greek church fathers here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Please Accept Our Apologies. The Greek Church Fathers A boy sits cross-legged on the ground. It is the last night of October, and a chill seeps up from the ground through a layer of snaking vines. He does not notice, so keen is his sense of anticipation. He has chosen this place carefully, for its sincerity. If he has chosen well and his expectations are fulfilled, he will be rewarded with gifts, as will all the other good children of the world. But he will be alone to witness the appearance of the figure who will rise up out of the vines and prove once and for all that his faith is justified. He will be the first to behold the great pumpkin. The boy, of course, is Linus from the Peanuts comic strip, who each Halloween tries to convince Charlie Brown and the other children to await this Santa Claus-style figure. Every year he is disappointed, but he does not renounce his faith. Now pumpkins are not the most philosophical of vegetables. That distinction surely belongs to the tomato, because everyone thinks it is a vegetable, but actually it is a fruit. Nonetheless, the humble pumpkin has played an occasional role in the writings of philosophers. Seneca wrote a satirical attack on the Emperor Claudius called the apokolokentosis, which means something like pumpkinification. The title is a pun on the term apotheosis, applied to emperors when they become gods. More recently, the philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga imagined an objection to his own views regarding the rationality of religious belief. Plantinga claimed that a Christian can rationally accept the existence of God without having proved it. The Christian could simply take this belief to be basic, the way you believe you ate dinner last night without needing any proof for that. Bonus points if you believe you had pumpkin pie for dessert. But if this is right, then couldn't someone like Linus rationally believe in the existence of the great pumpkin without giving any good reason for that belief? In fact, a careful reading of the Peanuts comic shows that Linus' belief is not a religious one. In one strip, he says, Pumpkinology, then, is different from religion, albeit equally controversial. If we go back closer to the time of Seneca, though, we do find pumpkins involved in a religious controversy. The context is the refutation of heresies by the church father Irenaeus, who wrote in the late second century. His targets are the so-called Gnostics, a group of thinkers who claimed to follow Christ but were, as far as Irenaeus was concerned, no Christians at all. Various Gnostics adopted various cosmologies. Indeed, Irenaeus was happy to emphasize the differences between them, like a skeptic pointing out disagreements among dogmatic philosophers. But all the Gnostics postulated a highest God who presides over a range of lower divine beings who receive names like Silence, Unity, Truth, Wisdom, and Life. In an uncharacteristically amusing passage, Irenaeus sarcastically suggests that they may as well believe in a divinity called kolokunthe, the Greek word for pumpkin. Some surviving Gnostic texts were discovered in Egypt, near the town of Naj-Hamaadi, in the mid-twentieth century. But we would know far less about them than we do without the refutations written by Irenaeus and the works of other church fathers who are sometimes called apologists because of their indefatigable defense of the new faith. As the fathers present them, the Gnostic theories indeed seem about as reasonable as Linus's faith in the great pumpkin. But notice that the Gnostics were taken seriously enough to provoke such refutations. They were also read by philosophers, notably in the next century in the school of Plotinus. In both cases, this may be because Gnostic views seemed too close for comfort. They drew inspiration not just from the Gospels but also from the philosophical tradition, their distinctive teachings echoing middle Platonic ideas. They believed that the cosmos was created not by the highest God, but by a more ignorant, lower deity. This explains why we don't live in a perfect world, free of suffering and evil. Accordingly, they disdained the material world and held that redemption lies in a purely spiritual life defined by certain knowledge. So far, so Platonist. A less familiar note was struck when they claimed that this life is available only to a select few. Jesus came for the sake of these elite and brought to them a new message about the highest God. The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, had according to them spoken only of the ignorant Creator deity. We saw that Plotinus was provoked by the Gnostics into defending the beauty and goodness of the physical realm despite thinking that matter is the principle of evils. The Church Fathers were likewise provoked, but why? Charlie Brown didn't believe in the great pumpkin, but he reacted to Linus with amused toleration, not the lengthy abuse offered by Irenaeus and other Church Fathers. Irenaeus would like us to think that he is motivated by moral indignation. He particularly resents the Gnostic claim to be an elite above the rest of the immaterial world. They compare themselves to gold immersed in filth. Already chosen by God for salvation, they have no need to perform good works to merit God's favor, as Christians like Irenaeus struggle to do. Instead, they feel free to indulge in scandalous behavior, seducing young women with promises of initiation. But sorry, Irenaeus, I'm not buying it. No amount of sexual misbehavior could explain the detailed exposition and refutation of Gnostic theory presented by Irenaeus. Instead, I suspect, Irenaeus attacked the Gnostics because he feared they might appeal to his own audience. They were that most dangerous of opponents, the enemy who agrees with you just enough to seduce your friends. And they were also a convenient opponent, in that Irenaeus' own views on God, creation, and mankind were brought into sharp relief by the contrasting views of the Gnostics. Refuting the Gnostics was an opportunity to defend the one true God, conceived not as a remote first principle followed by other principles, but a single creator who reigns supreme. So, Irenaeus does not just rename the Gnostics principles after vegetables. He hopes that by rooting out their heresy, he will plant the seeds of truth in his readers' minds. For instance, he points out that if there are inferior divinities that act contrary to God's will, as the Gnostics claim, then these divinities must be more powerful than God. How else could they defy his will? Instead, we should say that all things are subject to God's volition. Again, if the ignorant principles came from God, then God too must be ignorant, for causes share their natures with their effects. So we must reject the idea of an ignorant, lower-creating God. Yet again, regarding Gnostic dualism, the idea that there is a source of evil outside of God's power, he points out that if God is to be separate from the lower evil principle, there must be some third power in between them, keeping them apart. Indeed, once we abandon the idea of a single God, there is no reason to stop it too. We will wind up with an indefinite multiplicity of divinities, filling gaps between other divinities. Here, Irenaeus is remarkably prescient, describing in advance the sort of opulent metaphysical scheme espoused by the pagan philosopher Proclus several centuries later. This is appropriate because for Irenaeus the vine of heresy is rooted in pagan philosophy. He is happy to use philosophical premises in his invective against the Gnostics. For instance, we just saw him deploying the Platonist principle that causes and effects share a nature. But philosophy usually appears as the raw material that has been woven into the fabric of Gnosticism. Indeed, he compares the heresy to a garment sewn together from the old rags of Greek philosophy. He finds parallels between the Gnostics and the Hellenic schools. Their shameless behavior is reminiscent of the Cynics. The number symbolism they associate with their principles sounds suspiciously Pythagorean, and so on. Even Plato has been hijacked for their nefarious ends. They present lower principles as images of higher ones, borrowing the Platonic understanding of particular things as images of forms. Irenaeus seems to be objecting to this in part because he admires Plato, at least to some extent. Certainly, Plato is far preferable to the Gnostics, even if he did make the occasional error, for instance by believing that after death human souls pass into the bodies of animals. Nothing else divides Irenaeus from both the Gnostics and the philosophers. They are confident that humans can in principle attain perfect knowledge. We know that this possibility was a fundamental commitment of the Stoics, and the idea is fundamental to the Gnostics' elitism. By contrast, Irenaeus denies that men can know everything, and gives examples of questions that lie beyond our ken. We can make only plausible guesses as to what makes the Nile River rise, or what causes rain and other kinds of weather. At a more exalted level, how can humans know what was God doing before he created the world? Later, Augustine will raise this same question and be unable to resist quoting a joke answer he's heard, God was preparing hells for people who ask impertinent questions like this one. Irenaeus agrees with the spirit of that joke, going so far as to say that anything unexplained in Scripture should be left to God. One might assume that all the Church Fathers shared Irenaeus' attitude, and at best saw philosophy as a weapon to be used in refuting opponents. But that assumption is itself refuted by another second-century figure, the apologist Clement of Alexandria. The of Alexandria part of his name already helps to explain his enthusiasm for Hellenic philosophy. Whereas Irenaeus came from the eastern edge of the Roman Empire in Asia Minor, and wound up in the west as Bishop of Lyon, Clement resided in the intellectual center of the empire. As we've seen, Alexandria housed the greatest library and research institute of the ancient world, and was the headquarters of Middle Platonism in the generations leading up to Clement's lifetime. Notably, Philo of Alexandria, one of Clement's major influences, had lived there around the time of Jesus. Later on, Plotinus will study there, and it will be the home of the last school of Neoplatonists. As for Clement himself, he served as the instructor of Christian converts in this sophisticated city. It's no wonder that he sought to show how the ancient educational curriculum, from grammar to rhetoric and, especially, philosophy, could be a faithful friend to Christianity. Clement's pedagogical outlook is indicated by the title of one of his works, the Pedagogis, or Teacher. The title is a reference to Christ, who is here portrayed as a teacher who cures his students of sin. As we'll see, this is a theme that will be explored later by St. Augustine. Another work is called Stromates, meaning a patchwork of fabric. This recalls Irenaeus' dismissive description of Gnostic doctrines as a ragbag of philosophical influences. But Clement's quilt is, as he tells us, stitched together from the best parts of Hellenic philosophy and will help the reader to reach an understanding of Christian truths. Certainly, he admits that some pagan thinkers traded in falsehoods. He gives obvious examples, like Epicurean atheism and Stoic materialism. But truth too can be found in the Hellenic philosophers, especially Plato. Just as a coin retains its value no matter who handles it, so truth can be used to procure happiness even if it is unearthed in pagan soil. In fact, at one point Clement says that for him the very term philosophy means not just whatever the Hellenic thinkers have said, but only the true part of what they said, like a nut extracted from its shell. This kernel of philosophy is sent by God, first to help pagans to live better than they otherwise would have, and now, for Christians, to prepare the way for salvation. Clement claims that he is not just taking truth from the philosophers, he is taking it back. He provides a detailed chronology to show that Moses lived many generations before even the earliest Hellenic philosophers. This lends historical plausibility to his claim that Plato's political ideas, for instance, derive ultimately from the Old Testament. Indeed, Moses handed down truth in all the major departments of philosophy—politics, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. As a whole, the Scripture instructs us in that most philosophical of skills, dialectic, by which Clement means the ability to extract the true from the false. So it turns out that the best bits of philosophy, these snippets worth bringing to Clement's Christian quilting bee, come ultimately from the Bible. Of course, this is something of a backhanded compliment. Clement is telling us that the Greeks stole what wisdom they possessed, but at least had the good sense to steal from the best. In that case, though, why not dispense with philosophy and follow the advice of Irenaeus, seek the answers to all our questions in Scripture, and if we do not find them, reconcile ourselves to ignorance. Clement's answer will be repeated by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers for the next millennium and more. We use philosophy to prepare ourselves for faith, to understand more fully what we believe by faith, and to defend the faith against its enemies. Those who proceed straightaway to faith without study are like those who want to harvest pumpkins without first caring for the patch, if I may adapt an agricultural image used by Clement. This may sound strange to the modern ear, since we nowadays tend to think of religious faith and philosophical or rational argument as mutually exclusive paths. Faith surely is nothing other than belief that takes no heed of reason. Well, not for Clement. He carefully analyzes the Greek term pistis, which can be rendered into English as faith, but also as trust or conviction, translations which might be less misleading in the present context. Clement does use the word pistis to describe religious belief in the absence of philosophical reflection, but he also uses it for the attitude one takes towards the very things that are demonstrated in a philosophical argument, for instance the conclusion of an Aristotelian syllogism. Furthermore, pistis describes the belief we have in the case of first principles, the undemonstrated foundations of philosophical knowledge according to Aristotle. What do these three kinds of belief have in common? Clearly pistis, or faith, is not applied specifically to religious as opposed to secular beliefs. Nor does it pick out things believed immediately, without giving any rationale for the belief. That would apply to unreflective religion and first principles, but not to demonstrated conclusions. Rather, pistis is distinctive because of one's level of commitment. When we have faith, we believe with confidence, even certainty, because what we believe has become evident to us, as he puts it. Thus, Clement contrasts faith to mere opinion, where one's belief is still open to doubt. He adds though that faith is not just what we helplessly find ourselves believing. To have faith involves an act of the will, so that we are responsible for what we believe. Here, Clement seems to be drawing on the Stoics. Remember that Stoic thinkers like Epictetus likewise insisted that our ascent is under our control, and our control alone. Clement combines this with Aristotelian ideas about belief and knowledge to forge a new notion of pistis suitable for use by Christianity. When we have this sort of secure belief in God, then we have attained what Clement pointedly calls gnosis. This word means knowledge, which is why the intellectualist elitists attacked by Irenaeus were known as Gnostics. Clement is reclaiming the word gnosis for the true faith, just as he is reclaiming philosophy from the pagans. Actually, some scholars have claimed to find common ground between Clement and the Gnostics, because he too portrays human fulfillment in a highly intellectualist way. Also reminiscent of Gnosticism is his conviction that the scriptures are symbolic texts that need to be decoded through the use of philosophy. But on both scores his real model is not the hated Gnostics, but Philo of Alexandria. Clement follows Philo in pursuing philosophical exegesis of the Bible, and even quotes some of Philo's allegorical readings. Gnosticism's role in forming Clement's approach is that of a competitor, not an inspiration. He seeks to show that Orthodox Christianity too can make use of traditional learning and match Gnosticism in its sophistication. Clement and Irenaeus were struggling not just to defend Orthodoxy, but also to define it. In this era, Orthodox Christian belief had several competitors, not just pagans and Gnostics, but also Jews. In the first century after Christ, the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism had been contentious, as we saw last time. Now in the second century, Clement could point to the Hebrew Bible as the root of all that is good in philosophy and draw gratefully on the Jewish thinker Philo, yet Christians also needed to differentiate their religion from Judaism and explain why it should be preferred. No text sums up this problematic relationship so well as the Dialogue with Truffaut, written by another apologist, Justin Martyr. Like a Platonic dialogue, it dramatically presents an encounter between a sage and an interlocutor. The sage, Justin's mouthpiece, describes himself as a philosopher who dresses in a philosopher's distinctive garments. He debates with Truffaut, a possibly fictitious Jew, trying to convert him to Christianity. The speaker himself, presumably describing Justin's own conversion, tells how he was originally trained in philosophy, only to encounter a Christian who showed him the incoherence of various philosophical teachings. For instance, he at first accepted Plato's doctrine of the immortal soul, but was then persuaded that something subject to change and moral failure, like the soul, cannot possibly be ungenerated. That can apply to God alone. Soul is not then essentially alive, as Plato had argued in the Phaedo. Rather, God creates the soul and bestows life upon it. If the soul lives on after the death of the body, this is because eternal life is given to it as a gift that goes beyond its intrinsic nature. Nonetheless, Justin shares with Clement the idea that genuine philosophy is whatever is true, and therefore goes so far as to claim that Christianity itself is the true philosophy. From a philosophical point of view, though, the interest of Justin's dialogue wanes after the initial pages. Most of the text is dedicated to exegesis of the Old Testament, attempting to show that it prefigures and justifies Christian belief. The Jewish character Truffaut is mostly a passive straight man, though he is given an occasional chance to fight back, for instance by suggesting that the doctrine of the virgin birth is plagiarized from myths about Zeus. And though the conversation is depicted as a polite one, Justin really shows little respect for the Jewish faith. He includes a rather unedifying diatribe in which the Christian spokesman claims that circumcision and dietary laws are punishments laid upon the Jews for crucifying the Son of God. Even in the midst of this disturbing material, we do find passages of philosophical interest. The spokesman pauses to comment on the possibility of free will, which must be possessed by the Jews if God is to be just in punishing them for their evil misdeed. This mention of free will and evil brings us back to Irenaeus and his refutation of the Gnostics. You may have noticed that the Gnostic teaching could claim a distinct advantage over the Orthodox Christian one. By invoking an ignorant secondary God and the baseness of matter, the Gnostics could explain why the world is full of evil and sin. As we saw when we looked at Plotinus, this is much more difficult to explain in a system that recognizes only a single entirely good first principle. For Irenaeus and the other Fathers, the difficulty is even more, well, difficult. We've already seen Irenaeus insisting on the untrammeled freedom of God, and in coming generations Christians will reject the Neoplatonist's claim that all things proceed from the first principle necessarily. But if God is free and all-powerful, then why does He allow evil and suffering? Irenaeus's suggested solution would not prevail in the tradition, though it has found admirers among contemporary philosophers of religion. He begins from the Platonist-sounding assumption that, if souls are created, they must be changeable and imperfect. They begin in a condition like that of children, who need to develop to acquire wisdom and virtue. The Gnostics say that some are by nature bad and others by nature good. For Irenaeus, by contrast, it is up to each soul to become good. Suffering is the consequence of our inevitable imperfection, but we can strive to perfect ourselves through the exercise of our freedom of choice. Instead of blaming God for not creating us as gods like Himself, we should thank Him for calling us to perfect ourselves and giving us commands we can follow along the way. It's remarkable to see here how the imperfection of mankind is explained through metaphysical necessity rather than the doctrine of original sin expounded by Augustine. This is a road that Christianity could have taken but did not, at least not in the long run. In the short run, we find a breathtakingly radical version of Irenaeus's proposal in another apologist who happens to be the most philosophically interesting early Church Father. Join me as we continue to look at the origins of Christian philosophy with the Christian philosophy of origin, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fall and Rise, Origin. How do you feel about this whole all men are created equal thing? Is it, for example, a truth you hold to be self-evident? Thomas Jefferson did, which is why he led with it in the greatest divorce letter ever written, the American Declaration of Independence. But as self-evident truths go, it looks pretty controversial. Before we agree we will presumably want to understand men to refer to all humans, not just adult males. Then there is Jefferson's implication that a divine creator has bestowed the equality in question. That is made explicit in the following clause, which says that it is God who has endowed all of us with inalienable rights, such as the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Yet even atheists would probably agree that Jefferson was on to something. Most of us believe that all human beings have equal moral standing, and most ethical theories endorsed by today's philosophers reflect that. Followers of Kant want to say that every human should equally be considered an end and not a means. The echelitarians, the heirs of Mill and Bentham, typically think that we should be trying to maximize happiness universally, with each person having an equal claim to that happiness. These sentiments need to be squared against other apparently evident truths that push us back in the direction of inequality, for instance that our loved ones should have more weight in our moral calculations than total strangers do. Still, the equality of every human seems to be a promising starting point for moral reflection. Equality is not only a starting point, it is also a goal. We strive to achieve equality in democratic political arrangements, to treat all parties impartially in legal judgments, to eliminate inequality in social and economic conditions. All of which prompts the following thought. If we humans were indeed created by a just and loving God, then why weren't we created equal? It's patently obvious that we come into this world with radically different talents and capacities. Some are naturally intelligent, others are not. Some are gifted athletes, others uncoordinated and clumsy. Some have flowing, silken locks of hair cascading to their shoulders, while others have to content themselves with making podcasts. Even worse is the fact that some people are apparently born morally better than others. Certainly different childhood environments have an impact on our moral character, yet it does seem that certain people are born with the gifts of instinctive kindness, effortless self-control, and a cheerful outlook on life. Having lived in the American Midwest for several years, I can tell you that most of these people live there. At the other end of the spectrum are the bad seeds. People who have every advantage of privilege and upbringing, but find that, like Oscar Wilde, they can resist everything except temptation. In the ancient world, it was if anything taken for granted that all men, to say nothing of women, are not created equal. Just think of the three classes in Plato's Republic who are distinguished in terms of their inborn tendencies, or of Aristotle's views on natural slavery. Such natural inequalities, including morally significant inequalities, became increasingly difficult to explain as ancient philosophy developed. First, the Stoics, then the Platonists and Christians, insisted that the world is the result of providential divine activity. Why does God, despite untrammeled power, fail to arrange the world as we humans strive to arrange our own modest affairs, with equality and justice for all? The difficulty is narrower than the one we have looked at under the rubric of the problem of evil when we discussed Plotinus. Now we are asking not why there is anything bad in the universe at all, but more specifically why some people are born without gifts that are naturally given to others. One answer was given by a group we also mentioned when we looked at Plotinus, the Gnostics. For them, God's plan simply included a division of souls into three types. The best souls, the ones possessed by the Gnostic masters themselves, are permanently righteous and immune to the seductions of the physical world. Such souls are guaranteed to receive salvation. The worst souls cannot achieve salvation, and are lost from the day of their creation. In between are the souls who must struggle towards righteousness. The Gnostic view is bound to seem shocking, not only in its elitism, but also in its assumption that God would play favorites in a seemingly unjust manner. It certainly shocked Christian polemicists like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, who insisted that Christ came to redeem the whole human race, not just a fortunate few. But they did not think through the consequences of this rejection as thoroughly, indeed radically, as another Christian theologian. He was the most philosophically sophisticated and theologically daring of the early Greek church fathers. His name was Origines, known to us in English as Origen. Origen was the son of a Christian father who died in the persecutions of the emperor Septimus Severus at the dawn of the third century. At the same time, the wealth of the family was confiscated, but Origen, about twenty years old, had already received an excellent education in the grammatical curriculum I described back in episode 84. This enabled him to support his family as a teacher of grammar, and gave him the tools to exploit the unparalleled intellectual environment of his home city, Alexandria. He followed in the footsteps of Clement by teaching in the city's School for Converts to Christianity, and followed him again by drawing on the great Jewish philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria. As we've seen, Alexandria was also the center of pagan Platonism already in the time of Philo and, for centuries still, after the age of Origen. The pagan Platonists seemed to Origen to be allies, not enemies. He singles out Numenius for special praise. Origen probably became familiar with them by studying with none other than Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus. We know from Porphyry that Ammonius had a student named Origines. Though some have been skeptical that this was the same man, our Origen's extensive knowledge of Hellenic philosophy is consistent with the idea that he studied with Plotinus's master. If you had had a chance to sit on the dockside of Alexandria with him, admiring the lighthouse and trading anecdotes about the many philosophers named Ammonius, you might have asked Origen what he considered his greatest achievement. He could with some justification have mentioned either one of two massive works that survive today. One responds to a withering critique of Christianity by a Platonist philosopher named Celsus. Here Origen carries on the apologist tradition of Irenaeus, Justin, and Clement. A second treatise, On Principles, is a tour de force of theological speculation, the high point of Greek patristic literature for philosophically minded readers. It survives in quotations of the Greek by later authors and, in a Latin translation, by a later admirer and defender, Rufinus, who lived almost two centuries after Origen. Origen also wrote lengthy commentaries on several books of the Bible, which are partially preserved. But if Origen really wanted to impress you, he would probably have named a work that is now lost, the Hexapla. One of the most astounding feats of philology in the ancient world, this offered a side-by-side comparison of six versions of the Hebrew Bible. In six columns, Origen laid out the original Hebrew text, a transliteration of the Hebrew into Greek characters, three attempted Greek translations of the Hebrew, and finally, the most widely accepted Greek version, the Septuagint, noting places where this diverged from the Hebrew. Origen was born at the wrong time. He would, I think, have loved to publish the Hexapla on the internet and do the whole thing with hyperlinks and pop-up windows. As it was, he had to hope scribes would be willing to preserve this massive piece of erudition by copying it out over the coming millennium. They weren't. Which brings us back to our theme of what an unjust place the world is. Like the earlier church fathers, Origen could not accept the elitist doctrine of the Gnostics, which made God as arbitrary in his choices as a scribe deciding which text to preserve. But nor could he see how the world as we see it could be the direct creation of the perfectly just God whose scripture he so lovingly studied in the Hexapla. As Sherlock Holmes would say, once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth. Appealing to divine justice, Origen could eliminate the Gnostic theory that God chose to make us unequal. By the evidence of his own eyes, he could eliminate the idea that we are all in fact born equal. What remained was the possibility that souls were originally created equal, and only afterwards became unequal as a result of their own choices. A more timid thinker than Origen might have shied away from this radical conclusion. A more timid thinker could thus have avoided repeated condemnation in the coming generations. Origen was denounced by authors as varied as the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and the Latin Church Father Jerome, who debated the orthodoxy of Origen with the translator of On Principles, Rufinus. Origen though was anything but timid. As I mentioned two episodes ago, Origen explains in the opening pages of On Principles why he takes himself to have great license in devising solutions to theological and philosophical problems. As Christians, Origen and his reader have certain fundamental commitments derived from the clear meaning of Scripture. Origen lists these, but then points out how much remains unresolved. These are the areas that remain open for inquiry. His method is the opposite of the one we found in Irenaeus, who cautioned his readers not to pursue questions that have no answers in Revelation. The nature of the soul, the way in which God created the world, whether anything exists without a body, these are just such questions and Origen will pursue them in On Principles. Although his ideas about the soul are formulated in part as a response to the Gnostics, Origen shares something in common with his opponents. Like them, he sees the salvation of the soul as residing in intellectual fulfillment. Origen's intellectualism is also at play in explaining how souls fell away from God in the first place. When God first created the souls, they were all alike. This is not only because of the demands of justice, the theme I've been emphasizing, but also because God himself is simple and without any diversity, so that his effects cannot come from him already possessing variety and diversity. Instead, the souls were all created on an equal footing, rational beings without bodies but with the power of free choice. Being nothing but minds, they could only exercise this freedom by forming various beliefs. Origen is pointing here to the way that desire influences belief. He draws a connection between the Greek word suhē, or soul, and the verb suhastai, meaning to cool down, because the souls fall away from God when their love for him grows cold. Here Origen is picking up the theme we found in Clement. We do not just passively find ourselves believing things. Rather, belief always involves the exercise of choice. This is an insight we will meet again in Augustine. We like to imagine that our beliefs are formed rationally in reaction to the evidence at our disposal, but more commonly we rationalize our beliefs in response to our desires. For Origen, this is not just a psychological observation, but a key to explaining how diversity comes into the world. The souls who chose to adhere most closely to the truth became angels divided into ranks by their various beliefs. Others became wicked demons. In the middle, like the struggling souls of the Gnostics, are the souls that find themselves in human bodies. Our embodiment is the result of a prior intellectual failure which was also a failure of will. To undo the damage, God himself must become embodied in the person of Christ and lead us to salvation. Again, Origen understands this process as an increase in wisdom. He describes Christ as a teacher who is instructing the souls on how to improve their status. This pedagogical theme, one we already observed in Clement and will observe again in Augustine, is exactly what we'd expect from Origen, the instructor of new converts. He is also in tune with Irenaeus, who taught that life is a challenge laid down to souls, an opportunity to achieve greater perfection. Unlike Irenaeus, however, Origen boldly suggests that the whole cosmos can be understood as the product of the souls fall and rise. It is only because of the foolishness of souls that a complex and varied cosmos comes about in the first place, instead of the immaterial community of souls first created by God. Origen further believes, on the basis of certain Biblical passages, that eventually all souls, maybe even those of demons, will manage to return to a state of salvation. He indulges in further speculation here, pondering the Stoic doctrine of world cycles and wondering whether there might be a series of cosmic dramas in which souls first fall away from and then return to God. Characteristically, Origen discusses that possibility without quite committing himself to it wholeheartedly. His willingness to explore ideas in such a tentative way is an appealing feature of his thought, but it can make his actual views difficult to pin down. It doesn't help that our fullest version of On Principles is the Latin one by Rufinus. Since Rufinus's project was to defend Origen against charges of unorthodoxy and even heresy, he quietly corrected passages where Origen strayed into dangerous territory. Meanwhile, later critics of Origen, like Justinian, tendentiously quote Origen in an effort to make him seem as heretical as possible. Thus, passages from On Principles are sometimes preserved in two versions, a Latin one that looks rather banal, and a Greek one that seems flagrantly heretical. Discerning Origen's settled view in such cases, if he even had one, is not easy. For instance, Origen's critics tell us in no uncertain terms that he rejected the doctrine of bodily resurrection, and thought that when the souls achieve salvation, they will lose their bodies. This makes Origen sound like a committed Platonist. The soul is fundamentally an immaterial thing which acquires a casual association to a series of bodies, but can free itself entirely from the physical realm by achieving wisdom. In Rufinus's Latin version, though, Origen is somewhat more circumspect about whether we will ultimately be totally disembodied. Be that as it may, On Principles is certainly a work deeply influenced by Platonism, so it is rather ironic that Origen's greatest opponent was also a Platonist named Celsus. The two did not meet in person. Celsus lived in the generations before Origen, and his vicious attack on Christianity came to Origen's attention only when he received a copy from his patron, Ambrosius. Celsus had called his diatribe Logos Aletheis, meaning true doctrine, or true word. The word Logos in the title is of course a mocking reference to the assertion that Christ is the word of God. At the request of Ambrosius, Origen wrote a massive refutation which reasserted the truth of the Christian Logos over that of this pagan upstart. Origen guesses that the irreverent Celsus is an Epicurean. Apparently he finds it hard to believe that a philosopher this appalling could be anything else. But it's clear that Celsus was a Platonist, and one of those Platonists who really, really don't like Christians. Celsus painted adherents of this new faith in the most unflattering of terms, accusing them of deliberate secrecy born out of cowardice, and describing them as vermin. The Apostles, he said, were a low-born rabble, and Jesus was not the son of a virgin, but the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier. He also had a more principled complaint about Christian belief. He disdained their reliance on faith, their habit of discouraging questions and demanding unthinking acceptance of doctrine. Besides, the doctrines they are required to accept are absurd. The virgin birth is hard enough to swallow, but the notion that a god could become a man is simply metaphysically impossible. This is one of the places that Celsus's Platonist inclinations become clear, because of his sharp contrast between the divine and the physical, a contrast that no Epicurean would have recognized. We know all this thanks to Origen's quotations from Celsus which are interspersed with lengthy refutation. Celsus made the tactical error of putting many of his attacks into the mouth of a fictional Jewish spokesman. So Origen is to some extent able to turn the debate into one over the meaning of the Scriptures shared by Jew and Christian. Here we are in something like the territory of Justin's Against Truffaut, as Origen shows that the virgin birth and incarnation are in fact prefigured in the Old Testament. Mercifully, here he gives us only one version of the biblical texts he cites, not six. In fact, he is perhaps more keen to display his deep knowledge of the pagan tradition than his biblical erudition. Celsus had depicted Christians as ignorant, unquestioning lowlifes, a slander Origen can refute by displaying his own knowledge of philosophy and Hellenic culture. For instance, when Celsus says that the apostles were reprobates before they became followers of Christ, Origen says yes, just as were the followers of Socrates before they converted to philosophy. After Celsus's claim that God cannot inhabit a body, Origen asks what about the oracle at Delphi? Against Celsus's most general point that the Christians demand blind belief in place of reasoned argument, Origen follows the lead of Clement. Hellenic philosophy, or at least the Platonist part of it, is largely in agreement with the Gospels. And no wonder. As Clement had also said, the ideas supposedly discovered by Greek thinkers can themselves be traced back to Moses. There is then no opposition between faith and philosophy. None of this is to say that Origen saw the Bible as just one more philosophical text. To the contrary, he admits in Against Celsus and in his surviving commentaries on Scripture that the Bible nearly defies correct interpretation at times. It even contains outright historical impossibilities and contradictions, something eagerly pointed out by critics like Celsus and Porphyry. These do not, however, undermine the validity of Scripture. Rather, they are providentially included in the text to make sure we read it not as a straightforward historical narrative, but with higher allegorical methods of interpretation. The Scripture is designed to help everyone make progress, from the simplest to the most advanced reader. The most basic meaning, what we might call its literal sense, is what Origen calls the bodily interpretation. When we find contradictions at this level, we are pointed to a so-called spiritual interpretation which involves the sort of symbolic reading pioneered by Philo of Alexandria. To Philo's armory of interpretive weapons, Origen adds his own considerable philological skills. For instance, when the Bible says, In the beginning was the word, Origen catalogues all the different meanings of the Greek word arche, or beginning. It is, as it happens, the very same Greek word used for principle in the title of Origen's On Principles. The career of Origen shows us both the power and the limitations of Hellenic philosophy, and in particular Platonism, for the early Christian tradition. On the one hand, Origen's learning could be used to defend the faith, not least by presenting himself as an example of just how sophisticated a Christian can be. On the other hand, all that learning did not keep Origen from being persecuted along with his fellow religionists. He was tortured during the persecution of Decius around 250 AD, and died shortly thereafter. There were also limits to how much Hellenic philosophy a man like Origen could accept. One comes away from his treatise Against Celsus, realizing that Celsus was a truer Platonist than Origen could ever be. For instance, Celsus assumes that the world's rational design is unchanging, so that it can never contain more or less evil than it does now. Origen, by contrast, sees the world as evolving towards a more perfect state, in which all souls are reconciled to God. With Origen and the other Church Fathers, history becomes central in the history of philosophy. No longer is the world a static, unchanging object for us to contemplate, it is rather a stage on which is played out the greatest story ever told. At the center of that story are concrete historical events, especially the birth and crucifixion of Jesus, which give the whole cosmos its meaning, and even its intelligibility. Still, figures like Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen only begin to show us what Christianity will mean for the history of philosophy. In particular, though they do speak of the three Persons of the Trinity and the Incarnation, they are not yet grappling with the complex debates that will rage once Christianity becomes the dominant faith of the Empire. The Fathers of the second and third centuries had Gnostics, Pagans, and Jews as their primary opponents. In the fourth century, the debates will instead pit Christian against Christian. Conflict will rage around the most vexed topic of late ancient Christianity, the Trinity. This is, of course, a theological question, but in the next episode we'll see just how philosophically interesting it could become. Appropriately enough, it will be an episode where you get three thinkers for the price of one, the Cappadocians, next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Let's Talk Turkey, the Cappadocians. Some things run in families, musical talent for example. Consider the Bach family of Thuringia. They produced not only the renowned Johann Sebastian Bach, but also his children, a good number of whom became significant musicians in their own right. Or more recently, think of the Jackson family of Gary, Indiana. So deep was their talent pool that they were able to form the Jackson Five without even calling on the services of Sister Janet. Of course, musical stardom has many things in common with philosophy—the fast cars, the groupies, the constant press attention. But this phenomenon of famous families doesn't seem to be one of them. I recently appealed to listeners on the podcast's Facebook group—you might want to join in if you haven't yet—for examples of philosophical siblings. Helpful responses pointed me towards the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August, who were major thinkers of German Romanticism. I was also reminded of Plato's brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, who feature in The Republic. Okay, Glaucon and Adeimantus weren't necessarily great philosophers, but like the Jacksons, that family did have one heck of a frontman. As far as I can tell, though, the greatest philosophical siblings of all time were Christians who hailed from Cappadocia, a region of central Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. Their names were Macrina, Basil, Gregory, and Tito. Oh, no, sorry, Tito was one of the Jacksons. I always get that confused. Actually, there were five brothers and five sisters in this Cappadocian family. A decisive influence came from the oldest sibling, Macrina. She helped raise the younger kids and was partly responsible for bringing her brothers Gregory and Basil to a religious life. When Gregory wrote A Dialogue on the Soul, in imitation of Plato's Phaedo, he presented Macrina as a kind of Christian Socrates. She is shown on her deathbed using arguments to convince Gregory not to grieve at her imminent death. If Gregory gives us anything close to an accurate portrayal of Macrina, she was opinionated and knowledgeable about Hellenic philosophy, able to discourse on fine points of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and medical theory. As usual, though, this female philosopher is known to us only indirectly through the writings of men, in this case her two brothers. Of this fraternal pair, Gregory seems to have been more inclined towards philosophy than Basil. Though he had studied in Athens, at Macrina's prompting Basil became a monk living in ascetic retreat from the world. He was called away from this vocation to the highly politicized world that was the 4th century church. In the 360s, Basil took up a post in the Cappadocian city of Caesarea and eventually became bishop there. Much of his life would be devoted to doctrinal battles over Christian theology, as we'll see in a moment. For support in this struggle, he called on the services of his brother Gregory, who became bishop of a small town called Nissa. Hence, these two Cappadocian thinkers are usually called Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nissa. A third significant Cappadocian philosopher, or rather fourth, counting Macrina, is another Gregory called Gregory of Nazianzus, because he likewise took up a post as bishop in the small settlement of Nazianzus at Basil's urging. This Gregory was a dear friend of the family, and often wrote of his longing for the peace offered by a life of retreat with Basil and Macrina. But he was also a well-trained rhetorician who was steeped in previous Christian philosophy. All three Cappadocian fathers were especially influenced by origin, albeit that they did not follow him indiscriminately, rejecting for instance his view that the soul exists before it comes to be in a body. Origins influence in Cappadocia can perhaps be traced back to yet another Gregory, this name being to Cappadocian thought what the name Ammonius is for Neoplatonism. The earlier Gregory Thamaturgos, meaning Gregory the Wonder Worker, had brought originist teachings to the region in the 250s. Drawing on this originist tradition and their training in rhetoric and philosophy, the Cappadocians engaged in extensive debate with theological rivals, in addition to carrying out their daily pastoral duties. Neither of the Gregories took to this life with unmixed enthusiasm. Gregory of Nazianzus in particular had mixed feelings. His resentment at being assigned to such a backwater town by Basil and his preference for a life of withdrawal led him to complain bitterly about his calling and to abandon his duties more than once. Yet he did not shy from political controversy. His writings in defense of what he took to be orthodoxy became classics, to the point that in the later Byzantine period he was simply called Gregory the Theologian. He bravely faced the more dangerous side of the controversy as well. During time spent in Constantinople, he was showered with stones by rival monks and then nearly assassinated. The would-be killer had a last-moment change of heart, and Gregory forgave him on the spot. Whatever his misgivings about the perilous, distracting, and contentious life he led as a bishop, we should be grateful that he was forced into a life of active engagement with his Christian community. Many of his surviving writings are orations that were delivered to that community. In one of the most moving, he implores his listeners to care for the poor, and in particular for victims of leprosy. Here Gregory's rhetorical training is on full display as he tries to bring his audience to feel pity and mercy for the disadvantaged. At one point, he speaks of how lepers become so disfigured that they must cry out their own names so that their former friends will be able to recognize them. But Gregory does not only appeal to our emotions, he also calls on the assistance of philosophy. The condition of the lepers, he says, teaches us that things of the body are subject to destruction and suffering, and that only the goods of the soul are invulnerable—a point Stoics and Platonists had been making for a fair few centuries by this stage. When Gregory denounces his fellow citizens for their attachment to luxury—floors strewn with flower petals, slaveboys with modish haircuts, serving fine food—he sounds like Epictetus, or any number of authors from the rhetorical movement called the Second Sophistic. But Epictetus never told us that we need to devote our lives to the care of the poor, that the health of our souls could be secured through tending to those who are diseased in body. As soon as Gregory begins his oration by referring to St. Paul's triad of virtues—faith, hope and love—we realize that we are in a new ethical territory. Gregory extols love even above faith and hope, and identifies love of the poor as the purest expression of this virtue. We have here a stark contrast with pagan thinkers, and particularly the pagan Platonists of Gregory's time, like the somewhat earlier Iamblichus or the emperor Julian. In fact, like Basil, Gregory made the pilgrimage to the philosophical Mecca of Athens, around the same time Julian was there. Yet the fourth century offers few pairs of thinkers more opposed than Julian, the anti-Christian emperor, and Gregory the theologian. Not only did Gregory attack Julian directly in impassioned pro-Christian orations, but he had a completely different understanding of the place of philosophy in the good life. It isn't just that he emphasizes practical action more than Julian and other pagan Platonists do. It is also the nature of the action he recommends. Iamblichus and Julian think the practical side of philosophy means using theurgic ritual to come into contact with the gods. For Gregory, God has already come into contact with us, by sending us his son. We should humble ourselves just as he did, by going amongst the least fortunate and sharing whatever we have with them. Gregory repeatedly invokes an ethical precept from Plato, imitate God insofar as is possible. But his god is a very different one from Plato's, a god who is best imitated by loving one's fellow man without concern for oneself, and gladly choosing the very poverty one tries to alleviate in others. Greek ethics had long revolved around the apparently selfish goal of perfecting oneself. Now Gregory gives us the Christian version of that goal. We help ourselves only by helping others. And by the way, he adds, don't worry about those scaremongers who claim that leprosy might be contagious, those are just silly rumors. Leprosy was not the only potentially lethal malady found in the eastern Mediterranean at this time. Gregory's nearly averted assassination was the symptom of a chronic social and political disease, a severe case of theological dissent. The careers of both Gregory's and also Basil revolved around one of the most bitter and protracted intellectual disputes of the ancient world, a controversy over the Holy Trinity. This dispute threatened the unity of ancient Christianity and vexed political leaders in the highest seats of power. Various emperors tried imposing a solution, negotiating between disputing bishops, and occasionally playing them off one against the other, almost always to little avail. The fundamental question was this. Apparently the earliest church fathers, like Origen and the apologists, had recognized that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like Jews before them and Muslims after them, the Christians were emphatic that they believed in just one God, yet their God was somehow three. This problem turned out to need a lot of solving. Although one could wonder about the relation between all members of the Trinity, most attention was directed to the relation of begetting between the Father and the Son. If we could understand how this begetting works, we might understand better how exactly the Trinity forms a divine unity. In the normal course of events, fathers are distinct from their sons, and there's a good reason for that. The relation that a father bears to a son is an asymmetrical one. That is, fathers beget their sons, whereas sons are begotten by their fathers. This is not a two-way street. For instance, it would be impossible for Joe Keaton to be Buster Keaton's father while also being Buster's son. Yet in the case of God, this is precisely what happens. He is both father and son. It seems the begetting relation, which we hoped would solve our problem of how God can be both three and one, is just giving rise to further puzzles. An important early attempt to resolve these puzzles was put forward at the Council of Nicaea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in the year 325. Clips from across the empire assembled and produced a statement of belief, a creed, which would later be seen as a definitive statement of Christian doctrine. But to the extent that consensus was reached, it would not last. Nicaea would be followed by many more councils which likewise failed to put the dispute to rest. The Nicaean position on the relation of father to son was that they are the same in substance. The broader theological point of this formula was, of course, to ensure that the divine persons do constitute a unity. The more immediate political point was to put a stop to the malign influence of a theologian named Arius, who leaned towards affirming a significant difference between father and son. Nonetheless, the council wanted to stop short of the heresy known as Sibelionism, named after the third-century theologian Sibelius. This was the view that God is in reality a unity and not a trinity, for the persons are in themselves identical and distinguished from one another only as modes by which the divine unity expresses itself. Theologians of the fourth century thus presented themselves as steering a course between the two extreme views of Arianism and Sibelionism. Some tried to diffuse the controversy by arguing against applying the term uzia, the Greek word for substance or essence, to God in the first place. But compromise middle positions were waiting to be occupied, and if ever there was a debate where every possible position was eventually occupied by someone or other, it was the debate over the trinity. Some theologians proposed modifying the Nicaean formula to say that the father and the son are different in substance. After the Greek for this expression, modern scholars call this group the heteroceanes. The idea was to concede a real difference in the persons, albeit that they remain unified by a single divine will. Naturally enough, those who took up this view were accused by opponents of falling into the error of Arius by effectively affirming three gods where there should be only one. Some of these opponents realized they could stake out a ground between this supposedly neo-Arian heterocean position and the total identity view of the Sibelians by saying that the persons are similar in substance. It was this solution that was taken up by the heroes of today's episode, the Cappadocians. Of course, they presented their solution not as a correction of the Nicaean formula that the persons are the same in substance, but rather as an explanation of the sense in which that is true. Thus Gregory of Nyssa gave the analogy of three humans who share the same nature of humanity. As Aristotle himself said in his categories, the universal humanity is itself a sort of substance, which makes it parallel to the single substance of the godhead. Meanwhile, the three individual humans are distinct from one another, yet similar in virtue of their same nature, just as the three divine persons are similar, yet not fully identical. Appropriately enough, the debate over these ideas was itself pretty personal. The leading heterocean intellectual and the chief target of the Cappadocians' refutations was a man named Eunomius. In thinking through the implications of his heteroceanism, where father and son are said to be the same god and yet different, Eunomius gave a fairly sophisticated account of how words relate to things. Of course, he was particularly interested in words like father, son, and begotten, but his view can be generalized to all names. Eunomius proposed that a name will reveal the essence or nature of the thing that is named. Names cannot acquire this power by mere convention, but must have some kind of innate correctness. We would not know the begottenness of the divine son with merely human resources, but now that God has revealed this begottenness, we can say that in the sentence, the son is begotten by the father, the word begotten gives us a direct insight into the son's substance. This is a perfect fit with heterocean theology, since different words, begetting and begotten, will apply to the father and to the son, yielding a difference in substance. Along the way, Eunomius has taken sides in a dispute that goes back at least as far as Plato's Cratylus. As we saw a mere 75 episodes ago, in that dialogue Plato considers two theories of names, one of which makes names naturally relate to their bearers, as would happen in a case of onomatopoeia. It's not mere chance or custom that makes us use the word bang for a loud noise. Loud noises just sound like the word bang. On the naturalist theory, though, all genuine names relate intimately to what they name. Names can even be analyzed, perhaps by means of etymology, to arrive at an understanding of what is named. The Stoics too liked this theory of names, but by late antiquity the dominant position was that of Aristotle, who had said clearly in his work On Interpretation that names are conventional. We arbitrarily assign sounds to things, and thereby produce new names that work just fine. So, when Basil of Caesarea comes to refute Eunomius, he needs to reject the naturalist theory of names, and it is only to be expected that he would align himself with the Aristotelian position. This is exactly what he does, though there is some debate about how much he takes directly from philosophical sources and how much is filtered through previous Christian theological literature. He stakes out a position not unlike the one we've seen in Platonist commentators on Aristotle, according to which thoughts are an intermediary between language and the world. When you hear the word giraffe, you understand it as referring to a giraffe, but only by way of a thought in your mind, the thought or notion of giraffes. Basil takes this in a skeptical direction by claiming that the names we use can get us only as far as these notions. Never do we find language actually revealing the essence of a thing, it only signifies the way those things are conceptualized in our minds. In the case of the Trinity, this allows him to say that no real difference is being implied when we use one word, like begetting, to refer to the Father, and another word, like begotten, to refer to the Son. The upshot is that Basil has the anti-Eunomian position he wants, but only by casting doubt on the power of language and thought to get at things in the world. We might take this to show that Eunomius has a big advantage over Basil. Surely we want to protest, language does refer to the real things, and not only our mental conceptions of them. Surely too we can know the essences of these things, if indeed they have essences. Basil's stance seems to land us in a radical skepticism, not just about God, but about anything we can name. But Basil's point is somewhat more nuanced than I have made out thus far. Though he does insist that the essences of things remain unknowable to us, he adds that language and our mental conceptions allow us to identify those things and keep track of them. Thus, if I say, the tall strikingly beautiful creature in the enclosure there, I am successfully picking out an object, namely a giraffe. However, the description only leads to identification of the giraffe and the possibility of classing it with other things that share some of its characteristics. Never will I actually achieve a direct grasp of its substance, essence, or being. In Greek, it's ousia. Another objection, and one that the Cappadocians would find at least as troubling, is a religious one. Their anti-Eunomian theory places God irrevocably beyond the reach of our minds. One might suppose that the Cappadocians would simply bite the bullet here. After all, unlike pagan Platonists who honored contemplative perfection, didn't they emphasize good actions in this life rather than theoretical understanding? We saw Gregory of Nazianzus persuading his audience to love the poor, and Gregory of Nyssa wrote on the same theme, all in support of a social campaign launched by Basil. As bishop of Caesarea, he built a hospice which offered food and shelter for the indigent. And yet the Cappadocians were also powerfully attracted to a life of seclusion devoted to the contemplation of God. The tension faced by both Gregory's between pastoral duty and monastic retreat is one we'll be looking at in a few weeks when we discuss the ascetic movement. So, the Cappadocian Fathers insist that we can, rather paradoxically, know this unknowable God. For one thing, as Basil points out, we have a conception of God through his workings without knowing his substance. For instance, we can say that he is good because of the goodness of the world he has made. Philosophically, this is on a par with our ability to identify a giraffe through the impressions it makes on us, even if we cannot know its substance. This may still seem unsatisfying. As wonderful as giraffes are, our ultimate happiness does not require our coming to know their substances. With God, things are different. Gregory of Nyssa puts forth a radical response to this dilemma. He admits that God's essence is unknowable because God is unbounded or infinite. But this means that our desire for him must also be infinite. The reward we receive through contemplation, and even in the afterlife, is ceaseless progress along an infinite but never-ending path of knowledge. Just as in mathematics a curve may approach a straight line and get indefinitely closer without ever touching it, so the blessed soul comes ever closer to understanding God completely without this desire ever being fully satisfied. Some might think this sounds more like the eternal torment of Tantalus than a heavenly reward. But for Gregory, love and desire go hand in hand. Perfect love is love for a beloved object that can never be fully attained, so that the flame of desire is never quenched by the satisfaction of that desire. Thus, Gregory remains true to the characteristically Cappadocian conviction that God exceeds our grasp. The good thing about infinite unknowability, though, is that there is always more to say about it. We'll be saying more about it next week, when we reach the greatest ancient theorist of the ineffable. He will show us the limitations of human knowledge and language while challenging our expectations about the possibility of uniting pagan Platonist ideas to Christianity. Who was this great Christian Neoplatonist and negative theologian? Try as we might, we won't find out next week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Naming the Nameless, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Here's a trivia question for you. What do Stephen King and Søren Kierkegaard have in common? Well, their initials, obviously, and an interest in fear and trembling. But I have in mind something else—their use of pseudonyms. King has written novels under the pen name of Richard Bachmann. Kierkegaard, meanwhile, used a variety of pseudonyms in philosophical works like Fear and Trembling, supposedly authored by one Johannes de Silencio. Another book by Kierkegaard, entitled Either Or, presents itself as having been written by a scholar named Victor Emerita, who is, in turn, presenting the work of further authors named A and B. No major philosopher has made more abundant or inventive use of pseudonyms. But as readers, we know that it is Kierkegaard behind all the false names. The same cannot be said for the most important and famous pseudonymous writer of antique philosophy. His works were translated into Syriac, into Arabic, and into Latin. He influenced visionary mystics and rationalist thinkers, making a mark upon medieval philosophy, theology, and even architecture. Yet we have no idea who he was, only who he claimed to be—an associate of the apostles and a witness to the crucifixion of Christ. He went by the name of Dionysius. Dionysius the Areopagite was, in the first instance, a minor biblical character. The book of Acts mentions him as a man from Athens who was converted to the new faith by St. Paul. Perhaps the connection to Athens made this an attractive choice of pseudonym for a Christian Platonist. But whatever his motive, our nameless philosopher ironically took over the identity of a man who is, for us, almost nothing but a name—a convert from the Apostolic era. The works of the self-styled Dionysius complete the deception by alluding, almost casually, to his own presence at events from the biblical era. He mentions that he was a witness to the eclipse that occurred when Christ was crucified, and that he enjoyed a vision of Mary along with the apostles James and Peter. One of a series of letters composed by the author is addressed to St. Paul himself in exile on the island of Patmos. But, of course, neither this letter nor any other philosophical compositions were written by a companion of the apostles named Dionysius. Instead, they were composed several centuries later, in about 500 AD. Thus, scholars have come to call this author the pseudo-Dionysius. The pseudo was a late addition. Within a generation, some were questioning the author's identity, and for good measure, adding that he would seem to be a heretic. But others leapt to defend his apostolic authority. In particular, a man named John of Scythopolis wrote a series of comments explaining the works of Dionysius, along with a prologue, which speaks out in favor of Dionysius's authenticity and orthodoxy. The Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor, who we'll be looking at next week, was also an enthusiastic supporter of Dionysius. Thanks to these early adherents, the mask adopted by Dionysius remained firmly in place. Dionysius's stature rose another level when he was, rather amazingly, confused with Saint-Denis, the patron saint of France. This was thanks to the abbot who just happened to be in charge of the abbey of, wait for it, Saint-Denis. That rather convenient bit of scholarly confusion occurred in the 9th century, when the works of Dionysius were translated into Latin in Carolingian France. In this age, the philosophical influence of Dionysius reached a peak, as his works were taken up with unblushing eagerness and great ingenuity by the translator and philosopher John Scodas Eriugena. Eriugena was the greatest philosopher of the early Middle Ages in the Latin West, and took Dionysius as one of his chief inspirations. This may have done Dionysius no favors, given that Eriugena was a radical and controversial thinker. Yet as late as the 13th century, no less a thinker than Thomas Aquinas was writing commentaries on Dionysius and quoting him extensively in other works. By this time, the works of Dionysius had become standard texts in Christian medieval theology. His influence can be discerned not only in the writings of theologians and philosophers, but even in the design of Gothic churches. Dionysius's theory of angelic hierarchies is represented on the Cathedral of Chartres, and his writings, suffused with images about light, also had an impact on the Gothic use of stained glass. Speaking of hierarchies, that word is another sign of Dionysian influence. He seems to have invented the Greek noun hierarchia, from which we get our word hierarchy. All of which raises obvious questions. How did this guy get away with it for so long, and how was his deception eventually uncovered? To answer the second question first, it was only at the end of the 19th century that two scholars pointed out the fact that Dionysius borrows liberally from the works of Proclus, yes that Proclus, the Neoplatonist philosopher. This is how we know that Dionysius wrote his texts around 500 AD. He must have come after Proclus, who died in 485, and Dionysius is already being mentioned by other authors in the first half of the 6th century, so he wrote his own texts before then. Dionysius made such extensive use of Proclus, and Neoplatonic ideas more generally, that even some contemporaries grew suspicious. If Dionysius had really been an Athenian of the 1st century AD who hung around with St. Paul, he would have been seriously ahead of his time. But other readers thrilled to Dionysius's ambitious appropriation of Neoplatonism for Christian purposes. Entertainingly, an early remark added to the manuscripts of Dionysius claims that it was Proclus who stole from Dionysius, not the other way around. Those manuscripts of the works of Dionysius preserve five separate texts. First, there is a collection of ten letters, culminating in the one supposedly addressed to St. Paul. Then there are two works on the notion of hierarchy. One entitled the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy explains the role of priests, including the purpose and function of the sacraments. The other, the Celestial Hierarchy, deals with angels and applies to the angelic world, the Neoplatonic idea that the immaterial world should be structured in ordered ranks. Here, we might pause to think of staunch anti-Christian Neoplatonists like Porphyry and, yes, Proclus, spinning in their pagan graves as Dionysius rewrites their metaphysics as a structure for Christian theology. But for historians of philosophy, the most exciting texts of the Dionysian collection concern human language and knowledge, and how these fail when we attempt to grasp the nature of God. These two remaining texts are the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Thanks to these texts, the pseudo-Dionysius could rightly be honored as the patron saint of negative theology, even if he was not the patron saint of France. Before getting into the texts themselves, let me say something about this phrase, negative theology. Theologians and philosophers of religion frequently contrast two attitudes concerning the human attempt to grasp God. On the one hand, there is positive theology, sometimes called kataphatic, which comes from the Greek word kataphasis, meaning positive assertion. When we say that God is good or powerful or compare Him to a lion or a cloud, we are making positive assertions about Him. Negative theology tries to explain how this is possible. Negative theology, meanwhile, is sometimes called apophatic, because the Greek word for denial is apophasis. Negative theologians are more pessimistic about the prospects of naming, describing, and conceiving God. They point out that if God utterly transcends us and the other things He has created, then our language and concepts are unlikely to apply to Him fully, if at all. In their most pessimistic moments, negative theologians may go so far as to deny that we can know God at all. The pseudo-Dionysius was this sort of pessimist, and the unknowability of God was his favorite theme. Imitators followed him for many centuries to come. In his mystical theology, for instance, Dionysius compares God to a darkness beyond all light. As late as the 14th century, this inspired a mystical author to write a theological text, called the Cloud of Unknowing. Dionysius doesn't just give us metaphors, though. He argues for God's unnamability and unknowability. For instance, God is simple, so it cannot be the case that our many verbal expressions pick out distinct features of His essence. But his most fundamental rationale is that human cognition is simply inadequate to grasp an object of God's transcendence. Sense perception cannot grasp things properly understood by the mind. In just the same way, the mind cannot grasp things properly grasped by a higher power, the divine power by which God grasps Himself. This is a power not given to us, at least not in this life. Although Dionysius holds out hope that we will be granted a better access to God in Paradise, for now we are stuck with cognitive tools inadequate to the task of understanding our Maker. The much later philosopher and occasional mystic, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had some advice that would seem applicable here. Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. In the mystical theology, Dionysius more or less follows that advice. He surveys the various sorts of language with which one might try to capture God, and says that some are clearly more inappropriate than others. It is not fully adequate to call God good, or to call Him a stone, but it's much easier to see why God is not a stone than why He is not good. We can rise in our understanding of God as we come to see how various expressions are inappropriate for Him, a process that Dionysius compares to making a statue by carving away stone bit by bit. Ultimately, though, we should dispense with all verbal description of God, and even with negations. If we cannot say that God is good, neither can we say that He is not good. Thus, even denials must be denied, a point Dionysius makes in the very last line of the mystical theology. Having stalemated himself in this game of theological chess, Dionysius does what Wittgenstein would recommend, and puts down his pen. Apparently, the first rule of negative theology is, don't talk about negative theology. Or rather, silence is where Dionysius expects us to wind up, not where we begin. Which explains how he could also have written another, even more famous work, The Divine Names. In this longer and more complicated text, Dionysius moves back and forth between positive and negative theology. His goal is to explain the positive language that is ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Here we have the classic dilemma of the Christian negative theologian, a dilemma that is equally pressing for Jewish and Muslim negative theologians, by the way, as we'll be seeing soon. On the one hand, philosophical considerations show us that human language is inapplicable to God. On the other hand, revealed texts apply human language to God. Dionysius's solution to the dilemma is to explore the extent to which each word applied to God in the Bible is applicable to him, while also admitting that these words are not really applicable to him. In fact, his project in The Divine Names is somewhat narrower than this. It restricts itself to scriptural language that seems to be at a conceptual, rather than physical level. In the Bible, God is compared to a stone, a cloud, is said to have eyes, a face, and other bodily parts, and so on. Dionysius claims to have written another work on these more physical descriptions of God, but if it ever existed, this work is lost. That leaves us with terms like good, love, powerful, eternal, righteous, and so on. It is these terms that form the subject matter of the Divine Names, which moves through the scriptural language and explains how each expression reveals something about God, while also posing the threat that we will be misled. It is all too easy to think that if an earthly king is good, and God is good, then God and the earthly king somehow share an attribute. But this is not so. Whereas we can experience the goodness of a human king, God is beyond our direct experience, inaccessible to both our sensation and our mind. How then are we able to ascribe goodness to God in any sense? Dionysius has a ready answer, he assumes that the things that God makes are somehow revelatory of God's nature. Since God's effects are good, we can say that God is good. At one level, this is simply standard Neoplatonic metaphysics as familiar from authors like Proclus. Proclus has taught us, and taught Dionysius, that effects are contained preeminently in their causes. For instance, the unity of each thing is the effect of the perfect unity of the first principle that is truly one. To some extent, this is just common sense. Fire, being the cause of heat, is preeminently taught. Yet Dionysius is not quite happy with this picture because it would allow us to do what Proclus does with his own metaphysical principles, apply human language and concepts to them in a more or less unproblematic way. But Dionysius is too negative a theologian for that. So, he insists that, even if we can make progress towards understanding God as a cause on the basis of His effects, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we will ever reach Him. Rather, when we call God good on the basis that His effects are good, we should remind ourselves that He is beyond any notion of goodness we can conceive. Dionysius marks this point with an influential bit of linguistic trickery. He applies the Greek prefix huper to each positive term. This prefix was translated into Latin as super. Thus, God is not good, but hyper or super good. The genius of this, or if you're feeling less charitable, the sneakiness of this, is that it encapsulates both the positive and negative aspects of Dionysian theology in a single term. In one word, he captures the idea that God is so preeminently good that He is no longer really good in any sense we can understand. The tension between positive and negative approaches to God is the theme that runs throughout the divine names. We see it again, for instance, when Dionysius turns to the question of whether the scripturally sanctioned names apply to God in his entirety. They do, he insists. God is simple, so it is impossible for one name to name one aspect of God and another name some other aspect. Yet he also wants to deny that the names are all synonymous. There is a real diversity of names, but the diversity is caused by our human conceptions, not by the nature of what we are naming. This only stands to reason. After all, we are naming God on the basis of what He has caused, and the things He has caused have many different features. Dionysius uses the analogy of a seal that has made stamps in many bits of wax. God is single and one, yet has many different effects by which we name Him. This stress on divine simplicity and unity might cause us to raise an eyebrow, especially given that we were just looking at the Cappadocians. Like them, shouldn't Dionysius be insisting that God is a Trinity, that He is three as well as one? Well, yes, and Dionysius is in fact careful to mention the Trinity towards the beginning of his divine names. But the names he deals with in the rest of the work are names that reveal God as a whole, insofar as they reveal Him at all. When we call God wise, or powerful, or good, this refers to the entire Godhead, not only the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. Dionysius frequently reminds us that by revealing something of God, such names tempt us to believe that God is being revealed fully. This is why Scripture sometimes calls God by crude physical names, as a kind of warning. No one would really be stupid enough to think that God is literally a stone, or a lion, never mind both a stone and a lion. And of course, Dionysius's final word on the subject of divine names is to use no words at all. In the end, negative theology trumps positive theology, and the highest knowledge of God is a sort of ignorance or unknowing. This is clear in both the divine names and the mystical theology. And it might prompt us to wonder, what is the difference between the mystical theologian who has achieved this highest state, and an atheist who simply never thinks or knows about God at all? If ignorance is the final destination, it looks like the theologian's fate is the same as the fate of Plotinus's undescended soul and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. They were already where they wanted to be at the beginning of their journey. But while Dionysius might agree with Dorothy that there is no place like home, he would still say it is worth traveling the yellow brick road of negative theology. So he must somehow persuade us that the ignorance or emptiness reached once all divine names are transcended is distinct from the ignorance and emptiness of someone who has never given God a moment's thought. This is, of course, a problem that faces all negative theologians, but Dionysius has a distinctively Neoplatonic take on the problem. Under the influence of Proclus, he adopts the idea of precession and return. All of creation is a precession from God through the ordered ranks partially described in Dionysius's celestial hierarchy. We start our return from everyday physical names—stone, lion, face, and so on—which are applied to God, but are obviously not applied literally. From there, we progress to the sort of terms discussed in Dionysius's divine names. But we can go even further, leaving behind notions like goodness and power as we left aside the physical names. Thus, the end point is not the ignorance where we started, but the infinity of God Himself. Dionysius calls this unknowing not because it is a lack of knowledge, but because it transcends knowledge. It is, if you will, superknowledge. With our own reasonably superknowledge about the Neoplatonists, we might compare this to the way that their first principle, the One, mirrors matter, which is non-being and indeterminacy. Both are outside the scale of being, and both are infinite but for very different reasons. The One is beyond being, matter is below it. If you follow soccer, you might find the following comparison helpful. When a team is playing a game in the Pan-European Champions League, it is no longer playing in its National League. But that doesn't mean it has the status of a local club that isn't good enough for the National League. Rather, the club has transcended the English, French, or German League, it is now playing in Europe. The club is beyond the League because it is too good, whereas other teams are not in the League because they are not good enough. So that, in case you were wondering, is what the god of the Pseudo-Dionysius has in common with Bayern Munich. In the past couple of episodes, we've seen how Neoplatonic philosophy prepared the way for Christian theology. Thinking back to the pre-Socratics, we might remember that the first philosophers often took a critical stance towards traditional religion. Now, philosophical ideas are being pressed into the service of theology, and vice versa. With the medieval period looming not far in the distance, we are going to be looking at the interaction between philosophy and several religions, leading to innovation and increasing subtlety on both sides. But we won't have to leave late antiquity to see more outstanding examples of this productive interchange. Next time, we are going to tiptoe up to the brink of the medieval Byzantine world. We'll be looking at a man who could reasonably be counted as the last great philosophical theologian of late antiquity, depending on where you think late antiquity ends. For our purposes, it will be ending in the 7th century. I have to confess that this is pretty arbitrary, and a confession should put us in just the right frame of mind as we look at Maximus Confessor on the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Double or Nothing? Maximus the Confessor. It's amazing what other people care about. We've all raised an eyebrow at the spectacle of sports fans weeping in despair or screaming with joy over a game we find utterly tedious, or smiled secretly at a friend's deep emotional attachment to some ridiculous enthusiasm like model trains, stamp collecting, or giraffes. In such cases, we should no doubt celebrate the variety and richness of people's values, only to be expected, we might think, in a rich and varied world. But in other cases, the incomprehensible passions of other people can be deeply depressing. Think of the many violent conflicts that pit ethnic or religious groups against one another. The animosity between the two groups means everything to the participants. They are willing to die and kill for their tribe. To outsiders, this can only seem futile and irrational. Indeed, nearly all such conflicts seem pointless with the benefit of enough distance and perspective. A good example would be the late ancient dispute over the metaphysical relationship between the divine and human aspects of Jesus Christ. Nowadays I suspect even most devout Christians have given this question no thought whatsoever. From a non-Christian perspective, the debate seems even more bewildering. Yet some of the most intelligent citizens of the early Byzantine Empire devoted whole careers to disputing the issue. Over the question of Christ's humanity and divinity, and whether these were two different natures or just one nature, councils were convened, political institutions were endangered, and blood was spelt. Some of the blood belonged to the man we'll be discussing in this episode, the seventh-century thinker Maximus the Confessor. His honorific title Confessor refers to his staunch defense of a view that eventually became orthodox in the Byzantine tradition—Christ had two natures, united in a single person. But in his own life, Maximus was not celebrated for his orthodoxy. Instead, his enemies literally cut off the hand with which he had written of Christ's two natures and tore out the tongue with which he had so articulately defended his theology. He died soon after in the year 662, having joined Socrates in the select group of philosophers who have been violently persecuted for their beliefs. To understand why anyone would have thought it necessary to mutilate Maximus in this way, and why Maximus would run the risk of being so mutilated, we need to go back a few hundred years, to the fourth century. This was the age of the Cappadocian Fathers, who took part in politicized disputes over fine points of Christian theology. When I looked at them, I concentrated on the question of how the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. We saw that they wanted to steer a course between Arianism, which went too far in the direction of separating the persons of the Trinity, and Sibelianism, which simply identified the persons and held that they are distinct only from our limited human viewpoint. The Cappadocians presented themselves as steering another middle course in another controversy, which I did not have time to explore in that episode. In this case, debate raged over the fundamental Christian belief that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, the Son of God become flesh, in order that through his sacrifice humanity could be redeemed from sin. This belief brings with it a dilemma, much like the one we saw in the case of the Trinity. Just as theologians didn't want to say with the Aryans that the Father is utterly distinct from the Son, lest we wind up with two gods, so they didn't want to compromise the unity of Christ. He was one person, even if he was both man and God. On the other hand, just as they rejected the Sibelian error of erasing all difference between the persons, so it seemed unacceptable simply to identify Christ's unity with his divinity. After all, the divine is radically different from the human, so if there is no distinction here, then either Christ's humanity is swallowed up in his divinity or his divinity is entirely humbled and brought down to the level of the human. Neither option looks acceptable. If Christ was only divine, then God did not really take on human nature in order to redeem him. Whereas if he was only human, then his sacrifice was merely the death of some particularly virtuous man and not the Son of God. Besides, Christ was acknowledged as having been immune to sin. How was this possible unless his fallible human nature had somehow been perfected through his divinity? All parties to the dispute understood that the correct metaphysical understanding would recognize both the divinity and the humanity of Christ. Agreement remained elusive though when it came to the details. Often, those details were worked out using philosophical distinctions and assumptions. Consider, for instance, the 4th century theologian Apollinarius. He was especially concerned to safeguard the unity of Christ. Towards this end, he invoked the strikingly Platonist rationale that human nature is subject to change, whereas divine nature is unchanging and eternal. But whatever can change can diverge into imperfection. This means that if Christ had human thoughts and a human will, he was inevitably subject to sin. One way of taking this would be that if Christ was genuinely human, then it was possible for him to sin, which would be bad enough. But Apollinarius seems to have gone further and said that if Christ had a human will, he would actually have sinned, perhaps because he assumed that any genuine capacity must be realized at some point. Looking ahead, we can credit Maximus with being unusually clearheaded on this point. As we'll see, he will distinguish more rigorously between the capacity for thinking or willing something and the actual thinking or willing. Apollinarius was condemned in the late 4th century when his attempts to ensure Christ's unity were judged to violate the rule that Christ must be fully human. In sharp contrast was the view of a man named Nestorius, who brings us up to the 5th century. For Nestorius and his followers, Christ not only has two natures, but also two hypostases. What is a hypostasis? Historians of philosophy are most likely to encounter the word in Neoplatonic contexts as a technical term used for the levels of the Platonist hierarchy like soul and intellect. In this theological context though, hypostasis means something less elaborate, just an entity that is distinct from other entities. Thus, Nestorius' view amounts to splitting Christ into two entities with two natures, one human and one divine. Nestorius received full marks for avoiding the problems of Apollinarianism, but earned only a must-try harder when it came to the goal of upholding Christ's unity. He and his followers, the Nestorians, did assert that Christ was a single person, in Greek prosopon, but this was seen by critics as a superficial maneuver, a mask of unity concealing a real underlying duality. Indeed, the word prosopon means face or visage, and was used to describe the mask-wearing of characters in the Greek theater. When the Cappadocians took central stage, they also claimed the middle ground, insisting that Christ has two natures but is only one hypostasis, a single unified entity which is nonetheless both divine and human. In explaining this, Gregory of Nyssa drew on the Stoic theory of physical mixture to envisage a situation in which divinity and humanity were blended together while retaining their natures, just as in a red-hot sword the metal of the blade is suffused with fire, even as the nature of the metal remains distinct from the nature of the fire. A similar view was upheld by the influential theologian Cyril of Alexandria. It was incidentally on Cyril's watch as lead cleric in Alexandria that the Platonist Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob. Cyril's theology prevailed at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, which rejected the teachings of Nestorius. But neither this nor a further council at Chalcedon in 451 could unite the church. Some communities continued to uphold Apollinarius's Monophysite theory — the word comes from the Greek for one nature — while others preferred the two-nature and two-hypostasis view of Nestorius. Still others adhered to Cyril's understanding of Christ as a single person and hypostasis that comes out of two natures. This fracture had deep social and political consequences, and was a potential source of weakness within the Byzantine Empire — that is, the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which survived after the fall of the West. In the first half of the seventh century, it seemed especially pressing to resolve the controversy. Following a victorious, but draining, conflict with the Persians, the Byzantines were suddenly assaulted by a new and unexpected threat, the armies of Islam. After the death of the prophet Muhammad in the year 632, Muslim forces achieved an astonishingly rapid series of military conquests. In earlier antiquity, Christianity had chased paganism out of the Roman Empire by means of war, coercion, economic incentives, and plain old persuasion. Now Christianity faced the threat of a similar fate at the hands of Islam. That meant it was urgent to eliminate division within the Greek Christian sphere. This made it more appealing than ever to accept compromise positions that had been put forward. Perhaps, for instance, both sides might agree to disagree about the number of natures in Christ, and focus on agreeing that Christ is unified by having a single will. But theologians had, for many generations now, shown that they were too stubborn, or perhaps too conscientious, to be satisfied by verbal formulas that masked genuine differences of doctrine. In other words, they were going to keep causing trouble, Muslim invasions or no. Which finally brings us to our man Maximus. Following his teacher Sophronius, who was both stubborn and conscientious, Maximus wanted to uphold the two-nature theory. Sophronius and Maximus stridently rejected the new one-will idea as a compromise too far. It made no sense to ascribe only one will to a person who has two natures. Maximus carried on the fight after Sophronius died, continuing to insist that having a human nature and a divine nature means having two wills. His opponents fought back, appealing not just to political expediency, but also to the point made long ago by Apollinarius. If Christ has two wills, the wills can come into conflict. This means that Christ will inevitably sin, or at least that He inevitably could sin. Maximus replied with the point I mentioned above. We shouldn't confuse will as a capacity with will in the sense of a decision made by that capacity. Christ's divine will was a separate capacity from His human will, but these two wills always came together to issue a single joint decision, just as Christ's two natures cohered in a single hypostasis. And just as the Cappadocians had taught that the divine and human natures are fused without being confused, that is, both natures are preserved within a single entity, so Maximus now teaches that the human will of Jesus is preserved even though it is perfected by the presence of divinity. He reacted similarly to another compromise proposal, namely that Christ has a single activity. Here, the Greek word I'm translating as activity is energia, the source of the English word energy, which is frequently used as a rather awkward translation for energia in discussions of this debate. As with the will, the question is whether Christ's activities or energies are of two kinds or only one. Here, the single activity camp could draw on the authority of the pseudo-Dionysius, who had spoken of Christ possessing a theandric activity that is an activity characterized by both divinity and humanity. Maximus greatly admired Dionysius, but nonetheless rejected the single activity theory just as firmly as he did the single will theory. His point was much the same as it was in the will case. Christ retained a human capacity for activity which was perfected by the fusion of his human nature with divine nature. He gave the example of Christ's walking on water. Walking is a natural human act, but Christ's divinity made it possible for him to walk in a supernatural way. Walking on water is a single activity alright, but it must be understood as the simultaneous use of two distinct capacities to act. If you remember your Aristotle, you'll realize that Maximus is echoing the distinction between first and second actuality. Traditionally, this distinction is illustrated with the example of learning mathematics, but let's instead think about a coffee shop loyalty card. Initially, it is blank, a state of first potentiality. Then it fills up with stamps, one for each coffee you buy. When the card is full of stamps, it is in a state of first actuality, an actuality that is also a second potentiality or capacity, in this case, the all-important capacity to claim a free cup of coffee. When you redeem the card, that is second actuality. Applying this distinction to Maximus' Christology, we find him saying that Christ has two first actualities, a divine will and a human will. These are capacities to produce a concrete act of willing, which will be a second actuality. Even though the two wills are distinct capacities, or first actualities, they always agree, so they coincide at the level of second actuality. This happens when Christ actually wills something, when he, for instance, chooses to turn water into wine instead of coffee. But of course, Maximus does not have beverages percolating through his mind when he discusses all this. Rather, he wants to explain the metaphysical underpinnings of Christ's perfection, his freedom from sin. After this survey of late ancient Christology and Maximus' metaphysics, you might still be feeling that the entire debate was like whole coffee beans, groundless. Their rarified reflections may seem about as substantial as the froth on a cappuccino. By the way, the word cappuccino derives, appropriately enough, from the resemblance between the drink and the clothing worn by a certain order of Christian friars. This makes the coffee theme appropriate for discussing Maximus, but perhaps I'll use it again when I get to John Stuart Mill. And yet, for the participants in this debate, the issue was anything but trivial. Explaining what Christ was meant explaining how the entire human race had been saved from sin. For us philosophers, the debate is no less important, obviously for its historical importance, but also because it is at root a debate over metaphysics. If you are trying to figure out whether two things are in fact identical, for instance whether the mind is the same thing as the brain, or whether Christ's humanity is the same thing as His divinity, there's a test you can do. Try to find a statement that holds true of one of the two things, but not the other. If you manage this then you've proven that you are indeed dealing with two separate things, and not just one. This is how philosophers like Plato and Descartes have argued for mind-body dualism. They claim to discover a feature that the mind has, and the body lacks. For instance, Plato argued that the mind is simple and indestructible, a statement that could not be applied to the body. Exactly this strategy was used in the ancient Christological debate. One thing that seemed certain about the second person of the Trinity, the divine Logos, was that it could not suffer or be affected. And yet, if there's anything we know about Jesus is that He did suffer, He was crucified, and died in agony. Here Nestorius and his followers pounced, like the good metaphysicians they were. If God cannot suffer, then there must have been something in Christ other than God, which allowed Him to suffer. Cyril of Alexandria wrote a letter of refutation to Nestorius where he grappled with this difficulty directly. He turned the tables on his opponents by insisting that the whole point of the Incarnation is that God willingly submits His Son to the sufferings of the flesh. The letter concludes with a list of 12 doctrines destructive of the faith. The last item on the list says that if anyone refuses to admit that the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, suffered by being crucified, then he is to be considered anathema. That means you, Nestorius. Another example is the apparently bizarre debate over whether the Virgin Mary is to be honored with the phrase theotokos, a Greek word meaning one who gives birth to God. Nestorius disliked this expression because it, again, seemed indirectly to apply a property to God that God simply cannot have. God is eternal and prior to all things, so how can Mary give birth to Him? Instead, Nestorius proposed that Mary gave birth to Christ insofar as Christ was human. Cyril's response was that Mary did give birth to a man made of flesh like us, but in so doing she gave birth to God. This is no absurdity as Nestorius claimed but rather the whole point. She gave birth to the Word of God made flesh, this being the very meaning of the word Incarnation. On all these points, Maximus agreed with Cyril against Nestorius. He recognized that Christ had two natures but added that we should resist the Nestorian temptation to divide everything we say about Christ into two types, one set of statements that are true because He was God, the other set of statements true because He was a man. The unification of the two natures makes it possible for both God and man to suffer or to be born of a virgin. Maximus developed these points beyond metaphysics into the realm of ethics. Our understanding of the human good is radically transformed by learning that human nature was divinized in the person of Christ. Of course, normal humans are not free from sin, and they are not the incarnation of the Word of God, as Christ was. Nonetheless, we must work towards our own perfection, which means working towards our own more modest sort of divinity. Maximus was just the latest in a long line of ancient philosophers to explain how humans can, as Plato put it, achieve likeness to God insofar as is possible. But he was also influenced by more recent figures, the Cappadocians and the Pseudo-Dionysius. From them, he has taken the conviction that God is unknowable in His essence. He can be grasped only through His activities. So, even souls who achieve salvation in the afterlife will be allowed to participate in God's activity, rather than unifying with the divine essence itself. What about our life in this world? Here, Maximus again responded to earlier Christian thinkers. Some of them, especially Origen, had defended an intellectualist vision of the human good and emphasized the contemplation of God. Maximus agreed that we should try to contemplate God, albeit that we must do so by means of grasping his activities, since God Himself transcends the grasp of our limited minds. Indeed, he suggested that the knowledge of God is what distinguishes Christians from the Jews, whom he criticized for contenting themselves with the avoidance of sin. But Maximus recognized too that avoiding sin is no easy feat. We are drawn by the nature of our bodily existence towards pleasure and the passions, and it requires strength of will and not just a clever mind to subdue these desires to the law of reason and divinity. Echoing an exegetical tradition that goes back as far as Philo, Maximus read biblical passages as urging us to fight against the passions. For instance, the flight of Moses and the Jewish people from Egypt symbolizes, for Maximus, the need to turn away from the realm of sensation and towards the things of the mind. He referred to this as a kind of emptying of ourselves, removing all bodily attachments so that nothing but openness to virtue and God remain. This aspect of Maximus' ethical teaching can be understood only in light of another development within the early Greek-Christian tradition. His philosophy responds not only to the metaphysics of Cyril and the Cappadocians and the negative theology of Dionysius, but also to the ascetic teachings of figures like the desert father Evagrius. And if we want to understand the ethical significance of ancient Christian philosophy, we too must look back to the radical practices and psychological theories of men like Evagrius. I know you would love for me to go on to discuss this immediately, but I'm afraid you'll have to exercise some self-restraint and wait for one more week for the philosophy of Christian asceticism, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Practice Makes Perfect – Christian Asceticism Perhaps you've heard about this rather unsettling psychological experiment they did in 1972 known as the marshmallow test. A researcher would sit young children in a room and offer them a marshmallow or other treat. The children would be told that if they could restrain themselves from eating the marshmallow until the researcher returned, they would get an additional marshmallow as a reward. Some children ate the marshmallow the second they were alone, while others managed to get through the intervening time as the effort led them to writhe in their seats, pull their own hair, or loudly lament how slowly the time was passing. The unsettling part, aside from the whole how do psychologists get away with these mildly sadistic experiments issue, is that they checked in with the kids years later and discovered that those who managed to restrain themselves turned out to do better in life, educationally and in other ways. It's disturbing to think that our fate as adults is already determined by our powers of self-control at a very young age. To be honest, even at my age I would have a bit of difficulty passing the test, at least if the treat on offer were an almond croissant rather than a marshmallow. I think I'm not alone in this. Most of us fight our inclinations and desires every day, from the moment we resist the urge to stay in bed that little bit longer in the morning to the moment we decide to forgo that one more glass of wine before turning in for the night. It is not just a quotidian challenge, but also a philosophically puzzling phenomenon. Researchers often call the failure to resist desire a krasia, using a Greek word meaning lack of self-control, sometimes translated weakness of will. In the strict sense, we are a kratik when our desires lead us to act against our judgment about what is in fact best for us to do. This is hard to explain. A naive but appealingly simple analysis of human action would go like this. A person considers what is best for them to do, reaches a decision, and then acts accordingly. But in cases of akrasia, we reach such a decision and then ignore it, our judgment overcome by something as humble as a marshmallow. As the use of the Greek term akrasia suggests, this phenomenon was discussed by a number of ancient philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. For Socrates, as depicted in Plato's early dialogues, and for the Stoics, akrasia in the strict sense is impossible. When we seem to act against our better judgment, this simply means that deep down we are judging, for instance, that it is better to stay in bed than get to work on time, even if we claim to believe otherwise. Aristotle, meanwhile, takes the view that strong desires can make a judgment temporarily inactive. So for him akrasia is possible, but only in a weak sense. One cannot be clear-headed in judging that one should do something even as one is failing to do it. To explain such clear-eyed akrasia, we would need a more complicated moral psychology, such as the one found in Plato's Republic. Plato proposes that the soul has three aspects which compete for control—reason, spirit, and desire. When I judge rationally that it's time for bed, but drink more wine anyway, this happens because the desiring part of my soul dominates the rational part. Plato's was the most influential ancient theory of akrasia, but for philosophers who take the theory to its most radical conclusion, we must turn to the late antique Christians known as ascetics. The term asceticism comes from the Greek ascesis, which means practice. These Christians were indeed putting Plato's theory into practice, pushing themselves to the ultimate limits of self-control. Many pagan Greek thinkers had assumed that truly virtuous people simply lack any vicious desires. For instance, Aristotle believes that the virtuous always want to do the right thing. Thus, he distinguishes virtue from self-control, or ankratia, which is the state of character you have if you have bad desires, but manage to overcome those desires through rational judgment. By contrast, the Christians assumed that, at least in our fallen, sinful state, human life inevitably involves a struggle to defeat temptation. It was the unique prerogative of Christ to be without sin, perhaps even without inclination towards sin, though the story of his temptation by the devil gives a rather different impression. What the ascetics were practicing for was a Christ-like state in which desire had been completely defeated by rational judgment, insofar as is possible in this life. The most famous philosophical treatment of asceticism is not an ancient one, but Nietzsche's withering critique of the ascetic impulse in Christianity. I suppose many listeners will be familiar with his complaint that asceticism is a denial of life itself, a nihilistic rejection of embodied existence. Let's reserve judgment as to whether this is an oversimplification of Nietzsche. We'll decide that when we discuss him a few hundred episodes from now. But it is certainly an oversimplification of ancient Christian asceticism. In fact, the 4th century ascetics based their way of life around the belief that God himself had become embodied in this world. This is shown by the career of one of the most famous ascetics, Anthony the Great. He is known to us through a biography written by Athanasius, a theologian also known for his controversial writings about the Trinity. Athanasius presents Anthony as a fellow critic of the Arians, whom I mentioned when we were discussing the Cappadocians. For Arius and his followers, the Divine Son was above all a mediator between God the Father and humanity. Accordingly, the Arians placed the Son on an exalted, but still subordinate level, below the Father. One sign of this was their admission that the Divine Son was not co-eternal with the Father. Rather, as they put it, there was a time when the Son was not. For critics like Athanasius and Anthony, all this amounted to a denial that Jesus Christ was fully God. They insisted that Christ was wholly human and wholly divine, and thus both embodied and perfect. For Anthony, asceticism was accordingly a way of imitating God, of striving for a perfect embodied life, not a way of fleeing the body. On these theological foundations, Anthony built the life immortalized by Athanasius in a biography that would be read and imitated by many generations of Christians, beyond late antiquity and into the medieval age. Some measure of its potential impact is given by Augustine, who tells us of a man who converted to Christianity immediately upon reading it. In the biography, we first hear how Anthony gave away his family fortune to charity. He reserved only a little for the upkeep of his sister, but then thought better of it and gave even that away, arranging for the sister to live in a community of other ascetics. Athanasius doesn't tell us how the sister felt about all this. The existence of that community shows that Anthony was not, as sometimes claimed, the first to live a deliberately ascetic life. In fact, Athanasius describes him learning from other ascetics. But Anthony took things further than most. Others had moved to the outskirts of villages at the edge of the Egyptian desert, subsisting on little food and sleeping on the ground. Anthony though, had himself shot into a tomb, with instructions that a bit of bread should be brought to him every few days. With such dramatic gestures, Anthony won fame as one of the so-called Desert Fathers, radical ascetics of the 4th century AD whose struggle against desire also earned them the title Athletes of God. Like Anthony, many started wealthy but gave away their fortunes. Riches to rags stories abound in the ascetic literature. Having chosen poverty, they would reside in conditions of bare survival, devoting their lives to prayer and living in isolated cells or within communities that were forerunners of medieval monasteries. Even more famous than Anthony is Simeon the Stylite, who was known for living on top of a pillar for years at a time, supposedly without food. He had himself tied down so he would not fall off when hunger weakened him. Simeon's pragmatic reason for this lifestyle, elevated in both the literal and the metaphorical sense, is that it would remove him from the visitors who constantly came to interrupt his contemplation. But it had the reverse effect, as he became something of a tourist attraction, so he made the pillar higher. The stories about Simeon are vivid and even graphic, as when he had himself chained to a rock but was then persuaded that his strength of will should be chain enough to keep him there. When he had the chain removed, a swarm of insects was revealed squirming in his chafed flesh, which he had been enduring without complaint. With this sort of memorable detail, it's no wonder that literature about the Desert Fathers found a wide readership in later antiquity and the medieval age. The ascetic movement also provided a rare opportunity for women to take starring roles in Christian literature. For there were desert mothers as well. Unfortunately, we have no works actually written by female ascetics. Indeed, in all of late antiquity, only a small handful of Christian women produced surviving writings. The most prominent example is the poetry of the 5th century Byzantine empress Eudokia, and it doesn't get much less ascetic than being a 5th century Byzantine empress. Still, collections of sayings by heroes of asceticism, another very popular genre in the centuries to come, frequently included pious remarks ascribed to women like the 4th century hermit, Synkletica. Aristocratic women could also make an impact by sponsoring ascetic communities. An outstanding example was Melania the Elder, who founded such a community in Palestine and who associated with Rufinus. We already met him a few episodes back as a translator of origin. For the history of philosophy, the most significant female ascetics were those connected with the Cappadocians. We saw that Macrina, the sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, helped bring her brothers to the path of Christian devotion, and she helped many others along this road by founding an ascetic community, as did Melania the Elder. We also saw Gregory present his sister as a keen connoisseur and critic of Hellenic philosophy in his work on the immortality of the soul. This casts her in the Socratic role of a philosopher facing death with arguments and without fear. Gregory depicts her rather differently in his life of Macrina. Here the emphasis is on her piety, her humility, and her spirituality. After the man she was intended to marry died before they could wed, she dedicated herself to virginity and domestic labor. Though Gregory clearly considers it possible for a woman like Macrina to be a Christian exemplar, he does not drop his assumptions about gender roles. He compliments her for living and working along with the household maids, and in this text gives no hint that she also enjoyed a good old-fashioned Socratic discourse on immortality. Still, there is some continuity between the Macrina of this biography and the Macrina of Gregory's dialogue on the soul, in that the life presents her as a model of measured grief in the face of family deaths. If that doesn't impress you, she is also said to have worked miracles, using nothing but prayer to cure a child of eye disease and herself of a dangerous tumor. Other themes arise in a funeral oration written by the other Cappadocian Gregory, Gregory of Nazianzus, for his sister Gorgonia. In this case, Gorgonia did marry, but she persuaded her husband to take an oath of chastity with her. As with Anthony's sister, we don't hear how he felt about Gorgonia's vow, except that he went along with it, and this before the invention of the cold shower. Like Macrina, Gorgonia enjoyed miraculous recovery from injury and illness through prayer. Without casting doubt on the sincerity of these ascetic heroines, we may note that refusing marriage or marital relations as in the case of Gorgonia gave them a chance to escape the strictures of the patriarchal society of late antiquity. The idea that asceticism could restore equality between men and women, lost through sin, is a powerful undercurrent in this literature. In fact, Gregory of Nyssa believed that the distinction between male and female gender is itself a result of our sinful state. There was no such distinction in the initial creation of humankind, and it will be eliminated in the hereafter. In this life, meanwhile, outstandingly holy women could wield influence openly, something quite rare in antiquity. They had a significant intellectual impact, even if we learn about it only from men like the Gregories and Augustine, who saw his mother Monica as a paragon of Christian wisdom. Women's use of family wealth to house groups of like-minded ascetics was another way to exert influence. As all this suggests, despite the image of ancient ascetics as loner hermits, the movement had a decidedly political dimension. Melania, Macrina, and other founders wanted their communities to show how humans could live together, devoted to God, rather than to competition over wealth and secular power. To some extent, even gender inequalities could be eliminated in such groups, though that particular political bombshell was partially diffused during the 4th century, as it became less acceptable for women and men to join in the same communities. Historians referred to ascetics who lived in communities as kenobitic, from the Greek koinos bios, which means living in common. They are contrasted to ascetics who lived alone or in relative isolation, who are called eremitic, from the Greek word eremos, meaning desert. This is the root of our word, hermit. One could think of the kenobitic collectives as enactments of the first kind of virtuous city Socrates describes in the Republic, in which there are no luxuries and all individuals share the same goals. But Socrates' interlocutor Glaucon dismisses as a city of pigs was seen more favorably by these late ancient Christians. As for the more isolated ascetics, a different animal may leap to mind, the dog. The counter-cultural exploits and rough lifestyle of men like Anthony and Simeon inevitably bring to mind the cynics, whose name, as you'll remember, comes from the Greek for dog. And like the cynics, these eremitic ascetics did not lose political relevance by withdrawing from normal civic life. Admittedly, they did not, like Diogenes, sit in the midst of the city criticizing passing citizens for their hypocrisy. They didn't need to. An audience sought them out, even in the desert. Simeon on his pillar was a magnet for visitors who sought his advice on matters ranging from the theological to the mundane. The same is true of Anthony, and Athanasius records that the Desert Father had, at best, mixed feelings about this. Just as Gregory of Nazianzus wished to abandon his pastoral duties to join Macrina in a life of self-restrained retreat, Anthony would sometimes have preferred to be left in peace. But he engaged with his fellow Christians, through advice to visitors and of course by setting an example. We shouldn't underestimate the symbolic power and even the political subversiveness of Anthony's decision to abandon his wealth in favor of a lifestyle the ascetics referred to simply as philosophy. For the philosophical underpinnings of this philosophical way of life, the key author is Evagrius of Pontus. He hailed from Cappadocia and was a student of Gregory of Nazianzus. Like other Desert Fathers, he adopted a hermetic lifestyle to escape temptation, in this case quite literally since he began to compete as an athlete of God after a politically dangerous liaison with a woman in Constantinople. Once he fled to the desert, Evagrius wrote extensively about the challenges and tactics of asceticism, in works that were greatly admired by last week's subject, Maximus the Confessor. Not everyone was a fan though. There are clear borrowings from the thought of Origen in Evagrius' writings, so critics of Origen did not hesitate to attack Evagrius too. Indeed, Evagrius sometimes seems to agree with the controversial Origenist claims that all souls existed free from body before they sinned, and that all souls will ultimately achieve salvation. This link between Origenism and asceticism is no coincidence. For one thing, Origen himself had ascetic leanings, to say the least. Supposedly, he castrated himself as a teenager to escape the temptations of sex. At a more philosophical level, he also described human perfection in highly intellectualist terms as a process of reaching freedom from the body after many cycles of incarnation. So it's natural that he and his followers would see bodily desire as an obstacle to perfection. Yet like Anthony, Evagrius saw the war against desire as one that must be fought in the here and now, while we are embodied. His writings frequently referred to Plato's three-part soul, and described the ascetic project as the attempt to silence the lower desires, leaving mind free to contemplate God through prayer. Thus, his meditations on the ascetic struggle were really a subtle exploration of how to avoid acrasia. He made the struggle personal by blaming the lower desires on demons that lay constant siege to the ascetic. The demons undermine prayer by introducing unwanted thoughts, for instance lustful fantasies that might come to a monk as he tried to pray in his cell, or memories of the ascetic's previous life. He classified these distracting thoughts into eight types, gluttony, avarice, lust, and so on, a list that became the basis for the later tradition of seven deadly sins. His talk of demons here is not mere metaphor. Athanasius too described Anthony's battles for self-control as a battle against demons, and Evagrius discusses the demons' deceitful tricks in detail. They disguise themselves as angels, they make distracting noises when the ascetic tries to pray, or they temporarily retreat so as to lull the ascetic into false confidence. We might smirk at all this, yet a fairly sophisticated theory of the human soul is implicit in Evagrius' remarks. He saw the imagination as the aspect of the soul that could be targeted by the demons of desire, because imagination is allied with the senses rather than with the mind, a psychological analysis that goes back to Aristotle. He also draws on the Stoics, saying that the senses deliver impressions, or representations, to the mind, which the mind can then choose to follow or reject. These representations constitute the main weapon used by demons. They are trying to distract us from the pure mental apprehension of God. Since God is immaterial, He is not grasped through any impression or representation, but through pure thought, which is the goal of prayer. Evagrius also cites a wise man who claims the brain is a frequent target of demonic attack, apparently because this is a center for the reception of sense images. For some context, it would be worth turning briefly to a rather different author from around the same period, Nemesius of Emesa. He was a bishop and possibly another associate of the Cappadocians, who wrote in the late 4th century. He is known to us through his treatise On the Nature of Man, a kind of textbook summarizing the teachings of both pagan and Christian philosophers. For modern scholars, it is a goldmine of references to early thinkers whose works may be lost. For a 4th century audience, it was a useful guide to contemporary ideas about anatomy, psychology, free will, and other aspects of human nature. In one section, he describes several psychological faculties, including memory and imagination, and explains that they are seated in the brain. But Nemesius is enough of a Platonist to think that the soul also has functions that are exercised without the body, the kind of pure reasoning or contemplation Evagrius too encourages. And though Nemesius is clearly no ascetic himself, he does mention that a pious man will indulge only the desires that Plato called natural and necessary, meaning those we need to satisfy simply to survive. Anthony, Simeon, Macrina, and Evagrius would agree with this. They did not push their asceticism to the point of suicide, but swore off unnecessary yet pleasant activities such as sex, decent clothes, washing, or food and drink beyond the bare minimum. Marshmallows and almond croissants were definitely off the menu, and not only because they hadn't been invented yet either. Something else Nemesius has in common with the ascetics is the immense historical reach of his writings. His On the Nature of Man was translated into Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and Latin, while collections of sayings about the desert mothers and fathers found their way into all these languages and more. The monastic culture that transmitted the literature of asceticism also became a crucial conduit for mainstream philosophy. The works of Aristotle passed through Christian monasteries of the East, where they were read in Syriac before they were later translated into Arabic. Thus, the Syrian monastic communities which grew out of the ascetic movement provided a bridge across which philosophy traveled from late antiquity to the Islamic world. That's a story we'll be telling very soon. But first, we have some unfinished business here in late antiquity. We've looked at the Greek tradition pretty thoroughly, but have barely touched on Latin authors who include the greatest Christian thinker of antiquity, Augustine. These Latin patristic authors are the next stop on our itinerary. But before moving on, I'd like to pause to reflect on the Greek church fathers. Hopefully, the last seven episodes have convinced you that the faith of these fathers made a major contribution to ancient philosophy, but if you still aren't sure, I devoutly believe you'll be converted by my interview with George Boyce-Stones next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and the Church Fathers with George Boystones, who is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Durham University. Hi, George. Hello, Peter. Thanks for coming on. I'd like to start even before we get to the Church Fathers themselves by asking about the Bible. Some people have detected parallels with or even influences from strands of the ancient philosophical tradition in books of the New Testament. So how real do you think that that idea might be? Yeah, people have seen Stoicism, especially in Paul in particular, but in other books of the New Testament too. And from time to time people raise the idea that Jesus might have been influenced himself, at least in the shape that his message takes, by cynicism. And it's not wholly implausible. The Monty Python view of Palestine as a sort of Jewish state under Roman occupation misses out the fact that it's, culturally speaking, a very Hellenized country. It was part of Alexander's empire already, so it's been under Hellenic influence for three centuries. It's quite natural for people with any level of Greek education, Greek learning, to be phrasing their ideas in terms of the concepts of Greek philosophy. The Stoics and Epicureans, of course, get a name check in Acts, so people are aware of them at the very least. On the other hand, I think you have to work very hard to pin this down to anything very concrete. So claims that Paul is a Stoic, for example, I think seem to me to be quite implausible. As a matter of historical possibility, do we think that Paul could have read Stoic texts, or is the idea more that Stoicism would have been in the air in his intellectual environment? Well I find it more plausible to think that it's in the air. He clearly has a very profound rhetorical training. He writes Greek that's indicative of a high level of Greek education. He could have read Stoic texts, of course, it's just that there's nothing very specific, it seems to me, that comes through his writings that indicates that he's done so. So if you contrast him to someone like, say, Philo of Alexandria, maybe an unfair example, but there's a Jewish author of the first century AD who's totally steeped in the literature of Greek philosophy. No, that's a very helpful comparison. Philo and other Jews of the first and second centuries BC clearly are engaging very closely with Greek philosophy, have it available to them as studying the texts, and there is really no evidence of that sort of thing in Paul, I think. Well, moving then ahead into the second century when we really get into the people who are called the church fathers, and I guess I should say that for the sake of this interview we'll be focusing on the earlier fathers who wrote in Greek. So basically Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria in Origen. Well these guys are often said to be Platonists, right, or even called Christian Platonists, and I suppose that it's clear that there's influence from the Platonic tradition on them, so in this case, unlike say the case of Paul, it's clear that they know some texts, right, but is it fair to think about them as Christian Platonists? Yes, well they certainly didn't describe themselves as Platonists, partly of course because that term implies taking Plato as a philosophical authority, and Christians don't do that. There are substantial differences too, and in fact all of these thinkers, Christians of this period in general, tend to be quite clear that Plato is as good as it gets in the non-Christian tradition of philosophy, but that it's not short of getting the most important insights which underpin a full account of the truth of the world. I think it's quite helpful myself to see the Christians building on a Platonist argument actually, because the Platonists at this period are arguing against the Stoics, that the Stoics are kind of right, but limited in how far they're right, so the Stoics are pretty good at ethics, they're pretty good at physics, but they miss out on understanding of those metaphysical principles, the forms, a transcendent god, which really give some explanatory value to a philosophical system. And in a very similar way, I think Christians go on to say, well actually that's true of Platonism too, so Platonism also gets something else right, it's better than Stoicism, it's because it recognizes in particular the existence of a transcendent god, but it stops short of understanding the nature of that god essentially. So there's a strong engagement with Platonism, but at the same time a concern to map out the distance from Platonism to Christianity as well. And I guess that to some extent these figures are also self-consciously defining themselves in opposition to Hellenic culture, or at least pagan Hellenic culture. Yes, I mean it might be worth saying that they don't even describe themselves as philosophers on the whole, some of them do, but on the whole, to talk about philosophy is to talk about a Greek cultural activity, so Christian or philosopher for a Christian is an oppositional term already, so that's right. I suppose that one way of thinking about it might have been that you've kind of got the middle Platonists as represented in part by Philo of Alexandria, who I already mentioned, and then Platonism branches off in two directions and there's pagan Neoplatonism and then there's these church fathers. It sounds like that's not what you think, so you think that the pagan so-called middle Platonic tradition kind of marches on more or less continuously through Platonism and then Neoplatonism, whereas Christian philosophy, if we're going to call it that, is an independent thing which draws on Platonism but is its own development. Yeah, I mean, Philo never of course calls himself a Platonist, but structurally speaking, as far as I can tell, and this is controversial of course, but structurally speaking I think his system of thought is pretty much the same as a Platonist system of thought. The Christians aren't simply playing with terms here, they're not simply refusing the term Platonist, they actually, as I say, map out ways in which they're different from Platonism, so I think it's not even quite right to think of them as a branch of Platonism, although as I say, Platonism is the immediate point of reference for them in the Greek tradition. And yet it's still going to be the case, isn't it, that there are some points of agreements between these church fathers and figures like Plotinus. Plotinus, for example, endorses the idea of a fully transcendent first principle, he endorses the idea of divine providence and immaterial soul, so actually there's a lot of agreement, isn't there, between the so-called Christian Platonists and the Neo-Platonists? Yeah, and you've put your finger on the major point there, which is the point at which they both disagree with the Stoics, which is that in order to have a proper explanation of the world you have to go to a transcendent first cause, and the way the Christians in particular put this, I mean they go in a way further than the Platonists in thinking about it, the way they put this is to say that the problem with the Stoics is that they worship the creative, not the creator, so that their God is part of the world, which both Platonists and Christians say is the thing that needs explaining by some greater cause. So that really is the main point of coincidence, yeah. Well, as long as we're talking about God, I guess a striking difference between Plotinus and these church fathers would be that Plotinus wants to insist on the absolute unity of the first principle, whereas as Christians the church fathers are committed to some kind of doctrine of the Trinity, although I guess the figures we're looking at are early enough that it hasn't settled down into these sort of doctrines that are being churned out by church councils and so on, but they're still committed to the Trinity, right? Well they are, but it's also the case that it's very, as you say, it's very much a doctrine in a work in progress in the second century. I think the first use of the word for the Trinity comes in Theophilus in the late second century. We have the first kind of account of a Trinitarian, a systematic Trinitarian view of God in Athanagoras at the same sort of time, but most of these accounts of the Trinity in the early stages of the development of that doctrine don't really capture what later becomes the orthodox sense that you have to insist on unity as much as you have to insist on Trinity. So from a later perspective they seem very unorthodox and heretical, precisely in keeping the principles two separate, and in particular subordinationism so-called is one major problem that later councils have with the earlier fathers, because quite often God the Son is described as, is conceived as a derivative being from the Father in some way. Even though the relationship between the Father and the Son is supposed to be different from the relationship between God and the world, so the Son is maybe subordinate to the Father but not in the same way that a physical object is subordinate to God, presumably. No, but the comparison with Plotinus is quite helpful there, I think, because the relationship between God the Father and God the Son is very much conceived by early Christians in terms of the relationship between a sort of Platonic first principle, the one as it might be in Plotinus or just an intellect on the one hand, and the forms on the other. I mean, essentially God the Son at least takes the place that the forms take in a Platonic system, so it's that kind of sense of a second principle coming after a first. So they might be co-eternal even, but they're not one principle. And they even use the word logos, which means, well, what does it mean? Reason, word, account, something, anyway, they use the word logos, whatever it means, to describe the second person of the Trinity, which also sounds rather Platonic. That's tricky because it can sound Stoic as well, of course, and there's a certain play about kind of Stoic notions of deity that might be imported with the Son, but yes, it is, and Philo uses that word of the rationality that emanates from God, for example. But do you think that they were actually reaching for ideas? I mean, I think clearly this happens later on with, say, the Cappadocians. They do reach for ideas from the Hellenic philosophical tradition to explain how the Trinity works. Do you think that that's also true of these early church fathers, so people like Origen? I think there's absolutely no doubt that is true of the exploration of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, and the terms in which that relationship is described absolutely and sometimes quite explicitly in those sort of terms. I think where we have to be more careful is in thinking about the doctrine of the Trinity as a whole as something that's influenced by Platonism. So there are a lot of triads in Platonism. Plotinus, for example, has three first principles, and there are Platonists before him who do as well. So one thing that people sometimes try to do is to map all three persons of the Trinity onto some Platonic triad. One thing that facilitates that or that makes that tempting is the fact that both traditions make reference to a text which is ascribed to Plato. We don't think it's actually by Plato, but there's a letter ascribed to Plato where he talks very enigmatically about the three principles of his philosophy. I've got the quotation here. Actually, he says, it's like this, upon the king of all do all things turn, he is the end of all things and the cause of all good. Things of the second order turn upon the second principle, and those of the third order upon the third. So Platonists, including Plotinus, love that text as a Platonic proof text for their view about the divine principles, but Christians also like it as an indication of how close Plato really came. That's the Trinity. But getting the Holy Spirit into the equation is rather harder, it seems to me. The Holy Spirit doesn't really play the role of a metaphysical principle in early Christian thought, but rather it's a sort of principle of inspiration, so it's consistently appealed to as the spirit of prophecy, for example. Couldn't you think of the second person of the Trinity as a kind of procession kind of mechanism and the Holy Spirit as a returning kind of mechanism so that you would have this Platonist idea of procession and return going on within the Trinity? Or is that maybe something that happens later or never? That's a very nice Platonian idea. Of course, the people we're talking about at the moment are pre-Platonists, and I'm not sure that's an obvious model available in early... Yeah, it's not something you would find in Numenius or something like that, or there would be more... No, certainly not in such explicit terms. And I think it's all about the relationship between God and the world at this point anyway. God the Father is figured as creator and father at a very early stage, but then the question is how the Son relates to the world in the creation of the world. So as the formula comes to be, again a very Platonic formula, God creates the world through the Son, as the Platonist God creates through the forms. And then the Holy Spirit is about another kind of relationship that God has with people, so it's rather unidirectional, I would say. Well, that brings us on to something else which I think might be really distinct about this Christian tradition, which is that it pays a lot of attention to the importance of historical events in Platonism, and actually even in Plato, you get the idea that there's a sort of static relationship, a permanent relationship which never changes between these transcendent principles, maybe the demiurge or God or whatever, and the forms, and the physical universe which is eternal. But obviously the Christians are going to have to put a lot of emphasis on the incarnation, which is a historical event, and I guess maybe that would make it also more natural for them to think that the world is not eternal, although those two things don't necessarily need to go hand in hand, I suppose. No, but that's an absolutely key point. Some Platonists, of course, thought the world had a beginning. Plutarch is an example of that. But Christians are quite radical about the world having a beginning, and I would start there rather than with the incarnation, as a matter of fact, because it's about, it comes down to the question of why there's a world at all, and I think Christians feel that the Platonist answer to that is very, isn't a real answer at all. It doesn't explain anything at all. Obviously what the Platonists say is that God is of such and such nature and say the world is there and it is of such and such nature, but there's no kind of reason beyond that from the Christian perspective that Platonists are able to give. So it's fundamental, I think, to the Christian view of the world that it's created for a purpose, and in particular it's created for human beings. So the issue of its having a beginning and having a purpose is really very important there. And of course they think that it has a beginning in a much more radical sense than any Platonist thinks as well, because they think that God created not only the world but the matter out of which the world was created. So there being anything at all is something that the Christians want to explain there. And the relationship between God and the things that he creates is predicated on a free act of generosity on God's part rather than on some kind of necessary... I mean, again, maybe we don't want to assume that Platonism means Plotinus, but I think even in Numenius and other middle Platonists you definitely get the sense that it is a sort of necessary relationship between these transcendent principles and the things that come after them. Yeah, very much. And so there's a very nice text we have by Origen where he's in debate with a second century Platonist philosopher called Celsus, and Celsus had written an anti-Christian treatise already in the second century, the first one we know of, but a very interesting and thoughtful treatise. And one of the things that Celsus says about the Christians is that they're so arrogant. They have this view that the world is created for them, right? Well, you might as well say the world's been created for frogs or something like that. But in response, Origen's reply is that the world simply has no meaning if it isn't created for some purpose, and in particular it's created for human beings to benefit us, to bring us to a superior moral state, to bring us to union with God. And then the incarnation is presumably just another act of the same kind. It's part of that because certainly for Origen, it's a bit less clear for other thinkers, I think, but certainly for Origen, the need for this act of generosity towards human beings comes because there is a moral fall in the first place. So Origen actually begins with the creation of intellects, no world, just intellects, but the intellects sin, and God creates the world as a kind of reformatory for them. How does an intellect sin exactly? Does believing in an invalid syllogism or something? Something like that. Well, the idea is that the intellects are supposed to be unified with God the Son, again, playing the role of the object of intellectual contemplation, and they're supposed to think purely of him, solely of him, completely of him. And Origen talks about them falling away from that contemplation, and that the key word here is koros. They have a satiety. It's almost like they get bored with thinking about this. So that somehow or other their minds stray, and in that straying of the minds, that's what constitutes the fall. And the world is there to bring them back to something like that original pure state of intellectual union. I wonder if there's an epistemological corollary of that then, in that maybe if we're in some kind of fallen state, as Origen already seems to be implying, God might need to actually do something generous to put us in a position where we can have knowledge. Or are they more optimistic than that? Do they think that a philosopher, in principle, could get pretty far in understanding the relationship between God and the world, the sort of things that we've been talking about? Yes, well, of course, they can get as far as the Platonists got. As we said earlier on, the Platonists got pretty far in understanding the world. As we also said, they are limited, and in particular they're limited because the sheer application of reason only allows you to, essentially, as one of the fathers puts it, you can work out what the rules of nature are. But what you can't do is to understand the contingencies. You can't understand why this world, you can't understand what the particular historical narrative of this world is doing for you because you don't understand what the particular nature of the fall was. So since you get free will and generosity and providence and these kind of terms driving your view of the world, there are serious limits on what you can arrive at by sheer inference. So God does something else, which is to provide roots of inspiration whereby we can have, as it were, a direct insight into what his thinking was when he created the world. So we've already talked about that. We've already talked about the Holy Spirit as an agent of inspiration, inspiring the prophets, the Old Testament. Why did that need to happen? Well, it needed to happen because we as human beings couldn't get to a proper understanding of the world without an insight into the mind of the Creator. Right. So actually we could maybe draw a parallel between three things that God does. He creates the world for us. He sends us his Son and sacrifices his Son for us. And then he also gives us revelation and prophetic inspiration. And so it's like he keeps trying over and over to call us back to him. Yes, in what we're calling the Christian philosophers anyway, the emphasis on sacrifice isn't so strong as you might expect. In fact, what the incarnation is primarily about is itself an act of revelation. So when the Holy Spirit is inspiring the prophets, what he's actually doing is inspiring them to an insight of what the Son is as the reason of God, if you like. The problem is, again from a Christian perspective, that the Jews who are the guardians of this message, who are the recipients of this message in the first place, come to misunderstand it. In particular, they think they come to read the Old Testament rather too literally. Now, of course, if you've read Philo of Alexandria, that's nonsense, but that's how the Christians think about this. So again, you need a sort of super act of inspiration, which is Jesus coming down himself to say what's going on. And of course, they're reading the beginning of the Gospel of John, that the logos itself comes down, the word itself himself comes down and is made flesh. And Jesus in that kind of context is represented as the supreme epistemological authority, if you like. It actually is a very philosophical idea of the incarnation. It's like the healing of the mind as much as a redemption of the body, as it were. Yes, it's lifting of the veil, all these sorts of images. It's an act of exegesis almost. So God's given us the text, but then he has to send someone to tell us how to read them as well. So it's more like a double act of revelation, I think. Well speaking of texts, so far only really been talking about Greek texts. So mostly we were talking about the New Testament, which is in Greek, and these church fathers who wrote in Greek. But they have contemporaries who are church fathers who wrote in Latin. And I wonder whether you think there's a big difference between these early Latin church fathers and the early Greek church fathers, or is it just a matter of geographical and linguistic difference? Greek is the language of culture in the first three centuries of the era, so the default language for anyone writing philosophy, as a matter of fact. There is, of course, at this period, no division between the East and the West churches. There is later on. So it's purely a matter, I think, of personal choice more or less that some people write Latin. It's not a matter of birth or location. But there is a very distinguished Latin tradition going right the way back to the early second century. So we have Minutius Valix in the second century. Tertullian is a contemporary of Clements, and like Tansius, a very important figure for later on as well. All of that seems to change in the fourth century, though, when knowledge of Greek seems to go into some sort of decline. And there's a real flourishing of Latin literature. And also very interestingly, there's a great translation movement associated with that. So in the fourth century, we have Jerome translating the Bible. Not the first time the Bible's been translated into Latin, but of course, this is a very important translation. His associate, Rufinus, and him both translate the Greek fathers into Latin. And in fact, most of our knowledge of origin is through Rufinus' Latin translations of him now. But also very interestingly, you get Christians translating Greek philosophy. So Calcidius, for example, translates some comments on Plato's Timaeus. Marius Victorinus, who ends up as a Christian, it's not clear he's a Christian when he does this, but he makes Latin translations of Aristotle and perhaps even Plotinus. So one of the people who isn't very good at Greek in the fourth century is Augustine, but he has this very rich wealth of Latin material available to him now. We know that he made a very close study of Platonism, presumably through these translations, and talks at one point about Plotinus as a kind of reincarnated Plato as well. So he has access to a Latin translation of Plotinus, and he rates him very highly. Origin is contemporary of Plotinus'. In fact, according to some reports, he even studied with the same teacher as Plotinus. The reference point for his understanding of Platonism is really the generations before. So the move from, as it were, the Greek fathers to the Latin fathers, the third century to the fourth century, you can think of as more analogous, I would say, to the move between Middle Platonism and Platonian Platonism. That's the sort of breaking point. Well, in the next episode, I am in fact going to be coming on to talk about these early Latin Church Fathers as background for Augustine. But for now, I'll just thank George Boystones very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time for the early Latin Church Fathers on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Spreading the Word, the Latin Church Fathers. I suppose that all of us have a few guilty pleasures. I've admitted several times to a weakness for amen quaissence, and this series of podcasts has provided mounting evidence that I cannot resist a good pun, or indeed a bad pun. But how many of us are helpless to resist the great works of Latin literature? This was the guilty pleasure of the 4th century church father, Jerome. He was raised on a diet not of amen quaissence, but of Latin eloquence, with Cicero and other pagan authors on the menu. As he became more and more serious about his Christianity, this became a matter of increasing spiritual discomfort for Jerome. He flirted with the idea that the Scriptures might offer their own kind of eloquence, but more often he extolled their very lack of polish. These were rough, simple texts, and engaging with them could be seen as a discipline, an ordeal as real as the fasting and abstinence of the Desert Fathers. Or so claimed Jerome. And he ought to have known. He was himself something of a Desert Father, albeit one who retreated to isolation armed with a large library and a squad of scribes to help him with his research. To steal a joke that I rather like, his cave must have been unusually large. His ascetic practice included not only submitting to the unadorned, even crude, prose of the Bible, instead of the elegance of Cicero, but also learning to read the Bible in Hebrew. He consulted Jewish scholars, and translated the Bible into Latin directly from Hebrew, instead of the Greek Septuagint. In some of the many dozens of letters Jerome wrote to his patrons, friends, and rivals, Jerome claimed a nearly unique interpretive privilege on this basis. I have returned to the Hebrew source, he would say, and returned with insights about God's Word that have been obscured by translation. We might suppose it obvious that going back to the original language of a text is a good idea, but Jerome's use of Hebrew was controversial. After all, the Greek Septuagint was believed to be a divinely assisted translation. Jerome debated the value of the Hebrew original with no less a personage than Augustine. In all of this, Jerome was carrying on the work of Origen, often literally. He drew not only on consultation with Jewish scholars, but also on his extensive acquaintance with the works of Origen. In a previous episode, I mentioned that Origen's multi-column edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Hexapla, has not been preserved for posterity, but Jerome was still able to use it. He gives us a clue into why the Hexapla did not survive when he complains about the eye-watering price a copy would demand. This is also relevant to Jerome's feelings of guilt over the pleasures of literature and scholarship. In the ancient world, books were luxury items in every sense, expensive to buy, and properly appreciated only by those who had an expensive education. No wonder that Jerome had mixed feelings. He was inspired not only by Origen's scholarship, but also by his ascetic side, and by the example of desert fathers like Anthony the Great. Indeed, one of Jerome's own works was a biography of the desert father Paul the Hermit. Jerome's career thus embodies attention, on the one hand emphasizing the spiritual importance of self-restraint and voluntary poverty, on the other ennobling the image of the Christian scholar whose education and library were the ancient equivalent of elite private schooling and sports cars. This helps explain why so many ancient Christian heroes started out wealthy but voluntarily gave up their riches. They pursued a life of poverty, study, and seclusion, but only after they had been educated to an elite level. Usually, the better-known Christian ascetics had their cake before they started refusing to eat it. Why in this philosophy podcast am I bothering you with this tale of ancient Christian neurosis? The clue is an author I've already mentioned several times, Cicero. We've seen that philosophy was part and parcel of elite education and the canon of classic literature for readers of late antiquity. That's obviously true for the Greek tradition, which looked to Plato as a paragon of both literary and philosophical excellence. But it's also true for readers of Latin. The most significant church fathers who wrote in Latin—Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine—were all well-educated and all admired the great Latin stylists like Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero. How annoying that all these authors were pagans, and how especially annoying that Cicero, often taken as the greatest of the classical Latin authors, also happened to be the primary route through which pagan Hellenic philosophy had reached readers of Latin. This point is illustrated particularly well by Lactantius. His fame relies on a work called the Divine Institutes, written at the dawn of the fourth century in response to the great persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. In the Institutes, he says explicitly that his aim is to use such rhetorical gifts as he has to attack pagan belief and uphold Christianity. We are here in the territory of apologetics, which we have already explored with the Greek fathers Clement and Justin Martyr. Clement though was far less apologetic about his love for the classical tradition than Lactantius, or after him, Jerome. In fact, the Institutes of Lactantius slides casually from attacking pagan religion to attacking pagan philosophers in a way that would have appalled Clement. Even the noble Socrates is not spared, as Lactantius sneers at his dying request to sacrifice a rooster to the god Asclepius. As for Plato, Lactantius can provoke his audience's scorn by simply mentioning the Republic's idea that women should be shared among men in the ideal state. Sometimes Lactantius's mockery of the philosophers is unintentionally comic, as when he makes fun of the philosopher's belief that people could live on the far side of the earth without falling into the sky. Australians hang in there, we're sending help. Yet Lactantius can't help admiring certain philosophers, in particular Cicero. He loves Cicero above all as the paradigm of Latin eloquence. So, although he attacks several passages from Cicero in the course of the Institutes, he does so with some degree of respect. He seems to think Cicero should really have known better. And of the various philosophical traditions to come through the Greek tradition, in part through Cicero's Latin writings, it seems to be Cicero's own preferred school of skepticism that has made the biggest impression on Lactantius. He deftly wields the classical skeptical strategy of emphasizing disagreement amongst his opponents. He also thinks the skeptics were right when they admitted that perfect knowledge is beyond the capacity of mankind, Stoick claims to the contrary notwithstanding. On the other hand, dogmatic skeptics go too far when they claim that we know nothing. That, as Lactantius points out, would be self-defeating, because we would at least know that we know nothing. Rather, humans can have partial knowledge that falls short of the full understanding we might honor with the name of wisdom, in Greek sophia, and in Lactantius's Latin sapientia. At best, philosophy done with human resources can be only what its name promises, love of wisdom but not wisdom itself. For that, we must turn to a source higher than mankind, namely God. Thus, Lactantius argues that wisdom is inextricably linked to religion. Interestingly, he seems to assume that the Hellenic philosophy that inspired Cicero was not religious. He even says that a pagan would never be able to engage in philosophy and religious ritual at the same time. For Lactantius, philosophy still means Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools, which is unsurprising given that Cicero was such an important source for knowledge of philosophy in Latin. He seems unaware of Neoplatonism, and especially figures like his contemporary Iamblichus who fused Platonism with pagan religion. Ironically, though, Lactantius is playing much the same game as Iamblichus. He appeals to a learned audience that still includes many pagans, offering a wisdom built on revealed texts. Lactantius tends to quote pagan authorities even more than the Bible, even the Hermetic texts so beloved of Iamblichus. This is precisely because he is not preaching to the converted, literally, but aiming his critique of paganism at a broad literate readership. At least one Christian reader, Jerome, was more impressed by this critical project of Lactantius than by his positive exposition of Christian doctrines. There's no doubt that the most memorable parts of the Institutes are those where he chuckles at the irrationality of pagan belief and pokes holes in philosophical pretensions. But as the work goes on, Lactantius does provide an innovative ethical teaching to replace philosophical theories about virtue. He rejects the Socratic and Stoic notion that virtue is the same thing as knowledge. It is possible, indeed common, for us to know what we should do and lack the will to do it, a point that will be developed by Augustine. And where knowledge is something that comes to us from the outside through learning, virtue is a state of character that must come from within. He also objects to the philosophical claim that virtue is the highest good for humankind. No, virtue is at best a means to our highest good, which is an immortal life together with God. This makes sense of a passage earlier in the Institutes where Lactantius has argued that one must accept the presence of vice and suffering in the world, since without these, virtue would be pointless. Lactantius would agree with Irenaeus that this life is given to us as a trial and tribulation so that we can earn salvation the hard way. Thus, virtue for Lactantius consists largely in fortitude, in bearing whatever slings and arrows outrageous fortune sends our way. If we are virtuous, we will achieve the promised immortality in the hereafter. For now, the perfect human life in this world will have two aspects, just like the contemplative and practical aspects of happiness in the Aristotelian tradition. But Lactantius gives both aspects a new twist. Instead of rational contemplation, we should dedicate ourselves to worship of God. And instead of a life of heroic practical activity or political engagement, as praised by Aristotle and Cicero, we should help our fellow man. Lactantius places charity at the core of ethics, another idea that will be embraced by Augustine. For Lactantius, charity and all other practical virtue presupposes piety, because we become charitable in order to imitate God and his mercy. He develops his view in part by attacking the radical skeptical philosopher Carnaides. As you might recall, Carnaides famously came to Rome and gave speeches in praise of justice and then against justice. In the second speech against justice, he gave the vivid example of a wise man and a foolish man drowning at sea, with only one plank between them. The wise man would fight for the plank to save his life, justice be damned, because his life is more valuable. Lactantius first responds, what is this supposedly wise man doing on a ship? A reminder that in the ancient world, seafaring was a danger usually faced only to fight wars or make money. More to the point, he adds that the real wise man would fear sin much more than death, sin being any act that harms one's neighbor rather than helping him. And so it is that, thanks to Lactantius, charity begins at Rome. Like I say, when it comes to puns, I just have no self-control. In this case, I should perhaps have tried a bit harder, since neither Lactantius nor the other Latin church fathers were actually based in Rome. They came from and lived in various locales in the Western Empire and even in the East. North Africa in particular produced several theologians, including Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine himself. This only stands to reason. In late antiquity, the city of Rome was no longer the center of empire. In the 4th century, the emperors had relocated to the more easily defended Milan. And by the 380s, the emperor Valentinian II wasn't even the most powerful man in Milan. On more than one occasion, he had to yield to the bishop of that city, Ambrose. Like his contemporaries, the Cappadocians, Ambrose was deeply embroiled in theological controversies, in his case especially with the Arians. Ambrose was reluctantly installed as bishop at the demands of a near-riotous mob, an event that would be regretted in due course by the emperor Valentinian and his mother Justina, who favored the Arians. In 385, when Valentinian tried to seize a basilica in the city for use by Arians, Ambrose and his supporters faced them down. It wasn't Ambrose's only successful confrontation with imperial authority. Years later, another emperor, Theodosius, authorized a massacre of thousands at Thessalonica. Outraged, Ambrose withdrew the sacraments from Theodosius until he performed a humiliating public repentance. Around the same time, Ambrose used his deft political skills to prevent pagans from restoring the altar of the goddess Victory near the senate in Rome. When you're winning battles against Victory herself, you know you're on a roll. Ambrose is thus frequently cited as the first Christian leader to exert the power of the church as an autonomous political force, which could on occasion thwart emperors or put them firmly in their place. Of course, this achievement echoes down the centuries through the medieval age. As a result, Ambrose is better known for his political machinations than his philosophy. Even historians of philosophy probably think of him in the first instance as a formative influence on Augustine rather than for his own thought. But like Lactantius, Ambrose contributed significantly to the emerging tradition of Christian ethics. His best-known work, called De Officiis, or On Duties, is a Christian answer to a treatise of the same title by Cicero, that man again. Indeed, you might think of Ambrose's On Duties as a Christian reworking of Cicero, sometimes simply illustrating originally Ciceroian ethical points with examples drawn from the Bible. He tells us how Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command displayed all four classical Greek virtues—wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. In one particularly striking juxtaposition of sources, he compares Plato's story of the Ring of Gyges from the Republic, which asks whether anyone could resist acting unjustly if they acquired a ring of invisibility, with the virtue of David in the biblical Book of Samuel. David refrained from killing an enemy king who was asleep, even though he could have gotten away with it. As this suggests, Ambrose is in full agreement with Greek church fathers like Clement of Alexandria in holding that the truths found in Greek philosophy were already proclaimed earlier by Old Testament prophets. Moreover, Ambrose insists that only the Christians have made good on the aspirations of Plato, the Stoics, and other more-or-less right-minded Hellenic thinkers. He agrees with Plato that our ethical goal should be the subordination of desire to the rule of reason. But he thinks that all the pagan philosophers still thought too much in terms of what is advantageous to each of us in this life. Even the Stoics, for all their ethical stringency, admitted that one might prefer to be materially comfortable so long as it would not impede virtue. For Ambrose, as for Lactantius, even virtue itself is merely a means to the end of eternal life. Thus, he condemns wealth and other external goods as being actively harmful to the pursuit of our good, and praises poverty as a path that leads to salvation. It is this difference, Ambrose says, that justifies his decision to write anew on duties, to supplant that of the pagan Cicero. This pattern of using and also criticizing Greek philosophy, which, like my penchant for puns, is becoming increasingly familiar as we go along, goes back to the earliest great Latin father Tertullian, who wrote in the second century. He is well known for asking, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? This rhetorical question suggests that he wanted to sweep aside the whole Greek intellectual tradition in favor of the new Christian revelation. And no doubt Tertullian and other fathers were tempted to toss philosophy aside entirely, following St. Paul's warning, But, if we turn to a work Tertullian wrote on the subject of the soul, we see that he is in fact steeped in philosophical knowledge, and even well read in medical literature. He finds the medical text particularly useful because, unusually, within the patristic tradition, he wants to see the soul as a physical substance. Again, he is taking his lead here from a biblical source, the book of Genesis, which says that God breathed life into Adam. This leads Tertullian to ally himself with Stoics and medical authors who describe the soul as a sort of pneuma or breath. A more abstract theological motive is revealed midway through the work, when he criticizes Plato's claim that the soul is ungenerated and immaterial. In that case, says Tertullian, why not just call the soul God? Yet, Tertullian does not rely only on theological argument or scriptural citation. He gives powerful philosophical arguments, for instance, that if the soul were immaterial, it could not causally influence the body. This, of course, is still a chief argument for physicalist theories in the philosophy of mind today. Tertullian even resists the temptation to grant immateriality to the higher faculties of soul, such as the intellect. Instead, Tertullian sees intellect as a mere function of a soul that is in itself physical. How else, as he points out, could the intellect be influenced by the senses and learn from them? Tertullian seems almost to be criticizing in advance the theory that will, in the coming generations, be defended in Alexandria by Origen. Origen's explanation of sin and the cosmos will revolve around the claim that the soul pre-exists the body. Tertullian wants nothing to do with that idea. He associates it not only with Plato, but with the hated Gnostics, who we saw being refuted by other second-century theologians like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr. Like them, he traces the Gnostic heresy to the influence of Platonist philosophy. This idea that Hellenic thought is a source of heresy helps explain why we so often find Church Fathers expressing hostility towards Plato and other pagan thinkers, even as they reproduce arguments from these same philosophers. Here's a particularly ironic example. Tertullian thinks that Plato was right to argue in the Phaedo that the soul was immortal on the basis that it is simple. Of course, this means for him not that the soul is immaterial, but rather a uniform physical substance. Yet, at the beginning of this same work, he sarcastically questions whether Socrates was really untroubled when he took the Hemlock. Tertullian believes that no one could manage this without faith in God. If Tertullian could feel this conflicted about the merits of Platonist theories of soul in the second century, how would things be in the fourth century when theologians were grappling with the arguably heretical theory of Origen? This brings us full circle back to Jerome. In his biblical scholarship, he was influenced by Origen as by no other author. Yet, he also became a leading critic of Origenism. A heated dispute broke out between Jerome and his childhood friend Rufinus over the orthodoxy of Origen's works. Each of them produced a Latin translation of Origen's On Principles, Jerome's trying to bring out its outrageous features, Rufinus trying to minimize them. For Jerome, Origen went too far in the direction of Platonism, depicting the soul as a pre-existing, purely rational entity and thus reducing all human goodness to intellectual perfection. Jerome's contrary position brings together several strands of the Latin patristic tradition. Tertullian's insistence that the soul is created and not eternal, Lactantius's rejection of knowledge as man's highest end, and Ambrose's more moderate Platonic ethics, which implore us to restrain desire by reason but still leave a place for appropriate emotion in the good life. The so-called Origenist debate between Jerome and Rufinus was only one of several heated theological disputes in the fourth century. We've already looked at confrontations over the Holy Trinity and the nature, or natures, of Christ. Next, we're going to turn to a man whose career extended into the fifth century but was still shaped by these and other theological debates. This next church father displays his own hesitations and psychological frailties as no other ancient author. Yet, he spent his later years combating heresy with a sense of unshakable certainty. In the process, he laid down doctrines that would become authoritative for the next thousand years and more. In the meantime, we will finally turn to the true confessions of Augustine, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Life and Time, Augustine's Confessions. When I was a graduate student, I enrolled in a seminar on Augustine. The first day of the course, the students filed in to find the professor sitting next to a portable radio, which was playing some Miles Davis. We took our seats and waited for a few minutes, baffled, wondering whether we'd found our way to a music appreciation class by mistake. Finally, the professor turned the music off and explained that Augustine wrote the way Miles Davis played trumpet, improvising on traditional themes with the individuality of the artist revealed in the riffs. This illuminating comparison has obviously stayed with me, given that I still remember it almost 20 years later. That's the sort of teaching that inspired me as a student, and perhaps planted in my mind that I might get away with mentioning Buster Keaton occasionally when I became a teacher myself. Of course, starting with an autobiographical episode like this is itself a rhetorical trick, and a trick that is typical of our age. Walk into any bookstore and you'll find shelves and shelves of autobiographies, with their well-worn narrative themes of personal struggle and redemption, their uneasy combination of retrospective self-critique and carefully crafted self-justification. It is hard for us to imagine that anyone needed to invent the idea of writing that sort of book, but someone did invent it at the dawn of the 5th century. The author of course was Augustine, and the book was The Confessions. Like a Miles Davis record, it innovates by making familiar themes seem new. The conversion narrative of the Desert Father Anthony is mentioned in the very same breath as the climactic moment of Augustine's own conversion. We are meant to see Augustine's story within the context of literature on such Christian heroes as Anthony, but Anthony is a hero who displays superhuman self-control against supernatural enemies, literal demons of temptation. Augustine varies the theme by making himself all too human. His conversion story is told intimately and vividly, and Augustine depicts his own weaknesses with equal vividness. The effect is that the reader can identify with Augustine, can imagine being in his position. Thus, the reader can imagine following his path. To use another 20th century comparison, Anthony was the Superman of ancient Christian literature, an almost otherworldly figure of unattainable virtue. Augustine was Spider-Man, whom we meet as a conflicted adolescent in search of himself, and who remains prone to weakness and self-doubt, just like the rest of us do. Augustine was not bitten by a radioactive spider, but by the philosophy bug. It came in the form of Cicero's dialogue the Hortensius, which is now lost. Augustine read it as a young man while studying rhetoric, and was converted to the cause of philosophy, not yet to the Christian faith. His mother, the long-suffering and pious Monica, longed for Augustine to adopt her religion, but her belief was not shared by Augustine's father. He had other plans for the precocious young man. The family was not wealthy, but money was scraped together to send Augustine for a first-rate education in his hometown of Thagast, and then Carthage, both on the northern African coast. For the time being, Augustine would follow his father's dream of riches on earth rather than his mother's dream of riches in heaven. It took a full 12 years after reading the Hortensius for Augustine to reach his moment of conversion. By that time he was in Milan, where he had been pursuing a career as an up-and-coming rhetorician, earning his keep as a teacher, and wasting his time on such tasks as a panegyric for the emperor Valedtinian II. Those 12 years take up most of the autobiographical part of The Confessions. As he writes, Augustine is in his 40s, and looking back on his youthful search for a satisfying way to take up Cicero's exhortation to pursue philosophy. He is attracted by astrology and by a sect called the Manichaeans, named after their founding prophet Mani. In The Confessions, Augustine depicts the Manichaean teaching as one that appealed to his naive youthful impulses. In particular, he associates it with materialism and the Gnostic view of evil as a second principle opposed to God. After his conversion, Augustine would go on to write works in refutation of the Manichaeans, but as a young rhetoric student in Carthage, Augustine was impressed by the Manichaean doctrine. Disenchantment set in when he had a chance to meet a Manichaean teacher named Faustus, who struck Augustine as having more style than substance. Yet it was precisely the Manichaean's conception of substance that Augustine had difficulty shaking off. Again and again in The Confessions, he explains that he could not help imagining God, and also evil, as physical, material things. God for instance he conceived as a body penetrating the cosmos, the way that water soaked through a sponge. This is highly reminiscent of the Stoic understanding of God, so it's appropriate that Augustine was liberated by reading those anti-Stoic philosophers Plotinus and Porphyry. He came across Latin versions of their writings, translated by a man named Marius Victorinus. We'll come back to him in a future episode. Thanks to these books of the Platonists, as he calls them, Augustine was finally able to abandon his materialist assumptions. Plotinus explained to his satisfaction that something could exist without being a body. Just as important, Plotinus' theory that evil is a sort of non-being or privation dispelled the Manichaean idea of evil as an autonomous second principle. This section of The Confessions shows Augustine as closer to the attitude of a Clement than a Lactantius. Philosophy is not a target for mocking attack, but a useful bridge towards faith. On the other hand, Augustine emphasizes that the Platonist books did not teach him the all-important truths about the incarnation and sacrifice of God's Son. This is why even the combined forces of Cicero and the Platonists were unable to lead Augustine away from sin and self-interest to a truly philosophical way of life. Only the example of Christ could speak to Augustine's will and not just his intellect. Paradoxically, he needed to will a change in his own will, and this he remained unable to do. It was not for lack of good role models. In Milan, he had not only his mother who had moved to be with him, but also access to the greatest cleric of his age, Ambrose. Augustine was pushed powerfully towards conversion by hearing Ambrose's sermons. He at first attended these simply to enjoy Ambrose's considerable rhetorical prowess, but in this case there was substance along with the style, and Ambrose's message began to sink in. Yet not deep enough. Augustine tells us of his encounter with Ambrose a full three books prior to the story of his eventual conversion. The intervening sections of the Confessions provide a powerful illustration of that all-too-familiar human dilemma, knowing what one should do and refusing to do it. Thanks to the dream team of Cicero, Plotinus, and Ambrose, Augustine's mind has been converted. He rejects the false teachings of astrology and Manicheanism, accepting the existence of a good, immaterial, supreme God. But he is too tied to the pleasures of the flesh to react accordingly. Augustine compares his situation to that of a man who knows he needs to get out of bed, but just can't summon the will to get up. I have to admit that this example sounds horribly familiar to me, and I'm in good company. It was also used by Marcus Aurelius. In a more famous passage, Augustine describes himself as praying to God, Such conflict within the will is one of the central themes of the Confessions, and of Augustine's writings in general. The phenomenon has already been explored earlier in the narrative, with the famous description of a young Augustine stealing fruit from a pear tree with his friends. The irony of the story, with its inevitable reminiscence of the Garden of Eden, is that Augustine did not even want the pears. The theft was an utterly perverse act. He was sinful for the sake of being sinful, something Augustine still finds difficult to understand years later as he writes the Confessions. The theme of internal conflict reaches a peak in the scenes leading up to Augustine's conversion in which he is desperate with desire to become a Christian, but unable to make himself do so. What ties him to his former life is above all sexual desire. As a young man, he had a mistress of many years with whom he fathered a son. Rather unfairly, he tries to connect this liaison to the Manicheans, but neither the young Augustine nor the Manicheans were as debauched as he would like us to believe. In fact, Augustine mentions in passing that he was faithful to the mistress through these years, and the modern reader is less likely to be shocked by the affair than by the casual way the unnamed woman is sent away when a marriage is arranged for Augustine. To be fair, Augustine does tell us that he was terribly upset at the time, though not so upset that he refrained from taking custody of their son. As for the woman's point of view, we are told only that she vowed never to take up with another man. I like to imagine Augustine's mistress getting together with Anthony the Great's sister, who was dispossessed and packed off to a nunnery by her brother. They might have shared some choice observations about the noble ascetic impulses of ancient Christianity. Our look at the ascetic movement a few episodes back makes it easier for us to understand Augustine's dilemma here. Why, we might be wondering, doesn't he just convert to Christianity and get married? It's not as if all Christians had to become celibate, after all. But the Confessions makes clear that Augustine, and several of his friends, thought of Christian conversion as requiring renunciation of all worldly things—a career, theatrical and gladiatorial shows, and, above all, marriage and sexual relations. In the face of this all-or-nothing choice, Augustine faces an opponent more formidable than any Manichean himself. His eventual victory comes in a garden, where Augustine has been weeping over his inability to defeat his own desires. He suddenly hears a child's voice from nearby, chanting in Latin, tole, legae, take, read. Seizing up his copy of the Bible and opening it at random, he reads from Paul's letter to the Romans, instructing him to put on Christ and put aside lust. Like Paul himself, when he was knocked from the horse, Augustine is finally converted. As I've already mentioned, Augustine alludes to a different parallel, Anthony the Great, who was similarly persuaded to give up his riches by reading the Bible. At this climactic point, we are still only in the eighth of the Confessions' thirteen books. The autobiographical portion continues on through Book 9, with the story of Augustine's baptism and the death of Monica following a mystical vision shared by mother and son. It now becomes clear that Augustine is not content to write the first psychologically nuanced autobiography. He wants to write a psychologically nuanced autobiography that ends with a few metaphysical speculations on the nature of memory and time, and for good measure a bit of scriptural exegesis. But what does the story of Augustine's life have to do with the philosophy of time, or a commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis? The temptation is to say that Augustine's was not just any life, and that he cannot tell his story without indulging in that most Augustinian of pursuits, faith seeking understanding. But it might be truer to say again that Augustine is offering his own story to us only as one particularly vivid example. His path to God is one we are all called to follow, and it raises questions that confront us all. When he looks back on his own life, how does his past manage to live on in his mind? Indeed, is his past anything more than a memory? Furthermore, the story we have just seen is one of Augustine overcoming his separation from God. But even his conversion can bring him to God only partially, precisely because he is a creature subject to change and imperfection where God is eternal and perfect. Thus, Augustine laments at the very end of his philosophical analysis of time that he is scattered across time rather than being fully and eternally present. The same point is made more generally in the final book, which uses the beginning of Genesis to explain how an eternal God can relate to the temporal world He creates. Thus, the autobiography is powerfully connected to the closing philosophical section. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the whole Confessions is both philosophical and autobiographical. The theme of creation's separation from and return to God is approached in two ways. First, by telling Augustine's life story, and then by examining what it means that we are all able to have life stories in the first place, because we live in time and not in unchanging eternity. Even in this section, Augustine retains his habit of acute psychological observation. He asks, what is time? and then adds, as long as nobody asks me, then I know. The puzzles he raises about time were already raised by Aristotle and by skeptical philosophers, who Augustine knew well thanks to his exposure to Cicero. Indeed, in one early work he criticized the academic skeptics. But there is no ancient text that explores the paradoxical nature of time as thoroughly as the 11th book of the Confessions. The fundamental problem is identified by Augustine when he asks how time can have any length. Past time is already gone, and future time has yet to arrive. That leaves only the present time to exist as having length. But a length of time, a month, a day, a minute, a second, cannot be present. Only this instant right now can be present, and that seems to have no length. Indeed, although Augustine doesn't mention this, Aristotle had described the present instant, in Greek tōnōn, which literally means the now, as a durationless division or limit between past and future. So Augustine is, like me when I'm failing to get out of bed, in good company. He finds common cause with the Stoics, too, when he says that if time exists, it needs to be some kind of extension or distension. But how can this be, if time has no length? To solve this problem, Augustine turns to the example of a spoken phrase, giving the not-very-randomly chosen example, deus creato omnium, God, Creator of all. It takes time to utter these eight Latin syllables, so the sound of the entire phrase is never present as a whole. Any more than every minute in an hour could be present all at once. Yet we have no difficulty hearing this phrase as a unity and understanding it. This can only be because our minds are, at least if we know a bit of Latin, remembering and interpreting the sound as it passes into our ears. We retain the parts of the phrase that have already sounded, and anticipate the syllables yet to come. He also uses the example of hearing a song. Suppose you are listening to a Miles Davis trumpet solo. The solo may go on for minutes, but your mind is capable of putting it all together into one, more or less coherent experience. Admittedly, for you, its coherence may depend on how much you know about jazz theory and which part of Miles' career it comes from. Augustine infers from these observations that it is the mind that creates temporal extension. A long past time is simply a memory of past events as having taken a long time to happen, and likewise for the expectation of a long future time. This account helps him solve another problem too. It seems that the only things that exist are things that exist now, given that past things no longer exist and future things do not exist yet. But then how can it be true to say, for instance, that Socrates drank hemlock, or that there will be a Buster Keaton movie on TV tomorrow? This is a problem that still fascinates philosophers today. Some, who are called presentists, agree with Augustine that past and future things do not exist, hence their name. Disappointing for those who are expecting these to be philosophers who always show up with a nice present. Other philosophers who reject presentism attack the position in part by pressing this question about Socrates and Buster Keaton. What is it that makes past and future tense statements true, if neither past nor future things exist in any sense? Already back in the late 4th century, when he existed, Augustine was proposing an answer. Past and future things reside in our memory or expectation, and in that way they do exist presently. Whether you find this persuasive or not, I hope you'll join me in rejoicing that The Confessions is one thing from the past that does still exist. This work is one of Augustine's three masterpieces. It offers us not only one of the great life stories of antiquity, but also an ideal orientation for Augustine's contributions to the history of philosophy. It takes in all the themes of his career. The flirtation and then break with the Manicheans prefigures a life dominated by polemic, not only against these Manicheans, but also against rival Christian sects, the Donatists and Pelagians. Augustine's internal conflict is resolved only with a kind of divine intervention—take and read. This sums up Augustine's stance on human freedom, a stance he developed in large part in his polemic against the Pelagians. According to the Augustinian view, we can succeed in this struggle only thanks to divine assistance. This is so because all of us inherit sin from Adam, a sin which we cannot remove through mere effort. God's grace is needed, which is why his Son had to be sent and sacrificed for us. The Confessions also display the complexity of Augustine's attitude towards pagan culture, and especially the pagan philosophers. This question will again be central in the second of Augustine's masterpieces, The City of God. Here, he criticizes pagan religion and political values and asks what relationship a committed Christian could have towards the secular political world. In The City of God, pagan philosophers come in for heavy criticism. Yet throughout his career, Augustine also draws on the philosophers, especially the Platonists. Their influence is felt even, or perhaps especially, in Augustine's most ambitious work of theology, On the Trinity. Its project, already announced at the end of The Confessions, is to understand how humans are images of God and thus characterized by Trinitarian relationships. In explaining this, Augustine develops new and innovative ideas in the philosophy of mind. Both of these masterpieces will be occupying us in future episodes. But first, we're going to be staying with a theme suggested by that last book of The Confessions, where Augustine uses his philosophical analysis of time and eternity to interpret the opening verses of Genesis. We'll be turning to two shorter works, On the Teacher and On Christian Teaching. These may not qualify as milestones, on the order of Augustine's three masterpieces, but they will allow us to understand Augustine's views on communication, including the special kind of communication found in Scripture. So, it would make me kind of blue if you didn't join me for Augustine on Language, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Papa Don't Teach. Augustine on Language. There are certain things that fathers are expected to do with their sons, even though mothers can do these same things with their daughters equally well. Playing ball, going fishing, going to a football match, flying a kite, sitting round a campfire quoting memorable jokes from philosophy podcasts. In the ancient world though, things were a bit different, at least if your dad was Augustine. His idea of a father-son activity was to explore the nature of language together and to prove after long philosophical debate that all our knowledge derives from God. He wrote up a record of such a dialogue with his son Adeodatus in a work called De magistra, On the Teacher. In the Confessions, he tells us that it accurately represents Adeodatus's contributions. If this is true, then Adeodatus was a talented lad. His name means gift of God, but what God gives he can also take away. Adeodatus was Augustine's son by his mistress, the one sent away when a marriage was arranged for Augustine, and he lost the boy too when he died before reaching even 20 years of age. In his dialogue with the teenaged Adeodatus, we see Augustine picking up themes from earlier ancient philosophy and anticipating distinctions still made by philosophers of language today. The most obvious precedent is Plato's theory of recollection. In his dialogue The Meno, Plato had Socrates argue that we cannot actually acquire new knowledge through learning. Rather, teachers prompt us to remember forgotten knowledge that is already within our souls. Augustine would not have been able to read The Meno, but he did know a summary of the relevant passage from Cicero. In his own dialogue, he is going to argue for a similar conclusion. We never gain knowledge from human teachers, but find it in ourselves. On the other hand, he rejects Plato's idea that we are recollecting knowledge from before we are born. Instead, it is God himself who is teaching us from within, though we do not necessarily perceive this when we are learning. Augustine's path towards this conclusion is also very different from what we find in The Meno. On the Teacher is devoted mostly to the philosophy of language, and in particular how language can lead people to knowledge, if it does so at all. Augustine begins by asking Adeodatus what language is for, and the two agree that we use language to teach others and to remind ourselves. Language is, apparently, able to perform this task because it consists of signs. Not all signs are linguistic, for instance there are traffic signs and gestures, like pointing with the finger, but all words are signs. Even such words as if and nothing are agreed to be signs, even if it is hard to say what they are signs of. The father and son team notice that many puzzles arise here. When we are talking, it is not always clear whether we are talking about signs or the things they signify. Augustine gives the example of a statistical argument such as, if I get you to say lion, then a wild beast has just come out of your mouth, or if you are a man, in Latin homo, then you are made of two syllables. Such ambiguities plague any attempt to get clear about how exactly language works. In a lovely analogy, Augustine compares using language to philosophize about language to someone who is scratching an itch in his own fingers so that he can no longer tell which fingers are itching and which are scratching. Nonetheless, the two arrive at an appealing idea about how we might learn. We use signs, which are usually, but not always, linguistic, to teach people about things, and also about other signs. This leads our listener to gain knowledge of the things we are signifying. Thus I might tell you giraffes are tall, and if you had managed to get this far into the podcast without knowing that, you would thereby gain some new knowledge about giraffes. I can also use signs to tell you about other signs, as when I say, the word giraffe is a noun. Augustine has no quarrel with this second case where signs teach about other signs, but he raises doubts about whether signs can really give us knowledge about things. Certainly, this does not happen if I teach you the meaning of a word. Rather, it is the reverse. If I am to teach you what the word giraffe signifies, you must already know what a giraffe is. I might, for instance, point and say, look, that graceful creature with a long neck is a giraffe. In this sort of case, I am using a thing to teach you about a sign, not vice versa. Nor does my pointing at the giraffe, which is also a sign, give you knowledge about giraffes. It only draws your attention to the giraffe, and your sense perception does the rest. In fact, Adeudatus and Augustine find that there are puzzles even as to how I could use things to teach about signs. For instance, if I want to show you what the word dancing means, I can get up and dance for a minute. But you might conclude that the word dancing signifies dancing for one minute, or dancing like someone doing a bad imitation of James Brown. You wouldn't necessarily realize that this word refers to dancing in general. This problem of indeterminacy, that is how we can ever convey to someone the exact meaning of a word, reappeared much later in 20th century philosophy of language. A philosopher named Quine raised a puzzle to suggest that all translation is indeterminate. We are to imagine a linguist studying the language of a native tribe. The natives point and say, gavagai, when a rabbit runs past. The linguist might infer that gavagai means rabbit, but there are other possibilities. For instance, it might mean a part of a rabbit, or I could go for a nice stewed rabbit. Only once he has learned the language can the linguist engage with the natives so as to rule out these possibilities. But it's a puzzle how this is going to be possible, if the linguist cannot get started by learning what individual words mean. Augustine actually doesn't spend too much time worrying about this problem of whether we can use things to learn the meanings of signs. He perhaps underestimates the difficulty and assumes that a person of sufficient intelligence will be able to infer what a sign signifies, even if someone else might get the wrong idea. More difficult in his view is the question of how to teach about things using words. Suppose you already know what the words giraffe and tall mean, and I tell you, giraffes are tall. At best, my saying this is going to give you a belief that giraffes are tall. If you want to know that giraffes are tall, just hearing me utter these words is not enough. You must go do some empirical investigation. Check out a few giraffes and see if they are tall. But then, you'll be learning from your experience of the giraffes that giraffes really are tall, and not from my statement. In other cases empirical investigation will be irrelevant. I might say to you, justice is good. Again, even if you know what the words mean, this cannot induce knowledge, even if I try to convince you that I am right. Ultimately, you must consult your own understanding of justice and goodness to see whether the statement really is true or not. Whether you use sense experience or consider a more abstract subject within your mind, no human teacher will ever be giving you knowledge. All the teacher can give you is belief and encouragement to consider things for yourself. Any knowledge you get from this process is not innate, as Plato claimed, but comes from God himself. It was after all God who created the things that we experience through the senses. So, when you look at a giraffe to see whether it is tall, you are depending on God's creative act to make it possible for you to gain knowledge. In the more abstract cases, like the one about justice, you are consulting an inner truth, as Augustine puts it. Adeodatus is himself doing that, as he makes up his mind whether Augustine's argument about language is compelling. This inner truth, by whose light we achieve knowledge, is nothing other than God dwelling within us. So, it is God the Father, not Augustine the Father, who is in a position to bring Adeodatus to knowledge. Is language, then, like war in the opinion of Edwin Starr, good for absolutely nothing? Well, we have already seen that signs can serve to teach about other signs, but apart from that they seem only to give us belief. Even in the case where you tell me what you yourself believe, I will not thereby know whether you really believe it. You might be lying or misspeaking. For instance, if you say I love Buster Keaton, I might believe you love Buster Keaton, but maybe you are just trying to persuade me that you have good taste, and secretly you have never even seen one of his movies. If so, stop listening now and go watch one. The podcast will still be here when you get back. The upshot is that signs can only ever bring us to have beliefs about things, but this does not imply that signs are useless. They lead us to examine the things themselves and to examine our own sense of the truth. Furthermore, a human teacher can use language to dispel misconceptions and errors by showing their inconsistency or implausibility. This is what Socrates usually did in his conversations, and it is also a common occurrence in the dialogues that Augustine himself wrote early in his career. For Augustine, then, signs in general, and language in particular, do have an important role to play in bringing us to the truth. It's worth noting, by the way, that Augustine's argument for all this could be accepted even by an atheist. The atheist will simply reject Augustine's assumption that the truth that dwells within each of us is to be identified with God. But the atheist would not share Augustine's belief that one body of linguistic signs in particular serves to bring us to knowledge, the text collected in the Bible. The conversion scene from Augustine's Confessions, in which he hears a voice telling him to take and read and then comes across a particularly apt passage of the New Testament, is a vivid example of how signs can lead someone to truth. The Bible Augustine seized on that occasion would have been in Latin. He did know some Greek but complains in the Confessions that he never enjoyed studying it as a child. As for the Hebrew of the Old Testament, this was for Augustine a closed book, if you'll pardon the expression. One might therefore expect him to welcome his contemporary Jerome's project of returning to the Hebrew for a new Latin Bible, and he did point out the usefulness of Latin translations that render the Scriptures in slavishly accurate, word-by-word fashion. On the other hand, Augustine also defended the claims of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament which had supposedly been made with the assistance of divine inspiration. He discusses these points in a kind of handbook he wrote entitled Deoctrina Christiana, meaning On Christian Teaching. He tells us in its prologue that this work provides general instructions for interpreting the Scriptures, much as you might teach someone to read language in general. For more detailed exegesis of the Bible, one can turn for instance to his so-called literal commentary on Genesis. Here, literal, in Latin ad litiram, means that Augustine avoids allegorical or symbolic interpretation. But in On Christian Teaching, he does accept the need for such interpretation, at least regarding certain passages. But how do we know which passages should be read allegorically, and how do we know which allegorical interpretations we are to accept? Augustine answers this question with a kind of key to understanding the Bible, which he establishes in the first book of On Christian Teaching. His central claim is that all of Scripture has a single overarching purpose, to lead its reader to karitas. For Augustine, this word, usually translated charity, means a two-fold love, towards our neighbor and towards God. We should also bear love towards ourselves, but Augustine thinks that no one needs to be instructed in that respect. All humans naturally love themselves, as we can see from their instinct for self-preservation. We do need to be taught, indeed constantly reminded and persuaded, to love God and our fellow man. This message is conveyed so clearly and emphatically in the Bible that it can serve as a measuring stick against which to assess interpretations of any specific passage. If the overall point of the Bible is to lead us to charity, we can be certain that no interpretation inconsistent with charity could be correct. Most obviously, if a passage seems to imply that we should harm our fellow man, then we must resort to allegorical interpretation. Of course, there might be more than one allegorical interpretation possible. But, so long as these interpretations would promote charity, we can be relaxed about accepting any or even all of them. Augustine even suggests that God predicted that different readers would adopt these various interpretations so that in a sense, all of them could be correct. Let's try to bring together this work on Christian teaching with the theory of learning we found in On the Teacher. There, we saw Augustine saying that signs cannot give us knowledge but only beliefs. We may then reflect for ourselves and ultimately turn those beliefs into knowledge thanks to the light of inner truth. Augustine seems to be thinking more or less along the same lines in his handbook on interpreting Scripture. At least, he says in one striking passage that someone who has been confirmed in faith, hope, and charity has no further need of the Scriptures unless it is to teach others. Furthermore, he again states here that God's assistance is needed to benefit from teaching. And yet, it is worthwhile for one human to teach another, especially if the teaching is based upon the Scriptures, just as it is sensible to administer medicine even if no one recovers from illness without God willing it. Something we did not find in On the Teacher, though, was the idea that there is really only one thing worth learning. Now, in On Christian Teaching, Augustine not only rejects readings of Scripture inconsistent with charity, he seems to dismiss any intellectual activity except insofar as it helps us to achieve this aim. This emerges in a sustained discussion of what is and is not worth keeping from pagan writings. Augustine begins with the admirable sentiment that whatever truth has been found by the pagans should be embraced by Christians. But if all truths are equal in this respect, some truths are apparently more equal than others. Detailed knowledge of astronomy, for instance, is to be avoided because it doesn't help us understand Scripture and might also lead us along the wicked paths of astrology. These were paths Augustine himself traveled as a young man, as we know from the Confessions. Overall, Augustine tells his fellow Christians, the right approach to pagan wisdom is the attitude the Israelites took towards Egyptian treasure. They spurned the Egyptians' pagan idols but happily made off with their gold and other valuables so as to make better use of them than the Egyptians themselves could. Augustine mentions the Platonists in particular as having provided material worth commandeering for use in Christian teaching. Here too, the Confessions provide a fine example, when the books of the Platonists help free Augustine from his materialist beliefs. The Confessions also illustrate that, for Augustine, the Platonist books are good enough to help interpret the good book. He puts a finish to his autobiography not only with the philosophical discussion of time we looked at in the previous episode but also with a detailed reading of the opening verses of Genesis. At least three of the points he makes here are drawn from his study of Platonist philosophy. First, God is eternal, in Plotinus' sense of not being subject to time, even if Genesis gives the contrary impression by speaking of days of creation. In fact, time was created along with the physical universe. Second, we can understand the opening sentence of Genesis, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, with the help of Platonist metaphysics. Augustine connects this heaven to a phrase found in the Psalms, the heaven of heaven. This represents for him an intelligible realm of forms created by God but still eternal, again in the sense of being above time. Third, Genesis goes on to speak of earth being without form. This, Augustine understands in light of a theory of matter like that of Plotinus as being utterly formless. Again, he opposes this Platonist idea to the more crass physical imaginings of his own youth when he was under the sway of the Manicheans. In keeping with the interpretive theory of on-Christian doctrine, here in the Confessions Augustine is open to the possibility that other interpretations may be possible. So long as the message that emerges from an interpretation is true, mission accomplished. In fact, Augustine seems to suggest that the Bible necessarily gives rise to multiple interpretations. So concise is its expression, here in Genesis and elsewhere, that it is like a powerful jet of water coming from a confined source. Thus, many interpreters may be needed to unfold its entire meaning. But, of course, one needs to be careful that one does not defend an interpretation out of pride of ownership rather than because one's interpretation is true. Reading the Bible should be a cooperative effort carried out by the whole community, not a competition. In a circle that is presumably virtuous rather than vicious, the charitable attitude taught by Scripture is necessary if we are to take the right attitude towards the very task of interpreting Scripture. Augustine's openness to other interpretations is of course itself an example of this correct charitable attitude. So, how do the Platonist philosophical points that Augustine extracts from the opening of Genesis fit into his overall account of the Bible? In what sense do I become a more charitable person by realizing that matter is formless, or that God is eternal and beyond time? The answer is simple, because it helps me love God. When Augustine came to recognize God as a transcendent Creator who creates formless matter and then fashions a world out of that matter, he left behind the dualist teachings of the Manicheans. This meant accepting that the entire world is itself a kind of sign, pointing towards a Creator who has no opposing principle. This is only one example of Augustine's conviction that even rather advanced metaphysical truths of philosophy are inextricably bound up with issues of morality. To believe in a principle of evil is to fall short of an appreciation of the good, and thus to fall short of goodness. Augustine therefore sees a powerful link, if not an identity, between the search for knowledge and the search for goodness. So, we should not be surprised to discover a parallel between his views on language and his famous teaching on the will. We've seen in this episode that for Augustine, language by itself cannot bring us to knowledge. For that, we need the involvement of God dwelling within us. Likewise, he believes that we cannot be good without the assistance of God. All humans are born into a state of sin, and no matter how admirable their intentions, they will fall back into sin over and over again if left to their own resources. Even once someone converts to Christianity and receives baptism, every day will still be a struggle against temptation. Augustine makes this point vividly in his Confessions. What he confesses is not just youthful weakness and indiscretion, but an ongoing susceptibility to the allure of sin. But if only God's help can allow us to avoid evil, can we really say that we retain morally significant freedom? That question gives us a graceful transition to the next episode, when we'll be looking at Augustine on free will, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Help Wanted. Augustine on Freedom. Everyone says things they regret. The politician committing an embarrassing gaffe during a debate. The child casually letting slip to her babysitter that if her parents were home, she would have been in bed a long time ago. Eve saying to Adam, sure, I know he's a serpent, but I think he makes some good points. But not many people sit down, look over what they've said, or written, and compose an entire book listing places where they might have chosen their words more carefully. Augustine did. A few years before his death in 430 AD, Augustine composed the Reconsiderations, in Latin, Retractiones, which surveys his own major writings and singles out passages for correction or further comment. This would have been no small task. His writings were staggeringly extensive. An aged Augustine was himself stunned to see, when he counted them up, that he'd written 232 works. But however large the task, Augustine had a good reason to reconsider his words. They had been thrown back at him by opponents, who gleefully seized on passages in Augustine's earlier books. Look, they would say, our view is so reasonable that Augustine himself agreed with it only a few years ago. One example was a work Augustine finished writing in 391, called On Free Choice of the Will. Looking back on this work, Augustine admits that he did not always state his ideas about freedom and divine grace as fully as he might have, but he is adamant that his opponents are wrong to see the earlier Augustine as an ally. Opponents were something Augustine never had in short supply. We've already seen him telling the story of his disenchantment with the Manicheans in The Confessions, and he went on to write numerous works attacking them. In fact, throughout Augustine's mature career, he was always writing attacks on some group or other. This side of Augustine's persona can seem rather unpleasant. As the scholar J.J. O'Donnell said, But this was an age of polemical dispute, and Augustine was far from unusual in turning his finely honed rhetorical skills to the task of written refutation. Augustine's case was unique in another respect though. The theological positions he staked out in the course of these debates became fundamental to Western Christianity, as we see it in the medieval age, in the Protestant Reformation, and still today. Apart from the Manicheans, he had two main groups of antagonists, the Donatists and the Pelagians. The Donatists emerged decades before Augustine's birth. They were born out of the anti-Christian persecutions that occurred at the dawn of the fourth century. The Emperor Diocletian had commanded Christians to engage in sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods and to hand over church property and copies of the sacred scriptures to the pagan authorities. Members of the clergy who complied were denounced by hardliners leading to a split in the church. The church of the hardliners was named after Donatus, a bishop of Carthage. The Donatist movement taught that priests who were guilty of collaboration could no longer perform a legitimate baptism because they were corrupted by sin. They also believed that Christians may need to be baptized a second time to cleanse them of sins committed after their initial baptism. The Donatus church was particularly strong in Northern Africa where Augustine was born and where he became a bishop. He devoted a great deal of energy to destroying it. He was an influential presence at a council in Carthage in 411 which condemned Donatism, and he enthusiastically supported a new imperial edict which, rather ironically, persecuted the Donatists by outlawing their faith and making their property subject to confiscation. Though Augustine's support for this merciless treatment is not attractive, one can see why he found Donatism pernicious. Not only had it led to schism, but its council of perfection threatened to undermine the most basic functions of the church. If the Donatists were right, one would need to know the state of a priest's soul in order to be sure one had been successfully baptized. Worse, even a successful baptism could be only temporary since it could be undone by sin. Augustine's objection was not only practical though. Where the Donatists saw the church as a separate community, purified of sin and destined for heaven, Augustine thought that baptism or no, humans remain prone to sin and constantly in need of God's support to resist that temptation. In the Confessions, he describes his daily struggle against the lure of various pleasures, from food to music to sex. This is not just confession, but a way of making a broader point. His theological conviction and personal experience taught him that the tendency towards sin is an unavoidable part of human life, not something that can be washed away in a single ritual. Baptism is still necessary, of course, but it signifies not the elimination of sinful desires, but openness to God's help in overcoming those desires. So despite his reputation as a grim and demanding moralist, in this debate Augustine was actually leading a fight against moral perfectionism. The same is true of his polemic against the Pelagians. The Pelagians were a group of more recent origin, named after Augustine's contemporary Pelagius. The core of their teaching was that if God commands us to be good, it must be within our power to be good. After all, it makes no sense to command people to do things they are not in a position to do. If I command you to finish listening to this episode, then you have the ability to comply. But if I command you to transform yourself into a giraffe, you'll reject my demand as being not just silly, but impossible. Pelagius further argued that in order to be in a position to follow God's command, humans must possess a capacity for free will. It is in everyone's power to come to virtue by exerting this power of choice. His view was taken up by Julian, bishop of the town of Eclanum in southern Italy. He became the main opponent and target of Augustine, who wrote a series of increasingly hostile and polemical works against the Pelagian doctrine. In Augustine's view, the Pelagians, like the Donatists, were undermining the whole point of the Christian faith. If as they claimed, the human will is sovereign and capable of resisting sin all on its own, then why does God need to send his son and allow him to be sacrificed? In fact, God doesn't need to do anything at all. He can just wait to see who achieves goodness and who doesn't through the exercise of free will, and then dispense reward and punishment as appropriate. On the Pelagian view, Christ seems to be sent more as a moral teacher who encourages us towards virtue than as the indispensable source of salvation. That's a view we found some of the more intellectualist church fathers flirting with, so it is no surprise to see it turning up here in Pelagianism. Against this, Augustine drew above all on the writings of St. Paul, to set forth what may be his most influential teaching, the doctrine of original sin. You will probably be familiar with the basic idea, which is that the sin of Adam is somehow inherited or shared by all subsequent humans. Only the sacrifice of God's Son and his gift of divine grace can allow humans to overcome their fallen state. Thus, Augustine argued in direct opposition to the Pelagian view that we humans do not have the capacity to merit salvation on our own. We can only follow God's command to be good if God helps us to do so. Augustine actually faces two challenges here, the dispute with the Pelagians and the difficulty of reconciling his own teaching with the possibility of free will. That humans do possess free will, and free will that is morally significant, is a fundamental theme throughout Augustine's writings. His early treatise On Free Choice of the Will, the one quoted back at him by Pelagian opponents, could hardly be more emphatic in recognizing the reality of freedom. The work takes the form of a dialogue between Augustine and a friend named Evodius, who had been present at the death of Augustine's mother Monica, and who, like Augustine, went on to be a bishop. At this point in his career, the opponents who trouble Augustine are not yet the Pelagians, but the Manicheans. As we've seen, they believe that suffering in the world is caused by a principle of evil independent of God. Augustine and Evodius want instead to see suffering as a punishment, handed down in accordance with divine justice. Without human sin, there would be no suffering. It's at this stage that free will enters the picture. The two agree that no one can be justly punished for something unless he chooses to do it by his own will. We sin, argues Augustine, when we value things here in the temporal realm rather than that which is eternal. In other works, Augustine restates this idea by saying that all sin can be traced to pride. We are prideful when we bestow on created things the esteem that is due to God alone. Here in On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine instead puts the point in more Platonic language, echoing Plotinus by contrasting the unchanging eternal realm to the world of bodily, time-bound things. But, like Plotinus himself, he depends on arguments that originate with the Stoics. He contends that temporal things should not be valued because they can be taken away from us, and that control of one's own happiness and one's own will depends on valuing what is not vulnerable in this way. For seasoned historians of philosophy like us, Epictetus leaps inevitably to mind. And the Epictetan flavor of the work is one reason Pelagian opponents could find material here to embarrass the older Augustine. He remarks, for instance, that the virtuous mind cannot be enslaved to desire, and that virtue can be had merely by willing it. These remarks fit better with the demanding moral strictures of Stoicism, and Pelagianism, than the theory of grace Augustine will offer in coming years. Since Evodius is not a Pelagian, he has a rather different point to press in his dialogue with Augustine. If it is the power of free will that enables us to sin, then why did God give us this power in the first place? This question sets the agenda for the rest of the work. Augustine's goal will be not so much to vindicate the reality of free will, but to demonstrate that God is not to blame for any evil we see in the created world. He does owe us an explanation here. Having rejected the Manichean solution of explaining evil and suffering by appealing to a second principle opposed to God, he must show that all badness can instead be traced ultimately to human choice. Anything bad must be an evil directly willed by humans, or be sent as a just punishment from God for prior evils willed by humans. Hence Evodius's question, why did God give us free will if it leads to such horrendous results? We saw that in his Confessions, Augustine embraced Plotinus's account of evil as deficiency or non-being. He accepted the solution to the metaphysical problem of evil, the problem of how anything bad can arise in a world that derives solely from a good cause. Now though, Augustine is tackling something closer to the modern problem of evil, that is, why a good and omnipotent being would allow evil to happen. This difficulty arises for him as it did not for Plotinus, because he assumes that God is a free agent who could have arranged things in a very different way. He could, for instance, have decided not to create free creatures foreseeing the evil they would do. So why did he create us nevertheless? Augustine's answer is simple. God gives us free will so that we can use it to be good. When we sin, we are misusing this power. But we should no more conclude that the will itself is bad than we would think that our eyes or hands are bad because they can be used to commit evil. Indeed, it makes no sense to complain that God makes it possible for us to sin. By definition, sin is what God does not want. So if we sin, it must be because we are departing from what God intended us to do with the powers He has granted to us. Thus, the human will is, as Augustine terms it, an intermediary good, that is, something that is necessary for goodness yet can be used for evil. In this, the will falls between greater goods that are necessary for good and never used for evil, like virtue, and lesser goods, like the goods of the body. These are, as the Stoics said, not even necessary for living a good life. But Evodius sees another problem looming. Even if it was not a mistake for God to give us free will, how was it possible for him to do so? After all, God knows everything we will do before we do it. How then can we be free? If Augustine himself could have seen the future, he would have known that this so-called problem of divine foreknowledge would be discussed again and again by philosophers down through medieval times and into early modernity. But a non-theological version of the problem had already been posed before Augustine. Back when we looked at Aristotle's logical works, we discussed the so-called sea battle argument, which he raised in the ninth chapter of his work On Interpretation. There, Aristotle asked, if it is true now that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then is occurrence of the sea battle inevitable and hence necessary? Augustine is considering more or less the same issue. He adds, however, that God knows there will be a sea battle tomorrow. This changes things in two ways. First, one solution available to Aristotle was to deny that there are present truths about such future events. But that solution is now taken off the table. There must be a present truth, because God already knows it. Second, it may make a difference that we have introduced divine knowledge rather than mere truth. For if God really has knowledge of a future sea battle, then He has total certainty about it, He simply can't be wrong. And one might suppose that this certainty yields the necessity of the sea battle where mere truth wouldn't. Another difference is that Augustine's discussion is more narrow than Aristotle's. He is concerned not with all truths about the future, but only God's knowledge of what people are going to will. The solution he offers will work only for this case. He tells Evodius that it is incoherent to worry that God's knowledge necessitates anyone to will anything, for no one can will anything if he is necessitated. This solution looks rather inadequate. Evodius should respond to Augustine by saying, I am not anxious that God necessitates me to choose freely, or to will anything. Rather, I am anxious that because God foreknows what I will do, I do not do it by free choice or by will, even if it seems to me that I do. Evodius doesn't press the issue in this way. If he had, Augustine might respond that it is simply obvious that we do exercise will. This shows that we are not being necessitated, by God's knowledge or anything else. Anything else, Augustine actually does say, might help, which is that in general, no one makes anything happen by knowing it will happen. If I tell you that I will introduce another example involving a giraffe pretty soon, then you might thereby know I will do it, but your knowing this doesn't force me to do it. So if the worry is merely that God causally necessitates our actions, this worry is misplaced. Again, that response doesn't eliminate the whole problem of divine foreknowledge, but it might be enough to secure Augustine what he is after in this work, namely to show that God is not responsible for our evil choices. Can Augustine still absolve God of blame later in his career, once he has developed his doctrine of original sin against the Pelagians? According to this doctrine, I cannot be good unless God offers me the assistance of grace. Doesn't that mean that if God decides not to help me, I am condemned to sin? After all, without grace, I quite literally cannot choose to be good, or at least cannot be effective in so choosing. I will at best be in the situation Augustine so memorably describes in his Confessions, wanting to convert to virtue and purity, but unable to do so because of my lingering sinful desires. Here's a possible solution. Even if I cannot have a good will without God's help, perhaps I can without His help wish to have a good will. This wish is what philosophers nowadays call a second-order desire, that is a desire about another desire. A standard example is wanting to quit smoking. The simple desire to smoke is a first-order desire. The desire to lose this desire to smoke would be second-order. There are also second-order beliefs, as when I believe that my belief that giraffes are tall is a true belief. See, you were right, I did use a giraffe example. I suppose this was inevitable. Now, using this terminology, we can say that even if we can't help having sinful first-order desires for sex, wealth, and so on, we can at least form this second-order desire that these first-order desires go away. As we know from the Confessions, that is exactly what Augustine so fervently hoped in the time leading up to his conversion. Already in On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine seems to be considering this solution. He speaks about the will's ability to apply to itself, that is to have a will to will something or not to will it. Hence our possible solution, it is in my power to will to have a good will, and when I so will, God steps in and helps me to have a good will. This would fit well with Augustine's earlier remark that I can be good simply by willing to be good. But the solution presupposes two things, neither of which Augustine can accept once he sets his face against Pelagianism. First, good second-order will would only be guaranteed to succeed if God must help whoever wants their first-order desires to change. But grace is a gift, not something to be received on demand. Even if God is merciful and does always help those who ask for grace, He does not have to do so. And besides, as we know from Augustine's polemic against the Donatists, it isn't as if we can expect God to change our will from sinful to righteous overnight. Rather, the struggle against bad desire and corrupt will is a lifelong one to be fought one day at a time. Even more problematic is a further assumption of our attempted solution, namely that I can have a good second-order desire on my own, without God's help. Augustine would see this as smuggling in Pelagianism through the back door. Instead, he would say that all human willing, whether first or second order, requires God's help if it is to choose the good reliably. So how can Augustine escape the accusation, pressed by Julian of Eklinum on behalf of the Pelagians, that his God is in fact an unjust monster? This God punishes us for sins we cannot avoid, and our inability to avoid those sins is the result of an original error that was committed not by us, but by Adam. A full response would take us too deep into the realms of Augustine's theology. The short version of his answer is simply that, when somebody wills evil, they are doing exactly what they want. That's the whole point of willing, after all. As Epictetus already pointed out, no one, not even God, can force you to will anything. The fact that you are not in a position to have a better will does not absolve you of the disgrace, the moral failure, and hence the blame-worthiness of willing evil. So, all we can do is fervently pray for God's assistance and fervently praise Him for giving us the capacity to will itself. Or this can be used to choose rightly, at least if God does assist us. With His help, we can turn away from earthly things and towards unchanging eternal goods. When we do so, our values are transformed and aligned with those of another community, a heavenly society. This society gives its name to one of Augustine's greatest works, the City of God. I want you to want to join me to hear all about it next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Heaven and Earth, Augustine's City of God. Even the tallest tree needs the right soil to grow. Consider Buster Keaton. Though we think of him as a pioneer of cinema, he learned his trade on the stage, touring the vaudeville circuit with his family. In the family's surefire comedy act, the child, Buster, would be kicked around the stage by his father. Buster later claimed to have discovered his stone face screen persona at this literal school of hard knocks, when he noticed that the audience laughed louder when he kept his reactions to a minimum. Or, to move deftly on to the topic of today's podcast, consider the example of Augustine. This giant of the history of Christianity had his feet planted firmly in his historical context. We've already started to get a sense of how his writings respond to other lesser-known church fathers. Augustine's love-hate relationship towards Cicero and other Latin stylists is shared by his contemporary Jerome, and Lactantius anticipates the emphasis on the virtue of charity we find in Augustine's interpretive manual On Christian Teaching. The Augustinian position on freedom and sin responds not only to his opponents, the Pelagians, but also to an idea put forward by Tertullian. You'll remember that for Tertullian, the soul is a material substance, a sort of breath. On this basis, he argued that soul is physically transferred to each child by the child's father, a belief known as traducianism. This explains the weakness of our human souls. Had they been instead created by God, they would have been perfect. To address this, Augustine held that God does create each human soul directly, yet he insisted that all humans share in the sin of their original forefather, Adam. This Augustinian doctrine of original sin can furthermore be understood as an alternative to Origen's theory that originally perfect souls fell as the result of intellectual failure. Augustine agreed with Jerome that this was the wrong way to reconcile divine justice with human imperfection. Augustine attacks Origen's ideas in what may be his most ambitious single work, The City of God. A gargantuan treatise in no fewer than 22 books, The City of God is in part an attack on paganism, not unlike the attack staged by Lactantius. The immediate occasion of the work came not from Augustine's intellectual context, but his historical context. It was written in the wake of one of the most traumatic events to befall the empire during his lifetime, the sack of Rome in the year 410 by the army of the Gothic king Alaric. Like a kind-hearted boss, Alaric was actually rather reluctant in giving Rome the sack. He did so to extract concessions and recognition from the empire, not to bring the empire to its knees, so the sacking of the city was more restrained than it might have been. Still, the symbolism of the event was impossible to ignore. Augustine tells us that pagans in this era complaining about dry weather would say, no rain is the Christians' fault. If Christians could even be blamed when rain didn't fall, they could certainly be blamed when Rome did fall. It was divine payback, the pagans said, for the empire's adoption of Christianity and abandonment of the gods who had protected Rome since its founding. The city of God begins by refuting this accusation, but it doesn't end there. Over the course of the 22 books, Augustine has time to survey Roman history, to mock pagan belief, to envision what awaits us in the afterlife, indeed to recount the entire story of mankind, beginning with the Garden of Eden. At one point, he even provides a concise history of philosophy beginning with the pre-Socratics. Good thing that Augustine lived before the invention of the podcast, that kind of competition I definitely don't need. Still, his first order of business is to absolve Christianity of responsibility for depriving Rome of its divine defense system. He describes some of the disasters that befell Rome long before Christianity came along, such as the civil wars that led to the fall of the Republic. Cleverly using the pagans' literary hero Homer against them, he also points out that if pagan gods could protect cities, then Troy would not have been burnt down by the Greeks. He rebuts the accusation at a more philosophical level too, echoing the value system of the Stoics when he remarks that only a fool would think that defeat in war, or the sack of a city, is the worst of disasters. The real calamity is moral depravity, and Rome fell to the forces of immorality long before Alaric came along. Again, Augustine is able to turn the pagans' own literature against them here. Aristocratic Romans constantly lamented that the moral fiber of their society unraveled when the Republic fell. Augustine gleefully quotes passages from Cicero to this effect, and reminds us that this unraveling occurred before Christ was even born, never mind Christianity coming to dominate the Empire. Similarly, he alludes to Plato's Republic and its critique of tragedy when he is decrying the debauchery of Roman theatrical performances. This polemic may seem to be of limited interest for us, philosophers being quoted simply to score points in a cultural debate. But in fact, we are being subtly introduced to the main theme of the City of God, which is crucial for the history of philosophy. Augustine divides his discussion of Rome's failings into two parts, one dealing with earthly concerns like the sacking of cities, the other with the more fundamental questions of virtue and vice. This mirrors another contrast that gives the work its name, the contrast between the City of Man and the City of God. The City of God is eternal, and its members seek eternal blessedness. The City of Man is earthly in its concerns, and its members seek happiness in this life. Augustine traces these two cities back to the dawn of man, and then further still. The pride characteristic of the earthly city began with the fallen angels, while the good angels are the most outstanding citizens of the eternal city. Among the earliest humans, the City of Man is associated especially with Cain, who slew his brother Abel. And Augustine makes sure to remind us that another fratricide occurred at the founding of Rome when Romulus killed Remus. To tell the rest of this tale of two cities, Augustine devotes a large section of the City of God to a history of mankind based mostly on the Old Testament. He is not afraid to digress, dwelling on such topics as the practical arrangements on Borde Noah's Ark. Unfortunately, Augustine doesn't address my main question, which is whether the two giraffes had a special birth with high ceilings. He does, however, ask whether the boat was really big enough to hold all those animals. And what did the carnivorous animals eat? But the overall goal of Augustine's City of God is not to figure out whether goats and sheep were safe from lions and tigers on the ark. It is to separate sheep and goats in a more figurative sense. By defending the values of the Eternal City while exposing the fraudulence of the City of Man. To do that, Augustine needs to criticize not just the religious beliefs of pagans, but the core values of the society they have built. Along the way he will expose the failure of philosophers who attempted to provide rational support for this pagan culture. In doing so, he ironically draws inspiration from a pagan historian named Varro. He serves as a foil for Augustine throughout much of the City of God. Rather amusingly, given his own prolific writing career, Augustine marvels at Varro's output and wonders whether anyone could read everything that he wrote. Augustine discusses pagan society first in terms of human affairs, and then with regard to divine affairs, an opposition already used by Varro. We already know that Augustine was unimpressed by pagan society when it came to human affairs, the theatrical shows, and so on. But he also delivers a penetrating analysis of Roman political history. Why did the Romans expand their realm, subjugating one people after another, until their empires stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia? For the sake of glory, the glory that comes through victory, claimed on behalf of some general or emperor, or of Rome itself. Though Augustine sees the lust for glory as the characteristically Roman sin, it is only a version of the sin that besets all mankind, the sin of pride. We are prideful when we bestow an esteem on created things that belongs rightfully to God. Augustine remarks that in the earthly city, love of self leads to contempt for God, whereas in the eternal city, love of God leads to contempt of self. Yet it is not necessarily a sin to love oneself. In fact, Augustine thinks we cannot help loving ourselves. We should also love our fellow human beings. But we should love ourselves and other humans as created things, referring this love to God the creator. By instead pursuing glory above all else, the Romans have shown that they valued themselves, or their empire, in God's place. That's the bad news for the Romans, and in Augustine's opinion, news doesn't get much worse. But there's good news too, because the single-minded quest for glory can help one to avoid other evils. The outstanding men of Rome, especially in its earlier history, were capable of great self-sacrifice, willing to suffer and even die for the sake of renown. This renown is in the end worthless, and military conquests of no real value, either to the conquered conqueror or the conquered. Yet Augustine gives a kind of grudging respect to the great men of the Roman Republic. What they pursued may have been pointless, but they pursued it with relentless self-discipline, and gained an earthly dominion as their reward. He thus favourably compares the love of glory to the mere love of dominion, or political power. Sheer lust for power is compatible with open debauchery and criminality. Later he may be thinking of figures like Commodus or Calicula. Those who seek glory instead act well, because they want to be admired. Augustine's remarks on honor resonate with those of Aristotle who argued that one should not value honor, but rather valued being the sort of person who would be rightfully honored. So glory lovers make better rulers than lovers of power. But that doesn't mean they make good rulers. Augustine rightly observes that many Roman military campaigns were undertaken mostly to win prestige. Glory seekers thus initiate pointless violence with horrendous consequences for everyone else concerned. A good ruler would instead look to the true welfare of his people. Predictably, Augustine sees Christian rulers like Constantine as paradigm examples. So even though he excludes political rule from the goals of the city of God, he thinks the best political rulers are those who pursue the goal of eternal life. That exemplifies a tension that runs throughout the city of God. On the one hand, Augustine dismisses even the most basic physical needs as being of little importance compared to the need to improve one's soul. For instance, at one point he remarks that it is obviously preferable to be enslaved to another human than to one's own desires. In this same passage, he indicates that slavery is unnatural and a result of sin, but gives no sign that it might be a Christian's duty to try to eliminate the practice of slavery or even to free a single slave if the possibility arises. In such passages, Augustine seems disturbingly quietist, so concerned with dismissing the importance of earthly goods that no earthly evil can shock him into recommending political action. Yet Augustine clearly does think it matters whether people suffer or enslaved go hungry. He emphasizes the good results that follow here on earth when political rule is founded in Christian piety. And at the level of the individual, he says that the man who belongs to the city of God will help others and never do harm. For, such a man loves God and shares God's love of other men. These remarks of course fit well with the praise of charity we observed in On Christian Teaching, and to some extent Augustine practiced what he preached. He tried to use his position as a bishop to do good, and he would have had the opportunity since his position involved not just preaching, but significant legal authority. We also find him, for instance, writing a letter that laments the abduction of free people who are sold as slaves. But it strikes me that he was more interested in crusading against, say, the false theological doctrines of the Pelagians and Donatists than against the violent treatment of women or the practice of slavery. The city of God helps to explain this. Here Augustine argues that humans have no hope of stamping out evils in this life. The city of God, unlike the city of man, knows its limits. The rather half-hearted commitment to practical action that results, both at the political and individual level, is reminiscent of what we find in Plotinus. Indeed, Augustine echoes Plotinus's point that those who fight in wars, even wars in a just cause, see themselves as impelled by a regrettable necessity, rather than given a welcome chance to display courage or other virtues. This is not to say that the city of God was intended as an endorsement of Plotinus's philosophy. Far from it. In fact, it contains some of Augustine's most direct criticisms of the Platonists. He admits that the Platonists came closest to articulating the values embraced by citizens of the heavenly city. But this just makes it more disappointing that they failed in the end. Augustine thinks that Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry all recognize the reality of a single divine cause, and gives Porphyry in particular extra credit for expressing doubts about the pagan ritual practices of theurgy in the letter to Annibo, which you may recall as the now-lost work that provoked Iamblichus to write his defense of theurgy on mysteries. Yet, the Platonists persisted in accepting a multiplicity of deities. This began with Plato himself, whose dialogue Timaeus speaks of lesser gods who assist the divine craftsmen in creating the world. Later to Augustine's own day, Porphyry lost his nerve and failed to reject theurgy entirely, or to abolish the other divinities and accept the one true god. Augustine has already mocked the absurdities of the pagan gods earlier in the city of God. He enjoys himself tremendously as he describes the various minor divinities needed for a pagan marriage—one god to lead the bride home, another to keep her faithful to her and the god Priapus, whose responsibilities can't be explained in a family podcast like this one. How, Augustine wonders, can the young couple even enjoy their wedding night with this crowd of gods standing around watching? More importantly, how can the Platonists lend their intellectual credibility to such absurd religious beliefs? The same question goes for Varro, who supplied Augustine not only with historical information, but also ample discussion of pagan religion. Varro was too wise a man to accept such beliefs at face value, and was quietly critical of the building of idols and other pagan practices. But like Porphyry, who should also have known better, he fell short of the true monotheism championed by the Jews and Christians. Augustine's criticism of Hellenic philosophy goes deeper than this though. If he is really to expose the false promises of the city of man, he must show that no earthly realm and no earthly life can lead us to happiness. The Platonists and the Stoic schools taught that the wise man can achieve blessedness in this life by freeing himself of emotion and placing no value on earthly things. Augustine uses all his rhetorical powers against these claims in the city of God, asking whether it is really credible that someone could be subjected to extreme physical tortures or the ravages of illness and still count himself happy. Nor should we aspire to the emotionless state of apatheia praised by the Stoics. Augustine is frankly appalled by the suggestion that one could fail to grieve the death of a beloved friend, a point given added resonance by the tales of grief over the death of a good friend and of his son Adeodatus in the Confessions. But what about a life of virtue, identified as the highest good by Aristotle and also by Varro? Admirable though virtue may be, in this life it consists of an unceasing battle against evil, whether the evil is done by others or the evil within oneself. This can hardly be the basis of true happiness. It seems then that the Hellenic philosophical schools offer us no path to supreme blessedness but only something akin to what Buster Keaton's father offered him, a lesson in remaining unfazed by adversity. Augustine has not given up the idea that philosophy should be the pursuit of happiness, but he has abandoned the notion that happiness can be attained in this life. One might imagine a city of men more enlightened than Rome, which would pursue justice and peace instead of glory, but no earthly realm can promise permanent peace and permanent felicity. That reward is given only to those who live in the City of God and not in this life, but in the eternal hereafter. Who among us then are the citizens of the eternal city, the ones who will be truly happy? For now, we cannot tell. It is tempting to assume that the earthly representation of this city is the Christian church, but that is not Augustine's view. It would be more like the position of his rivals the Donatists, who saw their church as something like a walled city, separating the righteous few from the sinful multitude. For Augustine, a staunch critic of the Donatists, joining a church cannot exempt one from the empty seductions of the earthly city. And at least in theory, there could already have been citizens of the City of God before the time of Jesus, never mind the institutions of the church, though Augustine thinks that such people would have needed a special revelation of Christ's saving grace. The upshot is that in this world the two cities are mixed together. Only in the afterlife will we find out who is a sheep and who a goat. But it seems pretty clear that the pagan philosophers at least are goats, maybe that's why they insisted on wearing beards. Augustine accuses even the best of them, the Platonists, of using their powerful intellects for prideful ends. In the Confessions, Augustine spoke of being helped by Platonists to understand how God could be an immaterial substance, but here in the City of God, he attacks the Platonists' presumption in identifying themselves with such immaterial substances. Humans are not just souls, but souls inhabiting bodies. The Platonists should have marveled at the way that God has fused the immaterial soul with the material body. Instead, they marveled at themselves, pridefully claiming the status of an elite few who alone among humans could free themselves from bodily concerns. Augustine throws this accusation at Porphyry, among others, suggesting that he reserved true intellectual purification for philosophers, like himself, and condescendingly allowed lesser humans to participate in the profane practices of theurgy. Nonetheless, Augustine continues to make use of Platonist themes and metaphors. Platonists frequently describe themselves as exiles, or as prisoners, longing to flee the body and return to the intelligible world. Augustine instead speaks of the City of God itself as a captive here on earth, or as being on a pilgrimage. Augustine urges us to become, not separate souls freed from evil by individual effort, but members of a human society that gratefully receives an undeserved salvation. These are just a few examples of the way the City of God critically responds to the wisdom of the Greeks, and especially of Plato and his disciples. Augustine is inspired by the Platonists, yet disappointed. Of all the Greeks, they came closest to recognizing the one true God, but instead they embraced pagan belief. Ironically, they could have understood God more fully had they obeyed the inscription at their own temple at Delphi, Know thyself. For every human is an image of God, and knowing the nature of oneself is a path to knowing the divine. Augustine traveled this path, and wrote a guidebook for those who were willing to follow him. The result is probably the greatest work of philosophy by any late ancient Christian, on the Trinity. But before we get to this final Augustinian masterpiece, I want to look a bit more at Augustine's views on the Hellenic philosophical tradition. For this, I'll be turning to a guest who won't be sheepish in sharing her thoughts on how Augustine reacted to that tradition. It would really get my goat if you didn't tune in for an interview with Sarah Byers on Augustinian Ethics here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Augustine's ethics with Sarah Byers, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at Boston College. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Peter. Nice to have you on the podcast. Thanks very much. It's good to be here. Well, in the podcast I've already done, I've already been talking a bit about Augustine's reaction to various philosophers and especially the Platonists. But I know that you think the Stoics were also an important source for him, especially when it comes to ethics. So maybe we should start by having you say something briefly about how much he knew about Stoicism, which Stoic sources did he use, or which sources they report on Stoic doctrines. Okay. Well, most of the work that I've done so far in Augustine's ethics in relation to Stoicism has been specifically in the field of moral psychology. And there's a great deal of use of Stoicism in that area. And his principal sources were Cicero and Seneca. So in terms of Cicero, some of the important texts would be the Tusculon Disputations, the On Goals, the On the Republic, and the On Fate. And with Seneca, I saw him using On Providence, On Clemency, On Anger, On the Constancy of the Wise Person, for example. And it's interesting to note that in the Confessions, when he expresses his disappointment about Faustus, the Manichaean, one of the things that he says about Faustus was that Faustus had only read a few works by Seneca. And this implies, of course, that Augustine had read more than a few and that he was familiar with Seneca. And that's one of the things that I think scholars haven't taken into account enough in the past. And it's interesting to look at some of those connections. But another interesting thing is that Augustine also gives evidence of knowing things that are not extant today in Latin texts, such as the ones I just mentioned. But there are things that we have today in Greek sources, like Diogenes Laertius, that Augustine gives evidence of having known. So for example, in the City of God 14, he uses the Greek term eupatheia, which is a technical Stoic term for morally good emotion. But this term is not given in Greek by Cicero in Cicero's Tusculant Disputations, when he's summarizing the Stoic account of the good emotions and the bad emotions. And so then the question would be, where did Augustine know that term from, right? So it seems that either he knew it from a Latin source that's not extant anymore, like part of Cicero's Dei Fatto that's now lost, or else he had an anthology of extracts from Greek philosophers that was translated into Latin. And that's an argument that Coursel has made in another context that Augustine did have some kind of anthology or compendium or encyclopedia. One of the topics where Augustine seems to have drawn on the Stoics is their theory of motivation. And before we get onto what Augustine thinks about motivation and how it works when we have a desire and act on it, I thought since it's been a while since I actually covered the Stoics in the podcast, maybe you can just remind us what the Stoics think is happening. So if I have a desire to, say, eat a piece of cake, how does that arise? And then how do I act on it? Right. So, okay, so the theory of motivation is based on their general theory of cognition. So a motivation for the Stoics is a specific type of perception or cognition. And so the basic elements of Stoic epistemology are impression and assent. So the first thing that happens is I experience an impression, a first impression. You know, the term means something similar to the way that we use it in English, my first impression, the way something initially strikes me. And the Stoic term for this is fantasia. It's translated into Latin, it's visum. And then if I'm a rational being, if I'm a rational animal, a human, then I formulate to myself in mental language an interpretation of what I have sensed or the way that I've been struck. So, for example, if I smell chocolate cookies baking, and then I would think to myself, there are chocolate cookies baking in the oven. So that's the impression and then I have the choice of whether to assent to it or refuse assent, not assent. And in the case of motivation, there's a specific type of impression that I would have that is going to explain why I reach out and grab the cookie and somebody else who just walks into the kitchen and smells the cookies but doesn't grab the cookie doesn't do so. And the explanation that the Stoics have for that is that I had a motivating impression. So the particular features of this type of impression are that the mental language that I formulate to myself to interpret my sensory data spells out to me the attractive features in the cookie. So not only do I think there are cookies baking in the oven, but I think it's appropriate for me to eat those cookies because they're yummy. Go get that cookie. So I have an imperatival lectern. I have a sayable in my mind that's in the imperative mood and this is one of the essential features of this type of impression. So then again, I have to either assent or not. I have to either agree to do it or not to do it. And if I do decide to do it, then I will have impulse or may, which is the impetus to do the action. It's a psychological thrust, putting myself in motion to do the action. And at that point, the only thing that would prevent me from eating the cookie would be some kind of external obstacle. So if I trip on my way over to the oven or something, or if I come in and grab the cookie out of your hand and eat it instead. Exactly. Right. If you're competing with me for the cookie in a Hobbesian universe. But the point is I'm culpable or praiseworthy from the point that I give assent because at that point, the only thing that will stop me is something else. So the three is like kind of a tripartite analysis. So you've got impression, assent and impulse. Exactly. Right. How far does Augustine then follow the Stoics on this? Does he adopt the same basic tripartite structure when he's analyzing how human action works? Yes, he certainly does. And that's one of the things that I argued in a book that I had come out called Perception, Sensibility and Moral Motivation in Augustine, which came out at the end of 2012. What I argued there is that he adopts this tripartite model and he follows it very closely even in its details. So even the idea that there's an imperatival mental sayable that I experience in my mind when I experience a motivating impression, that's an idea that you can find in his corpus. He uses the word suggestio, for example, as a technical Latin term to render the Greek, phantasia, or hermeticae. So that's fairly extensively used by him. And, you know, one example in a famous text where he's doing that is in Confessions Book 8, where he has these sort of warring motivations. He's attracted to the virtue of continence, but then he's simultaneously or shortly thereafter, he's also attracted to the contradictory incontinent actions that his old habits are proposing to him. And so in that case, he's using the word suggestio and he's talking about continence appearing and having quasi-speech. And so I argue that that's an example of him using this model of the motivating impression that has mental language. And it's also found extensively in his sermons that he uses this same model. You see the word suggestio also appearing there over and over again, used in the same way. He does distinguish himself from the Stoics by trying to synthesize a Platonic arrow theory with this account of motivation. And the way that he does that is to say that in the higher part of the mind, the intellect recognizes intelligible goodness and beauty in certain types of actions or in certain types of objects. And then as a consequence of perceiving the goodness of an object, the mind in the lower part of the reason and the radiocinative discursive part of the reason, the mind then experiences the mental language and all the other things that happen in the Stoic model are happening in that discursive lower part of the mind. So that would be something that he adds to the Stoic theory, but he does so in a way that I argued was coherent in the sense that you have two different powers of the mind doing these different things and that they're aimed at different intentional objects. So the love or the attraction for the object is precisely for an object or a state of affairs. And the motivating impression is about an action, doing an action. So the two things work together in tandem. Right. And it still sounds anyway like it's more of a Stoic theory with a bit of Platonism added on top rather than what you might have expected, which is a Platonic theory with traces of Stoic terminology or whatever. Yes, this is true. Certainly at the level of talking about the genesis of concrete actions and the amount of detail that he gives, all the detail that he uses and the way of talking about concrete actions is all from the Stoics. Interesting. Okay. Actually, if I could ask you something else you mentioned sort of in passing there, you said that a lot of his sermons contain this theory or at least make allusions to this theory. And I think that's very interesting because to the extent that philosophers or historians of philosophy have drawn on Augustine's works at all, they tend to read things like the Confessions or on the Trinity or City of God, perhaps the philosophical dialogues that he wrote early in his career, but they don't look at texts like the sermons very often. So have you found that that's really rich hunting ground for philosophical ideas in Augustine? Yes, I have found that in this particular area of moral psychology, and I think there are several reasons, but just to name a couple of them. First of all, in the sermons, his goal is usually to exhort people to improve themselves morally. So obviously, if you want to exhort someone to improve herself morally, you need to try to help that person understand her present motivations to become self-aware and then consequently to reform, to come to want to do things differently or to do the right thing. Therefore, in the sermons, we sometimes get detailed descriptions of how motivation and temptation work, what's going on in the mind, when we're tempted, when we're motivated, etc. And another case is the case of the passions. In the sermons, he's dealing with assaysis, training in moral excellence, generally. And so, like the Stoics, he thinks that some emotions are morally bad, and therefore, in the sermons, he's explaining to people how bad emotions are generated in the psyche and how they can be forestalled or how they can be avoided. That brings us to, I think, a very obvious difference between the Stoics and Augustine when it comes to moral theory, which is that the Stoics famously think that we should be trying to avoid all emotion. So the Greek word here is pathe. So they think that what we should be doing is making rational judgments completely unclouded by these emotions. Whereas although Augustine obviously recognizes bad emotions, one of the themes that comes across in a work like The City of God is precisely that it could be good to have an emotion, so even something like grief, which the Stoics would reject. So the Stoics would say, if your best friend dies, then the rational thing to do is to accept that as part of divine providence. Whereas Augustine, by contrast, says that an emotion like grief could be appropriate, could be the right response to, say, the death of a friend. So how does Augustine defend the appropriateness of certain emotions when he's got this Stoic theory about assenting to these impressions? Right. I'm glad you brought this up because I think it's very helpful. Many people have a certain characterization of the Stoics in mind, which doesn't, they're not quite aware of the fact that the Stoics have this category of good emotions called the eupotheia. So it's very slippery in English sometimes to talk about different affective reactions and try to tie those to the Stoic categories and keep everybody on the same page. So basically the Stoics think that emotions are caused by judgments, that something good or bad has happened to me or is going to happen to me. Then they subdivide emotions into two categories, morally good and morally bad, depending on the truth or the falsity of the judgment. So I can have a good emotion if it's the result of a true judgment that something that's truly good or truly bad has happened to me or is going to happen to me. So, so far Augustine agrees with the Stoics. He thinks that all of that is right. But the difference comes in what is really good and what is really bad for us. Okay, so in terms of the content of the actual propositions that we're allowed to ascend to in order to have a morally good emotion, that's where the difference lies. So for the Stoics and Stoic value theory, the only thing that is good is virtue and everything else is indifferent. And then the class of indifferent things are subdivided into preferred, dispreferred and absolutely indifferent. So what the Stoics want to say is that the passions, the páthe are caused by false judgments that something that's merely a preferred indifferent is really good, basically. So I lose my job or I fall down on the ice and I break my hip and I think, oh, this is bad and then I become sad and I grieve. And the Stoics want to say, no, no, no, you're wrong. That's not really bad because those things are preferred indifference, which means in the Stoic theory, the eudaimonistic theory of the Stoics, it means that those things are neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness. In other words, they don't matter for virtue. Virtue is the only thing you need to be happy. Since having an unbroken leg isn't required for virtue in the long run, it doesn't matter even if it's preferred. It's rational to prefer to not have a broken leg. Right. So we're supposed to select things that are preferred, but we're supposed to do so with an absolute detachment and to always realize that it's not the preferred indifference that are the matter, that they're not constitutive of our happiness. They're the material cause, they're the things that we're working with as we make virtuous choices in life. And that's why they're preferred. Okay. So they might be useful for doing more good to more people or something like that, but they're not intrinsically valuable. So virtue is the only thing that's necessary for happiness and it's also sufficient for happiness. So Augustine's disagreement is to say, no, no, no, these preferred indifference are actually necessary for happiness, for being completely happy. They're not sufficient. The Stoics were right about that, but they're necessary. And so when I fall down and break my hip on the ice, I can think this is bad for me and I can be sad, but he wants to still say there is a radical difference in value between virtue and something like health. So when I fall down and break my hip, I can be sad, but I should be much less sad than I would be if I told a lie, because then I had done something against the virtue of honesty. Right. There's actually a passage in the city of God where he says, do the Stoics really expect us to believe that someone who's being tortured would really still be happy just because they were virtuous? And he says, of course not. And so his point would be that a necessary condition for happiness would be, for example, not being subjected to torture. Right. Right. Yes. In light of the distinction you just drew, I'm wondering whether we could resolve what I saw as a tension in the city of God and talked about in the episode on that. Because on the one hand, he keeps saying, well, we'll only be happy in the afterlife. But on the other hand, he keeps saying the Stoics are wrong to think that it doesn't matter if I or my friends and family are subjected to misery in this life. And so reading the city of God, you keep thinking, well, wait a minute, do the things that happen in this world matter or not? And I guess what you're saying is that they do matter because what happens to me in this life can destroy my happiness. For example, if I or my family is tortured to death, but nothing that happens in this life could be sufficient for happiness. Only God's blessings in the afterlife could be sufficient for happiness. Yes, I think that's generally right. I mean, one interesting thing to think about is that I think he believes that it's because the Stoics don't have an account of the afterlife that they have to do these mental gymnastics in which they want to claim that all the things that disappoint us in this life, like when our spouse cheats on us or when we fall down on the ice or when we can't eat the cookie, all those things, we have to tell ourselves that those things are not really things to grieve over. They're not really bad for us, even though our natural instinctive reaction is to recognize them as disappointments. And he thinks that it's just because the Stoics don't have a view of the afterlife that they get themselves boxed into this corner because it has to do with their associated belief that God is provident and that God is in control and that God is just. So the argument in Seneca's De Providencia, for example, goes, God is just, bad things seem to happen to good people, therefore these things can't really be bad, right? Because everything is smushed into this life. If you have a God who's provident and just, you have to have justice in this life. And Augustine wants to say, no, no, look, if we say that there's an afterlife, then you're relieved of this pressure to try to, you don't have to lie anymore and say that it's not bad for me when my spouse cheats on me, right? And then you don't have to say that that shouldn't affect my happiness because you have more time to work out the justice of things, basically. Justice comes about in the afterlife. So it's almost like you can stop pretending that this world is enough, is what the Stoics are effectively doing. Right, right. And they feel that they have to because they have no other option. But Augustine also thinks that even the Stoics should have known better because Plato is able to see that it's rational to believe in an afterlife, right? So he says this in his sermons, for example, look, even the pagans realized, even Plato realizes that there is an afterlife of rewards and punishments. So he thinks that's something we can know by reason and that you don't need to get that from the Bible. And so that's part of the reason why he's hard on the Stoics for not building in that second piece of the puzzle. And also why he says several times that the Platonists, even though they're not right because they're not Christians, they are preferable to all the other pagan schools. And that's in part because they do have this rational belief in the afterlife. Yes, that's one of the reasons. I mean, we could say more about that, but it's certainly one of the reasons. Yes. Well, actually, but before we start going off to talk about Platonism, I wanted to ask you something else about the Stoics, which is going back to this issue about assenting to the impressions that the world offers us. One thing that comes across very powerfully in the Confessions is this dramatization of someone, namely Augustine, who's in a situation where he's assented to a proposition, apparently, namely, I should convert to Christianity, or I should become a pious Christian. So he has assented, and yet he finds himself unable to do it. So it seems there, like the Stoic model of human action and motivation is no longer sufficient, right? Because it seems to him that he should become a Christian. He wholeheartedly apparently endorses this impression, and yet he finds himself not doing it. So how is it then that his belief in what he ought to do, and what he finds himself doing can come apart like that, if he's basically following the Stoic model? Okay, I don't read it that way, actually, I read the consent as happening in paragraph 29, which is the point at which he says that all the shadows of doubt were dispersed from his mind, that he came to a resolution. So this is after the take it and read bit. Yes, yes. So I think that the reading of that text actually is supposed to symbolize his adopting the propositional content that was in the impression. So the impression is given in, it's described in paragraph 27, the impression of continence, and the same propositional content is repeated, it's actually in the passage from the Bible that he reads, because it says, make no provision for the flesh and its lusts, and it talks about, essentially, it talks about continence, adopting a continent lifestyle. So it's a repetition of the same propositional content, but this time with commitment, with assent that happens in paragraph 29. So what's been happening then with him psychologically before that, because, so I mean, like, there's that famous bit, make me temporary or continent, but not yet. Right. So maybe the thought is that there, although he is like, he feels like he should assent to the proposition, I should be temporary, he's not assenting to it. But then it seems like even that's kind of a puzzle, because then it seems like he's assenting to the proposition that he should assent, right, to Christianity, but he's still failing to do something despite the fact that he's assenting to the thought that he should do it. Well, yeah, that's a bit like Frankfurt and that first and second order motivations, right? But I think, well, that that passage you just mentioned where he prays, make me continent, but not yet, it's much earlier in the confessions. And at that point, he's, what's happening is he sees Ambrose and he sees other philosophers who are either living a completely celibate life to be philosophers or to do, you know, sort of, to engage in contemplation of God. And he sees that in some sense, it's admirable, but he does not feel attracted to it for himself. So he doesn't perceive it as a good for himself. He just sees that, you know, it's good for them, it's working for them. And if I were a different type of person, then maybe it would work for me. And gee, God, if you could make me that type of person without my having to do anything to get myself into that state, then that would be nice. But I don't really want you to put me into that state yet, because I enjoy the state that I'm in. So that's what's happening earlier. And then in Confessions 8 in Chapter 27, he describes the first time that he actually perceives the virtue of continence or temperance as good for himself, as attractive and as good for himself, something that will make him happy in particular. But because he has this other habit, this habit of incontinent actions, as he calls them, there's a competition between this new motivation, the first time that he's motivated to be continent with, there's a competition between that and his previous lifestyle. So now he has warring motivations. And the actual consent doesn't come until paragraph 29. I suppose that if you had warring motivations, you could also kind of waver back and forth at the level of ascent. So like one moment, you might find yourself saying, yeah, I should really be a good Christian. And the next moment, you might be thinking, oh, but that woman's really beautiful. I'd really like to pursue her or whatever it is that he's thinking. And I guess the Stoics must have thought this too, right? I mean, they weren't committed to the view that every time you ascent to a moral proposition, you've made a decision that's going to last for the rest of your life. Yes. I mean, I think the difference is recognizing on a theoretical level that in some sense, a certain lifestyle or a certain type of behavior is admirable, and it seems to make other people happy, and it seems to be useful somehow or beneficial. But none of that is really a motivation for the Stoics or for Augustine. So when someone's experienced an actual motivating impression towards doing some action, they are saying to themselves, do it, go for it. So you can be having that interior self-imperative and still not ascent, right? That's still part of the impression. And if you have contradictory impressions, which you could have if you have a past habit of different dispositions being built up through different types of actions, then you're not necessarily going to ascend because your psychological weight is going to be distributed between these different abilities to find various things attractive. Let me ask you just one last question about this before we end. Yes. And this is about the theory of grace. So obviously, this takes us into the realm of theology a little bit, but I'm wondering how the theory of grace then would interact with the story that you've been telling. Because it makes me wonder, which part of my psychology does God have to interfere with, as it were, in order to give me grace? So is the idea that he makes things seem differently to me? Or does the idea that he helps me to ascend to the right seemings? Or what does he do exactly when he gives me grace? Yeah, this is an excellent question. And it's something that Augustine, his thinking about this question develops over time. But by the time that he gets to the Confessions, he's proposing to us himself as an example in the Confessions. And the model that he gives there is that because he was habituated in the wrong direction, in this incontinent lifestyle, as he calls it, he wasn't naturally able to perceive continents as good for him, as attractive for him. So the fact that he experiences this motivating impression of continents, of temperance in Book 8, he presents that as actually something that God gives him. So there's a first grace, which is when God makes him see the kalon quality of the virtue, that the virtue is good for him, that it will contribute to his happiness, that it's beautiful for him. It's a good and beautiful thing that he lacks and that he needs. And that's something that God has to do because on the natural level, our habits are determinative of how we perceive. Our habits influence our perception to such an extent that we're not going to be able to see a contradictory virtue to the vice that we have as good for us. So that, he thinks, is what grace is in the first instance. It's God giving us this motivating impression. So notice that it's God giving us an epistemological item that happens naturally all the time. But in certain kinds of cases, God has to give it to us because we can't get it naturally if we have bad habits. And then he seems to indicate also that the consent is also given by God, which is as a second grace in paragraph 29. Precisely because he has these conflicting dispositions, he cannot assent to the impression once it's given to him. So it's given as a second grace that God enables him to consent or consent in him would be an Augustinian way of saying it. Well, it's really interesting because it sounds like he's really thought in great detail then about how to adapt this Stoic model of motivation and action for use in this new Christian context. Right. And the text where you really see it happening, that he's thinking this through, is the text that he wrote right before the Confessions, which is Replies to Simplicianus. And in that text, you actually see an evolution of his thought about this question. So he starts off kind of thinking that maybe it's sufficient for people to come to some kind of conversion just by hearing preaching, exterior preaching. So the question is, what does it mean for God to call someone? And initially he's thinking, well, the calling is hearing preaching of, you know, virtues being talked about and the Christian life as a virtuous life. But he sees the problem that there's an empirical fact that two people can hear the same preaching, they hear the same message, and one person is moved and the other person is not moved. And then this causes him to say, if someone is moved, that person is moved because God is touching their mind with the type of impression by which their will may be moved. And then in the Confessions, I think we're getting an example of how that works in the life of a concrete person, namely himself. Well, that's very interesting. Okay, thank you very much. So we've mostly been talking about the Stoics. In the next episode, I'm going to be turning our attention to the Platonists, because we're going to be looking at how Augustine drew on the Platonist tradition, including Plotinus, to develop some revolutionary new ideas about the Trinity, or at least some revolutionary ideas about how philosophy could be used to explain the Trinity. But for now, I'll just thank Sarah Byers very much for coming on. Thank you very much, Peter. I enjoyed being with you. And please join me next time for Augustine on Mind and Memory, on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Me, Myself, and I – Augustine on Mind and Memory In the City of God, Augustine claims that no one can doubt his own existence. If anyone, perhaps a member of the skeptical academy, should claim that even this is doubtful, we can reply that it is incoherent to imagine someone thinking he exists and being mistaken about it. After all, no one can be mistaken without existing. Thus, as Augustine puts it, si fallor sum – if I err, then I exist. Sound familiar? It seems to be a version of the most famous three-word Latin argument in the History of Philosophy, cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Indeed, when Descartes put forward the argument in his Meditations, some of his readers pointed out that the same idea already appeared in Augustine. But Descartes' use of the argument had at least one advantage over Augustine's – he used it in a very prominent place, as the crucial first step towards dispelling total skepticism. Where did Augustine put it? In the 26th chapter of the 11th of the 22 books of the absurdly long City of God. In the newspaper trade, they call that burying the lead. In fact, this buried Augustinian treasure isn't even the main point Augustine is making in the 26th chapter of that 11th book. It's more a digression, occasioned by his observation that the human mind is an image of the divine trinity. All of us mirror the three-ness of God by existing, knowing we exist, and loving the fact that we exist. Typical Augustine in more than one way. Not only is a philosophical nugget delivered in a theological wrapping, but it is uncovered through reflection on Augustine's own self. Though Epictetus and Plotinus are worthy candidates for the title, probably no other ancient philosopher was as keen an observer of his own mental life as Augustine. Again and again, he solves theological and philosophical problems by turning inward. His reflections on evil are bound up with an almost obsessive preoccupation with his own struggle against sin. His merciless and detailed self-analysis exposes the gaping divide that separates imperfect created beings like himself from their Creator. But self-knowledge does not only let us see how different we are from God. Inspired by a verse of Genesis which asserts that man is created in God's image, Augustine believes that studying human nature will be a big step in the direction of understanding the divine nature. That is, in a nutshell, the project of On the Trinity, Augustine's most philosophically ambitious work and the culmination of his lifelong quest to understand himself. This quest begins with the realization of the mind's immediate access to itself. So it's no wonder that it was Augustine who first discovered the anti-skeptical argument that would reappear centuries later in Descartes, especially since, like Descartes, he also thought hard about the problem of skepticism. After all, Cicero, one of Augustine's main philosophical sources, had been a skeptic. Early in his writing career, Augustine even wrote a work entitled Against the Academics, meaning the Skeptics of the New Academy. Here he didn't yet formulate the argument, if I err, I am, found in the city of God, but he identified other types of infallible knowledge, including truths of logic and mathematics. In another earlier work, On Free Choice of the Will, he does make the point that no one could be mistaken about whether they exist. It's telling that, as in the city of God, in this case the error argument is presented as a step toward showing something about God, namely that he exists and is the cause of all other things. In both cases, it would be a distraction for Augustine to draw too much attention to the error argument. Sure, it's a brilliant argument. Really, Augustine deserves to have some hilarious t-shirts, mugs, and posters printed up about it, an honor that has instead gone to Descartes alone. I suspect that more than one philosophy student has ruined a first date by turning up in a I Drink, Therefore I Am shirt. But as Augustine has just said, here in On Free Choice of the Will, he explores philosophical arguments in order to understand more fully what he already believes as a Christian. Thus Augustine's favorite slogan is a biblical quote, which you won't see parodied on too many t-shirts or dorm room walls, Crede ut intelligas, believe so that you may understand. Unlike Descartes, he starts not from skepticism, but from faith, and he uses philosophy to explain the articles of that faith. As we've seen in previous episodes, this attitude is compatible with, indeed even demands, lengthy and sustained inquiry into standard philosophical topics like the nature of language, ethics, and metaphysics. Augustine's treatment of the mind is no exception. Like most Hellenic philosophers, he sees reason, or the mind, as the highest function of the human soul, while the soul in general is a principle of life. As we can see from early writings Augustine devoted to the topic of soul, he follows the Platonists in particular in thinking that the soul is immaterial and lives on after the death of the body. One of his early works distinguishes seven grades, or faculties, of the soul. At the bottom are the functions we share even with plants, like the capacity for growth and nourishment. At the upper end we have two functions of the mind, the desire for truth and its attainment. This inclusion of the desire or love for truth at the most exalted level of the life of soul is a sign of more distinctively Augustinian things to come in On the Trinity. As we already know from our look at Augustine's work On the Teacher, he thinks we attain knowledge not through instruction by humans, but by turning towards an inner standard of truth. This again looks rather Platonist, and in fact Augustine speaks in several works of immaterial forms that provide regulative principles for our knowledge. Of course these are not quite forms as Plato envisioned them. Augustine treats them instead as ideas in God's mind, here following the precedent of several so-called middle Platonists like Philo of Alexandria. This puts the Augustinian soul right where it is for other late ancient Platonists, from Plutarch to Plotinus to Proclus. We don't have to have a name starting with P to be a Platonist, but it helps. As an immaterial substance, the soul has an existence superior to that of the body, but it is inferior to the divine, to which it must look in order to have knowledge. Like Tertullian before him, Augustine insists that the soul is not to be put on a par with God. He doesn't go as far as Tertullian, who envisioned the soul as physical breath to keep it well below the status of divinity, but he does emphasize that soul changes, for example by undergoing moral progress, whereas God is eternal and thus unchanging. Again, this point that soul changes and God does not will be important when we get to On the Trinity. And we're going to get to it right now. We've just seen that the soul falls short of God's eternal perfection. Nonetheless, there is that line in Genesis telling us that we are created in God's image. In addition, there is the Nicene Creed. You'll remember from our episode on the Cappadocians that the Council of Nicaea established a doctrine on the Trinity that became authoritative for many Christians. Augustine was one of them. In line with the Creed and against the Arians, he asserted the total equality of all three persons of the Trinity, which together make up a single substance. This means that when he examines his own nature as a human in On the Trinity, he is not embarking on a dispassionate inquiry into the nature of the soul, its relation to the body, or the workings of the mind, though all those issues do arise and are given subtle and innovative treatment. Rather, Augustine is believing in order to understand. He is looking for a way in which we humans are trinities, that is, substances which by their very nature unify three aspects or functions, just as God is a unity of three persons. It would be a bonus if the Trinity within us had other features echoing those of the divine Trinity. For instance, we would ideally find a human Trinity in which all three elements are equal, as the divine persons are equal, and whose second element is begotten by the first, as the Son is begotten by the Father. You might be scratching your head as you try to think of an example to fit the bill, even without these extra requirements. But Augustine has no trouble reeling off numerous candidates. After devoting the first books of the work to the scriptural basis and correct understanding of the Trinitarian doctrine itself, he proceeds to investigate a whole series of trinities found in human nature. The examples involve different kinds of perception, awareness, and cognition. Augustine must look to the soul for good examples, because a trinity of bodies could never fit the bill. The bodies would not be in the same place as one another, and thus would not truly be a single substance. The same problem affects sensory perception. Here Augustine does identify a sort of trinity. There is the external object, the perception of that object, and the mind's focus on that object, which binds these two together. Since the thing that is seen is outside the soul, though, this is the wrong kind of trinity. Suppose, for instance, that you are at the zoo and stop to look at a giraffe. The giraffe is separate from and independent of your power of eyesight, as is proven by the fact that when the giraffe lopes back into its pen, you can no longer see it. Cases like this teach Augustine two lessons. The first is that the trinity we seek must be entirely within ourselves. If any of the three members of the human trinity is outside us, it will be separate and independent, like the giraffe. That would be a major disanalogy with the case of the divine trinity, so we need to avoid it. The second lesson is that human will or intention binds together the mind with its objects. In the case we just looked at, it is the mind's intention to see the giraffe that produces an act of vision, at least as long as the giraffe stays where we can see it. Bringing these two lessons together, the promising strategy would be to look for a case where the mind wills or intends to know something inside itself. And as luck would have it, this happens all the time. Whenever I think about something I know, or imagine something, or remember something. In these cases, I am not relying on something outside of me. If I consider the Pythagorean theorem, imagine a giraffe that is painted blue, or remember the name of my favorite high school teacher, I am turning my mind's attention to what is already inside it. So, in all such cases there are three things. First, the mental content, the theorem, the imaginary blue giraffe, or the teacher's name. Secondly, the mind's grasping of its own content, its thinking about what it knows, imagines, or remembers. Third, the mind's intention or will to grasp its own content with these mental acts. It is this willing that explains why the mind is entertaining the specific content that it has chosen, for instance by remembering the favorite teacher instead of the teacher who made you stay after school that time just because you were drawing pictures of blue giraffes instead of paying attention in class. Augustine in fact sees memory as particularly crucial for his project. It is involved even in the other cases of knowing and imagining. When we reflect on previously acquired knowledge, we are remembering what we know, and when we imagine new things, we are combining images we have experienced before, such as blue and giraffe. So Augustine's fascination with memory is part and parcel of his interest in self-knowledge. Not only does memory turn up prominently in On the Trinity, but Augustine discusses it at length in the tenth book of The Confessions. There, he speaks of it as a kind of storehouse or treasury for things we have learned or experienced, with a seemingly limitless storage capacity. Somehow the things we can remember stay hidden within the memory until we will them to come forward. This may be more or less difficult, with some things coming to mind immediately, others hovering just out of reach as when a word is on the tip of the tongue. But is it really the things themselves that are the objects of memory? After all, I can remember things that are no longer present, and even things that no longer exist. Augustine concludes from this that at least in some cases, what the memory produces for us is not the thing we remember, but an image of that thing. This helps to explain why remembering something feels so different from really experiencing it. You can remember being angry at your teacher without being angry now, or remember being in intense pain without so much as a twinge of actual pain. Puzzlingly though, in other cases of remembering, we do seem to have the things themselves before our minds. If I recall a number, I would seem to be thinking of the number, and not an image of that number. The same would seem to go for the memory itself. It seems absurd to suppose that, when I remember my own memory, I am getting at only an image of that memory. Which leads Augustine to a puzzle within a puzzle. If the memory can remember itself without an image, then it must be able to remember forgetting in the same way. But if this happens directly and not by an image, so that forgetting just is the content of my memory, won't this mean that we are having a mental act that is both a remembering and a forgetting? That puzzle might itself provoke us to a memory of Augustine's similar point in On the Teacher, that the word nothing must be a sign, but it is hard to see what it could be a sign of. Puzzled though he may be, here in the Confessions Augustine reaches a firm conclusion that is of great relevance to On the Trinity. He is enough of a Platonist to think that he is his own mind, and this means that he is his own memory. After all, in remembering his mind he is doing nothing more nor less than getting access to himself. Memory then, is starting to look like it may offer the Trinity we have been looking for. Since the remembered thing or image is within us, we can avoid the problem that arose in the case of seeing, where one element of the Trinity was separate from the others. By contrast, the memory, what it remembers, and the will to remember are all the same thing, namely the mind itself. The three are therefore one substance. Augustine also gets bonus points, the three seem to be equal to one another, and this Trinity even seems to involve a case of internal begetting, just like the Divine Trinity. When we recall something, the mind causes an episode of remembering through an act of will, which is tantamount to begetting its own content within itself. Though Augustine's score sheet is drawn up in accordance with Christian theology, he's incidentally aiming at that most Hellenic of goals, to fulfill the Delphic command, Know thyself. Like philosophers who identified the mind or soul with some kind of body, like fire or air, Augustine thinks self-knowledge means an immaterial mind knowing itself. This might sound like just more Platonism, but to say that would be doing Augustine a disservice. Think of Plotinus's treatment of the perfect self-knowledge possessed by intellect. He argued that such a self-thinking or self-knowing intellect could not be the first principle, as Aristotle had claimed, because it would necessarily fall short of perfect unity by having two aspects. It would be both what thinks and what is thought, both the knower and the known. Augustine goes this one better by seeing self-knowledge as involving not just duality, but Trinity. There is not only the mind as subject and object of its own mental act, but also the mind's will, which makes such mental acts possible. This is particularly clear in the cases we've been considering, where the mind remembers some specific content within itself by choosing to remember it. Without this intention, which Augustine often calls love, there would be no act of remembering at all. Even if Augustine is motivated by his theological quest to find a human image of the Divine Trinity, the point is a philosophically powerful one. But Augustine is still not satisfied. The cases we have been considering also have a fatal flaw. We go from remembering one thing to remembering another, the content of our thought constantly changing. In a sense, of course, the target of thought never changes, because in each case the mind is thinking about itself. But there is change here nonetheless, and hence a disanalogy to the Divine case. To some extent this is unavoidable. As a created thing, the human mind is inevitably subject to change. Yet we can do a little bit better by leaving aside the acts of thinking and remembering that come and go from moment to moment. These may seem to constitute the whole of our mental life. But in a bold move, Augustine proposes that the mind never ceases to know, remember, and love itself. Our mental life does not consist only of fleeting thoughts and images, but an enduring self-awareness. He even goes so far as to say that the mind's presence to itself from moment to moment is a kind of memory. Thus, we can say that you are remembering yourself right now, even if it is more usual to use the word memory when we are grasping images of things in the past. Obviously permanent self-awareness, by virtue of its very permanence, offers a better image of the eternal divine Trinity than the other human trinities we have considered. But we shouldn't get carried away and think that all humans necessarily have an adequate understanding of their own selves. Far from it. Even many philosophers, clever though they were, falsely believed that the soul is some sort of body. They made the mistake of adding an extraneous bodily image to the mind's basic awareness of itself. And they were not alone. In fact it is almost impossible for us to free ourselves from physical images when we think of our own minds. Thus, we have the most Augustinian of paradoxes, that it should be so difficult for the mind to understand itself even though the mind cannot help but know itself. This brings us full circle to the mind's indubitable awareness of itself. Again in On the Trinity, Augustine makes the point that reminded us of Descartes, that the mind cannot be in doubt about itself. Augustine remarks in The Confessions that nothing is closer to the mind than itself, and it still remains unknown to itself. Again, we see here a parallel between his ideas about knowledge and his treatment of sin. On the ethical front, nothing is more under our control than our own will, yet we remain unable to will the good, even when we want to do so. If our own minds are beyond our knowledge and our will, then how much more will God transcend our efforts to understand and love Him as we should? This means that the project of On the Trinity, as Augustine himself admits, is doomed to at best partial success. There's room for improvement too in our understanding of that project, so we're going to stay with Augustine and with On the Trinity for one more episode. As we've seen, On the Trinity shows us that every person is an image of God, one but also three. So, I'll give you three good reasons why you should join me next time, Charles Brittain. He'll be my guest next time, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Augustine's On the Trinity with Charles Britton, who is Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Cornell University. Hi, Charles. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on. Let's begin just by saying a little bit about what this text is about. So it's called De Trinitate, which means On the Trinity. What is Augustine's project in this work? So Augustine's project in the De Trinitate is to try to explain what the Trinity is, and then, having given the evidence for the being such a thing as a Trinity, i.e., a God composed of three different persons, to then try to allow the reader to conceptualize what a mysterious item like that would be. And that means, I guess, that there are actually at least two projects, because he wants to say something about God, and then he wants to say something about this human image of the Trinity that we find in ourselves. So, sorry, I didn't explain the human image part. So the structure of the book comes into three parts. The first part, he goes through the evidence for there being a Trinity in the Bible, and that gives him the data. The second part, he gives a theory of relations that's going to explain how you could have a Trinitarian substance, that is a substance that was unitary, but had three coextensive parts, or roughly something like that. And then the third part is where he tries to explain, tries to give the explanatory material by thinking about the closest analogue, or the image of God, which is the human mind. So those are the three parts of the book. And it sounds like, from what you just said, that his approach in these different parts of the book are actually very different. So even though the book itself is a three-in-one, the first part, where he goes through the Bible, sounds like it's more like a scriptural, exegetical work, or a theological work. And then maybe the section on relations, and then the last part about the human mind, sounds something more like a philosophical work. Or do you think that's too simplistic a characterization? No, I think that's brilliant. And it shows what a complicated book it is. It never struck me until now that I'm sure that that's how Augustine was structuring, that he had the image in mind when he was structuring the book, in that the first part is the content that makes it possible to do something. The second part is the intellectualization of it. So that's the theory of relations, the first part being the biblical information. And then the third part is the bit that deals with the affective part, which is what the Holy Spirit is doing in the Trinity. So that we have the info, we have the understanding of the information, and then we have the union of the information and the understanding, which is the love of the information expressed through understanding it. That seemed to me, maybe that's going too far, but that seems to me to actually capture something about the relation between the three parts, as Augustine might have seen it. So I think that was very plausible. I guess also in the kind of historiography of how this work has been read, it was a very influential work in the medieval period. But nowadays, do you think it's fair to say that theologians read the first part, and philosophers should read the second and third parts, but they don't? Is that pretty much how it works out? Well, I think that it's definitely true that philosophers should read the second and third parts, and they don't. I think that theologians do tend to read the whole book. They read the first part and the third part. They don't read the theory of relations. That was the important part in philosophical theology in the Middle Ages. They do read the third part, but they read it in an anti-philosophical way, because that's how contemporary theology is done. So they read it in what they call an ecclesiological reading, where the focus is not on what Augustine's explicit aim, which is illuminating the Trinity by looking at the image of God in our human mind, but rather by looking at the church as an analogue of the Holy Spirit, which is a perfectly reasonable Christian enterprise, just not the one that Augustine's pursuing in this book. Now, if we think about, for example, the middle part, which is about the theory of relation, obviously this is something that philosophers, going back at least as far as Aristotle, have had a lot to say about. Is Augustine actually drawing on that material in this work? So is he reading philosophical works and using that as part of the weaponry he's bringing to bear on this problem of explaining the Trinity? Well, yes, I think that that's one of the very exciting parts of the book, although it's still understudied. It's very clear that Augustine is appealing to the Aristotelian tradition of work on the categories. So, as you know, from the study of the commentators in Net Antiquity, we have this whole tradition of post-Aristotelian categorical theory, and we can see how it's developing. And Augustine's summoning or using some parts of that tradition that are post-Aristotelian and post-Pletana, so it's not quite clear how to date what he's doing, but he is definitely trying to explain this Christian mystery in terms of the contemporary, contemporary to him, categorical theory. He's trying to get these categories and then say, how can we explain how God could have some properties that don't appear to be essential? That's the issue. And when he gets on to talking about the philosophy of mind in the third part, he's drawing on Neo-Platonist discussions of the mind as well. Yes, that seems clear to you and me. But yes, I think that's more clear that if you know something about Plotinus, then it's very clear that there is a relation. It's highly controversial exactly how much Augustine rejects or accepts of the Platonian picture, but it's pretty undeniable that he's really reading things like Ennio 5.3, and that that's a fundamental way of understanding the human mind. The Platonist already had a vaguely Trinitarian understanding of the human mind, or the intellect, and that's he can appeal to when he's talking about the mind, although he doesn't appeal to it when he's talking to God, because Plotinus is not a Christian. Right. Well, let's move on then to talking about the project of that last part. What happens in that part is that he gives a whole series of potential images of the Trinity that would be found in the case of human beings, and he decides in each case that it's not quite right, and then he finally finds one that he's happy with. Maybe you could, though, start by telling us about one of the images that he's not happy with, and explain why it falls short of being an image of the divine Trinity. The human beings are the image of God. We know that from Genesis. Given that the human being is an image of God, Augustine then identifies the human mind as being the locus of the image of God in a human being. So that's his basic image. When he tries to understand how the human mind has Trinitarian structure, he starts off with the idea of the mind's self-knowledge, and he argues that the mind has a permanent and constitutive self-knowledge, so that what it is to be a human mind, or perhaps a human intellect, so what it is to be a human mind, is to be a self-reflective act of self-knowing. Something like that is what constitutes the being a human mind. So that's one basic image that goes through the book, and he likes that because it's permanent. Human souls are immortal, so human minds are immortal, intellects are immortal. So this self-knowledge, if it's a constitutive act, is something that's permanent, which is what we want for the God. Because God is eternal, you mean? Yes. Although he also does think that the soul is created, so it's only permanent. Yes, it's permanent in one direction. So that's one way in which it will fall short, presumably, of being a perfect image of the Trinity. Yes, it's not eternal. It's immortal from the time of its creation, whenever it was. If we think back to Plotinus, Plotinus thought that the intellect is twofold, because it's thinking about itself, but that means that it's both the subject of thought and it's the object of thought. In other words, it's the thing that's thinking and the thing that's being thought about. So why does Augustine think that if the soul or the mind is thinking about itself, that that would give us three aspects rather than only two? Well, there are two answers to that. One is that the mind is the image of God, and God is a Trinity. So this is perhaps not the most successful argument. But if you're a committed Christian, as Augustine is and thinks that you should be, if you want to understand the mystery of Trinity, then you do know that the human being is an image of God, and that therefore there's some Trinitarian structure. That's a sort of theological reason for thinking that there's a tripartite or three elements in the human mind. But Augustine's real innovation in the book in terms of the philosophy of mind, I think, is exactly this idea that there's a third element that's been misunderstood or underrated by the Platonist tradition. And in fact, not just by the Platonist tradition, but by the whole ancient philosophical tradition. And that's this element which he calls the will or the element of desire. And instead of thinking of that as a sort of subordinate element, which I think we tend to in the especially historic version of Platonism, that he thinks that it's really constitutive. So there's one thing to have the content, that's the father analogue, or what he calls memory and memoria. And it's another thing to be conscious of the content, to think the thought, but what makes it a case of thinking this particular thought is will or desire or love. And that, he thinks, is fundamental to life. So the intellect wouldn't be an animal, it wouldn't be alive, it wouldn't be a real entity, if it didn't involve, or if it weren't an expression of will or desire, since that's what it is to be alive. So the idea then is you've got the content, as you just put it, and that's the father, you've got the act of understanding, which is the son, and you've got the will, which is the Holy Spirit. And he thinks, does he, that you cannot think about the contents of your own mind without having will involved. So this third element always has to be there. What if you were thinking about something that you disliked, for example? Well, if you're thinking about something that you dislike, there's still the element. There are two ways. One is just entertaining a content means not doing all the other things that you could have been entertaining. This content can be represented as choosing. This is not exactly how I should think about it, of course. But you might think of it as I have all these contents. Now I'm going to think this one, that choice. So if you just imagine there are 100 things you might think, which one do you choose to think? Number 10. If you choose to think number 10, you've expressed a desire towards that content rather than other content. And he thinks the same is true in the case of perception, and even dreaming, all these cases where we think that it doesn't look as though they're expressions of will, they are expressions of desire. For instance, in the case of perception, you think that's a passive thing. You're not choosing to see these things. But of course, you can close your eyes if you're not interested in seeing something. So there's a sort of negative expression of will in that way. And he thinks that the will is involved pervasively through all of our cognitive faculties at any level at all. So there's nothing special about the case of self-knowledge that involves will. It's rather that the paradigm of cognition involves these three aspects. And that's how he gets the other images that he goes through in the book, because he thinks that they're all secondary images. That's really interesting. I guess one possible objection to that might be that there are cases where, for example, you don't want to think about something like, you know, my best friend has just betrayed me, and I'm very upset about it. And it's making me more and more upset the more I think about it, and there's nothing I can do about it now, it's already happened, I should really just stop thinking about it. And yet I find myself obsessively coming back to it. Does he think that somehow I'm still willing to think about it as it were willing against my own will? Yes. He thinks that kind of experience is what is to be a fallen soul or to be in a fallen body that we have all kinds of apparently autonomous psychological systems, so that we can't resist having certain kinds of thoughts. But nevertheless, there wouldn't be a system, there would be the autonomy, the energy that makes any psychological process go is a kind of desire, or expression of will. So we don't have unified psychologies, or bodies, all the different subsystems are not unified in our case, unless and they won't be unless we go to heaven and have a different body and a purified mind. But each subsystem involves expression of will or desire, or what can be characterized as well or desire, even though it's not a conscious or explicit will. And he thinks the same is true for animals. And it also explains every different level of life. So that in a vegetative soul, and what makes your body work at all, and your heart pump, is somehow an expression of desire for life that we have. And if we had no interest at all in the body, literally no interest at all in the physical world, then we would be dead. Our body wouldn't function. He goes through all of these versions of the image of the Trinity that would be found in us. What are the kind of criteria that he's looking for? So what features does this human Trinity need to have, that will qualify it as the best possible image of the Divine Trinity? He has a list, he ends up with a list of six or maybe a few more criteria. Focus on the most important ones. So the first thing is that it needs to be a Trinitarian substance. So we want something that would constitute a substance. That's why the mind is a good example, that it's Trinitarian. So it has three different aspects. Those are the basic idea for the, to be an image of God. Then there is more specific criteria that rule out various other possibilities. The first one is permanence, or preferably eternity. So in a human case, we can't get eternity, but permanence is one desideratum, which is the self-knowledge case. Another criterion which goes with permanence is non-adventitiousness. So not to be adventitious means that it didn't start and then finish. So there's no change involved in God. We don't want any change in the image if we can not have a change. The third one, maybe, sorry, this is the most important one, is that the three aspects or the three properties or whatever they are need to be equal to each other in the way that the persons of the Trinity are supposed to be equal to each other. And they need to be equal to each other and to the whole. That's what makes it a Trinitarian substance. So two things that he contrasts then are the case where you're actually thinking about some specific thing. For example, let's say the Pythagorean theorem and the case where you're just thinking about yourself. And so by these criteria that you just listed, the thinking about yourself is better as an image of the divine Trinity than thinking about the Pythagorean theorem. Why is that exactly? In the case of thinking about yourself, you have one substance, not two. There's some controversy as to exactly how Augustine understands the eternal objects of thought. So if you think of mathematics as being eternal objects of thought, that's not so clear. But in general, if you think of some other object that isn't yourself, then you don't have one substance. So take a simpler case than the Pythagorean theory. Think about looking at a clock. There's a clock and then there's you're looking at it. These are two completely different things. So the Pythagorean case goes partly there are, so it looks like there are two different objects there. There's you and there's the theorem that isn't constitutive of you. Secondly, it's a case it's not permanent. You only think about it for a certain amount of time. Thirdly, it's advantageous. You didn't probably always have the Pythagorean theorem as part of your mind. Speak for yourself. So that's actually one of the things that Augustine has a brilliant argument in Book 12 to show that Plato was wrong to think that we always knew the Pythagorean theorem and that we don't have innate knowledge. Oh, right. Because the theory of recollection would say that actually all the contents we can get are already there. And so this is one of the ways in which Augustine differs from Plotinus, that he doesn't think that it's constitutive of the human mind to have the contents of the divine intellect already part of it in some complicated latent way. Let's look then a little more at this case where you're thinking about or knowing yourself. This is the idea that anytime you're alive, you have this Trinitarian structure in your mind where you've got memory, in other words, the content, understanding, which is the grasp of the content and will, which is the thing that binds them together. And that's just by thinking about yourself, even though you're not thinking about anything in particular. That's a permanent feature of your psychology. It's hard to know exactly how to answer that or what he thinks about it. The idea of the mind's permanence of knowledge, when I said it was constitutive, I really mean that. It's not that there's you and then there's you thinking about these things somewhere in the background. It's rather that the thing that makes you into something able to have any other thought is somehow a self-knowing, a case of self-knowing. So to be a mind is to be self-knowing. And you think, put it in a permanent sense, right? So they think, what kind of sense does that make? And this way, I think it gets really exciting and interesting for our understanding of philosophy of mind that the idea has to be at least partly something like this, that to be a human mind or to be a cognitive agent involves having access to content and being conscious and then being able to or thinking or using your consciousness to entertain a certain given content. So the idea of the Trinitarian self-knowledge thing is to say that there are in fact these three elements that somehow are coextensive and identical, but you need to identify three different elements. If you thought of the mind as just being a storage place, like a memory, a content place or a specific content, it would be inert. If you think of it as just a consciousness, it doesn't have any content to be conscious of. Will doesn't make sense or desire doesn't make sense unless there's some subject object. The idea is that if you just try and think, what is the structure of a mind? What would it be to be a mind? Augustine thinks that this is what's good about the image, that he thinks it's just clear that there has to be a Trinitarian or there have to be three aspects to the mind, the ones that he identifies. But he also thinks that you can make a good case anyhow that these three aspects are just each the same thing viewed in three different ways or with three different relationships. The mind is its contents. It's the act of understanding and it is the will that binds the two things together. If you think about any one of those by itself, you can see how this works. If you think about, as I said, about the will, trying to think of a constitutive desire, the whole entity that you're thinking about is a constitutive desire. What would that mean if it weren't the desire for something? You can't have a desire that doesn't have a content and doesn't have an agent or somebody doing the desiring. So it's built into it. If you just imagine, here's a human being, what is it to be a human being? It's just to be this desire. That is to say that you have a Trinitarian substance. So that's one way of understanding what a human mind is. And he thinks you can do the same with the content side and with the consciousness side. Would it be possible to think that what Augustine is doing in this work on the Trinity is exactly the thing that he's describing? So if you don't think about some thought that you've got about something, whether it's mathematics or something you've learned about, whatever it is, but rather you're just thinking about the nature of your own mind, which is of course what he's doing here in De Trinitate, is that the activity he's talking about as the best image of the divine Trinity we can get in this life? Not exactly. But there are two things that, that's a good question. The two things are related in two different ways. So the first image was the mind's constitutive self-knowing, and the second image was the mind's thinking itself consciously, whatever exactly that means. So for the mind to think itself consciously, correctly, in a way that the content and the thought are identical, the mind needs to understand what its actual structure is. And one of the things that Augustine does in Brooks 8 through 10 is give really quite good arguments that the mind has a certain nature, that it's an immaterial substance of a certain kind, that the cogito arguments that Augustine's famous for. So those arguments are doing what he thinks is necessary for you to have the second kind of self-knowing, the conscious self-knowing. Your intellect won't succeed in knowing itself if it thinks of itself as material. And so he's purifying the mind through these arguments and giving it the ability to know itself or to make explicit what he thinks is its permanent self-knowledge of itself. So that's something that he does in the book. But the actual philosophical work of working out the theorem isn't the same as entertaining the theorem when you know it in Augustine any more than it is in Plotinus or in Plato, or in Aristotle, that unfortunately their model of successful philosophy is not doing philosophy, in my view. It's enjoying your understanding rather than coming to your understanding, this one way in which we perhaps differ from the ancients. But so one part of, so that was to answer one part of your question, that the exercise he is engaged in in the book is allowing the reader or getting the reader to be able to come to the second state, the self-thinking correctly. That's one thing he does. But then in book 14 and 15, rather hurriedly the books are a little badly constructed. In books 14 and 15 he tries to, and all the way through, but he makes explicit in books 14 and 15 that the second thing, the third thing we're trying to do is not just think ourselves or think ourselves consciously in the second image, but get somewhere, make progress towards the third more perfect image, which is what's going to happen if we go to heaven, the bit of a vision. So the process of purifying your mind involves not just getting rid of materialist thoughts and things like that, but also understanding the natural world and your position in the value hierarchy and becoming a proper Christian and understanding fully the Christian doctrine. So that of course is the project of the whole book, is to understand as much as we can the Christian doctrine. And this is the justification for the theological reading that I had mentioned earlier, that it's true that the purpose of the book is not abstract and purely historical or philosophical because the book, like all of Augustine's work, is aimed at purifying the reader, making them better, allowing them to go to heaven. It's really important that you're purified in this way. So there's a way in which the book contributes directly to the, the actual philosophical work in the book contributes directly to the goal, but I don't think that the process of arching or writing as he's writing itself constitutes that. I think that there are different kinds of thought about oneself. So it begins in theology, goes through philosophy, but ends with theology. That's the idea. Maybe a good way of thinking about Augustine in general. Yes, that seems quite plausible. Well, that seems like a good note to end on. Next time I'll be talking about some of the other authors who took up themes from Plato and Platonism and wrote in Latin leading up to the great philosopher Boethius. But for now I'll just thank Charles for coming on the podcast very much. Thank you very much. And please join me next time for Latin Platonism on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born Again, Latin Platonism. The curtain is about to come down on the classical drama that is ancient philosophy. It began in the 6th century BC with Thales. It will end in the 6th century AD or so, with the last generations of the Platonist school at Alexandria and Boethius in the fading Western Empire. Then it will be time to take our seats for Act II, Medieval Philosophy. Actually, as I've admitted before, you can draw the line earlier or later. We've already examined one thinker who lived into the mid-7th century, the Byzantine theologian and philosopher Maximus the Confessor. Especially for the Greek-speaking East, we need to think of the medieval era as continuous with antiquity. In the West where Latin dominates, there was a greater degree of social collapse. Yet we can still find a degree of continuity, thanks in no small part to a handful of thinkers who preserved ancient philosophy, especially Platonism, in attractively packaged Latin. Here, the most important figure is the aforementioned Boethius. But before we get to him, I want to consider some Platonic friends who are not so widely loved. We could call them collectively the Latin Platonists. Relatively obscure today, they were among the thinkers of antiquity most avidly studied by readers of Latin in the medieval era. The importation of Hellenic philosophy into Latin is nothing new. Back in the 1st century BC, we saw Cicero and Lucretius laboring to convey the subtleties of the Hellenistic schools to a Latinate readership. Then came Seneca, one of the greatest of the Stoics. But in medieval times Lucretius was not known at all, while Cicero and Seneca exerted influence mostly through Augustine. With these giants lost in the midst of history, medievals had to make do with authors of lesser stature. If you think that two of the indispensable philosophical authors of all time are Calcidius and Marcianus Capella, you are probably a monk living in the 10th or 11th century. In which case you most likely aren't listening to this podcast. But knowing about the medieval legacy of the Latin Platonists can be misleading. They weren't trying to save philosophy by setting it down in Latin just before the clock struck midnight and a new day began in total darkness. To the contrary, the texts we'll be looking at are erudite and even playful treatments of Greek knowledge aimed at an elite late antique audience. Accordingly, they are a lot of fun, which helps explain their historical influence. Along with the misconception that the medievals didn't read books for fun, I'd like to dispel the notion that they refused to read non-Christian authors. There is overt and sincerely held paganism in some of these Latin Platonist works. Even Christian authors like Boethius and his fellow translator Calcidius gave little or no sign of their religious affiliation when they wrote about Hellenic thought. Boethius is a particularly striking case. As we'll see, his philosophical treatises look as if they could have been written by a pagan, yet he also used philosophical ideas to expound the trinity. Boethius was following in the footsteps of Marius Victorinus. Augustine tells us that Victorinus began as a bitter opponent of Christianity, perhaps inspired by the anti-Christian polemics of the Platonist philosopher Porphyry. All the more reason to celebrate Victorinus's dramatic conversion to Christianity, which Augustine recounts in the Confessions. Within a few pages, we see Victorinus go from militant paganism to lukewarm Christianity, which doesn't include attendance at church—do wolves make Christians, he asks—and then to enthusiastic adoption of the new faith. As a Christian, he had to give up his chair as a teacher of rhetoric under the pagan policies of Julian the Apostate. Victorinus wrote theological works, including commentaries on the Bible and treatments of the trinity. But his greatest contribution to the history of philosophy was his translation of what Augustine calls the Books of the Platonists, works by Plotinus and Porphyry which, once rendered into Latin, were a formative influence on Augustine. As we know, Augustine had studied some Greek but far preferred to read Latin. This explains his dependence on Victorinus, and also his extensive use of Varro in works like The City of God. Like Cicero, Varro wrote extensively and informatively about Hellenic philosophy, and he did it in Latin. Augustine speaks also of Apuleius, who qualifies as the earliest Latin Platonist. He wrote in the 2nd century, making him a contemporary of so-called middle Platonists, like Numenius, and putting him before the groundbreaking synthesis of the Platonist tradition offered by Plotinus. In The City of God, Apuleius is mocked for his views on the subject of demons. This was a matter of some interest to Apuleius, because the warning voice who spoke to Socrates was identified as a demon. He wrote a philosophical treatise on this subject, in which he followed Plato by making demons intermediaries between the gods and humans. Augustine turns his characteristic wit and sarcasm against all this, but Apuleius was more cherished by later Latin pagan authors. Especially valued was another work of his called The Metamorphosis. This features a main character who is turned into an ass, which makes The Metamorphosis the midsummer night's dream of late antiquity. Had Augustine read that play, he might well have quoted it with reference to Apuleius and other pagan philosophers, Lord, what fools these mortals be! His contemptuous attitude is directed not only at long dead figures like Apuleius, but also near contemporaries, which reminds us that paganism was still a going concern in the early 5th century. Indeed, our next two Latin Platonists were pagans who lived at this time. One wrote about a dream, the other about a wedding. Macrobius' commentary on the dream of Scipio uses Platonist philosophy to expound a text written by Cicero. It appears at the end of Cicero's Republic, which does not survive completely today. As the title indicates, Cicero was taking inspiration from Plato, and the passage being commented upon by Macrobius makes that still more obvious. You'll remember that Plato ended his own republic with a myth in which a man named Ur has a vision of the cosmos and the fate of souls in the afterlife. Cicero accordingly ended his own republic with a cosmic vision in the form of a dream. He doesn't mention whether the dream came on a midsummer's night. The dreamer is Scipio, grandson of the famous Scipio Africanus who led Rome against Hannibal in the Punic War. In the dream, Scipio Africanus appears to his grandson and shows him a panoramic view of the heavens and earth. The main point of this is to put earthly things in perspective, by revealing to young Scipio the tiny scope of even the Roman Empire in comparison to the cosmos as a whole. Towards the end of the dream, Cicero also includes a summary of an argument for the immortality of the soul taken from Plato's Phaedrus. The argument is based on the notion that the soul is the principle of motion and change, both for other things and for itself. Nothing else moves it or causes it to change, for instance by bringing it into existence, which shows that it is eternal. If you aren't impressed by this argument, you're in good company. Aristotle, for one, dismissed it on the basis that souls are not really self-moving, but are moved by things they perceive and desire. But this passage of the Phaedrus became one of Plato's best-known arguments. Its popularity is shown by the fact that it turns up here in Cicero. Given Cicero's overt use of Plato, it's no surprise that an ancient Platonist like Macrobius would be attracted to the dream. His commentary on it often reads like a discussion of frequently asked questions regarding the Ciceronian source. Why do both Cicero and Plato end their works with myths? What are dreams, and how should we classify the dream Scipio is having? What is the overall point Cicero is trying to make with this dream? What is the significance of the numbers mentioned in Cicero's cosmology? And so on. Along the way, Macrobius gives us plenty of hints as to his own philosophical outlook. He is, of course, keen to emphasize the meeting of minds between Cicero and Plato, or Plato as read by ancient dogmatic Platonists. One would never know from this commentary that Cicero was actually sympathetic to the skeptical academy. Unlike some other ancient Platonists, Macrobius seems to have no allegiance to Aristotle. He mentions him mostly to defend the Phaedrus argument about souls' immortality against Aristotle's refutation. We can be a bit more specific about which kind of ancient Platonism Macrobius adopts. He seems to know both Plotinus and Porphyry well, and, unlike Apuleius, inhabits their cosmic worldview rather than that of the so-called middle Platonists. Thus, Macrobius recognizes a highest god who is ineffable, and who is followed by second and third principles called intellect and soul, just as in Plotinus. He also accepts Plotinus' views on ethics, holding that the goal for mankind should be a life of intellectual contemplation, withdrawn from things of the body. He justifies the use of myths by both Cicero and Plato by saying that this is an appropriate way for them to present ideas about the soul and its cosmic fate. As I mentioned when discussing the ending myth of the Republic, many readers nowadays find it troubling that Plato depicts the afterlife as a place of reward and punishment rather than sticking to the story that virtue is its own reward and vice its own punishment. To say that this does not bother Macrobius would be an understatement. For him, the prospect of reward and punishment is vital, and is the fundamental point we should take away from Cicero's dream. Yet Macrobius is no less enthusiastic to expound on Cicero's relatively brief remarks about cosmology. He shows off his knowledge of philosophical lore by discussing mathematical aspects of the heavens as discussed in Plato's Timaeus. Macrobius is well-informed also on such topics as the Milky Way. He cites a number of philosophical theories for this celestial phenomenon, including one from Aristotle's student Theophrastus, that it is a kind of seam where the sky is joined together. He also mentions the opinion of the atomist Democritus, who gets it pretty much right by suggesting that the Milky Way is the light of many stars blurred together. Macrobius fails, however, to mention the widespread view that the Milky Way is a candy bar. His treatment of scientific subjects also extends to the earthly realm. You may remember Lactantius ridiculing the notion that people could live on the far side of a spherical earth since they would fall off. Australian listeners of a nervous disposition will be relieved that Macrobius refutes such concerns. He points out that things fall not in some single downward direction but towards the center of the earth. Otherwise, rain would fall sideways at the equator instead of towards the ground. So much for the dream, now it's time to go on to a wedding. This will quite literally be a match made in heaven, since the groom is the god Mercury, who will wed a human woman named Philology. The story is told by Marcianus Capella. I know what you're thinking, but unfortunately the answer is no, he did not invent a capella singing. He did, however, invent this extravagant allegory which goes by the self-explanatory title The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. The first section of the book weaves Platonist teachings into a description of the divine wedding ceremony. After this exuberantly pagan opening section, seven bridesmaids representing the seven branches of ancient education give speeches in which they present the arts they symbolize. The edifying narrative is punctuated by distinctly unedifying interludes, in which the gods complain that they are bored, or try to persuade Mercury to call a halt to the speeches so he can get Philology into bed more quickly. It's all presented in torturous Latin festooned with obscure vocabulary, so much so that medieval readers had difficulty making sense of it. What we have here, in other words, is a strong late entry for the title of ancient philosophical work most likely to have been written well under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. No less a reader than C.S. Lewis said, and I know this seems too good to be true but I'm not making it up, quote, This universe, which has produced the orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Marcianus Capella. Marcianus would have loved my podcast. He tries to mention not only every god he can think of, but also every philosopher. Some of them, like Plato and Pythagoras, are deified and made to appear alongside other gods at the wedding. The possibility of reaching godlike status through learning is perhaps the point of the entire allegory, since we have here a symbol of human learning, philology, wetting the god Mercury. Alternatively, or additionally, Mercury may represent eloquence, and Marcianus's own work is an example of what it symbolically represents, erudition married to literary style. Of course, the idea of attaining godlikeness through philosophy is a well-worn Platonic theme that goes back to Plato himself, but Marcianus could draw on more recent ideas to explain how this might be possible. He identifies Mercury as nous, using the Greek word for mind, while philology seems to represent not humans generally, or even the human soul, but more specifically the rational soul. Even her name might be taken to indicate this—philology is a lover of logos, of reason and speech. So Marcianus was indeed under the influence when he wrote this, the influence of Neoplatonists. Marcianus drew, for instance, on Porphyry's now-lost commentary devoted to the sacred pagan writings known as the Chaldean Oracles. Of course, medieval readers cherished Marcianus not because of his overt and Platonist-flavored paganism but in spite of it. However much they may have enjoyed the elaborate narrative frame, the real usefulness of the work for them lay in the speeches of the Seven Bridesmaids. These speeches covered the disciplines that would later be called the liberal arts. The seven disciplines were divided into two groups, the so-called trivium on linguistic topics, namely grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and the mathematical quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmony. Marcianus provided medieval authors with a textbook for all seven arts, valuable not only for the information it preserved but also for its relative brevity and introductory character. But none of this would have mattered had the work not been in Latin. Marcianus himself repeatedly draws attention to the fact that he is transmitting Greek learning into a new tongue. Dialectic and geometry both mention how unusual it is to present their arts in Latin, and nous is not the only Greek technical term to show up in Marcianus' text. The Greek origins of the very names of the arts are also highlighted. Especially significant is the etymology of geometry as land measurement, which explains why this speech deals at length with what we would call geography. Though Marcianus' marriage was thus highly useful for Latin readers, it is not a translation and gave medievals no access to the words of Plato himself. For that, they depended entirely on a single, incomplete translation of one dialogue, the Timaeus. The translator was Calcidius, who also supplied a commentary that is deeply influenced by middle and neo-Platonism. We do not know much about him, our main clue being a preface which addresses the commentary to a clergyman in Spain named Osius. This suggests a date in the first half of the 4th century, and also that Calcidius was a Christian. Yet, though he does occasionally refer to the Bible, Calcidius makes no effort to Christianize Plato or the Platonists. Mostly, he simply ascribes later Platonist ideas directly to Plato. Again, an example is Plotinus' doctrine that the highest god is followed by a second intellective principle called nous. A more complicated example of his use of Platonist ideas is his treatment of providence. The middle Platonist drew a distinction between fate and providence. Fate was effectively the sort of divine mastery recognized by the Stoics, which is to say an imminent principle within the natural world. Fate is a sort of law laid down for the physical cosmos by a more exalted providence, which proceeds from divine, immaterial principles. All things are subject to providence, but only things within the physical, natural world are subject to fate. Now, because human souls have an immaterial part, the part with which they reason and can achieve virtue, humans are not necessarily bound by fate. Insofar as we live in accordance with reason alone and focus on pure contemplation, we effectively exempt ourselves from the law of fate. But as soon as we act within the physical world, we submit ourselves to those laws. Thus, to take an example I mentioned quite a while ago, when Oedipus killed a man who happened to be his father at a crossroads, his action was one performed within the physical realm. Fate governs such actions in the sense that it apportions reward and punishment in keeping with the laws laid down by providence. So we can say that it was fated that Oedipus would go on to marry his own mother, bring a plague upon his city, and tear his own eyes out. This sounds fairly stoic, except for the crucial Platonist caveat that Oedipus had a rational soul that was not controlled by fate. If he had chosen an accordance with reason, he could have avoided giving in to his angry impulse at the crossroads, a sure sign that his lower, spirited soul was in charge. These ideas about providence were first devised by middle Platonists, and they reappear in Neoplatonists including Plotinus, Porphyry, and Hierocles. Calcidius brings the theory into Latin though, and in the context of a commentary on the Timaeus that would be read for many generations to come. One of his allusions to the Bible even brings the Platonist theory of fate together with the Old Testament. He quotes a statement in which God promises that reward and punishment will be sent for the things we do, an indication that fate is a divinely appointed law triggered by our actions in this world. The texts I've discussed in this episode have much in common. Most obviously they are all in Latin, and self-consciously so. Like Cicero before them, they comment on the task of bringing Greek culture into a new language. Yet, the impact of Latin culture is also felt throughout their writings. Macrobius and Marcianus Capella knew and used Varro, Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, and Virgil. In fact, Macrobius wrote another work called the Saturnalia that presents Virgil as a consummate philosopher. He would be annoyed with me for failing to devote a podcast to the Aeneid. Another commonality is that the Latin Platonists frequently drew on the same relatively narrow range of sources. Plato's Timaeus looms larger than other dialogues, though they do refer to favorite passages from elsewhere in Plato, such as that argument for the soul's immortality found in the Phaedrus. I mentioned that it was defended by Macrobius, and Calcidius also weaves it into his commentary on the Timaeus. As for late antique philosophers, it's striking that the one who seems to influence the Latin Platonists most was not a church father or even Plotinus, but Porphyry. I've already mentioned Porphyry's impact on Victorinus, Macrobius, and Marcianus Capella, but I haven't told you that his commentary on the Timaeus was likely an important source for Calcidius. The only Latin Platonist not influenced by Porphyry was Apuleius, which only stands to reason since Porphyry lived quite a bit later than he did. Our later Latin Platonists furthermore adopt Porphyry's interest in Aristotelian logic, without exploring Aristotle much further. Victorinus translated Porphyry's Isegogae and Aristotle's categories and On Interpretation, which are also the basis for a long portion of the speech of dialectic in Marcianus Capella. In all these respects, our Latin Platonists anticipate what we will find in the last ancient philosopher to be covered in this series of podcasts, Boethius. He was an expert on Aristotelian logic, and drew heavily on Porphyry. Like Calcidius, he translated Greek philosophy into Latin and had an enormous impact on medieval culture. In fact, both Boethius and Macrobius were enthusiastically read and used by Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet, like Victorinus before him, Boethius did not let his interest in pagan thought stop him from writing about the Trinity. Meanwhile, Marcianus Capella's Marriage partially anticipates Boethius's greatest work, an allegory which likewise personifies an intellectual discipline, in this case, Lady Philosophy herself. But the occasion is a less festive one. Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy while under a death sentence, and the consolation Lady Philosophy offers him is needed because he faces imminent execution. We've had the marriage, next time it will be a funeral, as I come not only to praise ancient philosophy, but also to bury it. Here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fate, Hope, and Clarity. Boethius. As you might imagine, I find myself reading and working on philosophy in some rather strange places. On trains and buses, at the beach, at the department store while family members are trying on clothes, these are just a few of the places I've cuddled up with Plato or Avicenna. In fact, while I was preparing for this episode, you could have seen me in my kitchen reading about Boethius while making mashed potatoes. But I draw the line at airplanes. They make me too nervous to work, which I realize is silly. I mean, I know that I'm vanishingly unlikely to die in a plane crash. So for me, an hour spent in a plane is an hour wasted, at least as far as philosophy goes. Okay, an hour wasted. This makes me all the more impressed when I consider Boethius, who wrote his greatest philosophical work in the certain knowledge that he was indeed about to die, not while experiencing a plane crash, that would take some pretty quick writing, but while waiting to be executed at the order of the Emperor Theodoric in the year 525 or 6. On the other hand, Boethius got some help that has never been offered to me. While in captivity, he was visited by Lady Philosophy herself. His dialogue with her is recorded in The Consolation of Philosophy, not only his great latest work, but also a work with far-reaching influence on philosophy and literature. In The Consolation, Boethius complains to Lady Philosophy that he has been the victim of political intrigue, and this is true enough. He had occupied a high office under Theodoric, but fell from grace when he leapt to the defense of a Senator named Albinus who had been accused of treason. The nature of the supposed treason reminds us that we are now at the end of antiquity. The Empire is definitively split into two halves, with the western half wobbling, but not yet fallen. Theodoric was a Goth who had taken charge of Italy in the 490s, but he was not recognized by the East as a full Emperor in the West. Thus, Theodoric had a troubled relationship with the court in Constantinople, and was sensitive to the possibility that his independence might be undermined. This is probably what lay behind the charge of treason against Albinus, who had supposedly communicated with the Eastern Court. When Boethius spoke out on behalf of Albinus's faithfulness, he fell from favor. He was taken to Pavia, imprisoned, and, after an incarceration long enough that he could write his masterpiece, executed. Because Boethius did live at the very end of antiquity, and because his writings had such a decisive influence on medieval philosophy, he is often thought of as a medieval author. But even if Boethius was in fact ushering in a new age of thought in Christian Europe, with limited access to philosophical literature and disappearing knowledge of Greek, he was not of the medieval age. He was, rather, a Roman aristocrat, whose thought world was still more like that of Cicero than that of Anselm, Abelard, or Aquinas. You don't have to have a name starting with A to be a medieval philosopher, but it helps. Like Cicero, Boethius was a man with a busy public life, who devoted much of his free time to the study and Latin translation of Greek philosophy. Unlike Cicero, however, his attention was devoted almost entirely to Plato, Aristotle, and commentaries on Aristotle. Even more unlike Cicero, Boethius was a Christian, who wrote works on Trinitarian theology. In the 19th century, scholars doubted whether the author of the Consolation and the Logical Works, which have no overt Christian content, could also have produced these theological writings. But these doubts were ill-founded. In fact, even a casual perusal of Boethius' theological works shows that he is putting his knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy to use, as he explains God, the Trinity, and the Incarnation. But let's start where Boethius would probably want us to, his works on Aristotelian logic. In one of these, he announced his intention to translate all the works of Plato and Aristotle. If this enormously ambitious project had been brought to fruition, medieval philosophy might have looked very different. Theodoric has a lot to answer for. Before his untimely death, Boethius was fairly prolific but still got only as far as Aristotle's logical works. As we know, this was the usual starting place for the study of philosophy in late antiquity, in places like Alexandria. So it's no surprise that Boethius prioritized logic. He wrote translations and commentaries, in some cases more than one commentary on a single work, on Porphyry's introduction and most of Aristotle's organon. He wrote independent treatises too, one corresponding to Aristotle's topics but drawing heavily on Cicero's work of the same name. Boethius' focus on logic is not the only thing he shares with the philosophers of Alexandria. He was a near contemporary of the head of the Alexandrian school, Ammonius, and we often find him making comments about Aristotle that match with the remarks of Ammonius and his pupils. This is probably not because Boethius was in contact with the Alexandrian school, but because he drew on the same sources. Among those sources, the most important was Porphyry. Not only did Boethius write on Porphyry's introduction, he also drew heavily on Porphyry's commentaries on Aristotle. Boethius was a competent, though not terribly innovative, logician. His importance for the history of logic is nonetheless immense, since he became the primary conduit through which Aristotelian logic could reach Latin-reading medieval philosophers. An example of his influence is his decision to discuss a question Porphyry raised but didn't answer in his introduction. As you might remember, Porphyry asked what we should say about the status of universals, fundamental features shared by many individuals such as whiteness or humanity. Boethius' decision to discuss this problem in his commentary ensured that medieval readers would see the metaphysical issue of the status of universals as fundamental in Latin writings about logic. Logic more generally was fundamental for Boethius himself, and he drew on his logical expertise in his works on Christian theology and his consolation. In honor of his interest in the Trinity, I'll give you three examples. The first has to do with Aristotle's categories. As you'll remember, Aristotle there classifies types of predicates or terms that apply to things. One class of predicates is relation, which would include for instance master and slave, or father and son. I don't choose that second example randomly. In a treatise called On the Trinity, Boethius realizes that he can exploit the notion of a relation to explain the difference between the Trinitarian persons, father, son, and Holy Spirit. First though, he is careful to argue that God is in indivisible unity. Unlike created things, like a human who is composed out of both body and soul, God is, as Boethius puts it, nothing but what He is. Thus, if we say that God is good, we mean not that God is a substance of which goodness is predicated, as white would be predicated of a piece of paper, or as a form, like the soul, is predicated of a body. Rather, we mean that God is simply goodness itself. This looks like a good way of securing God's utter simplicity. Anything we can say about God will refer to a nature that is identical with God Himself. But that seems to raise problems for the doctrine of the Trinity. If the Father is identical to God, and so is the Son, then won't the Father be identical with the Son, so that we have one and not two persons? Yes and no, says Boethius. They will indeed be identical, but now exploiting Aristotle, there is still a relation between them that is sufficient to produce the difference in persons. The difference doesn't make God into two distinct beings, because adding relations to something doesn't affect what it is in itself. For instance, I might go stand next to you, so that you bear to me the relation of being to my left. If I then go around the other side, you'll have the relation of being to my right. But you remain unchanged in yourself throughout. In fact, you may not even notice. I'll be very quiet, because I'll probably be reading about philosophy the whole time. In the same way, God is subject to relations like fatherhood and sonhood without this turning Him into more than one thing. After all, as Boethius points out, a thing can bear a relation to itself, such as the relation of self-identity. This gives us some idea of what is happening in the Trinity, though not a full understanding, because we never experience something like the Trinitarian relationship among created things. This mention of created things takes us to another theological work by Boethius on why things are good in virtue of their existence. Here, Boethius is going to make use of another weapon from his logical arsenal. This one he borrows from Porphyry, the proper or inseparable accident. Here, the idea is that, even if a feature cannot be removed from something in reality, it may be possible to remove it conceptually. The standard example is a human's ability to laugh. Porphyry also gave the example of a scar, which, before the invention of laser surgery, couldn't be taken away from the scarred person. The point is that, since such features can at least be removed in our thought, they can't be essential to the thing that has the feature. If the scar on my thumb miraculously disappeared, I would still be me and would still be human. Thus equipped, let's turn to this theological treatise about why things are good. What Boethius wants to explain here is the fact that everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good. Obviously, the first thing we might want to explain is why Boethius would think this is true. One way of explaining it would be that he is accepting the understanding of goodness and evil pioneered by Plotinus and accepted by Augustine, who is one of Boethius's favorite authors. On this view, evil is just an absence of being, the failure of something to realize its nature to the extent that it could and should. But that means that insofar as anything does exist, it must be good. If it lacked goodness entirely, it would simply cease to be. Boethius is happy to accept this, which gives him a problem. He doesn't want to say things are good in their very essence. If part of what it is to be me is for me to be good, the way that part of what it is to be me is for me to be rational and alive, then I would be good in exactly the same way as God. For God is, as we saw, good in himself. Boethius solves the difficulty by asking us to imagine a situation that can never occur, where all created things exist but God, who is goodness itself, does not. In this case, claims Boethius, things would no longer be good by virtue of existing. They would still be good alright, remember that if they didn't they would cease to exist entirely. But the goodness would only be an inseparable accident, like humans' ability to laugh or my scar. This is because goodness is not part of what it is to be, say, a human, a giraffe, or any other created thing. This is one way that they differ from God. Goodness is thus conceptually separable from being human or giraffe, even if it is not separable in reality. Thus, it is only thanks to the presence of God, as Creator, that things are good insofar as they exist. It isn't entirely clear what Boethius means here. One plausible interpretation would be that he is showing his Platonist leanings and thinks that created things continue to exist by participating in God, who is goodness itself, like participating in a Platonic form of good. Goodness comes to them from the outside, as it were, bestowed by God rather than belonging to their own natures. But it is still intimately bound up with their existence, because they only exist at all, thanks to the will of God, the first good. Our third and final logical theme is the problem of truths about the future, which seem to make future events inevitable. As we've seen, Aristotle first broached this issue in his On Interpretation, with the famous example of the sea battle, and Boethius takes up the question in his commentary on that work. The reading of Aristotle he offers is also found in Greek commentators like Ammonius. According to this reading, Aristotle solves the difficulty by saying that there are only indefinite truths about future events. Unfortunately, it again isn't quite clear what Boethius means. He may mean that according to Aristotle, present statements about the future are indefinite because they are going to turn out true or false, but it isn't yet decided which. Thus, if I say, I will watch a Buster Keaton movie tomorrow, then this will certainly wind up being either true or false, but will not become true or false until I actually watch the movie or fail to do so. Alternatively, Boethius might mean that a statement like, I will watch a Buster Keaton movie tomorrow is right now true rather than false, but not necessarily true. So I could truly say that I will in fact watch the movie without this meaning that it is inevitable that I watch the movie. After all, the truth I'm asserting here is contingent, because I could easily have decided not to watch a Buster Keaton movie, unwise though that would be. If on the other hand I said 2 plus 2 will equal 4 tomorrow, what I am saying now will already be necessarily true. A more famous discussion of this issue occurs at the end of that jailhouse classic, The Consolation of Philosophy. Here though we are dealing with the version of the difficulty discussed by Augustine. Once we admit that God knows future events with certainty, don't we have to conclude that there are indeed present truths about those events, and that the truths are necessary? Boethius arrives at this point only after a long dialogue with his visitor Lady Philosophy. At first the prisoner Boethius is too distraught to worry about these logical niceties. Lady Philosophy has comforted him with a regime of arguments, first offering him gentle medicines and then more severe ones. The gentle medicines include getting Boethius to reflect on respects in which he remains fortunate. For instance, his family is still alive, even if he will shortly be killed. Lady Philosophy moves on to show Boethius that there is no point lamenting about the way the wheel of fortune turns. That is in the nature of fortune, after all, which stays the same only in that it is constantly changing, raising up the lowly and casting down the powerful. Lady Philosophy sounds very like Marcus Aurelius when she dismisses the role of chance in the universe or says that we should never value anything that can be taken away from us. A more Augustinian note is sounded when Lady Philosophy gives her positive account of happiness. It lies not in virtue and self-mastery, as Epictetus or Marcus might say, but is to be identified with God himself, which may remind us of Augustine's City of God. Still, pagan Hellenic sources are never far from Lady Philosophy's mind. She seems to have read Plato's Gorgias closely, as she comforts Boethius by telling him that the wicked of this world only seem to be powerful and happy. In fact, the good alone are powerful and do what they want, whereas the wicked suffer from their own wickedness. What would be good for them, as Plato held, would be corrective punishment. There's more than a hint of Plotinus mixed into Lady Philosophy's medicine too, perhaps filtered through Augustine. For here we find again the idea that evil itself is nothing, and therefore that the wicked are simply failing to do anything when they perform evil actions. Seen from the point of view of divine providence, the world contains no evil. Admittedly, it does contain suffering, but even this is sent by providence, either as a test for the good or a punishment for the evil. So far, so optimistic, but it does lead Boethius to this difficulty about providence itself. If God providentially knows everything that will happen, then isn't everything necessary? Lady Philosophy admits that it seems so, because God obviously cannot be wrong about anything. Since it seems that He could not have certainty about things that are in themselves uncertain, there is no possibility that the things He knows be otherwise. Thus all things that God knows, including future events, are necessary, but God knows everything, therefore everything is necessary. Towards a solution, Lady Philosophy points out that if you see something happening presently, that doesn't make what you are seeing necessary. She gives the example of a chariot race. If the motions of the chariot drivers are not even necessary while they are occurring, then much less could they be necessary before they occur. Moreover, as they are occurring, you can be certain that what you are seeing is happening. This shows that in a way, certainty is indeed compatible with the absence of necessity. The problem is that future events don't seem to be like this. From our point of view, they are still open or unsettled in a way that a present event is not. But our point of view is not the same as God's. Appealing to a distinction that was introduced by the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, Boethius has Lady Philosophy say that the way things are known is appropriate not to what is known, but to the knower. Thus events that seem uncertain to us could be certain for God. This is because God does not really know future events as future events. He never changes, so that unlike us, He has knowledge that does not alter from moment to moment. Instead, He sees all things, the things that for us are past, present, and future, with a single simultaneous knowledge. Boethius makes the point in Latin by saying that God's knowledge is not praevidencia, knowing in advance, but providencia, which means knowing from a commanding vantage point, like someone surveying things from a high mountain. This idea too is originally Neoplatonic, albeit that again, Boethius could have found it in Augustine. God has an unchanging relationship towards things that change in time, and as Plotinus said, a being who lives such an unchanging life can be called eternal. At first blush, this might seem to make the problem even worse. Now we are saying not only that God knows now what I will do tomorrow, but that He knows eternally and unchangingly what I will do tomorrow. If the sea battle argument makes my actions look inevitable, this argument looks like it could make my actions immutably inevitable. But Lady Philosophy draws the opposite conclusion. God's eternity means He sees every event occurring as if it were present for Him. His seeing tomorrow's chariot race is just like your seeing today's chariot race. So we should no more think that His foreknowledge implies necessity in a future event than we should think that our ordinary present knowledge implies necessity in a present event. This is an ingenious suggestion for solving the problem of divine foreknowledge, so much so that I think we wouldn't be spinning our wheels by thinking about it a bit more. We'll do just that in our next and final episode on ancient Christian philosophy, and indeed, ancient philosophy in general, by turning to the world's leading expert on Boethius's philosophy. I suspect that John Marin Bond already knows what he's going to say next time about Boethius and divine foreknowledge here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with John Maranbon, who will be talking to me about Boethius. Hi, John, thanks for coming on. It's a pleasure. I've already covered Boethius in a previous episode, but maybe we could start by just having you say something about who Boethius was. Right. Well, although Boethius might be placed, as I think he is in this series, at the end of a series of Latin church fathers, really he's very different because he lived at the end of the 5th, the beginning of the 6th century, spending most of his time in Rome, at a time when Italy was under the rule of the Ostrogoths. But Boethius belonged to the elite of Rome. This elite was allowed to go on living in a very traditional way and even given the illusion of some power. And somebody like Boethius received an extraordinarily good classical education, which involved learning Greek or almost certainly from a Greek native speaker. And he had full access to what was going on in Greece and to the whole of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian tradition as it was still preserved in the Greek-speaking world. So he's far more of a classical figure than somebody like Augustine, although Augustine is earlier. And unlike the church fathers, Boethius was indeed a Christian, but he was a Christian layman. He wasn't a priest or certainly not a bishop or anything like that. And he did indeed write some short theological works which seemed to relate to some theological controversies of the time in which he was trying to use his great skills, especially as a logician, in order to argue for what he thought to be the right theological positions. But the majority of his work has nothing to do with Christian doctrine. And for most of his life, indeed, what he was doing was putting into Latin various works on the liberal arts, so on arithmetic and on music and so on. But then he was translating Aristotle's logical works and providing commentaries on them and also providing logical textbooks. Well, what's the relationship then between all of these works and, I guess, in particular, what's the relationship of these theological writings and the logical writings to his most famous work, which we're going to be talking about today, which is his Consolation of Philosophy? You might say there were two main sorts of relation. Why is that when you read the Consolation of Philosophy, you're surprised that it's by a Christian author. And indeed, there were scholars in the past, nobody really follows them now, who thought that perhaps this was written by a different Boethius who was a pagan or perhaps Boethius at the end of his life had reverted to paganism, which seems a silly suggestion because he and his whole milieu was a Christian milieu. But the Consolation of Philosophy is a Consolation of Philosophy. It's written without any explicit references to Christianity. And a work like that makes sense if you think of somebody whose background was translating and commenting on Aristotle. And indeed, this was part of a wider project, which he never completed, to translate Aristotle and everything by Plato he could find. So, he is somebody who thinks of himself as belonging to the ancient tradition of philosophy, but fairly obviously sees no contradiction between that and being a Christian. And that's one thing which is explained by this earlier work. But also, when we turn to what I think is probably the most philosophically rigorous and interesting part of the Consolation, the fifth book and the argument about divine prescience and freedom, there Boethius, the logician, really comes to the fore. So, he's obviously looking back, especially to ideas that he had when he was commenting on Aristotle's own interpretation, though he's not just repeating them. But one couldn't imagine this argument without his basis as a logician. Well, that, in fact, is what I wanted to really concentrate on in this interview, which is the fifth book of the Consolation of Philosophy, the most famous part of the most famous thing that he wrote. And there he engages with this problem, which is basically that if God knows the future, which he must because he's omniscient, then it looks like that might pose a problem for human freedom. Could you say a little bit about why that is, in fact, a problem? All right. Well, perhaps I want to start from saying that intuitively, it's pretty obvious that there's a problem there. Just imagine if, as soon as you went out every day, somebody popped a letter through your postbox. I see a letter. And when you came back in the evening, you saw that this letter recounted exactly what you had gone on to do during the course of the day. And everything that you tried to do unexpected things, but you always found the letter corresponded. And then supposing you were told, well, this is not just somebody who's wonderful at guessing. It actually must be the case, because this letter doesn't express a guess, a well-founded belief about what you're going to do, but it expresses knowledge. So it must be true by definition. And that seems to be what people are saying when they say God foreknows what will happen. So, if you like, one can see intuitively that there's going to be a problem there. The question of how the problem is formulated, though, is much more difficult. And I think that most interpretation of Boethius gets wrong the way in which he formulates the problem. He formulates it in a perfectly sensible way, and therefore mistakes quite how his solution fits the problem, because it consumes the solution as the solution to a problem understood in a way that he never understood it. So what's the wrong way of understanding the problem? I think the wrong way of understanding it, and if I can try to put this without getting too technical, is the sort of thing where it would be easier to write things up on a blackboard with some logical notation. But the wrong way of construing it says that the problem for freedom is this, that if we say that God foreknows what I'm going to do, it's not just that God foreknows now what I'm going to do. God foreknew it yesterday, and indeed God foreknew it from eternity. And so God's knowing that I'm going to do something is a fact about the past. So God already knows, God has come to know that fact about the past, that I'm going to have a cup of coffee after my lunch today. But since we're dealing firstly with knowledge, so it's not God guessing, but it's God actually knowing. But secondly, because it's something in the past, it's necessary in the way that the past is necessary, you can't change it. It does seem that by pretty exceptional logical laws, you can infer that if God has come to know that I'm going to have a cup of coffee after lunch today, then it's necessary that I have that cup of coffee. Of course, you can say the same about anything that I do, so anything that I do or anybody does, because God foreknows all things in this way, is necessary. So there the emphasis is on, a vital stage in the argument is that God has come to know it's a fact about the past. And Boethius, when he's giving the solution to the problem, and one thing which everybody agrees is he spends a lot of time talking about time and eternity. And he says that in some sense at least, God does not relate to time in the way that other things do. This is often taken as being the assertion by Boethius that God is atemporal. So if you apply any sort of temporal qualification to God, such as God did this, God will do this, God does this if you're talking about the present, or God knew, God knows, God will know, you're making an incorrect assertion because you're treating God as something temporal. So then the solution to the proposal of problems. Exactly, then the solution is perfectly easy if you accept that. The problem relies on asserting that God's having come to know that what I'll do is a fact about the past. It's not a fact about the past, because no facts about God are facts about the past. End of the problem. However, I don't think that's at all how Boethius sees it. And in fact, when he sets up the problem, he doesn't make a big deal about the fact that God already knew things in the past. He doesn't even mention them. Absolutely, absolutely. No, no, that's precisely right, yes. I mean, that's the striking thing about it. And firstly, there's... so the first thing is that. He doesn't mention that. I mean, secondly, in order to put in a more precise way the argument that I've tried to give rather informally, you have to have an apparatus of propositional logic, which Boethius simply didn't have. And if you look at his work on propositional logic, he wrote this textbook on hypothetical syllogisms, you see that he didn't understand propositional logic. So he just, I mean, he couldn't have made that argument properly. And the other thing is that if that had been his argument, it would... I mean, it's very simple, it's very straightforward. And so... but in fact, you find a lot of detailed argumentation between putting forward the problem and bringing up this idea of eternity. And that would just be pointless, if that were the way to go about it. OK, well, it seems then like these other interpreters looked at the solution and then thought, well, this must be the problem, because at least this solution about eternity would be a solution to that problem. That's right. And also because the problem certainly was formulated in that way from the 13th century onwards. So they're reading back later. Yes, yes. OK, well, if that isn't the problem, then what is the problem? Right. I think the... I think he's... Boethius sees the problem like this. We know that God, that there is a God who knows everything, and knowing is grasping something for certain. But only what's fixed can be grasped for certain. So if the truth about my... about the sort of action which my having a cup of coffee is, is that it's something which might go one way or the other, because I might choose to have a cup of coffee or not. So if this thing which is going to happen in the future is uncertain, unfixed in this way, it's just not something that any being could grasp for certain. And yet we know that the world is such that there is a God who does grasp these things for certain. And it's not just that God gets them right. It's that they're grasped for certain. And so they are being considered by God as things which are fixed, because otherwise he wouldn't be grasping them for certain. So when you say that God knows them for certain, I guess what you mean is something like when God reflects on his knowledge that you'll have a cup of coffee, one of the things that he knows about it is that it couldn't be false that you're going to have a cup of coffee. Is that the idea? Well, yes. And I think that he... I mean, it couldn't be false because I know it. So how could it be false? Yeah. I mean, in a way it's even simpler for Boethius, because if you look at his commentary on interpretation, he makes the claim there that if you ever assert the proposition, it will happen. The meaning of that is that it will happen in such a way that it couldn't not happen. So the correct way for us of talking about, for instance, a future sea battle is not to say there will be a sea battle tomorrow, there won't be a sea battle tomorrow, but because if I say there will be a sea battle tomorrow and a sea battle takes place, I still would have been wrong, because my assertion that there will be a sea battle, in his view, means a sea battle is going to take place in such a way that it couldn't not take place. Just as if I assert I'm talking to you now, what I mean by that is I'm talking to you now and it can't not be the case. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes. And he thinks that goes... that applies to statements about the future. So you have to... if you want to make a statement about a contingent future, you have to say the sea battle will take place, but it will take place in such a way that it might not have taken place. So if God simply knows the proposition, John will have his cup of coffee after lunch, and not John will have his coffee after lunch in such a way that he mightn't, that means that God would be grasping the proposition, would be knowing the proposition, I'm going to have my coffee after lunch, and it couldn't be otherwise. But that, of course... I mean, if you want to maintain that in fact I'm free to have my cup of coffee or not, then you'd have to say that in that case God was... God had a false belief. But that can't be the case. So in order to ensure that God doesn't have false beliefs, we have to admit that nothing happens contingently. OK. So it sounds to me like the problem then really emerges from a certain understanding that he has about knowledge rather than a worry about past truth. Yeah, I think so, yes. And given that then, how does his solution really work? Because what he actually does say is that God is, if not timeless, then eternal in the sense that everything is present to God. How is that relevant for solving this problem put in terms of knowledge rather than past truth? Well I think one needs to think of the intermediate steps. And the important intermediate step is the challenge which is made to the principle that if one has a belief about something which is not like the way the thing is, then that belief isn't knowledge, but false belief. Now that principle, you might call it the likeness principle, so the little likeness between beliefs which are going to be true and the way things are. Well that might seem to be pretty obvious. It might seem to be very odd to suggest that you could have a belief which was in some way unlike the way in which the things really are, which are about which the belief is. And yet that belief should be true and should be knowledge. Can you give me an example of the sort of thing you mean? So in what way is a belief supposed to be like the object of the belief? In this particular case, the whole position, the problem hinges on saying that given that we are dealing with an event which is unfixed, then the belief has to be used to congruent with that in seeing it as something unfixed. So in the human case, if I'm thinking, oh, John might have a cup of coffee after lunch, he usually does, I might even then believe that you will, but I'll believe it in a way that's uncertain, and the thought is that I have this uncertain belief which matches an uncertain event. Exactly. And we take two cases of you having a belief about my having a cup of coffee after lunch. In both cases, you believe that I'm going to have a cup of coffee after lunch, and in fact I am. So in a certain sense, it's true. But in the first case, you believe it in the way that you've just described. In the second case, you believe it, but you believe I'm going to have a cup of coffee as a matter of necessity. Now so long as we're not determinists, you might say, well, in the second belief, you've got things wrong. You have indeed predicted what I'm going to do, but your belief isn't congruent with the way in which things are. Right. Just as if I thought, well, one plus one is probably two. Exactly, yes. I would make the same mistake in the other direction, because I would be taking something to be uncertain when it is in fact certain. Yeah, exactly, yes. And then I guess what Boethius would want to say is just that God is certain about things that are in themselves uncertain. Is that right? That's right, yes. But what Boethius wants to do is to say that actually that principle is wrong. So he puts forward what I like to call the modes of cognition principle, which is to say that one has to consider knowledge not from the things known, not from the point of view of things known, but from the point of view of the knower, and that knowers at different levels will know the same things, the same, we might say, states of affairs in different ways, but they can all be said to have knowledge. This is sometimes said to be Iamblichus' principle, because you find something a bit similar in Iamblichus, and certainly Boethius was influenced by it. But I think it's a bit different, because in Boethius, as you don't find, I think, in Iamblichus or anybody else taking up this principle, the whole emphasis falls on the really difficult case of knowing for certain something which, by its very nature, is uncertain. And what then follows the explanation about God and his relation to time is an explanation about how that can be, what it is about the nature of God, which is quite different from the nature of humans, which permits him to know in this way, and that's how it fits together. Namely, the fact that everything is present to him, past, present, and future are all present to him in the way that they're not to us. That's absolutely right, yes. But the other thing that I want to stress, and this again is against various other interpretations, is that the way that you've put it is all that Boethius is committed to. So quite a lot of people, and I said before in the ordinary way of, this common way of explaining this, people often talk about Boethius saying that God is atemporal. A way in which they often cash this out, which also seems to me a bit problematic, is to say that as a metaphysical fact about God, God's existence is simultaneous with past, present, and future. Now in parenthesis, I think if something is atemporal, you can't say it's simultaneous with, because simultaneity is a temporal motion. You say that it's existence is such that you can't place it temporally at all. But a lot of people want to have this perhaps rather funny view that metaphysically it's the case that past, present, and future are simultaneous with God's, as they say, atemporal existence. And therefore, because of this metaphysical status, God grasps everything at once and grasps everything as being present, because it really is present. Whereas I think all that Boethius commits himself to, and what seems to be more likely his position, is that God, because of the way in which God exists, he is able to know what really is the future, but just as we know the present, just in the same way as we know the present, because it's as it were present to him. Right, and that's why he compares God's situation to the situation of a human who's watching something happening right now, like a chariot race. Exactly, yes. That's right, yes. That's interesting. So speaking of the future, I guess one thing about Boethius is that he's often treated as if he were a medieval figure. I mean, you mentioned at the beginning that in some ways he's more classical than some of the earlier Latin church fathers, but to the extent that he's taught in universities nowadays, he's usually taught in courses on medieval philosophy. And I guess that to some extent that's justified because he was very influential in the medieval period. Absolutely, yes. So do you see him as kind of the beginning of medieval philosophy in a way? For the reasons I was saying, which you've just summarised, it would be wrong to see him himself as the beginning of medieval philosophy since he's so thoroughly a classical figure. And one of the important things about medieval Latin philosophy is that hardly any of the philosophers themselves knew any Greek. They had to rely on a rather limited range of translations from the Greek, a lot of which indeed were made by Boethius himself. Now, that position is not so different from that of some of the church fathers. I mean, you think of Augustine. Certainly there were certain Greek sources available to him in translation which weren't available later on. But again, he was mostly a thinker who was limited to what he could know from translation. And that's very, very different for Boethius. The way surrounding him as the first medieval thinker, I suppose I think of him as a thinker without whose works one can't imagine what medieval philosophy would have been. And I suppose you could say in some sense, surely that applies to almost any of the big sources. But there is a particularly vital role which he plays and the only other person who seems to play so important a role, or perhaps the two people, one is Aristotle himself, but is Aristotle as transmitted by Boethius, and the other is Augustine. Medieval philosophy would have turned out in a very different sort of way. And I suppose in fact, with regard both to Augustine and Boethius, we can almost sort of test this because Augustine and Boethius are tremendously important in the Latin tradition, but as of limited importance in the Byzantine tradition, they do, especially when the Theos-Gers get translated at some point, and of no importance in the Arabic tradition, though those traditions did have the other ancient authors. So one can gauge in some way the influence of Boethius and indeed Augustine by making such a comparison. Well, that gives me a perfect transition to the topic of the next episode, which will be in fact the beginning of medieval philosophy, at least the way I'm going to define it. And I'm going to be starting by looking at philosophy in the Islamic world, so the Arabic tradition that John was just referring to. But for now, I'll thank John very much. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to have spoken to you. And please join me next time when I'll begin to look at philosophy in the Islamic world here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Keynes College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Straight Path, Philosophy and Islam. Like a policeman following a silverware thief with a hole in his pocket, we have reached a fork in the road. The last episodes have brought us to the end of antiquity and to three traditions that were, at least at first, largely independent of one another. First, there is Byzantine philosophy, which we left with Maximus Confessor. Greek speakers in the Eastern Empire did not get a memo from some headquarters telling them that antiquity was over and that they had to stop philosophizing. To the contrary, scholars in the medieval Byzantine period simply carried on what had been business as usual in late antiquity. They commented on Aristotle. They applied the tools of Hellenic thought to expound Christian doctrine. They copied out manuscripts in Greek, which is why so much ancient philosophy survives today in its original language. Meanwhile, in most of the former Western Empire, Latin became the sole language of philosophy and knowledge of Greek became rare. As a result, the figures we looked at most recently, Augustine, the Latin Platonists, and Boethius, were indispensable sources in this part of the world. Most of Aristotle, and nearly all of Plato, were inaccessible in Latin for several centuries. We will reach these Byzantine and Latin traditions in due course, but first I'm going to take us down a third road, one that you need to travel from right to left, philosophy in Arabic. It unfolded in the lands dominated by a new faith that called itself the straight path, Islam. We have already tiptoed up to the beginning of this road too. I mentioned the Muslim conquests when talking about Maximus Confessor and alluded to developments in Syria in the episode about Christian asceticism. The Syriac language is about to make a brief but important appearance in our story. So far though, we haven't looked at a single thinker who wrote in or even spoke Arabic. That's about to change as we embark on a lengthy examination of philosophy in the Islamic world. This will of course mean talking about philosophers who were Muslims, and about the impact of Islam itself on philosophy, but it will also mean looking at Christian and Jewish thinkers who lived in Muslim lands. Christians played a major role in the early development of philosophy in Arabic. They served as translators, and some of the leading early exegetes of Aristotle in Arabic were Christians. Meanwhile, Jewish philosophy, between the 9th and 13th centuries, took place almost entirely within the territories dominated by Islam. Nowadays, scholarship on philosophy written in the Islamic world generally deals with these two faith traditions separately, but a more revealing approach is to look at the whole history of philosophy in the Islamic world in chronological order. This will allow us to situate Jewish philosophy in its immediate context, a context that, as often as not, was determined by developments in Islamic intellectual history. For instance, we'll soon be discussing early developments in Islamic theology which will provide us with the necessary background for understanding the great early Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon. An even more prominent example is Maimonides. He was one of the two greatest exponents of philosophy in the Iberian peninsula, or Andalusia, in the 12th century. The other was a Muslim, a Varroes. Thus, the coming episodes are about philosophy as it developed in the lands under Muslim political dominion, but I won't only be covering Muslim philosophers. In all, the story of philosophy in the Islamic world will be occupying us for about a year's worth of podcasts. Before we begin though, let me explain why I'm following this strand first rather than the Greek Byzantine or Latin medieval traditions. For one thing, we need to cover philosophy in Arabic before looking at philosophy in Latin. A shift in medieval Latin philosophy began in the 12th century as a result of ideas flowing from the Islamic world. Muslims like Abiseneh and Averroes, and Jews like Maimonides, exerted great influence on Christians like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The Greek Byzantine tradition, meanwhile, is a bit more autonomous. My plan is to make it the last thread of our medieval tapestry, so that it will be fresh in our minds as useful background for the Renaissance. And there is another reason to do philosophy in the Islamic world first, I just can't wait. Most of my own research has dealt with figures from this tradition, and now I'm going to get a chance to tell you about the philosophers I know best. If you're half as excited as I am, you'll be impatient too, so let's start. But where to start? Or rather, when? Well, if you're a bit fuzzy on the chronology of Islam, I suggest you try to remember the following date, 622 AD. This is the year in which the Prophet Muhammad led his followers away from the city of Mecca to the definitively named Medina. The word Madina just means city. The Islamic calendar is dated beginning from this event. You might see years of that calendar labeled with AH, which stands for the Latin phrase Ano Hegire, that is, the year of the Hijra, which is Arabic for emigration. So if you take an AD year and subtract 622, you'll be in the general ballpark of the corresponding AH date, albeit not exactly right, because the Islamic calendar is lunar, so that one of its years doesn't have quite the same length as one year in a solar calendar. Why in any case was this event so important that it merited being taken as the starting point of a new calendar? Because it marked the beginning of a distinct Muslim society. From this beginning would grow a great empire. Within just a few generations, the religion of Islam had spread with spectacular speed across not just the Arabian peninsula, but to the west across northern Africa and ultimately into Iberia, and to the east, through Iraq, and then further still into Persia and Central Asia. With Islam spread the Arabic language. The Quran is of course in the language spoken by Muhammad, and several verses call attention to this fact. God says to Muhammad such things as, we have made it for you an Arabic Quran. The very name of the holy book draws our attention to the importance of language in this new faith. Quran means recitation, and the first word that the prophet heard from the angel Gabriel, who delivered God's message to him, was the command ikra, recite. We saw in our examination of late Christian thought that it quickly became acceptable to read the Bible in languages other than the original, especially the Greek Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament that claimed divine inspiration. Not so with the Quran, which gave Arabic the divine seal of approval when it was given to Muhammad, the seal of the prophets. In much of the Islamic world, Arabic became and remained the primary language. Even in places that held on to their local tongue, like Persia, Arabic became an important and even dominant language for writing literature, including philosophy. This is why philosophers from Persia and Central Asia, including no less a thinker than Avicenna, wrote in Arabic, which was not necessarily their native language. Members of other faiths wrote in Arabic for the same reason. The Christian exegetes of Aristotle I mentioned wrote Arabic commentaries on Arabic translations of the Organon and the Physics. The two Jewish authors I described a moment ago, Saadia and Maimonides, also wrote in Arabic. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to equate philosophy in the Islamic world with philosophy in Arabic. That's largely true for the earlier period, but Maimonides wrote in Hebrew as well, and this became even more common among Jewish thinkers in the generations after him. A third important language for philosophy in the Islamic world was Persian. Users of this language already resisted the hegemony of Arabic, as Islam spread into the Persian realms. As I say, even in these areas, Arabic established itself as the main language for philosophy, but Avicenna, for instance, did use Persian for one of his treatises. Later on, we have a great deal of philosophy written in Persian, for instance in the Safavid period in Iran, in the 16th to 18th centuries. What I've said so far explains why I'm using the somewhat cumbersome phrase philosophy in the Islamic world, rather than speaking of Islamic philosophy or Arabic philosophy. You'll see both phrases used, and I have been known to use them myself, but speaking of Islamic philosophy excludes the Christians and Jews who, I want to insist, are an important part of our story, and Arabic philosophy wouldn't cover texts in other languages. By the way, please don't confuse the words Arabic and Arab. Arabic refers to a language, not the people among whom Islam first began. Actually, very few of the philosophers we'll be looking at were Arabs, yet almost all of them wrote mostly, or even exclusively, in Arabic. My point, anyway, is that I'm shooting for as broad a conception of this tradition as possible, one that includes philosophers from three religions writing in several languages and working in lands ranging from modern-day Spain to modern-day Afghanistan. I realize this story is already rather complicated, so I'm going to make up for it by offering you a simple chronology for what we're going to be looking at. There are two significant periods of philosophy in the Islamic world, before Avicenna and after Avicenna. He lived from the late 10th to the early 11th century. I suggest calling the time until then the formative period of philosophy in the Islamic world. During this formative period, the main concern of philosophers was the translation and interpretation of Greek philosophical texts, especially Aristotle. As we'll be seeing, formative period philosophers like al-Kindi and al-Farabi championed these texts and insisted that they contain truths of paramount importance for any reader, whether pagan, Christian, or Muslim. Yet these same thinkers pondered the question of how the Hellenic philosophical heritage could be reconciled with the teachings of Islam, and whether it might offer answers to questions being posed by contemporary Muslim theologians. This dynamic went beyond the confines of the Islamic faith, as Jewish and Christian authors staged their own appropriation of Aristotle and Neoplatonism. Not unlike Philo of Alexandria and the Christian Fathers in the ancient world, they used philosophy to explain the descriptions of God in the Old Testament, or expound the doctrine of the Trinity. Then Avicenna came along and changed everything. He was a philosopher of considerable self-confidence, which is a polite way of saying that he was immensely arrogant. But to be honest, he merited his high opinion of himself. Drawing together themes from Aristotle, from Platonism, and from Islamic theology, he forged something new. His self-consciously original works had something to contribute on nearly every major area of philosophy, from logic to physics to metaphysics, and he also found time to become the single most influential medical author of any medieval tradition. After Avicenna, philosophy in the eastern heartlands of the Islamic empire was consumed with the task of responding to him, instead of to Aristotle. The very language of philosophy became distinctively Avicennan, even in authors who opposed his ideas strenuously. A centuries-long process saw his terminology and ideas woven into the fabric of Islamic theology and into the mystical tradition of the Sufis. Among the most seminal figures of the post-Avicennan generations, Sukhravarti, founded yet another tradition within this tradition, illuminationism. It can best be understood as an intricate critique and reworking of Avicenna, much as Avicenna had offered a critique and reworking of Aristotle. But in the 11th century, news traveled slow, and texts often failed to travel at all. That is one reason we see a mostly autonomous tradition arising on the far western fringe of the Islamic empire in Andalusia. If you take Jewish and Muslim philosophy together, as I am going to do, then you notice that a big chunk of philosophy's history in the Islamic world happened in the 11th to 12th centuries on the Iberian peninsula. This time and place featured not only the aforementioned philosophical giants, the Jew Maimonides and the Muslim Averroes, but numerous other figures from both religions. This was in fact the high point for philosophical activity by Jews in the Islamic world. Andalusian philosophy was influenced by Avicenna, but much less so than philosophy in the East. Here, it was still possible for thinkers of both faiths to adopt broadly Aristotelian or Neoplatonic systems of thought, and even to complain that this confounded Avicenna was ruining everything and that right-minded philosophers should return to Aristotle. That pretty much sums up the attitude of Averroes. Meanwhile, the greatest mind in the history of philosophical Sufism, which became such a force in the eastern Islamic world, was Ibn Arabi, and he too hailed from Andalusia. To take account of all this, once we get past Avicenna, I'm going to devote a series of episodes to Andalusian philosophy before returning to the eastern tradition and following it all the way to the time we think of as early modernity. Ultimately, we will see the Islamic world fractured into three great empires, the Ottomans, the Safavids in Persia, and the Mughal Empire in India. All three empires offered something to the history of philosophy, though I should warn you that when we reach that late period, we will be entering territory that has barely been touched by modern scholarship. So that's a historical sketch of the journey ahead—a formative period of engagement with both Greek philosophy and Islamic theology, a decisive intervention by Avicenna, the greatest philosopher of the Islamic world, and then another forking path leading on the one hand west to Muslim Spain and the continued use of Hellenic materials, on the other hand east, with Avicenna having become the new king of the road. As for the philosophical issues that will be occupying our attention during this voyage, some of them have to do with where we have already been. For instance, both Muslim and Jewish philosophers will have a great deal to say about whether or not the universe is eternal. Not only will they remind us of the late ancient dispute between John Philoponus and upholders of eternity like Aristotle and Proclus, they will actually be drawing directly on these very arguments, since Philoponus's anti-eternity polemic was available to read in Arabic. Appropriately enough, therefore, the eternity debate didn't really stop after late antiquity, but went on and on. An equally long-running issue was the problem of how to understand Aristotle's remarks on the human intellect in the third book of his work, On the Soul. This is a particularly prominent case of the continuity of the Greek and Arabic traditions of commentary on Aristotle. But of course, philosophy in the Islamic world wouldn't deserve a year's worth of podcasts if it offered nothing but rehashed debates and puzzles from the ancient world. One of the reasons this new tradition is going to be so, well, new, creative in both its uses of and departures from the Greek inheritance is the religion of Islam itself. We've already seen how paganism and Christianity in late antiquity, as well as Judaism in the case of Philo of Alexandria were powerful spurs to philosophical innovation, we'll now see that the same is true of Islam. To start thinking about why we can do no better than to begin with the shahada, or Muslim profession of faith, there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. In the first half of that sentence, we have the core Muslim theological commitment to monotheism. Tawhid, the Arabic word for oneness, is at the core of both the Islamic faith and of Islamic philosophy. The prophet Muhammad clearly taught the centrality of tawhid not only with his words, but also with his actions, as when he entered the holy shrine of the Kaaba in his home city of Mecca and emptied it of the pagan idols that stood there. Monotheism gave Muslims something in common with members of other faiths, notably Christians and Jews, but also Zoroastrians, who were still numerous in the lands that fell under the sway of this new faith. Yet, God's oneness could also be the basis for interreligious dispute. In particular, from a Muslim point of view, the Christians' admirable acceptance of that oneness was rather undermined when they went on to insist that God is also a trinity. Accordingly, we're going to see Muslim philosophers using the tools of their trade to attack the Trinitarian doctrine, but we're also going to find Christians writing in Arabic to respond to these attacks and also to defend their own particular conception of the trinity against rival Christian views. It's not only the tradition of debate over the trinity that continues from late antiquity, but also the emphasis on the oneness of God. When Greek sources came to be translated into Arabic, Muslim readers immediately detected resonances between the Muslim doctrine of tawhid and certain halatic ideas. In particular, it looked tempting to find agreement with Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, who likewise taught that the first cause of all things was a transcendent one. More potentially problematic, for both interfaith agreement and the appropriation of the philosophical tradition, was the second half of the Shahada, and Muhammad is his prophet. Muslims recognized Jesus and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as genuine messengers from God, albeit that they of course denied the Christian claim that Jesus was the incarnation of God. But Christians and Jews were, naturally enough, not going to return the favor and admit that Muhammad was the final prophet that God would send to mankind. The Quran itself identifies Christians and Jews, among other groups, as peoples of the book, communities favored by God with a revelation. But the Quran itself was a book whose accepted by Muslims alone. As for philosophy, there soon arose the difficulty of how, and indeed whether, prophecy could be explained within rational theories of knowledge. What was the mechanism by which Muhammad and the other prophets had come to possess a wisdom beyond other humans? Did this wisdom go beyond any understanding that can be achieved through human resources? How do prophecy, and knowledge more generally, serve to legitimize the political power wielded by leaders like Muhammad? And, not to put too fine a point on it, but once God has sent numerous messengers with divinely revealed books to bring us to the truth, do we really need Aristotle and Plotinus too? Actually, Muslim belief provoked philosophical reflection even before the Greek philosophers were transmitted into Arabic. We can see this by looking at the earliest representatives of the tradition known as ilm al-kalam. This phrase literally means of the word, perhaps because the theologians were trying to understand God's word, but the phrase, usually shortened simply to kalam, is typically translated more loosely as rational theology. Kalam was indisputably theological in character, consisting mostly of disputes over the correct understanding of Islamic revelation, albeit that these disputes often appealed to rational intuition and argument. For this reason, kalam is often sharply contrasted to philosophy. Indeed, philosophers who wrote in Arabic themselves drew this contrast with figures like Al-Farabi and Averroes comparing the dialectical debates of kalam unfavorably to the demonstrative knowledge offered by Aristotelian philosophy. Yet, kalam is going to play an important part in our story, not only because it exercised a huge influence on philosophers, on Jewish thinkers as well as Muslims, but also because kalam is itself full of philosophically interesting positions and arguments. But don't take my word for it, join me next time as I look at the early theologians known as the Murtazilites, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, This is a Test, the Mortazilites. History teaches some lessons the hard way. For instance the lesson that the strongest leaders often leave the most disruption and discord when they die. The Greeks learned this from the chaos that followed the death of Alexander the Great. The same was brought home to the Romans by the demise of Constantine, and a few centuries later early Islamic society faced a similar experience. In this case, the question of political legitimacy was compounded by a problem of religious authority. When the Prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, it was not entirely clear who should succeed him, nor was it even clear what principles of legitimacy might justify one candidate over another. Was it crucial that the next leader be from the family of the prophet, or were personal qualities and suitability for the post decisive? On the religious front, who would guide the Muslim community now that Muhammad was gone, and with him, the direct link to divine revelation? He was the seal of the prophets, so it was clear that nothing like the Qur'an would be sent again, to the Muslims or to anyone else. Nor could the Qur'an itself provide all the answers. Like any text it stood in need of interpretation, but who should be recognized as an authoritative leader, and who could be trusted to extrapolate from the Qur'an to settle issues not addressed explicitly in the revelation itself? These questions would dominate much of the history of Islam, and lead to the fundamental division between Sunnis and Shiites. The split did not occur immediately, but its origins can be traced back to events immediately following Muhammad's death. The prophet's cousin and husband to his daughter Fatima was Ali. Shiite Muslims believe that rightful leadership of the Muslim community is inherited through a familial line beginning with Ali. In fact, the word Shiite comes from the Arabic shia'ali, meaning the party of Ali. Ali did succeed to the caliphate eventually, but only after being passed over for three other caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. These four are known as the Rashidun, or rightly guided caliphs, and they played an enormous role in shaping Islamic society. During their reigns, the Muslims began their startling military and cultural conquests from their base in what is now Saudi Arabia. Within a few generations, the Islamic empire would stretch from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia. The sequence of rightly guided caliphs ended with the assassination of Ali in the year 661, about 20 years later his son Hussein was killed in battle. When Hussein died, so did the prospect that the house of Ali might hold political rule. The next few centuries would see two lines of caliphs or caliphates, neither of which was descended from him. The word caliph derives from the phrase, khalifat rasul alaa, successor to the prophet of God. From 661 until 749, the succeeding would be done by the Umayyads from their capital in Damascus, and they were in fact fairly successful. This period saw continued expansion of the Islamic empire. Indeed, the Umayyad line continued in the far west maintaining a foothold in Iberia even when the Umayyads were mostly vanquished by the Abbasids in the mid-8th century. This new line of caliphs drew their strength from the east, from the Central Asian lands known as Khurasan, and from Iraq, which had already been a power base for Ali. The Abbasids could not claim descent from Ali himself, but at least took their name from their forefather Abbas, an uncle of the prophet. Thus, they could say that they were keeping the caliphate in the family. Accordingly, much more than the Umayyads, the Abbasid caliphs made explicit claims to religious as well as political authority. For example, the caliph al-Ma'mun claimed the title of imam while contending with his brother in a civil war over the caliphate. As we'll be seeing in later episodes, the supporters of the House of Ali would refer to the figures they recognized as rightful leaders as imams, and ascribe to them unique status as interpreters of Islam, as well as secular legitimacy. Al-Ma'mun is important for the story I want to tell in this episode, which is about not just political power, but Islamic theology and the philosophical positions that underlay that theology. At the end of his reign in 833 AD, al-Ma'mun laid down the so-called mihnah, a test or inquisition. He instructed that judges and scholars should be required to admit that the Qur'an was created by God and not eternal, like God himself. This may seem a rather abstract point, but al-Ma'mun thought it important enough to persecute and imprison anyone who disagreed with him. It's worth emphasizing how unusual this was. Risks of religious orthodoxy had not been imposed by caliphs before al-Ma'mun. Rather, the rights and wrongs of religious belief had usually been determined by the judgment of scholars, men who were steeped in the study of the Arabic language, the life and deeds of Muhammad, and the text and context of the Qur'an itself. It was no doubt part of al-Ma'mun's objective to assert his own authority over that of the scholars, and towards that end he may even have liked the idea of demoting the Qur'an to the status of a mere creature. But this doctrine of the Qur'an's createdness was not invented by al-Ma'mun. He took it from a group of thinkers who can, with some justice, claim to be the first philosophers of Islam, the Murtazilites. Justice was, in fact, one of the main obsessions of the Murtazilites. They liked to style themselves akhl atawhid wal ahl, the upholders of oneness and justice. Like Augustine arguing that the whole message of the Bible boils down to charity, for Murtazilites, the core teaching of Islam is that God is one and that He is just. Their most distinctive positions come directly from these two principles, as we'll see shortly. First, though, I should explain the sense in which one might reasonably describe these thinkers as philosophers. They certainly were not spending most of their time reading Aristotle, albeit that some of them did show, or at least claim, that they were familiar with his works. Rather, these were theologians, and their sacred texts were, well, sacred texts, the Qur'an itself of course, and also the collected sayings and anecdotes about the Prophet known as Hadith. Muslims are enjoined to follow the example of the Prophet in all things, and the practice of collecting Hadith emerged in order to address the problem I mentioned before. If the Qur'an is silent on a given question, whether it deals with practical arrangements or abstract religious belief, how should we know the answer to that question? An obvious strategy was to follow whatever Muhammad had said or done in his lifetime, insofar as this could be ascertained through reliable reports. Hadith scholarship, which blossomed during the Abbasid era, determined which reports were reliable by recording chains of testimony all the way back to eyewitnesses and companions of the Prophet. The accepted Hadith, alongside the Qur'an, became a second principal source for both Islamic law and Islamic theology. The Mu'tazilites certainly did base their theories on these two sources, but they also drew on a third resource, aql, or reason. It is really this that distinguishes the kind of theology we call kalam, and separates its practitioners, the muttaqallimun, from other Muslim scholars who often had a more conservative traditionalist bent. For instance, Mu'tazilite muttaqallimun would have no hesitation in adopting a figurative reading of Qur'anic descriptions of God as having a face, or sitting on a throne, since reason shows that God has no body. Traditionalists would instead accept such statements at face value. This point connects to the first of the Mu'tazilites' principles, God's unity. Here, their signature teaching was that God must be recognized as one not only in the sense that He is unique—all Muslims would, after all, affirm that there are no gods other than God—but also one in the sense that He is utterly free from multiplicity of any kind. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity fell afoul of this restriction, of course. So did certain views on a central issue of kalam, the status of God's attributes, such as His knowledge and power. The Mu'tazilites tended to deny the reality of attributes, or at least deny that they had any reality distinct from God's own reality. The role of reason here was to explain how it could still be true to say that God is knowing or powerful if there is no distinctly existing knowledge or power that belongs to Him. In this, God is unlike the things He creates. As we'll see in a moment, various Mu'tazilite theologians took various views about the physical makeup of created things, but in general they endorsed a theory according to which God connects certain attributes to atomic bodies. These atoms are indivisible bearers of properties, which are distinct from the atoms themselves in precisely the way that God's attributes are not distinct from Him. When it came to the second fundamental issue of God's justice, reason again laid down a fundamental ground rule. No one can be morally responsible for actions that were not in their own power. Thus, if humans are to be responsible for what they do, and if God is therefore to be just in rewarding and punishing them for what they do, then humans must have free will. This was sometimes expressed in terms of the physical theory. A man is an atom, or compound of atoms, and the man's actions or choices are attributes or properties that adhere in the atomic subject. Since the man is responsible for these actions or choices, it must be up to the man, and not to God, whether he comes to have the relevant attributes. Some Mu'tazilites even admitted that humans create their actions, whereas everything else is created by God. All of this relates to the apparently obscure teaching on the Qur'an's createdness, the one enforced in al-Mamun's Inquisition. Theologians understood the Qur'an as being a sort of divine attribute, as God's word. So, in denying the eternity of the Qur'an, the Mu'tazilites were simply adhering to their standard position on God's attributes. To make God's word, the Qur'an, a separately existing thing that is co-eternal with God, would be to deny tawhid, God's uniqueness and oneness, and would in fact be tantamount to shirk, or polytheism. The createdness of the Qur'an was also important for God's justice. In it, we find verses that condemn the specific opponents of Muhammad as sinners who are surely destined for hellfire. Mu'tazilites worried that, if such verses had been eternally established as part of God's word, then the sinners in question would simply be doing what had always been inevitable, rather than exercising their free will. In that case, God's justice would be compromised. He would be eternally promising damnation to people who had no choice in sinning. In part because of the political situation out of which they emerged, the Mu'tazilites and other Mu'takallimun had a particular interest in this question of sin and moral responsibility. In fact, the origins of the name Mu'tazilite are supposedly bound up with this issue. According to tradition, the man who began Mu'tazilite school in the first half of the 8th century was Wasil ibn Ata'ah. One day he was sitting with another early theologian named Hasan al-Basri, discussing the moral status of sinners. Hasan al-Basri held that sinners are believers, which Wasil found too generous. He did not go so far as other hardline theologians who condemned sinners as non-believers, but instead offered what would become the standard Mu'tazilite position, that Muslim sinners occupy an intermediate position, neither believers nor non-believers. Thus Wasil withdrew from the circle gathered around Hasan al-Basri and walked away, taking some new followers with him. They were the Mu'tazilites, meaning the ones who withdrew. An unkind observer might think that Wasil's intermediate position looks less like a solution and more like dodging a politically and theologically fraught issue. That is typical of kalam, in that theologians frequently offer positions that seem designed mostly to diffuse intractable debate. In this respect, kalam could be compared to late ancient debates over the Trinity, where verbal compromises were put forward in an attempt to satisfy groups who would never really agree. But also as in late antiquity, many theologians persisted in wanting a rigorous and detailed, indeed philosophical, account of the matters at hand. Nor should this story, with its pleasingly vivid etymology of the term Mu'tazilite, mislead us into thinking that the Mu'tazilite movement had a history like that of the Hellenistic philosophical schools, with a founder laying down a set of doctrines that subsequent members took pride in following. Indeed, even calling these early theologians Mu'tazilites is to some extent anachronistic, a habit borrowed from later authors who wanted neat classifications of theological groups. Eventually, the Mu'tazilites did cohere into two stable groups, associated with the cities of Baghdad and Basra. The Baghdadis and Basrans agreed about the main principles of Mu'tazilite kalam, including the points I just sketched, a denial of real and separate divine attributes, an insistence on human freedom, and an analysis of created things as atoms that bear properties. But there were points of dispute between the two groups, and there had been even more disagreement among earlier so-called Mu'tazilites. To reconstruct those early views, we unfortunately have to depend on later accounts, often written by hostile theologians. Our knowledge of early kalam is, in this respect, not unlike our knowledge of the pre-Socratics, or early Stoics. For complete texts, we mostly have to wait until the 9th century. For a really complete overview of Mu'tazilite doctrine, our best source is the enormous and aptly named, sufficing work, or muhni, of the Basran theologian Abd al-Jabbar, who lived around the turn of the 1st millennium AD. The lack of early unanimity among theologians of a Mu'tazilite persuasion is well illustrated by an 8th century theologian named Jahm ibn Safwan. Jahm put forward a view on divine attributes like the one I just described, which led some later authors to see him as linked to Mu'tazilism. But if card-carrying Mu'tazilites might have liked his stance on attributes, they would have been appalled by his remarks on freedom, which looks straightforwardly determinist. Jahm remarked that belief in God is bestowed by the choice of God, not of the believer himself. Without pushing the point too far, it might be helpful to think of the standard Mu'tazilite view as being akin to that of the Pelagians. You'll recall them as the late ancient Christians who insisted that humans must have it within their power to be righteous or to sin, since otherwise God could not punish sinners with justice. Jahm's view was more like that of Augustine, in maintaining that God alone could bestow the gift of faith. Mu'tazilite discussions of this issue attained a remarkable level of sophistication which would not embarrass a modern-day metaphysician working on the free will problem. Not that modern-day metaphysicians are easily embarrassed. Consider for instance the aforementioned Basran Mu'tazilite Abd al-Jabbar. He identified a problem that is familiar in the free will debate nowadays, when he worried that our choices might be determined by our own motivations. Suppose I see an almond croissant and stuff it eagerly into my mouth. It looks as though my powerful desire for the croissant caused me to perform this action. Where in that picture is free will? Whether my action is caused by my desire or by God, there was no possibility that I would do anything different, and if my action is inevitable, how can it be freely chosen? Abd al-Jabbar solves the puzzle by saying that even if some motivations compel us to act, not all motivations are like this. We can see this from the fact that people sometimes reflect on their already existing desires, perhaps with the help of external advice, and form a view as to whether these motivations are appropriate ones. In such a case, what began as a weaker motivation, such as the desire to lose weight, might wind up trumping an originally stronger motivation, like the desire to eat delicious pastries. Motivations then are causally relevant to action, but not irresistible causes. So, there remains space for free will. Similar ingenuity was applied in the other areas of mortazolite theory. An impressive early example is Abu'l-Dael, who might be seen as the Chrysippus of mortazolism. As you'll recall, Chrysippus was not the founder of Stoicism, but an early, sophisticated member of the school who systematized the teachings of the movement. Abu'l-Dael played something of the same role for the mortazolites. One of his more prominent teachings concerned the increasingly familiar problem of divine attributes. On the one hand, for the reasons already mentioned, he wanted to deny that the attributes have real and distinct existence. On the other hand, the Qur'an itself describes God as knowing, powerful, merciful, and so on. How can such statements be true if there is no such thing as divine knowledge, power, or mercy? Abu'l-Dael's suggested solution was that God is, as Abu'l-Dael put it, knowing with a knowledge that is nothing other than God. This yields the desired result that God is really knowing, even though his knowledge has no independent reality, for he simply is knowledge. Of course, the same analysis can be applied to other attributes. But that leads to a further problem. If God is identical to both his knowledge and his mercy, for instance, then won't his knowledge be the same thing as his mercy? That doesn't sound right. Here, Abu'l-Dael remarked that the attributes are neither the same as nor distinct from one another. Again, this at first looks uncomfortably like someone playing with words, but we can make sense of the view as follows. It is only in relation to the things he creates that God's knowledge becomes distinct from his mercy. For instance, he knows how many hairs are on my head. Not many. But this is not an object of his mercy. More like his wrath, in fact. In itself, though, God's essence remains one. A related Mu'tazilite distinction contrasts what they called attributes of essence and attributes of action, with the former describing the unity that is God himself, and the latter the relations that God bears to the things he creates. When it came to the nature of those created things, we see a similar dynamic of innovation and disagreement among early Mu'tazilites. Like Muttaqallimun of all persuasions, both at this period and later in the tradition, Mu'tazilites emphasized the radical dependence of such bodies on God. They even devised an argument for God's existence on the basis of their atomic physics. Since bodies cannot exist without possessing properties, and since the properties themselves come into and out of existence, bodies themselves must be created. That means they must have a creator. This sort of argument is occasionally referred to in contemporary philosophy of religion as the kalam proof for God. Again, though, broad consensus masks a large amount of dispute concerning the details of the physical theory. They disagreed, for instance, about how many atoms were the minimum needed to make up a discrete body. Abuludel, like an expert cricket batsman, went for six. A particularly radical version of kalam physics was put forward by An-Nadam, who was the nephew of Abuludel and one of the most radical and innovative of the 9th century Mu'tazilites. An-Nadam questioned the rigorous distinction between bodies and properties, using the word body to describe even things like colors, tastes, hardness, coldness, and so on. What we naively consider as bodily substances are nothing but interpenetrating properties. Some of these properties remain latent until they are caused by God to become manifest. For instance, when wood lights on fire, its latent heat and brightness suddenly manifest themselves. Not content with this rather daring theory, An-Nadam went on to deny the underlying atomic theory embraced by other Mu'tazilites, asserting instead that bodies are infinitely divisible. This left him with a problem that had already bedeviled anti-atomist philosophers in antiquity, familiar from the paradoxes of motion proposed by Zeno. If bodies and spatial intervals are infinitely divisible, then won't motion be impossible? After all, any given body will have to pass through an infinite number of points to complete even the smallest motion, but nothing can finish an infinite series of tasks. An-Nadam avoids the difficulty by proposing that bodies do not glide continuously over all points in an interval. Rather, they leap from one position to another. Thus, the physical world around us is like a motion picture, with seemingly continuous motion in fact emerging from a more fundamental reality of discontinuous bodily arrangements. Of course, with these examples of early philosophical kalam, I am, like one of An-Nadam's bodies, skipping over a lot. But I hope I've managed to persuade you that Mu'tazilism offers plenty of material for the historian of philosophy. As I've said, figures like Abu'l-Dail and An-Nadam did not engage carefully with the legacy of Greek philosophy, though some have suggested possible Hellenic sources, such as the Stoics. Their project was more akin to that of the more rationalist Church Fathers, like Origen or Augustine in some of his moods. They believed in order to understand, placing their trust in God's gift of reason. Here too, some scholars have claimed to find more than a parallel, and pointed to the possibility of real historical influence of Christian theology on early Islamic kalam. This is not impossible. As we'll see next time, Greek ideas, including those of the Fathers, were kept alive in places like Syria in the 7th and 8th centuries. Indeed, it can be hard not to think of ancient thought when reading about early Mu'tazilism. For instance, Abu'l-Dail's move of identifying God with his attributes is reminiscent of Boethius. Still, it would be a mistake to reduce Mu'tazilism to a mere echo of Christian theology or Greek philosophy. In fact, the direction of influence is at least as much the other way. As we'll be seeing, Mu'tazilites and other mutakallimun had a great impact on the way that Greek ideas were used and understood by more explicitly philosophical authors in the Islamic world, like Al-Kindi and Avicenna. Of course, for that to happen, the Greek texts first needed to be translated into Arabic. This too happened in the 8th to 10th centuries, the same period that saw the high point of the Abbasid Caliphate and the first flowering of kalam and of hadith scholarship. It happened in part thanks to our new friend al-Ma'mun. Legend relates that he once had a dream in which he was visited by Aristotle. The legend goes on to say that, once his alarm clock went off, al-Ma'mun decided to sponsor a massive translation movement. He would make Aristotle and the rest of Hellenic philosophy and science accessible to Islamic civilization. This story doesn't have much historical credibility, sadly, and not just because I added the bit about the alarm clock. But it is true enough that al-Ma'mun and his fellow Abbasid caliphs did support translations from Greek, even as they were imposing the Mu'tazilite-inspired mihnah on their subjects. You never know when you yourself might need to pass a test on all this stuff, so you better join me next time for the Greek-Arabic translation movement here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Levyhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Founded in Translation. From Greek to Syriac and Arabic. One of the remarkable things about Germany, where I live, is that so much of what they see on TV and in cinemas was originally in English. American sitcoms and crime serials, rom-coms and action blockbusters, are put before the public with the significant difference that it is all dubbed into German. They even use the same German actors to dub characters played by the original English-speaking characters so that stars like Will Smith or Meryl Streep always sound the same in every movie. Of course, German is a rather different language than English, and the translators of these movies and TV shows occasionally have to make difficult choices. For instance, German, like French, Spanish, and Italian, for example, distinguishes between a formal and informal version of you. Thus, every time anyone in an original version addresses anyone else, the translators must decide what sort of relationship is in play and render the scene accordingly, with an informal du or formal sie. As the Germans would say, das ist dochnicht neues. More than a millennium ago, another civilization did their level best to import the entire output of another culture, and did a fair bit of interpretation in the process. I refer, of course, to the Greek-Arabic translation movement. It began in the late 8th century AD, at the behest of the wealthy and influential elite of the Abbasid era. When the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded his new capital at Baghdad, he made it a round city, perhaps inspired by the geometry of Euclid. The translation movement is more often associated with the later caliph al-Ma'mun, who had the dream I mentioned at the end of the previous episode, but that's more a reflection of the success of propaganda put out by admirers of al-Ma'mun than of historical reality. Indeed, the dream is itself a carefully constructed bit of propaganda. We know that translations in fact began already under al-Mansur, who reigned from the 750s to the 770s. The later al-Ma'mun is also given credit for the famous Baghdad institution known as the Bayt al-Hikmah, or House of Wisdom. Sometimes rather inflated claims are made about the Bayt al-Hikmah, for instance that it was like a research university. Actually, though some research did go on there, like astronomical observations, it seems to have been mostly a library, staffed more by copyists and bookbinders than chemists and biologists. On the other hand, never underestimate the power of libraries, copyists, and bookbinders. By the end of the translation movement in the 10th century, an astonishing range of Greek scientific and philosophical texts had been rendered into Arabic. Their influence would last far beyond the Abbasid Caliphate. The translations included works on mathematics by authors like Euclid and Ptolemy, medical writings by Galen and other Greek authorities, and pretty much all the Aristotle that we can read today. Without al-Mansur, his successor Caliphs, and other rich patrons of the Abbasid age, there would have been no tradition of Hellenizing thought in the Islamic world. The very word for philosophy in Arabic is telling. It is falafah, which is of course simply a loanword from the Greek philosophia. While we're on the subject of etymology, I'll mention that the translation movement has left its traces even in modern English. Our word alchemy comes ultimately from the Greek hemea, and the al at the beginning is simply the Arabic definite article. Perhaps I can also take this opportunity to mention my all-time favorite etymology, which is of course that the word giraffe comes from the Arabic word zarafah. So why did they do it? The answer is complex and much debated, but let's start with a few basic and uncontroversial points. First, it was not a mere whim or the casual fancy of idiosyncratic caliphs. The translators were handsomely paid for their services, and the process stretched for over more than a century, representing a sustained effort sponsored at the highest levels. This was quite literally a major investment in the value of Hellenic culture. Second, the translations were, to some extent, motivated by common-sense usefulness. We don't need to invoke some kind of ideology to explain why people might want to be able to read the great works in such practical disciplines as medicine, geography, and engineering. Just as useful, if not more so, was the tradition of Greek astrology and its sister science astronomy. The two were both called by the same Arabic phrase, ilm al-nujum, the science of the stars. As in antiquity, astrology was desired for use in imperial propaganda, and of course to predict the future, which would be pretty useful if it could actually be done. But that doesn't explain why the Abbasids would have wanted an Arabic version of, say, Aristotle's metaphysics. Some Aristotle may have been translated early on for pragmatic reasons, since his logical works provided weapons to be deployed in disputation, for instance over the relative merits of the Muslim and Christian faiths. This might explain why the now-obscure topics, Aristotle's study of dialectic, was one of the first texts translated into Arabic. Cultural one-upsmanship may also have played a part. The new Islamic empire had a large and hostile neighbor in the shape of the Byzantine empire. What better way to demonstrate superiority than to translate works of Greek science and show a better understanding of them than the Greeks themselves? Efforts were also made to provide a lineage for Hellenic culture that traced the wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, and so on back to a much earlier time and a place not far from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. Much as ancient church fathers like Clement of Alexandria had done, the Abbasids were claiming not to take wisdom from the Greeks, but to take it back from the Greeks. If it's true that the translation movement was in part inspired by cultural rivalry with the Christian Byzantines, then there is an irony here worth savoring. The movement depended extensively on the involvement of Christians. If you had already heard of the translation movement before listening to this podcast, you may have had the following idea about it. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, Greek philosophy and science fell into disuse. Several centuries passed in which the Hellenic heritage was effectively ignored. Finally, Muslims got hold of these precious texts, blew the dust off, and started a cultural renaissance that could rival the goings-on in Europe in the 15th century. What this story leaves out is the crucial role of Christian intermediaries, who most often came from Syria. They wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic and thus, like Hebrew and Arabic, a member of the Semitic language group. As in much of the Eastern Roman Empire, Greek also remained a commonly used language in Syria. Thus, this region boasted bilingual scholars who produced Syriac translations and commentaries on Greek philosophical literature. If you cast your mind back, you may remember the 5th and 6th century school of Neoplatonic commentators in Alexandria and its leader Ammonius. Maybe in his day, philosophy was being done in Syriac, notably by his contemporary Sergius of Resh'ayna. Like Ammonius and his colleagues, Sergius and his successors concentrated on logic with forays into physics and metaphysics. For instance, Sergius produced a Syriac paraphrase of a work on cosmology by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. It's worth noting that Sergius didn't yet translate Aristotle. Instead, he wrote in Syriac about the meaning of Aristotle's works, which he assumed would still be read in Greek. As the generations progressed though, knowledge of Greek decreased and Syriac translations became a necessity. Scholars connected with the monastery of Kinesrin produced Syriac versions of Aristotle's logical writings in the 7th and 8th centuries, which bridged the time between the school of Alexandria and the Arabic translation movement. As a result, the transmission of Hellenic ideas to the Islamic world occurred just in the way this podcast would want, without any gap. But of course, these Christians were not motivated by a desire to prepare the way for a future philosophical tradition in Arabic. So we can ask, as we just did about the Abbasid translation movement, why did they do it? It's commonly assumed that their interest in logic must have been for the sake of theological dispute, for instance in arguments over the Trinity. That may have been one motive for the later Arabic translations, as I mentioned, but there's little evidence that it spurred on our Syriac authors. Rather, it seems likely that they concentrated on logic for the same reason the pagan Neoplatonists did—they thought it was the first thing you needed to learn in order to become a philosopher. But there was at least one difference between their approach and that of pagan thinkers like Proclus and Ammonius. For these Christians, philosophy would culminate not with Plato, but with the Pseudo-Dionysius. His divine names, which you may remember as a meditation on the possibility and ultimate impossibility of describing God, was translated into Syriac in this period. Another influence was the philosophical asceticism we saw in authors like Evagrius, whose writings were likewise translated. Though our textual evidence for this Syriac interlude in the history of philosophy is not as rich as it might be, we have enough to see that these were men with a systematic plan for doing Christian philosophy. Not unlike certain philosophically inclined Church Fathers, they drew on the best of pagan philosophy and fused it with sources from their own theological tradition. The continuing significance of Syrians and Syriac in the translation movement is clear from the personnel of the two most important groups of translators into Arabic, both of which were active in the 9th century. One was gathered around a Christian who lived in Iraq but was of Syrian extraction. His name was Hunayn ibn Ishaq. He specialized in the works of the Greek medical authority Galen. We have a fascinating report from Hunayn's own pen which tells us what he translated and recounts his efforts to track down manuscripts of Galen and his strategies for producing the best possible versions of the works he could find. Hunayn translated not from Greek into Arabic, but from Greek into Syriac. If an Arabic version was needed, this would typically be provided by another member of the circle. Hunayn ibn Ishaq's son, the confusingly named Ishaq ibn Hunayn, produced a number of highly skillful Arabic versions of Aristotle and other philosophical texts. When philosophers like Avicenna and Iverroes read Aristotle, it was never in Greek, a language of which they were ignorant. They were in the hands of the translators, and if the translator was Ishaq, those were good hands to be in. Less widely admired, even in the medieval Arabic tradition itself, were the Arabic versions of Greek texts executed by a group we call the Kindi circle. Their name comes from their leader Al-Kindi, who is usually recognized as the first philosopher to write in Arabic. He was a Muslim, but he collaborated with Christians of Syrian background, like the members of the Hunayn translation circle. These Christians could offer expertise in the relevant language, and perhaps also the intellectual background needed to understand what was going on in a work like Aristotle's Categories or On the Soul. Nonetheless, the translations of the Kindi circle were frequently criticized as being overly literal. A faithful word-by-word translation might be a useful crutch if you're trying to decipher a difficult Greek text, but if you don't know any Greek, or the Greek version is not available, such a translation can be like a code to which you have no hope of finding the key. A good example of this sort of translation is the Kindi circle version of the metaphysics. Admittedly, that's not the easiest text to understand in any language, but trying to extract Aristotle's meaning from their Arabic version of the metaphysics would take an interpretive genius beyond most of us. I would be tempted to say it simply couldn't be done if it wasn't for the fact that I have read Averroes' commentary on the metaphysics. For some parts of this commentary, Averroes was dependent solely on this early Arabic version of the work, but he still managed to understand it reasonably well. When you've got it, you've got it. By the way, the Arabic version of the metaphysics supplies us with a nice example of how translation could affect philosophical interpretation. One of the most important technical terms in that work is Eidos, which we would translate either as species or as form, depending on context. Likewise, Arabic translators had to use two different words to render Eidos, either naw – corresponding to species, or sura – the Arabic for form, the way a German translator needs to decide between formal z and informal du every time someone says u in an American movie. Thus, the translators of the metaphysics effectively decided for future readers what Aristotle had in mind every time he used the word Eidos, form or species, without the readers even knowing that any decision had been taken. Though the standard complaint about the Kindi circle was the aforementioned one that their style was overly literal, some of their translations go the other way and take startling liberties with their source texts. The most famous example is their version of the works of Plotinus. The works of Plato were not well known in Arabic, and to some extent the Arabic Plotinus filled the gap left by their absence. This translation was apparently part of a collection of Hellenic works on the soul and other topics of advanced philosophy, what the scholar Fritz Zimmerman called a Kindi's metaphysics phile. Other items in the collection included selections from Alexander of Aphrodisias and an Arabic version of Proclus's overview of Neoplatonism, the elements of theology. Through a process of addition and reworking that scholars are still trying to piece together, some of the Proclus materials were presented as a newly organized text called the Book of the Pure Good. Later, it would be translated again into Latin and called the Book of Causes or Liber de Causis, one of the most influential sources of Neoplatonic ideas in Latin medieval philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries. The story of the Book of Causes teaches us an important lesson, which is that if you want to make a text influential in 12th and 13th century Latin philosophy, it's a good idea to say that it was written by Aristotle. Unfortunately, that advice probably comes too late to help you now. It may, though, have been only an accident of mislabeling that led to some of the contents of Al-Kindi's metaphysics phile being falsely ascribed to Aristotle. The Arabic version of Plotinus begins with a prologue which explains that what we are about to read provides a capstone to Aristotle's philosophy. Perhaps this confused a later scribe into thinking that the text before him was actually by Aristotle. But whatever the reason, parts of both the Arabic Proclus and the Arabic Plotinus were presented as works of Aristotle. A selection of materials from the Arabic Plotinus was even called the theology of Aristotle – theology because it dealt with higher, divine causes like the soul, intellect, and first cause, and of Aristotle because it was, well, by Aristotle. Other chunks of Plotinus in Arabic have survived, but without the aura of Aristotle's name. Some are simply ascribed to a Greek sage, which I've just realized sounds like something you'd find on a spice rack. You won't be surprised to hear that the theology was the most widely read bit of the metaphysics phile, still being made the subject of interpretation and commentary as late as the Safavid period in 16th and 17th century Iran. As I say, the theology of Aristotle is not a particularly faithful version of Plotinus. I don't just mean that it fails to observe the niceties of Greek grammar or that, like a German translating an American science fiction epic, the translator had to make choices about the best way to capture one language in another. Rather, original phrases and whole paragraphs of interpretive material were inserted into this version, the equivalent of filming new scenes in German and splicing them into the original movie. In fact, now that I think about it, did the original version of Star Wars really have Luke Skywalker first meet Han Solo in a beer garden? The changes made to the Arabic Plotinus are anything but philosophically innocent. You could write a whole book about the alterations that are made here, and in fact, I did. This was the subject of a book I published about 10 years ago. Since I've only got a few minutes left to go in this episode, I'll be more succinct here and just give you two examples. One is the Arabic version of a passage in which Plotinus discussed Aristotle's theory of soul. Aristotle, as we know, had defined the human soul as the actuality or perfection of a living body. Plotinus disliked this view if only because it suggested that the soul must go out of existence when the body dies. So he mounted a series of criticisms against Aristotle's definition. In the Arabic version, Aristotle is carefully protected from Plotinus' refutation by the very way that this refutation is translated. It starts already when Aristotle's characterization of soul as the body's perfection is first mentioned. Unlike the original Plotinus, the Plotinus who has been dubbed into Arabic says that this is the view of the most excellent philosophers. The translation goes on to reframe Plotinus' criticism as a possible misunderstanding of Aristotle. His definition could be taken to indicate a strong dependence of soul on body, because a perfection seems to need the thing that it perfects, but it should instead be understood to mean that the soul is the source of the body's perfection, a source that transcends the body and has no dependence on it. Thus, Aristotle's definition is not just quietly defended from Plotinus, but even assimilated to Plotinus' own theory of soul, and all this in a translation of Plotinus. My second example comes from the other end of Plotinus' system, the first cause or one. As we saw a while back, Plotinus offers a strenuously negative treatment of this principle. His advice for understanding the one is simply, take away everything, and with a few exceptions, he consistently presents the one as beyond anything we can say or think. The Arabic Plotinus makes several changes here. The most obvious is that it refers to the one as the creator, so that Plotinus' philosophical theology is itself unified with that of the Abrahamic faiths. Furthermore, a number of positive characterizations are given to this first principle. God is, in fact, presented more or less the way that Plotinus presented his second principle, namely nous or mind. God is said, for example, to think all things, and is equated with being itself, whereas Plotinus had insisted, quoting Plato's Republic, that the one is beyond being. Occasionally, Plotinus' remarks about the intellect are simply translated as descriptions about the one. Meanwhile, the translator borrows language from the contemporary theologians we looked at last time, the Mo'atazilites. For instance, it speaks of sifat, divine attributes, using their kalam terminology. It's not entirely clear what inspired these changes or even who made them. One possibility is that they were introduced by al-Kindi himself, since the prologue to the theology says that he corrected the text. Perhaps some of his corrections were philosophical ones. But I think the changes are partially or entirely the work of the translator himself, a Christian member of the Kindi circle named al-Hemsi. Either way, the Arabic version takes liberties with its source in order to make Plotinus a neater fit with the theological and philosophical needs of a 9th century readership. That intended readership included Ahmad, the son of the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim. The prologue tells us that the Greek text was rendered into Arabic for him, which brings a whole new meaning to the phrase render unto Caesar. When you have friends in such high places, fidelity to a Greek philosophical source is probably not going to weigh as heavily on your mind as making the source seem interesting and useful for the intended reader. The customer is always right, especially when the customer's father controls one of the largest empires in the history of mankind. The same dynamic of patronage and reinterpretation is going to continue next week as we turn our attention to the center of the circle. We'll be looking at al-Kindi, the tutor of the caliph's son and the man dubbed philosopher of the Arabs. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Philosopher of the Arabs, Al-Kindi. This episode is devoted to a man I've spent much of my adult life coming to know. He was a pioneer in his field, who drew inspiration from an earlier tradition, but expressed that inspiration in a new medium. In so doing, he created some of the earliest, and still classic, works of their kind. Yes, it's Buster Keaton. No, just kidding, I'm actually talking about Al-Kindi, one of the few historical figures who has occupied more of my attention than Buster has over the last 15 years of my life. I've written a book about Al-Kindi, and with my colleague Peter Poorman, translated all of his philosophical works into English. Though this never occurred to me until now, maybe my enthusiasm for Al-Kindi can be explained by his having a lot in common with Keaton. Apart from their names beginning with K, they were indeed both pioneers, with Buster using ideas from his vaudeville youth in the new medium of silent film, while Al-Kindi was the first to make explicit use of Greek philosophy while writing in Arabic. Whether Al-Kindi walked the streets of Baghdad wearing a pork pie hat, though, is more doubtful. As we saw last time, Al-Kindi could read the Greek philosophical works hot off the presses, so to speak, as they were translated into Arabic. A devout Muslim, he oversaw the work of a circle of Christian translators. Probably he did not himself read Greek, but he improved the translated texts, possibly just in terms of style, possibly also with respect to content, and may have played some role in choosing the works selected for translation. Certainly he was an intermediary between the translators and the patrons who whose wealth was making the whole thing possible. Al-Kindi's family background put him in touch with the higher echelons of the Abbasid society of 9th century Iraq. The name Al-Kindi indicates that he belonged to the Arab tribe of the Kinda, which had been very powerful in earlier times, including the period before the coming of Islam. Our Al-Kindi was, we are told, a direct descendant of their kings, one of whom had been a companion of the prophet. Al-Kindi's own father was a Mir of the city of Kufa. To emphasize his noble lineage, Al-Kindi was honored in the later tradition with the epithet, philosopher of the Arabs. The honorific also alludes to the fact that he was unusual among philosophers in claiming descent from an Arab tribe. On the strength of this privileged background, Al-Kindi ascended about as high as a philosopher could at this time, becoming attached to the court of at least one caliph, Al-Mu'atasim. He was tutor to this caliph's son Ahmad, and dedicated several works to him. Al-Kindi's masterpiece, On First Philosophy, was addressed to the caliph himself, which is rather amusing since Al-Mu'atasim was more the type to crack together the skulls of enemies, like the Byzantines, than to crack his own skull against the formidable ramparts of Aristotelian metaphysics. In On First Philosophy, and other works, Al-Kindi was doing not just philosophy, but also public relations. He was explaining in detail why the newly translated texts emanating from his circle were valuable for a Muslim readership, especially the wealthy elite who sponsored the translations. In On First Philosophy, Al-Kindi responds stridently to certain unnamed critics, religious scholars who protested against the use of Hellenic philosophical materials. These opponents may have thought that the revelation of the Qur'an made such materials superfluous at best. Al-Kindi responds that the truth is valuable wherever we find it. He puts that sentiment into practice in his philosophical writings, showing that Greek ideas can provide support and explication for Muslim beliefs, ranging from the oneness of God to the immortality of the soul. The title, On First Philosophy, indicates that Al-Kindi is here giving us his version of the highest philosophical science covered in Aristotle's metaphysics. But, whereas that work deals with a variety of topics to do with principles, from principles of reasoning to the nature of substance, Al-Kindi seems to understand metaphysics rather narrowly as philosophical theology. For him, First Philosophy should study the first cause, which is of course God. Thus, one of the main topics of the work is what we can say about God, or rather what we can't say. The other main topic is the eternity of the universe. Why is this on the agenda? One might expect his reason to be that, if the universe is not eternal, it must have been created, which proves that there is in fact a Creator God. But if this is what Al-Kindi is thinking, he keeps that to himself. Instead, the point would seem to be that if God alone is eternal, then his eternity distinguishes him from everything he creates. If we consider again the motives of the Mu'tazilites in denying the eternity of the Qur'an, we may be struck by a parallel here. They too wanted to say that nothing is eternal other than God, not even God's own Word. This might help account for Al-Kindi's interest in the eternity question. But when Al-Kindi comes to give arguments against the eternity of the universe, he does not draw on contemporary theologians. His main source is instead the ancient Christian philosopher John Philoponus. You'll remember that Philoponus wrote works against the eternity of the universe, aiming refutations against both Aristotle and Proclus. Al-Kindi borrows from Philoponus extensively in this section of On First Philosophy, but avoids mentioning that Aristotle was one of Philoponus's targets. What with all this reticence, maybe the comparison to silent film stars isn't so far-fetched. Of course, as a public relations man for Hellenic thought, it would hardly do for Al-Kindi to criticize the great Aristotle. Indeed, he seems to be trying to agree with Aristotle as far as he can. He provides a meticulous proof that no body, including the body of the universe, can be infinitely large. He then asserts, with less argument than we might ideally have liked, that any feature of a finite body must itself be finite. Since time measures motion, as Aristotle said, and since motion applies to body, neither motion nor time can ever be infinite if there is no infinite body. Aristotle would agree with almost all of this, up until the last step. He would want to distinguish between the kind of infinity at stake in an unending body, where the infinite is actually present in its entirety, and the kind of infinity involved in eternal time. The second kind of infinity is not actual, but potential. It is like the infinity of numbers. Just as you can count as high as you want without ever reaching an actually infinite number, so you can count backwards how many years have already elapsed without reaching a starting point for the universe. By simply assuming that eternal time is on a par with infinite size, Al-Kindi misses the whole point of the Aristotelian distinction between actual and potential infinity. Somewhat more convincing is another consideration that Al-Kindi takes from Philoponus. If the universe has already existed eternally, then an infinite time must already have elapsed in order to reach the present moment. But an infinite time cannot finish elapsing. This proves that the past is not eternal. But that leaves it open that the future could still be potentially infinite. After all, the universe might simply continue to exist for an indefinitely increasing, but always finite, number of years. Despite the central role played by Philoponus in this discussion, Al-Kindi continues his selective silence by saying nothing about the biggest point of contention between Philoponus and Aristotle, the nature of the celestial spheres. Aristotle had argued that the heavenly bodies are made out of a so-called fifth element, which unlike air, earth, fire, and water, can be neither generated nor destroyed. Philoponus spent most of his refutation of Aristotle arguing against this conception of the heavenly bodies. Al-Kindi, by contrast, wrote a little treatise defending Aristotle's conception of the heavens as being made from a unique, indestructible material. This at first seems inexplicable until we get to a little caveat towards the end of that treatise. Indeed, Al-Kindi says, the heavenly spheres are indestructible, so they will exist forever, so long as God wants them to. Here, he's changed the rules by implying that even a body whose nature is not subject to destruction will vanish if God stops making it exist. This is perhaps why Al-Kindi thinks the universe's eternity is a matter for metaphysical theology and not physics. It is not the nature of the universe that determines how long it exists, but the will of God. When it comes to the question of how that divine will is exercised, Al-Kindi again thinks he can mostly agree with Aristotle. Drawing on works by Aristotle's most faithful ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, Al-Kindi says in several treatises that the heavens serve as an instrument of divine providence. They move at God's command, and their motions stir up the four elements in our realm—good old air, earth, fire, and water—so that they come together to form more complex bodies like rocks, plants, and yes, giraffes. This means that Al-Kindi's God is a rather standoffish chap. He does not directly cause things to happen down here among us, but works indirectly through the heavens, which Al-Kindi calls the proximate cause of such things. That may seem like a high price to pay for fidelity to Aristotle. Theologians like the Mu'tazilites conceived God as a much more hands-on deity, seeing him as the direct cause for all created things and events in our world, except, perhaps, freely-willed human actions. But Al-Kindi had an ulterior motive to say that the heavens are an instrument of providence. He was a staunch believer in astrology, and thought that observing heavenly motions would allow us to predict specific events in our lower world. Like Ptolemy before him, Al-Kindi thus managed to get astrology and Aristotelianism into a single theory, along with an emphatic endorsement of divine providence. It's looking as though Al-Kindi has a lot to say about God. But, if we take a closer look, this is all concerned God's effects in our world. We have learned that they are providentially ordered through divinely commanded heavenly motion. But we haven't learned much regarding God himself, and we aren't going to. Indeed, a ketonesque silence is forced upon us once we take seriously Al-Kindi's portrayal of God as what he calls a true one. This theme takes up the rest of On First Philosophy. Al-Kindi offers us a proof that there must be such a true one on the basis that all the things we see in our world are characterized by both unity and multiplicity. A single body, for instance, will have multiple parts. A single species, like humanity, will have many particular instances, like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. The single genus of animal to which human beings belong will contain other species, like goat, horse, and cow. Okay, and giraffe. In general, Al-Kindi insists that anything we can conceive as a unity will also involve some kind of many-ness. Now remember that Al-Kindi knew his Neoplatonism. The works of Plotinus and Proclus were translated in his circle. So, he has no hesitation in drawing the same conclusion they did, namely that there must be a principle of unity which bestows oneness on all these things that are both one and many. This will be the true one, which Al-Kindi wants to identify with God. Although the Greek sources of the doctrine are clear, what Al-Kindi is doing here also resonates with Islam and, yet again, with those Ma'atazilite theologians I keep mentioning. We've seen how much emphasis they placed on the doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God. One can only imagine how pleased Al-Kindi must have been to leaf through the translated works produced in his circle, the ink still wet on the page, and to discover the harmony between the unrestricted unity of the Neoplatonist first principle and the utter oneness of the Muslim God. Here's something he isn't going to keep quiet. Ironically, though, the message he is so eager to deliver is precisely one about not being able to speak. He now addresses the concerns of theologians who denied the applicability of divine attributes to a simple god, but also of Neoplatonists like Plotinus and, possibly, the Pseudo-Dionysius, who was well known to authors of the Syriac tradition and may even have influenced the Kindi circle's version of Plotinus. Both groups indulged in what is often called negative theology, the attempt to characterize God by explaining how he transcends human understanding and human language. In this same spirit, Al-Kindi launches into a complete catalogue of every kind of speech or predicate we can use. For this, he draws on logical works like Porphyry's Introduction. These would seem to have been well known to him because, as we saw last time, logical writings were among the first texts translated into Arabic and had already been a focus of attention among Syriac authors. In fact, there is another brief work by Al-Kindi which uses Porphyry's Introduction to refute the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Going through each of the types of predicates recognized by Porphyry, such as genus, species, accident, and so on, Al-Kindi argues that none of these are applicable to God. But to call God a Trinity is to apply terms to him like father and son, and these would have to fall under one or another of Porphyry's types of predicate. Al-Kindi adds that he has used Porphyry's work here simply because the Christians he is attacking are familiar with it. On First Philosophy makes the same point, but without applying it specifically to Trinitarian predications. Rather, it looks like he has all predicates in his sights. We have already seen why. Language always refers to things that possess both unity and multiplicity, and God is the true one, only a unity with no multiplicity at all. The rest is, apparently, silence. But hang on for a moment. Wasn't Al-Kindi just telling us that God is unique in being eternal? So there's a predicate that applies to him. Or what about the word one? It looks like we're allowed to apply that to God too. And actually, elsewhere Al-Kindi says that God is a pure agent with no trace of passivity much as he is a pure unity with no trace of multiplicity. In this, he is unlike the heavens, for instance, which do act upon us but are also acted upon by God. So, it looks as though Al-Kindi's thoroughly negative theology is not so thorough after all. There are a few predicates, at least one, eternal and agent, that do apply to God. Al-Kindi's treatment of God is not the only context in which he uses Aristotelian logic to do a bit of metaphysics. He also wrote a short treatise deploying ideas from Aristotle's categories to prove that the soul is immaterial. Here we can see him straining to use his still rather incomplete library of Greek philosophical texts to establish rational grounds for the core beliefs of Islam. He has a relatively poor knowledge even of Aristotle, who will in due course be the most widely read Hellenic thinker in Arabic translation. His incomplete acquaintance with Aristotle is clear from a catalogue of Aristotle's books written by Al-Kindi. Whereas he is able to give detailed information on what happens in a work like the categories, he sometimes seems to know very little about the Aristotelian treatises he is describing. In my favorite example, he tells us the title of the Aristotelian work on shortness and length of life, and then adds simply, it is about the shortness and length of life. Thanks for that. Although he must eventually have gained access to Aristotle's work on the soul, Al-Kindi's own writings about the soul mostly emphasize Platonist ideas. The soul is, as we just saw, immaterial. It has three parts, as Plato said, with the chief part being reason. Our goal as humans should be to make this rational part dominant, and to wean ourselves away from concern with the body. This is like cleaning the mirror of the soul of its stains and rust. What will we reflect, or rather, reflect upon, once this process of polishing is complete? As any good Platonist would tell you, the answer is, the things in the world of the intellect, a phrase Al-Kindi takes from his version of Plotinus. This disdain for the body was presumably restated in some of the numerous works on ethics and political philosophy we know were written by Al-Kindi. A highly informative list of works known in Arabic in the 10th century by the bookseller Ibn al-Nadim lists quite a few entries on these topics, but along with literally hundreds of other treatises by Al-Kindi, they are mostly lost. One Kindian ethical work does survive though. It is called On Dispelling Sorrow, and provides numerous bits of advice and memorable anecdotes to help us avoid sadness over the trials and tribulations of this world. Much of it could have been written by a Stoic author with a popular touch, but it begins with the standard invocation of the world of the intellect. If we value only intelligible things, which are stable and cannot be taken away from us, then we need never fear losing what we cherish, and so will never be sad. This Platonist psychological theory, and its made-to-match ethics, don't look particularly Aristotelian. But what may be Al-Kindi's best-known work in this area, A Letter on the Intellect, engages directly with the tradition of commentary on Aristotle's treatment of the intellect in the third book of On the Soul. Here, Al-Kindi manages, as so often, to get there first. He inaugurates a long tradition in which Muslim philosophers explain human knowledge in terms of a superhuman, separate intellect. The basic theory is that the human mind starts out in a state of merely potential knowledge, and is then activated, or illuminated, by this separate intellect. Al-Kindi calls it the first intellect, but later in the tradition it will frequently be called the active intellect. We'll be talking about this in more detail when we get to later thinkers like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. In fact, a standard itinerary in the study of Islamic philosophy would go just like that. Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and then we'd be ready to move on to the Latin European tradition. But, although we've now looked at the philosopher of the Arabs, we've only begun to examine early philosophy in Arabic. For one thing, I've promised to deal with Jewish philosophers along the way, and we're now in an excellent position to start doing just that. We've examined Al-Kindi and the Mu'tazilites, who are respectively the two chief influences on two early Jewish thinkers who wrote in Arabic, Isaac Israely and Saadia Gaon. The last Jewish philosopher we looked at was Philo of Alexandria, who lived way back in the first century AD. Next time, we'll be asking what has been happening in the Jewish tradition since him, and how Jewish philosophy began to blossom again in the soil of Islamic culture. I may not say much about Buster Keaton or any other star of the silent screen, nor about the stars that exercise providence in Al-Kindi's universe. Instead, it will be the Star of David that will light our way here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Chosen Ones, Judaism and Philosophy. Stop me if you've heard this one. A devout man is caught in a terrible flood, and retreats to the roof of his house as the waters rise inexorably towards him. As the water reaches the level of the roof, a rowboat comes past. The people in the boat offer to rescue him, but the man says, no need, I put my trust in God. The water keeps rising up to his knees. Two boy scouts come past in a canoe and offer to rescue him. The man says, no need, I put my trust in God. The water rises to his neck, but just in time a helicopter flies overhead and they throw down a rope. He shouts up, no need, I put my trust in God. The helicopter flies off and the man drowns. He goes to heaven and says to God, my Lord, I put my trust in you, why didn't you save me? God says, what are you talking about, I sent a rowboat, a canoe, and a helicopter. I know it's an old joke, but I did tell you to stop me if you've heard it before. It brings us to an issue that has been central in the history of both Islam and Judaism. Both of these faiths are, of course, based on a belief in prophetic revelation. But once God has sent his prophets, what comes next? Does he keep trying to deliver the message to humankind, sending help again and again until we finally accept it? It might seem that the teaching of Islam on this point is clear. God did send many prophets, and Muhammad was the last of them. The Qur'an would be the last book revealed to mankind. Of course, Muslims can still believe that God continues to work his will in the world in other ways. For instance, as we've seen, Muslims in the Shiite tradition believe that Ali and his descendants should be recognized as divinely sanctioned interpreters of the prophet's message. This belief and its rejection by Sunni Muslims have had momentous implications for both political affairs and interpretations of Muslim doctrine and law. A similar controversy raged among Jews in the 9th century, the period in which Greek philosophy was being imported into Arabic-speaking culture. The parallel is certainly not exact, but this too was a controversy about whether an original revelation should be understood in the light of later authoritative interpretation. In this case, the mainstream view was that of the Rabbinic Jews, who continue to be dominant in Judaism today. Of course, they accepted the written canon of scriptural writings, including the Torah, but they also believed that the revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai included more than what we find in the written Torah. The parts of the revelation that were not set down at that time passed down through the generations by word of mouth. Centuries later, this oral Torah became the basis for the texts of commentary and law composed by rabbis in late antiquity. In the 9th century, though, the authority ascribed to these rabbinic texts was questioned by another group of Jews, known as the Karaites. For them, the late ancient texts could claim no special authority, no divine sanction. They were just attempts by fallible humans to expound the meaning of the written Torah. Although these podcasts are devoted to the history of philosophy, not the history of religion, we have several reasons to look at the late antique writings that were at the center of this debate. For one thing, the texts themselves are of considerable philosophical interest. They represent the most crucial intellectual development in Judaism between our old friend Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century AD and the beginnings of medieval Jewish philosophy in the 9th century. Also, the history of Jewish philosophy has mostly unfolded within rabbinic Judaism. That means that if we are to understand the religious sources drawn on by Jewish philosophers, the inspiration and the challenges set to them by Judaism as they understood it, we cannot just think in terms of the Hebrew Bible. We also need to remember the later tradition of law and commentary. Above all, we need to consider the text known as the Mishnah and the bodies of commentary that emerged in its wake, Talmud and Midrash. These texts were set down in late antiquity, a time of considerable uncertainty and disruption for the Jews. As we saw when we looked at Philo of Alexandria, Jewish ritual had for centuries centered on the Temple in Jerusalem. It was destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BC, but soon thereafter rebuilt when control over Jerusalem passed to the more benign Persians. This ushered in the period known as Second Temple Judaism, which ended in scenes of carnage and despair when the Romans wrecked the Second Temple in 70 AD. The land of Judea was also devastated in this period with a significant loss of population. Things then went from bad to worse to even worse. In the first half of the 2nd century AD, there were Jewish uprisings all across the Roman world which led to renewed reprisals. For instance, an unsuccessful uprising in the time of Trajan provoked a backlash so severe that the Jewish population of Egypt was virtually wiped out. And yet Jewish patriarchs were still allowed a measure of political power in the Holy Land and served as intermediaries between the restive Jews and the Roman authorities. We might assume that the coming of Christianity would mean further bad news for the Jewish faith. Certainly, when we looked at late ancient Christian thought, we saw severe intellectual critique being aimed at the Jews by authors like Justin Martyr. Christians could be severe at the legal and political level too. There are plentiful examples of discriminatory laws, to say nothing of hostile rhetoric, being directed against the Jews by Christian emperors. On the other hand, Christians were aware of the Jewish roots of their own faith, and laws were also passed to protect their property and their religious practices. Nonetheless, it was a moment of great hope for Jews when the pagan Julian the Apostate became emperor. In an attempt to embarrass the Christians, he declared his intention to restore the Temple in Jerusalem. The hope was short lived. Hardly any progress had been made on the new construction when he died in battle, ending his brief reign. The Temple would not be rebuilt. But a different kind of edifice was already being erected, a structure of laws and of texts built one upon the other. The first to be set down was the Mishnah at around 200 AD. Credit for this text is given to Judah the Patriarch, but this is no monograph written by a single religious leader or scholar. Instead, it records the teachings of many scholars, called rabbis. The word rabbi, by the way, means my master. At first glance, it seems to be a book of legal judgments, which are divided into six large sections or orders covering the offering of crops, times of religious observance such as the Sabbath, which prayers to say in which circumstances, and so on. These judgments are obviously intimately related to the texts of the written revelation, but they are not presented as a commentary on Scripture, which is rarely mentioned explicitly. Instead, we are told what various rabbis decided about a wide range of legal questions. Legal issues concerning women, marriage, purity laws, and the like loom large in the Mishnah, and the text recognizes the possibility of allowing women to study Torah. Later Talmudic texts even name women scholars who spent years studying Torah in an intriguing parallel to well-educated Christian women in late antiquity like the Cappadocian Macrina and the ascetic women whom we refer to as Desert Mothers. This was not the first time that women were able to play a role in the intellectual culture of ancient Judaism. It has recently been argued that a group of Jewish women called the theraputai, who are mentioned by Philo of Alexandria, were part of the development towards allegorical readings of the Bible that is so striking a feature of Philo's own work. Rather surprisingly, given that the Mishnah was formed more than a century after the destruction of the Temple, much of the material gathered in it still deals with fine points of rituals that could only be carried out by priests while the Temple still stood. In this respect, the Mishnah seems to have an almost timeless frame of reference. Yet this magisterial and ahistorical aspect of the Mishnah is balanced by other features. For one thing, it is written in a much different kind of Hebrew from the language of the Torah. For another, there are the signs of its origin in oral teaching. The purpose of the written version may have been simply an aid to memory. And of course, oral traditions change over time. No one reading the Mishnah can miss this point because, rather surprisingly for readers expecting this to be an austere legal tome, the Mishnah frequently records disagreements between rabbis. This gives us a vivid sense of ongoing debate over the prescriptions and application of the Jewish law. Although the Mishnah is no commentary, it fills gaps left by Scripture, significantly extending the Jewish legal teaching through interpretation of the written revelation and through newly offered legal reasoning. Already during Late Antiquity, well before the skepticism of the Karaites, the rabbis needed to stake a claim to authority, to justify their right to make binding legal judgments. Ultimately, the authority of the Mishnah is grounded in its claim to set down the oral Torah, what was revealed at Sinai to Moses and his followers, but not included in written Scripture. But rabbis were also said to be wonder-working sages, capable of killing a man with a glance or magically causing a field to bring forth a crop of cucumbers. Whether this event led to the invention of the dill pickle is not recorded. The working of miracles further bolstered the rabbis' claim to authority. In rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnah would be seen not just as the collection of some learned legal opinions, but as a sacred text in its own right. Inevitably, the Mishnah itself became an object of study and commentary alongside the written Torah that was seen as the revelation given to Moses. So it was that, even as Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire, two further bodies of Jewish texts arose, Midrash and Talmud. Midrash is commentary on the Scriptures, and is standardly divided into two types, halakha, which deals with actual legal rulings, and agada, which provides religious teachings on non-legal subjects. These texts exploit the interpretive possibilities envisioned in a saying about Scripture found in the Mishnah, Jews also turned to the Mishnah itself, finding in it fertile ground for further reflection and commentary. This is what led to the writing of Talmud. There are actually two such texts, the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmud, which comment on the Mishnah much as the Midrashim comment on the written Torah. Like the Mishnah, the Talmud gives a sense of ongoing, subtle engagement with fine points of law, attempting to resolve discrepancies within the rabbinic teachings and, where possible, to smooth over the explicit disagreements found in the Mishnah. Yet, in this search to establish firm legal rulings, Talmud preserves further evidence of careful dialectical debate between scholars. Both for this reason, and because of the sort of topics covered—legal and moral responsibility, classification of certain objects and practices into one category or another, epistemology—some scholars have even described the Mishnah and Talmud as philosophical texts. There is some debate as to the interest of rabbinic scholars in Hellenic or Roman philosophical traditions. Though the texts do not make use of terminology from philosophical texts, there is evidence of personal encounters between rabbis and philosophers. And there are certainly themes of philosophical interest in the rabbinic texts. A good example is the legal status of intentions. Obviously, it is not easy to enforce laws having to do with inward intention. Thus, the rabbis sometimes try to eliminate talk of intentions from the law, for instance by interpreting the injunction not to covet another's property as an injunction not to steal. On the other hand, we find them teaching that rituals require kavana, or sincere intention. Going through the motions is not enough. Though the texts are not written in the style of philosophical treatises, their open acknowledgement of unresolved debate invite the reader to apply his or her own scholarly and philosophical reflection. The Talmud will sometimes offer scriptural proof texts to support rival legal views. At one point, we find the saying, both sides of a controversy are the word of God. So, the magnificent structure bequeathed to the later Jews by the rabbis of late antiquity was something of a maze. The complex dialectical and unsystematic nature of the Talmud meant there was not just room, but need for yet another layer of interpretive legal writing. This call would be answered in 12th century Andalusia by Maimonides, the greatest philosopher of medieval Judaism. He was also a legal scholar, whose greatest contribution in this field was the Mishneh Torah, or second law, a systematization and rationalization of the legal teachings of these rabbinical texts. As we'll see later, a central issue in Maimonides' writings is the relationship between human reason on the one hand and divine revelation and rabbinical teachings on the other. This had already been a vexed issue in late antiquity. For instance, the commentaries on scripture, known as Midrashim, assumed that the revealed text would never say anything in vain or superfluous. From this, the rabbis inferred that scripture does not bother to lay down rules that can be discovered by unaided human reflection. On this reading, scripture is not ever in disagreement with reason, yet its whole purpose is to supplement reasoning by revealing what would otherwise remain inaccessible to us. Nonetheless, legal reasoning must also be used to bring together scriptural materials and the oral tradition to reach concrete judgments. As one rabbinical text remarks, the Torah is like wheat made into flour or flax made into a garment. It provides the indispensable materials for constructing Jewish law and belief, not the finished product. If our tour through the history of philosophy has taught us anything, though, it is that the deliverances of reason differ from time to time and place to place. For the 9th century Jews who first wrote about philosophy in the Islamic world, reason was embodied above all by two non-Jewish traditions. First, the Greek philosophical works that were then being translated into Arabic. Second, the rational theology offered by the Mo'artazilites. We can see the impact of Hellenic philosophy most clearly in the output of a man named Isaac Israeli. His long life began in Egypt in the mid-9th century and is said to have extended for about 100 years. He traveled beyond the confines of Egypt, at least to modern-day Tunisia, and may also have journeyed to the eastern provinces of the Muslim empire. Somehow, on his travels he became acquainted with the writings of the man we looked at in the last episode, Al-Kindi. Drawing extensively on Al-Kindi and on Greek works in Arabic translation, Isaac became the first thinker of a type we'll be meeting several times in episodes to come, a Jewish Neoplatonist. The most famous of the Jewish Neoplatonists is probably Ibn Gabirol, who lived in the 11th century. Isaac anticipates Ibn Gabirol's metaphysical system in some respects. In particular, he introduces a novel twist to the scheme of emanation that became available to readers of Arabic when Plotinus and Proclus were translated. You'll remember that for the Greek Neoplatonists, all things pour forth necessarily from a highest principle which is absolutely one, like light shining from a source of illumination or water gushing from a fountain. In Plotinus's system, the first principle is followed by a universal mind, in Greek nous. Isaac, and later Ibn Gabirol, agree with that, but they interpose a stage between God and the mind. In Isaac, this intermediary stage consists of two principles emanated by God, matter and form. These two then come together to constitute a perfectly wise mind which knows all things. In turn, it produces a universal, rational soul through another process of emanation. The chain of emanation continues with the emergence of the lower types of soul and finally the physical universe. As in Al-Kindi, the heavenly bodies are causally primary and bring about bodily substances and events down here on earth. Isaac does not really solve one central problem that had always faced the Greek Neoplatonists, How is it that many things come forth from a principle that is purely one? Instead, he simply assumes that God is followed immediately by two principles, the so-called first matter and first form. On the other hand, the existence of matter at this exalted level of the system can help to explain why things progressively fall away from the perfection and unity of the first principle. For Isaac, emanation is not just a shining of light, but a casting of shadow. This increases as God's originating activity becomes more mediated by the intervening influence of mind, then soul, then the heavenly bodies. Now it must be admitted that so far none of this seems to have anything to do with Judaism. But Isaac describes his first principle as a creator God who, unlike all other causes, can produce things by bringing them to be out of nothing. Both Isaac and Al-Kindi refer to this special kind of causation as ibdah, or origination. In the case of Isaac, there has been some scholarly controversy as to whether God's originating act is necessary, as in Plotinus, or freely and arbitrarily willed. Isaac does not make it easy to tell, since he refers to God's creation as both an emanation and an act of will. My own feeling is that, like Plotinus, he simply thought that God could, necessarily, give rise to all things, but still be free in doing so, insofar as no other cause was forcing him to create. Another reason Isaac foreshadows developments in later Jewish philosophy is that he was not just a philosopher, he was also a doctor. Supposedly, when asked whether he regretted not having children, he responded that his medical writings would be a better legacy than any human offspring. He might have added that medical writings don't come home drunk in the middle of the night after claiming they were going to the library to do schoolwork. Isaac himself probably never worried his parents like that. Even from the small amount of his work that survives, we can tell that he had studied not just medicine and philosophy, but also Jewish religious texts. In one partially preserved work, called On Spirit and Soul, he brings together all three traditions in the space of only a few pages. For him, spirit, in Arabic ruh, is a subtle physical substance pervading the body, a conception that comes down to him from medical writers like Galen. But unlike Galen, who was reluctant to state any firm views on the soul's nature, Isaac sharply distinguishes soul from spirit, identifying the former as an immaterial principle which can survive the death of the body. Around this same time, other Jewish thinkers turn to a different source of inspiration in constructing a rational version of Judaism—not Neoplatonism and Galen, but the Islamic theology espoused by the Mu'tazilites. One instance is David al-Muqamis, who was active in the early 9th century and thus has a good claim to be the very first medieval Jewish philosopher. He follows the Mu'tazilites on several issues central to their teaching. For instance, he uses the so-called kalam proof of God's existence, which infers the need for a divine creator from the need for substances to be joined to their accidents. He also broadly accepts their ideas about how language applies to God, or rather fails to apply to him. Like the Mu'tazilites, he tends to deny the existence of real attributes distinct from God's essence. Islamic kalam was such a rich source of inspiration for Jewish thinkers in these early centuries that it could be embraced by both parties to the debate I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. With its valorization of human reason, Mu'tazilism was an obvious fit for Karaite Judaism, which gave no special authority to the rabbinical writings of antiquity. For these Karaites, the Torah could best be interpreted through the power of human rationality. Against that standard, they frequently found rabbinical texts to be wanting. For instance, they accused the rabbis of presenting God in an anthropomorphic way. It was perhaps to answer such criticisms that the greatest Jewish philosopher of this period wrote his masterpiece, A Rational Account of Jewish Belief. He too was deeply influenced by the Islamic current that was then swirling into the stream of Jewish intellectual history. His positions on a range of philosophical and theological issues clearly reflect the impact of ideas flowing from Mu'tazilism. Yet he was a passionate defender of rabbinic Judaism and wrote a tax which poured scorn on his Karaite contemporaries. With his thought, medieval Jewish philosophy reaches its first high-water mark. So I'll be in floods of tears if you don't join me to find out more about Saadia Gaon next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Reasoned Belief, Saadia Gaon. When you hear the word medieval, various things may leap to mind. Knights in shining armor. Monks laboring in monasteries. Peasants working in unrelieved squalor on feudal estates. Lords and ladies eating huge chunks of meat without the aid of a fork. Productive inter-religious dialogue, though, is probably pretty far down on this list. We tend to assume that such dialogue is a recent development made possible by today's more enlightened and tolerant attitude. Ecumenicism is in, persecutions and crusades are out, or at least we'd like to think so. But in these podcasts, I hope to persuade you to give up this prejudice about the medieval era. In due course, we'll see how Christian medieval thinkers writing in Latin drew extensively on Muslim and Jewish authors. For now, it's one reason I am weaving the story of Jewish medieval philosophy into the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, rather than separating it out as a story of its own. Especially in the Islamic medieval world, conditions were good for interfaith discourse and debate. For the most part, Muslims were happy for Jews and Christians to live peacefully in the vast swath of territory dominated by Islam. Admittedly, these other peoples of the book were subject to special conditions, such as higher taxes. This occasionally had the ironic result that Muslim rulers quietly discouraged members of other faiths from converting to Islam, because they needed the added revenue. One might compare the way governments nowadays are secretly quite happy for people to keep smoking, since it brings in extra funds through the cigarette tax. Of course, one shouldn't be blind to the hardships and oppression that were sometimes visited on non-Muslims. We'll see an extreme case of that when we get to the rule of the Almohads in Muslim Spain a few centuries down the line. Also, we should admit that interfaith discussion often took the form of vigorous refutation. For an example of that, you only have to wait a few minutes, since we'll discuss one in this episode. Still, there is an unanswerable case to be made that Jewish and Christian philosophers in the Islamic world creatively engaged with Muslim thinkers and vice versa. Exhibit A in proving that case? A man who decided more than a few cases of his own. The judge, biblical commentator, linguist, and philosopher Sa'id ibn Yusuf al-Fayyumi, more commonly known as Sa'idiyah Gaon. The last part of his name indicates that he hailed from Fayyum in Upper Egypt. He was born there in 882, just a few years after the death of al-Kindi. As we'll be seeing, these two near-contemporaries had a lot in common despite their different faiths. At the age of 23, Sa'idiyah left Egypt for Palestine, and 13 years after that he moved to Iraq, where he was appointed the Gaon of the Jewish Academy in the city of Sura. Which raises the question, what is a Gaon? Well, the Gaonim were heads of the rabbinic academies in Babylon from the 6th to the 11th centuries. This means that Sa'idiyah was first and foremost a scholar of Jewish law, and thus an expert not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also the oral traditions collected in the Mishnah and the vast commentary of the Talmud, as we discussed last time. Sa'idiyah was a staunch defender of the value of these teachings in the face of the Karaites, the critics of the oral teaching whom we met in the previous episode, and he wrote works of refutation against them. This was only one of several controversies that consumed his energies. A dispute over one legal decision saw the local Exilarch, a leader of the Jewish community in Babylonia, try to remove Sa'idiyah from his post. Along with his expertise in law, Sa'idiyah was also a leading exponent of linguistics. He produced a much-used Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest surviving work of Hebrew grammar. It's appropriate that Sa'idiyah was such an expert on words, because in his philosophical writings, he was much influenced by the Islamic science of the word kalam. He is often thought of not so much as a philosopher, but as a Jewish muta kalam, meaning an exponent of kalam. Since he seems especially close to the theologians known as the Mo'otazilites, who I talked about a few episodes back, you'll even see him called a Jewish Mo'otazilite. In this respect, he is comparable to the earlier Jewish thinker David Anwukamos. It may seem amazing that these Jewish philosophers should have such intellectual affinity with Islamic theologians. But, Sa'idiyah was not signaling his allegiance to the Mo'otazilites as such. For one thing, as I pointed out before, in the 9th century, the Mo'otazilites were not yet a unified school or movement to which one could declare allegiance. They were rather independent-minded theologians arguing with one another from some shared assumptions. Furthermore, I read Sa'idiyah not so much as a Jewish Mo'otazilite, but as an intellectual magpie who used all the materials available to him to mount a systematic, rational account of Jewish belief. It was the beliefs of his scriptures and of the legal traditions that claimed his allegiance. So, it's again appropriate that Sa'idiyah's main philosophical treatise should be called Kitab al-'Amarnat wal-Etikadat, the Book of Beliefs and Doctrines. In this treatise, he does not just set out the fundamental beliefs of Judaism, he explains how these beliefs are in accordance with reason. If he draws on Mo'otazilites and Greek authors in Arabic translation, it is because he thinks they have done a good job establishing principles of reason and arguing on that basis. Sa'idiyah shows his interest in correct philosophical method at the very beginning of his work. He tells us that when we are in search of knowledge, we should begin by coming to our senses, literally. Sensation is the first means by which humans can grasp truth. By this, Sa'idiyah means, in the first instance, everyday experiences, like seeing that a giraffe is standing in the field. Sensation also gives rise to general concepts of reason, such as the concept giraffe. However, reason can also grasp certain truths on its own, without using the senses. Here, we might be expecting an example like mathematical truths or laws of logic, but Sa'idiyah instead mentions how we instinctively approve of the truth itself and disapprove of falsehood. This immediate rational insight, then, is a second source of knowledge. A third route to knowledge is inference from the first two sources, as when I see smoke and infer that there is fire, or build up more complex mathematical truths from the simple ones I can grasp immediately. Finally, these three means to knowledge are supplemented by what we can learn from testimony. Here, as we might expect, Sa'idiyah is thinking above all of truths gleaned from religious texts. But it could also include more banal examples, as when you believe that Sa'idiyah lived in Iraq in the early 10th century because I just told you so. I think I forgot to mention that he died in 842. Take my word for it. Banal or not, though, Sa'idiyah seems to have strayed into more controversial ground with this fourth route to knowledge. Certainly, we acquire beliefs by means of testimony, but can we really acquire knowledge? That is a question that will turn up many times in episodes to come, not least next time when we look at the philosopher Arazi. As we'll see, he disdained uncritical dependence on authority, which in Arabic was called taqlid. Al-Farabi too will be unimpressed by claims to knowledge based on authoritative testimony, and we'll even see theologians like al-Ghazali throwing the accusation of taqlid at their opponents. For many proponents of kalam, just as for philosophers, we understand the truth by using our capacity for reason and not by believing what others have said. But Sa'idiyah is not claiming that we should blindly follow whatever tradition tells us. Rather, tradition itself is verified through the three other routes to knowledge. Not only did prophets perform miracles, giving sensible demonstrations of their authenticity, but the message of the Scriptures is in harmony with reason. We can figure out for ourselves that murder is wrong, for instance. So when the Ten Commandments include the order not to kill, we don't need to just take God's word for it. We know that the commandment is right. A thoughtful reading of the Bible shows that its messages are uniformly in keeping with the deliverances of reason. This may make it sound like human reason is standing in judgment over a divinely revealed text. But Sa'idiyah hastens to add that the process of confirmation also goes the other way. He supplies quotes from the Bible to prove that the Scriptures endorse the use of sensation, reason, and inference, just as these three sources ratify the truth of prophetic revelation. There is then a virtuous circle of mutual support between our inborn capacity to reach knowledge and the revealed truths that have additionally been granted to us. Systematic thinker that he is, Sa'idiyah goes on to apply the lessons of this methodological discussion, starting with the most important objects of human knowledge, God, and His creation of the universe. Unfortunately, this most important case of knowledge also presents the greatest difficulties. Unlike giraffes, God does not present Himself to the senses, so we might worry that the first route of sensation will be completely useless here. But as Sa'idiyah points out, not everything accessible to us through the senses is immediately accessible. He gives the example of snow, which upon inspection proves to derive from water, while water in turn comes from condensed vapor. In general, as we inquire using the senses, we go from the less to the more subtle in both the basic physical sense of what is less dense, like water vapor, and in the broader sense of what is abstract and difficult to experience. The same sort of procedure works with the universe as a whole. We begin by observing the world around us, and realize that it must derive from some cause. This of course will be God. As with snow and water vapor, we begin with the senses but come to accept the existence of something that cannot be sensed. At the risk of raining on Sa'idiyah's parade, we should consider a potential problem with his view before we steam on ahead. If God's existence is only inferred from what we can experience with the senses, then will we remain completely in the dark as to God's actual nature? He will be simply an unknown principle, postulated to explain where sensible things came from. But this would be to forget the second source of knowledge, the immediate deliverances of reason. These can tell us several things about God and His relation to the world. Firstly, using nothing but reason, we can prove that the universe is not eternal. In fact, that everybody must be created, which can be explained only by positing an incorporeal and eternal cause. Sa'idiyah provides a whole battery of arguments for this which are eerily reminiscent of the arguments given by al-Kindi. This is no coincidence, since both are reproducing proofs against the eternity of the universe devised by John Philoponus. Al-Kindi, by the way, also made the point that the question whether the universe is eternal is one that is settled by intellectual speculation alone. There are other points of overlap. For instance, both follow the eternity discussion with a proof that nothing can cause itself, and then go on to provide a consideration of God's attributes. Since Sa'idiyah wrote the Book of Doctrines and Beliefs when he was already in Iraq, where al-Kindi lived, I can't help wondering whether he was drawing on al-Kindi himself. Be that as it may, we have not yet exhausted the resources of reason in coming to understand God. We just saw that he is eternal and incorporeal. A bit of further reflection shows that he must also have several other features. First, as al-Kindi also said, God must be perfectly one. After all, he is not a body and thus has no parts, so he is completely simple. Also, as a creator, he must be alive, powerful, and knowledgeable. Alive, in order to be able to create anything at all, possessed of the immense power needed to summon an entire universe into being from nothing, and knowledgeable in order to make the world as well-designed as we see it to be. Again, Sa'idiyah insists that all this is grasped by reason itself, though it is also confirmed by scriptural authority. But, he is also showing his Mautazilite sympathies. As we saw, they were worried that ascribing numerous features to God would compromise his total oneness, his tawhid. Sa'idiyah agrees, saying many times that anyone who thinks that God has a multiplicity of features is reducing him to a body. Sa'idiyah avoids this by insisting that the distinction between God's power, knowledge, and life is an illusion. It may seem to us that God's power couldn't be the same thing as his knowledge and his life, but that's simply a sign of our limited perspective. In God, all three are the same. Sa'idiyah even suggests that it is specifically the limitations of our language that caused the problem. If we had a single word for something's being alive, powerful, and knowing, we could use that to describe God, and there would be no appearance of multiplicity. This may seem a rather dubious line of thought, but remember that Sa'idiyah asserted these three features of God purely on the basis that he created the world. And, Sa'idiyah emphasizes that we have no other means of access to God or his attributes. At the level of reason, then, we are simply grasping God as a creator. It is only when we try to explain what that means in words that we get into trouble, since our language leads us to speak of him in terms of three aspects, so compromising his unity. You may already be suspecting a lurking anti-Christian agenda here, and soon the agenda becomes explicit. We saw that al-Kindi criticized the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and this is yet another thing he has in common with Sa'idiyah. But unlike al-Kindi, Sa'idiyah has a story about where the Christians went astray. Indeed, he seems sympathetic to the more sophisticated breed of Christian. They understand God to be a Trinity, not because they crassly think of him as a body with three parts, but because they have grasped the necessity that there is a creator who is alive, powerful, and knowing. Their error is to be misled into postulating a genuine threeness in God, assigning each of these attributes to a distinct divine person. An easy enough mistake to make, Sa'idiyah admits, but a mistake nonetheless. He helpfully points out to them that if God had any form of multiplicity, he would be a body, something this more sophisticated type of Christian rightly rejects. If the Christians are sophisticated enough, they will probably respond that things can be multiple without being bodies. Even the Platonists said so. Just think of the intellect which Plotinus said was immaterial and one, but also many. Sa'idiyah, though, wants to draw a firm line between two kinds of things—those that are created, limited, and characterized by multiplicity, and the creator, who is eternal, incorporeal, and utterly one. By now, you're hopefully beginning to see why people connect Sa'idiyah so strongly with Mo'atazilism. His insistence on divine unity, even in the face of the apparent diversity of God's attributes, looks like what we saw in thinkers like Abu'l-Udeil. But can we really think of him as a Mo'atazilite sympathizer if he doesn't also argue, as they did, that God must give us freedom over our actions if we are to be morally responsible for what we do? This is my cue to mention that Sa'idiyah also argues that God must give us freedom over our actions if we are to be morally responsible for what we do. Using Mo'atazilite terminology, he remarks that it belongs to the justice of God to give man the capacity to do what God has commanded and to avoid what God has forbidden. Sa'idiyah also adds a discussion of the divine foreknowledge problem, which we saw turning up in Augustine and Boethius, the gist of Sa'idiyah's remarks being that although God does know what I will do before I do it, his knowledge doesn't actually cause me to do what I do. Sa'idiyah borrows so heavily from the Mo'atazilites in these parts of his book of beliefs and doctrines that one could almost forget that one is reading a Jewish author if it weren't for his constant allusions to the Bible as confirming his philosophical claims. Even his style of writing is typical of a kalam author. He often proceeds by listing possible positions on a given topic and then pedantically itemizing the ways that each of the wrong positions can be refuted. Paging through the work, you'll see him, for instance, describing Plato's ideas about the creation of the world and then asserting that Plato can be refuted in no fewer than twelve ways, all of which Sa'idiyah will be more than happy to explain. This dialectical style of writing, where one advances by means of refuting all other theories to leave the true one standing at the end, will be a future of kalam writing for centuries to come. Yet, for all his borrowings from kalam, Sa'idiyah also looks back at the centuries of Jewish heritage that have come and gone. He sharply differs from Muslim theologians on a variety of points. For instance, Muslims believed that some provisions of the Quranic law were abrogated, which means that they were effectively repealed by a subsequent revelation. Some Jews also accepted the possibility of abrogation, but Sa'idiyah firmly denies it, insisting that God's law can never be overturned. One might suppose that this only stands to reason, literally, since we saw earlier that reason and God's commandments are in full accord. If the law and the deliverances of reason always agree, it seems that to change his law, God would have to go against reason. Things are a bit more complicated than I let on, though, because in fact not all of God's commandments line up with things we can discover by reason. Sa'idiyah thinks that much of the Jewish law does simply endorse what reason can determine without revelation. But a whole class of laws, which are inaccessible to reason, are additionally laid upon the Jewish people. God's reason for this is to increase our happiness. For instance, laws concerning purification may seem arbitrary, but they encourage us to think little of our bodies and to concentrate on God. Or, the stipulation to keep one day as a Sabbath helps us by giving us respite from our labors and leading us to pray more than we otherwise would. Other laws offer additional specificity to a general rule of reason. For instance, reason tells us that man and woman should commit to one another and that stealing is wrong, but good luck using nothing but reason to discover the correct way to design a marriage ceremony or figure out exactly when something counts as one person's property so that it will be theft if another person takes it. What Sa'idiyah is saying here is to some extent commonsensical. Think, for instance, of how the British drive on the left, whereas people in normal countries, like Germany and the United States, drive on the right. It stands to reason that you need to pick one side or the other to drive on, but which side you pick is an arbitrary matter. What Sa'idiyah adds to this observation is that the need for arbitrary stipulation in lawmaking leaves space for Scripture to lay down commands that are not simply establishing what reason would independently have affirmed. Of course, as a rabbinic Jew, Sa'idiyah would also grant this status to the legal judgments preserved in the Mishnah and Talmud. Thus, even Sa'idiyah recognizes that reason does have its limits. By giving humans the power of reason, God has bestowed upon us a tool by which we can discover most of what we need to know, but God goes further than that and reveals commands and laws we could not otherwise have known. Though Sa'idiyah is here trying to explain something about the Jewish law, the moral of the story applies to Islam and Christianity too. Philosophers of all three faiths were typically very optimistic about reason and its ability to discover the most important truths—that's what made them philosophers, after all. But many of them also carefully defined boundaries past which reason could not go, at least not without help in the form of revelation. Though that is the most common stance we'll find among medieval philosophers, some are more rationalist still. Soon, we'll come to a famous example, the Muslim thinker Al-Farabi, who thought of religion as nothing but a user friendly version of the truths discovered by philosophy. Before we get to him, we'll be looking at a thinker who is less renowned today, but downright notorious in his own age. His name was Ar-Razi, but his opponents usually contented themselves with just calling him the heretic. What did he do to upset them so much? All will be revealed next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, High Five, Abu Bakr al-Razi. One they say is the loneliest number, but I find that hard to believe. After all, it has an infinite number of companions, and that's only counting the positive integers. And it has only to turn around to see that another infinity of negative numbers has got its back. But that's all assuming there is more than just one number. It would take a bold mathematician to doubt this and a bold philosopher to raise the same doubt in the context of metaphysics. Some have doubted it nonetheless. We call them monists. These are people who believe that all reality is one. Quite a while ago, we saw an example with the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides. Down the line, monism will rise again, albeit in a quite different form, in the philosophy of Spinoza. In between Parmenides and Spinoza, we occasionally find medieval thinkers flirting with a kind of monism. For instance, the 9th century Irish philosopher Eriugina was accused of being a monist because he suggested that God can ultimately be identified with all that he creates. Still, for the most part in medieval philosophy, when monism appears at all, it is seen as a danger to be avoided rather than a doctrine to be embraced. Yet most medieval thinkers would have thought it at least possible for there to be only one thing, namely God. God would just have to decide not to create anything other than himself. Certainly, some, especially in the Islamic world, did hold that God necessarily gives rise to the universe. The Neoplatonists had claimed as much with their doctrine of emanation. We recently saw that the Jewish philosopher Isaac Israeli might have held such a view. Before long, we'll see it asserted with great force and sophistication by Avicenna. But for the most part, Jews, Muslims, and Christians wanted to say that the universe is created in a gratuitous, freely-willed act of divine generosity. As we've already seen, and will be seeing again in the future, medieval philosophers paid a good deal of attention to the question of whether the universe is eternal. This was partially because it seemed to them that denying the eternity of the universe would prove that it is not necessary. If the universe came into existence after not existing, that could only be because God chose for it to exist rather than giving rise to it automatically, as light would always shine forth from an eternally existing light source. Thus, although it would indeed have taken a bold thinker to assert actual monism in this period, it would also have been bold to deny the possibility of monism, the possibility that God might have chosen to remain by himself, alone to enjoy his perfection. All of which brings us to this week's subject, who as it happens was one of the boldest philosophers in the Islamic world. His name was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi. He devised a theory according to which the universe was created in time, but was preceded by no fewer than five entities, all of them eternal principles. Before the universe came to be, God was never in danger of being lonely. He was eternally in the company of four other principles—soul, matter, time, and place. In putting forward this innovative, and rather shocking, theory, al-Razi showed that he cared little for convention. Perhaps he felt free to speculate in this way because he was not primarily a philosopher. His main vocation was that of a doctor. Here too, though, he showed an irreverent attitude towards authorities of the ancient medical tradition. Ironically enough, he may have learned this irreverence from the greatest of those authorities, Galen. Al-Razi agrees with Galen that, while respecting one's predecessors, one should never hesitate to question their views and modify those views in light of one's own ideas and experience. He applies that policy to Galen himself in a work called Shukuk Allah Jalinus, Doubts About Galen. He begins by affirming his great admiration for Galen, but reminds us that nothing could be more Galenic than the criticism of predecessors, even the ones we admire. After this tactful introduction, Al-Razi can't resist going on to a sarcastic and biting enumeration of mistakes he has discovered in Galen's works. His critique ranges over both philosophical issues like the eternity of the universe and the possibility of void space, and medical topics like Galen's list of the types of pulse and the ancient debate as to whether the body is ruled from the heart or the brain. In fact, we know from Al-Razi's voluminous surviving writings on medicine that he broadly accepted Galen's medical ideas. His work entitled Introduction to Medicine could easily have been called Introduction to Galenic Medicine. More in-depth medical works by Al-Razi likewise base themselves closely on Galen's anatomy, methodology, therapeutics, and so on. Al-Razi's independence of mind is also on show when it comes to medicine, however. He wrote a pioneering work on differential diagnosis, explaining how to tell the difference between smallpox and measles, and carefully collected observations from his medical practice. Practice is something he had plenty of, since he worked in hospitals in both Baghdad and the Persian city of Ra'i. His name, Al-Razi, by the way, simply means that he came from Ra'i. Many of his clinical observations are recorded in the staggeringly huge Hawi, or comprehensive book, along with notes on learned medical literature of the ancient world. Al-Razi certainly earned his esteem as an outstanding contributor to the history of medicine. In this respect, his only rival from the Islamic tradition was another philosopher, Avicenna. These two became the greatest medical authorities of the Arabic tradition, and were also used extensively in Latin translation by medical scholars of Europe, who called our man Ra'azis. Avicenna's systematization of medical learning would be even more influential than the writings of Al-Razi, but it's clear that the man from Ra'i was far more active and experienced in hands-on medicine. Unfortunately for Al-Razi's later reputation, but fortunately for us, he also turned his hand to philosophy. It's striking that, whereas his medical writings survive today in extraordinary abundance—the volumes of the modern printing of his comprehensive book can by themselves fill a long bookshelf—his philosophical writings are almost entirely lost. This is presumably because they were thought to be outrageous, even heretical. Yet the hostility provoked by his views also explains why we know anything about them at all. Though his writings on the five eternal principles are lost, his theory is discussed by a number of other authors. This is almost always because they need to explain what Al-Razi said before they go on to refute him and accuse him of heresy. Thus, reconstructing the theory is a bit like gathering the evidence concerning pre-Socratic thinkers or early Stoics, on the basis of later critics like Aristotle and the Church Fathers. We are at the mercy of witnesses who are often hostile and who always tell us less than we'd like to know. One hostile witness was a philosopher who actually debated Al-Razi in person. Rather confusingly, this other man was also from Ra'i, so he is also called Al-Razi, Abu Hatim Al-Razi. He was a member of a group within early Shi'ite Islam called the Ismailis, who we'll meet again in future episodes. In a work called On the Signs of Prophecy, Abu Hatim recounts the heated and occasionally hilarious arguments he had with our Al-Razi. They debated two main issues. The first was the theory of the five eternal principles, the second the topic of prophecy. Abu Hatim depicts Al-Razi as a convinced opponent of all prophetic revelation. After describing his face-to-face encounters with Al-Razi, he goes on to quote and refute a book Al-Razi had written on the subject. Between his denial that God is unique in having the status of an eternal principle, and his supposed rejection of the validity of prophecy, you can certainly see why Abu Hatim and other authors wished that Al-Razi had stuck to medicine. In fact, Abu Hatim and others frequently referred to him not by name, but simply as the heretic. Nonetheless, the evidence at our disposal is sufficient to reconstruct the five eternal theory in some detail. I'll come back at the end of this episode to the question of prophecy. To repeat, the five principles recognized by Al-Razi are God, soul, matter, time, and place. He is serious in holding that the last four are eternal, and in this respect on a par with God, even if God is superior to them in certain ways. God does not create any of them. Rather, they are the principles that need to be in place in order for God to create a universe at all. Let's try to see why this should be the case, taking the principles one by one. We'll start with matter. Already Aristotle had argued that if there were a first-ever event in the cosmos, then there would have to be some matter already existing before that event, with the potential for changing or moving. By the time of Al-Razi, many philosophers had already denied this and insisted that God is capable of creating things with no need for matter. Ancient Christian philosophers frequently said as much, for instance, even though the idea of creation from nothing is not obviously endorsed by the book of Genesis. More recently, both the Muslim Al-Kindi and the Jew Isaac Israely had stated that God alone is capable of absolute origination. If you or I want to start a ball rolling, then we first need to have a ball, and if there's no ball we need to go find some material ingredients for one. God, by contrast, can set the cosmos spinning even as he creates the cosmos out of thin air, or rather out of nothing at all. Al-Razi, though, thinks that there did need to be some potential or passive principle out of which God created the universe. It's worth repeating that, unlike Aristotle, he does think the universe was created. It began to exist after not existing. But for this to happen, there had to be something for God to make into a universe, and this was matter. Much as Aristotle describes matter as a principle of potentiality, Al-Razi says that matter is a passive principle which receives form or determination from God, who is an active principle. Of course, on this view, matter itself cannot be created, since that would give us a regress. God would have to create the matter out of something else, that is, out of some other kind of matter, which itself would have to be created out of some other matter, and so on. In all of this, Al-Razi is probably influenced less by Aristotle than by Plato, and in particular the Timaeus. You may remember that in that dialogue, Plato has the main character explain that the universe came to be when a divine craftsman imposed form on a so-called receptacle. There was an ancient debate as to whether Plato had in mind an actual event here, or whether the universe is eternally brought into being by this divine craftsman. Unlike the Neoplatonists, Al-Razi apparently thinks that for Plato, the universe did come to be with some first moment. He would have known the Timaeus thanks to his love-hate object Galen, who wrote a commentary and summary of the Timaeus, both of which were known in Arabic. We can be fairly sure that Al-Razi was inspired by the Timaeus, because in his debate with Abu Hatim he says he is following the lead of Plato. Characteristically, he adds that he has made a few improvements of his own to the Platonic theory. One such improvement is his conviction that eternal matter consists of atoms, which he conceives not as geometrical shapes, as in the Timaeus, but as particles moving in the void, more like the atomism of the pre-Socratics Democritus and Leucippus. This mention of void takes us on to the next two eternal principles I want to explain, what Al-Razi calls absolute time and absolute place. There must already be time before God creates the universe, because He will need to perform His creating action at some moment, which implies that time is already present. If you're wondering why God can't simply create time, just as He creates the universe, the answer is pretty obvious. To create time is to do something, and you can't do something without doing it at a time. Likewise, God will need a place to put the universe He is going to create. Again, He cannot first create a place for the universe, because He would need somewhere to put the place He wanted to create. So, in the case of both time and place, He can argue in much the way He did for matter. If these things were not eternal, then we would have an infinite regress, with time created at some other time, place created in some other place, matter made out of some other matter. One of the most interesting and novel features of Al-Razi's theory is his comparison of the eternal, or absolute, time and place that God requires in order to create a world, and the sort of time and place we experience in daily life. When Abu Hatim asks Al-Razi to explain what he means by absolute place, Al-Razi simply says, it is here where we are. One imagines him gesturing vaguely about him as he says this. Elsewhere, he more helpfully describes it as the infinite void into which God places the universe, like putting a liquid into an empty vessel. In this respect, he would agree with the Stoics, who also believed the cosmos is surrounded by infinite void. On the other hand, his atomic understanding of matter would be anathema to the Stoics. As for absolute time, when Abu Hatim asks for an explanation of this, Al-Razi enigmatically responds tick, tick, tick. His point is that absolute time and place are independent of any body, and of any motion or change in the universe. Absolute time simply passes, like a kind of cosmic metronome. By contrast, what he calls relative time and relative place are the time and place that depend on bodies and their motions. A day is an example of a relative time. It is a segment of absolute time that is marked off by one motion of the sun around the earth. A relative place would be, for instance, the location of your body, as you listen to me now. Relative time and place are thus the sort of time and place recognized and discussed by Aristotle, who emphasized the dependence of place and time on physical things and physical change. In one sense, Al-Razi thus accepts Aristotle's understanding of time and place. But with his typically critical attitude and desire to improve on the ancients, he also exposes this understanding as superficial. Now four was a number beloved of ancient philosophers. They recognized four elements, four bodily humors, four ages of man, and four quarters of the heavens. Akindi pointed out the prevalence of the number four in a work on music, and said that this is why the lute has four strings, from which I infer that his favorite Motown group would have been the four tops. Why in the face of these facts and an excellent singing group from Detroit does Al-Razi feel the need to posit a further fifth principle, an eternal soul? The answer is not that the five eternals would also have been a great name for a Motown band, though this is true enough. Rather, it may have to do with Al-Razi's day job as a doctor. As anyone in that line of work might be, he was very struck by the large amount of suffering in the world. Since he assumed that God is perfectly benevolent and wise, he could not believe that the universe of his experience was simply willed into existence by God. Many people nowadays would contend that there is too much suffering in the universe for it to have been created by an unhampered, benevolent creator, so it's striking to see a thinker of the early Islamic world saying precisely the same thing. But of course, Al-Razi does not react by becoming an atheist, which is what many would now see as the inescapable conclusion of the argument from evil. Rather, he says that to explain the creation of such a defective universe, we need to posit not just the perfectly wise active principle, that is God, but another active principle, which is foolish and ignorant. This is the eternal soul. Again, Al-Razi seems to be thinking here of the Timaeus, since there Plato likewise ascribes a soul to the entire universe. But again, there are differences. In Plato, the world soul is created by a divine craftsman, not eternal, and Plato does not depict this world soul as foolish and ignorant. In this respect, Al-Razi seems closer to some late ancient Platonists, especially Plutarch, who does talk about a foolish soul that is responsible for imperfections in the cosmos. At any rate, in Al-Razi's theory, this soul at some point foolishly conceives of a desire to entangle itself with matter. This incidentally explains why the creation of the universe can happen at an arbitrary moment within eternal time. Whereas God, being perfectly wise, would need a good reason to choose the first moment for the universe to exist, the foolish soul can simply lurch towards matter with no warning or good reason. In his debate with Abu Hatim, Al-Razi satirically compares the sudden unwise motion of soul towards matter to a sudden unwanted eruption of flatulence. This brings their discussion to an end as the audience breaks up in appalled recriminations against Al-Razi for this scandalous remark. Al-Razi's God, being wise and powerful, knew that an ill wind would blow if he allowed the soul to fulfill its desire to be with matter. So why didn't he stop the soul and prevent the existence of our universe with its abundance of evil and suffering? Al-Razi answers this challenge by comparing the soul to a child and God to a wise father. Just as the father might allow his child to go into a beautiful but dangerous garden full of thorns and stinging insects in order to teach the child a lesson, so God allows soul to envelop itself in matter. Mercifully, God intercedes to bestow form on matter. This explains why there is order and beauty in the world and not only the chaos and suffering that would have resulted from an unassisted engagement of eternal soul with eternal matter. Now that the universe exists, our purpose is to work towards the liberation of soul from matter. Humans can do this by living a life which ignores bodily concerns and pleasures and ultimately by achieving an afterlife of bliss when the soul will finally be free from the body. Al-Razi refers to this as a kind of liberation, which lies at the core of his ethical doctrines as we'll see in a future episode. Al-Razi draws another notable consequence from his conviction that God wants us to be free of suffering. He holds that God, in His benevolence and justice, has bestowed upon all humans the gift of reason or mind, in Arabic aql. With this emphasis on justice and reason, we may see a sign that he is drawing on ideas from contemporary Mu'tazilite theologians. In fact, we know that he debated with such theologians as well as with the Ismaili, Abu Hatim. In his debate with Abu Hatim, Al-Razi goes on to say something that would outrage a Muslim theologian of any persuasion. He observes that it would be unjust and counterproductive for God to single out only certain people as prophets, such that only they would receive a divine revelation that is withheld from the rest of us. That would only lead to strife, as groups gather around the various prophets and wage war against each other. We should therefore put our trust in reason, and not in prophecy. This is the most notorious aspect of Al-Razi's thought. Not only did he deny God's uniqueness as an eternal principle, questioning the central Islamic tenet of divine oneness, or tawhid, he also denied the very prophetic revelation given to Muhammad and to the biblical prophets recognized by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. It's hard to imagine a more fundamental rejection of Islam. No wonder they called him a heretic. But we need to be careful here. I suspect that Abu Hatim is misrepresenting Al-Razi's view. His critique may not have been aimed at Islam or revealed religion in general, but at more focused targets, for instance the Ismaili teaching espoused by Abu Hatim. Certainly, as we know from his attitude towards Galen, Al-Razi was a staunch opponent of the uncritical acceptance of authority, what in Arabic was called taqlid. The Ismailis, with their dependence on the guidance of inspired Imams, would have seemed to Al-Razi the ultimate practitioners of taqlid. This may explain the bitterness of his dispute with Abu Hatim. As for his attitude towards Islam more generally, there is good evidence that Al-Razi in fact emphasized the agreement between the Qur'an and his theory of the five eternals. He probably welcomed the Qur'an, not as something to be accepted on faith, but because his rational reflection showed its teachings to be true. If this was his attitude, he was not far from the rationalist view of his near contemporary, the more famous Al-Farabi. We will soon be turning to him and his school of Aristotelian philosophers in Baghdad. Before that though, I have chosen next week for our first interview in this series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world. Unlike the ignorant soul, my selection of this moment is not arbitrary. Having just looked at Al-Razi, this is the perfect time to have a broader discussion about medicine and philosophy in the Islamic world. After all, many philosophers of various faiths in this tradition were doctors. We've already seen two examples, namely Al-Razi and Isaac Israeli, and there are more to come. To diagnose this phenomenon, I'll be joined by Peter E. Poorman, who has a healthy understanding of the history of medicine, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and medicine in the Islamic world with Peter E. Poorman, who is Professor of Classics and Greco-Arabic studies at the University of Manchester. Hi Peter. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming on. Perhaps we can start by talking about the sources of medicine in the Islamic world. Would it be fair to say that the situation is similar to philosophy and that the main sources are Greek? Indeed they are. So the two big authorities, the two names that are mentioned over and over again in the Islamic tradition are on the one hand Hippocrates and on the other Galen. But then there are some lesser known physicians such as Rufus of Ephesus who dies around the year 100 and then there is for instance Paul of Aegina, a seventh-entry physician who worked in Alexandria and presumably because of his name hailed from the island of Aegina which is just opposite Athens or Piraeus. But generally speaking when it comes to the medical tradition, humoral pathology, the idea that blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile when in balance create health and when in imbalance create disease, this humoral pathology, this idea basically dominates the Islamic tradition and that's a Greek idea which we first find in the Treatise on the Nature of Men by Hippocrates which was then adopted, so that's the fifth-entry BC, which was then adopted by Galen, the physician who lives roughly from 1 to 9 till 216 AD and this physician Galen wrote a commentary on it and he adopted and adapted that humoral pathology and that's the cornerstone of medicine as it developed in the Islamic world. I suppose that most of the medical authors who are working in Arabic are at the mercy of the translators, I mean not Hunan and Nisak who is one of the most important translators of medical works into Arabic, but most medical authors would have just had to work with the Arabic versions that were given to them by the translators. Yeah that's correct, I mean it's not entirely correct for the ninth-entry so we have somebody called Attabari who probably knew Syriac, there's somebody called Ibn Sarabiyyun in the late ninth-entry who writes in Syriac and then is translated into Arabic, so some people would have had a notion or a knowledge of Syriac because they're Christians or some people would have a notion or some knowledge of Greek, although for the vast majority and certainly the most important figures that is true, so the people of whom we know and whom we admire, kind of the luminaries of the Arabic medical traditions, people like Ar-rezi, Ibn Sina, Avicenna and others, they totally relied on the translations. And even the Arabic technical terminology that's used in medical works is to some extent based on Greek technical terminology just like in philosophy? Yes and no, so basically there were three procedures or three ways in which the Greek vocabulary was adapted and adopted, so the first is just to translate one term with another, so the concept of mixture, you know kras is in Greek, it's very important, so how are the humors, these four humors mixed, now that's called mizaj in Arabic, that's an Arabic term, maybe has also a cognate in Syriac, but I mean like it's a good Arabic word. So other terms then are translated as what we call calques or loan translations, for instance there's a disease called alopecia, alopecia, you know the disease literally of the fox alopex, which is basically a loss of hair, which you Peter might be familiar with, and now this disease alopecia is then translated into Arabic as da'athalab, so literally the disease of the fox, so alopecia, kind of the fox disease in Greek becomes the disease of the fox in Arabic, that's a loan translation, and for this obviously the Greek word structure is important, and then sometimes we have just transliteration, take prunites, you know a brain fever, a disease which is sometimes nowadays associated with meningitis, that is often just transliterated, pharanites, and that's a procedure which also occurs, but in all these three cases, whether it's just you know like replacing a Greek word with an Arabic word, or finding a loan translation, or just transliterating the word, the Greek concepts are important that are behind that. To what extent do you think we're being misled by the fact that mostly what we've got access to here is these very learned texts which are grounded in this translation movement, I mean on the ground was a lot of the medical care that people were actually receiving, was it actually influenced by Greek medicine, or is this more like a literary tradition? Well it is both, so on the one hand you have a massive translation movement in the 9th century about which you talked in an earlier episode, and that obviously, so these translations, these texts are very important, but on the other hand you have a tradition on the ground, so even in pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry you find certain Greek technical terms mentioned, now that doesn't depend on a learned tradition, that's just because the Arabs lived in close contact with the Greeks or with the Byzantines and took certain ideas and concepts over from them, so it's not just one channel, you know, so the practice is important and the theory is important, but what did not happen is just that the text got translated and then all of a sudden some Arab author first reads them and then kind of applies the principles, you know like there is a tradition, there are physicians for instance, Christian physicians who practice medicine, who draw on these texts and who are then imitated, so one thing which is very important is the curriculum at Alexandria in late antiquity, that is more or less adopted wholesale in Baghdad in the 9th century, so there's on the one hand transfer of knowledge, but on the other hand then there is innovation and there are new ideas that stem from or that are built on this fundament, on this basis of Greek human pathology. That's actually the next thing I was going to ask you, what sorts of innovations or discoveries were made in the Arabic medical tradition? Well there are numerous innovations and that's first and foremost a very important point. I'd just like to give you a few examples from different areas, so for instance the first anatomical illustrations of the muscles of the eye which we have occur in an Arab manuscript in Hunayd ibn Ishaq's text, the Ten Treatises on the Eye, so there you find the first illustration of, you know like an anatomical illustration, so you know perhaps they're Greek antecedents and we don't have them, but for us as far as we know this is the first manuscript where we see it, it's by the way Cairo Tiptai Maud 100, so it's nowadays kept in Cairo in the National Library there, so that's one thing, you know illustration, anatomy, another thing is the discovery of new diseases or the differentiation between diseases about which people did not know beforehand, so Hunayd ibn Ishaq, the translator and physician who dies in the 870s for instance, describes in his work on eye diseases a condition called panus nowadays, P-A-N-N-U-S, sabal in Arabic and it's basically an overgrowth over the eye and this is a condition which was not known or which we do not find in Greek sources and which for the first time is described in this text, so new diseases are discovered or Ar-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Ar-Razi who dies in 925 roughly distinguishes between smallpox and measles for the first time, a distinction not made in earlier Greek sources, so you know new diseases are described but also new therapies are found, so obviously the Greek recipes you know like a very important Galen and Dioscorides, an author who lived in the first century AD. You mean drug recipes for medicines? Medicines yes, so again Dioscorides in the in the first century AD and Galen in the second century AD write on simple drugs, write work on simple drugs and Galen also on compound drugs, so many many recipes, a lot of information how individual medical substances, the so-called simple's work you know and that is translated into but it's not just people just take the recipe and don't do anything with it, so the recipes are further developed, it's like a cook who can't you know who can't refuse the temptation to innovate when he sees a recipe, similarly in like a lot of recipes are altered and also a lot of drugs come in from the east for the first time. The last innovation which I'd like to mention is the hospital, obviously there were Byzantine hospitals but when we come to the Arabic world, the ninth and tenth century, these institutions are much more sophisticated, they have teaching, they have research, they are secure in law, they have elite medicine practice there, so the best physicians practice in hospitals and some of them at least are you know like not confessional, so Christian Jews and Muslims equally practice there as physicians and come there as patients, so also on the social level there's a lot of innovation. Right, so the next time one of us is in hospital then we should give thanks to the Arabic medical tradition. Well I mean we could say that some of these innovations foreshadow modern developments but it's always difficult, one should always resist the temptation to find the present in the past. Well said, nice aphorism to go along with the epocrates' aphorisms. One disease you've worked on quite a bit is a disease that was recognized in the ancient tradition but the understanding of it was developed further in the Arabic tradition and this is melancholy, can you tell us a bit about that because I think it's philosophically interesting. Yes, so melancholy is a disease which has different manifestations and melancholy or the word the Greek word melina huile from which melancholy is derived actually means black bile, so melancholy is the disease of the black bile and the different types of this disease and the Greek physician who was really the most influential for the subsequent tradition is Rufus of Ephesus whom I mentioned earlier who lived around the year 100 AD and he wrote a treatise on melancholy and he distinguishes for instance between innate melancholy and acquired melancholy. Some people are just melancholic by character or by disposition but they have too much black bile and they have certain tendencies and some people acquired and the disease manifests in different ways. I mean nowadays when we say somebody's a melancholic it just means you know he has the blues you know so he's sad or whatever but melancholy in those days was really a form of madness so you have delusions so for some people thought they are made of parchment and they're you know like they're so dry that you know if somebody touches them they're brittle other thought they were made of porcelain and they could be you know crushed and crumble other people thought that they that Atlas who holds the world on his arms could get tired and then the the sky would fall or the world would crumble and they were afraid of that there's a famous case of an astronomer who thought that some thought they were cocks you know like basically chicken and cried like chicken and flap their wings like chicken so some became aggressive and would attack people other became despondent many people died from this disease so it's a huge huge spectrum of symptoms which come under melancholy which is kind of a kind of madness and it is caused by an axis of black bile and there are various ways and I won't go into all the details but melancholy is interesting because it really poses the question how does my bodily constitution influence my mental capacities so right which is obviously a matter of great importance to philosophers as well as the doctors yes and that brings us to someone you've mentioned who actually I talked about on the last episode of the podcast is Razi yes and he was both a doctor and a philosopher and I would say is unusual in that we have quite a lot of medical writings of his some philosophical writing so along with Avicenna he's a thinker for whom we have both sides represented to what extent would you say that his medical output is in tension with his philosophical output well I mean let's take for instance the topic of sexual intercourse you know obviously we all want to stay healthy and we all want to stay happy or happiness is a philosophical goal whereas health is a medical goal in some of his philosophical works for instance you know his philosophical way of life you know Razi advocates that sex is bad for you and under no circumstances should you engage in or seek sexual pleasure obviously he stands in a long philosophical tradition I mean even epicureans were wary of sex but certainly the Stoics were and others were too they just said you know like don't seek the pleasures of the flesh because they are transient and they might go away or they might last only four short period of time or they might give you grief you know try to find pleasure in things which are longer lasting so this is a position which has become nearly commonplace by late antiquity and which are Razi adopts in his philosophical works but when it comes to medicine and he writes a number of manuals I mean he writes two manuals on sexual intercourse he has a more nuanced position he says for some people sex is actually good and that can have medical benefits for instance in order to combat melancholy you know sex and entertainment too and wine drinking wine in moderation are things that are advocated in order to overcome melancholy and he recognizes that and so his philosophical position is very strict this medical position is very nuanced and I always thought there is this wonderful phrase where he says for some people sexual intercourse is actually beneficial I always thought that he was thinking of himself as being in that category but of course I'm speculating wouldn't be surprised another area where I think his medical output is interesting philosophically is what he has to say about methodology and in general I suppose that one of the more obvious places to look for philosophically interesting aspects of medicine in Greek in Latin and in Arabic is when they start talking about how doctors go about discovering new remedies identifying diseases and so on yeah what is Razi have to say about that oh a very very interesting figure in that that area so obviously you're right in saying that nowadays we still debate how can we discover drugs you know now we have double-blind trials and we have a huge you know literature and a lot of thought is going into the question how do we know that a drug works we think of the placebo effect you know how can we exclude that and so on so forth obviously what happens in in the ninth and tenth entry what happens with our eyes is not quite as sophisticated but there's a fundamental debate about how to arrive at the right treatment already in Greek times Galen writes on the sex for beginners Galen again in the second century AD is a different kind of sex so this is not on sex for beginners sex for beginners and lest I pronounce this incorrectly and he says that there are basically two important sects there's a third one the method is but they don't need to the concern us here there the empiricist to say let's do what works you know if we see that a drug works we don't have to ask why or what the inner bodily functions are it's too complicated we will never be able to ascertain that so let's do what works and then the rationalists and they say okay let's think about how the body works the humus fonts and other things and then because we understand how the body works we will be able to to find the right treatment now this is a debate of which are as it was aware and to which he contributes so he obviously knows about empiricists and rationalist and he like Galen adopts a middle ground he says you know empiricism alone certainly will not help us but nor would just book learning without you know using other principles help us so he occupies a middle ground like Galen and there are things in which he's very innovative for for instance when talking about phrenitis brain fever mentioned earlier during when I talked about translations when dealing with this condition he said that once he tried to bleed to phlebotomize likes to bleed one group of player patients and they did not contract the disease and then he left another group of patients deliberately and did not bleed them so we have the notion of a control group which we really find for the first time in our Razi obviously they're not randomized controlled trials as we have them nowadays but that's a quite a sophisticated way of doing things at another time he talks about statistics he talks about large chords of patients so in different ways so to speak he finds means to he finds ways to refine that that theory about medical epistemology which he in he inherits from the Greeks and there to hit innovates one thing that makes clear these kinds of examples is that Razi was really a medical practitioner he saw lots of patients he worked in hospitals and looking ahead to another philosopher who I haven't covered yet but I think we should discuss because he's so important in the history of Islamic medicine is Avicenna some people have thought that Avicenna unlike Razi wasn't particularly involved with medical practice but really was more of a book learning figure in the history of medicine very important as a transmitter of ideas about medicine but maybe not someone who actually had a lot of hands-on practice with patients to what extent do you think that that is true well I mean Avicenna was first and foremost a philosopher and a great intellect but I don't think I don't believe in these either-or scenarios you know like just because he was mainly in like so let's say his canon of medicine is mainly in like a book in which he condenses previous Greek and Arabic medical theory and arranges it very intelligently so that's for me also an area of innovation you like the arrangement of knowledge by division by the principle of division in a very very interesting way but that doesn't preclude that he had some medical experience so there are some 30 times in his Canon where he says you know I tried this or I you know you confirmed this by experience or whatever and they are like some stories in various sources in his biography but also in the later text talking about his life which confirmed that he was a practicing physician and I don't think that we have any I mean that there's any doubt that he practiced some medicine you know it probably wasn't what he did most of the time but he certainly had to practical experience now in his autobiography he boasts that at the age of 16 he had already meant mastered all of medicine it was a very easy subject and so on and so forth that is rhetoric and that's a philosophical stance and there's external evidence which shows that he actually learned from other earlier physicians later in life so I think I personally think and I have argued this in print in one of your forthcoming books that Avicenna is both a great theoretician but also has practiced medicine there's no doubt about it so actually maybe we could even say that he's sort of the reverse of Razi Razi is basically a doctor but also does some philosophy I've assigned as basically a philosopher but also does some medical practice well I think you say this because most of our Razi philosophical writings are lost I mean it is true to a certain extent but Razi was labeled as indeed an apostate all you know like an unbeliever and the later tradition wasn't very kind to his philosophical writings so I think if we had more we would appreciate his philosophy more but generally speaking I think that's that's right while we're on the topic of Avicenna I wanted to come back to something you mentioned earlier which is that in this tradition it's common to think about psychological states as being somehow dependent on states of the body and one area where this arises is that Avicenna associates various psychological faculties things like imagination so on with organs of the body and in particular the brain so could you say a little bit about that well I mean Avicenna has this theory of the five inner senses so each sense you know in outside sense like side to each outside faculty of sensation that corresponds in like something in the brain and it is situated in the brain and it's a difficult topic because again in his medical work in his philosophical works he formulates that theory slightly differently but what is clear is that he situates these faculties inside the brain and so that he tries to come to some understanding of how the I mean how the interface so to speak between the soul or the mental faculties and the physical faculties of sensation work and I think that his his take on this is actually quite a bit of a departure from what happened before because like the common sense for instance was already found in Aristotle but what he makes of it and the way he describes it is and how he links it to the five the five outer senses to the five in the senses is innovative but that's probably something you know more about than I do so you should actually maybe I'll talk about it more when I get to Avicenna and I'm talking about his psychology before we end I just wanted to give you a chance to say more generally where is the state of research into this whole field I mean is it in its infancy or is there a lot still to be done researching Islamic medicine well we stand on the shoulders of giants of course so they are the generation of my teachers have produced a wonderful and brilliant work I mean convention Manfred Ullmann Emily Savage Smith Remkrit Kreck and others but in my generation we are very few and you know like I'm in my early 40s now and there's not well I shouldn't say this man he looks younger but in any case but you'd like there are fairly few people I mean if you think of a major figure like Avicenna you know his canon of medicine is full of interesting philosophical things his medicine you know like he's the most important the most influential medical author and he's there are very few studies done by people who work with the Arabic sources and do something you know kind of who are trained in the history of medicine so the state is really on some level in its infancy and we certainly need more people to move into it okay well if anyone out there in the audience is tempted then they can give professor Foreman a call for now I'll just thank him very much for coming on the show thank you thanks for having me and please join me next time when I'll start to look at philosophy in the 10th century in the context of the Baghdad school of Aristotelian philosophers next time on the history of philosophy without any gaps
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Aristotelian Society, the Baghdad School. As you've probably gathered, I'm the kind of guy who keeps his finger on the pulse of the younger generation. Many has been the time that I have found myself clubbing and have had a youngster come up to me and say, yo, aren't you the emcee who lays down that fresh podcast about the history of philosophy? Mad props. So, I'm always abreast of the latest slang that the hip kids are using out on the street. One example is old school, sometimes spelled with a K instead of a CH, with the insouciant disregard for orthography that makes the youth of today so charming. I am reliably informed that if you are old school, or indeed kickin' it old school with a K, this means that you are evoking an earlier era, for instance the early hip hop of the 1980s. Sometimes the trendiest thing is what existed before you were even born. In fact, nothing is more old school than kickin' it old school. They've been doing it pretty much ever since school was invented, and to be more specific, on the mean streets of 10th century Baghdad. Well, maybe not on the actual streets, to be honest, which were no doubt terribly crowded and noisy. As the center of the sprawling Abbasid empire, Baghdad was one of the largest cities in the pre-modern world and larger than any medieval European city. It attracted merchants and strivers from near and far, members of different language groups and faiths. Most importantly for our story, it became a meeting place for scholars and scientists, literary stylists and theologians. In this and the next few episodes, we'll begin in Baghdad and then cast a wider geographical net looking at aspects of the intellectual ferment of the 10th century. The wide range of possible philosophical approaches on offer in this period formed the background for the innovations of Avicenna, a thinker of such power and influence that he foreclosed many of those possibilities for future generations while opening new ones. Among the philosophical movements in the 10th century, the most old school, and the one most frequently criticized by Avicenna, was the so-called Baghdad Peripatetics. They were a group of mostly Christian thinkers who staged a revival of the philosophical activities of late ancient Alexandria. Unlike Al-Kindi and other scholars of the 9th century, the Baghdad school was able to draw in a full range of texts from the Aristotelian tradition. Of course, this included Arabic versions of Aristotle's own works, often made by members of the translation circle gathered around Hunayn ibn Ishaq. They also used translations of commentaries from the Alexandrian tradition and made their own contributions to the transmission of philosophy into Arabic. The man usually credited with being the founder of the group was Abu Bishr Matta, and the leading member of the school in the 10th century was Yahya ibn Adi. Both were Christians and both translated works by Aristotle and various Aristotelian authors like Alexander and Themistius. However, it seems that they were making their Arabic translations mostly or always from Syriac rather than Greek. This shows that among Christians, the Syriac language was still important for the study of Aristotelian thought right up into the 10th century. For the later tradition, though, the most famous member of this group was one who, exceptionally, was a Muslim, Al-Farabi. I suspect that his fellow Baghdad peripatetics would have been stunned to learn that of all the philosophers in the school, only his name would loom large in the history of philosophy. There are several reasons why he is better known than his Christian colleagues. For one thing, he was, unlike them, a major contributor to political philosophy. His writings on politics, and especially the relation between philosophy and religion, would have an impact on later thinkers in Andalusia, including the great Averroes and Maimonides. For another thing, his contributions in logic were outstanding enough to be commended by Avicenna, who was otherwise quite scornful of the output of the Baghdad school. Ultimately, some of Al-Farabi's works would be translated into Latin and used by medieval thinkers in Christian Europe, something we cannot say of Abu Bishr Mata or Yahya ibn Adi. It's interesting that the Baghdad school followed the lead of its Alexandrian model by bringing together philosophers of disparate faiths. Just as in Alexandria, the pagan Ammonius taught Christians like John Philoponus, so in Baghdad, Muslims like Al-Farabi could have Christian students like ibn Adi. Though none of the core members of the school were Jews, we can add that Yahya ibn Adi wrote replies to questions on philosophical topics sent to him by a Jew named Ibn Abi Sa'id al-Mausili. Their polite and learned correspondence can still be read today. As we'll see in a future episode, Al-Farabi's views on religion are perfectly designed to allow philosophers to exchange ideas at a universal level, which transcends sectarian disagreement. Yet, as in the case of late antiquity, this pleasant narrative of collaborative intellectual activity does not tell the whole story. We saw that pagans like Ammonius had to tread carefully so as not to annoy the Christian authorities in Alexandria, lest they suffer the same fate as the Platonists at Athens, who saw their academy shut down by imperial edict. The Christians at Baghdad were under no comparable pressure from Muslim political authorities, as far as we know, but there is evidence of heated inter-religious debate as well as inter-religious cooperation. When discussing al-Kindi, I mentioned a short work in which he used Porphyry's logical introduction to attack the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. His arguments are preserved only because they were quoted by Yahya ibn Adi in a counter-refutation. Ibn Adi also seems to have had a surprisingly intense interest in Islamic theology, or kalam. He discusses kalam arguments in several works, including another refutation of the doctrine of acquisition. According to this doctrine, God creates the actions which humans then acquire so as to bear moral responsibility for those actions. Again, we'll be looking at that in a future episode. Not enough work has been done on Ibn Adi for us to be sure why he engages with Islamic theologians in this way, but he doesn't seem to be too impressed. More generally, it is certainly not the case that the Baghdad peripatetics all understood philosophy to reside at a lofty height of abstraction transcending religious concerns. Ibn Adi wrote numerous treatises defending his conception of the Trinity. If I can ask you to kick it old school for a moment, please cast your mind back to our discussion of the Trinitarian debates of late antiquity. As we saw, those debates featured two opposed views about the person of Christ. On the Monophysite view, Christ was a full unity of man and God. The Monophysite position was diametrically opposed to that of the Nestorians, for whom Christ had two natures and two so-called hypostases, a duality that could preserve Christ's full humanity and full divinity. Centuries later, Ibn Adi is still fighting the same battle, writing apologetic works in Arabic that use Aristotelian philosophical ideas to defend Monophysite Christianity and criticize Nestorianism. Another example of someone who fused philosophical and theological activity into one career was Abul Faraj ibn Atayeb, who lived well into the 11th century. In fact, he died a few years after Evasenna did. That makes him the last member of the Baghdad school. Before he turned out the lights and locked up, he found time to write commentaries on books of the Bible and also on Aristotelian logical works. Good follower of the Alexandrian tradition that he was, he devoted his attention to the first two works you would have studied in late antiquity—Porphyry's Introduction and Aristotle's Categories. His commentaries on both texts survive. Though they do contain some new material, Ibn Atayeb depends extensively on the previous commentary tradition, and there are many passages which are little more than Arabic versions of the remarks of earlier Greek commentators. That this was still possible in the early 11th century vividly demonstrates the continuing vitality of late ancient Aristotelianism. The most famous single event associated with the Baghdad school once again highlights the tensions that could exist between members of different faiths at this time, even as it illustrates the possibility of interreligious intellectual exchange. For this event, we need to go back a century or so from the later Ibn Atayeb back to the school's founder, Abu Bishr Matta. We have a report of a public debate involving Abu Bishr held at the court of a vizier named Ibn al-Furat. It seems to have begun as a social gathering to exchange ideas and rhetorical flourishes called a majlis, a talking session that was a very rough equivalent of the salons of 17th century France. For another example of a majlis, think of the full and frank exchange of views in which Abu Bakr al-Razi defended his five eternal theory against his Ismaili opponent Abu Hatim al-Razi. Unlike the argument of the two Razi's though, Abu Bishr was drawn into a more formal debate when the vizier asked those present whether someone would be willing to step forward and refute the grand claims Abu Bishr made for the Aristotelian science of logic. Unfortunately for Abu Bishr, the man who volunteered was the highly articulate and capable Abu Said al-Sirafi. He was a learned expert on the Arabic language, one of many scholars who were, at that time, pushing forward the study of grammar. Also, unfortunately for Abu Bishr, our surviving account of what then transpired comes down to us from reporters who were much more sympathetic to al-Sirafi's side of the debate. So, we do not hear much of the case for logic, but instead get an amusing and detailed tirade from al-Sirafi, which explains that a knowledge of Arabic grammar makes the study of Greek logic superfluous. Adherents of Aristotle are simply being pretentious when they extol the power of logic, priding themselves on mastering this art from another culture. As al-Sirafi points out in a dig at Abu Bishr's Christian beliefs, all this expertise in logic hasn't prevented him from thinking that the same thing can be both one and three. Al-Sirafi's arguments are not merely ad hominem insults, though. He wants to break down Abu Bishr's stated view, according to which linguistic expressions are mere representations of thoughts. For Abu Bishr, what happens at the level of thought is universal and shared by all mankind, and logic is the study of this translinguistic kind of intellectual activity. Though our account doesn't give him a chance to explain this in detail, he seems to mean that a given philosophical demonstration will be sound so long as its premises are true and its argumentative structure valid. It is irrelevant which language one uses to then state the demonstration. Here, Abu Bishr would be thinking of a passage in Aristotle's On Interpretation, which says that what happens in the soul is the same for everyone, but linguistic utterance varies from one person to another. Against this, al-Sirafi argues, quite plausibly, that even if logical inferences have some kind of universal validity, those inferences will do no good unless we are in a position to express them in precise Arabic, Greek, or whatever. This task is not the child's play or afterthought Abu Bishr would like us to think it is. It is a matter of fine judgment and expertise to know the right way to express a given logical relation in Arabic. Furthermore, language has a powerful effect on our thought, since it is full of ambiguity and subtle differences in meaning. In an Arabic-speaking culture, it is therefore expertise in Arabic that will save you from making mistakes, both as you put your own thoughts into language and as you try to understand what is meant by the expressions used by other people. He proves this with a series of linguistic puzzles which trick Abu Bishr into making basic conceptual errors. For instance, Abu Bishr admits that it is fine to say in Arabic something like Zaid is the tallest of his brothers, but this would imply that Zaid is his own brother. The conclusion is obvious. If you only have enough dirham in your bank account to afford one course of instruction in 10th century Baghdad, you'll be much better off spending your hard-earned cash at As-Siddafi's grammar school than Abu Bishr's logical academy, no matter how old-school it is. As I say, our evidence concerning this debate is written by partisans of As-Siddafi, but it seems quite likely that the whole event really was a public relations disaster for Abu Bishr. This is shown by the reaction among what the hip kids might call his posse of logicians. Both Al-Farabi and Ibn Adi have some scornful things to say about grammar, and it is easy to imagine that they are trying to win the debate for Abu Bishr after the fact. Al-Farabi makes two improvements to Abu Bishr's rather naïve claim that logic transcends language completely and operates at the level of thought. First, he points out that thought itself is linguistically structured. He uses the phrase interior discourse to describe what is happening in the mind. Second, he says that logic operates both with this kind of interior discourse and at the level of the external speech we use to communicate with one another. Yet logic remains universal, just as Abu Bishr said. When it deals with actual linguistic expressions, it concentrates on features that occur in all languages. It simply ignores those features that are specific to the language being used, which are the object of grammar. These are indeed a potential source of confusion, but no part of the rigorous search for truth. Thus, grammar is relegated to the study of the parochial and superficial, leaving logic to be the indispensable tool for all mankind. What Al-Farabi is saying here has several advantages over what we find ascribed to Abu Bishr in the record of the debate with As-Siddafi. For one thing, he avoids an implausibly sharp distinction between language and thought. Also, his view makes better sense of what Aristotle says, always a big advantage for members of the Baghdad school. After all, the organon, as Aristotle's logical works were collectively called, is full of observations about language and not only about logical validity. As we saw when we looked at ancient Aristotelianism, there was then a debate about the subject matter of the first work of the organon, the categories. Is it about words or things? The prevailing view was the compromise offered by porphyry. It deals with words insofar as they refer to things. This is still the formulation we find in the Baghdad group so that they could hardly exclude the analysis of language from the study of logic. This comes through strongly in Yahya ibn Adi's contribution to the debate about the relative merits between logic and grammar. He wrote a short treatise devoted specifically to this topic. He admits that grammar and logic have a lot in common, as they both deal with verbal expressions. They differ in their goals, however. Grammar is, again, a relatively superficial and unimportant discipline. It ensures that we follow conventional rules. He has in mind things like agreement between subject and verb or, in languages such as Arabic, making sure that feminine nouns get modified by adjectives that are also feminine. But grammar, by itself, will not help you say anything true. If you ask a grammarian whether you can say, Buster Keaton is a giraffe, he will give you the go-ahead because what you have said is not grammatically wrong. This is not ibn Adi's example, by the way. Logic, though, is the study of, you guessed it, verbal expressions insofar as they refer to things, and has as its objective the production of demonstrations and hence of truth. That might make it sound as if logic is not just indispensable to philosophy but is in fact simply the same thing as philosophy. If I can attain demonstrations of the truth by using logic, then what else is left for the rest of philosophy to do? That impression might also be given by a slogan about logic, which is found in ancient commentators and then repeated by Abu Bishr and other members of the Baghdad school, Logic is an instrument by which one knows true from false and good from bad. As grand as that sounds, it's important to note that it is still only an instrument. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek word organon. It does not identify truth or the good by itself, but is the indispensable tool that helps us to do so. How exactly does it help? For a well-considered answer, we can turn to another short treatise by ibn Adi. He explains that logic allows us to extend what we already know to be true by combining together these truths to reach new conclusions. Logic will tell you for instance that if you know that A is B and that every B is not C, then you can infer that A is not C. But that won't provide you with any truths about the world until you substitute in verbal expressions for the variable letters. For instance, if you already know that Buster Keaton is a silent movie comedian and that every silent movie comedian is not a giraffe, this logical scheme will allow you to infer that Buster Keaton is not a giraffe. Try doing that with grammar. Ibn Adi was nicknamed the logician, from which you might already expect that this defense of logic over grammar was not his only contribution to the field. Another interesting logical work of his is called On the Nature of the Possible. It is devoted to dealing with an argument that will be something of a golden oldie for regular listeners to this podcast, the sea battle argument that Aristotle discusses in On Interpretation. Very unusually, Ibn Adi combines an independent treatise on the deterministic argument with a commentary on the relevant chapter from Aristotle. To remind you, the argument is that if there are already truths now predicting what will happen in the future, then the future events cannot help occurring. They will be necessary. For Ibn Adi, what this means is that there will be nothing that is merely mumkin, an Arabic word that is usually translated possible but could be more exactly rendered as contingent. What is mumkin, or contingent, is neither impossible nor necessary. For instance, we naturally think that it is merely contingent and not necessary that you are listening to this right now. You could have done something else, after all. Like the late ancient Christian thinker Boethius, Ibn Adi is particularly concerned with the version of the sea battle argument that invokes God's knowledge of the future rather than truths about the future in general. And, like Boethius, he says that what God knows can be merely contingent even though God's knowledge has the full force of necessity. For, the features of the knower are not shared with the features of what is known. He adds an example. Without changing, God can know about things that involve change. For instance, he has eternally and unchangingly known about your listening to first the beginning, then the middle, and now nearly the end of this episode. And God knows you won't stop listening now. If this is right, then God can likewise know necessarily things that are in themselves contingent. So, the only reason to fear that God's knowledge makes things necessary would be if God actually caused them to happen by knowing them. This is, however, not the case, as Ibn Adi shows by going through the four types of cause recognized by Aristotle—form, matter, final cause, and efficient cause—and showing that God's knowledge does not fall under any of the four types. There was no Latin Arabic translation movement for Ibn Adi to draw on, so obviously he is not here being influenced by Boethius. The overlap between their solutions is instead explained by the fact that both are making careful use of the Greek texts written at the end of antiquity by Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle. In fact, these two Christians, Boethius and Ibn Adi, are, ironically enough, making use of a distinction originally introduced by the arch-pagan Neoplatonist, the Amblicus. It was he who first argued that the features of knowledge—for instance, necessity or immutability—are those appropriate to the knower, not to what is known. The remarkably close engagement of the Baghdad school with these late ancient scholars is also abundantly clear from one of the most fascinating manuscripts we have for this period of philosophy. Held in the Dutch city of Leiden, it contains an Arabic translation of Aristotle's physics, further translation of comments by Greek thinkers like Philoponus, and additional commentary by the Baghdad Peripatetics. With texts like this, the old school of Alexandria was revived in the new school of 10th century Baghdad. The Aristotelians of Baghdad may not have had a lighthouse to look at like they did in Alexandria, but they did have a philosophical heavyweight. He was their star pupil, and before we graduate to another topic, I'd like to give him a close examination. So bring an apple, or if you prefer, a PC, to class next week and join me for Al-Farabi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Second Master, Al-Farabi. One of the things I like about working on the history of philosophy is that it naturally leads you to work on all areas of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy is so specialized that it is becoming rare for one and the same person to work on, say, ethics and metaphysics, never mind these two areas plus epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and so on. But specialists in the history of philosophy often work on many or all of these areas. In fact, you're almost forced to do this if you are researching the most outstanding historical thinkers. Part of their greatness is often their ability to make innovations within many branches of philosophy, and to show how these branches are part of the same tree. You can't really understand Plato's ethics without understanding his metaphysics and theory of knowledge, nor can you work on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without grasping how it prepares the way for the Kantian ethical teaching. The first Muslim philosopher to offer us this kind of holistic and original philosophical system is Al-Farabi. We did see al-Kindi tackling a wide range of topics in philosophy, but it's up to the reader to figure out how his ideas on these topics might fit together. Ar-Razi seems to have been more systematic, but the loss of the writings in which he put forward his daring cosmology leave the interpreter with even more work to do, never mind the additional task of relating that cosmology to his surviving ethical treatises, which we'll be coming to in a later episode. From al-Farabi though, we have ambitious treatises which set out and interrelate views on metaphysics, theology, human nature, ethics, and political philosophy. He also produced more technical work in logic, and even that aspect of his thought clearly does relate to the rest of his system. In this, al-Farabi makes an interesting contrast not just to the earlier Muslim thinkers we've examined, but also to his Christian colleagues in the Baghdad school. Of these, the most significant is Yahya ibn Adi. More research is needed into ibn Adi, especially in light of new writings of his that have only recently been discovered in a manuscript preserved in Tehran. We might, for instance, come to a better understanding of how his treatises on Aristotelian philosophy relate to his Christian theological output. But my impression is that ibn Adi was more like al-Kindi, writing occasional works on well-defined topics and rarely giving us a view of the bigger picture. al-Farabi's system-building ambitions allowed him to exercise a much greater influence, to the point that he was honored with the title the Second Master. The First Master, of course, was Aristotle, who provided the frame within which al-Farabi hung his big picture theories. Because of his philosophical achievement and his influence, it would be nice if I could paint you a detailed picture of al-Farabi's life, but we unfortunately don't know much about that. His name provides a first clue and indicates that he came originally from Central Asia, either from Farab in Khorasan or Fariyab in Turkestan. We already saw that he was associated with the Baghdad Peripatetic School and in particular that he was the teacher of Yahya ibn Adi. This was not his only important Christian colleague. He tells us himself that he studied with another Christian named Yuhanna ibn Haylan. We also know that later in life he traveled to Syria and Egypt. He died in Damascus in the year 950 or 951. Here he enjoyed the patronage of Saif al-Dawla, who fought wars with the Byzantines and other enemies to establish a kingdom in northern Syria with Aleppo at its center. With his itinerant career and his dependence on the support of warlords, al-Farabi's biography anticipates that of Avicenna, who was likewise forced to spend his life moving from one city and patron to another. The broad outlines of Avicenna's philosophical system also look back to al-Farabi. Both were enthusiastic and talented logicians who wholeheartedly embraced the late ancient idea that philosophy must be grounded in the study of logic. From al-Farabi, Avicenna took over an understanding of God as a first cause who creates the rest of the universe by emanating it from himself. This process of emanation occurs necessarily and is achieved through a series of intermediaries. Al-Farabi also anticipates Avicenna by integrating his theory of knowledge into that emanationist system and making one and the same separate intellect responsible for both human knowledge and the forms of things down here on earth. There can be no doubting Avicenna's originality, but some of what seems to be new with him is actually original with al-Farabi. Avicenna and later thinkers like Averroes and Maimonides in Andalusia single out al-Farabi as the most important thinker of the early Arabic tradition and mostly ignore or disdain other predecessors. Modern scholars have unfortunately tended to follow suit and given little thought to al-Farabi's own intellectual context, but he was in some respects a typical member of the Baghdad school, even if he went beyond their core project of imitating the late ancient commentators on Aristotle. He did write commentaries of his own. These include a now-lost treatise devoted to Aristotle's ethics and numerous surviving writings on logic. Many of these are just summaries or paraphrases of the sort that was produced in antiquity by the rhetorician Themistius, remember him? and which will be produced again in the 12th century by Averroes. But we do have al-Farabi's full commentary as well as his paraphrase for Aristotle's On Interpretation. Inevitably, this leads al-Farabi to tackle our favourite philosophical puzzle from Aristotle's logic, the sea battle argument for determinism. We saw last time that Ibn Adi devoted a treatise to this argument, and although I'm aware that its familiarity may now be breeding contempt, it's worth looking briefly at what al-Farabi has to say too. I promise not to bring it up again for a while, in fact not until we get to Latin medieval philosophy. In his commentary on Aristotle's On Interpretation, al-Farabi challenges the usual assumption that Aristotle is trying to defeat an argument for determinism. That can't be right, because determinism is a topic that would be appropriately discussed in physics or metaphysics, whereas here Aristotle is doing logic. So we should understand things the other way around. When Aristotle denies that the present truth of propositions about the future shows that future events are necessary, he is simply assuming that the future events are not necessary. According to al-Farabi, this is blindingly obvious and the sort of thing only doubted by the more disreputable sort of Islamic theologian. As we'll see later, Islamic theology and disrepute are rarely far apart, as far as al-Farabi is concerned. On al-Farabi's interpretation, Aristotle is bringing up the deterministic argument only to make a point about the truth of propositions, which is relevant in logic. The point would be that propositions about the future cannot yet be settled as true or false, since otherwise the absurd consequence of determinism would follow. al-Farabi admits though that this solution will be awkward for someone who thinks that God knows the future. After all, if there is no truth now about whether I'll keep my promise to shut up about the sea battle until I get to Latin medieval philosophy, how can God know now whether I will keep that promise? It's actually not clear whether al-Farabi would accept that God knows such things. It may well be that he anticipates abbessena yet again in thinking that God in a sense lacks knowledge of particular events in our world, and that's something I do promise to say more about soon. Nonetheless, al-Farabi now offers a second solution of his own which I think has great philosophical merit. He says that present truths seem to make future events necessary only because the occurrence of those events is implied by the truth of the present propositions predicting them. In other words, if I say there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then that of course implies that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. But although there is a necessary connection between the statement and the event, the truth of the statement itself is not necessary. Rather, my statement, there will be a sea battle tomorrow, is contingently true, if it is true at all. So, if it is true, it only implies that the sea battle will take place contingently, not necessarily. By contrast, if I say 2 plus 2 will equal 4 tomorrow, what I say now is necessarily true because what it predicts is necessary. As we know from past episodes, Aristotelians had always discussed knowledge within the rubric of Aristotle's logic, and reasonably enough, since the posterior analytics, the crowning glory of his logical writings, is the closest thing we have to a work by Aristotle on epistemology. We have a detailed paraphrase of it by al-Farabi, and also a fascinating little treatise called On the Conditions of Certainty. Here, he lays out the various kinds of belief we can have, culminating in the perfectly certain beliefs envisioned by Aristotle in the posterior analytics. According to al-Farabi, we should only count ourselves as absolutely certain when what we believe is necessarily, essentially, and permanently true. Notice that this seems to suggest there is no absolute certainty about future events like sea battles, since those are certainly not permanent or essential. And, as we just saw, they are not necessary either. That's one reason I suspect that al-Farabi wasn't really worried about God's knowledge of the future. If future events aren't the sort of things one can know with absolute certainty and all God's knowledge is absolutely certain, then future events just aren't part of what God knows. al-Farabi also draws on the posterior analytics when he lays out his conception of the philosophical curriculum as a whole. He does this in several of his works, for instance in his Philosophy of Aristotle, an overview of Aristotle's philosophical writings. As we saw, al-Kindi also wrote a work along these lines, but al-Farabi seems to be considerably better informed. He's more in the dark when it comes to Plato, but that didn't stop him from writing a companion piece to this work on Aristotle called the Philosophy of Plato. As I mentioned before, Plato's dialogues were probably never known in complete translations in Arabic, though some were known in paraphrase summaries. Al-Farabi is likely not even using such summaries, but rather a translation of an ancient introduction to Plato. He simply goes through the dialogues title by title, often restricting himself to a dubious etymological explanation of each title. By the way, there's a third work often considered to form a trilogy along with the works on Plato and Aristotle, which argues for the harmony between the teachings of these two philosophers. But I think fairly convincing arguments have been made that it is either inauthentic or an early work whose contents al-Farabi later came to reject, so I won't say any more about it here. In the Philosophy of Aristotle, and in another work called the Attainment of Happiness, al-Farabi sets out his understanding of the late antique philosophical curriculum. In his version of this course of study, one should unsurprisingly begin with logic, thereafter progressing to physics and then metaphysics. Finally, one should turn to the practical subjects of ethics and political philosophy. This is where the posterior analytics becomes important. There, Aristotle explained how philosophical sciences can be built one upon another. Higher sciences provide the principles, or assumptions, on which lower sciences are built. A common example is that geometry provides the principles for the subordinate science of optics. That is, we need to use geometry to study things like reflections in mirrors, whereas the reverse is not true. Geometers have no need to know about optics. Ideally, the whole body of possible human knowledge can be envisioned as a hierarchy of sciences, with metaphysics, or first philosophy, establishing the highest principles upon which all other sciences depend. Talk about systematic. So why don't we start at the top, by doing metaphysics instead of logic and physics? Because, as Aristotle also pointed out, what is primary to us is usually not what is primary in itself. The most dramatic example is God. He is the first among causes, but certainly not the first cause we are aware of, or the easiest cause for us to understand. Rather, we begin with the everyday physical objects in the world around us, and, having understood these, work our way up towards understanding more fundamental principles, including God. But Al-Farabi resists the temptation to say that first philosophy is simply the study of God as first cause of all things. In a little essay he wrote on the purposes of Aristotle's metaphysics, Al-Farabi remarks that many people have been confused by this work because they assumed first philosophy must be nothing other than theology. Al-Kindi is an obvious culprit. He said precisely this at the beginning of his On First Philosophy. Instead, Al-Farabi wants to insist Aristotle's metaphysics is devoted to all the topics that are most primary among the sciences. That includes theology, insofar as God is the first cause of being for all other things, but also such principles as the law of non-contradiction, which Aristotle duly tackles in the fourth book of the metaphysics. Brief though this little essay is, Avicenna found it invaluable. He tells us that he read the metaphysics dozens of times, but never understood it until he came across Al-Farabi's little explanation. Presumably, what he found so helpful was Al-Farabi's rejection of the purely theological reading of Aristotle that was so prevalent in the Arabic tradition. So, now we know what Al-Farabi would like us to do—fully realize our potential for knowledge by working our way up from familiar things to genuinely primary things, and grasping all the sciences as one interlocking system. This constitutes what he calls ultimate happiness for mankind, hence the title of his work The Attainment of Happiness. But how do we get from where we are now, as mere podcast enthusiasts, to where Al-Farabi would like us to be? To answer that question, we need to turn from his systematic account of his philosophical curriculum to his systematic account of the universe. We find this laid out in his two most ambitious works, which have the not particularly punchy titles Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, and the Political Regime. These are the texts I mentioned earlier, which begin with accounts of the entire cosmos before moving on to discuss mankind and the ideal political arrangements in our cities. In these works, Al-Farabi begins not from what is familiar to us, but from what is truly primary. In just a few brilliantly innovative paragraphs, Al-Farabi begins by fusing together the emanationist scheme of Neoplatonism with ideas taken from Aristotle. You'll probably remember that, for Aristotle, God is a pure mind, which is the first cause of motion for the entire universe. You may not recall, though, that Aristotle posits not just this highest, separate intellect, but one intellect for each of the simple motions of the heavenly bodies. Broadly following this idea, Al-Farabi tells us, without argument, that every heavenly sphere has its own intellect. The Neoplatonic part comes in when he adds that these intellects and spheres descend from God in a kind of cascade of causation. God begins this cascade by emanating a first intellect, which is associated with the outermost sphere of the heavens. This sounds a lot like Plotinus, who believed that an intellect came forth from his first principle, the One. But unlike Plotinus, Al-Farabi has a whole series of celestial intellects, proceeding one by one, each one giving rise to the next, much as the first intellect came from God. The intellects are associated with the nested heavenly spheres, which are like transparent glass balls, one inside the other. Their motions around the earth are revealed to us by the visible planets seated upon them. This goes on until we arrive at the lowest of the intellects, which has responsibility for our world down here below the heavens. With all due respect to the Farabian God, the lowest separate intellect is arguably the most important and interesting entity in his entire system. Okay, it is not the first cause of all things, but it plays crucial and unique roles both in Al-Farabi's cosmology and in his theory of knowledge. It is able to carry out these two roles because, not unlike Plotinus's single intellect, it is thinking about the whole range of universal, intelligible forms that can be exemplified in our world. It has a perfect understanding of these forms, so that it is like a complete library of possible knowledge. But since it is a thinking intellect, if we compare it to a library, we should imagine it as a library that is always reading its own books. Its cosmological function, then, is to bestow its forms upon things here on earth, which are made of the four elements. When elemental matter is suitably mixed together so that it is prepared to be a baby giraffe, for instance, the intellect emanates the form of giraffe onto the matter. Zoo-keepers will scoff at this. They will insist that in their experience you get giraffes from mother and father giraffes, not from celestial intellects. But Al-Farabi knows better. What mother and father giraffes do, perhaps after a romantic candlelight dinner of dried grass and lukewarm water, is prepare some matter to be just right for receiving the form of giraffe, and that form is emanated from the lowest celestial intellect. This idea was extremely influential on Avicenna and others. In Arabic philosophical literature, the intellect is often honored with the phrase wahib as-suwār, which came into Latin as dāto'a for marum, the giver of forms. Influential or not, I suspect that Al-Farabi's theory will strike you as being nuttier than the snacks at an elephant's birthday party. But it actually solves a philosophical problem that rumbled along through antique philosophy. Plato introduced his infamous theory of forms, in part because he wanted to explain the one over many phenomenon. All giraffes participate in the one form of giraffe, which explains why they have a shared nature distinct from the one shared by elephants. But Al-Farabi is well aware of Aristotle's searching critique of the theory of forms, and agrees that we should not posit a second, transcendent world of perfect exemplars to solve the one over many problem. Because his own theory, with its giver of forms, is introduced in the context of a theory of emanation, it is often described as being neoplatonic or Platonist. But Al-Farabi himself would see it as anti-Platonist. According to his account, unity is provided not by Platonic forms, but by forms that are simply ideas in a mind, albeit that this mind is a single transcendent one. Furthermore, Al-Farabi's theory offers an explanation of the most controversial passage in all of Aristotle's writings, the fifth chapter of Book III of On the Soul. There, we are told that there is an eternally active separate intellect, which makes other kinds of thinking possible. Unlike me, Al-Farabi is pretty sure what Aristotle is talking about here, the giver of forms, which he therefore also calls the active intellect. As Al-Farabi explains in his letter on the intellect, the human mind goes through several stages as it works towards realizing its capacity for knowledge. It begins in a state of potentiality and is actualized through philosophical inquiry. Though he follows Aristotle in recognizing a role for sense experience in this process, ultimately Al-Farabi believes that the high grade of necessity and certainty required for true knowledge can only be secured through another sort of emanation from the giver of forms. This time, the forms will not be bestowed upon appropriately prepared matter, but instead on the appropriately prepared human mind. In part, what Al-Farabi is saying here was already stated by al-Kindi in his own letter on the intellect, which likewise spoke of a transcendent intellect that actualizes the human mind. But al-Kindi did not have the idea of giving the active intellect a cosmological role as well as a function in bringing about human knowledge. By making that move, al-Farabi is able to explain why my mind's receiving the form of giraffe or elephant from a separate intellect should allow me to know about the physical giraffes and elephants we see in zoos. In both cases, the same form is derived from the same source. It's just that in the knowledge case, that form is actualizing the potential of my mind, whereas in the zoo case it's actualizing matter's potential to become an animal. And al-Farabi makes one more innovative move we have not found in al-Kindi or anyone else thus far. He uses his theory of the intellect to explain prophecy. A prophet, he thinks, is basically someone whose mind has been fully actualized by the active intellect and who is in a position to share the resulting knowledge with the rest of mankind. How exactly does the prophet do this, and what are the consequences for al-Farabi's understanding of religion and society? Actualize your potential to find out by joining me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, State of Mind, Al-Farabi on Religion and Politics. If you were going to compare the leaders of your nation to a part of the body, which part would you choose? The fingers, perhaps, since they deftly remove money from your wallet? The skin, because they are so superficial? The tongue, because all they want is a taste of power? Or maybe you can think of an even less favorable comparison, which might bring a whole new meaning to the phrase seat of power. Let's not be cynical though. Most politicians probably mean well, and some even do well. A good leader can be the face of the nation, representing its people to the world, and also its brain, thinking through the issues that confront it. Al-Farabi would broadly agree with this last comparison, except that he would instead refer us to the heart. Not because his ideal ruler would constantly administer beatings. Rather because he follows Aristotle in believing that the so-called ruling faculty of the human body is located in the heart, and not the brain. He even wrote a little treatise answering Galen's criticisms of Aristotle on this point. So, when Al-Farabi frequently compares the well-run society to a healthy human body, he has it in mind that the presence of an effective ruler prevents the city from being heartless, rather than brainless. Al-Farabi takes this comparison between the city and the body so seriously that he also sometimes compares the good ruler to a doctor. As the doctor uses the medical art to impose good order on the body, so the ruler imposes good order on the citizens under his rule. Finding a point of agreement between Aristotle and Galen, Al-Farabi says that in both cases, the goal is a kind of balance or moderation. In Galen's medical theory, the doctor seeks to balance the four humours in the patient's body. And in Aristotle's ethical theory, each of us should be aiming for a balance, what we once upon a time called the Goldilocks theory of ethics, with each virtue defined as a mean between extremes. Al-Farabi also follows Aristotle in thinking that good political rule can help citizens to be happy by bringing them to virtue. In fact, he goes so far as to say that happiness is impossible for anyone who does not live in a well-run society. We can see how deeply Al-Farabi is influenced by ancient writings about politics by considering what sort of society he has in mind. He lived in the enormous empire ruled by the Abbasids, yet unhesitatingly took the individual city to be the fundamental setting for political affairs. His writings about the best arrangement of a society are political in the most etymological of senses. Like Plato and Aristotle, he is talking about the affairs of a city, or polis. This etymology works in Arabic too. The term often translated political in Al-Farabi, madani, has the same root as the word madina, meaning city. Nearly every page of his writings on political subjects betray the influence of Aristotle and above all, Plato. Though there was no complete Arabic translation of the Republic, Al-Farabi clearly knows the broad outlines of its argument, probably through an abbreviated paraphrase version. As we'll see, he adopts its teaching that a city can become good only if it is ruled by philosophers. He also recognizes the possibility that an entire city be virtuous, just as a person can be. A virtuous city is one in which the citizens, with the help of their ruler, have attained the right opinions and performed the right actions. By contrast, ignorant cities are full of people doing the wrong things because they hold the wrong opinions. Echoing Plato's Republic yet again, he speaks of ignorant cities that pursue honor, wealth, or pleasure, rather than genuine happiness. Notice that Al-Farabi speaks in terms of the opinions rather than the knowledge that should ideally be possessed by citizens. This thought even appears in the title of his work Principles of the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City. He finds it unrealistic or even impossible to expect that all the inhabitants will have real knowledge. As we saw last time, his conception of knowledge follows the highly demanding constraints laid down by Aristotle. Truly to know something, you must have possession of necessary and universal truths reached through valid demonstrations. This goal is so demanding, and talent and opportunity so scarce, that only a few people can hope to possess genuine knowledge. In fact, Al-Farabi thinks it is rather optimistic to suppose that anyone in a city will really have complete knowledge of all the truths that are merely believed by the inhabitants of the virtuous city. They need to have true opinions about God as the source of all truth and perfection in the world, about the heavenly bodies and the intellects that move them, the formation of mankind, the right arrangement of political affairs, and the afterlife. These are pretty well the topics Al-Farabi covers in on the opinions of the inhabitants of the virtuous city, and the topics we're dealing with in this and the previous podcast. In the absence of podcasts, though, the citizens of the virtuous city are going to need some other source of help. In the best case scenario, they will get their opinions from someone who knows, namely the true ruler or king, of the city. As in Plato, he will be not just a king, but also a philosopher. His intellect will be completely realized by receiving an emanation, not from the internet as with a podcast, but from the separate active intellect. Since the ideal ruler knows everything anyone might need to know, he can help his subjects to form virtuous opinions. And lest we forget, he will also need to help them perform virtuous actions. Without his guidance, the citizens will lack the right goals because of the false opinions they have regarding practical affairs. Following late ancient classifications of knowledge, Al-Farabi divides up philosophy into theoretical and practical. For him, the practical is defined as the sphere of the voluntary, so practical philosophy is relevant wherever choices must be made. Since it is a kind of philosophy, it will involve the grasp of necessary, universal truths. So on the practical front, what the philosopher, and hence the perfect ruler, possesses is general knowledge about practical affairs. This allows him to establish the right goals to be pursued by the citizens. They should pursue true happiness, as opposed to wealth, honor, or pleasure, for instance. They will need more help than that, though. As Al-Farabi points out, it isn't enough to have the right goal if one can't deliberate well about how to attain that goal. This amounts to seeing how the general deliverances of reason can be applied to practical affairs in detail and in individual cases. So the perfect ruler will need this capacity too. Again, Al-Farabi compares the ruler to the doctor. Galen had emphasized that good doctors do not just know generalities about medicine, they are also able to draw on their experience to tailor remedies to the needs and bodies of individual patients. In the same way, ethical virtue and the virtuous rule of cities means being able to judge each case in light of previous experience. As becomes especially clear in a work by Al-Farabi called The Book of Religion, the practical abilities of the ideal ruler are realized above all in the handing down of laws. We just saw that the ruler has to keep an eye on both universal goals and individual cases. His laws represent an application of the general to the particular, in a way appropriate for the city and its inhabitants. After all, each given city would have special needs because of its location, its climate, and the temperament of its people. The ruler will understand all this, and legislate accordingly. He will also be able to react appropriately as new situations arise. The ruler's law-giving function may seem a distinctively Islamic feature of Al-Farabi's theory, and as we'll see in a moment there is some truth in that, but Plato too discussed the philosophical basis of laws several times, not just in the Republic, but also in his final work The Laws. Plato's laws would have been known to Al-Farabi, probably in the form of another paraphrase by Galen. So far then, the Farabian political theory looks to be a subtle reworking and interweaving of themes from Plato and Aristotle, along with analogies drawn to Galenic medicine. All this sets the scene for Al-Farabi's most dramatic contribution to the history of political philosophy, his claim that the ideal ruler is not only a philosopher, but also a prophet. We saw last time that Al-Farabi makes God a rather remote first principle who affects humans through a chain of intermediary celestial intellects. This provides the context for Al-Farabi's theory of prophecy. The act of intellect which provides knowledge to individual human knowers is also the conduit through which God gives a revelation to the prophet. It will be this revelation that distinguishes the best possible ruler from a mere philosopher. The philosopher has perfectly realized the human capacity for knowledge, which is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it leaves no room to say that the prophet is intellectually superior to the philosopher. The two are alike in having all the universal knowledge that any human could possess, a state that Al-Farabi refers to as acquired intellect. Instead, what distinguishes the prophet from the philosopher occurs in a lower part of the soul, the imagination. What the prophet receives in revelation comes in the form of symbolic images. He may, for instance, have visions of what is to come in the future. Here, Al-Farabi is in broad agreement with his predecessor Al-Kindi, who wrote a work on prophetic dreams. According to Al-Kindi, a sleeping person's soul can receive images from the intellect into the imagination. These images may in some cases be like riddles which need to be decoded. For instance, Al-Kindi says that a dream about flying might signify that a voyage is in your near future. To some extent, these ideas about God-given prophetic visions were already worked into the Arabic translation of Aristotle's writings about dreams. So Al-Farabi is drawing on Arabic literature of the previous century here. Still, he does something new by seeing the possible implications for religion and political affairs. Thanks to the symbolic images the prophet received from God through the act of intellect, he is able not just to foretell the future, but also to represent what he knows in a way that his subjects can appreciate. For this purpose, the prophet's revelation takes the form of images and symbols, not demonstrative proofs. As we saw, Al-Farabi thinks that the citizens of the virtuous city need to have a whole range of beliefs about God, celestial intelligences, the afterlife, and so on. They do not need a philosophical understanding of any of these matters, they just need to be convinced. So it's fine if their opinions rest on the literal acceptance of symbols. The citizens might, for instance, believe in celestial intelligences but think of them as angels. For instance, in Islam, it is said to be the angel Gabriel who delivered the revelation of the Qur'an to Muhammad. For Al-Farabi, the angel would be a symbol of the act of intellect in its role as the intermediary between God and the prophet's soul. Similarly, the bliss attained by souls freed from body is presented in Islam as a garden of delights, a material symbol of the immaterial bliss that awaits the virtuous soul once it is freed from the body. I should hasten to add that these are my examples, not Al-Farabi's. In fact, his discussions of religion studiously avoid any explicit allusions to Islam or any other actual faith. He always addresses the topic in abstract and general terms. But it's pretty clear that when he describes the ideal prophet-philosopher-ruler who brings a revealed religion, he is thinking of Muhammad as a primary example. The prophet-ruler is also a lawgiver, which should put us in mind of Islamic law and its basis in Muhammad's revelation and teachings. Al-Farabi's book of religion strongly suggests this when it addresses the question of what the virtuous society should do when the prophet-ruler is no longer alive. Ideally, he would be replaced by another such ruler, or failing that, a group of people who collectively have the traits the prophet-ruler combines in his single and singular person. When the gifts of universal understanding, excellence in deliberation about particulars, and revelation are possessed by no individual or group of leaders, the citizens must adhere to the laws previously laid down by the perfect ruler or rulers. Mostly this just means following the letter of the laws as closely as possible. But circumstances change, and problems may arise that have no clear solution in the existing law. When this happens, Al-Farabi says, we must turn to jurisprudence. This art extends the legal rulings of the prophet to new questions and situations, and is grounded in a thorough study of the prophet and his legal judgments. To some extent, we find, again, these ideas prefigured in Plato, since he also raises the question of what to do in generations following an ideal lawgiver's death. But the details of Al-Farabi's discussion here leave little doubt that he has in mind Islamic jurisprudence, which in Arabic was called fiqh. It's a topic to which we will return in future podcasts. It's fascinating to see how Al-Farabi makes a place in his political theory for jurisprudence, which in his day had become a considerable social and political force in Muslim society. Al-Farabi's attitude towards the jurists might best be described as condescending but tolerant. He explains why fiqh is necessary, but it clearly plays a much less exalted role than philosophy. After all, philosophy gives us a way to understand for ourselves the true basis of the prophet ruler's laws, the truths that lie behind the merely symbolic images offered in a text like the Qur'an. What jurisprudence does, by contrast, is to stay within the legal framework and symbolic world of a religion. The jurist makes careful guesses about how best to extend these teachings without probing into their actual foundations. In this sense, the jurist never ventures beyond the parochial confines of his own religion. As several scholars have pointed out, one can draw an analogy here to the discipline of grammar, which we looked at in the episode on the Baghdad school. As we saw, for Al-Farabi and the other Baghdad Aristotelians, grammar is culturally specific because it is tied to the language of a single people, whereas logic is universal and uncovers the structure of human reason itself. Likewise, religion and the religious law are bound to one culture, inducing true opinions and laying down injunctions in a way tailored to that culture. A jurist thinks of this culturally specific material as if it were universal, absolutely true revelation, just as the grammarian thinks he can get at truth merely by studying the language he happens to speak. Ironically, a similar accusation is sometimes thrown at today's analytic philosophers, who occasionally seem to think that we can do philosophy by studying language, and that English is the only language that exists. Human philosophy, by contrast, is ostentatiously and explicitly universal. Every prophet-ruler and every philosopher understands the same truths, for instance, the oneness of God as first principle, the descent of his providential influence through the heavens and celestial intellects, and so on. These same truths are symbolized in different ways by different prophetic revelations, which Al-Farabi calls virtuous religions. So, Al-Farabi puts both jurisprudence and grammar, firmly and literally, in their place. They play a useful role but are limited to these perspectives of the here and now, a limitation usually ignored by the jurists and grammarians themselves. Regarding a third intellectual tradition which was also blossoming in his day, he is still more dismissive. This is rational theology, or kalam. In principle, Al-Farabi leaves an opening for kalam to play a similarly limited, but still useful, role. He associates theology with dialectic, which is the practice of arguing from agreed premises rather than offering demonstrations that can be traced back to solid first principles. And he admits that dialectic can be of great use, for instance to defend a virtuous religion from its detractors. In practice, though, he thinks that the practitioners of religious dialectic in his own society are like what comes next after your spouse says, honey, we need to talk. Seriously bad news. In a rather amusing discussion of theology in his work The Enumeration of the Sciences, Al-Farabi lists the different kinds of theologian, or practitioners of kalam. None of them are conscious of the dialectical nature of their enterprise and the modesty of its aims in comparison to the demonstrative majesty of philosophy. Instead, some theologians are of the view that even the most advanced human will be as a child compared to God. For these theologians, there is no point using human reason to guess at the truths underlying God's message, or even to ratify those truths. Instead, we should accept the prophet's veracity on the basis of the miracles he performed, and take his revelation at face value. Other theologians are more troubled by the surface meaning of revelation and try to eliminate its apparent implausibilities. Here Al-Farabi might be thinking, for instance, of passages in revealed texts that depict God as a physical being. These more skeptical theologians turn to sense perception, reason, and tradition, and assimilate the message of the prophet to the deliverances of these three sources. Notice this is almost exactly what we found inside Iagān. No surprise there, since Al-Farabi apparently has in mind the Muʿtazilite theologians who so deeply influenced Zādīyā. Next, there are some theologians who are just interested in interreligious debate. They content themselves with pointing out implausibilities in other religions, to distract opponents from the implausibilities of their own faith. Still others will stoop to mendacious tricks to win in debates with members of other religions. This is no-holds-barred dialectic, which Al-Farabi compares to the fact that all is fair in war, if not in love. It seems clear that these scheming deceivers are the most despicable representatives of kalam, but all the groups described here are subject at least to self-deception even if they don't deliberately deceive others, and none of them can hope to attain knowledge as the philosopher does. Actually, looking back now over the last two episodes, it strikes me that one central theme if not the central theme of Al-Farabi's philosophy has been knowledge. For this reason, I would like to take a closer look at this theme of knowledge, not only in Al-Farabi, but also looking ahead to what we will find in the great Avicenna. Demonstrate your faith in the podcast by joining me for an interview on these topics with Deborah Black. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Al-Farabi's epistemology with Deborah Black, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Hi, Deborah. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. So we're going to be talking about Al-Farabi's views about knowledge. Maybe we'll get on to talking about Avicenna a little bit later because they have a lot in common. But before we start talking about what Farabi actually says about knowledge and what it is, how we can get it, I thought maybe we should begin by talking about the sources that Al-Farabi draws on in developing his own ideas in epistemology. Okay. I also thought maybe I should say something a bit about the fact that we don't have an explicit treatise on—well, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but we don't really have an explicit notion of epistemology in Farabi or in any of the Islamic Aristotelians. So most of what he's saying that we would classify as epistemological comes in the context of elaborating on Aristotle's theory of demonstration in the posterior analytics. So that kind of segues as an answer to your question about sources because that really is the main source for Farabi, Aristotle's posterior analytics in the Arabic translation. And so epistemology is primarily a part of logic for Farabi and his successors and, to a lesser extent, a part of psychology because some of the discussion comes up in the context of dealing with cognitive psychology in Aristotle's Deonema. So those are the two main sources. The other sources are related to those. So one of the interesting features of Farabi's epistemology is that in addition to a theory of demonstrative science, so really knowledge in the highest form, he also addresses the status of lesser forms of knowledge and these are associated with other logical arts like dialectic rhetoric and poetics. And so Aristotle's treatises on those topics are also major sources. Another important source, and I kind of discovered this myself by accident, closely related to the posterior analytics, is the paraphrase of one of the Greek commentators, Themistius, from the fourth century. And the reason I discovered this is when both Farabi and Avicenna discuss Minos' paradox, they keep talking about a runaway slave. So instead of Socrates questioning a slave boy about the principles of geometry, they have a puzzle about how you recognize the runaway slave if you don't know who he is. And I stumbled upon that in Themistius. And so once I discovered that, I realized they're also reading a lot of Aristotle through Themistius. That's interesting because usually people think of Al-Farabi, maybe already al-Kindi, but Al-Farabi, Avicenna, as reading Aristotle through the lens of Neoplatonist commentators on Aristotle. And so they say, oh, that's why we get this fusion of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. But you're saying that at least when it comes to the posterior analytics, one of the big influences on them from late antiquity would actually be Themistius, who is maybe some kind of Platonist, but certainly not a Neoplatonist, a full-blown Neoplatonist like, say, Philoponus or Simplicius. Exactly. And I think in relation to that, too, unless you're talking about the cognitive psychology side of this, there's a sense in which there are more properly Platonic elements, particularly in Farabi, because this whole attempt to classify different forms of knowledge relative to the ideal of demonstration is in part cashed out in terms of what Farabi knows about Plato's epistemology from the versions of the Republic that they have and the sort of hierarchical view of different forms of knowledge that you find in Book Six of the Republic and other texts of that sort. And so even though Farabi doesn't know a lot of Plato's dialogues directly or doesn't seem to, so the Meno example sort of gives you a flavor of that, and if you read his philosophy of Plato, it's clear he knows a lot about the dialogues, but he doesn't really fully know their content. So I think there's a lot of Platonism in the sense of a very strong hierarchical ordering of the lesser modes of cognition to demonstrative science. Now, that's in Aristotle to some extent, but it's really emphasized by Plato. And in one of his rhetorical commentaries, there's this wonderful metaphor of rhetoric poetics and dialectic kind of being the means by which you climb out of Plato's cave in the Republic. So I think that's a very strong flavor in his approach. So using Aristotelian logic to escape from Plato's cave, basically? Exactly. And then if you're a prophet or a politician, you have to go back down again, but just as in Plato. Actually, that mention of prophecy raises another question, though, which is that, I mean, you've been focusing so far just on the Greek sources that Fadabi is using, and you did call him an Aristotelian before, and I guess everyone would agree with that characterization of him. Do you think that Islamic sources fundamentally change his way of thinking about knowledge, or is he really just trying to develop a theory of knowledge by engaging with Aristotle and other Greek works in Arabic translation? I think Fadabi, unlike Avicenna later, who I do think in particular makes creative use of some of the traditions of the Mu'tazilite theologians, so the earliest rationalist school of theology, Fadabi is indebted to that background in his tradition, but in a far more negative or adversarial sense. So I think that, I mean, I'm not an expert in kalam, but it's clear from what I know of the treatises of kalam or theology. They always start with epistemological issues, so they're always concerned with the sources of knowledge, they give classifications and so on. They sort of treat metaphysical issues through the lens of epistemology. So I think the very fact that Fadabi focuses on epistemology as an important topic in its own right, and even, you know, it does have one short treatise that's just on epistemological issues, I think that's a development that comes up from his rivalry with the Mu'tazilite theologians. So he thinks that they're wrong on almost everything, and that their epistemology is wrong, so he's got to develop a more clearly peripatetic sort of epistemology to address that. They're so wrong about everything that they're even wrong about what it would mean to be right about something. Exactly, and whenever Fadabi is classifying the different grades of ascent and the different types of knowledge, he always gets in a dig at the Mu'tazilites that they think they're getting knowledge and they think they're using the intellect, but it's just rhetoric and poetics. And in particular, he always rails against the description that the Mu'tazilites give for the goal of thinking, which they describe as an acquiescence of the soul, sikkun anafs, which is basically the idea that you come to assent to something, so that's their term for assent. And Fadabi always says they mistake psychological certitude, right, it feels like we're certain, for true epistemic understanding. So he says their acquiescence of the soul is really rhetorical assent. But just having to deal with those kinds of issues and think about what exactly assent is and what certitude is and so on, I think he's forced to do that because of addressing those rivals. So the objection here, I guess, then would be that just because you feel like you're certain about something doesn't mean that you really are certain. It's as simple as that. Exactly. Later on, Avicenna tries to grapple with that and there are places in which he sometimes sounds as if he's falling into that, but he seems to be a little bit more positively influenced by the Mutukalimun, although he would never admit that. Well, speaking of being certain, let's turn to this little treatise, which I guess you were just alluding to, which is called On the Conditions of Certainty, which is a work you've actually discussed in some of your publications. This is a treatise in which, it's a very short treatise, and he's trying to lay out, I guess, the different grades of certainty that someone can have. So in order that this doesn't take too long, maybe we should just go straight to the punchline and ask, what are the conditions under which I could take myself to be fully certain or as absolutely certain as he says? I don't know if that's even going directly to the punchline because that's all the treatise is about. And in fact, it's, I mean, so that's the one exception to the rule. I mean, this is a treatise just on epistemology, right? I mean, who's the next person to write a treatise with that title? It's probably Wittgenstein. He was way ahead of his time. So Farabi actually has six conditions for what he calls absolute certitude, and that's very important. There's certitude and there's absolute certitude. So we're already changing the focus a bit from what it is in the Aristotelian tradition and even the discussion of certitude itself is quite on Aristotelian. And I won't go into the details here, but as I've discussed, it's really a bit of an accident of translation, but it shifts the focus and allows Farabi and his successors to do kind of interesting things. So basically, certitude, Farabi presents a definition of certitude and he gives us the genus and then six differentiate and each one kind of builds on the one before until you get to this very stringent notion of absolute certitude. So basically, the idea is that under what conditions can we say that we're certain about some proposition P? And Farabi is sometimes not entirely clear that it's always propositional knowledge, but that seems to be the main focus. So first, you have to believe that P is true. P has to be true, and Farabi cashes that out in terms of correspondence with the way things are. Third, you have to know that P is true. And so if you take those three together, it sounds a bit like the contemporary definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Yeah, it actually sounds like kind of enough. Yeah, oh no, not enough. It is enough for certain kinds of certitude, but the other three conditions then narrow it down even more. So you then have to, after believing a true proposition and knowing that it's true, you have to know that it's necessary for P to be true. And I'll come back to that in a second. And then you have to know that at no time can P not be true or become false. And then finally, you have to know that conditions one through five are essentially and not accidentally true of P. Wow. So let me just say a couple of things about the third, fourth, and fifth and sixth are somewhat related conditions. The first point is that you might take three, four, five, and six as being justification conditions in some sense. But in fact, Rabi doesn't speak of them in those terms. And it's clear when he tries to explain what they are that they have some justificatory role, but that's not primarily how Rabi is viewing it. The third condition that you must know that P is true is very important and controversial from a philosophical point of view because that's essentially what we would now call a KK condition, a condition of knowing that one knows. And so the idea is that if you know anything or in this case are certain of it, then you know that you know it. And Rabi says you can actually generate an infinite number of propositions. So you also know that you know that you know and know that you know that you know that you know and so on ad infinitum. Not very useful for most purposes. Not very useful, but it's a very strong condition and it's one that captured the attention of Rabi's successors. So Avicenn always includes it in his accounts of what certitude is and then he gives corresponding default conditions for lesser degrees of knowledge. So that's controversial because it seems too hard to meet. But of course that's part of the traditional ideal that certitude is something special, it's not something we have all the time. So the next condition that it's necessary for P to be true, that might sound again like it's something similar, it's like the traditional Aristotelian notion that we can only have knowledge of necessary universal unchanging things. But when Rabi explains what it is, he means that we recognize it's necessary in the sense that we have direct evidence for it. And he uses this to rule out knowing something's true by authority or report or something. So he treats it, and this is why it's interesting relative to the KK condition, he treats it as acquiring the knowledge through a reliable method. So he refers explicitly to some reliable way for getting principles or to a reliable inferential method. So those two things don't go together, that you both have a knowing that you know condition and a reliableist kind of condition. But that's partly because Rabi's again really worried about people confusing the kind of ascent that the theologians talk about and that you get through religious discourse with real knowledge. Is the reason that I know that I know that I use the right method? Yes. I know which method I use. In part. But at this point, it still has nothing to do with the kind of thing you know. And it's only the last two conditions that throw that in. And that's one of the things that's fascinating about this treatise. Because then Rabi says, okay, in order to have absolute certitude, then you have to stipulate that there can't be any time at which P is not true and that P holds essentially and not accidentally. So that's the absolute certitude. That's what we're ultimately getting to. And so that's going to be only necessary universal truths. But by adding that as a further condition, Rabi says, so up to this point, you can have a kind of attenuated or relative, maybe we might want to say non-absolute, certitude about temporal contingent propositions. And that's a really major concession. So I can know for certain that I'm sitting in my office talking to Peter Adamson on Skype and looking at a blue wall when I'm experiencing it under the proper conditions. And you can call that certitude. And I don't think you would have standards for doing that on the traditional Aristotelian paradigm. Just that it wouldn't count as absolute certitude. Yeah. As terminology. Yeah. Maybe turning away from this treatise for a second. Can I ask you how this all relates to what I guess is the more famous thing about other Tharavi's epistemology, which is the role of this separate agent intellect, which else has come to know. Because what you just said implies that even if I can't get absolute certainty unless I'm dealing with necessary universal essential things, which it seems like would be the kind of thing I would get from the agent intellect, I could still, for example, be certain that I'm looking at a blue wall. So would the agent intellect just not be necessary in order for me to achieve that lower kind of certainty? Okay. I'm a little unsure about how to answer that. So on the one hand, I think I have a pretty minimalist reading of how the agent intellect functions in Tharavi. So I don't think that it functions as a guarantor. I think that Tharavi believes that we need sense experience to acquire even the primary intelligibles or first principles. And I know other people read him as arguing that those are kind of directly deposited in our minds by the agent intellect. But there are a few places where Tharavi seems to think that, in fact, he actually says that most ordinary people, the masses, think that we don't need sense experience to get primary intelligibles, but that's just wrong. So I think that he, on my reading, he simply sees the agent intellect as a necessary mechanism for explaining how we get abstract universals. And that it mostly is a metaphor to explain how natural, physical things in the sensible world can be illuminated so that we can abstract them. And I think many places he seems to suggest that it's our intellect, the so-called material intellect or potential intellect, that actually does the abstracting. So I think in many ways I'm a minimalist generally about the function of the agent intellect in Islamic philosophy. I think it's important to see it as kind of a theoretical posit that the philosophers think needs to be there in order to account for certain features of our cognition. But it's not like some external entity that's sort of doing the work for us, even in the stronger cases. So just to make sure that I got you right there. So what you're saying is that any time that I come to know anything for Al-Farabi, basically what I'm doing is I'm engaging with the world around me using my senses. And the only reason why the agent intellect needs to be invoked is to explain how I'm able to abstract some kind of universal notions or truths from this sense experience. So it's not like the sense experience sort of prepares the way for me to be zapped with an intelligible form from the agent intellect. Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that Farabi doesn't see the pictures being that way. What I'm not so clear about, because Farabi doesn't have a lot of developed accounts of sense perception and so on, is exactly how he would explain propositions like, I'm looking at a blue wall or I know that I'm sitting here right now. I presume that in some sense, well, if you're assenting to them and they're propositional, I think they're going to have to have some kind of an intellectual element to them. Do you think that it's just that he's enough of an Aristotelian to think that issues like that aren't really germane to the study of epistemology proper? Because what we're really interested in when we do epistemology proper is this higher grade kind of knowledge that Aristotle talks about as the goal in the posterior analytics? Yeah, I think that he's ultimately, he's very traditional that way in that the major insight is simply, well, yes, it's obviously the case that we're certain about all kinds of temporal contingent truths and we shouldn't deny that because that's not a good theory if it's not true, but it's not particularly interesting explaining how that happens. Right, so it's more like he's adding some detail around the edges of the Aristotelian theory rather than taking a huge jump away from it. Exactly, although I think in some ways it's a big breakthrough though simply to acknowledge, oh, you can say that because once you've acknowledged that then someone else is going to come along and have to deal with it and explain it. The floodgates are open. Yeah, and also, I mean, the other thing is we just don't have psychological treatises by Farabi and we don't know, I can't recall any reports about those, so part of it is just not something he wrote a lot about. So speaking of a big jump away from the Aristotelian theory, let's go back to something we mentioned briefly before, which is the role of the Islamic tradition in his epistemology and in particular what he has to say about prophecy. So I guess now I'm a little bit puzzled actually what you might say about prophecy because I would have thought that the explanation of prophecy, maybe this is reading Avicenna back into Farabi too much, but I would have thought that the explanation of prophecy in Farabi is that the prophet does get some kind of knowledge from the agent intellect. So would you just say that the agent intellect is doing something of a completely different kind there than happens in the case of normal human cognition? Well, it's another sort of yes and no perspective, I think. So Farabi clearly invokes the agent intellect in his accounts of prophecy and he usually, he changes the terminology in different treatises, but sometimes he speaks about what the agent intellect does as revelation. However, when you read the account of what revelation is, it's essentially the same as Farabi's account of the so-called acquired intellect, which is basically the perfected ordinary human intellect when it's acquired all intelligibles and Farabi thinks that that entails or maybe we would say that there are supervenes on that, some kind of a direct knowledge of the agent intellect. So that's the intellectual component of prophecy, but that's attainable in philosophy and that's attainable through totally natural means. So in some sense it sounds supernatural because he's invoking a separate intellect, but it's just the way that he invokes a separate intellect as a natural mechanism in the way we were just talking about a minute ago. What makes the agent intellect distinctive in prophecy for Farabi is that the prophet has a very strong imaginative faculty, which is a faculty in the body, and because of that the influence of the agent intellect can spill over or overflow into the imagination. So the prophet receives imaginatively the knowledge that his intellect acquires naturally, but the imagination is a symbolic imitative faculty, so in order to express what the imagination has received, it has to, if you will, translate intelligibles into appropriate images and And that's what the prophet does, and that's what religious texts show us. They show us a symbolic, imaginative expression of the truths that the prophet knows through his intellect, but the truths are exactly the same as the truths of philosophy, and in a virtuous religion they should map onto the rational, deduced truths that you would find in, say, Aristotelian philosophy. So actually you get a kind of parallel structure there where the relationship between demonstrative philosophy and religious discourse is the analogue to the relationship between the human intellect and the human imagination, so the two things are running alongside each other. Exactly, exactly. And so that view of there being something special about the prophet's intellect is something that you find in Avicenna to the extent that Avicenna thinks that perhaps Rabi's account of the uniqueness of the prophet is too much focused on the imaginative faculty, and so he suggests the prophet has an especially strong intellect, but he still agrees that the content is the same as the content of philosophy, just the prophet acquires it all at once and without having to go through all the work. And then for the consummate prophet, the overflow into the imagination and so on would be exactly the same. Okay, well actually already from a lot of the things we've said, it's been clear that there are several respects in which Al-Farabi is anticipating the epistemological views we find in Avicenna, so even though I haven't covered him yet, I thought maybe I could close by just asking you to what extent does Al-Farabi already kind of anticipate what we find in Avicenna, and what would you say are the main shifts away from Farabi that we then find in Avicenna? Well, I think a couple of things I've already mentioned that I think are central that Farabi provides a framework that Avicenna and all the other traditional Aristotelian philosophers take over. First of all, like Farabi, Avicenna takes over the focus on certitude versus knowledge. He includes this knowing that you know condition in the definition of certitude. He also takes over the expansion of the organon to include the rhetoric and poetics, which goes back to the Greek commentators, and the general stratification of modes of cognition that that brings in, so that structure is in all of Avicenna's accounts of the principles of knowledge. Something I didn't mention, but is the basic distinction between conceptualization or concept formation and ascent that is used to frame all epistemological discussions to solve Minos' paradox and so on. That's something that you find clearly formulated in Farabi and that Avicenna takes over. Where I think Avicenna makes particular strides as far as epistemology goes is first of all in the discussion of the principles of knowledge themselves and their epistemic classification. So it's a sort of aspect of the discussion of certitude. And Avicenna has these elaborate classifications of all of the different possible sources of knowledge based on their psychological mechanisms, the sorts of use that is made by the intellect of other faculties and so on. And all of his treatises corresponding to the posterior analytics start with this. And so this is partly inspired by Farabi and partly Avicenna taking over an approach of the Islamic theologians and making it his own. Along with that, one thing you see in Avicenna is a slightly more positive development of some of the aspects of epistemology that we now call social epistemology, so discussion of the sources of knowledge that we derive from the testimony of others. And so in a couple instances Avicenna actually tries to explain how testimony is a source of certain knowledge, which Farabi would never admit, and that's something he takes directly from theology. In other cases, while he still treats testimonial knowledge as inferior and as a form of dialectical or rhetorical ascent, he also develops an account of cases in which knowledge that we acquire on the basis of what we learn through social interaction and through conventions, those kinds of knowledge can only be learned that way. And in particular this is the case with ethical dicta and so on. So there's a further broadening of the scope of types of knowledge that are of interest to the philosopher and have different degrees of ascent. Avicenna also, one thing that he takes over just from a small hint in Farabi, occasionally Farabi will talk about empirical knowledge. And he'll mention it as a source of certitude, but he won't really explain it. And Avicenna develops an elaborate justification of why we have necessary knowledge of sort of causal empirical propositions like aspirin relieves pain. He usually likes to talk about scamony purging bile, but that's not as attractive as an aspirin example. So he tries to explain the cognitive mechanisms that go into that and why it produces certitude and produces reliable knowledge. I guess the main move in a completely different direction from Farabi is Avicenna's including introspective knowledge and self-awareness as among the foundations for knowledge. And this of course is something that Avicenna is very interested in and thinks is sort of the core kind of knowledge we have is our knowledge of ourselves. But Avicenna also brings that into his epistemological discussions and it also seems to license for him the use of thought experiments, which he loves to do. And that's something I don't think that Farabi really considered to be an important, or even perhaps he didn't even entertain that as a possible philosophical method. And that's very distinctive of Avicenna. So that's looking ahead to things like the famous flying man argument and so on. Yeah, exactly. Well, I will be getting onto Avicenna in a few more episodes. First I'm going to be looking at philosophical and scientific developments in the time between Farabi and Avicenna, or around the time of Farabi's death and taking up to the time of Avicenna, starting with the mathematical sciences and in particular the use of geometry to study optics, which will be the topic of the next episode. But for now, I'd like to thank Deborah Black very much for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me. It's always fun to talk about Al Farabi. Yeah, I agree. And please join me next time for Philosophy and Optics here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Eye of the Beholder, Theories of Vision. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is to beware of the obvious. Many things that once seemed obvious have turned out to be false, for instance that the earth is not moving. Conversely, many things that we now take to be self-evidently true are far from obvious. My favorite example of this is the fact that we think with our brains. If this were really so obvious, there would have been no ancient debate about whether the soul's ruling faculty was in the heart or the brain. Another example is eyesight. You probably just take it for granted that when you see something, it is because light is bouncing off what you are seeing and being directed to your eyes. And you're right, that is more or less what is happening. But so far is this from being obvious that no one in the ancient world even proposed such a theory of vision. It wasn't for lack of trying. In ancient Greek and Roman science there were at least three rival theories to explain human eyesight associated with three philosophical sources, Plato, Aristotle, and the atomists. But the first author to set down something like the correct theory of vision wrote neither in Greek nor in Latin, and he did not live in antiquity. His name was Ibn al-Haytham, and he lived in 10th to 11th century Cairo, and he wrote in Arabic. Something else the history of science teaches us is that such innovative leaps nearly always depend on the work of previous thinkers. Ibn al-Haytham was no exception. His treatise Kitāb al-Manādir, or Book of Optics, draws on ancient treatments of eyesight and human anatomy while also exploiting ideas put forward in the earlier Arabic tradition. Of course that detracts nothing from his achievement, but it means that if we are to understand his breakthrough we will need to consider a range of previous optical theories. So, if you'll pardon a pun weaker than the eyesight of an elderly bat, let's first have a look at Plato. He proposed a theory of eyesight in his dialogue Timaeus. Like I said when I covered this dialogue about 100 episodes ago, it is not Plato's most popular work nowadays, but it has historically been one of his most influential, especially in the medieval period. This dialogue deals with the providential design of the universe as a whole, and also of the human body. Within this account, vision is particularly important, because according to Plato, philosophy itself would never come about if we could not see. For it is our observations of the heavens that lead us to discover number and to investigate the nature of the universe. The dialogue tells us that we see, thanks to an invisible stream of very pure fire that is emitted from our eyes. In order for eyesight to take place, this stream must encounter a kindred fire outside, namely light. The resulting connection causes a motion in the soul, namely our seeing. Thus, Plato can answer the most basic questions one might want to pose about sight. Why can we only see what we are directly looking at, and not for instance what is behind us? And why can't we see in the dark, or when our eyes are shut? His answers would be that we see whatever the stream of fire from the eyes can reach, which means that the eyes must be open and the visible objects in front of us, and that without external illumination, the fire has nothing akin to it for it to connect with. Plato also takes up a question that will play a major role in subsequent discussions of eyesight—how do mirrors work? The answer is that the visual stream meets an external illumination on the surface of the reflective body. Plato even tries to explain why mirror images are reversed, and why curved mirrors yield different kinds of reflections. Historians of optics call this sort of theory extra-missionist, because it involves something being sent out of the eyes. We find a later extra-missionist theory in one of Plato's biggest fans, the doctor Galen. He supplements the Timaeus account with his own anatomical ideas. Unlike Plato, he is writing after the discovery of nerves, and in particular he's aware that there are nerves that connect the brain to the eyes. Also unlike Plato, he adopts a Stoic-inspired understanding of the human body, which sees many functions of soul as being carried out by a very fine sort of breath, or pneuma, that pervades the body. The finest kind of pneuma, the sort involved in perception, is distilled in the brain out of the less subtle breath taken into the lungs and then circulated around the body by the heart. Thus, Galen modifies Plato's theory by proposing that the brain is sending pneuma to the eyes. So refined is this pneuma that it has a nature akin to that of light itself. Yet Galen doesn't claim that the pneuma itself is being emitted out of the eyes to whatever we can see, like Plato's fiery visual stream. Instead, the pneuma affects the air in front of the eyes, transforming it into an instrument that brings the visual organ into contact with the visual object. This allows Galen to avoid a standard objection to extra-missionist theories, which is that the human body could never generate sufficient visual stream required to see out over a whole countryside or as far as the heavens. To this, Galen would say that the pneuma causes a chain reaction in which the whole transparent medium, even as far as a distant horizon or the heavens, is transformed into an instrument for seeing. In common with Plato though, he has an intuition that underlies all ancient extra-missionist theories of vision. In order to see a distant object, we need somehow to get into contact with that object. The extra-missionists are effectively saying that seeing is a special way of reaching out to touch other things, even if they are as remote as the vault of the heavens. We use either the air or a stream of visual fire to do this. To make this point, the Stoics compared the visual stream to a walking stick, which the viewer is using to tap whatever is seen. Other ancient philosophers quite literally took a different view. For them, when Muhammad sees a mountain, it is not Muhammad's sight that goes to the mountain, but the mountain that comes to Muhammad. Such a view is intro-missionist, that is, holds that something from the outside world is sent into the eyes. A prominent example is found in atomist authors, notably the Epicureans. They believed that very thin films of atoms are constantly being shed by all visible objects. The atomic sheets are called aidola, or images. When such an atomic image reaches the eyes, it literally collides with atoms of the soul through the portal of the eye. Again, sight is effectively being reduced to touch, but in this case we are touching something that reaches us from a distance, instead of our somehow reaching out to make contact. One advantage of the atomic theory was that it could claim to account for some visual illusions. A famous example is the square tower that looks round from a distance. The explanation would be that the atomic image is buffeted by the air on its way to us, the sharp corners literally being knocked off in the process. The same process might also explain how the images are reduced in size by the time they reach us so that they can fit into the eye. Critics were quick to point out the numerous weaknesses of this theory. To give just one example, if these atomic films are so flimsy, wouldn't they entangle with one another in mid-air, being destroyed or mixing together? Fortunately for the in-crowd though, there was another candidate theory for intro-missionists to adopt, that of Aristotle. For him, as you might remember, we see when the potential of our vision is activated by some external form. In order for this to happen, there must be an illuminated, transparent medium, like a stretch of air filled with sunlight, between the viewer and what is seen. Yet again, we see the need for some kind of contact. The illuminated air fills the gap between seer and scene, and by being in touch with both, transmits the visual form from the object to the eye. The theory solves some puzzles well, for instance by explaining why we can't see in the dark. It is because unilluminated air is incapable of carrying the image. Notice by the way that for Aristotle, we couldn't see through a void, because there would be no medium to carry the image to us. Again, there is room for criticism here. John Philoponus, the late ancient Christian who attacked Aristotle concerning the eternity of the world, also complained about the Aristotelian account of eyesight. He pointed out that Aristotle doesn't solve that most basic of questions, why can we only see what is in front of us? After all, something that is behind me in a well-lit room is touching the illuminated air that touches my eye, so the air should convey the image to me. Yet, with the exception of those of us who are primary school teachers, we are not able to see what is happening behind our backs. Much better positioned to deal with this problem were those authors who applied the tools of geometry to explain vision. The tradition of geometrical optics begins just after Aristotle with the work of Euclid, who I guess I don't need to say was pretty good at geometry. He saw that you could use this branch of mathematics to model what is happening in human vision. Actually, it's been claimed that this technical branch of applied geometry might have originated in Greek theater, when they were figuring out the sight lines for the audience. The dramatic insight here, at any rate, is that we can see only those objects that lie on a straight, unobstructed line drawn to the eye. As a whole, the visual field can be modeled as a cone whose vertex is at the eye and broadens out from there to cover everything we can see, with the edges of the cone corresponding to the edges of our peripheral vision. If something falls inside the cone and is not blocked by an opaque object, then we will see it. The only exception is what we see in a reflective surface like a mirror, which of course does let us see what is behind us. Here, geometry is again useful. If you look into a mirror obliquely from the right, you'll see what is located to the left, and at the corresponding angle. We can make diagrams representing what happens here by drawing a line from the eye to the surface of the mirror to the object seen. Now in Euclid, we are really talking about a mathematical model of vision. There is not much hint as to the physical process being modeled, albeit that it seems to go nicely with the kind of view found in Plato. The visual cone would represent the flow of rays from the eyes to what is seen, and the straight line within the cone would abstractly represent the visual rays. That possibility was exploited by the other great ancient figure in the history of Greek geometrical optics, Ptolemy, whom we already know from his work on astronomy and astrology. He puts some physical meat on the bones of the Euclidean theory, making it clear that the lines of our model do represent visual rays emitted from the eyes. He uses the model to account for a range of otherwise inexplicable phenomena. For instance, how do we tell how far away something is? Within his Platonic and Euclidean model, this is easy to explain. Since we are touching something with rays sent out from our eyes, we can tell how far the rays must travel before they light upon each object. We can also explain refraction, for instance the infamous straight stick that looks bent in water. This happens because the visual rays are being slowed and dragged away from their straight path when they meet a medium that is denser than air. The promise of this geometrical model and the transmission of Euclid and other optical works from Greek into Arabic meant that in the Islamic world, this general approach underlay all serious philosophical theories of vision. Ever ready to reflect on every topic under the sun, Akinde wrote extensively on optics, including numerous works on mirrors. Like Ptolemy, he adopts the extra-missionist theory and makes the lines of the model correspond to visual rays. He repeats a powerful rejection of the kind of intermission we find in Aristotle, with an objection already suggested by the ancient scientist Theon of Alexandria. If Aristotle were right that objects transmit visual forms through the air, then they would look the same from every angle. But consider what happens when we look at a circle from an oblique angle, we don't see a circle, but an oval. One consequence of Akinde's rejection of Aristotle's theory is that he no longer has much use for the idea of a transparent medium. Aristotle thought that illuminated air must be present to serve as a carrier of forms, and that air's transparency consists in its being able to do this job. In fact, for him, air is only potentially transparent when there is no light. Illumination makes it actually transparent, that is, actually able to transmit visual forms. By contrast, Akinde thinks of the transparency of air in negative terms as we would today. Transparency just means that which does not get in the way of our seeing, what is on the far side of it. Akinde, though, would understand this in terms of the visual ray theory. For him, air is transparent because it does not block our vision. When something intercepts the visual ray, then we see it instead of seeing through it. For this reason, Akinde tells us, it is the element earth that gives rise to visibility in objects. Unlike air, fire, and water, it is dense enough to intercept the rays from our eyes. That gives rise to yet another puzzle which should be familiar to anyone who has spent time with a four-year-old child. Why is the sky blue? After all, it is presumably made of air, which should have no color at all. Akinde rises to this challenge too, writing a little treatise specifically on the question. He explains that there are exhalations from the ground which ascend into the air, and that the blue color we see is the result of earthy particles suspended in the atmosphere. More generally, the different colors around us are the result of different elemental proportions, with dark colors belonging to things that have more earth in them. Highly polished surfaces like mirrors do not only intercept the rays, but actually reflect them so that they fall on other objects placed in appropriate positions. Finally, Akinde explains why we can't see in the dark, by saying that even dense objects are seen only when their surfaces are illuminated. Light only occurs when the visual ray and a ray of light fall on the same spot. So it is not the air between me and what I see that needs to be lit up, as Aristotle thought. Rather, the surface of what I am seeing must be illuminated. So in principle, I could see through a void after all, though as it happens Akinde didn't believe that void could exist. So powerful was the geometrical version of the visual ray theory that even staunch Aristotelians like Al-Farabi relied on it. In a work called The Enumeration of the Sciences, he devotes a brief section to optics, and actually says that its main purpose is to account for such phenomena as optical illusions. He also alludes to its use for determining such things as the height of mountains, another topic that had been discussed by Akinde. Still, it's not hard to mount a challenge to the visual ray theory. One of the biggest difficulties is this. If we are sending rays out of our eyes, then all the action seems to be happening at the far end, where the rays make contact with the visible object. But the sensation is happening here, in our brains. If we want to see, it isn't good enough to send something out that makes contact with a distant object. Information also has to return to the eye from the object, so that we can register what the visual ray has touched. In that case, every extra mission theory must also suppose some kind of intro mission, from object to eye, not only eye to object. But that seems pointless. If something comes from the object to the eye anyway, what is the point of supposing that anything at all comes out of the eye? This objection is found in two authors who were contemporaries, the philosopher Avicenna and the hero of our story Ibn al-Haytham. They abandoned the extra mission view entirely, but continued to exploit the advantages of geometrical optics. This means accepting the same visual cone postulated by Euclid, with its vertex at the eye and spreading to cover the whole visual field. But the direction of flow is different. Now, instead of the eye sending a cone of rays to the things it sees, it will be the visible objects that send rays to the eye. And now, finally, both Ibn al-Haytham and Avicenna suggest, these will be rays of light. No special visual emanation or pneuma is needed. Rather, as now seems so obvious, vision occurs when light bounces off objects and travels in straight lines to our eyes. Of course, the illuminated surfaces are in fact sending light in all directions, not just to the eyes of whoever is looking at them. You might think that the result would be nothing but blurred confusion, since every point on our eyes should be getting light from every point on every visible surface. But Ibn al-Haytham, adapting an idea Al-Kindi had used in describing the visual ray, explains that the points on the surface of the eye register only the light rays that fall on them most directly. So, each point on the eye's surface will be affected only by the light that hits it along a perpendicular path. The result is that the effect on the eye is a perfect map of the world, with each point on the eye corresponding to one, and only one, point on the surfaces in the field of vision. Ibn al-Haytham's theory was not only much closer to the truth than those of his predecessors, it also played a crucial role in the later development of optics. When his work on optics was translated into Latin, this inspired thinkers like Kepler. As the leading historian of medieval optics David Lindbergh has remarked, This was only one of the bright ideas to emerge from mathematical thought in the Islamic world and to illuminate the European scientific tradition. Ibn al-Haytham's whole project in the tradition of authors like Euclid and Ptolemy was an application of geometry to the problem of explaining sight. And geometry was only one of the mathematical sciences. Since antiquity, usually four such sciences were recognized, namely arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. Some measure of the impact of work done on these topics in the Arabic-speaking world can be found in our language. You might remember my saying that the first syllable of the word alchemy is simply the Arabic definite article, al. The same goes for our word algebra, which derives from the Arabic al-jabr, pioneered by the mathematician al-khwarizmi. Now this is a podcast about the history of philosophy, not mathematics. But as we've been seeing in this episode, figures we recognize as philosophers also worked in fields like geometrical optics, and the mathematical sciences are always included in overviews of the intellectual disciplines in texts by al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and others. To pay due respect to this feature of the formative period, I want to look at one other mathematical science and its philosophical implications. Next time will be a very special episode in which I discuss the discipline of harmonics. We'll not only be hearing what some philosophers of this period thought about music, but also hearing some examples of traditional music from the Islamic world, including an extended version of the clip I've been using to open and close this current series of episodes. So make sure to tune in next time for Music and Philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Strings Attached, Music and Philosophy. Doing this podcast has given me many opportunities to be grateful. Above all, to you, the listener, without whom the whole thing would be even more pointless than the UK at the end of a Eurovision Song Contest, but also to numerous colleagues who have helped out. I'm thinking not only of the many interview guests I've had on, but also scholars who have given me expert input on scripts and suggestions about which topics to cover. I owe another debt to those who have helped with music for this series. For ancient philosophy, it was Stefan Hagel who let me use clips of him playing reconstructed ancient instruments. When I got to philosophy in the Islamic world, I approached a number of musicians who do classical music from this tradition and got more help than I really needed, enough to put together an album when all I needed was an introductory clip or two. That gave me an idea. Why not do a special episode on music and philosophy in the Islamic world and play you some of the music that has kindly been made available to me? This would be a good idea even if I didn't have such nice music to include. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, the ancient tradition, and then the medieval traditions that drew on the ancients, recognized mathematics as a branch of philosophy. To be more accurate, it was often described as a preliminary or propedudic discipline, one to be studied in preparation for the chief philosophical sciences such as physics and metaphysics. The precedent for this was about as good as precedent gets. Plato declares in the Republic that students of philosophy should begin with mathematics, and then adds in the Timaeus that without the mathematical science of astronomy, mankind would never have started to do philosophy at all. Then, in an influential passage of his Metaphysics, Aristotle divides philosophy into three branches, physics, mathematics, and theology. Whereas physics studies things in the material world, and theology deals with things free of matter, mathematics considers things that are in matter but can be separated from them. An example might be the circular shape that exists in, say, a well-made pancake. We can abstract the circle from such objects and apply the discipline of geometry to it, though to be honest I'd rather leave the circle where it is and apply some maple syrup. The same goes for music. On a stringed instrument, you can create notes at different intervals by plucking strings of different lengths or blowing into a tube stopped at different positions. The ancients developed a science, often called harmonics, which abstractly studied the mathematical proportions that are physically realized in string instruments, like the lyre or the zither, or wind instruments, like the Greek flute known as the aulos. That's the instrument you heard in the clip I used as music for the first episodes in the podcast series. Philosophers sometimes look down on the actual making of music. It was often seen as a lower-class activity, especially when certain instruments were involved. Aristotle tells us of a legend that the goddess Athena invented the aulos but then threw it away because playing it made her face contort grotesquely. This same instrument is among those excluded from the ideal city in Plato's Republic. Yet, whatever these authorities said about actual music-making, harmonics was accepted by Late Antiquity as one of the four standard mathematical disciplines. In the Islamic world, authors inspired by the Hellenic tradition duly included harmonics, or music, in their overviews of the philosophical curriculum. For instance, in his overview of the work of Aristotle, al-Kindi faithfully records that there are four mathematical sciences that serve as preliminaries to philosophy. He tactfully avoids mentioning that there are nonetheless no works on mathematics by We even see the emergence of the Arabic word al-musiqi, a loanword from the Greek musike. Naturally, one didn't need to read Greek works in translation to have the idea of making music. Of course, there was a musical culture among the Arabs even before the advent of Islam. One story making the rounds by the 9th century reports that the ancient tradition of singing to camels began when a man with a beautiful voice fell off his camel, broke his hand, and burst out in melodious Arabic ya ya dar, oh my hand. This had a beneficial effect on his camel's emotional state, proving that music soothes even the beast that isn't so savage, or possibly just that camels have a rather sadistic sense of humor. Following the spread of Islam, various musical traditions swirled together, much as did cultural streams in literature, religion, science, and language. Persian music exerted a particularly strong influence, as we can see, for instance, from the names of the four strings on a kind of lute used in the Islamic world, the ud. Its highest and lowest strings have Persian names, zir and bam, whereas the two middle strings are called mathna and mathlath, which simply come from the Arabic for second and third. Much as the piano nowadays tends to figure centrally in the study of music theory, the ud plays the key role in philosophical treatments of music in the Islamic world. As usual, Akinde was the first to tackle the topic. He wrote several musical treatises that survive today. In one, he talks about the symbolic meaning of the number of strings on each string instrument. The four-stringed lute stands for a wide array of fourfold divisions in the world around us. Akinde mentions the quarters of the sky, the four elements, the four winds, the seasons, the bodily humours, and so on. Despite this widespread rule of four, not all cultures adopt four strings. Rather, every people has used an instrument with a number of strings appropriate to their beliefs. For instance, in India, they had a one-stringed instrument reflecting their belief in monism. Since I live in Munich, I thought I'd test Akinde's theory by asking a German if he would be willing to tell me how many strings they have here, but he said nine. About now, you may well be wondering what an ud sounds like. Here then is a track by Muhammad al-Qasadji, a master of the ud who played with the famous singer Umm Qalfum. I'd like to thank Mike Malek, who runs the website Mike's Uds, for making this track available to me. Having heard that, how do you feel? Akinde would say that it isn't only camels that can be deeply affected by music, but also humans. To some extent, this is common sense. Everyone has had the experience of being cheered up by joyful song, or saddened by a mournful dirge. But Akinde goes well beyond this everyday observation, explaining that the skilled musician can affect others by influencing the bodies and souls of his audience. I mentioned that he relates the four strings of the ud to the four humours of the body. For instance, the highest string, the zir, corresponds to yellow bile, and the mafna, or second string, to blood. Since our emotional states depend in part on the balance of humours in our body, the musician can manipulate our bodies and thus our emotions, simply by playing the strings of his ud. A story handed down about Akinde illustrates how this might work in practice. A merchant's son, who kept track of his father's accounts, was struck by an illness which rendered him catatonic. The father had always despised Akinde, but turned to him in his hour of need. Akinde instructed some of his students to play the ud to the boy. The boy revived, and sat up for long enough to give crucial information about the family business to his father. But when the students stopped playing, the son fell back into his former state and then died. Akinde explained that God sets the term of each life, and that this is beyond the power of music to change. All this sounds like magic, but a reasonably sophisticated and even plausible theory underlies it. Let's think about why Akinde might believe that the strings of the ud correspond to the four humors. Well, the strings are in a certain mathematical relationship, a proportion, and there is also a proportion between the humors. By creating a harmonious, or discordant, proportion in the ud, one can induce corresponding proportions to arise sympathetically in the body. For Akinde, it is no coincidence that the same mathematical structures would be found in such different things. Under the influence of mathematical works of Pythagorean authors like Nicomachus of Gerasa, Akinde sees the whole universe as having a mathematical structure. He wrote a treatise in which he used this idea to explain why Plato's Timaeus relates the fundamental elements of physics—fire, air, and so on—to geometrical shapes. No wonder, then, that he would think it necessary to study the mathematical disciplines, including harmonics, or music, before moving on to engage in philosophical study of the natural world. Thanks to the workings of divine providence, the natural world itself is full of mathematical structure and harmony. Akinde's theories about music struck a chord with later authors, especially a group of mysterious thinkers writing in the 10th century who called themselves the Brethren of Purity. I'll introduce them properly in a couple of episodes. For now, I'll just tell you that they were a group of anonymous authors based in the Iraqi city of Basra who wrote a collection of letters covering a huge array of philosophical, scientific, and religious topics. Adopting the traditional approach, they devote the opening epistles in their collection to the mathematical disciplines. The fifth letter deals with music and closely follows Akinde's ideas. The Brethren, too, match the strings of the Oud to the Elements to the Four Humours, and so on. They even claim that its proportions match those between the sizes of the elemental spheres. For instance, the ratio of the highest and second highest strings is said to be equivalent to that between the thickness of the spheres of elemental fire and air. I've been suggesting that music affects us emotionally by affecting our bodies, and certainly that is one mechanism that could be invoked by Akinde and the Brethren of Purity. But the Brethren make it clear that music can also have an influence on our immaterial souls, something Akinde, too, would probably accept given the long-standing Platonic and Pythagorean idea that the soul is somehow characterized by mathematical proportion. If you think way back, you may recall the idea of Plato's student Xenocrates that the soul is nothing more less than a number. To illustrate the way musicians can influence us, the Brethren talk about music being used to diffuse a drunken brawl. Yet, despite their idea that music has the power to affect the immaterial soul, the Brethren are very clear that music itself is a physical phenomenon. They tell us that sound spreads like ripples through air in all directions, like an expanding sphere, something they rather beautifully compare to the expansion of a ball of molten glass when it is being worked by a glassblower. Later, they draw an analogy that brings a whole new meaning to the term songwriter—airs like paper, songs like what is written on the paper, the notes of the song being like letters, and the playing of strings like the strokes of a pen. As that comparison suggests, the Brethren tend to explain music using concepts borrowed from the analysis of language. This is especially true when it comes to their account of rhythm. So far, I've been talking mostly about pitch and the relations between pitches, the intervals between notes produced by plucking strings of the Oud, for instance. But music unfolds over time, and this introduces the dimension of rhythm. The Brethren tell us that there are certain standard rhythmic sequences which they understand as combinations of attacks on an instrument which may or may not be followed by a pause. My German friends would want me to illustrate with an example from Beethoven. By the way, notice how many symphonies he eventually wound up writing? Nine. Maybe there's something to that theory of alkindis. In the case of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, we have the rhythmic sequence Da da da da, da da da da. The Brethren would understand this in light of their analogy with language. The rhythm is a repeated cycle of three syllables with short vowels followed by a syllable with a long vowel. Given that songs, then and now, are frequently accompanied by words, we thus have an intimate double relationship between music and language. They match structurally, and this facilitates the matching of words to the tune. That seems like a good cue to break for our second musical clip, which is brought to you by the Ensemble de Musique Classique Arabe, a group founded by Nida Abu-Mrad at the Antonine University in Lebanon. The work of this ensemble brings me to an interesting question. Is it possible for musicians nowadays to recreate music from the period I'm discussing in these podcasts? The answer is yes and no. This ensemble has released an album of music based on a set of notations by the music theorist Safi ad-Din al-Ummawi, who died in 1294 and whose musical theory was tremendously influential on the later tradition. Al-Ummawi lived at the twilight of the Abbasid era, several centuries after alkindi and the Brethren of Purity. In fact, he was attached not only to the late Abbasid court but also to the Mongols after Baghdad fell to them in the mid 13th century. How music actually sounded even in this period, never mind in the 9th or 10th century, is to some extent a matter of speculation, despite the information provided by al-Ummawi. So, it is a controversial question how music of the modern era relates to music that was made in the classical Islamic world. Let's now go back to the relationship between music and language, in particular poetry, which was often paired with music. Another author who wrote about music and, like the Brethren of Purity, lived in the 10th century was the historian Abul Faraj al-Isfahani. He spent 50 years producing a vast collection of poems that had been set to music, listing the melodic and rhythmic modes used. At that time, perhaps no other activity had the cultural centrality of poetry. Writers in all genres, including philosophy, frequently quote Arabic poetry, sometimes from poets who wrote before the advent of Islam. This close association of music with poetry tells us that music wasn't just used to calm down camels. Thanks to its strong links to poetry, it had a central place in the culture of the Islamic lands. It is a frequent topic in works of what is called adab, a difficult word to translate but perhaps refined and improving culture would be close to the mark. The word adab can simply mean education, but came to refer to a whole genre of writing in Arabic, which used literary flair to fuse edification with entertainment. Adab could also refer to an instructive anecdote or saying, hence the title of a collection ascribed to the translator and doctor Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Adab al-Fadasifah, or Sayings of the Philosophers. This is an early example of a common genre of popular philosophical literature in Arabic, which puts amusing or wise remarks into the mouths of various sages, often figures chosen from the Greek philosophical pantheon. I suspect that the average aristocrat of, say, 10th century Baghdad would have thought of Hellenic philosophy as consisting primarily of this so-called wisdom literature, rather than logical or metaphysical treatises by Aristotle and Plotinus. Proving the connection between adab and music, Hunayn's collection includes a whole section of wise sayings on music. Al-Kindi and the Brethren of Purity also include such wisdom sayings about the topic in their writings on the subject. My favorite item is found in the Brethren. A philosopher hears an incompetent musical performance and remarks that the sound of an owl is said to foretell death. He then adds, this musician is foretelling the death of the owl. A good story puts me in the mood for a good tune, so let's now have our next musical clip. Here we're looking ahead to the later centuries of Islam, because this one comes from the Bezmara Ensemble, who perform early Ottoman music. I'd like to thank Fikret Karakaya for permission to use this selection from their album, Splendors of Topkapi. So I like that one so much that I'm going to use it as introduction music later on, when we begin to look at the later tradition of philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world. For now though, we're staying in the 10th century and turning to what is probably the most philosophically interesting work on music from the formative period, Al-Farabi's Great Book of Music. Characteristically, his agenda here, or part of it, is to apply to music the understanding of the philosophical sciences he takes from the Aristotelian tradition. One might suppose that in doing so, he is merely signaling that philosophy sings from the same hymn sheet as the culture around him. After all, before that last clip, I was saying that music played a major role in the refined culture of the Abbasid age. But in fact, the delights of song were not welcomed with a universal chorus of approval in Islamic lands. Already in al-Kindi's day, a theologian named Ibn Abi Ad-Dunya had written an attack on musical entertainment, and there continued to be figures who found music at best frivolous and at worst impious. Even the Brethren of Purity remark that most people use music for mere pleasure, for instance at weddings. You can almost hear the disappointment in their voices, as they draw attention to this rather debased use of an art that should exploit and celebrate the divinely imposed harmony of the cosmos. The dispute concerning the permissibility of music in Islam would continue for centuries to come, with figures like Ibn Taymiyyah joining the critics. There was religious ammunition for both sides of the debate. Music could be defended by quoting anecdotes about the Prophet that seemed to indicate his approval. Drawing a strong connection between music and the more universally admired practice of poetry, as the Brethren do, was another strategy. It is one that Al-Farabi also adopts. In fact, he says that the most perfect kind of music always involves poetry that has been set to melody and rhythm. We've seen that he gives music the dignity of a full-blown science, and this is a further way to burnish its reputation. But Al-Farabi is not saying that every oud player is on a par with an Aristotelian philosopher. Rather, he distinguishes between the practical and theoretical sides of music. A music theorist needn't even be able to sing or play an instrument, something Al-Farabi illustrates by referring to Ptolemy, the great mathematician. He wrote on harmonics, but confessed to having a tenure. Conversely, the practice of music doesn't require a theoretical understanding. Indeed, Al-Farabi says, music was practiced for ages before the underlying theory was eventually discovered. The practical side of music has two further subdivisions, composition and performance. Here, we need to be careful. It isn't clear that there is a rigorous distinction between inventing a tune and playing it, since the performer might have considerable scope for improvisational variation. But, basically, Al-Farabi's idea is that these are two different abilities, something explained in terms of the differences between the imaginative faculties of various people. For it is in the imagination that music is conceived. Though music can be used merely to give pleasure, as the Brethren of Purity also admitted, it also has the power to represent things symbolically. For instance, one might represent a certain emotion with a certain kind of music. People with very powerful imaginations might be able to sit quietly and invent a song within their souls, whereas others need props to help them compose. Whereas we might imagine the songwriter trying out melodies on a piano, Al-Farabi gives the considerably more picturesque example of a musician who composed by tying bells to his clothing and ringing them with bodily motions. All of this should itself ring a bell. It chimes well with Al-Farabi's account of prophecy. After all, he told us that a prophet is precisely someone with a very powerful imaginative power who uses it to devise symbols for the truths grasped more explicitly and adequately at the level of intellect. This helps to explain why the theory of music and its practice are so distinct, to the point that they may be found in different people. Musical theory involves the intellect, whereas musical practice uses the imagination. And nothing guarantees that intellectual ability will come along with a powerful imagination, or vice versa. In fact, Al-Farabi goes so far as to say that it is not essential to music theory that it can actually be put into practice. In this, it is like geometry. As it happens, geometry can be used for practical purposes, like designing houses, but it is not intrinsically a practical science. A contrasting case would be medicine, which is inextricably bound up with the practical business of healing human bodies. This close association of practical affairs with medicine is again something we've seen before in Al-Farabi. You might remember that he compares the ideal ruler to a doctor. We find a similar idea in other authors of this period. In and around the 10th century, a number of authors expound the notion that ethics is like medicine, or rather is medicine, a kind of medicine that aims at treating souls rather than bodies. So prevalent is this idea that I am going to devote a whole episode to it, surveying texts on ethics that take the cue not only from Plato and Aristotle, but from that most famous of doctors, Galen. We'll be looking at ethical writings by two familiar figures, Ahrazi and Ibn Adi, and introducing a new thinker who will take us up to the time of Avicenna. For now though, I'll end with an extended version of the music I've been using for the current series of podcasts, from the album Anwar by the ensemble Maraghí, kindly made available to me by Giovanni de' Zorzi. Enjoy, and don't miss your appointment next week for some spiritual medicine, here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lieberman Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Balancing Acts, Arabic Ethical Literature. Next to the room where I am recording this, there is a bathroom in which you can currently see a bar of soap still in its wrapping. The label promises that this soap can help to re-establish the balance between the mind and the body. Amazingly, it was only slightly more expensive than normal soap, which limits itself to helping you wash your hands. And we're fortunate to live in a day and age when one can not only get soap for one's mind but also chicken soup for one's soul, as in the title of a line of popular self-help manuals. This sort of thing hasn't been possible since the Abbasid Empire. During the formative period of philosophy in the Islamic world, we find several authors writing their own popular self-help manuals with titles like On Dispelling Sadness, Benefits for Bodies and Souls, Refinement of Character, and most tellingly of all, Spiritual Medicine. That last one is the title of a work by Abu Bakr al-Razi, inventor of the widely deplored Theory of Five Eternals. You may recall that the works in which he set forth that theory no longer survive, perhaps because they were too controversial for anyone to want to copy them. The same cannot be said for the Spiritual Medicine, which on a casual reading seems like a rather harmless, if rather hectoring, collection of ethical advice. It was written as a partner piece to one of al-Razi's large medical treatises, the Book for al-Mansur, who was the patron to whom both texts were dedicated. The Book for al-Mansur tells you everything you need to know to have a healthy body. And the Spiritual Medicine completes the job by telling you how to have a healthy soul. To some extent this may seem familiar. Not only do we buy books called things like Chicken Soup for the Soul, but we routinely talk about mental or psychological health. What is less familiar, though, is the idea that ethics itself might be a kind of medicine. Here al-Razi is looking back to his chief influence from the Greek tradition, who was neither Plato nor Aristotle, but Galen. The greatest of ancient doctors, Galen wrote voluminously on every area of his art, creating a body of work that would underlie medical literature for many centuries, something we heard about in the interview with Peter Poorman. Galen also wrote about an idea that was prevalent in the ancient world, that the soul, like the body, can be ill or healthy. We find it, for instance, in Epicureanism, with its fourfold remedy of ethical advice. In Galen, ethical advice is part of what a skilled physician is able to offer his patient. Indeed, there can be no sharp divide between caring for the body and caring for the soul. As he argues in a work with the self-explanatory title, The States of the Soul Depend on the Mixtures of the Body, the effects of alcohol on people who drink is a particularly clear example of the way the body can affect even the rational part of the soul. Because of this intimate relation between body and soul, doctors can actually modify a person's ethical character by prescribing certain diets. The goal of Galenic ethics is not just, as my bar of soap would have it, establishing a balance between mind and body. It is also a matter of achieving balance within the soul, much as the doctor tries to balance the four humours in the body. As an admirer of Plato, Galen adopted the theory we find in dialogues like The Republic and Timaeus, according to which every person's soul has three aspects—reason, spirit, and desire. Ethically speaking, health consists in the appropriate interrelation of these three parts. Reason should dominate desire, with the assistance of the righteous indignation provided by spirit. Psychological disorders happen when the lower soul is out of control. For instance, when one is particularly prone to anger because of a strong-spirited part of the soul, something Galen admits affected his own mother. Libertines and gluttons, similarly, allow their desire to dominate their reason. Galen speaks at length about these failings of character in two ethical works that were known in the Arabic tradition. In fact, one, called On Character Traits, is lost in Greek but survives in Arabic. Darazi alludes to Galen's ideas with the very title spiritual medicine, and in the text itself he exploits and expands on the Galenic program of psychological medicine. He begins by telling us that God's greatest gift to mankind is akhl, meaning intellect or reason. It is in virtue of reason that we differ from non-human animals, as we can observe from the fact that they plunge headlong after pleasures, such as food or sex, without bothering to consider the consequences of what they are doing. On the other hand, animals naturally limit their pursuit of pleasure. For instance, they will stop eating once they are no longer hungry. By contrast, there are many humans who can never fulfill their immoderate desires. As Arazi says, offered power over half the world, many would still want to conquer the other half. From his own experience, Arazi tells the story of eating dates with a glutton who stuffed himself to bursting and then lamented that he could not go back to the beginning and start eating all over again. Arazi chastised him, pointing out that the pain caused by overeating was bound to outweigh the pleasure of the food. Remarks like that have led some to see Arazi as a kind of sophisticated hedonist along the lines of Epicurus, advising us to plan ahead to maximize our pleasures rather than heedlessly grabbing every pleasure that comes along. But in fact, Arazi was no hedonist at all. He accepted Plato's analysis of pleasure as resulting from the restoration of the body to its natural state, out of a state of deficiency. For instance, when you drink, it is pleasant because you are remedying the dryness of your body. Thus, pleasure is only possible because of the harmful states you are trying to remedy. So serious was he about this, that he supposedly offered the following explanation of what happens when you enjoy seeing a beautiful face, it's because you've been hanging around with ugly people and are yearning for a change. The good life though, lies not in the restoration of the body to its natural condition, but in a life of reason that is entirely free of the body. As Arazi says, the lower parts of the soul are given to us only to help keep us alive, so that we can keep trying to acquire knowledge. Ultimately, we should look forward, not to any bodily pleasure, but to the freedom from body we will enjoy in the afterlife. If Arazi cautions us to think about long-term pleasure rather than short-term pleasure, that is only a first stage of moral improvement in which we become better at least than irrational animals. The philosophical way of life is to go beyond this first stage and value only knowledge and justice. That of course fits with his theory of the five eternals, which as we saw, also speaks of the need for the soul to free itself from entanglement with the body. The teaching of the spiritual medicine also fits nicely with another, shorter work of Arazi on ethics, whose title is, none other than, The Philosophical Way of Life. Here Arazi responds to some unidentified detractors, who blamed him for refusing to lead the life of ascetic self-restraint. They said that he was failing to live up to the example of a philosopher he claims greatly to admire, Socrates. "'We know,' said these critics, that Socrates was highly ascetic, lived out in the wilderness in a large wine jar, eating nothing but grass, and fearlessly speaking his mind to the hypocrites of his society. So why doesn't Arazi do the same?' All this sounds familiar, but not from what we know of Socrates. Here the detail about the wine jug shows that Arazi's critics have confused Socrates with Diogenes the Cynic, a common mistake in the Arabic tradition. Arazi accepts that this picture of Socrates is historically accurate, but then adds that it describes him as a young man, when enthusiasm for philosophy led him to utter disdain for the body. As he matured, Socrates relaxed into a life of moderation, such as Arazi himself leads. This is sufficient to demonstrate that one has achieved mastery of desire through reason, the goal also recommended in the spiritual life. Arazi was not the first writer in the Islamic world to valorize Socrates as a moral exemplar. He also appeared in his guise as a Cynic-style ascetic in the works of al-Kindi. Al-Kindi gathered a collection of reports and sayings attributed to Socrates, and this too assigns to Socrates ancient anecdotes that had once belonged to Diogenes. For instance, we are told how Socrates ordered a great king to stop blocking his sunlight. Like Diogenes, Socrates gets some good one-liners such as, "'God gave man two ears, but only one tongue, so he would listen more than he talks.'" Al-Kindi worked some of this Socratic material into a little treatise on ethics that itself offers a kind of spiritual medicine, specifically against the malady that is sorrow. This treatise, called On Dispelling Sorrows, quotes Socrates saying that he is never sad, because he has nothing whose loss he would regret. He is teased about living in a wine jar by someone who asks what he'd do if his jar broke, and he replies that he'll still have somewhere to call home, since the place where the jar is won't break. Al-Kindi also relays stories about Alexander the Great. On his deathbed, Alexander tells his distraught mother to invite to his funeral everyone who has never suffered misfortune. She does so, and no one shows up, teaching his mother that her loss is simply the universal condition of mankind. This material, which wraps its tough-love message in a pleasing package of memorable anecdotes, might seem philosophically lightweight. But just as Arazi's spiritual medicine quietly upholds a set of values motivated by his theory of the five eternals, so Al-Kindi is basing his advice on the Platonist philosophy we know from his other works. He says right at the beginning of On Dispelling Sorrows that if we really want to be immune to sorrow, the only surefire method is to place no value whatsoever on things that can be destroyed. That goes not only for fancy soap and wine jars, but everything that exists in the physical world around us. Even the life and welfare of our loved ones, presumably, though Al-Kindi doesn't dwell on that potentially disturbing implication of what he is saying. Instead, he recommends that we cherish things in the intelligible world, valuing eternal objects of knowledge, rather than the passing things of this life. Apart from this Platonist rationale though, Al-Kindi's advice resonates strongly with Stoic authors like Epictetus. In fact, Al-Kindi also relates a parable found originally in Epictetus which compares life to a brief disembarkation during a journey by sea. Whoever is ready to race back to the boat without distraction or regret when the voyage home begins again, in other words when we die, will get the most pleasant seats on the ship of the afterlife. It's possible that there is a link between Al-Kindi and Ar-Razi in the form of a student of Al-Kindi's named Abu Zayd Al-Balhi. That last part of his name, Al-Balhi, simply means that he was from the city of Balkh in modern-day Afghanistan, just as the name Ar-Razi means someone from the Persian city of Rai. We know that our Ar-Razi studied with someone named Al-Balhi, but not whether it was this Al-Balhi. It's chronologically possible, certainly. So it's intriguing that the Abu Zayd Al-Balhi who studied with Al-Kindi produced a medical and ethical work that is highly reminiscent of Ar-Razi's matched treatises on bodily and spiritual medicine. In the case of Al-Balhi, the two types of medicine are placed side by side in a single work. Here again, both sections are clearly influenced by Galen. The part on medicine for the soul deals with disorders like anger, sorrow again, and the pathological obsessive thinking that was known in Arabic by the rather wonderful word waswas. Like his master Al-Kindi and his possible student Ar-Razi, we find Al-Balhi giving a range of practical advice for combating these difficulties. He also emphasizes the link between the body and the soul, saying for instance that those obsessive thoughts can be the result of a buildup of yellow bile. On the other hand, they can also be caused by demons. This gives me a thought of my own. It reminds me of the battles against the literal demons of distraction waged by late ancient ascetics like Evagrius. Now Galen was not the only game in town when it came to Hellenic sources for writing about ethics in Arabic. There was also Aristotle. The ten books of his Nicomachean Ethics were translated into Arabic, with a bonus eleventh book of inauthentic material sandwiched in the middle. This extended disco version of Aristotle's Ethics also had an impact on ethical writing in Arabic. Al-Farabi wrote a commentary on it, which is unfortunately lost, and later on so did Averroes. His commentary is also lost in Arabic but survives in Hebrew and Latin translations, which as we'll see later is not atypical for his commentaries. Back in the 10th century, you'd expect Aristotle to have a particularly powerful influence on, well, Aristotelians, and as we saw, there was no more prominent Aristotelian in 10th century Baghdad than the Christian thinker Yahya ibn Addi. So it's puzzling to turn to Ibn Addi and find him still working mostly within the Platonist ethical framework bequeathed to the Arabic-speaking world by Galen. Ibn Addi wrote a treatise called Taqdib al-Ahlak, usually translated as the refinement of character. The word Ahlak is also sometimes translated as character traits or even simply morals. Here again, we find the Platonic distinction of soul into reason, spirit, and desire, along with an insistence that ethical goodness is subduing the lower aspects of the soul to the judgments of reason. The reason that people become evil is simply that they give in to their animal nature. In fact, Ibn Addi rather pessimistically remarks that most people tend towards evil because human nature has so much of the animal in it. Obviously, he had never met my audience of podcast listeners. One striking aspect of Ibn Addi's treatise is its remarkably flexible attitude towards morality. He allows that what is virtuous for one person might be evil if found in another. For instance, it is wrong for almost everyone to amass wealth ostentatiously, to conceal one's ill will towards other people, or plot treachery against them. But all of these character traits are necessary for kings, who thus seem to be in a kind of special moral category. When reading passages like this, one can't help wondering about the intended audience of the work. In fact, all the writers we've looked at, al-Kindi, his student al-Balhi, and al-Razi, include anecdotes or advice about virtuous kings in their ethical writings. That doesn't by itself mean that all these works were directed at royalty, but we know that al-Kindi had connections to the Caliph's family, and al-Razi's spiritual medicine is explicitly dedicated to a powerful patron. One often gets the sense that our authors are at least aspiring to reach an aristocratic audience, a readership that itself aspires to be thought of as kingly. There is a genre of literary ethical works known as mirrors for princes, which can sometimes be philosophical, just think of Machiavelli, and our authors to some extent fall into that category. As a result, they often suggest that noble persons operate under rather special moral constraints. Al-Razi, for instance, states that a person raised as a prince cannot be expected to adopt the kind of ascetic lifestyle of a poorer person even if he devotes himself to philosophy. As we saw, al-Razi was in any case rather unimpressed by the idea of asceticism. Here Yahya ibn Adi is different, because he seems to take the radical ascetic as the ultimate ethical hero. He no doubt looks back to the Christian tradition of ascetics like Evagrius that we ourselves looked at in a previous episode. For most people, ibn Adi would recommend a life of moderation. But unlike al-Razi, he thinks that radical asceticism could be the right lifestyle for a select few and that these ascetics would be particularly admirable. This is clear not only from his remarks about ascetics in the refinement of character, but also from a fascinating little treatise he wrote on the subject of abstaining from sex. Muslims were frequently critical of celibacy. Al-Razi tends to agree with these critics on the basis that their recommended path to self-improvement would lead to the extinction of the human race if carried out on a universal scale. No sex means no children, and before long no children means no humanity. Confronting this problem, ibn Adi again says that asceticism is best, but not for everyone. Only those with a particularly powerful intellect should turn their backs on moderation with respect to sex and other pleasures and devote themselves wholly to the life of the mind. Since this will be a very small number of people, philosophically motivated celibacy won't make a dent in the population. I'll finish by looking at a final work with a familiar name, The Refinement of Character, by the Muslim Platonist philosopher and historian Miskawe, who lived well into the 11th century. He shares not only the title of ibn Adi's ethical treatise, but many of the same ideas. Yet again, Miskawe emphasizes that reason should dominate the lower soul. He also would agree with ibn Adi that we can envision more than one ethical standard to pursue. We might want to live lives of worldly virtue, in which case we should adopt a life of moderation as recommended by Aristotle's theory of the golden mean. Alternatively, we could pursue a life of pure intellectual contemplation, though Miskawe seems to think that this would not need to mean being a radical ascetic like the Christian heroes of ibn Adi. Both kinds of life would be lived in accordance with reason. To act moderately in the world does involve a concern with the body and not just the soul, but it still means letting one's action be governed by rationality. That sounds pretty Aristotelian actually, and indeed of all the authors I've discussed, Miskawe is the one who does the most with Aristotle's ethics. He clearly knows the Arabic translation of this work very well and refers to it often. On the other hand, he is still drawing on Galen, the indispensable source for Platonic ethics. The three-part soul is alive and well in Miskawe, as is the idea that ethics is a kind of medicine for the soul, as we saw in Ar-Razi and Al-Balhi. This is typical of Miskawe, who was not a particularly original philosopher but was extremely well read. His philosophical works tend to weave together themes from a wide range of sources, everything from Plotinus and Aristotle to Islamic religious proverbs. He thus represents a kind of cultured, popular understanding of philosophy that was current in the 10th and early 11th centuries. This was philosophy taken from Greek sources, freely mixed together with Islamic religious themes and displayed with literary style. It was a kind of philosophy that lacked the technical edge offered by sharper minds like Al-Farabi and Ibn Adi, but it might have endured as the dominant style of Hellenizing philosophy in the Islamic world, if not for a contemporary of Miskawe's, Avicenna. We'll be getting to him soon, but first I want to dwell a bit more on the context that led up to him. What sorts of philosophical options were there outside of the unblended Aristotelianism of the Baghdad school? We'll find out by looking further at Miskawe and at other authors who sought to achieve a balance between the Hellenistic philosophical heritage and the teachings of Islam. I'd like to see the bar of soap that could manage that. So join me next time as we take a luxurious soak in the waters of Islamicized Platonism during the age of the Buyids, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Undercover Brothers, Philosophy in the Buyid Age. In the past 15 episodes, I've been discussing the confrontation between Hellenic philosophy and the Arabic-speaking culture spread by Islam. As we've seen, that confrontation played itself out in the works of Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. As if that hasn't been complicated enough, I'd now like to pay tribute to another culture that I've mentioned only in passing, but which had immense significance in the story of philosophy in the Islamic world, Persia. Persia tends to play the role of the great Other in European historical narratives. They are the rivals of the Greeks, heroically defeated when the invading army of Xerxes was repelled in the 5th century BC. After being the base of the Seleucids, one of the imperial powers that emerged after the death of Alexander the Great, Persia became a rival of the Romans too. First the Parthians, then the Sassanids, went through cycles of war and peace with the Roman Empire and the Byzantines. In fact, one reason the Persians succumbed to the Arab armies in the mid-7th century was that they had been badly weakened by conflict with the Greek Christians of the Byzantine Empire. But even as Persia passed into the hands of Muslim rulers, its proud culture continued to assert itself. There was literary rivalry between the Persian and Arabic languages, and the Zoroastrianism of the Persians lived on within the Muslim Empire. As late as the 930s, it was possible for a warlord of Iran to reject the authority of the Abbasid caliphs and the faith of Islam and attempt to proclaim a Zoroastrian revival. More than a century earlier, Persian culture had probably helped to spark the translation movement which rendered Greek works of philosophy and science into Arabic. Already under the Sassanids, scientific works from India, on topics like mathematics and astronomy, were rendered into Persian. At this same time, we see Greek texts being translated for the Sassanids. Of particular interest for the history of philosophy is the Sassanid ruler Anush-e-Ruan, who reigned in the mid-6th century. He offered shelter to the Neoplatonist philosophers who left Athens after the Emperor Justinian closed down the academy there. He was also the recipient of works on Aristotelian logic by a man we call Paul the Persian. Among medieval scholars, the only one whose name brings a smile to my lips more easily than Paul the Persian is the wonderfully named Arabic-Latin translator Hermanus Alemanus, which means Herman the German. In light of these earlier developments in Sassanid Persia, we can even say that the early Abbasid caliphs were simply continuing their policy when they sponsored the translation movement. Carrying on the cultural activities of the Sassanids was a way for them to claim authority for their new imperial rule. In the later Abbasid Caliphate, the Persians could exert not just cultural influence, but also political power. This was especially true in the 10th century and the first half of the 11th century, a time dubbed the Iranian Intermezzo by one historian. In much of this period, the Central Asian lands of Khurasan and Transoxania were controlled by the Persian Empire known as the Samanids, while in the Islamic heartlands of Iraq and Iran, a new force came to be dominant, the Buyids. The Buyids began as three sons of a fisherman from the region around the Caspian Sea. Not content with fishing expeditions, the three brothers turned to military expeditions instead, and were so successful that the Buyid clan became the real power of the Abbasid Empire for more than a century. There was still a caliph, but what authority he retained was strictly religious. Military and political power was now in the hands of the Buyids. Both the Samanids and the Buyids revived Persian political practices, for instance by claiming for themselves the traditional Sasanian title King of Kings. Unlike the Samanids, the Buyids were Shi'ite Muslims. In other words, they recognized a sequence of Imams beginning with the prophet's cousin Ali and passing down through the family line. It's interesting that they were nonetheless content to allow the Abbasid caliphs to remain on their thrones. This may be because they feared the backlash from non-Shi'ite Muslims if they deposed the caliphs, or because they would not have been able to control a caliph who could claim descent from Ali's family, as they did with the Abbasids. The reign of the Persian Buyids and Samanids provides us with a context for understanding philosophy during this time. Philosophy in the 9th century is epitomized by al-Kindi, an Arab and native of Iraq and an intimate of the caliphs who reigned at the height of Abbasid power. In the 10th and early 11th centuries, Iraq continued to be a center for philosophy, not least thanks to the labors of Ibn Adi, Al-Farabi, and the rest of the Baghdad school. But this was also a time when philosophy was blossoming in Persian cities like Ra'i and still further east, including places under the dominion of the Samanids. Philosophers in this period often hailed from these cities, tended to travel throughout the empire, and attach themselves to the courts of local rulers as political power became more fragmented. Furthermore, at this time we see a growing relationship between philosophy and Shi'ite Islam. All of this is evident if we look at the impact of al-Kindi himself and of the texts translated in his circle. Two of his most important followers hailed from the eastern province of Balkh, where the Samanid rulers also originated. One of them was Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, the greatest astrologer of Islamic history. Supposedly, Abu Ma'shar was first an enemy of al-Kindi's, but al-Kindi won him over to the mathematical arts, and from there his career was, so to speak, written in the stars. The other was al-Kindi's student Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, who wrote on a variety of philosophical issues. We looked briefly at his writing on ethics in the last episode. Abu Zayd was in turn the teacher of al-Ameri, the most significant member of this group of thinkers we might call the Kindian tradition. Like al-Kindi's students from Balkh, al-Ameri came from the Persian province of Khurasan, in this case hailing from the city Nishapur. He complained of the prejudice against Easterners he encountered when visiting the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, and was glad to return home. The Kindian tradition helped to bring about a shift of philosophy towards the East, especially the Neoplatonic philosophy that had been translated in the Kindi circle. Al-Ameri, for instance, was fascinated by the Arabic version of Proclus that would later be influential in Latin as the Liber de Causis, or Book of Causes. You know that game Telephone, where a row of children whisper a message into each other's ears one after another and then giggle at the much different version that results at the end? Something similar happened here with Proclus, as the Kindi circle's reworking of his elements of theology was reworked again by al-Ameri. The Kindi circle's version brought Proclus into line with the simpler Neoplatonic system of Plotinus, and with Islam too, by making the first cause into a creator. In al-Ameri's hands, the Islamization is made yet more explicit. For instance, the intellect and soul of the Neoplatonic hierarchy are given the Quranic names pen and tablet. And, the emanation of all things from God now occurs not automatically, like light from a source or water from a fountain, but instead by a divine command. If we follow this Kindian tradition down to the 11th century, we come to another man we met already in the last episode, Abu Ali Miskowy. He was born in Ra'i, the home of everyone's favorite heretical doctor, Ar-Razi. Miskowy was no heretic, and no doctor either, although he knew at least some works by Galen. In fact, he knew some works by just about anyone you'd care to name, having been in charge of a library at Ra'i that belonged to a vizier of the Buyids. As one of the best-read scholars of the era, Miskowy wrote extensively on history, and was well placed to write philosophical works on ethics and metaphysics that combined Aristotle with the Neoplatonic texts produced by the Kindi circle. Like al-Kindi, Miskowy saw the resulting philosophical synthesis as fully compatible with Islam. One of his more interesting treatises, called On Soul and Intellect, presents and refutes the views of an impressively skeptical and idiosyncratic philosopher. This man proposed that we can explain all the things we see in the world around us by appealing to the physical forces of heat and light, instead of immaterial entities like soul and God. To prove that heat is the principle of life, he pointed out that a heart removed from the body of an animal will continue to beat if thrust into hot ashes. Kids, don't try this at home. Unfortunately, Miskowy does not tell us who this other author was, but contends himself with reasserting the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic doctrines that had become standard within this Kindian tradition. This is typical of him. Miskowy was not a particularly original thinker. But then again, he wasn't trying to be. He is interesting precisely because he so clearly represents what philosophy was becoming under the Buyids. Like the Buyids themselves, he was a Shiite from Persia, and he enjoyed the support of patrons of the day, who built up impressive libraries and enjoyed the company of intellectuals. At this time, a court philosopher could be a kind of status symbol, the 11th century equivalent of an expensive artwork that is admired, but not necessarily understood. As we'll see in a few episodes, no less a thinker than Avicenna spent much of his life within this kind of patronage relationship. Could we imagine such a thing nowadays, with fabulously rich patrons lavishing their wealth on philosophers of all people, choosing one to be the star attraction of a luxuriously well-paid entourage? To be honest, I'm imagining it right now. Philosophers like Miskowy moved in refined circles not only in socioeconomic terms, but also in terms of literary style. Miskowy was not just a philosopher, but also a historian. On this score, he might be compared to the ancient writer Plutarch. This attitude towards philosophy, where it is just one of numerous topics a cultivated author might discuss, is typical of the Buyid age. We do find more professional philosophers, in particular the members of the Baghdad school. But the less technical Islam-friendly philosophy embraced by the Kindian tradition was more culturally prevalent. We see it not just with Miskowy, but also with Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, one of the great literary figures of the age. He seems to have known almost everyone, and his gossipy works are a rich source of anecdotes and witty remarks. In fact, he's our source for the report of the debate over the merits of logic and grammar between the Baghdad philosopher Abu Bishr and the grammarian Al-Sirafi, which I mentioned in the episode on the Baghdad school. He also tells us stories involving people like Al-Amari and Miskowy, and wrote a series of questions on philosophical topics which were answered by Miskowy in an exchange which still survives today. With Miskowy and al-Tawhidi, we see the interpenetration of philosophy and adab, the refined and improving culture I mentioned in the episode on music. Authors had been combining intellectual speculation with stylish Arabic prose since the 9th century. The best example here is the outstanding writer Al-Jahiz, a student of Wathazilite theology who became one of the most imitated and important figures of early Arabic literature. This phenomenon of philosophical adab may have been the most significant vehicle for the cultural dispersion of ideas drawn from the Greek Arabic translation movement. Al-Tawhidi tells of learned exchanges at court and elegant excursions into the countryside, where the participants might, for instance, debate the meaning of remarks ascribed to the pre-Socratic Empedocles. In polite society, it was the done thing to quote the wise remarks and clever witticisms of ancient Greek philosophers. In the ancient world, philosophy had been a way of life. Now, it was a way of spicing up your dinner conversation. Then again, the same had already been true in the world of the Romans, as we saw when we talked about rhetoric and the second Sophistic. In both periods there was direct interaction between the committed philosophers and those who appropriated philosophy for more elegant literary productions. Ancient aristocrats might frequent the school of an Epictetus or Plotinus. Now, in the age of the Buyids, Al-Tawhidi could back up his style with substance if he chose to do so. He had attended the lessons of Ibn Adi in Baghdad. The themes we've been pursuing in this episode, Persian culture and literary culture, and the integration of philosophy with Islam, come together spectacularly in a collection of writings by a group of anonymous authors called Ikhwan al-Safa, the Brethren of Purity. Not since the Pseudo-Dionysius have we come upon such interesting unnamed philosophers. They composed a set of 52 epistles, each one devoted to a specific topic or branch of knowledge. The epistles begin with the mathematical sciences, which include geography and, as we saw in a previous episode, music. The Brethren then proceed through the departments of natural philosophy, dealing with everything Aristotle had covered and more, with treatises on minerals and plants. A third group of epistles deals with soul and intellect, and a final section treats religious questions and magic. The Brethren thus bring together an unparalleled range of material and provide a valuable window into the state of various arts in the age of the Buyids. It would be nice to be more specific about when the epistles were written, but there is no scholarly agreement on that. Nor, as I say, do we know for sure who these Brethren of Purity were. A Tahidi, ever a source of intriguing hearsay, preserves the most specific and plausible account. He identifies several of the Brethren, and puts them in the Iraqi city of Basra, in the company of an official of the Buyid government. Some scholars today are skeptical about the details of this story, but for our purposes, it's enough to note that the Brethren are, in their own right, to some extent typical of the philosophical culture of their day. Though they seem to have worked in Iraq, they may have had an Eastern cultural background. For one thing, they occasionally use Persian terminology. And then there is their name. The phrase Brethren of Purity derives from a collection of animal fables that was, in Arabic, called Qalilah wa-Dimna. Here we have another example of playing telephone. It was an ancient Indian work, which was translated into Persian, and then Syriac, and finally into Arabic. The Brethren take their name from a passage in the fables, which refers to some birds of a feather who decide to flock together and call themselves pure brothers. The most celebrated epistle in the collection by the Brethren is itself a zoological fable. It imagines a debate between humans and the other animals, in which the animals attempt to persuade a neutral judge, a benevolent king of demons, that they should no longer be oppressed by humans and subjected to maltreatment at their hands. What follows is an inventive, amusing, and richly detailed discussion amongst the animals, in which groups like the insects, the birds, and the predatory animals put forward their claims to equality or even superiority relative to humans. The result is one of the most favorable portrayals of non-human animals in Arabic literature, one which occasionally ascribes to them a kind of rationality and even the ability to worship God. The animals claim several times to be convinced monotheists and even Muslims. The cries of some creatures are said to be prayers in praise of God, which humans of course fail to understand. In the end, the humans prevail in the contest, not because they alone are rational, but because the other animal species have not produced the outstanding saintly figures boasted by humankind, rare those such human individuals may be. All this may remind us of the late ancient author Porphyry and his argument that animals are rational and so should not be used for food. But the prologue of this epistle presents a much more traditional contrast between rational humans and non-rational animals. So maybe the more favorable portrayal of animals in the fable is occasioned by the literary context, rather than any deeply held views on animal psychology. In the end, the brethren seem most interested in commenting indirectly on humankind, as when they show the animals debating the nature of perfect kingly rule. That brings us to another controversial question about the brethren. What sort of Muslims were they? Their works contain numerous clues that they may have been Shiites of some kind, and the epistles were later avidly read by Ismailis. The Ismailis were a branch within Shiite Islam, which achieved a remarkable political success around the time that the Buyids dominated in the Abbasid realm. The Fatimid Caliphate, which held control of Egypt from the early 10th until the later 12th century, was Ismaili. This unprecedented success for Shiite Islam created a base from which missionaries could be sent into the rest of the Muslim empire, seeking converts. It's possible that the brethren of purity were themselves Ismailis, and if so, they were not the only philosophers of the time to subscribe to this variety of Shiism. Several of the Da'is, or proselytizers, who promoted the cause of Ismailism drew on Hellenic philosophy to provide a systematic account of their religious beliefs. We have already met one of them, Abu Hatim Ar-Razi, the sparring partner of Abu Bakr Ar-Razi, who accused his fellow townsmen of rejecting the validity of prophecy. In Abu Hatim, and even more so in two other early Ismaili thinkers named An-Nasafi and Asijestani, we find a range of distinctive philosophical and theological positions that take as their starting point the Neoplatonic system known from Plotinus and Proclus as translated in the Kindi circle. They accept the production of a universal intellect and soul from God. Like Al-Ameri of the Kindian tradition, these Ismailis apply Quranic epithets like throne and pen to the Neoplatonic entities. The Ismailis are determined to emphasize the transcendence of God, and find even Plotinus's Neoplatonic system insufficient for this purpose. In a presumably unwitting replay of a move made by the later Greek Neoplatonist Demascius, they interpose a further level between the highest ineffable one and the intellect. In the case of the Ismailis, this additional level is called God's Word or Command, echoing passages in the Quran that describe God saying the word be to whatever He wants to create. Abu Hatim proposes another method for ensuring God's transcendence, which in this case recalls an idea put forward by the Pseudo-Dionysius. His method is to go beyond denying attributes as inappropriate to God and to deny even these denials. Thus, God is not only not perfect, but also not not perfect. Abu Hatim's proposal was taken up by a Sijestani, who spoke of worshipping God through the expression La wa la la, not and not not. For a Sijestani, this provides a correction to the simpler negative theology of thinkers like al-Kindi and the Mu'ath-Tazilites, who were content simply to deny the appropriateness of human language in God's case. But why would saying not not perfect, for instance, be any better than saying simply not perfect? I think a Sijestani's point must be that the double negation brings home to us the complete inapplicability of human language and concepts to God. The sense in which God is not perfect is like the sense in which the color blue is not heavy. For something like a color, the question of heaviness does not even arise. So it would be misleading to say that blue is not heavy, as if it might have been heavy but happens not to be, like a piece of furniture. Rather, the color blue is not even not heavy. The same rationale applies to God, but for any concept or word you care to name, because of his total transcendence beyond language and thought. The Ismaili philosophers faced a challenge other Neoplatonizing thinkers of their day did not. They needed to explain the need for guidance from an imam. This was, after all, what made them Shiites. They did so by integrating the imam into a hierarchical system of reality, which has a series of prophets laying down bodies of legislation as a concrete realization of the truths of the universal intellect. This sounds very like the view of prophecy we find in Al-Farabi, and indeed, at least one Ismaili thinker seems to have been powerfully influenced by him. This is the somewhat later al-Kirmani, who shifted away from the more traditional Platonist-style Neoplatonism of figures like a Sijestani to embrace a system more like that of Al-Farabi with his series of celestial intellects. But, despite these points of disagreements, the Ismailis generally would have agreed with one another, and disagreed with Al-Farabi in holding that a law handed down by a prophet is not enough. This law also needs to be interpreted, which is the role of subsequent figures who explain the inner meaning of the prophet's revelation. In the case of the Islamic revelation, the needed interpretation was of course brought by Ali and his descendants. These claims were robustly attacked by some other Muslims. They accused the Ismailis and other Shiites of demoting the importance of the prophet himself by suggesting that his revelation would be useless without guidance from later divinely appointed interpreters. And, they accused the Ismailis of having an esoteric view of Islam. All that really mattered was the inner meaning of the revelation, which could be known only to the Imams, who must be followed blindly by normal folk who lack their divine insight. Against this, Ismailis like a Sijestani and Al-Kirmani were careful to insist on the importance of the outer aspects of Islam. By this they meant above all ritual practices such as prayer, and following the letter of the law as laid down by the prophet. In an echo of the famous logic vs. grammar debate, a Sijestani compared this relation of inner and outer religion to the relation between a conceptual meaning and its verbal expression. For all this intellectual sophistication though, the Ismailis would not prevail. They did not manage to convert the lands of the Buyids and Samanids to Ismaili belief. To the contrary, in the middle of the 11th century, the Buyids would give way to a new political hegemony, and now it would be Sunni Muslims who would take charge. In two episodes, we'll be turning to the theological underpinnings of this Sunni revival, as we look at the Asherites. But, the Ismailis represent such an interesting moment in the intersection of Islam and philosophy that it will be worth spending one more episode in their company. I'm glad to say that we will have a guide of our own for this topic, a scholar who has done more than anyone to enrich our understanding of the Ismailis and their history. So, do not not join me for an interview with Farhad Daftari, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the Ismailis and philosophy with Dr. Farhad Dafthari, who is director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. Hi, Dr. Dafthari. Hello, Peter. Thank you very much for coming on the series. I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to have this conversation with you. I said something in the last episode about who the Ismailis were and a little bit about their use of Greek philosophical sources, but I was wondering if you could just start by saying a bit about Ismailism and what differentiates Ismailism from other kinds of Islam. As you know, the Ismailis are one of the major Shi'i communities. As such, they were of the opinion that after the Prophet, the leadership of the Muslim ummah or community belonged to his cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom they regard as their first spiritual leader or Imam. And furthermore, they held that this appointment had been sanctioned divinely. But then later on, the Shi'i themselves did not agree as to who were the rightful successors to Ali, especially after he was succeeded by two of his sons. On that basis, they became split into a number of groups and communities, each one actually recognizing a different line of Imams who descended from Ali. One of the main communities which evolved during this early period of Islam were the so-called Imami Shi'is. And the Imami Shi'is in the year 765 on the death of the contemporary Imam, a very well-known figure and also a scholar, Imam Jafar al-Sadik, when he died in 765, his succession was disputed amongst his sons. One group followed his eldest son who had been actually originally appointed as his successor, his name was Ismail, and those who now came to recognize Ismail and his descendants as their Imams became known as the Ismaili or Ismailis, named after Ismail. Whereas another group eventually evolved what is known today as the Esnashari or the Twelver Shi'a. They followed Ismail's younger half-brother Musa. And they're called Twelver Shi'ites because... They believe only in the line of 12 Imams, which ended in the occultation of the 12 Imams and his Shi'a have continued to await his reappearance as the Mahdi before the end of time. Can you just say something quickly about this idea of occultation? So the thought is that ideally the Imam is present and alive and available and is both a secular and religious ruler, but sometimes the Imam goes off into occultation, is no longer available, but he's not dead. So where does this idea come from and does it play a part in Ismaili thinking? All the various Shi'ite groups and communities at one time or another have had this idea of a Mahdi Imam, an Imam who has gone into occultation and who would reappear in the imminent future. But the whole idea of Mahdi-ship itself, it actually evolved over time and it served various purposes. For instance, at times when a certain Imam had no progeny, he was regarded by his community as the Mahdi, as the Imam who had gone into occultation and would reappear. Sometimes when the circumstances were not right for the Imam to be active openly, he chose to go into a temporary concealment, which is quite different from the type of occultation of the 12th Imam of the 12th verse. That was an expedient measure, so to speak, to protect the Imam under unfavorable conditions and circumstances. You have explained to us the difference then between Ismaili Shi'ism and other types of Shi'ism, but just to make things even more complicated, there's more than one kind of Ismailism. Can you so quickly explain why you get different strands of Ismaili Islam? Yes. The Ismailis were more or less a unified community until the year 1094. Most of these splits amongst the various Shi'i communities always revolved around the question of succession to an Imam. In that year, when the 8th Fatimid caliph who ruled from Cairo, he was a Fatimid caliph and at the same time he was the Imam of the Ismailis. When he died in 1094, his succession was disputed between two of his sons, Nizar and Al-Musta'ili. As a result, the entire Ismaili community also split into two rival factions named after these two sons, Nizari and Mustalians. The Mustalians were in Egypt and they recognized the later Fatimid caliphs as their Imams, whereas the Nizaris had their stronghold in Iran and they really were consolidated under the initial efforts of a famous diy or missionary by the name of Hassan Sabba, who is well known in history. These two communities of course had different historical trajectories, but the Mustalian Ismailis who eventually found their stronghold in Yemen and the Nizaris who initially concentrated in Iran and then Syria and then much later in Central Asia and still much later in South Asia, both of these main communities of the Ismailis survived the downfall of the Fatimid caliphate in 1171. Therefore, Ismailism has continued down to our times in its two forms, the Ta'i'ibi Mustalian form in Yemen and then India where they are known as the Boras and the Nizari Ismailis who are scattered today in more than 25 countries of the world and they have had a continuous line of Imams. The present Imam, His Highness the Aghachan, is the 49th Imam in the series and the main regions of concentration of that branch of Ismailism in Central Asia, Afghanistan, South Asia, Iran, Syria and since the early 1970s also immigrants from East Africa and other parts of Africa to various Western countries. And politically speaking the high point of secular power for the Ismailis has been the Fatimid caliphate. Do you say that's right? The Fatimid caliphate, I wouldn't call it as, I mean I wouldn't use the word secular in this context because as you know it's very difficult to separate the religious from secular although the two sort of domains have their own sort of mandate and so on. But the Fatimid caliphs were at the same time the Ismaili Imams and it was in fact in the person of the Fatimid caliph that the institution of the Ismaili dawah or mission and head of the state, these two positions came together because the Fatimid caliph Imam in fact was at the same time the head of the Fatimid state, the dawah or the state and the government apparatus and at the same time the supreme spiritual leader of the Ismaili dawah and in that capacity he articulated the religious policies of the mission which was active also outside of the Fatimid state and in fact had its most lasting and most significant success outside of the Fatimid state. And as a result we see that Ismailism disappeared in Egypt on the downfall of the Fatimids but it survived in the lands beyond the Fatimid state up until now. Maybe we can go on now to talking about the relationship between Ismailism and philosophy then. One of the striking things about Ismailism and their use of philosophical ideas is how much they drew on Hellenic sources, so sources that were originally Greek and in particular Neoplatonic sources, for example the Arabic versions of Plotinus. I'm wondering why you think they were so attracted to these texts in particular, for example why did they go for Plotinus rather than say Aristotle or Aristotelian logic which would have been seen as more primary by someone like Al-Farabi or the other Baghdad school Peripatetics. The great translation movement which really took off under the early Abbasids and really reached a peak under Zimamun. The Muslims for the first time now came into contact with Arabic translations of a whole host of Greek works from logic, medicine and also metaphysics and the works which modern scholars have called Neoplatonic. Together with the works of the great masters like Aristotle and Plato. These works in translation influenced a variety of Muslim scholars and thinkers. One should count amongst the foremost people who were influenced by this new kind of knowledge were Ismaili authors of the Iranian lands where Neoplatonism and other philosophical traditions became fashionable amongst educated classes, amongst the elite of the society. Now at the time the Ismaili dyes or missionaries who were at the same time the scholars and the authors of the community had adopted a particular policy of addressing their message to the educated strata of the society and to the elite. In order to do that they wanted to use the most intellectually fashionable language and idioms available to them and that was Neoplatonism which had already become quite popular amongst the Muslims of Khorasan and other regions of Central Asia and Iran. But what one must always keep in mind that in trying to harmonize the Ismaili theology with this type of philosophical tradition they continue to remain theologians. Deep down, deep in their hearts they would never consider themselves as part of the philosopher or the philosophers. They remain theologians but they garb their theological message in this intellectually fashionable language in order to maximize the intellectual appeal of their message to the educated elite and strata of the society without compromising their basic theological message which revolved around the central she-i doctrine of the Emomats. That actually was the next thing I was going to ask you because I think that's very interesting what you just said. So it's not so much that they selected Neoplatonism as a good match for Ismailism, it's that the audience they were speaking to had already acquired an interest in Neoplatonism. But still it seems to me like there is a good match between one central idea of Ismailism and Emomism in general and Neoplatonism which is the idea that some souls achieve a kind of union with higher divine principles. So in the case of Neoplatonism that would be the intellect and this is what knowledge is. So most souls remain as it were down here in the physical world trapped in sensation and imagination but the souls who Plotinus would consider to be philosophers achieve union with the intelligible world. And it is fair to say isn't it that the Ismailis are adapting that kind of epistemology to explain prophecy and Emomism. In order to have a better appreciation of the Ismailis appropriation and adoption of Neoplatonism and other philosophical traditions is to really stop and look back and to realize that from early on as a sheikh community the Ismailis were of the opinion that man or I would say human kind cannot come to know God and cannot come to have access to the truths of religion through his act or intellect alone and that he needed a guide. This was really the starting point of the Shia and they furthermore held that the message of Islam in fact came from the sources which were beyond the comprehension of our dream and hence the need for an Imam or a spiritual guide. And this actually did fit rather well with the Neoplatonism which they adopted and in fact what they did adopt that in a very creative manner to suit their own message which was in a sense also connected to their cyclical view of history which they had combined with their doctrine of Imamat. They believed that the sacred history of mankind would be consummated in seven eras, each era beginning with a speaker, a nateq or a prophet who would bring a new religious law. He would be succeeded by a legacy or a vasih and seven imams. The seventh imam of each era would rise in trying to become the nateq, the prophet of the following era. But the bottom line here is that in each era including the era of Islam whose prophet was Muhammad and then his was he an immediate successor Ali and then the imams recognized by the Ismailis, these were the sole sources or wellsprings of wisdom. They were the ones who were qualified to interpret the religious message of that era to the rank and file. In the era of Islam, the people who had that knowledge were, of course after the prophet and Ali were the imams recognized by the Ismailis and they were the ones whose guidance would also provide the believers with the sort of knowledge which they needed in order to purify their souls and acquire salvation. This idea that humankind requires a guide, not just the prophet but also Ali following the prophet Muhammad and then the imams, what is their argument for this? Because this is a position that was attacked by philosophical thinkers, for example, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Al-Ghazali, two people who aren't usually put in the same class together but they both accused the Ismailis of what's called taqlid which is uncritical acceptance of authority basically. And it seems like the Ismailis are making a very bold epistemological claim here which is that for most of us, so everyone other than one of these imams or prophets, it's impossible to achieve knowledge on one's own. So one needs an external guide. Do they have any kind of argument for convincing us of that? From our vantage point today, it's difficult to perhaps fully understand the situation of the early Muslims and the early Shia which provided the milieu in which this doctrine was actually articulated. At the time, they were thinking of a particular type of religious knowledge which was not available to everybody. That religious knowledge was possessed by the prophet and as part of his heritage had been passed on to Ali and then to the imams who were from the progeny of Ali. This was a type of divinely sanctioned knowledge. It was not, for instance, a knowledge of a type that one would acquire by enrolling in a course today. It was a very special type and we should really make a distinction between that type of religious knowledge or elm which is really the focal point of the doctrine of Imam ad which is passed on from imam to imam. So the idea isn't that you couldn't learn the rules of geometry without consulting an imam. It's that there's a specific knowledge. Exactly. Which mankind needs for its spiritual guidance. But then I guess even then it seems like a philosopher might object to that and say that without an argument to this effect, there's no reason to think that there's any kind of knowledge which is absolutely crucial for us to acquire that we can't achieve just using reason. In fact, there are alternative views in the context. Most of the Mu'athazila arguably think that reason is adequate to achieve understanding of the most important truths of Islam and his agreement with Islam and certainly that seems to be the position of numerous philosophers including al-Kindi al-Farabi. So what would the Ismailis say against that sort of view? The Ismailis would say what every other Shi'i or every member of any other Shi'i group would say that as I just tried to explain, we are not here talking about an ordinary type of knowledge. This is a type of knowledge which is the pre-recursive of the Ahlul Bayt, the people of the house, of the members of the Prophet's family. By the membership in the family in a sense, it's through that channel that they in fact inherit this knowledge. It's not a knowledge that can be acquired through education or election and this is why they did not agree with the way the bulk of the Muslim community at the time, later as the Sunnis, came to elect a successor to the Prophet. So maybe the idea then is just that it's not the sort of knowledge that anyone could have just by recourse to reason because it's too particular or contingent. Exactly. It's of a very, very special kind really. And so, I mean just to take an example, you wouldn't be able to use reason to know that you should pray five times a day facing Mecca, right? Because it's not the sort of reason you could ever discover by itself. So you have to have a prophet. It's also implied by the doctrine of the Imam that each Imam of the time should interpret the religious edicts, prohibitions, and commandments, and so on, according to the changing circumstances of the time. Which is one reason why you need continued guidance. So, that's built into the mechanism for progress is really embedded in the very doctrine of Imam. It's not a rigid, frozen type of institution. So I suppose that from a Shi'i point of view, they would accuse Sunnis of always having to go back to just the text of the Quran and the Hadith. Exactly. Exactly. And so you would have no way of adapting the religious teaching for... The Sunnis in fact may continue to use the fatwas of the dead scholars, but the Shi'i do not believe in that. So it's like a continuous living revelation all the time. It's a living Imam. It's the living Imam, the present Imam, particularly for the Ismailis, who is the foundation of the knowledge and the source of the guidance in every age. And his authority, his teaching authority, his guidance authority, in a sense, is independent of the authority of the previous Imams. That seems though to bring us to a problem, and this is I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you about, which is that also the Ismailis and other Shis get themselves into a similar situation because if the Imam is in occultation and you have no access to the Imam, then in fact you don't have this access to living revelation. So don't you wind up back in the same situation? That has happened. That has happened. In fact, that has happened for the 12 Shis since the time of the occultation of their 12th Imam in the year 874. And for the other branch of the Ismailis who do not recognize the Al-Ahman as the Imam, the succession of the Imams, they all have remained in concealment since the year 1130. And in the absence of the Imams, the Ta'ib, the Ismailis, have been led by Dais, or the supreme leaders with absolute power. And gradually, in all but name, these Dais have taken over the functions and the attributes of the Imams. And to a large extent, the Mujtahids, or the religious leaders and scholars of the Tuareg community, gradually have also appropriated the various functions that were reserved only for the Imams of that community. It's almost like you start with the Prophet Muhammad and then you have as a successor Ali, and then after the death of Ali you have Imams, and then when the Imams are in occultation you have Dais, but there's always someone to leave the community. And so you're never, as it were, the community is never abandoned and on their own. One of the early Hadiths of the Shi' community goes this way, that it's so important at all times to have an Imam that the earth, because he is the proof of God on earth. The Imam is the proof of God on earth, and the earth can never be without an Imam. It goes on to say that even if two men were left on the face of the earth, one of them had to be the Imam. So the presence of the Imam on earth is that important. Now whether he is a manifest Imam or an Imam in hiding, that's of course a different matter. Well that seems like a good note to end on. Next time I'll actually be looking at the Sunni side of the story to some extent, because I'll be speaking about Asharism, which becomes a dominant form of theology or kalam in the Sunni tradition as the centuries roll forward. For now I will thank Farhad Daftehri very much for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. And please join me next time when I will be talking about Asharism, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, God Willing the Asharites. If there were any justice in this world, most major philosophical problems would be named after Platonic dialogues. There would be the feto problem of the relationship between soul and body, the cratilis conundrum of how words acquire their meanings, the riddle of the republic, which asks what reason we have to be moral. But as Plato's Republic itself shows, there probably isn't any justice in this world. So Plato has to be content with lending a name to only two famous philosophical difficulties, Minos Paradox and the Euthyphro Dilemma. We all know about Minos Paradox, which shows that it is impossible to seek knowledge, but what about the Euthyphro Dilemma? It takes its name from the dialogue of the same name, in which Socrates asks a man named Euthyphro to define piety. When Euthyphro suggests that whatever the gods love is pious, Socrates asks whether this may not be the wrong way around. Don't things rather become pious because the gods love them? Just like that, Plato set down a problem which still concerns philosophers of religion. Does God determine what is moral? Some say yes, holding that if God is dead, everything is permitted. Sometimes that view is called a divine command theory of morality. Certain actions become morally good or evil because God declares them to be so. For instance, in general it is evil to kill your children, but when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac, it became right for him to do so, until the command was revoked at the last moment. Others have a hard time believing this theory. Could God really make it a good thing to murder the innocent or a bad thing to offer help to suffering children? If we are believers, shouldn't we rather say that God wants us to help children and avoid murdering them because the first is good and the second bad? Indeed, doesn't God himself have to obey certain moral rules if he is to be a good god and not an all-powerful tyrant? The dilemma may take its name from the Euthyphro, but the first time it takes central stage in our story comes more than a millennium after Plato, in a debate between two groups of theologians. One group we have already met, the Moautazilites. They assumed that there are moral laws which we can discover using our own reason, and by which even God is bound. We know it would be wrong for him to punish the innocent and reward the guilty, or to punish those who had no choice about their actions. From this, the Moautazilites inferred that humans must have power over their own actions, since in the Quran we hear that God will indeed reward and punish us. But the problem can't be resolved that easily. If God is really to be just, then doesn't he also have to deal fairly with his creatures? Yet doesn't he obviously fail to do so? A famous story discussed by several Islamic theologians illustrates the point. In the afterlife, three brothers find themselves in paradise, hell, and limbo. The first led a virtuous life, the second was wicked, and the third died in childhood before he could come to deserve either reward or punishment. This third one, who is in limbo, complains that God should have allowed him a longer life, giving him a chance to earn a place in paradise. God replies that had he been allowed to live to adulthood, he would have sinned and gone to hell. By letting him die early, God was doing him a favor. At which point the second brother cries out, why didn't you kill me as a child too? Then I wouldn't be in hell. Supposedly, this story helped to turn one of the greatest of all Muslim theologians away from the Moautazilite way of thinking. This was Abul Hasan al-Ash'ari, who lived in Iraq from 874 to 936. In case you're keeping track, this makes him a rough contemporary of philosophers like Ahrazi and Saadia Gaon, and a generation younger than Al-Farabi. Al-Ash'ari was first a Moautazilite theologian, in fact a student of al-Dubai, head of the Moautazilites in the city of Basra. This student-teacher relationship worked out much like the one between Plato and Aristotle, although as far as I know no one ever compared al-Ash'ari to a pony kicking its mother once it was born. Al-Ash'ari devised his own rival theological theory which rejected nearly every tenet of Moautazilism despite retaining its rational approach and its conceptual tools. He drew also on previous theologians who were at least in the orbit of Moautazilism. His most famous doctrine centers on the use of a technical term, acquisition, that had already been used by several other theologians. Yet his synthesis and his critique of the Moautazilites was original and coherent enough that he would lend his name not just to a puzzle or two, but to the dominant theological tradition of Sunni Islam, Ash'arism. Al-Ash'ari wrote several works that survive today, including a vast survey of previous theological opinions that remains one of our main sources for previous thinkers. In fact, when I was telling you in a previous episode about the early Moautazilites, a lot of what I said was based on reports found in al-Ash'ari. His ideas were then further developed by generations of like-minded theologians, for instance al-Baqilani and al-Jawaini, both of whom lived around the time of Avicenna and died in the early 11th century. The most famous Ash'arite of all, al-Ghazali, was a student of this Jawaani, and he would leave an indelible imprint on Ash'arite theology. We'll get to him in a future episode, but first I think we ought to consider al-Ash'ari's ideas in their own right. And let's start right there with the question of what we ought to do. We find the Ash'arites offering a bold defense of the divine command theory. Al-Ash'ari has no hesitation in embracing the most counterintuitive aspects of this theory, saying that God could torment innocent children in the afterlife, if he so chose. He could also punish those who believe in him and reward the unbelievers. Indeed, not only could he do these things, if he did them, his actions would be just, for justice means nothing more nor less than agreement with God's will. Al-Jawaani gives an ingenious argument to support these Ash'arite claims. If actions did not get their moral character from God, they would have to have that character in their own right as intrinsic features. For instance, murder would be wrong all by itself. But in fact, context makes all the difference. Were you to kill someone in self-defense, that would be morally justified. Thus, killing in its own right is morally neutral. Whether a given killing is right or not depends on its context, and for Al-Jawaani, that context is provided ultimately by God's law. That argument with its focus on how the attribute of justice or injustice belongs to actions illustrates a more general feature of the Ash'arite theology. Following the Mo'atazilites, they understand created things as atomic bodies which have properties, or accidents, that belong to them only for one moment at a time. Both schools also use this physical theory as a basis for a proof that the world was created by God. Accidents, or attributes, have only a fleeting existence, so obviously they cannot be eternal. Atoms might seem more stable, but they cannot exist without their accidents. From this, the theologians infer that atoms cannot be eternal either. After all, atoms need accidents to exist, and accidents come in and out of existence. Surely, therefore, atoms come in and out of existence too. For instance, no atom can exist without being either in motion or at rest. Inevitably, one of these two accidents must belong to any atom. But anything moving started to move at some point, and anything that is at rest started to be at rest. Thus, the atom must have started to exist, whether or not it first existed in a state of motion or in a state of rest. From this we can conclude that the world of atoms and their properties was brought into existence by some creator, namely God. It is He who creates every atom and every one of its attributes, giving them existence at each moment they exist. In Asharism, the radical implications of this conception become clear, as they emphasize the fleeting and utterly dependent nature of the accidents that belong to created things. In each and every instant, God has to choose to create every single attribute from scratch, so to speak. Things possess no stability or continuity in themselves. Rather, the fact that certain atoms continue to have certain motions and colors, for instance, is due to God's creating similar motion or color attributes in those atoms at successive moments. If I hit you in the face, it's not only the moral badness of this act that depends on God, also the motion of my hand, the pain in your nose, the red of the blood on your shirt and my knuckles. All these things are created by God. If He wished, He could create things differently so that when I hit you, it caused intense pleasure instead of pain, or turned you into a giraffe. The stability we experience in our everyday lives is thanks only to God's choice to make things appear stable. Something promised in the Qur'an in verses stating, you shall find no change in the way of God. This picture of constant creation, freely and arbitrarily willed by God at every moment, is often called occasionalism. It's especially associated with early modern thinkers, such as the seventeenth-century philosopher Malebranche, but al-Ash'ari articulated the view already here in the tenth century. He did so in full awareness of the awkward implications of the century, implications he was happy to accept. For instance, if it is God causing every attribute at each moment, then the apparent causes we see in the world around us are just that, only apparent causes. As we just saw, if I were to hit you, it wouldn't be me causing your nose to hurt or your shirt to be bloody. The Mu'tazilites would find this consequence intolerable. They believed that through our actions we engender certain effects, even chains of linked effects. For instance, a big game hunter might decide to pull a trigger, which causes his finger to move, which causes a gun to fire, which causes the motion of a bullet, which in turn causes the death of Hiawatha the giraffe. The hunter is the cause of all these events, not God, and the hunter bears moral responsibility. Don't worry, no actual giraffes were harmed in the making of this episode. Against all this, another ingenious argument was offered by the Ash'arites. Suppose that the hunter fires his gun but then has a well-deserved heart attack and dies before Hiawatha does. It seems absurd to propose that the hunter is causing Hiawatha's death, given that the hunter doesn't even exist at the moment that she expires. No, what is really happening is that all these events and attributes, from the pulling of the trigger to the last mournful flutter of Hiawatha's eyelashes, are being created by God. This brings us to the crux of the disagreement between Mu'tazilite and Ash'arite schools. The reason that the Mu'tazilites were so keen to say that the hunter, and humans in general, are genuine causes of effects in the world is that they wanted us and not God to be morally responsible for those effects. Better to say that a dead giraffe hunter takes the blame for this worst of all crimes than to blame it on God. The Ash'arites, though, were more concerned to preserve God's untrammeled power. Somewhat tendentiously, they characterized the Mu'tazilite position as follows. When God has power over something, it is outside human control, and when humans have power over something, it is outside God's control. It might seem that there is an attractive third alternative for the Mu'tazilites. Why not say that both God and humans have power over human actions? If God chooses to stop the giraffe hunter, he would have any number of ways to do so, a slightly earlier heart attack, for instance. But if God refrains from interfering, the hunter can carry out his nefarious crime. Against this, the Ash'arites argue that there can never be two causes for one and the same event or action. This would be what philosophers nowadays call over-determination. In our example, God and the hunter cannot both be the causes or creators of Hiawatha's cold-blooded murder. Here, the Ash'arites seem to have a point. If God is omnipotent, then ultimately it is up to God and not the hunter whether or not the giraffe dies, precisely because God's unlimited power can inevitably trump the hunter's finite power. Thus, God is the creator of the events in question, and the hunter is just playing out a role in a situation that is, in the last analysis, beyond his control. Of course, that is just what we would expect if God is the cause of the existence of all atoms and their attributes. If he is the creator of all things, then nothing can happen without his willing it to happen. Here al-Ash'ari refers to the Qur'anic verse which states, Al-Ash'ari adds that if humans could create their own actions, as the Maʿḥtazilites claim, this would undermine the argument for God's existence used by both schools. If attributes can be created without God's direct intervention, but instead by something like a human action, then the need for all atoms and attributes to be created proves nothing about God. So, there are significant advantages to the occasionalist view the Ash'arites put forward. On the other hand, there seems to be at least one huge disadvantage too. God winds up murdering giraffes. In fact, he winds up being the agent of all injustice and evil in the world. It looks as though the Ash'arites have secured God's unchallenged power at the price of his goodness. It was to deal with this problem that al-Ash'ari put forward what I have mentioned as his most famous, or perhaps I should say notorious, doctrine, the theory of acquisition. This word acquisition in Arabic qasp, or ʿqti sab, was also invoked by previous theologians, but it becomes a signature doctrine in Ash'arism. The basic idea here is that even if God creates an evil action, nonetheless, a human can be morally responsible for that action by acquiring it. One might also put the point by saying that the human carries out, or performs, the action. This doctrine is often dismissed as mere playing with words, but in fact it makes a good deal of sense, at least within the Ash'arites system. A good analogy might be color. Consider Hiawatha the giraffe's eyes, which are a beautiful and mysterious blue. On the Ash'arite analysis, God is the creator of this color, but obviously he doesn't thereby become colored, or take on any of the derivative features of Hiawatha's eye color. For instance, God is not visible, and does not call to mind the pellucid clarity of a summer sky over the African savanna. In just the same way, God creates evil actions without acquiring their derivative features. When he creates the action whereby I hit you, it is my arm that moves, while God remains unmoving. Likewise, I bear the responsibility, and will be justly punished in the afterlife. Yet, surely there is still a problem here, in that I have no choice but to hit you. Perhaps not. On al-Ash'ari's story, what happens here is that God creates in me the power to swing my arm and land my fist on your nose. And I can easily tell the difference between this kind of case, where I am voluntarily swinging my fist, and a different case, where I am forced to hit someone by an external power. The Ash'arites also contrast voluntary motions to the motions involved in shivering from fever and similar cases. There's an obvious difference here, and the difference is precisely that in the voluntary case, I am using a power God has created in me, whereas in the involuntary case I am using no power of my own. On the other hand, the Ash'arites are happy to admit that I must use this power that I have been given. If God determines that I will hit someone, He'll give me the power to do it, and I'm going to use that power come what may. This ensures that the entire event remains subject to God's will. But why not just say that it is up to me whether or not to use the power God gives me? For instance, God could empower me to hit you, but I might think better of it and shake your hand instead, leaving the power to hit you unused. This is exactly the Mu'tazilite view. They spoke of a so-called capacity to act which humans can use to perform an action if they choose to do so. Equally, they can refrain from using the capacity and do nothing. Against this, al-Ash'ari and his followers produce more clever arguments which show that there can be no such thing as an unrealized power. Consider my situation just before I decide whether or not to hit you. I have the power to hit you, and I am either going to use it or not. But that must mean my power to hit you isn't sufficient for my hitting you. Rather, I need to have a further power, my power to actually use that power of hitting you. This second power will be what enables me to realize the first power when I do in fact hit you. But what about this second power? Won't I need yet another power, a third one, in order to use that? This leads to an infinite regress, suggesting that if I really had an unrealized power, I would need to deploy an infinite number of powers in order for me to use it. But, if there are no unrealized powers, then obviously I cannot have both the power to hit you and the power to refrain from hitting you. Both powers would need to be realized, and then I would be both hitting you and not hitting you simultaneously, which is obviously absurd. With this line of argument, the Asherites are denying what is nowadays sometimes called the principle of alternative possibilities. That is, the principle that voluntary action and moral responsibility require the chance of acting in more than one way. In fact, they are denying that this principle is even coherent, or I can never have the power to do two inconsistent things at the same time. And, by the way, as Al-Jawaini adds, even if the Asherite reasoning is wrong here, and God winds up punishing us for actions we did not choose freely, then that doesn't really matter. As we saw, whatever God does will be just by definition, since justice just means conformity to His will. It may be inscrutable to us why He should determine that some will sin and some be righteous, but we're in no position to stand in judgment over such divine decrees. On this point, the Asherites are exploiting another idea of their opponents, the Mo'atazilites, in holding that God transcends human understanding. But, they stopped short of the Mo'atazilite position when it came to divine attributes. For the Asherites, it was no solution to deny the divine attributes entirely, or to reduce attributes like God's knowledge and justice to the essence of God Himself, as we saw the Mo'atazilites doing. Yet, the Asherites were also unhappy with traditionalist theologians who accepted, for instance, that God literally has hands, because of passages in the Qur'an which speak of God reaching out with both hands. Like the Mo'atazilites, the Asherites proposed a figurative reading of such texts, in this case suggesting that the hands referred to God's power. But, unlike the Mo'atazilites, they recognized that the power in question has a reality of its own. As to the question of how such attributes relate to God, this is a place where human comprehension fails. When we say that God has power, we should add the expression bila'qayf, that is, without saying how. This phrase is often taken to express a willfully obtuse or anti-rationalist position, and certainly the Asherites are here trying to demarcate the limits of our understanding. But adding bila'qayf is perhaps better understood as a caution against assuming that the familiar way, the how, or qayf, with which attributes belong to created things, is appropriate to the divine case. Thanks to al-Ash'ari and his first generations of disciples, there was a permanent change in Islamic theology. Mo'atazilism certainly did not die out, but Ash'arism would become the dominant school in centuries to come. As we'll be seeing, this had enormous consequences also for the history of philosophy. As I hope this episode has shown, the Asherites put forward numerous arguments of great philosophical interest. They did defend their system by quoting the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet, but the core of their method was rational argument, usually aimed dialectically against opponents. This method was itself something they shared with their chief opponents, the Mo'atazilites. Still, they did not consider themselves to be falasifa, or philosophers. That name was reserved for thinkers adopting methods and concepts drawn from the Greek texts that had been rendered into Arabic. And yet, when the greatest of the Asherites, al-Ghazali, wrote a work attacking the falasifa, he did not direct his critique at Aristotle, Plato, or Plotinus. His target was instead the greatest and most influential thinker of the Islamic world. A man we'll be starting to cover in the next episode. Please use all your power to join me next time for the Life and Times of Avicenna, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kingham's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Self-Made Man, Avicenna's Life and Works. My father was a man of balch. That's the first sentence of Avicenna's autobiography. As opening lines go, it isn't exactly a classic, no, call me Ishmael, or I sing of arms and a man, but it's a significant line nonetheless. It places us directly into the context in which Avicenna lived his life, which was not the Baghdad of Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, but the eastern reaches of the Islamic empire. He was born in a small town near the city of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. In Avicenna's day, it belonged to the vast area known as Khorasan. This eastern realm had once been a power base for the revolution that saw the Abbasids overthrow the Umayyads to become the second caliphate of Islamic history. But by Avicenna's day, the Abbasids no longer exercised any authority over the east, or for that matter over any part of the Islamic empire. The power of the caliphs was nominal, with real political authority being held by two Persian groups, the Buyids in Iraq and Iran, and the Samanids here in the east. This has direct relevance for Avicenna's life story, because his father worked for the Samanids as the governor of a village near Bukhara. The eastern setting is important for understanding Avicenna's further career. For one thing, it means that he had a Persian cultural background. Though he almost always wrote in Arabic, which had already been established as the dominant language of literature in the Islamic empire, he spoke Persian natively and did use it to write philosophy. Speaking of language, this might be a good opportunity for me to say something about Avicenna's name. His full name was Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina. In English, he is typically called Abicenna, which is the medieval Latin version of the name Ibn Sina. In these podcasts, for the most part I'm going with Arabic names, or English versions of those names, rather than using Latinizations. For instance, when we get to the Andalusian Jewish thinker whose real name was Ibn Jabirul, I'm going to call him Ibn Gabirol, rather than Avicebron, as he was known in medieval Latin. I am, however, making an exception for Avicenna and Iverroes, because they are so well known under these names. So much for his name, now back to his historical setting. As we saw a few episodes back, the eastern lands of the Muslim empire had seen an influx of Hellenic philosophy and science in the 9th and 10th centuries. For instance, we spoke of two associates of Al-Kindi from Balkh, the hometown of Avicenna's father. Because of this, and because of the wealth of the local Samanid rulers, the eastern Islamic lands were fertile ground for a budding genius like Avicenna. He mentions in his autobiography that in his capacity as a physician, he was invited to attend the Samanid ruler Nuh-i-Mansur when he was ill. This gave him the opportunity to visit the ruler's library in Bukhara, where Avicenna could see books he had never come across before, and would never find again. That the young Avicenna was indeed a budding genius is a point made crystal clear in his autobiography. His readers would not necessarily have expected modesty from him. To our ears, though, the autobiography rings so strongly of self-aggrandizement and arrogance that it becomes almost comic. Avicenna first tells us how he was recognized as a prodigy early on, having learned the Qur'an by heart by the age of 10. He learned arithmetic from a local grocer, and also studied jurisprudence. His father then had him tutored by a philosopher by the name of Ah-Nah-Tah-Lih, but he quickly outstripped his teacher, proving himself superior in logic and in astronomy. Avicenna furthermore claims to have taught himself to be a doctor. This took hardly any time at all, since, as he says, medicine is not one of the difficult sciences. Of course he also moved on to study the higher philosophical disciplines of physics and metaphysics, not just reading books, but also engaging in what he calls verification of their contents. And all of this by the time Avicenna was 16 years old, an age at which most of us are busy verifying our friends' claims that that cute kid in chemistry class totally has a crush on us. High school romance? Definitely one of the difficult sciences. So what does Avicenna mean when he says he was verifying what he found in the philosophy books? Some flavor of it is given by the next thing he says in the autobiography. He would stay up late into the night making files like note cards of arguments in syllogistic form. This was an ambitious experiment in applied logic. As we know, Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge had depicted perfect understanding as consisting of chains of syllogisms, tracing back to indubitable first principles. The links in these chains are called middle terms. For instance, if you want to explain why all giraffes have four chambers in their stomachs, you need to see that they are ruminants. That will allow you to build an Aristotelian demonstration, which will be the following syllogism. All giraffes are ruminants. All ruminants have four chamber stomachs. Therefore, all giraffes have four chamber stomachs. Ruminant is what fills the gap between giraffe and four compartment stomach, hence it is called the middle term. So, pursuing his own philosophy without any gaps, Avicenna tried to verify the traditional Hellenic sciences from the ground up, beginning from first principles and building syllogistic inferences by finding middle terms. Genius that he was, he was intimately familiar with the dawning of sudden insights where such a middle term would simply come to him as if unbidden. It was obvious to him that not everyone was as blessed as he in this respect, so he coined a term for the special faculty by which gifted people like him are suddenly able to find the missing syllogistic link, Hadz, or intuition. When intuition did not come, he would often go to the mosque and pray to God for inspiration. And when he grew tired with his nighttime study, he would drink wine to restore his strength. The autobiography's mention of wine drinking scandalized many later Muslim readers who leapt on the passage to accuse Avicenna of lax morality. The immediately preceding reference to prayer at the mosque didn't impress them nearly as much. But the wine drinking should be understood within the context of the ancient Galenic medical theory Avicenna had mastered so easily. For him, drinking wine was not a means to get drunk, it was more like drinking coffee for us to stay awake studying for an exam. Having said that, I reserve the right to make jokes about his wine drinking, I don't think he'd mind. Or maybe he would actually, because he was rather thin-skinned. There was for instance the time Avicenna was insulted at court by a scholar of Arabic. Avicenna went off and laboriously compiled a text made up of ridiculously obscure information about Arabic linguistics and returned to court. He claimed he had come across the book by chance, and then publicly asked the scholar to explain it to him. All of this was just in order to embarrass his rival. The material in the compilation was far too obscure for the linguist to recognize. In short, you wouldn't like Avicenna when he's angry. This story comes not from the autobiography itself, which naturally enough stops part way through his life. Even he wasn't enough of a genius to write his own life story posthumously. Instead, the anecdote appears in the completion of Avicenna's life story contributed by his student Al-Jusjani. This last part also contains rather sensational information about Avicenna's death. Al-Jusjani relates a rumor that Avicenna was poisoned by servants who were afraid they would be caught stealing from him. Then, he explains that Avicenna, having engaged in some self-diagnosis, realized that he needed to abstain from sexual activity for his own health. But he found himself unable to do this, and duly passed away, dying in 1037 in the city of Hamadan in modern-day Iran. This is gossipy stuff, which yet again scandalized later Muslim readers, and which I really shouldn't even be discussing in a very serious podcast like this. By the way, did I mention he also used to drink loads of wine? To be fair, Al-Jusjani does preserve a good deal of useful information too, about Avicenna's movements and the circumstances under which he wrote his philosophy. The general picture is that of a man who moved from one patronage context to another, often because he was forced to. I've already mentioned his connection to the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur. Avicenna says tersely that he was forced to leave and move from one city to another, finally winding up in Jurjan in northern Iran, not far from the city of Ra'i and from modern-day Tehran, on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. It was here that he met his student and future biographer, Al-Jusjani. While in Jurjan, Avicenna engaged in one of his many, frequently bitter, disputes with an intellectual rival, the polymath Al-Biruni, who is remembered today not so much for his dispute with Avicenna as for his work on mathematics and his pathbreaking writing about the culture of India. Avicenna was always up for a good dispute, also clashing with a representative of the Baghdad school of Aristotelian philosophers we covered some episodes back. This man, Abu Qasim al-Kirmani, was not one of the leading Baghdad peripatetics, but Avicenna saw him as symptomatic of the weak standards of the school as a whole. The only member of the school whose work he valued, or admitted to valuing, was Al-Farabi, whom he took seriously when it came to logic. As we saw when we looked at Al-Farabi, Avicenna was also greatly helped by his little essay on the purposes of Aristotle's metaphysics. On the other hand, one should never take Avicenna at his word when it comes to his influences. His admission in the autobiography that he could not understand the metaphysics without Al-Farabi's help is unusual. More typically, he is keen to conceal his dependence on other thinkers, and to explain how his native intelligence and hard work allowed him to reach an almost unprecedented level of insight all on his own. We should approach these claims skeptically. It may for instance be that he got quite a bit out of the work of another leading member of the Baghdad school, Yahya ibn Adi. He also tells us in the autobiography that in his youth he was exposed to the philosophical ideas of the Ismailis, because his father developed an allegiance to their cause. Avicenna insists that he immediately rejected these teachings in his youth, and there's no reason to doubt this. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that it could have been a route by which Neoplatonic ideas could have come to Avicenna's attention. Still, the greatest influence on Avicenna was undoubtedly, and unsurprisingly, Aristotle. Avicenna's most widely read work, titled Al-Shifa, which means The Healing, was an enormous reworking and rethinking of Aristotelian science, with separate volumes on every topic Aristotle had covered, and mathematics thrown in for good measure. It was explicitly intended as a so-called peripatetic work, that is, one that broadly follows an Aristotelian method and agenda of topics. Some recent work on The Healing has shown, for instance, how Avicenna wrote the masterpiece that is the section on metaphysics. This section deals with pretty much every topic taken up in Aristotle's metaphysics, but in a completely different order, giving arguments and conclusions original with Avicenna. Very unusually, in medieval philosophy Avicenna was a thinker who went out of his way to be original, deliberately overthrowing centuries of philosophical tradition to forge a new, distinctively Avicennan philosophy. At one point in his career, he even gave this innovative reworking of Aristotelianism a brand name. It was the Eastern, or Oriental philosophy, so called to distinguish it from the more traditional and less impressive kind of philosophy practiced in the West, that is, by the Aristotelians of Baghdad. He even wrote a summation of his philosophical doctrines called the Easterners, which is partially lost. Another characteristic work also preserved only in part was the Fair Judgment, which explained what Avicenna did and did not find acceptable in the previous philosophical tradition. The circumstances in which Avicenna wrote his magisterial Healing are characteristic of another aspect of his career, the constant upheaval he faced. He spent most of his life traveling from place to place in search of physical and financial security, so that he could concentrate on his modest project of shattering the entire philosophical tradition and building something new out of the shards. He found himself in the city of Hamadan, where he had been employed by the Buyid warlord Shams Adawla. When Shams Adawla died, his son wanted to retain Avicenna's services, but Avicenna rejected the offer. He quickly found out that you also wouldn't like Buyid rulers when they are angry, and had to go into hiding with another, less powerful patron. Astoundingly, it was under these difficult circumstances that he wrote the Healing, often relying on nothing but his memory to give him access to the texts he was so creatively rethinking. Finally though, he managed to find a more stable situation with a rival of the Buyids, another warlord named Allah Adawla. Avicenna died in the year 1037, still in Hamadan and still in the service of Allah Adawla. For him, Avicenna wrote a kind of summary of the contents of the Healing in the Persian language. A second abbreviated version in Arabic was called the Salvation. These texts are a good way to get into Avicenna's system, because they are relatively brief and clear. Of course brevity and clarity don't necessarily go hand in hand. The proof is another work of Avicenna's called الإشرات وطن بحات, or Pointers and Reminders. As the title suggests, this is a deliberately elusive and difficult work, which just supplies the reader with hints and prods to reconstruct arguments that Avicenna may have given in a fuller version elsewhere, either in discussion or in his longer treatises. If you don't mind my recording a personal impression, I would say it's the most difficult work of philosophy I've ever read, or tried to read, in Arabic. Rather unexpectedly though, the compressed and deliberately obscure style of the Pointers meant that it would wind up being perhaps his most popular treatise. It called out for later authors to explain it, provoking a long tradition of commentary. This is just one example of a more general phenomenon. As we've been seeing, the Arabic philosophical tradition drew inspiration from a range of sources, from Neoplatonic works, to the medicine of Galen and mathematics of Euclid and Ptolemy, to the theological systems put forth in Islamic kalam. Among these sources, Aristotle loomed largest. He had formed the basis of the late ancient philosophical curriculum, so it was only natural that in Syriac and then in Arabic, the study of philosophy and the study of Aristotle would remain nearly synonymous. Even highly original thinkers like Al-Farabi were content to devote a good deal of their activity to the interpretation of Aristotle. But, once Avicenna came along, things changed. The tradition of writing commentaries on Aristotle largely ground to a halt, with a couple of minor exceptions in the Eastern Empire and the very major exception of Averroes, far to the west in Islamic Spain. Centuries in the future, there would be a revival of interest in Hellenic sources in Safavid Persia, but for the time being it was a Persian from Khurasan who would have commentaries lavished upon him. Avicenna would be known by the honorific of leading master, in Arabic, a shaykh ar-ayis, fitting given that he certainly did shake up the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. We are accustomed to the idea of unforeseen consequences in history and history of philosophy. The revolution in the name of freedom, whose leaders lapse into totalitarianism after their victory. The adoption of pagan ideas to expound the theory of the Trinity. These are the narratives we revel in, thinking that history, like life, is what happens when people are busy making other plans. But in Avicenna's case, things unfolded pretty much as he intended. It's clear that he harbored ambitions of founding a new tradition in philosophy, and not just from his adoption of the phrase Eastern philosophy. He claims in his autobiography that his philosophy did not change in its fundamentals since the time he was 18 years old. But the style in which he presented that philosophy certainly did. In some texts, like The Healing and Fair Judgment, he engaged more or less explicitly with the peripatetic tradition. In The Pointers, he wrote elliptically as a challenge to train his students and readers. In still other works, he set his philosophy in the form of symbolic fables, one of which bears the enigmatic title Hayy ibn Yaqdan, or Living Son of Awake. We'll be hearing that title again. So Avicenna worked hard to earn the legacy that would be his. I suspect that if you informed him that people would soon think of him, instead of Aristotle, as synonymous with philosophy itself, he would simply have nodded with the satisfaction of a man whose carefully laid plans have come to fruition. But there was a price to pay too. Critics of philosophy now had a new target to aim at. When the next great thinker of the Islamic East, al-Ghazali, wrote a critical text entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, it was Avicenna he had in his sights. Attempting to retrench to the Aristotelian Old School of the Baghdad Peripatetics, Averroes responded that al-Ghazali's arguments were beside the point. Philosophy means Aristotle, insisted Averroes, and in his thought you will find no incoherence. But he was fighting a losing claim. Respect for Aristotle would never die completely, and there was certainly an awareness that Avicenna himself was in some sense an Aristotelian. Avicennism was even referred to as a peripatetic school of thought. Still, especially in the East, Avicenna, and not Aristotle, was the indispensable philosopher. Avicenna attracted not only criticism from theologians like al-Ghazali and reactionary Aristotelians like Averroes, but a degree of admiration from certain unexpected quarters. Much as had happened to Aristotle in antiquity, his ideas were absorbed into a variety of intellectual traditions. In the Eastern Islamic world, one particularly dominant example would be illuminationism, which critically reworked Avicenna's theories in something like the way he had reworked Aristotelianism. The theological tradition of kalam would also become suffused with Avicenna's ideas and language. Finally, the mystical Sufis would make use of Avicenna and even claim him as one of their own. There are passages of Avicenna which allude to the terminology of what was, in his day, already a burgeoning Sufi tradition. And to this day, there are interpreters who think that, under the hard-nosed rationalism of Avicenna's philosophy, you can discover the beating heart of a mystic. In my view this interpretation is deeply misguided, but there is no denying that Avicenna's philosophy would become a major point of reference for Sufi thinkers, including al-Ghazali in fact, but also the great mystic thinker Ibn al-Arabi. To say that Avicenna was no Sufi is not to say that there is no such thing as philosophical Sufism, and we'll be turning to it in due course. First, though, we should turn our attention to the ideas that made such an impact on the later tradition. Some of these were almost universally adopted, while others scandalized readers just as surely as the references to wine and sex in Avicenna's life story. For instance, Avicenna will demonstrate God's existence with a widely admired proof. The implications of that proof, though, will dismay Jewish and Christian readers as well as Muslims. In Avicenna we will find stunningly original thought experiments and fundamental distinctions that will provide the basis for the metaphysical theories of thinkers ranging from Maimonides to Aquinas to the Safavid thinker Mullah Sadr. Indeed, for all the criticism he provoked, it is hard to deny that he is the single most influential medieval philosopher. He was the only medieval thinker to exert significant influence in all three Abrahamic traditions – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In his autobiography, Avicenna tells us that his student and amanuensis al-Jusjani applied the following lines of poetry to Avicenna's disruptive life, pulled as he was from one patron to another. He became great indeed, to the point that there is no greater philosopher in the Islamic world. So you can't afford to miss next week's episode as I look at Avicenna's metaphysics here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode? By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Avicenna on Existence. I can't believe I haven't yet told you about my sister. She's a few years younger than me and also used to study philosophy, but she wanted a more exciting life and ran off to join the circus. Before long she became a skilled trapeze artist and married the bearded lady. After some initial confusion, the marriage was annulled. Her restless spirit led her to quit the circus though, and she moved into my basement, where she spends most of her time writing the scripts for this podcast, which I pass off as my own. Oh, one other thing you should know about my sister, she doesn't exist. I have never had a sister and, barring some very surprising news, am never going to have one. Yet it seems pretty clear that this sister of mine could exist. Everything I told you about her would be, if not likely, at least possible, well, apart from the idea that anything could be more exciting than philosophy. It isn't just my trapeze artist basement-dwelling sister who doesn't exist, but could have. There are an infinity of things that will never exist, even though they apparently could quite easily exist. They needn't be people. Unicorns and centaurs, the fourth of the five moons that are orbiting around the earth, the trophy that my favorite football team Arsenal won in the last five years. It seems obvious that such things could have existed, yet they never will. Then on the other hand, there are the things that do get to exist, but might just as easily not have existed. You and I, and every human who has ever lived or ever will, will fall into this category. In fact, if you look around you, you won't see anything that absolutely had to exist. Rather, the world is full of what philosophers would call contingent things. To call something contingent is just to say that it is neither necessary nor impossible. An impossible thing would be, for instance, a round square, or an activity even more worthwhile than philosophy. And what would a necessary existent be like? Let's set that aside for now, we'll talk about it as soon as my non-existent sister has written the next script. Philosophers refer to necessity, contingency, and impossibility as modal concepts, and to the whole phenomenon as modality, because these are three modes that can apply to things or to statements. You might find it strange to think about existing things in this context, and quite a few modern-day philosophers would agree. For them, it would be statements or propositions that are characterized by necessity, contingency, or impossibility. You can best think about this in terms of truth. A necessary proposition is one that is guaranteed to be true, an impossible proposition one that must be false, a contingent proposition one that might be true or false. For instance, I have a sister who was a trapeze artist. It's false, but could have been true. We already find this in Aristotle, minus the examples about trapeze artists. He talks quite a bit about modality in his logical works. He tells us, for instance, that if the two premises of a syllogism are necessarily true, then the conclusion that follows from them will also be necessarily true. We even saw modality turning up in his epistemology, when he said that knowledge in the strict sense must involve necessary truths. This was an aspect of Aristotle's logic that particularly interested Avicenna. His own extensive writings on logic respond to Aristotle and to his commentators, up to and including Al-Farabi. I've mentioned that Avicenna seems to have respected Al-Farabi more than any other predecessor who wrote in Arabic. Notwithstanding the story Avicenna tells about finally understanding the metaphysics thanks to Al-Farabi, his respect was based largely on their shared interest and expertise in logic. But as usual, Avicenna's respect for and use of his predecessors from Aristotle onwards didn't prevent him from putting forth innovative ideas of his own. Logic was certainly no exception. As I said last time, in the Islamic world Avicenna effectively replaced Aristotle as the author whom most personified philosophy. This was especially true in logic, since theologians and others trained in the later madrasa educational system were brought up on a diet of Avicennan logic, much as the philosophy students of late antiquity had begun with the Aristotelian Orgadon. Some of Avicenna's influential ideas in logic have to do precisely with the modal notions I've been discussing—necessity, contingency, and impossibility. As you might remember, Aristotle's own ideas about this were somewhat puzzling. On the one hand, he strenuously insists that there are some things that could be the case—could exist, could happen—but don't. He scornfully refutes a group of philosophers called the Magarians, who believe that there is no such thing as unrealized possibility. As Aristotle points out, this would eliminate the difference between being blind and just not seeing anything at the moment. In fact, it's perfectly possible to be able to see without actually seeing, for instance because one's eyes are closed. On the other hand, Aristotle argues in other contexts that what is eternally the case is also necessarily the case. For instance, he believes that if the heavens exist eternally, then it follows that they exist necessarily. That may be a seductive thought, but notice the apparent implication. If it is eternally the case that something doesn't exist, then it necessarily doesn't exist. In other words, my sister, who never has existed and never will, turns out on this theory to be impossible. That way of thinking of things seems unfortunate from our point of view, but generations of logicians and metaphysicians in antiquity and the early medieval period tended to work with precisely this way of thinking. It is sometimes called the statistical, or frequentist, view of modality. According to this statistical view, to say that something is impossible is nothing more nor less than saying that it never occurs, and to call something necessary is just to say it always occurs. Rather uncomfortably, this leaves us with only one remaining option regarding the contingent things in the middle, we'll have to say that they sometimes occur, but not always. For instance, to say it is contingently true that a human sleeps would be to say that sometimes humans sleep and sometimes they don't. That sounds okay when you apply it to general types of things like humans. Probably if no humans anywhere ever went to sleep, we would indeed be tempted to conclude that it is impossible for humans to sleep. But if you apply it to individual things that don't occur, it looks much less plausible. As I say, it doesn't seem to follow from the fact that my sister never exists, that she couldn't possibly exist. Nowadays, the statistical view of modality is long dead, and Avicenna helped kill it. In his logical system, it remains the case that propositions have statistical implications, even if they may seem not to. In fact, he criticizes philosophers like the members of the Baghdad school for overlooking this point. For instance, if I say the giraffe is tall, Avicenna would take this to imply that the giraffe is tall at some time or other. However, he also ties modality to the natures or essences of things. For instance, if I say that it is possible for humans to be trapeze artists, that will mean that it is compatible with human nature to be a trapeze artist. This will apply to every human, including humans like me who wouldn't even consider attempting to become a trapeze artist. Thus, we can now apparently say that there are some things that could be the case, but never are. So far, I've been talking about this as if it were solely an issue of logic, but it is also an issue about what exists, an issue of metaphysics. What might go so far is to say that for Avicenna, it is the issue of metaphysics. Therefore, just as it is compatible with my nature for me to be a trapeze artist or not, it is also compatible with my nature to exist or not. Here, we have arrived at what may be Avicenna's most famous philosophical distinction, the distinction between essence and existence. He makes the point with the example of a triangle. If you just consider the nature or essence of a triangle, and if you were paying attention in geometry class as a kid, you'll be able to see that a number of things follow from that essence. For instance, it must have an odd number of sides, and it must not be round. If you were paying more attention than I was, you might even be able to deduce that its internal angles are equal to the sum of two right angles. But one thing the essence of triangle will not tell you is whether it exists or doesn't exist. So here is something I share with triangles, albeit not the only thing, for instance they don't have sisters either. Both the triangle and I are contingent existence. This simply means that we have essences that are compatible with both existence and non-existence. In this we are unlike, say, round squares or carnivorous giraffes. These things cannot exist, because their essences preclude their existence, which is just to say that they are impossible. That's pretty obvious with the round square, since its being round will prevent it from being square and vice versa. We might express the point by saying that supposing the existence of such a thing would yield a contradiction. You might object to my other example though. You might insist that you're perfectly able to imagine a meat-eating giraffe, so this can't be an impossible existent. But I think Avicenna would disagree. As any good Aristotelian knows, it is essential to giraffes that they be vegetarian. The test for metaphysical possibility is not sheer conceivability, but what is compatible with the essence of a thing. Hence, not only are round squares impossible, but also non-rational humans and carnivorous giraffes. As a side note here, you might recall that there is a logical category called the proper accident, which is an accidental feature shared by all members of a species. The standard example is the ability to laugh, which belongs to all humans at all times. With his notion of essence, Avicenna can now explain very nicely what this means. Even though all humans can in fact laugh, something could still have a human essence, even if it lacked the ability to laugh. It just wouldn't be much fun at parties. By contrast, rationality is actually part of the human essence, so non-rational humans are genuinely impossible. The upshot of this is that we can envision three kinds of things. Existence that are necessary, contingent, and impossible. They have these modal features because of what their essence tells us about whether or not they exist. An impossible thing has an essence that rules out its existence. A necessary thing would have an essence that guarantees its existence. So far we haven't talked about whether there is anything like that, but spoiler alert, Avicenna thinks there is, as we'll find out next time. In between would be what in Arabic is called al-mumkin, the possible or contingent. Avicenna speaks of such things as having essences that neither deserve to exist nor deserve not to exist. Obviously, pretty much everything that does exist falls into this category. As I said, if you just look around, you'll find nothing but contingent things as far as the eye can see or the mind can contemplate. For Avicenna, such things need to be, as he puts it, preponderated to exist or not to exist. Since they do not exist under their own steam, so to speak, they will require something else to bring them into existence, if they are going to exist. This is what it means for one thing to be a cause of another, or at least a cause of its existence. With all these distinctions in hand, it would seem that Avicenna is in a position to give a straightforward metaphysical account of my non-existing sister. She could exist, but she doesn't. This should mean that her essence is compatible with existence, but unluckily for her, she has not been preponderated to exist. Here though, things get a bit tricky. Avicenna says in several contexts that those things that never exist at all are impossible. Gives the example of the mythical bird known as the phoenix. This looks like a mistake. Really what he should say is that there are two kinds of things that never exist. First there are things like round squares. As I said, these would be things whose essence immediately rules out their existence. But then there are also things that might have existed, but don't, like the phoenix. Why would Avicenna also call these items impossible, as if they were like round squares? Well, Avicenna himself had something in common with triangles, he was pretty sharp. So it's unlikely that this is just a mistake on his part. In fact, there are several reasons he might want to say that all the things that never exist and not just obvious absurdities like round squares are impossible. For one thing, there is more than one way to exist. So far we've been thinking about what Avicenna calls external or concrete existence, that is existence out there in the world. But he also has the notion of mental existence. In this sense, my sister on the flying trapeze does exist. We've been thinking about her for a good 15 minutes or so, so she exists in our minds. By contrast, something that really didn't exist at all would be something that never existed in any mind, anywhere, at any time. Perhaps because the mere thought of it would be absurd. That would give Avicenna a good reason to say that something that never exists must be impossible. If it really never exists, not even in the mind, then it must be inconceivable and hence impossible. Unfortunately, this is definitely not Avicenna's rationale. When he talks about the Phoenix example, he explicitly says that although it is impossible, it does have mental existence, which is actually pretty obvious. People do think about Phoenix's after all, though not as often as they used to. According to Avicenna, then, even things that are impossible can have mental existence, they just can't exist in concrete reality. So, let's try something else. Think back to what I said before about the two kinds of impossible things. Some like round squares must be non-existent by virtue of their very essences. Merely to suppose that such a thing exists would land you in absurdities. Not so for the Phoenix. No contradiction would arise if there were such a bird. But it might be impossible in a different way. Something apart from its essence might prevent it from ever existing. As we'll see next time, Avicenna talks about things that are contingent in themselves as being made necessary through another, that is, given a kind of guaranteed existence thanks to an external cause. So the converse might be true for things that are caused not to exist. They may in fact be contingent in themselves, but impossible through another. For instance, perhaps God prevents them from existing by not including them in his providential plan for the universe, in which case they are prevented from ever coming to be. Again, this would apply only to concrete existence in the world. The Phoenix seems possible to us, and it has mental existence, because we think about it, but God has arranged the world in such a way that the Phoenix can never be real, and it in that sense it is impossible. Here it's worth remembering that in and of itself, a contingent thing neither deserves to exist nor not to exist. Neither existence nor non-existence will be a default situation for it, rather it will have to be preponderated one way or another. So for every contingent essence, there are two ways things could go. Either there is a cause that makes it exist, in which case it necessarily follows that it will exist, and then it is necessary through another. Or there is a cause that makes it not exist, in which case it is rendered impossible. I should hasten to add that Avicenna doesn't spell this out the way I've just done. In particular, he doesn't give us the nice distinction between two kinds of impossible things, the absurd ones like round squares and the apparently possible ones like Phoenix's. He just says that in general, what never exists is impossible. The line of thought I've just sketched though would explain why he says that. Some things that never exist could have, but were caused not to. Others could not have been caused to exist, even by God, because they are intrinsically absurd. And both kinds are in a sense impossible. But the first kind, like the Phoenix, is made impossible by the chain of causation that ultimately flows from God, which prevents the thing from existing. The second kind, for instance the round square, is impossible all by itself, because the thing's own essence guarantees that it will never exist. This solution prompts the following question. What does God have against my poor sister? Was it really part of God's providential plan to exclude her from the universe, along with those other unfortunate people who don't exist? This seems a bit harsh, especially since I could really have used her help writing these podcasts. It is more likely though that Avicenna is not thinking of the whole issue at such a fine level of detail. After all, humans all share the same nature, as would all Phoenixes if they existed, albeit that only one would exist at any given time, according to legend. Avicenna's deliberations about what is and is not possible, then, are probably at the level of the universal, and not the particular. Not me and my sister, for instance, but the universal type, human being. This relates to one of Avicenna's most controversial philosophical discussions, which concerns precisely this question of how God relates to particulars. After all, if God didn't go out of His way to make my sister not exist, then apparently He also didn't make any special effort or decision to make sure that I do exist. Does God's providence even extend down to the level of particular things? Or is He only concerned that the right types of things exist? In that case, He providentially ensures that there will be humans, but not Phoenixes, while giving no attention to the question of which humans exist and which don't. We'll have a chance to get into this issue next time, as we turn our attention to Avicenna's philosophical account of God. At least as much as his work in logic, this will prove to be an area where Avicenna exerts tremendous influence on subsequent philosophers in the Islamic world and beyond. At the core of his theory is the identification of God with wajib al-wujūd, the necessary existent. Already in this episode, we wondered a couple of times whether there is anything that exists necessarily. Avicenna thinks he can prove that there is indeed a necessary existent, and that this necessary existent can be shown to have all the traditional attributes associated with God. How does he prove these things? To find out, it will be necessary for you to listen next time, for Avicenna on God, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. God bless!
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, By All Means Necessary, Avicenna on God. There are, we are told, fifty ways to leave your lover, and there are probably at least that many ways of attempting to prove the existence of God. Some are the equivalent of telling your lover you just need a bit of time to yourself, not very persuasive and unlikely to work unless stronger measures are taken further down the line. Others are like moving to a new city without leaving a forwarding address. If this strategy doesn't work, then nothing will, but on the other hand it raises more questions than it answers. In today's episode, we're going to look at a proof like that, the one offered by Avicenna. Along with the famous ontological argument mounted only a few years later by Anselm of Canterbury, Avicenna's proof is probably the most influential and interesting medieval attempt to show that God exists. It was enthusiastically received, repeated, and modified by medieval thinkers writing in Latin, like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. In the Arabic tradition, meanwhile, it would be known as Burhan As-Siddiqin, the demonstration of the truthful. One sign of its pervasive influence is the widespread later habit of referring to God as wajib al-wujood, the necessary existent, a phrase we find even in the writings of staunch critics of Avicenna. One reason the proof was so popular, I think, is that it rigorously captures an intuition that really does underlie people's belief in God. In this respect, it is unlike Anselm's proof, which tends to strike readers more as a clever trick than as a philosophical articulation of the grounds of faith. Avicenna exploits our intuition that the things around us from giraffes to planets, and indeed the universe as a whole, could quite easily not exist. So the fact that the universe does exist seems to cry out for an explanation. Anticipating Leibniz, whose ideas can in part be traced back to Avicenna, we might say that there should be some sufficient reason why anything at all exists rather than not existing. God would provide that reason. Ultimately, everything other than God would exist because of Him. We might be tempted to press on and ask why God exists. The answer is that the explanatory buck stops with Him. Unlike giraffes and planets, God cannot fail to exist. He is, in other words, a necessary being, and in fact the only necessary being. That's basically the line of thought Avicenna follows, but of course his version is going to be a bit more complicated and tightly argued. First, we need to think back to the distinctions introduced in the previous episode. You'll remember that Avicenna draws a contrast between essence and existence, and explains that something will be impossible, contingent, or necessary depending on how its essence relates to its existence. If something has an essence that precludes its existence, like a round square, then it obviously cannot exist. It is impossible. Contingent things will have essences that are in themselves open, or neutral, with respect to existence. Considered in themselves, they might exist or not exist. To explain why they exist, or don't exist for that matter, some cause needs to intervene, to preponderate them to existence or non-existence, as Avicenna would put it. Finally, a necessary existent would be that whose essence guarantees its existence. Now, what Avicenna wants to do is to prove that there is indeed a necessary existent. This of course would be God. To deny that there is any such thing would mean insisting that everything that exists is contingent, since there are clearly no impossible things that exist. So let's consider that scenario. Could it really be the case that everything that exists, exists contingently? It might seem so. Of course, each contingent thing will need some cause other than itself which will preponderate it to exist. Since that cause will itself be contingent, it will in turn need another cause to make it exist, and so on. An infinite regress seems to be looming here. Where will the sequence of preponderating causes end? But this is actually not the problem raised by Avicenna, and rightly so. To simplify matters, we can see why if we suppose that the sufficient cause of your existence is your mother. She had a cause too, namely your grandmother, who was caused by your great-grandmother, and so on. This sequence may go off into infinity, but so what? Each mother has a mother, so nothing is uncaused. The only problem would be if the causal sequence cannot be infinite for some reason, for instance because the universe has not existed eternally. But Avicenna is not the man to say that, because as we'll see, he thinks the universe is indeed eternal. Instead, Avicenna asks us to think about the entire collection, or aggregate, of all contingent things. In other words, we should consider the sum total of every contingent thing that exists now, has ever existed, or ever will. Now, what is the status of this collection of things? Obviously it isn't impossible, because it does exist. Rather, the collection as a whole is presumably contingent. This is the point where Avicenna is articulating the basic intuition that the whole universe, with its entire history, could have failed to exist. But if the whole aggregate is itself contingent, then it must obey the rules that apply to any contingent thing. In other words, it must have an external cause that preponderates it to exist. Now Avicenna pounces. The external cause is certainly not impossible, since it would never exist in order to serve as a cause. Nor can it be contingent, since then it would be included within the big aggregate of all contingent things that it causes. That leaves only one possibility, namely that the external cause is necessary. Thus, we have shown there is a necessary existent, known to its friends as God. It might seem that we could avoid the conclusion by rejecting Avicenna's assumption that the aggregate of contingent things is itself contingent. Okay, each thing inside the collection is contingent, but does that mean that the collection as a whole is contingent? We might consider a mathematical parallel here. Avicenna's aggregate looks a lot like a mathematical set, and sets frequently have features that their members do not. For instance, the set of numbers is not a number. Or if you stopped paying attention in math class when you were 13 years old and don't like that example, think of a clock. The parts of the clock might each be small, even though the clock as a whole is big. In general then, wholes don't automatically share the features of their parts. So maybe the whole collection of contingent things isn't contingent after all. It might be necessary. Translating that into less technical language, this would mean that the universe, past, present, and future, has no external cause. Instead, it simply must exist, and requests for an explanation of its existence are wrong-headed. That sounds like the sort of thing that a modern day atheist might say, so it's a bit surprising to see that Avicenna is fairly relaxed on the point. He sees that an opponent might raise this objection against his proof, and as if shrugging his shoulders, says that in that case, the opponent would just be giving him what he wants. After all, he is out to prove that there is a necessary existent. The opponent has actually admitted that, it's just that the opponent thinks that this necessary existent is the universe itself. So as Avicenna says, in a way, this is what was sought. The objection is no objection at all, but a capitulation. Unfortunately for Avicenna though, we can now see that his ingenious proof has not gotten him as far as he might have hoped. Perhaps there is a necessary existent, but it turns out to be the universe itself. Or maybe there are even many necessary existents. Perhaps there are many gods, as in pagan belief. Or maybe the necessary things aren't even divine. We might think that numbers necessarily exist, for instance. Or platonic forms. Avicenna may as well go around wearing something that says, I proved there is a necessary existent and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. Unless, that is, he can show us that the necessary existent, established by his argument, is to be identified with the god worshipped in Islam. Avicenna now turns to this further task with great energy, devoting lengthy sections of his various works on metaphysics to showing that a necessary existent must indeed have all the attributes we would associate with God. It turns out, or so he will argue, that necessary existents implies a wide range of other features, such as uniqueness, immateriality, wisdom, power, and generosity. Necessity thus becomes the core idea in Avicenna's understanding of God. In this, he is radically departing from the Aristotelian tradition. Before Avicenna, it was traditional to prove the existence and features of God by reasoning from features of the world we see around us. For instance, Aristotle himself had argued that we need an immaterial divine mover to explain the eternal motion of the heavens. Other arguments invoked the perfect design of the universe to prove that there is a wise and powerful Creator. Avicenna, by contrast, argues that there must be a necessary existent if anything whatsoever is to exist at all. Then, he extracts the entire range of familiar divine attributes from that notion of a necessary cause. That turns out to be a rather laborious enterprise, because Avicenna needs to argue for each individual attribute one at a time. I'll just give you a couple of examples. The first thing he needs to do, of course, is show that there is only one necessary existent since God is unique. Avicenna's argument is ingenious. He asks us to imagine that there are more than one necessary existents, and then he'll show that this would lead to absurd consequences. To keep it simple, let's just suppose that there are two necessary existents, and to make it fun, let's call them Buster and Charlie. Now, obviously, neither of them can be in any way a cause for the other. If Buster were a cause for Charlie, then Charlie would be causally dependent on Buster. But being causally dependent means being contingent, and we are supposing that Charlie is necessary. Obviously, the same goes for the reverse. Buster cannot be dependent on Charlie either. So for both to be necessary, Buster and Charlie must be entirely causally independent. No problem, that's exactly what we'd expect since both are uncaused necessary existents. But now we can ask, what makes Buster different from Charlie? After all, there are two of them, and there must be some explanation for this difference. Obviously, neither Buster nor Charlie can be the cause of the difference. Then whichever one was responsible for the difference between them would be causally prior to the other. Nor can some third thing explain why they are different. For instance, if Charlie has a mustache and Buster doesn't, then Charlie's mustache is causing Charlie to be different from Buster and causing Buster to be different from Charlie, so the mustache is a cause for both of them, and neither of them are necessary. As Avicenna would put the point, there has to be some distinguishing or individuating feature that prevents our two necessary existents from being identical, and if both are uncaused, then this cannot happen. And if there is no way to explain how multiple necessary existents could be made distinct from one another, we must reject the idea that there are more than one. The necessary existent is unique. Avicenna gives a similar argument to show that the necessary existent must be simple and without parts. His idea here is that if a single necessary existent had parts, then something would need to distinguish those parts from one another, but then by the same reasoning we just used, the parts would wind up being caused to be different from each other and then they would not be necessary. But how can a necessary existent have contingent parts? The necessary existent then is not only unique but simple. Avicenna uses the same word for both features, saying that the necessary existent is wahid, or one. This makes it clear, in case we missed it, that he has just given us a philosophical version of the Muslim doctrine of God's oneness, or tawhid, a typical illustration of how he conceives of philosophy's relationship to the faith of Islam. On this basis, he can quickly take another step towards establishing the divinity of the necessary existent by pointing out that a simple thing must be immaterial, since all material things have parts. So far then, Avicenna claims to have shown that something exists necessarily, and that with necessary existents, just as in the movie Highlander, there can be only one. This means that the necessary existent will be unique, simple, and immaterial. It is starting to sound more and more like God, and the next step will get us closer still. Avicenna continues to pursue the line of thought we've just been following, by emphasizing that the necessary existent can have no connection to matter whatsoever. After all, matter in the Aristotelian framework is one of the four kinds of cause, and a necessary existent can have no cause. What would such an immaterial thing be like? Well, it would have to be an intellect, because, as we'll see in the next episode, Avicenna equates thinking with immaterial activity. Indeed, it must be a perfect, separate intellect, not an intellect like the one you or I have, impaired by being related to a physical body. Now we have reason to affirm such traditional divine attributes as knowing and wise. But is it a move Avicenna is entitled to make? Even if we agree with him that intellects are always immaterial, is it really so obvious that anything immaterial has to be an intellect? Yes, says Avicenna. Thinking is an activity that will belong to any immaterial thing as long as it is not obstructed by being involved with matter. So, that's a sampling of Avicenna's arguments for his claim that a necessary existent would have all the features we associate with God. Of course, each of the arguments needs to be assessed on its own merits. Personally, I find some more convincing than others. For instance, I am not all that impressed by that last move of claiming that anything immaterial is an intellect. Avicenna seems to be simply assuming that intellectual thinking is the only immaterial activity there could possibly be. Notice also that, since Avicenna adopts a piecemeal approach and derives each traditional divine attribute from necessity, one at a time, someone might accept the initial proof for the necessary existent while rejecting his arguments for the various attributes. Such a critic could thereby stop short of accepting the existence of God. Or, the critic might agree that there is such an existent and that it has some of the attributes Avicenna tries to establish, but not all of them. For instance, perhaps it is unique and simple, but not an intellect. Another line of attack might focus on the original proof itself. Here, perhaps the most obvious potential point of weakness is Avicenna's fundamental idea that if something does exist and might not have existed, then it must have some external cause. The atheist objector might say that the universe just happens to exist, with no explanation and no cause, yet without being necessary. This would be an incoherent proposal on Avicenna's understanding of contingency, since for him, something's being contingent just means that the thing needs a cause to preponderate it to exist. The challenge for the atheist, then, would be to propose another conception of contingency, according to which the universe could just happen to exist without being necessary and without having any cause. The universe would be like the sequels to the first Highlander movie, whose existence is inexplicable. Avicenna's philosophical theology certainly was attacked later in the Islamic world, but not really from that direction. His fundamental proof of the necessary existent was popular, if not universally accepted. One critic was of Verroes, who was enough of a dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian to object to the proof on methodological grounds. He insisted that God's existence has to be shown on the basis of features of the natural world, as Aristotle had done. Thus, for a Verroes, we need to go through physics to prove that God exists. We can't do it with this independent metaphysical argument devised by Avicenna. The more mainstream view, though, was that Avicenna had gone too far by trying to infer all of God's features from his necessity. After all, you can think that God necessarily exists without thinking that everything about God is necessary. But this is precisely what Avicenna thought, which leads him to some rather controversial conclusions. The most obvious problem is that for Avicenna, God must cause the universe to exist. God can have no features or relations that are contingent, so his causing the universe must be something he does necessarily—out with freely-willed gratuitous and generous creation, and in with a necessary emanation of the universe, such as we saw in late antique Neoplatonism. As Avicenna says, God is necessary in himself, but the things that come from him are necessary through another. In other words, their own essences are contingent, so in themselves, they could fail to exist. But once God is in the picture, they absolutely have to exist, because God makes them exist and everything he does, he does necessarily. As we'll see, authors like the theologian and philosopher Alhazali were appalled by this suggestion and chose to fight Avicenna on the ground of the eternity of the universe. Alhazali wanted to insist that the universe is not eternal, and his main reason for this was that he wanted to preserve God's absolute freedom in opposition to the necessitarianism of Avicenna's theory. A further sore point in the later tradition concerns Avicenna's claim that God is an intellect. That itself was not an unpopular claim, at least few Muslims would want to deny that God is wise and knowing. The difficulty was, rather, the manner in which God knows. In one of the most heavily criticized and frequently discussed parts of his treatment of God, Avicenna raises the question of whether, and how, God can know about particular things. There is good reason to think he could not. Suppose that I go to the zoo, admire the giraffes, and then go home and watch a Buster Keaton short film. Ironically, given that that sounds like a perfect way to spend a day, God's very perfection would prevent him from tracking my movements with his knowledge. To do so, he would have to change, first knowing that I am at the zoo, then, a few hours later, knowing that I am chuckling at Keaton's sublime slapstick. But Avicenna must insist that God cannot change. How can he change, if everything about him is necessary? After all, in order to change, it has to be possible for something to be different and then, for that possibility to be realized. But with God there are no unrealized possibilities. There is only necessity. Nor is God's unchanging nature the only problem here. Avicenna adheres to the long-established principle which we first saw with Aristotle and have revisited more recently in the interview about Al-Farabi with Deborah Black, that the best kind of knowledge is universal and necessary in nature. We can apply this kind of high-grade knowledge or understanding to the world around us because we become aware of particular things that fall under universal concepts. For instance, I might universally know that giraffes are ruminant animals. So when I come across Hiawatha, who is a particular giraffe, then I can deploy this understanding and conclude that Hiawatha is a ruminant. But God, being a perfect separate intellect, should have only the most perfect kind of cognition, namely knowledge that is universal and necessary. Of course, that fits in perfectly with Avicenna's general claim that everything about him is necessary. So this is one bullet Avicenna is willing to bite. He says that God does know particulars but in a universal way. He gives the example of a particular eclipse which God could know about by timelessly knowing the necessary laws of celestial motion. As the creator of all things, God has a universal knowledge which covers all of what He has created. Again, this would provoke massive criticism among later authors. The Qur'an states that not even the weight of an atom in the earth or in heaven is hidden from God. Avicenna quotes this verse from Scripture in his discussion of God's knowledge, proclaiming that He has once again supplied a philosophical elucidation of Islamic belief. But for many readers this was a bluff. For them, a necessary existent that knows things only universally and not one at a time could not be equated with the personal untrammeled God of the Revelation, the God who is, as the Qur'an states, closer to man than His jugular vein. We'll see a range of criticisms in this vein before long when we get to Al-Ghazali and other opponents of Avicenna's necessitarian presentation of God. But we're not done with Avicenna yet. Next time we'll be looking at what is, along with the proof of the necessary existent, his most famous argument. This is the flying man thought experiment. It asks us to imagine someone being created by God in mid-air, without any access to the sensory world around him, and to consider what such a person would know about himself. As much as I hate to leave you hanging, though, for the month of August I'll be on my usual summer break. I'll be writing some more podcast scripts and quite possibly spending some time in a Bavarian beer garden or two. If only that were not merely possible, but also necessary. So please join me again in September, when I'll be putting out onto the airwaves a newly created episode on Avicenna's views about the soul and self-awareness, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Into Thin Air. Avicenna on the Soul. One of the most popular weapons in the arsenal of contemporary philosophy is the thought experiment. It's gotten so you can't venture into any department of philosophy without being asked whether you'd be willing to shove someone off a bridge to block a train before it hits a bus full of school children. Or suppose that your best friend stepped into a Star Trek-style teleportation device, and two identical people popped out at the far end instead of just one. In such a circumstance, would you be willing to buy both of them a birthday present? Thought experiments are nothing new though. Already in antiquity, Aristotle had asked what would happen if there were another universe. He concluded that the Earth in that universe would need to converge on the same natural place as the Earth here, since the two Earths share a nature. Thus the two universes couldn't possibly remain distinct. Which reminds me of my favorite example of a thought experiment from late antiquity. Plotinus wonders whether an eye on the outside of a second universe placed next to ours would be able to see our own universe. He concludes that it would not, since sensation works through a universal sympathy that binds our single universe together. The use of this method in philosophy raises a number of interesting issues, especially when we are considering scenarios like these that are so remote from our experience. Here it may help to draw a distinction between strict impossibility and inconceivability. It is not interesting or helpful to ask what would happen if 2 plus 2 were 5. That's just incoherent and so inconceivable. But it is possible, and philosophically useful, to think about conceivable scenarios like the ones I've mentioned. Such scenarios are almost certainly never going to come about, no matter how long we hang around on railway bridges. Yet they elicit our intuitions about various philosophical issues, from ethics to morality to cosmology. And intuitions are crucial in philosophical reflection, often providing its starting points or objections to what seemed to be a promising theory. So it makes sense that in the Islamic world, the champion of thought experimentation was the champion of philosophy itself, Avicenna. No thinker in any medieval tradition makes more eager or effective use of such scenarios. This probably relates to the ideas about philosophical inquiry I touched on in the episode about his life and works. As we saw there, he believed that intellectual progress is made by finding the linking or middle terms of syllogistic arguments. A thought experiment is not in itself a syllogism, but it can prompt you to reflect more effectively and help trigger an intuitive insight of that elusive middle term. More modestly, the experiment might just guide you towards the right conclusions, for which you could then seek a good demonstrative proof. So Avicenna was a devoted user of thought experiments and other ways of prompting himself and his readers to reach new insights. You'll remember that he wrote a work called Pointers and Reminders. It asks the reader to do most of the work by just hinting and alluding to the arguments that constitute Avicenna's philosophy without actually laying out those arguments. His most famous thought experiment is explicitly labeled as such a pointer or reminder, a tonn bich. It appears in several of his works and is clear that he was very pleased with it. Here's how it goes. Avicenna asks us to imagine someone being created out of thin air, and indeed into thin air, all at once and as a perfectly functioning adult. In one version, he actually tells you to imagine yourself suddenly being created this way, but I'll stick with the third person version. So this man is suspended or flying or falling in mid-air. His vision is somehow veiled, and there is no noise. Also, he isn't touching anything, not even the ground, and his limbs are splayed out so that he is not even in contact with his own body. Thus, he is in a state of total sensory deprivation. Furthermore, he has only just been created, so he has no memory of ever using any of his senses. So now the big question, will this person be aware of anything at all? He won't know that his own body exists, whether his limbs or his internal organs. And yet Avicenna insists he will nonetheless be self-aware. He will have a knowledge, Avicenna says, of his own essence or self. So what does that prove, other than that Avicenna's late-night wine drinking sessions bore some serious fruit? The flying man thought experiment is sometimes compared to Descartes' cogito argument, I think therefore I am, because it appeals to the inevitability of grasping one's own existence. But Avicenna is not trying to defeat radical skepticism, which was the purpose of the cogito. His argument is a different kettle of fish. In fact, he's out to fry more than just one fish. Most obviously, the flying man draws our attention to the phenomenon of self-awareness. Avicenna was fascinated by the fact that we are all always able to become aware of our own existence. The difference between us and the flying man is that our souls are full of the deliverances of sensation, of memories and thoughts. This might fool us into supposing that when we are self-aware, we are aware only that we are having some sensory experience, some memory, some thought. But Avicenna insists that self-awareness is more fundamental than any such mental activity. Indeed, all other mental activity presupposes self-awareness, since whatever I think or experience, I must always be recognizing it as my thought or experience. Of course, we are not always actively aware of this self-awareness, as if we spent all day constantly narrating our own lives to ourselves, like, here I am drinking a coffee, and now here I am drinking another coffee, and now here I am wondering whether I should stop drinking so much coffee. Rather, our primitive self-awareness is a kind of background foundation for all our mental life. Avicenna claims that it goes on even while we are asleep. To become actively conscious of it, we need to focus on it deliberately, and the flying man thought experiment is one way Avicenna helps us to do that. But this isn't all he wants to get out of the argument. He also points out that with the flying man, we have a situation where someone is aware that he exists, but is not aware that his body exists. This Avicenna claims shows that he is not his body, in other words that his self or essence is an incorporeal soul. He's invoking a general rule here, which goes like this. If I'm aware of thing 1 and not aware of thing 2, then thing 1 and thing 2 are not identical. This principle sounds plausible and is confirmed by study of that philosophical classic The Cat in the Hat, where thing 1 and thing 2 are indeed distinct. But is the principle really right? Consider an analogy. Avicenna could have known that he was drinking a glass of water instead of wine for a change. But given that modern chemistry hadn't yet been invented, he could not know that he was drinking H2O. He was aware of the water, but entirely unaware of the existence of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, or the molecules they make up. But that obviously doesn't prove that water is not the same thing as H2O. Likewise, perhaps the flying man is aware of a bodily self without realizing that that self is a body. For this reason, some interpreters have emphasized that Avicenna calls the thought experiment a mere pointer or reminder, a prompt that might help to shake us out of our materialist assumptions. And in fact, if Avicenna really wants to prove that the soul is immaterial, he has other ways of doing it. His favorite argument for this is not the flying man thought experiment, but one that cleverly uses Aristotle's theory of knowledge for metaphysical ends. We've seen numerous times that in the Aristotelian tradition, knowledge in the strict and proper sense should be directed at universals. So if I know about giraffes, I am grasping the universal giraffe rather than a given individual giraffe such as Hiawatha. But what makes Hiawatha an individual giraffe, distinct from all the other giraffes? The traditional answer, which Avicenna accepts, is matter. Because Hiawatha consists of one batch of matter arranged as a giraffe, while her cousin Harold consists of another batch of matter, Hiawatha is distinct from Harold. That suggests that if our minds take on a universal, rather than particular, form, then our minds must be immaterial. Here we might again be tempted to see a bit of Descartes in Avicenna. Though I'm sure Avicenna would have enjoyed being French with all the wine, I think we should again fight off the temptation to see him as a Descartes avant la latre. At least the cliche version of the Cartesian soul, a substance radically separate from the body which can interact with it in only a rather mysterious way, is not what Avicenna has in mind. Rather Avicenna considers only the intellectual part of the soul, what he calls the rational soul, to be separate from body in its activity. In fact, just like giraffes, the human soul needs matter in order to be the specific soul that it is. What makes your soul different from mine is that they are two separate forms given by the active intellect to two different bunches of matter. Whenever a bunch of matter is prepared in the right way, an appropriate form will emanate into it, just as in Al-Farabi's cosmological theory. Before this emanation into some particular matter, the soul doesn't exist. So seriously does Avicenna take this point that he uses it to show the impossibility of reincarnation. If a pre-existing soul turned up to inhabit a new body, then that body would wind up with two souls, the old one that is being reincarnated and the new one that has just been given by the active intellect. This causes Avicenna some problems at the other, more tragic end of the life cycle. Since the only aspect of the soul that operates without bodily organs is the intellect, or rational soul, it is only this rational soul that will survive the death of the body. But once there is no matter to be connected to, how will my immaterial soul be distinguished from yours, or from any other soul? Perhaps the difference is that each soul has a unique range of universal thoughts. You have spent your life studying frogs while I busied myself with giraffes, and this is what will differentiate us after death. Here it's worth noting that in an indirect way, the soul actually needs the body in order to continue its activities after death. After all, how could you know about frogs or I about giraffes if neither of us had ever been in a body? With the exception of a few basic first principles and concepts, Avicenna thinks that everything we know is derived from sense experience. The Neoplatonists had portrayed the body as a hindrance to wisdom and knowledge. Unlike them, Avicenna thinks that we absolutely need the body if we are to activate our intellects and live the life of the mind, whether during our embodied existence or thereafter. Avicenna innovates further when he explores our other psychological abilities. It's obvious that our mental lives do not consist solely of sense experience and intellection. There is also the faculty of memory, for instance, as when you think back to the blessed day when you first came across this podcast. There is also imagination, as when you try to conjure up an image of what your favorite podcaster might look like in person. If that ever happens, prepare to deploy your faculty for disappointment. Drawing on some suggestions in earlier authors, including the renowned Galen and the fairly obscure Nemesius, bonus points if you remember him, Avicenna develops a novel theory of what he calls the inner senses. The basic idea here is that just as we have five outer senses like vision, hearing, and so on, so we have five inner senses. These include memory and imagination, for instance. But Avicenna's most significant proposal here is the inner sense he calls wahm. The word is often translated into English as estimation, because the medieval Latin version of Avicenna's term was estimatio. But this faculty has nothing to do with estimating in the sense, for instance, of guessing how much something might weigh. Rather, wahm's basic function is to graph certain features of the world that are too abstract to be perceived by sensation, but not fully abstract and universal like the things grasped in the intellect. His favorite examples involve animals. When a sheep sees a wolf, it does not just perceive the wolf's great big eyes and frightfully long teeth, but also the wolf's hostility. So the sheep must have something in addition to sensation. It needs a faculty through which it can perceive something like hostility. That's why the sheep runs away, albeit not at a speed that will challenge the wolf much. So prominent are animals in Avicenna's treatment of wahm that I suspect he was driven to hypothesize the faculty largely because he didn't think it was possible to explain the complexity of animal behavior in any other way. Still, this faculty is something that humans too share. Like sheep, even the most woolly-minded of humans, who might never attain to intellection, are still capable of perceiving features of the world that are not objects of sense perception. The hostility of a wolf, for instance, is something immediately noticed even by little girls in fairy tales, so long as the wolf is not cunningly disguised in a grandmother's bonnet. Avicenna uses another word here, which is difficult to translate, when he is talking about such features of the world, manah. In some contexts this could be rendered as meaning, or more broadly something that someone has in mind. For this reason it came into medieval Latin translations as intensio, and you'll usually see it translated into English as intention. But it should be clear by now, Avicenna doesn't really have in mind things you would intend to do. Rather, he is trying to explain how it is that our mental life can be so rich, something difficult to explain with only the resources of the traditional Aristotelian theory that has to get by with nothing but sensation, imagination, and intellect. By adding his new faculty of wahm, Avicenna can more easily explain how both animals and humans experience the world as something more than colors, sounds, smells, and so on. On the other hand, the word wahm also has a more negative connotation. It can refer to a misleading or wrong-headed notion. So Avicenna invokes this same faculty of wahm to explain the spurious impressions we form, including those that we can hardly resist even when we know that they are wrong, as in cases of visual illusion. I'd like to pause to dwell on the importance of non-human animals in the story Avicenna is telling here. I just suggested that were it not for the relatively sophisticated behavior of sheep and other animals, Avicenna might not have felt the need to posit the faculty of wahm. But once he did, he inferred that it should belong to humans too, and found other functions for it to carry out. Though it may not be obvious, we're seeing here how the history of medicine has an impact on philosophy. Galen, as you might remember, had proved that the soul's ruling faculty is seated in the brain. He proved that by doing dissections of animals, not people. The implications for human psychology were obvious, without Galen needing to cut open human beings. Avicenna's writing on medicine is deeply influenced by Galen and it's no coincidence that his theory of the internal senses makes an appearance in that context too. Inspired by Galen, he assigns his five inner senses to different parts of the brain. One of many subplots in the history of philosophy and science is the long-running debate about how much we have in common with animals. Perhaps the greatest push in the direction of seeing animals as somehow kindred to us has come from anatomical research and the psychological theories based on that research. But of course Avicenna thinks that we are capable of something that no non-human animal can do. We can think. This is thanks to our intellects, which as we saw have the job of grasping universals. If we are like animals and having outer and inner senses, we are like God in that we have this ability to engage in intellection. Also because we are able to grasp ourselves using our intellects just like God grasps himself. In a point closely related to the conclusions of the flying man argument, Avicenna points out that whenever we know something, we can also know that we know that thing. All knowledge, in other words, is at least potentially accompanied by self-knowledge. God's case is not so different. He is better than us mostly in that his self-knowledge is of a better object, namely himself, and that it never ceases. But his knowledge does have an intellectual nature, which is why, as we saw in the last episode, Avicenna thinks that God can only know particular things through a grasp of universal truths. Given that we are not God and don't have an internal and perfect grasp of everything we can possibly know, how is it that we go from not knowing things to knowing them? This is one of the most hotly debated areas in research on Avicenna because he seems to give two answers. The first is an answer we might call empiricist. He thinks that after encountering sensible things, we are able to arrive at universal knowledge through a process of abstraction. This process was a matter of great interest to Avicenna, who discussed in detail how we can use induction to generalize from our experiences to understand universal truths about the world. For instance, after seeing a number of giraffes, we might be able to make the universal judgment that all giraffes are tall. And that seems like a pretty good answer to the question of how we acquire knowledge. Why then, does Avicenna also give a second answer, which is apt to strike us as considerably less good? Usually that we receive forms and emanation from the separate agent intellect, the lowest of the intellects of the celestial spheres. Usually philosophers have a hard time explaining how knowledge comes about. Avicenna though is so good at this philosophy business that he's come up with two explanations. How could both be true though? If we abstract universal forms from sense experience, why do we need the agent intellect? And if we have an emanation from the agent intellect, why do we need to go through the laborious process of abstracting from sense experience? Probably the answer is that the two accounts are aimed at explaining different things. The bottom-up process of abstraction explains why we do need sense experience to arrive at knowledge. You will never get to know about giraffes if you have never had experience of a giraffe. The top-down story about emanation, meanwhile, helps to build a strong link between Avicenna's theory of knowledge and his cosmology. However as in Al-Farabi, Avicenna's agent intellect is the so-called giver of forms, the source of forms that are emanated into matter, for instance when plants, animals, and humans are generated. If the agent intellect is the origin of forms in such material things, and also an origin of the forms in our souls, that would guarantee that the forms in our mind are a perfect match for the forms in things in the outside world. Another advantage of the agent intellect is that the forms we come to understand will have somewhere to reside when we are not thinking about them. Suppose I come to understand all about giraffes, then take a break to think about sheep for a few months, but then I revisit my knowledge about giraffes. Where has the universal form of giraffe actually been existing this whole time? Not in my soul since I was thinking about something else, and not out in the physical world since there is no universal form of giraffe out there, only particular giraffes like Hiawatha. The agent intellect is a kind of permanent home or storehouse for these forms, guaranteeing that they are always available, ready to be downloaded, if you will, by those who have managed to get access to them. Here Avicenna is adopting and transforming the theory of knowledge we found in Al-Farabi. It's yet another example of how he innovates within the framework provided by the Aristotelian tradition, which provides me with an excellent transition to the next episode, in which we'll be hearing from the author of the classic study Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. So come to your inner-senses and remember to join me for an interview with Dimitri Gutas, which will be ready to be downloaded next week, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Avicenna with Dimitri Gutas, who is a professor of Arabic and Greco-Arabic at Yale University. Hi, Dimitri. Hi, Peter. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I thought I'd start with a few questions about Avicenna's life story and how it might have impacted his development as a philosopher. One thing that I guess immediately leaves to mind here is that whereas a lot of the philosophers we've looked at lived and worked in Iraq, especially Baghdad, so Al-Farabi, for example, and the other members of the Baghdad school, Avicenna was from further east in Central Asia. So I was wondering whether you thought that that had any significance for understanding his philosophical thought. Yes, as always, the historical context is important. The thing to keep in mind is that around the year after 950, with the fall of the central importance of the caliph in Baghdad, there was great decentralization both of political power along with which there came decentralization of culture. And many of the cultural centers and city centers throughout the Islamic world, from Cordoba all the way to Bukhara in Central Asia, tried to imitate and get some of the culture they had developed in Baghdad. One of those things that intellectuals were interested in, of course, was philosophy. There was a great spread of philosophical knowledge through manuscripts and through individuals throughout these areas. So in Central Asia also, and especially in cities like Bukhara, you had people who were knowledgeable about philosophy, if not philosophers themselves, insofar as the general upper class culture included philosophical argumentation and philosophical thinking on various subjects very much to a large extent. So Visenya grew up in that context in which intellectuals studied philosophy, and they argued about philosophical issues as it had been done like that. Right. But maybe they didn't have the same kind of institutionalization of philosophy. So there was no Baghdad school in Bukhara. That's right, Bukhara school. The difference in this particular case is that there was no institutionalized or not institutionalized or an established, let's say, sequence of teachers and students in Bukhara that would constitute a philosophical school in that regard. So Visenya was just an individual person who studied philosophy, both with teachers and on his own as he insists. And so to that extent, he owes the information that he got to the fact that this philosophical knowledge had spread all around, but the particular emphasis in density with which he worked, obviously, these are due to him. So that actually brings us to a theme that's very significant in his autobiography. He presents himself as having had teachers, but mostly as being a self-made man, intellectually speaking. Do you buy that? Is that basically right, do you think? Well, basically it is right. There's always the truth is perhaps a bit tweaked in that regard because of Visenya wrote the autobiography, I believe, and I have argued, to show precisely that human reason by itself is able to acquire knowledge, the highest knowledge, knowledge contained in the intellects of the spheres, according to the cosmology of the time. So he presents you the biography as one person who actually was able to gain knowledge all by himself without necessarily having a need for teachers. On the other hand, he did have teachers and obviously they taught him something. We know especially Natily, who came to teach him ostensibly logic, was actually both a physician and especially a pharmacologist. He edited the Arabic translation of the material medical Dioskourides, of which a manuscript, as a matter of fact, survives in Leiden University, and in which he also added, in addition to the Arabic names, Persian words from Tabaristan, where Natily was himself. And Avicem, in his canon, the canon of medicine, actually does use that version of the Dioskourides as such. So he certainly had teachers and he certainly had people from whom he learned, but he surpassed the level of his teachers very quickly. So from that point of view, he was a self-taught man. When you say that he's actually presenting himself as an example of someone who can mostly reach knowledge by himself, do you think the point of that is, literally just to illustrate that the theory must be true because it worked in his case? Or is it more like, I'm a genius? Or is it more like, look, you could do this too? Is it supposed to be some kind of encouragement to the reader? None of those three. I think he simply shows it as evidence that is what actually happens. So it is evidence for his philosophical theory rather than either to boost his own ego or for any other reason. I think that is to show that, well, this is what happens and there are individuals that can do this sort of thing. Well, and here is one. So looking now at the other side of the teacher-student relationship, in addition to having teachers, he had students. And we have one text, for example, called The Discussions, the Mubarak that, which is basically a series of interchanges between him and some of his students on philosophical texts. How significant do you think that these relationships were for him? Do you think they had a major impact on the way that his philosophy developed? Increasingly, as we study these texts better, we find out that it was indeed very important in the later stages of his life because these discussions apparently took place in Isfahan, that is the last 15 years of his life when he was in Isfahan, with his students. And these discussions took the form both of written discussions, because those who were not in Isfahan at the time would write to him questions, as would other scholars, and he would respond, and of course orally with those disciples, perhaps if not students, who would be around. And it is possible, if one researches a particular subject in these notes, to see a sequence of letters, an initial statement by Avicenna of a certain theory, a subsequent question by the disciple, you said this, but what about this point? Could you elucidate this point, please? And then Avicenna would come back and then go over the same theory, changing a few things here and there to make it both more intelligible and perhaps more cogent, the argument that he had made initially. So clearly doing philosophy, as I called it, the praxis of philosophy, was very much an alive thing in his milieu at the time. So the argumentation, especially along with his disciples, certainly contributed to him fine-tuning many points that otherwise may not have been elucidated by him. I consider this give and take with his students also a paradigm, a model for philosophical discussion that really gave a lot of impetus to philosophical thinking the following two, three centuries. Right. Okay, that's interesting. I guess another area where we see the significance of his pedagogical activity is just the way that he wrote. He adopts several approaches to writing about philosophy, and if you contrast, for example, the Shifa or healing to the Isharat, the pointers, or however you want to translate that, you would almost not even realize you're reading the same philosopher as far as the style goes, even though the content, of course, is very similar. I guess that that too is something that's basically inspired by pedagogical reasons, is that right? Yeah, that is correct. Avicennes seems from the very beginning, once he had studied all philosophy, all the different branches of philosophy, he developed this concept that he should have a project to unify philosophy, all the different parts of it that historically had been developed. There were so many inconsistencies, particularly Aristotelian tradition in certain points, incorporate into it issues that were important in his time and place, and these are primarily issues that had to do with religious life, and update philosophy and make it logically consistent. In addition, he wanted this new philosophy, this new synthesis of philosophy that he made to reach as many people as possible. For that reason, he wrote in different styles, all the way from expository to poetic. He has quite a few long poems in a very simple meter that had been developed before in the Islamic culture, Arabic poems, for purposes of instruction, because they're so easy to memorize. He wrote those, and he wrote the same theories in a couple of allegorical tales, as well as the pointers that you mentioned, which is a very elusive style, which should help the students to learn by prodding them on to try and understand precisely what he's talking about, and therefore do the research themselves, rather than spoon feeding them all the arguments. He experimented, and he wrote in all those different styles. This is very important, and also one of the reasons why his philosophy was also so successful, because people from every walk of life and with every kind of intellectual background, all the way, let's say, from mystics who are interested in more symbolic forms of expression, to hardcore theologians who wanted logical argumentation, to literary people who would enjoy a good poem, all the different levels of intellectuals would find something in his writings to attract their attention. I'd like to think that if he were alive now, he'd be doing a podcast, actually. Yes, as a matter of fact, he would be using, what's these things called now, the social media or something. The social media. Exactly. He'd have a Twitter account. Right. So actually, one thing about that is that from the autobiography and other sources, we actually know something about when he wrote which of these works. So in addition to the changing style that he's using, we can also track the change of his thoughts on certain philosophical topics. And obviously, this is something you've worked on quite a bit. So I was wondering if you could give us an example of a topic on which his thought actually evolves over time, despite his claim in the autobiography that he never changed his philosophical position since the age of 18. Yes. Well, basically, he says that he hasn't learned anything new since that age. He has not added to his knowledge since then. That's a bit different. So that is a bit different. And I don't think, again, that he's lying as such, given the purpose, as I said, for which he wrote the autobiography, this falls into that pattern insofar as if you have already, through your reasoning, discovered truth as contained in the intellects of the celestial spheres, who know everything, basically, all the abstract universal knowledge, then obviously, there is nothing more to add insofar as you have that. The issue, of course, is in all sorts of details that one can come up again. And towards the end of his life, he does have a few sober moments when he says that human knowledge is so limited, so every generation should do its utmost to increase the store of human knowledge. So from that point of view, of course, he did believe that knowledge is cumulative and everybody should try to do his best to acquire as much as possible for the next generation. What he meant, I think, by that statement that he had not really added to his knowledge is that he understood the structure of knowledge and all the basic points of it as it relates to the world and the universe. And therefore, he did not need to add anything else. What we do see, of course, is that he kept fine-tuning a number of his ideas. And the one that I found very interesting is that in his epistemology, a theory of knowledge, which is very important for Avicem, it was one of the main areas in which he worked, because since knowledge is all important, how we know is equally important. He had many discussions in his logical works, repeatedly in work after work, the same discussion about the axiomatic principles with which thinking begins. And he enumerates a number of things. And towards the end of his life, he adds, in addition to the other elements that we know axiomatically, which is when our senses tell us about something, this is direct sensory knowledge. When our inner senses tell us something, again, this is some other kind of knowledge that we have, whether it is accurate or not is another issue. Or when we hear in our environment about certain ideas, certain popular ideas, and which we espouse is another kind of knowledge that we have to all these different kinds, which call the principles upon which you can base your syllogisms. He added self-awareness, the knowledge of the self, that is that we are aware that we are thinking. And as we are thinking, we know that we are thinking, the second order knowledge, basically self-awareness, which gives us immediate experience of the world and of ourselves. So, in his general empirical approach to knowledge that Avicenna had, he added this further element of what he calls self-reflection, perhaps, aitya bhariya. And in that regard, he is able to explain a number of things that we know, especially when it comes to self-knowledge. So, this is an area where he certainly developed his thinking. And one, by the way, I should say, I believe, was really, if not taken up by John Locke, repeated by John Locke a few centuries down the line. John Locke may or may not have known Avicenna. He certainly knew Avicenna in the Latin translations that had been made. But at the same time, John Locke was also an Arabist and he could read Arabic. And he was friends with the first Laudian professor of Arabic at Oxford, Edward Pocock, Sr. So, there's a lot to be investigated. That was intriguing. So, instead of looking ahead to Locke, I want to ask you about his looking back to some of his influences. And I guess the obvious source to talk about here is Aristotle, who for Avicenna, as really for almost all philosophers in the Islamic world, at least until Avicenna, would be the most important philosophical source. How would you describe Avicenna's attitude towards Aristotle? Because on the one hand, he is very influenced by him, but on the other hand, he's critical, or at least very original, in terms of his approach to Aristotle. Well, he's both, as a true philosopher should be. He certainly was educated in the Aristotelian tradition. This is because it was the major philosophical tradition in the Islamic world already from the very beginning. The curriculum that he studied, as he says in the biography, is clearly the Aristotelian curriculum of studies, whose origin goes back to Andronippus' edition of Aristotle's works, as it was developed later in late antiquity. On top of that, he was not one that would believe blindly in anybody else's theories, unless he could check them himself. So he did check Aristotle's theories, and he found certain discrepancies here and there, which he said, fine, this is what we should correct and add to. And also, he found that there were no other philosophers who would lay any claim either to his allegiance or even to his credence, because he did not find anybody else. Specifically about Plato, he has to say that if Plato wrote only those things that we know about and what came down to us was available in Arabic, then certainly Plato was not really a philosopher that could be counted upon for any serious philosophical discussion. So therefore, he was Aristotelian from that point of view. At the same time, he felt that he could improve on a number of points, and this is of course what he does in all his works. In his metaphysics, of course, colleague Amos Bertolacci has written this wonderful book about exactly how Avicenna reshaped Aristotelian metaphysics in a sense, into new directions. And we still have to write a book about that. Another area where he made huge advances on the Aristotelian thought was the theory of the soul, the de animum of course starting from that, which he developed tremendously from that time, exactly in order to accommodate his more advanced theory of knowledge of the time. So there are all these areas which he improved, perhaps it's not the right word, where he advanced beyond, let's say, within the Aristotelian parameters, but he advanced beyond the stage at which Aristotle had left it. So it was, I think, the proper attitude for a philosopher to have for a predecessor. Great admiration, of course, for the work that the predecessor has done, but at the same time not blind allegiance, but trying to improve and correct whatever chinks there may have been, let's say, in the armor of philosophy. Yeah, I guess one thing that's always struck me about it is how he, even when he's got very different things to say about philosophical topics than Aristotle, for example his proof of God's existence is completely different from Aristotle's, he still tends to adopt an Aristotelian agenda. I mean, he might reorder the questions, so for example, the metaphysics, as Bertolacci's book shows, he tackles a lot of the same issues, but in a different order. On the other hand, speaking of his philosophical agenda, it seems like a lot of the time he's also thinking about a very different group of thinkers, namely the Muftakali Muns, or the theologians, practitioners of Quran, and I'm curious to know what you have to say about this. I mean, it seems to me that he's at the very least trying to address problems that they've raised, right? So there's maybe two rival agendas here, there's the Aristotelian agenda and the Kalam agenda. So how do you see Kalam as sort of feeding into the Avicennan project? Basically, I think Kalam was the dominant way of thinking among the theologians of his time, and by the time both have Mu'tazilis and beginnings of Asharite thinking as well, neither of whom Avicenna liked very much, the system of thought was so disparate. The theologians had this system based on the fact that only atoms have real existence, and each atom has accidents attached to it, which atoms are configured in every single instant by a god who creates whatever it is that instant he wants to create, denying essentially causality. This, as such, created great difficulties, of course, for Avicenna to accept as a system, because of course he was wed to the Aristotelian model of understanding reality. However, this does not mean that they were not discussing issues that he thought should be discussed and should be explained. Therefore, he took from the theologians what I would say is the problematic, the problematics of the issues, and he addressed and he tried to resolve them in his own way as such. Certain individual ideas that were around he certainly must have taken as well. For example, this very important theory that he has about the necessary existence is being the first existence. This, as far as we can tell, was before Avicenna, was an issue that was discussed among the theologians, and the very concept itself, the being that is necessary of existence, of Adjipa and Mujud. So, he did take that concept over and he found it very useful, but of course analyzing necessity in an Aristotelian sense, as he did later on. Nevertheless, he was able to incorporate earlier details from the theological system into his own, but primarily he simply took the areas that they discussed and tried also to discuss them and he provided a philosophical answer to them. By the way, the proof of the necessary existence, that's Avicenna. That is Avicenna. So, it's the notion of a necessary existence. The notion of a necessary existence, yeah. Okay, so that's a quick look at the sources Avicenna was drawing on. Let's now look at his reception in the later Islamic world. I mean, it goes without saying, if only because I've already said it in several of these podcasts, that he's the most influential thinker in the Islamic world, very influential on Jewish philosophy, on Latin Christian philosophy, and so on. So, I guess this calls out for an explanation and that's something I'll be trying to explain later on, but it doesn't seem too early to tackle that now. So, I guess one possible explanation is he's a genius, he has the best philosophical ideas, and that's probably true, but maybe that's not the whole story. So, what other aspects of his work do you think explains how he became so influential? Now, the first thing I think is that he was able to prepare a system in which the philosophical knowledge from earlier stages was incorporated and presented as unified system, and the different parts of it were interrelated and logically consistent. So, it was not simply one area, let's say metaphysics only, or theory of the soul only, or what have you, that he brought forward. He discussed all the aspects of philosophy, all the different branches of philosophy, in one comprehensive system. Encyclopedia of universal knowledge, let's put it this way, he was able to put together, and each one of those parts was internally consistent and logically verifiable. This is one. So, it had a logical force to it. Secondly, and that was his major innovation, he incorporated into this philosophy within basically his understanding of the workings of the human soul on the basis of Aristotle's The Anima, many issues relating to religious life. So, questions like prophecy, which was of paramount importance, of course, for all revealed religions, if prophets bring real knowledge from God, how do they get this knowledge? Related to that is religious practices, praying, fasting, visitation of tombs, and things of that sort. On top of that, he also incorporated certain things that went called paranormal activities, like veridical dreams. Some people say, well, you know, I had a dream and this dream came true, basically. As well as some even less paranormal, perhaps more magical, like the evil eye. So, all these phenomena Avicenna tried to explain within his philosophical system in a rational way, or as a scientist, you would say today, because he accepted their truth and their reality and he simply wanted to show, for example, for prophecy, he did not simply rest on what was then common in Islamic parlance as the concept of revelation. Well, of course, the Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad and gave him the message, but this, of course, is only to be interpreted symbolically as something. So, the real question is, how does a prophet, Muhammad, and the previous prophets get their knowledge? By working on human reason and the way in which human reason can arrive at knowledge which is contained in the active intellect and in the interests of the spheres, he was able to offer a scientific philosophical explanation of this phenomenon and so on with all the others. Because of that, people who were interested in philosophy could very well integrate in philosophical thinking their everyday religious life as well. It was not a separate chapter and he did this without also positing a conflict between religious knowledge and philosophical knowledge at the same time. So, this was a great advancement. And thirdly, I think, exactly as I mentioned before, he was able to express all these ideas in different styles and in different contexts and in different literary forms which were easily acceptable and understandable. I guess one cost that philosophers pay for being influential, though, is that the later authors who are reacting to them can sort of do whatever they want with them, right? They're dead. And I think that Avicenna, in part because he was so important, is a philosopher who was not just influential but was often misread and, well, appropriated, let's say, in various ways. So, do you think that it would be fair to say that he was an author who was frequently distorted in the later tradition? Maybe already within the first few generations? Or is he more someone who... I mean, did people actually understand what he was even trying to do? Very much so. He was not so much misunderstood as interpreted in very different ways that fit the purposes of those who were doing the interpretation, whatever those were, exactly because of the great success and popularity of his works and his thinking. After him, everybody wanted a piece of him. So, the various strands of intellectual lines that we have in the Islamic world after him, they almost all want to adopt some part of him and perhaps tweak it a little bit to make it fit what it is that they wanted to say. But among the intellectuals, in all traditions within Islam, I don't think there was any doubt as to what it is that he had done. As an example, I cite normally a certain Maliki scholar from Tunis, Mazni, who lived about a hundred years after Avicenna. We said precisely this, that Avicenna was the chief philosopher who was able to incorporate and explain religion through philosophical means. And the same thing was said 300 years after him by Intaimiya, the great Hanbali theologian. However, the members of other traditions, intellectual traditions within Islam, perhaps they were not as forthcoming in their appreciation and telling the truth because they wanted to appropriate Avicenna in their own particular way, as did the Asharite theologians within the Shafi'i and Hanafi traditions, as well as the Shiite theologians. In addition, Sufism, Islamic mysticism, which after Avicenna's time became more widespread and with the appearance of certain great thinkers like Nalabi, for example, also became a mainstream intellectual tradition. They had their own interest in appropriating some of Avicenna's ideas. So that we see very soon, about a century after his death, some pseudepigraphic works being attributed to him. And this continued to the next two, three hundred years. But one particular turn that was taken was to make a mystical philosopher out of Avicenna. Because of the way in which he expressed himself in some works, because of some of the allegories that he wrote, which work obviously in symbolic terms, it was very soon after him spread that Avicenna essentially had two kinds of knowledge to offer. One real knowledge, mystical knowledge, and then the logical Aristotelian, or logically verifiable Aristotelian one. And this continued throughout the centuries, especially in the Persian speaking areas in Iran, precisely because of Avicenna's presumed Persian origins himself, that his mother was likely Persian, but also in the West. I think Tufail in Spain, in medieval Andalus, was perhaps the person most responsible for initiating this kind of interpretation. He came to this philosophical tale of his, Hayb Niakzam, in the introduction to which he tries to make some kind of compromise between a logical approach to thing and a mystical approach to knowledge. The European scholars in subsequent centuries, especially in the 19th century, they were prone to very much see Avicenna as an oriental in mystical terms. They started the tradition of seeing some of his works, the allegorical works especially, as being mystical in nature, as having a certain oriental philosophy, etc. And this continued until very recently. But all this has nothing to do with the real Avicenna. It is much more interesting if one studies the history of culture, basically, both East and West, to see the kind of terms in it, but not as far as Avicenna himself was concerned. Well, you just mentioned a lot of the things that I'm going to be covering in podcasts that come with Tufail al-Razali and the integration of Avicennaism into mysticism. So there's a lot to look forward to, but for now, I'll thank Dimitri Gutas very much for coming on to discuss the real Avicenna. Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure. And please join me next time again on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Special Delivery. Al-Razali. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you have heard an awful lot of philosophy by now. How has it made you feel? Hopefully curious, entertained, and occasionally even enlightened. But it doesn't always produce these beneficial effects. Some people, unbelievably enough, actually think it is pointless and boring. Losers. Others find it all too gripping. Philosophy bothers them, and can even cause anxiety, and a kind of existential paralysis. We might associate that with characters in 20th century novels by Camus, Sartre, or Kafka, but it's something that happened already long ago to one of the greatest and most complex thinkers of the Islamic world, Abu Hamad al-Ghazali. In his philosophical autobiography, the Munkid Minad Dalal, or Deliverer from Error, Al-Ghazali speaks of a crisis brought on by reflection on the nature of knowledge. This was philosophy as illness, and the name of the disease was skepticism. As you might remember, ancient skeptics like Sextus Empiricus claimed that skepticism could be a road to ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. They reported that, once they suspended judgment about all possible topics of inquiry, they found that a deep and lasting peace settled upon them, freed as they were from the stressful search for knowledge. But one man's calm is another's calamity. When Al-Ghazali argued himself into a skeptical corner, he found himself not liberated, but frustrated, at an intellectual stalemate. This is one of two life crises he speaks of in The Deliverer from Error, the other being a far more serious breakdown in the summer of the year 1095. In that case, religious reflection on the meaninglessness of his daily occupation as a teacher caused him to stop eating, and even rendered him unable to speak. Only after deciding to devote himself fully to God and give up on his teaching position in Baghdad did he find peace in spiritual retreat. In much the same way, it was by seeking refuge in God that Al-Ghazali was able to overcome his crisis of skepticism. The argument that led Al-Ghazali to his impasse is reminiscent of a report about the pre-Socratic atomist Democritus. If you have an absurdly good memory, you might recall my saying in episode 9 that Democritus drew rather skeptical conclusions from his atomic theory. Our senses tell us that honey is sweet, for instance, but the sweetness is only a matter of convention. Really, there are only atoms and void. Democritus then imagined sensation saying to the mind that it is in no position to overturn the deliverances of sense experiences like this, for without the senses the mind could know nothing at all. Similarly, Al-Ghazali imagines sense perception complaining after it is corrected by the mind. He gives the example of how shadows look to eyesight as if they are standing still, but are known by the mind to be slowly moving as the sun crosses the sky. Another example, taken from Aristotle, is that the sun looks very small yet is known to be very large on the basis of astronomy. Stung by this chastisement, sense perception might say to the mind, how do you know that there is no higher court of appeal that could correct you, the way you have corrected me? You might be like a man asleep and dreaming, blissfully unaware that you could awake and understand things as they truly are. This argument undercut Al-Ghazali's confidence in the deliverances of his own reason. Formerly, not unlike an ancient skeptic, remember that as Sextus emphasizes, skeptic means someone who is seeking, Al-Ghazali had been relentlessly seeking after certain knowledge. He was, he tells us in The Deliverer from Error, simply born with an innate thirst for understanding. He proposed a kind of test that certain knowledge would need to pass. Consider one of your beliefs, such as the belief that 10 is more than 3. And suppose someone comes along with a staff and says, I tell you that 3 is really more than 10, and here is my proof. And then he casts down his staff, which suddenly and miraculously becomes a snake. As Al-Ghazali says, you would be bewildered, but that would not tempt you to believe that 3 really is more than 10. Even such snake-proof deliverances of the mind, though, could fall prey to the skeptical doubt raised about the mind as a whole. You might remember me pouring cold water on the idea that Avicenna's flying man argument plays anything like the same philosophical role as Descartes' cogito. By contrast, Al-Ghazali's skeptical argument does seem to do more or less the same job as the radical doubt at the beginning of Descartes' meditations. Like Descartes, Al-Ghazali sees skepticism as a challenge to be overcome, not as the reassuring outcome the ancient skeptics took it to be. But Al-Ghazali does not point to anything like the Cartesian cogito to get himself out of his skeptical fix. Instead, he tells us that it was God who released him. A light was unexpectedly cast into his bosom. It is through this light that we must seek the kashf, or unveiling, of truth, and it is given only by divine generosity. Here we have Al-Ghazali's life story in a nutshell. A philosophical train of thought winds up being derailed, but then put back on track with divine assistance once Al-Ghazali is granted a mystical insight that both transcends and guarantees the truths of reason. As the whole anecdote suggests, Al-Ghazali's attitude towards philosophy was an ambivalent one. He made careful study and careful use of philosophy in his writings, but he also criticized its pretensions. Ultimately, philosophy was only one facet of his many-sided thought. His various intellectual allegiances were disdainfully described by Averroes, who remarked that Al-Ghazali was an Asharite with the Asharites, a philosopher with the philosophers, and a Sufi with the Sufis. This is unkind, but anyone who has spent time with Al-Ghazali's works will probably be tempted to agree. He is a protean thinker, and each of his works seem to show the reader only one part of a larger picture. In trying to understand how the puzzle pieces might fit together, we should probably start where Averroes does in this remark—with Asharism. You'll remember that this tradition of Islamic Rational Theology, or Kalam, had been founded when the more tazalite-trained theologian Al-Ashari turned against his teachers. One of his greatest followers was Al-Jawaini, whom I quoted several times in the episode on the Asharites. In turn, Al-Jawaini taught a young Al-Ghazali in the city of Nishapur, in the northeast of modern day Iran. The setting of this encounter was one of a system of schools, or madrasas, named nidamiyya in honor of their sponsor, the pro-Asharite vizier Nidaam al-Mulk. These madrasas are something new in our history of philosophy in the Islamic world. We've seen philosophy in court settings before, with thinkers like al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna all receiving support from various aristocrats and even from royalty. But though I have spoken of some groups as schools, for instance the Baghdad Peripatetics, we have not yet seen philosophy being done in the context of state-sponsored educational institutions. The nidamiyya schools will change that, and the change is here to stay. As we'll see in more detail in future episodes, some parts of philosophy, especially logic, became a standard part of the curriculum in the madrasas that educated legal scholars and theologians beginning around this time. The presiding force behind all this, the powerful vizier Nidaam al-Mulk, was not only a contemporary of Al-Ghazali's, but even had him in his entourage for some time until he was assassinated in the year 1085. After that, Al-Ghazali came to Baghdad to teach at the nidamiyya school there, only to give up his post in the wake of his spiritual crisis in 1095. As with Avicenna then, the cultural ambitions of political rulers set the scene in which Al-Ghazali was formed. We have now moved on from the time of Avicenna though. He died in 1037, whereas Al-Ghazali was born about 1053, and, as I've mentioned once before, died in the exquisitely memorable year 1111. In Al-Ghazali's day, the reigning power was no longer the Buyids or the Samanids, but the Turkish Seljuks, who had the dubious fortune of being the dominant force in the Islamic heartlands when those lands started to come under attack from the European crusaders. Our new friend Nidaam al-Mulk was vizier under the Seljuks for about 30 years. His educational system was part of a development sometimes called the Sunni revival. After power was held by the Shi'ite Buyids for generations, it now fell into the hands of the Seljuks, who were Sunni Muslims. This enabled Asharite theology to become dominant across much of the Islamic empire. Meanwhile, even as the Seljuks were establishing and extending their power throughout Persia and as far as modern-day Turkey, the ideas of Avicenna were being established and extended throughout the Eastern Islamic lands. They penetrated into Kalam just in time to reach Al-Ghazali, thanks to his teacher al-Juwaini, who was the first theologian to integrate Avicennan philosophy with Asharism. Al-Ghazali adds yet another ingredient to this already rather heady mixture—Sufism. I haven't had much to say about this mystical tradition yet, and I'll wait a bit longer still to introduce Sufism properly when we get to the great philosophical mystic Ibn al-Rabi. But I should mention now that it has been a going concern in Islam since long before the 11th century. Already in the 8th century, the female mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya pioneered the characteristically Sufi genre of poems, declaring her love for God. More about her later. For now, I'll just say that al-Ghazali was drawing on a rich wellspring of Sufi tradition with his mystical leanings, just as he drank from Avicennan waters in philosophy and from Asharite sources in theology. So well established was Sufism by this time that he was at one point able to reside in a Sufi convent in Baghdad right across from his sometime employer, the Nizamiya school. All this provides us with a social and intellectual context for The Deliverer from Error, in which al-Ghazali tells us the story of his own development as a thinker. As an autobiography, it needs to be taken with a good dose of the skepticism described by al-Ghazali. He is using well-worn tropes in describing his spiritual journey. Some of these are borrowed from Galen, who likewise told of how he needed to overcome an intellectual impasse brought on by skepticism. In any case, The Deliverer from Error is structured not so much by al-Ghazali's life story as by an evaluation of four different paths to the truth. Three of them we have already met in this episode, Kalam, philosophy, and Sufism, while the fourth is an old friend, the Shiite tradition known as Ismailism. But it was no friend of al-Ghazali's. Whereas he finds something to recommend in both Kalam and philosophy, and finds his ultimate rest in the mystical union of the Sufis, the Ismailis can offer him nothing apart from taqlid. As you'll remember, taqlid means the uncritical acceptance of authority. In this respect, al-Ghazali's polemic is a familiar one. As we've seen before, accusations of taqlid were thrown around constantly in the formative period. Theologians regularly accused other theologians of slavish adherence to authority, while philosophers like al-Farabi happily tarred non-philosophers with the taqlid brush. Al-Ghazali repaid the compliment, pointing out that the philosophers are apt to follow Aristotle wherever he leads. But this is not to say that he would always consider authority a bad thing. Not unlike al-Farabi, he considers acceptance of authority appropriate for most people. But those who claim to be scholars should, he believes, earn that title, through careful personal reflection, the independent judgment that in Arabic is called ijtihad. Even Muhammad's status as a prophet is something he encourages us to confirm for ourselves. By learning about his deeds and sayings as gathered in hadith literature, we can see for ourselves that Muhammad was a paragon of wisdom and virtue. In this way, independent reflection can give us a reason to depend on authority, so that our acceptance of that authority is no longer uncritical or slavish. Of course, al-Ghazali claims that the Ismailis represent the opposite of this approach, since they encourage us to depend on the teachings of a divinely appointed imam for our understanding of Islam. He mocks them by asking what a pious Muslim should do if he finds that it is time to pray and does not know which direction Mecca is. If he waits until he gets an authoritative judgment from the imam, he will violate his obligation to pray at the appointed hour. So he should just do his best to work out the right direction to face during prayer. While this is a persuasive argument that religion does sometimes require independent judgment, or ijtihad, it doesn't really touch the Ismailis. After all, they needn't insist that we rely on the imam for all decisions in religious practice, only that on certain issues the imam's guidance is indispensable. When it comes to kalam, al-Ghazali yet again sounds like the hardline philosopher al-Farabi. You'll recall that for him, rational theology can play a useful, albeit limited, role by defending a virtuous religion against its detractors. In other works, al-Ghazali writes as an Asharite theologian, albeit an independent-minded and innovative one, so it's quite surprising to see him giving the same, rather reductive, defensive role to kalam here in the Deliverer from Error. His complaint about the theological tradition is more or less what you might find in al-Farabi or Avasana, or later in Averroes. The arguments offered by theologians do not rise to the level of demonstrative proof. Here we are witnessing a real change in the kalam tradition. Earlier theologians were usually happy to restrict themselves to dialectical disputes with one another, or at least give every impression of doing so. Starting with al-Juwaini and al-Ghazali, though, theologians will be much more self-conscious in their methods, rising to the challenge laid down by Avasana's rigorous and influential studies in logic and epistemology. Later Asharites, for instance Fakhr ad-Din al-Razi, will continue to make a careful study of Avasana. This will lead them to write works that preserve the dialectical character of the kalam tradition, but also to strive for argumentative rigor and proof, rather than just trying to score points off their theological rivals. It was from philosophers, and especially Avasana, that al-Ghazali learned to be so strict about demonstration, though Greek philosophers are lurking not far in the background. Aristotle, with his rigorous definition of demonstrative knowledge in the posterior analytics, is certainly relevant. It is also worth again mentioning Galen, who in a lost work called simply On Demonstration, turned Aristotle's strictures against their author, complaining that many of Aristotle's supposed proofs were actually nothing of the sort. They say that history repeats itself, and so does the history of philosophy. Al-Ghazali likewise complains that the philosophers fall short of their own high standards with many of their arguments. By philosophers, he of course means Avasana, whose metaphysics receives a searching criticism in al-Ghazali's famous Incoherence of the Philosophers. But he is not a man to throw out logical babies along with the metaphysical bathwater. In The Deliverer from Error, he has nothing but scorn for people who doubt the utility and reliability of logic. Indeed, he ranks the rules of logic, along with his snake-proof beliefs in mathematics, as being totally certain. The stakes here are in any case, like your average snake, pretty low. Al-Ghazali emphasizes that logic has no bearing on religious belief, and it would be a misunderstanding of both logic and religion to think that they could come into conflict. Yet again, we see al-Ghazali rather unexpectedly taking the side of the Baghdad school in a heated cultural debate. Had he been present when the Christian logician Abu Bishr Mata clashed with the grammarian As-Sirafi, it seems he would have been on Abu Bishr's side. Still, the certainty of mathematics and logic has unfortunate consequences in al-Ghazali's view. It can lead people into thinking that the philosophers always attain the same kind of certainty, whereas actually their writings are stuffed full of errors, especially when it comes to metaphysics. Referring back to his earlier incoherence of the philosophers, al-Ghazali reminds us that he has already diagnosed the failings of Avicenna in this regard. By contrast, the philosophers' views concerning natural philosophy can mostly be accepted, while their theories on ethics and politics are simply plagiarized from earlier prophetic traditions. Here, al-Ghazali issues another warning. Just as one should not think that all of philosophy has the snake-proof certainty of mathematics and logic, so one shouldn't disdain these two rigorous arts because of the company they keep. This, he says, would be like refusing to taste honey because it is being served out of a glass that is also sometimes used in surgical operations. Al-Ghazali then wants to do a bit of surgery of his own on the philosophical tradition, removing the falsehoods and leaving behind what is demonstrative. That makes him sound like he might style himself as a philosopher, albeit a rather critical one. But remember that al-Ghazali experienced doubt concerning even mathematical certainties until he received reassurance from God. Such direct contact with the divine can offer something beyond even demonstration. It is impossible to express this level of insight fully to those who have not attained it. Al-Ghazali uses the Sufi term dhauk, or taste, for the immediate perception of divine truth afforded the true mystic. He also offers a visual analogy. For the mystic to tell the non-mystic about what he has grasped would be like trying to explain colors to a blind person. And what about the rest of us, who are not so fortunate as al-Ghazali and have not tasted the sweetness of God or seen his radiance? Well, we should demonstrate whatever we can, following the philosophers as far as they can take us, which is not nearly as far as they claim. But we must also trust in the guidance of true prophets, who should be assessed and verified through careful reflection on their words and deeds. To those who say that it is impossible for prophets to receive a knowledge beyond that normally available to mankind, al-Ghazali asks, if you did not see it, would you think that there was a substance so dangerous that a tiny speck of it could destroy a whole town? Yet a spark of fire can start a conflagration that levels great cities. Or take the lethal power of opium, which is beyond human reckoning. In short, there are many things we cannot understand and predict, so there is no reason to reject the possibility of prophecy out of hand. Thus al-Ghazali pulls epistemological rank on the philosopher in two ways. He lays claim to a mystical insight that is beyond the reach of their arguments, no matter how solid, and he also points out that many of their arguments aren't that solid anyway. Next time, we'll be seeing how the pride of philosophers like Avicenna has led them into error according to al-Ghazali, and what punishment he thinks they deserve for their hubris. The sheikh of the philosophers will get well and truly rattled as we roll on with al-Ghazali's incoherence of the philosophers. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gepps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Miracle Worker, Al-Khazali Against the Philosophers. In his autobiographical work Deliverer from Error, which we talked about last time, Al-Khazali considers a piece of advice given by the earlier theologian Ahmad ibn Hanbal. The advice is that if you're going to argue with someone, you shouldn't carefully explain their views and then go on to refute them. After all, your readers might stop before you get to the refutation part. Better just to deny them the air of publicity. This is a lesson the History of Philosophy had already taught. Think, for instance, of the pagan Neoplatonist, Simplicius, painstakingly copying out quotations from his arch-enemy, the Christian thinker John Philoponus, in order to display their idiocy. With the result that modern day scholars are able to read the otherwise lost words of Philoponus, and even to publish them without Simplicius's accompanying polemic. In the words of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, who kicked over a lamp and started a fire that burned down the city of Chicago in 1871, oops. After repeating this bit of advice, Al-Khazali explains that he did not follow it when he was attacking the Ismailis, because everyone knows what they think anyway. But when it came to attacking philosophy, perhaps he should have listened to Ibn Hanbal. Repeating Simplicius's tactical error, Al-Khazali wrote a work summarizing the views of Avicenna, calling it Maqasid al-Falasifa, which means aims of the philosophers. This was followed by a second treatise called Tahaft al-Falasifa, usually translated incoherence of the philosophers, although the word tahaft doesn't quite mean incoherence, rather it means a trip or stumble. The tahaft then is a study of cases where the philosophers have tripped up, going astray by teaching false doctrines or simply asserting doctrines without sufficient proof. This well thought out project was itself tripped up in Latin Christendom, where for a long while only the Maqasid was known. More than a century went by until they finally translated Averroes's rebuttal of Al-Ghazali, the tahaft a tahaft, or incoherence of the incoherence. In Latin, it was known under the exciting title, destruction of the destruction. This led to the further irony that Latin readers knew of Al-Ghazali's polemic only thanks to the counter-refutation of Averroes. But until that happened, Latin readers took Al-Ghazal, as they called him, to be a faithful follower of the philosophical tradition, useful for his lucid and apparently sympathetic presentation of the theories of Avicenna. Oops. It is of course the tahaft that reveals Al-Ghazali's true intentions concerning the philosophers. There has been a good deal of misunderstanding about this, even among people who have been able to read the work. It used to be thought, in fact it probably is still widely thought, that philosophy more or less died out in the Islamic world after the 12th century. On this version of events, Averroes was the last to defend philosophy from the fires of religious criticism, and it was Al-Ghazali who set the blaze going with his tahaft. But in fact, as we'll see in later episodes, philosophy was alive and well in the later tradition. There's even a case to be made that, far from being the arsonist who incinerated philosophy, Al-Ghazali played a major part in helping it to survive and stay relevant in the East. He makes the important but tacit assumption that explaining and then criticizing Avicenna is the same as explaining and criticizing philosophy itself. This helped Avicenna to replace Aristotle as the main point of reference. Also, while Al-Ghazali did criticize Avicenna, he did so selectively. He was very clear in his Deliverer from Error that some aspects of philosophy should be welcomed, especially logic. This is why I want to insist that the tahaft isn't about some sort of systematic incoherence in Avicenna and philosophy. It is not a wholesale rejection of the tools bequeathed by the philosophical tradition. Rather, it identifies the places where Avicenna has stumbled, attempting to go beyond what can be established with rational demonstration. Which is not to say that these are only minor and forgivable mistakes in Al-Ghazali's eyes. At the end of the tahaft, he identifies three philosophical teachings that are completely unacceptable and qualify for the label of heresy. They are the claims that the universe is eternal rather than created, that God has no knowledge of particular things but only of universals, and that only the soul lives on after death, with no possibility of bodily resurrection. Especially the second doctrine, about God's knowledge, is one that is specifically associated with Avicenna. Al-Ghazali is saying here that Avicenna and his followers have actually abandoned Islam. They are not merely wrong, they are apostates and can be punished accordingly. On other topics, the philosophers are wrong, but no more so than other misled Muslims, for instance the Mu'tazilites. Then, there are some cases where the philosophers are arguing for the right conclusion but not doing a good enough job of it. An example is their attempt to prove that the soul is immaterial. Al-Ghazali probably agrees that the soul is not a body, he just doesn't think Avicenna and friends have managed to prove it beyond doubt. Al-Ghazali is very interested, one might almost say obsessed, with the question of whether arguments are demonstrative. This is another legacy he passes on to later Muslim theologians. The way he proceeds in the tahafut anticipates what we will find among generations of authors in the Ash'arite tradition. Doctrines and arguments, especially from Avicenna, will be laid out and then criticized as false or simply inadequate. We often find Al-Ghazali saying that a certain philosophical argument is the product of what Avicenna called wahm, or estimation, the faculty that sheep use to perceive the hostility of wolves, but in humans it is also responsible for misleading impressions that we find almost impossible to resist. For instance, it is your wahm that would tell you that there must be empty space surrounding the physical universe, something Avicenna firmly denies. Turning Avicenna's idea of wahm against its author, Al-Ghazali says that such philosophical arguments as those offered to prove the eternity of the world proceed on the basis of wahm and misleading supposition. More careful reflection shows that the universe need not be eternal, and in fact that anyone who says it is eternal is effectively denying that God created it. This is the first topic taken up in the tahafut. Establishing the dialectical pattern he'll use throughout, Al-Ghazali summarizes several arguments to show that the universe is eternal and refutes each one in turn. These arguments are clearly drawn from Avicenna, and in fact Al-Ghazali is on pretty shaky ground with his assertion that all the philosophers would endorse them. In fact, plenty of philosophers who wrote in Arabic denied the eternity of the universe. Among Muslims there were al-Kindi and al-Razi and we could add the Persian thinker Miskohe. Among Jews there was Sa'adiyya Gaon, who, like al-Kindi, borrowed arguments from Philoponus to show that the universe was created with a first moment in time. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this was the mainstream philosophical view before Avicenna. But Al-Ghazali isn't going to let that bother him, and mentions only Plato and Galen as exceptions to the supposedly universal philosophical belief in eternity. Like the universe according to Al-Ghazali, my time is limited, so I can't go through all the arguments and counterarguments we find in the tahafut. I'll focus on the first one, which Al-Ghazali identifies as the most persuasive argument of the philosophers. On their behalf, he argues that a temporally limited effect cannot come from an eternal cause. God is eternal, so his will should likewise be eternal. And if he has an eternal will to produce the universe, then surely the universe too will be eternal. Not necessarily, replies Al-Ghazali. God could eternally will that something happen at a certain time. For instance, he may always have willed that you would be listening to this episode right now, in which case I'm grateful for his help with building the podcast audience. The philosophers aren't persuaded. If nothing at all exists, then what could lead God to choose one moment rather than another for the universe to begin? Something must change to make the moment he chooses be the right moment for him to create. We are given the culturally resonant example of a man pronouncing that he will divorce his wife. This must be effective either immediately, or contingent on some other event. The husband could, for instance, say that the divorce will be official as soon as the woman enters their house. But in God's case, there are no other events that could trigger the creation, so the universe must exist whenever God wills it, namely eternally. Again, Al-Ghazali admits that this is a seductive argument, but it falls below the level of demonstration. The divorce case is just an example, not a proof that eternal decisions must produce eternal effects. Unless the philosophers can give further argument for their claim, they and Al-Ghazali will just have to follow the example of the divorcing couple and go their separate ways because of irreconcilable differences. The philosophers try to do better by saying that before the universe exists, all moments of time are indistinguishable. Any moment would do as well as any other to be the time at which the universe begins to exist. This means that in order to create, God would have to choose one moment arbitrarily. But how can God do anything arbitrarily? We saw this argument before in Ahrazi, who proposed as a solution that a foolish soul would be responsible for selecting the fateful moment of creation. This is because Ahrazi thought arbitrary choice unsuitable for a perfectly wise deity. For Avicenna, the argument would be even more powerful since he thinks that all aspects of God are necessary, and how could God's selection of a moment for the start of the universe be both necessary and arbitrary? This brings us to the real core of Al-Ghazali's disagreement with Avicenna. Against Avicenna's necessitarianism, Ahrazali wants to uphold God's untrammeled power and choice. Here, his Asharite training is showing through, since, as we saw, Al-Ashari and his followers, like Ahrazali's teacher Al-Jawaini, wanted to make all things subject to God's inscrutable and unfettered will. In fact, Ahrazali is downright eager to say that God can arbitrarily choose a moment for creating the world. That would be the clearest possible case of free choice, when somebody is presented with more than one option and just picks one. Al-Ghazali gives the example of being offered two equally succulent dates, of which you can only have one. You wouldn't just stand there, unable to take either date because they both look so delicious. You'd grab one. Here, Al-Ghazali is anticipating a famous thought experiment devised by the medieval Christian thinker John Buridan, who instead envisioned a donkey standing between two equally appealing bales of hay. The moral of the story is clear. If we humans are able to choose one of two dates, then certainly a free God can arbitrarily choose a date to create the universe. In fact, the philosophers are really committed to this too. Surely the universe could be just a little bit bigger or smaller, for instance. Or the poles of the heavens could have different locations. Repeatedly, Al-Ghazali accuses the philosophers of a double standard. They allow arbitrary choice when it comes to the universe's spatial properties, like its size, but not when time is at stake. As the tahafut goes on, Al-Ghazali further argues that, unless God is freely choosing in this way, he cannot be counted as the real agent or maker of the universe. For, what we mean by an agent is someone who does something out of choice with an understanding of what he does. The philosophers instead abuse language by applying the word agent even to lifeless things like fire, which is supposedly the agent for burning what it touches. Al-Ghazali is alluding to the fact that in Arabic, the word for agent, fa'il, was used to refer to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. Against this usage, Al-Ghazali insists that we should restrict talk of agency to causes which act out of well-informed choice. By this standard, the Great Fire of Chicago apparently was caused by no agent at all, since the fire that broke out was not choosing to burn anything. Nor was Mrs. O'Leary's cow in a position to choose consciously to start the fire, since cows are famous for their lack of understanding and choice. If it seems unacceptable that the Great Fire of Chicago has no agent at all, then Asharite theology is ready with a different answer, God is the agent. If only he can create things after they do not exist, then only he is the real agent of the universe and of everything in it. Al-Ghazali returns to this question towards the end of the tahafut in a famous section devoted to the possibility of miracles. The philosophers, he says, deny miracles because they want causes to give rise to their effects necessarily. When Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over that lamp, and the flames touched the hay in her stall, burning was the necessary consequence, as was the disappointment of Bird and Stonkey, whose delicious bales of hay both went up in flames before he could decide which one to eat. Al-Ghazali, though, denies that it is necessary for something flammable to burn when touched by fire. We habitually expect to see burning, because every time we've seen fire touch something, like cotton or hay, it has burst into flame. But that doesn't mean the fire really makes the burning necessary. Rather, God is simply creating these two things side by side with the result that we infer a necessary connection between them. From this, we can infer that God could always create things differently. For instance, when Abraham was thrown into fire, he miraculously survived unscathed. We can explain the miracle by saying that God broke from his usual routine and declined to create burning, consequent to the presence of fire. This passage of the tahafut has frequently reminded readers of the famous treatment of causation by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. To anticipate, by a few hundred episodes, Hume will likewise say that it is only habit that leads us to expect apparent effects to follow from their apparent causes. The causation itself is something we can never observe. Of course, the context of Al-Ghazali's discussion is very different from that of Hume. Whereas the empiricist Hume is investigating the extent to which causation can be encountered through perception, Al-Ghazali is asserting an Ash'arite occasionalist picture of reality. Or is he? In fact, one of the most long-running controversies about philosophy in the Islamic world concerns this part of the tahafut and Al-Ghazali's understanding of causation. One possible interpretation does have him asserting the Ash'arite view and saying that, barring miracles, God always creates things in the way that we expect him to do. Fire doesn't do anything. As we've seen, it is not an agent. Instead, God creates burning when and where he has also created fire. This interpretation is encouraged by a passage in which Al-Ghazali imagines the philosophers objecting that if Al-Ghazali were right, then our world would be chaos and we would never know what might occur. If we left our house and then returned, we might find that our slave boy has turned into a dog, that one of our books has turned into a horse, or that a glass of water has become an apple tree. To this, Al-Ghazali calmly replies that God has spared us from such skeptical worries precisely by creating things in a predictable and regular sequence. Thanks to his following regular habits in his creative actions, we have developed habits of expectation about what will occur. Other interpreters find a less radical Al-Ghazali in these pages. They point out that it is one thing to say that causes do not necessitate their effects and another to say that causes do nothing at all to produce their effects. Suppose that a cow flinches and knocks over a lamp. Yes, I'm going to milk this example for all it's worth. Someone who admits the possibility of miracles might say that God could intervene and stop the flame in the lamp from setting the hay alight. For this reason, the flame by itself does not make the burning necessary. But the flame is still what burns the hay so long as God does not interfere. On this reading, Al-Ghazali is making his characteristic move of chastising the philosophers for seeing necessity where there is none. Fire does burn unless something prevents it from doing so, but that condition is only fulfilled if God decides not to prevent the burning. Thus, God is involved in every event, not usually as the direct cause of the event, but because his tacit permission is required for the event to occur. At stake in this debate is Al-Ghazali's whole intellectual stance. Is he basically an Avicennan philosopher, albeit one who is far more aware of the limitations of philosophy than Avicenna was? Or is he basically an Asharite? It's hard to tell just from the tahafut, since as Al-Ghazali himself says, his aim in this work is not to establish positive doctrine, but only to identify the philosopher's mistakes. His main target for most of the work is Avicenna's picture of God as a necessary cause, who eternally gives rise to a chain of secondary causes which in turn necessitate their own effects. He has numerous complaints about this picture. It rules out genuine agency on God's part, and also removes God from any direct relationship with almost all of his creation. As Al-Ghazali says, the philosophers adhere to the rule that, from one thing comes only one thing, famous under its Latin version as the ex uno unum principle. Because of this rule, Avicenna had God necessarily emanating only one single effect, namely the celestial intellect associated with the highest heavenly sphere. God's causal influence would then be passed down through the heavens until the lowest celestial intellect, the so-called agent intellect, which is responsible for giving forms to things in this world. Our interpretive problem, then, is that there is more than one way for Al-Ghazali to reject Avicenna's Necessitarian Theory. It would certainly do the trick if he were to adopt Asharite occasionalism, and insist that God directly makes everything happen, in each case choosing freely to do so. But it would be just as effective to admit that God creates things as secondary causes. They would cause their effects, but not necessarily so, since they would always be subject to God's interference. This would leave God's power unfettered, and also preserve at least the possibility of a direct relationship between God and each of his effects. Al-Ghazali may even want to leave both options open here. Either will give him the result he needs, and cow the Avicennans into submission. This would explain why he writes this section on miracles the way he does. First, he dismisses the claim that fire necessitates burning by insisting that we are dealing here with something habitual, and not something necessary. But then, he presents two alternative versions of what might be going on, an occasionalist one, and then another one that retains secondary causation. As I mentioned in the last episode, later authors like Averroes would complain that Al-Ghazali is a rather slippery character, a philosopher with the philosophers, an Asharite with the Asharites, and so on. But this may be just what he intended. The dialectical method of works like the tahafut is designed not to demonstrate doctrine, but to puncture philosophical pretension. He comes not to praise his own theories, but to bury those of Avicenna. This nuanced, critical stance towards Avicenna is one important thing that Al-Ghazali bequeathed to his successors. So, before we go west to look at philosophy in Andalusia in two weeks, I want to round off our look at the formative period by talking to an expert on this very aspect of Al-Ghazali's writings. I'll be utterly distraught if you don't join me as I speak to Frank Griffel about heresy, orthodoxy, and philosophy in Al-Ghazali next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Al-Ghazali with Frank Griffell, who is professor of Islamic studies at Yale University. Hi Frank. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for coming on. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because you've written about it, is how Ghazali affected conceptions of orthodoxy and toleration of belief in Islam. Before we get on to what Ghazali has to say about that, I thought maybe we should start by having you say what the situation is before Ghazali. So what is the standard attitude towards which beliefs can be tolerated and what happens to you if you step out of line in the Islamic world? When you talked about the tahafuda, I think you explained that on the last page, Al-Ghazali has this verdict of unbelief, kufr, against the philosophers. One of the things I have to keep in mind is that for Al-Ghazali, kufr always means apostasy from Islam. But he thinks about apostasy in a different way as earlier legal scholars in Islam have thought about it. Apostasy in the real meaning and the earlier meaning, in this case earlier in the sense of how Al-Ghazali understood it, means that somebody walks away from Islam and says, for instance, from now on I'm no longer a Muslim and I actually want to be, say, a Christian. That is something that the sharia in this case, Islamic law, always found to be punishable by death. There is a saying of the prophet which basically goes, whoever changes his religion, kill him. And that was applied to Muslims who in this case would walk away openly from Islam. Al-Ghazali thinks about it differently. He uses this so-called verdict of apostasy in order to rein in his doctrinal adversaries in Islam, particularly on the one hand the falasifah in this case, the movement of Avisanism, and secondary also a group of seven nashiyites, of Ismailites at this point in time. And he thinks that apostasy is a certain inner disposition that these people have, that they take on certain views and these views can no longer be regarded as Muslim. And for him, this is something that he actually calls clandestine apostasy, because it is not happening in the open. It is for him assumed a secret apostasy that someone would not say, okay, I've left Islam. No, these people still pretend to be Muslim, but because they have taken certain positions that are so far away from what can be in this case regarded Islam, they have become clandestine apostates. Zanadika is the Arabic term. And therefore, these people can also be punished with death, with capital punishment, despite the fact that they never declared open apostasy. And Ghazali seems to be adopting for himself the authority to decide who is and who isn't within the bounds of zandaka then. Yes, he does. And he does this, and this is something that he does not do as a philosopher, where he argues with philosophical arguments, but this he does as a Muslim legal scholar, as a faqih, which he also was. And he thinks that you can judge whether someone is in this unacceptable condition, just on the grounds of what they say, presumably. In fact, and here, and here I come back to the question that you asked at the beginning, he was the first to do that. Before this, nobody in Islam really said that these are positions that are no longer covered by Islam. By and large, although this is narrowing down a long narrative to a short sentence, by and large, we can say that before Al Ghazali, basically everything was tolerated in one way or another. And it is hard to find any writing in this case, any text that would argue these and these things are certainly no longer Islam. Of course, people wrote that this is wrong, and this is heterodox, and this should not be accepted as correct, and such a position, whoever holds it will end up in hell. But punishing a Muslim, in this case a co-Muslim, on account of a certain position in this world, rather than the next world, was something that probably hasn't much happened before Al Ghazali. Who did Al Ghazali think should actually do the execution, literally, in this case? Well, in one text he actually writes that if you ever get hold of someone like this, meaning in this case if you would have ever gotten hold of Avicenna, everybody could have killed him. Wow. That's a rather striking view. It is true that Al Ghazali's position in this regard is very harsh, and it's also very principled in a way. We have, however, to keep in mind that it also comes with, I would say, an equivalent view about religious toleration, which other people did not hold. By and large we can say that people were killed before Al Ghazali for various reasons. Some of them might have had to do, in this case, also with religious ideas. What I say is that nobody has ever written about it in that way. So he's the first theoretician, as it were, of killing people on religious grounds. In Islam, that's probably true. On the other hand, he's also the first theoretician, in this case, who thought about toleration in Islam and what are the bounds of toleration. Let's actually look at a text where he does talk about that. This is a work called Faiz al-Atafrikah, Binal Islam wa Zandaka, which in your book you translate decisive criterion for distinguishing Islam from clandestine apostasy. Yes. Bound to be a bestseller for the title like that. And so the title speaks of a criterion for telling whether or not someone is in this condition of apostasy. So what is the criterion that he offers us? In this book, Al-Hazali does two things. On the one hand, he does what he promises in the title, namely distinguish or single out those positions which can no longer, according to his position or according to his view, no longer be tolerated in Islam. Therefore, he singles out what in his view is Zandaka, clandestine unbelief. With regard to the philosophers, these are three positions. The first position is that the world has no beginning in time. The second position is that God does not know the individuals. God only knows classes of beings. And the third position is that there is no bodily resurrection in the afterlife, but that the afterlife is only something that the souls experience. These three positions, which were all held by Avicenna, Al-Hazali singles out and says this is, whoever holds this is a clandestine unbeliever, a zindik, and he can be, if he teaches it, not simply holds it, if he teaches it to other people, he can actually be killed. Can I ask you a question about that actually before you go on? So there's these three positions. The world is eternal, God doesn't know particulars, and the body isn't resurrected. So the afterlife is purely an afterlife of the soul. Do these three have something in common? I mean, why are those three things and not, why not, for example, the universe is necessary, although that's close to saying that the world is eternal? There are different opinions about this. My opinion is that two of them are related to one another, the two latter ones. The bodily resurrection in the afterlife and God's knowledge of particulars have to do with the validity of divinely revealed law in this world. Al-Hazali was, of course, a philosopher. He was also, as I said, a legal scholar. And thirdly, he was also a political thinker. For him, the main goal in political philosophy was the validity of divinely revealed law of Sharia. And his position was that if the ordinary people would not know that their deeds in this case are known to God firstly, and if they would get the impression that there is no bodily punishment or bodily reward in the afterlife, then they would no longer heed the law. So there's no reason for them to be good, in other words. Exactly. So the two latter ones are connected to the making people better in this world because they fear the punishment in the next world, or they strive to acquire the reward in the next world. With regard to the first position, the eternity of the world, there is actually much debate about this also in later Muslim literature. Avares, for instance, responds to that. And many other philosophers respond to Al-Ghazali's accusation here. And I have come to the position that this has more or less to do with Avicenna's view of God, in the sense that God for Avicenna becomes this, one might say, and here I would use words that Al-Ghazali would choose, becomes this impersonal creation machine. That is something where Al-Ghazali wanted to act against, and this can be best singled out in philosophical terms with the position of the eternity of the world. So actually, in a way, it just amounts to the other thing I mentioned, namely that God's relationship to the world is necessary. Which probably actually hangs together with the idea that he doesn't know particulars. Yes. What Al-Ghazali actually wants to do in his tahafud is kind of rectify philosophy, in a way. He does not want to abolish it, for sure, but he basically wants to say to the philosophers, listen, if you just give up the three positions, you can be good Muslims, and we're going to have you here, and we're going to sit around with a campfire, sit around the campfire with you. As long as, however, you hold these three positions, there can be no bridge between the two of us. Let's go back, though, before we get on to talking more about the tahafud. Let's talk a little bit more about the fazat at-Tafur-e-Kah. Because actually, as you've explained in some of your work on this, it's not just that there's the Muslims who have what you might call orthodox belief, in other words, the correct belief, and then these people who are in the state of apostasy, who have gone beyond the pale. It is so possible for people to have false beliefs and be tolerated. Right. What Ali does in this book, first, as I said, he singles out what is clandestine unbelief. Then he divides the Muslim community into three groups. First, those who hold these positions, which are apostasy and who are no longer Muslims. Secondly, a group of people who hold wrong positions, from his point of view, we would say heterodox positions. And this is a fairly large group for him, which, for instance, includes most Shiites, the Sunnis, and Mu'tazilites, as well as any other members, in this case, of Muslim groups. These are Muslims, and they're tolerated, and they enjoy all the legal protections that comes with being a member of the Muslim community. Thirdly, he identifies that group who are the orthodox, who hold the right positions, and of course, he counts himself amongst them. The criterion in this case for determining what is the right position is in this particular book connected to Quran interpretation. The question is basically, when is one prompted to interpret a certain formula or a certain word in the Quran allegorically, and when is one prompted, in this case, to understand it by what is called the outside meaning, the zahir, we would say the literal sense. And so presumably, actually, a lot of the people who are running around with false but tolerated beliefs would be people who took passages in the Quran literally, which are actually to be interpreted figuratively. Or the other way around. Right, okay. And Ghazali says, well, you're wrong about this, but that doesn't mean you're no longer Muslims. And he might even think that they're going to paradise, correct? Probably not. He's not that tolerant. No, but it is not so much, this is something one has to stress in this case. Ghazali does not write much about the afterlife. And he always makes clear that we know very little about the afterlife. He also says that this is really the realm of speculation, and it is only revelation that tells us anything meaningful about the afterlife. I see. So in other words, he would say he's not in a position to say which false beliefs wind up sending you to hell and which don't. Which is correct. And I guess as an Ash'alad, he would think that God could send everyone to paradise or everyone to hell anyway. So of course, he's not in a position to think that. Okay. What would be the standard by which we would decide whether to interpret a given passage in the Quran, figuratively or literally? In the Faisalat Tafrika and in a number of other words, al-Ghazali uses a formula which he calls the rule of interpretation, qanun atawil. We must say when we use the word interpretation, we should always keep in mind this is allegorical interpretation. It's not interpretation like we use the word now in English that you say, oh, I have to interpret this sentence. It means that we read the Quran different from what the literal sense of the text actually is. The rule of interpretation goes like this. We read the Quran in the literal sense as long as there is no demonstrative argument that prevents us from doing so. And a demonstrative argument would be a proof that proceeds from certain premises and thus establishes a certain conclusion. A demonstrative argument in this case by al-Ghazali is understood to the same meaning as Aristotle, for instance, understands it in the second analytics or Avicenna does in a similar way in this case. So he adopts this criteria of certain knowledge from the philosophical movement, from the Aristotelian movement. What would be an example of something he thinks you can demonstrate that would force you to read a text figuratively then? Al-Ghazali himself says when he's asked about this, these are all the passages in the Quran that talk about God as if he has a body. For instance, those verses in the Quran that speak of God having a hand or, for instance, the verses that say that he sits on the throne, similar suggestions that he would actually be, as the theologian said, in a certain direction, meaning that he would be at a certain place. All this, al-Ghazali thinks he can prove demonstratively, is impossible. God does not have a body. God is not in a certain direction. God is not physical. Thus, those verses we must read figuratively. He for instance says that hand represents the power to punish. Therefore, when the Quran talks about God's hand, in reality, what God wants to convey to us is God's ability to punish us. Throne represents majesty. What God truly wants to convey to us in the meaning of these verses is that God has a majesty that is beyond every other majesty, that he has the highest majesty. And that actually sounds a lot like what previous Asharites, in fact al-Ashari himself, had said about, for example, passages that suggest that God has a body. So I guess that what Ghazali is adding to that is this Aristotelian slash Avicennian notion of demonstration, is that right? That's correct. This is not a revision of Asharism. It is, one might say, very traditional Asharism. It is one can even say a philosophical expression of something that was current in Asharism before al-Ghazali. Right. That's a pretty good summary of a lot of what Ghazali does in his career, actually. So that, I think, leads us back to the tahafut because something very striking about that text is that he keeps accusing the philosophers, by which he means Avicenna, of giving arguments that are not demonstrative. So it's not just that they're wrong, it's that they're giving proofs that fall short of the standards that they themselves would aspire to reach. And so is this basically an application of the same sort of rule that he's giving in the Faisal al-Tafrikkah? Yes, it is. In the tahafut as well, he looks into a number of teachings that are put forward by Avicenna and his followers, and he says these positions cannot be proven demonstratively. What kind of consequences this has is different. If such a position, for instance, violates the outside meaning of the Quran, then it is at the same time also untrue. Others might say in this case the authority of revelation trumps over the authority of an argument that is non-demonstrative. However, sometimes al-Ghazali also accepts positions that the philosopher brings forward, yet in his opinion cannot prove demonstratively. This for instance applies to the cosmology, for instance, of Avicenna, the view that there are different spheres and there is a highest sphere which is connected with God. This is something which al-Ghazali at the end is sympathetic to, but he says this is not something that you philosophers know through demonstrative arguments, because your arguments are not demonstrative. No, you know this from earlier revelations, which have come down to Moses or to Jesus or to other earlier prophets than Muhammad, and this knowledge has triggered down to the philosophical movement, and now you pretend to know this solely on the base of reason, which al-Ghazali thinks is wrong. Right, so actually the title, the tafad of the philosopher, is usually translated as the incoherence of the philosophers, but maybe then we should understand it in a more literal way as like the places where the philosophers stumble, and so maybe that's more what he has in mind here, is that right? In fact, a young colleague of mine, Sascha Treiger, recently suggested that incoherence is not a good translation of tahafut. He rather suggested this is the precipitance of the philosophers. So places where they jumped the gun, as it were, right, and not places where they've even necessarily said what is false. True. I think that's interesting because I actually never thought about that before, that he might be telling them off for a methodological failure even in cases where they've said something true. There is a polemic going on in the tahafut about the providence of knowledge as well. In addition, of course, to what is right or wrong amongst the philosophers, al-Ghazali also accuses them of basically selling positions that have come down from prophecy as philosophical positions and that, he says, is wrong. Right. One last thing I wanted to ask you before we end is Ghazali's reception, and obviously that's a huge topic that we can't really tackle now, but maybe we could at least say a little bit about how he affected the way people saw philosophy. So he writes this work, The Incoherence or the Precipitance of the Philosophers, and I've said this in the podcast already that there's a kind of myth that he killed off philosophy in the East. And I know you agree with me that he didn't do that, but what effect did he have? So how do people see philosophy different after Ghazali? As I said before, for al-Ghazali, the tahafut is more or less a book where he wants to rectify the philosophical movement. He wants to say, these are the things you shouldn't do. As long as you don't do these things, particularly taking on the three positions that he identifies on the last page of the book, as long as that happens, you can actually be a viable movement in this case amongst the various movements of Islam. And that is, in fact, what we see is happening. First of all, however, what is also happening is that the word falafah and falasifah as a movement is understood in a different way. After al-Ghazali, it is understood as one particular movement amongst the various theological or philosophical movements within Islam. In fact, it becomes identified, particularly with these three positions that are condemned on the last page of the tahafut al-falasifah, or we can also say it really becomes identified with the Avicennan system. Right. So, effectively, it's quite ironic, really, that he helps Avicenna become the philosopher instead of Aristotle, let's say. Yes. Al-Ghazali does a number of things about philosophy in the Islamic tradition. First of all, he changes the understanding of the word falasifah. It becomes the meaning of Avicennism. On the other hand, he also creates philosophy within the tradition of kalam. From now on, we actually see a lot of philosophical arguments being used by figures that we usually identify as mutta kalimun, that means thinkers who are active within the tradition of kalam. One of the important followers of al-Ghazali, who is Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, as an example, he dies in 1210. He is somebody who becomes an active philosopher, who engages with the thought of Avicenna very seriously and very much in detail, yet at the same time, he saw himself as somebody who was active in kalam. So we now see philosophy being practiced by a number of thinkers, by people who are active in kalam, by Sufis, such as Ibn Arabi, and other thinkers. Philosophy is something which from now on leaves the more or less confined space of falasifah and becomes more widespread in the Islamic world. That would explain why Averroes is so upset about the tahafut. Because he keeps, I mean, I'll get to this later on, but when he writes tahafut al-tahafut, the precipitance of the precipitance, maybe we should translate it, he keeps saying, well, this is not what philosophy is. Philosophy is Aristotelianism, not Avicennaism. That is right. That is his kind of response. It also needs to be said, and you will come to that later on, that there are many things which are truly happening in al-Ghazali's tahafut al-falasifah in this case, that Averroes does not respond to because he doesn't understand the radicalness of the response that al-Ghazali puts out there. Well, speaking of Averroes, in fact, I'm next going to be turning to a whole other section of the series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world, because I will be looking at philosophy in Islamic Spain, and that's going to take me quite a few episodes. So that's what I'll start to do next week, but for now I'll just thank Frank Gifford for coming on very much. Thanks again for inviting me. Please join me next time as I begin to look at philosophy in Andalusia or Islamic Spain, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Philosophy's Reign in Spain, Andalucía. What do the following words have in common? Alcohol, saffron, coffee, hashish, and artichoke. Well, they could all be elements in a night to remember, or perhaps a night to try to forget. But what I have in mind is that they all come to us from Arabic. I've mentioned before my favorite of all etymologies, which is that the word giraffe comes from the Arabic zirafa. Not far behind is one I more recently learned about. The word arsenal derives from the Arabic phrase dar as-sinah, meaning house of manufacture, in other words the place where you make weapons. So rumors that arsenal comes from the old French for second best team in north London turn out to have been spread by nefarious Tottenham fans, as if there were any other kind. These are only a few of the English words that derive from Arabic. Some others practically contain all of world history in them. For instance orange, which came into Arabic from Sanskrit via Persian, or guitar, which has the same origin as the word zither, namely the Greek kithara. This passed into Arabic as kithar, thence into Spanish as gitarra, and then finally into English through French. Notice the intermediary role of Spanish there, which isn't a unique case. Words like adobe, aubergine, and tuna passed into our language from Arabic thanks to Spanish or Catalan. And here's my favorite example that stayed in Spanish. In Arabic, the word for until is hatta, which became hasta, as in hasta la vista, baby. Well, I say it stayed in Spanish, it did make the occasional foray into the Austrian dialect of English spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact, the number of Arabic-based words in English is as nothing compared to what we can find in Spanish. If you learned only the words that come from Arabic, you could probably do pretty well on a Spanish vocabulary exam. Next time you're near a Spanish dictionary, leaf through the words starting with al. Many of these come from Arabic and have kept the Arabic definite article al as a first syllable. We've seen this before, with the etymologies of the words alchemy and almagest, the title of Ptolemy's work on astronomy. The presence of all this Arabic in the Spanish language is, of course, due to the fact that the Iberian peninsula was mostly under Muslim rule for several centuries. They arrived in a year that will be easy to remember for American convenience store patrons, 7-Eleven. Here I can't resist telling a legend mentioned by Richard Fletcher in his book Moorish Spain. It said that the kings of the Christian Visigoths had a tower sealed with many locks. When each king came to power, he would add another lock, until there were 27 of them keeping safe the secret inside. Finally, a king could not restrain himself and had the locks opened. Inside he found paintings of Arab warriors on horseback and a scroll that said, It was an event worthy of a good legend. This former Roman province, the birthplace of no less a philosopher than Seneca, was taken by the Visigoths in the 5th century. Protected by the straits of Gibraltar to the south and the Pyrenees to the north, the Christian Visigothic kingdom survived nicely until the Muslim invasions of the early 8th century. This was not simply the westernmost part of the Arab conquests that saw so much territory fall into the hands of Muslim rulers. The bulk of the invading force that conquered modern day Spain and Portugal were Berbers who had been channeled into the conquest by Arab Muslims. It would take centuries of gradual conversion until Muslims would be the dominant religion in Iberia or Al-Andalus as it was called in Arabic, hence our word Andalusia. The new territory did not play a major role in the politics of the Islamic world until the year 756. This was the time when the Abbasid Caliphate supplanted the Umayyads as rulers of the Muslim lands in the east. The Umayyad Abd al-Rahman managed to escape to the west and set up a last outpost for his otherwise defunct caliphate in Cordoba. The Umayyad Calas would rule Andalusia from that city for generations, but in 1031 the last of them was deposed, the final outcome of a general collapse of central authority on the peninsula. In place of the western caliphate, Andalusia saw the rise of the so-called Taifa kings, rulers of individual cities and small territories. Taifa is another Spanish word that comes from Arabic. It derives from the word for faction, emphasizing the fractured condition of political power in this period. We've seen how the imperial agenda of the Abbasids led to the Greek Arabic translation movement, but in this case, the rise of smaller mini-states seems to have been the spark for intellectual development, as regional princes competed to gather intellectuals at their courts. We especially see developments in medicine during the 11th century, the time of the Taifa kings. In the next episode, we'll be looking at a thinker from the first half of the 11th century by the name of Ibn Hazm. But for historians of philosophy, the really crucial period starts at the end of this century, with the coming of yet another invasion from Morocco. The way was unwittingly paved by the Christians. There was constant threat of military conflict, and not infrequently actual conflict, between Muslims and Christians along the border of the two realms in northern Spain. Christian successes led the Taifa kings to seek support from northern Africa, and the Berber group known as the Almoravids was only too happy to help. Have you ever invited a guest over and had trouble getting them to leave? Then you know how the Taifa kings felt. Taking themselves as a military arm of the Caliphate in faraway Baghdad, the Almoravids re-established a centralized authority in Andalusia. But they would rule for less than a century. Starting in the middle of the 12th century, they were in turn replaced by yet another Berber power invading from Morocco. They bore the annoyingly similar name of Almohads. The earlier group, the Almoravids, take their name from a religious retreat, or ribat, and were thus called in Arabic al-muraa bithun. The new arrivals, the Almohads, are in Arabic al-muwa hidun, from the Arabic wahed, meaning one. These were the latest defenders of God's oneness, or tawhid. Inspired by an unstoppable religious fervor, the Almohads eliminated the Almoravids, first in Morocco and then in Andalusia. Hasta la vista, baby. The Almohads are one of the few powerful groups in the earlier history of Islam that might merit comparison with modern-day fundamentalists. It will be worth our while to say something about their origins and ideology, because they dominated Andalusia starting about 1170 and for almost 200 years, with important consequences for the history of philosophy. Eventually, their star would fall too, not because of still another Berber invasion, but because of the Christians. After taking Andalusia away from the Almohads bit by bit, the Christian reconquest will be almost complete by 1252, with only an outpost of Islamic dominion remaining in the far south until 1492. But before the reconquest, the Almohads held Andalusia during the lifetimes of such thinkers as the Aristotelian commentator of Veroes, the mystic Ibn Arabi, and the towering figure of Jewish thought, Maimonides. The Almohad movement was founded by a Berber named Ibn Tumart, a strict and charismatic religious leader who came from the mountains in Morocco. From there, he traveled to the east, where he supposedly met Al-Ghazali. In any case, Al-Ghazali seems to have influenced Ibn Tumart's thought. He had chosen a moment of great upheaval for his journey. The city of Jerusalem had recently been taken, and its people massacred with a staggering display of violence by the Christian armies of the First Crusade in the year 1099. Perhaps fired by his experiences in the tumultuous east, Ibn Tumart returned to his native land and gathered supporters around him. Like the prophet Muhammad, he received a kind of religious mission while meditating in a cave. He emerged not with a revelation like that of the prophet, but with a righteous cause. And by his followers as the Mahdi, or savior, Ibn Tumart set out to undermine Almoravid power and culture in Morocco. He mocked what he saw as the effeminacy of these desert Berbers, the men wearing veils like women should do. He broke up wedding parties and smashed musical instruments. He railed against hypocrisy and injustice. He claimed it was more important to depose the Almoravids than to fight the Christians. He was, in other words, seriously bad news, at least from an Almoravid point of view. All of this sounds like it would be pretty bad news for philosophy, too. Humorless, self-righteous religious zealots aren't known for their encouragement of innovative intellectual inquiry. Yet there was something of a rationalist streak within the Almohad ideology. Their name, with its allusion to God's oneness, is only one sign that they were concerned to strip religion down to its fundamentals. For Ibn Tumart, the basic truths of Islam are present to each human from the day of birth. Here, he follows a famous saying of the prophet, that every child is born with a natural aptness for right belief. It is his parents that make him a Jew, a Christian, or a pagan. As we'll see in a few episodes, this idea that society corrupts our natural ability to discover the truth about ourselves, and, above all, about God, will be dramatically represented in a fable written by the Andalusian Muslim thinker Ibn Tufail. In this tale, a child finds itself alone on an uninhabited island, and manages to become a philosopher through independent investigation and reflection. The author Ibn Tufail had links to the Almohad rulers, and it seems likely that the story is meant at least to fit with, if not to promote, the Almohad religious ideology. What if there was good news for philosophy, there was also bad news. Before the coming of the Almohads, Andalusia had been host to a cultural flowering among Jews, who often wrote in Arabic. Maimonides was only the greatest of many significant philosophers and scientists who represented Andalusian Jewry. Back in the 11th century, the time of the Ta'ifah kings, the thinker Ibn Gabirola was espousing Neoplatonism with an enthusiasm and intellectual sophistication not seen in Judaism since Isaac Israeli in the 9th century. Under the Almoravids, we can point to Judah Halevi, a critic of philosophy, who adopted within Judaism something like the posture of Al-Ghazali in Islam. He takes us almost up to the middle of the 12th century, dying in 1141. The next decades would be a high point for Jewish thought, with several podcast episodes worth of figures appearing around the time of the transfer of power from the Almoravids to the Almohads. Which brings us to the bad news. The Almohads had little or no tolerance for members of other faiths, and coerced Jews to convert on pain of exile. This triggered a kind of diaspora within the Jewish diaspora, with the expulsion of long-existing communities of Jews from Spain. So came to an end the celebrated Convivencia, in which members of all three faiths were quite literally living together in this westernmost of all the Islamic lands. There had already been Jews on the peninsula before the coming of the Muslim armies back in the 8th century, and for centuries Jews and Muslims had lived together peacefully in Andalusia. Christians too were in the mix. These were the so-called Mozarabs, the Iberian Christians who lived and often flourished under Muslim rule. The Convivencia brought with it the sharing of ideas and debate across religious divides. The debating aspect is memorably captured at the beginning of Judah Halevi's book Kuzari, which depicts a king choosing between the teachings of philosophy, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Spoiler alert, he converts to Judaism. The more positive side is especially evident in the Jewish appropriation of ideas from Muslim thinkers. Averroes in particular was embraced by the Jews, as his sophisticated commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Hebrew and even made the subject of further commentaries. This is one example of how philosophy in Andalusia developed independently and in very different ways from what was happening far away in the eastern lands of Iraq and Persia. We could say something similar about the religious movement embodied by the Almohads. The geographical remoteness of Morocco and Spain allowed for Ibn Tumad's idiosyncratic teaching first to gain a foothold and then to achieve political dominion. Andalusian philosophy is likewise a world unto itself, something dramatically illustrated by the relatively weak impact of Avicenna in Spain. In 12th century Andalusia, Avicenna was known to some extent, but he had nothing like the influence he was already having in the east. In fact, Ibn Tufail, the Muslim thinker of Andalusia, most friendly to Avicenna, admits that he has not been able to read many Avicennan writings. Even more striking is the relative neglect paid by Jewish thinkers to Avicenna. They were far more inspired by the stricter Aristotelianism of Al-Farabi and in due course of Avarawis. The coming of the Almohads, in any case, disrupted the harmony between the faiths that had been the norm in Andalusia. We shouldn't exaggerate the harmony, of course. For one thing, remember that there was almost constant conflict with the Christian powers to the north of Muslim-held territory in Spain, and there were episodes of violence against Jews within Andalusia before the coming of the Almohads, for instance a pogrom in Granada in 1066. But broadly speaking, until the Almohad conquest, Andalusia was a place where Jews could flourish, building numerous synagogues, and wielding social and political influence. Jewish scholars were valued by Muslim rulers and served as esteemed members at court, often valued for their expertise in medicine, much as we saw with Avicenna himself. After the Almohads, by contrast, many Jews fled to the Christian-held territory in Spain, or to other lands entirely. Maimonides himself decamped with his family to Jerusalem and then to Cairo. Some expatriates went to southern France, creating a new context for philosophy. For it was especially there that we see works of philosophy and science being translated from Arabic into Hebrew, an important step since the Andalusian Jewish scholars had been able to read Arabic natively, whereas Jews living in Christendom could usually work only with Hebrew or Latin. Averroes's works were crucial in this new translation movement, whereas Avicenna's works were hardly translated into Hebrew at all. His ideas were still known, but usually indirectly, and only because they had been used by authors like Maimonides. In covering the spread of Jewish philosophy into medieval Europe, I'll have to step beyond the official borders of this series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world. But it seems obvious that I should discuss the so-called Maimonidean controversy that raged among European Jews in the 13th century after I've discussed Maimonides himself. More generally, I want to take this opportunity to give a full picture of the development of medieval Jewish philosophy, since it mostly occurred in Andalusia or responded directly to texts written there. As I've said before, this doesn't mean separating off Jewish philosophy as if it were some kind of isolated phenomenon. Rather, I think of Andalusian philosophy in its entirety as a tradition within the larger tradition of philosophy in the Islamic world. I've already explained some reasons why Andalusian thought is so distinctive. There was the specific context provided by Almoravid and then Almorhad culture. There was the geographical remoteness of this region from the Islamic heartlands, where philosophy was developing in very different ways. And of course, there was convivencia itself, the cultural and intellectual interchange between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. One significant result for historians of philosophy is the fact that Spain became a major center for the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy and science from the Arabic into the Latin language. Sometimes with the collaboration of Jews and Muslims, Christian translators like Gerard of Cremona and Dominicus Gunda Salinus took advantage of the multicultural setting of Toledo to produce Latin versions of works by such authors as Aristotle, al-Kindi, Isaac Israeli, al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Gavirol. Thanks in part to these translations from Arabic, the course of philosophy in Latin Christendom was fundamentally changed. We'll have a chance to look at that process much later when we are looking at Latin medieval philosophy. For the forthcoming episodes, though, I'm going to avoid getting too far into the Latin context apart from an interview episode which will be devoted to the translations themselves. Instead, I'm going to focus on the ideas put forward by Muslim and Jewish thinkers, often in dialogue with one another. Here, one of the most interesting developments, far less known to historians of philosophy, is within mysticism. I already mentioned that Andalusia could boast of being the home of the great mystic Ibn Arabi, albeit that from there he traveled to the east just like Ibn Tumart and Maimonides, two men who wouldn't enjoy appearing in the same sentence. The Sufi teachings of Muslims like Ibn Arabi influenced the mystical Jewish tradition known as Qabbalah, some of whose texts were also produced in Spain. Thus, the situation with mysticism mirrors to some extent the situation with Aristotelian philosophy. Here we have Jewish thinkers taking ideas from Muslim thinkers and showing how they could be woven into long-standing Jewish intellectual traditions like Torah commentary, in the case of the philosopher Maimonides, or like mystical Judaism, in a work like the Zohar. I'm going to start, though, with something more specific to the religion of Islam. It's a topic I've brushed up against several times in previous episodes, Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh. This is a good time to look at the question of whether Islamic legal discussions have anything of value to offer the historian of philosophy. After all, the most prominent Muslim in the Andalusian tradition, a verroes, was a jurist as well as an Aristotelian philosopher. One of his most widely read works, the decisive treatise, is actually a legal judgment on the status of philosophy in the Islamic faith. By the 11th century, which is where I'll be starting to look in detail at developments in Spain, the main schools of jurisprudence have had time to emerge and establish themselves. In fact, you could argue that I'm slightly overdue to look at this phenomenon. But I wanted to wait until we reached next week's subject, an outstanding thinker of the 11th century named Ibn Hazm. His many-sided output will show us the range of intellectual activity that was already possible in 11th century Andalusia, with his contributions not just to jurisprudence, but also literature and philosophy. We'll also be getting into the previous legal tradition a bit as we consider the earlier development of the juridical schools and how the search for legal principles led scholars to sail into some rather philosophical waters. So join me next time as we go to law school, or rather schools, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi min alaikum.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Laying Down the Law, Ibn Hazm and Islamic Legal Theory. We're almost 150 episodes into this series of podcasts, so you'd think that by now we would have covered pretty much every branch of philosophy, from aesthetics to zoology. But there's at least one that I haven't discussed much yet, philosophy of law. We have touched on the subject of law now and again, for instance when talking about courtroom rhetoric in ancient Athens, or more recently, when we looked at the sources of law in Judaism, and then again in Al-Farabi's political philosophy. As you might remember, he gave jurisprudence the role of extrapolating from laws laid down by an original legislator who should be a prophet-philosopher-king. Al-Farabi was there alluding to the practices and function of Islamic jurisprudence, which in Arabic is called fiqh. Now we're going to take a closer look at Islamic law, which is more relevant to the history of philosophy than you might think. Some of the figures we've already examined, and some who are yet to come, were trained in and contributed to the legal tradition, alongside their philosophical accomplishments. Besides, Islamic legal theory itself is philosophically interesting. A genre of literature devoted to the principles of jurisprudence, or usul al-fiqh, explores the sources of legal obligation and the epistemological question of how a jurist can arrive at principled decisions. And, most importantly, the topic is a rich potential source of puns. So in this episode, which is available on a free trial basis, we're going courting. I plead guilty to a weakness for this sort of humor, so sue me. Towards the end of the episode, I will call our first witness for the intellectual history of Andalusia, Ibn Hazm. He was, among other things, the major author of a minor legal school, called zahirism. But my opening statement will concern the gradual emergence of the four most successful legal schools in Islam. Despite their differences, these schools attained a broad consensus on the sources and methods of Islamic law, a consensus that was rejected by Ibn Hazm and his fellow zahirites. The fundamental issues of legal methodology and legitimacy that confronted Islam are familiar to us from our look at the Jewish tradition. Both faiths possessed revealed books containing a great deal of law, so that there was at best a blurry distinction between a religious scholar and a legal scholar. Indeed, as we saw, the rabbis of ancient Judaism were basically interpreters and makers of law, whose achievements are recorded in the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash. We also saw how rabbinic texts claimed to draw on an uninterrupted tradition of religious wisdom, going back to the original revelation at the time of Moses. Finally, we mentioned the Karaites, who rejected this development in favor of a return to the less abundant, but divinely sent, resource of the Torah itself. I don't want to make any claims here about the historical connection, if any, between Jewish and Islamic law. I just want to observe that the way Islamic jurisprudence developed is bound to remind us of the situation with late ancient Judaism. The parallel is recognized by the Quran itself, which contains a verse stating that God has laid down a separate law for the Jews, for the Christians, and for the Muslims. Such verses helped to foster a multi-faith society and a multi-faith development of law in the Islamic world. I've already mentioned that Jews and Christians could usually practice their own faiths with little obstruction or harassment from their Muslim neighbors. And of course, for the Jews there was no real distinction between religious observance and carrying out the law. As the Muslim armies conquered their empire, they were under instructions to let the conquered peoples continue their social and legal customs unmolested, though it was also known for Muslim judges to decide cases involving Jewish or Christian litigants if the need arose. As with Jewish law, the defining feature of Islamic law is the religious foundation on which it is built. First and foremost, that foundation was provided by the Quran. The holy book contains hundreds of verses giving specific legal injunctions covering everything from divorce and orphans to prayer, dietary laws, and taxation. Many of the legal prescriptions appear in the chapters of the Quran revealed in Medina after Muhammad led his followers there away from Mecca. The Medinan chapters are on average longer than those revealed in Mecca, and make more detailed provisions for the new community led by the Prophet. One famous example of a legal provision is a verse that identifies gambling and wine as the work of Satan. Such declarations seem to be so explicit as to leave little for the legal theorist to theorize about. So why did Islam need not just one, but four major schools of legal theory? Well, it didn't, at least not at first. It was only in about the 10th century, the 4th century of the Islamic calendar, that the schools were clearly defined. And here I should mention that I'm going to be talking only about the schools of Sunni Islam in this episode, not the legal tradition within Shiite Islam. Not unlike the Hellenistic philosophical schools, they were distinguished by allegiance to various founding figures and by opposition to one another. Yet it had never been the case that all legal questions could be answered by recourse to the Quran. Specific though it is about many issues, it leaves many others unaddressed. Even when it does pronounce on a certain topic, the pronouncement may stand in need of subtle interpretation. Consider for instance this forbidding of gambling and wine. To apply the rule, you need to decide what counts as gambling, and for that matter, what counts as wine. The word used here, khamr, can be taken to refer specifically to wine made from grapes. So perhaps it is okay to drink wine made from dates. Not to be confused with a romantic night out in Paris, that would be a date made from wine. Or perhaps the injunction is laid down against all intoxicating beverages, or even all intoxicants period. How to decide such issues? In the generations after Muhammad's death, there was as yet no attempt to give a systematic answer to this question. But several answers were implied by legal practice. To some extent, this practice grew out of pre-Islamic Arab society. The Arabian Peninsula had sophisticated trading networks and settlements, so there were formal and less formal legal arrangements already in place. Many such arrangements were revised in the Quran. For instance, the revelation laid down various improvements concerning the property rights of women, while taxation was codified as a required charitable donation, one of the five pillars of Islam. The legal culture of the pre-Islamic society had depended heavily on custom, and early Muslims looked especially to the customs of especially pious or blessed men for an indication of their legal obligations. These included the Prophet himself, of course, but also the first rightly guided caliphs and pre-Islamic prophets recognized as genuine by the new faith. A further potential source of legal judgment was, well, judgment. In Arabic, the term is ra'i, which can also be translated as opinion. The idea is that a judge might, in the absence of any customary consensus, simply make up his own mind by applying common sense. That may seem innocuous enough, but the use of independent judgment would become the central debating point of Islamic jurisprudence over the coming centuries. On the one hand, it might seem that there is no avoiding the use of independent judgment. If the Quran does not answer a legal question, and there is no consensus on the question either, isn't the jurist simply forced to find the best solution he can? Such decisions, if accepted by other jurists, could then extend the existing body of consensus, like legal precedents being cited in court cases nowadays. The problem was the potentially arbitrary nature of the legal decisions, and of course their lack of any grounding in a religious source. What seemed to one jurist to be an obvious application of common sense might seem to another to be a case of making it up as you go along. Here there were two options, and the Muslim community tried both. On the one hand, you might try to build up the resources offered by authoritative religion. On the other, you might defend the practice of judgment from the charge of arbitrariness. The first strategy was practiced by scholars who made an effort to collect reliable reports of things the Prophet had said and done. Since it says in the Quran itself that the Prophet is to be emulated, even the smallest fact about his life could potentially have consequences for correct behavior and law. A report about his deeds or remarks is called a hadith, and the collectors and verifiers of these traditions are known as hadith scholars. As such reports acquired importance and authority, many thousands were fabricated and disseminated, for instance to support controversial theological positions. The scholars intervened in order to sort out the genuine from the bogus. They did so by establishing chains of transmission. Ideally, the scholar would write down a report received from a trustworthy source, who in turn got it from a trustworthy source, and so on all the way back to a companion of the Prophet who witnessed the deeds and sayings of Muhammad at first hand. Traditions transmitted through multiple chains were considered especially reliable. The scholars were rigorous with their methods. One statistic I've seen is that of half a million circulating traditions, only about 4-5,000 were retained as sound, which means that 99% were labeled untrustworthy. Obviously this development made it possible to answer many more questions about law and practice without the use of independent judgment. This was stressed by one of the great founders of Islamic legal theory, Ash-Shafi'i, who died in the year 819. His groundbreaking Epistle on Legal Theory attempted to show how apparent conflicts in the sources of the law can be resolved. Once this consistency was discovered, and once a body of sound hadith had been verified as supplementing the Quran, it would be possible to get by with a minimal and carefully restricted use of judgment. In fact, Ash-Shafi'i disdained the independent decisions that went under the name of Ra'i, and allowed only what he referred to as reasoning, in Arabic qiyas. This represents the second strategy mentioned above, where the jurist does exercise judgment but in a constrained and cautious fashion. One important type of reasoning was analogy. In fact, in some contexts the word qiyas can simply be translated as analogy. This method could be used, for instance, to deal with our problem about wine made from grapes. The key would be to determine the reason, in Arabic ʿilāh, why wine is forbidden. If the reason is that it intoxicates, then by analogy all other intoxicants would also be forbidden. More controversial was reasoning in light of the general welfare of the community. Some jurists thought it would be acceptable to exercise judgment to avoid obviously unwelcome results. Others, while perhaps agreeing about the right conclusion, thought that it was absolutely necessary to reach it by invoking a religious text. It will, I hope, be obvious that all of this is interesting, not just for the history of law, but also for the history of philosophy. Effectively, these theorists were setting out a legal epistemology, and in some cases doing so before most Greek philosophical texts were available in Arabic translation. It's interesting to note that some of their terminology matches technical terms found in philosophy. For instance, their word for reasoning or analogy, qiyas, was used by philosophers to refer to syllogistic arguments and even used as the Arabic title of Aristotle's logical work The Prior Analytics. Another example is illa, the rationale or basis for an analogy. For instance, that grape wine is outlawed on the basis of its being intoxicating, so anything else intoxicating is also outlawed. This same word, illa, was one term used for the notion of a cause, for instance in Aristotle's theory of the four kinds of cause. But the resonances between legal theory and philosophy were not just terminological. The legal schools had to develop sophisticated ideas about language in order to determine which objects a given Quranic word might refer to, and about epistemology. The method of establishing authoritative chains for the reports of hadith was an attempt to lay down conditions for certain knowledge on the basis of testimony. It may not be coincidental that, as we saw in the interview with Deborah Black, thinkers like Al-Farabi and Avicenna gave more attention to this sort of knowledge than had been the case in the previous tradition of Aristotelian philosophy. Some legal views also imply or presuppose moral principles. For instance, the idea that a good outcome can justify a legal judgment implicitly assumes a consequentialist approach to the law. These sorts of methodological and philosophical issues were precisely the ones at stake in debates between the schools of Islamic law. To oversimplify, there were three schools which contended for dominance in the Eastern Empire. The school of Ash-Shafi'i, a second school known as the Hanafis after their founder Abu Hanifa, which tended to be somewhat more open to the use of independent judgment, and finally the rather stricter Hanbalis. They took their name from a widely admired religious figure who was not really a legal scholar named Ibn Hanbal. He was famous for resisting the mihnah, or inquisition, imposed by the Abbasid caliphs when they tried to compel acceptance of the mohtazilite claim that the Qur'an is created. Meanwhile, a fourth school flourished further west in northern Africa and Muslim-controlled Spain. These were the Maliki's, named for the late 8th century jurist of Medina, Malik ibn Anas. Though it would be nice to say that the four schools are clearly differentiated in terms of method or legal doctrine, it would be closer to the truth to say that these four survived because they adopted some version of the moderate line pioneered by Ash-Shafi'i. Some degree of reasoning was allowed, albeit that debates continued about the details of how to apply reason, and the preeminence of hadith, along of course with the Qur'an, was accepted by all the schools. Thus, the differentiation between them is less about doctrine and more about geography and political affiliation. By the end of our formative period, we have the Maliki school, dominating in the west including in Spain, while the Hanafi's did well in Iraq and Central Asia, eventually being adopted by the Turkish Seljuk rulers. The Shafi'is meanwhile flourished in Egypt and also Persia, with many Ash'arite theologians belonging to this legal school. The division between the schools continues down to the present day. But of course, there were other approaches to law which did not accept this moderate orthodoxy. For the rest of this episode, I'd like to concentrate on one of them, the aforementioned Tha'heres, and on an author who wrote in its defense Ibn Hazm. In this case, the name of the school does not come from a founder's name, but from his nickname. A student of Ash'afi'i by the name of Dawud ibn Khalaf was dubbed a Zahiri because of his robust insistence on using the surface meaning of the Qur'an and hadith as the sole source of law. Zahir means evident or manifest. So this nickname could be translated as Mr. Manifest, if we were in a somewhat frivolous mood. If we were in a very frivolous mood indeed, we might even be inspired to imagine a superhero named Mr. Manifest. He could fight crime by keeping careful track of the cargo on boats. Much of what we know about the doctrine of his school, the Tha'heres, or manifest men, is derived from the Andalusian thinker Ibn Hazm, who lived quite a bit later, in the 11th century. His life spanned the transition I mentioned in the last episode, when the surviving western romp of the Umayyad Caliphate fell and was replaced by the regional Taifa kings. Ibn Hazm's eventful life story was bound up with this transition, as he tried several times to support claimants to the Umayyad throne in Spain. For his trouble, he sometimes found himself in prison, while at other points he rose to the level of vizier. Ultimately though, Ibn Hazm's political ambitions came to nothing, and the latter part of his life was spent in relative seclusion devoted to scholarship. Ibn Hazm first developed an interest in law out of embarrassment. He failed to follow the correct rituals of prayer at a funeral. Stung by this humiliation, he sought out a teacher and began with the writings of Al-Malik, founder of the fourth major school, the Maliki's, who as I've said were dominant in Andalusia. After a flirtation with the Shafi'is, he eventually became a staunch advocate of the Zahiri legal theory. This made him an equally staunch critic of the leading legal schools. As a Zahiri jurist, Ibn Hazm rejected even the moderate use of reasoning and independent judgment embraced by a Shafi'i. Instead, all legal reasoning must be based explicitly on the evident, or manifest, meaning of a religious proof text. There is no recourse to legal consensus, apart from unanimous judgments of the immediate companions of the prophet. Thus Ibn Hazm's legal manifesto recognizes no system of legal precedent, only the explicit injunctions of the Qur'an and the Hadith. And, by the way, he has very stringent requirements for the soundness of Hadith. This might make Ibn Hazm sound like a rather extreme fundamentalist, and indeed, mainstream legal scholars at the time saw the Zahiri movement as extreme. But it's worth noting the overall effect of the theory, which could in fact be a sort of liberalism. This is because the theory restricts the scope of Islamic law. If you can't find a straightforward command or prohibition of something in a proof text, declares Ibn Hazm, then you can infer that it is allowed but not required. After all, if God did want us to do something in particular or want us to avoid doing it, he would have set it down in Revelation. Ibn Hazm supports this with Qur'anic verses, which state that the book is complete or comprehensive, no command or prohibition is left out. An interesting example of how Ibn Hazm applied his principles to specific cases is homosexuality. Homosexual acts are the subject of disapproving remarks in both the Qur'an and Hadith, and most legal scholars had said that such acts are punishable by death, for instance by stoning. But in one of his legal works, Ibn Hazm reviews the proof texts for this view and finds them baseless. The explicit texts that list acts punishable by death make no mention of homosexuality. Also, of course, as an opponent of analogical reasoning, Ibn Hazm has no sympathy with attempts to see homosexual activity as analogous to some other sin that is punishable by death, for instance adultery. Thus, homosexuality cannot be a capital offense, though Ibn Hazm does think it is sinful and should be punished in some way, to encourage the sinner not to repeat the offense. Though these sorts of arguments are rather, well, legalistic, Ibn Hazm also deploys rather more philosophical considerations in defense of zahirism. For instance, he says that once we open the door to metaphorical or extended meaning of the language found in the Qur'an and Hadith, we will end up in skepticism. Taking words at face value whenever possible is the only way to be absolutely certain of the deliverances of the law. So, within a legal context, Ibn Hazm provides us with an example of the obsessive interest in certainty that also characterized theologians like Al-Ghazali and Aristotelian philosophers like Al-Farabi. In future episodes, we'll be seeing how the high standards placed on certain knowledge in philosophy, theology, and law did indeed lead to skepticism, or at least modesty concerning the possibility of knowledge. For now, I want to note that the link I just suggested between Ibn Hazm and Al-Farabi may be a historical one. Ibn Hazm himself tells us that he studied with teachers of logic who had learned this art at the feet of masters of the Baghdad Peripatetic school. There is no direct link here to Al-Farabi, but it seems that Ibn Hazm studied with students of Ibn Adi and perhaps Abu Bishr Matah. Ibn Hazm's speech speaks of this educational background in a work of his own on logic, which is based on a probably indirect acquaintance with Aristotle's logical writings. Logic and law are only two of the many topics to which Ibn Hazm devoted himself. His most famous work is on another subject beginning with L, love. Entitled Ring-Collar of the Dove, it is a literary tour de force about the nature, perils, and virtues of love, drawing attractively on Ibn Hazm's own experiences. He also tried his hand at poetry, notably on an occasion when a political enemy had his books burned. His verses state that, though the paper might burn, the ideas written on the paper would live on in his soul. Many of his other writings are polemical in nature, Ibn Hazm apparently having been a rather ornery and contentious man. He composed a refutation of Al-Kindi's ideas as found in Anfer's philosophy, and also engaged in a good deal of interfaith dispute. He was disdainful of the other Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Judaism, taking an unusually severe view concerning the falsehood and inauthenticity of their scriptures. Early in his career, he debated religion with a Jewish thinker. Later, he wrote a response to a set of criticisms of the Qur'an, supposedly written by a Jewish contemporary from Andalusia. In yet another famous work, called On the Sex of Religion, he discusses the mistaken views of Jews and Christians, as well as Muslim theologians and just about whoever else he can think of. With his many-sided activity, Ibn Hazm serves as a good introduction to what we'll be seeing in Andalusian philosophy. To start with the last point, there is the uneasy rivalry and interchange between Muslims and Jews. Ibn Hazm was quite firm in his criticisms of Judaism, and was also known to complain of their ability to acquire high social status in the Andalusia of his day. But of course, the very fact that Jews were attaining such status is significant. As I promised in the last episode, we'll soon be seeing how Jewish philosophy blossomed in the soil of Andalusia, with its multi-faith culture and social opportunities for Jews. Ibn Hazm also provides us with our first glimpse of the influence of the Baghdad Aristotelian school in Andalusia, something that will be very striking in other authors further down the line, including the two greats, Averroes and Maimonides. The fusion of legal and philosophical interests we see with Ibn Hazm is another taste of things to come, especially with Averroes. And finally, the literary side of Ibn Hazm's output is typically Andalusian. Many of the authors we'll be examining, especially among the Jews, were poets like him. And one of the most memorable works of Andalusian philosophy is also a literary creation, a kind of philosophical novel whose main character finds himself growing up alone on a desert island. This will be our main topic next time. It's manifest that you should join me for some island hopping with Ibn Bajja and Ibn Tufayl, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Fantasy Island, Im Baja and Im Tufe. An engineer, a geologist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island. They have some precious food, but it is all lodged in tin cans. Somehow, they need to get at the food before they starve to death. Let's find a sharp rock and use it to open the cans, suggests the engineer. No, let's put them in the surf and let erosion do the work for us, suggests the geologist. The economist smiles at their naive proposals and says, why not just assume we have a can opener? Ah yes, the remote desert island, mainstay not only of joke tellers and cartoonists, but also a long-running BBC radio program and more than a few films. Perhaps you yourself have wondered how you might fare if stranded alone on an island. I think that if I had my copy of Plato's collected dialogues, I'd be just fine, at least until my utter practical incompetence led me to die of starvation, thirst, or exposure, whichever came first. That's assuming that I wound up on the island at my current, relatively advanced age. If I had arrived as a newborn infant, I could have done much better. Even without a copy of Plato's dialogues, I might have transformed myself into a perfect philosopher and visionary mystic. All I would need is a little bit of help from a gazelle. I take this optimistic assessment of my chances from one of the most memorable and entertaining philosophical texts produced in the Islamic world. Its title is the name of the main, and almost only, character, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, which means living, son of awake. Its author was Ibn Tufail, who lived in 12th century Andalusia, serving two Almohad caliphs in the city of Granada. Apart from his philosophical island fantasy, he composed poetry in support of the Almohads, and also wrote a poem on medicine. Unlike the setting of his most famous work, no man is an island, and Ibn Tufail was certainly a product of his intellectual environment. I already mentioned in the introductory episode on the Andalusian philosophy that Hayy ibn Yaqdan seems to reflect Almohad ideology. As for Ibn Tufail's philosophical influences, he lets us know a good deal about this himself, in a fascinating preface he wrote to Hayy ibn Yaqdan. If you read this book, which you should, don't give in to the temptation to skip straight to the island story. From the preface, we can see that there are basically three main philosophical influences on Ibn Tufail. First, Avicenna. This may come as no surprise to you given how much I have emphasized Avicenna's wide-reaching influence in previous episodes. But, as I also mentioned in the introduction to philosophy in Spain, Avicenna's works were rather incompletely transmitted to Andalusia. Ibn Tufail seems to know them as well as anyone in Spain. The very title Hayy ibn Yaqdan is taken from a symbolic treatise written by Avicenna, and he tells us in the preface that he has been able to consult Avicenna's healing. He adds, though, that this is not necessarily the crucial text for understanding the thought of the great sheikh. Rather, one should turn to his Oriental philosophy and realize that Avicenna's system leads one to mysticism. So, here we see Ibn Tufail playing a significant role in creating the image of a mystical Avicenna, whose Sufi-style insights were captured above all in the mostly lost work on Oriental wisdom. In presenting mystical vision as an attainment beyond what philosophy can offer, Ibn Tufail is betraying that he has had a little bit of help too, not from a gazelle but from Al-Ghazali. This is his second main philosophical source, as he explains in the preface. Again, his textual knowledge here is incomplete, but he knows enough about Al-Ghazali to complain that his works tend to be inconsistent, leaving us in the dark as to Al-Ghazali's most deeply held beliefs. Ibn Tufail worries that the most decisive texts may be unavailable to him in Andalusia. Nonetheless, he is convinced that Al-Ghazali was one of those who reached the highest stages of mystical knowledge, stages Ibn Tufail himself has only been able to glimpse. When we turn to the island story of Ha'ibn Yajdan, we see this influence from Avicenna and Al-Ghazali playing itself out and culminating in a portrayal of the mystic at work. But, before we do turn to the story, I want to dwell for a bit on Ibn Tufail's third main influence, a man named Ibn Bajja. Ibn Tufail is rather critical of him, seeing him as a limited mind, incapable of the mystical heights reached by Avicenna and Al-Ghazali. But, Ibn Bajja deserves more credit than that. He was the first Muslim thinker in Andalusia who wholeheartedly adopted the Aristotelian style of philosophy that will reach its fulfillment in the writings of Iverroes. Ibn Bajja harks back to a pre-Evacennan phase in the history of philosophy, adhering more to the style of thought we found in Al-Farabi. In this, he was again anticipating Iverroes, who likewise takes over philosophical themes from Al-Farabi, such as the demonstrative nature of philosophy compared to the rhetorical and symbolic discourse of religion. Of course, Iverroes also carried on the characteristic Baghdad school activity of writing commentaries on Aristotle. We'll see next time that Ibn Tufail knew Iverroes, and supposedly even played a role in launching the commentary project that would take up so much of Iverroes's time and energy. So, it is natural to see a smooth sequence of three major Muslim philosophers in Spain, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Tufail, and Iverroes. Natural, but misleading, not only because it leaves out other Muslim Andalusian thinkers, but also because Ibn Bajja and Iverroes have much more in common intellectually with each other than with Ibn Tufail. It would be better to think of Ibn Tufail not as the second of three Aristotelians, but as the proponent of a mystically spiced Avicennism that finds itself inserted into the Farabianism of Ibn Bajja and Iverroes. He is, if you will, the chorizo in their peripatetic paella. Yet, Ibn Tufail does take over at least one major theme from his Spanish predecessor. Ibn Bajja wrote on a range of philosophical and scientific topics, including logic and medicine. He also contributed a work on the nature of the intellect, which, as we'll be seeing, influenced the notorious theory of intellect put forward by his successor Iverroes. But his best-known work is entitled Rule of the Solitary, and it's no coincidence that Ibn Tufail's island story is all about a solitary philosopher. Like Al-Farabi's major works, Ibn Bajja's Rule of the Solitary combines metaphysical speculation with political philosophy. But his views on politics seem to be considerably more pessimistic than those of Al-Farabi. He sees the cities of his time as irredeemably corrupt. So he focuses not on the perfect prophet and philosopher-ruler of Al-Farabi's theory, but on the isolated philosopher living amidst a morally bankrupt population. Ibn Tufail's support for the ruling Almohads did not prevent him from expressing a similarly bleak view about the prospects of bringing philosophical wisdom to Muslim society. Enough background, let's finally begin our island visit and look at the narrative of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdan. The strangeness and intrigue of the text is immediately evident, as it starts with not one, but two stories about how Hayy ibn Yaqdan came to be on the island in the first place. One story tells of how on a different, nearby island, the sister of a mighty king conceived a child in secret. Fearing scandal, she placed the infant in a chest which she sent floating away across the sea. The child, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, thus came to his island where he was the only inhabitant. The second alternative story is very different. It explains that the island lies in an ideal climate, just so that its earth is capable of spontaneously giving rise to a human. Ibn Tufail describes the process in considerable detail, with a bubble forming inside the earth and dividing into parts that will become Hayy's organs. This is one of several passages where we can see Ibn Tufail showing off his medical knowledge. Another more memorable one is only a few pages away, and will feature the most appealing character in Hayy ibn Yaqdan, a gazelle. It is thanks to the gazelle that Hayy survives in his island paradise. And by the way, it is thanks to the Arabic language that we have the word gazelle, which in Arabic is ghazal. Ibn Tufail makes a point of saying that with the arrival of the gazelle, the two alternative stories come together. She either finds the baby washed up on shore, or discovers him after he is spontaneously generated. From then on, we have a united narrative in which the gazelle nourishes the baby. Her actions are described in strikingly sympathetic terms. She has lost her own foal, which was snatched away by an eagle, and treats Hayy as a surrogate child. She also seems to be quite clever, realizing that she needs to crack open shelled fruits to feed Hayy and to keep him warm at night. I can feel Hayyawatha the giraffe starting to get jealous, so I'll hasten on to the tragic scene in which the gazelle dies. As she lies on her deathbed, Hayy is nearly overcome with grief, but resolves to try to cure her. Using a sharp stone as an impromptu scalpel, he cuts into his adoptive mother's chest in search of the diseased part. Kids definitely don't try this at home. He's unable to save her, but does manage to discover some rudimentary anatomy, learning about the placement of the lungs and the ventricles of the heart. Further investigation performed on other animals leads our medical prodigy to the conclusion that life is maintained through a kind of warm air, pervading through the body from its center in the heart. This is what Galen called pneuma, meaning breath. Showing an early talent for philosophy, Hayy also concludes that the rest of the body is nothing but an instrument for this controlling substance. At this stage though, our budding scientist and philosopher still fundamentally sees himself as an animal, like his gazelle mother. In fact, he is mortified to notice that he is completely naked, whereas other animals are well clothed with fur or feathers. Aiming to rectify this shortcoming, he garbs himself in eagle feathers. The other animals find this intimidating. It is only the first of several steps that will ultimately see Hayy attain mastery over the living things on his island. He learns to control fire, to hunt, and so on. Before long, his superiority over other animals becomes clear through less practical means as Hayy starts to engage in theoretical investigation about the world around him. He works out a theory of the four elements, and comes to understand the animal and plant kingdoms as wholes, or unities. In a rather lovely image, Hayy compares the soul-breath divided among all animals to a single quantity of water that has been meted out in individual portions to each living thing. He then compares the life principle of plants to water that has been frozen because of their more rudimentary nature. Ultimately, he sees that the whole cosmos, from the elements and living things on up to the heavenly bodies above, is a single unity. All of this seems to prepare the way for a more intense experience of oneness Hayy will have later on, when he has a mystical union with God. It is indeed God who next attracts Hayy's attention, as he comes to see that the entire universe must have an incorporeal first cause. Hayy gets to this conclusion much as he came to the island in two alternative ways. It is unclear to Hayy whether the physical universe has always existed, so first he assumes that it has not. In that case, there must have been some immaterial cause that brought material things into being. The other option is that the universe has existed eternally. In that case, it has been given an infinite power for motion and existence. But no body can contain infinite power, so the power must have been bestowed on the universe from an immaterial cause. This is pretty good work on Hayy's part, because he has on his own managed to rediscover the arguments for God's existence offered by Islamic theologians and by Aristotle, who was the author of the infinite power argument. Of course, we can't give the same credit for originality to Ibn Tufail, who was just weaving these traditional arguments into his island narrative. Nonetheless, Ibn Tufail is doing something unusual and important here. He is effectively telling us that the eternity of the universe debate does not need to be resolved. If you can prove the existence of an immaterial first cause either way, then it becomes unnecessary to decide the eternity question. We'll find a similar position later on, in Maimonides and in Aquinas. Once he has proved God's existence, Hayy really begins to see himself as superior to the other animals. They have no awareness of such a first cause, but busy themselves with mere bodily survival. Hayy also realizes that his true self is not, after all, a physical breath pervading his body, but a soul, which is like God in being immaterial. In this respect, he can see himself as partaking of the perfection of the celestial bodies, which affect the lower world through their motions. At this point, then, he's managed to figure out the basics of the Platonized Aristotelian theory already familiar to us from so many thinkers in the Islamic world. But Hayy's next conclusions will seem rather less familiar. Reflecting on the fact that he has an animal nature, yet also similarity to the heavens and to God, he resolves to become as perfect as possible at all three levels. At the animal level, he decides to become a vegetarian, to avoid thwarting God's will by destroying what he has created. He also imitates the heavenly spheres, which carry out God's providential order by going around his island and caring for animals and plants. He even goes so far as to prevent plants from having their growth stunted by excessive shade. In a notorious passage, he also spins around in imitation of the heavenly motion, something often seen as an allusion to the spinning dance of certain Sufis. I want to dwell instead, though, on what one might call the ecological ethics of this part of the story. There aren't many medieval authors who pay any attention to animal ethics. The other main example we've seen so far is Arazi, who insisted that we should avoid harming animals. Even more rare is to include care for plant life, as Ibn Tufil does here. It's worth noting that Hayy is said to reach these ethical conclusions by reflecting on divine providence. The old Platonic injunction to imitate God insofar as is possible has become a reason to care for the environment. But Hayy's Green Period is short-lived. He soon turns his attention away from nature to its creator, and decides to retreat into a cave on the island in order to contemplate God. The cave is a significant detail. It might call to mind the cave in which the Prophet Muhammad first received the revelation, or the pivotal moment in the career of the Al-Muhad founder Ibn Tumart when he conceived his religious mission after meditating in a cave. After days without food or even motion in the cave, Hayy achieves an experience of complete unity with God. In terms clearly drawn from the Sufi tradition, Ibn Tufil speaks of all things disappearing for Hayy, with only God remaining. Ibn Hayy's own self is dissolved in this mystical union. Of course, this is not something Ibn Tufil can describe adequately. It is something that we would need to experience ourselves. Ibn Tufil compares skeptics who reject this transcending of reason to bats who are blind in the light of the sun. Ironically, this analogy is drawn from Aristotle, who is so often presented as the main rival to mysticism in philosophy. That would seem to give Ibn Tufil a pretty good place to end his story. If he did end here, his tale would be thoroughly Avicennan, at least on his understanding of Avicenna. What Hayy learns on his island is more or less what you could learn from reading Avicenna. Galenic anatomy juxtaposed with an immaterialist theory of soul, a necessary first cause, which may give rise to an eternal universe, all crowned with the mystical union Ibn Tufil sees as the culmination of Avicenna's philosophy. Also deeply Avicennan is the idea that a sufficiently talented person, even if abandoned on the island without a single book, could become a perfect philosopher. We saw how Avicenna presents himself in his autobiography as a largely self-taught thinker. Hayy ibn Yaqdan can be seen as a dramatization of this idea that the philosopher can do it all on his own, dispensing not only with blind acceptance of authority, or taqlid, but even with revelation itself. We might think back to the second account of Hayy's arrival on the island. The spontaneous generation theory is like a physical version of Hayy's self-guided journey to enlightenment. And, by the way, which philosopher in the Islamic tradition considered it possible for humans to be spontaneously generated? Avicenna, who thought it was possible at least in principle. Since humans are generated when forms are sent from the agent intellect to suitably prepared matter, humans could arise by chance if matter just happened to be concocted in the right way. All this is daring on Ibn Tufil's part. We can imagine his much admired source al-Ghazali applauding the rejection of taqlid, but reacting with horror to the idea that prophecy is superfluous. If we keep reading, though, we'll see that Ibn Tufil has made room for religion in his tale. He refers back to the other island, presupposed by the first story, which had Hayy being conceived normally and abandoned by his mother. On this island is a corrupt society. It has a religion, which here remains unnamed, but as in Al-Farabi it seems obvious that the unidentified generic religion is meant to represent Islam. The wickedness of this island society provokes two virtuous men to opposite reactions. One, named Salaman, follows the scriptures of that society literally and tries to bring his fellow citizens to a more faithful religious life. The other, Absal, is given to a more figurative understanding of the scripture. But he despairs of communicating the hidden truths he has discovered to his benighted countrymen, so he leaves his island, and seeking solitude, comes to Hayy's island. The two meet in scenes apt to remind us of Robinson Crusoe's encounter with Friday. By the way, it's thought that an early modern English translation of Hayy ibn Yaxzan may have influenced Defoe and given him the idea for a Robinson Crusoe. Once Absal has encountered Hayy and taught him to use language, the two realize that they share the same beliefs. Hayy becomes a follower of Absal's faith, showing that philosophy and mysticism do not require religion, but do not rule it out either. Absal, meanwhile, accepts Hayy as a profound teacher. The two agree to return to Absal's island in an attempt to disseminate the truths they have come to understand. But they find that even the most enlightened members of the populace are unable to accept their teaching. Only now does Hayy realize why Absal's religious texts involve so many prohibitions and detailed practical instructions. The members of this society need such guidance, whereas the spontaneous philosopher Hayy does not. The happy end, such as it is, has Hayy and Absal sailing into the sunset to return to seclusion on their island. As Ibn Bajja would say, the two of them will there practice the rule of the solitary. It strikes me as significant that the second island, where Absal and Salaman dwell, is first introduced within the framework of the tale about the king's sister. In the spontaneous generation version of the tale, there need be no second island. Perhaps Ibn Tufa is telling us something here. The second island introduces the element of politics and religion to the narrative. The implicit message may be that the more fairy tale version of the story, with Hayy's mother placing him in a chest and setting him adrift on the water, is more acceptable and convincing to most people. In other words, it relates to the scientific account of spontaneous generation the way that religion relates to philosophy. That's just a guess on my part. In any case, from the juxtaposition between Hayy's path to enlightenment and the religion of Absal, it's clear that for Ibn Tufa, religion is indeed a rhetorical version of philosophical truth. Revelation needs to be understood figuratively, and is filled with guidance for non-philosophers who need to have their hands held to avoid going astray. In this, Ibn Tufa does not just look back to Al-Farabi, he also looks ahead to his colleague and the greatest Muslim thinker of Andalusia. Don't leave me stranded next time, as we begin to look at the man known to medieval authors simply as the commentator. It's Avarawis, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Back to Basics, a Varroes on Reason and Religion. In the unlikely event that you are invited to an audience before a king or queen, here are some guidelines to follow. Do not make casual jokes about regicide, or remark that the monarch's crown would go really well with what you yourself are wearing. Do avoid direct eye contact, and compare the monarch favourably to other outstanding royal figures. Alexander the Great is always a favourite. Do not snap your fingers and say, that reminds me I need to buy postage stamps. Do display your comprehensive knowledge of the works of Aristotle, and feel free to give favourable mention to this podcast, which sadly has yet to receive patronage from any of the crown heads of Europe. Actually, that bit of advice about Aristotle may or may not be applicable depending on the taste of the king or queen in question. But it was just the trick if you wanted to impress Abu Ya'aqoub Yusuf, who served as the Almohad ruler of Muslim Spain for about 20 years starting in 1163. Or so was the experience of a scholar who appeared before him, introduced to the emir by the subject of the last episode, Ibn Tufil. Ibn Tufil was the emir's doctor, and thus in a position to arrange an interview for his friend, a fellow philosopher, and, the subject of this episode, Abu Walid Imrosht. Imrosht, or Averroes, as he was known in Latin and is usually called in English, hailed from Cordoba and came from a family of legal scholars of the Maliki tradition, which as we saw was the dominant jurisprudential school in Andalusia. Averroes followed in their footsteps, eventually becoming the chief judge of Cordoba. So he was a well-connected individual. Still, meeting the Almohad ruler would have been a nervous occasion. After he was quizzed about his family background, Averroes became especially nervous when the emir asked him a question about the heavens. Are they, according to the philosophers, created, or are they eternal? You don't have to have read Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers to know that this is a rather provocative issue, and Averroes decided to play safe by playing dung. So the emir turned to Imtufel instead, engaging with him in a wide-ranging conversation that displayed the emir's considerable philosophical knowledge. Now reassured, Averroes joined the discussion and so impressed Abu Yaqub Yusuf that the emir bestowed upon him lavish rewards, including a fine steed. Now I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm skeptical whether this nice story has any basis in truth. It's derived from a history of Andalusia written in the following century, and the author of this history presents the anecdote as having been told by Averroes himself to one of his students. Like a good Hadith scholar, we should be cautious about the reliability of this chain of transmission. Likewise for another story from the same source, which states that Imtufel prompted Averroes to write elucidations of Aristotle's works because the emir found them difficult to understand. It's certainly plausible that readers of Aristotle would feel the need for some help, but Averroes's project of explaining Aristotle went well beyond the likely needs of the emir. It culminated in five line-by-line commentaries on Aristotle's major works, covering the posterior analytics, on the soul, the physics, on the heavens, and the metaphysics. So detailed and sophisticated are these commentaries that you could be forgiven for wondering whether there was anyone in Averroes's immediate environment of any social rank who could make much use of them. For the less ambitious, or perhaps we should say obsessed, reader of Aristotle, Averroes prepared two other sorts of text. Firstly, brief summaries that explain the main points of Aristotle's works. Secondly, running paraphrases such as those written in antiquity by the rhetorician Themistius. It's common to call Averroes's three sorts of exegesis short, middle, and long commentaries, but apart from the fact that the line-by-line commentaries are most definitely long, this terminology is rather misleading. More helpful would be to talk of epitomes and paraphrases reserving the word commentaries for the five massive works of exegesis that represented the peak of Averroes's achievement. On the strength of these writings, Averroes was known in Latin Christendom simply as the commentator, much as Aristotle was spoken of simply as the philosopher. When figures like Albert the Great or Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle, they would often have done so literally with a Latin translation of Averroes open on their desk. In fact, some of Aristotle's works were first made available through versions of Averroes's commentaries, which of course included Latin translations of the passages Averroes was commenting on. Averroes was equally influential among Jewish authors. Not only was he translated into Hebrew as well as Latin, but there were super-commentaries devoted to him, in other words commentaries on Averroes's commentaries. And it's a good thing too. Throughout the Latin and Hebrew translations, much of Averroes's output would be lost. Of his line-by-line commentaries, we have only a tiny handful of Arabic manuscripts, and the treatments of physics and On the Soul are lost in Arabic but survive in Latin and Hebrew. This is eloquent proof of Averroes's failure to make an impact on his fellow Muslims. He was read for some generations in Arabic, but mostly by Jews. When they turned to using Hebrew as the favored language of philosophy, there just wasn't anyone left who wanted to read the Arabic originals. This is a significant fact about the Islamic philosophical tradition. Sometimes Averroes is given credit for rescuing philosophy from the assault launched on it by Al-Ghazali, but if Averroes was trying to rescue anything, it was a rather old-fashioned version of philosophy. He looked back to the project of Al-Farabi and other members of the Baghdad school, who had likewise dutifully written summaries, paraphrases, and commentaries on Aristotle in the antique fashion. His was a doubly outdated endeavor, an attempt to revive the Baghdad revival of late antique Alexandria. But we are now in the 12th century. Averroes died in 1198, by which time the eastern heartlands of Islam were deep into the process of grappling with Avicenna rather than Aristotle. Averroes talks about Avicenna too, but is much less favorable towards him than his Andalusian colleague Ibn Tufayl. He usually mentions him only in order to complain that Avicenna is departing from Aristotle, and hence from the truth. This is the constant refrain of his response to Al-Ghazali's incoherence of the philosophers, entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence. Even if Al-Ghazali succeeds in refuting Avicenna, it doesn't really matter, because the real philosophy is what we find in Aristotle. In his commentaries too, Averroes is dismissive of Avicenna's achievement. He rejects the famous Avicennan proof of God's existence out of hand. The proper way to establish God is through the science of physics, by proving that there is a first cause of motion, just as Aristotle had done. Avicenna's attempt to do so in metaphysics is obviously wrong-headed, because God is part of the subject matter of metaphysics, and there is a rule of Aristotelian methodology which states that no science can prove the existence of its own subject matter. What Averroes offered then was a throwback to a philosophical approach that was simply no longer relevant for mainstream intellectuals in places like Persia. His project of commentary was not too little, but it was definitely too late. It didn't help either that Averroes worked so far west. His failure to make an impact in the East could in part be thanks to the practical difficulties of copying such enormous texts and carrying them across such a large distance. In fact, it's generally true that under the sea and thinkers had little impact on the Eastern tradition unless they actually went East themselves, like the great mystical thinker Ibn Arabi. Still, I think the basic explanation for Averroes' failure to find an Arabic readership is an intellectual one, not a practical one. For Latin Christendom, Averroes was a source of tremendous excitement, offering the most subtle and expert account available for Aristotle, whose works were suddenly becoming available in the 12th and 13th centuries. For a post-Avicenna, post-Ghazali audience of Muslim thinkers, by contrast, Averroes' commentaries were the equivalent of silent films made after the invention of sound. Averroes' allegiance to the old-school approach of the Baghdad Aristotelians is clear not only from his commentaries, but also from his most popular and frequently read work. Its full title is Fazl al-maqal wa taqrir ma'baina ashariyya wal-haqma min al-ittisar, which is a bit of a mouthful, especially considering how short the work is. The title means something like distinction of discourse and a determination of the relationship between the religious law and philosophy. A bit of a mouthful even in English, so it's usually just called the decisive treatise. This version of the title is not much more accurate than calling his works on Aristotle short, middle, and long commentaries. While I'm at it, silent movies weren't silent either. They were shown along with live music. It's a hard world for us pedants. A good thing about the title, decisive treatise, though, is that this little text is indeed decisive. In fact, it is a legal decision or judgment so that we here see Ivaroese in his guise as jurist. As often with a general legal judgment or fatwa, the question to be answered here concerns a certain practice and what Islam teaches about this practice. Standardly, the jurist needs to determine whether the practice is obligatory, encouraged, allowed, discouraged, or forbidden. We had a taste of this classificatory system when we looked at Ibn Hazm, whose literalist approach led him to say that anything not explicitly decided by the sources of the law is by default allowed. The issue decided in the decisive treatise, then, is going to be the legal status of philosophy, according to Islam. Obviously, given what we've seen about Ivaroese thus far, we wouldn't expect him to say that philosophy is forbidden or discouraged. It's hard to believe that he would want to say that philosophy is obligatory, like prayer, or the charitable tax paid by Muslims, so presumably he'll want to say that it is encouraged or merely allowed. But hard to believe or not, it turns out that he does think philosophy is obligatory, at least for those who have the talent and opportunity to pursue it. He supports this, as a good Islamic jurist should, by quoting scripture. The Qur'an contains remarks such as, A literalist like Ibn Hazm would not need long to make up his mind that such verses fall short of an explicit command to study philosophy. But Ivaroese, like most jurists, has a more flexible approach, and sees in these lines a requirement to investigate all created beings using the most powerful instrument God has given us, namely the intellect. And what is philosophy, if not the intellectual investigation of beings? But wait, there's more. The Revelation must want us to arrive at the best possible understanding that can result from such an investigation, so the first thing we need to do is determine what the best possible understanding might be. Luckily, we already know the answer from reading, or at least listening to podcasts about, Aristotle. The best understanding of anything is demonstrative knowledge, as described in the Posterior Analytics, not coincidentally one of the five texts to which Ivaroese devoted a full commentary. Indirectly, then, the Qur'an is instructing us to study logic in order to learn what standards need to be met by such demonstrative knowledge. But Ivaroese still isn't done. Since the study of all these things is obviously going to be quite a challenge, we can only undertake to fulfill the divine command in question by calling on the help of our predecessors. It doesn't matter whether these predecessors are Muslims or not, just so long as they can assist us in climbing to the epistemological peak of demonstrative knowledge. Thus, the Qur'an turns out to be commanding all Muslims to read Aristotle, if they are in a position to do so. When Ibn Hazm helped disseminate the Baghdad school's enthusiasm for Aristotle into Andalusia a few generations earlier, I tend to doubt that this is what he had in mind. Ivaroese doesn't have to address himself to such an obdurate opponent, but still, this is a legal treatise. His intended audience is not philosophers who need encouragement, or even the general reader, the man or woman on the Qorduban street. It is rather Ivaroese's fellow legal scholars. This explains much of what happens here in the decisive treatise. For one thing, you may have noticed that he has not provided a philosophical defense of philosophy. Rather, he's justifying philosophy by appeal to the Qur'an, as his fellow jurists would expect. Likewise, when Ivaroese considers objections against the practice of philosophy, he answers them not with philosophical proofs, but with dialectical arguments. These are arguments aimed squarely at legal scholars. If the critic of philosophy says that the companions of Muhammad did not engage in philosophy, which casts doubt on its necessity, then Ivaroese will retort that the companions did not engage in legal theory either. And if the critic complains that the pursuit of philosophy has led some people to unbelief, as Alhazali claimed happened to Avicenna, then Ivaroese will respond that the single-minded study of law has also led some jurists astray. So far then, we've learned that God wants us to do philosophy. Were he alive today, would Ivaroese therefore think that God wants you to listen to this podcast? Probably only the episodes on Aristotle. Of course, Ivaroese realizes that this is not a command that everyone can carry out. It's an interesting question whether we would nowadays want to say that everyone, or just about everyone, can do philosophy, but in Ivaroese's social context, it was obvious that a vanishingly small proportion of Muslims could have any hope of doing philosophy, never mind studying logic with the help of books by Aristotle translated into Arabic. Fortunately, God has mercifully provided for all the non-philosophers. It was for their sake that he did not send revelation in the form of demonstrative syllogisms, but in the form of powerful symbols and language that everyone can appreciate. Ivaroese thus sees the Qur'an as a fundamentally rhetorical text. It is persuasive, whereas philosophical discourse is demonstrative. Thus the Qur'an induces conviction and belief, not certain knowledge. This is no insult to the Qur'an, at least not as Ivaroese sees it. Rather, the perfection of the book lies precisely in its overwhelming persuasiveness. This is why I say that the decisive treatise shows Ivaroese carrying forward the agenda of the Baghdad school, and specifically of Al-Farabi. You'll remember that for Al-Farabi, the ideal ruler is both prophet and philosopher, able to grasp truth with certainty thanks to his powerful intellect, and able to represent truth symbolically thanks to his powerful imagination. Ivaroese is thinking along the same lines, except that his focus is less on the person of the prophet, and more on the nature of the words revealed to the prophet. Again, this may be due to the legal context. Having shown that philosophy is made obligatory in Islam, Ivaroese wants to push his argument forward into the characteristically legal realm of textual interpretation. If the Qur'an really has a rhetorical or symbolic nature, as he has claimed, then who is in the best position to determine the true meaning of its symbols and rhetoric? The traditional answer was of course the religious scholar. Who can draw on expertise in the Arabic language, the supplementary information provided by prophetic hadith, and the previous tradition of Qur'anic commentary? Ivaroese has a different answer, the philosopher. This is because the philosopher, or at least the successful philosopher, has access to something the scholar lacks, namely certain knowledge achieved through demonstration. After all, one thing we know for sure about the Qur'an is that it's true. And as Ivaroese says, quoting Aristotle without mentioning his source, truth does not contradict truth. This means that we can use demonstration as a check on possible interpretations of the revealed texts. Some interpretations can be ruled out, since they would have the Qur'an saying something false. To take a standard example, we could reject out of hand any interpretation which involves God having a body, since philosophy can demonstrate that he is incorporeal. Other interpretations, which would have the message of scripture agreeing with the philosopher's conclusions would be ratified, albeit not necessarily confirmed as correct. After all, there might be multiple interpretations of a single text, which interpret it as teaching different truths. But so long as the various interpretive meanings are all really true, there isn't much harm in that. Besides Ivaroese says, the interpreter gains some merit by establishing any possible interpretation, even if it is not the right one. Here, he echoes a well-known hadith stating that a judge who tries sincerely to rule correctly is rewarded once. If he succeeds, he is rewarded twice. Unfortunately, others have treated their philosophically-minded co-religionists rather, more harshly, Step-Forward Al-Ghazali. He has mentioned and chastised numerous times in the decisive treatise, although Ivaroese admits that he presumably had good intentions. But it's intentions like these that famously pave the road to hell, and Al-Ghazali's damnation of the philosophers has been hugely counterproductive in Ivaroese's eyes. Al-Ghazali's error was to write dialectical works like the Incoherence, and in such works to address questions that can only be tackled adequately through demonstration. These would include the eternity of the world, the nature of divine causation, and the manner in which God knows about his creation. Never do Al-Ghazali's discussions rise to the level of demonstrative proof, which is typical of a theologian like him. For Ivaroese, as for Al-Farabi, the practitioners of kalam only manage to do dialectic. This is the unfortunate middle ground between the exalted heights of demonstrative philosophy and the modest level of those who are content to accept rhetorical symbols. Worst of all, untutored readers, who should just accept rhetorical teachings, may come across the writings of men like Al-Ghazali. This is liable to mislead them into outright false belief if they are made to doubt the symbols they previously accepted at face value. Ivaroese compares Al-Ghazali and other theologians to someone who makes patients question the advice given them by their doctor, by raising doubts that could only be adequately answered by someone with an expert understanding of medicine. Ivaroese's critique of Al-Ghazali involves an irony, in that Al-Ghazali's critique of Avicenna had been very similar, that Avicenna failed to measure up to the demonstrative standards required by philosophy. Not for the first time, we see intellectuals accusing each other of failing to offer demonstrative proofs. This relates to the equally common accusation of taqlid, since depending uncritically on authority is a sure way to fall short of demonstration. But the modern reader of the decisive treatise is more likely to aim a rather different accusation at Ivaroese. Isn't this all horribly elitist? Particularly objectionable is his idea that the vast majority of believers should content themselves with symbolic versions of the truth without even being exposed to the dangers of more advanced philosophical discussion. This might put us in mind of Plato's Republic, in which the population is kept in line by being taught a so-called noble lie, a myth which persuades them to maintain social order. Here it's worth noting that Ivaroese wrote a paraphrase of Plato's Republic since he couldn't get his hands on Aristotle's politics. This paraphrase is, again tellingly, lost in Arabic but preserved in Hebrew. It's not easy to defend Ivaroese from the charge of elitism. One response might be to point again to the different social circumstances of his day when even basic literacy was uncommon, and also to bear in mind how high his expectations were when it came to philosophy. When he talks in the decisive treatise about the philosopher, he means not just someone who is striving after wisdom, but someone who has already got it. This is a person who has achieved systematic, demonstrative insight. By this standard, Avicenna wouldn't make the grade according to Ivaroese, and in fact it isn't clear who might apart from Aristotle himself. Fortunately, Ivaroese didn't believe that it was crucial for everyone to achieve philosophical insight. This is because of another theory he developed in the context of commenting on Aristotle's On the Soul. This theory is anything other than elitist, though it has the disadvantage of being frankly unbelievable. After a long and careful reflection, Ivaroese came to the view that all of humankind shares one single intellect. Why would he say such a thing, and what could he possibly have meant by it? If Ivaroese is right, then you already know what I think are the answers to these questions. But if he isn't, you'll have to wait two weeks to find out. Before we tackle Ivaroese's theory of the mind, it's time for us to celebrate reaching another milestone. One hundred and fifty episodes. We're in the midst of discussing Ivaroese, who, along with Avicenna, is the figure from the Islamic world who exerted the greatest influence on Latin Christendom. So I thought this would be a good time to explore the process by which Arabic philosophical works were translated into Latin. Decide to treat yourself to an interview with not one, but two of the world's leading experts on that subject, Doug Nicholas Hasse and Charles Burnett. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be a special 150th episode about the transmission of philosophy from Arabic into Latin, and I'm joined for this episode by two guests. First of all, Charles Burnett, who is Professor of the History of Arabic Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute in London, and secondly, Doug Nicholas-Hasse, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wurzburg. Hi Charles. Hello, pleased to be here. And hello, Doug. Hello. Thank you both for coming on the program. So I thought, Charles, I would ask you first to say something general about the translation movement, the Arabic-Latin translation movement. When did it happen and what sorts of texts did they translate? Well, it started off at the end of the 10th century and built up momentum during the 11th century, but the apogee really was in the 12th and early 13th century, and then it started to tear off towards the end of the 13th century. When, I say, most of the things which had to be translated were translated. We could say that Latin culture, we're talking about culture in which the language or communication of academic communication or Latin had caught up with Arabic culture. And the kinds of texts that were translated were those that were perceived to be lacking in the Latin West after the early Middle Ages. I was talking about a period in which classical culture, which was expressed largely in Greek, had died out in the West. The texts were no longer there. The Latin scholars were looking to fill in gaps in their knowledge. They knew, roughly, what the range of learning in science, especially in theoretical science, was, and they wanted to fill in the gaps, for example, in the mathematical sciences, in geometry and in astronomy in particular, and in philosophy. So the whole range of philosophy, they knew that Aristotle had written on many aspects of philosophy. They were lacking his works. They also wanted to fill in on medicine. They knew that Galen was the great authority on medicine. They wanted to catch up with a text on Galen, and they found these texts amongst the Arabs. Actually, one thing that I did cover quite a long time ago, although I haven't gotten to Latin medieval philosophy yet, is what happened at the very end of Late Antiquity in Latin. So the audience knows, for example, that there's Boethius, who's done some work on Aristotelian logic, and there's some other minor texts on the liberal arts and so on. But basically, until the Arabic Latin translation movement, they had almost no access to the rest of Aristotle and, in fact, the whole kind of legacy of Greek philosophy from antiquity. Is that right? That's right, yes. But in looking for these works of the Greeks, they found that the Arabs, too, had written works on the same day, developed this Greek learning. They'd added their own slant, or in fact, even discoveries to what the Greeks had produced. And so, in looking for Galen, they also found Avicenna, Razi, other Arabic doctors who had, as it were, developed using antipopates and such sources. They'd developed medicine over the centuries. And in looking for Aristotle, they found other Arabic philosophers who, having inherited the rich philosophical tradition of the Greeks, had developed it in their own ways. And certainly in mathematics, in astronomy, and in particular, the Arabs had made such strides forward in observation, in theoretical calculations and movements of the planets and so on, that the Latins were able to build their own astronomy on Arabic works. I guess actually an obvious comparison here is to the Greek-Arabic translation movement. And so, actually, what you've just said is already one big difference. So it's not as if you have the same group of texts, Galen, Aristotle, Ptolemy, coming into Arabic from Greek and then from Arabic into Latin, because the Arabic-Latin translation movement brings with it a whole bunch of new texts that only exist because of Islamic culture. But is that the main difference, would you say? Or how do the two translation movements compare? Well, another way of putting it, I suppose, is to say that what the Latins found amongst the Greeks in Byzantine sources, for example, were texts. What the Latins experienced in regard to the Arabs were masters, were teachers. They had not only the texts in Arabic, but they also had teachers, not always Arabs, sometimes Jews who were educated in the Arabic system, who were able to explain the texts. And so they were able, the Latin translators, the Latin scholars who were working in the context of Arabic learning, adjacent to Arabic centers of learning, were able to continue where the Arabs had left off, as it were, in commentary, in development, in the particular sciences or philosophy that they were involved in. Right. Well, that gives us an idea of, generally speaking, what happened and also when. Doug, where did this happen? So obviously, this is not something that was going on in, you know, Scandinavia, right? So it's presumably at points of contact between the Islamic world and the Christian world, is that right? Yeah. Well, in particular, three zones of contact between the two worlds, Spain, Andalusia, Sicily, and then the Crusader states. And in these three zones, we have in different phases, different translation movements. Roughly speaking, we have in the 11th century in Southern Italy, a translation movement in Spain in the 12th century, and again in Southern Italy in the 13th century at the court of the Hohenstaufen. And Charles knows more about this, and he insists on this, that there's also some activity in the Crusader states. But this is only recently been really known that the Crusaders not only were slaying people, but also translating. Presumably not at exactly the same time. So when you say the Crusader states, Charles, do you want to come in and say a bit more about that? Well, Antioch in particular was an important center, partly because of its cosmopolitan nature. Before it had been in Byzantine hands for 100 years in the 11th century. In the early 12th century, or the very end of the 11th century, it was conquered by the Crusaders. We then went on to conquer Jerusalem. In the wake of the Crusaders, it seems there were also scholars who were going up to, who were going there to help the Crusaders establish the monasteries, establish the local legal courts and that sort of thing. And we have evidence of a particular scholar called Stephen of Antioch who came from Pisa, who was the treasurer of the main Benedictine monastery in Antioch, that was St. Paul's, who was interested first of all in medicine, but he said very specifically that he wanted to introduce to the Latins the works, the Arabic works on the body, of the medicine, in order to progress later when he had actually practiced his translating skill to go on to the higher reaches of philosophy. Okay, so that's Antioch, but I gather that's not one of the main translation centers, right? So really we're thinking mostly about Italy, Spain, Sicily, and in that order, is that right? Yes, yes. Yes. Okay, general agreements on that. All right, so maybe Doug, if I come back to you on that, can you tell us something about the translations that were executed in southern Italy? Yeah, the first substantial translation movement was in the last quarter of the 11th century, and the context is Greek-speaking communities in southern Italy, Arabic-speaking communities in Sicily, and travel between North Africa and southern Italy. So one of the key figures is Constantinos Africanus, Constantine the African, who comes from what is today Tunisia to southern Italy, brings manuscripts, Arabic manuscripts, he's Arabic-speaking, and translates medical sources, but these sources contain much philosophical material, which then later becomes very important for what we then call the school of Chartres or the French cathedral schools, the national philosophy of the 12th century. So this is basically then someone whose origins are in the Islamic world, but is a Christian presumably, and that means that he would have spoken Greek, Arabic, and Latin, is that right? Well, I'm not sure about the Greek, I don't think he knew Greek, but he got acquainted with Greek communities in southern Italy, and these people there were already translating from Greek into Latin, and there was a translation culture already existing, and this person, Constantine the African, obviously offered further material, which was then translated into Latin, from Arabic, and one peculiar thing about this is that he's trying to hide his Arabic sources, so he doesn't, the texts look Greek from its Latin surface, so there are no Arabic transcriptions in there, the titles of these works often sound Greekizing, and something like Pantegna, and what's the, what's the Pantegna? It's a medical work which was, it consists of 20 books, 10 books of theory, and 10 books of practice. So these are basically Arabic-Latin translations that are, as it were, trying to pass as Greek-Latin translations, or at least you can't tell the difference, let's say, put it that way. It is, as you said, written in these translations are made in the context in which translations are also being made of medical texts and works of philosophy, Nimesius wrote on the nature of man, and translated from Greek into Latin, and one curious thing, for example, is that in the very first chapter of this translation of the Pantegna, Constantine situates himself in the history of medical writings, starting from Hippocrates going through Galen, and he mentions a whole series of Greek doctors, and then he misses out the Arabs altogether, and then comes to himself and says, I, Constantine, I'm the author of this book in the sense that I have put together this book from many sources. So no Razi, no Avicenna, just Constantine. Right, so this is interesting because it suggests maybe another parallel to the Greek-Arabic translation movement earlier, which is that philosophy comes into this culture on the back of other disciplines that we would maybe broadly consider as scientific, so things like medicine and astronomy and so on. It's in fact an important feature of the Arabic and Latin translation movements as a whole, that philosophy is translated rather late. They start with the sciences, there are, as Charles said, these gaps, they realize there are gaps in their sciences, among these sciences they have. They know the name of Ptolemy, but don't have text by Ptolemy. And also then if you move on to Spain in Andalusia, in the first half of the 12th century, a major translator like John of Seville translates many astrological treatises, others translate treatises on magic or on alchemy and so on medicine. And philosophy gets transported in these treatises too, but the proper great translations that then influence European philosophy so much by Avicenna, by Arvéros, by Aristotle come later in the second half of the 12th century, roughly speaking. You could say that it is works which have a direct and immediate practical value in medicine and astrology magic. That I translated first. I guess one obvious question that arises here, because you mentioned that there were already Greek-Latin translations going on, is why do they have to go to Arabic texts? I mean, why not just get Greek manuscripts from Byzantium and translate directly from Greek into Latin? Why do they need to deal with the Arabic-speaking world at all? Well, I think it's a matter of understanding the text. You can't understand a text unless someone explains what's going on. We do have cases of very literal translations being made, both from Greek and Arabic, by translators who obviously have not had the experience of knowing the subject matter and have no teacher of the subject matter, and these translations don't make much sense. Yeah, there's some Greek-Arabic translations like that too, actually, that are very hard to understand. But one thing which is distinctive of the greatest of the period, so we'll be going on to mention Toledo, becomes the most important centre for translating. And if you look at the translations made there by Jonathan Ramona, by Dominicus Conti-Salvi, they are accompanied already in the early Spanish scripts by explanations in the margin which explain difficulties, sometimes difficult terms, sometimes Arabic terms which have been left in the Arabic language, explained in Latin, sometimes difficult doctrines. But you get the impression immediately that there is some teaching going on here, that the texts are being transmitted together with explanations of the subject matter. This is why I think it's so important that the translations were made where there were already important Arabic centres. Toledo was a leading centre for astronomy in Islamic Al-Andalus before it was conquered by the Christians in 1085. So it's not really surprising that the first astronomical tables which give information, which allow you to predict the courses of the planets through the sky, were made in Toledo some 30 years later. Another example of this is that we have in Saragossa, in north-east Spain, two things. First of all we have a superb mathematician, one of the kings of Saragossa, one of the Banerhoud, who wrote a work called the Perfect Work on Mathematics, which includes everything that one could possibly know about geometry and arithmetic. At the same time, this is the early 12th century, you have Ibn Bajaj, a philosopher who was really developing Arabic philosophy in Al-Andalus, basing himself on Al-Farabi in the Islamic East. And it's not by chance that it is adjacent to this Arabic kingdom of Saragossa, that you have the first interest in astronomy in north-east Spain. And eventually, probably through a transfer of this interest in philosophy from Saragossa to Cordova, an interest in Arabic philosophy, eventually the works of Abarohis, which we translated. So one has to think of a dynamic society in which you have Arabic scholars and you have Latin scholars who became skilled in the subject matters involved. And there's not so much evidence, in fact there's very little evidence of this happening in the case of the Greek-Latin translations. And by the way, we should presumably imagine Jews being involved in this whole process as well, right? So it's not just Muslims and Christians. Right, there's one important figure, Avindahud, who's an Andalusian Jew who helps Dominico Sondeseib, one of the most important translators in Toledo, who's a canon of the cathedral in Toledo, with his translations, at least with some. On the other hand, let me come back to the question, why not translating only from Greek? Charles mentioned that the Arabs contributed a lot to the Greek sciences and philosophy they had acquired or inherited from the Greeks. And one important factor is that the cultural activity or scientific activity in general of the Arabic world was on a very different scale from that of the Latin culture, also in material respects. When an important monastery like St. Gallen, which was a center of learning in the 10th century, had about 500 titles in its library, we know this from the catalogue, a library in Cordoba of the Caliph could have an estimated 100,000 titles. And we know that it had more than 40 volumes of catalogue only. 40 volumes of catalogue, so lists of books. 40 volumes of lists of books. That's not bad. More than between 40 and 50. So it's like you get to go to the Library of Congress to do your research instead of your local public library, effectively. Of course, the background is, yes, the background is parchment in the Latin world and paper in the Arabic world and also cursive script, which was much more easily written than the book script of the scribes in the Latin world. And this, of course, was a much more active written culture and a large community, Arabic speaking, from the east in Buhara, the Silk Road, all the way up to Andalusia. And of course, if you are a scholar and there are no fixed boundaries here, you can travel, a Christian can travel in Islamic countries and you see this enormously active written culture and scientific culture. You're not searching for autonomy only among Greek manuscripts or Galen or Avicenna or Aristotle, but you hear and see that there's lots of interesting material you can get from the Arabs. One important thing I find that Charles has found out is that the translation movement in Spain had a certain coherence to it and that the model for this was a text by Farabi, which you may have mentioned, on the ordering of the sciences according to different forms of syllogism. So the model of demonstrative science was very important to Farabi and also to the order of these translation movements. They had a certain blueprint, so to speak, from Arabic, as Charles has shown, and several translators, Dominicus Condesari, Richard of Cremona, later Alfred of Shersell, Michael Scott, and in the 13th century, Hermanus Alemanus, continued a program of really translating a whole range of all the sciences that were known at the time. And that's a very impressive accomplishment. And in a way, it shows the long after-life of the curriculum of the sciences from late antiquity, because of course that was very influential on how Farabi thought the sciences would be structured as well. So this just runs and runs throughout all these different cultures, in fact. But the high ideal of demonstrative science is something that Farabi somehow adds, I would think, and that gets transported with it into the West. And how's to also structure university education, I think? Well, one might even say that what was put down by Farabi as a kind of theoretical description of the relationship of the sciences becomes a blueprint for the university curricula in the West. It's only in the West that it really is put into practice. I think that something that's very important about what you're saying is that the influence from scholars of the Islamic world on the development of philosophy and science more generally in the Latin-using Christian world wasn't just that they wound up reading Ivarides and Avicenna, it was that they were actually having face-to-face communication with scholars and experts on the relevant topics, so that their initial engagement with these topics would already have been shaped by the people who were helping them do the translations and just helping them understand the text they were looking at. This is quite true. We're not talking about a large number of Muslims actually living with the Christians, but as Dak has already mentioned, we have Jews, we have Christians, Arabs, called Musarabs in Al-Andalus, who were crossing the borders. And also, we must think not only of the books, but also the instruments in astronomy, for example. You would have the astrolabe and other astronomical instruments in medicine. We have this wonderful medical book on surgery by Al-Zahrawi, who is named after the Medina Zahrawi, which is just outside Cordova, living there in the 11th century, who gives descriptions of a whole range of surgical instruments that you use. These instruments too would have been well known, would have been conveyed to Christian doctors on the other side of the border. And you have the numerals. I mean, that's a big topic obviously, but it's another channel, because the merchants, of course, in the Mediterranean area, they got to know their Arabic merchant colleagues that had different ways to calculate. And with the Arabic numerals, and with algebra, it was much easier and obviously had many advantages in a practical side. And this was another contact that helped to get to know Arabic sciences and philosophy. We've said something about southern Italy and Spain. I think we should just touch on Sicily, at least briefly, before we move on to some general concluding remarks. Do you want to say something about that? Well, Sicily is a special place. It, as Charles mentioned, has been taken by the Normans after a longer rule by Arabs. And with the Normans and with the Norman kings and later the Hohenstaufen kings, there was always an Arabic-speaking community there, and also influential people at the court who spoke Arabic. And I think we have to mention an important figure here, King Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who is exceptionally interested in the sciences of the Jews and of the Arabs, of the Muslims, and he didn't have any contact problems. I mean, he's a very interesting person in that respect. We know that he was writing letters to scholars, Jewish scholars, Muslim scholars, and he attracted people to his court. We know this also from Arabic sources. And some of these people, a good number of them, actually translated. One of them was Michael Scott, a Scottish person who had travelled to Andalusia, became a canon of Toledo, the old big center of translation, and then for some reason came to Italy. He didn't always stay in the vicinity of the emperor, but he translated in Italy a large number of texts and avarice in particular, and that's important for European philosophical history, the commentator on Aristotle. Actually, before we leave the topic of Michael Scott, I have to ask you to explain something that you did in a piece of research a few years ago, where you showed the identity of the translator of several anonymous translations of avarice. So can you tell us how you did that and what you found out? Well, I had hoped I would identify sometime these anonymous translations. The big commentaries on the metaphysics, for example, by Aristotle or on the anima by Aristotle, they don't bear a translator's name, but we knew that they come from this translation culture in the context of King Frederick II Hohenstaufen. And the idea was perhaps we can do it not with technical vocabulary, like substantia or quiditas, but by looking at small worlds, like therefore in Latin qua propta is a particle distinctive of Michael Scott. Other translators use other particles, and with a statistical analysis of this particle usage, you can really see the handwriting, so to speak, the stylistic handwriting of the translators and system and group them. So, yeah, since then, it was always an old assumption that Michael Scott was responsible for a large number of commentaries, but it was successful. You actually approved it. I approved it, yes. Must not be bashful and modest. Yes, you can say this. Right. So actually, that brings us on to, I guess, a more general issue, which is about the methodology that was being used by these translators. I mean, a naive idea about this is someone hands you a text in Arabic and you just have to translate it into Latin. You know both languages, so there's no problem, but presumably there's more to it than that, Charles? Well, indeed there is. There are different methodologies that would be followed and that were followed. We've already mentioned that Constantine the African, for disguising his Arabic source, he was writing in a Latin which did not follow slavishly the Arabic original. But during the course of the 12th century, especially in regard to the great translating centre of Toledo, it became the norm to translate very literally word for word from the Arabic to such an extent that the Latin syntax followed the Arabic syntax. Very often Arabic words were included in the Latin and had to be explained by marginal annotations. It was regarded, in fact, both in respect to translating from Arabic and translating from Greek into Latin, that it was a sin to put anything of your own into the translation and that included changing the word order at your win, as it were. You had to be absolutely faithful to the original translator. This literal translation became the norm in the mid 12th century and remained the norm until the mid 13th century. The other thing that's got to be said about these translations, again we hinted at this, is that very often they were not made by a single person. That the Arabic text would be translated often by a Jew, sometimes by an Arabic Christian, a Mozarab, into perhaps a vernacular which was common between that Jew and the Latin translator, a form of Spanish or a romance language. Then the translator would put that into good Latin. This doesn't go against what I've said about literal translations because even going through the vernacular you would, I mean there's this famous quotation at the beginning of a translation about the Senna's book on the soul, this Abendauf, this Jew who came from Cordoba to Toledo, translated the word singularity one by one into the vernacular language and then Dominicus Gronsalvi translated them again one by one into Latin. So does it make any sense when it comes out of the far end? Strangely, well yes it does, partly because there was also an understanding of the subject matter, partly because people who read these translations, I'm thinking across the board with you, got used to this translation-ese Latin as it were. I think one might say that Dominicus Gronsalvi's Latin was actually quite good, but in certain astronomical works for example you have a very strange kind of Latin which then is followed by Latin authors who are not making translations simply because it becomes the way of writing a technical work. So they write in Latin as if they were writing something that had been translated from Arabic, that's really interesting. Well the style becomes established and you follow the same style. Doug, can you give us an example of some of the distinctive philosophical theories that actually become influential, so not just text but actual ideas or theories that circulate into the Latin using world from the Arabic using world? Well I can take Avicenna as an example. Avicenna's The Anima was translated and Avicenna's Metaphysics among other texts from Ashifa and one doctrine that was very influential among the scholastic philosophers was the distinction between essence and existence in different ways. I don't want to explain it now but it was in different areas of philosophy, for instance in the thinking on universals, in the thinking about individuation, also in the thinking about God as the necessary existent, it was very influential. The Necessae Essepersae is a concept that influenced also authors like Willem of Orvandier or Thomas Aquinas. And there we have also essence and existence because it's God's essence to exist. And in other areas such as psychology there are very influential intellect theories that many scholastics discuss such as Avarra's theory that there's only one intellect for all human beings and that becomes a famous or infamous theory. One thing that's interesting is that not only do they treat these Muslim thinkers as great authorities but sometimes they become notorious for really appalling doctrines. The one is one you just mentioned which is the idea that there's only one intellect for all of mankind but a stranger one though is that Avicenna becomes famous for having thought that humans could be spontaneously generated like just like worms from rotting meat or something. Yes, out of mud or out of rotten matter. Yes, but that's something Aristotle is responsible for this. I mean he has already thought that spontaneously generated beings are possible and Avicenna thought there's no reason to restrict this to lower animals like worms which we have in the fridge but also human beings. And Avarra on the other hand thought well this is impossible these are monsters so this is an example from natural philosophy basically which is I like it which is linked to the ontology of forms also and to theories of generations so it's philosophically interesting and it links up with many different other topics in the history of philosophy. But spontaneous generation remains a topic that people discuss because it was until modern theories about microorganisms was difficult to explain how life originates from matter without any parents and I like one one author here Tiberio Rosselliano of the early 16th century and he said well these new islands the American islands it's clear that these people cannot have gone there with bones so clearly Americans must have been created spontaneously generated spontaneously from mud basically. That would be news to my parents. Do you want to add anything Charles? Well I think one ought to emphasize that the heyday heyday of the translations coincided not without cause with the beginnings of the universities and so the university art courses in the seven liberal arts especially mathematical arts and the philosophy courses were provided with the books for their curriculum from the translations which were being made especially in Spain and we can see this in the case of the the early books which were being read in Oxford and Paris already by the end of the 12th century and in Bologna and eventually in university in Spain. Although this is something I'll get on to covering in great detail many episodes in the future I thought we should at least talk a little bit about the influence that these translations had in Latin using Europe. Anyone who picks up say Thomas Aquinas will see that he's constantly quoting Avicenna and Averroes so you get a kind of superficial idea that major and probably also minor Christian authors writing in Latin and Europe in the say 12th 13th 14th century were influenced by philosophy from the Islamic world but could you maybe say something more general than that I mean is it just that they occasionally quote them or what kind of impact did it have and how fast did the impact happen? Can I say one general thing here that the works of Aristotle that we're talking about in this philosophy of its philosophical contents although at first were translated both from Arabic and from Greek eventually in the course of the 13th century it was the Greek Latin translations which became used by Albertus Magnus Thomas Aquinas and so on but it was always the Arabic commentators that were used to explain these Greek philosophical works and that's why you see so many quotations of Averroes, Avisena, Al-Farabi, Al-Kindi and so on because the Greek works were interpreted through their Arabic commentators. If we take a very general view of the whole influence you can say in some disciplines the influence was not as strong than in others for instance in logic it was not as strong as in psychology, the anima, metaphysics and natural philosophy. In ethics it wasn't that strong. One could say metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology are these areas where the influence of Arabic philosophy was particularly strong. Also if we look at the centuries the influence was particularly strong in the 12th century at certain centres in French cathedral schools then in the 13th century we certainly have a high point of the climax of the influence of Arabic philosophical theories but it stretches all the way until the 1700 I could say until Averroes as the commentator, the commentator you read becomes out of fashion for certain complicated reasons that you have to address at some point in your podcast but for a long time every student would get in contact with these names with Avisena and Averroes and some other Arabic philosophers like Al-Kindi and Farabi but they were not that influential and some texts were copied extremely often because they were on the syllabus of the syllabus of the universities for instance the Liber de Causis. This is the version of prophes that was translated into Arabic and then from there translated into Latin as the book of causes or Liber de Causis. And since you Peter are an expert on the Neoplatonic tradition I presume that your readers know very well how important the Liber de Causis was and in fact there are more than 200 manuscripts, Latin manuscripts of the treatise and it was one of the most often copied Arabic treatises but the large commentaries by Averroes were also very influential. Right and in fact it is exactly Averroes that I'm going to be getting back to talking about in the next episode but for now I will just thank Charles Burnett very much for coming on and also dog Nicolas Hause. Thanks guys and please join me next week for more on Averroes here on the history of philosophy without any gaps. Outro
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Single-Minded, Averroes on the Intellect. When I was finishing my studies in philosophy and preparing to apply for a job, I got some advice about what to do in the interviews I was hoping to get. Given my area of interest, I should expect to be asked why it is worth studying the history of philosophy at all, instead of just ignoring all of these antiquated ideas and getting on with our own theories. The right answer, I was told, is that we can mine the history of philosophy to discover arguments and positions that would speak to today's concerns. A good example might be the way that Aristotle's ethics have given inspiration to many philosophers working in ethics in the last few decades. So, I prepared myself to say, preferably with a straight face, that contemporary philosophers of the 1990s could learn a thing or two from my PhD dissertation, not the easiest argument to make given that my topic was the Arabic translation of Plotinus. I stood in front of the mirror, practicing lines like, you may think that mental states supervene on states of the brain, but there is a surprisingly good case to be made that we have an undescended soul which never loses its connection to universal intellect. But I never really believed that this is the only, or even the best, rationale for studying the history of philosophy. Certainly historical texts have contributed to contemporary debates, as with Aristotle's ethics. Others seem almost to transcend the time they were written. No one can read Epictetus, for instance, without considering how his teachings might apply to their own lives. But to me, much of the fascination of the historical figures is how far they are from our ways of thinking, rather than how up-to-date we can make them seem. Indeed, I've always been drawn to thinkers whose views seem a bit far out, at least from today's vantage point. I find it fascinating that long-dead philosophers assumed certain things to be obviously true, which now seem obviously false, and that they built elaborate systems on these exotic foundations. To be useful, historical ideas don't always need to fit neatly into our ways of thinking. They can shake us out of those ways of thinking, helping us to see that our assumptions, too, are a product of our time and place. If this is the sort of thing you want from the history of philosophy, then it is hard to beat Averroes's ideas about the human intellect. Here we have the greatest medieval commentator on Aristotle, conducting a sustained inquiry into the meaning of Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, and changing his mind several times, before finally coming to the conclusion that—wait for it—there is only one human mind. All of us share in its activity, and through its thinking humankind is brought to its highest fulfillment. Averroes's proposal was greeted with derision and hostility in Latin Christendom. The doctrine of the unity of the human intellect was officially condemned by church authorities, and no less a writer than Thomas Aquinas composed a detailed attack on Averroes. Not only was his theory self-evidently false in its own right, but it was also wrong as an interpretation of Aristotle. But before we follow Aquinas in heaping scorn on Averroes's doctrine, we should try to understand it. After all, this was no casual notion mentioned only in passing. Averroes developed it in the longest of his three treatments of Aristotle's work On the Soul. As I mentioned last time, he wrote three kinds of interpretations for Aristotle's writings—epitomies, running paraphrases, and the longer proper commentaries which would quote the original Aristotelian text and then meticulously explain it, bit by bit. Averroes wrote all three sorts of exposition for On the Soul, and it was one of only four Aristotelian works to receive the full commentary treatment. This shows how important it was to him and also gives us an opportunity to see Averroes's ideas developing. It is only in the last, full commentary for On the Soul that we find the notorious doctrine that all mankind shares a single intellect. Averroes came to it only after lengthy and careful consideration of both the philosophical and interpretive issues facing him. He must then have had very good reasons for his apparently insane proposal. So what were they? Well firstly, the idea that there is a single intellect involved in all human knowledge was nothing new. We can go back at least as far as Plotinus. As I explained at several unsuccessful job interviews, he postulated an intellect, divine but below the absolute first principle, which is identical with the world of Platonic forms. For Plotinus, human souls come to have knowledge through their relation to this single intellect. This may seem to be the primary inspiration for the theory we find in Al-Farabi and Evasenna, who speak of a so-called agent intellect. Their agent intellect gives forms to matter, to facilitate the generation of things like sunflowers and giraffes, and it's also involved in the process of human knowledge. No doubt their theory did have late ancient roots, but it emerged not so much through reading Plotinus as from interpreting Aristotle. Following the antique commentators on Aristotle, Alkindi, Al-Farabi, and Evasenna envisioned a superhuman intellect which enables us to think. They themselves were thinking of the infamous fifth chapter of the third book of Aristotle's which speaks of a maker intellect that is like light. Just as light makes seeing possible by rendering things visible, the maker intellect makes thinking possible by rendering things intelligible. It's worth reminding ourselves why this theory seemed so plausible to so many clever philosophers. For one thing, it made good sense of a difficult and important passage in Aristotle, and that's always a bonus, but it also explained how universal knowledge is possible. Remember that, according to Aristotle, we can only count ourselves as having knowledge in the strict and proper sense when we have universal and necessary understanding. It's hard to see how that can emerge from our experience of things in the world around us, since these things are particular and not necessary, they come to be and pass away. Though the details vary from author to author, the single agent intellect was always used to explain how we are able to attain universal understanding on the basis of our encounter with particular things. To this extent, Averroes is doing nothing innovative when he invokes a single intellect to explain human knowledge. The new twist is to identify the single intellect with the human mind itself. Averroes' Muslim predecessors may have accepted the existence of a single universal intellect, but they also believed that each human has their own intellect or rational soul. You have such a power, and so do I. This is why once you have examined enough giraffes, and once the agent intellect lends you a helping hand, you come to understand giraffes, and I don't. In your intellect, the potential knowledge of giraffes has been realized. Well, my intellect remains woefully ignorant of giraffes, because I've been wasting my time watching TV and changing the channel every time a nature documentary comes on. So we can now say more specifically what Averroes' controversial thesis amounts to. He says that there is only one single human capacity for universal knowledge. Using the traditional technical terminology, he puts the point by saying that there is only one human material intellect. Here, the word material doesn't necessarily mean that we are literally dealing with a physical object, just that we are dealing with an intellect that is potential in character. This is the intellect that can take on an object of thought the way that a material, like wood, can take on the form of a table or of a toy giraffe. However, one might be tempted to say that this material intellect is material in a more literal sense, actually connected to a body. This is how Averroes understood the position of his esteemed fellow commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias. A related view was proposed by his esteemed fellow Andalusian philosopher, Ibn Bajja. As we saw when we looked at Ibn Tufel, Ibn Bajja devoted himself to the Baghdad school project of coming to grips with Aristotle but on Spanish soil. Averroes is Ibn Bajja's direct successor in this respect, and, on the more specific issue of the intellect, he also took inspiration from his predecessor. His first attempt to explain Aristotle's psychology appears in his Epitome devoted to Amn the Soul. Here he more or less follows Ibn Bajja's suggestion that the material intellect is markedly inferior to intellect, properly speaking. Since it gives us only the potential to think about universal truths, why not say that it resides in our storehouse of particular experiences? After all, it's thanks to your encounters with various giraffes, like Hiawatha, that you are able to arrive at scientific knowledge about giraffes in general. Following this line of thought, Ibn Bajja associated the material intellect with the imagination, where we keep and manipulate particular images like our remembered image of Hiawatha galloping across the savanna. For Ibn Bajja, these imaginary forms prepare the way for what he called a unification with the universal agent intellect. Once this unification occurs, the human soul is able to think universally, like a good giraffeologist should. In his Epitome of Aristotle's On the Soul, Iverroes expresses his admiration for Ibn Bajja's interpretation and basically adopts it himself. And the view does have its attractions. It makes good sense of the phrase material intellect itself, in that the imaginary forms in the soul serve as matter for actual thinking, like wood that is turned into a table. Upon further reflection, though, Iverroes decided he could not accept Ibn Bajja's teaching. The change of mind, pun as always intended, was the result of Iverroes doing exactly what you'd expect Iverroes to do, read Aristotle more carefully. Upon revisiting the crucial passages in On the Soul, Iverroes was impressed by the argument Aristotle gives to show that the intellect has no bodily organ. We covered that more than a hundred episodes ago, so it's just possible that you may need me to remind you how it went. The idea was that the intellect can take on any form, because all things are thinkable, so it cannot have any form by its own nature, otherwise it wouldn't be able to acquire that form after not having it. For instance, if the intellect were seated in the brain, and if brains are cold, then we would not be able to start thinking about cold after not thinking about cold. Rather, coldness would always be present in the intellect. Ponder this, Iverroes was moved to separate even the material intellect more completely from connection to matter. The imagination, as long since established in the medical tradition, is a power seated in part of the brain. Remember that Iverroes, like so many other philosophers of Andalusia, wrote about medicine as well as philosophy. So, no kind of intellect could be so intimately related to imagination as Ibn Bajja claimed. Thus, in this so-called middle commentary, or paraphrase, of Aristotle's On the Soul, Iverroes sets out a second position about the intellect. This time, he adopts something more like the view we find in Al-Farabi and Evicenna. Now, the idea is that each human has their own material intellect, which is a power completely free of connection to the body. It seems rather mysterious where such a power could come from, if it has nothing to do with the body. Iverroes finds the solution in the agent intellect. It actually has to do two things for us. First, it gives each of us our power for a universal understanding, which is the individual material intellect. Then, it activates that power when we unite to it. Of course, as in the earlier theory, this will happen only when we have gone through the necessary empirical investigation, looking at giraffes for instance. But Iverroes isn't done. Pondering the issue yet further, and probably reading On the Soul a few dozen more times just to be on the safe side, leads him to the realization that this theory has one little problem, it makes no sense. At its heart is a confusion about the difference between particular and universal things. That my own particular experiences of giraffes are mine is easy to understand. They are stored in my imagination, and this is seated in my brain. And my brain belongs only to me and not to anyone else, barring the eventuality of grave robbers stealing it for a mad scientist who wants to build a monster capable of hosting a philosophy podcast. But how could my intellect belong just to me if it has no such connection to my brain or to any other bodily organ? And here's another problem. Suppose that, jealous of your expertise, I go off and acquire a knowledge of giraffes equal to yours. Now that both of us are giraffeologists, you and I should be having exactly the same universal understanding of giraffes. But if this knowledge is truly universal, and not particular, then it can't be that you have one knowledge of giraffes and I another. Rather, we should be sharing the same knowledge. As Iverroes puts it, the thing you are understanding and the thing I am understanding must be numerically identical, not two individuals of the same type. Otherwise, understanding giraffes would be like the case of seeing giraffes, where it would be possible for you to look at Hiawatha while I look at her cousin Harold. The point is especially clear when we consider the case of one person teaching another. Obviously, it must be the very same knowledge that is first had by the teacher and then acquired by the student. Here, Iverroes is returning to a fundamental problem that confronts all those who try to follow Aristotle's theory. On the one hand, knowledge is universal. On the other, it belongs to one individual person at a time and on the basis of individual experiences. How can we explain both of these facts? According to Ibn Bajja and the earliest interpretation offered by Iverroes, the material intellect itself is bound up with individual experiences through the imagination. This explains very nicely why you understand and I don't, but it violates the nature of intellect itself, which is supposed to be unmixed with the body. The second interpretation of Iverroes solves this problem. Despite its name, even material intellect is completely free of connection to matter. But that leaves unexplained how the intellect belongs to one person rather than another. What we need then is to accept the universality of all intellect, even material intellect, while still explaining the obvious fact that different people have the experience of thinking about different things. And so, we finally reach Iverroes' notorious doctrine of the unity of the intellect. The material intellect will be a single, shared capacity for having universal and scientific understanding. It will not be some separate superhuman thing, but rather the highest power that belongs to humans. It's just that there is only one such power and it belongs simultaneously to all humans. Less notorious, but equally vital to Iverroes' theory is the part where he explains how it can be that you seem to be thinking about giraffes while I am not, given that we share the same intellect. Since this experience is particular to you, it must somehow be linked to your body, since it is your body that gives you your particularity. Iverroes' answer is ingenious. When the particular thought processes happening in your brain are being used as a basis for universal knowledge, then you have the experience of universal knowing. These thought processes could include not only the imagining and remembering of things you have seen, but also a lower kind of thinking, which Iverroes calls cogitation. This is not proper universal understanding, but more like the active consideration of particular things we have seen or otherwise experienced. In this way, Iverroes manages to have his cake and eat it too. The involvement of faculties seated in the brain takes care of the particular experiences of thinking had by different people, while the single intellect guarantees universality and the fact that different people can know exactly the same thing. There is admittedly a cost to be paid. If all the lower faculties that provide the universal intellect with a basis for its thinking are in the brain, then they will perish along with the body. This means that any immortality humans might have will be rather attenuated. I cannot have any afterlife that is particular to me, rather the only sense in which I will exist after death is that the universal intellect is my highest form, just like it is your highest form and the highest form of everyone who has ever lived. And that intellect isn't going anywhere, it is eternal. In fact, it is continuously thinking about all possible objects of thought. In order to make sure that this happens, Iverroes goes so far as to say that at every single moment in the history of the world, somebody, somewhere, is using his or her brain to enjoy a universal grasp of each of the objects of thought. Otherwise, the universal intellect would be idle, at least concerning whichever objects no one is thinking about. The failure of Iverroes' theory to provide for personal immortality was one of the main reasons Aquinas found it totally unacceptable. But of course, that's not an argument against the theory, just a possibly unwelcome consequence. Realizing this, Aquinas mounted a detailed response to Iverroes, fighting fire with fire by providing a careful exposition of Aristotle to show that the Iverroist reading was misconceived. But let's leave aside the questions of Aristotle interpretation and think about the position in philosophical terms. Aquinas repeatedly accuses Iverroes of being unable to explain the individual experience of thinking. As he says several times, we must explain how it is that this man understands, in Latin, hic homo intelligit. But, as I've now said several times, Iverroes does have an explanation for that. When the universal intellect draws on the images and particular thoughts in my brain to have understanding, then it is I who experience the understanding. A better objection, I think, would be that Iverroes is confusing different sorts of universality. We should distinguish between two ways in which a thought could be universal. On the one hand, it might be a universal act of thinking, one shared by everyone. On the other hand, the content of the thought might be universal. Consider a parallel case where I utter a sentence like, all giraffes are mammals. My utterance is obviously particular. It was said at a given time, in a given place, using my particular mouth. But the sentence is about a universal fact, one that applies not just to Hiawatha or Harold, but to all giraffes. Similarly, I should be able to have a particular thought about a universal fact. This may seem fairly obvious, but actually, it's difficult to make sense of what I've just said within an Aristotelian theory of mind. Part of the problem, as we've seen, is that matter, or body, is meant to be the so-called principle of individuation. In other words, it is what explains particularity. So, if intellect is not realized physically, it's hard to see how it could have a particular thought, whatever the content of that thought. A further problem is that in the Aristotelian tradition, the intellect is supposed to be identical with its object. The material intellect is nothing but a capacity to take on, and indeed to become, certain forms. If those forms are universal, then of course the capacity too should be universal. It seems to me that with his apparently crazy doctrine, Ivaroides was simply following certain Aristotelian ideas through to their logical conclusion. That isn't to say that his position is a correct interpretation of Aristotle, but it is a reasonable response to problems that had emerged after many centuries of attempts to understand Aristotle. This is worth emphasizing because Ivaroides's view might be taken as a lurch in the direction of Neoplatonism. This would be a natural enough thought, given that Neoplatonism, Plotinus, likewise had a universal intellect in his philosophy. But it would be a complete misunderstanding of what led Ivaroides to his position. To accept the different point of view I was just urging, where we have particular thoughts with universal content, Ivaroides would have had to abandon not anything Neoplatonic, but fundamental parts of the Aristotelian theory of mind. And that just wasn't going to happen. He was stuck to Aristotelianism like spots are stuck on a giraffe. Indeed, he was probably a more committed Aristotelian than any other thinker of the Islamic world. To understand better the consequences of his staunch loyalty to Aristotle, I want to spend one more episode on The Commentator. We'll be doing it in the company of one of The Commentator's most outstanding commentators, Richard Taylor. In this episode, I've drawn extensively on Taylor's account of Ivaroides' views on the intellect. But now, we've prepared our brains for unification with the source of this understanding. So let's all join together to think some more about Ivaroides, along with Richard Taylor, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Averroes with Richard C. Taylor, who is a professor of philosophy at Marquette University. Hi, Richard. Hi, Peter. So, thanks for coming on to talk about Averroes. We're going to focus on the extent to which his philosophy is consistent with the Islamic religion and whether he himself thought there might be tensions between philosophy and Islam. Perhaps you could start by addressing his use in a work that I've already talked about in an earlier episode, the so-called decisive treatise. He actually uses a phrase, truth does not contradict truth. And I was thinking maybe we could start by having you say something about that. That's an interesting way to start, I have to say, but I want to start earlier with the title because I don't like the title decisive treatise. I think right from the beginning, it causes a kind of misunderstanding of what the treatise is about. So I take it more literally following a Tunisian scholar named Al-Ghanoushi, and he renders it as the distinction of discourse. And so I think it's a treatise that distinguishes different kinds of discourse in various ways, a discourse that's appropriate for the masses, a kind of rhetorical discourse, a discourse that is dialectical in nature, where it assumes certain things and principles of religion, and then a further discourse which is philosophical. As I see it, the philosophical discourse in the treatise, which is explicitly a legal treatise, the philosophical discourse is a subtext underneath the religious treatise. So the Arabic title is Fasil al-Makal, and so you're saying Fasil means distinction and makal is just something you would say. So it's a distinction between different ways of speaking. That's right, different sorts of discourse. And this is following the view of Al-Farabi to some extent, the book of religion and other works, but he always has his own way of doing this. What's important in this then, you raise the question of this text about the truth does not contradict truth. And as you know, I discovered this hidden away, but in fact, it's a quotation from Aristotle's prior analytics, which is completely unsuitable to have in a religious treatise that is based on principles of religion. And this has remained hidden from all the translators and commentators up till year 2000. Until you. Well, yeah, I found it, but it became an interpretive key for me in understanding, because now what I will say is, this is a treatise on distinction of discourse. But the question is whether the three discourses can intersect. But isn't there also a question about whether different discourses can get at the truth? I mean, relating what you just said about distinction of discourse to the quotation, truth does not contradict truth. Is the idea that the truth that you establish through demonstration in philosophy cannot contradict the truth that you establish in dialectic or rhetoric? Is that the point? No, the point is in fact the reverse. So there is a level of understanding and a discourse of the rhetorical kind, and there is a discourse that is suitable for religion. But those discourses cannot contradict the truth. And so philosophy, in his own account, philosophy must ultimately be what decides the truth with regard to discourse. So he will later say that when it comes to matters of religion where there is different understandings of a certain scriptural passage, then ultimately the decision on the meaning of that passage will have to be determined through scientific consideration of what the truth is. And this is clear right at the beginning of the treatise where he talks about we must use the appropriate kind of kiyas, which in the religious context means religious analogy. So the prophet acted in a certain way, described in one of the hadiths or something, or he acted in a certain way, and then we should analogically apply it today on how we should act. So for example, the prohibition on wine today should analogically be also a prohibition on cocaine and other drugs and that sort of thing because they distort the mind and the ability of the mind to be open to the presence of God. So that's the religious principle. But the term kiyas, as Ivaro is equivocates on, is the term kiyas means syllogism. Then he goes on to say that in religious matters we should use the most appropriate and perfect kind of kiyas. And he says the most perfect kind of kiyas is borhan, which is philosophical demonstration. So the ultimate criterion in all of this will be philosophical. And he makes it quite clear even in the decisive treatise that the criterion is philosophical. So to come back to the point then, it isn't that these three discourses cannot intersect, but when a judgment is available through a philosophical discourse, then scriptural understandings must be reinterpreted in accordance with the truth that is available per se in the philosophical science of demonstration, a truth which in rhetoric, in rhetorical context or this religious context, the truth is hit upon only parotchitense, not per se. This is back to Aristotle's notion that demonstration itself is scientific understanding. Well, let's take a look then at some of the actual topics where you might think there's a tension then between philosophy and religion. And let's start with an obvious place to start. The Quran describes God as a merciful and wise creator of the universe. And certainly, Averroes agrees that there is a God and that God is the cause of the universe. What difference does it make to his reading of the Quran that he brings a philosophical conception of God as a cause? Well, given the account we just had, that there's a certain priority of truth to philosophy because truth cannot contradict truth but bears witness to itself in every way. So we can't have multiple levels and multiple kinds of truth. We can have ways of discussing things, modes of discourse, but ultimately, if we want to judge something with regard to truth, we have to use the best science available. Now, in the case of God, the best science available will be the philosophical science is understanding the true nature of God, which do not work with analogies and metaphors as much as religion does. It does not have as its end the bringing about of certain beliefs in people to motivate their actions in a certain way, but rather the end of philosophy is truth. Practical philosophy can be about action, but even then it's in a sense truth in action and moral virtue so that he can integrate that. So in the case of God, one has to understand then what is the nature of God as first cause and the kind of causality that God has. And in a verro is metaphysics, and if we're going to stay with this notion that philosophy is the primacy of truth, in a verro is metaphysics, God cannot be an efficient cause. That is, he can't be a maker directly. And so instead of verro is himself following, while he can say the world is caused by God and that God is merciful and many other things, these images give the sense of a God who can intervene at any time in the world and do things outside the regular norm of actions. And that's not what a verro is about. Rather, God is a final cause for things. That is, God is a goal and an end and a perfection toward which all reality strives and tries to perfect itself because God is the primary instance of being. And so everything strives to actualize itself as much as it can within the limits of its nature. That striving itself is caused by God as the perfect end or goal that everything strives toward. Therefore, God is the cause of the universe. But he doesn't make it happen the way that I might make a ball roll across a table by pushing the ball. That's right, and you can pray to God as much as you like, but you don't change God's mind, so to speak. And this gets into some difficulties about the issue of whether as a final cause, what does it mean to say God hears your prayers? In fact, something I already mentioned is that the Qur'an certainly could not be clearer that God is merciful and benevolent. So how, given this conception of God, could a verro is say that God exercises providence or mercy over us? I think it's a great mercy that God has given us a beautiful day today, and the sky is clear and it won't be raining. And we have this earth that we live on and can breathe and have the excellent lives that we do. We can do podcasts and have all kinds of communication. And so clearly God is merciful and benevolent to allow us to have these opportunities. So his mercy and benevolence is exercised more in the way that he sets the world up in general rather than taking care that each individual event turns out the right way? Would that be fair? I think that's a good way to say it, except it's wrong right from the beginning, because you said God sets it up. Oh right, so what you mean is that God's being the goal or final cause of everything yields a universe that is well ordered. Yes, and this is for veros as philosopher. While he will have a different mode of discourse speaking as a religious judge in that context, because there he's working with the religious language and meanings for people, but philosophically then this is creation, the ontological dependence of all reality, where God by this final causality draws things from potentiality into actuality. And the very being of things is their actualized being, and that is as all things strive toward the perfection that is God. So while the language may be the language of efficient causality or pushing and pulling, in fact it's more the model that God draws things toward him, as God is the ultimate object of love and fulfillment for all beings. Right, and of course he believes that the world is eternal as well, so this is an eternal process which is just constantly going on. It also involves though that God is then in some way eternally present to each and every being in the universe drawing it toward God. One thing that I'm curious about on this view is to go back to the contrast I was drawing between the universal and the particular. I mean I've already covered a long time ago the view of Alexander of Aphrodisias, who is one of the Veros's main sources, and Alexander thought that the divine providence exercised over the universe really only extends down to the level of general order and species for example. So providence will ensure that there are giraffes, but won't ensure that each individual giraffe has anything particular happen to it. And I'm wondering whether the final causation that's exercised by God on a Veros's view would extend to things like ensuring that we're having this conversation right now, or does it only ensure that for example there are humans, there are sunny days, maybe even that there are podcasts, but not that you and I are sitting here right now having this podcast conversation. So your question boils down to whether there is, we'd say philosophy then, whether there is particular providence. God wanted us as individuals to get together for this podcast. And for that, that would contradict his following of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the cosmos, and he does follow Alexander quite precisely on this. I want to push something else a little bit more. He does mention something about the preservation of species and that he's quite explicit. God's providence does not act with regard to individuals, but it does work at the level of species. But I think that can be easily misunderstood because it isn't as though God knows species. Because he says elsewhere, several times it makes it very clear that God does not have knowledge of particulars or universals. And because if God would know particulars, he would have to have senses and he would be posterior to the particulars, that is, the things that have to exist there, and then God would come to know. He'd find out about them by looking and seeing, as it were. And even universals, you'd have to look at particulars to form the universal concept. But if he doesn't know particulars and he doesn't know universals, it doesn't sound like there's anything left. Well, I want to be careful, though, about the mention of species from Alexander that you made a moment ago. And that is, it seemed to imply then we'd expect Iverus to say, well, then God can know species. But we just said God can't know universals or particulars. And God also is a unity, so he can't have a plurality of species in his mind. So I don't think for Iverus, God can even know kinds. In fact, Iverus is extremely explicit on this, that God only knows the most perfect entity in the universe himself. And he knows that perfectly and completely. But Iverus will go on to say in virtue of knowing himself as the perfect cause of all things in the universe, that he knows all things in the universe. Because to know is to know the cause. That's Aristotle. So actually, there's one particular that he knows, namely himself, because he's particular. Well, he's a unique entity. In particular, I want to be careful about the language sometimes, because in Arabic, a particular is al-Mushar al-Lahy, a thing that you can point to. And, well... You can try to point to God. You can try, but I don't know where you'd point because he's immaterial. Well, what about humans then? So we've already talked a little bit about the way God's providence does or doesn't affect humans in Iverus's view. I guess one issue that arises here in the context of thinking about providence is prophecy. Obviously, there's nothing more fundamental to Islam than the doctrine that Muhammad was a prophet of God. And that certainly looks like a case where God has selected an individual to bear his message to the rest of mankind. Does Iverus have any way of accounting for that on this doctrine of providence that you just described? Well, we have to go back to the distinction of discourses and the different kinds of discourses. So there is this sense of the general discourse for humanity and to make the moral guidance for human beings available to all human beings. And this is what happens in the case of Scripture. And so that's at the level of rhetoric, and that is also at the dialectical level, where they presume the existence of God and prophets, etc., and those prophets are guides in some way. But the question comes up as to how it is that God could pick out a particular person in a providential way to be, for example, how to pick out Muhammad as the prophet. And Iverus gets into this discussion, interestingly enough, in his comments on the Parvanaturalia, a short collection of works by Aristotle that was lumped together as a single work in the Arabic tradition that concerns matters of sensation, dreams, memory. The Arabic Parvanaturalia was a weird thing. It follows Aristotle up to the point of dreams, and then when it gets into dreams, it draws on Plotinus and Neoplatonism and becomes rather bizarre. So Aristotle himself says that he considers the possibility about dreams providing truth, and in the end he says, nah, it doesn't really. But in the Arabic version, it says, yes, yes. Yes, in fact, in dreams we are freed from sense perception, and we can really connect with the ancient intellect and receive from on high. Well, Iverus is commenting on this, and he's not sure what to do with this. And he says something really quite strange. He says, well, how is it possible if God is an intellect and the other things are intellects through which we come to have this prophecy, if they're intellects, their knowledge is universal? Well, if their knowledge is universal, then how do they pick out particulars in the world to give providence? That is, it would seem if they're pure intellects and their knowledge is universal in some way, then how do they find a determined particular in the world? And this is our problem back with Providence and Alexander, in a way, how to choose someone. So how did God choose Muhammad? And Iverus in this part of Naftar Aliya commentary says there are two key questions, and one is an epistemology question, and then there's this question. The epistemology question, he gives an interesting answer. This one, just forgot to answer it. Oops. So the point would be if God is pure intellect and self-thinking thought, as he says in his philosophical accounts, and he does say in some works that if you want my real understanding, look at my philosophical accounts, not my dialectical accounts. So in this case, then, it seems to be very problematic as to what prophecy is for Iverus. It's almost like he has no way of accounting for this in his philosophical system, but he doesn't want to come out and say that he has no way of accounting for it. Well, I think he doesn't have a way of accounting for it, yes, in his philosophical system. I think that's appropriate. But of course, when he is acting as a religious judge, then in dialectical fashion, he assumes the existence of it, he assumes the truth of the Scriptures, and deals in that context with responses in that way. But philosophically, he doesn't have a way to account for it. Now, he could do something bizarre and say that he had cognitive dissonance, and he thought this, as well as something completely contradictory to what we see him say in his philosophy. That would be the famous twofold truth doctrine that's sometimes ascribed to Iverus in literature. Right. But wait, we already took care of that, because truth does not contradict truth, and the ultimate judge with regard to truth is going to be philosophy. So it seems that he's developing—we see this in some of the other things we've already talked about—he's developing a very idiosyncratic conception of Islam. Because again, recall that God is not the efficient cause, but God is the Creator by drawing all things to himself. So the common language of God does this, God does that in the world, for him is a way of speaking that's appropriate for the non-philosophical. But properly speaking, the philosophical economy is built on Aristotle, where God is a final cause. Something you mentioned just a minute ago is the universality of the intellect. And that brings us on to what is probably Iverus's most famous philosophical doctrine, the unity of the intellect, which I actually talked about last time. So we don't need to go into the full details, but I wanted to at least ask you about what bearing this might have on his conception of Islam. And I thought maybe the point to focus on would be personal immortality, because it looks like, according to this doctrine, what's eternal about humans is not our ability to see or have a body or even our imagination, for example, but only this universal intellect which is shared by all mankind. And if it's only one intellect that's shared by all mankind, then it looks like at best, when you die and when I die, we'll only live on by being one and the same intellect. So is that a fair accusation? Is there any way that Iverus could say that I do live on after my death in a way that makes me different from you living on after your death? I think we need to discuss, first of all, what mode of discourse we want to use in answering that question with regard to some kind of afterlife for human beings. Certainly in the mode of discourse that we find in one of his theological work, the Kashaw Munash, in there we see him clearly stating that there is an afterlife for human beings and also is serving many of the religious doctrines. But again, we're back to the question of whether we should use that mode of discourse or we want to use the philosophical mode of discourse. In these podcasts, it seems that you want to talk about philosophy, so we'll use the philosophical mode of discourse for Iverus. And in the philosophical mode of discourse, then, human particular individuals think and they come to reason and they carry out various activities. But the intellect, according to Iverus, is something separate that human beings share from time to time, and they're not always in perfect connection with. And so, because he, among other reasons, he holds that in order for there to be the possibility of intersubjective discourse and a shared science, there has to be one thesaurus or collection of intelligibles or intelligible ideas. Not you have your horse, I have my horse. And so, since we have one shared intellect in that fashion, then we each come to know these intelligibles in our own way and connect with a separate intellect. It's a sort of Platonic doctrine in a way, but that Platonic doctrine in the history of philosophy keeps popping back up about this commonality and how it is that we could have a shared discourse. But as individuals, I work hard to understand Iverus and philosophy, and you do as well in your areas as well, to understand philosophy. And that's through individual personal effort and choices we make to stay home and read this book instead of going to the movies every Saturday night or whatever things we do. And so, through our own hard work, we come to develop our intellects and our connections and understandings of universals and our connections with a separate intellect. That way, this then means that we, once we have this, we have some universal knowledge, then we can make moral decisions. Because Aristotle talks about the practical syllogism, where we have a universal, a particular, and make a particular judgment as to how to act. And so, in our moral actions, although Thomas Aquinas later criticizes Iverus for this idea of separate intellect and says it's impossible for people to be moral, Iverus has no problem with this at all. Human beings make individual personal moral actions and responsibilities. My connection here then to your question is, okay, given that, is there any afterlife for individuals? And in his long commentary on the deionema, there's no discussion of personal immortality. In fact, the arguments indicate that there's no space for it. The same is true for his middle commentary on deionema, the short commentary on the deionema. And it seems that in these major philosophical works, there's no provision made for personal immortality. Sometimes the phraseology is used of monocychism, or we all share one soul. The phraseology is wrong. We each have our own soul, but we share one collection of intelligible ideas, which makes this, again, science, shared science and intersubjective discourse possible. The idea here then is that since, as Aristotle tells us, the soul is the form of the body, when the body dies, the soul will die, but the intellect will live on. And since there's only one intellect, in fact, he does, basically, he just bites the bullet in the end and would have to admit that there is no personal immortality. That's so an immortality where I am different from you. It seems to be the conclusion. You said earlier that Iverus has what you call the idiosyncratic view of Islam. And certainly, from everything you said about the decisive treatise or distinction of discourse, it's clear that he wants to say that philosophy is in a position to determine the truth about these matters. So, for example, providence, personal immortality, the way in which God causally relates to the world, all the things we've talked about, and some other things as well. The thing that I wonder, though, is, I mean, it's one thing to say, well, the Quran is kind of unclear on this point, when it talks, for example, about God sitting upon a throne. Should we imagine that God actually looks like a person and sits on something that looks like a chair literally? Well, arguably not, and many Muslims had wanted to distance themselves from that literal way of understanding God. But I think it's one thing to say something like that, and another to say, well, philosophy teaches us, for example, that no individual person can be picked out as a prophet by the divine. I mean, there's really no way, it seems to me, to square even the existence of Islam as a religion with that philosophical position. Or, again, it's one thing to say that philosophy tells us the sense in which we'll live on after death, but it's another thing to say that philosophy teaches us that we won't live on after our death at all. I mean, it seems like now philosophy is just saying P, where religion is asserting not P. So, is that a fair objection to make to a Veruess? Well, I think if we're really going to be fair, we have to understand that he's a human being, and he's found a way of understanding things, a certain methodology to work with, and it's Aristotelian philosophical thought. And he thinks that this really, in its idealized form, really shows the structure of the universe, all reality, the nature of human beings, the nature of God. But nevertheless, he's not a perfect human being, he's not a perfect philosopher, there is no such thing, but he has a methodology. And it doesn't mean that he always applies the methodology perfectly, since no one ever does anything perfect anyway. And so he has these ideas, he applies them as much as possible, and takes them, I think, really to the limits of the classical rationalist tradition in Islamic thought, and really following on Al-Farabi. And he takes it in directions that Asan does not go, but more follows the Farabian line, and pushes the limit as far as possible. So that reference we had earlier about truth does not contradict truth in the prior analytics of Aristotle. In his commentary on that, Averroes is absolutely enthusiastic about the possibility of all human discourse being put into syllogisms, and then being judged on the basis of Aristotelian syllogistic thought. And that's an ideal, that's something that's never going to be fully realized. Well, he also pushes this whole understanding of metaphysics and religion to its ultimate limit according to this kind of methodology. Is this methodology the best kind? Well, there's a lot more philosophy than just Aristotle in the world today. So he really pushes it, and there's a short passage in his commentary on the metaphysics where he just pushes it to the ultimate end. And he says that there is a Sharia, or a religious law, or religious guidance, or even just religion, that is specific to the philosophers. And he said, this is the Sharia which grasps God in the most perfect way, and God's creation the most perfect and full way, and gives us the greatest insight. And he says, this is the science of metaphysics, and it is the most perfect kind of worship that we can give to God. And I think in all this he believes he has a model to understand reality, and he just sticks to it all the way. And it means that ultimately if God is an immaterial reality, then we need to go beyond the material. We need to use the science of metaphysics as much as possible to have an insight into the real nature of God. And I think he's quite sincere when he says, this is the most perfect kind of worship. But I don't want to get into the idea that he does not go to the mosque or something of that sort. We have every indication that in fact he went to the mosque, he went with his family to the mosque. There's no, we don't want to bring into this a kind of modern or enlightenment conception of someone rejecting religion in some way. Religion is extremely important for the fulfillment of human beings and formation of character, and even the development of the philosopher. Well, speaking of pushing things to the limit and gaining insight into God, I will next week be turning to the very different philosophical tradition and asking whether it is a philosophical tradition in some sense of Islamic mysticism. Now I'll thank Richard very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, you're certainly welcome. It's been fun. And please join me next time for Imn-Aravi and Mysticism on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Matter of Taste, Ibn Arabi and Mysticism. Never let it be said that an obsession with Aristotle prevents you from getting out and meeting people. Take a Verruise. There are not one, but two famous stories about his encounters with contemporaries. We've already heard the one about his audience with the Almohad emir. Here's the other one. Averruise has heard tell of a young man who received revelatory insight while engaged in a spiritual retreat. He is eager to meet the youth and upon seeing him gives him a warm embrace. Yes, says Averruise, and the youth replies, yes. So far the discussion is going very positively, so Averruise smiles. But the youth now says, no. Averruise is now troubled and asks the young man about his revelatory experience. Has it taught him the same things that one can learn through reason? Yes and no, replies the youth, apparently figuring that this approach has worked well in the conversation so far. But then he adds, between the yes and the no, spirits fly from their matter and heads from their bodies. Averruise is impressed. Like Ibn Tufayl's fictional character, Hayy ibn Yaqdan, the young man has achieved wisdom without having to study Aristotle or any other books. Averruise can only give thanks to God that he was given a chance to meet this extraordinary individual. The youth's name? Muhiyad-din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Arabi. Averruise was right in his glowing assessment. Ibn Arabi will be honored with the title Ashaykh al-Aqbar, or greatest master, and recognized as the towering genius of the Islamic mystical tradition known as Sufism. The story is obviously more flattering to Ibn Arabi and puts Averruise's hard-won rational scholarship at a distinctively lower level than Ibn Arabi's mystical vision. So you may not be surprised to hear that it is not Averruise, but Ibn Arabi himself who relates the anecdote. Here he is looking back on his younger days in his homeland of Andalusia. He was born in the year 1165 in Mursia, and like Averruise, belonged to a fairly eminent family. He encountered Averruise after his spiritual enlightenment, but before he left Andalusia to go east at the age of 30. He went on the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca and never came back, eventually taking up residence as a Sufi master in Damascus. Was he a philosopher? As Ibn Arabi himself might say, yes and no. His writings are packed with technical terms borrowed from the philosophical tradition. He also uses vivid imagery to represent concepts familiar to us from philosophers, especially Avicenna. Yet it would be reductive and misleading to see Ibn Arabi as an Avicennan philosopher with an unusual flair for metaphor. As the story of the meeting with Averruise shows, he himself thought that the rational methods of philosophy are limited in what they can achieve. He seeks not the well-grounded, logically valid demonstrations extolled by Avicenna or Averruise, but rather truths that would seem like mere contradictions to such plodding purveyors of rational proof. One might more plausibly say that Ibn Arabi should be credited with bringing philosophy into the Sufi tradition. As I've just mentioned, he does show mastery of philosophical ideas and use them for his own purposes. But it would again be misleading to see him as the first philosophical Sufi. For one thing, he does not yet present Sufism as an explicit philosophical system. That will be left to his followers and especially his stepson and commentator al-Qunawi, who we'll meet in a later episode. For another thing, philosophy influenced Sufism before Ibn Arabi came along. Bear in mind we're in the 12th century here, and Sufism has had a long time to develop by this point in history. The word Sufi derives from the Arabic word suf, meaning wool, a reference to the rough garments worn by these mystics. This tells us something about the outward appearance and behavior of the Sufis. Like the late antique church fathers and mothers, and like the cynics, they were ascetics. Also like the desert fathers and mothers, the Sufis were the subject of an extensive body of literature, with anecdotes highlighting this ascetic impulse as well as their piety and intimate relationship with God, and their indictment of the hypocrisy of fellow Muslims. Here's one anecdote I particularly like, that illustrates not only the asceticism of Sufis, but also the one-upmanship that often features in this literary genre. A Sufi from Khorasan tells a Sufi from Iraq how abstemious he and his colleagues are. If God provides them with food, they give thanks, but if not, they go hungry without complaint. The other Sufi says this sort of thing is known in his land of Iraq too. It's what dogs do there. As for the Iraqi Sufis, when God sends them food, they give it away to the needy, and when he doesn't, they give thanks. And here's another story, which could easily have been a story about an ancient cynic philosopher. A prince is told that a man has been climbing around on the roof of his palace. The prince has the man brought before him and demands to know what he was doing up there. Looking for my lost camel, says the man. The prince laughs, but the man replies that the prince is engaged in an equally absurd task by trying to live a pious life while surrounded by wealth and luxury. The prince repents and becomes an ascetic. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that all three of these ascetic movements—cynicism, antique Christianity, and Sufism—have included women in the ranks of their greatest sages. The cynics had hyparchia, the Christians heroines like Makrina and Melania, and the Sufis have Rabia al-Adawiya. Alive already in the 8th century, she was among the earliest important, Muslim mystics. She introduced into Sufism the central theme of love and erotic longing for God. We have no surviving writings by Rabia, but some lines of verse are ascribed to her and she is a favorite protagonist in later Sufi literature. In one such literary portrayal, she says that the lover seeks a togetherness with the beloved so intense that nothing separates the two. Someone who consummates such an erotic relationship with God has experienced something that cannot be expressed in language. It is like taste in Arabic dhawq, which is a standard Sufi term for direct contact with God. Other stories tell of how she was oblivious to the beauty of the world around her because of her exclusive love for God. She remarked that, This theme of passionate love in Arabic ishq will play a role in the writings of later Sufis, including the great Persian poet Arumi. It is also prominent in the most famous of the early Sufis, the mystic martyr Al-Halaaj, whose name actually means someone who cards wool. I'm not exactly sure what carding wool is, to be honest. Maybe some kind of sheep-related gambling. Al-Halaaj led an eventful life, traveling from his home in the Persian province of Fars, to travel widely, including in India, where Sufism would blossom in centuries to come. But he is better known for the grotesque manner of his death in the year 922. After he set himself up as a religious teacher in Baghdad, he ran afoul of the authorities, making a particular enemy of the vizier Hamid, who served the Abbasid caliph al-Mukhtadir. At the vizier's instigation, Al-Halaaj was imprisoned and, according to one account, This spectacularly brutal murder was perhaps motivated more by political considerations than doctrinal ones. But certainly, Al-Halaaj could shock fellow Muslims with his teachings. He is most famous for a remark he made to his more moderate teacher, Al-Junaid. When he knocked on his master's door, Al-Junaid asked who was there, and Al-Halaaj called out, Since Al-Haq, the Truth, or the Real, is one of God's revealed names, this was a rather shocking remark, and one that the master Al-Junaid repudiated. Another major figure of the earlier Sufi tradition was Abu Sa'id ibn Abi al-Khayr. He played a major role in the social institutions of Sufism, introducing a set of rules to be followed by members of Sufi orders and also the idea of listening to music during Sufi gatherings. This tradition of samāh, or listening, is connected to the famous dance of the whirling dervishes. We know from a previous episode that the enjoyment of music was controversial for pious Muslims, so it was bold of Abu Sa'id to associate music and dance with the asceticism of the Sufis. In fact, it was something Ibn Arabi didn't like one bit. In a kind of foreshadowing of the anecdote that brings together Avarwis and Ibn Arabi, no less a philosopher than Avicenna supposedly made a visit to meet Abu Sa'id. The two got on famously, and after he departed, Avicenna was asked what he made of Abu Sa'id. He answered simply, Everything I know, he sees. Meanwhile, Abu Sa'id's students similarly wanted to know what he thought of Avicenna. His reply? Everything I see, he knows. These earlier figures give us a taste, if you'll pardon the expression, of the richness of, and perhaps the contradictions within, Sufism up to the time of Ibn Arabi. These men and women were recognized as sages, admired for their total devotion to God and renunciation of the things of this world. They often received support from the society around them, especially under the Seljuks, when they were sponsored by the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk, patron of the Nidamiya schools we discussed in the first episode on Al-Ghazali. Yet, the theology of the Sufis could also provoke hostility, even if it remained largely implicit. Most problematic was the suggestion that the Sufis themselves had attained some kind of divinity. This would be one possible interpretation of Al-Halaaj's statement, I am the truth. He was claiming to be identical with God. In fact, we might even take the Sufis to be teaching that the whole created universe is nothing but God. For, they often describe the universe, with all its variety and multiplicity, as an illusion, or veil, concealing an underlying divine unity, which alone is real. Is this the teaching we find in the much more elaborate and sophisticated works of Ibn Arabi? The answer is inevitable, yes and no. He frequently speaks of God as al-haq, the truth or the real, and does present the created universe as a veil that conceals God. On the other hand, the universe is also a manifestation of God. It is the form in which God shows himself. This sort of idea had occasionally been proposed in antiquity, especially by the anonymous Christian Neoplatonist who called himself Dionysius. But Ibn Arabi's works are unprecedented in the detail with which they present this idea. His writings attempt to hold two apparently contradictory ideas in a kind of dialectical tension. On the one hand, being or reality consists of nothing but God, who is utterly one. On the other hand, this single divine reality shows itself forth as a multiplicity of things that are, in their own way, real. As I say, Ibn Arabi was not the first to use philosophical materials in the service of mystical theory. Just think about Ghazali, who apparently saw Sufism as a higher path of understanding than philosophy. But if we're judging by sheer quantity, no one can compete with Ibn Arabi. His most ambitious and massive work, the Meccan Revelations, has received a modern edition which managed to cover only about a quarter of its chapters in about a dozen volumes. So, you'll understand that I only had time to read his works cover to cover twice in preparing this episode. It wasn't really Ibn Arabi's fault that he wrote so much. He was just setting down in writing what had been directly revealed to him from a divine source. In the preface to his most frequently read treatise entitled Ringstones of Wisdom, he explains that the work we are about to read was delivered to him in a dream by none other than the Prophet Muhammad. Ibn Arabi's stories of religious revelation constituted a powerful claim to authority, and one that was rather successful. Much as philosophy in the later Eastern tradition will frequently take the form of commentary on Avicenna, so philosophical Sufism will often be presented as commentary on Ibn Arabi. His Ringstones of Wisdom, far briefer than the gargantuan Meccan Revelations, has been the subject of hundreds of commentaries, stretching right down to the 20th century. The Ringstones of Wisdom consists of 27 chapters, each of which discusses a prophet recognized by Islam. The idea of the title is that every prophet is like a different setting on a ring into which the jewel of God's word is set. This explains why the different prophets bring superficially different messages, despite receiving their prophecy from the same source. The book begins with Adam, yes that Adam of Adam and Eve fame, and explains how God created mankind in order to see himself in this image. Of course, the last chapter concerns Muhammad, the seal of the prophets. Ibn Arabi's scripturally based method is closely related to his philosophical stance. The core of his teaching is that God is, in himself or in his essence, unknowable to us. We grasp him only insofar as he shows himself to us. This is why the application of pure reason, according to Ibn Arabi, tends inevitably towards a kind of emptiness, in which philosophers discover that God eludes all language and thought. Ultimately, this tendency leads to tanzi, meaning the denial of God's attributes because of his absolute transcendence. Equally, though, Ibn Arabi rejects a tendency he finds in some theologians, known as tashbih, to assimilate or compare God's nature to what God has created. Again, Ibn Arabi wants to strike a balance between yes and no, negotiating between the naive positive language of tashbih and the blank negation of tanzi. This is possible only because God has revealed himself. So, we must begin from the texts containing that revelation. Ibn Arabi is particularly glad to find verses in the Qur'an like this. There is nothing like unto him and he is the seeing, the hearing. In this single sentence, we have an apparent case of tanzi, there is nothing like God, and then an apparent case of tashbih, God is hearing and seeing, like you and me. Ibn Arabi's favorite way to explore, if not resolve, these tensions is to consider the divine names. In fact, God's names are infinite, but only a finite number have been revealed to us. It is by these names, and these names alone, that we can speak of God. This, by itself, is not a particularly bold or unusual idea, but in Ibn Arabi's hands it becomes a more radical notion, because he sees the created universe itself as nothing more nor less than the interplay between the divine names. Each name marks a certain relationship between God and the world he has created. For instance, he is said to be merciful because he shows mercy towards his creatures. There are many names because God relates to creatures in a variety of different ways. This strikes me as a very interesting answer to a long-standing philosophical problem, familiar especially from antique thinkers like Plotinus, Proclus, the Cappadocians, and the Pseudo-Dionysius. All these thinkers wanted to say that God, or the first principle, gives rise to the universe, but also that he transcends this universe. Various analogies had been proposed as models of the relationship between God and creation. Usually, the analogies involved relations of cause and effect. God is like a light shining forth rays, a mind giving rise to ideas, and so on. Ibn Arabi's brilliant, and deeply Quranic, idea is instead to think of this relationship as that between a thing and its names. This suggestion has many virtues. It helps to explain how a God who is purely one can give rise to a multiplicity. The most fundamental of puzzles in the Neoplatonic tradition can now be solved, since it is easy for us to understand that a single thing might have many names while itself remaining one. The names can even be in apparent tension with one another, because God can bear apparently contradictory relations to things in the universe. Ibn Arabi goes out of his way to emphasize this dwelling on opposed names like the merciful and the vengeful. In God himself, there is no opposition or multiplicity, yet we find conflict and variety in the way that he shows himself, which is to say in his names. Another advantage is that names have a rather ambiguous metaphysical status. Ibn Arabi's handling of this issue is sophisticated. He distinguishes carefully between three levels. There is the meaning, or bearer, of the name, in this case God, then the name itself, and only then is a third item the linguistic expression which we actually utter. He calls this linguistic manifestation the name of the name, and compares it to a cloak covering the name of God. All this nicely captures the situation we find ourselves in relative to God. We usually only see an outward surface appearance of God's self-manifestation. When we remove this first veil, we come to God's names, which are the ways in which God has shown himself the ways he relates to his creation. But even here, we have not arrived at full-blown reality or being. This would be God himself, which is why one of his names is al-Haq, the truth. Rather, we are here in the realm of yes and no, a kind of compromise between reality and illusion, between existence and non-existence. This is as real as created things can get, since they are only a manifestation or representation of what is really real, namely God. Ibn Arabi has several ways of articulating this idea. One is borrowed from Avicenna. In the Avicenna idea of a contingent thing that exists by being necessary through another, Ibn Arabi sees an example of the kind of halfway house he is looking for, between genuine being and total non-being. With characteristically beautiful imagery, he talks of non-existent things as suffering from a kind of restriction or constraint, and then finding relief as God breathes them out into their state of dependent existence. He refers to this process with a phrase taken from prophetic hadith, the breath of the merciful. Because of the ambiguous and even self-contradictory status of created existence, Ibn Arabi thinks it can best be grasped not by philosophical reason, but by what he calls imagination. This is something we access most frequently through dreams, whose conjuring of impossible images gives us a better insight into created reality than any Aristotelian syllogism. Consistently with this, when Ibn Arabi comes to consider specific philosophical problems, he often seems to revel in paradox, especially if he can ground the paradox in Scripture. A nice example is what he has to say about human action. Ibn Arabi instead draws our attention to an episode in the life of the prophet, when the tide of a battle turned after Muhammad symbolically threw a handful of sand towards the enemy. Subsequently, it was revealed to him, You threw not when you threw, but it was God who threw, that he might test the believers. An Asharite would embrace this Quranic verse as proof that God was really the one who performed the action of throwing. Ibn Arabi instead points out that the verse still says to Muhammad, when you threw. In other words, Muhammad did throw the sand, but only because God threw it. As always, created things are nothing but a manifestation of divine truth and reality. There's a widespread perception, I think, that philosophy in the later Islamic tradition becomes entirely suffused by mysticism. Rational argument is set aside in favor of a direct vision or taste of God, which cannot be put into words. Some welcome this development, ascribing to Ibn Arabi and his heirs the discovery of insights deeper than anything rationalist philosophy can offer. Others lament the slide of Islamic intellectual traditions into paradox-mongering and obfuscation. In fact, though, things were more complex. As we've just seen, Ibn Arabi does see philosophy as fundamentally limited, yet he weaves it into mystical Islam. Also, though his historical influence is enormous, it is not as if Sufism and later Islamic philosophy are just identical. Sufism will be a major player in the later development of philosophy, but the same is true of Asharite Kalam and Avicenna. So, whether you like mysticism or loathe it, later philosophy in the eastern lands of Islam will have something to offer you. We're not ready to look at it yet, though. Soon we'll be turning to the Jewish contribution to philosophy in Andalusia, something that will take us a number of episodes to cover. And before that, we have one last Muslim from the West to consider. What I've just been saying illustrates his thought rather well, as it happens, that to understand history we need to attend to interacting forces that are always more complex than they first may seem. Should you join me again next time? The answer is not an Ibn Arabi-style yes and no, but the one given by Molly Bloom at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses, Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because our subject will be a man with some claim to be the greatest of all pre-modern historians, Ibn Khaldun. Here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps. .
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Philosophy of History, Ibn Khaldun. Practically every movie ever made about sports has the same plot. A team of lovable losers gathers around an inspirational leader, overcoming their previous differences and going on what these Hollywood types call a journey of self-discovery. Finally, they must face a seemingly insurmountable foe and are victorious. It's obvious why we like these zeros to heroes narratives. Everyone likes to root for the underdog. But how is it that we find them plausible? Suspension of disbelief is going to be needed if a film like A League of Their Own is going to persuade us that a baseball team featuring Madonna and Rosie O'Donnell could win games, with or without the help of Tom Hanks. We fall for these stories, I think, because we can't help believing in team spirit. Real-world evidence to the contrary, we persist in thinking that togetherness and solidarity can help the underdogs to overcome any height disadvantage in basketball, any fastball-pitching ace, any collection of overpaid mercenaries who play soccer in Manchester. And we're right to believe this according to the 14th century judge, historian, and philosopher Ibn Khaldun. He developed a simple but powerful theory to explain the rise and fall of empires, caliphates, whole civilizations. And the key to his theory is basically team spirit. The Arabic term he uses for this concept is as-sabiya, which comes from a verb meaning to bind or tie together. An as-saba is thus a group of people who are bound together, a league of their own, if you will. When he talked about as-sabiya, Ibn Khaldun especially had in mind the feeling of solidarity and group identity possessed by tribal groups, such as the Arabs who originally spread Islam. Ibn Khaldun believed that this feeling of solidarity is the key to explaining both the rise and the fall of new political powers. Political changes, he argued, come in cycles. At the beginning of each cycle, a group or tribe achieves military and cultural conquest at the expense of some other fading group. They manage this because their feeling of solidarity makes them all but irresistible on the battlefield. Having achieved victory, they hand on power to the next generation which consolidates power. But a taste for luxury sets in leading to inexorable decline. This group becomes the next fading power, ready to be laid low by another tribe, hungry for domination and inspired by their own group feeling. Sound familiar? It should, because what Ibn Khaldun is describing here happened in Andalusia. First, there was the Muslim invasion of Iberia in the early 8th century, powered by Berber military strength. This invasion created a protected realm where the Umayyad Caliphate could survive after the Abbasids rose in the east. The western caliphate succumbed to internal strife and was ripe for the plucking, so the Almoravids came storming from the Moroccan desert to reap the harvest. But within a century, power was wrested from their grip by the next tribal invaders from northern Africa, the Almohads. By the time Ibn Khaldun was born in the year 1332, Almohad control over the western Islamic world, or Maghreb, had already been lost. Christians had succeeded in claiming most of Spain and Portugal, taking the crucial city of Seville in 1248. The south of Spain and the North African lands were still in Muslim hands, but no single power prevailed here. Rather, three groups split control of the lands from Marrakesh to Tripoli. Ibn Khaldun spent much of his very eventful life trying to help someone, anyone, claim unchallenged domination over the Maghreb. At times, he supported the Hafsids, who carried on the Almohad ideology and controlled Ibn Khaldun's home territory of Tunisia. But at one period, he also threw in his lot with the Maranids, who held Morocco. Thanks to a series of political intrigues and embassies, he traveled also to Granada in Andalusia, still under Islamic control. In 1364, he even undertook a diplomatic mission to Seville to meet with the Christian ruler Pedro the Cruel, which coincidentally is what my students call me when they are unhappy with the grades I give them. Ibn Khaldun traveled east too, to Mecca when he made his Hajj, or pilgrimage, and to Damascus. Eventually, he wound up in Cairo, which he recognized as the foremost city of Islamic civilization in his day. He died there in the year 1406. Ibn Khaldun's project as a historian was in part to chronicle and explain the political environment in which he moved. His theory of solidarity, or asabiyyah, has obvious relevance for the rise and fall of successive powers in Andalusia and North Africa. During his own lifetime, Ibn Khaldun thought he might be witnessing the next power to achieve domination through tribal solidarity. At this time, the Mongols were finishing their sweep through the Islamic lands led by the fearsome Tamerlane. Ibn Khaldun even met Tamerlane personally in Damascus in 1401. He expected that Tamerlane's Mongols might invade and crush the existing powers of Northern Africa, just as they had done throughout Central Asia and the Islamic heartlands. Already in 1258, the Mongols had deposed the last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, and by depose, I mean that they wrapped him in a carpet and had an elephant trample him to death. Ibn Khaldun was nothing if not unsentimental in his appreciation of conquest, so despite the legendary brutality of the Mongol conquerors, he looked forward to the prospect of a united Maghreb under Tamerlane's leadership. It was not to be, thanks to the so-called slave rulers of Egypt the Mamluks who stopped the Mongol invasion, thus preserving the thriving culture that Ibn Khaldun enjoyed in his last years in Cairo. Ibn Khaldun's theory of political cycles, powered by Asa Bia, fits Andalusian history so well that it can easily seem a just-so story, a theory designed to fit a specific historical setting. But he thought it could also explain the fading of the Greeks and the Persians, and perhaps most importantly, the original Islamic conquests in the generations after the prophet Muhammad. The theory is explicitly based on close observation of history, but also meant to be universal in its applicability, and even to have predictive power. Indeed, when you read Ibn Khaldun, you often have the impression that more recent political leaders could learn something from him. He was, for instance, doubtful that one can impose a unified political authority on ethnically and religiously diverse populations. Such power will inevitably be destabilized by expressions of Asa Bia, group solidarity. Had the architects of the new political orders in the wake of World Wars I and II been careful readers of Ibn Khaldun, the rest of 20th century history might have been very different. So, just in case any of you out there are going to be in charge of drawing the borders of a new country anytime soon, let's have a closer look at Ibn Khaldun's theory. It is set out in a lengthy treatise called the Introduction, or Muqaddimah. What it introduces is an even lengthier treatise called Kitab al-Ibar, or The Book of Observations. Ibn Khaldun wrote this monumental history in response to the upheaval of his age. The world as he knew it had just been reshaped by the coming of the plague earlier in the 14th century. It was a good moment to take stock, following the lead of several other historians admired by Ibn Khaldun, such as the earlier At-Tabari and Al-Mas'ud. They likewise authored vast histories that survive today, and give us the basis to produce our own reconstructions of Islamic history. Though Ibn Khaldun does mention such figures with respect, in general he is rather unimpressed by what passes for the writing of history in his day. Too often, it just uncritically repeats fabulous legends. Even the respectable al-Mas'udi tells of how Alexander the Great had himself lowered to the bottom of the sea in a glass box to look at the monsters dwelling there. Ridiculous, says Ibn Khaldun. Not only would anyone who tried to do this run out of air, but even if Alexander had formulated such a plan, he obviously wouldn't have been so foolhardy as to risk his royal person by getting into the box himself. With such passages, Ibn Khaldun attempts to purge history writing of that most familiar of intellectual sins in the Islamic world, taqlid, or the uncritical acceptance of authority. When we are assessing historical reports, common sense is a more important check than the reputation of the sources we are consulting. History should not, in other words, be verified through chains of transmission like reports about the prophet gathered by hadith scholars. It is rather a science. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun himself answers a question you may have been pondering while listening to this episode by telling us why he belongs in this series of podcasts. He insists that history is a branch of philosophy. It shares something with both rhetoric and political theory, but is a unique discipline and one that has never really been practiced correctly, at least until Ibn Khaldun came along. The very fact that he undertook to write a lengthy theoretical introduction to his history is telling. He presents himself as the first historian who has reflected explicitly on what it means to write about history, and who has explained how it should be done. His introduction explains why and how civilizations arise, the factors that explain variation between one society and another, the structures of leadership that inevitably emerge, the cultural practices that arise once people have settled in towns and cities, and so on. Thus, the introduction has a good deal in common with works like Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. Ibn Khaldun's account of how dynasties rise and fall is reminiscent of Plato's classification of the types of city, corrupting from one type of constitution to another as the generations pass. At a more detailed level, he agrees with Plato, for instance, that the expansion of cities is inextricably linked to luxury. But even if his introduction can be read as a work of political philosophy, Ibn Khaldun is not in the business of arguing for any particular political arrangement. This is not a normative account, an explanation of the best way to run a society. Rather, it is relentlessly descriptive, with Ibn Khaldun occupying the role of the all-seeing detached observer rather than the role of political advocate. This is particularly striking, given that he spent so much of his own life advocating one or another political power in the Maghreb. So, I prefer to see Ibn Khaldun not so much as a political philosopher as a kind of natural philosopher. Searching for the causes that underlie dynastic change, he anatomizes society and history with a practiced empirical eye, the way that Aristotle investigated animal life in his zoological works. Indeed, he frequently stresses that the phenomena he describes are natural. As Aristotle had said, the human is a political animal, solitary life is impossible, or nearly so, for humans. Furthermore, all the key elements of Ibn Khaldun's theory of rise and fall are natural to humankind. It is natural there should be a contrast between the sedentary folk of the city on the one hand and rootless country-dwelling folk like the Bedouin on the other. It is natural that social groups, especially the latter kind who are bound by tribal loyalty, will develop and draw strength from asa bia, the feeling of solidarity. It is natural that single leaders within such tribes will emerge as kings. It is even natural that, once the generation of tribal conquerors has settled down and begun to indulge in city life and its attendant luxuries, decline should set in. Hence, the entire cycle of dynastic change unfolds in accordance with human nature. We can expect each dynasty to go through five stages. First, conquest on the basis of group solidarity. Then, the emergence of a single ruler, followed by a period of wise rule in which the king looks to the good of his tribe. Then, a period of over-confidence and luxury as rule passes to a new generation, and the final inevitable collapse of the dynasty with a new tribal group waiting in the wings to seize control. Ibn Khaldun provides many examples to illustrate his theory. As you might expect, the first generations of Islam provide his favorite example of a nomadic tribe that achieves military conquest. Their success was especially due to religious fervor, an ingredient that can intensify and focus the already potent force of group solidarity. Here, the charismatic leadership of Ibn Tumart, who inspired the Berber Almohad movement, would have provided Ibn Khaldun with another obvious case. But Ibn Khaldun says far more about the early Muslims, dwelling not just on their commitment to the cause of Islam, but also on their unrefined virtue and their illiteracy, which he takes as a hallmark of the earliest generation. Remember that the Qur'an was at first always recited from memory and only later written down under the rightly guided caliphs. At one point, Ibn Khaldun tells of how the early Muslims were nonplussed the first time they encountered a pillow which they took for a bundle of rags. Like an underdog sports team, united by indomitable spirit, these unsophisticated Arabs were able to overcome seemingly impossible odds, time and again defeating far larger military forces. But their unity was short-lived. A story about the fourth caliph Ali makes the point. When critics asked him why the first rightly guided caliphs had ruled by universal agreement, whereas his own leadership was hotly contested, Ali said, Alongside the developing political fractures within the Islamic community, there was an increasing tendency to settle down. This was no coincidence. According to Ibn Khaldun's theory, the victorious group inevitably becomes more sedentary as power is consolidated, often by occupying the cities and towns of the previous fallen dynasty and taking over their customs. This is the cue for the equally inevitable political decline. Illnesses are apt to breed in the bad air of urban centers. And when you see citrus trees growing, says Ibn Khaldun, the end of the dynasty's fortunes cannot be far off, since this presupposes a well-established sedentary culture. In the halls of power, too, it will be clear that the leadership is running out of juice. The ruler will indulge in luxury and seclude himself from the people, wishing to speak only with intimates who have been chosen for their loyalty rather than their ability. The military, of course, likewise weakens, something Ibn Khaldun has observed in the case of the Muslims of Andalusia, who have gone from the conquerors to the vanquished as their armies have shrunk in size. All this may seem to contradict my earlier claim that Ibn Khaldun is merely describing political processes rather than evaluating their merits. The contrast between the harsh virtue of the nomads and the soft decadence of the city-dwellers may seem to be an endorsement of the former and condemnation of the latter. But sedentary culture brings many good things with it, too. In particular, the arts and sciences cannot flourish among the warlike nomads. Philosophy and the other intellectual disciplines are most advanced in the cities that have enjoyed the longest periods of stability. In a previous era, this would have been Alexandria or Baghdad, but in Ibn Khaldun's own day it was Cairo. No surprise, then, that he wound up living there at the end of his life. Conscious though he was of the political vulnerability of urban culture, Ibn Khaldun was an outstanding product of sedentary society. Indeed, he would encourage us to see the history of philosophy itself as an illustration of his theory. It is no surprise, he says, that among Muslims the greatest figures in philosophy and other disciplines, like grammar, have been non-Arabs. Overlooking Al-Kindi and thinking instead of Persians like Avicenna, Ibn Khaldun says that the Arabs were too nomadic to contribute to such a quintessentially sedentary art as philosophy. Because the arts and sciences are a hallmark of the sedentary life, Ibn Khaldun has much to say about them in his introduction. Some of what he says comes as a surprise. So far he has seemed a committed rationalist, an Aristotelian of history who uses empirical observation to devise a universal theory. Yet, he also speaks of such occult phenomena as divination by dreams and prophecy, and states unequivocally that those who enjoy such insight have a resource that outstrips human reasoning. He's highly critical, in fact, of thinkers like Avicenna who try to give naturalistic explanations of prophecy. This fits well with another aspect of Ibn Khaldun's intellectual outlook, his attitude towards Sufism. Here, our evidence points in two apparently contradictory directions. On the one hand, he issued a legal ruling, or fatwa, against recent Sufis like Ibn Arabi, stating that their books should be burned. On the other hand, in his introduction he frequently speaks positively of the Sufis, admiring their ability to achieve a special perception of divine truth closed off to philosophers. He was also linked to Sufi orders and even buried in a Sufi cemetery. There's been a good deal of controversy about this among modern-day scholars. I think the conflict can be resolved by seeing his judgement of Sufism as analogous to his theory of history. He admires the early Sufis, who led lives of simple asceticism like the prophetic companions and kept to themselves any supernatural insights they achieved, but he condemns more recent authors who have spoken openly of the mystical path. This is a corruption of what should have been an honest, straightforward intimacy with God, another slide into decadence and self-indulgence. So, despite his critique of Ibn Arabi and friends, Ibn Khaldun has a good deal of sympathy with the Sufi approach. He even proposes a general critique of rationalistic philosophy that could help vindicate mysticism. According to the Aristotelian philosophers, rational science means thinking universally about things that we have perceived with the senses. Because philosophy always operates with these universal mental conceptions, we can never be sure that there is a perfect match between philosophical teaching and the world of particulars outside. In any case, natural knowledge depends ultimately on our sensory experiences of individual things, so that rational philosophy can never rise above the level of sensation. To do that, an entirely different path is needed, the higher one traveled by saints and prophets. It may seem strange that the relentlessly empirical and critically-minded Ibn Khaldun should favor mystical insight to reason in this way. Yet even his treatment of Islamic history acknowledges the limits of reason. He admits that, however well his theory may describe the rise of Islam, it must make allowance for the genuinely miraculous nature of Muhammad's revelation. He lays down a general rule that tribal forces will be able to overwhelm fading powers only after years of preparation and struggle. It took a decade before the Abbasids were even ready to clash with the Umayyads, for example, so it was a sign of divine intervention that the early Muslim conquests were achieved so rapidly. Only after Muhammad and his early followers passed from the scene did the miraculous character of early Islamic history cease, allowing the usual cycle of dynastic change to play out as normal. In this respect, Ibn Khaldun's introduction gives us a good, well, introduction to the way philosophy will play out in later Islamic history. On the one hand, we will see rational philosophy pursued along Avicenna's lines, with all the intensity of a squad of athletes fired up by a great half-time team talk. On the other hand, philosophers will display the same penchant for skepticism found in Ibn Khaldun, and often on the same basis. Exploiting Avicenna's own rigorous distinction between mental and actual existence, they will wonder whether our mental concepts are an adequate match for things in the outside world. Such skeptical arguments will help make room for the higher kind of perception discussed within mysticism. The abiding question of the later tradition, as we'll see, is not philosophy, yes or no, but rather philosophy, how far can it take us and what will carry us the rest of the way? It would, however, take us too far to turn already to that eastern tradition. We've had a pretty thorough look at philosophy among Muslims in Andalusia now, but that is, at most, half the story. Muslim-controlled Spain and Portugal provided a context in which Jews, too, could contribute to the history of philosophy, and contribute they did. In fact, we are going to need more episodes to cover Jewish thought in Andalusia than we have spent on the Muslim thinkers. We'll be exploring rational Aristotelianism as espoused above all by Maimonides, a resurgence of Neoplatonism in figures like Ibn Gabirol, and a different strand of the mystical tradition in Kabbalistic literature. So, join me again as we take our next Spanish steps by turning to Jewish philosophy in Andalusia, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Matter Over Mind. Ibn Gabirol. Philosophy's history is a winding lane upon which we find ourselves part way through Spain. We've looked at some Muslims, like Ibn Tufayl, with his desert-set autodidactical tale, to say nothing of Averroes' theory of mind, which thinks there's one thinking for all humankind. But, we certainly cannot leave Al-Andalus until we've considered ideas among Jews. So let's stay in Iberia, not in South Tyrol, with a philosopher-poet, Ibn Gabirol. I actually thought about writing this entire episode in rhyming verse, but decided that this would be lots of work for me and rather annoying for you. Still, in principle, setting philosophy into poetic form is a good idea, and one with a long pedigree. For precedent, we can look back to early Greek philosophers, like Parmenides, or more recently to Avicenna, who composed poems on logic and medicine. I love that idea. Imagine turning up to a class on introductory logic, or at medical school, and being assigned a poem as your textbook. The human has bones also found in the lemur, for instance the tibia, sacrum, and femur. One really can't overstate the cultural centrality of poetry in pre-modern societies. This too is something we've occasionally seen in our history of philosophy, most obviously with the importance of Homer and Hesiod among Greek philosophers, but also when we looked at music in the Islamic world and saw Al-Farabi associating music closely with poetry in order to defend its value. So, putting philosophy in poetic form was a way of bringing it to a wider audience. The ancient or medieval version of the podcast, if you will. Of course, poetry is also far easier to memorize than prose, and the sheer beauty and power of poetic verse can help to make philosophical ideas more compelling. In the case of Ibn Gabirol, the subject of today's episode, we have a figure who is valued first and foremost for his poetry, at least among later Jewish readers. This poetic masterpiece is also a philosophical work, the Kingly Crown, which deals with the transcendence of God and the celestial bodies that move at his command. Like other poems from his pen, the Kingly Crown was written in Hebrew, whereas his two surviving prose works of philosophy were composed in Arabic. Of these two, the more famous is entitled Fountain of Life. It is often referred to under its Latin name, Fons Vitae, because the original Arabic version is lost. Apart from the medieval Latin translation, we have only a summary composed later in Hebrew by the Jewish philosopher Ibn Falakhera. In addition, there is another work on ethics, entitled On the Improvement of Character, which does still survive in Arabic. It's a fascinating text, as I'll explain in a moment, but it was not as important for Ibn Gabirol's later reception as his poetry and The Fountain of Life. One might say that Ibn Gabirol lived on in the later imagination as two separate authors. For Jewish readers, he was above all the Hebrew poet who wrote The Kingly Crown. For readers in Latin Christendom, he was the author of The Fountain of Life. Only in the 19th century did European scholars realize that Ibn Gabirol the poet was the same man as the philosopher-readers of Latin called Avicebrol. His real name was, in Arabic, Abu Ayyub Sulayman ibn Yahya ibn Jabirul, or in Hebrew Shlomo ben Yahudah ibn Gabirol. Born in 1021 or 1022 in Malaga, he was educated in Saragossa and gained patronage from another poet, the court official Shmuel HaNagid. We don't know a great deal about his life, though we learn from his own poetry the memorable detail that he suffered from a misery-inducing skin disease. Even the date of his death is uncertain, though most sources seem to indicate that he died in the 1050s, which is good enough for me. So here, with Ibn Gabirol, we're returning to the story of Jewish philosophy in the first half of the 11th century. We were picking up pretty much where we left off, since our look at early Jewish thought in the Islamic world featured Isaac Israeli. Ibn Gabirol has more in common with him than with the other early Jewish philosopher we considered at length, Saadia Gaon. Like Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol draws above all on the Neoplatonic tradition, as it was available in Arabic in texts like the so-called Theology of Aristotle. In Ibn Gabirol's case, there's another rather intriguing possible source, Empedocles. I don't know how much you remember about him, since we covered him way back in our look at the pre-Socratics, but hopefully you'll at least recall that he lived many centuries too early to be a Neoplatonist. In one of the stranger transformations of the Greek-Arabic philosophical transmission, far weirder than the confusion of Socrates with Diogenes the Cynic, for instance, though that's weird enough, Empedocles became the spokesman for a version of Neoplatonic metaphysics. In some Arabic texts, he is also presented as the very founder of Hellenic philosophy, teacher of Pythagoras and thus the source of all Greek wisdom. In the theory of this pseudo-Empedocles, God creates all things out of a primordial matter and uses his own divine will as an intermediary in this creative act. Ibn Falakera, the 13th century philosopher who summarized Ibn Gabirol's Fountain of Life in Hebrew, already pointed out that this work has something in common with these supposed teachings of Empedocles. In light of this, a number of scholars have identified pseudo-Empedocles as the main source for Ibn Gabirol's philosophy. But he never mentions the name Empedocles, and it may be that he and the authors who put Neoplatonic words into the mouth of the pre-Socratic Empedocles were drawing independently on a broader tradition. By the way, I know you're wondering how to say Empedocles in Arabic. It's An-ba-du-cliz, which is not nearly as much fun to say as my favorite Arabic version of a Greek name. Wonderfully, Porphyry was known in Arabic as Furfuryus. At the beginning of The Fountain of Life, Ibn Gabirol asked the question that will, with luck, be answered by the rest of the work, for what purpose was humankind created? Well I say that Ibn Gabirol asked this question. Actually, The Fountain of Life is a dialogue between an unnamed teacher and an unnamed student. In the Latin translation, the two characters are just called Magista and Disquipulus, neither of which, since we're keeping score, is anywhere near as much fun to say as Furfuryus. So the student, or Disquipulus, asks why humankind has been created. The basic answer is given only a few pages later. It is so that we can achieve knowledge of all things as they are, and above all, knowledge of the first essence, which of course is God. This is the knowledge that is going to be conveyed by the teacher to the student in the rest of the dialogue with or without the help of An-pa-du-cliz, or for that matter, Furfuryus. I love saying that. Now here we immediately have a problem. This way of describing the purpose of mankind is awfully intellectualist. We were put here for the sake of nothing but knowledge. Yet Ibn Gabirol also wrote the ethical treatise I mentioned on the improvement of character. That much briefer work is far less intellectualist, at least at first glance. In fact, it looks a great deal like the writings about ethics we considered in an earlier episode by authors like Arazi, Abu Zayd al-Balhi, and Miskowy. You might remember that they presented ethics as a kind of medicine, and saw virtue or good character as closely parallel to bodily health. Ibn Gabirol structures his ethical writing around this parallel too, and in a highly systematic way. He treats 20 different character traits, some good and some bad, assigning four traits to each of the bodily senses. For example, the sense of hearing is associated with love, hate, mercy, and hardheartedness. This schematic design allows Ibn Gabirol to integrate Galenic ethics with the teachings of Scripture. Each character trait, along with its link to sensation, is illustrated by quoting the Bible. For instance, to prove that hearing is connected to hardheartedness, he cites Exodus 9.12, The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not. On the other hand, Ibn Gabirol is using the same originally Galenic idea that we found in other Arabic works on ethics. Our character depends on the temperament of the body and its humours. For instance, if yellow bile dominates, you are likely to be prideful and impudent, whereas black bile will make you anxious. He doesn't say which bodily humour causes misery-inducing skin disease, incidentally. All the character traits are correlated, not only with sensation, but with heat, cold, dryness and moisture, the qualities that describe the four bodily humours. Knowing this will help us to fine-tune our bodies and our character, and ultimately to possess the noble traits that please God. So which is it, then? Are we created for the sake of ethical perfection, as this treatise on the improvement of character seems to be saying? Or for the sake of knowledge, as stated in The Fountain of Life? Well, that may be something of a false contrast. Like Galen and the earlier Arabic ethicists, Ibn Gabirol is firmly committed to the idea that virtue means the domination of desire by reason. In fact, he cites Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden as a paradigmatic case of giving in to desire. So we can bring together Ibn Gabirol's remarks on the human good in his two prose philosophical works, by saying that in ethics, we should make sure that the rational soul is not undermined by lower desire. That clears the way for the attainment of knowledge, a presumably higher goal pursued in The Fountain of Life. While this whole scheme does draw on the ethical tradition initiated by Galen, Ibn Gabirol would see it within the wider context of his Neoplatonic metaphysical system. In agreement with Plotinus and other late ancient Neoplatonists, he thinks the soul is situated between the physical world of bodies and the spiritual world of the universal intellect. Also as in Plotinus, Ibn Gabirol thinks that God is a completely unified first principle that is beyond this intellectual realm. With Ibn Gabirol, we are returning to a purer version of Neoplatonism than what we found in Muslim authors like Al-Farabi and Avicenna. God's transcendence above intellect, which I just mentioned, is a good example. Whereas Al-Farabi and Avicenna follow Aristotle in making God a supreme intellect, Ibn Gabirol places his God above all thought, and for that matter, pretty much everything else. In coming to know him, we are mostly doing something negative, denying that his essence is subject to inappropriate descriptions. Occasionally though, Ibn Gabirol will sound a more positive note. In The Fountain of Life, he does allow the possibility of special divine, or as the Latin translation says, theological, characteristics that belong to God. Usually though, Ibn Gabirol stresses that God is beyond what we can say or understand. He has a good reason for this, which is that a description always implies a relationship between two things, a subject and the descriptive property that belongs to that subject. For instance, if I say that the giraffe is tall, I am alluding to two items, the giraffe and its tallness. Since God is absolutely one, this sort of relationship is ruled out in his case. That sort of point is pretty familiar from earlier in the history of philosophy, whether among the original Neoplatonists or the Muslim theologians known as the Mu'atazilites. But Ibn Gabirol has a startling new way of seeing the issue. He thinks that whenever we have some feature describing a subject, we can speak of a relation between matter and form. Although no such relation exists in God, it will appear in all that he has created, including spiritual things, like soul and intellect. Thus we have Ibn Gabirol's most distinctive philosophical idea. Everything apart from God himself consists of a subject and its properties, which is to say, of matter and form. This idea is sometimes called universal hylomorphism, which may sound like a misery-inducing skin disease, but actually comes from the Greek words houle, or matter, and morphe, meaning form. In the Latin tradition, Ibn Gabirol was notorious for this claim. Christian philosophers like Aquinas mention him as a useful opponent to be refuted while proving such things as the immateriality of angels. We may be rather more sympathetic to Ibn Gabirol. After all, materialism is respectable these days in a way it just wasn't in 13th century Paris. But if Ibn Gabirol is a materialist, he's a materialist of a rather unfamiliar kind. For one thing, of course, he is excluding God from this universal analysis of things into matter and form. But even leaving God aside, this is a materialism which accepts the existence of incorporeal things, like soul and intellect. And how can something be made of matter if it is incorporeal? Well, even at the level of our physical world, Ibn Gabirol sees a clear difference between matter and body. Bodies inevitably have a variety of properties. For instance, they are extended in space. Or to say that in the Aristotelian language regularly used by Ibn Gabirol, they have accidents in the category of quantity. This just means that any body will have a certain length, breadth, and depth. These are forms, albeit forms of a basic kind, which must be presupposed if the body is to have other properties, like color or temperature. Matter, by contrast, is that which underlies all forms, even forms like these quantitative dimensions. It is what you are left with if you perform a thought experiment first suggested in Aristotle's metaphysics and repeated by Ibn Gabirol. Imagine stripping away all the properties and forms from something until nothing is left apart from the subject to which these forms belonged. That is matter. Obviously this sort of matter is rather abstract and difficult to conceive. You wouldn't be able to come upon a heap of matter lying in the middle of a room, for instance, since anything you could find in a room would have size, color, weight, and so on. This might make it a bit easier to believe that there will also be matter in spiritual or in corporeal things. But Ibn Gabirol doesn't just ask you to believe it, he argues for it at great length. In the third book of his Fountain of Life, he provides no fewer than 56 arguments to show that there must be some sort of intermediary between God and the physical world. This intermediary level will not have the complete unity and transcendence of God, but neither will it have spatial extension like bodies. Rather it will, as the Neoplatonists argued, consist of incorporeal substances that possess multiple forms. These will, of course, be the soul and intellect. In fact, Ibn Gabirol sees a hierarchy of four levels below God, which consist of different kinds of forms in combination with different grades of matter. Multiple forms in spiritual matter, souls, the heavenly bodies, and finally bodies down here on earth which are made of the four elements. As these levels proceed down from God, they are progressively less unified, like water streaming forth from a fountain and getting more and more muddy. Of course, someone might be willing to agree with Ibn Gabirol and earlier Neoplatonists that there are incorporeal things between God and the physical world, yet still question his idea that those things possess matter. Again, though, he has several arguments to offer. One depends on that old Platonist favorite, the idea that the corporeal world is an image or copy of the spiritual world. Given that things in our lower world are fundamentally matter-possessing form, presumably the same will go for the paradigms of which these things are copies. For a Platonically minded reader, though, this very line of argument might give rise to a creeping suspicion. Is Ibn Gabirol simply and simple-mindedly applying to spiritual things concepts that are only appropriate to bodies? He seems to have given in to a rampant Aristotelianism, according to which even spiritual substances are understood along the lines proposed by Aristotle for physical things. Ibn Gabirol does say a number of things that could encourage this suspicion. In particular, he remarks that matter has the features Aristotle associated with substance. It exists by virtue of itself, it has an essence, and it underlies various sorts of form. But on closer inspection, Ibn Gabirol turns out to be following a line of thought already explored by Plotinus. You might remember that Plotinus envisioned the intellect coming forth from his first principle, the One, in a two-stage process. First, the One produces an effect that is completely simple. Only when this effect turns back towards the One, in an unsuccessful attempt to return to its source, does it become intellect properly speaking, by grasping the multiplicity of Platonic forms instead of the One. Plotinus himself sometimes seems to think of the simple principle that becomes intellect as if it were a kind of matter. After all, like matter, it has a potential or power for realizing forms, in this case by thinking about them. All of this can be found as tentative suggestions in Plotinus, but now it becomes the explicit teaching of Ibn Gabirol. He even suggests that matter has a kind of precedence or priority relative to form. Until matter is on the scene, having been emanated by God, there is no subject that can come to possess a form, and there can be no form without a subject. This is true at each level of Ibn Gabirol's cosmos. Conceptually speaking, at least, matter comes first, and then it receives form. Of course, as Ibn Gabirol would hasten to add himself, this doesn't mean that matter ever actually exists without form. Rather, if you have one, you have the other, since matter cannot exist without actually being something and that means having a form. The two must always be created together. This mention of creation leads us to a final issue, which may have been bothering you for some time already. All this doesn't sound very, well, Jewish. The transcendent emanating God of the Fountain of Life would seem to have little to do with the God of the Hebrew Bible. In fact, later Jewish readers of the Fountain of Life sometimes complained that it proceeds without any biblical quotations or even allusions. One would be hard-pressed even to tell upon reading it what religion the author espoused. But Ibn Gabirol did see his philosophy as compatible with Judaism, as we can tell from his poem The Kingly Crown. Although it doesn't, say, set out 56 arguments in favor of a spiritual world in the form of Hebrew verse, it does resonate strongly with the teaching of the Fountain of Life. Especially striking is the praise of God's oneness and transcendence, and the hierarchical structure of the poem, which ascends through the heavenly spheres and a realm of intellect before ending with God. It also uses standard Neoplatonic imagery, saying for example that God creates like sending forth a ray of light. Thus, Ibn Gabirol introduces into Judaism the Neoplatonic idea of divine emanation, the way Al-Farabi and Avicenna brought it into Islam. And that could lead to more misgivings. Is his God really a creator? Or rather an automatic cause, like a source of light, or indeed a fountain of life? Certainly, Ibn Gabirol does use the language of emanation to describe the relation between God and his creation, yet he also gives a central role to divine will, which is said to be a sort of intermediary between God and the intellectual realm, much as intellect is an intermediary between God and the physical world. Here Ibn Gabirol is exploring a problem already familiar from antique Neoplatonism. On the one hand, the Platonists wanted to say that the universe inevitably comes forth from the first principle because of its superabundance. On the other hand, they wanted to ensure that the principle is free and not under any constraint in creating the universe. This is only one of several tensions that emerge with particular urgency in the Jewish Neoplatonism of figures like Isaac Israeli and Ibn Gabirol. Given the philosophical as well as historical interest of Jewish Neoplatonism, I thought it would be worth devoting another episode to the whole phenomenon. Now this is a topic I don't mind confessing, where I could use some help from my friend Sarah Pessin. So join me next time for no tricks and no traps, just a history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Jewish Neoplatonism with Sarah Pessin, who is Emil and Eva Hecht Chair in Judaic Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Denver. Hi, Sarah. Hi there. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for including me. I guess the first thing I should ask you is, who are the Jewish Neoplatonists? So I've said a little bit about Jewish philosophy already in the podcast series, and I certainly talked a lot about Neoplatonism. I did mention one philosopher already early on, who's pretty clearly a Jewish Neoplatonist, Isaac Israeli, and more recently another one, Ibn Gabi Rol. Do you see them as the two leading Jewish Neoplatonists? Yes, absolutely. I think people use the expression Jewish Neoplatonists to sometimes talk of other thinkers, but I would definitely say that Isaac Israeli and Solomon Ibn Gabi Rol really encapsulate, I think, what that term best means. I might also include Abraham Ibn Ezra, and Abraham Ibn Hazdai also bears, in some of his works, some elements that might include him as well. But those, I think, again, Israeli and Ibn Gabi Rol would probably be my two main choices. I'll probably get on to talk about Abraham Ibn Ezra later on. Do you want to just say a little bit about Ibn Hazdai? Because I haven't mentioned him yet. Ibn Hazdai's work, again, not all of it would be, I think, categorizable as Neoplatonic. And again, in some of the writing, there are some encyclopedic elements where folks seem to be just sort of recounting things. So it's hard, again, to know whether to include him fully in a Neoplatonic tradition. But in his work, The Prince and the Aesthetic, he has aspects of what is sometimes in the scholarship referred to as Ibn Hazdai's Neoplatonist is kind of seen as a common source of some kinds of materials that one finds in, for example, Isaac Israeli, in Ibn Gabi Rol, and Ibn Hazdai. These are elements that have certain pseudo-empedoclean rings to them. And so for that reason, one can categorize some of his work, at least, as having some Neoplatonic elements. You just mentioned the pseudo-empedocles, and that's a source for Neoplatonism among Jewish authors that I mentioned in the last episode. But could you maybe just go over that again for the listener and talk about some of the other Neoplatonic sources that these authors were drawing on? It is difficult. I think not just with Jewish Neoplatonic texts, but in reading through ancient and medieval writings it is sometimes difficult to see exactly and figure out exactly what the sources are. But for these Jewish Neoplatonists, some of the traditions that seem to be at play are the Kalam Fimah Tal-Khair tradition, or the Lieber-Dakausus tradition, theology of Aristotle materials, which in scholarship and Jewish Neoplatonism there's discussions of a longer and shorter versions of theology of Aristotle, and then broader Arabic Plotinus materials. You see hints or references that look like they're coming from Brethren of Purity materials, even some discussion of the G-ayat al-Hakim, so the Picatrix tradition in the Islamic world, pseudo-empedoclean sources, which is not entirely clear what exactly that tradition is or whether there are more than one, but certainly some materials that come up in Ibn Gabirol's work are attributed by his Hebrew translator, Ibn Falikayra, to have been empedoclean in nature, and we certainly find attribution of certain similar ideas in other Islamic sources that are attributed to empedocles. So again, it's unclear what connection, if any, this has to empedocles, and it's also of interest that there are differences in what seem to be the Jewish and Islamic versions of empedocleanism, which are again pseudo-empedocleanism, so that's a whole separate topic, but again, it's not entirely clear what exactly this tradition or traditions are, but it seems that again, there are certain shared elements that are referred to as having these pseudo-empedoclean overtones, and then it certainly seems that they're reading a variety of Islamic and Jewish theological, mystical, and philosophical traditions of the time, and of course also in the case of the Jewish Neoplatonists, also a familiarity with Jewish scriptural and rabbinic writings, as well as potentially some knowledge of certain Jewish mystical traditions. In the case of Ibn Gabirol, there seems to be a familiarity with some of the language at least that we find in, say, for Yitzirah, the Book of Formation, and so again, certain familiarity certainly with certain Jewish mystical trends. I guess a lot of those materials in a way are what we would expect, so the theology of Aristotle is just the Arabic version of Plotinus, the so-called Liber De Causus, or Book of Causes is just the Arabic Proclus, but Empedocles is a pre-Socratic philosopher and doesn't really have anything to do with Neoplatonism, at least not apparently so. So could you explain how it came to be in the Arabic tradition that Empedocles was associated with this sort of Neoplatonic doctrine? So again, the exact nature of what kind of a lineage this tradition or traditions has is I think not so clear, so it's not as if I don't intend to suggest some kind of a clear-cut answer here, but we do find in Islamic materials reference to Empedocles in terms of a doctrine of love and strife, and that seems connected up with what one might more generally think of as broader Pythagorean and Neoplatonic themes of limit and unlimited. That might be a bit of a summary way of putting it, but in some conceptual way that might be one way of thinking of a connection. Ibn Gabirol himself does not mention Empedocles. His Hebrew translator suggests that there is some Empedoclean element here, so Ibn Gabirol himself doesn't identify that, but what seems to be shared in both the Jewish and Islamic traditions, which is being referred to by scholars as a pseudo-Empedoclean tradition, is a notion of what is an Arabic al-unsa al-awl, which is sometimes translated as first matter or prime matter, and which I prefer to translate as grounding element. And in the Islamic case, it is also, in the Islamic case, there is additionally reference in those conversations to love and strife, whereas in the Jewish cases where this al-unsa al-awl is discussed, there seems rather to be, at least in the case of Ibn Gabirol, an emphasis on the relationship of form and matter as the kind of dyad that is being discussed. Right, so it's like the Islamic tradition is a little bit closer to the real Empedocles, as it were? In as much as the terms love and strife come up, yes, it seems a clear link. So it seems like there's an obvious question here. So you've said that they're drawing on these Neoplatonic texts, you've said they're drawing on rabbinical literature and Scripture, and someone might look at that and think, well, isn't the very term Jewish Neoplatonist a contradiction in terms? I mean, isn't there a problem of reconciling Neoplatonic texts, which often come from a pagan background, with the monotheistic revelation of Judaism? The way I think of that has to do with a broader question about what is Neoplatonic methodology, or to put it in another way, for those thinkers who we would accurately be describing as Neoplatonic in their spirit and in their way of thinking, what is it that they think that they're doing, and what is it that they think something like a scriptural text, the Torah, is doing, or other scriptural writings in Judaism. I think from a Jewish Neoplatonic methodological perspective, these thinkers do not view scriptural texts as literal, nor do they view Neoplatonic metaphysics as literal. So when one opens up this kind of methodological space, the most important texts are not literal, they do not denote spatiotemporally or historically, they're not used simply to refer to things in the way that ordinary language is used to refer to things, that really opens up a deep compatibility for a whole lot of texts. So the idea would be, if you're committed to this metaphorical, non-literal reading of both Neoplatonic literature on the one hand and biblical literature on the other hand, then you're never going to find yourself in a situation where you have just a flat contradiction of one against the other, because really what you're doing is trying to find a single system that lies behind both bodies of text where you can make them cohere. But it still seems like there must be philosophical doctrinal issues where the two belief systems would come into tension, right? So the obvious one, I suppose, is the contrast between a creation-based religion and an emanation-based metaphysics in Neoplatonism, and certainly that's something that was already felt to be a tension in late antiquity, because some Christians actually criticized Neoplatonic philosophers for saying that the world comes to be out of the first principle necessarily like a light shining forth or water pouring forth from a fountain. Do the Jewish Neoplatonists not see that as a problem? So I think it's interesting from two perspectives, both in terms of thinking the possibilities of what Jewish Neoplatonists think about emanation itself as potentially, and I'll use the word pious, I think that for Jewish Neoplatonists, the conception of the kind of necessity that you referred to just now, as long as it's not an external necessity, as long as it's a necessity from within, which in the conceptual space would not be actually called necessity, but just to take that conception, if one thinks of something as necessitated from within, I think the Jewish Neoplatonists have no concerns with God being, again, necessitated from within, which is not the language that they would use, but to the extent that emanation is a kind of quote unquote, necessitation of God from within, I see no reason why a Jewish Neoplatonist would have a problem with that. Quite frankly, I don't see any reason why various religious thinkers or other Jewish thinkers who are not Neoplatonist or other thinkers who are not Jewish who are religious would have a problem with that, but that's a side point. But I certainly don't think, I certainly don't, I actually don't understand that at all, but okay, side point. But I certainly don't see any reason for the Jewish Neoplatonists to have a problem with that. On the other hand, so that was from the perspective of thinking about what they might think of emanation as a concept. From the other perspective, it's, you know, what do they think the opening words of Genesis mean, which presumably for certain religious thinkers, Jewish or otherwise, are fueling some sense that emanation and this kind of, you know, system of thought of emanation and other Greek ideas would be impious. Again, I'm using that word to try to convey a certain idea there. Well, not only for Jewish Neoplatonists who might have a more open methodology for reading texts, but even for the tradition within Jewish rabbinic readings, and certainly within Jewish mystical readings, and even within various Jewish philosophical readings, there are so many different ways that Jewish thinkers read the opening words of Genesis that, again, I don't see any reason to think that a Jewish Neoplatonist would have, would start off even with any sense that the Genesis text tells me something about creation and therefore emanation will be competing with it in one of two ways. First of all, the opening words of Genesis in various rabbinic traditions are not even about cosmogony at all. So the opening words that are frequently translated as in the beginning in a popular Jewish reading, which again, it's not as if Ibn Gabrul or Isaac Israeli comments on this directly, but just to think about this, for Jewish thinkers who are familiar with rabbinic readings, a rabbinic reading of that text has in the beginning is translated as for the first, which is seen as referring to that the world was created, was brought about for the sake of the people Israel. The details aside, the point is, is that it's not seen as a claim about cosmogony beginnings. The other piece is that in Jewish mystical sources, that text is being read as very much a text about emanation, specifically of a Jewish mystical variety. Again, from various perspectives, I don't see any reason to think that a Jewish Neoplatonist would be too worried about a so-called creation versus emanation debate. So we might say that both on the philosophical side and on the textual side, there's no problem because on the philosophical side, they're quite happy for the universe to proceed necessarily from God anyway. And on the textual side, they don't think there's any proof text in Genesis or anywhere else, presumably, that tells you that the universe doesn't proceed necessarily from God. So it's all fine. Right. It's not as if either of them say this per se, but I see no reason conceptually and methodologically as on the part of scholars today to assume anything different than that. So here's an argument against you then, just to play devil's advocate. Ibn Gabrul makes a big deal about divine will and talks about how even universal matter, which seems to be the sort of most general or highest principle in a system, comes forth from God because it's willed. And one obvious way to understand the will, the way that someone like Al-Ghazali would understand it at least, is that you're only willing something if you could have refrained from doing it. So if the universe is willed to come forth from God, we might think that then these Jewish neo-Platonists must be committed to the idea that the universe is contingent rather than necessary. So this notion of divine will that you find, for example, in Al-Ghazali that you definitely find in various Jewish thinkers as well, this notion of Al-Ikhtiyya as kind of this choosing between alternatives. It is interesting that in Avicenna's own writing, he actually takes on that particular term and actually not only the term creation, but actually at one point the term Al-Ikhtiyya, and this is from John Hoover's writings, has brought this to my attention, talks about that term in a way that's consistent for Avicenna with emanation. So that within the Islamic philosophical tradition itself, there is a precedent for not only a general notion of will, but even this Al-Ikhtiyya, this choosing between alternatives language, to conceptually use it in full alignment with emanation. So it's something that I think is interesting to think about in terms of not making assumptions that concepts are so rigid for the neo-Platonists that they can't be brought together. Similarly, in Plotinus himself, although he uses a more broad term that's not necessarily the term that chooses between alternatives, but still he does talk about divine will, that's not a key theme, but he uses the term will as well. So again, conceptually for us to keep our minds open as to how neo-Platonists themselves use the term or the concept of will. And in Ibn Gabirol, he speaks of irrata, divine irrata, which is frequently translated as divine will, but we don't know conceptually that that rules out emanation. Just as we see in Avicenna, Avicenna speaks of creation, of al-Ikhtiyya, and of emanation in one breath, and there's no reason to think that Ibn Gabirol or any Jewish neo-Platonist cannot also speak in one breath of terms like divine irrata and speaking of creation and of holding fully to an emanationist conception of the world. In fact, I argue that divine irrata in Ibn Gabirol, when best understood, is not only consistent with Plotinian emanation, but actually refers to the downward unfolding of Plotinian emanation. So they actually just think that will, at least in the case of God, means necessarily emanating forth the universe or something to that effect? Yes, the adverb necessarily, that helps emphasize, at least in the history of philosophy, a certain strain of critique. The neo-Platonists themselves are not, although they easily could, but it's not as if they're going on and on about how this is a kind of necessitation. The concept space is broken up in a way where necessitation is generally seen as a bad thing, but again, this kind of necessitated from within. I don't think they're not sort of emphasizing that notion of necessity, but yes, certainly the idea of what we might describe as a necessarily emanating divine source for Ibn Gabirol, I would certainly say is consistent with and is in fact exactly what he means by the divine irat or the divine will. Actually, I really agree with that as it happens. So I think that even in neo-Platonism, usually when they talk about necessity, so the Greek word is anankē, they often would mean something like being under compulsion or doing something against you. Exactly, so I'm outside. Yeah, doing something against your will. And of course, that doesn't apply to the first principle in the way it gives rise to the universe. But while we're on the topic of the first principle, it seems to me that there's another potential area where they might get into trouble trying to bring together the Bible with neo-Platonism, and this is the ineffability of the first principle. So again, there's various ways of reading Plotinus on this, but a kind of standard neo-Platonic view would be that the first principle or the one, which would obviously correspond to God in Judaism, is completely ineffable. So there's nothing we can say about him. He's beyond our thought and language. And then you have the Bible, which seems to be saying quite a lot about God. So this obviously is a tension that's felt throughout the history of Islamic philosophy and Jewish philosophy, and it's something that will be central with Maimonides, who I'll be getting to in a few episodes. But how do these Jewish neo-Platonists negotiate between the sort of ineffability of the neo-Platonic first principle and the abundant language that's used about God in the Hebrew Bible? Well, you had mentioned Maimonides, and I would actually start by referring to Maimonides. I hadn't mentioned him at the start in the list of Jewish neo-Platonists, but he is actually an important Jewish neo-Platonist of a certain kind. He is sometimes referred to as a kind of Aristotelian neo-Platonism or a neo-Platonized Aristotelianism, and he is here, I think, of a piece with the tradition of Jewish neo-Platonism in spite, perhaps, of some of his differences in light of his more Aristotelian focus as it relates to the apophatic impulse, to the impulse of complete ineffability as it relates to God. Here, I think, Maimonides is very clear and here would be that his sentiments would be shared by other Jewish neo-Platonists. Maimonides is crystal clear that the biblical descriptions of God are allegorical and are in no way to be taken as literally true. And so, again, I think that this is certainly not a problem for Jewish neo-Platonists. They read the Bible and they read the entire Bible, as I mentioned earlier, with a certain methodological approach, which doesn't take very much literally, but maybe perhaps to say they certainly don't take the descriptions about God literally. So to put together the Bible and a tradition about God as completely ineffable is quite easy, I think, for them to do. So how about the ethical side of this then? Because if we have this sort of ineffable first principle or God that we're trying to get back to, another obvious question arises, how do we get to him? Or how does the soul return to God, as a neo-Platonist might put it? And it seems to me like there's sort of different answers here. So you'd expect a neo-Platonist to say, you should contemplate, you should try to at least grasp the contents of intellect as a start and then maybe work your way up to the one. Whereas the Jewish tradition might instead say, no, you should engage in certain religious practices or prayer, for example. So do you see attention in the Jewish neo-Platonic texts on that score? Maimonides here is the most complicated case, and I will therefore leave him aside, other than saying that Maimonides does talk about prayer and about commandments and has a variety of very important rabbinical writings which are dedicated to talking about rabbinic law. So in the case of Maimonides, it is subject to much debate as to sort of what is the relationship between his rabbinic writings and his guide of the perplexed and how that all fits together in his case. So I will leave that aside for right now. But certainly for Isaac Israeli and Ibn Gabi Rol and others in the Jewish neo-Platonic tradition, their emphasis is very much of a piece with what one finds in Plotinus and what one finds in the theology of Aristotle tradition, the kind of classic return kinds of passages in which one is called upon to return to one's root in intellect with the same sort of textual ambiguities as to whether one is returning to intellect or whether one can return beyond that. I tend to read all neo-Platonic traditions as ultimately thinking of returning to intellect even in cases where it suggests that one returns higher. But one finds these same kinds of languages. And in the case of Ibn Gabi Rol, it's quite interesting that in a passage in his text, the Phansvitae, the Fountain of Life text, one finds that the return passage that one finds actually in the theology of Aristotle coming from the Platonian tradition is amended in a very interesting way that I think sheds light on his link to this pseudo-Pedoclean tradition in describing the ascent or the return back to one's source. The highest level as it were that one reaches is described in normally a Platonic context as sort of coming into contact with light or light imagery comes in there. And in the Ibn Gabi Rol passage, there is this reference to coming and there being a shadow of some sort. And one finds references to shadows also in the writing of Isaac Israeli. And so what one can connect from these return passages with this shadowing language and in the case of Isaac Israeli's shadow language throughout his descriptions of the cosmos is this vestige I would suggest of this pseudo-Pedoclean tradition that we had mentioned in which there is conceived a kind of grounding elemental material kind of reality, the al-unsur al-awl, the first again, what I call grounding element, which is sometimes translated as first matter, as some kind of a cosmic shadowing principle, which itself deserves much more consideration as to again if this is not to be taken literally, then what does that mean? I will leave that aside. But other than to say that that's an interesting feature that one finds in the Jewish Neoplatonic tradition in the discussions of ascent and also in the case of Isaac Israeli in discussions of the emanation scheme in general, one finds mentions of shadow as well as light. So I guess the suggestion there would be that as you move up, although you get closer and closer to God, so you maybe you leave the body behind by turning towards intellect, you never leave this relationship where you have both form and matter, you have both light and shadow. And so that in a way that kind of binary structure that's so distinctive of Ibn Gabirol, it conditions even our ability to return back up the chain or the hierarchy of principles. I think it's helpful to think of the material grounding element in Ibn Gabirol in conceptual kinship with Plotinus' own understanding of intelligible matter. It is not clear that there is a historical connection or how exactly materials in which Plotinus discusses this are not necessarily the ones that are available to Ibn Gabirol, so we'll leave that aside. But at a conceptual level, intelligible matter in Plotinus, just like al-unsar al-awl, the material grounding element in the pseudo-empedoclean tradition that you find in Ibn Gabirol, can be described as the falling away from God. That is in some important sense what is signified. It is also seen as a source of desire and it has connections with love and I won't go into those details, so it actually has various interesting connotations. But I think one way to think of why would there be shadowiness, even if you get that far up, is to think of it as you are always not God. And that sounds like good Neoflatanism and good Judaism. Exactly. Right, so actually, I think a lot of people have a very different reading of Ibn Gabirol, so a standard view of him would be, oh, he's read some basic Aristotelian metaphysics, maybe he's read the categories and the physics or whatever, and so he's thought, oh, okay, I see, so Aristotelian substances are matter and form and the intellect is a substance, so the intellect must be matter and form, and he kind of blithely then applies this matter form structure to intellect. But it sounds like you think he's actually sort of putting his finger on something much deeper that's always been present in the Neoplatonic tradition. Absolutely. And I sometimes refer to the reading that I think you're correct to say is sort of the standard reading of Ibn Gabirol. I often refer to that as Aristotle gone bad, which is that exactly, he takes Aristotelian halomorphism and he just doesn't get it and he just applies it to intellect, as if that's his reasoning, either that he has no reason or he got it wrong and didn't understand it, and neither of those is a very compelling account. So when one looks at the pseudo-empedoclean tradition and how it connects with Plotinus, we'll leave aside, I mean, it doesn't seem clear that the material on intelligible matter and Plotinus is necessarily what's remaining in Arabic, so it's not clear exactly how to make this connection historically, but certainly conceptually there seems to be such a strong similarity that in the conversation of Al-Unsar al-Awl is a deeply Neoplatonic insight about the origin of all beings in not being God. Right, and in being, sort of, therefore being potential in some way and having to become something else, like by grasping intelligible objects and so on. Right, so that's the idea of intelligible matter is that first you have a material or potential aspect of intellect which then becomes actual when it grasps all of the forms. And I think the way that Plotinus describes it, again, conceptually is more vibrant than just speaking of potency, and this is how I like to think of it in Ibn Gabi role as well, but certainly what you said is correct, but just to think of the way that Plotinus describes the moment, as it were, outside of the one, this first moment of unfolding as a kind of deep expectancy, the moment in which that which is not God first desires towards God. I think that sort of is how I talk about how Plotinus thinks of intelligible matter. And so again, that's not inconsistent with thinking in terms of potency, but I do think there's this kind of, as I like to refer to it, a deep expectancy or a desire towards God which initiates the unfolding to begin to go further, as it were. And so in the case of Ibn Gabi role, both thinking conceptually along those lines, but also more broadly looking at his philosophical vision in terms of what I call a theology of desire, I very much talk about how this material grounding element marks not only the first moment as it were, and again we're not talking temporally, this is an eternal first moment, it not only marks the eternal first moment of not being God, but it also marks a deep eternal desire at the core of being to strive back towards God. Okay, well that's certainly a good note to end on. Next time I'll be looking at an author who's much less favorable to philosophy, namely Judah Halevi, and I'll be looking at his famous defense of Judaism as superior to any of the other Abrahamic traditions or philosophy, the Khazari. For now I will thank Sarah Pessin very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much. And I will invite the audience to join me next time when I will be talking about Judah Halevi here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Today's episode, Choosing My Religion, Judah Halevi. We choose some things about ourselves others are thrust upon us. I, for instance, did not choose to be born male, American, or devastatingly handsome. Yet two out of these three things happened anyway. And then there are some features of our lives that we usually grow up with, but are in our power to change. It seems that a lot of sports fans develop their allegiance as children, but I myself became a fan of Arsenal Football Club more or less on a whim after noticing that they played near where I used to live in London. Which taught me the lesson that even casual choices can lead to great emotional upheaval in the long term. Another example would be religion. Although most religious believers were raised in their faith, it's obviously possible to convert. One can even imagine a person surveying a wide range of religions and picking among them, like someone moving to North London and deciding whether to support Arsenal or Tottenham. Of course, in that case, the stakes would be considerably lower, and the choice would be far easier, since no sane person would voluntarily choose to be a Tottenham fan. In the multi-religious and multi-cultural society of today, we would even find it easy to imagine such a thing. I mean picking religions, not picking football teams. It is tempting to assume that in the medieval era, when religion was so powerful a factor in defining each person's social group, such a neutral and dispassionate selection between faiths would have been inconceivable. But people certainly did convert from one religion to another in the classical period of Islam, and did so voluntarily. We'll be seeing an example when we return to the eastern part of the empire and consider the thinker Abul Barakat al-Bartari, who converted from Judaism to Islam. There was also conversion under varying degrees of duress, as we've seen with Jews being pressured to become Muslims under the Almohads in medieval Spain. Centuries earlier, there had been a famous case of voluntary conversion towards Judaism. In the 8th century, a group called the Khazars, whose power was centered in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, became Jews. It's not clear how deeply this conversion penetrated into Khazar society, perhaps it was only the ruling class that became Jews. This event served to inspire a text which imagines exactly the scenario we have been considering, the Khuzari. Its author was Judah Ben Samuel Halevi, a poet, doctor, and philosopher who lived in Spain in the 11th to the 12th century. In the Khuzari, he depicts the king of the Khazars adjudicating between the rival claims of four belief systems, philosophy, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. At the risk of ruining whatever suspense still remains, I'll reveal that the king of the Khazars does indeed decide to convert to Judaism. In fact, although the choice between faiths is the most famous part of the Khuzari, Judah Halevi devotes most of the text to a series of conversations between the king and the Jewish advisor, the scholar who persuades him that Judaism has the strongest claim on the king's allegiance. Thus, the Khuzari is, for the most part, a dialogue between the converted king and this scholar. Nonetheless, the entire work presents a sustained and often polemical defense of the Jewish faith against its rivals, and also of rabbinical Judaism against the enemy within, the Karaite Jews. Whereas Halevi depicts spokesmen who argue in favor of philosophy, Christianity, and Islam, he does not deem Karaism worthy of this treatment. Instead, the Karaites are attacked within the dialogue between the king and the scholar. The Khuzari shows that Halevi too lived within a multicultural and multi-religious society. As we've been seeing, that is a fair description of the whole Islamic world in the classical period and it applies especially to Spain under the domination of Islam. Halevi came from the city of Tudela in the north of Spain, as did a man who was his younger contemporary friend and, most importantly, star of our next podcast episode, Abraham ibn Ezra. After traveling south, he won renown for his poetry, meeting and impressing fellow poet and philosopher Moses ibn Ezra. This launched a career which would see Halevi celebrated for his expertise in poetry and medicine. For a time, he would establish himself as a court doctor in Toledo, but his life was to be a peripatetic one and not in the Aristotelian sense. When Halevi was still quite young, possibly even a teenager, the Almoravids invaded from northern Africa and took control of the Taifa principalities of southern Spain. As we've seen, this was not nearly as unfavourable a development for Jews as the later coming of the Almohads, but it still caused some instability for men like Halevi. Along with Moses ibn Ezra, he was forced to leave a stable life in Granada when they sacked the city. He would travel from place to place after that, first to Toledo, Cordoba and Almería in Spain and at the end of his life to Egypt and, finally, to the Holy Land, where he died in 1141. Halevi wrote hundreds of surviving poems in Hebrew. He would deserve a place of honour in a podcast devoted to the history of Jewish literature, if anyone out there feels like starting one up. These poems reflect his sense of the state of Jewry in his own life. His own wanderings might have given him extra reason to focus on the theme of exile and it was a happy ending to his story that he eventually found his way to Israel, the land glorified in many of his verses. But it was not just the perennial situation of exile that troubled Halevi. His poems allude to the Jews' vulnerability as Christian and Muslim armies clashed for control of Spain. These same themes seem to underlie the Khuzari, which transposes the conflict between faiths to a more intellectual level, as their respective merits are judged by the king of the Khazars. As it develops, the Khuzari reflects Halevi's pride for his own faith and for the Holy Land, as well as his sadness about the tribulations of the Jews. He compares Israel's status among the nations to that of the heart and the body, but adds that just as the heart is affected by illnesses, so have the Israelites suffered mightily through the ages. Another striking feature of the king's judgment in the Khuzari is that it is not only religions that bid for his approval, there is also philosophy. This confirms for us the cultural prominence philosophy had attained in early 12th century Spain. Of course, the kind of philosophy envisioned here is that of Halevi's own context, not that of the 8th century fictional setting. This means that philosophy is presented as a highly rationalist theory that insists on the eternity of the universe, which is depicted as the necessary effect of a remote and impersonal god. Several times, Halevi alludes critically to Avicenna's view that God does not know about the particular things in our world. This view caused widespread horror among Muslim readers of Avicenna, and Halevi is likewise deeply unimpressed by it. It's worth noting though that philosophy is being presented here not just as a list of abstract ideas which we are being invited to reject, rather it is a full-fledged alternative to religion, placed on equal footing with the Abrahamic faiths in the beauty pageant of belief systems staged for the king of the Khazars. Of course, this is a backhanded compliment, if it is a compliment at all. Halevi is implying that philosophers must reject the truth claims of the three Abrahamic faiths. For them, religions can, at best, be second-class versions of the truth. Here we see that the universalist rationalism set out by Al-Farabi could not just inspire fellow philosophers like Averroes, who will live in the generations just after Halevi. It could also provoke pious Jews and Muslims into treating philosophy as a belligerent rival rather than the friend of faith that many philosophers wanted it to be. In Halevi's own immediate background, the universalist approach of a writer like Ibn Gabyrol may have seemed to pose a threat within Judaism itself. Thus, Halevi wastes no time in depicting philosophy in a negative light. The king of the Khazars summons a philosopher first when he begins his search for wisdom. He does so in response to a dream, a vision in which the king has been told that his intention is pleasing to God, but his action is not. As Halevi depicts the philosopher advertising his intellectual wares to the king, stress is placed on the aspects of philosophy most incompatible with Judaism. Its denial of creation, its claim that God is ignorant of particular things, its condescending suggestion that religion could prove useful for forming the king's habits and governing the king's nation even if it does not establish truth, as philosophy does. The king reacts unfavorably to some of these specific proposals and his own experience also undermines what the philosopher has said. After all, the king is a man who has just had a vision handed down to him from above, and the philosopher is trying to convince him that he needs to engage in deep study in order to unify with the active intellect. The king already has a hotline to God and the philosopher is telling him to go read the phone book. More importantly, the king knows from the dream that it is only his practical actions that need amendment, not his intention. His failings are at the level of practice and this is something the philosopher can discuss in only the broadest of terms. This anticipates a theme that will be emphasized later in opposition to the Karaites. Purity of soul and the sincere application of reason cannot tell us how God wants to be worshipped. For that we need revelation and tradition. But which revelation and which tradition? That's the cue for the speeches of the Christian and Muslim scholars who enter next. The king finds the Christian religion incoherent and remarks that in order to believe such things he would need to have been raised in the faith from childhood, an interesting comment in light of our earlier reflections. Halevi believes Christianity could never be endorsed by anyone considering it rationally from the outside. It is the Tottenham Hotspurs of the Abrahamic religions. Not much detail is given here as to why Christianity is literally incredible, but perhaps Halevi has in mind such teachings as the Incarnation and Trinity. Once the Christian is sent packing, Islam gets a hearing. This time the king complains that the main argument for Islam's truth is the miraculous nature of the Quran. But the king cannot appreciate this, since he is not a speaker of Arabic. That's a fascinating point for Halevi to put into the king's mouth. For one thing, it is a much less critical remark than what was said about Christianity. For another thing, Halevi himself certainly did know Arabic. Indeed, the Khazari itself is written in Judeo-Arabic, not in Hebrew. So this rationale for rejecting Islam is not one that could have been given by Halevi himself. A second rationale given here is one Halevi would surely share though, that although the Prophet Muhammad did supposedly perform other miracles, these were witnessed only by small numbers of people. More convincing would be reports about supernatural interventions by God in support of a faith, which were experienced by so many people that no skepticism regarding them is possible. It is this that finally leads the king to turn to the Jewish spokesman, since the Old Testament is full of such miracles, for instance the parting of the Red Sea. The king does so with some reluctance. He wasn't originally planning to consult the Jews, since he has heard such bad things about them. Here, as I've already mentioned, Halevi is alluding to the sorry condition of Judaism, embattled by other faiths and disdained by many people. That idea is present even in the official title of the Khazari, which is wonderfully alliterative in Arabic, Kitab ar-rad wa-dalil fiddin al-dalil, meaning Book of Refutation and Proof on behalf of the despised religion. The rabbinic scholar manages to convert the king in relatively short order, which sets the stage for the philosophical and theological debates to follow. He refers here not only to Judaism's unparalleled arsenal of miracle stories, but also spurs the king on to consider the historical primacy of the Jewish faith. We saw that in late antiquity, the Church Fathers insisted that Hellenic philosophy drew from Jewish roots. Now Halevi likewise insists that what good there is in philosophy derives ultimately from the figures we know from the Old Testament. It passed down ultimately from Adam himself, and of course then from Adam's sons, which incidentally makes my name an appropriate one for a philosophy podcaster. Philosophy then went to the Persians and the Chaldeans, and only then to the Greeks and Romans. No wonder that the teachings we find in Aristotle are to some extent garbled and false. This culture had no living tradition of wisdom passed down directly through the generations, such as the Jews enjoy. Now Halevi again mentions the philosopher's conviction that the universe is eternal. Anticipating Maimonides, he states that reason can prove neither the eternity nor non-eternity of the world, so that only prophetic testimony can decide the issue. But poor Aristotle didn't have the benefit of such a tradition. This passage is typical of Halevi's stance regarding philosophy. His critique is no unrestrained, anti-rational polemic. Rather, he is carefully trying to show that reason has its limits. Without the help of God, preserved through authentic tradition, we have no way to transcend these limits. So nuanced is Halevi's attitude that he even cites Hellenic sources in support of his own position of epistemic modesty and against the confident knowledge claims made by the philosophers of his own day. He quotes the Hippocratic maxim, life is short, but art is long, as well as Aristotle's uncharacteristically poetic remark that in our search for wisdom we are like bats blinded by the light of the sun. Most to the point are Halevi's allusions to a passage from Plato's Apology, in which Socrates claimed to have only human, but not divine wisdom. To experienced historians of philosophy like us, this inevitably evokes the approach of the ancient skeptics. Taking Socrates as a model, they were similarly hesitant about what humankind can know. Halevi even alludes to the incessant disagreement between various philosophers as a way to undermine their theories, another tactic frequently deployed by the ancient skeptics. The difference, of course, is that just like Aristotle, but unlike the Jews, the skeptics had no access to a tradition based on prophetic revelation. Halevi's insistence on the need for tradition also lies at the heart of his critique of another group of opponents, the Karaites. As you'll hopefully remember, these were Jews who rejected the authority of rabbinic texts such as the Mishnah and Talmud. Instead, they believed that the use of one's own reasoning was sufficient to interpret scripture and live a righteous life. A letter survives in which Halevi modestly says that his gazari is a mere trifle, which he wrote only to win over a so-called heretic. Scholars tend to think that this refers to a Karaite opponent, and indeed the gazari does take aim at the Karaite Jews. Against them, Halevi insists that resources of human reason are insufficient. How could we discover, for instance, the rules governing ritual purity for the slaughtering of animals? No amount of reasoning will lead us to the right answer, we must turn to tradition. Unsurprisingly, by relying on their individual judgments, the Karaites are beset by mutual disagreement, just like the philosophers. This is in stark contrast, Halevi proudly states, to the harmony between the teachings of the rabbinic scholars. This is scarcely a persuasive move on Halevi's part, since as we saw, the Talmud in fact records in great detail the disagreements and disputes between scholars rather than setting out a single body of unchallenged teaching. Halevi could, however, turn this to his advantage. The sages may have debated among themselves, but ultimately the truth would emerge from this process as a consensus view. What distinguishes the rabbinic Jews from both the Karaites and philosophers then is not a blanket rejection of reasoning. Rather it is the belief that reasoning can be successful only within the context of wisdom, passed down through an inspired tradition. Nonetheless, Halevi can often sound like a vigorous anti-rationalist. At one point he castigates the Karaites for reasoning about Scripture at all, citing the biblical text, He also emphasizes the features of nature that cannot be understood or reproduced by humans. We cannot anticipate, for example, when an egg might be spoiled and unable to hatch. For that matter, even nature, whose complexity already outstrips human understanding, cannot suffice as an explanation for the creation of humans. After all, humans are capable of rationality and thought, so how can they be the results of a mindless, natural process? To get results like that, divine intervention is needed. Yet passages such as these express only one half of Halevi's attitude towards human reason. At another point, far from contrasting the deliverances of reason to prophetic truth, he says that prophecy corrects our false beliefs in the same way that reason can correct our naive everyday beliefs. For instance, it is only through careful reasoning that we would be able to disprove the possibility of void space, or realize that every body is in principle infinitely divisible. Both of these claims are familiar from Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. Halevi also likes to use philosophy against itself, sounding like many a Platonist when he says that the soul's connection to matter is what prevents it from attaining knowledge more easily. Ultimately, Halevi believes not that the philosophers are wrong to seek truth, but simply that their search is doomed to failure because they do not avail themselves of divine assistance. Thus he unfavorably compares Aristotle's speculations in zoology to the more profound observations about animals laid down in the Jewish law. If all this is sounding familiar to you, it may be because you were king of the Khazars in a former life. Or more likely, it's because you listened to the podcast episodes about Al-Ghazali. Halevi delivers a moderate critique of philosophy. Like the king himself, it is admirable in its intentions, but arrogant and misguided in carrying out these intentions. And this is highly reminiscent of Al-Ghazali, which is no coincidence. As we know from looking at other Andalusian thinkers like Ibn Tufail, Al-Ghazali's works were known in Muslim Spain. They seem to have been used by Judah Halevi, so that the two have far more in common than just their general attitude to faith and reason. A particularly striking case is Halevi's accusation that for all their boasts about reason, the philosophers in fact engage in taqlid, uncritically accepting the doctrines of their masters. At best, this is an accusation that misses as many targets as it hits. Avicenna looms large in the portrayal of philosophy we find in both Al-Ghazali and Judah Halevi, and he was anything but an uncritical follower of authority. Indeed, if Avicenna could have read the Khuzari, I imagine he would have been happy to throw the accusation of taqlid back at Halevi himself. It is, after all, Halevi who insists that one must depend upon tradition in seeking the truth. Of course, Halevi would hasten to add that his tradition is supported by divine revelation as proven by numerous miracles. Not for the first time, we see that one man's taqlid is another man's humble submission to the guidance of rightful authority. Soon, Jews in Spain and indeed throughout the Mediterranean world will have another rightful authority to guide them—maimonides. Halevi paves the way for him in some respects, for instance with his emphasis on the limits of human reason, a theme that will resonate strongly in the pages of the great Maimonides. We'll be turning to him in a couple of episodes, but first I want to complete the picture I've been painting of earlier Jewish thought in Andalusia. Among the thinkers we will look at next time is Judah Halevi's close friend, Abraham ibn Ezra. The association between them seems to have crossed some intellectual barriers, given that Ibn Ezra was a devotee of several sciences about which Halevi was rather skeptical. The best example is astrology, a topic explored enthusiastically by Ibn Ezra but dismissed in typical fashion by Halevi in the Khuzari. No doubt the heavens do influence our world, he says, but it is beyond human ability to make predictions on that basis. Maybe so, but even without looking at the stars, I am boldly going to predict that you will want to join me as I look at the tension between astrology and freedom in Jewish thought next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born Under a Bad Sign, Freedom and Astrology in Jewish Philosophy If Abraham ibn Ezra didn't have bad luck, he would have had no luck at all. He was born under a bad sign, as he reports in a poem he wrote about his unfortunate time of birth. Had he become a candle maker, the sun would never set again. If he were a dealer in shrouds, people would stop dying. And, when Ibn Ezra spoke of his bad birth sign, he wasn't kidding. He was a convinced astrologer, and indeed the author of numerous works on the subject of astrology, and he believed that all events here on earth, involving individuals both great and humble, and entire nations, are steered by the heavenly bodies. They say that there's nothing new under the sun, and Ibn Ezra's belief in astrology is a good example. Many moons ago, we saw that figures in antiquity, notably Ptolemy, contributed to both the science of astronomy and what most people would now consider to be the pseudoscience of astrology. Astrological teachings came into the Islamic world not only from Hellenic culture, but also from India, and the science assumed great cultural importance. Like the Roman emperors, Caliphs used astrology for imperial propaganda, and, like the philosophers of the Roman empire, thinkers of the Muslim world were known to combine astrology with the cosmological teachings of Aristotelianism and Platonism. Astrology was already a major interest of al-Kindi, and he helped to launch the career of one of the most important early astrologers, Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi. Abu Ma'shar, like al-Kindi, drew on philosophy to give a methodological and cosmological rationale for this science. This is not to say that all philosophers of the Muslim faith accepted the validity of astrology. It was criticized, and indeed mocked, by al-Farabi. Avicenna also wrote a refutation of the claims of astrologers. We find a similar situation among Jews, with both advocates and critics of this science of the stars. In the century before al-Kindi and Abu Ma'shar, there was already a major Jewish astrologer named Mash'allah. Like Abu Ma'shar, his works were translated into Latin and became influential in medieval Christendom. But it would be in Andalusia that astrology really came to the fore as a subject of debate between Jews. It was a debate of considerable philosophical interest, since astrology seemed to undermine human freedom, yet was also often considered to have a solid foundation in Aristotelian natural philosophy. In this episode, I'm going to look at three thinkers of 12th century Andalusia who contributed to this debate. First, the aforementioned Abraham ibn Ezra, who, as I've already said, was an astrological hardliner. Next will come Abraham ibn Dawud, a philosopher whose major work, the Exalted Faith, is an exploration of the question of human freedom. And, after these two Abrahams, it will make sense to turn to a Moses. In fact, to Moses Maimonides, the greatest of all medieval Jewish philosophers. He wrote a withering criticism of astrology and went so far as to blame astrological activities for the ancient misfortunes of the Jews. As I've already said, our first thinker, Abraham ibn Ezra, was no stranger to misfortune himself. Like many other Jews of Andalusia, including Maimonides, ibn Ezra was forced to flee his home when the political situation there became untenable thanks to the anti-Jewish policies of the Almohads. This personal misfortune for ibn Ezra became good fortune for the Jews of Christian Europe. Ibn Ezra was one of the earliest authors to expose Jews in France and Italy to the highly advanced culture of Arabic-speaking Andalusia. To do so, he needed to write in Hebrew. As ibn Ezra traveled far and wide to Rome, Lucca, Ruan, and even London, he encountered Jewish communities who were in need of guidance in both religion and science. But these co-religionists knew no Arabic, so he wrote for them in Hebrew. Most important for the history of Judaism were his commentaries on the Bible. He presented these as an improvement on all other available commentary. He judged the early medieval commentaries of the Gaonim, like Saadia Gaon, to be full of extraneous matter drawn from non-religious science. Meanwhile, the Christians' attempts to understand what was for them the Old Testament were marred by an excess of figurative and symbolic exegesis. Ibn Ezra, by contrast, claimed to strike the right balance between explaining the surface and underlying meanings of the text. He lamented the decline of expertise in the Hebrew language among his readers, and indeed all Jews since the nation had been exiled from the Promised Land so many centuries ago. To remedy this, he offered detailed analysis of difficult grammatical points and vocabulary in Scripture. And of course, as a product of the cutting-edge culture of Andalusia, he could weave scientific points into his commentaries when appropriate. This happened more frequently than you might expect. For Ibn Ezra, being a good biblical commentator is like being a good Hollywood journalist. You need intimate knowledge of the stars. One example was the timing of Jewish holidays. Ibn Ezra used his astronomical knowledge to refute Karaite claims about the Jewish calendar. You'll remember that the Karaites were Jews who rejected the authority of late ancient rabbinical literature like the Talmud. Against them, Ibn Ezra was able to show that the resources of rational astrology are by themselves insufficient to settle all questions concerning the calendar, which means that we must depend on the authority of the rabbinic teachings recorded in the Talmud. Ibn Ezra also saw astrology as central for understanding the plight of the Jewish people. Their exile is due to the malign influence of Saturn. In this sense, all Jews are born under a bad sign to such an extent that an individual's specific horoscope can be trumped by the more general misfortune that has befallen the Jews as a whole. So Ibn Ezra says that a Jew whose time of birth indicates kingship will manage to reach a position within a royal court, but not actually sit on the throne himself. He also invoked astrology when explaining God's description of himself to Moses, the original Moses that is, as the liberator of the Jewish people. This may seem to be a case of God damning himself with faint praise, since he could have called himself, for instance, the creator of all things, not just liberator of the Jewish people. Read the end of the book of Job if you want to see God itemizing a more impressive resume. Ibn Ezra says, though, that the liberation of Jews was very impressive indeed, since it miraculously overturned malign astral influence. Interestingly, Ibn Ezra presented these ideas in a debate with his colleague and acquaintance Judah Halevi, who we looked at in the last episode. This was a remarkable relationship, given that Halevi and Ibn Ezra seemed to stand at opposite ends of the intellectual climate among Jews of the 12th century. In his Khuzari, Halevi emphasized the limits of reason, one factor which underlay his dismissal of astrology. This contrasts sharply with Ibn Ezra's attempt to explain God's relationship to the Jewish people in terms of astral influence. Of course, astrology had more quotidian uses too. In addition to casting birth horoscopes like Ibn Ezra's, which forecast that bad luck and trouble would be his only friends apart from Judah Halevi, one could also use astrology to make day-to-day decisions. Wondering whether to take a journey? Worried you might be getting ill? Hoping to find the location of some buried treasure? The stars will give you the answers to such questions, or at least a qualified astrologer will once he has consulted them. With this kind of help, we have a better chance of leading a healthy, successful life. For instance, you might use the stars to see that an illness is indicated for you, and just in time change your diet to ward it off. Ibn Ezra hastens to stress, though, that a righteous person will be even more securely guarded against suffering and distress, for the righteous are protected by divine providence, a more powerful ally than any skill in astrology. Here Ibn Ezra seems to be suggesting that it is, after all, possible for human beings to escape astral influence. The astrologer might come down sick as he has foreseen, but through his own efforts it may be milder because he's been watching what he eats and drinks. The righteous man seems to have transcended the sphere of physical influence entirely, using the beneficial influence that comes directly from God rather than suffering the malign influence of the stars. Evidently, when God wants to look after his favored servants, he can run rings around Saturn. This question of how much influence the stars do have on us, and whether we can elude that influence, usually arises only implicitly in Ibn Ezra. But it is front and center for our next 12th century Jewish author and the second Abraham of this episode. I'm sorry to say that Abraham Lincoln hasn't made the cut, though I did think about mentioning Abe Vigoda, who as the star of the old TV show Fish is presumably a Pisces. I now want to look at Abraham Ibn Dawud, who lived about a generation before Maimonides and paved the way for him by showing how Judaism and Aristotelianism could be brought into harmony with one another. He may also have paved the way for the further journey of Aristotelianism into Christianity. It seems likely, though not certain, that Ibn Dawud is the same man as the Jewish scholar who was known in Latin as Abun Dawuth. In the city of Toledo, this Abun Dawuth worked with the Christian translator Dominicus Gundesalinus to produce Latin versions of Arabic philosophical works. We know that Ibn Dawud did travel to Toledo from his home in southern Spain. This may have been another case of fleeing from the Almohads who invaded southern Spain from their base in North Africa in the middle of the 12th century. Assuming that Ibn Dawud and Abun Dawuth were the same man, he should on this basis alone be recognized as a significant contributor to the history of philosophy. As we'll be seeing in Duke the transmission of scientific and philosophical thought from Arabic into Latin had a huge impact on Christian medieval philosophy, just like the earlier introduction of Hellenic philosophy into Arabic, and for that matter, like Ibn Ezra's dissemination of Arabic philosophical literature among the Hebrew-reading Jews of Christian Europe. Aside from his possible role in the Arabic-Latin translations, Ibn Dawud's main achievement in philosophy is a book called The Exalted Faith. It was written in Arabic, but that version is lost, so it can be read today only in its Hebrew translation called Ha-Emunah-Ha-Rama. The goal of the work is not unlike that of Maimonides's most famous philosophical treatise, The Guide for the Perplexed. Like Maimonides, Ibn Dawud wants to resolve tensions that seem to arise between Aristotelianism and Scripture. Thus, he often emphasizes the agreement between philosophy and revelation, following Saadia's lead by mining Scripture for examples of the ten Aristotelian categories, and confidently identifying angels with the heavenly intellects of the Aristotelian system as it has come down to him. His method is usually to establish philosophical doctrines rationally and then quote Scripture in confirmation of those doctrines. Having said that, Ibn Dawud's Exalted Faith is not on a par with The Guide for the Perplexed. Of course, Ibn Dawud is a less powerful and original thinker than Maimonides—that's true of nearly all medieval thinkers—but I mean more that The Exalted Faith is directed at a narrower question. This is a guide for people perplexed specifically about free will. He explicitly states that puzzlement over this issue provides the occasion for the whole work, and he returns to solve it at the end, in a way that vindicates both human freedom and divine providence. In between, he runs through a wide range of topics, pausing occasionally to criticize his predecessors, especially Ibn Gabirol. He believes that we can only understand human freedom if we have first grasped the principles of Aristotelian cosmology, the nature of prophecy, the sense in which our language applies to God, and so on. His position on the free will issue emerges out of this systematic survey of philosophy as it has reached him in Andalusia. We find partial agreement between him and Ibn Ezra, insofar as Ibn Dawud, too, thinks that events in our earthly realm are caused by the heavenly motions. He speaks in rather astrological terms of the powers exercised by individual heavenly bodies. But he does not go into anything like the detail provided by Ibn Ezra, who was willing to explain exactly which stars have which effects, for instance by heating and cooling objects down here where we live. That fever you have, for instance, might have been caused by Mars, which stirs up hot yellow bile. It can't be a coincidence that you can also make yourself ill by eating too many Mars bars. Unlike Ibn Ezra, Ibn Dawud frequently invokes the agent intellect or giver of forms familiar from Muslim thinkers like Al-Farabi and Avicenna. It might look like Ibn Dawud has too many explanations on offer here. Is it the stars that cause things to happen through physical means, or rather the celestial intellect that does so by giving forms? But, as Ibn Dawud points out, two kinds of cause is exactly the right number. As every Aristotelian knows, substances are combinations of matter and form. The role of the agent intellect is to give form to suitably prepared matter. And it is physical processes, the ones ultimately caused by the stars, that prepare the matter. He compares this to the building of a ship, which requires not just physical labor but also the guiding principle of the idea of a ship in the shipbuilder's mind. Because the stars' motions play this crucial role in causing things to happen in our lower world, and because their motions are caused by God, Ibn Dawud sees the heavens as the instruments of divine providence. They are, he says, the servants of God's decree. Since late antiquity, we've seen many examples of this kind of theory, where heavenly bodies and sub-divine intellects play an intermediary role by passing on the causal influence and providential benevolence of God to the earthly realm. This sort of mediation has always been subject to criticism, not just because it abolishes any direct connection between God and most of his creatures, but also because it apparently leads to determinism. Everything will necessarily flow forth from God, his influence cascading relentlessly and inevitably down through intermediary principles like water rushing down the levels of a fountain. So, it's noteworthy that Ibn Dawud thinks the exact reverse. It is precisely the presence of intermediaries in his cosmic system that allows for free will and contingency in our lives. His rationale for this is that God, being simple, can give rise only to a simple effect. This is the principle of ex uno unum, or only one from one, that had been criticized in Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers. For Ibn Dawud, the principle means that God cannot give rise to opposed contraries. Being simple, he could not, for instance, create both black and white. This, presumably, is why God doesn't publish his own newspaper. More to the point, God cannot give rise to both good and evil, which is one reason he must be absolved of responsibility for evils in our world. Another reason is that evils are, for Ibn Dawud, associated with privations. Following a tradition that goes back to Plotinus, he sees evil as the lack of goodness, especially in the human intellect. And again, privation is not the sort of thing that could be caused by God. Ibn Dawud illustrates this with a memorable example, God does not need to create the absence of an elephant in Spain. So, for Ibn Dawud, the problem of evil is the elephant that is not in the room. It is simply impossible for God to give rise to evils, so we must explain evil with reference to other causes. These will be the intermediary, heavenly causes that affect our world more directly. The movements of the heavens and the emanation of forms from the active intellect bring about natural and chance events. Human actions are not steered by these natural causes, though. Rather, we act voluntarily. Like all good managers, the God of Ibn Dawud's philosophy is willing to delegate. He oversees a providential order by appointing the heavens as his deputies and then gives humans the capacity to act of their own accord. Ibn Dawud walks a careful line with respect to astrology. His system shows that the stars do cause some events, so that there could be a basis for this controversial science, but it also ensures that we humans are not the mere playthings of the stars. A far more hostile line was taken by Maimonides. We'll be turning to him properly in a couple of episodes, but in this and the next episode I will already be giving you a glimpse of his wide-ranging and influential writings. Most important for our subject in this episode is a letter he wrote to some Jews in Provence who had solicited his opinion on the subject of astrology. Maimonides' response is unequivocal. Not only are the claims of astrologers entirely baseless and false, but astrology played a decisive role in the tragedy of the Jewish people. He blames the destruction of the Temple on the idolatrous practices of astrologers among early Jews. They placed their trust in the stars when they should have been arming themselves against their enemies. Maimonides also sees a close link between astrology and idolatry, a somewhat unfair accusation given that, as we've seen, in his day astrological beliefs had been carefully woven into the fabric of Judaism by authors like Ibn Ezra. But Maimonides' diatribe is not solely religious. He explains to the rabbis in Provence exactly why astrologers cannot predict the future as they claim. Like Ibn Dawud and other Aristotelians of the Islamic world, Maimonides accepts that the stars do have an influence on our world. For him too, the heavens are the servants and instruments of divine providence. But when it comes to their actual effects, he follows the late ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias in thinking that the stars only bring about the general regularities of nature. In Aristotelian jargon, the celestial world perpetuates species but does not bring about events at the level of individuals. In the jargon of this podcast, this means that the stars ensure that there are giraffes without ensuring that Hiawatha has blue eyes. Individual events, according to what Maimonides states as the common consent of the philosophers, are simply down to chance. So they cannot be predicted by astrologers. Maimonides himself prefers a different view, albeit one with the same consequences for astrology. Individual events are brought about by divine providence, but not through the influence of celestial motion. Using an example from Talmudic literature, Maimonides says that it is not the stars that determine that Reuben is a poor tanner whose children have died and Simon a rich perfumer with a healthy family. Rather, this is a matter of chance if the philosophers are to be believed, or alternatively the will of God, which is the teaching of faith. Once the claims of astrology are falsified, we can rest assured that there is room for free human action. The heavens bring about only the continuation of natural species and the operation of chance, or divine providence, would not impede on our capacity for choice. Not that this settles all the issues we might be worrying about. In particular, if divine providence does oversee the lives of individuals, as Maimonides suggests, Reuben, the childless tanner, will want to know why his lot in life is so much worse than that of Simon the perfumer and family man. In this letter on astrology, Maimonides only briefly alludes to his preferred answer, suffering is sent as a punishment or to allow for a later compensating reward. But, we'll have a chance to examine Maimonides' views on suffering and greater death later on in an episode on what Jewish philosophers made of the book of Job. In the more immediate future, I want to look at a rather different question. Let's assume that Ibn Dawud and Maimonides are right, and that we do have free will. In that case, what should we do with it? You can find out by making the right choice and joining me next time when I'll be looking at ethics in Maimonides and the lesser known, but rather wonderful, Ibn Pakuda, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, With All Your Heart, Ethics and Judaism. One day a silent film comedian named Charlie decided he wanted to kill a rival for the affections of the girl he was sweet on. He chose a weapon that had served him well in the past, a banana skin, to be dropped on the street just in front of an open manhole cover as the rival passed by. But at the last minute, the rival veered away to buy a newspaper, escaping harm and not even noticing his brush with death. As fate would have it, across town another silent film comedian named Buster was also plotting murder most foul. He too wanted to bump off a rival and likewise selected a banana skin as his instrument. In this case, the plan worked and the rival slipped to a sewery doom. Buster thought it was the perfect crime, but he was arrested and at the trial the banana skin was presented in evidence covered with his fingerprints. Yes, he lost on appeal. Fate was not yet satisfied though. On that very same day, a third comedian named Harold finished eating a banana and negligently tossed the banana skin onto the street rather than depositing it in a litter basket. A complete stranger half and by slipped on the banana skin and fell into an open manhole cover to Harold's horror. Now, how should we judge our three comedians from an ethical point of view? Should we evaluate their actions on the basis of their intentions or the consequences their actions produced? If we go with intentions, then it looks like Buster is no worse than Charlie. Both of them intended to kill their rival, and the fact that Buster succeeded is a matter of luck. Yet, at least in the law, we do place some weight on consequences. Charlie would be guilty of attempted murder and face a lesser sentence than the successful murderer Buster. On the other hand, if it's consequences that matter, then it looks like Harold should be blamed for bringing about a death even though he had no intention of doing so. Yet maybe we do blame him at least a little. Certainly he's guilty of littering, and we might think he has an obligation to be more careful with his banana peels. It seems abundantly clear though that he is less morally blameworthy than Buster who deliberately killed someone despite the fact that the outcome of their actions was the same. So our examples seem to show two things. First, there may be a case for restricting the possession of bananas by silent film actors. Second, in moral deliberations both intention and consequence matter. This applies to the good just as much as the bad. If I intend wholeheartedly to save someone's life but don't manage it, I will not be seen as a hero. But neither am I a genuine hero if I save someone's life but without meaning to or out of the wrong motive. Imagine someone who rescues a drowning child solely in the hope that the child's parents will offer money as a reward. So goodness has both an external and an internal aspect. It's not enough to do the right thing, you must do it for the right reason. This is the central point of a wonderful treatise which gets too little attention from historians of philosophy, The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, written by the 11th century Jewish philosopher of Andalusia, Bahia ibn Pakuda. We don't know much about him or his life apart from the fact that he served as a judge, but Ibn Pakuda's treatise on the duties of the heart became a favorite text among later Jews, a highlight of what is sometimes called pietistic literature. Ibn Pakuda explains the purposes of his treatise in the same terms I have just used, by saying that good actions, the actions that are pleasing to God, have an internal as well as an external aspect. Whether we are performing a religious ritual or helping a neighbor, we cannot simply go through the motions, we must act sincerely, avoiding any taint of hypocrisy. Though this may seem a rather obvious point, it is one Ibn Pakuda thinks has been widely ignored in the writings of his co-religionists. They have written only of our outer duties, such as the motions and actions to be performed in sacrifice or in our relations to other people, and to be fair, there was plenty for them to discuss. Ibn Pakuda counts 613 kinds of external duty placed upon the Jews by God. But the internal duties, the duties of the heart, are limitless. In concentrating on the obvious, the visible, the external, previous authors have missed what is decisive in good action, which is like focusing on the expression of words at the expense of their meaning. This is the gap Ibn Pakuda wants to fill, by giving his readers guidance and encouragement in purifying their desires, intentions, or will, what he calls the heart. For him, the actions we perform and their consequences do matter, but not nearly as much as the intentions that underlie them. In fact, he insists that a good intention that is thwarted has more moral weight than a good action by itself. So his treatise is a work of ethical exhortation and advice which should bring us to have the right intentions. It is however not a general work of ethics. The context is explicitly a religious one, not only because Ibn Pakuda frequently quotes scripture and traditional rabbinic texts, but also because the duties he has in mind are laid on us by God. Human reason is not in a position to discern the full range of our obligations. This is why the law was revealed. In fact, different people are given different duties, corresponding to the blessings God has given them. God expects more from those who can do more, and from those He has helped. Thus the Jews have many external duties, such as the obeying of dietary laws that other people do not have, because God delivered them from Egypt to the Promised Land. Likewise, prophets are placed under obligations to God that do not apply to the rest of us. But of course, Ibn Pakuda is not here to tell us about the external duties required by the law. That is what earlier authors have done. Rather, he is here to explain what it means to have good intentions, and how we can develop them. So, the theological presuppositions of the work do not prevent Ibn Pakuda from making use of a wide range of ethical material. Some of this is drawn from popular philosophical literature. Once upon a time, I mentioned that Seneca tells an anecdote about Plato, in which he refused to beat a slave on the grounds that he was still angry. In Ibn Pakuda, this story reappears, albeit assigned to an anonymous ruler, rather than Plato. It's only one of many memorable and compelling stories offered by Ibn Pakuda. Maybe my favorite is a parable about a city in India, where the people would choose a new king each year but then, without warning, exile him. One canny ruler discovered what the people had in mind. So he used his time on the throne to seize wealth from the city and send it abroad. When he was exiled, he happily went off to find his amassed wealth waiting for him. In the same way, we should spend our limited time on earth focusing on a heavenly reward, rather than a fortune in this life. As the use of such stories suggests, Ibn Pakuda is the most user-friendly of writers. He even presents his advice in the form of numbered lists to make them easier to memorize. The advice is deeply humane. Admittedly, he demands much of his reader. Every action we perform, no matter how small, should be performed in such a way as to please God. He often compares our relation to God to that between a subject and a king, or between a servant and a master, and he assumes that a perfect servant will think of nothing but the interests of his master. Still, Ibn Pakuda realizes that this is expecting a lot, and identifies many steps we can take along the path to that goal. Ideally, we should be motivated by obedience to and love for God, yet Ibn Pakuda often gives us other reasons that we might find more persuasive, given our human frailties. It is better to act rightly even if we only do so in hope that God will reward us with wealth or a large family. Only at a higher stage of ethical development will we learn to make our happiness independent of such things. Here it is instructive to compare Ibn Pakuda's stance to that of the Stoics. As you might recall, they too rejected external goods as being of no real significance. Wealth or family do not motivate the Stoic sage. But unlike the Stoics, Ibn Pakuda is willing to meet the non-sage halfway, with his encouraging message that we can make real progress even while our values remain imperfect. In fact, he thinks that one of the most important and praiseworthy duties of the heart is repentance, which presupposes that we have done wrong, either in our intentions or in our actions. No Stoic would say, as Ibn Pakuda does, that the penitent man may be better than one who committed no wrong in the first place. The philosophical interest of Ibn Pakuda's writing does not lie just in its unprecedented focus on intentions. He also applies his idea about internal duty to beliefs. We should not be satisfied to believe the truth if we can go further and actually establish or demonstrate what is true. Knowledge and proof relate to true beliefs the way that good intentions relate to right actions. So, like many other authors we've looked at in the Islamic world, he attacks taqlid, the uncritical acceptance of authority. Being Ibn Pakuda, he offers a nice parable to illustrate the point. If a servant were asked to weigh money for a king and lazily assign this important task to someone else, he would still be blameworthy even if the king wound up with the right answer. Ibn Pakuda puts his own beliefs in the balance by deploying the arguments of philosophy to prove central tenets of Judaism. In particular, he argues against the eternity of the world and for the oneness of God. Like Muslim theologians, he sees God's oneness, or tawhid, as the most important doctrine of his faith. The arguments in this part of the text are remarkably similar to those we find in al-Kindi's On First philosophy. With his emphasis on the need to demonstrate what other Jews merely believe, Ibn Pakuda is more like a later Muslim philosopher, also of Andalusia, of Verruese. It's rather surprising to see the core idea of of Verruese's decisive treatise showing up generations earlier in a deeply pious work of Jewish ethical teaching. In fact, the valorization of proof over belief, of philosophical demonstration over obedience to authority, seems to be a general feature of philosophy in Andalusia, embraced by Jews and Muslims alike. Averruese is only the most famous example of this do-it-yourself attitude in epistemology. That's not to say, of course, that Ibn Pakuda was as rationalist an author as a Verruese. We've already seen that he thinks reason is incapable of establishing most of our God-given duties. But nor was it impossible for Jewish thinkers to embrace Aristotle in something like the way Averruese did. Jews started to do precisely this in the 12th century, the age of Averruese. One of the philosophers we looked at last time, Ibn Dawud, was a pretty dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian, and so was the greatest thinker of Andalusian Judaism, Maimonides. His ethical writings make for an interesting contrast to Ibn Pakuda. As we saw in an earlier episode, the main influences on Arabic ethical writing of the formative period were Aristotle and Galen. There is little trace of either in Ibn Pakuda, though at one point he does speak in rather Aristotelian terms of moderation concerning things that are neither forbidden nor commanded by the law. Maimonides, by contrast, draws on Aristotle's and Galen's ideas in practically every page of his writings on ethics. Actually, he did not dedicate any work solely to ethics. The subject is instead discussed in parts of larger works, for example a section of his commentary on the Mishnah, often called the Eight Chapters. Here and elsewhere, he follows Galen's ethical writings by encouraging us to cure the soul of its ills, which are, of course, vicious character traits. Like Galen and his followers in the Arabic-speaking world, Maimonides sees this process in terms of subordinating the lower parts of the soul to reason. So he thinks that knowledge is indispensable for the goodness of soul. Maimonides again follows this Galenic ethical tradition by accepting that we are already born with ethical tendencies, a result of our innate physical makeup with which we are born. Fortunately, we can overcome these tendencies by training. If you're the sort of person who gets angry easily, angry enough to try to kill people with fruit maybe, you aren't doomed to be a bad seed, you can cultivate good character traits by practicing to hold your temper. As we've seen before, this idea of habituation provides a convenient link between Galenic ethics and Aristotelian ethics. And more than any of the other ethicists we have examined in the Islamic world, with the exception of Miskaway, Maimonides is an enthusiastic proponent of Aristotle's ethics. He finds the theory of the mean particularly fruitful. Normally, the best ethical disposition is the one that is between two extremes, for instance, courage between cowardice and rashness, or modesty between impudence and shyness. But it won't do for Maimonides simply to reassert the Aristotelian theory. Each of his significant discussions of ethics is found, as I've said, in a larger treatise where his wider goal is to give an account of the law, or of rabbinic literature. So he cannot just overlook possible tensions between the Jewish tradition and the Aristotelian ethical theory. We saw last time that his predecessor Ibn Dawud insisted on the total agreements between philosophy and the Torah. Maimonides has a more nuanced view of this relationship, freely admitting that there are differences of opinion between Athens and Jerusalem. In fact, we saw an example of that last time, too. Maimonides's letter on astrology allowed for a divergence of views between philosophy and the Torah concerning divine providence. Still, in his ethical writings his main goal is to reconcile his philosophical and religious sources. For this project, the most obvious problem concerns precisely the Aristotelian idea of virtue as a mean between extremes. In Judaism, the virtuous man often seems to be one whose character traits are extreme rather than moderate. For instance, in Genesis, Abraham restrains himself from gazing upon his own wife, Sarah, and from taking any spoils of war after victory in battle. Such actions are above and beyond the call, and seem to show Abraham as a kind of ascetic. Maimonides obviously doesn't want to deny that they are admirable, but neither can he plausibly portray them as illustrating Aristotle's doctrine of the mean. Of course, as a good Aristotelian he knows that the solution to a problem with Aristotle is always more Aristotle. If we think back to the Nicomachean ethics, we may recall Aristotle advising us that it can be a good idea deliberately to tend towards one of two extremes, depending on the character traits we find in ourselves. This advice is much like what we just saw with Galen. If you diagnose yourself as an angry sort of person, you should practice enduring humiliation with patience. When your rival hits you with a banana cream pie, do what Charlie, Buster, and Harold would do, stay silent. This according to Maimonides is the strategy adopted by the virtuous men valorized in the ancient texts of Judaism. As he puts it, they would stay inside the line of the law, by erring on the ascetic side. This makes sense, since few of us need to train ourselves to seek enough food, sex, or wealth. Rather, almost all people tend to give in to pleasure, a point also made by Aristotle. The wise ancients, understanding this, steered a course towards asceticism, but without going too far from the moderate behavior that remained their ultimate goal. It may seem surprising that even prophets like Abraham would need to take such precautions, but Maimonides openly admits that the prophets were no paradigms of virtue. Solomon, for instance, had many wives, a sure sign that he was given to lust. When Abraham refused to look at his own wife's body, he was guarding himself against just such tendencies. Maimonides thus calls this tactic a precaution against vice, and says that people who adopt the tactic are displaying piety, in Hebrew hasidut. Sometimes ignorant people, seeing such pious acts, misunderstand the purpose of the exercise and become extreme ascetics. They may indulge in extreme fasting, wear unpleasant clothing, or withdraw from society to lead a life of isolation. Such ascetics go too far, by rejecting activities that are nowhere forbidden in the Torah. From this point, Maimonides is more or less in agreement with the earlier Bahya im Pakuda. It may not seem so, given that im Pakuda speaks rather favorably of asceticism in his work on the duties of the heart. But he strikes a note that would harmonize well with Maimonides, when he says that the purpose of ascetic practice is to establish soul's authority over the body. Given a choice between the life of an extreme ascetic, and that of a moderate person who errs on the ascetic side, im Pakuda too would give his approval to the second, more moderate approach. And perhaps we should expect that Maimonides and im Pakuda would have a similar understanding of virtuous action. After all, they are both trying to provide us with a theory that supports and explains the commandments of the law and the judgments found in the Mishnah and Talmud. Yet, already with im Daoud, and more decisively with Maimonides, we are seeing a major shift in the Jewish intellectual tradition. No longer will rational philosophy take the form of Neoplatonism, as in im Gavirol, or of pious exhortation, as in im Pakuda. Maimonides' embrace of Aristotle is going to be more divisive than these earlier developments, if only because Maimonides was, well, Maimonides, the greatest scholar of Jewish law in his age and the most powerful thinker to boot. Much as with Avicenna's impact on philosophy in the East, Maimonides' version of Aristotelianism will come to define philosophy for generations of later Jewish readers. It will also force them to take sides for or against philosophy, as Maimonides understood it. So, I heartily urge you to do your duty and join me as I look at Maimonides' life and ideas, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. I am not a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian. I am a Christian.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode The Great Eagle Maimonides In Judaism there's a saying, from Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses. I guess you won't need me to tell you who the first Moses was. The second Moses is the subject of today's episode, the Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known in Hebrew with the honorific acronym Rambam, and known in English usually by his Latinized name Maimonides. Whether you call him Moses Rambam or Maimonides, this is a man with some claim to being the most important figure of medieval Judaism. As we've already seen, Maimonides had predecessors who fused philosophy with Jewish religious teachings, but none of these predecessors reached Maimonides's importance philosophically and none of them attained his standing as a rabbinic scholar. In short, Maimonides was both the greatest Jewish religious authority of the medieval period and the greatest Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, perhaps the greatest of all time, though Spinoza provides some stiff competition. Maimonides was an almost exact contemporary of the great Aristotelian commentator of Aroes. They died only six years apart, and they both hailed from Cordoba. Maimonides was born in 1138 into the family business, which was Jewish law. His father, Maimon, was an authoritative legal scholar, which helps to explain how it is that Maimonides was already able to write vastly learned works on rabbinic law by the time he was in his 20s. By that time, the family had left Cordoba and transplanted itself to Fes in Morocco. They seemed to have left Spain in hopes of finding a climate more hospitable to Jews. During Maimonides's childhood, Al-Andalus had been invaded by the Almohads. As you might remember, they had a very strict understanding of Islam, but they created an atmosphere which was hospitable to philosophy, as we saw with the Verroes and the somewhat older Im Tufail. But the Almohads were not as hospitable to Jews and Christians as they were to Muslim philosophers. There is good evidence that they even required Jews to convert to Islam or be exiled. This may help to explain why Maimonides's family moved to Fes. Actually, the Almohads also controlled Morocco, which had been their launching pad for the invasion of Spain, but conditions there may have been slightly less repressive for Jews. Alternatively, it is alleged in some sources that Maimonides and his family pretended to be Muslims for some years, before finally traveling across the Mediterranean to Jerusalem and settling in Cairo. It was here that Maimonides spent the latter part of his life, and here that he wrote his greatest works of law and philosophy. Needless to say, it's a somewhat sensitive question whether Maimonides, honored as the great eagle of Judaism, ever hid his faith under the guise of Islam. Scholars have argued the point in both directions. Some hold that it's inconceivable that his family could have survived in Almohad territory for so long, living openly as Jews. Others say that the evidence for forced conversions is not overwhelmingly strong anyway, and that the historical testimony in favor of Maimonides's counterfeit Islam is found only in Muslim authors, who can hardly be trusted on this point. Be all that as it may, it was in Cairo that Maimonides came into his own and earned his well-deserved reputation as a great rabbinic scholar. This calling defined him as a thinker at least as much as his interest in philosophy. As a young man, he already wrote a commentary on the Mishnah. This commentary, like most of Maimonides's works, was written in Judeo-Arabic. But Maimonides used Hebrew to write his greatest work on Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, a work whose ambition is in proportion to its importance. As we've seen in previous episodes, Jewish law is based not only on the Hebrew Bible, and especially the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, but also on the tradition of oral that was enshrined in the Mishnah, and the Talmud which was written to explicate and expand on the Mishnah. Navigating this vast textual terrain was no easy matter, even for so highly expert a scholar as Maimonides. So Maimonides set out to produce a work that would make it possible for Jews to find clear guidance on all matters of ritual and observance, without trawling through the deep and majestic waters of the classical texts. This is not to say that Maimonides sought to supplant the Mishnah and Talmud, or to render them obsolete. He would have considered it a great spiritual calling to study the classical texts in detail. But his Mishneh Torah would gather together the teachings of these texts, eliminating apparent contradictions and providing the tacit general principles underlying the law. Thus, the title of the work, Mishneh Torah, means the Second Law. He is happy to give his reader the impression that for most religious purposes, this Second Law will provide clear and sufficient guidance. Trying to decide a fine point of dietary law, or the rules governing property or marriage? Look no further than the Mishneh Torah, which gathers together all the legal instructions into one convenient package. It's common to see Maimonides as a thinker with two sides, the rabbinic and the philosophical. But in fact, his religious thought is not easily separated from his philosophy, nor can we separate his philosophy from his teachings on the Bible and the rabbinic tradition. We saw in the last episode that ethical remarks in his rabbinic writings are obviously grounded in Aristotle's teachings on ethics. We even find him saying that intellectual perfection is the highest fulfillment of human nature. Thus, the valorization of philosophy, which we found all the way back in Aristotle's Ethics, is presented by Maimonides as the core of an even older tradition. The revealed texts of the Jewish Bible and the teachings of the rabbinic tradition. One might wonder how Maimonides could reconcile Aristotelian ethics with his own project of setting out the requirements of legal theory. One is tempted to say to him, which is it? Am I supposed to devote my life to following the halacha, the law set down in the Jewish tradition, or to achieving Aristotelian virtue and ultimately theoretical contemplation? But Maimonides saw no tension here. For him, the Jewish law offers a kind of training instituted by divine providence in order to bring us closer to our highest end. Even pagan ancient philosophers believed that one needed to condition the soul to make it virtuous and self-controlled, and that this was a precondition for intellectual perfection. Maimonides agrees, and sees in the law an elaborate and well-designed system for this conditioning of our souls. So, for Maimonides there is no tension between spiritual devotion and a devotion to Aristotelian philosophy. This is never more clear than in the Book of Knowledge, the first part of the Mishnei Torah, which lays down certain principles that serve as a foundation for the legal teachings in the rest of the work. The Book of Knowledge is, in large part, a distillation of Aristotelian philosophy as it was known to Maimonides. He surveys not only ethics, but also cosmology, the theory of the four elements, and a rationalist conception of God as simple and immaterial. Like Iverroes, if less explicitly, Maimonides seems to hold that the truths of religion and the truths of philosophy are one and the same. If the rabbis taught truth, as they surely did, and if Aristotelian philosophy discovers truth, as it surely does, despite some limitations which we'll discuss shortly, then the sages among the Jews, even those who lived well before Aristotle, must already have understood the core truths of the Aristotelian system. For instance, Maimonides teaches that Aristotle's idea of matter underlying form can be found lurking in the Bible and rabbinic literature. This is how he understands a biblical reference to a married harlot. Matter, like this adulterous wife, is promiscuous in that it takes on one form after another. Just as Maimonides's monumental guide for religious practice drew on philosophy, so his philosophy takes the form of a guide for understanding religious texts. And when I say guide, I mean it. Maimonides gave his greatest philosophical work the title, Guide for the Perplexed. This title makes the work sound like a self-help book, but if so, it's help for a very particular kind of person. The guide was written to dispel not just any old kind of perplexity, but the specific perplexity that arises for students of philosophy. Such students learn from philosophical argument certain truths that look incompatible with Scripture. In particular, they learn that God has no body, is utterly transcendent, completely unlike His creation by being simple and perfect in every way. Well, might they be perplexed when they turn to their Bible and find it saying that God has a face, or a back, or gets angry, or sits upon a throne? The guide is addressed to a student of Maimonides named Joseph and promises to solve this apparent contradiction between philosophy and Scripture for Joseph and any other reader in his position. The central problem of the guide is thus familiar to us from our discussion of several Muslim authors and movements. In particular, the Mu'tazilites held that God's simplicity and uniqueness make it impossible for us to describe Him with the language we use for created things. Maimonides was no fan of Islamic speculative theology, but on this point he was basically in agreement with Mu'tazilites. Incidentally, he was also in agreement with the Almohads, whose repression of the Jews of Spain led Maimonides to comment in one letter, Despite his disdain for Islam as a religion, he agreed with Muslim theological hardliners in upholding the absolute simplicity, immateriality, and transcendence of God. Unlike Iverroes, Maimonides considered this rationalist understanding of God to be of paramount importance for all believers. The fact that God has no body needs to be understood by all Jews, not only an elite group of philosophers. So what are we to do with those passages in the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts which seem to say otherwise? Here, Maimonides has a three-fold strategy. First, he explains that many apparently positive statements about God are in fact concealed negations. For instance, if we say that God is powerful, this indicates merely that He is not weak. And if we say that He is all-knowing, this indicates merely that He is not ignorant. But hang on, if God isn't ignorant, then mustn't He have knowledge? No, because to say that something has knowledge would be to put it at the level of creatures. You or I can have knowledge, God cannot. He is exalted above this very notion. But that doesn't mean that He lacks knowledge, as would be implied by claiming that He is ignorant. Of course, not all the problematic statements about God in Scripture lend themselves to this kind of analysis, but Maimonides is ready with his second strategy. The remaining statements may seem to be about God, but actually, they are about what God has created. For instance, if we say that God is providential, what we mean is that the world is well-ordered and well-designed. If we say that God is angry, what we mean is that things are happening here in the created world which are unfriendly to us. When things seem more conducive to our happiness, we say God is merciful. Strictly speaking, though, God Himself is neither providential, nor angry, nor merciful. These are properties that you or I might have, but God is too transcendent to possess such attributes. Finally, the third strategy. There are certain other statements about God which just need to be taken allegorically or symbolically. For instance, when we are told that God sits upon a throne, this is meant simply to convey symbolically that God is the ruler of the world. Of course, we can't really say that God is the ruler of the world either. This must in turn be understood either negatively, for instance by saying that God is not subject to any authority, or as a concealed description of what God has created, rather than of God. This analysis of theological discourse may seem to us rather disappointing. It seems to suggest that the language of Scripture is empty, that it tells us nothing about God. No less a philosopher than Thomas Aquinas criticizes Maimonides's account on more or less these grounds. But Maimonides anticipates this objection and tries to respond to it. The attributes that refer to God's actions, that He is providential, for instance, are not empty, because they tell us something true about creation, in this case that it is well designed. What about the negative attributes, for instance that God is strong in the sense of not weak, or knowing in the sense of not ignorant? Maimonides explains that even negations can be informative, giving the example of a ship. Imagine that someone is trying to describe a ship to me, but using only negations and denials. I am told that this unnamed thing is neither animal, nor plant, nor human, nor small, nor made of stone, and so on and so forth. I will, according to Maimonides, get steadily closer to the idea of a ship. Of course, the difference is that in the case of the ship, there is some positive concept I could also have. In fact, in this rather perverse version of 20 Questions, the game could end when I say, oh, okay, I think I know, it's a ship. In God's case, that isn't possible. Process of elimination is all we have. In the end, wisdom consists in eliminating everything and being left with nothing, a transcendent nothing that is superior to all other things, rather than being simply the lack or absence of those things. This seems to impose a significant limitation on the power of human reason to know God, but maybe that's just tough. Who says that human reason should be able to know God, any more than a giraffe can understand trigonometry? You might be disappointed by Maimonides' theory, but disappointment doesn't count as a valid objection. Besides, Maimonides can point to something else that should dispel our disappointment. In our perplexity, we have received guidance, not just from Maimonides, but from prophets, first and foremost among them, Moses. Like the ancient Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides considered his namesake, the original Moses, to be the greatest of prophets. Indeed, Maimonides devoted much of his life to the correct exposition of the Mosaic prophetic revelation. Yet he adhered to what may seem a surprisingly naturalistic explanation of prophecy. He used allegorical interpretation to diffuse any suggestion in the Bible that God literally spoke to prophets, or that he was seen by them. Prophets received truth intellectually, not through the senses, as a kind of natural emanation upon the prophet. Following such Islamic thinkers as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, Maimonides believed that prophecy occurs in the person who was adequately prepared for such a bestowal. In fact, he argued that God would need to intervene miraculously to prevent such a suitably prepared person from receiving prophetic insight, rather than having to intervene to make it happen in the first place. It might seem strange that God would do such a thing, but Maimonides suggests that it could occur if there was some greater good in view. More generally, he accepted the possibility of miracles. Yet he sought to protect Aristotelian science from the potentially disastrous implications of such an admission. As we saw, in commenting on Al-Ghazali's discussion of miracles and the incoherence of the philosophers, Maimonides's fellow Andalusian, Averroes, worried that the universality and necessity of science could be undermined by the existence of miracles. Maimonides insightfully shrugs this off by pointing out that, for Aristotle, the truths of natural philosophy hold always or for the most part. Aristotle did not mind the occasional accidental departure from nature, the odd five-legged giraffe. But if such exceptions can be allowed, or rather ignored, by the Aristotelian natural philosopher, then surely there would also be room for the occasional miracle. Here, one wants to object that a miracle is not just an accidental departure from nature, where things have gone badly, but a deliberate violation of nature and its laws at the hands of God. In one work, Maimonides suggests that in fact, nature contains within it the seeds of miracles. It is somehow a part of the Red Sea's nature to part at just the right time to allow the Israelites passage to the other side. Elsewhere, though, he admits that the natures of things do change in a miracle, but only temporarily. With all these issues—divine attributes, prophecy, miracles—we again see Maimonides negotiating between Judaism and Aristotelianism. He sees these two traditions as fundamentally in but tensions constantly threaten to arise. In episodes to come, we will find later Jewish philosophy oscillating between the poles of Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism. Many Jews will try to recruit Maimonides to their own outlook by emphasizing either the philosophical underpinning of his rabbinic teaching, or the more skeptical side of his thought, which is emphasized in the guide. Others will condemn Maimonides for his philosophical excesses, which led him to depart from a literal understanding of Scripture. But Maimonides was in fact neither a radical Aristotelian nor an anti-rational skeptic. Rather, he sought carefully to determine not only the truths accessible to reason, but also the line beyond which reason cannot pass. In its own proper sphere, reason reigns supreme. Aristotelian ethics is accepted as fundamental for understanding the Jewish law, and as we'll see next time, Maimonides also holds that Aristotelian physics is a perfectly adequate science regarding the earthly world below the heavens. Yet the heavens themselves, to say nothing of God, outstrip our understanding. This is only to be expected. It would be wrong to demand that the world or its Creator is fully intelligible to us, and wrong to expect ourselves to understand everything. As Maimonides says in the ethical section of his Book of Knowledge, the Torah does not demand more of us than we can manage, and neither does Maimonides. This modest and moderate approach is on full display in his treatment of one of the most contentious issues of medieval philosophy—the question of whether the world is eternal. But as it turns out, the question of what Maimonides thought about this issue is itself contentious. I'd be eternally grateful if you join me next time to find out why. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, He Moves in Mysterious Ways, Maimonides on Eternity. I don't mean to complain, but figuring out the history of philosophy can sometimes be pretty difficult. Figures in the history of philosophy, both great and small, wrote in all these inconvenient other languages until they finally learned English, were careless about making sure their works were preserved in reliable manuscripts, and generally gave very little thought to the plight of future podcasters. At least you can say, though, that philosophers have usually tried to tell us what they think about philosophy. This you might suppose is the whole point. But not always. At some places and times, there have been philosophers who deliberately concealed their true opinions on philosophical topics. In some cases, they left clues or warnings for their readers to help those in the know see through the veil of confusion to the true doctrines underneath. How widespread a phenomenon is this? Well, that is itself a difficult question to answer. Certainly, if we fast forward to the modern era, we can think of philosophers who were pretty clearly atheists, or atheists by the standards of their day, who nonetheless professed faithful obedience to religious doctrine. Concerning the pre-modern era, though, even the suggestion of so-called dissimulation, that is concealing one's true doctrines, is apt to get historians fighting amongst themselves. One of the main instigators of these interpretive controversies has been Leo Strauss. In his 1952 book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss suggested that Maimonides, among other figures, can only be read rightly if dissimulation is at the forefront of the reader's mind. For Strauss, who was reacting to recent events in Europe, philosophy is, or at least ought to be, inherently subversive of entrenched political order. Thus, the proper philosopher will always be at risk of persecution from the reigning authority, and this will mean that he must, on occasion, cloak his true teachings. Strauss applied this reading to several thinkers we've already covered, including Plato and Al-Farabi, but it has been especially influential in the case of Maimonides. As we saw last time, Maimonides is the greatest of the medieval Jewish philosophers. So when it comes to reading him rightly, the stakes are pretty high. And one of the most influential ways of reading him is the one proposed by Leo Strauss, according to which one must read between the lines, and pay attention to pregnant silences in order to deliver the text's true meaning. I should perhaps put my cards on the table and say that I'm not very fond of Straussian readings. It seems to me a bad methodology to privilege what philosophers don't say above what they do say. Too much latitude is left to the historian to determine which remarks the philosopher might have been expected to make, but didn't. And when Straussian interpretive subtleties are applied to thinkers like Plato, it strains belief. Plato proposed things like putting women in charge of the ideal city, and sharing children and property equally among the ruling class. If these were the acceptable ideas he was willing to make public, what were the dangerous ideas he kept secret? The mind boggles. In the case of Maimonides, though, the Straussian reading has a bit more going for it, because of what Maimonides says himself. At the beginning of his greatest work, The Guide for the Perplexed, there is a passage that is itself pretty perplexing. Here, Maimonides cautions the reader that some care will need to be taken with the book. For instance, it may not provide all the premises necessary to reach some of the conclusions he will argue for. Or it may employ premises that Maimonides doesn't actually accept. This may be for pedagogical reasons. Also, some topics are so sensitive and advanced that they should be explained only among a select few, and not before the wider public. If we think back to Averroes's idea in his decisive treatise that exposure to philosophical arguments could endanger the necessary faith of simple believers, we'll get a sense of the threat that worries Maimonides here. These comments pretty obviously encourage a Straussian reading of The Guide. Admittedly, it is a bit strange that Maimonides is warning the reader in this clear and explicit way, if the point is to keep things secret, but it does put us on alert that The Guide may not offer to guide us along the straightest of paths. In this episode, I want to look at a kind of test case for this interpretation of Maimonides, the eternity of the created universe. We've already seen that this was a much debated issue in the Arabic philosophical tradition, with everyone from Al-Kindi to Avicenna and Al-Ghazali expressing a view, while drawing on arguments that go back to ancient figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Philoponus. Looking back over this history, Maimonides manages to reach a new, and rather modest position on the eternity of the universe. According to him, philosophy is simply incapable of deciding the issue. He's well aware that there have been many arguments for and against eternity, but after careful consideration, Maimonides finds that each argument can be countered with an effective response. This leaves us in a state of uncertainty, which can be dispelled only by recourse to the sacred Scriptures. They tell us that the world was in fact created, and is not eternal. Without this revealed information, we would never know for sure. But hang on a minute. This is the same Maimonides who encourages us to make full use of the allegorical and figurative readings of the Bible that were pioneered by Philo of Alexandria. As we saw last time, he tells us to take descriptions of God in the Bible and reinterpret them in a way compatible with philosophical truth. If the Bible suggests that God has a body, we should just find an interpretation that removes this suggestion. So why not do the same with passages that seem to say the world was created with a first moment of time? Actually, matters are even more complicated. As Maimonides tells us, some of the ancient rabbis who commented on Scripture believed that the world as we see it was created from some kind of pre-existing material. The beginning of Genesis seems to say that before God made the world, there was only chaotic formlessness, tohu wa bohu. He then made heaven and earth. Did he make it out of this chaos? Some rabbis thought so. Others proposed that God used his own garments as a material for the heavens. Genesis also talks about the six days of creation. This suggests that at least time itself was already present so that God's creative process could unfold over the course of a whole week. Maimonides observes that these rabbinical interpretations of Genesis seem to agree with Plato's Timaeus, according to which the universe was created by a God out of eternal matter. All of this suggests that if Maimonides had wanted to read the Bible figuratively, as containing the hidden teaching that the universe is eternal, he would have had little trouble doing so. But he didn't. Why not? Here, opinions diverge. Some, inspired by the Straussian take on Maimonides, think that he in fact did think that the universe is eternal and that he just didn't want to say so. Again, why not? Well, Maimonides remarks that such a teaching would undermine the whole of the law, apparently because it would undercut our sense that God is a personal deity who intervenes in our world who can arbitrarily decide to create, to reward, to punish. It would make God a kind of automatic necessary cause like the one envisioned by Avicenna to say that the universe is eternal. How could such an impersonal God be the lawgiver who chose the Jewish people and gave them the promised land? On this reading, then, Maimonides is worried that Jews who are not philosophers would begin to doubt the law if they learned that the universe is actually eternal so he conceals the truth from them. But if he's concealing this belief, then how are we supposed to know that Maimonides believed it? Well, remember that he has warned us to read the Guide carefully, on the lookout for omitted or bogus premises. Our interpretive wits will need to be sharp when we get to the second part of the work in which Maimonides proves that God exists, that he is purely one and without a body. He announces that in order to prove these things, he will simply assume something false, only that the universe is eternal. This gives him the chance to use Aristotelian arguments for the existence of an immaterial first cause, arguments that presuppose the eternity of the universe. For instance, if the universe is eternal, and thus exists for an infinite time, it cannot be produced by something that is finite, but all bodies are finite, therefore the cause of the universe cannot be a body. Why would Maimonides argue in this way from a premise he doesn't even accept? This is a way of signaling to the more alert readers, the ones that have remembered the warnings at the beginning of the Guide, that the universe really is eternal? But this isn't the only way of reading the Guide. In fact, it isn't the way I myself would endorse. Rather, in my view, we should notice that Maimonides also says that if the physical universe is not eternal, then it is simply obvious that it has been caused by an immaterial first cause. After all, the cause existed before all bodies had been created, so clearly it is not a body. If he instead chooses to argue on the assumption of an eternal universe, he's deliberately choosing the more difficult path. If God's existence and immateriality can be shown even in this way, then it must really be proven beyond all doubt. This interpretation would take Maimonides at his word when he says that he assumes eternity for the sake of these proofs, and when he says that he doesn't in fact believe in the premise that is so assumed. Notice incidentally that on this reading, the strategy used by Maimonides is exactly the same as the one adopted by Ibn Tufayl, who likewise proved God's existence twice, both the easy way, assuming a created universe, and the hard way, assuming that the universe is eternal. This returns us to our earlier question though. The Bible seems to be susceptible to many readings, no less than Maimonides himself is. And Maimonides usually has little hesitation in reading the Bible to say whatever he thinks it must say in order to make it come out true. So if it is really true that reason cannot decide the eternity issue, why think that the Bible's description of creation settles the matter? I think one reason can be discerned from the surface meaning of the guide. He goes through numerous arguments in favor of the world's eternity and rejects them all. Typically, he says that these arguments make the mistake of assuming that the rules governing God's creation are the same as the rules that operate within the created world. Thus we see, for instance, that created causes need to operate on pre-existing material. A tailor can't make a suit without cloth to work with. This is what led people like Plato and the rabbis who gave those readings of Genesis described by Maimonides to assume that the whole universe is made out of some material that existed before it. But who says that God is like a tailor? To the contrary, the ability to create from nothing, ex nihilo as they say in the Latin tradition, is a distinctive feature of divine causation. If we have a hard time imagining this, it is because of our own limitations as humans. Maimonides is rather impatient with those who fail to understand this which puts him in a bit of a quandary. After all, some of the philosophers who upheld the eternity of the universe are great heroes of his. In particular, he is in the awkward position of claiming that all Aristotle's arguments for the world's eternity, which appear in works like The Physics and On the Heavens, are undermined by this rather simple mistake of putting God on a par with created causes. But Maimonides finds a way out. Exercising in some alert reading of his own, he finds places in Aristotle's works where Aristotle suggests that the eternity of the universe is a particularly intractable problem. In particular, there is a passage in Aristotle's work The Topics which says that the problem is a dialectical one. We are called to investigate it even though its difficulty seems to defy proof. Seizing on this rather convenient sentence, Maimonides insists that it shows Aristotle to have been well aware that he could not really prove the eternity of the world. If the issue is dialectical, all one can do is offer more or less persuasive arguments. The whole demonstration is like the Eleven of Diamonds, simply not on the cards. This is not to say, though, that Maimonides believes the issue to be perfectly balanced as far as reason is concerned. Actually, he is pretty convinced that the universe is not eternal, and he doesn't need Scripture to reach this conviction. He points out that there are many apparently permanent features of the universe that seem to be unnecessary. For instance, why are there exactly the number of stars we see in the night sky? Surely it would have been just as reasonable for God to create one or two more stars, or one or two less. When we consider this, we see that the universe was almost certainly fashioned by a God who was to some extent arbitrary in his choices about what to create. The caveat almost certainly is needed, because we cannot presume to look into the inner recesses of God's wisdom and know all that He knew in creating. But as far as we can tell, the world looks very much as if it was created by arbitrary, unconstrained divine will, rather than by a God who was following some kind of iron-clad law of necessity. It may not be immediately obvious why this is relevant to the eternity question. The connection is one we have seen before. In the Aristotelian tradition, it was assumed that anything eternal is necessary, and vice versa. If the number of stars in the world is exactly such and such, and if the world is eternal, then it was necessary that the number of stars was exactly such and such. But this seems absurd. It just strikes us as obvious that there could have been a few more stars, that this was a choice that was in God's power. In that case, the number of stars is not necessary, and hence, neither is it eternal. Here, Maimonides has very cleverly turned the age-old Aristotelian equation of necessity and eternity against Aristotle, or anyone else who asserts the eternity of the world. The world might turn out to be eternal after all, and hence necessary, but if so, there is an awful lot we don't understand about it, starting with the reason why the number of stars couldn't have been different. As clever as this is, Maimonides is walking a fine line. He wants to emphasize that these things could have been otherwise, which shows that they aren't eternal, but on the other hand, he doesn't want to say that God makes these choices just on a whim. Rather, Maimonides is after the idea that the world displays signs of both wisdom and volition. God does make choices, but the choices are purposeful, and have the outcome that the world is providentially ordered. This endangers Maimonides' position to some extent. A philosopher like Avicenna might say that God's creation is indeed necessary, and unnecessarily results in a providentially well-ordered world. To say that God could have made a different world by choosing differently is, from this point of view, tantamount to criticizing the choices God did make as being frivolous whims, rather than a working out of what must be the case if the best results are to be achieved. Here we see a tangle of problems that will reappear in modern European philosophy in such thinkers as Spinoza and Leibniz. It's no accident that Maimonides fastens on to features of the heavens above us when he is exploring the mysteries of God's creation. He believed that celestial motions provide one of the biggest challenges to Aristotelian science, in fact a challenge that had gone unmet. As you'll remember, Aristotle taught that the planets and fixed stars are embedded in spheres rotating around our earth. But observation of celestial motion had never really cohered with this picture. If you observe the planets night after night, you will not see them moving in a steady, stately fashion around the earth. Instead, you will see them slow down and speed up, acting like anything but a body embedded in a huge, transparent, revolving sphere, as Aristotle had claimed. As we saw many episodes ago, ancient astronomers like Ptolemy had proposed systems for the heavens which explained this, but these were at odds with Aristotle's picture. A Ptolemaic system still puts earth in the center, but also postulates spheres within spheres, so-called epicycles, to explain certain phenomena, and also the existence of eccentric spheres, that is, spheres whose center is not at the midpoint of the cosmos. These tensions plagued Maimonides as they plagued his contemporary Averroes. Maimonides concluded that celestial motion is simply beyond the power of the human mind to understand. While he accepted that the astronomical theories that came down to him were useful, he could not accept that their implied account of the physical makeup of the universe was correct. How for instance can we say that earth moves towards the center of the universe, but then say that some heavenly spheres are eccentric? Either the universe has a center point or it doesn't, and Maimonides understood the best science of his day to be having it both ways. He was right, of course. Some think that he made yet another brilliant move in response, by thinking of the scientific theories offered by his predecessors as merely instrumental in nature. That is, they would provide a kind of explanation and prediction that matches what we see, enabling us for example to forecast where a given star will be on a given night, but the theories would be only useful fictions, not descriptions of the situation as it really is. Although I hesitate to wade into the waters of subatomic physics, one might compare the way we sometimes think of electrons surrounding the nucleus of an atom in a cloud, and sometimes as being like orbiting planets. Neither picture quite captures what is going on, but both are useful. Perhaps it is appropriate that Maimonides, who has occasioned such controversy among his interpreters, was himself so open to the thought that our knowledge has its limits. We do not fully understand the cosmos around us, and still less do we understand the god who created that cosmos. In both cases, we select useful, yet potentially misleading, concepts to get a handle on something we wish we understood more fully. For Maimonides, wisdom frequently consists in realizing the pitfalls involved in using such concepts. The dangers of depicting god as a lion or as having a face, the misleading assertions made by Aristotelian physics once it strays above the more easily comprehensible territory of the world below the heavens. He offered to guide the perplexed, but often by telling us why we are perplexed in the first place, and cautioning us that our perplexity will never be fully dispelled in some cases. If that leaves you a bit unsatisfied, then you'll be relieved to know that next time we'll be turning to a guide of our own who can help us dispel any further perplexity about the great eagle. Join me next time for an interview with leading Maimonides scholar Sarah Stroumsa, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Sarah Strumsa, who is professor of Arabic studies and Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Hi, Sarah, thanks for coming on. Hi. We're going to be talking about Maimonides, who is a thinker you've published about. And in fact, in 2009, you wrote a book, or published a book, called Maimonides in His World Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker. And obviously, Maimonides lived in various places around the Mediterranean. So in that sense, he's a Mediterranean thinker. He lived in Andalusia, he lived in Palestine, he lived in Cairo. But before we even get into talking about him, to what extent can we actually talk about a Mediterranean culture at this point in history? Rather than speaking about Mediterranean culture, which sounds like one single unit, and of course, this is not something that existed at this point, but we can speak about common denominators. And there were very strong common denominators for a large part of the Mediterranean and the adjacent cultures. There was one for a large part of the Mediterranean, there was one lingua franca, which was Arabic. It was used by Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and it served as a basis for culture and cultural transmission. There was in various garbs and various manifestations, there was one ruling religion, which was Islam, Shiite Islam, Sunni Islam, but Islam was ruling most parts of, large parts of the Southern Mediterranean. These two things created a basis for cultural exchange that are unprecedented, really, and very different from the culture that we can see in the Latin West, or even with the English as the common language today. And I suppose that what Maimonides did, namely traveling around, living at different places within the Islamic-dominated sphere around the Mediterranean, was not an uncommon thing for people to do at this time, is that right? Not at all, especially for merchants, and it's not just around the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean culture in that way reached as far as India and Ceylon, but it's not just the traveling. Even when you assume a person like Maimonides, or like his peers, sitting in one place, they tapped into the culture that came from all sides of the Mediterranean, and that they tapped into the Mediterranean from previous cultures. So Maimonides could draw from things that were translated into Arabic from Syriac, and from even things that arrived from India, and from, naturally, from Greek philosophy. So this became his Mediterranean culture. I think that perhaps the most important thing about Maimonides being a Mediterranean thinker is to say that he was not just a Jewish thinker, that he was not just following Arabic philosophy, but that he tapped into several subcultures, and his own culture included all of them. And how common is that among other Jewish intellectuals at the time? So even before we get to Maimonides, would you say that he's just the latest in a long line of Jewish thinkers who are engaging with various strands of the Islamic tradition? So for example, I'm thinking of people like Saadia Ghaun, who's much earlier, but he's obviously responding to Islamic kalam, much as Maimonides does later. Yes, I think it would be correct to say it. There is Saadia, there is Muqammas before Saadia, there is Judah Halevi and other people who engage with the culture around them. I think it's a question of extent with Maimonides, the intellectualist curiosity is far above that of others, in the sense that he really goes out of his way, not just to listen to what his Muslim neighbors say and engage with them, or Christian neighbors say and engage with them, but he goes out of his way literally to look for books of previous cultures, to look and learn what happened around. So in that sense, he is a phenomenal sui generis. Right. But on the other hand, he's very much a man of his time and place. So what are the specific conditions that he's facing, let's say in Andalusia, where he starts out, that are confronting the Jewish community that we need to know about in order to understand his thought? Maimonides grew up in Cordova and in 1148 Cordova was captured by the Almohads, which was a dynasty, a Berber dynasty that came from North Africa, which had some peculiar understandings of the version of Sunni Islam that they adopted and created in some ways. One of the things that was peculiar to them and was different from any other system in Islam was that they did not give the religious minorities Christianity and Judaism a protected place and a legitimate place within the world of Islam. And they demanded that all Jews and Christians convert to Islam or leave the territory. Maybe it's worth emphasizing that that's really unusual. It's really unusual because all Muslim versions following the regular Muslim interpretation of the Quran, both Shiite and Sunnis, accept that the monotheist minorities can live under Islam in a somewhat humble situation, but protected. So this was really part of the revolution of the Almohads, which of course affected gravely both the Jewish and the Christian communities. And was the intellectual direction of the Almohads also important for Maimonides? So one thing I was wondering is whether you think there's a link, say, between Maimonides' view on divine attributes and the very kind of rigorous monotheism of Imtumut and the Almohads. That's a very important topic because if we assume, and I assume, that Maimonides' family, like the rest of the Jewish community, lived as crypto-Jews and lived outwardly as Muslims until they could leave Almohad territories, then Maimonides was very heavily exposed to Almohad theology. The word Almohad is a Latinized form of Muwahidun, which means those who believe in the unity of God. Now all Muslims believe in the unity of God, but the Almohads claimed that they were particularly monotheists because they reject any anthropomorphic understanding of the deity. And they claim that anyone who does not reject it outwardly will be an infidel. Now Maimonides seems to have swallowed and integrated this perception wholly. Again, Maimonides is not the first Jewish thinker who does not believe that God has a body. Saadia also does not believe that God has a body. But Maimonides is the first to actually say that anyone who does not say it is an infidel. And Maimonides imposed it as an article of faith on small children, women, anyone, whether the elite or the common people. And this is just one manifestation of how deeply influenced by the Almohads Maimonides was. It's a bit puzzling, isn't it, because you have this political movement in Andalusia, which is very hostile to Judaism. And of course Maimonides is the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, probably. And it's hard to understand how it could work psychologically, even, that he would be taking some of his philosophical inspiration from this very hostile group. But I suppose the explanation would just be that it's the intellectual atmosphere that he grew up in. It's that and it's also that the Almohads didn't invent it from scratch. They were influenced by Islamic trends, Muslim trends in theology, the Asharia, and also were exposed themselves to Islamic philosophy. So the idea that God does not have a body, it didn't come to Maimonides as a shock. It was something that was natural for him to accept. It's just, I think, that the kind of forcefulness with which you can or you should impose it, I think this is something that he took from his Almohads regime. He also took from the Almohads regime some things that you can see as technical, like the way you compose a book or the way the kind of literature or the genre of literature that you write, which are sort of technical things that you do take, that everyone does take from the society around you. Right. Actually, I wanted to ask you some more about what you just mentioned, which is the tradition of Islamic kalam, or rational theology, as it's sometimes translated. We've already mentioned also Saadia, who is very influenced by Mottazilism, and Maimonides talks explicitly about the various strands of Islamic kalam. So you've got the Mottazilites, you've got the Asharites, who you just mentioned. So what do you think he thinks about the use of ideas from Islamic kalam within the context of doing whatever it is he's doing, so maybe Jewish philosophy, the sort of thing he's doing in the Guide for the Perplexed? Maimonides sees himself as part of the school tradition, and this is a different school tradition. This is a school tradition of the so-called Aristotelian philosophers. And as part of the school tradition, he thinks in a very orthodox way, in the sense that he follows his predecessors. These are also Muslims, but they are not the Mottazilites. He really thinks that the influence of the Mottazilites on both Muslim and Jewish philosophy was enormous and wrong. So he argues a lot with the Mottazilites. This does not mean that he was not himself a little bit influenced by it. But as a theory, this is not a theory or a system, this is not a system that he adopted. He regarded the Mottazilites as people who harness the truth to their theological ideas, whereas he regarded his own philosophy as something that follows the truth without any consideration of how well will it fit theology. Right. So is it really the methodological approach of these theologians that he rejects, or is it also the content? Because we've already mentioned the very rigorous stance he takes on divine unity, the impossibility of predicating words of God, and that actually does sound a lot like the Mottazilite position. I suppose on other fronts, like his natural philosophy, he would follow Aristotle rather than adopting kalam atomism and so on. But is it more the methodological approach that he's upset about? Maimonides makes a point to stress the methodology, because it's very convenient to say their methodology is completely wrong. And he stresses from the beginning of the guide that there is a way to do things. You begin with certain things and you learn, you have, he tells his student, I want you to get to the truth by its own way and not by accident. So his argument is that the methodology is so wrong that even if they come to the truth, it's in the wrong way and it's by accident and therefore it doesn't sit very well. It doesn't count. It doesn't, not only that it doesn't count, it doesn't sit very well. It will not get you to the point where you really know that this is the truth and nothing can shake it. But there are obviously also content issues between himself and the kalam. You mentioned atomism, issues of physics. There is also again the school tradition. Who were your teachers? What books do you rely on? What tradition do you follow? I think this was very important for him. And you've already said that for him, the tradition that he's following is the school tradition which he would trace ultimately back to Aristotle. How does he see the Muslim thinkers as fitting into that? So you've got, I guess, as very important predecessors of Maimonides, you've got Al-Farabi and Avicenna. Does he think that there's just kind of a straightforward way you can use Farabian and Avicenna in philosophy the way you would use Aristotle or does he have a more nuanced attitude towards them? What's remarkable about Maimonides is the amount of his independence. He obviously fits Al-Farabi into the school tradition and he sees himself, there was someone who called Maimonides a disciple of Al-Farabi. He has no qualms about seeing himself as a disciple of this Muslim philosopher. Avicenna, he has some qualms about Avicenna. He doesn't see Avicenna or Al-Farabi on the same level. But the fact that Avicenna was part of the tradition was, I think, obvious to him. He does, he is completely aware of the fact that he takes his tradition from the Muslim philosophers before him. This is the school. And the fact that he is a Jew in this context doesn't really matter to him, I think. It seems to me actually that the way he criticizes Kalam as being merely dialectical, in other words it only induces unjustified beliefs rather than the certainty that you get from philosophy, that contrast that he draws between Kalam and philosophy is itself a very Farabian idea, and it's presumably one of the main things he's taking from Al-Farabi. Yes, and one can really show that he takes Al-Farabi's argument, because Al-Farabi has argued that the Christians, the Church Fathers created some kind of Christian Kalam, and this was taken by the Mo'otazilite Kalam. And Maimonides takes the same argument and adds to it the Jewish link. So he just continues Al-Farabi's argument, whereas for him the right way would be to go back directly to the sources, not through the Church Fathers, not through the Mo'otazilites, but to go through the translations of Aristotle and his students. Does it make a difference for all this which text of Maimonides we're talking about, though? Because I guess in this conversation, I don't know about you, but I've mostly been thinking about the Guide for the Perplexed, which is an explicitly philosophical work. But obviously that's not the only thing he wrote. So he wrote on Jewish law, he wrote commentaries on Scripture. Is that attitude that rejects the dialectical approach of Kalam but accepts some kind of authoritative status for the Aristotelian philosophical tradition, is that constant across his whole corpus, or is it something that's really special about the Guide? Maimonides was also a leader of the community, and he was very conscious of the fact that people in the community were of different intellectual ability and with different levels of understanding. And he really didn't want to shake the community, but he did want to inculcate into even very simple people some basic truth. The result of this is that there are differences between his various books, but there are differences of how much you can teach people in what language. I don't think you will find that in any of his books he supports dialectical theology, but he allows for simpler and less complicated argumentations. And actually in his correspondence we sometimes find him actually telling people regarding points that are not essential, not like the incorporeality of God, but like the existence of a bodily afterlife. He tells people explicitly there is no harm in you believing in it, which at the same time suggests if the person would understand that this is not the completely truth stance, but there is no harm in you believing in it. Another issue that arises in this general area though is how he himself saw the use of philosophy for understanding the Torah. Does he think that you can use philosophy in a more or less straightforward way to understand the meaning of scripture? So here we might think of another Muslim philosopher, Ivaroise, who is a near contemporary of his. And in the so-called decisive treatise, Fassil al-Makal, Ivaroise argues that the philosopher is the one who is in a position to understand the Quran, because the philosopher is in possession of certain truth, and so he can check what the scripture says against the truths that he already knows. Does Maimonides have that kind of very aggressive philosophical approach to interpreting scripture? Maimonides' approach to the interpretation of scriptures by the philosopher is very close to Ivaroise, and I think it actually shows, the guide actually shows that Maimonides read these theological treatises of Ivaroise and was influenced by them. More than Fassil and Makal, I think that one can argue that the guide is like Manahij al-Adillah, another book of Ivaroise, which also it seems very clear that Maimonides read it before writing the guide. I wouldn't say exactly that Maimonides thinks that the philosopher is the right person to understand the Torah. I would put it slightly differently and would say that Maimonides stresses the interpretation of the book, and whenever the text, the simple text of the Torah seems to contradict philosophical truths, one has to interpret. One has to use exegesis in order to make the two agree. He thinks it's possible, and he thinks that this exercise of translating, as it were, the scriptures into philosophical language is part of the education of a human being that brings him gradually, theoretically also brings her gradually, but there are very few cases that he knows of women who got to this position. The prophetess Miriam, for example. But usually this is the way that the human being is moved from one stage of understanding to another. Maybe we could just close by talking about a specific example of this, which is a work of his called The Treatise on Resurrection, which is again a text you've worked on. This seems to be a case where philosophy and religion might be coming into some kind of conflict, because if you think that there's a religious fact that we just know, because it was revealed to us perhaps, that our bodies will be resurrected, that seems to be in conflict with the standard, what you've been calling the school tradition, philosophical understanding of the afterlife, which is at best an individual immortality based on having a disembodied soul. So how does Maimonides in this text negotiate between these two sort of imperatives? Let me first say that Maimonides did not believe in individual immortality. In this he's different from Avicenna, for example. But he did believe in the immortality of the intellect, not of the soul, but of the intellectual part of the soul. And he has a somewhat easier position than Muslim philosophers or Christian philosophers, because the Hebrew Bible doesn't actually say that the bodies will be resurrected. But it's somewhat easier, because by the time, by the 12th century when Maimonides lives, this is unquestionable for all Jews around him that the bodies will be resurrected. Why is that if it's not in the Hebrew Bible? Why did it become such a sort of assumption among Jews? It's already in the first Christian centuries, this is something that is already part and parcel of most Jewish communities' belief. It's an idea that came from Persia and was accepted by Jews and then became an essential part of Christianity and essential part of Islam. By the 12th century, nobody argues with it, except the philosophers who really don't believe in it and who despise the body and who can't really say it. So what Maimonides does is to avoid saying it. He never says, I don't believe in the resurrection of the body. And some people would say that perhaps he does believe in it. He says this is an article of faith. He never says this is the truth. He says it's an article of faith. It's no more and no less than an article of faith. I don't talk about it anymore. And the fact that he's forced to talk about it, I think, makes him really angry. So that strikes me as a kind of unsatisfactory position to be in. So, I mean, in general, in medieval philosophy, this issue comes up over and over. What will happen if reason or philosophy tells us one thing and religion or scripture or the religious tradition tells us something else and various views are taken to either eliminate this possibility, like in Aquinas, let's say, or to say that religion trumps philosophy or that philosophy trumps religion, which seems to be what Averroes would say. But if Maimonides' solution is just, well, be quiet if that happens, is that the idea? Because that doesn't really seem like a philosophical stance. It seems more like a tactical position. Well, in that position, in that question, he's very much like Averroes. He doesn't say be quiet. He says this is what the religion says. It's not something that we discuss logically. But then, aside from it, in different contexts, he does say what he does believe will happen, and it does not include the body. It includes the separation of the intellect in the afterlife, not in paradise, but in the world to come, which is the concept that he insists on, and the world to come is a blissful existence which does not include the body. Maybe then it has something to do with something you said before, which is the fact that his different texts are aimed at different audiences. So if you're talking to people, for example, who might not be able to imagine an afterlife without a body, it could be a very bad idea to say, by the way, there's no body in the afterlife because they might just conclude that they'll die. Exactly. And cease to exist. Exactly. And Maimonides actually brings parable that he borrows from Avicenna about the difference between a child who would prefer playing with his ball rather than being a king. And as he grows, then he will not be interested in the ball anymore. He will be interested in the kingdom. There is a gradual development which the Scriptures take you through gradually according to your ability. And this gradual development will also gradually teach you that the body is less important than you think now. Well, that seems like a good note to end on, and maybe Maimonides would have wanted us to end on. Perhaps. Next time I will, instead of looking at the sources and inspirations of Maimonides, which is what we've been doing today, I'm going to start looking at the reception of Maimonides and later Jewish philosophy. For now, I'll thank Sarah very much for coming on the podcast. And please join me next time for the reception of Maimonides here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Burnt Offerings, the Maimonides Controversy I've been wondering whether this podcast should have a minimum age restriction. I try to keep things family-friendly, but it isn't always easy to avoid adult themes. We've had some scenes of a sexual nature, with Plato's erotic dialogues and the cynics copulating in public, to say nothing of the steamy interaction of unity and multiplicity in Pythagorean metaphysics. There's been violence too, in late antiquity, with the brutal treatment meted out to the pagan Platonist hierarchies and the Christian theologian Maximus the Confessor, and more recently the Mongols' innovative method for killing the last of the Abbasid caliphs. As for philosophy itself, it certainly involves making things explicit. Nonetheless, I'm a firm believer that it is never too early to start doing philosophy. If you've ever discussed ethics or Zeno's paradoxes with a child, you'll know that they have some pretty good ideas. In fact, recently a listener got in touch to report his five-year-old son's solution to the Psorides paradox, and I bet that Chrysippus himself couldn't have done better at that age. So it's hard for me to hold onto my historian's sense of detachment when I consider what happened in Barcelona in the year 1305. In a foreshadowing of FC Barcelona's ban on letting the other team ever touch the ball, in that year the Jewish authorities laid down a ban on touching books about philosophy. Specifically, they stated that anyone under the age of 25 should be forbidden from reading Greek works on physics or metaphysics, either in Greek or in translation. Here we are, about 1700 years after the death of Socrates, and philosophy is still being accused of corrupting the youth. The rabbinic judge who imposed the ban was named Solomon ibn Adret, also known as Rashba, and he was responding to calls for help from southern France. Solomon ibn Adret and his French allies hoped this would set a good example and lead to a ban on philosophy there too. Not only did this fail to occur, but the Barcelona prohibition provoked other Jews in France into excommunicating anyone who tried to stop people from studying philosophy. Members of the pro-philosophy camp were duly targeted with a counter-excommunication amidst confusion about which decision carried legal force. The whole sorry event, more legal farce than legal force, ended when the very ironically named French king, Philip the Fair, decided to exile all the Jews from his realm in southern France. As a historian of philosophy, you wouldn't expect me to have much sympathy with Solomon ibn Adret and his allies, and you'd be right. Not only were they opponents of philosophy, but they weren't much good at learning from history. Their move against rationalist currents in Judaism was a reprise of a more famous sequence of events that happened back in the 1230s, the so-called Maimonidean controversy. That earlier dispute saw Maimonides's guide to the perplexed being burnt in the French city of Montpellier after it was denounced to Christian authorities by Jews who were opposed to the study of philosophy. The two controversies had several things in common. In both cases, Jews energetically and tragically attacked one another even as a far greater danger loomed in the form of the local Christian authorities. In both cases, the critics of philosophy were surprisingly polite about Maimonides himself, the leading figure of recent Jewish intellectual history. In fact, the supporters of the 1305 ban quoted Maimonides himself in favor of the prohibition in a passage where he had expressed the danger of exposing youthful readers to advanced philosophical ideas. And in both cases, conservatives were reacting against the spread of philosophical ideas among Jews, made possible because of translations of Maimonides, Aristotle, Averroes, and other authors into Hebrew. These controversies involved not just the place of philosophy in Judaism, but the question of whether different communities of Jews needed to have the same laws. Solomon ibn Adret was in fact reluctant at first to impose the ban on studying philosophy. This was not because he had a secret soft spot for Aristotle, but because as a Spanish rabbi he had misgivings about responding to a debate that began among Jews in France. The Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s likewise raged in both Spain and southern France. In fact, one can see the event as a reaction by conservative French Jews against the importation of philosophy from Andalusia. This process began already during Maimonides' lifetime, as did the controversy over Maimonides himself. He now occupies an unparalleled role in Jewish intellectual history, a leading authority not just in philosophy but also in rabbinic law, so it's a surprise to see how much hostility he was able to provoke in his contemporaries. His forbiddingly learned and provokingly rationalist works spread far and wide, winning adherents and opponents. One opponent was Samuel ben Ali, the Gaon or head of the Baghdad Rabbinic Academy. Samuel was shocked by what he took to be Maimonides' understanding of the afterlife as a mere metaphor. We've seen that many philosophers in the Islamic world, notably Avicenna and Averroes, saw life after death as a purely intellectual affair. Samuel took Maimonides to follow these ideas and to deny the possibility of a bodily resurrection. Maimonides himself replied to these charges with that characteristic subtlety that tended to leave lingering questions about his actual doctrine. On the one hand, said Maimonides, I do accept the resurrection of the body. On the other hand, even if I took talk of resurrection metaphorically, that would still preserve the doctrine's truth. In this debate, Maimonides made the point that our view on bodily resurrection should go hand in hand with our view on God's creation of the universe. If God created the universe from nothing, with a beginning in time, he may just as well recreate our bodies in the hereafter. On the other hand, if, as the philosophers think, the universe has existed eternally, then there is no reason to think God would suddenly start creating things from nothing just to give us a body again after we die. Well, exactly, his opponents might have responded, and we couldn't help noticing that the eternity of the universe is another topic on which you seem to be rather slippery. I mentioned when looking at Maimonides's discussion of eternity that some 20th century interpreters have suspected him of secretly accepting that the universe has already existed. This interpretation goes back to the time of Maimonides. In fact, one of his greatest supporters, Samuel ibn Tibbon, was probably an eternalist. On this and other topics, Samuel and other Maimonidians thought that a true understanding of the Guide of the Perplexed would reveal adherence to radically Aristotelian doctrines. Samuel ibn Tibbon was not just a careful reader and proponent of Maimonides's guide, he was also its translator. He was a member of a staggeringly productive family, which generated many translations from Arabic over the course of the 13th century. They were sort of like a medieval Jewish version of the Jackson Five, if the Jacksons had been spread over several generations instead of being brothers, and if Germain had specialized in rendering averroes into Hebrew. Their activity began with Samuel's father Judah ibn Tibbon, who translated authors like Sadia Gaon, Ibn Pakuda, and Judah Halevi, whose Kuzari is hardly a provocative piece of Aristotelian philosophy. With Samuel ibn Tibbon, the process of Hebrew translation ventured into more contentious territory. He produced a Hebrew version of the Guide in 1205, following this a few years later with the first Hebrew version of a work by Aristotle. Rather strangely, the text he chose for this was the Meteorology. Aristotle also wrote his own philosophical works. For instance, he composed a treatise on a question which I know has been bothering you for at least a hundred episodes. Why do some parts of the land stick up above the water of the seas, if, as Aristotle says, earth is heavier than water and thus has a greater tendency to move down towards the center of the universe? The family business was carried on by Samuel's son Moses ibn Tibbon, who carried the project on to averroes and his commentaries on Aristotle. We'll look at the consequences of this in the next episode. The upshot of all this activity was that Aristotelian and Maimonidean philosophy became widely available to Hebrew-reading Jews in Christian Europe, where previously such texts could be read only in Arabic, either in Spain or elsewhere in the Islamic world. This completed the process begun already in the 12th century by figures like Abraham ibn Ezra. As we saw a few episodes back, his Hebrew compositions brought astrology and other sciences from Andalusia to Italy and France. Those ideas too had provoked opposition and criticism, not least from ibn Ezra's colleague Judah Halevi. But now, in the 13th century, the stakes are higher. Not only is Aristotle and later the sophisticated body of commentaries by averroes, gradually finding its way into Jewish culture, but with Maimonides a figure of undisputed genius and standing in the Jewish community has come to embody philosophy. Maimonides' Hebrew writings, especially his major work of Jewish law, or halacha, the Mishnei Torah, did not of course need to be translated. So, during his lifetime, they were already being read by Jews. Some complained of the presumption of Maimonides' project, seeing his work as an attempt to replace the Talmud by rearranging and systematizing its contents. Yet most gratefully accepted the towering achievement of Maimonides' Mishnei Torah and other legal works. This helps to explain why even the anti-Maimonidians in the controversies had such nice things to say about the man himself. In fact, they bent over backwards to excuse him for writing the provocatively rationalist Guide for the Perplexed. In the first Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s, which led to the burning of the Guide in France, the leader of the critics was a man with the unbeatably biblical name Solomon ben Abraham. He's not to be confused with Solomon ibn Adret, protagonist of the later 1305 ban on teaching philosophy to the young. Solomon ben Abraham did not attack Maimonides for writing the Guide. He attacked those who had translated it and disseminated it widely among a French readership. It's not clear who was responsible for the burning of the Guide, probably in 1232 or 1233. Pro-Maimonidians blamed Solomon and his allies, but this charge has been questioned in modern scholarship. However the culprit was, it was a member of the Jewish community in southern France who appealed to the Christian authorities for help in stopping the spread of Maimonideanism from Spain. The clerical authorities who actually had the Guide burned were in fact involved in the violent suppression of a group called the Cathars, who were considered heretical Christians. So it may be that the conservative Jewish appeal to the local Christian bishop which resulted in the burning of Maimonides' books was a reaction to a general atmosphere of religious suppression. In fact, an author writing on behalf of the Maimonideans accused his opponents of having said to the Christians, since you are destroying heretics among you, destroy ours as well. The proponents of philosophy were infuriated. For a Jew to inform on other Jews to Christians was unprecedented, to say nothing of the outrage of subjecting the writings of the great Maimonides to such abuse. The philosophical camp's answer came from Spain, more specifically Saragossa, where a ban was pronounced against Solomon ben Abraham and his allies. What was needed clearly was a calm head. It turned out to belong to a man named Moses ben Nahman, usually known as Nahmanides, or Rambam. He was a relatively conservative legal scholar and a significant contributor to the burgeoning literature of Kabbalah, or tradition, an approach to Jewish scripture which we'll be looking at in more detail soon. In his writings, Nahmanides does not outright reject the possibility of using reason to understand the universe around us. But he insisted upon the possibility that God intervenes within nature to work his will. In fact, many events that we take to be mere chance occurrences or coincidences are, as Nahmanides puts it, hidden miracles, God working through the mechanisms of nature he has put in place. On the whole, his understanding of philosophy, or at least the application of philosophy to nature, is much like that of Al-Ghazali, at least according to the more rationalist reading of his Incoherence of the Philosophers. Like that version of Al-Ghazali, Nahmanides would accept explanations in terms of natural causes, but insist on the fact that God can always trump nature, and indeed is regularly doing so. Given this intellectual profile and his eminence in the community, Nahmanides seemed a natural ally for the critics of Maimonides. They wrote to him requesting him to join them in declaring war on the great eagle. But he replied by encouraging them to release the doves of peace. Nahmanides pointed to the admirable features of Maimonides's writings, not only his mastery of rabbinic law, but also his ability to show the appeal of Judaism for philosophically minded readers. Nahmanides understood that the purpose of Maimonides's guide was not to corrupt pious Jews by exposing them to philosophy, but on the contrary, to show those already in danger of such corruption that Aristotle could be reconciled with the Torah. Characteristically, Nahmanides made his point by paraphrasing a biblical passage, He was also mindful that it was politically awkward, and also legally dubious, for Jews in one area to act against the practices of other communities. The Talmud says that it is forbidden to declare a ruling on the population unless the majority of the population is able to abide by it. For Nahmanides, Maimonides might well fill a need among philosophy enthusiasts in Spain, and it wasn't the place of Jews in Provence to attack that local practice. One might compare this, for instance, to the fact that polygamy was at this time accepted among Jews living among Muslims, but not by those in Christian lands. Nahmanides was consistent and even-handed in his localism, and also chastised the pro-Maimonidians for their counterban against the anti-Maimonidean ringleaders of Provence. Of course, there's something slightly condescending about Nahmanides's attitude towards the philosophers. That's just how they do things down south. But he was fighting fire with fire, albeit in a more figurative sense than the book burners of Montpellier. The Maimonidians were, after all, more than a little condescending themselves, since they taught that no one can understand the Torah properly without a mastery of philosophy. During his lifetime, Maimonides had already provoked hostility by saying it is heresy to think that God has a body. This accusation is itself heretical, complained one rabbi of Provence. Of course it's true that God has no body, but that doesn't invalidate the faith of simple folk who cannot understand this fact. Here we have the key difference between radical Maimonidians like Samuel ibn Tibbon and men like Solomon ben Abraham who fretted about the corrosive effects of philosophy. The Maimonidians followed an idea pioneered in an Islamic context by a farabi and later embraced by a verroes that Aristotelian philosophy establishes with proof what religion can express only in persuasive symbols. On this view, it is not philosophy, but religion and the religious law that are local, since a prophetic revelation is tailored for a certain group of believers. For a particularly vivid example of a philosopher who adopted this verroes line on the relationship between reason and faith, we can turn briefly to the later 13th century thinker Isaac al-Balag. He was part of the process I've already mentioned in which philosophical works were translated from Arabic into Hebrew. He executed a Hebrew translation of Al-Ghazali's overview of Avicenna's thought, the intentions of the philosophers, and then indicated where he departed from its teachings in a work of his own, entitled Tikum ha-De'ot, meaning the correction of doctrines. Under the influence of a verroes, al-Balag was convinced that Aristotelian philosophy and science represented the greatest achievement of human reason. Its distinctive doctrines, such as the eternity of the universe, had been demonstrated by adamantine proofs. Maimonides was thus wrong to doubt the success of Aristotle's arguments and to assert that the question was one that could be settled only by revelation. Al-Balag's approach to scripture also followed the lead of a verroes. The Torah is written not for elite philosophers, but for the common folk. This means that its true meaning is hidden beneath the literal sense of the text. And it is, of course, the philosopher who is in the best position to determine that true meaning by showing that the Torah and philosophical demonstration teach the same lessons. On the other hand, al-Balag, unlike a verroes in his decisive treatise, allows for the possibility that the Torah may contain truths inaccessible to philosophy. The prophets of old may have been given knowledge by direct revelation, which we simply cannot understand by using our reason. In that case, all we can do is accept those teachings by faith without hoping to ratify them using our natural powers of reasoning. These ideas of Isaac al-Balag show that, in the battle over the value of philosophy for Jews, the Torah itself was at stake. Consider, for instance, the legal injunctions laid down in scripture and painstakingly expounded in them Mishnah and Talmud. As we saw in the episode on ethics in Jewish philosophy, Maimonides drew on Aristotle and Galen to argue that the purpose of the law is to encourage virtue. One might say that, for him, God plays the role played by the ideal human legislator in Aristotle. Both devise laws that will lead humans to perfection. This means that, at least in general terms, human reason can grasp the rationale underlying the divine law. For other Jewish legal scholars, these ideas of Maimonides smacked of arrogance. Like the Asharites in opposition to their fellow Muslim theologians, the Mu'tazilites, Maimonides's critics responded that the commands and ways of God are inscrutable to reason. In the end, the Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s was not ended by the peacemaking efforts of Maimonides or by a lasting consensus concerning such questions. That much is shown by the similar tensions surrounding the Barcelona ban on teaching philosophy some 70 years later. Instead, it seems that the community agreed to disagree, but more quietly, simply because they were horrified by the intervention of Christian authorities and the scandal that this intervention was provoked by Jews. As I've said, the participants in these events seemed tragically blind to the greater danger posed to them by Christian institutions. A decade or so after the burning of Maimonides's books, the Talmud itself would be publicly burned in Paris. But that isn't to say that Jewish philosophy could flourish only in the context of Islamic political rule. Philosophy among Jews continued in Spain after the Christian reconquest and was also pursued in France and Italy. In fact, a key development in philosophy of the 13th and 14th centuries involved both Jews and Christians living in Christian lands, the embrace of the Muslim philosopher and Aristotelian commentator, Averroes. One of Averroes's greatest exponents was a Jew who've hailed not from Muslim Spain, but from Christian Provence, epicenter of the Maimonidean controversy. If you liked Maimonides and Nahmanides, then you'll love Gersonides, our topic on the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Man and Superman. Gersonides and the Jewish Reaction to Iverroes. If you want to bring the ideas of a long-dead philosopher to a wider audience, you have three basic choices, not counting podcasts. You can translate the philosopher's writings into a new language. You can produce writings of your own that present the philosopher's ideas, perhaps applying them to new problems to show the philosopher's perennial relevance. Or you can write commentaries. These methods were practiced already in the ancient world. Let's hear it for Boethius in particular, who did all three of these things for Aristotle. And they are still practiced today. We've also seen translations, independent treatises, and commentaries among philosophical authors writing in Arabic. Now that we've arrived at philosophy in Hebrew, there's a fourth approach to consider. Not podcasts or interpretive dance, though that would be pretty awesome, but rather the super commentary. A super commentary is not a commentary that comes from the planet Krypton or has been bitten by a radioactive spider. It's something more mundane. A commentary about another commentary. As we know, the commentaries of Iverroes had a great impact on Christian philosophers when they were translated into Latin, and on Jewish philosophers when translated into Hebrew. Among the Christians, Iverroes was simply the commentator. And among the Jews, one scholar in particular deserves the title of the super commentator, Levi Ben Gerson, usually known as Gersonides, or alternatively Ralbag, an honorific that abbreviates Rabbi Levi Ben Gerson, just as Maimonides is known as Rambam. When it came to understanding Aristotle, Iverroes was the man, and that would make Gersonides Superman. He didn't hail from Krypton, even though Ralbag would be a pretty decent name for a comic book space alien. Rather he lived in Provence in southern France, where he may have worked as a money lender alongside his philosophical and religious scholarly activities. I'm not sure how well the money lending business treated him, but those scholarly activities definitely paid dividends. In addition to his super commentaries on Iverroes, he produced commentaries on books of the Bible, treatises on mathematics, and one of the greatest treatises of medieval Jewish thought, the Milhamot HaShem, or Wars of the Lord, which brings together the richness of the Aristotelian tradition with the ideas of Maimonides in an effort to show that there is no contradiction between philosophy and faith. A particularly impressive aspect of his writing is his contribution to astronomy, in honor of which a crater on the moon has been named Rabbi Levi. See, I told you he could be from outer space. Now you might be imagining that Gersonides's commentaries on Iverroes were unfeasibly enormous. After all, I told you when talking about Iverroes that his line-by-line so-called long commentaries were very long indeed. How huge would a commentary on such a commentary be? But Gersonides focused on the epitomes and paraphrases of Iverroes, the texts misleadingly called short and middle commentaries. He seems to have been especially interested in logic and psychology. For instance, he wrote super commentaries on Iverroes's epitomes of the three first works in the Organon, or Aristotelian logical writings. Incidentally, these super commentaries were later translated into Latin, just as Iverroes was. These exegetical works of Gersonides represent the high-water mark of response to Iverroes among Jews. He lived in the first half of the 14th century, dying in 1344, which meant that he had access to the fruits of the Hebrew translation movement I've mentioned in previous episodes. Across Europe, the commentaries of Iverroes were attracting intense attention. For instance, Hebrew versions of the logical paraphrases were produced by three separate translators in Naples and in southern France. We can get an impression of Iverroes's impact not only from Gersonides, but from a range of other figures. Let's take, as an example, Shem Tov ben Joseph Falakera, who probably lived in Andalusia and died at the end of the 13th century. He wrote a lovely little treatise in Hebrew called the Epistle of the Debate, which adapts the ideas of Iverroes's decisive treatise for a Jewish audience. In it, Falakera imagines a debate between a philosophically-minded Jew and a religious scholar who thinks that Jews have no business reading Aristotle and Iverroes. The defender of philosophy does not try to insist that everything philosophers have said can be reconciled with Judaism. Instead, he compares himself to someone eating the fruit of a pomegranate and discarding the peel, or taking honey from bees. In particular, we should discard the philosophers' denial of miracles, though this can be excused since they did not have the benefit of a tradition relating the miracle stories. And on the point that matters most, philosophers agree with the Jewish faith when they argue that the world is produced by a single creator. The religious scholar retorts that there is no need to argue for this at all since it is stated clearly in Revelation. Here's where Falakera's Iverroism starts to show. He has his proponent of philosophy say that, without rational proof, religious beliefs are only being accepted blindly by authority. To believe on the basis of philosophical proof is like seeing something with your own eyes rather than relying on the testimony of others. Indeed, the religious scholar himself, for all his learning, is no better than the common ignoramus who mouths the teachings of Judaism without a proper understanding of what he says. Of course, this is in full agreement with the message of Iverroes's decisive treatise, and even the tactics deployed by Falakera's protagonist are reminiscent of Iverroes. You might remember that Iverroes was writing a legal treatise, so he based himself on Quranic quotations and gave arguments that were directed squarely at fellow jurists. Falakera's Epistle of the Debate is not a legal document, like Iverroes's treatise was, but he too cites scripture in support of philosophy. For instance, from Deuteronomy, And like Iverroes, he argues dialectically, trying to hit anti-philosophy legal scholars where it hurts. Not only does he suggest that such a scholar has no better status than your average Jew, but he draws a comparison between reaching philosophical understanding and using reason to extrapolate from rabbinic texts to lay down new legal judgments. If Falakera's Epistle shows that Iverroes found an eager reception among Jews, it also shows that the Hebrew philosophical movement he helped inspire was hotly debated. You don't write a dialogue like that if there are no real opponents of philosophy to be won over. As we saw last time, even Maimonides sparked both metaphorical and literal fires of controversy. If this great Jewish legal mind could rouse such opposition, what would the community make of non-Jews with problematic teachings, like Aristotle and Iverroes? Enter Gersonides. As an expert on Jewish law, or halakhah, he was well placed to judge Aristotle's compatibility with the Torah. And as an expert mathematician and astronomer, he was in a good position to pass judgment on the epistemology and science that came down through the Aristotelian tradition. Following the lead of Maimonides, he did not take the philosopher's word for anything, but passed judgments on their arguments and suggested improvements where needed. The title of his chief philosophical work refers to this task. Using the language of the Bible, he says that he is fighting the wars of the Lord by overturning the mistakes of philosophical predecessors. If Gersonides hoped to silence once and for all the debate about philosophy, he was not successful. One later critic sarcastically referred to his treatise as the wars against the Lord. But certainly no one could ever accuse Gersonides of uncritically following his philosophical authorities. Anyone who reads the wars of the Lord will immediately be struck by his exhaustive listing of all the arguments on each topic he tackles. He then suggests problems with each of the positions he has listed, only then declaring his own position. This approach may be inspired by Averroes's commentaries. Averroes, himself adopting the policy of late ancient commentators, would frequently explain all the previous interpretations of a given passage in Aristotle before setting out his own reading. A case in point would be Averroes's notorious discussions of intellect in his three works of exegesis devoted to Aristotle's On the Soul. Reading those commentaries, one can learn not only what Averroes thinks Aristotle meant, but also what other commentators, ranging from Alexander to Ibn Bajja, had said. The wars of the Lord goes this one better by summarizing many of the same views on the intellect and throwing Averroes's own position into the mix. Actually, Gersonides was not able to read Averroes's full or long commentary to On the Soul since it hadn't yet been translated into Hebrew. But thanks to comments Averroes himself added to his earlier epitome of On the Soul, Gersonides was aware of the rather shocking Averroes thesis that all of humankind shares one intellect. Like the earlier Aquinas, he objects to this that, on this theory, we cannot explain how one person knows while another does not. When I talked about Averroes, I said that this is a bad objection, since Averroes already gave the answer, I experience thinking when the universal intellect uses my sensation, imagination and memory as a basis for thought. Gersonides understands Averroes well here, so he gives a better version of the objection, saying that if Rubin's intellect is the same as Simon's, then Rubin's intellect can use Simon's sensation just as well as Simon's intellect can. Even though Gersonides has no time for Averroes's idea of a single human intellect, he does accept the long-standing philosophical theory that there is one superhuman celestial intellect, the so-called agent intellect. Being a super commentator, maybe he liked the idea of anything superhuman. Like Al-Farabi and Avicenna, he gives this celestial intellect a role in activating human thought and also makes it responsible for giving forms to material things here on Earth. He notices a problem that previous philosophers had not sufficiently discussed. So focused were they on the theoretical knowledge achieved by philosophers that they never worried about where we get practical knowledge. He fills the gap by saying that the agent intellect helps carpenters know how to build wooden models of giraffes just as much as it helps biologists understand the essential nature of giraffes. Maybe I don't need to say that this isn't Gersonides's example. After all, the agent intellect is also thinking in practical terms, as when it provides Hiawatha with a long neck to get at those tasty leaves high up on the trees. Since the agent intellect is causing everything to happen on Earth on the basis of its universal knowledge, you would think that nothing would escape its notice. It should know every last detail of every event and being that falls under its influence, and that without needing to tap anyone's phones or steam open envelopes to read people's mail. But if this is the case, then a couple of long-standing philosophical problems would seem to be looming. First, will the agent intellect know what is going to happen in the future, for instance, what I am going to do tomorrow? If so, then it looks like I will have no choice about what I do. I know I promised in a previous episode not to bring up this problem again until we hit Latin medieval philosophy, but I am not as good at seeing the future as the agent intellect is. And then there's a second problem. If the intellect's knowledge is really universal, then how will it know about particular things? It might know all about giraffes and even be able to give the form of giraffe to suitably prepared matter, but it couldn't know that Hiawatha is right now taking a nap because that's a bit of information about a particular giraffe. This is just a version of the problem faced by Avicenna who raised the same issue, but with higher stakes, when he talked about divine knowledge. For Avicenna, God has only general knowledge of the universe, a knowledge God has only by knowing himself as the cause of the universe. This may have been the most controversial position taken by Avicenna, and that's against some stiff competition. It was rejected by many philosophers from all three Abrahamic faiths, including Maimonides among the Jews. Maimonides wanted to insist that God does know about particulars, albeit not in the way that we humans do. As Gersonides relates, in the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides names five ways in which God's knowledge differs from ours. Whereas we have many acts of knowledge for many things, God knows all things with a single act. He also knows things that don't exist, but might have, whereas we know only what exists. God can know infinity, whereas we can't. God knows changing things without changing, as we do. And finally, my favorite, God knows what will happen in the future without ruling out the possibility that things will be different. One of the most interesting parts of the Wars of the Lord, and that's also against some stiff competition, is Gersonides's critical discussion of Maimonides's distinctions. He has especially interesting things to say about the idea that God's knowledge is infinite, and the idea that God could know the future while leaving open alternate possibilities. Concerning the first point, Gersonides flatly rejects the notion that any knowledge, even God's, could embrace something that is actually infinite. To know something is to place it within a certain definition or limit, the very antithesis of the indefiniteness that characterizes infinity. But in a sense, even we puny humans can know infinity. For instance, we know bodies to be infinitely divisible. What this means is not that we could know an infinite number of actually divided parts in a body. Rather, it means that we understand the essence of bodies, in light of which we realize that it is, in principle, possible to divide bodies an indefinite number of times. No matter how small, every body is divisible. The only alternative would be atomism, which Gersonides rejects. Gersonides's solution to the problem of future knowledge is similar. We have no idea what will happen in the future, but the agent intellect and God certainly do. This, however, does not mean that they already know in full and complete detail all that will occur tomorrow or a week from now or in coming years. Rather, it means that they understand the cosmic order and structure within which those events can happen. This is really just a version of Avicenna's theory. God does not know particulars as such, but rather knows the universal causal system that gives rise to them. So Gersonides is siding with Avicenna and against just about everyone else. But he prefers this to Maimonides's solution, which he finds barely comprehensible. If God knows that Hiawatha will take a nap tomorrow, how can it still be possible that she not take a nap? This so-called solution makes it sound like God is just making educated guesses, since he is leaving open the possibility that things will go otherwise than he predicts. This would be mere belief, not knowledge. Unfortunately for Gersonides, he happens to have some beliefs of his own that don't fit very well with the theory he is defending. He thinks that astrologers frequently forecast events accurately, that people have dreams that represent things to come, and that prophets can know the future, thanks to Revelation. In fact, he devotes the whole second book of the Wars of the Lord to precisely these phenomena. And astrologers, prophets, and prophetic dreamers certainly seem to be foretelling particular events. But Gersonides is nothing if not a consistent thinker, so, like a cowboy who has been assembling model airplanes, he sticks to his guns. In the case of astrology, for instance, he contends that the stars are signifying only the cosmic order, and that in exceptional cases, humans exercise freedom to depart from what has been predicted. In some cases, prophecies have a conditional form—if one thing happens, another will follow, which again depends not on certain knowledge of particular events, but on an implicit understanding of the cosmic order. He gives the biblical example of Joseph interpreting the Pharaoh's dream by prophesying a seven-year famine. This leaves it up to the Pharaoh whether he will act in such a way as to avoid the dire consequences of the famine by storing up grain in advance. Although Gersonides wound up covering all these topics and more in the Wars of the Lord, it seems that his original plan was to focus on that most controversial of topics for medieval Jews—creation, and the question of the eternity of the universe. Here, Gersonides takes an unusual stance, firmly rejecting the position of his two main influences, Maimonides and Iverroes. The world is not eternal, as Iverroes, and possibly Maimonides, thought. Gersonides argues that this is impossible, deploying a range of arguments familiar from the late ancient commentator Philoponus, and from Muslims like al-Kindi and al-Ghazali. He also adds an argument of his own, which has some deep philosophical consequences. Since Aristotle firmly rejects the possibility of anything being actually infinite, the question had always been whether past eternity would mean that an actual infinity has already been reached. So the opponents of eternity claimed that an infinite time would actually need to elapse to get to the current moment. The response from Aristotle's partisans had always been that past eternity doesn't count as an actual infinity, since past moments, humans, and events have ceased existing, so they can't all join together to form part of an actual infinity. Against this, Gersonides argues that, in a sense, past things do still exist, or are real. If the event of Socrates's death has now receded into utter nothingness, what would make it true to say, for instance, that Socrates died of hemlock? Metaphysicians still debate this question of what must exist now in order to make statements about the past come out true. Within the debate of Gersonides's own time, he gives his allegiance to the least popular option from among the possible positions on eternity that had been listed by Maimonides. Rather than accepting the possibility that the universe was created out of nothing at some specific time, or accepting that the universe is eternal, Gersonides adopts the view that philosophers writing in Arabic had always associated with Plato. On this view, the universe was created at a specific time, but not out of nothing. Rather, God used pre-existing matter as a basis to fashion the world. Gersonides claims to find an endorsement of this idea in the opening verses of Genesis. In our look at philosophy in the Islamic world, though, we have seen no Jewish authors accept the Platonic idea until now. The only Muslim to embrace it was the unorthodox Arazi. Clearly, Gersonides was no slave to Averroes, Maimonides, and his other sources. He firmly believed in the agreement of Torah and philosophy, but only once philosophy was suitably adjusted by placing it on firmer foundations. He thus represents the rationalist wing of 14th century Judaism, which was still wrestling with a legacy of Maimonides. But you need two wings to fly, so naturally there was another, less rationalist wing of the Jewish response to the great eagle. We've already looked at the so-called Maimonides controversy of the 1230s, but we haven't yet looked at the greatest medieval critic of Maimonides, who was another figure of the 14th century, born right around the time that Gersonides died. In his zeal to criticize Maimonides, he formulated searching criticisms of Aristotelian physics, anticipating various discoveries we associate with early modern science in Europe. So let's keep the momentum going as we move on with Hasdai Crescus, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Neither the Time Nor the Place – Hasdai Kreskus If you want to build something new, you sometimes need to destroy something old. It's true in the construction business, when you might need to dynamite an abandoned building to build a new one, in the agriculture business, when you need to clear a field to plant your crops, and of course in the philosophy business too. I'm sure many of you have spent this tour of philosophy looking forward to the rise of modern physics. We're not there yet, but in this episode we're going to look at a figure who helped clear the ground on which modern physics would be built. His name was Hasdai Kreskus. The writings of Maimonides and Gersonides provoked Kreskus into a stunning assault on the assumptions underlying Aristotelian physics. His criticisms were not wholly new. Some of his ideas are prefigured in the ancient Christian critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus, and the more Aristotle-friendly Andalusian Muslim thinker Ibn Bajja. But Kreskus went further than them, both in the daring of his arguments and in his historical reach. This aspect of his writings caused little excitement among Jews in the following generations, but he would be cited by Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola, and later by Smirnoff and Noza. It would be going too far to say that without Kreskus there would have been no modern science, but it would not be going far enough if we didn't credit Kreskus with some part in the gradual demise of Aristotelian science. As scientific revolutionaries go, Kreskus cut a somewhat unlikely figure. For one thing, his intentions concerning natural philosophy were mostly destructive. He was more demolition man than architect. Yet in arguing that Maimonides and Aristotle had failed to rule out such things as void and actual infinity, he was indirectly led to contemplate possibilities that had been almost universally rejected since antiquity. For another thing, Kreskus led a life dominated more by the discontents of his people than the contents of Aristotle's physics. He hailed from Barcelona, where he rose as a scholar at the city's yeshiva. This was in the mid to late 14th century, so we're talking here about Spain under the rule of Christians after the Reconquest. Christian rule was, during this period, rather favorable to Jews in general and to Kreskus in particular. He moved to Zaragoza, capital of Aragon, and the king and queen appointed him as the highest legal authority for Jews in their realm. Then, in the year 1391, disaster struck. It came in the form of pogroms against the Jews in many Spanish cities, with the Christian authorities incapable of checking the violence. The Jewish community of Kreskus's former home in Barcelona was destroyed, and Kreskus's own son was killed there. This calamity was a foretaste of what would come almost exactly a century later with the total expulsion of Jews from Spain. As a high-ranking Jewish leader, Kreskus worked to find safe havens for his co-religionists. He also went on the offensive against the Christians, at least in writing. Among his works is a treatise written in Catalan, which criticizes ten principles of the Christian faith such as original sin, the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, the virginity of Mary, and so on. Under the circumstances, this may sound remarkably provocative, but the intended audience was probably Kreskus's fellow Jews, or converts, who he hoped might recant and return to Judaism. Within Judaism too, Kreskus's great preoccupation was the principles of religion. His greatest work, the one that contains his reflections on Aristotelian natural philosophy, is entitled Or Hashem, or Light of the Lord. It was occasioned by the philosophical approach to the Jewish law that Kreskus found in Maimonides's Mishneh Torah. Maimonides followed the traditional count of 613 commandments in the law. Among these, he put one above all others, the commandment to believe in God. Also in the Mishneh Torah, as well as in his commentary on the Mishnah, Maimonides itemized thirteen principles of the Jewish religion. These again included the existence of God, as well as God's incorporeality, divine providence, prophecy in general, and the special prophethood of Moses in particular, and so on. Following previous authors who had simplified this list, Kreskus distilled Maimonides's dogma into three main claims. God exists, he is one, and he has no body. Naturally, Kreskus thought all three of these claims are true. In fact, he thought they are held in common by all reasonable religions, never mind the true religion, which is Judaism. But he did not think that Maimonides, or for that matter Aristotle or Gersonides, had managed to prove them. The purpose of the light of the Lord is thus to expose the flaws in Maimonides's arguments, which were drawn largely from Aristotle. Thereby, Kreskus intended to make room, not for modern physics, but for a clearer understanding of how and why we should accept these paramount principles of Judaism. Kreskus worried that Maimonides had placed the majestic edifice of Jewish law on the shaky foundations of Aristotelian science. The light of the Lord offers an explosion of arguments designed to knock down this whole condemned structure, so that Kreskus can raise something more solid in its place. Kreskus already makes a fundamental point against Maimonides's handling of the first and chief principle, the existence of God. As I just mentioned, Maimonides counts belief in God as a commandment laid upon us by God himself. This, Kreskus argues, simply makes no sense. For one thing, why would anyone follow a command from God without already believing that God exists? The existence of God is a principle presupposed by the commandments of the law, not itself among those commandments. Furthermore, it is not just up to us to decide what we believe. And if something is not a matter of choice, then it is incoherent to issue commands about it. Here, Kreskus has made an interesting philosophical point about the nature of belief, that it responds to things like good evidence or good reasons, and not to a decision made by the believer. Suppose I command you to believe that Buster Keaton is the greatest figure in the history of cinema. In fact, suppose I offer you a tall stack of money to believe that. No matter how much you like the deal, you can't just decide to believe this, or anything else. Our beliefs respond not to bribes or threats, but to what we find convincing, a point lost on those Christians who tried to compel Kreskus and his fellow Jews to convert. If you were minded to accept my bribe, the most you could do would be to seek out good evidence that Keaton really is as great as I claim, for instance by watching some of his films. Likewise, Kreskus says, we believe in God because we have reasons to do so, not because it is commanded. But all this is merely a skirmish before the main battle which is fought over the premises used by Maimonides to demonstrate what he thinks we are commanded to believe, that God exists, is one, and is immaterial. As we saw when we looked at Maimonides, he offered two methods for proving God's existence. The easy method is to presuppose that the cosmos began in time, and infer from this that such a cosmos would need a creator. The other method is the one attacked by Kreskus. In this case we instead begin by arguing that the cosmos is eternal. We show that the heavens of the cosmos are eternally moving. Since time is the measure of motion, as Aristotle tells us, time must be eternal too. On the other hand, the body of the cosmos is finite in size. It has an edge, namely the outer surface of the furthermost heavenly sphere which is surrounded by nothing, not even empty void. Since the cosmos is finite in this way, it cannot contain within itself the power needed to generate an eternal motion. Instead there must be an immaterial mover capable of causing the everlasting motion of the heavens, and this is God. To his credit, Maimonides is very forthcoming about the principles that need to be accepted or established if this argument is to work. He counts 26 of them, and sets them out at the beginning of the second part of his Guide for the Perplexed. As you might have noticed from the summary I just gave, the premises include practically every core idea of Aristotle's physics, the eternity and finite size of the universe, the nature of time, and the impossibility of void. Crescus is going to raise serious doubts about these premises and all the arguments that had been used to support them. He will thus threaten to sweep away the whole of natural philosophy as it was known in the medieval period. Again, he does this not because he has a better physics to put in its place, but simply because he sees the Aristotelian system as an inadequate basis for belief in God. Since there are 26 premises to consider, I won't be able to go through them all, but a look at the highlights, like a viewing of one or two Buster Keaton movies, should be apple proof of greatness. At the risk of making it sound like this episode is going to be an awfully long one, let's start with infinity. Aristotle accepted the possibility of what is called a potential infinity, which is when you have a situation of indefinite increase, like counting up through numbers. There's no end to the process, but you will never get to an actually infinite number, so this is perfectly possible. It's impossible, though, that anything be actually infinite, for instance that the body of the universe be unlimited in size. Aristotle devised clever arguments to show the impossibility of such a scenario. Imagine, for instance, an infinitely large disk that is rotating around a central point. Now picture an endless line drawn from that center point across the disk, like an infinitely long spoke in an infinitely large wheel. Aristotle realizes that in a rotating circle, a point further from the center will move faster than one closer to the center. For instance, in a normal, finitely sized wheel, a point on the wheel's rim moves faster as the wheel spins than a point on a spoke right near the middle. So a point infinitely distant from the center on our infinitely long line would need to move infinitely fast, if it is to move along in this rotation. But infinitely fast motion is absurd, so there cannot be an infinitely large body. Against this sort of argument, Kresge uses a tactic Aristotle himself had employed in thinking about potential infinity. Aristotle had said, for instance, that any finite body can always be divided, then divided again and again. In principle, there is no limit to how small the divisions can be, though of course there is a practical limit to how finely we can chop things up. Similarly, Aristotle would explain the infinity of the eternal past like this. For any number of years you choose to name, the universe has existed for longer than that number of years. In other words, if you say, has the world existed for one million years? Aristotle will be willing to say, sure, in fact, for longer than that, and he'll give you the same response no matter what number you choose. Just as with dividing a body or counting upwards through the numbers, you never have to stop, but neither do you ever finish the process by arriving at an actually infinite number of past years. Now Kresge proposes that the same thing can be applied to Aristotle's thought experiment of the infinitely long line on the infinite disk. Take any point on the line you like. It will always be true to say that the line extends past that point as it stretches away from the center of the disk. Yet there is no particular point that is infinitely far from the center, no point that would need to be moving infinitely fast for the rotation to succeed. Rather, the points on the line are at indefinitely increasing, yet in each case finite, distances from the center of the disk. In a stroke of genius, Kresge thinks to compare this to an already well-known result in geometry in which two lines can approach each other indefinitely, getting closer and closer without ever meeting. You might remember the word asymptote from high school. That's what Kresge is referring to. If the distance between two lines can get smaller and smaller forever without ever going to zero, then likewise the line's length can get bigger and bigger forever while remaining limited at any given point. And like this imaginary line, Kresge isn't done. He adds several more points of his own that controvert age-old assumptions about infinity. For instance, he states that a line bounded in one direction and infinite in the other is no smaller than a line that is infinite in both directions. Here Kresge is rejecting an assumption made even by other critics of Aristotle, like Akinde in his arguments against the eternity of the universe. Akinde and pretty much everyone else had assumed that one infinite quantity cannot form only a part of another infinite quantity while both are equal in size. Imagine for instance an infinite pile of marbles, half of which are red and half of which are black. Before Kresge, most philosophers would see this as impossible because the red marbles would be infinite in number yet only half as many as the infinite total number of marbles. Kresge fails to see the problem. In his example, the two lines are obviously going to be the same size, even though one is bounded at one end while the other is not. After all, both lines are of indefinite and unmeasurable length. This is all that infinite means, without a limit. Kresge doesn't develop this idea at length, so to speak. Aristotle and Akinde would probably say he has lost his marbles. But in fact he has made a fundamental breakthrough, one that would make it possible to accept, for instance, that the set of positive integers is the same size as the set of even positive integers. After all, that case is just like our example of the infinite pile of marbles, half of which are red. Kresge's new conception of infinity has implications for how we conceive of the physical universe. Aristotle, Maimonides, and friends assumed that the cosmos ends at the sphere of fixed stars, and that there is no empty space beyond that sphere. But Kresge again sees no problem with supposing an infinite void around the cosmos, as the Stoics had suggested in antiquity. After all, he's shown with his example of the infinitely long line on the disk that there is nothing absurd with supposing that space extends indefinitely. Hang on a minute though, because Aristotle has another way of blocking this move. He argued that, infinite or not, void space is impossible. His most persuasive argument was that the speed of any motion is inversely related to the density of the medium it passes through. There is, for instance, the well-known phenomenon that giraffes lope more quickly through the fresh air of the savanna than they do through honey. But a void space has zero density, so the speed of any motion through it should be infinitely fast—the same absurdity we had before with the infinite line on the infinite disk. Against this, Kresge deploys an idea that had already been suggested by Philoponus and Ibn Bajja, that the effect of a dense medium is only to slow down a motion's intrinsic speed. With a void, there would be no slowing effect at all, so the speed would be determined solely by the motion's impetus. But of course, this speed will remain finite. Kresge sees another problem for Aristotle and Maimonides here. Motions are indeed impeded and slowed down by the friction of the media they pass through, but this is never going to happen in the case of the rotation of the heavens, since in Aristotle's own cosmology, there is no friction applied to them. Why then do we need an infinite power to make them move? It would be one thing if the heavens moved infinitely quickly. That would indeed call for a power of infinite intensity to make them go. But on Aristotle's own reckoning, the heavens are instead moving at a finite speed, albeit for an infinitely long time. No infinite or immaterial cause is needed to explain this, argues Kresge. Rather, a finite amount of power could be applied to set them into motion, and they will just rotate forever, since there is nothing to slow them down or stop them. And another thing, while we're at it, it doesn't actually seem that any external cause is necessary to move the heavens, whether the cause would be finite or infinite in power. The heavens are surely alive and capable of moving themselves, after all. If not, they would be less impressive than even a humble insect down here on earth. Maimonides's proof for God's existence is by now in tatters, and Aristotelian natural philosophy has suffered a lot of collateral damage in the process. This is all that Kresge set out to achieve. But he also points out that, given the shakiness of Aristotle's physics, we could easily imagine that our universe is radically different from the one supposed in the philosophical tradition. For instance, if actual infinity is possible, and if there is an infinite void, there could well be other worlds out there in the emptiness, a hypothesis last seriously entertained by ancient atomists. In fact, our own cosmos might be only one in an infinite series of worlds created and then destroyed by God. Of course, this would presuppose that time stretches back beyond the existence of our world, something Aristotle would reject, but I'm guessing you won't be surprised to hear that Kresge sees no problem here. Like the early unorthodox Muslim philosopher Ar-Razi, Kresge is giving up on the Aristotelian understanding of time as dependent on motion, and of place as the limit surrounding a body. Rather, place is simply the void or emptiness whose possibility Kresge has now established. As for time, Aristotle had defined it as the measure of motion in respect of prior and posterior. Not really, says Kresge. For one thing, time could measure bodies at rest, too, or even the extended existence of immaterial things. He admits that Aristotle was right, for once, to define time as a measure, but it is a measure that we ourselves impose when we evaluate the interval between any two moments, as when we say that the starting and end point for one revolution of the sun are a year apart. So here, Kresge is unlike Ar-Razi, for whom time was an independent, eternal principle of the universe. For Kresge, time is instead brought into being by our mental activity, so it exists only in the soul. As a result, Kresge has no trouble in supposing that time stretches back to before our cosmos existed. That just means we can mentally entertain longer periods than the finite time during which the cosmos has been around. If he's serious about all this, Kresge is proposing that God creates a universe containing infinitely many worlds existing now, and a further infinity of worlds in the past and in the future. Which just goes to show how lucky we are to live in the world that had Buster Keaton in it. Kresge's demolition job on Aristotelian physics is his most famous achievement, and probably deservedly so. But it should not distract us from the important fact that he actually accepts the point Maimonides was trying to prove with his 26 premises. God does exist, and we can even prove it. How? Well, basically by using Avicenna's method. If we consider the whole of Kresge's universe with all its worlds, we may be grappling with something that is infinite, but it is still something that could have failed to exist. There must be a necessary existent to explain why this infinite contingency has been realized, and of course that necessary existent is God. Actually, Maimonides knew and made use of Avicenna's proof too, but Kresge thinks he didn't understand it properly. In his version of Avicenna's argument, Maimonides mentioned that if all things are possibly non-existent, then at some point in eternal time this possibility would be realized, and at that point there would be nothing. Kresge rejects this, seeing that the proof from contingency needs to assume nothing about eternity or for that matter about whether the things God has created are finite or infinite. Rather, Avicenna's insight was to label the whole aggregate of created things, finite or infinite, as contingent, and argue from there to the need for an external necessary cause to explain why this contingency has been realized. We can tell from this that Kresge was no implacable foe of philosophy in all its forms. Rather, like Al-Ghazali in the Eastern Islamic world, he held philosophers to their own standards, pointing out the holes in their supposedly demonstrative arguments. Yet he made use of philosophical ideas himself when he turned to the question of how the Jewish law could be grounded. It's tempting to buttonhole Gersonides and Kresge, the two great thinkers of medieval Judaism after Maimonides, as representing the rationalist and anti-rationalist paths open to Jews in this period. There's something to that idea. Yet Gersonides, despite his enthusiasm for Averroes, was also a critic of the previous philosophical tradition, and Kresge structured his Light of the Lord in pretty much the same way as Gersonides structured his Wars of the Lord. Both proceed by listing classic arguments of philosophy and then passing judgment upon them. For Kresge, there is a time and place for everything, even philosophy. So, both these thinkers were complex characters, which makes it worth our while to spend one more episode in their company. Please join me for an interview with an expert on both of them, Tamar Rudofsky, at the same time and same place, The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Gersonides and Crescus with Tama Rudofsky, who is professor of philosophy at Ohio State University. Hi, Tama, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hello. First, could you just provide the listeners with a quick reminder of who Gersonides and Crescus were? So their death dates are Gersonides died in 1344, Crescus in 1410, so that means they weren't contemporaries, they didn't know each other, but they're often discussed together. So can you just sort of say who they are and maybe give us an idea of why people tend to group them together in that way? Well, I think we can start with why they are grouped together. That's a pretty straightforward answer. We can think of Jewish philosophy as being pre-Maimonides and post-Maimonides, and both Gersonides and Crescus are responding to Maimonides' guide for the perplexed. They respond in different ways, but they're both seen as taking on issues in Maimonides' guide. Gersonides was born in France, 1288. He was extremely influential as a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. His major work, Milchimot Hashem, or Milchimot Adonai, Wars of the Lord, was written in response to Maimonides' guide for the perplexed. Crescus wrote somewhat later, born in 1340 in Barcelona. His major work, Sefer or Adonai, the Book of the Light of the Lord, was finished several months before his death, and it was written as a polemic against both Maimonides and Gersonides. So if we see the trajectory from Maimonides onward, we see Gersonides taking on some of Maimonides' positions, but not all, and Gersonides taking on both. Not only do these two philosophers get associated with each other as different reactions to Maimonides, but I think they're often seen, at least by people who don't know their works very well, as conveniently opposed figures. So Gersonides is a rationalist, he's a commentator on a Verroes, and Crescus is an anti-rationalist because he's famous for this attack on Aristotelian natural philosophy. And to be honest, this is pretty much what I thought before I started looking into them more to write about them for the podcasts. But actually reading them more carefully, I was struck by the fact that, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, their works are very similar to each other, so they both have this habit of presenting other philosophers' arguments in great detail, and they'll go through all the premises and so on, and then they'll refute the arguments or say what's wrong with the arguments. So do you think that the two of them actually have more in common than people often are aware of? Well, that's an interesting question, yes and no. So they do share certain similarities, but yet I think their objectives are very different. In terms of similarities, both are writing under the shadow of Christian scholasticism, both are aware of scholastic method. Scholasticism is becoming more and more popular in the Jewish idiom, and so we find Jewish philosophers really writing in a much more rigorous, what we would call analytic style. They're aping Aristotle, they're aping the scholastics, I mean not aping, but they're really copying methodologically and pedagogically this sort of rigor that we don't find, for example, if we read Maimonides' God for the perplexed. I think students are often really surprised to find almost a lack of rigorous philosophical argument in Maimonides' guide. Gersonides says at the outset that he wants to render philosophy scientific, he's very concerned with the rational aspect of philosophy, and we find Crescus in that same camp. So yes, they do share certain methodological similarities, but I would then go on to argue that they're really very different in terms of what they see their role to be. Crescus is much more global than Gersonides, and he really takes on a global attack upon the very doing of philosophy. He's directing his work against all Aristotelians, Maimonides, Gersonides, anyone who uses Aristotle's arguments to undermine Judaism. So he really sees Aristotle's physics and metaphysics as threatening the fabric of Judaism, and he is determined to marshal whatever he needs to dismantle Aristotle. And that's clearly not Gersonides' point of view. Oh, no, absolutely not. I would say that Gersonides is quite comfortable with philosophy. He's a philosopher's philosopher, and perhaps that's why I've always been attracted to him. He's much more concerned to render Jewish beliefs even more rational than anyone else had done. So he's very much within the rationalist camp. He really takes on philosophical arguments in support of Judaism. He doesn't see the philosophical arguments as threatening in any way, Judaism. Could I just follow up on something you said there, which is that both of them are writing in the shadow of Latin scholasticism, which of course is something I haven't covered in the podcast yet, but nonetheless, I think it might be worth saying something about how much they knew about Latin scholastic philosophers. So we're talking about Gersonides living in the first half of the 14th century, Crescus in the second half of the 14th century. I mean, he died in 1410, so already into the 15th century. So that means in theory they could have been aware of authors like Aquinas or even Scotus. How plausible is it to think that they were actually reading the works of the famous scholastic philosophers? I mean, I know there's a controversy about whether Gersonides read anything in Latin, for example. I wish I could give a definitive answer. There is quite a lot of disagreement over the extent to which Gersonides was aware of Latin writers and whether or not he used Latin or was aware of Latin texts. I personally feel that he did make use of works written in Latin. I think there's good evidence for that. I think it's also worth noting that he himself worked in Avignon at the papal court the very two years that Occam was there. And if you look at Occam's theory, for example, of future contingents and you compare it to Gersonides' theory of future contingents, both of them are espousing a minority view which had not been developed before in either Jewish or scholastic philosophy. So to me it's remarkably naive to claim that Gersonides is writing in a vacuum. He's at the court, he's doing astronomer, he's the papal astronomer, he's having works commissioned. In Crescas' case also, he's writing during the height of the scholastic world. There are a lot of similarities between him and Nicholas Oresme, between him and Peter Oriel. Zev Harvey has written extensively on the similarities. Again, we don't have definitive proof, but the writings suggest that Crescas was very much aware of what was happening in the 14th century. That's really interesting. Among the scholastics. So it's very, very interesting. I guess when they invent a time machine, the first thing we should do is go back and listen to Gersonides arguing with Occam about future contingents. Oh, absolutely. And I'm convinced that they probably spoke in Provencal. Because we know that Gersonides knew Provencal, Occam knew Provencal. What are they talking as they're circling around the court on a Tuesday afternoon? Okay. Note to self before they invent time travel, learn Provencal. I can listen to them. Right. Okay. So I wanted to focus in particular on one philosophical topic because obviously both Crescas and Gersonides talk about many philosophical topics and we can't cover all that. So I thought maybe we could focus on one that you've written about a lot, which is time and eternity. And beginning with Gersonides, he seems to have a very unusual view on this because he denies the eternity of the universe as I understand it. But on the other hand, he thinks that time is eternal. So time has been, as it were, there the whole time that God has been there. Maybe that would be one way of thinking about it. But the physical universe has come into existence at some particular moment. So a finite number of years ago. So first of all, I guess, is that right? And second of all, how does he defend that view? Well, he actually has a fairly, as you suggest, he has a fairly complex view. And his longest book in Wars of the Lord is devoted to the problem of creation. Book six is actually longer than the other five books together. Well, I'm not counting book five, which is his book on astronomy, but books one through four. And he's responding in part to Maimonides. Now it's interesting because I imagine that when you presented Maimonides, you talked a great length about how ambiguous Maimonides himself is with respect to the doctrine of creation. Maimonides can be read as postulating creation ex nihilo. He can be read as an eternal creation theorist. He can be read as an epistemological skeptic. I mean, there are any number of ways of unpacking what Maimonides has in mind. And so Maimonides' own theory is ambiguous. Here, Sonnides takes on Maimonides, positions Maimonides as an ex nihilo theorist. So he reads Maimonides' guide very straightforwardly and takes on Maimonides' theories of time and creation. And so what he will want to argue is that, as you suggested, the world itself is eternal in the sense that it's engendered out of what he calls a pre-existent matter. He distinguishes two types of matter, Geshem and Homer, and taken from the book of Genesis. He's not being particularly creative on this score. But he does argue that the world was created out of an eternally pre-existent matter. And yet, at the same time, he wants to argue that time is finite. And so the world itself, the temporal sphere, is not eternal but was actually generated. And he makes a very interesting point, arguing that with respect to potentiality, the past itself is finite and contains no potency. Only the future contains potency. So he's really distinguishing himself from the Aristotelian model of time. And I find that very interesting because it then allows him, in his material having to do with future contentions, to claim that the future is open once he's allowed for the potency embedded in the future rather than the past. So let me get clear on something there. So there's pre-existing matter before the universe as we know and love it exists. And you said that the past is finite and that the temporal sphere came into existence at a certain moment, a finite number of years ago. That's right. Does he actually think that time itself came into existence when the physical universe came into existence? Or does he think that time extends backwards into the period when there was only pre-existing matter? I read him in the latter way that time and motion are finite but ungenerated. So it's an odd combination. So Homer itself has an underlying temporal thread to it. So it's sort of like maybe he thinks something like organized time or time that's measured comes into existence when the cosmos starts to move. Right. Although he doesn't make the sort of arguments that Plato, for example, makes in the Timaeus. Actually, you just mentioned Plato. And Plato is always mentioned in the context of these eternity debates in the Arabic-speaking world as someone who did in fact believe that there was pre-existing matter and then the cosmos came to be because the demiurge comes along and organizes the matter. But I know that also in the rabbinical tradition there was this tradition of rabbis talking on the basis of Genesis about a pre-existing material substrate. So do you think that Gersonides would have seen himself as a follower of Plato or the rabbinical literature or both? I mean, did he think there was a kind of nice confluence between, say, the Mishnah and Plato on this issue? Oh, he definitely uses both. I mean, he sees himself in book six as bringing together both the rabbinic strand and the philosophical strand. He uses both. As you rightly point out, there's a long rabbinical tradition of reading the first verses in Genesis as supporting, well, not so much an eternity model, but an eternal matter, a pre-existing matter. And God still plays a role in that Genesis model. And so I think this is the sort of model that Gersonides has in mind. Another question I guess that arises here is, does he have a convincing argument for this? So, I mean, it's one thing to say, oh, look, I agree with Plato. I agree with the rabbis, the ancient rabbis. So I must be right. But presumably he has more to offer here than kind of appeal to authority. So is his main idea going to be actually in a way an Aristotelian one, which is that if you don't have some kind of potential, in other words, matter that can be actualized when God creates the universe, then there's nothing for God to work with. And so there's no way he could actually create. No, he actually, it's very interesting. In book six, he provides us with about a dozen very carefully worked out arguments having to do with the of the finite divisibility of time. So he really takes on the whole theory of the continuum, infinite divisibility and why it is that an infinite sequence can't be infinitely divided. He's very much aware of the Aristotelian arguments as they come in through the physics. I mean, we've got the super commentaries as well. And so, no, no, he's not at all working on the basis. In fact, in book six, I mean, I should point out he doesn't quote rabbinic authorities at all. Very much unlike Maimonides, if you read the guide, Maimonides is quoting right and left. But Gersonides rarely quotes scripture in support of a philosophical position. And so what we have is sustained analytic argument that probably I think I would say the first example of sustained analytic argument in Jewish philosophy. That's interesting because that in a way reinforces this contrast we were talking about before between Gersonides, who's this kind of hard nosed philosopher who really wants to argue within the philosophical tradition, and Crescus, who of course, is much more like a critic of the philosophical tradition, even though they both write texts full of arguments. And Crescus actually is also quite well known for having interesting things to say about time. So in this case, what he does is much more of a wholesale criticism of the Aristotelian conception of time. So what does he not like about Aristotle's conception of time? And what conception of time does he want to replace it with? Well, Crescus, as I said earlier, is trying to weaken Aristotle's hold on Jewish philosophy. And he sees that hold as really cemented in the 26 propositions that Maimonides lays out in the Guide for the Perplex. These propositions form the basis of Maimonides' metaphysics. They're primarily Aristotelian. They're written in part in response to Islamic kalam ontology, and Maimonides is replacing the kalam with these 26 propositions. But Crescus turns to those propositions and dismantles them one by one. The ones that are obviously most germane to today have to do with time and space. And so what Crescus will want to do is claim that it's these propositions that lead philosophers to reject creation. And so what he tries to do is reject, well, he starts first by rejecting Aristotle's theory of time, replacing it with what some scholars have called a subjective conception of time, suggesting that time is defined in terms of what he calls the duration of the life of the thinking soul. So this is quite different from anything that you'll find in Jewish philosophy. It actually reminds me of Augustine's subjective conception of time. I was just going to say that. Yeah, oh, very, very much, very, very much. Now obviously Crescus hasn't read Augustine, but you know, thinking about theories of time, there are only so many ways one can characterize time. And if you're rejecting wholesale, the Aristotelian conception, there are just so many moves you can make. And so what he wants to claim is that the existence of time is only in the human soul. It's only because we have a mental conception of measurement that time even exists. Time becomes definite only by being measured by motion. And so here he's, you know, he's certainly adhering to certain Aristotelian pieces, but replacing the objective measure with a subjective awareness of time. Actually, I'm always fascinated by this kind of subjective theory of time. And it always makes me wonder the same thing, both in Augustine and in Crescus, and whoever else says it. So because it seems clear that they're saying, well, there's no time kind of out in the world. So it's going on, as it were, in our minds. But then it seems to me like that could be understood in two different ways. One way would be to say, well, look, our own mental life is conditioned by time, really. And so when we experience our thoughts or our memories kind of going on from moment to moment, that experience is conditioned by this phenomenon, which is time. So I would almost say it's real, but it's a mental phenomenon rather than objective phenomenon. So that's one way to understand it. And another way to understand it would be that time is basically an illusion. So we project our experience of things as being temporal onto the world, but actually it's kind of an artifact of just the way we think. And there isn't anything either inside the mind or outside the mind that's genuinely temporal. I'm not sure that that distinction makes sense. But if it does, which side of that do you think that Crescus would be on? I think it does make sense. Now, I'll lay my cards on the table. I think Augustine adopts the second, and I also think that Crescus adopts the second. So I'm reading this subjectivity of time in a fairly radical way. I think they really, well, let's stick with Crescus. I think Crescus really wants to say that time is nothing but duration. Hittabkut is the Hebrew term that he uses. Time is not identified with anything outside the soul, with physical motion, with bodies, with temporal flux, etc, etc. So I think this is fairly radical. And it's also not identified with the objective fact that our thoughts are somehow elapsing. So it's really like a mentally produced phenomenon. Yes. That's amazing. I mean, it's, I think, almost inevitably bears comparison with Kant as well. So actually, this is another thing we should do if we get a time machine, we should collect Kant, Crescus, and Augustine and make them all talk to each other about time. That's right. That's right. So, speaking of the future, and what happened after Crescus, let's not go as far as Kant, but let's go a little bit into the legacy of both Gersonides and Crescus. So I guess with Gersonides, when I think about his later influence, I think about him mostly in terms of his super-commentaries on Averroes, rather than in terms of the Wars of the Lord. And so I would think of him as a kind of forerunner of Jewish Averroism in the Renaissance, which is something I guess I'll cover eventually. With Crescus, the thing that leaps to mind is that he has some role to play in maybe helping to kickstart the rise of modern science because of his criticisms of Aristotelian natural philosophy. But these are kind of vague ideas. So could you say something a little bit more about what kind of influence both of them exerted in the later tradition? Sure. Certainly Gersonides' super-commentaries on Averroes were tremendously influential. But I want to suggest that the Wars of the Lord was as well. Interestingly, the book was reviled by his immediate successors. The title, Milchomot Hashem, was transposed to be Milchomot Negeh Hashem, Wars Against the Lord. And so most of his successors really found Gersonides quite difficult. He was just far to the, I don't know if you say to the right or to the left, but he was far more extreme in his ultra-rationalism than most philosophers. Interestingly, he was rediscovered in the 19th century by modern Jewish philosophers looking for rationalist models in the medieval period. And so you look at the early 19th century German Jewish reformers, Maimonides wasn't even rationalist enough for them. And so Gersonides becomes their role model. And so he really re-enjoys a renaissance in the 19th and 20th century. And I think that's one reason perhaps why he's been so popular in the latter half of the 20th century. Because of his rigor, he's a logician as well. We didn't even talk about his logical work, but he writes a work in logic. In his astronomy, I must take the opportunity to say that he's one of two Jewish philosophers who had lunar craters named after them. Who's the other one? Is it you? Abraham and Benezra, writing a hundred years earlier from Jewish philosopher and astrologer. And I'm guessing the reason they had craters is because both of them were so interested in astronomy and astrology. So we have there, you know, we have the legacy in astronomy, the legacy in astrology, and of course we haven't had time to say anything about his astrology. And his proto and extreme rationalism, he says in, and I want to just read a sentence from the wars. If the literal sense of the Torah, of scripture differs from reason, it is necessary to interpret those passages in accordance with the demands of reason. This is really a remarkable statement for a Jewish philosopher to be making in the early 14th century. Maimonides danced around that issue, but Gersonides very, very clearly, reason is not incompatible with the true understanding of Torah. He clearly learned a lot from reading of Aroes, right? That is exactly right. And so I really see him as a champion for religious rationalism. And so is Crescus basically a hero of the other side, so the people who thought that even Maimonides was already going too far in the rationalist direction would presumably have quite welcomed Crescus's attack. Exactly. So Crescus becomes more a spokesperson for, I don't want to say for apologetics, because that's really not taking him fully seriously. I mean, he's a very serious philosopher, but he does reinstate the balance and he really does see himself as a protector of the faith. And he has been seen that way, of course, by his successors. But I think Seth Harvey made a wonderful point. I mean, he suggested that it's the critique of Aristotelian science undertaken by Crescus that really opens the possibility for the dismantling of Aristotelian science. And so one might argue that Crescus's critique of Aristotle helped lay the groundwork for the abandonment of Aristotelian science in subsequent centuries. So we have already, you know, the 15th, 16th, 17th century, even in Spinoza, we see reference back to Crescus. Crescus allows for alternative scientific worldview. So in a way, he's a forerunner. I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but a forerunner of the scientific revolution. Right, because sometimes the most scientific thing you can do is point out the mistakes of earlier scientists. Exactly, exactly. I think another, just maybe last thought that I would have about this is that Maimonides himself, of course, in some of his moods, he's very keen to emphasize the limits of reason, the things that we can't know, say about the heavenly spheres. And so you could think of Gersonides and Crescus not as a kind of fan and critic of Maimonides, but as people who are latching on to different moments in this very complicated philosophical profile of Maimonides. So Gersonides running with the rationalist elements and Crescus running with a more skeptical element. Right, right. Although Gersonides is very clear, there are very few limits to human intellect. And I'm guessing, you know, if you think about the difference between Maimonides and Gersonides, Maimonides says very clearly in the guide, I've done my best to learn astronomy. I've studied albatrossia. I've studied the eccentric and the epicycle. Maybe someone more intelligent than I can figure out these details. Then Gersonides comes along, one of the most brilliant astronomers of the period. And so therein lies the difference. Yeah, right. Well, speaking of the limits of human reason, in the next episode, I'm going to be looking at something rather different, which is what various Jewish philosophers made of the Book of Job. And this question actually comes up, so can we understand why suffering is inflicted on humans by God, or does God inflict suffering on us at all? So that's what I'll be talking about next time. But for now, I'd like to thank Tama Rudofsky very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been really lots of fun. Thank you. And please join me for the Book of Job and Jewish philosophy next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Suffering in Jewish Philosophy As universes go, this one does have its good points. There is the occasional promotion at work, the odd open-air screening of Buster Keaton's The General, the opportunity to enjoy friends, family, and podcasts. But on the other side of the balance is the enormous amount of suffering endured by humans. Poverty, war, sickness, pain, these things have always been prevalent in human life and show no sign of being banished any time soon. It's a matter of dispute, whether the good outweighs the bad, but there's no disputing the reality and extent of suffering. So, theologians and philosophers of all religious persuasions have always felt the need to offer what is called a theodicy, from the Greek words theos or God and dike or justice. To offer a theodicy is to justify God, that is to explain how it can be that the world does contain evil and suffering, even though it was fashioned by a wise, good, and powerful divinity. Obviously, this issue is nothing new in our history of philosophy. Plato's appeal to the principle of necessity in his Timaeus, Plotinus's idea that evil is a kind of privation or non-being, the Greek church-father origins idea of fallen souls, these are only a few of the prominent theodicies we've already discussed. But the problem of suffering might nonetheless be said to occupy an especially central place in the Jewish philosophical tradition. The narrative of Judaism embodies the problem at its most paradoxical. The Jews are selected by God as the chosen people, yet wind up suffering more than any other people, their temple destroyed, their homeland lost, scattered in exile. How providential then, perhaps literally, that the Hebrew Bible should include one of the classic religious texts on suffering, namely the book of Job. I don't know if you've read it recently, but if not you might want to. It's not terribly long and has a poetic power that is awesome in every sense of the word. I'll summarize it for you now, occasionally quoting from Len Goodman's translation of the Arabic version by Sa'adi Yagaon, which is a nice Job if you can get it. It begins in once-upon-a-time mode, with the following words, A man there was in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, God-fearing and shunning evil. Here we already have one of the key thematic and philosophical points of the book. Job is a good man, so surely God will shower favors upon him, right? Well, yes, at first. He has a large family, is wealthy with lots of livestock, and conscientiously sacrifices to God to thank him for this bounty. But then, a second character turns up—Satan. He suggests to God that Job only shows due reverence to his Lord because he has been so highly favored. Take away his prosperity in his family and he'll sing a different tune, cursing God's name. God agrees to test Job, and arranges for his wealth and family to be lost. Job is, naturally, rather upset by this. He tears his clothing, shaves his head, and falls prostrate, saying, Naked came I from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return to the grave. Still, he does not curse God, so Satan urges God to take away Job's bodily health. God allows this too, instructing only that Job's soul be left unharmed, and Job is struck down with illness, covered from head to toe with sores. Now, Job laments at greater length. He still does not curse God, but does curse the day he was born, and in general, bewails his fate. At this stage, things turn more in the direction of a debate. Three friends of Job appear, with the rather wonderful names Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. Rather than offering comfort and sympathy, they berate Job. Surely he has committed some sin, or God would not be visiting such misery upon him. Job denies this, insisting that he has remained righteous. Next, a fourth friend, named Elihu, having listened to this and been unimpressed by Job's critics, joins the conversation. He puts it to Job that God and His majesty may be inscrutable to us in his ways, but can never be accused of injustice. If God sees fit, He may send down the greatest of suffering on any man, until his soul wretch at food, even the choicest ailments and the bulk of his flesh perish from sight, his bones ground until invisible. Then he may also reward the same man later in compensation. Job is silenced by this speech, but a far more impressive speaker is yet to come. From the midst of a great storm, the voice of God comes to Job, saying in effect, who are you to complain? Where was Job when God was fashioning the world? Suitably chastised, Job agrees that the Lord's power is invincible and recants his lament, taking solace in dust and ashes. Which turns out to be a good move. God is now satisfied that Job has passed the test, and commands that Job be restored to wealth, regain wealth and a large family, and in general live happily ever after. This riches to rags to riches story can be read as a kind of philosophical dialogue, albeit not of the sort preferred by Socrates. There is no question and answer exchange or detailed refutation. Rather, the cast of characters mostly declaim at one another in long accusatory speeches. On the other hand, the book of Job does have something in common with the Socratic dialogue. It ends without giving any obvious answer to the main question at hand. There's no clear message about why a just God would allow suffering to be inflicted on a good man. What does come through loud and clear, like a voice from the whirlwind, is God's might and unquestionable majesty. Perhaps the answer to our question about why God allows evil is that, as mere humans, we have no right to ask. But Jewish commentators on the book of Job were not content to leave it at that. It received some attention in antique Judaism, but came to be an object of especially intense scrutiny in the medieval period. Many commentaries were written on Job, often dealing more with the linguistic or surface meaning of the book. But philosophers too were attracted to it. Like late ancient commentators on Plato, they thought the text's failure to provide any clear doctrine was only skin deep. A philosophically informed reading could discover a rich teaching on divine providence, often on the basis of small but crucial clues. Looking at these treatments of Job will allow us to do two worthwhile things at once—to follow the key philosophical theme of suffering through the history of medieval Jewish thought, and to see how scriptural commentary could be a means of philosophical reflection, and vice versa. I'm going to look at several readings of Job, beginning with the one offered by its Arabic translator Saadia Gaon. As you'll remember, Saadia was the leading early medieval Jewish philosopher. He lived from the 9th to the 10th century. He discusses the problem of suffering in the work we talked about before, the book of doctrines and beliefs, but he also wrote a commentary on the book of Job itself. Like later philosophical commentators, Saadia thinks it contains a positive teaching about God and evil. He avoids the most tempting and easy resolution of the problem, which is to agree with Job's friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—love those names—that Job must have done something to deserve his torment. There is something right about their view in that God does indeed punish the wicked with suffering, but there is another purpose for suffering too—to test the righteous. This is the hidden message of the speech given by Job's fourth and wisest friend Elihu. Here Saadia is giving a fairly plausible reading of the text, since in the dialogue between God and Satan, God does seem to agree to wreak havoc upon Job as a way of testing his devotion. The idea is also faithful to Jewish tradition, since late ancient rabbinic thought had offered a similar interpretation of the infamous episode in which Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. There too, Abraham was being tested by God. Like Abraham, Job passes the test with flying colors. To maintain this reading, Saadia needs to quash any suspicion that Job's lament in the book is itself a kind of sin, a failure to accept what God has sent, however unwelcome it may be. It may seem unjust for God to test Job in this way, especially if he's being arbitrarily singled out for such an ordeal, but this overlooks the fact that Job will be rewarded later on to recompense him for his pains. That's what happens at the end of the story, when Job has his considerable wealth, health, and family restored to him. On Saadia's interpretation, it's crucial that God does not explain his whole strategy in the final speech from the whirlwind. Suppose he were to say, look here Job, all of this is like a scheduled fire drill, only a test. You just need to be patient and you are guaranteed to win out in the long run. In that case, Job would not really be tested, since it would be obvious that the smart play is to display devotion and humility until the test is over. Hence, God simply declares his own unchallenged power to see whether Job will submit as he ought to. Once Job does submit, he gets his reward. Of course, none of that is to be found at the surface level of the text. As Robert Eisen has said in his very useful study of the book of Job in medieval Jewish philosophy, Saadia is often the philosopher, reading ideas into the biblical text, rather than the exegete, reading them out of it. And not just any philosopher either, but a philosopher who was deeply influenced by Islamic kalam. When we first looked at Saadia, we saw that he borrowed extensively from the contemporary Muslim theologians known as the Mu'athazilites. Of course, they too had something to say about suffering and divine justice, and sometimes they even did so in the context of discussing Job, whose travails are mentioned twice in the Qur'an. As the self-styled Upholders of Divine Justice, the Mu'athazilites wanted above all to avoid admitting that God would ever deal unfairly with his creatures. Just as any evil we commit in this life will be punished, either before we die or in the hereafter, so any suffering we undergo in this life will be recompensed either in this life or the next. The Mu'athazilites went so far as to extend this idea to animals, stating that those who suffer will be rewarded in paradise, for instance with food. The Mu'athazilite God has been compared to a cosmic bookkeeper, always making sure the scales are balanced with evil going punished and suffering made good by compensation. In sharp contrast would be the theory of the rival kalam school, the Asharites. Their view would correspond to the don't ask, don't tell reading of God's final speech in the book of Job. We should simply accept what God, in his majesty, chooses for us without presuming to evaluate how well it conforms to our human expectations of justice. Saadia lived too early to see this opposition become entrenched in Islamic kalam, but it was well known to later Jewish philosophers, including the greatest of them, Maimonides. As we know, his guide to the perplexed is meant to help resolve philosophical difficulties arising from Scripture, so it is no surprise to see him include in it a discussion of the philosophically difficult book of Job. Where Saadia, and for that matter I, have presented Job's three friends as sharing a single view, Maimonides thinks that they represent three different ideas about divine providence. On his reading, only Eliphaz thinks Job is being punished for previous sins. Maimonides agrees with Saadia on this point. As it says right at the start of the book, Job is a righteous man, he has committed no sins for which he could be punished, so Eliphaz is simply wrong. Next comes Bildad, who for Maimonides is espousing the fire drill theory of Saadia and the Motezilites. Suffering is only a test. Zophar, meanwhile, goes with the Asherite view that God's ways are simply inscrutable. More remarkable still is that Maimonides sees Job himself as espousing a theory of providence. Maimonides thinks of the theory as being that of Aristotle, but it actually bears a greater resemblance to the interpretation of Aristotle we long ago saw being offered by Alexander of Aphrodisias. According to this Aristotelian theory, divine providence looks to the general good order of the universe but has no application at the level of the individual. To this, one could add Avicenna's question about whether God even knows about the things that befall individual people, never mind whether he actually intends them. So, when Job laments, he is not really blaming any divine plan, he is just cursing the fact that the natural order has by chance visited particularly harsh suffering on him. What this theory misses, according to Maimonides, is the fact that in exceptional cases humans may be granted reprieve from the vicissitudes of the natural order. This is the point he finds in the speech of the fourth friend Elihu. At one stage Elihu refers to an angel who will speak on behalf of the afflicted. What does this angel represent? Apparently some intervening force that can rescue people like Job from their distress. For Maimonides this has to do with the distinctively human faculty of intellect. The angel could represent a prophetic vision of future events, which allows the recipient of the vision to avoid future evils. But more fundamental, for Maimonides, is the idea that the intellectual part of each human transcends the physical realm where suffering occurs. So, Maimonides does after all diagnose a failure of sorts on the part of Job. Though Job is righteous and without sin, he is no philosopher. This means that he conceives of happiness in terms of the material goods of wealth, health, and family, and can only lament when these material goods are suddenly lost. What he ought to do is seek refuge in intellectual life, identifying himself with that part of him which is invulnerable. We are given a hint in this direction early in the book of Job, when God tells Satan that he can ruin Job's body but must spare his soul. The lesson discovered by Maimonides shares much with ethical teachings we have seen previously in our history of philosophy. Ultimately, it goes back through the Platonist tradition to the ethical ideal of Stoics like Epictetus. We should value only what is invulnerable, which for Platonists means nothing but the immaterial intellectual soul. Among texts from the Arabic-speaking sphere, it may remind us of the ethical treatises of figures like al-Kindi, al-Balchi, al-Razi, and Miskaway. They all argued that goods apart from intellect are inevitably lost, so that valuing them leads inevitably to sorrow. For subsequent Jewish philosophers, though, this intellectualist ethics would be first and foremost associated with Maimonides. His interpretation of the book of Job was taken up by two rationalist, pro-Maimonidean thinkers we looked at in episode 164, Ibn Tibbon and Gersonides. Both of them adhere fairly closely to Maimonides's reading of Job, albeit that they turn his ideas in rather different directions. The arch-Maimonidean Ibn Tibbon wants to stress the irrelevance of the material sphere for the happiness of the right-thinking person. He focuses especially on the immortality of the human soul. Like Maimonides, Ibn Tibbon thinks that Job laments because of his lack of philosophical understanding. If he were a philosopher, he would know that he is going to live on after death and be free of suffering. The surest way for him to avoid misery in this life is to identify himself with that intellectual part of him that will survive, since it is already beyond the bodily realm. This doesn't seem to justify the bodily sufferings that are visited upon us. To state the obvious, pain hurts, and the fact that I have an immortal soul doesn't make it hurt any less. But Ibn Tibbon thinks the Maimonidean theory can help explain why God would allow suffering. It is actually good for us to suffer, not because we are being tested as Saadia proposed, but because it teaches us not to seek happiness in this world. If our earthly lives consisted of nothing but pleasure and comfort, what reason would we have to turn towards our true happiness which lies in intellectual perfection? Gersonides takes a rather different tack in his Wars of the Lord, as well as a commentary he devoted to the Book of Job. Yes, yes, Gersonides agrees, we should pursue intellectual perfection, as the philosophers say, but this is not the ultimate lesson of the Book of Job. It is rather the assumed background. Unlike Maimonides and Ibn Tibbon, who thought that Job laments because he lacks philosophical insight, Gersonides thinks that Job is a philosopher from the start. What he needs to learn is that God has provided us not only with the prospect of an afterlife free of suffering, but also by helping us in this life. When Job begins his lament by cursing the day he was born, Gersonides takes this to represent a belief in astrological determinism. As an Aristotelian philosopher, Job thinks that our bodies, though not our intellectual souls, are at the mercy of nature and its workings. The speech of Elihu and the declaration of God from the whirlwind are supposed to remind Job, and us, that it is within God's power to show favors to individuals if he so chooses. He can do so by selecting someone to receive prophecy, for instance. Here, Gersonides is correcting the excesses of Aristotelian rationalism, where too little room is left for miraculous divine intervention. Gersonides has good reason to establish harmony between the Maimonidean approach and more traditional conceptions of divine providence. Remember that Maimonides and his followers did not step into an intellectual void. Generations of thinkers in Andalusia have already tried to marry the philosophical and Jewish traditions. This could take the form, or should I say matter and form, of Neoplatonic revival and the work of Ibn Gabirol. But the mainstream approach was more that of an author like Ibn Pakhuda. In his ethical work On the Duties of the Heart, which we examine several episodes back, he adopted a view on human suffering much like that of Saadia Khan. The mere fact of embodiment, which makes it possible for us to suffer, is a test sent to humankind by God. The right response is not to develop some kind of complex theory of providence, or to achieve unity with an act of intellect. Rather, it is to endure whatever God decrees for us with patience and humility with no thought of reward. This means that Ibn Pakhuda has a very simple take on the book of Job. For him, it shows a righteous man accepting the suffering that has been inflicted upon him. Job's friends are simply wrong to say that this is in any way a punishment that Job has deserved. In the 14th century, at least one author reasserted this sort of traditionalist interpretation against the rationalist exegesis of the Maimonideans. This was Simon ben Zimah Duran. He was, I regret to say, not one half of a 14th century music duo called Duran Duran, but rather a rabbi and legal scholar of Spain and Algeria who opposed rationalist developments within Jewish philosophy. One of Duran's works is a commentary on the book of Job, and in it he retrenches to a viewpoint much like that of Sadia and Ibn Pakhuda—suffering is a divine test sent by providence. Unlike them, though, Duran thinks that Job must have done something wrong to bring on this test. He finds the prospect of completely unprovoked suffering sent by God intolerable. Duran finds it easy to assume, though, that Job must have sinned at least a little, since after all he was a rich man who lived a life of comfort. For that matter, the very fact that Job gives voice to his anger and distress can itself be counted as a sin. By so forthrightly rejecting Maimonides's reading of Job and returning to a more traditional Jewish theodicy, Duran gives us a small glimpse of a wider phenomenon. We are accustomed to thinking of Maimonides as the greatest of medieval Jewish authorities in both philosophy and law, but in the generations following his death, his impact was not universally welcomed. The most obvious example was the Maimonidean controversy, which we've already examined. It was in the face of this sort of hostility that Gersonides sought to soften the rationalist edges of the Maimonidean philosophy. Further reactions to Maimonides came from a more radical direction, as we saw with Crescus's assault on Aristotelian natural philosophy. Mystical writers too criticized the great eagle for refusing to achieve a higher altitude. These critics belong to the movement known as Kabbalah. In the next episode, I'll be discussing the roots and development of the Kabbalistic tradition and how its authors responded to philosophers like Maimonides. So, don't mess with the Zohar, but do join me next time for Philosophy and Kabbalah, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Chariot of Fire, Kabbalah. I think I won't be offending anyone's religious sensibilities if I point out that the Bible contains some passages that are, shall we say, hard to understand. Just last week we saw the deep moral and theological puzzles posed by the book of Job, and in the past we've seen people worrying about physical descriptions of God in the Bible, and even about an episode in which Noah drinks himself into unconsciousness. But for sheer, tantalizing incomprehensibility, it is hard to beat the beginning of the book of Ezekiel. It begins where the book of Job ended, in a storm, with the prophet Ezekiel beholding a cloud full of flame. Within the cloud were four figures with four faces and four wings apiece, the faces those of humans, lions, bulls, and eagles. These beings moved next to the wheels of a great domed chariot bearing a throne, upon which sat a fiery, brilliantly shining figure, the Lord himself. If you're hoping that I am going to explain this vision to you, then I'll have to disappoint you. I don't know what it means, and if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you. The Mishnah and Talmud lay down the following restriction. The laws of incest may not be expounded in the presence of three people, the story of creation in the presence of two, nor the chariot in the presence of one, unless he is a sage. I know that my listeners are very wise, but you might not qualify as sages, and I certainly hope there's more than one of you. Despite this prohibition on teaching, or perhaps in part because of it, a genre of interpretive literature devoted to the chariot, or Merkaba, already developed in late antiquity. These esoteric treatises describe the journey of the mystic to behold God sitting upon his throne. Such texts help to inspire the most famous tradition of writing produced by medieval Jews, Kabbalah. The Hebrew word kabbalah means tradition. It refers to the fact that mystical ideas and interpretations of Scripture were handed down through the generations. Much as the Mishnah bans open teaching concerning the chariot, Kabbalists emphasize the secretive nature of their teaching. The influential German esotericist Eliezer of Worms referred specifically to the chariot when he said that the tradition, or kabbalah, of such interpretations can be transmitted only orally. No wonder then that Eliezer and the Kabbalists made themselves rather hard to understand when they did write down their ideas. We've looked at some strange and difficult texts before in our history of philosophy, like Iamblichus's Defense of Pagan Theurgy and the paradoxical writings of Ibn Adabi. But Kabbalah outdoes them, offering a welter of symbolic images, numerological analysis, and biblical exegesis that is usually more dumbfounding than the passages being interpreted. This stuff makes Iamblichus look like Bertrand Russell. Yet depending on further exegesis by other scholars, I hope that I can convey something of the underlying philosophical content of the Kabbalah and something of its relation to medieval Jewish thought more broadly. That Kabbalah is part of the story of medieval Jewish thought is already a point of controversy. The most celebrated Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, is written in Aramaic and narrates the journey of several rabbis through the Holy Land as they have a series of mystical encounters. In other words, the Zohar presents itself as a work from antiquity. But the great modern scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Skolem, showed that the Zohar must be a medieval text. He carefully analyzed the language used in the text to show that it couldn't reflect ancient usage, and also pointed out that whoever wrote the Zohar was pretty vague on the geography of the Holy Land. So it's now generally accepted that it was produced in the late 13th century. Skolem thought it was the work of a Kabbalist named Moses of Leon, but it may rather be a joint production of the group gathered around him. The enormous size and complexity of the Zohar would already be enough to suggest that it did not emerge from nowhere. Indeed, it is, aptly enough, drawing on a long-standing tradition of mystical literature. Among genuinely antique writings, we have the aforementioned texts devoted to the chariot, and also a work called the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation. Its origins are even more shrouded in uncertainty than those of the Zohar, but it is certainly far older than the medieval texts of Kabbalah proper. Already Saadia Gaon, who, as you'll remember, lived from the 9th to the 10th centuries, wrote a commentary on it. The Book of Creation anticipates some of the key themes of Kabbalistic literature. It refers to 32 paths of wisdom by which God created the universe, a reference to the numbers from 1 to 10 plus the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These numbers and letters are at the core of the Kabbalah. In part because of its late antique sources of inspiration, Kabbalah offers a revival of ideas from antiquity, not only from avowedly Jewish texts, but also from Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. You might remember that Christian authors mocked the rich symbolic language of Gnosticism, for instance when Irenaeus suggested that his Gnostic opponents might as well worship a divinity called pumpkin. The historical connection between Gnosticism and Kabbalah is hard to work out in detail, but seems real enough. In the case of Neoplatonism, things are a bit clearer. Kabbalists built on the philosophical writings of men like Ibn Gabriel, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and especially Maimonides, all of whom transmitted Neoplatonic ideas about the ineffability of God. The Kabbalist Moses of Burgos remarked that he and his associates planted their feet at the spot, reached by the heads of the philosophers. That nicely encapsulates the Kabbalists' attitude towards philosophy. Figures like Maimonides had gone as far as they could with human reason, and even pointed out the inability of reason to grasp God. The Kabbalists could go further by following one of two paths. Following a distinction already made in the medieval period, scholars now speak of contemplative versus ecstatic, or theosophical versus prophetic Kabbalah. The first contemplative kind begins with the earliest significant Kabbalistic text, the Sefer ha-Bahir, or Book of Splendor. It seems to have been produced in southern France in the late 12th century. The Book of Splendor looks back to antique mystical literature, referring, for instance, to Ezekiel's vision of the chariot, but it also anticipates the most central and celebrated teaching of the Kabbalah by enumerating powers within the structure of the divine. These are the so-called seferot, an inadequate translation of which might be numbers. Standardly, Kabbalists recognize ten of them. Though the seferot are associated with the first ten arithmetical numbers and with letters of the Hebrew alphabet, they are most frequently designated by ten names, beginning with keter, hokma, and binah, meaning crown, wisdom, and understanding. There were hints of this in the ancient Book of Creation and here in the Book of Splendor, but it is in the Zohar and other writings produced in the 12th and 13th centuries that the teaching of the seferot fully emerges. Particularly important in developing the theory was a circle of rabbis in Provence gathered around Abraham ben David, known as Rabad, and his son Isaac the Blind. This group has been credited with creating the first fusion between Kabbalistic teachings and Jewish philosophical sources. To see why, we must start at the top, with the idea of God's ineffability. Philosophers like Ibn Gabirol and Maimonides had been willing to admit that God lies beyond our grasp. We can understand him only indirectly by knowing the things he has created or by speaking of him negatively. The Provençal Kabbalists basically agree. They refer to God and himself as ein sof, the infinite, about which we can have no knowledge or speech. But they add a caveat that makes all the difference, namely that God also shows himself in the guise of the seferot. So the seferot play something like the role of divine attributes or of relations between God and the universe. We might loosely compare the contrast between the philosophers and Kabbalists here to that between the two groups of Muslim theologians we looked at, the rigorously negative Mu'atazilites and the more attribute-friendly Asharites. Or to make a comparison with more like-minded Islamic literature, we might think of the seferot as being analogous to the names of God in Ibn Arabi's mysticism. Like the names in Ibn Arabi, the seferot do not just represent God to his creation, they also interrelate and even come into conflict. The dynamic interaction between the seferot is one of the most striking aspects of Kabbalah. We find the Kabbalists evoking the Neoplatonic idea of a cycle of procession and return, all things coming from the first principle and going back to it, but within the divine seferot themselves. The first two seferot look especially Neoplatonic. The first, keter, or crown, shares God's infinity and ineffability. For this reason, there was debate among the Kabbalists about whether the crown could even be associated with a Hebrew letter, as are the other seferot. So we might tentatively compare keter, or crown, to the Neoplatonic one, with the following seferah, wisdom, playing a function much like the Neoplatonists' intellect. It contains the essences of things and also emanates the subsequent seferot, just as Plotinus' intellect is the realm of forms and gives rise to the rest of the Neoplatonic hierarchy. Such analogies may help to reassure us that it is worth including a discussion of Kabbalah in our history of philosophy, but we shouldn't push the analogies too far. The full set of ten seferot is distinctive. The importance of a set of ten powers is emphasized already in the ancient book of creation, which warns the reader, do not say that they are eleven or that they are nine. Also unique to Kabbalah is the welter of symbolic resonances assigned to the seferot. One seferah may stand to another as male to female, with frankly erotic language being used to describe the relationship. The seferot are also associated with the parts of the soul and of the human body, and they are of course matched to the parts of the chariot beheld in the vision of Ezekiel. The vivid and concrete language used in speaking of the seferot and the numerology used by the Kabbalists evoke another sort of ancient Jewish mystical literature which assigned huge numerical values to the size of God's limbs. There's a contrast here to Jewish medieval philosophers, from Sadia to Maimonides, who insisted that the incorporeality of God is absolutely fundamental to a correct understanding of Judaism. The Kabbalists agreed, of course, that God is in himself utterly beyond body or any other created thing. Yet they were more relaxed about the application of corporeal and even sensual language to the divine through the medium of the seferot. Rabad acidly remarked, regarding Maimonides's intolerance of Jews who describe God in bodily terms, This tradition within the tradition that was Kabbalah, the so-called contemplative or theosophical strand developed in Provence but found its way into Spain. This was thanks to Isaac the Blind, whose students brought this seferotic theory to the Catalonian city of Gerona at the beginning of the 13th century. From there, Kabbalistic ideas were taken up by a number of Spanish Jewish scholars, not least among them, Nahmanides, whom we saw trying to keep the peace in our episode on the Maimonides controversy. Given his standing in the Jewish community, Nahmanides's endorsement of Kabbalah gave the tradition a major push. He helped to create the momentum that eventually culminated with the writing of the Zohar towards the end of the 13th century. Northern Spain, which by this point had passed from Muslim into Christian hands, became the new center of Kabbalistic activity on the part of the Jews. The initial circulation of the Zohar occurred there. As we saw, the lead suspect for authorship was Moses from León, a north-central region of Spain, and a significant number of other Kabbalistic authors wrote there from the 13th to the 14th centuries. One is worth picking out in particular, Abraham Abulafia, greatest representative of the second ecstatic, or prophetic, variety of Kabbalah. His life stretched from 1240 to the 1290s, and it was rather eventful, though not quite as eventful as he expected it to be. After experiences he took to be prophetic in nature, Abulafia declared himself to be the Messiah, and he supposedly tried to get an audience with Pope Nicholas III in Rome in order to announce the good news. This should set up a fantastic anecdote, but unfortunately there isn't one, because the Pope died before there could be an encounter between the two, plus Abulafia may have made the whole thing up. Abulafia moved on to Sicily, where he acquired some followers but also provoked sufficient outrage that the locals appealed to Solomon ibn Adret, another expert in Kabbalah who hailed from Barcelona. We met him in a previous episode too, instituting a ban on teaching philosophy to the young. The two Kabbalists disagreed on several points. The touchiest issue was that Abulafia claimed to be the Messiah, whereas ibn Adret claimed that he, you know, wasn't. But also ibn Adret represented the more theoretical brand of Kabbalah as we know it from the Zohar and from Rabad and his circle. Since this, Abulafia proposed a new set of traditional values. When he wasn't provoking popes, Abulafia was trying to provoke a direct vision of God through the use of certain meditation techniques emphasizing a side of Kabbalah that has been compared to the ancient practices of Theurgy defended by Iamblichus. Through such ritualistic practices, the mystic could facilitate a union, or cleaving, together with God. Or if not God, then at least the active intellect, which was associated with one of the divine seferot. Abulafia called the resulting brand of Kabbalah prophetic and explicitly contrasted his approach to the contemplative, more theoretical style of ibn Adret. Rather than just investigating the symbolic relationships among the seferot, Abulafia would do things like repetitively chanting the letters of the tetragrammaton, joining its four consonants to all the Hebrew vowels in sequence. Spiritual practices like head-shaking, weeping, and fixed hand gestures would accompany the chanting. All this was in part inspired by rituals described by the aforementioned Eliezer of Worms. This may sound like an anti-rationalist critique of contemplative Kabbalah. Forget sephirotic theory, let's chant meaningless syllables and shake our heads until God grants us a vision, and then tell the Pope about it. But that would be unfair to Abulafia, who knew his way around philosophy. He wrote no fewer than three works commenting on Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed, and who retained elements of theoretical Kabbalah alongside his meditative practices. After all, we just saw that active intellect is seen by Abulafia as the target of mystical union. He also associated the ten seferot with the ten heavenly intellects of the Aristotelian cosmology. So it might be better to think of the practical side of prophetic Kabbalah as a complement or completion of the theory of the seferot. The ritual practices recruit the body into the soul's efforts to reach God. This helps to explain why Abulafia so frequently sounds like a Platonist, just like the other Kabbalists. One of his favorite themes is the opposition between our intellect and our imagination, something Abulafia compares to the relation between a rider and a horse that needs to be controlled with a whip. The same image had been used in the Platonist tradition to represent reason's control over the lower parts of the soul. And like the Platonists, Abulafia sees the lower psychological faculty, which he calls imagination, as a power closely tied to body which needs to be dominated by the intellectual part of the soul. But of course this is Kabbalah, so Abulafia's account of intellectual perfection comes packaged in the images and tropes of the Jewish tradition. Our flight from body towards God is like the flight of Moses and the Jews from Egypt. Abulafia also refers to the Biblical character Enoch who was transformed into the angel Metatron. In just the same way, the right mystical practices will enable us to transform into active intellect. Such details show us that Abulafia, like Kabbalists more generally, shared Maimonides' goal of finding agreement between the Jewish and philosophical traditions. But from a Maimonidean point of view, the Kabbalists are like British drivers from an American point of view, going the wrong direction. In Kabbalah, philosophy is absorbed into a coded and recoded language of scriptural images and esoteric terminology. Maimonides was doing the reverse, offering guidance to those who were perplexed by Biblical language by translating that language into rationalist Aristotelianism. A nice example is the one we began with, Ezekiel's vision of the chariot. Maimonides proposed reading this passage as a metaphysical theory dressed in symbolic robes. A student of Abulafia's rejected this, insisting that the chariot conveys to us the secrets of the emanations among the Seferot. Yet that reference to emanation strikes another Platonist note. And for some observers, the contrast between Maimonides and Kabbalah was not so much about rationalism as opposed to mysticism, it was instead about different approaches to philosophy, Kabbalah's Platonism or Maimonides's Aristotelianism. One partisan of the Aristotelian approach was the 15th century Renaissance thinker Elijah del Medigo. He was struck by the neat fit between Kabbalah and the Platonist texts that were just being made available in his day, thanks to new translations from Greek into Latin. In the Renaissance, Jewish philosophers will continue to take up both the Maimonidean and Kabbalistic sides of this debate. In fact, we may need to take another look at Kabbalah when we get to Renaissance philosophy. It continued to work its magic on Jewish thinkers in that period, and also made its influence felt among so-called Christian Kabbalists. In subsequent centuries Kabbalah will, appropriately enough, appear in numerous manifestations of which the most famous is probably Hasidic Judaism. In fact, Kabbalah is another one of those subjects that could provide material for a whole series of podcasts on its own. For now though, I'm going to stick with the task at hand by taking the story of medieval Jewish philosophy up to the brink of the Renaissance. We'll be looking next at the spread of Jewish thought beyond the borders of Spain and Provence where our focus has been for the last 15 or so episodes. To paraphrase Bob Marley, we know where we're going, we know where we've been. It's another exodus, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you you you you you you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? A Matter of Principles—Albo and Abravanel As every American schoolchild knows, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He was dispatched on his voyage of discovery by Ferdinand and Isabella, famous as heroes of the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. But heroic isn't really the right word for them if you ask me. In the same year of 1492, they offered the Jews and Muslims remaining in Spain a stark choice—convert to Christianity, leave our realms, or die. Many Jews converted and many left, sometimes choosing the Islamic world as the safest haven. This was a departure from the policy of earlier Christian monarchs. A century earlier, the rulers of the Christian principalities in Spain had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to stop a spasm of violence targeting Jews in the year 1391. The view from the top typically saw Jews as valuable members of the community, serving an especially useful role in economic terms. On the other hand, throughout the medieval period, Jews were often seen as being akin to Muslims. Often they were respected as Abrahamic peoples, much as Muslims designated the Christians and Jews as fellow peoples of the book. But for the same reason, chasing the last Muslims out of Spain seemed to the rulers to go hand in hand with the removal of the Jews. Before this final act of religious cleansing, there had of course been centuries of tension, cooperation, and competition between the three faiths that flourished in Andalusia, frequently spilling across the border into southern France. We have already seen several examples. There was the Kuzari of Judah Halevi, with its favorable comparison of Judaism to Christianity and Islam. There was the shocking event in which Christian authorities were enlisted by Jews to repress rationalist currents among their co-religionists in the so-called Maimonidean controversy. We met the Jewish translator Avndauf, who helped render philosophical works into Latin for a Christian readership, and Gersonides, who lavished his attention on the works of the Muslim commentator Averroes. There were long periods of peace, but also outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence under both Islamic and Christian rule. One particularly remarkable illustration of the fraught tension between Christians and Jews occurred in the early 15th century. It was a debate, or rather a series of debates, convened by one of the anti-popes of Avignon over a nearly two-year period. From February 1413 to November 1414, 69 sessions were held in the Spanish city of Tortosa. At these sessions, Jewish rabbis had the opportunity to defend their religion against a particularly knowledgeable opponent. He was a Christian who had converted from Judaism, taking the rather wonderful new name of Geronimo de Santa Fe. Geronimo knew his Talmud well, so he was able to argue that statements in this rabbinic text proved that the Messiah, still expected by his Jewish contemporaries, had in fact already appeared, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Most of the rabbis who debated with Geronimo eventually capitulated, signing a document abandoning the authority of the Talmud, which suggests that they converted to Christianity. But not all the Jewish scholars were willing to sign. One who did not was Joseph Albo. A native of Aragon in Spain, Albo was a student of Hasdai Crescus, the brilliant critic of Maimonides and Aristotelian natural philosophy. Albo's participation in the debate left a mark on his writings. He composed a now-lost attack on Christianity and a surviving treatise called Sefer HaIkadim, or Book of Principles. This was a contribution to what can fairly be described as the dominant debate within later medieval Jewish philosophy, never mind debates with the Christians—the question of the principles that ground the Jewish law. We already saw that Albo's teacher Crescus was taking up Maimonides' list of principles in the light of the Lord. He complained that in offering a philosophical defense of his principles, Maimonides had unwittingly placed the whole edifice of Judaism on an unsteady foundation. Albo followed his master in criticizing Maimonides, but with his own Book of Principles, he was still pursuing the broadly Maimonidean project of trying to establish the basis on which belief must rest. From a historical point of view, we can see this as a reaction to the challenges that faced the Jewish communities of Spain and southern France in the medieval period. The Muslim Almohads chased Maimonides and many other Jews out of Andalusia, and the situation of Jews later, under Christian rule, was not particularly comfortable either. Constant pressure to convert, either to Islam or to Christianity, was answered with polemical writings against the rival faiths, but also with attempts to show that the Jewish law rests on certain well-defined and well-demonstrated principles. Maimonides was the greatest exponent of this strategy. In pursuing it, he was applying to his religion the lessons of philosophy. Like a demonstrative science, as defined by Aristotle, the Judaism of Maimonides would have a solid foundation in first principles, which play a role like axioms in mathematics. In fact, we might compare the discussion of principles in Maimonides and his heirs to something we saw in late antiquity. The pagan thinker Proclus wrote a work called The Elements of Theology in which he imitated the axiomatic method of Euclid to present Neoplatonism as a demonstrative science. Just as Proclus was responding to the rising tide of Christianity in antiquity, so the competition of the Almohads brand of Islam and the Christianity of the Reconquest led Maimonides, Crescas, Albo, and others to investigate and establish the principles of their own faith. Another benefit of their approach was to lay down exactly what it means to be Jewish. What would Jews give up by converting, and what beliefs must they maintain to avoid heresy? Maimonides' ideas about the principles were highly intellectualist. For him, Judaism was of course about law and practice, but it was also a matter of assenting to a range of doctrines, doctrines that just happened to bear a striking resemblance to the ideas of the philosophers. Hence his controversial claim that Jews must believe in the incorporeality of God. Albo tends to be less rigorous in drawing the line between orthodoxy and heresy. Perhaps because of his experiences in the Tawatossa debate, which had focused on the question of whether Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, Albo does not think that belief in the future appearance of Messiah is a litmus test for membership in the Jewish faith. Jews are supposed to believe this, alright, but denying it does not make you a heretic. Albo gives the same status to belief in bodily resurrection, another flashpoint in criticisms of Maimonides. As long as one accepts some form of reward and punishment after death, one is within the scope of Jewish belief, as far as Albo is concerned. When we imagine someone laying down a religious creed or list of doctrines, we don't usually think of it as a plea for flexibility and tolerance. But as these examples show, the laying down of principles and non-negotiable beliefs can widen the boundaries of orthodoxy just as much as it can tighten them. As a student of Crescus, Albo is particularly dubious that reason can establish the wide range of doctrines promised by Maimonides. Not only does Albo think that someone might imagine God as a body, yet remain within the faith, but he denies that rational proof can establish God's immateriality. Maimonides' philosophical theology centered on three claims—God exists, is one, and is immaterial. Of these, Albo thinks only God's existence could be proven demonstratively. For this purpose, Albo favors a regress argument already found in Aristotle to the effect that there must be some uncaused cause that can first activate potential for change. It's consistent with this proof that the matter out of which the universe is made might be eternal rather than created. This is the view that was adopted by Gersonides. Albo doesn't believe it, but neither does he think that it can be ruled out by rational argument. Happily, these beliefs that Albo recognizes as true but not susceptible to rational demonstration are on his reckoning, not necessary, principles anyway. You absolutely need to believe that God exists if you want to be Jewish, and you also need to believe that God created the universe. But if you find yourself with the false belief that God has a body, or used pre-existing matter in creating, then you'll merely be wrong, not a heretic. Obviously, this means that Albo needs to distinguish between at least two kinds of true belief involved in Judaism. There are the genuine principles, which he calls ikarim, or roots, and then there are the beliefs derived from, or associated with, these principles. There are only three genuine principles—God exists, the Torah is revealed from heaven, and we will be rewarded and punished in the next life. The validity of the Torah itself stands or falls with these so every Jew really has to accept them. Within the many other true beliefs involved in Judaism, there are others whose denial would not involve heretical rejection of the Torah, but which a Jew must endorse if he is to be rewarded in the afterlife. This includes, for instance, belief in the Messiah still to come. Thus Albo disagreed with Maimonides on a number of points, not only about the status of certain specific beliefs within the law, but also regarding the power of reason to establish these beliefs. Yet on one more general point, he was a faithful Maimonidean. Like Maimonides, he conceived of the Jewish law as having the same structure as in Aristotelian science. His slimmer portfolio of principles still performs the function that the principles of Maimonides had played. They are like axioms or first principles in a demonstrative system. In fact, Albo explicitly mentions Aristotle's work on demonstrative science, the posterior analytics, when he is explaining the relationship between his principles and the doctrines derived from those principles. In the coming generations, this conception of the law would be challenged by a figure who might fairly be described as the last significant Jewish thinker of the medieval period, Isaac Abravanel. Abravanel was born in 1437 in the city of Lisbon. So for those of you who have been wondering when this look at philosophy in Andalusia would include someone from Portugal instead of Spain, the moment has arrived, and not a moment too soon, since we're almost done. However, Abravanel's family was Spanish, and in the 1480s he moved to the kingdom of Aragon and Castile, ruled jointly by the aforementioned Ferdinand and Isabella. That feeling of dread you are now experiencing, since you know what is about to happen in 1492, is one that Abravanel apparently lacked. He blithely went to work for the royal couple as a tax official. When the crisis of 1492 came, he lost his position and his second homeland when he chose exile over conversion to Christianity. Eventually he wound up in Venice where he died in 1508. His son, Giuda Abravanel, would become a significant philosopher in his own right. But reflecting the Abravanel family's new Italian home, his ideas seem more at home in the Renaissance rather than the medieval under the sea and tradition we've been following, so we will return to him when we get to Renaissance philosophy. This just goes to show you how blurry are the lines between periods of philosophy. In this case, we're drawing a line between medieval and Renaissance that winds up separating a father from his son. Confirming that the attempt to understand the principles of Judaism was a core issue for thinkers of this period, Abravanel wrote a work entitled Principles of the Faith. This was, however, only one of numerous compositions he produced, among them a commentary on Maimonides's Guide to the Perplexed. Speaking of perplexity, a strange feature of Abravanel's writing is that he seems to be further away from Maimonides's intellectualist approach than Crescas and Albo were, yet he presents himself as defending Maimonides from their criticisms. How can this be? Well, let's start with Abravanel's disagreement with the way his predecessors had pursued their principle project. He narrows down the list of principles even more than Albo had done, getting the number of fundamental doctrines down to the tidy sum of just one—belief in the creation of the world from nothing. He expects even less of rational demonstration than Albo did, stating that not even this single principle can be proven. Then he seems to change his mind and abandons even the core principle of creation, leaving us with a grand total of zero principles. Well, at least it's a round number. This is not because Abravanel thinks that in matters of religious belief anything goes. To the contrary, he is as strict about matters of orthodoxy as Maimonides had been, and thus stricter than Albo. Instead, he is abandoning the whole idea that the law is built on certain foundational beliefs, whether these can be rationally proven or not. Instead, he holds that all the truths given to us in the Torah should be accepted. Like Albo, he explicitly mentions the idea that the law could be structured like a demonstrative science, he just doesn't think the revelation works like that. It all comes from God, it's all true, and no one truth it contains is more fundamental than any other, or, for that matter, more optional. Abravanel insists that Jews are not permitted to disbelieve even the smallest thing in the Torah, and where there is no doubt, there is no need to appeal to grounding principles. Our attitude towards the law should ideally be that of emunah, or faith, by which he means total and unshakeable certainty. This sort of certainty could be induced by, for instance, witnessing a miracle. The whole of the law, not just some favored set of beliefs, merits and demands faith. The believers who have this complete and unflinching commitment, and not those who have convinced themselves of thirteen or three or one particular doctrine, will be those who are rewarded in the next life. That certainly explains why Abravanel would agree with Maimonides's rigorous stand on matters of orthodoxy while disagreeing with him on the matter of principles. The disagreement is of course a sizable one, yet Abravanel speaks out in defense of Maimonides against the criticisms of Crescas and Albo by suggesting that Maimonides had portrayed the laws consisting of principles and derived beliefs for merely pedagogical purposes. Those who need guidance can be started out with a set of basic principles, Maimonides used thirteen, and then brought to accept the rest of the law on that basis. But one shouldn't confuse a useful teaching strategy with an analysis of the nature of the revelation itself. Abravanel finds other points of agreement with Maimonides too. Perhaps the most interesting concerns his response to Crescas who had castigated Maimonides for claiming that God commands us to believe in him. As you'll recall, Crescas argued that this makes no sense because you can't reasonably command someone to believe something. Oh yes you can, says Abravanel. We are under an obligation to believe and may be severely punished if we fail to do so. This doesn't mean that one can just change one's belief at will in response to a threat or command, but one can take steps that might lead to belief. It's interesting to note that Abravanel is here making a suggestion later found in the French philosopher Pascal. When Pascal produces his famous wager argument, that it would be a better bet to believe in God than not, he admits that one cannot just change one's belief in response to such an argument. Instead, one should, for instance, go to church regularly and, in general, live as a Christian, hoping that real belief will come in due course. It's perhaps appropriate that our discussion has wound its way to a French thinker. As you may have noticed, our look at Jewish philosophy in Islamic controlled Spain has overspilled its borders for a good number of episodes now. We've looked at figures who lived in Spain under Christian rule, like Crescas, or who lived outside Spain, most often in southern France, like Gersonides. Most poignantly representative are those who were forced to relocate, living anew the ancient Jewish story of exile. The Almohad regime was so unwelcoming to Jews that Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides fled. The Christians who replaced the Almohads were sometimes more favorable, but sometimes, as our new acquaintance Isaac Abravanel learned, they were not. I hope you are convinced that the story I've been telling is nonetheless a unified one. Medieval Jewish thought is not neatly bounded by political or geographical limits, but it has a recognizable shape, a narrative arc with Maimonides at its apex and the Andalusian culture of convivencia as its cultural setting. Yet there were Jewish thinkers in this period that do not fit into that story because they live far outside the orbit of Andalusian culture. We'll meet two significant examples soon when we turn back to the Eastern Islamic world, namely Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi and Ibn Qamuna. As we will see, they are fully integrated into philosophical developments in the East in the wake of Avicenna. And there were still other Jewish thinkers who responded to other currents within the stream of Islamic intellectual history. Take for instance the development of Karaite Judaism. The Karaites have appeared several times in our narrative as the targets of refutation by rabbinic Jews, from Saadia to Judah Halevi. But they were not content to be targets. Karaite communities in Jerusalem, in Egypt, and even in Christian Byzantium developed their own theology by drawing on ideas from the Moatazolite tradition. This happened from the 10th to the 12th centuries, around the same time that a Rositilian philosophy was blossoming among Jews in Andalusia. Philosophy could flourish among Jews in other places too. For instance in a region we have not discussed at any point so far in our history, Yemen. For the first half of the 15th century, as Joseph Albo was defending Judaism in debate and in writing in the far West, the Jewish community in Yemen enjoyed a benign environment under Zaidi-Shiite rule. From this period we have works by a little known philosopher named Hotar Ben Shalomo, from the Yemenite city of Damar. At first glance, one might see Hotar as akin to a man like Albo, since Hotar also wrote a work responding to Maimonides' 13 principles. But on closer inspection, it turns out that Hotar is reacting not just to Maimonides, but to the peculiar strain of Neoplatonism handed down within Ismaili Shi'ism. He thus shows knowledge of ideas familiar from earlier authors, like the Brethren of Purity and the Ismaili philosopher-missionaries such as al-Qirmani. If you're struggling to remember these names, I don't blame you. I covered them more than 30 episodes ago when I looked at philosophy in the Buyid age. To this already heady mixture of Maimonides and Islamized Platonism, Hotar added allusions to Islamic mystics like al-Halaaj and Jewish mystical texts such as the Book of Creation, a forerunner of the Kabbalah. If you're struggling to remember that, you have less excuse, since I talked about it in the last episode. As a result, it has been proposed that Hotar represents a distinctive eastern strand of medieval Jewish philosophy. Men like Hotar shared the obsession with Maimonides that we see among Spanish and French Jews, and they combine this with a range of other influences owing to the different texts available to them. Here in Yemen, we have a kind of alternate reality of Jewish philosophy, in which Averroes was never born and the Aristotelian cosmology of Maimonides is fused with the cosmic hierarchy of Neoplatonism. This is, in miniature, the story of philosophy in the Islamic world more generally. Like 19th century young men, we've gone west and stayed there for quite a while, but it's just about time we turned our attention back to events in the Islamic heartlands. The third chapter of the story of philosophy in the Islamic world is about to begin—a story that will be dominated not by Maimonides or Averroes, but by Avicenna. Before fulfilling these eastern promises, though, I want to take one last general look at the contribution of medieval Jews in philosophy and science. If there were a high school devoted to that subject, our next interview guest would be its principal. So join me for a conversation with Gad Freudental here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. God bless! God bless!
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and science among medieval Jews with Gad Freudenthal, who is professor of Jewish philosophy at the University of Geneva. Hi Gad, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. We're going to be talking here about the engagement between Jewish culture and the scientific culture that came into the Arabic language from the Greek tradition. And so I thought I would start by asking you whether there's anything in particular you think we should bear in mind about Judaism, which conditioned this engagement with the scientific literature. Well, I should say there's one central feature of Judaism that should be borne in mind. And this is that at least since the second century, Judaism was, or rather has been a culture devoted to the study of the sacred texts of Judaism, which means the Mishnah followed by the Talmud. The Talmud was concluded towards the end of the fifth century, and since then, being a Jewish intellectual, Jewish scholar meant studying the Talmud, commenting it with a lot of inventiveness and creativity. This means that Judaism was what can be termed a Talmudo-centric culture, a culture at whose center you have the Talmud. This means ipso facto that was ever was outside this sphere of Talmud commentary was an external or foreign culture or foreign knowledge. And the entry of such foreign knowledge into Judaism was quite problematical. And this has been the case from the first encounter of, serious encounter of Judaism with these foreign cultures, which is in the eighth, ninth century up to today. So is the problem there something more like we're already doing Talmuda commentary, so we don't need to do the science, it's superfluous? Or is it more like we're just not interested in anything other than this because it's not what we're devoted to as intellectuals? Both, and a third thing as well, namely that you are supposed, if you are a male and intellectual, you are supposed to devote yourself your entire life to the study, the study of the Talmud. That means not only it's not needed, but it's even forbidden to study anything that is not ultimately a word of God. Science and philosophy come from human reason. These are secular things. They are not even irrelevant, they are just harmful to a Jewish scholar. A traditional Jewish scholar has to devote himself entirely to Talmud study. I think that's really interesting actually, because I suppose the basic assumption that a lot of people might have is that the problem would rather be that in philosophy there are some doctrines that are problematic from the point of view of Judaism, say the eternity of the world or something like that. And although that's true, you're saying that there's in a way a more fundamental problem, which is that if you're pursuing philosophy at all, you're not doing what you ought to be doing, which is engaging with the Talmud and the other religious texts. This is entirely right. The fundamental problem is to engage with any thought that comes from outside the Bible and its derivatives, from outside the world of God, the sacred and canonical world of God. Then, in addition, on top of it, you have even harmful doctrines like the eternity of the world or the absence of individual providence. Right, so throughout the whole medieval period, then, you've got this, what you've called a Talmudic-centric culture, which is living and working inside of what we might call a majority culture, the Islamic empire and also under Christendom. So how did the presence of this majority culture influence or condition the way that Jewish authors then received the scientific literature? Well, we really have to completely separate the two chapters. Under Islam, Jews live more or less in harmony with the majority culture. This holds good for the Orient, Iraq of today, the Malgrém and especially of Andalusia. This gives rise to a number of centres of Jewish culture that are really flourishing, again, especially in Andalusia. These are Jewish cultures that flourish for the greater part in Arabic with some Hebrew poetry that are completely influenced, very strongly influenced by the Arabic culture because every Jewish intellectual was Arabophone, they talked Arabic and especially they read Arabic. This means they had direct access to the writings of the majority culture. In Christendom, that means especially what is today southern France and in part in Italy, they lived under Christianity and usually they did not have access to the writings of the majority culture, except in Italy to some extent. But one can say that in the Middle Ages, on the whole, Jewish culture in Christendom does not have access to the majority culture, which means that they depend only on translations and all these translations are done from Arabic. They work in Hebrew, they think in Hebrew, they write in Hebrew and they depend entirely on Hebrew translations from the Arabic. So you have Jews living in Muslim-dominated lands who can read Arabic and write in Arabic and speak Arabic, but you don't have too many Jews in Christendom who read and write in Latin. That's the point. Yes, that's the point. But we have to distinguish between southern France where you have almost no Jews who know English, and Italy where you have a few philosophers who are abreast of scholastic philosophy, with one very important exception, and this is medicine. You have quite a number of Jewish physicians who learn Latin and who are able to read Latin or at least translate from Latin into Hebrew to make these works available to Jewish doctors who don't read Latin. Maybe something that's worth emphasizing about the side of Islamic culture is that the Jews who are writing in Arabic were writing in Hebrew characters, which meant that although they were reading Arabic works written by Muslims and Christians, I suppose, occasionally, the Muslims wouldn't have been able to read what they were writing, usually, because it wasn't being transcribed into an Arabic alphabet, even though it was in the Arabic language. Yes, this is a kind of aspect of this Jewish seclusion. That means that they want to write for Jews about Jewish teams. So for one thing, they are not of interest to Muslims, and second, the fact that they write in Hebrew usually keeps non-Jews from reading it. But I should add that this is not a feature only of the Arabic, but almost all Jewish languages, and there were really many of them, a few tense, were written in Hebrew characters. This is true of Provencal, this is true of Judeo-Italian, this is true of Ladido and many other languages. So the Jewish tendency is to write in Hebrew characters. Yeah, I think you mentioned to me yesterday that they wrote German and Hebrew characters up until, what, the 18th century? Yeah, the middle of the 18th century, just the period of Mendelssohn. There is a switch in the Jewish community from writing in Hebrew characters to writing in Latin characters or German characters, and Mendelssohn was really one of the first Jews to write perfect German. All right, I'll have to bear that in mind when I get to Mendelssohn in the podcast in a few hundred episodes. Right, so let's go back to the Islamic culture, and I think here maybe we could divide our discussion into two parts. One part about what happens before Maimonides and then say something about Maimonides. So what do you think we should generally say about the attitude towards this Greek-Arabic learning in Jewish culture prior to Maimonides? Well, the reception of Greek-Arabic learning begins in the east, that means around Baghdad, and the main person here is Sadiya Gaon, who really introduced his philosophy into Judaism. He was an exceptional charismatic leader who wrote a number of works in religious philosophy and on Hebrew language. So he's already beyond the age of resistance to philosophy, if I may say so, and on the contrary he realizes how important it is that Jews be able to recognize that philosophy is not in contradiction to their traditional thought. This was really his life's goal and he succeeded in it fairly well. Then we have in the Maghreb a small center in the 10th century, and especially we have in Andalusia a whole Jewish culture that flourishes in Arabic, uses Arabic to interpret the Bible, absorbs Arabic grammar, and gives rise to the best Hebrew poetry ever written. And in addition, there are a number of philosophers who write about religious philosophy in Arabic, also in Arabic characters, and this is really the beginning of Jewish philosophy, albeit in Arabic. Yeah, it's interesting that they write poetry in Hebrew and then they write prose works in Arabic. Is there some reason for that? There must be a reason. Although, there is one scholar really who tried to give an explanation, it's a kind of resistance. What you think is more important, what you think is more elevated, you reserve for Hebrew, and for the more down-to-earth topics like metaphysics, for example, you write in Arabic. But this is a real issue that hasn't been investigated to the end, really. Right, I like the idea that metaphysics is a down-to-earth topic. That's really good. It's not on the level of exalting God in poetry. That is the point. For them, the exaltation of God, saying God's praise, is something they do in Hebrew. Although they wrote also a lot of love poems also in Hebrew. Very, very moving love poems. One thing that might be worth emphasizing here is that you do have philosophical works by Jews before Maimonides that don't, to put it crudely, look Jewish. So a really good example would be even Gabi et al. and his Fountain of Life, which may be an exceptional case, but still, you can read that text, and people have read that text without even being aware that the author is Jewish. But I suppose that would be quite an exception, right? It is an exception. The Jews would write philosophy for non-Jews, that means real general works like metaphysics, something like this, is really an exception. Avicii Bronn was an exception, and we now know since a few months that Ibn Dawud also wrote such a kind of work. It's a commentary on Aristotle's physics, which hasn't been found, but we know it existed. So there are such cases, but they're relatively rare. The main issue that is of interest to Jewish philosophers, to Jews who studied philosophy, is to show that the Jewish tradition and the philosophy tradition say the same things in different worlds and to different audiences. Right, and I suppose maybe the fact that they're not writing at this more universal level that Farabi and Avicenna and so on write in, where there's only very occasional allusions to Islam, if any, would have something to do with the fact that they're assuming that their entire audience will consist of Jews anyway. Is that right? Not necessarily. I would imagine theoretically that you find a large community of people who get interested in pure philosophy and that would have people writing for it in pure philosophy, but I don't think it's the case. Some historians would say that if someone is writing very general philosophy and he's so distanced from the Jewish community that he might convert. But this would be speculation. Right. Well, let's move on to Maimonides. So now you have the unenviable task of telling us what the most important thing to know is about Maimonides' attitude towards Greek-Arabic learning, and you have a couple of minutes to do that, so good luck. Some people do it their entire life to do it just this. Well, let me begin by the thought of power rather of what Maimonides says in the introduction of the guide of the Perplex, which he finished writing about 1190. He says that a Jewish intellectual, a Jewish reader, is torn between the obligation to be faithful to the tradition of his ancestors, that means the faithfulness to Judaism, and the intrinsic appeal of human reason. This individual in Maimonides' time is torn between the two because he thinks that they contradict one another. For example, the Bible says that man was created in the image of God. What is the image of God? Usually people think in physical terms. But Maimonides knows from philosophy that God has no physical shape. So he is aware of the fact that the text of the Bible, read on the first level of interpretation, and often seems to contradict what philosophy proves. And this Jew is in a kind of existential angst. He thinks that he would either betray his reason or betray his faith. And Maimonides comes in and says, take the truth from whoever says it. If Aristotle is right, let us take it. By this he gave a legitimation to posterior generations to get interested in those external or foreign alien sciences. This was really the great achievement of Maimonides, that he gave this authorization, this legitimation, religious legitimation, to the study of philosophy. Even more so, he made this into obligation, an obligation. If you don't know philosophy, you perforce misunderstand the Bible. You read the things that are wrong. So a Jewish intellectual, a Jewish male indeed, any Jewish male, is obligated to learn philosophy in order to correctly perceive the truth of religion. This was really a break from tradition. Now Maimonides had an incomparable impact on posterity because he was not a mere philosopher, he was also a man of the Jewish law. He summarized the Jewish law in an impressive work called Mishneh Torah, the Repetition of the Law, that really summarizes the entire code of Jewish law in 14 volumes. And this became the code of law for many centuries, and it studied and applied until this very day. So Maimonides had an incomparable legitimation to give also his opinion on philosophy. This didn't deter later generations, people who were opposed to philosophy, from saying that Maimonides was wrong or even say that the author of the Mishneh Torah can impossibly be also the author of the Guide of the Perplexed. So we have here a daring, very daring intellectual with an incomparable charisma who really changed the intellectual, the spiritual face of Judaism through his work. To go back to something you said about the Guide of the Perplexed, you were saying just now that he sees the tension between philosophy and religion, not so much as a matter of should I be devoting my life to studying Talmud or should I be devoting it to studying Aristotle, but rather really in terms of doctrines. So there's a conflict between, for example, should I believe that I was created in God's image, which implies that God might have a body, or should I believe that God has no body? So is he moving away from worrying about it as a kind of what do I do with my life question and more towards a question of doctrines? In a way, yes, just because he recognized that philosophy has truth, and he repeated, take the truth from whoever says it, just because he recognized the truth of philosophy. And on the other hand, both committed to Judaism, he moves towards formulating principles of faith of Judaism, which until then were vaguely formulated, mainly by one of his predecessors, but he was really the first one who re-systematized it and listed certain principles of Judaism that for him were the core of Jewish belief. Until then Judaism was more a set of rules, how you behave, how you cook, how you conduct your family life, and so on, and was less a matter of ideas, of doctrines. He really put on the table the first set of clear principles of faith, or if you want, dogmas, saying a Jew has to believe this and this and that. Let's maybe move along now to the Christian context. And I guess the most striking thing here is something you've already mentioned, which is that Jews living in Christendom really are only going to be working on philosophical and scientific texts that they can read in Hebrew, which presupposes that you need a translation movement from Arabic into Hebrew in this case. So we've had the Greek, in previous episodes we've talked about the Greek-Arabic translation movement, and also we've had an interview actually with Doug Hasse and Charles Burnett about the Arabic-Latin translation movement, and now we have the Arabic-Hebrew translation movement. And I think it's really interesting that that happened where and when it did, so basically in southern France, sort of in the wake of Maimonides. So is there some way of explaining that? I mean, why not earlier, why not elsewhere? Well, it really begins slowly but surely already in the first half of the 12th century, but it accelerates in the second half of the century. There are two obvious reasons for this. One is that there is an immigration, a forced immigration of many scholars from Île Andeluz, it means from Muslim Spain to southern France. So you have there a number of scholars who arrive and are available for translation. This doesn't mean that they begin to translate. A second factor was that they were aware that their own culture, their own Judeo-Arab culture, nurtured by philosophy, is superior in a way to the Talmud or centristic culture in southern Spain of the day. So they get into contact with the local scholars, explain to them what philosophy has to contribute, and slowly but surely these scholars get interested in philosophy. So we have a number of translations already in the second half of the 12th century of religious works of Judaism like Saadia Gaon and other works. As it happens, and this is really the best way it could happen, in 1204 Maimonides' Guile of the Perplex is translated into Hebrew. This, as I said before, Maimonides was an extremely charismatic personality and this translation really gets the philosophical movement underway. So Maimonides dies just the same year that his work is translated into Hebrew and from now on the Guile of the Perplex will have more influence in Hebrew for centuries than in Arabic. In Arabic it was still studied after Maimonides' death but not to a great extent. The main study of Maimonides would not be of the original Judeo-Arabic text but of the Hebrew translation done by Samuel and Tybal in 1204 and revised in 1213. This was an extremely scholarly translation done according to the best standards not only of his day but even of ours. And this is a translation that has been used for centuries by many, many tens of thousands of individuals and has been replaced by a better Hebrew translation only a few years ago. And is part of the explanation then for the desire to read, let's say, Aristotle in Hebrew or actually more often Averroes in Hebrew, is that they're thinking we can't understand Maimonides unless we understand Aristotelianism? Exactly. I mean, once they get interested in Maimonides because he's a Jewish thinker who has something to teach them about Jewish faith, they realize that they can't understand Maimonides without knowing philosophy. So you have a number of individuals who are bilingual and who write encyclopedias in order to introduce them to philosophy and things progress during the 13th century and then more and more people get really interested in philosophy and they get more and more translations underway mainly of Averroes but also in mathematics, in astronomy and in other fields of contemporary science and philosophy. And then it gets into rolling and you have other intellectuals who write works of their own drawing on this material. But it's very important to remember that all this moved is something self-contained in Hebrew. In order that material be studied by the Jews in southern France, it has first to be translated. That means you have a number of gatekeepers, translators, who decide what will go into the Jewish cultural system and what will remain outside. So as it happens, for example, our mutual friend Avicenna was almost not at all translated and did not influence Jewish thought in the Middle Ages or later. Actually, I was just thinking that there's an interesting contrast here between Avicenna and Maimonides because what happens in the Islamic philosophical tradition is that Avicenna comes along and effectively replaces Aristotle. And Maimonides, who you might think of as someone who plays a comparable role in Jewish philosophy just in that he's the most important figure in the tradition, he has the exact reverse effect, which is that everyone flocks to Aristotelian texts because they feel like they won't be able to understand Maimonides without reading, say, a Verruese. That's quite strange and interesting. Well, perhaps there are also other reasons, but it's really, as you know, it's not quite clear why Avicenna was not at all received in Hebrew. It's probably more a question of the attitude of Avicenna in the Iberian Peninsula from where came the text that the Jews were translated, because most of the translators, almost all the translators came from Andalusia. That means they had their own set of values of different philosophers who is better, who is more important. And as it happens, the Jewish translators came with these values, 2000, France, and translated according to the Andalusian preferences. And there Avicenna was low. I guess that brings us to something else that's worth noting about Jewish philosophy under Christendom, which is that it varies very widely from one place to another. The situation in Provence is nothing like, for example, the situation among Jews living in Germany. And one of the differences is that in some communities, they seem to be much more interested in science and philosophy than in other communities. So is that really just a function of how close they were to Andalusia and so how much access they had to this Arabic Hebrew translation culture? Probably not. Texts traveled very easily from the south to the north and vice versa. So if the Jews in Northern Europe were interested in science and philosophy, they would without doubt be able to get themselves as these texts. The reason is rather that the Jewish culture in Northern Europe remained Talmud-centric. They had a very flourishing culture of Talmud commentary called the Tosefot, and they thought their culture was superior to any other culture. For this reason, they were not interested in anything that could come from any other culture, either Jewish or non-Jewish. This was a kind of a closed system that did not at all seek for any improvement or any input from outside. Of course, there are always small exceptions, but the big picture is that the culture of Jews in Northern France and in Northern Germany remained hostile to the study of philosophy and science. And when in Southern France there were conflicts over the study of philosophy, because it was never the case that an entire community was entirely committed to Maimonides. There were always people, probably the majority, who rejected this study. So when conflicts over the study of philosophy broke out in Southern France, the Northerners always sided with those who were hostile to philosophy and science. This was really a constant condition of Jewish cultures in Northern Europe, and this is exactly why I insist that we should never talk about Jewish culture in the singular, but Jewish cultures, because they vary a lot, even between Northern France and Northern Germany, a fourth century between the North and the South. And how do things then develop as we move on past what we might consider the medieval era into what we might be more tempted to call the Renaissance or early modern Europe? Well, here we have to make further distinctions. First of all, Italy has its own history. There are closer relations between Christians and Jews already in the 13th century, I mean intellectuals, already in the 13th century. And this is the only place where you have Jewish intellectuals, Jewish philosophers, who know something about Christian philosophy. And in the Renaissance, you have a number of quite important intellectuals who get involved in Renaissance philosophy, who study in the universities and so on. So this is one story. As to what the greatest centers of Jewish life would then be in East Europe. East Europe is a kind of sequel of the Ashkenazi Jewry, that means the Jews of Ashkenazi Germany and Northern France, who moved to the East, I don't think in the 15th century or 14th century. And the hostile attitude that they had towards study of science and philosophy, already in the Middle Ages, continued in the new residences, mainly in Poland, in Russia and Lithuania. And so we have there a culture which continues to study the Talmud almost exclusively. The Guide of the Perplex is near to no study at all. It is printed one time in the middle of the 16th century, if I remember correctly, and then never again. And it's not studied in Eastern Europe. When Rabbi David Frankl, who was to be Moses Mendelssohn's teacher, printed the Guide in 1743 near Berlin, this was a revolutionary event. And this really signaled the beginning of the Jewish enlightenment, called Haskalah in Hebrew. And it was for 200 years the Guide was nearly unavailable. Here it was again. And to get again the Jews interested in philosophy, he found the best means to do it, namely reprint a work that had been written more than 500 years earlier. Maimonides was still the symbol of interest in and openness to philosophy. After this reprinting of Maimonides in 1743, David Frankl got the Haskalah into rolling. It means that this entire episode of the Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, the Middle Ages, was the starting point for the interest in philosophy among Jews in the early modern period. It's really paradoxical because the general enlightenment, you discarded the medieval authors. Here, on the contrary, you used them in order to begin to get into contact with modernity. I really like this way that very old texts sometimes have this revolutionary impact. I mean Aristotle and scholastic philosophy in Latin, for example, would be another example. So lots to look forward to there in future episodes. In some cases, very distant future episodes. In the nearer future, I'm going to be moving along in the next episode to look at philosophy in the Eastern Islamic Empire, and we'll be looking at the impact of Avicenna and the other aspects of the formative period in the later tradition. But for now, I'll thank Gadroyd and Tal very much for coming on the podcast. It was my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. And please join me next time as I start to look at philosophy in the Eastern Islamic world, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Golden Ages, the Later Eastern Traditions. Last year, the biologist and atheist provocateur Richard Dawkins posted the following comment on the social media website Twitter, quote, All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though. If Dawkins was trying to unleash anger and controversy, he certainly succeeded. Furious reactions focused on the first sentence, the part about the Nobel Prize. But I was more struck by the second sentence. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though. That's a standard caveat you'll hear from people who want to criticize Islam as a religion or Muslim culture, but who are enlightened enough to realize that once upon a time, a long, long time ago, like in the Middle Ages, Muslims were capable of scientific discovery, fabulous works of art, and in short, all the things we expect from a great civilization. Of course, we are here in the realm of political and religious polemic rather than sober and careful history. But behind this, what have the Muslims done for us lately question is a serious historical puzzle. The puzzle would go something like this. From the 7th to 12th centuries, which I suppose is what people like Dawkins mean by the Middle Ages, the Muslims conquered a vast empire, produced scientists and mathematicians like Ibn al-Haytham and al-Khwarizmi and philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes. Sadly, starting in the 13th century or so, we have a situation of terminal decline, both politically and intellectually. The Muslims are pushed back and then pushed out completely in Spain. In the Eastern heartlands, the Abbasid Caliphate ends with the murder of the last caliph by the invading Mongols. Philosophy and science are forgotten, with Averroes the last to engage seriously with the ideas of the Greeks. So it's a good thing that just in time, the Latin world wakes from its medieval slumber. Following the translation of the precious works of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and others into Latin, medieval Christian Europe surges into its own golden age, with scholastics like Aquinas and Scotus gracing 13th century Christendom. Rather than offering you an explanation of this decline, in this and the coming episodes I'm going to tell you that there is no decline to explain. To the contrary, a good case can be made that the very period in which philosophy and science supposedly died in the East was actually part of a golden age of philosophy in the Islamic world. This was proposed by Dimitri Gutas, who put the end of his golden age in about 1350, a full century after the height of the Mongol invasion. And, as Gutas pointed out, things did not end there either. By the 14th century we are already seeing the rise of the Ottomans in Anatolia. Along with the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals of India, the Ottomans will be one of three great Muslim powers of the 15th to 19th centuries. All three of these dominions made contributions to the history of philosophy and science. This is not to say that Muslim culture went from strength to strength in the entire period from the fall of the Abbasids down to the time of colonialism. The Mongols did cause enormous destruction and chaos in some areas. But even this often led to the movement of ideas within the Islamic lands, as philosophically minded scholars moved at speed to escape the Mongol depredations, bringing their ideas with them. Furthermore, the Mongols were capable of building, not just tearing down. After the pillaging was over, Mongol princes had to settle down and rule, at which point they were known to sponsor science and serve as patrons for philosophers just as the Abbasids, Buyids, and Seljuks had done before them. Patronage relations will also feature when we look at the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. So court culture continues to be a factor in the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. Equally important will be madrasa culture. We saw already that educational institutions, set up as charitable foundations, were a major feature of the Seljuk period with the vizier Nizam al-Mulk giving his name to the network of Nizamiyah madrasas, which employed, among others, the theologian al-Ghazali. These schools did focus on the Islamic sciences like Quran interpretation, the study of the sayings of the prophet or hadith, and so on. But they also taught logic, always a gateway drug leading to the intoxications of metaphysics. I'll be devoting a whole episode to later innovations in logic, something in part made possible by the madrasa system. There's a parallel here that is hard to resist. As the madrasas were becoming an ever more dominant part of the intellectual scene in the Islamic world, the universities were rising in Latin Christendom. It is presumably no coincidence that in both settings we see the development of something that could fairly be called scholasticism. Like their Latin-writing Christian contemporaries, Muslim philosopher-theologians in the East were producing enormously sophisticated treatises full of finely drawn distinctions always depending on their mastery of logic. Also as in late medieval Christendom, the commentary emerges as a primary vehicle for philosophy. So instead of imagining the Islamic world in decline while Europe surges forward towards the Renaissance, we can actually discern a parallel development in the two realms. The difference is that in Europe, scholastic philosophy and commentary responded above all to Aristotle. In the Islamic heartlands, from Syria to Central Asia, Aristotle had by now been displaced by Avicenna. I've already mentioned this numerous times, and in the episodes to come we're going to see Avicenna dominate the philosophical landscape in the way I have promised. The most original philosophical minds were often religious scholars, theologians and jurists. They will express their originality by attacking, adapting, and adopting the ideas of Avicenna, a phenomenon I suggest calling Avicennian scholasticism. It would however be too simple to think in terms of just one Avicennian tradition in these later centuries. Better, although even this is a bit of a simplification, would be to think of four branches sprouting and intertwining from the 12th century onwards, with all four responding to Avicenna. The seeds of three of these branches were planted in the formative period. The first branch grows out of Islamic theology or kalam, especially among the Asharites. A massively influential theologian who lived into the early 13th century, dying in the year 1210, was Fakhr ad-Din Ahrazi. He is an outstanding example of the scholastic tendency I just described, his lengthy works full of deft dialectical maneuvering as he negotiates between classic Asharite positions and the ideas of Avicenna. Among Ahrazi's major works is a commentary on Avicenna. Along with other works by Ahrazi, it will provoke further commentaries by like-minded Asharite philosopher-theologians and their intellectual rivals. Among those rivals, one stands out in particular, Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. He is such a complicated figure that it is difficult to see him as growing from just one branch of the tradition, but for at least part of his career At-Tuzi espoused Ismaili Shi'ism, and he will not be the only Shiite thinker in these later centuries. This is the second branch I have in mind, philosophy among Shiites, of both the Ismaili and Twelver varieties. When we get to the Safavid period, we are going to see numerous thinkers doing their philosophy within the framework of Twelver Shi'ism, which was upheld by the Safavid dynasty. Among these was Mullah Saadra, the most famous Muslim philosopher after the 12th century. Saadra lived in Safavid Persia in the 17th century and is noteworthy for the way he draws together nearly all the strands of philosophy in the Islamic world up to his time. He is not only a Shiite, and one whose philosophy is deeply engaged with Avicenna, he also stands at the intersection of our third and fourth branches Sufism and Illuminationism. With Sufism we again know where we stand, since we have already investigated the great Ibn Adabi and seen how philosophy and mysticism came together in his voluminous writings. I emphasized how influential he would be in the later Eastern tradition, and this is something else we are going to explore in episodes to come. It will be especially fun to talk about the great Persian Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Aroomi, who lived about the same time as the aforementioned Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. In fact, they died within one year of each other, as did another Sufi philosopher named Saadr ad-Din Akunawi. It is really Akunawi who can be credited with fusing the Sufism of Ibn Adabi to the metaphysical system of Avicenna. Sufism will remain important still later, exerting influence not only on Safavid thinkers like Mullah Sadra, but also in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. That leaves the fourth branch, which is something new, Illuminationism. This is the brainchild of another great figure of the 12th century named Suhrabadi. He put forward his philosophy using the richly evocative language of light and shadow, and called his style of thought Isharaki, usually translated as Illuminationist. For Suhrabadi, God is the light of lights, and emanates forth further immaterial lights whose brilliance falls upon the shadowy world of bodies, which are described as dark barriers to illumination. Suhrabadi is drawing here on ideas from Neoplatonic and Sufi sources, but insists that his main inspiration comes from Plato and other ancient thinkers of Greece, Persia, and India. Nonetheless, as we'll see Suhrabadi does not really depart from the pattern of his age when philosophizing meant thinking about Avicenna. He is highly critical of Avicenna to be sure, but his metaphysics of light is developed in the shadow of Avicenna's system, with his light of lights serving as a particularly brilliant adaptation of the Avicennan idea of God as the necessary existent. This sort of philosophical theology will continue to be a main theme for us as we look at the later period. Many of the thinkers we'll be examining were, after all, card-carrying members of a kalam school, most often the Asherites. Logic too will come up frequently, since as I've said it was a basic part of a scholarly education. There will also be contributions in psychology, with critical discussions of Avicenna's theory of soul, and there will be ethics, notably in a highly influential treatise by Atouzi written for one of his Ismaili patrons. Great strides will be made in the sciences as well. Atouzi was only one of many outstanding mathematicians and astronomers of the later Muslim world. A group of philosophers, theologians, and mathematicians gathered round his person and the observatory he led at Maragha in the mid to late 13th century. Astronomy will feature again in the scientific achievements made after the Eastern Muslim lands were divided amongst the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Those Muslims, they did do great things in the Middle Ages, and then they kept on doing them. And not just Muslims either. In our look at the formative period, and especially Andalusia, Christians and Jews have contributed to the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, and that will continue to be the case in the coming episodes, even if the vast majority of thinkers we'll consider are going to be Muslim. Amidst these other developments, the two deepest philosophical issues from the 12th century onwards have to do with metaphysics and epistemology. On the metaphysical side, Avicenna's proposed distinction between existence and essence will spark a long-running argument about the nature of being, which incidentally will provide us with further striking parallels to Latin scholasticism. In epistemology, we've already seen that in the wake of Avicenna, theologians like Alghazali were preoccupied with the question of certainty. Were the arguments of the philosophers, in other words Avicenna, really watertight? Did they offer demonstration, or just make a plausible case for their conclusions, if that? What was a preoccupation in Alghazali will become something like an obsession for theologians like Arazi and Atuzzi. Ever more attention is paid to philosophical method, and attitudes towards philosophical argument become ever more stringent. The result will be a tendency towards skepticism, and emphasis on the limits of philosophy as various thinkers conclude that human reason is simply incapable of producing arguments that rise to the standard expected by Avicenna and his heirs. In this sense, the later Eastern tradition picks up where we left off in the formative period, with critics of philosophy following the lead of Alghazali. A good example here is Ashahrastani, another Asharite theologian and in fact a successor of Alghazali's as a teacher at the Nizamiya madrasa in Baghdad. Ashahrastani is best known for compiling a work surveying the ideas of various groups within the Islamic world, including not only the philosophers, but also religious factions, the kalam schools, and so on. But he also composed a withering attack on Avicenna. Its title compares what he is doing to a wrestling match with the universe. In five sections, Asharastani grapples with Avicenna over the nature of God and the creation of the universe. Each section begins with a summary of Avicenna's position and ends with a statement of Asharastani's own view. But the best bits are the middles of the sections, where he exposes contradictions in Avicenna's system and devises objections against him. On the issue of existence, which I just mentioned, Asharastani presciently anticipates a later debate that will ask whether God and created things exist in the same sense. Asharastani thinks that Avicenna gets himself into all sorts of trouble here by supposing that God exists in something like the same way as created things. For instance, God would be revealed as multiple rather than truly one, since he would need to be distinguished from other things that exist by adding the characteristic of necessity to him. In other words, if God is the necessary existent, as Avicenna claims, then God will consist of two things, existence and necessity. So we should just give up on this whole project and say that God's existence has nothing in common with created existence at all. That way, we won't need to introduce some feature like necessity to distinguish God from other things that might compromise his simplicity. Asharastani also takes issue with Avicenna's notorious idea that God knows everything universally by knowing him as their cause. The proposal has numerous difficulties, argues Asharastani. Again, it would compromise divine unity. When Avicenna says that God knows himself, that gives us not one, but three things, God as the thing that is thinking, God's act of thinking, and God as the object that is thought. Inevitably, this reminds Asharastani of the Christians, who likewise said that God is three things in one. The comparison is not, of course, meant to be a flattering one. Then there's this idea that God creates things just by thinking about them. It's unclear, complains Asharastani, whether God first thinks about each thing and then creates it, or whether he has to create it in order to know about it. Neither of those options looks particularly good for Avicenna. Or still, if God creates things by thinking about them, then does that mean he creates himself when he thinks about himself? Asharastani nicely represents the opposition provoked by Avicenna among theologians. There was sustained attack from the Asharite point of view, with al-Ghazali and Asharastani paving the way for the more intricate and positive engagement with Avicenna that we'll find in Fakhradin al-Razi. But the Asharites were not alone in their annoyance. Perhaps no one in the 12th and 13th centuries was more infuriated by Avicenna than Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi. There's no deeper disappointment than the one felt by a former admirer, and this was the situation of Abd al-Latif. In the teenage years of his remarkably eventful life, he studied at that same Baghdad madrasa where al-Ghazali and Asharastani had served as teachers. He went through the standard curriculum of study for a religious scholar, learning by heart, works on grammar, law, and hadith. This practice of rote memorization sounds tiresome to us, but Abd al-Latif swore by it, commenting that if you really know a book, it should make no difference whether you lose your physical copy of it. Incidentally, this recalls a story told by al-Ghazali. As a young man he was mugged for his books, and then mocked by the thief for not having memorized them. As Abd al-Latif went on with his studies, he traveled widely, visiting Mosul, Cairo, and Damascus. His own account of his journeys makes him sound like a late 12th century version of Woody Allen's character Zelig, or Forrest Gump. He meets everybody, at one point encountering Maimonides of all people, in Cairo, and at another point becoming a member of Saladin's entourage. For most of this time, Abd al-Latif was of the view that everything worth knowing could be found in the works of Avicenna, but more serious study of the ancients convinced him otherwise. The true philosophers lived simple ascetic lives, unlike the wine-drinking, supposedly sexually voracious Avicenna. In a sign that Abd al-Latif is no follower of al-Ghazali's, he adds that the ethical burden of philosophy is actually heavier than that placed on us by the religious law. Like his near-contemporary Averroes far to the west, Abd al-Latif came to the view that one should go beyond Avicenna into the past, studying the wisdom of the ancients and their more faithful Muslim interpreters like al-Farabi. It's for this reason that Abd al-Latif wrote a paraphrase on one book of the Aristotelian metaphysics, a rare expression of interest in Aristotle in the Islamic East after his works had been otherwise eclipsed by Avicenna. But this was more flash in the pan than the dawning of a new era of Aristotelian scholarship. Not until the Safavid period will we witness a true resurgence of interest in the philosophical works that had been translated from Greek into Arabic under the Abbasids. A more typical thinker for this earlier transitional period would be a man like Abd al-Adin al-Kashani, known as Baba Abd al. About a generation younger than Abd al-Latif, Baba Abd al was not a remarkably original thinker, but he was a harbinger of things to come in some respects. For one thing, he combines philosophy with Sufism, much like his contemporary Sukhravadi and any number of philosophical mystics to come in later centuries. For another, he writes in Persian rather than Arabic. This choice will become common only later in the wake of the more influential At-Tuzi who helped to integrate Avicenna's Arabic philosophical terminology into the Persian tongue. Baba Abd al. anticipates this linguistic shift, even translating a few philosophical works from Arabic into Persian. In his own philosophical writings meanwhile, Baba Abd al. tackles topics from logic to psychology to ethics to humankind's relation to God, drawing variously on Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, and Avicenna. Philosophy of this period, spanning from the death of Al-Ghazali in that easy to remember year 1111, to the Mongol invasions of the middle 13th century reminds me to some extent of the 10th century under the Buyids. It's a time of variety in the history of philosophy. In the 10th century, there was the professionalized Aristotelianism of the Baghdad school, the open-minded Platonism of the Kindian tradition, the sophisticated Kalam of quarreling Moatazilites and Asharites. For about a century, there were a lot of directions philosophy could have gone. Avicenna put an end to that, serving as a one-man filter through which philosophical ideas would have to pass to the later Eastern tradition. Now though, things are again growing more diverse. Avicenna always plays a role somehow. Some scholars like Ashah Rastani and Abd al-Atif al-Baghdadi struggle against him with all their might and decry his pernicious influence both intellectual and moral. Others, like Fakhradin Arazi, are more temperate critics, borrowing as much as they reject. Avicenna provoked synthesis, as with Sufism, and creative adaptation, as in Suhraradi's New Illuminationist philosophy. Philosophy was once again branching in different directions, and this time no single thinker was going to intervene to prune it back to a single stock. So, with all this going on, why is it widely thought that philosophy in the Islamic world goes into steep and terminal decline after Ghazali and Iverroes? The answer is simple. The later Eastern thinkers had little or no influence on European philosophy, so European historians of philosophy have until recently paid them little or no attention. The narrative of decline and the notion that Muslim philosophy and science ended in the Middle Ages make for bad history. It's the kind of history that involves thinking something never existed simply because you haven't looked for it. We, of course, are not going to make that mistake and are going to take a good long look at the Eastern thinkers I've mentioned in this episode and many more besides. In fact, I'll be starting not with Suhraradi, Arazi, or At-Tuzi, but with another man from Baghdad, not to be confused with Abd al-Atif. This was Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, who like his contemporaries worked within the framework laid down by Avicenna, but was unafraid to criticize him. Not unlike Husdai Crescas in the Jewish tradition, whom we saw developing new ideas in physics by attacking Maimonides, Abul Barakat's disagreements with Avicenna's physics led him to some novel and startlingly modern ideas. So, join me as I begin to fulfill these Eastern promises, starting with Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, All Things Considered – Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi As we turn to the first major figure of this series of episodes on philosophy in the later Islamic world, a few warnings are in order. Firstly, beware that, as always, there will be some wince-inducingly bad puns, because a History of Philosophy podcast without puns would be like drilling holes in a wall. Secondly, even more than in the previous episodes on the Islamic world, there will be a lot of unfamiliar names coming at you. I suspect that most listeners will recognize at best a handful of the many thinkers I'm going to discuss, with the most famous probably being Rumi, Ibn Taymiyya, and Mullah Sadra. Among the less prominent names, you'll have to try to keep apart the founder of illuminationism, Sukhravardhi, and one of his followers, Shahrazuri, a Sufi named Al-Kunawi and a logician named Al-Hoonaji, and avoid confusing the great theologian of the 12th century, Fakhradin Arazi, with the unorthodox philosopher and doctor Arazi, whom we discussed many episodes ago. Here I should mention, in case you haven't yet come across them, the timelines of philosophers I put on the podcast website. These will show you not only how to spell all these difficult names, but also when they lived. There are so far three timelines on philosophy in classical Greece, late antiquity, and now the Islamic world, and they include every thinker I've mentioned in the podcasts. A third warning is more substantive. The episodes to come are going to be looking at figures and movements that are unknown even to most academic experts, never mind the wider public. Research on philosophy in the Islamic world, including my own research by the way, has always focused on texts written up to the 12th century or so. Averroes, Maimonides, and Al-Ghazali are the most recent thinkers who have been adequately studied and who are accessible in good editions and English translations. As I stressed in the last episode, this isn't because there is no philosophy happening later on. If anything, part of the challenge is dealing with the enormous mass of surviving material, which consists mostly of unstudied manuscripts housed in libraries around the world, from Europe to Cairo, Istanbul, Iran, and India. For many of the topics I'll be considering, it is only within the last decade or so that scholars have made significant progress in understanding this material. Probably the most egregious example is philosophy in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, which remains almost entirely untouched by secondary literature in European languages. Naturally, I am still going to try to cover all this without any gaps and to show the philosophical interest of the later authors, but I should first issue a general caveat that everything I will say is, even more than usual, subject to significant revision by future research. These warnings, including the one about the puns, already apply as we turn to our first major figure, Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi. Let's start with his name, Al-Baghdadi. As you might guess, this just means he was from Baghdad. As you might also guess, that is hardly unique. We just met at the end of the last episode a critic of Avicenna named Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi. They were not contemporaries. As you can see on the podcast website's timeline, Abd al-Latif died in 1231 AD. We're not sure of the death date for today's subject, Abul Barakat, but it would have been earlier, probably in the 1160s, so please don't confuse them. A worse problem than the danger of confusion with other men from Baghdad is that Abul Barakat, despite his considerable importance, is not well studied. The main publication on him is a collection of articles by Shlomo Pines published way back in 1979 when I was 7 years old. I'll just pause to let you work out my age before proceeding. It's not on a timeline, by the way. You'd think that in the decades since then, research on him would have made a lot of progress, but it hasn't really. Without enough complaining, let's at least give Abul Barakat a podcast episode to himself, which is the least he deserves. He emerged in the same cultural context that produced Avicenna and Al-Ghazali. We're still in the period of the Seljuks, when regional courts frequently supported philosophers even as an extensive system of madrasas for religious scholars was blossoming. Like Avicenna and unlike Al-Ghazali, Abul Barakat found more support at the courts than at the schools. This includes the Caliphal court at Baghdad. Probably you've heard enough by now about the good relations between faiths in the Islamic world that you will not be stunned to hear that this well-connected individual was in fact a Jew who converted to Islam only towards the end of his life. Alongside his philosophical writing, he even produced a commentary on Ecclesiastes, a book of the Jewish Bible. So when he did write about philosophy, he did not approach it from quite the same point of view frequently adopted by later Avicennan thinkers, who were typically trained as jurists and Islamic theologians. Still, he shows a mastery of the dialectical methods employed by such authors. Here we might detect an echo of the earlier Saadia Gaon, another Jewish author who was influenced by the argumentative methods and ideas of kalam. Abul Barakat's conversion to Islam is the most intriguing thing about his life story. We hear about it only in Muslim sources, and there is no consensus among these sources about how exactly the conversion occurred. The one thing the accounts agree about is that the conversion was not motivated by a change in religious conviction. We are variously told that he craved more respect from his Muslim colleagues, or that he converted out of fear for his life, either after being captured as a prisoner of war, or because he failed in his duties as a physician. One version has it that the sultan's wife died while under his care, and he was afraid he would be executed if he didn't do something dramatic and fast. But we also hear that he set it down as a condition for his conversion that his daughters could still inherit his wealth without themselves converting. That casts some doubt on the idea that it was a desperate act of self-preservation. Rather, Abul Barakat seems to have been in a position to convert on his own terms or not at all. In any case, Abul Barakat's philosophical masterpiece shows few signs of his Jewish background, though the Bible is cited a few times. Its title in Arabic is Kitab al-Mawtabbar, which means the book of what has been carefully considered. This is explained at the beginning of the text where Abul Barakat tells us how he came to write the work. He says that he has carefully studied both the ancients and the moderns. This would mean, at least in the first instance, Aristotle and Avicenna. He didn't find either particularly illuminating, he says, and is now setting out to give us the fruits of his own reflections on all the main departments of Avicenna's philosophy. In English, the work might easily have been called all things considered. Of course, Abul Barakat's insistence here on his own originality is, ironically, not very original. He is harking back to the self-conscious independence of figures like Ahazali, Avicenna, and Ahrazi. This is in keeping with the disdain of Taqlid, the uncritical acceptance of authority that we've found throughout intellectual life in the Islamic world. And like Avicenna and Ahrazi, Abul Barakat was a doctor. Perhaps he was like them following the lead of the great medical writer Galen, who was similarly keen to stress his independence of mind. What then were the issues on which Abul Barakat felt the need to make like a lonely baseball player and strike out on his own? I did warn you about the puns. We'd need quite a few episodes to answer this question fully, but I'll mention ideas drawn from his physics and his views on the human soul. Let's start with physics, and the rather basic question of what happens when something moves. Just for a change of pace, let's use an example that isn't amusing in any way. Suppose you throw a stone into the air. Why does it first move up, then stop moving up and begin to fall back down? We know what Aristotle's answer would be, more or less. The force applied by throwing the stone makes it move unnaturally, that is to say, up. But since it is an earthy body, the stone has a natural tendency to move down towards its natural place at the center of the universe. At some point, this natural tendency kicks in and it starts to fall. If you want to try the experiment later yourself, do move out of the way before this happens. Also, of course, don't attempt any of this stone throwing at all if you live in a glass house. The difficulty at any rate is explaining in detail why the stone moves up as far as it does before beginning to fall. It seems clear that somehow the initial force of the throwing motion is being extinguished as the stone moves, until its natural motion can take over and make it fall. But why? In his typical fashion, Avicenna considered and rejected various answers to this question before formulating his own theory. That theory centers on the Arabic term mael, usually translated as inclination. Avicenna is here taking over and further developing an idea from the ancient Christian critic of Aristotle, John Philoponus. Philoponus had suggested that when you throw a stone, you temporarily give it a power for unnatural motion. The stone stops moving upwards once this power wears off. Avicenna partially agrees. He thinks that you do give the stone a so-called inclination to move upwards, but it doesn't just get used up like fuel running out. Rather, air resistance gradually wears away at the stone's inclination. Then the stone comes to rest in mid-air ever so briefly before beginning to fall as its natural tendency gives it a new inclination to move downwards. The story told by Avicenna has seemed exciting to historians of science because it sounds quite a lot like modern impetus theory. Once something is set in motion, it will continue unless it is prevented or slowed by something else. The resonance with impetus theory is especially strong when it comes to what Avicenna says about motion in a void. In a void, the stone would just keep moving indefinitely because there would be no resistance to slow it down and overcome its inclination. The catch is that Avicenna doesn't think this can happen. In fact, he introduces the point about inclination and indefinite motion precisely to show that there cannot be void. If there were, then a finite source of motion like your throwing arm could in theory give rise to an infinite motion, setting a rock sailing off forever through the void with a mere flick of the wrist, and that, thinks Avicenna, is absurd. What does Abul Barakat do with all this? On the one hand, he broadly accepts Avicenna's idea of an inclination, but he thinks that things are more complicated. For him, the whole time the stone is moving upward, it has two inclinations simultaneously, the one imparted by the thrower, which causes it to move up, and the natural inclination that makes it tend downwards. Here he's exploiting another point made by Avicenna, namely that not all inclinations are actually effective in causing motion. Suppose you are holding something heavy in your hand, like a copy of a book based on your favorite podcast. Actually, make it two copies. Even when you hold them still, the books have an inclination to move down, which means you'll have to exert force to keep them from falling. On Abul Barakat's analysis, what's happening here is that the two forces, or inclinations, are in perfect balance. The power you exert to keep the books still is just enough to counteract their natural, downward inclination. Something like this happens in the case of the stone. When it is at the top of its arc, the stone's natural inclination for downward motion has just gained equilibrium with the externally imposed inclination to go up. Against what some predecessors had claimed, there is no moment of rest between the stone's rising and its falling. Rather, one inclination is fading as the other gains the upper hand, so there is no extended time, however brief, where the stone hovers motionless. This is a brilliant proposal, in that it can explain deceleration and acceleration. As the stone is moving up, its motion gets slower and slower due to the steady influence of its natural downward inclination, then as the inclination imposed by the thrower wears off, it not only stops but begins to accelerate downwards. This might just be the best explanation of these phenomena anyone managed to offer prior to the modern concept of gravity. Other aspects of Abul Barakat's new and unfamiliar physical theories sound rather, well, familiar. Unlike Avicenna, he affirms that void is indeed possible, and he also argues against the Aristotelian doctrine that time is the measure of motion. Broadly speaking, these views sound like what we found recently in the Jewish philosopher Crescus. On anyone's theory of time, though, it can't be the case that Abul Barakat was taking his ideas from Crescus. If anything, it would have to be the other way around. As a glance at that timeline will reveal, Crescus comes along about two centuries after Abul Barakat. Given that Abul Barakat was Jewish, for most of his life at least, it is tempting to connect the two thinkers, but as far as I am aware, this is a question that has not been settled so far. Still, we can at least say that they are probably drawing on the same sources, such as Philoponos. On these same points, Abul Barakat also sounds like the earlier Muslim philosopher and doctor Abu Bakr al-Razi with his infamous theory of five eternal principles. And there is another strong resonance between them. Both stress the fact that time is something we grasp immediately. We don't need to see anything moving to be aware of time passing. Rather, it is something that is just obvious to us. Both also refer to the beliefs of common everyday people to prove their point. Just as al-Razi got everyday people to agree that time would still exist, even if the universe were to vanish, Abul Barakat points to the way Arabic speakers wish each other a long and healthy life by saying, may God let you go on longer. What this expression reveals, suggests Abul Barakat, is a dim awareness that time measures not motion, but existence. Though the immediacy of time to our minds does sound like al-Razi, and like Immanuel Kant for that matter, Abul Barakat's argument once again has Avicennan roots too. Avicenna held that existence is something that does not need to be proven or grasped on the basis of anything else. It is rather something of which we have immediate awareness. We also saw with the famous flying man thought experiment that for Avicenna, the existence of one's own self is just immediately obvious. Abul Barakat has had the ingenious idea to claim the same kind of immediacy for time. Enough time remains to describe one other innovation made by Abul Barakat, which in fact concerns exactly the topic I just mentioned, the self. This is a rather slippery word, especially in Arabic. The Arabic word nafs can mean both self and soul. So if Avicenna and Abul Barakat are right and you are immediately aware of your self, then in Arabic at least, it seems to follow that you are immediately aware of your soul. Abul Barakat is happy to follow Avicenna this far. In fact, like a stone thrown through the void, he is happy to go quite a bit further. Avicenna and the other Aristotelians had tried to understand the soul in terms of the capacities and faculties that belong to living things. Your soul gives you the ability to nourish your body by digesting food, to reproduce, to grow, to move around, to see, hear, and so on, and of course to think. The Aristotelians also sharply distinguish between these faculties though. Some of them we have in common with plants, others with animals, while thinking is reserved for us humans. Okay, also God and angels, but who's counting? Abul Barakat thinks this is all wrong. Our souls are not just bundles of disparate capacities. Rather what the soul is, what the self is, what you and I are, is a single seat of awareness. It is the same soul that sees and hears, that imagines and thinks and dreams, and initiates motion by throwing rocks. It is, if you will, the principle that gives you a first-person perspective on things. Abul Barakat complains that the way Aristotelians like Avicenna have divided up the soul's faculties is arbitrary. Why say that there is one faculty for seeing and another for imagining, but not say that there is one faculty for seeing yellow and another for seeing red? He also appeals again to everyday speech, pointing to commonly used Arabic expressions like my soul is pleased. The fact that the soul is the subject of all our awareness proves firstly that the soul exists and secondly that it is one single thing. Its unity also proves that it is not a body, since the body, unlike the soul, is nothing but a bundle of various distinct parts. To this, Abul Barakat adds that if your soul were your body, then you would lose part of it if you lost a hand or a limb, but this is absurd. Of course, the body does play a role in conditioning our experience. The fact that your eye is pointing at a certain object in good lighting conditions explains why you see what you are seeing, and not anything else. This accounts for the variety of sensations that are brought to the awareness of the self, but the self that is aware remains a unity. Much like Avicenna's theory of inclination, Abul Barakat's theory of the self sounds strikingly modern, but that impression is to some extent qualified by his wider purposes. Avicenna wanted to use his impetus-like idea of inclination to show that void is impossible. In the same way, I suspect that Abul Barakat developed his theory of the single unified self, what we might be tempted to describe as a seat of consciousness, above all for theological reasons. Having sketched this theory of the human soul, he could go on to apply the same principles to the divine mind. In fact, he explicitly affirms that our thinking is like God's. With his notion that an external multiplicity of objects can be brought to the awareness of a single self, he can now say that God remains one, even though God is aware of the many things in the universe he has created. This will help to solve the problem faced by Avicenna, who had a hard time explaining how his necessary God could know anything apart from himself. As this small sample shows, Abul Barakat exemplifies a movement as real as that traced by a throne stone, doing philosophy by way of thoughtful consideration of Avicenna. Like Al-Ghazali, Abul Barakat's contributions to philosophy often came in the form of criticisms. But where Al-Ghazali was criticizing Avicennism from the outside, from his standpoint as an Asharite theologian or Sufi mystic, Abul Barakat was in some sense an Avicennian philosopher. And there was nothing more Avicennian than questioning the traditional authorities and adopting new and innovative positions when it seemed like a good idea. This is what we find in Abul Barakat and many other later thinkers. They were much like the ancient commentators, who had their own agenda and their own ideas but expressed these while elucidating Aristotle. Others of the later Eastern tradition similarly practiced philosophy by using and occasionally abusing Avicenna. A significant difference, though, is that few ancient philosophers ever explicitly criticized or disagreed with Aristotle. Avicenna was rarely afforded that level of deference. Abul Barakat is a case in point. He often takes over ideas from Avicenna, but just as often says loud and clear where Avicenna has gone wrong. The master of critical engagement with Avicenna, though, and here the stress should be on the word critical, was a man with a familiar method and a familiar name and a nearly unprecedented capacity for argument. My soul would be very pleased if you joined me to hear about another Arazi, this time one called Fakhr-A-Din. He's only a stone's throw away on the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. The comedy sketches of Monty Python's Flying Circus seem at times to be aimed specifically at an audience of philosophers. Of course there's the Philosopher's Song, about how all famous philosophers were alcoholics — inevitably it ascribes to Descartes the sentiment, I drink, therefore I am — and the football match, pitting the great Greek philosophers against their German counterparts. But my favorite is the argument sketch, in which a man goes to an argument clinic and is dissatisfied with the service he receives. It includes exchanges like, I came here for a good argument. No, you came here for an argument. And argument is an intellectual process, contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes. No it isn't. I think that in the whole history of philosophy in the Islamic world, the person best qualified to work as a professional arguer at an argument clinic would have to be Fakhradin Arazi. His works are almost inaccessible to the English reader because they have hardly been translated. This is a shame because an arguer of his talents is ideally designed for today's audience of professional philosophers. Like a 21st century analytic philosopher, he delights in the deaf distinction, the counterexample, the terminological clarification that will defeat an opponent. Here's an example. Arazi was chatting with a colleague who was impressed by a passage in the great Al-Ghazali who had refuted an argument put forward by a Shiite theologian. The Shiite had tried to force an unwelcome consequence on his Sunni opponents. Either the human intellect can know God with its own resources, or guidance from an imam is needed. This is a dilemma for Sunnis, especially those of the Asharite theological school, like Al-Ghazali, since they deny the need for an imam, but do not believe our intellect is able to grasp God. So, Al-Ghazali responded that the intellect would itself be needed to adjudicate between the rival claims of the intellect and the imam, thus the Shiite has to accept the need for intellect as well. As what he makes of this, Arazi responds with an entirely characteristic remark. The original argument is false, and the objection of Al-Ghazali is pointless. Arazi is no defender of the imam, in fact he is an Asharite theologian, just like Al-Ghazali, but he has no hesitation in irreverently dismissing the move made by his great predecessor. Al-Ghazali gains nothing by showing that intellect is necessary. The Shiite opponent might very well admit this. What Al-Ghazali needs to do is that intellect is sufficient, because that would show that there is no need for an imam. This little anecdote tells you most of what you need to know about Arazi. He constantly tested the arguments of others, no matter how eminent they might be, and regardless of whether it would cause offense. He was adept at seeing both sides of any debate. In the case I just described, he provided a counter-refutation of Al-Ghazali, even though he himself agreed with Al-Ghazali's rejection of the doctrine of the imam. And he had a very sharp philosophical mind, maybe the sharpest in the eastern realms of Islam since Avicenna himself. His contrast between a necessary and a sufficient condition is one that philosophers nowadays wield, often with the same dialectical delight displayed by Arazi. Woe betide you if you show up at an American philosophy department to give a talk and confuse one of these with the other. Today's philosophers often annoy people with their aggressive argumentative behavior, and Arazi likewise found that his methods won him more arguments than friends. The scene I just described occurred during a tour of Transoxiana in Central Asia, during which Arazi seems to have arrived in each new city looking for people to refute. He wrote up an account of his trip called Al-Munadharaat, meaning, wait for it, debates. A sentence from the beginning again tells us most of what we need to know about Arazi. As his name indicates, Fakhradin Arazi was a stranger in these lands. The name Arazi means someone from Ra'i, a city in northern Persia. He's not to be confused with the earlier controversialist from the same city, Abu Bakr Arazi, who we looked at in episode 126. Fakhradin's vocation as legal scholar and theologian was a case of carrying on the family tradition. His father was an expert in these fields and could trace his intellectual lineage back to al-Jawaini, the teacher of al-Ghazali, and through him to al-Ash'ari himself, founder of the whole Ash'arite school of theology. So Fakhradin was steeped in what was by now a long tradition of Islamic theology, or kalam, pursued from an Ash'arite doctrinal perspective. This shows in all his works, especially his early ones, which adhere closely to Ash'arite positions. But as he matured, he seems to have developed a great appreciation for Avicenna's philosophy. Even more than al-Ghazali, Fakhradin Arazi grasped not only the challenge that Avicenna posed to Ash'arite theology, but also its power. He wrote enormous and enormously influential works in which he examined pretty well every topic dealt with in Avicenna's physics and metaphysics as well as Ash'arite theology. In these writings, his controversialist personality found its ideal literary expression. Each topic he takes up is subjected to a detailed dialectical consideration, with arguments, counter-arguments, counter-counter-arguments, and so on being listed and evaluated. Often Arazi's opinion appears only as a perfunctory conclusion, if he sees fit to betray his own view at all. He used this kind of procedure even in masterful commentaries on the Qur'an, regarding which the jurist Ibn Taymiyyah later commented, But most interesting for us are the works he himself called philosophical, including a massive commentary on the pointers of Avicenna. Because of the size and complexity of Arazi's writings, research on his thought is only just beginning. I'm going to give you a sample of what he offers by running through his remarks on several hotly debated issues from Avicenna, before ending with an area of Arazi's thought that has been particularly well explored, namely his ethics. Let's start with an issue from Avicenna's natural philosophy, time. Arazi discusses this in several of his large philosophical works, including the especially interesting Matalib al-Aaliyah, or Exalted Topics of Inquiry. In this work, he evaluates the conceptions of time put forward by a range of thinkers, including Aristotle, Avicenna, previous theologians, and the earlier Abu Bakr Arazi. You may remember that the first Arazi made time one of his five eternal principles. He also claimed that eternal, or absolute time, is simply obvious to us. We need no demonstration or proof to know that it exists. Perhaps because these ideas had been echoed by the more recent Abu al-Barakat al-Baghdadi, subject of the last episode, Fakhradin Arazi finds this proposal intriguing. Before he even gets to the question of how time can be defined, he dedicates a long discussion to the question of how we know that time exists. Pursuing his usual policy, he subjects this question to a forbiddingly thorough analysis, even considering seriously the possibility that time does not exist after all. Interestingly, Arazi seems to think that the burden of proof lies on the person who thinks that time does exist. In other words, its real existence must be proven unless we are persuaded that its real existence is so obvious that it needs no proof. This may strike us as odd. Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the person who makes the surprising claim that time doesn't exist? Arazi's approach here can be understood better if we notice the way he poses the problem. The skeptic about time, he says, would be someone who thinks that time does exist, but only mentally. In other words, time would be only subjective, a feature of the way we perceive the world, but there would be no time out there in reality. Here Arazi is using a distinction borrowed from Avicenna, between mental and real existence. You may remember my trapeze artist sister who only exists mentally and not out in the world. In her case, we know that she does not exist, but some mentally existing things have a strong purchase on our minds. We can hardly help believing that they are real even though they are not. What if time was like that? Well, Arazi provides no fewer than 12 proofs to show that time is like that and has no real existence. He then gives 21 arguments to show that time can be grasped directly, as the earlier Arazi and Abulbarakat al-Baghdadi had claimed, and stands in no need of proof, before finally moving on to four ways of proving that time does exist. One of these is Avicenna's. In some cases, though not all, Arazi adds refutations of the proofs and arguments being listed. Finally, he makes a terse remark approving of the fourth and final proof that time does exist. This last proof is borrowed from the theological tradition. It claims that time must exist because we need it to coordinate two otherwise unconnected events. For instance, if I say to you that I will meet you when the sun rises, my arrival and the rising of the sun are being connected by a third thing, namely the time at which both will occur. In this discussion of time, we see two things that tend to push Arazi towards a rather more skeptical position than we might expect from an Islamic theologian, or for that matter, an Avicennan philosopher. First, there is his dialectical method, which involves examining all possible arguments for and against every thesis. The sheer abundance of proofs and counter-proofs tends to induce uncertainty, or at least bewilderment. This aspect of his approach was not lost on observers. Critics complained that Arazi was far better at explaining the arguments in support of heretical views than he was at refuting them. A second and deeper reason for his skeptical leanings is the way that mental existence comes into the discussion. Arazi seems to think that each and every concept we have must be proven to have some external reality to which it applies. In the absence of proof, merely mental existence is the default. Simply given the stringent standards of proof used in post-Avicennan philosophy and theology, this amounts to a major concession to the skeptic. Here I must mention an anecdote about Arazi, even if it is probably not authentic. A friend came upon him weeping and asked what was the matter. Arazi answered that he had just discovered that a belief he had held as certain was in fact false. If this was the case, then how could he be sure that any of his beliefs were true? Arazi's demand for ironclad demonstration is a hallmark of his treatment of Avicenna on other topics too. Consider, for instance, his handling of the famous Flying Man thought experiment. As you'll remember, Avicenna asked us to imagine a person created in mid-air without any sensory awareness. He thought that the Flying Man would know that he exists, showing that one can be aware of one's self without being aware of one's body. For Avicenna, this was at least an indication that the self is not a bodily thing. He drew the further conclusion that self-awareness is fundamental to our mental life, to the point that it must continue even when we are deeply asleep. In his commentary on the passage where Avicenna proposes these ideas, Arazi first carefully explains what Avicenna is up to and then starts raising questions. One question is like the one he had posed concerning time. Is the fundamental nature of self-awareness just obvious, or does it need to be proven? If the latter, then the Flying Man thought experiment doesn't seem to constitute such a proof. Nor is it obvious. Compare the claim that you are self-aware while asleep to a really certain truth, such as the fact that the whole is greater than the part. Furthermore, even if it is true that we are always aware of ourselves, even that would not show that we must be aware of ourselves. It's a leap from saying that something is always true to saying that it is necessarily true. Speaking of necessity, what does Arazi make of Avicenna's most famous proof, the demonstration that there is a necessary existent? As Arazi himself might say there is an on the one hand and an on the other hand. On the one hand, like many other theologians in the later period, he is happy to accept Avicenna's characterization of God as the necessary existent. In fact, he frequently refutes some position by suggesting that it would either make God contingent or make something other than God necessary. On the other hand, Arazi raises problems for Avicenna's proof every step of the way. Concerning the basic argument that there is a necessary existent, he controversially thinks that Avicenna is trying to prove this by analyzing the very concept of existence, and this he believes cannot be done. You can show that God exists, but not as a matter of conceptual necessity. Rather, we must first observe that there are some contingent things, and trace back an explanatory chain to their first and ultimate cause, which is the necessary existent. Even then, Arazi challenges each step of Avicenna's attempt to show that the necessary existent is to be identified with God. He is not even convinced by Avicenna's arguments in favor of the uniqueness of the necessary existent. As we've seen several times, Avicenna's most contentious ideas about God concern divine thought. He tried to show that God is a perfect intellect whose unchanging thought is directed primarily at itself, as in Aristotle. This raised the question of whether God knows about particular things in our world at all. Notoriously, Avicenna said that God does know about such things, but in a universal way. As you would expect by now, Arazi is ready with a long list of complaints. It's not clear to him for one thing that Avicenna succeeded in proving that God thinks. For Avicenna, this followed from God's being immaterial. This in turn followed from the fact that God is undivided. As the necessary existent, God can have no parts, since if he did his existence would be dependent on those parts. Arazi retorts that some undivided things are in bodies anyway, like the geometrical point, which resides in a solid. As far as the nature of God's thinking goes, Arazi finds this especially problematic. If God has even universal knowledge, then this knowledge will reside in God's essence. This sounds to Arazi more like the theory of divine attributes defended by Asherite theologians like himself than the more austere theology of an utterly simple God intended by Avicenna. When he then turns to the hotly contested issue about God's knowledge of particulars as such, Arazi presents a whole battery of arguments on all sides of the question. Some of these are drawn from earlier theologians, others from Avicenna and his partisans. Particularly interesting are the considerations he mentions about whether God could eternally know about things that happen at a particular time. Perhaps so. Arazi asks us to consider someone's knowledge that Zaid enters a city at a given time. This knowledge will be the same whether one knows it before Zaid's arrival, at the moment of the arrival, or afterwards. But he wouldn't be Arazi if he didn't also ask us to consider a counterargument. Suppose that someone doesn't know what time it is. In that case, he will not be able to know whether Zaid's arrival is future, current, or past. To know that, our knower, or God, would need to change by becoming aware that the time of Zaid's arrival has itself now arrived. After a customarily detailed enumeration of arguments on all sides of the issue, Fakhradin finally concludes on a rather flat-footed note. He points out that everyone who prays to God is asking for him to intercede concerning something particular. I don't pray that there are giraffes, but that Hayyawatha the giraffe will recover from her recent neck reduction surgery. This sort of prayer only makes sense if Avicenna is wrong, and that, Arazi says, is good enough for him. As I've mentioned, this is another typical feature of Arazi's dialectical procedure. When he does come to tell us what he himself thinks, it is often rather underwhelming. His last-second appeal to common opinion and religious practice would hardly strike Avicenna as decisive. We may even be tempted to ask whether Arazi is being serious. Is he actually quietly suspending judgment, a skeptic in the end, or just more interested in the cut and thrust of dialectical debate than in solving the problems at hand? On at least some topics, he does develop a more robust positive theory. A nice example is his stance on ethics. As in other areas, early in his career he follows the Asherite tradition pretty closely. We saw in episode 137 that the Asherites accepted a divine command theory of ethics. Good and bad are whatever God decrees them to be. But as Arazi's thought develops under the influence of Avicenna in philosophy, he is increasingly tempted by the thought that humans are just using words like good and bad to express what they find beneficial and harmful. In fact, he says in several of his works that our moral language has no meaning apart from a reference to what we find pleasant and painful, whether physically or psychologically. This sounds like yet another skeptical or even relativist move. Political judgments would turn out to be merely subjective, just a matter of certain people expressing a preference concerning certain things. But Arazi is no skeptic when it comes to pleasure and pain. There really are such things, and they really do motivate us to act in certain ways. He finds a clever way to connect this with the classical Asherite tendency to conflate ethics with Islamic law. Arazi thinks everything we do is intended to win us pleasure or to spare us pain, and that applies to the next life as well as this one. Once one has accepted the revelation brought by Muhammad, one takes on board a whole raft of commands and prohibitions. Crucially these come along with threats and promises. Violate God's law and you will be punished in eternal fire. Obey and you will go to paradise. Thus it turns out that you should follow God's law precisely in order to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The Asherites may be right that divine law is laid down arbitrarily, but there is nothing arbitrary about our reasons for obeying. Here we see Arazi adopting a version of what is nowadays called consequentialism. The right thing to do for each person is whatever leads to the maximally beneficial results. In his version of consequentialism, it is the consequences for this specific agent that matter, not what would benefit humans generally. So sophisticated is Arazi that he anticipates a move made in 20th century consequentialism by devising a response to a potential objection. The objection is an obvious one. Sometimes people do things that are not in their interest, for instance by telling the truth when it would be advantageous to lie. His answer is that in such cases one is following a rule that in general maximizes benefit for all concerned. If everyone felt free to lie all the time, that would be disastrous. So we all agree to adopt honesty as a general policy and to disapprove of and punish liars. The apparently selfless do-gooder, then, is just looking to the bigger picture, promoting a policy that is beneficial over the long haul even if it is counterproductive in terms of his narrow concerns on this particular occasion. As this whole discussion shows, Fakhradin did develop interesting positive philosophical theories, so it would be wrong to think of him as nothing other than a one-man argument clinic. It can be hard though to see through the maze of thrusts and counter-thrusts in his voluminous writing. The main impression he gives to us is the one he gave to his contemporaries he writes for the sake of argument, in every sense of the phrase. His debating style was sufficiently provocative that by the time of his death in the year 1210 he had to ask to be buried in a secret location so that a group of outraged opponents would be prevented from desecrating the site. Of course, he annoyed not just other theologians, but also partisans of Avicenna. We'll soon be looking at Nasir ad-Din Atouzi, who wrote a commentary on Avicenna answering the criticisms of Fakhradin, whom Atouzi aptly and archly called, Prince of the Controversialists. But for all his ability to annoy, Fakhradin became an immensely influential figure. Many commentaries were written on his writings, which were chock full of Avicennan terminology and argumentation. That meant that even when philosophers and theologians weren't writing commentaries on Avicenna, they were often engaging with Avicenna anyway through the medium of Arazi. Despite his immense intellectual legacy, Fakhradin's arguments do not win him a clear victory in the contest to be the most influential philosopher of his period. His lifetime overlaps with those of the great Andalusian thinkers Averroes and Maimonides, for one thing. But even in the East, he had serious competition from a man who died, in fact was executed, about 20 years before Fakhradin passed away, and who founded a new movement of philosophy within Islam. The execution? It was ordered by the great Muslim leader and scourge of the Crusaders, Saladin. And the new philosophical movement? It was called Illuminationism. Join me next time as I shed some light on its founder, Sukhravarti, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Leading Light, Suhrvadi. The years right around 1190 were busy ones for Saladin, the famous Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose real name in Arabic was Salah ad-Din. In an assault culminating at the Battle of Hattin in the year 1187, Saladin shocked European Christendom by taking almost all of the Holy Land back from the Christian rulers who had held it for nearly a century, ever since the First Crusade. Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem and its surroundings provoked the Third Crusade, which succeeded in taking back much of the territory for the Christians, albeit that Jerusalem itself remained in Muslim hands. Given how much he had on his plate at the time, the last thing Saladin needed was a charismatic and brilliant, but religiously unsound, philosopher exerting influence over his son. So he had the philosopher killed, probably in the year 1191. The philosopher's name was Shihab ad-Din al-Suhrvadi, sometimes called al-Maqtul, meaning the Murdered One. This dramatic story is an unusual one in that philosophers seem to have faced remarkably little threat of persecution or political harassment in the Islamic world. For most of Islamic history, political conditions seem to have encouraged, or at least allowed, intellectual and scientific experimentation. The early unorthodox thinker Ar-Azi was deemed a heretic by some, and al-Ghazali pronounced Avicenna's ideas to constitute a departure from Islam so grave that it would merit a death sentence. But neither of these thinkers actually faced persecution for their ideas. To the contrary, both had high-ranking patrons. If anything, Avicenna's problem was that powerful men were competing to claim him for their courts. Even Suhrvadi, who was an unusually provocative philosopher, ran afoul of Saladin only because of his position as the pet philosopher of Saladin's young son. Why do I say that he was provocative? Well, here's a story that may give you an idea. As his name implies, Suhrvadi probably came from the small town of Suhrvad in northwestern Iran. He studied elsewhere in Iran and then traveled in Syria, winding up in the city of Aleppo in 1183. It had just fallen to Saladin's forces, who captured the city from the rival Muslim force known as the Zengids. What happened next is summarized so well by Suhrvadi scholar John Walbridge that I won't try to improve on it. Quote, He entered the city in clothes so shabby that he was mistaken for a donkey driver. He took up residence at a madrasa where the director quickly realized that he was a man of learning and tactfully sent his young son with a gift of decent clothes. Suhrvadi brought out a large gem and told the boy to go to the market and have it priced. The boy came back and reported that the prince-governor, a teenage son of Saladin, had bid thirty thousand dirhams for it. Suhrvadi then smashed the gem with a rock, telling the boy that he could have had better clothes had he wished. It was this teenage son of Saladin who took Suhrvadi into his court with the aforementioned fatal consequences. The story suggests that Suhrvadi was more a traveling magician than philosopher, but he was good for more than precious stones. Indeed, he was among the most multifaceted thinkers in the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, able to provide cutting-edge logical analysis alongside gems of mystical wisdom. Along with Fakhradin Arazi, the philosophical theologian we examined last time, Suhrvadi was the most influential thinker of the Muslim East in the 12th century. He is credited with founding a whole philosophical tradition known as the Isharaki, or Illuminationist, school, one of the most important strands within the tapestry of later Islamic philosophy. Yet, it is somewhat misleading to think of him as the founder of a school. His ideas were taken up in the following generations, not by immediate followers or students, but by those who read his writings. His books inspired a posthumous legacy, inviting commentary and further expansion of his innovative ideas. Innovative though those ideas were, Suhrvadi looked back to his predecessors even as he indulged in the rhetoric of new beginnings. Like Fakhradin, he responded especially to Avicenna. In his works, Suhrvadi speaks frequently of the peripatetics, defining his own position in opposition to theirs. Here, peripatetic no longer means Aristotelian, it means Avicennan. In his greatest work of philosophy, the Hekmat al-Ishraq, or Philosophy of Illumination, Suhrvadi admits to having been in the thrall of Avicenna's philosophical system when he wrote his earliest treatises. Now though, says Suhrvadi, he is offering a different set of ideas. He is basing himself on figures from the ancient Greek tradition, he names Hermes and Empedocles, the Stoics and above all Plato, and from the Eastern traditions of Persia and even India. We should take this with a grain of salt though. Already in his earlier so-called peripatetic works, Suhrvadi began to sketch some of his more distinctive doctrines. As for the magisterial Philosophy of Illumination, it does embrace at least one authentically platonic theory, the theory of forms. And Suhrvadi does distance himself from the peripatetics more than he had done before. Yet, he continues to draw heavily on Avicenna. Suhrvadi's philosophy, and by extension illuminationism more generally, is above all a reimagining of Avicennism, even if its inventor packaged it as an anti-Avicennan revival of ancient ideas. A fundamental and typical example is Suhrvadi's very conception of philosophy. He recognizes two approaches, which he calls the paths of inquiry and intuition. The path of inquiry is that of the peripatetics, in other words Avicenna. The reader who is interested only in the peripatetics approach is advised to stop reading the philosophy of illumination and turn to their works instead. But this is far from a dismissal of the path of inquiry. Rather, inquiry represents one half of Suhrvadi's philosophical method. He insists that the perfect philosopher will have mastered both inquiry and intuition. In a remark that may remind us of the political ideas of Al-Farabi, he adds that such a perfect philosopher would be the rightful caliph. As for intuition, this involves not the discursive argumentation of Avicenna and like-minded thinkers, but direct apprehension of God and other principles. It's especially in this context that Suhrvadi praises earlier thinkers, including Sufis and the sages of Greece, India, and Persia. Plato in particular is credited with having enjoyed an unmediated vision of what Suhrvadi calls the lights of the immaterial world, culminating in the light of lights, in other words God. Before we get overly excited about this, however, we should note that in one passage, where Plato's authority is cited, the words put in this illustrious predecessor's mouth are actually a quote from the theology of Aristotle, which is to say a part of the Arabic translation of Plotinus. Plotinus might not mind. He might even recognize something of himself, as Suhrvadi zealously corrects peripatetic thought, even while stealing the best of the Aristotelian's ideas. The critical part begins already in the first section of the philosophy of illumination, which is devoted to topics in logic and epistemology. Suhrvadi makes some proposals for simplifying Avicenna's logical system, as I'll explain in a later episode. But his most striking innovations here concern knowledge. For one thing, Suhrvadi makes some skeptical remarks about definitions, which are of course crucial to the whole enterprise of Aristotelian science. From the peripatetic's point of view, giving a definition involves stating the essential features of the thing defined, and thus establishing both the wider class, to which something belongs, and the specific aspects that belong to it, but not the other things in that class. For instance, emeralds belong to the wider class of gemstones, and are specified by being green. Thus, it is essential to emeralds to be gemstones and to be green. We can define them, at least in part, as green gemstones. Sounds good as gold, right? But Suhrvadi thinks it is more like fool's gold. He reminds us that Aristotle himself laid down the rule that you can only know something on the basis of something else you already know. So if I already know about the essential features that enter into the definition, then presumably I know the defined thing already. In our example, if I know all about gemstones and the color green, then surely I already know about emeralds. What further knowledge could be gained by actually formulating the definition? To this updated version of Minos Paradox, Suhrvadi adds the worry that the search for essential features is open-ended. How can I be sure that there aren't more as yet undiscovered essential features that distinguish emeralds from everything else? For instance, there are no doubt other kinds of green gemstones, so our definition is so far incomplete, and in principle we'll never know for sure that it is complete, no matter how many more features we may add. This may make Suhrvadi sound like a thoroughgoing skeptic. If I can't ever define anything, how will I know what anything is? But that's not the case. Instead, he wants to say that the process of seeking definitions is pointless, because we already know what things are. If I know that emeralds are green gemstones, that knowledge ultimately rests not on my knowing a definition of emeralds or the color green, but rather on direct apprehension of emeralds and the color green. Actually, this seems plausible, at least for some cases. As Suhrvadi points out, no one thinks they need to define a color to know what it is. He generalizes the point, arguing that direct apprehension is the basis of all our knowledge. Definition is therefore pointless, at best a concatenation of things we already knew directly. What exactly is happening when we directly apprehend something like the color green? This is where Suhrvadi polishes off the Aristotelians with a new epistemology that he thinks is rock solid, the theory of knowledge by presence. His paradigm case is eyesight. Suhrvadi mentions and rejects the various theories of vision that we surveyed back in episode 132, and replaces them with a breathtakingly simple, not to say naive, account. Seeing is just the presence to the eye of something visible and illuminated. Similarly, you know something when it is present to your mind, and presence is defined negatively as the absence of an obstacle that blocks apprehension. As Suhrvadi puts it at one point, presence is simply the non-existence of absence. This sounds rather mystifying, so it's appropriate that the idea was enthusiastically taken up by later mystically inclined thinkers. Yet Suhrvadi was already developing his idea of knowledge by presence in his so-called peripatetic works, and he sees the basic idea as part and parcel of the peripatetic tradition. In fact, Suhrvadi tells us of a dream he had, in which none other than Aristotle explained to him the idea of knowledge by presence. I suspect that when Suhrvadi had this dream, he'd fallen asleep reading Avicenna in bed. I say this because the dream Aristotle seems to be acquainted with Avicenna's famous flying man argument and the attendant idea that we are all permanently aware of ourselves. Suhrvadi agrees with Avicenna on this point. When you are aware of yourself, you are not grasping yourself through some kind of representation, like an imaginary image, or by thinking of yourself as falling under some sort of universal description or definition. Rather, you just immediately grasp yourself. Suhrvadi's dream and his theory of knowledge by presence apply this Avicenna insight more widely. If you can directly apprehend yourself, then you can also apprehend other things directly, such as the color green, or any particular object you might see or hear. This expansion of direct self-awareness to direct awareness of other things is a real epistemological breakthrough. It enables Suhrvadi to present individual acts of sense perception as the foundation of all our knowledge. This is in sharp contrast to the Aristotelians, who since Aristotle himself had supposed that genuine knowledge is always universal in character, and who had thus had difficulty explaining how knowledge can be grounded in encounters with particular things in the sensible world around us. In Suhrvadi's theory, there is no need to worry about getting from my experience of Hiawatha or Harold to a universal understanding of giraffes. My visual encounter with Hiawatha or Harold already counts as fully-blown knowledge, knowledge that simply consists in a particular giraffe being present to my awareness. Even better, we can apply the point to God's knowledge. Avicenna's most notorious claim that God knows about particular things only universally can now be rejected. Instead, we can say that God has the same kind of knowledge that his creatures do concerning particular giraffes, particular gemstones, and all other particulars. They are present to his all-seeing eye. Suhrvadi, too, has a most notorious claim, and we've now arrived at it. He thinks that God, and a whole range of other immaterial things, are lights. Hence his decision to call his own philosophy illuminationist. His metaphysics describes the emanation of all things from God, who is the light of lights. This highest divine light produces a large number of further lights, which include the angelic beings that govern the heavenly spheres, the platonic forms, and the souls that command the bodies of humans and animals. Bodies themselves are described as dark or shadowy things which form a barrier or obstruction to the light shed by these higher luminous beings. When he presents this scheme, Suhrvadi insists that he is not using the word light metaphorically, as the Neoplatonists had done. Certainly, he is drawing on the metaphors of emanation found in authors like Plotinus as well as Islamic sources, for instance the Quranic verse stating that God is the light of heaven and earth. But when he talks about light, he really means it. This is not to say that God is a light in the same sense as a physical light source like a lamp. Rather, Suhrvadi distinguishes between two kinds of light, which he calls accidental and separated or pure. Accidental light is the light we see in the physical world. Pure lights are things like souls, platonic forms, and God himself. But both are kinds of light, which Suhrvadi understands as that which is immediately manifest to whatever beholds it. Avicenna had said that souls, separate intellects, and God are all capable of permanent self-awareness. In fact, Avicenna argued, and Suhrvadi agrees, that to be aware of anything else, something must first be aware of itself. Again, this makes a certain amount of sense. Anyone who can think, oh look, it's a giraffe, must also be able to think, oh, here I am, looking at a giraffe, and so must be self-aware. Suhrvadi infers that all these self-aware things, from souls to God, must be lights that are manifest to themselves, because light is simply that which is immediately evident. Suhrvadi's illuminationist revolution is starting to look less revolutionary than it pretends. This suspicion seems at first to be confirmed when we look more closely at the details of Suhrvadi's metaphysics. He again agrees with Avicenna that God, the light of lights, is a necessary existent that gives rise to just one cause, which is of course a further light. There are then further lights emanating forth in a necessary chain reaction, like the chain of intellects recognized by Avicenna, followed by eternally moving celestial bodies and our world below the heavens, called by Suhrvadi, dark barriers. All of this may seem to suggest that what Suhrvadi is calling light is just what Avicenna called existence. There is the ultimate source of existence, God, which is now the ultimate source of light. Then there are the dependent lights that are illuminated, in other words, given existence by that first light. Furthermore, Avicenna holds that existence is something that is immediately evident and primary to our minds, which is precisely what Suhrvadi thinks is so special about light. But it would be a mistake to see Suhrvadi's metaphysics as nothing more than Avicennan metaphysics with a higher electricity bill. Light is not just a different word for existence. For one thing, Suhrvadi doesn't think there is any such thing as existence. To say that something exists is just a mental judgment, a point Suhrvadi makes in his criticism of Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, but we'll come back to this in a further episode. For another thing, Suhrvadi recognizes different degrees of purity or intensity in light. Your soul is a self-aware light and in that respect of the same nature as God, but God is a much purer, brighter light than any soul. In addition to this fundamental difference between a light-based metaphysics and a metaphysics of existence, Suhrvadi's system involves a number of smaller, but still significant, departures from Avicenna. Where the Peripatetics had recognized four elements, Suhrvadi has only three. He argues that physical fire is simply very hot air, perhaps because he doesn't want there to be any confusion between the source of illumination in things and a material element. Where the Peripatetics postulated one immaterial intellect to move each celestial sphere, Suhrvadi recognizes a vast multiplicity of lights whose complex interrelations give rise to the complicated motions of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle had admitted to being unsure whether there need to be 47 or 55 movers in total to explain the observed motions of the planets. Al-Farabi and Avicenna, as Suhrvadi says, reduce this to 10, one for each sphere. In what could almost be a parody of Aristotle's uncertainty, Suhrvadi remarks that the number must be more than 10 or 20 or 200 or 2,000 or 100,000. Anyway, we won't be running out of them anytime soon. More remarkably, Suhrvadi returns to a doctrine that had been universally rejected by the followers of Aristotle in the Islamic world, the Platonic Theory of Forms. Things in this world are mere images of incorporeal lights, perfect exemplars only imperfectly realized by the bodies we see. Characteristically, Suhrvadi devises his own terminology for the idea, calling the physical images talismans, while the forms are dominating lights, or archetypes. But his version of the theory is a true image of its Platonic archetype. What Suhrvadi adds is mostly a set of responses to peripatetic arguments against the existence of such forms. For instance, he corrects the widespread assumption that forms are like universal ideas existing outside of minds, something the peripatetics deemed absurd. No, says Suhrvadi, they are not like the universals in our minds, but universal only in the sense that they are a single cause that emanates form into many bodily individuals. For my money, this shows that Suhrvadi not only took over ideas from the Platonic tradition, but understood Plato's original intent very well, and this without being able to read a translation of any Platonic dialogues, since these were known in the Arabic-speaking world only in brief summaries. Still, Suhrvadi's philosophy draws more from Avicenna than from Plato, or any of the other sages he prides himself in following. A nice example is his treatment of reincarnation, something he considers at least possible, here signaling his agreement with, as he says, Buddha and the Eastern Sages. Yet in developing this topic, he uses an argument borrowed from Avicenna to the effect that in the case of humans, as opposed to animals, a new soul is provided to each person by the celestial giver of forms. There is no transmigration of souls into the human body, since if there were, the human would wind up with two souls. This is to take nothing away from Suhrvadi's originality, nor should we underestimate the power of his rhetoric in claiming the mantle of ancient traditions as he overthrows the system of Avicenna. This helped his ideas to become a viable alternative to Avicenna, which could be embraced by thinkers who sought to attach themselves to a rival tradition. These would be the thinkers who styled themselves, following Suhrvadi, as Ishraki, or Illuminationist. Ironically, the gesture of self-description is itself reminiscent of Avicenna. In one period of his career, he experimented with a new designation for his own philosophy, which as it happens comes from the same Arabic root, Mashriqi, or Eastern. Whereas Avicenna's flirtation with this label has been more confusing than anything else, Suhrvadi's exercise in branding would be a great success. Centuries later, we will find Iranian thinkers like the great Mullah Sadra still drawing heavily and explicitly on the Illuminationist tradition. But Suhrvadi's influence is already felt in the generations immediately after him, as we'll see next time. It would be unbearable if you didn't join me for more on the lightness of being with the Illuminationists here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Bright Ideas, Illuminationism. What do you expect to happen to you after you die? Perhaps you do not believe in an afterlife and think there will be nothing at all. Or maybe you adhere to the traditional Christian options of hell, purgatory, and heaven, destinations that received the ultimate travel guides in Dante's Divine Comedy. I myself am hoping to be reincarnated. If I get to be a human again, I'd like to host another podcast, but without tackling such an enormous topic. I could do a series on dentistry, called The History of Gaps, without any philosophy. If I return as an animal, of course you know what I'd like to be, just in case I'm leaving behind a very long scarf for my future self. This idea that the soul will live on but pass into a different body is sometimes called transmigration, or metempsychosis, and it features now and again in the history of philosophy. We probably associate it especially with the Indian tradition, but also with the ancient Pythagoreans. It is usually taken as a sign of their influence that, in the Phaedo and other dialogues, Plato has Socrates speak of human souls being reborn into non-human animal bodies. In the Islamic world, the doctrine of transmigration was itself reborn among the illuminationists. Very few philosophers or theologians had embraced it before Sukhravadi, the founder of illuminationism, and even he was tentative on the subject. Invoking not only the sages of India and Greece, but also his own Persian forefathers, in his most important work The Philosophy of Illumination, Sukhravadi declared it at least possible that humans are reborn as animals. He did not, however, think that souls can go the other way, from animal into human bodies. As I mentioned in passing last time, he reproduced an argument against this possibility taken from Avicenna. The argument is that a suitably prepared human body automatically receives an emanated soul. If it received a transmigrating soul also, then it would wind up with two souls. And when it comes to souls, one is company for the body, but two is most definitely a crowd. In The Philosophy of Illumination, Sukhravadi seems sympathetic but unsure about transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, while in other works he argued against it. Yet he is consistent in rejecting the idea that the souls of humans existed before coming into human bodies. Despite or perhaps because of Sukhravadi's uncertainty about transmigration, the theme becomes a distinctive feature of the Isharaki, or illuminationist, tradition in philosophy. It takes its place alongside other Sukhravadian ideas, such as his doctrine of knowledge by presence, his rejection of Avicenna's essence-existence distinction as applying to things in reality outside the mind, and his critique of peripatetic logic on such topics as definition. Actually, though, later authors in the Islamic world, and for that matter historians of philosophy nowadays, are oversimplifying when they speak of an illuminationist school initiated by Sukhravadi. We can certainly point to several philosophers who were inspired by Sukhravadi in the generations after his death, and who wrote favorable commentaries on his works. We're going to look at three of them in this episode. But they are not direct successors or students of Sukhravadi, nor do they agree with him about everything. They actually draw on a wide range of sources, sometimes showing more sympathy to Avicenna than Sukhravadi had, and taking over arguments and positions from other critics of Avicenna, like Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi. This is especially true of our first so-called illuminationist Ibn Qamuna, who died in 1284. Ibn Qamuna was no straightforward follower of Sukhravadi, in fact not even a member of the same religion. We looked recently at the Jewish-Muslim convert Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, and now we see again with Ibn Qamuna that Jews contributed to philosophy in the East, not only in Andalusia. Some sources allege that, like Abul Barakat, Ibn Qamuna converted to Islam. But it seems more likely that he remained a Jew to the end of his life. In works on Jewish religious topics, such as a treatise on the difference between Karaite and rabbinical Judaism, he draws on Andalusian thinkers like Judah Halevi and Maimonides. His philosophical works though are situated within the Eastern tradition of reflecting on Avicenna. Along with Fakhradin Ahrazi and other thinkers we'll be looking at in the coming episodes, he nicely represents what I have been calling Avicennan scholasticism. Ibn Qamuna carefully dissected and tested philosophical arguments for their demonstrative value and usually found them wanting. Though he is usually thought of as an illuminationist, he does not shy away from applying this rigorous strategy to Sukhravadi himself. An excellent example is this whole question of the soul. He dismisses all the arguments for and against transmigration as inadequate, suggesting that philosophy is incapable of resolving the issue. But he's more confident regarding the question of whether our souls existed before we were born. Against Sukhravadi, Ibn Qamuna answers this question positively. In this respect he adheres more closely to the position of Plato than Sukhravadi had done, even though Plato was supposedly a key source for Sukhravadi's illuminationist philosophy. Ibn Qamuna sets out an ambitious and complex proof to show that the soul must be eternal in the past as well as the future. In fact, his primary motivation in asserting that the soul has eternally pre-existed the body seems to be that he wants to safeguard the future immortality of the soul. If your soul only came into existence with your body, reasons Ibn Qamuna, then it is liable to go out of existence when your body dies. Ibn Qamuna's argument for the soul's pre-eternity depends on a fundamental idea of avicennas, which Ibn Qamuna articulates especially clearly. He introduces the terminology of a complete cause. This is a cause that guarantees its resulting effect. Clearly many of the things we call causes are not complete causes in this sense. My mentioning a giraffe or Buster Keaton may cause a wry smile among long-time podcast listeners who have heard the example many times before, but it is not a complete cause of the wry smile since the effect may well not follow, as when a listener is annoyed rather than amused by my always using the same examples. Putting the idea into more technical language that will help reveal the connection to avicenna, we can say that a complete cause necessitates its effect. Avicenna thought that God, the necessary existent, necessitates contingent things to exist so that they become, as he puts it, necessary through another. On this view, God's existence is a complete cause for all other things. He is sufficient for and guarantees whatever He causes whenever He exists, which is always. An obvious consequence is that the universe is eternal. Like someone listening to disco music, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with soul. The answer is that for Ibn Kamuna, God is the complete cause of the soul. Thus the soul is guaranteed to exist whenever God exists, which is to say, eternally. Ibn Kamuna is exceedingly proud of this argument, repeating it in several works and emphasizing that it is original with him. To get the demonstration to go through, he of course needs to show that God is the cause of the soul, something he achieves with a complicated proof that the soul is simple and that anything simple must have a simple cause. Along the way, he also has to defeat Avicenna's rival view that each soul needs a body in order to exist. For Avicenna, this followed from the need for one soul to be individuated from another. Since all souls are of the same kind, they would be identical to one another if they were not differentiated by their relations to different bodies. In other words, according to Avicenna, your soul got to be different from my soul because it came into existence when your body, and not my body, was prepared to receive a soul. Since Ibn Kamuna thinks our souls existed before they were in our bodies, he clearly can't follow Avicenna here. He instead explains how one soul differs from another by reviving a proposal from Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, who had suggested that souls are not really all of the same kind. Rather, just as a human soul would differ in species from the soul of a giraffe, so my soul differs in species from yours. That means they are different by their very nature, regardless of which, if any, body they might belong to. Ibn Kamuna develops his proof without ever claiming that he can define the soul, whether it is your soul, my soul, or a giraffe's soul. Indeed, in other contexts where he talks about the logical ideas of Avicenna and other so-called peripatetics, he is skeptical that anything can be perfectly defined. He adds that we can't even make positive universal judgments based on experience, since we never know whether a counterexample might come along in the future. As we can see from this, Ibn Kamuna's disagreement with Suhrabadi over the pre-existence of soul didn't stop him from upholding the illuminationist position on other topics. And from a historical point of view, he was a pivotal figure in the history of illuminationism. Though he would not have known Suhrabadi personally, he seems to have been instrumental in carrying illuminationist ideas from Syria, where Suhrabadi wrote his major works and was executed, to the eastern regions of the Islamic world. Without Ibn Kamuna, there might have been no illuminationist tradition at all. We can see his illuminationist sympathies emerging again in an interesting exchange of ideas with his contemporary, the Shiite Avicennan philosopher and astronomer Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi, who we'll be covering in depth next time. In the exchange, Ibn Kamuna respectfully poses a series of puzzles to At-Tuzi. At one point he explicitly refers to Suhrabadi, and in general he gives the impression of wanting to test At-Tuzi, a leading peripatetic, to see whether he can deal with illuminationist criticisms. The correspondence between Ibn Kamuna and At-Tuzi illustrates an awkward feature of 13th century philosophy in the Islamic East. All the significant thinkers seem to have known each other, so it's hard for me to avoid mentioning figures I haven't yet covered properly. At-Tuzi in particular had all the other interesting philosophers of the time in his address book. He also corresponded with Sa'd al-Din Akhunawi, a leading philosophical Sufi we'll be considering later, and one of his students was a major illuminationist. This was Qutb ad-Din al-Shirazi. Like At-Tuzi himself, but of course unlike the Jewish Ibn Kamuna, Qutb ad-Din was a Shiite Muslim. Also like At-Tuzi, he was a multi-faceted thinker who wrote not only on philosophy but also on the sciences, producing sophisticated works on astronomy, medicine, and optics. From a young age he was trained as a Sufi, so mystical themes also make themselves felt in his philosophy. If stories concerning Qutb ad-Din's personality may be believed, he was apparently quite a guy, with a penchant for chess, music, and magic tricks, and a rather sharp sense of humor. When he heard that a Jewish colleague was writing a commentary on the Qur'an, and had offered an interpretation of the line, we have no knowledge except what you have taught us, Qutb ad-Din remarked, he should have stopped at the first half of the verse. But he was open-minded enough to make use of the works of his Jewish colleague Ibn Kamuna, alongside another illuminationist by the name of Shahrazuri. Both Shahrazuri and Qutb ad-Din wrote commentaries on Suhrabadi's major work, The Philosophy of Illumination. It seems that Qutb ad-Din was making liberal use of Shahrazuri's ideas in carrying on the illuminationist tradition. Again, we have here something more complex than a faithful exposition of Suhrabadi's case. Where Shahrazuri enthusiastically adopts the characteristic symbolic language of illumination, Qutb ad-Din follows Ibn Kamuna in writing more like an Avicennan philosopher. He was, after all, a student of At-Tuzi, who is still known today for his staunch defense of Avicenna against his critics. So it's only to be expected that Qutb ad-Din sometimes departs from the illuminationist position and returns to orthodox Avicennism. He restores fire to its place alongside the other three elements, where Suhrabadi had proposed that fire is nothing but heated air. And though he accepts Suhrabadi's skeptical attack on the theory of definition, he suggests that we can make do with essential descriptions of things and proceed with our science much as the Aristotelians had intended. But what we really want to know is, what are our prospects of being reborn as giraffes? Whereas Qutb ad-Din emphasizes that the illuminationist founder, Suhrabadi, was rather tentative on the issue, Shahrazuri has no hesitations. He thinks Suhrabadi was convinced that human souls can definitely go into animal bodies, and Shahrazuri accepts this too. He admits Ibn Kamuna's point that there is no certain demonstration available on this score, but the truth of the theory is validated by the mystical experiences of great sages. Which great sages? The same ones name-checked by Suhrabadi, including the Buddha and Plato. Shahrazuri mentions here the arguments for the eternity of soul in Plato's Phaedo. As for how he would know anything about Indian beliefs in transmigration, we should remember that by this point, the Islamic world has had cultural exchange with India for centuries. The science of India played a role in the development of mathematics, astronomy, and astrology already during the early Abbasid era, and a contemporary of Avicenna's, the great scientist al-Biruni wrote a sprawling work called simply Al-Hind, meaning India. Al-Biruni had gathered information from Indian Brahmins taken as war captives. He even anticipated the illuminationists by finding agreement between some Indian ideas and the doctrines of the Greeks. The sages of India and Greece, as well as Persia, are also invoked by these illuminationists in defense of another distinctive theory, the so-called world of images. It may sound like a media superstore, but it is actually a metaphysical realm, first postulated by Suhrabadi and then further developed by his commentators Shahrazuri and Khutub ad-Din. We've been seeing that many of the illuminationists' innovations were put forward as criticisms of Avicenna. The world of images instead constitutes a major revision to the longer established hierarchy of Neoplatonism. Since Plotinus, Platonists and those influenced by them had recognized three realms or layers of existence below the first principle. A world of intellect is followed by that of the soul, with the natural or bodily realm below. The problem with this scheme from the illuminationists' point of view is that it has no place for such supernatural beings as the jinn of Islamic tradition, jinn relates to our word genii, or for the demonic beings known in Arabic as shayatin, this is related to our word satan, which comes from the same root in Hebrew. Furthermore, there are the objects seen in visions by prophets and in dreams. What are these things? Not mere illusions, that's for sure. We have the authority of the Quran itself for jinn, and visions have been enjoyed not only by the prophets but also by those Greek, Persian and Indian sages who were so venerated by the illuminationists. Demons and the objects of dream visions fit badly into the traditional Platonic metaphysical hierarchy. They seem to be neither bodies nor souls nor intellects. This was already recognized in antiquity, with Neoplatonists like Proclus treating demonic entities as mediating principles above the human soul but below the truly divine. Still, it was a new idea to establish a whole fourth realm to house these mediating entities as Suhravarti proposed. This world of images is populated with things that are immaterial and thus distinct from bodies. Humans can grasp more transcendent items, like platonic forms, using the intellectual aspect of the soul. But for these intermediary image entities, we must instead do what children had to do before the invention of television, use our imaginations. The imaginative faculty of a prophet is like a polished mirror that shows things from the world of images. This isn't far from an idea accepted by the peripatetic philosophers. Al-Farabi already made the influential claim that prophecy is realized by a particularly powerful human imagination. The illuminationists improve on a theory, or at least they think it's an improvement, by assigning a special metaphysical status to the images themselves. There's a connection here to the debates over the soul that I was discussing earlier in this episode. Both Shahr Azuri and Qutb Ad-Din think that after death some human souls manage to avoid transmigration into animal bodies. Instead, the souls arrive in the world of images, taking up residence there alongside the demons and so on. To be honest, I think I'd rather be a giraffe. But the illuminationists would disagree, since they see animal bodies as a punishment for evil behavior in a previous life. At the other end of the scale, the purest of souls can escape the bodily realm of death and go beyond even the world of images, enjoying a direct vision of the lights of the intelligible realm. If you think all of this sounds pretty odd, I'm inclined to agree with you. To my mind it illustrates an interesting tension within illuminationist philosophy. On the one hand, they are not just willing, but eager, to accept the direct visionary testimony of authoritative sages. Suhr Havadi invokes such direct vision in support of his fundamental idea that the higher principles are lights, and for such exotic teachings as reincarnation and the world of images. On the other hand, the illuminationists are unforgiving critics when it comes to the proofs of rationalist philosophy. This is so even when those proofs were put forward by Suhr Havadi. We find Ibn Kamuna complaining that Suhr Havadi's arguments against the pre-existence of soul in the philosophy of illumination fall below the standard of true demonstration, and even worse, they reach the wrong conclusion. More typically, the illuminationists hold the avicennine peripatetic thinkers to the highest standard envisioned by the peripatetics themselves, and the arguments are nearly always found wanting. Are the illuminationists being inconsistent then? Credulous in the face of intuitive visions but hypercritical when anyone attempts to put in the hard work of demonstrating something? I don't think so. Their epistemology is consistent with, indeed demands, both attitudes. Suhr Havadi dismissed the peripatetic's methods not just because they wouldn't work, but because they were superfluous. When you have the option of directly beholding the way things are, why go the long way around by using dubious syllogisms to prove these same truths? With their philosophical posture, the illuminationists reconcile two major currents in 12th and 13th century thought. The ideal of direct vision is of course borrowed from the Sufis, and illuminationism is accordingly seen sometimes as a part of the mystical tradition within Islam. Equally important though is the rigorous side of illuminationism where they contribute to avicennine scholasticism. Authors like Ibn Qamuna pick up on the more technical and critical aspects of Suhr Havadi and echo the careful argumentative techniques and relentless demand for certainty that we find in other 12th century philosophers, like Fakhradin Arazi. At one point, Qutb ad-Din comments that whereas avicenna thought that every distinction valid in the mind must reflect a distinction that is real out in the world, after Suhr Havadi this confidence that our concepts would match reality had been permanently shaken. The illuminationists are thus a part of a general trend towards philosophical skepticism in this period, but only a part. Avicenna was under fire from attackers who used his tools against him, for instance by invoking avicenna's own distinction between mental and concrete existence and suggesting that he and other philosophers move from the mental to the real all too easily. Peripatetic philosophy could use a hand, and is going to get it, in the shape of Qutb ad-Din's teacher. He was no illuminationist, but at one point or another in his career he was just about everything else. Next time we meet a man who didn't need to die to reinvent himself radically, Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, today's episode, A Man for All Seasons, Nasir ad-Din Atouzi. Just as Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire has always depended on the kindness of strangers, philosophers have almost always depended on the kindness of the rich and powerful. Already in the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle consorted with political leaders, Plato with the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse and of course Aristotle with Alexander the Great. Even Plotinus fraternized with senators and called on their support for his plan to found a new city. Down the line, patronage will play a decisive role in Renaissance philosophy and Descartes will die shortly after moving to Sweden to tutor the Queen. Isn't this a bit unsettling, not to say tawdry, not to say outrageously hypocritical? Surely the true philosopher ought to disdain the compromises, flattery, and diplomacy involved in a life at court. Philosophy should be a dispassionate inquiry into the truth, not an attempt to flatter the powerful. It's an issue that still confronts us today, with philosophers and other academics wary of any government or university policy that might infringe on their intellectual freedom. If the spectacle of the court philosopher does indeed unsettle you, then the Islamic world offers plenty of reason for disquiet. Many of the major figures we've looked at benefited from patronage relationships, from Akindi, tutoring the Caliph's son, to Iverroes, supposedly writing his commentaries at the behest of the An-Muhad-i-Mir. Even worse, there's good reason to think that political pressures affected the ideas put forward by these philosophers. Consider for instance the striking resonances between Akindi's ideas and those of the Ma'atazilite theologians. Acceptance of the Ma'atazilite position on the createdness of the Qur'an was being made compulsory by the very same caliph that engaged Akindi's services as a tutor. That might be a coincidence, but I tend to doubt it. A more subtle effect of patronage is its influence on the literary form philosophers choose for their writings. Avasana and others constructed their works with an eye fixed firmly on the pedagogical needs and interests of their readers, and that meant in the first instance the needs and interests of wealthy patrons. No thinker of the Islamic world brings these issues to the fore as much as Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. To this day, controversy rages over the question of just how much his political connections even determined the content of his writings. At-Tuzi espoused different opinions at different times, and rather conveniently those opinions tended to match the ones promoted by his masters. Were his changing ideas nonetheless held sincerely, or was he a philosophical weathervane, changing direction with the gust of new political winds? The main shift in his writings concerns his religious allegiances, and in particular whether he joined the Ismaili community of Shi'i Muslims out of sincere conviction, or rather as a hypocritical career move. Somewhat surprisingly, the charge of hypocrisy has often been pressed by admirers of At-Tuzi. So great a scholar would be apprised to be claimed for one community or another, so Twelver Shiites have often been eager to say that At-Tuzi held to their version of Shi'ism throughout his life. This was the tradition in which At-Tuzi was raised, and he returned to it in the end. On this interpretation, he only claimed to adopt Ismailism while he was enjoying the patronage of Ismaili rulers. Once they were swept away by the Mongols, he was free to repudiate that branch of Shi'ism openly and to proclaim the Twelver beliefs he had secretly held all the while. The debate extends even to the authenticity of those works ascribed to At-Tuzi which most obviously uphold Ismaili teachings. Before passing judgment, we are going to need to understand the political and religious situation a bit better. In fact, we practically need a flow chart. The Nizaris, whose patronage At-Tuzi enjoyed for some time, are a subgroup of the Ismailis. The Ismailis are in turn a subgroup of the Shi'ites who are of course on one side of the major divide in Islam between Sunnis and Shi'ites. In other words, some Muslims are Shi'ites, some Shi'ites are Ismailis, and some Ismailis are Nizaris. Apart from the Nizaris, we've seen all these groups before. To review, Shi'ites are Muslims who believe that rightful authority is passed down through the family of the prophet, beginning with his cousin Ali. Different groups of Shi'ites then accept different lines of imams, or rightful successors, to Ali. The Twelvers and Ismailis broke with one another over the question of succession, with the two groups championing two different sons of the imam Ja'far Asadik, who died in the year 765. The name of the Itna Asheri, or Twelver Shi'ites, refers to the line of 12 imams recognized by this group, while the Ismailis get their name from Ismail, the older brother whose claim they accepted. We saw in episode 135 that some Ismaili missionaries embraced Neoplatonic texts drawn from the Greek tradition, using this philosophical material to put forward a distinctive version of Shi'ite theology. This was at a time when Ismailis held the reins of power in Egypt, before being tossed out by Syrian forces, including Saladin. Finally, the Nizaris were a group that broke off from other Ismailis. Again, the split was over a question of succession in the line of imams. Which brings us to At-Tuzi. As I say, he was raised as a Twelver Shi'ite, but he may have had leanings towards Ismailism early in life. A decisive moment came in the year 1220, when the young man immersed in his studies in the Central Asian province of Khorasan looked up from his books and noticed that the Mongols were rampaging in his direction. He fled to the shelter of the Nizari rulers, whose conflicts with other Muslims had given them good reason to build nearly impregnable fortresses, a base from which the Nizaris sometimes ordered targeted deaths for their political and religious opponents. Our word assassin comes from the group of killers who carried out these missions. While At-Tuzi was enjoying the safety, and even friendship, of the Nizari leaders, he wrote works with clear Ismaili commitments. One is an intellectual autobiography entitled Contemplation and Action. It is apt to remind us of the life stories written by Avicenna and Alghazali, except that in Alghazali's Deliverer from Error, the Ismailis are mercilessly attacked, whereas At-Tuzi tells of how this community finally offered him the truths he had been seeking since childhood. By the time he is writing his works under the sheltering wing of the Nizaris, At-Tuzi is already a formidable scholar, a polymath who is expert in the mathematical sciences and philosophy, especially the theories of Avicenna. He does not hesitate to use philosophical arguments to defend the Ismaili view of things. Already the earlier Ismaili philosophers had promoted the idea that God in himself remains utterly transcendent and relates to the world only through a command. Now At-Tuzi supports this line of thought with a claim taken straight from Avicenna, God being purely one can have only one effect. This effect will not be, as in Avicenna, a first celestial intellect. While At-Tuzi does here recognize a chain of intellects descending through the heavenly spheres, he says that these are preceded by the divine command, which serves as an intermediary between God and the universe that he creates. Philosophy is also deployed to prove the central Ismaili doctrine of the imam. For At-Tuzi, Avicenna epistemology proves the possibility of such a perfectly enlightened teacher by explaining what it would mean for a human to have a completely actualized intellect. It also shows that the rest of us who are not perfect need an external teacher. As Avicenna and indeed Aristotle have shown us, potentiality can be realized only through some external cause that is already actual, so a potential learner needs a teacher on the outside, that teacher being, of course, the imam. These same arguments are put forward in another explicitly Ismaili work called Paradise of Submission. This is one of the works whose authenticity is questioned by those who would prefer At-Tuzi not to be such a forthright defender of the Ismaili community, but it again does what you would expect At-Tuzi to do, mount a defense of that community using the arsenal provided by philosophy. He argues against the view that all humans are equal in intellect. This would inevitably lead to a kind of relativism in which all believers would be equal and there would be no point sorting true from false. Thus, the more imperfect minds should look to a perfect mind to help them, again, this will be the imam. Nor is this guidance a matter only of belief, we also need the imam to help us perfect our moral character. Moral character is the topic of another work from At-Tuzi's Ismaili period entitled Ethics for Nasir. The title refers to the fact that it is dedicated to the Nizari ruler Nasir ad-Din ibn Abi Mansur. Yes, this ruler was called Nasir ad-Din while At-Tuzi was named Nasir ad-Din. That's just in case you weren't sufficiently confused by the Shi'ism flowchart earlier. In this treatise, At-Tuzi sets out to provide a complete discussion of what Aristotelians had always called practical philosophy. As already suggested by Aristotle, philosophy's contribution to our practical affairs is divided into three parts concerning the individual, the household, and the city. Thus, the title Ethics, a more accurate character trait, really only applies to the first major section of the work on individual action. Here, At-Tuzi sticks closely to the work called Refinement of Character, written by the earlier Platonist thinker Miskaway. We covered it in episode 134 on Arabic ethical literature. Concerning the household, he uses a work written by Avicenna, and for politics he draws especially on Al-Farabi. Though this treatise is thus heavily dependent on earlier authors, it had a huge popularity in subsequent centuries. This is in no small part because of the simple fact that it was written in Persian. At-Tuzi's decision to write many of his works in Persian is in itself symptomatic of the Nizadi context in which he was writing. They have sometimes been seen as a self-consciously Iranian movement, and they promoted the use of Persian in their writings. At-Tuzi helped to launch Persian as a philosophical language, in part by integrating Arabic terminology into works written in this language. Even though I unfortunately can't read Persian, I can easily recognize many technical terms in Persian philosophical works, because these words are often just the same as in Arabic. Another characteristic feature of this work on practical philosophy is the occasional, usually rather subtle allusion to Ismaili doctrines. Unsurprising, perhaps, given the intended recipient of the work. Nonetheless, it's a piece of evidence in support of the idea that At-Tuzi was sincere in his support of the Nizadi cause at this stage of his career. It's interesting to note that Avicenna plays a relatively small part in this work by At-Tuzi. Indeed, it would be fair to say that ethics and politics are the only areas of philosophy in which Avicenna did not dominate the later Eastern tradition. The fact that an Avicenna expert like At-Tuzi turned to Miskaway for ethics and Al-Farabi for political philosophy is telling in this regard, and there's certainly no doubting At-Tuzi's expertise when it came to Avicenna, as we can see from yet another work he wrote during his stay with the Nizaris, a commentary on the Pointers and Reminders. As I've mentioned before, the Pointers is a deliberately compressed and difficult work, much briefer than Avicenna's magisterial healing. It seemed to cry out for commentary, and that is what it got. Fakhradina Razi already turned the project of commenting on the Pointers into an opportunity for raising doubts about Avicenna's philosophy. In effect, At-Tuzi's commentary is a response to Razi, in which the doubts are answered or exposed as mere, sophisticated quibbles. The result is one of the most staunchly pro-Avicennian works produced in the whole long history of responding to Avicenna. Let's go straight to the top and consider how At-Tuzi responds to Fakhradina Razi's complaints about Avicenna's portrayal of God. We already saw in the episode on Razi how he dealt with Avicenna's claim that God is an intellect. If this is so, says Razi, then God must have objects of knowledge which are distinct from God himself. This shows, Razi gleefully claims, that Avicenna is committed to something like the Asherite understanding of God. The Asherite theologians, after all, recognize divine attributes that have their own distinct reality but reside in God's essence. In just the same way, Avicenna must admit that there are bits of knowledge residing in God's mind. To this, At-Tuzi replies that there is no distinction between God and what God knows. Rather, as Avicenna said loudly and clearly, God knows all other things by knowing himself as their cause. Of course, this is a particularly exalted case of self-knowledge, but as At-Tuzi points out, it does have something in common with our more humble knowledge of ourselves. When you know yourself, there is no distinction between the thing that knows and the thing that is known. Rather, as At-Tuzi puts it, you occur to yourself without of course being a second thing that resides in your own mind. The same is true of God, except that he needs no further knowledge apart from self-knowledge the way that we do, for in knowing himself, he already knows everything. The two commentators fight a similar battle when it comes to Avicenna's famous identification of God as the necessary existent. On this point, Razi again detects a kind of composition or multiplicity in Avicenna's supposedly simple God. For Avicenna, the difference between God and created things is that God's essence guarantees his existence, whereas a created thing like Hiawatha the giraffe, or anything else apart from God for that matter, has an essence that needs to receive existence from some external cause. Fine, says Razi, but in that case the essences of God and Hiawatha both receive the same thing, existence, and in both cases this is something distinct from the essence. It's just that God supplies himself with his own existence, whereas Hiawatha, for all her charms, cannot manage this trick. Much as Razi claimed before that God's knowledge would be something distinct that resides in God, he claims now that God's very existence would have to be a distinct thing that permanently comes to his essence. At-Tuzi's response to this far-reaching consequences, both philosophically and historically. He identifies a crucial premise in Razi's attack, namely that Hiawatha and God must both receive the same kind of existence for their essences, if they are to exist. This is wrong, says At-Tuzi. In fact, God's existence is of a fundamentally different kind from ours. In particular, it is an existence which is in no way distinct from the essence to which it belongs. Perhaps this would be clearer if I give you an analogy. On Razi's interpretation, the difference between Hiawatha and God is like the difference between me and the nice man who drives the ice cream truck. We can both get ice cream, but I need to get it from the nice man, whereas the nice man can supply it to himself. That might be why he needs to go on a diet. On At-Tuzi's understanding, the difference is more like that and a banana split. Whereas I need to get ice cream from some other source, the banana split just is ice cream. So if we say that I have ice cream and also that the banana split has ice cream, we are using the phrase in rather different ways. Likewise, if I say that Hiawatha exists and that God exists, I am using the word exists in two ways. Hiawatha receives existence, whereas God just is existence. On the other hand, At-Tuzi believes that the two uses of the word are related. As At-Tuzi says, using some terminology also found in Avicenna, there is a relation of tashkik, or analogy, between created existence and divine existence. Now, like the nice man giving me a free sample of ice cream, at the moment I'm just giving you a taste of something bigger and better. We'll look again at the analogy idea in the next episode when we have a more wide-ranging look at interpretations of Avicenna's essence-existence distinction in the later tradition. The Pointers' commentary, like the Ismaili works and Ethics for Nasir, were written while At-Tuzi lived in the strongholds of the Nizari leaders. But even the strongest leader tends to lose his hold when the Mongols come to town, and so it was in this case. Led by Hulagu, they arrived at the main Nizari fortress in Alamut, which is in northern Iran, in the year 1256. At-Tuzi was sent as a negotiator to speak to the Mongols, and I don't know about you, but I'm giving him serious points for bravery there. But, like a grocery shopper who refuses to get a store card, At-Tuzi doesn't earn many points for loyalty. Once Alamut fell, At-Tuzi announced that he had never really sympathized with the Ismailis. He made his services available to Hulagu and accompanied him to Baghdad where the Mongols successfully overwhelmed the city and executed the last of the Abbasid caliphs, Al-Musta'asim. It's even reported that At-Tuzi suggested the brutal means by which the caliph was executed, to avoid spilling his blood, roll him to death in a carpet. Other versions of the story have him being rolled up in a carpet and then trampled by elephants or horses. While this may make it sound as if At-Tuzi sold his soul to the devil, at least he got a good deal. As a Shiite, whether Twelver or Ismaili, he may well have welcomed the end of the line of Sunni caliphs, and perhaps he really did spend his years with the Ismailis under duress, in which case the coming of the Mongols would have been very welcome. Certainly, his intellectual career blossomed thanks to his friendly dealings with the Mongols. The execution of the caliph occurred in early 1258. Just one year later, with Hulagu's support, At-Tuzi became director of a research center and observatory at Maragha in modern-day Azerbaijan. Recreating something of the intellectual ambition of ancient Alexandria, Maragha would, in due course, have an enormous library as well as the observatory and attract scholars from across the Islamic world. The work done at Maragha has been called a scientific revolution before the Renaissance, and one part of the case for that claim would be At-Tuzi's own writings, among them a work dedicated to the Mongol ruler Hulagu. So, was At-Tuzi a hero or a villain, a turncoat or a turning point in intellectual history? Perhaps the answer is all of the above. After all, nothing prevents a great thinker from switching teams when there's suddenly a new playing field. It's even been proposed that we should not apply the usual standards of political and even religious allegiance to a man like At-Tuzi. Some have argued that he was answering to a higher calling, seeing himself primarily as a philosophical advisor to kings, a role he could play for rulers of very different religious persuasions as long as they were enlightened enough to accept his counsel. Perhaps. But it seems to me a problem with this view that in his Ismaili phase At-Tuzi stridently argued that philosophy cannot reach the truths made available through the imams recognized by Shiite Islam. In these same works, assuming they are authentic, he also defends a specifically Nizari understanding of those truths. This doesn't sound like a man who thinks his philosophical gifts allow him to stand above the differences of religious opinion that divided his contemporaries. At-Tuzi's role in the history of Shi'ism seems bound to remain a matter of controversy. By contrast, his role in the history of philosophy is secure. He was the foremost defender of Avicennism in the 13th century. He wrote the most influential and eagerly read work of ethics in the later Eastern tradition. And he led an extraordinary scientific center at Maragha which all by itself gives the lie to any suspicion that the arrival of the Mongols ended serious intellectual inquiry in the Islamic world. To the contrary, in this case the Mongols actually sponsored such activity. This is one sign of the scientific and philosophical continuity that was possible across either side of the Mongol invasion. Next time, we're going to look further at another example of this continuity. Before the Mongols came, philosophy in the East centered on arguments over the legacy of Avicenna, with one issue looming perhaps larger than any other, his distinction between existence and essence. After the Mongols came, Avicenna continued to dominate philosophical and theological debate, and that distinction remained as controversial as ever. If you've ever seen philosophers arguing about metaphysics, you'll know that it takes more than the collapse of a great civilization to shut them up. Don't let anything less stop you from joining me as I look at the debate over the nature of existence next time on The History of Philosophy, Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Be or Not to Be – Debating Avicenna's Metaphysics Ever since I mentioned her in episode 139, my sister, the former trapeze artist, has been pestering me about working her into another episode. I resisted at first, but after all, she's family, or at least she would be if she existed. So let's welcome her back to the podcast. She's asked me to focus in particular on the plight of people like her, as she feels that our society has a real bias against non-existent people and does far too little to take their needs into account. Actually, there's a somewhat serious point here. In some areas of ethics, there arises a genuine difficulty about whether we could possibly have ethical obligations to people who don't exist. For instance, environmental ethicists wonder how it could be that we are perpetrating a moral wrong upon as yet non-existent future generations if we act in a way that will make the world a worse place for them to live. But in this episode, I will be returning to the more metaphysical question I discussed back in episode 139, What if any metaphysical status could non-existent things possibly have? It's a question that remains important, even if we show callous disregard to the huge population of non-existent people not living around us. For it will help us understand what it means for people like you and me, and all other things, to exist. As we saw in that earlier episode, Avicenna proposed a fundamental contrast that addresses this issue. He distinguished between the essence of a thing and that thing's existence. A thing's essence is what makes it the sort of thing that it is. Ayahuatha has the essence of a giraffe, whereas I have a human essence. What about my sister? Well, the temptation in her case is to say that she has a human essence, just like mine, but in her case this essence has not been realized, which is just to say that she doesn't exist. But as we saw, Avicenna takes a slightly different tack here, saying that my sister does exist, it's just that the sort of existence she has is mental, rather than concrete or external. In other words, she exists by virtue of being something we think about, even if she doesn't have reality outside our minds. Avicenna further points out that, for each item other than God, the essence leaves it open whether the thing in question exists. Giraffes and humans don't need to exist. That they do is the result of some cause that has made them exist. This is true even in the case of mental existence, since mentally existent things are made to exist by someone's thinking about them. So it is that giraffes and humans are merely possible or contingent beings. By contrast, God is a necessary existent, which means that God's essence guarantees his existence. In fact, Avicenna suggests that God's essence just is existence. That is, in a nutshell, the story I told you when we looked at Avicenna's metaphysics. One thing I didn't tell you then was that he seems to have been responding to an ongoing dispute among Muslim theologians. As usual, there was a dispute here between the members of the Mu'atazilite and Ash'arite schools of Qalam. It concerned the rather abstruse sounding question of whether the non-existent is a thing. The Mu'atazilites said yes, while the Ash'arites said no. Their disagreement concerned the very issue we've been discussing, though they often raised it in the context of interpreting certain verses of the Qur'an. In particular, the revelation states several times that when God wants a thing, He says to it, be, and it is. This verse applies the word thing to the item God has not yet created, and His command is addressed to this non-existing thing. Partially on the scriptural basis, Mu'atazilites argued that non-existent things, like my sister, are indeed things. But the Ash'arites rejected their talk of non-existing things as nonsensical. The Qalam debate helps to explain several things. First, my non-existent sister's strong preference for the Mu'atazilites. Second, Avicenna's new range of distinctions in metaphysics. The link between his discussion and that of the theologians is especially shown by the fact that he sometimes uses the neologism shay'iyya, or thingness, to express the idea of an essence. This bit of terminology may seem to indicate that he is signaling agreement with the Mu'atazilites, just as they would have non-existing things that can receive existence from God, so Avicenna would postulate essences that need to receive existence from a cause. On the other hand, Avicenna agrees with the Ash'arites that there are no non-existing things, because every contingent essence gets existence somehow, even if it is only mental existence. The theological background helps to explain something else too, which is the fact that philosophically-minded theologians after Avicenna were a little short of obsessed with this issue of essence and existence. That's the story I want to tell in this episode—the debates that raged, especially in the 12th and 13th centuries, over the distinction and how it should be applied to created things and to God. The cast of characters in this story include several figures familiar from the last few episodes. The founder of the illuminationist philosophy Suhrawadi, the great Ash'arite purveyor of arguments, Fakhradin Arazi, and the complex character we looked at last time, Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. The first two were contemporaries. Suhrawadi died in 1191, Arazi in 1210. We will start with the dispute between them, as Suhrawadi rejects Avicenna's distinction and Arazi defends it. Then we move on to several 13th century thinkers including At-Tuzi who further developed Avicenna's ideas. Before we get into the historical details though, let's think a little about the distinction for ourselves. At first glance, it seems eminently reasonable. Avicenna seems right in saying that it is one thing to understand what a giraffe is, to grasp its essence, and another thing to ascribe existence to a given giraffe like Hayawatha. It also looks like a good move to say that an existent that is necessary in itself would be one whose essence guarantees its existence, whether or not we agree with Avicenna that there actually is such a thing and that it is God. But upon further reflection, there's something rather odd about these essences, or thingnesses, Avicenna speaks about. What status could they possibly have independently of existence? Think again of my sister. Does she really hover in logical or metaphysical space, waiting in hope to see whether she will get to exist in concrete reality or remain only in our minds? Can we really make sense of the idea that there are not only giraffes and people, but essences of giraffes and essences of people which do not in themselves possess existence? Things aren't much clearer when it comes to existence itself. It seems straightforwardly true that asking what a thing is is different from asking whether it exists. Aristotle already made that point in one of his logical works. But Aristotle doesn't ever seem to use the idea of what we might call just plain existence, existence that remains the same no matter what essence it gets added to. Rather, he would think of the kind of being I have as fundamentally different from the kind of being we find in a giraffe. For the giraffe, being is not just to exist, but to be a giraffe. If we have the idea of being a human, being a giraffe, being God, and so on, why do we also need the more general and neutral notion of just plain existence? These were the issues at stake in the dispute between Suhrvadi and Fakhradin Ahrazi. We can start with Suhrvadi, since his position on Avicenna's metaphysical essence-existence distinction is simple, he doesn't like it. We saw when we looked at him that he was a trenchant critic of Avicenna, though in this case he may actually be directing his fire more at contemporary Avicenna thinkers like Ahrazi. Suhrvadi admits that we can draw a conceptual distinction between the essence of a thing and its existence, but that's all it is, a conceptual distinction. Suppose I am confronted with a giraffe at the zoo. I can think about what sort of thing she is, and thus consider her in terms of what Avicenna calls her essence, or I could just think that there is indeed something here in the giraffe enclosure, thus affirming that she exists. But the giraffe itself is not composed from two real things, her essence and her existence. She's just a giraffe, and she is the real thing there in the enclosure. Thus Suhrvadi rejects the notion that there are essences out there in reality that receive existence, like light switches waiting to be turned on. Nor is there any external reality that we could call existence. Rather, existence is merely a judgment made in the mind. He applies the same point to several other Avicenna notions, by the way, such as contingency. Again, contingency is not something real, but just our judging that a certain thing might not have existed. The same goes for relations, like the relation between brother and sister. These are all, as he puts it, things applied only by the mind. All this sounds pretty commonsensical. But if you aren't convinced, Suhrvadi has a nifty argument to persuade you that existence is nothing more than a mental judgment. Suppose that existence really were out there, really real. In that case, it must itself exist. But this way lies madness. If existence exists, then presumably its existence also exists, and so on. To say that a giraffe exists within existence that is real, and not only a judgment of the mind, is to commit oneself to an infinite regress of existences. Suhrvadi makes an equally persuasive argument against the idea of real essences more or less along the lines I've already suggested. If we posit that the essences that receive existence are real, then aren't we saying that these essences already exist? Just as a light switch must already exist if it is to be turned on, and a brother must exist before he can be pestered by his sister, so a real essence would need to exist in order to receive existence. But this seems to show that essences exist before they receive existence, which is clearly absurd. These are powerful objections to Evasena's distinction, at least if the distinction is understood as one that concerns the nature of things and not just the way we conceive of them. So it would take a powerful thinker, a master of argument, to respond to them adequately. Looks like a job for Fakhradin Arazi. Confronting Suhrvadi's nifty regress argument, which stated that existence would itself have to exist, Arazi reminds us of the original reason for distinguishing between essence and existence in things other than God. I cannot tell from considering the essence of such a thing whether it will exist or not. Nothing about giraffes requires that they exist. Thus, Hayahuatha's existence must be, as Arazi puts it following Evasena, additional to her essence. But this line of argument won't work for existence itself. We are not in doubt about whether existence exists. In fact, existence isn't even the sort of thing that exists or doesn't exist. Rather, things with essences exist or don't exist. So there is no reason to suppose that Hayahuatha's existence will require a further existence. Arazi not only fends off Suhrvadi's attack, he also argues positively for the real version of the distinction. All things that exist have something in common, namely the very fact that they exist. So existence is, Arazi says, shared equally by absolutely everything that there is, even God. Yet we don't only see single undifferentiated existence, rather we see lots of different kinds of things that exist. It must be the essences of these things that makes them distinct from one another. A giraffe and I are on equal footing in that we exist, but we have very different essences, which is why I don't lope across the savannah and Hayahuatha isn't hosting this podcast. Notice that according to what Arazi is saying here, we need essence and existence to be really distinct. We are trying to explain how it can be that things are different from one another and that difference is not the product of our mental judgments, so Suhrvadi must be wrong to say that essences are only figments of the mind. This line of argument has a further implication, which Arazi is not shy in embracing. I just said that according to him everything that there is has existence, even God. In respect of existing, God is no different, no better than I am. What makes him better than me, indeed infinitely better, is his essence, which among other things guarantees that he has existence, whereas I need something to cause me to exist. That's just what we mean when we say that God is a necessary existence, whereas I am a contingent thing. But existence in itself is always the same. It is the realization of an essence, whether necessarily or contingently. Arazi's great opponent in Avasena exegesis, Atuze, sees the situation differently. As we saw last time, he thinks that we can't really equate the way that God exists with the way that you or I exist. Whereas our essences leave it open whether we exist, God's essence actually is his existence. This means we can only say that there is a certain analogy to be drawn between the existence of created, contingent things and the existence of God. We can now perhaps see more clearly why Atuze would want to insist on this. Like Arazi, Atuze expresses full agreement with Avasena's real distinction between essence and existence. He would have no truck with Suhrvadi's skeptical position, which thinks of these as mere judgments of the mind. So, for him too, existence is really something out there in the world. But we just said that for Atuze, God's essence is his existence. If all existence is the same, as Arazi claims, then God's essence would have to be the same as any existence you care to choose, my existence for example. But this is obviously ridiculous, so there must be a difference between divine existence and created existence. Divine existence is the necessary being of God, whereas created existence is something that comes to an essence from an outside cause. Of course, Arazi would try to avoid this consequence by denying that God, or God's essence, is to be identified with existence itself. In fact, he goes so far as to say that God's essence causes him to exist. But there's a price to pay here, which is that the whole point of Avasena's theology was to say that God's existence has no cause. Atuze's position has the advantage of making God completely uncaused, even by his own essence. He can also ascribe a higher degree of simplicity to God. Since for Atuze, we cannot drive a wedge between God's essence and his existence. They are one and the same. Something really intriguing about all this, by the way, is that Arazi and Atuze are here fighting the same dispute as one we find in Latin medieval philosophy between Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. In that case, the opening move was an analogy theory like that of Atuze. This was the position of Aquinas, which was then heavily criticized by Scotus, who thought that existence just means existence, even in God's case. As it is usually put in that context, Scotus, like Arazi, thought that existence is unifical. We will of course get into all that in future episodes on the Latin philosophers. For now, I'll just note the parallel and point out that it is no coincidence. Not that Aquinas and Scotus were reading Arazi and Atuze, or vice versa, but both disputes were triggered by an engagement with Avicenna, whose metaphysics leaves open both the analogical and unifical interpretations. It is no surprise that clever philosophers would take Avicenna's ideas in both directions. For now though, we're going to stay in the East, where we immediately observe something interesting among theologians of the Asharite persuasion. Of course, Arazi was an Asharite, and by far the most influential one since Agrazadi. So you might expect later Asharite thinkers to follow his lead on this central debate concerning essence and existence. But that's not what happened. Instead, the next significant thinker of this school parted company with him. This was Atir-at-din al-Abhari, who died in 1265, 60 years after Arazi. Al-Abhari was on board with Arazi's general project of using Avicenna ideas to uphold traditional Asharite positions in theology, but he was more concerned than Arazi to uphold one traditional Asharite position, the one I mentioned at the start of this episode, denying that the non-existent is a thing. For al-Abhari, Avicenna's and Arazi's enthusiastic embrace of the real distinction between essence and existence looks rather… well, he just comes out and says it. Mo'atazalite. After all, what are these contingent essences that need to receive existence, if not things that come to exist when God commands them to do so? Al-Abhari unhesitatingly rephrases the old Asharite view using the anachronistic language of Avicennism. His school's beloved founder, al-Ashari himself, was just saying that there is no real difference between essence and existence. For al-Abhari, the skeptical approach of the illuminationist Suhrawadi did a better job of capturing Asharite doctrine than the hard line Avicennism of his fellow Asharite Arazi. Following this line of thought, al-Abhari went on to accept At-Tuzi's position, which equated God's existence with his essence, and rejected Arazi's idea that existence is always the same, whether it belongs to God or creatures. Al-Abhari adds a clever new argument on this point by noting that everything real must be either necessary or contingent. That sounds reasonable, right? Now let's assume that Arazi is right to say that existence is real, and is always the same, whether it belongs to God or to created things. Which is it, then? Is the common existence shared by God and his creatures necessary or contingent? Neither option looks good. If existence is in itself contingent, then clearly it can't belong to God, the necessary existence. But if it is necessary, then it can't belong to contingent things, like us. Thus, we must distinguish between two varieties of existence, the necessary kind and the contingent kind, rather than thinking that it only comes in one flavor, as Arazi had supposed. These positions would be carried on by al-Abhari's student, a man named Najm al-Din Al-Khatibi Al-Khaswini. He died about a decade after his master in 1276. I mention Al-Khatibi now only because he will play a significant role in an episode coming your way soon, which is about logic in the later Eastern tradition. Al-Khatibi wrote a treatise on Avicennan logic, which became a standard textbook for many generations of students. But before turning to him and other contributors to logic, I want to stay with this theme of existence. There is a further position I haven't considered yet, which is the one upheld by philosophical mystics. Think back for a moment to Arazi's argument for the real distinction between essence and existence. He said that all things share existence in common, and are differentiated by essence. But as we know from looking at Ibn Adabi, philosophically-minded Sufis like him like to use the technical language of Avicennah to express the fundamental unity of all things. Thinkers who were that way inclined realized that they could now articulate Ibn Adabi's position in a new way. The essential differences between things will be unmasked as an illusion, an illusion that will not fool the mystic who grasps the oneness of being. In the next episode, we'll be looking at two great Sufis from the 13th century, one of them the famous Persian poet Rumi. So, join me to find out how the philosophical Sufis are like hot dog vendors. They make us one with everything. Here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Eyes Wide Shut, Rumi and Philosophical Sufism. As you may have noticed, I like a good etymology. About the only thing I enjoy more is an almond croissant. The word croissant, of course, comes from the French for crescent, and that derives from the Latin crescare meaning to grow, because the growing or waxing moon is crescent-shaped. Hungry for more? How about the word mysticism? It derives ultimately from the Greek verb muéin, meaning to shut one's eyes or lips, a reference to the secrecy of Greek mystery religion. Appropriately enough, mysticism makes many historians of philosophy want to shut their eyes and block their ears for good measure. After all, philosophy is devoted to rational discourse, whereas mysticism tries to reach beyond the limits of reason to what cannot be said or even thought. Yet, we've seen before that mysticism has both drawn on and contributed to the history of philosophy. Neoplatonism is often considered a kind of mysticism. That is less true than often supposed. Plotinus, for instance, is far less mystical than his reputation would suggest, but it certainly applies to a figure like the Pseudo-Dionysius. We saw mysticism blooming in the soil of Spain and southern France too, in the case of the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, and of course with the greatest of the Muslim mystics, the Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi. Now, I'd like to turn our gaze to some other thinkers whose eyes were wide shut, Sufi authors of the Eastern tradition. As with Kabbalah, the full history of Sufism would burst the seams of this podcast series just as surely as too many croissants will burst the seams of your trousers. The Sufis contributed to the literary traditions of Persia, the Ottoman Empire, India, and even China. So we'll have further opportunities to note their influence in future episodes. But in this episode, I'm going to focus on just two men, men who knew each other well, who died a year apart, and who both lived in Konya, in central Anatolia during the 13th century. Probably you will have heard of one of them, but not the other. The less familiar name is Sadr al-Din Akunawi, the more celebrated one Jalal al-Din Rumi. They took very different approaches to writing about Sufi ideas. Al-Kunawi was a systematizer, committed to expounding the ideas of his master Ibn Arabi in relatively clear language, replete with a new technical terminology. In the case of Rumi, as I say I'm guessing you will know who he is. The great Persian poet of mysticism, translations of his works can be found on the shelves of pretty much any bookstore. Though you probably won't find them in the philosophy section, Rumi's poems are packed with philosophical ideas, and make for interesting reading alongside the more technical works of al-Kunawi. The term philosophical mysticism is now regularly applied to al-Kunawi and his heirs, authors like the 15th century Sufis Shams ad-Din Lahiji and Abd al-Rahman Jaami. Their works merit this designation in part because they integrate philosophical language into their mystical writings. As we know, at this point in Islamic history, philosophical language means above all the language of Avicenna. Yet this mysticism is philosophical not just because of its terminology. Al-Kunawi dealt with issues that had been central to Avicenna's metaphysics while adopting the mystical approach of Ibn Arabi. One such issue was the notion of wujud, or existence, which occupied our attention in last week's episode. The doctrine of the oneness of existence, in Arabic waḥtat al-wujūd, became a distinctive feature of the so-called Akhbārian tradition, meaning the followers of Ibn Arabi because of his honorific title al-akhbar, the greatest. See? Etymologies. You have to love them. All this was thanks not so much to Ibn Arabi himself, who does not make systematic use of the phrase oneness of existence, but rather to al-Kunawi and other philosophical Sufis. So what does it mean to speak of the oneness of existence? An eminent critic of the idea was the famous theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya, and he thought he knew what the Sufis were up to. Referring to Ibn Arabi, al-Kunawi, and another Sufi philosopher of the 13th century, the Andalusian thinker Ibn Sabīn, Ibn Taymiyya said that for them, there is only one existence. This would mean, on Ibn Taymiyya's understanding, that there is no difference whatsoever between the existence of God and the existence of what God creates. In other words, the philosophical Sufis were monists. Ibn Taymiyya did not hesitate to point out the grim consequences of such a doctrine. The universe, being identical with God, must be eternal, and ironically, given the Sufis' claims of elevated insight, they must think that understanding the universe is just as good as understanding God, since there is no difference between the two. Obviously, this isn't a particularly sympathetic portrayal of the mystic's position, nor do I think it captures what al-Kunawi really wanted to say. We can better understand his point by considering one of the technical terms introduced by al-Kunawi, taayyun, or specification. If I may trouble you with another etymology, this comes from the Arabic word ayn, which means an individual or particular thing. So, for something to be specified is for it to be selected as a particular thing. Every existing thing other than God is specified in this way, whereas God is absolute or unrestricted existence. One might therefore think of created beings as limited fragments or better images or representations of God's infinite being. Taking forward ideas from Ibn Arabi, al-Kunawi explains that God's perfect and perfectly unified existence exceeds the grasp of our minds. Yet, he shows himself to us, or as al-Kunawi would put it, he makes himself manifest to us by creating the universe. As in Ibn Arabi, God's names or attributes are seen as a primary case of divine manifestation which provides a basis for linking the whole theory to the language of the Qur'an. So, we can now see that Ibn Taymiyyah was wrong, or at least oversimplifying. Al-Kunawi would say that there is indeed a difference between God and the created universe. It is the same as the difference between a real thing and its name, or a real thing and a mere image of that thing. Characteristically, al-Kunawi expresses this idea in both the metaphorical language of Ibn Arabi and in the philosophical language of Avicenna. One of his favorite metaphors is one that goes all the way back to Plato's dialogue the Taimiyyas. Created objects are mere reflections of divine reality. Other Sufis will add other images, saying for instance that things in our universe are mere waves and ripples in the single infinite sea of divine reality. A more Avicennan note is struck when al-Kunawi says that God's existence is necessary. Created things, by contrast, have a merely contingent existence since it is up to God to decide how to make himself manifest. Again though, there is more going on here than the use of Avicennan terminology. As we saw last time, a pivotal question in the debates over Avicenna's metaphysics concerned the status of things that do not exist. What are we to make of an essence that has not, or not yet, been granted existence by God? Al-Kunawi has a very interesting answer to this question. He says that non-existent things are things that reside in God's knowledge rather than being made manifest in the created world. Before God creates something, it remains hidden in the recesses of the divine mind, just as God himself is hidden. This is the meaning of the prophetic saying that God is a hidden treasure. We might understand al-Kunawi to be making a fairly basic point here, namely that God knows what he can make before he makes it. If God knows about these items, then they must have some kind of metaphysical status. They are, if you will, non-existent things. If that is what al-Kunawi wants to say, then his position sounds a lot like that of the early Islamic theologians called the Mu'tazilites. As we saw last time, these theologians were inspired by the famous Quranic verses that tell us that God creates by saying to something, be. In keeping with these verses, the Mu'tazilites propose that the non-existent is a thing. After all, God can hardly address this command, be, to something unless it is indeed something. Yet, so far, it does not exist. Casting about for a metaphysical drawer to contain such things, a natural thought would be that before being created, they reside in God's power or knowledge, which sounds a lot like what al-Kunawi is saying. I'd like to congratulate myself for drawing this rather unexpected connection. Unfortunately, someone else got there first and deserves the credit. A contemporary of al-Kunawi and a man we've spoken about quite a lot in recent episodes, Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. We have an exchange of letters between the two men in which At-Tuzi remarks that al-Kunawi's views on the status of essences sound rather like the position of the Mu'tazilites. In response, al-Kunawi hastens to correct this impression, and upon reflection I think he has a good reason for doing so. His position is unlike that of the Mu'tazilites in that the so-called non-existent things that are still hidden in the divine mind are in fact more real than the things God actually creates. Al-Kunawi speaks of these non-existent essences as paradigms, or patterns. Think again of the Platonic metaphor of the mirror. Just as in the Timaeus, the things we naively take to be most real are in fact mere images of the truly real things, which are the paradigms in the divine realm. Whereas the Platonists were usually confident that the human mind can come to understand these higher paradigms, al-Kunawi accepts significant limitations on human knowledge. His exchange with At-Tuzi is polite and shows a considerable degree of mutual admiration between the two scholars. But in it, al-Kunawi says that the intellectual exertions of philosophers like At-Tuzi can take us only so far. The Sufi climbs higher, achieving a mystical insight of God that trumps any intellectual knowledge. Only the prophets are afforded a more intimate knowledge of what is really real. As al-Kunawi often says in his works, the mystics' insights lie beyond the reach of discursive argument and can be communicated only in hints and illusions. Or perhaps in poems. Which brings us to al-Kunawi's famous friend Jalal ad-Din Rumi. The two men both lived, as I've said, in the city of Qonya. In fact, al-Kunawi said the prayer at Rumi's burial in the year 1273 before dying himself a year later and being buried not far from the great poet. But Rumi came originally from modern-day Afghanistan, to be precise from the city of Balkh. His father was also a Sufi master, in fact one link in a chain of teachers and students stretching back to al-Ghazali's brother Ahmad, who was respected as a great authority in Sufism. Rumi's father moved the family east when the poet-to-be was still a child, presumably in flight from the Mongol invasion. Despite the upheaval, young Rumi was trained in a range of disciplines, including law, theology, and philosophy, and studied in the city of Aleppo before settling in Qonya and gathering a group of students around him. We have prose works based on his oral teachings, but his fame is due to the enormous collections of verses in which he devised powerful and vivid images to convey mystical insights. Are these poems works of philosophy? He himself would probably have said no, given that he thinks of the philosophers as a well-defined group with well-defined limitations, as al-Kunawi too had said. Rumi described Avicenna as a donkey on ice and remarked that, The leg of the reasoners is wooden, a wooden leg is awfully unsteady. But of course, having a wooden leg doesn't mean having no leg to stand on at all. Like al-Kunawi, Rumi believed that Sufism is not so much a stark alternative to philosophy as a higher discipline that contains the insights of philosophy within it. This helps to explain why the term intellect has such a positive connotation in his writings. He often contrasts the intellect to the lower self or soul and encourages us to turn away from the latter and towards the former. We are hybrid creatures, an animal-soul tied to a spiritual mind, like angels with asses' tails. Because the terms for intellect and soul, akhl and nafs, are grammatically masculine and feminine, Rumi allegorically represents the relation between intellect and soul with the relation between man and woman, or Adam and Eve. Many of Rumi's most celebrated images appear in verses where he exhorts us to abandon the self. Famously, he makes much use of the sensual metaphors of drunkenness and sex. The self is like the cork, and when removed we find the wine within. Our inability to know God is like the child's inability to imagine the pleasure of intercourse. These metaphors are well chosen to represent the ecstatic abandonment of self that is the ultimate goal of the Sufi path. The tradition had usually called it fana'a, or annihilation. For Rumi, this is the meaning of the shocking statement made by the Sufi martyr Al-Halaaj when he announced that he was God. This meant, as Rumi puts it, that Al-Halaaj had "...become his own enemy, and destroyed himself so completely that it was God and not the man who spoke these words." In loving God and desiring union with him, the mystic is thus in love with his own non-existence, like a shadow in love with the sun, even though the sun's light will banish it. Notice that with such images, Rumi poetically evokes the same idea we found in Al-Khunawi. To ascend to the level of true reality is to leave existence and join non-existence, like a drop of vinegar dissolving in an ocean of honey. Of course, this is no simple process. You're not going to just wake up one morning, have an almond croissant for breakfast, and then abandon yourself and unite to God's essence. The Sufi path is an arduous one of self-transformation and self-realization. Along the way, there are many stages. This is what Rumi understands by a prophetic reference to hundreds or thousands of veils between us and God. All the things we value in the created realm—our loved ones, our friends, food and drink, our knowledge, the cosmos itself, even almond croissants—are but veils that must be torn asunder if we are to know the single reality of God face to face. Rumi is here proposing a radical overturning of values such as we have not seen since the days of late antiquity in the Stoics, who thought that everything but virtue was indifferent, and in Christians like Augustine, who adapted Stoic ethics for their own religious purposes. So, Rumi's insistence on abolishing the self has both a metaphysical and an ethical aspect. The metaphysical point is that, like Akunawe, he thinks anything other than God is a delimitation or specification of God's absolute oneness and existence. Our creaturely limitations make each of us what we are, and in mystical union such limitations are removed. From an ethical perspective, even our most deeply held individual values and concerns separate us from God. Again, Rumi offers wonderful metaphors for the painful and laborious transformation that the mystic must undergo in giving up these things. My favorite, I think, is the allegory of the chickpeas. As they boil in the pot, the chickpeas cry out that they are being tormented by the heat. They cannot comprehend that they are being transformed into something far better. Just so, God sends us troubles in order to purify us even if it means our ultimate destruction. Oh chickpeas, Rumi writes, boil in tribulation so that neither your existence nor your selfhood may remain. This metaphor seems to cry out for a pun, but the only thing I can think of is that if the mystic must die to unite with God, then his vision will be like that of the chickpea, Postomos. Maybe it would be better just to move on. Or rather, let's go back and think again about the relationship between Rumi's mysticism and philosophy. On this score, it's worth emphasizing that knowledge itself is one of the veils that Rumi tells us to remove. How then can he constantly be instructing us to leave the self behind and identify with the intellect? The answer is given in passages that distinguish between two kinds of intellect, partial or acquired, and universal. These are of course philosophical terms, but as often in Sufism they here take on a rather new meaning. For Rumi, acquired intellect is knowledge that is, well, acquired, learned from books and teachers. This includes the philosophical sciences. Such knowledge flows into us from the outside like a stream of water into a house, and is thus dependent on its outer source. Universal intellect, by contrast, is to be found within. As Rumi puts it, using terms already familiar to us from other Sufis, the heart is a mirror and reflects the ineffable divinity that thus dwells inside us. Does this mean that Rumi would have no use for teachers, even teachers of mystical insight and practice? That would be a rather shocking break from tradition, even by his standards. As we saw in the case of Rumi's own father, Sufis did study with masters, as did jurists, theologians, and philosophers. In all these fields, a thinker's intellectual credentials were established by naming their teacher, their teacher's teacher, and so on. Here, Rumi is no exception. Like many other figures we have looked at, he did criticize Taklid, the uncritical acceptance of authority. As usual, he devised a lovely image to illustrate the point. A man of Taklid is like a blind person who has been told there is water rushing through a stream, whereas the man who has his own insight is like the blind person once he has filled a wineskin with the water and can feel its weight. Yet, the most pivotal relationship in Rumi's life was with a spiritual teacher named Shams ad-din at-taprizi. Rumi became so attached to him that Rumi's own students chased Shams away out of jealousy. Shams returned but then left again for good, leaving Rumi to pine for his master. Many of his poems are addressed to Shams. So, Rumi is preaching what he practiced when he warns that even if your goal is direct apprehension of the divine, you must begin more humbly by accepting guidance. Guidance from a human teacher, first learning the theory of Sufism and only then the practice, and of course guidance from God himself. As Rumi says, Since you are not a sultan, be a subject. Since you have not become God's tongue, become an ear. The accomplished mystic also displays a deep humility in that he achieves union only by annihilating himself. God manifests unbidden to the mystic who has removed the veils that used to separate him from reality, just as the whole creation is a voluntary self-manifestation of divine reality. Again, we see that Rumi's mystical practice is grounded in something like the metaphysical picture offered by Al-Kunawi. But with all due respect to Al-Kunawi, I'd have to say that Rumi puts the point more memorably. I'd like to close with a few of his verses on this topic in the translation of a leading scholar of philosophical Sufism, William Chirik. The caravan of the unseen enters the visible world, but it remains hidden from all these ugly people. How should lovely women come to ugly men? The nightingale always comes to the rosebush. The jasmine grows next to the narcissus. The rose comes to the sweet-mouthed bud. All of these are symbols. I mean that the other world keeps coming into this world. Like cream hidden in the soul of milk, no place keeps coming into place. Like intellect concealed in blood and skin, the traceless keeps entering into traces. From beyond intellect, beautiful love comes dragging her skirts, a cup of wine in its hand. And from beyond love that indescribable One who can only be called That keeps coming. I'm no expert on Persian mystical poetry, but I think what Rumi is trying to tell you is this. You should join me next time for an interview with another expert on philosophical Sufism, Muhammad Rustam. He will be the nightingale coming to the rosebush that is the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophical Sufism with Mohamed Rustam, who is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University. Hi Mohamed. Hello Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I guess the obvious first question here is what do we mean when we talk about philosophical Sufism? Obviously, it must have some relationship to philosophy on the one hand and Sufism on the other hand, but I suppose maybe it's a more specific idea than Sufism in general, some specifically philosophical kind of Sufism. Is that the idea? Yes, well, the term philosophical Sufism is somewhat problematic because it can take in Sufism, Muslim mystics who are well trained in philosophy, the formal discipline of philosophy, and as well as philosophical theology in the later period. And it can also relate to authors who had a penchant for philosophical modes of expression, but who were not really philosophers in any way at all. So with that in mind, we can kind of say that philosophical Sufism broadly refers to the theoretical or doctrinal attempt on the part of Sufis to articulate some of these more central topics in Islamic thought pertaining to things like cosmology, ontology, theology, so on and so forth. So within the framework of what we can call their spiritual vision, this means that at minimum we encounter in philosophical Sufism a more concrete kind of articulation of any given abstract philosophical theological problem or position. While it's true that philosophical Sufism and philosophy are conceived here from one perspective as two sides of the same coin, I would not wish to indulge in the simplistic characterization that we sometimes find that says that philosophical Sufism is simply philosophy clothed up in mythic form or symbolic garb or something like that. Philosophical Sufism presents itself by virtue of its emphasis on the lived and the concrete understanding of revelation as if you like a kind of improved version of philosophy or philosophical theology, but one in which the philosophical vision and revelation are kind of complementary and articulated in something like a highly symbolic form. Often philosophical Sufism refers to the school of Ibn Arabi in particular, so there's that added nuance there. And this is because an increasingly systematic and more philosophical understanding of Ibn Arabi's own teachings eventually come to take center stage in the writings of his followers, particularly Huniway, who is of course his stepson and his most important direct disciple. Thus the term school of Ibn Arabi describes a particular approach largely colored by the thought of Ibn Arabi himself to the major philosophical and religious issues which confronted medieval Islamic thought. But it should also be noted that the term normally used in Arabic and Persian to characterize the perspective of Ibn Arabi on the one hand, but also kind of philosophical Sufism more generally is Irfan Naveri or Persian Irfan Nazari, which is normally translated as something like theoretical Sufism or even speculative Sufism I guess would work. This is a fairly helpful designation in terms of what's happened in philosophical Sufism, conceived in the widest possible sense, but with the caveat that by the term theoretical Sufism we mean here the wedding of philosophical activity and lived practical aspect of Islamic spirituality. There are less, if you like, armchair philosophical Sufis in classical Islamic civilization, if you will. So it sounds like in a way we could think about philosophical Sufism either as part of the history of philosophy in the Islamic world or as part of the history of Sufism in the Islamic world, and either one would be legitimate. Yes, on one level this is correct, especially as we move further into the East and down the historical unfolding of the Islamic intellectual tradition where the lines start to get blurred in so many different places. Philosophers of Aristotelian kind of peripatetic bent now writing as illuminationists on the one hand and then engaging people like Rumi and Ibn Arabi on the other hand. So that kind of ambiguity I think that you're drawing on or the kind of universal applicability of this term really is kind of symptomatic of the more eclectic nature of the Islamic intellectual tradition in the post-Abbas and in the face of Islamic history. So you've already mentioned in passing the most important figure in the history of philosophical Sufism and maybe the second most important, Ibn Arabi and his follower Qunawi. Do you think it would be fair to say that Ibn Arabi was the first philosophical Sufi or the first to do philosophy within Sufism? I would not say that. On the one hand, as the tradition develops later, of course it's greatly indebted to him, but we find that Ibn Arabi is really following an intellectual trend within Sufism that largely was made popular probably by Ghazali's time, especially by Ghazali, in which of course a greater attention is paid to issues in cosmology and ontology primarily, but now within the framework of Sufi discourse. So one of the key figures in the integration of philosophy in Sufism, someone who was actually like a younger Andalusian contemporary of Ibn Arabi was Ibn Sabin, who was much better trained actually than Ibn Arabi in the formal discipline of philosophy. Probably the single figure who was the most pivotal in terms of the harmonization of philosophy in Sufism and when we can really start speaking about kind of philosophical Sufism as such is that the great Persian Sufi martyr, Ainuqaddat Hamadani, who died in 1131 of the common era and who was put to death by the Seljib government at the age of 33 ostensibly on charges of heresy. Not only was Ainuqaddat important because he was the student of Ahmad Ghazali, Ghazali's famous younger brother who himself was a major figure in the Persian world, but he was also very well read in Avicenna and of course Ghazali himself. He thus brings together over a century before Ibn Arabi two really important strands in Islamic thought, kind of like a careful synthesis between philosophy, theology, mysticism in a manner which is more explicit than Ghazali in terms of his reliance on philosophy, but which conscientiously seeks to address certain perceived limitations in Avicenna because of his non-committal stance on mysticism. So Ainuqaddat kind of stands as a seriously overlooked figure in this later Islamic intellectual tradition as someone who for the first time articulates a number of concepts that would become kind of stock expressions and ideas in both Persian and Arabic language Sufism. For example, you have the Muhammadan reality, the haqiqah Muhammadiyya, which after Ainuqaddat as far as I can see, and particularly actually in Ibn Arabi and his followers, it really takes center stage, but the idea we find in Ainuqaddat explicitly, the Muhammadan reality is identified with the first intellect of neo-Platonic Islamic cosmology. There is in fact some kind of indication in Ainuqaddat's main theoretical work in Arabic. He wrote pretty much all of his works in Persian, but he has one Arabic book called Zubt-i-Dul-Hakkaiq, or the Quintessence of Reality. And if we read between the lines there, it seems that even Ibn Arabi's most unique doctrine of the nature of the divine names may have at least in part been influenced by Ainuqaddat, but that whole question remains to be answered in furthering the investigation. Okay, that's really interesting. So it sounds like Ibn Arabi's not coming out of a void in terms of the effort to integrate philosophy with Sufism. He's rather responding to something that was already an ongoing process. Yes. And I think it's also interesting, by the way, that Avicenna was already central at this very early stage of philosophical Sufism, and that's something we'll see carrying on through the later Sufi tradition. Yes, indeed. So to what extent would you say that Ibn Arabi is actually doing philosophy in a systematic way? I mean, I've covered him already, right? So there's clearly a lot of philosophical ideas in Ibn Arabi, but he writes these incredibly long sprawling discussions of all sorts of things, right? And really, from what I've read, it seems like usually attempts to cobble together a philosophical system from Ibn Arabi, have to take texts from here and there, bring them together, and then do quite a lot of interpretation. Is that unfair? Or do you think that's basically right, that he's not a systematic thinker, but that he has philosophically interesting things to say unsystematically? Yeah, I think that's actually an excellent characterization. What makes Ibn Arabi so interesting is that, as you've noticed, I'm sure, in reading him, you know, one of the things that jumps out is that there isn't, like, a direct kind of engagement with the discipline of philosophy. In fact, we don't even have a record of him having ever read Islamic philosophy. I mean, he mentions, you know, he never mentions Avicenna, for example, explicitly. But as you've demonstrated in your previous podcast, Ibn Arabi says that he met Averroes, and his writings do evince on one level a deep familiarity with the hosts of philosophical terms and concepts. But, you know, the likeliest place Ibn Arabi would have learned of these was through his formal training in kalam, or philosophical theology. Of course, he was very well versed in Mu'tazilite and Asharite thought. And given the fact that that's not such a surprise anyway, because Islamic theology was thoroughly Avicennized by Ibn Arabi's time, we're thus not surprised that, you know, his ontology, its broad outlines, is even quite Avicennine. That was standard fare in Islamic theology by Ibn Arabi's time, of course. So Ibn Arabi's not technically speaking a systematic thinker, so you're correct definitely to say that. And I'd say that he's not systematic in that he does not try to, like, fit things neatly into an ordered worldview. He continuously, you know, when he'll refine his position, he'll affirm concepts from one different and even antithetical angle on one point, and then he'll go on later to deny it from another point. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Ibn Arabi in early modern scholarship was characterized as a madman. And even today you have people call him, I remember, at least one book has been written which tries to demonstrate how Ibn Arabi was kind of like a proto-postmodernist. Of course, there is a certain degree of coherence in Ibn Arabi's worldview as well. I wouldn't say a certain degree. I'd actually say a great degree of coherence. But it's far from being systematic in any real sense of the term. I mean, sometimes in the middle of a sentence in one of his books he'll insert a parenthetical comment. He'll say something like, you know, the current topic under discussion would actually have come before the topic that preceded this discussion. But then he'll tell us that his ordering of the material is a result of divine unveiling war kashf, and that's not the result of his own intellectual efforts at systematizing. So the kind of anti-systematic spirit, if we can call it that, in Ibn Arabi's writings, and indeed the vast ocean of symbolism, as you mentioned, visionary experiences, arcane, kind of mysterious references, that was clearly imbibed by Qunawiy, interestingly enough. And Qunawiy was, of course, very much a philosopher in a way that Ibn Arabi was not. And so Ibn Arabi trains Qunawiy. He's a stepson. And the same individual ends up becoming so different in so many ways from Ibn Arabi. Qunawiy, you know, we have, for example, a handwritten copy in his own handwriting of Suhrabadi's Hikmahtullah Shrakh, philosophy of elimination. And he initiates, of course, a very serious correspondence with a Nasridian tusi after having read tusi's already famous commentary of Panavasana's Ishaara. So Qunawiy represents a unique turning point in the history of philosophical Sufism in a way that Ibn Arabi doesn't, because we have here for the first time a first-rate scholar, a theologian, but somebody who's trained by none other than Ibn Arabi himself. And he's got kind of a foot in the Perpetetic and the Shraki traditions, and he's also, for better or worse, we can call him an Akbarian or someone who belonged to the so-called school of Ibn Arabi. And one of his own writings are quite different from Ibn Arabi's often in terms of, you know, their modes of expression, their form, and even to some extent their content. They're far more systematic, logical, they're ordered, they're less, if you like, Baroque in style. And there's an element of the visionary there, but we now encounter a visionary who kind of crafts Sufi discourse to sound more logically rigorous and more philosophically inclined in terms of the language, too. It can certainly be said that Qunawiy is the single individual most responsible for the more reified kind of abstract manner of expression that characterizes the school of Ibn Arabi. And, you know, he intended to emphasize, as did every major follower in the school after him, especially Qaysari, Dawudu Qaysari, he wouldn't necessarily have given pride of place to certain elements of these certain aspects of Ibn Arabi's thought, whereas Qunawiy does. And in many ways this is interesting, because Qunawiy, he's commenting on in many ways what is important or what he finds to be important in Ibn Arabi's own articulation of his vision of things. And Qunawiy is necessarily leaving out a lot of key kind of mythological, cosmological discussions you find in Ibn Arabi and things that Ibn Arabi would say over 30, 40 pages in the Fuduhat. And Qunawiy, you know, he'll have a one-page, dense explanation of what's going on there, and in a language that I think his intention is to really speak to audiences whose ears, so to speak, were not as well trained as his were in understanding his stepfather. So sort of Ibn Arabi for dummies. Yeah, in many ways a kind of dumbed-down version of Ibn Arabi. In fact, a teacher of mine once said to me, you know, we should stop calling it the school of Ibn Arabi. We should just call it the school of Qunawiy, because it's largely, you know, like the all the followers after Qunawiy or after Ibn Arabi, they're in one way or another influenced by Qunawiy. And he's really seen as kind of like the filter to interpret Ibn Arabi. Even Shami, the famous poet, Persian poet who died in 1492, who was very much a follower of the school of Ibn Arabi, in one of his books he says that if you want to understand Ibn Arabi, you can only do it through reading Qunawiy. So you kind of have this acknowledgement even into the 15th, 16th century that this person is really the prism through which Ibn Arabi is to be interpreted. So let me ask you about a couple of the philosophical issues that seem really central, I think both for Ibn Arabi and Qunawiy. And of course, they're both going to have to do with God and God's relationship to the world since it doesn't get more central than that. And maybe we can go straight to what might be the most obvious worry that someone could have about these philosophical Sufis, which is that they seem to be describing the created universe as nothing but a manifestation, maybe an illusory manifestation of God. And so this might make you think that they're some kind of monists. In other words, they actually think only God exists, or maybe they're pantheists. In other words, they think that everything is God. Do you think they can be defended against these charges? Now that's a trick question, in a sense. See the easiest way to reply to your question would be to say yes, and since there are plenty of passages, Ibn Arabi in particular, that can be read as exclusively a kind of form of monism or pantheism or panentheism, or even as something that brings together one or all of these isms, like pantheistic monism or something like that. The problem here, as I see it, really has to do with whether these kinds of terms, reductive as they must necessarily be, can really do justice to Ibn Arabi's vision. Stress is in the same breath, really. Oneness and unity, but there's alongside that multiplicity, otherness and even relationality. So let's take, for example, the question of pantheism. Does Ibn Arabi say that there's an essential identity or some kind of identity with God in the cosmos? Yes, he certainly does speak like this, and that was enough, of course, to drive Ibn Taymiyya mad. I mean, he really liked Ibn Arabi to a point, but after a while, he just lost, I think he just stopped being patient with him, and then he decides to refute him and call him an incarnationist and all kinds of things, or someone who, he was an ittihadi, someone who didn't really distinguish between the Creator and the creature. Ibn Arabi would tell us that that does not in any way explain the entire picture. So while he'd say yes, that that is true, God and the cosmos are one, or something like this, God has identified with the world or being in the world or part of the world, he'd say bespeaks God's givenness or his revealedness or manifestness in the cosmos, which points up to what he called his imminence or tashbih. And at the same time, Ibn Arabi places just as much, even more actually, emphasis on how the cosmos is not God in any sense of the term, how God is so utterly beyond and distinct from the world and stands above it by virtue of his inaccessibility or hiddenness or non-revealed face if you like, and that points up his transcendence or his tanzi. So Ibn Arabi commonly refers to the cosmos as he, not he, huwa allahu wa, he, not he. And that does away with the kind of simplistic either-or kind of scenario in which the explanation of the cosmic situation and God's relationship to it tries to trap God and is it like this or is it like that. The huwa allahu wa seeks to really retain both. I'd best be very cautious to use any of these terms, pantheism, monism, so on and so forth. If we were to use them, we'd have to add a great degree of qualification. And by the time these qualifications can be made, you know, Ibn Arabi's, if you want to say zamona, sure, but then all the other stuff, the very terms in question would then really not carry much weight because we'd have to add so many caveats and so many explanations and so many, we'd have to really gloss these terms that they really stop, they just lose much of their significance. So I mean, from this perspective, even a term that is used often to explain the perspective of Ibn Arabi and his followers, wa hata tawujood, or the oneness of being, even that phrase, I mean, it's something that Ibn Arabi doesn't use and use the term himself. I mean, it only becomes, you know, a technical term three or four decades after his death. But that term also, it has certain major limitations to it because it can be perceived as emphasizing only the he aspect of the he not he formula. And that's certainly how Ibn Taymiyya understood the term and many other later detractors of Ibn Arabi as well. For example, Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the famous Indian Sufi who died in 1624. It seems like what you're saying is basically that Ibn Arabi gives us this interesting dialectical idea where the world is both God and not God. And so it would be overly simplistic to just take one side of this polarity. But on the other hand, I mean, as philosophers, we're probably not too happy with someone saying, well, the solution is to just contradict yourself all the time. And so it seemed to me, and this is something I talked a bit about in the episode on him, but I wanted to get you to say something more about it. It seemed to me that one of the most promising moves he makes to explain this position without just saying, you know, P and not P are both true, is to describe the world in terms of divine attributes or the names of God. Because it seems like a name plausibly is both in a sense the same thing as the named thing and in a sense not the same as the named thing. But on the other hand, it's hard to understand how something like a name could metaphysically be the same as the created universe. So do you think the point he's trying to make there, is that more of an analogy? So is he saying that created things relate to God the way that names might relate to the bearer of the name? Or is it actually that we are literally the names of God as created things? This too is a quick question. You know, Ibn Arabi, his most common way of speaking about what the names are, or really what they're not, is by speaking of them as relationships. So this is something that he does which seems, at least from one perspective, quite revolutionary in the history of Islamic thought. Because I mean, the way we speak about the divine names in classical Islamic theology was to maintain that they somehow inherit in God, or God's essence, what they've called Qayyim Abidatihi, but not in a way that kind of gave them independent ontological status such that they could be said to be super-attitude. So for many medieval Muslim theologians and presumably some philosophers, the objective kind of ontological status of the divine names was never really called into question. It was a given, even if their morality could not be easily understood or explained. Ibn Arabi comes in the scene and he vehemently rejects this common type of picture of the divine names. And he says that the divine names do not inherit God in any way, and he says that they're not ontological entities, which is like one of his main points, and he really tries to explain things from that perspective. He says they're not Umar Ujudiyyah, or ontological things. So instead he says that they are technically speaking relationships, nisa, between what we can call God as revealed or manifest, and the objects of God's knowledge that do enter into concrete existence. So what Ibn Arabi and the later tradition called lokayah, self-disclosure or manifestation, mad'ahir in Arabic. So the divine names come about as a result of God's self-disclosure or manifestation, and they thus make the God-world relationship for Ibn Arabi possible. Yet the cosmos, it's nothing other than a conglomeration of the divine names, we can say, as displayed through the existential aspects of God's knowledge. So the universe is impregnated ultimately with the divine attributes, and the very multiplicity in the cosmos, therefore, as we see it, because it manifests the attributes obviously point to the divine names. So by the same token, since the divine names are relationships for Ibn Arabi and not actual ontological entities, the multiplicity in the cosmos is in actuality not any real kind of plurality. So this kind of move that Ibn Arabi's making here, where he's emphasizing their reality on one level and then ultimately because they're relationships, they're ultimately unreal, has posed the greatest, I think, philosophical challenge for his later interpreters. How do we understand these names? Because the names, they allow for multiplicity to emerge, and at the same time, they're paradoxically the very reason for the world's relative unreality. So actually, I find that very helpful philosophically, because if the names really denote relationships or relations, it does seem like a relation is a real thing without being an entity in its own right, which is kind of what he wants, right? Yes. So let me ask you something rather different now, just about the later historical influence of Ibn Arabi. And actually, maybe we can start with a contemporary of Kunawi, namely Yrumi, who's maybe the most famous Sufi, even more famous than Ibn Arabi because of his poetry and the popularity of his literary outputs. These two were friends, Kunawi and Rumi, were friends. They're even buried near each other in Kunia. And it seems a little bit hard to wrap our minds around, right? So Kunawi is, as you were saying before, systematic, even sort of technical approach to Sufism, Rumi, this kind of ecstatic poet. So how do we reconcile two such different authors as being two outgrowths of the same Sufi tree, as it were? Right. Well, that's, you know, that's, again, another very, very important question. There's a really nice anecdote, and there are all kinds of anecdotes about, in which Kunawi figures, you know. But this one in the later tradition, it tells us that one day Kunawi and Rumi are sitting together in Kunia, and one of Rumi's students comes up to him and asks him a question that had been bothering him. And Rumi gives him, in characteristic fashion, a couplet in Persian, and the student's happy, and he walks away, and he's very pleased with his answer. So Kunawi turns to Rumi and he says to him, how is it that you can make such difficult ideas seem so simple? And to this Rumi responds, he says, how is it that you can make such simple ideas sound so difficult? What is important to keep in mind here is that neither Rumi nor Kunawi saw a problem with each other's different modes of expression. I mean, Rumi's thought evinces some of the theoretical, philosophical tendencies which characterize Kunawi. I mean, Rumi was a Mas'aridi theologian also. But Kunawi's thought also evinces some of the more poetic tendencies that we find in Rumi. Judging from the plain sense of Rumi's reply to Kunawi, he probably did think that Kunawi was unnecessarily complicating things, if you like. So having said that, there is a caveat here that we need to introduce, at least where Rumi is concerned. He's often seen as kind of being an anti-intellectual or anti-philosophical person. I mean, and there's plenty of verses in his poetry to corroborate that kind of a position. The most common verse, surely, is the one in which it says, he says that the leg of the philosophers is wooden. A wooden leg is terribly unsturdy. Poy istid lal yon chubim bovad, poy chubim sakh mitam kim bovad. But one contemporary scholar, at least one that I've seen, emphasizes here that Rumi doesn't say the philosophers don't have a leg to stand on. He says that they do, but that it's just wooden, so it's not enough to allow them to, in Rumi's language, fly up to the heavenly empyrean. So in order to do this, Rumi would emphasize love, and that's, of course, the thing that he's known best for. But I get the feeling that when we would not necessarily disagree, I think that ultimately they see their goals essentially similar, even if their modes of expression and intellectual types really were not the same. We could even say that in a sense they take on two different sides of Ibn Arabi's thought, because obviously Ibn Arabi is full of poetic imagery. And also, you know, there's the earlier tradition of love, poetry, and Sufism. So Rumi is taking that on, and Kunawi is taking on the more technical philosophically influenced aspects of Ibn Arabi. And how appropriate that he was uniting these two apparently contradictory tendencies in himself. Yes, yes, exactly. Just one last question, looking ahead a bit to where we're going in future episodes. Obviously Sufism has this massive influence across the Islamic world, really down to the present day. But can you say something a little bit more specifically about philosophical Sufism? So what was the kind of geographical spread of philosophical Sufism? I mean, obviously we've been talking about people who wrote in Persian, as well as Arabic. So certainly there's this philosophical Sufi tradition in Persia. What about, for example, in India or elsewhere in the Islamic world in the, let's say the early modern period? Right. So what's particularly interesting here is that, like you said, the philosophical Sufism or Sufism of a more kind of theoretical really spreads throughout the eastern lands of Islam like wildfire. I mean, you have, this is a phenomenon for at least over the next 500 years, you have, you know, people in the Ottoman period, for example, writing in sometimes Persian but often Ottoman Turkish, like Ismail and Qaravi, who's directly bringing together Ibn Arabi's thought, and actually he was a commentator on Rumi too. And the Ottoman world was so vast that you have authors in that universe who belong to, you know, who lived in places like today, will be Bosnia, Turkey, Syria, so very, very vast geographical expanse. Of course, Persia and central Asia. In India, where the school lived in Arabic in particular, had a very important second wind, if you like. The writings there tended to be in Persian because most Indian Sufis in the later period wrote in Persian, in Arabic and Persian, or even, like, an Arab or Persian. And there the aforementioned Shagam al-Siri Hindi, he was very important for the, at least responding to Ibn Arabi, even though he wasn't necessarily always on board with his central theses. Shawali Allah al-Dahlami was a major figure also who was working in the Indian context and who had a very important role to play in bringing Ibn Arabi's thought and bringing his philosophical Sufism into something like a more mainstream intellectual discourse, because he was a very well-respected scholar who won the Olamat class as well. So India's case is interesting. You have many other minor figures in India, Khawaja Khord and Mubarak Zillah, Ela Habadi, people like this, all of whom, their writing really evince a very deep kind of penetration, if you like, of the central tenets of the school of Ibn Arabi and who, like Bonawi and like his later followers, all try their hand at systematizing this worldview. And then what happens in India is you have many, you know, practical Sufi manuals written by Sufi masters, you know, guides of how to get there, so to speak, but which conscientiously engage the school of Ibn Arabi. One of the most interesting later developments in which philosophical Sufism has yet another sphere of influence is actually in China, which is quite surprising. I mean, research into this is only being done today in a more sustained fashion. But, you know, by the 17th century you have very important Chinese Olam, or Chinese scholars, Wang Daoyu, Lu Zhi, people like this, who in order to attempt to explain Islam to their Chinese counterparts, most of whom were neo-Confucians, they drew on the writings of Ibn Arabi and his followers, usually through Persian translation. But they did so by crafting the Chinese language now to speak the language of neo-Confucianism. So you have Chinese Muslim authors drawing on Ibn Arabi's ideas, but recasting them in Chinese in such a way that a neo-Confucian could kind of understand, and also some of their Buddhist colleagues as well. That's a trend that in many ways characterized the later intellectual life of the Chinese Muslim Chinese. In many ways it's also symptomatic of what's happening in North America and Europe in the 20th century and even into now the 21st century, where you have many authors who for one reason or another espouse the cause of Ibn Arabi or the school of Ibn Arabi or philosophical Sufism or the wedding of philosophical Sufism and who seek to remold even the English language, for example, to speak these things, or French. So that's the influence of the school of Ibn Arabi on Sufism proper. But it also has a very important sustained influence on the discipline of Islamic philosophy as well. And this is most clearly seen, of course, in Amul-i-Sarra, the writings of Amul-i-Sarra. The entire school of Isfahan right into the, again, the 20th century, even until today you have many authors in Iran who are followers of Mu'l-i-Sarra or espouse his views, but who have a vested interest in Ibn Arabi. So in Mu'l-i-Sarra you have the wedding of several different strands of Islamic thought, the Shiite theology, of course, very deep engagement with the philosophical traditions. Mu'l-i-Sarra's responded to Surah Al-Ardi, obviously. And he takes Ibn Arabi extremely seriously, to the point that he's even himself accused at some points in his career of being too pro-Ibn Arabi or too pro-Sunni. So all of these trends, if we look at them together in terms of the geographical dispersion of the tradition, we have a very, very wide expanse in which Ibn Arabi's ideas and the systematization and articulation of his ideas go into so many different modes, so to speak. You have them in practical manuals. Now they're in Chinese, speaking Confucian Chinese. They're in philosophical texts. Of course, the poetic tradition is greatly indebted to Ibn Arabi. And actually, Ayin al-Khuzad and Ibn Arabi actually meet up in the Persian poetic tradition as well, where you have Ayin al-Khuzad speaking theoretically about many of these ideas in Persian in the Ibn Arabi school, articulating some of the same ideas in Arabic and then in Persian. And then you have poets like Iraqi, who died in the 13th century, or Mahmud Shivesteri, who died in the following century, trying to bring them together now within the medium of the poetic tradition. And so Persian poetry also is given a new life because of the school of Ibn Arabi. Thanks. That's really remarkable and amazing. I mean, obviously, the later history of Sufism is so vast that it could be the subject for its own series of podcasts. So someone should really do that, Mahmud. Yes. Just saying. But we're taking hints. Right, exactly. So thank you very much. You also mentioned a lot of things that I'll be getting on to look at. So philosophy in the Ottoman tradition in the Mughal period of India, and especially, I guess, the self of its, but more approximately next week, I'll be moving on to something very different, which will actually be the ongoing tradition of logic in this period. So I hope the audience will join me for that. For now, I'll just thank you, Mahmud, for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. And please join me next time for the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode… Proof Positive – The Logical Tradition In the Islamic world, many humorous stories are told featuring the Sufi folk hero Mullah Nasruddin. For example, Nasruddin turns up at a border crossing, and the customs officer searches him, his donkey and his empty basket, for contraband. He finds nothing and waves him through. The next week the same thing happens, and again the following week, and so on, but the customs officer can find nothing hidden on the donkey or in the basket. This goes on for years. The customs officer eventually retires. He runs into Nasruddin at the market and says, I'm retired now you can tell me. I know you must have been smuggling something all those years. What was it? Donkeys and baskets, replies Nasruddin. Or how about this one. Nasruddin is sitting by a river and sees a traveler arrive at the far shore. The traveler looks around and then calls out, how do I get across? What do you mean? asks Nasruddin. You're already across! And here's a third one, more germane to the topic of this week's episode. A king declares that he will tolerate no deviations from the truth, and that anyone who tells a lie in his city will be executed. Nasruddin goes to the city, presents himself at the gates, and is asked what his business is. I'm here to be executed, he explains. What should the guard do? If he executes Nasruddin, then he makes him a truth teller so he is innocent and should not have been killed. But if he lets him go, then Nasruddin is guilty of lying and should have been put to death. This is a picturesque version of one of the most famous logical puzzles, the liar paradox. It can be formulated in various ways, but the basic idea is that somebody makes a statement that will be true if it is false and false if it is true. For instance, this sentence is a lie. If that sentence is true, then it is a lie, so it is false. But if the sentence is false, it isn't a lie, so it is true. I referred to this paradox many episodes ago when talking about the Stoics. The great Stoic logician Chrysippus wrote about the liar, but his treatments of the problem are lost. It also received considerable attention in Latin medieval philosophy, and philosophers are still interested in the paradox today. Less well known is the fact that many thinkers of the Islamic world were fascinated by the liar paradox. The first discussions were not produced by philosophers engaged with the Greek tradition—no surprise there, since Aristotle never discusses it and Chrysippus's works did not make it into the Arabic-speaking world. Rather, it was the theologians of the kalam tradition who first dealt with it in about the 9th and 10th centuries. Interest in it becomes truly obsessive though in the period we're dealing with now, the 12th century onwards. Over the course of generations, considerable progress was made with the formulation of the paradox. The first attempts focused on something that is actually a distraction, namely the status of the person who is making the paradoxical utterance—is he lying or not? We thus find theologians imagining a scenario where someone has never spoken a lie in his life and then suddenly says, I have told a lie. This will only be true if this very sentence is a lie, but then of course it must be false. Alternatively, they imagine someone saying, everything I say is a lie. These early discussions tend to accept the simplest but least satisfying solution. You would think that every meaningful assertion must be either true or false. Philosophers often call this the principle of bivalence. One way to deal with the liar is to bite the bullet and make it an exception to this principle, that is to admit that it is neither true nor false. Like I say, simple but not very satisfying. A philosopher we've covered recently achieved some advances concerning both the formulation and the solution to the paradox. I have in mind Nasir ad-Din Atouzi. He had the insight that the liar paradox is really a problem about self-reference. In other words, it arises because we are making a statement that is about itself. Atouzi explained this very clearly by pointing out that a statement can be about anything at all, not just about things like giraffes and silent film stars, but also about other statements, as when I say, the statement giraffes are tall is true. And once we've allowed this, then we can hardly ban statements that are about themselves like the one in the liar paradox. Thus his formulation of the paradoxical utterance is simply, this statement is false. That zeroes in on the real problem, which is not whether the person making the statement is lying or not, but whether the statement itself is true or not. And of course, if it is true, then it is false, but if it is false, then it is true. Of course it's one thing to state the paradox clearly and quite another to solve it. Atouzi tried to pull off that second trick by considering what it means for a statement to be true in the first place. A true statement, he argued, is one that describes something else as being the way it really is. But this can't happen with a self-referential statement, because it is not about something else at all, it is about itself. Thus, issues of truth and falsehood don't even arise for it. Basically, this is just an advanced version of the bullet-biting solution of his predecessors with the improvement that he now gives a reason why the problematic statement is neither true nor false. Unless the statement is about something else, it just can't be true or false, for that matter. Unfortunately, this solution is not a particularly good one. Other statements that are about themselves certainly seem to be true or false. I would be speaking the truth if I were to say, this sentence I'm now uttering is in English. And I'd be saying something false if I said, this sentence I'm now uttering is in German. So, banning truth and falsehood in the case of self-referential statements looks not just arbitrary, but downright wrong. Further attempts at a solution will be made in centuries to come though, as we'll see in a future episode. Another puzzle is why these theologian-philosophers would be spending so much effort on something like the liar paradox. Or perhaps it isn't a puzzle. Starting in the 11th century, and for centuries thereafter, the Islamic world saw a golden age of logic. This was not the logic of the formative period, when Al-Farabi and the Baghdad school were still writing commentaries on Aristotle's logical treatises. Instead, just as we've been seeing in the areas of metaphysics and philosophical theology, Avicenna was now the indispensable man. Post-Avicenna and logicians worked within Avicenna's new system, even when they disagreed with him and made further adjustments to that system. Just what was new about Avicenna? I can't answer that question fully here, but I'll give you an example. Like Aristotle's logic, Avicenna's logic is still concerned with syllogisms made up of two premises and a conclusion, where both premises and the conclusion involve something being predicated of a subject. To take an example of which, like a beloved stuffed animal is by now well-worn but still does its job admirably, all giraffes are animals. Hiawatha is a giraffe, therefore Hiawatha is an animal. What's going on here is that animal is being predicated of all giraffes, while giraffe is being predicated of Hiawatha. The argument form is A is said of all B, B is said of C, therefore A is said of C. Avicenna is happy with all this, but observes that all such predications can be taken in two ways, either essentially or under a certain description. For instance, it is essentially true of humans that they can laugh, but if we stipulate that a certain human is asleep, then the human cannot laugh. In other words, laughing is impossible for humans under the description that they are asleep. Avicenna also explains more clearly than Aristotle what it means for something to be said essentially of a subject. Laughing is said of human is going to be true as long as at some time, some human or other laughs. It only has to happen once. Laughing is said of all humans will be true as long as every human laughs at least once. And this sounds about right. It would be unreasonable to insist that laughing is said of all humans only if everyone is laughing all the time. After all, you can only tell so many jokes about Mullah Nasruddin. Now, looking ahead to the post-Efsenan period, we find his successors operating with the same distinction between essential predications and predications that are only true under a description. But again, that didn't mean they agreed with everything he said. A nice example here is Najm ad-Din Akat B. al-Kazwini, a member of the group of pioneering scientists and philosophers gathered around D'Atouzi at the Mar'aga Observatory. We met al-Khatibi briefly three episodes ago when we looked at the debates over essence and existence. Writing in the middle of the 13th century, al-Khatibi applied another Avicenna distinction to these predications that are studied in logic. It's an idea we're seeing more and more often as we move into this later period – the distinction between mental and concrete existence. We might wonder whether Avicenna is right to say that animal is said of giraffe only if there is at some point a giraffe that is an animal. What if we lived in a world where there are no giraffes out there in concrete reality? In this horrible yet perfectly possible world, Avicenna could not accept the truth of the statement animal is said of giraffe because there would be no giraffes to do the job of being animals. Al-Khatibi agrees that it would be false as concerns concrete reality, but it would remain true as concerns mental existence – even if giraffe exists only in my mind, I could still understand giraffes to be animals. A related point had been made in the previous century by another thinker we've already met, Fakhradin Arazi. Fakhradin too was interested in whether truth is tied to the frequency with which things happen. In this case, the question was whether things that are eternal are thereby necessary. We know that Aristotle would say yes to this question. For instance, the heavenly spheres, being in his opinion eternal, exist necessarily. Exploiting ideas he finds in Avicenna, Fakhradin now moves decisively away from this Aristotelian position. For him, whether something is always the case has nothing to do with its being necessary. The heavenly spheres may indeed exist eternally, as Aristotle and Avicenna claimed, but they are certainly not necessary, since it is up to God whether they exist. In a way, this is just good Avicennism. Avicenna would agree that the spheres are in themselves only contingently existent. They must indeed exist, but only because God is causing them to exist. Their eternity is borrowed from God's, not the result of any intrinsic necessity. Yet, Fakhradin's firm insistence that eternity doesn't imply necessity is probably more motivated by theological considerations. He was not only a master of philosophical argument, but also an Asherite theologian, and the Asherites always stressed that all things are subject to God's will. And God's will might have been different, had he seen fit. By finally making a clean break between eternity and necessity, Fakhradin is able to say that eternal things are just as contingent on God's free choices as things that do start and stop existing. Even though logic in this later period was always done within the framework laid down by Avicenna, his works were not necessarily on the standard reading list. As often as not, students of logic would be reading a book by someone like Al-Khatibi, rather than by Avicenna himself. Al-Khatibi's logical textbook, Ar-Risālā al-Shamsīya, was studied in logic classes in the madrasas for many centuries. He was only one of several authors working around the time of At-Tūzī, in other words during and after the Mongol invasions, who produced such summaries of logic for the beginning reader. Another was Al-Khatibi's teacher Al-Abhārī, and in the same period we might also mention Sirajādīn al-ʿOrmāwī. All these men wrote advanced works on philosophical theology, not only logic textbooks for beginners. But, if I may indulge in a self-referential statement, here's a sentence that was true then and is still true today. If you want to impress your fellow philosophers, you should write ambitious theoretical treatises, but if you want to be read, you should write a textbook for the general reader. In a pinch, a podcast will do just as well. When I say that these textbooks have been influential, I mean it. This is a tradition that still lived on in Egypt, Persia, and India as late as the 20th century. And the textbooks of Al-Khatibi and his contemporaries were not only studied by students, they were also made the subject of commentaries, just like Avicenna's own works. It all confirms a parallel I've drawn in past episodes between the role of Aristotle in late antiquity and the role of Avicenna in later Islamic intellectual history. By writing a useful introduction to Aristotle's logic, a late ancient Platonist like Porphyry could be read by many generations of students, not only in Greek, but also through Latin and Arabic translation. And, he could become an object of commentary in all these languages. With their handy introductions to Avicenna's logic, the 13th century authors accomplished more or less the same thing. More than the late ancient commentators on Aristotle, the logicians in the Islamic world were ready to challenge and openly criticize their indispensable author Avicenna. This goes against an assumption that has been made even by experts in the history of Arabic logic. It has often been taken for granted that the later centuries were a time of unoriginality and stagnation. Scholars were led to this assumption by the fact that, in the wake of the 13th century textbooks, most writing on logic took the form of either commentaries or glosses, in other words, marginal notations on earlier works. Yet again, there's a parallel here to late antiquity. Nowadays, everyone admits that the late ancient commentators on Aristotle showed great originality in the interpretive texts they wrote in places like Alexandria. But only recently has it started to emerge that the same is true of logical works written in places like Maragha from the 13th century onwards. As logicians reacted to Avicenna and the textbooks he inspired, they took up new issues like the liar paradox, they questioned Avicenna's opinions, and they patched holes in the Avicennan logical system. Research on all this is in its infancy, but here are a couple of examples that have come to light. First let's consider the question of what logic is even about. What is its subject matter? Avicenna, true to form, had an excellent answer to this question. So excellent was his answer, in fact, that it came to be the standard view in the Latin Christian tradition too. His answer was that logic is about second intentions. A first intention is a concept in our minds like the concept of giraffe. This is a concept that is about something, namely giraffes out in concrete reality. A second intention is about one of these first-order concepts. For instance, I might see that giraffe is a species and that it belongs to the genus animal. Species and genus are, then, concepts about concepts, rather than being directly about things in the outside world. And logic deals with this meta-level of concepts. Clever though Avicenna's answer is, it was rejected by yet another logician of the 13th century whose name was Aftal-ad-din al-khunajji. Sorry, I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you, but hopefully it will at least convey the overall point that this was, if anything, a period of feverish philosophical activity, rather than one of decline. On this question of the subject matter of logic, al-khunajji insisted that logic is a proper philosophical science. But philosophical sciences do not study second-order concepts, they study the essential properties of things. For instance, giraffeology, if it is a science, and who would dare to deny this, deals with the essential properties of giraffes. Likewise, logic should deal with the essential properties that belong to our first-order concepts. This is the right way to think about such things as species and genera, they are essential features of notions like giraffe, not a second order of notions laid on top of our basic concepts. The later tradition also had the admirable goal of ensuring that logic was without gaps. And here they noticed a serious problem. The systems of Aristotle and Avicenna are fine and good if you want to focus on arguments that consist of nothing but predications, like animal is said of giraffe, but there are plenty of valid arguments that are not of this form. One example had already been pointed out by the Stoics, conditional inferences, like if it is day, then there is light. That sort of case was already noted by Al-Farabi and Avicenna, and continued to be discussed in the later period. Another exception was the so-called relational syllogism. The standard example here concerned the relation of equality. If I say that A is equal to B and B is equal to C, you'll have no trouble in seeing that A is equal to C. Or, we might consider the relation of being in something. If the mouse is in the box and the box is in the house, obviously the mouse is in the house. Even Dr. Seuss could tell you that. Like conditional if-then arguments, the relational syllogisms do not quite fit into the Aristotelian and Avicenna syllogistic. This problem, pointed out forcefully by Fakhradi Narazi, provoked solutions in commentaries and glosses at the time of the Mongols and thereafter into the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal periods. As I've already hinted, the reason logic was such a fixture of intellectual activity in these centuries is that it had been integrated into the educational system. The madrasas that were set up under the Seljuks survived the Mongol invasions. The beginner jurists and theologians at these institutions cut their teeth on logic, usually using the sort of textbook I mentioned before. If the students became particularly interested in logic, they could then use those teeth to bite the bullet of denying the principle of bivalence to solve the liar paradox. But of course, most students were content to do their exercises and move on to theology or the law. There is perhaps no simple answer to the question of why logic became so widespread an aspect of the education of religious scholars. Al-Ghazali can take some of the credit, or blame, since alongside his criticisms of Avicenna and the other philosophers, he poured scorn on anyone who dismissed the validity and utility of logic. Other theologians agreed, and went so far as to begin general works on the religious sciences with the treatment of logic. A good example is yet another author I haven't mentioned yet, Saif ad-Din al-Ahmadi. He died in 1233 as the Mongols were on the horizon, so to speak. He contributed to the discussion of various logical issues, including the liar paradox, and was among the first to integrate logic into writing on what was called usul ad-Din, or principles of religion. Thanks to thinkers like al-Ahmadi, logic became so pervasive that even vigorous critics of Avicenna would usually try to show their mastery of this science, sometimes making the odd innovation of their own in the process. In the 12th century, Suhrabadi, the founder of illuminationism, criticized Avicenna in the first, logical, section of his most important work, The Philosophy of Illumination. We already saw him arguing that the philosophical goal of providing definitions is misguided and in fact impossible. He also made technical proposals in the direction of simplifying Avicenna's system, consistently with his rhetoric that the so-called peripatetics are always overcomplicating things. He suggested, for example, that we don't need to consider both affirmative and negative propositions. Rather, any negative proposition can be rephrased as an affirmation with a negative predicate. For instance, instead of negating the proposition all men fly, we could just affirmatively say all men are non-flying. Not earth-shattering, perhaps, but it shows he is playing the Avicenna logical game. Yet, it would be an exaggeration to say that everyone was keen to take part in this game. Some thinkers did firmly reject the utility of logic as practiced by Avicenna and his heirs. One of them wrote that the philosophers' theories and I quote, These are the words of the most famous, or perhaps I should say notorious, intellectual of the Mongol period. The mere mention of his name still has the power to make some people like an irate camel, spitting mad. But his reputation for anti-intellectualism and fundamentalism underestimates the subtlety and argumentative skill shown by one of the greatest ever Muslim religious scholars. It's only logical that you should join me next time as I discuss Ibn Taymiyya, Hereon, the History of Philosophy, Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, today's episode, By the Book, Ibn Taymiyyah. It's a thankless job being a critic of philosophy. The anti-philosopher typically winds up getting sucked into the whole business they want to attack. After all, anyone who mounts a serious case against philosophy is bound to give what amounts to a philosophical argument, which is a bit self-defeating. And in a bitter irony, the really sophisticated and interesting opponents of philosophy are simply absorbed into the annals of the subject they so detest. Haters gonna hate, and historians gonna say, gosh those arguments you gave are really interesting and in fact we'd like to devote a podcast to you. So it is that we've covered numerous thinkers who positioned themselves against the philosophical systems of their day, from ancient skeptics like Carnaides and Sextus, to Christian theologians hostile to Hellenic philosophy like Irenaeus and Tertullian, to opponents of philosophical rationalism and Judaism, think of those who instigated the Maimonides controversy. Among Muslims, Al-Ghazali is the most famous critic on the strength of his incoherence of the philosophers. But as we saw, his attitude towards philosophy, as embodied above all by Avicenna, was rather subtle. For one thing, he had a great appreciation for logic. Not so with the subject of this episode. You'll find no more strident detractor of philosophy in the Islamic world than Ibn Taymiyya. We've cast a broad net in our history of philosophy in the Islamic world, considering not just logic and a recitilianism but also rational theology or kalam, the theory of justification underlying Islamic law, and philosophical Sufism. Ibn Taymiyya railed against all of these. He advocated a return to the original teachings of the Qur'an and the first generations of Muslims, those who lived close to the time of the Prophet Muhammad and thus had privileged access to his teachings and their meaning. His appeal for Islam to go back to its roots is directly relevant to political issues in the Islamic world today. A villain to some and hero to others, Ibn Taymiyya has been blamed or praised for launching an anti-rationalist traditionalism which became a dominant force in Islamic culture and which inspires radical Islamists today. Of course, I never mention the popular conception of a historical thinker without going on to say that it is misleading, and Ibn Taymiyya is no exception. For one thing, recent research has suggested that, although Ibn Taymiyya had a close-knit circle of admirers and followers, he did not exert widespread influence within the Islamic world in subsequent centuries. His cultural resonance is a more recent phenomenon. Also, despite his opposition to philosophy and kalam, it is inaccurate to describe him as an anti-rationalist. To the contrary, he insisted that the deliverances of reason are necessarily in harmony with the Qur'an and prophetic traditions. His basis for this claim was the same as the one given by that arch-rationalist Averroes. Revelation is true, whatever is proven by reason is true, and there can be no contradiction between two truths. Of course, Ibn Taymiyya did not agree with Averroes that we should therefore use Aristotle to understand the teachings of the Qur'an. Instead, he urged us to dispense with the pretentious subtleties of the philosophers and theologians. We should rather accept the deliverances of natural reasoning and the straightforward Islam of the earliest generations, who in Arabic are called the salaf, meaning predecessors or forebears. It is for this reason that Ibn Taymiyya is credited with laying down the template for the salafist movement in Islam. But we need to be careful here. If you have heard the term salafism before, it may conjure up for you modern-day Islamic extremism and violent jihad. You may also connect it to the Wahhabi movement. These groups, and in fact the founder of Wahhabism, the 18th century figure Muhammad ibn Abd Wahhab, have certainly been influenced by Ibn Taymiyya. But Ibn Taymiyya lived in a different era, and the forces he saw as threatening Islam were not those of the 18th or 21st centuries. The chief historical factor in his thought was the Mongol invasion, which had penetrated far into the Islamic world before Ibn Taymiyya even came along. He was born in Syria in 1263, about a decade after the Mongols laid waste to Baghdad and deposed the last of the Abbasid caliphs. He left Syria at a young age, as the Mongols advanced still further, and spent the rest of his life in the domain of the Mamluks. Based in Egypt, the Mamluks were the last redoubt of Islam as Ibn Taymiyya knew it. So, by the time of his death in 1328, Ibn Taymiyya had been witness to what he would have seen as an existential battle to preserve Islam. With his fiery rhetoric calling on fellow Muslims to go back to basics, Ibn Taymiyya sought to be a standard-bearer in that battle, but he waged his war mostly within the context of jurisprudence. In fact, we should see him not primarily as an ideologue, or for that matter as an anti-philosopher, but as a jurist with a new set of ideas about how to reach correct verdicts within Islamic law. These verdicts have often been used, and abused, in modern invocations of Ibn Taymiyya. To take just one example, Ibn Taymiyya judged that it was licit for Muslims to kill the soldiers of the Mongol army, even though the Mongol forces had by this time converted to Islam. This has been taken by some as a rationale for jihad against foreign religions or peoples, but in fact Ibn Taymiyya defended his judgment by classifying the Mongols as a rebel group within Islam who were trying to topple the legitimate authority of the Mamluks. Not that Ibn Taymiyya specialized in the legal niceties of warfare. Many of his rulings concern property and contract issues, and aspects of Islamic ritual observance. An often discussed case is his ban on making trips specifically to visit the tombs of Muslim saints. In this respect, he resembles the other jurists we discussed back in episode 147, the one on Sunni legal theories. But in one fundamental way, he was very different. Much like American legal theorists nowadays who try to interpret the constitution strictly in accordance with the intention of the founding fathers, Ibn Taymiyya restricted the basis of correct legal judgment to the Qur'an, prophetic hadith, and reports about the early generations or salaf. He thus dispensed with much of the apparatus of legal opinion that had been built up in the previous centuries. He associated himself closely with one of the main Sunni schools, the Hanbalis, who were the best fit for his originalist brand of jurisprudence. Yet he rejected or reinvented such basic legal concepts as consensus. For him, the only consensus that mattered was that of the first generations. The opinions of legal scholars since that time carry no weight. The same goes for the idea, widespread in Islamic jurisprudence, that all else being equal, legal rulings should seek the optimal practical result. For Ibn Taymiyya, any truly advantageous consideration is always to be found in the Qur'an and other literature from the prophetic time. Jurists who expand on this, no matter how well intentioned they may be, are just making it up as they go along. Which as it happens is exactly what some other jurists accused Ibn Taymiyya of doing. Just as today's American constitutional originalists are charged with foisting their own political views on the founding fathers, so Ibn Taymiyya had trouble convincing everyone that he was merely following the judgments of the salaf. As one contemporary critic put it, for several years now he has been giving legal opinions not according to any particular legal school, but according to what evidence he finds convincing. Even some of his fellow Hanbalis scholars often found his judgments and methods arbitrary. But he was at least willing to engage in the juridical enterprise even if he refused to play by the normal rules. By contrast, the traditions of philosophical Sufism, Kalam, and philosophy earned nothing but scorn from Ibn Taymiyya. Although he was himself an adherent of moderate Sufism, his most ferocious invective was directed towards the thinkers he called philosophical Sufis. He interpreted their doctrine of the unity of existence as implying that God and his creation would become one and the same thing. This made them a threat even more pernicious than the Mongols. The Sufis' supporters got their revenge, prevailing upon the Mamluk Sultan to imprison Ibn Taymiyya for several years in that ancient city of philosophy, Alexandria. As for Kalam, Ibn Taymiyya saw the various theological schools in much the same light as the jurists. They went beyond the prophetic teachings, and in doing so went astray. Yet, as in law, he had no hesitation in invoking the authority of the salaf to adopt what look suspiciously like distinctive and innovative positions within standard Kalam debates. A good example is his remarks on the classic problem of God's attribute of will. There are basically two positions that had been taken here. First, the view of the Asharite theologians, who had made God's will unrestricted and tied it to events arising in the created universe. Indeed, when God decides to create the universe in the first place, He wills to do so. Then there is the philosopher's opinion, by which I of course mean Avicenna's opinion. He agrees that God has a will, but thinks that like everything else about God this will is eternal and necessary. It doesn't look like there is any room to steer between these two positions, but Ibn Taymiyya manages it. He agrees with Avicenna that the divine will is eternal, but builds into this the more Asharite notion that God's will is constantly God is no motionless intellect, as Aristotle had claimed, but an ever-active, ever-transforming and willing agent. His perfection consists not in remaining always the same, but in always willing something new and willing the best thing for that moment. As Ibn Taymiyya says, it is no deficiency to will the right thing at the right time. So Avicenna and the other philosophers were just wrong to think that God's divinity would be compromised if He were to change. As this example shows, Ibn Taymiyya's reputation as an anti-rationalist is largely misleading. He was willing and able to meet the theologians and philosophers on their turf, to engage in argument against them and to develop distinctive theological ideas of his own, even if he would have insisted that those ideas were already to be found in the earliest teachings of Islam. Ibn Taymiyya also understood that in attacking the theologians and the philosophers, he was not really taking on two separate groups. What the historian Ibn Khaldun will remark upon later in the 14th century was already true in Ibn Taymiyya's lifetime around the beginning of that same century. Avicennan philosophy had wormed its way into kalam to the point where the two were hardly distinguishable anymore. Both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun see expertise in logic in particular as the marker distinguishing the later kalam of their time from the early kalam which we looked at in the episodes on the Mo'atazilite and Asharite schools. Logic's role in the education of religious scholars alarmed Ibn Taymiyya. He spoke out against numerous aspects of philosophy, rejecting for instance the avicennan theory that celestial intellects serve as an intermediary between God and our earthly realm, but it was the philosopher's logic and its attendant theory of knowledge that provoked his most interesting and detailed critique. Whereas the earlier critic of philosophy Alhazali welcomed the study of logic by religious scholars, Ibn Taymiyya thought logic was at best a waste of time and at worst incoherent. He was not alone in this. One forerunner was the hadith scholar Ibn al-Salah, who in the first half of the 13th century had issued a legal ruling prohibiting the study of logic. He condemned it as the first step towards the study of philosophy, describing its greatest exponent Avicenna as the devil of the human devils. Echoing Alhazali's opinion that Avicenna's theories made him an apostate, Ibn al-Salah urged that the death sentence would be appropriate for anyone who refuses to give up on the study of logic and philosophy. As for Ibn Taymiyya, I already mentioned in a previous episode his comparison of logical expertise to camel meat at the top of a mountain, hard to reach and not worth the effort. He also says that using logic is like being told to point at your left ear and reaching all the way around your head with your right hand to do it, instead of just using your left hand. Both comparisons appear in his enormous treatise The Refutation of the Logicians, which was provoked by his meeting with a philosophy enthusiast in Alexandria. Ibn Taymiyya's extensive knowledge of authors like Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, Suhrabadi, and Fakhradina Razi meant that he was well acquainted not only with logical theory, but also with doubts that had been raised concerning this theory. Taking a leaf out of Suhrabadi's book, he begins by questioning the philosopher's claim that knowing something presupposes being able to define it. This idea had a long pedigree, of course. It played a central role in Socrates' relentless questioning of his fellow Athenians and again in Aristotle's epistemology. But, in Ibn Taymiyya's opinion, definitions do nothing at all to bring us to knowledge. Rather, it is your knowledge of something that allows you to recognize a definition as correct. If anything gives us knowledge, it is a demonstrative proof, not a definition. Here too, though, the philosophers stand on shaky ground. They have rather restrictive rules for what counts as a demonstration. It must be a syllogism with exactly two premises which are universal in scope. You won't be surprised to hear that Ibn Taymiyya disagrees. The number of premises you need, he argues, will depend on how much background knowledge you have. If someone learns that the prophet forbids the drinking of intoxicating beverages, he might immediately infer that he shouldn't drink wine. Someone else might first need to learn that wine is an intoxicating beverage. A third person might understand both the prohibition and the intoxicating nature of wine, but remain unmoved because he isn't a Muslim and so doesn't accept the authority of the prophet. Ibn Taymiyya uses the same example to argue that legal judgments don't need to involve syllogistic arguments at all. If you should learn that the prophet prohibited intoxicating beverages, then so long as you are Muslim and know what an intoxicating beverage is, you have knowledge with no need for any argument. It's telling that Ibn Taymiyya uses legal examples to make these points about logic. This confirms our suspicion that he is alarmed at the way logic was being integrated into juridical education. With these criticisms, Ibn Taymiyya is not so much proposing a different way of doing logic as trying to show that logic is pointless. Exhibitions and syllogisms presuppose, or come along in the wake of, our direct knowledge of things. In much the same way, he dismisses the premium that Aristotelians place on universal knowledge. In the first instance, argues Ibn Taymiyya, we always know particular things. Our universal knowledge is just a generalization from our experience of particulars and is always liable to be trumped by a novel encounter that will overturn the generalization. How then can universal understanding be better than particular experience? Ibn Taymiyya even goes so far as to say on this basis that sensation is better than intellect. That would be a heresy from the philosopher's point of view, but it's an obvious fact for Ibn Taymiyya, given that sense perception of particular things is the sole basis for the universal generalities of the mind. All of this helps him to show that the philosopher's logic is no better than the kind of reasoning used in Islamic jurisprudence. Legal judgments, as we know, were frequently reached on the basis of analogy, and analogy means transferring a judgment from one particular case to other particular cases that are similar to it. With its emphasis on particulars, Ibn Taymiyya's epistemology is, not coincidentally, custom made to make sense of this kind of reasoning. He makes a further clever point against the philosophers by observing that, as even they would agree, the best thing of all to know is God, or as they would put it, the necessary existent. But God is a particular thing, not a universal thing. So the best knowledge possible is not universal in nature. Worse still, the philosophers must admit that there can be no proof of God, since they think we can only demonstrate universal truths, and God is not a universal. As Ibn Taymiyya enumerates the weak points of logic, it becomes clear that however pointless this science is, he has mastered it fairly well. In this he is unlike previous critics, notably the grammarian As-Sirafi. You may remember that he trounced the Baghdad Aristotelian philosopher Abu Bishr Matah in a debate over the relative merits of logic and grammar, but without getting much into the details of logical theory. Ibn Taymiyya is a more dangerous kind of opponent, the kind that knows his enemy. He mentions such technical points as the reduction of all syllogistic forms to the first figure and the merely mental existence of universals. He also has a good eye for the embarrassing anecdote. He tells us that the logician al-khunajiyi admitted on his deathbed that he knew nothing apart from the fact that a contingent thing needs an external cause to exist, but the contingent thing's lack of a cause is nonexistent, so in fact he wound up knowing nothing at all. This is not to say that Ibn Taymiyya's critique of logic is always well-grounded. His complaint that the efficacy of an argument depends on the listener's background knowledge was actually well understood by Aristotle and his heirs. This is why they routinely distinguish between what is absolutely primary, in an explanation, and what is primary for a given person who is seeking that explanation. The philosophers could use this same point to answer Ibn Taymiyya's criticism about particulars and universals. Sure, sensible, particular things are primary to us, but they are not primary in scientific explanation. Ibn Taymiyya did offer a significant challenge to the logicians, but they seemed to have felt that they could answer his criticisms or get away with ignoring them. They were probably right about that. In modern times, Ibn Taymiyya's radical agenda has won him great cultural currency. Among the Muslim thinkers we've covered so far, only al-Ghazali and Rumi equal his prominence in the contemporary world. But in his own time, and for some centuries thereafter, Ibn Taymiyya's legal radicalism made him a relatively marginal figure. His criticisms did not put a stop to philosophical Sufism in the mold of Ibn Arabi or derail the process by which logic and other philosophical disciplines were integrated into religious education. But, to be fair to him, stopping the development of Abasenid philosophy and kalam, or for that matter philosophical Sufism, was proving to be a difficult task indeed. As we'll see next time, even the Mongol invasions couldn't manage it. In fact, there was so much intellectual activity in this period of supposed decline that we may wonder, Is it even possible to provide a general overview of philosophy and science under the Mongol dynasties? Join me as I say, yes we can, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Aftermath. Philosophy and science in the Mongol age. What comes from Central Asia arrives on horseback, kills everyone in sight, eventually toppling one of the world's great civilizations, and has a leader whose name will be borrowed by a German pop band from the 1970s. If you said the Huns, you're almost right. They did help cause the fall of the Roman Empire by unleashing chaos among barbarian tribes. But as far as I know, there has never been a German pop band named Attila, whereas the German entry in the 1979 Eurovision Song Contest was in fact a group called Shingis Khan. They came forth with their eponymous hit, the classic Shingis Khan, which has a beat almost as irresistible as the Mongol hordes and better lyrics. For instance, Et soikt es sieben Kinde in einer nacht und über seine Feinde hare noer geh lacht, which I suggest translating, He fathered seven children in a single night and just laughed when his enemies came into sight. And then there's the admirably candid line, Las nach Vodka hollen, denvers in Mongolin, meaning, Get some more vodka, because we are Mongols. I almost feel like stopping the episode right there, quite literally on a high note, but I really want to tell you about the real Mongols, this super tribal group once led by Genghis Khan and their surprising role in the history of philosophy. Surprising because it was not entirely negative. The Mongols did wreak devastation and death wherever they went, why else would you name a German pop band after them? But once their army had swept through, they were left with territory to rule and they rose to the challenge. By the middle of the 13th century, a quarter century after the death of the mighty Genghis, the Mongols figured out that they could get more out of the territory they conquered through taxation than by wholesale slaughter. They had burst out of their homeland in Central Asia at the beginning of the 13th century, taking control of Northern China and then laying waste to areas in the Islamic world, including Khorasan, home of many of the philosophers we've met, including Avicenna. By the time of Genghis Khan's death in 1227, their realm reached as far as the Caspian Sea. Within another 15 years, they had defeated the Seljuks to take power in Anatolia. It was only a matter of time until they toppled the Abbasid dynasty, which had in any case been wielding only symbolic power for many years at this point. This occurred when the Mongol ruler Hulagu, accompanied as we saw by the politically flexible philosopher Atuzi, invaded Baghdad and killed the last of the caliphs in 1258. The Mongols' westward expansion was finally stopped only when the Mamluks managed a successful defense of Syria and Egypt. With their borders stabilizing in the year 1260, the Mongols now needed to consolidate their hold over the eastern Islamic realms. They had to become, as Ibn Khaldun's theory of history would predict, sedentary rulers rather than a rampaging horde fueled by tribal solidarity. One important development was the conversion of their leaders to Islam. Prior to that, the Mongols had been varied in their religious beliefs, embracing Christianity, Buddhism, and paganism. The rulers who succeeded Atuzi's patron Hulagu were known as the Ilkhans. One of them converted from Buddhism to Islam, and those Mongols who were not already Muslims followed his lead. So it was that the Mongols went from being an existential threat to Islamic civilization to being the rulers of Islamic civilization. For all the havoc they had wreaked, they proved capable of rebuilding that civilization and even of supporting scholarly activity. They understood the value of skilled laborers among their new subjects and would sometimes move them around their empire to where they could do the most good. Add to this the fact that intellectuals were often among the populations fleeing in terror from Mongol advances. We saw this in the case of Fakhradin al-Razi and Ibn Taymiyyah, for instance. So the Mongols directly and indirectly helped ideas to spread around the Islamic world. The experts that could still flourish within the new Mongol order included philosophers. Especially likely to win favor were those with competence in astronomy and medicine, sciences that were valued by the Mongols no less than by the earlier Muslim dynasties they had now replaced. In fact, they even imported Muslim astronomers into China. In the Islamic world itself, the best example of the phenomenon is a man we already know well, Nasir ad-Din Atuzi. We've discussed how he spent his last years leading scientific research at an astronomical observatory in the city of Maragh. In addition to the works I described in the episode on Atuzi, it's worth mentioning here his edition of Euclid's Elements, which drew on the two main Arabic translations of the work and marked differences in the two transmissions for readers. This philological achievement made Atuzi's version of the Elements the standard edition for successive generations. And it wasn't only Atuzi who was doing math in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. He gathered around him a formidable group of scholars working on astronomical, medical, and philosophical topics. We already met one of them, Qutb ad-Din Ashirazi. You may remember him as the illuminationist philosopher who had a flair for performing magic. One trick Qutb ad-Din tried to pull off in astronomy was to solve an age-old problem that had already bedeviled the ancients. The planets are supposedly seated upon spheres, which are revolving in simple circular motions around the earth. Yet, we do not see them moving along a steady course. Rather, when their movements night to night are tracked, they seem to stop and even move backwards. Ptolemy had offered two possible solutions to this problem of retrograde motion. One was to suppose that the planets are indeed on single spheres, but say that they revolve around a different point than the center of the earth. These spheres would be eccentric, meaning quite literally off-center. The other was to postulate smaller spheres embedded within the large single sphere with its own rotating motion. These smaller spheres, or epicycles, would be the seats of the visible planets. The irregular motion of the planets could then be described as a combination of the revolution of the larger sphere around the earth, plus the smaller revolution of the planet around the epicycle. Considering all this, Qutb ad-Din concluded that although a mathematical model could be made to fit the phenomena either way, the first solution with eccentric spheres is preferable, for its simplicity. He defended this Occam's razor-style preference for simple scientific explanations on theological grounds. God would not make his cosmos more complicated than necessary. As this example shows, the scholars gathered around At-Huzi saw no conflict between the science of astronomy and the verities of Islam. This was in part because they pursued astronomy as a relatively autonomous science, which did not involve the more controversial claims of Avicenna's philosophy. One might compare the cultural position of astronomy at this time to that of logic. Both disciplines had come into Islamic culture as part and parcel of the Hellenic legacy. Now though, they were being studied independently and were seen as perfectly appropriate for religious scholars. This was fully in accord with the advice of al-Ghazali, who had poured scorn not only on those who questioned the validity of logic, but also on those who rejected the mathematical sciences. Even if these sciences might occasionally lead to error, he said, a rational foe is better than an ignorant friend. Qutb ad-Din also contributed to another science with longstanding ties to philosophy, medicine. He wrote a commentary on the Kanem, Avicenna's encyclopedic work of medicine. This is a reminder that Avicenna was as dominant in the later medical tradition as in later philosophy. The greatest medical writer of the 13th century, this age of Mongol invasion, was not Qutb ad-Din, but the somewhat earlier Ibn Anafis. I haven't mentioned him before, and it's a bit of a digression to bring him up now to be honest, because he didn't live in the territories conquered by the Mongols. Born in Damascus, he moved to Cairo, and thus lived within the rather less dangerous realm of the Mamluks. But I can't pass over him for two reasons. First, he made one of the most remarkable medical advances of the Islamic world, by being the first person to realize that blood is passed from one ventricle of the heart to the other through the lungs, contravening the teaching of Galen and Avicenna, and making a big stride in the direction of an accurate understanding of the circulatory system. The text in which he announced this discovery? His own commentary on the Canon of Avicenna, a reminder that the commentary traditions he provoked were full of original and valuable ideas. The other reason it's worth bringing up Ibn Anafis is that he wrote another very different work, a critical response to Ibn Tufail's island fantasy Hayy ibn Yaqdan, meaning Living Son of Awake. Ibn Anafis understood all too well the implication of Ibn Tufail's book. It dramatizes Avicenna's belief that a human can reach wisdom on his or her own, using nothing but the innate capacity for reason. To counter this, Ibn Anafis wrote his own island story in which the hero is named Fadil ibn Natik, or Virtuous, Son of the Rational, or in an alternate translation Virtuous, Son of the One Who Speaks. Like Ibn Tufail's protagonist, Ibn Anafis's main character Fadil is able on his own to realize that God must exist, but then his island is visited by a ship whose passengers expose him to the revelation. Ibn Anafis's message is clear—no man is an island. Attainment of the necessary truths requires the access to prophecy provided by a religious tradition. This constitutes an inversion of the lesson taught by Ibn Tufail, whose story ends with Hayy turning his back on society because the religious faith of its citizens falls short of his own independently discovered philosophical and mystical insights. From a historical point of view, Ibn Anafis's riposte to Ibn Tufail is noteworthy as an example of the impact of Andalusian thought outside of Andalusia. Nor is this the only example. Averroes's works were known to Ibn Taymiyyah, and of course the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi exercised immense influence in the later Eastern traditions. But, if we turn away from Ibn Anafis's Mamluk setting and back to Mongol-controlled territory, we find that the philosophical action during and after the Mongol invasions resembled what had been going on before they arrived. We saw how Fakhradin Ar-Razi fused Avicennan philosophy with the ideas and methods of Asharite Kalam. The seeds planted by Ar-Razi reach full flower with a sequence of influential theologians named Al-Baydawi, Al-Iji, and At-Taftazani. Collectively they span the whole 14th century, with Al-Baydawi dying in 1316, Al-Iji in 1355, and At-Taftazani in 1390. Their influential works were composed, not in spite of Mongol political hegemony, but actually within the elite circles of Mongol political life. Al-Iji was a highly placed judge under the Ilkhans, and by the end of his life At-Taftazani held a high position at the Mongol court in Samarkand. He provides us with a nice link between two centers of intellectual activity under the Mongols. At-Taftazani studied with Qutb-Ad-Din Ashirazi, the illuminationist and student of At-Tuzi we just saw trying to work out the details of Ptolemy's astronomical system. So, he was one of the scholars who continued the legacy of the Maraga Observatory, and he brought this legacy to Samarkand. The reason this is important is that Samarkand was the location for the court of the great Timur, known in Europe as Tamerlane. Timur really deserves a German pop group of his very own. He inflicted a new round of destructive conquest upon Persia and Central Asia, and launched a new Mongol dynasty, the Timurids, whose rule extended from the late 14th down to the early 16th century. At-Taftazani died holding office under Timur himself. His works and those of his predecessor theologians, Al-Baydawi and Al-Iji, would remain required reading at Samarkand when another research center and observatory was established there by Timur's grandson, Uleg Beg. The sequence of names and events may be slightly bewildering, but the take-home messages should be clear enough. Mongol rulers and their armies remained hazardous to the health of anyone standing in their way, yet they continued the traditions of patronage familiar to us from the high point of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Seljuks. And the scholars they patronized defy our expectations. They were Sunni theologians, but also astronomers, experts in logic but also deeply learned religious scholars. Most unexpected of all, they were sometimes Christians. One of the scholars who worked at Maraka was known as Bar Hebraeus. He hailed originally from Anatolia, but found himself in Aleppo when it was overcome by the Mongols in the year 1260. In some respects, Bar Hebraeus is typical for the era. In philosophy, he was influenced by Avicenna, he wrote on astronomy, and he was a doctor, serving at one point as physician to a Mongol ruler. And, as a participant in the scientific endeavor at Maraka, he was yet another associate of Atuzi. We even have a manuscript that once belonged to him, containing mathematical works that had been revised by Atuzi. Less typical, though, is the fact that he was a Christian. Also, he wrote some of his works in Syriac, a language that has not appeared in our story since we looked at the first translations of Greek works into the Semitic languages. In an inversion of that original translation movement, and one entirely appropriate to the Mongol age, Bar Hebraeus produced Syriac versions of works by the foremost philosophical authority of his time, Avicenna. Were all these scholars of the Mongol age really philosophers, or just pious traditionally-minded Muslims and Christians who were broad-minded enough to take an interest in less controversial disciplines like logic and astronomy? On this question I'd like to quote the great scholar of Islamic theology, Wilfrid Madelung. I'll translate his remarks from German, which between Madelung and the 1970s pop group Genghis Khan is clearly the language to know, if you want to find out more about Mongol history. He writes, When the Mongol rulers converted to Sunni Islam in the 14th century, the study and teaching of philosophy was most certainly allowed, and was practiced openly. This intellectual freedom in the East stood in sharp contrast to the situation in the central Islamic lands ruled by the Mamluks, where in the wake of the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate there was a restrictive atmosphere with little patience for departures from Sunni orthodoxy. A phenomenon like Ibn Taymiyya would hardly have been possible in the East. In other words, and again probably contrary to our expectations, the situation for philosophical development under the newly Muslim Mongols was arguably better than the situation under the stricter Mamluks. Men like Ibn Taymiyya, of course, saw that strictness as a big advantage of Mamluk rule. Meanwhile, thinkers who took advantage of the more open intellectual atmosphere of the Mongol dynasties included the aforementioned al-Baidawi, al-Iji, and At-Taftasani, each of whom deeply influenced the next. For all their interests in topics like logic and astronomy, they considered themselves to be theologians, and understood this to mean that they were not doing philosophy. Yet, they knew their Avicenna, and were well acquainted with the Avicennan kalam of Fakhradina Razi. So, their theology was shot through with Avicennan themes, something we can observe in the very way that they define their discipline of theology. It was standard practice for these authors to explain the scope of theology when they began writing their Summaries of Islamic Doctrine, texts that will be read for centuries to come. Following Razi, they naturally enough identify God as the central object of study in theology, along with topics like prophecy and the afterlife. But, they conceive of the study of God in rather Avicennan terms, calling him the necessary existent, and seeing him primarily as the cause of existence for contingent beings. On the other hand, they are also committed to the conception of God as an absolutely free and unfettered agent that had been defended many generations ago by their fellow theologian al-Ghazali. We can see this even from their work on astronomy. This tends in a rather skeptical direction, a tendency we already detected in Fakhradina Razi. In this case, the skepticism is founded in their conviction that God could have chosen any one of a large number of ways to construct the cosmos. Also, according to the Asharite teaching, God's intervention from moment to moment is needed to perpetuate the existence of that cosmos and all it contains. So, al-Iji wonders whether we really need to suppose that the planets are seated upon transparent spheres, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had assumed. Wouldn't it work just as well if they were on hoop or belt shaped rings surrounding the earth? Excitingly, he also questions the long-standing philosophical assumption that the earth is standing still, while the heavens turn above us. Perhaps it is the earth that is spinning, and we just can't tell because we are spinning right along with it. Al-Iji anticipates that the philosophers will object to this by pointing out that earth falls, and thus has a tendency to move down towards the midpoint of the cosmos rather than rotating. To this, al-Iji replies that earth might have two tendencies or inclinations at the same time, one making it tend to fall, the other making the earth as a whole revolve once each day. Here, we may detect the continued influence of Abul Barakhat al-Baghdadi, the Jewish Muslim convert who first proposed this dual inclination theory. The fact that such ideas were being put forth in the Mongol era suggests that to some extent, the Mongol dynasties were like the Muslim political regimes that preceded them. As I've said, they went so far as to found astronomical research centers. Whether they did so out of genuine curiosity and admiration for science, or as a way of shoring up political legitimacy or both, is of no concern to us. What matters is that they made it possible for philosophy, philosophically tinged theology, and science to survive and even thrive in this period. The greatest example is probably Maragha, a home for several significant scholars and supposedly a library containing hundreds of thousands of volumes. Later, as we've seen, Samarkand became another important center. But other places fared less well. The Mongols redrew both the political and cultural maps, and cities that had been hotbeds of intellectual activity now became stagnant backwaters. Above all, the former Abbasid capital Baghdad could not recover from the Mongol devastation. Iraq more generally lost its status as the cultural center of the Islamic world. There was also massive destruction elsewhere, for instance in Khurasan. In compensation, the territory corresponding to modern-day Iran became ever more defined as a political entity and as a region at the forefront of cultural developments in the Islamic world. Persian culture has been important right from the beginning of philosophy in the Islamic world, with some Greek works being translated into Persian early on, and with numerous scholars of Persian background flourishing in the Buyid period. Now, though, Iran is going to occupy the limelight as never before. Soon, we'll be taking the story forward to the Safavid empire, seeing a renaissance of interest in the Hellenic philosophical legacy and the rise of great synthetic theologian-philosopher-mystics, foremost among them, Mullah Sadr. First, though, we'll set the stage by focusing on the next great philosophical city—not Athens, Rome, or Baghdad, not even Samarkand. No, we'll be close to the shores of the Persian Gulf in southern Iran. If you, like Avicenna, are fond of a drop of wine, you might want to have a glass of Shiraz on hand as you listen to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Family Feud – Philosophy at Shiraz One stereotypical image of the philosopher is that of a hermit living in isolation in a cave or on top of a mountain, meditating and dispensing inscrutable wisdom to those who have had the wherewithal to make a pilgrimage to this remote location. We owe the image in part to the ascetics who have often appeared in the history of philosophy, for instance in classical India and among the Christians of late antiquity. But in reality, philosophy has usually been a creature of the cities. Socrates hardly ever ventured outside the walls of Athens. Along with Plato and Aristotle, he gave his hometown an indelible association with his favorite topic of conversation. Philosophically minded Romans like Cicero still visited Athens, even though there was more philosophical action in other cities like Alexandria and in Rome itself. Paris and Constantinople would probably claim bragging rights as the greatest centers of philosophy in medieval Christendom. As for the Islamic world, it's hard to look past Baghdad as the unofficial capital of philosophy. But, as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, Baghdad eventually fell from its pedestal in the wake of the Mongol invasion. There were other cities ready to take its place, including Constantinople once it was in the hands of the Ottomans, and Lucknow in India under the rulership of the Mughals. Then there was the city that is still known today as the Athens of Iran, Shiraz. I guess that Athens is therefore the Shiraz of Greece. No less an authority than Wikipedia announces that this south Iranian city is also known as the city of poets, literature, wine, and flowers, adding that the wine grape variety called Shiraz has nothing to do with the place. On the other hand, Wikipedia thinks Peter Adamson was an actor who appeared on the British soap opera Coronation Street, so I'm taking all that information with a grain of salt. After consulting some other sources, I can however confirm that Shiraz is an old city continuously inhabited since the time of the pre-Islamic Sasanians and the capital of the part of Iran known as Fars. It survived the Mongols largely unscathed, since its rulers prudently offered to submit to Mongol rule rather than resisting. In the 15th century, it was visited by a traveler from Venice who recorded that it was a prosperous place with 200,000 inhabitants. The city had a long-standing reputation for scholarly activity and piety. In keeping with this, Shiraz has produced philosophers of outstanding vintage, if not the grapes for Shiraz wine. Among them was the greatest thinker of Safavid Persia, Sar al-Din Shirazi, better known as Mullah Sadra. He died in the year 1640, by which time the madrasas of Shiraz had been a hotbed of philosophical activity for several centuries. Philosophically speaking, we can trace the city's importance back at least as far as the middle of the 14th century, when it was the home of one of the greatest Sunni theologians of the Mongol era, Al-Iji. We met him in the last episode. You might recall him discussing the question of whether the earth might be revolving. In a sign that philosophy itself was beginning to revolve around Shiraz, another major theologian of the later 14th century, Al-Jurjani, also visited the city. Al-Jurjani wrote a commentary on one of Al-Iji's theological works which, to put it mildly, received a warm reception in later generations. In fact, Al-Iji has still been studied along with a commentary of Al-Jurjani in modern times, by religious scholars at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Though both of these men thought hard about astronomy, their main activity consisted in developing and systematizing Ash'arite Sunni theology or kalam, with the help of ideas borrowed from Avicenna. This process had been going on since the 12th century, despite the criticisms leveled at Avicenna by Ash'arites like Al-Ghazali and Ash'ar Hastani. But other Ash'arites, especially Fakhradin Arazi, had woven Avicennan philosophy together with kalam so tightly that there seemed to be little hope of unraveling them again. It's telling that the severest critic of Avicennan philosophy in the Mongol age, namely Ibn Taymiyyah, was also very hostile towards kalam. The more influential mainstream theologians of the Mongol period thought that Avicennan philosophy offered useful tools for systematizing and defending their theological school doctrines. And they did need to defend those doctrines. Something I haven't mentioned yet is that in Central Asia, there was another theological school that rivaled the Ash'arites. These were the Matoridis, who like the Ash'arites were named after a founding figure of the 10th century, in this case Abu Mansur al-Matoridi. It would take us too far afield to go into the details of the disputes between the Ash'arites and Matoridis. What matters for us is that in the period of the Mongol invasion, members of these rival schools engaged in particularly intense debate with one another. This is probably because Matoridi scholars from Central Asia were fleeing away from the Mongols and coming into more direct contact with Ash'arites further west. In fact, one of the prominent Mongol-era theologians I mentioned, Ataf Dezani, was a Matoridi. So an Ash'arite like al-Iji, all the way down near the Persian Gulf in Shiraz, had a new and pressing reason to reformulate his school's theology, to make it as coherent and convincing as possible. Philosophical theology is like any other business, it thrives under the pressure of competition. Avicennan ideas gave al-Iji and those influenced by him like al-Jurjani the edge they needed to prevail in these disputes. All of which means that as we come up to the 15th century and the dawn of the Safavid period, Avicennizing theology had already set down roots in Shiraz. In this city of flowers it will now blossom in the years just prior to the coming of the Safavids. But to be honest, this floral metaphor is a bit too tranquil for what happened in Shiraz in the late 1400s. The atmosphere was more vicious than verdant, as hostility bloomed between two scholars named Sadr ad-Din Tashtaki and Jalal ad-Din Dawani. Tashtaki and Dawani engaged in a long-running dispute that was personal in every sense. They had face-to-face debates as well as writing treatises against one another's positions. If philosophical theology really does benefit from competition, then these two were each other's greatest benefactors. They died within just a few years of one another right around 1500, but the hostility didn't end there. Tashtaki's son, Hiyyath ad-Din, carried on the family feud, writing work after work in which he took the side of his father, Tashtaki, against the hated Dawani. Some scholars have referred to these philosophers as forming a school of Shiraz, but in light of the deep hostility between Dawani and the two Tashtakis, a more appropriate expression might be the duel of Shiraz fought not with swords, but with sharply honed syllogisms. It isn't entirely clear what motivated the animosity between Dawani and the Tashtakis. Dawani seems to have been more comfortable with the integration of Sunni theology with Avicenna that had been dominant in Shiraz in the previous generations, thanks to figures like Ali Ji. By contrast, the Tashtakis are highly critical of the Sunni theologians, directing their invective at Asharites as far back as al-Ghazali. One possibility is that the dispute was confessional in nature, with Dawani as a Sunni theologian being targeted by the Tashtakis who may have been Shiite, but we can't be entirely sure which of these men may have been Shiite or Sunni. The Shiite Safavids took over Iran in Hiyyath ad-Din Tashtaki's lifetime, at which point he would certainly have had to at least pay lip service to the Twelver Shi'ism of the new rulers. And among Hiyyath ad-Din's students we find both Sunni and Shiite scholars, which doesn't exactly help to decide the issue. Whatever religious disagreement may have been underlying the feud, it's abundantly clear that Dawani and the Tashtakis had profound disagreements in philosophy. The younger Tashtaki, Hiyyath ad-Din, devoted most of his writings to attacking Dawani and his allies. Since he disagreed with Dawani about practically everything, in doing so he managed to touch on most of the key philosophical issues of the time. Even apparently dry and technical topics in logic could provide an opportunity to pursue the vendetta. As we saw a few episodes back, logicians over the past few centuries had been particularly fascinated by the liar paradox, what we should say about a statement like this sentence is false. Dawani and the Tashtakis produced treatises devoted specifically to this issue, passing judgment on earlier solutions offered by everyone from al-Qatibi, author of the standard textbook on Avasanin logic, to the illuminationist Ibn Kamuna, to recent theologians like At-Taftazani. And of course, they offered their own rival solutions. Dawani tried to dissolve the paradox by saying that the paradoxical statement is in fact no statement at all. It can't be, because it can be neither true nor false, and every meaningful statement is either true or false. Were they alive today, the Tashtakis would have loved the earlier episode where I discussed this topic, because I there mentioned this sort of response and said it is the simplest, but least satisfying solution. The reason it's unsatisfying is that it is so ad hoc. Dawani seems simply to stipulate that statements that would give rise to the paradox don't count as real statements. To be fair, his solution is a bit more principled than that. For Dawani, the ability to be consistently true or false is a kind of litmus test to qualify as a meaningful statement, and the liar statement fails that test. More interesting to my mind though is the solution proposed by Dawani's rival Sadr-Ad-Din Tashtaki. He says that the difficulty is caused by the fact that the liar statement is about another statement. If I say, what Zaid is saying now is false, then whether or not this is true depends on whether what Zaid says is true or false. In just the same way, the paradoxical utterance, what I am saying now is false, is a statement about what I am now saying. It is neither true nor false, because there is no consistent way to say that the statement it refers to, namely itself, is true or that it is false. Sadr-Ad-Din thus shows how the paradox is generated by the clash between first order and second order truth. That's a nice point. So I say round one goes to the dashtakis. This logical issue though was not really at the heart of the conflict at Shiraz. When the debate turned to metaphysics, it became like a grill party in the mountains. The stakes were higher. Here the dispute was over the nature of God, and over something else that mattered a great deal to these figures, namely who could lay claim to being the better interpreters of Avicenna. We've seen in previous episodes how intellectuals in the later period boasted of their educational lineage. For instance, Fakhra-Din Arazi could claim to be the latest in a line of teachers and students stretching back to Al-Ashari, the founder of his theological school. In the same way, both Dawani and the elder dashtaki claim to be 11th generation students of Avicenna. Their two chains of teachers overlapped, splitting only after the familiar figures Atuzi and his student, the illuminationist Qutb-Adina Shirazi, whose name incidentally reminds us that he was yet another major intellectual associated with our new favorite city. In any case, the arguments at Shiraz were fought not only over philosophical issues but also when it came to the interpretation of Avicenna. In this respect, we might compare the Dawani-dashtaki rivalry to arguments in late antique or medieval philosophy. Proclus, Philoponus, and Simplicius mingled disagreement over the meaning of Plato's dialogues with their disagreement over the eternity of the universe. Another example would be Thomas Aquinas, who refuted Averroes's theory of the intellect not just by showing its falsehood but also by criticizing it as a reading of Aristotle. Similarly, for all their other disagreements, Dawani and the dashtakis agreed that the winner in their debates would be the one who could show that their position was closest to that of Avicenna. No wonder then that the most contentious issues at Shiraz were the ones where Avicenna's own view was hardest to pin down. As we know, by this time there had already been a long-running controversy about Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, especially in relation to his famous identification of God with the necessary existent. At the heart of the debate, especially as it was carried on in Shiraz, is what seems like a pretty basic question. Does God have an essence or not? Sometimes Avicenna says that God has no essence at all, while at other times he qualifies this, stating that God has no essence apart from his existence. The point may seem trifling, but on this issue turns the fundamental question of how we should conceive of God and his relation to the contingent things he creates. For Dawani, it is crucial that God does have an essence, and that this essence is nothing other than existence. He invokes this point in responding to a widely discussed problem posed by the early illuminationist philosopher Ibn Qamuna, whom we covered back in episode 175. The problem was known as Ibn Qamuna's Sophistry. It goes like this. Suppose we accept Avicenna's characterization of God as the necessary existent. Avicenna already asked how we know the necessary existent is unique. It would be a rather nice bonus of his theory if we could use it to prove that there is only one God, and Ibn Qamuna thought he could manage it. His argument was that there cannot be more than one thing whose essence is necessary existence. If there were, then both of them would be necessary, so they would need to have some other essential feature in order to be distinguished from one another. But the original idea was to imagine two things whose essences consist in nothing but necessary existence. So, this additional distinguishing feature cannot also be part of the essence, meaning that these supposedly distinct entities are in fact one and the same. The fact that this was known as Ibn Qamuna's Sophistry shows that, to put it mildly, his argument was not universally admired. From Dawani's point of view, Ibn Qamuna was making much ado about nothing. Or rather, much ado about the only thing that there is. God is pure existence, and it is ridiculous to suppose that there could be two different versions of pure existence. Dawani's idea has a further more radical implication. If God is nothing other than existence itself, then it would seem that, insofar as other things also exist, it is because they somehow partake of God. Whereas God is pure existence itself, in Arabic wujud, other things are merely existent, or mawjud. For Dawani, this means that other things are in a sense unreal. Whatever dependent reality they have is due solely to God's presence in them. In themselves, they do not exist at all, because unlike God, their essences are neutral with respect to existence. To draw an imperfect analogy, not used by Dawani himself, one might suppose that it is water's essence to be wet, and that other things become wet only thanks to the presence of water in them. For Sadr-ud-din Dashtaki, it's Dawani who is all wet. He, rightly I think, identifies a Sufi flavor to Dawani's argument, according to which God is somehow unified with all things insofar as it is his presence to them that makes them exist. Dashtaki is right again when he says that Dawani's position looks a lot like the one that was put forward several generations ago by Atuzi. This is in a sense bad news for Dashtaki. He is facing a united front of rather formidable opponents. But he is nonetheless confident in rejecting Dawani's contrast between God as existence and other things as merely existent. Instead, Dashtaki insists that we are using the word existence in the same sense when we say that a God or a created thing is existent. To this extent at least, he is closer to the view of Fakhra-din Arazi, which I compared in an earlier episode to the position of Duns Skodas in the Latin tradition. As Skodas puts it, essence is unifical, having the same meaning in every case, even in the case of God. Of course, if both God and other things can be said to exist in one and the same sense, then Dashtaki owes us an explanation of what it is that makes God so different from the other things. Simple, he says, God has no essence at all. By contrast, the other things, the things that are contingent and must be brought into existence by God, have particular essences that distinguish them from God and from each other. Whether it was metaphysical questions like this one, or logical issues like the liar paradox, the thinkers of Shiraz tended to present their work in the form of commentaries, or glosses, on the works of earlier philosophers and theologians. Indeed, this was a widespread phenomenon. Writers in the later Islamic ages loved to present their ideas in the form of texts about other texts. Already before the Mongol period, we saw figures like Arazi and Atuzi writing not just independent treatises, but also commentaries on Avicenna. As the centuries go by, the production of commentaries, summaries, and glosses on earlier works becomes more and more common. This isn't true only of philosophy. It also happens in works of Islamic jurisprudence, for instance, and even in the Sufi tradition. As in antiquity, the writing of commentaries was closely tied to practices of teaching and learning. To teach someone, whether in philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, or the prophetic sayings, usually meant giving them expertise in the classic works of the field. In fact, students would obtain a license to teach from their masters, which listed which works they themselves had mastered and were now able to explain to a new generation. The commentary, or gloss, is a natural text to produce in a teaching context, but it may seem a curious format for debating with one's rivals. In fact, Hiyyath-Ad-Din Dashtaki felt the need to explain why his father wrote almost nothing apart from glosses, or marginal notations, on the works of other theologians. It was basically a matter of efficiency, he explained. Rather than going over all the points that had already been made in previous generations, the elder Dashtaki could focus on making truly original points of his own. This explanation overturns our expectations, suggesting as it does that in restricting himself to commentary on another text, Sarra-Din was actually able to be more original in his writing, rather than going over old ground. Academics of today might want to take note. And certainly we should avoid assuming that the dominance of commentary and glosses in these centuries is a sign of philosophical or intellectual stagnation. Dawani and the Dashtakis were clearly highly original and opinionated thinkers, even if a cursory glance at lists of their works shows that all three of them spent most of their time expounding the writings of others. For instance, Dawani wrote commentaries on works by the earlier Avisanizing Sunni theologians al-Baidawi, al-Iji, and At-Tafd-Azani, and on a treatise by At-Tuzi. He even wrote a self-commentary on one of his own works. In an even more dramatic demonstration of the dominance of commentary at this time, we see the emergence of commentaries and glosses devoted to texts that were already commentaries or glosses. This may sound like the very definition of a pointless text, but such a work could provide the occasion for serious philosophical controversy. One of the writings in which Dawani attacked his rival Dashtaki was a set of super glosses on glosses that Dashtaki had written for a commentary on a work by al-Qatibi. You may need first and second order sentences to understand the liar paradox, but if you want to understand philosophical literature of this later period, you need to reckon with third and even fourth order commentary. So pervasive is this trend that I want to devote a whole episode to it, in which I'll be joined by a guest who has done more than anyone to argue for the interest and importance of philosophical commentary in the Islamic world. How would I feel if you skipped my interview with Robert Wisnowski? No comment. Catch it next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Professor Robert Wisnowski from McGill University about commentary culture in later Islamic philosophy. Hi, Robert. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I guess the first thing I should ask you to explain is what we're talking about here. So, when we talk about later philosophical commentaries, what sorts of texts do we have in mind? How much material is there? Who was writing it? Who were they writing for? We're talking about a wide range of texts. We probably have about 60, 70, 75 or so major core texts that were written over the course of several centuries in the Islamic Middle Ages, from Avicenna, who died in 1038 onwards, and then all the way through the 15th or 16th century. So, scholars and philosophers would write commentaries on earlier texts by previous authorities, and then they would write their own new texts, which they hoped would be the origins of new commentary chains. So, of those 60, 70, 80 or so major original texts that were written in the centuries by Avicenna and in the centuries that followed Avicenna, we probably have 800 or 900 extant commentaries. And by commentaries, I mean not only first-order commentaries, that is to say, direct engagements with the authoritative text, but also second and third and sometimes even fourth-order commentaries, by which I mean glosses or super-commentaries on a previous commentary, glosses on that super-commentary, sometimes super-glosses on the glosses, and so on. So, we have a very wide range of texts that were commented on, and also some of these commentary chains were very deep as well. And they began, as I said, in the period around Avicenna in the 11th century, and they last all the way up until the end of the 19th century. Who are some of the other authors that they're commenting on? So, the original core texts that provide the basis for either a commentary or a super-commentary or a super-super commentary and so on? Well, Avicenna is the person who, in some ways, or in many ways, starts this post-classical philosophical commentary culture. His works served as the basis for future commentaries, particularly in the 12th and 13th centuries. As time went on, as I mentioned before, people who had written commentaries on earlier texts themselves wrote new original works of their own, and these new original works of their own became the basis of future commentary traditions. The most important one after Avicenna is probably Nisir ad-Din Toussi, and Nisir ad-Din Toussi wrote a philosophical creed called Tadrid al-Ittakad, or Outline of Dogma, which itself spurred an enormous number of commentaries, super-commentaries, glosses and super-glosses. But not only Toussi, his contemporaries, Ghazwini Katibi and Elabhari, wrote philosophical texts and logical texts which engendered enormous commentary traditions. So probably combined these three authors, each of whom was active in the middle of the 13th century, between them probably engendered commentary traditions with over a hundred or a hundred and fifty or so commentaries, super-commentaries, glosses and super-glosses. This is really amazing. And this is material that survives today, mostly I guess in manuscripts in libraries found in the Islamic world today, is that right? That's right. When I'm talking about particular numbers or ranges of numbers, I'm talking about the number of manuscript witnesses or number of works for which we have at least one manuscript witness extant today. Of course, the number grows even larger if we take into account works that are reported by Islamic bibliographers, but which either have not survived in manuscript form till today, in which were lost, or which we simply haven't been able to locate. Some of these works of course have been edited, but only a very small fraction of them. I would say probably ten to fifteen percent of the total number, which I, as I said at the beginning, is probably around eight or nine hundred total philosophical commentaries. So if you have these hundreds and hundreds of commentaries, obviously there must have been some kind of social and institutional context in which this was being done. And I suppose this is basically the madrasa system of education, is that right? That's right. So these commentaries serve a scholastic purpose. They're in some ways for the same reason that late antique Greek philosophical commentaries served a scholastic purpose, that they helped the professor in giving a philosophy lesson. So the professor would teach the students about a particular philosophical text by going through the original philosophical text that he was teaching, first in a kind of word-by-word way, and then in a broader philosophical sense in order to bring out the philosophical context of the arguments, how these arguments relate to other arguments that the author of the text would have written, and so on. And this was often part of a curriculum of a madrasa, particularly in the later period, certainly in the Ottoman and Safavid and Mughal periods, philosophical texts were part of the curricula of many madrasas, and in particular logic texts were part of the curricula of many madrasas. And this is because logic was seen as a useful propaedeutic to legal studies, which was at the center of the madrasa teaching mission. Well sometimes, however, when you were teaching, if you were a student or professor in a madrasa, and for one reason or another philosophy or a philosophical text was not included in the curriculum of the madrasa, perhaps it was written into the deed of gift of the original person who endowed the madrasa that no philosophy should ever be taught at the madrasa. You see this, in fact, they're called wakfias, that no rational science should ever be taught in the madrasa. Of course, that doesn't mean that the professors and students at the madrasa never taught and learned philosophy, they just did it off campus, or they did it in an informal way and in an extracurricular way. Podcasting, basically. Like podcasting! Right. So actually one thing that that makes clear is that these are institutions where they're not necessarily philosophical institutions for sure, so they're learning fiqh or jurisprudence, they're maybe getting ready to become theologians. And so one question that arises, I think, here is the extent to which we can really talk about the authors and the text as philosophical. So if they're commenting on avicenna, for example, it seems pretty clear that there's a philosophical enterprise at stake. But do you think that we can even really distinguish in this later period between theologians and philosophers? Or do we just have a kind of collision of the philosophical and theological traditions at this point? I think that there is a collision, there's a, well, not so much a collision as a conflation, a confluence of philosophical and theological traditions. Our terms, of course, philosophy and theology are English and don't necessarily map on to the Arabic equivalents of these terms. There, of course, is the Arabic term falsafa, has a relatively restricted sense in the Islamic intellectual context, and which refers to Aristotelian philosophy as undertaken in the late antique tradition influenced by Neoplatonic ideas and so on. But there's also kalam, and kalam has sometimes simply been translated into English as theology. But kalam is more than simply theology. Uddakallamun, the practitioners of kalam, undertook extensive study and investigation and discussions of topics in natural philosophy, and they also wrote on theories of argumentation, on philosophy of language, and other topics that we would consider to be philosophical. And even in the parts of kalam which are strictly theological, that is to say, where there are discussions of and articulations of theories of divine being and divine attributes, the ideas of the great philosophers such as Avicenna were appropriated so assiduously and so enthusiastically by post-Avicennian Muttakalamun that, in fact, in the post-Avicennian period, kalam and falsafa merge to a great extent. And as the famous North African historian, Bilhaldun, complained in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, it sometimes becomes very difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The problems of kalam become the problems of philosophy and the problems of philosophy become the problems of kalam. You've mentioned a couple of times that this is not the first occasion on which we find philosophy in the context of commentaries. You mentioned there are these late antique commentators, usually on Aristotle, which is something I covered way back in the podcast. And that makes me wonder what the textual sources are for the writing of commentaries in this later Muslim tradition. It seems to me that there are two obvious potential sources. One is precisely these philosophical commentaries, which were then imitated in the Baghdad Peripatetic School by Farabi and others, also by Averroes in Spain. But then there's also commentaries on the Quran, so tafsir. I'm wondering whether the philosophical commentaries that were written in the madrasas are drawing on one or the other of those commentary traditions, or both maybe? I think they're drawing on both, but they're drawing primarily on the late antique philosophical commentary tradition. We see the same range of commentatorial practices in the post-Avicennian period, in Arabic philosophical commentaries that we do in the late antique period, with Greek philosophical commentaries. So a commentator will be interested in a text or engage in a core or original philosophical text that he's commenting on in a variety of ways. So one of the first ways is philological. The commentator has to determine whether the text at hand really is an accurate representation of the original philosophical text. So you mean that there might be mistakes in the way the text was copied down by the scribe, in other words? Exactly, and a commentator, we find, often complains that a previous scribe might have mis-transcribed a word or a phrase or missed out a sentence. And we find this in late antique Greek commentators as well as in post-Avicennian Arabic philosophical commentators. So that's the philological part of commentating. There's a lexicographical part as well. When a commentator encounters a particular term or phrase in the original text which is not transparent, the philosophical commentator will gloss that word or phrase with more familiar language. Sometimes the commentator will provide definitions of terms that are in the core text. Other times the commentator will provide identifications of authors and texts that are mentioned in passing and mentioned only vaguely in the text. So for example, if the original text says, some authors think this, or one of the modern philosophers says that, sometimes the commentator will identify who in fact the original author is referring to. Which is very helpful for us, if that right it is. It's extremely helpful for us. Other times the commentator will engage in what we might consider to be more philosophical activities or will engage more philosophically with the text. So if there's a proposition in the text that's unproven, the commentator will supply a proof for that text. If there's a proof in the original philosophical text that is missing a premise or which contains a faulty premise, then the commentator will correct the proof in the text. Sometimes commentators will correct the replacement proofs of previous commentators. And that's one of the reasons you would write a super commentary, right? Absolutely. You say, well, Fakhradine has Avicenna wrong. That's right. So here's a better version of a proof that would support Avicenna. That's right. In an even broader sense, commentators are engaged in systematizing the philosophy in the core text. So it's quite often the case that philosophers are inconsistent, that they say one thing in one place and another thing in another place. You're not implying that Avicenna is inconsistent, are you? He is, but so is Aristotle. It happens to the best of us. It happens to the best of us. And sometimes the job of the commentator is to address obvious inconsistencies in the core text and to explain how, in fact, what appeared to be inconsistencies really are not inconsistent, that there's an underlying harmony within the text. Other times, the author of the original text will have said one thing in one text and another thing in another text. The job of the commentator will be to address issues of consistency between those two texts and show how, in fact, there is an underlying harmony. Even more broadly, there may be inconsistencies between what the author of the original text says and what other authorities say, other philosophers or other members, great figures in the school that the author is also a member of, say. And again, harmonization and systematization requires a lot of effort from the commentator. So that's what commentators do. At some point also, commentators do what we, with our modern intuitions, might think of as truly philosophical, and that is, sometimes they reject what is in the original text. They don't simply explicate it. They don't set it in context. They don't just explain how what appears to be incongruous statements, in fact, are harmonizable. They reject the theory and show where the arguments are wrong and supply a replacement theory. So in fact, they're generating new philosophy in the commentary. And we see this particularly with John Philoponus, for example, and his theory of impetus, which is articulated in the commentary on Aristotle's physics in late antiquity, and we see it also in post-Avicennian philosophers as well. So this entire range of activities that philosophical commentators engage in was very much in line with and a continuation of late antique exegetical practice. To the extent that post-Avicennian philosophical commentators were also influenced by commentaries on the Qur'an, I would say that the attention that was paid, the very strict and close attention that was paid to textual study, to lexicography, to philology by commentators on the Qur'an, and as well as scholars in the traditional Islamic sciences, what were called the transmitted sciences, the mankulat, post-Avicennian philosophical commentators took from them their strict criteria of textual authenticity, of historical situating of the text, and so on and so forth. So to the extent that they were influenced by more traditional Islamic scholars, I think it was in those areas. It's like they're trained in the arts of, say, grammar and Hadith scholarship, and then they bring those skills to a philosophical enterprise that's fundamentally growing out of this late antique tradition. Absolutely, and they try to uphold the extremely high standards of philological and historical scholarship that, for example, scholars of tafsir, scholars of Hadith criticism show in their own work and apply those to the study of philosophical texts, the commentaries on philosophical texts. By the way, out of curiosity to the word tafsir, to me that usually means commentary on the Qur'an. Do they use the word tafsir also to refer to what they're doing if they're commenting on Avicenna, for example? No, tafsir in the post-Avicennian period is almost entirely reserved for Qur'an commentary. Of course, the exception is the commentaries that were written on Aristotle by Arab scholars, such as Ibn Rushd. Those long commentaries are called tafsir. But by and large, the commentaries were called shara, and glosses were called hashias or marginal comments, hawashi, ta'aleh qat, appendices. Actually, maybe another question is how did they look on the page? Do you usually have a kind of core text in the middle with comments all around it, like in the margin? Or is it like the lemma, in other words the quote from the main text is then just followed by a long stretch of prose, or do they do both? The commentaries would start as a single rectangular text block with wide margins on a folio, and then the commentary would get written in, often in diagonal lines, in the margins of the original text block. As commentaries became themselves more authoritative, as a single commentator's work of exegesis came to be established as the primary means of approaching an original or core text, that commentary would then become incorporated into the main text block, and margins would be left for a super commentary. So, returning to the philosophical import of all this, what are some of the philosophical issues that become really prevalent in this later commentary tradition? The main issues that were discussed by post-Avicennian philosophical commentators were issues of interpretation of Avicenna's own ideas, Avicenna's metaphysics in particular, his epistemology, his logic, and so on. Avicenna really served as the Aristotle of the late Islamic period, so just as we find many, many commentaries on different Aristotelian works in the late antique period, so we find many commentators addressing works of Avicenna in the post-Avicennian period. The work that they addressed most was the Kitapel-i-Sharat Watanbehat, the Book of Pointers and Reminders, and this text was particularly attractive to post-Avicennian commentators for a number of reasons. One was that the text itself is relatively underdetermined, it's a series of propositions, so that lends itself to commentatorial activity where you can supply the proofs for those propositions that are simply listed in the Isharat. It's also one of Avicenna's last works, so there's a sense of definitiveness about what he's saying in the Isharat. It's also a relatively short work, so it doesn't require such an enormous commitment of time and effort to undertake a commentary on it in the way that commenting on his magnum opus, the Shifa, would. And in the initial commentaries on the Isharat, problems of Avicenna's modal logic come up. Avicenna invents a new way of, or a new pair, of readings of modalized propositions which supersede those of Aristotelian modal logic and become the subject of enormous discussion in post-Avicennian philosophical commentary. So by modal logic you mean propositions that involve necessity and contingency? Absolutely, that's right. And issues of metaphysics are extremely contentious. How best to interpret Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, whether or not essence and existence are distinct in all beings other than God, or whether essence and existence are also distinct in God, too, is a major point of debate amongst post-Avicennian theologians. The idea of necessary and possible existence, intrinsically necessary existence, extrinsically necessary of existence, these are very central Avicennian distinctions, and how best to interpret them and mesh them with other Avicennian metaphysical ideas and theories and distinctions becomes the primary focus of post-Avicennian commentary. Issues of epistemology come up the role of the ancient intellect in producing our knowledge of universal concepts, the role of the wahm or faculty of estimation in the process of abstraction. Again, these are issues that come up in trying to interpret what Avicenna said, to repair Avicenna's own theories amongst some commentators and with other commentators trying to replace Avicenna's theories if they're irreparably damaged with better theories. And this occurs initially in commentaries on the Isha'at, but then they become the main set of problems for all philosophy, regardless of whether you're engaging directly with the text of Avicenna or not. So the great authors of the middle part of the 13th century, Toussi, Haswini Katibi, Abhuri, who themselves write great textbooks of logic and philosophy, are very much operating with the set of Avicennian problems in mind as they compose their own works, which then dominate the attention of commentators in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Just in closing, you just told us that Avicenna has set the agenda for this later tradition. What is the agenda now that faces us? I mean, one thing I think that you've conveyed is that there's a huge amount of material to be studied here, and a lot of it might not be that philosophically gripping, right? Because if they're just describing the philological situation or the meaning of a certain Arabic word, we might not think, okay, well, that's really philosophically important, but it sounds like any one of these texts might contain gems of philosophical insight and analysis. So what do you think is the future in terms of the prospects for understanding and studying this vast mountain of material that's mostly not even edited, never mind translated and studied? It's a daunting prospect trying to come to grips with this enormous body of philosophical material. And as you say, you're not necessarily going to be rewarded with pearls of wisdom each time you delve into a philosophical commentary. Some commentaries are, of course, derivative and dry and uninteresting. But anecdotally, my experience and the experience of colleagues whom I've been in contact with, who are increasingly interested in and engaged in investigating this post-Avasanian commentary material, is that we don't actually have to look that hard to find philosophically interesting material in these commentaries. Setting these ideas in their philosophical context, of course, requires a lot of historical research. It requires a lot of philological effort, because as you say, many of these texts remain in manuscript form. But the rewards are great. And simply as an effort to try to understand the place of philosophy in the context of Islamic civilization, I think is worth the effort. It makes it worthwhile for us scholars to really try and understand what happened, how philosophy evolved, and the place that philosophy occupied in Islamic intellectual culture. This is something that has for many, many generations been assumed to have been a very marginal activity. And in fact, what we're discovering is that it's much more central than we had previously thought. So the gems of philosophical insight will come out, but I think our motivation has to be primarily simply to try and understand what happened, to try and construct a narrative of what happened to philosophy in the post-Avasanian period, and in the process of constructing that narrative, in the process of undertaking research on the texts that we need to look at in order to construct that narrative, we will inevitably come across gems that will be of interest to contemporary philosophers, people who are simply interested in philosophical ideas and not necessarily interested in Islamic intellectual history. But we can't predict precisely where those will occur. The reason I'm confident is not only because I've had the experience myself so anecdotally of coming across really fascinating ideas and fascinating distinctions and new examples, but that in the case of the late antique Greek commentators, which again had been assumed to be interesting and valuable only insofar as they contained fragments of pre-Socratic philosophers, for example, or of Stoic philosophers, and which had been found upon further investigation to contain really quite interesting and innovative philosophical ideas. I think that that experience allows us or justifies our extrapolation to the post-Avasanian field, to the post-Avasanian period, this same kind of confidence that we just simply need to get to work and really investigate these philosophical commentaries in a systematic and comprehensive way, and the gems will be there. And I guess the good news is we'll never run out of stuff to look at, at least no time soon. Never say never. And it may seem that I'll never run out of philosophy in the Islamic world to look at in the podcast, but I am getting towards the end. I do still need to look at what happened philosophically in the three later empires of the Islamic world running up into the modern period, namely the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Safavids in Persia. So that is the material I'll be turning towards in the next few episodes. For now, I'll thank Rob Wysnowski very much. Thank you, Peter. Please join me next time as we move on into the latest period of philosophy in the Islamic world, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Follow the Leader, Philosophy under the Safavids. Like a policeman following two silverware thieves with holes in their pockets, we have reached another fork in the road. The last time I used this joke, we were branching off into the Islamic world, leaving for later the philosophical traditions of medieval Christendom. Now almost 70 episodes and about a millennium later, we are remaining within the Islamic world, but following three more or less simultaneous, mutually interacting political realms. Furthest west is the Ottoman Empire, with its capital in Istanbul, formerly the Byzantine capital city Constantinople. The Ottomans emerged just after the coming of the Mongols and the fall of the Seljuks in the 13th century. To the east, beginning in the early 16th century, India fell under the Islamic rule of the Mughals. And in the middle there is Persia, which at the same time became the home of the Safavids. We are going to cover all three, beginning in this and the next couple of episodes with the Safavids, which among these three empires is the one most celebrated for its contribution to the history of philosophy. Indeed, the Safavids give us the only Muslim philosopher from these later centuries who has received much attention in modern day European scholarship, namely Mullah Saadra. Because of his importance, we'll be devoting several episodes to him. In this episode, I want to look at a few other thinkers of the Safavid period, because Saadra wasn't the only game in town. Which town? Well, you might expect it to be Shiraz, given our recent focus on that city and the fact that Saadra himself was born there. But the scholars who did some of the first studies of Safavid philosophy—I'm thinking especially here of Henri Cobain and Seyyed Hossein Nasr—used the phrase school of Isfahan to refer to Saadra and the other philosophers of this period. Towards the center of modern day Iran, several hundred miles due south of Tehran, Isfahan was indeed a significant center for scholarship. Mullah Saadra studied there, as did other philosophers I'm going to mention in this episode, yet Shiraz remained important, and the city of Qom played host to Safavid thinkers too. More to the point, it isn't so clear that the Safavid thinkers necessarily formed a school. As we saw, members of the so-called school of Shiraz were in fact united by nothing so much as mutual loathing. The Safavid thinkers collectively described as the school of Isfahan may not have been as hostile to one another as Dawani and the Dashtakis had been in Shiraz, but they did disagree profoundly on the key philosophical issues of their day. In particular, one of Mullah Saadra's most distinctive positions in metaphysics was developed in direct opposition to his teacher, the greatest Safavid thinker apart from Saadra himself, a man by the name of Mir-da-mad. So, if we think of a school as a tradition of thought united around a set of doctrines, perhaps those of the school founder as with the Epicureans in Hellenistic philosophy or the Asherites in Islamic kalam, then the Safavid thinkers were not a school. Yet they did share much in common with one another, above all in terms of the sources that influenced them. Mullah Saadra's thought is a remarkable confluence of several currents flowing from earlier Islamic intellectual history. He draws on the eviscienizing kalam that had been so vibrantly and contentiously pursued at Shiraz just at the dawn of the Safavid period. He is also heavily influenced by Sufism and by the illuminationist tradition inaugurated by Suhrabadi. Finally, he exemplifies one of the most striking features of Safavid philosophy, a resurgence of interest in the Greek philosophical works that had been translated into Arabic so long ago. No thinker of the period fused these traditions as powerfully and influentially as Saadra did, but in his choice of inspirations he was very much a man of his time and place. Of course, we shouldn't overlook the most obvious commonality of the Safavid thinkers, which is that they were Shi'ite Muslims, of the Twelver variety. They could hardly have been otherwise, living as they did under Safavid rule. Safavid rule began in the early 16th century, right where we left off in the episode about Shiraz. In fact, the younger of the two dashtakis, Khayyath ad-Din, lived well into the Safavid period, dying in 1541. Safavid power expanded as far as Shiraz already in 1504, and thereafter Khayyath ad-Din was on good terms with the rising power. He was even invited by the Shah of the Safavids to rebuild the old observatory at Maragha, where At-Huzi and his students had done so much to advance the study of astronomy and philosophy more than two centuries ago. Khayyath ad-Din turned down the offer, claiming that the stars were not auspicious for such an undertaking, a reminder that just as in Europe the story of astrology continued to be intertwined with the story of astronomy in the Islamic realms. Along with anyone else who wanted to pursue a scholarly career under the Safavids, Khayyath ad-Din espoused the beliefs of the Twelver branch of Shi'ite Islam. This form of Shi'ism is still dominant in modern-day Iran, and in geographical terms too there is a rough equivalence between Iran today and the domain controlled by the Safavids in the 16th century. Just to keep this at the front of our minds, from here on out I'm going to refer to this region as Iran, rather than Persia. So who were the Safavids? They take their name from a figure of the Mongol period named Safi ad-Din. He died in the year 1334. He was no conqueror, but the head of a Sufi order which came to be named after him. Only decades after Safi ad-Din's death did this group, the Safavids, begin to assert Twelver Shi'ism. Through the 15th century, the Safavids increasingly became a military, and not just spiritual force. Finally, a leader named Ismayu, the first Safavid Shah, established a base and a new state in Azerbaijan. The power of the Safavids spread from there, gaining hold over Iran within about a decade. They had laid claim to an ancient land, but their legitimacy was not recognized by all other Muslims. To the contrary, Safavid history would be marked by constant struggle against the Ottomans, who were staunch proponents of Sunni Islam. The upshot was, among other things, a new context for the development of philosophy. Of course it was nothing new that Shiite Islam should be intertwined with philosophy. We've seen how the previous major Shiite state, the Fatimids of Egypt, sent out missionaries to spread acceptance of the Ismaili form of Shi'ism in the 10th and 11th centuries. Here I should perhaps take the opportunity to mention one Ismaili who I didn't cover back in episode 135, where I talked about some of these other missionaries. This was a man by the name of Nasir Khosrow, a fascinating character who was about a generation older than Avicenna and a generation younger than Al-Ghazali. Like Avicenna, he hailed from Khurasan. His embrace of Ismailism led him to give up on his career as a tax collector to take up the new career of collecting converts for the Ismaili cause. Nasir Khosrow traveled to Fatimid Egypt and then extensively throughout the Islamic realms. In fact, his best-known book is one that recounts his travels. But like other missionaries sent out by the Fatimids, he also wrote on philosophical subjects. In one work, Nasir Khosrow explains the harmony between Ismaili teachings and the doctrines of the philosophers on a wide range of issues, such as creation, God's oneness, aspects of the physical world, and logic. He exploits the traditional Ismaili contrast between an exoteric and esoteric teaching. The philosophers have delivered the former, attaining to truths gleaned through human reason rather than divine inspiration. The Ismailis, with their recourse to the teachings of the Imams, of course have access to the interior or esoteric truths. Moving forward, we've already looked at another great Shiite thinker of the 13th century, At-Tuzi. We saw how he alternated between Ismaili and Twelver Shi'ism and colored his philosophical writings with Shiite ideas. Yet At-Tuzi did have Sunni students, and his philosophical works were enthusiastically commented upon by Sunni theologians. Naturally, Shiite scholars were drawn to his more specifically Shiite writings. For instance, he composed a creed of Shiite belief which became the subject of commentary and glosses by numerous later authors, including our new friends, those old enemies at Shiraz. And his immediate circle of students included not just Sunnis but also Shiites. The most outstanding example was a man named Alamah al-Hili. He studied with At-Tuzi and another of At-Tuzi's students, the logician al-Qatibi, presumably at Maraghah. In a further exploit, al-Hili is credited with helping persuade one of the Mongol rulers to convert to Twelver Shi'ism in the early 14th century, a full 200 years before the more historically momentous shift toward Shi'ism under the Safavids. Al-Hili represents a different side of Shiite intellectual history than what we found with the earlier Ismailis. Whereas they were inspired by Greek philosophy, especially the works of Neoplatonism that had been translated back in the time of al-Kindi, al-Hili was more impressed by the work of Islamic theologians. He drew especially on the ideas of the Mu'atazilites, a nice example of the fact that kalam doctrines had appeal across the Sunni-Shiite divide. Here's an example. You might remember that the Mu'atazilites disagreed with their rivals, the Asharites, over the question of how morality is grounded. Is an action good because God commands us to perform it? Or is it that certain actions are intrinsically good, and God commands us to do them because He recognizes their goodness? The second option was the one taken by the Mu'atazilites, and on this, as on many other topics, al-Hili follows their lead. He gives a nifty argument against the Asharite theory that things become good because God commands them. Anyone who does anything, al-Hili says, must have some reason or motive for what they are doing. If you have such a reason for doing something and the power to do it, then the action will follow. For instance, if I love Buster Keaton movies, that gives me reason enough to watch one tonight. It is because I think watching his movies is a good thing to do that I watch them. But what would be God's reason for commanding something if He doesn't already see it as a good thing to command? The Asharite position leaves God without any motive to act upon. God would be like a Hollywood star getting too little help from the director. He'll have no motivation and will thus be unable to act at all. So what about Safavid dominated Iran? What sort of Shiite philosophy are we going to find here? Something more like the Neo-Platonism inspired ideas of the earlier Ismailis, which saw philosophy as the exoteric complement of the inspired message of the Prophets and Imams? Or perhaps the kind of Shiite Mu'atazilism espoused by al-Hili? Even though the Safavid thinkers are Twelver Shiites, the answer turns out to be that they are much closer in spirit to the Ismailis. Neo-Platonism sees an unexpected resurgence under the Safavids, with a renewed interest in the doubly ancient texts of authors like Plotinus. Already antique figures when translated into Arabic in the 9th century, Plotinus and other Greek thinkers at first received careful attention but then suffered centuries of neglect in the wake of Avicenna, like silent movie stars after the invention of the Tawkis. That changes now. Mullah Sadr and other Safavid thinkers were deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism. They were especially fascinated by the so-called theology of Aristotle, the Arabic version of parts of Plotinus's writings that had passed into Arabic under the name of Aristotle. Many of the surviving manuscripts of the theology of Aristotle come from Iran, and that's no coincidence. It was even made the subject of a major commentary in the 17th century. The author of that commentary, a student of Mullah Sadr's son-in-law, was named Sa'id Qummi. His name means that he came from the Iranian city of Qum, a major scholarly center then and now. But the renewed appetite for Greek sources did not mean that Avicenna was no longer on the menu. Safavid thinkers continued to write glosses and commentaries on his writings as well. So what we're seeing here is a mix of the old and the new, or rather a mix of the extremely old with the fairly old, given that Avicenna himself had died in 1037, half a millennium before the heyday of the Safavids. To this already heady brew, the Safavid thinkers add two more ingredients, Sufism and Illuminationism. Ibn Arabi and Suhrabadi were long dead by the time of Safavid Iran, but their ideas remained alive and well. We find this combination of influences already in a man who provides us with continuity between the achievements of Mullah Sadr and the earlier disputations in Sadr's home city of Shiraz. The younger dashtaki Ghiyath-a-Din had a student named Najmadin-a-Nairizi whose thought has all the hallmarks of Safavid philosophy. Whereas it's possible, but not certain, that the dashtakis were sincere Shiites, A-Nairizi was totally committed to the Safavid religious agenda. In his writings he even curses the first three caliphs of Islam, whom Shiites see as having held power when it should have passed to Ali. This was the sort of thing that really annoyed Sunni Muslims like the Ottomans. When he turns to doing philosophy, A-Nairizi seems to be carrying on where the dashtakis left off. He is a staunch advocate of Avicenna, as they were, and continues the practice of writing commentaries on earlier thinkers such as Atouzi. We also find him writing glosses on earlier commentaries, like on al-Jurjani's commentary on the major theological treatise by al-Iji, and, I like this, a set of glosses on al-Jurjani's glosses to a commentary devoted to the standard logical textbook of al-Qatibi. Eat your heart out of Arowiz and Gersonides. They are known to us as the commentator and his super commentator, but these guys are writing super super super commentaries. Texts our recent interview guest Rob Wisnowski once suggested to me should be called super duper pooper commentaries. Notice by the way that A-Nairizi's Shiism doesn't stop him from commenting on Sunni scholars. That broad-mindedness extends to his other interests, which show him moving towards the wider philosophical tastes of later Safavid thinkers. He knows and uses the theology of Aristotle, is influenced by Sufism, and, most tellingly, engages with the illuminationist works of Sukhravati and his followers. Of course, he writes commentaries on them. But bearing out my earlier warning that commentaries are not necessarily slavish recapitulations of the texts being commented upon, A-Nairizi is actually very critical of Sukhravati. One area where he takes issue with Sukhravati is political philosophy. Naturally, Shiite thinkers tend to have a different approach to political legitimacy than Sunnis would. They believe that our allegiance is due to the imams chosen by God and identified through their family connection to Ali. Sukhravati held that political rulership is rightly wielded by a kind of perfect philosopher, a virtuous man who masters both the argumentative and mystical sides of wisdom. In his commentary, A-Nairizi speculates that with this line of argument Sukhravati was probably trying to lay claim to political power for himself. No wonder Saladin had him killed. Furthermore, A-Nairizi adds, there seems to be no general connection between political success and wisdom. Though there are occasionally wise rulers, we can easily think of rulers without wisdom and of wise men who had no power. Here, A-Nairizi names Noah of Ark fame. He was wise, but possessed no political authority. The political ruler may be the shepherd of his flock, but apparently if your followers are literally a flock, that doesn't count. Underlying this dispute with Sukhravati is A-Nairizi's conviction that political dominion is bestowed by God. For him, politics is a game of follow the leader, and the rightful leader is the Imam, appointed by divine fiat. Even the Safavid Shahs rule as a mere substitute in the absence of the true ruler, the Imam. Fortunately for A-Nairizi and his fellow scholars, those Shahs had a fairly friendly attitude towards philosophy. Like so many other potentates of the Islamic world before them, they sought out intellectuals and scholars to grace their court. Good examples are the teachers of Mullah Jadra, by the names of Mir Damaad and Shaykh Bahai. Both of them were not only philosophers and theologians, but held the position of Shaykh al-Islam, given to the foremost legal scholar under the Safavids. There are some nice stories which put them together in royal company. In one of them, Mir Damaad and fellow thinker Shaykh Bahai are riding along with the great Safavid ruler Shah Abbas. Mir Damaad was, it would seem, full figured, and his horse was lagging behind the others. When the Shah teased him that Shaykh Bahai was outpacing him, Mir Damaad replied that the Shaykh's horse was just running fast with joy to have such an eminent rider. The Shah then rode ahead and mentioned that Mir Damaad's corpulence was slowing down his horse. Shaykh Bahai tactfully replied that the steed was simply having trouble carrying the weight of so much knowledge. But enough horsing around. Let's consider one of Mir Damaad's weightier ideas, in fact the one for which he is best known, the idea of perpetual creation. The theory was put forth in Mir Damaad's treatise Al-Khabasat, meaning Blazing Embers. Given his approach to horsemanship, I guess there is not much danger of confusing it with Imel Brooks' western Blazing Saddles. His idea of perpetual creation returns us to a problem we thought about a lot when discussing the formative period of philosophy in the Islamic world, namely the question of whether the universe has always existed. As we saw, thinkers ranging from the early philosophers Al-Kindi and Sa'ad-i-Agaon to the great Sunni theologian Al-Ghazali refused to accept that the universe is eternal. They believed that there was no way to reconcile its eternity with the idea that it was produced by a freely chosen act of divine creation. Since Mir Damaad was influenced by both Avicenna and the Neoplatonic texts that were coming back into vogue in the Safavid times, he was unsurprisingly more inclined to think that the universe is eternally emanated from God, like rays of light from a source of illumination. What Mir Damaad brings to this debate is a new way of thinking about the relationship between God and the universe. Avicenna had reasoned that if the universe necessarily proceeds from God, and God is eternal, then the universe too must be eternal. Taking advantage of some terminology he finds in Avicenna himself, Mir Damaad offers a different view. We should actually distinguish between three levels of reality. The humblest things are subject to time. These will be things that come and go, like you, me, giraffes, and the vain hope that Arsenal will win the league next year. The most exalted thing is, of course, God, who is eternal in the sense of being utterly beyond time. To mark this special status, Mir Damaad uses the Arabic word sarmad. But this is rather mysterious, isn't it? How can a timeless God relate to things in our world which are happening at certain times? How could He perform an action to create the universe, or for that matter anything else, at a specific time if He is timeless? And how can He timelessly know about things that are happening in time? Mir Damaad solves this age-old problem by positing a kind of transitional status between temporality and timeless eternity. For this he uses another Arabic word dahr, which we might translate as perpetuity. This term refers specifically to the relationship between the timeless God and the temporal events in the world. God in Himself is timeless, but His action is perpetual, lasting forever but still relating to things that are happening at certain times in the created universe. Nothing in the universe lasts forever and unchangingly, but the universe as a whole has always been here since it is the result of God's perpetual creative act, hence the phrase huduth dahri, or perpetual creation. You might wonder whether there is more going on here than mere wordplay. Does it really help, philosophically speaking, to assign different words—eternity, perpetuity, and time—to these three levels? Yes, because the different words mark out different kinds of before and after. The perpetual is after the eternal, only in the sense of causal dependence. For instance, God's creative act had to be caused by Him since it was up to Him whether to create. It was, to put it in Avicennan terms, contingent whether or not God would create anything at all. But the perpetual does not involve the before and after of time, which we see in things like giraffes and arsenals' chants at winning the league title, things that begin to be and pass away. Though this point was implicit to some extent in Avicenna, Mir Dhamad has made a real advance in clarifying the distinction between causal and temporal priority. So what came after Mir Dhamad himself? As we'll see in a few episodes, he was influential beyond the Safavid realm, his works being read enthusiastically in India. And his name is still one to conjure with among scholars in modern-day Iran. But his most immediate legacy came, well, immediately, in the shape of his student Mullah Sadr. Sadr shares much with Mir Dhamad, not only in terms of their influences but also in their own distinctive philosophical ideas. For instance, we'll see Sadr radicalizing Mir Dhamad's idea that the created universe is in constant change by developing the even bolder theory that all of creation is changing or moving in its very substance. But on one topic, Sadr turned decisively away from his teacher, deciding that Mir Dhamad backed the wrong horse in the centuries-old debate over Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence. This will be our focus next time as we turn to the greatest thinker of Safavid Iran. Try to keep up as we enter the home stretch in our look at the later philosophical tradition in the Islamic world, reaching the milestone that is Mullah Sadr, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Be Continued, Mula Sadra on Existence It may seem obvious that the greatest philosophers are the ones who break completely with the ideas of their predecessors. We might call this the Descartes syndrome, in honor of Descartes' claim to be starting from scratch, throwing aside the accumulated arguments of scholastic philosophy. But that's not what I think. I think that the great philosophers are, often as not, those who bring together and rethink the ideas they find in the previous tradition. Their originality consists in creative engagement, not creative destruction. They realize that synthesis is not a sin, that taking the historical long view is no shortcoming. It takes a great mind to weave together the loose strands of numerous intellectual traditions. We can observe this with Plato, who drew on all the currents of Greek science, literature, and philosophy up to his day, with Plotinus, whose so-called neo-Platonism was in large part new because of its novel combination of themes from middle Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelianism, in Latin Christendom with that great synthesist Thomas Aquinas, and by the way with Descartes, who owes far more to the scholastic tradition than he would like you to believe. In the later Islamic world, there is one figure who stands undisputed as master of the metaphysical medli, Mulla Sadr, whose lifespan actually overlapped with that of Descartes. Like the other thinkers I've just mentioned, Sadr was a thinker powerful enough to reshape earlier philosophical currents retrospectively. Before him, illuminationism, Sufism, and later Avicennian philosophy did frequently cross paths, but usually remained distinct streams. Once these streams flowed together in the oceanic mind of Mulla Sadr, they suddenly could seem to be mere tributaries, finding at last the single destination that had been intended all along. This isn't to say that Sadr's contemporaries or immediate successors recognized him as a kind of new Avicenna, an indispensable thinker to whom they would all be forced to respond, but he was certainly influential in subsequent generations, and no philosopher of the Islamic world lives on in the modern day as vividly as Sadr, especially in Iran, where his works continue to be the subject of intense study. Scholars beyond Iran too have made him the most well-researched philosopher of the later Eastern traditions. Admittedly, this isn't saying much given how little attention this whole period of philosophy has received. Sadr's actual name was Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Shirazi. The phrase Sadr al-Din, which is the basis of his usual sobriquet, Mulla Sadr, is an honorific title meaning master of religion. As the last bit of his proper name, Ashirazi, indicates, he hailed from our new favorite philosophical city Shiraz, where he was born in the year 1571 or 1572. That's the year 979 in the Islamic calendar if you're keeping score at home. It's said that he was born after his father prayed to God to send him a pious child in return for which the father would donate a large amount to charity. He definitely got his money's worth. Despite the connection to Shiraz, Sadr was not a student in the direct line of al-Dawani or the Dashtakis. In fact, it seems that the study of philosophy at Shiraz had died down a bit by the time of Sadr. He certainly knew the works of the earlier Shirazi thinkers, whom he mentions often in his writings. But after a period of self-teaching, he decided to leave the city in search of a master. He wound up in the city of Kazwin, which hosted the court of the great Safavid Shah Abbas. This gave him access to the two leading intellectuals of the day, both of whom I mentioned last time, Shaykh Bahai and Mir Damaad. With Shaykh Bahai, the young Sadr studied the traditional Islamic sciences, that is, law, Quran commentary, and prophetic reports or hadith. Mir Damaad instructed him in philosophy, and may also have been one of his teachers in Sufism. Soon enough, Sadr the student became Sadr the teacher. He went back to his home city, but found Shiraz to be unfriendly. He complained bitterly about the criticisms he faced here. This episode has often been exaggerated by historians, in keeping with what we might call the Socrates Syndrome, our deep-seated and rather perverse desire to believe that great philosophers must face persecution and repression. As usual, at least in the Islamic world, there isn't much reason to suspect a Socrates Syndrome in Sadr's case. Still, he was stung by the hostility he faced there and left before long. Thereafter, he moved around quite a bit, not least in the direction of Mecca. He made the Hajj no fewer than seven times, dying in the midst of his final pilgrimage in the mid-1630s or possibly in 1640. Before then, he was made head of a madrasa back in Shiraz. Here he taught the same range of subjects he had learned from his own teachers, Shaykh Bahayi and Mir Damaad. It was also here that he finished writing his philosophical masterpiece, whose complexity and brilliance is only enhanced by the fact that its title could easily have been the name of a Motown singing group—The Four Journeys. Sadr's choice of title connects the work to the Sufi tradition. Ibn Arabi II had spoken of four journeys, naming God as the guide for those who travel from Him, to Him, in Him, and through Him. And more recently, the language of four journeys had been used by the elder Dashtaki. The metaphor of a journey is appropriate to Sadr's philosophy, which as we will see centers on the dynamism and motion of all things. The first of the four journeys is the one that was already undertaken by Aristotle. We begin with what is familiar to us and work our way up towards divine first principles. But Sadr's journeys unfold along a two-way street. Created things come forth from God like rays from a shining light so that the path back to the divine is not just a scientific enterprise but a return home. The talk of shining lights may put us in mind of the illuminationist tradition inaugurated by Suhrvādī and this is not misleading. Mūla Sadr takes over many ideas from Suhrvādī, though he has a fundamental disagreement with him on the issue of existence, as we'll see shortly. Of course philosophers had long found it enlightening to use the metaphor of illumination. We can cast our gaze back as far as the metaphor of the sun in Plato's Republic and its use by later ancient Platonists. These Platonists were another main source of inspiration for Sadr, who like other intellectuals of the Safavid period was fascinated by texts like The Theology of Aristotle, which he cites frequently. As we know, the theology is in fact an Arabic version of the writings of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, but he is happy to cite from it as evidence for the views of Aristotle. Sadr's conviction that all things proceed from a divine first principle and return to it is one example of his deep debt to Neoplatonism. His fascination with such antique sources didn't prevent him from responding to more recent thinkers though. In the four journeys, he often gives us a context for his own ideas by going through and refuting the positions of other philosophers in the Avicenna tradition. Avicenna himself is a nearly constant presence, and Sadr takes time to explain and critique the ideas of authors like Fakhradin Arazi, Atuzzi, and Aldawani. In fact, along the way, the four journeys offers a summary and commentary for the philosophical movements we've been considering in recent episodes, much as Aristotle surveyed the Presocratics in Plato. But if Sadr has plenty of guides for his philosophical journey, he is also exploring new territory. His originality centers above all on one fundamental issue, existence. As we've seen, especially in episode 177, arguments over existence had been raging for centuries before Sadr came along. Sadr himself draws a contrast between two basic positions. On the one hand, there are those thinkers who accept what he calls the primacy of essence. These are people who think that existence is a judgment of the mind. Out in the world, we find only things, like a giraffe, without finding the existence of the giraffe as a further item that itself must exist. As we know, this was the position of Suhrvādī, among others. It's a bit misleading for Sadr to use the phrase primacy of essence, since in fact Suhrvādī thought that essences too are mental constructs. But what Sadr means is clear enough. Suhrvādī and like-minded philosophers hold that there are real things outside the mind, but no real existence that would belong to those things. This was also the view adopted by Sadr's own teacher, Meer-dāmād, and accepted by Sadr himself early in his career. But you don't have to be as tall as a giraffe to grow out of things, and Sadr, in due course, left behind the primacy of essence to embrace the primacy of existence. He associates this position especially with mystical authors like Ibn Arabi and Al-Kunawī. Primacy of existence means that existence, or being, does have reality outside the mind. In fact, following the lead of the philosophical Sufis, Sadr is happy to say that there is nothing real apart from existence. Despite adopting a diametrically opposed view to Suhrvādī on the primacy of essence, or existence, Sadr makes enthusiastic use of illuminationist language to express this idea. Existence, he says, just is light, and we can envision all of reality as rays spreading forth from a divine source. God is pure existence and pure light, whereas other things are always limited in their existence or elimination. So, like Suhrvādī, Sadr describes created things as suffering from darkness. Like the Sufis, he says that such things are compromised by non-being and privation. They fail to attain the perfect existence that belongs to God alone. And, like Avasana, he says that this is in part because these things are contingent, whereas God is necessary. The primacy of existence is developed at great length in the four journeys, but also in other works by Sadr, for instance a handy little text called the Wisdom of the Throne, which you'll be glad to know has been translated into English. The first section of this treatise provides a nice introduction to his metaphysics, beginning with the difference between God and other things. God is existence itself, whereas other things have various kinds of lack or limitation mingled with their existence. As Al-khūna we had put it, using more terminology that will be borrowed by Sadr, things other than God are in some way specified, whereas God is the existence that is simple, infinite, and unrestricted. This idea in hand, Sadr is able to provide what must be one of the quickest ever proofs of God's existence. It is simply obvious, he says, that there is existence. As Avasana too had observed, existence is immediately obvious to the mind. And God is nothing but pure existence, so there is a God. Q as Euclid might say, ED. If that went a bit too quickly for your taste, Sadr has a further point to add, which is that anything with limited or restricted existence needs some further thing that restricts it. So, if we imagine that all things are marked by some form of non-being or darkness, then we would wind up with an infinite regress. Only simple existence can stop the chain of limited things and limiting factors. All this may sound rather sketchy. It will make a bit more sense though once we see how Sadr wants to fill it out. Like the ancient Neoplatonists, he understands the first principle to be completely simple and an infinite source of all being. Sadr envisions a chain of beings at increasing distance from God, who is the source of their illumination and existence. The lowest entities are mere physical bodies, followed by more perfect bodies like those of animals and humans, then souls, and between the souls and God, an intelligible world. A note of agreement with Sukhravadi is struck when Sadr explains the nature of this intelligible realm. Like his illustrious illuminationist predecessor, Sadr thinks that Avasana and other followers of Aristotle were wrong to reject the existence of Platonic forms. The familiar bodily things we see around us are nothing but images of these higher forms or paradigms. With his distinctive flair of refusing ideas from different sources, Sadr goes on to say that these forms are residing in God's very essence. They thus have the same status as the divine names mentioned in the Qur'an, and so celebrated by Ibn Arabi. Sadr agrees with his illustrious Sufi predecessor that God's essence remains completely simple and without qualification, so that the divine names are relations. God's initial manifestation to the created world. In an effort to capture the way that the paradigms begin the process of God's unfolding his divinity out into a universe, Sadr uses the phrase nafas ar-ahman, or breath of the merciful, yet another borrowing from Ibn Arabi. With all this borrowing going on, devotees of the Descartes syndrome may be downright disappointed. Is this all just a patchwork of old ideas? A bit of Neoplatonic precession and reversion, a few of Suhraradi's Platonic forms, alongside motifs from Avicenna and philosophical Sufism? We might think it's like a polyester suit, impressively synthetic but not exactly trend setting. But reserve judgment for a moment, because we're finally in a position to appreciate Sadr's most characteristic and significant philosophical move in the long-running debate about existence. He uses an old word to express his new idea, tashqiq. The term is already found in Avicenna and was deployed more emphatically by At-Huzi. Scholars writing about Mullah Sadr have translated tashqiq in various ways, systematic ambiguity, modulation, gradation, and intensification. The basic idea is that existence comes in various degrees. Here, Sadr is once again responding, this time critically, to Suhraradi. Suhraradi had imagined degrees of intensity within a certain essence, giving the example of black. All black things are black, but some are blacker than others. At the one end, you have your beloved but badly faded Iron Maiden t-shirt, bought in the 1970s. At the other end, the sense of humor expressed in a particularly morbid joke about ravens told by a goth whose favorite song is Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones. Sadr proposes that we can likewise think of the descent of all things from God as occurring along a decreasing scale of intensity. But this time, the variation in intensity will concern existence rather than blackness or any other essence. This makes Suhraradi's imagery of light and darkness particularly apt for expressing Sadr's metaphysics. Things fade in their degree of illumination as they go forth and away from God. Or if you prefer a moister analogy, think of the river imagery with which I began this episode. Existence pours forth from God, and in a metaphysical version of the trickle-down effect, what is at first a single gushing torrent divides into many smaller rivulets. Whichever metaphor you prefer, lamp or damp, it will nicely capture Sadr's conviction that all of creation is continuous, an unbroken flow that goes forth from its divine source. In holding that all of existence remains connected to God, that to be is continued, if you will, Sadr again signals his agreement with the tradition of philosophical Sufism inaugurated by Ibn Arabi and pursued by authors like al-Kunawi. But by emphasizing that existence varies in intensity, he avoids a problem that had always faced philosophical Sufis. When you read the treatises of Ibn Arabi and al-Kunawi, or for that matter the poetry of Arumi, you might easily get the impression that the difference between created things and God is a mere illusion. The mystic is someone who rises above this illusion to grasp what these thinkers called the unity of existence, in Arabic waḥtat al-ujūd. Critics of the philosophical Sufis, like Ibn Taymiyya, rather unfairly accuse them of equating created things, such as themselves, with the mighty God who should be recognized as being exalted above all things. Mulla Sadr wanted to embrace the mystical insight that God is intimately present to all He creates. As the Qur'an puts it, He is closer to man than His jugular vein. But he was also sensitive to the sort of objection pressed by Ibn Taymiyya, so he wanted to be absolutely clear that he was not lapsing into monism by asserting the absolute unity of everything with God. The problem is especially acute for Sadr because of a point he takes over from another of his major sources, Suhrvādī. Earlier in this episode, I recalled how Suhrvādī responded to Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence by denying that the distinction applies to real things out in the world. Rather, we distinguish essence and existence only at the level of our mental judgments. Obviously, Sadr disagrees with this when it comes to existence. For him, there is nothing more real than existence, in fact nothing real other than existence. But when it comes to essence, he thinks Suhrvādī is like a man with $10 hidden in his shoe, right on the money. Essences are nothing but concepts we use to differentiate one thing from another. There are good reasons to insist on this, such as the ones already given by Suhrvādī. If I say that essences are really out there in the world, like metaphysical light switches waiting to be turned on, as I put it in an earlier episode, then these essences must in some sense exist before they receive existence. The conceptualist understanding of essences Sadr finds in the illuminationist tradition helps him avoid that absurdity. But now, we risk falling into a different problem pointed out by Fakhra Dinarāzī. Without real essences, there will be no way to differentiate one existent thing from another, and all of existence will lapse into a single unity. It's here that the idea of tashkīk, gradation or modulation, really comes into its own. It shows us how existence could in a sense be one, but without eliminating all differentiation. For even if there is nothing but existence, things do differ in terms of the intensity of their existence. All beings other than God have some admixture of non-being or privation, which is why they are lesser in existence than he is. But the variation in intensity is always gradual. If you'll pardon the expression, this is a metaphysics without any gaps, like the metaphysics of classical neoflatanism. In fact, it goes beyond mere gaplessness by eliminating even the boundaries that separate one sort of existence from another. Sure, the world seems to us to be divided up neatly with some things qualifying as humans and others as giraffes, but the rigid dividing lines are figments of our minds, not features of things out in the world. Out in the world, there is real difference, because of variation in intensity. That difference is indeed what gives rise to our different concepts. But where the conceptual essences have firmly drawn boundaries, the intensity of existence out in the world is continuous, like the color spectrum rather than a palette of individual color samples. This may all sound a bit too good to be true. Sadr is having his cake and eating it, able to enjoy the sublime taste offered by the Sufi's unity of existence without giving up Avicenna's fundamental contrast between divine, necessary existence and created contingent existence. The whole thing turns on the continuity of modulated or gradational existence, so a skeptical response would probably focus on attacking him here. The skeptic could start by complaining that Sadr's acceptance of platonic forms commits him to clear divisions between types of things. After all, Plato introduced his forms, in part, to explain just this fact that different things in the world around us fall into different types. But Sadr has another move he can make here, and I choose the word move quite deliberately. Not only does he think that all existence is marked by continuous variation in intensity, he also thinks that all existence is in constant motion. When we divide it up into essences, we are mentally imposing an artificially static interpretation on existence, a kind of freeze-frame snapshot of something that is in fact constantly changing. We're going to need another episode to get our heads around this idea, so go with the flow and join me for Mula Sadra on Substantial Motion. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Return to Sender. Mula Sadra on Motion and Knowledge. I think it must be pretty stressful being a shark. For one thing, all those teeth and no dental insurance. And then there's this business about having to keep moving at all times just to keep breathing. If sharks do find this constant motion vexing, then they have something in common with philosophers. One of the more troubling proposals made in early Greek philosophy was Heraclitus's idea that all things are in never-ending flux. When I looked at Heraclitus in one of the earliest podcast episodes, I claimed that this isn't really what he was trying to say, but it's how Plato and Aristotle understood him. They worried that if the flux doctrine is true, then nothing could ever be known. For knowledge to be possible, there must be stable objects with stable natures. Plato thought this could be guaranteed by postulating his forms, while Aristotle said that there is not just change, but something that undergoes change while remaining the same, as when one and the same shark survives even as it swims from one place to another or loses one of its many teeth. These responses to the flux doctrine were reasserted in subsequent centuries. Most thinkers agreed with Plato and Aristotle that reality is like a homeless horse, it needs something stable. But as Heraclitus observed, things change. Mula Sadra revived the notion of constant change, motion, or flux as part of his innovative theory of existence, which we started to look at last time. Let's get our teeth into Sadra's proposal by thinking again about that shark. For Aristotle, the shark is a substance, which among other things means that it is the sort of thing that can go from having one property to having another, contrary property. In fact, our word substance comes from a Latin translation of the Greek term osea. The translation was chosen to highlight the fact that substances stand under accidental properties. Everyone in the Aristotelian tradition agreed that things are changing pretty much constantly with respect to their accidents, for instance our shark who is gliding through the water off the coast of Florida and so changing its location. Underlying such accidental changes are substances, which provide stability. Admittedly, they too are generated and eventually destroyed, but as long as a substance exists it remains one and the same thing. Sadra, though, argued that everything we see is also changing constantly in respect of its substance. Like sharks, we are always on the move, and not just those of us who live in Finland. Sadra can point to some persuasive examples in his attempt to convince us that there is substantial motion, and not just accidental motion. Think of boiling water, he says. What we have here is an item that is gradually being transformed from water into steam. There is no sudden shift from one kind of substance to another. Even more compelling, consider the most central example of an Aristotelian substance, a living organism like a human being. If we think of a fetus developing in the womb, we have a case where the seed is transformed into an embryo and slowly takes on the form of a baby. Now, an Aristotelian might give some ground here and admit that the generation of a substance like a baby, or the transformation of water into steam, isn't instantaneous. There is no clear first moment where seed becomes infant, but the Aristotelian will stand firm by insisting that, once the baby has been produced, we have a stable substance. Sadra could reply by pointing to the constant change undergone by humans as they mature from infant to adult. That does seem to be a transformation at least as radical as the one undergone by a swimming shark or boiling water. It's just that we easily overlook most cases of substantial change because the changes are so gradual. Sadra thus has a reasonably good case for his idea that things can move, or change, in their substances. That won't be enough for him though. He actually wants to insist that everything is changing in its substance all the time. It is really this that makes him an heir of Heraclitus, and such a striking exception to the metaphysical obsession with stability handed down since classical times. Many things around us may seem to endure without alteration, but in fact nothing stands still. It's a message Sadra finds in the Quran, which states, When you see the mountains, you think they are stable, but they are fleeting, just like the clouds. Yet philosophical concerns, more than exegetical ones, drive him to insist on the universality of change. As we saw last time, Sadra believes that existence cascades forth from God like gradually diminishing light. There are no firm boundaries between things. Rather, things differ in terms of their intensity of existence. It is we who impose well-defined boundaries on this gradual and continuous reality, when we grasp things as having certain essences. This thing here is a hammer, that one over there, a hammerhead shark. This doctrine of tashqiq, the modulation or gradation of being, goes hand in hand with the doctrine of universal, substantial motion. After all, someone might object to Sadra that even if existence has a continuous range of intensity, each existent thing might still have a fixed and discrete nature, in other words a real essence. Think of Sadra's own example of colors. If you point at a given spot on a gradually shaded wheel, perhaps a nice sharkskin grey, you'll be pointing at a determinate color. The fact that there are very similar colors just to either side of it, slightly more blue in one direction, slightly less blue in the other, doesn't stop this grey color from being the color it is. And if you're waiting for me to make a 50 shades of grey joke, forget it. This is a family podcast. In the case of existence, the same objection would say that this thing here is a mature hammerhead shark. Admittedly, there are other very similar existence, like immature hammerhead sharks, but that doesn't prevent the shark from having a fixed nature or essence. Now though, with his doctrine of substantial motion in hand, Sadra can respond that the shark is not just infinitely close to very similar things in the intensity of its existence, it is also becoming one of those very similar things, for instance a very slightly more mature shark. Even if Damien Hirst comes along with a chainsaw and some formaldehyde, the shark will always be changing in its very substance. Again, we are not usually able to discern the changes because, like the differences in the intensity of existence at any one time, the transformation is typically very gradual. That is why it is so easy, indeed inevitable, for us to undertake an even more conceptual version of what Damien Hirst did with his shark, imposing cuts upon a continuous thing and suspending it in mental formaldehyde by considering it in terms of a sharply defined essence. In reality though, things are continuous in every way, blurry at all possible edges, at any given time because of the gradation of existence, and across time because of constant change. What inspired Mula Sadra to devise this radical new metaphysical picture? The answer lies at least partially with his debt to Neoplatonism. Plotinus and his heirs had envisioned the universe in terms of precession and reversion, a pouring forth of all things from a divine source, and then a return to sender as these things strive to reunite with their principle. In fact, the idea of change within substance was already pioneered by some later Neoplatonists to understand the fundamental transformation undergone by soul as it inclines towards the body. Sadra reinvents this idea and puts it to a more optimistic use to describe the way all existing things strive to return to God. But among these existing things it is of course humans that interest Sadra most. So how exactly do we change in order to, as the Quran puts it, return to our Lord? The answer is knowledge. Perhaps no other kind of change interests Sadra so much as the transformation involved in coming to know something. This may surprise you, given that I keep saying that for Sadra we think about things by imposing falsely determinate essences on an indeterminate reality. But it's a rare philosopher who has nothing nice to say about knowledge, and Sadra is no exception. In fact, his two signature doctrines, the gradation of being and substantial change, converge again in his theory of knowledge. For Sadra, real knowledge is not a mere relation to something outside as might happen in sense perception. Rather, my coming to know a thing means that I myself must change in order actually to become that thing. Here, Sadra is reviving a proposal made by the Greek Neoplatonist Porphyry. In a work that is lost to us, but was known in Arabic, Porphyry has suggested that when we have knowledge our minds literally become identical to the things that they know. This was mocked by Avicenna, who pointed out the absurdity of saying that two distinct things could ever become identical. With his penchant for retrieving the ideas of late antiquity, Sadra comes to Porphyry's defense. Not only are things changing all the time, but sometimes they change to become identical with other things. How can this happen? Not obviously because we receive a representation or impression from the thing we know, as when the eye or memory registers an image of a shark swimming in its tank. Nor by abstracting a universal essence from that image, which would apply to all sharks. These ideas had been suggested by various of Sadra's predecessors. But he prefers an idea pioneered by Suhrvādī, according to which I know something when it is intimately present to me. Knowing a shark doesn't mean that the shark is physically present to me. If it did, I'd suggest we stick to knowing giraffes, much less dangerous. Rather, knowledge involves a two-fold transformation, in which both the thing known and the thing that knows change to become one and the same. This means that the knowing soul has to take the shark presented to it in sense experience, preferably from a safe distance, and conceive an intelligible version of the shark within itself. Thus, knowledge is not a passive process, like receiving an image, or a negative process, like abstraction. Rather, it's an active process of achieving unity with something else, at a higher, more intense level of existence, namely the level of existence appropriate to intelligible things. The reason it is more intense is that the so-called dark, material aspects of the things we know have been left behind. When I know the shark, the shark's body is not in my mind, only the idea of the shark. Even though this is not a theory about abstraction, it may still sound rather abstract. Perhaps it will help if we recall the close connection that Sukhravādī already drew between, on the one hand, my knowing something else by its presence to me, and on the other hand, my knowledge of my own self. For Śādra, there is really no distinction between these two things at all. For me to know the shark is for me to make myself into the idea of the shark, and thus to engage in a particularly shark-flavored form of self-knowledge. This solves a troubling anomaly in Avicenna's theory of knowledge. For all his creativity and independence of mind, Avicenna thought more or less along Aristotelian lines when he tried to understand human knowledge. He talked of abstracting forms from the images we encounter through sense experience. But then, he noticed that there was this special case of self-knowledge. Even the flying man in Avicenna's famous thought experiment, only just created in mid-air and without any access to his senses, can know that he exists. Avicenna seems to have cherished the notion that self-knowledge is a very different kind of thing from other kinds of knowledge, but it's actually rather perplexing. How can it be that one and the same mind is capable of two such different kinds of knowing, and what do the two have to do with one another? For Sadr, these problems vanish, as all knowledge is revealed to be self-knowledge. And, appropriately given his metaphysics, it gets even better. Sadr can solve another vexed issue in Avicenna by applying his analysis of knowledge to God himself. As we've seen numerous times, one of Avicenna's most notorious philosophical claims was that God does not know particular things as such, but only universally. Sadr can now say quite easily that God knows everything, because all existence is immediately present to him, and knowledge is nothing other than presence. Why is all existence immediately present to him? Good question, but Sadr has a good answer. As we know from last time, God just is unrestricted existence. So, everything, insofar as it exists, is a manifestation of God, and God is to that extent identical to each thing. Whereas we must give things intelligible existence within our souls, God already has all things within himself at an even higher level of existence, indeed at the highest, most pure level of existence possible. Again sounding like a Neoplatonist, Sadr remarks that a simple reality is all things, and that the higher a principle is, the more things it will contain within itself. To put the point in illuminationist terms, God is the light within all things, and a light that is fully present to itself. Though there is indeed plenty of Neoplatonism and illuminationism here, we shouldn't overlook the relevance of another ism for Sadr's theory, Sufism. As I've said, on his theory, each thing is just a manifestation of God, since God is the existence within that thing. For this reason, in a sense we are, usually unwittingly, knowing God every time we know anything. For we are getting a glimmer of the blinding light that is his existence. Thus, Sadr describes the things around us as veils for the divine, since they distract us from God, and he uses the traditional Sufi word kashf, or unveiling, to describe the process of knowledge. In knowing those things, we are, after all, bringing them to a higher level of existence that is closer to God by making them intelligible for and in ourselves. Ultimately, of course, this process could culminate in the knowledge of pure existence itself, which is to say knowledge of God himself. That is the sort of experience afforded to the mystic, for whom nothing remains veiled. Like some of the other philosophical Sufis and Sufi-influenced philosophers we've talked about, such as Al-Kunawi and Ibn Tufail, Sadr sees no opposition between philosophical demonstration and mystical union. Again, appropriately given his metaphysics, the two are instead continuous. The mystic enjoys the purest, most exalted form of knowledge, but this isn't the only kind of knowledge there is. The philosophical understanding of things, too, involves unveiling, even if the philosopher is still, to some extent, in the dark. I'll finish off this look at Sadr, where he would, perhaps, have wanted me to begin—the Quranic revelation. Though I have mentioned the Qur'an a few times in this and the past episode, I haven't perhaps conveyed the density of Islamic imagery and language in his works. To add just one more example, he compares the way we face God's existence to the way that Muslims face the Ka'aba in Mecca as they pray. Sadr wrote extensive commentaries on the Holy Book, an enterprise intimately connected with his philosophy. As many earlier Muslim theologians had emphasized, the Qur'an is God's Word, and hence an attribute of the divine. For Sadr, this means that it makes manifest the ultimate reality that is God Himself. Like other modes of existence, the Qur'an shows itself in the world at many levels. The actual verses that get recited and written down are only one manifestation of the single reality that is the Qur'an. So, while Sadr admits the usefulness of the many commentators who have focused on the vocabulary and grammar of the Qur'an, he sees their project as rather superficial. The more insightful interpreter of the revelation goes beyond the husk of its linguistic garb to the true meaning within. As he makes good on his promise, Sadr shows us how his metaphysics of intensity and unity can be applied to the task of scriptural exegesis. For instance, we've seen how God's existence contains within it all the things that come after Him. In the same way, the first or opening chapter of the Qur'an contains within its brief compass the entirety of the Qur'an. Its praise of God introduces us to the divine attributes that give us our best access to the unknowable unity of God Himself. An even higher degree of unity is found in the name Allah itself, which the Sufi tradition had considered to be an all-gathering name. Following this tradition, Sadr considers Allah to be God's proper name. It contains all the other divine attributes, just as the opening chapter contains the whole of the Qur'an and the Qur'an the whole of creation. If we turn to specific topics that may seem more theological, we again find that Sadr's philosophy operates in tandem with his exposition of the Qur'an and the prophetic sayings or hadith. A good example is his treatment of the afterlife. For Sadr, there can be no doubting that we do live on after death and that our afterlife will be bodily, not the purely intellectual existence envisioned by philosophers from al-Kindi to Avicenna and Iverroes. But as usual, Sadr puts a distinctive twist on this teaching. He employs an idea that is familiar to us from the illuminationists, that humans possess a powerful imaginative capacity tied to a kind of third realm between the sensible and intellectual planes of existence. He's also thinking here of Ibn Arabi who likewise gave the imagination a central place in his theory of human understanding and existence. Sadr thinks that we retain our imaginative power after death, and that we use it to project for ourselves a new body. This is not a crass physical body, the kind of thing a shark could get its teeth into, but its imaginary nature, contrary to what we might suppose, makes it more, rather than less, real. The bodies we will imagine for ourselves will be appropriate to the way we lived in this life, with the more beastly among us coming to see themselves in animal bodies. This is Sadr's version of the reincarnation theory, which we saw earlier illuminationists variously flirting with, accepting, and rejecting. In his hands it becomes a distinctively Sadrian idea, related to the varied intensity of existence. The subtle, or imaginary, body of the afterlife being a step towards the intelligible has a higher degree of existence than the bodies we have in this life. His doctrine of universal motion is relevant here too, since our transformation from physically embodied beings to imaginally embodied beings is simply another case of change in substance. Sadr is at pains to emphasize the agreement between such theories and the teachings of Islam, more specifically the Shiite Islam, ascendant under the Safavids. His proposal about the imaginary body safeguards traditional belief about resurrection, albeit in an unexpected way. And when he follows earlier illuminationists by affirming that the soul already existed before coming into the body, he confirms the point with quotations from the Shiite Imams. Between his Shiite faith, his allegiance to the illuminationist and Sufi traditions, his critical engagement with Avicennan philosophy and kalam, and the innovative doctrines he devised himself, Sadr has a lot of balls to keep in the air, but he never seems to drop them. For a thinker of this complexity and importance, we ourselves would be dropping the ball if we didn't take the opportunity to talk to an expert in his thought. Next time I'll say to Sadr scholar Sajjad Rizvi what Germans say when they see a shark, hi, as I welcome him to the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of LMU Munich. Today's episode will be an interview with Sajjad Rizvi, who is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. Hi, Sajjad. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure to do this. And today we're going to be talking about Mullah Sadra and his conception of philosophy. I've already covered him to some extent in the podcast, but perhaps you could just say a bit about who he was. Okay, so Mullah Sadra was a thinker in Sahibah, Iran, who lived roughly between 1571 and 1635. He's arguably the most important philosopher, theologian, exegete of that period. And he wrote extensive works, which in many ways were the culmination of philosophical traditions that had gone before him, but also initiated a new way and approach to philosophy, which then had quite an extensive impact in the time after him. Was he actually perceived as being the main philosopher of his time in his own day? Not necessarily, although within a few years of his death, we do have some contemporaries, later contemporaries, referring back to him, not always in a very complementary manner, partly because by the later part of the 17th century, the study of philosophy was much more contested than it was in his time. And I guess if people are attacking you, that often means you're important. Exactly, yes. And so already in the 1660s, we have a couple of texts which cite him directly, cite passages from his works. So we know those works were circulating in some manner, particularly his major work, which is known as The Four Journeys, and attacking him, yes. One of the interesting things, I think, about Safavid philosophy is that we see a kind of revival of the use of Greek sources, or at least Greek sources in Arabic translation, which had not been read quite so intensively ever since the intervention of Avicenna quite some centuries earlier, in the 10th and 11th centuries. What sorts of sources from the Greek tradition would Sadr have known, and why do you think that the Safavid thinkers suddenly go back to these Hellenic sources? Well, there are a number of sources that Mullah Sadr cites directly. There's of course the so-called theology of Aristotle, the paraphrase of parts of Enid's 4 to 6 of Plotinus, which was very significant for earlier philosophy in the world of Islam, and then again became important in the Safavid period. And we know this because we have so many copies of manuscripts of the text from that period, we have commentaries on the text from that period, we have arguably two Persian translations of the text in that period, and extensive citations in the works of Mullah Sadr and others. So that's probably the most important work, and this is just a reflection of the fact that this is arguably the most important work from the Greek heritage in Islamic philosophy anyway. Does it actually happen that the theology of Aristotle edges out Aristotle, so they would think of the theology as the most important thing Aristotle wrote? Absolutely, insofar as quite often Mullah Sadr and others who were contemporary to him would, for example, say Aristotle said, and the quotation actually is from the theology of Aristotle. They thought it was by Aristotle. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, there were some people before him and also at his time who, well, not necessarily, they didn't necessarily see Aristotle as the author, or they recognized that the theology of Aristotle was a work from the Platonic tradition. So we do have sources before Mullah Sadr which, for example, say Plato said, and the quotation comes from the theology of Aristotle, which is quite interesting. And one of those people, for example, was Sahrawadee in the 12th century who does that. And there's certainly a recognition that Aristotle fits within a Platonic tradition. But yes, it was broadly the case that they thought the theology of Aristotle was a work of Aristotle's. Okay, so what other sources then are they using besides the theology? From the Greek tradition, there are a number of other minor works, sort of minor Plutinian Arabica. So you have the sayings of the Greek sage. Some of those excerpts, which of course are from Plotinus, are given. Some of the excerpts from the book of Pure Good, which is of course paraphrased from Proclus, that's sometimes cited. And of course you have another work, which is the so-called Golden Verses of Pythagoras, primarily through a commentary attributed to Iamblichus, or to a Iamblichus. We know this text was quite important in the period, and if you look at the modern edition of that text, it's primarily based on Safford manuscripts. These other works are important because it gives you an idea of the sort of taste that Safford thinkers had in the Greek tradition. This was very much a taste for late Neoplatonism. So it's really almost as if we're back to the 3rd, 4th, 5th century AD here in the 16th, 17th century in Iran. Absolutely, I think it's a very conscious effort at going back to the earliest tradition, going back to understanding what the heritage was, because there's a sense in which what Mulla Sadra and the thinkers in his time were doing is that they are trying to rethink or to see where philosophy culminates, where does the conception of philosophy culminate, and that requires them in a sense to go back to the beginning. Presumably though, they're not only drawing on these Neoplatonic sources that originally came from Greek, they're also drawing on the previous Islamic tradition, and I suppose maybe the most important source for Sadra would be Ibn Arabi, is that right? Yes, but there are also others. So in terms of a lot of the ideas that Sadra has which indicate a monist tendency, and a lot of his ideas about the nature of the soul, certainly Ibn Arabi and the school of Ibn Arabi, so the commentators on Ibn Arabi such as Qaysari are very important. Then of course there are the works from the peripatitic tradition or the Avi Senin tradition itself, and there what is quite interesting is that he cites extensively Fakhr Dina Razi through the Eastern discussions, and he cites that text as an example of what the peripatitic tradition says on all sorts of issues, and we already know from some recent studies of how important Razi was for the conceptualization of philosophy in the later period. Incidentally I think it's maybe worth sort of emphasizing what you just said implicitly, which is that they call Avi Senin philosophy peripatitic philosophy, so in other words they think Aristotelian philosophy and Avi Senin philosophy are the same thing. Yes, I think that's very clear and that's very explicit in fact. So they definitely see Avi Senin as modifying and taking forward the peripatitic project, and then that's expressed through of course his own works such as The Cure, but also the works of his direct disciple, Bahman Yar, and then of course the work of Razi, the early Razi perhaps. It's quite ironic isn't it because they think Aristotle is Plotinus and then they think Avicenna is Aristotle. Yes, but actually what's interesting is that Sadler makes a distinction, so there are at least a couple of passages in his major work The Four Journeys where he actually says Aristotle is superior to Avicenna, because the Aristotle that he's thinking of is one which is mystically inclined i.e. Plotinus, and he says that one of the problems with Avicenna is that because he didn't have that sort of mystical taste he was a lesser thinker than Aristotle. All of this is quite reminiscent in a way of Ghazali, because when Ghazali wrote his famous Incoherence of the Philosophers he speaks fairly indiscriminately of the philosophers and attacks the philosophers, but by that he basically means Avicenna. One of the things he does is to identify three areas in which the philosophers fell into unbelief. One is the eternity of the world, which they endorse wrongly. Another is God's knowledge of particulars, which they wrongly deny. And the third is the resurrection of the body, which they again deny. And Sadr, because he in a sense wants to champion philosophy, he's actually got a stake in defending philosophy against these three charges, but I guess his goal would be to show that philosophical arguments can be given to defend the correct view on each case, so the non-eternity of the world, the fact that God does no particulars, and the fact that the body is resurrected. Is that roughly right? I think it is. In fact, it would be fair to say that a lot of later Islamic philosophy, basically after the 14th, 15th century in particular, is concerned with trying to respond to these theological attacks. And that's partly because what happens to the course of philosophy and theology in the medieval period, so to a large extent a number of philosophical ideas are then incorporated into theology, but that also leads to theology, by which I mean the Kalam tradition, actually becomes far more sophisticated but also more important in the study that you have in seminaries. So because of that, there is this need for those who are primarily interested in philosophy, by which they were talking about Hekma and not Fadzafah, not Greek inspired philosophy in the early period, they felt the need to respond to these theological accusations and felt that they could make a case for why it was that philosophy was still the supreme science and that philosophy was still the best place to articulate theological arguments. And so do they actually think, okay, well there are two things here, there's Kalam, which is, let's say theology, and there's Hekma, which is, let's say philosophy, and you've actually got a choice about which one to do so. They don't think that Kalam and philosophy are just fused into one single tradition. I think there was a sense in which Kalam and philosophy, generally understood, is fusing insofar as the Kalam texts were incorporating philosophical sections, particularly the preliminary sections in the texts, which talked about the nature of existence and knowledge. There's still a sense in which Kalam, just as Fadzafah, is considered to be a lesser type of inquiry, as opposed to Hekma. And there are reasons related to method, there are reasons related to the scope of the science and so forth, which mean that they want to champion Hekma over these, and they want to, in a sense, take away from the claims that some of the Kalam thinkers were making for the significance of their particular discipline. So I think that is definitely happening in that period. So it's really about reorienting notions around the hierarchy of the sciences, the classification of the sciences, which is going on in the period, and that ultimately involves, in a way very similar to Avicenna, a complete sort of eclipse of Kalam. Right. Okay, so let's look at some of these challenges that came from Kalam, and in particular, Huzalay, to the philosophical tradition, and start with the eternity of the world. What does Sadr say about this issue? Right. So Sadr is writing at a time in which, broadly speaking, most theologians and, arguably, most philosophers think that there is, in a sense, an impasse between two very different positions. One is, of course, that the world is created, and it's created in time, and this account is somehow more faithful to the scripture, and that certainly seems to have been Huzali's position, at least in the incoherence, perhaps not in some other texts. And the other position, of course, is that the cosmos is a natural and logical progression from, an emanation from, a super-bundly good one, which is a source of everything. And that basically means that there cannot be any role for divine volition, divine choice, divine creation, as we would normally understand that. Sadr wants to, in a sense, have it both ways. He wants to have a cosmos which always has been, and which is a product, almost a natural product of the existence of the divine one, but also one in which there's a space for the divine to constantly intervene in the universe, into the cosmos, in the process of continual or renewed creation, as the term goes. And this concept of renewed creation partly goes back to Ibn Arabi, in fact. The term in Arabic is Khalkh Jadid, which you find in Ibn Arabi. And he does it through this conception that he has that substances, which are the basic, in a sense, building blocks of ontology of the cosmos, are constantly in the process of motion. And they're in constant process of becoming, and at every level of becoming there is a direct connection between them and divine causality. So it's God which facilitates the becoming of each of these substances. So every substance, beginning from the most basic material things, such as rocks, all the way through to the most intelligent humans, and beyond, are in this process of a path towards the divine, and in the process of becoming perfected. And at each stage of that becoming perfect, it is God who actively is facilitating this. So the thought then would be that you've got this, I guess, endless process of a process that's been going on forever, but there's no stability or fixity to it because everything is constantly being called back towards God or moving towards God. And so there's a sense in which things aren't eternal because they're subject to change, and in fact some kind of radical change, like changing in their very being as they move back towards God. But on the other hand, it doesn't matter so much how long this has been happening, so the key thing is not that there was a time in which everything started to exist, the key thing is that everything is going to kind of flux as it moves towards God. Absolutely. It's the whole idea that there is fundamentally a singular reality or singular existence, but also in a dynamic process, and that dynamic process has always been in this process of unfolding. Of course, one of the reasons why this is quite radical is because if one goes back to Avicenna, and of course other thinkers before him, they would think that the idea of motion as substance is a bit odd, and certainly they explicitly deny it. So classically, motion only exists within four of the categories, four of the accidental categories if you go back to our strategic category theory. And this is something that Sadhva is denying, partly because of the way in which he's conceiving of the totality of existence as unity. So for him, fundamentally, the reason why substantial motion is important is because of Sadhva's views on the nature of existence, that existence is the primary thing in a sense, ontologically, it's what binds everything together, it's what defines the continuity of what is in existence and in reality. So what that basically means then is that for change to happen in a particular category or an accident, it can't really be the case that it can happen on its own, because accidents really don't have any existence on their own. Accidents can only exist within substances. And substances themselves are changing. Exactly. So that's why substances themselves have to also change. It's not just the category of quantity or quality that is changing, but it's changing because the very substances. And the classic example, of course, that he uses, which is a very old one, is how does the human develop from the embryo to the old man? And his argument is this is not just about accidental changes at different stages of life, the form in which that human is presented, but rather because the very substance of that human is changing. Okay, let's move on to the second topic then, which was God's knowledge of particulars. And roughly the problem here was always Aristotle thinks that when you know something, it's because you have a grasp of some kind of universal truth. And since God is supposed to know everything, he should also have grasp of universal truth. But for example, he doesn't have sensation like a visual faculty, which is what we use to grasp the particulars that fall under those universals. So the suspicion that you find in people like Avicenna is that God only knows universals. And then the puzzle is whether you can also find a way for him to know particulars as well. So could he know Sajjad as well as knowing the universal man? What does Sajjad have to say about this? I think there are two ways that Sajjad tries to deal with it. One is to go back to this whole issue of what we mean by perception and even sense perception. So ultimately, when he's talking about sense perception, he's not talking about the physical senses perceiving or grasping something from an extra mental object. But rather, he sees the perception, including the senses, as directly related to the functions of the rational soul itself. So it's ultimately the rational soul, which is seeing, tasting, feeling, hearing and so forth. And everything that exists in a sense outside of the human is really different types of preparations for how it is that the soul makes sense of it. So ultimately, then, everything in terms of perception is somehow happening internal to the soul. But it also means that what that rational soul is then grasping are actually particulars. They're not universals abstracted from extra mental objects. For instance, if I look at you and I see you right now, listeners, you can't tell, but he is here visually as well. So I look at you and I get an image of you in my eye, my physical eye, but that's not seeing. He would say that what's the seeing is the particular you being present to my rational soul in an act of genuine sight. Yes. And that's in a sense, that's how perception is working. And of course, the fact that you use presence is quite useful there because that brings me to the second point, which is that knowledge is ultimately always through presence. And this is a theme that's already in Sukhravati. Absolutely. And it is this other idea of knowledge by presence, which he takes up. And the ultimate exemplar of knowledge by presence is God's knowledge. It's both his self knowledge and also his knowledge of everything that is other than God. So because of presentional knowledge, also God can know everything in its particularity. And not through representations, but by these actual particulars being present. Absolutely. Since the representations are normally understood to be universals. Right. What's the relationship between his grasping them in that way? I mean, if I'm present to God right now by God knowing me, but I'm also an existent, which is in flux and constantly changing by moving towards God, are those somehow the same thing? Or is it like I'm trying to get to the version of myself that God's perceiving all the time? Or how do those two things come together? I think it could partly also be the fact that in a sense, that's why it's important for God to perceive the particular because that particular is constantly changing. So if it was only to grasp the universal, then you'd have to start asking the question of what are the features of that universal, which would somehow be fixed in time. And that becomes trickier because he wants the content of that universal to be rather empty. So it's as if God is knowing me as something that's coming towards him all the time. Absolutely. And the very fact of the path that that individual may have towards God is also something which is open to God's knowledge. So that's part of the pull feature as opposed to the push. There's effort which is being made from that individual and the path towards God. But then God is also pulling that individual towards him. Like a magnet. Yes. And there's always this kind of interesting dialectic between the push and the pull, between the act of becoming, the act of being prepared to receive more and more. As just neo-platonic, right? Procession and reversion. Absolutely. And in fact, I think I've always actually said that the best way to understand someone like Sathera is precisely in terms of neo-platonism. And it's so clear from the sources. But it's more and more that the comparison with late neo-platonism, I think, is a very fruitful way of understanding it. Speaking of where the soul is going, let's look at the third topic on which Ghazali accused the philosophers of unbelief, which is the resurrection of the body. If I'm being called back towards God all the time, one obvious thought, especially if you were a neo-platonist, actually, is that I improve my situation and get closer to God when I'm freed from the body. Why then would Sathera or anyone influenced by neo-platonism think that I need to have a body after I die so my soul is released from the body and then later on it gets a body again? Well, I think Sathera actually has two accounts. One is precisely the one you mentioned, which is the ultimate perfection lies in a spiritual or immaterial survival of the soul. And that's expressed, for example, in his famous doctrine where he defines the soul as something which is material in its beginning, but spiritual in its survival, its end, where in a sense outlived the body. But Sathera is very keen that he also finds a solution to Ghazali's third accusation. And so for him, what constitutes the body of the afterlife is a very significant one. He has to deal with this problem of how does God resurrect bodies without just saying, well, that's what it says in the scripture, which would be an easy solution. And in fact, that's what Abhisitna, for example, at one point says, that's what the scripture says, we can believe it, but I can't prove it. It's interesting, actually, isn't it, that Sathera would feel the pressure to do this? So he actually does think that you have to use philosophy and give philosophical arguments for how these things happen. He's not just willing to say, well, believe it because it's been revealed to us. Absolutely, because that's part of his project, as I said, of trying to reinsert, in a sense, philosophy as this ultimate science, as this ultimate discipline, which then defines everything else and which should act as the primary discipline that you acquire in the seminary. And that's actually one of his most important legacies is the re-centering, if you will, the philosophy in the curriculum. How then does the soul then get a body back? Okay, so it comes back to this definition of how the soul fundamentally is related to the creative agency of the divine, for which there are certain scriptural texts cited. And he also makes use of Ibn Arabi's ideas about the spiritual endeavor, so to speak, of the soul. So what basically happens is that the soul, the death of the body, of course, leaves the body, the body is corrupted, it becomes non-existent. But the soul, of course, continues to have the faculties that it had in this world. It continues in particular to have the faculty of imagination. And of course, we all know, going back to Abhi Sen and perhaps beyond, that the real powerhouse of the soul is the imagination. So it's the imagination which then is capable of producing, it's capable of creating, it's that part of the rational soul which is always, in a sense, linked into the soul. In a sense, linked into the divine. And it's also the one which is capable of making sense of the memory that the soul has. So the soul, of course, has the memory of the person or the body to which it was attached. And it uses that memory of the body to then produce a new body, which resembles, which is recognizably the same as, for example, Sajjad, as he was when he was still alive. But it recreated in a perfect manner. So you look even more handsome than you do now. Absolutely, yes. Astonishingly, radiantly so. And the reason for that- I thought you meant it was astonishing that you might look even better than you look now. I don't know. But certainly the idea that people in the afterlife, certainly those who've been good, are then placed in a perfect form in paradise is, of course, something which is scriptural. And in fact, in that section on the afterlife and paradise, he actually cites precisely those prophetic sayings and the sayings from the Shia Muslim tradition, that people in paradise are eternally youthful and good looking and fit and, you know, all the things that you would want over an afterlife. And that's precisely because it's the imaginative faculty of the rational soul which has survived, which has then produced this, because it's what, in effect, is acting as the instrument of divine creative agency. Finally, let me ask you something about Sadr's afterlife, as it were, which is what happened to him after he died, or rather what happened to his works. What was his intellectual legacy in the Sa'avid period and beyond? I think his legacy is very important. His legacy continues. In fact, today, the ideas of Mullah Sa'ad are probably dominant in the Shia seminary, particularly in Iran. That's still the case. You still have TV programs in Iran on Sadr's philosophy, on far more obscure ideas than we've discussed today. But in the immediate aftermath, what happened was that there was a legacy in Iran, and that took a while to kick in. It really is probably in the later part of the 18th century that people start teaching his texts, writing commentaries and glosses on his works, partly because the philosophical curriculum remained centered upon Avicenna for quite a while. But it's probably the case that already from the earlier part of the 18th century, when people were teaching Avicenna, they were doing so through a Sadrian prism, so to speak. In India, of course, he had a massive impact. And this is primarily through his work, the commentary and the guidance, the work of Abhuri in the 13th century. And this was adopted as a school text from arguably the end of the 17th, certainly the 18th, early 18th century. And it was extensively glossed upon, so much so that in India, around 100-odd comments were written on Mullah Saduah's commentary from the early 18th century all the way through to the early 20th century. So his work then became the basic core of the philosophical curriculum in India. And it actually was significant in this production of a new curriculum in India, which was known as the Darsi Nizami, established in the middle of the 18th century, which I guess you might deal with in a later episode. And the significant thing about the Darsi Nizami was its significant championing of philosophy as the ultimate science of the seminary and privileging the rational sciences over the scriptural ones. It's interesting, isn't it, that just as Avicenna had pushed Aristotle out as the main philosopher to whom everyone responds, now we have Sadra, at least in these realms, pushing Avicenna out and becoming the main philosopher. Yes, and so far, as really in the later period, both in Iran and India, when they really are talking about philosophy or the philosopher increasing the default understanding as Mullah Saduah. Right. Well, it is in fact exactly these later developments that I'll be starting to look at next time. For now, I'll thank Sadr Idrisvi very much for coming on. Thank you for having me. And please join me next time for Philosophy in India, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Subcontinental Drift. Philosophy in Islamic India. In the very first episode of this podcast series, I said that I would not be tackling the philosophical traditions of India or China. As you know, if you heard the recent announcement on the podcast feed, I've changed my mind about that. I will in fact be doing a spin-off series of episodes on classical Indian philosophy, working with expert Jainardhan Gennari. I'm very excited about it, and not only because it opens up a whole new range of potential puns. Indian cuisine alone offers mouthwatering possibilities for wordplay. If you think I'm going to curry favor with you by revealing any of those puns now already, you've got another thing cumin. Well, I might just be willing to do a couple of jokes about Indian-style bread, but unfortunately, none come to mind. In this episode though, we will be getting a foretaste of what the Indian subcontinent has to offer by following our current thread on philosophy in the Islamic world. India may not be the first nation to leap to mind when you think about the Islamic world, but in fact, Islam is the second most common religion in today's India, embraced by 13% of the population. And India has played a major role in the history of Islam. At a very early stage, scientific ideas filtered into the Arabic-speaking world, something we can trace especially in texts about astronomy and astrology. There was literary influence too. In a previous episode, I already made mention of the khalila wadhimna, an animal fable from India that was translated into Persian and Arabic. But up until the 11th century, the time of Avicenna, the subcontinent was still more or less foreign terrain from the Muslim viewpoint. The great scientist al-Biruni, a contemporary of Avicenna, wrote a massive treatise intended to change that. Entitled A Truthful Account of India, it was a wide-ranging discussion of the cultural practices and religious and philosophical beliefs of the inhabitants of this exotic land. Al-Biruni was in a unique position to gather and present this information since he found himself in the entourage of the Muslim warlord Mahmoud of Ghazna, who was making incursions into northern India from his base in modern-day Afghanistan. Al-Biruni learned Sanskrit and interviewed members of the Brahmin class who were brought from India by Mahmoud, receiving a crash course in classical Indian teachings. He was struck, as many have been since, by the parallels between these teachings and the ideas he knew from the Greek works available to him in Arabic translation. The Ghaznavid dynasty, founded by al-Biruni's master Mahmoud, was the first Islamic power to dominate Indian territory, but it was certainly not the last. A series of less enduring sultanates based at Delhi in the north maintained Islamic political presence in India for several centuries. The Delhi Sultanate managed to repel the advances of the Mongols around the year 1300, which as we've seen is more than we can say for many other Muslim leaders of that time. But in the late 14th century, India was invaded and Delhi sacked by a new Mongol wave led by Tamerlane. In the episode on philosophy in the Mongol period, I mentioned that Tamerlane's grandson Uleg Beg established a scientific center and observatory in Samarkand. He was following the precedent set by Hulagu, the Mongol conqueror of Baghdad and the patron of the Maraga Observatory which played host to so many philosophers and astronomers. It was in turn a descendant of the same line as Uleg Beg, the warlord Babur, who founded the powerful and long-lasting Mughal dynasty in the early 16th century. At first the Mughals, like the Delhi Sultans, held only the territory in northern India, but Akbar, the grandson of Babur, pushed both north and south, making good use of their relatively new gunpowder-based weaponry, as if the Mongols and their descendants hadn't been fearsome enough already. By the beginning of the 17th century, most of India was held by the Mughals, whose power had been extended into the enormous southern plateau called the Deccan. The Mughals rose to power at about the same time as the Safavids in Iran, and these powerful empires set the stage for two vibrant philosophical traditions. Actually, it might instead be better to think of a single tradition with two branches. Ideas flowed from Persia into India even as the empires were establishing themselves. Dawani, one of the philosophers of Shiraz, was invited to come to India. He turned down the offer, but did dedicate a work to a vizier of the subcontinent. Maybe he should have come in person. As things turned out, his rivals, the Dashtakis, would be much read in Mughal India. Credit for this is often given to a scholar and politician named Fathallah Shirazi. He was, as his name implies, from the city of Shiraz and had studied there with the philosopher Ghiyath ad-Din Dashtaki, the younger of the two Dashtakis. Fathallah came to India and joined the court of Akbar. Here he proved himself an all-round intellectual, doing astronomical research and even designing military equipment. It's not entirely clear how large a role Fathallah really played in disseminating the philosophical tradition of Shiraz. At least a share of the credit for building up a new tradition of philosophy in Muslim India should also go to Abd al-Hakim Sialkot I. A scholar of the Punjab region, Sialkot I was in favor at the court of the Mughal Shah Jahan. He was invited by the Shah to pass judgment on the disputes between Al Ghazali and Avicenna, on the usual contentious issues of the eternity of the universe, God's knowledge of particulars, and bodily resurrection. But perhaps the first really major Muslim thinker in India was the slightly later Mahmoud Jaonpuri. He lived in the first half of the 17th century and was active in northern India. Like Fathallah and Sialkot I, Jaonpuri was a well-connected individual, serving as tutor to one of Shah Jahan's sons in Bengal. He wrote a philosophical commentary on one of his own works. The commentary, called Ashams al-Bazigha, became a standard text on philosophy for subsequent generations of students in India. Jaonpuri gives us another example of the way that Indian scholars were responding to the intellectual tradition in Iran. As I've already said, the works of the Dashta keys were widely read, probably to a greater degree than philosophers whose names are more famous today like Mullah Sadra and even Avicenna himself. We do, however, find Jaonpuri engaging with Sadra's teacher Mir Damaad, and in particular with the latter's characteristic doctrine of perpetual creation. As we saw a few episodes back, Mir Damaad thought he could resolve the age-old disagreements over the nature of divine causation and the eternity of the universe by saying that all things are first created at the level of the perpetual. The everlasting models of all things are then made manifest in our temporal realm, in which they come to be and pass away. Jaonpuri sympathizes with what Mir Damaad was trying to do here, but he believes the theory has one small flaw—it's incoherent. Mir Damaad was supposing in effect that the same thing is created twice—once perpetually, and then again within time. For instance, Hayawatha the giraffe would exist perpetually as part of God's everlasting creative act, but she would also turn up around about the early 21st century on the African savanna. Thus Hayawatha would absurdly be prior to herself. Furthermore, Mir Damaad spoke of things at the level of perpetuity as being non-existent, echoing the Sufi idea that things are non-existent within God's power and then made manifest or existent when they are created. Again, this makes no sense to Jaonpuri. If anything, the perpetual things at the level of the divine should be more existent than the things in the temporal realm. Thus, Jaonpuri respectfully suggests that it would be better to return to the idea of eternal emanation, already found in the classic Muslim philosophers Al-Farabi and Avasana. It's a reminder that, even with all the Mongol era, Shirazi, and Safavid authors being read in this later period, philosophers of the formative period too continue to exert their influence. To some extent, even Avasana had been supplanted by more recent authors. We know he was read at least occasionally—hardly surprising since Avasana was so important to thinkers like the Dashtakis, who represented the cutting edge of philosophical thought at this period. For the most part though, India saw the emergence of a less Avasana-centered approach to the rational sciences known as the Darci Nizami. This curriculum seems to have evolved over generations, but it is called Darci Nizami in honor of Nizam ad-Din Siralavi, a scholar who took a significant hand in devising its standard version. He was a member of the leading scholarly family of Mughal India in the 18th century, the Farangi Mahal. This clan, based in the city of Lucknow, received favor from the Mughal princes and could count a number of influential scholars among their ranks. The earlier thinkers I've just mentioned, like Fathallah Shirazi, Abd al-Hakim Sialkhoti, and Mahmoud Jaanpuri paved the way for the Farangi Mahal family. In fact, Nizam ad-Din was a fifth generation student of Fathallah, and a work by Jaanpuri was one of the texts in the Darci Nizami curriculum. The point of the Darci Nizami was not necessarily to produce philosophers. Rather, students would read a selection of canonical texts, sometimes only in summarized versions, and be trained in logic and other fields so as to prepare them for work as government officials and jurists. Still, this pedagogical activity in the madrasahs naturally gave rise to a large number of commentaries and glosses on the texts included in the curriculum. And hopefully you've been convinced, by previous episodes, that the commentary form is entirely compatible with philosophical innovation and originality. Just in case you haven't yet been convinced, here's another example. One work on logic produced in India was the Sulam al-Ollum, or Ladder of the Sciences, by Muhyb Bellah al-Bihari, who died in the year 1707. Al-Bihari's treatise was tailor-made to be the subject of commentary, offering a dense survey of issues in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology. His successors duly composed more than 90 commentaries and glosses on the Ladder of the Sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not only did the original text of al-Bihari find its way into the Darci Nizami curriculum, glosses and commentaries on his work also became standard reading, and these provoked still further reflection from still later authors. A fascinating issue to emerge in this complex textual tradition concerned the question of whether God can be defined. The obvious answer, in light of the usual Muslim belief in divine transcendence, was no. But how to justify this answer philosophically? Avicenna suggested one possible strategy, which was developed in one of the standard commentaries on al-Bihari. Since God has no body, and since his essence is the same as his existence, God is simple, but definitions always have multiple parts. The definition of human, for example, is rational mortal animal, and one can think of these three items, rationality, mortality, and animality, as the parts of the definition. So, to define God would be to compromise his simplicity by breaking him up into conceptual parts. But what Avicenna gave, he could also take away. We've seen numerous times that later thinkers were fascinated by his distinction between mental and concrete existence. It is one thing for Haya Watha to exist in my mind, and another for her to exist outside my mind. If we now apply this distinction to God, we can see that there is a problem with the argument I just sketched. Sure, God may be simple in reality, but why think he is also simple when he exists in my mind? If my idea of him has parts, that should give me the opportunity to offer a definition of him, without implying that God himself has parts. In other words, God could have conceptual parts, but remain simple in reality. To take a not-so-random example of how this proposal might be filled out, suppose I understand God as the necessary existent. God himself lacks all multiplicity, as Avicenna argued, but the idea of a necessary existent is obviously not simple. It has two ingredients, necessity and existence. The commentators and super commentators on Al-Bihari realize that there is a much more troubling issue lurking here. We've just seen that the rules that apply to God outside the mind might be different from those that apply to God as he exists mentally. Outside, he is simple, in my mind he may have conceptual parts. So why not think this is true for other things besides God? If I am only getting mental representations of the things out there in reality, how can I be sure that the features of these representations match the features of the things in themselves? The commentators are here raising a fundamental skeptical worry of the sort that emerged independently in early modern European philosophy, in philosophers like Descartes, Hume and Kant. The commentators of India are led to the same destination, but along a path entirely characteristic of later philosophy in the Islamic world. The issue that provokes the debate is a theological one, and the debate centers on one of Avicenna's standard distinctions, in this case the contrast between mental and concrete existence. We've seen before how that same contrast could push Muslim writers in a skeptical direction. The point already arose when we talked about Fakhradin al-Razi. But it's remarkable to see it being formulated here as a general problem of epistemology. In the end, the Mughal era commentators on al-Bihari stop short of drawing the radically skeptical conclusion that there can be no link at all between our ideas and things in the outside world. Rather, we have universal knowledge gleaned from our experience of external things, and are also able to grasp the peculiar characteristics of those things. As a result, we have mental representations that may, as the commentators say, reveal the nature of the outside things. But this still leaves a skeptical worry. We have no independent confirmation that our representations correspond to, or reveal, the things they are meant to represent. This point led a 19th century philosopher of India, Fadl al-Haq al-Khayr al-Badi, to go further and doubt that our ideas do ever succeed in capturing the essences of things in themselves. So far, we've been looking at the transplanting of ideas from elsewhere in the Islamic world onto Indian soil. But of course, this soil was not barren. To the contrary, the Indian subcontinent had its own ancient philosophical and religious traditions, the ones we'll be covering in that future series of episodes. Did Muslim intellectuals attempt to come to grips with these indigenous belief systems? Indeed they did. Under the great Akbar, it was decreed that religious scholars should work through a range of intellectual sciences, including medicine, logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics, and history. They should also learn about the Hindu traditions, studying the Sanskrit language and acquainting themselves with the teachings of the Nyaya and Vedanta rules. Akbar was remarkable among Muslim rulers in India for his friendliness towards Hinduism, a policy which happened to be politically expedient as well. He even married Hindu women and allowed them to keep their religion, rather than converting to Islam. You might think it doesn't get much more friendly than that, but at least one member of the Islamic ruling class in India can give Akbar some serious competition when it comes to affection for classical Indian culture. He was a 17th century prince by the name of Dara Shihoo, the son and intended successor of the Shah Jahan. But upon his father's death, conflict erupted between Dara Shihoo and his brothers. This ended in Dara's untimely death on charges of irreligion. These accusations were obviously politically motivated, since Dara Shihoo's death paved the way for the accession of one of his brothers. But the prosecuting attorneys would have had plenty to work with, since in fact Dara was pretty daring in his ideas about religion. From a young age he was enthusiastic about the teachings of the Sufis, and trained with a beloved master to achieve ever greater degrees of spiritual enlightenment. He also engaged in Sufi practices like breath control, writing that he was able to pass through an entire night inhaling only twice. What really left him breathless, though, was the wisdom contained in ancient Sanskrit works like the Upanishads. Dara produced a translation of this text and pronounced it the oldest of the revelations sent by God to humankind. He considered the Upanishads superior to other revealed books like the Torah and the New Testament of the Christians. For him, this Sanskrit source could provide the key to unlock the deeper meaning of the revelation sent to Muhammad. To some extent, this was a well-established attitude towards Hinduism among Muslims. Islam standardly recognized Hindus and Buddhists, alongside Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, as peoples of the book, favored with prophets who brought the word of God. But Dara Shihoo went further than this by giving the Upanishads privileged place above all other revelations, apart of course from the Quran itself. He even daringly suggested that the Quran alludes to the Upanishads in a much-discussed verse that makes mention of a hidden book. What could this book be, reasoned Dara, if not the oldest of the revelations? To press home his point, Dara Shihoo wrote a treatise attempting to illustrate the agreement of the Islamic and Indian traditions. It is titled The Confluence of the Oceans. The phrase is taken from another verse of the Quran and symbolizes the meeting place between the two great religions. When an English translation of Dara's treatise was published in Calcutta in 1929, one reviewer dismissed it rather high-handedly, writing, This little treatise is not a work of deep insight or great spirituality. The subject matter is entirely matter-of-fact and consists of nothing but wooden terminological comparisons. It lacks both eloquence and inspiration. I find this amazing, because The Confluence of the Oceans is a truly remarkable document, and would be so even if it hadn't been written by a Mughal prince. In it, Dara Shihoo goes through the key ideas of the Hindu teaching as he understands it. He shows that the core ideas and vocabulary of this teaching correspond to Arabic concepts and terminology used by Muslim intellectuals, especially philosophical Sufis. Thus, the Sanskrit term maya is connected to the passionate love or ishq of the Sufis, and the Quranic names of God are matched to Sanskrit equivalents. Both the Islamic and Hindu traditions, explains Dara Shihoo, have more or less the same cosmological theories and similar ideas about the soul. In this context, Dara even alludes to Avasena's theory of the five internal senses, and as usual claims to find the same ideas in his Sanskrit sources. He touches also on more controversial points. After sketching the Indian theory that world cycles repeat over and over in an infinite loop of time, Dara says that this notion too can be shown to agree with the Qur'an. In proof, he cites verses on resurrection. To those Muslims who complain that on this theory Muhammad will no longer be the last of the prophets, Dara responds that it will be the very same Prophet Muhammad that returns in the next cycle. He will end the line of prophets in each and every iteration of the endlessly repeated history of the world. Dara is also prone to defend contentious ideas within Islam by referring to other religious traditions. One frequent point of dispute among Muslim theologians had been whether God is ever actually visible. Can he manifest himself so that we can actually see him? Of course, most philosophers would dismiss the idea out of hand, but Dara thinks it is possible, and claims as allies the many religious sages who have claimed to behold God. Dara says he is happy to find himself in agreement with them, whether they believe in the Qur'an, the Vedas, the Book of David, or the Old and the New Testament. For Dara Shikhu, the extensive agreement between the different religious and philosophical traditions known to him showed that no one people has a monopoly on wisdom or truth. But I'll tell you who did have a monopoly, the East India Company. The first half of the 18th century saw the collapse of both the Safavid and the Mughal empires, in the latter case paving the way for the era of British colonialism. This isn't the right podcast for getting into the reasons for the demise of these two mighty powers, I will just say that the fall of the Mughals was not only a matter of British conquest and exploitation at the hands of the East India Company. To some extent, at least, they succumbed to internal problems before the colonial depredation began. This is, however, the podcast to consider the fate of philosophy in the 18th century and beyond. In the last few episodes on the Islamic world, we'll be seeing not just how the tradition of figures like Avicenna or Mullah Sadr continued right down to the 20th century, we'll also be discovering how ideas from Europe were received among Muslims. But before we do that, there is a third empire to deal with. We've been to Persia and India and visited with the Safavids and the Mughals. Next time, you might want to listen with your feet up, perhaps on some sort of upholstered footstool, as we take on the Ottomans, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Turkish Delights, Philosophy Under the Ottomans. Stop me if you'd heard this one. What's the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher? To do mathematics, you need only a pencil and an eraser, and philosophy likewise, except you don't need the eraser. It's true, philosophy doesn't require much in their way of equipment. To do this podcast on the history of philosophy, I only need some books, a microphone, and a computer. Oh, and one other very important thing, coffee. This is something we philosophers share with mathematicians, who have been called machines for turning coffee into theorems. If I were deprived of my daily dose, as a podcaster I would go from has been to has been. So, I have a lot of sympathy for the 17th century Ottoman scholar Qatib Chedebi. He supposedly died while drinking coffee, which is not a bad way to go. And he put his arguments where his mouth was. Qatib Chedebi was an impressive scholar who produced much admired works including a bibliographical dictionary and a treatise on geography. But his last work, entitled The Balance of Truth, is among other things a plea for flexibility and tolerance with respect to social and religious practices that were controversial in Qatib Chedebi's day. Among those controversial practices was the drinking of coffee. I can't entirely side with him, since Chedebi also speaks up in favor of allowing people to smoke tobacco, whereas I am one of those people who will move away and start pretending to cough if anyone lights up in my presence. Still, I have to admire his policy of pragmatism. With his moderate and open-minded approach to Islam, Chedebi was signaling his opposition to a popular movement of his day, the Khadiz Adelis. Named after the charismatic preacher Mehmed Khadizadeh, the Khadiz Adelis opposed not only the fragrant activities of coffee drinking and tobacco smoking, but anything that smelled of innovation and religion. They were even upset by such apparently innocuous novelties as shaking the hands of one fellow's worshippers in the mosque. The Khadiz Adelis' great opponents were the Sufi orders, which were influential and massively popular in the Ottoman Empire. They also became rivals to the scholars, who formed both the intelligentsia and the legal class in the Ottoman state, the ulema. The ulema had always been important as the main repository of religious learning and legal authority in Sunni Islam. But under the Ottomans, their influence and social status reached new heights. Their coziness with the Ottoman rulers and their entrenched status, with scholarly sinecures being passed down from father to son within certain fortunate families, enraged the Khadiz Adelis. So this popular movement was taking aim at not just religious innovations and the theological excesses of the Sufis, but also the corruption and complacency of the ulema. The Khadiz Adelis succeeded for a time. The Sultan Murad was persuaded to put some of their policies into practice, for instance by declaring the death penalty for anyone caught smoking. This was at best a temporary and mixed success. There are even stories of Ottoman soldiers being executed after being caught with tobacco and defiantly indulging in one last smoke while being led to their deaths. Qatib Chelebi was a hero of the moderate stance within these debates. He made a point that still has application in political and social debates today, namely that there is no point forbidding something that people are going to do no matter what. He also acknowledges the problem of corruption among the scholarly class and shares the Khadiz Adelis' alarm at the excesses of some Sufis, but he speaks up in defense of the controversial Ibn Arabi, pointing out that his theories are so hard to understand that it would be uncharitable not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Like Al-Ghazali before him, he disdainfully rejects those who propose throwing out the intellectual baby with the bathwater of corruption among the ulema. His balance of truth actually begins by insisting upon the value of such traditional scholarly disciplines as logic, mathematics, and astronomy. Without training in these sciences, how is the Muslim jurist to adjudicate in a land measurement dispute or understand Quranic references to the stations of the moon? Among the traditions that Chelebi values is philosophy. He laments that the study of more advanced philosophical topics has gone into retreat at the madrasas of his day. He himself has had to pursue it outside the standard educational curriculum, something Chelebi compares to the way that Plato learned in the marketplace at the feet of Socrates. He provides a list of the scholars he most admires, mentioning numerous names that will be familiar to us—Asharite philosopher-theologians like Al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, as well as later Mongol-era thinkers such as al-Iji and the Shirazi philosopher Dawani. Patib Chelebi's complaint about a slump in pursuit of the intellectual sciences should not be dismissed out of hand. In the next episode, I'll return to the question of whether there really was an intellectual decline in the 17th century Ottoman Empire. But more generally, Ottoman madrasa education was more or less along the lines of the curriculum taught in Persia and in Mughal India. For centuries, this education helped form the religious and legal scholars of the ulema class. Given the close relations between the ulema and the state, the curriculum was thus at the heart of the Ottoman conception of Sunni Islam, and so at the heart of the Ottoman sultans' claim to legitimacy as the defenders of the faith. The Ottomans take their name from Osman, who achieved a first famous victory for his dynasty, but certainly not the last, in a clash with the Byzantines in the year 1305. Osman and his followers were Turkic tribesmen and ghazis, or religious warriors, who rallied around the cause of Islam. Not without reason, later Ottoman intellectuals would look to Ibn Khaldun's theory of tribal solidarity to explain their own history. But their ascent to power was not exactly uninterrupted. The Ottomans had early successes in Eastern Europe from their base in Anatolia, penetrating into the Balkans and defeating a combined force of Serbs and Bosnians in a famous battle at Kosovo in 1389. If we've learned anything about the 13th and 14th centuries though, it's this. Watch out for Mongols. Legend has it that Osman's tribe first came to Anatolia as refugees from the initial Mongol invasion. But around the year 1400, the new round of Mongol conquests, led by Tamerlane, arrived at the Ottoman's doorstep. They were crushed at the Battle of Ankara, and the Ottoman leader Bayezid was taken captive and then executed. You can't keep a good empire down though. The Ottomans regrouped, took back their territory in Anatolia, and renewed their attacks against Christian forces in the Balkans. The big breakthrough came in 1453, when Mehmet II overran the city of Constantinople itself, or should I say Istanbul, and thus brought to an end a story we'll be telling in the future when we look at Byzantine philosophy. As a result, the Ottoman sultans could adopt something of the charisma of Roman emperors, a charisma augmented further when the sultan Selim defeated Mamluk forces to lay claim to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1517. And still the Ottomans weren't done. Selim's successor, the famous Suleiman the Magnificent, pushed the frontiers of Ottoman territory yet further into Egypt and Iraq. The result was a mighty empire, beset by rivals on all sides yet still able to survive and indeed flourish for centuries to come. Ottoman forces clashed with a variety of European powers, including the Habsburgs, the Venetians, and the Portuguese, and they contended with the Mamluk dynasty before Selim wrested Egypt from their grasp. At least as important was their rivalry with another Muslim empire located to the east, the Safavids in Persia. As I've said, the Ottomans' legitimacy rested in large part on their claim to be the champions of Sunni Islam. They duly saw the Shiite Safavids as natural enemies, and there was frequent military conflict between the two empires. That religious context had deep consequences for the development of philosophy in the Ottoman empire. For one thing, with the rise of the Safavids, many Sunni scholars relocated from the newly Shiite Persia to the Ottoman realm. One example was Muslih Ad-Din al-Lari, who originally studied at Shiraz and thus had a deep knowledge of the works of the feuding philosophers of that city, the two dashtakis and Dawani. Lari was in fact a student of the younger dashtaki. I unfortunately haven't been able to confirm my suspicion that he had two fellow students named Mo and Curly. In one of his works, Lari says explicitly that a number of Sunnis like himself left Iran because of the Safavid's religious policies. Lari is a particularly interesting case because he at first went to India and joined the court of a Mughal ruler before coming to Aleppo and Constantinople, I mean Istanbul, in 1566. So here we have a single thinker who spent time in all three of the later Islamic empires bringing with him the ideas of the so-called school of Shiraz. Nor was Lari content simply to transmit the ideas of his teachers. He also wrote works of his own on history, logic, astronomy, and so on. In keeping with the scholarly customs of the day, many of these were in the form of commentaries and glosses on earlier works. He wrote for instance two commentaries on astronomical works by an Ottoman scientist of the 15th century by the name of Al-Ad-Din al-Kushji. Like his commentator, Lari, Al-Kushji originally hailed from further east, in his case Central Asia. He worked at the astronomical observatory founded by the Mongol ruler Uleg Beg in Samarkand. In fact, he was the son of Uleg Beg's falconer. But he soon enough spread his wings and took flight to the Ottoman realm, passing through Iran on the way to the city formerly known as Constantinople. He settled here in Istanbul and became one of the greatest scientists in Ottoman history. Though he was primarily an astronomer and not a philosopher, Al-Kushji had some interesting things to say about how these two fields relate to one another. I mentioned in a previous episode that, like logic, astronomy had become in a sense safe for Islamic religious scholars by being made autonomous from the more controversial aspects of philosophy. But there was always a worry that philosophy might sneak in through the back door. After all, Aristotelian natural philosophy tells us why the heavens are revolving and why Earth stays unmoving at the center of the universe. Earth has a natural tendency to move downwards until stopped by some obstacle and then come to rest, whereas heavenly bodies are made of a special fifth element that naturally moves in circles. But unlike Atouzi and his fellow philosopher-scientists at the Maragha Observatory, Al-Kushji had no strong commitment to the Aristotelian cosmology. For all we know, he admitted the Earth might be rotating. We can't exclude this through observation. On the other hand, he isn't particularly worried either by the Asharite theologians' insistence that God, being omnipotent and entirely free, could radically change the heavens in the blink of an eye. The mathematical astronomer is not presupposing any particular causal account of the heavens, he is just devising models on the basis of what has been observed and the only truths he needs to invoke are geometrical ones which are not open to doubt. As far as the astronomer is concerned, it simply doesn't matter whether the philosophers are right to invoke natural causes or whether the theologians are right to give all the credit to God. A scientist like Al-Kushji could afford to remain neutral in the face of the now age-old quarrel between Aristotelian philosophy and Islamic kalam, but he was lucky. The sultan never asked him for his opinion on the matter. It had been known to happen. Back in the late 15th century, the sultan Mehmed II asked two scholars to write responses to Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, then as now the most famous text for the clash between philosophy and Asharite theology. This was an unusual project for both scholars, who were more accustomed to write commentaries on the standard kalam works of the Ottoman educational curriculum. But as Ayman Shihadeh dryly remarks in a study of this event, when commissioned by the sultan, scholars normally obliged. In fact this was no ordinary commission, but a kind of contest. Both authors were given a large monetary reward, but the winner also received a fabulous robe. The victor was Kojozada, the loser Al-Adin Atuzy, not to be confused with the much more famous Nasir-Adin Atuzy. Both oversaw madrasas in the Ottoman realm and so qualified as leading intellectuals. And the approach they took to writing their own versions of The Incoherence of the Philosophers is rather telling in what it says about the mindset of leading intellectuals of this period. They tackled the topics raised by Al-Ghazali, but without engaging with his text in great detail. Instead, Kojozada and Al-Adin drew freely on more recent works, such as the widely read commentary by Al-Jurjani on the great Asharite theologian Ali-Iji. So a lot of new material was brought to bear on the classic debate between Al-Ghazali and Avicenna. Also characteristic is that both Kojozada and Al-Adin were broadly happy with Al-Ghazali's approach, in that they likewise proposed criticisms of Avicenna. In fact, we find them agreeing that some of Avicenna's positions amount to apostasy from Islam. On the other hand, they aren't necessarily impressed by the actual arguments used by Al-Ghazali. A nice example is the debate over the eternity of the universe. Kojozada agrees with Al-Ghazali in rejecting Avicenna's position, that is, he too holds that the universe is created rather than eternal, but he rebuts Al-Ghazali's arguments for this conclusion. In the original Incoherence, Al-Ghazali had for instance pointed out that if Aristotle and Avicenna were right to think the universe is eternal, then an infinite number of humans must already have existed, and human souls survive the death of their bodies. Thus, there should by now be an actually infinite number of human souls hanging around, but the philosophers reject the possibility that there could be any actual infinity. Thus, they must admit that the universe cannot be eternal. Nice try, says Kojozada, but this argument won't work. The problem involved in an actual infinity is that you can't go through it in order and get to the end, like counting up through the integers and eventually reaching an infinite number. But here, there is no need to go through the infinite souls in order. They have no relationship of priority and posteriority the way that numbers do. They just all coexist as a disordered jumble and there's nothing absurd in that. Of course, we might try counting backwards through infinite past time. One year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and so on. That would give us the absurd kind of infinity, since the years do have an order going into the past. This argument too was deployed against the eternity of the world, for instance in antiquity, by John Philoponus, and in early Arabic philosophy by al-Kindi. But this won't work either, says Kojozada. The problem here is that the past years are no longer existent, so the philosophers are not stuck with an actual infinite quantity. Kojozada, therefore, proposes a different argument of his own. The infinite past times do not exist in reality, but they exist mentally. Not of course in our puny human minds, which cannot really grasp infinity, but in the mind of God all past times should still be present, since he is omniscient. And the times would have order, since he would know which times were earlier and which later. Thus, if past time were infinite, then the absurd kind of infinity would turn up in God's mind. It would have only what Kojozada calls a shadowy kind of existence, that is mental instead of concrete existence, but it would be there nonetheless. By the way, on this topic of God's knowledge, Kojozada has another interesting proposal concerning a different part of Alhazali's incoherence. Avicenna infamously held that God knows particular things only universally. For Alhazali and other critics, this claim had the unacceptable consequence that God would not know particular things at all. Not so, says Kojozada, for each individual thing is unique in the combination of universal properties it possesses. For instance, there are lots of bald people, lots of podcasters, lots of philosophers, lots of coffee drinkers, but I may be the only bald coffee drinking podcasting philosopher. If there are any others out there, let me know. The upshot is that God could know about me without knowing anything non-universal, by knowing that these universals are found together in my case, and only in my case. This example might suggest that Ottoman scholars were interested only in philosophy when it got into theological territory, but that impression is misleading. Ottomans contributed to all branches of philosophy. Take for instance ethics, which offers us a chance to glance again at the history of Jewish philosophy in Islamic lands. Many Jews fled to Ottoman territory when they were exiled from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th century. As a result, texts familiar to us from our look at Andalusian thought, like Maimonides's Guide and a central Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, were read and debated by Jews living in the empire. One outstanding example is Moses Al-Mosnino, who lived in Salonika in the 16th century. He wrote commentaries on Averroes, Al-Ghazali, and the ethics of Aristotle. Al-Mosnino also drew on Latin philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary, he follows the sort of intellectualist position in ethics we've already seen in other Jewish thinkers like Maimonides himself. But he adds to this the Kabbalistic notion that the souls of Jews, in particular, have a spark of the divine in them, which is why the Bible says that mankind was created in God's image. If such a soul achieves intellectual perfection by subduing the body in this life, it can look forward to a reunion with God in the hereafter. In the same century, practical philosophy was also being pursued by the Muslim Ottoman philosopher Ali-Chelebi Kinalezadeh. In another case of reworking a famous text from elsewhere in the Islamic world, Kinalezadeh produced a treatise called The Exalted Ethics. It was a reworking of Dawani's treatise on ethics, which was itself a reworking of the widely read Ethics for Nasir by Nasir ad-Din Atuzi. That's the famous Atuzi again. As we saw when we looked at Atuzi, the title is slightly misleading, in that his work tackled all areas of practical philosophy, including political philosophy and household management, not just ethics. Kinalezadeh followed his lead, along the way providing a justification for the arrangement of Ottoman society. He explains that a functioning society has four main groups, the soldiers, or men of the sword, the scholars, or men of the pen, in other words the ulema, the craftsmen, and the farmers. As in Plato's Republic, the just ordering of society requires that these groups be in appropriate balance. As for the leaders, they belong to a class of their very own. Kinalezadeh praises Suleiman as a real-life philosopher-king. Kinalezadeh had good reason to do so. Suleiman was the most outstanding of the Ottoman rulers, having increased the territory held by the Ottomans to unprecedented size in Kinalezadeh's own lifetime. These were the glory days of the Ottoman realm, when madrasas were being built at a rapid pace, setting the stage for the scholarly activities I've been discussing in this episode. But nothing good lasts forever. What became of philosophy, as the Ottoman Empire lost territory and finally ended, and as its inhabitants were increasingly exposed to European culture through travel, trade, and colonization? I hope that I have dispelled the myth of post-medieval decline in the many episodes I have now devoted to philosophy in the later traditions, but as we now move ever closer to the present day, are we finally going to see the end of meaningful philosophical activity in the Islamic world? There will be a few weeks before you can find out, because I will now be taking my usual annual break, during which I plan to drink a lot of coffee and put down on paper some of the ideas that have been percolating in my mind for the forthcoming episodes on Latin medieval philosophy. I'll return in late September with several future episodes about the recent past, as I cover 19th and 20th century philosophy in the Islamic world. Later on, the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, Today's episode, The Young Ones, Encounters with European Thought. At the beginning of our history of philosophy in the Islamic world, we saw an intellectual revolution, as Greek science was made available in Arabic in the 9th century. Three centuries later, Latin-speaking Christendom was transformed by the translation of works from Arabic. Now, as we reach the end of our journey through the Islamic world, history repeats itself yet again. From the Copernican revolution in astronomy to 19th century positivism, scientific and philosophical ideas flowed from Europe into the Islamic world. This was only to be expected in the Ottoman Empire, which was in direct contact with European civilization, but travelers from and to Europe also spread the new theories as far as the Mughal Empire in India. As with the original Greek-Arabic translation movement, some bemoaned the corrupting influence of the new foreign science. Others gladly embraced the European ideas, arguing that they offered a chance to revive Islam and strengthen Muslim political regimes against their enemies. Still others took a middle path, by proposing a more selective approach or by reinterpreting European philosophy so as to harmonize it with Islamic tradition. The process of negotiation unfolded in a fraught atmosphere, even an atmosphere of crisis, as territories long held by powerful Muslim states fell under the sway of colonial power. For intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the question of whether to adopt European ways of thinking was an urgent one. Could these ideas be used to reverse military setbacks, revive faltering empires, and renew the religion of Islam itself? Already in the 17th century, Qatad Chelebi, who we saw last time promoting a tolerant policy on coffee and tobacco, wondered if a scientific deficit could explain the fact that parts of the Ottoman Empire were going up in smoke at the hands of the Venetians. Yet there was also the option of returning to earlier traditions in the Islamic world. In this context, the Salafism of Ibn Taymiyya, which preached adherence to the teachings of the earliest Muslims, could suddenly seem more appealing than it had in previous centuries. It was duly taken up in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose followers, the Wahhabis, would go on to create an independent state on the Arabian peninsula. But one didn't have to be a Wahhabi to think that there was a great deal of value in Islamic intellectual heritage. Two learned traditions in particular had been proving their resilience for centuries, Kalam and Sufism. Kalam, suffused with ideas from Avicenna, had survived the Mongols and been given new impetus at Shiraz. Standard works of logic and philosophical theology were studied by generation upon generation of students in Iran, India, and the Ottoman Empire. And, as we have seen, these works weren't just read and taught, they also provoked more commentary than an impetuous public kiss at an office party. It may be tempting to think that this scholarly tradition must have ground to a halt, or at least declined, as the Ottoman and Mughal empires expired, but we've learned to be wary of such temptations. The supposed death of philosophy in the east after Al Ghazali and the presumed intellectual decline after the Mongol invasions have both proved on closer examination to be largely figments of scholarly imagination. Much the same seems to be true here. Yet again, some historians have told a narrative of intellectual decline in the later Muslim empires. They have pointed to pessimistic observers like Khatib Chelebi himself, whom we saw lamenting the poor standards of the intellectuals in the 17th century. Of course, we need to bear in mind the universal human tendency to think that things aren't what they used to be. Just think of how parents always think their generation's pop music was better than the rubbish their kids listened to. On the other hand, sometimes things really do degenerate. The moms and dads of the 1950s were wrong to complain about Elvis, but their counterparts in the early 1990s were right to complain about Milli Vanilli. Plus, Khatib Chelebi was no fool. So let's suppose he was observing a real decline in scholarly sophistication. What might explain it? Just as Al Ghazali and the Mongols have been accused of causing earlier supposed retreats from philosophy, in this case the finger of blame would point squarely at the Qadizadelis. As we saw in the last episode, this puritanical religious group attacked both the Sufi orders and the scholars, or ulama, who concerned themselves with the rational sciences. Qadizadeli influence might explain a sudden withdrawal from those sciences in Ottoman society. It's a pretty plausible story at first glance. There is some evidence that the founder of the movement, Mehmed Qadizadeh, was hostile towards the rational sciences. Khatib Chelebi assigns to him the memorable quote, Who sheds a tear if a logician dies? But the Qadizadeli's posture with regard to the sciences was not unlike Al Ghazali's before them, an attitude of selectivity rather than outright opposition. We find them endorsing the study of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and even approving of the vast array of philosophical ideas that had been domesticated within Islamic theology. In any case, whatever inroads they may have achieved against the sciences seem to have been short-lived. The heyday of the Qadizadelis was the mid-17th century. Not long after, around the turn of the 18th century, we find new madrasas opening in the cities of the Ottoman Empire. These schools would continue to train religious scholars and jurists in the rational sciences. Major change would come only in the 19th century with reforms inspired by European models of education. We find a similar picture among Muslims living in India. We saw in an earlier episode that the rather wonderfully named Faraghi Mahal family was responsible for carrying forward the rational sciences in 18th century India. In the 19th century, this tradition was still going strong, with a torch passing to another group in the city of Khairabad. Scholars of the Khairabadi school wrote on logic and philosophy throughout the 19th century. More than their predecessors, they tended to write independent works, focusing on specific problems in logic, rather than working their ideas into glosses and comments on earlier standard works. Still, they took inspiration from the many commentaries produced over the preceding centuries in India and Iran. They even cast their gaze as far back as Avicenna himself, engaging with him more than the Faraghi Mahalis had done. It's worth dwelling on that for a moment. Remember that Avicenna died in the middle of the 11th century, and here he is still being read carefully by the leading philosophers of India in the 19th century. Even Elvis may not prove to have such a long-lasting legacy. As for Milli Vanilli, they are already half forgotten. According to an informal poll I've conducted, most people guess that it's the name of an ice cream flavor. Of course, the Khairabadis were pursuing these activities under British colonial power in India a fact of some relevance for the school. One of their members, Fadl al-Haq al-Khairabadi, spent years serving the East India Company but was then involved in the 1857 uprising against the British. He was tried for treason because he supported a legal judgment approving of jihad against the British. Fadl al-Haq's punishment was deportation to a penal colony where he died in 1861. Yet even these traumatic events could not kill the Khairabadi's school. Fadl al-Haq al-Khairabadi's son, Abd al-Haq, enjoyed royal patronage and held posts in Tonk, Calcutta, and Rampur. His students would ensure the continuation of the school's activities into the early 20th century. In short, it would seem that such anti-scientific polemic as there was in both the Ottoman and Indian spheres did not derail the train of philosophical kalam. But the Qadiz ad-Dalis were training their sights on another target too, the Sufis. Were their attacks more successful in this case? And more generally, did philosophical Sufism survive into the modern age? For us, this is an important question given the long-standing links between Sufism and philosophy. Let's start to answer it not with the Ottoman Empire, but in India. We've already discussed the 17th century royal prince Dada Shikul and seen him drawing on Sufism to find harmony between the Islamic and Hindu religious traditions. A somewhat similar figure of the 18th century was Shah Wali Allah from the city of Delhi. Perhaps because he was living in a time of great political upheaval, Wali Allah was one of many Muslim thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries who sought to revive the religion of Islam itself. This idea of renewal was ironically a very old one. We see it, for example, in the title of one of Al Ghazali's major works, Revival of the Religious Sciences. Towards this end, Wali Allah composed The Conclusive Proof of God, a major work on the prophetic traditions known as hadith. In this and other works, he draws on the Sufi idea that the differences we see in things are representations of a higher unity. In particular, he works with the idea of a world of images, which we've seen in Ibn Arabi and in the Illuminationists. According to this theory, things in our world have archetypes, much like platonic forms, to which gifted individuals can gain access through their imaginative powers. Wali Allah proposes applying this doctrine to the phenomenon of religion itself. In a move reminiscent of Dara Shikhu's syncretic treatment of Islam and Hinduism, Wali Allah claims that the various religions of the world are just specific versions of the single paradigm religion shared by all mankind. The religious commandments and laws laid upon this or that population are providentially tailored to their own specific needs. The purpose of religion, and for that matter of all human society and all political institutions, is to bring humankind ever closer to a single shared perfection. Wali Allah's universalist vision is appropriate for the pluralist society he lived in, but it is in some tension with his commitment to Islam as the most perfect religion. He claims that Islam is unusual among religions, in that its legal provisions are not so closely suited to just one group. This is why Muhammad was the last to receive a prophetic revelation. The message he brought was most universal, and thus most final. This doesn't fit that well with Wali Allah's overall theory. All earthly religions are equal in being versions of the perfect exemplar religion, but apparently one earthly religion is more equal than the others. As for the Ottoman Empire, Sufism had also been playing a significant role there for many generations. Already in the early 15th century, we find the doctrines of Ibn Arabi being defended by Mullah Fanari. We might compare him to Al-Qunawī, the philosophical Sufi I covered alongside Rumi in a previous episode. Like Al-Qunawī, Mullah Fanari used the tools of Avicennan philosophy in order to expound the doctrine of wahtat al-wujūd, or unity of existence, which became the characteristic position of Ibn Arabi's followers. Fanari duly criticized At-Tuzi's claim that existence is ascribed to God and to created things in different but analogically related ways. Instead, Fanari insisted that existence is existence, whether it belongs to God, to a human, or to Elvis Presley, who I think we can all agree was more than merely human. Thus Fanari managed to safeguard the claim that existence is one. But as usual in philosophical Sufism, Fanari wanted to stop short of eliminating all distinction between the divine and the created. Anticipating the view of the Shirazi thinker Dawani, he suggested that one can still hold on to a distinction of sorts between God and other things by repeating Avicenna's point that God's essence is existence, whereas other things have essences that need to receive existence from a cause. In centuries to come, Sufism would continue to flourish in the Ottoman Empire, shrugging off criticism from opponents like the Qadiz Adelis. Ibn Arabi himself was honored in the early 16th century, when a lavish monument was built on his grave in Damascus on the orders of the Ottoman Sultan. A couple of centuries on from there, we've just seen how in 18th century India, Shah Wali Allah was working within the Sufi philosophical tradition. And about a generation earlier, we have a comparable Ottoman figure by the name of Abd al Ghani al-Nabalousi. He died in 1731, whereas Wali Allah died in 1762, and Elvis Presley died in 1977, or at least that's what they want us to believe. Like Wali Allah, Abd al Ghani was a well-rounded scholar who did draw on Sufism but also wrote on Hadith and composed poetry. And, like his Ottoman predecessor Mullah Fanadi, Abd al Ghani spoke out in defense of Ibn Arabi's unity of existence doctrine. God is the one true reality which can never be known but only appears to us in various guises. Abd al Ghani also practiced asceticism, undergoing a period of seclusion in middle age when he refused to socialize with anyone, purposefully deprived himself of sleep, and so on. But Abd al Ghani abandoned his hermetic lifestyle after a time, traveling widely throughout the Ottoman lands and adopting moderate religious views. He agreed with Khatib Chelebi's tolerant stance on practices like tobacco smoking, for instance. As for other religions, he was happy to debate theology with Christians, whom he considered brothers in thought, though like Wali Allah, he considered Islam the one true and universal creed. Moderates like Khatib Chelebi and Abd al Ghani an-Nabalousi tended to have a friendly, even enthusiastically welcoming, attitude towards the natural sciences. As Chelebi put the point, knowledge can never be harmful and ignorance is never beneficial. The narrative of decline would have it that anti-rationalist forces, such as the Khadiz ad-Dalis, made it impossible for science to flourish in the Ottoman Empire. Exhibit A for the indictment is the destruction of an astronomical observatory at Istanbul in 1580. We know from the earlier case of Maragha that such observatories could be centers for scientific research and so it was at Istanbul, where the astronomer Taqi Adin devised a plan for a steam engine and in 1577 made observations about Halley's Comet, parallel to those made in the same year in Europe by Tiho Brahe. But for Taqi Adin, this comet was the beginning of an unfortunate tale. He took it as an opportune sign for launching a military campaign against the Safavids. As I've mentioned before, as Shi'ite Muslims, the Safavids were always seen as rivals by the Sunni Ottomans. This expedition ended in failure, and it may be that the observatory was destroyed because the advice given by Taqi Adin turned out to be counterproductive. Alternatively, the demolition may have been an expression of a more general distrust of astrology. It seems in any case that it should not be blamed on anti-rationalist sentiment inspired by the Kaadiz ad-Dalis. In 1660, Ottoman astronomers were given something rather different to worry about, the Copernican account of the solar system. We've seen scientists of the Islamic world debating whether the Earth might in fact be rotating rather than standing still beneath revolving, heavenly spheres. Now they were confronted with the possibility that the Earth might in fact be orbiting around the sun as well as rotating on its own axis. This was thanks to an Ottoman scholar named Ibrahim Effendi, who translated a book on Copernican philosophy from French into Arabic. Ibrahim was convinced of the value of his translation, since it might help to rectify problems in the Ptolemaic, Earth-centered astronomical system. But he did not go so far as to endorse the Copernican theory. In a familiar pattern, the theory was met with a mixture of dismissive rejection, cautious interest, and eager acceptance. My favorite response came from a scholar who pronounced the heliocentric view plausible, drawing an analogy to cooking. It makes more sense to turn meat over a fire than turning the fire around the meat. Copernican astronomy wouldn't be the last European idea to get the Ottomans juices flowing. As the empire experienced military setbacks and lost territory, its intellectuals and leaders looked to Europe for new ideas and organizational techniques that might help restore the Ottomans to their former position of dominance. Already in the 18th century, organizational techniques from Prussia were borrowed for the Ottoman military. A much further reaching reform movement was launched in the mid-19th century, the Tanzimat. The Tanzimat introduced free-market economic policies and a thorough shakeup of the state bureaucracy and educational system, all inspired by models in Europe. The result was a fundamental reshaping of Ottoman political ideology. A group of intellectuals known as the Young Ottomans argued that the Tanzimat had not gone far enough. They pushed for a constitutional form of government and put their faith in the power of nationalism rather than religion. The Sultans had always drawn legitimacy from their status as defenders of Islam, never forgetting that the empire had begun thanks to conquests made by Turkish razis, or holy warriors. Now though, the ideal of unity between state and religion, or in Ottoman Turkish din ud-devlet, was being replaced by an ideal of separation of the two spheres. Things were taken still further by another generation of political activists, the Young Turks. For all their reforming zeal, the Young Ottomans had embraced the value of Islamic tradition. They had not challenged the status of the ulama, or religious scholars, and had frequently sought support for their political ideas in the core texts of Islam, for instance by citing reports about the prophet to argue for constitutionalism. But by the late 19th century the more radical Young Turks were embracing European materialism and scientism. One particularly interesting example was Abdullah Cevdet, who remarked that religion is the science of the masses whereas science is the religion of the elite. Like Al-Farabi in the time of medieval Islam, Cevdet believed that society should be led by those with rational understanding and that the role of religion was to bring along the common people to an outlook compatible with the teachings of science. Similarly, the leading Young Turk intellectual Zia Gokalp saw religion as serving a fundamentally social function, part of what he called culture as opposed to the rational achievements that qualify as civilization. Cevdet Gokalp and the other Young Turks looked not to Aristotle for their conception of science, but to European philosophers of the 19th century. Gokalp was particularly influenced by the sociologist Emil Durkheim, while Cevdet took inspiration from the materialist Ludwig Büchner and the positivist Auguste Comte. Darwinism, both biological and social, also played a role in the new ideology of the Young Turks. All these ideas were taken over by Cevdet and placed alongside thinkers from ancient Greece and the Islamic tradition in a massive treatise called Funun ve Felsive, meaning sciences and philosophy. For Cevdet, the findings of modern science could be found implicitly in the Islamic revelation. When we read in the Quran of God's ways, this is nothing but a reference to the laws of physics. The critics of the Young Turks could be forgiven for thinking that even such rationalist uses of revelation were mere lip service paid to Islam. The philosophy of some Young Turks was aggressively materialist, loudly rejecting the notion of a soul distinct from the body and more quietly thinking that even the existence of God was nothing but a convenient superstition. Of course, all of this did not go unchallenged, and some critics came from the ranks of the Young Turks' fellow reformers. A less radical stance, but one still friendly to science and European philosophy, was taken by men like Ismirli Ismail Haqi. Haqi was a classic product of the new educational system brought in under the Tanzimat. He did not want to dispense with religious tradition, or see it as serving a purely social function as Gokalp had suggested. Rather, he thought that modernity could be fused with tradition. He drew a parallel with the emergence of a new philosophical brand of kalam in the works of Fakhradin Ahrazi. Back in the 12th century, Ahrazi had woven Avicenna into Islamic theology to make it more relevant for his time. So must the intellectuals of Haqi's own time renew Islamic theology by drawing on the positivism of Kant. Haqi was thus occupying a middle position between conservatives and radicals. One conservative remarked that it had already been a mistake for the Abbasids to have Greek science translated in the first place, and that Ottoman scholars with European leanings like Haqi were repeating that error. Yet Haqi himself attacked the most radical of the Young Turks, accusing Tevdet of ignorance of Islam and helping to pave the way for his trial on charges of blasphemy. Another scholar who adopted this sort of middle position was Ahmad Hilmi. Hilmi can be grouped with the Young Turks. He criticized the ulama for their backward notions, embraced Darwinism, and insisted on the harmony between science and Islam. But Hilmi was drawn to Sufism as well, and rejected the crude materialism of thinkers like Tevdet. Hilmi also exemplifies a darker side of European influence. He drew on the racist theories then current in France to support the Turkish nationalism that he held in common with other Young Turks. And anti-feminist French authors served him well, as he angrily denounced the freedoms that were being granted to women in the new society that the Young Ottomans and Young Turks had helped to build. Hilmi was not merely imagining things. Already in the late 19th century, attitudes towards women were changing, not least among women themselves. It was increasingly possible for women writers to take part in political and religious debates, and take part they did. The last 200 years have seen an unprecedented development in the Islamic world, as women intellectuals have not just drawn on European ideas, but also gone back to the core text of Islam—to argue for the emancipation of women in Muslim society. If you've been thinking that it's about time we let the other half of the human race have its say, then, as Milli Vanilli put it when they got caught limb-sicking all their songs, you took the words right out of my mouth. So join me for a discussion of women scholars in Islam, next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Stronger Sex, Women, Scholars and Islam. Quiz time. Which of the following has not been mentioned in these podcasts on philosophy in the Islamic world? A giraffe, a silent film star, or a woman philosopher? Okay, it's a trick question. I've actually mentioned all three. The giraffe was Hayawatha, the silent film star Buster Keaton, and the woman philosopher was, of course, my non-existent sister. If you think a non-existent person can't be a philosopher, all I can say is, try telling that to my sister's face. And what, you might think, could be more appropriate? The only female thinker I've seen fit to mention this whole time doesn't exist. Surely the oppressive arrangements of Islamic societies, from medieval times down to today, have excluded women from pursuing intellectual pursuits. That would make this a very short episode. But it turns out that women have always been allowed to play a part in Islamic intellectual history, even if that part has undeniably been more limited than the one allowed to men. In fact, some of the men we have discussed were taught by women. For instance, the 12th century thinker Abdalatif al-Baghdadi, whom we discussed back in episode 171, studied with a female religious scholar named Bint al-Ibaari. And the greatest of the philosophical Sufis, Ibn Arabi, studied under a woman named Fatima of Cordoba. Speaking of which, it's actually not true that women have gone entirely unnoticed so far. I did discuss Rabia, a major early Sufi, who helped introduce the theme of passionate love for God into Islamic mysticism. That's not a bad place to start with our topic, since women feature prominently in the history of religious asceticism and mysticism from early on in the Islamic world. Here, we can detect a parallel to late antiquity, where we saw several desert mothers joining in the Christian ascetic movement. In the Latin Christian medieval world too, there were major female mystics who will before long be featuring in this podcast. In the Islamic tradition, Rabia was the most famous such figure, quoted by many male Sufis and imitated by many female ones. Rabia exemplified rigorous asceticism, unmarried and destitute. She came by her poverty the old-fashioned way by actually being poor. In fact, she was a freed slave. But like the late antique desert mothers, many other Muslim women who contributed to Sufism were well-to-do. Some literally contributed by sponsoring religious orders and retreats, while others gave up their lives of luxury for the rigors of asceticism. In another respect, Rabia was downright unusual. She remained steadfastly celibate. This corresponds to the expectations we might have from the Christian ascetic tradition, but in fact most women honored as Sufi sates were married. Even so, they were often seen as having an ambivalent relation towards their husbands and towards femininity itself. Within a hundred years of Rabia, who died at the end of the 8th century, we have an interesting example in the person of Umm Ali of Balkh. Unlike Rabia, Umm Ali was from a wealthy background and was well-educated in the Islamic sciences of her day. She not only married, but according to some stories, aggressively pursued her husband and teased him for being unmanly in eluding her advances. As his wife, she annoyed him by boldly unveiling herself while studying with a male Sufi teacher. She justified this on the grounds that the teacher was another spiritual partner alongside her husband. In these stories, Umm Ali departs from expectations about women in medieval Islamic society. In fact, her teacher paid her the dubious compliment that she was in effect a man wearing women's clothes. Similarly, Rabia was praised as being no longer a woman because of her intimate knowledge of God. Perhaps then, women mystics were exceptions who proved the rule. Their ascetic lifestyle and intense spirituality freed them from the constraints normally imposed on women in Islamic society to the point of transcending their gender in the eyes of that society. Yet, female Sufis were not the only women playing a role in the Islamic religious traditions. I choose the word traditions advisedly because of the significant number of female transmitters of hadith, the traditions, about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The earliest transmitters included the wives of the Prophet, who are admired in Islam as exemplars for other women to emulate. Among them, the most important for the reporting of hadith was Muhammad's favorite wife, Aisha. As we saw when we looked at Islamic jurisprudence, reports about the Prophet are a fundamental basis for the law and as a guide for day-to-day life of all Muslims. To ensure the reliability of these reports, hadith scholars traced each of them back through a chain of transmitters who each needed to be trustworthy, indeed above reproach. And well over 1,000 of these reports have chains of transmission beginning with Aisha. These hadith and stories about Aisha herself provide key sources concerning attitudes towards women in Islam. Once it was claimed to her that the Prophet deemed prayer to be interrupted if a woman, donkey, or dog should come between the believer and the direction of Mecca, Aisha rejected the report on the basis of personal experience. The Prophet prayed when she herself was lying in front of him. And I have to at least mention another anecdote in which she scoffed at the notion that, according to the Prophet, a believer could be damned to hell for mistreating a cat. Other reports transmitted by Aisha show her high degree of learning and especially her mastery of detailed legal issues. Given the example set by Aisha, and to a lesser extent the Prophet's other wives, it is no surprise that numerous women were important early transmitters of hadith. Yet there was a steep decline in the participation of women in hadith scholarship following the earliest generations. This is probably because of the increasing specialization of those who gathered and authenticated traditions, often by traveling long distances to interview witnesses. All this required freedom of movement and financial independence, something not available to women at this time in history. But in the late 10th century or so, once the corpus of hadith was better established, women came back into the game. When we hear of men being taught by women, it is often because the women are experts in the prophetic traditions and are passing them on to the next generation. All of this means that, even in the medieval period, and certainly later on, many women, usually wealthy ones, could boast of a high degree of education and expertise in the Islamic sciences. Still, women's education was kept within certain bounds. We've seen many times how central educational institutions were to intellectual developments in the Islamic world, something that is of course true in other cultures as well. So a major shift in opportunities for female intellectuals would come only in the later period we've been looking at in recent episodes. Last time, we saw how reform movements in the late Ottoman Empire, partly inspired by European philosophy, resulted in an overhaul of education and the emergence of new political ideas. After the 1908 revolution that gave rise to the modern nation of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, probably better known to you as Atatürk, would stress the liberation of women as part of a new secularist society. The seeds for this change were already laid in the Ottoman era. We've seen how the Young Turk movement of the late 19th century pushed for secularism and scientism. Part of that political program was an insistence that women should be educated, if only because they represented an untapped economic resource. As one Young Turk intellectual, Namik Kemal, not to be confused with Mustafa Kemal, put it, The present idleness of women, who constitute more than half the human population, and their entire economic dependence, disturbed the balance of the general laws of cooperation and the welfare of mankind. The Young Turks often made the case for their ideology in newly launched magazines and journals, and a parallel development saw the emergence of periodicals written for, and often by, women. The authors of pieces in magazines like The Lady's Own Gazette were often the daughters of the bureaucrats who were running Ottoman society after the Tanzimat Reforms. They contributed literature, advice columns, and political essays which sometimes reflected explicitly on the question of whether to imitate the model of European female intellectuals. An article published in 1895 by the novelist Fatma Aliye is a good example. Speaking of the so-called Blue Stockings, women who pursued salon culture in Britain, she affirmed that their intellectual activities should be adopted by Muslim women, but that their immodest behavior should not. Like the men who set the agenda of the Young Turks, authors like Aliye knew that increased access to education would make all the difference. Against her stance, some argued that this would corrupt girls by making them inappropriately masculine. It's interesting to note that this debate echoes one that had taken place a century earlier in England, above all in the work of the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. Her pioneering work Vindication of the Rights of Woman is, among other things, a plea for better education for girls. In the past century, such educational reforms have indeed produced the sort of figure who had previously been as nonexistent as my sister—politicized Muslim women intellectuals. We might assume that these would all be passionate liberals railing against the patriarchal nature of Islamic culture, but—and I know you'll be surprised to hear me say this—it's dangerous to make such assumptions. Take for instance the Egyptian thinker Aisha Abdar-Rahman, who published under the pen name Bint Ash-Shati, meaning daughter of the shore. She was born in 1913 and died in 1998. She grew up in rural Egypt, the daughter of an illiterate but supportive mother and a father who was a conservative religious scholar. From inauspicious beginnings, she managed to attend Cairo University and to have an academic career beginning at the time of the Second World War. She's apparently the first woman ever to have produced extensive exegesis of the Qur'an, but she was not in the business of citing revelation to promote women's liberation. Rather, to quote a study of her by Ruth Roded, when commenting on the Qur'an, she chose difficult, theological Qur'anic verses with no social implications whatsoever, which seems to be the strategy of an ambitious woman carefully invading a traditional male domain. Yet Bint Ash-Shati was certainly not an apolitical thinker. Befitting her background, she argued for improving conditions for peasants in the countryside, and she wrote fiction depicting the plight of women in rural society. Also, she did write a scholarly work devoted to the subject of women. As we've seen, Muhammad's wives have always played a central role in Islamic conceptions of femininity, and they provide both the theme and the title of her treatise The Wives of the Prophet. It is a work rooted in traditional scholarship, with information drawn from the many reports about the Prophet and his companions. But Bint Ash-Shati also imagines the inner mental life of her protagonists, in a sense reimagining the story of Muhammad's life from the point of view of his wives. Still, it's not exactly a statement of feminism. Bint Ash-Shati associates femininity with weakness and repeatedly describes the petty bickering and jealousy among Muhammad's wives. Roded goes so far as to say that in The Wives of the Prophet, Bint Ash-Shati is trading in almost misogynist stereotypes. But of course, there have been powerfully liberal voices too, among women intellectuals. In the past several decades, one outstanding example has been Fatima Mernissi. Born in Fez in 1940, Mernissi has held a professorship of sociology in Morocco and written several pioneering books considering the place of women in Islamic society. Her most famous work is Beyond the Veil, published in 1973. In this book, Mernissi draws a contrast between the Western oppression of women and the oppression distinctive of Islamic society. Whereas West Western thought has always insisted on the biological inferiority of females, Islamic society has instead feared women precisely because they are the stronger sex. Here, Mernissi contrasts Freudian ideas about women to sentiments she finds in a medieval author who is very familiar to us, Al-Ghazali. Whereas Sigmund Freud saw women as essentially passive, Al-Ghazali depicted them as active and sexually demanding, needing to be kept satisfied by their husbands to contain their potential for causing familial strife. Women are also possessed of a far greater degree of self-control than men. Hence the practice of veiling women. This is not done to protect them or hide them away. To the contrary, women are veiled in order to protect the weaker sex, namely men, who tend to lack control over their passions. Mernissi is onto something here. As we've seen many times, the Islamic intellectual tradition echoed Platonist ethics by describing virtue as the rule of reason over desire. Mernissi sees Al-Ghazali, and by extension the wider Islamic tradition, as associating the feminine with a provocation to untamed desire. Men must restrain and discipline their desires for women, and hence exert control and command over the women themselves, rather than showing them love and respect. But it is not just intellectuals like Al-Ghazali who are to blame. For Mernissi, the history of Muslim society is in large measure the history of an attempt to defuse women's power. She contrasts the status of women after the advent of Islam to this situation in the so-called jahiliyyah, or time of ignorance, before Muhammad received his prophetic message. In the pre-Islamic society, social structures were tribal, and women had a relatively high degree of self-determination. This was abolished early on in the history of Islam, through such legal means as rules on divorce, through veiling, and through the restriction of women to certain spaces. Only in recent times as the forces of modernity have broken down traditional Islamic social structures has it become possible for women to wield power again by invading the previously male enclaves of the workplace, politics, and the public sphere. But for Mernissi, the long-standing oppression of women in fact stemmed from a distortion of the Islamic revelation. She sees the prophet's message as a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian one. Mernissi argues for this reading of history and religion in another book called Women and Islam. She makes her case using the techniques of the Islamic religious sciences, especially a science we have already considered in this episode, hadith scholarship. Supposedly, the prophet once remarked that, Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity. This report has been used down the ages to justify the exclusion of women from political and economic leadership. As Mernissi recounts at the beginning of the book, it was even once quoted to her in her local grocery store. The report is deemed sound in the classical collections of hadith, but Mernissi decides to explore the provenance of the saying more thoroughly. She discovers that this quotation of the prophet was originally reported, many years after it was supposedly uttered, by one Abu Bakr. She further argues that this man's reliability is rather questionable and produces evidence that he was in fact convicted of bearing false testimony. For Mernissi, the conclusion is clear. This is obviously an unsound hadith, and only the sexist motives of the medieval hadith scholars could have blinded them to this fact. Mernissi takes the same text-critical approach when she considers the practice of veiling women. The institution of the veil can be traced back to a verse of the Qur'an, which instructs Muslims to request things of the prophet's wives from behind a curtain in Arabic hijab. As Mernissi emphasizes, many verses of the Qur'an were revealed in response to specific events, and this is one of them. The occasion was the prophet's marriage to his beautiful cousin Zainab. The verses were revealed when some guests overstayed their welcome, preventing the couple from enjoying their wedding night. For Mernissi, this context indicates that the so-called verse of the hijab was revealed to teach believers a lesson in tactfulness. It has, however, been abused to divide space itself into two realms, the private domestic sphere allowed to women and the public sphere of political and economic action reserved for men. The word hijab can also mean a veil, and as we've already seen, Mernissi sees the practice of veiling as an attempt by men to defend themselves from the attractions of women. But on her reading, there is no basis for this practice in the Qur'an. Mernissi could draw in some support here from an unlikely source, the 11th century Andalusian jurist Ibn Hazm, whom we discussed in episode 147. As we saw then, Ibn Hazm was a supporter of the Zahari school of Islamic law, which accepted a very restricted range of sources in reaching legal decisions. We saw, for instance, that he rejected the death penalty for homosexuality, since there is no support for this in the explicit statements found in the Qur'an and hadith. Similarly, he dismisses the religious requirement for veiling as having no basis in the authoritative texts of Islam. It is sometimes claimed that Andalusian society was unusual in the medieval period for allowing a greater degree of liberty and self-expression to women than was possible elsewhere in the Islamic world. This is a matter of debate, and even more debatable is the possibility that Ibn Hazm had anything remotely approximating feminist leanings. He does tell us himself that much of his early education was given to him by women, for instance in reading the Qur'an. This confirms again that in medieval Islam, women played an important role in scholarly transmission and in teaching. Still, in this and other cases, Ibn Hazm's woman-friendly rulings were not inspired by his experiences learning at the feet of women. Rather, they were a consequence of his restrictive legal method which often yielded liberal results simply because he could find no basis for more restrictive practices in the Qur'an or the hadith. Ironically though, Fatima Mernissi does have something in common with Ibn Hazm, and even more ironically with the Salafist jurist Ibn Taymiyya. Like them, she urges a return to the original teachings of Islam, and wants her fellow Muslims to divest themselves of distortions introduced in later Islamic history. For Mernissi, the distortions began almost immediately, in part thanks to the first caliph Umar. Though she admits that he had many admirable features, she also produces evidence that Umar was very hostile towards women. And he was, of course, only one of a long series of rulers and scholars whose misogyny led them to twist the revelation towards oppressive ends. Islam's true teaching concerning women, for Mernissi, is represented not by unsound anti-feminist hadith or the wearing of veils, but by a verse revealed to Muhammad after his wife Umm Salama asked why the Qur'an only ever spoke about men. In response, Muhammad received a revelation that seems to set women and men on a par. God shows forgiveness and gives reward to women and men who have surrendered to God, women and men who believe, women and men who show charity, and so on. Mernissi suggests that this verse was sent down in answer not just to an idle question by Umm Salama, but a wider demand from the women of the community for protection within the laws of the new religion. This demand was providentially answered, not only by that verse, but by the institution of laws protecting the women's right of inheritance. As these examples show, the status of women in Islam is inextricably bound up with interpretation of the core Islamic texts, the Qur'an itself, and reports concerning the sayings and deeds of the Prophet and his companions, including his wives. Mernissi puts her faith in what she calls memory, a recalling of the original intention of the Islamic revelation. She is convinced that the correct interpretation will give women their rightful place as equal partners, within the family and in religion. It's not my place to say what is and is not the true interpretation of these texts, but I do plan to continue giving women their rightful place in the history of philosophy. Soon we'll be turning to philosophy in medieval Christendom and meeting great women figures like Hildegard of Bingen. First though we need to finish our look at the Islamic world, with three final episodes that will continue to bring our story into the 20th century. So man up, or woman up, and join me next time as I continue to discuss recent philosophical developments in the Islamic world here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, All for One and One for All, Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Abdu. I read somewhere, and recently confirmed with 45 seconds or so of intensive research on the Internet, that the most common given name in the world is Muhammad. Apparently the most common surname is Chang, which to my mind raises the question of why we don't run into more people named Muhammad Chang. The reason for the popularity of the name Muhammad at least is clear enough, Muslim parents naming boys after the Prophet. Statistically speaking then, it's no surprise that two of the greatest Muslim thinkers of the early 20th century were both named Muhammad, Muhammad Abdu and Muhammad Iqbal. They came from nearly opposite ends of the Islamic world, Abdu growing up in Egypt and Iqbal in India. But they had more in common than just a name. Both were influenced by the traditions of philosophy and Sufism in the Islamic world, but looked also to more recent European thinkers. Both advocated a reformist view of Islam, rejecting fatalist and determinist elements in the tradition to make room for individual and social improvement. And both were politically active, involved in debates about how Islamic society could be reformed in the face of colonial domination by external powers. Colonialism was, of course, the bitter water in which Muslim intellectuals of this period were forced to swim. Foreign governments steered events in both India and the failing Ottoman Empire, which was at the time called the Sick Man of Europe. Many Muslim intellectuals thought colonialism was the disease, not the cure, and Muhammad Abdu was one of them. He was born in rural Egypt in 1849, at which time the Ottomans had lost control over Egypt, forced to recognize the governorship of their rebellious general Muhammad Ali. Obviously not to be confused with the rebellious Boxer. But as Abdu was growing up, the governors, or hadiths, of Egypt were under immense pressure from the colonial powers, especially the British. Abdu would later express resentment at this state of affairs, remarking, Here he was agreeing with his early mentor and ally, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani. Al-Afghani arrived to teach at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, passing himself off as a Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan. He had actually been born in Shi'ite Persia, where he had the opportunity to study classic works of philosophy not so commonly read in the Ottoman realms. He was thus able to instruct the young Muhammad Abdu in texts like Avicenna's Pointers and Reminders. Before long, Abdu would be publishing a set of glosses on Dawani's commentary on a theological treatise by the Mongol-era thinker Al-Iji. It's a remarkable example of the continuity of Islamic intellectual history, as Avicennan kalam continues to be relevant for intellectuals in late 19th century Egypt. But if Al-Afghani and Abdu took an interest in the past, they were no conservatives. To the contrary, they were reformists and modernizers who insisted that the Islamic tradition already contained the seeds of worthwhile ideas that had only later been discovered in Christendom. Darwinian evolution? It's anticipated in a verse of the Quran. Democracy? Its virtues are enshrined in Islamic teaching through the practice of shura or consultation among the community. Abdu left Egypt when the British invaded in 1882, joining Al-Afghani in Paris. From here, the two published a political journal, the Standard Forum for Political Dissent in this final phase of the Ottoman Empire. And I have to mention this fantastic title among the Egyptian periodicals, Mr. Sunglasses, after the nickname of the Jewish reforming intellectual who founded it. But Abdu would eventually break with Al-Afghani. This may be because Abdu came to advocate a degree of cooperation with the British in Egypt, moving away from his teacher's implacable opposition to colonialist power. He returned to Egypt and to Al-Azhar University, where he taught for a number of years before the government appointed him mufti, or chief judge of all Egypt, which to be honest, shows more faith in philosophy professors than I would. During this time, Abdu continued to promote a reformist agenda. He declared war on taqlid, the blind acceptance of tradition that we've so often seen condemned. Abdu took himself to be advocating a return to the true original teaching of Islam. He was convinced that weakness in Islamic societies in the face of colonial power was a punishment for a divergence from this teaching. The traditional scholars among the ulema, trapped within their sclerotic ways of thinking by taqlid, were only perpetuating an erroneous approach to Islam. For Abdu, nothing represented this error more than a belief in fatalism or determinism, that is, the view that God has predestined all that will happen. Such a belief naturally lends itself to passivity and quietism, an attitude of waiting to see what God has ordained. This is the opposite of what is needed to improve society, and what is demanded by Islam, individual action. For Abdu, political reform and religious commitment went hand in hand. This sentiment would find agreement with our second Muhammad, who we'll turn to now, and if I'm in the mood perhaps there will even be another Muhammad or two at the end of the episode. Muhammad Iqbal was born in the Punjab in the year 1877. This was a time of intellectual upheaval for Muslims in the subcontinent. We know already that there was continuity with the scholarly traditions of the past, for instance with the Khaira Badi school of Avisanizing philosopher theologians. But we also know that over in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century, the young Ottoman and young Turk movements were taking inspiration from European scientific and political ideas and challenging long entrenched institutions and ideologies. Things in India were no different. Leading the charge for the modernists was Syed Ahmad Khan, who died just at the end of the century in 1898. He founded the Aligarh University as a means of bringing westernizing education into India, a replacement of the Darci Nizami curriculum followed by religious scholars over the last few centuries. But, like his reform-minded Ottoman contemporaries, Khan was no slavish devotee of all European ideas. He pointed out that scholars had long ago responded to the Greek-Arabic translations by taking the best of the Hellenic heritage and discarding what was erroneous. He urged the scholars of his day to do likewise, by responding to recent scientific discoveries. He was confident that they would find nothing but agreement with Islam so long as the religious sources were interpreted properly. For Khan saw Islam as what he called a natural religion, in perfect harmony with whatever science could deliver. On the political front, meanwhile, reformers in India were proclaiming that democratic ideals could be discovered in the Quran and hadith. Such ideals were needed to stage a renewal of Islam in the subcontinent, to reverse what these modernizers saw as the backwardness of their co-religionists. A telling example is Khan's view on polygamy. Although Islam in theory allows a man to marry more than one woman, it also requires the husband to treat all the wives equally, but that is impossible in practice so that Islam effectively prohibits polygamy. Khan's ingenious interpretation, by the way, was taken over by Abdur in Egypt. Meanwhile, more traditionally minded scholars were insisting on the value of the Islamic sciences as they had been practiced for so many generations. A member of the Faragh-e-Mahal school tradition, which was still alive in the early 20th century, followed Khan's example by founding a new institution for those traditional sciences in 1919. A key point in the political debates of the time was the relationship between Islam and the state. Could Muslims living under colonial rule still be said to live within the sphere of the Islamic faith, called in Arabic dar al-Islam? Or does Islam demand that its believers recognize only political leaders who claim the mantle of religious authority? In 1922, an answer to this question came in a fatwa issued in Delhi affirming the need for a caliph who wields both secular and religious authority. The contrary view was that religion and politics can be, and perhaps even should be, separate. A people need not be united by religious allegiance, they can gather together as an independent nation. In the Islamic world, this secularist version of nationalist ideology has had its most famous expression in the rise of Turkey following the demise of the Ottoman Empire. But nationalism had supporters among Muslims in India as well, whose ideology would have a concrete focus after the partition of India and formation of Pakistan in 1947. Many have seen Iqbal as a forerunner of Pakistani nationalism, and it is true that early on he was attracted to the nation-state ideology. But in his later years, he turned against the whole idea of a state defined independently of religion. In fact, he remarked that nationalism was the greatest threat to Islam. That might sound a bit alarmist, but bear in mind the Mongols were no longer around. And Iqbal believed that nationalism, like the Mongols, had the power to break empires. He saw the nation-state as a distinctively Western development, in which nationalism replaces religion as the bond between people, something he connected to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Yet Iqbal was no knee-jerk opponent of Western ideas. To the contrary, he spent years studying at several European universities, including the LMU in Munich, where I work. I'm pleased to say that this is where Iqbal got his PhD. He then returned to India, settling in Lahore, where he became a leading poet in the Urdu language. Rejecting the idea of art for art's sake, Iqbal determined that his poetry would have political significance. He called his verses a song of war. During his time in Europe, Iqbal absorbed the ideas of Western thinkers, and drew on them for the rest of his career. A glance through a set of English-language lectures he gave in several Indian cities, published in 1934 under the title The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, gives one a sense of his wide range of influences. At one point, he quotes on a single page the pre-Socratic ancient philosophers Zeno of Aliyah, the Muslim thinkers Al-Ash'ari and Ibn Hazm, the Western philosophers Bergson and Russell, and the mathematician Cantor. Not exactly without any gaps, but still pretty impressive. Among the European thinkers, the most influential for Iqbal was Friedrich Nietzsche. We've seen a lot of surprising uses of European philosophical ideas in these podcasts, but perhaps none is more surprising than the spectacle of an Indian intellectual using Nietzsche to vindicate Islam. As you probably know, and as we'll be exploring in depth someday if all goes well, Nietzsche was a late 19th century German thinker who mounted a searching critique of Judeo-Christian values. He argued that Christianity consists in a self-abnegating embrace of weakness over strength, of the otherworldly over this world. Iqbal agreed with this assessment, and then added that just the reverse is true of Islam. For Iqbal, the Qur'an is the revelatory text that celebrates this world. It concentrates on the particular and concrete, demanding its readers to marvel at the physical world as an expression of God's might. In this respect, the Islamic revelation was fundamentally opposed to the abstract theorizing tendency we can see in Greek philosophy. So for Iqbal, it was a crass error to use Hellenic ideas to expound the Qur'an, as did the early philosophers and theologians in the Islamic world. The affinity for this world also accounts for the great achievements in natural science made by Muslims. These achievements, he hastens to add, lay behind the rise of modern science in Europe, with experimenters like Roger Bacon drawing on Muslim predecessors like Ibn al-Haytham. This aspect of Iqbal's thought makes him seem like a hardcore rationalist, along the lines of his fellow Indian intellectual Ahmad Khan or Abdullah Chavedat and Zia Gokalp of the Young Turks in the late Ottoman Empire. But Iqbal, like so many Muslim thinkers before him, saw no tension between extolling rational science and cherishing the prospect of super-rational intuition, as described in the Sufi tradition. There are, Iqbal notes, only three ways to reach knowledge. Experience of nature, the lessons of history, and intuitive union with reality. In the Islamic tradition, Iqbal could point to scientists like Ibn al-Haytham who learned from nature, and to Ibn Khaldun who learned from history. The Sufis alone achieved intuitive knowledge. But, again alluding to Western ideas, Iqbal rejects a strict opposition made by the American philosopher William James between mystical consciousness and normal everyday consciousness. The two are in fact continuous. The difference is that mystical intuition sees reality all at once, whereas rational inquiry takes things bit by bit. Iqbal thus gives his approval not to James, but to his fellow poet Rumi, who spoke of grasping the whole unity of the divine with the heart, rather than restricting oneself to the use of reason. In accordance with these Sufi-inspired ideas, Iqbal argues that the function of religion is not to lay down a rigid, unchanging law which all its adherents must forever obey. Together Islam has the flexibility to adapt itself to the needs of different peoples, places and times. For this idea, Iqbal refers to the earlier Indian Sufi thinker Shah Wali Allah. However it manifests in a given case, Islam is meant to be realized through political institutions. The original Muhammad was a lawgiver and leader, not just a prophet, a sign that Islam is politically engaged. Unlike Christianity, which Iqbal believes focuses only on salvation of the individual believer. Through its political manifestation, Islam guides its adherents towards a unified grasp of reality, and towards harmony with one another. Here lies the fundamental error of the nationalist project. The nation-state is built around ethnic or geographical identity rather than religious devotion. By separating a state from spirit, this political ideal creates what Iqbal calls a dualism which does not exist in Islam. But remember, Iqbal is a Nietzschean. When he speaks of achieving union through intuitive understanding, he does not mean an escape from this world. The ascetic traditions within Sufism are something he dismisses as corruptions, the result of influence from world-denying traditions such as Neoplatonism or Buddhism. In place of the false Sufism of unity with an otherworldly divinity, Iqbal wants to achieve unity within this world. This is his understanding of tawhid, the central Islamic tenet of God's oneness. He puts it as follows, Islam demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man's loyalty to his own ideal nature. This is the link between Iqbal's political thought, his Sufi-inflected ideas about knowledge, and his admiration for science. If God is in the world, then we know him by knowing the world in its wholeness and its unity, and reflecting that wholeness and unity in our political affairs. The ultimate aim for Islam is to achieve global solidarity in a kind of Muslim League of Nations. Geographical and racial divisions would be acknowledged only for facility of reference, as he puts it, rather than providing identity to the community as in the western nation-state. Easier said than done, of course. Iqbal was painfully aware that unity was hard to come by among the Muslims of India, never mind across the globe. So when it came to concrete political proposals, he was practical enough to suggest taking small steps toward the ultimate goal of Islamic unity. Within India, he thought it a good idea to assign different regions to different communities, and his goal of pan-Islamic unity did not stop him from urging individual Muslim countries to strive for internal coherence and strength. Just as Iqbal's epistemology makes a place for both rational science, which investigates the world one part at a time, and Sufi intuition, which sees the whole in one glance, so Iqbal's political theory recognizes the need for strong parts within the whole. The unified parts of the global Muslim whole could be nations, and within those nations, also individuals. The individual self must develop towards fulfillment, but it can only do so within the context of a well-run society. With his all-for-one and one-for-all theories of knowledge and politics, Iqbal set out a nuanced, moderate position. He did not adopt the hardcore rationalism of Ahmad Khan, yet he was equally critical of the conservative attitudes of the Indian ulema. Politically, he rejected the secular nation-state ideal of the young Turks. At the other extreme were thinkers like Abu'l-Ala Maududi, who wanted to see the founding of explicitly Islamic states defined by their adherence to the religious law. Iqbal influenced Maududi with his idea that Islam can provide a political ideology, but unlike him insisted on the flexibility and adaptation of Islam to historical change and the character of each given community. So there you have it, Abdou and Iqbal, two of the leading thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And you know, I do believe they've put me in the mood to mention one more recent Muhammad, the Algerian Mohamed Arqoun, who died just recently in 2010. Arqoun had something in common with me. No, not because I've decided to change my first name to Muhammad, though now that I think about it Peter Chang has a nice ring to it. What I mean is that he was also a historian of philosophy in the Islamic world. He devoted particular attention to the ethicist and historian Miskawe, a contemporary of Avicenna's, who made an appearance in this podcast in episode 134. Arqoun took Miskawe to be a central figure in a humanist movement that took place in the Islamic world in the 10th and 11th centuries. Arqoun was not just a historian though. He was also an original philosopher in his own right, with an approach shaped by French philosophical culture. He held a professorship at the Sorbonne. Being of Berber background, and having a foot in both Algerian and French culture, Arqoun was intimately familiar with the experience of being an outsider. This, along with his study of the very different worldview he found in medieval authors like Miskawe, led him to reflect on the nature of religious and social identity. Arqoun thought that the answer lay in what he called the imaginaire, the images and concepts through which a group perceives reality. The imaginaire defines the boundaries of what is thinkable for the adherents of a religion or members of a society. By remaining within these boundaries, Muslims adhere to the orthodoxy that defines them as a group. That orthodoxy is not determined by the Qur'an. Rather, the revelation is in itself open-ended, subject to an indefinite range of interpretations. The limits imposed by orthodoxy close down alternative readings of the Qur'an, establishing a concrete set of laws, practices, and even a specific form of reasoning. Thus, Arqoun distinguishes between the Qur'anic revelation and the Islamic reality that is made out of it. Living in multicultural, colonialist, and post-colonialist societies, all three Muhammad's – Abdu, Iqbal, and Arqoun – struggled with this issue of religious identity. In their different ways, they all drew a distinction between the revelatory message brought by the Prophet Muhammad and what had been made out of that revelation in subsequent centuries. This has been true of other recent thinkers too. From the conservatives who have adopted Ibn Taymiyya's Salafism to feminists like Fatima Mernissi, many modern Muslim intellectuals have questioned tradition, paradoxically proposing to renew Islam by going back to its ultimate origins. Yet, thinkers who arose long ago in Islamic history have remained relevant. Abdu was steeped in the traditions of eviscerizing kalam, Iqbal endorsed the universalist vision of Shah Wali Allah, and Arqoun took inspiration from Miskawe's humanism. Many other thinkers have turned to Averroes, seeing him as the arch-rationalist of Islamic history. For instance, yet another Muhammad, the Moroccan thinker Muhammad al-Jaberi, who, like Arqoun, died in 2010. Already in the year 1902, in fact, Iqbal engaged in a debate with one of his contemporaries, who lamented the indifference with which Muslims had greeted Averroes. Other thinkers with great currency in modern-day Islam include Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun. But among all the historical figures we've met, one in particular has given rise to a vibrant, still-living philosophical tradition. And you'll never guess what his middle name was. Join me next time as we look at the legacy of Sadr-Ad-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi, better known as Mullah Sadr, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, I ran so far after Sadr. Driving a car while under the influence is absolutely unacceptable, but doing philosophy while under the influence is all but unavoidable. Just as practically all art and literature responds to previous works in the same fields, so practically all philosophers are in close dialogue with their predecessors. We've now surveyed almost the entire history of philosophy in the Islamic world, so we would now be in a position to ask, who has been the most influential figure of all from this tradition? Taking the long historical view, there is only one possible answer, Avicenna. But we could take a different tack, and ask which thinker has provided the most inspiration for Islamic philosophy today and in the recent past. Here the answer is not quite so clear, but a very strong case could be made for Mullah Sadr. In modern day Iran, religious scholars still study the works of Sadr, not just as a historical figure, but as a philosopher whose teachings remain relevant to their social and religious concerns. In this episode, we're going to look at how this came about, concentrating on two of the foremost exponents of his thought in the last two centuries, Sabzavari and Tabatabai. They will bring us up to the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Of course, when that revolution deposed the last of the Iranian Shahs, it was not the Safavid dynasty that was being ended. The Safavids already lost their hegemony in Iran in 1722, ushering in a period of fractured tribal rule for most of the 18th century. Finally, one tribe, the Khajars, rose to dominance and held sway in Iran from 1796 to 1925. The Khajars liked to compare themselves to great Persian empires of the past, the Ikhaymenids and Sassanians, but the reality was rather different. Throughout the 19th century, they struggled to fend off pressure from the Russians and British. As in the Ottoman Empire, European-inspired reforms were brought in, but this didn't prevent Iran from being effectively colonialized. A new dynasty began when Riza Khan, a Russian-trained officer, seized power in a 1921 coup. He would be installed as the first Pahlavi Shah in 1926. The succeeding line of monarchs would end only thanks to the 1979 revolution. Now, if you read around in Histories of Islamic Philosophy, you can easily get the impression that Mullah Sadra was the central thinker for Iranians throughout all these upheavals and changes of power. But in fact, it was really only in the 19th century under the Khajars that he became the central figure. A good deal of the credit for this can go to Zabzavari. Born on the cusp of the 19th century in 1797 or 98, his name refers to his home city of Zabzavar, which lies in the northeastern corner of Iran. He was scathing in his assessment of the state of philosophy in his day, writing that it was woven by spiders of forgetfulness. Yet it was still possible for him to study the classical works of Sufism and logic, and above all the writings of Sadra, with masters in Mashhad and in Isfahan, still a center of philosophical activity as it had been in the glory days of the Safavids. On the other hand, in Isfahan, he also encountered Ahmed Asahi, known for his highly critical attitude towards Sadra. Like so many of the Muslim thinkers we've looked at, and for that matter the Jewish philosophers we looked at, Zabzavari was a jurist as well as a philosopher. He maintained the ascetic lifestyle we've come to expect from Sufi inclined thinkers, though he did allow himself the luxury of a pair of eyeglasses. A biographical notice on him makes a point of mentioning these, adding that the spectacles make a nice metaphor for his advanced spiritual insight. Well put, but when it comes to stories about eyewear and 19th century Islamic intellectual history, I prefer the anecdote I mentioned in the last episode about the Egyptian Jewish reformer and journal founder called Mr. Sunglasses. To be honest, it puts the one about Zabzavari in the shade. But Zabzavari himself was no shady character. In fact, he was a follower of the illuminationist tradition, or at least the version of illuminationism he found in Mullah Sadra. He wrote a large number of works in both Arabic and Persian, some dedicated to Qajar royalty. Following the tendency of later Muslim thinkers to present their ideas in the form of glosses and commentaries, Zabzavari produced exegetical works on several of Sadra's writings, and also on the poetry of Rumi. He also commented on his own poetry, composing verses on topics in philosophy and logic, and then writing his own explanatory treatises as a guide to the poems. This may sound like a rather odd approach, but it makes a lot of sense if you are trying to explain complicated ideas for the novice. In the days before PowerPoint, the most powerful way to get a point across and make it memorable was to put it in verse. The commentary he added unpacks the poetic material for the student reader. To be extra sure, Zabzavari later added a further layer of explanatory glosses on the commentary. As friend of the podcast Sajjad Rizvi has put it, it was through this textbook that "...the thought of Mula Sadra was simplified, vernacularized, and disseminated." Its popularity is shown by the fact that it has itself become the object of further commentaries, more than 40 of them in the past century and a half. Zabzavari's commentary on his philosophical poem has been translated into English. A quick perusal of the book will show even the casual reader that, well, that the reader is going to have to spend some more time with it to make any sense of what Zabzavari is trying to say. It may be a carefully thought out textbook, but is also full of technical language and subtle metaphysical argument. It does help if you know something about Sadra and the tradition of debates over Avicenna's metaphysics that led up to him, which fortunately we do. Zabzavari starts by sounding a familiar note when he argues for the primacy of existence. This position, which was also the one adopted by the mature Sadra, insists that existence is not a mere mental construct, but a concrete reality out in the world. Indeed, again following Sadra, Zabzavari holds that there is really nothing out in the world other than existence. Its reality is in fact obvious, a point already made by Avicenna. The hard question is what we should understand by existence exactly. He gives a number of arguments against those who, like Sadra's teacher, Mir Dhanad, instead hold that essences are real and that existence is all in the mind. My favorite of these goes as follows. Causes are obviously prior to their effects. But if all we have to work with is essences, then this priority remains inexplicable. Imagine for instance that one fire starts another fire. Clearly, every fire, just insofar as it is a fire, is equal in essence to every other fire with none having priority to any other. So the fire that plays the role of cause must have something else that is giving it priority over the one it ignites. This will be existence, since the cause is the source of the existence for the effect. That is what makes it prior. You'd think that Mir Dhanad would have seen this point, given that one of his most important works was entitled Blazing Embers. Of course, the cause that most interests Zabzavari is God, and here his burning ambition is to keep the flame of a sadra's philosophical theology alight. To this end, he explains and defends the core sadrian teaching of modulation or analogy in being, in Arabic tashqiq. You'll remember that according to this teaching, all things have existence in varying degrees or intensities. Not only does Zabzavari think this doctrine is true, he argues that it is really unavoidable, at least once sadra has pointed out the option. Again, his argument is ingenious. Start with the fact that, as Avicenna already observed, God does not just have a particularly impressive essence that receives existence. God does not receive existence at all, for he is a necessary being, and has no cause. For this reason, we must say that God or God's essence just is his existence. But if this is right, then as At-Tuzi already observed, what we mean by existence, in God's essence, cannot be the same as what it means in the case of something like you, me, a giraffe, or the Eiffel Tower. All of these non-divine things have existence as additional to their essences. Actually, Zabzavari can't quite say that, since like sadra, he doesn't think that essences are real, only existence is real. But he can say that created things have causes, and are thus dependent in their existence. In this respect, they are fundamentally unlike God. So if we say that existence is not modulated, in other words that existence always means the same thing, we are faced with a stark choice. Genuine existence belongs either to God or to created things. It can't belong to both, since the two cases are so different. But if genuine existence belongs to created things, we are putting God beyond the bounds of existence completely. That doesn't look like a good move, especially if we want to keep saying that God is the necessary existent. Zabzavari says that such a move would in fact render God completely unknowable to us. So it looks like it will have to be God that genuinely exists. But in that case, it is created things that don't exist, which looks equally implausible. Instead, we should drop the assumption that existence always means the same thing. Rather, existence varies from case to case. Both God and the Eiffel Tower exist, but with vastly different intensities of existence. Also with vastly different views of Paris. God's is even better. As I say, Zabzavari follows Sadr in believing that essences are only in the mind, not in reality. It may seem to us as though the world is divided up nicely into various kinds of things, but in fact there is only the scale of perfection in existence, decreasing gradually as it moves away from God. Zabzavari draws an important conclusion from this. Avicenna and earlier Aristotelian philosophers had assumed that the world of the mind corresponds quite closely to the concrete world out there. But now that we are thinking along these Sadrian lines, we see that this is just not true. Our minds impose rigid distinctions where none really exists. In one of the most striking illustrations of the gulf between mental and concrete existence we've seen so far, Zabzavari points out that even impossible things, like a second god, can exist in the mind. In fact, even non-existence has mental existence because we can think about it. This sort of point could easily lead to skepticism, as it threatened to do at around this same time among Muslim philosophers working in India. In the 20th century, Sadr himself would be greeted with some skepticism. A group of Iranian theologians, known as the Maqtabi tafqiq, have been bitterly opposed to his influence, and the practice of philosophy more generally. They urge us to turn, not to Sadra and other philosophers, but to revelation and the teachings of the Imams recognized in Shi'ite Islam. Paired with the innate awareness of God, implanted into every human soul, these religious sources offer the best, indeed the only, way towards knowledge. With their hostile stance towards philosophy, the members of the Maqtabi tafqiq were carrying on a tradition of opposition to Sadra that extends back to the Safavid period, and as I mentioned before, Sabzavadi's contemporary Ahmad Asahi was similarly critical. In the 20th century, the anti-philosophical movement even tried to have one of the foremost adherents of Sadra's thought banned from teaching the subject. The adherent in question was, however, not to be budged. He insisted that his students had come to him with a suitcase full of doubts and problems, as he nicely put it, so that he had a duty to share his learning with these troubled young men. And share he did. His name was Sayyid Muhammad Hossein Tabatabai, usually honored with the epithet alama, meaning the knowledgeable or the erudite. Alama Tabatabai was born in 1904 into a family with long-standing scholarly credentials. He was orphaned at an early age and brought up by one of those scholarly relatives, an uncle, who saw to it that Tabatabai was properly trained. He studied law and philosophy in Najaf. The philosophical works he read there give us another indication of the remarkable staying power of authors from the formative period. Of course, Tabatabai was schooled in Avicenna, but he also studied Miskaway for ethics. In the Sadrian tradition, he read works by Sadra himself and the explanatory guidance of Sabzavari. After a stay in the city of Tabriz was cut short by a Soviet invasion of northern Iran, Tabatabai came to the city of Qom in 1946. This is where he would spend the rest of his career teaching the works of Sadra and other philosophers against some opposition, as I just mentioned, and producing a staggeringly huge commentary on the Quran. This took Tabatabai about 20 years to write and is distinguished by its insistence on using the Quran to interpret itself. That is, he explained each passage in light of other passages from the Quran, rather than extraneous material. At this point, I probably don't still have to be emphasizing that there have been extremely pious Muslims on both sides of the debate as to the value of philosophy. But what the heck, I'll emphasize it one more time. Tabatabai led an ascetic life, like Zabzabari before him, venerated the Shiite Imams, and was one of the great modern-day commentators on the Quran. The tension between him and the skeptical critics of philosophy among the Muqtabi tafkik was not a conflict between reason and Shiite piety, but between two different conceptions of what pious-Shiism should consist in. While Tabatabai was obviously on the pro-philosophy side in this debate, he was no blind follower of Mullah Sadr. He avoided teaching Sadr's views on the afterlife, evidently finding these problematic. More positively, he brought the Sadrian philosophy to bear on contemporary issues, arguing forcefully against the atheism and materialism of the Marxist philosophy that had just gained ascendancy in the Soviet Union. Against this ideology, Tabatabai put forward a novel distinction between the etibari and the hakiki, which means something like conventional as opposed to inherent. His idea was that social arrangements are brought about by human convention, but that they nonetheless have a basis in what is really useful and good for humankind. A simple example would be something like real estate. If someone is recognized as the owner of a parcel of land on the basis that he moved onto the land and worked it so as to raise crops there, then his ownership is, as Tabatabai would put it, a matter of etibar, or social custom. But it is based on the real effort that the farmer put into the land, so that the custom has a basis in reality. A similar story can be told about all good political and legal arrangements. Tabatabai died in 1981, only two years after the 1979 revolution which deposed the last of the Pahlavi Shahs. His relationship to the revolution remains a contentious issue. In 1979, he was too old to take part in any meaningful way, but some of his students were involved in the revolution. He had also earlier endorsed the notion that an outstanding individual may be recognized as head of the jurists in the absence of guidance from the line of imams venerated by the Shiites. This idea was also used by Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the revolution. Less controversial is the role Tabatabai played in influencing two scholars who have had a major impact on the perception of Islamic philosophy in Europe and the United States. In 1958, he was visited by the French scholar Henri Corbin, and he was later a colleague of the Iranian-born philosopher and historian Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr had been educated in the United States before returning to Iran to work as a professor of philosophy. The revolution broke out while he was on a trip abroad, and Nasr did not return, instead taking up academic positions in the States. Tabatabai inspired Corbin and Nasr to advance a new assessment of the philosophical tradition of Islam. Like this podcast, they argued forcefully against the idea that this tradition ended with Haverawis. They and their students have emphasized the role of Persian culture throughout the history of philosophy in Islam, and seen Mullah Sadra as the key figure of the later centuries. Taking their cue from Sadra himself, they have promoted an interpretation of Islamic intellectual history which highlights philosophical Sufism and Illuminationism. Nasr in particular, however, has not been content to be a mere historian of philosophy. Inspired not only by Sadra, but by traditions of thought from across the globe, he has been an advocate of what he calls the perennial philosophy, which consists of a core of doctrines and spiritual goals that is found in many religious and philosophical traditions including Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity. With this idea of perennial philosophy, Nasr is apt to remind us more of Dara Shikoh and especially Shah Wali Allah, Muslim thinkers who have likewise pointed to the commonalities spanning religious and cultural boundaries. Admittedly, when Nasr spells out the content of this perennial philosophy, he does tend to sound a lot like a Sadrian philosopher. He says things like, But what is really important to Nasr here is the idea of the absolute, which for him represents a core religious teaching that conflicts with modern-day relativism and materialism. He does not discount the differences between religious traditions and ritual practices. To the contrary, he insists that each such tradition represents a new independent descent of the absolute into our reality. But the unity of God as the absolute guarantees that there will be a single unity underlying all the disparate religious teachings. The perennial philosophy has some surprising advantages according to Nasr. For instance, it can form the basis of a realistic and effective environmentalist philosophy, because members of all these religions accept the need to place cosmic harmony above the selfish gratification of our individual desires. Nasr is rather dismissive of secular atheistic approaches to environmental ethics, however well-intentioned, if only for practical reasons, since most people on the planet are religious and need to be given reasons to safeguard the environment that speak to their religious worldview. Speaking as one of the mere historians, another group that Nasr tends to dismiss, I see another significant advantage in Nasr's approach. He and Courban were among the earliest to call attention to the riches of later philosophy in the Islamic world. In these podcasts, I certainly haven't adopted their interpretive approach wholesale. For one thing, I've emphasized the role of philosophical theologians in the Sunni tradition more than they would. Also, I tend to disagree with them when it comes to the interpretation of Avicenna himself, no small point, since Avicenna has been so central in nearly all subsequent philosophical developments in the Islamic world. But without the work of Courban and Nasr, there would be far less awareness of post-Avicenna and Eastern thought in the Islamic world. So indirectly, you have them to thank, or blame, for the last 25 podcasts or so. With Nasr and a few of the other still-living or recently deceased thinkers I've looked at, like Fatimah Mernissi and Muhammad Arkun, I've now brought this story of philosophy in the Islamic world up to the present day. Obviously, there would be much, much more to say about the last century of Islamic intellectual history. One could easily imagine another dozen episodes or so on topics we've only touched on briefly, such as political Islam, the rationalism of thinkers inspired by Averroes, and also on regions in the Islamic world I haven't even mentioned, like Indonesia. But one has to stop somewhere, and I'm going to stop here. In two weeks, I'll be rewinding one and a half millennia to pick up a thread that I left dangling 75 episodes ago, the beginnings of medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom. After that, we'll be looking at philosophy in the Byzantine Empire, and somewhere in there I'll also be kicking off the spin-off series of episodes on classical philosophy in India in collaboration with Jannardin Gennari. But speaking of collaboration, I do want to devote one more episode to developments in recent Islamic philosophy. For that, I'll be joined by one of the very few European scholars who is doing research on that topic, Anke von Kügelgen. She'll be my guest in the next and last episode on philosophy in the Islamic world, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy in the contemporary Islamic world with Anke von Kugelgen, who is professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Bern. Hello, Professor von Kugelgen. Hello. Thank you for coming on the show. Obviously, there are Muslims living all over the world in very different societies. There isn't really much reason to think that philosophical developments in say Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, whatever, are all going to be the same. Is it nonetheless possible to identify general philosophical trends in the Islamic world over the last century or so? Your question is very legitimate. Indeed, the so-called Muslim societies differ considerably from each other in many respects. Not least in regard to philosophical wedanchawung, you might call that currents and teachings. Unfortunately, the knowledge of the development of philosophy in the 19th to the 20th centuries in Muslim societies is still very limited though. There has been almost no research into this in the West. Although philosophical questions and arguments play an important role, not least in public debates about social and state reforms, social and supranational identities, human, individual and collective rights. With some of my doctoral students, I'm about to create at our institute a main research area, which we call contemporary philosophy in the near and Middle East. The nucleus or basis of it is a book that is an overview of philosophy in the Islamic world covering the 19th and 20th centuries, which I direct and co-edit with my colleague, Professor Ulrich Rudolf, and we have a redactor, Michael Frey. It will be the fourth volume of an overview of the whole history of the philosophy in the Islamic world. What the so-called Muslim societies share with each other, and by the way, I would say with many other non-Western societies and even with Western societies themselves, is in my view, the challenge of modern philosophy and science. Be it Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, or Lahore in the second half of the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century, the main ideas of positivism, Darwinism, materialism, socialism and constitutionalism provoked extensive reactions. They were particularly discussed in the newly established cultural and scientific journals and in some private schools, primarily, I would say, at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. And the responses to these challenging ideas varied just like in Europe or in the United States. Sometimes scholars welcomed the new developments, sometimes rejected them, and sometimes remained undecided. Of course, the responses were developed against the background of one's own intellectual traditions, and that is normal. And these traditions differed quite considerably from each other in terms of what was taught at the madrasas, that is, Muslim schools. There would be a difference between a mainly Shiite context like Iran and a predominantly Sunni environment like Egypt or the other countries nominally or fully belonging to the Ottoman Empire. Then there were also many private schools, not least the Christian confessional schools, either indigenous or run by missionaries. Despite all that, when they were confronted with a new understanding of science and philosophy, the differences between the traditions played a very minor role. Modern science, as you well know, had abundant determinism and any belief in unshakable knowledge, shifting to empirically based research and an heuristic approach. Philosophy had more or less given up on metaphysics, thus the core of what had been considered among Muslim philosophers over centuries as the first and most noble part of philosophy, meaning metaphysics seemed to have lost its meaning. Moreover, many parts of philosophy had, so to speak, gained independence and turned into sciences like psychology and sociology during the 19th century. That process, you all know, already started earlier with, for instance, biology and physics and spun off new sciences in the 19th centuries like paleontology. There were, roughly speaking, I would say, three main ways of reacting to this immense challenge, to stick to tradition, to adapt the modern ideas, or to harmonize the two with one another. Some schools successfully sealed themselves off from European influences and are even today still teaching traditional deterministic philosophies. So, for instance, in Iran, but also in India and Pakistan, the school following the Shirazian philosopher of being or existence, wajood in Arabic, mula sadra, from the 16th century, is still alive and well. Then, at the other extreme, there was wholehearted adaptation. At first, the European models were rather strongly imitated. So you have, for instance, the doctor, a medical doctor, Shibley Shumai from Lebanon and the Ottoman thinker Bahat Tefik, who propagated evolutionism following really one to one, more or less, the Germans, Ludwig Büchner or Ernst Hegel. Or you have the Iranian Azeri writer Mirza Fathali Ahunzadeh and the Ottoman politician and diplomat Ahmed Rizha, who spread positivism among their compatriots. These authors were, however, not all that influential in their home countries, though their writings are still in print today. The third approach was, as I said, in the middle, incorporating the new ideas into the traditional religious framework. Here, the first examples were Muslim reformers like the Iranian cosmopolitan and also political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. By the way, he is an Iranian or was an Iranian, not an Afghan. The Egyptian educational reformer and Mufti Muhammad Abduh and the Indian educational reformer said Ahmed Khan. Their motto was that Islam is a rational religion. So here, they are taking on the well-known claim of the classical Muslim philosophers and theologians that Islam is in full harmony with reason and thus with science and philosophy. But this idea, which seems to imply that reason or revelation has to submit to the other, took on a new aspect in the face of philosophies that are solely interested in this world and no longer in metaphysics or in God's essence and his attributes. In many Muslim societies, it stimulated the reformers to what I would call anthropologize the understanding of religion. The center of interest became the individual human being and the societies that human beings built. Since these reformers considered modern science and philosophy as a necessary mean to progress and fully compatible with Islam, they helped pave the way to a secularization of knowledge. So now let me come back to the core of your question, which was about developments and different geographical locations. At first, one can observe similar and closely connected developments across the Islamic world, especially until the establishment of national states in the near Middle East and in North Africa. But then, philosophies have become more diverse with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire into the republics of Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, among others after World War One, also independence from Great Britain in the case of Egypt, India and Pakistan, and as you all know from France and North Africa. In general, we can say that in each country, mainstream political philosophy has clearly been marked by state ideology. For instance, socialism in Syria, Iraq, and also in Egypt, especially in the 1950s and 60s. Camelism in Turkey from the 1930s onwards, followed by the Turkish Islamic synthesis. In Iran, then, you have the struggle between the constitutionalists and the adherents of the state doctrine of the Wilayet-e-Fakhr, which means the guardianship of the Jewish consort. Although the internal development and tradition of each country also plays a role in other fields of philosophy, the interest in European and North American philosophy remains a strong common feature. Here, the colonial background has left its imprint, of course. French philosophers like Henri Bergson and nowadays Michel Foucault, and also the French reception of English and German philosophers prevail, for instance, in Tunisia or Morocco, whereas you find English philosophers as, for instance, Herbert Spencer, Bertrand Russell, and also the English reception of French and German philosophers prevailing in Egypt and India. In Turkey, for instance, we see influence from philosophers in exile. This is very interesting. The neo-positivist Hans Reichenbach, and especially the historian of philosophy, Hans von Astell, have been very influential through their teachings and pupils at the University of Istanbul and had a major impact on the development of academic philosophy. So, we do see a divergence between different natures. Still, there have been some clear common features too. Since the late 17th of the last century, there is a new field that might be labeled philosophy of Turaz. That is the philosophically inspired, completely new interpretation of the Muslim intellectual heritage. It started in Lebanon and Syria with Hossein Muroo and Qayyab Tizini, and has been taken up in many Arab-speaking countries, with Muhammad Abed al-Jabri from Morocco as its known renowned representative. His works are widespread, apparently also in Indonesia. Okay, so it's a very complicated situation, a lot of variety, but also some common features. One thing I'm wondering is about the institutional frameworks within which philosophy is being practiced in the Islamic world today. So, should we be thinking in terms of like independent scholars outside the academy, maybe political commentators and activists, or should we be thinking more about people like us? So, academics who work in universities or maybe in the madrasa or maybe both? In fact, you have both. Philosophy in terms of the continuation of traditional schools of commentaries on Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, or Mulla Mahamudra in India is still taught at the madrasas. And it continues to be taught rather traditionally even at the reformed schools like for instance the Azhar. In Cairo. Yeah, in Cairo. The spread of European philosophy happened outside these institutions. This is very important to note. At the turn of the 20th century, the main channel of dissemination was cultural and scientific journals, not universities, they were not there. They were run by Muslim or Christian intellectuals, frequently medical doctors, but often self-made journalists and writers who knew at least one European language and had traveled to Europe, in some cases also the United States. The first case was apparently the Ottoman journal Felsa Fé Majmose that had survived for only six months in 1913. That may just be typical for the time since we find a lot of other non-specialized journals with only a short lifespan in that period. So this is not something special really. In some Arabic countries, professional philosophical journals started to appear in the last quarter of the 20th century. They have been closely linked to the universities and their philosophical departments, as well as to philosophical societies and congresses. In fact, philosophical societies and congresses have been another mean of disseminating philosophy, both traditional and modern types and currents also. Probably the first philosophical Congress to meet regularly is the Indian Philosophical Congress. And it was already created in 1925 at the initiative of Sarva Pali Radhakrishnan, who became president of India then in the 1960s. Most of these philosophical congresses and societies are national institutions or at least nationally anchored. Pakistan and afterwards also Bangladesh established their own philosophical associations and also Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan have their own philosophical societies. So this is like analogous to the American Philosophical Association or something? Exactly. Right, okay. With the establishment of modern universities, which started in the late 1920s in Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran and so on, and in India even earlier than that, philosophy had a new kind of academic context that profoundly differed from that of a madrasa. In these universities, philosophy was soon being taught just like in Europe or the United States. I mean, just like we know it nowadays. The main difference is that besides the main fields of theoretical and practical philosophy and the history of Western philosophy as well as modern logic, there has been always a chair of Islamic philosophy. In contrast though to the traditional commentary-oriented teaching at the madrasa, Islamic philosophy is understood in terms of the history of the development of philosophy in Muslim societies. Depending on the chair holder however, what is understood then under Islamic philosophy can differ quite considerably. So for instance, the first chair holder of Islamic philosophy at the University of Egypt, nowadays it's the Cairo University, Mustafa Abd al-Razk, developed a new perspective on the emergence of Islamic philosophy. According to him, it did not only arise due to the influence of Greek and other cultures, but had its origins also in the methods of Islamic jurisprudence, el-Mussula al-fik, developed by al-Shafi. Moreover, he emphasized the ties between el-Mulkalam and philosophy and stressed the contribution of early Islamic mysticism to Islamic ethics. And he has been rather influential in Egypt. By the way, Mustafa Abd al-Razk was not just an academic, he was also politically active. First in the Egyptian opposition and after his retirement from the university in 1938, he served as a government minister. It's actually very common for professors of philosophy and the so-called Muslim societies to be politically engaged, be it with or against the government. So for instance, the Iranian professor of Western philosophy at the University of Tehran, Hulam Ali Hoddad-Awadel, served for several years as chairman of the parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And Mansif Marzouki, the interim president of Tunisia, still today, as well as Leopold Seder Senghor, the first president of Senegal, they both studied philosophy and Senghor has remained a great admirer of Henri Bergson throughout his life. So another example of what you can achieve if you study a philosophy. Exactly. Like Alexander the Great. Coming president. And just to mention two other renowned personalities as further examples, the Syrian professor emeritus of Western philosophy, Sadaq Jalal al-Adham, was after 1967 actively engaged for the Palestinian cause and later on he constantly agitated against Middle Eastern forms of despotism in various articles and manifestives and is still doing. The Palestinian professor of Islamic philosophy, Sari Nusayba, has been politically very active in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, among others as the representative of the PLO in East Jerusalem. But with these examples, I don't mean to say that almost every professor of philosophy is politically engaged. In fact, most of them stay with academia on a national and also international level. Right. So much like in Europe, where there are some politically active academics, but most of them are just writing their books. Like me. Okay. So I guess, for the purposes of this podcast, I don't want to get too much into these political issues, although that's interesting as well. But rather to look back at all this stuff that I've covered over the dozens of episodes I've already spent looking at the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. And something that I'm very curious to hear more about is which philosophers, and maybe we could just concentrate for the moment on the sort of famous names up to say the 14th century or so, which of the historical figures have had the most significant cultural currency in the 20th century? Yes, I would say from the Masjid, Abi Sena, Ibn Sina, and to a lesser extent Al-Farabi, and from the Maghreb, of course, Averis, Ibn Rushd, and also Ibn Khaldun, though it is contested, I mean, even among Arab philosophers themselves, whether Ibn Khaldun can be called a philosopher, given his harsh criticism of the philosopher. Also Miska Way and Ibn Tufail have had some influence today. Let me start with Ibn Khaldun. For the Lebanese professor of philosophy, Fahmy Jad'an, with Ibn Khaldun, we have the beginning of the nahda, that is the Renaissance, an awakening of Muslim culture and an opening of the mind to progress, I mean, already in the 14th century. And for many contemporary intellectuals, he represents a turn towards realism and to a rational and empirically based rational approach to history. His harsh criticism of Felsa can be seen, to a certain extent, as being only a rejection of metaphysics, and thus of the possibility of grasping the hidden world using reason. Ibn Khaldun's encouragement of all sciences that deal with facts, his sharp analysis of historical events and his search for causality in history, all of which, by the way, was largely based on the Aristotelian theory of causes, these have been seen by quite a number of professors of philosophy as a major step forward. We find a whole series of scholars writing voluminous works on Ibn Khaldun and paying tribute to him. For instance, the Moroccan professor emeritus of history, Abdullah Laoui, who served, by the way, as a diplomatic representative in Cairo, and Paris, I won't come back to politics, and his compatriots and professors of philosophy, the late Mohammed Aziz al-Lahababi and Mohammed Abid al-Jabri. Also, I could name here the Lebanese professor emeritus of philosophy, Naseef Nasr. Still, they did not hesitate to criticize Ibn Khaldun on some topics, especially for his belief in miracles and superstition and his cyclical understanding of history. The research of Al-Farabi has been quite different and until now, at least, much less well-defined and widespread. It's really only the phrase al-madina al-fardila, that is, the Virtuous City, which is part of the title of one of his major works, that has been frequently used. But this is just a way of referring to an ideal of a city or a state and has nothing to do with Al-Farabi's own visions of politics. Several Arab intellectuals do regard Al-Farabi as a model to follow in respect to his rational and methodological approach. One scholar I can think of goes further. This is the Tunisian professor Fatih Tariqi, who is, by the way, holder of the UNESCO chair of philosophy in the Arabic world. In the context of his philosophy of living together, he has something like that philosophy of living together, he develops on Al-Farabi's concept of takul, as crucial for our time. In English, it might be rendered by reasonableness, I mean, this is from the German, take it from German, or practical reason. So, the idea here is that it is being contrasted to the theoretical reflection. Al-Farabi's notion of takul is meant to open the way for using reason in practical social life. So, this is like Phronesis, I guess, exactly. So, it's like the ability to use reason to get through practical affairs rather than thinking about maths or metaphysics or something. Exactly. So, let's not wait any longer. What about Avicenna? Yes, as for Avicenna, you have mentioned in your podcast that the Avicenna tradition has continued to be taught at madrasas and has more or less been fused with ideas from Sufism and Kalam. This kind of teaching is still alive in some madrasas, for instance, in Iran and Pakistan. The reception of Avicenna in modern Muslim societies seems to be understood, except in purely academic research, exactly in that way. And according to the Moroccan philosopher Al-Jabari, it is also that kind of mystical philosophy that the Islamic world has to get rid of in order to become again a part of modern civilization. He also criticizes Avicenna's theories in some detail. For instance, when Avicenna describes the world's dependence on God by saying that it is an existent, possible by itself and necessary through another. Mumken al-wujood min zatihi wa jib min raidehi. Al-Jabari understands this third value, he calls it Qima falifa, as an offense against the premise of the excluded middle because it gives created things this status that is supposedly neither just contingent nor just necessary. But this understanding of Avicenna is contested by quite a number of Arab professors of philosophy, like Ali Harb, George D'Arabishi and Mahmoud Amin al-Alim. However, the prevailing image of Avicenna is that he is close to mysticism or theosophy, not to Aristotle. Some scholars have admired him for this, for instance, the Iranian professor of philosophy, Said Hussein Nasser, who has been for quite a while at the Georgetown University in Washington. There's something ironic here because both Said Hussein Nasser, who wants to continue this Avicenna path, and Al-Jabari, who wants to reject it, they both consider a veris as representing an alternative to Avicenna. They both see a veris as someone who separated philosophy and science from religion. So the teachings of a veris are rejected by Said Hussein Nasser and propagated by Al-Jabari, but for the same reason. Actually, I want to ask you about a veris in a second because he's someone you've worked on quite a bit. I mean, his reception in the contemporary world, but actually that makes me wonder about Greek philosophy. So you just said that they don't see Avicenna as particularly close to Aristotle, and they have this mystical reading of him. Are the Greek philosophers still taken seriously as philosophers in the contemporary Islamic world the way that they are in, you know, European nations and in the United States? Yes, they are indeed. Greek philosophy actually enjoyed a revival from the second half of the 19th century onwards. It was seen as a common source that influenced both the Oriental and Occidental civilizations. We find them trying to make Greek philosophy directly fruitful for the modern day without referring to the Muslim medieval philosophers like Al-Faradi, Avicenna, or a veris. Aristotle seems to have been the most revered among the Greek philosophers. This is no wonder, especially influential in spreading his works where two Egyptian writers and political liberal thinkers, activists, and also temporary ministers for culture. These are Lutfi Asayit and Tahar Hussein. Lutfi Asayit translated even Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the work on generation and corruption, the physics, and the politics into Arabic. However, I mean, he didn't know Greek, so he translated from French. Better than nothing. Yes, exactly. For Lutfi Asayit, the return to Aristotle meant giving knowledge and judgment a sound basis, and he was convinced that the scientific spirit of Aristotle could help to restore that spirit in the Arab world. As to Tahar Hussein, who was a professor of ancient history, classical philology, and Arabic literature, he was very well versed in ancient Greek, and he also translated something from Aristotle, the constitution of Athens, into Arabic. He did that just after the so-called constitutional revolution in Egypt in 1919, when the Egyptians were discussing which political system to adopt. In his foreword, he explicitly argues against taking the Islamic principle of consultation, the shura, under the first four caliphs as a model, and recommends adopting the liberal principles of the Greek tradition. That's interesting. But this was a statement he later reconsidered. So there's a sort of parallel there where, I mean, you could think about like the American Revolution, where they refer back to this Greek model of democracy, or, you know, other appeals to say, the Roman Republic, in European history, so we see a parallel development in the Islamic world. We do. And so apart from Aristotle, or the I mean, maybe Plato or Socrates? Yes, Socrates, Plato and with him Socrates, has been much admired. And the Egyptian government employee and writer Muhammad al-Wailihi, for instance, was very critical of modern Western society. He wrote a book on ethics, where he talks about what he calls the healing of the soul, ere legenefs, I mean, the whole book is called like that, by the way. And he takes especially Socrates as a model. And he even accused modern European philosophers of having distorted their Greek sources. Socrates also inspired the translator of Darwin's The Origins of Species into Arabic, the Egyptian Ismail Madher. He saw Socrates as a model of virtue and of the right approach to critical investigation. That's really interesting. I'm especially struck by this idea that ethics is the healing of the soul, because that's an idea that we already saw, when we looked at ethical works written in the 10th century, in the Islamic world. So this seems to run right through the tradition. But not by Avicenna here, but directly going back to the roots. Yeah, right. So going to the same sources that actually inspired the original authors in the formative period. Let's get back to Averroes, though, because this is the person you've worked on the most in terms of his impact on the contemporary Islamic world. And as you've shown in your work on him, he's often been held up as a kind of hero of rationalism, a harbinger of modernity. Can you say something more about how he's been used to defend certain political and religious ideas within the Islamic world? I would like actually to concentrate here on the Arab world. So not the whole Islamic world? No, a bit too much. The rediscovery of Averroes in Arab-speaking intellectual circles dates back to the second half of the 19th century, when his Tahafud et Tahafud, and perhaps also his companion of Aristotle's Metaphysics, were published for the first time in an Arab country, while several other works were printed in Munich. This idea of him being a hero of rationalism started at the beginning of the 20th century and takes the fate of Averroes' thought in Europe as an important point of reference. It was Farah Antoun, a Lebanese Christian socialist and secularist writer, who thought that the voice of Ibn Rushd should be made known to the Arabs as a way to explain the descent of the Islamic and ascent of the European culture. But then there was a new wave of reinterpretation of the intellectual history, what I call the Turath turn, in the late 70s. And it's really at this point that Averroes was styled by some prominent scholars as a hero. Here the socio-political circumstances and personal orientations of these professors of philosophy was very relevant. In socialist Syria, for instance, Paep Tizini interpreted Averroes' theory of the world's eternity as an early expression of materialism and atheism even. He set aside Averroes' theological philosophical treatises, believing that Averroes was not speaking his true beliefs in them. In Morocco, when Muslim advocates of the unity of religion and state were becoming politically strong, Muhammad Abi al-Jabari launched his well-known critique of Arab reason, Naqd al-Aqd al-Arabi. He wanted to establish a new tradition of critical rationalism, which he saw as specific to the Maghreb, with an axiomatic view as its core method. He thought that Averroes was the high point of this sort of rationalism because of his criticism of the analogy between the suprasensible and the sensible, that is the Qiyas al-Rab al-Shahid, which had been put forward in Kalam and by Avi Senar and was criticized by Averroes. Instead, according to al-Jabari, Averroes regarded religion and philosophy as two axiomatic and deductive systems and the correctness of each system could only be proven within that system. But by the way, the peak of Averroes' understanding as a forerunner of modernity is probably reached not with the work of any philosopher, but with a film. It's called Destiny, Al-Masrir, and was directed by the Egyptian filmmaker, very renowned filmmaker Yusuf al-Shahid in 1997. It shows Averroes fighting dogmatism and fanaticism and ends with his books being burned by the religious authorities. Matthew 40. Actually, I've seen it. It has musical numbers in it and dance routines. Elisabeth Bishan Okay, you've seen it. Matthew 40. Yes, it's good. Elisabeth Bishan Having said all that, there has been another way of understanding Averroes' thought. He has also been seen as a harmonizer of religion and philosophy, as the one who most consistently and successfully showed that the Islamic revelation is in full agreement with reason. The Egyptian scholar Mahmoud Qasim, who taught for long years at the Dar al-Aloom in Cairo and published Averroes al-Qash' al-Manaj al-Adillah, placed him in the tradition of the Mu'athazilids, al-Kindi, and al-Razali, trying to demonstrate Averroes' orthodoxy. Matthew 40. Wow. Elisabeth Bishan That is amazing. Matthew 40. That is amazing. Elisabeth Bishan According to him, Ibn Rushd actually rejected the theory of the world's eternity and taught its creation. He believed not in a collective but in an individual immortality of the soul. And he subordinated philosophical to religious truth. Matthew 40. So, basically, I got a lot wrong in my podcast. Elisabeth Bishan No, please, please leave it. Pupil, I mean, you have even a pupil of Mahmoud Qasim, the independent scholar, Muhammad Ammara, who wrote a lot, a lot of books. He also used Averroes as one of his favorite models of Islamic rationalism, but in a little different way first. During the late 60s and 70s, on the basis of Averroes' definition of the relationship between religion and philosophy, of the world's eternity, and of his theory of knowledge and of the freedom of act and will, he tried to show that materialists and Muslims, and he calls it idealism, idealists, could be united. Since the 1980s, however, Ammara has changed his view on Averroes and adopted the theological approach now really of his teacher, Mahmoud Qasim. In that sense, he is still promoting Averroes as a model of Islamic rationalism, but sees him as being in agreement with Ibn Taymiyyah and his teaching of the harmony of reason and scripture. Finally, I would like to add that besides this kind of use of Averroes for various political and cultural purposes, there is also strong academic research on Averroes at several Arab universities. The research focuses especially on Averroes' commentaries and includes the retensilation of those commentaries back into Arabic, when the Arabic original is lost and we have only Hebrew or Latin versions. Right. Well, obviously, since the colonialist period, if not earlier, the Islamic world has been exposed to ideas from Europe. And we saw already we're talking about the Greek impact on modern day Islamic society, but there's also more recent ideas from Europe. So, I guess it's pretty easy to think of cases of this. You have maybe Marxism having an impact on political ideas in the Islamic world. What about more kind of technical philosophy? So, have ideas from thinkers like Descartes or Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, people like that, have they had a major impact on contemporary philosophy in the Islamic world? I mean, maybe even a greater impact than figures like Avicenna? Yes, down to the modern day, almost every European philosophical school and major philosopher has found advocates and opponents and many Muslim philosophical traditions have been reframed or harmonized with one or the other modern European philosophy. Due to the very incomplete state of research, though, it is hard to say who has been the most widely read of the European philosophers and who has been the most influential. Was it Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Kant, Spencer, Bergson, Nietzsche, Heidegger or somebody else? There seem to have been waves of interest in one or the other philosopher and these waves seem to differ quite considerably from country to country. So, I prefer not to go on record with a statement given the current state of research where our knowledge is still so scattered. But concerning the reception of two philosophers, we will soon know more. Roman Seidel's dissertation on Kant in Iran will come out this year and Kata Musa's dissertation on Heidegger in contemporary Arabic philosophy will be published next year. Right. Or maybe it's already out depending on when you're listening to this. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and I suppose in a way that brings back again this point that's come up over and over, which is that saying, oh, the Islamic world, they all read Heidegger or something. I mean, it's as silly as saying in Europe, the most influential philosopher is Kant or something, right? I mean, it's just too complicated a situation. But on the other hand, I would still like to ask you one general question. Which is about critics of philosophy. I mean, you just mentioned him, Tamiya, a minute ago, and actually, you've written about him as well. And so he's someone who was very hostile to the philosophers of his day. And he was even critical of logic, which was broadly accepted by theologians like Al-Razabi, Fakhr al-Din al-Azi, and so on. And obviously, he's a very prominently discussed figure nowadays. Does his antipathy to philosophy in particular, live on as sort of explicit anti-rationalism in some parts of the Islamic world? And M.Tamiya is indeed a figure whose writings and opinions seem to be more widespread in the 20th century than ever before. But the work you mentioned is Rad al-Mantikayin, that is his refutation of the logicians, apparently does not count among them. Neither does his work, his major work averting the conflict between reason and tradition, dar ta'aru del aqlu wa nakl. Also, I would be careful about calling him anti-rational. In fact, he emphasizes again and again that reason is in full agreement with the Quran and the sound Sunnah. For him, reason means common sense, and also reasoning about moral and social questions on the basis of the Islamic revelation, or on empirical grounds. Even Tamiya does not reject natural science as such, he does reject what I called in one of my articles, intellectualism, meaning the non-empirical theories of mystics like even Arabi, the theology of the later Kalam, and of course, of the Muslim philosophers. Like Avicenna and so on. Yeah, actually, that's more or less in line with what I said about Tamiya in my podcast on him, which is not surprising, since I was reading your articles about him to write the podcast. Okay, I see. So we're going full circle here. Yes, among the explicitly anti-Western and anti-philosophical Muslim thinkers in the modern Arab world, the rejection of rationalism and logic is, as far as I can say, at this stage of research, not much based on Ippentamir's arguments. For example, the founder of Al-Ikhwan and Muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, simply stated as a dogma that mankind is unable to apprehend God by reason, so we should keep away from philosophical theories and logical proofs. And Saeed Qutb, the founder of the radical wing of his Brotherhood, who was sentenced to death by the Egyptian president Jamaduddin Abd al-Nasser in 1966, thought that rational logic, and he calls it al-mantik al-dhihni, was a bad way to reach God and the religious dogmas. He contrasts it to what he calls emotional logic, al-mantik al-wijdani, which he says attracts men through imagination and spiritual visualization. Both Hassan al-Banna and Saeed Qutb accepted natural sciences and medicine, though especially as applied sciences. What they rejected was all reasoning in the sphere that concerned man as an individual and collective, moral, emotional, and responsible being. Thus modern and ancient philosophy, the humanities and social sciences were exempt from free reasoning and should have at their bases the Qur'an and Sunnah only. Right. Okay, so taking us all the way back to the beginning of the Islamic tradition, appropriately enough. And in fact, in the next episode, I am going to rewind the clock quite a distance, because I'm going to be starting to look at medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom. So, we're finally done with the Islamic world, and that's what I'll be doing starting next time. But for now, I'd like to thank Anke van Kuggen very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time as I turn to medieval philosophy in Latin Christendom here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.com. Today's episode, Arts of Darkness – Introduction to Medieval Philosophy Most periods in the history of philosophy have appealing names. Putting Plato, Aristotle, and Friends under the heading of classical philosophy already highlights the unique role of ancient thought as the model and source for all that comes after. Authors like Erasmus and Machiavelli can bask in the positive connotations of the term Renaissance. As for Descartes, Hume, and Kant, their importance and fame is so well established that they hardly need any help from a historical label, but they get an alluring one nonetheless, modern philosophy, with its suggestion that these are the thinkers who remain relevant for us today. The poor relative is medieval philosophy. This word medieval is useful, since it picks out the epoch in European history that we're going to be covering in the coming episodes, but there's no denying that it sounds vaguely like an insult. Neither classical nor modern, the word medieval conjures up a time of social collapse, superstition, oppressive and dogmatic religious authority. Medieval philosophy is, in short, the philosophy of the Dark Ages. The next year and more of podcasts will be devoted to the task of shedding light on this supposedly dark period of human thought. Hopefully, by the end of this series of episodes, you'll not only still be listening, but will have been convinced that the medieval period richly merits such lavish attention. I'll start trying to persuade you in this episode by highlighting some of the main figures and themes that lie ahead of us. First, a brief word about what I mean by medieval philosophy. As you know, I've already covered philosophy in the Islamic world in previous episodes, and in so doing provided extensive coverage of Jewish thought in the medieval period. We even made a few forays into Christian Europe when we looked at figures like Gersonides. So none of that material is on our to-do list, though as we'll be seeing, characters like Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides will turn up again as influences on the philosophers we will be covering. Something else that is on our to-do list, but not yet, is the Byzantine tradition. In the surviving eastern part of the Roman Empire, the medieval period saw the continued production of philosophical works in Greek, and we'll get to that in due course. As of now, though, when I say medieval philosophy, what I mean is the philosophy of Latin Christendom in the medieval period. That gives us clear cultural and geographical boundaries for our topic. More difficult is setting chronological boundaries. As far as starting point goes, the die is cast. The last thinker I covered from Latin Christendom was Boethius, so we need to pick up the story after him. In those long ago episodes, I said that Augustine and Boethius must be seen as late antique figures, not as early medieval philosophers, even if they are often taught in courses on medieval philosophy. Now, Boethius died in 525 AD, so you would think I'd be kicking off these episodes with figures from the later 6th or perhaps 7th centuries, but here we do have a period that could legitimately be called a Dark Age, at least as far as philosophy goes. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, philosophy collapsed too, though not for nearly as long as you might think. In the popular imagination, intellectual history recovered only in the Renaissance, and popular imagination is almost right. It's just that the recovery happened in the Carolingian Renaissance, that is during the reign of Charlemagne in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. Scholars attached to his court, particularly Alquin, renewed the study of philosophy, along with the other disciplines they called the liberal arts. Following this rebirth, we have continuous philosophical activity in Europe until, well, I guess until 2014, with fairly good prospects of its continuing for the foreseeable future. So from the point of view of the historian of philosophy, you could even consider the 9th century as the true Renaissance. This is not to deny, of course, that a Renaissance also happened after the medieval age. The thought of that period, as we'll be seeing after we've looked at the Byzantines, was far more continuous with medieval intellectual history than is often supposed. But there were genuinely new developments in the Renaissance too, notably the reception of new sources, especially Plato, into Latin, the composition of philosophy in vernacular languages instead of Latin, and this self-conscious return to classical texts staged by the humanists. Still, the line dividing late medieval philosophy from Renaissance philosophy is at best a very blurry one. Mostly for convenience, I am going to draw it at the year 1400. I will, however, be emphasizing that medieval thought anticipated Renaissance and early modern thought in some ways, and in other ways, survived past 1400. So that's the terrain to be covered, philosophy in Latin Christendom starting after Boethius, which pretty much means beginning with the Carolingian period around the year 800 AD, and ending in 1400. It's more than half a millennium of philosophy, featuring debates within all areas of philosophy and many dozens, in fact hundreds, of significant figures. In keeping with the no-gaps approach of this whole series, we'll be looking at quite a number of them, far too many even to name in this introductory episode. But just so you have an idea of what to expect, let me mention a few. The most obvious is Thomas Aquinas. I suppose he is the only medieval thinker who you'd be almost certain to encounter in an undergraduate course on philosophy unless you count Anselm, because of the couple of pages in which he presented his famous ontological argument for the existence of God. There are several reasons why Aquinas is so prominent. He was among the first who grappled systematically with the works of Aristotle that were reintroduced into Latin Christendom in the 12th and 13th centuries. Showing a rare gift for synthesis, he wove Aristotle with ideas from previous medieval thought, especially themes from Augustine and Neoplatonism. His writings are also very readable, at least by medieval standards, composed in straightforward Latin and full of concise arguments that were designed for use in teaching contexts. In fact, as I can testify from my own experiences teaching Aquinas to students, those arguments still work quite nicely in the same context today. To this, we can add the fact that he is recognized by today's Catholic Church as a leading theological authority, even promoted in recent papal encyclicals. It would, however, be a serious mistake to think of the coming journey as a dutiful trek through dimly-lit lowlands as we make our way to the solitary peak of Aquinas, followed by a swift descent back into obscurity until we reach the Renaissance. This was certainly not the way the medieval themselves saw things. Though Aquinas always had his adherents, he had his detractors too. It was only much later that he came to be seen as the indispensable medieval thinker. Centering our story on Aquinas would not only be historically anachronistic, it would also run the risk of obscuring other thinkers from this period who should have an equal claim to our attention. Take, for instance, Aquinas' contemporary, John Duns Scotus, who innovated in several areas of philosophy and whose radical new understanding of necessity and contingency set the stage for later thinkers like Leibniz. Or take Peter Abelard, among the most original logicians and metaphysicians who has ever lived, and no mean contributor to the history of ethics. Abelard is frequently seen as the first major scholastic thinker, but he was not the first major medieval philosopher. That title should probably go to Eriugena, an author of the Carolingian period who was unusual in being able to work with and translate Greek patristic literature. This led him to propose a stunning, and for his contemporaries, shocking vision of God and the created world, rethinking the Christian Neoplatonism of late antiquity. Another pioneering figure was Anselm of Canterbury, best known for his aforementioned ontological argument for the existence of God, though as we'll see, he was more than a one-trick pony. Along with these two early thinkers, let me mention two later ones from the 14th century, William of Ockham and John Buridan. Ockham is primarily known for his contributions to the longest-running philosophical debate of the whole medieval period, the Problem of Universals. But his work ranged more widely than that, for instance into political philosophy. As for Buridan, he is probably the medieval thinker whose star has risen fastest in recent scholarship. Like Abelard, he was a brilliant logician and able to see the far-reaching connections between logical issues and other philosophical problems. As so often, thus far, the entries on this list of landmark thinkers have something in common—they are all men. But one exciting aspect of medieval intellectual history is the emergence of great women thinkers. Foremost among them is Hildegard of Bingen, but we'll be looking at a number of women in the coming series. We do have to be careful not to exaggerate here. As in antiquity and the Islamic world, women were rarely, if ever, allowed to enter into the cut and thrust of technical philosophical debate—that's something that seems to have occurred only in early modern Europe, and about time too. But taking the broad-minded approach that is by now customary in this podcast, we can very easily make a case for the inclusion of medieval women into our history. They were major contributors to philosophical mysticism and played a significant role in the marriage of philosophy and medieval literature. That's only a small sampling of the wonderful philosophers who await our attention in the coming months. The next question is, what sorts of philosophical issues can we expect to see them discussing? A short answer would be all sorts. Every branch of philosophy was explored in the medieval period, as I'll be explaining in the rest of this episode. But let's start with the most obvious—medieval thinkers had a lot to say about God, and religious beliefs more generally. I have been known to make the mischievous remark that working on contemporary philosophy of religion is basically just like studying medieval philosophy, except not as interesting and you don't have to learn Latin. That's a bit unfair to my colleagues who do philosophy of religion, but there's some truth in it. Most of the proofs for and against God's existence still being debated today were already discussed with great sophistication in the medieval period, along with such issues as divine omnipotence, the nature of miracles, the metaphysics of the afterlife, and so on. Furthermore, the medieval discussions did not simply presuppose the truth of Christian belief. Philosophers frequently offered arguments that were explicitly designed to be convincing even for a hypothetical atheist or non-Christian reader. So this aspect of medieval philosophy should interest you if you are religious, or are interested in religion, or are keenly anti-religious and want to understand the opposing side. If you couldn't care less about religion, medieval philosophy still has a lot to offer you. Perhaps the most common and pernicious prejudice about medieval philosophy is that it was really all theology, that these thinkers talked of nothing but God and other recondite questions of faith, such as the proverbial puzzle about the angels dancing on the head of a pen. There are at least three reasons why this is wrong. First, the fact that a philosophical argument, distinction, or concept was developed in a theological context doesn't preclude the development from having application outside such a context. Ideas developed to explain such things as the Trinity, the Incarnation, or transubstantiation can be deployed outside the debates where they were first proposed. Second, this actually happened historically. A nice example would be one I mentioned briefly already, Scotus's conception of necessity and contingency. This may have been introduced to explain God's omnipotence, but it constituted a giant step in the direction of our modern-day understanding of these notions. When atheist philosophers do modal logic today, they are working with a conception of modality that owes a great deal to Scotus. Third, medieval philosophers didn't spend all their time arguing about God and theology. Especially once the medieval universities arose with a distinction made between theological and non-theological faculties, it was standard to designate certain areas of intellectual activity as drawing solely on natural reason. As early as the Carolingian period, we find examples of philosophical debate being conducted for its own sake without any explicit comment on what the debate might all mean for our understanding of God or the state of our souls. And, like souls, according to most medieval philosophers, such debates could have a life of their own. Perhaps the best example is an issue I've also already mentioned in passing, the problem of universals. I've pondered long and hard about the best example to use to illustrate this problem, and decided that a good choice would be giraffes. So then, giraffes, we might wonder what it is that is shared by all members of this class that makes each of them qualify as a giraffe. This would be a universal, in other words it would exist in or apply to all the particular members of the class of giraffes. But do such universal natures really exist? If so, what sort of existence could they possibly possess? While this question does, as we'll see, connect to theological problems in various ways, it was treated throughout the medieval period as an issue to be solved in its own right. In general, philosophical logic and philosophy of language were the first areas to capture the attention of medieval thinkers. This happened already in the Carolingian period, and problems of logic and language remained urgent in the minds of 14th century figures like Occam and Buridun. This is a striking feature of medieval philosophy, and one that should make this period of thought especially interesting for contemporary philosophers. Like 20th century analytic philosophy, medieval philosophy was deeply and centrally concerned with philosophical problems related to language. These philosophers' fascination with words was not restricted to the Word of God. Nor were theology, logic, and language the only games in town. Free will, for instance, had been put squarely at the center of the Latin Christian philosophical tradition thanks to patristic authors, especially Augustine. It stayed there in the medieval period, as the nature of freedom, both human and divine, continued to be an abiding concern. Another Augustinian theme of perennial importance was the nature of knowledge. When we looked at Augustine, we saw him proposing in a short work called On the Teacher that humans achieve knowledge thanks to assistance from God. For Augustine, our ability to attain truth relies on the presence within our souls of the truth, that is Christ. This so-called illuminationist model of knowledge continued to be popular among medievals, but it received competition when Aristotle's more empiricist approach became known. The stage was set for an epistemological showdown which unfolded in the 13th century. Meanwhile, there were questions about the scope and possibility of human knowledge. We tend to assume that radical skeptical hypotheses are a distinctive feature of modern philosophy, emerging for the first time with people like Descartes and Hume. But we find such skeptical hypotheses already in medieval texts, albeit never developed with quite the systematic ambition of the modern philosophers. Like Muslims and Jews in the medieval period, the Latin Christians also saw the development of a mystical tradition, which not only stressed the limitations of natural human knowledge, but also offered a path to go beyond those limitations. We saw with Sufism and Kabbalah how mystics both drew on and influenced mainstream philosophy, and the same is going to be true here. The female medieval thinkers usually come into the story about here, allowed to contribute to spiritual literature just like the desert mothers of late antiquity and the female Sufis of the Islamic world. But of course this was a game men could play too, with an especially impressive development of philosophical mysticism late in our period in Germany, the most famous name here being Meister Eckhart. And by the way, another lesson we've learned from late antiquity and the Islamic world applies here too. There is no sharp boundary between mystical and non-mystical authors. We'll find figures like Eckhart offering arguments, and specialists in argument, like Aquinas, occasionally sounding like mystics, or the figure like Aquinas' contemporary Bonaventure pursuing both approaches with equal intensity. The mystics remind us that philosophy does not appear only in texts that consist of relentless argumentation. To tell the story of medieval philosophy without any gaps, we need to cast our net wide enough to take in literary works like Dante's Divine Comedy and the visionary treatises and poems of Hildegard. The scholar of medieval thought must look beyond the obvious formats of the free-standing philosophical treatise or commentary on Aristotle, and take seriously text-like glosses written in the margins of manuscripts, or pastoral literature, a potential source of insight into medieval ideas about ethics. And speaking of ethics, we should not underestimate the medieval contributions in practical philosophy. The need to define sin and to explain what is happening in humans when they perform sinful actions led to a blossoming of reflection on ethical issues in Latin Christendom. Throughout the medieval centuries, debates also raged over questions in political philosophy. The most burning issue here concerned the rival claims to authority made by the Church on the one side and by worldly rulers on the other. Should the kings and emperors of Europe submit to the commands of the popes? And if so, then on which issues? We also find fascinating medieval discussions of more specific issues in ethics and politics, for instance voluntary poverty and the circumstances in which it is just to wage war. A final area I'd like to mention, before wrapping up this introduction, is natural science. Throughout this series of podcasts, we've occasionally cast an eye on the intricate connections between philosophy and the sciences, considering such areas as medicine, optics, and astronomy. Again, there's an unhelpful prejudice that lurks here, to the effect that the Renaissance and early modern periods in Europe saw advancements in the natural sciences, which had been stalled ever since late antiquity. But as we'll see, the medievals too engaged in science. Early scientific discussions centered on the one dialogue of Plato that was partially known to the Latin Christians, his Timaeus. A more empiricist approach to science came along later, but well within the medieval period. One of the great contributors to scientific method, Roger Bacon, lived in the 13th century and was thus a near-contemporary of Aquinas. So, there's plenty for us to look forward to. Next time, however, we're going to start by looking back. I'll be reminding you of the late ancient legacy for the medievals, and mentioning the few texts of significance for the history of philosophy produced in Latin in the couple of centuries following Boethius. Mostly, though, we'll be looking at the Carolingians and the Renaissance they staged a good 500 years before the Renaissance. Starting next week, whether you're old or young, you'll have an opportunity to feel middle-aged here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Charles in Charge, the Carolingian Renaissance. Suppose a man writes one podcast per week, excepting four weeks of summer, when he is on break. During the writing of each podcast, he consumes three cups of coffee, and each cup contains 250 milliliters of water. If an Olympic-sized swimming pool contains 2.5 million liters of water, how many years of podcasting will it take the man to drink a swimming pool's worth of coffee? Ah yes, the word problem. Mortal enemy of nearly every schoolchild, though somehow I always rather liked them when I was doing math as a kid. Whether you like them or loathe them, they go back a long way. Some of the earliest examples can be found in a text written by a man who has a strong claim to be the first significant medieval philosopher, Alquin. He is most famous for his association with Charles the Great, usually known in English by the badly pronounced French version of that name, Charlemagne. Alquin has been called Charles's Minister of Religious Affairs. He took a hand in formulating decrees issued in Charles's name, tutored Charles himself in philosophy, and promoted learning in Charles's vast kingdom, expressing the fond hope that Charles's court at Aachen might become a new Athens. The sort of learning Alquin wanted to promote with the benevolent support of Charles was embodied by the liberal arts. These weren't arts that voted for left-wing politicians, not least because there was no opportunity to vote when Charles was in charge. Rather, the liberal arts were a curriculum of seven disciplines divided into two groups of three and four. The first three arts, or trivium, included grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. The remaining four, or quadrivium, were mathematical in nature and comprised arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This is where the word problems come in. Alquin's little book Propositiones ad aquendos iuvenes, or Problems to Sharpen the Minds of the Young, is a collection of mathematical puzzles. Some demand calculation, for instance by asking the reader to multiply and add fractions of numbers of animals. Some are more like logic puzzles. For instance, if two men marry each other's mothers, and both couples have sons, how will these sons be related to one another? Answer at the end of this episode. Alquin's interest in the liberal arts is an example of something we tend to underestimate, the continuity between late ancient and medieval culture. We see this in the political sphere, with Charlemagne dealing with the still-existing Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. We see it in law, with Roman legal codes exercising influence on medieval legal codes. We see it in religion, with theological debates fought by Augustine and his contemporaries still much on the minds of medieval churchmen. And we see it in philosophy too. Alongside Aristotle, the most dominant philosophical authorities in the medieval centuries were two Latin Christians of the late ancient world, Augustine and Boethius. In fact, for early medieval philosophy we can hardly distinguish between the influence of Boethius and that of Aristotle. Until a more complete set of Aristotelian works became available in the 12th century, the medieval's had access only to the logical writings that had been translated into Latin and commented upon by Boethius. Other works by Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy and series of short treatises on Christian theology, alongside the writings of Augustine, provided medievals with further indirect access to ancient thought. Then there were the more obscure Latin works that I looked at in episode 117 just before veering off to tackle philosophy in the Islamic world, which brings us back to the liberal arts. Back then I mentioned a Latin work called The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written by Marcianus Capella. It depicted the seven liberal arts disciplines as bridesmaids in attendance at an allegorical wedding, much as Boethius personified our favorite discipline as Lady Philosophy in the Consolation. Marcianus' work was very popular in the early Middle Ages, and it was only one of several texts to bring the liberal arts to the attention of men like Alquin. In fact, the curriculum appeared as early as the first century BC when the Roman scholar Marcus Varro composed a now-lost work on the disciplines, covering the seven liberal arts plus medicine and architecture. In its medieval form as a sequence of seven disciplines, it turns up not only in Marcianus, but also in Augustine, who was in turn drawing on late ancient Platonist sources. Boethius is worth mentioning again here, since he was not only the key source for dialectic, or logic, but also wrote a text on music. And then there was another author of late antiquity who I haven't mentioned yet, but who was an absolutely crucial source of knowledge for medieval scholars. His name was Isidore of Seville, and his much-read work was entitled Etymologies. As Isidore's name tells us, he lived in Seville, where he was in fact bishop. This was in the late 6th and early 7th century, at which point the Western Roman Empire was like a man who has lost all his James Brown records, defunct. Isidore's Spain was ruled by the Visigoths, though around the time of his birth they were forced to contend with Byzantine attempts to recapture the Iberian Peninsula. Despite this, intellectually speaking Isidore still inhabits late antiquity. The impressive range of texts he uses as sources in his Etymologies includes the great Latin writers. He is especially fond of Virgil, Cicero, and Lucan, but cites a host of other ancient authors too, such as Ovid, Horace, and even our old Epicurean friend Lucretius. Such pagan figures weren't entirely unknown to Isidore's medieval heirs. In fact, there were medieval commentaries, not only on the pagan Marcianus, but also on works by Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace. But the medieval's more usually relied on Isidore himself as a conduit for much ancient knowledge and culture. From this point of view, his Etymologies could hardly have been more useful. Divided into 20 books, it begins by covering the liberal arts, before going on to the Christian religious sciences, cosmology and natural science, and finally activities like agriculture, war, shipbuilding, and food preparation. True to its name, Isidore's Etymologies is structured around words. It will typically explain the meaning or supposed derivation of each term he discusses. He even gives us a brief account of how things get their names. There may be some underlying rationale, as with the word rex meaning king, which comes from rectae agendum, or acting correctly. Alternatively, it may be a reference to the origin of a thing. The word for human being, homo, reflects the belief that humans came from the earth, homus. And no, the name of the popular chickpea-based spread homus does not come from this Latin word, though Isidore would probably think it does. He's in fact given to rather fanciful and even far-fetched etymologies. This may be because he is less interested in actually finding the right derivation than in helping us remember the meaning. Sometimes though, he does get the etymology right, for instance with the words history and philosophy. He correctly tells us that the former comes from the Greek historein, meaning to observe, and that philosophy means love of wisdom. In a rare lapse, he fails to deal with the phrase without any gaps, so I'll do it for him. The origin of the word gap is hereditary, it's in our genes. While Isidore's etymologies can't exactly be described as a work of philosophy, there is quite a bit of philosophy in it. He goes through the basics of logic echoing the ancient approach to this subject by summarizing Porphyry's Isagoge, followed by Aristotle's logical works. While going over these, he quotes the saying that when writing on interpretation, Aristotle dipped his pen in his mind. This remark would later be repeated by Charlemagne himself in the midst of a dialogue about logic with Alquin. To some extent, we can also see Isidore's whole project as a philosophical or scientific one. He is not just telling us where words come from, he is teaching us what they mean, and about the things for which they stand. As he says himself, one of the tasks he is undertaking is the differentiation of things, by telling us the features that distinguish one thing from another. It is for example cruelty that distinguishes the tyrant from the king. All of this is reminiscent of far older philosophical works, for example Plato, who told a similar story about etymology and its significance in his Cratylus, and whose dialogue the Sophist explored the idea that understanding something means finding its distinguishing features. Another figure of the very late ancient world who loomed large in the early medieval age was Gregory the Great. He was a contemporary of Isidore's, in fact a friend of Isidore's older brother, and pope from the years 590-604. For Alquin and other Carolingian era thinkers, Gregory was a major authority in theology and ethics. His most significant work is a massive commentary on the Book of Job, though other works survive too, notably a set of dialogues on miraculous events. His approach to the Bible emphasized allegorical readings. Rather ironically, given that this kind of interpretation was pioneered by the Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, Gregory claimed that allegory distinguishes the true Christian approach to the Old Testament from the overly literal understanding of the Jews. As for ethics, Gregory aspired to live his life in accordance with the monastic ideal. At one point, we looked at the so-called desert fathers like Evagrius who joined their Christian piety to a radical asceticism. Such radical withdrawal from the world is in the background here, but a more relevant influence on Gregory would have been Benedict, who lived in Italy in the first half of the 6th century. Benedict composed a rule, or set of instructions, for the monks under his supervision, which helped to shape Gregory's idea of the perfect religious life. All these ancient figures helped shape the philosophy and worldview of the outstanding intellectual during the reign of Charlemagne, Alquin. For instance, Alquin's view of ethics was deeply shaped by the monastic tradition, as we can see from the many surviving letters he wrote to fellow clergymen, giving advice on best practice in monasteries and the personal quest for virtue. He also owed something more basic to Gregory the Great, namely the fact that he was a Christian at all. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Gregory did play a significant role in the Christianization of Alquin's home island of Britain. He sent a mission to convert the pagans there to the true faith in the year 596, a major event in the spread of the new faith in the British Isles. With conversion came the establishment of monasteries, the center of learning in Anglo-Saxon Britain at this time, just as on the continent. Alquin himself came from Northumbria, where he was able to study at one of the most significant libraries of the time, at the monastery in York. He could also benefit from another illustrious predecessor, a fellow scholar of Northumbria whose name you will certainly know if you've ever read anything about early British history, Bede. He is known mostly for his work as a historian, and Alquin in fact wrote a history of York in poetic form that makes extensive use of Bede and praises him in fairly extravagant terms, but both men were the sort of all-round scholars the liberal arts curriculum was meant to produce. They contributed not just to history, but also theology and mathematics, and tried their hand at poetry too, the main outlet for their skill in the art of rhetoric, since monks were hardly given frequent opportunities to make public speeches or argue court cases. All this activity was part and parcel of a religious vocation. For instance, both men used their competence in mathematics to write about the correct calculation of the calendar, which had such important religious implications that major political disputes could arise over the correct date of Easter. Because of Alquin's link to the glamorous and historically pivotal court of Charlemagne, it's easy to overlook the importance of his British background for his profile as a scholar. But in fact, Alquin did not spend that much of his life at the Frankish court. He probably joined Charles only in 786, when he was already an accomplished scholar in his mid-40s, and he thereafter returned to England for three years before returning to court. But even if Alquin's scholarly personality was Northumbrian, the highlights of his scholarly output came through his association with Charles. In stark contrast to the disappointing political leadership back home, Charles was an awe-inspiring monarch who took a genuine interest in religious and intellectual issues. A treatise by Alquin on rhetoric takes the form of a dialogue between himself and his king, and Alquin went so far as to call Charles, a philosopher steeped in liberal studies, enjoying a wisdom given to him by God. Here we catch a glimpse of a still-emerging ideology that is going to occupy our attention in the coming episodes—the idea that God appoints secular kings to rule. An interesting example is a set of decrees written in Northumbria in 786, quite likely with Alquin's involvement. These emphasize the dire sin involved in regicide, pointing out that it means killing the Lord's anointed. Alquin's devotion to Charles is also shown by the fact that he compares him to the biblical Solomon in a short work he wrote about the soul. Elsewhere, he compares him to King David. And there's a hint of Alquin's commitment to the ideal of kingship in his account of the soul itself. Alquin proceeds on the principle that it is natural for humans to love God, and that this love is the same as our love for the good. Since it is the rational part of the soul that loves God, this aspect of the soul is its best part, and must rule over the body and the rest of the soul, as if from a throne of royal power. This wasn't mere flattery on Alquin's part. The parallel between reason and a just ruler goes back to Plato's Republic. And though Alquin couldn't have read the Republic, his broadly Platonist allegiances are as clear as his allegiance to Charles. He even speaks of our mind as being trapped in our body as in a prison, another image that can be found in Plato. Alquin's studies in York would have acquainted him with a number of late ancient authors with a broadly Platonic outlook. Not least among them was Augustine, whom Alquin cites by name in this little treatise on the soul. In fact, he mentions having read a work by Augustine while in England, which he is now unable to get hold of in Francia. Among Alquin's borrowings from Augustine is the idea that the powers of the soul form an image of the Trinity, with the three divine persons corresponding to understanding, will, and memory. With his wide learning, Alquin was useful to Charles as a tutor and court intellectual, and also as a proponent of the theology espoused by the Frankish court. Charles saw himself not just as a secular ruler, but as an authority in religious matters, and involved himself in a variety of religious disputes. One such dispute concerned the veneration of images, icons of Jesus and the saints. This religious practice had been forbidden in the Byzantine realm by imperial edict earlier in the 8th century, and more recently rehabilitated. Any bead had pronounced on the issue, urging a middle path between veneration of icons and the no-tolerance policy of the Byzantine iconoclasts. Visual images may be used in worship, but not worship themselves. Now in Alquin's day, a fellow scholar at the Frankish court named Theodulf criticized the resurgence of full-blown veneration of icons in Byzantium. I mention all this for several reasons. First, it gives us a foretaste of a controversy we'll be looking at later on when we discuss Byzantine philosophy. Second, it's a nice example of the interconnected world inhabited by men like Alquin. The Frankish elite had dealings and arguments, both political and theological, with the far-away court in Constantinople. Indeed, Charles engaged in diplomatic relations with the even further-flung court of the Muslim caliph in Baghdad. Third, theological disputes like this relate to our philosophical concerns more closely than you might think. Alquin's Platonist outlook was a good match for Theodulf's critique of image worship. After all, we use our senses to view images, and from a Platonist point of view, sensation is vastly inferior to the powers of the mind. The point is made by Alquin himself in a letter to his student Fredegisus, when he extols the mind's understanding above the power of eyesight. Alquin got more directly involved in another theological controversy, over a new doctrine that was being propounded by some Christians in Visigothic Spain—adoptionism. It was a new entry in the long list of attempts to explain how Christ could have been both God and human. The adoptionists proposed that Christ was fully God's Son insofar as He was divine, but only adopted by God as a Son insofar as they share in His human nature. If this strikes you as a pretty good suggestion, then you haven't been studying your liberal arts. Alquin wrote attacks on adoptionism and also outlined the controversy for a high-born woman — it's not entirely clear who — in a letter to her that survives today. In it, he remarks that the woman's training in dialectic will help her understand that Christ as a human cannot have been God in name only, as the adoptionists claim. On the other hand, he elsewhere says that the adoptionists went astray by being too confident in the application of reason to the nature, or rather natures, of Christ. A true understanding of this matter lies beyond our capacity for rational understanding, and, as Alquin puts it, where reason fails, their faith becomes necessary. If these arguments remind you of the controversies that raged among earlier Christian theologians, then you have been studying your history of philosophy. Along with his focus on the liberal arts, the Platonist flavor of his philosophy, the monastic flavor of his ethics, and his reading list — so heavily dominated by Augustine, Boethius, Isidore, and Gregory, among others — this can seem to make Alquin as much a figure of late antiquity as of the Middle Ages. But that appearance is largely deceiving. It's been estimated that as much as 94% of Latin literature was lost in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. Without the copyists and scholars of the Carolingian period, it would have been more like 100%. They did much to save authors like Cicero, Isidore, Boethius, and Virgil from oblivion, but they lived in an age where knowledge of these authors had become very rare and was possible only because of the labors of scholars working in religious institutions. It was a very different world from the one inhabited by even late ancient Christian thinkers like Boethius. Another crucial difference between Alquin and Boethius is that Alquin had no knowledge of Greek. He was thus restricted to working solely with the materials preserved in the Latin texts that had survived from late antiquity. In this, Alquin was typical of his time, and of early medieval philosophy in general. But in the history of philosophy, every rule has an exception. In this case, the exception came from Ireland, and his name was John Scodas Eriugena. We'll begin to look at his life and work next time. But before I leave you, I owe you the solutions to a couple of puzzles. First, the one about two men who marry each other's mothers and have sons with them. In this case, each of the sons is both the nephew and the uncle of the other. Then there was the question about the podcaster who is trying to drink a swimming pool's worth of coffee. According to the figures I gave you, the podcaster will drink 36 liters of coffee each year. At this rate, drinking his way through a volume of 2.5 million liters will take him approximately 644,444 years. Coincidentally, this is the same length of time projected for covering the entire history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Grace Notes, Ariugina and the Predestination Controversy. Loyal listeners will remember my sister. You know a fair bit about her already, her career as a trapeze artist, her short temper, the help she gives me writing these podcasts, and the fact that she doesn't exist. One thing I haven't mentioned about her yet is that she's an atheist. She is annoyed that God hasn't allowed her to exist and has decided to return the favor. Like I say, short temper. Most other atheists you meet will give more conventional reasons for their disbelief. They may say that modern science has managed to account for all the features of the world, formerly inexplicable without reference to a wise creator. In light of this, we no longer have good evidence for the existence of God or any supernatural being. Or the atheist may invoke the notorious problem of evil. The God worshipped in the Abrahamic religions is meant to be all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing. How then can the world be so full of suffering and evil? Why would God allow this, since He is clearly in a position to put a stop to it, and being good would certainly want to do so? The standard response from the theist is the free will defense. God allows suffering and evil because He must do so if He is to give freedom to His creatures. In giving us meaningful freedom of choice, He must give us the chance to do wrong, but doing wrong means doing evil and causing suffering. In the Christian tradition, especially since Augustine, the origins of sin were traced back as far as the first humans. The original sin of Adam and Eve has been passed down to all their descendants, and the human condition is one of congenital weakness. As Oscar Wilde put it, we can resist anything except temptation. In particular, we can resist God's mercy, literally embodied, when He became a human and sacrificed Himself for us. This act of sacrifice has held out a promise of rescue from the state of sin, but according to Augustine, we were not thereby restored to the even more original sinlessness of Adam and Eve through Christ. Rather, humans have retained a tendency towards evil, and only a further gift of divine grace can give us the strength to be good. We cannot, in other words, merit salvation on our own power, but need God's help in order to be saved. Of course, you know all this, and whether you are an atheist or not, you probably regard it as theology and not philosophy. But, as we'll be seeing in this episode and in episodes to come, the Augustinian position on grace led to agonized debate among medieval philosophers. In fact, whether or not you are an atheist, your understanding of free will has probably been indirectly shaped by centuries worth of reflection on this thorny theological problem. A moment's reflection of our own shows why this problem is so, well, problematic. Augustine insisted, on the one hand, that sin is the result of free will. Not just the original sin of Adam and Eve, but all human sin is a perverted use of the freedom God has given us. This is why it is just that God should punish us for our misdeeds. On the other hand, Augustine also insisted that, born into sin as we are, none of us can be good without God's help. To say otherwise would be to fall into the position of the rival theologian Pelagius, which Augustine attacked ferociously in the mature phase of his career. Given Augustine's authority, medieval's standardly took the Pelagian view to be heretical. So for them it was a basic ground rule that humans need grace from God in order to be good. It is up to God, not us, whether any of us will receive that gift. But in that case, it looks like God is like a man standing at the edge of a lake, who sees a group of drowning people who cannot swim. He has plenty of life preservers on hand, but throws them only to a select few, letting the others sink to their doom. Surely we would not praise this man for saving the lucky ones, but rather accuse him of heartlessness for ignoring others he could have helped. In the same way, one might say to Augustine and the medieval's who followed his lead that their God is not merciful but arbitrary, unjustly letting some of his creatures go to eternal torment when he could have given them salvation. Besides, on this Augustinian picture, humans in this state of sin turn out to lack meaningful free will after all. If we aren't able to be good without God's help, then any freedom we have seems to be useless, nothing more than the ability to decide exactly which sins we will commit. These were bullets that one 9th century medieval thinker was ready and willing to bite. He was a monk named Gottschalk, who set forth a doctrine known as double predestination. His idea was a simple one. God has decided in his inscrutable wisdom which of us will be saved and which condemned. The decision was made already before any of us were born, and there is no court of appeal. It's an uncompromising view, but one that looks pretty reasonable within the Augustinian framework I've just been talking about. After all, if my salvation requires God's intervention, and if he decides not to intervene, then he has effectively decided that I will be damned. From this point of view, Gottschalk was simply drawing the obvious conclusion of Augustine's teaching. Indeed, he was able to quote from the works of Augustine in support of his own position. From another point of view though, Gottschalk's teaching was dangerous and deviant and needed to be stamped out. His two main critics were fellow clerics, one a student of Alquin and Gottschalk's former abbot, Urbanus Maudus, the other an influential bishop named Hinckmar. Both of them worried that anyone convinced by Gottschalk would lose any motivation for being good. After all, if God has already decided I'm going to hell, then there's nothing I can do about it, and I may as well have some fun first. Even better if God has placed me among the elect, since I'm sure to keep my place, no matter how many sins I commit. All this was happening during the reign of Charlemagne's grandson, a monarch by the name of Charles the Bald. To get an idea of what he might have looked like, go to Google Images and search for Peter Adamson. In the year 849, Charles the Bald decided that the predestination debate was unlike his hair, he'd had just about enough of it. Hinckmar had the ear of the king, so Gottschalk was not likely to find favor once Charles stepped in. Indeed, Gottschalk was imprisoned and his writings burnt. Here we see again, as with Charlemagne, that secular rulers could, and did, try to settle theological controversies, weighing in with a kind of authority not even Augustine's texts could provide. Still, things didn't end there. Even as Charles himself discussed the problem of free will with his advisors, Gottschalk's sympathizers continued to espouse the double predestination doctrine. What was needed was a more convincing account, one that would preserve the teaching of Augustine while also preserving human freedom. For this purpose, Hinckmar turned to the sharpest mind of the time, which belonged to John Scotus Eriugena. He hailed from Ireland, one of numerous scholars who found their way from there to mainland Europe in the Carolingian period, presumably fleeing from Viking raids. In fact, both Scotus and Eriugena mean someone from Ireland, so his name rather redundantly means John Irishman Irishman. Watch out by the way that you don't confuse him with the more famous medieval thinker Duns Scotus, who was Scottish. I've actually been in libraries where books by one Scotus were shelved amidst the books by the other Scotus. We know of Eriugena's presence at Charles the Bald's court by the 840s. He supposedly enjoyed a warm relationship with the sovereign. Reports to this effect are borne out by the fact that he was entrusted with the task of translating a precious text sent to the court as a gift by the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer. Did monarchs have fantastic names in the 9th century or what? The manuscript contained the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, a late ancient Christian theologian strongly influenced by pagan Neoplatonism. We covered him back in episode 105. Eriugena was ideal for the task. He had facility with Greek, very rare even among well-trained scholars in the Latin West. Equally important, he had a taste for bold speculative philosophy, which was exactly what he found in Dionysius. The results would be fully revealed only in Eriugena's masterpiece, a sprawling philosophical and theological dialogue entitled the Periphusion. For now though, Eriugena did as Hinkmar requested, producing a strident refutation of Gottschalk's theory of double predestination. It did not end the debate, but had at least one salutary effect by teaching Hinkmar to be more careful what he wished for. Eriugena's distinctive taste for bold speculation was all too clear from the arguments he aimed at Gottschalk. Hinkmar was alarmed and disowned the treatise entirely. It would eventually be condemned in the year 855, about five years after it was written, even though Eriugena was writing in support of what would turn out to be the victorious side in the debate. Two more theologians leapt into the fray to attack Eriugena, who withdrew from the controversy without further attempts to justify his stance, albeit that some of the ideas he put forward in this early treatise do reappear in the Periphusion. Eriugena would have had cause to feel bitter about the reception given to his treatise on predestination, because the most fundamental point he wanted to make was one already put forward by Hinkmar and Urbanus Maurus. If we want to be good Augustinians, we must posit an asymmetry between goodness and sin. In our fallen state, we are capable of sinning, but incapable of being good. For that, we need the help of God's grace. The Pelagians were unacceptable because they placed both good and evil within the scope of human power, and thus left insufficient room for grace. Gottschalk strayed too far in the other direction by effectively making God the author of both goodness and sin, in that both are predestined. Neither of these views preserved asymmetry. Hinkmar, Urbanus, and Eriugena all saw this point. They secured the needed asymmetry by saying that God predestines the redemption of those He elects to receive effective grace, but He does not predestine the damnation of sinners. Of course, it's one thing to say these things and another to argue for them. Step forward, Eriugena. He begins his treatise with a mission statement that could apply to his whole career, stating that, True philosophy is true religion, and true religion is true philosophy. He then adds some rather swaggering remarks to the effect that his expertise in the liberal arts of dialectic and rhetoric will enable him to clear up the whole predestination debate. Eriugena even quotes some technical terms in the original Greek, advertising the unprecedented level of intellectual firepower he's bringing to this fight. By contrast, Gottschalk is routinely convicted of muddled thinking, which has seduced him into deviation from true religion. At one point, Eriugena aims the philosopher's ultimate insult at his opponent, saying that Gottschalk's position doesn't even manage to be false, because for that it would have to have a misleading resemblance to the truth. Gottschalk's position is so incoherent that it falls short of this modest goal and remains nothing but empty words. One mistake Eriugena claims to find in Gottschalk is a confusion between God's foreknowing that I will do something and his predestining that I will do it. As Boethius had already argued in Late Antiquity, knowing that something is going to happen doesn't mean causing that thing to happen. Thus God can foreknow sin without predestining it. When making this distinction, Eriugena quotes Augustine's definition of predestination as the arrangement before time began of all that God is going to do. This is only one of many quotes from Augustine in the treatise, a reminder that this was not just an abstract theological debate, but an argument over how to interpret this authoritative father of the church. In fact, there are chapters of Eriugena's On Predestination that consist almost entirely of quotation from Augustine, a technique Eriugena will reuse later in his Paraphysion, which includes long-verbatim citations of Greek and Latin authorities. Bear in mind, by the way, that this sort of extensive quotation made more sense in the 9th century than it would today. Eriugena can't assume his readers will have access to the text he refers to, and lengthy citation is not just a way of borrowing Augustine's authority, but also making those passages readily available to his audience. Yet Eriugena offers arguments as well as quotations. He complains that, in addition to that fundamental confusion between God's knowing a thing and causing it to happen, Gottschalk has ascribed a double predestination to a God who is purely one. It's an early sign of his Neoplatonic leanings that Eriugena hammers relentlessly on this point. Gottschalk's position would require that God exercises two distinct and contrary kinds of predestination towards his creation, and this is inconsistent with God's simplicity. Instead, everything that God does proceeds from one essence. You might wonder whether Eriugena's argument makes sense here. After all, he does want to say that God foreknows not just two things, but everything that will ever happen with his single, simple act of knowledge. So why couldn't God also predestine two kinds of things, choosing the elect for salvation and the unredeemed sinners for punishment? But Eriugena has a good answer, in that his argument turns on the kind of causation exercised by simple things. On Gottschalk's theory, God would be the cause of two contrary things, predestining both salvation and damnation. This is something a cause with multiple parts might be able to do. Take the humble pencil, for instance. Its business end can put marks on a page, while the eraser at the back can take marks off a page. The reason it can have these two contrary effects is that it has more than one part. But God is not like this. He is utterly simple. Maybe though this isn't the only way for a cause to have contrary effects. It might act at different times. Consider a murderous doctor who saves someone's life one day by performing an operation only to kill that same person with poison on the following day. Could God perhaps do the same, dealing out eternal life at one time and eternal punishment at some other time? Not according to Eriugena. Again, taking over ideas found in Augustine and Boethius, he thinks that God is eternal and does not change from one moment to the next. Divine foreknowledge and predestination already occurred before time even began and never altered thereafter. In fact, Eriugena says it is misleading to talk about God's foreknowing. He even questions whether past, present, and future tense verbs can be applied to God as they are to temporal things. This gives us another reason why we cannot imagine God exercising two opposite kinds of causation. He would have to use both in his timeless eternity so that we would have a simple cause doing two contrary things simultaneously. And this is clearly absurd. Another problem with the double predestination doctrine, according to Eriugena, is that it fails to preserve divine justice. If God is to issue commands to us and justly punish us when we fail to obey, then he must give us freedom rather than pre-determining us to sin. Likewise, it would make no sense for God to reward us for doing things if we had no choice whether to do them. But on this score, there is another problem. Eriugena has to avoid falling into the Pelagian heresy which gives humans not just free will, but the capacity to merit salvation without any involvement from God. Of course, he refuses to go so far as gut-shocked by making God predestine all human actions, both good and sinful, but he accepts that God does exercise predestination over some of us. He has, from eternity, decided which of us will be offered effective grace and thus obtain salvation. Here we come back to the point about asymmetry. God must get some of the credit for helping us to be saved, but none of the blame, when we sin and are damned. Eriugena's way of achieving this is to say that human freedom is exercised in both good and bad actions. In the case of bad actions, God knows beforehand that sin will occur, and after the sin has been committed, he administers just punishment. Apart from that, he stays out of it. The case of good actions is different. Here, God must step in to assist the person who is choosing freely. Divine grace is, as Eriugena puts it, cooperative. Without it, a person who is freely choosing to do good would be unable to succeed. Let's go back to our analogy of the drowning swimmers. When I described this before, I gave the impression that the swimmers were going under through no fault of their own. That is not how Eriugena sees things. Rather, God would be like someone on shore who has generously offered to save everyone in the water. Some of the swimmers are ignoring this and in fact making every effort to drown themselves, eagerly weighing themselves down so that they will sink. Clearly, there is no obligation to save these fools against their will. Meanwhile, others are doing their best to stay afloat, and gratefully accept the offer of assistance. If they get help from the men on shore, their own efforts will enable them to avoid drowning. Analogously, it is just for God to punish those who freely sin, and both free choice and grace are involved in salvation. To this extent, Eriugena was basically following the line already suggested by Gottschalk's other opponents, Hinkmar and Urbanus Maurus. Eriugena does indulge in his distinctly philosophical style and pushes hard on points like God's utter unity, but it's really only as he develops his argument that he goes beyond what Hinkmar could accept. In another premonition of his Neoplatonic leanings, Eriugena brings up the late antique idea that evil is privation or non-being. This notion was already pioneered by Plotinus, and we find it in some of Eriugena's favorite authors like Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius. Here Eriugena finds another point he can use against Gottschalk. How can God predestine sin or cause evil and sin if evil and sin are nothing at all? In fact, how can God even foreknow sin, the point on which Gottschalk relied so much? There's quite literally nothing to know. Pondering this puzzle, Eriugena concludes that God knows sin the way we see darkness, in other words by being aware of the absence of goodness or light. A further radical, and therefore Eriugena's contemporaries unacceptable implication is that God does not after all directly cause the punishment of the damned. Their suffering is an evil, and evil is non-being, or nothing. Eriugena understands it as a failure on the part of these souls to attain salvation and happiness. God's role in this process is merely that he sets up a just order of laws governing the universe under which sinners fall short of the salvation that God actively offers to others who seek his help. Although Eriugena was going out on a limb with these arguments, it would be wrong to treat him, as historians often do, as an entirely marginal figure, a man out of place and time whose interests and theological views were radically different from those of his contemporaries. Admittedly, his magisterial paraphyseon is like nothing else written in the period. Ambitious, massively long, and full of ideas taken from the Greek thinkers to whom Eriugena had such unique access, it is the most sophisticated philosophical text of the Carolingian period. Yet there are many connections between the paraphyseon and the intellectual climate in which Eriugena lived. In a future episode, we'll see that less renowned, sometimes even unidentified, thinkers of the period engaged with Eriugena's ideas and commented upon many of the philosophical issues he raised. Still, it's a pretty remarkable book and deserves an episode all to itself. Like Charles the Bald, I'll be tearing my hair out if you don't join me next time for Eriugena's Paraphysion, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode… Much Ado About Nothing – Arijuna's Paraphysion Spare a thought, if you will, for Zepo Marx. He was the not-particularly-famous fourth member of the famous Marx Brothers. I trust you will be familiar with his siblings. Groucho with his quick wit, his cigar and his grease-paint mustache. Chico with his piano-playing pyrotechnics and preposterous accent. And of course Harpo, the greatest silent film star after the advent of sound, and beneficiary of the best-props department since Shakespeare's assistant suggested working a skull into the final act of Hamlet. But what did Zepo have? A reasonable singing voice and a willingness to play straight man to Groucho. Last in alphabetical order and last in the fans' hearts, Zepo teaches us the importance of competitive advantage. To succeed in show business, just like normal business, you need to offer something special, something that makes you stand out from the crowd. The same point applies to the history of philosophy, as nicely illustrated by John Scodas Arijuna. In many respects he was a man of his time. Like his contemporaries, Arijuna's intellectual world was structured by the study of the liberal arts. This is something we can see in his contribution to the debate over predestination that we discussed last time. Arijuna also commented on that classical presentation of the liberal arts, Marcianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology, probably in the course of teaching it to younger scholars. This sort of activity would not have distinguished Arijuna from other scholars of the Carolingian period whose names are nowadays known only to experts. The Zepo of 9th century medieval philosophy was arguably Urbanus Maurus, who joined Hinkmar and Arijuna in attacking Gottschalk's teaching on predestination. He also wrote an encyclopedic work called On the Nature of Things, carrying on the legacy of earlier chroniclers of human knowledge like Isidore of Seville. Arijuna's competitive advantage over scholars like Urbanus was his facility with Greek. This was not entirely unique. Hinkmar's teacher Hilduin, bishop of Saint-Denis, already had a go at producing a Latin version of the works of Dionysius. But in combination with his adventurous turn of mind, Arijuna's access to the works of Dionysius, as well as other Greek theologians like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, made him the most remarkable thinker of the period. His place in history is secured by an enormous treatise to which he pointedly gave a Greek title, Periphuzion, or On Nature. It takes the form of a dialogue told over five long books featuring only two characters, the neutratur, or teacher, and the alumnus, or student. The alumnus is no neophyte. He is steeped in the Latin tradition, especially Augustine, and like the teacher, is able to throw Greek terminology into the discussion. His role is to set problems and puzzles for the teacher to solve, for instance by asking for a resolution of apparent conflicts between authoritative texts. He is also of a more conservative mindset than the teacher. Throughout the dialogue, the student is coaxed away from his traditional understanding of topics in logic, metaphysics, and theology, and brought to accept far bolder, more innovative teachings based on Dionysius and the other Greek sources. The Periphuzion has an alternate Latin title, De Divisione Naturae, meaning On the Division of Nature, and for good reason. The alternate title refers to a division set out at the beginning of the whole work, which, despite many digressions, provides a structure for all that will follow. It is a fourfold division of nature, which for Eriugina means, all things both those that are and those that are not. This maximally general use of the word nature goes all the way back to the Presocratics, whose general inquiries into the world around them were also usually given the title On Nature. The teacher proposes dividing all things in terms of two criteria, whether or not they create and whether or not they are created. This yields four types of thing, creating but not created, both creating and created, not creating but created, and neither creating nor created. The student, apparently having already attended some classes we missed, is quick to understand what the first three types would mean. The first type is what creates but is not created. Pretty obviously, this is God. The third, opposite type is also easy. That which does not create but is created will be the familiar non-divine things in the world around us. The student is immediately able to provide the less obvious identification of the second type, that which is created but also creates. This applies to what Eriugina calls primordial causes, which play roughly the role of the forms in the Platonic tradition or divine ideas in ancient authors from Philo of Alexandria to Augustine. On Eriugina's version of the doctrine, God first creates things within himself by grasping them in his wisdom. The things then proceed into the created world as concrete manifestations of God's intellectual understanding. This is how we get the familiar objects in the world around us, the created but not creating things of the third division. They participate in the primordial causes just as sensible things participate in forms in the ancient Platonist theories. Eriugina puts a distinctively Christian twist on this old idea though. For him, the primordial causes are not just God's ideas but are His Word, also known as the Second Person of the Trinity. The begetting of the Son by the Father is thus identified with the creation of the causes of all things within God Himself. This is more than theological window dressing. An ancient pagan Platonist could easily agree with Eriugina that ideas and a divine mind are the intelligible causes of the physical things that participate in them. But such a Platonist might stop short of Eriugina's idea that the creation of these physical things is simply the manifestation of God in the world. It would not be a stretch to see Eriugina as understanding the whole process of creation through the lens of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. According to that doctrine, the Son is eternally begotten by the Father and then becomes present in the created world by being incarnated as Jesus Christ. Eriugina understands all of creation to follow this sort of two-step procedure. First, things are created within God Himself by being grasped in His Wisdom or Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. they manifest in, or as Eriugina also puts it, descend into, the created world itself. Eriugina is even willing to say that God is in a sense creating Himself within or as the world. Here He is as so often taking inspiration from the pseudo-Dionysius, who had spoken of theophany, literally God's showing Himself or appearing to us in the things He has created. At this point, the student in Eriugina's dialogue is like someone trying to remember the names of the Marx Brothers. He has easily managed the first three items on the list, but the fourth presents more difficulty. The student has to ask the teacher to explain what sort of nature might be neither creating nor created. So far, all three of the divisions of nature have turned out to be in some sense identical with God. The creating Father, the created and creating Son, or primordial causes, and the created manifestation that is the world. The same is true of the fourth division. For Eriugina, all created things are designed and destined to return to their divine source. Of course, God remains a creator, but if we think about Him as the final cause, or goal, for the things He has created, then we are not thinking of Him in this way. He is not source, but destination, not starting point, but finish line. Again, Eriugina is here taking over a traditional Platonist thesis, but rethinking it in Christian terms. Late ancient Platonists thought of reality as coming forth from a single divine principle and then returning to it. This dynamic of precession and return could take many forms. For instance, pagan Platonists saw the human soul as an effect of a universal intellect and then understood philosophy itself as the soul's attempt to return to its cause by achieving intellectual knowledge. Eriugina's version of this circular dynamic is that the emergence of things from God is mirrored by an eventual return to Him. In the end, the distinctions between created things will be eliminated as all things are received back into God. Eriugina is quick to point out that his beloved discipline of dialectic, one of the liberal arts, itself embodies this process with its procedure of division and synthesis, a procedure that is, of course, on show in the paraphysion itself. At a more theological level, the Christian story of humankind's fall and redemption fits perfectly into the Platonist pattern of precession and return. Having fallen away from God through sin, human nature is renewed and made whole again. For Eriugina, this means that we will ultimately be gathered back into the divine primordial causes. This is a rather daring version of the Christian narrative of sin and redemption since it seems to imply that everything will ultimately just become identical with God. Suggestions in this direction were already present in Eriugina's work on predestination, but our future unity with God emerges as a major theme only in the paraphysion. It's easy to get the impression that Eriugina foresees a complete reversal of the original creation and holds that in the end, there will be nothing at all other than God. But in fact, his eschatological theory is more nuanced than that. He says that things will indeed be changed into God, but even so will preserve their own natures. While this may sound paradoxical, it exemplifies a fundamental aspect of Eriugina's thought. He understands the world, now and at the end of time, to be both separate from God and the same as him, since created beings are simply an expression of what God is. Despite the access we have to God through the created world that is his manifestation, Eriugina thinks that God in himself remains utterly beyond our grasp. It is on this point that Dionysian influence becomes really unmistakable. Unlike the divine names of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugina's paraphysion offers a detailed exploration of the two theological paths, positive and negative, called in Greek kataphatike and apophatike. The positive, or kataphatic, approach is to transfer to God words that are appropriate for created things. Above all, there are the many names and descriptions applied to God in Scripture. For Eriugina, these are to be taken in a metaphorical sense. Even highly complementary names like truth or goodness are not to be used of God in a straightforward sense, since God is rather the cause of truth and goodness. For this reason, Eriugina repeats a linguistic trick first proposed by Dionysius, who added the Greek prefix hupa to words when applying them to God. In English, the corresponding prefix would be super, in the sense of above or beyond. We would not, for instance, call God essence, but rather super-essential. Not call him wise, but rather beyond wise, not loving, but more than loving. What Eriugina likes about this is that it combines the virtues of positive and negative theology. The surface grammar of a statement like God is super good is positive, it seems to offer a description of God, assigning to him the attribute of super goodness, whatever that might mean. But as soon as we start to think about what that would in fact mean, we see that the force of the prefix super is negative. Using it involves denying that God is good, not because he falls short of goodness, but because he transcends goodness entirely. The apparently positive statement is in fact a concealed negation. But even a purely apophatic, or negative theology, undersells God's transcendence. You can't just add negations to all the positive attributes, even sneaky negations like the prefix super. If you stop there, you remain within the realm of language, which is applicable to created things but not to God. Eriugina has a nice argument for this, which begins from the observation that any description we can give of something will always have some other opposing description. As soon as we use language to describe something, we imply that there is something else that has the opposed feature. If I say that Zeppo Marx looks good in a suit, then I am contrasting him to other people that don't look so good in a suit. But nothing can be opposed to God, since there is nothing else that stands alongside him, as an internal principle. This means that not only positive predicates, but also the negations, or opposites of those predicates are going to be inappropriate to God. Eriugina refuses to take no for an answer, and urges us to place God beyond the reach of language entirely, whether that language is positive or negative. In a remarkable section found in the third book of the Periphyseion, Eriugina applies his radical metaphysics to an issue that had bothered several of his predecessors—the problem of non-being or nothingness. Back in classical antiquity, Parmenides had proposed a radical metaphysics of his own, by banning all talk of non-being, including even the non-being involved in differentiating between things. Parmenides's argument was that non-being just isn't the sort of thing one can talk or think about, so we are left with nothing but being, which must be unchanging, undifferentiated, and one. Plato conceded that Parmenides had a point, but only as concerns absolute non-being. In his dialogue The Sophist, he argued that we can make sense of non-being if it means difference rather than the unrestricted negation of being. If I say that Harpo is not well-dressed, this doesn't require me to say that there is such a thing as non-being, it just means that Harpo is different from people like Zepo, who are well-dressed. Centuries later, Augustine, too, made much ado about nothing. In his dialogue On the Teacher, he raised the problem that if words are signs that refer to things, then we apparently need something for the word nothing to refer to. But that clearly makes no sense, since the word nothing refers to, well, nothing. Closer to the time of Ariugina, Alcuin student Fredegisus had written a little treatise with the cheerful title On Nothing and Darkness. Fredegisus wanted to solve Augustine's worry about the referent of the word nothing in light of the notion that it was God who assigned names to things. God created an object for every word he instituted so that there are no empty words, words that fail to refer at all. Hence, even the words nothing and darkness do refer to existing things. Ariugina likewise approaches the topic of nothing within the context of creation. He is out to explain the meaning of the by-now traditional claim that God created the universe from nothing, in Latin ex nihilo. When the teacher and student in the Paraphysion first broached this issue, there seems to be, if you'll pardon the expression, nothing to worry about. It seems that the word nothing in the phrase creation from nothing simply means the absence of all things. The point of talking of creation ex nihilo, then, would simply be that God did not create the universe out of anything else that was already present, for instance, pre-existing matter. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. The student reminds the teacher that they accepted not just a temporal creation of bodies out of nothing, but the eternal creation of all things in God's wisdom, in the form of the primordial causes. How can things be eternally made in this fashion, yet also be created from nothing? A first step towards an answer is to realize that temporal priority is not the only priority in town. God is eternally prior to the things he creates by being their cause, rather than by existing before they do. As we know from Arijuna's earlier discussion of the primordial causes, things are created within God and exist eternally and virtually in him before becoming manifest in the physical universe. But as far as the present problem goes, this sounds more like a step backwards than a step forwards. Aren't we now saying that the things around us were in fact created from something, namely the primordial causes? Well yes. So the only possible conclusion is that the phrase creation from nothing applies to the way the primordial causes themselves are produced by and within God. The word nothing simply indicates that God is beyond all being, or as Dionysius would say, he is super essential. God himself is the nothingness from which all things come, an unknowable nothingness or darkness that transcends even things he creates within himself. This account of unknowable darkness sheds further light on the division of four kinds of nature at the beginning of the Paraphysion. As the first creating and uncreated nature, God the Father is utterly transcendent, an unknowable source of the things he fashions within himself in an act of begetting. What is begotten within him is the word which contains within it the causes of created things. So this word is the second nature both created and creating. Yet the second nature is still transcendent, because it lies beyond the created and not creating third nature of the physical universe we see around us. Our language and thought are at home only with this third nature, with physical reality. This becomes clear in Erigena's treatment of the ten Aristotelian categories, which shows how he was inspired not just by the exotic Greek texts he was able to read, but also by the works of Latin logic that were standard fare in the Carolingian period. Of course the ancient classification, which divides predications or descriptions of things into ten types, is familiar from Aristotle's categories, throughout late antiquity used as an introductory textbook on logic. The early medieval's know it too, thanks to the translation and commentary of Boethius. But the Carolingians were actually more interested in a different related work called On the Ten Categories, because it was falsely believed to be a work of Augustine's. This supposedly Augustinian work is a major source for the first book of Erigena's Periphyseion. Under its influence, he argues that the physical objects we see around us are mere collections of accidental features, like qualities and quantities, which have been joined to the first category of substance. Yet substance itself lies beyond the things we can see and touch. It is simple, whereas bodies are composites of these accidental features. And in fact, even though things around us have qualities and quantities, like Zeppo's handsome features and his being a certain height, the categories of quality and quantity in themselves are also beyond physical things, invisible principles that have visible effects. All this is fully consistent with Erigena's metaphysical scheme, which makes the physical universe a mere manifestation or visible appearance of invisible, intelligible principles. We're going to return to this sort of hyper-realist understanding of substance and the other categories in the next scripted episode, which will be looking at early medieval thinkers who make even Zeppo Marx look like a household name. Actually, some of these thinkers don't even have names, or at least not names we know about. All the more reason to highlight their contribution, and to say something more general about the importance of anonymous scholars in the medieval period, when so much philosophy appeared in the context of marginal notations and comments on manuscripts. But since it's been more than a thousand years since these unheralded scholars lived, it won't do any harm if you have to wait a few more weeks to hear about them. In two weeks, you'll instead be hearing from Steven Gersh, as we take Erigena as the launching point for a chat about Platonism in the medieval age. But even before that, we have some celebrating to do as we reach a major milestone on the podcast. I'll be joined by two scholars who are anything but anonymous, John Maronbon and Jill Cray. They will be helping me answer an overdue question, what is medieval philosophy anyway? Here on the 200th episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be a special 200th celebratory episode about medieval philosophy. And I have two guests. First of all, John Maronbon, who is Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Hi, John, thanks for coming on. It's a great pleasure. And my second guest is Jill Cray, who is Emeritus Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy at the University of London and Honorary Fellow of the Warburg Institute. Glad to be here. So we've just used about half of the episode to read your titles, but now we can move on to talking about medieval philosophy. And the first thing I wanted to ask both of you about is the chronological boundaries of medieval philosophy. I guess that when people think about the medieval world, they probably think mostly about, say, the 10th, 11th, 12th centuries. But sometimes figures from late antiquity are taught in medieval philosophy classes, for example, Augustine and Boethius. And at the far end, you might wonder, where is the boundary between medieval philosophy and Renaissance philosophy? So starting with you, John, could you say something about the boundary between medieval philosophy and late antiquities, so the early boundary? Yes, indeed. I think a good place to start is with Plotinus, so starting in the third century. Now, of course, in a way, you can't say that's medieval philosophy. But if you're talking about dividing up the whole of philosophy, I like to work with this notion that I call long Middle Ages. But I'm not trying to be imperialistic about the Middle Ages just for want of a better term. I'm going to start roughly with Plotinus and going on roughly to Leibniz. Leibniz just gets us into the early 18th century. So that just seems to be a sensible way to carve things up. That's a very long way. So the third to the 18th century. Yeah. That's a pretty long Middle Ages. It is a long, and I say, I don't wish to put anything on the term Middle Ages. But I think that's a good way to start. And then there are lots of smaller subdivisions within that. I don't think any very useful subdivision corresponds to what's very often thought of as the medieval philosophy. So starting circa 800s and thinking about the Latin tradition in the court of Charlemagne and going on up till, I don't know, 1500. But we're going to discuss that later. OK. Well, I mean, that's where I've just started, actually, in this series on medieval philosophy. And so maybe I should say how I thought about it. And you can tell me why I'm wrong. The way I thought about it was that there are figures who are still culturally within the Roman Empire, even if the Roman Empire is kind of fading away. And so that's why in the Latin tradition, the last person I've covered in late antiquity was Boethius. In fact, we did an interview with you about the hymn. And then I thought, well, I could start sort of around the court of Charlemagne because now the Roman Empire is really a thing of the past. And so we've got a kind of new cultural context for philosophy. Does that make sense? Or is that not really a very good way of cutting up the historical periods? Well, I mean, I think that's unhelpful if you want to think about the way in which there are more than one tradition of medieval philosophy, which is something that you especially would be aware of. So you have a tradition in Islamic countries, an Arabic tradition, which seems to sort of tack on much more closely to late antiquity. Though, of course, you also in a sense have a discrete starting point for that because you can start to see when people first do this sort of work in Arabic. But there's also the Byzantine or Greek tradition. And even this idea of culturally within, culturally not within the ancient world is perhaps a bit difficult. So indeed, I remember an interview about Boethius. And the odd thing is that Boethius is much more culturally within the ancient world than Augustine roughly a century earlier. So there are things happening there. Then think about one of the most important early medieval philosophers, John Scotus Eriugena, who lived in the ninth century. Well there's an enormously strong connection between him and Byzantine philosophy. Maximus and Thessa, Pseudo-Dionysius going back. And is there really a break from antiquity there? Right. So I think that's another thing we could maybe think about as being what is characteristic of medieval philosophy is which sources are they drawing on. And here, maybe I should say that when I talk about medieval philosophy, I'm really thinking about only the Latin Christian tradition. Just because that's what I'm covering now. I mean, I've already done philosophy in the Islamic world as kind of its own story. So if we just concentrate on the Latin using Christian sphere, it does seem like there's a remarkable thing that happens here, even between say Boethius and the Court of Charlemagne or Eriugena, which is that Greek works in Latin translation or not mostly fall away. And they mostly are using Boethius, for example, for access to Aristotelian logic. Or Boethius is in a position to read Plato, but someone like Alquin isn't, right? With some exceptions. Well, I'd like to correct that in the sense that they're not using Boethius in the ninth century mostly. That's more something which characterizes the late 10th century onwards. I think where you are pointing to something, which is obviously so, is the fact that if you're thinking about the Latin tradition, then we do have to admit a gap, even though you're doing philosophy without the gaps, between sort of roughly Boethius and about the 790s in anything that one might really consider to be philosophical. It's not that people stopped writing in Latin. But I really would challenge anybody to find the slightest philosophical reflection in Althelm or in the Hesperica Famina written in Ireland or so on. There are some exceptions. I mean, there are some bits of philosophical speculation in some of these bits of Irish Latin from the seventh century. But insofar as you get a gap, you do. But it's only a gap in the Latin tradition. Right. And I didn't do Anglo-Saxon philosophy either, for example. I would say that people in the Renaissance, especially the 15th century, would support your view about Boethius because they were very keen on writing good classical Latin. And they thought Boethius was the last of the Romans, the first of the barbarians. They didn't like the kind of Latin that he introduced. And they would say he's really the end of that tradition. So they would certainly support your view if you're looking purely from a kind of stylistic, formalistic point of view, which in the 15th century was an important issue. So they would have associated Boethius in a way with the medieval tradition just because of the way he wrote. The beginning because the people they were reading from the Middle Ages, whom they didn't like, were using the Boethian translations and commentaries. And they were really very keen that if you wanted to think well, you had to write well. If you wanted to think as a classical philosopher, you had to write as a classical philosopher. And they thought that he introduced a lot of jargon, a lot of terms that were later picked up and developed. And he's really the cutoff point for them. So they would endorse your. So they would say if you want to read good Latin, read Cicero or something like that. Absolutely. And they might include Augustine because of the Christian element. And they thought that. But Boethius is really where they drew the line. So we've just been talking about with John the fact that there is a lot of continuity between what I guess I'm describing as early medieval philosophy and Latin Christendom. And what had been happening in late antiquity or in the Byzantine world. So for example, the influence of Pseudo Dionysius on Ariugina is a really nice example of that. And I guess that if there's a lot of continuity at the beginning end, there's going to be even more. Is it going to be the case that there's a lot of continuity at the tail end? And in fact, something that I'm worried about in terms of the future of the podcast is that I sort of have to at some point say, OK, now we're moving from medieval philosophy into Renaissance philosophy just because I have to change heading, as it were. So where should I put the boundary between medieval philosophy and Renaissance philosophy? Well, just as John has a long period that goes from late antiquity to Leibniz, I have a long Renaissance. And I think there's a good argument for saying that the Renaissance, which we think of as the rebirth of ancient and classical ideas, really begins in the 12th century. And this is where you start getting interest in Plato. You start getting new translations of Aristotle. And those continue to be the dominant philosophical tradition, at least until the middle of the 17th century. So I would also argue for a long period. But the problem with the term Renaissance is that it's something that really probably people think of most often in art history or in literature. And these have a different chronology. So for instance, the Renaissance in art begins with Giotto in the early 13th century. And we look at the Renaissance in humanism with Petrarch, who lives in the 14th century. But in terms of philosophy, you don't really get anything that's new, that's novel until perhaps the 15th century, as I was mentioning, where people start saying, we don't actually like these medieval translations of Aristotle. We don't like the medieval translations of Plato. We want to have new translations. We want to have new commentaries. We want to get access to philosophical Greek texts that weren't available. So I think you could make an argument, depending on how you slice it up, either to start, as I suggested, in the 12th century, or if you're thinking about what's really new, something new that comes in, that maybe about 1400 would be the beginning of a tradition of reevaluating the medieval philosophical tradition. It's still there. Aristotle still remains at the center until the middle of the 17th century. And I think that's the key element of continuity, because even many of the new Greek texts that come in are commentaries, ancient Greek commentaries, on Aristotle. So I would say that there's a continuity, but there are fluctuations within that continuity where new waves come in and things change. Another issue is that if you're looking at universities, which are foundations that really begin in the 13th century, the university education in philosophy stays pretty stable from that period to the 17th century. You get people like Hobbes complaining about using medieval Aristotelian commentators in philosophy in the 17th century. So there are changes. There are new translations. New things come in. But on the whole, there's, especially in the university tradition, a really large block of continuity. Yes. I mean, I think Jill has just said quite a lot of what I would want to say in justification for this sort of long Middle Ages as an overarching period. And I've no disagreement either. If you want to think then in terms of sub periods with either of these two renaissance, a long renaissance or a short renaissance, because both of those ideas bring out important themes. I suppose about your longer renaissance, going back to the 12th century, but then you might even want to go back earlier because of this whole business of 9th century humanism, people being very interested in the classics then, and so on. I think one thing that this whole discussion raises is the question of what is distinctive about medieval philosophy, if anything, that differentiates it from late antiquity or late antique philosophy on the one hand and renaissance philosophy on the other hand. I think it's interesting that from the renaissance point of view, one of the distinctive features of medieval Latin philosophy might have just been style. Actually the way that they write, the kind of terminology they use, the fact that they don't use nice Latin, so to speak. And they use a scholastic framework of questions and disputations, very formalistic. You have a very standard way, you set up a problem, you argue against it, you then argue against that. And for the humanists who are modeling themselves in the first instance on Cicero, later on Plato, this is very inelegant. They like the more literary discursive framework. They like to play around with irony and things like that. So for them, they regarded the scholastic tradition as this very formalistic tradition, as rather clumsy and not something you want to read for pleasure, which they thought philosophy should also be something that you could read almost as a literary and rhetorical genre as well. So is there anything we could say about the actual philosophical content though of works produced in all of these periods that would help us to differentiate medieval philosophy in the middle from what came before and what came after? I mean, are there any really sort of telltale signs about medieval philosophy? There's sort of certain issues that they get interested in or even certain texts that they're concentrating on? Or is it really just going to be a matter of the same kinds of issues popping up across the centuries? I think it's probably the latter. But in order to answer your question, I need to know what the medieval philosophy of that term is supposed to refer to, especially since I think this is not only would Jill not disagree, but in a sense is what she's been saying that the humanism she's been talking about doesn't belong to a given chronological period. So when you were talking about the attitude to philosophy, to style philosophy, wanting to be able to read it with pleasure, all of that would apply to something like John of Salisbury in the 12th century. None of it really would apply to Suarez. Who's often considered a Renaissance philosopher? He is a Renaissance philosopher. He's not a medieval philosopher, I would insist on that. Finally a point of clarity. Whatever else we say to Suarez is a Renaissance philosopher. That's good to know. But on this question of issues, a good example of this is one of the debates that's very important in the Middle Ages and continues to be in the Renaissance is intellect versus will. And this is something that people debated about, Franciscans versus Dominicans. And a philosopher whom I'm interested in the late 15th century, Marsilio Ficino, the first man who translated all of Plato into Latin, the great reviver of the Platonic tradition. And this is a difference, by the way, with the Middle Ages, which had very little of Plato and after Ficino they had the entire corpus. When he's writing about Plato, his commentary on the Phalibos, and whether or not Plato believes in the intellect or the will, he draws on Thomas Aquinas. And people are still debating the same issues. They're still looking back. The texts they use sometimes are the same, but then they add new texts, like adding Plato into the mixture. But then we shouldn't want to say that interest in the intellectual will and their relations is something which typifies the medieval and the Renaissance periods, because then you take our most famous early modern philosopher, Descartes, and this is absolutely central for him too. Yeah, I think actually when I eventually get to early modern philosophy, in a way these same issues will arise because despite all the rhetoric that you find in Descartes about getting rid of the scholastic burden of the past, in fact he is reproducing a lot of arguments that already turn up in medieval texts, whatever we mean by medieval, and he's reacting to scholastic philosophy in a much more nuanced and engaged way than just chucking it all out the window. So far we've seen that chronologically speaking, we've got a very complex, blurry picture. And it sounds to me like at best if we can say that there are certain features that are very notable about say Renaissance philosophy, we're probably going to find at least examples of the same sorts of things in the so-called medieval period. So chronologically it's difficult, but I'll do my best. I was actually thinking of 1400 as a good cutoff point. I also would make the point that there's a geographical issue here as well, because somebody like Nicholas of Cusa, one of the great philosophers of the 15th century, was born in medieval Germany because at the period he was born Germany was very much in the Middle Ages, but then he came to Italy which was in the full flow of the Renaissance, and he was a contemporary of Leon Battista Alberti and Cosimo de' Medici, and somebody like Cardinal Bazarian who was another great Platonic philosopher of the 15th century was born in the medieval Byzantine Empire, but then came to Italy and was a great Renaissance figure. So we have to cut it up in different ways there as well. Yeah, when I was covering the history of Jewish philosophy, I actually mentioned that the Abravanel family and said that I was treating the father as a medieval Jewish philosopher and I was going to be treating the son later on as a Renaissance philosopher because the family moved to Italy. Yeah, but I mean I think somebody like Nicholas of Cusa had one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot in the Renaissance, and you can tell that by his Latin because in some ways he discovers new texts of Plautus, he's in some ways a humanist, but he still writes, he doesn't really write with the elegance of the Italian humanists, so he never really overcomes that background. So the Renaissance is something that develops in different places at different times. So anyway, let's move on to I think a different dimension of this question of what medieval philosophy is, sort of taking it for granted now that the chronological question is a difficult one. I guess that when people think about medieval philosophy, what they will expect to hear about is first of all a lot about God and then maybe kind of abstruse theological questions of the kind of cliche would be how many angels dance on the head of a pen or whatever. And since I'm pretty early now in this series on medieval philosophy, I thought this would be a nice chance to get into the question of what sorts of things we should consider as falling under the heading of medieval philosophy. Pretty obviously the kind of scholastic text that you mentioned before, Jill, sort of disputed questions about the nature of truth or the soul. Commentaries on Aristotle. Commentaries on Aristotle. No one would dispute that these are medieval philosophy. But what should we say about the range of philosophical topics that get covered in the medieval period and how far we can push our notion of what philosophy is? So for example, should we consider theology to be part of medieval philosophy on the one hand? And on the other hand, to what extent do we need to consider whole other disciplines? So the sciences, for example, or text and mysticism or magic and alchemy. To what extent should those things be factored into our understanding of what medieval philosophy is? John, do you want to say something about that first? Yes. Suppose we start, because it's simpler and clearer, with the big medieval universities, so Paris and Oxford in the 13th and 14th centuries. There you have a rather clear division between the arts faculty and the theology faculty. And there are also other faculties, which like the theology faculty, are considered to be higher faculties. You have to have studied in the arts faculty first, so medicine or law. The arts faculty, by about 1250, is a faculty of Aristotelian studies. And that embraces just about the whole Aristotelian corpus. So covering a lot which we would now consider to be science rather than philosophy. Added to that is a lot of logic, and not just Aristotelian logic, but branches of logic which get developed, which go beyond anything in Aristotle. Now, you could propose just looking at those faculties. One of the uses of the word philosophia was to refer to what went on in the arts faculties. It was also sometimes used to refer to ancient philosophy, and in a sense, the arts faculties were the continuation of that. However, if you restricted yourself in that way, you'd miss out much of the most interesting philosophical speculation which went on in the course of doing theology. So you'd miss out on most of what Aquinas and almost all of what Scotus and Ockham and the most famous medieval figures did. I think that the best way to make a choice is to start from what we consider now to be interesting philosophical questions, and try to define things in that way. To look back and see where you find those questions being dealt with, which might be in the arts faculty, might be in theology. But then to place these discussions within their context, so you have to go beyond treating those narrow questions. You're not just pulling out something for contemporary interest. You are going back and replacing it within its context, which often means doing quite a bit of theology. As an historian of philosophy, one wouldn't want to be asking about a theological question for its own sake. As a historian of philosophy, you're not interested in such in the Trinity and how it can be that something can be both three and one. But in fact, you'll find yourself dealing with lots of questions about the Trinity because that's where people discussed a lot of their basic metaphysics. Yeah, they talk about parts and wholes, for example, when they're doing the Trinitarian question. I'll give you an interview later in this series about theories of parts and wholes. One of the things that comes up is that they talk about that in the context of doing theology, basically. So maybe we should draw a distinction between how people in that period used the word philosophy or cognate words, and how we might want to use the word philosophy. So if we say we're interested in the history of medieval philosophy, then that roughly, according to you, and I guess I agree with this, would mean something like, well, what I'm interested in is anything that seems philosophically interesting from this period, which for the sake of argument, I'm calling medieval. Do you think that's a sort of legitimate way of proceeding? I think that's right. But then I think you have to, as I say, replace things within the context of discussion. So I'm suspicious of the approach which would just take a discussion about mariology, for example, about parts and wholes, which takes place within a Trinitarian context without telling you anything at all about this theological context, because that often has a great effect on the arguments that people are putting forward. Right. It motivates the arguments and constrains the sorts of arguments that would be acceptable. Exactly. I come from a history background rather than a philosophy background, so I tend to take the view, which is a little different from John's, which is that we should look at what they thought at the time, what they considered to be philosophy. And that is a much broader and more capacious term. And after all, science, at least in the Renaissance and I think in the Middle Ages as well, was called natural philosophy. It was considered to be a very normal branch. Psychology, all these other areas, even astronomy, astrology, were part of what you studied in philosophy. And I think philosophy changes in the 17th century, becomes more narrow, more epistemologically and logically focused, whereas it had a much broader framework. And as John said, if you wanted to study anything, theology, medicine, law, you first studied philosophy. It was the background you needed to study anything. So I'd be happier with the notion that really included everything, included biology, included psychology, included music, included astronomy and astrology, even sort of medical questions. For instance, the Merton School, which was a very technical mathematical school of natural philosophy in 14th century England, they applied mechanical ideas to medicine. They applied it to theology. And I'd like to see philosophy as being the kind of core discipline that led you more or less to any other learned discussion in the period. So it's a slightly broader idea. Is there a danger though that by defining it that way? I mean, that sounds really good, but is there a danger that now when I say I'm doing the history of medieval philosophy, and that's what I'm covering in this podcast, but it could also arise for people who aren't doing podcasts. So if you're teaching classes about it or trying to write books about it, is there a danger that the history of medieval philosophy just becomes the history of all intellectual endeavor in the medieval period? Or should we welcome that maybe? Well, I'm not sure we shouldn't welcome it. I think it might be good. For instance, look at Dante. I mean, Dante is the great literary figure of the Middle Ages. There's a lot of philosophy in there. I'm quite happy for Dante to be in a philosophy course. I see no real problem with that. And therefore, if he's there, why shouldn't theologians be there? Why shouldn't great astronomers be there? Why shouldn't somebody like Nicole Lorrain, a French philosopher who translated Aristotle into French, but also did very important astronomical work? If we chop him up and say, well, this bit of him is philosophy and this bit is, he's a translator, this bit is astronomy, I think it doesn't make sense. I think we need to look at people in their context. But again, that's thinking of it historically rather than from a philosophical point of view. Yes. It's one thing I would say to say that one needs to know about these other things people were doing. So that, for example, with Oresme, you would need to know about the whole range of his activities if you were writing a book on him. However, if somebody finds that a certain part of Oresme's work reflects interestingly on what we now consider to be philosophical problems, I can't see why you can't detach that and focus on it whilst putting it in its context. And it seems more correct, more useful at least to describe that as medieval philosophy than to describe astronomy as medieval philosophy. If there's a book labeled medieval philosophy and you go to the philosophy section of a bookshop, you don't expect lots of it to be about astronomy. But some of it? Well, you expect to be, yeah, I think you expect to be told that the same people might well have been interested in what we think of as philosophical questions and astronomical questions. There are going to be bits of medieval astronomy that you need to know about in order to understand the discussion of the philosophical issues. But I'm not sure that you would want, if what you're going for is medieval philosophy, if you want to find a large discussion of medieval astronomy there. You need to be warned in advance that this label medieval philosophy is misleading. As you might imagine, so as the host of a history philosophy podcast without any gaps, obviously I'm very in favor of this broad approach. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment and pose an argument to both of you for a more restrictive understanding of what philosophy could mean. And this would take its cue actually from some medieval authors like Aquinas who distinguish pretty carefully between what we can discover through human reason, the natural resources of human reason, and what we can't. And then you could say, okay, well, philosophy will be everything or maybe only part of what humans can discover through natural resources of their own minds. And therefore we're going to exclude a lot of theology because theology is stuff that you only know about through revelation. And by the same token, you might then argue that mystical authors, so Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, people like that, so who I'm actually planning to cover, that this is an argument for not covering them. So you might argue, well, you don't need to cover these people because what they're interested in is truths you can acquire, not through reasoning and argument, but through some kind of mystical union with God. So another route to God, which is somehow transcendent above what reason can provide. Would that be a justifiable way of demarcating medieval philosophy from other things that were happening in the medieval period? I would say that your definition actually allows the capacious view of philosophy that I've been talking about because it would exclude astronomy, medicine, psychology, because these are all things that you do by reason. So from that point of view, I would agree with that. But I'd also like to include theology. And I think Meister Eckhart is a part of philosophy. And somebody like Nicholas of Cusa, who I mentioned, read him as a philosopher as well as a theologian. And I think that I wouldn't want to exclude somebody like Dionysius the Areopagite, whom people in the 15th century regarded as the prince of Christian philosophers. And yet he's a mystical author. He's drawing on Proclus, but he brings in a huge amount of mystical Christianity. So I, again, not like to draw the lines. I'd like to keep it open. Yeah. I'd like to make a distinction between theology in the sense of working from revealed premises and just doing that, but then working using the tools of philosophy. And this is what, for the most part, Pinus and especially people like Scotus and Ockham did. And it would seem to be very strange to exclude all that work from the area of philosophy. Though, as I say, you need to attach it, I think, to a question which we find philosophical in itself. But if you wanted to exclude that, it would mean that you couldn't talk about contingency and necessity and Scotus or anything like that, because his whole understanding of this is based on revealed premises. So you have that on the one side. On the other hand, you have the sort of theology which seems to use methods very different from philosophy. And those are the mystics that you're talking about. But there again, I think I'm not really in disagreement with Jill, because there isn't a sharp distinction. Eckhart, after all, is a highly trained scholastic theologian and philosopher, as well as a mystic. And again, so Pseudodinasius is somebody who's obviously steeped in Neoplatonism. And there do seem to be arguments for his positions. It's just they're often not put in a very argumentative way. Yeah, I guess that there's two things going on there. One is that, I mean, I mentioned Aquinas, because he distinguishes so clearly between what you can get through reason and what you can get only through divine revelation. But that's kind of an exceptional case. I mean, if someone like Maista Eckhart or the Pseudodinasius, who I already discussed back when I did late antiquity, these are people who seem to be sort of doing philosophy. And then all of a sudden, they're talking about mysticism. And then they kind of slosh back and forth. And so it seems kind of artificial to impose a distinction between the mystical part of their output and the so-called philosophical part of their output. But I think something else that John just at least implied and that I'd like to really emphasize is that even if you don't care about any of this religion stuff, right, I mean, you might be a convinced atheist and sort of assume that you therefore won't be interested in medieval philosophy, and especially the parts of medieval philosophy that look more theological. A lot of the time, the advances that were made in the medieval period that are most relevant to contemporary philosophy and that prepare the way for later philosophy to the most extent, happen in the context of talking about the Trinity or talking about God's relationship to the universe. And that example you mentioned is a really good one. Scotus's understanding of necessity and contingency, which as we'll see later on, is a huge step towards our modern understanding of necessity and contingency. That is something that he develops in large part in order to talk about God. So if you say, well, I'm just not going to take any of this stuff about God seriously as philosophy, then you actually would miss some of the most important things that have a bearing on the later history of philosophy. There is a way you can bring in that distinction. I was thinking in terms of, for instance, the secular Aristotelians in Italy in the 14th and 15th century who were very keen to say, well, if we listen to Aristotle, we think the world is eternal. We think the soul is probably mortal. And that is an argument we can develop as philosophers. Now, of course, there is the argument from Revelation, and that's for theologians, and we don't remotely doubt that it's true, but that's another question. And they did try and do this. And this was something that was a very controversial but very important thread, particularly within Italian philosophy. So they were trying to make this distinction. We want our autonomy as philosophers to be able to argue on Aristotelian premises, which lead us to conclusions, which as Christians and which theologians would not necessarily agree with or would disagree with. And so we keep them separate. So in that point of view, I think you could make the kind of distinction that you're trying to draw, and it would be legitimate. Yeah, actually, there's an irony here as well, which is that sometimes texts or events that we might think of as anti-philosophical, like the condonations that were issued in the 1270s in Paris, they often get talked about as part of the history of philosophy, because they have a bearing on all of these issues that we're describing. And so actually, we'll be seeing in this series, something that also happened when I was doing philosophy in the Islamic world, which is that figures who attack philosophy and are critical of it, maybe Al-Ghazali or Al-Taimiya, for example, in the Islamic world, I very happily devote episodes to them. And in a way, what you were just saying could explain why that's a legitimate thing to do. Another example of that is in 1513, there was a papal brief which came out saying, you must no longer make this argument of the so-called double truth, and that all philosophers must argue that these theological doctrines are philosophically demonstrable. So again, this is a papal brief. Is this part of the history of philosophy? Well, yes, it is. It's quite important. The pope is intervening. It's part of the Fifth Lateran Council. It's part of the history of Christianity. But it's also very crucial for the history of philosophy. So if we leave those kind of interventions out of the story, we don't get the full story from my perspective. Well, of course, you're going to have to talk about condemnations and prohibitions, which often seem to have exactly the opposite effect that intended. So the business with the new Aristotle, new translations of Aristotle's monological works coming in to use at the beginning of the 13th century and lots of prohibitions of various sorts issued. And then a decade or two passes, and not only are they not prohibited, but they're all compulsory. And the papal bull of 1513 didn't work either. Exactly. Ignored. Componazio. It didn't have the effect. But it's important that they tried. But in fact, in the same way, you find that people decide that, no, this is not viable. We really have to follow our philosophical traditions. So it looks like the history of philosophy itself is pretty much unstoppable. And so far, so is the podcast. So this was the 200th episode. Next time, you can hear the 201st episode, which will be devoted to what I guess I will carefully describe as early medieval philosophy, which is where I am now in the story. But for now, I will thank John Maronbon very much for coming on. Thank you. And Jill Cray. Thank you. And please join me to hear more about early medieval philosophy, or whatever you want to call it, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Stephen Gersh, who is Professor of Medieval Studies and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and who was my PhD doctoral advisor. So thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Stephen. My pleasure. So we're going to be talking about Platonism in the Middle Ages, something about which I learned a lot from you about 15 years ago, so I'm very excited to do this interview. And it seems like the obvious first question is, what did they know about Plato himself in the Middle Ages? Well, it depends which part of the Middle Ages you talk about. It's a complicated question. In actual fact, for most of the Middle Ages, they didn't know an enormous amount about Plato. There's one dialogue of Plato that you can assume had been read by most people, and that was the Timaeus. And the Timaeus, of course, is the main cosmological dialogue of Plato. So that tended to make a cosmological interpretation of Plato particularly widespread. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, things changed slightly. There are some translations of other dialogues of Plato, the Phaedo and the Meno are translated in the 12th century, and they begin to have some circulation, and you find traces of the readings of these texts in some late medieval writers. More significant, however, is the fact that Greek writers who knew Plato's works, like Proclus, tend to become known in the late Middle Ages. So, for example, later medieval writers will sometimes have some knowledge of the Parmenides because they know the Parmenides through Proclus's commentary, which was translated into Latin by William Merbeke in the 13th century. So the Parmenides begins to acquire a bit of an indirect tradition. But basically, the study of Plato in the Middle Ages is through indirect sources. And it's not really until the 15th century, people like Leonardo Bruni and Marsilio Ficino start to translate more Plato that the Platonic works really become known for themselves. And in some respects, the knowledge of Plato directly in the West is a product of the Renaissance. Of course, what I said is true of the Latin Middle Ages. If you switch over to the Byzantine world, things are slightly different. And there, obviously, the works of Plato were available in Greek throughout the tradition, and they were admired as stylistic models. But the question is, again, rather tricky that there's not as much influence of Plato's works in the Byzantine tradition as you might expect. And I think, although they knew more of Plato, some of it was a bit suspect, and they weren't quite sure how it fitted in with theology. So it's not possible to say that there was a huge amount of reading of Plato among the Byzantines. And so there are periods where it does tend to pick up a bit. People like Theodore Metochitaz and N. Kefirus Gregoras and so on are picking up on the study of Plato. And then, of course, at the end of the Middle Ages, you've got someone like Comistus Plathon, who was a great reviver of Plato. So the answer to your question is that it's a complicated question in the West. It tends to be an indirect tradition, except for the Timaeus. In the Byzantine world, it's a direct tradition, but Plato still remains somewhat subterranean, perhaps for ideological reasons. Right, and I'll actually get on to doing Byzantine philosophy later on, after I've finished Latin Christendom. But I guess it's worth just emphasizing that the reason why Plato could be recovered fully in the Latin West is that he survived in Byzantine. Right. And I realize, though, there wouldn't be a link. Of course, the main manuscripts that we have for most Greek philosophical writers are Byzantine, and they don't go back to antiquity. Right, we don't have any handwritten dialogues. So essentially, I mean, we're relying on the Byzantines, really, for all of it. The shame. So, although it gives all these Philologians something to do with editing manuscripts. So sticking, then, to Plato in the Latin West, and I guess maybe we could focus on the Timaeus in particular, since that was the text that they had for most of the Middle Ages, what aspects of Plato's thought, especially in the Timaeus, did medieval thinkers most pick up on? Well, the Timaeus, Erugina knew the translation of Calcidius of the Timaeus. He quotes Calcidius by name. And in the Periphasion, on which I think you already have already talked about that, there is clearly some knowledge of the Timaeus. And the interest in the Timaeus, though, picks up its most famously associated with the so-called school of Chartres in the early 12th century. They seem to have been, there's a group of writers, William of Conch, Thierry of Chartres, and so on. These writers were extremely interested in the Timaeus, and they developed a kind of cosmological Platonism from the Timaeus, and they were interested in questions like how the account of the cosmology in the Timaeus fitted in with the Book of Genesis. Generally, the assumption was that the Timaeus was a parallel account to the Book of Genesis, so that gave them difficulties, because there are obviously differences between the Book of Genesis and about, you know, whether the world was created in time or whether it was not created, whether it was eternal, and whether there is a trinity reflected in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis and this kind of thing. So there are a lot of problems in bringing Genesis together with the Timaeus, but that was one of the things that was popular in the early 12th century in France. But interestingly enough, that reading of the Timaeus actually picks up before that, and there are a number of glosses on major authors of late antiquity. For example, there are glasses, particularly interesting sets of glosses on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, and these are, they start really in the late Carolingian in the 9th century, and then there are 10th and 11th century glosses on Boethius, and these glosses often pick up on this cosmological Plato. So there's a sort of a tradition of reading the Timaeus reflected in these glosses, and they sometimes quote Plato by name or Calcidius by name, so it's not as though the school of Chartres in the 12th century really, they were totally pioneering the reading of this. But basically the Timaeus is, it gives you a basic account of Platonism, it describes the two-world theory, the contrast between the forms and the created world. It's notable for the way in which a cosmic soul is a central doctrine. That became a rather difficult doctrine for Christian readers, because there are problems about having a cosmic soul if you're a Christian, because there are questions of whether the cosmic soul has some kind of moral dimension. Is it fallen? Does it have moral responsibility? This is rather difficult to do in the case of a cosmic soul. Like the world soul would need to be redeemed by Christ. Exactly, so there would be rather difficult problems. And there's also the question that, the question is what is the status of the world soul? There are some people in the 12th century who try to suggest it was somewhat like the Holy Spirit, but this raised problems because the Holy Spirit was supposed to be consubstantial with the Father and the Son, and the three persons are consubstantial, and the world soul is clearly not consubstantial with the demiurge. Because the demiurge actually creates the soul. So there are problems with that, but it didn't stop a lot of writers of the period trying to build bridges between Christian doctrine and the Timaeus. So the world soul, I guess the two-world theory, some reflection on the nature of matter, they're probably the cosmological issues essentially. Actually, I was just going to ask you that quickly. In the Arabic tradition, when Plato's Timaeus is brought up in cosmological contexts, something you see over and over in Maimonides, for example, is the association of Plato's name with the idea that the cosmos is created from pre-existing matter. Is that something they worry about a lot in this Latin tradition? Well, they certainly do deal with it. A good example of tackling that question would be William of Combs's glasses on the Timaeus. It's one of the most important sets of glasses on the Timaeus in the 12th century. And he does raise the question of the pre-existing, pre-existence of matter. And basically what he does is try to bring it into line with an Augustinian view. Of course, Augustin's view is that the world was created together with time. So in other words, there wasn't any pre-existing period before time. So time came into existence together with the cosmos. So you couldn't really ask the question what went on before the cosmos existed. But this does leave you with this question of the substratum, which is a rather chaotic substratum in Plato. What do you do with it? And the solution of William of Combs and some other 12th century Platonists is to say, well, it's kind of hypothetical. In other words, the disorder of matter is something that would have been the case if God hadn't been there to impose order. So what it does is it shows us exactly what God contributed to the cosmos, that the chaos would have existed without God. But it doesn't exist before in any kind of temporal sense. Right, and actually there is material in Timaeus that would support the idea that time only begins with ordered cosmos because it says that the heavenly motion somehow brings time into existence. So it's actually not that crazy a reading of the text, right? So Plato's Timaeus then was known, some of his other dialogues were known indirectly or later on. But obviously he's not the only source for Platonism that's available. In an episode I did a long time ago, I covered some of the other sources. For example, Marciones Capella, Calcidius, who you've already mentioned, Macrobius. So could you just, though, since that was quite a long time ago, could you just remind the listeners what other avenues there were for Platonism into the Latin West? Yes. Well, you've mentioned some of the key names. I would say there are two classes of writers that transmitted Platonism to the West. They would be the Patristic sources, and Augustine is the obvious one because you've had a podcast on him, so the audience has heard a lot about Augustine and Platonism, I'm sure. But he was one of the main transmitters of the Platonic doctrine, and Dionysius Iariopagite is another Christian writer who, of course, was extremely influential on Erugina, translated by Erugina. So both of those writers are transmitting a Platonic doctrine. And writers like Macrobius were extremely influential. There are a lot of classes on Macrobius, and Macrobius in a way is very striking because he presents probably the fullest account of Plotinus' doctrine. That was available before Ficino. He does summarize parts of Plotinus. Certainly Ennead 5.2 is very close to the way in which Macrobius summarizes the doctrine of the three first principles. So Macrobius was a source for Platonism, and Marcianus, of course, in the two books of allegory, there's a great deal of Neoplatonism in that myth of Mercury and Philology. Calcidius, that you've already mentioned, his commentary does include a certain amount of independent work. And Boethius, who really was a Platonist, despite the fact that he can be thought of as an Aristotelian if you just take account of what his translations, which survive, which of course are on logical works, but the Consolation of Philosophy is a Platonist work, and the Theological Tractates are essentially Platonist works. So all of these are transmitters of Plato. But it's Platonism, of course, transformed by late antiquity. It simply is not the pure Platonism of the dialogues. I don't think you really understand the history of philosophy in the West if you think that the Platonism that's transmitted really is the Platonism of the dialogues. It's the Platonism of late antique writers, middle Platonists or Neoplatonists, Plotinus, Porphyry and the like, who worked over Plato. Augustine says, for example, in the Contracademikos, that Plato relives in Plotinus. And his Plato is essentially through Plotinus. So it's late antique Platonism that's the crucial thing underlying all of these Latin sources. One thing that I think is striking too is the association between the liberal arts and Platonism. So obviously Marcionis Coppella, he's one of the main sources for thinking about the liberal arts in the allegory that you mentioned of the marriage of Mercury and Philology. Because the seven liberal arts are personified as characters in that allegory, and you have a lot of glosses on Marcionis, so this would have been a way for Platonism to kind of creep into the Latin tradition just because their standard texts on the liberal arts happened to be full of Platonism. Or do you think that maybe, is it maybe the reverse also true, that they were pulled towards working on the liberal arts because these were some of the most interesting philosophical texts? I would think the first view is probably more likely to be correct. The study of these works was part of a curriculum, clearly. I don't think you can really make a case for there being a very fixed curriculum throughout the early Middle Ages. In some respects I think it was more of an ideal than something that was realized probably in practice. But I think probably students were interested in Marcionis as a source of astronomy and things like that. And in the course of doing that they tended to pick up Platonism. There is an interesting case of one of Erudita's opponents, Prudentius of Troyes, who accused him of getting into his Neo-Platonic thought because he was getting too much interested in Marcionis Capella. That may be indication of the fact that it was the sort of liberal arts books that were sort of entrapping people in Platonism rather than they were driven by a Platonist intent to read his liberal arts books. Sort of liberal arts as a gateway drug. I think it was. Because after all the liberal arts in a way were gateways to Christian thought too. And Augustine on Christian teaching explains his own theory of the liberal arts. The liberal arts are the way you learn in order to read scripture. So it's not a strong, it's not a difficult thing to move from that position that he sketches out there to a position that the liberal arts are key to pagan Platonism as well. Because structurally it's parallel. Speaking of paganism, what do they do with the more overtly pagan or generally non-Christian aspects of these texts because they sometimes talk about deities other than the one god. And even in Plato himself in the Timaeus for example there are lesser gods whom the Demiurge addresses when he's creating the universe. That's a very interesting question. To some extent it's been studied. Although there are aspects of the problem that haven't been looked at in detail. The basic approach was probably allegorization. And the gods of mythology can be treated as equivalent to physical forces. You can identify Jupiter with the fire and the heaven, Juno with the air, Neptune with water. You can identify them with the four elements. You can also identify them sometimes with metaphysical values rather than with physical ones. And so the general tendency was to find some acceptable physical or metaphysical truth lying behind the narrative. And this was a question that exercised medieval writers quite a lot. And there are periods in which there's a lot of interest in this kind of allegorical reading of pagan texts. The 12th century, I mentioned it before, in connection with the school of Chartres, is a great period for this. And you find members of the school, if there was really a school there's somewhat debate about that, like Bernard Silvestris who are actually writing commentaries on Virgil. There's a philosopher who writes a commentary on the first six books of the Aeneid. It's rather a tangle but there's a lot of philosophical ideas inside it. And there was a tradition for interpreting the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid as a metaphysical cosmological text. And this starts out in late antiquity with Servius and you find it in Macrobius. And it fits into the myth of Virgil the great sage, the great philosopher, which of course is one of the ideas of Virgil that you find in Dante. So the allegorical technique was used throughout the Middle Ages but there were periods certainly where scholars thought that this kind of thing was too pagan. And there are periods where this kind of allegorical reading is very common. For example in Thierry of Chartres or William of Comte you find quite a lot of this. On the other hand you only have to go back another generation or two to someone like Anselm of Canterbury who's working in a monastery in Beck and they're not doing it at all. Anselm doesn't have any of this kind of thing. So it was a matter of taste really and there were fashions that came and went. Now an interesting aspect of it is in the late Middle Ages when the works of Proclus became available, Proclus's works are full of gods and henads as he called them. And there was a real problem of what to do with all these henads. And you find writers like Thomas Aquinas and some of the right German writers of the late Middle Ages like Dietrich of Freiberg and Berthold of Mosburg working in the 13th to 14th century who grapple with this problem of what to do with Proclus's henads. And there are various strategies. One way is to identify them with intellects. Another one way is to identify them with divine names of the one god. So Proclus's blatant polytheism at the end of the Middle Ages is a bit of a challenge and there are various ways in which they had to address this. It's interesting that they take these texts to be sufficiently authoritative that they bother trying to save them in that way. I mean why not just say, oh these texts are pagan so they're full of falsehoods. Well in the case of Proclus, his work was very much prized because, probably because of the axiomatic form of the elements of theology. You know the 211 propositions to reduce theology to an axiomatic form is an attractive prospect. And in the 12th and 13th centuries the work was, began to be popular because of the axiomatic form. So a writer who has succeeded in reducing all theology to 211 axioms is worth looking at. It's just unfortunate that 20 or 30 of the propositions happen to be about pagan gods. It can be about the pagans, yeah. So I guess you just have to take the rough with the smooth. Yeah, so there's enough in there that they wanted to keep, that they wanted to save the rest basically. So that's interesting because up until what you were saying about Proclus, we'd mostly been talking about a relatively earlier period of medieval philosophy up to the 12th century. And I suppose that one thought someone might have is that when the works of Aristotle were fully recovered, which happens in the late 12th, early 13th century, that Platonism would be sort of suppressed or edged out by this resurgence, Aristotelianism, maybe almost the reverse of what happened actually in late antiquity when the Aristotelianism of someone like Alexander of Aphrodisias was supplanted by the Platonism of people like Plotinus. But what you just said about Proclus actually suggests that that's not the case. Right. Well, you have to be very careful about this. There are a lot of books, textbooks, that seem to create the impression that somehow Platonism faded from the scene because of the arrival of the Aristotelian works. That is a massive oversimplification that we need to avoid. For one thing, Aristotle became known through lots of indirect sources that were somewhat Platonistic in terms of their complexion. That's the first thing. The other thing is that it depends what you mean by Platonism. You could, for example, there's a Platonism which emerges through all the indirect sources of late antiquity that I've been mentioning, the patristic ones and also the secular ones. There's also a Platonism which you discover by reading, say, Aristotle's works in which he criticizes Plato. Now in the time of someone like Thomas Aquinas, clearly there are two ways in which Thomas Aquinas is being exposed to Platonism. There's the one way which is that he's seeing the works of Aristotle are attacking Plato. So that's a certain form of Platonism which he's on the whole going to criticize. On the other hand, there's all the Platonism which is sort of the underground tradition of Platonism in the Augustine, which he's of course still using in a way, and Dionysius the Areopagite on whom he writes a commentary is a Platonist or the book of causes, which he uses extensively, which is another Platonist work. So in a way, he's attacking a certain definition of Platonism, yet at the same time, he's absorbing and still transmitting a Platonism, but it's not called Platonism. He calls it something else. A good example of that is Aquinas' treatise on the separate substances in which he spends a lot of time attacking Platonism. And of course the Platonism he's attacking is the Platonism that's come through Aristotle. But he ends up advocating the doctrine of pseudodionisius, or he doesn't call him pseudodionisius, he calls him Dionysius the Areopagite because of course he believes in the authenticity of Dionysius. So we then get a completely Neoplatonic Proclian ending to the text. But of course he doesn't think it's Platonism, he thinks that's revealed doctrine because Dionysius is a Christian authority. So he's attacking one picture of Platonism and then he's actually replacing it with another one. So it's a question of what you define by Platonism. So they're writers like Aquinas that you don't think of primarily as Platonists who actually have this Platonic streak in them. Then there's a tradition which has been studied particularly recently in Germany, which is the Albertist tradition in Germany, which has been the subject of a lot of scholarship in recent years and includes people like, well, Albert the Great, of course, the founder of it. But people who work in his tradition like Dietrich of Freiburg, which is not the Freiburg in Brisego, it's the other one further east, and Bertolt of Mosburg, and Meister Eckhart. And this German Dominican, they were all Dominicans, is a tradition that preserves quite a radical form of Platonism and they're particularly fond of Proclus. Bertolt of Mosburg in the 14th century produced the largest commentary on Proclus that's been produced, a huge work that's been edited recently. And what he does is he uses an interpretation of Proclus's elements of theology as a kind of a framework in which to produce a kind of entire encyclopedia of philosophy. And of course he interprets the Arabs that he knew in Latin translation into that, and has this Albert and Ulrich of Strasbourg and all these people. And it's all added into a huge encyclopedia based on the Latin version of Proclus. So there's this German tradition which has been very much studied, and that in the end leads, I suppose, to Nicholas of Cusa at the end of the Middle Ages, who of course is one of the arch Platonists of the Middle Ages. He's a transitional figure to the Renaissance. So actually that sort of tour you just took us on makes me think a couple of things. One is that there isn't just one Platonist tradition, there's streams of Platonism through patristic authors like Augustine, through Latin secular texts like Macrobius and Marcianus, and there's Platonism that's managed to get mistaken for Christian doctrine, like in Dionysius, who actually was a Christian but is drawing on Proclus, so sort of smuggles Neo-Platonism into Christianity. So that's one thing that I'm taking out of all this. But something else is that rather than a kind of Platonist period early in the Middle Ages, followed by an Aristotelian period, it sounds more like what we have is a fairly complicated and to some extent subject to trends and revivals, but still more or less continuous tradition of Platonism all the way from late antiquity down to the Renaissance. Do you think that's true? Right. I think it depends to some extent whether you look at institutional structures or the history of ideas, because it's quite clear that the medieval universities in terms of their methodology were predominantly Aristotelian. They had the disputation and all of this stuff. So from the institutional point of view and the pedagogical point of view, there is no doubt that Aristotelianism was dominant in methodology. And this is not totally surprising. After all, the Aristotelian works are very methodological. They clearly look like textbooks. I mean, they were textbooks probably originally. Whereas Plato's works are more discursive, they're more literary and rhetorical and so on. So they're harder to use really as college textbooks. If you look at the institutional side, and I think you have to say that the late Middle Ages is an era of Aristotelianism, but when you get away from the institutional side and you look at the actual doctrine, then the picture looks rather different. And I would say in the late Middle Ages, there's something of a balance between more Aristotelian approaches and less Aristotelian approaches. And I think one could make a case, certainly in terms of doctrine, abstracting from certain features of the pedagogical and institutional framework, for saying there is an absolutely continuous tradition of Platonism right through the Middle Ages that remains very strong. And it's probably a mistake, therefore, to think that when Ficino translated all the works of Plato in the 15th century, this was some kind of massive change. In actual fact, things have been leading up to it for a long time. The real difference, however, is that for the first time, the Greek texts are becoming available. We know, for example, that Petrarch was interested in reading Plato in Greek, but he never mastered the Greek enough to do it. So the lack of Greek in the West was something that held things back for a long time. And it wasn't maybe until the 15th century that Greek became sufficiently common as a language that people were able to go to the Platonic text directly. But when Ficino revived Platonism, we talk about it that way, there was still an awful lot of Platonism that had remained within all these separate channels. But it's a very complex issue, and a lot of it depends on defining exactly what you mean by Platonism. Right, so thank you very much for that whirlwind tour of Platonism or Platonisms in the medieval period. I'm going to be sticking with the earlier period as we march on. So for now, I'll thank Stephen Gersh very much for coming on the podcast and for inspiring me originally with my love of Platonism. Well, I have a happy memory of that. And I will encourage you to join me next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Philosophers Anonymous – The Roots of Scholasticism If the rise of social media has taught us anything, it's that cutting-edge communication technologies are valued for one reason above all others – we can use them to tell other people about our cats. Things were no different when the very latest in communication technology was pen, ink and parchment. So it was that in the early Middle Ages, a scholar at the Abbey of Reichenau wrote a poem about his cat, Pangur. Here it is, in the translation of no less a fellow poet than W.H. Auden. Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are! Alone together, scholar and cat, Each has his own work to do daily. For you it is hunting, for me study. Your shining eye watches the wall, My feeble eye is fixed on a book. You rejoice when your claws entrap a mouse, I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem. Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other. Thus we live ever without tedium and envy. The charm of the poem is undeniable with the evident affection of this medieval monk for his faithful feline companion. It's made more touching by the fact that the poem is not in Latin, but in Old Irish. The author was an Irishman living far from home in Germany. More poignant still, I think, is the fact that we know the cat's name, but not that of the poet. In both respects, he was a typical representative of early medieval culture. There were many Irish scholars living on the European mainland in this period, enriching its culture with their expertise in classical languages and the liberal arts, as well as the occasional cat poem. We've already met the greatest of these Irishmen, John Scodas Eriugena, and we'll be meeting more in this episode. But even more typical is his anonymity. It's sometimes jokingly remarked by experts in medieval philosophy, who are of course famous for their sense of humor, that the most prolific philosopher of the age was named anonymous. We have hundreds of manuscripts with philosophical texts written by unnamed authors who are unsurprisingly usually given short shrift by historians, and you can't really blame them. After all, there are many obscure figures from these centuries whose names we do know, and who are likewise waiting to be rescued from oblivion. We'll be meeting some of them in this episode too. One of the characteristic scholarly activities of the medieval period was commentary on earlier texts. Many surviving manuscripts are adorned by anonymous comments or glosses. These were written in the margins or just above the words of the main text so that one is literally invited to read between the lines. This was no act of vandalism, as it would be if you wrote in a library book today. To the contrary, we find that manuscripts were sometimes produced with glosses specifically in mind, with deliberately wide margins around the main text to leave room for them. Experts can tell a lot about these manuscripts by studying the handwriting used in them. For instance, even when a text is in Latin, telltale abbreviations and features of the script used may show that the scholar who copied it out was from Ireland. Which brings us back to the contribution of Irish scholars in the Carolingian period. We know the names of many such scholars, in part thanks to a list of names written in a 9th century manuscript. Ironically, the man who recorded them is himself anonymous, while many of the Irishmen he mentions are to us nothing more than names. Yet in their day they were renowned scholars. They are being listed here as the leading exegetes of earlier works by classical authors like Horace and Ovid, and earlier medieval authors like Bede. Other manuscripts show us that, exceptional though he may have been, Ariugina was far from alone. His knowledge of Greek was remarkable, but not unique among Irishmen working in France in the late 9th century. His countryman Martin was active at this time in the city of Lyon, and I do mean active. There are at least 20 manuscripts with his handwriting in them, one of which is a glossary and grammar book for learning Greek. Two other Irish scribes, both anonymous, were close to Ariugina. In fact one of them has even been thought to be Ariugina himself. More likely, though less romantic, is the explanation that they are two unknown students of his. The scribes are known to today's scholars simply as I-1 and I-2. These Irish eyes smiled on the philosophical ideas of their teacher. They revised and added glosses to the Paraphysion, possibly under the guidance of Ariugina himself, and made notes on other manuscripts including Boethius's treatise on music. In one manuscript, the distinctive ideas of Ariugina are used to interpret the Bible. There's nothing here to suggest that Ariugina's colleagues were outstanding philosophers in their own right, but it does show that he was not operating in a vacuum. To the contrary, what we have here is a little group of like-minded scholars gathered around one outstanding figure who are collectively trying to understand and expound the Bible and texts of classical antiquity. Further anonymous scholars from about this time applied Ariugina's ideas to other philosophical works. One was On the Ten Categories, itself an anonymous work, but popular in the earlier medieval period because it was thought to be by Augustine. In a gloss to one manuscript of this work, a scholar is trying to explain a passage which speaks of being as the most general genus. The idea here is a simple but important one. Given that you are listening to a philosophy podcast, you are, I think I can assume, a human being like me. So we are members of the same species, the human species. But we are also animals, just like Hiawatha the giraffe. Aristotle called this higher level grouping a genus. The genus of animal includes humans, giraffes, and all the other animal species. We can go further though. Animals fall under a higher genus of living things, which includes plants. Living things then fall under the still higher genus of bodies, which embraces not only animals and plants but also things like rocks. If we keep going like this, will we eventually get to a most general genus, a group that includes absolutely everything? According to this text and the Glossator, the answer is yes. Everything there is, is a being. Reasonable enough, you might think. After all, can you think of anything that isn't a being? My nonexistent sister doesn't count. It's when the anonymous commentator connects these logical ideas to theology that his affection for Eriugino starts to show. Following the sort of Platonist line found in the Paraphysion, the anonymous author explains that this highest genus, being, is to be identified with God himself. All created being, from rocks to plants to animals to humans, are derived from this single divine being. Another anonymous gloss adds the negative perspective of Eriugino's theology, stating that since the divine being is beyond our comprehension, it is rather paradoxically a kind of non-being. With these glosses, our unknown scholars are not just showing us that Eriugino's ideas had some impact among his contemporaries. They are also paving the way for a long-running argument over the general features of things, usually called universals. Eriugino and his colleagues seem to think that a nature found in many things, like human, giraffe, or even being, is not just something real, but something divine, a cause for all the things that partake of it. One author of the time compared the relation between the species human and individual humans to the relation between the roots of a tree and its branches. John Maronbon, friend of the podcast and one of the few scholars to work with these glosses, has called this view hyper-realism, the idea that a general nature is not just real, but expresses its reality in the individuals that partake of it. This is, in effect, the logical version of Eriugino's core metaphysical teaching that God's transcendent being is made manifest in created things. If you were to ask one of these unnamed scholars what they thought they were doing when they meticulously studied and annotated their logical textbooks, they would unhesitatingly reply, dialectic. Entrined as one of the liberal arts, dialectic offered considerable scope for exploring philosophical issues. In the first instance, it would mean doing logic. But as we have just seen, fairly innocuous logical texts could provoke forays into metaphysics and theology. So just imagine what might happen when the texts being glossed weren't so innocuous. This was the case with the marriage of philology and mercury of Marciones Capella, whose frankly pagan contents were tolerated by early medieval readers eager to learn from it. It was simply too useful a text to be ignored, providing, as it did, a detailed discussion of all seven liberal arts. Back in the time of Charlemagne, Alquin had described these arts as the columns that support the temple of Christian wisdom. Now, in the time of Charlemagne's grandson Charles the Bald, Ariugina was only one of several scholars writing glosses on the work. You won't be surprised to hear that an important set of glosses on Marciones, produced even before Ariugina's, is by our mysterious new friend, Anonymous. This unnamed scholar's comments were a major source for a further set of glosses by a philosopher whose name we do know, Remigius of Auxerre. It's usually assumed that these explanatory comments were added to Marciones's allegory as an aid to teaching, as I suggested with Ariugina's glosses. But there may have been more to it than that. A closer look shows that the commentators struggle with apparent contradictions between Marciones and other authoritative texts. Never mind the paganism, Marciones doesn't even agree with the standard astronomical picture bequeathed from the ancients. He makes Mars and Venus orbit around the Sun rather than the Earth. The glosses also discuss discrepancies between Marciones and Boethius on technical points concerning the musical scales. With their glosses, our commentators are trying to reconcile their key sources for two of the liberal arts, astronomy and music. This suggests a more advanced enterprise than classroom teaching, even if other manuscripts like the Greek-Latin glossary I mentioned earlier were obviously produced for a pedagogical context. With all this careful exegesis devoted to authoritative texts produced within teaching contexts and by collaborative groups of scholars, we're seeing the emergence of something that historians usually call scholasticism. The word comes from schola, the Latin for school, and for good reason. Before the arrival of the universities around the year 1200, philosophy was normally done in the context of the schools that were scattered throughout medieval Europe in England, France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. They were sometimes supported by secular authorities, as when the courts of Charlemagne and Charles de Bald facilitated the scholarship of Alquin, Ariugina and their less celebrated collaborators. More often, they were instruments of the church, based at religious houses, parish churches and cathedrals. That last setting was particularly important. Cathedral schools, a kind of forerunner of the medieval universities, would provide the context for a flowering of scholasticism in the 12th century, the age of thinkers like Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury, who are frequently seen as pioneers of scholasticism. But 12th century scholasticism did not come from nowhere. The intellectual values of the 9th century scholars we've just been discussing were not so different from those of an Anselm or an Abelard. They all saw antique literature as a storehouse of wisdom, which needed to be preserved and explained through copying and commentary. This applied especially to Christian authorities like Augustine Boethius and Isidore of Seville, but pagan authors like Plato, Aristotle and Marciones were also valued. The classical works were not followed out of blind devotion, but precisely because they were taken to represent the greatest achievements of human reason. It's worth remembering here that in the 9th century, it was actually feasible to master the sum total of existing human wisdom. So much had been lost in the disruptions of late antiquity and the early medieval period that a committed scholar with access to a well-stocked library could work their way through all the important texts on theology and the liberal arts. This remained a rare attainment to be sure. The schools that proliferated from the 9th to the 11th centuries were not primarily intended to turn out fully rounded intellectuals. Their purpose was more modest and more practical. In an age where nearly the entire population was illiterate, where were the functionaries of the secular government and church going to come from? The next generation of officials, secretaries and clergymen would be trained to read and write at the schools under the banner of the first liberal art, grammar. The very word comes from the Greek for letters and the basic purpose of grammatical training was indeed to impart the gift of literacy. As the schools became more numerous and as competition intensified between masters trying to attract students, the schoolmen became ever more specialized and ever more likely to engage in technical disputes over dialectic and theology. It would be nice to say that there was simply a smooth gradual increase in school activities from the 9th century down to the blossoming of full-blown scholasticism in the 12th century, but as usual things are a bit more complicated. I realized this when I sat down to make a list of the philosophers I wanted to cover in these episodes on the early medieval period. I had several thinkers from the 9th century and quite a few from the 11th and 12th, but couldn't think of a single one for the 10th century. This was to some extent the result of ignorance on my part, but I'm not entirely to blame. The 10th century was a period of considerable disruption, with more Viking raids and the new threat posed by the Magyars. Moving along the Danube River from Hungary, they invaded Bavaria, which is where I live, but I'm glad to report that the Hungarians I've met here have been very nice. By the year 937, the Magyars had visited destruction on wide swaths of Germany and moved into France. Finally, they were defeated by Otto, king of Germany, in 955. This period of instability contrasts sharply to what was going on in the Islamic world at the same time. The Muslim conquests had previously spread the new religion over a vast territory from Spain to the Indus River. Even more land fell into Muslim hands in the 10th century as they wrested control of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica away from the Christians and even made incursions into mainland France and Italy. And if you look back at the timeline on the podcast website, you'll see that this period was a high point for philosophy in the Islamic world, bookended by the later life of Al-Farabi and the early life of Avicenna. Meanwhile, what was going on in Christian Europe philosophically speaking? Not a great deal, to be honest, but more than is commonly thought. Take Abbo of Fleury, for instance. He was brought to the abbey there when very young and returned as a master after further training in Paris and Rheim. Abbo wrote on logic and astronomy, contributing to the study of the calendar as Bede and Alquin had done a few generations ago. Also like Alquin, Abbo was committed to the monastic ethic and urged discipline upon the younger monks under his care. This led to his undoing when he was killed by his own brethren when he tried to break up a fight among some monks at a monastery he was visiting. That happened in the year 1004, only one year after the death of a man who was perhaps the most outstanding scholar of the 10th century, Gerbert of Oriac. He eventually became pope and in this role was known as Sylvester II. Gerbert or Sylvester thus makes up to some extent for all those anonymous philosophers I mentioned having had two names. He had particular interests in mathematics and natural science, pioneering the use of the abacus for doing arithmetic and building his own astronomical instruments. Most of the scholars I've mentioned in this episode came from, or at least worked in, France. But as I say, there were schools springing up all over Europe. A particularly interesting one was at the Abbey of Saint-Gaulle in Switzerland. Here there was even a female teacher of Greek by the name of Hedwig. She was the niece of Otto, the German king who defeated the Magyars. Saint-Gaulle could also boast of another well-rounded expert in the liberal arts, Notka, who was nicknamed La Bayo, or the Lip, because of his protruding lower lip. Notka La Bayo helped the young men who came to study Latin with him by producing German translations of the core text of the liberal arts curriculum, like Marcianus's Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Gregory the Great's Moralia, and Boethius's Latin versions of Aristotle's Logic. In fact, Notka interspersed the German version with the Latin original, much like the facing page translations used nowadays. So far I've been giving the impression that any well-educated person in these centuries would have had unalloyed respect and admiration towards the sort of text Notka was making available in German, but in fact that is not the case. Though no one would have had a bad word to say about the classical church fathers, there were plenty of critics who thought that pagan literature was dangerous, especially for the minds of young Christians. Ariugina was chastised for occupying himself with Marcianus rather than Augustine. When Gerbert of Ariac was being considered for an archbishopric, an opponent to his candidacy remarked, Even the anonymous poets were getting in on the act. One of them took time out from petting his cat to ask what good it could possibly do for Christians to read the pagan Marcianus Capella. Yet perhaps the most famous remark about the dangers of the liberal arts was uttered by a specialist in those very arts. His name was Landfrank of Beck, praised upon his death as a man who would have been admired by Aristotle for his skill in dialectic and by Cicero for his mastery of rhetoric. Landfrank drew on a deep knowledge of the liberal arts in commenting on the morality of Gregory the Great and wrote now-lost philosophical works. Yet when he was embroiled in a notorious theological controversy with a scholar named Berengar, Landfrank said to his opponent, Like scholasticism itself, their dispute had its roots in the 9th century. Back then, a monk named Ratramnus had written an explanation of the Eucharist for Charles the Bald, in which he explained that the bread and wine used in communion are symbolic in nature. Now in the 11th century, Berengar took up a similar view, arguing that the bread and wine are Christ's flesh and blood only figuratively. Landfrank disagreed fervently concerning the theological point. For him, only the appearance and flavor of bread and wine remain, but really they have been transformed into the flesh and blood born of the Virgin. More interesting for the history of philosophy is Landfrank's disagreement with Berengar's whole approach to the issue. It was simply inappropriate to use reason to understand this mysterious and miraculous transformation. Rather, one should follow authoritative doctrine and only then apply reason to defend and understand the Eucharist more deeply. Like many medieval debates to come, the clash between Landfrank and Berengar was about the scope and place of reason in theology as much as it was about the theological issue at hand. Various thinkers will take various views on this methodological question in the centuries to come, but most will broadly agree with Landfrank. Reason plays a vital role in Christian doctrine, but there are bounds beyond which reason cannot go. Philosophy should thus accept a subordinate role to scripture, comparable to the relationship between a handmaiden and her mistress. This famous analogy was devised by an author we'll be looking at next time as we turn to a philosophical problem so crucial that you have probably been wondering why I haven't mentioned it yet. If a woman loses her virginity, can God make her a virgin again? Join me next time to find out the answer, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Virgin Territory. Peter Damian on changing the past. Suppose a Roman citizen captures a bear and brings it to the capital to be used in gladiatorial combat. Before the bear has a chance to perform, it breaks loose, runs through the streets, and kills an innocent passerby. Is the person who captured the bear liable for the death? This question was discussed by Ulpian, who wrote in the early 3rd century AD and is a major source for our knowledge of ancient law. In case you're curious, his answer is that there is no liability, since as soon as the bear escapes captivity, it reverts to its status as a wild animal. You might assume that this must have been a response to an actual event, and perhaps it was. But legal scholars did frequently work with hypothetical examples too, using imaginary scenarios to illuminate the fine points of law. This was a practice that would have been well known to the early medieval schoolmen, because they were trained in a curriculum that culminated in theology and law. Indeed, the emergence of scholasticism in the 11th and 12th centuries went hand in hand with the development of medieval law, which was deeply influenced by the Roman legal tradition. From early on in the Middle Ages, hypothetical cases were used in other areas of intellectual endeavor. Consideration of such scenarios could help to determine points of church doctrine and to clarify philosophical issues. Suppose for instance that a man has sex with a woman he mistakenly believes to be his wife. Has he committed the sin of adultery? Or suppose that the devil transforms himself so that he looks like Christ. Would a Christian who is convinced by this deception and worships the devil be committing a sin? Commenting on this phenomenon, the historian of early medieval society, Richard Southern, has remarked that, This is a fact of no small importance for the history of philosophy. A penchant for creative hypothetical reasoning is still visible in later thinkers like Descartes, as we see with his skeptical evil demon hypothesis. Nowadays, when contemporary philosophers discuss, say, a scientist named Mary who knows everything there is to know about the color red apart from what it looks like, or the possibility of zombies, physically identical copies of humans with no inner consciousness, they are unwitting heirs to an originally medieval habit of mind that in turn may have derived from Roman legal culture. All of which should help to explain why I'm going to spend this episode on the question of whether God can restore virginity to a woman after she has had sex. Clearly, this is not exactly a problem of pressing practical importance, but it led Peter Damian, a theologian of the 11th century, to contemplate the nature of God's power more generally. His reasons for doing so were theological. Yet Damian's treatment of the question touches on a fundamental philosophical issue, the nature of possibility itself. Again, this is typical of the medieval age. A love of hypothetical thought experiments goes very nicely with a conviction in the existence of an all-powerful creator. You can introduce pretty well any scenario, no matter how baroque, with the words, This sort of thing happened in the Islamic world too. It may seem that invoking God's power in this way is just a quaintly medieval way of getting at possibilities that we don't find in the actual world. After all, calling God omnipotent seems to mean just that he can do anything that can be done. The idea of a human being is a very important part of the Christian tradition. The idea of a human being is a very important part of the Christian tradition. To put this in more technical terms, omnipotence would be the capacity to bring about any possible state of affairs. From this point of view, asking whether God can do something is just a medieval way of asking whether that thing is possible. Could God, for instance, create a color without a body in which the color resides? Could he create a human the size of a mountain? Could he indeed restore virginity after it has been lost? But this overlooks alternative definitions of omnipotence. God may be so powerful that he can even do impossible things. He might, for instance, be able to create a round square to make 1 plus 1 equal 3, or make me both bald and not bald, which would be a 50% improvement over the current situation. A different opposing option would be to say that there are some things which are indeed possible, but which God cannot do. For instance, one might suppose that God cannot sin. Peter Abelard held this view, as we'll see in an upcoming interview episode. The upshot is that medieval discussions of God's power and the medieval thought experiments involving God's use of that power do tell us a lot about medieval notions of possibility, but we also need to bear in mind that the scope of God's power may be narrower, or wider, than the scope of what is possible. We especially need to bear it in mind when we look at Peter Damian's discussion of whether God can restore lost virginity. Damian is not primarily interested in clarifying the philosophical notion of possibility. His concern is rather to understand, and above all, not to disrespect, God's majestic omnipotence. He approaches the issue as a theologian, indeed as a theologian with a powerful distaste for abstract disputes with no religious motivation or foundation. His influential role in shaping the intellectual scene of the 11th century was not due to a love of dialectical inquiry, but his deep commitment to the religious life. He was born in the year 1007 in the northern Italian city of Ravenna, incidentally a major center for the study of law in the early Middle Ages. Over the coming century, the Normans would be extending their power throughout Europe. I hold all of Italy by the end of the century, and I probably don't need to tell you that William the Conqueror successfully invaded England in 1066, though I bet you didn't know that this is the same year that Peter Damian would write his discussion on God's power to restore virginity. In his early years, Damian established himself as a teacher of the liberal arts, and may also have been trained in the law. However, he retired to a monastic life, becoming prior of the Fonte of Elana monastery, and after the teaching and spiritual devotion of Vermold of Ravenna, Damian took up the cause of eremitic monasticism. This means that rather than living in a community, monks should seek isolation and live a life of individual prayer, insofar as possible. Damian himself felt the tension between this aspiration and a life helping others through preaching. Ultimately, he decided that living as a hermit would be a more powerful way to serve the cause of faith. In this he was following the example set by antique figures like Evagrius, who said of the hermit, Damian encouraged such punishing practices as sleep deprivation and self-flagellation, tools for suppressing everything else to make room for the love for God. But he also fought for the cause of church reform, railing against corruption and insisting on the need to banish from the church any clergymen who were found practicing sodomy. His letter on this subject is a key source for medieval attitudes towards homosexuality. It's only one of the 180 letters we have from Peter Damian. Another was addressed to Desiderios, a monk at the monastery of Monte Cassino, and contains Damian's discussion on restoring virginity. His point of departure is a remark made by the Latin church father Jerome, While mindful of Jerome's authority, Damian begs to differ. We should not dare to place any limits on God's power. The recipient of the letter, Desiderios, had taken a different view. He defended Jerome's remark on the basis that if God does not want to restore a woman's virginity, then he cannot do so. Damian, who is not known for pulling any punches in his correspondence, dismisses this out of hand. If God is unable to do otherwise than he wishes, then all things would be impossible for him apart from the things that he has actually done. For instance, if God chooses to make it rain, then it would be impossible for him to make it not rain. Here, Damian is setting down an initial point of great philosophical interest. There are some things which do not happen, but remain possible nonetheless. That may seem obvious. Right now you are listening to this podcast but could quite easily be doing something else, though I wouldn't recommend it. But maybe it isn't so obvious after all. Consider this. Assuming you have listened to the podcast up until this point, does it remain possible that you haven't listened to it? It seems plausible to say that you could have refrained from listening to it beforehand, but now it is too late. There are no do-overs, and what is done is done. For some reason, ancient and medieval thinkers, beginning with Aristotle, were attracted to the notion that the past is necessary. The same consideration can be applied to the present. You are listening to the podcast right now, so again, the die is cast, and you can no longer avoid listening to it right now. This leaves only the future to be genuinely open, with different conflicting possibilities available to us. Once the future has become the present and then the past, though, these possibilities will be narrowed down to one actual state of affairs which is necessary in the sense that it is too late to prevent it. Now we can see more clearly what is at stake in Peter Damian's letter on divine omnipotence. If God can restore a woman's virginity, then he can undo the past, so the past is not necessary after all. Well, maybe that is what it means. It depends entirely on what we mean by restoring virginity. Rather than getting straight to the question of whether God can really change the past, Damian insists that God can make two kinds of change to the woman's condition now. He can restore her with respect to merit and with respect to the flesh. The latter simply means putting her body back in the condition it was in before engaging in intercourse, in other words, restoring her hymen. It's quite obvious that God can do this. He can also remove the moral imperfection that, according to Damian, would be involved in the original loss of virginity. For a philosophically minded reader whose concern is solely with God's ability to change the past, all this is entirely beside the point. But it is vital for Damian's wider aim, which is to ensure that God is capable of offering redemption to humankind. At stake here is the possibility of the narrative of Christianity itself, whereby God saves humans from the sin into which they have fallen. To him, this would be a matter of considerably greater importance than clarifying our ideas about possibility and necessity. In this respect, Damian's letter is of a piece with his other activities, such as fighting for the purity of the church and acting as a spokesman for the virtues of eremitic monasticism. Virginity stands for the spiritual purity that he was striving for throughout his career, and its restoration stands for the cleansing of sin through divine grace. For similar reasons, Damian also dwells on the question of what it means to say that God cannot do evil or commit a sin. Anxious as always not to curtail God's power, Damian seeks refuge in the traditional thought that evil is non-being, or nothingness. Thus, even if we say that God is unable to do sin, there is literally nothing, no positive reality, that lies outside the scope of God's power. The discussion of the virginity question is dangerously close to being settled right here. If restoring virginity were an evil, then on that basis alone, we could conclude that it is not something God could do. In that case, we would never find out Damian's view on the broader question of God's ability to change the past, which would be a shame. Fortunately, Damian thinks it is obviously a good thing to restore virginity. Also fortunate is that Damian does still want to tell us not only whether a virgin can be restored physically and morally to a pure state, but also whether God can make it the case that she never lost her virginity in the first place. So far, Damian has said nothing that would settle this issue. As he moves on to deal with the problem, he considers an admirably clear example that doesn't involve the theological and moral complexities of the virginity case. Can God now make it the case that Rome never existed? That's the good news. The bad news is that scholars are deeply divided over how to interpret the solution, or perhaps solutions, that Damian goes on to offer. I'll spend the rest of this episode explaining some of the different interpretations. The simplest reading, and one still frequently associated with Damian, is that he takes the radical position of holding that God can do even impossible things. Even though Rome did exist, God can make it so that it never existed, thus bringing about a contradictory state of affairs. Rome both did and did not exist. Some scholars have connected Damian's supposed embrace of this to his supposed hostility towards dialectic and philosophy, for Damian would be rejecting the most fundamental rule of logic, the principle of non-contradiction, which states that the same thing can never be both true and false. But this interpretation has severe problems. In this very letter, Damian actually claims more expertise in dialectic than his opponents, and he also asserts that God cannot make contradictory things happen, since if he did, he would be thwarting his own will. On the other hand, Damian does clearly seem to be saying that God can bring it about that, if you will, there was no place like Rome. And a moment's reflection will show that this doesn't need to involve bringing about a contradiction. If God now makes it so that Rome never existed, he would not make Rome both exist and not exist in the past, rather he would replace its past existence with its past non-existence. There's nothing impossible about that, unless of course we think that the past is necessary and unalterable. Here, another interpretation presents itself. Damian follows Boethius's lead in holding that God is eternal in the strongest sense of not being subject to time at all. This means that even if Rome's existence is necessary, from our point of view, because it lies in our past, it may not be necessary from God's point of view. He is standing outside of time surveying all things at once, so for him, the past is no more necessary than the future. Given Damian's emphasis on God's timelessness, this reading has some plausibility. But it doesn't really do justice to Damian's insistence that God really can make it such that Rome never existed, even though it did exist. In fact, he says, with his characteristic rhetorical aggression, that someone who denies this deserves to be branded. Simply alluding to the timeless nature of God's power doesn't explain how it is that both options remain timelessly open to him. So, here's a simpler idea. Maybe Damian just wants to reaffirm that God retains the power to do things even when he does not do them, as we already saw with the rain example. All things are subject to God's will, and the fact that they have already happened doesn't mean that they fall outside the scope of his power. If this is all Damian wishes to say, then he is in line with more standard treatments of the question in the later Middle Ages, giving us a less outrageous, but more sensible Peter Damian. We can expand on this interpretation in light of a distinction that Damian makes between two kinds of necessity, which we might call absolute and subsequent necessity. Something is absolutely necessary if it intrinsically cannot be otherwise. For instance, it is absolutely necessary that one plus one is two. By contrast, some things are necessary only on a certain assumption. For instance, if we assume that you will finish listening to this episode, it necessarily follows from this that you will have listened to it, but your having listened to it would not thereby become absolutely necessary. It would remain the case that you could have refrained from listening to it. It's hard to imagine why you'd stop listening now, having gotten this far, but it remains possible in itself. Applying this idea to the past, we can say that once God wills that Rome should exist, it necessarily follows that Rome must exist, given that nothing can thwart God's will. Yet, Rome's existence remains merely possible in itself. God's timeless eternity remains relevant here, in that his relationship to past, present, and future events is always the same, unlike our case, where the future is open and the past and present closed. Whether we talk about Rome's past existence, the present existence of Germany, or the future existence of a nation wisely ruled by a benevolent, giraffe-loving philosopher, we are dealing with things that become necessary only if God wills them to be the case. In this sense, the past is subject to God's will in just the same way the future is. Still, God cannot will anything both to occur and not to occur, so there is no threat that a contradiction will arise. I find this interpretation fairly compelling, but it too has potential problems. Some scholars claim to find in Damien the idea that the principle of non-contradiction itself is subject to God's will, meaning that God simply chooses to avoid bringing about contradictions. If this principle itself is subject to God's will, then after all these subtle interpretive maneuvers, we would be back with something like the traditional reading that God can do the impossible. Setting this aside, though, it's noteworthy that Damien distinguishes between two kinds of necessity. About a generation later, in the same context of the question whether God can change the past, the more famous thinker Anselm of Canterbury will make the same distinction very clearly by contrasting nekessitas praekedens with nekessitas sequens, preceding and subsequent necessity. It's just one example of Anselm's clear-headed approach to the problems that had arisen in the first few centuries of medieval philosophy, an approach which, for some, licenses calling him the first great scholastic philosopher. It's too late for you to avoid hearing all about Peter Damien, but it remains up to you whether you'll learn more about Anselm by joining me next time for The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode … A Canterbury Tale – Anselm's Life and Works You will presumably be familiar with Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book with almost as many jokes about philosophy in it as this series of podcasts, and his are funnier. Another novel by Adams, entitled Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, is less celebrated, but has a scene in it that I like very much. In this scene, the title character, Dirk Gently, refers to Sir Isaac Newton as the renowned inventor of the cat flap. When it's pointed out to him that, more to the point, Newton also discovered gravity, Dirk responds that gravity was just waiting around for someone to notice it, whereas the cat flap was a true stroke of genius. A door within a door, you see. It's put to him that this actually seems quite an obvious idea, at which point Dirk says, It is a rare mind indeed that can replace the hitherto non-existent with the blindingly obvious. Of course, being extraordinarily famous for one thing, when you deserve to be famous for other things too, is not that harsh a fate. Zepo Marx, the obscure fourth Marx brother, would presumably have leapt at such a chance. And it certainly wouldn't have bothered Anselm of Canterbury that he was in this respect the Isaac Newton of medieval philosophy. Fain was the last thing on his mind when he devised his so-called ontological argument, a proof intended to show that the existence of God is blindingly obvious, indeed entailed by our very conception of God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Anselm owes his renown mostly to this argument, yet even without it he would deserve a prominent place in the history of medieval philosophy. He lived most of his life in the 11th century, dying in 1109, but helped to prepare the way for the flowering of scholasticism in the 12th century. He was also a significant, though reluctant, actor on the political stage, whose life story will give us a first glimpse of the clash between the authority of the church and of the state. Anselm was formed by, and for the most part remained within, the sort of monastic intellectual culture that has provided the main context for philosophy ever since the Carolingian Renaissance. Like Peter Damian, who featured in last week's episode, Anselm hailed from northern Italy, but he moved in his early 20s to France, where he became a monk at the Abbey of Bek in the year 1059. Here, he encountered Landfrank, whom we saw engaging in a dispute over the correct understanding of the Eucharist in a previous episode. Landfrank was well known as a teacher of the liberal arts, and must have had a significant role in shaping the intellectual outlook of Anselm, who succeeded him as the prior of Bek in 1063, later becoming Abbot. He did not enjoy the duties involved in these posts, but that was nothing compared to what awaited him. In 1093, he reluctantly agreed to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. His biographer, Eyad Mir, claims that when Anselm was being invested as Archbishop, he actually physically resisted when William II, the King of England, personally bestowed the ring and staff upon him. The King's right to appoint bishops was at this time becoming a matter of intense debate. As we'll be discussing in a future episode, the investiture controversy had already erupted in the 1070s, as the Church resisted the claims of secular rulers to exercise authority over the clergy. But, in describing the scene, Eyad Mir may also have been writing with the benefit of hindsight, having a clearer understanding of the significance of this investiture ceremony, and also knowledge of the rocky relationship Anselm was to have with William. They clashed over the restoration of land to the Church and other financial matters. Eventually, Anselm had to go to Rome to petition the Pope for his support. He returned to England after William's death, only to go into exile again because of the investiture controversy which pitted him against William's successor, Henry I. Amidst these political battles, and despite his official duties, Anselm somehow managed to compose the works of philosophy and theology that stand as a landmark in the transition from early medieval thought to the intellectual renaissance of the 12th century. And yes, I know we just had a renaissance in the Carolingian period, but between the 8th and the 15th centuries, philosophy was reborn more often than a phoenix with a heavy smoking habit. In many respects, Anselm's writings would be at home in the earlier period we've been examining so far. He tells us that one of his better known works, the Monologion, was written at the request of his fellow monks, for the sake of meditating on the divine. Anselm was, he tells us, reluctant to set down his thoughts, but did so in humble compliance to their requests. The pastoral dimension of Anselm's career is also shown, for instance, by prayers and other spiritual writings which are rarely read by historians of philosophy but provide important context for his more philosophical writings. These texts are also deeply informed by Augustine, still the dominant intellectual force in monastic culture. On the other hand, those same writings point the way towards a major feature of philosophy in the 12th and 13th century, a reliance on reason rather than revelation and authority. In the preface of the Monologion, Anselm explains that what we are about to read will, supposedly at the request of Anselm's brethren, consist of nothing but rational argument. True to his word, in what follows Anselm refrains from quoting scripture. This approach displeased his teacher Lanfranc when Anselm sent him the Monologion to ask whether it met with his approval. Even though Lanfranc had criticized his opponent Berengar for trying to explicate the Eucharist using nothing but the tools of dialectic, Lanfranc was no opponent of the use of reason. So his disquiet at the lack of authoritative quotations in the Monologion powerfully demonstrates the novelty of Anselm's method. In the 12th century, figures like Abelard will have no hesitation in setting out pure argument such as to persuade even a fair-minded Jew or atheist. Anselm was a pioneer in this regard, and though he was humble enough to submit the Monologion to Lanfranc, he was also confident enough in his approach that he left the treatise as it was, despite Lanfranc's criticism. It was while he was at Beck in the 1070s and 80s that Anselm wrote the groundbreaking Monologion and its sequel, the Proslogion, which contains the famous ontological argument. Yet at this same time, he was dealing with somewhat more traditional topics. He penned a work on grammar, the first of the liberal arts, and he used his dialectical skills to sort out the problem of freedom's compatibility with divine predestination and the Augustinian position on grace, the issue that had led to such disputes in the time of Ariugina. Later, during his time at Canterbury, Anselm's rationalist project would take an even bolder form, as he tried to show why God not only did, but in fact had to, become incarnate as a human. Again, the preface to the work declares his method. Even if we knew nothing about Christ, we could work out for ourselves that God must become man in order to save humankind, and that otherwise the immortality for which humans are destined could never come to pass. Behind that argument lurks a fundamental presupposition of Anselm. Things in the created world can only be rightly understood in light of their purposes. To some extent this was old news. Ever since Aristotle, nature had usually been understood in a teleological way. If you want to understand a giraffe's long neck, you have to realize what purpose is being served by its length. But Anselm, following the lead of Augustine, tends to see even apparently abstract notions in teleological terms. Consider, for instance, his treatise entitled On Truth. We might assume that this is a pretty straightforward notion. A sentence is true if what it says matches the way that things are. Anselm would agree with that as far as it goes, but he would insist that affirmative sentences like this need to be understood as serving some purpose. They are, as it were, trying to do something. Their goal is to describe the world, or as Anselm puts it, to signify that what is, is. So, the truth of an assertion is an example of what Anselm calls rectitudo, meaning correctness, or if you prefer to stick closer to the Latin word, rectitude. In light of this understanding of truth, Anselm feels free to apply the concept of truth much more widely than we would today. If truth is the same thing as correctness, or rectitude, it can turn up wherever rectitude is at stake. And for Anselm, that's just about everywhere. For example, he says that a right action is a true action. God, being purely good and the source of all other goods, is the ultimate example of something that is as it ought to be, so Anselm concludes that God is nothing other than truth itself. Finally, we can apply this concept of truth or rectitude to the human will. Since we can will what we ought to as when we love God, or fail to do this as when we sin, the will can be true or false. In other words, it can have or lack rectitude. Anselm develops this idea in two further treatises which form a trilogy together with On Truth, called On Free Will and On the Fall of the Devil. Here, Anselm is trying to understand the sinful choices that led to the fall of humans and of Satan, a former angel who was punished for trying to usurp God's authority. Like On Truth, these treatises are written in dialogue form. As in Eriugina's Paraphysion, the dialogue unfolds between a teacher and a student, with the teacher coaxing a puzzled student into understanding the novel ideas being put forward. At the very outset, the student poses the question that had so vexed Eriugina and his contemporaries, if we need God's grace to avoid sin, how is it that we remain free? The teacher responds by saying that freedom is not the power to choose between sinning and not sinning. After all, God cannot sin, nor can the angels who have been confirmed in their commitment to God after they chose obedience to him rather than the defiance shown by Satan. With this point, Anselm is heading into the area we talked about last time, when we wondered whether there is anything that God cannot do. His answer is yes, God cannot will evil. He can only will one thing, namely the good. But this does not make him any less free. In fact, God's inability to choose anything but goodness makes him more free than a creature who can choose between good and evil. This may sound perplexing, but it is easier to understand in light of Anselm's earlier definition of the will. Remember that the will is not just a power to choose, but has a purpose. This purpose is, as Anselm puts it, to preserve rectitude for its own sake, and freedom is nothing more nor less than the ability to do this. In other words, the reason we have a will is so that we can persevere in willing goodness or justice, because they are good and just, rather than to win some reward or avoid some punishment. Someone is free so long as they are able to do this. Obviously, being unable to sin, like God and the good angels, does not amount to an inability to exercise will rightly. To the contrary, it is a guarantee that the will is always used in the way it was meant to be used, in other words, a guarantee that such a will is free. As humans, we face a different and more problematic situation. The first humans, like Satan before he fell, faced the choice of whether to use will correctly or incorrectly. Unfortunately, they picked wrong. We still bear the burden of this choice, being unable to will goodness consistently because we are born into original sin. To use Anselm's preferred language again, we are not in a position to preserve rectitude for its own sake. Doesn't that mean then that we do lack freedom after all? Anselm argues that it does not, and his argument is a clever one. Someone could have a power to do something without being in a position to use that power. His example is eyesight. Suppose that I sit you down in a theater where a Marx Brothers movie is playing and that your eyes are in good working order. Clearly, you have the power to see the movie. Now imagine that I blindfold you. Would you now lack the power to see the movie? No, that would be the case of someone who actually lacks eyesight, that is, someone who is blind. Rather, you do have the power but are unable to use that power until the blindfold is removed. It could have been worse, at least it isn't a silent movie. In the same way, even in their fallen state, humans have the power to preserve rectitude for its own sake. In other words, they do have free wills. It's just that they can't use this power in the way it was meant to be used, at least not without God's help. But that isn't to say that humans can't use their free wills at all. We are willing freely with every choice we make, including our sinful choices. Why though does sinning count as a use of free will if the purpose of the will is to preserve rectitude? Well, because you can use a power without using it rightly. The purpose of my power to write philosophy podcasts is to entertain and inform my audience. If I used this power to put out a dull and misleading episode, you never know, it might happen, then I would not be using the power as I should, but I would still be using it. Likewise, the choices of Adam, Eve, and Satan before they fell and the sinful choices we make now are incorrect uses of the will, yet they are still free uses of the will. Now, you might object to this that sinning doesn't seem to have anything to do with freedom at all. If freedom is the power to preserve the will's rectitude, how is it involved in violating that very rectitude? To understand Anselm's answer, we need to factor in another condition that he lays down for freedom of the will. No one is free to will something if they are compelled or coerced into willing it. Even the threat of guaranteed punishment can count as coercion. This is why Anselm insists that Satan could not have known the awful fate that would befall him if he defied God. If he had known, he would not only have chosen differently, but would have had no alternative but to choose differently, so he would not have been free. The same goes for humans. If God acts justly in punishing us, it is because humankind sins, as Anselm puts it, through a judgment that is so free that it cannot be coerced to sin by anything else. This is what the will to sin has in common with the will to preserve rectitude. Neither are coerced by any outside force. Whether the choice is good or bad, the choice is only free if it is determined by the person who is exercising their will to choose. A remarkable feature of Anselm's analysis is that, according to him, someone can even be coerced by their own motivations. When he is describing the fall of the devil, he says that Satan must have had two opposing motivations. One was a motivation to be just, the other a motivation to have whatever would make him happy. Justice would imply obedience to God, while Satan supposed that he would become happy by defying God. The other angels had the same pair of motivations but chose justice over happiness, and good thing too, since Satan's choice made him far from happy in the end. Anselm reasons that if God had given the angels only one of these two motivations, they would have been unfree in their choices. If he bestowed only the desire for justice upon the angels, he would effectively be forcing them to be obedient, which would render their choice both unfree and morally worthless. As it is, all the angels did have a choice of which motivation to follow, which is why Satan could rightly be punished and the good angels rightly rewarded. The fact that the good angels can no longer sin is no hindrance to their continued moral goodness and freedom, since this is a reward for their original free choice to be obedient to God. And what about God himself? He doesn't seem to have two motivations, one for justice and one for happiness, rather he has a simple, single will. But that's no problem, because no one else is responsible for giving God this single motivation, as he would have been responsible for giving such a motivation to the angels. Since God's goodness comes entirely from within, so that there is no hint of coercion in his choice, he remains fully self-determined and free. With all due respect to Arijuna, I have to say that this is an unprecedentedly sophisticated and clear-minded attempt to make sense of Augustine's position on freedom. With a deft series of distinctions and definitions, Anselm has secured everything an Augustinian might want. There is the needed asymmetry between acting rightly and wrongly, in that we are unable to be good without grace, but able to be evil through our own power. Yet, we also remain free with respect to these choices. We can also see exactly how God remains perfectly free even without being able to do certain things that even his creatures can do, like sin, for example. These victories do not come without costs, though. In particular, we might balk at defining an apparently basic idea like freedom with the rather complicated formula, power to preserve rectitude for its own sake. But Anselm was a master at deriving powerful conclusions from such verbal formulas. Take this example, that in which nothing greater can be conceived. It should be blindingly obvious what can be proved on the basis of that phrase, but if it isn't, I suggest you join me next time, as we turn to Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.com. Today's episode, Somebody's Perfect, Anselm's Ontological Argument. I was planning a vacation recently and heard about this amazing island. It lies in the most temperate region of the ocean and is always pleasantly warm and sunny, untouched by hurricanes or monsoons. The beaches are a pearly white, made of sand so fine that lying on them is said to be like sprawling on a silken blanket. A gentle breeze wafts the scent of hibiscus and coconut through the air, except for one particular area frequented by people who don't like the smell of hibiscus and coconut. Here, it instead smells like freshly brewed coffee. No one is quite sure why. As for the islanders, they are without exception cheerful and wealthy, yet take delight in satisfying the whims of visitors, plying them with exotic cocktails and succulent food and arranging nightly showings of Buster Keaton movies with live accompaniment by the world's leading pianists. It sounded pretty good, and I was just about to book my travel arrangements when I found out that this otherwise perfect island has one serious flaw. It doesn't exist. That's the last time I take vacation advice from my sister. In fact, my non-existent sister is not the first to imagine such a perfect island, an island which could not possibly be improved apart from its unfortunate non-existence. It appears in a famous objection made by a monk named Gaunilo to a proof for the existence of God devised by Anselm of Canterbury. When even the objection to an argument is famous, you can guess that the argument itself must be pretty well known, and indeed Anselm's so-called ontological argument for God's existence is probably the single most famous philosophical contribution by any medieval philosopher. It has provoked critiques, starting with Gaunilo in Anselm's own lifetime and subsequently from such leading philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. It has also inspired later arguments for God. Proofs with the same general strategy, usually spelled out in much more rigorous fashion, have been offered for instance by Descartes, Gödel, and Alvin Plantinga. It's standard for historians of philosophy, like me, to complain that Anselm's argument is usually taken out of context. Students are typically asked to read only the few brief paragraphs where the proof is set out, ignoring the rest of the treatise in which the proof appears, Anselm's Proslogion, to say nothing of his previous and closely related work, the Monologion. And, as we'll see in this episode, it does help in understanding Anselm's argument to look at these texts in their entirety as well as his response to the critique of Gaunilo. But to some extent, Anselm is himself to blame for the fact that people focus on the proof to the exclusion of the rest of the Proslogion. It comes at the start of the treatise and provides the foundation for all that follows, so the whole project stands or falls on the success of this strategy. Indeed, in the prologue, Anselm tells us that he wants to base his account of God on one single powerful pattern of reasoning. This will be a departure from the approach of the Monologion, which offered several independent proofs of God's existence, among other things, in an attempt to capture the nature of God insofar as is possible for the human mind. What the two texts have in common is that their arguments are intended to be convincing even for an atheist, such as the fool of the biblical Psalms who, This fool is explicitly invoked at the start of the ontological argument. The idea is that Anselm's proof could bring even this person to see that God must exist. That same sort of ambition can already be found in the Monologion. It begins by asserting that the arguments to come should persuade any rational person, even one who has never heard of God or Christianity. This is a bold claim, given that Anselm is going to go on to argue not just for God's existence, but for specifically Christian doctrines like the Trinity, purely on the basis of rational argumentation. Yet, Anselm is far from dismissing the importance of revelation, or belief through religious faith. His motto is the Augustinian slogan, Credo ut Intelligam – I believe in order to understand – something we see, for instance, in the dialogues on free will we talked about last time. At one point, the student character in those dialogues is confronted with a puzzling theological doctrine and says, I believe this, but I want to understand it. The ontological argument and the rest of the reasoning offered in both the Monologion and the Proslogion are not intended to replace faith with rational proof, as if this were something better, but to provide an insight into what exactly the person of faith already believes. It's important to bear this in mind when looking at Anselm's various proofs for God's existence. It helps draw our attention to a feature of all these proofs which is that they are not only about establishing that God does in fact exist, rather they are part of a larger project of understanding what God is like. The formula at the center of the ontological argument describes God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. From this formula, Anselm wants to infer not just that God exists, and indeed necessarily exists, but also that He is good, powerful, just, eternal, and so on. In this respect, his proof is not unlike one offered several decades earlier, but half a world away, in Central Asia. The great Muslim philosopher Avicenna also devised an argument for a necessarily existing God. Much as Anselm tries to extract a wide range of traditional attributes of God from the formula that than which nothing greater can be conceived, Avicenna wanted to show that a necessary existent must have such features as uniqueness, immateriality, power, and goodness. This is what Anselm has in mind when he says that his Proslogion is going to provide one single argument that will yield all the results achieved through separate arguments in the monologuion. The first of those has a very Platonist flavor. It observes that there must be some cause for the goodness we find in the things around us. Although goodness manifests itself in different ways, goodness itself should have the same meaning in each case. Otherwise, we would have no unified idea of goodness, but instead lots of different ideas that are misleadingly expressed by the same word. We need therefore to suppose that there is a cause of goodness, which is the source of this shared nature that we find in all good things. As the cause of all goodness, this source will itself be good, indeed the most good and great of all things, namely God. This may not look like a very persuasive argument, but it is no worse, if also no better, than the reasoning given to support the theory of forms in Plato's dialogues. Of course, what Anselm is describing here is not going to be just an abstract form of goodness, but rather an entity that is maximally good. The same result is achieved through a different argument in the monologuion, which begins from the humble observation that some things are better than others. Anselm's example is that humans are better by nature than horses, which are better by nature than trees. Can we imagine that the scale of goodness just keeps going indefinitely, like a scale of heat with no highest temperature? In that case, there would have to be an infinity of natures in the universe, since every nature has some nature that is better than it. But this strikes Anselm as patently absurd. So again, we can postulate a highest nature, which is maximally good, and this, of course, is God. Already here in the monologuion, Anselm reaches the same conclusion he will be heading for when he devises his ontological argument a few years later. If God is maximally good, as these proofs claim to show, then he must have every property that belongs to a maximally good thing. What properties will these be? Well, any property, such that it is better or greater, to have it than not to have it. In contemporary philosophy of religion, these are sometimes called the great-making properties. For instance, it is better to be powerful than to be weak, so God, being maximally good, will be powerful. In fact, he will be all-powerful, since it is better to have each individual power than not to have it, so he must have them all. He will also be just, merciful, wise, eternal, and so on, since again it is better to have these properties than not to have them. So far, the reasoning we've been following seems to suggest that we can grasp God's nature quite easily. We just think of every property, such that having it is better than not having it, and describe it to God. Job done. But Anselm cautions us against such a straightforward interpretation of what he is doing. He may not be a negative theologian on a par with the pseudo-Dionysius or Eriugina, but he does deny that we can grasp God's nature fully with the finite resources of the human mind. In fact, you can even establish this using the same logic of great-making properties. Anselm would think it obviously better to be beyond the grasp of human language and thought than to be graspable by humankind. So God, being maximally good, must be ineffable. How can we nonetheless ascribe all those other great-making properties to him? In the monologuion, Anselm gives a traditional response, that we are only using the likenesses of created things to describe him. But he already glimpses a more innovative answer, God is understood not as the best thing, or as greater than everything else, but as that than which nothing is better or greater. As Anselm will later point out in his replies to Gagnilo's criticism, this is a subtle but crucial difference. The ontological argument would not work if we just said that God is greater than anything else. We need to say that God is that than which nothing greater could exist, or be conceived. This also leaves it open for Anselm to admit that God outstrips our understanding. If he were the greatest thing we can conceive, then obviously we would be in a position to conceive of him. But if he is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, he may to some extent lie beyond our grasp. Still, we do grasp him to some extent, just as we must to some extent grasp anything when we call it ineffable or inconceivable. Suppose I say, five trillion is an inconceivably large number. Even as I tell you that you can't conceive of this number, I am telling you something about it, namely that it lies beyond your comprehension. The Proslogion is devoted entirely to working out the implications of this idea that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. From this idea, one can infer God's goodness, eternity, omnipotence, and so on. By the way, this part of Anselm's project struck his critic Gaunilo as unproblematic. It was only the argument at the very beginning that failed to convince him. Why? Because the famous argument tries to infer the very existence of God from this formula, and this application of Anselm's new trick struck Gaunilo as too tricky by half. Yet the argument is elegantly, or perhaps infuriatingly, simple. Invoking the atheistic fool from the Psalms quotation, Anselm says that even though the fool does not believe in God, he will surely be able to understand the formula, that is, he can follow what the words mean. To put it the way that Anselm does, this thing than which nothing greater can be conceived at least exists in the fool's mind, even if it does not exist in reality. But now, Anselm can show the fool that his atheistic position makes no sense. It is contradictory to suppose that God doesn't exist in reality but only in the mind if we understand God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is because if God existed only in the mind, it would be easy to conceive of things better than him. Notably, we could conceive of him as existing in reality and not just in the mind. As Anselm puts the point, if that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the mind alone, this same that than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought, but this is obviously impossible. This is the same sort of reasoning used later in the Proslogion to prove that God is, for instance, eternal. It belongs to the very nature of that than which a greater cannot be thought to be eternal because if it were not eternal, we could think of something better by thinking of something that is eternal. In the same way, it is implied by the formula that the thing in question must exist because if it didn't exist, we could conceive of something better than it. The fool must therefore admit that God exists on pain of contradicting himself. Like Mr. T., Gounilo pitied the fool and argued on his behalf that Anselm's argument did not work. He devised a number of objections including his famous island analogy. Consider, says Gounilo, an island than which no better island can be conceived. If we suppose that this island didn't exist in reality, we would fall into the same contradiction because a non-existing island clearly isn't one than which no better island can be conceived. Therefore, such an island in fact exists. This is a powerful objection. If you can use a pattern of reasoning to prove something false, then you know there is something wrong with that pattern of reasoning. Since the version of the argument with the island apparently works just like Anselm's argument but yields a false conclusion, we can infer that Anselm's proof must be a failure. Notice though that Gounilo's island objection shows only that the reasoning used by Anselm must have gone astray somewhere without actually diagnosing his mistake. How might Anselm respond? We don't have to guess because we actually have Anselm's reply to Gounilo's criticisms, which is a very helpful document for understanding how Anselm thought his proof was supposed to work in the first place. Obviously, to meet the objection, he has to show that it makes a difference that we are being asked to think about an island as opposed to God. The difference is that existence belongs to the very nature of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, whereas existence cannot belong to the very nature of an island. As the American military proved when they were testing atom bombs in the Pacific Ocean, an island is the sort of thing that can go out of existence. So, if we find ourselves entertaining the idea of an island that cannot possibly fail to exist, then what we are entertaining makes no sense. By contrast, that than which nothing greater can be conceived is going to be something whose very nature guarantees its real existence. Anselm had already made this point back in the Proslogion. That than which nothing greater can be conceived is not merely something that exists, it is something that must exist. It exists necessarily, because it cannot even be conceived as not existing. I think that this is a good response to the island objection. But that doesn't mean the proof works. It's been subject to many other criticisms. Apart from the island objection mounted by Gaunilo, the most well-known response is probably the one made by Kant, who argued that Anselm was wrong to take existence as a property on a par with features like justice, goodness, or eternity. Existence is not just one more property that I can think of a thing as having. This is why it struck an absurd note at the beginning of this episode, when I treated the existence or non-existence of an island as a feature on a par with the whiteness of its sands or the scent of its breezes. According to Kant, when I think of something, I am conceiving of it as having a range of properties. Its existence is simply the realization or instantiation in the world of something that has those properties. Whether this same objection can be applied to the idea of necessary existence, though, seems to me to be an open question. Even if existence is not a property, like justice or eternity, the trait of existing necessarily might be. But I think we don't need to deny that existence or necessary existence is a property in order to defeat Anselm's argument. If the way I've set it out does capture Anselm's line of reasoning accurately, then it has a more fundamental flaw. For me to say that necessary existence is included in the very nature of a thing is not yet to assert that the thing exists. Rather, it is to say that if it did exist, then it would, by its very nature, exist necessarily. This seems not only right, but a genuine insight on Anselm's part, and one strikingly parallel to what Avicenna had been doing just a few years previously. Anselm saw that if God is to be that in which nothing greater can be conceived, he would be the sort of thing that cannot fail to exist. But this, as far as I can see, just means that God cannot exist contingently. In other words, he can't exist while possibly not existing. From this, it doesn't follow that God in fact exists. Gaunilo made this same point in a passage which should be remembered alongside his much more frequently noticed island objection. He wrote, So there you have it. Anselm's famous proof and a few possible responses to it. Obviously, this comes very far from exhausting the topic, but then too, concentrating on the ontological argument comes far from exhausting the topic of Anselm and his philosophy. This is why I began last time by looking at other aspects of his thought. He was a pivotal figure in medieval philosophy, not so much for the proof as for the whole approach he took, an approach where faith seeks understanding through rational arguments that presuppose none of the beliefs that are held by faith. This will set the tone for the further developments of early scholasticism in the thought of Peter Abelard and other thinkers of the 12th century. Such is Anselm's importance, in fact, that I'd like to spend one more episode with him. So, don't be a fool, join me for an interview than which no greater can be conceived, as I talk to Anselm expert Eileen Sweeney here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode will be an interview with Eileen Sweeney, who is professor of philosophy at Boston College. Hi, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Peter. And we're going to be talking about Anselm, one of the most important early medieval philosophers. Maybe you could begin by just reminding the listener who Anselm was and why he's important. So Anselm was a Benedictine monk of the 11th century. He was also Archbishop of Canterbury. He was the writer of many, many important philosophical arguments, proofs for the existence of God, accounts of free choice, also an important political figure. He had at least two important tussles with the King of England trying to assert power over the church, and he went into exile twice. So he was an active person as well as a speculative thinker. He already mentioned obliquely the most famous thing about him, which is something I mentioned in the last episode, which is his famous ontological argument for the existence of God. And with Anselm, I always think that maybe more than any other thinker in the entire history of philosophy, he's someone who's reduced to just one argument, and it's really only a page or two. Right. It's not even a long argument. And so there's an obvious worry that this is being ripped out of the context in which he offered the argument, and in fact this context is something you've done work on and written a book about. So could you tell us something about that context? What was he trying to achieve in his philosophical works, and in fact which kinds of works did he write and what's the sort of flavor of them? Anselm's works cover a huge range from what we would think of as works in spirituality, prayers and meditations, to works that seem purely philosophical, really in our sense, that are composed of very tight logical arguments that could even be formalized according to modern rules. The work for which Anselm is most famous, his ontological argument is taken from the Proslogion, which is a combination of all of those things, that there are prayers, there are meditations, and there are lots of arguments. The very succinct ontological argument, the fact that it can be taken out and is so short, is I think one of the reasons for its popularity. But if we put not just the ontological argument back into the Proslogion, but the Proslogion in the context of all of Anselm's work, I think a more full picture of what the point of the argument was and why it was important to him becomes clear. So that Anselm's earliest writings were actually devotional prayers, and Anselm may be reduced to the ontological argument in philosophical circles, but in spirituality circles, he also has a very important place as developing a form of prayer that is highly emotional, imaginative, and personal. And a lot of the trends that we now think of as being developed in the 12th and 13th century, especially in the spirituality of women, actually begin with Anselm. So those prayers are an original contribution. Then the next set of works are the important, the sort of next in chronological order, are the two long meditations and arguments on the nature of God. The first one, the Monologion, which is concerned not just with God and the God of the philosophers, we might say, but also God as Trinity. And the Proslogion, which covers that same ground. There are also a set of works, the Trilogy of Dialogues, which I think are some of the most interesting of Anselm's works, on truth and free choice and sin. And I think together they constitute a kind of philosophical anthropology on Anselm's part so that he's worked on the nature of God and now he's working on what it is to be human, to be a creature of God. And then there are a set of works I put together that I think of as going together on the incarnation. Anselm is also reduced to one of his arguments in the discipline of theology. He wrote a book called Curdeo Homo, Why God Became Man. And Anselm is known mostly infamously for forgiving an argument about why it is that God became man that describes Jesus as paying a kind of debt back to God for having been dishonored. And this argument has been criticized for giving God the kind of construction of being a feudal lord and also for putting, some have argued, a kind of violence at the center of the story of salvation. I think that's not quite what Anselm was up to, but it does show the degree to which he was willing to try to submit to reason deep and hard questions about why it is that this all-powerful, all-good God that Anselm thought God was would become human in this particular form and suffer and be killed. How innovative is it that he combines the devotional material, for example, prayers, with more discursive philosophical material? I mean, I think about possible precursors in, say, Boethius. So Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy has these poems and then the dialogue sections with Lady Philosophy. Augustine obviously has very complicated literary constructions in his work, and Anselm is taking his cue from Augustine in a lot of respects. But are there other early medieval authors who write works like the Monologion and the Postlogion, for example? While I can't think of anybody important between Boethius and Anselm, I do think it's important to know that from Augustine to Boethius to Anselm and even after Anselm, there is a much greater sort of interdisciplinary tradition in the sense that people who wrote speculative philosophical texts were engaged theologians and also wrote literary works of various kinds, whether they were prayers or poems. I think Anselm's and the contrast in Anselm between those two elements comes out more strongly because the nature of his arguments are more austere, more clearly logical in our sense than, say, Augustine's more rhetorical arguments, and also that his spirituality is more, we might say, emotionally overwrought. He describes very high highs and low lows in terms of what he has found as a kind of source of tremendous joy or what he hasn't quite figured out as sort of making him fall all the way back into the depths. So actually what we have in Anselm is maybe an exaggerated contrast between these two sides, the devotional being juxtaposed with the kind of discourse where it's tempting to pick out sentences as premises in an argument and even number them, which of course is what people always do with the ontological argument. That's right, but I think it's important to remember that that contrast is more for us than it would have been at the time. I think the historian Richard Southern makes a very good point when he argues that Anselm's argument are really the outgrowths of a monastic project of meditation that is thinking long and hard and deeply about what might be a verse of scripture, but in Anselm's case, it might be a particular proposition. Does God exist? Is God good? What does it mean for God to be just? And so the long thoughtfulness on that has emotional consequences in terms of what I can know, what I desire to know, what I can't quite reach, but also intellectual ones because he really is engaging reason to further the project of the desire of faith, not as something that is opposed to it. Obviously then, a kind of objective in any global interpretation of Anselm would be to bring together these two sides of his authorship. And you've just indicated one direction for doing that because you could think that, as it were, his mental life is expressed in both the prayers and the arguments, let's say. But do you think that in addition to that, there's something that a philosophical reader will miss out on if, as I would imagine a lot of philosophical readers do, they just skip over the prayers or they just jump to the kind of argument bits? I mean, maybe not only the ontological argument. I mean, obviously, you should read more than that. But you can imagine someone who just skips the prayers and goes straight to the arguments. Do you think that they will actually misunderstand the arguments in some sense, if they do that? I think they will miss something important about the arguments because there is, I think, a sense in which Anselm's arguments can be thought of as successful. That is, not everyone will say they're perfectly valid, but that they are strong philosophical arguments which are respectable enough to make people want to engage with them as arguments in that way. But there's an important sense in which Anselm thinks that all of his arguments, and this is in some ways true for the arguments about the nature of God as it is for trying to grasp the nature of humanity or creaturehood, also in some sense always fall short of their object. And so that sense of what it is that the possibilities are for reason to do for us, to take us toward what it is that we desire to understand, for Anselm always has that sort of double edge to it. And I think we'll misunderstand. We will think that he thought he accomplished more than he thought he could, that the thing was proved and he's done. Or we will think that it's all just a kind of poetic sort of reflection on the unknowableness of God. And I think it's very important to try to understand that for Anselm, it's neither the one nor the other, but both at the same time. And that Augustinian slogan, faith seeking understanding, which we really associate with Anselm very strongly, is presumably to be understood in light of that context that's being provided by the devotional material. Is that right? I think that's right. And I think that for me, one of the most important things about that faith seeking understanding slogan is that it's the expression of the ING part of the seeking. That is, it's the desire to move from what Anselm believes and wants deeply to understand. So he wants to make fully present or more present to his understanding so that he can grasp it more clearly, love God more, orient his whole life toward God in a more important and significant way through that process of understanding. I also think that Anselm wants to push the limits of that faith seeking understanding in a very extreme way. That is, that he tries very hard to begin his arguments by assuming as little as possible, if you will, in terms of the proposition. When he starts with God as that then which none greater can be conceived, that concept is in a way completely empty. There's no content to it. He hasn't told us anything in particular. He has assumed no particular character of God, but assumed simply a kind of stretch of the understanding towards what we can possibly understand. And that sort of notion that he wants so badly to understand what he believes, that he is willing to take it back to the very beginning, to the most bare bones in order to make that stretch as long as possible and with as much direction and fervor as possible. Okay, in that case it sounds like when he says, I'm doing faith seeking understanding here, faith doesn't mean here are some propositions I'm helping myself to and assuming them to be true. Obviously, he doesn't assume that God exists before the ontological argument starts. I guess that some people sometimes think there's something fishy about assuming that God is that then which nothing greater can be conceived. But it sounds like you don't think that anything substantive is being assumed there. So, it's not like that's the faith component. And then the argument is the understanding component. It's more like the faith component is the entire conception of the project as a spiritual journey towards God. No, I think that's very well said. I think that is what the faith component is. It's the nature of the entire project. Now, it's true that some of us might say, well, look, you can't just assume this notion of that then which none greater can be conceived. But I think that for Anselm, that is a kind of basic rational conception of what God would be if there were one worthy of the name. And he sees that in sources as distinct as Seneca and the Psalms, and so forth, that it comes from various sources. But I think he thinks of it as fairly basic, fairly formal about the minimum idea you can start from that doesn't actually assume anything about particular content, or about the existence of something that corresponds with that particular content. You said before that Anselm doesn't think that we can use reason to know God fully. And that makes me wonder what the purpose of an argument like the ontological argument would be, or even more generally, all the arguments he offers in his philosophical works. Because presumably, he doesn't think that the ordinary believer who hasn't read his works or other philosophical works is lacking faith, because he starts with faith. So isn't there in a way almost an objection one could make to Anselm here, like you're not providing us with anything we needed, you're just kind of going on through these rational arguments to supposedly get us closer to God, but you admit that God can't feed grass with reason anyway. So I guess maybe one way of asking the question is why not stick with faith? Well, it's never really possible to stick with faith. I mean, Augustine figured that out. Because as soon as I articulate what it is that I believe, I've already engaged reason in the process. So that there already is in some kind of statement, some set of commitments, there is already some content there that is being understood or assumed to be understood in some way. And so once we realize that there's nothing like a pure faith, just like there's nothing like pure reason either, in the sense that we assume something like the rules of language, a certain level of rationality, Augustine has to, or sorry, Anselm assumes a kind of possibility of ordering things in terms of better and worse, there are various kinds of minimal requirements for discourse. I think of these as a little bit like Aristotle's notion of what's required, or the kind of faith that's required in the principle of non-contradiction. He can't prove it, you can doubt it if you want, but you will contradict yourself in the very doubting of it. Matthew 24 Does that mean then that everyone's committed to some kind of articulated set of beliefs about God just by virtue of being a Christian, let's say, and then there will be various degrees to which they've actually thought through what those beliefs consist in or imply? But it still seems to me that, I mean, I wonder what Anselm would say is the improvement in his situation by having gone through the rational arguments. I mean, if he had just started by trying to love God without trying to understand him any better, would he be a worse Christian? Would his soul be in a worse state? Would he merit less in the way of salvation? I mean, is there, what's the payoff of doing these argumentative procedures? Dr. Angela Brintlinger Anselm seems to think, I mean, there would be two answers here. One kind of what I would think about the point of these things are and the way Anselm thought of them in his own spiritual life and the way in which he thought that they would be useful to his fellow monks. Because in this sense, Anselm was a pretty strong elitist. That is, he thought that if you were, that the highest kind of life was the monastic life, no questions asked. And that the monastic life was the project of thinking, meditating, stretching the mind toward God at every moment in every possible way. So doing that activity is the same as doing the monastic activities, saying the office. That's another way of engaging in that same project. So in that sense, it's an essential part of the monastic life and finding a new form of expression for that meditation, for that desire for and connection to God is a crucial and essential part of his life. I think that in terms of where we are, and I think this is true for Anselm too, that is, it's true that if the distance between us and God is infinite, even if Anselm moves me a certain distance, there's still an infinite distance still left. And so I suppose that's the point of the, so why bother question. Anselm has a strong emotional argument for this, or an emotional stance about this. And what he has to say is that the crucial sort of spiritual task is to rouse the soul towards love of God, to make this the sort of live and open question, to move you toward that. And so he thinks that the outcome of the arguments in fact has the byproduct of increasing desire, of making me direct myself and love God more dearly, want that end more dearly. At the end of the Prose Logian, he quotes a line from Psalms about, let tears be my meat day and night. And it seems that he hasn't got anything but tears, but the tears are the substance, that is the greater and greater desire, the greater and greater movement toward that, toward God with greater and greater desire and understanding. That is the spiritual project of the monastic life. Something I think is interesting there is that on the one hand, you make it sound like this is something that Anselm is doing for himself as an expression of his own desire to reach God, but on the other hand, there's an audience and the audience is fellow monks, maybe not so much us, but we can perhaps put ourselves in the place of one of his intended readers. And I wonder whether there's a difference there, because what Anselm is doing for the fellow monks, who would actually have been lower ranking monks than him, right? So what he's offering them is perhaps also some kind of spiritual guidance in the form of arguments. And I wonder if there's maybe a tension there, because it's one thing to do a kind of meditative procedure for the benefit of one's own soul. It's another to say, well, I've already done this, and now I'm going to write it out for you. Right? It's sort of like that, it reminds me a little bit of something people talk about with Aristotle sometimes, that his scientific works are somewhere in between an exploration of nature, so that the writing is actually an exploring, and a representation or report of the exploration he's already done for the benefit of the students. And I wonder which of those you think Anselm is doing, is it more like he's exploring and trying to reach God as he writes? Or is it more like that's happened off the page, and he's handing you a text that tells you what happens? I think it's somewhere between those two. You know, he tells a story in the preface of the Prose Logian about how he struggled and struggled to come up with this argument. I don't know if you know the preface, and he says, and he and then he couldn't get it, he couldn't get it, and then it came to him almost involuntarily. And then he wrote it down, and the text disappeared, and he had to write it again. So there's this sense of him participating in this process and wanting to give the reader a sense that they are participating in the process of Anselm seeking. It's not a closed operation. The other thing is he wrote an interesting preface to his prayers, where he invites the reader to meditate on them in different pieces slowly, to participate in the process, rather than to read them as objective, finished works as a kind of observer. It's clear that he wants us to experience and participate in the process along with him. I'm wondering what lessons we should take from all this as we go forward and read other works of medieval philosophy. I mean, coming down the pipe, we've got high scholasticism. A little closer to what I'll be covering soon, we've got works by people like Abelard and other logicians in his time period, which really are very oriented towards rigorous argument. And, I mean, if you think about, say, Aquinas picking up the Summa or a text like that, it's really just argument, argument, argument. And you don't get this juxtaposition of devotional literature with discursive, rational persuasion the way that Anselm does. And I'm wondering whether you think Anselm is just atypical among medieval philosophers in this respect, or whether there's a more general lesson that we need to take from this and bear in mind as we go on through the subsequent centuries. I think there's some of both of those aspects. That is that Anselm either stands at the end of an era in a monastic tradition where these kinds of speculative explorations really fit within a monastic spiritual context and that they fit pretty seamlessly into that context. And it's clear that, say, by the time we're getting to Abelard, that that unity of form, that Anselm can do all of that stuff within the same form doesn't happen by the time we get to Abelard. That is, he writes fairly polemical theological treatises, but there are also hymns and poetry that Abelard writes, but there's a little more separation between those genres. On the other hand, depending on the thinker, I think that we do have to be a little more attuned to the aspects of spirituality that are there even, I would say, in something like this in the Theologiae. That is, I think that Aquinas's rhetorical structuring of those questions, his placement of scriptural quotes in certain kinds of ways do have a kind of spiritual resonance to them that maybe we don't catch anymore because we're thinking of them as proof texts or something else, as I don't want to launch into an account of Aquinas now, but I think there are elements in at least some of the authors going forward. It becomes more difficult by the time or less likely that you'll find this sort of thing by the time we reach a more thorough division between the arts faculty and the theological faculty. But it comes back in someone like Bonaventure, who writes his commentaries on Peter Lombard, but also writes works that have much more of this kind of mixed feel that would be at home on a shelf next to some of Anselm's works. Right. Okay, well, some of this material is what I'll be looking at next as I move on to looking at developments in logic around the time of Abelard. For now, I'll thank Eileen Sweeney very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me. It was fun. And please join me again next time for the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode ... All or Nothing – The Problem of Universals Irving Thaldberg, the producer of the Marx Brothers movies, had a brilliant knack for show business but also a nasty habit of making people wait for him. The Marx Brothers were familiar with this habit. Once he made them wait outside his office for so long that they smoked cigars, blew the smoke under the crack beneath his door, and yelled fire. Another time, Thaldberg interrupted a meeting with them and left them waiting in his office, and the Marx Brothers decided they'd had enough. When the producer finally returned to the meeting, he found them gathered stark naked in front of his office's fireplace, which they were using to roast potatoes. Thaldberg laughed, had a potato, and never made them wait again. This anecdote confirms something already abundantly clear from their movies. The Marx Brothers shared an anarchic and irreverent sense of humor. And of course, that wasn't the only thing they had in common. They were really brothers and thus shared the same parents, they had grown up together in the Bronx, they all liked a roasted potato, and they all hated being made to wait. In addition, there is the obvious fact that the Marx Brothers were all humans. That may be obvious, but philosophically speaking it is surprisingly hard to explain. In addition to the specific features that distinguish each person—Chico's piano playing ability, for instance, or Groucho's quick wit—all humans share in the feature of humanity, and we are all animals, a feature we have the honor of sharing with giraffes, among other creatures. Philosophers call such shared features universals because they belong to all the members of a class. For instance, humanity belongs universally to all humans. But what exactly is this shared humanity? On the one hand, it seems to have an important role in the world and in our understanding of things. When we know, for instance, that all humans are rational, it seems that we are understanding something not just about you, me, Groucho, or Zeppo, but about humanity itself. What we are understanding is that the possession of humanity implies rationality. On the other hand, the idea of a universal thing that actually exists out in the world is rather an odd one. In our everyday experience, we never encounter abstract humanity or animality. Rather, we encounter concrete particular humans and animals, whom we can distinguish from the other members of their class by their special characteristics. We tell Groucho apart from another animal, like Hiawatha, by noting that he is a human, whereas she is a giraffe. And we tell him apart from Chico, by noticing that he cannot play piano, but can come up with witty remarks like, why don't you leave in a huff? If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute in a huff. The difficulty of accounting for the shared features of things is called the problem of universals. Perhaps the most famous attempt to answer the problem is also the earliest attempt, Plato's theory of forms. This theory was apparently intended to explain common characteristics, like humanity or largeness, by postulating a single overarching form, or paradigm, humanity itself, or largeness itself. As far back as the medieval period, readers have understood Plato's forms as universals, though this may not be quite right. Aristotle points out that, although a platonic form plays the role of a universal by accounting for shared membership in a kind of thing, it also seems to be just another kind of particular, albeit a perfect unchanging and paradigmatic particular. In fact, it was Aristotle himself who really started talk of universals in philosophy, but he left it rather unclear what sort of metaphysical status we should assign to a universal like humanity or animality. For this reason, ancient commentators on Aristotle already engaged in detailed discussions of the problem of universals, discussions that were passed on to the medievals thanks to the translations and commentaries of Boethius. For Boethius and his medieval heirs, the starting point for discussion of this problem was the beginning of Porphyry's widely read introduction to Aristotelian logic. In a few sentences that rank as one of the most enticing, but unsatisfying passages in the history of philosophy, Porphyry sketches out the questions that would need to be answered in order to solve the problem of universals. We would first need to decide whether they are real or not, if they are real, whether they are bodily or incorporeal, and if they are incorporeal, whether they exist in bodies or separately. That last question was of particular importance for Porphyry and other ancient commentators who wanted to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, since it seemed plausible to say that Plato's forms were indeed separate universals, whereas Aristotle recognized the reality of universals but understood them to be imminent within bodies. The exegetical problem of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle was one reason the ancient commentators, like Porphyry and Boethius, were so interested in the problem of universals, but it wasn't the only reason. If you think about it, many of the things we say every day involve universals. Even when I talk about a particular thing, like a specific person, I'll often be saying that some universal feature applies to that particular. Suppose I say, for instance, that Groucho is chomping on a cigar, or that Hiawatha is loping across a savanna. Groucho and Hiawatha are particulars, but many people may be chomping on cigars, and many giraffes loping across a savanna. So chomping on a cigar, or loping across a savanna, are universals. They can be and are realized in many particular instances. Then there are sentences where no particulars appear at all, as when we say, cigar smoking is unhealthy, or giraffe is a type of animal. This explains why philosophers still worry about the problem of universals today. Until we sort out the status of universals, we cannot really say how our language gets hold of the result. None of this escaped the ancient commentators and their medieval readers, but they had further reasons of their own to take the problem seriously. Unlike most philosophers nowadays, they followed Aristotle's lead in believing that knowledge in the strict and proper sense, the kind of knowledge involved in scientific understanding, is universal in scope. So for them, answering Porphyry's questions was an urgent task in the study of knowledge or epistemology, as well as in the philosophy of language. Given the strictly introductory purposes of his little treatise on logic, Porphyry took the liberty of leaving his own questions unanswered. So, the passage offered a wonderful opportunity for later philosophers. By commenting on it, they could offer their own account of universals without having to worry about contending with Porphyry's own theory. This led to a certain way of posing the problem that would puzzle contemporary philosophers. Because Porphyry was introducing Aristotelian logic, the kind of universals he was interested in were the species and genera of substances. In other words, his questions were framed in terms of asking whether such items as humanity and animality are real, are incorporeal, and are separate. Though one could extend the question to non-substantial cases like cigar chomping and loping across a savannah, later thinkers taking up Porphyry's questions usually didn't do this. They simply focused on sorting out the status of substantial species and genera. Since the medieval's encountered Porphyry through Boethius, they had to take account of what he had said on the issue. They had plenty to work with, because Boethius was so interested in Porphyry's introduction that he commented on it twice. In the first commentary, he made a convincing point concerning Porphyry's list of questions, namely that his posing all three questions already implied his answer to the first two. If you answer the first question by saying that universals are not real, you don't need to go on to ask whether they are bodily or incorporeal. And if you answer this second question by saying that they are bodily, you don't need to ask whether they are separate from bodies or in them. Thus, Boethius assumed that for Porphyry, universals are indeed both real and incorporeal. In his second commentary, he explained why and how this is so. Universals must be real, since otherwise there would be nothing for us to know when we understand the general features of things. We encounter such features in particulars and then abstract or isolate them through a mental process, something Boethius compares to isolating the line that forms the edge of a body. The feature we are noticing is alike in all the members of a species. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo are all similar in being humans. But it is only at the level of mental understanding that we isolate humanity as something in its own right. While this goes well beyond the intriguing list of questions posed by Porphyry, Boethius says less than one might want about the humanity that is in Groucho and also in Harpo. Is that humanity one and the same thing? Or is it that we have Groucho's humanity, which is one thing, and Harpo's humanity, which is something else, but these two humanities are similar to one another? If we take the first alternative, we are committed to something that really exists out in the world and is universal. If we take the second alternative, then true universality occurs only in the mind of someone who abstracts and isolates humanity as a general concept. An analogy might help here. The first option would be like you're watching the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup on television while I am watching it in a cinema. One and the same movie is being viewed in two places at the same time. The second option would be like two actual bowls of duck soup made according to the same recipe. They taste exactly alike but were made from different sets of ingredients and are two distinct meals. Vegetarians may want to vary the example slightly using the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. In the 12th century, philosophers working in France split over the correct understanding of universals more or less along the lines I've just indicated. Some thinkers, whom we can call realists, believed that humanity is something real that exists in the world. It is present or instantiated every time that a human exists. Others found this impossible to accept and insisted that everything that really exists is something particular. Historians usually refer to this camp as the nominalists. The usual tutorial here is that nominalism was pioneered by the great Peter Abelard, following ideas first put forward by his teacher Rosselin. And that the anti-realist position is called nominalist because Abelard and his allies held that a universal is nothing but a word or a name, in Latin nomen. In fact things are considerably more complicated. Let's start by considering the contribution made by Rosselin to this debate. He is often portrayed as a forerunner of Abelard's nominalism, not least by the famous Anselm of Canterbury, who mocked Rosselin for saying that universals are nothing but puffs of air. But modern scholars have doubted whether Rosselin really meant to stake out a metaphysical position about universals at all. He did, however, pave the way for Abelard by insisting on a strong contrast between language and its features on the one hand, and the reality expressed by language on the other hand. A nice example of this is tense. Consider the difference between saying Groucho smoked a cigar and saying Groucho is smoking a cigar, or Groucho will smoke a cigar. Rosselin, Abelard, and other so-called nominalists were inclined to think that different sentences with verbs and different tenses could all refer to one and the same event. It's just that Groucho smoking the cigar is future, present, or past from the point of view of the speaker. In this and other cases, it is dangerous to assume a diversity of things on the basis of the diverse linguistic expressions used to refer to those things. There's a further difficulty here in that words are themselves things. For instance, if I utter the name Groucho, that sound I am making is a thing, just like Groucho himself is a thing. Abelard would later eliminate any possible confusion on this score by distinguishing between the utterance in itself, which he called a vox, and the utterance insofar as it is meaningful, which he called a sermo. The utterance is indeed a thing, but it is not insofar as it is a thing that it has meaning, but insofar as it is a sermo, or signifying utterance. Along with other like-minded writers at the dawn of the 12th century, most of whom are anonymous, Rosselin was putting forward his ideas about language in the context of grammar, the first of the liberal arts. The main authority for grammar was the late ancient author Priscian, and his work was made the subject of several commentaries at about this time. Priscian informed his readers that a name or noun must always signify a substance by ascribing some quality to that substance. Here we get a bit closer to the problem of universals. To what does a general noun like human refer? A universal substance, or only particular human substances like Groucho and Harpo? We find grammatical commentaries close to Rosselin's approach saying that words have always been introduced to signify substance. Only afterwards do they come to signify other similar things. For example, someone, somewhere, would have first used the word human and meant by it one particular human. Perhaps it was Adam referring with surprise and delight to Eve, who had just been produced from one of his ribs. Thereafter, as a matter of convention, this same word, human, was applied to anything else that seemed to be similar to the first thing that bore the name of human. This does seem to head in the direction of Abelard's later nominalist view. It would seem, though, that Abelard first explicitly formulated nominalism only as a critical response to those who started espousing realism about universals. His target was a man named William of Champo, master of the school at Notre Dame and a rival of Abelard. The two first encountered one another in Paris right around the 1100s and later led competing schools. In an autobiographical work, Abelard tells us himself how he refuted William's realist understanding of universals. In response, William reformulated his theory only to be crushed again by the superior intellect of Abelard. But we don't have to take Abelard's word for this. We can judge for ourselves who had the better of the debate because Abelard's commentary on Porphyry explains William's original and revised positions, alongside the objections that apparently forced William to change his view and then retreat from the debate altogether. William's original way of understanding universals as real things went as follows. If we consider humanity just by itself, we see that it is universal in nature. It is one and the same for and in all humans. However, in various particulars, humanity is joined to various or characteristics which William called forms. Thus in Chico Marx, humanity is connected to piano playing ability and a preposterous Italian accent, whereas in Harpo Marx, it is joined to harp playing ability and a tendency to sprint after any attractive female who was foolish enough to wander past. Without these other forms, humanity would remain single and universal, but it becomes particularized and multiple thanks to its association with such accidental features. There is a family resemblance between this proposal by William of Champot and the hyper-realism of the earlier Eriugena and his followers. They believe that every substance is an expression of a single archetypal substance, much as ultimately, all things are an expression of the transcendent reality that is God. William's theory was not so Platonist in that it did not assert the existence of some paradigmatic humanity separate from all individual humans. In a way, this was its chief flaw. If humanity in itself is not separate from humans, and if it is one and the same in all humans, then all humans turn out to be numerically identical with each other insofar as they are humans. In other words, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are all actually one human being. This, at least, is the objection pressed against William by Abelard. To point to the accidental features of things, as William did, is no help, for such accidental features depend on the individual substances to which they belong. Conceptually speaking, Harpo must first exist as a human substance and only then have such additional features as harp playing and skirt chasing. But insofar as he is just a human substance, Harpo will be the same substance as Chico and Groucho. A further problem is that if one and the same substance, namely universal humanity, is the substance of both Harpo and Groucho, then it will have contrary properties. Humanity will be both mute and wisecracking, both harp playing and non-harp playing. Even the Marx Brothers movies never involved anything quite that absurd. Despite his name, William of Champo did not respond to this attack by washing his hair of the whole matter. Instead, he proposed a revised account. This time, the idea was to say that it is in virtue of their agreement in humanity that particular humans have a shared nature. Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and, yes, even Zeppo, are all different, but there is some one thing in which they agree. Or, as William of Champo preferred to put it, they do not differ in respect of humanity. Abelard easily dismisses William's tricky negative formulation. Two humans do not disagree in respect of being a stone either, since they are both equally not a stone. To the more basic idea that the Marx Brothers, and all the rest of us, are humans in virtue of some real thing that is humanity, Abelard replies that human is just what each person is in himself or herself. So this had better be distinct in each person, otherwise, just as with the first attempt to defend realism, Harpo and Groucho will wind up being identical insofar as they are humans. The problem, as Abelard sees it, is that William and the other realists are desperate to hold on to this notion that humanity is a thing. But in fact, humans are alike not in virtue of some real object in the world, namely their humanity. Rather, they are simply alike in all being humans. And being a human is not a thing. It is, rather, what Abelard calls a status, again, coining a new technical term in order to clarify the situation as he sees it. A thing's status is simply some way that it is, and ways of being are not themselves things. The realists might complain that a status must indeed be a thing. My being a human is something about which we can have knowledge and something that explains features of the world. For instance, my being a human explains my being rational and alive, so how could it be nothing at all? Abelard responds with an example. Suppose a slave of ancient Rome is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum. His refusing to go is a status, and it explains something, namely, why he was beaten. But we are surely not tempted to say that his refusing to go to the forum is actually a thing in its own right. Rather, the man who refuses and is beaten for it is a thing. His refusing to go is just a status, one that he lives to regret. This leaves the way clear for Abelard to give his own positive account of the universal, which is that it is nothing more nor less than a word. Universality is like the tense of a verb. It is an unavoidable aspect of our language, but it does not correspond to anything out in the world. Rather, we produce universality through a mental process of extracting some shared feature of things. In my mind, I take the four Marx brothers, and for that matter all the other humans I have ever encountered, and I remove from them the accidental features that vary from one person to another. What I am left with is a common idea that applies to all equally. Abelard compares this to the way painters represent the idea of a lion by depicting a single generic lion, as opposed to painting some particular lion, like the one that was killed by Hercules. It is this conceptual operation, rather than the existence of any universal thing, that allows us to use words universally. When I say the Marx brothers were all human, I am simply ignoring their particular features and focusing on a commonality I have noticed about them. And, what I am saying is true, because they do each have the status of being a human, which is not something universal. In fact, being a human is no thing at all. With this deft series of arguments, terminological devices, and clarifications, Abelard has set out the first explicit and sophisticated version of nominalism. It will not be the last. As we shall see, debates over the problem of universals would be confronted by later medieval thinkers, some of whom will show in greater detail how nominalism might answer possible objections. But we've only begun to consider the astoundingly innovative and brilliant philosophy of Abelard, which involves new proposals in philosophy of language, metaphysics, theology, and ethics. Which is to say nothing of the events with which his name is above all associated, his love affair with Heloise, and its tragic ending. I am a big fan of the Marx brothers, so you probably don't want to take the risk of making me wait. You'd better join me as soon as you can for the next episode on the story of Heloise and Peter Abelard, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.com. Today's episode, Get Thee to a Nunnery, Heloise and Abelard. Some listeners will be relieved to know that in this episode I'm going to skip the usual opening, attention-grabbing example, humorous anecdote, or tribute to classic film. The story I have to tell needs no introduction, being itself a classic tale of star-crossed love. Its protagonists are Peter Abelard and Heloise, who fell desperately in love, produced a child, and married in secret. On the orders of Heloise's outraged uncle, Abelard was attacked and castrated, and he and Heloise both took up a monastic life. From Abelard's own account of this disastrous sequence of events, and from the moving and intellectually high-powered letters the two sent to one another, we know the whole story and also something of what happened next. Abelard set up a religious retreat called the Paraclete in honor of the Holy Spirit. The word is derived from Greek and means comforter. He invited Heloise and some of her fellow nuns to live there and advised them on religious questions. The two are now buried together in a Paris cemetery, which, appropriately to Abelard's role in medieval culture, is the resting place of both other philosophers like Lyotard and Mélo Ponty and a rock star, Jim Morrison. It's a story that has been exciting the romantic imagination since the 13th century, when Jean de Meun worked the couple into his consummate work of courtly love, The Romance of the Rose. Jean also translated into French several letters exchanged between the two, as well as Abelard's autobiographical account, melodramatically but not inaccurately, entitled Historia Calamitatum, or Story of Calamities. Ever since, Abelard and Heloise have gone down in history as something like a real-life Romeo and Juliet. There is even a legend that when Abelard's grave was opened so that Heloise could be buried with him, his skeleton opened its arms to embrace her corpse. Modern-day scholars have responded with the attitude we would expect from them, skepticism. They have even raised doubts as to whether the documents used by Jean de Meun are genuine. Now though, their authenticity is widely accepted, which is a good thing, since they offer a fascinating window onto Abelard's intellectual development and onto the personality of the brilliant Heloise. One reason scholars have doubted the authenticity of her letters is that they are not what we would expect from a 12th century nun. They are astonishing in their frank and open descriptions of her own state of mind, and her refusal to accept Abelard's moralizing account of the tragedy that befell them. For some, they also suggest that Abelard's philosophy was powerfully influenced by Heloise's concerns, ideas and interests. Even before the two men, both had established a reputation. In The Story of Calamities, Abelard tells us that he decided to seduce Heloise, in large part because of her widely admired intellect. In looks, she did not rank lowest, he remarks, while in the extent of her learning she stood supreme. He was rightly confident of his ability to win her affections, since he himself was good looking and was already established as a scholarly celebrity for his expertise in dialectic. John of Salisbury, who would later briefly study with Abelard, wrote that he was so eminent in logic that he alone was thought to converse with Aristotle. Exploiting his renown, Abelard arranged to become Heloise's teacher, and the rest is, quite literally, history. Of course, even today it remains true that skill in philosophy is a sure-fire way of picking up dates. No doubt many listeners will have noticed the improvement in their own love lives since they began following the podcast. But in the 12th century, such skill could also attract envy and rivalry. Abelard's account of his life story does not tell only of his relationship with Heloise and his consequences. It also recounts his numerous conflicts with other leading intellectuals of the day. His enemies included the leading theologian and political operator Bernard of Clavo, and no fewer than three of Abelard's own teachers, Rosalind, William of Champo, and Anselm of Léon, who was not to be confused with Anselm of Canterbury. It would be putting it mildly to say that Abelard does not emphasize his intellectual debt to these figures. To the contrary, he portrays William of Champo and Anselm of Léon as jealous and incompetent. He takes evident relish in explaining how he demolished William's theory of universals not once, but twice, and says that Anselm's reputation was, "...owed more to long practice than to intelligence or memory," adding the mocking comment that his visitors left him more confused than they had arrived. Then again, that was also true of Socrates. The case of Rosalind is more complicated. Abelard subjects him to no similar character assassination in The Story of Calamities, and we know from other sources that he was powerfully influenced by Rosalind's approach to logic. Modern-day scholars have called this approach vocalism, alluding to Rosalind's insistence that dialectic deals with words and not things. With this, Rosalind paved the way for Abelard's nominalism. However, Rosalind's vocalism was offered not as a solution to the problem of universals, but as the key to interpreting the works of logic that were being studied with such intensity at this time. For Rosalind, Porphyry's introduction and Aristotle's categories were about words, not things. This reading of the texts was anticipated already in antiquity, when it was suggested as a way of defusing potential conflict between Plato and Aristotle. If Aristotle was only talking about words in his logical writings and not making any claims about things, then it was no problem that he acknowledged only everyday physical objects as substances and made no mention of the transcendent objects recognized in Platonism. After all, our words refer in the first instance to physical things, not to gods, immaterial souls, or forms. Still, even if Rosalind was not espousing nominalism, his proposal could naturally lead to a position like Abelard's. Universal species and genera play a major role in the logical treatises of Porphyry and Aristotle. So, if those treatises really are only about words and not things, it stands to reason that species and genera are nothing but words, as Abelard claimed. Despite Rosalind's importance in helping to shape Abelard's understanding of dialectic, Abelard turned against him as well, heavily criticizing Rosalind's teaching on the Trinity, of which more in a later episode. Rosalind returned the favor in a letter we have from him in which he excoriates Abelard's treatment of Heloise, writing, Abelard's own account makes it clear that he was a proud, even arrogant man, and one who remained fiercely concerned with his reputation even as he was later writing down his life He claims that when he was castrated, his loss of face bothered him more than the loss of other parts of his anatomy. Though this side of his personality is not particularly attractive, Abelard was right to be proud of his fame. It was certainly well deserved. His works represent the high point of the study of dialectic in the early medieval period, and not just because of his innovative nominalist account of universals. Another major contribution was his account of propositions. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Abelard actually discovered the idea of a proposition, more or less as it is used in philosophy today. Take a common everyday sentence like, When I say this, I am making an assertion, and there is something I am asserting, namely that there is indeed a giraffe in the kitchen cooking dinner. Abelard calls this the proposition's dictum, meaning that which is said, and compares the relationship between the proposition and the dictum to that between a name and the thing that it names. Nowadays, philosophers would call the dictum the proposition's content. Now remember Rosseland's and Abelard's point that differences at the level of words do not need to imply differences at the level of things. With this in mind, Abelard points out that the same content can be expressed in many different ways. If I say, The giraffe cooks dinner, or The giraffe is cooking dinner, there is no difference in content, just a difference in expression. The same goes for tense as we saw in the last episode. If I tomorrow say, The giraffe was cooking dinner, that could refer to exactly the same thing as my saying today, The giraffe is cooking dinner. And it goes for grammatical mood too, like if I said, The giraffe should be cooking dinner, instead of The giraffe is cooking dinner. Abelard makes another leap forward when it comes to the question of negating a proposition. For Boethius, the negation of the proposition, A giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner, would be, A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner, which looks reasonable enough, and not just because giraffes are notoriously bad cooks. But it has a disadvantage, which is that in stating this denial, I seem to be implying that there is indeed some giraffe I am talking about, it's just that the giraffe in question is not cooking dinner. What if I wanted to deny the proposition without suggesting this? Abelard gives us the tools to do so, by saying that there are, in fact, two ways to negate a proposition. In addition to saying, A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner, I could say, It is not the case that, A giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner. In the latter case, I am not committing myself to the notion that there is some giraffe who might be getting dinner ready if she weren't so lazy. Abelard calls the first kind of negation, separative, because it just denies that a predicate is connected to a subject. The second kind is called destructive, because what is being denied is the whole proposition, rather than the attachment of the predicate to the subject. If not for his encounter with Héloïse, Abelard might have continued to focus mostly on these sorts of logical issues, which dominated during his early career. Things changed once he became a monk, and devoted himself to his new pastoral duties and to theological issues. The religious life may have been thrust upon him, but he made it his own. Then again, as a monk, Abelard was still able to teach and engage in intellectual disputation, much as he had done before. Héloïse, by contrast, lamented piteously even as she took the habit, and never really reconciled herself to her new narrow, and quite literally cloistered life. It was an ironic fate, in that Héloïse had earlier disguised herself as a nun to get away from her overbearing uncle. Apparently, it was this that provoked the uncle into having Abelard attacked and mutilated, because he was under the impression that Abelard was forsaking her. Once she really was a nun, Héloïse was in a sense still in disguise, living a life of chastity but still consumed with her old desires. She tells Abelard so in letters she wrote to him in a correspondence provoked by her reading of his story of calamities. Abelard's message in that work was that the misfortunes that befell him were sent by God to punish his lustful sin and steer him towards a more righteous path. Héloïse was having none of this. In her letters, she points out that she and Abelard were actually separated, and thus chased, when disaster struck. In the aftermath of that disaster, Héloïse has continued to be chased in body, but not in her mind. She admits that she is not able to repent sincerely, as Abelard was apparently able to do. In her first letter responding to Abelard's account of their story, we find the following stunningly forthright passage. To get the full sense of what that quotation tells us about Héloïse, we need to notice that it turns on a pun. The Latin word for empress is emperatrix, while the word for whore is meritrix. This was a woman who could call on classical learning and do rhetorical tricks even in the midst of impassioned lament. The same is clear from Abelard's presentation of Héloïse in The Story of Calamities. At first he writes about her as if she was simply an instrument of temptation, sent by God to bring about Abelard's well-deserved downfall. But he goes on to repeat the argument she made at the time, against the idea of marrying in secret to mollify her uncle. It was a bad idea on practical grounds for one thing. It would not make the uncle happy, and would tarnish Abelard's name. She was right on both counts, of course. She also gave more principled reasons, quoting classical objections to marriage as inimical to the scholarly life. Seneca, for instance, cautioning that philosophy is a serious and all-consuming activity which allows no room for family entanglements. Héloïse's honest self-appraisal, her refusal to renounce the value of the love she shared with Abelard, and her literary taste do not only make her an intriguing and sympathetic historical character, they also allowed her to play a role in shaping Abelard's intellectual career. Her broad reading in classical literature, including authors like Seneca, whom she cited in her diatribe against marriage, seems to have rubbed off on Abelard. Some scholars also give her a role in the development of Abelard's revolutionary approach to ethics. We'll have an opportunity to test this hypothesis in the next episode. Furthermore, after taking up residence at the Paraclete with her fellow nuns, Héloïse requested pastoral guidance from Abelard. He composed hymns at her request, sent her letters offering rules for the sisters' conduct, and answered a set of detailed questions she posed to him concerning difficulties of scriptural interpretation. Constance Meuse, who has written extensively about their relationship, has commented that these questions are so insightfully posed that it's clear Héloïse could have answered them herself. Meuse also suspects her to be the author of a poem which mocks the idea that the liberal arts are an inappropriate activity for women. She and Abelard shared not only a passion for one another, but also for such intellectual pursuits. Once they were committed to their new monastic lives, they also became committed to the more religious disciplines of theology and biblical exegesis. Héloïse was a devoted enough student of the Bible that she learned some Hebrew in addition to her Greek and Latin—a rare attainment for anyone at this time, let alone for a female scholar. The questions on scripture she sent to Abelard also represent this part of her intellectual life. As for Abelard, he is often seen as a champion of dialectic and as a devotee of the pagan philosophers, and he was indeed both of these. Yet he devoted much of his life to theological problems. Abelard's characteristic self-confidence convinced him that he could outdo scholars with long training in church doctrine and exegesis. In one of his more self-congratulatory anecdotes, he relates how, as a younger man who was still a complete neophyte in the field of scriptural exegesis, he took up an obscure biblical passage and produced such marvelously insightful commentary on it that students flocked to him. This does not mean that Abelard paid no heed to the authoritative tradition. When his theological proposals met with condemnation and he was forced to burn his writings on the subject, he did not change his mind, but did change his method, seeking support for his views in the Church Fathers. One product of this renewed interest in the tradition was his treatise Sic et Non, which one might loosely, if verbosely, render as on the one hand and on the other hand. The book consists of textual quotations, mostly from patristic authorities, which take contradictory views on a variety of questions. This may sound like an irreverent, even subversive, project, reminiscent of the ancient skeptics' practice of piling off arguments on both sides of a philosophical debate in order to induce uncertainty and suspension of judgment. But for Abelard, the compilation of disagreements was just a preliminary step towards resolving those disagreements by showing them to be merely apparent. In another example of his sensitivity to the way that language can mislead, he cautioned against taking patristic or scriptural texts at face value. The same moral is taught by another of his triumphant anecdotes, which in this case pits him directly against his enemy Anselm of Léon. The story goes that Anselm was outraged at a supposed heresy uttered by Abelard. Abelard said he could explain his view, but Anselm demanded that he offer authoritative support and not try to confuse the issue with rational argumentation. In response, Abelard immediately, and no doubt gleefully, produced a quotation from Augustine which confirmed his own view verbatim. Flustered, Anselm said weakly that the passage in Augustine needed to be treated with care and that despite appearances it did not really confirm Abelard's view, to which Abelard triumphantly replied that this was irrelevant at the moment as he was looking only for words, not interpretation. You can see why Anselm of Léon was bound to despise him, and at the same time why Heloise was bound to love him. I can't help agreeing with her, and I have a lot more to say about him. Unfortunately, Hiawatha says that dinner is ready now. So, like the romance of Heloise and Abelard, our look at this great medieval thinker will have to be interrupted, but considerably less violently, as you'll only have to wait one more week to hear about the revolutionary ethical theory of Peter Abelard, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? It's the Thought That Counts, Abelard's Ethics. I was recently at a gathering of historians of philosophy—yes, that's the kind of jet-set exciting life I lead—when someone made a general observation about medieval philosophers. Someone else mentioned Peter Abelard as an exception. The first historian replied that Abelard doesn't count because he was not a medieval philosopher but a modern philosopher who time-traveled to the medieval age. And indeed, when you read Abelard, you notice how easily he would fit into a modern-day department of analytic philosophers. All the traits are there—the sardonic tone of voice, the confidence in his own sharpness of mind, the bold and original theoretical claims, and the relentless defense of those claims by anticipating and undercutting all possible objections. Like modern-day philosophers, Abelard loved to work with examples—the more vivid and thought-provoking the better. Here are just a few drawn from his writings on ethics. Two men want to build a house to serve the poor, but only one of them can do so because he is wealthy whereas the other is himself destitute. A servant is pursued by a lord who has lost his mind and is forced to kill him in self-defense, even though the servant's active insubordination will certainly bring terrible consequences. A monk is trapped in a bed with a group of affectionate women and cannot escape sexual pleasure as a result. A poor woman smothers her own baby by rolling over on him in the night. Or, if those examples aren't controversial enough for you, what about the men who were adamantly convinced that it was morally right for them to execute Jesus Christ? Just as the story of Abelard and Heloise needed no introduction, so Abelard's use of examples is hard to improve upon, and I won't be replacing them with scenarios about giraffes or classic film stars. In fact, I'm even more tempted than usual to tell you to forget about listening to this podcast and just go read Abelard instead. Well, that might be going a bit far. The best thing is if you do both. The work I recommend to you is called The Ethics, or alternatively Know Thyself, and it makes use of all the examples I just mentioned. Let's start by considering the case of sponsoring a house to shelter the poor. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing to do. But what exactly does the goodness consist in, and where is it to be located? The answer seems obvious. The building of a poor house is a good thing, which is why we praise the sponsor who arranges for the house to be built. The same would be the case with a sinful action. For instance, if someone commits adultery, we blame him for doing so because engaging in adultery is wrong. Apparently then, it is actions that are good and bad, right and wrong. So it is by performing actions that people are good and bad, righteous or sinful, praiseworthy or blameworthy. Abelard denies this however, and with his example provides a powerful reason for doing so. He asks us to imagine not one, but two people who want to sponsor a poor house. Abelard doesn't give them names, so let's just call them Groucho and Harpo. You have to let me have a bit of fun. They are equal in their moral zeal, their sympathy for the plight of the poor, and their desire to do something to help the indigent. Both of them decide to have a poor house built, but with differing results. In Groucho's case, everything runs smoothly, but poor Harpo is robbed by a thief before he can donate the money, leaving him unable to sponsor a dollhouse to shelter church mice, never mind a real house to shelter people who are as poor as church mice. Now Abelard asks us, do we really give Groucho more credit, morally speaking, than Harpo? The only reason Groucho has the house built, and Harpo does not, is that Groucho can do so and Harpo cannot, but this seems to be a matter of luck, not of moral character. What this shows is that the action, in this case sponsoring the house, cannot actually be the thing we care about when we are considering right and wrong. Abelard has a battery of other examples to prove the same point. Suppose that Chico and Zeppo are judges who both condemn men to be executed. The two condemned men really are criminals who deserve to be put to death, so in both cases the judgments can be considered just. However, in passing down his sentence, Chico is motivated simply by the desire to make the right decision, whereas Zeppo harbors a secret vendetta against the man he is condemning. He would have sentenced the defendant to death no matter what. Even though our two judges performed exactly the same action, it seems clear that Chico has done right, whereas Zeppo has done wrong. Again, we see that actions in themselves are not morally decisive. Abelard also uses the more theologically loaded example of handing over Jesus Christ to be crucified. This is an action that was performed by God the Father who allowed his son to be sacrificed, but also by Judas who was betraying Christ. Obviously, we don't make the same moral judgment concerning God that we do in the case of Judas. Actions by themselves, then, are neither good nor bad. So, we need to look somewhere else to find right and wrong. An obvious place would be the desires and motivations that bring people to perform their actions. Think of the examples we've already considered. The reason we admire both Groucho and Harpo, it seems, is that both have the right sort of desire, namely to help the poor. It's just that being poor himself, Harpo can't fulfill this desire, whereas Groucho can. And the reason we admire Chico the judge and not Zeppo is that Chico is genuinely trying to pass down the right verdict, whereas Zeppo is motivated by revenge. Likewise, Christians admire God the Father but curse Judas because they believe God gave his son for the sake of redeeming mankind, whereas Judas was motivated by greed and resentment. Plausible though this may seem at first blush, it is problematic to say that motives and desires are the proper objects of moral judgment. After all, can you really be blamed for having wicked desires, the sort of motivations that Abelard calls a bad will? Perhaps you are powerfully tempted by opportunities to overeat, betray your friends, and cast aspersions on the Marx Brothers. But we wouldn't and shouldn't judge you harshly just for having these desires so long as you manage to resist them. In fact, Abelard goes so far as to say that it is more admirable to avoid sin when temptation is powerful. It's easy to avoid wrongdoing when you have no urge to do wrong. The difficult thing is resisting sins you would very much like to commit. This is why we admire those who struggle against their own bad wills and prevail more than we admire those who have no bad will in the first place. Indeed, you might wonder whether someone who is just lucky enough to have a good will is admirable at all. If you are simply the sort of person who gets a kick out of helping old ladies across the street and volunteering for charities and never feels the compunction to do anything wrong, then we might describe you as fortunate rather than morally outstanding. Abelard is putting his finger on a deep philosophical quandary here, one that is often framed in terms of a contrast between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. Aristotle was convinced that virtuous people take pleasure in doing virtuous things and have a strong desire to do so, in part because they have the habit of acting well and people enjoy whatever is customary for them. Kant instead is going to argue that people must be acting out of moral duty if their actions are actually to count as morally good. If they happen to desire and enjoy virtue, that's fine, but it has nothing to do with morality. Abelard is an important forerunner of Kant's position in this controversy. In fact, he seems to be suggesting an even more radical view than Kant's, namely that you must have bad desires and resist them if you are to be rightly congratulated for being virtuous. As Abelard puts it, people who are born with a tendency towards sinful lusts have been given material for a fight so that victorious over themselves through the virtue of moderation they might obtain a crown. Though he doesn't quite come out and say so, it seems that for him, the most admirable people would be the ones who have the worst desires while managing to prevail in the struggle against those desires. While this aspect of Abelard's moral theory is, to say the least, open to dispute, he has an almost irresistible argument against the idea that desires and motivations make all the difference between good and bad. This is that people sometimes do wrong while acting against their desires. As usual, he offers a vivid example. This is the case of the servant who kills his feudal lord in self-defense. It's certainly something he would not want to do, given the reprisals that will certainly be meted out to any medieval servant who kills his lord. But he does it nonetheless, because if he doesn't, his lord is going to murder him instead. Of course, usually when people sin, they are acting on a sinful desire, but this example shows that that can't always be the case. Perhaps then, we could say something slightly different, namely that the sin consists in enjoying a wrongful action. The servant example is unusual, in that it is a case where such an action is committed reluctantly, but usually people take pleasure in wicked behavior. So it might be this reveling in sin that marks people as sinful. But yet again, Abelard argues that this cannot be right. It's here that he gives his example of a man who has taken a sincere vow of chastity, but who is chained down and forced to enjoy sex with women. As we know from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this is the sort of thing that happened from time to time in the Middle Ages. Again, it's hard to argue against Abelard's point once he has given you the example. Clearly there is a difference between sinning and taking enjoyment in sinning. So now, we seem to be stuck. If morality isn't a matter of which action you perform, nor a matter of what motivations lead you to act the way you do, nor a matter of taking pleasure in wrongdoing, then where do the wickedness of sin and the righteousness of virtue reside? Abelard's answer is that they lie in consenting to a desire, in other words in forming an intention to act in a certain way. Consider again the man who is chained down and forced to abandon his chastity. Don't worry, or for that matter get your hopes up, because this won't be getting graphic. The reason he is not to be condemned for the sinful activity that ensues, or for the pleasure he gets out of it, is that he is not consented to what is happening. If he were released from his chains, he would immediately flee from this temptation. His case, then, is entirely different from that of someone who intentionally breaks a vow of chastity. In light of this observation, we can now see that there are four stages involved in any action, whether sinful, virtuous, or morally neutral. First, we have a desire, or will, that motivates us to perform the action. We do not necessarily have any control over whether or not we have a certain desire, we may simply find that we have it. What we can control is whether or not we consent to a desire, as opposed to resisting it. Giving consent then is a second stage, which consists in forming an intention to act on the desire in question. Then, the action itself is a further third stage. Just as the desire does not guarantee consent, so consent to the desire does not guarantee acting on it, something might prevent the action from occurring, as when Harpo's poverty stops him from performing an act of charity. Fourth and finally, if one does succeed in performing the action, there will come the results of acting, which could include taking pleasure in sin. Abelard's theory, then, amounts to the claim that morality has to do only with the second stage of consent. Good and bad lie with the intentions we form, not the desires we have, the actions we perform, or the pleasure we take in them. Like any interesting philosophical claim, Abelard's idea not only has some good arguments behind it, but also some difficult objections to face. The most obvious one, perhaps, is this. What makes good intentions good and bad ones bad? The natural thing to say would be that an intention is good if it intends a good action, and bad if it intends a bad action. But Abelard is telling us that all actions are in themselves morally neutral. So it can't be, for instance, the sinfulness of committing adultery that makes it wrong to intend to commit adultery. Rather, it must be the other way around. Whereas Abelard's position so far has, like his writing style, been one that would not be out of place in contemporary philosophy, his solution to this problem is one that strikes a more medieval note. He thinks that sinful intentions are the ones that show contempt for God by consenting to desires that God wants us to resist. Conversely, good intentions are the ones that would please God, though we don't hear much about these because Abelard's ethics breaks off just after the start of the second book, which was planned to cover goodness. This does not mean, though, that Abelard is telling us that morality is just a matter of following biblical commandments. Though he doesn't say much about this issue, he seems to think that natural reason is capable of discerning good from bad, that is, of telling which desires ought to receive our consent. So, he is convinced that pagans, especially pagan philosophers, were capable of virtue. And, historically speaking, Abelard is right to claim common ground with non-Christian thinkers. His ethical theory is similar to one we saw a long time ago in the Stoics. They also thought that human action involves giving consent to a motivating impression that one ought to do something. Abelard is especially close to Roman Stoics like Epictetus, who likewise argued that the morally decisive thing is the exercise of one's power of choice, or pro heiressis. However, Epictetus argued for this by pointing to the fact that choice alone is completely under our power. Abelard, by contrast, reaches the same conclusion by showing that we do not really blame or praise people for their desires or even for the actions they perform, but for the fact that they consented to do such and such an action. Another objection arises here though. We often reward and punish people for their actions, whereas we hardly ever do this because of their intentions. Consider, for instance, the fact that we send people to jail for murder, but don't imprison people for merely forming the intention to kill. If a would-be murderer doesn't even get to the stage of attempting the murder, then he is guilty of no crime. This seems to show that it is actually the action we care about after all. You'll never guess how Abelard meets this objection. Yes, with an example. He asks us to imagine a poverty-stricken woman who takes her child into her bed to keep him warm and tragically smothers him in her sleep. Here, the desire and the intention to kill the baby are very much absent, yet she might be told by a priest to do penance for what has happened. Why is this? For purely pragmatic reasons, says Abelard. We want to discourage other women from doing the same thing, so we make a lesson of the woman even though she is morally innocent. This is a good answer, I think, and it can be generalized. The reason we spend so much time evaluating, punishing, and praising actions is that they are our only guides to finding out what intentions people had, even if they may be imperfect guides. Actions are public and observable, whereas intentions are not. So, we must look to the things people do to find out what they chose to do, but strictly speaking, we judge them on their choices, not on their actions as such. It's also worth emphasizing that even if actions are in themselves morally neutral, on Abelard's theory, that doesn't mean that they are morally neutral in every respect. Rather, they become good or bad precisely by stemming from good or bad intentions. But the road to hell is famously paved with good intentions. What if someone does something truly appalling while intending to carry out God's will? In that sort of case, wouldn't we condemn the appalling action despite the fact that the person was doing their best to act well? Abelard discusses this problem too. In a passage that he must have known would shock his readers, he comments that those who crucified Christ were acting in ignorance and doing what they thought was right. On this basis, he maintains that what they did was not really a sin, which is why Christ said, Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Abelard even remarks that they would have been more blameworthy if they had failed to persecute Christ given that they thought it was morally right to do so, because it is always a sin to fail to do what you think you ought to do. Yet, he still wants to say that what they did was somehow wrong. This makes most sense if we take Abelard to be thinking that intentions have to tick two boxes in order to be good. Firstly, the person involved must believe that what they are intending is right. Secondly, the intention must in fact actually be right, that is, actually be what God would want. Let's close by considering whether all this really is as pioneering as I've suggested. Was Abelard a kind of conceptual time traveler? Just by itself, his emphasis on intention fits rather well into the landscape of 12th century moral theory. In particular, Abelard's enemy Anselm of Léon had already said that merely forming an intention to sin is itself sinful. But Anselm also assumed that the subsequent action is sinful. What was unique and genuinely radical about Abelard was that he denied this and insisted on the moral neutrality of actions in themselves. Some scholars have traced this development to the influence of Heloise, or seen it as a joint effort by the two lovers. In one of her letters to Abelard, Heloise looks back upon their earlier dalliance and says that she is both wholly guilty and wholly innocent. For, sinful though her actions were, they were done out of sincere love. At which point she adds, It is not the doing of the thing, but the condition of the doer, which makes the crime. And justice should weigh not what was done, but the spirit in which it was done. But this does not really show agreement between Heloise and Abelard. In fact, thinking that it does, runs the risk of underestimating the sophistication and interest of Heloise's letter. She sees her former self as illustrating the paradox that, someone can do wrong precisely because of a motivation that is itself good, namely love. Elsewhere in her letters, she uses her current self to illustrate the flip side of the same paradox. In her soul, she still yearns for Abelard even though her outward comportment is chaste. Where Abelard insisted that good actions become good because of their good intentions, Heloise insisted that an innocent soul is compatible with exterior sin. While a tormented soul may lead an outwardly blameless life. We should not fall into the trap of thinking that Heloise's interest as a moral thinker is exhausted by the impact she may have had on Abelard. Medieval women could have minds of their own, and Heloise certainly did. There's more to say about how Abelard compares to his contemporaries, especially two other leading figures of 12th century intellectual life, his chief antagonist Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St. Victor, the most influential theologian of the age along with Abelard. But before broadening our view of this period, I want to focus on Abelard himself for one more episode. For that purpose, I'll be joined by a guest who is becoming something of a fixture in this podcast series, and who is one of the world's leading Abelard scholars, John Marin Bon. Why not form the intention now to join me for an interview with him next time on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about freedom in Peter Abelard, and I'll be joined by John Marinbon, who is Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, here for his record-equalling third appearance on the podcast. Hi, John. Hello. Hello. So maybe first you can just remind us who Peter Abelard was. Right. Abelard is probably the most important and certainly the most controversial philosopher of the 12th century. He's born in 1079, and his work really spans the first four decades of the 12th century. Up until about 1120, he's working mainly on logic. After that, he interested himself increasingly in theology. And he writes a variety of theological works, and also one work which is striking in its form because it consists of a dialogue involving a philosopher, so something a bit like a pagan philosopher who talks first to a Jew and then to a Christian. But we're not going to be talking about that. That's true, yes. Actually, I've already mentioned that anyway. What we are going to be talking about is freedom and ideas like contingency and necessity in Peter Abelard. And this is something I've already tackled several times on the podcast and pretty recently, in fact, in the context of Latin medieval philosophy, because I talked about Ariugina's views on predestination. And when I was introducing Anselm, I talked about his views on freedom and what freedom of the will would consist in. Now Abelard's not responding directly to Ariugina and Anselm. That's right? That's right, yes. Abelard's discussion comes out of looking at Aristotle's On Interpretation, chapter 9 of that, Boethius's commentary on the Aristotle, and then also Boethius's constellation of philosophy, book 5, where Boethius himself is looking back, at least in part, to that Aristotelian logical tradition. And presumably he knows the Aristotle in Boethius's Latin translation as well. Exactly, yes. And the reason why this comes up in this context is that in the famous ninth chapter of On Interpretation, Aristotle presents an argument for determinism, which he then refutes. And down to today, there's not a lot of agreement about what exactly the deterministic argument is, nor is there agreement about what the solution is. Can you sketch what the basic problem is, just to remind people, even though I have looked at this before? Right. The background problem, Aristotle's problem, is just that if we say there's going to be a sea battle, there'll be a sea battle tomorrow, and if we consider that every proposition is either false or true, so it seems that we've got to say, well, that's either false or true. We may not, we don't know which it is, but supposing it's true, then there's going to be a sea battle tomorrow. Supposing it's false, there isn't. So it seems that just by thinking of logic, we've established that there's no contingency with regard to whether or not that sea battle takes place. Because if it's already true now, then it's too late to do anything about it, as it were. Yes. Of course, one way out of that, and some people think that that was the way Aristotle took, and some people deny it, is just to deny the principle of by-valence, say deny that the contingent proposition does have to be false or true, and say that with regard to future contingent propositions, then either. But I guess that solution is off the table if you have divine omniscience, right? Exactly. So the problem which really concerns Abelard, and which concern Boethius, especially in the conversation of philosophy, exactly is what happens when you bring in a god who knows all things. Why not just say that God doesn't know the future, though? I mean, why couldn't he know all the things that there are to know, which means all the past things and all the present things, and maybe the future things that are necessary, like one plus one will still equal two tomorrow? It's difficult to answer that in that I don't think anybody took the view of saying that simply future contingents aren't among the things which are there to be known. It was always considered that it would detract from God's omniscience. And I suppose I think there's a certain sort of common sense in that. It does seem, if some being knows all that's going to happen in the future, this being seems obviously to know more than a being who doesn't. Right, so just the fact that there could be truths to know is already going to give them a big push in the direction of saying that God knows them. Yeah. Okay. So, how does Abelard then set up the problem? Is that basically his way into it? Yeah, so that's basically his way into it. If we put his way of stating it so that we can then see how he gets out of it. I suppose it's quite important that in his way of stating it, he rather forgets the temporal elements. So, we're in fact talking about God's knowledge of the future. But his way of stating the problem is to say that if God or indeed if anybody knows a proposition, then that proposition is true, because you can only know what is true in virtue of the meaning of know. This is surely something which is necessarily the case, because we're not just talking about an accident, we're talking about what something must be in order to be known. So, we can say that necessarily if God knows some proposition P, then P is true. And then the problem is put in terms of, well, doesn't that mean therefore that P is necessary? Right. So, this wouldn't only apply to future facts. So, it would also mean if God knows that there was a sea battle yesterday, then necessarily there was a sea battle yesterday as well. Yes. Right. But of course, that doesn't seem to be such a problem, because although there's a certain sense in which we want to say that yesterday's sea battle wasn't necessary, there's also a certain sense from now in which it is necessary and there's nothing we can do about it. And one could say the same about the present too. But when you consider this with regard to the future, it seems to be a problem, because we want to say now it's open whether or not the sea battle is going to take place. When you frame the argument this way, how much work is being done by the fact that we're talking about knowledge? Imagine that I say I now have a true belief, but not knowledge, that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. There's evidence concerning it, and I've checked with the generals and the admirals, and they all have assured me that there will be a sea battle. So, I believe now truly that there will be a sea battle tomorrow. Would that not raise the same problems? Because it's true now. No, it would raise the same problems if we can take it that it's true. So, I don't think a lot of accounts of knowledge are that it's true belief plus something or other. And the important thing I think in setting up this problem is the truth of it. However, when you're saying, well, the admirals have assured me, it seems you're not talking about a true belief, but simply about a belief for which we have a very great deal of evidence so it's highly probable that it will turn out to be true. And of course, there's no problem about that. Well, what I was imagining was a case where it's a justified belief, and in addition, it happens to be true. And although I can't be sure that it's true, in fact, it is true. What I was wondering, in other words, is whether the necessity is supposed to flow from the thought that anything I know must be incapable of being otherwise, because that's what knowledge is like. And that wouldn't be true of true belief. Well, yeah, yes. Perhaps casting that in terms of true belief in that way is a first step on the way to the – in a way rather simple, but also, as it turns out, an adequate solution that Abelard proposes. Because what Abelard has, which Boethius doesn't have, is a notion of operating on propositions. So, if we take a complex proposition such as, if it's day, it's light, and then we think about negating it, Boethius, it seemed, could only think of negating each or both of its parts. So, if it's not day, it's light, or if it's day, it's not light, or if it's not day, it's not light. But what Abelard realizes is that you can do something which is different, which you can say that the whole of that isn't true. That's to say, this doesn't follow from that. Once you start to think in that way, you can see that in this problem, there's a distinction between the true proposition that necessarily, the whole of what follows is necessary. If someone knows P, then P, and we accept that. And there's an interesting in that and putting the necessity operator before P. So, it doesn't follow from that that necessarily P. So, it's like the difference between saying necessarily colon, if it's now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then there will be a sea battle tomorrow. And on the other hand, saying, if it's now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then necessarily there will be a sea battle tomorrow. Exactly, yes. Because where you put the necessity, whether it's applying to the whole inference or the actual event of the sea battle. And then Abelard applies this to get out of the deterministic argument. So, how exactly does that work? Well, so, I mean, his point would be that just because God knows everything, including whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow or not, and there's a connection of necessity between God's knowing things and their happening, this doesn't mean that they happen necessarily. It just necessary that if he knows them, then they happen. Yes, just as it's necessary that if I know something, it will happen or it happens. The thing is, though, I can't know future contingents. Where as God can. Where as God can. But, I mean, Abelard considers that he's solved the problem, but he's only really solved or thinks he's solved the problem because he's, as I said at the beginning, removed the temporal element from it. So, I think one can see it common sensically that it's not nearly so worrying that somebody should know what's happening now. And we don't feel there's a problem about that removing contingency. Whereas there does seem really to be a problem about somebody knowing what's happening in the future, and also supposing that's contingent, that that might or might not happen. Because it seems, if we're insisting that God now knows what's going to happen in the future and that that's contingent in the future, then it seems that something in the future must have the power to make what God supposedly knows now into not knowledge, but false belief. Otherwise how could it be contingent? So what you're saying is, if, let's change the example. Let's say the example, so, because I can't really stage sea battles. No. I don't know about you. But I do have the power to have eggs for breakfast tomorrow morning. Exactly, yes. Taking that example, I guess what you're saying is something like this. Given that tomorrow morning it will be up to me whether or not I have eggs, it would be in my power tomorrow morning retroactively to make God have had a false belief today about whether I would have eggs or not. Exactly, yes. That's really bad. Yes. And that's really bad. And if you want to see why the, why Abel-Arzolichian analysis won't get round that, then what you need to consider is that it's, let's consider God's belief about your eggs. And it's not just a matter that God now has a belief about how many eggs we're going to have tomorrow morning. God had that belief yesterday, in fact, He had it from all eternity. There's a sense in which that belief is necessary, not necessary in a straightforward sense, but as people said, accidentally necessary because it's in the past. God has come to that belief. And so, it's not just a belief, it's knowledge. So, God has that knowledge and that's because of the past is necessary. So, what we have is both that necessarily if God knows P, then P, but also we've got that necessarily God knows P with the necessity of the past. And most people would admit that you can, in this case, as well, transfer necessity so that you can then validate the juice necessarily P. Okay, so thinking about that in a slightly less technical way, we could say that if God already knew yesterday and indeed from eternity that I'll have eggs tomorrow for breakfast, and although it's not too late for me to do anything about having eggs tomorrow for breakfast, it is too late for me to stop God from knowing that I'll have eggs tomorrow for breakfast. And if I can't stop him from knowing that, then I can't do otherwise with respect to having the eggs. Is that basically the problem? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's—it's knowledge and we've seen the past, so you can't change it. Because you can't have been wrong and it's past, so you can't do anything about it. In fact, after all, and despite Abelard's help for a bit of logic, you've got to have those six eggs or whatever God knew. I'm sorry. Oh, no. I'm glad it's just you and not God telling me that. And of course, that's good in a sense because future medieval philosophers are going to keep discussing this. So this leaves room for them to say something interesting about it. Exactly, yes. And I mean, they do see that Abelard didn't succeed in dealing with the problem. And they come up with all sorts of clever ways of trying to deal with it, though whether any of them are successful or not, it's hard to say. But Abelard, I would—I'd quite like to say something about another aspect of the problem of freedom where Abelard might be more successful, certainly he's very successful in formulating an interesting problem. And I think that he proposes an interesting solution to it. This is a problem about freedom, which comes from a somewhat different direction, not just from thinking about the logic of propositions that are true or false and then putting God's knowledge, but thinking about the nature of God and his ways of acting. Because it's agreed among all medieval Christians that God is omnipotent and also that he's completely benevolent. So he always wants to do the best thing. But then Abelard says—and this is something which he becomes very interested in in the middle of his career when he's moved away from just doing logic. And so, if you like, moved on from the discussion which we were looking at before. So let's consider God and how he acts. Well, at every juncture, he has to do whatever's best. But if he has to do whatever's best, then he has no alternative choices. Because he knows what's best, too. Exactly, he knows what's best. He can't get it wrong. And there's also no chance of him saying, well, I'd like to do this, but I can't because God's omnipotent. Oh, right. Okay. So God cannot do other than he does. And so, actually, we possess more freedom than he does. Actually, he doesn't possess any freedom at all because he has to do exactly the best thing at every moment throughout eternity. Yes, I mean, that's right. What you just said, I think, is indeed what Abelard will come down to saying in the end. But you would—I mean, you might think that that's not the case. You might think that because God is just acting of necessity and we're used to thinking when we have a Christian thinker that God in some way is arranging all things. So if God acts of necessity and God is omnipotent, then surely there's going to be no room for us to— Oh, so it's even worse. So we're not free either. That could be the problem. And what's interesting is Abelard puts that to himself in the form of a particular objection to the view that he's trying to propound. He recognizes that this view that God cannot do other than he does is a very strange view and other thinkers haven't held it in the past. And he knows he's going to be criticized for it, as indeed he was, but nonetheless he wants to put it forward. He does put forward this objection to it. He's talking about somebody who, as a matter of fact, is going to be damned because he's led an evil life and he deserves to be damned. So take this person who's going to be damned. This is equal to this Damnandus. Christian doctrine requires nonetheless that we say that it's possible for him to be saved by God because if he's going to be saved, it's going to be by God. And if we were to deny that it was possible for him to be saved, then we'd be saying that whatever he did, he couldn't be saved. And that would certainly be against Christian doctrine. We know as a matter of fact he's not going to do the right things and so he's not going to be saved, but he might do them. And so if it's the case that it's possible he'll be saved by God, surely it's the case that it's possible that God will save him because for him to be saved by God means the same as for God to save him. And if it's possible for God to save him, but in fact God isn't going to save him, then we've shown that God can do what he doesn't do. So, Abelard's found a very good argument against his own position. However, Abelard denies that consequence and he denies the consequence by denying that in fact it's possible for him to be saved by God means the same as it's possible for God to save him. He agrees that if we just take the simple statement, God saves him, he is saved by God, they have exactly the same meaning. They're just two forms of words saying the same thing. But when you talk about possibility, that's not the case because he says that when we're talking about what's, that we say it's possible for him to be saved by God, we're referring possibility to him and to his capacities. And there Abelard would say, as Christian doctrine demands, that of course it's possible for him to be saved by God because it's possible for any human being to be saved by God. That possibility remains until the moment of their death and damnation. But when we're talking about whether it's possible for God to save him, then it's different because we're talking about what's possible for God and given that in fact he has done evil and it would be unjust to save him, it's not possible for God to save him. Pete and Jono because he'd have to do something worse. Peter well, yeah, he'd have to do something which was exactly wrong, which he'd have to do something unjust, which first of all would be against God's nature and secondly wouldn't be the best action that he could take. The best action in this case is to do what's just and damn the man. Jono Let me ask you a more basic question about Abelard's whole position here. Why not say that when God's making a decision like this, for example, whether to damn the sinner or not, he evaluates the situation, he sees what's best to do, and then he decides freely to do the best thing. In other words, why not say that his knowledge of what's best doesn't force him to do what's best, it just gives him a reason to do what's best and then he acts on that reason, even though he'd have the possibility of not acting on that reason. Peter Because Abelard doesn't believe he does have the ability of not acting on that reason, because not acting on that reason would mean that he wasn't doing the best thing. Jono But that seems kind of circular. So what I'm saying is that, I mean, you can't prove that God has no ability not to do the best thing just by insisting that he must do the best thing. Peter But how? If God is omniscient, omnipotent and entirely good. Jono Oh, so it actually flows from his nature. Peter It flows from his nature. And I mean, of course, an obvious objection is you might say yes, but supposing there are two things which are equally good for him to do. Jono Oh, right, okay. Peter And so then, there must be some cases where that, but no, I mean, Abelard says there couldn't be a case like that, because supposing there were, then there'd be no reason why God should do one rather than the other. And so God would be acting without reason. And the universe couldn't be like that. It could never be. Jono So just as God can't do something unjust or wrong, he can't do anything arbitrary either. Peter Exactly. Jono So there must always be a best thing for him to do and he must do. Peter One best thing. Jono Just by his very nature as an all powerful, all good, all knowing deity. Peter Exactly, yes. Yes. Jono I'm guessing that this position was not received with universal acclaim among later philosophers. Peter I mean, it was received with universal disdain. So what happened was, there's actually an interesting discussion by Hugh of St. Victor. So I think of it as a very different cast, but quite an intelligent man, quite near the time where he goes through, he knows the argument, probably not from any source that actually survives now, but he knows in some detail, and he discusses it quite well. Then it gets taken up by Peter the Lombard in his sentences. And this is a book which comes to be enormously influential and used in the all the theology faculties of the universities. Peter the Lombard takes up a bit of the argument in a somewhat garbled version and rejects it out of hand. Everybody else knows the argument through Peter the Lombard. It's not Peter the Lombard doesn't mention Abelard's name, he clearly has Abelard in mind. So people know this argument as a position and a position which the Lombard rejects, and they also reject it. Sometimes they devise more elaborate arguments than the Lombard himself had. The one person who seems perhaps to have some inkling that it's by Abelard is Aquinas, who in I think it's his questions on power, refers to this position as having been taken by a certain Peter Amalario. We do see some sort of text that has come through to him. But anyway, it's something which is universally rejected until, I mean, the one thinker who in some ways follows it, but thinks he's rejecting it is the first thinker, the first sort of significant thinker who restores the parentage of the argument to Abelard, and that's a Leibniz. Leibniz in the end didn't actually read Abelard's Theologia, Theologia Scholarium, or Theologia Christiana, in which this argument is put. He read an abbreviation of it. He discusses it quite fully, and he rejects it and he suggests that Abelard's view is completely different from his own, but actually Leibniz finds himself in much the same sort of position because he has the same sort of view about God as always having to choose the best. So although Leibniz might say that when Abelard puts forward this argument he's just playing with words, actually it's something which is rather central to Leibniz's own thought and a difficulty for Leibniz himself. Okay, well, it will be a while until I get to Leibniz, but I will very soon be getting to people like Hugh of St. Victor and also Peter Lombard in the coming episodes, which will continue to look at philosophy in the 12th century. For now, I'll thank John Maronpon very much for coming on the podcast again. Not at all, it was a great pleasure. And please join me next time for more on 12th century philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Learn Everything, the Victorines. Religion put the history into the history of philosophy. The pagans of antiquity by and large saw history as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of the world. Whether you were a Platonist who saw physical things as mere images of eternal forms, an Aristotelian who believed that the celestial bodies are moved everlastingly by a divine intellect, or an Epicurean who thought that all things result from random atomic interactions, you were offering an account of the universe's permanent state. No particular historical event figured importantly into any of these worldviews. But for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, history was central. All three faiths accepted the reality of prophecy, with the figures of Moses and Muhammad, of course playing an especially crucial role for Jews and Muslims respectively. The divine had manifested in the created world at certain times and places. Die-hard Aristotelian philosophers of these two religions could nonetheless just about preserve a, the more things change, the more they stay the same, attitude. They could and did explain prophecy as a naturally occurring interaction between immaterial principles and unusually gifted humans. The possibility of such interaction is always present, and its mechanism is rationally comprehensible. It's just that it only occurs when circumstances are especially favorable. But for medieval Christians, this sort of compromise was not really available. For them, the universe was ultimately a stage upon which is played out the drama of humankind's fall and redemption. Already in antiquity, Christian thinkers historicized philosophical doctrines in order to fit them into this theological picture. The Greek church father Origen is a perfect example. He adapted Platonism into a cosmic morality tale in which souls err and fall away from God, later returning to him through the guidance of Christ. For the medievals, a more influential reimagining of this fall-and-rise structure was that of Augustine. He understood the universe and its relation to God in thoroughly historical terms, with the key events being the original sin of the first humans and the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God. The philosophical implications were far-reaching. For medieval Christian thinkers, God intervenes in, and even enters into, the world in a way that is not necessary but contingent on his will. History teaches us when and how this has occurred, so these thinkers were bound to take history very seriously. No medieval thinker took it more seriously than Hugh of St. Victor. For him, the correct understanding of history was foundational for all knowledge, or at least, all knowledge worth having. It was the most basic of three approaches he described for interpreting Scripture. When taking up the Bible, one must first understand it as what we would call a literal record of real events. This is what Hugh calls a historical interpretation. One should not stop there, though. A second approach discerns a further symbolic meaning behind historical events. Hugh calls this type of exegesis allegorical. Finally, there is what he calls tropological interpretation which means taking an ethical message from the text. Hugh applies all three kinds of approach to the same scriptural material, for instance in a treatise he wrote on Noah's On the one hand, the Ark was a real boat. Hugh describes it in bewildering detail to the point that it seems clear he was envisioning an intricate diagram of the Ark, even though no such diagram is found in the existing manuscripts of his treatise. He dwells on descriptions found in the Bible, for instance about the dimensions of the boat, and adds details of his own, like little side compartments to allow seals and otters to swim into the sea and then return to the Ark. I haven't seen the recent movie Noah starring Russell Crowe, and when I do see it I'm going to be really disappointed if they left this out. The Ark's structure is then mined for its symbolic significance, as when Hugh says that the Ark had two exits, a door and a window, which represent the soul's ability to engage in practical action or to look upwards in contemplation. Finally, the story of the Ark teaches us a moral lesson. The flood waters that have covered the earth represent the worldly desires that deluge the soul, and the Ark, a place we build within ourselves, safe from these desires. Hugh produced a number of other exegetical, contemplative, and educational works, the best known of which is his Didascalicon, which means something like educational handbook. Much copied and much read in the Middle Ages, it provides an overview of secular and religious learning aimed at budding scholars. This was Hugh's natural audience, because he was head of the school at the Abbey of St. Victor. In no small part thanks to Hugh, this institution became one of the most important intellectual centers of the entire Middle Ages. Historians even have a collective name for the scholars who taught and studied there, the Victorines. The Abbey was founded in 1108 by none other than William of Champo, whose Realist theory of universals was twice refuted by Peter Abelard. Perhaps in reaction to his defeat at the hands of Abelard, William and some colleagues retired to an empty hermitage dedicated to St. Victor, which was near Paris on the River of Seine. This might sound like a simple retreat, in every sense of the word. But in founding the Abbey, William of Champo was joining a Reformed movement that reshaped the Church in the 12th In the previous century, Peter Damian had already urged that stricter discipline should become the norm in monastic settings. Despite Abelard's unforgiving portrayal of him, William was a skilled dialectician who could blend expertise in the secular arts with the sort of spiritual reform pioneered by Damian. That blend would become the trademark of the Abbey of St. Victor. It was a place to engage in austere contemplation, but also a school that produced highly trained scholars who traveled throughout Europe, spreading the reformist practices and the knowledge they had acquired on the banks of the Seine. The list of scholars who were associated with St. Victor is effectively a roll call of the major intellectuals of the time. Hughes students Andrew and Richard of St. Victor took on different aspects of their master's legacy, Andrew achieving renown as a scriptural interpreter, Richard as a contemplative or mystical author. Peter Lombard, author of the most influential theological synthesis of the century and subject of an upcoming episode of this podcast, also studied under Hughes. Bernard of Clavo, had friendly relations with the Victorines, and Thomas Becket, of will-no-one-rid me of this troublesome priest fame, was friends with Ashard, the second man to serve as abbot at St. Victor. Among all these leading lights, Hugh shined most brightly. This, at least, was the opinion of the 13th century theologian Bonaventure, who reportedly commented on his predecessors, Hugh of St. Victor's most famous remark befits this versatility and his attention to the educational needs of the students at the Abbey. He wrote in his Didascalicon, Hugh's remark could be a motto for this podcast series, yet the quotation needs to be understood within its original context, namely a discussion of the things a student needs to know in order to interpret Scripture. Hugh was under no illusions about the difficulty and unwelcoming nature of this task. He compared the works of the philosophers to a freshly painted wall whose inviting color conceals the clay of error beneath, whereas the Scriptures are more like a honeycomb, seemingly dry, yet sweet once one delves into them. The rigorous and comprehensive course of study described in the Didascalicon is designed to prepare students to do just that. Expertise in geometry, for instance, comes in handy when analyzing the dimensions of the ark. For this same reason, Hugh is also quick to criticize those who pursue knowledge uselessly. He complains that in his day, there are many who study, but few who are wise. The targets of his lament are those who engage in learning for its own sake rather than for the sake of understanding God and the Bible. It is easy to dismiss this attitude as typically medieval, and not in a good way. Speaking of the cultivation of the liberal arts in the Carolingian era, the great historian Edward Gibbon wrote that, were only cultivated as the handmaids of superstition. Now, he might seem to be carrying forward that same approach in the 12th century, even as men like Avelard were pursuing what may seem a more enlightened and rational form of philosophy. But, just as we saw that the Carolingians were considerably more sophisticated than Gibbon's quote suggests, so Hugh's attitude toward secular learning rests on a nuanced understanding of humankind. As Platonists of various religious persuasions had been teaching for centuries, we are divided between two natures, immaterial souls attached to physical bodies. Philosophy must address itself to both aspects. For Hugh, our incorporeal aspect is served by theoretical philosophy, which culminates in contemplation and pure understanding, whereas practical philosophy teaches us how to engage with the bodily realm and to attain virtue. His two-fold project was reflected in the life that Hugh and his colleagues lived at St. Victor, with their dual commitment to scholarship and ascetic discipline. When William of Champo was debating the merits of founding the abbey in the first place, a colleague named Hildebert encouraged him by saying that William's previous attainments as a dialectician had made him only half a philosopher. What was missing was strict ethical discipline. Hugh provided a theoretical framework for this approach to philosophy. The reason that his Didy Skelikon became the medieval equivalent of a bestseller was that it provided a concise and clear encapsulation of the Victorine program of study. His overview of the secular sciences is fairly traditional, built around the seven liberal arts already familiar to us from the Carolingian period. He does, however, innovate by adding a list of seven so-called mechanical arts like fabric-making, hunting, and medicine. Less obvious but deeper novelty is Hugh's interest in the very process of learning. The first stage involves wide reading and, above all, memorization of what one has read. Nowadays, memorization seems to have gone out of fashion as a learning method. What's the point of having lots of information in your head when you can just look it up on the internet? Hugh can tell you what the point is. By memorizing, we internalize what we have read, beginning to reshape the soul itself by conforming it to that which we seek to know. Hugh keeps this in mind throughout his works. From the schematic presentation of the sciences in the Didy Skelikon to the richly symbolic correspondences detailed in his work on Noah's Ark, he is constantly trying to help his readers remember what they are reading. Next, the educational process continues to another stage, which Hugh calls meditatio. An obvious translation here would be meditation, but a better one might be rumination. Hugh describes it as a kind of undirected procedure of pondering over what one has read and memorized. He seems to see it almost as a kind of reward for the hard work one has put into reading and memorization, speaking of the delight of the ruminative process. Finally, after memoria and meditatio comes moralia, which means putting one's insights into practice ethically. In another of Hugh's beloved parallels, and in this case a fairly plausible one, the three stages of learning are said to correspond to his three approaches to Scripture. History is analogous to memory, the more open-ended search for allegorical interpretation is analogous to meditation, and the trophological discovery of ethical lessons in Scripture is of course analogical to moralia. Hugh compares the learning process to the minting of a coin, with the malleable soul of the learner taking on the likeness of whatever it knows. It is in this sense that the mind is said to be all things. There's a nice wordplay here which works in both English and Latin. Through learning, the soul is reformed, just as monastic culture was being reformed through the efforts of the Victorines and others. For Hugh, these two sorts of reformation are individual and social enactments of the cosmic redemption that is at the heart of Christian theology. Here we come back to the Augustinian understanding of history, with its central moments of fall and redemption. When we achieve understanding and virtue, we are acquiring something that we lacked at birth, but we are also recovering something that was lost by human nature through sin. In fact, we have the chance to attain an even higher degree of perfection than the first humans ever had. Adam and Eve were created with a natural knowledge that we lack, but they never achieved the crowning perfection that comes through obedience to God. Hugh's educational theory depends not only on this theological background, but also on a metaphysical framework that is assumed throughout the Didascalicon. Like Ariugina, the most sophisticated of those surprisingly sophisticated Carolingians, Hugh sees created things as images of paradigmatic forms, called primordial causes. These causes are like the plan that a skilled craftsman makes in his mind before producing something. Hence they are ideas within the wisdom of God, which is identified with the second person of the Trinity. The Christian trappings of the view are not merely incidental. If the paradigms were not identical with the divine Son, Hugh could not equate growth and understanding with the path towards redemption. In fact, given his warning that knowledge is useless if it does not bring us closer to God, Hugh can really only justify the attempt to achieve understanding of paradigmatic forms by associating those forms with divinity. Nonetheless, the metaphysical picture itself is fundamentally Platonist. Plotinus and like-minded pagans would readily have agreed that philosophy is nothing more nor less than, as Hugh puts it, the pursuit of that wisdom which is the sole primordial idea or pattern of things. The ancient Platonists had been divided when it came to the question of using physical things to attain wisdom. Since we are trying to reach immaterial paradigms, the material world could seem to be at best a distraction. This seems to have been the view of Plotinus and his student Porphyry. But Porphyry's student Eamblichus and later Neoplatonists like Proclus held that pagan religious and magical practices could enable one to make contact with divinity through bodily things. Probably none of them would appreciate the comparison, but Hugh of St. Victor is in this respect more like Eamblichus and Proclus than like Plotinus and Porphyry. Where the Neoplatonists spoke of theurgy, Hugh speaks of sacraments. In fact, he composed a major theological treatise entitled On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. We normally associate this term sacraments with a very specific set of Christian ceremonial practices, such as marriage, ordination of priests and, of course, the Eucharist. But Hugh uses the term more broadly, to refer to any physical thing that also has a symbolic meaning and bears the operation of divine If you want to see an example, just look around. Hugh considers the creation of the world itself to be a sacrament, an infusion of grace into the corporeal realm. Impressive though creation is though, Hugh believes that the restoration of fallen nature is more difficult than creating nature in the first place. So, it took God only six days to fashion the world, whereas the restoration of humankind takes six ages. Yet again, there is a connection here to Hugh's understanding of history. Broadly understood, history is, quite simply, everything that has happened in the physical universe. Though a factual or historical understanding of the world is foundational, we will never reach an understanding of nature's divine paradigms unless we also think allegorically. Hence, Hugh remarks in the Didascalicon that things as well as words have meaning. This is the occasion for one of Hugh's many slighting references to the philosophers. With their expertise in dialectic, they remain at the level of words, which are mere representations of human concepts, whereas things that have actually existed in history are representations of divine ideas. Later medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas will justify philosophical inquiry by citing a famous biblical text, Romans 1.20, Hugh would agree to an extent, but is convinced that in our fallen state no such inquiry can succeed on its own in bringing us to God. Only the grace offered in sacraments and, above all, in the Incarnation, makes this possible. This is why he dismisses what one might call the merely philosophical, secular learning that makes no attempt to understand Scripture or to see history itself in allegorical terms. It's fitting that someone as interested in history as Hugh was should have had a big impact upon it. It was William of Champo who had founded the abbey and initiated the characteristically Victorian fusion of scholarship and spirituality, but Hugh was the real intellectual father of the Victorines who followed. Among his successors, Richard of St. Victor particularly stands out. He originally came from Scotland. So if there are any patriotic Scots out there listening who have been waiting impatiently for me to arrive at countrymen like David Hume, you just got your wish a few hundred episodes early. As implied in that quote I mentioned from Bonaventure, Richard was the one who excelled in contemplation, he especially continued the allegorical and contemplative aspects of Hugh's legacy. Two of his most significant works allegorize parts of the Old Testament. One is devoted to Jacob and his family, the other to the Ark, not Noah's work but the Ark of the Covenant, the one that Indiana Jones was looking for. Richard's treatise on the Ark of the Covenant lays out an entire theory of contemplation. Whereas Hugh speaks of this as a final stage in the mental transformation that brings us closer to God, for Richard, contemplation itself comes in six different stages. These range from imaginative reflection on the beauty of the sensible world to the mystical attitude appropriate for things that are beyond human reason. It's common to say that this contemplative aspect of the Victorines exemplifies a widespread feature of the 12th century, interiorization. This was a period when thinkers urged us to turn our gaze inward in search of divinity, and to reshape the inner self that we find there so that it reflects God's image more truly. We've just seen Hugh understanding Noah's Ark in this way, Abelard's idea that moral goodness lies in the soul's intentions and not outward actions is another example. This observation is illuminating to a degree, but like any historical generalization, should be qualified with a few caveats. For one thing, it was not really all that new. Rather, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor were laying particular emphasis on long-standing contemplative themes in the Augustinian, monastic, and Platonist traditions. Furthermore, these Victorine heroes of interiority also laid great emphasis on the beauty of nature. Contemplation can be directed outwards as well as inwards. As we'll see in due course, other 12th century thinkers were even more deeply engaged in the study of nature. This time of interiority was also a time for celebrating the exterior world as the visible manifestation of divine grace. Finally, whatever interiorization we find with the Victorines was compatible with political engagement. Their monastic lifestyle echoed the so-called Gregorian Reform, led by Pope Gregory VII at the end of the 11th century. The Victorines may have been great spiritualists, but they also traveled to other monasteries, taking on positions of leadership and trying to spread the Reform movement. As the historian Giles Constable has written, this movement sought to monasticize first the clergy by imposing on them a standard of life previously reserved for monks and then the entire world. So the Victorines were not just writers of the lost arks. They were morally and politically active as reformers and preachers. This is something they had in common with their powerful ally Bernard of Creveaux. Actually, saying that Bernard of Creveaux was merely politically engaged would be like saying that Indiana Jones had a fairly hands-on approach to archaeology. Bernard was a central figure of the 12th century, who not only pushed the Reform agenda but also took a hand in church politics and helped to launch the Second Crusade, unlike Indiana Jones, who of course was involved in the last Crusade. In the history of philosophy, Bernard usually plays a more subsidiary role, featuring above all as the scourge of Peter Abelard. We have yet to delve into the nature of that dispute. Doing so will give us a further opportunity to appreciate the Victorines and the subtle mind of Abelard, as we take up the most controversial topic of Christianity in the 12th century, and most other centuries too for that matter, the Trinity. You won't want to miss the next episode, because, to quote what might have been Hugh of St. Victor's favorite line from Raiders of the Lost Ark, we are merely passing through history, but this, this is history. The history of philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London, the LMU in Munich, and Riese's Peanut Butter Cups online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Like Father, Like Son – Debating the Trinity. I don't know if you're familiar with Riese's peanut butter cups. They were nearly invented in the 19th century by George Washington Carver, who was credited with the idea of peanut butter itself. Amazingly, he stopped there, rather than taking the next natural step of coating a small puck of peanut butter in chocolate and wrapping the result in luridly orange plastic. As Dirk Gently said, it takes a genius to render the previously non-existent obvious, and in this case, the genius in question was H.B. Riese, who devised the peanut butter cup in 1928. When I was a kid, they were marketed with commercials that are emblazoned upon my memory. At a cinema, a boy is eating a chocolate bar and a girl is enjoying peanut butter straight from the jar, as one does at the movies. Both jump at the horror movie playing on screen with the result that the chocolate lands in the peanut butter. The result? Surprisingly delicious. They turn out to be, as the 1970s tagline put it, two tastes that taste great together. Why am I bothering you with this? This episode isn't really being brought to you by Hershey, the maker of Riese's peanut butter cups, though if they'd like to send me a year's supply in thanks for their free publicity, that wouldn't go amiss. Rather, my thinking is that debates over the Trinity were the Riese's peanut butter cup of medieval philosophy. Some have a taste for the rational inquiry of philosophy, others for their revelatory truth claims of religion. Many assume that the two don't mix, that they are like oil and vinegar. But they turn out to be more like chocolate and peanut butter, two tastes that taste great together. Anti-Christians were convinced that they could find evidence for God's Trinitarian nature in the Bible. Augustine's On the Trinity devotes several books to the scriptural basis of the doctrine, which is, of course, central to Christian theology. But Augustine goes on to show in his On the Trinity that the conceptual tools of philosophy can help us see how it is possible for one and the same substance to be three persons. The core of the Trinitarian dogma is the claim that the three divine persons differ from one another while being the same God. But what does this mean? A first thought might be that each thing is the same as itself and different from any other thing. This makes the Trinitarian doctrine look problematic. But further reflection will show that there are many ways of being the same or different. For instance, the Marx brothers were four things, so not the same as each other in every respect, but they were the same in respect of being human. The problem of universals, which we looked at a few episodes back, is really just the difficulty of how things are able to share this sort of sameness. Then there is the problem of sameness over time. Am I the same as the boy who watched those Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials? That boy was different in many ways. More hair, but less interest in philosophy, albeit that an enthusiasm for peanut butter cups has remained undiminished through the years. Or what about a thing and its parts? Is a peanut butter cup the same as its peanut butter center plus its chocolate coating? It may seem so, but consider that in that case anything that loses a part of itself would cease to be the same thing. Do I really make a peanut butter cup no longer the same thing by taking a bite out of it? Or make myself no longer the same thing by trimming my fingernails? As we can already see then, consideration of the Trinity leads directly to fundamental issues in metaphysics. The same is true for epistemology. While Christians did invoke passages in the Bible to support their Trinitarian doctrine, they were also tempted to think that human reasoning can establish God's triune nature without any help from revelation. Anselm already made a case for this in his Monologion. In the 12th century, a number of thinkers went so far as to say that pagan philosophers had reached an understanding of God's Trinity even before the time of Christ. Yet medieval thinkers frequently hastened to remind us that God lies beyond the grasp of reason. This might seem to apply especially to the mysterious, even paradoxical notion that he is somehow three despite being one and even simple. The Trinity duly became a kind of litmus test for how far medieval thought that reason can take us in understanding God. It was a test that Peter Abelard failed, according to Bernard of Clairvaux. When Bernard and his allies summoned Abelard to the city of Sainz to face trial in the year 1141, the accusations concerned his teaching on the Trinity. Bernard wrote to the Pope about Abelard, He is ready to give reasons for everything, even for those things which are above reason. Bernard had been alerted to the offensive nature of Abelard's teaching by William of Saint-Héry, who had compiled a list of his erroneous claims in theology. Abelard had differentiated the divine persons in terms of their distinctive properties, ascribing power especially to the Father, wisdom especially to the Son, and love especially to the Holy Spirit. William and Bernard took exception to the suggestion that the persons were not equal in respect of power and wisdom. For Bernard, Abelard also placed too little emphasis on the role of grace in human redemption. He seemed to suggest that Christ was merely an ethical example for us to follow. This goes well with Abelard's moral teaching and his claim that virtue involves forming the right intentions which lie wholly within our power. Unfortunately, at least in Bernard's opinion, it didn't go so well with Christianity. Abelard was coming dangerously close to Pelagianism, the heretical doctrine that humans can merit salvation without divine grace. Abelard refused to answer to his critics at Sainz, instead appealing to the Pope. But Bernard prevailed when the Pope took his side. Abelard was excommunicated, confined to a monastery, and forced to burn his writings on theology with his own hands. Eventually, Bernard and Abelard were reconciled, and the Pope lifted the excommunication, but the damage was done. Abelard later recalled the episode as a humiliation worse in some respects than his earlier castration. In the longer run, though, these events have done more harm to Bernard's reputation than to Abelard's. Historians of philosophy, like me, tend to see him as an anti-rationalist and pig-headed obscurantist, incapable of appreciating the subtlety of Abelard's superior mind. It doesn't help that Bernard evidently didn't bother to examine Abelard's works for himself, largely just following the accusations of William of Saint-Héry. Worse still, Bernard was a repeat offender. He went on to make accusations against another of the leading philosophers of the era, Gilbert of Poitiers, and succeeded in getting Gilbert to recant some of his theological claims. There's an important lesson here. If you want historians of philosophy to look kindly upon you, be kind to philosophers. But Bernard of Clavaux was far more than an anti-philosopher. It's appropriate that his preaching played a role in the launching of the Second Crusade in 1146, because he was nothing if not a crusader. He was a leading member of the reformist Cistercian order, distinguished by their white clothing and strict observance. The name Cistercian comes from the Latin name of the city of Citeau, where Bernard arrived in 1112 to join a community who followed the rule of Saint Benedict. He became a critic of other orders and communities, such as the one at Cluny, which was Abelard's first stop after his excommunication. He would spend the rest of his life there and at another Cluniac priory. The purpose of the austere Cistercian rule was of course to bring the monks closer to God. Bernard and his brethren were convinced that a rigorous, spiritual life could even provoke a direct vision of the divine, a mystical approach that contrasted sharply to the argument-based approach of the schoolmen. Bernard's devotion to monastic spirituality and his critique of Abelard and others for what he saw as vainglorious abuse of reason did not mean that he was wholly opposed to the intellectual tools provided by the secular liberal arts. The historian G. R. Evans has written that Bernard was Abelard had strayed into errors. Bernard and William of Saint-Hervie worried that those errors might be passed on to other, simpler believers who did not have the tools to diagnose where Abelard had gone wrong. Before we get too indignant on Abelard's behalf, we should also bear in mind that he attacked his own teacher, Roscelin, for, wait for it, an erroneous teaching on the Trinity. Following the account of names he found in classical works on grammar, Roscelin assumed that, if the divine persons have three different names, they must be not one but three things. Abelard attacked this assumption, turning against Roscelin his own strategy of distinguishing the level of words from the level of things. The persons cannot be different things, as Roscelin claimed. That would be to fall into the heresy of tritheism, a belief in three gods rather than one. Rather, Abelard argued, the persons differ in respect of their properties, like the father's power as opposed to the son's wisdom. Hence, the accusation Bernard leveled at Abelard that he failed to acknowledge the equality of the persons in respect of power and wisdom. But if God really is one and not three, how can he have different properties from himself? To deal with this question, Abelard developed a systematic account of how things are the same as and different from each other. He wasn't the first to do this. Aristotle and his followers had already distinguished between various sorts of sameness and difference. The most obvious way of being the same is to be numerically the same. For instance, you are numerically the same as yourself. This means that if we count, we find that there is only one thing here, whereas if we counted you and me, we would have two things, In other words, you and I are numerically distinct people. Yet, we are still the same in other respects. We are the same in form or in species, for instance, because we are both human. So far, so sensible. The problem is that in being a trinity, God is in some sense not identical with himself, despite being numerically one. That is, when we count how many gods there are, we had better come up with the answer only one. And yet, A tempting option might be to shrug and say, what can I tell you, the trinity is a mystery, so just believe it. But of course, that is not Abelard's approach. Instead, he points out that it actually happens all the time that two things are numerically the same, yet somehow different. Imagine that you are holding a peanut butter cup, and somehow resisting the urge to pop it into your mouth. How many things would be in your hand? The answer pretty clearly is one. Yet we could differentiate within this numerically one thing between the peanut butter cup on the one hand, and on the other hand, the peanut butter and chocolate from which it is made. After all, I can say things about the ingredients that are not true of the peanut butter cup. For example, I can say that the peanut butter and chocolate are what the cup is made of, whereas I cannot say that the cup is what the cup is made of. Unfortunately, God can't be exactly like a peanut butter cup, and not only because being omnipresent, he wouldn't fit into the orange wrapper. It's also because, despite being three persons, he is simple. He has no parts. Nor can he be distinguished into matter and form, the way a peanut butter cup can be distinguished into its succulent ingredients and the delightful shape that has been imposed on them. I particularly like those little ridges on the outside. Still, we have made a step towards understanding what must be going on with the Trinity by showing that a thing can be different from itself. This will especially be the case with the Trinity, because the persons are not, as Abelard puts it, mixed with one another, the way that the properties of physical things can be. A peanut butter cup is sweet and round, so sweetness and roundness are mixed together in it. This just means that the sweet thing is round and the round thing is sweet. The persons are not like this, because they actually exclude one another. The Father begets the Son and is not begotten, so the Father is not mixed with the Son. For this reason, Abelard is in a good position to insist that his account of the Trinity doesn't just reduce to calling one thing by three names. In this case, the difference in words really does express a difference in the thing. Ripping back from the details of this philosophical account of the Trinity, we should pause to notice that it is, indeed, just that—a philosophical account of the Trinity. Abelard was boldly carrying on Anselm of Canterbury's project of applying pure reason to fundamental precepts of Christian faith. It was a trend-setting move. Christians like William of Saint-Héry and Bernard of Clavo remarked with disquiet that, thanks to Abelard, there was a trend throughout France of engaging in rational disputation over the nature of the Holy Trinity. Supporters of Abelard stepped forward to denounce his critics in terms much harsher than those you'll find in any modern-day historian of philosophy. Abelard's student, Beringar of Poitiers, delighted in mentioning Bernard's youthful indiscretions and dismissed Bernard's major commentary on the biblical Song of Songs as derivative and badly written to boot. We also have a number of anonymous treatises preserved in manuscripts, which carry on Abelard's ideas in theology as well as logic. Other anonymous authors sought to reconcile Abelard's views with the ideas found in the other main contributors to the Trinity debate in the 12th century—the Victorines. If I may belabour the central metaphor of this episode just a bit more, the Victorines took a peanut-butter-cup approach to the cultural conflict between the secular teachings of the schoolmen and the rigorous monasticism of the Cistercians. Hugh of St. Victor was the H. B. Ries of the movement, immersed as he was in the liberal arts, while also being deeply committed to a life of spiritual devotion. When he turned his attention to the Trinity, he drew heavily on Augustine's On the Trinity. Augustine had discerned a threefold structure in human thought, insofar as the mind, its act of understanding, and its desire to understand can be distinguished from one another. Hugh points out that this same structure should appear in any rational being. Since God too is rational, we can thus extrapolate from our own Trinitarian nature to God's, without necessarily needing any scriptural revelation to point us in this direction. Given his carefully orthodox and Augustinian conclusions, to say nothing of his commitment to monastic reform, Hugh's rationalist approach to the Trinity provoked no hostility from Bernard of Creveaux. To the contrary, Hugh actually contacted Bernard well before William of Saint-Héry did, expressing his own worries about Avalard's teachings on various topics. Hugh's follower, Richard of St. Victor, set out a more daring exploration of the Trinity. He carried on Hugh's rationalist approach, going so far as to complain that he has nowhere been able to find sufficient proofs of this key Christian doctrine. He admits that humans are incapable of knowing God fully, but points out that, to some extent, humans are unknowable even to themselves. Somehow, we are single beings composed of two radically different things, a physical body and an immaterial soul. This fact too must remain mysterious, but it points the way towards a similar compatibility of unity and plurality in God. Richard proceeds by establishing God's unity and simplicity first, and then arguing that God is nonetheless three persons. Divine simplicity is secured by reaffirming a claim already made by Boethius. Whereas a human can be powerful or wise, God is his power and wisdom. Furthermore, these features are really identical to one another. Despite our use of several different words, in itself God's power is just the same thing as his wisdom. This could be taken as a quiet criticism of Abelard in that Richard is applying power and wisdom to God as a whole, rather than seeing these as properties that are specially appropriate to one or another divine person. As for the multiplicity of persons, Richard provides an innovative account that revolves around the idea of God's love. In line with Anselm's famous formula that God is that in which nothing greater can be conceived, we can say that God must bear the greatest possible love towards the most perfect object, namely himself. But as Gregory the Great observed, love is ideally directed not at oneself but at another person. So God must love someone else, and this someone else must be himself, since otherwise he would not be loving the most perfect object. So that gives us a God who is two persons. We're two-thirds of the way there. Richard next makes the assumption that in perfect love, a person not only loves someone else but also desires that they love a third person. Hence the need for the Holy Spirit. It provides the Father and Son someone that they can love jointly. Richard's assumption looks suspiciously convenient, and for all his stress on providing convincing arguments he doesn't really make a strong case for it. Why does true love entail wanting the beloved to love some third person? I think one might come to his aid by giving the example of raising children. I don't want to imply that any romantic alliance that lacks children is defective or imperfect, but there is something special and fulfilling in the way that the mutual love of two parents is inextricably bound up with their love for that child. Richard hastens to add that, given God's simplicity, the difference in persons does not amount to a difference in substance. That would lead to tritheism, the accusation Abelard threw at Roscelin. Richard avoids it by drawing a distinction between the being of a substance and what he calls its existence. He calls attention to the ex part of the Latin existere. In Latin, the preposition ex means from. In light of this, we should understand existence to refer not just to something's being, but to where it came from. In the case of the Father, we have a divine person who did not come from anywhere. He exists in and from himself. By contrast, the Son comes from, or is begotten by, the Father, while the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and Son jointly. Though the entire Godhead is a single substance, the three different ways of originating distinguish the persons from one another. Though Bernard of Clairvaux probably wouldn't care to admit it, Richard's account is not all that dissimilar from Abelard's, with the three types of existence in Richard essentially playing the role Abelard assigned to the special properties of the persons. The Victorines also shared Abelard's fundamental aim of using unaided reason to explain this theological doctrine. This is why Hugh of St. Victor, like Abelard, was inclined to admit that the pre-Christian philosophers had intimations of the Trinity. Pagan thinkers like Plato were pretty good at reasoning, after all, so it's only natural to expect that they would have gotten at the truth. That expectation seemed to be confirmed by the one Platonic dialogue known to the medievals, the Timaeus. There we find Plato describing a divine creator who looks to a kind of cosmic blueprint, the forms, which could be seen as playing the role of the second person of the Trinity, or God's wisdom. This creator furthermore fashions a force of life within the cosmos, a soul of the entire universe. For Abelard, this so-called world soul was analogous to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Despite accusations to the contrary, neither Abelard nor his closest followers went so far as to say that Plato had fully understood the Trinity, but others were not quite so cagey. In next week's episode, we'll turn to another group of 12th century philosophers who loved Plato, poetry, and peanut butter cups. Well, maybe not peanut butter cups, but unless you're trying to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, two out of three is not bad. Next time is the so-called School of Chartres, which included some of the most intriguing philosophers of the 12th century. The intrigue starts with the question of whether this supposed school even existed. So don't miss another taste of two more tastes that taste great together. History and philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Shoulders of Giants, Philosophy at Schacht. Teachers have always evaluated their students, and nowadays, the students are invited to return the favor. I've taught in the United States, England, and Germany. In all these places, I have had to distribute forms at the end of each semester so my students could anonymously voice their opinion of the quality of my teaching. It's a useful exercise, even if it reflects the modern-day tendency to think of students simply as paying customers who need to be happy with the level of service they're getting. Another sign of the same tendency is the availability of websites where you can rate your professor, even saying whether the teacher in question is hot. Happily this doesn't yet exist in Germany, so I have been spared having to face statistical evidence as to whether or not I am heiss. Reflecting on one's instructors is not only a modern-day activity though. The greatest teacher evaluation in history is surely Plato's Dialogues, which explore the character and techniques of Plato's teacher, Socrates, more deeply than any paperwork or website could hope to do. As a bonus, we learn from Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium that Socrates was most definitely hot. The medievals too like to comment on their instructors. For a forerunner of today's negative evaluations, just think of Peter Abelard's scathing remarks about his teachers, Anselm of Leon, and William of Champo. And for a glowing report from the same period, we can turn to John of Salisbury. He's going to be appearing routinely in the coming episodes, since he is a richly informative source for the intellectual scene in the 12th century and wrote a major treatise on political philosophy, the Polycraticus, as well as a defense of the logical arts, the Metalogicon. In the Metalogicon, John praises the effective pedagogical techniques of Bernard of Chartres. From what he said, I think Bernard's teaching would pass muster even with the discerning students of today. John mentions Bernard's sensitivity to the needs of his pupils, his focus on the essentials of the teaching curriculum, and his encouragement of dialogue in class. Bernard was surprisingly lenient with students caught plagiarizing from classical sources when they were supposed to be writing original prose in a classical style. Another of Bernard's gifts as a teacher was that he could come up with vivid imagery to make a point. An example is his famous remark that we are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants. If we see farther than our predecessors could, it is because we are adding modestly to their mighty achievements. Among the giants on whose shoulder Bernard of Chartres liked to perch was that master of the teacher evaluation, Plato. Bernard's philosophy was shot through with Platonism, and especially with ideas from the one dialogue known to the early medievalists, the Timaeus. The late ancient philosopher Calcidius produced a Latin translation and commentary on this dialogue which became the primary conduit for Plato into the medieval world. Bernard continued an ongoing tradition of adding marginal glosses to the Timaeus, which explained the text for his students and showed how Plato's depiction of a divine cosmic craftsman could be reconciled with Christianity. An anonymous set of surviving glosses on the Timaeus has, plausibly, been ascribed to Bernard of Chartres. At the very least, these glosses reflect Bernard's approach to the text, which was so influential that he effectively rendered Calcidius's commentary obsolete. We can see this just by counting surviving manuscripts. There are almost 50 manuscripts of the Latin Timaeus on its own from the 12th century, a huge increase from the handful we have from the 11th century. Yet the number of copies of Calcidius's commentary falls precipitously. His popularity would recover only in the Renaissance. So it's for good reason that John of Salisbury honors Bernard of Chartres with the title Most Accomplished of the Platonists of Our Time. A trickier question is whether we should honor Bernard with being the founder of a philosophical movement, a group of like-minded thinkers whom we can call a school of Chartres. Many scholars have been happy to credit him with this achievement, in large part thanks to the testimony of John of Salisbury. John was not a student of Bernard himself, but he did learn from Bernard's students. These included two major philosophers of the 12th century, Gilbert of Poitiers, significant enough that he's going to be getting his own episode, and William of Crench, who, as we're going to see in this episode, carried on Bernard's example by engaging creatively with the Timaeus. John also studied with Thierry of Chartres, the greatest Frenchman named Thierry, until a certain striker came along to play for Arsenal. Thierry of Chartres is sometimes thought to have been Bernard's brother, and he taught another commentator named Clarenbald of Arras. We can also throw into the mix another Platonist philosopher of the 12th century, Bernard Silvestris, who is not to be confused with Bernard of Chartres. Together, all these thinkers represent a formidable group. If, that is, they were a group. A skeptical note was sounded decades ago by the medievalist Richard Southern. He was confronting a romantic conception indelibly linked to the surviving Western façade of the Chartres Cathedral. In carvings on this façade dating from the 12th century, we see representations of the liberal arts along with a group of pagan philosophers. If you look on the website for this episode, you'll see a picture of the carving of Pythagoras. It seems almost too good to be true, a representation of all that the school of Chartres held dear, executed in stone just when this school was at the height of its powers. And Southern argued that it is, indeed, too good to be true. He pointed out how little evidence there is that all these men, apart from Bernard of Chartres himself, actually taught at Chartres for any significant period of time. In fact, the more important location for teaching at this time was Paris. In the case of Chartres, for instance, the most we can say is that he may have divided his time between Paris and Chartres. Bernard Silvestris dedicated a major treatise called the Cosmographia to Chartres, but his own teaching was carried out at Tours. A lot of ink has been spilled over this issue of geography. The real question for the historian of philosophy, though, is not where the figures of the so-called school of Chartres were active, but whether they actually shared a distinctive intellectual program. To some extent, the answer is yes. If we think about these figures I've named, Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conch, Gilbert of Poitiers, Clarenbelle of Arras, Bernard of Silvestris, and John of Salisbury, we can say that they all had expertise in the liberal arts and an interest in classical literary and philosophical texts, but so did lots of other thinkers of the 12th century. Certainly, most can be identified as Platonists, but the Timaeus-centered Platonist project of Bernard of Chartres and others doesn't really find an echo in Gilbert, and John of Salisbury was opposed to Platonism. His admiration for Bernard notwithstanding, he gently mocked Bernard's hope of reconciling the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. If these two great men couldn't even agree when they were alive, John said, there isn't much hope of getting them to agree now that they're dead. Despite this lack of one single location or body of doctrines, there remains a kind of family resemblance among the so-called Chartresians. It wasn't just an affection for Plato that was passed from Bernard of Chartres to a whole generation of scholars, but a certain sort of literary taste and style of reading. These figures inevitably call to mind the later humanists of the Renaissance, given their close attention to the Latin text of favorite classical authors. At this time, figures like William of Champo and Avelard had placed the logical and metaphysical questions that could arise in dialectic at the center of the liberal arts. By contrast, the Chartresians celebrated the arts of grammar and rhetoric. As John of Salisbury makes clear, Bernard of Chartres was an inspiring teacher who encouraged attention to and love for the classics. Thierry of Chartres commented on Cicero's works on rhetoric, and Bernard of Silvestris commented on Virgil, while William of Conch loved to quote Horace. In keeping with their intense study of secular literature, the Chartresians often wrote in a self-consciously literary style. Admittedly, Avelard did write poetry too, but his philosophy is mostly set out in rigorous, argumentative texts that prefigure 13th century scholasticism. By contrast, when the Chartresians weren't writing commentaries and glosses on classical texts, they were trying to compose classics of their own, using poetic or dialogue form. Another trademark literary technique came into play when they were reading rather than writing. They often used the word integumentum, meaning a covering or cloak, to express the way the surface meaning of a text may conceal its true significance. With this technique, frankly pagan material could be redeemed for use in a Christian context. In his commentary on Virgil, Bernard of Silvestris explains the seduction of Venus by Vulcan as a symbolic representation of the corruption of the mind by lust. A similar message is taught by the encounter between Aeneas and Dido. Virgil shows Dido perishing in flame after Aeneas leaves her to show the way that sinful lusts burn away to mere embers once the soul resists them. The same strategy could be used to save Plato from himself, as it were. Confronted with a passage of the Timaeus, which seems to say that souls exist in the stars before coming into the body, William of Conch remarked that Plato was offering nothing heretical but the most profound philosophy sheltered in the covering of the words. Plato meant only that different souls are influenced by the different stars during our earthly life, not that souls really existed previously in the heavens. The Schatrians reserve their boldest such maneuver for another problematic idea in Plato, the so-called world soul. In the Timaeus, it is said that the divine craftsman not only gives souls to individual humans, but also grants a soul to the entire universe. The cosmos is a single living organism, a visible god that constitutes the greatest image of the intelligible realm. This is problematic from a Christian point of view. It is difficult, for instance, to see how the soul of the whole universe could fall and be redeemed by Christ. Among the Schatrians, it was William of Conch who engaged with this problem most seriously. His initial solution was one that had been suggested, but never wholeheartedly embraced, by Peter Abelard. Plato's talk of the world soul is an integumentum for the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. As his career went on, though, William expressed uncertainty on this point, and no wonder. There were obvious objections to his proposal. For instance, Plato clearly says that the divine craftsman creates the soul of the cosmos, whereas the Holy Spirit is of course uncreated. In glosses he wrote on the Timaeus, William was willing to go only this far, Some say the world soul is the Holy Spirit, which we now neither deny nor affirm. Bernard Silvestris was not quite so shy. He was happy to affirm that the pagan philosophers were simply expressing the ideas of Christian theology in different terms. Where Christians speak of the divine Son, the philosophers say intellect, and where Christians talk of a Holy Spirit, the philosophers say world soul. Though this is often thought of as a distinctively Schatrian position, it was in fact never taught by the one thinker we know to have been based primarily at Schacht, the earlier Bernard. He never proposed identifying Plato's cosmic soul with a divine person. In general, Bernard was careful not to let Platonic metaphysics infringe on the unchallenged transcendence of God. We can see this from his handling of the Platonic forms or ideas. Bernard was wholeheartedly committed to this theory, but he stopped short of the traditional identification of the transcendent forms with God's wisdom and the second person of the Trinity. Because the forms are created, they must be inferior, or posterior, to God himself, something Bernard expressed by saying that while the forms are eternal, they are not co-eternal with the Holy Trinity. Bernard's explanation of these eternal forms could hardly be more characteristic. It displays his grammatical approach to the issue and his flair for vivid metaphor. Taking the example of the color white, he compared the noun whiteness to a virgin, the verb is white is like a virgin lying on a bed, waiting to be defiled. Finally, the adjective white is like the same woman after having lost her virginity. His point was that whiteness in itself is pure and untouched by matter. It is a separate form, graspable only by the mind. By contrast, the whiteness we see in white bodies around us is mixed together with matter and so available to sense perception. Bernard coined the phrase forma nativae, or inborn forms, for the images of transcendent ideas that appear in material bodies. The resulting picture of the world is true to the one we find in Plato's Timaeus. Bernard's divine creator is distinct from the intelligible forms, and fashions the physical cosmos by putting imminent images of those forms into matter. Though other Chartrians likewise took inspiration from the Timaeus, they did not always apply its ideas in the same way. Thierry of Chartres and his student, Klarembald, also appropriated Platonic ideas in their theology. But rather than distinguishing God from the forms, they actually identified God with one form in particular, the form of being. This is an idea they could find in Boethius, and as we'll be seeing, it will have a powerful echo later on in Aquinas. Thierry of Chartres also offered a memorable, if not particularly illuminating, suggestion for how to conceive of the Trinity. He compared the three persons in one God to the fact that one times one times one equals one. He meant this to represent not just the way that unity can be preserved, even as multiplicity is introduced, but also the equality of the persons to one another. Again, the Chartres training in the liberal arts is showing here, with Thierry applying arithmetic to theology, much as Bernard of Chartres had used grammar in his metaphysics. But reflection on the Timaeus was bound to lead to interest in another area of philosophy not represented among the liberal arts, the study of nature. Plato's dialogue does speak of a divine craftsman, and of forms, but it is above all a description of the physical universe. The Chartresians followed suit. An outstanding example is a treatise by William of Conch, to which he gave the rather surprising title Dragmaticon. To the modern ear, the title calls to mind nothing so much as a cross-dressing transformer. Medieval readers would have found it an odd choice too. But by naming his treatise Dragmaticon, William was following a vogue for Greek-style titles, like Hugh of St. Victor's pedagogical bestseller Didascalicon. In this case, William was apparently alluding to the dramatic presentation of the Dragmaticon. It takes the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and Geoffrey Plantagenet, who was at that time the Duke of Normandy. William served as tutor to Geoffrey's sons, one of whom would go on to become King Henry II of England. The Dragmaticon thus echoes a long-standing ideal of scholarship in aristocratic surroundings. Like Alquin teaching Charlemagne, William offers tutelage to the Duke and his family. This traditional setting for philosophy, already challenged by the activity at cathedral schools and monasteries, is about to be largely supplanted by the rise of the medieval university. William's fictionalized lessons with the Duke prove, if proof were needed, that card-carrying Platonists could take a deep interest in the natural world. William adheres to the standard Platonist goal of using the intellect rather than the senses, but this is no bar to pursuing philosophy of nature, since he thinks that the fundamental principles of physical things are invisible. For instance, the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, can never be found in nature in their pure forms. We grasp them by abstracting from the bodies we see around us. Like Plato in the Timaeus, William also thinks that the elements consist of invisibly small particles, indivisible atoms. Throughout the Dragonmaticon, the character of the Duke is often the mouthpiece for authorities who apparently disagree with William's teaching. So here, when the topic of atomism comes up, the Duke points out that Boethius speaks of matter as infinitely divisible, and not as consisting of indivisible atoms. To this, William's philosopher character responds, not very persuasively, that the atoms are indeed infinite, but only in the sense that we cannot grasp their multitude with our limited minds. In any case, William insists upon his right to overturn accepted teaching if he sees fit. One mustn't run roughshod over the teaching of the Church Fathers, or more recent authorities like Bede, when issues of theology and morality are at stake, but the philosophy of nature is different. William thinks that in physics, only probable explanations can be provided, and when he finds his own account more probable than that of the Fathers, he is not afraid to say so. A notable example comes when he rejects the traditional idea that there is water in the heavens. This rather strange notion is based on a line in the book of Genesis, where God is said to have placed the sky amidst the waters so as to divide them apart. But for William, water has its natural place between earth and air. It cannot be found up in the celestial realm, which is fiery in nature. His naturalist approach is also on display when he interprets the biblical statement that Eve was fashioned from a rib, taken from Adam's side. In an earlier treatise called Philosophy of the World, which William used as a basis for the Dragomatacon, he had argued that both Adam and Eve were made from muddy earth. When creating Adam, God had used material with a perfect balance of elemental properties. Eve is said to be taken from Adam's side because she was instead made from mud lying nearby, which was not so ideal in its proportions. This typifies the Chartrean approach to textual interpretation. William treats Adam's rib as an integumentum for a true scientific explanation. He corrects the surface meaning of the text in light of his conviction that all bodies are made of the four elements. And I reckon he's right. If you want to make human bodily tissue out of ribs, you first have to make the ribs out of the four elements, and then preferably coat them in barbecue sauce. The Dragomatacon is full of similarly naturalist proposals, devoted to explaining everything from the fact that our fingers are more swollen when we wake up in the morning, to the legend that the Prophet Muhammad's tomb floats in mid-air. Adam suspects it is a kind of magic trick involving magnets. In some cases, he tries to explain supposed phenomena that are in fact spurious, for instance why babies born early and in the seventh month of pregnancy sometimes survive, even though premature babies born in the eighth month always die. In general, his ideas about female sexuality make for alarming reading. He believes that pleasure in sex is needed to conceive, which is why prostitutes rarely get pregnant. To the Duke's objection that rape victims do conceive, William's philosopher responds that although the victim may not be rationally consenting to the sex act, she takes carnal pleasure in it nonetheless. Obviously, this is not William of Conch at his best, and in general, no modern day scientist is going to be impressed by his theories. Still, William does represent a remarkable feature of 12th century thought, a blossoming of exploration devoted to the physical universe. And it's only natural that you should join me again next time to see how other authors like Bernard Silvestris and Alain Avlille applied their literary and scientific imaginations to understanding the created world. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Book – Philosophy of Nature The faithfulness of nature to its original laws of motion, the continuance of all things as they were from the beginning of the creation, awaken a considerate mind into a quick and lively sense of the depth thereof. There is no blemish in the book of nature. God never saw it necessary, as upon mature thoughts, to correct and amend anything in this great volume of the creation, since the first volume thereof. These words were written in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Protestant English theologian John Spencer. Spencer's jest seems to fit his age. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, God does not intervene capriciously in the world, but has made nature perfect and unchanging. And Spencer's polemic had contemporary political relevance. He was arguing against those who invoked supposedly miraculous occurrences or prodigies as signs of God's displeasure with the English government. Yet that quotation would also be right at home in the twelfth century, a time when intellectuals likewise spoke of an unblemished book of nature. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, remarked that the whole of the sensible world is like a book written by the finger of God. The metaphor goes back to antiquity and can be found in several works by Augustine. It was the beginning of a long-running tradition, according to which the Bible is not the only good book sent by God. Nature is another revelation of God's providential will, so it behooves the thoughtful Christian to study it by undertaking what we would call science and what the medievals, and for that matter John Spencer, called natural philosophy. This was a part of intellectual life from the very beginnings of the medieval age. From the eighth century onwards, scholars like Bede, Alquin, and Abbau of Florie displayed expertise in the field of astronomy. The use of the instrument known as the astrolabe began around 1000 AD, a development sometimes credited to Gerbert of Ariac. Like the numbers that would have been written on the counters of Gerbert's beloved abacus, the astrolabe was an import from the Islamic world, where Arabic-speaking scientists were far more advanced than their Latin Christian counterparts. The 12th century would produce even more readers for the book of nature. It's no coincidence that this coincided with a surge of interest in Arabic scientific literature, which began to be translated into Latin at this time. But something we'll be looking at in a future episode, so I won't go into it now, lest, like an emperor ordering a bust, I get ahead of myself. I do however want to mention Adalard of Bath, a fascinating figure who translated mathematical works from Arabic into Latin and wrote a set of Questions on Natural Philosophy in dialogue form for which he claimed to be using his Arabic learning. Adalard overturns any lingering prejudices we might have about authority-bound, intellectually slavish medievals. In his dialogue on natural philosophy, Adalard has one of the characters say, And he wasn't alone. We may remember Peter Abelard's triumphant anecdote in which he embarrassed Anselm of Léon by turning Anselm's demand for authoritative evidence against him. Equally memorable is a comment made by the theologian Alan of Lille, about whom much more shortly. He expressed his doubts about authority by comparing it to a nose made of wax. It can be bent any which way you like. The discover-it-yourself attitude of Adalard of Bath and other 12th century thinkers went together with another attitude liable to strike us as genuinely scientific, a preference for explanations in terms of the regularities of nature rather than miracles. Five centuries before John Spencer, the book of nature was expected to work in a predictable fashion, ensuring the comprehensibility of the universe. This is something we can trace back further still if we look hard enough. Already in the 7th century, one of those anonymous Irish scholars we keep meeting wrote a work explaining miracles of the Bible in more or less naturalist terms. For instance, Lot's wife turned into salt when God adjusted the balance of substances in her body, and the virgin birth can be understood as analogous to spontaneous generation. But it's really with figures like Adalard of Bath that we see an impatience with simplistic appeals to God's will. As he puts it, there is nothing in nature that lacks a reason. All very well, you might say, but Adalard is surely an exceptional case, a mathematician and translator at the extreme rationalist fringe of his age. There's some truth in that. Yet we can see many of the same tendencies in the far more mainstream group we looked at last time, the thinkers who have traditionally been linked to Chartres. The naturalist approach to the Bible we saw with William of Conch was also adopted by Thierry of Chartres. In his commentary on the book of Genesis, he states that he will be tackling this biblical text secundum physicum et ad luteram, meaning that he will approach it with the tools of natural philosophy and linguistic analysis. He will not, he says, try to draw out any allegorical or moral significance from the text, which makes for a stark contrast with Hugh and Richard of St. Victor. True to his word, Thierry's commentary trades in illuminating empirical observations, as when he compares the emergence of dry land from the seas to the way that water, spread on a tabletop, dries unevenly. But this is not to say that the 12th century saw a wholesale abandonment of long-cherished authoritative texts. In this respect, Adalard of Bath was indeed unusual for the emphasis he placed on observation and the newly available material just being imported from the Arabic-speaking sphere. For this reason, a leading French historian of this period, Jean Jolive, has described Adalard as studying nature sans livre, without a book. In other words, he no longer saw nature as something to be decoded, the way you interpret a text, using the tools of the liberal arts and the wisdom of classical texts. But it was left to more mainstream scholars, especially those who reflect the so-called Chartrean approach, to produce the most elaborate and popular works of natural philosophy in the 12th century. They took their inspiration from Latin works of late antiquity, like Marcianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. But for them, the most important guide to the book of nature was Plato's Timaeus. We've already seen one outstanding representative of this kind of natural philosophy with William of Conch's Dragmaticon. For the rest of this episode, I'll be telling you about two others. One is the Cosmographia, note the Greek title, written by Bernard Silvestris. The other, written a generation later and influenced by the Cosmographia, is the Lament of Nature by the aforementioned theologian, Alan of Lille. The two texts have a great deal in common. Both alternate between prose and poetry, a literary technique already used by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy. In fact, Lady Philosophy, from Boethius's Consolation, provided a model for the character of nature as depicted by Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille. The two authors agree about nature's function. She helps to perpetuate the cosmic order by reproducing forms in matter, something Alan compares to the production of coins from unformed metal. Bernard and Alan both make a place for humankind in their narratives too. They see humans as an image in miniature of the universe. Each of us is a so-called microcosm of the great cosmos that surrounds us. The main difference between Bernard and Alan is that whereas Bernard's Cosmographia sticks to the cosmological themes promised by its title, Alan's treatise has an ethical theme. He tells of how nature appeared before a human poet to lament the misdeeds of humankind. She is especially outraged by sexual misdeeds, and among these by the practice of homosexuality. There's a revealing, in every sense of the word, detail in Alan of Lille's description of nature's appearance. She takes the form of a ravishingly beautiful woman, with a dress upon which are inscribed depictions of plants and animals, but the dress is torn. Alan has lifted this straight from Boethius, who likewise had lady philosophy appearing in a garment that had been violently ripped by unnamed attackers. In Alan of Lille's Lament, the torn dress represents the assault on natural modesty by human evildoers. But in his hands, the image has taken on a more complex meaning as well. He refers to her garment with the Latin word integumentum, cloak or covering, the term routinely used by the Scharzwians to describe the surface meaning of a text which hides its true philosophical message. In fact, just before the bit explaining nature's torn clothing, Alan has used this very same literary technique to explain why the classical poets spoke of pagan gods who engaged in sexual misconduct of their own. Such myths are only a covering which when unmasked reveals a deeper meaning. The false pagan husk conceals the kernel of monotheistic truth. For Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille, the idea of a literary integumentum, cloaking an inner truth, was not just a key to unlock classical texts, but also key to their own literary productions. They unhesitatingly imitate the allegorical approach of late ancient authors like Marcianus Capella, populating their cosmos with a whole host of supernatural figures. Not only nature, but also such cosmic forces as mind and heaven, who are likewise personified and allowed to give speeches and recite poetry. Their classicizing literary taste is expressed in the very names of these characters, which are often Greek rather than Latin. Along the way, we meet such supernatural beings as nous, houle, and urania, meaning intellect, matter, and heaven. At the same time, their use of allegory expresses a conviction about nature itself. Macrobius, another of the ancient Latin authors whose writings inspired Bernard and Alan, had written that, but like an allegory or fable which needs careful interpretation if she is to be read rightly as the work of God's providence. Bernard and Alan may wrap their philosophy of nature in cunningly woven literary artifice, but their core message is clear nonetheless, especially if you know your Timaeus. Plato's dialogue describes a divine intellect, the so-called demiurge or craftsman of the universe, putting images of intelligible forms into a passive receptacle to produce bodies. Bernard and Alan likewise explain the physical cosmos as the joint production of several principles. Bernard's Cosmographia begins with nature's plea to nous, or mind. She is unhappy with the unformed chaotic state of matter and requests that mind do something about it. Matter's own attitude about this prospect is ambivalent. On the one hand, she is described as yearning for form, an idea that can be traced back to Aristotle through the intermediary of Calcidius. On the other hand, matter is, several times, said to have an innate tendency towards chaos and evil, so that mind and nature must struggle to master her and subdue her to form. Again, this reflects the Platonic source, since the Timaeus states that the receptacle needs to be persuaded by intellect if it is to submit to order and form. As a result, the universe is something of a mixed bag, a meeting of mind with matter's recalcitrance. Broadly speaking, though, what we see is a well-ordered and providentially designed cosmos. Even something as basic as the arrangement of the four elements has a purpose. Potentially destructive fire is separated from Earth by a buffer of air and water, a point also made by William of Conch in his Dragmaticon. Furthermore, the motions of the heavenly bodies ensure that events here on Earth will unfold in the way that providence intends. For Bernard, every human is allotted a certain lifespan by the stars at the moment of his or her birth, a clear allusion to astrology which was frequently associated with natural philosophy throughout the medieval period. In a wonderful and characteristic passage, Bernard evokes once again the idea that the natural world can be read as a book. Like written announcements of things to come, the stars foretold the lives of Homeric heroes, the Latin eloquence of Cicero and Virgil, and the mathematical skill of Thales. In fact, he goes further, making the stars not only signs, but also causes of things that happen in the world below. He does add the significant, though unexplained, caveat that humans retain their freedom even in the face of what he calls the laws of the fates and inexorable destiny. Bernard is thus very optimistic about the physical universe, which as an image and effect of the intelligible forms in cosmic mind is a case of the perfect coming from the perfect. Yet he gives matter considerable scope in explaining natural phenomena that seem less than perfect. Non-human animals, for instance, are said to be made with somewhat less care than humans, so that they are unbalanced and more easily dominated by the elemental humors. Lions have tempers that quite literally run hot, whereas donkeys are overly influenced by phlegm, which makes them stupid. Unfortunately, Bernard does not pause to tell us which humoral imbalance affects giraffes, but since I criticized her cooking a few episodes back, Hiawatha has been rather melancholy, so I suppose it has to do with black bile. Humans alone are perfectly balanced in terms of their elemental makeup. But as Alain of Lille would hasten to add, this does not mean that they always do as they ought to. In fact, he has nature say that humans are unlike other animals in that they alone can defy her laws. When Alain develops this theme, he shows again that his imagination was literary in more than one sense. As I mentioned, the misconduct that especially concerns nature in his prose poem is sexual deviance above all homosexuality. The ethical polemic takes an unexpected turn when nature compares same-sex relations to a grammatical mistake. Whereas heterosexual sex is like a well-formed sentence, homosexual sex is like using the wrong gender for a word in Latin. In English, an analogous, albeit non-gendered metaphor might be combining a singular noun with a plural verb. Even in the long history of unconvincing attempts to say what could possibly be morally wrong about homosexual love, Alain's remarks are not particularly impressive, but they do reveal something about him as an author. The evocation of grammar in this context shows that here, in the second half of the 12th century, the liberal arts retain their fundamental role even, or especially, in the context of natural philosophy. If you see nature as a book, then why not apply the arts of linguistic analysis to understanding the world around you? Nature is not only like a myth that needs interpretation, but also has her rules and norms, like language does. Supposedly unnatural sex breaches those norms, and is thus akin to a solicism in speaking or writing, and no self-respecting medieval scholar would want to be accused of that. In this episode, we've been seeing how the various liberal arts became allied to the study of nature in the early medieval period. Not just the grammatical and literary arts of the Trivium, but also the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium, with the new translations of Adalard of Bath and the astronomy and cosmology of Bernard Silvestris. Soon we'll be returning to the discipline that was the natural home of philosophical speculation in this period, dialectic. Following the Aristotelian tradition, medieval logicians worked with a system of general classes called genera and species, whose members are, of course, individual things like you, me, and Hiawatha the giraffe. A few episodes back, we saw how much trouble they had accounting for the genera and species, the universals that are predicated of individual things. But there is also the problem of explaining how it is that each individual thing is in fact individual. This difficulty attracted the attention of one of the best minds of the 12th century. So that's one thing you won't want to miss, an episode on individuation and Gilbert of Poitiers, which is coming up in two weeks. But before that, I have another more unusual and even less missable episode to offer you. I'll be posting a special triple interview, in which you'll have the chance to hear from three other podcasters who have been tackling medieval history. The hosts of the History of the Crusades podcast, the History of Byzantium podcast, and the British History podcast. Join me and them next time here on the History of Philosophy. Without any gaps. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich. This episode will be an unusual and, I hope you'll agree, exciting one. As you know, I'm currently looking at medieval philosophy on the podcast, and today I'll be interviewing three other podcasters who have also covered the medieval era in their historical podcast series. Sharon Estaw of the History of the Crusades podcast, Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast, and Jamie Jeffers of the British History podcast. And my first guest is Sharon Estaw, who is the host of the History of the Crusades podcast, which recently completed looking at the entire history of the Crusades. Hi, Sharon, thanks for being interviewed. Hi, Peter. It's great to have you on. I've listened to your whole series. It is great and I encourage people to listen to it as well. Oh, thank you. Well, it was fun to do and I'm a bit sad it's over, really. I'm sad it's over too, but you're maybe moving on to other topics, right? I may well be, so you have to watch this space. So you've actually covered the Crusades. Maybe you can explain what that means. I mean, I guess everyone's heard of the Crusades, so Latin Christians going off to the Holy Land to try to reconquer Jerusalem and other territory. But how did you conceive of the project? What are the boundaries of the project for you? I basically wanted to focus on the Crusades in the medieval era, focusing on the Middle East. I actually read an article this morning, strangely, that from one of the historians that writes books on the Crusades, who was actually arguing that the Crusades started in medieval times and are still going on today. So I wanted to sort of draw boundaries and make sure that I was just concentrating on the Middle Eastern Crusades of the Middle Ages. So I started off at the end of the 11th century with the call to arms by Pope Urban II, and we did the First Crusade, which established the Crusader states in the Holy Land and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And then we went through the Second Crusade, the Third Crusade, the Fourth Crusade, which ended up being the Latin Christians attacking the Christian, Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople, and the Fifth Crusade, which involved Egypt, and then the gradual decline of the Crusader states, ending with the fall of Acre. So it covers about 200 years of history. Yeah, and it basically is a series of increasingly disastrous outings from the Latin Christian point of view, I mean, after the initial successes. But once you get into the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, it's really some horrible historical events that really brought a lot of shame on the people who launched the Crusades in the first place. Absolutely. It's actually a really fascinating couple of hundred years of history. It starts off with, as you said, a success where the Latin Christians came in and conquered quite a bit of territory in the Holy Land, and then they established themselves, and from then on they kind of peaked and then went downhill rapidly. And most of the Crusades were dramatically unsuccessful from the Latin Christian point of view. But what I found really interesting was that relatively recently there's also been a lot of scholarship done on the Muslim point of view, because before that we really had the history of the Crusades only from the Latin Christian point of view, where the Muslim side was sort of not discussed. But of course you really need the two sides to the story, otherwise you don't have the complete picture. So I tried to also give the Muslim point of view, which makes it quite interesting. So now that I'm actually now looking at Latin Christianity, and I'm just sort of going through the 12th and early 13th century, and that's exactly the time that they started getting the import of knowledge about Aristotle and other authors from the Islamic world into the Latin world, with the result that Muslim philosophers like Avicenna, Avarwes, and Ghazali became very influential on figures like, say, Thomas Aquinas, just to name the most famous person. And so something that I'm sort of necessarily emphasizing a lot in my series is the kind of friendly relationship, or at least very productive relationship, between Islamic culture and Christian culture in the medieval period. And I guess that a lot of people think about the Crusades as representing exactly the opposite of that. They think of the Crusades as a real clash of cultures, as a phrase, or clash of civilizations, as a phrase that's often used. Do you think that the history of the Crusades bears out that characterization of the relationships between Latin Christianity and Islam in the medieval period? Well, that's a really interesting question, because I guess I'll maybe approach that in two parts. First, I think there was a huge clash of culture, particularly at the beginning of the Crusades, where the Latin Christians thought of themselves as being very learned and of being sort of the dominant force. But at the time of the First Crusade, for instance, the population of London and the population of Paris was about 20,000 people, and they really weren't very sophisticated cities. And I know they thought of themselves as being sophisticated, but when they, for instance, went to Constantinople, I mean, that was a city of 500,000 people with a very rich culture and a heritage that stretched back a very long time. And I think it was a bit of a shock for the Latin Christians to see how cultured Constantinople was. And also in the Islamic world, once they got to the Middle East, Baghdad, for instance, had a population of around half a million people, and they had a very rich culture. A lot of work had been done in mathematics and science, and they were really a lot more advanced in the Islamic world than in the West, which I imagine was a bit of a shock to a lot of Crusaders. And there were some Crusaders, particularly as the Crusader states were established, there were quite a lot of people who were fluent in Arabic, who freely interacted with Muslims. A lot of Muslim merchants also freely interacted with the trading centers in the Crusader states. And there was quite a lot of overlap and interaction, and a lot of Crusaders who were coming to the Crusader states for the first time were shocked at the level of interaction between the two cultures. So for a lot of people, they did think of it as Islam versus Christianity, but the reality was much more fluid and blurred. Something else that actually surprised me, I have to admit, while I was listening to your series, is how complicated the political dynamic was between the Christians and the Muslims, partially because there isn't just a monolithic group of Christians and a monolithic group of Muslims, but sometimes the Christians would try to play different groups of Muslims off against each other. Or the most remarkable thing is when there was an attempt to forge an alliance between the Mongols and the Christians in order to fight the Muslims and dislodge them from Egypt. So that kind of thing would tell you that the people at that time didn't really see it as just a kind of clash of civilizations, you know, all Muslims against all Christians. They had a much more nuanced understanding of the political realities on the ground. Absolutely. And it was all really about politics rather than religion. You know, while some people did set out on the Crusades for purely religious reasons, there were a goodly few that set out for reasons of personal gain. For example, Baldwin of Boulogne, who was Geoffrey de Bouillon, who was one of the leaders of the First Crusade, he was his younger brother. Being a younger son, he was not due to inherit any of his family's lands, and he was actually destined for life in the church. But he was a very ambitious man, and the church didn't really suit him. So during the First Crusade, he journeyed to the Middle East with his wife and his children, clearly not intending to return back to Europe, and ended up founding one of the Crusader states and later on becoming King of Jerusalem. While there was a veneer of clash of religions, I think a lot of it was about politics and advancement, personal gain, and the like. And I guess that the lower ranking soldiers who weren't going to wind up, you know, running a Crusader state, they could still hope for booty, at least, to bring it back. Absolutely. And at the time of the First Crusade, at least, there'd been some terrible famines in Europe and a lot of peasants were just, you know, anything was going to be better than staying in Europe. And they were promised that the Middle East would be the land of milk and honey and that everything would be brilliant if they made the 2000 mile journey on foot to the Middle East. And a lot of them found that life there was worse and more harsh than life back home. But it's true, a lot of people went there trying to improve their lives. It seems like also it changed people's views once they actually contacted some society or once they settled in the Crusader states and they started, for example, trading with Muslims. Something that you mentioned at one point in one of the later episodes, as I recall, is that some Crusaders turn up in the Crusader states and they're outraged to find that the local Christians are trading and consorting with all the local Muslims and they get really bent out of shape about this. It reminds me a little bit of things that happen in the history of philosophy where Christian scholars who are maybe living nearer to Muslim society, so a famous example would be in Toledo where a lot of the translations happened, they actually are collaborating with Jewish and Muslim scholars in order to produce, say, Arabic, Latin scientific translations. Absolutely. I think the event you mentioned was probably just prior to the fall of Acre where a group of Italian Crusaders came to the Crusader states, or the last remaining Crusader state, which was the Kingdom of Acre. They were all hell-bent on taking back Jerusalem and pushing the Muslims back out of the territory that had been won by the Latin Christians. But when they arrived at Acre, they were absolutely astonished to find Muslims walking around freely in the city and buying and selling and even drinking in the taverns. And a group of probably intoxicated Italian Crusaders decided that they wouldn't wait to kill Muslims out on the battlefield, they may as well start now in the city of Acre. So they started a bar fight which quickly got well out of hand and spread to the city and many Muslims lost their lives. And as a result of that, the peace treaty between the Latin Christians and the Egyptians was called off with the result that eventually Acre fell, which meant that the Latin Christians were effectively evicted from the Holy Land. So yes, it's sad that a lot of people arriving from the West just had this quite prejudiced view of Muslims and Islam, whereas the people who'd been living there, as you said, they interacted quite freely. Many of them could speak Arabic fluently. And they used to interact with Muslims on a daily basis. Right. So actually, just to take that as an example, one thing that you talk about a bit in your series, but not as much as say Jamie Jeffers, who I'm going to be interviewing later on in this episode, is the kind of sources that you're dealing with. So how do we know something like that? I mean, how do we know that these Italian Crusaders turned up and then they started a bar fight because it's hard to believe that the Italian Crusaders would have been eager to talk about their role in this hugely counterproductive event? Well, that's another very interesting question because sources in the medieval era are very difficult. For example, the speech that Pope Urban made at Clamont, which started the First Crusade, there's five different versions of that speech. And apparently most of them were written decades after the actual speech occurred. But luckily there is an existing letter that was penned by Pope Urban. I think he wrote to some Belgians pleading with them to go on crusade. So the sources of first, I guess, are sketchy. And secondly, there was a tendency back in medieval times not so much to pitch for historical accuracy, but for drama and for really showing events how they would have liked them to have happened rather than how they actually did happen. But luckily we've got many historians and scholars who've spent their careers sifting through all the sources and trying to work out the history from the myth. And I rely heavily on their work. So let me ask you one last question before I move on to my next podcaster. I wanted to ask everyone if you could just name one person or one historical figure from the series that you've been doing, who would you name and why would you say that they're so fascinating? I spent a lot of time trying to narrow this down to one figure. I got a top three in the end. Eleanor of Aquitaine, of course, made it into the top three, as did the leper king, poor old King Baldwin, who was king at a time. It was a horrible time to be a king as it was. But the poor man, his body was falling apart on him as he was trying to rule this terrible sort of factions and infighting that was going on. But the person that I chose as the most fascinating person was Emperor Frederick II Stupor Mundi. He was king of Sicily and emperor of Germany. And he was a totally fascinating person. He was clearly very intellectual, but he saw himself as really superior to just about everyone else in the western part of Europe. Because he was brought up in the court in Sicily, he was fluent in Arabic and had a lot of interaction with the Muslim world. And he was very into philosophy, interestingly. And his big opponent in the Crusades was the current leader of Egypt at the time, Al-Kamil. And they used to exchange philosophical arguments amongst each other. In fact, when they were trying to negotiate the return of Jerusalem, at one stage, Stupor Mundi, who he was often called, decided to try and intellectually belittle Al-Kamil by sending him a list of historical, I mean, sorry, philosophical questions and mathematical questions and scientific questions to try and prove his superiority. The reason why he was fascinating, I think, is that because clearly there was a clash between Latin Christendom and Islam, but Emperor Frederick was really almost on the Muslim side. He was clashing constantly with the Pope. And in fact, apparently one Pope attempted to have him assassinated. And one Pope also mustered an army and invaded his territory while he was in Jerusalem trying to establish Jerusalem as for Latin Christendom. It seemed to have a lot more respect for Islam than for his own religion, which strangely the Muslims found quite baffling. And of course, the Latin Christians found quite baffling as well. And he's actually one of several people we could name who sort of stand at the nexus between our two podcast series. So another would be Bernard of Clairvaux, who helped launch one of the Crusades by giving rousing speeches. So he appeared in your podcast series doing that. And then he appeared in my podcast series attacking Peter Avelard and other philosophers. So he's a major medieval figure who's sort of too big to be contained by any one podcast series. And the same goes for Frederick II. By the way, I can't believe you didn't name Peter the Hermit as your favorite figure, because it's sort of a running joke in your podcast as Peter the Hermit. It is. I sort of, I found Peter the Hermit quite irritating. And I also found King Guy of Jerusalem quite irritating. But my irritation came out in a sort of an unexpectedly and unintentionally sort of humorous way. That's sort of how I dealt with my irritation over them. You seem quite affectionate, especially towards Peter the Hermit. You can tell in those series that you really don't like Guy, King Guy. He's just a jerk. He is. Although Peter the Hermit, I mean, yeah, he was such a strange man. I mean, he rode around on a donkey barefoot in rags. And yet he managed to convince 20,000-odd peasants from Europe to walk 2,000 miles to the Holy Land to their eventual deaths, really. He managed to escape the carnage, but a lot of the peasants who followed him to the land of milk and honey didn't. And he just keeps popping up through it. You sort of can't keep Peter the Hermit down. He pops up in the siege of Antioch. He's everywhere. I'll never underestimate anyone named Peter. Right, well, if you want to hear more about Peter the Hermit and Frederick II and a range of other fascinating figures from medieval history, then I would encourage you, like I said, to listen to Sharon's podcast. It's called The History of the Crusades. First, Sharon, thanks very much for being interviewed for the podcast series. Thank you for having me. It was fun. My next guest is Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast. Hi, Robin. Thanks for coming on to be interviewed. Hello. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a big fan of your podcast as well. So I'm really pleased to have this chance to talk to you. And surprisingly, our two podcasts have something in common, which is that they were both inspired, at least in part, by another podcast. So this is Mike Duncan's very popular History of Rome podcast, which is a more obvious model for you than for me. But I was listening to it, and it's part of what gave me the idea to do the History of Philosophy podcast because I thought, oh, I could tackle the history of philosophy with the same kind of detail and narrative that he tackled the history of Rome. And you explicitly said at the beginning of your podcast that you were going to be taking up the story of Rome where he left off, right? Yeah, absolutely. I actually wrote to Mike, I'm not sure if he ever got the email saying, you know, you should continue. And I'm sure people would want to pay to keep you going and, you know, continue the Roman story. And I was just transfixed by how great a job he did of telling the whole story century after century and keeping it entertaining and walking this great line between holding your hand and assuming you can figure stuff out for yourself. And because I was already recording podcasts on American TV shows, I had this possibility in my mind when I sent him that message of, well, you know, I suppose it's something I could think about doing, but I'd never thought about it before he said he was going to finish. It all happened very, very fast. And I suppose it was inspired by just not wanting him to stop and wanting to have this audio history of the whole Roman Empire from start till 1453. Because he stopped at the fall of the Western Empire. So basically your podcast series picks up the story with the Eastern Empire, which we then call the Byzantine Empire. Exactly. And you didn't have like a pre-existing obsession with Byzantine history or anything. I think that's actually very unusual, if that's true. I mean, most podcasters are not au fait with the podcasting technology, but they're on top of the topic and you wrote the opposite situation. Yeah. I'd grown up with an interest in the Romans from all sorts of different angles, including just going to church or whatever, and the Romans are everywhere you look. And I had studied Justinian a little bit at university in my first year. And I ended up reading John Julius Norwich's well-known series on Byzantium, which is very entertaining and definitely presents the Byzantines as these historical underdogs surviving against the odds. So I did sort of know the story and I was interested in it, but I hadn't looked into it with any more depth than that. So I think one thing that that whole story raises, if we're thinking about medieval history, is how inappropriate in a way it is to talk about medieval history and apply that concept to Byzantine history, because we usually think of the relationship between ancient history or Roman history and medieval history as a kind of societal collapse in Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, and then that ushers in the medieval period. And in your case, or rather in the case of the Byzantine Empire, that just doesn't happen. So you have basically a continuity between what we think of as the Roman Empire and then the Byzantine Empire. Yeah, I mean, one could say that within Constantinople, the ancient world never went away. They never stopped. And, you know, the libraries there just carried on as if no big change had happened. Out in the countryside, there was more noticeable change. But yeah, I mean, you bring up the point. I think a lot of us who end up studying history come to realize how much famous historians like Gibbon have influenced the way we view history, that we, as you said, we tend to think of pre-Roman and post-Roman Europe as a dividing line. But then if you look at how the Roman state developed, it was changing all the time. And one could argue that a psychological and spiritual change for the empire actually came around the first century, that the fact that a figure like Jesus could find receptive ears for his message beyond Palestine indicates that the old world of pagan gods had changed significantly, and that what we think of as the medieval Christian world had begun then. Or if you look at things on the level of government, the crisis of the third century in Rome saw the state have to become much harder and more professional to survive. And so the ancient world of city-states and a sort of elite private life where the rich played out their rivalries by becoming politicians, that ended then. And so you do look at the Roman world the more you get into it and think, when did a real change from the ancient world come? And in my story, of course, the coming of Islam and the Arab empire is probably more directly disruptive in a way that the fall of the West was, that it's less easy to point to one moment where everything changed. But of course, that only affects the Eastern Mediterranean initially, it doesn't affect the West. It's quite hard to say this point ancient world, this point medieval world, the more you look into it, the more continuity there is, and the more you see this process of change happening slowly over different areas of life. Yeah, I think something is true in the history of philosophy, actually. I mean, I haven't gotten to Byzantine philosophy yet, I will eventually. And by the way, when I do, I will be glad that I've been listening to your podcast, because I don't know all the history stuff as context. But I know enough about Byzantine philosophy to know that it's a lot like late ancient Greek philosophy. I mean, not just because it's in Greek, but they're still using Neoplatonic ideas to understand Christian theology. They still write commentaries on Aristotle. And in general, it's sort of like they keep going without missing a beat from the late antique school of Alexandria, let's say. That's probably a bit oversimplified, but it's a much more continuous tradition than you would have in the case of Latin Christian Europe in the medieval period. Although even there, there's a lot of ways in which it's very continuous. I mean, the most influential texts in early medieval philosophy are by people like Boethius and Augustine, who are late ancient figures. So do you think then that there's a kind of misconception here about medieval Byzantine society or history among people who haven't looked into it so much, where they think of it as a kind of, you know, a distinctively medieval period that's very sharply contrasted with the Roman period? In fact, actually, I think Byzantine, like medieval, it's one of the few historical designations that's also used as an insult. It's overly complicated. Right. Would you say that's something you're trying to dispel among your audience? I hope I can give people an idea of how slowly a lot of transitions take place. Because I think, like when you look at Christianity, you can look at its development on many different levels and, you know, Constantine converts in 300 and by 400, you've got an emperor like Theodosius making laws against, you know, any other kind of belief or worship in the public sphere, but you move on 100 years later into the 500s and you've got, you know, someone like Procopius writing who clearly doesn't believe in any of the imperial propaganda about Christianity and the state, even if he himself goes to church. And where I've reached now in the 700s, we find people out in the countryside are still, you know, celebrating weddings or gathering in the harvest in using the same traditions and invocations of pagan gods that their ancestors would have done a millennium before. But if you saw them in church on Sunday, you would think, oh, you know, they are medieval Christians just like I imagined. I think if you look at a process like that, you start to get a sense that history is ever changing and medieval is a helpful designation because you need to know quickly what period you're in and, you know, where you are in the timeline and so on. But it's important not to pigeonhole a whole era of time as representing kind of fixed values. You know, the medieval is a helpful distinction, but don't think it means people and have come out of nowhere and are nothing like the people they were 100 or 200 years before. Yeah, I think what you mentioned before that in some ways the coming of Islam and the conquering of so much land that had belonged to the Romans, as the Byzantines actually called themselves, that that was a more disruptive event, at least in the East, than anything that had happened in the Western Empire. And I think that that maybe should tell us that if we're going to sort of look for a really pivotal moment in Byzantine history, we shouldn't look earlier than that. We should look in a period which we would now consider to be sort of in the midst of early medieval time, namely the seventh century and then into the eighth century. So one thing I wanted to ask you, because I'm asking all three of the guests on this episode, and I think it's maybe especially important to ask you this because you're working on a period of history that a lot of people don't know anything about. If you were going to name one figure who you've covered who you would consider particularly fascinating or who you think more people should know about, who would it be? I mean, I think the controversial but correct answer would be that looking into Muhammad and his origins is very fascinating, but we don't know enough about him to have a very concrete sense of who he was or what he did. So I would probably fall back on the classic Byzantine answer of Justinian, who was a very famous emperor from the sixth century. And Muhammad is not a bad place to start in the sense that we know almost nothing about Muhammad's daily life. No one was writing around the time where he would have lived. Whereas Justinian, we have three or four different historians who may have even met him but directly lived under his policies. And so you start to get a real rich, complicated sense of his personality. And that's very rare for most figures in ancient and medieval history to have that many sources. And he lived in very interesting times, which is always fun to read about. One thing that you mentioned a lot when you were looking at the rise of Islam is the question of how much religious ideology or religious zeal motivated the armies that spread Islam in the end, as opposed to other motivations like just trying to take land or winning honor or booty. And I think that's an interesting question also to ask about some of the earlier material that you've covered in your series. So for example, Justinian seems to have been motivated both by politics and by religion. And I think that's a salutary lesson because when we think about the medieval period, we tend to think about people who were motivated above all by religious belief. And I think that's true in philosophy too, by the way, that people have a tendency to assume that all medieval philosophy is just theology. But as you've been showing in your podcast, actually their motivations are much more nuanced and various than that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, religion plays a very big part in people's lives, but it is balanced by earthly concerns. Certainly the Byzantines are very rarely motivated directly by religion when it comes to making war. Pragmatic concerns take over and they very much don't view Islam as a sort of competing religion for a long time. They're so sure of their own Christian beliefs as the truth that if your neighbor, even if they're strong and powerful says, well, we believe in X, Y, Z, you just say, well, that's crazy. You know, we know the truth. There must be an explanation within our scripture. What you believe is irrelevant. In terms of how politics plays out, religion tends to play a very big role. I think religion in a way becomes molded in with what we would think of as mundane political concerns, legitimacy and popularity and so on. Leaders increasingly understand that they must be seen to be fulfilling a religious role in society and fulfilling God's plans in their public policy. In the Byzantine case, a lot of that has to do with unity, that we are all God's people, therefore we must all believe the same thing. We must all follow the same religious practices. I think that's a particular sort of Roman concern, that the Roman Empire was built on the idea that we observe what the gods want better than anyone. It was an idea that went very deep into the soil of the Mediterranean so that even though Jesus didn't say anything in particular about that, it was just assumed that God will favor us if we get everyone on the same page and performing the rights the same way. It's a common political concern, I think, to get your nation or get your empire on the same page, everybody pushing in the same direction to achieve things, but it definitely assumes a religious complexion and that touches almost everything in society. But again, in that blended way, it's not as simple as they believed something we don't, therefore they are different. I think they were behaving in a very similar way to us, but instead of thinking about how can we grow the economy, they were thinking about how can we please God. And that might actually be the same thing. Well, there's a lot in that, I think. So I think one thing about Byzantine history is that you actually have some very powerful women who play a significant role in Byzantine politics and so on. And so, again, we have a tendency to think about medieval history as being the story of men waging war on other men, mostly, but that's not necessarily the case for the Byzantine historical story. Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, women were just as put upon and dismissed in terms of real power and authority and choice in their own lives as you would expect in ancient and medieval times. But in two areas, I suppose, women could gain some power in the Byzantine world in particular. One of course is if they were in the royal family, which gave them not only a connection to the ruling political dynasty, but an aura of being connected to God. And so we will get more interesting empresses as my story goes on. We do have one way back in the late 400s, the wife of Zeno Arigny, when the emperor dies, it's said that she chooses his successor because she is the legitimate ruler. And we don't really know a lot more about it, but it's nice to think that maybe she really did have a say and she ends up choosing a man, Anastasius, who turns out to be a very good emperor. So, you know, maybe she should get the credit for that. But the other area, of course, is in what we would say a nunnery that monks and nuns were genuinely thought of as people to go to for advice or for healing, you know, out in the countryside. And so women could gain some freedom and some status through that. So I hope to be able to explore that more as the podcast goes on. It hasn't come up a lot by 700. Yeah, I'm actually coming to a case very much like your second category soon, because I'm going to be looking at Hildegard of Bingen in an episode in my series. Right. So we've had a nice little look there at what you've been doing on your podcast and how Byzantine history might relate to other parts of medieval history. And of course, it relates very much to the Islamic world, just like I was talking about with Sharon. So thank you very much. That was really helpful and interesting. Thanks so much for having me. And again, that's the History of Byzantium podcast, if you want to hear Robin's own series on Byzantine history. And my next guest will be Jamie Jeffers of the British History Podcast. Hello, Peter, thank you. Again, I'm a big fan of your podcast, and I would encourage everyone who's listening to this to go check it out if they haven't already. As I just said, it's called the British History Podcast, and I guess the title pretty much explains what it is. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about it nonetheless. Well, it's a chronological retelling of the story of Britain. We start in the ice ages, so we start pretty far back, and we have been moving steadily forward now for about two, no, God, what is it, three and a half years now. And we are up to the late eighth century, which is the period where we have, off of Mercia, this big Anglo-Saxon king jockeying for power with Charlemagne. So it gets pretty exciting. But essentially what it is is it's just a chronological retelling of the story of Britain. And I include in that story side comments on cultural developments, how trade, how geography, how climate change, because that was an issue, how all kinds of things play into this story and change the way history played out. So I try and take a full view of everything instead of just focusing on the great man approach and hopefully provide people with a three-dimensional picture of what was going on. That is interesting, actually, because you are, after three and a half years, getting to just about the point, historically speaking, where I began with medieval philosophy, not with philosophy in general, because of course I started in antiquity. But I started medieval philosophy in basically the Carolingian period with Alquin and then Ariugina. And so Alquin obviously was at the court of Charlemagne. And so he's right about where you are now. And I guess maybe that even raises the question of to what extent you would consider what you've been doing to be medieval. I mean, I'm saying that this is a kind of chance for people who work on medieval topics and podcasting to come together. And I guess no one could deny that the Crusades are medieval. But people don't necessarily think of Byzantine history as medieval. And I don't know whether you think of what you've been doing as medieval or late antiquity or what. Oh, you know, that's a great question. One of those things where, you know, where do you draw the lines, especially in a period of history that's so poorly studied? I would say that the last year would probably be easily classified as medieval. The sub-Roman period, what happened after Rome pulled out, I can imagine that there might be some arguments as to whether or not that hundred year period after Rome pulled out of Britannia, whether or not that could legitimately be called medieval or if we should just call it sub-Roman or whatever. And then the first year was ice ages and Roman, which is pretty clearly not medieval. But yeah, this is one of those periods of time that it's just soupy. And the nice thing about studying this area of history, and actually history in general, is that the more you study it, the more you realize that everything is soupy. And unfortunately, our classifications for antiquity, you know, sub-Roman, medieval, it's all soupy as well. So I honestly don't know. I would say that definitely the last year is, it's got to be medieval. But other than that. Medieval, if anything, is medieval. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, actually, one thing that's interesting, I think, about your podcast is that you've spent so much time lavishing attention on things that happened between the Roman withdrawal, and people obviously know about the Romans being in Britain, and the period of medieval history in Britain that people first think of. So you know, William the Conqueror, knights running around in shining armor, that sort of medieval history. And in a way, your podcast takes a similar approach to mine. So the slogan of my podcast is without any gaps, right? And so what I'm trying to do is look at the whole history of philosophy without leaving anything out. And I think you may be even taking that approach a little bit more seriously than I am. You get the history of Britain without any gaps. I get into some trouble. I get the occasional negative review because I go too far. But it's one of those things where the way British history is typically taught is that we had the, there was darkness, right? In the beginning, there was darkness. And then there were the Romans. And then there was darkness again. And then there was William the Conqueror. And that's pretty much how most people have learned this period of history. But the reality is, is that the Romans were there for less than 400 years. And really, considering how badly they did towards the end, you could probably say about 300 years. And then you have this massive gap from 400, about 400 to 410, where there are just no Romans, right? All the way to 1066, all this history, all this development of cultural history that we just don't want to talk about. And instead, we just give it this kind of soupy, I guess soupy is, cartoony would be a better word. We have this cartoony view that essentially what happened was all the Britons went back to living in caves. And it was just like prehistory. And then along came the Normans, and then things started getting better. There was this brief period with Alfred, but for the most part, he just burned some cakes. And that's all that people know. And the reality is, is that there's this rich tapestry of history, and there are these crazy events, this amazing drama that's going on. And it's the foundry of what becomes Englishness. The modern English culture is finding its beginnings right there. As well as conflicts between the Welsh and the English and the Scots and the English, there's all these conflicts that are brewing that can reach back all the way to this period in time. And so the fact that we ignore it is just criminal. And I can't for the life of me understand how people can expect to have a full understanding of what 1066 was and why it's important without understanding the Anglo-Saxons. It just doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. So yeah, I don't think you can have any gaps. Yeah, there's something similar that happens in philosophy, but maybe even more so, where if you are doing a normal—even if you majored in philosophy, this is something I've complained about on a regular basis on my podcast—that standardly you might do, you know, Plato, Aristotle, and then maybe you would do like Augustine, who's late antiquity already, or maybe some Plotinus, also late antiquity. Then you might do Aquinas, like a medieval philosopher, but pretty much you're immediately going to move on to Descartes. And so you have these huge jumps from one place to another in the history of philosophy. And I guess, you know, we have to admit that if you're trying to design a syllabus to take people through the whole history of philosophy in one or two semesters, you don't have a choice. But of course, this is an advantage of podcasting, because no one's making us go any faster than we want to. Right. I think one of the things that I would agree is a kind of misconception about philosophy and history is that all the action is provoked by a few really extraordinary individuals who are usually men. Do you think that there are more specific misconceptions about the period of British history you've been looking at in your podcast? The biggest misconception I've run into, because I have people who write into me, when I first got into the Middle Ages, so after Rome pulled out, I had a bunch of people writing in and asking questions. And the questions that I was getting, the predominant number of questions that I was getting belonged in prehistory. Not even like Neolithic, but they're like Paleolithic questions. And it goes into this way that we've been teaching history where the Victorians identified strongly with the Normans and they identified strongly with the Romans. But the Anglo-Saxons, not so much. And so they treated them as sort of a speed bump and a bit of an embarrassment. And we still have that hangover from the Victorian era where we look at the Anglo-Saxon period as sort of this period of darkness where everybody was filthy all the time. And it's shocking how many things people get wrong when you investigate their biases when it comes to the Anglo-Saxon period. I mean, the fact that most people believe that the Anglo-Saxons were eating rotten meat is just stunning. But if you talk to some random person on the street and ask them why the Anglo-Saxons heavily spiced their food, they'll tell you it was because the meat was rotten, as if, you know, people in the Middle Ages didn't get sick from rotted food. It's one of those strange things that everybody, if you think about it for 30 seconds, you're like, that's ridiculous. No one's going to do that. But it's just one of those zombie myths that people pass around. It never seems to go away. And it's the same thing with cleanliness. We imagine them being much dirtier than they were. If you went in to a feast and you didn't wash your hands beforehand, people would react to you like you just grew a third head. Not even a second head, like a third head. Like you're the weirdest guy in the world. And so the idea that they were these just disgusting, primitive people is just wildly off base. And you've also been showing that the political situation in Anglo-Saxon Britain was very complicated and involved a lot of moving parts. So it was a very sophisticated world politically and socially speaking as well. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it was definitely bloody. We imagine it being bloody and it was. But it's one of those things where you look at it and while it is bloody, it's no less bloody than things were under the Plantagenets or under the Tudors. There was a lot of intrigue, there was a lot of fighting, but that just seems to be the way things went for a very long period of time. It was really no worse than any other period of time. But it was. It was a very complicated world that they were living in. They had to balance a lot of different things. They were influenced by things that are remarkably similar to what were influenced by today. They were influenced by trends, by cliques. They were remarkably similar to us in certain ways. They're obviously, the past is a foreign country, so in many ways they were alien. But there are certain ways that they are very familiar. And you've actually applied that to something that's come up a lot on my podcast, which is the role of religion in medieval culture. I think a lot of people, and I would in fact say this is probably the biggest misconception about medieval philosophy, is that it's really all just theology and they never talk about anything that isn't to do with God or God's relationship to the world or the incarnation of Christ or the Eucharist or something like that. And although of course they do talk about those things, they talk about the full range of philosophical issues like everything from political philosophy to theory of knowledge, free will, you name it, often with an eye on some kind of theological issue in the background. I think there's a real kind of fallacy that the history of medieval philosophy is just kind of philosophy of religion, but in Latin. And something you've mentioned on the podcast, on your podcast that is, is that you think that their attitudes towards religion were a lot more nuanced than we might expect for early Christian Britain. Oh yeah, yeah. The way they approached religion seems very familiar. You had people that were clearly pious. You had people who were clearly deep believers, but you also had people who were just going along to get along. And you also had people who were getting into these religious power structures because there was power there. It was a deeply cynical move. And you have people converting for deeply cynical reasons. I mean, the famous story of Edwin's conversion, Edwin was this Northumbrian king who is one of the big highlights of my show so far, actually. But he converts. And when he's converting, you have these Christians making arguments on why they should convert and why it would be better if Edwin became a Christian. And his religious advisors are making arguments against that. And essentially what it comes down to is if you become a Christian, you're going to get fabulous cash and prizes. And you can see him, he's playing both sides for a long period of his history. And then right at the last minute, he decides to go and convert. And it strikes me as such a cynical move. It strikes me as definitely, there's the possibility that he had a legitimate experience. We don't have a diary from Edwin saying, I was in my room late at night, I had a dream, and Jesus came to me and talked to me and I need to convert. But based upon how long it took him to convert and the things that he was weighing and the moment where he chose to convert, it strikes me as a deeply cynical political move. And we do see that play out quite a bit in the medieval period where you have priests and monks who don't even know the 10 commandments. They have no idea what the 10 commandments are, but yet they're men of the cloth. And the reason why that is happening is because you have these rich families stacking the religious houses with their lesser sons and their unwanted daughters, because that's where the other political structure is, the other power structure is. So they're trying to just expand their power base to better manipulate what's happening on the island and maybe even across the channel. But it's not necessarily because they felt the call. You do have people who felt the call, but you also have people like Wilfred who pretty clearly just wanted to be the Archbishop of York and was going to do what he had to in order to become it. Yeah, he's a real character, isn't he? Wilfred, he keeps coming up on your podcast at the Archbishop who won't die. Yeah. So for the people who haven't listened to my show, there's this recurring Archbishop who is, he won't die, he keeps on coming back from seemingly nothing. He ends up at one point shipwrecked and fighting to the death against a bunch of pirates. He takes a couple trips to Rome to go and tattle on the King of Northumbria to the Pope himself, and then comes back and complains to the King of Northumbria and says, hey, the Pope's on my side and the King of Northumbria doesn't care and chucks him in jail. Like, there's this huge thing that's going on. And essentially what everything seems to be coming down to for Wilfred is he wants to be the Archbishop. It's not about God's plan. He just wants to be the Archbishop. And for good reason, because when he was the Archbishop briefly, he was marching around with an army of his own. Like, this wasn't like he had ecclesiastical duties and he really liked ministering to his flock. He had a damn army. So he wanted to get back to that. And it's one of those interesting things where you can have clearly pious people. I think Bede is a good example of someone who is clearly pious. And I think Alcuin is another example. But then you have people like Wilfred and I suspect Archbishop J.M. Burt and others who were there purely for the power. Actually, something I was going to ask you, because I've asked also Sharon and Robin about this in the earlier parts of this episode, if you had to name one most fascinating person from the period you've covered so far, would you name Wilfred or Edwin or one of the people you've already mentioned or someone else? King Offa of Mercia, hands down. King Offa of Mercia took over his kingdom after he had a distant cousin ruling it who was famous for sleeping with a bunch of nuns out of wedlock. And his name was Ethelbald. And so he took over his kingdom in the middle of a civil war and then went into a kind of a kinslaying, just bloodlust. He said, and we only get hints of it. And we get hints of it primarily in letters from Alcuin and in land grants and stuff like that. But essentially what happened was Offa was running around trimming the family tree in order to make sure that his line went ahead of time. Because this was a period where the requirement that you were born into a legitimate marriage wasn't part of rule. So all these bastard kids from all these different nuns all had a claim to the throne. So he's running around doing that. While at the same time consolidating his kingdom, expanding it. So he's going and taking over the Huissa. He's going and taking over for part of it Kent. He's fighting with Wessex. He's doing all this other stuff. And solidifying his power, he creates this gigantic dike between England and Wales. Probably there's some argument, but it's probably him. And at the same time as all of that, he's also jockeying for power with Charlemagne himself. To such an extent that Charlemagne actually suggests that they go and have their kids marry. Which seemed like it was going to work and it actually might go and unify the two kingdoms and correct trade relations. All the way until Offa said, well that's fine, but I also want one of your daughters to marry my son. And Charlemagne showed his true colors and said, there's no way in hell I'm going to have one of your filthy English sons sleeping with my daughter. And then everything went sideways. But I mean, this is an incredibly important character in English history. His reign is the starting point of the continuous use of currency in England. Like there's all these things that come about because of Offa. And at the same time, you have a very tortured character because he's engaging in these incredibly brutal policies in order to secure the throne for his son. And so he's both an intriguing character and clearly powerful, but he's got this dark side as well. Mad Fientist Another thing that I like a lot about your podcast, and maybe I like this because it's something that I'm aspiring to do with my podcast as well, is that you focus a lot on the role of women in the history of Britain. And in fact, one thing that I like about medieval philosophy is that it gives me a chance to do that. So it's a much richer period than most of what I've been covering so far in the podcast series. And this is something that you've been doing pretty much right along in your podcast series as well. Dr. The reason is because a lot of our history was written by monks, at least in this period. We have a tremendous amount of material for monks. And pretty much by design, monks don't know a hell of a lot about women. And so there's a lot, there's this huge gap in our knowledge as to what was going on with women during this period. I'm positive that there were women working with these kings and talking to them and, and trying to figure out what they should do politically or economically or whatever. But the monks aren't writing it down, so we just don't know. Dr. That's a kind of microcosm or certainly a good example of a problem that you come up with a lot in your podcast. The sort of refrain of your podcast is, well, here's an interesting question and we just don't know the answer. It happens in almost every single episode. And I guess I don't have to say that too much in my podcast because by the very nature of looking at the history of philosophy, we're only looking at texts that have managed to survive. Although, I guess I did talk about recently, I talked about the fact that a lot of interesting medieval texts that have survived are in fact anonymous. So you have a manuscript, but you don't know who it's by. And these tend to get ignored by historians of philosophy. But you've alluded in a lot of your podcast episodes to archaeological evidence, like you were just mentioning coins, for example. So do you get frustrated at the sort of barriers that are thrown up in your way in terms of the poverty of sources available to us? Or is that part of the excitement for you? Well, I mean, it's fun to talk about to a certain degree, but it definitely is frustrating. I do occasionally get people writing in or writing negative reviews saying that they're tired of me not giving them straight facts. And one of my favorite complaints I got was that I don't give enough details on what was happening in Wales during this period. And the way the person wrote it was, I want more information on what happened in Wales during this period. And I wrote back and said, me too. The thing is that we do just not know a lot of things. And I'm really looking forward to getting to a period where things are better documented. But on the other hand, it is fun because it's a bit like a murder mystery. You're constantly just trying to piece things together and tease out facts and figure out what was going on. Well, that seems like as good a note to end on as any for a roundup of discussions about medieval history. So thanks very much, Jamie. Thank you. And thank you very much for listening. That you've just heard me talking to Sharon Eastaw of the History of the Crusades podcast, Robin Pearson of the History of Byzantium podcast, and Jamie Jeffers of the British History podcast. And of course, you can join me again next time to hear more about medieval philosophy here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, One of a Kind, Gilbert of Poitiers on Individuation. Faithful listeners know a lot about me by now. My love of giraffes in classic film, my baldness, my support for Arsenal Football Club. You may also have noticed that I'm rather keen on the history of philosophy. But here's something that I haven't mentioned yet. I'm an identical twin. Unlike my sister, my twin brother is very much existent. In fact, he runs a museum in Manhattan, the Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle. Please drop by if you're in the neighborhood. And it doesn't get much more existent than that. Perhaps it's because I grew up as a twin that I've always been fascinated by the philosophical problem of individuation. What makes two things of the same type different from one another? As children, my brother and I were constantly confronted with adults who seemed to have difficulty with this concept. I hated being called the twins, as if the two of us were entirely interchangeable. And I still bear a grudge against a teacher who was going through an attendance list one morning and called out the Adamsons, apparently unaware that one of us might be present without the other. But you don't have to be a twin to be concerned with the problem of individuation. Consider another set of siblings who were considerably more famous, despite their lack of podcasting and museum directing exploits, the Marx Brothers. It was usually quite easy to tell the Marx Brothers apart, except when Groucho and Harper were performing the wonderful mirror scene in Duck Soup. Do yourself a favor and Google it. But what exactly made them four distinct individuals? This is the flip side of the problem of the universals, where the challenge was accounting for the humanity that belongs to Groucho, Harper, Chico, and Zeppo. Now we're asking not how it is that they all belong to the same species, but how it is that they come to be four separate members of that species. We can also pose the question in this way. How, or why, is humanity divided into Groucho, Harper, me, and my brother, the way that the genus Animal is divided into many species, like human, giraffe, and elephant? Ancient and medieval philosophers did pose the question like that, and added that particulars cannot be further divided in the same way. This is why the particular members of a species are called individuals, and why the difficulty of accounting for the whole phenomenon is called the problem of individuation. You might think that giving a solution is easy. All we need to do is find any feature that belongs to Groucho and doesn't belong to Harper. This feature will distinguish Groucho from Harper, and hence individuate him. For instance, Groucho wears a grease paint mustache, and Harper doesn't. This may be a promising first step, but it's no more than that, because we are not just asking why or how Groucho is distinct from Harper. We want to know how it is that Groucho is distinct from all other humans, what makes him the individual that he is and no other. And as even the merest acquaintance with silent film will tell you, there have been more than a few humans apart from Groucho who wore grease paint mustaches. The same applies to other properties that could help us pick Groucho out from the crowd or from his brothers. Groucho was brilliant at wisecracking, but so was W.C. Fields. He smoked a cigar, but so did Fidel Castro. He later hosted a game show on American television, but so did Wink Martindale. Just as with the problem of universals, late ancient and medieval philosophers thought about individuation within the framework of Aristotelian logic. But which instrument from Aristotle's conceptual toolkit can unlock this particular difficulty? We can immediately rule out the genus and species as candidates for individuating factors. It obviously is not by being an animal or a human that Groucho becomes distinct from all other things, because there are plenty of other animals and humans. For that matter, suppose Groucho were in fact the only existing human, like Adam just after having been created and before a bit of gentle ribbing from God yielded Eve, or perhaps as the only survivor of a disease that strikes down everyone in its path apart from wisecracking game show hosts who smoke cigars and wear grease paint. If Groucho were the only human in existence, then humanity might seem sufficient to individuate him. But even then there would be problems. We really want Groucho to be individuated, not just from all the other things that exist presently, but from all the other things that ever have or will exist. So even if he were the first human, like Adam, or the last one, like the sole survivor of an apocalypse, we would need to say more to explain what makes him unique. In fact, we might even want to guarantee that he is distinct even from other possible humans, like my non-existent sister. This line of thought may push us in the direction of solutions suggested, though not fully worked out, by Porphyry and Boethius. These were the two ancient authors who exerted the most influence on medieval discussions of the problem. Both of them hinted at what we might call an accidentalist theory of individuation. By this I mean the idea that the accidental features of a thing make it the individual that it is. The idea of an accident is standard Aristotelian fare. It just means any feature that belongs to a thing, but not in virtue of the thing's species membership, so that it can survive as the kind of thing it is, even if the feature is lost. For example, Groucho's cigar smoking is accidental to him because he remains a human even when he's not smoking a cigar and even if he quits smoking cigars entirely. By contrast, his being alive is essential, not accidental, since he can no longer exist as a human without being alive. Now we've already seen that an accident like cigar smoking is not up to the job of individuating, since other humans also smoke cigars. But what if we took all the accidental features together? There may be other cigar smokers and other game show hosts, but there aren't likely to be any other cigar smoking game show hosts who are named Marx, wear round glasses, and get mentioned posthumously in philosophy podcasts. Indeed, it seems quite plausible to think that no individual possibly could share all the features of another individual. This is what Porphyry must have been thinking when he remarked, "...things are called individuals because each of them consists of characteristics, the collection of which can never be the same for anything else." Boethius knew this passage well. He commented on Porphyry's introductory illogical work twice, and sometimes spoke as if he agreed with the idea. On the other hand, it may seem superfluous to appeal to all the properties of something if we could just point to one property that nothing else shares or could share. Boethius made a couple of suggestions in this direction too. What if we just referred to the place occupied by something at a given time? That would pick out Groucho very nicely, since nothing else can be exactly where Groucho is when he is there. Alternatively, and rather more mysteriously, Boethius alludes to a special kind of property which belongs to only one person. Using the example of Plato, he says this property would be called platonity. It would be a quality that relates to Plato the way that humanity relates to human. This quality, he says, belongs only to one man and not just to any man, but only to Plato. The idea does have its appeal, not least because, applied to our favorite example, it would give the world the new and delightful word grouchosity. Also, it is clear that, to the extent that we can make sense of a property like this, the property of being Groucho or Plato, it is a property that can be possessed by only one thing. But this will need to be filled in with a lot more detail if it is to provide a truly illuminating account of individuation. Step forward, Gilbert of Poitiers. Distinguished from most of his peers, if not actually individuated, by his unusually sharp intellect and skill in dialectic, Gilbert was a student of Bernard of Chartres and held the office of Chancellor at Chartres in the 1130s, in addition to teaching in Paris. So, Gilbert is yet another representative of the group we have been with some trepidation calling the School of Chartres. His solution to the problem of individuation departs from the accidentalist strategy that had been sketched in Porphyry and Boethius and then adopted by many medieval Rauptu and during the time of Gilbert, including Thierry of Chartres, another student of Bernard, and Thierry's own student, Clarenbold of Arras. Despite the popularity of the accidentalist theory in the early medieval period, and the weight of authority that supported it, Gilbert had good reasons to be skeptical. Just to restate the basic idea, the accidentalist realizes that nothing can be individuated by essential features, since these are shared by all other members of the same species. Groucho is rational, but so are Harpo, my brother, and every other human that ever has or will exist. Instead, we should look to accidental features. While Groucho does have accidents also found in other humans, it could never happen that some other human has all the same accidents. Alternatively, we can point to an accident of Groucho's that nothing else could have, such as his place. Sounds good, right? So what's the problem? Actually, there are several. One might not bother us so much today, but would be seen as deeply troubling in a medieval context. Incorporeal things like God and angels have no place. Indeed, God has no accidents at all. Yet, incorporeal things can be individuals. So the accidentalist account is at best incomplete. We'll have to come up with a separate way to individuate immaterial beings. Another difficulty is that accidents are usually held only temporarily. Indeed, we said that accidental features are precisely the features that a thing can lose, while surviving as the thing it is. How can Groucho be the individual that he is, because of his place, if he can move around? Or how can he be individuated by a whole set of features that include cigar smoking and wisecracking, when he can give up cigars and imitate Harpo's vow of silence? If you think about this, or for that matter if you read Aristotle, you begin to suspect that the accidentalist strategy gets things backwards. Substances like humans, giraffes, trees, and rocks do not depend on their accidents in order to be the substances that they are. To the contrary, Groucho's accident of cigar smoking can only exist thanks to Groucho, because this accident is, as Aristotelians would say, predicated of him. This is just as true of place as it is true of any other accident. For Aristotle and his followers, something's place is, strictly speaking, the boundary of whatever is containing it. For instance, the inner boundary of the air in contact with me right now. If place is determined by the thing placed inside it, how can place do the job of individuating that thing? The problem here is that Groucho's place is defined, indeed individuated, with reference to Groucho, not the other way around. The same applies to other accidents. As Boethius pointed out in his commentaries, Aristotelian logic recognizes not just individual substances like Groucho, but also individual accidents, like the cigar smoking that belongs to him and no one else. It seems that Groucho's cigar smoking is individual because it belongs to him, and that Groucho's place is defined as a limit that surrounds his body. But in that case, the accidentalist story is circular. Groucho is supposedly individuated by his accidents, but his accidents only get to be individual because they belong to him and no one else. At the root of all these difficulties is a fundamental confusion. The accidentalist account is plausible because we do in fact use accidents to tell things apart. We really do tell Groucho from Harpo by noticing that he is, for example, the one with the cigar, and not the one with the blonde wig. But that doesn't mean that accidents really account for the distinctness between things. How could they, if accidents depend on those very things? This would be like saying that the Marx Brothers movies are funny because people laugh at them. It's true that these two things go together, funny movies do provoke laughter, and we can tell that a movie is funny from the fact that people laugh at it. But it's because the movies are funny that people laugh, not the other way around. In the same way, it may be true that we only find particular accidents and unique collections of accidents in individual substances. This is why we can use accidents to tell substances apart, but that has to do with epistemology, not with metaphysics. In other words, accidents show us that things are individual, but they don't explain why things are individual. Gilbert of Poitiers' novel approach to the issue is going to avoid all these problems. How does he manage it? Well, he's a scholastic philosopher, so of course he proceeds by making some careful distinctions. These are often expressed with innovative technical terminology, which does not necessarily make his views easier to follow. He contrasts what something is, id quod est, with that by which it is what it is, id quo est. Groucho is a human, but is what he is through humanity. The same distinction can be made for accidental features. A cigar smoker is what he is by virtue of cigar smoking. Effectively, this just boils down to the distinction between a thing and the features that characterize it. Next, Gilbert says that only a substance and not its characterizing features can be individual. Groucho is an individual, but his humanity, his cigar smoking, and his wisecracking are not. Instead, they are what Gilbert calls dividuals. By this he means that these features can be found elsewhere too. Cigar smoking is divided among Groucho, Fidel Castro, and all the other cigar smokers. Now here comes the clever part. As Boethius taught us, Groucho's cigar smoking is not to be confused with Fidel Castro's. Nor do Groucho and Harpo have the same humanity. Rather, humanity appears twice in them, and four times if you add Chico and Zeppo too. In each of the Marx brothers, in each of the Adamson brothers, in every human, there is a humanity which belongs only to that individual human, while also being similar, or conforming, to other instances of humanity. It is the fact that humanity can be exemplified over and over like this that leads Gilbert to deny that one single instance of humanity can be called an individual. An individual is, as we would expect, something non-repeatable. Nonetheless, the humanity in Groucho is singular, as Gilbert puts it, because it is his humanity and no one else's. These points put Gilbert in a position to make sense of Boethius' suggestion about grouchosity. Grouchosity will be the entire collection, or as Gilbert says, the total form, of Groucho's features. Together, the singular features coalesce, or cohere, into an individual. Though each member of the total form is a divigial, in that a similar property may be found elsewhere, you are never going to find all the properties exemplified anywhere else. While this may sound reminiscent of the accidentalist view, it is really very different. Gilbert actually treats the essential and accidental features of a thing as being on a par, at least as far as individuation goes. All of them are possessed as singular features and serve as parts of the total form that guarantees individuality. Also, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Gilbert does not confuse the question of what makes something individual with the question of how we know something is individual. He sees clearly that accidents merely show us that one individual is distinct from another without making it be distinct. We can also see how well he grasps this point from the fact that he includes not only the present features of a thing in the total form, but also all the things past and future properties. Obviously, we currently have no access to future properties, so they can play no practical role in helping us distinguish one individual from another. Imagine how useless it would have been if, when people couldn't tell me and my brother apart as children, my mother had said, oh well the one on the left is the one who will be a philosopher and the one on the right is the future museum director. Metaphysically though, future properties are important, because they enter into the totality of singular characteristics which collectively guarantee the thing's individuality. This also solves the problem about things changing over time. According to Gilbert, it is the total form that individuates, and this includes all the properties the thing has over its whole existence. As an added bonus, Gilbert has a nice story to tell about that other, more celebrated difficulty, the problem of universals. We arrive at a universal by noticing the similarity between singular characteristics, for instance the four instances of humanity in the four Marx Brothers. But, Gilbert insists, everything that really exists is singular. Universal humanity, freed from connection to any individual human, is only a conceptual construct. Yet it does guide our thought in a useful and accurate way, since all humans do really each possess their own singular humanity. On this score, Gilbert is fairly close to Abelard's nominalism. We can also guess what he might say to the obvious complaint that he is just helping himself to the idea that Groucho's humanity, cigar smoking and so on, are singular. Is he assuming too much here? After all, what we wanted to do is explain, in the first place, how it comes to be that there are single things in the world, and not just universal things. To this, Gilbert can reply that there are no universal things, nothing can exist without being singular. If Groucho is a cigar-smoking human, then his cigar-smoking and his humanity must be real, so they must be singular. Gilbert of Poitiers' subtle account of individuality is quite an achievement, and one that shows how much good philosophy could be done within the apparently unpromising context of commentary upon centuries-old logical works. One should not be misled by that context though. Gilbert's aim was not just to explain authoritative works of logic, or even to devise a powerful and original account of individuality. The whole time, he had his eye on related theological issues. For instance, his theory enables him to say very clearly what it means for God to be simple. Whereas all other individuals have total forms, made up of many characterizing features, God is what He is through a single, simple form called divinity. This is one of the doctrines for which Gilbert, like Peter Abelard, was attacked by Bernard of Clairvaux and his allies. When he was put on trial in 1147, with the Pope himself being asked to judge on the question of Gilbert's heresy, the very first accusation was that he taught that God is distinct from the form or nature of divinity. Gilbert came out of his ordeal better than Abelard did, since he was cleared of the charges after a confession of faith was drawn up, which was acceptable both to him and to his critics. He later had a small measure of revenge upon Bernard of Clairvaux. When the great man held out an olive branch by suggesting a meeting to read through some theological texts together, Gilbert suggested that Bernard would be better served by learning some beginner's level material from the school curriculum. With Gilbert of Poitiers, we've almost finished with the scholars connected to the so-called School of Chartres. But there's one important member of this group who remains to be considered, John of Salisbury. He briefly studied with Gilbert in Paris and is among our most important sources of information on philosophy in the 12th century. Not only that, but John was one of the first medieval thinkers to write a treatise dedicated specifically to political philosophy. To understand it, we'll have to look at the historical political context, and especially the famous investiture controversy, which pitted secular authority against the church. That will be our topic two weeks from now. But first we'll be investing a little more time in metaphysics. We've just seen that individuals were often understood as parts or divisions of universals. But what about the parts of the individuals themselves? Things like my brother's hands, or his hair, if that is, he had any hair. Like I said, we're identical. Medieval thinkers had a lot to say about this too, as we'll be discovering next time in an interview with Andrew Arlig, an expert on medieval myriology, the study of parts and wholes. And the best part is, you only have to wait a mere seven days, until the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London. Today's episode will be an interview with Andrew Arlig, who is associate professor at Brooklyn College, and we're going to be talking about theories of parts and wholes in medieval philosophy. Hi, Andrew. Hi. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Before we get into the issue about what medieval philosophers say about this topic, maybe you could just say something general about why philosophers nowadays are interested in parts and wholes. What's so fascinating about this as a philosophical problem? It's because most of the things we encounter or think exist are complex, and therefore they're going to have structure, they're going to have elements and bits that are made of components. As soon as you have these complexity, these bits and elements and so forth, you're going to be invited to think about how they're put together. You're going to be invited to think about the dependence relations that hold between them. So do the bits depend on the whole? Does the whole depend on the bits, the elements? If so, philosophers can get quite sophisticated about this and come up with fine-grained distinctions and kinds of dependence. And all of this is, again, prompted by the mere fact that you have complexity. So the dependence issue would be something like, do all my parts need to exist in order for me to exist? Yeah, that's a very basic way of raising the issue. If I depend on all my parts, then surely that has implications for my identity over time, persistence over time, and so forth. Because it seems like if I cut your hand off, I kill you. Right. Because if one of your parts disappears, then you disappear. And in fact, even medievals will talk this way. When Socrates clips his fingernails, have we committed homicide? That's something that Peter Abelard, the 12th century philosopher, he raises that question. His answer is no. But he raises that question in part because he is thinking about relations of dependence between the parts and the whole. Okay, well that brings us on to what we really want to discuss, which is what medieval philosophers have to say about this. Nowadays, in analytic philosophy, there's a kind of industry of people who work on what's now called myriology, the study of this issue, parts and wholes, which is from the Greek word for part. But presumably, there isn't a kind of sub-discipline of philosophy done by medieval philosophers, which is about parts and wholes, is there? Or is there a kind of context where they naturally raise this problem? Well, I think it's anachronistic to say that some of them devoted their energies to myriology, the way a professional metaphysician might do it nowadays. But there are contexts where they do linger over questions about parts and wholes. There are places in the commentary tradition in particular where you can predict that they will stop and talk about this. For instance, in the logic handbooks throughout the Middle Ages, there's usually a discussion about parts and wholes that's prompted by Boethius's on the vision. Boethius also talks about these things called the topics, and one of the topics has to do with parts and wholes. And so they'll rehearse what Boethius says, and they'll comment on that and elaborate on that. There's also, it seems to be standard stock questions in the physics commentaries where Aristotle says something in book one of the physics about the problem of the part and the whole, and a very standard question you find is whether the whole is its parts. And it's raised by this sort of almost incidental remark of Aristotle, but they elaborate it and often elaborate in quite interesting ways. So the medieval philosophers themselves think of this as a basic issue that arises in both logic and metaphysics then? That's very important to them because most things in their universe have structure, and they've got to figure out the ways in which these things are composed, structured, and so forth. And they're very keen on understanding that there are a variety of different components and things, and there are going to be therefore a variety of different ways in which the parts related to the whole and the whole related to the part for that reason. Yeah, actually that was the next thing I was thinking I might ask, because on the one hand it seems like an obvious concept. So you've got a whole, it's made of some parts. But on the other hand, once you start thinking about the different kinds of things that there are, for example there are immaterial objects which may or may not have parts, there are artifacts, in other words things that are made by people, which have parts where you can swap out one part from another very easily. There are organic wholes, which have organic parts, so like the hand case or the fingernails. And so in general it seems like sometimes the parts have a more or less casual relationship to the whole, whereas in other cases it seems like the whole couldn't exist without exactly having the parts that it has. And so in light of this variety between the different types of part-whole relations, is there anything that the medieval thinkers would say we can say in general to characterize what it means to be a whole and what it means to be a part? The most general thing you could say is that anything that's a product of a division is a part of some kind or other, but because you have different ways of dividing a thing, you'll have different parts that arrive after the cutting. Or they'll also say, look, anything that can be put together is a part, and as a correlate, you should understand that whole and part are relational notions, so you have a part only if you have a whole and you have a whole only if you have parts. So a whole is also understood to be anything that kind of embraces a bunch of things as a whole in some way or other, and anything that can be divided up into smaller bits will be a whole for them. The other thing that's quite general that you can say is that for them a part, and this is something that's interesting, especially if you do contemporary theories of parts and wholes, a part for them is always in some way or other less than the whole. So it's a smaller bit. I mean, I'm speaking quantitatively, and there are ways in which you have to extend that in a metaphorical or analogical sense to get what I'm after, but there's always some way, even in cases like universals where there's a way in which the part is the whole, but still even then the parts, if you had only one of the parts, you still wouldn't be grasping the entire thing. Do they think that just any kind of random assortment of things could be considered as the parts of a whole? So say me, the Eiffel Tower, and the number four, could those be parts of a whole just by sort of divining it? Now, so you've just articulated a position in contemporary myriology that's called universalism. The only person I know of who countenances that is Peter Abelard, this 12th century philosopher. Most others will back off from universalism or the sort of completely unrestricted composition. That said, and one of the reasons why I think this is that many of them think that God, for instance, can't enter into any kind of whole. So you couldn't have a whole consisting of me and God. Oh, right. Okay. So there's at least one restriction. So there's at least one restriction on universalism. And usually the restriction stops at around heaps. So someone will talk about piles or heaps of stuff, and they'll say that that's a unity of a sort. So often this discussion of wholes, by the way, is bound up with the notion of unity, being a one. And so someone will say, well, a pile of things is one in some weak sense, but it's less of a one than, say, a chair, some kind of artifact with structure that's nailed together, glued together, whatever. And then a chair is less of a one than, say, you or I, or substances. So they draw these ontological distinctions that way, and so they have grades of unity. So this goes back to something I was saying before, which is that there are different kinds of parts and wholes. And so what you're saying is that it's not just that there's different kinds. It's also that they're kind of rank ordered. So they're really good examples of wholes, like maybe organic bodies or animals, plants. And then there are quite poor examples of wholes, which would be like a pile of beans or something. Well, it's just a hierarchy of being. And this is coming out of the Aristotelian idea that substances are the primary beings, and the traditional distinction between substances and artifacts and then other accidental unities that Aristotle talks about. So a pile, again, is an accidental unity in a very kind of weak sense. It's just a bunch of stuff that's in the same location at the same time. For most of them, I think almost to the last one of them, even a table or a chair is, strictly speaking, an accidental unity and not a substance. Because it's just being held together by nails and not by some physical principle. The form that's holding them together is still accidental. So is that what led Avalard to adopt the universalist position? Because if you think, well, this is just a kind of continuity that you can have less and less unified wholes. So why not just say, well, in the limit case, any old collection of things, even if they're not anywhere near each other. Yeah, plurality of stuff. Yeah, like I said, Avalard seems to have allowed that there's a weak sense in which any kind of plurality. Now, he doesn't raise the issue of God. But any kind of, he says, you know, any kind of plurality, even me and a particular instance of paleness could be a whole in some sense of whole. Because, you know, they're two bits and you can just sort of draw a ring around them and that's a whole. But it's, you know, it's a rather uninteresting whole. It's not as interesting as, say, a chair or Socrates. Right. So, you know, he says this, it's almost kind of a throwaway remark in his treatment of parts and wholes. What then should we say about this case, if I cut my hand off, then obviously I don't die. So why doesn't that immediately prove that I don't depend on the existence of my parts in order to exist? In general, the answer is yes, I don't depend on my hand. There are different ways to divide me up, which means there are different sets of parts you need to consider. And so the hand may be the wrong sort of thing to fixate on when I'm thinking about whether I depend on my parts. It's a very common distinction to say that things like hands, flesh, eyes, and so forth aren't necessary, that some of them can be taken away. Aristotle even discusses this in his book, his Metaphysics Book Five. He has a whole discussion of being mutilated, and that's linked up. It follows right after his discussion of the word whole in Book Five. So mutilation can occur when you chop off a hand or something like that. But then there are other kinds of parts that I have, which are often called substantial parts or essential parts. Sometimes the terminology is principal part, and I do need all of those. So it would be an example of something like that? Well, earlier on, principal parts were identified as things like my head or my heart or things like that. Or as it just happens that I can't cut your head off without destroying you. Right. So sometimes the distinction is made that way. Later on, when people talk about the essential or substantial parts, they're talking about the substantial form and the matter. So the soul, you can't lose your soul. Right. So they'll often reframe the question and say, well, we need to think about... The answer is, for some kinds of parts, yes, the whole depends on the parts. For other kinds of parts, if we consider those, usually wholes don't depend on those, especially when we're talking about substances like human eye. That's a traditional answer. One thing that you mentioned before is that they often raise the part-whole topic in the context of thinking about logic. And something that maybe is a little bit surprising for us is that they think about, for example, the genus-species relationship. So for example, animal and human, or animal and giraffe, is my favorite example. They would think of the species like human and giraffe as parts of the genus-animal. So is that just a metaphor? What sense can we make of this idea that we have these two abstract concepts, one of which is being conceived of as a part of the other? Yeah, there's this long tradition. And again, I think it goes back to the Greeks of thinking of universals as in some sense a whole. I think intuitively it's this, that hey, when you're talking about human, what you're talking about is you're corralling all the humans together and you're making some kind of generalization that holds of all in each of them. And so in some sense it's a whole. In fact, the Greek word whole is part of the Greek word for universal, katholou. So this kind of notion that these are related, it goes back quite a ways. And actually we talk about individual instances of a universal as particulars. In Greek, sometimes one of the expressions they use actually has the word for part in it as well. Right. And actually Boethius remarks on this in On Division. He actually notes that etymology. And in fact in one of the translations, particular is the part of particular is italicized for that reason. Because Boethius seems to be making that point that, hey, a particular in a way is a part of the universals that embrace it or encompass it. I mean, actually I notice that those words embrace, encompass, contain. Those also suggest that we're talking about something that's at least in some interesting sense like a whole, like a crowd or like a pile of things. So the reason, I mean, what I asked about originally though was the relationship between human and giraffe to animal. So it seems like what you're implying is that the relationship that you and I have to the species human is going to be analogous to the relationship that the species human and the species giraffe have to the genus animal. Well animal embraces both species. So it's like a ever widening concentric. And if you think of individuals and you draw a circle around them, so you have two groups of things with circles drawn around them and then the animal just sort of draw, you draw a circle around the two groups and you get ever widening holes, so to speak. Right. And so in theory, the biggest hole would be something like the genus of things or genus of existence. People know they won't say that because they all know their Aristotle and being or entity is not a genus. So we'll stop with substance. That's the highest genus. That's the highest genus for that category. Right, because then the accidents don't fall under that. So there's actually no hole that embraces everything. Is that right? Well, it would seem if they're going to follow through on this Aristotelian doctrine that there's no highest genus that... So here's another case where you wouldn't have universalism in this context of abstract entities. Oh, because you mean you can't just take... You don't have a super genus or a super class that is all the things that exist. Right. Okay, so actually that means that they don't think of holes as working in quite the way that we think that sets work. No. Presumably we would be happy with the notion of the set of everything that there is, but there's no hole that's the whole of everything that there is. That seems right. That seems like a fair characterization. That's interesting. Okay. What you were just saying about the relationship between individuals to species and species to genus gets us back, I think, to something we mentioned at the beginning, which is the question of interdependence. Right. And there is a problem here about whether the species depends for its existence on the existence of all the individuals. And in some sense it seems like it clearly doesn't. So when I die, hopefully a long time from now, the species human won't go out of existence. Among the tragic aspects of my death will not be the perishing of the species human. But on the other hand, it's a little bit harder to tell whether the genus animal somehow depends for its existence on all the species because they seem to kind of come together. So presumably there's a kind of domino effect here. So you might think, well, if the genus will exist, then the species will exist. And if the species exists, then all the individuals exist. Or you could go the other way. If the individuals exist, the species exists. And if the species exists, the genus exists. But it's not quite clear whether that's actually true. So what do the medievalists think about this? I mean, the question is raised, certainly. So they're attuned to these kind of worries. And then what precisely is the dependence between the individuals and the species? Because Aristotle doesn't, at least in the categories, encourage us to think that, he says that you and I, for instance, are primary substances. And the species is a secondary substance. That would suggest that there's a kind of order of dependence from that the species depends on us. And then the genus is even further out. So it depends. It's even got a more tenuous dependence relation. But that can't seem quite right. As you pointed out, when I die, the species shouldn't be compromised. So they are worried about that. And they come up with different stories for how this individual and the universals are related to one another. And it's hard to say. There's one party lying at that point. But presumably, they're all going to at least say that the continued existence of the species doesn't depend on the existence of every single one of the individuals. They're going to want to say that. In fact, this is one of Abelard's criticisms of a view that apparently had some advocates in the 12th century. The view he critiqued was that the species was actually just a crowd, that it was, to use a bit of technical language, the species wasn't a universal whole. It was an integral whole. It's like a crowd is an integral whole. And one of his criticisms is, well, then if you have that, if that's what a species is, that's what a universal is in general, then when I or you die or Socrates dies, the species seems to change. But that can't be right. So this would be like saying that all of my body parts have to keep existing in order for me to keep existing, which seems false because you could cut off my hand and I don't die. Yeah. So it's a very similar kind of reasoning. And so whatever the case is, the species and genus can't be, even if they depend in some way, I mean, here's one way they're often going to say or speak. They'll say, the species human wouldn't exist if there were no humans ever. But provided you have some humans, even if they change, even if the individuals are born and die, you'll have the species and the species won't depend on any particular individual, any particular set of individuals existing. But if there were no giraffes at all, there's no species giraffe. Maybe a way to put it is if there had never been and never will be giraffes, there would be no species giraffe. Do they get into the question about what if there's only one? Yes. Because they worry about the Phoenix. Yeah, right. Do you have a distinction between the individual Phoenix and the species Phoenix? Because there's only ever one. Because by definition, there's only ever one. And they're not just mythological examples. They raise the example of a sun. There's only one sun as far as their worldview goes. So do you have a species sun in addition to the individual sun? And usually the answer is, well, even though there is in act only one sun or only one Phoenix, you could always, there's no reason why you couldn't have two. And therefore, you have a species that covers both the actual and possible individuals. Right. So staying with this issue about universals, one of the things that I've been talking about in the podcast is this famous problem of universals. And maybe one way of describing the problem is whether universals are some real thing out in the world. That's kind of an over-simplistic way of putting the problem. It seems to me that if someone says, well, look, universals are just wholes of parts, and the parts in this case are the individual instances, since the individuals are real, clearly the universal is real. So I was wondering whether thinking about universal particular as a whole part relation immediately gives you a realist position on the problem of universals. That's an interesting question. In part, my answer is that the way we now draw the line between realism and nominalism may be not the best way to think about the medieval problem. So here's an example. Abelard, again, has a very famous discussion, which is in translation if your readers wanted to follow up on it. In it, Abelard describes a number of positions that we would now call nominalisms, using say David Armstrong's categories, would now call a nominalist position, which he identifies as a realist position precisely because his opponents have picked out some thing, to use the Latin term, res, out there that the universal term corresponds to. Now here's an example. David Armstrong would classify that position I referred to earlier, which this 12th century view, which is sometimes called the collection theory of universals, the view that says what the species human is is just the collection of individual humans. David Armstrong would call that a class or a myriological nominalism, whereas Abelard, because of the way he construes things, describes it as a realism. Because the whole is really out there. But there were problems with it. And his own recommended view is that you identify, that you associate the property of universality only with terms. So he takes a classical anti-realist position in part. One last thing I wanted to ask you is that we've been talking about this in, as it were, as a purely abstract philosophical issue. One thing that's of course always notable about medieval philosophers is that they have theological worries. And this seems like a case where that would happen. If you are a Christian theologian, which they are, then if you start thinking about parts and wholes, you might think, oh, well, I've got to explain the Trinity. So you might be tempted to think that the persons of the Trinity are parts of the unified Godhead. Or you might worry about Christ, because Christ is both God and man. So you might think of divinity and humanity as two parts of the whole that is Christ. Do they explicitly apply these part-whole worries to these theological cases or other theological cases? They bring in premises. Well, first I should maybe back up and say that almost any Christian theologian who talks about these issues will say, by the way, we're having a speculative discussion of this, but these are mysteries at the end of the day. And so there's going to be a point at which maybe reason's going to give out, or at least unaided human reason's going to give out. They then will, you know, often go on and have very sophisticated philosophically interesting discussions of how this is supposed to work. Now the Trinity case where you have three persons in the Godhead, there's going to be a problem because of absolute simplicity. Many of the discussions of absolute simplicity, in many of those discussions, they're very, very adamant that there are no parts, really no parts, I mean it, no parts, in the divine. So any way in which you might want to try to divide up the Godhead, not having it. Now, here's where the myriology comes in in the Trinity. The reasons that they give for why you can't have absolute simplicity include, well look, if you had parts, then you'd have to have some cause that unified them. But God's not caused, certainly by not anything outside of his own essence. So that can't be. Or another interesting thing, and this picks up on, you know, this has applications for mundane objects that will say, look, if you have parts, then the Godhead would depend on those parts. But God doesn't depend on anything. Now here's why this might apply to mundane things. There is an interesting question about whether I depend on my parts, really some parts. They use this thesis to defend absolute simplicity. Now for the Incarnation, there maybe myriology gets a bit more traction because you do have just two distinct natures, you're trying to cram them into one person. And so they'll think about, okay, well how can I do this? Interestingly someone like Aquinas, I looked at this just recently, he said, no actually you do have composition, but you don't have parts. So you have a composition but not with respect to parts. You have a composition merely, as he says, with respect to number. How you cash that out, I'm not quite sure, but then again, maybe this is one of those places where we have run out of things to say as philosophers. Yeah, I think that's actually a very distinctive feature of the whole medieval approach to these theological issues. When they talk about it philosophically, on the one hand they want to get as far as they can using reason, but on the other hand they really have to make sure that they don't get the whole way to explaining it, because then they've compromised the mystery aspect of it. Right, right. Right. Okay, well, I think that's enough about parts and wholes for now. This obviously was only one part of the series of podcasts that is the History of Philosophy, so please join me for another part in which I'll talk about more medieval philosophy next week. But for now, I'll thank Andrew Arlick very much for coming on. Thank you, it was my pleasure. And please join me again next time on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode Two Swords, Early Medieval Political Philosophy. Ranking Roger, lead singer of the ska band The English Beat, is not exactly known for incisive commentary about epoch-making events in the history of political thought. This is after all the man who gave the world such lyrics as, You move your little feet, you rock to the beat, I see you upon the street, you look so sweet, I see you with your dancin' feet. Yet he also sang the words, Two swords, slashing at each other, only sharpen one another. And you could hardly ask for a better ten-word summary of the key events in early medieval political life. The image of two swords was frequently used in the debates of the time. It was drawn from a passage of the New Testament that has no obvious relevance to politics. It comes in the Book of Luke, just after the description of the Last Supper and Christ's prediction that Peter will deny him three times in the day to come. Jesus's disciples are gathering weapons and say, Behold, here are two swords, to which he replies, It is enough. A widespread medieval interpretation of this text took the two swords to refer to the spiritual authority of the church and the secular rulership exercised by kings or emperors. We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a time when the church exercised suffocating, unchallenged control over all aspects of society. But if anything, the rise of the church as a powerful institution created an unprecedented situation where there were not just one, but two possible supreme authorities. In ancient Greece and Rome, pagan religious institutions were largely integrated into political life. Just consider the fact that Julius Caesar's career included a stint as High Priest of Jupiter. Even after the advent of Christianity, religious standing continued to be closely tied to political sovereignty with both Western and Eastern emperors intervening in theological controversies, calling church councils and appointing bishops. But the church already began to acquire a degree of autonomy in late antiquity. Bishop Ambrose of Milan successfully faced down two emperors in the late 4th century. This was a foreshadowing of the famous public humiliation that would befall Emperor Henry IV in the year 1077, forced to wait barefoot in the snow as he begged for absolution from Pope Gregory VII. This was the most notorious episode of the so-called investiture contest, which saw the swords of church and empire slash at each other over several generations, leading thinkers and polemicists of the 11th and 12th centuries to sharpen their theories of political legitimacy. The seeds of the conflict go back at least as far as the 9th century, when the two swords were wielded by the same man, Charlemagne. This at least was the view of his court philosopher Alquin, who understood the text from the Book of Luke to refer to his emperor's mission of combating both heretics within the church and pagans outside it. Yet Alquin did recognize different spheres of action for church and emperor. Speaking to a priest on behalf of Charles, he wrote, Our job is the defense of the church and fortification of the faith, yours to aid our warfare by prayer. In his own voice Alquin said that The secular and the spiritual power are separated. The former bears the sword of death in its hand, the latter bears the key of life in its tongue. With these remarks Alquin was echoing the ideas of Pope Galazius, who did much to shape early medieval conceptions of political life. In a much quoted letter written to the Eastern Emperor Anastasius at the end of the 5th century, Pope Galazius affirmed the legitimacy of imperial power but insisted that the church is supreme in questions of religion. In this neat picture, which is sometimes called political dualism, kings and emperors have ultimate responsibility for and power over worldly affairs, while popes and bishops deal with spiritual matters. But the neat picture was already being blurred in the Carolingian period. Charlemagne's father Pepin sought and received the sitting pope's approval to seize kingship in 751, and Charlemagne himself was anointed as emperor by Pope Leo on Christmas Day in the year 800. It was not necessarily the stocking stuffer Charles was hoping for. Indeed, he subsequently claimed he would never have entered the church had he known what Leo was planning. If his regret was sincere, then it was perhaps because he understood all too well the implication that imperial authority was for the pope to give, and therefore to withhold, should the pope deem it suitable. Under Charlemagne's grandson Charles the Bald, this idea of ecclesiastical primacy was explicitly articulated by Bishop Hinkmar. We met him when talking about Ariugina and the Predestination Controversy. Hinkmar pointed out, and points don't get much more pointed than this, that royal power is conferred by religious consecration, whereas religious authority depends on no royal stamp of approval. History seemed to be on his side. Charles the Bald was anointed king of Aquitaine by a bishop in the year 848, just the first of a series of Frankish kings to be symbolically legitimized by the church in this way. Unfortunately for Hinkmar's theory though, even the highest positions in the church were often filled at the whim of a secular monarch. In the 11th century, the German Emperor Henry III found it expedient to install a pope of his choice, so that the pope could reciprocate by crowning him. He was simply extending the logic of a long-standing practice whereby kings and emperors would select the men who served as bishops within their realms. It's here that we come to the term investiture, which gives the investiture contest its name. It seemed only reasonable to the early medieval monarchs that they should be able to appoint bishops, not only because of the religious aura historically attached to their royal position, but also because of the considerable worldly implications. A medieval bishop, after all, would control land and other wealth. They could even control military forces. So, selecting a bishop was as much a political appointment as a spiritual one. Before long though, this practice of lay investiture would give rise to conflict between the most powerful men of Europe. Forget Bernie Madoff or the subprime mortgage crisis, this is what a real controversy over investment looks like. It began in earnest in the later 11th century, as part of the reform movement sweeping across the European clergy, triggered in part by debates over the practice of simony, in which church offices were effectively bought and sold. Many monastic figures railed against simony, including familiar names like Abbo Afluri and Peter Damian. But few wanted to go so far as a certain cardinal named Humburt. He drew a close link between simony and lay investiture, complaining that men could become bishops by bribing the secular authority, with the decision then being rubber-stamped by the church. Humburt was even willing to say that a bishop who paid for his office was a bishop in name only, so that any priest he then ordained was not really a priest either and thus could not administer the sacraments. There's an echo here of a late antique controversy involving Augustine. He had refuted the Donatists, who claimed that a priest in a state of grave sin cannot effectively perform sacraments. Augustine rejected this in part because of the alarming consequence that every Christian would somehow need to verify the state of his or her priest's soul. For similar reasons, Peter Damian and others rejected Humburt's position. But the problem was admitted to be a real one, and under the pontificate of Gregory VII, the investiture contest was like an inexpertly poured beer. It came rapidly to a head. Gregory had a great zeal for reform, and an equally great zeal for strengthening the papacy. It's no coincidence for example that Berengar's interpretation of the Eucharist as merely symbolic was condemned under Gregory. This was part of a larger quest to establish Rome as the supreme arbiter in matters of doctrine. Gregory's push for centralizing church power in the papacy meant reining in the bishops and asserting dominion over them. And how could he do that if bishoprics were still in the gift of secular rulers? On the other hand, look at it from the point of view of a king or emperor such as Henry IV. The loss of control over the bishoprics would be a huge blow in practical and symbolic terms, so it was all but inevitable that Henry and Gregory would come into conflict. In the popular imagination, the central event of their contest of wills is Henry's capitulation, begging for forgiveness in the snow after Gregory excommunicated him. But this was in fact a tactical surrender on Henry's part, which helped him win the wider war. Once Gregory did absolve him, Henry was able to consolidate his political position in Germany, and ultimately to depose Gregory as pope. The investiture contest was not over though. It would finally be resolved when the next German emperor, Henry V, reached an agreement with Pope Calixtus II. We know this agreement as the Concordat of Worms. The broad outlines of the reconciliation were already proposed by Ivo of Chartres, an expert on canon law who had studied with L'Enfranque of Beck and associated with Abelard's despised teacher, Anselm of Leon. Ivo saw clearly the key problem, which was the fact that a bishopric combined both worldly and spiritual authority. Returning to something of the spirit of Galasius's dualist political theory, Ivo suggested that kings should still bestow land and any other temporal gifts upon a would-be bishop, but the church would also need to confer religious office on the candidate. Effectively, both sides would thus have a veto. For the historian of philosophy, the ins and outs of the contest itself are less interesting than the issue of principle. Contrary to what you would probably expect concerning the medieval age, what we're seeing here is the emergence of the idea that political authority can be distinctively secular, with religious standing being reserved for the church. Of course, the idea was emerging slowly and very incompletely. Kings were being deprived of control over spiritual affairs, but their own standing continued to be linked intimately to religion. The Carolingian monarchs were said to be king by the grace of God, a formula already used by Isidore of Seville. And, though they were said to hold the sword of earthly force, which one can see as a step towards the modern idea of the state monopoly on violence, there was the significant caveat that kings and emperors should always wield this sword in defense of the church. For this reason, those authors who polemicized on behalf of the kings sought to de-emphasize the secular nature of royal authority. As so often in this period, some of our best examples come in works of unknown authorship. A work written by the so-called Anonymous of York set forth the boldest claims for kingly privilege. Anonymous puts all his emphasis on the king's holiness, going so far as to argue that even in Jesus Christ, kingship was more important than priesthood. The rival view was put forward by propagandists who supported the primacy of the papacy. A particularly interesting author from this camp is the fabulously named Manigold of Lautenbach. He lived through the high point of the investiture contest and wrote in favor of the claims advanced by Pope Gregory VII, arguing that the church can rightly depose an earthly ruler who fails to live up to the necessary moral standards, whereas papal authority is not invalidated by moral failures in the man who holds the office. For his pains, Manigold was imprisoned by Henry IV. Manigold of Lautenbach is especially noteworthy because he drew a direct connection between the royalist position and the study of philosophy. In a treatise attacking a royalist opponent named Wolfhelm, Manigold produced one of the most bitter anti-philosophical works of the early medieval period. He grudgingly admitted that the philosophers sometimes got things right, as with their teachings on virtue, which is only to be expected since they are using the God-given power of reason. But philosophers too are merely human, and so are bound to go astray. Inevitably then, their views are a mix of true and false. Writing at the close of the 11th century, Manigold makes for a vivid contrast with authors of the century to come. Though he admires Plato above all others, as many 12th century thinkers will, he unhesitatingly identifies errors in Plato and dismisses out of hand the notion that the Platonic dialogues might refer obliquely to the Holy Trinity. Even before the burst of interest in natural philosophy in the 12th century, he's already warning that inquiry into the physical world comes at the expense of religious concerns. He also reminds the reader that all natural laws are subject to revision by miracles, remarking gleefully that these have been so frequent that nature can hardly have any confidence in herself anymore. The Concordat of Worms was reached in the helpfully memorable year of 1122, but this did not usher in an age without political thought. To the contrary, the first major medieval work devoted to political philosophy was written later in the 12th century by John of Salisbury. You may remember him as the author who wrote so admiringly, albeit at second hand, about the teaching methods of Bernard of Chartres. John's own list of teachers is second to none in this period. He studied with Peter Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, William of Canche, and Thierry of Chartres. From the tradition of scholarship associated with Chartres, he inherited a love for classical literature, so much so that he's been called the best read man of the 12th century. And John of Salisbury was no amateur when it came to political life either. He left the often literally cloistered world of the schoolmen for the rough and tumble of church politics. He applied for a post with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1147, armed with a letter of introduction from no less a personage than Bernard of Clavaux. He spent the next twelve years as an ambassador for the church, rubbing shoulders with the Pope and somehow finding time to write his two main works, the Metalogicon, an impassioned defense of the logical arts from certain unnamed critics, and the treatise we're going to talk about now, the Polycraticus. John's wide reading is on show throughout the Polycraticus, as he draws on Cicero, shows unusually good knowledge of Aristotle for the time, and quotes such ancient writers as Horace and Virgil. He constantly illustrates his points with examples from classical history, much as Machiavelli will do several centuries later, and has a good eye for the amusing anecdote as when he repeats Cicero's wry remark about a man who served as Roman consul for only one day, so vigilant was he that he never slept during his term of office. John also cites at length from another supposed source a letter to the emperor Trajan written by the historian and philosopher Plutarch. But it seems almost certain that he has only invented this letter as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. These include an extended comparison of society to a unified organic body, with the ruler as its head, the senate or advisors of the ruler as the heart, the treasurers as the stomach, the soldiers and tax collectors as the hands, and the lower classes as the feet. While this metaphor did appear in antiquity, John gives it unprecedented and vivid detail, as when he says that the functions of the lower classes are so manifold that society has more feet than a centipede. Like any good philosophical metaphor, John's comparison has important implications. If the whole of society is like a single organism, then each of its parts are intended to contribute to the welfare of the whole. Echoing themes already found in Plato's Republic, John insists that each member of the society must carry out his proper function if the society is to flourish. This applies even, or rather especially, to the ruler. John recognizes the unchallenged authority of the ruler who is an image of God upon the earth. But this does not mean that the ruler is somehow outside of the social body as a whole. Rather, as its head, the true king or prince is one who looks to the good of all the members, and he is subject to the laws, just like anyone else. Again, as in Plato, the benevolent ruler has a kind of perverse twin, the malevolent tyrant, who instead uses his position for selfish gain, an image of Satan rather than of God. John's political theory takes a startling turn when he expresses approval of tyrannicide, that is, the murder of such an evil king. He arrives at the topic in a rather roundabout way, in the course of talking about flattery at court. Such behavior is normally condemnable, but flattery of a tyrant may be excused as a necessary expedient. John then adds that we're surely allowed to flatter such a ruler given that we're even permitted to slay him. After dropping this bombshell, John says little more on the topic. He does later mention a series of classical tyrants who got their comeuppance, sometimes by being murdered, but he seems far less aware of the potentially explosive nature of his teaching here than later readers were, for instance Fidel Castro, who cited John in a defense of his actions in the Cuban Revolution. Some readers have inferred from this that John was not really making a practical or political recommendation at all, but simply pointing out that tyrants tend to get murdered, and their murderers tend to get excused. On this reading, his remarks are, yet again in the spirit of Plato, just part of a wider case that the true king prospers in this world and in the next, whereas the tyrant is inevitably miserable. But upon closer inspection, it seems that John is serious about permitting tyrannicide. It's just that he severely limits the practical implications of this permission. For one thing, a kingslayer motivated by justice should wait to be sure the wicked ruler will not mend his ways. Even then, he may not go back on an oath to the king, which would eliminate many potential assassins in a feudal context, or violate religious obligations in carrying out the murder. The whole idea is to act as an instrument of divine justice, so the last thing you should do is act against God in the process of eliminating the tyrant. In the end, John suggests it's probably best just to pray for God to deal with the tyrant, rather than taking matters into one's own hands. Furthermore, John sees tyranny as a more widespread phenomenon. It's a sort of evil character that can be found among private citizens who are to be dealt with by the rule of law, rather than by vigilante justice. Also among priests. Ecclesiastical tyranny is the most harmful of all, because the priests look to our salvation rather than our worldly welfare. Yet, one may not exercise violence against this kind of tyrant because of the sanctity of the clergy. Ultimately, John is more interested in the ideal case where things go well than in the cases where tyranny undermines the unity and prosperity of society. That happy outcome requires virtue on the part of both ruler and clergy. But, like Manigold of Lautenbach, John thinks that moral failure can undermine a secular ruler's legitimacy, whereas this is never the case with a pope. Here, John taps into a rich vein of political thought, which holds that an unjust ruler is not just an unfortunate cross to be born, but in truth no ruler at all, whether or not anyone is in a position to do something about it. We can even find this idea expressed in an etymology provided by Isidore of Seville, which I mentioned in an earlier episode. The Latin word for king, rex, relates to the word recte, meaning correctly or with justice. With his focus on justice and his insistence that even the king is subject to the law, John was a man of his time. The 12th century was not just an era of resurgent philosophy, it was also a time of law, with legal scholars doing what John was doing, turning back to antiquity for inspiration, and adapting classical ideas for their new situation. Next time, we'll be looking at two great systematizers of the period, Gratian and Peter Lombard, whose masterful compilations would set the stage for legal and theological thought for the rest of the middle ages and beyond. So join me as we imitate the good ruler by laying down the law, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Law and Order, Gratian and Peter Lombard. In the 12th century, the Church was represented by two separate, yet equally important groups, the theologians who investigated religious doctrine and the jurists who established ecclesiastical law. This is their story. Like the culprits apprehended and prosecuted on the TV series Law and Order, 12th century intellectuals had a lot to answer for. It was at this time that scholasticism began to flower, before blossoming fully in the 13th century. Ground's enough for an indictment according to several leading thinkers of the early modern era. Men like Descartes and Hobbes quietly borrowed from scholasticism but loudly denounced its shortcomings. That attitude still persists today, so that the word scholasticism stands for an inflexible body of authoritative doctrines which only left room for philosophers to engage in pointless distinction-mongering. But I think that scholasticism is like an unjustly accused defendant on Law and Order, or a child who's dressed himself as a mummy for Halloween. It gets a bad rap. While exploring the roots of scholasticism, we've seen remarkably open-minded writers engaging in controversies over fundamental theological and philosophical issues. In this episode, I'll be continuing my defense of scholasticism which will feature a pair of star witnesses, Gratian and Peter Lombard. Far from parroting an unquestioned and monolithic body of teachings, these two authors exposed and creatively reconciled tensions and outright contradictions in the authoritative tradition. Both of them hailed from northern Italy, which along with Paris was an early center for scholastic activity, especially with regard to law. The resurgence of legal activity began in the later 11th century, when the Digest of Roman Law assembled under the Eastern Emperor Justinian was being read in Italy. In the 12th century, the city of Bologna in particular became the place to be for ambitious young lawyers, and law in Bologna had a first name, it's G-R-A-T-I-A-N. We don't know much about Gratian, unfortunately, beyond the fact that he seems to have been active in Bologna in the first half of the century. His masterful compilation of law circulated in different versions during his own lifetime, and it hasn't been possible to determine the date he wrote it, though we know it appeared at some point in a 20-year span from 1125 to 1145. It's usually called the Decretum, but the title that Gratian gave it is more revealing, the Concordantia Discordantium Canonum. This shows that Gratian's goal was not simply to lay down the law, if you will, but to bring discordant legal texts into agreement. Towards this end, he supplied thousands of quotations from a wide range of sources, including Latin and Greek church fathers, earlier church councils, and letters written by popes. He was following in the footsteps of earlier compilers, a notable example being Ivo of Chartres, whom we mentioned last time for his contribution to the investiture contest. Ivo is not exactly a household name, but he really should be, given that he was both an early proponent of the solution accepted in the Concordat of Worms and a forerunner of Gratian. It's important to note that Gratian and Ivo were talking mostly about church law, not secular law. So Gratian's Decretum deals not with general problems of property, contract, or criminal law, but with issues that arise in ecclesiastical contexts. What to do about misbehaving priests, for example, or the range of powers that belong to bishops. He has much to say about the appointment of clergy, as well he might given the context of the investiture contest. Gratian improved on earlier canonists like Ivo by being more comprehensive, but his real innovation was his ambition of bringing the legal tradition into agreement with itself. He does not just quote from earlier texts, but adds bridging passages and comments called dicta, which explain the relevance of the material and resolve apparent conflicts. His favorite single author is Augustine, and as anyone who has read him will know, Augustine alone supplies more conflicting evidence than a double episode of Law and Order. An important precedent for Gratian's harmonizing approach was Peter Abelard's treatise Sic et Non. But Abelard, in characteristically provocative fashion, simply juxtaposed conflicting passages and left the job of reconciliation to the reader. Gratian's Decretum is like a legal version of Sic et Non with an answer key. The result was a work that became canonical in every sense of the word, attracting more than 100 commentaries before this entry was out. When universities began to appear in places like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, Gratian's work provided a textbook for students. Some observers worried that law was outstripping theology as a subject. As bright young men flock to become lawyers, one contemporary complained that, perception that northern Italy was the home of law, and Paris the place for cutting edge theology. Gratian's Decretum would be supplanted as the key legal compilation in the mid-13th century, but he is still quoted liberally by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and remained important to later experts in canon law. One particularly important canonist, a contemporary of Aquinas, was called Acursius, a name which would be equally at home in Voldemort's spellbook. Gratian was certainly influential then, but does he really deserve a place in a history of philosophy? Yes he does, and not just because he followed the example of Abelard and was later quoted by Aquinas. The Decretum touches on a number of philosophical issues, sometimes in passing and sometimes at greater length. The best example is the opening sections, which take up the question of law itself, what it is, under what circumstances it has force, and how we identify the sources on which to base church law in particular. He begins by telling us, Gratian then adds that the so-called golden rule, Christ's exhortation to do to others as we would have them do to us, is an expression of this natural law. This is a big moment, since it's the first time that we're encountering the concept of natural law, which will play a major role in later medieval and early modern philosophy. We may immediately feel wrong-footed though. The phrase natural law conjures up the idea of a set of rules that we should all be able to access with our inborn reason. And Gratian seems to agree, since he will go on to say that natural law emerges along with rational creatures and never changes thereafter. If natural law has to do with reason, and not revelation, then why is he drawing such a strong link between natural law and Scripture? Of course, Gratian is writing about church law, so he wants to stress that Scripture does indeed have a distinctively legal kind of authority. But he does not seem to be saying that the deliverances of natural law can only be reached by turning to Scripture, nor does he think that everything found in Scripture is part of the natural law. Rather, he's doing what he does best, by emphasizing agreement, in this case between natural and religious law. His choice of example is a good one. The golden rule may be found in the New Testament, but it is also something that humans could grasp without the benefit of revelation. Which is not to deny that God is part of the story. After all, human reason itself is a gift from God as far as Gratian is concerned. So heathens too are drawing on a divine source when they discover and follow the natural law with no help from the Bible. Alongside the natural law, there is what Gratian calls human law. This means any law set down by a human authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical. In addition, there are all the requirements and guidelines that fall under the heading of custom. How then does custom relate to human and natural law? One thing is clear, no human law or custom has force if it contravenes the natural law. For instance, let's assume it is part of the natural law that children should respect their parents. If so, then we cannot be obligated to mistreat our parents just because some king lays down a supposed law directing us to do so, or less hypothetically, because we belong to a society where the old are routinely scorned by the young. So the natural law sets boundaries for human laws and custom. There's plenty of room within these boundaries though, which is why there can be so much variation between various human laws and various customs without any departure from natural justice. More difficult is the question of how customs interact with human law. Gratian tries to strike a delicate balance here, as he juxtaposes texts that seem to give priority to custom with others that emphasize the authority of written laws. He reasonably points out that laws are pointless if they contradict deeply ingrained social practices. Had he been alive in 1920s America, Gratian would not have been surprised that prohibition failed to produce a teetotalling population. Custom also gives us rules to follow when human law is silent. On the other hand, Gratian is a great supporter of centralized authority, especially the authority of the pope. He strongly supports the Church's side in the investiture contest, declaring lay investiture as invalid. And his compilation of church doctrine is itself an attempt to strike a blow for law against custom. With a book like Gratian's, the popes and their emissaries would find it easier to insist that local church authorities around Europe were, almost literally, singing from the same hymn sheet. These issues about the nature and sources of legal authority are the most obviously philosophical ones in the Decretum. But there are many more, sometimes raised only in passing as when Gratian mentions that there is one circumstance where we may be permitted to violate natural law when we are faced with an exclusive choice between two evils. Interestingly, a gloss on this passage gives us, as an example, the Jews whose conscience told them they must crucify Jesus. As Peter Appelard pointed out, they were, this time literally, damned if they did and damned if they didn't. Murdering Christ was a sin, but neither would it be right for them to violate their own moral conviction. Gratian also offers influential remarks on another issue, the question of when Christians can justly partake in war. He sets down two basic requirements here, namely that the war be declared by a legitimate authority, and that the war be undertaken for reasons of defense or redressing an injury, and for the sake of justice rather than revenge. At first, this sounds rather restrictive. Armies would be unleashed only in response to the wrongful aggression of others. But when Gratian discusses the source of wrongdoing that could justly provoke a declaration of war, he states that all enemies of the church are fair targets. This was no idle point, given that the First Crusade had been launched in living memory at the end of the 11th century, with the Second Crusade coming up shortly after Gratian wrote the Decretum. Another problem he faces is narrower, and has to do with the role of clergy in war. Priests are forbidden to shed blood, yet it was common for them to go on campaign, with the Crusades again providing a good example. Supposedly, one bishop avoided shedding blood by electing to use a mace rather than a sword in battle. Gratian's solution is slightly less creative. Clergymen may help wage war in an advisory and spiritual capacity, but not do any fighting themselves. Gratian was not the only systematizing thinker of the 12th century to hail from northern Italy. Indeed, he was not even the most famous. That honor must go to another man whose geographical origin is clear from his very name, Peter Lombard. He wrote a massive treatise on theology, whose broad approach was much like the one Gratian took in the Decretum. Apparently conflicting authorities were quoted, with Peter Lombard explaining how the conflicts could be resolved. His masterpiece was called The Sentences. The English version of the title may seem rather generic. One imagines a blurb on the cover saying, if you like Peter Lombard's first two books, The Letters and The Words, you'll love his sentences. But actually, the Latin title, Sentensiae, refers to the authoritative opinions he is quoting. In any case, here's how influential it was. I could spend the rest of this series on medieval philosophy talking about nothing but texts responding to the sentences, and still do a pretty good job of covering the terrain without any gaps. It became standard for theologians to cut their teeth by commenting on the work. This could be the occasion for pathbreaking philosophy, when the commentaries were written by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. The practice would become so well established that we still find Martin Luther commenting on the sentences in the early 16th century. His personal copy, with extensive annotations, still exists today. It's only with Peter Lombard that we finally see the full emergence of something many would assume was an ever-present feature of medieval intellectual life—a systematic and complete presentation of Christian theology. Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers had ambitions in this direction, and Peter drew on both of them. But the most thorough single work of theology prior to his sentences was Hugh of St. Victor's On the Sacraments. All these men were active in Paris, so it's no coincidence that Peter came there early in his career bearing a letter of introduction addressed to the Abbey of St. Victor by none other than Bernard of Clairvaux, whose endeavor to live a godly life apparently involved becoming omnipresent in the history of this period. Peter may even have studied with Hugh of St. Victor personally. But in his sentences he dropped Hugh's distinctively historical approach and adopted a more logical or conceptual structure. Peter also helped his readers by equipping his text with features we take for granted today, but which were not so obvious at the time. The sentences has a table of events, detailed chapter headings, and even dots to indicate where direct quotations of other texts begin and end, the way we use quotation marks. Like Gratian, Peter Lombard wants to demonstrate that the apparent differences between authoritative texts mask a deeper underlying agreement. The approach is summed up in the nifty Latin expression diverse sed non adversi, diverse but not opposed. On some particularly difficult topics, though, Peter simply set out different theological positions without trying to harmonize them or decide between them. One such case was the incarnation. From all the many topics covered in the sentences, I've chosen to discuss this one, not only because it is an important theological issue, but also because Peter's remarks on it occasion some criticism amongst his readers. The basic question is familiar to us from late ancient Christian philosophy. Christ was both fully human and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, but how can one person be both fully human and fully divine? Peter approaches the question much as late ancient authors had done by asking about the relationship between two natures in Christ, but his immediate points of reference are more recent. He discusses three positions on the question, which recall the theories of the incarnation defended by Hugh of St. Victor, Gilbert of Poitiers, and Peter Abelard. All three shared a basic assumption about human nature, namely that every human has an immaterial soul and a material body. Since the soul seems to be much more like God than the body is, you wouldn't blame these medieval thinkers for assuming that Christ's divine nature had to do especially with his soul. And indeed, Peter Lombard remarks that divinity became united to Christ's flesh through his intellect, or rational soul. On the other hand, Christ's divinity should be somehow joined to his entire human nature, and human nature does include the body. How then was divinity joined to both body and soul in Christ? The first answer, inspired by Hugh of St. Victor, is that the body and soul were both assumed by the divine nature. This avoids the difficulty of leaving Christ's body outside his divinity, but threatens to eliminate the human nature entirely. The second view, which is that of Gilbert of Poitiers, takes more or less the opposite approach by saying that divinity is a third distinct thing in Christ added to body and soul. Here, there's no danger of eliding Christ's humanity, but it's difficult to see how Christ will be a single unified person. Divinity and humanity would be juxtaposed rather than fused. Indeed, you might even wonder how on this view we have one rather than two persons in Christ, and the whole point was to understand how a single person can have two natures. Finally, there's the third view, based on Abelard. This time, the idea is to start with the divine person and imagine it taking on human nature in a more accidental or extrinsic way, like someone putting on a set of clothes that he can later take off. Peter Lombard is too modest to pick from among these options. He simply documents the strengths and weaknesses of all three views without endorsing any of them. Oddly, he was later taken to task for embracing one idea that he seems to reject pretty decisively in the sentences, namely that Christ's human personhood is nothing whatsoever. If it were, then his humanity would constitute a further person alongside the second person of the Trinity. The judgment that in Christ the human person was nothing has been called Christological nihilism, which I mention mostly in case anyone out there is in a religious heavy metal band and is looking for a good album title. There are some hints that Peter may have taught this view in private, but as I say he does not endorse Christological nihilism in the sentences. More generally, the sentences was mostly accepted as being not just acceptably orthodox but the ultimate guidebook to Christian theology and its textual sources. Hence its long career as a basis for commentaries, which gives the work a central role in the history of philosophy. Of course, Peter Lombard was setting out to write about theology, not philosophy. But like Gratian, he touches on many philosophically important topics, some of which are familiar to us from entirely non-theological contexts. The debate over the incarnation we've just been discussing has a variety of philosophical implications. Any solution depends on a theory of human nature and a view on the question of how natures or essences belong to particular things. As we heard in the interview with Andrew Arlig, it connects to questions about parts and wholes, too. Another nice example of the philosophical interest of the sentences comes along later in Book 3 when Peter is discussing Christ's possession of the virtues. This leads him to inquire into the nature of faith, hope, and charity. In this context, he asks whether perfect charity is compatible with treating some people better than others. Modern ethicists still wonder whether we are justified in preferring to promote the welfare of our own friends and family, as opposed to, say, strangers in other countries who are poverty-stricken and need our help much more than our intimates do. Admittedly, in the sentences, the question comes and goes quickly, but that very brevity invited later authors to have their say on this and other philosophical issues Peter had raised, producing more than a few sentences of their own. Either Gratian nor Lombard were exactly philosophers then, but given their importance in the history of philosophy and the many philosophical issues that arise in the Decretum and the sentences, I hope you'll agree that it made sense for me to devote an episode to them. It should also be clear by now why I have put them together. Not that this is a novel idea, there was even a medieval legend that the two were brothers. If you still aren't convinced, though, I can call on support from Dante, who placed Gratian immediately alongside Lombard in the circle of the sun in the tenth canto of his Paradiso. See, I told you they were star witnesses. But I'm not quite done presenting testimony. I'm so convinced about the importance of the history of law for the history of philosophy that I want to spend one more episode on the topic. Next time, you'll be hearing an interview with Caroline Humphress, whom you might remember from episode 100 of the podcast. As an expert on Roman law, she's perfectly placed to provide testimony on the tradition that led up to Gratian. So, ladies and gentlemen of the podcast audience, there is only one verdict you can possibly reach, which is that you should join me again next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about medieval law and its roots in ancient law with Caroline Humphress, who is Professor of History at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Hi, Caroline. Hi, Beth. Thanks for coming on the podcast again. It's a pleasure. Longtime listeners will know that you came on one of the special double episodes before to talk about ancient society, together with Mike Trapp. Great to be invited back. Thank you. And this time we're going to be talking about the legal tradition. This is something I've just touched on in the previous episode, because I was talking about Gratian, the great systematizer of law in the 12th century. And we're going to be talking about where that tradition of medieval law came from, which in the first instance really means talking about Roman law. So maybe you can start by telling us what sorts of works in the legal tradition came out of the Roman era. So I think we have to remember, first of all, that the Roman era is a very long era. So you know, we're looking at the 12 tables in terms of the first compilation of written law, which we have extant, so that's around about 450 BC. And then we go all the way through to the Justinianic compilation, which is in the 530s AD. So there's almost a millennium worth of legal development there and an incredibly diverse set of legal sources, and also a very important Roman, particularly Roman tradition of jurisprudential literature. So by that, I mean, commentaries by legal experts on particular texts and also on the works of each other. So there's a really broad kind of distinction there between the 12 tables, which gives rise to what gets called the Roman us cavilae, the law of the citizens, the kives. Moving on from that you then get the praetorian developments in what's known as the us honorarium. So that's centered on the city of Rome itself, the praetors, urban praetor, and also the praetor for the peregrines, the foreigners developed a huge branch of civil law, which related to non citizens. So you have these various different strands of development, then you have this jurisprudential tradition, these legal experts who really get going in the late republic into the first century AD. They produce commentaries on the us cavilae, they produce commentaries on the praetorian law. They also give responses. So a really important part of Roman jurisprudence is these jurists giving responses to concrete situations to petitioners, but also giving opinions on particular legal matters arising out of a kind of casuistic approach to thinking about law. So you don't so much get Roman jurists as great systematizers in the sense of sitting down writing treatises about a particular topic in Roman law. What they do is that they take concrete cases and then they try and reason out from those cases and do it in a kind of professionalized body. Okay, so there's this broad distinction then between actual laws, lists of laws, so the earliest one is the twelve tables that you mentioned, and then reflecting on the laws. And as a philosopher, what I immediately want to know is when they reflect on the laws or comment on the laws, do they reflect on them in a particularly theoretical way or are they just saying, well, this terminology here is unclear, so let me explain to you what this word means or how high level does it get? So I should also mention of course that the Roman system really kind of got going and developed because it's a remedy-based system, so we shouldn't think about the twelve tables as a set of laws, they are more a set of scenarios or remedies which people can expect the Roman state to take care of. So part of the reasons why the twelve tables were formalized was to say what it's okay to do via self-help and what it's okay to actually go and ask the state to give redress for if you have a legal problem. So this would be something like if someone steals my horse, then I can expect the state to come in and do such and such to them, demand that they pay me back or something. Yeah, so at an early period, for example, if you were a householder and somebody came along to your house and you actually caught them in the act of stealing something, you could kill them and the state wouldn't be interested in that. So that changes as the Roman state increases and expands and grows and becomes literally an empire, albeit an empire with a monarch ruling over it, you very much see that these sorts of things develop and change, but it really does stay remedial. So if we then move to the jurists, what the jurists are interested in doing is still keeping that kind of remedial basis. So they look at cases. These are either cases which are practical, they're really happening out there. Gaius has a case against Sestus and they come and they ask a jurist for advice about that and the jurist will give advice or they're hypothetical cases. So this is where your question about the theorizing comes in. So Roman jurists definitely were interested in theory, as we might call it. They're interested in frameworks, developing particular ways of seeing law and understanding law, but what they're not interested in mostly is actually then writing that up in a treatise. They want to see those sorts of discussions as emerging out of concrete cases, whether those cases are real or invented, if you like. And the hypothetical case is then to tie it down to, at least in theory, a potential decision that could be made in a real-life legal situation. So they never just try to isolate the principle at stake. It's always about what would we do. Exactly. So it's not like a common law idea about precedent. Certainly that's not what the jurists are about. They're not saying, you know, here we have all of these various precedents to do with case law, so the judge who comes along and judges in a similar case is bound by that. That's not part of Roman law. What the jurists are really, I think, interested in, what you can see if you look at their texts, is that they're developing a particular methodology, a scientific methodology, and that bears a lot of relation and crossover, I think, to philosophical method and ways of thinking about dialectic, for example. And the use of thought experiments, actually. Absolutely. So the jurists, you know, some of the jurists argued that law was a science. Others argued that it's an art, so it's one of those, you know, kind of distinctions, but they all agree that it has a system. It's like medicine in that respect. Exactly. And where does the standing of these legal judgments come from? I mean, if a reputable jurist says, well, the correct understanding of such and such a law or the correct decision in such and such a case is the following, does that have any binding force on later decisions or is it just his opinion? So again, it depends which period of Roman history you're looking at, but if we go for the kind of the imperial period, so the early empire into the late empire, then definitely there were jurists who had more of a standing than others did. And we've got to remember that jurist prudence up until perhaps third, fourth, fifth centuries was quite cliquey. You know, these guys are well educated. Most of them come from pretty good families. Most of them before the Severe and dynasty in the third century end up at Rome. They usually know each other. They move in the similar kinds of circles. So there's very high reputational stakes. There's also from the first, second century onwards, the idea that some emperors actually gave specific jurists what's called the jus respondendi, the right to respond. Now there's some problems about how historically concrete that is because our real evidence for that, apart from a couple of inscriptions, comes from the early sixth century and the emperor Justinian, who had various reasons of his own for wanting to make it look like the only jurists who were authoritative were the ones who had been given imperial opinions. But even before Justinian, you get in the later Roman period in particular, emperors ruling about jurists who are more authoritative than others. So very famously, the emperor Theodosius II picked out five Roman jurists from the earlier empire, from the second, third centuries AD, and said that these were the guys who should, whose opinions should be particularly well respected in court and established various rules and methodologies for reading them against each other and what you were to do if they all agreed or all disagreed, etc., etc. Okay, well that actually brings us on to something that I obviously need to ask you, which is how this all relates to medieval law, and in particular, to what extent these texts survived into the medieval period and were read or when they started to be read again. So could you tell us something about that? Yeah, so really, it comes down to Justinian, as I mentioned, an emperor in the early sixth century who, emperor in the eastern half of the empire based in Constantinople in the late 520s, early 530s, he produced a very big compilation of law, which included a text known as the Digest. Now the Digest is pretty much our source for Roman juristic literature. So Justinian assembled all of the works of the jurists previous to that epoch, got a commission to go through and did a kind of cut and paste job, harmonizing them, putting them within specific books and titles, systematically reorganizing them, and then announced in preambles to the Digest that the work was a work of reason, in a kind of written reason, that it was, there was no incoherence within it, which is very important for the Middle Ages. So the Digest is one of the texts which when it gets rediscovered in the West in the later 11th century into the early 12th century, it's a game changer in terms of the systematic professional study of law in the medieval West. The continuation of the tradition in what we would term the Byzantine Empire is slightly more straightforward. So you have the Justinianic compilation, which later gets known as the Corpus Series Covilas, then you have the Byzantine emperors who come along and redo that compilation at various points in Byzantine imperial history. You also in the East have a continuing tradition of legal expertise. So the jurists as they're known under the earlier Roman Empire, become referred to as the Antikesso race in the later, so that's the kind of more of a straight connection there. But that's not to say that the Roman legal texts didn't actually have, you know, a kind of presence in that period between the 6th century and the 11th, 12th centuries in the West. Certainly the Christian church acted as a kind of, as a carrier for lots of Roman legal ideas and in fact, also Roman legal texts. So some of these Roman legal texts were being copied in monasteries and scriptoria around medieval Europe. There are also the so-called libri ligales as they were later known, what we refer to as the barbarian law codes. So some of those are more Roman than others, but particularly for example, in the Lombard kingdoms, where again, you have that kind of more straight relationship with the Justinianic compilation because Justinian, even though he issued his legal compilation from Constantinople, was urged by the then Pope, Virgilius, to also authorize it for use in Italy, because Justinian was busy trying to reconquer Italy and reconquer the West. So again, that's kind of more of a straight overlap there. So there's quite a lot of Roman law in Lombard law. But what you tend to lack, I think this is it's true to say, is that straight kind of sense of legal expertise that you get in the jurisprudence of the earlier period. It seems actually like a kind of microcosm of medieval cultures' relationship to ancient culture in general. So we see it in philosophy as well, that in the Byzantine Greek-speaking world, things just kind of march on as if nothing has happened, because in a sense, nothing has happened, whereas in the West, the Empire falls apart. And so you have a period of loss, which is then followed by a period of recovery, which in many fields seems to happen in the late 11th and the 12th century. And so this would be another case of that. Yeah, although I wouldn't want to suggest that nothing changes in the Byzantine period, because there are huge changes in terms of what Leo, the emperor, in the 9th century is doing with Roman law. So it's not so much that you've got a kind of stagnation as far as the law is concerned in the East. They're developing Roman legal ideas. Big questions about whether they're actually applying them. That's something else, which we might want to think about. But definitely, the rediscovery of the Digest, whichever way you play it, that rediscovery of the Digest in the sort of late 1070s into the 1080s and the systematic study of it at the University of Bologna really is, it introduces a whole different way of thinking about law. And I suppose, by the way, that that also explains why law emerges in such a big way in northern Italy, because that's where Justinian had promulgated his Digest. Yeah, although again, it's, you know, there are lots of scholarly debates and arguments about how direct that lineage is. Some scholars would argue that the text of the Digest that was recovered, and it wasn't recovered en masse as a kind of something which floated down from heaven complete. There were various different stages to recovering what's known as the Corpus Juris Cavilis. But some scholars argue that it was brought from Constantinople. Some say that it was, you know, lying in a library neglected. So yeah, it's a really complex area, but a very interesting one too. And by the way, it was promulgated in Latin already in the ancient time. So it's not like they had to translate it from Greek into Latin. Yeah, although there are some technicalities of Justinian's corpus. There are some uses of other languages in the Roman Juris. So as the Empire expanded, and you get Roman jurists who have perhaps provincial backgrounds and who maybe are even writing for a provincial audience, you do get little bits of Greek within the predominantly Latin text. Justinian, though, who remember is based in Constantinople in the early sixth century, he decides after, you know, having put together the Digest, the Institutes and his Codex, he's still issuing new constitutions, what's known as novels, and he makes a decision in the 540s that they will be issued in Greek. So you do have this sort of shift in the early sixth century from Latin into Greek. Now, again, you know, that there are big questions scholars have pointed out that the official texts of imperial constitutions may have been Latin, but there must have been Greek translations because the texts which are actually used as working texts in the Eastern Empire are in Greek. So that kind of bilingualism is already there. It's just not there on the surface when you look at the great big late Roman compilations like that of Theodosius II or Justinian's Codex. Okay, so this all then shows us something we've been seeing over and over in the podcast so far, which is the continuity between antiquity and the medieval period. On the other hand, I'd like to ask you something about something that seems to me to be a very striking feature of medieval law, starting at least in the 12th century, which is that they have two systems of law, as far as I know, namely what we might call secular law on the one hand and what's usually called canon law on the other hand, which is basically the law within the church. And that makes me wonder whether that distinction really is new in the medieval period or whether there was already a distinction between religious law and non-religious law in the Roman time. Yeah, so as ever with these kinds of scholarly questions, it depends which context you ask that question from. So I'll try and enumerate what I mean by that. So if we take, for example, the 438 compilation of Theodosius II, very famously in Book 16 of that compilation, the Theodosian Code, you have a number of imperial constitutions relating to what we would term religion. So there are various titles within Book 16 concerning monks, concerning bishops, concerning the Catholic faith. Definitely, it's a book about religion. Now, again, this is not wholly new because Roman law, even though in a narrow sense, Roman civil law means private law, because that's what the Roman jurists tend to focus on, in a broader sense, the Roman civil law had always included public law and religious law too. So depending on if you're seeing the Theodosian Code as a product from the earlier period, you could actually argue that Book 16 should be there and it fits. But if you're looking back on it from the medieval period, it looks strikingly new because this is the first time that you get imperial constitutions legislation relating to the Christian church. Now at the same time as all this is going on, the Christian church, of course, is growing and developing institutionally. So it's kind of creating an institutional structure for itself. The first use of the term, the body of canon law, so the Corpus Rius Canonicum comes from the 12th century, but there is definitely something that we can call canon law earlier. So for example, the Council of Nicaea at Metin 325, very quickly compilations of the canons that were agreed at that council. So the things which the bishops actually said, okay, it pleases us to have these issued, they get circulated and they're known as the canons of the church. There's also a body of literature and both from the earlier period and going through into the Middle Ages relating to apostolic constitutions. So some of that is pseudepigraphal. So you know, people are saying this is what the Council of Jerusalem, when it met in AD 46 put together. So you've got this kind of pushing back of this idea that people, individuals in the church meeting council and come up with decisions and they are the kind of things which the church then has to abide by. So that idea of apostolic constitutions, apostolic canons goes right the way through to the Middle Ages. But it's called pseudepigraphy because it's not really from the earlier period. Yeah, although again, we need to remember that that's from a modern perspective looking back. You know, if we'd asked pseudo Isidore, whoever pseudo Isidore was, you know, in the sixth and seventh centuries, is this pseudo stuff? Is this pseudepigraphal? I think he probably would have said no. So that needs to be remembered. But on the other hand, you can't trust a guy whose name is pseudo Isidore. Yeah, but his name wasn't even pseudo Isidore. But the other thing to remember about kind of, you know, canon law, if you can call it that before the 12th century is also papal decretals. So we have evidence for basically popes acting like emperors, you know, people sending questions to them saying, can I do X? Is it okay to do Y? And the Pope writes back and gives an opinion about that and the opinion has authority. So the point at which this begins in the late fourth century, the Pope is of course, the Bishop of Rome. And the whole idea that the Pope is the Pope is something which is going to be developed into the early medieval period into the high Middle Ages. But there is a real precedent there for those later papal decretals, which becomes such an important part of canon law. Okay, so all that explains why it is that when Gratian comes along towards the end of the 12th century, he doesn't think that he's inventing canon law, he thinks he's summarizing and collecting canon law. Absolutely. But the collecting part I think is really crucial. So you will find excerpts from Roman law in the work of Ivar of Chartres, for example, or in Bacarda Vermes. But what they're not interested in doing so much, I mean, they're interested in gathering together these texts because they're authoritative in some way, and they can use them in a specific context. I think what's different with Gratian is that he's actually starting out with big questions such as, what is law? What does it have to do with God? What does God want us to think of law being? What's justice? And he's producing this incredible, well, concordance of disconcordant texts. He wants to put them together and then come up with some sorts of answers at the end. And that's partly because of the scholastic method too. Right. And here, we're pretty clearly getting closer to philosophical territory. And there's a lot of different things we could focus on here, including the question of what law is. But I'd like to start by looking back to something that I covered a few episodes back, which is questions about political authority and legitimacy, and in particular, the relative standing of the Pope, or the church in general, on the one hand, and the secular king or emperor on the other hand. And that raises a question, again, about what the situation would have been in antiquity. So certainly, we find emperors like Justinian, for example, or already Constantine, attempting to intervene in what we might call religious affairs. So they call councils, they express an opinion, to say the least, about theological points, for example, Trinitarian controversies and so on. To what extent does that create an important precedent then running into the medieval period, where it is accepted that what we would think of as a secular authority is able to sort of lay down the law, in this case, the religious law, and not just the secular law? So first of all, I would just want to maybe problematize this idea of there being the secular and the religious or the secular and the sacred. So a lot of bishops in the later Roman Empire, as in the early Middle Ages, were landowners. They have a secular authority, they have, you know, various fiefs and vassals. They have armies. Yeah, they do, absolutely. So I think that that's one area. The other way that I want to kind of reframe the question a little is, of course, it's important and you do get late Roman emperors stepping in and, you know, saying this is going to be the case. Most famously, supposedly Theodosius I, you know, who was made, according to some of the late Roman sources, to do penance by Ambrose of Milan. So, you know, there you have this really stark humbling of an emperor by a bishop because an emperor had overstepped the mark and needed to be brought back into the fold the right way of thinking. But from the research that I've done, I think it's much more of a question of the church bringing the imperial authorities in. So what you usually find in the late Roman period is some kind of, you know, ecclesiastical individual who has a problem and then asks the emperor to bring their authority to bear on solving that problem. So, you know, perhaps not invariably, but I think a lot of times, but when we're not seeing so much the emperor stepping in, we're seeing the church inviting imperial authorities to come in, you know, and give weight to whatever. And then, of course, the thing expands and becomes much more widespread than I think that the individual ecclesiastics ever envisaged. They let the genie out of the bottle, basically. Exactly, exactly. Okay. And what about the standing of the emperor himself? I mean, obviously, Augustus had plenty of authority in the early Roman Empire, and so did his successors. To what extent was that authority legitimized in a legal way? I mean, was it just, oh, he's got all the swords and he's got all the money, so he's in charge? Or did they actually claim to have some kind of legal standing as emperor as well? What we know really comes down to some texts that Justinian exerted in the early 6th century in this work called The Digest that I was mentioning before. So, in this sense, Roman law, and especially the kind of imperial Roman law, it's like a toolkit. So, if you go to Book 1 of The Digest, you'll see a statement by Ulpian saying that the prince is above the laws. So, you know, the prince can do whatever he likes, to put it more bluntly than Ulpian does. But if you go to Book 1 of the Codex, which is the collection of imperial constitutions put together by the same emperor Justinian, you will see there that a constitution from Theodosius II has been exerted and included, saying that it's part of the imperial authority, part of the imperial magistry, that the emperor should be bound by the laws. So, depending on what argument you want to make, you can go to these Roman legal sources, these Justinianic texts, and you can develop an argument about how the emperor is above the law, or you can develop an argument about how the emperor is bound by the law. Does that, by the way, literally mean that the emperor could, for example, be arrested for murder? So, if the emperor turned around and ran someone through with his sword, then in theory, at least, according to the second theory, the guards could come along and drag him away. Yeah, although the Roman jurists would never have developed that as a theory. So it's much more likely that those statements from Ulpian were very concrete statements, which then got exerted by Justinian and made to look more general. And then that opens the way for the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, those statements to be put into situations which they were never envisaged to be used in. So, Bartolus of Sassafarato, one of the medieval so-called commentators, took these statements and tried to use them as justification for Italian city republics having the right of self-governance above emperors. Now, this is not something which the Roman jurists or Justinian ever envisaged. The other really important text which arose out of the Justinianic compilation is that the so-called text on the Lex Regia. So this is where an emperor's, there's a text written by a Roman jurist, which states that Roman emperors were granted their authority by the people, basically, at the beginning of their imperial rule. And this has a huge afterlife in medieval debates, because obviously, if you focus on that text, then you can begin to justify the notion that communities are the ones who give power to rulers to rule. I see. That actually, to some extent, already answers the next question I was going to ask, but I think I'll ask it anyway, because what I was going to ask is that there seems to be a kind of paradox that if the emperor is somehow bound by the law, you might have thought that the emperor is also the source of the law, or that his authority is what makes the law, or what gives the law its standing in the first place, and then that would be at least circular if not worse. But of course, if the emperor's legitimacy stems from the people, then that would, as it were, be the place where the buck stops. Yeah. Well, I think when Justinian puts all these texts together, he very famously states at the beginning of the digests, remember, these are loads of excerpts of different juristic authorities that he's putting together, but he states at the beginning in one of the preambles that it now proceeds as if straight from his divine mouth. So this idea that he is in fact the complete source and fount for the law at the same time as respecting the Roman civil law, etc., etc. So it's a fine balance, I think. The text about custom as well in the jurist, so that's Salvius Julianus wrote a text, a very important proof text, about whether it's custom that makes law and can custom actually circumvent statute. So if you have a community or a city that has practiced something for a very long time, and then you have a piece of statute legislation which overturns that, is there an argument there for overturning the statute? So these sorts of debates, questions were certainly known to the Roman jurists, but they were, you know, medieval jurists really ran with them. You know, working within the new universities, applying scholastic methods, yeah, they were used in contexts which you just couldn't imagine in the sixth century when Justinian actually put this stuff together. Those examples give us some different models for understanding how law comes about or how it comes to have the standing that it has. We've mentioned the idea that the emperor might just declare it to be the case. We've mentioned custom. We've mentioned the will of the people. But there's another important idea that we're going to see numerous times in episodes to come, which is the idea of a natural law. And then the human law, as Aquinas calls it, would in some way be a formalization or a specification of what's already naturally legal, so to speak. And again, I'm wondering to what extent that is already prefigured in the ancient world. Is that a theme that the medievals were picking up and running with from these legal texts themselves? I think it is, but it would be a mistake to think that all of the medieval reasoning somehow stemmed out of the ancient world. And again, there are texts there which medieval thinkers could use, both canonists and civilians. So individuals who are working within a canon law traditions or early ecclesiastical traditions. So for example, the idea within early Christian thought of natural laws revelation. That's very important. Revelation, of course, is to come along and argue that natural law is not just about revelation, it's also about reason and it's accessible to human reason. So that's something we also find being picked up by Thomas Aquinas and developed in different ways by Bonaventura and other different medieval thinkers. And certainly the individuals in the medieval period working somewhere like Bologna with these newly rediscovered Roman legal texts would have seen in the beginning of Justinian's Digest as well as elsewhere that the Roman jurists thought about natural law and they kind of left these very suggestive sentences which scholars ever since have argued about. So it's not just the medieval, it's also the early moderns and indeed today the whole natural law tradition is influenced to some extent by Roman stoic ideas, which I think you can also see coming through in various different ways in the Roman jurisprudential tradition too. But they're more picking up on suggestions than a well-developed theory that was present in Justinian's Digest or something like that? Yes, I think that they're putting it together. So Peter Stein once said that Justinian's Digest is like a kind of giant supermarket where you can go around sort of shopping for ideas and that's a really useful model. You know, all that later thinkers are like magpies and they go for the shiny bits. Yeah, they do the same thing with Augustine. Yeah, indeed. Let me finish by asking you a more specific question about two groups of people in particular in Roman society and then how ideas regarding these groups then evolved in the medieval period. This is actually something we talked about in the previous interview as well, I think. Namely, slaves and women. So these are maybe lower groups of people than the male citizens, at least from the Roman point of view, and they were presumably covered quite extensively in the Roman legal literature. What did the legal literature say about slaves and women? That's probably a big question, but in brief. And what did the medieval then do with that material when they picked it up? So I think that there is a big difference, and I'm going to sort of put my neck out and just say it, that I think that if you're looking at the Roman Empire into the late empire, you have a kind of societal structure there, which is the paterfamilias, which is a legal institution. So this notion that you have the male head of the household and that the children and his wife and slaves are part of the familiar, and they are all dependent basically on the paterfamilias unless they can get out of his power in various different ways. I think that kind of societal, I don't know if you'd even want to call it sociological type of setup, is not something that continues on balance into the early Middle Ages and the medieval world. But you definitely have, again, that use of the kind of the shiny bits from the text which relate to that notion of patriarchal authority, and also authority of slave over master being picked up and used in medieval contexts. So very straight application that I can think of would be the kind of Aquinas's argument, which is also there, I think, in a nascent form in Gratian, that slavery is part of the just gentium, so it's part of the law, which is common to all peoples, but it's not actually part of natural law, except in the sense that it's an addition to natural law. That's something which they're developing using Roman materials. So you can see how again, the Roman materials would never have envisaged, I think that kind of argument being made within the Christian context that Aquinas and Gratian are interested in making it in, although Augustine makes some moves towards that direction. And yet the sort of raw materials for that argument, the authority, if you like, is coming out of that earlier tradition in those texts. Okay, well, speaking about the role of women in society, something that I promised on earlier episodes is that the medieval period is going to give us an opportunity to see some female philosophers. And the most famous of them is Hildegard of Bingen, and she will be the topic of the next episode. So that's an exciting thing to look forward to. For now, I'll thank Caroline Humphries very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much indeed. And please join me next time as I talk about Hildegard of Bingen here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode... Leading Light Hildegard of Bingen When I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame, a joke was doing the rounds. Notre Dame is playing football away at Boston College and the two coaches are chatting before the game. The BC coach asks whether the Notre Dame coach would like to know the result beforehand. How's that possible? asks the Notre Dame coach and his colleague says, just follow me. He goes to a pay phone and feeds in $10 in quarters, then dials and hands the phone to the Notre Dame coach. A deep voice says, this is God, what would you like to know? The coach asks about the result of the game and God says, you're going to lose by a field goal. When the game is played, the prediction proves true. The following season, BC is playing the return game at Notre Dame. The two coaches meet again and agree to try to find out the result ahead of time. They go to a pay phone and the Notre Dame coach slots in a single quarter. The BC coach says, only 25 cents? Sure, says the Notre Dame coach. From here it's a local call. The point of the joke is presumably to exalt the home of the Fighting Irish at the expense of their fellow Catholic school, Boston College. But I enjoy it in a different, rather more ironic way. It exposes the preposterous notion that God, assuming he exists, would be more strongly tied to one university than another. I say it's preposterous, but probably not everyone back at South Bend would agree. This is, after all, a region which refuses to set its clocks ahead in spring, like the rest of the country, instead sticking to what the locals like to call God's time. But for me, the notion that God arbitrarily chooses certain people or places for his favor is downright medieval. I don't mean that as an insult, of course, but as a genuine historical observation. Actually, the idea goes all the way back to antiquity. In one of his more puzzling pronouncements, which is saying something, Aristotle remarked that the divine mover is located at the periphery of the cosmos, a line which occasioned many attempted explanations by later commentators. The phenomenon of prophecy, meanwhile, was common currency among the Abrahamic religions, and prophecy was usually understood as God choosing certain humans to be granted special knowledge. Hence, many ancient thinkers, and nearly all medieval ones, accepted the possibility that God manifests himself in specific places or to specific people. But it's one thing to believe this, and another to be confronted with someone who claims to have experienced such a manifestation. That's what happened to Bernard of Clavaux in the year 1146, when he opened his mail and found a letter from a woman named Hildegard of Bingen. Amidst fulsome praise for Bernard, the letter contained some disconcerting claims. Hildegard wrote that she had been having visions, in fact experiencing them since childhood. She had long kept them secret but was now asking Bernard what to do about it. Characteristically though, Hildegard had already decided what to do. Five years earlier, a particularly vivid vision had unlocked for her the inner meaning of Scripture. After confiding in a trusted monk named Vollmar, she had begun to compose her first major writing called Scivias. The title apparently abbreviates the Latin, Scivias Domini, Know the Ways of the Lord. So, Hildegard was by this time preparing to reveal herself to the world, just as God had revealed himself to her. Bernard and the other church authorities undertook to investigate her claims, and Hildegard's gift was accepted as true. Henceforth she would not be the obscure head of a convent in the Rhine Valley, southwest of the city of Mainz. She would instead be honored as the Sibyl of the Rhine, a visionary whose fame spread across Europe, like Joan of Arc but with a pen instead of a sword. And we know which of those is the mightier. When Hildegard wrote to Bernard, she was already well into her 40s, having been born just before the turn of the 12th century. According to her own account of her childhood, which is quoted in one of the admiring biographies written after Hildegard's death, she was already visited by what she called the living light at the age of three. She began to display what one can only call magical powers, for instance by foreseeing the pattern on the coat of an as-yet unborn calf. As a reward for this adorable act of clairvoyance, Hildegard was given the calf as a present. Her parents could afford it, they were well-to-do. But they didn't do all that well by Hildegard. At the age of eight, she was entrusted to the care of a woman named Jutta, who brought Hildegard with her to a convent attached to the monastery of Disibodenberg. Hildegard would remain here for decades, living a life of solitude but managing to acquire some degree of education thanks to Jutta and later the monk Volmar. She would later withdraw with her sisters to a new location some distance away, a decision which would annoy just about everyone concerned apart from Hildegard herself. But she usually got her way. This she was of course unlike most 12th century women. But then not too many 12th century women had direct communications from God or would have been a position to write about these communications. As if that weren't enough, Hildegard wrote on scientific topics, particularly medicine, with descriptions of the properties of plants, animals, and gemstones placed in a setting reminiscent of the works on natural philosophy composed by her contemporaries. And speaking of composing, she also wrote words and music for liturgical use. Scores for these pieces have survived, and they are frequently performed by early music groups. In fact, the clip of music you've been hearing at the beginning and end of each episode on medieval philosophy is taken from a piece by Hildegard called Veni Criator Spiritus. These compositions are quite unusual for the period, which is unsurprising given that as one of her correspondents gushed in a letter written to Hildegard, she had made no prior study of music. But now the skeptic in me wants to speak up. In her own day and in modern times, Hildegard has often been treated as a kind of idiot savant, a mere conduit for the inspiration that flowed through her. Yet her three main works all present intense descriptions of the visions she had enjoyed, followed by highly articulate discussions of the theological and philosophical meaning of those visions. The obvious inference is that Hildegard was both an intense visionary and a highly articulate theologian and philosopher. So you can't blame me for being suspicious when her medieval biographers emphasize her simplicity rather than her learning, celebrating the divine fire that dwelt within Hildegard rather than paying tribute to her intellectual firepower. But I have to admit that this way of seeing Hildegard began with Hildegard herself. She said that the entire content of her writings was revealed to her by the living light, not just the visions, but the interpretive passages in which she makes sense of them. Her intimate understanding of the Christian textual tradition, and even of books by certain philosophers, was not the result of study but simply another manifestation of her gift. This aspect of Hildegard's intellectual profile is bound up with the most basic and yet most remarkable fact about her—she was a woman. From what we have seen so far, medieval philosophy was like long-range communication before the invention of the telegraph, exclusively male. It was practiced in the boys' club context of monasteries and schools. The coming of the universities at the turn of the 13th century is going to cause many changes, but gender diversity will not be among them. If Hildegard and her writings were taken seriously, indeed recognized as sources of deep wisdom, it was precisely because that wisdom was understood to be not her own. Hildegard herself said as much, Anyone who picks up her writings expecting to find a proto-feminist will be alarmed at the frequency with which she emphasizes her lowly status as a mere woman formed in the rib of Adam. Her ideas, she seems to suggest, would count for nothing if they had not been dictated to her by God himself. In a letter she wrote to another female mystical thinker of the time, Elizabeth of Schönaal, Hildegard wrote that she is nothing but a vessel built by God for himself and filled with his inspiration. Yet a comparison of these two women reveals that Hildegard was extraordinary even among medieval women mystics. Elizabeth had to rely on her brother to write down her visions, whereas Hildegard boldly and pointedly wrote her own treatises and in Latin, the language of intellectual culture rather than in German. And then there is Hildegard's confident interpretation of her own visions. After you've read Hildegard, you'll probably remember above all the imagery. For instance, Skivias begins by describing how she saw a mountain the color of iron, upon which was seated a vast man glowing with light and sprouting two wings, while a small child stood at the foot of the mountain, its face obscured by light, pouring forth from the man above. But you shouldn't forget to read on to the explanation, which tells you that the man is God, the mountain his created kingdom, and the child the humble person who is suffused with grace. In short, Hildegard is not sharing with us a report about some inscrutable trance state. The visionary image serves as a text, like the text of the Bible, and it is paired with an authoritative exposition that only Hildegard can supply. Indeed, her works frequently slide from exegesis of the visions to exegesis of biblical passages and back again. So even though Hildegard is often described as a mystic, her works are full of discursive explanatory prose. Likewise, Hildegard is far from disdaining rationality as a feeble and inadequate mode of understanding. To the contrary, she speaks frequently and positively of human reason, which she identifies as the third and highest part of the human being along with body and soul. She sees vice as a failure of rationality and reason as our instrument for reaching God. But reason does need to know its limits and accept guidance from faith. Hildegard makes this clear on the rare occasions when she alludes to the masters of the schools in her day, usually critically. Her attitude here is close to that of Bernard of Clavaux or William of Saint-Héry, who encouraged Bernard to persecute Peter Abelard. Hildegard complains that the schoolmen were motivated by desire for fame rather than wisdom, and blames them for failing to root out heretics like the Cathars, who, she remarks in a particularly wince-inducing moment, are worse than the Jews. Were these accusations based on actual acquaintance with scholastic teachings? Hildegard's works touch on a wide range of philosophical and theological issues, so she frequently has the opportunity to imply such acquaintance, and imply it she does. To mention just a few examples, she refers to the understanding and will as twin powers of soul. She speaks of God creating natural things like a smith forming things from bronze, much as authors like Bernard Silvestris spoke of nature coining things from matter. She distinguishes God's foreknowledge from his creative activity, and she assumes Augustine's idea that evil is non-being. With her typical flair, she adds to that idea a wonderful image, saying that evil first emerged when Satan fell and stretched out his hand to grasp at the nothingness through which he was plummeting. Her works on physical topics are also full of recognizable, if occasionally somewhat idiosyncratic, appropriations of standard medical learning. She teaches, for example, that gemstones contain inner heat since they were formed by warmth in the earth. This accounts for their beneficial healing powers. But the most remarkable example of Hildegard's confrontation with scholasticism is a letter she addressed to the Parisian master Odo of Soissons. He had written to her to ask her opinion about Gilbert of Poitiers' idea that divinity is a property distinct from God himself. As usual, Hildegard begins by stressing her humble position. She is not imbued with human doctrine, but depends on God for guidance. But she is far from hesitant in answering his question. Although she well understands Gilbert's point, she thinks he is laboring under the misconception that human words can be applied to God. Like other critics of Gilbert, she argues that his teaching would compromise divine simplicity. Divinity is therefore to be identified with God, and in fact nothing whatsoever can be added to him in adherence to the rule that, whatever is in God is God. Surely though God's light didn't descend all the way from heaven just to tell Hildegard that Gilbert and his scholastic colleagues were stepping out of line. Didn't the visions grant her insights that were unavailable in any other way? Actually, it seems not. One of the stranger aspects of her writings is that, although the accounts of the visions are very strange, the ideas she extracts from them with the help of the living light aren't particularly strange at all. Far from giving her a unique way of understanding God, the light frequently tells her that God is beyond her grasp, just as he is beyond the grasp of all other humans. Divine transcendence is of course anything but a novel idea, even if one can count on Hildegard to express it in an indelibly memorable way. The knowledge of humanity is like a mountain rising up towards God, but the summit of that mountain is God's own knowledge, which remains hidden from view. Unique though her works are, her ideas fit well into the landscape of 12th century thought. For instance, her exegetical remarks, whether directed to her own visions or to Scripture, often juxtapose historical, allegorical, and ethical interpretations. This is familiar to us from Hugh of St. Victor. Her cosmology, too, is similar to what we find in other natural philosophy of the time. It does have unusual aspects as when she describes the cosmos as having an egg-shaped rather than spherical form, but this seems to be intended mostly for symbolic effect. The shape of the egg represents the initial simplicity of humankind, broadening into understanding with revelation, and then constricting to a time of great tribulations as the world approaches its end. One of the key themes we found in Bernard Silvestris and Alain of Lille was that the human is an image and miniature of the universe, a so-called microcosm. And this is a favorite theme of Hildegard's, too. She writes that, This is of course not to say that Hildegard's writing is banal or derivative, far from it, but it is to say that what is really philosophically revolutionary about her writing has not so much to do with what she believes, but with the way she writes about her beliefs. She speaks with an authority that no philosophical argument, however well-designed, can provide, because when she speaks, it is actually God we are hearing. The overall effect is as if an Old Testament prophet were proclaiming the philosophical teachings of the day. This is particularly important when it comes to the area of philosophy that is perhaps most dominant in Hildegard's writings, which is ethics. Again, her ethical teaching itself is nothing revolutionary. She praises virtue and scorns vice, which for her, as for so many Christian authors, means loving God instead of the world. But no other author of her time, and few of any time, expressed this core idea with such a powerful combination of imagery, poetry, and stagecraft. And I do mean stagecraft. Hildegard's Skivias includes a play written to be performed by her sisters in costume, in which they acted the parts of the virtues, the vices, and the penitent soul who was trying to improve her lot. This raised not just eyebrows, but hackles. An abbess, who gives us a late entry in the competition for best name of the 12th century, Kingsvich of Andernach, wrote to Hildegard, criticizing the impropriety of such goings-on. The practical implications of Hildegard's epistemic and moral certainty are evident from her dealings with church authorities. Consider for instance a letter she wrote to the Archbishop of Mainz, who would have been the leading ecclesiastical official in her area. Hildegard had been instructed to allow one of her nuns to depart in order to take up a post elsewhere. Unhappy with this decision, Hildegard did not hesitate to pull rank on the archbishop, speaking on behalf of the clear fountain, that is, the voice of God, to say that, The legal pretext brought in order to obtain authority over this girl are useless before God, for I am the height and the depth, the circle and the descending light. In other words, back off. Of course, Hildegard is not saying that she herself outranks the bishop. The first-person pronouns in that passage represent God, not her. But given that she claims to speak for God, she can effectively pull rank on the archbishop. This is not to say that Hildegard saw herself, or if you prefer that the light of God told her to see herself, as beyond church authority. Towards the end of her life, she became embroiled in the worst controversy of her career. She was instructed to exhume the body of an excommunicated man buried in her graveyard, and refused on the grounds that the man had recanted before his death. Rather than digging up the grave, she dug in her heels, and once again invoked the moral certainty granted to her by her visions. She did not yield even when her convent was punished by being forbidden to indulge in music, as painful a sanction as one could imagine for Hildegard. Nonetheless, she did work through proper channels to get the decision reversed rather than simply engaging in outright defiance. So we cannot consider Hildegard a rebel exactly, but she knew her own mind, and knew that her own mind was aligned with that of God. It's easy to imagine that, amidst the admiration she received from her contemporaries, there was also a good deal of disapproval and frustration, if not envy. Chastising letters like the one from the abbess Tengsvitch of Andernach are presumably only the tip of an iceberg. If she was met with mixed feelings in her own time, Hildegard provokes little but admiration today. As I come to the end of this episode, I'd like to illustrate one more reason why, which is simply the beauty and power of her writing. Here is one of her verses in Latin, and then in English. Caritas abundant in omnia Deimis excellentissima super sidera Atque amantissima in omnia Quia sumoregi osculum pacis dedit Love abounds in all things, excels from the depths to beyond the stars, is lovingly disposed to all things. She has given the king on high the kiss of peace. Whatever we make of her purported gift of divine vision, it's clear that Hildegard had a gift for writing. For this, for her humble yet imperious personality, and for her inimitable fusion of powerful imagery and philosophy, I am tempted to name her as the most fascinating figure we've covered in our look at the 12th century. At the very least, I'd put her in the top three along with Peter Abelard and Heloise, and by my reckoning, the majority of that list is female. So much for the notion that medieval philosophy was a boys' club. Heloise and Hildegard capture our imagination today, and they had the same effect on the powerful men who controlled their fates. In both cases, facility with Latin was a big part of the reason, even though Hildegard lacked a thorough training in grammar and had to have her text corrected before circulating them. Hildegard also allows the German vernacular to come through in her writing on nature, reaching for her native tongue to name plants or maladies. One example I like is her reference to someone who is fergichtiget, meaning affected by gout. And she wasn't the only 12th century scholar thinking in two languages. In the next episode, I'm going to be looking at a development that laid the groundwork for the explosion of philosophical literature we'll be seeing in the 13th century. The fuse was lit by bilingual scholars working in such places as Toledo, Sicily, and Constantinople. Join me as we travel around Europe and from Greek and Arabic to Latin, as our historical journey reaches the topic of philosophical translations. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Rediscovery Channel, Translations into Latin. I know you'll find this difficult to believe, but I can on occasion be somewhat pedantic. When American friends invite me somewhere by asking, do you want to come with?, is all I can do to keep myself from shouting back, the preposition with takes an object. Fortunately, I've read a lot of Stoicism, so I can usually manage to restrain myself and say, sure, I'd love to come with you. In their ironic way, the gods of grammar have arranged for me to live in Germany, where I can now annoy others by committing Solicisms of my own on a regular basis. But that doesn't mean I don't get annoyed myself. Probably the worst thing is the way younger Germans unnecessarily use English words. My pedants' hackles rise faster than the stock price of a helium manufacturing company when I hear them use verbs like downloden, dansen, or mannigen. Sometimes Germans even use English words and phrases that actual English speakers would never say, like handy for portable phones, smoking for a tuxedo, and worst of all, potnaluck to describe two people who happen to be dressed the same. But I can't really enjoy gloating about the parlous state of the German language, and not only because, if I did, the most suitable English word to describe my emotional state would be schadenfreude. It's also because so much of the philosophy I love goes in for the same sort of linguistic borrowing. If you read through medieval Arabic translations of Hellenistic scientific works, you'll come across plenty of examples, with Greek words simply transliterated in Arabic, as when they call imagination fantasia. A few centuries later, when medieval scholars in turn began to translate from Arabic into Latin, it was a case of plus achans, plus c'est la même chose. One of the first Latin translators was Adalard of Bath, and he scattered Arabisms through his works, sometimes providing an explanatory gloss for the reader. For instance, when discussing the outermost sphere of the cosmos, he wrote in Latin script the word al-mustaqim, which reflects the Arabic al-mustaqim, and helpfully added id est rectus, that is, straight. If that still leaves you puzzled, you're probably in the same state as most of Adalard's readers, who had no way of seeing behind the Arabicism to the true meaning. That didn't stop them from trying though. When Thomas Aquinas was reading another treatise derived from Arabic, he came across the phrase, the first cause is not iliathim. You can almost see him scratching his head in confusion, before deciding that this strange word iliathim must reflect the Greek word for matter, houli, which would make sense, given that the first cause, or god, indeed has no matter. So a good guess, but wrong. In fact, iliathim is an Arabicism based on the word for shape or form. So what Aquinas was reading was in fact a statement of God's transcendence, the first cause has no shape, that is, no determination or attribute. Meanwhile, other coinages from Arabic were becoming common currency in the works of Aquinas and others. The Latin technical terminology of the 13th century often reflects terms they inherited from the Arabic-speaking philosophers like Avicenna. To give just two examples, any medieval philosophy scholar will be familiar with the word intentio and the phrase dator for marum, which correspond respectively to Avicenna's ma'ana and wahib as-suwar. These mean, respectively, the content of a thought in Avicenna's theory of the soul, and the giver of forms in his cosmology, which emanates souls and other forms into pre-prepared matter to produce the substances we find in nature. Such details of vocabulary are glimpses of a wider process. As Greek and Arabic works became available to the medieval Latin reader, philosophy itself was revolutionized. This was one of the two historical developments that had the greatest impact on medieval philosophy as we move forward into the 13th century. I'll leave you to guess at what the other one might be until the end of this episode. Aquinas and his contemporaries lived in an entirely different intellectual world than Anselm or even Peter Abelard, who was active only a century earlier. The late ancient sources, who had exercised so much influence in early medieval philosophy like Boethius and especially Augustine, remained vitally important, but they were now joined by Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Ivaroies, who had been made abundantly accessible in Latin. The most important philosophical source of all was one who had still been known very incompletely in Abelard's day. This was, of course, Aristotle. The coming century of Latin medieval thought will be dominated by the project of absorbing these new sources and integrating them with what had come before, even as some rejected the new texts as a dangerous source of heresy. Much like the earlier Greek-Arabic translation movement, the Latin translations began with practical disciplines, rather than going straight for metaphysics or ethics. Already in the 10th century, Gerbut of Oriac may have picked up some of his mathematical knowledge thanks to travels in Spain, bringing him into contact with the Islamic world. When the first major medieval translator came along in the 11th century, his specialty was medicine. This was Constantine the African, who brought books from Tunisia to Salerno and produced the Pantegny, a Latin version of an Arabic medical work. Faithful listeners won't have to be told that medicine had long-standing links to philosophy. The Pantegny was no exception, used as one of the most important sources for the Dragmaticon of the Chartrean thinker William of Conch. For instance, it was from Constantine's translation that William took the idea that there were several psychological faculties seated in the brain, an idea that will be reinforced for Latin readers when they read it in Avicenna's work on the soul. All this was only a small foretaste of the philosophical and scientific feast that would be dished up to the Latin-speaking world in the 12th century. The first course was served by Adalard of Bath. I choose the word course advisedly, since his focus on mathematics seems to have been motivated by a concern with the course of study we know as the liberal arts. His Latin version of Euclid's Elements, based not on the original Greek but on an Arabic translation, filled a gap by supplying a standard work on geometry. The success of Adalard's project is shown by the existence of a manuscript from the same time period, where his rendering of the Elements is found together with works by Boethius on music and arithmetic, thus providing a primer on the quadrivium. Like many medieval translators, Adalard wrote scientific treatises of his own too, which brings us to a bit of a puzzle. Obviously, he was acquainted with Arabic scientific literature, he translated some of it, so it seems we should believe him when he says that in his original writings he is drawing on Arabic learning. Yet scholars have failed to identify his sources. So is this just a bluff? Perhaps not. Adalard may mean that he studied with another scholar who spoke Arabic, and is thus referring to personal oral instruction rather than literary sources which we can trace today. There's an important lesson there, and you don't need to understand Arabic to learn it. In this period, scientific and philosophical learning was being shared from one culture to another through face-to-face contacts. This was not some sort of medieval interlibrary loan as happened earlier when Ariugino was able to get his hands on Greek manuscripts sent to France as a gift from the Byzantine emperor. Rather, the translations mostly emerged in places and times where Latin-speaking Christians had access to native speakers of Greek or Arabic. As those cops from Law and Order can tell you, detective work means looking for motive and opportunity, and that holds true even if the culprits are responsible for nothing worse than executing some philosophical translations. The 12th century provided motive in the form of a large and growing audience of schoolmen in Paris and elsewhere who were eager to get their hands on the works that would fill out their liberal arts reading list. As for opportunity, that came in the form of military conquests. The best example is the most important center for Arabic-Latin translations, Toledo. It fell into Christian hands in 1085, though it would be several decades before Christian scholars arrived and took advantage of the presence of Arabic-speaking colleagues. At least some of these scholars came to Toledo specifically in search of otherwise unavailable texts. For instance, Gerard of Cremona, one of the greatest of the Toledoan translators, went there to find Ptolemy's Almagest. After his death, Gerard's students wrote of how he was motivated by pity for readers of Latin who had so little access to the literary riches available in Arabic. Another translator in Toledo at the same time was Dominicus Gundisallvi, whose name you'll also see as Gundisallinus. Between the two of them, Gerard and Gundisallvi rendered numerous works by Aristotle and by Muslim and Jewish authors too into Latin. A particularly intriguing translator, also active in Toledo, is one who called himself Avendauthe. He's usually thought to be none other than Abraham ibn Dawud, a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher who appeared in this series back in episode 158. It was thanks to him that readers of Latin could peruse one of the works of the Islamic world that exerted most influence in the 13th century, Avicenna's Treatise on the Soul. Avendauthe nicely illustrates the point about personal scholarly contacts. In the preface to his translation of Avicenna, he tells us that he would read out the text in the vernacular to Gundisallvi. This probably means that he was reading it out in Arabic, though some have suspected a process of double translation, with Avendauthe reading it in a vernacular romance dialect and Gundisallvi in turn translating on the fly into Latin. Moving along to the next generation of translators, among the successors of Gerard of Cremona and Gundisallvi was Michael Scott. And for you proud Scots out there, that's two natives of your country so far, the first being Richard of St. Victor. And there are more to come. Michael Scott translated Aristotle's writings on zoology from Arabic in Toledo before travelling to Rome and then joining the court of Frederick II of Sicily. He carried on the Toledoan project of uncovering what Gundisallvi once called the works hidden in the secret places of the Greek and Arabic languages. With a particular devotion to Aristotle and his greatest commentator, Averroes. I get goosebumps when I consider that Averroes's own lifetime overlapped with the first translations done in Toledo in the 12th century. Even as he commented on the Arabic Aristotle done in southern Muslim Spain, the Toledoans were translating Aristotle from Arabic up in northern Christian Spain. Michael Scott was in turn active in the first decades of the 13th century, so just following Averroes's death in 1198. He was not the sole translator of Averroes into Latin, but was responsible for the majority of his commentaries. These commentaries would have a massive impact on the study of Aristotle in Latin. For one thing, they helped to make Aristotle himself available, since Averroes's longest commentaries quoted the Aristotelian text bit by bit before commenting on them. The metaphysics, in particular, was for some time known in Latin only in the version that Michael Scott produced while translating Averroes. Although translations based on the Greek quickly overtook these Arabic-Latin versions, Averroes never fell out of favor as the medieval's primary guide to Aristotle. His ideas concerning the eternity of the world and the human intellect will occasion bitter dispute, and the controversial movement sometimes called Averroism will be a going concern well until the Renaissance. The radical Aristotelians we call the Averroists and their detractors did agree on one thing. They all saw Averroes primarily as an Aristotelian philosopher. Those who rejected his ideas did so not because he was a Muslim, but because his commentaries revealed a conflict between Aristotle and Christianity, or, as Thomas Aquinas argued, because his commentaries in fact misrepresented Aristotle to make it seem that there was such a conflict. I've just mentioned that Michael Scott was present at the court of Frederick II of Sicily, which brings us to the fact that the translation movement was not wholly Toledo. Frederick was a great admirer of Arabic culture and had extensive ties with the Islamic world, as Sharon Eastaw mentioned in the interview about her podcast series on the Crusades. In a dramatic illustration of this, he sent a set of questions on mathematics to the Ayyubid sultan. Frederick had the endearing habit of practicing diplomacy by means of intellectual posturing. His questions were passed on to a Muslim scholar named Kamal ad-Din ibn Yunus, who was also the teacher of two scholars present at Frederick's court, a Christian translator and astrologer called Theodore of Antioch and a Muslim named al-Urmawi. Through these contexts, knowledge about Avicenna and Al-Farabi would have been brought to Sicily. So far, we've been seeing how such interpersonal connections between Christians and Arabic-speaking Jews and Muslims helped trigger the intellectual upheavals of the 13th century. But the Islamic world was not the only culture in possession of these scientific treasures coveted by Latin Christians. There was also the Byzantine realm, where many antique philosophical texts were still available in the original Greek. Indeed, our present-day access to Greek philosophical texts is almost entirely thanks to the Byzantine manuscript tradition. By this time, the Eastern Roman Empire was a shadow of its former glory, reduced in size and power in the wake of the Muslim conquests. But Constantinople could still offer unparalleled access to Aristotle and other Hellenic authors. Again, it was in the 12th century that translators began to exploit this. The most important was James of Venice, who was in the Byzantine capital in 1136 along with two other Italian translators. James was single-handedly responsible for a massive increase in the amount of Aristotle available in Latin, with new versions of several logical works and treatises on natural philosophy. James of Venice worked with Greek texts, but he had something in common with his colleagues who translated from Arabic—absolute fidelity to the text being translated. Whichever language they were working with, the translators would try to render each word in the source text into Latin, even sticking to word order insofar as they could. So medieval scholars had to get used to a kind of translation-ese, reading texts full of phrases that would be natural enough in Greek but that seemed very strange to the Latin ear. Not everyone appreciated the effect. As a well-read aficionado of classical literature, John of Salisbury was appalled by James of Venice's version of the posterior analytics. He said blame must lie with the translator or with scribes who had made errors copying the Latin text, but certainly not with Aristotle himself—a judgment John might have revised if he had ever had the somewhat dubious pleasure of reading Aristotle in Greek. But the translators knew what they were doing. Their method was born out of reverence for the source texts. As one translator remarked, he should be condemned who, when he translates a book, does not blush to take away from the author what he had labored over and to usurp that material for himself. This highly literal technique had been used in the Greek-Arabic translation movement, too, though some Arabic translators adopted a more natural style. In the case of the Latin translations, the technique continued to be used well into the 13th century. It would be criticized and abandoned later in the Renaissance. We still see it with the greatest translator of that century, William of Moabekke, who from 1260 to 1280 undertook to produce new versions of just about all of Aristotle. His translations supplanted the earlier ones, such as those by James of Venice, and became the basis for the sophisticated Aristotelian philosophy of the late 13th and 14th centuries. Another important figure to build on earlier achievements was Robert Grossetest, who will be covering his own right in a future episode. For now, I'll just mention that he produced a popular version of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and commented on several Aristotelian treatises. In one spectacular case, the translations from Arabic and Greek came together to expose the complicated history of the Liber De Causis, or Book of Causes, which had been translated by Gerard of Cremona. The Arabic work he translated had a different title, Kitab fil Macht al-Khayr, or Book of the Pure Good. It was in turn a selective adaptation from the Elements of Theology, a systematic presentation of late ancient Platonism from the pen of one of its greatest exponents, Proclus. The Latin version, the Book of Causes, was a popular work, for instance it received a commentary from Albert the Great. And no wonder, since it was associated with the name of Aristotle. But then William of Moabeca translated the original source from Greek, that is, the really original source, Proclus's Elements of Theology. Thomas Aquinas explained the situation in his own commentary on the Book of Causes, and compared the Latin version to what William had found in Proclus. For good measure, he also brought in a further source, the pseudo-dianing Isias. All in all, it was a remarkable feat of textual criticism, only slightly besmirched by his guess about the provenance of that strange word ilyathim which was made in this same commentary. It's going to take me many episodes to chart the full impact of these new texts. As a conclusion to this episode, I want to mention just the biggest and most obvious point. The influx of works by Aristotle, Averroes, Avicenna, and others, led to a new understanding of what philosophy is in place. The translators had initially sought to fill gaps in the liberal arts curriculum, a goal I can only salute, given my own objection to gaps. But the arrival of Aristotle changed things out of all recognition. We already see this beginning to happen in Toledo, where a short work on the philosophical curriculum by Al-Farabi was translated and then used to help in deciding what else to translate. By the mid-13th century, the sequence of philosophical works required for arts students at the universities of Paris and Oxford was thoroughly Aristotelian, and thus had more in common with the curriculum of 5th century Alexandria or 10th century Baghdad than with that of Carolingian or even 12th century France. The difference already began with logic. In the very early medieval period, Latin readers lacked even access to Boethius, but his versions of the initial writings in Aristotle's Organon or Logical Treatises came into wide use in the 12th century. But the translation movement completed the Organon, and this made a big difference. It meant that medievalists could now study the Sophistical Refutations, inspiring them to sophisticated work on pseudo-arguments and argument technique more generally. It also meant they were reading Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle laid out his theory of scientific demonstration. This changed medieval perceptions about how philosophy should be carried out. Even a very well-informed 12th century thinker like John of Salisbury could proclaim solidarity with the moderate skepticism of Cicero, according to which we must often content ourselves with merely probable beliefs. That favorite text of the 12th century, Plato's Timaeus, fit nicely with his approach since its cosmology is presented as a mere likely account of the universe. The average 13th century scholastic thinker will be having none of this. He has read the Posterior Analytics, and knows that philosophy is meant to consist of valid syllogistic arguments grounded ultimately in certain first principles. Aquinas, admittedly not exactly an average scholastic thinker, will even claim that theology is a special case of an Aristotelian demonstrative science. Furthermore, the Posterior Analytics and other newly translated works made it abundantly clear that a good Aristotelian should be empirical in studying the created world. Certainly, the 12th century can boast numerous treatises on natural philosophy, especially by the thinkers in the orbit of Chartres. But these authors were engaged in a literary exercise more than an empirical one, building on the ideas of Plato's Timaeus. Without the newly rediscovered Aristotle, it's unthinkable that we could get a 13th century thinker like Roger Bacon, who developed remarkable new ideas about how science might be grounded in sense experience. Now then, with this look of the translations under our belt, we're just about ready to tackle the 13th century. Why only just about? Well, because of that second of the two most important developments I mentioned towards the start of this episode. What is that development? Well, after the next episode, we'll understand not just how it was that 13th century thinkers saw Aristotle as the man, we'll also see how he got to be the big man on campus. Make sure to bring an apple for the teacher, because we'll be seeing how the schools of the early medieval age planted the seeds for the core educational institutions of Europe, the universities. As my German friends would say, nicht vergesen zu downloden, the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Straw Men – The Rise of the Universities With the huge influx of scientific and philosophical literature we discussed last time, an educational ideal of the early medieval ages drifted out of reach. No longer would it be possible for any one person, no matter how intelligent and industrious, to master all available human knowledge. Ironic, then, you might say, that it was at just about the same time, in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, that we see the rise of the medieval universities. The very name university, after all, seems to promise the opportunity of comprehensive education. It is a place where you can study all things. But, as it turns out, that is not what the medieval word meant. The term universitas had nothing to do with universal knowledge, nor, for that matter, did it refer to a place. This is not to say that the medieval university had nothing in common with our modern-day institutions. To the contrary, a list of the customs and practices that still survive from medieval universities could include the wearing of academic gowns, the division of teaching staff into faculties and of teaching sessions into lectures and seminars, the observing of summer holidays, the provision of student housing, the hazing of first-year students, examinations, endowed chairs, the awarding of bachelor's and master's degrees, and such administrative terms as chancellor and rector. Also, medieval university students drank a lot. Yet the fact that we still use the word university can be misleading. Originally, universitas just meant a group of people who banded together for collective action. It was applied to many such groups, not only scholarly ones. So, when the medieval's called these scholars at Bologna, Paris, or Oxford a universitas, it was because those scholars had joined forces, at first to seek informal protection of their interests from the church or secular governments, and then later to seek recognition as legal entities. It was only much later that these groups acquired buildings for teaching. Typically, masters would instruct their students in private rooms, such a room being called a scola, or school. At the University of Paris, many of these rooms were on the street of straw, so called because the students sat on bundles of straw during class. Instruction in these schools had already been the practice for generations, which is why we've been talking about scholastics, schoolmen, and so on as we've looked at the 12th century. What changed with the universities is that the students and masters came together to form politically and economically powerful blocs. This enabled them to win the support of kings, bishops, and popes, and also to annoy those same authorities with their demands, unlawful behavior, and alarming independence of mind. In this sense, the universities were simply a development out of the schools of the preceding generations. But the difference was more than one of size. Up through the 12th century, there had been two major institutional contexts for philosophy, the monastery and the school. In a monastery, the emphasis was on personal moral development, and the philosophical teaching that went on was part of a pastoral relationship between master and student, hence the intensely personal, intimate flavor of works by monastic thinkers like Anselm. The schools were instead places of professional expertise in the liberal arts, driven in part by competition between masters who sought to draw fee-paying students. It's in that context that we must understand the bitterness between Peter Abolyard and William of Champo, for instance. Intellectually, their feud was about the status of universals, but personally it was about who could claim the status of sharpest mind in Paris. It's also usual to see Bernard of Clavau's attempt to bring Abolyard and, later, Gilbert of Poitiers to heel as a manifestation of tension between these two institutional settings. Bernard represented the monastic ethos and wanted to subdue the creeping secularism and arrogance of the upstart schoolmen. One might take the emergence of the universities as a clear victory for team Abolyard, but in fact they sought to preserve the moral framework of monastic life alongside the liberal arts curriculum. Such moral traits as discipline and modesty were considered as important for the student as the knowledge they would acquire. In theory, at least, such moral features were even considered in the process of awarding degrees. Student instruction also continued to have a religious setting. Admittedly, most of the dozens of universities that sprang up around Europe in the Middle Ages did concentrate on the liberal arts and the disciplines of medicine and law. But the two universities that were most important in the history of philosophy were Oxford and, above all, Paris. At both, theology was the culminating discipline of the university, with the arts treated as a more basic preparatory level of study. Bonaventure, one of the greatest professors at Paris, remarked that the arts were like the foundation of a house, medicine and law like the house's walls, and theology like the roof at the top. Another difference between the universities and the earlier schools was simply the higher degree of organization implied by the term universitas. Such practices as the wearing of specific clothing, those academic gowns, and the use of official seals on documents were outward manifestations of the corporate nature of the university. Not all the universities had the same kind of organizational structure, though. There were many differences of detail from one university to the next. But the main contrast is between the arrangements at Paris and at Bologna, whose size, fame, and early foundation made them the two models that others would follow. Bologna came along first, having emerged as a major center for law already in the 12th century. The University of Paris can be roughly dated to the turn of the 13th century. It would be associated, above all, with theology, carrying on the tradition of the great Parisian theologians among the schoolmen at St. Victor and in nearby Chartres. So it's no coincidence that it was Bologna that gave us Gratian and Paris that gave us Peter Lombard. Beyond this intellectual difference, there was a contrast of constituency. Bologna was really a corporation founded by students. For them, the university was a way to improve their bargaining position against their own masters. Collective action meant they could force masters to, for example, pay a fine if a lecture was missed, started late, or taught inadequately. The Bolognese students would have loved the Rate My Professor website. By contrast, the Paris model, which was adopted also at Oxford, had the masters joining together as a university to offer a program of studies to young students. And I do mean young. Scholars would begin their studies at the Faculty of Arts at the tender age of 14. The majority of them would never even attain a degree, satisfying themselves with a basic grounding that could launch them on their further careers. This is another important contrast between medieval universities and the ones we know. These great centers of learning were to a large extent offering what we would think of as a high school education. The fact that most of the students were teenagers helps to explain why they were so strong-willed and, to be frank, badly behaved. They were scholars, but they weren't necessarily gentlemen. Many complained about the debauchery of these supposedly morally upstanding young men, and some of the biggest disputes involving universities in the 13th century erupted when the students came together to show solidarity for a fellow scholar who had, say, committed murder. The reason the confederations of students were so powerful was that they could threaten to vote with their feet if the town or other authorities failed to capitulate in such a case. This happened more than once in medieval times. The university at Cambridge was indirectly born when students left Oxford in protest at the hanging of students in reaction to a murder committed by one among their number. Similarly, the University of Vicenza was set up by students who withdrew from Bologna. Decamping like this, or simply going on strike, served as a powerful threat in any political dispute. Masters depended on teaching students for their livelihood, while the cities too benefited economically from the presence of such a large number of students. Perhaps no one benefited more than the whorehouses and taverns. Two of the most significant events concerning the University of Paris in the 13th century involved arguments over a bar bill. The first came in 1200, when a student beat up an innkeeper after arguing with him over payment, and the town authorities reacted by killing several students. In protest, the university went on strike, forcing the king to take sides. He backed the university, and offered it a charter outlining its new rights. Medieval universities didn't have sports teams, but they went in for rematches nonetheless. Almost 30 years later, another dispute over a bill led to riots, another police intervention, and then a strike of no fewer than three years, which ended when the authorities once again gave in to student demands. Students didn't actually have to open negotiations over their rights by beating up innkeepers though. Bologna had been given royal backing much earlier, when a more peaceful appeal to Frederic Barbarossa led to his placing the scholars there under his protection in 1158. However the rights were acquired, to be a student at these major institutions of learning was to enjoy a significant degree of legal protection. In Paris, a university student could only be arrested if he was caught in the very act of committing homicide, adultery, rape, or at the scene of bloodshed with a club, rock, or weapon. Amidst all this murder, rioting, whoring, and political brinksmanship, the universities did manage to put on a few classes. So what was the medieval version of the student experience, as today's institutions like to put it? The first thing to realize is that each student had a relationship with one particular master. In fact, in Paris it was laid down that no one could be considered a student without such a relationship. To matriculate was to be entered into the list of students attached to that master. This was a matter of legal importance, since it was how each student secured access to the rights that the university had managed to win for itself. Having matriculated, the student would be instructed by the arts faculty for the rest of his teenage years. The first degree he could attain would be the bachelor's, or baccalaureus. Despite attempts to suggest that this term came into Latin from the Arabic-speaking world, it seems to be of older provenance and to refer originally to a wreath worn on the head of an initiate. At this stage, the student could himself instruct younger students, while working towards a master's degree of his own. You'll notice, by the way, that I keep referring to the student as he. Women were not admitted to study at the university, so female intellectuals of the 13th and 14th centuries, and there were some, as we'll be seeing, were educated outside the university system, either in a convent, like Hildegard of Bingen had been, or through private tutoring in the aristocratic class. As he progressed through the course of study, the student would be instructed largely through means of lectures. The word lecture comes from the Latin lectio, meaning that an authoritative text was read by the master for the benefit of the students. The so-called ordinary lectures on standard texts were the bread and butter of the arts teaching, and took place first thing in the morning. Masters could also read texts outside the usual curriculum in extraordinary lectures. Furthermore, reading could be done in two different ways. The master could either offer an exposition of the text in the form of a running paraphrase, or depart from it a bit more by posing a series of problems or questions about it. These were called in Latin questiónes. The same kinds of teaching were already used in the 12th century schools. Guebert of Poitiers already refers to them. A further kind of teaching was the disputation. This was an event where two, hopefully well-prepared students would argue on either side of a point, with the master coming in at the end to adjudicate the issue. The most freewheeling kind of teaching at the university would have been the quadlibital disputation, the word quadlibet meaning anything you like. Here the idea was that the audience could raise any question for debate, with the master again giving an answer in conclusion. Occasionally, though not usually, the questions raised were intentionally trivial or silly. If a person is born with two heads, for instance, should he be baptized once or twice? This is one of the practices that was mocked by later critics of scholasticism who liked to depict the activities of the university as strictly authority-bound and mired in absurd minutiae. But in fact, all these modes of teaching gave the masters opportunities to put forward new, and sometimes even daring, ideas. This could be true even with the ordinary lecture taught as straightforward exposition, but it's more obvious with the other types of teaching. Even standard texts could serve as a jumping-off point for innovative philosophical ideas when lectures were put in the form of questions. A good example would be Duns Scotuses, pioneering metaphysical theories which were advanced in lectures on that standby of the theology curriculum, Peter Lombard's Sentences. In the context of an extraordinary lecture, meanwhile, masters were by definition travelling off the beaten path in terms of their choice of material. Then there were the disputed questions, which are worth dwelling on in a bit more detail. Textual reports of a disputed question will include the cases put for and against a given proposition, followed by the master's response and then replies to the initial arguments pro and contra. Often, the master would answer the question at hand, not with a flat yes or no, but by showing the true solution to be rather more subtle. The arguments on both sides might invoke a wide range of authorities. Everyone from Aristotle to Augustine to Avicenna, and maybe even occasionally an author whose name didn't start with an A. Isidore of Seville, perhaps. The upshot was that a series of disputed questions on a given topic could provide an evaluation of the whole history of ideas on that topic, along with nuanced attempts to reconcile the different authoritative views and original positions staked out by means of finely drawn distinctions. Good examples of the genre are Aquinas's disputed questions on truth and on evil. Here, we see the full flowering of the dialectical seeds planted by Abelard in his Sic et Non, and then by Gratian and Peter Lombard. We can now also see why so many works of medieval philosophy take the form of expositions or disputed questions. They were simply records of teaching, set down by the master himself or as a report by students who were present. Even writings not grounded in an actual teaching session would often display the same structure, the most famous example being Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. So that's how the students would be taught. The next question is what the students would be taught. And in the 13th century, questions didn't get much more disputed than this one. Certainly some texts were uncontentious. In theology, the basic textbook became Lombard's sentences with further lectures on the Bible, and no one was going to complain about that. The debates rather concerned the Arts faculty syllabus, which provided the reading list for the majority of students who were also the youngest and most impressionable participants of the university. As the name Arts Faculty implies, the basic structure was at first still the old trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. But as the works of Aristotle became available, there were heated debates about which of them should be read. There could be little objection to pursuing the old logic that had already been known before the translation movement, with its works by Aristotle and Boethius. But what about Aristotle's works on natural philosophy and his metaphysics? These were full of problematic teachings. For instance, Aristotle seemed to depict the human as a mortal being whose soul was a mere form of the body, and argued that the universe had always existed rather than having been created. The debate over teaching Aristotle ran for a generation and more, with an initial salvo in the second decade of the 13th century. Statutes laid down in Paris in the year 1215 banned teaching of the books of Aristotle on metaphysics and natural philosophy or on summaries of them. Of course, the implication is that masters had been doing exactly that. The ban, of course, had no effect elsewhere. Aristotle continued to be read in Oxford, while a new university at Toulouse boldly advertised the possibility of studying the natural philosophy that was now blacklisted in Paris. Nor did the ban do much to blunt the Parisians' interest in this cutting-edge Aristotelian material. As we'll be seeing in coming episodes, much of the philosophical action in the first half of the 13th century continued to revolve around the interpretation and assimilation of Aristotle. By the middle of the century, the process was complete. In the 1250s, a new curriculum was set down in Paris. It did not just allow, but actually required, the reading of numerous works by Aristotle on natural philosophy and psychology as well as his metaphysics and ethics. From henceforth, philosophical education in Latin Christendom was going to mean what it had meant in late antiquity and what it had meant in the Islamic world until Avicenna came along. It was going to mean the study of Aristotle. Though our interest in this podcast series is of course with the universities as a setting for philosophy, we should remember that the universities were not institutions of philosophy, not even in the more inclusive medieval sense of the term philosophy. As we've seen, Bologna, which was the most important university alongside Paris, specialized in law. Conversely, some disciplines that did belong to the study of philosophy in the broad medieval sense were not studied at the universities, at least not as part of the standard curriculum. The mechanical arts had been included by Hugh of St. Victor in his catalogue of the arts, but apart from medicine, these did not feature in the course of study at Paris or Oxford. A more striking absence was the whole second part of the liberal arts curriculum, the mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium. These were pursued at universities, but would remain excluded from ordinary lectures. What about the crowning role of theology, at least in the system observed in Paris and Oxford? Did it cast a long shadow over the secular disciplines pursued by the arts masters? As with a good question, it isn't possible to give a simple yes or no answer. For one thing, students and masters in the theology faculty might also teach in the arts faculty, so the university was not clearly divided into two constituencies of theologians and arts masters. Nonetheless, theology professors did worry that their colleagues in the arts might be drawn into what they disdainfully called curiosity about logic or the natural world. It was an updated version of the complaints that, in the previous century, men like Bernard of Clairvaux had directed against men like Abelard. This tension will come to a head in the 1270s, with two rounds of condemnations in Paris, which sought to bring the arts masters and other Aristotle enthusiasts to heel. A further complication was that there was, after all, a way in which the university masters split into two different constituencies. As Abelard knew, with every nun comes a sic. The influence of the two mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, would be increasingly felt at Paris as the 13th century wore on. They would cause much annoyance among these secular masters who had not taken orders. Mendicants sometimes refused to join in collective action on behalf of the university, they refused to study or teach in the arts faculty, and, perhaps worst of all, they took jobs away from ambitious secular masters. Its attention will need to bear in mind when we look at the upcoming condemnations, or at the debate between the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the arts master C.J. of Brabant. In fact, because the institutional setting will form such an important backdrop for philosophy in the 13th century, I'll be devoting another episode to it before we plunge into the intellectual excitements to come. There's no disputing that you should join me for a conversation on this topic with medieval philosophy expert Kent Amery, next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Professor Kent Emery, who is Professor of History of Medieval Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Hi, Professor Emery. Hello, good to see you, Peter. Thank you for coming on the podcast. We're going to be talking about the institutions in which medieval philosophy was done. And the reason I wanted to talk to you about that, apart from the fact that you're an expert on it, is that it's always been something that strikes me about medieval philosophy. If you compare, say, Anselm writing very early to someone writing much later like Occam, even though we consider them both to be medieval thinkers, they're really inhabiting very different social worlds and very different intellectual contexts. So really what I wanted to talk to you about is the shift from the earlier period to the later period and what difference that makes for our understanding of these texts. So starting with the earlier period, what are the institutional contexts in which someone like Anselm would have been thinking about and writing about philosophy? Well, as I think you know, Peter, philosophy in the earlier Middle Ages, and let's say that's from the 9th through the 12th centuries, was taught in usually three kinds of schools. Those were the cathedral schools and largely in the monasteries. And this was the context in which Anselm did his writing and his teaching of students. And one can see the effect on this in a certain curriculum that was developed within the monastic tradition, all oriented, of course, to the contemplative life and the worship of God. But the liberal arts, as defined and understood in late antiquity, that is the three trivial arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic, and the quadrilateral arts, the mathematical arts of music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy, were part of the normal pedagogy directed towards not only being able to read and understand the scriptures in light of these liberal arts, as Augustine had recommended many centuries before, but also as an instrument for the contemplation of God by the mind. Now if one sees what we call philosophy in Anselm, in fact it is the application, as specialists have shown to us, a very technical, both dialectical and grammatical instruments of analysis, a kind of speculative grammar which had developed out of Priscian and the study of grammar, first of all as an instrument of knowing the Latin language for the reading of scripture, but also then to a certain conceptualization of linguistic problems. This is really what I think modern scholars, this use of these two liberal arts in particular, in an analysis about how we speak about God, and therefore in Anselm's understanding, how we conceive God, really and truthfully, I think that this is what we would call philosophy in Anselm, of subordinate to the end of the monastic life and the monastic institutions that is ultimately the contemplation of God. And you can actually see that to some extent even from the way that Anselm's works are framed because they're in dialogue or they're written for his monastic brothers. Yes, and these are the people who are addressing questions to him, as we know, in the Monologian and the Proseologian. But this does not mean that he is not embarking here in an enterprise to see what the mind alone can conceive about the existence of God and then after the existence of God, the properties and attributes of God. This is an exercise in which he is setting aside for the moment the information of the sacred scriptures. So that was possible within a monastic setting? That was possible within a… Just as much as later on in the universities. Yes, and in one of his treatises, Anselm actually says, let us set aside the beautiful concordances of scripture and sort of in a sense come to the rational structure underneath those beautiful concordances. What were those concordances? They were the monastic and liturgical way of reading the scriptures whereby there was a perfect convenience and harmony between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Nonetheless, though, I would think there must be some way in which the monastic setting has an impact on the way that they do philosophy, I mean, beyond the fact that they would have been doing the liberal arts, that that was the way that monks were actually educated. So what effect does the goal of the monastic life have on the way that these earlier philosophers did philosophy, maybe as contrasted to the so-called scholastics who were working later on in a university context? Well, I don't want to bring up in too simple-minded a way philosophy is a way of life, a pied-a-deux. But if we look, for example, to Anselm's De Veritate, it's a very interesting treatise where he talks about truth on a different number of levels. There is, for example, a grammatical truth, there is a logical truth, then we move on the truth of the correspondence between the minds and things, which we modern people would call philosophy, and then the final and most important, the harmony or correspondence between life and doctrine and the divine exemplar. Here in the end, note that the life proves the doctrine, and the doctrine forms the life. So in one sense, it's highly contemplative, but in another sense, the aim of it is to form and shape a life in a moral and practical way. Yeah, I was also struck when I was looking at Avelard's Ethics, that he actually says that ethics is the whole purpose of doing philosophy. And so, he's, even someone who's, I mean, renowned for his technical expertise, like Avelard, also thinks of the ultimate aim of philosophy as being, in some sense, the impact that it has on our life. Yes, you may remember, I think it's in Book 7 of The City of God, that Augustine gives a fascinating doxography of Greek philosophy. And he makes this statement, it's about the ethical end of philosophy. He said that Socrates, whether it was because he noticed that the students of philosophy were either bored, or because they were impious in dealing into divine things, which were the things of nature, that Socrates was the first to orient philosophy to the question of the good and the way to live. Now, this didn't mean anti-intellectual, because then he builds on the tradition that the order of knowing depends upon the order of being, and the order of right living, the ultimate end, depends upon the right order of knowing. Therefore, you can bring in physics logic as the ground of ethics. I think this idea, yes, is really mainstream in Latin thought, before Aristotle, and is influencing both monks like Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, and then someone who's really doing a kind of new thing, Peter Avelard. But that ideal is still there. That philosophy proves itself by issuing in a life that can be defined and represents some kind of virtue in relation to God and the soul. So you just mentioned, you just said before Aristotle, so obviously we're well after Aristotle himself, but what you mean is the recovery of the full works of Aristotle around the late 12th, 13th century. That's linked, in my mind at least, to the rise of the universities, which is something I've just covered in the last episode of the podcast. What difference did it make in terms of the kinds of topics that philosophers could consider or the way that they would write, that they were now working within a university context instead of a monastic context? Well, the story of the reception of Aristotle in the Latin West is an astonishing story, and I think it cannot be underestimated the shock that the recovery of a full encyclopedia, so comprehensive, without Christian revelation, was to the thinkers of the time. It was a huge challenge. Here is a comprehensive explanation from the first cause on of the universe, of things visible and invisible, as the Catholic creed puts it. So the question is then, all of a sudden we have something which is quite different from what had developed as the Latin and Christian form of wisdom, and the question always is, what do we do with this? Well, the story of the both positive and negative attitudes towards Aristotle in later medieval thought, 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, is pretty well known and can be studied with each individual thinker. And I'll be covering it in episodes to come. Yes. I think the interesting thing is that through the late 12th century and into the early 13th century, and by the, let's say, second decade of the 13th century, for some reason the curriculum of Aristotle became the foundation of the teaching of the liberal arts as it was taught in the university. And so to a very great extent, the students who went to the faculty of arts in the university, I'm thinking here mainly of Paris, and to a lesser extent of Oxford, because there the order of studies was directed ultimately to theology, not medicine or laws in some other universities. But nonetheless, this was the common curriculum, and the students would first of all have to master the organon and the logical corpus of Aristotle. And then, for the most part, philosophy was understood very distinctly in the university by the masters in the faculty of arts as commenting on the various books of Aristotle. Natural philosophy in the physics. This was crucial. The metaphysics, and this presents a problem in regard to Christian theology, and the ethics. These were the three major high points, shall we see, of the liberal arts curriculum. And in this sense, philosophy, understood as something different from Christian wisdom, is Aristotle. And nonetheless, we think of some of the great works of philosophy from the 13th century. We think of works that are theological works, like obviously the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. So is there a difference between the sorts of writings or arguments that one would produce as a master of arts from what would be going on in the theology faculty? Yes, this is very distinctly. In fact, the masters of arts were, in a sense, had to, as a discipline, develop a kind of historicized mind and a kind of modal mind. That is, they had to, in a way, bracket out certain kinds of information from theology in order to be able to expound the text of Aristotle as he meant to theologize in the arts faculty was sort of beyond the limits, was unacceptable, the formal limits of the pedagogy in the arts faculty. But it was also true that one should not philosophize too much in the theology faculty. So in the theology faculty, as you know, and that's where most of the famous thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, John Donscotes, Henry of Ghent, were professors in the theology faculty when they were in the university. And there, all of a sudden, the duty is to expound the revelation and to expound the Holy, the sacred scriptures. And they taught most of their courses on the scriptures. Of course, having been through a training in the arts, that is, in the corpus of Aristotle, naturally they would bring these conceptual ideas and instruments of thinking into their thinking about the datum or the data of Christian revelation. And so modern scholars who, in a sense, want to find a distinct philosophy from theology in the Middle Ages have the habit of going to, and in a way it's perfectly legitimate, of going to these big theological works like the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas or the Ordinatio of John Donscotes or the Quadrilateral Questions of Henry of Ghent and trying to extract from them concepts which we define as philosophical and not theological. But this would have been not understood well by either the masters in the faculty of arts or the masters in the faculty of theology in the university. Because in their minds, philosophy was done in the arts and theology was done, reasonably enough, in theology. That's right. So, we can see some of the same matters treated in the great theological works. But if we have an attention to formal causality, what difference does that make when we're asking questions which also pertain to physics, but we're asking them under the rubric of a theology which already affirms belief, for example, in the creation of the universe? Or a theology that presumes a kind of crazy change that can take place in the transubstantiation of the sacrament of the altar, but which according to Aristotle's physics could not take place at all. Okay. So, it seems like one difference you've sketched there then is a pretty basic one, which is that early on they would cut their teeth on the liberal arts and then, as you were describing in Anselm, they would sort of reach back into their earlier education when they were trying to understand God and the way to live and so on. Whereas these scholastic figures, since they cut their teeth on Aristotle, they were reaching back to the organ on the physics even when they did theology. So, one difference is just that they've had a different education in the universities than they could have had in the ninth or the tenth centuries. Is there any other difference, though, between the theology or the philosophical theology that could have been produced by an earlier thinker like Anselm or Avelard and what could be produced by the scholastics in a university setting? Well, let me put this in something you personally will understand very well. The metaphysics of Aristotle is also first philosophy and it is also theology. Now all of a sudden you have a theology of the Greeks, of the philosophers, of the pagans, and a revelation of the Christians. I haven't used the word theology, although that becomes the word in the thirteenth century, but let me go back to the twelfth century. When Avelard started composing treatises called Theologia Christiana, Bernard of Clairvaux from the monastery said this was an absolute atrocity. No one, no Christian should use the term theology. The reason is that theology was associated with the demonology of the late anti-Platonic philosophers who are treated by Augustine in the city of God, and it had all the resonances of paganism and demonology. And so, interestingly enough, Bernard of Clairvaux says, no, what we do is philosophia Christiana, Christian wisdom, love of wisdom. Well, this totally confuses, for example, our use of the terms theology and philosophy and used institutionally to distinguish a theology department from a philosophy department. How in just 150 years or 100 years could this whole turnaround and all of a sudden what Aristotle does is strictly philosophy and what goes on with Christian wisdom is now properly designated as theology. This kind of change is prompted by the accomplishment of Aristotle. The other question which you say too, we talked about how philosophy had to issue in a way of life within the monastery. In the structure is that one's teaching novices to grow into the monastic life, which is a way of perfection and so on. Now you have a kind of the Aristotelian corpus. That's a pagan corpus. To what degree could a Christian man of the 13th century be an Aristotelian in any kind of internalization? So this enters what we would call a kind of certain objective approach to philosophy. So like when you're a university student, you're not there to learn what kind of person to be. Yes. And move on to some other field of study later. Yes, and in a way in which anybody who studies a Platonic tradition will understand, and then you can think in the Christian terms of Augustine's De Magistro, in the monastery the whole pedagogy is a very personal thing where the master must know the soul and the disposition of the soul of his student. Therefore all of a sudden in the university lecture room, now you're broadcasting doctrine to a bunch of people whom you may not know personally at well. Yes, you can acquire friendships with them as students and professors always do, but you have no particular spiritual authority over the students as would be the case in the monastery. A very interesting question in the Summa of Henry of Ghent where he asks if it is possible for a monk to teach this science, this science meaning scholastic science, which is closely related to the topic, is it possible to teach this science, that is scholastic theology, in a state of mortal sin? So in other words if the teacher has a sinful soul, can they still teach theology to the students? Truthfully, and the question is truthfully. And after long and complicated arguments, Henry says yes you could. In fact you could have an atheist teaching. Yes, off the grounds if you were doing it as starting out with a set of contingent presuppositions and then working out the validity of inferences from them. And the student may not know that the person is a non-believer or that he's leading an egregious sexual life outside the classroom. But nonetheless if what the person formally and objectively is saying is in accordance with Catholic doctrine, well then it can be of value to the students. It seems like that must be connected to the fact that so many of the intellectual authorities in the 13th century onwards are not just pagan but also Muslim and even Jewish. So they're referring to Avicenna and Ivarohes and Maimonides and they don't mind the fact that they're not Christians as long as they're getting the arguments right. Well I could give you something I think you would like very well. You just jogged it into my memory now. My great subject of my study, Dennis the Carthusian to whom I've dedicated much of my intellectual life in the 15th century, a monk, a Carthusian monk for goodness sake but at the same time a Master of Arts from the University of Cologne before he went into the monastery. And he had a particular fondness for Avicenna. And so in one case he is defending some position, metaphysical position, I can't remember exactly now what it is, of Avicenna. And then he says something which Remi Bragg in Paris told me was quite astonishing because most medieval Latins would not have had this. Dennis says, and so Avicenna was a heretic in his own sect and rightly so because it is the duty of philosophy in every age to expose the falsehood of false religions. So he says basically that Avicenna unwittingly exposed the falsehood of Islam. Yes. And he's giving them compliments. And so we go back to the late antique view of porphyry and so on whereby philosophy does subordinate the myths and corrects the error of the religion. Now needless to say, then the question becomes for a person like Dennis, okay, so what differentiates the Christian revelation which must subordinate philosophy to its ends whereas we can praise someone like Avicenna and presumably of Aroes in certain respects because they were not taken in by the deceptive and false religion of Islam. An interesting concept it seems to me. So going back to the 13th century, I guess one other thing that happens there is that it gives the opportunity for people who wouldn't have been to universities or maybe couldn't go to universities like women the opportunity to engage in this philosophical tradition as well which is one striking thing about the Middle Ages which I've been pointing out in these podcasts is that more so than in late antiquity, you have female authors that we actually have texts from who are saying philosophically interesting things and taking part in the history of philosophy. Yes, this is true. Now of course we have some really exceptional people in the 12th century who are benefiting like Hildegard, Bing and so on who are benefiting from this monastic curriculum. Clearly these educated women were receiving the same kind of liberal arts mainly in the verbal arts of exposition, grammar in that sense, exegesis, grammar in terms of a more speculative analysis and so on. But I think in the later Middle Ages it's interesting to know that this pedagogy of mystical theology would have been one typical to women and there was a whole sort of constituted authoritative library on this and it would include many writings of Augustine and some interesting what we would call philosophic writings, De Veritate for example. And it would include the Dionysian corpus in Latin. Then we would have a lot of selected writings of the fathers, for example Gregory the Great on Job and on Ezekiel. This would be part of this library. Many things of Bernard of Clairvaux and then all of a sudden all the treatises in mystical theology which ultimately even if they have quite different doctrines are emanating from the tradition of pseudo-Dionysius and a lot of late medieval authors, for example Jean Gerson and of course the writers interestingly enough really important here, writers from the 12th century, Abbe of Saint Victor, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor. And this whole tradition of theology and the philosophy that's implicit or explicit in this tradition, which is far more platonic than the Aristotelian base for scholastic theology was continuing in full stream. And by the end of the Middle Ages, even by the 15th century, in some ways is what's new in the Middle Ages in comparison to the schools. By this time the schools which are in many sense becoming narrower and narrower and repeating themselves as scotus, thomas, albertus and so on. So I guess we're seeing there again something I've been trying to emphasize throughout which is that it's not just one story of philosophy in the medieval period but numerous stories that interact with each other and we've just found out that those stories sometimes track the difference between different institutional contexts. So thank you very much, Ken Emery, for coming on the podcast. Well this was, I was very pleased to speak with you, an eminent scholar in late antique and Arabic philosophy, but a former graduate of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. That's right, I'm back home. So thanks again very much and please join me next time when I'm going to be moving on to look at some of the things we've just mentioned as I start to look at medieval philosophy in the 13th century here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, No Uncertain Terms – 13th Century Logic Whatever you think of Bill Clinton's performance as US President, you cannot deny that he would have made an excellent scholastic philosopher. Admittedly, the monastic lifestyle might have presented him with some difficulties, but Clinton was able, in the midst of a cross-examination, to come up with the line, it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is. Clearly this is a man who would have been right at home in a medieval disputation. Clinton's ease with such fine distinctions was acquired through his training in law, another reason to think he would have found the medieval university a congenial setting. But the medievals who really got to the bottom of the meaning of the word is, and quite a few other words into the bargain, were those who taught and wrote about logic. With today's look at this topic, I'm kicking off a mini-series devoted to developments in several departments of philosophy during the 13th century. Episodes on natural science, the soul, metaphysics, and ethics will set the table for the feast of philosophy that comes in the works of major figures like Roger Fakin, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Henry of Ghent. Along the way, we'll whet our appetite by sampling the ideas of some lesser-known figures whose historical impact far exceeded their present-day notoriety. The 13th century was a time of great intellectual upheaval, as new ideas from Aristotle and the Islamic world reshaped all philosophical disciplines. Nowhere was the impact of these sources more immediate or far-reaching than in logic. The result was the greatest period of development in this discipline between the invention of logic by Aristotle and the work of Gottlob Frege in the 19th century. Of course, logic had been a standard part of the curriculum for centuries already, in the guise of dialectic, one of the arts covered in the Trivium. And Aristotle was already central to the study of dialectic during the 12th century. So the change was not a sudden rediscovery of Aristotelian logic as such. It was rather the expansion of the logical works now available, and the increase in the number and sophistication of logical textbooks and commentaries. To mark this distinction, the medievals themselves referred to the Aristotelian texts that had long been available in the translations of Boethius as the Old Logic, whereas the works that had become available more recently were called the New Logic. It may seem perverse to call equally ancient things old and new, but as Bill Clinton might put it, sometimes it depends upon what the meaning of the word new is. We can already see this process of recovering Aristotle in John of Salisbury, that most well-read man of the 12th century. Along with his pioneering political treatise, the Polycraticus, John composed another work with a Greek-style name, the Metalogicon. At the outset of the work, he announces that he is taking issue with a man he calls Cornificius. The gesture is a typical sign of John's antiquarian literary taste. Cornificius was a critic of Virgil whose name is being borrowed for the occasion. Whoever he really was, John's opponent didn't like the arts of the trivia. He dismissed dialectic as pointless, probably because of the poor teaching he received. John describes how classes would become so consumed with pedantic complexity that participants would bring along a bag of peas, counting them out one by one to keep track of multiple negations. Cornificius was thus led to adopt the opposed view that whatever is useful in the study of language and argument can be learned quickly and easily. Against him, John argues passionately that the arts of the trivium are anything but trivial. Without grammar, one cannot use words properly, without rhetoric, one cannot use them eloquently, and without dialectic, one cannot pursue philosophy itself. John still represents a 12th century mindset, as is clear from his interest in authors like Virgil and Cicero, his frequent allusions to Marciano Scapella and his praise of the thinkers of Schacht as the greatest teachers of the age. But he's already aware of more logical works than had been used by, say, Bernard of Schacht. He explains the usefulness of the whole of Aristotle's Organon, or collection of logical works, including the so-called New Logic. This included the Prior Analytics, which systematically surveys the types of valid syllogism, the Topics, which studies dialectic, and the Sophistical Refutations, which offers a diagnosis of misleading, invalid arguments. These are the works that are going to revolutionize logic among 13th century thinkers. They will take to heart John's declaration that no one who fails to master the analytics can call himself a logician. Before the student of logic can proceed to the syllogistic arguments of the analytics, though, he will first need to learn about the parts of arguments. These parts will be the individual premises of syllogisms, and even more basically, the terms that appear in those premises. If for instance our syllogism is, Giraffes are ruminants, all ruminants have four stomachs, therefore giraffes have four stomachs, then the first premise is giraffes are ruminants, and it includes the terms giraffe and ruminant. This way of understanding the study of logic was established in antiquity, when it governed the interpretation of Aristotle's works on logic. His categories was thought to address the topic of individual terms, and his on-interpretation deals with whole propositions. The Prior Analytics would complete the job by looking at how one should put together propositions to form valid arguments. The Sophistical Refutations, meanwhile, shows how not to do this. All of this was a perfect fit for the new universities in Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere. Since students were so often asked to participate in disputation, it was urgent that they master the skills and rules of argumentation. That included being able to spot bad argumentative moves made by your opponent, which is where the study of Sophistical Arguments came in. Actually, there's a chicken and egg problem here. Were the schoolmen so interested in logic because of their educational culture, or did that culture only develop because of the availability of Aristotle's entire logic? There is truth in both alternatives. Disputation was already a feature of 12th century education, but 13th and 14th century logic reached new heights of technical sophistication, thanks to the encounter with Aristotle. In the first half of the 13th century, progress was made especially in understanding individual terms. For this reason, the logicians of this period are credited with devising what is called terminist logic. This is not to say that their writings dealt only with terms, only that the sections they devoted to terms contained their most innovative proposals. Two particularly important early terminists were William of Sherwood and Peter of Spain. Active in the 1230s and 40s, they both wrote overviews of logic, with substantial sections devoted to the analysis of terms. Somewhat later, their work was taken up and further developed by Nicolas of Paris and the author of a text called simply Logica. This is ascribed to Lambert of Auxerre, but its authenticity isn't certain. Especially the textbook by Peter of Spain will be used by later writers like John Buridan. Some of the advances made by the early terminists were practical ones, which enabled them to do advanced logic without the use of quasi-mathematical symbols or quotation marks, neither of which were in use at this time. Like any natural language, Latin grammar frequently allows for ambiguity. The sentence, omnis camelo par dos homo non est, for instance, can mean, not every giraffe is a human, or every giraffe is not a human. To avoid such problems, our logicians simply laid down the artificial rule that not affects what comes directly after it in a sentence. Another slightly more colourful example would be a mnemonic device devised by the logicians to help them recall the main properties of syllogistic arguments. Had he been a 13th century scholastic, though Clinton would have been disappointed to discover that Barbara was not an intern coming to help out with the logic class, it was rather the first of a set of clever nicknames given to the syllogistic moods. Each letter in the name has a significance. For instance, the three A's in Barbara indicate that the first premise, second premise, and conclusion of the relevant syllogism all involve affirming something universally, like when I say all giraffes are animals. As I've said, the more substantive proposals made by the terminus have to do with the individual terms that appear in the propositions that can serve as premises and conclusions in a syllogism. Aristotle's logic dealt with what is called categorical logic, from the Greek katagoren, which means to predicate one thing of another. In other words, he was interested in propositions like, Socrates is human, where the predicate human is ascribed to the subject Socrates. Of course, we can also say that a predicate fails to apply to a subject, as when we say Hiawatha is not human. So there's another reason Bill Clinton would have made a good medieval logician. He was expert at issuing categorical denials. Back in the 12th century, Abelard had already pointed out that there was a big difference between merely formulating such a predication and actually asserting it. His theory of dicta, things that can be said, played a role in his nominalist position on universals, but it was more basically a point of logic. A dictum, such as Hiawatha's being a giraffe, does not yet assert that Hiawatha actually is a giraffe. To do that, you must deploy the verb is, or in Latin est, Hiawatha is a giraffe, or if you prefer, Hiawatha camelo pados est. Logicians then, as now, called this verb a copula. One thing we can see from this example is that not all the terms in such a proposition are categorical, that is, standing for a subject or predicate. Rather, we must add another kind of term, a copula, in order to have an assertion at all. And there are many other terms that play a non-categorical role in propositions. If I say every giraffe is an animal, or Bill Clinton is sometimes faithful, the words every and sometimes seem to be modifying either the terms of the proposition or the way that the predicates are attached to the subject. We might say that such terms come along with the subject and predicate. Indeed, this is what the medievalists did say. Alongside catagorimatic terms that refer to the subject and predicate of the preposition, they recognized syn-catagorimatic terms, adding the prefix syn- which means with in Greek. This vocabulary was actually borrowed from grammar, showing yet again the interplay of the three arts of the triveum. Much of the technical discussion in terminus logic involved syn-catagorimatic terms. Take for instance these so-called modal terms necessarily and possibly. If I say giraffe is necessarily animal, is necessarily functioning as an adverb that modifies the whole proposition, or does it only modify the predicate, so that I am ascribing to giraffe the property of necessarily being an animal? That might seem like a pointless question, but it is actually crucial. If necessarily is attached to the predicate and not the copula, then the proposition as a whole is being asserted as merely true, and not as a necessary truth. In which case I won't be able to use this premise in an argument to prove other necessary truths, because you can't infer a necessary truth from a mere truth. In this case, the terminus held that the necessity does apply to the whole proposition. It's perhaps not surprising that a word like necessarily would give rise to such difficulties, but the terminus found that even the copula needed careful thought. Bill Clinton was right, it isn't so obvious what the meaning of the word is is. If I say giraffe is animal, does that refer to some one existing giraffe like Hiawatha who is an animal? Does it mean that all the presently existing giraffes are animals? Does it mean that all past, present, and future giraffes are animals? Or perhaps even that there is a conceptual connection between giraffe and animal, such that my claim would be true even if there are never any giraffes? You can pose more or less the same question as one that concerns the apparently more straightforward categorimatic terms. What exactly is the function of a single term, like giraffe? Does it allude to one specific giraffe I have in mind, like Hiawatha? Or to all the giraffes that exist? To the ones that exist now or also in the past and future? Or could it refer even to possible but never really existing giraffes, like Hiawatha's sister who often features as an example in my non-existent sisters non-existent philosophy podcast? In fact, it seems clear that one and the same term giraffe can function in all of these ways. For this reason, the terminus distinguished between what a term means and how it functions in a given proposition. They called its general meaning its signification. Following suggestive remarks in Aristotle, signification was defined with reference to communication between a speaker and a listener. The signification of a term giraffe is either the concept in my mind that I'm trying to convey to you when I say giraffe, or it is the concept that arises in your mind when you hear me say it. The concepts in our minds in turn signify things out in the world, for instance Hiawatha in the giraffe enclosure. But as we've just seen, I don't need to have any particular giraffe in mind when I say giraffe is animal. So the terminus devised a theory about what they called supposition. A term supposits for whatever it stands for in a given proposition. So the term giraffe has only one signification, but many possible suppositions. No ingenuity was spared in distinguishing a supposition into its types and subtypes. Most generally, the terminus recognized three types, which were called personal, simple, and material supposition. Personal supposition is when a term supposits for a thing or things in the world. Despite the name, the thing doesn't need to be a person. The word tower might, for instance, supposit for the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which do both have a lot of personality as towers go, but still aren't persons. Our authors further distinguish between types of personal supposition in order to clarify which giraffes I am referring to when I say giraffe. I can, for instance, use the word to refer only to one giraffe, like Hiawatha, and then I am using discrete supposition. Equally, I can use the same term to refer to all giraffes, which is distributive supposition. What if I am not referring to any giraffes in particular, but just to the basic concept of giraffe? In that case, I am using what the terminus called simple supposition. William of Sherwood's example is, human is a species. Obviously, this isn't a case of personal supposition at all, since it isn't as if Bill Clinton or any other human is a species. In addition to personal and simple supposition, the third and final type is illustrated by propositions like, human has five letters. Here I am referring neither to particular humans nor to the species human, but to the word itself. The terminus expressed this by saying that I am engaging in neither personal nor simple supposition but material supposition. What's the point of all this? Most basically, the terminus are trying to keep track of what we are and are not committing ourselves to when we say things. An important benefit of this is that we can thereby avoid making fallacious inferences. As they again spared no ingenuity in pointing out, many fallacies are invalid because they use the same term twice, but with two different kinds of supposition. This was something already recognized in antiquity, albeit with much less systematic rigor. For example, Augustine warned against the following tricky argument, You are human. Human is made up of two syllables. Therefore, you are made up of two syllables. This would be an example of a fallacy that arises because one moves from personal supposition to material supposition. The first premise is about you, the second premise about the word human. In this case, spotting the mistake is pretty easy, but the terminus explored more difficult cases too. For instance, how can it be true to say, Pepper is sold here and in Rome, if there is no particular peppercorn that is sold in both Munich, where I am now, and in Rome? Various solutions were offered here, for instance, by saying that the proposition involves a special kind of unfixed, simple supposition. But supposition theory wasn't only a tool for avoiding mistakes. It also provided a context for arguing over numerous important philosophical issues. For example, we can now recast the problem of universals as one about the supposition of terms. If I say, red is a color, what is the term red suppositing for, and why is my statement true? It is tempting to say that red here has simple supposition and thus refers to the universal red. The reason it is true is that the universal red is a real thing and is a color. Of course, this interpretation would be unacceptable to those thinkers who, in the tradition of Peter Abelard, insisted that nothing real can be universal. Thus in the 14th century, the nominalist John Buridan is going to argue against distinguishing simple and material supposition. Since the universal is actually just a name, saying something like human is a species or red is a color is actually a statement about the word human or the word red. The work of the terminus also raised problems that belong to what we would nowadays call philosophy of language. Take for instance the question of how a term comes to have the supposition that it has. A novel and philosophically exciting feature of the terminus theory is that a term's supposition is a function of the proposition in which that term appears. Adding syn-categorimatic terms can change the supposition of the term. Imagine for instance that I take the proposition, giraffes are tall, and add the word always to get giraffes are always tall. I thereby extend the scope of, or as the medievals said, ampliate, the term giraffes, so that it supposits for the giraffes that exist in the past and future, and not just for the ones that exist now. On the other hand, if I add the word blue and say blue giraffes are tall, I restrict the term giraffes to only those giraffes that are blue. The reason this is exciting is that it suggests a general theory about language. What determines the supposition of a term is its context. There was in fact debate about this suggestion in the 13th century. Some logicians, especially in Oxford, thought that supposition was indeed a function of context. Others, especially in Paris, held that each term has a natural supposition all by itself, which can be altered by its context to produce what they called accidental supposition. A final thing to note about logic in the first half of the 13th century is that despite their focus on terms and predications, these authors realized that their logic needed to go beyond what they could find in Aristotle. Here there is indirect influence from Stoic logic, mostly via Boethius. The Stoics had not added much to Aristotle's pioneering work on categorical syllogisms, but had explored other kinds of inferences, for instance those involving if-then statements. Just like the late ancient Aristotelians, the medieval logicians were loathe to admit that Aristotle had dropped the ball when it came to these inferences. Instead they tried to show how Aristotelian logic could be extended to handle them, thinking of something like an if-then statement as a molecular proposition made up of two atomic statements, both of which are predications. An example might be, if Hiawatha is a giraffe, then she is tall. Here the if and then simply link two predications. This can be handled easily enough within the terminus system by treating if and then as syn-categorimatic terms, and then giving appropriate truth conditions for the molecular propositions that involve them. They did something similar, with the more basic problem of propositions that seemed to involve no predication at all. A statement like Hiawatha runs would be analyzed as a concealed, predicative statement. Hiawatha is running. We ourselves are now running out of time. Indeed, given the topic of this episode, you might say that we are like a US president in his 8th year, coming up against term limits. So I'm going to leave it there for now, but with a promise more reliable than you'd hear in any political campaign, we have much more to expect from medieval logic. And 13th century philosophy can stake a claim to achievements in a broad range of other philosophical areas too, a claim that is, unlike Bill Clinton, unimpeachable. Elect to join me next time as we continue our campaign with a discussion of the impact of Aristotle's physics on medieval natural philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. If someone asked you to summarize the place of medieval philosophy in the history of Western science in only two sentences, you could do worse than to say, In the medieval period, science was based largely on Aristotle. Early modern thinkers had to free themselves from Aristotelianism to launch the scientific revolution. On the other hand, you could also do a lot better. Of course, any two-sentence summary of a whole philosophical age is likely to be misleading. The only perfect one that comes to mind for me is, medieval philosophy is really interesting. There's this great podcast about it, which you should really check out. But it's particularly misleading to portray the medievals as backward-thinking Aristotelians. True, they did devote considerable effort to understanding Aristotle's newly available works on natural philosophy and related material from the Islamic world, but they were not backward-thinking. Some of the new ideas that emerged in early modern science have their ultimate roots in commentaries on Aristotle's physics, composed beginning around the middle of the 13th century. And some of these innovations were put forward by that shadowy, multifaceted thinker we have come not to know, but to love anyway, Anonymous. When we think about the deficiencies of the ancients' natural philosophy, the first thing to leap to mind is their false view of the cosmos. I hate to break this to any Aristotelians who may be listening, but the universe is not in fact a perfect sphere, containing nested smaller spheres that serve as seats for the planets, with the earth sitting still in the middle of the whole system. We now know that the sun does not circle the earth, but the other way around, although we continue to speak of sunrise and sunset, which is a good thing since those words are needed to put on productions of Fiddler on the Roof. But it was not just an incorrect cosmology that Aristotle bequeathed to posterity. It was also a well-entrenched theory of fundamental physical principles like motion, time, and space, or rather place. 13th century commentators on the physics are not going to challenge the earth-centered cosmology, but they are going to make productive suggestions about these principles of natural philosophy. Their suggestions were not necessarily intended as innovations. In fact, they were often put forward as explanations of what Aristotle himself meant to say. But the commentators didn't just want to get Aristotle right, they wanted to show that what he said was itself right. Better to give an implausible interpretation of his texts that credits him with a true theory, than to give a more convincing reading of his words that has him making a mistake. If all else failed, they were willing to depart from Aristotle's teachings when they couldn't account for the phenomena we see around us. Thus, the medievals bring to bear observations from the natural world in their commentaries. Consider, for instance, the difference between throwing a feather and throwing a baseball. Non-American listeners may wish to substitute a different culturally appropriate example. For instance, British audience members can imagine throwing a cricket ball, and Germans a potato dumpling. Why is it so much easier to throw the baseball than to throw the feather, so that the same amount of force will cause the baseball to fly a considerable distance, but the feather to float harmlessly to one's feet? It turns out that this is a very difficult question for Aristotle to answer. In fact, he is hard-pressed to explain the motion of projectiles at all, since he generally explains motion and change in terms of the influence of a mover on something that can move. In his jargon, the mover actualizes the movable thing's potential for motion or change. He applies this analysis not just to spatial motion, but other kinds of change, like making something hot. That would indeed be a nice example for his theory. If you put a baseball next to a fire, the heat of the fire will actualize the potential hotness of the baseball, in other words, warm it up. Likewise, if a group of people are pushing a broken down car along a road, they are actualizing its potential for motion. If the actuality is bestowed by the mover, though, why does the motion continue once the mover is no longer exerting any influence? The baseball does stop heating up as soon as it's taken away from the fire, as Aristotle's account would expect, but the car may continue to roll briefly after the people stop pushing it. And if you throw the baseball, its motion occurs almost entirely after it is no longer in contact with your hand. So what is causing it to keep moving? And what determines the distance it flies before dropping to the ground? Like a clumsy bartender, Aristotle was grasping at straws as he tried to provide an answer. He suggested that the medium through which the projectile is moving is somehow responsible for keeping it in motion. When you throw the baseball into the air, the baseball displaces the air and it is the motion of the air, rather than your throwing arm, that keeps the ball moving forward. A strike against this theory is the aforementioned fact that it is sometimes easier to throw heavy things than light things. If you displace the air with the same amount of force, shouldn't anything fly along in the same way? This point was made by Richard Rufus of Cornwall, who was thought to be the author of one of the most interesting commentaries on the physics written in the first half of the 13th century. Rufus taught at the universities in Oxford and Paris, serving first as a Master in the Arts faculty at Paris before joining the Franciscans. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle already in the 1230s, making him one of the earliest masters to engage seriously with these works. Rufus's account of projectile motion is reminiscent of one that had been proposed by the ancient Christian commentator on Aristotle, John Philoponus. Rufus thinks that when you throw the baseball, you give it what he calls an impression, which makes it move unnaturally. The baseball's natural inclination would be to simply drop to the ground, but thanks to the impression made when you throw it, the baseball can temporarily move towards home plate instead, pushing air out of the way as it does so. This also explains why it is easier to throw baseballs than feathers. The baseball is heavier, so that you have to exert more force on it when you throw, hence the impression made upon it is more powerful. Here Rufus is trying to explain how projectile motion works, and in the process departing from Aristotle in what looks to be a promising direction. But we shouldn't credit him with too much. This is not quite the later idea of impetus, since Rufus lacks the idea that a moving object will continue to move unless something stops it. For that, we have to wait until the 14th century. The word impetus was indeed used in the 13th century, but with a different meaning, and by opponents of Rufus's impression theory. Not least among them was Roger Bacon. As we'll be seeing in a later episode, Bacon was an innovative thinker in his own right. But he had little time for Richard Rufus, about whom he remarked, No author was accounted more famous by the foolish multitude, but the wise considered him insane. Bacon preferred a version of Aristotle's original account, with the parts of the medium helping to carry the projectile along. So far we've been talking about the mechanics of how motion actually works. But if you think about it, motion is also pretty strange from a metaphysical point of view. This is because it seems to exist only over time, rather than at a time. When you are helping the baseball to get cozy and warm by the fire, it only ever has one given temperature. And at any instant while a thrown baseball is hurtling through the air, it only has one position. How are these temperatures and positions glued together, as it were, into a single fluid change or motion? The question was raised by Zeno of Elea, a follower of Parmenides whom we discussed a mere 218 episodes ago. Zeno argued that an arrow in flight is not moving, because it is at rest at each time during its supposed flight. This was another puzzle that engaged the attention of medieval commentators. They looked at it from a typically Aristotelian point of view by asking how motion relates to the scheme of 10 categories. But we can think about the problem from a less technical perspective by simply asking how motion or change relates to the property that will be reached by the end of the motion or change. How, for instance, does the heating of the baseball relate to the final condition of the baseball, which is to be, like a high-scoring instructor on the Rate Your Professor website, and how does the flight of a thrown baseball relate to the position it will have at the end of its flight? The Muslim commentator, Averroes, had given an answer to this question when he was discussing Aristotle's remark that there are four kinds of change. Something can alter in respect of its place, its quality, its quantity, or its very substance. Averroes took this to mean that a motion in respect of a quality, for instance, is nothing more than that quality in an incomplete state. For instance, when the baseball is being warmed up, it is on the way to being hot, so we can just think of its status at any one time as incomplete hotness, a score I'd be more than happy to settle for on Rate Your Professor. In other words, the change involved in heating is nothing more than a series of stages of heat. When the medieval commentators began studying the physics, they frequently read their Latin version of Averroes alongside it. Helpful a guide, though Averroes may have been, he was often criticized in the Latin commentaries. These have been studied by Cecilia Trifoli in a book surveying the remarks of no fewer than ten commentators who worked in Oxford in the middle of the 13th century. It's worth noting that all but two of them are anonymous. Just as in the earlier medieval period, unidentified authors continued to play a significant role in the development of philosophy. One of these anonymous commentators complains that Averroes' idea of motion as an incomplete property is itself incomplete. Each stage in the motion or change, for instance, each degree of heat in the increasingly warm baseball, is a product of change just as much as the degree of heat achieved at the end of the heating process. This means we'll need a separate motion to explain each partial change along the way. Besides, the commentator adds, some changes aren't gradual. When a substance like an animal comes to be, it does so all at once and not part by part. Despite these criticisms, a theory of motion inspired by Averroes is going to be put forward by another commentator on Aristotle in the following decades, whose name is not only known, but renowned, Albert the Great. He proposes that we can think of a change as being just the same form as the one that will exist at the end of the change, but with potentiality mixed in. Across time, the change flows towards its final result, with the form becoming progressively more actual at each moment. These metaphysical difficulties about motion have to do with the fact that it is, as the commentators put it, a successive entity. Motion or change exists bit by bit across time, rather than all at once. Considering how puzzling the commentators find this, it's no surprise that they also find time itself puzzling. And they aren't the only ones. Aristotle had raised a whole series of problems about time in his physics, and another main source of inspiration for the medieval's, Augustine, had wrestled with the topic in his Confessions. Both of them wondered whether we can even say that time is real. The doubt is similar to the one we saw concerning motion. Just as a motion unfolds across time and so is never entirely present, so does temporal duration seem to lie outside what presently exists. After all, the past is already gone, the future is yet to come, and the present moment has no duration of any magnitude but is an undivided instant. We often compare temporal duration to spatial magnitude, even talking about a long or short time the way we might talk about a long or short distance, but actually space is very different from time. The distance between pitcher's mound and home plate is all present at once, whereas the time it takes the ball to travel that distance is not. One way to solve this problem is to give up on time's real existence outside the mind. It is we who measure changes in the world by tracking their temporal duration so that time is really a phenomenon of the soul rather than the physical world. Aristotle flirted with this idea, saying that there can be no time without soul, and Augustine also made time a feature of our mental life. For the 13th century commentators, though, it was once again of Verroes who especially represented this skeptical view about time's existence. In his physics commentary, he pointed out that Aristotle's famous definition of time as a number of motion implies that time is mind-dependent. The motion is really out there, but the numbering only happens in your head. This doesn't mean that time is wholly fictitious, though. The motion in the world does have the potential to be numbered, so there is a basis in reality for the mental process of assigning a time to the motion. Like when somebody with a speed gun tells you that a fastball took exactly 0.4 seconds to reach home plate. But the commentators believe that Verroes has once again swung and missed. Richard Rufus, followed by anonymous authors, argued that Verroes was confusing number with counting. The 0.4 seconds that it takes for the ball to reach home plate really is the number of the motion, whether or not anyone counts it. That number is already an actuality, and the only sense in which it is potential is that the number may or may not be measured or counted, for instance by the guy with the speed gun. This is not the only context in which our commentators tackle the problem of number. It also arises when they are discussing the treatment of infinity in Aristotle's physics. The standard Aristotelian view here is that nothing can be actually infinite, but there can be potential infinities. For instance, you cannot have an infinitely big body, but you could have a body that is increasing indefinitely in size while always remaining finitely large. Of course, the ban on thinking about actual infinities is one of the things that will have to be abandoned if we are to get to developments in modern science and especially mathematics. So it's noteworthy that our medieval commentators begin to argue for the possibility of actual infinities in physics. They still don't want to say that there could be an infinitely large body, but there is a kind of infinity even in a body of limited size. As Aristotle himself had said, any body can at least in principle be divided and subdivided without limit. The ancient atomists were wrong to think that you would ever reach a smallest body that can no longer be cut. The question, then, is what we should say about the divisions that can be made in a given body. Let's imagine slicing a baseball in half, then in a quarter, then an eighth, and so on, like taking apart an orange with an indefinitely large number of segments. Maybe this is what they have in mind when they talk about juicing a baseball. On the face of it, this sounds like a standard case of potential infinity. There are indefinitely many segments you can get out of the ball if you have a sharp enough knife. But think about the case of time, which we just considered. We decided that the number of time is actual in the world. What is potential is the counting of that time. So couldn't we say that even if the divisions of the ball are potential, the number of potential divisions is actual? According to this view, which was defended by some of the commentators, infinity would be a real feature of number outside the soul. Other commentators disagreed, and said that the number of divisions becomes actual only when you do some dividing, whether it is with a knife, or by imagining divisions in your mind. At the bottom of this dispute is an ambiguity in the concept of infinity. Is infinity an unlimited magnitude, or is it just the idea that something is indefinite, as when you can at each stage make an even smaller division than the last division you made? We've now considered medieval discussions about motion, time, and infinity, three of the four principles of natural philosophy discussed by Aristotle. The last of them was place, and in this case too Aristotle's account raised serious problems. His canonical definition tells us that the place of a thing is the inner surface of whatever contains that thing. Suppose, for instance, that I were to plunge a baseball into a pitcher of water. After all, what good is a baseball without a pitcher? In this case, the place of the baseball would be the surface of the water that surrounds it, while the place of the water would be the pitcher, or rather the inner surface of the pitcher where it touches the water. Aristotle considered and dismissed a rival theory, which is that the place of each thing is the three-dimensional extension occupied by that thing. So on this view, the place of the baseball in the water is a spatial region exactly the size of the baseball itself. This region was previously occupied by water, but when the baseball was plunged into the pitcher it displaced some of the water and quite literally took its place. Even though Aristotle explicitly rejected this idea of place as extension, commentators found it attractive, because it could help resolve tensions within Aristotle's physics. For example, he thought that there are natural places for the four elements. Earth is trying to get to its proper place at the center of the cosmos and fire to the outer edge of the realm below the celestial spheres, which is why Earth falls and fire rises. Pretty clearly, these natural places are not containing boundaries, they sound more like regions of space. Then there was the problem of the place of the universe itself. For Aristotle, there is nothing outside the spherical cosmos, not even empty space, so there is no further body containing the cosmos to provide it with a place. Absurdly, it would seem that the universe is nowhere at all. Yet again, the commentators turned their ingenuity to solving these problems. Regarding the place of the cosmos, they engaged with an ingenious solution suggested by Averroes. Since nothing contains the outermost sphere of the cosmos, we can in this exceptional case say that its place is provided by the center point of the whole universe around which the sphere is rotating. Strike three for Averroes, according to some of our commentators. His solution would make the Earth prior to the heavens an explanation, which is inconsistent with the heavens' superior role in Aristotelian natural philosophy. They devised substitute accounts, for instance that the place of the outermost heaven could be its own outer surface. As for the place of more everyday objects, like baseballs, they suggest that we might be able to find a compromise between Aristotle's definition and the idea that place is extension. After all, the containing boundary of a body defines a three-dimensional region within itself, which is exactly the extension occupied by the body. By the middle of the 13th century then, considerable progress was being made in natural philosophy, concerning topics we still associate with physics, cosmology, motion, time, infinity, and space, or at least place. But for Aristotle and his medieval followers, natural philosophy included much more than this. They took physics to include the study of plants, animals, and human nature itself. Such living beings all have a principle that gives them life, which is what Aristotle meant by soul. On this topic too, 13th century philosophers wrestled with the ideas they were finding in Aristotle and in works of the Islamic world. This time, the situation was like post-season baseball because there was much more to play for. The religious implications of Aristotelian ideas about the soul were deeply troubling. My pitch to you is that you should join me next time to find out why, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stayin' Alive 13th Century Psychology. Unlike Bill Clinton, George Clinton, who founded the 1970s funk bands Parliament and Funkadelic, and is no relation as far as I'm aware, would probably have made a terrible scholastic philosopher. A more natural place for Clinton in the history of philosophy would have been late ancient Neoplatonism, as we can see from the fact that Parliament recorded a song called Everything is on the One. Still, Clinton had the appropriate qualifications to teach at a medieval university. He did, after all, bear the title Dr. Funkenstein. And it would have been a lot of fun to see the medieval arts masters devoting a disputed question to the definitions offered in the 1970 Funkadelic song, What is Soul? We find in Aristotle that soul is the form of the body that has life potentially, they might have said. But to the contrary, it is stated on the album Maggot Brain that soul is a ham-hawk in your cornflakes. In fact, medieval theories of soul were never quite that funky, but they are liable to strike us as odd nonetheless unless we have a thorough understanding of the sources that influenced those theories, which fortunately, we do. As we've been seeing, 13th century philosophers had access to an unprecedented range of texts, which came down to them from very different traditions. Reading a treatise on the soul from the early part of this century can be a bit like attending a Parliament Funkadelic concert. There are plenty of ideas on display, but the overall impression is rather chaotic. One of the most sophisticated authors of the time was William of Auvergne. He wrote a lengthy treatise on soul, which tries to reconcile traditional Augustinian ideas with material from Aristotle and Evasenna. One scholar has commented that the upshot is, To the extent that this is a fair judgment, it's not because William of Auvergne or other 13th century philosophers were slavishly following their sources without noticing the contradictions between them. They were selective and discriminating in their use of previous material and willing to criticize some of their most influential predecessors. William stresses at the outset of his treatise that he will not simply rely on the authority of Aristotle. Later, he says pointedly that one must often disagree with Aristotle, even if his views should be welcomed when they turn out to be true. When it came to the question, what is soul?, one particular problem was as obvious as a ham-hawk sitting in a bowl of cornflakes. Aristotle had indeed defined the soul as the form of the body, or as the body's perfection, using the Greek term entelecheia. He went on to present the soul as a set of faculties, most of which are exercised through the body. This makes a certain amount of sense if you think of soul, first and foremost, as a principle of life. It meant that Aristotle could ascribe souls to plants and animals, as well as humans, plants leading a life restricted to the functions of nutrition and reproduction, and animals displaying the further capacities of self-motion and sensation. If the soul is the body's form though, then doesn't it depend on the body for its continued existence? If so, then the prospects look pretty dim for a key tenet of Christianity, the survival of soul following the death of the body. Of course, it wasn't only Christians, and, while we're in a 1970s mood, the Bee Gees, who had a vested interest in staying alive. In late antiquity, Plotinus had criticized Aristotle's definition of soul precisely on the grounds that it would make soul dependent on body. Following Plato, he saw the soul as a substance in its own right, which is immaterial and has only a temporary relationship to the body. Christians could find the same attitude in ancient religious authorities like Augustine. On the other hand, Christians had reasons not to go too far in a Platonizing direction. Their religion centered on the incarnation of God, and was committed to the eventual resurrection of the body in paradise, so it was awkward to admit that the body is nothing but an incidental and unwelcome accretion onto the soul. The upshot is that medieval authors didn't just have an exegetical problem about what to do with Aristotle's definition of soul, they had a philosophical problem, how to preserve the human soul's exalted status as an immaterial substance while still saying that one human person is a union of soul and body. Nor was that the only problem they faced. I've just said that for Aristotle, the soul has a whole range of different powers, ranging from the lowly faculty of nutrition, which we share even with plants, to the distinctively human capacity for intellectual thought. How then to show that there is unity, this time not between soul and body, but within the soul itself? If your distinctively human part is your intellect, it might seem that your lower powers would be incidental to you, no part of who or what you really are. One might even wonder whether humans have a plurality of souls, one for thinking, a second for the functions we share with animals, and a third soul for the functions we share with plants. All of which relates to the aforementioned question of the afterlife. The lower powers of nutrition, reproduction, sensation, and self-motion can only be exercised through the body. Upon the death of our bodies, then, will we become purely intellectual beings? And if we were really intellectual beings right along, what would be the point of our taking bodies again at the resurrection? I've already mentioned the obvious authority figures of Aristotle and Augustine. But in discussions of the soul, it was a different author who, like the mothership descending from the rafters every night during the P-Funk Earth Tour, took center stage. This was Avicenna. We saw last time how Averroes's ideas provided an inspiration and foil for authors writing about physics in the first half of the 13th century. In psychology, that is, the study of soul, from the Greek συχη meaning soul, Avicenna may have been even more influential, to the point that his importance at first outstripped that of Aristotle. The earliest example of this tendency is in a work on the soul by Dominicus Gundesalvi, one of the translators who worked at Toledo in the 12th century. He quotes liberally from Avicenna while making only sparing use of Aristotle. Moving forward into the 13th century, we find something similar with the Oxford arts master John Blund, who did not die until 1248, but was already lecturing on Aristotle around the turn of the century. He too turned to Avicenna for help in understanding the soul. Friend of the podcast, Doug Hasse, has written that if Blund's writing on the soul reflects actual classroom discussion, then the textbook must have been Avicenna's on the soul, and not Aristotle's. John Blund recognizes the challenge presented by Aristotle's original definition of soul as the form of the body, and he embraces Avicenna's solution. Namely that the soul does exercise its powers through the body, but its relation to body is merely accidental. Blund connects this to a methodological question. Which branch of philosophy studies the soul? Insofar as the soul is studied through its incidental relation to the body, it falls under the purview of physics. But, insofar as one studies the soul in itself, one is doing metaphysics. Then comes a remark that may overturn our expectations about medieval philosophy, though these expectations have been overturned so often by now that they are as dizzy as the stage manager at a parliament funkydellic show. Blund asks whether the soul isn't a subject studied in theology. Yes, he replies, but only as concerns the soul's reward and punishment. The question of what soul is actually has nothing to do with theology. What we discover when we tackle the properly philosophical issue of the soul's nature, then, is that it is incorporeal. Blund shows this with a proof that indirectly goes all the way back to a dialogue of Plato's, the Phaedo. This just goes to show that whatever happens to your soul, at least your best arguments may live on well after your death. Like Plato, Blund argues that if soul is the principle of life, then being alive is intrinsic to soul. So, it is no more susceptible to death than a triangle is susceptible to having angles that fail to add up to 180 degrees. As an immaterial thing, the soul is not just immortal, but also simple, notwithstanding its numerous faculties which form a unity within it the way that species are unified within a single genus. On the other hand, only the rational aspect of the soul survives after the body's death, since it is the aspect whose power can be exercised without using the body at all. At this point, we might wonder when the theologians are going to burst through the door insisting that they want to have a say after all. They may complain that Blund is making the soul sound very much like God. It is simple, immaterial, and eternal. So how is it that the rational soul falls short of divinity? Blund doesn't consider this question as such, but he would have a good answer ready. Even though the soul is simple in comparison to the body, it is in some sense composed out of multiple aspects. Blund applies to soul a distinction taken from Boethius, contrasting being or substance in itself to the particular nature or essence that belongs to that substance. For instance, it is one thing for me simply to be, and another for me to be a human. A soul too exists as a substance, which takes on a nature, in this case the nature-appropriate two souls. To this minimal extent, it fails to be completely one. This idea that even an immaterial substance like the soul may be constituted from more than one thing is going to play a major role in 13th century psychology. For instance, Aquinas will say that it is thanks to this sort of composition that angels are distinct from God. Only God alone is perfectly simple, pure being with no qualifications or specifications added. Earlier in the century, the same basic idea is often expressed with the apparently rather paradoxical claim that incorporeal things are made of both form and matter. Obviously, the matter of something like a soul or an angel cannot be like the crude matter of bodies, but even an angel or soul does have matter. Here we can detect the influence of another thinker from the Islamic world, in this case a Jewish one, the 11th century philosopher Ibn Gabirol. He put forward a doctrine that attracted both admiration and condemnation from Latin medieval thinkers. We know his theory under the name of Universal Hylomorphism. This sounds a bit like it could be a parliament funkadelic song. I mean, they released one track called Funkentelehi, which in turn sounds like it could be Aristotle's description for the soul of a German radio operator. But in fact, Ibn Gabirol just wanted to say that everything, apart of course from God himself, is composed from both matter and form. Among other advantages, this would ensure that only God is perfectly simple. Where John Blund flirted with Ibn Gabirol's idea, and other authors, such as Philip the Chancellor and Roger Bacon, embraced it outright, it was firmly rejected by William of Auvergne. He was a dominant figure on the philosophical scene until his death in 1249, serving as the Bishop of Paris beginning in 1228. Towards the end of his life, he wrote a lengthy treatise on the soul, which he included as part of an even more massive treatise collecting his thoughts on a range of theological topics. As this context suggests, he does not follow John Blund in confining himself to a philosophical as opposed to theological treatment of soul. For instance, he immediately announces in a prologue that the natural philosopher cannot know that the soul is created in God's image, a belief that had inspired Augustine's treatment of the human mind in On the Trinity. William borrows heavily from Augustine, but Avicenna remains a powerful influence here too. One of William's borrowings from Avicenna is precisely to insist that soul is substantial rather than being only an accidental form of the body. In a phrase that will appear in other medieval treatments of soul, William states that the soul is a hok aliquid, or this something, Aristotle's expression for an independent and self-subsisting individual. It was for this very reason that other thinkers made soul a compound of matter and form, to ensure that it is a this something. But William thinks soul is a special kind of individual, which is free from matter. To prove this, he again makes use of Avicenna. He argues that if soul is capable of thinking about a simple and immaterial object of the understanding, then it must itself be simple and immaterial. This already rings Avicenna's bells, but the more obvious debt to Avicenna comes when William tells us to imagine a human in mid-air without anything available to his senses. This is Avicenna's famous Flying Man thought experiment, although William draws from it a slightly different conclusion. Avicenna asked us to recognize that the Flying Man would be directly aware of himself and his own existence even without any sensory input. By contrast, William simply observes that the Flying Man will be capable of thinking. It is apparently only by noticing that he is thinking that the Flying Man knows that he exists. Thus, William drops, or at least fails to emphasize, Avicenna's innovative proposal that every human soul has permanent self-awareness that is more fundamental than any act of thinking or sensation. Having said that, William lays great emphasis on the soul's guaranteed knowledge of itself. In a passage that evokes Augustine while also prefiguring a rather famous bit of Descartes' Meditations, William argues that the soul could never know that it does not exist, because the soul's knowing anything presupposes that it does exist. To deny the existence of soul and the impressively functional human body, moreover, would be like seeing an expertly steered ship and denying that it has a helmsman. To his credit, William anticipates the objection that may leap to mind for the modern reader. Some machines are capable of very impressive functions despite being lifeless and thus evidently having no souls. Using the example of a water clock, William says that this is no counterargument at all, because human intervention is needed to set up the machine and keep it functioning properly. He also singles out for criticism Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most important late antique commentator on Aristotle. William is appalled by Alexander's suggestion that the soul could somehow emerge from, and hence depend on, the physical states of the body. This must be wrong, because the soul is superior to the body and the better can never be generated by the worse. Besides, William adds, the soul is a substance, so it cannot just be an accidental side-effect of bodily composition. Whereas Alexander appears only as a whipping boy, Avicenna seems to provoke a more mixed response. Not only does William like Avicenna's idea that the soul has guaranteed access to itself, he also agrees with John Blund and Avicenna that the soul's relation to body is purely incidental. In fact, the body is nothing but an external tool for the body, like a musician's instrument or like a house or even prison in which the soul finds itself for now, but can eventually leave. On the other hand, William keeps an eye on the doctrine of the resurrection, insisting that humanity consists in both body and soul, not only the soul. He also chastises Avicenna for saying that the soul needs the body in order to be singled out as the individual soul that it is, and continues to depend on the body for this individuating function during its earthly life. William is further annoyed by Avicenna's idea that the soul is given to the body by an intellectual celestial being distinct from God, the so-called giver of forms. No, it is God himself who creates each soul directly, as an individual substance which is already differentiated from other souls. One interesting stretch of William's treatise concerns the question of how exactly, and when exactly, the soul comes to be in the body. William is particularly concerned with the advent of the rational soul, since it is only upon its arrival that the embryo can really said to be a human. This happens not at conception, but on the 46th day of the pregnancy. Prior to that, the lower soul parts may already be present, which causes William's some concern along the lines mentioned earlier. If the developing infant can have a vegetative or animal soul without the rational soul, then do these souls remain distinct throughout the human's life? If so, then each of us is walking around with two or even three souls. Perhaps George Clinton has that much soul, but for the rest of us it seems quite unlikely. William's solution to this problem, if you can really call it a solution, comes in the shape of a metaphor. When God finally gives the rational soul to the embryo, the lower souls are absorbed into it, like dimmer lights being swallowed up in a much brighter light. While this isn't particularly persuasive, William does make the more telling point that we cannot just say that there's a distinct soul for each power or faculty that a person possesses. Within sensation alone, there are five powers—sight, hearing, and so on—but no one would say that sensation involves five souls. Just as one and the same person can fulfill various governmental offices, so one soul can be responsible for various functions. If you'd prefer a groovier example, just think of how George Clinton was able to be the presiding genius for both Parliament and Funkadelic. William levels one more criticism at the previous tradition, which is worth mentioning because of the resonance it will have later on. He observes that the rational soul has not only an intellectual power, but also a power of choice—what Augustine called the will. Yet Aristotle and his followers in the Islamic world paid little or no attention to this crucial human capacity. William even seems to say that the will can operate independently of the judgments of intellect. This would make him an early proponent of what has come to be called voluntarism. And by the end of this series of podcasts on medieval philosophy, no one will be able to accuse us of paying too little attention to this. But here, we are leaving the study of the soul and getting into the area of ethics, a terrain I'll be exploring in a couple of weeks. Next time, though, I will progress to another science—metaphysics. We'll be talking about William of Auvers' contemporary Philip the Chancellor, among other authors, and learning about another pivotal medieval theory, the doctrine of transcendentals. And speaking of transcendent, let me close with one more tribute to Dr. Funkenstein, the disco fiend with the monster sound, George Clinton. If you've got faults, defects, or shortcomings like arthritis, rheumatism, or migraines, whatever part of your body it is, I want you to lay it on your podcast listening device and let the vibes flow through. Because philosophy not only moves, it can remove, dig? The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funkstmanship and your knowledge of the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, It's All Good – The Transcendentals. Normally I make an effort to spare you the technical jargon that typically festoons philosophical prose. I assume that people listening to podcasts while they are jogging or washing the dishes don't really want to fight their way through the sort of phrases I use all the time in my day job, like internalistic epistemic theory of justification, jointly necessary and sufficient conditions, or full-bodied medium roast. A lot of the best philosophy is done during coffee breaks. But with the medieval's it's often tempting to make an exception. This isn't just because they were such lovers of technical terminology, it's also because their conceptual breakthroughs often went together with the development of fine distinctions. In some cases, what may seem a case of mere scholastic hair-splitting has survived to become a standard instrument in the toolkit of today's philosophers. An excellent example is the contrast between extensional and intentional. We're going to find this distinction useful for today's episode, so I hope it won't ruin your morning run or evening wash-up if I take a moment to explain it. The basic idea is that you can think of or talk about one and the same thing, or group of things, in more than one way. George Clinton, for instance, was the leader of the soul-drenched jazz organ-infused 1970s band Funkadelic, and also the leader of the more disco-leaning group called Parliament. Hence, if you are thinking about the leader of Funkadelic, and I am thinking about the leader of Parliament, what we are thinking about is extensionally identical. We are, in other words, thinking of the same man out there in the world, namely George Clinton. But our thoughts are intentionally distinct. Thinking about the leader of Funkadelic is not the same as thinking of the leader of Parliament, even if it turns out that you and I are thinking about the same man. They must be different, since someone could realize that George Clinton led Funkadelic without realizing that he led Parliament. Another frequently used example, which as it happens also involves organs, is that the extension of the phrase animals with hearts is the same as the extension of the phrase animals with kidneys, because all animals with hearts have kidneys, and vice versa. But these phrases obviously mean different things, so they are intentionally distinct. The medieval's achieved unprecedented clarity on this point and deployed it in innovative ways, but it was suggested much earlier by an ancient philosopher who was better at providing distinctions than the committee who decides on the Queen's Honours list each year, Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle mentions that unity is convertible with being, even though unity and being are somehow different. Anything that is, is one thing, and vice versa. So, being and unity are extensionally identical. Now, the metaphysics was one of the many texts that came to be read by scholastic philosophers in the 13th century after being unknown during the early medieval period. Once the medieval's began to study the work, this passage really caught their attention. Aristotle did have a point, after all. How could anything exist without having some kind of unity? Even something that is nothing more than a scattered bunch of other things, like a crowd, is still one crowd. It must have some degree of unity, or we wouldn't be entitled to refer to it as something that is. Which brings us to the transcendentals. To forestall any confusion straight away, no, the transcendentals are not a group of medieval superheroes. But they're pretty super nonetheless, because they are nothing less than the properties or features that apply to all existing things. Being and unity are both transcendentals, because everything that is, is, even Bill Clinton would agree to that, and as we've just said, everything that is, is one. There are other examples, notably true and good. Aquinas also includes thing and something, which sound less redundant in Latin than they do in English, res and aliquid. As we'll see in a bit, beauty was also considered as a possible transcendental. But medieval's thought of more besides these, and in fact, you can quite easily make your own transcendentals at home. To take a rather trivial example, nothing can be both round and square, so all existing things have the property of not being a round square. The transcendental that first attracted serious attention in the 13th century was goodness. We can see this in William of Auxerre, a master of theology at Paris in the decades following the founding of the university. He's not to be confused with William of Auvergne, whose views of the soul we discussed last time. William of Auxerre took up a question that had been raised by Boethius in one of his theological treatises. Why, asks Boethius, are all things that exist good? William accepted Boethius's answer, namely that God is a purely good cause, so everything God creates winds up being good, too. For this reason, William claims, to be and to be good are one and the same thing. Reading Boethius or William of Auxerre on this issue, one may feel like someone who's turned up late to a play and missed the first act. Whoever said that everything that is is good? What about natural disasters, burnt coffee, and the repeated success of soccer teams coached by José Mourinho? The world seems to be chock full of terrible things, so how can anyone say that all things are good? The answer lies with the late ancient Platonist doctrine about goodness, which found a welcome reception in Augustine and Boethius and was then widely accepted by the medievals. According to this doctrine, nothing can be at all without having some share in goodness. This is not to say that everything is perfect. To the contrary, only God is perfect. But even evil things must be good in some ways, or they could not be at all. By now, this understanding of evil as relative non-being is familiar to us, so I won't linger over the point now. Suffice to say that it forms a background assumption for the whole discussion of transcendentals and explains why goodness is always included alongside unity and truth as coextensive with being. Instead, let's consider a more subtle question, which William of Auxerre leaves unanswered. How can it be true to say that being and being good are one and the same? William himself admits that this is problematic. After all, one thing can be more good than another, but it seems that one thing cannot be more than another. A solution would be provided by Philip the Chancellor, another theologian of Paris and a contemporary of William of Auxerre. Both died in the 1230s. Philip was a significant figure in the life of the university in the first third of the century, because he served as chancellor at the Cathedral of Notre Dame for about 20 years. Philip's decisive contribution to the theory of transcendentals came in a treatise called De Bono, meaning on the good, and not as you may have been hoping that the work is a prophetic tribute to the lead singer of U2. Like William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor was strongly influenced by Boethius, and he accepted their conviction that being and good are convertible. But unlike William, he also made use of the materials from Aristotle and the Islamic world that had recently become available in Latin. In fact, Philip nicely illustrates the dynamic we've been seeing throughout early 13th century philosophy, with newly translated texts being used to make progress on difficulties that had already been faced by earlier generations. Thanks to his exposure to Aristotle and the resources of terminist logic, Philip was able to explain more precisely the relationship between being, goodness, unity, and truth. We can formulate the puzzle facing him a bit more precisely by framing it as a dilemma. If being is the same as unity, truth, and goodness, then aren't these further notions pointless, or as the medieval's put it, nougatory? Unity, truth, and goodness would be mere synonyms of being. Saying that all things that are are good would no longer be an ambitious claim about metaphysics and God's creation, but a mere tautology on a par with such empty observations as it is what it is, or as 1970s soul singers like to say, everything is everything. On the other hand, if saying that a thing is does have a different meaning from saying that a thing is good, then goodness must somehow differ from being. And this suggests that Boethius was wrong. It isn't necessary that whatever is is good. Philip the Chancellor's solution is that being, unity, goodness, and truth are indeed the same, but only extensionally. They are however different in intention. He makes this point using the vocabulary of 13th century logic, writing that, though they are convertible with respect to the extension and scope of their supposits, the good goes beyond being conceptually. We see here how important supposition theory could be in context beyond logic. To say that two different terms supposit for the same thing means that the two terms refer to the same object or objects out in the world. But this doesn't mean that the two terms have the same signification. To go back to our former example, the terms leader of parliament and leader of funkadelic both supposit for George Clinton while meaning something entirely different. Supposition theory provided the tools clearly to express this fact, and Aristotelian theory of language could offer a deeper explanation of what is going on. For Aristotle, words signify concepts in the mind, and concepts signify things in the world. So we use different words to lead the mind to different concepts which may turn out to apply to one and the same thing, in our example, George Clinton. Likewise, being and unity are distinct concepts, but both apply universally to everything that there is. Unfortunately, like children in a fairy tale scattering breadcrumbs, Philip the Chancellor is not out of the woods yet. This is because the terms being, unity, and so on clearly have a much closer, more intimate connection than other words that are intentionally different while being extensionally the same. It seems that whatever falls under being must also fall under unity, goodness, and truth. This isn't always the case. George Clinton may be the leader of both parliament and funkadelic, but he could retire and pass leadership of the bands to two different people, perhaps Fred Wesley and Bootsy Collins. Then the titles would become extensionally as well as intentionally distinct. Or as the medieval's would say, the terms leader of funkadelic and leader of parliament would come to suppose it for different things. With the transcendental terms this cannot happen. Why not? Again, Philip is ready with an answer here, which is that, although the other terms do indeed introduce a conceptual change from the basic idea of being, they do not add much. Being the leader of funkadelic is a positive feature that brings with it certain legal and financial rights, as George Clinton has often been eager to point out. By contrast, unity adds only something negative to being, namely the absence of division. This idea that the other transcendentals add negative characterizations was also used in a text written jointly by yet another Parisian theologian, Alexandre of Hales, and some of his collaborators, especially John de la Rochelle. However, Alexander and John added that the transcendentals could also allude to the way that being relates to other things. For instance, the reason that being is convertible with truth, something that may have been puzzling you throughout this episode, is that any case of being can be understood, that is, can be related to the intellect. Likewise, the good is being insofar as it relates to our will or faculty of choice. These ideas will be taken up by the most famous exponent of transcendental theory, Thomas Aquinas. He states explicitly that when two things differ only conceptually, this is because they are distinguished only by virtue of negations or relations. So that's how the transcendentals differ from one another. But what is it that they all have in common? Well, they are extensionally the same, of course, because they apply to all things. But the medievals had a more rigorous way of putting this point. To be worthy of the name, the transcendentals are going to need something to transcend. Where Parliament funkydelic transcended the boundaries of musical genre and often of good taste, the medieval's transcendentals transcended the categories. These, of course, were another inheritance from the Aristotelian tradition. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, and the rest were taken by the scholastics to constitute ten classes of being. On this understanding of Aristotle's categories, being human really is what it sounds like, a way of being, in this case a kind of being that is appropriate to substances. By contrast, the being that belongs to blue is a qualitative sort of being. What's special about the transcendentals is that they cut across the division between categories, applying just as much to a substance like human as to a quality like blue. For instance, just as each human that is is one human, so each instance of blue that is is one instance of blue. Though this cross-categorial status gives the transcendentals both their name and their philosophical importance, it also raises some problems. Within the Aristotelian logical framework used by the scholastics, we understand concepts by finding definitions. And we define things by dividing a large class into a smaller subclass, as when we say that human is the sort of animal that is rational. But obviously with the transcendentals that won't be possible. You can't understand being as a certain specific kind of something or other, because everything that there is has being. We grasp the categories as divisions within being, but we can't grasp being itself in a similar way, since it isn't a division of any more general class. That applies of course to the other transcendentals too. Unity, truth, and goodness all apply to everything. How then should we try to define them? The answer is, basically, that we can't. The best we can do is somehow to characterize them, for instance by explaining that unity means being insofar as it lacks division. This isn't a proper definition, but it does convey what we might mean when we talk about unity and also why it is different from being. Intentionally different of course, not extensionally different. If you press the point by asking how we would learn about such general concepts, the scholastics will suggest that you go read one of the texts that has been made available in the recent Latin translation movement. This time, they will point you not to Aristotle, but to Avicenna. He argued that concepts like being are, as he put it, primary intelligibles. They are immediately available to the mind, and we do not learn about them on the basis of anything else. Authors like Thomas Aquinas are happy to accept this and even cite Avicenna by name when explaining the idea. As a result, the transcendentals are not just important notions in 13th century metaphysics. They actually define what metaphysics is, since it can be understood as the science of the first and most general concepts that we have. Which of course is going to raise even more problems. A rival conception of metaphysics would make it the science of the most fundamental causes of being, rather than the most general concepts, which brings metaphysics very close to theology. Aristotle's metaphysics muddied the waters, rather than clearing them up, since some parts of it seemed to undertake a general study of being, and other parts and inquiry into the first causes of all things. Any attempt to bring the two projects together would inevitably lead to a further question, is it really true that the transcendentals apply to everything in the same way? Can we apply the notions of being, unity, and goodness to God in the same way as we apply them to created things? These concerns are going to lead to intense debate in the later 13th century, most notably between Aquinas and Duns Scotus. The transcendentals also play a role in another area of philosophy entirely, aesthetics. The medieval's did not recognize aesthetics as a sub-discipline of philosophy along with physics, ethics, or metaphysics, but they did talk about beauty, which some authors, including Alexandre O'Hare's and his colleagues, wanted to include in the list of transcendentals. Some scholars have sought to find the same idea in Thomas Aquinas, but in passages where Aquinas enumerates the transcendentals, beauty is not included, and with good reason. Elsewhere, Aquinas tells us that to be beautiful is to be good in a certain way. Beauty is the tendency of goodness to be pleasing. So, beauty would relate to goodness much as goodness relates to being. In a sense then, it counts as a transcendental, because its extension is just as wide as that of goodness, which in turn is just as wide as the scope of being. But beauty is unlike the other transcendentals in that it involves a relational feature of goodness rather than of being. Aquinas's remarks on beauty stand in a long tradition, which, like the conception of evil as non-being, can be traced back to Augustan and ultimately to pagan Platonism. In this tradition, beauty is defined in terms of symmetry and order, which are in turn seen as manifestations of divine reality in the physical realm. God, in other words, is ultimately and perfectly beautiful, something expressed in a famous line of Augustan's confessions, Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new. If you consider a work of art such as the Schacht Cathedral, you can see how this spiritual, dare I say transcendent, understanding of beauty might be put into practice. But what about a work of art like, say, the classic Funkadelic album Let's Take It to the Stage? Part of what makes it enjoyable is its ridiculousness, its irreverence, its roughness around the edges. You might suppose that in the Middle Ages, aesthetic tastes ran exclusively towards the cathedral end of that spectrum. But as it turns out, the medieval artistic sensibility could be pretty funky. When commenting on the appeal of poetry or visual artworks, medieval authors often emphasized the play of contradictory features, like sweetness and bitterness in food. Audiences enjoyed incongruity and parody, and did not insist that beauty should somehow convey a transcendental goodness present in all created things. To the contrary, they were comfortable with the idea that beauty was merely skin deep. In fact, Isidore of Seville related the Latin word for beauty, pulchritudo, to the word for skin, peles. It is tempting to think that in this case, the philosophers were like a medieval peasant whose land has been confiscated by the local lord. They simply lost the plot. But Aquinas does emphasize the relational nature of beauty. Just as truth is being as related to the mind, so beauty is goodness as related to our capacity to feel delight. This fits with the dynamic nature of aesthetic experience, which always depends on an interaction between artwork and audience. Philosophers were also open to the idea that beauty is, if not superficial or skin deep, then at least characteristically bodily in nature. They belonged after all to a religion based on the incarnation of the divine in a human body. For this reason, somewhat less intellectualist thinkers, including Aquinas's contemporary Bonaventure, gave great weight to sensation and used vividly physical metaphors as they described our journey to know God. For the most powerful of examples, we need only think back to the visions of Hildegard of Bingen. For authors with this frame of mind, the beauty of nature or of a work of art could have a role in spiritual life precisely because these things appeal to the senses. As I've said, the case of beauty shows that the theory of transcendentals was not only about metaphysics. If I may indulge in one more technical expression, the transcendentals have what philosophers would nowadays call a normative dimension. It is not only being or unity that has universal scope, but also goodness and according to at least some authors, beauty. For the 13th century scholastics, then, existing things do not just call us to know about them, but also to value them. As they would put it, things make a claim on our will as well as our intellect. But how should we respond to and understand the goodness of these things, and what is our place within the world of goods? These are the questions we'll be tackling next week as we turn to a final major philosophical discipline in this survey of developments in the earlier 13th century. Our topic will be ethics, especially theories of moral conscience. That's next time on every podcast listener's not-so-guilty pleasure, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Do the Right Thing – 13th Century Ethics. I'd like you to imagine that you're riding the London Underground at rush hour, and that you have managed to get a seat. Or perhaps you really are a Londoner who is riding the Underground at rush hour while listening to this, in which case you were no doubt already imagining that you had a seat. Now imagine that you notice a woman with a swollen belly standing right nearby. Being, like all my listeners, an outstanding and admirable human being, you hasten to offer her your seat. As it happens, another passenger standing next to you turns out to be a philosopher. She also turns out to be one of those rare philosophers who is actually socially outgoing. I did say you'd have to use your imagination. She asks you why you offered your seat to the pregnant woman. Probably you'd shrug and say that it was obviously the right thing to do. The philosopher, being a philosopher, might reply, sure, but that doesn't explain why you did it. People fail to do the right thing all the time. To which you would presumably say something to the effect that it would not have felt right to continue sitting there while someone in greater need was forced to stand. Your conscience would not have allowed it. This answer would strike the philosopher as intriguing, especially if she happened to have an interest in 13th century moral theory. Medieval thinkers devoted careful attention to the phenomenon of moral conscience. Some of them saw it as playing precisely the role just suggested. Conscience explains why you actually perform the actions you take to be good, rather than just understanding that that would be the right thing to do and then doing something else. As the medieval's would put it, conscience somehow involves the power of will and not just the power of reason. The idea that humans have such a power, the faculty of will, was not a medieval invention. The concept emerged in late antiquity and played a major role in the writings of Augustine. Its prominence in the Augustinian tradition explains why, as we saw a couple of episodes back, William of Auvergne was indignant and puzzled to find it receiving so little attention in the works of Aristotle and philosophers of the Islamic world. This is typical of the situation that gave birth to 13th century ethics. As in other areas of philosophy, new translations were making new ideas available, and these needed somehow to be reconciled with long traditional doctrines and authorities. In the case of ethics, the most important new arrival on the scene was, appropriately enough, the ethics, that is, the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle. But in this case, it would take a few additional decades before the confrontation with Aristotle could fully emerge. This is because his ethics were not rendered into Latin in their entirety until the late 1240s. Until that time, only the first three of the ten books of the ethics were in circulation, in a translation probably executed by Burgundio of Pisa. Incomplete access didn't stop the scholastics from trying to understand what Aristotle was saying. A handful of commentaries on the ethics survive from the first part of the century. As usual, they are mostly anonymous. The commentators had plenty of material to make up for the unavailability of the last seven books of Aristotle's ethics. Not only did they bring to the text all the traditional ideas of Augustinian ethics, but they also made use of other new sources like Avicenna. Among Avicenna's bequests to the Latin philosophers was his claim that the soul is two-faced. Not like a hypocritical politician, or for that matter a Batman villain. Rather, the point is that the soul has one relation to the body, which is inferior to it, and another relation to a principle superior to it. For Avicenna, the superior principle would have been a celestial intellect, but the medieval's could easily adapt his point by saying that the soul's two faces look down to the body and up to God. Of course, their recommendation is the same you'd hear from a tightrope walking instructor, don't look down. When they turned to Aristotle, the commentators saw that they could use the two-faced soul idea to expound his understanding of happiness. The first book of his ethics explains that happiness must be something self-sufficient and complete or perfect. For Aristotle, as for so many other ancient authors, this goal can be achieved by living a life of virtue. But the medieval readers saw that he recognized two kinds of virtue, practical and intellectual. Here was a chance to invoke the two faces. A practical life demands that the soul pay heed to the body, whereas the perfect intellectual life means that the soul focuses on contemplating God. In spelling out the details of these two lives, the early commentators wind up straying rather far from their source material. As it happens, the last book of Aristotle's ethics praises the life of contemplation as the most happy of all. But of course our commentators couldn't read this final book. So when they likewise give contemplation first prize as the most perfect life, they must be getting the idea from somewhere else, for instance Avicenna. They also describe contemplation as a sort of mystical union with God which would be totally foreign to Aristotle. It would not be until the commentary of Robert Kill would be that this tendency was corrected. When it comes to the practical side of things, the divergences are even more striking. Aristotle envisioned the excellent man as leading a life of civic engagement, his virtues displayed by fighting bravely in war, participating in government, and showing generosity to friends. The commentators instead reflect the ascetic impulse that began in ancient Christianity and lived on in medieval monasticism. They see practical virtue primarily as the soul's resisting bodily desire, with each soul attempting to bring itself closer to God rather than to seek collaboration with fellow humans. Moreover, they dismiss virtue in this life as inadequate for true happiness. Didn't Aristotle himself say that true happiness is perfect? And don't we all know that our worldly existence, like a rush hour tube journey, is bound to be imperfect? Only the prospect of an afterlife together with God can satisfy Aristotle's ambitious criteria. This may all sound like a theological distortion of Aristotle's ethics, such as we might expect from a bunch of medieval commentators. But remember, we're in the 13th century. The scholastics are increasingly distinguishing between the remit of theology and the remit of philosophy, with Aristotle of course personifying the philosophical side of that contrast. So it is here. The commentators talk of two complementary approaches to ethics. For Aristotle and other philosophers, virtue is a matter of hard-won habit acquired through moral education and repetition of good actions. Theologians don't deny that such habitual virtues exist, but they add that God infuses us with another kind of virtue, a tendency to prefer good to evil. This tendency survives in us even in our current fallen state of sin. I see a parallel here to another 13th century debate in the field of epistemology. Some thinkers of the period, for instance Bonaventure, believe that humans have knowledge through illumination from God. Others, such as Aquinas, instead emphasize the role of sense experience, adopting Aristotle's broadly empiricist approach. Similarly in ethics, the theological line is that we should open ourselves to God's assistance, whereas the philosophical or Aristotelian stance is that we need to improve through experience. The inborn tendency to choose the good, which we would call moral conscience, is discussed not so much in the commentaries on Aristotle as in commentaries on the sentences of Peter Lombard. In a characteristically concise and authority-strewn discussion, Lombard had posed the question of why the will does not always steer us towards what is good. He cited the Latin Church Father Jerome, who referred to a spark of reason which could not be extinguished even in Cain. This more or less set the terms of the debate. On the one hand, we have a spark within us that urges us to be righteous. On the other hand, we nonetheless fall into sin. Both are everyday features of our moral life, and both stand in need of explanation. The passage that Peter Lombard cited from Jerome supplied another ingredient to the conversation. There, the medieval's could find a Greek-derived term which they wrote as synderesis. It isn't too far wrong to think of this as a kind of innate ethical conscience, except that the 13th century authors routinely distinguish between synderesis and conscience in Latin conscientia. Before we get into the mechanics of synderesis and conscience, let's go back to your imaginary conversation with the philosopher on the tube. Initially, you told her that it just struck you as obviously right to give up your seat to the pregnant woman. The philosopher pointed out that there is a difference between seeing that one ought to do something and actually deciding to do it, perhaps even wanting to do it. Where should we put our feelings of obligation and remorse in this story? The medieval's speak of the murmurings of guilt we experience when we do something wrong. Are these murmurings helping us to realize something to form knowledge about good and bad? Or are they instead helping to motivate us, giving us a kind of push towards what we already know to be good and a desire to do it? From a medieval point of view, the question here is whether conscience and the spark of synderesis have more to do with reason or will. If they are connected especially to reason, they must be intended to help us to know the good. If they are connected to the will, they are meant to help us choose the good. An early treatment of this problem can be found in the treatise On the Good by Philip the Chancellor, the same text that introduced us to the topic of transcendentals. Which I can't resist pointing out is a great example of why it is worth doing the history of philosophy without any gaps. Most likely you'd never heard of Philip the Chancellor before, but he turns out to have played a pivotal role in both the history of metaphysics and the history of ethics. Plus, he's got a cool name. Philip the Chancellor's view is that synderesis is a disposition, in other words an inborn tendency, and one that straddles the divide between reason and will. It is, as he says, superior to our power of reasoning, and should instead be called by the more exalted name of understanding. Philip seeks to have his cake and eat it too, by presenting synderesis as a power that produces both motivation and knowledge. It is a supreme moral power, not only because it has this overarching influence upon us, but also because it can never go wrong. The catch is that synderesis isn't enough, because it only guides us to very general moral precepts. When you select a specific action that you take to be good, you have gone past synderesis and come to what Philip calls conscience. Conscience is engaged when your base-level sense of right and wrong, which is given by synderesis, is supplemented by the power of choice, so that you make up your mind to do something specific here and now. Even well-meaning people can go wrong at this stage, something Philip illustrates with an example we've seen before in Peter Abelard. The people who put Christ to death were acting, as we might put it, in good conscience. Philip puts it by saying that their synderesis was in good working order. It allowed them to see that someone who pretends to be the Son of God should be executed. Their mistake, fallible as they were, was to think that Christ was a mere pretender and therefore someone who fell under this general rule. We can change our example on the tube slightly to provide a parallel case. Suppose you give up your seat to the woman with a sympathetic smile at her bulging belly, but she's not pregnant after all, just overweight, and when she realizes why you've offered your seat, she is mortified. This kind of situation, where someone unwittingly does something bad, you know, like offending someone on public transport or putting to death the Son of God, is also raised in Bonaventure's commentary on Peter Lombard's sentences. Specifically, he asks whether people should always try to follow their conscience. His answer is a qualified yes. Scholastics hardly ever answer a question with an unqualified yes. You should never do something you believe to be wrong, nor should you fail to do something you believe to be right. But following your conscience isn't a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn't excuse you from blame when you get things wrong. As Abelard already pointed out when he discussed the example of Christ's killers, people following deeply and sincerely held beliefs can commit grievous sins. The upshot is that if you want to do what is good, what is pleasing to God, as Bonaventure puts it, you need to satisfy two conditions. You have to believe that what you're doing is right, and it actually has to be right. This is compatible with what Philip the Chancellor said about the same issue, though Bonaventure's discussion is more detailed and illuminating. When it comes to the role of reason and will in conscience though, Bonaventure has a view that is quite different from Philip's. He exploits the by-now traditional distinction between sinderesis and conscience to give due weight to both rational belief and motivation. For Bonaventure, conscience operates at two levels. First, it gives us a sense of general moral rules about which we can never be wrong. These rules, he suggests, could be equated with the natural law. Second, conscience is also involved in determining how to apply those rules, and as in Philip, this sort of applied conscience can go astray. For Philip, of course, the unerring and general grasp of moral precepts was the function of sinderesis, but Bonaventure has reserved another role for this power. For him, sinderesis is precisely the motivational power that pushes you to do what your conscience has judged to be right. Let's go back one more time to our imaginary example and suppose that it had been Bonaventure who struck up a conversation on the tube with you. To make this possible, let's also imagine that you speak Latin. Bonaventure would say that when you realized you should give up your seat, this was because you used your conscience to understand the general rule that people in need should be given assistance. A further use of conscience determined that this woman was in need because she looked to be pregnant. However, it is sinderesis that made you actively eager to give up your seat, and that would murmur with recriminations in your soul if you refused to budge. In other words, it would help move your will towards the right choice. The upshot is that conscience is an intellectual power, a tendency to form beliefs, whereas sinderesis has to do with what Bonaventure calls the desiring part of the soul. Here we have what could be called a volitionalist account of moral feeling. For Bonaventure and many other medieval thinkers, intellectual judgments about the good could remain idle, without some distinct power to explain why we are actually motivated to act on those judgments. But many other medieval thinkers would disagree. Those who adopted a more Aristotelian line can be called intellectualists. They tended to think that the will simply follows and puts into action the judgments reached by practical reason. Their idea is that believing something to be good already involves having a reason to do it so that judgments about right and wrong have motivational force built into them. It would probably have been impossible for the earliest commentators of the 13th century to develop a reading of Aristotle along these lines because their access to the text was so partial. But when the whole Nicomachean ethics came into circulation in the middle of the century, the opportunity was there, and it was taken by Albert the Great. Albert was the first master to lecture on the complete ethics in the year 1249 and in the city of Cologne. The student who took the notes on these lectures was a young Thomas Aquinas. We'll get into Aquinas's views on these matters in a future episode. For now I just want to glance at Albert's way of understanding Cinderasis. He is happy to make it a faculty for knowing something along the lines I've just sketched, rather than a faculty for desiring or wanting something. So he gives it more or less the function that Philip the Chancellor had assigned to Cinderasis, it is the power to grasp general ethical precepts. The difference is that it is no longer an overarching power that governs both reason and will, but a source of rules to use as a basis for moral reasoning. So, what Cinderasis gives you is akin to the first principles that we use in the non-practical sciences. A convenient, though slightly anachronistic, analogy might be the axioms of geometry or arithmetic. This is only one respect in which Albert shows himself to be a more faithful Aristotelian than earlier commentators on the ethics. Like them, he continues to see contemplation of God as the sole source of perfect human happiness, something Aquinas too will accept. But Albert makes space for genuinely civic virtue in his ethical teaching on the basis that this sort of practical goodness is an important step along the way to ultimate beatitude because it prepares the soul for contemplation. As I've said, Albert's more profoundly Aristotelian approach was only possible because he was able to read the whole of the ethics. So, some of the credit should go to the man who produced that complete Latin translation from the Greek original. Important though this contribution was, it would be a gross injustice to see this translator as nothing but a transmitter of texts. He was a philosopher in his own right, and the author of interesting ideas about science, notably concerning the subject of light. So, join me next time for an illuminating episode about Robert Grossetest, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Light That Never Goes Out, Robert Grossetest. Metaphors exercise a stronger influence in philosophy than most philosophers would probably like to admit. Whole political theories have been grounded in the comparison of the state to a human body, as we saw with the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury. Philosophy itself has often been described metaphorically, as when the Stoics drew an analogy between its three parts of ethics, physics, and logic, and the yoke, white, and shell of an egg, or the fruit, trees, and surrounding wall of an orchard. In our own day, misguided parents who discouraged their children from studying philosophy modify this Stoic image, suggesting that philosophy may be more like a natural fertilizer sometimes used in orchards. But no metaphor has been a more constant or influential feature in the history of philosophy than the comparison of knowledge to eyesight. It plays a role not just in major philosophical works like Plato's Republic, but even in our very language. To realize something is to see it, and you can perceive that something is true. To make a nice point in an argument is to offer an observation, while accurate anticipation of future events can be called foresight. The same was true of Ancient Greek. Our word theory comes from the Greek theoria, which means viewing or beholding, but was used by Aristotle to refer to philosophical contemplation. Even the Greek word for intellect, nous, comes from a verb of seeing, noēn. The medievals were enthusiastic users of this metaphor, not least because it went so nicely with another analogy, between God and light. Even this has Greek roots. The Neoplatonists frequently said that their first principle generates all other things like a source of illumination spreading forth its rays. In the Islamic world, the metaphor was central to the illuminationist philosophy of the 12th century thinker Sukhravarti. Christians could read in the Book of John that God is light, and this was taken up and developed by patristic authors like Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius. The next step is considerably more obvious than putting together peanut butter and chocolate to get Reese's peanut butter cups. If God is light, and knowledge is vision, then perhaps God is the light that enables us to have knowledge. That in a peanut shell is what has come to be called the medieval theory of divine illumination. It is based on one of Augustine's favorite metaphors, and also captures his idea that we can only achieve knowledge thanks to Christ's presence as an inner teacher in our souls. So naturally enough, it is often seen, there's that visual metaphor again, as a distinctively Augustinian aspect of 13th century medieval thought. After all these comparisons though, comes a contrast, between this Augustinian divine illumination model and an Aristotelian theory of knowledge, according to which humans come to know things through sense experience. Aristotle proposed a bottom-up epistemology building on sensation, whereas the Augustinians insisted that something as exalted as knowledge can only come from the very top, that is from God. The implications of the dispute are far-reaching. For instance, the Augustinian theory makes it sound like the best way to achieve knowledge might be to withdraw from the world and meditate, or contemplate, in the hopes of opening oneself to the divine light. The Aristotelian model would instead encourage us to go out into the world and investigate, in order to activate the mind's potential for understanding. But as so often, this neat contrast gets messier the more closely you look at it. Aristotle himself used the light metaphor in one of his most influential bits of writing, where he compares a mysterious, unidentified maker-intellect to the light that makes eyesight possible. In antiquity, Alexander of Aphrodisias, no Platonist, never mind Augustinian, identified this intellect with God. Meanwhile, we find pioneers of the divine illumination theory emphasizing the need for what they call experimentum, not experiment exactly, but sensory experience of the physical world around us. In this episode I'll be looking at such a pioneer, Robert Grossetest. He gives light a central role in his philosophy, not only in explaining knowledge, but also in setting out a breathtakingly original cosmology, which involves some rather illuminating suggestions about mathematics. Most of the major philosophers of 13th century medieval Europe were active in the second half of the century. Like Philip the Chancellor, Robert Grossetest is an exception. He died in 1253, having served as Chancellor of the University of Oxford. These were good decades for Chancellors, before being consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln in 1235. On that basis, you might conclude that we're dealing here with a distinctively English thinker. Certainly, there's no denying that Grossetest is an important figure for the development of philosophy at Oxford. There is a scholarly controversy lurking here though, since some have proposed that Grossetest must have received an intellectual formation in Paris. Wherever he received his initial education, he wasn't content to stop learning. In the early 1230s, when he was already into his 60s, he decided to learn Greek. His motivation was probably, above all, theological. He wished to read the New Testament in the original. He was able to draw on the assistance of Greek-speaking scholars, who had begun to travel in Europe more frequently following the crusader's sack of Constantinople in 1204. Remarkably, Grossetest not only mastered the language, but went on to execute translations of key philosophical works, including Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and On the Heavens. He also consulted and translated Greek commentaries on these works from the Late Ancient and Byzantine periods. This aspect of Grossetest's career is apt to remind us of the 9th century translator and philosopher, Eriugena. They even both translated writings of Dionysius. Grossetest's light-based speculations also tend to make him seem a distinctively Platonist thinker not unlike Eriugena. But Grossetest was doing philosophy in the 13th century, and that almost always meant studying the works of Aristotle. He was no exception. Grossetest's understanding of knowledge as involving illumination from God features in his comments on that key work of Aristotelian epistemology and scientific theory, the posterior analytics. Confronted with Aristotle's pronouncement that we have demonstrative knowledge of something only when we know its cause, Grossetest says that he couldn't agree more. He's also happy to sign up to the doctrine that knowledge must be universal in character. The illuminationist theory comes in when he explains how we are able to have such knowledge. Universals, Grossetest explains, appear at numerous levels of reality. They exist in physical things around us as their forms, and that sound you hear is Peter Abelard turning in his grave. Universals exist in the heavens and in the minds of angels, and finally, and most importantly, they exist in God's mind as the eternal, paradigmatic reasons of things. That other sound you hear is Aristotle turning in his grave, as Grossetest says that the whole theory of demonstrative knowledge can only work if we factor in these rather Platonist-sounding divine ideas. They are not only the source of all universality, but also the true causes of all created things. And you did say, didn't you Aristotle, that we can only know things by knowing their causes? But we shouldn't get carried away in emphasizing the perversely anti-Aristotelian nature of Grossetest's commentary on Aristotle. He is totally committed to Aristotle's idea that humans cannot reach knowledge without sensation. Admittedly, he does have a distinctively Christian reason for this, which is that in our fallen state, we cannot just know things in God's light. Instead, we must engage in laborious empirical study to make up for our weakness as knowers. But as Grossetest puts it, knowledge comes to us via the senses, but not from the senses. For no knowledge would be possible without the illumination provided by the divine light. Even people who know nothing of God are, unbeknownst to themselves, grasping truths in the light of God's reasons. I should head off a common misconception at this point, which is that theories of divine illumination always involve simple acts of awareness, inexpressible in language and perhaps even mystical in character. This is certainly not Grossetest's view. Though he sometimes talks as if we grasp simple essences in God's light, he more usually mentions it to explain how we grasp complex propositions. Otherwise, he could hardly integrate this theory into a discussion of Aristotelian demonstration. The contribution of divine illumination is to ground the certainty of syllogistic arguments. When we reach a demonstration, our minds come a bit closer to God's own mind, which of course permanently understands the causes or reasons of everything. It is however important to him, as it would be for some more mystical authors, to assert that in the ideal case, we have a direct illumination from God. This is the situation of the blessed in the afterlife. They will enjoy a grasp of God without mediation, as Grossetest puts it. On this point, he is willing to voice a rare explicit disagreement with Dionysius, whose relentless emphasis on divine transcendence didn't allow for such a direct vision of God. Instead, Dionysius had proposed that souls in heaven get only a representation of what God may be like in himself, like people who didn't get to go to Woodstock and have to content themselves with watching documentaries about it. Interesting though Grossetest's translations and commentaries are, it is his little treatise On Light that is most likely to, as the Woodstock generation would have put it, totally blow your mind. It's a brief work, only a few pages long, but these are among the most innovative pages of philosophy written in the first half of the 13th century. As you will not be surprised to hear, On Light deals with the topic of light. It treats this topic, not in the context of the study of human eyesight, or for that matter human knowledge, though Grossetest tackled both issues elsewhere. Instead, his gist here is that the entire cosmos is quite literally formed from light. This light begins at a single point, and then disperses itself through space, as far as the outermost sphere of heaven, which is the most pure and perfect body, primary matter which has received primary form, the primary form being light itself. At this outermost limit of the universe, body is at its most subtle. The universe contains a series of concentric celestial spheres, and below it the most dense of bodies, the four Aristotelian elements, and ultimately earth. It's obvious that Grossetest is here trying to understand the Bible's statement that God began to create by saying, let there be light. But that isn't the only source for his spectacular proposals. Firstly, there is his understanding of the mechanics of light. It's crucial to his theory that each point of light has a natural tendency to spread out in all directions. This principle was first set out in the Arabic tradition by al-Kindi, and then taken up by the great Ibn al-Haytham, the first scientist to come close to a true understanding of human eyesight. Grossetest probably did not know Ibn al-Haytham, who was translated into Latin too late for him to read, but he read optical works by al-Kindi as well as a treatise by him called On Rays, which tries to explain a wide range of physical and magical phenomena by appealing to the influence of rays. Another figure lurking in the background is Ibn Gabirol. Grossetest takes from Ibn Gabirol the idea that light is form, and that the extension of form carries matter along with it. For, as Grossetest states, not once, but twice, the form of light cannot exist without matter. This is fundamental, because it explains why a material universe should arise from the natural dispersion of light. As far as modern scholars have been able to discover though, Grossetest's use of mathematics to explain this dispersion seems to be all his own. His idea is that as it extends outwards, light is multiplied into three dimensions. This requires not just finite, but infinite expansion. Not because an infinite amount of space needs to be occupied. To the contrary, Grossetest retains the traditional cosmology of Aristotle, according to which the universe is finite and spherical in form. It is rather because a point can only become a line, a line a surface, and a surface three-dimensional, through an infinite multiplication. He in fact considers a point to be a part of a line, and smaller angles to be parts of a larger angle. As light is multiplied through the three dimensions, ratios arise between different spatial magnitudes. On standard medieval assumptions about infinity this is clearly impossible. One infinity cannot stand in a definite ratio to another by being its double or triple. Grossetest rejects these standard assumptions though. He gives the example of the numbers, which are twice as numerous as the even numbers. On the modern-day understanding of infinity, Grossetest is wrong about that particular example. But if he's lost the battle, he's winning the war, because the modern-day mathematician would say that he's right to recognize some infinities as larger than others. This is what is meant by saying that one infinite set has a larger cardinality than another. For instance, the irrational numbers compared to the irrational numbers. So score one point for Grossetest, and given his views on the infinite self-multiplication of points, that could be a pretty big victory. But of course, for him, the mathematics is only a means to the end of explaining God's creation. Actually, he never mentions God in On Light, but it has been plausibly suggested that Grossetest was led to ponder the notion of infinity by reflecting on the boundlessness of God's mind. We can also see him as trying to capture what other thinkers of his time were approaching through the idea of transcendentals. If God is a Light, and all things in creation are somehow fashioned from Light, then Light is a unifying principle for all things. Light is metaphysically fundamental and also required for knowledge, so that we can compare it to the transcendentals of Being and Truth. Grossetest himself connects Light to another transcendental, namely, beauty. Just as Light alone has the natural tendency to diffuse itself, so Light alone is intrinsically beautiful. This is why the most beautiful body in the universe is the outermost celestial sphere, which is a pure fusion of Light with primary matter. Given his fascination with Light, and his emphasis on empirical observation of the world around us, it would be a bit disappointing if Grossetest had nothing to say about actual eyesight. So it's with relief that we can turn finally to his remarks on the rainbow, one of several themes in optics that he discusses in his works. He wrote a treatise dedicated specifically to the rainbow, in which he rejected Aristotle's account of this phenomenon. He made a real advance by proposing that the rainbow effect is created by the refraction of sunlight through a cloud. This idea was adopted and adapted a generation or so later by Roger Bacon. Bacon agreed that Light is being refracted to produce a rainbow, but not by the cloud as a whole. Rather, it is the individual droplets of water in the cloud, with Light bouncing off them as if from innumerable tiny mirrors. Grossetest's explanation of the rainbow tells us something about his more general approach to science. On the one hand, the science of optics is grounded in pure mathematics. By thinking of rays of light and their reflections as lines and angles, mathematicians since Euclid had long been applying the tools of geometry to mirrors and shadows. On the other hand, a mirror reflection, the casting of a shadow or a rainbow, is a physical phenomenon. In talking about the rainbow, Grossetest, and after him Roger Bacon, are not content just to provide a geometrical model that could explain what we see. They invoke empirical evidence for and against a given model. It's on this basis that Grossetest argues for refraction of light rays rather than mirror reflection. Still, there has been quite a bit of controversy about how much credit we should give Grossetest for developing new techniques in empirical science. At one end of the spectrum, A.C. Crombie published a book in the 1950s with the provocative title, Robert Grossetest and the Origins of Experimental Science. At the other end, the leading scholar of his thought James McAvoy has tartly commented that Grossetest was too bookish to be bothered experimenting. While that may underrate his contributions in empirical science, it would be going too far to say that Grossetest did anything so grand as invent or anticipate the experimental scientific method. His idea is rather that, with God's light making the world intelligible to us, we can reach scientific understanding simply by observing. As I said earlier, this is the real meaning of his term expedimentum. It should be translated experience, or observation, not experiment. On the other hand, Grossetest was certainly an eager proponent of the use of mathematics in physics, and in this sense he does foreshadow later scientific developments. But it would be rash to draw general conclusions about experience and science in the 13th century without first examining Roger Bacon. He was one of Grossetest's greatest admirers and lavished praise on the Bishop of Lincoln. Yet Bacon tends to outshine Grossetest in the minds of most historians. Find out why next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Origin of Species – Roger Bacon Around the turn of the 13th century, a young man from the town of Assisi, in the center of modern-day Italy, informed his father that he wouldn't be going into the family business. In fact, he wouldn't be going into any business at all, unless you count caring for lepers and preaching to birds as a business. The young man's name was, of course, Francis. By the time of his death in 1226, he had started a movement that would transform Christianity across Europe. The followers of Francis of Assisi were the Franciscans, just one of several mendicant orders who emerged in the 13th century. The term mendicant refers to the fact that they were sworn to poverty and survived on charitable donations alone. The members of mendicant orders, sometimes called friars, posed a challenge to the established church. Their devotion to a life of humility and poverty served as an unspoken, and sometimes spoken, rebuke to the wealth of bishops and the worldly entanglements of popes. A clash was inevitable. As we'll see in a few episodes, it came in the form of agonized debate over the mendicant ideal of absolute poverty. More surprising was the role that the Franciscans came to play in the medieval universities, and thus in the history of philosophy. Francis of Assisi himself was no scholar. He led a life of simplicity, without the adornment of book learning, which could so easily lead to pridefulness. But already in Francis's lifetime, the friars of his order began to take instruction in church doctrine and theology from lecturers. Robert Grozetest, subject of last week's episode, was not himself a member of the order, but did serve as the first lecturer to the Franciscan friars in Oxford. There he may have met, if not actually taught, Roger Bacon. Along with Bonaventure and Peter Olivey, Bacon is the first of three outstanding Franciscan thinkers who are going to be occupying our attention in the next several episodes. Later on, after considering figures from another mendicant order, the Dominicans, we'll be meeting two other great Franciscan philosophers, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. But I'm going to follow the lead of Walter White celebrating his birthday on Breaking Bad and start things off with Bacon. This is not for reasons of chronology. Roger Bacon actually outlived Bonaventure by some 20 years, dying in the early 1290s, whereas Bonaventure died in 1274. Rather, it's because he takes our story on directly from Robert Grozetest. Bacon carried on Grozetest's intellectual project, by adopting and expanding on his idea of a science founded in experience, and by exploring the problems of light and vision that drove Grozetest's innovations in physics. He also admired Grozetest's activity as a translator, valuing his productions far higher than those of more famous contributors to the translation movement such as William of Moerbeke. Grozetest was one of the few contemporaries who managed to earn Bacon's respect. Another was Adam Marsh, a student of Grozetest whose lectures Bacon was able to attend in Oxford. Bacon was also a student and master at the University of Paris, where he encountered such heavyweights as Alexandre of Hales and William of Auvergne. Because he went back and forth several times between Paris and Oxford, Bacon had a deep familiarity with the scholastic culture on both sides of the channel. He was not particularly impressed. Alexandre of Hales, he noted, represented an older generation which still lacked access to the full range of works in natural science and metaphysics because translations were not yet available or because their study was banned in Paris. Earlier still, luminaries like Gratian, Peter Lombard, and the Victorines had been unaware of the philosophical riches that would be unearthed in the translation movement. They might thus be forgiven for their slighting references to the sciences, but there was no excuse for Bacon's own contemporaries, who were failing to engage with the Aristotelian tradition as Bacon himself set out to do. Because he was so disappointed by most of the Latin translations he could consult, and because he was doubtful that any translation can capture the full meaning of an original text, Bacon devoted himself to the study of languages. He mastered Greek and Hebrew, and encouraged others to do the same. Above all, he implored the church authorities to make sciencia experimentales, or science based on experience, fundamental to the university curriculum. He made his pitch in a series of works addressed to Pope Clement IV in the 1260s. These were written at the explicit invitation of the Pope, which gave Bacon an exemption from his order's rule against publishing works for wider circulation. The result was a frenzy of scholarly activity, intended to demonstrate the utility and acceptability of the sciencia experimentales. Discoveries made in natural philosophy could not just put theology on a sound foundation, they could help in just about every area of human endeavor, from statecraft to warfare. In one astonishing passage, Bacon proposes the possibility of building chariots that can power themselves, a flying machine like a bird but with artificial wings, and instruments for diving to the bottom of rivers or the sea. To persuade us of the viability of the last scheme, he mentions how Alexander the Great had himself lowered in such a device to do some deep-sea exploring, a legend also recounted by the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, who found it much harder to swallow. Though he was an imaginative enough man to look forward to the invention of the car, plane, and submarine, Bacon spent most of his time looking to the past. He was convinced that the ancients were more advanced in the sciences than the men of his own age. Not so much the ancients in general, but Aristotle in particular. For Bacon, Aristotle was one of the few who have achieved a complete, or nearly complete, understanding of philosophy. No one has matched the insight achieved by the earliest Biblical figures such as Adam and Noah, and by Solomon, who was the first to revive science after a period of oblivion. Later, there was another revival thanks to the Greeks and especially Aristotle, and here Bacon hastens, like many an ancient Christian, to say that Hellenic science was all borrowed from the Hebrew tradition. Since Aristotle, Bacon believes that only Muslim thinkers have come close to the same level of understanding, and especially Avicenna. In his quest to take a place of his own in this pantheon of greats, Bacon emphasizes again and again the indispensable role of sense experience. He admits that human souls may have some sort of innate knowledge within them, but we cannot access this knowledge because of our fallen and bodily state. So we are effectively born as blank slates, and unless we are fortunate enough to enjoy a direct illumination from an angel or god, we are on our own. We must learn through close observation of nature and other personal experiences. As Bacon says, knowledge achieved in this way is better than knowledge achieved through abstract proof. He applies this even to mathematics. It is one thing to follow the logic of a proof for the first proposition of Euclid's elements, another to have the intuitive insight provided by a visible diagram that accompanies the proof. Bacon is above all renowned for his application of mathematics to natural philosophy, and I'll get to that shortly, but he was a multifaceted thinker who made innovations in a whole range of fields. We can see this for instance from his work in The Philosophy of Language. Given Bacon's philological activities and his extensive training in the logical arts, it was natural for this to become one of his abiding interests. And given his irreverent and creative mind, it's natural that he would take an unusual approach. He pays particular attention to what we might nowadays call semiotics, that is the study of signs. Usually he has in mind significant language, but street signs and even the noises made by animals would count as signs as well. Here, Bacon is taking up a theme explored in the works of Augustine, but unlike fellow Franciscans such as Bonaventure, Bacon did not really see himself as an Augustinian. He tries to persuade us that he developed his own ideas about signs without even consulting Augustine's works. Bacon holds that significant language is conventional in nature. The meaning of our words is entirely artificial in contrast to natural signs like the barking of a dog. Language is thus a tool that we fashion for ourselves. Indeed, words can only have meaning when they are used by someone who has the intention to signify. In the first instance, this will be the person who first used a word to signify some existing thing. The meaning of the word is set by the intention of this original name-giver. Whoever first applied the word bacon to cured pork determined that cured pork is what the word bacon would signify. But since language is entirely conventional, others are free to take the same word and use it differently. This gives rise to the possibility of equivocation. If I use the word bacon to refer to cured meat, but you use it for a 13th century philosopher and scientist, we are using the word with two entirely different meanings, or equivocally. Bacon, the philosopher, not the cured meat, thinks that equivocation is a complex phenomenon which none of his predecessors managed to explore fully. It comes in different types, which may be closer to or further away from the unifical use of a word. Using a word unifically means using it in exactly the same way on two occasions, as when I offer you bacon for breakfast and then later ask if you'd like bacon for lunch too. Furthest from this unifical use is applying the same word to something that exists and then something that doesn't exist. This is because the existent and the non-existent can share nothing in common at all. As Bacon puts it, the distance between them is infinite. His position here is a bit puzzling. You'd think that the name Roger Bacon, which was used during his life to refer to him, can still be used now that he is dead in exactly the same way, without any equivocation at all. But Bacon's remarks on the non-existent fit with his idea that the original name-giver always seeks to signify some existing thing. Once the thing no longer exists, the act of signifying cannot possibly be the same. From here, Bacon goes on to provide a list of types of equivocation, from most to least equivocal. There's the use of words to signify two things that have a relation. The classic example here is healthy, which can be applied to a person or to the sort of food that helps a person to be healthy. A diametrically opposed example might be bacon bits, a rather alarming and certainly unhealthy offering found in many American salad bars. Bacon bits stand in some kind of relation to real bacon, though perhaps only the manufacturers know exactly what that relation is. Another form of equivocation is when the same word is used to refer to both a genus and a species. I might talk of Bacon generally at one time, and Canadian Bacon at another. Finally, the slightest form of equivocation is when a word is used with the same meaning but different grammatical form. I'm not able to illustrate this with Bacon, but Roger Bacon himself points out that it works with eggs. In Latin, the word ovum means egg in both the nominative and accusative case. Given that he is analyzing language and not doing theology, Bacon only occasionally touches on the implications of all this for talking about God. Unlike many medieval thinkers, he's confident that humans can use language to refer to God. He suggests that this may be achieved through a relation or analogy between God and the things he creates. This is a proposal we'll be seeing again when we get to Thomas Aquinas. And speaking of seeing, let's now turn to a more famous aspect of Roger Bacon's thought, his theory of light and vision. I've said already that here, he continues the efforts begun by Robert Grossetest. But whereas Grossetest's natural philosophy traced all things back to the propagation and multiplication of light, Bacon is going to go the other way, explaining the propagation of light in terms of a more basic set of physical principles. The word at the heart of his physics is species. This is potentially confusing because we've so often seen this word in the context of logic, as when species is contrasted to genus. Originally, the Latin word speciase means the outward appearance of something, and that's somewhat closer to the way Bacon is using it. A good English rendering might be likeness. Bacon's idea is, then, that natural things influence the world around them by imposing their species, or likeness, on other things. Hence, Bacon's official definition of species as, the first effect of any natural agent. A basic example might be fire, which affects nearby bodies by giving them the species of heat. Bacon sees this as the mechanism that underlies all physical interaction. Sound, for instance, is a species produced by vibration, so that the excitement of particles involved in frying Bacon causes a sizzling noise that is impressed on the air and then your ear. When you taste the Bacon, the species is the taste that is communicated to your tongue and thus to your sense faculty. And illumination, of course, is the propagation of a species from a light source. Though species like these, which are available to our outer senses, are the most obvious examples, Bacon's theory can be applied more widely. He alludes to Avicenna's case of the sheep that perceives hostility in the wolf and agrees with him that a faculty called estimation in the sheep receives the species of the wolf's hostility. Bacon denies that in producing a species, things are somehow sending out parts of themselves, which would be lost, like the sheets of atoms that are thrown off of things in the visual theory of ancient atomism. Strictly speaking, species are not emitted at all. Instead, the influence of the natural agent causes a potentiality to be realized in the thing it affects. This can occur only through direct contact. So if a light source is to illuminate a visible object, it needs first to actualize the potential illumination of the air that is immediately surrounding it. This illuminated air then affects the air next to it, and so on, until the species of illumination is realized in the visible object. The same is true for the propagation, or as Bacon calls it following Grossetest, the multiplication, of any species. For this reason, Bacon thinks that all natural action requires a medium. It would be impossible in a void. Thus in vision, there needs to be air, or some other transparent medium, between the light source and the lit-up visible object, and between the object and the viewer. Even though the medium is absolutely required for the multiplication of species, it also inhibits the transmission of the natural effect by offering resistance. This is one reason why the influence becomes less pronounced as one gets further away from the original source. You feel less heat from a frying pan if you stand on the far side of the kitchen. On the other hand, Bacon thinks that the mere process of being successively multiplied also causes a gradual weakening of influence. This may remind us of the ideas put forward by earlier 13th century physicists like Richard Rufus. They propose that a force impressed on a moved body will wear out by itself in addition to being impeded by the air or other medium through which the projectile moves. Obviously Bacon's theory is especially well-suited to explaining the propagation of light, and he does apply it especially in that context. He confronts the age-old question of whether we see by sending something out from our eyes like visual rays, or by receiving some influence that comes to the eyes from the visible object. His answer? Both, of course, because all natural things influence their surroundings. By this rule, the sense organ too must cause a multiplication of species, even if it also receives the species of what it sees. It may seem superfluous that the eye should actively do something to its environment as well as being affected by a species coming from the object. But Bacon thinks there is empirical evidence to support his two-way theory. The fact that cats' eyes gleam in the dark shows that they are sending out visual rays, while the after-images of bright lights that we see after we turn away from those lights shows that our eyes have been affected. With all of this, Bacon is drawing on the visual theories of the Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham, whose works he studied with great care. He played a major role in the transmission of Ibn al-Haytham's theories in Latin Christendom to the point that Bacon's version of those theories will remain the standard account of eyesight until Kepler in the 17th century. But his ambition to situate optics within a more general physics shows the influence of another source from the Islamic world, a text called On Rays, which is ascribed to the earlier Muslim thinker Akindi. This treatise invokes the mechanism of rays to explain not just light and vision, but other natural influences like sound, as well as the more occult powers involved in astrology and magic. Bacon's multiplication of species is an updated version of the same theory, and Bacon tends to agree with Akindi that the natural philosopher should take an interest in astrological and magical influence. He is also an enthusiastic believer in the science of alchemy. We need to be cautious approaching this aspect of Bacon's thought, where he explores what we would nowadays call pseudoscience. When he uses the word magic, it is always because he wants to draw a distinction between the fraudulent claims of magicians and his own science of experience. Experience demonstrates that stars do exert an astrological influence, but we should not follow Akindi and others who went so far as to say that the stars actually determine all future events. Rather, astrology can provide only probable conjectures, and is at its most reliable when predicting general phenomena, like weather patterns. Similarly, when it comes to alchemy, we need to base our practice in experience. For Bacon, this means understanding that bodies are composed from four fundamental ingredients, the so-called humours. Alchemy is the art that studies and learns to manipulate these ingredients and their effects. It was of course standard medical theory that human and other organic bodies are made up of the four humours, but he is unusual in applying this scheme to non-organic things, like minerals and metals. Bacon has an almost obsessive interest in the possible applications of this theory, and especially in the use of alchemy and medicine to prolong the span of one's life. In a passage that brings together many of his scientific interests, Bacon explains how to produce an elixir of longevity. First, get an alchemist to make you a mixture which is perfectly balanced in its humoral properties. Next, have an astronomer tell you the propitious moment in terms of astral influence. Finally, ask a specialist in geometrical optics to set up mirrors so that they will focus the astral rays on the mixture, transmitting the celestial virtue into it. Of course, if you are lucky enough to find yourself in Paris or Oxford in the 13th century, you'll only need to find one specialist to carry out all these tasks, Roger Bacon himself. But something must have gone wrong, because Bacon did not live an extraordinarily long life, but then we all know that Bacon is unhealthy. Nor did his astrological investigations help him to avoid misfortune in his later years. In the late 1270s, he was caught up in a church crackdown on deviant philosophical teachings, which included, among other things, condemnation of belief in magic. Bacon's frequent diatribes against magic were probably intended not only to mark the boundaries of proper science, but also to shield him against precisely such condemnations. If so, they didn't work any better than his experiments with longevity, and he found himself imprisoned briefly for his unorthodox teachings. Nowadays he gets a warmer reception. Despite his flirtations with the occult, he has, like Robert Grossetest but with considerably more plausibility, been held as a pioneer in experimental science, a worthy forerunner to a man who shared not just his name, but his scientific attitude, the Renaissance thinker Francis Bacon. But in our zeal to detect the early stirrings of modern science in the medieval age, we shouldn't overlook the historical and philosophical importance of the arts of magic and astrology. Indeed, I feel that with regard to this topic, we're like the bacon at a British sandwich shop on a roll. So join me next time for an episode that I'm sure will leave you spellbound as I discuss medieval magic with the world's leading expert on the topic, Charles Burnett, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about magic in the medieval age with Charles Burnett, who is professor of the history of Islamic influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute in London. Hi Charles. Hello. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Nice to be here. Again, you actually came on before with Dag Hasse to do a discussion of the influence and translations of Arabic philosophical and scientific works in Latin, and we're going to be touching on that again in this interview, but we're focusing on magic. So maybe you can start by telling us what we're going to be meaning when we say magic. What would you understand by the term magic and what would the medievals have understood by the term magic? Well, that's a very difficult question and has been much debated by scholars, so much so that many scholars prefer not even to use the word magic for magic, as it were, but would prefer to substitute something like occult sciences or necromancy or prestigea or hermeticism. The strange thing is that magic, madica, although it's a classical term, probably of Persian origin, is not very much used in the Middle Ages. And so when you're talking about magic in the Middle Ages, you're talking about a term which probably would not have been understood by most medieval scholars. It becomes used again in the Renaissance, but the most common word for what we might presume to be magic in the Middle Ages is necromancy or necromancy. I suppose if you tried to define it, you couldn't do better than to start with the definition which we find in the specular Mastronomiae, which has been attributed, which is often attributed to Albertus Magnus. Now there's a question mark as to actually who wrote it, but we know that it came into being in the 1260s. And there, necromancy or necromancy is divided into three parts. And one kind involves the invocation of spirits or daimones, spiritus or daimones, and they use what we call suffumigations in a sense. Another part simply involves the use of exotic languages and unrecognizable words, usually inscribed on materials like a talisman. And a third kind is using simply the powers of nature, the powers of the planets, the powers of the four elements and so on. And these three parts encompass quite a lot of what one might discover, what one might describe as being magic in the Middle Ages. The first type that you mentioned, which is demonic or involves spirits and is associated with incense, is the idea there that these demons are smoky beings and that they're sort of quasi-physical? They, well, absolutely. I mean, they are attracted by the incense and the whole purpose of this magic, which is often described as being ceremonious magic. You have to wear special clothing, you have to have a special kind of altar, you have to do things at a special or significant time, usually astrologically determined. And the whole purpose is to summon the spirits so that they do your will. So they actually follow commands or at least are willing to reconsider requests? Well, you've got to subdue them, you've got to make them follow your commands. And they are described. I mean, here, there's a considerable literature on the nature of spiritus or dime owners in Arabic, urukhan, yiart, and they are described as being part corporeal and part incorporeal. They're corporeal to the extent that they can actually use their senses, i.e. they can hear and see, therefore they hear the invocations that you direct them to. And they're semi-corporeal in the sense that they dwell halfway between the material earth and the completely incorporeal heavens where the angels and God and his saints dwell. And this is an idea that goes back to antiquity. Oh, it does, yes. In fact, one of the most detailed discussions of the nature of these spirits is in Calchitis' commentary on Plato's Timaeus. Right, okay. Now, in terms of the things that you can accomplish using magic, it seems to me as a real outsider to this whole literature that one of the main things you can achieve is somehow predicting the future. And I don't know whether that is something that you could do by asking a demon, but things like astrology, which we might also think has something to do with magic, for example, and other forms of prediction. I mean, I would have thought that that falls under the heading of magic, but what you were just describing, the three kinds of magic you just described, seem to be rather different. Well, yes, I suppose the magic that I have been describing is the magic that puts power into the practitioner's hands. He's able to change the future, he's able to change situations, he's able to destroy an enemy, he's able to make people love each other. As long as what he does, though, is still in conformity with the position of the heavens. So there is an element of choice, and if you like astrological prediction, and for that reason, again going back to the speculum astronomiae, the use of talismans, the summoning of spirits and so on, to affect the future is described as being one, the division of astrology which is called elections, choices, choices for the future. There is of course the whole area of the mantic arts, again they have a special name, which are simply predictive. I mean using geomancy, for example, where you use dots randomly cast on the sand and rearrange them into geomantic figures and the figures will tell you the future, will tell you what's going on, hidden things. Scapulomancy, where you look at signs, marks on shoulder blades extracted from sheep, and other sort of legends and so on, whereby you can just predict the future. And of course astrology is described as being the most perfect way of prognosticating the future. But by the time you get to astrology, you're, well, let's say on the border lines of magic, because astrology really shouldn't and wasn't described as being a magical art except by its opponents. Right, so actually you said before that sometimes people use the phrase occult sciences and that might encompass what you're describing as magic, also astrology and perhaps also alchemy, right? But I guess you're suggesting that we should keep these three things separate. Well, it's quite true that occult sciences is a much better general term for the whole, for all these, to encompass all these different arts, crafts. But one can also go back to the distinction already in the speculum astronomiae between, let's say spiritual or ceremonious magic and natural magic. And natural magic, you're dealing entirely with forces in the nature which are already there and that you might say is closer to natural science and indeed to astrology because you're finding out actually what the situation in the universe is, the best time for doing things, the best time for bringing together objects, materials and so on in order to affect something else. So that's where we might start thinking that the occult sciences come very close to being related to philosophy or most related to philosophy or most straightforwardly related to philosophy. Well, yes, especially if you then consider what are called the occult natures. And for example, in the Aristotelian tradition, everything natural causes and effects are usually explained in terms of relationship between the four elements, four qualities. But there are many things in nature which do not follow this, whose explanation cannot be derived from Aristotelian philosophy, such as the magnet, I mean, why does the magnet draw iron towards it? All action at a distance has to be explained and can't be explained simply in elemental terms. And so everything, many things in nature are considered to have occult qualities specific to them, to their species, by which they do things which are not explicable in terms of Aristotelian physics, but are natural all the same. And so magic in this case would be a way of manipulating, discovering and manipulating these occult features. And then other kinds of magic involve discovering and manipulating other kinds of entity that aren't available to the naked eye, so to speak, so things like demons. Well, of course, yes, yes. And this includes the whole area of medicine, for example, that different herbs, different drugs have their specific qualities, occult qualities by which they can heal people. And of course, medicine, if you like, medicine is another practical art which involves changing nature for the better. At least one hopes that most doctors are trying to change things for the better. And so medicine is ranged alongside magic, or necromancy, let's say, specifically necromancy, and the science of talismans, astrology, science of navigation, using burning mirrors as the class of practical physics, practical natural science, or as Al-Farabi would say, the branches of natural science. All these have a practical aim. So in a way, you know, they're parallel to each other. Medicine, astrology, magic, in all those cases, you are changing the nature around you. Before we get any further into this, maybe I should just pause to ask you a more basic question, which is, how do we know anything about medieval magic? I mean, you've just told us what it is. And it sounds like it's actually quite a complicated phenomenon that relates to a long tradition that goes back to the Arabic world, the Arabic-speaking world, antiquity. You've already mentioned one text which discusses magic. And magic is also discussed sometimes critically by philosophical authors, including John of Salisbury, for example, who I've already mentioned in the podcast. But there's also quite a number of surviving texts that discuss magic without complaining about it, but actually tell you how to do it, right? And I suppose that there's also what we might call material culture, like surviving talismans and so on. So can you give us a sense of the range of material on which a historian of medieval magic might draw? Well, indeed, the range is very wide indeed. You can, there's such a lot at the popular level, which I don't think we're going to go into, like charms and spells and curses and so on, which have magical effects which are regarded as being part of magic. At least they incorporate what we call words of power. But then we have the learned tradition of magic in the West, which is almost entirely based on Arabic texts, translations from Arabic texts. The central figure in this learner tradition is Hermes. We also have Apollonius, Baudinus, we have Tharpitip and Kurun, we have various Arabic authors, we have Tungtum al-Hindi, who probably has in fact a Sanskrit origin. But these texts were all translated from Arabic into Latin. One characteristic really of magical texts is that they are anonymous. So we rarely have a translator, we rarely have a real author, a named author, the authors are the sages of antiquity, and the translators remain anonymous, so it's very difficult to say exactly when these texts came into Europe. But we do have some early manuscripts from the 12th century, especially associated with Hugo of Sant'Alia, who was a specialist in hermetic literature. And then we start having the discussions of these texts, often in critical ways, like William of Orvera in the early 13th century, in his Deo-Universo, who names a whole lot of magical texts just in order to condemn them. And is it actually the case that these Arabic-Latin translation texts, are they really based on Arabic texts? I mean, do they make up—I mean, of course some of them are, and sometimes we even have the original Arabic as well as the Latin translation, but are there quite a few texts where they pretend that they're drawing on this long tradition and they're actually just making it up themselves, or is it hard to say? Well, in the last event it is hard to say. One can recognise many of these Latin translations as being translations, but there's one text which is really quite essential, which I think you've already discussed in your podcast, and that is Al-Kindi's Dei Radiis, which exists only in Latin, so we already have a question mark as to whether there ever was an Arabic original. In fact, I think it's quite likely there was. But this text has a distinction of being a rare text which actually gives a theory behind how much it works. And this is really an attempt to explain how action at a distance could be possible by invoking this mechanism of array. Absolutely, yes. And the Raze, it just so happens I know about this text because it's supposedly written by Al-Kindi, who I've worked on, and the Raze are invoked to explain a very wide variety of phenomena, including some which we would consider to be correct, like eyesight, but then also things like the power of magic words, the power of the stars on the earth, and so on. So how does he think that Raze function in order to explain action at a distance exactly? Well, all he says is that everything emits rays. I don't know how they emit rays, but not only the stars, which obviously emit rays, the heavenly bodies, but also things on earth, and the eyes, as you mentioned, of course, they emit rays because that's how they actually collect the material and the information to recall it into the mind. But above all, the voice, the human voice, the verbum, the word, emits rays which have powerful effects on what is addressed by those words. And speaking of words, do Arabic words then survive in Latin magical terminology quite a lot? This is an interesting thing because in order to invoke the spirits, the ruhaniyat, or the sus, you have to know their names. And what language do they speak? Well, you have whole lists of names which don't make sense in Arabic or in Latin. Very often they will have apparently Greek endings or Hebrew, look like Hebrew words, names. But the important thing is to pronounce them absolutely correctly. And when you're translating something from Arabic into Latin, since Arabic is generally unvowed, then you can lose an awful lot. You mean they only write the consonants, they don't write the short vowels? And so the power of these words is likely to be lost when they arrive in the Western world. I see it. Okay, I meant more whether they have technical terms that are like Latinized versions of Arabic technical terms, which you sometimes see happening way in the Greek Arabic translation movement originally, and then you see it happening again in philosophical texts. You'll sometimes see a word that's really an Arabic word, but they've just made it. A calic as it were. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I suppose you could say that even the word spiritus is a calic on the ruhaniyat, and ruh means spirit, and the ruhaniyat is a... Because there are so many different words for spirit. I mean, sorry, spiritus in Latin means so many different ways, but they have actually chosen this word rather than, say, daimon or some other Latin word, larva or whatever, to translate this Arabic word. The other context in which you see real Arabic words are in the prayers, where sometimes Arabic words are left untranslated, like if there's a prayer to the divine light, you'd have the nur, elahi, just transliterated, and then perhaps a Latin translation over it. But the Arabic words in themselves were regarded as having some power. Okay, so you're describing what sounds like a fairly extensive literature that survived down to us, and I mean, we should bear in mind here that what survives down to today would be a fraction of what existed then, because it has to be copied and survive the fortunes of fire and loss and so on. So this was obviously quite a substantial body of texts, even leaving aside the more popular side of magic that you were describing before. And I guess that a lot of listeners might be surprised at this, because we might assume that the attitudes of religious authorities towards magic would have been disapproving, to say the least. So is that right? I mean, was it widely condemned by the church and by theologians and so on? Or were there contexts in which magic was seen as acceptable or appropriate? Well, to go back to that text I referred to at the beginning, the spectrum astronomiae, of the three divisions of magic, the first two involving spirits and unknown languages were condemned. And the third one, involving natural magic, just the manipulation of the natural forces which were there anyway, was accepted. And I think you find this quite frequently, that people can engage in, if they're knowledgeable about how nature works, they can actually use natural forces for the good. Another thing that you find is that the magic ceremonies, in which the spirits are used in that sort of thing, occasionally re-worded so that they become Christian ceremonies, as some go on called Jean de Moligny in the 14th century, who takes a typical way of actually sacrificing to the spirits, invoking the spirits, summoning them, and he makes it into a praise of the Virgin Mary and summoning the Virgin Mary. So that's one thing you can do if you're a Christian. The condemnations, well you do find condemnations alongside the condemnations of Aristotelian philosophy in the 15th century. So magic is no worse off than Aristotle. But I think you could say, but maybe this is going to be your next question anyway, is that to a large extent, magic went underground in the Middle Ages. You have this period, let's say an open period when the translations were made in the 12th and early 13th century, and then the manuscripts disappear. You don't have manuscripts. You have occasional references, well many references, often to classical sources like as it was in those etymologies where you have a very large section on magic. But it's only in Renaissance that the same text which was translated in the 12th and early 13th century started to emerge again from the underground as it were, and were copied and also received in a very positive way by people like Ficino and Piccadilla, Mirandola, and you have vast magical sumi. There's one by someone called Giorgio Anselmi from the beginning of the 14th century for example, which includes, perhaps this is interesting, the mantig arts, geomancy, scapulomancy, chahramancy, but devotes most of its 200 odd folios to the art of talismans, of making talismans, invoking spirits and unchanging things through these means. So you do find condemnations obviously, but magic, well maybe there's another contrast, when you see magic described in Isidore and St. Augustine and so on, it's always in negative tones. But when you start reading these texts which were around, which were rediscovered in the Renaissance, you see that they are very positive. They are texts which have good ends. I mean the magician is told that magic might be questionable, but it depends on the person who's using magic. If he uses it for a good end, that's fine. That's another parallel with medicine actually. It is. It's a kind of cliché almost, the medical doctor is the person who can poison you or heal you. Absolutely, yes. And so the good doctor is the one who heals you obviously. There is an introduction to one magical text, in fact Tharpitium Nucuras on talismans, in which magic is described as being like an axe. And if you know how to use it for a good end, that's fine. But it can also cause a lot of... Chop wood, not people. It can cause a lot of harm. The more open attitude towards magic and more positive attitude that you're describing with the 12th and 13th century, the period where the translations came in from Arabic, is that because it's reflecting a positive, or at least generally accepting, attitude towards magic in the Arabic-speaking world that was then transmitted through these texts? I mean, could you, so to speak, get in less trouble for magic in the Arabic-speaking world than in Latin Christianity? I think that depends on the period and the place really, just as astrology sometimes strongly condemns, sometimes a part of court culture. One can't fail to mention the most important magical handbook of the whole of this period. That's the Re'ayat al-Hakim, or what became the Picatrix in Latin, which arose in Al-Andalus in the court, in just about the time of the breaking up of the Caliphate of Cordova, the early 11th century. And that has what I think is one of the best definitions of magic. Maybe I should have mentioned this at the very beginning, but at the beginning of the Re'ayat al-Hakim, magic is divided into three parts, but in a different way from the way that we find in the specular astronomical. Normally it is all, the magician is entirely involved in manipulating body and spirit. And when he, almost always, he of course, when he is bringing spirit to spirit, bringing to bear spirit on spirit, he is involved in what in Arabic, using a Persian word, is called spirit. And this becomes simply an opus in Latin, but we can identify these texts, which tell you how to contact and manipulate the spirit of another person or of an animal, of taming animals, for example. You use the spirit, spirit contact directly. The second is spirit on matter and that's when you take a talisman, something made out of material, it didn't be metal, it could be any material, and you inscribe through spiritual letters, with the spiritual power, into that talisman, and spirit on matter. And the third part of magic is alchemy, where you mix matter with matter. So this is a neat way, really, of describing the three parts of magic, which became known of course through the translation of the Gaya Ta'ikma into Latin in the 1260s in the court of Alfonso and Sabyo. But another, within the same context, also by Maslama Al Madritti, the composer of the Gaya Ta'ikma, we have the Rutbat Al Haqim, the step of the wise men, and there you have the intellectual description of the intellectual progress, or you could say the gnostic progress, I suppose, of the adept, where it's necessary to go through all the liberal arts, you go as far as recent can go, and then when you've reached the top step, as it were, of the liberal arts, there are two more steps. The first step is alchemy, which is what is dealt with in fact in the Rutbat Al Haqim, the step of the wise men, and the final, the ultimate step, is magic, seer, or necromancy. This is probably a fine example from the Middle Ages of how magic is not prestidigitation, it's not playing tricks, it's not deceiving people, but it is describing the highest level that a human being can aspire to. And this of course is what's taken up again in the Renaissance, when you see what Ficino has to say. Maybe in conclusion we could just say something about why the historian of philosophy should be interested in this whole phenomenon of magic. I mean, a lot of the magical texts themselves certainly don't read as if they're philosophical works, but on the other hand, even from what you just said, it seems that the magical tradition, for one thing, is drawing on the philosophical tradition, so the idea that you go through the liberal arts, for example, before you get to magic, that in some ways comparable to, for example, the mystical tradition, which sometimes compares mystical enlightenment to a further step beyond philosophy. So there's that idea, but there's also the idea that magic might give you access to something that looks a lot like what philosophers talk about, so for example, the operation of natural properties on one another, but in a deeper way. So there's both a methodological continuity and also a theoretical continuity with magic, between philosophy and magic. Do you think that's fair? Oh yes, I think this is very true. It's just another way, as it were. And what is described in magic actually is the achievement of the perfect nature. Other connections of course we've already mentioned. Why does the magnet attract iron? The occult powers, they have to be explained at least by natural science, which is within philosophy. There's a whole genre of magic called the Arsenotoria, which is relevant to philosophy because it's something which arose in the philosophy faculties of the universities, especially in Paris, which enabled the student to learn in a remarkably short time what he would otherwise take a year or years to learn. And of course philosophy is one of the main things that he has to learn, or he can learn very quickly using the Arsenotoria. But this is based on angels, on geometrical diagrams, on a sort of contemplation of a mandala. So that's another connection with philosophy. But there are, I mean there's a book, I don't know whether you've seen it, by Nicola Valparo called La Vurgle, or something like that, which is all about first of all occult powers and then the nature's hatred of the empty space. And in order to explain these unnatural things, as it were, certainly not explicable in Aristotelian terms, magical texts can be brought into play. Right, well thank you very much Charles for coming on the podcast. And join me next time to hear about something probably very different as I get back to mainstream history of philosophy in the medieval period in the 13th century, right here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stairway to Heaven – Bonaventure It would be so convenient if figures in the history of philosophy actually fell neatly into the boxes we use to keep them straight in our heads. You have your liberals and your conservatives, your idealists and your materialists, your empiricists and your rationalists. But often as not, philosophers defy such easy categorization. No contrast is older or more familiar to the historian of philosophy than the one between Platonism and Aristotelianism, yet Aristotle borrowed more than a few ideas from Plato, and I'm on record as saying that Plato was not a Platonist. So you should already have been suspicious when I said that in covering 13th century scholasticism I'd be looking in turn at the Franciscans and then the Dominicans. Were these two orders really associated with opposing philosophical approaches or doctrines? The traditional answer would be yes, and the traditional basis for that answer would be the contrast between two of the era's greatest thinkers, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, stands for a mystically tinged theology and skepticism concerning the secular offerings of philosophy. He steers by the star of Augustine, about whom he wrote, Aquinas, a Dominican, represents the Aristotelian side of the debate, aware that theology is needed to complete the teachings found in the philosophers, but eager to make full use of those teachings nonetheless. The contrast is epitomized by their rival conceptions of human knowledge. Bonaventure takes on Augustine's idea, already revived by Robert Grossetest, that human knowledge is possible only thanks to an illumination, granted by God. Aquinas instead places his trust in our senses, following the Aristotelian line that we can abstract general knowledge of the world from our perceptual experiences. The contrast seems to be confirmed by other members of the two orders. Bonaventure had Franciscan followers like his student John Peckham, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and, in turn, taught Matthew of Aquasparta. Both of them followed Bonaventure on many points, not least the requirement for divine illumination in human knowledge. In recognition of this group, one book devoted to the illumination theory has gone so far as to say, one and the same. Among the Dominicans, meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas's own teacher, Albert the Great, was among the most outstanding exponents of Aristotle in the 13th century, and Thomas's contemporary, Robert Kilwardby, did pioneering work commenting on Aristotle's logic. But, and I know you'll be shocked to hear me say this, simple contrasts rarely tell the whole story. Augustinian scholasticism cannot just be equated with Aristotelianism. Albert the Great's thought was shot through with Platonist themes. Citations of Augustine are far from difficult to find in the pages of Aquinas's works, and Kilwardby is notorious for his involvement in condemnations aimed against the excesses of Aristotelian philosophy. What about the Augustinian side of the contrast? Well, when we talked about Grosotest and his embrace of Augustine's illumination theory, we already saw that he presented that theory in the context of commenting on Aristotle. And among the Franciscans, we need only cast our mind back to Roger Bacon to see a very different approach to philosophy than the one pursued by Bonaventure. As for Bonaventure himself, though his admiration for Augustine is unmistakable, his ideas incorporate Aristotelian philosophy within a larger vision. This strategy is encapsulated in a short treatise of his entitled Retracing the Arts to Theology. It surveys the arts and philosophical sciences, and shows that the image of the divine is present in even the meanest of them. The project is in the spirit of Hugh of St. Victor, who, as you may remember, earned special praise from Bonaventure as excelling in reasoning, preaching, and contemplation. Hugh of St. Victor did not consider the so-called mechanical arts beneath his notice, and neither does Bonaventure, who sketches the purpose of such activities as farming, hunting, and weaving. Even these arts are a light given to us by God. But Bonaventure calls them an external light because they involve us with things outside ourselves. Every human enjoys the gift of two further lights within his or her own nature—the lower light of sensation and the inner light of philosophy. Crowning them all is the light of grace, which offers salvation. But all four of these lights, and not just the last one, are given by God. Bonaventure also detects images of the divine within all these arts. When a blacksmith makes a horseshoe, he tries to fashion something that represents, as well as possible, the idea of a horseshoe in his mind. This is an unwitting imitation of God's creation of things through the divine word. And when we see something, the visual image we get is a so-called similitude begotten by whatever it is we're seeing, just as God the Son is begotten by God the Father. Parallels of the same sort are discovered in the various philosophical sciences. When he comes to logic, Bonaventure takes his cue from the Aristotelian account of words as representing mental concepts. He points out that linguistic signs make our ideas known in physical form, that is, in the sounds we make when we talk. Just so was the divine made known in the Incarnation. What does all this show, other than that Bonaventure has mastered the Augustinian art of finding Christian motifs in even the unlikeliest places? At least two things. One is that the other arts can be considered to be handmaids of theology, a famous phrase with roots in antiquity. Anyone thinking that philosophy, or the other lights given to humankind, may be incompatible with theology had better turn up the dimmer switch and think again. Far from being in tension with theology, the other arts are to be used by theology. This is another idea we can trace back to Hugh of St. Victor, who admonished his youthful students to learn everything because all knowledge may help in understanding Scripture. Bonaventure is saying something further though. For him, the lights of the arts, sensation, and philosophy show that we have been created in God's image. Every use of these lights is an imitation of divinity, whether it's a smith making horseshoes, someone using his hearing to listen to the smiths, or a philosopher studying horseshoe crabs. The parallels Bonaventure draws may seem far-fetched, but they are backed up by his explanation of how created things come to have the limited degree of reality they possess. In this short work, that explanation is only sketched. The causes or reasons for things that we find in matter are mere images of what Bonaventure calls ideal reasons, which are found in God himself. We might go so far as to say that created things are nothing more than signs of divine reality, much as a linguistic sign represents the meaning intended by the person who used the sign. You listen to someone's words to know what they have in mind. Likewise, we can seek to understand the divine mind by investigating the created signs in the world around us. Thus do the building blocks of terminus logic become symbolic elements supporting the serene edifice of Bonaventure's theology. He would never consider philosophy to be an error or sin, provided that the philosopher does not lose sight of the overall goal. This very work, retracing the art to theology, practices what it preaches and shows the philosopher how to proceed. Bonaventure postulates divine exemplars of things, another idea with late antique roots, but in his hands the theory itself shows that pagan philosophy was bound to remain incomplete, and that Christians who pursue philosophy purely for its own sake are engaging in a futile exercise, the misguided sort of activity that some medieval's condemned as mere curiosity. To study the world for its own sake is to concentrate on the created image at the expense of the divine reality. All of this might lead us to expect that in Bonaventure's hands the illumination theory would above all concern knowledge of God. True understanding would consist in simply beholding His light in the form of the divine exemplars. But for Bonaventure this is a prospect we may anticipate only in the afterlife. Our knowledge in this life always falls short of a direct grasp of God. This point emerges in one of Bonaventure's most direct treatments of the issue, the fourth of a set of disputed questions on the subject of the knowledge of Christ. He chose this as the first topic he would take up after becoming ordinary master at Paris in 1253-4. His selection of theme may indicate the influence of Alexander of Hales, the first Franciscan to be a master at the University of Paris. Alexander was the contemporary whose ideas had the greatest impact on Bonaventure, who studied with Alexander after his arrival in Paris from his native Italy in the 1230s. Bonaventure admired his master greatly and spoke of his own ideas as little more than dutiful exposition of those that Alexander had put forward. The admiration was mutual, with Alexander saying of his famous student that, in him, Adam seemed not to have sinned. Now, a scholastic discussion of Christ's knowledge may sound like a pretty unpromising place to look for philosophical arguments. But Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure had sound philosophical, as well as theological, reasons for being interested in the problem. Christ is believed to be fully human and fully divine, and in his former aspect he fulfills human nature perfectly. Thus, Christ gives us an example, or rather the one and only example, at least in this earthly life, of a person who enjoys the full remit of possible human knowledge. To focus on his manner of knowing is thus to explore the ideal human cognitive state, something we might, with numerous caveats to avoid anachronism, to say nothing of heresy, compare to the Stoics' idea of a perfect sage who would never make a mistake. This explains why the fourth question in Bonaventure's series actually has nothing directly to do with Christ's knowledge. Instead, it asks whether it is generally the case that humans attain certainty through illumination from the divine exemplars. Where Grossetest explored the illumination theory while commenting on Aristotle, Bonaventure reveals the true intellectual lineage of the idea by kicking off his disputed question with no fewer than nine quotations from Augustine. The format gives him ample opportunity to do this, because it is standard to quote authoritative sources and produce arguments on both sides of a question before resolving it. In this case, we get 34 points in favor of the illumination theory and 26 against. After then offering a response that sets out his own positive answer, Bonaventure concludes by answering the negative considerations one by one. Again, this is totally standard for the format, as is the fact that Bonaventure does not just say, yes, we do know in the light of the divine exemplars, but uses the opportunity to refine the proposal and indeed to unfold a whole theory of human knowledge. Though this theory requires that the divine exemplars are somehow involved in each case of our knowing, Bonaventure stridently denies that the exemplars are the only factor involved by being the direct objects of our thought. If they were, then we would enjoy a vision of God already in this life every time we attained knowledge. That would leave no room for improvement, which is unacceptable since our state in paradise, or when granted a special revelation, surely has to be better than the state of everyday knowing. And yet, the exemplars must be involved somehow every time anyone knows anything. This case has already been made in the initial series of arguments in favor of the proposal, which were taken from Augustine and others. You'll be relieved to hear that I am not going to tell you about all 34 of them. Instead, I'll reduce them to two groups of considerations, having to do on the one hand with the things that we know, and on the other hand with our situation as knowers. Concerning the objects that we know, Bonaventure sounds like many a Platonist when he demands that nothing can really be known unless it is unchanging. There is a hint of Aristotle here too. He stipulated that only necessary and eternal things are truly knowable. For the Platonists, for Aristotle, and now for Bonaventure, I cannot take myself to know that something is true, if it may stop being true at some point. But in that case, created things in the sensible world cannot, strictly speaking, be the true objects of our knowledge, because none of them endure forever. And what about us as knowers? Here Bonaventure and the sources he has quoted argue that by themselves, our minds are simply too limited to achieve genuine knowledge. How can a limited mind come to grasp the unlimited as when we come to understand number, which is potentially infinite? How can creatures who are fallible by nature enjoy knowledge, which is infallible? This mismatch between imperfect knowers and the perfection of knowledge can be overcome only if some other perfect principle is involved, and that principle is provided by divine illumination. We can bring the whole line of argument together by referring to the key word in the title of Bonaventure's disputed question, how is it that humans achieve certainty? Only if there is no hint of unreliability on either side, in the subject or in the object. The things we know must be guaranteed to be permanently knowable, and our act of knowing must be guaranteed to grasp the truth about those things. And speaking of truth, Bonaventure repeats an argument from Augustine to the effect that God must be involved in our knowledge, since knowledge is always true, and God is nothing other than the truth itself. We can see here that the theory of illumination connects to another central theme of medieval thought, the doctrine of the transcendentals. God is the source of being and truth for all things, and all that he has created has being and truth. So, when we know about them, we are indirectly knowing him. It's another way of making the point we found in The Retracing of the Arts to Theology, that all created things are mere signs of divine reality. But we need to be careful here. All that talk about unchanging objects may lead us to think that the divine exemplars are, in fact, the things we know, if that is, we get to know anything. As I've already said though, Bonaventure insists otherwise. In the response at the center of the disputed question, he explains that we never know the divine exemplars, at least not in this life. Rather, we do know created things as images of the exemplars. The talk of illumination is not meant to suggest that we are beholding God's ideas, like lights flashing in our mind's eye. Rather, we are knowing about created things in the light of the exemplars. The metaphor does not have God playing the role of a brilliant lamp into which we are staring, but of a lamp that is making other things visible so that we can see them. Bonaventure describes it with somewhat less metaphorical, but not entirely literal, language by saying that the exemplars serve as rules or standards for the things we know. When we know that giraffes are ruminants, it's as if we are implicitly comparing created giraffes to the divine idea of a giraffe, with the comparison allowing for certain knowledge rather than a mere belief. The exemplars provide a perfect standard in the light of which we can judge. But something else is needed too, an encounter with some actual created giraffes. Otherwise, there will be nothing for the divine light to illuminate. To this extent, like Grossetest before him, Bonaventure could retain something of Aristotle's point that human knowledge draws on sense perception. Like someone interrupted halfway through the process of extracting milk fat from butter, Bonaventure has left much unclarified. The broad lines of his teaching are explicit and emphatic enough that his followers, notably John Peckham and Matthew of Aqua Sparta, will also embrace the theory, but they add various refinements of their own, for which I'll give just one example. John Peckham notes that some of our concepts seem to be so immediate that we grasp them with no prompting from sense perception. The transcendentals would be such primary concepts. So Peckham made them an exception to the general rule that sensation is needed as a second source for knowledge alongside the divine exemplars. He and Matthew are also somewhat more careful in distinguishing between the grasp of simple concepts and whole propositions, the difference between understanding plain old giraffe and understanding a complex truth like giraffes are ruminants. It seems that Grossetest mostly had propositions in mind when he first started to develop the illumination theory, but by the time we get to Bonaventure, and especially his followers, we are seeing the theory applied to both kinds of knowledge. I don't want you to come away from this look at Bonaventure's epistemology with the impression that the understanding and acquisition of knowledge was, for him, the final goal of his writings. To see that it was not, we can do no better than to turn to his most celebrated treatise, The Journey of the Mind to God. In this work, Bonaventure makes many of the same points we've already discussed, for instance that created things are mere signs or traces of God. The illumination theory also emerges at several points, as when Bonaventure says that God provides the rule by which we understand things as if we make our judgments in accordance with immutable laws, or that since the human mind is changeable, it cannot know unchanging things without help. But like his retracing the arts to theology, Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind to God places the illumination theory and philosophy itself within a more general and ambitious context. It is a contemplative work, full of numerical correspondences and other symbolic images, yet another reminder of the 12th century Victorines. Where they had analyzed the various features of Noah's Ark, Bonaventure stays closer to home, in more sense than one, by dwelling on a vision enjoyed by his fellow Italian, and the founder of his movement, Francis of Assisi. Francis beheld an angel with six wings, which for Bonaventure symbolized six steps in our journey towards God, from created things seen as the traces of God, all the way up to the Trinity itself, by way of an analysis of the human soul. As in his other works, Bonaventure does give normal, non-theological knowledge its due. Philosophy allows us to understand the workings of our own souls, which as we know from Augustine, has a three-fold structure that mirrors the divine Trinity. But we should leave this mode of thinking behind when we come to contemplate the Trinity itself. At this stage, scripture must play the role that philosophy played before. Ultimately, Bonaventure is true to his Franciscan roots. For all his deft scholastic distinctions, and his care to retain at least some of Aristotle's teachings, philosophical knowledge is not his objective. Or rather, even if philosophical knowledge is his objective, it is not his only objective. Just as bodies and the mind are a kind of ladder to God, a stairway to heaven if you will, the real meaning of philosophy is found when we discover that it too is a trace of the divine. As Bonaventure says, there should be no speculation without devotion, no observation without exaltation, and no knowledge without love. For his vast body of writings, his combination of spirituality with intellectual dexterity, and his devotion not just to the divine exemplars, but to the example of Francis himself, for many Bonaventure stands unchallenged as the greatest of the medieval Franciscans. But as historians of philosophy, we may want to reserve judgment, because there are some awfully impressive Franciscans to come, not least Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Next time, we'll be looking at a less well-known Franciscan thinker, whose ideas about cognition and the soul can also fairly be placed among his order's greatest achievements. Frankly, I'd advise you not to miss the next episode, when we'll be turning our attention to Peter Olivi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Your Attention Please, Peter Olivey. Here's a riddle, which I only just made up. What do you sometimes not pay when you want to, and at other times pay, without trying? The answer is attention. Attempting to focus on something, and failing to do so, is the most familiar of experiences. You might be listening to a favourite podcast, or reading a reasonably priced and handsomely packaged book based on that podcast, and finding that your mind wanders. It happens to me all the time. I might be reading up on, say, 13th century Franciscan philosophy, and realize that my eyes have been drifting across the same page for several minutes without my actually taking in any meaning. At other moments, we are also able to pay attention to things without any effort. We are often aware of things, yet not consciously aware of them. Suppose that you're at a crowded party, focusing on a conversation with one person, and then halfway across the room someone else says your name. Your ears will prick up and you'll notice you've been mentioned. You have been monitoring the hubbub of voices in the room without even realizing it. Given how common these experiences are, you'd think they would have attracted the interest of philosophers from the very beginning, but that isn't really the case. There were some discussions of awareness and attention in late antiquity, notably in Augustine and in Plotinus, who even gave the example of failing to concentrate when you're reading. But the first philosopher to put attention at the center of his, well, attention, was Peter Olivier. Born in southern France in the late 1240s, Olivier entered the Franciscan order at the tender age of 12. He studied at Paris and had the opportunity to learn from Bonaventure, who was by then Minister-General of the order. Olivier seems to have expected that he would become a master at the university, but this ambition was thwarted after a heated rivalry between Olivier and another young Franciscan named Arnold Gayard. Probably thanks to their mutual recriminations, neither was allowed to pursue the higher studies at Paris needed to become master of theology. It wouldn't be the last dispute of Olivier's career. He was a provocative and challenging figure known above all for his insistence that voluntary poverty was central to the mission of the Franciscan order. Other enthusiasts for this ascetic approach rallied around Olivier, seeing him as a great spiritual leader even as others within and outside the order saw him as a troublesome radical. Olivier's orthodoxy was questioned, but he ultimately managed to persuade the order that his teachings were acceptable. In 1287, he was even appointed as the lecturer to the Franciscans in Florence. He died 11 years later in his native France. Olivier would probably be surprised to find himself praised as an innovative philosophical mind or to be highlighted in this podcast at all. His vocation was that of a theologian, and his writings are dedicated to commentary on the Bible and to defense of his strict interpretation of the Franciscan way. His explicit remarks about the philosophers are largely dismissive, though one should bear in mind that by philosophers he means those who follow Aristotle. In one frequently quoted passage, Olivier's penchant for sarcasm is on full display as he responds to an argument of Aristotle's by saying, Aristotle argues for his claim without sufficient reason, indeed with almost no reason at all, but without reason he is believed as the god of this age. Olivier sneers at those contemporaries who are willing to follow Aristotle's authority wherever it leads, rather than engaging in the philosophical reflection needed to improve on Aristotelian doctrine. And improvement was needed, in Olivier's view. We are, after all, talking about a pagan idolater who defended such abominable teachings as the eternity of the world. Olivier's very lack of allegiance to the Aristotelian tradition freed him to make new philosophical proposals, which can be almost startling in their anticipation of themes from the early modern period. Of course, Olivier isn't the first theologian we've seen stray into philosophical territory. Nor is he the first to do so in the context of commenting on that mainstay of 13th century scholasticism, the sentences of Peter Lombard. It's above all here that he sets forth some of his most original ideas, in the form of a critique aimed at Aristotelian views on the human soul. Here, he's carrying on a discussion that began in earlier 13th century writings concerning Aristotle's definition of soul as the form of the body. In addition to the obvious difficulty that this could imply the soul's dependence on the body, so that it could not be immortal, there was a puzzle about whether we can really understand humans to have only one form. Olivier's contemporary Thomas Aquinas insisted that this is exactly what we should think. For Aquinas, the person is a single substance whose unity is provided by one and only one form, which is the person's soul. Olivier rejects this idea. Actually, that's putting it mildly. What he really says is that Aquinas' view is a brutal error which is contrary to reason and dangerous to the faith. It may be true that some powers of the soul are tied to the body in the way Aristotle suggests. The soul gives us powers of digestion, reproduction, sensation, and movement, and Olivier admits that the use of such powers requires the body. But the rational soul cannot be a bodily form. This higher soul has powers that are manifestly non-corporeal, in particular the faculties of thought and free choice. So how could it have such an intimate relationship with the body? In order to explain how we humans can have such radically different powers, ranging from the lowly capacity for nutrition to the exalted exercise of freedom and intellect of thought, we should simply give up on the idea that each of us has one and only one form. Instead, we possess a plurality of forms, which give us a variety of powers, or faculties. And in its entirety, the human soul is simply an aggregate or collection of these different powers which are the parts of a greater whole. This conclusion frees Olivier from any concern that the soul may be unable to survive without the body, or that its relation to the body would render it unable to exercise a power of choice, exempt from the necessity that attaches to physical things. The rational soul is a stranger to corporeal things, something Olivier at one point memorably captures by proposing that the soul's being in a body would be like wine being contained in a chamber pot. But, as Aquinas would be quick to point out, Olivier's pluralist theory has a big disadvantage too. It threatens to undermine the unity of the soul, and thus of the human person. Olivier seems to be suggesting that the person is not one, but at least two substances, an immaterial, rational soul hovering above an embodied being that is made up of another form and bodily matter. But in fact, this isn't how he sees things. Instead, the soul is already a substance in its own right, with no dependence on the body at all. It does have matter, but the soul's matter is incorporeal or spiritual, an idea taken from Ibn Gabirol and already used by Philip the Chancellor and Olivier's fellow Franciscans Roger Bacon and Bonaventure. This spiritual matter unifies the multiple powers and forms that make up a single soul. The physical body too is included in the unified person. The lower soul is responsible for sensation and other tasks realized through the body, so we should admit that it is unified with the body it is using. The higher rational soul lacks this sort of connection to the body, but it is unified to the lower soul because they share the same spiritual matter. Thus, even though the rational soul has no direct relationship to, never mind dependence on, the body, it forms a unity with the body indirectly or transitively. It is unified to the lower soul and the lower soul is in turn unified to the body. All of this is, I think, profoundly unaerostitilian, which of course would bother Olivier not one little bit. In Aristotle's writings on the soul, we are told that it is the human person who performs the various psychological functions through the soul. Your soul is not a separate thing in its own right, never mind a separate thing whose most important part is only indirectly related to your body. By contrast, Olivier insists that the soul itself is the subject of our most important psychological activities. This is evident from his treatment of free will. Here, we're going to get a first taste of a central dispute in later medieval philosophy. This dispute is usually framed as a clash between two ways of explaining free actions, which modern day scholars call intellectualist and voluntarist. The basic idea of the intellectualist is that human choice is prompted by some belief or understanding of the best thing to do. The voluntarist, by contrast, wants to say that a free choice consists in a sheer act of the will. Our choices may somehow be influenced by our beliefs, but ultimately, the explanatory buck stops with the faculty of will, not the faculty of reason. To some extent, this sharp contrast is like a Swedish communist's favorite dish, a red herring. The so-called voluntarists typically provide a role for reason in human choices, while the so-called rationalists do acknowledge the need for a faculty of will. Still, there is at the very least a strong difference in emphasis between an author like Olivier who looks forward to the voluntarists of the 14th century and Thomas Aquinas. He is usually seen as an intellectualist, not least by Olivier himself, who is no more impressed by Aquinas' views on freedom than by his rivals' views on the unity of soul. For now, it would be enough to explain Olivier's complaints without asking whether he really represents Aquinas' ideas fairly. As Olivier understands it, the intellectualist explanation of choice would have the will being moved passively by reason. Suppose I believe that my listeners will be entertained by the frequent use of puns, and come up with a wince-inducing wordplay, perhaps something about herring. Having formed the admittedly rather dubious belief that it would be a fantastic idea to include this pun in my next episode, I'd choose to do so and write it into the script. The intellectualist thinks my will is just carrying out the determination of my reason, like an executive branch of government whose sole task is to implement rulings laid down by a legislative branch. But this must be wrong, says Olivier. In fact, with characteristic asperity, he calls it insane. The whole point of the will is that it initiates choice. It's therefore the will that makes the decision, and the most that reason can do is to give it advice. The will is not passive, with respect to beliefs or reason, but active. It moves itself, rather than being moved by another part of the soul. As I say, there's a connection here to Olivier's ideas about the higher soul. One of his main purposes in isolating the higher, thinking and willing soul from the body is that bodies are incapable of this kind of self-initiating activity which is not moved by anything else. A stone can't just get up and roll on its own, it needs some other cause to set it in motion. By contrast, humans, including the Rolling Stones, are self-movers. They can spontaneously decide to do things, like writing music or going on tour. Even after a career that single-handedly guaranteed the profitability of the British market in controlled substances, this remains true even of Keith Richards. So how much more must it be true for the rest of us? So when Mick Jagger sang Start Me Up, he needed to look no further than his own self-startings. And according to Olivier, if we are searching for the source of this spontaneous action, we should look to the will's irreducible capacity for choice, not to the reason's ability to perceive things as choice-worthy. Olivier's emphasis on the soul's active nature finds its most unusual and philosophically fruitful expression in another area of his psychology, his account of perception. Again, the best way to appreciate his view is to start with the position he's attacking. It's one we're familiar with since we've seen it put forward by Roger Bacon. According to him, perception occurs when a so-called species reaches the perceiver from an object. This could be a sound, a smell, or something more sophisticated, like the hostility of a dangerous animal. But philosophers talking about perception usually focus on the case of vision, so let's do the same. In honor of the hero of this episode, imagine you're seeing a green olive. Bacon's explanation of how the visual experience occurs is that a green object like an olive will affect the air surrounding it by imparting the species of green to it. This species is then passed on or multiplied through one part of the air after another. When the effect gets to the air touching your eye, this species is received in your eye and this enables you to see green. A pretty plausible theory, you might say, and in fact one that is in broad terms true. But Peter Olivey thinks it suffers from two fatal weaknesses. The first is that the species in the eye would be a physical cause, whereas it is your immaterial soul that is registering the presence of a green object. Whatever it means for the so-called species of green to turn up in your eye, the presence of the species in the eye cannot be identical with, or even give rise to, a perception in your soul. This is because while immaterial things can influence physical things, as when your soul commands your arm to reach out to take an olive out of a bowl, the reverse is not the case. Bodies cannot affect anything incorporeal. So that's the first problem with the species theory, one that would of course only impress someone who shares Olivey's assumption that bodily states cannot affect an immaterial The second problem, however, involves fewer metaphysical presuppositions. In fact, it is a brilliant, if not necessarily unanswerable, objection which will have echoes in early modern philosophy in debates over the empirical basis of knowledge. Olivey observes that, according to the species theory, what you would be aware of when you see a green olive is not actually the olive. It is the species of green in your eye. This might explain why you see green, but it can't explain why you see the green olive. At best, what you would be accessing is a representation of the green olive. But this, Olivey insists, is just false. Unless you're looking at a picture of something, or its image in a mirror, you don't see only a representation or species of the thing you see, you see the thing itself. What Olivey is proposing here is an early version of what is nowadays called direct realism, a theory of perception that avoids invoking representations of the objects of perception in favor of the claim that we perceive things without any intermediary. Of course, merely denying representationalism isn't a positive explanation of how perception does work. Olivey does offer such an explanation, but not one that is particularly explanatory. It again ties in with his claims about the rational soul, and especially the will. On that topic, Olivey wanted to insist on the active, self-initiating nature of the soul, and the same is true here. What really bothers him about the species theory is that it makes us passive as perceivers, much as the intellectualist theory of choice made the will passive. Against this, Olivey insists that perception is no more passive than the will. To perceive an Olive, I must actively do something. I must attend, or pay attention to the Olive. In fact, Olivey even uses the Latin word atencio to describe the phenomenon. He also uses the evocative language of imbibing, or drinking in, what is perceived. Less metaphorically, but still somewhat mysteriously, he speaks of the soul's aspectus, a kind of orientation or direction of focus that we bring to bear on things when we attend to them. Olivey gives an illustration of his point, that is not unlike the one I gave at the beginning of this episode, about your mind wandering when you try to read. He asks us to consider someone sleeping with his eyes open. If there is some light in the room, the eyes should be physically affected by their surroundings, just as they are when the person is awake. So, the person should see if seeing is a purely passive process, as the species theory demands. But in fact, sleeping people don't see anything, because their souls are at rest and not attending to the things around them. I should note that Olivey doesn't rule out that the eyes are somehow affected by their surroundings. He admits that they are, as is clear from Roger Bacon's point that we continue to see after-images of bright lights after we stop looking at them. Olivey's claim is rather that the physical effects in the eyes or other sense organs do not cause sensation. The soul perceives simply by attending to the things to which it has access. And there's another possible misunderstanding we should avoid. Olivey obviously is not claiming that we have to be giving something our full, conscious attention in order to perceive it. If you're reading about philosophy, and a bowl of olives is in your field of vision beyond the book, you may be seeing the bowl without, as we might say, really paying attention to it. But all this shows, according to Olivey, is that the soul's active attention comes in degrees. It can be entirely absent, as in the sleeping case, or it can consist in the kind of basic background awareness of our surroundings that we have as we go about our daily lives. I think he would have loved the case where you overhear your name at a party, since it suggests that our souls are actively monitoring things all the time, always ready to give particularly close attention to something that suddenly comes to seem salient and interesting. Who has the better of the debate between Olivey and the representationist? That's a complicated question, and in fact philosophers of perception today still argue over a version of the same question. The biggest challenge for Olivey and other direct realists is probably the difficulty of accounting for perceptual error, as when you take a green olive to be a black olive because you are seeing it through a fog of cigarette smoke, something that would have been a routine occurrence in many restaurants until just a few years ago. For a representationalist, this is no problem. It's just a case where something is represented but without total accuracy. For a direct realist like Olivey, it's harder to explain, since he wants to insist that you are seeing the olive itself with no filtering representation that could distort the experience. He could however appeal to the fact that even as we directly see the olive, we are also directly seeing the intervening space between the eye and the olive, which in this case is full of smoke. So our overall experience combines these two perceptions. Meanwhile, his theory seems more plausible when we consider normal perceptions that represent things as they really are. It certainly doesn't seem to us that we perceive things through a screen of representative images. I would add that in the context of medieval philosophy, Olivey's position carries particular force. His contemporaries would have agreed with his assumptions about the immateriality of the soul. They would all have admitted that immaterial things like souls, and for that matter God, are able somehow to relate to and even act upon the physical world. If my immaterial soul can make my arm move, why can't my soul also reach out to something that is across the room in order to see it? But there's a danger for Olivey here too. Once we start thinking along these lines, we see that the real mystery is why an immaterial soul should be restricted to perceiving only the things that are related to its body in appropriate ways. Why can't I see behind my head if it is my soul's attention that makes the difference and not the way the objects in front of me are affecting my eyes? Olivey's perception would seem to be that our bodies do restrict the scope of our awareness in this life. Remember that the power of sensation is in the lower soul, and thus tied to the body. In the afterlife, we will not be so restricted, but have a more general and unimpeded apprehension of things. Olivey's ideas about the soul, and especially about perception, have won him admiration from modern-day historians of philosophy. But the just plain historians know him above all for a different reason. His central role in one of the central religious debates in the late 13th century. It was a contest with ethical and political, as well as theological, dimensions. Olivey became the standard-bearer for one side in that contest, fiercely defending an ideal of deliberate poverty, which for him constituted the core of the Franciscan way of life. He set this ideal within an apocalyptic view of history, according to which the Franciscans had arisen just in time to prepare humanity for its final days. Assuming he wasn't right about this apart from his calculations being off by about 700 years, I'll be back in a couple of weeks to tackle this topic of deliberate poverty. First though, I'll be looking in more detail at the non-rational powers of soul that have occupied our attention in this episode, and in particular at the non-human creatures who share these same powers, animals. My guest will be Johanna Toivonen, one of the scholars who has done most in recent years to draw attention to Olivey, and who has thought quite a bit about the attitudes that Olivey and medieval thinkers adopted towards animals. So gather your house pets around your podcast listening device, and join us for the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about animals in medieval philosophy with Johanna Teuvenen, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jveskilla in Finland. Hi Johanna. Hello. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Medieval philosophers, when they think about animals, are responding mostly to the Aristotelian tradition, and in the Aristotelian tradition there's a pretty strong contrast between animal nature and human nature, even though humans are of course a kind of animal as well, which we'll get on to discussing. But what would be the traditional dividing line, according to Aristotelian philosophy, between humans and non-human animals? Well, the basic idea that is at the bottom of the medieval thinking is the Aristotelian distinction in the three different kinds of souls, the vegetative, sensitive, and rational. They give different kinds of powers to various kinds of beings, and simply put, human beings are those animals that are capable of doing rational operations, like understanding universals, reasoning conclusions from premises, and also acting freely. We also have to remember that in the Middle Ages the difference was also metaphysical. I mean, it's not only that we are capable of doing different things, but it's also that we have an immaterial, immortal soul, and that's always at the bottom of the medieval views. So medieval philosophers would all agree that when an animal dies, it just dies and ceases to exist, whereas when a human dies, he or she lives on? Yes. Okay. Well, despite that contrast, humans think, animals don't, humans live on after the death of the body, animals don't. Humans are still actually a kind of animal, I mean, the canonical definition of human is a rational, mortal animal. So clearly there must be something we share with animals as well. So what are the kind of faculties then that we have in common with animals that licenses the Aristotelian tradition to define us as a kind of animal? Basically all the capacities and powers that animals have, humans have as well. So the rational soul in the Aristotelian system that was accepted by medievalists, all the powers of the lower types of souls belong to the higher kinds. So the rational gives all the abilities that animals have plus the intellectual abilities. So more concretely, medieval philosophers thought that human beings have the five familiar external senses, and on top of that, a bunch of more complex psychological capacities that they called internal senses. Then of course human beings have emotions which we share with other animals. Then it's a kind of more complicated question whether these powers function in the similar way in human beings than they do in non-human animals. So you mean we can see and a dog can see, but something different might be happening when we see them when a dog sees? Yes, that's a possible way of thinking. And there are some medieval authors who explicitly say that human beings perceive in a different way just because we are also rational beings. But my impression is that not all think in this way. But there are some medieval authors who also think that at least some of the sensory processes are exactly the same in non-human animals and in us. Okay, well if we focus then on sensation for a moment, since that seems to be the most obvious thing that we share with non-human animals, do they pretty much understand by sensation the same thing that Aristotle understood by sensation, or do we see development in theories of sensation in the medieval period? In principle, they developed their theories of perception in the Aristotelian framework. But they also inherited other elements. And one significant difference to some of that, obviously it was a big discussion in the Middle Ages of how the perception actually takes place. And one of the biggest differences to Aristotelian theories that some authors defended was the idea that the mind is somehow active in perception, so that we have to pay attention to external world in order to perceive it in the first place. So for instance, Peter Olivey argues strongly that without this kind of paying attention to external world, we wouldn't perceive anything. And he bases his whole theory of perception on this kind of active involvement with the world. So it's like you're conscious of what you're perceiving? Would that be an anachronistic way of saying it? I mean, there's maybe light coming into your eyes or images forming in your eyes, and then his ideas that you see because your soul is attending to what's happening in your eyes. Is that the idea? I think it's even more radical that you actually... Okay, something is coming to your eyes, but that is not perception. So perception is when you direct your attention to an object, and he kind of seems to separate these two processes from each other. Okay, and he would say that that's true of animals as well, even lower animals. When a chicken sees some corn on the ground, it's directing its attention to something in the same way that we do? Yes, well, that's how I understand his theory. Because the other option is that he doesn't have a theory of perception that applies to animals at all. And he seems a bit rather counterintuitive. Plus there are some kind of internal reasons for in his thinking to kind of attribute his kind of activity of the soul even to non-human animals. You mentioned just a minute ago that it's not only the five familiar external senses, sight, hearing, etc., that we share in common with animals, but that there are some higher kind of internal senses that animals have that we also have. And these are senses that were first postulated by Avicenna, I guess, or maybe first systematized by Avicenna. And the medievalists do take this on. So what do they do with this idea? Or maybe first explain what they are and then explain what they do with this idea? Yeah, well, the basic idea is that animals apparently act in ways that cannot be explained completely by appealing only to perception. I mean, the famous example from Avicenna is the sheep which flees a wolf without having any experience of the dangerousness of the wolf. So the scientific explanation for this was that we have to postulate some kind of psychological powers into animals which explain this behavior. Because the sheep can't just see dangerousness in the wolf or hostility in the wolf, because that's not a visual feature of the wolf, right? The wolf can be seen to be gray, maybe, but not dangerous. And I guess probably there are too many sheep running around who have had intimate familiarity with the hostility of wolves because they got eaten. So you're saying that when the sheep sees the wolf, it has some other faculty through which it perceives that the wolf is hostile? Or somehow grasps the hostility of the wolf. There were different ways of explaining how this actually happens. But on top of that, obviously, being able to remember things, being able to learn things, being able to imagine things that are not present, and more special ways of perceiving things, for instance, Aristotelian common sensibles and stuff like that. So these were all kind of psychological functions that we explained by appealing to so-called internal senses, the common sense, estimation, imagination, memory, and sometimes some other senses. That all sounds pretty familiar from Avicenna. Are they really just taking that over from him, or did they change the theory in various ways? I guess for one thing, probably, Olivi would say that we have to attend to the object of an internal sense, just like we have to attend to the object of an external sense, and that's not necessarily something we find in Avicenna. Yeah. Yeah, they took Avicenna's theory, they kind of liked it. They took it as a kind of very good scientific theory of animal psychology. But they obviously continued to discuss about the details of the theory, and in some respects they also developed the theory to some directions. And they also challenged many features of the theory. I mean, Olivi's prime example, because he actually argues that there's only one internal sense, namely the common sense, and then he goes on to explain how all the psychological functions can be done by the single common sense. So it's like a one faculty fits all faculty. Kind of, yes. I think one of his motivations is actually related to this paying attention idea, that if there's one central power in the soul which pays attention, it's kind of easier to explain that that power is a kind of centralizing power in the soul, and it pays attention either to external world or to the memory or something else. It's a remarkably exciting idea, I think, because it sounds a lot like a sort of Cartesian center of consciousness or something like that. And I think it's remarkable that that would have emerged as a proposal that would cover both humans and non-human animals, even if he's presumably mostly interested in the human case. Or am I getting too excited about this? No, I think you are getting as excited as you should. Okay, well, I mean, from all that it seems to follow that we in fact have a lot in common with animals, at least according to certain authors. It's not just that they have the five external senses, but they have these very high-level cognitive powers, and the only thing they really lack is universal understanding. And actually, most humans lack universal understanding too. And it seems to me that that should give the medievals a reason to treat animals benevolently. In fact, maybe even treat animals as well as you would treat any human who doesn't engage in scientific understanding. Or like, if I have a non-philosopher neighbor, then in a way the neighbor is in the same situation as a cow, right, because the cow and the neighbor are engaging in all the same psychological activities. So do they actually draw that kind of ethical inference? I think this is a very interesting question, although it must be admitted that it wasn't central for medievals. And again, a systematic study on this topic would be really welcome to the scholarship. But in general, I think medieval philosophers shared the rather widespread idea from antiquity that animals exist for the sake of human beings. And they found this obviously from the Bible, but also from Aristotle's Politics, where Aristotle argues that plants exist for the sake of animals, and animals exist for the sake of human beings. The basic point was for them that human beings are above the rest of the creation. So it is actually okay to use animals in order to sustain one's life. But occasionally they argue that there are some kind of limits to this use of animals. Namely that you may use animals in order to sustain your life, but you may not use them more than is sufficient for sustaining your life. So otherwise you would be abusing animals. So this idea appears in medieval texts. So you could maybe use them to do farm labor, but you couldn't beat them to death or something like that? Might be that this is the idea behind things. Philosophers are not so interested in the details of this idea. Okay, so if I understand what you're saying, then the point here is that whatever turns out to be ethically appropriate in our relationship to animals, it won't be a matter of what we share in common with them, which I think a lot of people would nowadays say is really decisive. Rather, it would be a matter of what their purpose here on earth is. And the idea would be that God or nature put them on earth to serve us, and so we should use them that way. But we shouldn't use them differently, because that would violate the purpose for which they were intended. Yeah, probably something like that. Okay, I think though there's still maybe a problem lurking here, because if humans are really only differentiated from animals in terms of their rationality, then aren't we going to have trouble saying something reasonable about humans who can't use rationality? I mean, what about people who have sustained head injuries, for example, and can't engage in intellectual understanding even potentially anymore? Or what about just people who never get around to it, right? They're busy, or they don't get to go to school or whatever. I mean, it seems, A, like a remarkably elitist view of human nature, but B, in some ways sort of even worse, it seems like they're going to have to define a lot of humans as actually not being human, but as being essentially like animals. There are medieval philosophers who seem to suggest that the actual ability to use reason is actually a decisive factor in making us human beings. And the idea seems to be that those who are incapable of using reason, they are not human beings in the proper sense of the word. However, they also believe that even those people who are incapable of using their reason have the kind of metaphysical building block, the rational soul. It doesn't disappear when you hit your head to a wall too hard. So in the kind of metaphysical sense, all human beings are human beings, and they are also different from other animals, even when they can't use their reason. And there was a practical side to this discussion, because medieval philosophers were interested in practical questions of whether we should baptize, let's say, people who are born with a severe handicap or something like that. And they always answered that yes, we should, because they still have a rational soul and they are human beings. They are persons in that sense. I see. So your membership in the species of humanity isn't really decided by what you in fact can do, but rather just by being a member of the species is already enough to prove that you have an immortal intellectual soul. No one ever sees you using it, and in fact, even if you never use it. In principle, yes. Yes. Okay. I wonder though, I mean, in Aristotle, there is some discussion of borderline cases, not between animals and humans, but between plants and animals. He talks about sea anemones or something that it's not clear whether they're animals or not because they don't move around and it's not obvious whether they have any sensation or not. I mean, what you're talking about sounds like there might be borderline cases from a medieval point of view, maybe not from our point of view, hopefully not, but borderline cases between animals and humans. Are they really worried about that or is it only me who's worried about that? They were. They discussed about kind of fanciful creatures that they found from some stories from antiquity about various humanoid species that live somewhere far away. And a particular species that they discussed was pygmies. Pygmies. Pygmies. Yes. Okay. And the discussion centered actually on their ability to use reason. So some authors claimed, for instance, Albertus Magnus, claimed that they are not human beings, even though they are capable of doing kind of astonishing things with their mind. Whereas some other authors actually argued that they are capable of using, capable of doing rational things, that they are capable of thinking rationally. And that means that they actually are human beings despite that they are small. Okay. Right. And of course they don't have any empirical evidence really about pygmies so they're kind of guessing. That's a kind of, my initial understanding of the discussion was that it's based on some kind of earlier sources, that they don't actually have any connection. But there's one text, namely from Peter of Obergni, who says that sometimes some people who come from faraway lands bring with them some samples of pygmies or something like that. Okay. It's very difficult to say whether this was kind of just again a story or some real thing. But I mean, that's kind of a historical question, whether they had any connections to these kind of things. And I can't say that I know it. But it's an interesting text nevertheless. Yeah, that is interesting. So one other question I have is how all of this looks on the moral side of the equation, because we've been talking about scientific understanding and grasping intelligibles, so it's all very theoretical. But I suppose that another contrast between animals and humans would be that humans can engage in moral life and they can achieve virtue, they can engage in political activity. And so would that be another way of distinguishing the humans from the animals in the way that the medieval authors want to? I think we have to distinguish here. I mean, the moral side of the story is that's pretty clear. Human beings are different from other animals just because we are capable of acting morally or immorally for that. So animals are not free. They don't have a free will. So their actions are somehow determined by their nature or so on. When they see something desirable, they immediately go for it. Human beings may reflect whether it would be right to grasp that desirable thing at this moment. And this makes us moral agents. And that's connected to what you've been saying before, because free will is located in the rational soul, presumably, and his ability to reflect on whether we should go for things. Exactly, yes. But then the other side, the political side, I mean, that's kind of interesting, because medieval philosophers had access to Aristotle's politics, where Aristotle argues that human beings are more political than other animals. And he really seems to indicate that there are other animal species that are political. Like what? Like bees and cranes and ants. Cranes are a nice example in my view, because cranes are political. The idea, I mean, it's obvious that this is related to how we understand what being political means. The basic idea is that we find from several medieval authors that if a certain species, members of a certain species act together in order to achieve a common goal, then they are political animals. So it's very kind of low-level political nature in that sense. And the cranes are a nice example just because they are not political always. They are political only when they migrate. This is what Albertus Manus says about them. Because they cooperate to fly in formation? Exactly, yes. They even have a leader. And there are some medieval authors who say that the cranes are political in the sense that kind of in a Republican sense, because they change the leader every now and then. So I guess Canadian geese are also political. Probably, yeah. Yeah, okay. So as cranes and bees are political in this sense, it was a rather strong idea in the Middle Ages that human beings are also political just because we are biological beings. We need other human beings in order to survive. They had this more rational or intellectual understanding of the politics, namely the idea that we talk about justice and so on. And it seems to me, I mean, this is a kind of research question that I'm working on at the moment, but it seems to me that at the later stages in the 14th century and so on, the biological conception of political is kind of reduced so that the more rational understanding of being political is kind of given a more central role in discussions. Okay, well, I think just looking back over everything you said, it strikes me that there's a general question here, which is to what extent are they just sort of beholden to a university theory about animals and they don't really care about information that comes their way regarding actual animals? And sort of like Aristotle himself, he says things about children that make you suspect that he's never spent more than a minute or two with an actual child. And I wonder whether we should accuse the medieval's of ignoring information or evidence that's staring them in the face about animals, or whether you would be willing to credit them with a more nuanced and maybe in quotation marks scientific approach to animals. It's quite clear that they were not interested in the empirical stuff in a similar way as we, for instance, are. So in a way, they were not kind of searching for empirical evidence for the abuse and so on. On the other hand, it seems to me that they were kind of sensitive to the information that they got from various places. For instance, they decided to talk about this pygmy just because they thought there might be some kind of, well, quasi-empirical material that needs to be accommodated with the theory. But on the other hand, also they were not willing to give up the kind of distinction between human beings and other animals that was based on the Aristotelian distinction. They might have discussed about the borderline cases and kind of see how far this theory can be stretched in several ways, but to my knowledge, they never rejected the theory on the basis of empirical evidence. Okay, so they are nuanced, but only within the theory, basically. Yes. Okay. Well, thanks very much for coming on to talk about animals and the medieval traditions, certainly a topic that you won't see very often. Next time, I'm going to be talking about a rather different topic, but staying in the Franciscan tradition, as we've been talking about, Peter Oliver. And what I'm going to be discussing is poverty. For now, I'll thank Johanna Toivonen very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And join me next time when we will be looking at poverty here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode None for me, thanks Franciscan Poverty The medieval's would, I think, have been puzzled by our phrase, poor as a church mouse. Not that mice in general had it good in the Middle Ages, but if any mouse at the time was well off, it was probably the mouse who lived in a church. Extraordinary amounts of wealth were held by the church at this time, thanks to centuries worth of donations from secular rulers who wished to express, or at least be seen to express, piety. The census of the Domesday book, compiled in 1086, shows that at that time, 26% of land in the area surveyed belonged to church institutions, as compared to only 17% for the royal family. Indeed, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was in large part just an extension of the nobility, with many a well-born son being parked in a monastery or other religious setting because he was not the first in line for inheritance. If you want to see just how flush the church was, go to the British city of Lincoln, where you can still see the Bishop's Palace, in part built right around the time that Robert Grossetas was bishop there. Even a glance at this imposing structure will be enough to confirm that medieval bishops were not so much church mice as big cheeses. And then came Francis of Assisi. In the sort of gesture pioneered by such ancient heroes of ascetic Christianity as Anthony the Great, Francis abandoned a life of material comfort to devote himself to charity. He lived in deliberate poverty, and the rule of his order demanded that his followers do the same. It reads in part, Let the friars take nothing for themselves as property, neither house nor place, nor anything else. The Franciscan movement called Christians to greater religious commitment, through preaching, but also by offering themselves as examples of humility and piety. The friars seemed to be everything that the powerful, complacent, and wealthy church was not. But as the order expanded and swelled from a small band of spiritual insurgents to a major religious movement, it became an established institution in its own right. But how could an organization with links across Europe, with buildings and libraries, with a constant flow of income from charitable donations, be staffed by men who owned nothing and were not even allowed to handle money? The very success of the Franciscans' mission threatened to undermine their aspiration to emulate Francis himself. Here lay the seeds of a bitter dispute over the practicality and permissibility of deliberate poverty which unfolded over several decades in the late 13th and 14th centuries. Critics argued that the Franciscans and other mendicants, notably the Dominicans, were engaged in a counterproductive enterprise, with poverty actually undermining their ability to help the poor and teach religion. Given the obvious and unflattering comparison between the riches of the established religious hierarchy and the ostentatious penury of the Franciscans, we might expect that such criticisms came from bishops and popes who worried that their authority was being undermined. But the earliest critics of the mendicant's vow in the 1250s were motivated by a different political context, one that will be all too familiar to today's professional philosophers – university infighting, especially over the filling of academic positions. We can trace the trouble back to a man who has been flitting in and out of our story for several episodes – Alexander of Hales. We first saw him as the leader of a group of masters who wrote on the transcendentals, then as the teacher who inspired the young Bonaventure. But if you remember just one thing about Alexander, let it be that he was the first Franciscan to hold a chair at the University of Paris. He already held the chair of theology when, in about 1236, he decided to join the order. Since the Dominicans already held two other chairs, this gave the mendicants control over three out of twelve chairs in theology at Paris. That alarmed the so-called secular masters who resented the loss of these posts to the friars. I say so-called, because many of these secular masters also took holy orders and could even be priests – remember that many of them worked in the faculty of theology. Nonetheless, the term secular is often applied to masters who were not mendicants. The seculars were also stung by the mendicants' refusal to show solidarity with them, for instance by failing to join in a teaching strike in 1229. The rivalry found expression in secular objections to the mendicants' vows, with a first significant critique coming from the Parisian master William of Saint-Amour. He would have cause to regret his intervention since he was condemned in 1256 after the mendicants presented evidence of William's supposedly heretical teachings to the pope. Before his downfall, William made a number of points against the vow of poverty, and after his condemnation these were echoed and extended by another secular master, Gerard of Abbeville. To some extent, their case rested on plain common sense. The mendicants claimed to be devoted to the care of the poor and would donate their worldly wealth to charity upon joining the order. All well and good, argued William and Gerard, but really effective assistance to the poor requires careful acquisition and management of resources. Purity is a lifelong calling, not something best shown with one spectacular act of self-abnegation. From this point of view, the development of the Franciscan order into a well-established organization with considerable material assets was advantageous, but it was hypocritical for the friars to present themselves as rootless beggars at the same time. Another accusation was that the mendicant ethos was effectively a revival of the ancient Manichean heresy which despised the things of the physical world. Humility is well and good, but the refusal to own any possessions at all constituted a degradation of the human, who is, after all, unique among creatures as being fashioned in the image of God. But the most intriguing anti-poverty arguments were those that drew on the legal traditions we surveyed when looking at the work of Gratian in the 12th century. The writings of canon lawyers like Gratian and the legal digest of Justinian were invoked on both sides of the controversy. To see why these texts were relevant, we need to understand better how the mendicants themselves described the legal status of the buildings they lived in, the clothes they wore, the books they read, the food they ate, and so on. They appealed to a distinction between ownership and use. The basic idea is quite simple. Suppose that the device you use to listen to this podcast stops working. To avoid the horrific consequence that you would be unable to get your weekly dose of the history of philosophy, you borrow a similar device from a friend while yours is being fixed. You have physical possession of the device and are free to use it for as long as your friend allows, but you don't own it. Likewise, the Franciscans understood their apparent possessions in fact to belong to someone else, namely the church as a whole, as represented by the Pope. A Franciscan friar with a place to live, a small library of books, and enough food and storage for the next week would consider all these things to belong to someone else, even though he is making use of them. Plausible though this rationale may seem, in the long run it would be a hostage to fortune. The rationale depended on the Pope's acknowledging ownership of the Order's property. So when in the 14th century the Pope turned against the mendicants, the legal justification was potentially undermined. And in the short run, the distinction between use and ownership presented a tempting target for secular critics. They argued that we may be able to apply the contrast to things like buildings and books, but not food and other items that are consumed and being used. In theory, every time they had dinner, the friars were using food that belonged to someone else. But are you really only using something you don't own, if you destroy it in the process? Mendicants may have been poor, but they offered a wealth of arguments in favor of their vow. Numerous Franciscans and Dominicans, including Thomas Aquinas, wrote on the subject, but I'm going to concentrate on Bonaventure and Peter Olivey, the two Franciscans who have been occupying our attention in recent episodes. As Minister General of the Order, Bonaventure was bound to get involved with the issue. Part of his task was to define the implications of the vow more precisely. A treatise aimed at other Franciscans, which may have been written by Bonaventure, answers questions that had been posed about the bounds of acceptable conduct. A friar may own no clothing apart from two tunics, and he's allowed to patch one of his tunics to keep it in usable condition. So would he be allowed to sew his two tunics together, treating one as a patch for the other, enabling him to wear two layers in winter? Pretty clearly, the friars who asked such questions were not enthusiastically embracing the rigors of asceticism, but when you consider how cold Paris can get in the winter, you can't blame them for asking. As we'll see shortly, Peter Olivey will have no patience for this sort of half-hearted approach, but Bonaventure was inclined to take a more moderate line. Above all, he could hardly define the strictures of poverty in such a way that the institutional mission of the order would be undermined, being, as he was, the head of that institution. So even though he often criticized hypocrisy and backsliding among his fellow friars, he was seen as a moderate within the poverty debate, in contrast to the more zealous Peter Olivey. In a vigorous response to the secular critic William of Saint-Amour, Bonaventure argues for the coherence and legitimacy of the Franciscan way of life. He highlights the spiritual dangers of wealth, which draws us away from God and towards the things of the body. Voluntary poverty is the most powerful way of taming one's desires, comparable to the vow of chastity undertaken in a monastic life. And if, as everyone admits, perfect chastity is better than lesser forms of sexual restraint, then how can one deny that perfect poverty is best? Ownership is inextricably bound to sin. In fact, it became a feature of human life only after the fall from grace. In a state of perfected nature, all things would be held in common. But Bonaventure tempers this potentially radical, even communist, attitude by admitting that mendicancy is not the only way to live a good and Christian life. One objection lobbed at the mendicants was that they were, ironically, committing the sin of pride, flaunting their poverty with a quite literally holier-than-thou attitude. Appropriately for a mendicant, Bonaventure begs to differ. Though he is convinced that poverty is the most perfect life, he need not condemn all other lifestyles as wicked. Imperfection is not the same as sin. Just take the less radical sort of poverty found among monks. They may fall short of the perfect self-denial shown by mendicants because they do own things in common with each other. Yet, the monastic life is clearly an admirable one. On the other hand, it's important to Bonaventure that the original exemplars of Christian conduct did embrace unqualified poverty. These exemplars were, of course, Christ and his apostles. A heated debate within the larger poverty debate concerned passages in the Bible that seemed to conflict with the mendicant ethic. It's mentioned in passing that the apostles carried purses, something Bonaventure was forced to explain away after William of Saint-Amour pointed to it as proof that Christ and his companions handled money. But as with William's polemic, the most philosophically fruitful aspect of Bonaventure's defense concerns economic theory. His challenge is to show how the mendicants can indeed use what looks very much like their property, given that they own nothing. He is in a strong position when it comes to something like books, which we should remember counted as something of a luxury item. The mendicant's use of books could be compared to the way that children in our own time are given textbooks to use for the duration of the school year. They don't own the books but merely use them, and the school can take the books away from the children at any time. For Bonaventure, this is a point of not just moral, but legal significance. The mendicant has no legal standing whatsoever as concerns the things he uses. Thus, he cannot sue someone in a dispute over property, and must give up the things he uses if the real owner commands, namely the church. This account can even be extended to things consumed in use, like food. The consumption occurs with the permission of the owner, and involves no legal right of ownership. As William had done, Bonaventure draws on traditional ideas about law stretching back to antiquity. The position of the mendicant is like that of miners, or the insane, who in Roman law could dispose of things that are legally owned by a parent or guardian. Bonaventure's intervention in the debate was a decisive one. Pope Nicholas III embraced his ideas, and in 1279 wrote a papal bull confirming the Franciscan's position in which he drew directly on Bonaventure's ideas. This added a new and rather surprising aspect to the whole dispute. To us, the mendicant movement looks like a rebuke to the established church, but for a while at least it was the mendicants who could claim papal backing. The alliance between the church hierarchy and the friars would erode in the subsequent decades though. In the 1320s, the shoe was on the other foot, or at least it would have been if the Franciscans wore any shoes. At that time, Pope John XII issued declarations in explicit criticism of the mendicant's legal theory. By then, secular masters like Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaine had chipped away at Bonaventure's carefully laid legal justifications. If the mendicants are like miners or the insane, they can't even legally receive gifts which makes it impossible to give them alms. Aristotle's authority could also be invoked against the mendicants since he was clearly against the ethos of poverty. His Nicomachean ethics emphasizes the need for wealth as a component of the good life, if only because it enables us to show generosity towards others. As for the Franciscans' claim that they could coherently abandon all ownership of goods, the secular masters responded that this is in fact impossible. Everyone must at least be guaranteed the basic means of subsistence. This is why one may be excused for stealing food if one is starving to death. Godfrey of Fontaine introduces the idea of natural ownership, a kind of inalienable right so fundamental that one cannot even give it away voluntarily. I'd like to dwell for a moment of how extraordinary this is. We're here seeing the emergence of the notion of a basic economic right. Of course, this is not to say that Godfrey is developing a systematic theory of human rights, but it is a significant step along the way to such theories, something we would scarcely have expected to find within the context of a politicized debate over religious asceticism. The secular arguments damaged the Franciscan case, but the friar's cause was arguably undermined above all from within, as poverty zealots demanded a more radical approach than the one defended by Bonaventure. The main protagonist here is Peter Olivey, who set the theme of poverty within an apocalyptic view of history. For him, Francis of Assisi was the angel of the sixth seal from the book of Revelation, whose role was to usher in a new and final age of the world. As his followers, the Franciscans were tasked with preparing all of humankind for the end of days, and their utter poverty played a crucial role in this enterprise since it allowed them to serve as moral exemplars. Like Bonaventure, Olivey vicariously refuted criticisms of mendicancy, but he also turned his fire against other Franciscans, who, among other things, had argued that renunciation of ownership was only implied by their vow rather than included within it. No, insisted Olivey, renunciation is at the very core of the Franciscan life, and it is of central importance that it grows out of a vow. By taking this vow, the friar performs an act of infinite self-discipline. Indeed, it is doubly infinite. Not only is he giving up all right of ownership, but the promise has no time limit, so that it binds his actions indefinitely into the future. Only with this sort of absolute and endless commitment can a human gain infinite merit. This may make Olivey sound like an extreme and unattractively doctrinaire moral theorist. That's certainly what his opponents thought. They worried that on Olivey's view, a mendicant would be in constant danger of mortal sin, since enjoyment of even one luxury in a moment of weakness would violate the sacred vow. Yet, when it came to the actual practice of what was called poor use, Olivey showed flexibility. He understood that it would be impossible to give general rules covering all possible circumstances and encourage Franciscans to consult their own conscience when considering difficult cases. Here, we may detect a connection to the idea put forward by Bonaventure and others, that an indwelling sense of morality, called conscience or cinderasis, plays a fundamental role in ethical life. Nonetheless, Olivey's many supporters in the order were attracted not so much by his tolerant approach to individual decisions as by his firm insistence on the centrality of poverty in the Franciscan way of life. His followers formed a camp within the mendicants, fervent in their asceticism and expecting the end of days. But it also won him enemies and led to him being censured in 1283. In the longer term, Olivey's apocalyptic views set zealous mendicancy on a collision course with the papacy. Though he did not name names, he suggested that the end days would feature the appearance of an Antichrist pope. He also hid the churchmen in their apostolically approved purses, asserting that even bishops could and should give up their extensive assets and embrace the mendicant way. Even after his death, Olivey was celebrated as a great spiritual figure by some, while others condemned him as a heretic. The zealot camp within the order would eventually face papal suppression, with four friars being burned alive for their intransigence in 1318. A year earlier, Pope John XII had written in some exasperation that, while poverty is great, unity is greater. With that, we'll leave the Franciscans for a time. In fact, for a little while I'm leaving you also. I am about to begin my traditional month-long summer break. Unlike a zealous Franciscan, I am hoping to store up quite a few treasures for the future. In upcoming episodes on medieval philosophy, we'll be turning to the other mendicant order, the Dominicans, including Albert the Great and, of course, Thomas Aquinas. But first, I will look at a development outside the mendicant movement and even outside the world of universities and schoolmen that has been occupying our attention recently. I'll be considering the Beguine mystics, Hardewich and Mechtel of Magdeburg, which will give us another chance to recognize the contribution of women to the history of medieval thought. You can expect that episode on September 27, 2015. A week prior to that, on September 20, will come a long-awaited debut, as I launch the first of a series of episodes devoted to classical philosophy in India, written together with an expert on the subject, Jainardhan Ganari. I'll be releasing episodes on Indian and medieval thought in alternating weeks throughout the rest of 2015 and probably throughout all of 2016. If you follow the podcast by subscribing to an RSS feed, you'll need to sign up to a second feed to get those episodes on Indian philosophy. Of course, you'll have an announcement about all this in September, and there will be links to everything on the podcast website, where I will, of course, post both the Indian and medieval episodes. So, for the next month, the podcast will be like a Franciscan's bank balance. Plenty of nothing. But a wealth of philosophy from two traditions will be available beginning on September 20, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Begin the Begin, Hardewich and Mechthild of Magdeburg. By now, you probably feel you have a good understanding of what philosophy was like in the 13th century. It was often highly technical, marked as it was by the use of new logical tools. Though theology was the highest science, philosophical problems were often pursued with less reference to religious doctrine than to Aristotle and other works made newly available in Latin translation. And of course, it was undertaken at the newly founded universities, by men who were usually clerics and always wrote in Latin. For this episode, you can forget all that. We're about to see that at this same time philosophical works were written outside the university context, by women, without using Aristotle or the newfangled logic, and in vernacular languages instead of the Latin of the schoolmen. The protagonists of our story will be Hardewich and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Hardewich's dates are uncertain, but she lived in the first part of the 13th century. Mechthild was born in about 1208 and died in about 1282 at the convent of Helfta. They were extraordinary figures, though not entirely unique. Among the thinkers we've met so far, the obvious comparison is Hildegard of Bingen. But the occasional use of a German word notwithstanding, Hildegard wrote in Latin, as much a part of her claim to authority as the visions she claimed to have received from God. As for figures yet to come, we won't have to wait until the Renaissance to meet other women and men who wrote in vernacular languages. Most obviously, there will be philosopher mystics like Meister Eckhart who wrote in German. A less obvious, but still illuminating comparison might be Eckhart's near-contemporary Dante Alighieri. Of course, his Divine Comedy is in Italian, but he also composed treatises in Latin, one of which is, ironically, devoted to the literary merits of the vernacular. Dante had access to educational and political opportunities that would have been closed to Hardewich, Mechthild, and the women thinkers of his own day. But like them, he was working outside the institutional framework of the universities. His case, along with others we'll be coming to in due course, shows that it was not only mystical authors who could contribute to medieval philosophy without being schoolmen. Still, mysticism did offer unprecedented opportunities for literary achievement in the 13th century, and it's no accident that the medieval women whose words and ideas have survived were usually mystics or spiritual authorities. A leading scholar of medieval mysticism, Bernard McGinn, has spoken of a democratization of Christianity that began in the early 13th century in which access to God was gradually conceded to ordinary believers as well as the powerful representatives of the Church. Hardewich would have belonged to the first generations experiencing that change. Yet there had been female writers before, even setting aside the exceptional case of Hildegard. All the way back in the Carolingian period, a woman named Duoda had written a manual of advice for her teenage son which mixes prose and poetry, a literary strategy we know from Boethius and his imitators in the School of Schacht. Mechthild's works gain their power in part from a similar alternation of verse and prose sections. Moving forward to the 10th century, we can mention the German nun, Rotzwitter, an author of considerable literary ambition who, like Hildegard, wrote poetry and plays drawing on ancient exemplars like Terence. Rotzwitter even evokes Lady Philosophy, whose dress provides some of the threads she has woven into her own writing, a witty inversion of Boethius's image of Lady Philosophy in a tattered dress that has been torn by the ignorant. Rotzwitter and Hildegard might be seen as the female counterparts of philosophers who wrote in a monastic context, like Anselm and the Victorines. In the 13th century, the universities emerged as an alternative institution in which philosophy could flourish, but these were not open to women. There was, however, another option, the one exploited by both Hadevich and Mechthild, the Beguine movement. Though the Beguines were not nuns, they did cohabitate, remain unmarried, and commit themselves to lives of devotion. They also performed charitable works, which led them to be far more socially involved than nuns, who were, quite literally, cloistered in their convents. The outward engagement of the Beguines helped to make the movement controversial, as did the gray zone they inhabited as religiously committed women who had taken no vows that would seclude them and hence justify their autonomy in the eyes of the church. They were refused permission to preach or to live as mendicants, as the Franciscans and Dominicans did. The predictable excuse was that such activities could lead to the wrong kind of intercourse between the Beguines and laypeople. Instead, the Beguines typically supported themselves by working with textiles, and pursued a more subtle form of outreach, not least by writing to fellow Beguines and other intimates. With these restrictions in place, the movement was given papal approval in 1216. This was the context for the work of Hadevich, who came from the Low Countries where the Beguine movement first emerged. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about her life apart from what her writings themselves contain. They make clear that she was a spiritual advisor to her fellow Beguines, but also that she became estranged from her group after being accused of unorthodoxy. A manuscript of her works says she came from Antwerp, but that notice was written centuries after her death, so it's far from reliable. Still, you can be confident in naming her as a philosopher from what is now Belgium, in case you're ever asked to name one during a trivia contest. She wrote in Dutch and in several genres. We have a series of letters from her pen, probably addressed to a young Beguine, then there are 14 visions, reminiscent of those recorded by Hildegard of Bingen, and poems in two different styles. It's not certain whether all these texts are actually by Hadevich, with particular controversy concerning some of the poems. The situation with Mächtild is not as problematic when it comes to authenticity. She has left to posterity a work in seven books called Das Flissende Licht der Gotheit, meaning The Flowing Light of Divinity. But the situation here is problematic in a different respect. The original version is lost. It survives in a middle-high German translation of Mächtild's Middle Low German, executed in the 1340s, and in a partial Latin version. Low German is of course still used today by the coach of Germany's World Cup-winning national soccer team. If you know modern German, this 14th century translation hovers just on the edge of the comprehensible, a bit like reading Chaucer for speakers of modern English. Though we're better informed about Mächtild's life than the life of Hadevich, we don't know as much as we'd like. We do know that Mächtild was encouraged and assisted by her confessor, Henry of Halle, and that she wrote the seventh and final book of The Flowing Light at Helft as a blind old woman depending on the assistance of the nuns there. The title is announced by Mächtild herself, or rather was announced to her by God as she relates in a prologue to the entire work. Here, she also tells us to read The Flowing Light nine times if we hope to understand it. It is of course remarkable that women were in a position to write such ambitious texts in the 13th century, and equally remarkable that men helped them to do so, and later copied and translated their works. But it would be a mistake to reduce the historical and philosophical interest of Hadevich and Mächtild to the mere fact of their gender. A better way into their thought is something I've already highlighted. They composed their works in vernacular language. To write in Dutch or German was to stand outside the hierarchy of authority and learning, and to stand outside that hierarchy offered the chance of critiquing it. Mächtild in particular was stern in her criticism of corrupt priests. At one point, she steals a march on her fellow vernacular poet Dante by recounting a vision of clergymen in hell. She saw them being punished for their worldly sins by having their souls plunged in fiery water, devils fished them out with claws instead of nets, deposited them on the shore, skinned them alive, and boiled them for supper. Self-satisfied schoolmen are likewise skewered by Mächtild. After being warned that her daring book may wind up being burned, she receives a vision from God who assures her that no one can burn the truth, and that Mächtild's book symbolizes the Trinity. The physical parchment is the incarnation of the Son, the written words the divinity of the Father, the spoken words the Holy Spirit. When Mächtild humbly replies that she is no learned holy man, she is told that many clever men have wasted their gold on schooling that did them no good, and that learned tongues shall be taught by the unlearned mouth. It is not the learned, but Mächtild, who is allowed to drink from the stream of God's Spirit, just as the flood waters fall on the high peaks but gather in the low valley. Mächtild does not need the education offered by the masters at the universities. Her master is God. Elsewhere she blames those who do have book learning, but refuse to give themselves over to the power of naked love. That brings us to the central theme in the work of Mächtild and of Hadavich too, love. For this, both use the word minne, which they take from the vernacular literary tradition of courtly love. This allows our authors to play on the ideal of unrequited love familiar from medieval romances. Of course, these stories and poems often depicted a man pining for an unobtainable woman, whereas Hadavich and Mächtild assume the lover's role, assigning to Christ, or the entire Godhead, the role of the elusive beloved. There's something of a paradox here, with our authors claiming special access to God, yet speaking constantly of their utter estrangement from Him. The paradox may be resolved by noting the fleeting nature of mystical experience, and the inability of the mystics to enjoy that experience on command. When they sit down to write, they are recalling moments of exalted intimacy, having come back down to earth. It's this that makes their use of the motifs of courtly love philosophical. The talk of minne is, among other things, a way of articulating the experience of the special kind of knowledge afforded to the mystic, followed by the sudden loss of that knowledge. Let's consider how Hadavich, taking a thread or two from Lady Philosophy, weaves together eroticism with epistemology. She may be a mystic, but is far from being opposed to rationality. In her letters, she speaks often of the virtues of reason, encouraging her reader to promote rationality above desire and pleasure, and depicting it as an unerring guide sent by God. It is by following her own reason that Hadavich has been able to achieve union with God. But if this is not anti-rationalism, neither is it a cold intellectualism. Reason must abandon itself to love's wish, while love consents to be forced and held within the bounds of reason. A similar message can be taken from Hadavich's visions. In another echo of Boethius and Lady Philosophy, one of these visions speaks of the soul's encounter with Queen Reason, who is described as wearing a dress covered with eyes, which represent knowledge. Reason requires the guidance of love, which crowns the eyes of knowledge. At the conclusion of the vision, Hadavich leaves reason behind to be embraced by love. The Dutch word reidene does double duty for reasoning and speaking. In moving on to love, Hadavich is thus leaving behind language as well as reason, as she enjoys an intimate, inexpressible encounter with the divine. But such encounters are as temporary as they are intense. Hadavich makes bold use of sexual imagery to describe this special kind of knowledge, drawing not just on the literature of courtly love, but also on the song of songs. In one particularly stunning letter, she quotes from this most erotic book of the Bible and speaks of the soul as a bride longing for the divine beloved, whose arms are outstretched, his lips ready to kiss those of the lover and to satisfy all her desires. But usually she strikes a more desolate note. The moment of union is like lightning followed by the thunder of estrangement from God. In moments where her soul is bereft, she realizes her utter unworthiness and unpayable debt. No poet of courtly love can outdo Hadavich when it comes to lamenting for the absent beloved. Many of her own poems are devoted to this theme, and feature lines like, More numerous than the stars in heaven are the griefs of love, Or the suffering that can only be known by him who sincerely forsakes all for love and then remains unnourished by her. Hadavich also speaks of what she calls unfaith, a kind of exquisite despair in which one is overcome by love, yet convinced that it is unrequited. Like the knight suffering in silence while his lady is blissfully unaware, the soul can only wait for God to take some notice of it. This swooning, poetic language evokes the paradox of mystical knowledge, which is the most certain and exalted form of knowing when it occurs, but arrives always unbidden and vanishes just as suddenly. Hadavich draws our attention to the superior status of these visions and also their transience. She often tells exactly what day a given vision came to her. Typically it's on a religious occasion, like Pentecost. She may achieve nothing less than a direct sight of God's face, only to lose it after a brief time. Reason serves as the initial guide, and love takes the soul into the bridal chamber, but once there, the soul can only await her lover in hope. What Hadavich is describing here has much in common with Neoplatonic theories of knowledge, especially those of a Christian variety, which tend to depict God coming to the soul, rather than the soul ascending under its own power. Hadavich also has a metaphysical theory to back up this theory of knowledge. She believes that our souls were created eternally in God as divine exemplars, and that mystical vision, or part of it, is coming to behold one's true original self. In the flowing light of Mechtel de Magdeburg, we find many of the same themes worked out with even greater detail. The work contains scenes of frank sexuality, with the soul depicted waiting in bed and love sick as she hopes for the arrival of her betrothed, or as naked so that there is nothing between the soul and God. Considering such passages, modern day feminist interpreters have drawn attention to the way Mechtild includes the body as part of the relationship of minne between herself and God. According to some of these interpreters, the patriarchal values of medieval society are being subverted in the flowing light. This was an age when women were seen only in terms of their sexual and bodily nature. Mechtild responded by valorizing physicality and making it a means to union with God, rather than a hindrance to that union. At the same time, gender roles may be switched, as when Hadevich and Mechtild make themselves the lover and Christ the beloved, or the woman author may present herself as a soul who is neither male nor female. We should however note that many of the same points could be made with reference to male authors. In mystical writers like Bernard of Clairvaux, we can find some of the same erotic imagery, and male philosophers often express surprisingly fluid ideas about gender, for instance by wondering whether we will still be distinguished as men and women when we receive our resurrected bodies. Besides, the valorization of the physical is built into standard Christian theology, thanks to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. For precisely this reason, feminist readers of Mechtild have pointed out that she gives a central place to the Eucharist in her thought. In the 13th century, the same tendency may have been congenial to the interests of the Church, given worries about the Cathar heresy which blossomed in southern France. Since the 12th century, the Cathars had been promoting a kind of renewed Manicheanism, which disdained the body and even denied that Christ had become fully incarnate as a human. In such a context, it was actually in line with the values of the Church when the Beguine mystics gave their bodies a positive role to play in spiritual life. So, as I said at the outset, we should not read Haarevich and Mechtild solely, or even chiefly, through the lens of their gender. We should instead recognize them as representing, and creatively responding to, wider trends in medieval society and mysticism. You may object that their ostentatious humility was inextricably bound up with their femininity. Just think of Hildegard of Bingen's constant refrain that, as a mere woman, she was a suitable vessel for God's words. Some men of the period took a similar view. William of Auvergne suggested that mystical visions were more often given to women because their souls are more impressionable. And certainly, there is a rhetoric of passivity in these 13th century Beguines. They do not present themselves as mere mouthpieces for God, as Hildegard often did, but Mechtild is quick to assure us that she did not seek out the favors given to her, and Haarevich makes it clear that her visions come when God wills, not when she wishes. Still, neither of them seem to think that their humble status is primarily a matter of gender. Rather, their claims of unworthiness are bound up with the economy of redemption. One of the most striking chapters in Mechtild's Flowing Light consists of the following single sentence. This is the theological side of Haarevich's courtly love theme of resignation and unfaith. As the lover suffers in her wait for the beloved, she is vividly aware that she deserves nothing better. In the Flowing Light, Mechtild similarly returns again and again to the idea of estrangement or abandonment. For her, the greatest form of minne is the one that abandons all expectation that the beloved will arrive, the love that lets go of love. This is the frame of mind that leads Mechtild to say, not once, but twice, that she would as soon die of love. But in a characteristic paradox, Mechtild finds a kind of joy in this very despair. At the end of a lengthy dialogue between the soul as bride and God who remains aloof from her, she captures the thought in a rhyming couplet, The deeper I sink, the sweeter I drink. It's perhaps this that most separates our beguenes from the more intellectualist and Platonist mystics in the medieval period. Haarevich and Mechtild know the ecstasy that comes with beholding God, but they also depict the exquisite pleasure of not knowing when they will be given a chance to behold Him again. That seems an appropriate note on which to end our look at Haarevich and Mechtild. It isn't the end of our interest in the beguenes. In a future episode, we'll be meeting another member of the movement who met a tragic end, Margherita Poretti. But for now, we'll be turning back to the scholasticism that most people associate with medieval philosophy as we begin to examine an order that in fact had close links to the beguenes. We've met the Franciscans. Next time we'll start getting to know the Dominicans, beginning with Robert Kilwardby. That's next time, but not next week, since as you hopefully have gathered by now, the medieval episodes are appearing only every other weekend as I alternate with the series of episodes on philosophy in India. If that leaves you abandoned and estranged, then you can take some solace in the thought that Haarevich and Mechtild knew how you feel. But at least you know you only have to wait two weeks for the next encounter with medieval philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Binding Arbitration, Robert Kilwardby. As a wise man once said, the solution to a problem with Aristotle is always more Aristotle. Okay, it wasn't actually a wise man, it was me, in episode 159, talking about Maimonides' ethics. But as a philosopher, I am at least striving to be wise, and it's only to be expected that Maimonides and any other medieval philosopher would strive to answer objections to Aristotelian philosophy by using the resources of that philosophy. Of course, fighting fire with fire is a high-risk strategy, and in the case of Maimonides, it led to the burning of his works. Again, we might think this was only to be expected. Just as philosophers of the Middle Ages were committed Aristotelians, so there were medieval critics who wanted to commit the works of philosophers to the flames. In addition to the burning of Maimonides' writings, carried out by Christian authorities at the behest of Jews, there were decrees by the Christian church condemning certain philosophical doctrines as unacceptable. Most famous is a condemnation laid down by the Bishop of Paris in 1277, which will be the topic of a future episode. But in the very same month, a similar edict was made at the University of Oxford by Robert Kilwardby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. On this basis alone, it seems easy to fit Kilwardby into our pattern. In an age when philosophers chafed against and were constrained by anti-philosophical authorities, Kilwardby was on the side of the anti-philosophers. He would represent the latest attempt to stem the Aristotelian tide that had been rising throughout the 13th century in hopes of preserving a more traditional Augustinian approach. On this telling, he was the Augustinian foil to his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian who may even have been one of the prime targets of Kilwardby's active censorship in Oxford. Kilwardby would thus be an intellectual ally of a man like the Franciscan theologian Peter Olivey, whom we saw sneering at his contemporaries for seeing Aristotle as the god of this age, and instead favouring the opinions of Augustine as Olivey understood them. But if scholastic philosophy teaches us anything, it's that we should question stark oppositions and seek to draw our distinctions more finely. So it is here. Kilwardby spent decades as a student and master in both Paris and Oxford before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1272. He wrote works of Aristotelian logic, natural philosophy, and ethics, writings that would influence Albert the Great, who was certainly no one's idea of an anti-philosopher. If we want to understand Kilwardby, it's far better to start with this extensive body of writings than with his decision to prohibit certain philosophical teachings at Oxford. In these writings, we do find Kilwardby saying that Augustine was, much more sublimely enlightened than Aristotle, especially in spiritual matters. But we also find that he is keen to establish agreement between these two great authorities insofar as he can, so that his own teachings emerge as creative compromises. Kilwardby's credentials as a faithful Aristotelian can be established easily enough by turning to his work in logic and grammar, which were no less fundamental for him than for other university schoolmen. Far from questioning Aristotle's teachings, he applies ideas taken from other areas of Aristotelian science to these arts of the trivium. In particular, he uses concepts from natural philosophy to explain language and philosophical arguments. His grammatical writings are based on the ancient linguistic theorist, Priscian, not Aristotle. Yet, Kilwardby explains the function of a verb by referring to Aristotle's ideas about emotion, while a noun in the nominative case stands for a substance that is undergoing or carrying out emotion. He is also at pains to present grammar as a science in the Aristotelian sense. This is no easy task, since Aristotelian sciences are supposed to be general or universal, whereas the study of grammar would seem to be specific to whatever language it is you are analyzing – one grammar for Latin, another for Greek or English. While Kilwardby is of course aware of the differences between languages, he nonetheless insists that there are some features common to all languages, for instance, that there are only four parts of speech that can be declined, namely nouns, verbs, pronouns, and participles. Thus, grammar has the requisite universality to be considered in Aristotelian science. More striking still is what he does with logic. Nowadays, we would ourselves decline to see strong links between logic and physics, but Kilwardby thinks it is useful to take the four-cause theory of Aristotle's natural philosophy and apply it to syllogistic arguments. The efficient cause of a syllogism is the person who forms it, and its final cause or purpose is of course to produce knowledge. Kilwardby also thinks of syllogisms as having a material and formal cause. Basically, the matter of a syllogism is the terms that appear in the premises, while the form is the way that the terms are arranged. Consider an everyday syllogism like the following explanation of why Hiawatha was unable to achieve her childhood dream. Here, the terms are giraffe, able to roller skate, and able to compete in roller derby, while the form of the argument is, no A is B, only B is C, therefore no A is C. All the elements that the medieval's called syncatogormatic features of the syllogism, such as negation or modifiers like necessarily and possibly, belong to the form and not the matter. Now this is quite interesting, because we also talk about logic being formal. So Kilwardby's view may seem to be a step towards the more abstract and even mathematical conception of logic that philosophers work with today. Kilwardby's contributions to philosophy of language and logic are also significant for a more basic reason—he got there before most of his contemporaries. He wrote the oldest commentary on Priscian's grammar that we can date, and was also one of the first to comment on the newly translated logical works by Aristotle. He did all this during his time at Paris, before joining the Dominicans in 1245 and returning to his native England, where he would turn his attention to more theological topics. In the 1250s, he was still working on problems within Aristotle's natural philosophy. He devoted one set of disputed questions from this period to the much debated topic of time, which we saw puzzling earlier 13th century thinkers like Richard Rufus and, well, a whole bunch of other guys whose names we don't know. Here we have a good opportunity to test Kilwardby's allegiance to Augustine, as opposed to Aristotle, since Augustine's Confessions is famous for proposing that time only exists in our minds and not in external reality. Kilwardby does cite this opinion, but can't bring himself to accept it. One reason for thinking that time is unreal would also apply to motion. Like time, motion exists only stretched across past, present, and future, yet the past no longer exists, while the future does not yet exist. It Kilwardby assumes that no one will want to say that motion is unreal, so neither should we say this of time. Instead, both motion and time should be thought of as successive entities, which exist precisely by coming into being and elapsing. Time relates to successive motion as its quantity, much as spatial extension is a quantity for bodies, with the significant difference that spatial quantity remains fixed, while temporal quantity is transient. So, if there is any mind-independent or subjective aspect of time, it is not the quantitative measure of motions out in the world. Instead, it would be our own measurements of time, which render it, as Kilwardby says, determinate by dividing it into minutes and hours. But even this is not presented as a way of saving Augustine's position. Instead, Kilwardby uses the point to explain Aristotle's claim that we know time by counting, or marking off, a motion. So far we're building up a picture of a man who seems no more likely to condemn Aristotelian philosophy than to join a roller derby team. But Kilwardby's actions in 1277 will become more explicable once we've talked about another area of his thought, his views on the soul. Like many of the other thinkers we've met from the 13th century, he accepted an apparently paradoxical idea first put forward by the Jewish thinker Ibn Gabirol, though Kilwardby never mentions him and may not even have known the ultimate source of the theory. The idea is that even spiritual beings like the soul have matter, only God is truly immaterial. Paradoxical though this sounds, one can give a powerful argument for it. Matter was one popular answer to the long-running question of what makes something an individual. Whereas the nature of giraffes is something held in common by Hiawatha, Harold, and all other giraffes, there's only one particular bit of matter that makes up Hiawatha, while Harold is made of another bit of matter. If it's matter that individuates things in its way, something that Kilwardby believed for at least part of his career, then spiritual things too must have matter. Otherwise, how could your soul and mine be distinct individuals? Kilwardby took this idea to be faithfully Augustinian, and even associated the tendency of matter to take on form with Augustine's talk of seminal reasons, an idea that Augustine had in turn borrowed from the Stoics. Still, when Kilwardby uses the idea to explain the human soul, his expertise in Aristotelian logic is on full display. In this logical system, there is no idea more fundamental than the relation of genus to species. The most general genus of things is substance, and this genus is divided, subdivided, and sub-subdivided into ever more specific classes, as when we say that there are bodily and spiritual substances, living bodily substances as opposed to inanimate ones, animals as opposed to plants, and humans as opposed to giraffes. We've already seen Kilwardby bringing together natural philosophy with logic, and he does so again here. He thinks of matter as having the potential or power to take on all these forms, from the most general form of substance down to the most specific form of rationality, which is distinctive of humans. So you have not just one, but many forms, one that makes you a substance, another that makes you a physical body, another that makes you a living being, another that makes you an animal, and finally the form that makes you a human. It may already be obvious what this has to do with the soul, especially since we've seen a very similar set of ideas in Peter Olivey. For him and for Kilwardby, the soul is not just one simple form. The lower psychological powers, the ones responsible for giving you life and the ability to move and engage in sensation, come as forms that are distinct from the rational soul, which is what makes you a human. And the soul in its entirety is nothing but the conjunction of all these powers. When humans are first forming as embryos, the powers are added sequentially. This is an idea we already saw in William of Auvergne, but with a crucial difference. For William, each form was effectively replaced or swallowed up when newer, more sophisticated forms arise in the fetus, something he compared to a brighter light engulfing a dimmer light. Kilwardby instead compares the process to a geometrical construction, where a triangle is added to a trapezoid to form a pentagon. But he has more to offer than just a change of metaphor, and gives both philosophical and theological arguments to show that the powers or forms in the soul remain distinct. Philosophically, it's clear to him that the many abilities we exercise as living beings, from digestion to thought, require numerous different powers, and not just one. Theologically, Kilwardby worries that if there is only a simple, rational soul in a human, then the human that was Christ could not in fact have been the incarnation of God, but only an immaterial divine spirit with a loose connection to a body. In holding that our soul consists of a plurality of forms or powers, Kilwardby flirts with the danger we noted when looking at Audevis. If this theory is correct, then won't the unity of my person be compromised? My rational soul will be associated with the lower parts of my being, but it will be a distinct entity that floats free of the rest. To avoid this, Kilwardby cites Augustine, the soul joins to the body in order to fulfill its desire for knowledge about all things. And unlike a giraffe who dreams of rolling around the rink, the soul can achieve its desire, thanks to what Kilwardby calls its unibility, that is, its innate tendency to form a unity with the body. But why does the soul need to be united to the body in order to have knowledge? Because Kilwardby is enough of an Aristotelian to think that most of our intellectual understanding depends upon the experience of the senses. In the contest between Augustinian theories of illumination and Aristotelian ideas of empirical science, Kilwardby predictably takes a conciliatory middle position. Knowledge of some things, like mathematical truths, the soul and God himself, is implanted within the soul from birth. But for everything else, we need to explore the world using sensation. And speaking of sensation, this topic is the occasion for yet another compromise theory. We saw that Peter Olivey accepted that the sense organs, such as the eyes, are affected by their surroundings, yet denied that the physical changes in these organs have any role in the soul's sensory awareness. Instead, the soul is aware of things by simply extending its attention to them. Olivey thus rejected views like that of Roger Bacon, according to which sensation occurs precisely when a representative species of a sense object is registered in the eyes. When Kilwardby comes to discuss sensation, he splits the difference. On the one hand, he agrees with Olivey that a mere bodily change cannot affect the soul. On the other hand, he thinks the sense organ must play a greater role than Olivey would allow, otherwise things would not need to be physically present in the right place, suitably illuminated and so on, if we are to see them. His idea is instead that when the image of a sense object is present in the organ, the soul can assimilate itself to that image. It does so by actively making a further image for itself, which is an image of the image in the sense organ. Suppose I am looking at Hiawatha, who was wistfully staring at a pair of roller skates she will never wear. An image of her is present in my eyes, but the mere reception of this image is not seeing. For me to see her is for my soul to fashion a further likeness of her, as Kilwardby puts it, in and from itself. Peter Olivey would be ready with an objection here, namely that if the image in the sense organ is being used as an intermediary in this way, then my soul is not actually perceiving Hiawatha, but rather an image of Hiawatha. But Kilwardby insists that, in grasping a suitably exact likeness of a thing, I am in fact perceiving that very thing. And perhaps he's right about this. If you were looking at a photograph of your mother, you probably wouldn't hesitate to say that you were seeing, or looking at, your mother. On this and other topics, Kilwardby presented himself as being like a good roller skater, expert in balancing acts. Where we would probably say that his theory of sensation is neither Aristotelian nor Augustinian, he insisted that it expose the hidden agreement between the two ancient authorities. Which brings us finally to the mystery of why this conciliatory man used the power of his office as Archbishop to prohibit philosophical ideas. The works I've been discussing were mostly written 20 years or more before the 1277 ban. So perhaps his views drifted towards intolerance as he aged and rose within the church hierarchy. We may hope for old age to bring wisdom, but often as not, it just brings grumpiness. But a look at the 30 theses Kilwardby actually prohibited tells a different story. About half of them concern issues in grammar and logic, but the most central issue was one that had long been of interest to Kilwardby, the unity of the soul. The masters of Oxford were forbidden to teach that in human embryos, the lower souls are extinguished when the higher soul arrives, or in general, that the powers of the soul are all explained by virtue of a single form. It's often been suspected that Kilwardby's target was none other than the recently deceased Thomas Aquinas. Yet Kilwardby's attempts to explain and justify his prohibition show that he actually didn't have Aquinas in mind. What Kilwardby wanted to stamp out was the idea that the soul is a single form, something that had been asserted by William of Aran and others such as John Blunt. Aquinas took an even more extreme view than them. He thought that a human is a composite of body and soul, and that this whole composite has only one form. Kilwardby later stated that this view was unknown to him when he laid down the prohibition, adding that he didn't really understand it. He had been arguing against people with the far more reasonable, yet still in his view false view, that humans have numerous forms, the single form that is the soul, plus some more forms that belong to the body. In other words, when Aquinas argued that a human has only one form in total, which determines the features and powers of both body and soul, he was adopting a stance so radical and unfamiliar that Kilwardby hadn't even thought to ban it. But perhaps we care less about who Kilwardby was trying to blacklist, and more about the black mark against his own name. After a career devoted to careful arbitration between Augustinian and Aristotelian teachings, Kilwardby sought to make that arbitration a binding one. In so doing, he unwittingly wrote his own epitaph. He has gone down in history as an enemy of Aristotelianism, alongside the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tampier. But this is unfair, as we can see if we take note of the differences between the Oxford ban and the one in Paris. As Kilwardby himself stressed, he was only prohibiting the teaching of certain doctrines, not condemning them as heretical as was done in Paris. And unlike Bishop Tampier, Kilwardby was himself a philosopher. His ban came backed with rational as well as theological arguments. This was not an attempt to crush philosophical inquiry, but an attempt to stop masters from teaching their students things that were demonstrably false. Obviously, this isn't to praise or excuse Kilwardby's actions, just to say that it would be a mistake to conflate the situation in Oxford with that of Paris, or to reduce Kilwardby's whole career to the prohibition. The Oxford ban would be reasserted in 1284 by Bonaventure's student John Peckham, by which time Kilwardby had been dead for five years. The second time around, it was more obvious that Aquinas was a potential target, and the Dominicans rallied around him. In 1286, the Order gave an across-the-board approval for all Aquinas's teachings. He was thoroughly orthodox, the Dominicans were saying, and he was ours. It was one step in the process by which he ultimately became the most famous and institutionally approved of all medieval thinkers. But to really appreciate Thomas Aquinas's place in medieval philosophy, we need to put him in context, and that means, among other things, looking at his teacher, the greatest 13th century Dominican thinker other than Aquinas himself, Albert the Great. He'll be the subject of two upcoming episodes. First though, I want to dwell on a theme that has emerged from this look at Kilwardby. I mentioned that he applies the distinction between matter and form to syllogistic arguments. It's an idea with far-reaching implications for both the history and philosophy of logic. To find out why it matters so much, join me next time as I meet someone with good form in explaining medieval logic. Katerina de Töll, Novice. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about medieval logic with Katerina Dotel-Novais, who is Associate Professor at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Hi, Katerina, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hello, thanks for inviting me. Okay, so as a preliminary question, I've just said we're going to be talking about medieval logic, and I'm wondering whether that really makes sense. Do medieval philosophers even have a defined notion of logic as a discipline? And if they do, how would they explain the difference between logic and other areas of philosophy? Okay, well, let me start by saying that everything I will say during this interview pertains to the Latin authors, the authors who were writing in Latin. So I will not say every time the Latin medieval authors, but it should be clear that it's not that I'm disregarding all the other traditions, you know, which were active at the same time and who, which were not writing in Latin. But so about the Latin medieval authors, they in fact didn't care much about the issue of the scope of logic as much as modern philosophy, contemporary philosophers of logic do, and logicians. So there's this big ongoing debate and philosophy of logic on criteria of demarcation for logical constants, and that's because many people now seem to think that this is the best, perhaps even the only way to demarcate logic as a discipline, right, to demarcate the logic or the class of logical constants. And they also feel that it's impossible to understand logic as such unless we have a clear criterion, a clear demarcation of logic from the other disciplines. And my feeling is that there's a bit of a Kantian influence, this obsession with demarcations and borders, etc. But so the medieval philosophers were not engaging in this project. They were not actively looking for sharp ways to demarcate logic from other disciplines. That's not something they were concerned about. But this being said, they do offer considerations on what counts as logic, and one place where this typically happens is that the prefaces of their big sums of logic work, right. So they have these big textbooks in logic, and very often the very first one or two pages they're saying what logic is all about and why logic is important, and that's why the student will do well to go on and study all of it through their textbooks. And so two people who do this, for example, are two of the main 14th century logicians, William of Ockham and John Bureta. And then they say, for example, that logic concerns reasoning, that it concerns the principles to establish the truth and falsity of propositions. It concerns producing new knowledge. So they say many things along these lines. And also some authors, many authors say that one of the main purposes of logic is to teach people how to engage in disputations and debates. So that's also thought to be an important function for logic, which of course ties up with Aristotle and say the topics and the surface graphitations, which are also about debates. But so despite the fact that, despite their lack of interest in the question of a sharp demarcation for logic as a discipline, logic as such was a fairly well-defined discipline. And there are two main reasons for that. Well, two main ways to think about this, the unity of logic at the time. One is purely institutional, you might say. You might call it purely institutional, which is that logic was one of the topics taught to students very early on in the standard curriculum. It was part of the trivium together with grammar and rhetoric. And so that's really pretty much the first thing that students would learn, even as they were very, very young when they learned that. So even like 14 years old, they were already learning logic. And this for many reasons. And one of them is that also there was the thought that knowledge of logic was thought to play a fundamental role for other so-called higher disciplines like law, theology, and medicine. Logic was supposed to provide the foundations for any intellectual inquiry. So it was very important. And actually that's something that's common between late antique philosophy and medieval philosophy. Absolutely. So this idea that logic is the first thing you study and then you move on to the higher scientists. Logic comes first, absolutely. Yeah, so that is absolutely there. And so that's why logic had a very important role to play. On the one hand, there's also sometimes the thought that logic was for schoolboys, right? So many of the Latin authors, what they did is they wrote on logic at the early stages of their career. And then the serious ones then moved on to one of the other disciplines and in particular theology, which was supposed to be the most noble one of them. And one exception to this is, for example, John Buridan, who I just mentioned. He's one of the few people who have stayed at the arts faculty throughout his career. So he did not move on to become a doctor in theology. He did not move on to write on theological matters. And by contrast, William of Ockham, who I also just mentioned, did exactly the opposite. Did what most other important authors did, which was to first write on logic as a young man, as a masters of art, and then move on to write on theology and other so-called more important topics. But anyway, so that's one observation. The other thing is that besides this institutional factor that made logic a coherent role, there's also the influence of the logical writings of Aristotle, which really provided the main background for the development of medieval logic, especially starting at the 13th century. So that's what I'm saying here now, that the role of Aristotle is not to be found, certainly not to the same extent in the 12th century and before, but from the 13th century onward when the logical writings of Aristotle became widely read again in the Latin world. And so just to be clear, the categories and on interpretation were read throughout and people had knowledge of syllogistics through Boethius, but they didn't read the prior analytics, the posterior analytics, the topics, the sophistical refutations, they didn't read that. And this picked up again in the 13th century. From there on, Aristotle really was the main kind of figure that gave unity to the discipline too. And again, Buret, Ammon, and Ockham, who have been mentioning it quite a few times already, both explicitly mention Aristotle in their prefaces to their big logic compendia. So basically the conception of what logic is, is one of the many things that changed because of the reintroduction of the complete works of Aristotle into the Latin tradition. Absolutely. And in fact, there are even names for that in the Latin tradition. So already back in the medieval times, there was a well-known distinction between logica vetus, which means old logic, logica nova, which means new logic, and logica modernorum, which means modern logic. A logica vetus category was used to describe the material pertaining to the texts by Aristotle that had been known throughout, as I said, the categories and the interpretation. And this tradition continued. So of course, in the 12th century, that's pretty much all there is. And sometimes people think that in the 13th, 14th century, these discussions were abandoned, but that's not true. They continued to talk about, and so all these discussions on universals and on categories pertain to logica vetus. Logica nova is the category where you find works that deal explicitly with the new, so-called new texts by Aristotle, new in the sense that they became available again. And this is the Sophistica of the Tations, the topics and the two analytics. And so logica nova is when people are commenting on these particular texts and writing questions on these texts. So we're really engaging with these texts. So it's still Aristotle, but it's the so-called new Aristotle. And then logica modernorum were the developments which were in numerous ways related to Aristotle's logical writings, but were innovations, medieval innovations. So for example, the theory of obugationes, which is a particular kind of debating technique, which was very influential in the 14th century, that doesn't connect in any direct way to the work of Aristotle, and so that's why it's called logica modernorum. Another concept is the concept of supposition, which is the main notion in the medieval theories of semantics, or in the medieval theories of what propositions, sentences mean. And that's also part of the logica modernorum. Okay. So obviously, from what you've just said, there's lots and lots of things we could talk about here, lots of topics that get covered within actually all three of those branches of medieval logic. And from all these things, I thought we could focus on just one because you've published about it. And this is the question of whether medieval logic is formal, and what it would even mean for logic to be formal. So before we get into the formality of medieval logic, let's just talk about this phrase, formal logic. So this is a word you sometimes see thrown around. For example, it's used in the name of courses you can take at universities. I'm studying formal logic. Presumably this doesn't mean logic while wearing evening wear, right? It must have some other meanings. So what do we nowadays mean when we say that logic is formal? Yes. Well, this is actually a very difficult question. Very interesting, very important question, but also very difficult. So in fact, the main problem is that, as you say, people use the, it's a set phrase in a sense, formal logic, and people use it very, very liberally and very often. And yet often people are talking past each other because there are different meanings of formal, of the adjective formal as applied to formal logic. And these meanings are all kind of floating around. And so the set phrase is being used in equivocal ways and often people are not aware of that. And so because I was worried about this situation of people talking past each other, I once wrote a paper called The Different Ways in Which Logic is Said to be Formal, where I wanted precisely to do a taxonomy of these different ways in which people talk about logic as being formal nowadays, but also actually going back in history. And there I distinguished eight senses, eight, so that's quite a lot, different senses of formal relevant for logic. And so I tried to organize a bit these debates. And I just want to mention that I was not the first one to do this. John McFarland had already done work in this direction. It was very, for me, it was very influential, but there were things that I thought could be done even better than he had done. And that's why I thought, okay, I'm going to write this paper. That's how research works. Exactly, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I don't want people to think that I'm saying I'm the first one who worried about this. And if not, at least McFarland had done serious work on this. You are the first person to discuss it on this podcast. Okay, good. You have primacy there. Okay. So just of the eight senses that I distinguished in this paper, I'll just briefly mention three, which may come across as familiar to some of the listeners. So one is the formal schematic, which is the sense of formality that one typically encounters in the first pages of logic textbooks. And people explain what is logical about. They say, well, you know, logic deals with arguments and we're interested in the, you know, the schemes that underlie arguments. And so we are not interested in the non-logical words that are occurring in the argument where only we take them out and we just focus on the scheme and we study these schemes. So it's like using variables. Yes. Well, yeah. Or schematic letters. I mean, so there's this important distinction between schematic letters and variables. But that's exactly the idea, right? So you have all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C. That's a schema. And the letters are taking the place of terms that you can fill in and produce real arguments. So that's a very, you know, still very pervasive sense of formal. But then there's also the form of total abstraction from meaning, which became, in the 20th century, became a rather influential notion of the formal. And I call this notion of the formal formal as de-seminification. And here you can think of people like Hilbert and Bernays who have written, you know, on this notion. And then the other, another important sense from modern logicians is the formal is computable. And that is understood as formal as pertaining to operations that can be carried out mechanically, which don't require insight or ingenuity. And so just to go back to our medieval authors, I want to say that so the formal schematic has its roots in Latin medieval logic. So it's very important. And that's one of the things I did. So I have this entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on medieval theories of consequence. One of the things I wanted to do there was to trace the history of the notion of the formal schematic, going back to the Latin medieval authors. But these other senses that I was talking about are for the most part later editions. So they're not as relevant for us when we're talking about medieval authors. Actually, when we talk about formal logic, since as you were saying before, the context for medieval logic is so deeply Aristotelian, even for the old logic, it was Aristotelian, it calls to mind immediately the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. So to what extent does that distinction play a role in the ancient and medieval conception of logic? Do they think of logic as being formal, in the sense that it has to do with form rather than matter? So this is really also one of the things that got me going on this research. I thought the notion of form and formal is so important in current debates and philosophy of logic. But I mean, ultimately, it should go back to Aristotle, I thought. So how does this… Everything goes back to Aristotle. That's true in any case. But I think in this case in particular, I thought people were not sufficiently aware of the metaphysical Aristotelian roots of this. Sometimes I call it this ideology, the logical form ideology, and the negative connotation is intended. And so I thought that you really needed to go back and try to understand the presuppositions that are being taken for granted when people are thinking about these matters. And I thought one way to do this is to go all the way back to Aristotle and understand to which extent the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter was really the starting point for this tradition. And then what happened was that I quickly discovered, and this is something that has been acknowledged by other people before me, that Aristotle himself does not apply the form-matter, the metaphysical form-matter distinction to arguments, to logical or linguistic objects, with two exceptions, one passage in the physics and one in the metaphysics, and they're virtually identical, these two passages, by the way. That's the only, the two only places where he does that. And so, and so, and then I was quite struck by this. I thought, wow, funny, huh? And that's something that John McFarlane also says. Aristotle is the father of hylomorphism, Aristotle is the father of logic, but he's not the father of logical hylomorphism. He doesn't mix the two things. So that's an interesting observation. And so I thought, you know, what happened in between? Why do we now apply form and matter so extensively to logic? And the first step in this development was, well, I guess you could say the first step, the first step after I started, the first important step is with the ancient commentators, which I know have been extensively covered by these series of podcasts, and rightly so, because they're wonderful. And the first person that we know of having applied the form-matter distinction specifically to arguments is Alexander of Aphrodisias. And so we don't know for sure whether he was picking up from a source that we now no longer have, or if he really was, if it was an innovation by him. We don't know that for sure. But he then really starts talking about the form and matter of syllogisms, right, and applying these two concepts to syllogisms. And so that's a big transformation. So you may ask yourself, is it that Aristotle thought that arguments were not the kinds of entities which would have form and matter as constituent elements? Right? So I mean, that goes back to the discussion of Aristotle's metaphysics, of Aristotle's holomorphism, what kinds of entities actually do have form and matter. And that's a big debate in Aristotle's scholarship, which I'm going to leave aside. So then apparently Aristotle didn't think that arguments had form and matter properly speaking. But then some centuries later, we have somebody like Alexander clearly thinking that it made good sense that it was appropriate to apply this distinction to arguments. So what would that mean? What would it mean to say that a syllogism has a form and then matter? What's the difference between the form and the matter of a syllogism? Yeah. So this is also something that underwent a transformation over time. At first, people like Alexander and other ancient commentators, they usually reserve the term form to talk about the figure of a syllogism. So the figure of a syllogism has to do with the disposition of the terms. So there's first figure, second figure, third figure. And so this does not have to do with the so-called logical terms. It does not have to do with terms like all or no, which are now thought to be the logical terms. The logical terms, so to say, they define the mood of a syllogism. The moods are Barbara, Salarant, et cetera. And the mood is really with the logical terminology in it. So it's very important to realize that at first, people were using the concept of form to talk about not about the so-called logical terminology in syllogistic arguments, but to talk about the relative disposition of the non-logical terms in the argument. So just to make sure that that's clear. So the figure would be, for example, A, B, B, C, therefore A, C. And then an example of that, a mood would be Barbara, which is all A are B, all B are C, therefore all A are C. So you add the all to get the mood. Yeah. So for example, it's Barbara and Salarant are both first figure syllogisms, but Barbara is all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C. And Salarant is all A is B, no B is C, therefore no A is C. Right. The listener can check the validity of that at home. Yes. Homework. Right. Okay. So what did the medievals then do with this idea? Yeah. So a lot of things happened, right? So one of the main steps in this important transformation, because I mean, as I was saying, the schematic notion of the formal would then apply to syllogisms, would then say that the form of a syllogism is the mood of the syllogism. And that's very different from what the Asian commentators were doing. And this transformation went stepwise. So at some point already in the 12th century and early 13th century, you see some authors saying that the form of a syllogism cannot be understood in two ways, either as pertaining to the figure or as pertaining to the mood. And then by analogy, they would also say that the matter of a syllogism could also be understood in two ways, either as pertaining to the propositions or as pertaining to the terms. And so there's this 12th century anonymous commentary on the prior analytics, which is the oldest. So anyway, so it's the only 12th century commentary on the prior analytics that we know of. And this commentary already talks about these two senses, but doesn't say that one has priority over the other. And then already in the 13th century, you see texts talking about these two senses of form and matter as pertaining to syllogisms. And then they talk about one being the proximate cause and the other being the remote cause. So there's already an important distinction there. But at that time, so there was still these two senses, right, of the form and matter of syllogisms. When you get to the 14th century, the sense of form as pertaining to the figure of syllogisms is nowhere to be seen anymore. And then we really moved to what I call the schematic notion of the formal. And the other notion of the formal, which pertain to the disposition of the terms and not to the logical terminology, is no longer to be seen. And so in the schematic understanding, the idea is that when you actually substitute words like giraffe or animal into the argument form, giraffe and animal play the role of matter and the scheme is the form. Exactly. So if you take Barbara again, right, so Barbara, the schematic version of Barbara is O A is B, O B is C, therefore O A is C. I can replace whatever terms for A, B, and C in a systematic way. And I would produce an argument that has the property of necessary truth preservation, which means that if the premises are true, then the conclusion will necessarily be true as well. So if I say to you, all cows are blue, all blue things are made of stone, the conclusion is all cows are made of stone. And this is a valid argument, even though the premises are false. Right. Okay. Well, if we take this seriously, this idea that arguments have matter and form, then it seems that we have a kind of metaphysical understanding of what an argument is, just as in the case of, say, a giraffe, my favorite example, instead of cow. You have the soul playing the role of form, you have the body playing the role of matter, but then there's this very powerful unity between the two. So that's why you get one animal or one giraffe. Can we conceive of syllogisms or arguments in general having this kind of unity, this very strong unity that comes from somehow inserting matter into form? Because actually it seems sort of like, well, I could kind of chuck any terms into that scheme. So it's quite accidental, the relationship between a particular scheme and a particular set of terms that are supposedly playing the role of matter. Yeah, so the first question, if you're serious about thinking about the metaphysics of arguments, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether arguments are the kinds of entities to which one can attribute form and matter. As I was saying, it looked like Aristotle thought that they were not, and then later the ancient commentators thought that they were. And one hypothesis that somebody put forward to me once, but I haven't investigated, and to my knowledge nobody has investigated yet, is that the stoic idea of lekta, of arguments as being viewed as more reified entities, that might have played a role in these developments. Then you think, okay, they're really entities in a robust sense, and therefore you can apply the metaphysical notions of form and matter to them. But as a matter of fact, both in the medieval times and in current discussions, a lot of people I think don't take the metaphysical perspective sufficiently seriously. So on the one hand they import many of the presuppositions, for example the idea of uniqueness of form, right, so an argument can have only one logical form. This is a metaphysical presupposition that makes sense in the context of say, Aristotelian hyalomorphism, but does it make sense when you're talking about arguments? And so one of my worries is that a lot of people import these metaphysical presuppositions without having thought hard enough about them, right, so in an uncritical way. In the medieval times what you see is that a lot of authors take the connection, when they're talking about form and matter with respect to logic, they take the connection to metaphysical hyalomorphisms quite lightly. So for them it's just a convenient way to refer to certain logical properties of arguments, you know, use the term law of matter, form, without making strong or metaphysical claims. So you see that a lot. But there are authors who take the metaphysical perspective on arguments very seriously, and the main example of that would be Robert Kilriby, who's a 13th century author, and in many senses one of the most sophisticated 13th century philosophers working in the Aristotelian tradition. So what he did, I always say he wanted to be more Aristotelian than Aristotle himself. What he wanted to do was to unify the different doctrines that Aristotle had in different fields and put them all together. So Kilriby is very serious about thinking about arguments as having form and matter from a metaphysical perspective. And it's very, very interesting what he does, and very sophisticated. So there was some of that too, and all these difficult questions, these difficult metaphysical questions that you were raising with respect to unity or form, he deals with all of them. He's very, very committed to thinking hard about these matters. It seems to me like an obvious objection against that sort of view, that these arguments are actually metaphysical entities that have a form and a matter, is that there's just various ways that you can formalize a given argument. And so something like Kilriby's position sounds to me like it implies that there's just one right way to formalize a given argument. And I'm wondering why anyone would say that. Is the idea that there can only be one reason why a given argument is valid, and that the form tells you why the argument is valid? Because it seems to me that if you took a certain argument and you could say, well, I can formalize it in three different ways, and all the formalizations are valid, then what's the problem? Yeah, so I mean, as I said, if you take seriously the idea of form and matter as applied to arguments in a metaphysical sense, then you might start thinking that form is something truly inherent in the argument as such on a deep ontological level. And then the question arises whether plurality of forms is possible at all. This is actually an interesting debate in 13th century metaphysics, where people like Rufus and some other authors were saying that it made perfect sense to talk about a plurality even of substantial forms in one and the same substance. I think this is crazy. I mean, me being the Aristotelian that I am, I think that form is the principle of unity and matter are the parts that the principle of unity ties together. So there cannot be a multiplicity of forms. But some of these authors thought it made sense. So in that sense, if you think that there can be only one form in one entity and you're serious about the idea of arguments having form and matter, then the conclusion will be that there can only be one form, correct form for an argument, because this is an inherent metaphysical property of the argument itself. And you, as a logician, you're in the business of discovering this pre-existing entity in the argument itself. But if you take a lighter perspective on all these things and you think, well, it's not really something that's really there, right, in an independent way, but it's something that you can attribute to an argument because then it makes it convenient to study this particular argument from a particular perspective. And so what I want to say is that a lot of the people who think, you know, discuss these matters in contemporary philosophy of logic import some of these assumptions like the assumption of uniqueness and the assumption of a pre-existing entity, but in an uncritical way without being aware of the metaphysical presuppositions that are grounding these assumptions. And so that's one of the things I did with my work was try to be critical of that. It sounds like there's quite a lot of variety then in the way that medieval philosophers think about even this one issue, the question of whether syllogisms have form and matter, and if so, what would be the form, what would be the matter? And I was going to finish the whole discussion by asking you whether it makes sense to talk about medieval logic as being formal and what that would mean for medieval logic. But now I'm wondering whether the answer is just, well, it depends, because it depends what formal means, and the medieval philosophers themselves had different views about what formal means, and so Killward Bee's logic would be formal in maybe a different sense than say Occam's, because I presume Occam wouldn't have these kind of very robust metaphysical assumptions about what a syllogism is. Well, so the thing is that in any case you need to understand, and that's very important, that medieval logicians, nobody thought, nobody, that logic deals only with the formal. This is a very important difference between current thinking about logic and medieval thinking about logic. So for example, there is the distinction that you find in the 14th century, for example, with Biridam, between formal consequence and material consequence. And so modern logicians would say that only formal consequences fall under the scope of logic these days, and material consequences are not logic. So they would say that an argument like, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, falls out of the scope of logic because it's merely materially valid. The medieval authors would never think of restricting the scope of logic only to what even they would call formal. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind. With this being said, what you can do is look at medieval logic either looking for their own conceptions of formality or using our modern conceptions of formality and trying to see whether what we call formal, if these properties are also to be seen in medieval logic. So these are two different things. So I would say that certainly with respect to the formal as schematic, that's already there. But then again, that doesn't exhaust the scope of logic for the medieval logicians, whereas some modern people might think it does. But even if you think about the formal as computable, which is not a notion that they had in any way, some of the theories, for example, Occam's supposition theory, and I've written on that too, in a sense what he's after is principles of interpretation of propositions that can be applied in a more or less mechanical way. And in that sense, there is a sense in which that theory is formal in the sense of computable, which is a modern notion of formality, just because it's about not involving the ingenuity or insight of the interpreter. So one of the terms that I use to describe Occam's theory of supposition is formal hermeneutics. So there are all kinds of ways in which you can ask this question. And yeah, I guess we probably don't have the time to talk about all of them, but just to give a glimpse of the complexity, but also of the relevance of the question. Right, okay. Well, in fact, we are out of time now. So I'm going to ask the listeners to use their computers to join me again next time when I'll be talking about Albert the Great, who's the next big figure of medieval philosophy that we need to cover. For now, though, I'll thank Catherine-Dutèle Novais for coming on the show. Thank you very much. And please join me again next time to hear about Albert the Great on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode... Animal, Vegetable, Mineral – Albert the Great's Natural Philosophy What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common? Their middle name. And the same goes for the subject of today's episode, who has something else in common with both of them. Like Alexander, he had a close working relationship with Aristotle. And like Winnie the Pooh, he was interested in exploring the animal world, and went so far as to undertake a personal inspection of beehives, though as far as I'm aware, his voluminous writings never mention a heffalump. Nor did he restrict his research to animals. Indeed, there was little or nothing in the universe that escaped his interest. Apt, then, that he was known as the Universal Doctor, and already honored in his own time with the title Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great. The admiration was, however, less universal than the scope of Albert's intellectual ambitions. Roger Bacon believed he was, if not a bear of very little brain, then a master of very little training. Albert, heard no philosophy and was not taught by anyone, complained Bacon, and was one of many authors to write in Latin, who was misled by the poor standard of translations into this language, having himself no facility in Greek or Arabic. There is a grain of truth in these harsh judgments, in that Albert did not enjoy the sort of education Bacon would have seen as indispensable for work in natural philosophy. He hailed from Lauingen in Svebia, though his career would later give him a particularly strong connection to Cologne. Born around the turn of the 13th century, Albert joined the Dominican order as a young man, by which time he was living in Padua. Though he was a student here, he was not trained in the cutting-edge Aristotelian philosophy so valued by Bacon. His precocious interest in the natural world had to be satisfied largely through independent investigation and observation. He would not come to Paris, and be exposed to the intellectual currents of university life there, until the 1240s. Nonetheless, he was deemed an outstanding enough mind to be made the first Dominican master of theology at Paris, which makes him the counterpart of the Franciscan master, Alexander of Hales. During his time at Paris, Albert acquired a student, whose name would eventually eclipse his, Thomas Aquinas. Though the two would not see eye to eye on every issue, Albert's intense interest in Aristotelian philosophy was certainly passed on to his illustrious student. In fact, Thomas accompanied Albert to Cologne in 1248, and was the one to write down the notes on Albert's lectures on Aristotle's ethics. In response to requests from fellow Dominicans, Albert then undertook an ambitious project. He would write about the entirety of Aristotelian natural philosophy, dealing not just with the principles of physics, but more specific topics like the heavens, animals, plants, and even minerals. Albert thus took up Aristotle's natural philosophy in its full scope and ambition, something that had not been done, except in the Islamic world, since Aristotle's own colleague Theophrastus. So impressive is this feat, that I'm going to devote an entire episode to it. In the next episode, we'll turn to Albert's ideas in metaphysics, which paved the way for Aquinas's own theories. But, just to finish off the story of his life, I must mention that in 1260, Albert was appointed bishop of Regensburg, a beautiful city located on the Danube River. He lived there for only one year, which is something I have in common with him. I lived in Regensburg for the same length of time, but more than 700 years after Albert did, with the result that I wasn't able to meet him. Albert did not relish the duties of a bishop, and persuaded the pope to accept his resignation. He first joined the papal curia, but eventually found his way back to Cologne, where he would spend his final years dying in 1280, by which time he'd outlived his most famous student by six years. Perhaps it was Albert's close study of plant life that enabled him to live to such a ripe old age. His investigations in this sphere deserve special praise, because as he noted himself, the ancient tradition gave him relatively little to go on. There was a work called On Plants, falsely ascribed to Aristotle, actually by Nicholas of Damascus. There was ancient literature on agriculture, and medical writings that discussed the uses of certain plants. Still, Albert was obligated to supplement this material with observations he'd made himself, but he would have done so anyway. He was as committed as his critic Roger Bacon to the centrality of experience in natural philosophy. All our knowledge is grounded in sensation, and one can reach the universal truths envisioned in Aristotelian philosophy only on the strength of individual observations. Even when it came to something as humble as plants, Albert was not going to be satisfied with anything less than full-blown science. His own work On Plants emphasizes that he does not share the medical doctor's practical aims. He wants to put the philosophy back into this branch of natural philosophy. And that means understanding real branches, along with all the other parts of plants. He also carefully distinguishes between kinds of plants, while admitting that the dividing lines between types can be blurry. And he seeks to identify the essential and accidental parts of each plant type. Thorns, for instance, are mere accidental growths, whereas other parts of a plant belong to its very nature. He draws parallels between plant parts and animal parts. Plant sap is a source of warmth for the organism, like blood in animals. Knots and trees are like digestive organs, while the wood is analogous to flesh and the bark to skin. The features that distinguish the various species of plant, and Albert lists about 400 of them, can often be explained in brute material terms. The shape of a leaf will be caused by the proportion of watery and earthy constituents in the plant matter, with wetter ingredients causing the leaves to spread out like water does. On the other hand, a role must also be given to the heavens, which have a particularly powerful effect on plants because they are so simple. Here, Albert would be thinking of such phenomena as seasonal crop cycles. This is a pervasive feature of Albert's natural philosophy. He not only writes treatises about the heavens, but also thinks the celestial bodies exert influence over the generation of plants, animals, and humans. Monstrous births and deformities are a good example. In general, they result from matters failure to take on the nature of an animal or human properly. Since it is matter that is to blame, these monstrosities do not detract from the universality of natural philosophy. Often, matter refuses to cooperate because the heavens have worked some malign influence. As usual, Albert also mentions his own experiences on this topic, reporting on deformed births which he puts down to astrological causes, and on conversations he had with midwives about the phenomenon. Albert mentions the case of a pig born with the head of a human, something that could not be explained through normal biological functioning, and thus must be put down to heavenly influence. You may snort with disbelief at his gullibility, but after all we do think that humans can be pig-headed, so why not the reverse? This shows that Albert had something else in common with Winnie the Pooh, an interest in piglets. And speaking of pork products, also with Roger Bacon, given that he too was an enthusiastic believer in astral influence. In the later medieval and renaissance tradition, the two were brought even closer together. Alchemical and astrological treatises were spuriously ascribed to Albert, and he was even said to have taught alchemy to Bacon. But actually Albert did not stray too far from Aristotle in the direction of the so-called occult sciences. In his authentic works, he dismissed the claims of alchemy, agreeing with Avicenna that alchemists can only produce something that looks like gold, but is not really gold. Characteristically, he cited his own experience. He repeatedly tried firing a golden metal produced by an alchemist, and found that it broke down into dross instead of melting as it ought to. As for astrology, he admitted the possibility of such feats as predicting lifespan on the basis of a birth horoscope. But usually he invokes the stars in what we would see as more scientific settings, as in his treatment of the rising and possible shifting of the seas. Albert was aware of claims that the oceans and seas had changed location over time. There was very convincing evidence that this is the case, such as the discovery of an ancient ship's rudder buried deep under now-dry ground. Of course, the phenomenon is a genuine one. Unfortunately, the explanation offered for it was false. It was proposed that changes in the position of the stars, over long periods of time, brought about the shifting of the seas. Albert disagrees, arguing that the cycles of the planetary movements are regular, so that we should see the seas moving progressively across the earth as centuries go by, something that would certainly have been noted in recorded history. On the other hand, he admits that floods, like the one that deluged the whole earth in Noah's day, are caused by the heavens, and in particular by astral conjunctions. Then there's the evident phenomenon of the rising and falling tide. Again, and this time correctly, Albert puts this down to the influence of the moon. He even says that the moon causes tide to rise like a magnet pulling iron, which is remarkably close to the truth. Unfortunately, he then adds a more detailed and entirely spurious explanation, namely that the moon is causing vapor under the water to expand, which makes the sea level rise. As these examples show, Albert was not interested only in living things, but also in what we can, in his case quite literally, call the elements. Another of his treatises on natural philosophy deals with minerals, which he divides into stones and metals. It's in this context that he makes his skeptical remarks concerning alchemy. You might think that here the role of the heavens would be minimal, but in fact Albert thinks that stones are formed precisely when celestial influence causes earthy matter to condense, which always requires the admixture of at least some moisture to hold the stone together. Metals, by contrast, are produced through the concentration of vapor that has escaped from within the hollows of the earth. Albert also retails some rather fanciful claims about minerals, speaking of their healing properties and other effects we might deem magical, a belief he shares with his fellow German thinker Hildegard of Bingen. But as ever, he draws impressively on his own experience. He may for instance be the first author to note the poisonous effects of mercury. You may be wondering how Albert had the opportunity to observe nature so carefully, since you're probably imagining him holed up in a university scriptorium or Dominican house. But as it happens, it was precisely his life as a Dominican that gave him the chance to see the world up close. As a mendicant, he always undertook his travels on foot. Given the many cities in which he lived and worked, that meant a lot of walking. He was a peripatetic philosopher in every sense of the word. Albert didn't just keep his eyes open while on the road though, he made active inquiries, as with his interviewing of midwives and testing of fake gold. He did the same when it came to the animal world, inspecting ants, bees' hives, and my favorite example, having himself lower down a rock face to examine an eagle's nest. As with plants and minerals, Albert was a pioneer in revisiting the topic of zoology, a major interest of Aristotle's that had been largely dropped ever since, with the exception of authors in the Islamic world like Avicenna. Naturally enough, the animal that most interested Albert was the human. He discussed human nature in various places, including a dedicated treatise called simply On the Human Being. It combines a detailed philosophical consideration of the soul's relation to the body, with some theological speculations concerning Adam and Eve, all arranged in the form of disputed questions. As usual, Albert draws extensively on Aristotle while also paying due respect to the opinions of Augustine and other church authorities. But the most decisive influence on his theory of soul is Avicenna. Albert follows him by outlining two ways of thinking about the soul. On the one hand, there is Aristotle's idea that the soul is the form of the body, in the sense that it is the body's act or perfection. On the other hand, there is the soul, considered as a substance in its own right, which can even survive bodily death. As observed a generation earlier by John Blund, these two points of view on the soul belong respectively to the physicist and the metaphysician. In physics, or natural philosophy, we grasp the soul through the activities it manifests in the body. In metaphysics, we understand soul as it is in itself, rather than approaching it through its effects. The contrast may be borrowed most immediately from Avicenna, but it echoes a long-standing Platonist approach to human nature, according to which our true selves are immaterial and immortal even if they have acquired an intimate relationship with corruptible bodies. And indeed, Albert is enough of a Platonist to say that the human, as such, is nothing but intellect. On the other hand, this is scholastic philosophy so there's always an on the other hand, Albert doesn't want to go too far in this Platonist direction. In particular, he resists the idea that the soul has only a casual or accidental relation to the body. To avoid this, he rejects Plato's idea that the soul already existed before coming into the body, and emphasizes the soul's essential tendency or inclination to join a body. This in fact is what distinguishes the human soul from an angel which has no such inclination. Albert also rejects a popular argument in favor of the substantiality of the human soul. We've seen that many 13th century thinkers followed Im Gabyrol in holding that all created things, including the soul, consist of both matter and form. This would have the significant advantage of making soul a hok aliquid, or this something, as the scholastics put it. Anything that combines matter and form would be a substance in its own right, even if the matter at stake is so-called spiritual matter. Albert associates this idea with Plato as well as with Im Gabyrol. Against both of them, he insists on a more Aristotelian way of looking at things. The soul may have potentialities and powers, and in fact it needs the body to exercise many of these, but we should not confuse potentiality with materiality. So, while it's true that all things other than God have potentialities, which they may or may not use, this does not mean that the soul or angels have matter. In fact, Albert will even admit that insofar as the soul is conceived as a form, it remains incomplete without its body, for as a form, it is nothing but a source of bodily activities like nutrition or sensation. Obviously, it needs the body as an instrument to carry out those activities and realize its potential. Just as obviously, when the body dies, the opportunity to do so is lost. But the soul survives, because it is also a substance in its own right. Its activities are destroyed while it lives on, like a blacksmith who can survive the destruction of his anvil and hammer. One reason for Albert to demote the lower functions of soul to mere activities realized in a body is that there is one further theory he wants to avoid. It's one we've seen in Peter Olivey and Robert Kilwardby that there are a plurality of forms in every single human. Like Aquinas after him, Albert instead insists that the soul is a single substance and act. In fact, early in his career he claims that the whole human soul arrives in the body as a unity bestowed directly by God. This would mean that the generation of human souls is totally unlike what happens with other animals. The soul of a giraffe would emerge from material causes, whereas human souls would come from outside the physical realm entirely. As Albert begins to read more deeply in Aristotelian zoology though, he becomes dissatisfied with this story. He comes to think that the lower part of the human soul emerges from the matter provided by a pregnant mother receiving form from the father, just as in other animal species. Yet, the power of intellect still needs to be given to the human directly by God. In other words, you've got your sense faculties and your ability to digest food from your parents along with your eye color, but you've got your mind from God. Despite its double origin, Albert continues to insist that the soul is a single form, and not a collection of forms enabling us to perform different activities. To the objection that a single form could never produce such varied results, Albert can respond that the variety results from the disparate nature of the body. Soul uses a subtle spirit pervading the entire body as an intermediary through which it expresses its activities in that body. These activities are then further diversified by the bodily organs. This is a pattern of thinking that arises repeatedly in Albert. A single cause can give rise to many different effects by using various recipients as intermediaries. Take his theory of celestial influence, which has been a running theme in this episode. Albert thinks the planets affect our lower world by means of light, but he also knows that bodies like the moon get their light from the sun. So, why don't we always just see the same sort of effects that would be produced by sunlight, instead of finding that the different celestial bodies have different effects? For instance, the moon has a particular effect on moisture, as demanded in astrological theory, which is why it is closely connected to the tides. The reason is that the light of the sun is absorbed by the moon and takes on a special lunar character before being passed on to the seas or an unfortunate pig embryo. Albert uses the same kind of account in an even more exalted part of his philosophy. When he comes to explain how a simple god could give rise to such a bewilderingly complex world, he suggests that god's effect is nothing other than simple being. This being is, however, diversified by the essences of the things god creates. But I'll shed more light on the universal doctor's attempt to explain the origin of the universe next time, as we continue to look at Albert the Great, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Shadow Knows – Albert the Great's Metaphysics. Do you believe that all things in the universe, in their bewildering, seemingly infinite variety, derive from only one single cause? If so, you're in good company. It might just be the very oldest idea in the history of philosophy. It emerged in Mediterranean culture with the Presocratics, who proposed that all things arise out of some fundamental constituent, perhaps air, water, or, as Anaximander proposed, the indefinite. And as we're seeing in the episodes on philosophy in India, at around the same time, the authors of the Upanishads were tracing all things to the single reality that is Brahman. Yet objections to the idea are almost as antique as the idea itself. As Aristotle pointed out, some Presocratics preferred to introduce two or more causal principles. Think of Empedocles's love and strife, or the atomists' infinite indestructible particles. Aristotle thought they were on the right track, because a single cause would remain inert, having nothing to act upon. In fact, even two principles wouldn't be enough, since they would cancel each other out. But as Ferris Bueller discovered, it's not so easy to avoid a single principle. In late antiquity, all philosophers accepted that the universe derives from one cause, with the pagan Neoplatonists identifying this cause as the One, or Good, and the Jews and Christians of course seeing the God of their scriptures as the almighty creator of all things. Still, like an offer of marriage from a Montague to a Capulet, the proposal continued to cause trouble. Philosophers worried less that a single cause would remain entirely inactive, as Aristotle claimed, and more that such a cause could only have one effect. The Neoplatonic first principle and the Judeo-Christian God were claimed to be perfectly simple, and how can a perfectly simple thing generate a multiplicity? Only indirectly, claimed the Neoplatonists, their One would produce only one effect, which would form a link in a causal chain stretching down all the way to our physical realm. We might expect thinkers of the Abrahamic faiths to abandon this scheme in favor of one where God simply creates each thing directly. Indeed, many thinkers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam said precisely that. But those with a greater commitment to the Hellenic heritage adhered to the motto, From one thing, only one thing can come. In Latin, ab uno non nisi unum. It's a motto that became notorious in both the Arabic and Latin spheres. In the Islamic world, the theologian Al-Ghazali attacked Avicenna for his adherence to the from one only one rule, making this one of the central polemics of his incoherence of the philosophers. And in Paris, the rule appeared on the list of banned propositions in the condemnation of 1277. Yet it struck some philosophers as intuitively plausible or even obvious. One of them was Albert the Great. In the previous episode, we saw that his commitment to Aristotelian natural philosophy was unprecedented in the medieval era. When it came to his metaphysics, he was equally committed to ideas from the Neoplatonic tradition. It would even, I think, be fair to say that Albert is the most Neoplatonically inclined medieval thinker we've met since Eriugena all the way back in the 9th century. And no wonder, because Neoplatonic theories reached him from a variety of authoritative sources. These sources seemed to confirm one another, presenting a united front endorsing the from one only one motto, and its corollary that God uses intermediaries to fashion the universe. For starters, there was Avicenna. His works had been exerting influence in the Latin sphere since the 12th century, especially regarding the soul. But Albert drew more deeply on Avicenna than others had done, something we can see from his exposition of Aristotle's metaphysics, which refers constantly to Avicenna. Then there was that favorite source of Eriugena's, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Albert commented on his works in lectures that were recorded by none other than Thomas Aquinas, who would later write his own commentary on Dionysius's Divine Names. Since Dionysius was covertly drawing on the ideas of the late ancient Platonist Proclus, this too helped push Albert in a Neoplatonic direction. Finally, there was an even more indirect route through which Proclus was smuggled into Latin Christendom, the Book of Causes. This is a partial translation of Proclus's elegant and axiomatic presentation of Neoplatonist philosophy based on an Arabic translation produced in the 9th century. It acquired considerable authority because it was thought to be a work of Aristotle himself. This is basically what Albert believed, though he saw it as an excerpt of a work by Aristotle's. Albert thought that the excerpting was done by a Jewish author called David, probably meaning the translator Ibn Dawud. True to its name, the Book of Causes recognizes a multiplicity of causal principles. But true to the Neoplatonic tradition that spawned it, the work arranges these principles in a chain that descends from a highest, single, and simple cause. Like Plotinus, Proclus called it the One. The work of reconciling this teaching with Abrahamic belief already began in the Arabic translation which speaks of the first cause as Creator, or simply God. This Creator is first of all the cause of being, which is followed by intellect, soul, and the world accessible to sense perception. These subsequent principles serve as intermediaries, each of them passing on the Creator's causal influence to the next level down, like a cosmic version of Pass the Parcel. In keeping with the from one only one rule, the being that is created immediately by God is said to be one and simple, and to take on diversity only because it assumes the form of intellect. All of this chimed well with Avicenna. He too had made an intellect, the first effect of God, and let it be an intermediary between God and the rest of creation. And Avicenna gave Albert another piece for his metaphysical puzzle, the distinction between existence and essence. According to this Avicenna teaching, the nature, or essence, of each created thing leaves it as an open question whether or not that thing exists. This is why such things need causes in the first place. They are insufficient to account for their own existence, and need help from some external influence if they are to be brought into being. By contrast, God's essence guarantees, or even is identical to, his existence. This is what it means to say that God exists necessarily, whereas all other things exist contingently. Each of them could intrinsically have failed to exist, and exist only because of the chain of causes that goes back to God. Albert is broadly happy with this picture, but he's more reluctant than Avicenna to say that existence is bestowed by God only indirectly. Instead, he would like to say that when God creates being, he is creating the being of all things. But how can he say this while still obeying the maxim, from one only one? Simple. He admits that the being produced by God is in itself one, but becomes complex and diversified precisely when it joins to the essences of created things, as Avicenna described. In a further borrowing from his Neoplatonic sources, he compares God to a flowing fountain or shining light with being as a single stream or irradiation which is received by many things. He has a bit of a problem with these sources too though. Neoplatonists and Avicenna too said that God produces an intellect and uses it as an intermediary to create other things. Albert doesn't want to separate God from creation in this way, so he resorts to a cunning bit of exegesis. His commentary on the Book of Causes finds a way to agree with its claim that intellect comes from God before anything else. The word used in the Latin translation for intellect is intelligentsia, but this doesn't need to mean an intellect, it could also mean an intellectual concept, an idea. This is precisely what it does mean according to Albert. The Book of Causes is telling us that the first concept produced by God is being, and it is a concept that applies to all things. With this move, Albert has managed to bring teachings of late antiquity, heavily filtered through Arabic transmission, into line with an idea of his own time, the transcendentals. As we saw in episode 228, the Scholastics in the 13th century had developed a theory according to which some concepts, such as being, truth, goodness, and unity, apply to all things. Albert's story explains why this should be so. As Avicenna said, God has being through his very essence, so it stands to reason that being must be his one effect. Being is thus received by everything that derives from him, which of course means everything other than God himself. For this reason, Albert insists that among the transcendentals, being is the most primary. Goodness, unity, and truth do always come along with being, but this is only because we can add more specific notions to that of being, like the fact that a certain being is undivided, which is what we mean when we say that something is one. The essences of created things play a similar role. When a giraffe comes to be, its essence restricts or contracts being into the act of existence appropriate to being a giraffe. And here, Albert does think that intermediaries are needed to explain how being is received in such a limited and diminished way, with all due respect to giraffes, needless to say. Like shadows which dim the reception of a brilliant light, other causal factors besides God are needed to explain the very specific and limited form of being that turns up in each created thing. We saw last time what those causal factors might be. Each giraffe comes from its mother and father through a material process whose details are known best to the giraffes themselves, and there is also a role for the heavenly bodies. But none of these lesser causes accounts for the sheer being of any created thing. When excited and appreciative zoo visitors exclaim, Thank God there are giraffes, Albert would say they are getting things just right. All of this gives us a new perspective on his work in zoology and the other physical sciences. Like earlier medievals with an interest in nature, Albert would have seen science as a way to appreciate God's handiwork and generosity. Every animal, plant, and stone is a reflection or vestige of God's being, however humble. This doesn't mean though that the natural philosopher has to meditate on God even as he dissects a plant or repels down a cliff to learn about the breeding habits of eagles. In fact, there's even a sense in which this would be inappropriate. As Albert puts it in one striking passage, When I am discussing natural things, God's miracles are nothing to me. It is another science that undertakes to grasp things insofar as they are related to God, theology. Harder to distinguish other remits of theology and metaphysics, since the latter discipline does investigate how being and the other transcendentals flow forth from the divine first principle. Everything we've been discussing in this episode so far would count as metaphysics from Albert's point of view, not as theology. The difference is that theology is supposed to orient the practitioner to love and enjoy God as opposed to just understanding Him as a cause. Thus Albert says that for all the scientific insight Aristotle offered us when it comes to the created world, he does not give us what we need to achieve salvation. When we do theology, we approach even the created universe with a different and more exalted approach, one that aims at beatitude rather than worldly understanding. Ultimately, and I do mean ultimately, the beatitude towards which theology strives is available only in the afterlife. After their bodily death, those who achieve salvation will get to see God face to face, as it says in the Bible. Each of us is a mere shadowy image of God's light, but once beatified, as they used to say on the radio in the 1940s, the shadow knows. It was a matter of considerable controversy how exactly to understand this knowledge though. As with the from one only one principle, church condemnation was brought to bear on the issue. In 1241, William of Auvergne, in his capacity as the Bishop of Paris, required theologians to admit that the blessed souls see nothing less than God in His very essence or substance. Anyone who denied this would be subject to excommunication. When it came to the beatific vision, William was not willing to settle for second best. But it's one thing to say this, and another to explain how it could be so. On the one hand, various respected authors could be found saying that God exceeds our grasp even in paradise. These included Augustine, whose authority was as unimpeachable as a man with a lethal fruit allergy. On the other hand, we've been seeing throughout this episode that even in this life, anyone who has read some Aristotle and the Book of Causes can attain at least an incomplete understanding of God. What exactly is added to this when we behold Him in the afterlife? Albert addresses these tensions by taking seriously the idea that the knowledge of God available to the blessed is a kind of vision, and carefully comparing this vision to the one involved in normal eyesight. For Albert, when we see something, we do so by receiving a species from the viewed object. Here he turns out to agree with the sort of view put forward by his nemesis Roger Bacon, which was rejected by Peter Olivey and Robert Kilwardby. Especially for Olivey, eyesight cannot take place by virtue of an image or species, because then we would be perceiving a representation of something, rather than the thing itself. For Albert though, we perceive the thing through the representation when it arrives in the eye. But this is not how things work when we see God. Albert wrote about the issue throughout his career, beginning early on in the years just after William of Auvin's 1241 Condonation. To avoid the banned doctrine, and to make sense of the idea that we do see God face to face, Albert admitted that there is no species involved in seeing God. There is no representation that would serve as an intermediary between the soul and God, because here no representation is needed. Albert quotes Bernard of Clavot on this point, Instead, we are talking here about a direct confrontation between the soul and God's face, which means, as William insisted, the divine essence itself. Yet, Albert also wants to preserve Augustine's claim that God's infinity transcends our mind. Characteristically, he makes use of an Aristotelian distinction, in this case the one between knowing that something is the case and what something is. The blessed will see that God is before them, but not attain a full understanding of what God is in His essence. Elements of Albert's solution will reappear in the treatment of the beatific vision we find in Albert's student, Thomas Aquinas. In particular, both of them speak of a so-called light of glory, which God infuses into the Here, we may think of the tradition of explaining human knowledge by appealing to divine illumination. Though this is associated more with figures like Grossetest and Bonaventure than with Albert, he does also make a place for illumination in his epistemology. We do not receive forms as direct emanations from God, or for that matter from a celestial intellect, as Avicenna claimed. But as Bonaventure suggested, abstraction of ideas from sensation is not enough. We need the light of divine truth to strengthen our minds if we are to achieve the scientific understanding to which Albert dedicated his life. The light of glory in heaven strengthens us further, allowing for a knowledge of God that would be impossible in this earthly life. Aquinas too explains the beatific vision in terms of a light of glory, but draws on other philosophical resources to explain it, including some taken from the Arabic tradition. And something similar happens with his portrayal of theology itself. He agrees with Albert that it is a science, but finds a new way to integrate the theologian's endeavor into the Aristotelian hierarchy of knowledge. We'll look at this theme soon as we finally begin to tackle the thought of Aquinas, the most famous medieval philosopher. But next time, as a kind of transition, we'll be looking at another issue dealt with by both Albert and Aquinas, as well as several other 13th century thinkers. As so often with Albert, it would be Avicenna who provided a crucial spur to reflection with his teaching on self-awareness. And even Avicenna's Flying Man would know not to miss my interview with Therese Corry on this subject in the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you by the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about self-awareness in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and my guest for this topic will be Therese Corry, who is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Hi Therese. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. We're going to be talking about self-awareness in these two great 13th century thinkers, and before getting on to what they thought about self-awareness, I thought it might be a good idea if we said something about what self-awareness is. Right. Obviously, people might think of themselves as being aware of themselves in some sort of vague way, but as a philosophical issue, how are you going to be using this notion of self-awareness? Yeah, so it's helpful to think about self-awareness as something that's pre-philosophical and very concrete, very experiential, so it's not some sort of abstract analysis, what is the self or what is the mind. And it's self-awareness because it's got some sort of first personal content. So when I say, I'm hungry or I'm tired, right, this implies some sort of self-awareness. And we can think about the different kinds of phenomena that self-awareness encompasses. So sometimes if you're learning a new language and you're trying to speak grammatically correctly and you suddenly start to have this horrible sense that you're standing outside yourself, watching yourself make all these grammatical mistakes, you know, that's a kind of unfortunate kind of difficult. Horribly familiar actually. Yes. You're describing me learning German over the last years. There's a kind of self-awareness that blocks you from speaking another language. But you know, there's much friendlier kinds of self-awareness. So if you're sitting on a beach watching a sunset, right, your attention might be totally drawn to the sunset, but you still have sort of a halo of self-awareness around that experience. You're aware of where your body is in space and you're aware of yourself as sort of seeing the sunset from a perspective, even though you're not really thinking about that. And you can easily turn your attention to yourself and say, wow, I'm really enjoying this vacation and really feel relaxed, right? So self- awareness can apply different sort of grades of attention. It seems interesting that you can be more or less self-aware as you were just saying, to the point where you can be what we might call self-conscious, which is like the I'm trying to learn a language case, all the way down to something like I'm totally immersed in what I'm doing and not thinking about myself at all. Are you saying though that even in a case like that, there's this, what you call the halo of self-awareness so that even if I'm not actively thinking about myself as having a first-person perspective on the world, I'd still be self-aware all the time no matter what? Well, it depends. It depends who we're talking about. If we look at the history of philosophy, and we'll see a little bit later on that Aquinas definitely would say, yes, there is this kind of halo of self-awareness. No matter what I'm thinking about, I'm still somehow present to myself and my acts. Yeah, so but there's sort of a problem with self-awareness in a way because philosophically it's very interesting because when you reflect on your experiences of self-awareness, you're able to gather information about how the mind works. And so that's very helpful for the philosophy of mind. But, you know, it's a good source of information, but it's not a great source of information. And so you've got this problem that when you reflect on yourself, you say, you know, I'm the person who's the most familiar with myself. Right? There's this sort of feeling of privileged access to yourself where, but then when you start to sort of dig a little bit deeper, you realize that you're very obscure to yourself in ways that aren't immediately apparent, right? So you might do something and then say, well, gosh, I'm not even sure why I did that. What was my motivation? And you have a hard time answering that question or, you know, you might even something like it's so simple as a mood, right? You might say, well, am I really angry at that person? Am I just tired or hungry? Right? And those things are, they seem like they should be such easy questions to answer because I am myself, but yet somehow I don't manage to answer them. Yeah. It's like sometimes you ask someone, how are you feeling? And they say, I'm not sure. Yes. And what they mean is something like, I'm not sure whether I'm getting ill or something like that, but I'm always tempted to say, what do you mean you're not sure? Of course you know how you feel. Who else could know better? Right. And actually, Augustine says something like this, doesn't he? Doesn't he say that there's a paradox about the fact that you're the closest thing to yourself and yet you're such a mystery to yourself? Yes. Yeah. Yes. And he's, he's a big source for the medieval debate, in fact, which centers exactly on this problem of being obscure to yourself, even though you are yourself, because in a way that, that poses a big puzzle, right? I mean, I haven't, I have a great excuse for why I don't understand kangaroos very well, right? I can say, well, I'm not a kangaroo. Sorry. I can't answer that question, but then I don't have that excuse about myself. And in Augustine in particular, there's a sort of tradition of thought that develops that, that I think he's a key representative of that wants to say, well, okay, you have no excuse. In fact, you are yourself, the mind is a self knowing thing. And so you should be able to know yourself. And in fact, you do know yourself all the time in some sort of hidden way outside the realm of consciousness. And then it's only in later turning your attention to yourself that you're able to sort of bring that self knowing that you already have to the, to the surface of consciousness. And so I'll give you, it seems like a bit of a weird theory, but maybe it helps to think about how Augustine backs into this idea. And he gives the example of the inscription, know thyself. And he says, so okay, the, the inscription tells me to know myself, but if I don't know myself already, how am I going to know that the inscription applies to me? But if I know myself already, then the inscription doesn't apply to me. So it seems like it both applies to me and doesn't apply to me. So you've got this sort of paradox here. So it's a sort of pointless command, because either I already know myself, in which case, why bother telling me to know myself, or I don't know myself, and then how would I get started? It's sort of like Minos paradox. Yes, it is. It's very similar. Minos paradox applied to the self. I guess the main source that you have in mind here is on the Trinity. Because this is a text where Augustine tries to use the mind's relationships to itself to articulate the structure of the Trinity and seeing humans as a mirror or image of the Trinity. And then I suppose that another obvious source for them would be Avicenna. Because when I think about self awareness, it might just be me, actually, a very reasonable hypothesis. But when I think about... Are you sure? Are you sure what you think about that? So when I think about self awareness in medieval philosophy, I think about Avicenna's flying man argument. So this is his idea. It's kind of a thought experiment where you imagine God creating someone who's not enjoying any sensory access to the world around him. And then Avicenna claims that this man who would be created in midair, not seeing or hearing or smelling anything, he would still be aware of his own existence. Is this an important source for the 13th century debate on self awareness? Absolutely. Yeah. In fact, I think Avicenna's flying man is such a vivid example that it catalyzes, it seems to me, the debate about this problem of how we are able to know ourselves and yet we have so much trouble knowing ourselves. Because when you think about this flying man example, what it gives you in giving this hypothetical idea of a man who does not have any sensory input but nevertheless knows himself, it leads very naturally to the conclusion, well maybe we're all like that. If we could just strip away the sensory distractions, we would discover that at the core of the soul, there's a kind of self knowing that's just always on. And so I think this image, then they see the same idea in Augustine and this forms a very powerful impetus for early 13th century thinkers to say, okay, well you know, we're confused and obscure to ourselves but that's because our sensory input or sensory stimuli is competing for attention with the soul itself. And the soul is always self knowing, it's sort of responsible. In the core of its being, it's always knowing itself. And the reason we're not able to tap into that is we're distracted. And so we have to turn the gaze away from the outside and into the inside so we can recover that self knowing that we already had. And I call that a super conscious self knowing because it's sort of outside the realm of consciousness but it's an activity that's always happening in the depths of the soul. It's a paradox that there's something that you've known all the time but your attention has to be called to it. And I would say the ultimate forefather of this must be Plotinus. I'm sure. Because he's got this idea that the soul is always connected to intellect and the job of philosophy is to alert you to the fact that your soul is always engaging in intellectual knowledge. And of course he's a common source for both Avicenna and Augustine. Right. Okay, so that's the kind of deep historical background. What was being done with these ideas in the early 13th century before we get to Albert? Yeah, so one thing to remember about the early 13th century is that in discussing self awareness from a psychological perspective asking the question how do we know ourselves, that's really a kind of new thing that's being done philosophically. Because if you go back into the 12th century you discover that self awareness is described or self knowledge is described much more as an ethical kind of activity. And there's an ethical imperative to the soul. You have to turn your attention inward, recover your true dignity, recognize that you are an immaterial substance and by having your mind led to this sort of concept of what the soul is in its inner core then you'll have this access to the realm of the immaterial and you'll be able to sort of your mind will then approach the divine. Right. So there's a sort of trajectory of ethical purification that self awareness is part of. And it's really in the beginning of the 13th century that we then start to see discussions of how exactly the mind knows itself. You know, what are the psychological mechanisms that make this phenomenon of self awareness even possible. And as you can imagine at the beginning of any sort of trend like this it takes a while even to sort out well what are the different kinds of self awareness that we're talking about. So they spend quite a lot of time, someone like William Noble Verne for instance, he's going to take the Avasanian-Augustinian line all the way down and say yes the soul is in fact super consciously self knowing all the time. And we contrast that basic kind of essential self knowing with moments at which the soul turns its attention inward and then is able to discover what it already knew. You basically have two levels of self knowing. Yes. Permanent super conscious self knowing. Yes. This paradoxical thing where I know myself without knowing that I know myself. And then there are these moments where I actually attend to that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so you've got these two kinds of self awareness that are kind of being differentiated out very clearly. And they go over and over and over this. But it's a little bit frustrating because they haven't quite taken the step at this point to then say okay, you know, how do these kinds of self knowing work? Right. Do they connect it a lot with metaphysical features of the self or the soul? I mean, is there an idea that the reason you're able to do this to reflect on yourself is because you're an immaterial soul? So there's something that a body wouldn't be able to do but an immaterial soul could for some reason? Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually there's a there's text in Avicenna that give them this idea and also in the Liber de Causis that you know, you do have since you're immaterial, you should have some sort of ability to be present or be evident to yourself. And that's why this problem of the obscurity of your own conscious states, right, where you're not sure about your motivations or your moods or the nature of the mind. That's why it's so problematic in a view like this because they want to say, look, if the soul is an immaterial entity, it should have all of this available to it, right? And the mere fact that it can reflect on itself and regain an awareness of what's happening within itself or the nature of the mind itself, that sort of evidence for the immateriality of the soul in these thinkers. Right. Because Avicenna actually says that things are automatically intelligible unless matter gets in the way. Yeah. So what he would say is, well, given that your soul is immaterial, there's nothing to stop it from being known. Exactly. And in a way, he's almost forced to say that you have super conscious self knowledge, because otherwise you'd have to explain why you weren't knowing yourself, even though you're not material. Yes. Okay. So what does Albert do with all these ideas? I mean, he's a very careful reader of Avicenna, among others. So does he also follow this Avicenna line that we find in William of Auvergne and other earlier 13th century thinkers? Yes. So, well, Albert's very eclectic in his own way. So he takes on board as many of the sources as he possibly can. And so we do see in him these theories similar to what we see in the earlier 13th century. So he posits his super conscious self knowing. And then he says, well, sometimes the soul is able to turn its attention inward and think about itself. Right. But then he's also going to take another tradition on board, which is a sort of Aristotelian way of thinking about self awareness. And in the Aristotelian tradition, the soul is aware of itself or the intellect is aware of itself in its acts or in being activated thinking about something else. Right. And so in this tradition, there's no conflict between your awareness of the world and your self awareness. In fact, your awareness is strengthened by your self awareness. And you can see what kinds of things they sort of have in mind. If you think about the moments in your life that you remember yourself most clearly in, they tend to be the moments in which you had the strongest and most intense experience of something else. So, you know, we say everybody knows where they were on September 11th. Right. They can tell you what was I thinking, who was I talking to, how did I feel, how did I react? This huge sort of very intense, memorable self awareness. But in an experience that's very, very outward focused. Right. So in this tradition, the two, the awareness and the self awareness sort of come along with each other. And Albert takes that on board as well. So, you know, so he just puts all of these traditions together. So he would actually have three, at least three kinds of self awareness. So there's super conscious self knowing in the background. I'm always knowing myself. There's then becoming aware of that, oh, I've been knowing myself my whole time. And then there's this other self awareness that happens when I know about something else, or I'm aware of it. Right. Is that supposed to be a separate activity? I mean, when I know myself in knowing what a giraffe is, for example, is the idea that when I know what a giraffe is, I just get some kind of self awareness or self knowledge for free along with that? Or is it more like I have to then reflect on the fact in a kind of second order way, reflect on the fact that I'm knowing what a giraffe is? Yeah. So the way Albert's able to integrate all of these different themes and different traditions is he considers them each as representing a different sort of or accounting for a different kind of phenomenon. Right. And so for him, the Aristotelian tradition is describing what you what you describe as getting self awareness for free while you're knowing a giraffe. Right. You're automatically aware of yourself as the one who's knowing the giraffe, but then turning your attention to yourself. He says, yeah, that's exactly what the Augustinians and the Avicennians talked about. Right. You turn your attention inward. And then in addition to all that, there's a kind of activity on the ground floor or we could say on the top floor of the soul, outside the realm of consciousness, where the soul is always active and always knowing itself in some diffuse way. Okay. In that case, it seems like this is an example of Albert's eclecticism leading him to maybe even a better philosophical position. And he's drawing on all these different sources. And that actually leads him to articulate or at least put his finger on a bunch of, I would say, genuinely real psychological phenomena. Although I'm not totally convinced that this super conscious self awareness is always there. And I guess that Aquinas isn't either. Exactly. So he's really not. And I guess that, I mean, if we think about Aquinas, who I haven't covered yet in the podcast, but I will be soon. Usually when people think about him and his psychology or his epistemology, they think about him as being a thoroughgoing Aristotelian and hence some sort of empiricist. And empiricists usually think that the soul is a kind of blank slate. There's nothing there until you have experience. And he would then build intellectual knowledge on sense experience. I'll get to all this in a future episode, but let's just pretend that that's what he thinks. Yeah, because it's sort of what he thinks. Take it as given. Wouldn't that mean that the only kind of self awareness he can accept is the kind that you get through knowing something that's outside you because you couldn't get some kind of built in self awareness if you're just a blank slate? Right. Right. Yes. And here I think you see really there's a key difference between Albert and Aquinas. Even though Aquinas is Albert's student, he's going to reject Albert's view on super conscious self knowing. And he's going to insist that in a properly empiricist way, all our knowledge, even our self awareness comes to us originating in some way in sense perception. And here's where I think we have to be a little bit careful though, because it's very easy to misinterpret Aquinas on this point. To say that somehow we have to pretend like the intellect is a sense object and feed it through some sort of process that's designed for bringing us intellectual knowledge of sensory objects. So for instance, if we think about how that process works, right, when you know a frog, you have the sensory impression of the frog, and then your imagination sort of puts together an image. I'm sure you're going to get into this in a later episode. I'll probably use a giraffe instead of a frog. But yeah. I'm a little partial to frogs. So you can use a giraffe later. So then you have an image of the frog in your imagination. So even if the frog goes away in the senses, you saw that image there. And then from that image, you're able to abstract a concept of what is a frog, right, intellectually understood. And some interpreters of Aquinas have said, okay, well, he must think that something similar is of the intellect, right? If you haven't had a sensory experience of something, you have to start immediately at the level of the imagination and put together a sort of picture and then abstract a concept from that imaginative picture. Right. So you would say, well, I somehow picture what an intellect might be, and then I abstract an image from it. And that's absolutely not what Aquinas means. What he wants to say is that the intellect, the human intellect being a blank slate is only activated when it receives this information about objects from the outside world. Right. And in that activation, it's then manifested to itself. So it's not as though it has to process information about itself. It's just present to itself instantly, intuitively, when it's engaged in knowing anything at all. Basically, that just spells out something I said in a kind of vague way when I said you get it for free. That's right. Okay. Yes. Does he actually have arguments against the other option, though? I mean, does he say, well, these other people have this idea of superconscious self-knowing, but that's wrong because da da da da? Yes, he does. And it's one of the views that he frequently rejects, in fact. He never mentions Albert when he does this. Okay, that would be impolite. It would. It really would. But sort of to get a sense of what's at stake here, I think it's helpful to sort of, you could make an analogy for Albert's view of superconscious self-knowing and Aquinas' view of sort of self-knowing that's free, right? Or self-knowing that's free when you know anything at all. And you can think of this using the sort of classic example of the mind is a place that lights things up, right? And Albert's view is very much like this idea that we know that we talk about outer space as dark, but in fact, we know that sunlight is streaming through it all the time. And the only reason we don't see it is that there's not anything for it to reflect off of, to really then have an object to be visible, right? So sunlight isn't sort of a thing that we can see until it's reflected off of something, right? But nevertheless, we know that it's passing through space. And for Albert, this is exactly how the mind is, right? There's a sort of light in the mind, and the mind is always sort of filled with light, but in a kind of diffuse way when we're not thinking about anything, right? And he says that's what this superconscious self-knowing is, is a kind of activity the mind is always on, but there's nothing to focus its attention on to make it visible to itself. But nevertheless, it's sort of present to itself, right? And that's why you wouldn't notice that you're knowing yourself. Exactly, right? By definition, you can't notice because there's nothing to focus your attention on. And for Aquinas, right, he thinks of the mind instead as a kind of room that's hermetically sealed, right? It's absolutely dark. There's no activity in it at all. There's no light, nothing. And the moment at which the object, let's say, you know, like a raging bull comes crashing through the door. A raging frog. Raging frog comes crashing through the door, and two things happen at once, right? When the frog comes in, the light is sort of suddenly present in the room, lighting up the frog and the room, right? And so they have to be there together for Aquinas. You mean the light that's coming in for the door? Yes. In your analogy. It's not the most, you know, perfect analogy, but at least it gets to the root of what the difference is between Albert and Aquinas. So if I was going to distill that down into an objection to Albert, I guess what he would say is, well, if you're born in a state of bare potentiality, then why would this actuality always be there for you? I kind of think, though, that the Albert slash Avicenna slash Augustin position in the metaphysical picture that they're all working with is more plausible. I mean, it's one thing to say, well, you're your brain. And, you know, when you're born, your brain hasn't started to do anything of any interest yet. So how can you say that you're already self-knowing as a newborn baby? Yeah. But if you think that you are your immortal immaterial soul, I would say there's a lot more reason to think that a soul like that should have a kind of built in actuality of its own rather than just being a mere potentiality. Because a mere potentiality is nothing. Yeah. And that's why I think Aquinas is really, as far as I can tell, the first person in the 13th century to reject this notion of superconscious self-knowing because it just seems so intuitive, right? If you're going to accept the existence of an immaterial soul, then why not superconscious? Like, how could it be ignorant of itself? But I think we have to remember for Aquinas that what's driving his rejection of superconscious self-knowing is ultimately his anthropology. And he's very committed to a notion of human nature as being essentially embodied. And embodiment is something positive. It's something that contributes to our knowledge, even though he defends the existence of an immaterial soul. We're immaterial souls in an embodied way, and that means we have to be knowers and self-knowers in an embodied way. So his worry about Avicenna and Albert on this particular issue is that it makes the soul too active in a way that's independent from the body. And to him that sounds too much like saying that the soul is a kind of angelic substance that's united to a body. It's not really validating the importance of embodiment and sensory perception in our ordinary knowing, even our knowing of ourselves. And I think also for him, and we can see this especially in light of the historical background, if the soul is always superconsciously self-knowing, and yet we're not able to tap into that on a regular basis, you start to get the sense that, especially when you read William of Overn, it's your fault. You're the one who's been distracted by your sensory environment, and if you focused a little harder and turned your attention inward, you would be able to sort of start acting like a soul. And for Aquinas I think that's particularly distasteful because it suggests that the sensory environment somehow detracts from our knowing, or provides a kind of disadvantage in our doing the kind of thing that a knower does, knowing ourselves. And so that I think is why he's so attracted to this more Aristotelian tradition of saying that the soul's self, any kind of self-knowing, has to be predicated on the activation of the intellect that comes originating in sense perception. You don't perfect the soul by turning away from the bodily world, you perfect the soul by investigating it. Yes. Right, so it's a kind of Aristotelian anti-neo-platonist move. You discover, in a way you could say, well you discover who you really are in your interactions with the world. Right. I guess in that way Aquinas's position might seem to be a better fit than for what will happen later with the enlightenment, and maybe even nowadays. And so I wonder whether you think that Aquinas's views on self-awareness resonate with later views on self-awareness, so like what happened in the 14th century even nowadays, in terms of contemporary debates on self-awareness. It's a small question just to finish up. Connected to the rest of the history of philosophy and also without any gaps. Yeah, could you do that in maybe two minutes? Yeah, we'll try here. Yeah, so I think one of the things, so Aquinas is often put in connection with Descartes on the one hand, and Hume on the other, right? And there's sort of Descartes and Hume are now sort of thought to represent two poles on self-awareness. Descartes sort of thinks that you can very much, in a way like Avicenna, you can sort of have this awareness of yourself independently of any sensory perception, or at least it seems to be what he thinks. And Hume sort of takes the opposite view and says, no you can only be aware of your acts, right? So I'm aware if I really think about it, I'm aware of thoughts, but I can't really get at any sort of thinker. I'm not really aware of any sort of thinker, I'm just sort of positing or postulating that there's a thinker behind all those acts, right? And so there's a lot of debate in the literature as Aquinas closes to Descartes, is he closer to Hume? And I think in a way he does something very clever that allows him to carve out a middle ground between the two of them. And he says that the human intellect isn't just aware of thoughts as though they're kind of objects in the mind. So this is against Hume, right? And we often talk, I think for Aquinas this would be incorrect, to talk about a thought as a thing or a feeling or an insight. He would much prefer to construe these in terms of verbs. It's me thinking, me feeling, me discovering, right? And for him, the situation is very much similar to any sort of sensory experience in which you see an agent performing an action. You don't have some sort of experience of the action and then an experience of the agent, right? I don't see running and then a runner. I see the runner precisely as running and I perceive running as the runner running, right? And so they're indissociable, right? And he sees the mind in exactly the same way. I don't perceive a bare mind and I don't perceive just thoughts. I perceive myself thinking. And that's part of this sort of Aristotelian idea that I'm always revealed to myself as acting in some way. And if one were to try to connect this to contemporary debates about the philosophy of mind, I suppose that a lot of people nowadays would say that consciousness is some sort of second order reflection on or just background awareness of one's psychological states or something like that. And I take it from what you're saying that Aquinas would reject that, right? Because he doesn't think of self-awareness as second order. He thinks of it as somehow already present in the first order. Yeah, so he would defend what we would call now, I think, a same order theory of conscious, well, in this case, self-consciousness precisely. You know, so a second order theory might say, well, you have these kind of first order acts that are focused on objects in the world and then second order acts are focused on those acts. So first order act, I'm knowing the frog. Second order act, I'm knowing that I know the frog. I know my act, knowing the frog. And for Aquinas, there aren't, I think he explains self-awareness in such a way that there aren't two separate acts. There's only one act, your act of knowing the frog, and it's from the inside of that act that the mind is lit up to itself. And what's great about a theory like this, I think, or an advantage of a theory like this, is that it's a little easier to explain first person phenomena from this kind of perspective. Because when you've got a second order act focused on a first order act, it immediately raises the question, well, I'm perceiving an act. How do I know whose act this is, right? Where Aquinas can simply say, well, you're aware of yourself on the inside of the act. And so there's never any sort of question of how, whose act is this, right? Because you're perceiving it from the inside rather than from the outside. Right, so if you got angry and I got angry, if I was aware of your being angry, I should be able to know that that's not the same thing as my being angry. Right. And his explanation for that would be that part of what it is for me to get angry is to be aware that it's me who's getting angry. And thus there's no problem about how I tell the difference. Yes. Okay. Because you're aware of your getting angry from the inside of that act, right? Whereas you're aware of my getting angry from the outside. Yeah. Well, I think this, if nothing else, has shown us that Aquinas is really interesting, which is maybe not a surprise because he's sort of got the reputation of being quite interesting. But hopefully it has given listeners a reason to stick around for the next few episodes when I'm going to be looking more systematically at Thomas Aquinas, starting next time with his life and works and his attitudes towards the relationship between philosophy and theology. So for now, I'll thank Theres Corry. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Peter. And please join me next time as I start to look in depth at Thomas Aquinas here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Ox Heard Round the World, Thomas Aquinas. Albert the Great was a keen-eyed observer, not only of nature but also of talent. His classes were attended by a young man of quiet disposition who was, shall we say, big-boned. The other students called him dumb ox. But Albert was impressed by him and, so the story goes, remarked that this dumb ox would one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard throughout the world. And so it has proved. That student, Thomas Aquinas, would become the most famous medieval philosopher, to the point where he almost needs no introduction. In this episode, I'm going to introduce him anyway by looking at his life, his works, and his approach to the vexed question of how Aristotelian philosophy could be made compatible with Christian theology. Like most of the 13th century thinkers we've met, Aquinas plied his trade in a university setting and wrote, indeed no doubt thought, using the Scholastic Method. Born in the mid-1220s, he came from a wealthy family in Naples. He was first educated at the Abbey of Monte Cassino. Bonus points if you remember that name. Monte Cassino was also the home of the recipient of Peter Damian's letter on restoring virginity covered back in episode 203. Aquinas didn't need to have his virginity restored. A famous anecdote has his brothers seeking to dissuade him from signing up to the Dominican order, sending a prostitute to show young Thomas what he'd be missing out on. Aquinas simply chased her away. Like most students of the age, Aquinas was only a teenager when he began his university training, in his case at the University of Naples. He joined the Dominicans in the early 1240s, over his family's creatively expressed objections, and escaped from their influence when he moved to Paris in 1244. His further studies also brought him to Cologne, where he worked with Albert the Great, but it was in Paris that he became a master of theology in 1256. This inaugurated the first two stints at Paris. At other times we find him working at Dominican priories in Ovieto, Rome, and back in Naples before dying in 1274 while en route to a council at Lyon. Given that he lived to be only about 50 years old, Aquinas's output was prodigious. His most famous work, the Summa Theologiae, is a sprawling text which remained unfinished at death, but still contains three sizable sections, with the second subdivided into two parts. It was only the third of three synoptic works that covered the whole of theology, the first being his commentary on the sentences of Peter Lombard, written, as was standard, upon his taking up the post of master at Paris, and the second being his Summa Consurgentiles. There is some debate about what, if any, title Aquinas himself gave to that work, and how it relates to the Summa Theologiae. The consurgentiles of the traditional title would mean against the non-Christians, and it has been read as a manual for use in converting Muslims and Jews in Spain. But if so, it seems odd that Aquinas devotes so much space to arguing for ideas that Jews and Christians would readily have admitted, such as the existence of God. Rather, the summa consurgentiles may have been an attempt to show how Christian belief can be placed on rational foundations, a project of at least as much interest for Aquinas's fellow Christians as for representatives of other faiths. Only in the fourth and final book does Aquinas turn to aspects of the Christian religion that cannot be established by rational argument, like the doctrine of the Trinity. The consurgentiles is also noteworthy in that it simply lays out arguments one after another, rather than using the disputed question structure of the more famous Summa Theologiae. With this structure, the Summa Theologiae imitates classroom disputation, though in a streamlined or idealized fashion. Aquinas also held a number of actual disputed questions, with each question containing a large number of arguments for or against the various theses being considered. The Summa is different. Its three parts deal respectively with God, humankind, and Christ. These parts are then divided into numerous questions, each of which contains a number of articles, and it is within each article that the disputed question structure comes to the fore. Each article usually gives only a small number of objections, mostly drawn from authoritative sources, before citing another such source against these objections, introduced by said contra, on the other hand. This is followed by a response in Aquinas' own name, and finally he gives answers to the objections to the extent that these are not already obvious from his response. The cited authorities are carefully chosen. Aquinas uses them to show how Christian sources like Augustine, the Greek church fathers, and the Bible itself can be integrated with Aristotle and other philosophical sources, like the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Ivarroes, and the Jewish Maimonides. Platonist sources are also important for Aquinas. He continues to use the book of causes, even after realizing that it is based on Proclus rather than Aristotle, and he is also powerfully influenced by the pseudo-Dionysius. It's even been suggested that the whole Summa has a structure inspired by the Neoplatonic theme of precession and return, beginning from God as the first cause of all things, and then following the path that leads back to him through the virtues and the grace offered by Christ. Alongside the three Summas and his sets of disputed questions on topics like virtue, truth and evil, Aquinas' commentaries give us another sign of his intellectual inheritance. He commented on books of the Bible and on works of Christian and non-Christian Platonism, including two treatises by Boethius, The Divine Names of the Pseudo-Dionysius and The Book of Causes. Finally, he followed his teacher Albert's example by writing several commentaries on Aristotle. As this choice of subjects already suggests, Aquinas saw no unbridgeable chasm between reason and religion. Such a harmonizing view was, of course, as typically medieval as knights in shining armor, or alarmingly low standards of sanitation. From rationalists like Abelard to mystically-leaning Augustinians like Bonaventure, we've found widespread agreement that Aristotle and other philosophers could at least be reconciled with the Christian faith. But Aquinas proposes a new way of conceptualizing this relationship. He defines very clearly the differences between theology and philosophy, a methodological distinction that reflects the division between the theology and arts faculties within the universities. We see this in a commentary written during his first period in Paris devoted to Boethius's On the Trinity. It does not cover most of the text, and in fact doesn't really get to the part about the Trinity, instead lavishing attention on Boethius's remarks concerning philosophical method. Aquinas's commentary explains Boethius's meaning line by line, but then steps back to consider the issues at stake by raising a number of difficulties which are handled using what else? The disputed question structure. Already in the prologue to his commentary, Aquinas points to a difference between the method of philosophy and that of theology. The philosopher begins with things in the created world and proceeds to God, whereas the theologian goes the other way around. But the difference is more than direction of travel. The philosopher moves along the lower road of natural reason. He must base himself solely on what he can glean from the senses, since all natural reasoning must have recourse to experience of the physical world. Many, even most, of Aquinas's contemporaries would have said that even this sort of reasoning depends on an illumination from God. We've seen how Bonaventure, among others, thought such illumination was indispensable for the certainty of a philosophical demonstration. Aquinas disagrees. The light of reason is derived from God, but this is given to us automatically when we are created as humans, and for the most part no further assistance is needed. The human intellect is itself active and can illuminate the images it derives from the senses so as to understand them. It is only when we try to understand such supernatural themes as the Trinity that an additional light must be added. But this does not mean that God is entirely out of bounds for the philosopher. Several times Aquinas cites what may be his very favorite line from the Bible, The invisible things of him are clearly known from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made. That's Romans 1.20. Aquinas takes this to indicate that the philosopher can indeed know God, but only indirectly. Natural reason approaches God as the cause of created things, rather than grasping Him in himself as we hope to do in the afterlife. The philosopher cannot offer demonstrations that divulge God's essence, if only because we demonstrate things on the basis of their causes, and God has no cause. The Trinity is a good example of this limitation. In himself, God is indeed three in one. But we can never come to know this naturally, because with our inborn resources, we grasp God only as a cause, and it is the whole Godhead that creates things, not only one or the other divine person. Nonetheless, philosopher can offer several services to religion. It can help the Christian to refute false criticisms of religious doctrine, the task known as apologetics. And it can offer a deeper understanding of something accepted on the basis of faith. It should be underlined that this does not mean proving the articles of faith. These are believed on a voluntary basis, thanks to another supernatural light infused within us by God during this life, which is what Aquinas fundamentally understands faith to be. Rather, Aquinas has in mind the sort of procedure used by Augustine or Boethius, as when Augustine used philosophical tools to show us that the inner workings of our own mind give us some inkling of God's Trinitarian nature. A final task for philosophy is establishing what Aquinas calls the preambles of faith, things that pave the way for religion but are accessible to natural reason. Among these, none is more central than the very existence of God. Aquinas is adamant that even if the philosopher cannot demonstrate what God is, he can demonstrate that God is. For further light on all this, we can do no better than to turn to the beginning of the Summa Theologiae. As the title implies, this is nothing less than a comprehensive study of theology, and Aquinas begins by explaining the nature of his enterprise. Theology is, he insists, a science, and a science in the Aristotelian sense. That is, it offers demonstrative proofs based on unshakable first principles. The difference between theology and other sciences is that those principles are not available to human reason itself. How then can theology be a science at all? To answer this question, Aquinas reminds us of a teaching found in Aristotle's posterior analytics. One science can take over as principles things established in another science. The study of optics might require the principle that parallel lines never meet, and this is something shown in a higher science, namely geometry. Likewise, the human science of theology takes its principle from a higher science, namely the self-understanding of God himself and the understanding that the blessed have of him in the afterlife. Here, it helps to know that the Latin word sciencia is a bit more flexible than our word science. Like Aristotle's Greek term episteme, it can mean a branch of knowledge like optics or theology, but it can also mean knowledge or understanding. Thus, it is natural for Aquinas to say that God's sciencia provides the principles of the sacred sciencia, that is theology, the way that one human sciencia or science grounds another demonstrating its principles. But whether we are speaking English or Latin, we may worry that no article of faith could ever be the basis of a rational science. We typically assume today that faith is antithetical to reason. Faith is belief that one embraces on the basis of authority, or by a sheer act of will, or just because one was brought up in a religious family. It is, in other words, the sort of belief that involves the absence of rational justification. In a sense, Aquinas could agree. He admits that in this life, humans have no direct access to the certain truths that ground theology. Those truths are as certain as truth comes, since we are talking here about nothing less than God's own knowledge of himself. The theologian is like the optician who doesn't understand geometry, who we might say takes it as a matter of faith that parallel lines won't meet in the end. Likewise, the theologian, like the optician, operates with perfectly certain principles. It's just that he doesn't himself understand why they are certain. This is, of course, unlikely to satisfy the atheist, but Aquinas isn't talking to atheists, he's talking to fellow Christians, in fact, to students of theology. We should bear this in mind as we turn to the next topic of the Summa, namely the existence of God. Aquinas told us in his commentary on Boethius that the philosopher can use natural reason to prove that God exists, though not to understand what God is. Thus, we might expect the proofs Aquinas offers here to be intended as knockdown demonstrations. If so, we're apt to be disappointed. In a set of famous arguments often called the Five Ways, Aquinas describes five ways of establishing that God does in fact exist. These are some of the most thoroughly discussed arguments in the history of philosophy, and if all that discussion has shown anything, it is that the arguments need a lot of help if they are to be made watertight and convincing. For this reason, I tend to sympathize with readers who see the Five Ways in the context of theology, as Aquinas understands theology. Remember that philosophy offers the theologian various services. This includes proving certain preliminary points, which could certainly include the existence of God. But it can also help us to understand things we already accept on the basis of faith, and you can be sure that these would most definitely include the existence of God. So it may be better to think of the Five Ways as offering the theologian a set of rational approaches for thinking about God, even if they are also intended to work as proofs. This could help to explain their relative sketchiness and the various holes one can easily poke in the argumentation. As Aquinas scholar Rudi de Velde has put it, What Aquinas is saying is like this. Although there are several objections to the assumption that God exists, which should be taken seriously, we Christians firmly hold that God is existent. Now granted that this is true, as we believe it is, let us then try, with the help of arguments found in the philosophical tradition, to show how the human mind may be led to an understanding of this truth. Having said that, it is also important that Aquinas thinks we can and should try to prove that God exists. It is not simply obvious, or as he puts it, known through itself, that this is the case. This is one of those places where Aquinas is signaling his departure from the mainstream. Most 13th century thinkers followed Augustine, who held that it is simply incoherent to argue that God doesn't exist. A typical Augustinian argument to this effect was that God is truth, and it is self-defeating to deny that there is truth, since, to do so, you'd have to say that it is true that there is no truth. This sort of reasoning had been used by Anselm, who was of course responsible for an even more famous attempt to show that God's existence simply cannot be denied. This was his ontological argument, which Aquinas interprets as trying to establish that God's existence is self-evident. For Aquinas, the argument fails, because it concludes from what must be the case in our minds to what must be the case in external reality. Though Aquinas does put his finger here on a feature of the argument that makes people uncomfortable, I don't think it is a good objection. After all, the whole point of Anselm's ontological argument is to move from our idea of God to God's real existence. Aquinas simply rules this out as an illegal kind of inference. This amounts to stipulating that the ontological argument doesn't work, rather than pinpointing where exactly the flaw in Anselm's reasoning might be. If God's existence is not self-evident, how should it be established? On the basis of sense perception, of course, since it is on the basis of the visible, created world that the invisible must be known. Each of the five ways duly takes its departure from a feature of the world of sense experience. Take the first of the ways. It argues that every motion depends on some cause which moves it. That mover might in turn be moved, as when I move a stick that moves a rock. But the chain of movers cannot go on forever, since without a first unmoved mover, the chain of movers could never begin. Thus, there is a first mover, which Aquinas blithely adds, everyone understands to be God. You see what I mean. The argument has more holes than the plot of a movie about the invention of Swiss cheese. How do we know that something can't move itself, as when I get up from the sofa to fetch a drink from the kitchen? And why isn't it good enough to have a chain of moved causes, each of which is moved by the previous cause into infinity? Or take the third of the five ways, which is probably the most mystifying. Here, Aquinas asks whether it could be the case that all things are merely possible or contingent. No, because a contingent thing can fail to exist. So if all things are contingent, then at some point everything would have failed to exist. But that is absurd, because if everything had been non-existent in the past, then nothing would exist now. It follows that not everything is contingent. Instead, there must be a necessary being, and again, this is what everyone understands to be God. And again, the argument looks almost painfully bad, especially the bit where he infers that if each thing could fail to exist, then at some point all things must fail to exist. Aquinas may be assuming as an unstated premise something called the Principle of Planitude, that every genuine possibility is realized at some point. If it is genuinely possible for all things to be non-existent, as surely it is if each thing individually can be non-existent, then at some point this must happen. As for why he might just assume the Principle of Planitude without saying so, we might think Aquinas is depending on Aristotle's endorsement of the Principle. Or perhaps he'd have us turn to Avicenna, whose own more elaborate proof of the necessary existent is lurking in the background. A similar game can be played with the first way. In that case, we might seek answers in Aristotle, who is the inspiration for Aquinas's argument, or elsewhere in Aquinas, by looking to his theory of action to see why absolute self-motion is impossible. Of course, we might also use our own ingenuity to improve the arguments. Plenty of people have done so. But a more sensible reaction might be to assume that the student is familiar with these types of argument from studying their Aristotle and their Avicenna, and is just being reminded of several philosophical approaches to God that can be invoked in the rest of the Summa. To quote another Aquinas scholar, Brian Davies, "...the purpose of the five ways is to set the ball rolling, not to bring the game to an end." Of course, we are ourselves only just getting the ball rolling with Aquinas. In coming episodes, we'll look more at his conception of God, as well as his ethics and political philosophy. But next time, we'll be turning to one of the issues on which he was most out of step with his contemporaries, the nature of the human soul. Join me for what should be a pretty animated episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode… Everybody Needs Some Body – Aquinas on Soul and Knowledge I haven't actually checked and I'm not sure how to go about doing so, but I would be willing to bet that there is as much scholarship devoted to Thomas Aquinas as to the rest of medieval philosophy put together. He's also the only medieval philosopher you're likely to study in a typical undergraduate philosophy degree. So I was rather surprised at what happened when I sought advice from several colleagues as to what I should cover in these podcasts on medieval philosophy. I had a sketchy plan already, which included quite a few episodes devoted to various aspects of Aquinas' thought, much as I've done in the past with figures like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. My expert advisors told me that this was unnecessary and even misleading. The most exciting scholarship is nowadays being devoted to other thinkers like Scotus and John Burredon. And it would be a distortion to give so much attention to Aquinas, who was in many ways unrepresentative of medieval philosophy in general and the late 13th century in particular. In this podcast series, we've come across many important thinkers who are not famous. With Aquinas, have we now reached a famous thinker who is not important? Well, as Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what the meaning of the word important is. In the modern day, Aquinas has unparalleled significance for the Catholic Church. His centrality was recognized in an encyclical in 1879 and reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in 1998. And philosophers, Catholic and not, have recognized him as a thinker with innovative and fruitful teachings on the relationship between reason and religion, legal and political philosophy, the theory of action, epistemology, and many more topics besides. While his writings are not marked by the rhetorical elegance of a Plato or Augustine, they have a wonderful clarity which invites philosophical reflection. And his Latin is pretty easy too, which doesn't hurt. Nonetheless, there is one sense in which it is wrong to treat Aquinas as the most important medieval philosopher. He wasn't perceived as such in his time or in the generations following his death. His was an age during which Augustinianism continued to be dominant, even in the Aristotle-steeped world of the universities. In comparison to figures like William of Auvergne, Grosotest, Bonaventure, or Robert Kilwardby, Aquinas can be considered to be something of a radical Aristotelian. Some of his views attracted indignant, even uncomprehending reactions. Of course Aquinas himself would have rejected the label radical Aristotelian. Indeed, he attacked colleagues in Paris who were more radical still, the so-called Latin Averroists, to whom will be coming in due course. But the very heat of his invective against them may stem from his realization that he could all too easily be lumped in with the Averroists. Like a left-wing politician excoriating communists, for being even further to the left, Aquinas clashed with the Aristotelian extremists so as to emerge as a moderate. For corroboration, we need look no further than the 1277 condemnations of Paris. Unlike Kilwardby with his Oxford ban, the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tampier, does seem to have had Aquinas in his sights. The Dominicans leapt to the defense of their fellow friar and began building the case for his rather early canonization in 1323. There are other signs of his high standing in the eyes of his contemporaries, such as his prominent appearance alongside other theologians in Dante's Paradiso. But if one were to choose the 13th century thinker whose ideas had most influence in the following century, then Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, or for that matter Albert the Great, would be at least as plausible choices as Aquinas. His emergence as the indispensable thinker of the Middle Ages was a slow one, and owes something to Renaissance authors like John Cabroll, the 15th century author of a work called Defenses of the Theology of Thomas Aquinas, and later in the 16th century, the great exponent of Aquinas, Cardinal Cajetan. All of which leaves me in a quandary. On the one hand, I assume most listeners will want to hear quite a bit about Aquinas, and I want to take advantage of the massive and sophisticated body of literature on his thought. On the other hand, I don't want to give him disproportionate coverage for the reasons just mentioned. The solution I've hit on is to compare his views to those of other 13th century thinkers. This will help to put him in context, and allow us to discover how idiosyncratic his ideas really were. I'll begin with the area of Aquinas' thought where he was most out of step with his contemporaries, his views on human nature and knowledge. Happily, I've prepared the way for this discussion in previous episodes. We've seen how prevalent it was to suppose that the human soul consists of numerous forms, and that many philosophers of the time made human knowledge depend on illumination from God. On both issues, Aquinas departs from the consensus. He's having none of these plural forms you'll find in other theories of soul, or rather, he's having one and only one of them. The functions of human life do not proceed from a multiplicity of forms, but just the one form that he identifies as the rational human soul. To some extent, this is just good Aristotle, at least as far as Aquinas is concerned. Every substance has a single substantial form, and each human soul plays that role for the human who possesses it. My soul provides me with all the features that are essential to me as a human being. Any other forms I may have will be accidental, like my baldness, my height, or my being located in Munich. Proponents of form pluralism found it incredible that just one form could produce such a wide variety of effects. When you order pizza, it would be responsible for everything from moving your body to the front door when the delivery arrives, to calculating the tip, to digesting the pizza after it's been consumed, to making your heart continue beating, however much of a struggle that might be given all the pizza you've been eating lately. But Aquinas thinks the pluralists are confusing the need for many forms with the need for many powers. Just one form can bestow many capacities on a substance, so long as that substance has many different parts for exercising those capacities. The presence of one and the same soul helps your heart to beat and your stomach to digest because your heart and stomach are such different organs. Like a reliable pizzeria, Aquinas' theory delivers what it promises, by securing the unity of the soul where form pluralism would, according to him, give us only an aggregate or heap. What we loosely refer to as lower souls, responsible for things like digestion and sensation, are only sets of capacities within the single form that is the rational soul. This is the position that Killwardby will condemn at Oxford. Aquinas wants to go even further than that though. He insists that the soul is the only substantial form to be found in each human. It is predicated directly of prime matter rather than coming on top of lower level constituents that are themselves substances. For example, there would be no actual elements, like fire and earth, in the human body, because if there were, the substantial forms of fire and earth would be present, and that would undermine the unity of the human substance. While the claim is a bold one, it isn't quite as crazy as it may first seem. Though Aquinas does not want to admit that there are any further full-blown substances within each person, he is happy to admit that the human has parts, like blood, bones, heart, and brain. Indeed, the soul itself is such a part. The distinction between distinct part and distinct substance may seem subtle, but for Aquinas it's crucial. Many scholastics believe that the soul is one substance and the body another substance. They like this idea, because it suggested that the soul could unproblematically survive the death of the body, something expressed by the popular analogy of a pilot in a ship, who can simply disembark and go on his way when his journey is at an end. But for Aquinas this is unacceptable, because the soul would have a merely accidental relation to the body. Besides, if that theory were true, we'd need some third intermediary principle to bind the body to the soul, whereas it was supposed to be the soul itself that unifies the human. Powerful though these considerations are, Aquinas's view faced more stiff opposition than the hero in a zombie movie. Bonaventure's student John Peckham was just one figure who insisted on form pluralism, condemning the Thomistic doctrine in 1284, a decade after Aquinas died. Another posthumous attack came from William de la Mer, whose correction of brother Thomas argued that a plurality of substantial forms could still constitute a unified soul if they worked together in a coordinated fashion. This critical treatise by William actually took aim at no fewer than 118 different teachings of Aquinas. Written in the late 1270s, it was made required reading among Franciscans, but provoked a defense from Aquinas's fellow Dominicans, evidence that the debates over Aquinas's orthodoxy began within just a few years of his death. One area where Aquinas's theory has surprising implications is the development of the human embryo. Given that today's Catholic Church is notable for its insistence that full-blown human life begins at conception, it's eyebrow-raising that Aquinas, the Church's most canonical thinker, doesn't think anything of the sort. Instead, Aquinas believes that the presence of a rational soul requires the presence of organs that can carry out its functions. Since this is lacking at early stages of fetal development, only the lower, nutritive or plant-like functions are present at first. They are succeeded by the functions of the sensory and motive powers, and finally by the advent of the distinctively human rational soul. The lower functions also have a different source than the powers of reason. They are brought out of the material provided by the parents, whereas the rational soul can be given only by God, and so is created directly in the embryo at some point during gestation. With the arrival of each new kind of soul, the previous form is destroyed or discarded and replaced with the new single and unified form, which however retains the powers available to the previous forms that were in the embryo. As you might expect, scholarly ingenuity has been devoted to reconciling this teaching with that of the modern Church. Obviously, the generation of a fetus is in some sense a continuous process, and at the very least Aquinas will want to say that the early embryo has the potential to become the human that will actually develop some weeks later, so there's some prospect of harmonizing the two positions, or at least minimizing the tension between them. Everything we've seen Aquinas saying so far can be understood as his way of explaining the Aristotelian definition of soul as the form of the body. So seriously does he take this definition that he's now left with a serious problem. How can the soul be immortal? If the soul is not accidentally related to body, like a pilot is related to a ship, but is the substantial form of that body responsible for even such humble and obviously physical processes like digestion, how could it possibly still exist after death? Aquinas comes dangerously close to denying that it can do so. He thinks the soul's disembodied condition is unnatural to it and that the soul will be unable to exercise many of its powers in that condition. In a way, that's good news, since it gives him a sound basis for insisting on the need for eventual bodily resurrection, which is of course standard Christian doctrine. But he still needs to persuade us that the soul can somehow avoid vanishing between the moment of bodily death and the future time when it gets its body back. Here he points to Aristotle's claim that intellectual thought is a purely immaterial process requiring no bodily organ. Before it's seated in an organ, the mind's processes would be particularized and thus unable to engage in general universal thinking. And if the mind can engage in its distinctive operation without using the body, then it can survive the death of the body. But Aquinas seems to be trying to have his pizza and eat it too. On the one hand, the mind must act without the body in order to think universally. On the other hand, my mind is only my mind because it is a power of my soul, and my soul is only my soul because it is tied to my particular body. This is a point on which Aquinas really needs to insist. Unlike some of the radical Aristotelians who were active in Paris around the same time, he absolutely rejects the proposal of the Muslim commentator Averroes that there is only one intellect for all of humankind, befitting the universality of intellect of thinking. Instead, the mind borrows the individuality of the soul, which is in turn individual because it is the form of one individual body. This explains an obvious fact, which Aquinas never tires of invoking against Averroes, when a person thinks it is that person and not anyone else who is thinking. Furthermore, even if thought itself is an immaterial process, Aquinas insists that the body plays a vital role in human knowledge. He takes very seriously another remark of Aristotle's that thinking always requires a phantasm or imaginary representation. If you had never encountered pizza, you would be unable to imagine or represent it to yourself, and that would mean, tragically, that you couldn't think about it at all. It may seem that thinking about pizza in general, picturing the pizza you are hoping to have later, and actually seeing and tasting a particular pizza are rather similar processes, but a Aquinas thinks there is a big leap from seeing or imagining pizza to thinking about pizza. Non-human animals can do the former quite readily, just think of what a dog does when the scent of freshly delivered pizza reaches its nose. But animals can't think universally about pizzas or anything else, according to Aquinas. They are incapable of the immaterial grasp of an intelligible form freed from all particularity, particularity that is present even when you are imagining or remembering pizza, since you are then grasping one particular image, a process that, unlike Intellect, does depend on the body. How do we manage the trick of universal thought where other animals cannot? It's here that other thinkers, like Bonaventure, would invoke divine illumination. According to them, it is our imperfect access to the exemplars in God's mind that lends perfect intelligibility and certainty to our highest thought processes. It's traditional to contrast that illumination theory, which has its roots in Augustine, to the hard-nosed Aristotelian empiricism of Aquinas. But Aquinas agrees with the illumination theory to some extent. He too thinks something further is needed in order to transform the particular images of sensation, imagination, and memory into the universal ideas present in our minds. This extra topping on the pizza of Aquinas' epistemology is the Agent Intellect. Again, he here takes issue with many of his predecessors, especially thinkers of the Islamic world like Avicenna, who postulated a single Agent Intellect that activates thinking in the individual minds of particular humans. No, says Aquinas, it is true that some principle is needed to confer actual intelligibility and universality on our representations of things, but that principle is within the human soul. Each of us is created by God with our own Agent Intellect, a natural light that we carry within us and that we can use to illuminate the images of things we have encountered in the world around us. From the point of view of his contemporaries, this could seem a rather feeble gesture in the direction of agreement with Augustine. Aquinas was duly subjected to further criticism, for instance by yet another Franciscan, a student of John Peckham's named Roger Marston. He insisted that illumination was needed from outside the soul. The Agent Intellect is not a power of the human soul, but nothing less than God himself. From our point of view, however, Aquinas may seem to be striking a balance between the illumination theory and a more extreme form of empiricism. He thinks that humans are born with everything they need to think abstract universal thoughts, but denies that such thoughts require no more than the particular images we glean through sensation. As for the charge that he is cutting God out of the story of human knowledge, this is easy to rebut. After all, the natural light that dwells within each of us was given to us by God when he infused our rational souls into our developing bodies. So that's what Aquinas has to say about the metaphysics of soul and the process by which we achieve knowledge. We also saw last time how Aquinas situates naturally acquired knowledge within theology. But there's one more thing we might want to know. Why is it so important to have knowledge anyway? So important, Aquinas would say, that it is one reason we are given bodies in the first place. We won't be able to understand the role of knowledge in the good human life without talking more about that good life. That will mean tackling the question of what Aquinas understands by happiness, which is, for him, as for Aristotle, the central concept in ethics. To illuminate his ideas on that subject, I'll be juxtaposing Aquinas's ethical teaching to that of his own teacher, Albert the Great. So join me for that when it's time for the next special delivery of the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, What Comes Naturally? Ethics in Albert and Aquinas. Down through the ages there haven't been many things upon which philosophers agreed, but nearly all of them have been willing to admit that Socrates was a pretty great guy. Seen as a paragon of virtue in antiquity, he was still admired in medieval times, especially by such boosters of classical philosophy as Peter Abelard. Nor was Socrates the only hero of pre-Christian times. There was Cato, for instance, who heroically killed himself when Julius Caesar destroyed the Roman Republic. Dante duly praised Cato in his Convivio and placed him among the saved in his Divine Comedy. Likewise, the 14th century English thinker Robert Holcott allowed that Socrates was saved and given eternal life. These posthumous tributes show how difficult some medieval found it to accept that Christians had a monopoly on virtue. But from a theological point of view, this was rather inconvenient. How did Socrates and Cato manage to be so virtuous, given that they were pagans who lacked belief in the Christian God and lived too early to receive Christ's offer of grace? Augustine's view on this matter was a strict Though pagans may on occasion seem virtuous, their virtue is in fact false. For their actions, no matter how admirable they may seem, are not directed towards the true goodness of the Christian God. In his City of God, Augustine argued at length that the courage, integrity, and justice displayed by famous Romans were grounded in the wrong motives. Even Cato's suicide was a prideful act, undertaken out of resentment against Caesar. Following Augustine's lead, medievals often distinguished the apparent wisdom and virtue of pagans from the real wisdom and virtue of the followers of Christ. John of Salisbury, himself quite a booster of ancient culture, qualified his praise of Socrates and other ancient philosophers with the remark, Why would Augustine and his successors have taken such an extreme stance? One factor may have been the need to ward off Pelagianism. As we know from previous episodes, the Pelagians held that humans can be saved without the need for grace, a view deemed heretical in the wake of Augustine's thunderous denunciations. And if Socrates could be genuinely virtuous without even being a Christian, then surely Pelagians would have been right to say that it is possible to merit salvation using nothing more than our natural resources. Yet one could admit the possibility of pagan virtue while avoiding Pelagianism. It is one thing to say that everyone will if left to their own devices sin at some point or other, and another to say that no one can ever be truly virtuous without God's help. So we need to seek a deeper explanation of the medieval denial of pagan virtue. The Augustinian position was not based on simple opposition to Pelagianism, but on the conviction that God is the source of all goods in human life and the ultimate goal of all good human action. This is why we see early medieval thinkers giving God at least part of the credit for every case of human virtue. In that indispensable textbook of the medieval universities, The Sentences of Peter Lombard, we read that, "... virtue is a good quality of mind that God alone works in us." There's a parallel here to the Augustinian theory of knowledge. We've seen how medieval proponents of the illumination theory argued, again following Augustine, that God must be somehow involved every time a human achieves genuine understanding. Likewise, on the ethical front, divine help was needed if humans were to be capable of genuine goodness. It was often said that virtue is infused into the human by God much as the mind is illuminated with knowledge by the divine light. A good example is Philip the Chancellor, whose ethical teachings we looked at back in episode 229. He shows his Augustinian credentials by suggesting that all real virtues come from God. Natural virtue, such as was possessed by the pagans, would not be virtue in the true sense of the word. Philip also calls this natural kind of moral excellence political virtue because it is expressed in our this-worldly life and in our dealings with other people, rather than having to do with our relationship to God. For Philip, even the so-called cardinal virtues, namely courage, temperance, prudence, and justice, have to be infused by God and not naturally acquired, if they are to be virtues in the true sense of the word. And the best examples of full-blown virtue are the so-called theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This position had the advantage of agreeing with Augustine and Peter Lombard, two of the pillars that supported early 13th century scholasticism. But it had disadvantages too. For one thing, it seems frankly implausible. Are we really to believe that Socrates was not showing real courage when he unflinchingly drank the hemlock? That not a single decision reached by pagan judges had ever been truly just? For another thing, there was Aristotle. As we also saw in episode 229, it took a while for his Nicomachean ethics to become available in a complete Latin version. Once it did, the medievals were confronted with Aristotle's lengthy and sophisticated explanation of how virtue is acquired through moral education, which leads to the cultivation of good habits. How could his readers continue insisting that true virtue must be infused and never acquired through natural means? It would be like discovering how your parents go about buying and wrapping your Christmas presents, yet stubbornly maintaining that the presents are really brought by Santa Claus. I hasten to reassure any children who may be listening that of course some Christmas presents are brought by Santa Claus. He came down the chimney with that toy you really wanted, whereas it was your parents who brought you that itchy sweater. When it came to the gifts of the spirit, a similar compromise was reached by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Albert was the first 13th century thinker to engage seriously with the whole ethics, teaching lectures on the basis of Robert Grossetet's translation. He also composed another, shorter exegesis of Aristotle's ethics, plus a free-standing work entitled On the Good. In these writings, Albert sought to reconcile Aristotle with the Augustinian moral worldview of his predecessors. As if that wasn't tricky enough, he also had to reconcile tensions within Aristotle's own ethical teaching. Notoriously, the Nicomachean ethics lavishes a tension on the practical virtues, explaining that they are dispositions to choose the ideal mean between extremes, dispositions that we acquire through training and repetition. Then, in the final chapter, Aristotle adds that pure contemplation is to be preferred to virtuous practical activity. Is he telling us to spend our time doing philosophy in addition to being practically virtuous, or telling us to forget practical virtue if circumstances allow and spend all our time contemplating? As we saw in the previous episode devoted to his metaphysics, Albert does think that humans achieve perfect performance in the world, and that the human race is a natural It is a contemplation available to us in the afterlife, when the blessed will behold God face to face. That is impossible in our current earthly life, but we can start working towards that goal in the here and now. Like Santa, God knows who has been naughty or nice, and He'll reward the deserving. In this sense, Albert's teaching conforms to what we've found in every book of the book. He has a sense of self-confidence, and a sense of self-confidence. Like Peter Lombard and Philip the Chancellor, he tells us to Perfect virtue requires that when we perform good actions, we are striving to reach the perfect good, which is God Himself. Albert here exploits an idea that was often emphasized in medieval guidelines for administering the sacrament of confession. Whether an action is sinful or evil, is it a good thing? Or is it a good thing? It may seem that helping old ladies across the street is always good, but if you help an old lady across the street because you want to impress the married person you are hoping to seduce, you aren't being virtuous. Likewise, our conception of life's ultimate end makes a difference to the goodness of our actions. If we just seek worldly virtue, that's less perfect. If we just seek worldly virtue, that's less perfect. Albert still admits that worldly virtue is a kind of happiness, even if it is a lesser one. Where Augustine said that only false virtue was available to the pagans of Rome, Albert thinks that even a pagan can become genuinely, if imperfectly, virtuous. For pagans too, can acquire the so-called political virtues through the process of life. The idea of a world that is perfect is a kind of happiness. Furthermore, the happiness of contemplation can be achieved in this life. Such earthly contemplative happiness trumps the happiness of acquired political virtue, though it falls short of the perfect beatitude of the blessed in heaven. The upshot is that Albert's ethics envisions three possible degrees of human happiness, lying respectively in the same way Albert's ethics. The first two were already described by Aristotle in his ethics, but the third is known only in Christian theology. Ideally, the lesser kinds of virtue and happiness are stages on the way to ultimate beatitude. Acting virtuously towards our neighbors is a kind of preparation for the life of the person who is in the present. The second is that the person who is in the present is the person who is in the present. This nuanced theory, drawing together ideas from both Aristotle and the Augustinian tradition, was itself a preparation and stepping stone towards the more celebrated ethics of Thomas Aquinas. With Albert, he holds that our ultimate happiness can lie in the beatific vision alone. No creative thing can satisfy the human will, but the fact that we are in the present is a very important thing. The second is that the person who is in the present is the person who is in the present. No creative thing can satisfy the human will, because no matter how good a created thing may be, it is good only by participating in God's more perfect goodness. On this point, by the way, Albert and Aquinas agree with their fellow Dominican, Robert Kilwardby. He too emphasized the difference between the mere felicity of this life and the full happiness or beatitude available in the afterlife. But, as in other areas of his philosophy, Kilwardby leans more towards the present than the present. For him, all philosophical speculation is justified by its contribution to our moral development. Whereas Albert, following Aristotle, made contemplation an end in itself and one that trumps the life of practical virtue. Characteristically, Aquinas splits the difference. He agrees with Albert that contemplative vision is our ultimate end, but adds the more authentic and more authentic. He agrees with Albert that contemplative vision is our ultimate end, but adds the more authentic and more authentic. He agrees with Albert that contemplative vision is our ultimate end, but adds the more Augustinian point that the vision of the divine essence involves not just knowledge of God, but also love and the delight one has in beholding Him. Yet, Aquinas was keenly aware of the tensions between Aristotelian and Augustinian ethics, as is abundantly clear from a set of disputed questions that he devoted to the topic of the virtues. His attempt to resolve those tensions begins with the question of the divine. He asks whether virtue is correctly defined as This definition was offered by Peter Lombard as a summary of Augustin's teaching on virtue, and Aquinas can hardly deny that it hits the mark. So, he goes on to agree with the definition, adding just one more thing. He says that virtue is the most important thing in the world. He says that virtue is the most important thing in the world. So, he goes on to agree with the definition, adding just one apparently innocuous remark, that the definition would still be accurate without the last bit about God working virtue in us without our help. That part of the definition applies only to infused virtue, and not to the kind of virtue we acquire by developing our natural capacity for goodness. Now, Aquinas is not sliding into Pelagianism here. Aquinas does not hotly deny that natural virtue is enough to merit salvation and hence ultimate happiness. But the fact remains that virtuous acts can be performed and virtuous character cultivated with no special help from God. When we speak of such natural virtue, we do not mean that a virtuous character is born in us by nature, as if babies come into the world already honest, courageous, and generous. Rather, babies come into the world with a natural ability to acquire these traits. Acquiring them takes training and practice, which is why parents coach them to perform the right kind of action repeatedly until it becomes, as we might aptly put it, second nature. Aquinas's explanation of this point is a wonderful example of his writing method. He is trying to steer a course between Augustine and Aristotle, and is honest enough to quote precisely the most awkward passages for his solution. He is trying to steer a course between Augustine and Aristotle, and is honest enough to quote precisely the most awkward passages for his solution. Thus, he admits that Augustine seems to deny the possibility of natural virtue. The life of all those without faith is sin. Wherever knowledge of the truth is lacking, their virtue is false, even if one's behavior is excellent. Since Aquinas believes, following Aristotle, that we can indeed acquire virtue naturally, through habituation, he has to defuse this quotation. He does so by replying tersely, and unconvincingly, that such Augustinean remarks were meant to apply only to the higher virtues that lead us to true beatitude. In the next article, Aquinas tacks back in the other direction. Now, he asks whether virtue is always naturally acquired, or can also be infused by God. Of course, he thinks it can be infused, despite evidence in Aristotle to the contrary. Aquinas is not a true person, but a true person. Of course, he thinks it can be infused, despite evidence in Aristotle to the contrary. But it is too simple just to shrug and say that there are two kinds of virtue which arise in different ways. For one might wonder, if we can acquire some virtue naturally, why is this not enough? Why is divine infusion also needed? Aquinas poses the objection in the terms of traditional ancient ideas about virtue. Acquiring good dispositions means that our will is guided by sound rational judgement, rather than by the lower appetites for such things as pleasure and wealth. The catch is that there's more to the good life than eating moderately and being generous with your money. Nor is it enough to fight bravely for your country, be kind to your friends, and do all the other things that naturally virtuous pagans like Socrates or Cato were able to manage. Naturally acquired virtue is like the bus that takes you to the airport. It does get you somewhere, but not to your ultimate destination. In the journey of life, that destination is God, and it is the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that enable us to order our choices to that most final events. So, a higher virtue, like charity, does not supplant natural virtue, it rather perfects the limited virtues we can acquire through our natural resources. What could Aquinas say to a pagan, or atheist, who claims they are happy to settle for a life of natural virtue? Basically, that they cannot hope to be truly happy that way. We are born not only with a disposition to acquire earthly virtue, but also a natural yearning for the good that can be satisfied fully only by the supreme good, which is God. Like the airport shuttle, human nature points beyond itself, having the built-in resources to pursue and attain limited good, but the purpose and desire for unlimited good. It's no good objecting that we can know God even in this life, so that a taste of the supernatural is already available to us in the here and now. The world is grounded in sensation, and on that basis, we can only reason to the existence of God, not to an understanding of what He is in His essence. This may still seem to paint a rather rosy picture of naturally acquired morality. Aquinas doesn't seem to be coming anywhere close to Augustine's condemnation of pagan courage and justice as false virtue. Yet, Aquinas would add a more damning point of his own. In Aristotle's own conception, a virtuous person is someone who has the habit of discerning and choosing the good. The well-behaved atheists and pagans aren't just falling short, but making a colossal error, one with moral and not just abstract philosophical implications. For they are failing to discern and choose God, the greatest and most perfect good of all. One could with some justice accuse Albert and Aquinas of framing Christian happiness in a rather Aristotelian way. For both, contemplation in this life is better than virtuous practical action, and for both, the beatitude that some will attain in the next life centers on an even better sort of contemplation. The salvation we are promised through grace looks suspiciously like the theoretical activity celebrated in the last book of Aristotle's Ethics. Yet, one can with equal justice say that Aquinas works Christian values into the fabric of Aristotelian ethics. A nice example is his handling of the virtue of courage. Aquinas follows Aristotle in thinking of the courageous person as the one who can face danger, especially death, with steadfastness. But this is praiseworthy only if one faces danger for the right reason. His favorite example of courage is the strikingly Christian one of the martyr who endures torment and death for the sake of his faith in God. Whereas for Aristotle, the paradigm case was fighting bravely in war. This also helps to explain a feature of Aquinas' ethics that I haven't mentioned yet, which is that the virtues we can acquire naturally, like courage and justice, can also be infused by God. You might imagine God bestowing courage on a martyr who is faced by a gruesome death without the martyr having had the long moral education needed to produce this virtuous character trait naturally. Before I let you go, I want to return briefly to a parallel I drew at the start of this episode between morality and knowledge. This is a parallel that Aquinas draws too. He points out the similarity between thinking that all knowledge is granted by divine illumination, and thinking that all virtue is infused by God. In both cases, Aquinas moves away from the strict Augustinian position common in his day. Knowledge and virtue can both be acquired, with some difficulty, as the realization of naturally inborn capacities. But in neither case is it enough to have what comes naturally. Natural reason is enough for philosophy, but not enough for theology. The life of natural virtue is better than nothing, but infinitely inferior to true happiness. This same pattern plays out in another area of his thought, political philosophy. With his famous and influential conception of natural law, Aquinas once again seeks to give credit to human nature where it is due. And we're due to discuss that next time, as we place Aquinas's doctrine of law in the context of 13th century political philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. God be with you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, What Pleases the Prince, the Rule of Law. The most famous 13th century political document was not written by any philosopher. It is, of course, the Magna Carta, forced upon King John by the English barons in the year 1215. Its influence has been far-reaching, its symbolic importance hard to overestimate. To give just one example, the American state of Massachusetts, where I grew up, adopted a seal in 1775 showing a man holding a sword in one hand and a copy of Magna Carta in the other. Though many of its provisions are so dated as to be irrelevant to us today, people still point to its 39th chapter, which guarantees due process of law for all freemen. This is a hint at its philosophical significance, which lies above all in its attempt to constrain the king himself by requiring him to submit to the law. Nowadays, we take it for granted that our leaders are subject to the law, even if we can't take it for granted that they will always follow the law. In the medieval period, though, this was not so obvious. Kings naturally promoted an ideal of absolute sovereignty and saw themselves as the source of the law rather than as being subject to it. Yet, they were rarely in the position to wield unfettered military and political power with no concern for the consent of other political players within their kingdoms. Their supremacy was challenged on battlefields in the drawing up of documents like the Magna Carta and in the writings of intellectuals. As we know from our earlier look at Gratian and other legal theorists, medieval ideas of law were inspired by the Roman tradition. When it came to the question of how law relates to political authority, the medieval's turned to Ulpian's digest of the law code gathered under the Emperor Justinian. There, they could read that what pleases the prince has the force of law, and also that the prince is not bound by the law. These passages seem abundantly clear. A ruler's authority is expressed not just with the sword, but through the authorship of legislation, and as the author of the law, the ruler stands above it. But there are two kinds of people who can be trusted to find surprising interpretations of abundantly clear texts, medieval commentators, and lawyers. So just imagine what was possible for medieval's who wrote legal commentaries. One such author, active in the 13th century, went by the rather splendid name, Acursius. He ingeniously suggested that when the digest says, the prince is not bound by the law, this means simply that the prince has the freedom to revise old laws and make new ones. In his actions though, he is bound by the laws that are currently on the books. This is not to say that legal theorists always sought to constrain the sovereignty of the ruler. Something else we know from our previous discussions is that medieval legal ideas developed within two parallel spheres, church law and secular law. It was in the area of church law that we see the first dramatic moves in the direction of absolute sovereignty. This may seem surprising, but remember that the church had its own power hierarchy, its own laws, and vast material wealth. At the top of that hierarchy, there was a single figure, the pope. Using terms first applied to Roman rulers, the pope was said to be a living law, or the one who holds all laws within his breast. The early 13th century canon lawyer, Laurentius Hispanus, waxed enthusiastic about the pope's right to reconstitute law with his will, the sole source of legal legitimacy. In principle, a bad pope could be put on trial and deposed by other officeholders of the church. Obviously, some remedy would be required if the papacy were held by someone with heretical views, for instance, but in practice the popes were relatively unchallenged to an extent that could only be envied by their secular counterparts. Attitudes towards medieval kings and emperors were shaped not just by the Roman legal tradition, but also by the legacy of Germanic political affairs, where the monarch was sometimes actually appointed by the most powerful lords, and the feudal arrangements that arose in the earlier medieval period. This gave rise to the expectation that a king should consult with his nobles and represent their interests. To some extent, this was a matter of sheer practicality. The king could not wage war, or keep the peace, without the cooperation of the men who could deliver the soldiers, and his coffers would only be full if wealth flowed up the feudal chain. Unpopular kings could find their freedom to rule curtailed, as John found out. There were intellectual justifications at play too. If the king was subject to the law, this was because the law is laid down for the sake of ensuring the common good of the community, and the ruler should always be pursuing that good. The point was put nicely by another 13th century legal author, an Englishman known as Braxton, who wrote, The law makes the king. There is no king, where will rules rather than law. It sounds better in Latin, without lex there is no rex. The underlying idea here is that the king's legitimacy depends in part upon the goodness of his rule. When we think of medieval political affairs, the phrase divine right of kings frequently springs to mind. Indeed, kings did claim that they were selected to rule by God himself, but there is a flip side to this coin. If the earthly king rules at the pleasure of God, then perhaps it is really what pleases the divine king that has the force of law. The idea that the cosmos is providentially governed or ruled by God goes back to antiquity of course. We may detect some survival of this idea in our modern talk of natural laws, which hints at a legislator behind the regularities of the universe. And that may in turn put us in mind of one of the most famous political ideas of the 13th century, the natural law. In a work written jointly by the Parisian thinkers gathered around Alexander of Hales, one of the authors, probably Jean de la Rochelle, actually compares the natural law to the law of nature. A law of nature applies to all created things, to use an anachronistic example this would be something like the law of gravity. By contrast, the natural law is relevant only to rational creatures. This natural law could be seen as a test of political legitimacy. The ruler who governs in accordance with it is a true king, the one who does not is nothing but a despot who deserves to be deposed. But what exactly does it mean to speak of natural law? By far the most famous medieval treatment is that of Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, his name is so indelibly linked to natural law theory that you could be forgiven for thinking he invented it. But he didn't. It has ancient roots and as I mentioned in episode 219, it's already invoked by the 12th century legal writer Gratian. He gave the example of the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as a precept of the natural law, and 13th century thinkers regularly give the same example. Authors like William of Auxerre gave the natural law a central role in ethics. All virtue stems from it because it disposes us to choose what is good. It underlies basic ethical rules, such as that one should not kill or steal, to evident implications of the golden rule. In William, we find a more controversial application of the natural law, one that will become increasingly resonant as debates unfold over the mendicant's vow of poverty. He asks whether the private ownership of property is in accordance with the natural law or not. On the one hand, it would seem not. Humans naturally look to that common or shared good, which is also the goal of the good ruler. On the other hand, if we take seriously the idea that the natural law tells us not to steal, we must conclude that natural law recognizes right of ownership, since you can't steal what doesn't belong to anyone. His solution is that the natural law, just like humanly legislated or positive law, must adapt to circumstance. In a state of innocence, there would indeed be common ownership, but one consequence of sin is the need to allow and defend private ownership. For fallen humans are so greedy and competitive that without this measure, society would collapse into violence. If you cast your mind back to another earlier episode where I talked about early 13th century ethics, you may notice that the natural law seems to have a close connection to what the medieval's called sinderesis. This is our inborn urge to want what is good, comparable to our modern-day notion of moral conscience. Neither this nor the concept of natural law can be found in Aristotle, but here's something else that should never be underestimated, the ability of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas to weave un-Aristotelian ideas together with ideas from Aristotle. So in this case, Albert already proposed that sinderesis can be seen as providing not so much an urge for what is good as principles for practical reasoning. This is the background for Aquinas' celebrated treatment of law in his Summa Theologiae. Like Albert, he appeals to the traditional idea of sinderesis and gives it a rather intellectualist spin. It is simply our inborn tendency to accept the precepts of the natural law. For Aquinas, the most fundamental precept of all is simply that one should do good and avoid evil. This is the underlying principle at work whenever we deliberate about practical affairs, whether in our own individual actions, in a family setting, or at the political level. Of course, we face difficult choices and challenges in all these spheres. How far can such a general injunction take us? Suppose you're wondering whether your child is ready to be given an allowance, or how heavily to tax cigarettes, or whether to legalize euthanasia. In such situations, being told to pursue the good and avoid the bad, or for that matter to do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, isn't particularly useful advice. And in fact, even though Aquinas suggests that we reason from the principles of natural law to specific practical decisions, he almost never spells out how that would work in practice. It may therefore be better to think of sinderesis and the natural law as the source of our ability to reason about practical matters and our tendency to go for whatever seems best, rather than as providing a set of rules to follow when we are deliberating. But why does Aquinas describe all this in terms of law? Why not talk of moral conscience instead, as did other 13th century authors? The answer lies with Aquinas' ambitious undertaking to integrate the natural law within a whole legal theory. For him, law is defined as, "...a certain dictate of reason for the common good, made by him who has the care of the community, and promulgated." That's a bit of a mouthful, but each part of the definition seems reasonable enough. Laws have to do with rationality, since they serve as principles and reasons for action. Laws have the goal of securing the good for the whole group or community subject to them. Laws derive from a legislator, the one who oversees that community, and a law must be made known to those subject to it or promulgated. In the case of the natural law, the legislator is God himself, and it is promulgated when its precepts are implanted in each human mind. As the phrase natural law suggests, we have it from our very nature, getting it for free, so to speak. This doesn't mean that people always adhere to the natural law, sadly, because humans do not always follow practical reasoning, as when they are overwhelmed by their irrational desires. So, that's why natural law qualifies as a type of law. But, it is only one of four kinds of law recognized by Aquinas. The supreme law is what he calls eternal law, which is nothing but the principles by which God governs the whole universe. Eternal law touches all things, even if they are inanimate or irrational. Not because things like stones or giraffes consciously try to put God's law into practice, but because they fall within his providential oversight over his creation. The natural law exists only within us as rational beings, as our way of participating in this most general, eternal law. Natural law is thus the impression of the divine light in us. Fundamental though it is for our ability to reason about the good and bad, the natural law is not enough. For one thing, it is merely natural, and cannot suffice to help us find our way to our ultimate end, which is supernatural. For this reason, God also gave us the divine law in the form of revelation. In some cases, this may even seem to trump or overturn the natural law, as when God commanded Abraham to kill his own son, an action that seems to fly in the face of all the dictates of practical reasoning. Then finally, there is the kind of law that normally springs to mind when we think of legal affairs, the laws passed by kings and other legislators. Aquinas calls this human law. Again, we might wonder why it is needed. Can't we just apply our inborn ability to reason, using our tendency to follow the natural law? Unfortunately not. For one thing, human laws are laid down with a view to securing the benefit of a whole community, not just an individual. Again, law secures the common good of that community. Human laws will differ from one community to another, because their circumstances are different. Though every community is working from the same ultimate starting points, they naturally reach different conclusions depending on their situation. If you are ruling a nation of gluttons, you might pass laws against fast food, which would be unnecessary in a community made up of more moderate eaters. Given that all humans have the lamentable tendency to sin, as well as the tendency to seek out and choose the good, every community is going to need some laws that are compulsory. That's part of what makes a law a law, and not just a suggestion for best practice. With all this, Aquinas is doing as Aristotle had done before him, by forging close links between ethics and politics. Political legislation is guided by the same principles that ground ethical deliberation, with human laws being simply a determination of the natural law as applied to the circumstances and needs of a given community. Good human laws aim to bring all members of the community along towards virtue, by preventing them from sinning and, more positively, by offering them enforced training in virtuous behaviour. The reason we outlaw murder isn't simply to prevent people from getting killed, though that is surely part of the point. It's also to ensure that our community is full of people who would not even consider committing murder. Law accomplishes its objectives especially through the threat of punishment, but if all goes well, those who are subject to the law will internalize its values, and cheerfully act in accordance with those values. When you go through life without murdering people, it's hopefully not because you're afraid you'll get caught, but because that's just not how you were brought up. One might wonder how Aquinas can apply this analysis of human law to cases of unjust legislation. For once, the answer is simple, he doesn't. An unjust law is, strictly speaking, no law at all, but simply a form of coercion. Since it lacks a grounding in the natural law, and fails to promote the common good, such a law lacks legitimacy. In one of the more inspiring cases of the perennial relevance of medieval philosophy, Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to this idea in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Speaking of segregation laws, he wrote, An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just, any law that degrades human personality is unjust. Of course Aquinas was not trying to incite his readers to civil disobedience. When he considers the question of whether one should ever break the law, he focuses on good laws rather than bad ones, and asks whether it could ever be right to break a good law. Yes, says Aquinas, but only in the case of an emergency. His example is that the gates of a city should not be open during a siege, a rule you might break to let a group of the city's defenders retreat back inside the walls. In less pressing circumstances, one should seek to change the law instead of simply defying it. Furthermore, we should be reluctant to change laws, since that always comes with the cost of undermining custom and stability, even if the intended change is for the good. Just as only just laws are truly laws, so for Aquinas the true ruler is the one who aims at the common good. This is the difference between the true king and a tyrant. At least this is what it says in a treatise on political rule which was addressed to the King of Cyprus and is ascribed to Aquinas, though it is not clear how much of it is from his pen. It does bear the hallmarks of his Aristotelian approach, justifying the state by appealing to the idea that humans are political animals and portraying democracy as a defective kind of government in which the lower class is in charge of the state. This treatise also seems to invoke something like the natural law when it tries to justify the whole concept of monarchy, as you would if you were writing to the King of Cyprus. The author argues that just as there is a single bee that rules each colony, so a single man should rule the state, as the one god governs the universe. There are some problems squaring these remarks with Aquinas' remarks about politics elsewhere. In the Summa Theologiae, he endorses Aristotle's support for a so-called mixed constitution, which he thinks can also be found in the Old Law of the Hebrew Bible. It also bears some resemblance to the limited monarchy often seen in the Middle Ages, which is presumably no coincidence. Under this arrangement, there is indeed a single ruler, but his governance is mediated through other officers, for instance judges. The ruler could be anyone, and he adopts his special role as the representative of all the people, even as his power is shared out among subordinates. Aquinas proclaims that, A government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern and because the rules are chosen by all. While this may sound as if Aquinas wants to constrain what could otherwise be unshackled regal authority, he does say that the prince is subject to the law not because it can compel him, but only in the sense that he should voluntarily follow it. Another difficulty with that passage about the bees is that for all his talk of natural law, Aquinas does not usually make such direct appeals to nature when he is talking about how we should arrange our practical affairs. A notorious exception is his remark that homosexuality is shown to be wrong by the fact that even non-human animals mate with the opposite sex. But normally, Aquinas doesn't seem to think you can simply read off moral precepts from observations about the natural world. This has led to a controversy about how exactly he thinks the natural law works. Is the idea that humans have certain natural and essential functions, from reproduction to contemplation, and that the natural law declares to be good anything that will promote these functions? Or is it simply that reasoning about the good is a natural inborn tendency, and that Aquinas thinks that this establishes the universality and inevitability of such reasoning? Many are opposed to the whole notion of natural law, because it seems to imply that certain actions are good to us because they are natural. This idea may seem sinister, given that it could be used, and indeed has been used, to forbid such things as homosexuality and contraception. It may also seem downright silly. Is it wrong for me to travel by plane since it is unnatural for humans to fly? On the alternative interpretation of Aquinas, none of these problems arise. The natural part of the natural law is just supposed to mean that part of being human is having a tendency to prefer and use reason to pursue the good. It's hard to tell which interpretation is correct, in part because Aquinas is rather sparing in his examples of what does and does not immediately conflict with the natural law. The medievals did not invoke the natural law to solve tricky moral problems, but to explain deeply held and fairly basic attitudes that nearly all of us share. But it's easy to draw controversial conclusions from uncontroversial starting points. Take for instance the topic of warfare. When he was itemizing the precepts of the natural law, the jurist Gracian included on his list the idea that violence should be repelled with force. This looks like an invitation to wage war, at least in self-defense, something most of us and most medievals would find reasonable enough. But we're talking about philosophy in medieval Christendom, and didn't Christ tell us to turn the other cheek? How then could Christian intellectuals give a rationale for the state's use of violence? We'll find out next time, when we'll be seeing Aquinas and other medievals declaring their views on the justice of war. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at Keynes College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode… Onward Christian Soldiers – Just War Theory July 13, 1099 is a date that lives in infamy. It was on this day that the warriors of the First Crusade succeeded in their mission of wresting the holy city of Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims. What followed was slaughter on an almost unimaginable scale. Thousands of Muslims and Jews were put to the sword. Christian sources on the massacre state that 10,000 people were killed in the Temple of Solomon alone. The slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles. You might say, what else would you expect? Medieval Christian knights were hardly going to show mercy to non-Christians. But consider another infamous date – April 12, 1204. In this climax to the shameful sequence of events known as the Fourth Crusade, Christian warriors who were supposed to be trying to recapture the Holy Land sacked the capital city of the Byzantine Empire. A three-day spasm of murder, rape, and destruction followed. This greatest of the medieval Christian cities would never really recover. Surely though, the Latin Christians wouldn't do this sort of thing on their own territory. Sadly they very much would. Only five years later, on July 22, 1209, the city of Bésier in southern France was sacked in the Crusade against the Cathars. Not only the Cathar heretics sheltering inside, but the entire population of the city was put to death. Supposedly, the papal legate overseeing this horrific event instructed the soldiers, kill them all, for God will know his own. To hear more about these and other shocking events, you can check out the History of the Crusades podcast. Its host, Sharon Eastaw, was one of the medieval podcasters I interviewed some time back. Her series shows that the Crusades against the Muslims and Cathars involved extraordinary levels of violence. Of course, medieval Christians had no monopoly on horrific cruelty in the name of religion in that or any other period, but the Crusades seem somehow special because of their flagrant hypocrisy. We read in the book of Matthew that Christ instructed his followers to turn the other cheek, and for good measure stated that, all they who take the sword shall perish with the sword. How could the atrocities perpetrated by the Crusaders be justified within a Christian worldview? Well, obviously they couldn't, and in fact the sacking of Constantinople and massacre at Beziers were seen as shocking by many contemporary Christians. Yet, there was widespread agreement among medieval Christians that the Crusades were morally justified, even obligatory. More generally, intellectuals of the period gave careful thought to the question of war. The pacifist sentiments of Christ notwithstanding, there were circumstances in which Christians could, and indeed should, take up arms. Despite the religious context, medieval discussions of just war can seem eerily familiar as when we find them wondering whether the use of ultimate weapons can ever be justified, though they meant by this crossbows, not atomic bombs, or what legal conditions need to be satisfied before war can justly be declared. To justify war, you first have the general problem of reconciling violence with Biblical teachings. As the main character of the recent movie, Calvary, puts it, The commandment, Thou shalt not kill, does not have an asterisk beside it, referring you to the bottom of the page where there's a list of instances where it is okay to kill people. Some early Christian intellectuals were inclined to agree. The Latin Church Father Tertullian suggested that no Christian should engage in warfare, while the Greek Father Origen said that believers should fight in good causes, but only with prayer. The decisive influence for the medieval's came, as so often, from Augustine, who argued forcefully that violence can often be justified. The important thing to Augustine's mind was the intention that leads one to engage in warfare or other violence. Though peace is our ultimate goal, even in the midst of war, we are permitted to break the peace temporarily in order to combat and to punish sin to defend the faith with arms as well as words. So, the medieval's generally assumed that war is sometimes justified. How though to determine exactly when and how wars can be fought justly? To answer this question, they looked to the Roman legal tradition. Isidore of Seville summed up the legal standpoint on war as follows, A war is just when, by a formal declaration, it is waged in order to regain what has been stolen or to repel the attack of the enemies. This passage was quoted prominently in the widely read Legal Decretum of the legal scholar Gratian, and thus set the template for pretty much all medieval discussions of war. At the heart of Isidore's definition is the idea that you are always allowed, morally speaking, to defend yourself and your property. This is part of the natural law. Of course, that doesn't mean that whenever you or your property have been attacked you should immediately retaliate with violence. If someone steals one of your books, even a particularly beloved book based on your favorite podcast series, you shouldn't just go over to their place and exact some vigilante justice, you should report them to the authorities. And of course, the medieval legal thinkers were hardly going to encourage people to take the law into their own hands. Violence in general, and war in particular, was justified as a last resort to be used when legal measures could not be brought to bear. An obvious case would be an imminent physical assault on your person. In such a case, you have permission to fight back since there is no time to call in the proper authorities. Similarly, if a king's territory is invaded, he may legitimately unleash his armies to protect his realm. In either case, the violence used against the aggressor is a substitute for the legal sanction that would be imposed if circumstances permitted. Legitimate violence by private citizens or by the state has thus been called an extraordinary legal process by Frederick Russell, who quite literally wrote the book on medieval theories of war. In a real courtroom setting, the punishment must fit the crime. Likewise, our legal authors stressed that legitimate violence must be proportional. If someone slaps you in the face, you're not morally required to turn the other cheek, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to kill him. Sometimes, what counts as proportional is not so easy to determine. If you're assaulted by an unarmed person and you have a weapon, can you use it? Even more difficult is to say how armies should conduct themselves in a war. As in the face-slapping case, the fact that a war is justified doesn't mean that anything goes. The medieval's notions of acceptable military conduct were shaped by ideals of chivalry as well as by the legal tradition, so they worried about the use of powerful but ungallant weapons like crossbows, about the even more ungallant use of deception and ambushes, and about the common practice of despoiling captured cities. A confessional manual written by Johannes de Dao in the middle of the 13th century offered advice concerning these issues to soldiers who feared that they might fall into sin while on campaign. A look through more theoretical literature would have been discouraging to such worried warriors. No less an authority than Peter Lombard judged that any soldier would be bound to sin, while the more optimistic Hugh of Saint-Cher said that the rare individual might manage it. Yet theologians were sometimes remarkably permissive in their attitudes about conduct in war. Unsurprisingly, there was general agreement that heretics could justly be slain. Augustine himself had argued that charity towards sinners could sometimes involve killing them. More surprising is that they permitted at least the unintentional killing of faithful Christians who might be mixed in with the heretics. This isn't quite kill them all for God will know his own, but a medieval knight probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Remember though Augustine's point that warfare is justified by the good intention of those who declare the war and fight it. If your aim is really to punish and prevent sin and to restore peace, that in itself should preclude many of the actions we would today call war crimes. A soldier who took this point seriously was bound to wonder what he should do if he was called to serve in an unjust war. Could there be any such thing as a medieval conscientious objector? We may again be surprised to find that the answer is yes. The Dominican writer Roland of Cremona stated that soldiers who were being dragged into an obviously immoral military endeavor should refuse to participate. Yet there was a powerful counterweight to this tendency, namely the medieval relation between vassal and lord. Since a vassal was sworn to give military service to his lord, any refusal to do so had grave moral as well as practical consequences. In addition, authorities like Augustine taught that war leaders had the moral responsibility for unjust wars, effectively absolving the frontline soldiers from the overall sinfulness of the conflict. The general advice to the medieval warrior was, then, to just follow orders. All of this should make it clear that the medieval church was not in the business of trying to stamp out warfare. But of course, the church went further than that. Bishops and popes, sometimes encouraged and in the case of the Crusades, actually launched wars. Here we arrive at another key question. On whose authority can war justly be waged? Clearly a medieval peasant was in no position to declare war, but plenty of feudal lords had well-armed knights at their disposal. There were also those recognized as kings and, at the top of the secular power structure, the Holy Roman Emperor. In parallel to that structure was the church, with the Pope playing a role analogous to the emperor's. And don't forget that the church had extensive land holdings and the ability to flex its own military muscle. In short, there were plenty of people who were in a position to start serious trouble. Who actually had the right to do so? Different legal authors took different views on the matter. One of the most important commentators on Gratian's Decretum, an Italian canon lawyer named Huguizio, suggested that only a secular prince can wage war justly. But just war requires rightful authority, and no medieval author could deny that there is one authority that outranks all others—Gods. Hence, all agreed that the wars fought at God's explicit command in the Old Testament were justified. From here, it was only a short step to seeing the Pope as having legitimate authority to declare war, for the Pope is God's representative on earth. A war launched by the church could even be seen as a version of the War of Self-Defense. It would, quite literally, be fought in defense of the faith. We can find this sequence of thought in Gratian and many of his followers. A particularly clear case was Hostensius, a canonist who was tireless in his efforts to justify the supreme authority of the Pope in such matters, something Russell memorably describes as high theory in the service of low cunning. Hostensius and like-minded lawyers supplied the intellectual rationale for the Crusades, arguing that the Pope was entitled to incite them and also that he could offer genuine absolution of sins for those who took the cross. But how could this be squarried with the idea that just wars need a just cause? The Crusades seem to be a clear case of an unprovoked and offensive war, not a case of self-defense. One possible rationale was that Islam itself, as an apostate religion, was an attack on the Christian faith, reason enough to fight against Muslims wherever they might be found. But this was not the usual justification. Even Hugutio recognized that Islamic states could exercise legitimate sovereignty. Instead, the casus belli, or legal justification for war, was that the Muslims were occupying the Holy Land, which Christians saw as rightfully theirs to control. The upshot is that atrocities or not, the Crusades were seen as satisfying all the standard medieval criteria for just war. It seems clear that they would thus have found approval with the medieval thinker most famous for his views on just war, who was of course Thomas Aquinas. I've been arguing over the past episodes that Aquinas needs to be understood within his historical and intellectual context, and this is never more true than when reading his remarks on warfare. His comments are famous and influential, but surprisingly brief. They take up a single question with only four articles in the Summa Theologiae. Nor is what he has to say very original. He's largely in agreement with the Augustinian legal tradition. One book on the topic goes so far as to say, But that's a bit harsh, because there are several ways in which his discussion is a milestone in just war theory. First, Aquinas brings his characteristic clarity and nuance to the issue. He identifies three criteria by which wars are justified. They must be fought with legitimate authority, for a legitimate reason, and with the right intention. This checklist could withstand philosophical scrutiny even today, and Aquinas makes interesting remarks about each item on the list. Regarding authority, he points out that the reason a private person cannot make war is that he could instead turn to a higher authority. This makes clear an assumption that underlies much of the medieval theory of war. Figures like princes, emperors, and popes have the authority to declare war precisely because there is no legal authority above them, to which they could turn in order to settle disputes. On the issue of just cause, Aquinas connects the usual ideas about self-defense and rectification of injustice to Aristotelian political philosophy. Wars are just when they are waged to defend the common good, the same goal rulers should have in view when they are making laws. Finally, there's a third criterion of good intention. It's here that Aquinas's most philosophically fruitful idea comes in. It's called the doctrine of double effect. The classic text on this is found in his treatment of a question that we've seen to be closely related to the topic of just war. Is it alright to kill an attacker in self-defense? Aquinas says yes, and reasons as follows. It may be that you use force against an attacker solely with the intention of protecting yourself and kill the attacker in the process. The fact that you didn't intend to kill him makes this case very different from one where you deliberately murder somebody. The difference is indeed so large that it excuses you from moral as well as legal blame. In general, we may be justified in performing actions even if they have unwelcome side effects, and the justification turns, at least in part, on the fact that we don't intend those side effects. Aquinas doesn't say a lot about this, nor does he raise it in the context of discussing war, but the relevance is clear. In declaring a war, you pretty well guarantee that soldiers on both sides will be killed, but you do not intend these deaths. In specific military situations, too, double effect comes into play. A much discussed case is where you bomb an area with a civilian population in order to accomplish a legitimate military goal, like destroying a weapons factory. You may be permitted to do so, despite predicting that you'll cause civilian deaths, because killing those civilians is not your goal, but an inevitable and unwelcome side effect. Double effect is also frequently invoked in medical contexts. When a doctor amputates a limb, her goal is saving the patient's life, and even though it will obviously result in the loss of the limb, that is not the doctor's intention. Persuasive though such cases are, the doctrine of double effect turns out to be very difficult to formulate or defend with total precision. For starters, it may seem to give us far too much moral license. Couldn't I just excuse any horrendous consequence of my actions by saying that the consequence isn't one I intended? We wouldn't be very impressed if a government bombed an entire city in order to kill a single terrorist, and then said that the massive loss of life was just a regrettable side effect. But this objection relies on a misunderstanding. Proponents of the doctrine of double effect, like medieval just war theorists, are careful to warn that our actions must be proportionate. In that case though, why do we need the idea of double effect at all? We could just say that a responsible agent should weigh up all the foreseeable consequences of her action, both welcome and unwelcome. If the action has all things considered the best outcome of all the things she could do in her situation, she should perform that action. The answer I think is that the doctrine of double effect is designed for people who don't like to think this way. The idea that you can weigh up all the good and bad consequences striving to get as beneficial a mix as possible is characteristically utilitarian. This way of thinking could, in principle, license you even to form the intention to engage in torture or crusade-style mass murder so long as the consequences are good enough. The double effect theorist is more likely to be someone who thinks that some kinds of action are simply never permitted, at least if they are chosen directly. Taking another person's life would be an obvious example. Intentional murder is a line you just shouldn't cross. The problem is that sometimes we find ourselves in tragic situations where the best available option involves crossing one of these lines. The doctrine of double effect would explain why doing so is morally excusable. The unwanted result is not something you intended, but something you simply couldn't avoid. As Aquinas says, it is only accidentally related to the action you chose to perform. This explanation of the motive for double effect helps explain why it has been so important in contemporary Catholic thought. Notably, the doctrine has been used to explain why even abortion opponents could approve of a life-saving operation on a pregnant woman that will incidentally lead to the death of the fetus. Obviously, this is a rather contentious example, which I don't propose to discuss at greater length here, but I will mention that even in less contentious cases, there are other objections for the doctrine to overcome. Why should our intentions make so much moral difference? Isn't the decisive thing rather what you can reasonably be expected to foresee as the result of what you do? Again, it seems that any action can be described in various ways. The historian says, the Crusaders deliberately went on a mass killing spree slaying Cathars and Christians alike, where the Crusaders themselves would say, we eliminated heresy from the bosom of the community, and sadly a few Christians got killed in the process. From this perspective, double effect looks like an invitation simply to justify your action by describing it in the best possible light. Whether you like it or loathe it, the doctrine of double effect gives us another example of Aquinas's far-reaching, and often surprising, influence in the history of philosophy. And we aren't done with him yet. I'll soon be moving on to the contribution of his controversial colleagues in the Paris Arts Faculty, but I'll be mentioning Aquinas in future episodes, notably when we look at late 13th century developments in metaphysics. Before all that, I want to step back and consider his thought as a whole. For that purpose, I'll be joined by one of the world's leading experts on Aquinas's thought in an interview whose effect will probably be to double your understanding of this legendary thinker. If you're still doubting Thomas, you won't be once you've heard me speak to Scott MacDonald, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Thomas Aquinas with Scott McDonald, who is professor of philosophy and Norma K. Regan professor in Christian studies at Cornell University. Hi, Scott, thanks for coming on. Hi, Peter. We're going to be focusing in this episode on Aquinas' relationship to Aristotle, especially as it bears on Aquinas' theory of knowledge. But let's start with a more basic question. Which text by Aristotle did Aquinas actually know, and how did he get access to them? One of the things that makes Aquinas an interesting figure in the history of the reception of Aristotle in the West is Aquinas is in the first generation of thinkers to have been raised on really the complete Aristotelian corpus. The bulk of the Aristotelian corpus was translated into Latin and made available in the West beginning about 1150. And it grew gradually from the logical texts, then what we think of as the basic natural philosophical texts, the physics and texts of that sort, and the metaphysics and the ethics. Finally, by about 1240, almost everything of Aristotle was available in Latin and known in, say, Paris, where Aquinas was a graduate student. Albert the Great, who was Aquinas' teacher in Paris, was one of the leading first generation Aristotelians. He was an adult when all of Aristotle became available. So you might say his formation wasn't on the Aristotelian text, but Aquinas, who was Albert's graduate student, really cut his teeth on the Aristotelian philosophy with Albert and had essentially all of the Aristotelian corpus available to him. And that's what makes him, in a way, a paradigm representative of the assimilation of Aristotelianism in the Latin West. And scholars usually think they can tell a difference between Albert and Aquinas on that basis, right? Because whereas Aquinas seems to be a dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian, Albert's often thought to have more Platonic or Platonist tendencies. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. One of the things that you can discern when you read them is there are certain Aristotelian principles that someone like Albert the Great is working to get his mind around, but you can see that it's not natural for him and he's having some trouble with it. But for Aquinas, it's come to him in pure form, and so he's much more fully formed as an Aristotelian. Yeah, you've got to get him young. Exactly. Moral of that story. I guess that not all of Aristotle's works were equally important for Aquinas, so there are some works that are really central to his understanding of Aristotle, and they're not, for example, his works on zoology. Right. That's right. So some of the empirical works are less important. What we tend to think of as the big Aristotelian works were the big works for Aquinas. So De Anima informs his view of the nature of the human being and his views about thought and epistemology. Metaphysics is important to him. Aristotle's ethics, the Nicomachean ethics, is important to Aquinas. So the big texts that we think of, texts that we might not think of as among the most important of Aristotle's texts today that were particularly important to Aquinas include, for example, the posterior analytics, which shapes Aquinas' thought quite deeply and profoundly. And he wrote commentaries on some of these. He wrote commentaries on most of the important works of Aristotle, and he's got big fat commentaries on the metaphysics. And I mean fat on the metaphysics, on the ethics, on the physics. Yeah, up there with Averroes' long commentaries. Yeah, in the same ballpark, I think. Well, let's turn to the epistemological issues that we wanted to focus on. Aristotle is well known for upholding a more or less empirical or empiricist theory of knowledge. In other words, he thinks that our knowledge is entirely grounded in sensation, or is at least mostly grounded in sensation. So first of all, is that actually how Aquinas reads Aristotle? And if it is, does he agree with that? That is how Aquinas reads Aristotle as essentially an empiricist about human knowledge. And he reads Aristotle as holding that all of our knowledge begins in sense perception, our sensory experience of the physical world. And Aquinas thinks Aristotle's right about that. And in doing so, he disagrees with a long and influential tradition in medieval thought, which sides with Augustine and the Platonist tradition. That side of the tradition holds that we can have direct access to, for example, the intelligibles through our mental faculty, without needing to rely on sense perception for those kinds of things. So Aquinas diverges from an important mainline tradition in agreeing with Aristotle about empiricism. So he thinks you have to work your way up from sense perception up to universal knowledge. Really all has to start from sensory experience. And so when you think about that for a minute, you can see where the difficulties are going to arise. On the one hand, the Platonists have it easy in accounting for our knowledge of intelligible matters like mathematics. It's easy because they just postulate that we can have direct access to the objects of that knowledge. The empiricist has to explain how we can get to that fancy knowledge starting from something as simple as seeing a dog on the street. Yeah, they actually seem, in a way, to have the reverse problem, though. Because although the Aristotelians have to explain how you can get to this fancy knowledge, as you just called it, on the basis of sensation, the Augustinian Platonists need to explain why everyone doesn't have it. And so the Aristotelians can explain very easily the fact that you know about giraffes and I don't because you've gone and looked at some giraffes. So it seems to have something to do with our different experiences. The Augustinians can explain how we could get to abstract knowledge, but it looks like they've both got a problem. Yeah, it's typical of philosophical theories, isn't it, that you find the easy problems to solve and lying right behind those solutions or the difficulties. Right. Well, actually way back when, when I looked at Aristotle's posterior analytics, which is one of the texts you mentioned as being important to Aquinas, one of the things I talked about is that Aristotle puts very high demands on knowledge in the strict sense episteme. And one of them is this one we've just mentioned, which is that knowledge has to be universal. So how exactly does Aquinas think that you can go from these very everyday sense experiences to a position where you satisfy these demands, in particular that you have knowledge that's necessary and universal and completely certain? It's not entirely clear how the account is supposed to work at every point, just as it is for Aristotle, and Aquinas follows Aristotle closely in these matters. But the linchpin in the account, as far as Aquinas understands it, is the existence of what Aquinas calls an agent intellect. Aquinas is interpreting Aristotle's De Anima, Book Three, in talking about the agent intellect. And unlike some of the philosophers in the Islamic tradition, Aquinas doesn't take Aristotle to beholding that the agent intellect is a separate intellect that is separate from individual human beings. Aquinas takes it to be a part of or a feature of our own intellects. So the role of agent intellect in Aquinas' epistemology is to take material that's been supplied, cognitive material that's been supplied by the senses and processed in the imaginative part of the soul, and extracting from that epistemic material what Aquinas calls forms. So the agent intellect, as it were, goes to work on material provided by the senses and abstracts from it, universal forms. When you say abstracts, should we infer from that that really that's a process of elimination? So I've seen all of these giraffes, and I'm trying to get to the universal of giraffe, and then what I have to do is get rid of the particularities of each individual giraffe I've seen, or does it actually enhance the particular forms that I've seen by bestowing universality on it, or are those somehow the same thing? I think it's very difficult to say what Aquinas thinks the exact process is supposed to be. Aquinas will sometimes tell a story very much like the story that Aristotle tells at the end of the posterior analytics, and it's notoriously difficult to tell what Aristotle has in mind in that story. There's a kind of metaphysical slogan that Aquinas sometimes uses that mirrors, even if it doesn't explain his idea about what the agent intellect does. He says sometimes that forms are particular in concrete things, but they are universal in mind. So he wants to have his cake and eat it too, that is, he wants to say that out there in the external world there aren't universal forms, there are only mental beings, but nevertheless in some sense it's the same form that's particular in the individual that's the subject of sense perception that ends up in the intellect after agent intellect has done its work that's now universal in nature. So he wants there to be a seamless connection between the particular form out there and the universal form in intellect when agent intellect has finished its work. And it better be a particular version and a universal version of the same form, otherwise if I have a form of giraffe in my mind it wouldn't be knowledge of the giraffes running around on the savannah. Exactly. That way that you just put that reminds me of one of the philosophers from the Islamic tradition you just alluded to, who obviously were very influential on Aquinas even when he didn't agree with him, and this is Avicenna. Because Avicenna actually argues that if you have universals in your mind that that in itself proves that the mind is immaterial, and so that leads him into a dualist conception of the soul. In other words, he argues that the rational soul is a different kind of substance from the body, and Aquinas does, doesn't he use the same sort of argument to show supposedly that the soul is immaterial? Yeah, Aquinas thinks that if the intellect weren't immaterial, it wouldn't be able to play the role of abstracting or hosting, having, being the possessor of universal forms. So the fact that we can think universally, Aquinas thinks, is evidence that the intellectual part of the soul is, doesn't have an organ and is itself immaterial. Nevertheless, Aquinas is perhaps less of a dualist than Avicenna is about these matters. Aquinas is committed to what he thinks of as Aristotelian hylomorphism as the best way to understand the nature of a human being. That is, he thinks that human beings are by their very nature combinations of form and matter, the rational soul being the substantial form and matter, or technically prime matter being the matter of a human being. So Aquinas doesn't think that we have a substance, intellect, which is a different substance from our bodies or our matter. We're one substance, a hylomorphic substance, but part of the rational soul, the intellect part must be itself immaterial and function independently of a material organ in order to think universal thoughts. And that just happens to go very nicely with the Christian doctrine on the resurrection of the body. That's right, and Aquinas then is able to say things like, once a human being dies, the soul will not be complete until it receives a resurrected body again, because a soul apart from a body is in certain respects an essentially incomplete being. Yeah, it's interesting that because Avicenna would say, well, because Avicenna was also an empiricist, he would say, well, you need the body to actualize the intellect, because otherwise you're not going to be able to get to these universals. But once you've done that, you can get rid of the body, you don't need it anymore. So why does Aquinas think you still need it once you've actually gotten up to the level of having intellectual? I think his main point is simply the metaphysical one. It's I suppose we can talk about metaphysical needs, but substantial forms are by their very nature designed to or fitted for being the forms of the things they're forms of. So it's a, you might say, there's a kind of metaphysical ineptitude in the existence of a form without matter, a substantial form without matter. Like an actuality floating around with no corresponding potentiality. Yeah. In fact, I think he struggles a bit, as one might imagine, to describe how it all works once the resurrected body and soul have been reunited. I'm not sure he has a clear view about why we would need to have a body in that situation. This mention of pure actualities floating around without potentialities brings us nicely on to the highest possible topic of contemplation, which is God. And it seems to me that what you were saying about Aquinas' empiricism poses us with another problem here, because obviously God is a purely immaterial, purely actual substance, and is not the sort of thing that you can grasp with the senses. So if Aquinas is really going to be serious about following Aristotle's epistemic theory, he's going to be an empiricist, then how does he think we could possibly ever have knowledge of something like God, or for that matter, an angel, so any immaterial substance? Aquinas thinks we get knowledge about immaterial things like God from two different sources. Basically as a Christian, Aquinas thinks that God can pass along information, as it were. So there's revelation, and revelation contains information about God's nature, and the ultimate source of revelation, disregarding whatever the mechanisms or means might be, the ultimate source of revelation is God himself. So God tells us things about himself in Christian revelation, and Aquinas says there's good reason for that, because otherwise it would take us a long time to figure out very important stuff, we'd get a lot of it wrong, and only smart people would be able to figure it out. So Aquinas thinks there are good practical reasons for revelation. The other side of the story, though, is Aquinas thinks that we can, even given his empiricist restrictions, achieve what we might call natural knowledge of God, or philosophical knowledge of God. So Aquinas believes that we can figure out a lot about the nature of the causes of things from the features of the effects they cause. So he believes certain causal principles about the effects resembling their causes in certain respects. So Aquinas thinks that we can start with God's effects. God is creator of the universe, including the physical world that we can access through our senses. So all of the bodies that we can access with our senses potentially provide us information about their ultimate cause, the divine being. So Aquinas thinks we can start from sensory experience, apply certain causal principles, and reach interesting results that we can then leverage with other kinds of reasoning to learn quite a bit about the divine nature. That's the way in which Aquinas's famous Summa Theologiae begins. Question two, he asks whether God's existence can be demonstrated. The answer is yes, it can, beginning from things that are self-evident to the senses using causal principles. And the five ways are, or the five ways each begin with an observational premise, something that an empiricist can be relatively happy with, and then proceeds on the basis of causal principles. It's striking though that he says that you can demonstrate the existence of God in that way, because going back to the posterior analytics, we mentioned already that it's a very demanding theory of knowledge. And one of the demanding criteria that Aristotle gives is that if you're really going to demonstrate something so that you achieve knowledge in the strict sense of that thing, you're supposed to move from causes to effects, not from effects to causes, right, because causes are the explanations of things, and demonstration or understanding is supposed to be explanatory. So doesn't that mean that actually you cannot have a science of God in the strict sense, at least not in the sense that Aristotle's described in the posterior analytics? We have to be careful there. Aquinas does subscribe to the view he finds in Aristotle's posterior analytics, but it's a nuanced view. So he takes the very strict conception of demonstration and correspondingly demonstrative knowledge that comes in the early part of the posterior analytics, not as describing necessary and sufficient conditions on demonstration or knowledge, such that if you don't meet them, you don't have demonstration or you don't have knowledge. He takes them to be an account of what we might think of as the gold standard for demonstration or for knowledge, that is the paradigms, if you think now in a sort of Platonist frame of mind about paradigms. Paradigms are things that concrete instances strive to participate in to some extent without being that thing itself. So Aquinas thinks there are ways in which forms of argument and certain kinds of epistemic states can approximate the very rigorous description provided at the beginning of the posterior analytics without fulfilling all of them. So there are ways in which an argument can be a demonstration without satisfying all the conditions. A good example of that is the proofs for God's existence, which argue from effects to causes that obviously fails to satisfy the condition on gold standard demonstration, which you mentioned, that is identifying the causes of the effects and being explanatory in, you might say, the most robust sense. Nevertheless, Aquinas thinks you can get something that counts as demonstration, though not gold standard demonstration, by giving up that criterion and satisfying it in another way via causal principle that leads you to causes from effects. So that's one kind of example of the way in which demonstration which isn't paradigm demonstration is nevertheless legitimate demonstration and a sort of knowledge to be gained by that demonstration while not being paradigm knowledge is nevertheless legitimate knowledge. What about the other side of the coin, which is the kind of theology that proceeds from revelation? It might seem strange to us that, I mean, since nowadays we think about faith as the attitude you take towards a belief where you don't have certainty or you don't have proof, at least that's one way of thinking about faith. So it might seem strange to us that he thinks that theology based on revelation and hence on faith could be a science, but he does call it a science. He calls it a sacred science. That's right. So, he sometimes calls it sacra doctrina, sacred teaching. And he thinks that it is a science, though again, he's quite clear that it isn't a paradigm science. So he recognizes that it doesn't satisfy the conditions laid out for episteme haplos or scantia simplicater at the beginning of posterior analytics. In this case, the basic idea is that science is understood now as organized bodies of knowledge that have a unified subject matter. Sciences can be related to one another. So for example, and it's the sort of thing Aristotle himself says, someone who works on optics, there can be a science of optics. It largely involves using geometrical principles and ideas. But the optician isn't a geometer, or that is, he needn't be a geometer. He can get the principles of geometry from the geometer. Now that's going to be okay, provided the geometer's doing his work properly. So you might say the first principles of optics can be inherited from geometry. They're not real first principles. The geometer's doing that part of it. But the optician is taking them as first principles. They're inherited from what we might call a higher or more basic science. So that's an idea Aristotle has, and that's the idea Aquinas develops to explain how sacra doctrina, which begins from articles of faith, can nevertheless be a science, despite the fact that its first principles aren't, you might say, honest to God first principles. So to speak. So to speak. So what happens in this case, Aquinas says, is the articles of faith are inherited, as it were, from a higher science, namely the science that God himself knows. So God has access to the first principles, the real first principles, and hands along things that the theologian can use as first principles in sacra doctrina. So sacra doctrina is like optics. It's a subordinate science that relies on another science, in this case, the divine science. For us, it's not an ideal science, it's just that we don't have the ability to go up and prove that the first principles are true. Yeah, so what we take as first principles when we do sacra doctrina aren't first principles for us. And in fact, they may even be derived in the divine science. We take them on the divine say-so, so to speak, in the way the optician takes something on the geometer's say-so. But Aquinas is quick to point out that if you abstract from our particular perspective on it, we're actually in better shape in sacra doctrina than otherwise, because what more secure first principles could you have, ultimate first principles could you have, than those which God himself knows in the divine mind? Right. Actually, this brings me to the last thing I was going to ask you, because Aristotle lived before Revelation, so he's not in a position to avail himself of these principles, and thus he's not in a position to do sacra doctrina. And that would lead us to expect that Aquinas would think that Aristotle must be missing out on something that someone like Aquinas isn't missing out on. But I'm still wondering what Aquinas thinks about Aristotle if you just go in terms of natural reason. Does he think that Aristotle has achieved as much as anyone possibly could using the natural light of reason? Or does he think that although Aristotle is a very, very good philosopher, he sometimes makes mistakes? I mean, in several of the things you've said already, it became clear that it looks like he's trying to find ways to make Aristotle come out true. But he is willing to criticize Aristotle on occasion. He's certainly clear that he believes some of the things that Aristotle believes are false. So Aquinas does not believe that the world has no beginning in time, as Aristotle believes. So he's quite happy articulating views that are incompatible with views of Aristotle. Having said that, it doesn't happen very often. And interestingly, Aquinas often finds himself arguing against what he thinks of as more radical interpreters of Aristotle, Islamic thinkers or Latin thinkers in the West influenced by Islamic thinkers. He often finds himself arguing against them in their adoption of what they take to be Aristotelian principles. For example, the defense of the eternity of the world. He finds himself arguing against them, not simply about the facts, but about whether they've interpreted Aristotle correctly. So Aquinas thinks in many cases, the radical interpreters of Aristotle haven't read Aristotle right. So Aquinas finds more agreement between Aristotle and his own Christian metaphysics and epistemology than some people who outwardly claim a greater allegiance to Aristotle. Well, that gives me a nice transition to the topic of the next episode, which will be the fact that some other people in Aquinas' lifetime, and in fact, the same city of Paris, were also vexed by some of these so-called radical Aristotelians and officially condemned their views. And that's what I'm going to be looking at next time. So for now, I'll thank Scott very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. And please join me next time for the Condemnations of Philosophical Doctrines in Paris, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Paris When It Sizzles—The Condemnations. Given that you're still listening to this series of podcasts, you're presumably at least open to thinking that medieval philosophy might be interesting, or even better, thoroughly convinced that it is very interesting indeed. But of course, not everyone agrees. Prejudice against it derives above all from the assumption that thinkers of this period were constrained by the iron shackles of theology. Any green shoots of genuine innovation or free thought would have been trampled by the Church before they could blossom, leaving us with a dreary succession of unoriginal scholastics. Of course, we know by now that this would be at best a crude exaggeration, since there were plenty of heated debates amongst the scholastics themselves to say nothing of philosophy outside the university setting. Still, there were clearly restrictions on the freedom of thought in medieval Christendom. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard ran into trouble for his theological teachings and not just his love life. Around the turn of the 13th century, the Crusades in southern France against the Cathars showed just how far the Church was willing to go in its efforts to stamp out heterodoxy. Of course, that was not really a dispute over philosophical ideas, but it may have influenced the development of philosophy. The concept of the transcendentals may have developed in part to emphasize that all of creation is good and not an arena in which good and evil principles clash, as the Cathars believed. If we're looking for the effects of persecution and censorship on medieval philosophy, then one event in particular looms above all others—the condemnations issued at Paris by the city bishop Stephen Tomfier in 1270 and 1277. It was not the first intervention in the intellectual life of the university. Restrictions had been placed on the works of Aristotle earlier in the 13th century, though these were ultimately abandoned in favor of a curriculum based on a full range of Aristotelian writings. Tomfier's condemnations were rather different. He enumerated specific condemned teachings in 1270, a brief list of ten propositions, and then in 1277, a much longer list with 219 articles. In neither case was anyone explicitly named as having taught the condemned articles, though the 1277 articles were preceded by an introductory remark which complained that the errors on the list were being discussed in the arts faculty at the University of Paris. Also, two manuscripts of this longer list have notes in the margin that do name names. Both refer to a certain Boethius, who is of course not the famous thinker of late antiquity who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, but probably Boethius of Dacia. One of the two notes also singles out Sigé of Brabant. As we'll see, these figures, Boethius of Dacia and Sigé of Brabant, are at the center of modern-day assessments of the condemnations. Tomfier was not alone in being alarmed by goings-on among the masters and students of arts in Paris. In the late 1260s, Bonaventure had identified certain philosophical teachings as heretical, singling out three in particular, determinism, the eternity of the universe, and worst of all, the notion that all of humankind shares one single intellect. In his work The Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Bonaventure compared these three doctrines to three beasts of the apocalypse. In another treatise, On the Days of Creation, he added as a fourth heresy the idea that happiness is attainable in this life, and complained that some of his contemporaries were turning the wine of theology into water by mixing in pagan teachings. It would be easy to take this as an expression of Augustinian opposition to enthusiasm for Aristotle, but remember that Bonaventure was at pains to integrate Aristotelian ideas into his own writings where possible. Moreover, his critique of the arts masters was echoed by the two leading Aristotelians of the time, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. We have the record of a correspondence in which Albert was asked to pass judgment on 13 propositions, 10 of which are identical to the articles condemned in 1270. He duly explains why each of the suspect teachings is erroneous. In that same year, Aquinas wrote a work attacking the idea named by Bonaventure as being particularly heinous, namely of Verroes's view that there is only one single mind that we all share. Then there's a treatise called Errors of the Philosophers, which is ascribed to Aquinas's student Giles of Rome, though its authenticity is doubted. It names and shames philosophical authorities, including many from the Islamic world, for their unacceptable doctrines. Aristotle too comes in for criticism, not for failing to endorse the truths of faith, since these may have been beyond his ken, but for falsely asserting things contrary to the faith. The theologians, it would seem, were presenting a united front against provocative philosophical ideas. Their apparent goal was to rein in the arts faculty, where heretical doctrines were at best being openly discussed in front of the young students, and at worst actually being endorsed on the authority of Aristotle. But the exact sources of the controversy at Paris have themselves been a matter of controversy among modern day scholars. The standard line is that some of the arts masters were indeed willing to follow Aristotle and of Verroes wherever they might lead. C.J. of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia have been called Latin Averroists and Radical Aristotelians, notorious especially for their views on the intellect and the eternity of the universe. They are typically contrasted to Aquinas, who emerges as a moderate figure positioned between the intolerance of Stephen Tampier and the excessive rationalism of the Averroists. Aquinas and Albert before him sought to cure radical Aristotelianism with the antidote of less radical Aristotelianism. Albert said the cause of the heretical teachings was in fact that some Parisians were ignorant of true philosophy and deceived by the sophisticated arguments. Aquinas's treatise against the unity of the intellect did not content itself with showing the incompatibility of the theory with religion. He showed that Averroes's teaching conflicts with common sense, and above all offered an unconvincing interpretation of Aristotle. Here we see Albert and his student Aquinas trying to rescue Aristotle from his overly fervent supporters. Unfortunately, this version of the story is far too simple, and indeed subject to qualification on pretty much every detail. We'll see in the next episode that the intellectual position of the so-called Latin Averroists, and indeed the very idea that there was such a group, is a matter of fierce debate. As for Aquinas, you'd have to go to an advanced yoga class to find a more complicated position. His treatise on the unity of the intellect clearly shows that he wanted to distance himself from the arts masters without going so far as to name his chief target, who was probably CJ of Brabant. But it seems likely that the bishop was targeting Aquinas along with the arts masters. Though his teachings weren't included on the earlier 1270 list, perhaps because of his eminent standing in Paris, the far longer condemnation in 1277 does take aim at numerous ideas that can be associated with Aquinas, including his controversial position that each human has only a single substantial form. The 1277 condemnation was issued on the third anniversary of Aquinas's death, which may not be a coincidence. And in the days following the condemnation, Bishop Tompier pursued an inquiry against Aquinas's student, Giles of Rome, who was accused of making unacceptable statements in his commentary on the sentences of Peter Lombard. The result was that Giles was prevented from teaching theology at Paris. Furthermore, later witnesses were certainly under the impression that the 1277 condemnation was directed towards Aquinas as well as the arts masters. In his survey of Aquinas's errors, William de la Mer is not reluctant to point out that some of these errors already appeared on Tompier's list. Almost two decades after 1277, Aquinas's admirer Godfrey of Fontaine urged the sitting bishop of Paris to overturn Tompier's condemnation. He pointed out that Tompier and his commission had been so sloppy that the list contains internal contradictions, and decried the way that it besmirched the excellent teachings of the great Aquinas. Godfrey did not get his wish though. The condemnation stayed in force, and was still being invoked against much later figures like Pico della Mirandola in the late 1400s and even against Galileo in the early 17th century. Since it had been issued on the authority of the bishop of Paris and not the pope, there was some debate about its general application. Could its force cross the sea to affect teaching in England, for instance? Pico della Mirandola satirically added that if Tompier's authority couldn't reach across the English Channel, then neither could it reach over the Alps to apply to him in Italy. If there is debate about the exact target of the condemnations, then it is also unclear exactly what effect it was intended to have. For one thing, as I've already suggested, Tompier seems to have been outraged by the mere discussion of heretical theses, whether or not anyone actually accepted them. He speaks in the prologue to the 1277 articles of the fact that the arts masters were discussing these propositions in class, as if there were any room for debate about them. He threatens not just the masters with excommunication, but also any student who hears a master defending such theses and fails to report it. After this dramatic opening, we might be expecting that the condemned theses would involve rejecting core tenets of Christianity. That may be true in some cases, like the proposition that God only moves the cosmos rather than actually creating it. But many of the issues seem rather obscure or technical. The bishop forbids teaching or declaring that forms are divided only through matter, and that the subject and object of knowledge are a single substance. You'd have to be a well-trained scholastic to understand most of the theses, never mind believe in them. And indeed, Tompier was assisted by a commission of expert theologians, including Henry of Ghent whom we'll be getting to know in a future episode. This along with Tompier's opening allusion to activities in the arts faculty suggests that condemned articles were based on actual teaching sessions at Paris, perhaps the so-called reports of disputations set down by students. Individual articles often seem quite innocuous unless you understand the broader context in which the articles were discussed. Let's take the example I just mentioned, the proposition that form is divided only through matter. The issue here is one familiar to us from our look at the 12th century thinker Gilbert of Poitiers. How is it that each individual comes to be the particular individual that it is? We saw Gilbert struggling to explain this and considering a range of possible answers. In the 13th century, under the influence of Aristotle and thinkers from the Islamic world like Avicenna and Ibn Gabirol, a consensus emerged. Each thing is made an individual by its matter. Thus, and I know you've been missing this example, the four Marx brothers are the same in form, essence, or species because they are all humans. They become distinct individuals because they are made of four distinct parcels of matter, which is why Groucho is over here smoking a cigar while Harpo is over there chasing girls, while Chico is betting on the horses. All fine and good, but what if we are dealing with things that have no matter? There's no problem about God, since there's only one of him, but what about angels? They are spiritual beings, yet supposedly quite numerous. For much of the 13th century, this posed no difficulty. It was widely agreed that even spiritual things have some kind of matter which can be invoked to explain what differentiates one angel from another. This was the position of Bonaventure, for one. But Aquinas questioned this consensus. For him, all matter is spatially extended, so angels cannot be made of matter. How then does it happen that there is more than one angel? Following the logic of his metaphysical commitments with complete consistency, he assumed that each angel is unique in species. In other words, each angel is a distinct type of thing. The difference between the angels Michael and Gabriel is like the difference between humans and horses. Of course, there are lots of humans and lots of horses, which is how there could be more than one Marx brother and how there could be horse races for Chico to bet on. This is because humans and horses are made of matter. In the case of angels, by contrast, each is, quite literally, one of a kind. Aquinas' position is apparently condemned in the 1277 list, which forbids the teaching that, God cannot multiply individuals of the same species without matter, and, as already mentioned, that form is divided only through matter. I say apparently because Aquinas actually didn't take himself to be denying that God lacks the ability to make more than one angel of the same type. His point was that it is just incoherent to suppose that there are two distinct immaterial things of the same species. For God to make two angels that are the same in species would be like his creating a round square, dry water, or a boring episode of this podcast. Such things are intrinsically contradictory, and it was uncontroversial to say that God's omnipotence does not allow him to bring about contradictions. It's also worth noting that even Bonaventure's view, which was the standard theory among the schoolmen, is threatened by the condemnation. It requires us to believe that God could create two angels that are the same in species and lack matter, whereas Bonaventure wanted to say that it is matter that distinguishes the angels. This looks sloppy on Tomfier's part, perhaps a sign that the articles were assembled in a hurry for some reason, maybe so that they could be published by the anniversary of Aquinas' death? On the other hand, the most eminent theologian on his commission, Henry of Ghent, did believe that God can make two identical angels. He suggested that they could be distinguished by the different acts of creation that bring them into existence. So perhaps the wording of the condemned articles is carefully chosen after all. So far we've seen that there is no scholarly agreement about the targets or intended effects of the condemnations. The dispute continues when we come to the most important question of all, what effect did they actually have? Did Tomfier succeed in crushing the spirit of innovation at Paris and elsewhere? Or did his actions achieve nothing, or even backfire, as so often happens with censorship? A case for the latter option was mounted by the historian Pierre Duhem. He suggested that Tomfier unwittingly helped to pave the way for the rise of modern science by condemning certain ideas of Aristotelian science that actually needed to be rejected if progress was to be made. While Duhem's version of this thesis is now usually seen as an oversimplification, there is still a plausible argument to be made in favor of his basic idea. The argument centers especially on the idea that God has the power to do things that are naturally impossible even if he cannot bring about actual contradictions. As the medieval's would say, God has the absolute power to do anything whatsoever, as long as no inconsistency results. In particular, the condemnations require everyone to admit that God can create more than one universe, and that he can move the vault of the heavens away from its present location by moving it in a straight line. So what we're imagining here is that the spherical universe could be just one of several such universes, or that our universe is simply shifted, say, a mile to the left. As the latter proposition mentions, the offending philosophers who denied God's ability to move the cosmos had given a reason why it would be impossible. In order for God to do this, or to create another cosmos, there would have to be empty space or void beyond our universe. Otherwise, there would be nowhere to put the second universe, and nowhere for our universe to move to when God shifts it. Now, of course, Tampier and his commission were not claiming that God actually does these things, but they did believe, and were demanding that others admit, that God could do it if he wanted. This was a real blow against Aristotelian science, which was wholeheartedly committed to the impossibility of void. But it can also be taken as an unintentional blow in favor of scientific progress, since of course void is possible. We duly find thinkers after 1277 accepting the possibility and even actual existence of void, and also mentioning the condemnation as they do so. But let's not act like the universe if it were shifted one mile to the left and get carried away. Fourteenth century thinkers were developing new ideas in physical science for a number of reasons, and they may have cited the condemnation just as a convenient support for views they would have developed anyway on the basis of independent considerations. Leaving aside these specific issues of physics, what can we say about the effects of the condemnation more generally? There is little doubt that church authority was brought to bear against some specific thinkers. I've already mentioned Giles of Rome as a victim of persecution, and don't forget that Roger Bacon was even imprisoned for his teachings. Nor did the church need to be omnipotent to put daring theologians like Peter Olivey in hot water if not dry water. Of course it's hardly news that 13th century Europe was no high point in the history of free speech, but 1277 marks something more specific, an institutional effort to thwart the pursuit of philosophy independently of theology. To quote Luca Bianchi, a scholar who has written extensively on the condemnations, Tampier was not so much interested in distinguishing philosophy from theology, but in subordinating the one to the other. If we think of philosophy as an autonomous discipline that should be allowed to follow reason wherever it leads, then philosophy does seem to have been hampered by the condemnations. This is shown by the fact that later arts masters like John Buridan will refuse even to discuss certain topics because they are the affair of the theologians and not the philosophers. Soon, we'll be looking at figures in the time of the condemnations who were less circumspect. We'll be asking whether it is really justified to speak of radical Aristotelianism or Latin Averroism in the 13th century by looking more closely at the controversial figures Sigé of Rabant and Boethius of Dacia. First though, it will be time to celebrate a milestone. The next episode will be the 250th installment of this podcast series, and I'm going to devote it to answering listener questions about such topics as philosophy, philosophy podcasting, and Buster Keaton. You never know, maybe the Marx Brothers will come up too. That's next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to a special 250th episode of the History of Philosophy podcast. In this episode, I'll be celebrating reaching the 250 mark by answering listener questions, which came in on Facebook, Twitter, and the podcast website, which you can, of course, find at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Thanks to everyone who sent in a question, I hope I've managed to take note of everything that came in. If you have a question, or something else to say about the history of philosophy, and want to know what I or other listeners think, just head over to the website, where you can leave comments on the comments page, or on each individual episode page. And if you want to pass judgment on the podcast as a whole, then a good way to do that is by rating it or making a comment on iTunes. With that, let's get going. I'll read out some of the shorter questions verbatim, and take the liberty of summarizing some of the longer ones in my own words. First up, I'm going to tackle a question raised by Raphael and Josh. Both wondered about including African philosophy in this series, and whether Ancient Egypt has contributed anything to the history of philosophy. I'm starting with this because it gives me the chance to make a little announcement. As you know, I'm now covering Ancient Indian philosophy in a series of episodes written together with Janardhan Gennari. If you haven't found it yet, you can do so on the website, or by searching for the second podcast feed, which is called The History of Philosophy in India. In any case, once we are done with our series on India, which will take us at least well into 2017, I'm going to be teaming up with another co-author, Chike Jeffers of Dalhousie University. With his help, I'm in fact going to be doing a whole series on philosophy in the African tradition, including texts and figures of the African diaspora. Those episodes will be released on the same feed that's now devoted to Indian philosophy, and of course you'll be able to find them on the podcast website too. Even further in the future, I hope to tackle Chinese philosophy and perhaps return to do more episodes on India, since Janardhan and I are for the moment only planning to cover the first millennium or so of that story. Anyway, when Chike and I begin this series on African philosophy, we are indeed going to consider philosophical material from Ancient Egypt, returning to a time even before Thales and the other pre-Socratics, where I first began the whole series of podcasts back in 2010. There is certainly philosophical material from Ancient Egypt, for instance the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, in which a well-spoken peasant speaks up for his rights by articulating ideas of justice. We also plan to set the Egyptian writings in a larger context by glancing at other ancient cultures and asking what they may have contributed to the history of philosophy even before the Greeks came along. Next up are questions about the whole point of this philosophy business. Referring to the ancient idea that the purpose of philosophy is to learn how to live, Thomas wanted to know whether philosophy affects the way I myself live. I have to admit that as a historian of philosophy, I tend to think about it more as an object of study than as a way of deciding how to live my life. Actually, I would even go so far as to say that I try not to get too invested in the ideas of historical thinkers, because I want to concentrate on understanding what they meant and whether the ideas have internal coherence rather than concentrating on whether or not I actually agree with them. Of course, that isn't the only way to do history of philosophy, but it's the way I tend to do it. Having said that, there are authors who almost can't be read that way. They demand your attention and ask you to apply what they are saying to your own life. The best examples I know are the Roman Stoics, especially Epictetus. I find especially compelling his idea that, no matter what situation you are in, you can only be in control of your own response to the situation. So you should focus on that and let things that are out of your control take care of themselves. I wouldn't say that I'm particularly good at following that advice, but I do occasionally remind myself to try. Also, there's the very fact that I am devoting my life to philosophy, which is something plenty of historical philosophers encourage me to do. I'm particularly impressed by Aristotle's point that philosophy is not the sort of thing you should do in order to achieve some further goal. If you are studying philosophy in hopes of making money out of it or impressing your friends, then you're doing it for the wrong reason, and not just because, let's face it, it's unlikely to help you achieve those goals anyway. Rather, philosophy is something to be pursued for its own sake. And I guess that applies to philosophy podcasting too. On a related note, Donne wanted to know more about the ancient idea of happiness as something invulnerable which cannot be taken away. This is definitely an important theme, and in fact it underlies Epictetus's advice to concentrate on your own choices, because no one else can take away your power of choice. I see a kind of trade-off here. The more you insist that your happiness will be invulnerable to circumstance, the narrower a conception of happiness you will need to have. Thus, many ancient thinkers, such as the Stoics, excluded everything else from happiness apart from virtue. Virtue is something that is truly up to you, and you can stay virtuous no matter what, even under a vicious tyranny or in the face of terrible bad fortune. I tend to think that this goes too far. Surely part of the happy life is having basic material comforts, a happy family life, health, and so on. So instead, I would again go along with Aristotle, for whom some so-called external goods are needed for the best life, even if that means it is not entirely under our control whether we get to live such a life. Next up, some questions about the whole without any gaps thing. One of them came from Matt Teichman, who by the way is the host of the excellent Elucidations podcast, which features interviews with professional philosophers, well worth checking out. Matt asked how we can plug the gaps in the teaching of the history of philosophy. Of course, in the podcast I have an advantage over philosophy instructors at schools and universities. I have the liberty of moving at a snail's pace through the whole history of philosophy. When you are designing a course curriculum though, you might face tough decisions if you are determined to expose students to less commonly read philosophers. Are you really going to drop Aquinas from your course to make room for Ariugina? Or skip over David Hume to accommodate Mary Wollstonecraft? What I've come to think, having worked at filling gaps with this podcast for the last five years, is that teachers, including myself, should just give up on any pretense of being comprehensive when they cover history of philosophy. Imagine that you're trying to do a year-long overview of the whole history of philosophy, not an infrequent task at universities around the world. You might think, what can I cover from the medieval period? Well, I have to include Aquinas, because he's super famous, and I have to do Anselm's ontological argument because it's also super famous, and that leaves me no time for anything else. Now, I love Aquinas and the ontological argument as much as the next historian of philosophy, but I'm not convinced that they merit the attention of students more than Ariugina, Abelard, Hildegard of Bingen, Scotus, Occam, Buridan, Alvarabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, or Ibn Arabi. That's only a list of top-shelf medieval thinkers, and doesn't even get into fascinating figures from this period who are practically unknown except to experts and listeners of this podcast, like Peter Damian, Mihzil de Magdeburg, C.J. Brabant, Yahya M'Adi, or Fakhradin Arazi. My point is that, when we're exposing students to the history of philosophy, we should not tell ourselves we only have time to visit the highlights, because we don't even have time to do that. This realization might be liberating. If we give up on the idea that teaching history of philosophy is about paying a brief visit to the most famous or important thinkers, that will free us up to prioritize other concerns. Of course, different teachers will have different priorities, but for me, one priority is to include women philosophers and philosophers from non-European traditions. It's important for students to learn that some wonderful philosophers throughout history have been women, and that there is great philosophy from India, China, Africa, and the Islamic world. I suspect that many instructors are reluctant to cover such topics, precisely because they are so unfamiliar. But as I've been pleased to discover doing this podcast, there are plenty of translations and secondary literature out there. Just look at the further reading section I've put up for each episode on the website. On the basis of this material, any instructor can do something to broaden the curriculum, and in the process, the next generation's conception of what philosophy has been and could be in the future. Which however, brings us to a more provocative version of the question. This comes from my fellow historian of philosophy, Martin Lentz, who plays devil's advocate by asking, why bother about the history of philosophy at all? Why should we care about leaving no gaps? And is it possible to leave no gaps? These questions hardly admit of brief answers, of course. Well, maybe the third one does, no, it's not possible to leave no gaps. That's something that remains an aspiration for the podcast rather than a realistic goal. Podcast listeners and readers of the book version are right to keep pointing out things I could have covered but didn't. One thing I regret, for instance, is that I should have done an episode on the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. As for why we should even bother to try, let's assume for the sake of argument that philosophy in general is not a waste of time. If so, then we can take the question to mean, why study the history of philosophy, especially in this comprehensive way, rather than limiting our energies to contemporary philosophical discussions? Again, this is relevant to teaching contexts. Should we make students read historical texts, whether that means Plato or Hildegard? Or allow them to engage solely with today's debates over ethics, philosophy of mind, and so on? Well, today's philosophy is just the most recent part of the history of philosophy, and the jury's out on whether it is a particularly interesting part. I see philosophy above all as an exploration of the interrelation between ideas. Philosophy doesn't directly show us what the truth is, rather it shows us how ideas and proposals hang together, that if I make a certain assumption or argument, certain consequences will follow, and that there are certain objections I will have to face. By studying the whole history of philosophy, we map out a whole system of interrelated ideas, with the help of the very clever men and women who have for more than 2,000 years been making one assumption, one argument at a time, and seeing where they lead. Of course, the more gapless our approach, the fuller a picture we get. This is why we should study the history of philosophy and do it with as few gaps as possible. In fact, I would consider restricting your attention to contemporary philosophy a rather bizarre idea. Contemporary philosophy's only advantage over older philosophy is that it is happening now, and why should a philosopher care about that? To this, someone might say, contemporary philosophy does have a distinctive advantage, which is that it has learned from all previous philosophy, to which I'd say not really. What it has mostly done is forgotten almost all the previous philosophy. It's not as if the philosophical presuppositions of Neoplatonism, Scholastic metaphysics, or the Upanishads are being carefully considered and rejected by contemporary philosophers. Rather, the contemporary thinkers, by and large, start from their own assumptions, whatever strikes them as intuitive, and go from there. There's nothing wrong with this, since it's pretty much what all philosophers do, even if, back in the day, philosophers tended to be better informed about the history of their discipline than they usually are now. But it does mean that today's philosophers are exploring a fairly small corner of philosophical territory. The full terrain, by contrast, is the whole network of interrelated assumptions, arguments, and ideas. If you want to see the whole picture, or at least the part of the picture that philosophers have managed to fill out so far, then you have to study the history of philosophy from its beginnings and in all cultures up to the present day. But hang on, you might be saying. What about science? Listeners Zachary and Adnan both asked about this. Do ancient and medieval ideas still have any meaning for us? Has the success of modern science effectively rendered these ideas, or even philosophy itself, pointless? No, I don't think so. Certainly some philosophical ideas have been rendered obsolete. Scientists think of ancient and medieval cosmology, for instance. But as Zachary suggested, it is hard to imagine biologists dispensing entirely with Aristotle's idea of teleology or purposiveness in nature. Besides, there is a whole range of philosophical questions, the vast bulk of them, that science cannot address with its methods. Also, science itself needs philosophy, because scientists need to think about their own methodology, what justifies it, what its limitations may be, and so on. Science may have things to tell us that we should consider when thinking about free will or consciousness, but a neurosurgeon with no training in philosophy is unlikely to reach anything but very naive conclusions about free will or consciousness. Without naming names, you can probably think of authors or media personalities who are trained scientists and who don't hesitate to leap to sweeping philosophical generalizations on that basis. This is about as sensible as me making claims about quantum mechanics or DNA on the basis of my philosophical training. Fortunately, there are some academics who have training on both the science and the philosophy sides, and they do an invaluable service by helping the two disciplines talk to one another. Chris also asks about my approach to the history of philosophy. Citing another author who tried to cover the whole thing single-handedly, he mentions that Frederick Copleston said the historian of philosophy must have a certain sympathy with historical figures so as to better understand them. Chris also wants to know how I see my approach as differing from the methods of other histories, like those of Copleston, Bertrand Russell, and Anthony Kenny. I've already mentioned that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether I ultimately agree with the figures I am reading, but I do try hard to be sympathetic in a different way, by trying to see things from their point of view. In fact, that is in a way the most interesting thing about the history of philosophy for me at least. It's a chance to inhabit another worldview with assumptions and argumentative goals I would never have had myself. I think that makes my approach different from Russell and Kenny, both of whom definitely had robust philosophical positions that they brought to their histories. But I should admit that I haven't thought deeply about these other single-author histories. Since I started working on the podcast I've tried not to dip into them, because I wanted to go my own way and not be unduly influenced by other approaches. Also, for my purposes, it's more useful to spend my time reading primary texts and delving into detailed secondary literature on specific authors, texts, and problems, since I want to get a really good sense of each topic before attempting to summarize it myself. Which brings us to a question sent in by Nick, which is basically, how do I go about producing the podcast? As I've already implied, one of the hardest parts is actually planning what to cover, and in how much detail. Imagine looking at an otherwise blank screen that says Episode List, Medieval Philosophy at the top. How to go about filling out that list, as I had to do about a year ago? The answer basically is that I write down things I already know I will need to include, I then flesh out this preliminary list by looking at secondary literature. For most periods in the history of philosophy, there have been a proliferation of companions and handbooks that can be helpful here. The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is also very valuable for this initial stage. I also use these sources to help me figure out what else to read. Once I've got my draft list of episode topics, I run it past specialist colleagues, who are kind enough to tell me what I've left out, which themes and topics to highlight, and so on. From there, I start reading more widely. That often makes me realize I need to revise my list of episodes, but the main point is to generate the scripts. I try to keep those under three and a half thousand words. I would tell you how much time I spend on each script, but I have a strict policy of not letting myself even think about that. I will divulge that about 65% of this time is spent thinking up clever episode titles. Later, the scripts, with clever, or at least would-be clever, titles intact, become the basis for the chapters of the later book versions published with Oxford University Press. And by the way, the paperback version of Volume 1 on classical philosophy is coming out as of March 2016, followed soon by the third and latest volume of the series on philosophy in the Islamic world out in hardback in the summer of 2016. I've added new chapters to all three volumes so far after realizing there were topics I should have included in the podcast series, but didn't. While I'm doing all this, I'm always on the lookout for people to interview. Here I try to get a good mix of guests including younger and more senior academics. Often these are people whose work I've found helpful in my own reading. As you might have gathered from listening to these episodes, I usually give the guest a list of questions in advance so they know what to expect. And here I should say that one great thing about the whole podcasting experience is how generous other academics have been with their time, appearing as guests, giving me input on topics to cover and on individual scripts, and so on. Anyway, I then record the podcast, using a portable microphone, a Zoom H4N for the interviews, and a different one for the scripted episodes, a Samson G-Track with a pop filter mounted on the heaviest book available, which is usually in my ancient Greek dictionary. My biggest luxury as a podcaster is that I have always had graduate student assistants who knew something about audio editing who turn these recordings into the final episodes. When I say thank you at the start of the episodes, I'm mostly thanking the source of the funding that pays for this editing. If you heard an unedited episode, you'd listen to me stumbling over my words, possibly cursing, and then going back to do that sentence again. We also edit the interviews so that they sound as smooth as possible. On which note, I'm glad to say that questions have come in from all the editors who have worked on the project with me so far. The first was Rory O'Connell, who asks, Nice try, Rory. More serious-minded is Faye Edwards, who edited the episodes on Late Antiquity, which is her field of specialty. She suggested I could comment on the relation between philosophy and religion, which is an issue that generates a lot of feedback from listeners. Adam and Mehmet also asked me to say something about this topic. As I've gotten into philosophy within the Abrahamic traditions, some listeners have even complained that religious issues have become too dominant in the podcast. Of course, I want listeners who are atheists, or who are members of other religions, to be interested in learning about a pious Christian theologian like Augustine, a devoted Shiite thinker like Mola Sadra, or a learned Jewish scholar like Maimonides. But it seems to me wrong to try to separate out the religious elements of their thought from what we might think of as the philosophical elements. That line is simply too blurry. In an episode coming up, I will talk about medieval arguments over transubstantiation and the Trinity. Cases like these show us that abstract philosophical positions can emerge from theological debates. For instance, when you think about bread turning into flesh, you may wonder whether in general it is possible for accidents, like the texture and taste we associate with bread, to survive in the absence of the substances they belong to. That's not a burning issue for many philosophers today, but posed in this abstract way, it is clearly a philosophical and not a theological question. Indeed, we might wonder whether accidents can survive without their substances in other non-theological contexts. For example, in antiquity, it was wondered whether the scent of an apple can hang in the air and survive even after the apple has been eaten. On the other hand, it would be artificial and misleading to consider the philosophical ideas that emerged in religious discussions without paying heed to the theological commitments of the authors in question. We also need to talk about religion frequently because it has been an important part of the historical context for philosophy in almost all ages and places. Others have been led by their religious beliefs into concentrating on certain topics rather than others, and religious dogmas have often constrained the bounds of acceptable philosophical conviction. I don't lament this, as many do. To the contrary, I find it fascinating to see how clever people of the past have maneuvered within whatever conceptual space they were allowed, and also how they sometimes pushed at the boundaries of that space. I got a whole bunch of questions from my current editor, Andreas Lama, who is also a specialist on philosophy in the Islamic world and a member of my team here in Munich. He can ask me questions about avicenna, or answer them for me, anytime he wants, so he wanted me instead to say what is the most underrated animal in the history of philosophy. Before the podcast got going, it was clearly the giraffe, but I'd like to think I've rectified that situation by now. So these days, I would say the most underappreciated animal in this field is the horse, always being put behind a cut. Sorry. Returning to the issue of my life as a podcaster, Bob asked me to describe my life as an academic. I guess it isn't too unusual in that I have to teach, do research, and take care of some administrative tasks. I moved to my current position in Munich in 2012 from King's College London, though I am still affiliated with the department there. Being an academic in Germany has various advantages. One thing I really like about it is that there is no huge tuition fee for the students. In my view, this compares very favorably with the USA and the UK, where I've taught in the past. It means that teaching philosophy is more about a common intellectual enterprise and less about customer service. Having said that, the medieval university masters were under a lot of pressure to keep their fee-paying students happy. The more capitalist approach of the English-speaking world is ironically rather medieval. As for how podcasting fits into my academic life, obviously it is very time-consuming, but I see it as being more like a fun hobby and not exactly as part of my real job. Still, I've found that doing the podcast has been very fruitful for me as an academic. It has led me to texts and topics I would never have gotten into otherwise. For instance, next semester I am teaching a lecture series here in Munich on women in ancient and medieval philosophy, and that's something I got seriously interested in through the podcast. I hope to do courses here on Indian philosophy too. Despite all my brave words about the feasibility of looking beyond the usual canon of philosophical works, I'm sure I would never have made time to delve into the Indian tradition if it weren't for the podcast. I also hope that my published research, which is still mostly on late antique thought and philosophy in the Islamic world, has benefited greatly from the perspective I've gotten from trawling through the full breadth of these traditions. Speaking of which, one question about the so-called non-Western philosophical tradition was posed by Omar, who says, I agree this is a common assumption, and to be honest I can't really speak to the issue as far as Chinese philosophy goes, though I do hope to get there in future podcasts. But as for India, it certainly is a misconception. There are whole sub-traditions of Indian thought distinguished by their interest in logic, and the rivalry between schools meant that there was pretty much constant argumentation back and forth. Perhaps when people think of Indian literature as less argumentative than Greek thought, they have in mind the earlier period of the Upanishads or the Hindu epics, but we find scenes highly reminiscent of Platonic dialogues in these texts. Ancient India was anything but an argument-free zone. But let's get back to the fascinating subject of me. Jason asks, As it can be good to start off defining terms, who is Peter Adamson? Maybe the answer should include how he discovered philosophy. Well, as anyone who has met me in person will know, I am a strapping and muscular fellow with a commanding presence, silken flowing blonde hair and piercing blue eyes the color of a storm-tossed sea. So most of the kids in my high school expected me to become a professional athlete, or perhaps pursue a career in acting or as a model. I, however, wanted to be a writer, so when I went off to university I was planning to major in English, and that last part is actually true. The institution I attended, Williams College, is a liberal arts school which encourages or even requires students to pursue a range of different subjects. I took a course on philosophy, just out of curiosity, and was immediately hooked, especially by Plato, still today as in antiquity the most enticing gateway drug into the discipline. I can also trace my interest in the history of philosophy to my undergraduate years, because the Williams department laid a lot of emphasis on this. I was still majoring in literature too though, and especially intrigued by medieval texts. It will be a return to these early interests of mine when in upcoming episodes I look at The Romance of the Rose and Dante's Divine Comedy. So I got into medieval philosophy as a way of combining my two academic interests. The rest is, quite literally, history. I went to Notre Dame for my PhD because of its strength in medieval philosophy, and that's where I got into Neoplatonism and Arabic philosophy, which are still my main areas of focus in my research and teaching. That tells you something about my personal philosophical tastes, but several questions came in that asked me to reveal more. For instance, Adam also asked whether there are any philosophers that are overrated, and whether there are any philosophy books I have struggled to get my head around. The answer to the latter question is definitely yes. I spent a whole summer once trying to get to the point where I could follow what Kant was basically trying to say in The Critique of Pure Reason, and even with authors I know very well, there are texts I find utterly mystifying, for instance Plato's dialogue The Parmenides. As far as overrated thinkers go, I have to admit that I am one of those English-speaking philosophers who secretly wonder whether a lot of 20th century French philosophy might be an emperor with no clothes. I tried to wrap my mind around Derrida in graduate school, but without much success. He's someone I could perhaps mention in answer to Matthew's question, who is one philosopher you wish you could leave out? But in all honesty, if anything, I am eager to get to the so-called continental tradition, and to tackle the challenge of demystifying figures like Heidegger or Derrida. More generally, there are definitely some figures who are harder to cover than others, because they are more technical or difficult to understand. It will be very hard to write podcasts about such challenging and intricate authors as Duns Scotus, Fichte, or Husserl without oversimplifying them greatly. That doesn't mean I would want to skip them exactly, but maybe it means I wouldn't mind if my non-existent sister got her act together and really did write a script or two. Along these same lines, Rose asks, If you were having a dinner party and could invite six philosophers, who would they be? I think probably I would settle for one philosopher and go for a drink with David Hume. Unless Buster Keaton counts as a philosopher. Speaking of which, here's one more question from Adam. It's rumored you like Buster Keaton films. Do they have any philosophical angle for you, or do you watch them to relax? I have actually wondered whether I might try to write a podcast about Buster Keaton in this series, if and when I get to the early 20th century. I do think there are philosophical aspects of his movies. The way Buster as a character is always confronted by an implacably uncooperative physical environment, often in the form of technology out of control, seems to me to be a comment on modernity that could be placed alongside other early 20th century reflections, and actually here Heidegger comes to mind. Keaton's movies also comment on the nature of film itself, the most obvious example being Sherlock Jr., in which he plays a movie projectionist who falls asleep and steps into a movie by walking up and into the screen. I'm sure Buster himself would have scoffed at the idea that he was doing anything philosophical, but sometimes philosophy is where you find it, even if no one intentionally put it there. I actually didn't get too many questions about the figures and movements I've covered in the podcast so far, perhaps a sign that I've already covered these things in exhausting, as well as exhaustive, detail. But a few queries along these lines did come in. Callan and Michel both asked about Plato's theory of forms. Callan wanted to know whether that theory could be reconciled with relativism. You might think the answer would be a clear no, since the whole point of forms is to serve as a universal and objective standard of truth. But actually, later Platonists talk about forms being received in the soul of the knower, for example by being understood discursively rather than in the kind of all-at-once knowledge that is characteristic of the superhuman intellect that serves as the realm of forms. So, there could be room for saying that one and the same form is understood by you in a different way than the way I understand it. Nonetheless, Platonists didn't to my knowledge ever make that move, precisely because it would undermine the prospect of attaining certain knowledge. Which might be another way of saying that if you were a Platonist, you probably aren't a relativist. Michel meanwhile wanted to know if there is any relation between the theory of forms and Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence. Basically here, the answer really is just no. We shouldn't mistake essences, as Avicenna for instance understands them, with Platonic forms. The essence of something is just its fundamental nature, and for Avicenna physical things have essences too. The point of distinguishing essence from existence is not that existence is physical realization while the essence is a separate paradigm or form, rather it is that one and the same thing, like Hiawatha the giraffe, can be analyzed as possessing both an essence, the nature that makes her a giraffe and not a horse or any other kind of thing, and existence, which is not part of the essence since being a giraffe does not guarantee existing. Only God's essence must, by its very nature, be realized or exist. Lucas asks whether medieval or ancient philosophers had something like our present-day notion of phenomenality. Probably not, though it depends what you mean by phenomenality, but to me that term suggests a distinction between the way things are in themselves and the way that they seem to us. That is a fundamental contrast in Kant, as I seem to remember from my summer trying to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, and it becomes important for later thinkers who are responding to Kant like the phenomenologists. Medieval philosophers start laying the groundwork for that contrast, especially in the 14th century, as we'll see, because that is going to be a time when the correspondence between our ideas and the external world is put under increasing scrutiny. In fact, we'll get pretty close to these issues when we look at the idea of intentionality in later medieval philosophy. Another question that came in on the podcast website was, which missing work of philosophy is the biggest loss to us? To put it another way, if a new batch of scrolls were found, which work would be the most exciting to discover? The obvious answer would probably be one of Aristotle's many lost works, for instance the part of his Poetics that would have dealt with comedy, but I have a different suggestion. A substantial discovery of works by Chrysippus would be about the most exciting thing I can imagine. You might remember that, although he wasn't regarded as the founder of Stoicism, that honor being reserved for Zeno of Citium, it was really Chrysippus's doctrines that became definitive of Stoic philosophy. By all accounts, his works were also phenomenally sophisticated, showing technical prowess in logic, which he also applied to other topics like the problem of vagueness. So it's a real shame that his writings are lost and known only through later reports. Another suggestion might be works by Hypatia, who may be the most significant female philosopher of antiquity, though it's actually unclear whether she wrote much on philosophy or was mostly interested in mathematics. I was also asked to say something about languages, like how many do I know and do I have any advice for learning languages to use in the history of philosophy. Of course, it's right that this is crucial for good historical work. If you can only read a philosophical work in translation, there's always going to be a limit to how well you can understand it, something I've been feeling keenly while reading texts from the Indian tradition, since I'm unable to go consult the original Pali or Sanskrit texts. In my own research, I work regularly with Greek, Arabic, and Latin, but the only language I actually speak, apart from English, is German. I can read secondary literature in French, Italian, and Spanish well enough to make use of it, though. My advice on learning is basically to start as young as you can. Recently, I've been trying to learn Persian, which has been fascinating and definitely worthwhile since if you know Arabic philosophical terminology, you can recognize a lot of the words in a Persian philosophical text. But mastering the grammar and vocabulary has been a challenge for me now that I'm in my 40s. Another piece of advice I'd have is that, especially with a classical language like Greek or Latin, it's invaluable to join a reading group and go through a text carefully with others who know the language. It makes sense to do this after one or two years of getting the basics of the language under your belt. On a less practical and more philosophical note, Bob posed a nice question about the soul. He observed that in ancient and medieval philosophy, there is a tension between thinking of the human person as being an organism that has a soul, and thinking of the person as just identical to the soul. This is exactly right, I think. It is basically the difference between Aristotle's and Plato's understanding of the person. For Plato, you really are your soul, and you just happen to find yourself in a body. In fact, your soul can also transmigrate to other bodies. For Aristotle, by contrast, the person is a composite or combination of a soul and a body, and the soul is really just the set of capacities that makes the body a living thing. As we've seen, later interpreters tried to bring the two conceptions closer together, notably by appealing to Aristotle's claim that thinking happens without a bodily organ. So an obvious harmonizing move made by many later ancient and medieval thinkers was to say that the person just is his or her thinking or rational soul, and this was the soul Plato talks about which can survive independently of the body. Finally, here's a difficult question from medieval philosophy expert Stephen Reid. Around 1100, the Latin West had little Aristotle and less Plato. Over the next 100 years or so, they went to great lengths to recover the whole of Aristotle's extant texts, but seemed to have made no effort to recover Plato's works. Is that true? If so, why? Is the same also true of the Arabs in the same position some two or three hundred years earlier? Is Neoplatonism to blame, or at least an explanation, for the seeming lack of interest in Plato's own writings? These suggestions already point in the right direction, I think. In the 13th century, the philosophical agenda was set, at least to some extent, by the interests of authors from the Arabic-speaking world. They had engaged in great detail and depth with Aristotle while remaining largely ignorant of Plato. In fact, there wasn't, as far as we know, a single Platonic dialogue that was fully available in Arabic. And that is indeed a legacy of later antiquity, when philosophical texts were above all produced for teaching purposes, and teaching philosophy usually meant teaching Aristotle. Plato was simply considered more advanced and too difficult for the introductory student. Something else to bear in mind here is that Aristotle's writings offer a ready-made curriculum for reading and teaching, with separate treatises on individual philosophical disciplines like logic, ethics, physics, and metaphysics. That's not true of Plato. In fact, his dialogues may have been seen as literature just as much as philosophy. Remember how his style was admired by the rhetoricians and stylists of the Second Sophistic in late antiquity. Of course, the Latin-speaking medieval world wasn't totally ignorant of or uninterested in Plato, and had a special interest in the Timaeus, which we saw influencing many 12th century schoolmen. But when they tried to build up a university curriculum, they were always going to make the same decision as the men who designed the curriculum of teaching in late ancient Alexandria and use Aristotle rather than Plato. The other side of this coin is that when we get to the Renaissance, the rejection of scholasticism is going to go hand in hand with an embrace of Plato's dialogues, newly available in translations based on Byzantine Greek manuscripts. And Plato has never left us since. Fittingly, this question has brought us to look ahead to the future of the podcast, which is indeed going to move on to Byzantium and then the Renaissance, all the while devoting episodes in alternating weeks to the cultures of India and then Africa. But before we reach the Byzantines, the medievals are going to occupy us for some time still. The underestimated riches of the 14th century are already on the horizon, and as we'll see, it's one of the most fascinating periods of the history of philosophy. Next time though, we'll be looking at the 13th century thinkers who were most impressed and excited by that Aristotelian curriculum of study. The next 250 episodes will kick off with the so-called Latin of Veroists, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Masters of the University, Latin Averroism. Consistency, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds. If so, it's much like the hobgoblin who features as one of the supervillains pitted against Spider-Man, regularly defeated. Perhaps no one manages to speak and behave with complete consistency, and many people lead double lives that require them to engage in doublethink. The anarchist who makes her living as a policewoman, the marriage counselor who cheats on his wife, the physicist who researches the Big Bang during the week and prays to a creator god on Sundays. Philosophers normally hold themselves to a higher standard though. Any philosopher who is caught out maintaining two mutually contradictory propositions can be expected to give up on one or both of those propositions, not just out of embarrassment but because consistency is a ground rule of proper reasoning. Least of all would we expect to find medieval schoolmen embracing inconsistency, having been trained in logic from a young age. How strange then that modern scholarship has associated a rather flagrant version of doublethink with the most convinced rationalists of the late 13th century, C.J. of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and whichever other masters of the Paris arts faculty followed their lead. Supposedly, C.J. and Boethius endorsed a doctrine of double truth. They thought that one in the same question might receive two true answers, one provided by the rational arguments of Aristotelian philosophy, the other by Christian faith. Aristotle has proved the world to be eternal, yet we know through faith that it was created in time and from nothing. Aristotle's greatest commentator, Averroes, has shown that there can only be one immaterial intellect for all humankind, yet Christian faith requires that we survive as distinct individuals after the death of our bodies. As arts masters, C.J. and Boethius were effectively professional philosophers, so they couldn't retreat from doctrines that were proven in Aristotle and Averroes. Still, they were Christians and unwilling to give up on the belief in creation or an individual afterlife. What solution could be more elegant than saying that both sides are correct, despite contradicting one another? Contemporaries were apparently convinced that these so-called Latin Averroes, or radical Aristotelians, embraced double truth. The prologue of the 1277 condemnations assembled by the Bishop of Paris, which we looked at in episode 249, complains that some members of the arts faculty believe that some things are true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as if there were two contrary truths and as if the truth of sacred scripture were contradicted by the truth in the sayings of the accursed pagans. And there's also Thomas Aquinas. In a treatise he wrote attacking views that were being defended by certain unidentified masters he called Averroists, he wrote that one such master, probably Sigé of Brabant, thinks that faith is of things whose contrary can be necessarily concluded, so that faith is of the false and impossible. But with all due respect to Aquinas, these are hardly unbiased sources. The idea of double truth was obviously useful as an accusation, but was it really advanced as a positive doctrine by either Sigé or Boethius? Nowadays scholars are unanimous in saying no. Double truth is deemed to be a figment of earlier interpreters' imagination. But that doesn't mean that Sigé and Boethius were untroubled by apparent contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian faith, to say nothing of the trouble they might get into if they openly embraced the former at the expense of the latter. It would seem that Sigé in particular moderated his remarks, if not his true convictions, in response to Bishop Tanfier's first condemnation in the year 1270. Before 1270, Sigé unabashedly embraced problematic doctrines on the strength of philosophical argumentation. After 1270, he didn't exactly give up on those doctrines, but he did become increasingly cautious in talking about them. His writings contain regular warnings that he is merely reporting the views of the philosophers, not asserting them in his own right. Sigé emphasizes that he himself accepts the teachings of faith, whatever the philosophical arguments might say. Let's look at a specific example, the one highlighted by Aquinas in the treatise he wrote attacking the so-called Averroists. The Averroists include, as you would expect, Averroes himself. In his final and longest commentary on Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, Averroes made the striking, not to say bizarre, claim that all humans share one single intellect. Bizarre or not, he had good reasons for saying this. When both you and I understand something, we are understanding one and the same thing. If we've both taken a class on giraffe biology, we wouldn't expect you to have got your head around one nature of giraffe, while I have come to grasp some other nature of giraffe. Rather, we should both know about the same nature. But in that case, what could possibly differentiate your understanding about giraffes from mine? I just said that you got your head around giraffes, but according to Aristotle, your head has nothing to do with it. The intellect has no organ, and though you might use your brain to imagine giraffes competing in roller derby, or remember giraffes you have known and loved, you do not use your brain, or any other part of your body, when you engage in a proper intellectual understanding of giraffes. The mind that grasps the nature of giraffes has no special connection to your body, because its activity is purely immaterial. But for Averroes, matter is, as philosophers like to say, the principle of individuation. Without a relationship to matter, there is no way for multiple things to be distinguished one from another. We are forced then to say that there is only one act of understanding that grasps the nature of giraffes. When you and I complete our course on giraffeology, we have both come to engage in this single act of understanding. It's the activity of a single mind, which depends on people like us, who have wisely chosen to use their senses, imagination, and memory to learn about giraffes. If you and I enjoy the exquisite experience of knowing all about giraffes where other people do not, this is because it is our sensations and memories that are being used as the basis for a universal act of understanding about giraffes. The universal intellect is getting no help from the giraffe ignoramuses, so they don't get to share in that experience. I dare say you aren't convinced, and if not, you're in good company. Aquinas found this whole theory to be about as plausible as a giraffe on roller skates. He opens his treatise on the unity of the intellect by saying that the Averroists clearly contradict the teaching of the faith by denying that we can live on after death as individually distinct souls. He won't even bother insisting on this point since it's so obvious. Instead, he wants to show us that the Averroists are also contradicting Aristotle. Despite his extensive and respectful use of Averroes's commentaries in other writings, here Aquinas condemns him as not a peripatetic, but the perverter of peripatetic philosophy. In fact, you don't need either Aristotle or the Bible to realize that the notion of a single shared intellect is absurd, for it is clear that an act of understanding belongs to one particular human and not all humans. Still, it is worth explaining where the Averroists have gone wrong just to make sure everyone understands that the unicity doctrine is indeed a perversion of Aristotle, not a plausible interpretation of his words. Aquinas thinks the error is rooted in the way Averroes and his followers emphasize the mind's independence from the body. Once we see that the mind does somehow depend on the body, we have reason to say that your mind is different from mine, it depends on your body and not my body. Now, Aquinas agrees with Averroes that the mind has no bodily organ. This is stated loud and clear in Aristotle and besides, Aquinas has already said that we can keep using our minds after bodily death. However, the mind is only one power or capacity of a single soul, which is the form of the body, as Aristotle also says loudly and clearly. Aquinas accuses the Averroes of violating this clear teaching of Aristotle by making the intellect completely different from the human soul. For them, it's as if we are beings with a soul and body who then occasionally get access to a free-floating mind, like many computers accessing the same online content, or as Aquinas, less anachronistically, says, many people somehow seeing through a single eye. The irony, as we know from previous episodes, is that it is not the Averroes, but rather Aquinas who holds an unorthodox position on this score. Most 13th century thinkers did believe that the highest part of the soul, the part responsible for the activities of intellect and will, was a separate power or substance distinct from any forms that are seated in the body. So when C.J. defended such a pluralist idea about the soul, he was simply agreeing with mainstream scholastic ideas. Of course, it was far less mainstream for him to press on following in the wake of Averroes and point out that in that case there will be nothing to differentiate one separate intellect from another. We saw that one of the propositions condemned at Paris was that there cannot be many immaterial things of the same kind, like angels or on the usual 13th century understanding, human minds. We also said that Aquinas himself could have been the target of this condemnation. He thought that each angel must be unique in species, since it would otherwise be impossible for one angel to be distinct from another. So when C.J. started suggesting in the 1260s that Averroes' idea of a single intellect wasn't so crazy after all, he was himself being far from crazy. C.J. was simply combining a standard idea about the nature of the human mind, namely that it is independent from body and distinct from any bodily form, with a principle that even Aquinas admitted, namely that anything with a truly immaterial nature must be unique. But given the troubling implications, C.J. also wasn't crazy enough to endorse these ideas publicly after the 1270 condemnation. Instead, his final discussion of the intellectual soul begins by insisting that he will be, as he puts it, seeking the mind of the philosophers in this matter rather than the truth. He does go on to explain the case for the Averroes theory, but also presents arguments in the other direction and concludes by admitting that he is unsure how to resolve the issue. Especially with that last admission of uncertainty, C.J. might be responding to the condemnation, and indeed to Aquinas' attack on him, by adopting a less assertive position. He may have written these words at around the time of a 1272 statute adopted by all the arts masters in Paris, in which they sought to distance themselves from the rationalism that so provoked the bishop and theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventure. In this statute, the arts masters officially declared that they would steer clear of issues that are, so to speak, above their pay grade, because they fall under the purview of theology, not philosophy. Furthermore, they promised to refute any philosophical teachings that might be in tension with the faith. It has been suggested that C.J. and Boethius of Dacia may have been in full agreement with this statute, but in fact it seems unlikely that even the chastened C.J. of the mid-1270s would have been entirely happy with the form of words used by the masters. For he does not, unlike the statute, go so far as to speak of false philosophical teachings. Instead, C.J.'s considered view would seem to be that correct philosophical reasoning can lead to beliefs forbidden by faith. Though we should not be convinced by such reasoning, neither should we expect that we can find a flaw in the arguments. Rather, this is just a sign of our own limitations, limitations that affected even so great a thinker as Aristotle, who was himself only human, as C.J. remarks. One might say then that for C.J., philosophy can, at least on some more difficult topics, reach only provisional results. These results need to be checked against and potentially corrected by faith, because philosophy is not always in a position to correct itself. This is subtly different from the attitude we find in the other so-called Latin of Aroist, Boethius of Dacia. To get the traditional reading out of the way first, we do not find any straightforward two-fold truth theory in Boethius either. To the contrary, he staunchly upholds the ban on self-contradiction that is such a fundamental presupposition of Aristotelian logic. What Boethius has to say about conflicts between philosophy and faith is inspired by a different aspect of logical theory, the autonomous activity of individual sciences. Aristotle occasionally remarks that a given argument or issue is or is not germane to a given science. When a mathematician thinks about triangles, he doesn't need to worry about the material the triangular things are made of, and it is not the job of the natural philosopher to consider abstract metaphysical issues. In Boethius's hands, this idea licenses a strikingly autonomous conception of philosophy. The philosopher must proceed on the basis of natural reasoning, and insofar as we are doing philosophy, we shouldn't question the deliverances of this reasoning. In fact, we should even deny anything that conflicts with our scientific principles, for example that a dead person could return to life. But any arts master can also take off his philosopher hat and assume the role of a pious believer. With his Christian hat on, he will readily admit that there are things on heaven and earth that are not dreamt of in Aristotle's philosophy. This line of thought emerges most clearly in Boethius's treatise on the eternity of the world, which clearly explains the Aristotelian case against an absolute creation of the universe from nothing. Within natural philosophy, no change can arise out of nothing, but must involve the realization of some pre-existing capacity for change. Also, there can be no first motion, since every motion requires an antecedent motion to set it off. Of course, as Christians, we know that it is indeed possible for motion to begin, and for change to come from nothing at all. This is what happened when God created the world. But divine creation is a supernatural act, and thus beyond the ken of natural philosophy. As Boethius puts it, Whatever the philosopher denies or concedes as natural philosopher, this he denies or concedes from natural causes and principles. However nice it might be if we could show rationally that creation from nothing is possible, this sadly can't be done. It is foolish to insist on rational proof for things that can't be proven within the framework of natural science. So the philosopher should content himself with explaining what can and cannot happen naturally, letting the theologian concern himself with what might be supernaturally possible for God. Boethius's solution to the conflict between reason and faith does allow for the kind of doublethink mentioned at the beginning of this episode. Consider the Big Bang cosmologist who goes to church on Sundays. She might say that she isn't really being inconsistent, but just taking two different points of view on the question of where the universe came from. During the week, she pursues an answer using the tools of science, and on the weekend, she accepts a wholly different explanation on the basis of faith. This may seem irrational, yet Boethius would say it is anything but. To the contrary, it makes space for the purely rational endeavor that is science. There is no conflict between reason and faith, and indeed there cannot be such a conflict, since the philosopher readily admits that he is not speaking of what is the case absolutely, but only of what follows from the principles of his science. The implicit message is that the bishop of Paris and the theology faculty should back off and let the arts masters get on with their business of expounding Aristotle. This is an autonomous enterprise with its own ground rules. It poses no threat to the faith, since faith involves stepping outside the discipline of rational science so that the ground rules no longer apply. But this way, Boethius's proposal doesn't sound particularly shocking, and indeed it wasn't. Consider one remark he makes, When someone puts aside rational arguments, he immediately ceases to be a philosopher. Philosophy does not rest on revelations and miracles. The sentiment may sound familiar, since we saw Albert the Great saying almost exactly the same thing, When I am discussing natural things, God's miracles are nothing to me. We can find anticipations of Boethius's strategy in even more mainstream thinkers of the earlier 13th century, like the Paris theologian Alexander of Hales. Writing well before the contentious debates of the 1270s, Alexander stated that, Those philosophers who wished to prove that the world always existed proceeded only from the principles of natural philosophy. So if Aristotle and his followers denied creation, they did not do so in absolute terms, but only because they were speaking as natural philosophers. Why all the fuss then? A division of labor between the theologian and the philosopher had seemed reasonable in Paris only a generation before. Now, in the 1270s, it is tendentiously being presented as an admission that reason and faith reached two contradictory truths amidst accusations of error and heresy. To understand why, we need to distinguish between two groups of critics. On the one hand, there were men like Bonaventure and Bishop Tomfier. They had no time for the subtle qualifications offered by C.J. and Boethius. The caveats of the so-called Avaroists may have been sincere, but the fact remained that they were teaching teenaged university students how to prove the eternity of the world and the unicity of the human intellect. Like Socrates's jurors, the Parisian authorities saw this as an open and shut case of philosophy corrupting the youth. An aggravating circumstance could be added to the charge sheet too. I mentioned in passing in episode 249 that Bonaventure complained about contemporaries who thought happiness can be achieved fully in this life. While this complaint might apply to Albert the Great and Aquinas, both of whom recognized a limited form of earthly happiness, it makes more sense as an attack on the so-called Avaroists. Boethius of Dacia wrote a work called On the Supreme Good, which unhesitatingly takes the intellectual perfection of the philosophers to be the greatest aim of humankind. Very different, on the other hand, were the concerns of more philosophically-minded critics of the arts masters like Albert and above all Thomas Aquinas. Their worry was that the Avaroists were bringing philosophy itself into disrepute. As you'll hopefully recall from our first episode on Aquinas, he had his own way of understanding the relationship between natural reason and theology. For him, the two cooperate by making distinctive and valuable contributions to a unified body of demonstrative science. Human reason is augmented with the addition of new principles taken from revelation, but reason is never corrected or overridden by faith as Boethius would have it. For Aquinas, reason does exactly what Aristotle promised. It establishes necessary conclusions on the basis of indubitable first principles. And it would be a pretty poor necessary conclusion that comes with a footnote saying that it actually only holds when we are wearing our philosopher hats. In a sense, Aquinas's goal was the same as the one pursued by C.J. and Boethius. All three sought to make space for pure rational inquiry within the institutional framework of the medieval university. C.J. and Boethius attempted to do so by carefully qualifying their philosophical claims. C.J., stung by the condemnations, framed his exegesis of Aristotle with warnings about the limited competence of human reason. Boethius admitted that natural reasoning can always be trumped once supernatural phenomena are taken into account. But these were rather precarious ways of securing an autonomous role for science. Much better would be to show that science establishes truly reliable conclusions without having to worry that these conclusions will later be shown to admit of exceptions or just be outright false from the standpoint of faith. This was Aquinas's solution. He went so far as to integrate theology itself into a thoroughly Aristotelian picture of human knowledge, enthroning it as the new queen of the sciences which both draws from and contributes to rational inquiry. In this respect, Aquinas was a more radical Aristotelian than either Boethius or C.J. But of course, it's one thing to promise that there are no conflicts between reason and faith, and quite another to show how apparent conflicts can be resolved. We've seen in this episode how Aquinas sought to do that in the case of the Averroes teaching on the intellect, but that leaves the much thornier issue of the eternity of the world. Thornier because it was far more difficult to dispel the impression that Aristotle accepted an eternal world and that anyone who adopts Aristotelian science must follow him. In past installments, we've looked at this issue in late antique philosophers like Philophonus and in thinkers of the Islamic world like Akindi, Avicenna, Ahazali, and Maimonides. If you want to review some of those episodes, then you should do so as soon as possible, because you don't have forever until we start to look at the eternity of the world in Aquinas and his contemporaries, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. You can find me on Twitter and Twitter at K-9 at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Never Ending Story, the Eternity of the World. We saw in an earlier episode that medieval universities had a lot in common with today's universities. No wonder then that philosophers of the Middle Ages also had a lot in common with today's philosophers. A penchant for university intrigue, occasional despair over the behavior of their students, and an obsessive interest in particular philosophical issues. In some cases, those issues are the same—philosophy of mind, free will, logic. In others, the abiding concerns of the medieval have fallen out of fashion. One of those is the eternity of the universe. Immanuel Kant still took this problem seriously enough to discuss it in his Critique of Pure Reason, which poses an antinomy of pure reason concerning the infinity of time and space. Nowadays, the advance of modern science has taken it pretty firmly off the agenda. How different things were in the 13th century, when it seems that every significant thinker felt obligated to address the issue. But isn't this rather strange? After all, these philosophers were confident that they knew the right answer to the question of whether the universal is eternal. No, it isn't, because it was created with a beginning in time by God. So why spend so much time debating the issue? Besides, not much seems to be at stake here. If God is infinitely powerful, then surely he could have decided to create an eternal world. If he decided not to, but to create a temporally finite universe instead, then what philosophical significance could this possibly have? Quite a bit, as it turns out, and for two reasons. The first is that if you were making a list of points where Aristotle disagreed with Christian doctrine, this would appear at the very top. In several works, Aristotle made his belief in an eternal universe abundantly clear. In a painful irony, he even used it as a premise in proving the existence of God. So it was difficult, though as we'll see, not impossible, to deny that this represents a direct clash between Aristotelianism and Christianity. The second reason is that there is more here philosophically than meets the eye. Aristotle and many later philosophers had seen a firm link between eternity and necessity. For them, something that always exists cannot fail to exist. So asking whether the universe has always existed could seem tantamount to asking whether it had to exist, in which case God had no choice but to create it. By the same reasoning, if you could prove that the universe is not eternal, that would prove that it did not have to exist. And this would seem to imply that some cause beyond the universe was responsible for creating it. The happy result would be that you could prove the existence of a creating God by demonstrating the impossibility of the world's eternity. This helps to explain the proliferation of arguments for and against eternity, not only among Latin Christian thinkers but also the Greek and Arabic writing philosophers who influenced them. Appropriately enough, long-time listeners may have the feeling they've been hearing about this problem forever. The never-ending story goes back to late antiquity, when John Philoponus insisted that Plato's dialogue, the Timaeus, had to be read as denying the eternity of the world, a result much to his satisfaction given that he was a Christian who believed that the universe is created. Pagan Platonists like Proclus and Simplicius disagreed, insisting that Plato could be read as agreeing with Aristotle. The dispute passed into the Islamic world, where some relevant works of Proclus and Philoponus were translated into Arabic. Here, there was still some interest in reconciling Plato with Aristotle, but the chief issue came to be the compatibility of Greek thought with Islam and Judaism. In the Islamic sphere, most philosophers and theologians rejected the eternity thesis, often on the basis that an eternal world would need no creator. But the terms of the debate changed with Avicenna, who showed a way to affirm both the createdness and the eternity of the universe. He explained that if something is contingent, in other words in its own right capable either of existing or non-existing, then it would need an external cause to make it exist. Contingent things will exist only if God, the necessary existent, renders them existent. Yet for Avicenna, divine creation can be, and in fact must be, eternal, precisely because God is the necessary existent. He is necessary in all respects. So whatever He does, He does necessarily, and that includes causing the universe to exist. This whole theory was subjected to a searching critique in Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, but that work was received into the Latin medieval tradition rather late. In another painful irony, the Latin Christians in fact saw Algazelle, as they called him, as a staunch ally of Avicenna, because he also wrote an exposition of Avicenna's ideas. This summary, called The Aims of the Philosophers, was translated into Latin much earlier, so it was taken to be an expression of Al-Ghazali's own views, whereas it was in fact mere preparatory groundwork for the critique of Avicenna presented in his Incoherence. Another influential text was The Guide of the Perplexed by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. After a nuanced and balanced assessment of arguments for and against eternity, Maimonides concluded that philosophy cannot decide the issue. The universe might be eternal, or it might not. The only way we can know for sure would be if God were to reveal to us whether or not He created the world with a beginning in time, and this is exactly what He's done in the Bible. In Latin Christendom, the best-known stance on eternity is, as so often, that of Thomas Aquinas. He takes over Maimonides's solution of declaring a draw between the rational arguments for and against an eternal world, with the contest settled only by faith. He even follows Maimonides's inspired, if not particularly persuasive, attempt to show that Aristotle was not so convinced about eternity after all. Both of them refer to a passage from Aristotle's work on dialectic, the topics, which mentions this as a particularly difficult and debated question. Aquinas and Maimonides take this as a hint that Aristotle knew the question of eternity could not be resolved with complete certainty. With these two moves borrowed from Maimonides, Aquinas sought to take some of the heat out of the eternity debate. Neither the proponents nor the opponents of eternity could prove their case, and Aristotle's authority would be preserved in the bargain. The whole question could be removed from philosophy's to-do list as one whose resolution falls outside the remit of reason. Aquinas saw himself as occupying the reasonable middle ground. On the one hand, we're more strident Aristotelians who thought that philosophy does provide knockdown arguments in favor of eternity. It was clear that at least the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes fell into this category even if Aristotle himself didn't. On the other hand, there were fellow Christians who were equally convinced that they could prove that the world has existed for only a limited time. A good example of the latter approach can be found in Aquinas's fellow theologian at Paris, Bonaventure. In yet another irony, that's three so far in this episode if you're keeping track, Bonaventure shows more confidence in the power of reason to settle the issue than the supposedly far more rationalist Aquinas. In several of his writings, including his commentary on the sentences, Bonaventure argues that an eternal universe is impossible. Obviously, he does not want to suggest that God has insufficient power to create such a universe. Rather, the problem is on the side of created things. Bonaventure's central idea is simply to reject Avicenna's supposed insight that something could be both created and eternal. For Bonaventure, this is just a contradiction in terms. Creation means bringing something to be from nothing, in Latin ex nihilo. So if God genuinely creates the universe, then the universe must be preceded by nothingness. Bonaventure assumes that the philosophers who believed in eternity were not so stupid as to miss this point. Instead, their mistake was falsely supposing that God performs his works the way a created cause would, by bringing things to be from pre-existing matter or potentiality, like a carpenter who makes things out of wood, or fire which transforms fuel into flames. On this misconception, the universe would at least have to come from eternally pre-existent matter if not actually being eternal in the finished form that we see. To this core idea, Bonaventure adds a battery of further arguments. For one thing, he thinks that an infinite period of time cannot already have elapsed so as to reach the current instant. Also, even the philosophers would admit that it is impossible for an infinity of things to exist actually and all at the same time. But this is exactly what would happen if the universe were eternal. Just consider the souls of all the humans who have lived. If there have always been humans, and if human souls survived death, then by now we would have gotten to an infinite number of souls. Bonaventure connects this point to that other central dispute concerning philosophy in the 1260s and 70s, the unicity of the intellect. As we saw last time, there was intense debate in the late 13th century over Averroes's claim that all humans share only one single mind. Bonaventure observes that if this were true, Averroes could avoid admitting that there are an infinity of souls. There would only be one eternal mind for the whole human race rather than an infinity of rational souls continuing to exist after the deaths of their bodies. The two heretical doctrines of an eternal world and single intellect are thus the Hansel and Gretel of Averroism. They go astray hand in hand. If you're in the mood for one more irony, then you'll be glad to hear that consideration of the human species could also be used to argue in favor of the eternity of the universe. The point here has nothing to do with the survival of souls but the question of where humans come from. I won't get into details, since this is a podcast for the whole family, but we'll go so far as to tell you that people are generated by other people. Or as Aristotle put it in one of his pithier lines, man comes from man and the sun. But if each human has been generated by another human, there must be an endless string of humans all the way back into the past. So the world must be eternal. This argument is raised in a treatise about the eternity of the world ascribed to the so-called Latin Averroist, Sige of Brabant. Believe it or not, Sige actually raises the example of which comes first, the chicken or the egg? His answer is that every egg is preceded by a chicken to infinity. After more than 250 episodes, it's about time we got an answer to that question. Sige does not make so bold as to claim that the universe actually is eternal on this basis. He contends himself with presenting the argument and then saying, in one of those remarks that so infuriated his contemporaries and so intrigues modern day scholars, that he is simply presenting the opinion of Aristotle without endorsing it. Nonetheless, the treatise was sufficiently provocative that Henry of Ghent took up the argument in one of his disputed questions. He raises the possibility that there could be disastrous cataclysmic events after which species might need to be restarted, as it were. If all the chickens are wiped out in a flood, then we'll need to get some new eggs somewhere. The solution could lie in spontaneous generation, which for Aristotle and the medieval was a genuine phenomenon. But there's a problem, as Henry points out. Aristotle accepted that you can get things like flies and worms from mud or rotting flesh, but denied that more complex, so-called perfect animals can arise in this way. Avicenna was notorious for claiming that even humans can generate spontaneously, at least in theory, but few medieval thinkers agreed with him. In fact, this is one of the propositions that was condemned in 1277. So we are not going to escape the need for an infinite series of humans by supposing that humans can be spontaneously generated. And by the way, Henry adds, even if this were possible, the resulting infant would die from lack of care if no other humans were around. Of course, Henry doesn't draw the conclusion that there have always been humans. We're talking about a key member of the commission that drew up that 1277 condemnation, which also included the thesis that the universe is eternal. Instead, Henry says that God directly created the first members of each species among the higher animals. Their seed became the basis for all subsequent members of the species. If you want an omelet, you have to break a few eggs, but if you want an egg, God first has to create a chicken. Many of these same arguments reappear in Aquinas's various discussions of the eternity question. In addition to a short treatise devoted specifically to the problem, he takes it up in both the Summa Theologiae and Summa Contagentiles, as well as a set of disputed questions he wrote on the power of God. Throughout, he consistently adheres to the position I already described. Arguments for and against eternity are listed, but always found to fall short of providing real proof, though Aquinas allows that the arguments against eternity tend to be more persuasive. But he doesn't just point out the flaws in the various arguments. He shifts the terms of the debate by focusing on the question of whether any created universe could be eternal, rather than on the question of whether this universe we actually live in is eternal. This is well illustrated by his reaction to the infinite souls argument that so excited Bonaventure. Aquinas effectively dismisses it as irrelevant. He observes that God could have created a universe with no humans at all. The prospect of infinite human souls is no obstacle to God's creating an eternal world if it is in his power to create a world that has no souls in the first place. What about Bonaventure's more central claim that if God is to be a genuine creator, he must create out of nothing and therefore with a first moment in time? Never one to pass up an opportunity to make a subtle but crucial distinction, Aquinas points out that the phrase out of nothing is ambiguous. It could mean, as Bonaventure wants, from a situation where there was nothing, but it could also just mean not from something, in the sense that God needed no matter to form a world, in other words nothing whose potential for being a universe needed to be realized. Aquinas even goes so far as to cite Avicenna for the idea that eternal creation could be from nothing in this sense. He would also agree with Avicenna that when philosophers establish God as a principle who comes before all other things, the priority in question has to do with causation and not time. God is before the world because it depends on him, not because he existed before the world did. Aquinas is surprisingly sarcastic about Bonaventure's view. He remarks that some of his contemporaries have been amazingly sharp-eyed, able to see an inconsistency between createdness and eternity when even Augustine was unable to do so. Aquinas also points out that if God really could have created an eternal world, those who say otherwise are unintentionally disparaging his infinite power. While Aquinas is more severe in his rhetoric against Bonaventure and like-minded Christian theologians, he does also expose the flaws in philosophical arguments for eternity, including arguments found in Aristotle. One of the most prominent of these had been an appeal to the nature of the heavens. The heavens are, according to Aristotelian cosmology, made of indestructible stuff, the so-called fifth element. And many philosophers thought that if something cannot be destroyed, then neither can it be generated. Aquinas retains as much as he can of the Aristotelian view here by saying that the heavens are indeed immune to change, but they still depend on God for their very existence. Their permanent, unvarying nature presupposes that God has already brought them to be and given them this nature. Incidentally, Aquinas's teacher, Albert the Great, found a nifty way to press Aristotle's ideas about the fifth element into the service of creationism. Since the heavens are indeed incapable of being generated naturally, Albert says, they can only have come into existence by being created supernaturally. Aquinas's overall strategy obviously seeks to eliminate any direct clash between philosophy and Christian teaching. But there is a further insight underlying his position. He follows the late ancient thinker Boethius, the original one not Boethius of Dacia, in holding that God alone is eternal not in the sense of existing forever, but rather in that he is timeless. This means that an eternally created world would still fall short of God's sort of atemporal eternity. What makes the created world non-divine is not, in other words, the fact that it has only been around for a certain amount of time, it is that it is subject to time at all. And of course that it is dependent on God for its very existence. Neither of these features presuppose that the past existence of the universe is finite. Again, this tends to take the heat out of the debate. Whether the universe has always existed or not, its temporal existence shows its inferiority to the timeless God who created it. Given the bitterness with which Aquinas attacks his more radical Aristotelian contemporaries, and the fact that Boethius of Dacia is thought to belong to this group, it's a bit of a shock to read Boethius's own treatise on the eternity of the world. We discussed this text last time and asked whether it shows Boethius adopting a double truth theory, and we decided the answer is no. In fact, we can now see that Boethius's position is very close to that of Aquinas. He insists that the natural philosopher cannot pronounce with any finality on the question at hand precisely because this philosopher does not reckon with supernatural causes. Boethius's handling of individual arguments also recalls Aquinas's treatment of those same arguments. He too gives short shrift to Bonaventure's idea that genuine creation must mean bringing something to be after it was nothing, and he too says that the heavens immunity to generation and destruction has to do only with natural causes. Boethius even cites the same passage from the topics to prove that Aristotle considered the eternity question too difficult to resolve with any certainty. This is another nail in the coffin of any straightforward contrast between Aquinas and the so-called Latin Averroists, Boethius of Dacia and Sege of Brabant. As I've suggested before, Aquinas had real disagreements with Boethius and Sege, but he had more in common with them than he would gladly have admitted. He shared their admiration for Aristotelian science, and in a way was even more staunch in defense of that science. Unlike them, he refused to admit that proper philosophical reason can ever lead to incorrect conclusions. Nonetheless, he was, like Sege, prepared to place limitations on the scope of philosophy. Better to admit that an issue cannot be settled rationally than to admit an irreconcilable clash between philosophy and Christian doctrine, and with good reason. In the 13th century, if Aristotle was seen to be contending against religion, there was only going to be one winner. That concludes our look at the debates, recriminations, and personalities that dominate historians' view of Paris in the later 13th century, and I'd be the last to deny the historical or philosophical interest of these debates. They do, however, tend to obscure the fact that there were other interesting developments going on in the arts faculty in this period. We'll discover one of these developments next time, as we remind ourselves that however much time and energy the Scholastics poured into arguing over eternity, the intellect, and the nature of God, their minds rarely strayed far from the linguistic arts of the Trivium, namely logic, grammar, and rhetoric. We've spoken extensively about logic in previous episodes. Next time is the turn of grammar, as we examine the seminal contributions to philosophy of language made by the arts masters. As for rhetoric, I hope I don't need it to persuade you to join me next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Let Me Count the Ways – Speculative Grammar. Some ideas seem so appealing, so obvious, that they appear again and again throughout the history of philosophy. One of them is that language corresponds to the world. From Parmenides, who banned non-being from his metaphysics because it cannot be spoken, to Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus proposes that propositions are like pictures that show reality, it seems that philosophers have never stopped trying to understand how this correspondence might work. And for good reason. A true sentence is one that describes things as they really are. Thus, if we want to understand reality, and we're philosophers, so of course we want to do that, an obvious way to make progress would be to analyze language. The fact that language accurately represents the world suggests that the parts and structures of language somehow mirror the parts and structures of reality. Consider a sentence like, the giraffe roller skates. It seems irresistible to think that the world is arranged in much the way the sentence is. You have a concrete entity, the medieval would say a substance, which is the giraffe, and you have the action the giraffe is performing, namely roller skating. The grammatical contrast between subject and verb parallels the metaphysical contrast between the substance and the action. On the other hand, there also seem to be features of language that don't hook up with reality so well. What would be the real things that correspond to words like if and not, to say nothing of phrases like Peter's nonexistent sister? In light of this, we might decide that language's purchase on reality is somewhat more tenuous, or at least more complicated. If you want to know just how complicated, you can do no better than to read discussions of language produced by university masters towards the end of the 13th century. This was the heyday of what is called speculative grammar. It may seem odd that philosophical questions would be raised in the context of doing grammar. Chances are that you haven't been asked to think much about grammar since you were a child, and that was the usual medieval practice too. The word comes from the Greek grammata meaning letters. Studying grammar was at first, quite literally, a matter of learning your letters, that is learning to read. This is why the late antique pagan philosopher Simplicius chose to insult his rival John Philoponus by calling him the grammarian. He was effectively calling him a mere schoolmaster. But already in antiquity, grammar came to include more sophisticated discussions of language. In a medieval setting, grammar was one of the three disciplines of the trivium, along with rhetoric and logic. This meant that the clever men of the arts faculty where the trivium was taught took a professional interest in grammar and connected it to their other philosophical interests. This, in a nutshell, is how grammar became speculative. Of course, grammar had been part of the trivium before the rise of the universities, and indeed since antiquity, but conceptions of grammar became more ambitious in the 13th century. This was, as usual, because of Aristotle. Once they were able to read the full range of Aristotle's logical works, and especially his posterior analytics, the masters were led to wonder whether grammar would really qualify as a full-blown science in Aristotle's sense. The arts masters were desperate to say that it would, given the central role of grammar in their university careers. But there was a problem. Aristotle states clearly that a science must establish universal truths, whereas grammar seems always to study a particular language. The arts masters were teaching Latin grammar, but of course they knew that there were grammars for other languages. They even noted and worried about such things as Latin's lack of definite articles, an apparent defect relative to Greek. Variation between languages also casts doubt on the idea we were just exploring, that there is a neat correspondence between language and world. Grammatical structures differ greatly from one language to another, but it isn't as if there was one reality for the French and another for the English. Okay, maybe that's a bad example, but you know what I mean. The grammarians were not to be dissuaded though. They admitted that many features of Latin, or of any other language, are accidental, but insisted that some features must be shared by all languages. It would be these universal features which are essential to language as such that are studied in grammar as a properly scientific enterprise. For instance, in Latin the word for giraffe is camelo pardos, while in German it is giraffe. It tells us nothing about real giraffes that the German word is etymologically related to the English word, while the Latin word is not, but it does tell us something about giraffes that in all three languages the word in question is a noun. A giraffe is a substance, and nouns typically pick out substances. Well, actually it's more complicated than that, and you can't say I didn't warn you. The authoritative source for medieval grammarians was not any work by Aristotle, but the Institutes of the 6th century author Priscian. A measure of its popularity and the importance of grammar in medieval education is that there are more than 1,000 surviving manuscripts of the Institutes. When Priscian gets to defining the noun, he says that it signifies not just substance, but also quality, which makes sense. There are other nouns that could pick out a giraffe, including her proper name Hiawatha, and such words as animal or thing, to say nothing of nominal phrases like tallest residence of the zoo and all Savannah roller skating champion 2016. When we say giraffe, we are signifying a substance only insofar as it has the particular quality, indeed the particularly wonderful quality, of being a giraffe. This line of thought is at best implicit in Priscian himself, but in the works of the 13th century grammarians, it becomes as explicit as an adult rated movie. Indeed, the idea that words signify in different ways, or modes, is the basis for the name that was given to some of the speculative grammarians in this period, modistae, or modists. The modists were distinguished not just by their conviction that grammar does indeed have the rank of a universal science, but by their decision to dedicate whole treatises to the subject of the modes of signification, modi significandi. We have already gotten to know one of the earliest figures usually considered as modists, Boethius of Dacia, one of the so-called Latin Averroists. There was also his countryman Martin of Dacia, who like Boethius wrote around 1270. Their ideas were taken up and further developed by figures whose lives and work stretched into the 14th century, including Rodolfus Brito, Thomas of Erfurt, and C.J. of Courtois, not to be confused with the other so-called Averroist, C.J. of Rabant, though he did also write about grammar. And by the way, there are also a number of anonymous treatises that apply the modist approach, so this was a significant and widespread movement in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The core idea of modism is that our ways of talking express our ways of thinking, and that our ways of thinking in turn express the way things are. Thus, we have a distinction between three types of modes. The modes of signification, which belong to language, the modes of understanding, which are the ways we grasp reality, and finally the modes of being. It's vital to the modists that each thing out in the world really does have multiple modes of being, since otherwise there would be no basis in reality for the various ways we can think and talk about a given thing. My mother, Hiawatha, is only one single giraffe, but I can refer to her in an almost indefinitely large number of ways. As giraffe, as animal, as beautiful, as tall, as running, as a running joke. These ways of speaking latch onto her modes of being, the various ways that she genuinely is. When I think of her prodigious stature and speak of her as tall, I am talking about her insofar as she possesses the accidental attribute or property of tallness. When I instead think of her as a giraffe, I call her by that name, I am talking about the mode of being that she shares in common with other members of her species. But the modist theory makes it sound as though our concepts somehow intervene between language and reality. Does a word like giraffe or running really signify Hiawatha at all, or just my thought of Hiawatha? This question was one of those disputed ones. Some authors insisted that words must refer to or signify concrete things like a particular giraffe. But many modists, such as Martin of Dacia, insisted that language does signify concepts, at least in the first instance. To signify something, you have to have it in mind. Your words express your thoughts rather than the thing itself. On the other hand, your concept is about the concrete thing in the world. This means that language can still signify the real thing via mental concepts. If I say, oh how exciting, here comes a giraffe, what I am fundamentally doing is communicating a thought I am having. But since my thought is itself about something, namely Hiawatha as she comes towards us on roller skates, my words do incidentally say something about the world. Now, not all the noises we make signify. We are capable of making meaningless noises as when we grunt or just speak nonsense. The terminus logician William of Sherwood gives an example that would be at home in a Harry Potter novel, Buba Blikatrix. For the medieval sounds made by non-human animals would fall mostly or entirely into this category of literally insignificant noise. How then does a mere sound come to acquire meaning? Mostly through an act of the mind, which imposes a certain meaning on a certain sound. This is what the grammarians call the ratio significandi, or signifying relation. Once this is added, we have something more than a sound, we have a meaningful verbal expression, in Latin dictio. But even this is not enough, since one and the same dictio can be used in different ways, something particularly clear for speakers of Latin, where case endings can be added to indicate whether something is the subject of a verb, the object of a verb, an instrument, or what have you. Hence, the expression for giraffe in Latin takes a different form when I say the giraffe sees, camelo pados videt, than it does when I say I see the giraffe, vidio camelo padum. Sorry, I don't know how to say roller skate in Latin. We could even indicate one and the same thing with different parts of speech. The modus like the example of pain. I can refer to it using the noun pain, the verb hurt, the adjective painful, or even the interjection ouch. The grammatical differences are there to mark further acts of the intellect, whose various modes of understanding correlate with cases and parts of speech. When I just mean to refer to the pain in my toe, I use a noun. When I describe how it is making my toe feel, I use the adjective, and when I want to let you know that you are standing on my foot, I use the interjection. Once the mode of understanding is marked at the level of language, we have what the grammarians called a paz oraciones, a word as it would actually appear in a real sentence. The grammarians like to say that with this sort of expression, we are signifying one thing as another, like when I signify a pain as something that is hurting me right now. When all goes well, the mode of signification reveals a mode of understanding that actually fits the way the world is. In other words, grasps a real thing under one of its modes of being. My toe really hurts. The thing out there really is a giraffe, and it really is seeing something or being seen or standing on my foot. But sometimes all does not go well. There's a difference between saying something meaningful and saying something true. The grammarians recognize this, and in fact, their theory makes it easy to explain. Suppose you say to me, giraffes are ugly. I understand what you're saying just fine, but I also know that you're saying something false. The good news is that you have successfully used language to convey to me what you're thinking. The bad news is that you are thinking about giraffes in a way that does not correspond to the way they really are. More puzzling for the modus were cases where language doesn't look like it even could correspond to the world, under any mode of being. What does the word nothing refer to, or the word matter, assuming as the medievalists did that matter is pure potentiality? Again, the level of the mental concept could come to the rescue here. By negating concepts that do refer to reality, the mind is capable of forming notions of potentiality, nothingness, or privation, even though no such absences really exist outside the mind. This solution could also be used to handle empty words like centaur or chimera. These signify concepts that are only figments of the mind, with no correlate outside in real being. Then there are the linguistic expressions that don't even pretend to signify anything. Those words like if and not. This is pretty much the group of Latin words that are indeclinable, in other words that get no nominal or verbal endings. The grammarians tended to see them as serving a merely auxiliary function. It was even claimed that they are, properly speaking, not part of language. In other cases, a term might be a mere substitute for a fully formed pars orazionis. A good example is the pronoun, like he or it. Obviously, you can't know what a pronoun refers to without the help of context. In general, the grammarians are prepared to admit that context is vital in understanding the way that a given word functions in a given sentence. We can see this as a legacy from the terminus logicians who, as we noted back in episode 225, sometimes argued that the supposition or referent of a term might be established by the context in which the term is used. But the grammarians go further, emphasizing that speaker and listener are engaged in a cooperative enterprise. The speaker tries to make his meaning clear, and the listener seeks an interpretation of his words that will make sense. This is one reason our attempts to communicate aren't tripped up by the many ambiguities found in natural languages. But with all the best will in the world, some ways of using language are bound to cause philosophical controversy. One case that gave the grammarians trouble was the apparently innocent word whiteness. The standard modus story here would be that there are various modes of being picked out by forms of the word white. There is the adjective white, which is applied to a substance qualified by the accident of whiteness. There is the process of acquiring such an accident, which we call whitening. And then there is the accident itself, which is the whiteness in a substance. But can't I also use the word without thinking of any white thing in particular? It's this usage that seems to be at stake when I say something like, I don't look good in white, or, white is the mixture of all other colors. Images like these can clearly be true, though my first example wasn't. I happen to be one of those people who can wear anything. But what are these statements about? While some were prepared to admit that whiteness is something out there in the world, Boethius of Dacia was reluctant to do so. For him, this is another case where a word refers to something in the mind, in this case an abstract generalization produced by the mind based on experiences of particular white things. A similar problem concerned terms like human, giraffe, or animal. On the one hand these can name individual things out in the world, like Groucho Marx and Hiawatha. On the other hand, they are the names of species and genera which are found in many things, because not only Groucho is a human but also Harpo, Chico, and all the rest of us. This led the grammarians to weigh in on the long-running problem of universals. Among the modists, perhaps the most innovative view was that of Rodolphus Brito. At first, his solution may seem like Boethius of Dacia's idea about whiteness. Rodolphus appeals to the modist theory of the mode of understanding and explains that the mode of understanding relevant to genera and species is the one that responds to the similarity between, for instance, one human and all other humans. However, he insists that this mode of understanding is grounded in the nature of the external rings. We can all generate a general, common notion of humanity in our minds. So Rodolphus is adopting what we might call a moderate realism concerning universals. Our universal ideas are not mere figments like our ideas of chimeras or centaurs, nor are they mere abstractions like Boethius's whiteness. When we think of the human species, we are attending to humans as they are alike to one another and not only as if they were alike to one another. We can also signal to other people that we have in mind whatever is common to all humans by adding the word every, which is what we do in order to make a universal statement, like every human is an animal, or every human should watch the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers. Rodolphus's solution is classic modism. It distinguishes the levels of language, concept, and reality, but sees intimate connections between these three levels. Of course, that connection isn't always present. We do talk about chimeras that even say things that are meaningless or horror of horrors ungrammatical. But the whole point of modism is to reveal how the connections work when things go well. Still, we can see easily how the tools of speculative grammar could be turned in a more skeptical direction. If you think that universals have no basis in reality, you might argue that phrases like every human express only modes of understanding and not modes of being. You might emphasize the arbitrariness of language and of the mind. In short, you might think less like a 13th century philosopher and more like a 14th century philosopher. The metaphysical and epistemological confidence of the later 13th century will not be shared by subsequent generations. But we're not ready for the 14th century quite yet. We have yet to cover two most important scholastic thinkers to come along in the generation after Aquinas and Bonaventure, namely Henry of Ghent and John Dunne's Scotus. And even before that, I want to give you a reminder that it wasn't only the schoolmen who were thinking about philosophy at this period. Since we've been thinking in this episode about language, I thought it would be a good time to have a break from university life and look at a work of vernacular literature that has much to say about philosophy, even though historians of philosophy haven't had much to say about it in return. Next time, our topic won't be the flowering of scholasticism. We'll be talking about an actual flower, and in fact some actual de-flowering as we turn to a French epic of courtly love, the Romance of the Rose, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Love Reign Over Me – The Romance of the Rose. Looking for a romantic gift for that special someone? I highly recommend that you do not get them a copy of the 12th century treatise On Love by Andreas Kapilanos. Your intended sweetheart is going to have misgivings about your liaison once he or she reads the first page. Here Andreas explains what love is, namely a certain innate suffering caused by seeing, and thinking too much about, the shapeliness of someone of the opposite sex. And of course he has a point. We all know from the lyrics of pop songs, if not from personal experience, that to love is to suffer. There's the fear of possible rejection, and the agony of actual rejection. There are the pangs of longing when the beloved is absent, replaced by anxiety and befuddlement when the beloved is present. Just ask Pat Benatar, who proclaimed that love is a battlefield. Or Billie Holiday, whose hard-won expertise on this matter led her to proclaim that, you don't know what love is until you've learned the meaning of the blues. The Jay Giles band went further still, singing, I've had the blues, the reds and the pinks, one thing for sure, love stinks. Somewhat more poetic, but little more encouraging, is the definition of love found in The Romance of the Rose. It reads, Love is a mental illness afflicting two persons of the opposite sex. It comes upon people through a burning desire, born of disordered perception, to embrace and to kiss and to seek carnal gratification. But, like a first date, this passage should be approached carefully. For starters, it's really just a reworking of the earlier definition given by Andreas Kapelanis. This is typical of The Romance of the Rose, a poem built largely of other literary materials. Being a well-read expert in the amatory arts, the author Jean de Meun strips his sources of their Latin and re-clothes them in French, having his way with them in the process. In this case, he goes further than Andreas by saying that love is actually a kind of illness. To further complicate matters, it isn't exactly Jean who is responsible for ravishing the literary model in this way. At this point in the poem, we are not hearing the author's own voice, but that of Reason, one of the many personifications and emblematic characters who populate The Romance of the Rose. When Reason compares love to an illness, it is part of her overall effort to show that we should not allow the irrational passions of love to rule over us. We should never give in to such an excess of emotion that we would experience suffering as a result of our affection. Clearly, Reason doesn't know the meaning of the blues. Jean de Meun himself doesn't necessarily see things in such black-and-white terms though. He allows the voice of Reason to have its say, but not to have the last word. Other characters will weigh in with their own ideas about love and the erotic before the poem is out. Like the Kama Sutra, Jean adopts a wide range of positions when it comes to sexuality. For all its exuberance and prodigious length, Jean's contribution is a doubly modest one. He expressly draws on earlier sources, above all The Art of Love by the Latin poet Ovid, The Ancient Philosopher Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and The Complaint of Nature by Alain of Lille. So dependent is he on these and other texts that he feels free to blame them for any untruths to be found in his own poem. Furthermore, Jean's exuberant and inventive reuse of these Latin works is itself offered as the completion of a poem started by another man. As Jean tells us himself in a characteristically perplexing and ironic passage midway through the poem, the romance was begun by a certain Guillaume de Yoriss. Jean even takes the trouble to tell us how much time elapsed between the work of the two authors, about 40 years, and to identify for us the last line that was written by Guillaume. That line comes about 4,000 lines into a work which in its completed form contains almost 22,000 lines. Thus, more than four-fifths of the work is by Jean. We know nothing about Guillaume de Yoriss apart from what is divulged by the poem itself, which isn't much. Jean is writing at about 1270, so if Guillaume wrote 40 years earlier, then we can date him to around 1230. He is a classic exponent of the courtly love poetic tradition which we saw inspiring the big-yin mystics Hadidic and Mächtild of Magdeburg. So we find in him the idea of devoting oneself entirely to romantic love and a depiction of the agony experience when the beloved is unattainable. Guillaume goes so far as to say that, "...no pain can equal that suffered by lovers." What drew Jean to this particular text is a matter of speculation. My guess is that it was not only the standard themes of courtly love that attracted him, but also Guillaume's self-aware literary artifice and his display of good literary taste. He presents his poem as the recounting of a dream in which he finds himself in a garden, populated by personifications of the psychological and practical considerations that arise in a love affair. Pleasure, courtesy, fair welcome, and the God of Love himself are all described as are the forces that thwart seduction like jealousy, evil tongue, chastity, fear, and shame. Guillaume dreams of himself pledging loyalty to the God of Love in the terms of a vassal speaking to a Lord. In the greatest obsession with a rosebud you'll find outside of Citizen Kane, he adopts the role of a besotted lover who longs to possess a beautiful rose growing within the garden. To do so, the lover must call on the forces of love to help with his seduction and lay siege to the defenses arrayed to protect the flower's innocence, including a symbolic fortress built around the rose. For a reader who grew up in the 1980s, the thought is irresistible, Pat Benatar was right, love really is a battlefield. For a medieval reader, meanwhile, the dream setting would recall Cicero's famous Dream of Scipio, which was commented upon by Macrobius. Just to make sure we don't miss the point, Guillaume refers to Macrobius at the very outset of his own poem. For Jean, the most self-conscious of writers, it might also have been intriguing that Guillaume often comments on his own efforts as a writer as when he frequently apologizes that words are inadequate to describe what he saw in the dream. Intriguing or not, Guillaume's 4,000 lines wouldn't earn a place in our history of philosophy, but Jean de Meun is like the emotional life of the Jay Giles band, a horse of a different color. He trained at the University of Paris and made more traditional contributions to our subject. One imagines him winking at the reader when he says in his poem what a great service it would be if someone would translate Boethius's Consolation from Latin into the vernacular. Jean himself would go on to produce a French version of it, and also to translate the exchange of letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise. As for his continuation of the Romance of the Rose, it's one of the most important works of medieval literature in any language, and it has much to say about philosophy. Jean peppers his poem with parodic allusions to scholastic practice and vocabulary, as when his characters accuse one another of sophistry or challenge one another to produce definitions and proofs in support of their claims about love. He also refers to many philosophers by name, from Plato and Aristotle to Avicenna and Abelard. Then there is more substantive philosophical material which Jean makes accessible to his French audience by including it in his poem, a direct translation of a passage from Plato's Timaeus, and an extensive summary of Boethius's ideas about the necessity of the future. He also takes a stand on issues that had divided philosophers in the medieval period. The intellectual tumult of the 12th century still seems to be very much alive for Jean. One of his main sources is Alain of Lille. He is fascinated by the story of Abelard and Heloise, and as we'll see shortly by the whole topic of castration, and he weighs in on the 12th century debate as to whether Plato had already grasped the Trinity, his answer being no. A more contemporary note is struck by a vicious attack on the mendicant movement and its vow of self-imposed poverty. Jean hides behind, but not far behind, another symbolic character to make this attack, namely false seeming. This character is introduced to argue that a successful seduction often involves a bit of economy with the truth. False seeming advises rubbing onion juice into the eyes to make for a convincing display of love-struck weeping. But then comes one of the many digressions that, paradoxically, seem to be Jean's main purpose in writing his continuation of the romance. This digression is an attack on the voluntary poverty of the mendicant friars. Speaking on behalf of the mendicants, false seeming boasts of the cunning hypocrisy that makes it possible to amass wealth while acquiring a reputation for abstemious piety. We pretend to be poor, says false seeming, but we have everything while having nothing. Though Jean's poem is thus not short on allusions to scholastic culture, it is a good deal more entertaining than anything produced by the schoolmen. By turns ironic, self-righteous, provocative, violent, funny, crude, elegant, and obscene, the romance of the Rose is quite frankly a hell of a lot of fun. Medievalists agree because it allows them to play their favorite game of spot the illusion. Nearly every one of the secondary works I've consulted triumphantly pointed out previously unnoticed parallels to classical or medieval texts used by Jean. Of course, detecting such resonances would also have been part of the fun for a well-read medieval audience. But if the fun is in the allusions, then the action is with the poem's central theme. Guillaume already announces that the poem contains the whole art of love, and Jean continues with at least the pretense that we are being offered instruction and fair warning in Affairs of the Heart. The narrative depicts the challenges that face lovers and the means by which these challenges can be overcome. A series of benevolent symbolic personifications, including one simply named Friend, appear to give the central character advice on how to win his rose. But this is no mere instruction manual, no courtly love for dummies. Jean seems to be trying to say something about love, about its correct place in human life, or perhaps the place it is inevitably going to occupy whether correctly or not. But what is his message? Here, interpretations differ. One traditional idea is that there is a sharp contrast between Jean and Guillaume. Where Guillaume was indeed a courtly author, Jean is, for all his learning, earthier and more naturalistic. He celebrates the simple pleasures of sexuality, finding both joy and comedy in this innate human drive. On this telling, Jean could be allied with the so-called Latin of Aroists and seen as not only vernacular, but even secular in his endorsement of the purely natural. Indeed, some of the speeches in the Romance suggest that Jean sees sexual activity in light of a tacit theory of natural law. He emphasizes that, to speak with yet another bit of popular music, birds do it, bees do it, and so we humans too may as well fall in love. Other readings situate Jean in a more distinctively Christian and theological frame of reference. On this interpretation, his satire is intended to warn us against excessive interest in purely physical delight, which is a consequence of our fallen nature. It's no wonder that such disagreements should emerge, because both points of view, and more besides, are present in the poem. A range of characters are allowed to express various ideas about love and at great length. The speeches are written with such conviction that they may seem to speak for Jean himself, yet the speeches don't agree with one another. This feature of the Romance has been leading readers into their own disagreements for a long time. Several later medieval readers, including Christine de Pizan, got involved in a debate over the poem, the so-called Carelles de la Rose. Christine complained of the misogyny that is indeed a striking feature of Jean's work, as in a horrific passage where a jealous husband speaks of beating his wife into submission. Another famous Jean, namely Jean Gasson, agreed with Christine that the poem was bad news, liable to lead its readers into lechery. To these complaints, a defender of Jean de Meun, named Pierre Cole, responded that the poet simply, made each character speak according to his nature. It is wrongheaded to say that the author believes women to be as evil as the jealous man, in accordance with his character, declares. Of all the speeches in the Romance, the most decisive for our assessment of Jean's true attitude toward sexuality is the one given by reason. This is actually the second appearance of reason in the poem. Guillaume had already included a scene in which reason advises against pursuing the love affair. In short order, she was rebuffed by the character of the lover. Jean reprises the scene and gives it a far more detailed treatment. Where Guillaume, devoted 75 verses to Reason's point of view, Jean gives her more than 3,000. As you might expect, Reason's main objection to passionate love is that it is irrational. This does not mean that there is no proper role for sex in the good life, for sexual activity is required if the human species is to live on, a point emphasized later in a further speech by genius, a character and theme borrowed from Alain of Lille. The lover is no more impressed by this second, long-winded appearance from reason than he was by the first. When she names Socrates as a paradigm of rationality, he responds, I would not give three chickpeas for Socrates. And on the whole, he observes, whenever love spied me sitting, listening to the sermon, he took a spade and threw out of my head by one ear whatever reason had put in the other. This looks like it could be grist to the mill of the theological reading. In our fallen state, we are incapable of listening to the call of reason and giving sex its proper value. Where we should feel natural desire, we are carried away by unrestrained lust. But, the fact that the lover rejects the advice of reason needn't mean that we, as readers, are supposed to follow suit. If reason really is speaking for Jeanne, then she is calling us not to act like the hero of courtly love romance, but like the man Augustin was striving to be. One who, as reason says, loves all humans generally, rather than becoming obsessed with just one particular human. The lover's failure to do so is meant not to be inevitable, but instructive. It's hard to know Jeanne's true intention though, because it is unclear whether reason is an instrument or target of his satire. A case in point is one of the most memorable passages of the whole romance. In the course of her argument, reason has alluded to the classical legend according to which Saturn was castrated and his testicles thrown into the sea, resulting in the birth of Venus. The lover reacts by castigating reason for her use of the word testicles, where she might have employed a suitable euphemism. Reason responds that, as Plato taught, language is for communication. Towards this end, she has herself made appropriate words for the things created by God so that there can be no objection to her using frank language. The lover remains unmoved, albeit without indicating how many chickpeas he would or wouldn't give for Plato. What are we to make of this? Any plausible answer needs to look ahead to the very end of the romance, a section that is climactic in every sense of the word. The lover finally manages to achieve his objective and his deflowering of the rose is veiled in only the thinnest of allegorical veils. The lover compares his labors to those of Hercules as he struggles to force his staff through a narrow passage to reach into a reliquary and so on. You get the idea. It's been well remarked of this passage that it shows how euphemism may in fact be at least as obscene and much more pornographic than plain speech. We have to assume that Jean was well aware of this when he composed the rather unromantic conclusion of his romance. So we may be rather skeptical of the lover's confidence in the power of evasive language. His objection to reason's speech might better have been directed to its matter rather than its form. Once you've decided to speak of gods castrating one another, your choice of words is almost beside the point. And indeed, the lover could have called on a formidable range of allies if he sought to press this objection. Augustine and Macrobius and before them Plato had expressed disquiet with such myths. The reason would be prepared for this complaint too. Where the lover advises her to use a euphemistic gloss to cloak her meaning if she absolutely must bring testicles into the discussion, reason replies that we should use an interpretive gloss to uncover the deeper meaning of the myth. Like the Platonist authors of the 12th century who have been associated with a school of Chartres, reason speaks of the surface of a myth as a covering or integumentum that conceals deeper philosophical meaning. So there are indeed good reasons to think in this scene and others that the character of the lover does not speak for Jean. He is not held up for adulation, but as an example of the addled state into which love can lead us. His fixation on improper language would go hand in hand with his own improper obsession with private pleasure. Where he should love all humankind and appreciate nature as God's creation, the lover thinks only of his rose. In other words, his problem is that he is not a philosopher. This is borne out at least to some extent by what happens when nature herself appears as a character. In passages based closely on Alain of Lille's complaint of nature, Jean has his personification of nature extol the well-ordered design of the cosmos and especially the heavens. She digresses to several philosophical themes, including an explanation of the darker patches on the moon as being made of more transparent material than the rest. Amidst all this cosmic harmony, it is only humans who violate the correct order with their sexual immoderation. But reading the Romance of the Rose is like attending a disputation at the medieval university. There's always an on the other hand. In this case, nature herself is made to imagine and describe some rather unnatural scenes, as when she talks about what would happen if animals could learn to reason and talk. Besides, earlier in the poem, more disreputable characters have been allowed to state that it is only natural for humans to engage in sex outside the bounds of marriage. Women are, we are told, naturally attracted to all men and not only one husband. Jean's poem contains lofty philosophical praise of nature, but also shows that a natural sexual ethics could be not so much high-minded as below the belt. Again, one might take him to be critiquing those who are content with the merely physical or natural, satire in the aid of a theological message, but to my mind the interpretations that seek to enlist Jean on the side of naturalism or supernaturalism miss the rather obvious point that he is staging a dialogue between these points of view, and at least as much for our enjoyment as for our edification. Why should we expect the intellectual tensions to be resolved, rather than displayed and explored? The Romance of the Rose is not a philosophical work disguised as a poem about love. Rather, it is a poem that is in love with philosophy but hesitates to get into a committed relationship. Along with other vernacular poems that it anticipates, like Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Romance shows how philosophy was working its way into the literature of this period. But what about the other arts, such as painting, music, or the architectural marvels being produced by the builders of cathedrals? Were such endeavours influenced by medieval philosophical ideas? For that matter, did medieval philosophers even develop ideas that would belong to the branch of philosophy we now call aesthetics? We'll find out next time, in an artful conversation that doesn't dodge these difficult questions, featuring Andreas Speer. He'll be in the frame next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about medieval aesthetics with Andreas Speer, who is the director of the Thomas Institute at the University of Cologne. Hi, Andreas. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure from me. Well, we're going to be talking about medieval aesthetics and that immediately raises a problem because the medieval's don't actually recognize aesthetics as a branch of philosophy alongside physics, ethics, metaphysics, etc. And that raises the question of where we should be looking for their ideas about aesthetics, if anywhere. Yeah. In general, this is not such an exception because there are other branches like, let's say, anthropology or if we talk about philosophy of mind, where we have also this kind of modern division of philosophy into branches and what we find in the Divisiones Philosophiae at this time. But there's some special case with aesthetics because maybe this field is much more designed from a 19th century perspective. And even in the treatment of medieval aesthetics, if you go to some classics like Eco's book or Asuntos' book on medieval aesthetics, they seem to take over uncritically the definition of Hegel's vorlesung, the aesthetic, that the subject of aesthetics is nothing but fine art. So we are really bound to it. But what shall we do? So my suggestion is, and what I did is, that we take a hermeneutical point of view. And that means that we start with the way how people experience this, what we call medieval art, because the perception is also the creation of the object, as we know. And let's start, for example, with our contemporary point of view and the reflections about it. But take the very same view and look how people at the time we call the Middle Ages are, you know, reflecting upon those works, the very same may be, we consider as art objects. So I call this the reconstructive hermeneutics of the experience of medieval art. So your idea is if we put it in an art museum today, and it was produced in the Middle Ages, then medieval aesthetics could be the study of what the medieval said about those things, maybe statues, architecture, stuff like that. Indeed. And we will find very, very interesting contexts. They are totally different from the theoretical context we take into consideration when we talk about those objects. Now, for example, we can, if you go here in Cologne, we are in Cologne, if you go into the Museum Schnütgen, which is one of the most famous museums of medieval art. And if we ask where we find them in a medieval period, we find them, for example, in the theoretical context in churches. So they are situated in a very different context. And this context also has its interpretation. So it's interpretive tools. And we can find then also reflections upon those objects in relation to the context where we can find them. I guess the same thing would be true for ancient art, actually. Yes. The statues that we put up in our museums, they stood in temples and they were religious objects. Yes. Right? Yes. And does that mean that if we're looking for remarks about aesthetics in the medieval period, we actually have to turn to liturgical literature or theology? For example, this is one of the most prominent fields where we can find those reflections. And this is even confirmed by the text you find usually in compendia on medieval aesthetic writings. And there they are mostly presented outside the context, so just as quotes. And you don't know where the quotes are from and what is the context, what is even the genus of the text. Let's start with one prominent example. And that is the writings of Abbessus Gérere and the Abbey of Saint-Denis, which is often taken as the model, the first model of a Gothic cathedral. Those writings, and this is what we discovered when we started the research and even doing then the critical edition on those texts, the most important text is structured according to the consecration, the retus of a church. So which is very interesting because first you see how the reflection on this art took place. Then also you get an idea of what medieval art in such a context is. This is much more performative than just located in a museum where you can go and watch it. You have to use it. You have to be part of it. This is also, when we think from a contemporary theory of aesthetics, a very interesting starting point and point of comparison instead of taking it in a kind of objective schema of what we call the history of the fine arts. Right, because they're not thinking of it primarily as an art object, they're thinking of it as a ritual object. But I suppose actually in a way we might think there's something right about that. So that we could even think about something like a painting that hangs in a museum as something that exists within a context that we interact with in a certain way. Yes, and we can see it in those writings that what's taking place is that indeed we find ways that people at this time consider special objects, special parts of art, examples of artwork, separate from the day-to-day things they were doing. So there is this kind of difference we can also see. But those differences are conceptualized in a different way than just the definition of oh, that's fine arts. Because you don't find, it is interesting, you don't find a notion like arspurchra. The idea we get from the 19th century and especially from this very powerful Hegelian tradition that we find the specific object of aesthetics at the intersection of art and beauty. This is not this overall idea which puts together our understanding on what we find when we are considering what the understanding of aesthetics or an aesthetic object is in a specific time. It's even not the case nowadays. So to a certain extent, this hermeneutical point of view on medieval art opens also a new or is connected, deeply connected with contemporary reflections upon what art is, which is not always fine art. So this opening of the understanding with respect to object and theory, what we find in contemporary aesthetic theory, I think we have to take this point of view if we would like to understand what in the medieval period is considered an aesthetic object, for example. Actually, I guess that a lot of the previous literature, so you mentioned Umberto Eco's book on medieval aesthetics, for example, a lot of this literature does focus on the concept of beauty. So what would you say if he or someone else came and said to you, well, no, hang on a second, we can think about medieval aesthetics as a kind of unified topic. And the topic is the philosophical reflection on beauty. Yeah. Isn't that a legitimate undertaking? It has some difficulties as well, because you have to consider where you find even the reflections on beauty. If we, for example, take Thomas Aquinas, who was always seen as one of the heroes in this business, as an example. As in so many other businesses. Yes, in many others. This is in particular one place which is very prominent, and this Trinitarian theology. So if you really look, locate, relocate the places, the reflections on beauty, one very prominent place is Trinitarian theology. Beauty as one of those appropriated names by which the relation between the father and the son is expressed. We have that in connection with this another place that is the tradition of the divine names in the Dionysian tradition, where the beauty shows up as one of the co-expressions of the good, bonum et pulchum. Beauty is one of the expressions how to understand the efficacy of goodness, like the light, like love, and so on. So this is one very prominent place. Maybe those are the two most prominent places and even what we call the transcendental beauty is located in the divine name discourse in connection with what we call the transcendental thought. But there the beauty hardly appears as a transcendental of its own. So this is a much weaker place, the reflections on the beauty, and it is not connected with reflecting, for example, a specific expression of doing art. If we are interested in this, then we have really to go into the different subject of writings, where the reflections on how to produce certain kind of artworks and make them perfect. So, for example, the Schedulativasarum Artium of the so-called Theophilus Presbyter, who as an author is not really well known and present. Maybe this is an author fiction, but we don't know it. But then we are talking about art. Maybe in addition to when we talk about the beauty, indeed, there is maybe another tradition which we can relate to the Victorines and maybe to Bonaventure. But this is then a follow up on what I said about the context of the beauty, because it is this neo-Platonic idea that you have the well-ordered cosmos. This is more a cosmological than an aesthetic approach. Now we have this well-ordered cosmos and all the stages of the cosmos as expressions of this well-orderedness, which is then in the Platonic tradition expressed in this very famous notion of the Calo Cagatia. That means that the goodness and the beauty go together and form this kind of harmonious cosmic order. But this is a very speculative notion and is hardly addressed to a concrete theory of an art object or an artwork. In fact, it almost seems diametrically opposed to that, because according to this theory of the transcendentals, everything that is, is good, beautiful, true, and whatever. So you have all these transcendental features. And in that sense, a stone lying in a field is as much an example of beauty as a statue or cathedral. Indeed. And this is a good point, because in this respect, the beauty is not discretive like in Hegel, because this is the first time maybe in the early Renaissance where even the name fine arts is coming up and where this is taken to single out a certain group of artwork from the very general understanding of art. Because until the 12th century, everything was art, which was produced by man. This techné on and fusé on opposition, what is natural and what is technical, or artwork in the very wide sense, this distinction coming up from Plato. And in this respect, art is not a very specific notion. It is even until the appearance of Aristotle covered all doctrinal and scientific approach as well as the more technical and day-to-day labor and crafts work, what one does. Do they even then have the notion in the medieval period of an artist in our sense? So what you were just saying is that there's this idea of art as techné, but of course that covers carpenters and shoemakers and so on. In fact, those are the classic examples. So would they have a distinct concept that they would apply, for example, to a sculptor or painter? I think we have to make a distinction until Aristotle appears on the scene. Until the 12th century, the concept of an artist is very wide. Even philosophy is taken as art of arts, as artium. So when we take the famous division of the arts in the Jugo of St. Victor's Diascolicon, one of the most prominent scholarly texts and even didactical texts in the 12th century, art covers everything. What is interesting in Jugo of St. Victor is that he even incorporates the mechanical arts among the philosophical arts. So we have then the traditional division with the theoretical and the practical arts into logic, but also then he talks about the mechanical arts as part of this. This is interesting, but the concept of the artist is a very general one. This is opposed to the creator and this is also a discourse on creativity, but a very general discourse on creativity. What is the divine artifacts and what is the human artifacts? The divine artifacts, which is infinite creativity, not depending from any context and material conditions whatsoever. What is the human artist doing? This famous dictum of Ars imitatou naturam, that the arts imitate the nature, also defines the constraints of the human creativity, which has to respect the given conditions. So this is very prominent and this concerns the entire human creativity. With Aristotle, we get this clear distinction between art and scientia, art and science. And here, this is the starting point in the early Renaissance, where you start to think about the specific value even of different arts. This is then when architecture, painting, sculpturing were singled out and you find it for the first time in the Campanile of the Duomo in Firenze, represented in a visual, iconic form and you can find it in the famous museum, I think by Giotto. Giotto made these three plates where he singled out and added to because they didn't have a very prominent place in former times. For example, in this famous Didas Calicon, architecture is just summarized under the armature. So, architecture is seen as part of armory. Although it's not even so prominent that it has a place of its own. It's part of armory in the very broad sense. This is as if he didn't know where else to put it or something. Yes. But here you can see that the reflection on art and craft are then starting to focus a kind of a canon of its own. I think the Aristotelian context have a lot to find the proper theoretical place of what art does. I guess also in Bonaventure, in the reduction of the arts to theology, drawing on here of Saint Victor, he also describes the mechanical arts as a kind of reflection of divine creativity. I think that's interesting because in a way it suggests a very kind of exalted role for even the humble artist, even the shoemaker, is in a way doing something that's a reflection or image of God's creative activity. But on the other hand, it seems that one difference between Renaissance art and medieval art is that with Renaissance art, it really makes a big difference who the individual artist is. So, if you think about maybe like Giotto, there's this sort of hand of the artist. And at least nowadays, we think it's very important that it's Giotto who painted this painting and that it's an expression of his individuality. And I guess that that's not so true in medieval art. Is that right? The first is the lack of sources we have, but we also find sources and reflections on individuality, mainly that, for example, the craftmen who did the stone work. So, they had the individual signs on the stone they made, for example. There are signs of individuality. So, they would literally put an insignia on what I made. Yes, yes. And at night, we have also expressions where, in fact, we have to make, at least starting from the Latin, the difference between the architectus and the magister operis. The architectus is mainly a speculative figure, just the one who was in charge, like the bishop, the abbot, and so on. And the true architect, the one who was really leading the stuff, this is the magister operis. And some of those, you find at least in the 12th, 13th century, you find also plates where they have some inscriptions, where you find some signs of this individuality. In general, indeed, the idea of a workspace, maybe take a cathedral workspace. And the most times they were working in the very same way and self-understanding until today. So, they are just part of this over-century building campaign, which is, to a certain extent, not bound to the individual, but to the group and to this tradition you are inscribing yourself, a little bit in the habit a commentator has, whose originality is only showing up in connection with the tradition he is entering. Actually, something I've talked about in a lot of episodes is the fact that there are these anonymous commentaries on Aristotle and other texts, and the anonymous artists who work on the cathedrals are almost like the same thing. And indeed, there is a sign of, there is a change of Zep's perception, because cutting off this tradition, I think this is something that belongs very much to the self-definition of the Renaissance. The Renaissance as a conceptual framework. So think of Petrarch and those who initiated this and invented the Middle Ages, because the Middle Ages are an invention. And nobody in the Middle Ages thought ever to live in the Middle Ages. They were just living in the continuity with the old ancient tradition and commanding on this and sticking together. Just imagining them saying to each other, boy, I can't wait for the Middle Ages to be over. Yeah, it's impossible. Because it is an invention which has maybe its strongest realization because, you know, the institutionally speaking, the universities gained much stronger during the period we normally considered the Renaissance period. So this was, institutionally speaking, the academies, the academies were a kind of an institutional alternative of learning. But the strong tradition was the continuation of the medieval tradition at the universities until the 18th century. Even the commending on Aristotle and following the usual traps and traces of dispute and comment. The break is much harder and maybe this is, since this is culturally more visual, is much stronger in the art world because here indeed we find the going back to the ancient models to late antiquity, an open break with the way how, for example, literary places were treated. The medieval cathedrals are not done on the on the plain grounds. They were always incorporating the predecessor part. So there are the built continuity, literary continuity, often with the pre-Christian period. And when we take, for example, places like Chartres and Saint-Denis, they were all built on pre-Christian grounds and they were incorporating even those sources, those starting poems, even the cathedral in Cologne. If you go to the excavations, a Roman house from the first century, a very, very, very early, very early place. Yeah, almost like medieval philosophy being built on Aristotle. Yes, yes. Or think of San Clemente, where you find an old Roman house and you find a mitros, a ritual place, and then the early Christian churches and so on. But when it comes to the renovation of Saint Peter, that is the most famous counterexample, the old basilica was turned down. It was totally erased. Nothing was left. And even Michelangelo wanted to switch the burial place of Saint Peter on aesthetic grounds because it was not due to the original plan of an ideal church. So normally, I'm not so in favor of all those epoch and split narratives, because they are, for example, with respect to philosophy, the power to exclude things. So they are the Middle Ages were invented a little bit to tell people and read Hegel, so you can forget about it. Don't read those stuff. It's boring. Yeah. Stupid sophistication of scholastic idiots. But if you're talking about the art world, we can see that something happens in the period we call the Renaissance, and that the way the approach to art and to the self understanding of art and what art represents changed pretty much in comparison with the medieval time. If I can take you back to something you were talking about earlier, which is this contrast between the idea of beauty as being represented in all of creation, and the much more specific idea of producing handmade artwork, something we would consider to be an artwork. Is there still not a connection in terms of the actual features of the artworks that were produced? Because I think a lot of people look at, for example, Saint Denis, and they see Neoplatonic metaphysics turned into stone, right? Because there's this light, there's symmetry, and is there truth to that? I think this is the wrong way to see it. It's the same, for example, there are articles, they try to connect the theories, the speculations of the school of charter to the building of the cathedral of charter. I think there is nothing you can connect to this. I think this is this Hegelian approach that you need an idea in the beginning, maybe that the very same person who is in charge of the building campaign must have this idea and that the concrete art is then the objectivation of this idea in concrete materiality and cultural contextualization. I think this is simply historically not true. Because if you do the archaeological groundwork, you see that it goes the way around. It starts from the conditions. And for example, if you consider the texts which were used in the working labs and the work surrounding the cathedral, those are not speculative texts. It's not speculative mathematics. Even now, an architect uses very concrete and practical things, applied geometry, applied arithmetics. In connection with this, if we find and I like very much the hermeneutics of Arthur Danto who asked what makes an artwork special. That is what he calls the transfiguration of the commonplace, of the daily things. Indeed, you can find this. Even the medieval people, they consider differences. They think about those configurations taking place. For example, let's take Saint Denis. We can see it in the writings of this famous Abbessouge and so far they are really telling. They tell us the ideas of a Benedictine monk, for example, attending day to day the preaching hours in the cathedral, watching them, the sunlight passing through. And even if you, I talked about this already, that for example, his writing on the consecration of the Abbessouge, so again, the name is telling, what he is doing is describing the consecration of the abbey according to the structure of the liturgy you can find in the ritual. And you see where light appears and what he tries to do. He tries to assemble. And if we know that at this time the church was not finished, it was just laid out and parts of them were finished. So he tries to give an imagination of what the church would look like if we follow the passage of the liturgy and follow him through this place, as is so to say, in performative art. And this is one example in which context we find even then also the theoretical ideas. They are much more, I call it applied theology, taking up reflections. They have to nail down, to break down, to poetry. There's a much closer connection between poetry, for example, and art, than to speculative philosophy or speculative theology. So this is our idea from the 19th, 20th century, that we need such a kind of speculative underpinning. But this is not the most proper way where you find the context for what I call the transfiguration of the commonplace in the Middle Ages. Right, well that seems to me to summarize something that's true of medieval philosophy or the medieval world in general, which is that although it doesn't always give us what we're looking for, it gives us things that are very interesting. Yeah, yeah. But this is, I think, a typical hermeneutical problem. So I'm fine with this. And then I came to meet and to cooperate with a fantastic art historian from America, Jan van der Molen, with whom I did the first research on this, even that we went to Saint-Denis and did the measurements, for the first time concrete measurements. And you see then that it's not all ideal and planned. It was, it's simply grown. It's grown, yeah, one upon the other. And then, this is like in nature, so there are then asymmetries and disrupts and problems, which we can never explain if this was done on a ground zero, ideal plan or map. But he told me, start and we will look. At the end, it was a great discovery for me, if you would then follow the object and follow the context, just, I think, those two things. But I think for me to understand that it was also theoretically a kind of an door opener or gate opener for me to look for more contemporary ideas of art. For example, let's see in the way of the object-trouve art, the art which, for example, Joseph Beuys, that you take again the point of view of this very wide concept of art, not this limited one, which is defined as fine arts by being part of a canon. But to break with those canonical interpretations, the understanding of art. This helped a lot to widen the horizon, where you have to look for, if you're looking for reflections on medieval aesthetics. You have just to go to the object and keep the classifications open. You can later try to do this. The first time is just broaden your perspective and also your understanding of what you are looking for. Stay and be surprised. This is, I think, quite a different approach than starting with a very clear concept, just looking for what you are looking for. You always find then what you're looking for. Like when you are doing an excavation, if you have a clear understanding, you will always interpret everything what you find in connection with your given, already given and fixed scheme. Right. Okay. Well, good advice to apply in the history of philosophy as well. For now, I'll thank Andreas Speer very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. And please join me next time as we continue to look at medieval philosophy, hopefully keeping in mind these broad horizons here on the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Frequently Asked Questions, Henry of Ghent. In recent episodes I've been trying to show how misleading it is to think of Thomas Aquinas as the definitive thinker of the late 13th century, never mind of medieval philosophy in general. Sure, he was original, brilliant, and in the long run very influential, but his staunch commitment to Aristotle made him idiosyncratic, if not quite as controversial as some colleagues at the Paris Arts Faculty. A figure who might better personify the intellectual climate in these decades would be Henry of Ghent. Of course, he's far less famous than Aquinas. I recently asked someone whether they'd ever heard of him and got the response, well, I've heard of Henry and I've heard of Ghent, but not Henry of Ghent. Yet he was a major figure in his time. Though he was born earlier than Aquinas, Henry's long stint as master of theology came after Aquinas' death in 1274, running from 1276 until just before Henry's death in 1293. For evidence of his standing as a leading and more mainstream intellectual, we need only recall the 1277 condemnations. Where Aquinas may have been one of the targets, Henry of Ghent was on the commission that drew up the list of banned teachings. With Henry, we also have a leading exponent of the format that dominated philosophical writings of the 13th century, the disputed question. His extensive writings are largely in this form, and have been gathered into one large theological treatise, called either his Summa or Questiones Ordinariae, and a series of fifteen further collections of questions on various issues, the quadlibita. In this sprawling body of work, Henry touches on all the contested issues of his day. He is often thought of as a champion of Augustine's ideas and cast as an Augustinian critic of Aquinas. But we won't understand Henry well if we think of him just as a foil for Aquinas. Henry too was an original and synthetic thinker, eager to draw on the authority of Augustine, but also of Aristotle, and any number of sources from the theological, philosophical, and legal traditions. And it was Henry, more than Aquinas, who would set the agenda for the last towering figure of late 13th century thought, John Duns Scotus. This despite the fact that, as Scotus himself complained, it can be hard to pin down Henry's ideas because he says different things in different places about the same topics. His views seem to have evolved over time, and the very form of his writings means that you can find Henry tackling pretty well any philosophical issue, but not so easily discern the coherence or thrust of his thought as a whole. Rather than forcing his varied and voluminous output into a simple framework, or choosing just one problem that he discusses, I'm going to touch on a whole range of questions addressed by Henry. This will incidentally give us a nice survey of some key philosophical issues as we get ready to turn to Scotus and then the very different context of the 14th century. So question 1. Henry was a theologian. Does that mean that he wasn't a philosopher? On this point, Henry agrees with Thomas Aquinas. Theology is a science and one with an intimate relationship with philosophy. Henry condemns the pursuit of the liberal arts or other rational sciences for their own sake as mere curiosity, but commends the use of philosophy towards a higher goal. This goal is, of course, God, who is ultimately pursued in practical sciences like ethics, because he is the highest good, and also in theoretical sciences like natural philosophy or metaphysics, because he is the ultimate cause of all things. Philosophy can thus be very useful as long as one has already accepted the truths of the Christian faith in advance. This is an important constraint, because philosophy on its own is liable to reach conclusions that would be overturned from the perspective of theology. One reason for this is that philosophers consider only what Henry calls proximate causes, which may be trumped by the ultimate cause that is God. He alludes several times to the example of Hezekiah, taken from the Bible. Hezekiah was on his deathbed and doctors and philosophers would have predicted his imminent demise by looking to the natural causes at play, but instead God chose to heal him. Thus, as Paul puts it in another book of the Bible, does God make foolish the wisdom of this world? Still, philosophy can help us understand religious doctrines more fully. As far as Henry is concerned, it is better to grasp something with certainty on the basis of reason than without certainty on the basis of faith. This may sound a bit surprising coming from a medieval theologian. Surely the truths of faith are as certain as it gets? Yes, of course, but, and this is less surprising coming from a medieval theologian, we need to make a distinction here. Unshakeable confidence through faith is possible, but given only to a lucky few. In themselves, religious truths, like God's having created the world or His having a Trinitarian nature are perfectly certain, but most believers are less than absolutely sure about them. So as Henry puts it, the certainty on the side of the believer may differ from the certainty of what is believed. This is a distinction we could apply to non-religious cases too. Imagine that you've worked out a complicated mathematical proof. Assuming the proof's conclusion is indeed true, it is in itself perfectly certain, but you, the mathematician, may still be unsure. You can't rule out that you made a mistake along the way. Much of what Henry has to say on these matters is in agreement with Aquinas. Like him, Henry situates theology within a system inspired by Aristotle in which higher sciences provide the principles for lower sciences, with theology all the way at the top. Henry is happy to claim agreement with the philosophers, insofar as they too make the study of God the highest science. This is part of what philosophers call metaphysics. We can even say that metaphysics is a first science because it studies primary concepts like being. Still, metaphysics is part of human philosophy, which studies things in themselves, whereas theology studies things in relation to their divine source. That makes theology, not metaphysics, the highest and most authoritative of all sciences. And here, Henry does disagree with Aquinas. Thomas had suggested that theology is subordinated to an even higher science, namely that of God himself. This proposal prompts a scathing response from Henry. He remarks that Aquinas apparently didn't understand what it means for one's science to be subordinate to another. Divine knowledge is not made up of discursive arguments that can provide premises to be used in the demonstrations of a lower science. So it is a crass mistake to integrate God's understanding of himself into the scientific hierarchy. Question 2. While we're on the subject, what is knowledge anyway? Here Henry had a choice to make. He could go for an Aristotelian model of knowledge according to which we use our senses to learn about the world around us and then abstract our concepts from these experiences. Or he could adopt a more Augustinian theory on which God illuminates the mind. Other 13th century thinkers had emphasized one of these two stories without entirely rejecting the other, Bonaventure highlighting the need for illumination, Aquinas the contribution of sensation. Characteristically, Henry goes for both. He describes our initial attempts to achieve knowledge along more or less Aristotelian lines. We form rough concepts in our minds on the basis of our sense experiences. The mind has some work to do here, constructing an abstract notion of, say, a giraffe on the basis of numerous encounters with giraffes. In some cases, we can immediately arrive at such a concept without having to depend on intuition, as with a fundamental idea like being, or thing. Either way, Henry calls the concept a mental word. This is going to be important in a more theological area of his thought, since he thinks that we can understand the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God, as the product of God's intellectual thinking. But of course, it also makes it easier to see how thoughts connect to language. When you utter a word, like giraffe, you are simply expressing the concept or mental word of giraffe that is in your mind. As we form mental words, we are of course trying to understand the nature of the things we are encountering, to grasp the very essence that makes something a giraffe. That isn't something we can achieve simply by forming a concept though. Since we are limited creatures, our ability to apprehend natures is also limited. Henry compares the initial concept we form to seeing a book in dim light, such that you can tell there are letters written there, but not what they say. How then can we see things in, so to speak, the full light of day? This is the cue for Henry to turn to the second option, the Augustinian Illumination Theory. The human mind can achieve certain understanding of true essences with help from God. But Henry doesn't think that God simply sends the essence into your mind the way that Avicenna's active intellect emanates forms into the human soul, like Star Trek characters beaming down from a spaceship onto a planet. Instead, Henry dares to boldly go where someone had already gone before, Plato. He asserts that true knowledge can be had only in the light of perfect exemplars, which reside with God after he created them as models for the things we find around us in the physical universe. These exemplars are the very natures and essences of the things. By aligning our initial concepts with them, we can avoid all error and guarantee a successful end to the scientific enterprise. Question 3. What was that thing you just said about having an immediate grasp of the concept of being? Here we have to mention Avicenna again. A signature doctrine found in his writings has to do with the core notions of metaphysics, the so-called transcendentals, which are those features that belong to absolutely everything, like unity, truth, and of course, being. Avicenna thought that the idea of being, or of a thing, is so basic that we cannot be extracting it from our experiences of the world. Rather, it is known primarily, or immediately. Henry agrees and seizes the chance to forge another link between philosophy and theology. Since God is the highest being, and the source of all being, we are already, in the dim, imperfect way possible for us with our natural resources, grasping God as soon as we get hold of this primary concept. The vague understanding of being that is immediately available to us mirrors the transcendent being of God, which is indeterminate not because it is vague, but because it is infinite. Of course, this doesn't mean that all humans are aware of an innate knowledge of God that they've had since childhood. It takes a lot of philosophy to see that our idea of being, which is so fundamental that we usually don't even articulate it to ourselves, is in some way a crude intuition of the divine. Question 4. This has all been pretty abstract and metaphysical so far. Does Henry have anything to say about more concrete issues, for instance in ethics? Well, Henry has something to say about almost everything, so the answer is definitely yes. My favorite example is his discussion of whether it is morally permissible for a condemned prisoner to escape in order to save his own life. Let's suppose that Mr. Spock has been court-martialed by Starfleet command for some crime, like beaming onto a planet together with several anonymous red-shirted crew members when he ought to know from experience that those guys always get killed. Spock is in the brig awaiting his execution, but he sees a chance to escape. Is he entitled to run away? Listeners who find this example too frivolous are invited to go read Plato's dialogue Crito instead since it presents the same scenario with Socrates in the condemned prisoner role. Henry says that Spock should go right ahead and escape. He appeals to the natural law, according to which every human has the right, and even the responsibility, to maintain the link between soul and body. This is not to say that the judge who condemned the man was acting unjustly, since the judge does have the right to put him to death, but it is to say that the criminal retains an inalienable right for self-preservation. For the same reason, Henry says it is morally acceptable to steal food if the alternative is starvation. On the other hand, it's not that anything goes when you are trying to save your own life. Since the judge, or the state, owns things like the prison cell's bars and the shackles, the prisoner would transgress if he destroyed these things in a bid for freedom. Needless to say, it would also be wrong to injure or kill the guards. Still, Mr. Spock can escape with a clear conscience if he is left unattended and can just walk out without doing any damage, something Henry compares to the fact that you're allowed to stroll through someone else's field if no one has bothered to put a fence around it. Question 5. What is the relationship between the intellect and the will? I'm so glad you asked, because with this final question, we come to a pivotal contribution by Henry and one that paves the way for Duns Scotus's more famous treatment of human freedom. The issue has been a recurring one throughout the medieval period, with early figures like Ariugina and Anselm wondering how humans can be free if they need God's grace to avoid sin, and Peter Abelard locating moral responsibility in human intention because intention is something over which we have free control. In the late 13th century, the issue is much more focused on two powers within the soul, the intellect and the will. There is a division of labour here. Intellect is tasked with determining the best thing to do in any given situation, and on this basis will forms a volition to act. Henry says that this makes will superior to intellect, since the intellect has only an advisory capacity, whereas will has the executive function. He thus compares the intellect to a servant who goes before a master bearing a lamp to help the master see. But there's an obvious problem here. If the intellect tells the will what it ought to do, and the will always chooses accordingly, then how is the will free? It seems to be constrained, not by God's grace or any other external factor, but by the rational processes going on in the intellect. Suppose Mr. Spock is deciding whether to escape from prison. As it happens, he's read Henry of Ghent's disputed question and agrees with Henry's reasoning. He duly concludes that it would be right for him to escape. Since he now thinks that, all things considered, this is the best thing to do, all that remains for his will to do is ratify that belief by deciding to act upon it. In other words, it would just rubber stamp the decision already made by intellect and set action in motion. That way of looking at things could be called rationalist or intellectualist. Aristotle gave medieval authors a big push in this intellectualist direction since he depicts human choices as the outcome of practical reasoning. Aquinas is often seen as taking Aristotle's lead. He of course insists that the will is free, yet it seems that for him the will cannot act directly against the intellect. What it can do is influence the intellect, for instance by instructing it to direct its attention to certain considerations rather than others, an all too familiar phenomenon, as when you rationalize about why it would be a great idea to watch Star Trek instead of reading some Henry of Ghent. I really ought to relax first, or it will provide me with good examples to use when I explain Henry's ideas later on. For Aquinas, freedom really belongs to intellect and will together, which act in concert to discern and choose whatever seems good. For Henry, this underestimates the power of the will. For when the will chooses, it is moving itself, not being moved to choose by the intellect. It treats the outcome of rational deliberation in the intellect as a proposal, and is always free to reject intellect's advice. This must be so, because if intellect could actually bring the will to move, it would render the will unfree. It may seem that Henry has gone too far here. Why bother deliberating at all if the will is just going to ignore the conclusion you reach? His answer takes the form of a metaphor. The counsel of the intellect creates a kind of weight in the will, meaning a propensity to do one thing rather than another. This weight disposes the will to make a certain choice, but without constraining it so that it must make that choice. This may seem rather unsatisfactory. It seems that Henry makes freedom consist in the will's capacity to defy good advice from intellect. This would be rather ironic, since Henry agrees with Anselm that humans have been given freedom for a very specific purpose, namely so that we can choose what is good. Really, Henry just wants to ensure that when the will does choose rightly, it is choosing freely. If it only ever has one option, the one recommended by the intellect, then it would not be free. This availability of multiple options is going to be a key issue for Scodas too. The two of them are laying the seeds of Voluntarism, which is going to be a striking feature of philosophy in the 14th century. Question 6. What will the next couple of episodes be about? It's just about time for us to move on to Scodas, who took much from Henry while frequently opposing his teachings. But Henry really deserves a bit more attention from us and he's going to get it in the shape of two more episodes. One will be an interview with a leading expert on his thought, Martin Picave, who will be joining me next time to look more deeply into this central issue of Henry's thought, his so-called Voluntarism, and his understanding of the will. After that, I want to do something that would probably win approval from Henry himself. In this episode, and in fact in the whole series of episodes on medieval philosophy, we've been looking for the philosophical ideas in authors like Henry who thought of themselves primarily as theologians. I want to put this approach to the ultimate test by considering a couple of explicitly theological issues. We'll see how thinkers like Aquinas, Henry, and Scodas applied philosophical tools even in this sort of context, drawing fine distinctions, offering rational arguments, and alluding to Aristotle as they clashed over church doctrines. One could choose many issues to illustrate this, but my intellect has decided to focus on the Trinity and the Eucharist, and in this case, my will went along with the idea. So it is, if you will, indisputable that you should tune in for the next couple of episodes here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Martin Picave, who is Professor of Philosophy and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and we're going to be talking about one of his particular areas of interest in his research, Henry of Ghent. Hi, Martin. Thanks for coming on. Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me here. Henry of Ghent is known to specialists of medieval philosophy, at least for several things, and I think probably the thing he's most known for is that he's an early example of voluntarism. And I thought maybe we could start there. Can you say a little bit about what you understand by the term voluntarism and why we might think that Henry is an example of a voluntarist? Yes, the term voluntarism is often used in two ways. In the first way, it means someone who thinks that in one way or another, the will is what makes us properly human, is kind of the highest human faculty. And if that's the idea of voluntarism, then I think it's fairly clear that Henry of Ghent, like many others, is a voluntarist because he repeatedly says that the will is the highest power of the human soul. It's higher than the intellect, for example. And yeah, I think that's a clear cut case. There's another use of the term voluntarism, and there it is supposed to indicate that voluntarists have a specific view about human freedom. And there it's a bit more difficult to see what voluntarism would actually mean. I take it that in this respect, voluntarism is often used as a term that is supposed to equal the term libertarianism, i.e. the idea that freedom requires indeterminacy, that if everything in the world is causally determined, there wouldn't be any freedom. And in this sense, I think the term voluntarism is sort of misleading, because there are a lot of philosophers in the medieval period who are, in this sense, libertarians. They don't think that our actions are causally determined or they can't be causally determined. Otherwise, there wouldn't be anything like merit and raise and blame. But it's less clear that Henry is a voluntarist in that sense. In fact, I guess some people who we would call intellectualists are libertarians, in the sense you just described. Aquinas, for example, is sort of the example of an intellectualist that people always mention. But he doesn't think that free choice is compatible with being causally determined, does he? Absolutely, I agree with you. Okay. Now, this view you've just described under the heading of libertarianism, the second sense of voluntarism, is one that I associate with Duns Scotus, who I'll be covering soon in the podcast and is going to be coming up a lot over the episodes to come. Now, Scotus does think that free will presupposes the presence of alternative possibilities. And this, I think, is very plausible to us. I mean, if I imagine that I'm choosing freely, then it seems that I'm almost forced to imagine that I'm choosing between several alternatives. I might be choosing something as trivial as which flavor of ice cream to order or something as important as what career to pursue. But the thought would be that if there isn't more than one thing I can do, then I'm not choosing freely, even if it's only, shall I do this or not? So I had at least two alternatives, either do it or not. So how can Henry be such a staunch supporter of voluntarism in this first sense and the free will in general, if he isn't following this idea that there have to be alternative possibilities? Yeah, so the idea that freedom involves a power to do otherwise, a robust power to do otherwise, is interestingly strikingly absent from many authors before Scotus. I mean, I think you covered Anselm of Canterbury in one of your previous episodes. And there, when Anselm discusses the nature of freedom, he talks about the power to sin, not to sin. And he thinks that freedom is not the power to sin or not to sin. It's how to preserve the rectitude of the world for the sake of rectitude. So even in this very early account of freedom, you find the power to otherwise interestingly absent. And the same is true for the late 13th century, for the period of Henry of Ghent. Henry does not think that human freedom consists of having a power to do otherwise, or that freedom in general consists of a power to do otherwise. And he has various reasons for that. And some of them are theological, some of them are more philosophical. So there are a couple of theological reasons why he thinks that freedom cannot consist in a power to do otherwise. Maybe the most obscure has to do with the Trinity, namely that there's this idea that the production of the Holy Spirit from the Father is both necessary and a free act. It's necessary, of course, because the Trinity is necessarily three persons, but it's also supposed to be a free act. So here we get something that is both free and necessary. There is no, God couldn't have just chosen not to generate the Holy Spirit. That's, I said, the most obscure case, maybe, but there are others less obscure. So, in the order of obscurity, the second one would be the following scenario. There's this idea among theologians in that period that at the end of the day, the blessed see God face to face. And of course, this is supposed to be the ultimate act of human happiness. It's hard to imagine this is an unfree act. So, it's supposed to be a free act. We see God face to face, and we love God in this instance. But again, there's no way the agent could decide, oh, well, I'm not going to do this. I want to rather watch television. You're beholding the divine essence, and you think, nah, that's not for me. That's impossible. So again, there's a scenario of an act that is both free, but it doesn't involve a power to do otherwise. But we can also make this idea, I think, plausible to us if we think just in general about freedom. And I think everyone would agree that freedom is kind of a perfection. It is something that we all find a good thing. That's why I said it's a perfection. Now, is a power to do otherwise in the light of seeing or thinking about something as good to pursue, would it be a perfection to have a power not to follow the command of reason? I think this is maybe the philosophical reason why Henry thinks the alternative possibilities is not part of the essence of freedom. But I should modify this because Henry actually makes a distinction. He makes a distinction between freedom, libertas, and libem abiturium. So, Henry thinks that the proponents, in his time, more imaginative proponents of the idea that freedom involves a power to do otherwise have a point. But what they should rather say is that we have a power to do otherwise only with respect to means towards an end. When I think about what I ought to make for dinner tonight, and so in this sense, I have a robust power to do otherwise, but I don't have a power to do otherwise in some other aspects and other respects. Freedom ultimately does not involve a power to do otherwise. Okay. Well, so if he rejects this notion that freedom is the power to do otherwise, does he replace it or challenge it with a different positive account of what freedom is? Yeah. So, that's in a way the trouble that these voluntarists are in. They have to explain two things. They have to explain in what sense the will is free. And then they have to explain also how it follows from this that we have a power otherwise with respect to some objects or some actions, i.e., for example, actions that are directed at means towards an end. Henry ultimately thinks that to act freely is just to be able to act with pleasure and in a quasi- choosing way. Quasi-iligitator is his term there. So, it's very hard to understand what that's supposed to mean. And authors writing after Henry and taking issue with Henry's view have a hard time to kind of spell this out. But I think the easiest way to think about this is that he tries to grapple with a notion of spontaneity. He thinks that free agents are agents that bring about their actions in a spontaneous way. And I think that's captured in this phrase quasi-iligitator because, of course, in election or in choice, this is one way of exercising this spontaneity. But there's a more fundamental one to which he only gives the circumscription, i.e., quasi-choosing. That sounds to me like the notion that the agent is just moving him or herself. Is that the idea? I mean, this is all about the will, presumably, so hence voluntarism, right? Will is voluntus in Latin. Is the idea then that the will is a power for self-motion and that that's what makes us free? Exactly. So, Henry's account of freedom is underpinned by an attempt to explain how the will is a self-mover. Okay, but then the reason I asked is that this, to me, is a potential worry because if we know our Aristotle, which Henry certainly did, probably better than either you or I do even, even though we both have read our fair share of Aristotle, there is a refutation of the notion of self-motion in Aristotle, which basically says, to greatly oversimplify, that if you have a case of something that looks like self-motion, actually you can always analyze it into one aspect that's doing the moving and another aspect that's doing the being moved. There's an active part and a passive part. Hence, if Henry really wants us to believe that the will is a power for self-motion, it looks like he has to somehow reject Aristotle's proof that self-motion is impossible. Yes, so Henry knows about this objection. It's actually an objection that has been raised to him by his contemporaries, among others, by Gottfried Fontaine, who's kind of one of the main rivals of Henry in the late 1280s. And Henry gives a very verbose reply, as he often does, to this problem. And basically, the solution gives us to say, well, yes, the potency axiom that you just referred to applies, and it entails that everything that is moving itself is divided into parts, but it does not apply in the same sense to immaterial things like the will. But still, in one way, you might say, Henry just restricts the Aristotelian thought to material objects. But in another way, he goes along with it and he says, well, yes, so even in the will, we can make a distinction between the moving aspect of the will and the will as a moved thing. So, this is just an intentional distinction. That's kind of one of his inventions that he also applies to other things. He thinks there's not a real distinction between the will as a mover and the will as moved. But there are these two aspects in the will, which is a simple psychological power. Okay. Is he presenting that as an explanation of what Aristotle really meant? Or is he presenting that as a correction to Aristotle's argument? As a correction to Aristotle. Oh, okay. That's interesting. Actually, I have to say, I find that pretty convincing, in particular, because in the medieval period and already in late antiquity, you very often have the idea that immaterial things are capable of grasping themselves cognitively, or maybe knowing themselves or being aware of themselves in a way that bodies wouldn't be capable of. So, this kind of self-reversion, as late antique Platonists put it, or self-awareness is something I actually had another interview about with Therese Corry a few episodes back. So, insofar as there's a kind of parallel between the act of self-grasping or self-awareness and the act of self-moving, I think actually Henry's on pretty solid ground there. Yeah, yeah. And he also quotes ancient sources. Remember, well, one of the key Latin texts, at least, for the Platonic idea of self-motion is Macrobius' commentary on the Summium Scipiones, where you get kind of a criticism of the Aristotelian, quotation mark, prohibition of self-motion. Okay. I think, though, that there's another possible objection that one could bring against him, if he really means by freedom spontaneity. And this is a kind of objection that you often hear in contemporary debates about free will that's directed against modern-day libertarians, which is that, since the libertarian is denying that pre-existing desires, beliefs, attitudes, and so on will necessarily give rise to an action or a choice, it must be that the action or choice is, to some extent, random, because there's all your attitudes and beliefs and desires, and then on the basis of that, you still have to make a further decision, and you can still choose either way. So your choices are not somehow fully grounded in the beliefs and desires that you find yourself with. Rather, there's this extra thing, and the extra thing, really, by definition, has to be something that you're not making just because of some belief or desire, because the belief or desire doesn't cause it to happen. So why wouldn't the choice ultimately just be a kind of random or arbitrary act, rather than something that's grounded in the reasons we have for doing things? Yeah, so Henry's account of how the will moves itself to action, of course, does not entail that we don't act on account of reasons. He is fairly on board with this idea. It would be crazy to reject that, because human beings, it's part of our human nature that we think about what we ought to do, and then we act on the reasons with which we come up. So he definitely doesn't want to destroy that connection. But of course, as you rightly point out, he has a problem. If you don't make action and volition, kind of the effect of reasons and beliefs and desires, then you seem to have a kind of disconnect, a problematic disconnect. So Henry has a complicated theory about in what way reasons contribute to action and to the forming of volitions. And the key idea here is that reasons and everything that comes from the intellect basically provides a causa sine qua non, so a necessary cause for action. The idea is that reasons or cognition or anything on the cognitive side of the soul doesn't kind of impress itself on the will and make the will move in a certain way. But it kind of provides a condition under which the will can pick this or pick that or move itself to action. The notion of causa sine qua non or necessary cause is very vague. Let me give you an example how to think about this. He's not the only one who uses this notion in this period. The idea is, for example, this. Imagine you have a pot of water on a hot stove. Now, you might think about the action of the activity of the hot stove in two ways. So, first, there's an activity, the stove is hot. But there's also a second kind of activity that's related to the heat of the stove, that is, it is heating. So the stove couldn't heat if there isn't anything around that is heatable, like the water in the stove. In the same way, he thinks about volitions and the connection between volitions and reasons. So, of course, I can only pick the pizza in the shop over the mac and cheese if I have a thought about the one or the other. But it's not that the thought itself makes the will or causes the will to choose the one or the other in any robust sense of causing. It's just there, provides an occasion for the will to choose one or the other. Does that just boil down to what modern day philosophers mean when they talk about the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions? The belief that macaroni and cheese taste good is a necessary condition for choosing to eat it, but it's a sufficient condition? Yes. Okay. That sounds like a pretty good answer, I guess. And I suppose that that connects to what we were talking about at the very beginning, which is that he's called a voluntarist. You mentioned that he thinks that the will is the highest power of the soul. And it's not immediately clear what highest means there. But I suppose that at least part of what it means is that the lower powers, in this case, the intellect, can only kind of create the conditions for the will to engage itself in a certain way and move itself, as we were just talking about. But the lower powers can't necessitate it. And they also aren't sufficient reasons. And what that means is that just judging that macaroni and cheese is delicious would never be enough to make you choose it. Yes, absolutely. So in this sense, we could say, yeah, he's a voluntarist because he thinks that the will has a certain form of command or mastery that cannot be pushed around by reasons or desires or beliefs. Okay. Does that really boil down to the thought that the will can trump reason or override it? I mean, let's imagine a case where you have very, very good reasons for doing something, and you just decide, well, I'm not going to do this anyway. That sort of willfully rejects the very good reasons that I have for doing it and kind of perversely decide not to do it. Is that the kind of thing that convinces him that the will is superior to the intellect? Yes, definitely thinks that the will can control thought and can override thought. But in my view, when he talks about how the will can go against reasons, these texts are interestingly underdeveloped, I think, because if you take on one side seriously what he says, that the will needs reason to act, namely as a necessary cause, not as a sufficient cause, that seems to entail that it is impossible for the will to act against any reason. So that there has to be, even for the, even if the, let's say, imagine reason tells you, you should really do action x, y, z. And so, in order for the will then to go against this, the will seems to have to have another reason. That's why you gave us the example of choosing between two different things for dinner. So the idea is I have reasons to choose both, but then it somehow remains up to the will to decide which reasons it will find more compelling on this occasion. It seems to me like something an intellectualist could say here, though, is that when you're choosing between two things, actually what you're doing is choosing between two reasons. And in fact, what must happen is that you find one reason more compelling than another. And the key word here would be compelling. The intellect judges that actually my reasons for doing one thing, so eating macaroni and cheese on this occasion, are more compelling than my reasons for eating something else on this occasion. Hence, the voluntarists are wrong, because in the end, even though it's true that you have different reasons for doing different things and that you choose one rather than the other, what makes the difference in choosing isn't some kind of self-motion of the will. It's rather which reasons turn out to be found most compelling. Yes. So I think, obviously, Henry thinks the will can go against what appears the stronger reason, so can direct itself towards something that appears at first as the lesser option. But I think to understand how the will can go against reason, in this case, not to understand that it's important to keep in mind that we should not think about reasons for acting in an atomistic sense, that they are the situations where we just, they're just these two reasons. We should think about them as connected with a whole bunch of other things around them. That, for example, when I wonder whether I should go to church on the weekend, or whatnot, there are whole other things that things I might find that pleasant and good for other reasons, that in the vicinity that on which I'm not focused, when I think of this one thing as it's reasonable to choose this. And because there are all these other things in the vicinity, and there are descriptions under which they're good, and even descriptions under which they're better than the thing that appears to me first as the obvious best choice, maybe because they may be more pleasurable, or so they're more pleasurable in sense of providing more sense for pleasure, and so on, the will can move towards these things. And of course, by endorsing something else, the will will emphasize the aspect under which the other thing is the most choice-worthy. I see. The reason the will is the top dog, so to speak, is that it actually decides which messages from the intellect to pay most attention to, and thus to find more compelling on this occasion. Exactly. And this is the model here is less worked out in Henry of Ghent, I think. It's more worked out in Scotus, who actually has a very sophisticated theory of how the will can direct itself. He thinks about the area of reasons in the same way as we think with the visual field. I mean, if I look at your books right now, I look at one book, I can move my gaze because there are all these other things in my visual field. And he thinks the same way when the intellect thinks about what we ought to do. There's not just one thing the intellect focuses on, but there are all these other things in the thinking sphere, so to say, to which the will can direct itself. Okay. Actually, it's interesting that you mentioned Scotus there, because I wanted to end anyway by asking you about their relative influence later on. They're both well known for being voluntarists. Scotus is a more famous name in general, and I know that Henry is, in general, actually a very influential figure in the 14th century. He's a scholastic philosopher to whom later scholastics constantly refer, I think even more than they refer to Aquinas, for example. And so, back then he was a name to conjure with in a way that he isn't now. But to what extent is he perceived as the key thinker in voluntarism by later voluntarists? Do they think that once Scotus comes along, it's clear that Scotus has made a big jump forward in terms of how to present a voluntarist theory of the will? Or do they go back to Henry? Yeah, that's quite interesting. So, the modern historiography of philosophy, of medieval philosophy, always thinks that kind of Scotus overcame all these problems of the previous generations and is the voluntarist par excellence that then kind of developed some modern or more modern understanding of freedom and contingency. But in the medieval period, that was definitely not the case. So, people after Scotus had terrible problems to understand the idea that freedom was about it otherwise, for the various reasons I mentioned earlier in the interview, for these theological reasons. So, there are a lot of people after Scotus in the early 14th century who kind of tried to defend a more Henrician version, I tried to understand how we could understand freedom as an ability to act with pleasure and in a quasi-choosing way. So, he's by no way in the view of the people in the early 14th century kind of superseded by Scotus. I'm glad you answered that question because, among other things, we've just learned the new word Henrician, which is officially my new favorite word. Things that Henry of Ghent might say, and in fact, next time I'm going to still be in the realm of the Henrician, because I'm going to be looking at the views that Henry of Ghent and other scholastics of the late 13th century put forward on this question of the Trinity, which came up a couple of times in this interview. For now, I'll thank Martin Picave very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. And please join me next time to find out what might be philosophically interesting about theological debates over the Trinity at the end of the 13th century here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode – Here Comes the Sun – The Trinity and the Eucharist. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass contains a scene in which Alice, in discussion with the White Queen, says that she cannot believe impossible things. The Queen responds, I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. That's why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. From which you might infer that the White Queen would have felt quite at home in the Middle Ages, and not just because she was royalty. Medieval philosophy is notoriously intertwined with Christian theology, and some Christian doctrines may seem to involve embracing the impossible. In modern times, philosophers have sometimes taken this to be a great virtue. Søren Kierkegaard put the notion of the absurd at the center of Christianity, arguing that we should not, and indeed cannot, rationally accept the idea of God's incarnation as a human – it can be believed only by faith. The medievals were far more inclined to think that reason goes hand in hand with faith. By this stage, I've hopefully managed to disabuse you of any notion that medieval thinkers spent all their time thinking of nothing but faith, ignoring the deliverances of natural reason. We've also seen that, when they did think about theology, they often took a highly rationalist approach. In this episode, we're going to look at issues that posed a particularly stern test for that approach. We won't live up to the example set by the White Queen – I, for my part, have already had breakfast – and we will be trying to wrap our minds around only two apparently impossible beliefs. These are the Trinity, that is, the doctrine that God is one and simple, yet three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and the Eucharist, that is, the doctrine that bread and wine can turn into the body and blood of Christ. However hard these things may be to believe, medieval thinkers insisted that they are not, in fact, impossible. Men like Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus pushed reasoning to its limits in order to show that the Trinity and Eucharist are indeed possible and even, to a large extent, rationally comprehensible. This project led them to investigate topics of more general interest, like philosophy of mind, the metaphysical status of relations, and the connection between substances and their properties. Of course, Christian thinkers had been using philosophy to grapple with these matters since long before the late 13th century. We mentioned a while back that in the 11th century, a bitter dispute erupted in which Lanfranc of Beck attacked Berengar of Tours for holding that the Eucharist is merely symbolic in character and that in the 12th century, Abelard and others convinced themselves that pagan philosophers like Plato had managed to understand the Trinity. These discussions lived on in the memory of later medieval thinkers. Aquinas actually refers to Berengar's position as a heresy in his Summa Theologiae. But when it came to the Trinity, they took their cue above all from an even earlier author, Augustine. In his work entitled On the Trinity, he suggested that we can glimpse something of God's Trinitarian nature in the workings of our own minds. When we think about something, there is a three-way relationship between the object of our thought, the act of thinking about that object, and the will, or as Augustine puts it, love of the mind by which it directs its thinking towards that object. Yet the mind remains, despite this complex inner structure, a single immaterial entity. This is an image of the way that God can be simple, yet a trinity of persons. This theory had great appeal for the medievals. Could it be found in authoritative Church Father? Did it offer the opportunity for subtle exploration of the human soul? Did it show how philosophical reasoning could support a central dogma of the Church? The answer was like the endgame in a chess match, check, check, and check again. We duly find Aquinas and Henry of Ghent presenting and refining Augustine's account, applying the theory of mind that was current in their own day. The Latin translations of Aristotle and Arabic philosophical works encouraged 13th century thinkers to adopt what we might call a faculty-based psychology. By this I mean not that the Scholastics worked in the arts and theology faculties, though that's also true, but that they thought about the soul in terms of a range of powers, or faculties. In this case, the relevant faculties were the intellect and the will, which were associated respectively with the begetting of the Son and the production of the Holy Spirit, called spiration. As Aquinas explains, the relation between the Father and Son is one of intellectual understanding. The second person of the Trinity is begotten when God grasps Himself intellectually. In general, when the mind understands something it forms a word, which may actually be verbally uttered but may just remain in the intellect, what Aquinas calls an interior word. This is pretty handy, since in the Bible the book of John speaks of a logos, or word, who is God's Son incarnated as Christ. But God will not be just two persons, He will be three. This is because will is distinct from intellect, or to put it another way, because loving something is distinct from understanding it. Since God does love Himself, as well He should since He is the highest good and thus the most lovable thing, we have a further act which is associated with the production of the Holy Spirit. And by the way, the Holy Spirit is produced by an act of will that involves mutual love between the Father and the Son. This point was made already in the 12th century by Hugh of St. Victor. Now it is emphasized by Henry of Ghent as a way to refute the theory of the Byzantine Greek theologians who had the Spirit proceeding from the Father alone. In applying this psychological analysis, Aquinas and Henry need to steer between two heresies, namely Arianism and Sibelionism. Arius held that God is three substances and not only one, while Sibelius denied real plurality among the persons. Against Arius, we can say that God is truly one, because even in humans, never mind God, there is no difference in substance between intellect and will. And against Sibelius, we can say that God is truly three, because there is obviously a difference, what Aquinas calls an opposition, between the intellect and what it understands, or the will and what it loves. In this respect, the persons have a genuine multiplicity unlike God's other attributes. There is no opposition between, say, God's power and His wisdom, but there is a difference between Father and Son, because the Father begets while the Son is begotten. Furthermore, the act of intellect must accompany and precede the will. You have to understand something before you can direct your will towards it. Even if I effortlessly and inevitably desire amanquasants as soon as I think about them, the two acts are different, and my thinking about them is presupposed by my desiring them. This is why there is an order of precession among the persons, even if the persons remain one in substance and therefore equal to one another. At the core of this philosophical explanation of the Trinity is the idea of a relation, which is reasonable enough. Still today, when philosophers want to talk about relations, they're apt to give the example of the relation of paternity that holds between a father and a son. In late antiquity, Boethius had already proposed understanding the Trinity using Aristotle's ideas about relation. But do we want to go so far as to say that the Trinitarian persons just are relations? Well, if we're Aquinas, then that's exactly what we want to do. In created things, relations are accidents that belong to the things that enter into the relation. Consider, if you will, the Marx brothers. Harpo is Groucho's brother, but Harpo is not the same thing as a relation of brotherhood. In God though, things are different. According to Aquinas, when we talk about God the Father having a relation of paternity to God the Son, we are not talking about an accidental property that belongs to God, the way Harpo's brotherhood belongs to Him accidentally. Rather, the relation of paternity just is God, or the divine essence. This is what it means when Christian theologians talk of the Trinitarian persons as hypostases in God, that they refer to relations in the mode of substance. Some thinkers of the next generations followed Aquinas's basic line of thought without necessarily following him on every detail. These included Giles of Rome and Godfrey of Fontaines. But others, including Henry of Ghent and Franciscans like Duns Scotus, found themselves doubting Thomas. These critics were more than happy to make use of the psychological analysis of the Trinity based on God's acts of intellect and will, but they found it incoherent to say that the Trinitarian persons are nothing more than the relations that arise from God's self-understanding and self-love. Instead, they saw the persons as having more fundamental properties that underlie those relations. The Father is distinguished by His primacy as the divine person who is unbekotten and ungenerated. Aquinas alludes to this proposal, it was already put forward by his contemporary Bonaventure. But Aquinas rejects it on the basis that it is a purely negative way of characterizing the Father. This would be like saying there is nothing more to being tall than not being short. Aquinas's rivals, though, were not short of objections they could press against his theory. Scotus pointed out that relations presuppose the things that enter into the relations. Conceptually speaking, there must in some sense be a Father and Son before the Father can be related to the Son, just as I cannot be taller than you unless you and I both first exist, and even then, given my stature, it's rather unlikely. Henry of Ghent, meanwhile, complained that a relation has no reality over and above the thing that enters into the relation. Rather, it just means that we are considering one thing in respect of another. Harpo's relation of brotherhood to Groucho is not another real thing in addition to Harpo. It's Harpo who is real, and we say he is a brother simply because we are considering him in respect of Groucho. If this is right, then Aquinas's view could collapse into Sibelionism. If the persons are only relations, and relations are nothing real, then Aquinas is failing to distinguish the persons from one another at all. On the other hand, there was also a danger in distinguishing the persons from one another too sharply and straying instead into the Arian heresy. The goal then is to show that the distinction of persons is not just a matter of our point of view, a merely notional distinction like that between Harpo and Groucho's brother, without saying that the persons are entirely separate things like Harpo and Groucho are. It was in part to solve this difficulty that Scodis introduced what he called a formal distinction. His idea is that we sometimes make a distinction within a single thing, where the contrast is genuinely grounded in features or aspects of the thing itself. The two aspects are always found together, but have different definitions and can be imagined as appearing in isolation from one another, even though they never do. We might say that one thing is formally distinct from another if it is not separate, but separable in principle. What would be an example of this? Scodis mentions several cases, one of which is the difference between intellect and will. Though they have different functions, they are simply faculties or operations of one and the same soul, so we don't have two separate things here, and will is never found without intellect or vice versa since every intellectual being is also capable of voluntary choice, but we could in theory imagine an intellectual being that has no power of will. Of course, it's no coincidence that the intellect and will are precisely the powers mentioned in the psychological account of the Trinity, and of course, the persons of the Trinity too are formally distinct. This is a particularly clear case where theological speculation spurred philosophical ingenuity. The same thing happened in debates over our second theological topic, the Eucharist. As with the Trinity, one could easily risk courting heresy by offering philosophical explanations of the Eucharist, but our schoolmen didn't let that stop them. They eagerly tried to explain how exactly wine and bread can really, and not just symbolically as Berengar had claimed, become the blood and body of Christ. Clearly, this is a miraculous event, and not one detectable to the senses. The host still looks like bread after it is changed to the body of Christ. So we know about it not through natural reason, but through Scripture. At Luke 22 19, Christ breaks bread and hands it to his disciples saying, This is my body which is given for you. Once you assume by faith that this transformation really happens, philosophical puzzles arise, and this is where reason comes in. Actually, there are far too many puzzles for me to discuss here. How can the body of Christ be in more than one place at a time, for instance? How can it be in a place that is too small for it? What happens when consecrated wine goes bad and turns to vinegar, or consecrated bread goes moldy? All these questions and more were debated by the scholastics. But I want to focus on the most fundamental problem, which is the nature of the change involved in the Eucharist. If you're like I was before I read up on this, you probably think there is a standard view that would have been held by all medieval thinkers summed up by the word transubstantiation. As the word implies, in Eucharistic change, the entirety of one substance is replaced by the entirety of another substance. If that's what you think, then you'll be as surprised as I was to learn that the word transubstantiation seems to have come into Latin discussions of the Eucharist only in the middle of the 12th century, and that the substance-to-substance conception of the change was very controversial. Like several other controversial theses, this one was held by none other than Thomas Aquinas. He argued forcefully that it is not enough for the host's matter to be preserved and gain nothing more than a new form, as some other theologians claimed. This is what happens in natural change. Transubstantiation is something more miraculous, made possible only by divine power. Both the matter and the form of bread are transmuted into the matter and form of the body of Christ, not annihilated and replaced, but really transformed. We can draw a rough parallel here to Aquinas' ideas about the Trinity. In that case, he proposed that in God, relations can be identical to an essence rather than additional to it. Now he proposes that we can have one whole substance becoming another, and that this can be a real change, even though nothing persists, not even prime matter. In neither case could we know that this is true through philosophy, but in both cases we can use philosophy to say rigorously what is happening and show that it is not impossible. Also as with the Trinity, Aquinas' view did not garner unanimous support. Giles of Rome, usually rather close to Aquinas' approach, diverged from him on this issue. He said that matter is in its essence preserved through the change, even if no particular portion of matter survives from the bread to the body. Scodas was even more critical. He argued that the body of Christ, which is in heaven, having ascended to the Father, simply acquires a new external relation by which it becomes present on the altar. This is a strange kind of presence, in which the parts of what is present are not in the different parts of the place where it is present. It's not that Christ's foot is pointing towards one end of the altar and his head pointing it to the other end. Instead, the whole of the body is present to every part of the place on the altar. Of course, there's another far simpler question we might have about Eucharistic change. How is it that the features of the bread survive even when the bread does not, since it has, in whatever way, become the body of Christ? It still looks and tastes like bread, not like human flesh. Here, Aquinas makes another bold proposal, namely that accidents can survive in the absence of the substances to which they belong. Of course, this doesn't usually happen. Harpo's sense of humor, his tendency to chase skirts, and his relation of brotherhood to Groucho all perished along with him when he died. But again, that is the natural way of things. Once God is involved, the survival of accidents on their own is indeed possible. In fact, we can even see rationally that this is possible. God is capable of creating the flavor of bread indirectly by creating bread and allowing the bread to sustain the accident of its flavor in existence. But whatever he can do indirectly, he can surely do directly. This provoked disagreement from a philosopher who is usually thought of as being more of a rationalist than Aquinas himself, his so-called Averroist opponent, C.J. of Brabant. C.J. did accept that God can change bread into the body of Christ while leaving the accidents as they were. But he denied that we can use philosophical arguments to prove that this is possible. Rather, this is one of those times where we must admit that human reason has severe limitations. Just as our unaided minds devise arguments to show that the universe must be eternal and are hard pressed to see what could be wrong with these arguments, so the natural resources of philosophy cannot establish the possibility of a surviving separate accident. This is for the same reason we saw before when looking at C.J., namely that the philosopher must reason on the basis of natural laws, which of course lay down that accidents depend for their survival on the substances that have those accidents. No bread and wine thus means no flavor of bread or wine from the philosopher's point of view. The theologian, by contrast, has a point of view from which he can admit that the flavor or color of bread can survive without the bread. But C.J. did not prevail in this dispute. As we move forward into the 14th century, we will see philosophers invoking God's omnipotence and thinking rationally about the implications of a power that can, quite literally, do anything that can be done. This is already a prominent idea in our next major thinker, who lived from the 13th into the 14th century. We've already mentioned him several times, and he is a thinker of such power and influence that he is going to be worth several episodes more of our attention, John Dunne's SCOTUS. But before we come to him, I want to dwell on the issues raised in this episode a bit longer. Next time I'll be joined by a guest who has written extensively on medieval philosophers and the way that they squared their faith with the dictates of rationality. Join me for a conversation in which Richard Cross will relate some further ideas about philosophy and the Trinity, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Richard Cross, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Hi, Richard. Hi. So, we're going to be talking about the Trinity and what various medieval philosophers suggested as ways of understanding the Trinity. But before we get into that specific issue, I wanted to ask you something more general, which is about sameness and difference. And the reason I want to start with that is that the Trinity seems like it's really a problem of sameness and difference. We want to say that there are three persons in the divine God, and these three persons are somehow distinct from one another, but they're also somehow the same or identical, because the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all one God. Would you say that's a fair assessment of the problem, first of all? I would say that's a very fair assessment of the problem. And the thought that there might be some notion of sameness that's distinct from the notion of identity is probably a rather odd thought. But it's a thought, I think, which a number of medieval philosophers had, and oddly enough, they by and large worked it out exactly in the context of thinking of the theological problem itself. So, whereas we might come to that particular distinction between sameness and identity in a very different way, they came to it from that angle. And here's the thing in a nutshell. We might be inclined to think that sameness and identity are the same relationship, but it looks like there are common or garden cases where it might not be. And one example which crops up frequently in the literature, I forget who originated it, would be the example of a bronze statue. So it looks like we have one object there, the bronze statue, but in fact, there's something rather curious about it. Because we can melt the bronze down, and the statue is destroyed, but the lump of bronze seems to be the same lump of bronze. So it turns out that the lump and the statue have different, as we might say, persistence conditions. And that suggests very strongly that they're non-identical, because things which are identical have all the same properties, and these two things seem not to have all the same properties. So the basic idea here, just to make sure I got this straight, is that just as the father and son are non-identical, because they're different persons of the Trinity, yet the same, because they're the same God, the idea is that the bronze statue is the same as the bronze it's made of, but it's not identical. That's exactly right. And so presumably, we can say the same thing about difference. So I'm different from you. And what that means is that we're different in the sense of not being the same. But we're also not identical. Everything that's not the same as something else is non-identical. But the case of the bronze statue is sort of weird, because the bronze is the same as the statue is made of, but it's also non-identical. That's exactly right. So you're quite right about the application in the divine case. So this has cropped up quite a bit in modern literature on the Trinity, and how people have typically thought about it is something like this. We think there's one God, and we think there are three persons. And we think that somehow this one God entity is shared by the three persons. And if we just take one of the persons, let's say the Father, and we take the God substance, I'm going to call it the divine essence, because that's how theologians like to talk. The divine essence relative to the Father is as the bronze is relative to the statue. It's somehow a constituent of that person in the way that we might think of the bronze as constituting the statue. The difference is, and some people think this is a terrible wrinkle, even if you can make sense of the notion of sameness without identity, is that the divine essence, the one God entity, is supposed to be able to constitute three persons simultaneously, which we don't think of so much in the case of the statue. We think the bronze is just constituting the statue. Yeah, to use another example, which I find quite illuminating, that's mentioned in something that we wrote about this, a hand is the same as a fist made out of the hand, but it's not identical. How can we tell? Well, because sometimes my hand unclenches, and it's no longer a fist. But we can't really say that the same thing happens in the case of God, because of course, there's never a time when God is the Son, but not the Father, or vice versa. Yes, that's exactly right. And the divine case is hard for another reason as well. If we think about the statue, the bronze and the statue, and we wonder what it is that distinguishes the bronze from the statue, we might think, well, it's what we might say, it might call a modal property, it's that the bronze can be melted down and survive, and the statue not, and so it's a can be kind of property. So people who are inclined to think that the bronze and the statue are in fact identical, would be inclined to think that you couldn't have things differing merely by modal properties. Now in the divine case, I mean, so let me say a bit more, nobody thinks that the modal property is anything like a quality that is, as it were, super added to the lump. It just sounds like a different way of describing the same thing. In the divine case, there's another difficulty, which is analogous to that, which has got to do with divine simplicity. So a lot of theologians are inclined to think that, well, the three persons, since they're non-identical, must be distinguished by something. But theologians after Augustine are inclined to think that there's nothing in God that explains anything, right, that explains any of the predications we might want to make in God, other than the divine essence itself. So a bit like the modal property and the statue, it looks like, you know, you've got a difference without a difference, and they think that they can say that, and perhaps their case is no harder than the case of the statue and the bronze. But it does sound harder to me, because if you want to say that the divine essence explains fatherhood, sonhood, and spirithood, that would be as if the bronze explained why it's a statue of a human, a statue of a horse, and a sphere. Yes, that's exactly right. And so some theologians in the Middle Ages thought that that really was just too mysterious, that you just couldn't have that amount of a lack of explanation. And so some theologians, starting really with Scotus, and then people following him, thought that what you would have to say is that whatever distinguishes the divine persons from each other ought to be as real as the divine essence is. So now we have some kind of complexity or composition, which is the price that gets paid, still within the context of sameness with and without identity. But in this case, the non-identities are explained, the distinctions are explained by additional properties or forms added on to or plugged into, as it were, the divine essence. That's actually not that mysterious on the face of it. I mean, I'm a single human being, but I have more than one property, right? Yes. I'm bald, I'm bearded, I'm a philosopher, to take sort of standard examples I like to use about myself. And I wouldn't like to say they are true, but not all of them. In fact, they are. Well, we know you're a philosopher. Yeah, at least that. So I have these multiple properties, and we don't have any difficulty with that. But I guess the difficulty is, what's the explanation for the different properties? So the explanation of my having a beard, whatever it is, it's not the same as the explanation of my being bald. That would be pretty strange, right? Because it would explain both why I have hair and why I don't have hair. Yes. And they're certainly not the same explanation of why I'm a philosopher. And these, so were there, you were saying that there are medieval theologians who wanted to say that it's the same explanation that explains why God is both a father and a son? Yes, I think, I mean, it's very controversial to think this, I think you might find this in Aquinas, for example, because the standard idea, the standard theological idea, is that what's supposed to explain the distinctions between the persons is they're being related to each other in certain ways. That is to say, that one is a father, and the other is a son, and those are relational predicates. And then you make a very plausible move, which is that we shouldn't think of relations as anything like forms or properties, right? Super added, they're just ways in which two things are towards each other. So Aquinas might well say, well, you know, the relation is nothing over and above the essence. And as soon as you made that move, you've got exactly the position that you were just describing, which Scotus thought was just absurd. Because it doesn't do enough to explain the difference between the persons? Precisely so. It seems like in general, there's a Schiller and Corribdus kind of model here, where, on the one hand, you don't want to violate divine simplicity. But on the other hand, you don't want to deny the real difference between the Trinity. And so is it, would you say that is generally the case that the different theological solutions flirt with one or the other of these two dangers to a greater or lesser extent? Yes, I would, I would say that very much. Historically, you find that the complete simplicity view, largely in Western theologians after Augustine, I think the Eastern tradition generally, was never as wedded to that. And so the Eastern tradition, for example, wants to make a distinction between the divine essence, and what we might call, as they put it, things that surround the essence, which we might think of as divine attributes. So there's the divine essence, somehow explaining the presence of a whole set of further additional, let's call them, controversially form-like things that are features of the divine essence. The motivation behind this for the Eastern theologians, I mean, paradigm case, Gregory of Nyssa back in the fourth century, was that we can know of God and name of God, the things around the essence, but neither know nor name the essence itself. And Scotus, oddly enough, if you read him in his whole discussion of this, he picks up explicitly on an Eastern tradition in this case, and thinks that, I really think if you pushed him, he would say that the Augustinian emphasis on complete divine simplicity was an aberration or a mistake. Basically, he follows the Eastern theologians in thinking that we should distinguish between the essence and the attributes. Why? Among other things, because we should distinguish between the attributes themselves, there's got to be a distinction between God's wisdom and God's goodness, because he doesn't see how wisdom could ever be identical to goodness. Whereas some other theologians would say that's just an aspect of the limitation of human understanding that we think God's goodness and wisdom must be distinct. That's exactly right. It's interesting, there's a parallel to all this in the Islamic case, because they don't obviously have the problem of the Trinity, but they do have this problem of divine attributes. But staying now in the Christian tradition, since that's what I'm covering now in the podcast, let me ask you a bit more about Scotus, because he's a thinker that you're very expert on. It's from what you've said so far about Scotus, it seems to me like the danger he's flirting with is going to be what might be called tritheism, the idea that we've got three gods, we've succeeded in distinguishing the Father from the Son from the Holy Spirit, but oops. Now there's three things instead of one, or maybe it's even worse, maybe there's four things, like the three persons, plus the divine essence. Maybe there's even seven things. Maybe there's the three persons, the property that individuates each of them, plus the divine essence. Maybe we could go on, but anyway, more than one. So how does he seek to avoid that consequence? Yes. So in other words, the worry is that we've secured non-identity, but the price we paid is non-sameness. Yes, exactly. So here, he appeals to something, a very different philosophical issue. And it's the theory of universals, that what we're trying to preserve in the divine case is that there's one divine substance, and that self-identical entity is a constituent of three persons. Now, Scotus thinks that there's no other case where you would have three substance-like things, persons, constituted by one and the same substantial unit, right? In this case, God or the God entity, whatever we're going to call it. So Scotus accepts the view that there are shared universals, that is to say, give you an example, a shared humanity that somehow explains how we are all human, a shared dogness that somehow explains how all dogs are dogs. But he doesn't think that in the creaturely case, that item, humanity, dogness, whatever it might be, has numerical unity. He thinks it has some other kind of unity, let's call it specific unity, that falls short of numerical unity. And so of course, what we now can say in the divine case is, aha, here's something that seems to be a shared property that has itself numerical unity and identity, which wouldn't be the case for creatures. Now, why would one think all of these things? He thinks we ought to posit such universals in the case of creatures, because he thinks he needs an explanation or a ground for the fact that, say, all human beings resemble each other in certain salient ways. He thinks resemblance couldn't be a primitive property. He thinks that he couldn't have numerical unity, because if it did, there really would be some sense in which we were all the same thing, because we would be in exactly the kind of relationship that divine persons are. And self evidently, we're not. And here's the argument. The divine persons aren't capable of doing distinct things, because their actions somehow are all fundamentally attributed to or explained by the numerically singular divine essence, whereas we palpably can do different things. He thinks that the divine persons all share the same mental life. It's a rather curious thing, but it was very common theological view. Because fundamentally, their mental lives are the mental life of the divine substance entity. Where clearly, we don't have shared mentality or shared activity. Right. But isn't it still the case that the Father begets the Son, and the Son doesn't beget the Father? So isn't that something the Father can and does do that the Son can't do? I mean, the Son doesn't beget himself. Yes, that's true. And Scutta has a very crafty solution to this. That sounds like him. Yeah. I'm not sure how good a solution this is, actually. I mean, he thinks that all three persons share exactly the same causal powers. So the Son, like the Father, has a causal power to beget the Son. And the only thing which happens is that the Son is, there's a necessary block on the Son's ever exercising that causal power. Because that would make him a self-causing, nothing to self- cause, but he has the power. So he has a necessarily unrealizable power. Exactly. So... That does sound like Scutta's. It does, doesn't it? Okay, that's all good. The only thing is, I'm not really seeing how that saves him from tritheism. Because, in fact, the comparison to universals exacerbates my worry. So if we take you, me and Buster Keaton, we've got three human beings. We're not the, we're the same. Yes. Because we're all humans. But the whole point is that we're not the same human being and therefore we're not identical. Yes. So how does the comparison to universals help him say that the persons are non-identical, but still the same? Because if we have three humans, we have both non-identity and non-sameness. So the universal comparison seems to actually suggest that there are three things rather than one thing. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Yes. Well, then at that point, so the universals thing is only an analogy. Okay. And Scutta's, some theologians do talk about things like universals in this context. I don't think Scutta's ever uses that word for the divine essence, but because his preferred word for what we nowadays would label universals is things which are common. And what happens to things which are common is that they get shared out in different ways. And so the idea is that human nature gets shared out by being somehow divided up into numerically many instantiations, whereas the divine essence doesn't get divided up in this way. So on a purely technical point, while we should say the analogies to something that's common and not to something that's universal, but I still see the force of the worry. And I think at that point, Scutta's would go right back to where we started from, and think, aha, well, here we have a case where there's a relationship between the divine essence and the divine person that is akin to the relationship between the bronze and the statue, right? And so we've got sameness between the essence and the person secured. And we simply iterate that. I see. So it's like he wants to use the comparison to universals to explain the diversity or the non identity, but he wants to use the comparison to the bronze and the statue to get the sameness. Yes. So if you could hold those two things together in your head at the same time, then you've got the Trinity. Yes. Well, I think he had a capacious head. He could probably hold it all together quite nicely. Right. Actually, that leads me to a more general question about the Trinity, which is something that's always fascinated me about the subject, which is that all of these philosopher theologians, not only in the medieval period, but in late antiquity, already with Augustine and Boethius, and after the medieval period, there's so many discussions about the Trinity, and they're trying to make sense of the Trinity in some way. But on the other hand, it's also supposed to be in some level mystery. And so something that always strikes me about it is that not always, but most of the time, what they want to do is explain the Trinity to a very high degree, but leave something on explains so that it can remain mysterious. Is that what Scotus is trying to do? So is there anything that he thinks remains somehow beyond our comprehension about the Trinity? Or does he really think that he can give a rational account of what the Trinity is and why we should believe in it? He certainly thinks that there's no mysterious third as it were left over. I think he's got he thinks got the whole thing mapped up very nicely. And he thinks he's done it just by using metaphysical apparatus that is just part of his general toolkit for analysis of the material world. So he thinks he's got a theory of, let's say, the kinds of substance there could be that's maximally general that uses the same analytical tools at the divine level and the creaturely level. And I think he thinks he's got the whole thing licked. And so another slightly different question, though, is one thing to give a rational account of the Trinity. And it's another to tell us that God is a Trinity. Yes. So maybe we can make a distinction between how we discover that God is a Trinity, namely through revelation, and then whether we can use reason to account for that. Would he say that we could use reason to discover that God is a Trinity? Or is that something we only know through revelation? Well, in most medieval theologians thought it was something you only knew through revelation. And you can understand why they might think that. There were some who thought that, you know, rational reflection on some aspect of the created world could lead you to an argument in favour of the doctrine of the Trinity. The famous example is 12th century theologian, Richard Dawson Victor, who started from, well, the datum that God was love. Suppose you could get that datum by rational reflection and not by revelation. He then thought you could show that love requires something, an object that gets you two persons, and that perfect love requires those two objects themselves being united in their love for a third object. And that exhausted the kinds of love there were. So that would get you right to three objects that you need to make this relationship work. And Scotus doesn't accept that argument. He does have some, he has some other rather bizarre arguments about the kinds of production that there could be. Scotus thinks that we could share about God that he's supremely perfect. And he thinks that amongst great making or affection inducing properties is being productive. So he thinks that you might want to say God's necessarily productive. Or the most perfect kinds of production would be something which resulted in something that was equal to yourself, supposing especially that if you were that you were an infinite being like God's supposed to be. And he thinks that there are necessarily just two kinds of production. One that is automatic and not the result of desire. And another which is whether automatic or not the result of desire. That gives us two kinds of production. He calls them natural and voluntary. And the most perfect being would be most perfectly productive. That is to say, would produce an image of itself by natural production and an image of itself by voluntary production. And hey presto, that gets you three. So the Father is the producer, the Son is the thing produced naturally and the Holy Spirit by voluntary action. Exactly. So and again, you'll notice that he's got that just from reflection on what he takes to be necessary structures that we can necessarily metaphysical structures or in this case, structures somehow, yeah, call them metaphysical structures that we can just glean by observing the world. Do you think that that was controversial? Did other people react to philosophers like Scotus by saying, hang on a second, you're trying to explain too much about this with reason? No, I didn't think they minded that. A lot of them did mind about the distinctions that he between let's say the divine essence, and the attributes or the divine essence and the distinguishing personal properties. A lot of them minded about that, because they've been taught, I think, from Augustine onwards, that you really shouldn't posit that much distinction in God. I think Scotus could quite reasonably retort to them. Well, really, if you can't have that much distinction in God, how on earth are you going to have three persons? So he'd basically just push back and say, yeah, you're insisting on simplicity so much that you're going to ruin the doctrine of the Trinity by saying that there's identity between the persons and not just sameness. That's exactly right. And it was clearly controversial, even when he was alive, in Oxford, around 1300, he first of all states that there must be this kind of distinction in God between the essence and the distinguishing properties. And he says something like, I forget the exact words, you can doubt it all you like, but that it's so my intellect has no doubt. A couple of years later, he puts forward exactly the same view. And he says, I propose without asserting it, and you know, in default of any better view that and then he says exactly the same thing that he'd said earlier. So he's started to have second thoughts. No, he hasn't. He's just covering his back. Oh, I see. When he gets to he gets to Paris in about 1304, he states the same thing again, but without him not so assertively as I don't doubt it, and not so hesitantly as I don't assert it, right? He asserts it without really trumpeting it. Okay, but he thinks it the whole time. All the time. He doesn't see any alternative. Right. Well, something about which I have no doubt is that you should join me to hear more about SCOTUS, which you can begin to do in the next episode, because I'll be devoting several episodes to this great medieval thinker. For now, I'll thank Richard Cross very much for coming on the show. Well, thank you. And please join me next time as I start to look at Duns SCOTUS. That will be after the annual summer break, but we'll be back in September here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Once and for All, a Scotus on Being. We began our tour through the world of 13th century philosophy by citing a classic philosophical remark, it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is. Those who recall the political debates of the 1990s will have no trouble identifying this as a quote from Bill Clinton. But historians of philosophy might rather think of a far earlier debate. Among medievals, there was a heated controversy over the meaning of is. Does being, in Latin esse, have only one meaning or many different meanings? Usually, we have no difficulty answering this sort of question. The word bill is obviously used with a number of different meanings. It could be the first name of a former president, the business end of a duck, or what the waiter hands you at the end of a business lunch. Aristotle explained at the beginning of his categories, a work on which philosophers from late antiquity through the middle ages cut their teeth, that words are used equivocally when they are applied with such different meanings. If a word is used on different occasions with the same meaning, I am using that word unifically. Thus, when I apply the word human to Bill Clinton and to Aristotle, I am using it as a unifical term. So why did the medieval's worry whether the word being is used equivocally or unifically? Most historians of philosophy will tell you that the problem first emerged in the late 13th century with Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent defending the equivocal theory of being and John Duns Scotus a unifical understanding. But that's because most historians of philosophy aren't regular listeners to this podcast. By contrast, you, my faithful audience, will know that a controversy over this issue had already emerged in the Islamic world. Muslim philosopher-theologians writing in Arabic anticipated the views we find in Christian philosopher-theologians writing in Latin, like Aquinas, Henry, and Scotus. Some of the clever philosophical moves that most historians take to be inventions of the Latin schoolmen were actually reinventions. Particularly striking are the parallels between the arguments given by the so-called subtle doctor, Duns Scotus, and the no less subtle Fakhradin Ahrazi, who lived about a century earlier. This is no coincidence. Scotus and Fakhradin were not reading one another, but they were provoked by the same source, Avicenna. His works were highly influential in Latin and totally dominant in 12th and 13th century Arabic philosophy. And it was Avicenna who first made a distinction that forms the background to both debates over the meaning of being. He contrasted the essence of a thing to that thing's existence. The idea is a pretty plausible one. On the one hand, you have the question of what something is by its very nature. On the other hand, the question of whether it exists. Actually, these two questions are already distinguished by Aristotle. What Avicenna added was the point that essences are almost always neutral with respect to existence. He gave the example of a triangle. You can study the nature or essence of a triangle and learn all sorts of things about it, for instance that its angles add up to 180 degrees. But nothing about the nature of triangle tells you whether it exists or not. So, if a triangle does exist, this must be because some other thing, like a child doing geometry homework, has come along and made it exist. The same point will apply to the child too, of course. She is a human, and if you think about what it means to be a human, you'll see that humanity guarantees many things, being alive, being rational, being an animal, but not just plain, being. So, for the child to exist, she too must be caused to exist. However, Avicenna added, there is one essence that is not like this, the essence of that which necessarily exists. And this necessary existent, of course, is God. He exists through himself by his very nature so that he cannot fail to exist, and exists without needing a cause. The essence-existence distinction was taken up eagerly by Muslim theologians, and the Christians independently followed suit. Already William of Auvergne made use of it in the first half of the 13th century, but the most famous example, as usual, is Aquinas. It forms the core idea of his early work On Being and Essence, in Latin De Ente et Essentia. Germans are always disappointed to learn that despite being called De Ente, it is not a treatise about ducks. The background in Avicenna is quite obvious. Aquinas cites him on the very first page for the idea that existence and essence are immediate concepts of the mind, not ideas we need to reach through some indirect process of reasoning. He also applies Avicenna's triangle test to demonstrate the difference between essence and existence. I can know what something is without knowing whether there is any such thing. For Aquinas, this shows that there is what the scholastics like to call a real distinction here. In other words, essence is distinct from existence, and not just in the way we think about it. The two are really distinct in things themselves. His follower, Giles of Rome, agreed, and in fact took the point even further than Aquinas probably wanted to go. Giles compared the combination of essence and existence to the relation between the matter and the form of a physical substance. Just as matter is a separate principle that receives form, so essences are distinct in themselves and then receive actual existence. The essence serves to put limits or boundaries on being, whereas in God, being remains infinite and unlimited. What does all this have to do with Bill Clinton's puzzle about the meaning of is? Well, let's consider again how Avicenna's distinction might apply to God. Well, in the divine case, the distinction actually breaks down. The reason God exists through his very essence is that God has no essence apart from his existence. Or, we might go so far as to say that he just is being or existence. This at least is how Avicenna saw things. But if this is so, then it looks like God has being of a very different sort than the being we find in, say, Bill Clinton. The existence that is God is not the same as the existence which was given to Bill Clinton when he was created. This forces us to say that there are at least two kinds of existence. On the one hand, we have divine existence which is necessary and identical to God's very essence. On the other hand, we have created existence which is contingent and distinct from the essence of the created thing. We can reach the same result without appealing to the unusual case of God. If, like any self-respecting scholastic, you have read your Aristotle, you know he says that being is said in many ways. Aristotle would seem to think that the being of a human is different from the being of a duck. An Aristotelian will also be tempted to think that the independent being of substances, like humans and ducks, is different from the dependent being of accidental properties, like the color of the duck's bill or Bill Clinton's determination to get a bill through Congress. On this basis, Aquinas was led to the conclusion that being is indeed used equivocally. It means one thing when applied to God, another when applied to creatures. On the other hand, he didn't think that this was a case of pure equivocation like the completely different senses of the word bill. Instead, language is applied to God and to creatures in different, yet related ways. Again, this is good Aristotle. He too had said that though being is said in many ways, it is one of those terms that is applied to one primary case and then some other secondary cases. A classic illustration is the term healthy. Its primary use is when we apply it to a healthy person, but we can also say that food or medicine is healthy because it contributes to the health of the person. Here we are dealing with a particular kind of equivocal use, which is called analogy. Aquinas uses the theory of analogy to explain how various perfections are ascribed to God. Just as healthy is said primarily of the healthy person, so good is applied primarily to God, who is the cause of good and is perfect goodness itself. The same analysis can be given in the case of being. God is not just any old existing thing, but the source of existence for all other things. He is, in fact, being itself. Aquinas's approach has various advantages. Most obviously, it splits the difference between making God too transcendent and not transcendent enough. We don't want all the words we use for created things to be applied to God in a purely equivocal way. If that were the case, these words would have utterly different meanings from the ones they have when used normally, and these meanings would have to remain mysterious, given that we can reach knowledge of God only on the basis of created things. If, on the other hand, we applied terms to God unifically, then we would be putting Him on a par with created things. Another bonus is that Aquinas avoids violating divine simplicity. If God is truly simple, then His various traits, like goodness and mercy, cannot be really distinct from one another, and this could only be the case if we are using the words goodness and mercy rather differently in His case. After all, I can call a created thing good without meaning that that thing is merciful. If I rejoice, oh man, this almond croissant is good, this has nothing to do with mercy, even if I did say merci to the nice French baker who sold it to me. The identity between God's essence and His existence is another aspect of God's simplicity, and a way in which He differs even from other immaterial things, like souls and angels whose essence is distinct from their existence. Though the analogy theory and the essence-existence distinction make a good pairing, they don't have to come together. In the generation of Scotus, a theologian named Godfrey of Fontaines accepted that we apply language to God analogically, yet he launched a powerful attack against the essence-existence distinction targeting its formulation by Aquinas and especially Giles of Rome. While Godfrey accepts that we can think about things in terms of their essences, or as existing things, he denies that this is a real distinction in the things themselves. Instead, it is a distinction of the sort we saw when looking at speculative grammar. If I think or speak of a duck's essence or a duck as existing, I am just using two different modes of signifying the same thing. This no more implies a real difference in ducks than it would if I used the adjective beautiful, when saying ducks are beautiful, and then the noun beauty, in saying ducks have a beauty rare even among waterfowl. Besides, the real version of the distinction runs afoul of obvious difficulties. If, as Giles of Rome claimed, essence is something distinct that receives existence the way that matter receives form, then essence would already have to exist before it receives existence the way that matter may already exist before taking on form. This is clearly absurd. But what about Avicenna's triangle argument, that we can understand what something is without knowing whether it exists? To this, Godfrey replies, we can only know things when they do in fact exist. We never grasp mysterious ontologically neutral essences, but real things. We're almost ready now to look at Scotus's solution, but not quite. While Aquinas, Giles, and Godfrey are an important part of the background, there is another author to whom Scotus replies most directly, and this is Henry of Ghent. Henry's position on these matters is similar to that of Aquinas, but with a few twists. Henry too thinks that being is applied to God and to creatures by way of analogy. This is connected to the way we come to know God. As we saw in our episode on Henry, he is inspired by Avicenna's proposal that being is a primary concept of the mind. For Henry, this means that all of us have a kind of indistinct awareness or intuition of God who, as the doctrine of analogy would suggest, is nothing other than pure being. Henry also accepts the distinction between essence and existence. But, as Godfrey pointed out in his objections to the real version of the distinction, the two only ever come together. Henry admits that there is no such thing as essence without existence, so that the difference between them is weaker than that between two really distinct objects like say Bill and Hillary Clinton, who, it is safe to say, have had their differences. Yet neither are essence and existence fully identical. They are, says Henry, intentionally distinct. This is a step in the direction of Scotus's notion of a formal distinction, a kind of middle ground between a real distinction and a distinction that is merely the product of our minds. Indeed, Scotus himself apparently wanted to understand the difference between essence and existence using his idea of a formal distinction. Actually, he doesn't say much about this. Our recent interview guest Richard Cross has written that, When he does mention it, though, he seems to see it as a formal distinction, like the difference between the persons of the Trinity. Just as Avicenna said, it is no part of what it means to be a duck that the duck must exist, so we can distinguish between the essence of a duck and its existence. But, as Henry said, that doesn't mean that there are duck essences that don't exist. To the contrary, any real essence is always found together with existence. So, even though we can grasp these two aspects of the duck as being different, they are always found together, and are thus only formally, not really, distinct. Something to which Scotus has definitely given sustained attention, and which is very much at the heart of his metaphysical thinking, is the univocity of being. Characteristically, Scotus uses several clever arguments to support his position. One, by his standard relatively straightforward argument, is the following. Scotus agrees with Aquinas that natural knowledge of God must be built on our experience of the created world. So, to grasp that God is a being, we need to extend a concept of being that we got from created things and apply it to God. Hence, it must be the same concept, and the term being needs to be used with the same meaning. Another somewhat more complicated rationale goes like this. We can apply the notion of being to God without realizing that God is infinite, necessary, purely actual, or whatever else makes God's being so different. Plenty of people admit that God exists without understanding that He exists necessarily or is infinite. So, clearly we begin by applying the normal notion of being to Him, and then add infinity, necessity, and so on. It is these added features that make God so special. It's not by virtue of just existing or being that He transcends created things. And speaking of transcending, Scotus's claim that being is unifical has a lot to do with a theme we've discussed in previous episodes, the transcendentals. Just by way of reminder, the transcendentals are features that belong to all things, both divine and worldly. These include unity, goodness, truth, and of course, being. Scotus takes this very seriously, and assumes that these features do indeed transcend all divisions within reality. Everything is a being, and then it's a further question what kind of being. When we divide being into types, we're actually applying another more complicated transcendental feature. Not everything is finite, nor is everything infinite, but everything is either finite or infinite. The same point goes for necessity and contingency. Everything that exists, exists either necessarily in itself, or only contingent upon some cause. These pairs of properties divide being, with God on one side and creation on the other. With this, by the way, Scotus is rejecting Henry's idea that we are obscurely grasping God when we form our immediate idea of being. For Scotus, being is unifical, so our general idea of being applies to everything that is, and is no more appropriate to God than to anything else that exists. Thus, if you want to grasp God it isn't enough to grasp being. You have to be more specific about what kind of being you have in mind. If you take your idea of being and add a feature, like infinity or necessity, then you're getting somewhere, since God and only God is an infinite being, and only He necessarily exists. We say that Aquinas's analogy theory has several advantages, but the same is true of Scotus's univocity theory. One has to do with the nature of the enterprise we're engaged in here, namely metaphysics. Scotus borrows another idea from Avicenna here, saying that metaphysics is the study of being in general. But every science needs a single object of study. Experts in waterfowl study creatures all of whom are equally, and in the same sense, waterfowl. In the same way, if metaphysics is a properly unified science, the metaphysician needs to be able to study being wherever it turns up, in God or in creatures, in substances or in accidents, and needs to mean the same thing by being in each case. General contrary properties like necessary and contingent, or infinite and finite, will also fall under this science of metaphysics. This is because jointly, each pair covers everything that has being, and metaphysics is the general study of all beings. The fact that Scotus has borrowed so much from Avicenna does not of course detract from Scotus's importance as a thinker. For one thing, he stole from the best. For another, he develops Avicenna's ideas considerably. He puts them at the service of a unifical theory of being that was new in Latin Christendom, even if it had, unbeknownst to Scotus, already been defended in Central Asia by Fakhradin Arazi. But there is a different problem lurking here. In the Islamic world, Avicenna's strong association between God and necessity had attracted a good deal of criticism. Most were prepared to agree with Avicenna that God must exist through himself because he is the necessary existent. But few were prepared to admit that God is necessary in every respect. Doesn't God enjoy the same sort of freedom we do, or rather a far greater degree of freedom? But then, how is divine freedom compatible with his necessary existence? Reflection on this issue leads Scotus to a radical philosophical breakthrough as he develops a theory of contingency so innovative and influential that it might be called the first modern theory of free will. To find out how he did it, duck out of school or work, and enjoy some free time while listening to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Will or Not to Will, SCOTUS on Freedom. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 3. We find the Prince of Denmark doing what he does best, hesitating. He has an apparently perfect opportunity to revenge his father's murder at the hands of his uncle Claudius, having found him alone, praying. Hamlet has Claudius at his mercy, but then realizes that killing him now might be too merciful. If he slays Claudius while he prays for forgiveness, then Claudius will go to heaven. Am I then revenged, asked Hamlet, to take him in the purging of his soul when he is fit and seasoned for his passage? He decides to wait for a better opportunity. And thus, as Hamlet puts it elsewhere, the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. I could hardly have put it better myself. And we've all been there, well, perhaps not quite in this situation, but we've all been uncertain how to act, or certain how to act, but uncertain whether the time for action has come. At such moments, we feel vividly that we have a genuine power to choose whether or not to act. Hamlet is not like a Greek tragic hero, carried inevitably forward by his own character, the tide of events, and the will of the gods. He is a quintessentially modern tragic hero, blessed, or perhaps cursed, with the power and responsibility to shape the present and the future. He must choose whether it is right to kill or not to kill, and, famously, whether to be or not to be. As philosophers nowadays would put it, these choices seem to be characterized by the presence of alternative possibilities. Hamlet can kill Claudius as he prays, or refrain from doing so. Both paths are open to him, and he must choose which one to follow. For some philosophers, we can count ourselves as free only when such alternative possibilities are available. Freedom is not just, for example, doing what you want. If you cannot avoid performing a given action, you are unfree with respect to that action, whether you want to perform the action or not. Of course, the idea that freedom involves open alternatives was not invented by Shakespeare. It has a long history, and can perhaps be traced back ultimately to Aristotle. In his logical work On Interpretation, Aristotle points out that if everything were necessary, it would make no sense for us to engage in deliberation. Yet Aristotle also gave philosophers a powerful reason to be suspicious about the idea of genuinely open possibilities. In the same passage, he suggests that whatever is happening right now in the present moment is necessary. If this is right, then at the very moment Hamlet passes up the chance to kill Claudius, his not killing Claudius is necessary. And this makes a certain amount of sense. How could it still be possible for Hamlet to strike, even as he is in the act of withdrawing, saying, upsord, and know thou a more horrid bent? To get to the modern-day notion of simultaneous, genuinely open possibilities, we are going to have to make a few subtle distinctions. In particular, we are going to have to turn to a man who specialized in such distinctions, John Duns Scotus. We've already met him engaging in debates over the Trinity, and arguing for the univocity of being, but now I'd like to introduce him properly. I'm treating him as the last of the great thinkers of the 13th century, even though his life spanned the 13th and 14th centuries, as did his thought, responding as it did to Henry of Ghent and others, while also setting the agenda for numerous thinkers in the age to come. He was born in Scotland in the 1260s, hence the Scotus part of his name. He wrote many of his works right around the turn of the century, lecturing on Peter Lombard's sentences in Oxford in the year 1300 itself. As you might remember, theologians standardly taught the sentences and used this as an excuse to put forth their own views, something especially true in Scotus's case. He then had two stints at Paris, where he became a master of theology, before dying in Cologne in 1308. His works are full of newly-coined terminology, brilliant argumentation, novel philosophical notions and torturously complex reasoning, making them a thrilling, yet challenging read for interpreters to say nothing of podcasters. His earliest important work consists in those lectures on the sentences given in Oxford. We have a revision of the lectures from his time in Paris, as well as student notes on his Parisian lectures, along with other philosophical and theological works, including a commentary on Aristotle's metaphysics and a treatise on God. More information can be gleaned from other sources, like additional notes produced by Scotus's secretary, William of Alnwick. The upshot is that Scotus has left a wealth of material for us to study, yet this material is often confusing, because of layers of revision and the fact that it's sometimes other people who are reporting what he said. We also find a significant evolution in thought, with Scotus changing his mind in characteristically subtle ways as his career goes along. His views on freedom and the will offer a good example. Scotus seems to have changed his mind about the nature of possibility and also the role of our intellect in forming our choices. When he thinks about the relation between intellect and will, Scotus is reacting especially to Henry of Ghent. Henry is regarded as a pioneer of voluntarism. We saw him saying that the intellect has only an advisory capacity with the will serving as the supreme power within the human soul. On this reckoning, it is Hamlet's will alone that determines the choice not to kill Claudius, even if it is taking the advice of Hamlet's intellect that slaying Claudius just when he is at prayer isn't the best way of exacting revenge. The early Scotus is reluctant to give the will sole responsibility, and makes intellect and will cooperative causes in forming choice. But he comes to adopt a more purely voluntaristic view like Henry's, and this is the understanding of human action that we usually associate with Scotus. Like Henry, and unlike Aquinas, the mature Scotus insists that the will is not moved to make its choices by intellect, rather it simply moves itself. With this, he is rejecting a basic tenet of Aristotle, who had argued that self-motion is impossible, so that he could trace all motion back to the single ultimate mover that is God. Scotus scornfully dismisses this idea, stating that the impossibility of self-motion is not a first, no not even a tenth principle. But Scotus still seeks to base his theory on Aristotle, this is scholastic philosophy after all, and is especially persuaded by Aristotle's idea that rational powers are distinguished from natural powers by their capacity to select either of two contraries. The idea here is that a merely natural cause gives rise to only one effect. Fire always heats things up and never cools them down. By contrast, a so-called rational power can do either of two opposed things, as when a jazz fan decides whether to listen to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five or the Miles Davis album Birth of the Cool. Scotus argues on this basis that only the will is truly rational, because only will can choose from either of two alternatives. The intellect is instead a natural cause, more like fire. It can only form beliefs based on the available evidence. Thus, Hamlet judges that killing Claudius while he prays will allow him to go to heaven. He's wrong about this, by the way. Shakespeare allows us to enjoy the irony of Claudius saying, just after Hamlet departs, that his prayers are ineffective. "...my words fly up, my thoughts remain below, words without thoughts never to heaven go." Wrong or right, Hamlet's intellect must reach the judgment that seems most compelling. Yet, he is still free to choose however he wills on the basis of this judgment. As Scotus puts it, if the will had no power over the opposite in that very instant, and at the time when it is actually determined to something, then no effect that is being actualized would be contingent. Freedom is not about judging or not judging. To will or not to will, that is the question, as Will Shakespeare didn't quite say. If we are to be capable of this sort of freedom, then we are going to need genuinely open alternatives to choose between. To show how this could be so, Scotus is going to have to produce a definition of possibility that was not dreamt of in Aristotle's philosophy. Before Scotus, it was common to assume that merely possible or contingent things are simply the things that happen sometimes but not always. And fair enough, you might say. It seems right that necessities are always true while impossibilities are never true. It is eternally the case that 1 plus 1 equals 2, eternally false that 1 plus 1 equals 3. Contingent things, by contrast, might be the case, but don't need to be. It's possible for me to sit and for me to stand. This is how it can be that you'll occasionally find me standing, though usually you'll find me sitting, since that's the posture I adopt for reading about philosophy. Notice that on this reckoning, genuinely possible things do need to happen at least at some point. If something is never the case, then, according to the traditional Aristotelian view, it must be impossible. Also, as we already said, in this way of thinking, the past and present are no longer contingent. They are necessary, since it is too late to do anything to change them. Scotus explicitly rejects this whole way of thinking. He says, I do not call contingent everything that is not necessary, or not eternal. Instead, I refer to something the opposite of which is possible even at the very moment it actually exists or occurs. That's actually a pretty straightforward explanation by Scotus's standards, but let's unpack it a bit. Of the traditional conception of contingency, only the future was open. As Hamlet stalks the hallways of Elsinore looking for Claudius, it is still open for him to kill or not. But once he finds Claudius and chooses to spare his life, the die is cast. It's not possible for him to kill Claudius while not killing Claudius. Scotus's breakthrough is to insist that it does remain possible for Hamlet to kill Claudius even as he refrains from doing so. This is because possibility, or contingency, is not defined in terms of what happens or doesn't happen. It's defined in terms of what could happen, whether or not it does in fact happen. That sounds a bit circular. But it isn't, because Scotus has a brilliant way of explaining precisely what we mean when we say that something could be the case even when it isn't. The contingent is just that which implies no contradiction. Scotus puts the point in terms of repugnance. The reason a round square is impossible is that the terms round and square are incompatible with or repugnant to one another. Scotus actually prefers the example of the chimera, a mythical beast made up of parts of a lion, snake, and goat. Since these animal natures in fact exclude one another, the chimera cannot exist. Possible things are possible because they involve no such repugnance or incompatibility. As Avicenna pointed out, neither do such things need to exist. There's nothing about the essence of a lion, a snake, or a goat that guarantees the existence of lions, snakes, or goats. And the same goes in the case of actions like Hamlet's. There is no logical or metaphysical impossibility entailed by killing Claudius at prayer, so it remains possible for Hamlet to do so, even as he is deciding it would be better to catch Claudius later on when he is in a state of sin. This conception of possibility is often held as Scotus's greatest contribution to the history of philosophy, and not without reason, even if, as usual, we have to admit that groundwork was laid by previous thinkers. For Scotus, the most important inspiration here was, yet again, Henry of Ghent. Henry already had the idea that some things that are genuinely possible are never realized. What makes them possible is that they are conceived as possibilities in the mind of God. I don't have a sister, but I could have had one. For Henry, what this means is that God understands that he could have created her. Now it might seem that there is a big difference between Scotus and his predecessor on this score. Henry argued that things become possible because God thinks about them as things he could create, whereas Scotus says that things are possible in themselves, just by virtue of not involving any repugnance or intrinsic impossibility. But actually, we can find Scotus too talking the way that Henry did. His approach is especially close to Henry's in his early works, but he always seems to retain the idea that possibility is somehow grounded in God's creative power. So is Scotus's position on possibility, like a chimera, stuck together out of incompatible parts? No. And to see why, we need to, of course, draw a distinction. Repugnance or incompatibility belongs to things by their very nature. Chimeras are intrinsically impossible and lions intrinsically possible. But before lions can be possible in this way, God has first to think of them as something he can create. Thus we should distinguish between a first moment and second moment in the order of nature. In the first moment, God thinks, here's something I could make, a lion, something Henry and Scotus describe as the creation of lions in intelligible being. In the second moment, lions are in themselves possible. This possibility is not something God needs to bestow on lions, nor does God need to do any extra work to prevent lions from combining with snakes and goats to form chimeras, since chimeras are in themselves impossible. Finally, in a third moment, God actually creates some, but not all, of the things that could possibly be created. The reason there are no round squares or chimeras is that they can't exist. The reason I do exist and my sister doesn't is down to God's choice as a creator. And make no mistake, God does have a choice about what he creates. Scotus's idea of simultaneously open possibilities is meant to apply to God's freedom as much as to ours, if not more so. This is despite the fact that God is a necessary being. Scotus, being Scotus, in fact has a clever and complicated proof of God's necessary existence. I'll avoid the complicated bits and cut straight to the most brilliant part. After a lot of work, Scotus is able to demonstrate to his own satisfaction that there could possibly be a cause for all other things, which is first and therefore uncaused. In other words, he shows that God might exist. From this, Scotus thinks he can immediately infer that God does exist. For just consider, obviously a first cause does not come to exist by being caused to exist by something else. So the only way for such a cause to exist is by being necessarily actual. But we know that there is a way for the cause to exist since we established that it might exist. Therefore, the cause is necessarily actual, so God does, in fact, exist. As Scotus notes himself, his proof is reminiscent of earlier attempts to demonstrate the existence of God. The move from God's possible existence to his actual existence may remind us of the equally clever, and most people would say equally dubious, move at the center of Anselm's ontological argument. Scotus's proof also recalls Avicenna and his idea of God as a necessarily existing first cause. Unlike Avicenna, though, Scotus thinks that God's actions as a creator are contingent, even if God exists necessarily. It may seem that, with Henry of Ghent's help, Scotus has already shown us how this could be so. God chooses only some possible creatures for actual existence. But as Hamlet might say, not so fast. Even granted that there are a variety of ways for God to make the world, isn't he required to choose the best of those ways? After all, he is perfectly good and benevolent. So when God considered whether to create lions, he had to consider whether a world with lions is better than a world without lions. Apparently he decided the answer was yes, though giraffes might beg to differ with this decision. But this is not quite how the medievals typically saw things. Aquinas and Bonaventure denied that it even makes sense to talk about a best of all possible worlds. Any created world is infinitely inferior to God himself, so that no matter what world God creates, there will be an infinite amount of room for improvement. We can say that our actual world is in a sense perfect because it is internally well ordered, but there is no point comparing this world to other worlds that might have entirely different sorts of creatures in it. Scodas likewise focuses on the question of whether things could be better arranged, given the natures that actually exist, rather than the question whether a whole different set of natures might be preferable. He says that our world is perfect as it is, but for a different reason. Namely, that whatever God does is perfect just by definition. God's goodness does not consist in his choosing the best out of available options. Rather, it consists in conferring goodness on whichever option he does choose. To put it another way, if God had decided to arrange things differently, then that different arrangement would be best. This is a rather surprising conclusion. To understand it more fully, we're going to have to turn away from the metaphysical issues that have been concerning us over the past couple of episodes, and towards the question of just what Scodas understands by the good. Would he agree with Hamlet that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so? Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt that you should join me for Scodas's ethics, next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. You can sign up at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode ... On Command, SCOTUS on Ethics. My parents knew a minister who spent a week living on a few dollars a day to draw attention to the plight of the poor. At church, a member of the parish came up to her and said she had seen a picture of the minister's family having dinner in the paper and was shocked. Why shocked? inquired the minister. The parishioner's response? No matter how poor one is, or is pretending to be, one can still serve one's ketchup from a bowl. You have to admire this sort of unwavering commitment to right and wrong. Some things are just not acceptable under any circumstances. Okay, perhaps serving ketchup out of a bottle is not one of them, but here's a different example. What about killing your own child? I'm glad to say my parents don't have a story about that. There is one in the Bible though. In chapter 22 of the book of Genesis, we are told how God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountaintop. Abraham dutifully obeys and prepares his son upon an altar. But just as he is grasping hold of the knife to do the terrible deed, an angel is sent to tell Abraham to stop. He has passed the test and need not kill his son after all. Despite the happy ending, this passage can easily provoke theological and philosophical perplexity. How can the same God who sent down the Ten Commandments, including thou shalt not kill, demand that Abraham slay his own son? And if we accept that Abraham was right to obey God, does that show that any action, even the murder of one's own family members, could be righteous in sufficiently extreme circumstances? The mere thought may seem to throw the whole of morality into question. To see how, go have a look at Fear and Trembling by the 19th century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard. He uses the case of Abraham and Isaac to show that we may have duties higher than the requirements of ethics. Within the ethical realm, it is wrong to kill one's child, but a divine command can trump ethical considerations. Another way of thinking about it might be that the rule against killing still holds, but not under just any circumstances. Just think back to our discussion of Medieval Just War theory when we saw the Medievals explaining exactly that thou shalt sometimes go ahead and kill after all, and this on supposedly good Christian principles. There is yet another way of thinking about the Abraham case, and it's this third way I want to talk about in today's episode. Instead of thinking of God's commands as extraordinary events that override or change our moral duty, we might see divine commands as the source of all moral obligation. We should do whatever God wants us to do, and because He wants us to do it. While you might not find this a particularly tempting idea, you can probably see why Medievals would be attracted to it. We've regularly seen them saying that God is the highest good and source of all good, just as He is the highest being who is the source of all being, and highest truth who is the source of all truth. At the very least, Medievals would find it plausible that our knowledge of moral duty comes from God, since on the popular illumination theory, our knowledge in general comes from God. So, we find Hugh of St. Victor saying that our understanding of good and evil is a kind of command given to the heart of man. Of course, the Bible itself might also encourage this way of thinking. Abraham is praised for his willingness to sacrifice his son, if it is the will of God, and all of us are bound by the Ten Commandments given to Moses. Modern day philosophers call this the divine command theory of ethics. According to this theory, God is a kind of legislator of morality, whose decrees establish right and wrong. Of course, this means that had God legislated differently, right and wrong would be different. He does not look to some objective set of ethical standards when He tells us what to do, but makes up His own divine mind what He wants us to do. Within a religious framework, this actually makes a lot of sense. It would explain obligations to follow certain dietary laws, or to carry out certain rituals in certain ways. One might be able to come up with independent reasons for going on pilgrimage to Mecca, avoiding pork, or remaining chased outside the bounds of marriage, but it's far simpler for religious believers to say that they do these things because God told them to. Likewise, why not just say that we are to avoid murder and theft because God's commandments forbid them? The downside is that if God commands us to commit murder, as He did with Abraham, then we will have a moral duty to perform an apparently immoral action. Yesterday's wrong will be today's new right. Even if we suppose that God never actually changes the moral laws, the mere fact that He could do so is already quite troubling. It seems irresistible to think that in such a case God would be evil. To see this, just consider how you would react to the Abraham story if God had let him go ahead and kill Isaac. Could you really believe that this was the right thing for Abraham to do? And could you really believe that God was being just rather than cruel and tyrannical? Well, maybe you could if you were done Scodas. We can see immediately why he might like the divine command theory. As we saw in the last episode, Scodas is a voluntarist who lays great emphasis on God's untrammeled freedom. Even the natures of things are, for him, ultimately grounded in God's will. Before God creates giraffes, He first grafts their natures and so creates them in intelligible being. So, even when we are doing non-moral reasoning, like when we undertake scientific inquiry into the nature of giraffes, in a sense we are just exploring the choices made by God. It wouldn't be at all surprising if Scodas thought the same is true of moral reasoning. And this is indeed pretty much what he thinks. We do find earlier thinkers, such as Philip the Chancellor, making moves in the direction of ethical voluntarism or divine command theory, but Scodas's new ideas about the contingency of the created order allow him to develop such a theory with unprecedented sophistication. God could have created the world differently, so that there might have been no giraffes, or murder might have been morally acceptable. It's hard to see which of those would be more horrifying. You wouldn't be surprised that Scodas develops this idea by drawing a subtle distinction. If you've lost track of how many such distinctions we've seen Scodas make, I don't blame you. He'd probably tell you that the number depends on exactly how you count distinctions. In this case, he contrasts the absolute and ordained power of God. God's absolute power is His ability to do anything whatsoever that can be done. On Scodas's understanding of possibility, this means that God has the absolute power to do anything that is not repugnant to itself or self-contradictory. We can see immediately why this fits the divine command theory. Since there is no contradiction in, say, allowing sex outside of marriage, God could have allowed it had He chosen to do so. But once God has laid down a natural and moral order, He can continue to act within that order. Because it involves adhering to such an established order, this is called ordained power. So far it sounds like morality for Scodas would be determined solely by God's choices, with no constraints whatsoever on those choices. But actually this isn't quite right. For one thing, there is the constraint I just mentioned. God's absolute power doesn't enable Him to do or command things that are just incoherent. As we saw last time, God cannot create a chimera, because chimeras are intrinsically impossible, since nothing with the nature of a lion can also have the nature of a snake and a goat. Similarly, Scodas believes that God cannot release us from the responsibility to love Him. This is because God is the highest good, and what is good is intrinsically lovable. So a kind of contradiction would be implied if God told us to hate Him. This emerges in Scodas's discussion of the Ten Commandments, a key text for his moral theory. He thinks that the commandments of the first table, namely the first four which regard our duties to God, are just a spelling out of the inevitable requirement to love God. The remaining commandments have to do with our relations to created things, and these are subject to God's will. With this move, Scodas has radically rethought the traditional idea of natural law. Prominently mentioned in Gracian's Decretum, the concept of natural law was expounded by numerous 13th century theologians, including Aquinas. For him, morality is promulgated by being written into our very nature, giving us the ability to use our inborn reason to discern right from wrong. This means that, for Aquinas too, the moral law does stem ultimately from God, but only in the sense that it is God who created us and gave us our human nature and capacity for reasoning. For Scodas, natural law in the strict sense includes much less. In fact, it includes only the inevitable requirement to love God, and the further obligations that stem directly from this, such as not worshiping graven images, the third commandment. The rest of the commandments are consonant with this fundamental moral principle, but do depend on God's voluntary decree. This is why they can be revoked, as when Abraham was suddenly commanded to kill instead of not killing. Here we come to another constraint on what God can command. We may be able to accept that He can change the rules and tell Abraham to sacrifice his son, but surely God cannot command Abraham both to kill and not to kill. That would be another case of incoherence or self-contradiction. The same applies to the moral order more generally. The laws must be coherent. Indeed, that's why they merit the name of an order. This could help Scodas respond to an obvious complaint against his ethical voluntarism. If God just freely decides what is good and what is bad, then there will be no point at all in moral reasoning. All we could do is consult Scripture and follow the rules. But if the moral order is consistent and coherent, as Scodas insists, then there is a place for such reasoning after all. Once God has laid down the contingent order that prevails in our world, it is possible for us to study that order and understand our place within it. This is an eminently rational enterprise, and again it is not unlike what we do in natural science, where we use reason to understand the created world that God chose to bring into existence. Nonetheless, Scodas is departing radically from the sort of ethical doctrine we find in Aquinas and above all in Aristotle. For Aristotle, human nature is the foundation of ethics. To be a good person is to be an excellent human, which means making excellent use of reason, the distinctively human faculty. The habit of excellent reasoning that gives rise to excellent action is called virtue. For an Aristotelian, virtue is like a second nature, an acquired disposition to do the right thing in each circumstance. Thus a person who has the virtue of generosity will, upon seeing someone in need, judge that they are to be helped and perform a generous act, perhaps by giving them money or recommending a good podcast. Moreover, someone who really has this virtue is going to have other virtues as well, like courage, temperance, and wisdom. All the virtues are bound together by a capacity for good practical reasoning, which Aristotle calls furnesis and the medieval's called prudencia or prudence. Last but not least, for Aristotle, having and exercising the virtues is what makes humans happy, the end towards which his entire ethics is directed. The ultimate end of happiness moves us to act as we pursue the most excellent and blessed life possible. Scodas modifies or rejects every aspect of this Aristotelian picture. For starters, human nature cannot be the ultimate ground of ethics because human nature itself is contingently created by God. Furthermore, while Scodas agrees that virtue is the disposition to choose well, he denies that virtue explains morally good choice. This is because virtue always points the way towards the good. In this sense, virtue is not a properly rational cause, which has the ability to pick between different alternatives, but like a natural cause such as fire, which always gives rise to heat. If choice is involved, then we need more than virtue, we need the will. Even if you have the virtue of easily and consistently discerning the right thing to do, your will must still make the right choice on each occasion. And of course, good actions are not good because they proceed from virtuous dispositions, as an Aristotelian might think, or because they conform to the ends of human nature. A good action is good because God commanded it. Scodas is no more satisfied with the Aristotelian story when it comes to prudence and the unity of the virtues. He thinks it's obvious that you can have some virtues and lack others. For one thing, you might find yourself in a situation where you cannot practice or exercise virtue in a certain sphere. A person who grows up stranded on a desert island might be resourceful, moderate, and wise, but is not going to have much chance to work on generosity or sociability. And in any case, the will's inviolable power to choose well or badly on each occasion means that there is no guarantee that tending to choose well in one sphere will mean doing so in another. For the same reason, Scodas cannot accept the notion that good practical reasoning, or prudence, will guarantee good action. For prudence belongs to the intellect, not the will. Someone might understand perfectly well that they should not commit adultery, but go ahead and do it anyway. A final, in every sense of the word, disagreement with the Aristotelians concerns the question of happiness. We saw that Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, seeking to hold onto as much of Aristotle's ethical teachings as they could, distinguished two types or levels of happiness. We can attain a degree of happiness in this life through virtuous activity, with a higher happiness secured through a vision of God in the afterlife. In both cases, the final end of happiness moves us to engage in practical action or to pursue understanding. Scodas thinks this is wrong. Obviously we are not moved by any end to choose that end, not even by God. For Scodas, the will is a self-mover, since otherwise our willing would be constrained and unfree. Besides, no human activity can secure happiness, since we can be happy only through the greatest of goods which is God. Though it may be reasonable to pursue created goods in this life, we cannot be satisfied with them, nor should we forget that, as Scodas puts it, everything other than God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa. This God-centered moral theory may sound like a reassertion of Augustine against Aristotle. It certainly banishes any prospect that we might naturally attain or merit happiness and salvation, and in that respect Scodas is on the same page as Augustine. But Scodas disagrees with Augustine on a different point. Having demoted natural virtues so far, he sees no problem with the idea that we can in fact be naturally virtuous without the help of God, something Augustine denied. For similar reasons, he has no use for Aquinas's idea that there are divinely infused as well as natural virtues. All of this may seem to leave a gap in Scodas's moral theory, and you know how I feel about gaps. If virtue doesn't, as it were, spontaneously give rise to good action, then how and why do we act rightly? Of course, part of the answer is that we choose to do so through the will, but on what basis? Is it just random luck? Here Scodas looks back to an early medieval predecessor, namely Anselm. He likes Anselm's idea that we have two kinds of motivation which often come into conflict with one another. On the one hand, we want what is useful to ourselves. On the other, we have an inclination towards justice that remains intact even in our state of original sin. As we saw, prudence doesn't guarantee that we will choose justice over our own advantage, but it has an important role to play nonetheless in helping us to see which actions are and are not just. When you deliberate about the right thing to do, you are engaging in this kind of reasoning, and thanks to your inborn affection for justice, you have a motivation to choose in accordance with the advice that results, even if the freedom of your will means that there is no guarantee you will do so. One lesson to draw from all this might be that morality really has to do only with the choices made by the will. If you choose in accordance with the moral law laid down by God, then you have acted rightly. The action that results from the choice would really be only a byproduct with the moral value residing solely with the choice. This is the view that was taken in the 12th century by Peter Abelard, who taught that actions in themselves are neither good nor bad. What is good or bad is the intention to perform an action, as shown by the fact that one and the same action could be performed out of a good intention or a bad one. I might donate money to charity to help others, or to impress my friends. While Scotus's voluntarism might seem to fit nicely with Abelard's idea, he doesn't go as far as he might have in this direction. For that, we have to wait for William of Ockham, who also enthusiastically embraces voluntarism, and does say that morality concerns only the interior act of the soul, which gives rise to an outward physical action. So, for example, Ockham will say that God rewards and punishes people for their interior choices, and not for what they actually do. Scotus takes a more moderate view. He certainly agrees that interior choices can be morally good or bad. But following other Franciscan thinkers like Bonaventure and Richard of Middleton, he also emphasizes that the outward act acquires a moral character of its own by flowing from a good or bad choice. This helps him explain something else about the biblical commandments. If you look over the list, it won't take long, there are only ten of them, you might notice that we are instructed not to covet another person's spouse, and also not to commit adultery. In a view like Abelard's or Ockham's, this might seem redundant. The problem is the coveting, not the adulterous act to which the coveting leads. For Scotus, though, the exterior act of adultery has a wrongness of its own, despite being caused by an act of will that is already wrong in and of itself. The name of Peter Abelard happily gives us a nice transition to the next topic I've chosen to tackle from among the many subtleties of Scotus. If you do remember Abelard, you will probably recall three things about him. The moral theory I just mentioned, his nominalist stance regarding universals, and the fact that he regretfully separated from Heloise after being forcibly separated from an intimate part of himself. The good news for Scotus is that it's not the last of these that will be relevant next time. Instead, I want to look at how Scotus dealt with the issue of universals. This will help set up the return to nominalism we'll see in 14th century figures who reacted against the qualified realism of Scotus's metaphysics. So here is something you shouldn't do under any circumstances. Miss the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, One in a Million – Scotus on Universals and Individuals. Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you. This charming traditional poem may be suitable for a declaration of love between 7-year-olds, yet upon closer inspection it proves to be rather perplexing. For one thing, surely violets are violet, not blue. For another thing, what exactly does it mean to say that all roses are red? The poem doesn't say that this or that rose is red, but that all roses are red. Actually, of course, it's also not true that all roses are red. The author of this poem clearly wasn't much of a gardener. But let's leave that aside and focus on making philosophical, rather than botanical, sense of the remark. It takes us back to a set of puzzles we met in the 12th century when Peter Abelard and his rivals disputed the question of universals. Abelard was a nominalist. In other words, he held that there is no real, universal nature that belongs to all roses and is responsible for their being roses. Nor is there any universal nature of redness that belongs to all red things. For Abelard, all real things are individuals, and when we call a given individual red or rose, we are simply applying general names that apply in virtue of the similarity between things. It's because this individual flower is like that one that we do not call this rose by any other name, regardless of whether it would smell as sweet. Opponents of Abelard, like William of Champo, were realists, meaning that they took the universal nature of roses to be something real that is present in each and every single rose, and likewise for redness in each red thing. If you think about it, there's actually another puzzle lurking here too. It's really a remarkably complex poem. I have in mind the problem of individuation. Again, this is a difficulty we encountered in the 12th century in the work of Gilbert of Poitiers, who wondered what makes each thing an individual. Though we treated these two philosophical issues separately in the earlier episodes, they obviously make a good pair. The problem of universals is about what things in a given class have in common with one another. What makes all roses roses. The problem of individuation is what makes a member of a given class different from the other members of that class. What makes the rose in my lapel to be a unique rose distinct from all the other roses in the world. These problems were certainly discussed by earlier 13th century thinkers like Aquinas, but in this episode I want to look at how Scodas, our final thinker of the century, rose to the challenge of solving both puzzles, and in so doing set the terms of the later debate. Let's start with Avelard's central idea, the one that really led him to his nominalist position, namely that everything that is is one individual. On the face of it, this looks plausible or even obvious. How can a thing exist without being just the one thing that it is? In fact, cast your mind back to one more previous medieval discussion about the doctrine of transcendentals. According to that doctrine, everything that has being also has unity, or to put it another way, everything that is is one. But we're already several minutes into a podcast episode on Scodas, so it's well past time for a subtle distinction. Scodas agrees with Avelard that all real things are one, and thus preserves the idea that unity is a transcendental, that is a feature of all things with a scope equal to that of being. But he denies that whatever is one is an individual. His way of putting it uses traditional Aristotelian language to express a novel idea. He says that there is a kind of unity that is less than numerical unity. This lesser kind of unity is the kind possessed by common natures, shared among multiple things, as all roses share the nature of being a rose. Since common natures have a degree of unity, they also have a degree of reality or being. So, it would be tempting to label Scodas as a realist within the debate over universals. He is, after all, saying that shared natures are real. But just as every rose has its thorn, there is a sting in every tail told by Scodas. He strenuously denies that universals exist in external reality. For him, universality is a feature of our mental life. We have a general or universal understanding of roses that we abstract from all our encounters with particular roses, but there's no such thing as a universal nature of rose that exists by itself out there in the world. That, at least on his understanding, is what would be claimed by the Platonic theory of forms, a theory Scodas thinks is obviously false. To say that there is a Platonic form of rose would be like saying that the very nature of roses is itself a separate individual, which is not just false, but in fact rather silly. Nor is the nature of the rose a full-blown individual thing that is a part of each individual rose, like an individual person might be part of the crowd at a botanical garden. So, when Scodas asserts that the common nature of roses is real, he sees himself as offering a moderate view between realism about universals and the sort of position adopted by Abelard which ascribes no reality to common natures at all. Against the nominalists, he claims that common natures are real. Against realists, he claims that common natures are not in themselves universal, and that they have a lesser degree of unity and reality than that possessed by more familiar things like particular roses, which are individuals. Needless to say, Scodas has clever arguments for all this. It's easy for him to show that the common nature is not a full-blown individual. If that were the case, then the nature of roses would be numerically only one thing. The result would be that there could only ever be one rose, a result whose absurdity will be evident to anyone other than Saint Exupéry's character, the Little Prince. It's more difficult to show that common natures are not only in the mind, where they are grasped universally, but also out there in the real world. Well, it would be difficult for most people, but this is Scodas, and he's able to produce several arguments to prove the reality of shared natures. For one thing, we need them to account for causation. In most cases, we see that causes pass on some kind of shared nature to their effects. Humans generate humans, sugar makes things sweet, and maybe roses germinate further roses, though I'm not much of a gardener either, so I wouldn't swear to it. For another thing, and more importantly, we do grasp things out there in the world by subsuming them under general concepts. This doesn't mean that there is anything universal out there, like there is in the mind, but our universal notion of roses must be latching on to a common nature that is somehow actually in all roses. Otherwise, universal concepts like rose or flower, which are examples of the species and genera so beloved of medieval logicians, would be pure fictions. Scodas thus signals his agreement with Avicenna, who stated that, What this means, at least on Scodas's understanding, is that one and the same common nature appears in both particular horses and in the universal idea of horse. The nature is neither universal nor particular in itself. We make it universal by thinking about it, as when we make a universal judgment, such as horses like eating roses. The nature can also be part of a real individual in the world, and it's this that justifies such general judgments. When I think that horses enjoy a nice rose now and again, I'm thinking about all the individual things that share the nature of hoarseness. This is, of course, just to say that I'm thinking about all the individual horses. Notice, though, that just as hoarseness doesn't care whether it appears in a universal thought or in a particular horse, so it doesn't care which particular horses it belongs to. As Scodas puts it, And this makes sense. Suppose God had decided not to create Secretariat, so that that particular horse never existed. This would make a big difference to the history of horse racing, but no difference at all to the nature of horses. So, that's Scodas's explanation of how horses are horses, roses are roses, and nominalists and Platonists are both wrong. But we still have our second problem of how individual horses and roses are individuals. In fact, Scodas's story might even seem to make this problem worse, because he's insisting that the nature of roseness, or hoarseness, in an individual rose or horse is not in itself individual. Remember, that nature in itself has less than numerical unity, it remains common or shared even when it is part of a given individual. Evidently, then, it is nothing about the nature of roses that makes this rose the particular rose that it is. No surprise there, Scodas would say, again, if the very nature of rose were responsible for individuality, there could only ever be one individual rose. Clearly, then, we're going to need a different explanation of how things become individuals. In fact, there were several explanations available to Scodas being defended by various contemporaries. We've already met one of them in the context of the 1277 Condemnations. As you might recall, there was a kerfuffle over the question of how angels become individuated. This posed a problem for Thomas Aquinas, because he thought that things of the same kind are individuated by matter, that is, one rose is distinct from another rose because it is made of different material stuff. Since angels have no matter, Aquinas was forced to conclude that each angel is unique in its species. Even God cannot make two distinct immaterial things of the same kind. It's in the context of this very same question about angels that Scodas takes up the problem of individuation in his early Lectura. In typical scholastic fashion, he considers a series of proposals about how individuation occurs and refutes each of them. The explanation in terms of matter was also the topic of a debate between Scodas and a follower of Aquinas named William Peter Godinus. Scodas makes several rather convincing points against the theory. For starters, matter is supposedly that which survives when something is destroyed. When a rose dies, its lifeless corpse might be put into the compost, which is then used to grow another bed of roses. In this scenario, a given bit of matter might belong first to one rose and then another rose, and obviously one in the same matter can't be responsible for distinguishing one rose from another. Also, even if we granted that matter makes the rose individual, then we could still ask, what makes the matter individual? Matter doesn't, after all, seem to be just intrinsically something individual, given that all sorts of different things are made of it. So, in order to use Aquinas's explanation, we actually need a further explanation of how this matter that constitutes this rose became this bit of matter, rather than some other bit. As I say, this is only one of the theories Scodas wants to uproot. Another was put forth by Henry of Ghent. He had the rather curious idea that individuation can be explained negatively, or rather by a double negation. What makes something an individual, is that it is not identical with other members of the same species, and that it is not divided into further individuals. In other words, are roses distinct from other roses, and that things that make it up are parts, not whole entities? Scodas gives this answer short shrift. We don't want to hear what individuals are not, but how they are what they are. We want a positive account of individuation, and in this case, two negatives don't make a positive. I think Scodas is right to criticize Henry here, or at least to criticize Henry as Scodas is understanding him. The fact that one rose is not identical to another is precisely what needs to be explained, it's not the explanation. So far, though, Scodas has himself only told us two ways not to explain individuation. We're still waiting for the right answer. To get our heads around that right answer, it might help to go back to what we were just saying about matter. If a thing is individuated by its matter, Scodas complained, then that matter would itself need to be individuated by something else. This kind of problem bedevils many attempts to explain individuality, as we saw in that episode on Gilbert of Poitiers. If a thing is individuated by its place, say, or by its accidents, then what individuates the place or the accidents? What we need is a principle of individuation that is, unlike matter or the common nature, itself individual. We need a nature that is singular, rather than common, that belongs to only one thing and can belong only to that thing. In the history of philosophy, such a singular nature is usually called a hexaiety, from the Latin word hec meaning this. Basically, the word means thisness. It's still used routinely by metaphysicians today, so that this concept constitutes one of Scodas's most prominent and long-lasting contributions to later philosophy. Actually, he has loads of such contributions, but this one is more obvious than most. Scodas hardly ever uses the Latin word hexaiety himself, though it was enthusiastically bandied about by his followers. He prefers such phrases as form of the individual, lowest-level form, or difference of the individual. That last expression is particularly illuminating, because Scodas explains the singular nature by drawing an analogy to the difference that picks out one species from another species in the same genus. If we have a large class or genus, like flowers, then this specific difference of roses will be whatever distinguishes roses from other flowers. Perhaps that roses are the only flower that have thorns. Of course, this isn't true, and apparently botanists insist that those sharp things on roses should in fact be called prickles. So much for every rose having its thorn. But as I told you, I'm not much on botany. I refer you instead to Albert the Great. Anyway, let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the species of rose is distinguished from all other flowers by having thorns. In just the same way, according to Scodas, Secretariat is distinguished from other members of the species of horse by Secretariat's singular essence, or hexaiety. The upshot is that individuals are made up of two aspects or parts. First, each thing has its common nature, which makes it like other things. Second, it has its singular essence, which makes it be a specific individual. Secretariat is thus made up of both hoarseness and secretariat-ness. So in a way, Scodas agrees with that assumption that drove Abelard to his nominalism, that everything that exists is individual. Officially, Scodas of course denies that everything real is an individual, since common natures are real. But common natures don't just hang around on their own, as the Platonist claims. They are only ever found conjoined to, or contracted by, the hexaieties that make things individual, or when we universalize the common natures in our minds. To put it another way, full-blown reality always involves numerical unity, that is individuality. Indeed, the two natures in each thing, one common and one singular, are said to be only formally distinct, in the latest deployment of what may be Scodas's favorite distinction, though this, like Secretariat's Triple Crown, is a title for which there was plenty of competition. While all of this is clearly quite clever, it is also rather unsatisfying. Doesn't Scodas's solution boil down to saying that what makes me individual is just whatever makes me individual? It's hardly helpful to say that I am Peter Adamson thanks to my Peter Adamson-ness. The analogy to this specific difference is a bit more illuminating, but it doesn't really help me envision what that feature could be that makes me the individual I am, distinct from other humans, the way that thorns might make rose the species it is, distinct from other flowers. There's a good reason for this, though. Scodas thinks that in our current embodied life, the singular essence is not something we can grasp. God can understand hexaieties, but in this life at least, humans cannot do the same, something Scodas blames either on original sin or our dependence on sensation. This turns out to be helpful for Scodas in wriggling out of an exegetical embarrassment. Aristotle says quite clearly that individuals have no essences, whereas Scodas is insisting that they do. He avoids outright contradiction with Aristotle by saying that when Aristotle denied that there are individual essences, he just meant that there are no such essences that we can know. This interpretive move is, I have to say, about as lame as a one-legged horse. On the bright side, though, Scodas has achieved resounding agreement with Aristotle on a different point. In Aristotle's theory of knowledge, scientific understanding is said to involve universal judgments. Scodas can now explain why. It's because singular essences are unknowable for us, even though they are real. We infer their reality only by an indirect argument, on the basis that if there were no hexaieties, nothing could be an individual, something the Scodas scholar Peter King has compared to postulating the existence of an unseen planet on the basis of its effects on other heavenly bodies. But, no sooner has Scodas ratified the traditional Aristotelian doctrine that science must be universal, than he, characteristically, makes yet another departure from Aristotle. Just as characteristically, it takes the form of a distinction. The sort of understanding involved in Aristotelian science is universal and abstractive cognition. But there's another kind of cognition available to the intellect, and Scodas calls it intuitive cognition. This is a little bit misleading for the modern reader. We typically use the word intuition to mean something like instinctive or inspired insight, as in the tacitly sexist phrase, women's intuition. This is not what Scodas means by it. Instead, he means something like direct acquaintance with a thing, as opposed to the sort of cognition involved when you make a judgment about that thing or use general concepts abstracted from sense experience. Obviously, it is the latter abstractive sort of cognition that is involved in Aristotelian science and analyzed in medieval logic. And this is the kind of activity that medievalists usually took to be characteristic of the human mind. The intellect grasps roses universally, by means of a general, abstracted concept of roses. But Scodas insists that the intellect is also capable of simply grasping an individual object, simply because it is present to us in existence. Actually, insists is a bit strong. He does make the claim forcefully in some passages, but in other places he says that intuitive cognition is impossible in this life just like understanding of hexaieties. Still, when he speaks in favor of the idea, he gives compelling arguments and examples. For one thing, clearly sensation is able to engage in intuitive cognition. Seeing or smelling a rose would be a paradigm case for this kind of intuition. The particular rose simply presents itself to sensation. But intellect is better than sensation, so how can it be incapable of something that sense perception does all the time? Also, if we assume that the intellect can grasp individuals intuitively, this explains how it is able to apply its universal ideas to particulars. In order to judge that Secretariat is a horse, and therefore likes eating roses, the intellect had better be able to grasp Secretariat somehow. Also, there is the phenomenon of self-awareness, which we discussed some episodes back in an interview with Therese Corry. In this case, too, the intellect is having an intuition, since it is grasping itself as present to itself, not using some kind of abstract concept of itself. 14th century thinkers like Occam are going to use this idea of intuitive cognition too, and with less hesitation than Scodas. This exemplifies his far-reaching influence. You might have noticed that I have devoted a lot of attention to Scodas. This is in part because he's just so brilliant, but also because he brilliantly sets the stage for 14th century philosophy. Many of the main themes we'll be looking at in episodes to come, especially the ones on scholastic thinkers, revolve around Scodas's ideas. His voluntarism in psychology and ethics, and his realism about common natures, both provoked vigorous debates, as did such technical moves as his formal distinction and the contrast between absolute and ordained power. Since Scodas was a Franciscan, his ideas were especially influential among thinkers of this order, even if they were not always accepted. We'll see a fine example of this when we get to his fellow Franciscan, William of Occam, himself one of the rare prominent thinkers in an unjustly ignored period of philosophy, the 14th century. But, before we do turn to the 14th century, it will be well worth spending just a bit more time in the company of Duns Scodas. We're going to focus a little bit more on his influential theory of cognition, which I've only sketched rather abstractly in this episode. My intuition tells me you won't want to miss an interview on this topic with Giorgio Pini as we finish off our look at Scodas and the 13th century, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with support from King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Duns Scotus with Giorgio Pini, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Hi Giorgio. Hello Peter. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. We're going to be focusing on Scotus's theory of cognition or knowledge, and in order to get at what's special about Scotus, I thought it would be a good idea to first ask you about his predecessors. Maybe we could focus on Aquinas because Aquinas is famous, and also Scotus responds to him quite extensively. What is the kind of basic idea that Aquinas would have about how we come to have knowledge of the world around us through our sense experience? Yeah, Thomas Aquinas's idea was that we get knowledge of everyday objects, let's say a good example. By starting up with sensory properties, so for example, color of the giraffe or the smell of the giraffe, all things that we can get acquainted with by our senses. Then we develop that sort of information through our cognitive powers, so our sensory power, our memory, and finally our mental powers. What do we get at the end of the story? Well we get the concept of a giraffe, that is for Aquinas, a form that is present in our mind, and that form corresponds to the form of the giraffe out in the world. The two are very similar, even the same under some respects. For that reason, for Aquinas, we can in that way for Aquinas, we can get to the essence of things in the world, know what a giraffe is, starting with our senses and ending up with concepts in our mind. And this concept would basically involve all of the essential properties of what a giraffe is, so there's nothing left out. Yes, yes, there is nothing left out. Aquinas is aware that it may be very difficult and it may also take a long time to get all the essential properties, something that a biologist can do in many years, but it's pretty confident that it is something that we can do, just relying on our senses and our cognitive powers. And in fact, the state of knowledge of giraffes in 13th century Paris was actually terrible. Yes, I guess so. What happens then after we die? Because Aquinas thinks that what happens in the beatific vision or when we get to heaven, as it were, is that our cognitive access to the truth improves quite a lot. And from what you just said, it sounds like there's not much room for improvement. Yeah. For Aquinas, basically the same pattern, the same kind of explanation works in the next life, of course, with some sort of modification. In the next life, we will not be acquainted with everyday material objects like a giraffe. Our knowledge will be of God, a very different kind of object. So in order to get the knowledge of God, we will not be able to rely on our senses, clearly. At the same time, Aquinas is willing to keep the basics of his account of knowledge. And he says that we still have a form in our mind, a form of God, when we know God. The way we acquire it is not through our senses, but basically God himself will give us this form. The peculiar idea that Aquinas has is that in the case of the beatific vision of our knowledge of God in the next life, God will play the role both of the object, what we know, and of the form through which we know that object. So God will play two roles, so to speak. As if God were both the giraffe and the image of the giraffe. Exactly, exactly. Okay. So that's a very special case, obviously, but in general terms, he thinks that the cognitive mechanism is the same. It's the same. You get a form. Exactly. You get a form through different channels, through the senses in the case of this life, directly from God in the next life. The cognitive mechanism that is in us is basically the same, and it works in the same way. In a way, we can say that God has to adapt to it, because for us to know is just to have a form in our mind. So if God wants to be known by us, he has to play the role of the form as well, of this image. And this is one of the things that Scotus is going to question and challenge, because he thinks there's a big difference between our knowledge in this life and our knowledge in the next life. Correct. To get into that, though, let's start with this life. What would Scotus say is happening when I look at a giraffe? So I'm at the zoo, there's the giraffe. What would he think happens? Okay, well, on the one hand, he says something that is similar to what Aquinas says, because he thinks that I get acquainted with the giraffe, I know what a giraffe is, starting with the sensory information that I gather from the giraffe, starting from these sensory qualities. So again, the color, the smell, the noise that the giraffe can make in certain circumstances. This is the starting point, like for Aquinas. But then the way this information, the starting information is developed, is a little different for Scotus, because Scotus is very much aware of a problem. He thinks that what these sensory properties like the smell, the color, the noise that a giraffe makes, what these kind of sensory properties give us is very little information, very little. If we think of the gap between the smell of a giraffe and the sophistication of a concept that a biologist has of what a giraffe is, there seems to be a long way to go. And there seems to be no way just to bridge this gap through making the information that is already present in the sensory qualities more and more sophisticated through some sort of refinement. Scotus thinks that something more is required. And how do I get to this something more? Because it seems like the only access I have to the world around me is through my senses. The only access that I have is correct, to the world is through my senses. But we also have a very powerful mental capacities of an inferential kind, so that we can make reasonings about the information that we gather through the senses. That was something that Aquinas as well, of course, was well aware of. But for Scotus, it is on this inferential capacities that we have really to focus in order to explain how we get from the sensory information to the more sophisticated concept that we have in our mind. How does the story work for Scotus? Well, again, I start with my direct acquaintance with the smell or with the color. Then I can get a concept of what a color is. But this is still a concept of a property, what a medieval thinker would call an accident is not what a giraffe is, what an object is. If we could rely just on our senses, and on the development of what we get from our senses that we can just carry out, we should stop here. How do we get to the concept of what a giraffe is? Well, at that point, our inferential powers come in, and we realize, we reason actually, that if there are properties, there must be a subject underlying them. There must be something, an object that is not a property, but is the thing to which all these properties belong. So you start with these accidents, so it's brown, it smells bad. Yes. Let's face it, giraffes are not the most fragrant beasts. It's tall, it's located in the zoo. And then you think, well, wait a minute, these accidents are all kind of happening in the same place. So it must be that there's something underneath, so to speak, to which they belong. Precisely. Yes. And this is a piece of reasoning. There is not something that we can arrive at only by the information we get from the senses and by some sort of elaboration of that information. And does he actually think that it's literally a conscious piece of reasoning that sort of goes through your mind explicitly? Oh, look, there must be something underneath? Well, Skodos is not very clear about this, but I don't think that is the case. I think that Skodos thinks that just because our mind is built up in a certain way, it has the power, it is predisposed to work in that way when faced with some accidents. So I do not have consciously to think, oh, there is a smell, there is a color, they cannot just float, they do not just float around in reality, but they always come together. So there must be a subject to which they belong. This is a piece of reasoning that I make sort of unconsciously, if you want, just because my mind is set up to work in that way. Okay, but what if a skeptic came along and said, well, I don't believe there's anything underlying. I think that maybe there is a giraffe, but to me, a giraffe is nothing more than a kind of collection or bundle, as sometimes is said in today's metaphysics, is like a bundle theory. Of a substance. The idea would be that there's nothing more to the giraffe than being a bundle of these properties. Yes. Well, Skodos is in some ways aware of this possible criticism. So he actually has an argument to show that there must be something underlying, which is not a property, but is a subject of properties. His basic argument is that that is the best explanation to account for the fact that these different accidents, these different properties, a smell, a color, come together and they are sort of the bundle, if you want, is constant over time. And some of these properties, some of these elements of the bundle can be lost, but other ones are retained and we still recognize some sort of very important identity over time. And that is his argument that he thinks the argument that is the argument that he uses to show that there must be an underlying object, an underlying subject behind these different properties. That's interesting because it actually echoes something Aristotle says in the categories where he's trying to explain what a substance is and he says a substance is the thing that undergoes change. So for example, human goes from being white to not white or from not white to white. And so that idea of the underlying thing that persists through change, the idea that that's what it really means to be a substance, seems to go all the way back to Aristotle. Absolutely. Yes. Because, well, Aristotle was definitely the main source of the Scodas, even though Scodas, like many other scholastic thinkers, used Aristotle in a very inventive way. So for example, concerning this problem of the underlying object, as you said, there is definitely the idea of the Aristotelian substance underlying different changes. But Scodas adds a twist to this idea, if you want, because Scodas thinks that there is also a cognitive side to this story. So that he's talking about not just the structure of reality, the fact that there are underlying subjects, but he's also saying that, well, we can find out that there are underlying objects, that there are objects behind us, males, colors, because there is something that goes on over time and remains the same in some sense. So an idea like that of a substance that started up like something purely metaphysical, if you want, something that tells us something about the way the word is. Now that same idea is being used by Scodas also to illustrate something about the way we know the word is. Let me try a different kind of skeptical response to this theory, instead of thinking of the substance as a bundle of properties. What if I said, okay, sure, there is something underlying these properties, but I couldn't possibly know what it is because of the way you just set it up, right? So you've told me my access to the world is through sense perception. All the things I get through sense perception are just accidental properties. It seems like the only thing left for the substance to be is an I know not what, as Locke later will put it. Yes. On the one hand, Scodas would agree that in this life we can never have a complete grasp of what a thing is, as he says, a complete grasp of the essence of a thing. On the other hand, he is very confident that even though our grasp is sort of not completely detailed, we can still get a grasp of the essence of something. How can we do that? Well, the problem, as you indicated, is that we have to bridge the gap between properties and what this subject is. Scodas thinks that we can do that because the object underlying these properties is not something of a completely different kind from the properties that are present in that object. After all, we say both about the object and about the properties that they are something. That may not be very informative, admittedly, but this is something that for Scodas is very, very important because he argues that if we say both about the object and about the properties that they are something, we must be using the word something in the same sense. And that is what offers us a bridge between properties and object. So this is referring to the theory of the univocity of being, in other words, the idea that existence or being always means the same thing, whether it's God, an accident, a substance, which is something I talked about in a recent episode. So the thought there, I guess, would be that I do have access to accidents. I don't have immediate access to substances, but since substances are beings and accidents are beings, and since being is being, because it's unifical, I've got access to something that's of the same type as the thing I really want access to, which is the substance. Precisely. So the idea is that, as you said, I start up with accidents, then I can form the concept of a being, of something, just out of the little information I get from accidents. After all, even if I am just acquainted with the color or with the smell, I can form the concept of something, of a being, out of that little piece of information that I have. Now that I have the concept of a being, I can make an inference and conclude that there must be something behind those properties, those colors, those smells. What do I know about that something? Admittedly, not very much, but at least I know that it is something in the very same sense of something in which properties, accidents, are something. And I know, of course, that that object is the subject of properties. So at least I have the basis on which I can build up a more and more sophisticated concept of what that thing is. The more information I gather, the more accidents I am acquainted with, the more things I can say about that object. And I guess that also means that I can have a unified science, which is metaphysics, which studies all the beings, accidents, substances, and also God. Absolutely. So even though Scodas seems to have some sort of skeptical sides in what he says, because he thinks that we do not have a direct access to the objects, to even material objects in this world, he is pretty confident that we can build up a science of being, a science of reality in this life. We can have very solid metaphysics. And the tools by which we build up metaphysics for Scodas are basically two. The first one is the univocal concept of being, about which we have just been talking about. Because we have this univocal concept, we can move from our acquaintance of accidents and derive that knowledge of objects. The second tool is our inferential capacities. Scodas argues that we can trust our inferential capacities completely. So for example, we can trust completely the principle of non-contradiction, and we can trust completely our capacities to derive consequences from a premise. That is the other way by which, even though I do not have a direct grasp of what a giraffe is, I'm not plugged in to the essence of a giraffe directly, I can arrive at a pretty sophisticated and complex concept of what a giraffe is by saying, first of all, a giraffe is an object. Second, it is an object which is the subject of such and such and such properties. You keep saying in this life as a kind of caveat, which implies that things will be different in the next life. We said before regarding Aquinas that Aquinas has the idea that cognition will work in the same basic way in this life and in the afterlife. I take it that for Scodas that's not true, so does that mean that in the afterlife I just am plugged in to the essence of giraffe, as you put it? That sounds like paradise to me. Well, in a way, yes. That's definitely the case. That's the other important difference between Scodas and Aquinas concerning the theory of cognition. In the next life, we will not rely anymore on our senses, clearly. We will not need to make this sometimes complicated inference, starting with the senses arriving at the notion of an object underlying the accidental properties. In the next life, we will make use of a special power that we already have in this life, but because of the limitations, our cognitive limitations in this life, we do not use now. This special cognitive power that we have is what Scodas calls intuitive cognition, which is a power to have direct access to the essence of something without all the mediation of the senses of inferential powers that are necessary right now. And this intuitive kind of knowledge, can I have that at all during this life? I mean, is there anything I have intuitive access to? Yeah. Not giraffes, apparently, but... For Scodas, that is actually a controversial point about scholars of Scodas, but Scodas is pretty clear that in this life, there are some cases in which we have this intuitive knowledge of things. So that is also evidence that we are able to have it in the next life, because there are a few cases which are pretty uncontroversial for Scodas, in which we have this intuitive, direct grasp of the essence of something in this life. His examples are our own cognitive faculties, and possibly even our own mind. How do we know our own cognitive faculties? Well, clearly not through sensory accidents, because cognitive faculties are not things that have sensory accidents. Like I don't smell myself thinking or... Exactly, I don't smell myself thinking. But I do know that I think. How do I know? Well, according to Scodas, because I have a sort of direct access to my power of thinking, and that direct access is this cognitive knowledge. Right, and so the way that I would access what a giraffe is in the afterlife is the way that I access the fact that I'm thinking about giraffes right now? Yes, there is a little complication about that, because in the next life the main object of knowledge will be God, and God is an object important enough to be basically the main, if not the only, object of knowledge in the next life. But there will be no God through this intuitive knowledge directly, without any mediation, so no need of a form of God, as Aquinas had thought. And by knowing the essence of God directly, I will also know in a sort of secondary way, but very powerful way, all the essences of the other things, because all the essences of the other things are contained in some way in God. So I do get the giraffes after all. That's all I care about. Absolutely. In a much better way than I can get the giraffe in this life. Just out of curiosity, this very heavy restriction on our intuitive knowledge in this life, is that a punishment for the fall, or is it just because we're embodied, or both? Or is it not clear? It is not clear, in the sense that Scaurus takes into account both the possibilities that you mentioned. It says that it may be due just to the fall as a sort of punishment. For the fall, maybe now we have to get the essence of things in a roundabout way, through the senses, through inferences. We are not able to do it directly anymore. And in only few cases, like the knowledge of our cognitive powers, or even of our volitions, we can do that in a direct way. So this could be a consequence of the fall, or it could just be the fact that we are embodied beings, that we have a body. And so God decided maybe to harmonize our body and our minds, and He decided just to create things in such a way that to my power to get knowledge of things. And the other corresponds to my power to get knowledge of sensory accidents through the senses. Scodos doesn't have a definitive view about this, but it's pretty clear that this is a contingent situation. This is true just in this life. And it is also quite clear that for Scodos, this is a cognitive limitation. So the senses are very useful in this life because they are the only door through which I can get access to objects, to material objects. But they are also a very limiting kind of door, because they do not give us a direct access to the essence of things. In the next life, we do not need that kind of channel, limiting channel, we can get access to essences of things in that sort of direct way. One last question, speaking of the afterlife, let me ask you something about Scodos' afterlife in the historical tradition. A lot of the things you said for me ring bells with people like Descartes or Hume. So for example, the idea that we have some kind of immediate access to the fact that we're thinking sounds a lot like Descartes' famous cogito argument. The idea that we only get access to material substances through the kind of sense impressions they make on us sounds like Hume and the other empiricists. Is that just a coincidence or is there a historical link between Scodos and these early modern thinkers? No, I don't think it is a coincidence. Of course, there are many differences between Scodos and these early modern thinkers. For example, as I said, Scodos was never a skeptic and never even went through a stage of skepticism because he always had full confidence in our inferential capacities and in our ability to make up a univocal concept of what something is. Also for Scodos, sensory properties are not just in my mind, they are out there in the world, they are objective features of the world. And that is quite an important difference between Scodos on the one hand, and I would say all late medieval thinkers on the one hand, or most of them, and early modern thinkers. At the same time, there are indeed some striking similarities and that is not a coincidence because Scodos had a very strong influence on many people thinking and writing after him. More specifically, he had a very strong influence on people writing textbooks of metaphysics or on cognition. People like Francisco Suárez, for example, a Spanish thinker active in the 16th century, who wrote an entire system of philosophy. Suárez was heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas, but he was also heavily influenced by Scodos. Actually, we can say that he read Aquinas through Scodos. Suárez, in turn, was influencing a tradition of textbooks that were the sort of textbooks with which, for example, Descartes was familiar with when he studied in the Jesuit college, he was given access to these kind of textbooks. So in this way, even though it is in an indirect way, I think that it is correct to say that Scodos had an influence on early modern thought. Right. And of course, I will be getting to all of these guys eventually, Suárez and early modern thought and so on. In the near future, I will be turning to medieval philosophy in the 14th century. Scodos lived until the first decade of the 14th century. I'm going to be turning to other 14th century thinkers in the episodes to come. But for now, I'll thank Giorgio Pini very much for coming on the show. Thank you. And please join me next time as I go on further into the 14th century here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Time of the Signs, the 14th Century. If asked to name my favorite century, I would probably go with the 20th, which gave us Buster Keaton, Stevie Wonder, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Beat that 21st century. Most other historians of philosophy, being more serious-minded, would probably choose either the 4th century BC, the time of Plato and Aristotle, or the 17th century AD, which can boast Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Margaret Cavendish, to name just a few. Actually, as far as philosophy goes, that's probably just the right answer. Aficionados of medieval thought might, however, be tempted to go for the 13th century, when you had the rise of the universities, the recovery of Aristotle, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus. It's a real embarrassment of riches. In comparison, the 14th century looks to be a plain old embarrassment. A popular book about the history of the period labels it as calamitous, and here's a two-word phrase that will probably tempt you to agree immediately, Black Death. On the philosophical front, it's one of those eras people tend to skip, going straight from high scholasticism to the Renaissance and Reformation, or indeed vaulting all the way to the aforementioned glories of the Enlightenment. But this is a big mistake. For one thing, you can't understand the philosophical developments of the Renaissance and Reformation without knowing what happened in the 14th century. Of course, you'd expect me to say this, without any gaps and all that, but it's particularly true in this case. The word Renaissance suggests a break with what came before, but in fact scholastic philosophy continued to flourish in the 15th and 16th centuries when we see the emergence of factions or schools following the lead of Scotus, Occam, and others. The name of Occam also reminds us that, historical influence aside, the 14th century did have its share of famous names. In the scholastic context, William of Occam and John Buridan are probably the best known figures. But specialists in medieval philosophy know that there are many others who deserve to be better known, like Peter Oriel, Gregory of Rimini, Adam Wodum, Walter Burley, Nicholas of Autrichor, and Nicole Oresme. It has to be said that these are mostly figures of the early or mid-14th century, though Oresme didn't die until 1382. Later in the century, after the Black Death and during the Hundred Years' War, fewer stars seemed to shine in the scholastic firmament. But there are exceptions, such as the controversial John Wycliffe, who died around the same time as Oresme and helped to set the agenda for 15th century thought. It would be another big mistake to think that 14th century philosophy is just the story of scholasticism. Here is a selective list of figures from this period who were active outside the university context and who we'll be covering in the episodes to come. Mariette Porrett, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Thalle, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Julian of Norwich. Admittedly, none of these authors are primarily seen as philosophers. Dante and Chaucer are stars in a different firmament, being respectively the greatest figures in Italian and English medieval literature. It's easy to make a case for including Dante in our series, though. His Divine Comedy has much to say about philosophy, and he wrote two treatises on philosophical topics, the Convivio and On Monarchy. Chaucer, meanwhile, was interested in scholasticism and reflects on its ideas in several of his poetic works. As for Mariette, Eckhart, Thalle, and Julian, they are all more usually categorized as mystics. But by this stage, you should be comfortable with the idea that the line between philosophy and mysticism is, at best, a blurry one. We'll be seeing that 14th century mystical texts dealt with a range of issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, easily warranting their inclusion in our story. That's just a thumbnail sketch of what happened in the history of philosophy during the 1300s. Before getting into more detail, let's have a quick look at the wider historical context. As I've already mentioned, it was a rough century. Even aside from the Black Death, which struck around 1350 and reduced populations across Europe by something like one-third, there were plenty of other disasters to contend with. It seems that population growth had already slowed towards the end of the 13th century, and terrible weather in 1315 and 1316 caused harvests to fail with widespread famine the inevitable result. Average temperatures also cooled in the so-called Little Ice Age, following a warming period that had prevailed in Europe in the previous centuries. While the people suffered, their leaders squabbled. As we'll see, a question that much occupied political thinkers of the time was the relative authority of church and state. Positions were adopted all along the spectrum here, with Aquinas's disciple Giles of Rome making a strong case for the supremacy of the pope, and Marsilius of Padua going just as far in a secularist direction. This was not just an abstract theoretical dispute, but a reaction to current events. We'll see this in Dante too. He scatters political observations, predictions, and outright character assassinations throughout his Divine Comedy, reserving a special place in hell, quite literally, for Pope Boniface VIII. The papacy in this period was embattled, and not just because of insolent Italian vernacular poets. Early in the century, King Philip IV of France came into conflict with this same pope, Boniface VIII, who threatened him with excommunication. Philip had the pope taken prisoner, and the pontiff died soon after. His immediate successors fell under the influence of the French crown, one symptom being the relocation of the pope's residence to Avignon. It would remain there for more than 70 years, a matter of annoyance to Italians, who expressed their dismay by complaining of the debauchery of the papal court. Petrarch called it the sewer of the world. To the modern year, the name Avignon immediately conjures up the schism within the church, with one pope there and another in Rome. This situation began in 1378 and persisted into the 15th century. Worldly rulers too were causing their fair share of mischief. Particularly important for our story is the Hundred Years' War between France and England, since Paris and Oxford are the main centres for scholastic philosophy in this period. This so-called war was more a matter of intermittent hostility, beginning in 1337 when Edward III of England entered into conflict with Philip VI of France over the possession of Gascony. The English made significant advances, culminating in the capture of the French king John and his son at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. But the French clawed back territory under Charles V, who ruled until 1380. All of this naturally made it more difficult for ideas and scholars to pass freely between the English and French spheres. But already earlier in the century, we see a dramatic reduction in the number of Englishmen being trained in Paris. The war between the two states would at most have perpetuated the autonomy of Oxford from Paris without entirely preventing schoolmen at one university from following developments at the other. This is one of the biggest changes in the university culture of the period. Over the previous hundred years, Paris had been the centre of the scholastic world. But modern-day historians usually see Paris as surrendering its leading role to Oxford in the 14th century. In his excellent book on the topic, William Cordenay says that, We shouldn't exaggerate here though. Parisian scholars continued to do sophisticated and innovative work. In a later episode about God's knowledge of the future, the Parisian theologians Peter Auriol and Gregory of Rimini will feature prominently. Something else to bear in mind is that scholasticism could, and did, develop outside of Oxford and Paris. The famous William of Ockham is a good example. Though he did study theology at Oxford, his early education and the high point of his writing career were both at the Franciscan house in London. For reasons we'll get into later, he spent his final years at Avignon and then Munich. Scholasticism itself followed Ockham's example by moving all over Europe. Marsilius of Ingin, who as it happens also followed Ockham on philosophical matters, went from Paris to Heidelberg late in the century. By the time the 1300s draw to a close, scholasticism will be a pan-European phenomenon, with places like Prague and Padua giving the older universities a run for their money. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the ideas being put forward by Ockham and others. Wycliffe, whose ideas would be influential at Prague, decried the men he called the doctors of signs, and sneered at the sort of logical exercises that, he said, amused the university scholars at Christmas. Why doctors of signs? Well, this is a reference to a philosophical teaching that became dominant in the first half of the century concerning the problem of universals. We know from episode 263 that Scodas defended a moderate realism about common natures. True universals are only in the mind, he said, yet these mental generalizations are grounded in real natures out in the world. So an individual giraffe like Hiawatha has a real giraffe nature which is shared with other giraffes. Scodas took great pains to distinguish his own position from the more extreme realism he associated with Platonism, but that did not stop Ockham and others from attacking his view. For Ockham, and then a whole range of other 14th century thinkers such as Buridan and Marsilius of Ingin, a common name is nothing but a sign that stands for a range of individuals out in the world. There is no shared giraffe nature, never mind a platonic form of giraffes. The name giraffe simply signifies all the particular giraffes. We've met this sort of attitude before, back in the 12th century with the work of Peter Abelard. We called his position nominalist, a word that is also routinely applied to Ockham, Buridan, and their philosophical allies. But we need to be careful here. For one thing, they did not call themselves nominalists. This title was applied to them in retrospect. For another thing, nominalism has come to be used for a whole collection of philosophical theses that hang together nicely and seem to be characteristic of much 14th century thought. Like a police artist helping to solve a crime at a beauty parlor, let me offer you another thumbnail sketch. Begin with the nominalist denial of real common natures. From this we can see that he is raising a doubt as to whether our ideas mirror reality the way that Scodas and others assumed. Yes, we have ideas that we apply to many things in common, but this is only a feature of our mental life and language. There is nothing common or shared out there in reality. From here, you could worry that other aspects of our thought may be misleading or fail to capture reality fully. You could also start to question philosophical science itself, at least as Aristotle understood it. In the Aristotelian tradition, scientific judgments are thought to be universal in scope and to get hold of necessary truths about nature. But now, we're being told that there is nothing universal in nature. And the nominalist also tends to doubt that anything in nature is really necessary. This is because, while the nominalist disagrees with Scodas about the common features of things, he is ready to make common cause with Scodas's voluntarism. Scodas had shown how God's absolute freedom could be understood as the power to choose between mutually exclusive alternatives. As we saw in episode 261, God has an absolute power to do anything that can be done, that is, anything that isn't self-contradictory. Taking this idea seriously, the nominalist concludes that the whole created world is fundamentally contingent. It could have been otherwise, because God could have created a very different universe. The upshot is a double assault on the confident rationalism of Aristotelian philosophy. Though reason can still rule out some things as impossible—there can be no round squares or dry water—the scope of God's freedom means that all things in our world could have been different, even radically different. Furthermore, the way we speak and think about those things might be quite misleading, as when we grasp a universe of individuals by means of universal terms and concepts. Some pretty radical thoughts are lurking here. If our mind and language do not match the structure of the world, why not give in to a thoroughgoing skepticism? Though we'll see hints in that direction in the 14th century, more common will be a less radical tendency simply to restrict the scope of what reason can achieve. In theology, faith and revelation are on hand to fill the gap, leading to a less rationalist and Aristotelian approach in religious and ethical matters than we saw with figures like Aquinas and Scotus. But contrary to what you might expect, these same ideas can be seen as fruitful for science. If we cannot simply reflect on our universal ideas to discern invariable necessities of nature, then the only way to learn about the world is to go look at it. Thus, the nominalists also have a fairly well-deserved reputation for empiricism, and are often credited with taking important steps in the direction of modern science. One particularly crucial insight will be that mathematical concepts and tools can be applied to topics in natural philosophy. Again, we should avoid exaggerating here. The so-called nominalists certainly did not agree with one another about everything, and throughout the century there were plenty of realists fighting against the nominalist tide. In Occam's own day, he was challenged by Walter Burley, who continued to fly the flag for realism. A generation or so later, Wycliffe's snide reference to the doctors of signs already tells us where he stood. Eventually, this confrontation will crystallize into the 15th century Wegischreit, a German word that literally means dispute over methods. The battle lines will be drawn between the so-called Via Antiqua and Via Moderna. The ancient approach is traditional Aristotelianism, the modern approach that of the nominalists. For instance, a document written at Cologne in 1425 contrasts Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great and other antiqui to the modern masters John Buridan and Marsilius of Ingin, two famous nominalists. Like the word nominalist itself, though, this contrast between ancient and modern is not yet used by the 14th century thinkers themselves. Whatever terms we use, we should not read back into the 14th century the 15th and 16th century tendency to divide scholastics into schools of thought like Occamists, Thomists, and Scotists. This is another point made by the aforementioned William Cordenay. He admits that there were brief periods where Oxford might have seen a wave of enthusiasm for Aquinas or Scotus, but these were usually short-lived and for a reason that may surprise us. We tend to think of medieval philosophers as being indebted to authority, as innovating only by mistake or because they could see no other way to find agreement between their various sources. But in fact, there were good career reasons for a master to show how clever and original he was. So, the game was to be innovative, but not so innovative that one ran into trouble with the church, a trick Occam, among others, did not manage to pull off. Of course, leading scholastics like Scotus and Occam still exerted tremendous influence on other thinkers. Usually though, this was because they set the terms of further debate, not because they ended debate by inspiring school allegiance. Take for instance, Scotus' distinctive idea of the formal distinction, meaning a real difference between two aspects of one and the same thing. In subsequent generations, some scholastics adopted it as a useful tool, especially for explaining the divine trinity. But even these proponents of Scotus' idea went beyond him by providing their own justifications for his distinction. Other scholastics rejected Scotus' proposal. One of them was Peter Auriol. He offered a subtle exploration of the formal distinction, but ultimately dismissed it on the basis that such a distinction between the Trinitarian persons would undermine divine simplicity. In the 15th century, the humanists will enjoy mocking this sort of hair-splitting and distinction-mongering much as some observers nowadays decry the apparently pointless and technical work done by analytic philosophers. Yet some of the greatest literary minds of the age were very interested in the output of the university schoolmen. I have already mentioned Dante and Chaucer as examples. But they also exemplify something else, something that will ultimately pose an even greater challenge to the intellectual hegemony of the scholastics, the use of vernacular language. Philosophical learning was steadily becoming more available to those who couldn't read Latin. In a sense, this was nothing new. It goes back at least as far as the 9th century English translation of Boethius, credited to King Alfred, and we saw 13th century examples like Mächtel of Magdeburg and Hardewich, or The Romance of the Rose. But it's in the 14th century that medieval philosophy really begins to feature lay authors and vernacular languages. Soon we're going to kick off the century with a figure who helps make this point, Marguerite Poretz. She's one of the most remarkable mystical authors of the 14th century, or of any century. She's not much like Occam, who has been mentioned so often in this introductory episode, but like him, she got in trouble with the church. In fact, she got in a lot more trouble than he did. Before looking at her, however, I want to pull a bit more on one of the strands that runs through the century to come. I've been saying that volunteerism is a central theme of 14th century thought, and after our look at Henry of Ghent and Scotus, you hopefully have a good sense of what the word means. But it will still be helpful for us to take a step back and think about the whole idea of volunteerism. What is it exactly, and is volunteerism philosophically defensible? An expert on this topic has volunteered to tell us. Tom Pink, who will be my guest next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the will in medieval philosophy with Tom Pink, who is Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. Hi Tom. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Not at all. The first thing I'm going to ask you is a pretty basic question. Why should we posit the will at all, as most medieval philosophers do? There are two reasons. The first is that there seems to be, if we talk about our motivations as the psychological states that move us into action, and they can include desires, emotions, decisions, intentions, there are certain motivations that seem quite special. The first way they seem to be special is that they seem particularly responsive to reasons for action and serve to determine how we finally act. These aren't just ordinary desires or ordinary emotions, but are decisions and intentions to act. We deliberate about what to do and then on the basis of that deliberation, we take a decision, which seems to be an event whereby we form an intention, outright determination to act, which persists until the time for action comes and then we act. These decisions and intentions seem very, very closely based on what we think we ought to do, on the judgments of what philosophers have called our practical intellect, our intellectual judgments about how to act. The first thing about the will is that it's conceived of as the part of our motive, general motivational capacity that's specially responsive to reason and to our own deliberation about how to act and which determines what subsequent actions we perform. The second point about these motivations and decision and intention is that we seem to be able to control them. Most people have a strong intuition that they lack direct control over what they desire or what emotions they feel. Desires come over us, fear comes over us, anger comes over us, but our decisions and intentions are things we determine for ourselves. It's not just up to me whether I raise my hand or lower it, it's up to me also whether I first decide to raise my hand or decide to lower it. So there's an intuitive relation between these decisions and intentions and the exercise of freedom. Freedom starts in our own heads in what we decide and intend to do, and that makes it very natural to look at decisions as a kind of action in their own right. If we think of what we control as primarily our action, our control, our freedom, seems to start in our head with what we decide to do. And so decisions to act seem themselves to be a kind of action generating action, and so they're conceived in medieval philosophy. Okay, well that combination of reasons to posit the will already pushes us towards a classification or differentiation between different kinds of medieval theories of the will, which is something I've been talking about in the podcast already, which is on the one hand intellectualism and on the other hand voluntarism. So intellectualism is associated with people like Aquinas, for example, voluntarism with Scotus and then a variety of thinkers of the 14th century. And I was struck by the fact that you said, well, on the one hand the will is responsive to reasons, which sounds more intellectualist, and on the other hand it's something we have control over, and that sounds like it maybe more will favor the voluntarists. So do you think that's right? I mean, is that a good way of thinking about the difference between intellectualism and voluntarism that the intellectualists are emphasizing the first thing and the voluntarists are emphasizing the second thing? I think it's more, I think the disagreement between intellectualism and voluntarism is not so much disagreement about how important it is to relate the will to freedom, but rather a disagreement about how to conceive freedom. Everyone thinks that the will is in some sense free or the taking of decisions and the forming of intentions is something we control, but there is then going to be a disagreement about how to understand this power of control. But it is, of course, going to involve a disagreement about how importantly the power is related to reason. I think if we look at the intellectualist, the intellectualist sees the operation of the will of our capacity to take decisions and form intentions as very closely tied to the operation of the practical intellect, to our judgments about what it's best to do. Whereas the voluntarist will see our decisions and intentions as occurring to some degree independently, potentially independently, what we judge it best to do. So I might judge it best to do one thing and end up taking a decision to do quite another thing. So for the voluntarist it's almost like you have to think about a situation like, should I eat this chocolate cake? And I sort of weigh up all the merits, pro and con, and then whereas an intellectualist would say, well, if I deem it best, all things considered, to eat the cake, then I will eat the cake and the will will just be my power of choosing to eat the cake on that basis. The voluntarist will say, well, there's something I still have to do above and beyond the sort of considering it. I have to then have an additional act of will. Yes. Okay. That's right. Now, why is there this disagreement? I think it's important to see voluntarism and intellectualism in medieval action theory as not completely opposed points of view, but actually related but differing ways of working through tensions in the way to understand and theorize about action and freedom that everyone felt, at a certain level felt in very, very similar ways. And I think it's also important to see intellectualists and voluntarists as sharing fundamentally the same theory of action. What's different between them is the way they understand freedom in relation to action. So, it might help perhaps if I just talk very generally about how they look at action and then about how they look at freedom. Okay, go ahead. The theory of action is really a theory of a very important relation. It's the relationship between actions, things we do, and their objects, the goals that our actions are aimed at. We might call this goal direction or purposiveness. And from Aristotle onwards, purposiveness is understood by lots of people as absolutely fundamental to the theory of agency. To be performing actions is to be doing something as a means to an end. Even if the action you perform is done for its own sake, it's still got an end, its own performance. And you can look at inaction as also importantly goal directed. If I'm not just inactive but deliberately refraining from action, that's going to be goal directed too. I deliberately stay still in order to be unnoticed. My inaction has a goal. That's what makes it recognizable as a sort of negative exercise of agency. Deliberate a mission. I see my enemy about to get hit by a truck. That's right. I stand still. I stand very still in case I distract them from their end. So, how do you understand goal directedness? It's very important that goal direction, the relationship of an action to its object, is understood apart from the whole problem of freedom, which is understood as a very different kind of problem to do with the relationship between not an action and its object but between the agent and the action. Because when we exercise freedom, we're thinking about ourselves as people who determine for ourselves which actions we perform. So we're exercising power over the action. Whereas the relationship between an action and its object is a very different relationship, it's relationship between the action and something it's directed at, which seems like an object of thought. After all, and that's of course what it might remain merely an object of thought because of course many actions are unsuccessful. The goal never happens. You never get there. So all that occurs when we perform the action is this occurrence of an event, a thing we do, and then this object is directed at the goal, which seems to be something that exists in our minds. So it's like the idea of the chocolate cake I'm going to bake and that explains my action even if the oven doesn't work and the cake doesn't come out. Or the fortune I will make on the stock market through my endeavors, which of course may never occur. Your example is even greedier than mine. Yes, absolutely. Even less likely to occur. So there's no reason why of course your theory of purposiveness, the relationship of an action to its object, and your theory of freedom, the relationship between the agent and the action, as somebody who determines the action, should be particularly closely related. And indeed we find in medieval action theory a fairly important gap between the way people think about purposiveness, where there is a huge consensus, and the way people think about freedom, where there is a great deal of disagreement, and a disagreement that gives rise to the difference between intellectualism and voluntarism. Why is it though that the theory of purposiveness doesn't kind of compel you in a particular direction in terms of this debate between intellectualism and voluntarism? Because I would have thought that the intellectualist is exactly someone who's going to think that the way that my actions explained is that the purpose, the goal, what they would call the final end of the action, so the cake or the fortune to be won on the stock market, will appear to me as good and thus compel in some sense my choice. And they don't see any other factors involved in coming to perform a certain action, whereas the voluntarist is going to be precisely someone who says that the fortune to be won on the stock market or the chocolate cake is, and my assessment of it as good, is inadequate to get me to act. I need to also have an act of the will in addition to that. I think it's to do with the idea of goal directedness. You can think of an object as worth going for, and just believing that it's a good goal to go for, of course, is not obviously ipso facto to be aiming at it as your goal. You're just aiming at an object as worthy of belief, as true, and the object is that a certain goal is worth pursuing. It's another thing to think of a psychological state as directed at the object as its goal, and that makes room for the possibility of a voluntarist conception of the will. You think of the practical intellect as directed at objects as true, and the object of thought is that a goal is worth pursuing, but you think of the will itself, where action is going to be going on, as directed at the object, not as something true, but as good, and not only as good, but as the goal at which your psychological state is directed at attaining. Those are two different ways of bringing the idea of a goal into an object of thought. You can bring the goal in as part of a claim to the effect that it's good, or it's good goal to aim at, and then what really matters is truth, or you can treat it as the object of your thought as something good to be attained through the object of thought, and then it is the goal, not just a sort of kind of theoretical thing or theoretical claim. Okay, so what you're saying is that both camps agree about what an action is, and what makes an action intelligible, namely that it's goal-directed, and then the question is rather what's happening in the psychological faculties within the soul once I've identified a certain goal as choice-worthy. Yes. Okay, so what exactly do you think are the strongest arguments in favor of the intellectualist as opposed to the voluntarist picture? I mean, I would have thought that the voluntarist has a pretty easy objection to make to the intellectualist, which is precisely that sometimes people don't do the thing that seems best to them. So these are the famous cases of acacia, or weakness of will, where, you know, I'm trying to lose weight and all things considered, I think it would be better if I didn't eat this chocolate cake, but here I am doing it. This is a kind of classic example. So why doesn't intellectualism just fold as soon as cases like that are brought to bear against it? I think the reason has to be seen by turning from the theory of action itself to the theory of freedom, which is what we exercise through our actions and how you conceive that. Because there are certain ways of thinking about freedom that are going to lead you to tie the exercise of freedom and therefore also the actions through which you exercise freedom very closely to the operation of your intellectual capacities. It's very important that action is understood by both voluntarists and intellectualists as not just as goal direction, but goal direction at the level of your psychological states, what modern philosophers call content-bearing psychological attitudes. Attitudes because they involve you being mentally directed as an object of thought. You know, you can have a mental direction to an object of thought just as true, and that's clearly going on at the level of the practical intellect as I've been describing it. I think that a goal would be a good goal to pursue, and what I'm entertaining is the claim that a goal would be a good goal to pursue, and I'm directing my thought of that in the form of a belief that's directed to that object as true. That's a classic example of a sort of theoretical mental operation, and it's responsive to a theoretical reason that presents objects to thought to me as worthy of belief as likely to be true. But I can also direct my thought at objects as good, and one very obvious way of doing that is just by having desires. When I want something, it looks as though I'm directing my thought to an object as good or desirable in some way. But if we think of goal direction as involving likewise an object of thought, but this time as a goal, we can introduce actions as a further form of psychological attitude or kind of content-bearing psychological state or the formation of them, where I direct my thought at an object not simply as good but as a goal to be attained through my directing my thought at it. And the point at which we might be thought of as doing that is when we take a decision. I just want something, I'm just sort of entertaining it as desirable, but when I decide on it, I'm adopting it as my goal, and the point of my decision is to get me to that goal. And what medieval action theory does is to treat the primary case of action as precisely involving the formation of a goal-directed attitude when we take a decision, perform an act of Alexio as they call it. And so the primary form of action, primary way we pursue goals, is in our head when we take decisions. And the special goal-directed attitude is commonly conceived of as involving decisions and intentions whereby we are especially responsive to practical reason as recommending goals to us and determining ourselves to pursue those goals by adopting them as goals, by directing our minds at them as goals to be attained through our mental direction. Of course, on the basis of our decisions, we then do things with capacities outside the mind itself, like we raise our hand on the basis of a prime decision to raise our hand or cross the road or whatever. These, for medieval action theorists, are secondary cases of actions. The primary case of action is when we first take a decision to do these things, and these decisions are called elicited actions of the will. The actions decided upon, the secondary case of action, are called commanded or impurated actions because they're seen as being commanded by the will. Modern philosophers very often don't believe that actions include elicited actions of the will itself, and that's because in the 17th century Thomas Hobbes comes along and denies the existence of special reason involving goal-directed motivations occurring inside your head. Everything is just passion or passive motivation for Hobbes, and the only actions are the commanded or impurated actions, which are seen as just effects of our content-bearing psychological attitudes. So he basically just thinks you find yourself with these desires and beliefs, and then the action part is the outcome of that. The way you were describing the elicited actions seems to me to give the voluntarist a potentially very powerful objection to intellectualism, which is that if we're trying to explain free will here, which is the ultimate goal, then the intellectualist is unable to do that because the intellectualist has to admit that we're in some sense compelled by the way things seem to us. So if it seems to me that the right way to proceed is to cross the street or bake a chocolate cake or invest in the stock market, then in some sense that's what I must do. So how can the intellectualist hold on to the idea that the act of will remains free? Well, there are two aspects to freedom as freedom is understood in medieval thought, which put together both voluntarism and intellectualism. Prima facie quite appealing options. Intellectualism goes with one side of freedom. Voluntarism goes with the other side of freedom. And this division between two aspects of freedom goes back, I think, to St Augustine and also to Lombard's immensely influential commentary on Augustine's way of conceiving freedom, which you can read in the sentences. The two aspects of freedom are this. On the one hand, we can think of freedom as a kind of power over alternatives, the kind of power we intuitively understand ourselves to possess when we think that it's up to me whether I raise my hand or lure it or I have control over which I do. The very way that we think about freedom involves an expression, it's up to me whether, that comes with alternatives. And this is what Lombard talks about when he talks about the libertas minor of this life, when we have alternatives which can include quite nasty and irrational ones as sinners, unfortunately available to us, that we can go in for. But then there is another kind of libertas, another kind of freedom, which we will enjoy in heaven, libertas minor of heaven, which will involve a state of complete rationality and compliance with law. What we might think of as a state of liberation, which is their gloss and the kind of freedom that St. Paul describes Christ as bringing us in the epistles. And presumably God has this kind of freedom as well. Absolutely. God, who is perfectly free, is also perfectly rational. And of course there are many alternatives that God would not go for on the very standard conception of God, which are all the nasty, sinful, and demeaning ones, ones that we, unfortunately in this life, are all too free to go in for. And so there is also a way of conceiving a freedom, not as a power of alternatives or not as immediately as that, but rather as a state of rationality. And in the sense, of course, rationality can remove alternatives. The more rational you are, the less likely you're going to go for all the dodgy things that a mere power over alternatives will make available to you. And there is a deep tension within medieval theories of freedom about how you reconcile a conception of freedom as a power over alternatives with a conception of freedom as fundamentally our capacity for reason. Or as more and more closely tied to our capacity for reason, the more perfectly we enjoy freedom. So there are now going to be two projects within medieval theories of freedom. One is a theory that takes as primary the idea of a power over alternatives. And the other that takes as primary the idea of freedom as somehow provided to us by our reason. These aren't exclusive projects in that everyone to some extent wants to make sense of alternatives. Everyone wants to some extent to make sense of the connection between freedom and reason. Everyone wants to make sense of alternatives because that's just an intuitive way of understanding freedom. That's the way we immediately understand it. It's up to me whether or not I or I for various alternatives. On the other hand, people recognize that the lower animals aren't as plausibly free as we are. And why is that? Well, they seem to lack reason. So everyone wants to make sense of the connection between freedom and reason. Everyone wants to make sense of a connection between freedom and alternatives. But because of the tensions between these two ways of thinking about freedom, you'll get people being pushed in one direction primarily or the other. And one can look at intellectualism as driven fundamentally by the connection between freedom and reason and voluntarism as driven fundamentally by the connection between freedom and the power over alternatives. But as long as the intellectuals can say that I'm reasoning by choosing between alternatives, then they can accommodate my objection from before, which is that there's only one choice. They say, no, there's more than one choice. You're weighing them up against each other. Take Aquinas. Aquinas is fundamentally constructing his theory of freedom out of the theory of our capacity for reason. At the same time, he's also linking the operation of the will in an intellectualist fashion to the operation of the practical intellect. He sees our freedom of will as linked to a freedom of the intellect, because what we fundamentally decide to do is going to be linked to our judgments about what is best to do. But he's not going to abandon the idea of freedom as always in this life involving power over alternatives. That is going to be provided by our capacity for reason and the nature of its objects in this life as Aquinas understands them. In this life, we're always presented by a set of options that are alternative goods, where each good option is finitely good and balanceable, at least prima facie, against other options by way of the good. And that gives us our freedom of alternatives. So what do you think that we nowadays can take from these medieval conceptions of the will and of freedom? I mean, do you think that, for example, do you think that the consensus view, medieval view of action has now been superseded and so the whole thing is taking place with assumptions about how human actions work that Hobbes already showed that we should get rid of? Or do you think that there's something here that we should hold on to in contemporary attempts to understand the will or freedom? I think that we still have much to learn. I don't think Hobbes' victory over these medieval theories that he won in practical terms in the 17th century is a victory that we should recognise as fully justified, far from it. I think there is much to be said for accommodating our conception of the distinctive nature of decision and intention by seeing decision and intention as indeed psychological attitudes directed at their objects as goals to be attained through their formation. And you can actually provide a very convincing theory of the rationality of decision and intention in those terms. At the same time, I think we shouldn't see disputes about freedom simply as they are understood in modern philosophy as disputes between compatibilists and incompatibilists, which are fundamentally disputes about the implications of freedom of causal determinism. We should recognise there are actually deep problems about the relationship between freedom and our capacity for reason as well and those problems are very much ignored by the Hobbesian tradition. But they are actually real ones because we do intuitively limit freedom to ourselves and possibly higher animals because we see ourselves as having a capacity for reason that really low animals like sharks and mice lack. At the same time, we do tie freedom to power over alternatives that in some sense seems to be threatened by our capacity for reason. As I say, the more reasonable you are, the less available certain alternatives should be to you. Really silly ones. But that seems to be a reduction in your power over alternatives. That's a real problem that the Hobbesian tradition has led us to neglect. Let me see if I understand what you're saying. So you're saying that contemporary theorists of freedom are usually worried about things like, does the physical situation of the universe compel me to act in certain ways and if so, does that make me unfree? And compatibilists will say, no, my acting freely is compatible, that's the term, with causal determination. The incompatible will say no, and then they argue about that. But what they're not thinking about is, hang on a second, I'm figuring out what to do and how does the process of figuring out what to do, weighing up alternatives and coming to a reasoned view about what to do, how does that relate to my freedom? Does it grow out of the reasoning process? I mean, is it constituted maybe even by the reasoning process? Or is there something over and above the reasoning process, as the voluntarists would have said? Yes, yes. Our capacity to go in for the reasoning process seems to give us our capacity for freedom. Yet at the same time, when we go through our reasoning process and see some options as, say, for example, overwhelmingly preferable compared to other options, our rationality seems to remove or make some alternatives, the less sensible ones, less available to us. So that if we were perfectly rational, we'd immediately go for the best one each time. So our capacity for rationality seems to both give us freedom, but threaten to remove it if we associate freedom with a power over alternatives. I think also there is something very interesting about the very idea of freedom as a power over alternatives, which I think Scotus was particularly interested in, which is the very idea of having a power that you exercise to do one thing while possessing as a power at the same time to do another thing. That's a very interesting way of conceiving of power, and it's a way of conceiving a power that's very different from the way we ordinarily conceive what the medievalists would have called bog-standard efficient causation, what we just call causation. When a brick hits a window, there seems to be only one thing the brick can do when it exercises its power, which is to break the window. There's no idea of the brick having a power to do more than one thing and of alternatives being available to the brick in the way that they're available to a free agent. And that suggests that when we exercise freedom, something is going on that's fundamentally different from ordinary causation. But that raises a problem about whether kinds of power are available to us that are unlike ordinary causation. And that's a problem that has nothing to do with the debate about the possibility of causal determinism. It's to do with another possibly deeper issue, which is what kinds of power does nature permit to occur or does nature leave room for? Are all cases of power just ordinary causation, as a lot of modern philosophers are inclined to think, or can you get different kinds of power besides ordinary causation? For example, freedom is a power over alternatives, or another kind of power that medievalists seem to think of, which we might call normative power, which is the power of an object of thought to move you, not by acting as an efficient cause, when the object of thought may not yet be actual. It might be an option by way of action that you haven't yet attained. It's just something you're contemplating, but its goodness might move you to go for it. That seems a kind of power that's unlike ordinary efficient causation. It's kind of normative power that's associated medieval thought with formal and final causation. They think it's perfectly possible. Of course, Thomas Hobbes thought was impossible, as he said, moved not by an efficient is nonsense. Okay, well that's a very nice note to end on. Thanks, Tom, very much for that discussion of the will and medieval philosophy and maybe what we have to learn from it. And there's only one thing that you can or they should decide to do, which is to join me again next time when I'll be continuing to look at later medieval philosophy in the 14th century, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, After Virtue, Marguerite Porat. Who is the medieval version of Socrates? Perhaps Albert the Great, a famous philosopher who had an even more famous philosopher for a student. Or actually any number of scholastics, since they all loved a good disputed question. Or how about Peter of Olivey, champion of voluntary poverty? You might also think of Roger Bacon because he was sent to prison for his teachings. But if we're thinking along these lines, then the medieval thinker with the best claim to the title might be Marguerite Porat. Like Socrates, she was executed after courageously refusing to recant her convictions. Rather than being allowed a final chat about the immortality of soul with friends, followed by a bowl of hemlock, Marguerite was burned to death. It didn't come without warning. Years earlier, she had been arrested after a book she had written came to the attention of the local bishop. The book was destroyed before her very eyes, and she was warned never again to disseminate such heresy on pain of execution. Marguerite didn't let this stop her. She was evidently a woman of means and some social standing, since she could afford to have several copies of her book made, keeping one herself, as she admitted, and having her ideas written down and passed to others, including another bishop. In 1308, she was arrested and excommunicated. A protracted period of imprisonment followed. The Inquisitor, William of Paris, couldn't even get this stubborn woman to take an oath on the sacrament so that a trial could begin. Finally, he gave up trying to extract her cooperation. A panel of Parisian theologians was assembled, and they agreed that her book was heretical. She was handed over to the secular authorities and executed in Paris on June 1, 1310. The book, for which she died, fared somewhat better. It is called The Mirror of Simple Souls Who Dwell in Wishing and in Longing. Without Marguerite's name attached, it enjoyed a fairly wide dissemination, being translated into Latin and Middle English, and also reworked into Middle French on the basis of the original Old French version. It may already have influenced Maester Eckhart, a contemporary of Marguerite's, and like her a major philosopher-mystic. Of the thinkers we've covered so far in the series, the obvious comparison is of course not really Socrates, but earlier women mystics, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadevich and Mertil of Magdeburg. Her similarity to the Bingen mystics, Hadevich and Mektild, seems especially strong. Several medieval authors refer to Marguerite as a Bingen, which makes it tempting to connect her persecution to the increasing disquiet caused by the Bingen movement in the early 14th century. This culminated in a condemnation at the Council of Vienne in 1312, so only two years after Marguerite was killed. But several scholars now doubt that she was in fact a Bingen, so we probably shouldn't push this connection too far. Like the Biggens though, Marguerite wrote in a vernacular language, and her central concern is with the possibility and implications of union with God. Some of her favorite metaphors, such as the image of melting away, can also be found in their works. She even uses a central trope, taken from the courtly love literature that inspired the earlier Biggens. Her work is effectively a three-way dialogue between her own soul, love, and reason. Occasionally other characters appear, like temptation and truth. This is a clear echo of the allegorical dialogues we find in such works as The Romance of the Rose, where love and reason are shown debating the merits of romantic entanglements. Yet Marguerite's writing does not display the eroticism we find in Hadevich and Mektild. Even set alongside their works, Marguerite's mirror seems far closer to being something we might call a philosophical treatise. Her central character of love has a clear agenda and sets out the bold philosophical and theological claims that made this book so shocking to the bishop and the inquisitors. It's clear from the book itself that Marguerite knew she was, quite literally, playing with fire. There's nothing quite as blunt as Mektild of Magdeburg's mention of a threat to burn her book. You may remember her retort that it's impossible to burn the truth. But Marguerite alludes frequently to the controversial nature of her ideas. The purpose of the character of reason in the book is in part to express reluctance or outright opposition to the teachings of love. So reason speaks for the reader who has trouble accepting Marguerite's teaching and is allowed to point out apparent contradictions in that teaching or warn that the teaching seems to be straying into dangerous territory. At one point, she anticipates that the church will be astonished by one of her core ideas, namely that soul can free itself of any need to use the virtues. She was right to worry. Precisely this doctrine was among those condemned by her inquisitors and used as proof of her heresy. Well, perhaps, worry is the wrong word. Marguerite seems to have known she was courting controversy and not minded doing so. She provocatively refers to the religious institutions of her day as Holy Church the Lesser, in contrast to the greater church of the souls who have been freed by love for God, and mentions that such souls no longer even need to pray. Clearly, Marguerite was well aware of the daring nature of her book. This is entirely typical of her. Her mirror is a highly self-conscious work, something else it shares in common with the Romance of the Rose. The mirror wears its artifice on its sleeve and several times offers so-called glosses on its own contents. It's a book that includes its own commentary. She makes the point emphatically in a prologue, which also reveals Marguerite's dependence on earlier literary models. Playing on an earlier romance about Alexander the Great by Alexander of Banae, she tells the story of a princess who falls in love with King Alexander but lives far away from him. The princess gains solace by commissioning a painting of the king. In the same way, Marguerite says that her own book is a representation of her soul's love for God. A character named Soul then appears throughout the text in discussion with reason and love. This device is much like the character of the lover in the Romance of the Rose. Like Jean de Meun, Marguerite takes on the dual roles of author and character. Paradoxically, the character's point of view is more limited than that of the book as a whole. In the mirror, Marguerite as author depicts the growing understanding of Marguerite's soul. What is it then that the soul and the reader too must come to understand? Ultimately something that cannot be put into words. The piece of divine life cannot be thought or written. The comparison of the book to a painting is an apt one. Famously, a picture is a thousand words, but no number of words can fully express the nature of God or the soul's condition once it is united to God. Like the painting of the beloved king that would be discarded if the king himself were present, Marguerite's book points beyond itself towards an unmediated encounter between the soul and God. I said before that the mirror reads somewhat more like a philosophical treatise than do the writings of Harivitch and Mactild. Though that is true, it's also rather ironic, since Marguerite is far more forthright than they were in her critique of human reason. I've mentioned already that she includes reason as a character and depicts her as having a decidedly limited perspective. Harivitch in particular was full of praise for reason and depicts reason as being guided by love. For Marguerite, reason instead needs to be transcended. In part this is a critique of book learning, the sort of expertise taught at the universities, and the sort of expertise boasted by the theologians who will have Marguerite put to death. So it's almost a bit of anticipatory revenge when Marguerite announces the death of reason part way through her book. Already in her prologue, she has said, Later, she adds that the soul Reason herself is called one-eyed, and in what looks like a rather frank insult aimed at the experts of book learning, Marguerite says, It is plainly seen from Reason's disciples that an ass would achieve nothing which was willing to give them ear. But we shouldn't exaggerate her anti-rationalism. After all, being one-eyed is not the same as having no eyes at all, and the character of reason does come to accept something of the teachings of love, even if haltingly, imperfectly, and reluctantly. Eventually, reason pledges her allegiance to the soul, now apparently converted to seeing things more or less in Marguerite's way. On the other hand, it's remarked that the book could have been much shorter if reason wasn't so slow on the uptake. Again, the idea seems to be that reason can make some slow progress, but the full truth is beyond her. This interpretation of Marguerite's critique of human reason is confirmed by her notorious remarks on the subject of virtue. In one of the poems scattered through the work, Marguerite writes, Like the inquisitors at Paris, the character of reason is appalled by these remarks and tries to poke logical holes in them. No surprise here, since for Marguerite, living in accordance with reason goes hand in hand with living virtuously. Hildegard and Hadavich would have agreed with that, but they do not dare to suggest that virtue is something the soul needs to transcend. Marguerite dares to do more than suggest it, she states it clearly and repeatedly, as when she writes that the soul experiences no grace, she feels no longings of the spirit, since she has taken leave of the virtues, a passage later quoted by her inquisitors as proof of heresy. With chilling prescience, Marguerite at one point allows the virtues to speak for themselves and to complain that anyone who holds them in such little regard is a heretic and a bad Christian. In a typical reversal, she however argues that having left the virtues behind, this pure soul is the most virtuous of all. As one scholar has put it, this looks more like piling a paradox upon a scandal than like diffusing the explosive implications of what she said, but lets appoint ourselves as an interpretive bomb squad and see whether we can contain the philosophical damage. For starters, Marguerite is certainly not recommending that we all immediately give up on virtue. This is not a triumph of mysticism over morality. She makes it clear that the virtues have an important preparatory role in bringing us closer to God. They are like messengers sent by love to call us away from our own limited concerns so as to free us from the burden of ourselves, as Marguerite nicely phrases it. As with her treatment of reason, her attitude towards virtue is that it has a real value and use, but a value and use that are limited. So she has harsh words for those who content themselves with living virtuously. They too are one-eyed and like a mother owl who thinks no birds are finer than her own brood. Here she has in mind people who immerse themselves in heroic asceticism and charitable deeds, as if such acts of self-abnegation were the highest possible goal we might have. Ascetics are doomed to remain lost, because they have an unfulfilled desire to reach God, something that cannot be attained through worldly virtue. Here we might detect an echo of critiques against the voluntary poverty of the mendicant orders. Marguerite has tried this path herself and found it inadequate. Even those who live in virtue, while realizing there could be something higher, are for Marguerite slaves and merchants because of their lowly point of view, a good example of her tendency to apply the class distinctions of medieval society to grades of enlightenment. To transcend this forlorn state, the soul should not of course engage in sin or vice, but neither should she concern herself with the virtues of asceticism. She takes leave of the virtues, in other words, in the sense that she no longer makes any use of them. Up to this point, Marguerite's ethical teaching is strikingly reminiscent of late ancient Platonism. Plotinus, especially, is noted for his idea that what he calls civic virtue, which means acting virtuously in the world of the senses, is a mere preparatory stage, a step along the ladder towards purification and intellectual understanding. The parallel is close enough to suggest that Marguerite is yet another medieval figure to be influenced by Neoplatonism, however indirectly. But of course, parallel lines never meet, and she develops the idea of transcending virtue in a way that is, whatever her accusers may have thought, distinctively Christian. For Marguerite, what comes after virtue is nothing other than a higher, more important virtue, namely humility, which she styles mother of the virtues. Monility does not consist in obsessive attention to our own desires or actions, however well intentioned. It consists in giving up on our desires, on acting to achieve some purpose. It consists, in fact, in giving up one's self and identity completely, by letting one's will dissolve completely into the will of God. And when I say dissolve, I mean it. We have here come to the core of Marguerite's thought, which is the idea of the soul's annihilation. It is the annihilated soul that love praises throughout the book and that no longer devotes itself to action, virtuous or otherwise. This is also the soul that has transcended reason, yet it's in describing this soul that Marguerite makes her most significant contributions to philosophy. She is making a novel claim about the workings of the human will, that the soul's highest attainment is to cease willing entirely, and even cease willing to have a will. Or as contemporary philosophers might put it, the annihilated soul has neither first nor second order desires. It wants nothing and wants to want nothing. So intimate is the relationship between soul and will that this can be achieved only through the soul's being humbled to the point that it is extinguished, something Marguerite describes as a kind of death. Or as soon as the soul expresses itself as a being distinct from God, it must exercise its will, so that even willing things for God's sake prevents the soul from achieving complete union between its own will and God's. To which you might say, what's so great about that? Of course, a medieval reader might be happy to take it for granted that we should strive to eliminate any distance between our own wills and the divine will. Even a few readers would be happy to pursue the line of thought as far as Marguerite does. But Marguerite can offer a further rationale, which is that the extinction of will guarantees the extinction of unsatisfied desire. After all, you can't be unhappy about lacking things you don't want. Or as Marguerite puts it, the annihilated soul lacks nothing since she wishes for nothing. Furthermore, in accepting her own annihilation, the soul is actually coming to understand her metaphysical situation more accurately. For, according to Marguerite, the soul's infinite inferiority to God means that it has really always been nothing. So her recommendation is not so much that the soul should steadily work to eliminate her own reality, but that she should see through the illusion that she was ever anything, and thus come to know her own nothingness. Marguerite sums it up better than I can when she writes, God is so great that the soul can comprehend nothing of Him, and on account of this nothingness, she has reached the certainty of knowing nothing and of wishing for nothing. Characteristically, Marguerite still has a few more paradoxes to add on to this scandalous teaching. She makes the point that God cannot force the soul to give up on her will. The gift of a free will was inalienable because the whole nature of a free will is to be independent of any constraint. Therefore, just as the soul and no one else can be responsible for her own sin, only the soul can choose to submit her will to that of God. To bring out the paradox more clearly, we might say that the soul must use will to abandon her will. And here's another paradox, though the soul is nothing, she is a recipient of God's love. Even better, God has loved her eternally, which means that the soul has always existed, to the extent that we can say she exists at all. This idea of an eternally pre-existing soul is rather outrageous, something Marguerite acknowledges by having reason protest when it is first proposed. But she refuses to back away from it, insisting that in the soul's original state with God, she was simple. Thus, the mirror of simple souls ends by reflecting upon the fact that in returning to God, this simple soul returns to itself. It's undeniable that Marguerite Poet was a remarkable figure, but she was not utterly unique. We have met mystically inclined women thinkers before, and we'll be meeting more of them as we move on through the 14th century, like Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. But of course not all philosopher-mystics were women. Much later in this series on the 14th century, we'll be meeting the aforementioned Meister Eckhart, another figure who was condemned for heresy, though in a stroke of good luck, he had already died by the time the condemnation was issued. Of course, with good luck like that, who needs bad luck? For now though, we'll be staying with a different theme raised by Marguerite, the use of the vernacular. Our next author even wrote in defense of using vernacular language, in his case Italian. In a typically ironic gesture, he composed that defense in Latin, but he did compose some works in Italian too. You might have heard of at least one of them, The Divine Comedy, a poem that proves that the Italian language is no laughing matter. Don't miss what's bound to be one hell of an episode as we turn to Dante Alighieri, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Hell and Back, Dante Arrigieri. You never forget your first love, and that goes for intellectual loves too. Mine was Dante Arrigieri, whose marvelous poem The Divine Comedy entranced me so much when I was about 19 years old that it got me into the study of medieval intellectual culture. From there I got curious about medieval philosophy, in both Latin Christendom and the Islamic world, and the rest is history, or at least history of philosophy. It was an unusual way to get into the philosophy business, but I'm confident that Dante himself would have approved. He made a concerted effort to spread philosophical knowledge to as wide a readership as possible, not by producing a podcast, which given the technical limitations of his age is excusable, but by writing in Italian. Dante himself was an outsider to the world of the so-called clerk or cleric. He did however possess enough Latin and sufficient knowledge of scholasticism to engage with its teaching in a vernacular language, not least in The Divine Comedy. philosophy was only Dante's second love though. His first love was Beatrice. The poems she inspired are gathered in Dante's first major work, La vita nuova, or The New Life, written in 1292, two years after Beatrice's tragic early death. La vita nuova also offers a running commentary on the poems, marked by an obsession with numerical structure that will stay with Dante throughout his career. He associates Beatrice with the number 9, and later constructs his comedy in light of numerological structures. For example, it has a total of 100 chapters or cantos with lengths that are sometimes symmetrically arranged. Dante's fusion of the personal with the poetic is also common to both La vita nuova and the later comedy, as is his well-justified confidence in his own genius. That confidence is on full display in the rather pedantic commentary he devotes to his own poems in La vita nuova. He would go on to use the technique again in the convivio, or banquet. It is here in the convivio that Dante reveals how he fell in love all over again with the new object of his affections being lady philosophy. Already in La vita nuova, Dante mentions a gracious lady, Dona Gentile, who caught his eye after Beatrice's death. There, this new lady seemed to be a distraction from Dante's pure and faithful love for the departed Beatrice. In the convivio, Dante again suggests that there has been a struggle for his affections, with his new enthusiasm for philosophical learning, pushing all other considerations from his mind. Many scholars have seen this as a passing phase, with Dante later repudiating philosophy in favor of a higher pursuit, a poetical theology personified yet again by Beatrice. It is she who sends the ancient poet Virgil to guide Dante through hell in Inferno, the first of the three canticles of the comedy, and then appears in person to show Dante through the spheres of the heavens in Paradiso. We'll return later to the question of whether Dante came to regret his flirtation with philosophy, but first let's help ourselves to some of the morsels served at Dante's convivio. You can hardly miss its philosophical mission, given that he starts the work by quoting the famous beginning of Aristotle's metaphysics, By Nature All Humans Desire to Know. You'll usually see this translated as All Men Desire to Know, but Dante most definitely has women in mind. They form a significant section of his intended audience, since they are shut out of the learned discourse conducted in Latin by the schoolmen. Yet women and others unversed in Latin share the universal human appetite for knowledge. Dante wants to help them to satisfy that hunger. He compares himself to someone providing crumbs of bread fallen from the table of the wise. Hence his decision to write the poems and commentary of the convivio in Italian, something he says he has done out of compassion for a relatively uneducated audience. This is something Dante feels he must defend, and for good reason. Just consider a story preserved in the 13th century Italian collection called the Novellino, in which a vernacular author dreams that the muses appear to him and accuse him of prostituting himself. Anticipating such concerns, Dante goes on at some length justifying his use of Italian in the convivio. Here he is venturing into territory explored in another work, On the Eloquence of the Vernacular, which Dante chose to write in Latin. There he goes so far as to praise vernacular language as being in some respects better than Latin. Effectively, Latin has become an artificial language, in fact more a grammar than a real natural language like Italian. Latin has become universal and unchanging, a kind of antidote to the multiplying of human languages after the Tower of Babel. But Dante prefers his mother tongue, or rather a loftier version of it, appropriate to such exalted topics as human virtue. This would be a sort of idealized discourse to be used by all Italians, with a purity that raises it above their local dialects. Ironically, in the convivio which is actually in Italian, Dante is less confident of the superiority of the vernacular. He even argues that if he had written a Latin explanation for his Italian poems, then the commentary would be more noble than the poems they comment upon, whereas in fact the commentary should serve the text it expounds. Later on, he does mention the idea that language should match the theme at hand, clearly a fundamental assumption of his literary aesthetics, but in this case he explains to the reader that his writing is deliberately harsh because of the seriousness of his philosophical theme. That theme is, indeed, the exalted topic of virtue. Unfortunately, the convivio is unfinished, it was probably supposed to go through the virtues one by one, but we really only have a discussion of virtue in general. He has good reasons for concentrating on this ethical topic. Traditionally, Aristotelians had taken metaphysics to be chief among the human sciences. For Dante, this place is instead assumed by ethics. For one thing, ethics directs us to pursue the other sciences by teaching us that we ought to pursue rational perfection. This, of course, is a fundamental teaching of Aristotle's ethics. For another thing, even in the grip of his philosophical enthusiasm, Dante is convinced that reason can take us only so far. We cannot come to know God in this life by engaging in philosophical theory. That is the knowledge that would constitute perfect happiness reached through contemplation. Since such ultimate bliss is unattainable for now, we have to make do with the lesser practical happiness attained through ethical virtue. If this sounds familiar, it should. Dante is reiterating the two-level theory of happiness we found in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. But he goes further by making ethics completely central to the sort of philosophy possible for human reason. This goes hand in hand with Dante's decision to speak to an unlearned Italianate audience. The rarified truths of contemplative theoretical philosophy are beyond our earthly reach. So if philosophy here and now is mostly about being ethically virtuous, and if we are all potentially virtuous, then why not think that philosophy is for everyone? Yet Dante also gives voice to elitism of a different sort. Those who refuse to be guided by reason are bound to remain vicious and are no better than animals. His words are not directed to such reprobates. Given Dante's fascination with virtue and vice, with sorting the pure wheat from the rotten chaff, what could be a more natural project for him than a vast poem in the vernacular language describing the fates of those who have been good and evil in this life? That is, of course, what we get in The Divine Comedy, a work more deserving of a podcast series of its own than the brief coverage I'm going to give it here. As you probably know, in the comedy Dante depicts himself as a pilgrim traveling through the three realms of the afterlife, Hell, Purgatory, and the Heavenly Paradise. We've seen this sort of device before, with Jean de Meun in his Romance of the Rose and Marguerite Poet in her Mirror of Simple Souls, both adopting the dual roles of author and protagonist. Dante exploits the resulting ironic distance, as when he has a character in Paradise predict what is in store for Dante the pilgrim, naming events that have already befallen Dante the author by the time he is writing his poem. My favorite example of this sort of thing comes in Inferno 15. Here, Dante the pilgrim expresses shock upon finding his mentor, Brunetto Latini, being eternally punished for sodomy, the decision to put him there having, of course, been taken by Dante the author. It's not the only case in which Dante the pilgrim feels sympathy for those damned by God. He even swoons in a faint out of pity for the star-crossed lovers Paolo and Francesca. What Dante the author thinks, or wants us to think, about such sympathetic sinners is a difficult question. For us, the most relevant such case comes when Dante visits Limbo, the first circle of Hell, which is reserved for virtuous people who were pagans or unbaptized. Their plight is made more vivid by the fact that Dante's guide at this stage is Virgil, himself a pagan and thus resident in Limbo when he is not taking Italian poets on a tour of the afterlife. While the denizens of Limbo are spared the horrific punishments the pilgrim will see later in Hell, like being turned into bleeding trees, having their bodies torn asunder or being embedded in ice, the virtuous non-Christians do suffer from their unfulfilled longing for God. This, of course, fits perfectly with the convivio. The perfect happiness envisioned there is forever forbidden to the unbaptized. The role Call of Disappointed Spirits in Limbo reads like an excerpt from the episode list of this podcast series. Dante mentions the pagans Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Empedocles, Zeno, Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Seneca, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as two Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes. Pride of place is, however, given to the man described simply as the master of those who know, who is, of course, Aristotle. Despite this praise, the knowledge attained by Aristotle and the rest was insufficient. Dante speaks of This may seem rather unfair. How can it be just for God to punish pagans for not embracing Christ when they lived centuries before Christ was even born? Dante is sensitive to the problem. In Paradiso, he considers the fate of the man born on the banks of the Indus River who has no way of knowing about Christianity. It's a problem that will seem yet more urgent in coming centuries when Europeans grapple with the discovery of previously uncontacted peoples in the New World. The scene in Limbo is not the only philosophical gathering in the Divine Comedy. Much later, as Dante is ascending through the celestial spheres on his tour of paradise, he reaches the Circle of the Sun. This is the section of the poem most frequently discussed by historians of philosophy, in part because Dante makes Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas the two chief spokesmen of this circle. Dante puts a speech of praise for St. Francis into the mouth of the Dominican theologian Aquinas, while the Franciscan Bonaventure speaks of the virtues of St. Dominic. The rivalry between the orders on earth is replaced by harmony and mutual admiration here in paradise. Both Aquinas and Bonaventure are accompanied by other spirits who appear as dancing lights in two rings. They include such familiar medieval figures as Anselm, Peter Lombard, Gracian, and Hugh of St. Victor. But one name has raised the eyebrows of many a reader, CJ of Brabant. Dante has Aquinas introduce him with the words, What is this notorious so-called Avarowist doing in paradise, and why is it Aquinas of all people who is made to present him to Dante? It clearly fits with the broader harmonizing theme of the Circle of the Sun. Here, whether we are Dominicans or Franciscans, moderate or radical followers of Aristotle, we can all finally get along. Aquinas's heavenly reconciliation with CJ is matched by Bonaventure's introduction of Joachim of Fiore, a controversial 12th century thinker who commented on the book of Apocalypse and looked ahead to the coming of the Antichrist. In real life, he was powerfully criticized by Bonaventure just as CJ was attacked by Aquinas. Many have suspected though that Dante's choice to include CJ may be more than an instance of heavenly reconciliation. Mightn't it be a sign of his deeper intellectual sympathies? Was Dante himself attracted by the radical teachings of the Avarowists? It's certainly plausible that he knew about their ideas. Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend and fellow exponent of the sweet new style in poetry, could have been a conduit for radical ideas from Paris. On the one hand, we've already seen that in both the Convivio and the Divine Comedy, Dante places limits on what pure reason can achieve. He sounds more like Aquinas than like Boethius of Dacia when he emphasizes that perfect happiness is achieved only through a contemplation of God that is impossible in this life. On the other hand, the place of honor given in paradise to CJ and his controversial demonstrated truths suggest that Dante did think there is a place for pure rational inquiry outside of theology. On both counts, Dante's attitude in the Convivio seems to be retained in the Divine Comedy. Reason can tell us a lot, but it can't tell us everything or make us completely happy. An influential French scholar of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilsan, wrote that CJ appears in Paradise to, "...symbolize the independence of a definite portion of the temporal order, that portion which we call philosophy." For Gilsan, Dante's choice has to do only with the role of reason in general, not with specific Averroist teaching. Yet there are signs that Dante may have flirted with at least one notorious teaching associated with the so-called Averroists, the unity of the intellect. In the Convivio, Dante says quite clearly that each individual human has his or her own potential intellect which he understands as a power for receiving understanding through an illumination from God. And in Purgatorio, he has the ancient poet Statius tell Dante the Pilgrim that Averroes's theory, according to which there is only one potential intellect for all of humankind, is in error. But Statius also admits that it was an easy mistake for Averroes to fall into and refers to the great Muslim commentator as, "...one wiser than you are." Quite a contrast to the invective aimed at Averroes and his theory by Aquinas and others. But the plot doesn't really thicken until we turn to Dante's treatise on political rule, On Monarchy. Written at about the same time Dante was working on The Divine Comedy, this is a defense of the idea of a unified and universal political rule. As he elaborates on this idea, Dante explains that the fulfillment of intellectual potential is something the whole human race must do together. He speaks as if it is a single power that is being exercised not individually, but collectively. Given his rejection of Averroes's theory in the comedy, most interpreters have taken this to be merely a loose way of speaking. But, friend of the podcast, John Marronbon, has argued that for Dante, rational argument left to its own devices would confirm that Averroes was right. Rational argument would suggest that since there is no bodily organ for intellect of thought, such thought cannot belong to one individual at a time, it is universal and shared by all. There are sound theological reasons to reject the idea though. In light of these concerns, Averroes's theory of the single shared human mind must in the end be abandoned, even if it makes sense within the confines of the Aristotelian system. This is the philosophical issue that seems most telling when it comes to determining Dante's attitude towards Averroism, but it is far from the only philosophical issue explored in the comedy. There is for instance a discussion of free will in Purgatorio which affirms that the heavenly bodies do have influence on human affairs, but do not constrain our freedom. Dante also has much to say about the heavens in Paradiso, which only stands to reason. The celestial realm after all serves as the setting of this final part of the poem. While visiting the sphere of the moon, Dante is treated to a discussion of Plato's idea that souls go to be with the stars after the death of the earthly body. Echoing 12th century interpreters who sought to put the most favorable possible interpretation of Plato's Timaeus, Dante has Beatrice suggest that Plato's words are not literally true, but may be valid in an allegorical sense. Elsewhere in Paradiso, Beatrice adds some further thoughts on free will, brings the pilgrim to the so-called Empyrean, an immaterial realm beyond the heavens where blessed souls dwell, and even describes a kind of scientific experiment involving candles and mirrors while refuting the pilgrims idea that spots on the moon are caused by variations in density. Such disquisitions are a characteristic feature of this part of the poem. They make Paradiso a rich source for Dante's philosophical ideas, even if most readers seem to prefer reading about the sadistic tortures meted out to the damned in Inferno. The Paradiso also has quite a bit to say about political philosophy. For this topic though, the essential reading is Dante's aforementioned treatise entitled On Monarchy. We'll look at it next time as we consider ideas about political authority in the early 14th century. I'll be damned if you shouldn't join me again for that, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Our Power is Real, The Clash of Church and State. At the turn of the 14th century, Giles of Rome found himself on the wrong side of history. He was a steadfast supporter of Boniface VIII, the pope who fought a losing political battle with the French king Philip IV, known as Philip the Fair. It's safe to say that it wasn't Boniface who gave him that nickname. Reacting to the taxes levied on church property by Philip, and also the English crown, Boniface issued what I can't resist calling an angry papal bull, or even a whole herd of bulls, a series of documents commanding secular kings to bend to the authority of the papacy. In 1301, he wrote that as pope he was, "... placed above kings and kingdoms, with the responsibility and right to uproot and destroy, to disperse and scatter, to build and to plant." Invoking a biblical metaphor familiar to us from an earlier episode, Boniface argued that the church is given two swords of spiritual and temporal power. If kings wield temporal power, it is on behalf of the church, and at the command and by the permission of the priest, as Boniface put it. But Philip was not cowed. As one of his representatives put it when speaking to the pope, "... your power is verbal, ours however is real." The king showed this power by having Boniface arrested leading to the pope's death in 1303. It was commented that Boniface took the papacy like a fox, ruled like a lion, but died like a dog. It may surprise you to hear that medieval kings were standing up to the pope like this, and coming out as victors into the bargain, in the deeply religious medieval age. We are apt to think of the separation of church and state as a distinctively modern idea, but the medieval's would need no lessons from us on this score. At the turn of the 14th century, the church and the medieval states were not just separate, but at each other's throats. We know from our earlier discussion of the clashing of these two swords that this struggle was a constant of medieval culture, and really an inevitable one, given the substantial involvement of clerics in the temporal sphere, with vast landholdings and military forces at their command. Besides, the whole point of being a king or an emperor is that you don't answer to anyone. Such a monarch is the supreme authority in his sphere of action. Remember that this was even used to explain why wars must be fought, because there is no higher court of appeal to resolve conflicts between rulers. And then the pope comes along and says to these rulers, no actually, they answer to him and their otherwise supreme power is exercised at his behest and at his discretion. For the secular theorists in the debate, the problem was saying where royal power and authority did come from if not from the pope. Their answer was that such authority is granted directly by God. This is the kind of historical irony I really cherish. The idea that kings have a divine right to rule seems an obvious example of the way that religion and politics were intertwined in earlier times. Yet the idea was, to no small degree, put forward in order to resist the rival claims of the church. This is not to deny that compromise positions were available. A figure often seen as a moderate in the debate was John of Paris, whose on royal and papal power was written at the height of the confrontation between Pope Boniface and King Philip. John resists the urge to subordinate one power to the other. For him, the secular ruler and the pope receive their authorities separately from God, having dominion over temporal and spiritual concerns respectively. Each must take the lead within his own sphere. This may sound closer to the secularist position, since it would mean that the pope should stay out of temporal affairs, yet John also points out that each of the two powers is subject to correction by the other. A king might depose a wicked pope, a pope excommunicate a wicked king. Like an unenthusiastic accountancy student, Giles of Rome had no interest in such checks and balances. His treatise on the power of the church is as forthright a defense of the pope's position as you could hope to read, which is not particularly surprising given that it was dedicated to Boniface himself. Giles explicitly aims to prove the superiority of the spiritual order to the temporal order, and hence of the pope to all secular rulers. The pope wields both swords, though he allows secular rulers to use the sword of temporal authority at his command. Giles sees here a parallel to the relationship between soul and body. It is because of our dual nature, both spiritual and physical, that we fall under two kinds of authority, spiritual and temporal. But the church has spiritual authority over all human souls, and the temporal order is subordinate to spiritual authority just as a human's body is subordinate to that human soul. After all, the soul rules the body with the limbs moving as the soul dictates. In Aristotelian terms, Giles is here suggesting that church authority is an efficient cause of temporal affairs. It sets them in motion like the soul moves the body. But final causality is also relevant. Our ultimate goal, as humans, is a spiritual one, namely the soul's ultimate beatitude. Here Giles is recalling a doctrine of his teacher, Thomas Aquinas, and putting it to political ends. Our final end is the contemplation of God, and obviously it is not any secular king, but the head of the church who guides us towards that end. On this basis, Giles also rejects any notion that there could be two parallel orders that operate independently of one another. We have only one final end, not two, and all temporal goods must be used in pursuit of the single spiritual goal shared by all humankind. An Aristotelian example might be that we should value money, a temporal good, only because it helps us display virtues, like generosity. But the implications of Giles' theory might better be illustrated with a case like the Crusades, where the military might of kings was used to achieve an objective set by the papacy and the soldiers were promised a heavenly reward, namely the remission of their sins. The chance of seizing a few temporal goods in the shape of landholdings or booty was, in theory at least, merely a welcome bonus. Giles' defense of papal supremacy invokes another idea familiar from Aquinas, the subordination of the sciences. We saw that for Aquinas, theology is the highest of all disciplines and gives principles to lower philosophical sciences. Giles has a similar idea, which he applies especially to the philosophy of nature. Physics is a lower science than metaphysics because it is more restricted in its scope. The student of nature studies only bodily things, whereas the metaphysician studies all things, both spiritual and bodily. In much the same way, the concerns and the authority of secular kings are particular and parochial, where the concerns and authority of the pope is universal. Giles goes so far as to suggest that the pope's universal rule over humankind is like God's rule over the created universe. God rules over all things, and natural causes are inferior to the supreme divine cause. In fact, a natural cause, like fire or an animal that generates another animal, involves what we might call delegated power. This is secondary causation, which derives ultimately from God's primary causal power and is always subject to being overturned by that power, which is what happens in a miracle. Also, the pope may frequently allow secular affairs to proceed as if they were independent, but he can always assert his ultimate authority if he wishes. We see this when he refrains from intervening in secular court cases, though he does have final authority which could be brought to bear when answering an appeal from a temporal judge. Just as God voluntarily restricts his own absolute power by usually exercising his power within an ordained set of natural laws, so the pope lays down laws and statutes for the running of the church and voluntarily obeys these laws. Really though, he is above their jurisdiction because of what Giles explicitly calls his absolute power. But one can't help wondering, what if the pope is a complete jerk? Do we really want to put ourselves in a position where a vicious man can exercise such untrammeled and unchallenged authority? Giles confronts this question and in doing so makes a point of perennial relevance. We should distinguish between the moral standing of a person and the moral standing of the position of authority that a person may occupy. In other words, even if the current pope is a vicious man, the papacy as such retains its supremacy. Conversely, the fact that some other person may have great moral virtue does not give that person spiritual authority. As Giles says, just the fact that you're a great singer doesn't make you the cantor in your local church. You have to be awarded the office. Here Giles may seem too relaxed about handing great power to wicked men. In a slightly earlier work called On the Abdication of the Pope, Giles had argued that popes are given their position through election by the cardinals and thereafter can be removed only voluntarily, that is, by abdication, the sole exception being popes who fall into heresy. Still, his comments on separating the dignity of the office from the moral status of the office holder can be read as a refreshing change from much ancient and medieval political writing which tended to emphasize above all the moral character of the ideal ruler. This is ironic, since Giles was himself a significant contributor to that moralizing tradition. Years prior to his defense of papal authority, he had written a work called On the Government of Princes. This became a hugely popular text translated into numerous European vernacular languages and preserved in about 300 manuscripts. It is an example of the so-called mirror-for-princes genre, texts that give moral and practical advice to rulers and aspiring rulers. Drawing extensively on Aristotle's ethical and political writings, this earlier treatise sees Giles arguing for the supreme rule of the secular monarch. This isn't necessarily in direct contradiction with the later treatise On the Power of the Church, since there Giles will recognize that the king is at the top of the temporal hierarchy, even if that whole hierarchy is subordinate to spiritual authority. But in a third work, his commentary on the sentences, Giles makes some remarks that cast doubt on the moralizing project of his mirror-for-princes. In Our Fallen State of Sin, he says, all secular authority is inevitably coercive and character. If a temporal ruler claims to rule with a view to the common good, this is always a pretense since post-Lapsarian humans are inevitably selfish in their motives. This is contrasted to the situation before the fall, when, Giles contends, Adam was in position of rule over Eve because men are superior to women, but this rule was based on mutual love, so involved no coercion. For a far more optimistic attitude towards secular rule, we can turn back to Dante Alighieri. Dante's political theory is diametrically opposed to that of Giles of Rome. Where Giles championed the cause of Boniface VIII, Dante condemned this pope to hell. Where Giles placed secular rule under the universal authority of the papacy, Dante puts all his trust in the universal, but temporal, rule of an emperor. His arguments to this end are presented in a work composed in Latin called On Monarchy. As one scholar wrote shortly after World War II in this work, the rights of the secular state as against Vatican direction are maintained with an emphasis that would have shocked Aquinas, but was destined to be quoted with many a chuckle by Benito Mussolini. Dante hoped that his theory would find historical embodiment in the person of Henry VII of Luxembourg, a Holy Roman Emperor whose invasion of Italy was greeted with great enthusiasm by Dante. In the Paradiso, he would immortalize Henry and lament the ultimate failure of imperial rule in Italy by having Beatrice say that, in heaven shall sit the soul of noble Henry, he shall show Italy the righteous way, but when she is unready. The contrast between Giles of Rome and Dante gives us a nice example of the fact that the same premise can be used to reach very different conclusions. Like Giles, Dante avails himself of the idea that humankind in general shares a single end, the perfection of our intellectual capacities. Since we all have this goal in common, there should be a single political order which seeks to help us along to reach our shared objective. This means that we should have a single ruler, whose imperial authority should ideally stretch over the entire earth, bounded only by the ocean, as Dante puts it. Like Giles, Dante sees a parallel here to the providential rule of the one God over the universe. There are many advantages to be expected from this political arrangement. Peace will reign without multiple political entities competing for domination. The sole ruler will also be without greed, because his power will be so supreme that there will be nothing left for him to desire. And there are more abstract, dare I say philosophical, justifications for a single imperium. Dante refers to the theory of transcendentals, reminding us of the scholastic teaching that unity correlates to goodness. This shows that a single rule is also the best rule. Furthermore, he cites the Neoplatonic work called the Book of Causes for the idea that the higher a cause, the further its reach should be. It follows that the highest political rule must reach to all things. Dante thinks that Aristotle would agree with him about all this, which is less than entirely convincing given that Aristotle conceived of politics within the context of a city-state or polis, a far smaller political entity than a world-spanning empire. For Dante, the real ancient model is of course not Athens, but Rome. He thinks that divine providence settled on Rome as the center of imperial authority, something shown even by the fact that King David was supposedly born at the same time that Aeneas, again supposedly, founded the city of Rome. You might complain that Rome was for many centuries a republic and not the seat of empire. To this Dante would triumphantly remind you that Christ himself was born during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar. What could be a greater indication of God's approval? On the last page of On Monarchy, Dante somewhat grudgingly admits that the emperor owes respect and deference to the pope as a son does to his father. But apart from this, ecclesiastical power appears in the work solely as an undesirable obstacle to the imperial project. Dante here reflects on the tensions between the papacy and secular rule in his own lifetime. He rejects the biblical interpretation that has two swords being put in the hands of the church and denies that political authority was ever in the gift of the church, either by nature or by divine command. Where Giles of Rome referred to the Old Testament passages to prove that kings were invested with their office by priests among the Hebrews, Dante points out that the Christian church arose only after the establishment of the Roman Empire under Augustus. This obviously shows that imperial authority cannot derive from the command of the popes, since the church didn't even exist when imperial authority was originally, and most successfully, exercised. Just as there has been scholarly controversy as to whether the philosophical ideas of the convivio are retained in the divine comedy, so interpreters don't agree about the relationship between the Dante of On Monarchy and the Dante of the Comedy. It's been proposed that On Monarchy represented a passing phase of enthusiasm for secular rule with a more theological attitude emerging in the famous poem. But there are numerous signs that Dante's political attitudes remained fairly constant throughout his career. He champions the Roman Empire in the convivio as well, and in both On Monarchy and in the comedy decries the idea that the Emperor Constantine placed the western realms of Christendom under the power of the papacy. Even if Constantine did this, he had no legitimate standing to do so, since the realms of the empire must remain united and under a sole temporal ruler. Dante even has Constantine appear in Paradise to admit his error. And just in case we're not yet sure how Dante feels about the medieval papacy, Canto 19 of Inferno predicts the damnation of Boniface and treats us to the spectacle of another pope being punished for simony by being buried head down in the earth with his legs and feet writhing as they are burned by flames. While it would be hard to imagine anyone taking a firmer stance against the misdeeds of the church, we're about to meet another Italian who gave it a good try. Our next author will be just as staunch in his advocacy of secular authority and just as implacably opposed to the political claims of the popes. But he will do more than either Giles or Dante to advance the theoretical justification of legitimate political rule. Exiled from his life as a scholastic in Paris, this scholar made his way to a city that still today offers a refuge for wandering philosophers, Munich. So get ready to say a hearty Grüskot to Marsilius of Padua next time here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Render Unto Caesar, Marsilius of Padua. Political rulers should govern in the interest of their subjects, not in their own interests. It's a common enough sentiment, even if it is a guideline more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Already Plato, in the first book of his Republic, has Socrates argue that rulers must look at after the welfare of the citizens the way that shepherds look to the welfare of their flocks. Medieval thinkers in both the Islamic and Latin Christian worlds followed a similar, broadly Aristotelian line, a state should be governed in such a way that the citizens of a state become virtuous. It's on this basis that Al-Farabi distinguished between what he called the virtuous city and other cities in which citizens seek lower ends like pleasure or honour. Aquinas likewise took the purpose of laws to be the training of citizens in virtue, and just in the last episode we saw Dante justifying the idea of universal rule in terms of the universal shared goal of humankind to achieve the contemplative virtue of intellectual perfection. All these high-minded recommendations provoke a pretty obvious response, easier said than done. It's one thing to say how rulers should govern, and with what end in view, another to ensure that they do govern in this way. Much ancient and medieval political philosophy is disappointingly sketchy when it comes to that question. Describing an ideal state where virtuous men and even philosophers are in charge is all well and good, but it smacks of utopianism. Plato already recognized this, contenting himself with showing that it is just about possible for philosopher kings to come to power, albeit very unlikely. In general, one gets the impression that political thinkers were resigned to the fact that rulers would come to power by chance through military conquest or inheritance. They optimistically hoped, in the face of a staggeringly large amount of evidence to the contrary, that God was providentially appointing the right men, and occasionally women, to sit on the thrones. And they wrote works like Giles of Rome's On the Government of Princes, works of moral exhortation for the ruler in hopes that some of the good advice would rub off. This is about what you'd expect from philosophers shaped by medieval culture. Was it really possible to envision a system for ensuring good rulership when actual rulership was always determined on the battlefield or by family connections? Well, at least one medieval thinker did just that. His name was Marsilius of Padua. Like Giles of Rome, he responded to the struggle between papacy and secular princes that raged in the early 14th century. But unlike Giles, he was very much on the secular side. Marsilius's masterpiece, The Defender of the Peace, makes direct reference to the ambitious clerics who, in Marsilius's view, were the chief cause of political unrest and conflict in his age. He condemned the popes Boniface VIII and John XXII for standing in the way of the rightful rule of kings and emperors, and explained in detail why and how secular rule is legitimate. It was a polemic he waged at considerable personal cost. After initially being educated in his hometown of Padua, Marsilius moved back and forth between there and Paris, where he wrote The Defender of the Peace in the year 1324. Perhaps because of his controversial writings, however, Marsilius left, or more dramatically fled, from Paris with a colleague named Jean of Jandun. They travelled to the court of Ludwig of Bavaria, whose seat of power was in Munich, which just happens to be where I'm recording this. Germany's welcoming attitude to refugees is evidently a long-standing one. Ludwig and Marsilius were an ideal match, since Ludwig embodied the idea that secular rulers can and should wield power independently of the papacy. He invaded Italy and had himself crowned emperor at Rome in 1328, in a ceremony involving compliant bishops who were enemies of Pope John XXII, as well as representatives of the Roman aristocracy. The pope was, it goes without saying, not best pleased. By this time he had already made it clear what he thought of Marsilius, naming both him and Jean of Jandun as heretics, and excommunicating them in 1327. Ludwig returned the favor the next year by declaring the pope deposed. As with the earlier struggle between Philip the Fair and Pope Boniface, these events meant that the debate over papal and princely sovereignty was far from abstract and theoretical. It addressed the burning political question of the day. Given that he was such a partisan of Emperor Ludwig, you might think that Marsilius would seek to establish his patron's legitimacy by appealing to God's providence. This is what Dante had done in celebrating the Roman Empire and his own imperial hope, Henry VII. But for Marsilius, God establishes legitimate rulers only through the actions of individual human communities. If divine providence takes a hand in our political affairs, it is by guiding the people to choose the best rulers, not by bestowing victory in war or a favorable birth. The rightful ruler is determined by an election, on the part of either the universal body of the citizens or the prevailing part, as Marsilius famously puts it. Of course, he is not envisioning here something like a modern-day representative democracy. For one thing, he excludes slaves and women, along with foreigners and children from the ranks of citizens. For another thing, Marsilius is imagining an assembly of citizens along the lines of the noble electors whose support was in fact needed by German rulers like Ludwig. This was an ancient practice that goes back to Carolingian times and even to the traditions of Germanic tribes. So why have I described Marsilius as such a pioneering political theorist? Because he actually has a political theory to explain why kings or emperors must be chosen through election. He appeals to a principle of Roman law taken over by the medieval canonists which states that what affects all, likewise, should be approved by all. On this basis, Marsilius reasons that the citizens must express their consent if the ruler is justly to rule over them. This is achieved through the process of election. The assembly of citizens is actually a legislative body and retains its standing even after having chosen a ruler. In fact, the ruler doesn't even need to be a single person, though Marsilius does insist, following a traditional analogy we've seen in earlier medieval authors like John of Salisbury, that political rule should flow from a single person or group, as an animal is ruled from a single organ, namely the heart. Nor is this just going to be a rubber stamping procedure where the strongest strongmen or bluest blue-bloods can assume that the nobles will acclaim them as kings or counselors. Marsilius explicitly names, as an advantage of the elective process, that it has the best chance of putting virtuous men in charge. This is to be a genuinely representative government with the representing to be done by those whom the citizens choose. The chosen virtuous ruler cannot even pass his authority onto his children. Instead, a new election must be held to appoint the successor. This is to safeguard against the possibility of a vicious son taking the throne from a virtuous father. Even aficionados of Roman history will appreciate it when I say, comitus, I'm looking at you. However, Marsilius does allow that the son of a virtuous monarch is likely to be virtuous too, having been raised by such an outstanding father, and one gets the sense that in his ideal scenario, inherited rule would still be frequent. Still, the point stands that inheritance in no way legitimates the ruler. of government comes only from the consent of the governed. Marsilius thus provides exactly what we found missing in earlier political theorists. He reasons that if the common good of the citizens is really the purpose of governance, then the citizens should have a say in deciding how their common good is best achieved. Power does not flow downwards from God through a divinely anointed king or pope, it flows upward from the people. Marsilius is not quite expressing a thought that might seem natural for us, namely that consent of the governed is required because it is an intrinsic requirement of justice. Rather, consent is a useful device, it is the mechanism by which the governed secure whatever is in their best interests. On the other hand, the reason why we need rulers in the first place is that the people may not all agree on what is most beneficial. Hence the title of Marsilius's book. The elected ruler is the defender of the peace because the citizens consent to be governed by that ruler rather than coming into conflict with each other. The whole citizenry, or its prevailing part, is in the best position to judge the best person or persons who should be nominated to secure the best overall results. Marsilius is strikingly optimistic about this. In sharp contrast to the elitism of a Plato or Al-Farabi, he argues that the people as a whole will make better choices than a select group of wise men. We can see how seriously Marsilius takes this from his answer to an argument in favor of hereditary rule. One might suppose that under that system the people will be more docile and will just accept that each ruler as anointed thanks to their family ties. To this, Marsilius responds that on the contrary, the people would be more likely to rebel against automatically inherited rule, and rightly so, since they would realize that they are being governed by men who are inferior to themselves. Perhaps understandably, Marsilius does not belabor the notion that hereditary rulers around Latin Christendom could rightfully be deposed if they did not come to their position through a new, valid election. In any case, his chief target is not rule by inheritance, despite his opposition to it. Instead, it is the Church that he accuses of disrupting the peace. This, Marsilius wryly remarks, is a source of dissension that was unknown to Aristotle, who never had the dubious privilege of experiencing the grasping greed and temporal ambitions of the Christian Church. In fact, one can describe the defender of the peace as an update of Aristotle's politics, which takes account of the new dangers posed by clerical authority. Aristotle could not have foreseen the depredations of the popes, or as Marsilius likes to call them, the Roman bishops. But no one who reads Marsilius will be in any doubt as to the dangers they pose. He systematically deprives the popes, and the Church more generally, of any right to interfere in the temporal order. The priesthood has the sole purpose of seeing to our spiritual needs, which means looking to the eternal life and not the affairs of this world. The priests do play an important role in administering the sacraments, and thus helping us free ourselves of sin, but apart from that they should mind their business. In this, they would be following the example of Christ, who disavowed temporal rule, saying "...my kingdom is not of this world, and, of course, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." But surely the medieval Church at least has the responsibility of enforcing orthodox Christian belief? Marsilius responds, "...not so fast, and don't call me Shirley." The priesthood may have the role of identifying heretics, but it cannot assert the right to punish them. Consider the analogous case of a doctor who diagnoses leprosy. The doctor advises the secular authorities, and it is they who undertake appropriate measures like a quarantine. Priests, whether popes or not, who think that they have an authority over any aspect of the temporal order, should again look to the example of Christ, who, after all, allowed himself to be judged by a secular official, Pontius Pilate. Having taken away their political influence, Marsilius now really hits the priests where it hurts, in their pocketbooks. Again referring to the example of Christ and the apostles, he argues that poverty is inextricably bound up with the Christian moral ideal. Predictably, he quotes Jesus' advice from the Bible, "...sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven." Here we come again to the bitter controversy over the mendicant orders and the ideal of poverty. We saw before how Peter Olivey, Bonaventure, and others had defended that ideal in the 13th century. In the early 1320s, the dispute reached a new intensity thanks to Pope John XXII, who declared the vow of poverty irrational and therefore even heretical, insofar as the Franciscans and other mendicants were ascribing the supposed perfection of absolute poverty to Christ and the apostles. The Pope's rejection of the mendicant vow ran along lines familiar to us. Even if the Franciscans could reasonably decline to own things like houses, they must at least use things like the food they eat, otherwise they would starve themselves to death which would constitute the sin of suicide. After all, it makes no sense to say you use but do not own the bread, or more optimistically haume-quassant, that you eat, given that you destroy the thing in the process of using it. In the 13th century, the mendicants had been able to rely on papal support, and could take refuge in the argument that the things they used in fact belonged to the Pope. Now the sitting pope was refusing to acknowledge this, and in fact condemning the whole notion of voluntary absolute poverty. Marsilius's response is a furious one, accusing the pope himself of being a heretic for his stance. This by the way is a constant refrain of his strictures against papal overreach, that popes might be, and indeed have recently been, heretical, so one cannot entrust them with a power such as excommunication or with a special right to determine the meaning of scripture. As a basis for his response to Pope John's arguments, Marsilius develops an innovative conception of ownership and, especially, of legal rights. So innovative is this section of the defender of the peace, in fact, that many scholars have credited Marsilius with helping to invent the concept of individual legal rights. An important step in Marsilius's argument is in fact the definition of the Latin term ius, which is often translated into English as right. In one sense, though, ius just means whatever is determined by laws or by legal commands and prohibitions. One could perhaps still speak here of what is legally right. Some scholars have found Marsilius's remarks here intriguing because he seems to be saying that there is a significant sense in which whatever a legal authority decides should be right becomes right. This position is sometimes called legal positivism. It would contrast sharply with a theory of law like the one we found in Aquinas, where human laws must be grounded in the natural law and are in a sense just a more precise application of that law. By contrast, Marsilius really has no use for the concept of natural law because for him the realm of the legal is subject to human decision. On the other hand, the positivist tendencies in Marsilius should perhaps be qualified, insofar as laws do need to look to the common advantage of the citizens, as we saw earlier. This would constrain the range of choices open to the legislator. An unfair or unjust law might count as no true law at all, as might a law that contravenes divinely ordained commands. In addition to this first sense of the word ius, Marsilius recognizes a second meaning. A ius, or right, is whatever is allowed to us within the scope of the law. To see what he has in mind here, let's take as an example your right to say that Buster Keaton's silent films aren't funny. For you to say this would certainly be erroneous, but you have the right to do it. There is no law requiring people to appreciate Keaton's films, despite the letters I keep sending to my congressman. Your right to insult Buster Keaton is just one of many such rights. In general, you are permitted to do anything not forbidden by the law. Besides which, we have certain positive rights, such as my right to bring you to court if you steal the Buster Keaton poster hanging over the desk where I'm sitting right now. This shows that ownership is closely connected to the content of a right. Indeed, ownership is really a kind of right, the right to decide whether others can use the things we own. Now, Marsilius is just about ready to clarify what is happening with voluntary poverty. He observes that rights in general, and the right of ownership in particular, are voluntarily exercised. The fact that you have the right to lament the supposed unfunniness of Keaton, or even of silent comedy in general, doesn't mean that you have to be obnoxious enough to go and do it. Similarly, you can have ownership rights over something without exercising those rights. Suppose a noblewoman donates bread to a Franciscan house. She can allow the friars to use the bread by eating it without transferring ownership to them. The fact that you can voluntarily let someone else use your possessions shows that the right of use is distinct from the right of ownership. The noblewoman might also renounce her ownership of the bread, so that if someone stole it from the Franciscan's pantry, she couldn't take the thief to court, but that doesn't mean that the mendicant friars are forced to assume ownership of the bread. The bread has come into their possession and they intend to use it, but they do not own it and have no legal claim to the bread. So, if the noblewoman renounces ownership and the friars don't accept ownership, then who does own the bread? Nobody, says Marsilius. He invokes the Roman concept of a res nullius, or something owned by no one. He gives the nice example that a mendicant could go fishing, catch and eat a fish, without the fish ever passing into his ownership. One implication of Marsilius's analysis is that, legally speaking, you can steal from mendicants. If you are standing on a river bank feeling hungry, see a Franciscan grilling a fish he just caught, and just walk over and take it from him and eat it, then the Franciscan has no legal recourse against you. The fish didn't belong to him after all, he was just using it. The bad news is that you've committed a grave sin, and broken divine law, rather than human law. For us, the reason all this is important is not so much the legitimization of poverty, as the theory of rights Marsilius has developed along the way. As the scholar Brian Tierney has written, In True Without Any Gap Spirit, let's look quickly at how this sort of idea was developed by another, far more obscure, 14th century author named William of Pagula. In the early 1330s, he wrote another one of those Mirrors for Princes, or Works of Moral and Practical Advice, in this case dedicated to the English king William III. Its theme is the practice of purveyance, a custom in which the crown could requisition goods from the king's subjects and just stipulate the price to be paid. In other words, if you were a peasant, and the king came along and demanded you sell him your pig for one copper coin, you would have to do it. William of Pagula decries this practice and says that it is unjust to pay less than what he calls the true price, meaning the price reached through negotiation and agreed by both parties. It's unjust not simply because paying less is hard on the already poor peasant, but because even peasants have rights of ownership over their possessions. These include the right to sell, or refuse to sell, depending on whether the owner is happy with the price on offer. You should by now be convinced that the first half of the 14th century was something of a high point in the history of political philosophy. Yet we still haven't even looked at the most famous political thinker of the period. Like Marsilius, our next author took refuge with Ludwig of Bavaria after getting in trouble with the church, and like Marsilius, he was a devout, in every sense of the term, defender of the ethic of poverty, and a major figure in the development of ideas about rights and the state. Join me next time as we begin to look at a man most would recognize as the most significant scholastic philosopher of the 14th century, and with all due respect to William of Pagula, definitely the most significant medieval philosopher named William, is the life and political thought of William of Ockham, next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Do As You're Told, Occam on Ethics and Political Philosophy. The medieval world was a world of hierarchies. Land holding and military service were organized through feudalism, with every man but the king having to fulfill obligations to his lord. The church too was hierarchically arranged with the pope at its apex. Philosophy and theology were no exception. After moving through the stratified educational system of the university, scholastics would speculate about angels arranged in descending ranks, about the subordination of all human sciences within a single system, and about the created universe itself, which was seen as a hierarchically ordered cosmos ruled by God. Yet, as we've been seeing, it was also a time of dissension and schism. There was rivalry between hierarchies, with the popes and emperors contending to be the truly supreme representatives of God on earth. And there was tension within hierarchies too, as when nobles resisted the demands of their kings, or clerics protested at the conduct or decrees of wicked popes. But how could such dissent be justified? How do we reject the leaders of our institutions without rejecting the legitimacy of the institutions themselves? A number of scholars came to grips with this question in the Middle Ages, none with more seriousness or subtlety than William of Ockham. In fact, he is sometimes called the more-than-subtle doctor to indicate that he surpassed the subtle doctor Duns Scotus. In his later years, Ockham devoted himself to polemics against a pope whom he considered to be a heretic. In the process, he developed something like a theory of principled disobedience. This is ironic, because his earlier scholastic work features an ethical theory which takes obedience as its core idea. Like the merely subtle Scotus, Ockham was inclined to think that right and wrong are generated by divine commands. Under certain circumstances, you may encourage people to depose a wicked pope, but if the ruler you're dealing with is God, you should just do as you're told. We can divide Ockham's career into two parts. Appropriately enough, the life-changing event that marks the division in his biography took place in the city indelibly associated with schism, Avignon. He went there in 1324 to defend himself against charges of heresy. Prior to that, he received his training at Greyfriars, the Franciscan convent in London, and then pursued a degree in theology at Oxford. But he returned to London without becoming a master of theology, which is why he is sometimes also called the venerable Inceptor, surely the least catchy nickname in all of medieval philosophy. It just means that he remained a beginner. Still, his time at Oxford gave him the chance to lecture on the sentences of Peter Lombard, and we have written records of these lectures, as well as many disputed questions and writings on logic from the first part of his career. So, the genres within which Ockham was working are familiar, but his ideas were sufficiently daring that they provoked intense opposition. Ockham frequently developed his ideas by criticizing Scotus, and Scotus' followers, like William of Alnwick and John of Reading, lucked to defend their master. It may have been John of Reading who asked the papal court to look into the orthodoxy of Ockham's teachings on such issues as the Eucharist. Ockham's views were criticized at Avignon, but he was not actually pronounced a heretic. Yet it was not his fate to return to his native England to live out his life writing disputed questions. Instead, he was swept up in the highly political clash between the Franciscan mendicants and Pope John XXII over that most disputed of questions in this period, the possibility of absolute poverty. Ockham threw in his lot with the head of the Franciscan order, Michael of Cizena, and they fled from Avignon in 1328. These renegade Franciscans found sanctuary with Ludwig of Bavaria, the same man who gave patronage and protection to Marcellius of Padua, which explains why, here in Munich, there is an Ockhamstrasse right near where I work. It also explains why, from 1328 until his death in 1347, Ockham devoted his writing to political topics. As I've said though, Ockham was a controversial figure long before he got to Munich. One of the teachings that raised eyebrows in Avignon gives us some insight into how radical and uncompromising he could be, and how willing he was to follow his principles to their conclusions. He claimed that God could, if he so wished, require us to commit adultery or steal, and that if he did so, it would be right for us to obey. He even speculated about God commanding us to hate him, something that was picked out by the Avignon commission as particularly problematic. Why would Ockham say these things? Well, he was a standard bearer of voluntarism, the view developed by Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus, which insisted that both divine and human will are capable of uncaused decision-making unconstrained by any outside necessity. Ockham follows in the footsteps of Scotus by making moral laws subject to God's will. It's only a natural inference from this that, if God did tell you to commit adultery, it would become morally right for you to do so. But don't get your hopes up. Ockham doesn't dream that God will actually issue any such command. It's just that, in principle, he could. There's a scholarly controversy about Ockham's ethical theory though. It's clear enough that he ascribes God great latitude in fashioning the moral law. But is it really the case that we ought to, for instance, avoid committing adultery simply because he has told us that adultery is wrong? If so, then Ockham would simply be taking forward Duns Scotus's divine command theory of ethics. But interpreters have pointed to passages in Ockham's work that suggest a more complicated position. For one thing, he often invokes the role of right reason and conscience in morality. He goes so far as to say, in fact, that no action can be virtuous unless it is guided by right reason. If you just spontaneously and unthinkingly help an old lady across the street, give money to the poor, or recommend your favorite podcast to someone in dire need of philosophical inspiration, it doesn't count as a morally virtuous act. You have to do these things because they are the right thing to do, and in fact, for only this reason. This may seem unnecessarily strict. So long as the old lady gets across the street, who cares what is going on in my mind when I decide to offer her assistance? Helping her is an intrinsically good thing to do, isn't it? Not according to Ockham. He insists that any action considered in itself is morally neutral. He gives the example of walking to church. Someone might set out towards church because of religious devotion, but then along the way, start to fantasize about seducing one of the other parishioners. Here the very same journey is at first motivated by love of God, then by adulterous lust. In Ockham's estimation, this one act thus starts out as morally praiseworthy, but becomes wicked part way through. And things could go the other way around. He asks us to consider someone who commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. Since suicide is wrong, this counts as a sinful act. But if the person changes his mind halfway down, his continued fall is no longer sinful because it no longer stems from his will. The conclusion can be generalized. Since any action can be done out of a variety of motives, a virtuous action gets its character only from the process of practical reasoning and volition that gave rise to it. There's a further reason for Ockham to stress the role of natural reasoning in ethics. Somehow, people do manage to act well despite being ignorant of divine revelation. The pagans who lived before Christ seem, in some cases, to have been downright heroic. Just consider Socrates or Cato the Younger, both widely admired for their bravery in resisting tyranny. Such characters obviously represent a serious difficulty for any divine command theory of ethics. Somehow, these virtuous pagans managed to play the game of morality expertly despite never having learned the rules. Ockham resolves the difficulty by pointing to the importance of practical rationality in our moral lives. Since pagans were often quite good at reasoning, they frequently managed to discern the right thing to do. But we should not be misled by this into thinking that virtuous actions are good because they are identified as such by reason. Only God's command makes something good. If a pagan manages to distinguish good from bad, it is because she is picking up clues to God's will by examining the created world. Ockham even speaks here of self-evident moral principles, as for instance that the needy should be helped. This is the principle that inspires you to help the old lady or recommend the podcast. But it is only evident to you, or to a pre-Christian pagan, because you live in a world with a particular moral order which is ordained by God. He might have laid down a very different order, in which case the conclusions of right reason would have to be correspondingly different. It follows from this that even if pagans sometimes made the right choices, they never really understood why their choices were right. For Ockham, morality is ultimately a matter of obeying God. This may sound rather arbitrary. Why should I do something just because God tells me to? To avoid punishment? That would be like following the laws of a king out of fear rather than in an appreciation of the justice of the laws, a rather unattractive view. But Ockham doesn't emphasize the dire consequences that face the sinner so much as the positive consideration that we should love God and want to do as He commands. In fact, some interpreters even think that, for Ockham, this is why we should do as God commands, that love for Him, for God not for Ockham, is the source from which all moral motivation must flow. A test case considered by Ockham is, what if God commands us to hate Him, or simply to neither love nor hate Him? Ockham points out that this command would yield a kind of contradiction, in which case we would need to hate God or fail to love Him precisely out of our love for Him. Thus, the commanded act of will is actually impossible. By now it is clear that Ockham's moral theory is all about what is happening within the soul of the agent. Good people perform actions that we can all observe, but the business end of their virtue is on the inside, where good reasoning and free volition form the real basis of morality. This has obvious consequences for politics. For one thing, it tends to push Ockham away from the Aristotelian idea that the state's primary aim should be training and conditioning its citizens to be good. Virtue is ultimately a matter of free choices, which can never be determined by external influence. So it makes sense that Ockham has a rather limited conception of the role of the state in our practical lives. Government can give people the opportunity to live good lives by arresting and punishing the wicked and maintaining order, but this is largely a matter of removing practical obstacles rather than positively encouraging us to strive for virtue. For another thing, it makes perfect sense that Ockham would emphasize the role of individual conscience in political life. You should do things because you understand them to be good, and believe things because you have good reason for thinking they are true. The responsibility is yours, and you cannot simply outsource your decisions or beliefs to external authorities. With admirable consistency, Ockham held himself to this demanding and individualistic ethic. It's easy to get confused and think that his flight to Munich was a direct outcome of the examination of his doctrines for heresy at Avignon. But this isn't the case. He left Avignon as a conscientious objector to the papacy of John XXII because of this pope's opposition to the Franciscan ethic of poverty. We don't need to go through the arguments for and against the mendicant's stance again. Suffice it to say that, like Peter Olivey Bonaventure and his contemporary Marcellius of Padua, Ockham was a fierce proponent of absolute poverty. But the political writings of his later career add something else to the debate that I do want to discuss, a sustained justification of dissidents against papal authority. For a man like Marcellius, this posed relatively little difficulty. He was a secular polemicist, and duly argued that the pope has no coercive authority in the first place, not over temporal rulers and not even over other clerics. Ockham, by contrast, was no secularist. He had a deep respect for the papacy and thought that a pope's authority could be resisted only in special and extreme circumstances. We've been seeing already that late medieval secularists tended to think that a king or emperor could move against a wicked pope, but that basic principles for unseating a pope had been familiar for generations, at least since that indispensable legal thinker Gratian, whose ideas were developed by the canonist Huguccio. According to this legal tradition, the pope's position within the spiritual realm is supreme. Locals often spoke of him as possessing a plenitude of power which can be challenged by no one. So, just as secular monarchs must resort to war to settle their differences, because there is no human authority above them, there is no court that can sit in judgment on a pope. This may seem to rule out any accusation of heresy in his case, but there is one exception. A pope might explicitly embrace a teaching that had already been established as heretical earlier in church history. In this case, there is no court or trial needed, since the prior decision of the church can justify action against him. In fact, a pope in this position is really no pope at all, having surrendered his spiritual authority by falling into unbelief. This was, of course, exactly the situation facing Occam, or so he believed. The church had, somewhat grudgingly, approved of absolute poverty in the 13th century. Now Pope John was overturning this decision, and thus adopting a view that had already been established as false. Worse, he was clinging obstinately to this falsehood. For Occam, this is actually part of what it means to be a heretic. In addition to holding a wrong belief, you have to insist on holding that wrong belief, even in the face of convincing arguments against it. Occam is saying that all of us, even popes, have a kind of moral responsibility for our own beliefs. We need to take criticism and refutation seriously, and change our minds if we are given good reason to do so. There's a powerful anti-authoritarian message here, insofar as reasons for abandoning a falsehood could, in principle, come from anywhere. To take a far from hypothetical example, suppose you are a pope, and a lowly Franciscan friar presents you with sound arguments that absolute poverty is conceptually possible and spiritually admirable. It's no good pulling rank on the friar, or ignoring him. You have to engage in an honest attempt to discern the truth and change your mind if the opponent's view is more compelling. Which is not to say that you have to spend your whole life weighing up all rival opinions, no matter how outrageous they may seem to be. But neither should you bow to others because they hold a position of authority. If a single individual's views receive special consideration, this is, as Occam puts it, not especially because of his greater position, but because he has a better account to give for himself, because of his better life, because he is better instructed about the case, or for some similar reason. On this basis, Occam thought that in principle, any Christian could in good conscience oppose a heretical pope, indeed that one actually ought to do so. He threw in his lot with Michael of Cizena and Ludwig of Bavaria because he was practicing what he preached. Of course a lowly friar like himself did not pose much threat to papal power, though Occam did his best by wielding his pen in a series of polemical documents. Sadly, despite rumors to the contrary, the sword is quite a bit mightier than the pen. So effective resistance to Pope John would have to come from rulers like Ludwig. Occam supported Ludwig and other such rulers, arguing along with Marsilius that they do have an independent authority of their own, rather than being subordinate to the church. Legitimacy stems from consent of the people, and once granted it cannot be withdrawn. The people just have to put up with the rulers they have chosen. But Occam did not go quite so far in the secularist direction as Marsilius. He asked the temporal and spiritual powers to keep out of each other's way, rather than trying to put the papacy under the imperial thumb. An emperor can depose a pope, only in the unusual crisis posed by papal heresy, and correspondingly, popes can intervene in temporal affairs only in a dire situation where no temporal power is adequate to the task. Otherwise, the two powers are separate and equal simply because both are unchallenged in their own respective spheres. And by the way, all of this is of course subject to the caveat that God has decreed it to be so. It is because God wills it that people may rightly choose to be ruled by a non-spiritual power. As usual, Occam remains consistent, applying his divine command theory to politics as well as ethics. I wanted to start our look at Occam with these political issues because they played such an important role in his life story, and also of course, because they situate him relative to the other thinkers of the early 14th century we've been looking at over the past few episodes. But as I guess most listeners will know, he is not famous primarily for his teaching on conscience or the papacy. If he is one of the few medieval philosophers whose name is familiar outside of specialist circles, it's because of a two-word phrase, Occam's razor. But just what was it that he wanted to trim away with this famous razor? Cut to next week's episode, in which we'll discover why he is taken to be the supreme representative of 14th century nominalism here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode... A Close Shave, Occam's Nominalism William of Occam devoted the last two decades of his life to defending the Franciscan ideal of absolute poverty, and the first part of his career was also about making do with less. In the works he wrote before his fateful trip to Avignon, he wrote about a wide range of issues in theology, logic, and metaphysics. And the metaphysics he defended was deliberately impoverished. He sought to eliminate the unnecessary entities postulated by other scholastics, especially Duns Scotus. Occam's very name is synonymous with this endeavour. Even people who know nothing about medieval philosophy will probably be familiar with Occam's razor, by which people usually mean that we should not provide complex explanations when simpler ones will do. Occam himself formulates the principle in several ways. For instance, plurality is not to be posited without necessity. If you think about it, crediting this to Occam as if it were a brilliant innovation is a bit odd. It's not as if philosophers before his time had revelled in deliberately postulating as many entities as possible for no good reason. Admittedly, some thinkers, like the late antique Neoplatonists, seem to have had a taste for the Baroque, but even they were at pains to give arguments for each entity they introduced into their systems. As for Occam's contemporaries, they would readily have agreed with him that it is bad philosophical policy to posit superfluous principles or beings. In fact, John of Reading, an opponent of Occam and follower of Duns Scotus's teachings, called this guideline Scotus's Rule. So anyone who tells you that Occam was the first to praise the virtues of metaphysical simplicity with his razor principle is telling a barefaced lie. Yet Occam deserves his reputation. His expert metaphysical trimming showed contemporaries the austere countenance of nominalism. Scotus's signature move was the drawing of subtle distinctions to show that there are more things than might meet the eye. Thus the individual substance is revealed on closer inspection to consist of a common nature contracted by a particularizing singularity, the so-called axiety. Occam's signature move is the reverse, show how to get equally good results with fewer metaphysical assumptions. It's important to bear this in mind. For the most part, he is indeed after the same results as his realist opponents. For instance, Occam is not out to unmask universal generalizations as mere illusions. Like other scholastics, he embraces the Aristotelian principle that science establishes universal truths. His point is that we can account for such truths without postulating any universal things or common natures. The world is made up of individuals and nothing else. In fact, Occam even thinks that he can get by with a reduced number of individuals. Medieval scholastics cut their teeth on Aristotle's introductory logical treatise The Categories. They standardly assumed that there are individual entities that fall under all ten of the categories named by Aristotle. There would be not only individual substances, like Groucho Marx, but also individual qualities like the black of his mustache, individual quantities like the length of his cigar, individual places like his location in Fredonia, individual actions like the waggling of his eyebrows, individual relations like his being Harpo's brother, and so on. Occam's masterpiece, the Summa Logikae, devotes great effort to demolishing this picture. For him, the world consists of nothing but substances and their qualities. Those of us who didn't cut our teeth on Aristotle might instead say things and their properties. Of course, we talk as if there were quantities, actions, places, relations, and so on, but we can always translate such talk into statements about substances and qualities. Not to be outdone by Scotus, Occam introduces a distinction of his own to show how this can be done. He contrasts absolute and connotative names. An absolute name signifies something directly and unproblematically. Occam's example is that animal refers to all animals. A connotative name, by contrast, refers to two things, one directly and one indirectly. His example is white, which refers primarily to a thing that has whiteness in it, and secondarily to the whiteness in the thing. In English, a better example might be calling Groucho's cigar a Cuban because it comes from Cuba. Though you name it after a relation it bears to its country of origin, you are still just talking about a substance, namely the cigar. Occam's strategy, then, is to show that expressions in all ten categories, apart from substance and quality, are connotative terms. When we speak of a cigar as long, it may seem that there must be a real length in the cigar. This would be an individual that falls under the category of quantity. But in fact, Occam says, speaking of quantity just means that the parts of a substance are at a certain distance from one another. It would be a hassle to go around saying things like, one end of Groucho's cigar is so distant from the other end that he'll need all day to smoke it. So we save time by using the connotative term long to refer to the disposition of its parts. This is a nice illustration of the razor principle at work. Occam hasn't argued here that it is absurd to posit a really existing length in the cigar. He's just showed us that we don't need to. Length is superfluous, so we eliminate it from our metaphysical inventory of the world. Having said that, Occam does also give arguments against accepting individuals in the categories apart from substance and quality. Take the category of relation. He does apply the razor strategy here, explaining how we can get by without relations. Because that thinking of the wonderful mirror scene from Duck Soup, we say that Groucho and Harpo look quite similar. Occam would say that we don't need to postulate a relation of similarity here, we can just say they both have qualities of the same type. But he also gives an argument against the very coherence of existing relations. If the relation of brotherhood between Groucho and Harpo were a real thing, then it stands to reason that God and His omnipotence could create this relation without creating Groucho and Harpo. Their relation of brotherhood would then exist in the absence of the brothers, which is clearly absurd. Actually, Occam concedes that we do need really existing relations for certain theological purposes, notably to account for the Trinity. But within the natural order, we can do without them. An interesting example, by the way, of a medieval philosopher refusing to tailor his general metaphysics to fit Christian doctrine. With these arguments, Occam has shaved away most of the individuals recognized in previous scholastic metaphysics. But when we call him a nominalist, it's really because of his mission to remove universals from the face of the earth. Occam considered a belief in universals to be a crass mistake, in fact, as he puts it, the worst error in philosophy. If there were a universal humanity in all four Marx brothers, for instance, then it would have to be in more than one place at the same time. Also, it would be impossible for God completely to destroy Groucho Marx, not just because of his immortal place in the history of cinema, but because when God tried to annihilate Groucho, the part of Groucho that is universal humanity would have to survive. Thus, Occam proclaims his agreement with Avicenna, who had insisted that natures are universal only in the mind. Now, Scodas claimed to agree with Avicenna too. Characteristically, he drew a distinction between the universal humanity, which is indeed in our minds, and the common nature that is shared by all humans and is contracted to be individual in each of them. Occam is not impressed. He thinks Scodas's proposal boils down to saying that one and the same thing can be both common and individual, which is absurd. But Occam's realist opponents had good reasons for their view. One of the most important had to do with knowledge. There do seem to be features shared in common by all humans, and when we have knowledge of these features, our understanding is not directed at any particular human. When I think that humans are rational, I am not thinking that Groucho is rational, that Chico is rational, or, least of all, that Harpo is rational. I am thinking that rationality belongs to human nature itself. Again, it is not Occam's mission to deny the possibility of such knowledge. Instead, he shows that it is unnecessary to postulate real universals or common natures to explain the universal knowledge we do genuinely have. He recalls another distinction from Scodas between two kinds of cognition, two ways of grasping things. On the one hand there is intuitive cognition, which is the sort involved when you grasp a particular thing, as when seeing a particular human, like Groucho. On the other hand, there is abstractive cognition, which as its name implies, requires abstracting away from any particular human to a general idea of humanity. For the realists, abstractive cognition is what allows us to have knowledge of the common features of things. When you grasp humanity as a general idea, you do so by having what was standardly called an intelligible species, a representation in the mind of humanity as such. This should remind us of Roger Bacon and his use of species to explain vision and other forms of sensation. There too, we were said to grasp things through the possession of a species that represents to us the things we are seeing. Intelligible species perform the same role at the level of universal thought. When you consider human nature in itself, you are enabled to do so by having the intelligible species of humanity in your mind, just like you would be able to see a human by having a visual species in your eye. Intelligible species were regularly invoked in scholastic epistemology by Aquinas, Scotus, and others. Now, despite retaining the contrast between intuitive and abstractive cognition, Occam is going to reject this whole picture. For starters, he dispenses with the idea that we need to have a species of whatever we understand. Like his fellow Franciscan Peter Olivey, Occam worries that the use of such species would obstruct our direct access to the things we know. Even when I do something like remember seeing Groucho yesterday, I am not somehow using a mental picture of Groucho, I'm thinking directly of Groucho. Furthermore, if I needed to use a representative image or species to think about something, how could I ever be sure that the image accurately represented the thing I want to think about? But what happens when we are thinking of humans in general, rather than of Groucho in particular? Scotus had argued that we need to have an intelligible species in the mind in order to do this. Otherwise, we would have only our remembered images of individual humans and could only think about Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and so on, never universally, about human nature as such. Occam, of course, disagrees. Postulating such a species is superfluous and so violates the razor principle. In fact, all cognition involves grasping particulars. When you engage in abstractive cognition, in other words when you think at a universal level, you are simply thinking indifferently of all the individual humans. This actually seems pretty plausible. If I say the Marx brothers are hilarious, I am not postulating some common nature, we could call it Marxism if that name weren't already taken, and saying that it is part and parcel of this nature to be hilarious. I just mean that each of the Marx brothers, taken singly, is hilarious. Well, maybe not Zeppo. Just so, when I entertain the familiar example of a true proposition in Aristotelian science, human is rational, I am just thinking that each particular human is capable of reason. Occam is cautioning us not to be misled by the surface grammar of the statement into thinking that there is such a thing as humanity which has a special relationship with rationality. Rather, there are just particular humans. Since he develops his theory against the background of terminus logic, Occam puts the point by insisting that the word human, in a sentence like human is rational, just stands in for, or supposits for, individual humans. In fact, it stands in for all individual humans, past, present, and future. This brings us to another difference between intuitive and abstractive cognition. Suppose I see that Groucho is shooting an elephant in his pajamas. How it got in his pajamas, I'll never know. Here I am having an intuitive cognition, which among other things involves judging that Groucho exists. But abstractive cognition is entirely silent on the question of existence. Thinking about the nature of humans doesn't involve judging that there are any humans, though of course you wouldn't be in a position to think about human nature if you had never had any direct acquaintance with a really existing human. To put the same point in Occam's terms, abstractive cognition depends on first having had some relevant intuitive cognitions. One reason that there is such a close connection between intuitive cognition and existence is that each intuition is the intuition that it is simply because it is caused by a given thing out in the world. Seeing Groucho counts as an intuition of Groucho because it was caused by him. Well, that's usually the case. Occam does recognize deviant cases of intuition that are not caused by existing things. For one thing, he suggests that we could be directly aware that something does not exist, a thesis heavily criticized by several later scholastics. For another thing, always mindful of God's untrammeled omnipotence, it occurs to Occam that God could give someone intuitive cognition of something that is not really present. He could make you see Groucho Marx in front of you right now, even though Groucho has been dead for decades, a miracle I personally would be very excited to experience. This however is the exception that proves the rule, since the cognition you have in such a case is miraculously the same as the one you would have if Groucho were in front of you, that is, the one that would be caused by the real Groucho. In the more normal situation of course, it is through encounters with real individual things that we build up our store of general concepts. Having experienced particular humans, I construct for myself a general notion of humanity. Occam's views about the status of these general concepts developed over the course of his career. To understand his earlier view, we need to look at one last bit of scholastic terminology, which unfortunately is rather confusing for a speaker of modern English. The Scholastics referred to things that have real existence out in the world as being subjective, and things represented in the mind as objective, so pretty much the reverse of how we would use these terms. Way back when we looked at Anselm, we saw a nice anticipation of this distinction. To warm us up for his ontological argument, he asked us to compare the idea of a painting in the artist's mind with the same painting existing in reality. In the later Scholastic terminology, the idea in the artist's mind would be the painting as objectively existent, whereas the real painting would exist subjectively. While the painting might exist in both ways, some things have only objective existence in the mind and no subjective or real existence. For Occam, these unreal things would include universals, since there is no common or universal nature of humanity out in the world. In his early works, he expresses this with the notion of a fictum, or in plural, ficta. The ficta are mental constructs or representations which we generate for ourselves after encountering things in the world. The mistake of Scotus and others was to think that common natures are real things, whereas in fact they are unreal ficta. Of course, the idea of something that exists in a way but without being real is rather strange. If Occam was willing to postulate such items early on, it was because he thought that they were absolutely needed to explain the way that we reason. After all, I must be thinking about something when I think that humans are rational. Since I am not thinking about any particular humans, I must be thinking about my concept of humans, which is one of these ficta. But Occam was about to be shaved with his own razor. Another Scholastic thinker, a fellow student named Walter Chatton, convinced Occam that the ficta are superfluous. We can do without them by saying that the act of cognition itself serves as the concept. And you can see why Occam was willing to be convinced by Chatton's proposal. His early theory of cognition involved three kinds of entities, mentally constructed concepts or ficta, the things in the world that prompted us to form these concepts, and acts of cognition. With Chatton's help, Occam now gets this down to just two items, things in the world and mental acts. Even better, the item that has been eliminated is the one that looked rather fishy, metaphysically speaking, with this odd status of being objectively existent but unreal. The acts, by contrast, are like a vegetarian meal at a seafood restaurant, not fishy at all. They are just individual qualities belonging to a mind. And as we know, Occam is happy to admit the real existence of individual qualities. The question is whether it makes sense to say that concepts are just mental acts. For the later Occam, the answer is an emphatic yes. Mental acts signify and resemble things in the world, just like ficta were supposed to do in the earlier theory. So mental acts can be brought together to form the propositions studied in logic. But this may seem to present him with a difficulty. How can logic, which analyzes the relations between bits of language like terms and propositions, apply to these so far rather mysterious mental acts? Very nicely, as it turns out. Logic is directly relevant to the realm of the mental, according to Occam, because for him, thought itself is linguistic. Why did he think this, and what would it even mean to imagine a mental language? Do we really think in words, phrases, sentences, or even whole syllogisms? I believe I'll sentence you to two weeks of waiting before you find out, in the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? What do you think? Occam on mental language. It's a good thing that I didn't read Mark Twain's essay The Awful German Language before learning German myself, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered to try. He laments the German habit of building extremely long compound words like Get er al statz vor Nettin ver samlungen and the use of grammatical case endings. When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. Then there is Twain's criticism of German nouns. As he says, every noun is either masculine, feminine, or neuter, and this has to be learned by heart since the genders seem to have been assigned more or less at random. Twain remarks, Wielhelm, it has gone to the opera. I'm with Twain on this. When I speak German, I can just about bring myself to refer to knife, spoon, and fork as it, he, and she. Whether this is more revealing of German attitudes towards gender or tableware, I've never been sure. But in my mind, I'm thinking of them as it, it, and it. The language of my thought is more sensible, stripped clean of such idiosyncrasies as grammatical gender, case, and umlauts. But is there really such a thing as a language of thought? As an American, do I not just think in English? For that matter, do I really think in language at all? The idea goes far back in the history of philosophy. In his dialogue The Theaetetus, Plato says that thinking is the soul's talking to itself. But it is William of Ockham who offers the first really well worked out theory of mental language and how it relates to spoken and written language. In developing this theory, Ockham takes his cue from Aristotle. At the beginning of his treatise On Interpretation, Aristotle says that, whereas spoken and written signs are different for different people, affections in the soul are the same for all. What he seems to have in mind is this. A German may call something a löfel, or as I call it a spoon, but we both have the same idea in our minds. Ockham would say that the two different spoken expressions, löfel and spoon, are subordinated to one and the same thing, namely a term in mental language. At the level of thought, the German and I are speaking the same language, and if we were telepaths or angels, we could even communicate in this language. In order to communicate in the more usual fashion, the German and I would formulate the same sentence mentally and would then express that sentence differently in speech or in writing. We call German and English natural languages, but according to Ockham it is really mental language that is natural. He distinguishes between two kinds of sign, natural and conventional. In the case of a conventional sign, a deliberate choice has been made which has led to an agreement whereby we use one thing to bring another thing to mind. The sign needn't be a word. Ockham uses the example of a barrel hoop hanging outside a tavern to indicate that wine may be purchased inside. Spoken languages, with the possible exception of onomatopoeias like bang or woof, are obviously conventional in this sense. According to Ockham, the signs of mental language are by contrast natural. They are the same for everyone and can signify things without depending on agreed practices or the voluntary imposition of meaning. One consequence of this is that mental language lacks the sorts of idiosyncrasies I was just talking about. Ockham notes that nouns at the level of thought have no grammatical gender. In this respect, English wins a small victory by being closer to mental language than German, or for that matter, Latin. Even if mental language did involve grammatical gender, you still wouldn't have to refer to a fork in thought as a she because mental language has no pronouns either. In general, mental terms will have only the features that are needed in order to signify or be meaningful. While the gender of a Latin noun may fall away in the language of thought, Ockham holds that its grammatical case would not because its case affects the meaning of a sentence containing the word. The difference between the function of spoon in the spoon is on the table, nominative case, and I admire the spoon's fine polish, genitive case. So that's a small victory for German. But why insist that there is a mental language at all? Again, Aristotle provides an important part of the answer. In his theory of demonstration, he had insisted that true scientific understanding always involves necessary and universal truths. As both a voluntarist and nominalist, Ockham might have been expected simply to dispense with this doctrine. Instead, he insists upon it, and is at pains to work out a way for our knowledge to satisfy Aristotle's constraints. Clearly particular things out in the world, like an individual spoon or harpo marks, cannot be objects of scientific demonstration since these are neither necessary nor universal. Besides, when I do science, I am grasping things that are true. And in a striking departure from the traditional medieval view that truth is a transcendental feature found in all things, Ockham assumes that only statements or sentences can be true. It is not, in other words, spoons that are true, but rather sentences, like, Harpo stole the spoons from the silverware cabinet. In the case of scientific knowledge, the true sentences at stake are conclusions of demonstrative proofs and it is these that are the objects of our thought. It might seem that the sentences whose truth is apprehended in science could be spoken or written ones. Why not just say that an English-speaking biologist has demonstrative understanding of the English sentence, humans are animals, while a German one understands the sentence, Menschen sind Tiere? Ockham insists that only mental sentences can do the job, and for a reason we've already seen, spoken and written language is conventional. So it can hardly offer the sort of fixed target needed for scientific understanding. Just consider the innocuous remark, Your gift was a wonderful surprise. That sentence would not be true if the English word gift shifted from its present meaning and acquired the meaning it has in German, where gift means poison. Mental language, by contrast, consists of natural signs whose signification is unchanging. To all this, one might object that Ockham is wasting his time. In light of his own voluntarism, it cannot be the case that science graphs necessary truths because for Ockham nothing about the created world is necessary. Take the fact that humans are animals. Ockham thinks that God could have chosen not to create humans. In this case, there would be no humans to be animals, so the sentence, humans are animals, would not seem to be necessarily true. Yet Ockham thinks that this sentence does express a general truth which would hold even in a world without humans. In such a human-free world, it would remain true that if there were any humans, they would be animals. He concludes that Aristotle's theory of demonstration can be retained, but only if we assume that the objects of demonstrative scientific knowledge are mental sentences. Ockham's position on this question was controversial in his own time. For one thing, there were realist thinkers like Scodas and Walter Burley who held that the objects of general scientific understanding are common or universal things out in the world. As a nominalist, Ockham of course has no truck with this idea, but his theory was also criticized by a fellow nominalist, Walter Chatton. Chatton was not prepared to admit that when we grasp a truth, we are always apprehending bits of language, mental or otherwise. This does happen occasionally, for instance if I grasp that human is a noun, since in that case I am grasping something about the term human. When I judge that humans are animals, though, I am grasping something about individual humans, not about the term human. That sounds as if it would be quite congenial to Ockham, who, as we saw last time, insists that concepts are mental acts directed towards individual things in the world. Nonetheless, he insists that when we form a judgment, we are judging that something is true and only sentences can be true. As he puts it, one cannot assent to a rock or a cow. Individual things come into the story because the sentences we are judging to be true are themselves about things in the world, namely the things to which the terms in the sentences refer. Of course, this all depends on Ockham's idea that a term in mental language just as much as a spoken word can indeed be a sign that refers to something else, which might strike us as a rather strange idea. What makes one thought the sign of a spoon, another thought the sign of a fork? This is no problem in the case of things like the barrel hoop outside the tavern or the spoken word spoon. These signify wine and spoons, respectively, thanks to agreed conventions about their meaning. But Ockham has already told us that convention plays no role in determining the signification of a mental term. What else might do the job? Two things according to Ockham. First, a mental term is caused by the thing it signifies. It is through encounters with spoons that we got to have the term for spoon in our mental language. Second, and rather mysteriously, the mental term resembles the thing it signifies. Of course, it might resemble some other things too, perhaps the mental term for spoon is also a lot like a ladle, but it resembles spoons more than it resembles anything else. One consequence of this explanation for mental signification is that you cannot have synonyms in mental language. Each mental sign is the sign that it is because it is caused by a certain sort of thing in the world and resembles that sort of thing. There can be only one mental term that is caused by spoons and resembles spoons. By contrast, in conventional languages, there can be more than one word that signify the same thing, not just in two different languages as with löfl and spoon, but also within one and the same language as with the English words gift and present. Assuming these are perfect synonyms, it is one and the same mental term that I express in spoken language by saying gift and by saying present. The reason English has two terms here where mental language has only one is according to Occam just a matter of stylistic ornamentation. In this case, a better explanation, as often with English synonyms, would be that the two words have respectively a Germanic and a Latin etymology, but obviously that would have nothing to do with signs at the level of thought either. A problem arises for Occam's view right about here. Suppose that I meet an amusing man at a party who introduces himself to me as Julius. After the party, I remark to my friend, there was this hilarious fellow at the party who was wisecracking and smoking a big cigar. Actually he reminded me of Groucho Marx. At which point my friend says, you idiot that was Groucho Marx. His real first name is Julius. You should have gotten an autograph. In this case, it seems that I was having two different thoughts, one of Julius from the party, another of Groucho Marx, the movie star. I would even have been willing to make contradictory assertions about them. Until my friend disabuses me, I would believe that I have met Julius from the party while also believing that I have never had the honor of meeting Groucho Marx in person. But Julius just is Groucho Marx. So it seems clear that I have one thought of Groucho and another thought of Julius from the party and that these must be synonymous. Yet Occam insists that there are no synonyms in mental language. It's not clear how he could solve this problem apart from insisting that, in thinking of Groucho and Julius, I am, unbeknownst to myself, actually having one and the same thought, since it is caused by the same person and resembles him more than it resembles anything else. If synonymy is ruled out in the language of thought, what about equivocation, where we have a single term that has more than one meaning? Obviously, this does happen in conventional language. A familiar example in English is that the word bank has a different meaning in the phrases bank account and river bank. German offers more spectacular examples. As Mark Twain writes, in German, Poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. Occam's explanation for synonyms was that two different signs in conventional language might express the same sign in mental language. With equivocation, the reverse happens. One in the same conventional sign, in our example, the word bank, expresses two distinct thoughts. Immediately, then, we may suspect that mental terms cannot be equivocal. After all, there is no further sort of discourse to which mental language is subordinated, so equivocation at the level of mental language could never be resolved by disambiguating at a higher level the way we disambiguated bank by referring to the distinct thoughts of a place to put money and a place for a nice riverside picnic. This is basically Occam's view. He thinks that most equivocation is caused by the vagaries of convention and would disappear in mental language. But there is an exception. As we saw in an earlier episode devoted to terminus logic, there are different ways that a term can refer to, or supposit for, things. When you just refer to a thing normally, like by saying, I dropped my spoon, this is personal supposition. But you can also use the word spoon to refer to the very notion of spoons, like by saying, a spoon is used for eating. This is simple supposition. Or you can make observations about the word spoon as when you say, spoon is a noun. This is material supposition. So here we have another kind of ambiguity. The English word spoon can signify in all three ways, and this sort of ambiguity is one that Occam is prepared to admit in mental language too. In other words, it is one and the same thought of spoon that appears in the mental equivalents of the English sentences, I dropped my spoon, and spoon as a noun. Even though in the first case I am thinking of a real spoon out in the world, personal supposition, but in the second case thinking about the mental term spoon itself, material supposition. So, it's becoming clear that it is no easy matter to say how, exactly, mental language lines up with conventional language. We would like for Occam to go systematically through the features of spoken and written language and tell us which of these features occur in mental language and which don't. Although he does make a few remarks in this direction, it seems that he may not have worked out the theory in full detail. A good example is the connotative term, which is something we mentioned last time. This is a term that refers primarily to one thing and secondarily to another. Our former example was calling Groucho's cigar a Cuban with reference to the island where it was made. Occam has quite a lot to say about connotative terms since they help him to eliminate so much of the clutter from traditional scholastic metaphysics. But scholars have debated whether there ought to be connotative terms in his mental language. Or to take another example, what about syncartic or ematic terms? These are the bits of a sentence that help establish its meaning, but without playing the role of a subject or predicate in a sentence. Thus in the statement, all spoons are metal or wooden, the words all and of are syncartic or ematic. Here the problem isn't whether such terms would appear in mental language at all. Clearly they would, since they affect the signification of the other terms and the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The problem is that it's hard to see how syncartic or ematic terms get into our mental language in the first place. Remember, things in the world cause our thoughts, and there doesn't seem to be anything out there in the world that might cause the thoughts that play a syncantagorimatic role. As Occam scholar Calvin Normore has nicely put it, the world doesn't contain ifs and cans the way it does pots and pans. Early in his career, Occam seems to think that we extract such terms from conventional language, and this sounds fairly plausible. It's from seeing how adults use words like all and if that children learn to think by using such terms. But that would be a remarkable inversion of the normal order of priority between mental and conventional language. Usually, mental language leads the way, and the job of speaking and writing is just to express what has already been thought. Another option would be that syncarticorimatic thinking is just innate. We might be hard-wired to think in terms of it, and, and but. And this would be not a function of the conventional language you speak. Americans would have the same hard-wiring, but express the same thoughts by saying wen, und, and aber. The fact that Occam says less on such matters than he might has led some to argue that we exaggerate its importance in his philosophy. I think it more likely that these are the teething problems that often come along with a theory that is more or less new. I say more or less new because Occam was certainly not the first to associate mental life with language. In addition to the passages in Plato and Aristotle mentioned at the start of this episode, there was the medieval depiction of the human mind as an image of the Trinity. Following Augustine, scholastics like Aquinas and Henry of Ghent propose that the mind forms a word within itself when it understands something, which for them is a reflection of the second person of the Trinity. For Aquinas, such a mental word can be simple or complex, just as spoken language can consist of single words or full sentences. So Occam was not engaging in radical innovation with his theory of mental language. Still, his approach was very different. For him, the crucial issues concern logic and meaning, not a theological approach to the human mind. This is why he paid unprecedented attention to the question whether thought really has all the structures and features we find in conventional language, even if he paid somewhat less attention to that question than we might like. Occam is most famous for his reductive metaphysics, as enshrined in the razor principle. But we've seen in this and the previous episode that many of his innovations had to do with the human mind. These two aspects of his thought are of course not unrelated. Having eliminated everything from the world around him apart from individual substances and qualities, Occam needed to explain how we are able to form true thoughts that seem to be about other things, like relations and universals. For this purpose, he took materials given to him by Scotus and others and devised a sophisticated theory of knowledge and the mind. Pondering this, I formed and assented to the following proposition in mental language, it would be a good idea to have an interview about Occam's philosophy of mind. Luckily for me, the external world agreed to cooperate by making it possible for me to interview Susan Brower Toland, an expert on this very topic. Join me to hear a conversation with her in conventional spoken language next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about William of Ockham's philosophy of mind with Susan Brower Toland, who is Associate Professor in Philosophy at St. Louis University. Hi Susan. Hi. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. We are going to be talking about Ockham's philosophy of mind, something that's been discussed quite a lot in literature on him, including things you've written. I think maybe the most basic question in the philosophy of mind is what does it mean to grasp something with the mind at all, because that will tell us something about what he thinks the mind is. Let's say I'm looking at you right now. What does he think is happening? To get a sense for what it is for the mind to grasp something, you'd have to probably begin with his distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition. If you are grasping a particular object immediately in front of you, that's going to require appeal to his notion of intuitive cognition. So that might be the place to start. Okay, so what's the difference between intuitive and abstractive cognition? Ockham actually has a kind of technical way of marking this distinction, but we could get a handle on it as just a first approximation by just thinking of intuitive cognition along the lines of our own, maybe more pre-theoretic notion of perception. So essentially, intuitive cognition is the kind of cognition by which we just have direct access to, gain information about objects in our immediate environment. It's that kind of cognition by which we can immediately form true contingent beliefs about sort of how things stand right here and right now. So that's the basic idea. The way Ockham himself likes to mark this distinction is by identifying intuitive cognition in terms of the role, the kind of functional role it plays vis-a-vis judgments about local, present, contingent matters of fact. So here's the role it plays. It's actually a two-fold role. One is a psychological role. So what he'll say is an intuitive cognition of some object is such that it will immediately, that it automatically give rise to judgments about that object. So if I have an intuitive cognition of you, I will, on the basis of that intuition, just immediately form a host of judgments. Peter exists. Peter is to the left of me. Peter is pale today, whatever the case may be. So intuitive cognition plays that kind of psychological role in occasioning or causing immediately certain judgments, particularly about existence and about the contingent attributes of the object, intuitively cognized. And then the second role that he uses to identify intuitive cognitions is a broadly epistemic role. So he'll say that intuitive cognition of some object is such that it immediately or non-inferentially justifies the judgments that are formed on the basis of it. And so in fact, he thinks that the judgments or the beliefs formed on the basis of intuition have a kind of privileged epistemic status. They are immediately justified by that intuition. And he'll signal this by talking about the judgments as evident or constituting evident knowledge. So that's basically how he thinks of intuitive cognition. And then abstractive cognition is just any state that doesn't play that twofold role in judgment. Okay. So an intuitive cognition would be something like you're looking at me and you see that I'm bald. Thanks for not using that as an example. You see that I'm bald and you have a kind of certainty that I'm bald, which just is immediately justified. I mean, your belief that I'm bald is immediately justified by your intuition that I'm bald. Right. I mean, you could even think of Akkum as starting from this assumption or observation. We just seem to possess knowledge about what's going on around us, what and how things are right here and right now. And then intuitive cognition is the mechanism that explains how we have such knowledge. It seems like if that's the kind of basis for all of our judgments, there is something missing though, namely all the things that are missing. There's lots of things that don't exist. The example I always use in the podcast is my non-existent sister. And actually, I think I know some things about my non-existent sister, for example, that if she existed, she'd be female and that if she existed, she would be a child of my parents. Does he have anything to say about the judgments we make about non-existing things? Well, so there's a couple of things to say there. Interestingly, in almost every occasion in which he offers a definition of intuitive and abstractive cognition or where he's marking that distinction, he'll say intuitive cognitive cognition is that cognition by which we judge that things exist or don't exist. So there is some question about what's going on in that second clause. He doesn't often talk about, you know, in the case where you're judging something doesn't exist or you form a judgment about your non-existent sister, I'd be inclined to say that in the natural case, that would be inferential. So you have all these judgments that are immediately occasioned by what is immediately around you and you could probably infer from that, okay, there's not my sister or there's not such and such. But I think that certainly on his view would not be a case of you're intuitively cognizing your non-existent sister. It would be you're intuitively cognizing all the things that exist, judging that they exist, what they're like, how they're situated, and then you could probably infer from all that, no sister. But that's to say what might be going on in the natural case. Occam does think that we could have intuitive cognitions of non-existence and that won't ever happen in the natural case. That requires a miracle, but such miracles could occur. So God could supernaturally intervene and cause you to have an intuitive cognition of something that doesn't exist. What would that be like? Well, I think his idea is, well, let's not take your non-existent sister. So let's take something that we know what it's like. So when you perceive a cup, you have your coffee cup in front of you, we know what that's like to perceive a cup. Suppose you don't, there is no cup in front of you, but God miraculously intervenes to cause an intuitive cognition of a cup. And you say, what would that be like? Well, Occam would say, it's just like if the cup were there. That's sort of what's a bit bizarre about his allowing this. The idea is that God can bring about directly anything he can bring about through secondary causes. So if the cup can bring about an intuitive cognition in you, God can bring about that very state. That's actually really worrisome because now couldn't a skeptic come along and say, well, how do I know God isn't just giving me all of my intuitive cognitions? I mean, it's basically Descartes' evil demon, right? Yes. Yeah. And it does not take very long at all for that precise question to emerge. In Occam, interestingly, and it gets more bizarre because what he wants to say is, in the case where God is intervening to cause an intuitive cognition of a non-existent cup, you don't form a false judgment that the cup exists. In that case, you judge that the cup doesn't exist. So that's what's bizarre about what he's saying here because Occam's essentially saying that God can bring about in us the very same state that in the normal course of things would be brought about by the cup. Except in the case where God brings about that state, the state causes not the erroneous judgment that the cup exists. Now in that case, you will form a true judgment that the cup doesn't exist. And that's because God wouldn't deceive me? Not using intuitive cognition. Occam certainly thinks God can deceive us. If God wanted to deceive us, he could just directly cause in you a judgment that the cup exists when it doesn't. I mean, he's certainly willing to allow that God could deceive us. For some reason, he is not willing to allow that God could deceive you using an intuitive cognition. There's this link between intuitive cognition and true judgments. So this is like what you said before, that they immediately justify judgments and they're certain. Yes. So basically, his idea is that if God gave me an intuitive cognition of a non-existent cup, what I would think is, ah, it's a non-existent cup. Even though it would be just like seeing a cup. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's very strange. That is, it is very strange. And it's implausible. And it was recognized as such by his immediate successor. So Chatton comes along and just says what you would expect somebody to say, of course God could cause in you an intuitive cognition of something that doesn't exist. But if he does that, you're going to form the false judgment that the thing exists. Again, Wodom, both of these are younger Franciscan contemporaries. Adam Wodom essentially embraces the skeptical consequences that you were gesturing at just a bit earlier. So he says, he follows Chatton, God would cause in us this intuitive cognition of a non-existent, we would form a false belief. And then he basically goes on to say, yeah, and so we can't ever know on the basis of perception what exists because for any intuitive state, we don't know whether God's causing it or whether the object is. So it does pretty quickly get to skeptical worries and maybe, I mean, I don't know that we have a good answer about why Occam takes the position he does, but one natural thought is that he sees the skeptical implications of allowing that intuitive cognition can lead to false judgments that would sort of undermine its ability to justify beliefs about based on it. Right, so effectively what we're seeing here is an anticipation of this later development of seeing how difficult it will be to found all of our knowledge in these indubitable first judgments. Right. Okay. Let's move on to, or inside, maybe further inside the mind to something which might more be described as his theory of consciousness. And what I mean by that is the judgments that we make about judgments, because it's not only that I can think, here's a cup, I can also think something like, I'm seeing a cup. In other words, I can be aware that I'm having an intuitive cognitive experience. Does he think that my awareness of an intuitive cognition is itself also an intuitive cognition? That's right. So his theory of intuitive cognition plays an important role, not only in our grasp of the external environment, but our grasp of our own states. So to say something about how the role that intuition plays in its account of self-knowledge, I just need to quickly add one slight complication to what I said earlier about intuitive and abstractive cognition, or just add something I haven't said so far. And that is, and this again is something different and controversial in Occam's theory of intuitive cognition. Occam introduces intuitive cognition both at the level of senses and at the level of intellect. So as lots of your listeners are no doubt aware, medievals following their ancient predecessors distinguish between sensory and intellective cognition, where sensory cognition is just going to be the deliverance of the senses, whatever cognitive contribution you get from internal sense faculties. And then intellect is going to be responsible for things like concept formation, judgments, discursive reasoning, and for Occam, controversially, intuitive cognition. So if you're thinking about intuitive cognition along the lines I suggested earlier as akin to perception, it's very odd to place it at the level of intellect. Most thinkers would keep it as something that goes on at the level of senses. Occam essentially posits intuitive cognition both at senses and at intellect. So in the ordinary case, I'm perceiving you. It'll start with a sensory intuition of you that will occasion an intellective intuition. It's the intellective intuition that then occasions or causes all those judgments. Now I'm pointing all this out for two reasons. One, because the introduction of intuitive cognition at intellect is controversial, but Occam does it precisely because he thinks you won't be able to account for self-knowledge unless you do introduce intuitive cognition. And the way he arrives at this is just by reflecting on the domain and the phenomenology of self-knowledge. So among the states we seem to be aware of are our thoughts and our volitions. So we seem to have knowledge about our own mental or intellective states. And that knowledge seems to be immediate. It has some of these perception-like qualities. It's immediate and our knowledge also seems to be specially secure. And he basically just points out kind of by a process of elimination. You're not going to be able to secure these features of self-knowledge, its domain or its phenomenology, by appeal to senses, by appeal to inferential reasoning, by appeal to abstractive cognition. So most thinkers have only abstractive cognition at intellect. That's why he introduces intuition at the level of intellect and it amounts to not only intuition at the level of intellect but higher order or reflexive intuition. So just like you said, you can have a direct intuition of, I can be having a direct intuitive cognition of you, and then I'll have a higher order intuitive cognition of my intuition of you, in which case I will form judgments just in the way I do at the first order level. I'll form second order self-attributing judgments. There's a perception of Peter and me. I'm seeing Peter now, whatever the case may be. So essentially his account of self-knowledge is a higher order iteration of his first order theory of perception. Does that happen automatically? I mean, if I suppose that you're looking at me and you have an intuitive cognition that I'm bald, and then in addition you could have an intuitive cognition that you're seeing that I'm bald, and I can see that it's right that just as you couldn't be wrong that I'm bald because you're just seeing me and I'm bald, so also you couldn't be wrong about the fact that you're seeing someone who's bald, in other words that you're having the experience of seeing a bald person. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like we always have these second order judgments. It's not like we go through life seeing things and also constantly being aware that we're seeing things, being self-aware or knowing about ourselves that we're seeing. So does he think that that happens, the way that it's sort of inevitable that when you look at me you'll always have intuitive cognitions of me? Yeah. I mean, so there are some complications here. Obviously, if he thought that for every mental state, every occurrence state, we were aware of that state, then he would be liable to infinite regress problems because then you'd have to be aware of your higher order intuition. I'd be aware that I'm aware, and aware that I'm aware. People bring this objection against him and he's very aware of this objection, so he does have to work to try to limit the scope of what you're conscious of, and he has different strategies for trying to do that sometimes. In lots of cases, it looks like it's going to be a matter of an appeal to attention or will or so. I can have all kinds of information coming in via intuitive cognition, but it could be I'm only paying attention to you and not all the books I see in the background or whatever. So some of it will be what you attend to. So if I'm attending to my perception of you, then that's what I'll have a higher order ... Or the higher order intuition will be a matter of my attending just to you. Right. It's actually very rare that people see me without seeing books behind me. Pretty much wherever I am, there are philosophy books all around. It's part of seeing you. Yeah, exactly. And then sometimes he'll also just appeal to the limits of the intellect. We just can't be aware of lots of things at once. Yeah, fifth order cognition is pretty difficult. That's right. Or even many things. It's very hard for me to be aware of many ... It's not just limits in terms of higher order iterations, but also just the number of first order things I can be aware of at once. So I guess here's two ways I'm trying to answer your question. On the one hand, I think he does think that we are conscious of lots of our state. So this higher order intuition is just a kind of way of bestowing consciousness on the first order state. So if I have a higher order intuition of my first order intuition of you, I'm just aware of seeing you. But all the judgments I form about you, like I'm seeing Peter, I don't have a higher order cognition of those, so it's not like I'm conscious of all those judgments, that I'm aware of thinking these things. So I'll just be aware of perceiving you. So on the one hand, it might be that consciousness will be more ubiquitous than perhaps we're inclined to think it is, but it's not going to ... There are definite limits on the scope of what we're conscious of. So far we've only been talking about what's happening right now, what he would say about that. So the judgment that I'm making right now that you're sitting in front of me, and then my ability to reflect on that in various ways. So to be aware that I'm seeing you, and maybe even to be aware that I'm aware that I'm seeing you. But what about the situation over time? Because tomorrow, probably, I mean, my memory is reasonably good, I'll probably be able to remember having this conversation tomorrow, and you won't be there anymore. But I feel, usually, when I remember things like that, that I'm just as certain that I'm remembering them as I was when they were happening. Would he therefore say that I also have an intuitive cognitive judgment about something that happened in the past, even though it's not happening anymore? He would say this much, your memory is rooted in prior higher order intuitions. So essentially, now that we've got his account of self-knowledge out, where it's easy to see what his account of memory is, two things. One, I mean, memory really broadly, for him, is just going to be your ability, a capacity to retain and represent information again that you've had before. But then there's a stricter notion of memory that I think you're interested in. He would call this memory strictly so-called, and that's the capacity to remember or represent, sorry, the capacity to represent a past event as past. And he thinks that sort of memory, you're remembering, tomorrow, you're remembering our conversation today. That's going to be, you are representing a past event as past. Interestingly, the reason this is a kind of self-knowledge is for Occam, he thinks memory in that strict sense is not just about you representing a past event as past, it's actually autobiographical in nature. So what you're doing in that case is actually representing your own past experiences. So the idea is essentially that during our conversation, you are aware of what you're hearing and what you're seeing via higher order intuition. And in virtue of your awareness of what you're seeing and what you're hearing and what's currently going on, you are thereby disposed to remember that. And so for him, memory will just be like self-knowledge, it is self-knowledge, it's a type of self-knowledge, it's a higher order self-attributing judgment. So tomorrow, when you reflect on our conversation, your capacity to reflect is rooted in your awareness of what you're seeing and hearing today. And what you do tomorrow is a form of judgment like this. I talked, I remember hearing what Susan said yesterday. I remember seeing her, I don't know, wear her glasses or something. So memory of that sort is essentially representing your own past mental states. That's just what memory is. And so it's rooted in intuition that way, because you can only remember, or higher order intuition, you're only going to be able to remember things that you were conscious of at the time. And then it takes the same structure of self-knowledge, a higher order self-attributing judgment. One thing that strikes me as surprising about that, at least against the background of the previous tradition, is that according to what you said earlier, these higher order judgments, like awareness, judgment awareness, are all in the intellect. So what you just said implies that memory happens in the intellect, whereas most previous medieval thinkers and also Aristotle put memory in some lower faculty of the soul. Is he really serious about this? So he thinks we remember with our intellects. Yep. Yeah, he's serious about this. He can accommodate some of the older traditions because he's willing to recognize, as I hinted at earlier, memory in a bunch of different, there's a bunch of different broader notions of memory. So one's ability to revisit some content, that's a memory, broadly speaking. You're not necessarily representing it as past, but if just the ability to retrieve some representational content, that can be memory. And certainly animals can do that. That kind of thing can go on at the sensory level. But what he wants to call memory in the strict sense is purely intellective. And that is your right to observe. It's new. So whenever I remember that I was having such and such an experience, I'm using my mind. But one advantage of that, I suppose, is that if, like a lot of medieval thinkers, he believes that you lose all your psychological faculties after death apart from your mind or your rational soul, you could still easily remember all the things you experienced with the senses just by virtue of the fact that your mind survived. You wouldn't need your brain, in other words. Right. Yes. In fact, the context in which Occam gives one of his fullest accounts of the nature of memory is in the context of a discussion about whether the disembodied soul can remember its embodied states. And it's actually, that's where you can find one of his most elaborate discussions of memory. And that discussion of memory is precisely in service of his affirmative answer to that question. Yes, the disembodied soul, the post-death pre-resurrection soul, can recall embodied senses for just this reason. Would it be going too far to say that this suggests that he's anticipating something like John Locke's theory of personal identity over time, because Locke would say that I'm the same person from one day to the next because of a continuity of consciousness or awareness or mental states? And then he could say, well, that even carries on after death? I actually think that order might be reversed. I think his account of memory presupposes the continuity of a subject. So essentially, when you're forming a memory, you're forming a self-attributing judgment. I saw, you know, say, Occam's example he likes to use is this example of John's lecture. So if I'm after death disposed to reflect on John's lecture, I'm going to form a judgment like this. I saw John lecture. And what that, I think, what it actually does is presuppose the enduring subject, because on his view, the account of memory, I mean, basically, his account of memory is presupposing a continuous existence of a single enduring self, right? The self that's the, right, the subject of the I that's remembering. So it's the reference of the I and the self-attributing judgment. But it's the same subject that was subject to the prior mental state thus remembered. So I think it's actually the reverse. His account of memory isn't giving you an enduring self. I think it's presupposing an enduring self, in particular, the rational soul. Okay. We've talked about several subsequent philosophers and also contemporaries like Chatton, for example, and leaving Descartes and Locke aside and focusing on the 14th century figures. So far, everyone you've mentioned is someone who was criticizing Occam. Is that a representative sample? I mean, are Occam's ideas and philosophy of mind ideas that were widely rejected? Or did they also find a lot of supporters? Well, I think it's a mixed bag. I also think that the evidence is still out in a certain way. We've got a lot to learn about the 14th century. But if you just take, so I've spent a lot of time looking at Walter Chatton. So this is an immediate successor of Occam. He's somebody who rejects, he's a critic. I mean, he rejects lots and lots of Occam's conclusions. So as we've already seen, he rejects this idea of consciousness or self-knowledge being explained by higher order intuition. He rejects this idea that intuitive cognition of a non-existent would yield a true judgment. And this is just a start of all the things in Occam, all the conclusions Occam draws that Chatton rejects. On the other hand, he's enormously influenced by Occam. Chatton U takes on much of the apparatus that Occam adopts. So Occam describes thought as occurring in a language of thought and gives a fairly elaborate account of this. Chatton will adopt that whole framework and then reject particular conclusions. So I think even among people who reject some of Occam's particular conclusions, you see the influence. You see a tremendous influence anyway. You get people like Adam Wodom, who's a fairly faithful and sympathetic reader. And he accepts lots, so he'll defend the higher order account of self-knowledge as higher order intuition or higher order perception, but he'll reject Occam's conclusions about intuitive cognition. So I think there's no getting around how influential Occam was and his system. But it would be hard to say that anybody accepted all the conclusions or rejected all of them. Okay. Well, that pretty much wraps up our look at Occam himself, but he's going to keep coming up in the next few podcasts, including next time when we'll actually be looking at reactions to Occam from nominalists but also from realists, for example, Walter Burley, who insists that universals really do exist out there in the world. So for now, I'll thank Susan Brower-Tolan very much for coming on the podcast. It's been great. Thanks. And please join me next time for Reactions to Occam, here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Keeping it Real – Responses to Occam. What does it mean to be an influential philosopher? The obvious answer would be that influential philosophers have followers, card-carrying members of traditions whose cards were stamped with the names of the founders. Many Platonists participated in the legacy of the one Plato. The Epicureans still celebrated the great man's birthday centuries after his death, and to this very day Germany has its fair share of Kantians and Heideggerians. But influence doesn't need to work that way. Philosophers can make their mark on history by inspiring thoughtful criticism, as Plato provoked Aristotle and Kant provoked Hegel. William of Occam was certainly influential in the first way, in that many self-silent nominalists have looked to him for inspiration even down to modern times. But among his contemporaries, his impact is shown above all by the criticism he attracted. Fellow nominalists disputed the fine points of his thought, and others mounted a spirited defence of realism, insisting that he had cut too deeply with his famous razor. One particularly important critic was a man we have already met, Walter Chatton, who was at Oxford at the same time as Occam. His objections seem to have had an unparalleled influence on Occam himself. We saw that he convinced his more famous Franciscan colleague to give up the early theory that universals are pseudo-entities in the mind, called ficta, and that was only one of several cases in which Chatton's arguments persuaded Occam to change his teachings. Both Chatton and Occam were in turn important influences on Adam Wodham, another Franciscan and a nominalist who studied with both men. Though Wodham did not adopt Occam's views across the board, he seems to have been the closest Occam had to a faithful adherent. His debates with John of Reading, a strident critic of Occam and a follower of Scotus effectively carried on the Occam-Scotus debate into the next generation. All these figures were active in England, but they also paid some attention to developments from across the channel at the University of Paris. A good illustration of this was a controversy concerning a central idea in the epistemology of both Scotus and Occam, namely intuitive cognition. This is the sort of cognition involved when we grasp particular things directly, prompting us to make judgments about the world around us. This includes judgment about which things exist. When a damsel in distress is tied to the train tracks and looks up to see a locomotive about to run her over, that is an intuitive cognition, and it causes her to judge that the train, unfortunately for her, is very much existent. By contrast, when after freeing herself from her bonds at the last moment, she goes back to her day job comparing the energy efficiency of steam and coal-powered engines, that is abstractive cognition because it involves making general and abstract judgments. So far, so straightforward. But there were doubts about the range of intuitive cognitions we can enjoy and about their exact nature. We saw in the interview with Susan Brower Toland that Occam extended this sort of cognition to non-existing things. God might make a non-existing thing appear to you just as if it did exist, giving you an intuitive cognition of it. As Susan mentioned, this was among the teachings of Occam criticized by Walter Chatton, and it was rejected even by Occam's closest follower Adam Wodham. Chatton complained that it came perilously close to the theory of another thinker of Occam's generation, Peter Auriol. Auriol was yet another Franciscan, and the most influential figure of the time to work on the continent. He taught in Bologna, Toulouse, and Paris and died in 1322 shortly after being made an archbishop in Provence. Auriol made a controversial proposal about human cognition. He agreed with Occam that only individual things exist in the outside world. To explain how it is that we nonetheless arrive at universal concepts in abstractive cognition, he suggested that the individual exists in our minds in a special way, which he called apparent being. This idea can also be applied to our intuitive cognitions. You know how when you're sitting on a train that is stopped at a station, and the train on the next platform starts to move, you have the sensation that your own train is moving? For Auriol, this would be an example of the way that individual things in the outside world can be grasped as having apparent properties, in this case motion. He gives the similar, but unsurprisingly more pre-industrial example of trees on a riverbank, seeming to move because you are on a boat moving down the river. For Chatton, both Occam and Auriol were undermining the very foundations of human knowledge. He complains that if Occam were right that we can have intuitive cognitions of things that don't even exist, then all human certainty would perish. As for phenomena like the apparently moving trees, these are not cases where sensation misleads us by actually presenting an unmoving thing to us as if it were moving. Rather, a higher faculty of the soul collects together successive cognitions of the trees, and on this basis we judge falsely that the trees are moving. A broadly similar explanation is offered by Wodum. The senses are not to blame. You aren't literally feeling your own train start to roll or seeing the trees move, even if it is all but irresistible to experience them as doing so. In a striking passage, Wodum illustrates the point by referring to an ancient teaching that denies the revolution of the heavens above us. Rather, it is the earth that turns with us on it, creating the illusion that the celestial bodies move. This is an important debate both philosophically and historically. It shows how the seeds of later worries about skepticism were already being planted in the 14th century. Auriol assumed that some cognitions are true and some not, even if they involve only apparent being. But as his opponents hasten to point out, it sounds as if it would be impossible for us to know which cognitions are the true ones. Important or not though, the debate was largely one waged among like-minded philosophers. Like Occam, Auriol, and Wodum were nominalists. They thought that everything outside the mind is an individual. Indeed, given that nominalism was such a prominent feature of 14th century thought, you could be forgiven for thinking that all scholastic philosophers of the time shared this point of view. But that's rarely the way things work in the history of philosophy. More usually, new intellectual movements are opposed by spirited defense and revision of more traditional ways of thinking. And so it was here. Even as nominalist allies like Wodum were tinkering with the train of Occam's thought, others were trying to derail it completely. The chief engineer of this development was Walter Burley. He hailed originally from Yorkshire and was educated at both Oxford and Paris, where he apparently was able to study under Duns Scotus. Later in life, Burley joined a group of scholars gathered around the Bishop of Durham, who helped him get out of jail when he was arrested for having trees cut down without permission. I like to think that he did it because he was annoyed at the way they seemed to be moving every time he sailed past in a boat. Despite the connection to Scotus, in his early career Burley champions not Scotus's subtle theory of common natures and individuation, but a form of realism closer to what we find in 13th century thinkers like Aquinas. According to this realist view, universals actually exist only in the mind, yet correspond to shared features that are present in particular things. Thus the universal tree would be fully abstracted in the mind, but the same nature would also be a part of each tree, a third item alongside the matter and form that combine to produce that tree. The common nature out in the world that answers to our universal idea of a tree is identical with all the particular trees, given that it is found in each of them. In due course, however, Burley became aware of Occam's vigorous attack on this form of realism. Occam showed the awkwardness of claiming that common natures are part of, or identical with, their instances. Aside from making the obvious complaint that the same thing cannot be universal and particular, common and individual, he pointed out that in destroying a particular thing, one would also destroy the common nature in that thing. When Burley chopped down a tree in the forest, he would be eliminating the very nature of tree-ness, which nonetheless survives in all the other trees. All of this is absurd. For Occam, the lesson was clear, nothing outside the mind can be universal in any way. But Burley saw that another solution was available. If it is incoherent to suppose that the universal out in the world is real by being identical with its particulars, why not say that it is real but distinct from its particulars? Burley begins to develop this solution in a commentary on Aristotle's physics, which he wrote in 1324. In this and other works, he adopts a position that is diametrically opposed to Occam's, and adds insult to injury by directing personal abuse at his opponent. He sarcastically remarks that Occam claims to know more about logic than any other mortal, calls him a beginner in philosophy, and for good measure, a heretic. More importantly, he meets Occam's nominalist polemic with a defense of wholehearted realism. The common nature of trees is no longer a part of particular trees, and so in some sense identical with each tree, it has a full-blown and distinct reality of its own. This is why it can survive destruction at the hands of a forest fire or an axe-wielding scholastic philosopher the way that individual trees cannot. Burley's later view is sometimes compared to Platonism, but he himself would deny the parallel. For Burley, the real universal tree never exists completely separate and unrelated to individual trees, as Plato wanted. Rather, it is a special kind of thing that exists wherever there are trees and in each tree without being a part of it. This may sound rather mysterious, but a good sense of what Burley has in mind can be gleaned from the way he responds to nominalist arguments. Occam claimed that for a realist, universals would have to be in more than one place at the same time and would need to have contradictory properties. For instance, when Socrates is not moving and Plato is, the universal humanity would be both at rest and in motion. To this, Burley says, This species' humanity is the same in Socrates and Plato. If it is said that the same thing is both here and in Rome, and simultaneously moving and at rest, we may respond that this species' humanity is one thing as a species, and there is no absurdity in something that is one as a species, being both here and in Rome, or simultaneously moving and at rest. Occam's mistake is the same as the one made by other, less radical realists, including Burley himself at a younger age. Both assume that the only way for a universal to be real is for it to be identical with, or a part of, a particular. In reality, a universal nature like tree-ness or humanity plays by different rules. Of course, Occam will here want to apply his famous razor, asking what could justify the apparently gratuitous assumption of such universal things outside the mind. An answer comes in Burley's commentary on Porphyry's introduction to logic, a standard context for treatments of this issue ever since late antiquity. Burley's main argument for realism has to do with our knowledge. Aristotle tells us that proper scientific understanding is universal in character. Surely then, there must be real universal objects for us to grasp. After all, it can hardly be that knowledge requires us to grasp all the particulars that fall under a given universal. Otherwise, as Burley puts it, we would need to know every last peasant in India before we could know the nature of humanity. Aristotle also says that the individual cannot be defined. Human and giraffe have entries in the ideal scientific dictionary, but Socrates and Hiawatha do not. So, if the nominalists were right, then neither knowledge nor definitions would latch onto things as they really are. As we know, Occam would have a reply for these arguments. He thinks that our knowledge and definitions have as their target concepts that we derive from individual things in the world rather than real universals in the world. Nonetheless, Burley has put his finger on a key potential weakness of the nominalist project. Admitting a mismatch between universal ideas and particular reality does give a foothold to skepticism, as we in fact just saw earlier in this episode with Oriel's idea of apparent being. You might nonetheless think that Burley's position is fatally undermined by depending too heavily on ancient ideas about knowledge. He grounds his argument for realism on the assumption that science and definitions are universal in character. As we saw, his opponent Occam did admit this Aristotelian doctrine too, so the assumption is dialectically effective. Still, it would certainly not command widespread agreement now, and this may make Burley's realism seem outmoded and poorly justified. Fortunately, Burley does have points to make in favor of realism that we might find more convincing. In his physics commentary, he points out that we often have desires that are not directed at any particular object. When I'm hungry, I want food, not some particular food. The same is true in commerce. If I have contracted to sell you a horse and you have already paid me, I can satisfy our agreement by giving you any one of the horses in my possession. Another consideration comes from language. When we first begin to use a word in a certain way, for instance by applying the sound tree to trees, we do not have in mind any specific tree, but are envisioning an open-ended use of this word for all trees in the future. So, it isn't only Aristotelian science that has universals as its target, but also pervasive features of everyday life, such as desires, promises, and language use. Still, Burley's realism is clearly motivated in large part by fidelity to Aristotle. It has been said that his goal is to be sound rather than striking or original. Predictably, he takes further umbrage at Occam's attempt to reduce the ten Aristotelian categories to a mere two, which by the way was not unique in this period, the aforementioned Peter Oriel thought he could get the list down to five. Against such attempts at reduction, Burley argues for the reality and distinctness of all ten categories. They are nothing less than the ten classes into which the real universals are divided. The categories do also apply to our mental concepts and language, but this is simply because our thoughts and language have the ten types of universals as their target. So, Occam's attempt to reduce all the properties of things to a single class of qualities is a flagrant departure from Aristotle's teaching and a failure to understand the structure of reality. And according to Burley, there's a further type of entity in the real world that is unjustly eliminated by Occam's nominalism. Categorial terms pick out simple items like one quality, place, time, or action, but there are also more complex items out there. For instance, one can know not only tree or green, but also that trees are green. Modern-day philosophers would call such things states of affairs or facts. True to form, Burley thinks that they too have distinct reality, on the basis that they can be grasped by the mind and expressed in language. Ultimately, it is the real fact that trees are green that is signified by the sentence, trees are green. But it would be unfair simply to say that Burley thinks that Occam is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to physics. He thinks that Occam is wrong about lots of other things too. To give just one other example, he rejects Occam's analysis of the process by which we sin. We saw in an earlier episode that, for Occam, morality has to do solely with the interior act by which we choose to perform our outward actions. This is of a piece with his voluntarism. It is not really in acting, but in willing to act that we do right and wrong. It's also of a piece with Occam's rejection of the more intellectualist approach to sin which acknowledges that moral evil could at least sometimes be the result of bad reasoning. By contrast, Burley looks back to 13th century intellectualism, sounding more like Aquinas than like his own voluntarist contemporaries. For Burley, we may often do wrong even when we know what is right, not by a perverse act of will but because we deliberate badly as when our reasoning processes are overwhelmed by the strength of our desires. Of course, like Aquinas, Burley still retains a place for the will. Our reasoning can be only a partial cause of action, and an exercise of the will is always required to bring the act to fruition. But, with this further disagreement between Burley and Occam, we are only skimming the surface of deep and troubled waters. Moral responsibility was a major topic of debate in the early 14th century. These same thinkers we've just been discussing tried to establish the conditions under which humans can do good and ultimately merit salvation. The radical voluntarism of Occam and his allies led them into dangerous territory. If the human will is genuinely free, then do we really need God's help in order to avoid sin? On the other hand, if God is genuinely free, can we have any confidence about whether and how He will offer us an eternal reward? For some contemporaries, notably Thomas Bradwardine, Occam did indeed go too far with his voluntarism so far that he undermined the fundamental principles of the Christian teaching on grace. It was a theological debate with philosophical implications, including the question whether we retain our freedom even if God knows in advance what we will do. As for instance, he already knows that you'll join me to hear all about Occam, Bradwardine, and the predestination debate next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Back to the Future – Foreknowledge and Predestination. Suppose you and I are arguing about the outcome of an upcoming election. I think that candidate A will prevail over candidate B and I have good reasons for my view. All the polls suggest that candidate A has an insurmountable lead and candidate B is manifestly unfit for office. You however insist that candidate B may just bring a surprise victory. When the vote is held, candidate B does indeed win the election. In addition to my dismay at the outcome, I must shoulder the additional burden of admitting that you were right and I was wrong. Or perhaps not. I might say to you, look, when you predicted the outcome of the election, the result was still open. The voters still had the capacity to choose between both candidates. So it cannot already have been true then that candidate B would win. That only became true once the election was actually held. So in fact, when you and I were having our argument, neither of us was right because there was as yet no truth of the matter. Now please excuse me while I look into the rules for acquiring Canadian citizenship. Since you are a faithful listener of this podcast, my argument will probably remind you of a passage in Aristotle. I covered it a mere 241 episodes ago, so you probably remember it quite well. But just in case, here's a recap. In the 9th chapter of his logical work, On Interpretation, Aristotle presents an argument for determinism using the example of a sea battle. The argument goes that if it is now true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, then the sea battle's occurrence is already guaranteed. So there's no point deliberating about whether to fight the battle. The present truth shows that it is already settled that it will happen. Worse still, the same pattern of argument can be used for any future event. Since there are present truths about all the things that will happen in the future, all things will happen necessarily. Of course, this conclusion will be unproblematic for certain cases. No one will mind it being true now, and thus unavoidable, that 1 plus 1 will still equal 2 tomorrow. And Aristotle, at least, would have no objection to saying that the sun will necessarily rise tomorrow. The argument is disturbing only when it comes to what philosophers call future contingents, that is future events that seem as though they may or may not happen, like the outcome of an election or the waging of a sea battle. As Aristotle points out, these future contingents are exactly the things we ponder and deliberate about as if more than one option were still open. It is not entirely clear how Aristotle intended to avoid the problem, but in the 14th century it was generally accepted that his solution was simply to deny that there are present truths about future contingents. We find this in Occam's commentary on Aristotle's Uninterpretation, for instance. This is the response I just proposed taking in the example of the election. Before an election is held, there is no truth one way or another about its outcome, since that outcome remains open. But the medieval's could not easily take this simple way out. If there are no present truths about future contingents, then it would seem that God cannot know the future, and admitting this would mean denying His omniscience. Actually, the Parisian scholastic Peter Aureole did stick to what he took to be Aristotle's solution here, arguing that God's knowing in advance what we will do would render our actions necessary. But he was the exception. Most philosophers of the period felt the need to explain how God can know what will happen without rendering future events necessary. A traditional solution was to follow the late ancient thinker Boethius. He proposed that the way in which God knows things might be different from the way those things are in themselves. Thus, God could eternally know things that happen in time, and necessarily know things that are contingent. Thomas Aquinas adopted a version of this response to the problem, explaining that the contingency of things has to do with the contingency of their immediate causes, not any uncertainty or contingency in God's ultimate causation or in His knowledge. Thus, the voters, in their limited wisdom, would contingently determine that candidate B wins the election, whereas God, in His infinite wisdom, would have eternal and necessary knowledge of this outcome. But in the early 14th century, this view came under fire. It was rejected by Duns Scotus, for example, and also by William of Ockham's teacher Henry of Harclay, who insisted that God's perfect knowledge must involve knowing things as they are. We may use immaterial psychological powers to grasp a stone, yet we grasp the stone as material. In the same way, God can be said to know all things necessarily, but know the contingent things as contingent. It was open for thinkers in this generation to abandon the Boethian solution because of the new advances made by Scotus in thinking about possibility. Remember that for him, a freely choosing agent, whether human or divine, can choose to do a certain thing, while in that same moment retaining the possibility of choosing differently. Even as I stand in the ballot box putting down my vote for A, there is an unrealized, yet still real, possibility that I vote for B. When we looked at Scotus's theory of possibility, we thought about it in this context of divine and human freedom, but it's obviously relevant to the problem of future contingents too. The reason that I can be free to choose B even while choosing A is that for Scotus, something remains possible or contingent so long as it implies nothing contradictory. Clearly, no contradiction follows from supposing that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, nor does a contradiction follow from supposing that there will be no sea battle tomorrow. Thus, both are possible. In light of this, Scotus can and does resolve the problem by saying that, when it is presently true that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, it remains possible that there will not be a sea battle. Just as my choice of A doesn't make it impossible that I choose B, a proposition about the future can be true while possibly being false. But one thing about determinists is that they are very determined. They will stubbornly insist that the problem is not really yet resolved by arguing that past events are necessary. And this makes sense. If an election has already been held and produced a clear result, we don't argue about what the outcome was, though we might disagree about why the voters chose as they did. And no one deliberates about whether to have a sea battle yesterday. Past events are not open, but decided or determined, so it is natural to think that they are necessary. The reason this is problematic is that, if we admit against Aristotle and Peter Auriol that there are present truths about the future, then how can we resist thinking that there were also past truths about the future? Just as it is true now that a sea battle will occur tomorrow, so it was already true yesterday that the sea battle will occur tomorrow. So if everything in the past is necessary, the truth of this proposition is necessary after all. To avoid this problem, the Scholastics extended the new theory of possibility even to facts about the past. They said that in general, truths may be either determinate or indeterminate, meaning that they may or may not exclude their contraries. Thus for instance, the statement, there will be a sea battle on Monday, is indeterminately true, since it is true even though it could have been false. By contrast, the statement 1 plus 1 equals 2 is determinately true. It is true and can never be false. In a reminder of the value of anonymous material from the Scholastic tradition, this idea is first found in a manuscript of unknown authorship. And in a reminder of the value of identified but fairly obscure medieval thinkers, it is embraced by such non-household names as Arnold of Strelley and Richard Kamsall. According to this way of thinking, even truths about the past can be indeterminate, which is often expressed by saying that, despite being true, they can always have been false. Applying this to God's knowledge, we can say that God knows that candidate B will win the election. Since this is a contingent event, God's knowledge still leaves it possible that candidate A will win, and even possible that it could always have been true that candidate A would win, despite the fact that, as it happens, this is and has always been false. All of this is just a spelling out of what it means for something to be true, but contingently or indeterminately true, rather than necessarily true. Unsurprisingly, one of the most sophisticated treatments of this issue is found in William of Ockham. In his treatise On Predestination, he sets out the implications of his voluntarism for the problem of divine foreknowledge. Like Scotus and others, he argues that God can know something to be true without its contrary being impossible, so that the truth he knows could never have been true. Admittedly, we do say that God necessarily has knowledge of everything, but it is only necessary that he knows without what he knows being necessary. As Ockham puts it, For example, God knows that this person will be saved is true, and yet it is possible that he will never have known that this person will be saved. And so that proposition is immutable and is nevertheless not necessary but contingent. But what about the problem that, if propositions were already true in the past, they will be necessarily true because the past is necessary? Ockham concedes that, in general, past things are necessary, but he denies that there are necessary past truths about future things. It is misleading to say that if it was true yesterday that there would be a sea battle tomorrow, then the truth about the sea battle is a fact about the way things were in the past. Rather, it was a fact about the future, and remains so until the sea battle occurs. This solves the problem because, as we've just seen, facts about the future are contingent. Someone might raise a different worry here. God knows that God knows in advance that I will vote for candidate A. According to Ockham, God's knowing this leaves it still possible that I vote for candidate B. I still have free will as to which I will choose. But then it looks as if it is in my power to make God be wrong. It is open for me to act in a way contrary to what he predicts. This objection thinks Ockham is a mistake. God knows I will vote for candidate A, since this is how I will choose. But if I were to choose candidate B, then God would always have known this instead. He compares the objection to denying that when Socrates is sitting, it is possible for Socrates to be standing. Of course it is possible for Socrates to be standing now even when he is sitting. What is impossible is that he be standing on the assumption that he is sitting, that is, that he be sitting and standing at the same time. So it is with God's knowledge. It's possible that he knows I will choose A, and possible that he knows I will choose B, because either option is possible for me. What is not possible is that God knows I will choose B while also knowing that I will choose A. With these distinctions, Scotus, Ockham, and the other 14th century voluntarists have offered a powerful, and in fact I think correct, solution to the age-old dilemma of future contingents. With the exception of Aureole, they are driven to admit that there are present and past truths about the future because they don't want to give up on divine omniscience. But this is the right move for purely philosophical reasons, since once we have a grip on contingency, as Scotus understands it, such truths can be acknowledged without any deterministic consequences. Indeed, the whole issue gives us a nice example of the fact that theological considerations could prompt genuine philosophical advances, advances that should be welcomed even by staunch atheists. Unfortunately, there was another theological problem lurking here, one that would not be so easy to solve. This is a problem we saw much earlier in medieval history, back in the 9th century, with Eriugena and his opponents in the predestination debate. If we need God's grace to be saved, then are we still free? Like God's knowledge, this problem had never gone away and it erupted with new force in the first half of the 14th century. In fact, the problem could now be posed with unprecedented clarity. According to Scotus and other voluntarists, a free agent is one who can choose between genuinely possible alternatives. But in the case of a human action, there are two free agents involved, not just one. God and the human who performs the action. So long as someone freely chooses what will happen, contingency is safeguarded, but it is not much comfort to be told that my action is contingent if it was chosen by God instead of by me. It was felt that Scotus may have fallen into this trap, since he speaks as if it is God's will alone that selects from all possible things which ones will happen and which will not. The way out of the difficulty may seem obvious. Why not just say that it is up to us to choose what to do, for instance whether to commit a sin or not, with God knowing what we will do, but not choosing or willing it? After all, we would hope that God always wills for all of us to be perfectly good, but all too often, the attractions of sin prove too powerful. Just ask candidate B. Unfortunately, Christian dogma made this solution at least problematic and possibly heretical. In one of the more decisive moments in the history of Christian belief, St. Augustine had prevailed against the followers of Pelagius, who held that it is in the power of humans to be good and thus merit salvation. No, Augustine replied, God's grace is needed if we are to be saved. Following Augustine, most medieval's felt constrained to admit that God somehow predestines both the elect and the damned, freely choosing to offer grace to the former and not to the latter. If that is the whole story, then it looks like all the good philosophical work done by our voluntarists in solving the problem of future contingents has done nothing to safeguard human freedom. God does not just know what we will do, He also forces us to do it or even chooses for us. Not only would this deprive us of freedom, it would make God responsible for sin. To avoid this disappointing result, several voluntarists argue that God helps those who help themselves. A good example is the Dominican thinker Durandus of St. Poisson. He considers that, even though a human cannot merit salvation all on her own, she can at least try to be good. When she sincerely wills goodness, this natural and free act of willing prepares the way for God's grace, which is then infused as the theological virtue of charity. God's freedom to predestine the elect is not compromised, since He is entirely free in bestowing grace upon those who will be saved. Durandus compares this to the way a king might voluntarily gift a horse to one of his knights to reward the knight for good service. Occam takes a broadly similar approach, making the merit that yields salvation a kind of joint product of divine and human action. While God's involvement is absolutely needed, the starting point lies with the human agent's initial choice to will goodness. Durandus, Occam, and other scholastics who adopted this theory of cooperative grace believed they had avoided the Pelagian heresy by stressing God's freedom to bestow grace. God owes us nothing, and it is up to Him whether or not to come to our assistance even once we show that we deserve it. But not everyone was impressed. A thunderous condemnation of their position was presented by Thomas Bradwardine, a remarkable thinker who studied at Oxford and, shortly before dying of the Black Death in 1349, became Archbishop of Canterbury. For Bradwardine, the theory of grace found in Durandus, Occam, and others was nothing but rank Pelagianism, since it took the initiative for salvation out of God's hands. Instead, we must admit that nothing can happen in the created world without God's willing it. He is the co-mover of every motion. And this must apply even to determinations of the human will. So when someone first wills to try to be good, this too requires God's freely offered assistance and involvement. With Bradwardine, we have a good example of voluntarism that roots all contingency in God's untrammeled freedom. Of course, this view is not without its problems. While it is evident that Bradwardine is no Pelagian, it isn't so clear how he can account for our moral responsibility. After all, if God is responsible or co-responsible for everything I do, then isn't God to be blamed for my sins just as He is to be credited with bestowing merit and grace? Here Bradwardine takes recourse to the quite literally ancient expedient of saying that evil is nothing but a privation of good, a theory first articulated by the late ancient Platonist Plotinus and then embraced by Augustine. Since sin is a privation or deficiency of goodness, it is not something God actually has to create and its presence in our world is ultimately due to human frailty. Sadly, this is not very persuasive. Bradwardine wants to have things both ways. He argues that God is intimately implicated in everything we do, speaking of God's agency as being co-effective, simultaneous and mixed with human agency. Yet he still wants to ascribe sin to human will and not divine will. As God knew already in the mid-14th century, the debate between Bradwardine and his so-called Pelagian opponents was not the end of the story. Bradwardine is a striking anticipation of what we will find in the Protestant Reformation, to the point that we even find him saying that God eternally predestines a specific number of elect who will receive salvation. As with the emergence of secularist political theories and philosophy in vernacular languages, developments we associate with the 15th and even 16th centuries are already to be found here in the later medieval period. Another such development, as we'll see soon, was a step in the direction of early modern science, and among the men responsible for that was none other than Thomas Bradwardine. Not only that, but he was a major contributor to debates in that most fundamental discipline of scholastic philosophy, logic. So his name is guaranteed to come up several times in future episodes, as we turn our attention to developments in both logic and the physical sciences here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Trivial Pursuits – 14th Century Logic When I arrived at the University of Notre Dame as a graduate student, I was asked to take a course on formal logic. I'll admit that I had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I appreciated that logic is foundational to philosophy. It was with good reason that the medievals made their trivium of logical and linguistic arts foundational to university study. You can't do philosophy without reasoning well, and how can you do that without knowing the rules of reasoning? On the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that if I had wanted to take courses involving proofs and blackboards full of symbols, I could have just studied math instead. I suspect some listeners may feel the same and are coming to this episode on logic in 14th century scholasticism not so much with a degree in mathematical logic as with a degree of trepidation. So let me offer the reassuring observation that in a way we've already been exploring medieval logic in considerable depth without even realizing it. When we examined the debate between Occam's nominalism and Burleigh's realism, discussed mental language, and asked whether acknowledging truths about the future leads to determinism, we were discussing problems raised in treatises on logic. Take the nominalism-realism debate. This was really a controversy about logical issues, namely the categories, universals, and supposition theory. We were trying to decide whether general terms in our language, and especially in the propositions that make up a valid syllogism, stand for, or supposit for, something real in the external world or merely universal concepts. But of course, supposition theory was not only devoted to this sort of question, which we today would consider as belonging to metaphysics rather than logic. What our medieval logicians really wanted was to determine the range of things a given term might stand for. Sometimes, of course, this is quite straightforward. In the sentence, Groucho smokes cigars, the term Groucho stands for Groucho Marx. But we need only go as far as the rest of this sentence to see that things can get trickier. What does the term cigars stand for? The particular cigars that he in fact smokes during his life, or perhaps cigars in general? To say nothing of sentence is like, every farmer who has a donkey beats it, a famous example found in Walter Burley and still discussed by philosophers of language today who call a whole class of propositions donkey sentences in honor of Burley's example. Again, the statement looks straightforward at first glance, but what does the word it refer to at the end of the sentence? Let's imagine a farmer who has two donkeys. It follows from our sentence, every farmer who has a donkey beats it, that this farmer must beat at least one of them. But it seems to be an open question what the word it refers to. Would the sentence be true if the farmer only beats one donkey and leaves the other alone? Or must both donkeys be subject to the As this example shows, the lurking threat here is ambiguity. To avoid such unclarities, the medievals distinguish different types of supposition, as we've mentioned numerous times already. A word like cigar might be said to supposit personally when it stands for a specific cigar and simply when it stands for the very notion of cigars. To understand how the word cigar is being used in a given context requires knowing which sort of supposition it has, and the point of this, in turn, is to avoid making fallacious inferences. For instance, you might argue, Groucho is a human. Human is a kind of animal, therefore Groucho is a kind of animal. This sophisticated argument trades on the ambiguity of human, which in the first premise has personal supposition, it stands for Groucho, and in the second premise, simple supposition, it stands for the universal, human, which is indeed a kind or species of animal. Sensitivity to ambiguity is also important in the interpretation of texts, including authoritative texts such as the writings of the Church Fathers or the Bible itself. This is one topic on which Burleigh and Ockham agree. They both contrast the use of words in their strict meaning with using figures of speech or other kinds of equivocation. So common did this technique become that in 1340, a statute was passed down in Paris forbidding instructors from condemning an authoritative text as false according to strict meaning without carefully explaining the alternative interpretation on which the text turns out to be true. Are there no limits to the significations that a given word can take on over and above its strict meaning? Consider that in the 1980s, the word bad was used to mean something pretty close to the usual meaning of good. When Michael Jackson sang, I'm bad, I'm bad, you know it, this was not an expression of low self-esteem. Yet there must be some constraints to the meanings of terms if communication is to be possible. John Burritton achieves this with his proposal that signification is determined not only by the intention of the speaker but by the conventions agreed between two or more speakers in a given context. If you intend to mean good when you say bad, that is fine so long as the person you're talking to is up to speed on 1980s slang. Such concerns had already animated terminus logic in the 13th century, and figures like Burleigh and Ockham look back to terminism more than to the modism of the speculative grammarians in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. There is, however, a shift insofar as 14th century logic becomes particularly concerned with the ambiguity at the level of entire propositions and not just individual terms. The mid-century logician William Hatesbury wrote a whole treatise exploring this topic. Some of his examples will remind us of our discussions about contingency and free will. Take a sentence like Elvis can be alive and dead. To decide whether this is true or false, we have to tease apart its two possible meanings. If it means that the sentences Elvis is alive and Elvis is dead can both be true at the same time, it is false. But, if it just means that at one and the same time either Elvis is alive could be true or Elvis is dead could be true, then this is perfectly unobjectionable, which is why all those Elvis sightings may be ridiculous but are not logically incoherent. Having noticed that propositions, just like individual terms, can be ambiguous, we might wonder whether entire propositions can have a signification, just like terms do. If the word Groucho in Groucho Smokes Cigars signifies Groucho, what does the whole sentence signify? We mentioned before that Walter Burley answered this question with his typical realist approach arguing that there is something real out there in the outside world, a state of affairs that the proposition represents. A similar view was taken by Occam's student Adam Wodham, who was troubled by Occam's idea that when we know something, what we are knowing is simply the true proposition that we affirm. Wodham thought that this cannot be right. When I know that Groucho smokes cigars, the target of my knowledge is not a proposition, but Groucho and a fact about him. This suggestion was taken up by Gregory of Rimini, a major theologian of the Augustinian order and another figure who worked in the middle of the century dying in 1358. Gregory was active in Paris and Italy but responded to the English philosophers who have dominated our recent episodes, weighing in on such debates as the problem of divine foreknowledge. He also had a distinctive view on this question of the proposition holding that there is a complex object of signification which is a real and even eternal thing. The idea here then is that Groucho smoking cigars is an abstract state of affairs that may or may not be realized at some point in the history of the world. When it does come about, because Groucho is alive and habitually smokes cigars, the proposition, Groucho smokes cigars, is true. It signifies that the state of affairs is currently actual. Needless to say, thinkers of a more nominalist bent, like John Buridan, were stridently opposed to this, but it's a proposal that has found adherence among some modern day philosophers. Another interesting point made by Gregory, which also has its roots in earlier debates, concerns the intellectual act by which we grasp a proposition. The question here is, how many things are we doing with our mind when we assent to a sentence? Durand of Saint-Porissant believed that the mind can only do one thing at a time. Just as nothing can be simultaneously hot and cold, so the human intellect cannot simultaneously have two acts, one that grasps heat and another that grasps coldness. So we must have a single holistic grasp of each sentence when we think about it. But this view was criticized by another scholastic named Thomas Wilton. He pointed out that when we draw the conclusion of an argument, we cannot be thinking only about the conclusion, but must also still bear in mind the premises of the argument. Otherwise, we would not be drawing the conclusion on the basis of those premises, but would just be making an unjustified assertion. So, the mind must simultaneously have different acts directed towards the premises and the conclusion. Gregory of Rimini comes down on Durand's side of the debate on the basis that the intellect is immaterial and hence simple. A piece of paper is a physical object, so when you write down a sentence on it, you can distribute the terms across different parts of the paper, but the intellect has no distinct parts and must therefore grasp each whole proposition all at once. With this debate, we're moving on from individual terms and propositions to the complexities of entire arguments. Starting in the early 14th century, logicians began to write treatises about the inferences we make when we produce such arguments. They called this branch of logic the study of consequences, because a conclusion of an argument is the consequence of or follows from its premises. We can capture this relation of consequence by saying with John Buridan that a valid argument is one in which it is impossible for the antecedent to be true while the consequent is false. In other words, the truth of the premise or premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. The easiest case is where the basis of the inference is obvious and explicit. As with the classic and, thanks to the citizen jurors of Athens, empirically verified example, Socrates is a human, all humans are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal. But you can bet that our medieval logicians have thought about more difficult cases too. For starters, inferences may be good, even if not everything is explicitly spelled out. Take the simpler argument, Socrates is human, therefore Socrates is mortal. By Buridan's definition, this is a valid inference because if it is true that Socrates is human, it cannot be false that he is mortal. It's just that the linking premise of the inference, that all humans are mortal, is not stated explicitly. Thomas Bradwardine, whom we met while looking at the predestination debate, went so far as to say that any proposition signifies everything that it implies because as soon as you accept that the proposition is true, all its consequences may be validly inferred. In some cases, you can validly draw conclusions that seem entirely irrelevant to the stated premises. Occam and others accept inferences like, some human is immortal, therefore Groucho doesn't smoke cigars, because it's impossible that some human is immortal and once you assume that something impossible is true, anything will follow. Conversely, this argument also works, Groucho smokes cigars, therefore humans are mortal, because humans are necessarily mortal and a necessary truth may validly be affirmed from any premises. Other logical writings explored the so-called insolubilia and sophismata, meaning, respectively, paradoxical arguments and arguments that look valid but in fact are not. Bradwardine's name comes up again here, because he offered an influential solution to the famous paradox of the liar in his work on insolubles. The paradox arises with sentences like, what I am saying right now is false. As a moment's reflection shows, this sentence would seem to be true, if it is false, and vice versa. Bradwardine's solution is worthy of Dunne's scotus in its subtlety. He carefully defines the notions of true and false so as to prevent the problem from arising. For him, a proposition is true if it signifies only as is the case. A false proposition, by contrast, signifies otherwise than is the case. The key here is the word only in his definition of true. A true sentence must signify only as is the case, whereas a false sentence is under no such constraint. Thus, the liar statement cannot be true on Bradwardine's definitions, for suppose that it were true, then the statement would signify that it is true, which would be the case, but also that it is not true, which would not be the case. Conversely, there is no such problem with its being false, since false statements are allowed to signify both otherwise than is the case and as is the case. All these logical methods and distinctions come together in a fascinating and somewhat mysterious activity that was pursued by the scholastics at their universities, a game called Obligations. Several of the authors we have discussed wrote about Obligations, including notably Walter Burley. So did a couple of authors not yet mentioned, Richard Kelvington and Roger Swineshead, both active in the 1330s. The game was already played in the 13th century, as we know from numerous treatises on the topic, including some by unnamed authors, yet another example where anonymous works are among the most important ones to survive today. A game of Obligations goes as follows. There are two players, called Opponent and Respondent. In the most common version of the game, the opponent proposes something, which the respondent is to assume is true until the round is over, unless it is something impossible, in which case he should deny it. Then, the opponent keeps offering more propositions, trying to get the respondent to make a mistake by contradicting himself, admitting something he should deny, or vice versa. So, to take a simple case, if the respondent is sitting down, the opponent might start by getting him to admit he is standing, then ask him whether or not he admits, either you are standing or the King of France is in the room. The respondent should admit this on his former assumption, even though he is sitting down and there is no royal presence. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that all of 14th century logic was just intended to help Scholastics win at this game, sometimes you do almost get that impression. The terminology of Obligations is pervasive in discussion of other questions, including theological debates. Being able to distinguish between different sorts of supposition and to disambiguate between the possible interpretations of a given sentence was crucial for the respondent, as was recognizing when the opponent might be leading him into a paradoxical or sophistical trap. But surely, being good at obligations was not an end in itself. Why were these scholars spending so much time on this logical game? Appropriately, this is a question much debated by modern day scholars. One idea is that it was just a way of exploring the topic of inferences. One anonymous author of the 13th century suggests as much. But, in the 14th century, there was that whole other genre of logical work devoted especially to inferences, the aforementioned works on consequences. So this seems an inadequate explanation. Another possibility is that the Scholastics wanted to explore what is nowadays called counterfactual reasoning. In other words, the opponent gets the respondent to assume something false in the first move, and thereafter the conversation simply discovers what would lead from this false assumption. This is another reason the respondent shouldn't agree to suppose anything impossible in the first move, since as we've already seen, you can infer anything you like from an impossible proposition. But a close look at the work on obligations by Kelvington shows him making the point that we would actually have to change the rules of the game if we want to think about counterfactual reasoning. He gives the following example. Let's say I am the opponent and you are the respondent. As my opening move, I get you to assume, falsely, that you are in Rome. You should agree, since this is not impossible. Next I ask you to agree to the proposition, either you are not in Rome or you are a bishop. In fact, this is true because in real life you are not in Rome, and by normal, obligational rules, you should admit anything that is true, if it doesn't contradict what you have already agreed to. Next I point out that these two premises prove that you are a bishop. So the whole argument would go like this. You are in Rome. Either you are not in Rome or you are a bishop. Therefore, you are a bishop. And this doesn't look like a good example of counterfactual reasoning. No one would think that it follows from my being in Rome that I am a bishop. Kelvington thus says that if we want to restrict ourselves to the counterfactual implications, the respondent should be allowed to refuse the second premise, even though it is true. Effectively, the respondent would pretend to inhabit a counterfactual situation where he is in Rome and should give all his answers supposing that he lives in that alternative world rather than in the real world. This is only to scratch the surface of the game of obligations and its philosophical implications. It's such an intriguing feature of later medieval logic that I have tracked down a respondent of my own for the sake of learning more. You're not obligated to join me for the next episode, but if you miss it there will be consequences, notably that you won't get to hear me speaking to Sarah Uckleman and even playing a few rounds of obligations with her here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode will be an episode about dynamic logic in medieval obligations with Sarah Uckleman, who is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Durham. Hi, Sarah. Hello. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. You've published a lot about this genre of logical work or logical game, we might say, called obligations. And we'll get on to talking about that. But first, I wanted to ask you about your approach to this material, because you've argued in these publications that obligations show us an example of what's sometimes called dynamic or interactive logic already in the medieval period, which would be very exciting if it were true, if you're right about this. Because modern day logicians, I mean, really modern day, like this is something people are interested in right now, are interested in this phenomenon of dynamic logic. Can you explain what dynamic logic is and what it's being opposed to, like maybe static logic? Yes. So the idea is that generally, in logic, you have a set of propositions, and they each have a truth value, and this truth value is fixed. And so you can ask of a certain set of propositions, what do these propositions entail? And this is also going to be a fixed notion, because nothing is changing about the truth values of the propositions. Dynamic logic brings in a way of dealing with change. So what could be true now might be false tomorrow. Today it is Sunday, tomorrow it will rain. And so dynamic logic brings in a way for us to deal with these changes in the world, in our knowledge, in our belief. You can set up dynamics to happen at many different levels. But essentially, the idea is that you are no longer working from a fixed starting point, but your starting point might change, perhaps in the process of your reasoning. But why does that make a difference for the actual logic? I mean, we already had the idea in normal logic that things are either true or false. Why can't I just say, well, this proposition is true now. So the syllogism that uses this proposition as a premise is true now, or it's sound now. Tomorrow, if the proposition is false, then the same syllogism will be false. But that doesn't really seem to make any difference of logic. It's just which arguments come out true and which ones come out false. In that situation, perhaps. But suppose that you are dealing with a much more continuous set of reasoning, where I am in the process of reasoning, say, about what I should do. Today it is sunny, so I don't need to bring my umbrella with me. But I need to think ahead, well, what happens if tomorrow it is raining? Then I need to bring my umbrella. Or in another kind of context where you will see this sort of thing is, how about if I get new information? So I don't know if it's sunny or if it's raining. And so I will reason in one way, but then new information might come in that says, oh, in fact, it is raining right now. This is going to change the way I reason about what I do in the future. So as I said, there are many different kind of contexts in which dynamics can come up. It can either be facts about the world changing, or it can be our knowledge of facts about the world that changes. Okay. And why are modern day logicians interested in this then? Is it because it's just a better way of modeling the way that we reason in real life? So they're interested in it for, certainly that's one reason, but also because when you have a dynamic reasoning situation, it's also likely to be an interactive or another way to put it, a multi-agent reasoning setting, where you've got many different people with different knowledge, different actions, they say different things. This changes the knowledge that they have. So I tell one person something, he now knows something that he didn't know before. He knows that fact, but he also knows that I knew that fact. And so you can do much more complex modeling of kind of everyday situations because everyday reasoning doesn't involve simply sitting there doing syllogisms in your armchair. It involves talking to people, getting information from them, reasoning on the basis of that information, arguing with them, trying to get them to be convinced of your position. And these are all things that we do in everyday life. So that is one reason why logicians are interested in them. Some logicians are also interested in them from the computational side of things. Computers. Computers need to be able to reason sometimes from inconsistent or incomplete information. They will often have kind of new information coming in, say if a program feeds back the result of its computation to another program. And so you can use these sorts of developments in dynamic logic either for looking at kind of how people reason and interact, but also how machines reason and interact. Everybody likes reasoning about machines. Right, yeah, absolutely everybody. It is at least true that nobody could be listening to this podcast without machines. So if only for that reason we should support this kind of application of logic. Indeed. Does this sort of thing then actually get into what you might think of as the formal language or the symbolic structure of logic? I mean, are you saying that dynamic situations can't just be modeled with the standard apparatus of traditional logic? Because I was thinking that, you know, if again, I might have something like hypothetical reasoning. So if A, then B, and I need to be open to the thought that A might at first be true and then be false. So my computer, let's say, might need to know to keep checking whether or not A is true, because if it goes from being true to false, then it should stop inferring B. Right. But that's not a new logical device, is it? No, but what you can think of dynamic logic, it's not meant to replace static approaches, but to extend them. And to give us more tools, more refined means of modeling, you can make things more precise by adding in multiple people, by adding in changes over time. It just gives you a more accurate picture of how things are actually working. So that's kind of one advantage of this sort of approach. The other advantage is, is that if you can make this formal and precise, then you could actually feed it into a computer and tell the computer how it is that it is supposed to reason in these particular ways. Humans are surprisingly good at doing this without reflection. We can reason about what other people know on the basis of things that we hear them say, or things that we've told them. We have a lot of practice with reasoning about interactive settings, even if we don't ever make this articulated to ourselves. One thing that dynamic logic can do is make these things more explicit. And by making them more explicit, it helps us to recognize what we are doing when, and can therefore lead to making fewer mistakes, because you are better able to recognize what it is that's going on instead of doing this in a sort of non-reflective fashion. It's not only about teaching computers to think like humans, it's actually maybe about teaching humans to think like better humans? Yes. Okay. Turning then to the medievals, you're going to try to connect this idea of dynamic logic to this genre of logical writing called obligations. And I tried to explain this in the last episodes, what obligations were, and maybe why the medievals might be doing them. But you're the expert, so you're going to tell us what the real answer is. What were obligations? So obligations were a special type of disputation that arose. The first explicit treatises that we have on the subject are from the beginning of the 13th century, but you can find discussions of them throughout the 13th century and into the 14th century and even later. They are at root a type of formalized logical disputation that have two players, an opponent and a respondent, and a couple of very simple rules that the opponent and the respondent has to follow. Now, these rules differ from author to author. There were many people writing on these treatises. They were a part of the undergraduate logical curricula, so if you wrote a textbook, you would be writing on obligations. And so everybody had their own kind of idiosyncratic views. Basically, the most simple version of the most straightforward type, it's a type called positio for positing or simply putting forward a thesis, is that the opponent puts forward a statement initially, which is either true or false, and if it's not inconsistent, the respondent should admit it. That's the base condition for the game to start. Once that has happened, the opponent will continue to put forward further propositions to which the respondent is able to make one of three responses. He can concede the proposition, he can deny it, or he can be doubtful about it. Which of these actions he does is governed by certain rules. He is obligated by these rules to perform these certain actions, and that's where you get the name obligations for these types of disputations. Sentences that the opponent puts forward are divided into two types, those that are relevant and those that are irrelevant. The relevant ones are either logically entailed by what you've already conceded or logically inconsistent with what you've already conceded. The ones which are entailed, you should concede. The ones which are inconsistent, you should deny. The other sentences, the ones which are neither logically entailed by nor logically inconsistent, they are irrelevant, and you can respond to them, you can concede them if they are known to be true, deny them if they are known to be false, and then use the third option to be doubtful or to remain agnostic if you don't know. Okay, let me see if I understand that. Let's try this with an example. Let's say that I'm the respondent and you're the opponent. You're the opponent, so we start out by you telling me to concede something, and you tell me to concede that Socrates is a human, and I should concede this, in fact I have to by the rules, because it's not contradictory. Whereas if you ask me to concede Socrates is a human but not alive, I should deny that. So that's how things start. And then the next thing you do is you pose another proposition to me, and if it's something that's logically entailed by Socrates is human, for example, Socrates is an animal, I should say yes. If it's something that's refuted or inconsistent, Socrates is a donkey, then I should deny. And if it's irrelevant, like Socrates is in Athens, then I should go ahead and concede it. If you know that he's in Athens. I should only concede it if it's true. If it's known to be true. And if it's not, then I should doubt it. Yes. Then you can say, I don't know. And the rules say that I can't just sort of deny, deny, deny. If you say, I can't avoid being caught in a logical paradox or puzzle by just refusing to admit anything. That's right. Because as soon as you deny something that follows from something that you've already conceded, so for example, you've conceded that Socrates is human. If you then deny that Socrates is an animal, then I in my righteous Latin tone will come and say, ergo male, you have done badly, because you haven't followed the rules. Meaning I lose effectively. It does sound like it's really a game and there's a winner and a loser. The opponent wins or the respondent wins. And there's also a mechanism by which time is called, right? So basically the idea is that if the respondent can survive for long enough without making a mistake, then he wins. Right. And if the respondent at some point does make a mistake, he doesn't follow the rules properly, then the opponent wins. Right. And would they stop then? I mean, if the respondent loses, they'd stop. As soon as the respondent has made a mistake, then they will stop and they will say, you've made a mistake. Here's why. Here's where, here's what you should have done instead. And let's go through and try it again. So in this respect, the disputations have a very strong pedagogical component in that as soon as an error has been made, things stop and you try to analyze exactly where the error arose to make sure that that doesn't happen again in the future. I see. So this actually implies that the opponent is the teacher and the respondent is the student. Was that actually usually the case or do we not know? We don't know. One of the things that is kind of confusing about these disputations is we have a lot of theoretical treatises about them and no concrete evidence for their actual occurrence. We don't have anybody writing in their school diary. And today we spent the morning doing obligational disputations. But the general sense is that the opponent is going to be the teacher, the one who is trying to train the students in a particular tactic, and the respondent then is the one who is being tested, the student. Okay. Well, this raises the issue of why they were doing it, assuming they were doing it. And I think part of the answer must have been that it's fun. Yeah. Right? At least it was fun for them. I'm not sure whether the listener thinks it sounds like fun, but you could imagine it's sort of like a word game or a logic puzzle. So it's maybe like medieval Sudoku or something. But in addition to being fun, since it was being done in this medieval university setting, we would tend to assume, especially since it also has this pedagogical flavor, that they were trying to achieve something. And here, I guess the two obvious options are that it's for training the students' minds, so it's to maybe sharpen their wits or make them better at logic. That would be maybe a less exciting reason from the point of view of the history of philosophy, although not totally unexciting. But the more exciting reason might be that they thought they could actually discover things about logic. Do we think that that's true? Or do we just not know? We don't really know. And in fact, one of the big open questions about medieval logic is what was the point of these disputations? The first treatises that we have from the beginning of the 13th century don't touch on the question at all. It's almost as if they spring fully formed into the logical curriculum, that we are codifying something that everybody knows about and everybody has done, so we're just putting down into writing the rules and some useful examples. A number of approaches have been advanced. A number of modern commentators have tried to say that these represent an early attempt at axiomatic reasoning, or that they were systems for counterfactual reasoning, or for belief revision, or for thought experiments, or that this is the forerunner of the modern thesis defense. There are many different accounts that are actually advanced. I fall onto the camp of it's actually a bit of both, in that it has a pedagogical aspect, but it was also used for more theoretical purposes. On the side in favor of it being a pedagogical tool is the fact that this was a part of the undergraduate curriculum. These are found in textbooks that were used for training students. They provide a very good method by which you can learn to recognize logical inferences. When does something in fact entail something else? They're also very good on the mental side of things in helping you remember what you've already conceded. Now in a university setting that is based a lot on actual disputations for examinations and also just for public display, it's very important that you remember what you've said previously so that you don't end up tripping yourself up. A number of years back I was lucky enough to have a group of artificial intelligence students who actually took the rules for the basic form of obligations and created a program that would be the opponent's to a human person's respondent. Unfortunately it's not available on the website anymore, but during the period when it was I would regularly go and play these disputations because it is fun, it's interesting, it's a way to kind of exercise your logical brain, and I found that in general I was actually pretty bad. We could get about 12 or 15 steps in before I made a mistake, before I just couldn't keep everything in my head at the same time. And if you're going to do these on a regular basis, once a week, once a day, in a very varied setting, my feeling is that you could start very quickly to be able to keep a lot more in your head at once. So people who underestimate the pedagogical aspects of these I think are really missing out on part of the story. But there's another view about the theoretical purpose of these that's been advanced by Peter King, which I find very persuasive. And he wants to argue that what these disputations are training is not, they're not actual disputations, they're not about any substantive topic, but they are training you about how disputations can go. So the word that he uses is that they provide a meta-methodology for disputing. And some of the examples that show up in some of the treatises really display this nicely, because the propositions that are involved are not things like Socrates is human, Socrates is an animal, but things like that Socrates is an animal should be conceded. And so you get statements about the rules of the disputation occurring in the disputation itself. So you concede something like, the next thing I'm going to concede is true. Yes. Without even knowing what it was. Yes. And a common kind of paradoxical initial statement that is often put forward is, should you admit the positum is false? And That's basically a liar paradox. Exactly. Should I admit that the thing that I'm admitting is false? Yes. Right. And presumably the answer is no, or the only way to figure out the answer is to figure out the liar paradox. Yes. Okay. Right. Maybe that's a partial answer to the next thing I was going to ask, and then we really will get back to this dynamic logic issue, which is how this logic game relates to other logic games we know about from the history of philosophy. And for me, both because it's historically connected and because I happen to know about it and it's famous, the thing that leads to my mind is Aristotle's Topics. Aristotle's Topics is one of his works that the medieval at least would have considered to be a logical work. And it's a work in which he describes dialectical argument games and talks about the rules and the strategies for winning at these games. And again, it looks like there's two people, they're trying to win against each other by winning an argument. On the other hand, the thing you just mentioned, this thing about sort of second order propositions that are about whether first order propositions are true, that doesn't strike me as a very prominent feature of Aristotle's Topics. That's not very Aristotelian. And in fact, it seems to me that Aristotle's examples usually make it sound like there's content, there's philosophical content. So is one difference between what Aristotle was doing and what these medieval's are doing, that the medieval's were directing their attention more to the actual methodology of argument rather than just using argument in real disputation? Absolutely. So it's interesting that you mention Aristotle's Topics because some of the treatises that we have when they're kind of setting up the introduction, why it is that we do these disputations, why it is that I'm writing a treatise on this topic, will actually say something that sounds very much like what Aristotle says in Book 8, Chapter 4 of the Topics, where he's describing the point of disputations as taking something and seeing what follows from it. That if you have something that's possible, nothing impossible should follow from it. In that chapter, Aristotle makes a distinction between the dialectical, didactic, and heuristic disputations. The dialectical being two people working cooperatively to try to find the truth of the matter, the didactic being the teacher leading the student to a particular matter, and then the heuristic ones, or the sophistical ones, essentially arguing for the sake of winning. The rules there are a lot more flexible. So in that sense, there are certainly affinities between the obligational disputations and the disputations in the Topics. The, in particular, dialectical disputations can always be rewritten into a question-and-answerer format. So the questioner, say the opponent, puts forward questions and then the answerer is then going to say either yes or no, true or false, concede or deny to each of these. But the dialectical disputations of Aristotle only admit yes and no answers. So one way that the obligations differ from that is that we have a third option of I don't know. Doubt plays a role in these disputations that doesn't, where it doesn't have a role in Aristotle. Another is that while it may seem more on the lines of the dialectical disputations and that they're question-and-answer, yes and no, maybe with a third option of I don't know added, they aren't exactly cooperative. It's not that we have the opponent and the respondent working in tandem trying to find the root of the matter, but instead you have an opponent who is actively trying to trip up the respondent to make him act not in accord with the rules. And then this goes back to the point that you mentioned about the lack of substantive issues that are being discussed. The Aristotelian disputations are always about some particular thesis, the truth of which actually matters. But if you look at all of the, if you look at the obligational disputations, far from starting from some substantive thesis, the truth of which matters, they generally start from a thesis which is known to be false. For example, Socrates is a donkey. This is something that we would admit in the context of an obligational disputation because it's not inconsistent, but you certainly wouldn't be arguing for an Aristotelian disputation. In fact, the opponent might even deliberately start with that because it's probably a little bit harder to track your reasoning if you started with something false than if you started with something true. Exactly. Because actually if you're the respondent and all you have to do is be consistent with the truth, you just keep saying true things, you'll always be consistent. Exactly. And this is one of the particular things about this variant of positio in that you're required to concede the initial statement if it's inconsistent, but the game is only difficult if the statement is in fact false. Actually, one thing that strikes me about all this is that in antiquity there was a polemic, not involving Aristotle himself, but involving Aristotelians who criticized the Stoics for being interested in logic for logic's sake. And they said things like, oh, they're interested in these kinds of inferences like if A therefore A. And that's stupid. That's not even really part of logic because you can't use it. It's not truth producing or it doesn't help us expand our knowledge, maybe this kind of inference. And I find it very striking that the medieval heirs of the Aristotelian logicians were very interested in logic for its own sake, and maybe this obligations game is a manifestation of that interest. Now, let's finally get on to our central question, which is why we might think that obligations do manifest this thing that you're calling dynamic logic. So in order to do that, I need to kind of give some more details and a couple of examples. The canonical version that I've been talking about, as I said, there's a number of different variants. Every author had their own tweaks to the rules, the little things you can change. But the canonical variant is found in the works of Walter Burley. His treatise on obligations is not the first one, but it does it's one of the most comprehensive and it gives a very nice kind of canonical treatment of it. One of the things that is relevant, pardon the pun, in his notion of obligations is his definition of relevance. What is relevant is determined on the basis of what is logically following from or logically inconsistent with everything that you have conceded. And this also includes the negations of things that you've denied. That's conceding a negation is the same as denying the unnegated form. So relevance is something that is going to change at each step of a disputation. So I'd like to give just a couple of examples to illustrate this. The first is a very simple one that has a very nice, very nice conclusion. Let us assume that it is not now snowing. Thankfully, even though it's wintertime, we can say that this is true, but it's not inconsistent. It could be snowing. So I pause it to you. It is snowing. What do you do? I concede. Good, because it's not inconsistent. Next, I pause it to you. Either it is not snowing or you are a bishop. Okay, I concede because it's possible that I'm a bishop. You concede because it's not relevant. Okay. The disjunction, it is not snowing or you are a bishop doesn't follow from the statement it is snowing. Right. Okay. So it's irrelevant, but it happens to be true because it is not snowing. Okay. Now I pause it to you that you are a bishop. Ah, okay. And so now I have to try to remember what I've already conceded. Okay, what should I do? You should concede because from conceding that it is snowing and either it is not snowing or you are a bishop, it logically follows that you are a bishop. Great. Okay. So there you are. That is a very happy outcome. You can find versions of this example where the conclusion is you are an ass, but this just goes with the medieval desire of proving that everybody is a donkey. Even bishops. Even bishops. But suppose that we have the same starting point. We start with the sentence, it is snowing. You can see that. But then at my second step, I say you are a bishop. What will you do then? Then I doubt it? You'll deny it. I deny it. Because it doesn't logically follow from it is snowing. Because on his rule I only concede I will deny anything that doesn't follow from. It doesn't follow from and you know it is false. I see. Okay. So you deny that you are a bishop. Okay. Now I put forward either it is not snowing or you are a bishop. And presumably I should deny that too. Yeah. Because I know I'm not a bishop. It's false and I've already denied that it's snowing. Yes. You've already conceded that it is snowing so that is the same as denying that it is not snowing. Okay. Right. So these examples illustrate two things. One is that relevance is not simply a matter of the relationship between sentences, but it's a matter of which order you come across them in the disputation. Because in the first example, by the time that we got to the sentence, you are a bishop, it had become relevant. It was a logical consequence of the things that you'd already conceded or denied. Because it was introduced in a disjunctive proposition that I conceded. Yes. But in the second example, when I throw that forward as your second statement. I just denied it because it's false. Right. Okay. I see. So the reason that this approach to obligations is can be seen as dynamic is that at every counts as relevant changes. At every stage, you need to stop and recalculate. Okay. I may have possibly added in new information. Now I have to see what follows from what I've got. And at every stage, anytime that you concede something that is irrelevant or deny something that is irrelevant, this gives you more fodder for your logical gristmill. You now have more things that you could conclude from. So at every stage, you're going to have to stop and ask yourself, what is now relevant? Because this is going to change. And the change is what makes it dynamic. You can't sit down kind of in advance, calculate it all out, and then just kind of reason by rote. And would all of the authors who wrote about obligations agree with this idea that you need to bear in mind that the truth value of a proposition might depend on where it comes in the sequence? Absolutely not. In fact, this precise example of Burley's that we looked at, where I proved that you were a bishop, this is one that caused a lot of problems for certain authors, one in particular being Richard Swinesed, who was working in Oxford roughly the same time, about five to ten years later, I think. And he took strong objection to Burley's account of the rules whereby the order of the propositions mattered, whereby something could be irrelevant at one stage and relevant at another, and whereby you could essentially prove any contingent proposition. So the proof that I gave that you are a bishop, I could substitute any sentence in for that that I wanted, and exactly the same proof would work. Because as long as you offer me a disjunction and the second member of the disjunction isn't impossible, then I have to let it in. So you can immediately get in. But why is that so bad? I mean, it seems like that's in the spirit of the game, that you should be inviting me to acquire these commitments to contingently false propositions, and that you have to maneuver me into admitting them, but that's okay because I'm allowed to say false things, I'm just not allowed to contradict myself. Right. So you, I think, would be perfectly happy to continue playing by Burley's rules. Swain said wasn't. He didn't like the lack of systematicity that it gave. He thought that in this context, you could then just kind of prove too much. I see. So he took Burley's rules and changed them in one small but very significant way. He redefined what it meant to be relevant. In Burley's rules, remember, a proposition is relevant if it is a logical consequence of or logically contradicts what you have conceded or the negations of what you've denied so far. And that's why you have to kind of check at every stage whether new things have become relevant. For Swain said, something is relevant if it logically follows from or logically contradicts the initial statement. That's it. It doesn't matter what else you go on to concede or deny in the course of the disputation. Relevance will never change because the initial statement never changes. So actually, this is a much easier game, right? I just have to check whatever you offer me, whether it's consistent with the initial proposition. Yeah. So it seems like even a child could play this quite easily now. Yes. Okay. So this is actually one of my personal complaints against Swain said, is that he took what is a fairly tricky and fairly interesting and difficult game and turned it into child's play. Right. Because then it is merely a matter of looking at the logical relationships between two propositions, the one you started with and the one that has been put forward. And that is generally not going to be difficult to calculate. Right. So then it isn't as much fun. Yeah. Actually, there are even more complicated versions of obligations, which maybe are so complicated that we won't be able to talk about them without the assistance of a chalkboard. But I did want to ask you about one other variant. So far, we've been talking about this kind of game, which is called Positio, where you just begin by asserting a proposition. Yeah. But there's another kind of... There's several kinds of obligation games, and there's another one which is called the Dubitatio, which, as the name implies, must involve doubting something. Yes. How does this game work, and why might it be relevant to what we've been talking about? So Dubitatio is very interesting. If you go back to the three answers that the respondent can make, he can either concede a proposition, he can deny a proposition, or he can doubt it. In Positio, you generally start with a false proposition, which the respondent is obliged to concede, so long as it's not contradictory. There's a variant which is symmetric to it, Depositio, in which a true proposition is put forward, but the respondent is required to deny it. So you can see that that's going to work in basically a completely symmetric way. That's the same game, because as you said... It is. ...denying something is the same as... ...conceiting its negation. But there's the third response. It could be that some particular proposition that you know, either you know it to be true or you know it to be false, is put forward, and then you are required to doubt it. So I doubt that Socrates is human, or I doubt that Socrates is a donkey? Yes. Even though, in actual fact, you know that Socrates is human, and you know that Socrates is not a donkey. And why is that more interesting? Or why is that interesting at all? Yes. So many of the medieval logicians didn't actually seem to recognize that this was interesting. Just as Depositio can be reduced to Positio, they thought that Dubitatio could also be reduced to Positio, and therefore a lot of the medieval treatises don't even discuss it or discuss it in very little detail. However, Nicholas of Paris, writing in the middle of the 13th century, shows why Dubitatio is actually more than just a variation on Positio, and why it should be interesting to modern logicians and modern philosophers. And it's because it's working at a higher level. Depositio and Positio are at the level of truth. You take something that is true or false, you concede or deny it. If you take something that is known to be true or known to be false, and then pretend that you doubt it, this becomes much more difficult. And one of the ways that this is illustrated is by looking at the rules that are given. The rules for Positio are deterministic. For every proposition that is put forward, it is either relevant or irrelevant, and whichever one it is, there is a uniquely applicable rule that tells you what you need to do. There's never any choice. There's always a right answer. Exactly. In Dubitatio, there is always going to be a right answer, but there could be more than one. And to give an example of one of the rules, if you doubt some particular proposition, and it implies another one, then the rule is that you shouldn't deny the proposition that is entailed. So if I've doubted Socrates as a human, and then you ask, what about Socrates as an animal? You shouldn't deny it. I shouldn't deny it, but I could doubt or assent to it. Yes, and you're given the choice. So immediately there, this shows from the formal point of view that it can't be reduced, because it is non-deterministic in nature, and Positio is deterministic. These two are incommensurable. You can't reduce Dubitatio to Positio. And in fact, in Dubitatio, the respondent could use strategy, because he might think, oh, I think I'll assent to this, because it will make it easier as I go forward. Right. Then I have more things that are relevant, because I have brought in kind of new information. It gives me more to work with. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's really interesting. This way of thinking about obligations as having to do with dynamic logic, this is clearly an attempt on your part to show why obligations are interesting from the point of view of a modern-day logician. Do you think that that's the only way to show that they're relevant from this point of view? Or what do you think of other attempts that have been made to sort of bring obligations to the attention of modern-day logicians? There aren't that many. There are mostly kind of historians of philosophy, historians of medieval logic, who have looked at these and who have been unsure about what they have been for. I've mentioned people who have attempted to give accounts of them as counterfactual reasoning or as belief revision or as axiomatic systems. And for the most part, there's no agreement on any of these interpretations. And for any interpretation that you get, you can come up with some reason why it doesn't appear to work very well. In particular, the account of them as counterfactual reasoning. If you look at the people who have advanced this as an interpretation of obligations, what you will often find is them saying something along the lines of, if obligations are a theory of counterfactual reasoning, they're not a very good one. They don't give us the answers that we expect. They seem to get things wrong. They don't seem to be engaging with the right kinds of things. And so you might want to say, well, perhaps it's not just that they got counterfactual reasoning wrong, but that they weren't trying to do counterfactual reasoning at all. And this is something that I have recently argued with respect to Positio, because most people who advanced the counterfactual account are looking at Positio as the main, most common, most prominent kind of canonical version. This is not to say that I don't think counterfactual reasoning plays a role at all in obligations, because I think it does, just not in the version called Positio. It seems like it obviously involves counterfactual reasoning, because I start by supposing that something false is true, and then I think about what would follow from it. So isn't it counterfactual automatically? This is very much along the lines of what the modern commentators who advanced this view are saying, but if you then actually kind of see what sort of counterfactual claims you sent to and not, it doesn't work very well. If we still have time, then I'd like to give an example that actually shows how Positio is not counterfactual, but how another variant, one that is even less commonly talked about than Dubitatio, does seem to show some sort of counterfactual leanings. This variant is called variously, Sit Verum, Let it be True, or Re Veritas, The Truth of Things. And in this version of the game, the opponent starts off by saying, Let it be true that... And then this is before the game starts, this is not the initial statement that is to be conceded, it is sort of scene setting. So, let it be true that Antichrist exists, to take another common medieval example that you get. Let me first give an example following this of Positio where we don't have that sort of assumption, to show how the argumentation that's going on there is not counterfactual. Now I can posit to you that Antichrist exists, and this is not inconsistent, it's false. But you would concede it. Then I say Antichrist is colored, you admit that because it follows from the fact that he exists, that he has to have a color. I say that Antichrist is white. Now from the fact that he exists and he is colored, it doesn't follow that he is white. It's therefore not relevant, and we have to look to the actual world. In the actual world, Antichrist does not exist. He has no color. So he's not white. He's not white. So I should deny it, not doubt it. Now suppose that we say, exactly, suppose that we are actually doing re veritas, the truth of things is that Antichrist does exist. So now I posit that Antichrist exists, you concede it, I say he is colored, you concede it, I say he is white, and now you doubt it. Because now I'm thinking about this counterfactual world in which case, in which he might be white because he's really colored. Right. He might be white, he might be black, but you don't know which. But he exists, and therefore you are doubtful about it, as opposed to the case in the non-counterfactual situation where you look at the actual world, he doesn't exist, and you just deny it. So the difference is that in Positio, the actual world continues to be our standard for truth, whereas in Sidverum, actually you enter this counterfactual world. And that's what you look to for the evaluation of irrelevant claims. Right, okay, great. Yeah. Well, that was far from irrelevant. And that pretty much wraps up my look at logic in the 14th century, at least for the time being. I'm going to be moving on from there to look at the contributions of 14th century thinkers in mathematics and science. For now, I'll thank Sarah Uckleman very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you for inviting me. This was lots of fun. And you are of course obligated to join me next time as I move on to later medieval mathematics and science here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I am Peter Adamson and you are listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Quadrifugal Pursuits – The Oxford Calculators. Suppose you opened a work on physics in antiquity or at a medieval university and compared it to a physics textbook from the modern day. The first big difference that was tri-key would be, well, probably the ancient or medieval text is in Greek or Latin, but the second big difference would be that the modern textbook is full of mathematics, with formulas and numbers strewn across every page. Not so with works on natural philosophy written in antiquity or the 13th century. I never had to ask you to recall ideas from high school math class when discussing Aristotle's physics, Richard Rufus, or Albert the Great. Though it might seem obvious nowadays that physics should involve doing calculations and solving equations, the earlier history of physics suggests that this approach is far from evident. Any shepherd will readily think to use numbers to keep track of the size of the flock, but it took scientists a long time to realize that it would also make sense to use numbers to keep track of how fast a sheep is working its way across the meadow as it grazes, or to compare the speed of this motion to its motion when it runs away from a wolf. To say nothing of applying mathematics to more subtle sorts of change, like the rate at which the grass in the meadow is turning brown in autumn or warming up on a summer's day. In the popular imagination, the breakthrough came suddenly, when early modern scientists first merged the study of mathematics with the study of nature. But in fact, certain natural phenomena, notably the motions of the stars and the harmonic ratios we used to produce music, had fallen under the study of mathematics since antiquity. The medievals too dealt with these phenomena in the so-called quadrivium of liberal arts, that is, the four mathematical sciences arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. As for the application of mathematical concepts to spatial motion and changes in quality like colour or temperature, we do not need to wait for Galileo and Newton. This step was already taken in the 14th century by a group of thinkers at the University of Oxford, especially Merton College, who historians call the calculators. We've already met most of the Oxford calculators while surveying developments in 14th century logic. One key figure, as in logic and the debato for predestination, was Thomas Bradwardine. Notice that, although even most professional philosophers have not heard of Bradwardine, he is emerging in this series as a truly pivotal figure in medieval thought, who made crucial contributions in a number of different fields. He must be one of the best illustrations we have yet come across of why it makes sense to study the history of philosophy without any gaps. In a work devoted to the proportions of motion, written in 1328, Bradwardine set forth an influential mathematical analysis of the relationship between the force applied to a moving body, the resistance the body encounters, and the velocity of the motion that will result. Also significant was that champion of realism, Walter Burley, who in addition to writing on Aristotle's physics, composed treatises analyzing qualitative change. Other calculators included Richard Kelvington and Roger Swineshead, whom we met in our discussion of 14th century logic, as well as another Swineshead whose first name was Richard and who actually wrote a treatise called Book of Calculations. I would love to be able to report that Roger and Richard were both called Swineshead as a comment on their personal appearance, disappointingly it instead indicates that they came from the same town. Still other calculators included John Dumbleton and William Hatesbury, disappointingly not named for his dislike of soft fruits. There were good reasons for medieval thinkers not to do what the calculators finally did, by pursuing a mathematical approach to physics. For starters, crucial mathematical tools were still lacking. On the bright side, algebra had been invented by the 9th century Muslim scholar al-Khwarizmi and passed into Latin in the 12th century. The name betrays the cultural origin of this branch of mathematics, it comes from the Arabic al-jabr. But calculus was still centuries away from being discovered. Then too, there were doctrinal reasons to think that mathematical techniques would be out of place in discussions of physical change. In Aristotelian terms, such items as the color of grass or the warmth of a sunny day belong to the category of quality. The category of quantity takes in an entirely different range of properties like length. So applying numbers to colors and temperatures would require contemplating a categorical monstrosity, the quantity of a quality. Worse still, Aristotle gave explicit instructions that we are not to engage in what he called metabasis, or crossing, from one scientific field to another except under certain rather strict conditions. Basically, he allows it only when one of the sciences in question is subordinated to the other. That is, it must take its principles from the other science, as we saw Aquinas thinks that natural reason takes its principles from theology. So, to take results from mathematics and apply them in natural philosophy seemed to contravene Aristotelian methodology. The calculators were aware of the problem. Radwarding pleads that his procedure is justified since we can speak in a broad sense of proportion whenever there is a question of more and less. Since grass can be more or less green and emotion can be more or less fast, this means that we apply the mathematics of proportion to these things. Possibly, the context of contemporary nominalism played a role here too. Consider that for Occam, knowledge or science operates at the level of propositions. So long as we don't engage in outright equivocation, that is, use the same term in two different senses, it should be possible to combine true propositions into valid arguments so long as they share terms whether or not these propositions were proven true in the same or in different sciences. Also, nominalism readily grants that important scientific concepts like universals may be only in the mind. Thus, the calculators lived at a time when introducing a mathematical abstraction like velocity may have seemed less problematic. It would not need to imply the existence of a real thing out there in the world, to which the word velocity applies. Given all this, we can hardly be surprised that in earlier medieval philosophy there had been no tradition of applying numbers to qualitative changes and motions. When the calculators ventured to do so, even they do it only in a rather abstract fashion. They use variables by saying suppose a motion moves A in time B, or simple numbers saying suppose a motion moves 2 in 1 hour. There is no idea here of actually going out to measure real motions or to contrive units for the measurement of things like force, acceleration, resistance and velocity. Instead, the calculator's arguments move at the level of intuition and what they take to be common sense. Furthermore, when we talk about their mathematical approach, we should not imagine that there are formulas or equations scattered through the manuscripts of their works, as in the modern-day physics textbook. Instead, everything is spelled out in Latin apart from the letters used as variables. In this respect, the calculator's discussions of motion read very much like works on scholastic logic. There's a good reason for this, these discussions often appear in works on scholastic logic. As just mentioned, these calculators were the same men who were writing about sophisms, obligations, and so on. They often took up the topic of change in motion when discussing statistical arguments. Consider the following rather strange sentence. Socrates is whiter than Plato begins to be white. It is the first item considered by Richard Kelvington in his work about sophisms. What he has in mind is that Socrates is completely white. Apparently it has been cloudy during all the time he spent in the marketplace doing philosophy. Whereas Plato is not white, but is just becoming white. Perhaps this is a young Plato turning pale with embarrassment as Socrates refutes him in the marketplace. Hence the sophistical sentence, Plato is just turning white while Socrates is completely white and so is now whiter than Plato is beginning to be. Kelvington considers an objection to this sentence, namely that there are an indefinite number of shades of white between Plato's still dusky color and Socrates's brilliant pure whiteness. Doesn't that mean that Socrates is infinitely whiter than Plato? No, says Kelvington. Just because there are an infinite number of degrees of whiteness between not white and white, doesn't mean that anything can be infinitely white. We might say that pure white is the limit of the process of whitening, and as something whitens, it goes through an indefinite number of degrees of whiteness along the way, just as something moving in a straight line can be thought of as moving across all the points that make up that line. For a nice example of a sophism concerning spatial motion, we can turn to Hatesbury, who considers the following puzzle. Suppose that Socrates moves distance b over the course of day a. Notice that as promised he uses generic variables rather than concrete units. On the same day, Plato moves exactly the same distance. But whereas Socrates is moving at a constant rate, Plato starts slow and speeds up as he goes, like a hare gradually accelerating to catch a tortoise that is plodding steadily along. Plato catches up with Socrates only at the very end of the day. So, here comes the sophistical sentence. Can we say that Socrates and Plato will begin to move equally fast? It may seem so, since they covered the same ground in the same time. But Hatesbury denies this, since Plato is not moving at the same speed as Socrates. Rather, as the calculators would put it, Socrates and Plato have the same total velocity, meaning that the complete distance and time of the motion are equal, but their velocities at each moment are different. Given the scholastics fascination with such logical puzzles, we might suppose that the calculators chose to explore motion in such depth simply to handle these and similar sophistries. Maybe they just didn't want to get caught out in a game of obligations after admitting that Plato is moving or turning white. But there was more to it. There were good theological reasons to worry about change, including one we have thought about in an earlier episode, understanding the Eucharist, which as we saw was a topic that elicited deep reflection on qualities and the way that they alter. The problem also came up when discussing the increase of God-given grace in a human being. By now I've probably said this more times than there are shades of white, but it bears repeating that the theological context of medieval thought, far from precluding scientific advance and inquiry, often provoked it. These theological worries seem to have been on the mind of Walter Burley when he wrote his treatises on change, for example. In these treatises, Burley wanted to explain in greater depth what happens when someone, or something, is turning white, or when water heats until it turns into air, or a person grows in grace, but he uses the more mundane examples in his discussion. Burley considers a theory from an unnamed opponent, perhaps Thomas Wilton, that the process of change always involves a mixture of two contrary qualities. Thus, something that starts out cold and is becoming hot would have a certain ratio of cold to hot in it. We can even assign numbers to the ratio. Starting out from zero degrees of heat, water might advance to six degrees, at which point it would transform into air. Halfway through this process, it would have three degrees of cold and three of heat, hence we could say that the temperature would result from the mixture of qualities. Now, Burley has no quarrel with the basic idea of degrees of heat and cold. This notion could have come to the scholastics through the medical tradition. The ancient Dr. Galen, and following him, Muslim thinkers whose works were translated into Latin, like Al-Kindi and Averroes, had assigned degrees of these basic qualities to drugs in their works on pharmacology. The same background helps to explain why Burley and the other calculators speak of the latitude of equality, meaning the range of intensity that a feature like white or heat may have. In medical texts by Galen and Avicenna, health is described as a state with a certain latitude, meaning that the human body can become somewhat more or less hot, dry and so on, while still remaining healthy. While Burley is happy to think of qualities in these terms, he rejects the theory of mixed qualities. Instead, he believes that qualitative change involves a succession of different qualitative forms in the changing thing. Something that is heating up has a form of heat that is slightly more intense than the one it had a moment ago, and slightly less intense than the one it will have a moment from now. On this account, we can again think of qualitative change as being very much like spatial motion, a successive passage through an indefinite number of intensities. The analogy between motion and a change in quality means that the methods applied to one should apply to the other. Just as we can introduce quantitative measures to talk about degrees of heat or white, and even assign these degrees numbers, so we should be able to assign numbers to the intensity of a motion, and that is exactly what we find the calculators doing. Here, the most important contributions are made by Bradwardine and Hatesbury. In the treatise on proportions that I mentioned earlier, Bradwardine offers a new and influential mathematical analysis of spatial motion. Aristotle had argued that the speed of such a movement would be inversely proportional to the resistance offered by a medium. This is why you would need to exert much more force to walk through water than through air at the same speed. From this, Aristotle had drawn the conclusion that motion in a void would be impossible because it would offer zero resistance, implying that an infinite speed would result. No, by the 14th century, this argument against void had been rejected by a number of thinkers, including in late antiquity John Philoponus, and in the Islamic world several thinkers including Im Baja, Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, and Fakhra Din Arazi. They all made roughly the same complaint, which is that resistance only slows down the intrinsic speed of a motion. In a void, there would be no slowing effect at all, so the motion would simply have its basic speed, which of course would be finite. In the 14th century, a number of Latin Christian thinkers likewise accept that void is possible at least in theory, and that bodies could move in a void. As we saw a while back, the 1277 condomations may have helped popularize this view since they discouraged the notion that God would be unable to create empty space should He choose to do so. Brad Wergene would agree that void is in principle possible. He makes a telling objection to Aristotle's position, namely that if it were really true that motion in void would have to be infinite in speed, whereas a minimal resistance would make the motion finite in speed, then adding just this small amount of resistance to avoid space would somehow cause an infinite reduction in speed. Furthermore, he observes that increasing resistance more and more doesn't just make things move slower and slower. At some point, the motion will grind to a halt completely. Imagine walking through a medium whose density is increasing. First it's like walking through air, then through water, then yogurt, then molasses, and so on. Eventually, you would be unable to move at all rather than moving more and more slowly. This is unexplained by Aristotle's simple theory that there is an inverse relation between speed and resistance. Instead, Brad Wergene offers a new theory centering on what is in effect a new formula, though of course he presents it in Latin sentences and not symbols. To understand it, I'm afraid you will now need to dust off some of that high school math. Following earlier medieval ideas about proportions, he says that to double a speed, you don't have the resistance, or double the force applied to the moving body. Rather, you have to take the ratio of the force to the resistance and multiply this by itself. In other words, you have to square that ratio. To triple the speed, you would need to cube that same ratio, or multiply it by itself three times. Thus, if a ratio of force to resistance is 3 to 2, and this yields a certain speed, then to triple that speed, you would need a ratio of force to resistance of 27 to 8, that is 3 to the third to 2 to the third. Brad Wergene does not back this up with empirical proof, and in fact it has some counterintuitive results as was pointed out by other 14th century thinkers like Nicolas Rennes, on whom more is shortly. But the other calculators liked it, in part because the speed is now calculated as a function of the extent to which the force is in excess of the resistance. If the ratio of the force to resistance is 1 to 1, or even less, then the speed will be zero, which is why you cannot walk through molasses, as people learned in Boston in the year 1919, googled the phrase Great Molasses Flood to see what I mean. Unlike those Bostonians, the calculators continued to make progress with another breakthrough, first explained in writing by William Hatesbury. Think back to our earlier example of Plato and Socrates moving the same distance in the same time, but at varying speeds, because Plato starts slow and accelerates, while Socrates moves at a constant rate. The calculators would say that Socrates's steady motion is uniform, while Plato's speeding up makes his motion deform. It is pretty easy to work out how far something will move in a given time if its speed is constant, but it is not so easy to work it out if the speed is varying. What we would like to do is find a way to reduce the case of accelerated motion to the simpler case of motion with constant speed. Hatesbury accomplishes this by announcing what is now known as the Mean Speed Theorem. It states that if a body is moving while changing speed, it will cover the same distance in a given time, that it would have covered if it moved for the same time with its mean speed. Suppose a sheep moves for an hour across a meadow, slowing down and speeding up as it does so, first grazing and then lurching into the sheep version of a sprint when it sees a wolf in the next field. The different speeds can then be averaged. You might take its speed at every minute, then divide by 60 to get the mean speed. And the distance it moves will be the same as the distance it would have moved if it had been going at that rate constantly the whole hour. This is good work on Hatesbury's part, and not only because he's right. Also because to conceptualize this situation like this, he needs to introduce the idea of a speed at a time. It's a notion we find obvious, living as we do in an age where we can just look at the speedometer of the car to see how fast we are going right this moment. But as with so many apparently obvious ideas, it needed to be discovered. It has to be admitted that Hatesbury didn't actually prove the mean speed theorem, he only articulated it and left it to the reader to see that it makes intuitive sense. Before long though, something like a proof was offered by Nicole Oresme, who modeled the situation of the accelerating motion using geometrical diagrams. These diagrams anticipate the geometrical approach to these and related topics later taken by Galileo. If you're still not impressed, no less a figure than Leibniz, who of course is going to help introduce the much needed tools of calculus, was aware of the calculators and praised their pioneering work. And if even that doesn't impress you, then I guess I will need a whole further episode to do it. Join me next time, when we will look at more innovations in physics made by 14th century thinkers, including John Buridan. He proposed that, however difficult it might be to impress podcast listeners, it is at least possible to impress a force into a body. This impressed force is what we call impetus, and it will feature heavily in the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London at the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode… Get to the Point, 14th Century Physics. It's a bit misleading to talk about Aristotelian physics. Not because Aristotle was uninterested in physics. To the contrary, he quite literally wrote the book on the subject. Already in late antiquity and still in the medieval worlds of Islam, Byzantium and Latin Christianity, his work, the physics, was the fundamental source for natural philosophy. The word physics comes from the Greek phusis meaning nature. What I mean is rather that in a way, Aristotle had not one but two physics, one for the terrestrial world and one for the heavens. Down here, in the region where we live, often called the sublunary realm because it is situated below the sphere of the moon, all things are made of four elements, air, earth, fire and water. They have natural tendencies to move in straight lines up or down, that is to say away from or towards the center point of the universe. This is because they are trying to reach what Aristotle calls their natural places. Thus fire tries to occupy the region just below the sphere of the moon while earth tries to work its way towards the center of the cosmos which is why flames flicker upwards and stones fall downwards. The reason that the four elements do not just sift apart is that they are bound together as composite substances, something that Aristotelians across the ages tended to explain with reference to heavenly movement. It is because the heavens revolve around us that our world is so complex and varied. And revolve around us they do. In the celestial world, things move in perfect circles instead of straight lines. This according to Aristotle shows that heavenly bodies are made of a different kind of matter, not the four sublunary elements but an ungenerated indestructible fifth element called aether. So distinctive is the nature and physics that governs this realm that Aristotle devoted a separate treatise to it called On the Heavens. For him, the visible planets and fixed stars are seated upon transparent spheres made of the fifth element which concentrically surround the likewise spherical terrestrial realm. If Aristotle gave the medieval's their cosmology, then Ptolemy gave them their astronomy. His system had first been passed on to the Islamic world, something you can still see in the title used for Ptolemy's massively influential treatise the Almagest. That al at the beginning is just the Arabic definite article. Astronomical treatises of the Islamic world were in turn enormously influential on Latin Christendom which borrowed everything from terminology like zij for an astronomical table to instruments like the astrolabe. Latin works like On the Sphere, written in the first half of the 13th century by John of Sakrobosko, offered textbooks for the university students who studied astronomy as part of the quadrivium. As we move into the 14th century, we see that the story of astronomy and cosmology is parallel to and bound up with the story of philosophy. For one thing, we have a similar trend towards use of vernacular languages. Nicole Oren translated and commented on Aristotle's On the Heavens in French, and a work on the use of the astrolabe was written in English by none other than Geoffrey Chaucer. And, much as nominalism and voluntarism were putting pressure on various long-held Aristotelian presuppositions, so the science of the stars was increasingly subjected to doubt. We've already seen that one key aspect of Aristotle's cosmology, the eternity of the celestial bodies, and hence of the cosmos as a whole, led to intense controversy in the 13th century. Eternalism was widely rejected, even by the hard-line Aristotelians of the Parisian arts faculty. Now in the 14th century, the Aristotelian Ptolemaic worldview received more detailed criticism. In 1364, a Parisian master named Henry of Langenstein argued that the perfect spheres envisioned in that worldview could make sense only as a mathematical model, not as a real physical cosmology. Other authors toyed with revisions to the Aristotelian system, though without necessarily embracing these revisions. Mightn't it be that the earth rotates under an unmoving heaven instead of the other way around? Could we even tell the difference? We saw in passing that Adam Wodham mentions this hypothesis to illustrate the notion of an apparent property, a cosmic version of the case of trees on a riverbank seeming to move when you are on a boat. John Buridan and Nicole Oresme both discussed the hypothesis too. Buridan decides against it on the grounds that if the earth were turning, a projectile, like an arrow, fired straight up should fall some distance away because the ground would turn beneath it during its flight. Oresme disagrees. If someone on a moving boat fires an arrow straight up, the arrow will fall back down onto the same spot in the boat because it will retain its lateral motion while flying. Ultimately, Oresme does stop short of embracing the idea of a turning earth, but not without first having established it as a serious possibility. Another innovative natural philosopher, active in the 14th century, was Francis of Marchia. Like Occam, he was a Franciscan who came into conflict with the pope over the principle of voluntary poverty and, unlike Occam, he was ultimately brought to trial to answer for his defiance. Marchia was a pioneer of the impetus theory, which we'll get to shortly. First, I want to mention his views on another matter, namely whether there is in fact another matter aside from the elements that exist in the terrestrial realm. Was Aristotle right to hold that the celestial bodies are made from a special kind of stuff, indestructible and uniquely suited for permanent circular motion? Here Marchia offers what you might call an internal critique of Aristotelian physics. On the traditional understanding of Aristotle's view, the most fundamental sort of matter is nothing but pure potentiality. It survives through all change, even change between the elements. Marchia points out that this sort of underlying prime matter is just as indestructible as the heavens, that is, it cannot be generated or annihilated by any natural power. In this sense, matter is the same for the whole created universe, both sublunary and heavenly. It can be admitted that the celestial spheres, with their perfect rotations, are bodies of a different kind than we find here in our earthly realm, but this is due to their different forms, not the matter from which they are made. Where Marchia casts doubt on the radical contrast between celestial and terrestrial physics, others question the causal connections that were supposed to obtain between the two realms. This was problematic because taking the idea of celestial influence really seriously in the 1300s was a bit like taking disco culture really seriously in the 1970s, it might lead you to embrace astrology. This was a highly contentious discipline, enthusiastically endorsed by some medieval philosophers like Roger Bacon, criticized harshly by others like the author of a work called Errors of the Philosophers. Thomas Bradwardine, too, was fiercely opposed to any suggestion of astrological determinism. A compromise view could be that the heavens do influence things down here and that astrologers might sometimes be able to discern this. But heavenly influence should not be the sole causal factor determining the events in our lives. At the very least, human free will should also play a part. The stars were also invoked to explain such things as the functioning of magnets and even the impossibility of creating a void space, since that would imply that there are places where celestial influence cannot reach. Again though, all of this came under scrutiny in the 14th century. Already the condemnations in Paris back in 1277 had censured the thesis that, if the heavens should stand still, fire would not burn because nature would cease to operate. A couple of generations on, Buridan and Orem question whether natural processes really depend on causal influences from the heavens. They point to the fact that in the Bible, the prophet Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still in the sky, which did not result in a collapse in all natural processes, only a collapse in the enemies arrayed against the Israeli army. Buridan explains that, without any help from the heavens, the four sublunary elements could simply interact with one another so as to yield indefinite change in mixture. The traditional recipe had celestial influence ensuring that fire keeps turning into air. For Buridan, you can just add water. As Francis of Marcia pointed out in his argument for the commonality of celestial and terrestrial matter, Aristotelian doctrine had it that matter is bare potentiality. Everything made of this matter will occupy space, without any gaps, if you'll pardon the expression, since void is impossible, and be indefinitely divisible. Aristotle understood this last point to mean that, in principle, you can take any continuous body and cut it in half, cut one of the resulting halves in half, cut one of the resulting quarters in half, and so on forever. You might imagine doing this with a cake, taking off ever thinner slices. Aristotle put this conception forward against the atomists who had lived around the time of Socrates, who believed that every body is made up of smallest indivisible parts. You may recall that this is what atom means, uncuttable. Most scholastics agree with Aristotle about this, albeit with occasional modifications. Duns Scotus, for one, forthrightly rejected atomism but held that the infinite number of parts that can possibly be isolated in a body are all actually present, not just potentially present. Occam agrees with Scotus, since he can make no sense of a thing that exists merely potentially. If a whole body is real and it is made of parts, then its parts must be real too. Occam's argument for this illustrates his penchant for transposing metaphysical issues to the propositional level. For him, talk of potential being is just talk of negation plus possibility. Hence, if you say, this body potentially has parts, you can only mean this body has no parts though it could, which is false since bodies do have parts. The parts are however not separated from one another as atoms would be, and in fact they overlap. Half the cake includes two quarters of the cake as its sub-parts. Another interesting point made by Scotus, and later by Francis of Marchia, is that the same amount of stuff, what Scotus calls quantity of matter, can be packed into a greater or lesser volume. Here our medieval thinkers are getting at the notion that we'll later be called mass. A more radical break with Aristotle's theory of matter was contemplated by Occam's teacher Henry of Harclay, as well as Occam's intellectual sparring partner Walter Chatton. Both of them were ready to admit that material things are, after all, made up of atoms, though not of the sort envisioned by ancient atomists. Instead, there would be actual points in a line or a body. Given that as we just saw, Scotus and Occam accepted that all the parts of a whole are actually present, you might expect them to be happy with this. After all, isn't a line just made up of an infinite number of parts which are indivisible points? Well, not according to Occam. He argues that an actual point is always the termination of a line, or even nothing apart from the fact of the line's ending. In fact, according to Occam, not even God can create a point existing all by itself. But Harclay and Chatton offered a powerful consideration for the reality of real, discrete points. They asked us to imagine a sphere approaching a plane. We might picture a billiard ball approaching a tabletop, though both the ball and the table would need to be geometrically flawless. In fact, to eliminate the imperfections that would arise in a real case, Chatton asked us to imagine that it is God who creates the situation in all its geometrical perfection. Our medieval atomists now argue that, when the sphere first touches the plane, it will contact it at only a single point. This thought experiment provoked responses from Occam, Wodham, and Buridan. I think the most clever answer is the one given by Wodham. He imagines trying to isolate the part of the sphere touching the plane by slicing away upper portions of the sphere. You could start by cutting away the top hemisphere, then take off further layers as you work your way down. If you cut down so far that only the point of contact is left, the sphere will be gone completely. This shows that any constitutive part of the sphere that is really touching the plane must be extended. Further thought experiments, both possible and impossible, played a role in the most famous development of 14th century physics, the theory of impetus. It is associated especially with John Buridan, but first appears in Francis of Marsha. In yet another striking case where theological discussion prompted scientific advance, Marsha takes up the issue while discussing the way that the power of grace is instilled in the sacraments. He draws an analogy between this miraculous case and the mundane fact that a power for motion may be implanted in bodies, as when you throw a projectile like a javelin. Why does the javelin keep moving once it has left the hand of the thrower? For Marsha, the answer lies in what he calls virtus derelicta, or remaining power. Buridan will call it impetus. The theory of impetus is usually seen as a complete departure from Aristotle's theory of motion, perhaps in part because it was already proposed in late antiquity by John Philoponus, who was certainly a stern critic of Aristotelian physics. For Marsha, though, it is just an elucidation of what Aristotle must have meant in the passages of his Physics that Analyze Motion. To Aristotle's mind, there must be something that causes the javelin to carry on moving. Since this cannot be the thrower's hand, once the javelin is in mid-flight, he appeals to the air around the javelin. As it hurtles onward, the javelin displaces the air in front of it, and this displaced air is pushed behind the javelin which gives it an onward shove. If your name is John, history suggests that you will not find this persuasive. Both John Philoponus and John Buridan pointed out the ridiculous consequences of Aristotle's theory, for instance that people on a boat sailing swiftly down a river would feel wind at their backs and not in their faces. Marsha more respectfully admitted that the medium may play a part in moving the body, while insisting that the remaining power given to the javelin by the thrower also helps to explain its tendency to keep moving until the power is expended. Not everyone was persuaded by the new idea. Occam, for one, said that it would be amazing if my hand caused some power in the stone by touching it. Impetus theory has clear advantages over Aristotle's account though. It explains why you can throw rocks further than feathers. Thanks to its size and density, a rock is able to take on a greater impetus. It also shows us why falling objects tend to accelerate, so that a rock dropped off a building will kill you, whereas a rock dropped from one inch above your head will merely bruise you. As the rock falls, its impetus constantly builds thanks to its weight. Note that this is not the same as the later scientific concept of inertia. Neither Marsha nor Buridan claim that all moving bodies continue moving by default, slowing or stopping only when impeded. Rather, the idea is that a body can be invested with a power that will make it tend to move, as the attractive power in a magnet moves it towards metal. But this tendency will always be brought to an end. Buridan is still committed to the Aristotelian idea that something must be causing motion whenever motion happens. The heavens are, quite literally, the exception that proves this rule. There is a passage in Buridan where he speculates that celestial rotation can, in principle, go on forever. In this respect, it is unlike the motion of the sublunary elements, which travel along straight lines and thus must always stop. Earth will stop if it reaches an obstacle or, failing that, its natural place at the center of the cosmos. A heavenly sphere, by contrast, can keep going round and round, as there is no hindrance and no termination of its path. Yet, this is not because the sphere just keeps spinning without any causal influence, the way we would think about a wheel that turns forever so long as it encounters no friction. Rather, the sphere is moved by an externally imposed force, namely the impetus given to it by God or an angel. I know this sounds rather bizarre, but bear with me. We'll see why Buridan invokes an angel here in a future episode. Even in the perfect obstacle-free realm of the stars, then, there is no inertia, only the implanted power Buridan calls impetus. Let's conclude by stepping back from all these theories and asking about the methods that gave rise to them. The frequent appeals to concrete cases, all those thrown projectiles, boats, and falling rocks, may suggest that we are here seeing the rise of observation-based science. But rarely, if ever, do we get the sense that authors like Marcia, Occam, or Buridan made a special effort to observe such phenomena, never mind measuring them. Like the advances made by the Oxford calculators, these were conceptual breakthroughs, not triumphs of experiment. In fact, 14th century physics often involves thought experiments that could never be conducted in real life. Appeal was made to God's absolute power, that is, the divine capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, like the perfect sphere touching the perfect plane. These discussions of motion, divisibility, matter, and so on make constant reference to Aristotle by way of his greatest commentator, Averroes, but my hunch is that a different Muslim thinker helped inspire the use of this sort of thought experiment, Avicenna. His famous flying man argument, much discussed in Latin Christendom, asks us to suppose that God creates a mature human in mid-air. I covered it in episode 141 of this podcast series. Perhaps medieval science owed as much to Avicenna's startling method of argument as it did to the astronomical tables and astrologers of the Islamic world. That is speculation on my part, but something I can say with total confidence is that Avicenna was vital for a further scientific discipline, medicine. His canon offered an authoritative overview of medicine as a whole and became the most important source for the Latin Christians alongside the works of the ancient doctor Galen. We've touched in the past on the relation between medicine and philosophy, in antiquity with Hippocrates and Galen, and in the Islamic world too. Medieval medicine doesn't have a great reputation. Words like leeches and bloodletting leave to mind. But in Latin Christendom too, medicine was a sophisticated science with close links to philosophy. So make an appointment for an interview with Monica Green, whose thorough examination of medieval medicine will put the physical back in the physical sciences. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about medieval medicine with Monica Green, who is professor of history at Arizona State University. Hi, Monica. Hello, how are you today? I'm good. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. We are going to be talking about medieval medicine. And let's start with what I think is a very basic question of how we know anything about medieval medicine. There are quite a number of surviving treatises on medical subjects, so that's obviously one body of literature that we can draw on. But I know from reading your work that you also think historians of medicine should be drawing on a wider range of texts. So for example, you mentioned legal treatises, and we can probably also learn something about medieval medicine from artifacts of physical things like, say, talismans or even medical instruments. So there's probably a lot you could say here, but could you give us some kind of idea of the range of sources that we can draw on as historians here? Certainly. One of the things I'm trying to do is persuade general historians that the work of telling the story of the history of health and the history of disease is everybody's job is that everybody who ever lived had a body. Probably most people who ever lived had something go wrong with their body at some point. They stubbed their toe, they had a cut, and then the whole range of other kinds of disease. So health is an issue that affects everyone, and it's certainly a concern for a lot of people in terms of the choices they make about how to live their lives. So as something that's pervasive in society, basically almost anything can be used potentially as a source to tell us something about ill health, about attempts to preserve health when it's already there, and to alleviate conditions when something about the body goes wrong. The medical texts that you refer to, they're the low-hanging fruit, just because their relationship to medicine is so obvious. And in that respect, we haven't even touched a fraction of the material that's out there. In terms of finding these sources, identifying what they are, where they came from, who wrote them, how they circulated, and then what their content is in terms of the actual ideas they're carrying forward about medicine, about the humors, about the structure of the body. So there's that entire range. And as I said, they're the low-hanging fruit in the sense that they're readily identifiable. Finding other kinds of sources is more of a challenge for the simple reason that their medical content won't necessarily be flagged. So when an archivist is describing some document, they will describe who it's written by, who it's written to, the date, place, basic sorts of things. But they won't say that, oh, in this letter, King X was telling his advisor about, please acquire these other kinds of medical ingredients for me because I have need to treat my gout. So there's ways in which medical concerns might be represented in the documents. But we, unless we're experts in that particular archive, we won't know that. We won't have that level of detail. And so you mentioned that legal sources, the one legal source that I have used in detail was actually brought to me by another historian. So the other historian had already found it and he consulted me about it and basically we worked on it together. He is a legal historian and I as a medical historian trying to work through the case of, I mean, and it was an amazing case of a midwife who was accused of murder of one of her patients and really can get into great levels of detail where this was one of the many things that were fascinating about it. You really have to go into what were the conceptions of the physiology of the female body. This was a case of childbirth where the woman had given birth to her child by a first midwife who was already present at the birth. But then the placenta was retained after the birth and so a second midwife was called to help with a retained placenta and then the woman, the new mother died soon after that. But the point is that we had to go through all of the ideas about the retention of the placenta, how risky was it and to what extent fault can be laid at the door of a medical practitioner. I mean, this is still a period where there aren't very well developed ideas about medical malpractice but clearly there was debate and that was the context of this trial is, is this a case where the woman would have died anyway or is this a case where some bad decision or maybe even malicious activity had gone on. But again, we don't know how many other such cases like that might be out there. There's just thousands of archives. I guess the listeners would not forgive me if I didn't ask you whether she was found innocent or guilty. That's the thing. It's only a partial document that we have and well, and we speculated, we don't know. The quick answer is we don't know. And part of what we did was go through, the other complication with that case is the woman who died was Christian. The midwife who was accused of murder was Jewish. And so part of the contextualization that we had to do in that case was look at what were the attitudes and what was the experience of Jewish Christian relations in that town. So it was not a pretty picture. That's fascinating. Actually, that sort of leads on to the next thing I was going to ask because since I work on Islamic philosophy, I know that there's a lot of influence from the Islamic world, including Jewish authors, but also Muslim authors like Avicenna, on medieval medicine in Latin Christendom. And I'm wondering, since I know that they knew Avicenna, for example, very well, I'm wondering whether these sources from the Islamic world even dominate in the medieval period. I mean, how well do they know, let's say, Hippocrates and Galen? Or do they even get most of their Galenic medicine indirectly over authors like, say, Avicenna, Averroes, other authors from the Islamic world? That's such a wonderful question. And it's a question that has driven a lot of work in the intellectual side of the history of medicine, which parallels a lot the history of philosophy and also the history of science, is looking at texts, looking at the development of theoretical concepts, and then looking at the transmission of those concepts, both within linguistic traditions and across linguistic traditions. So the phenomenon, first of all, the phenomenon of translation in medicine parallels the translation of scientific texts and, to an extent, parallels the translation of philosophical texts. What I'm realizing is there are some interesting differences, is that we more or less assume that those things are happening at the same time and pretty much in the same places. And what I'm realizing with medicine is that medicine seems to be happening earlier and separately from the other intellectual traditions. So one of the people I'm working on now is someone named Constantine the African. He is an immigrant to Italy. He's from North Africa, probably from the area that today we call Tunisia. And we don't really know the circumstances of why he left Tunisia, why or how he came to Italy. But certainly he came, and he first goes to the cultural community in the United States, to the cultural town of Salerno, and then goes to the monastery of Monte Cassino, which is just south of Rome. And he spends the rest of his life there translating works from Arabic into Latin. The work that he's doing in translation precedes the main period of translation of scientific texts by almost a century. And also philosophical texts, actually. Yes. And he's been the biggest mystery in all of this. I mean, again, as I just said, we don't know his motivations. The fact that he comes to Monte Cassino, at this time the monastery where he's at, is the foundation of the Benedictine order, and it is one of the most amazing places. And during the period that he's there, it's the site of an amazing investment in renewal and rebuilding the site of the monastery. There's an amazing new basilica that is opened in this period. And the library is growing. And one of the things that we're learning about what Constantine was doing is, we've always seen him as a translator from Arabic into Latin. As if it's just kind of this two point, from point A to point B, and then that's all that's involved. What we're realizing now is that even before Constantine arrived, somebody at the monastery, we don't know who, is already going through older Latin works in medicine, is collecting a lot of these things, and is editing. I mean, comparing two or three different copies of a text and trying to find out, okay, do we have even a good text in front of this? Have we correctly transcribed these Greek words, or translated these Greek words? So there's a tremendous amount of editing work. And in a topic as technical as medicine, editing work necessarily involves analysis. It's not going to be immediately obvious to you which of two alternatives of a spelling of a word is the correct one, because you have to figure out what the word means. What physiological process is this referring to, or what part of the body is this referring to? So the work of translation is, it's much more contextually nuanced than we thought. Then there's a secondary question. So, okay, we can say, and we're understanding better now, what is actually going on at Monte Cassino, and the tremendous amount of intellectual work, and not just technical rendering that's happening. The next question is, okay, well, what is the larger impact of that? That's one thing to say, okay, in the context of this one monastery, there's discussion, there's translation, there is a circulation of text. Why does anybody else pay attention to it? Why does anybody copy this work? Why does anybody transmit this work? And something that I've had evidence for for a long time, but it just kind of keeps repeating itself, is things that we know were composed in southern Italy, in many cases we find them in England ten years, twenty years later. Those are maximums of how long that it takes to get there. That's simply showing up in manuscripts in these distant places. Germany, the same thing, we know that these texts very quickly got disseminated to Germany, we know that they very quickly got disseminated to France. So what we have, the phenomenon that we have, is that Constantine was rendering this Arabic material into Latin, but almost immediately it then becomes Latin medicine. Not simply in the sense of it's being written in Latin, but that it's being absorbed, read, commented on by individuals at a variety of different intellectual centers throughout the continent. So it's amazing. But to go back to your initial question about Avicenna, Avicenna also is translated in the 1150s, 1160s, 1170s perhaps. He does not have that same immediate impact as the works that Constantine. So that's part of the work that I've been doing, is to assess why certain things are adopted readily and circulate widely, and other things disappear. I mean, even though we know when and where they're translated, they have no immediate impact. And how much of a difference does it make that these works are being rendered into Latin? So you've got both Greek and Arabic sources in medicine, just as in philosophy, coming into Latin. Do they make a lot of medically significant decisions in terms of how to, for example, render technical terms into Latin? Oh, everything. Every word that's being translated is a decision that has to be made. Are you trying to find a Latin equivalent for the word, whether it's Arabic or Greek? Do you have to coin a new word to try to render this? Do you just transliterate? So taking an Arabic word in Arabic letters and just putting it into Latin letters without changing the word. And then once you have a sentence that you've put together, does it make sense? Is it, you know, is it comprehensible? We have very few of Constantine the African's translations have been critically edited. So we have very little opportunity, even though in many cases we know what his original Arabic source was, hardly any of these texts have been compared side by side of the original Arabic with the Latin. And so there's not a lot of work that's been done about how he was making those decisions and what the normal pattern of translation was. I'm willing to bet, by the way, the Arabic texts probably aren't very well edited either. Well, yeah, that's the other side of the story. That's the other side. And in some cases, at least in terms of the surveys that have been done thus far, the original Arabic hasn't been identified. It may not have survived to the present day. I'm actually in a period of the podcast, which is much later now, I've been doing the fourteenth century, and one of the things I've been talking about in the past few episodes is the extent to which fourteenth century science or physics especially anticipates breakthroughs that we associate more with modern physics. And so I'm wondering to what extent we can say that also about medicine. I mean, do they actually make discoveries or advances in the medieval period on the medical front that we would consider from our point of view to be steps forward? Or are they just kind of reworking the Galenic medical approach? How do they sort of come out as scientists from our point of view? That's a kind of question that I usually try to avoid. I mean, that implicit comparison. No, there's two things. There's the comparative element on the one hand, and then there's the kind of the teleological element in the other in the sense of can we find direct connections between what happened in the fourteenth century and the present day? So it not simply has to have happened in the fourteenth century, but it has to have persisted in subsequent centuries and very, very different contexts. In part we can give a positive answer to those questions. Things that, and I don't work on the fourteenth century in terms of medical theory. There's some other work that I've been doing on the fourteenth century from a very different perspective. But some things that I would point to that we can say there were clear things that came into being in the fourteenth century that have persisted long term in Western medicine is number one, absolutely the focus on anatomy. There is already anatomical interest in the main period I work on, which is the twelfth century. There are several texts being written that describe how to do an anatomy of a pig. And the pig, because of its long torso and there might be other reasons as well, is considered a good enough substitute for the basic structure of human anatomy to do kind of a gross anatomical autopsies. So anatomy of the pig is being done. There are a couple of anatomical texts which seem to be feeding into a stunning rise in surgery. There's new surgical texts being written in the twelfth century when there had not been any new surgical texts in the Latin tradition written since late antiquity. So after six, seven hundred year gap, surgery suddenly comes into its own. So that's in the twelfth century. But in the fourteenth century, as I said, with the increasing development of the practice of human anatomy, some of which is investigative, some of which is forensic in the sense of attempting to determine cause of death. Some of it is also pedagogical or even exploratory in the sense of actually trying to get a better understanding about the structure of the human body and the physiological processes that are tied to certain parts of the anatomy. Also in the fourteenth century, I would say there are some major developments in pharmaceutics in terms of new processes, new chemical processes that are being used. Distillation is more regularly being used as a way to bring out what is considered to be the essences of natural medicinal products and attempts to formalize and regularize that. So there is some way in which some of that work is being quantified as well. And the other thing that I would say is distinctive is much more regularized attention to public health, to ways in which there should be some kind of legal responsibility of urban communities to preserve health of their communities. And an important development in that respect is that it's very, very clear now that a lot of that work in terms of the legal aspects of public health starts well before the black death, that it's not simply a reaction to this new epidemic disease, that these are basically urban concerns, is that when you're gathering a large number of people together, it matters that you can make sure the water supply is good, make sure that the sewers are functioning well. Yes, I think there's a lot of development in this period. That's clearly, what you just mentioned is clearly the thing that would lead to mind in terms of public health, but actually medicine generally for the 14th century is the black death. Did they, I mean, there must have been theories that actually passed around in the medical community. I mean, obviously, there were lots of ideas about what was causing the black death, other than just the wrath of God. But what did the medical writers make of the black death? I think crucial for understanding how we read medical texts that describe the black death now is that it's very clear that they are dealing with a brand new disease. This is, in modern terms, we would call this an emerging disease, something that they have never seen before. Plague had been present in Europe before, but so far as we can tell, most of the Latin medical writers don't see a connection. They don't see it as something, we've been through this before, there are earlier medical descriptions of this, let's dig them out and restudent them. In the Islamic world, that's different, because Islam arises during the time of the Justinianic plague. There is discussion of plague, not in the Quran and not directly in the Hadith, but then it's discussed in other literature as well. So there is a tradition in Islamic thinking or in texts written by Islamic scholars where they see the continuity, or they don't have to start from scratch in conceptualizing the disease. Whereas for Latin authors it is completely new. So in terms of your question about what do they think causes it, there are a variety of different causal theories which are not necessarily incompatible with each other. This is the wrath of God, that it is something that is suddenly striking many places all at the same time. Again, we've had this narrative about the arrival of the Black Death in the Mediterranean basin, in North Africa and in Europe. We've had this for a very long time, but it's very interesting the ways in which the new genetic understanding of the history of the strains of plague that struck the Mediterranean and Europe in this period is reinforcing the narratives that we already had. This really is coming very suddenly, very quickly, without any framework in which to explain it. The suddenness and the terror that it caused is palpable in ways that we're rediscovering now. There is work starting on this path of going back and rereading those early medical treatises on plague with a new eye, with a new empathy, if you will, of what exactly they were dealing with, of how to explain such massive death, such sudden death, and death that was being caused in ways that they had never seen before. One other thing you've worked on a lot in your research into medieval medicine is gender and medicine. And again, there's a lot we could talk about here, but I was wondering if you could just sketch for us a few of the avenues of research, one being the way that there's a lot of research one could follow here. I mean, obviously, one thing would be the treatment of women patients, who are presumably about half of patients. And the other thing would be female medical practitioners, just like we have female philosophers, and increasingly, in fact, have female philosophers in the 14th century, for example. Were there female physicians? You already mentioned midwives would be another kind of medical practitioner who was a woman. What's the general picture, or does it really vary quite a bit in time and place through the medieval period? What I've done in my work with respect to women and gender is actually look at three questions is, how are women problematized as a category within medical understandings about physiology? So to what extent is there a generic, basic human physiology that then in terms of conceptualizing physiology, conceptualizing pathology, do you see a generic human body and then specific things that have to do with a male genitalia, with a female genitalia, and so forth? Or is there the assumption that the normal human body is male, and then everything about the female body is different and potentially pathological? Or is there a way in which there's some other combination of that? But asking this question of how does sex, sexual difference, function in medical conceptualization, or even how much is it gender, in the sense that something is mutable in terms of the expectations of the society? So just looking at the content of medical writing about women, then I've looked at the question of to what extent did women contribute to those traditions? So women as authors of medical texts, women as readers of medical texts, or women as audiences of medical texts in any kind of way. And the answer to that is very, very minimal. In terms of women as authors of medical texts, the periods I've worked on, 12th century there's Hildegard of Bingen, who is also very famous in the history of philosophy for a variety of reasons. There's Trotta of Salerno, working in Salerno in the 12th century. And that's it. That's it. It won't be until the 15th century that I can find persuasive evidence that women are writing recipes, writing collections of, or gathering together collections of recipes of various kinds of practices. Now, as you already know from the work in the history of philosophy, what gets written down is not the totality of what is said, is debated, is the discourse that goes on in any community. And so then the next question is how are women practicing medicine even though they might not necessarily be creating a written record of what they're doing. And in that respect, I have found there's a variety of evidence. But the biggest thing that I did in my own work was ask this question about literacy. Because what literacy means, I think, for looking at women is do you have the opportunity to engage in a way that is more than just dialogue with people who are not present. That's really what writing does. It allows us to have dialogue, or even if it's not dialogue in the sense of it's going back and forth, that you can actually set up lines of communication across space but across generations. That when you read Aristotle in a way, you are still engaging with the world that Aristotle perceived. Can women engage with the practices of other women? So one of the questions, going back to the midwife example I was talking about before, I asked the question, so again, as I said, the situation that she was dealing with was retained placenta. And really almost any medical obstetrical text you look at up to the present day, retained placenta is a very serious condition. If the placenta doesn't come out after birth within about half an hour is what would be considered normative. Huge risk of massive hemorrhaging if the placenta doesn't come out. So I asked the question, okay we have this midwife, she's Jewish, would she have been literate, first of all? And the evidence about literacy in Jewish communities in Jewish communities generally is high. How much literacy there is among women is another question. Could she have read either Hebrew text on obstetrics or Latin text on obstetrics? Could she have participated in this longer discourse about what do you do when the placenta is retained? And what I found was that there was in fact two different lines of argument. Is avicenna would have said, just wait, it will resolve itself, it will come out, just wait. Another line of medical opinion was no, you have to reach in and take it out forcefully. And so what I raised the question is if she were literate, in fact that would have complicated her decision because she had two different expectations about what the normal procedure would be. So for me it matters very much whether or not women can participate in these traditions of passing lore on from person to person, from generation to generation, and from country to country. You know, very long distance transmission of information like that. Overall my answer was that the evidence was very, very slim. That there were not simply that there were so few women as writers, but very few women who could be documented to own medical texts. And even when they did own medical texts, they weren't necessarily owning texts on women's medicine. So that's the larger picture is that I think all of those questions are related. Okay, well it's sort of summing up, just to bring things to a conclusion, I think a lot of what you've said shows us that there are very deep parallels between the history of philosophy and history of medicine in this period. So just to mention a few of the things that you brought up, we have some participation of women, as we were just talking about, Hildegard of Bingen in both cases actually. But just as you said, the 15th century really seems to be a kind of new period for the possibility of participation in women. I would say there's probably a bit more. The picture for women in philosophy might look a little bit better than what you were describing for the medieval period than medicine, but you still have to look pretty hard for surviving texts. There's not a lot of surviving texts by women, so that's one thing. Another thing is that you have this transformative process by which Greek and Arabic texts are brought into Latin. The choices they make as translators, everything you said about that would also apply to translations of philosophical texts, of course. And then you have the same kind of pattern of innovation and so on. And I guess my question is, is that just a kind of coincidence? Is it because medicine and philosophy travel together that their patterns of development in this period are so similar? Or am I sort of leaping to the conclusion too quickly that medicine develops in this period sort of along the same track that philosophy does? I would say there are repeated intersections between medicine and philosophy. Number one, in the sense that, as Galen would have said in the second century, the best physician is also a philosopher. That so much of what physicians do is speculative. I mean, we have the word physician in our language now because physic is the task of seeing inside the body. The surgeon, for most of the period that I work on surgery, is really working on the surface of the body. Taking care of broken bones and so forth, but there is no exploratory surgery. There will be almost nothing that is going deep into the cavities of the body. Pharmacy has a kind of an intellectual and in some regard even almost mathematical element in the sense that you're trying to calculate the intensity of the medicine with the intensity of the condition in the patient's body. But with physic, it's all speculation. You're trying to interpret what is the physiology that's going on in the body? What is going on with the blood? What is going on with the urine? Urine analysis is the most symbolic aspect of medical practice in this period. In fact, many representations that you find of physicians, and I've been able to document this, the point at which that holding up, and I'm sure you've seen pictures of this, of a physician holding up a urine glass. That's the iconic, in the same way we would say somebody with a white coat and a stethoscope is the iconic image of the physician now. In the Middle Ages, it would have been the urine glass because the urine is one of the few means that you can have something coming out of the body that tells you what is going on inside of the body. But the entire process of that is speculative. And so the foundation of it is a foundation based on really Aristotelian philosophy and dialectic. And I think in many cases, again, we don't know a lot about the earliest phases of development of medicine, but in terms of once we're talking about a university context of medicine, in the 13th century and into the 14th century, these are people who would have all, to go into physics, to go into medicine, you would have already studied Aristotle. That capability of understanding that level of logical analysis is the foundation for everything that comes after it. So yes, absolutely, they go hand in hand. Well, speaking of logical analysis, the next figure I'm going to be moving on to in the podcast is one of the great logicians of the 14th century. Some people might say the greatest logician. He's up there with William of Ockham and other great minds in the history of logic in the 14th century. And this is John Buridan. And we'll be seeing also that he contributed greatly to science and in particular physics. So that's what we'll be moving on to next. For now, I would like to thank Monica Green very much for coming on to share some of her vast knowledge of medieval medicine with us. Thank you very much. And please join me next time as we move on to John Buridan here on the history of philosophy without any gaps. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Portrait of the Artist, John Burridden. Can a medieval philosopher be fashionable? We'll probably never see Hildegard of Bingen's music feature in the pop charts or teenagers ensuring that "#HenryofGhent trends on Twitter." But even among scholars of medieval philosophy, there are trends and fashions. As I've mentioned before, Thomas Aquinas is nowadays like a television sitcom that has been running for too many seasons, still beloved but overly familiar. Who then is the hipster's scholastic philosopher? Actually, Henry of Ghent is a candidate and certainly Scodas has received a lot of attention in recent scholarship. But as far as I can tell, the most fashionable choice these days is John Burridden. The last few episodes have already given a sense of why this should be. His name has come up numerous times as we've looked at 14th century developments in logic and physics. But there's more than his historical importance at play here. Burridden is a perfect match for the concerns of today's analytic philosophers, who for better or worse are today's arbiters of what counts as cool in the history of philosophy. Burridden shares their technical virtuosity, their enthusiasm for empirical science, and equal impatience for extravagant metaphysics. And perhaps most importantly, his philosophy seems to be resolutely non-religious. Obviously, Burridden was no atheist, and theological issues inevitably come up in his works from time to time. Usually though, he mentions such issues simply to explain that they are above his pay grade, because he is not a theologian but a master of arts. As far as we know, Burridden never even attempted to get a higher degree, and remained a teacher in the arts faculty in Paris for about 40 years, from the 1320s until his death around 1361. In today's terms, this would be a bit like working as a high school teacher instead of becoming a university professor. Now, I'm a university professor who has nothing but admiration for high school teachers, I'm sure I couldn't do that job. But still, one might wonder whether Burridden lacked ambition or perhaps fell foul of some sort of political intrigue? Apparently not the latter, he was supported with numerous stipends during his time in Paris. Rather, it seems that the faculty of arts suited Burridden's interests, which lay with the study of logic and the other sciences covered by Aristotle like physics and ethics. At one point, he asks why the arts faculty is lower than those of theology, medicine, or law. His answer is a pointed one, the arts faculty has less money, but it studies more fundamental things, since logic and physics provide the principles for the higher disciplines. Because Burridden did not become a theologian, we have no lectures from him on the sentences of Peter Lombard, as we do for other major late medieval thinkers like Scotus and Occam. But there's plenty to read nonetheless, starting with numerous commentaries on Aristotle, including the physics and ethics, as well as all the logical treatises. These systematic accounts of Aristotle were extremely influential in subsequent generations, not only in Paris, but also at the new universities that emerged in central and eastern Europe, something we'll look at in a later episode. Equally important was the work that must count as Burridden's greatest achievement, the massive Summuli De Dialectica, or Compendium of Dialectic. A substantial reworking and expansion of an earlier logical compendium written by Peter of Spain about a century earlier, Burridden's Summuli would become a standard textbook of logic in the medieval university. It epitomizes what would come to be called the Via Moderna, the nominalist approach to logic and philosophy as a whole. For Burridden's young students, studying logic was probably like being made to eat their vegetables. For Burridden himself though, logic is a nourishing meal in itself, served in nine courses. This is the number of treatises in his Summuli devoted to the various branches of logic we've already discussed, like category theory, supposition theory, consequences, demonstrations, sophisms, and so on. For Burridden, logic as a whole is a practically oriented discipline with two aspects. First, there is what he calls theoretical logic from which we learn how to put together arguments in principle. Second, there is applied logic where logic is actually being deployed to argue for a given conclusion. So the logic student is acquiring a skill that will serve him in good stead no matter what kind of discourse he may want to interpret or produce. In keeping with this practical conception of logic, Burridden is keenly interested in the way language is actually used in real texts and arguments. It's in part on this basis that he rejects the approach of these speculative grammarians who had dominated this subject a couple of generations before and were still active in his day. It's futile to infer the function of a word from its grammatical form, he thinks, because natural languages just don't work that way. Burridden gives the nice example of verbs that are grammatically active but passive in meaning, like to receive. One response might be to purify natural language, working with an ideal version of Latin free of such unfortunate deviations from true logical form. This is not Burridden's way, and for good reason. He thinks that language is thoroughly conventional with meaning determined by the intentions of language users. He defends this picture of language in a number of ways. One of them more spectacular is a thought experiment. Suppose he says that there were a cataclysm in which our language is entirely lost. A new language might then arise in which the word donkey is used to refer to animals in general. In this situation, probably the least frightening post-apocalyptic scenario ever envisioned, it would be true to say, a human is a donkey, because the word donkey would mean what the word animal means now. Burridden also considers more realistic cases as when language is used metaphorically or ironically. If you want to hear terms being used to supposit in an unusual way, just hang out with teenagers. This is not to say that language is a free-for-all, where every term is given its meaning anew on each occasion of use. Normally, when we say donkey, we are referring to donkeys, and this normal or proper use needs to be explained somehow. Burridden's suggestion is a case where his ideas resonate with modern-day proposals. Like some philosophers of language nowadays, he thinks that words initially receive their meaning in a kind of baptism, where a word is initially imposed on a certain thing. The clearest case would be giving a proper name to an individual, as parents do when a baby is born. Even in this case, meaning is set by the intentions of language users, in this case the parents. To this extent, the assignment of a word's primary meaning is like deviant cases, as when a teenager is asked how she is doing and says, fine. Here too, the teenager's intention determines the word's meaning, namely that it is none of your business. Burridden here avails himself of Occam's idea that the same mental concepts can be expressed in different conventional signs. In that example of the language apocalypse, he says that the word donkey would come to represent the same thing at the mental level that the word animal does now. While this does sound very much like Occam, Burridden is less inclined to think of concepts as a language, properly speaking. For him, language is thoroughly conventional, whereas our minds latch onto things in the world via a natural process of concept formation. Burridden's explanation of how this occurs is thoroughly nominalistic. As he puts it, whatever exists outside the soul does so in reality as an individual that is distinct from all else. Our access to those things outside the soul is through sensation of individual things, which is why it makes sense to speak of Burridden as an empiricist. Once you have encountered individual donkeys, your mind can entertain a singular concept of each specific donkey and also form a universal concept of donkeys in general. It may seem that the nominalist's main problem is to account for the latter possibility. If there are no real universals, then how do we form universal concepts? But Burridden actually thinks this is quite straightforward. Individual donkeys obviously resemble one another, the long ears, the big dark eyes, the rich and distinctive scent. To form a notion of donkeys, we simply abstract these shared features, ignoring the properties that belong to only one donkey, like your own donkey's name, its location in your barn, or its tendency to step on your foot. A realist like Walter Burley would of course insist that the similarity between donkeys is the result of their having a real common nature. Burridden dismisses this idea though. If mere likeness is enough to justify positing a common nature, then such natures will proliferate uncontrollably. Suppose your donkey does step on your foot. In the moment it does so, it becomes like everything else that steps on anyone's foot. But surely this is not in virtue of some real common nature. He, Burridden, not the donkey, finds it somewhat more puzzling how we can have singular concepts. This is because we are not completely reliable in re-identifying individual things. If I snuck into your barn and replace your donkey with mine, you might not notice it until the donkey failed to step on your foot all the time. Or you might run into my identical twin brother Glenn and apply your concept of me to him, telling him how much you like his philosophy podcast. He gets that all the time. As far as I know, Burridden didn't have a twin brother, but he gives an equally compelling example. Suppose you are at sea and fall asleep. When you wake up, you will not be able to see that the ship has drifted because you cannot tell one part of the water from another. In light of this, Burridden thinks that a singular concept can only ever be tied to an individual because we are actually sensing that individual. As he puts it, the thing must be in the prospect of the cognizing person. This means that if you have not had an individual be in your physical presence, you can only ever grasp them under a description that could in theory apply to other individuals. It's only in this weaker sense that we have a singular concept of Burridden, for example, since none of us have ever met him. A realist like Walter Burley would of course find this whole account inadequate. And here's one reason why. Burridden has said that we grasp things universally simply by focusing on features found in many individuals. Outside the soul, it is only the individuals that are real. But in that case, can't we just divide up the world however we like? Instead of contrasting donkeys and humans, we could contrast those creatures that step on people's feet with those that don't. The former may be a more useful kind of classification, but it is no more rooted in the common natures of things because things have no real common natures. Doesn't this undermine Aristotelian science? According to Aristotle, a proper demonstration that yields true understanding must be universal in scope and must also get at essential properties. How can we retain this idea if we accept that our universal concepts are just based on any old likenesses? Burridden expert Gyula Klima has taken up this problem and contrasted realist essentialism with what he calls predicate essentialism. He explains that for Burridden, an essential predicate will be a feature that things must have in order to keep existing. Thus all donkeys need to have their predicates living and non-rational if they are to remain the same individuals that they are now. By contrast, stepping on someone's foot is a property that a given donkey can have and then lose, much to the relief of its victim. This is why we will never encounter a donkey that is not alive or that is rational, whereas we can encounter donkeys that are not stepping on anyone's foot. Hence the universality of a statement in Aristotelian science, such as all donkeys are alive. In Burridden's technical terms, this is a matter of ampliation. By speaking of all donkeys, we ampliate the word donkey so that it refers to every individual donkey that exists now, that ever has existed or ever will exist. Every one of these donkeys is alive and non-rational and must remain so if it is to avoid being destroyed. For Burridden, this is all we mean by the contrast between essential and accidental predicates, and it is enough to suit the requirements set down in Aristotle's philosophy of science. All this talk of donkeys will probably put you in mind of the most famous idea ascribed to Burridden. Where Occam had a razor, Burridden had an ass. He is famous for devising the example of a hungry donkey or ass that is presented with two equally tempting bales of hay. Would the donkey be able to choose arbitrarily between the two bales, or just stand there starving to death? Obviously, the latter answer is, well, asinine. Surely the donkey would indeed just choose some hay and start eating. But how is this possible? It would seem, after all, that we choose to do one thing rather than another precisely because we judge it to be preferable. In the case of the donkey, this explanation is not available, neither bale of hay can be preferred to the other, yet choice seems to occur nonetheless. It's unfortunate that Burridden is so famous for having invented this intriguing puzzle, because in fact he didn't. For one thing, it was invented quite a bit earlier by the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali. Admittedly, his discussion of the problem is donkey-free, and instead asks us to imagine a human choosing between two equally appealing dates. But more importantly, the donkey example actually never appears in Burridden's writings. It was used by later authors when they discussed his position on free will. Let's then take a look at what Burridden does say about human freedom. He tends to break with the voluntarism of Scotus and Occam, returning to a more intellectualist position like that we found in Aquinas. According to this position, choice is simply the will's execution of a judgment reached by the intellect. That seems true to our experience of making decisions, where we do usually choose what seems, upon reflection, to be the best course of action. Yet it seems that sometimes the will fails to follow the dictates of reason. Or does it? Burridden thinks that it can, but only in a very limited way. One cannot simply reject one's own overall best judgment about what to do and do something different. When your will seems to be overwhelming your capacity for judgment, it is actually that capacity for judgment that is causing the problem. Suppose that, despite being an animal lover, you give into anger and beat your donkey because it steps on your foot. Here your judgment that it would be good to seek revenge has temporarily overwhelmed your general conviction that animals should be treated with kindness. But Burridden does make an important exception. The will can defer following reason in cases where the situation seems uncertain. Suppose you see a succulent apple on a shelf. You are hungry and judge that it would be good to eat the apple. But you might wait before eating it just in case. Perhaps the apple has a worm in it. Perhaps it is really a ceramic apple that would break your teeth. Perhaps some other more tempting food will come along soon. Perhaps your donkey will be hungry and your donkey loves apples. You needn't have one specific belief that undermines the judgment in favor of eating an apple. Indeed, if you did that would be a case where reason judges that the apple should not be eaten. Rather, you hold off because your will is adopting a cautious wait-and-see attitude. The rational judgment is not rejected, but filed under things to be done later when the time seems right. The will might also do this when the thing that seems best to the intellect is particularly daunting and difficult. So now we can see why the donkey and the bales of hay would be a puzzle worth putting to Burridden or even a mockery of his position. Put in that situation, would the donkey just defer acting indefinitely? Presumably his answer would be that if donkeys had reason and free choice, and in fact he thinks they don't, then the donkey would simply judge that it should pick one bale of hay at random and start eating. Nothing in Burridden's view would seem to foreclose this rather banal response. Burridden's treatment of freedom is unusual in another respect. He feels the need to respond to skeptical worries about whether we are indeed capable of free choice. Denying this would, he thinks, be pernicious in religious, scientific, and moral terms. He also considers it simply evident from experience that we do make choices all the time. Nonetheless, Burridden admits it is not possible to prove that we are free. Sometimes medieval thinkers say that a certain proposition is unprovable precisely because it is so obvious. As Aristotle observed, demonstrations should use more obvious or better-known premises to establish less obvious conclusions. It is at best pointless and at worst methodologically incoherent to try to prove something blindingly obvious. But that doesn't seem to be quite what Burridden means here. Though he considers it evident that we are free, he also considers this an exalted topic of inquiry that may elude our capacity for scientific demonstration. This slightly uncomfortable combination, confidence in what seems evident to us, coupled with an awareness of the fallibility of human reasoning, also characterizes Burridden's response to his fellow Parisian Nicholas of Autrecourt. Nicholas mounts a case for skepticism that is unprecedented in the medieval period for both its sophistication and its potentially far-reaching implications. Answering this challenge, Burridden decides to move the epistemological goalposts. He argues that we can consider ourselves to be capable of certain knowledge so long as we have a properly modest understanding of what certainty involves. As we'll see, Burridden's vocation as an arts master will be relevant here. Confronted with skeptical arguments that appeal to God's power to deceive us and confound our expectations, he simply says that such worries are not his concern. Sure, God can perform miracles, but this is a matter for theologians to sort out. Could this really be an adequate response to the skeptic? We'll find out in a couple of episodes when we look at the clash between John Burridden and Nicholas of Autrecourt. First, though, we're going to rely on something that is far more certain, the expertise of Jack Zupko. He's a leading scholar of Burridden's thought who will join me for an interview about this most fashionable of 14th century scholastics next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of Alberta. Today's episode will be an interview about John Buridan with Jack Zypko, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta. Hi, Jack. Yeah. Hi, Peter. Thanks. This is very nice. Yeah, it's great to have you on the series because we're going to be talking about John Buridan and you're someone who's published a lot about him, including a book about Buridan, which is subtitled Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. And I take the subtitle to be an indication of the importance of the fact that he remained in the faculty of arts, which is unusual. I mean, he doesn't join one of the orders. He doesn't become a Franciscan or Dominican. And also he doesn't join the theology faculty. So in this respect, he's unlike a lot of the other major medieval philosophers we've looked at like Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and so on. So what do you think that these biographical facts tell us about his philosophical project? Yeah. Well, I think actually that they tell us quite a bit about Buridan, but it's all indirect because he never himself tells us why he remains a career arts master, why he doesn't join a religious order like the Dominicans and Franciscans. But there would have been reasons for doing so. The normal career path for an academic in the fourteenth century in Paris was to study for your arts degree, become a master, and lecture in arts, and then move on to an advanced faculty, very often theology, and support yourself as a theology student by lecturing on arts. We have evidence of this as well. Not uniquely, but unlike almost everyone else we know from the period, Buridan remains for his entire career for almost 30 years in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris and remains an arts master without ever advancing to the Faculty of Theology or as far as we know ever attempting to earn a theology degree. And that's despite the fact that he was pretty well known in his own lifetime as a very smart guy. Indeed. He seems to have made a career for himself as a secular master. In my view, I think you can find some evidence of this in his writings, he seems very conscious of this fact and very conscious as well of his role in commenting on Aristotle and of the idea, and you see this in his works from the 1340s and 1350s, of the idea that perhaps philosophy is a secular enterprise. Now that in itself wasn't terribly surprising I don't think because Thomas Aquinas for example never refers to a Christian as a philosopher. For him philosophy is a pagan activity. So Augustine is not a philosopher, Augustine is a theologian. Exactly right. So that's the sort of, and you can see how that was kind of translated over into career paths and so on. But Buridan takes this a little bit differently. For him a philosopher is indeed, it's a secular, not a pagan activity, but it's different from theology. The reason I say this is because he never in his writings to my knowledge refers to theology as a scientia or a science in the Aristotelian sense, meaning a body of knowledge. That's quite significant. Now it wouldn't have been his place as an arts master to pronounce on theology. He would have gotten into trouble for that for sure. But it's telling that whenever he uses the term scientia, which is knowledge which philosophers should be concerned with, he doesn't ever say that this form of knowing exists in the faculty of theology. He more typically says the theologians will decide for themselves and kind of pushes it off. But I think that we can, in many places, we can read that as saying he's skeptical about whether you can have genuine scientia in theology. I guess then your idea is that he really wanted to have certain knowledge and that's what his goal was in his writings and he thought that was something he could only achieve in the secular philosophical arts faculty. Well, I think, and it's also tied together with this notion, and this is what I tried to push in my book, of placing philosophy on a new and secular foundation, by which we mean not a theological foundation. So this is something that could be respectfully pursued by someone who's a Christian. And it would be involved with questions, a menu of questions if you will, that were determined by Aristotle and the commentary tradition on Aristotle's writings that would begin in logic, the art of art and science of sciences, as Peter of Spain said, and move out from there to metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, and so on. And I see this as a very significant change from the way philosophy was done, not just from the way philosophy was done in the 13th century, but also among his peers. And in fact it seems like a premonition of what's to come in centuries later, early modern philosophy and so on. That's the harder part of the argument and I certainly don't want to suggest that really modernity in philosophy, forget about Descartes, it begins with Buridan. He invented philosophy as we understand it. That's much too strong a claim. Oh come on, it's just a podcast. Right. You can say it here. Yeah, right. It's not in print. Zany and crazy claims. Well it's possible that we could advance this, but we have a lot of filling in to do. So we know that Buridan as well was terrifically influential in the universities, especially in Eastern Europe and Northern Italy. His students went out and then took copies of Buridan's writings with them and used those writings as the basis for their own commentaries on Aristotle. So we have this kind of chain of transmission and we don't know a lot about it going into the 15th century, but the more we learn about it and we continue to see Buridan's hand and Buridan's influence in the way books like De Anima were read, we'll one day be able to have a kind of seamless story between late scholasticism and the early modern period, Descartes and thinkers like that. And there's no doubt that Buridan will be a major part of that story. I think so. I think so, just because of the way he does things. Now obviously the arts faculty was not invented to facilitate this sort of project. It's intended to train younger students. And something else that you in fact emphasize a lot in your book is that Buridan was a teacher and that his writings were produced in a pedagogical context. What does that mean for us as readers of Buridan? How does it affect the way that we should follow through a commentary on Aristotle or other works that he wrote? Yeah. It means that we should be careful, or at least I've always found when I read Buridan, careful about surface appearances because sometimes things can appear fairly straightforward and simplistic because he is teaching. He is trying to tell arts undergraduates what they need to know about Aristotle. But if you look further and read more deeply, you see that he replies to questions in ways that very much engage the arguments and that signal important shifts in position, including shifts away from Aristotle. But it's all done in a kind of subtle fashion. And so when you read Buridan, you shouldn't expect the writer of independent treatises saying here are the principles of philosophy and here is how it goes. Working in a commentary tradition, he was guided initially by authoritative texts. And those were not just the texts of Aristotle, but in logic texts like Peter of Spain. So there was a textbook tradition of logic. Buridan does amazing things in logic. He revolutionizes logic, but he does it within this commentary context on Peter of Spain. And you have to read far enough to see what he's doing. So this is just the latest example of something that we've seen really throughout almost the whole history of philosophy now, which is that often the most innovative thinkers are presenting their ideas within the context of writing commentaries. We saw it in late antiquity. We saw it actually in the later Islamic period, even later than Buridan. We've also been seeing it throughout Latin medieval philosophy. Yeah, unfortunately, I think the commentary as a genre is not well thought of in our world. People imagine, well, a commentary that's not original and how could we find good philosophy in a commentary? It's simply someone riffing on themes that have been discussed by others. But that's very far from the truth. Really a lot of things were going on in commentaries and a lot of original work as well. But on the other hand, it seems like the teaching context would impose certain limits on Buridan's project. So something you've already mentioned is that he doesn't see it as part of his task, or even maybe he doesn't see it as something he's allowed to do, to venture into more theological territory. And I guess that one might also say he's not going to stray too far from the topics that let's say Aristotle has set in the source text because otherwise he's not writing a commentary anymore. Yeah, yeah. So the genre, and not specifically the commentary, but the subject matter, and so the curriculum of the University of Paris for undergraduates was what determined what Buridan was lecturing on. He doesn't stray too far away, but again, beneath that rubric, I'll give you an example that might bring this home, not so much with Aristotle but with Peter of Spain. His logical masterwork, the Simulae De dialectica, which became the logic textbook in most of Europe for several hundred years afterwards, is written as a commentary on Peter of Spain. So you go into that and you find Buridan treating sometimes some very old material, doing logic in a way that was no longer done in the 14th century. But he reinvents things. And there's one place, the fourth treatise on supposition, where he thought Peter of Spain's remarks were just so badly done that he took them out and replaced them with his own. That's not exactly a commentary. So it's not a commentary, right? But he rewrites the source text so that it should say what it should say and works from there. So there's actually, I think, quite a bit of room for inventiveness within the genre, and indeed within the pedagogical context of the university. And of course, even in earlier generations, we see people like Scodas really bending the notion of what could be in a commentary. Absolutely. Say a commentary on the sentences of Peter Lombard. It's not like they're just quoting each sentence of Lombard and then saying what Lombard means. Exactly. They change it into a question format where they handle one topic after another and so on. Yeah. And indeed there's a distinction within the genre between the expositio, which is a literal commentary, typically a line-by-line exposition of the authoritative text, and the quaestio, which is, as it suggests, a question based on the text. And the question usually comes from a lemma from the text. And these quaestiones develop lives of their own so that you'd see arts masters treating the same questions and responding to each other and each other's arguments in the context of these questions. And that gets them quite far away from the original source. Indeed. Right. Yeah. So, in terms of the content that gets presented in these works, I guess the thing that Bergen is most known for is being a nominalist. And something else that you argue for in your book, which kind of surprised me, because I think of the 14th century as a time where realism and nominalism are jousting for supremacy, you say, well, not really, because in a way Bergen could take nominalism as the default position. Yes. He basically felt that that position had won the day, as it were. Yeah. And thus, you suggest that we shouldn't see him so much through the lens of nominalism as such as see him as what you call a parsimonious. Yeah. And so I'm wondering whether you could say something more about what you take that to mean. Sure. I think that for Buriden, and indeed for other 14th century thinkers, nominalism is not a bit of doctrine, right? It shouldn't be thought of as a position on whether there are real universals or not. That was a part of it, and nominalists did hold this view. But to my mind, and certainly, you know, Buriden is a very good example of this, nominalism is a method. It's a way of doing philosophy, and it's guided by a new way of doing logic that begins to be practiced by people like William of Ockham and is perfected by Buriden. And it involves an important change in semantic theory. In particular, the most important of those changes is the shift in theory of predication. So before the new logic, the standard theory of predication was called the Inherence Theory. Roughly, a sentence is true just in case the predicate of the sentence inheres in its subject. Now, of course, you can see that if you look into this further, you have to do quite a bit of metaphysics, right, in order to understand the phenomenon of predication. The new logic, the terminus logic that Buriden and Ockham practice rejects this. It says roughly that a sentence is true just in case the subject term stands for the same thing as the predicate term. There's no— They both have the same deposit. Exactly. There's the same object out in the world satisfies both the subject and predicate term. Precisely. So we bracket or shove aside any notion of adherence or predication becomes more a question of reference, right, of individuals in the world. And that completely turns around semantic theory and allows us—allowed semantic theory to be disconnected from very thorny metaphysical issues that it had really bogged down with from the time of Abelard on. Just to make sure that I get this, the difference then would be if you take a sentence like, Peter is bald, which sadly I am. So the first initial position, the inheritance position, is that baldness somehow inheres in me or exists in me. And of course then that puts the onus on the proponent of this theory to say what my baldness is. Exactly. Because it's evidently a real thing out in the world. What's the quality baldness? That's a kind of universal. It's a common nature. Is it a property that you share with others and so on? And it fails to inhere in you because you have a nice thick head of hair. Still. Still, okay. But it does exist in Telle Sivalis. Yes. The star of Kojak. Indeed. Right. It's not a very contemporary reference. And on the new logic view, you say, well, the reason the sentence is true is that I satisfy the name Peter because Peter refers to me and I satisfy the predicate baldness because I'm bald. Bald man, right? Okay. Or bald individual. Peter are the same person. Right. The same individual. So the sentence is true. Okay. Right. Yeah. Now, what does Burieden bring that earlier nominalists hadn't in defending this way of thinking about predication or does he take it so much for granted that he feels like he doesn't need to defend it? I think it's the latter. I don't know of any place where he offers a kind of defense of this as the way. It's his very methodology. And going back to the book, I think it's what characterizes his kind of philosophical outlook. So it's not the case that there weren't people around in the 14th century who believed in real universals. Walter Burley is a kind of realist who believes in universals. But it's the way in which you think about subjects and predicates and common natures and so on. And the way in which they're used in arguments and the way in which the truth conditions of those arguments are explicated that makes all the difference. The other thing I would say there too is that for Burieden and most of his contemporaries, if you talked about realism, for them initially at least, it was Plato's realism, which they only understood in cartoon form from Aristotle's metaphysics, who has all kinds of arguments against it. And in Burieden and other 14th century authors not having Plato's works, Platonic realism was hilarious. Surely you're not a Platonic realist was typically the way they approached it. Poor Plato. Yeah, yeah. It's sad. They certainly had respect for him, but the respect was… and they knew of course that they only had the first half of the Timaeus in Latin. But on the question of universals, virtually everyone thought that Plato's view was a non-starter. Because they're basically just using Aristotle's critique of Plato as their source for knowledge about Plato. That's right. One advantage I think of seeing him as a parsimonious thinker instead of concentrating on this debate about nominalism and realism concerning universals is that we can apply this conception of his methodology in other areas of his philosophy. And one that we should probably mention, because you're part of the team that's producing the translation and edition of the De Anima commentary, so the commentary by Burieden on Aristotle's On the Soul, is psychology, so what he has to say about the soul. How does his parsimonious approach to philosophy manifest itself in that context? Yeah, well there's a couple of different ways. One way that applies across the board is through judicious use of the razor, right? So what we know as Occam's razor, you know, it's certainly found in Occam, was not known in the Middle Ages as Occam's razor. But the notion that when you explain a phenomenon, you know, especially a natural phenomenon, you should use as few entities as you can to construct a satisfactory explanation. That runs throughout Burieden's metaphysics and natural philosophy. I would say that the highest level, it comes out in Burieden's efforts to, I want to use here the term naturalism, but I don't mean it in a contemporary sense, in quite the sense that we have now, but I mean it in the sense that Burieden resolutely focuses on nature and the way in which the natural world unfolds and wants to come up with the most parsimonious understanding of that. And if a phenomenon is complex, he's certainly willing to come up with a complex explanation, and we can see this in his writings when he's talking about the propagation of light and vision, right? He knew this was a complex phenomenon because he had sources from Islamic philosophy and perspectivism and so on that he was dealing with. And along with the naturalism, there's a sort of shying away, if you will, from purely metaphysical explanations. It seems like this area of the soul in particular is one where, first of all, from our point of view, they're all positing a superfluous entity, namely the immaterial soul, or at least a very controversial entity. I mean, maybe some of the listeners believe in immaterial souls as well, but a lot of people would say, well, you don't need that. And I guess I wonder why wouldn't Burieden be led by his own methodology to say, well, surely if I can have the body performing certain faculties, maybe the explanatory principle of soul in general is just otios. Yeah, yeah. Well, indeed, if one were to follow the naturalism kind of all the way down, you would arrive at such a position. And in fact, what Burieden does here is quite interesting. Where the human intellect of soul is concerned, and this is the controversial item, right, it's the immaterial soul. It's supposed to be in here in the body somehow and be extended, but not by the extension of the body, right? There's this problem about how something immaterial can be in a place and in here in something physical. When he comes to discuss this question, he says basically that the position of the Catholic faith, right, of Christianity, that the human soul is immaterial and yet inherent in the body is not demonstrable by natural reason. And in the same question, he sketches also the position of a Verruese, who has a monocychist position, a kind of single intellect of soul that's shared by all cognizers. And, this is the naturalistic position, that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, who has a material intellect. And what's very interesting is Burieden says up front that a philosopher without having the benefit of the faith should agree with the position of Alexander. In other words, should agree with the material intellect takes precisely the position you're suggesting. It's just that we know otherwise and we believe on faith that the human soul is immaterial. And I take it you think he's being sincere there? Yes. He's not sort of subtly indicating to his students, oh, by the way, the Catholic faith is wrong. Yeah. He's actually saying, well, we know this doctrine to be true, even though we can't demonstrate it. Well, we believe it to be true. You see, it's not going to be scantia because we can argue for it. So in other words, he's happy to enumerate the arguments in favor of the position as he does in the case of Averroes and Alexander and the objections. But he says if you focus on the natural evidence, the preponderance of the arguments are in favor of Alexander. But that's not demonstrative either, or at least it's not, it doesn't show that the other views are false. It reminds me a little bit of the late 13th century discussions on the eternity of the world, actually. Yeah. Where you have people, even someone like Aquinas, will say, well, actually, there's no demonstration for the eternity of the world. There's no demonstration against it. The reason that we believe it not to be eternal is that the Bible says it's not eternal, effectively. Yeah, it's certainly that, but it's also the indicating to students that, look, in holding this position, we're not sort of violating good epistemic principles. So you can't come along and say, I can demonstrate the materiality of the soul, because you can't do that, right? And he's quick to point that out. There has been, about a decade ago, an interpretation that suggested that Buridan was between the lines, a kind of crypto materialist. But I've published on this, arguing that this doesn't hold up, because there's just no evidence of it elsewhere in his writings. I suspect that his approach to this particular question was just one of setting a boundary, right? Because natural philosophy is concerned with things that are evident to sense memory and sense, following an Aristotelian line. The claim that the soul is something that's not evident in this way places it beyond the reach of the natural philosopher. One other thing that we should probably mention before we finish is Buridan's thought in physics. Yes. Because I guess the thing he's maybe most known for, other than his nominalism, is his theory of impetus, or generally what he does with Aristotelian science. Is that another area where you see this parsimonious methodology having an influence on the conclusions he reaches? Yeah, I suppose so. But I guess I wouldn't describe it as parsimony, but as yet another example of Buridan trying to develop explanations that actually fit the phenomena. So historically, at the time Buridan was writing his commentary on the physics, everyone knew that the Aristotelian theory of anti-peristasis was wrong. Or there's some— This is the view that the air kind of comes in from behind and pushes the projectile through space. Right, right. So if Aristotle's right, then I could, say, put a javelin on a table top and go behind it with a bellows and pump it quickly and the javelin would begin to move, right? Because I'm pushing it along. But Buridan knows this is wrong. And he gives us an example. He says he's noticed that on the Seine River there are barges carrying grain and these are moving up and down the Seine River. Now you'd expect that if anti-peristasis were true, that is, if the air in front of the barge, where the barge is moving, is being pushed out of the way and going to the back of the barge to fill up the vacuum that's created by the motion of the barge, the sailors would have grain blowing all over them, right? Because it would create a wind, right, that would blow the grain on them. And he says, we don't see this happening, therefore there's something wrong here. Because the grain's loosely piled just a piece of the boat. Yeah, exactly. So you can imagine there's chaff and so on. And the wind from the motion, from the push at the back, would go over the top of the boat and blow the grain on the sailors and that just doesn't happen. It's a brilliant observation, actually. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, he's very attuned to the natural world and to showing his students just why this theory doesn't make any sense. And he picks up from, well, several intermediaries, the theory comes from Philoponus, the notion that instead we should think of motion as a quality that's in an object that's somehow impressed in it. In the case of violent motion, it's impressed by the javelin, the thrower, right? And there were elaborate theories of impetus which talked about how long-lasting it was, right? So a javelin will not keep moving, right, but the impetus will gradually decline as gravity pulls it down. And he says also, and this is interesting because you'd think that only a theologian would say something like this, that this is actually a better explanation of the motion of superlunary bodies, right, the stars and the planets, because God could have put into them at the moment of their creation an eternal impetus and that would cause them to acquire the quality to keep moving in the circular fashion that they move or however it is. And that's a better explanation of their motion than anything else that was around. Yeah, this is interesting. The reason I asked about the parsimony issue in this context is that I could imagine an opponent of the impetus theory precisely on parsimonious grounds saying, well, I don't want this hypothesized occult force that's been impressed into the projectile. I want something that I know is already there and Aristotle's theory is better for that purpose because I know there's air surrounding the projectile, so if the air could somehow be pushing it along, there would be more parsimonious. In that sense, you could even argue that this is a place where he's willing to be less parsimonious because he wants to account for the phenomena. I think that's right. I think that Bearden senses that Aristotle stumbles on the phenomena here and that we have to change this, which is important to note. Just taking it back to commentaries and authority, he certainly will reject Aristotle's view where he thinks it's wrong. Another place is in the theory of modal syllogistic. All logicians knew that Aristotle's theory had serious gaps in it and was problematic. The real issue was how to fill it in and how to revamp it. And Bearden and a number of other logicians take that task on. Okay, well, we're not quite done looking at Bearden because next time we're going to be looking at skepticism in the 14th century, seeing Bearden's response to skepticism and concentrating especially on a thinker who advanced some skeptical arguments named Nicholas of Autocourt. But for now, I'll thank Jap Zukow very much for coming on the podcast. Well gosh, Peter, it's been really delightful and thanks for this opportunity to talk about Bearden with you. And please join me next time for Nicholas of Autocourt and Skepticism in the Medieval Period, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Seeing is Believing, Nicholas of Autokort's Skeptical Challenge. Is having knowledge more like being pregnant or more like being hungry? What I mean is that pregnancy is an all-or-nothing affair. It's like being alive or being located above the equator, either you are or you aren't. Being hungry, by contrast, admits of degrees taking in everything from Winnie the Pooh's hankering for a little something to the ravenous and permanently unquenched appetite of the cookie monster. If knowing is like this, then you could have more or less certain knowledge of things. You would presumably be prepared to say, for instance, that you know how old you are, but if pushed, you might admit that, though you do know this, you aren't as absolutely certain about it as you are about, say, the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 4. After all, one could devise remotely possible scenarios according to which your actual age is different. Perhaps in your first year of life, you were mixed up with another baby who had a different birthday. Or perhaps your parents are spies who falsified your birth certificate. If you start taking such scenarios really seriously, you might conclude that you don't really know how old you are after all. Then you would be starting to think that knowing is like being pregnant. Real knowledge would have to have the highest degree of certainty, and if this sort of certainty is absent, then knowledge too would be lacking. Often it is the skeptic who insists that knowledge is like this. The philosopher who leaps to mind immediately is Descartes. In his meditations, he famously subjects all his beliefs to rigorous doubt, inspecting them to see whether any of them rise to the level of absolute certainty. But Descartes was not the first to advance such a demanding test for knowledge. It was a challenge already issued by the academic skeptics in antiquity. They took advantage of the Stoics' assumption that knowledge is indeed like pregnancy, an all-or-nothing cognitive state that rules out all possibility of error. In turn, the academics propose that no belief has guaranteed certainty, so by the Stoics' demanding epistemological standards, we should admit that we know nothing, like Socrates did. Though a work by the later ancient skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, was translated into Latin around the turn of the 14th century, it doesn't seem to have had much impact, and we might easily suppose that the religious confidence of the medieval would have prevented them from seriously exploring skepticism anyway. But if we did suppose this, it would be a case where we ourselves fall into error. In fact, a number of 14th century thinkers mounted serious skeptical challenges, albeit without necessarily embracing skepticism in the end. Among them was Nicholas of Otzekor. Born around 1300, he was a contemporary of John Buridan at Paris, lecturing on theology there around the 1330s. He provides us with another entry in our melancholy list of medieval thinkers who were condemned for their teachings. This occurred in 1346, with Nicholas retracting the problematic theses in 1347. It's an interesting and rather ironic case of condemnation. Typically, we assume that philosophers ran into trouble for embracing Aristotelian doctrines too enthusiastically, as with the Parisian masters targeted in 1277. But Nicholas's unacceptable teachings were part of his polemic against Aristotelianism. In the prologue of his late work, Exigit odo Exicucionis, also known as the Universal Treatise, he complained bitterly about scholastic contemporaries who endorsed every claim in Aristotle and of Aries as if it were a self-evident truth. Nicholas sought to undermine these pretensions and in so doing, suggested that almost nothing can be known with certainty. The occasion for this onslaught on scholastic theories of knowledge was an exchange of letters with a certain Bernard of Oretzo. Two of the nine letters Nicholas wrote to Bernard survive. In the first letter, Nicholas is drawing out what he sees as the consequences of Bernard's own ideas about knowledge. These ideas included the now familiar notion of intuitive cognition, the sort of direct apprehension of something that we have in sensation. It is on this basis that we judge whether or not things exist. But Bernard admitted, it could happen that we have an intuitive cognition of something that doesn't exist. What he must have in mind is a scenario like the one that worried Occam. God might create in someone the impression that they are seeing something that isn't there, like by miraculously making me see Groucho Marx standing before me. Occam foresaw the potential of such hypothetical cases to undermine our knowledge, so he insisted that genuinely intuitive cognitions do not give rise to false beliefs. In the scenario just described, if I am really having an intuitive cognition of a non-existent Groucho, that could only mean seeing Groucho while understanding that he is non-existent. Thus, intuitive cognitions are reliable and can still serve as the foundations of all our knowledge. But there's an obvious complaint to be made here, and it duly came from that specialist in complaining about Occam, namely Walter Chatton. Chatton points out that if God wants to, he can create in me the experience of seeing a non-existent Groucho that is just like the impression I would have if I really saw Groucho. So if we admit that such a miraculous event could involve an intuitive cognition, then we have to admit that such cognitions can be misleading after all. All this is the scholastic version of later skeptical puzzles like Descartes' evil demon hypothesis, or more recently, the hypothesis that all of Keanu Reeves' experiences might be a computer-generated alternate reality called the matrix. Since the illusion case is indistinguishable from the case where we are having a normal experience, shouldn't we admit that all our normal experiences are, as far as we know, illusions? We don't have to wait for Descartes or Keanu Reeves to find an affirmative answer to this question. It is precisely what Nicolas Avotacourt says in his letter to Bernard. We cannot infer with certainty that Groucho is really in front of us when we see him unless we assume that our experience is arising normally and not thanks to a supernatural intervention or other deviant source. And, since that assumption is not one we can make with certainty, we cannot ever be certain that what we are seeing is real. Nicolas is not shy in pointing out the pervasive skepticism that is looming here. If intuitive cognitions give us no certainty about the existence of the things they report, then his correspondent Bernard cannot know whether the pope exists or even whether he has a head. Nor could the apostles have been sure that Christ was crucified or rose from the dead. Seeing is believing, but it isn't knowing. Is there anything we could still be certain of in the face of these sweeping skeptical worries? Nicolas addresses himself to this question in a second letter which offers a still more penetrating critique of Aristotelian epistemology. Aristotle and the tradition he inaugurated were committed to what is nowadays called foundationalism, that is the idea that all our knowledge rests on indubitable first principles. This must be so, since otherwise we would always be justifying every proposition we assert with reference to some further proposition and this process would go on indefinitely. Nicolas is ready to admit that there is one principle that is genuinely certain. He formulates it as follows, Contradictories cannot be true at the same time. Thus, while I might not be sure whether Groucho exists, I can at least be sure that Groucho does not both exist and not exist, and that he cannot be both pregnant and not pregnant. The latter would be the better bet here. It's at this point that Nicolas shows himself to be a proponent of the all-or-nothing understanding of certain knowledge. Having granted the absolute certainty of this first principle of reasoning, he says that if anything else is to be genuinely certain, it must have the same status as that principle. Anything less certain than it will fall short of being completely evident. But this is an extraordinarily high standard for certainty. It means, as Nicolas points out, that nothing is certain unless supposing it to be false entails a contradiction. In fact, it might seem that nothing at all could be certain in this sense apart from the very principle that contradictories cannot both be true. However, Nicolas thinks that there may be other truths that are, as he puts it, reduced to this first principle. These would be propositions where the subject and the predicate are somehow really the same. For example, if human is defined as rational animal, it could be completely certain that humans are animals, since to deny this would be to contradict oneself, it would amount to saying that rational animal is not animal. Similarly, Nicolas admits that from the statement, a house exists, one can infer with total certainty that a wall exists since there can be no house without a wall. The catch is that, as we know from the first letter to Bernard, we can never have this level of certainty that any given house exists or that any given human exists. The things we know for sure simply derive from the meanings of the words. They never include anything that could on any scenario, no matter how far-fetched, be false. Nicolas's anti-Aristotelian motives become clearer as he spells out the consequences. For one thing, we cannot be sure that there are substances underlying the accidents of which we are aware. It's natural to assume that there is a substance, namely a human, underlying the sounds and visible shapes we see when we are aware of Groucho, but it is not a straightforward contradiction to suppose that accidents exist in the absence of any substance to which they belong. Here, it may be on Nicolas's mind that accidents do supposedly survive without their original substance in the case of the Eucharist, where the color and taste of bread persist even though the bread has miraculously become the body of Christ. So this is not just a bizarre yet theoretically possible scenario. According to the Christian faith, it actually happens. For another thing, we cannot be sure about necessary causal connections between things. Obviously we are accustomed to expecting that fire will heat things up, but if this should fail to occur, no contradiction would result. Thus our belief that a fire will heat a stone brought near to it falls short of true certainty, the certainty possessed by the first principle about contradictory. The upshot, as Nicolas gleefully remarks, is that all of Aristotle's physics and metaphysics is entirely deprived of certainty. But was Nicolas really seeking to replace the confident convictions of Aristotelian science with thoroughgoing skepticism? Apparently not. At the end of his first letter, Nicolas mentions briefly that in disputations at the Sorbonne in Paris, he has affirmed the evident certainty of the deliverances of the senses and of our own actions. It would have been nice to hear more about this. But it seems at least to show that Nicolas is far from embracing the skeptical implications he has just outlined. His point is rather that Bernard's more traditional scholastic position would lead to those disastrous implications. In fact, when Nicolas was later attacked for his teachings, he did emphasize that everything stated in his letters to Bernard was intended only as a dialectical refutation, not as a statement of his own views. Yet we may still wonder, in the face of his arguments, how could any confidence in our everyday beliefs be restored? One obvious way out would be to reject Nicolas's assumption about the all-or-nothing nature of knowledge and certainty. This is how supporters of Aristotelian orthodoxy responded. One of them, named Master Giles, wrote a letter to Nicolas in which he insisted that certainty does come in degrees. So here we are back to the idea that knowledge is like being hungry in that it admits of more and less. As Giles points out, Aristotle himself said that in a proper demonstration, we should be more confident about our premises than the conclusion since we are trying to reason from what we know better to what is as yet unknown. Yet the conclusion may nonetheless be certain, having been established through this very demonstration. Another more subtle way to reply to Nicolas might be to say that whether one counts oneself as certain depends on context. The standards of certainty appropriate to mathematics are not the same as those appropriate to knowing how old I am. In mathematics, all the certain truths are full-blown logical necessities. It would be unreasonable to demand that our everyday beliefs need to meet that standard. A version of this answer was put forward by John Buridan. He agrees that some principles are certain because denying them would involve embracing a contradiction. These would include such things as saying that human is animal. But not everything of which we are certain has certainty in this strongest degree. When we are doing natural philosophy, we should seek and accept the type of certainty relevant to natural things. This means we are allowed to exclude the occurrence of miraculous examples like the ones that worried Occam and Chatton. Sure, God can make accidents exist with no substance, prevent fire from burning things, or cause something to appear to exist when it does not. But if we are doing natural philosophy, this is irrelevant because the conclusions reached in that context are certain under the proviso that the causes involved are indeed natural, not supernatural. Buridan's solution hearkens back to the stance of Boethius of Dacia, one of the so-called Latin Averroists in the 13th century. He too claimed the right to set aside theological possibilities as long as one is doing physics. Thus, he could show that the world is eternal because no natural motion can arise from nothing, while admitting that this conclusion is overturned once we take into account supernatural creation by God. This sort of response is actually one that Nicholas anticipated himself. He pointed out that certainty about the deliverances of the senses can be secured so long as one assumes that no miracle is taking place, but with his typically demanding approach, added that that assumption is itself uncertain. But I tend to think that Buridan is right. The best way to answer the skeptic is not to show that our knowledge can survive radical scenarios like miracles, evil demons, or the matrix. It is to say that that test is too demanding, and that our beliefs can count as knowledge even if we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that the beliefs in question are false. Nicholas himself seems to have realized this. In the aforementioned universal treatise, he too lowers the bar for human knowledge, albeit in a different way than Buridan. Here, Nicholas still insists that complete certainty is nearly impossible to achieve. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that the principle about the contradictories, named in his second letter as the sole example of absolute certainty, may not be so certain after all. He imagines someone being habituated to suppose that two contradictory things could both be true. Instead of embracing radical skepticism though, he admits that we may not need absolute certainty anyway. We should instead accept that our grasp of the truth is, as Nicholas puts it, merely probable. This means that we have better reason to affirm the belief than deny it, perhaps much better reason, without being able actually to prove it beyond all possible doubt. The human mind is able to find itself at rest in endorsing such beliefs, confident of being right while still accepting the theoretical possibility of being wrong. But if we are expecting Nicholas to restore the teachings of Aristotelian scholasticism with the sole caveat that they are probable rather than certain, we have another thing coming. We saw other scholastics of this period flirting with the idea that there could be atoms, indivisible components of which perceptible bodies are made. Nicholas doesn't just flirt with this idea, he asks it to come home with him for the night and makes it breakfast in the morning. In themselves, he argues, the components of the universe are eternal. When we seem to see substances being generated and destroyed, in fact we are seeing eternal atoms combining and separating. This revisionary account of physical change goes nicely with his continued doubts about the causes invoked by Aristotelian thinkers. Like Al-Ghazali before him and David Hume after him, Nicholas suggests that experience of the connection between events only yields an expectation that things will be similar in the future. His examples here are well chosen, the way that magnets attract iron and the efficacy of medicine. In these cases, we have no clear understanding of the relation between cause and effect, only a habit of expecting the iron to move towards the magnet and of the disease to be cured. Nicholas of Autocourt was not the only one to voice skeptical ideas around the middle of the 14th century. Similar worries about causation can be found in John of Miracourt, another Parisian thinker who was in fact centred in 1347, the same year that Nicholas was forced to recant his views. For John too, the knowledge that a cause will yield an effect lacks the certainty possessed by a certain first principle. In England, the same sort of ideas were put forth by Robert Holcott, who emphasized the absolute power of God to stop causes from working normally. Even when heat does follow fire, this does not prove that fire caused it any more than the fact that people get afraid in the dark shows that darkness is the cause of fear. More radical still was the Oxford theologian Nicholas Astin. For him, we can never be certain about anything unless it is necessarily true and nothing outside of God is necessary. In theory at least, this banishes all common sense belief from the realm of genuine knowledge. Astin gives some memorable examples, as for instance that there is no outright contradiction involved in the same person being in two places at the same time. If this is possible, then it should also be possible for a person to walk up to another version of himself and cut off his own head. Astin also addressed himself to a question raised by the early medieval theologian Peter Damian, asserting that God can change the past, since no necessary truths would be violated were he to do so. What accounts for this spread of skeptical concerns in the 14th century? The most obvious explanations is that scholastics were impressed by God's power to do anything that is logically possible. With this threat lurking in the background, all knowledge about the created world would seem to be, as it were, marked with an asterisk. It may be true that fire heats, that substances underlie accidents, and that people can't be in more than one place at a time, but all of these truths presuppose that God is not overturning them by performing a miracle. On the other hand, it's not as if God's omnipotence was only discovered in the 14th century. Earlier, medievals likewise held that God can do anything that is logically possible without then engaging in the sort of skeptical worries we've been discussing in this episode. Remember too that Nicholas's skeptical challenge was incited by a more technical and specific doctrine, namely the idea that an intuitive cognition can have a non-existent object. So, while late medieval skepticism did involve allusions to miracles, it may have had its roots more in the epistemology of the time than the fear that the good Christian God sometimes acts like Descartes' evil demon. Still, there's no doubt that Nicholas and other skeptically-minded authors of this period managed a striking anticipation of Descartes and other early modern thinkers. It seems evident, insofar as anything is evident, that this period represents an earlier high-water mark in the history of philosophical skepticism. So I'm sure, insofar as I'm sure of anything, that you'll want to join me for an interview with one of the world's leading experts on medieval skepticism, Dominic Perler. It will be an interview worth waiting for, which is just as well, since it won't appear until mid-September. As usual, I'm having a summer break with a hiatus of one month in both the medieval episodes and the episodes on philosophy in India. Once we get back, we'll be on the home stretch to finish off both of these series. After that, beginning in early 2018, we'll be launching the next two series on Byzantine philosophy and Africana philosophy. So there is certainly plenty to look forward to here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview with Dominic Perler, who is Professor of Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Hi, Dominic. Hello. Thanks for coming on the podcast. We're going to be talking about skepticism in medieval philosophy, and this seems like a kind of surprising topic. It would be easy to assume that medieval thinkers don't really get into the issue of skepticism because they have very confident beliefs, religious beliefs and other beliefs about metaphysics, the nature of the soul and all sorts of things. And we might suppose that it's really with early modern philosophy, with figures like Descartes, that skepticism comes back into the history of philosophy after playing a role in antiquity with the ancient skeptics. So what reason is there even to think that medieval philosophers have something to say about the topic of skepticism? First of all, we should take into account that medieval thinkers were familiar with ancient sources. In particular, they knew quite well the academic tradition. They read Cicero's Academica and Augustine's Contra Academicus. That's why they were familiar with many skeptical scenarios, say sensory illusions, the dream hypothesis, or even the hypothesis that a divine being could intervene and manipulate our cognitive states. So that gave rise to many skeptical debates. They started in the 13th century. Henry of Ghent is a famous person who read Augustine and commented on all the skeptical cases presented in Contra Academicus. Then we shouldn't forget that it was in fact the Christian tradition that gave rise to new types of skeptical scenarios. Let's take the example of demons, the so-called fallen angels, that could intervene and in a way tamper with our brain so that they create sensory images of things that do not exist. So how can we know that we do have reliable cognitive states? Why couldn't it be the case that right now a demon is intervening and in a way changing something in my brain? In addition, Christian thinkers appealed to divine omnipotence and they understood omnipotence in two ways. First of all, God can use his power according to the laws of nature. But second, he can also in a way ignore these laws and do whatever he likes. That was called the potentia absoluta. And by using this unlimited power, God can do everything, including everything that concerns our cognition. So why couldn't it be that God creates a mere thought about a thing that doesn't exist while I mistakenly believe that this thing exists? Actually, that sounds a lot like Descartes' evil demon hypothesis. A demon could, for example, be inserting a belief into the listener's mind that they're listening to a podcast, but actually they're not listening to a podcast and God could do the same thing, presumably. In fact, and it was exactly this hypothesis that was thoroughly discussed in the 14th That doesn't mean that skeptical thinkers drew the same conclusions as Descartes. Why not? First of all, they made the same remark as Descartes later made in the first meditation. God is a benevolent creator. That's why we shouldn't think that he wants to deceive us. So all medieval thinkers said that in principle, God could use his unlimited power to deceive us, but since he's a good God, he does not want to deceive us. That's why they thought, well, if it's not God, then it's perhaps one of these demons that can intervene. And then they asked the question, but how far can it go? So is it really true that a demon can do everything that concerns my intellect? Or can it intervene on a lower level only, say on the level of inner senses, so that the demon can perhaps manipulate my sensory images, but not the way I abstract something from these sensory images? That's why they made a limited use of this skeptical scenario. And maybe it's worth saying here that what we're talking about, I guess, is going to be uses of skeptical arguments or hypotheses. We're not actually going to find medieval philosophers who are full-blown skeptics the way that ancient skeptics were skeptics, or even the way that, say, David Hume is a skeptic. Indeed, I think we should clearly distinguish between the methodological use of skeptical arguments and a skeptical position. That is, medieval thinkers were convinced that we do have and can have reliable knowledge, but they tried in a way to test our knowledge claims and said, but are you really certain that you have knowledge of material things or of supernatural things? And that's why they introduced skeptical hypotheses. But that was a methodological use, and we should not in a way think that they denied the possibility of knowledge completely. In addition, we should also distinguish between unlimited skepticism and what would be called local skepticism. That is, skepticism that concerns some types of knowledge claims, say about causal relations or about a certain range of entities, say material substances or whatever. Or you might be skeptical about your senses, but not about your mind or something like that. Exactly, exactly. And since the medieval worked with a hierarchy of faculties of the soul, they thought that you could be skeptical about the senses, because they might not be reliable. Since we are not perfect beings, we don't have perfect senses. But nevertheless, we have an intellect that is a higher faculty, and on that level, we can perhaps reach perfect knowledge. Actually, one of the things I wanted to ask you was exactly about this, because they have these epistemological theories inherited mostly from the ancients, if you count Augustine as ancient, which I would. So, for example, you have the basically empiricists epistemology or theory of knowledge from Aristotle, you have the more illuminationist model of how we get knowledge from Augustine. And I'm wondering whether these positive theories of how we acquire knowledge actually themselves gave rise to discussions about skeptical hypotheses. Yes, in fact, they did give rise to skeptical hypotheses. Let's start with Aristotle, who claims to summarize it briefly that we first get sensory properties from material things, and then we form sensory images. Let's take an example. I see the table in front of me. So I get the color or the size and the shape of the table and then I form some kind of image of the table. Then Aristotelians claimed that we are able to abstract something like the essential features of the table. And it's exactly at this point that some thinkers ask skeptical questions. Why, they ask, can we abstract essential features? What enables us to do that? And how can we be sure that we abstract exactly the essential features that are in the table? Could it be that these essential features are not accessible to us or that we don't have the cognitive means to reach them? So that's why they asked, can we really go beyond the level of sensory images? And perhaps do we need external help in order to do that? The illuminationists, for instance, said that, well, a human being cannot just get everything out from sensory images. So we need illumination. God in a way needs to assist us so that we really get the essence of the thing. And others with more skeptical motivations thought that perhaps that's something we can never reach. Perhaps our knowledge is limited. So maybe there's three possible views there. The Aristotelian view, which is sense perception will get you all the way to universal necessary understanding of essences. The illuminationist view taken from Augustine, which is that sense perception won't do that. It's a more Platonist view, I guess. So you need direct illumination from God. And then the third view would be, well, maybe we don't actually get knowledge of essences. But actually it does seem like a genuine skeptical position. And this is actually a position held by some medieval philosophers. In fact, that is a skeptical position, although I wouldn't say that they would really claim that we can never go beyond the sensory level, since they also had the Christian belief that in a way we are more or less equipped with reliable faculties. They would say that, well, perhaps we cannot get exactly the essential features as they are, but we can get something out of the thing. And if we repeatedly go through a process of abstraction, then in the end, we can have at least an approximation. So they didn't take the full blown skeptical position. You can get close enough, basically. Exactly. And let's add another argument they often use. They said, if you start, as Aristotle says, with the grasp of sensible properties, then you have only access to properties. I mentioned the color of the table or the size, but how do I get the substance of the table? And this again was a source of skepticism because some people said, well, and if the properties are not identical with the substance, if they are, as many, especially 14th century said, accidents that are really distinct entities, then we get only these entities through this empirical process, but never the substance in itself. So perhaps even if we have reliable faculties, our knowledge is very limited. We can know about color, size and shape, but not about the thing itself that has color, size and shape. It strikes me that part of the problem there is that the ancient views of knowledge had set the bar very high for what would count as scientific knowledge or understanding. Aristotle thinks that understanding is necessary, universal, essential. And so Aristotle would reject, as a kind of really good example of knowledge, he would reject something like the microphone is sitting on the table, which nowadays seems like a very good example of knowledge. And so maybe part of what's going on here is that the medieval's are thinking, well, the resources that we've been offered are pretty much satisfactory for understanding that there's a microphone sitting on the table, but they're not going to get us all the way to this kind of full blown Aristotelian knowledge. Definitely. And terminologically, they distinguish between sciencia, which would be science or knowledge in this full blown sense, and mere cognizio, cognition. And most medieval said, perhaps we can never have full blown knowledge, or if it's possible only in some disciplines like mathematics, but that's even an exception. In most cases, we have just cognition, cognizio. And that's why they said, well, perhaps we shouldn't have this kind of very high standards. Perhaps we should be satisfied with cognition that is reliable in most cases and limited to some types of things in the world, like properties, but not necessarily substances. And that seems to in a way to pre figure what happens in early modern philosophy, where there are other thinkers who lower the bar a bit for what counts as knowledge. By the way, is that contrast between sciencia and cognizio? Can we line that up with the contrast between knowledge and belief? Or is cognizio more like knowledge, but a lesser form of knowledge rather than merely true belief? It depends on what you understand exactly by knowledge. If you say that knowledge is justified true belief, then cognizio is certainly not knowledge because we don't have a justification just by having or acquiring cognition. In most cases, it's just a belief, not even true belief, because most medievalists would say that we can have wrong cognition. Why that? Because we acquire cognition through a causal process, and many things can go wrong while we acquire a cognition. That's why a lot depends on how you acquire it. So you first have a cognition, which is a mere belief, and then you can ask, how did I get it? And then you can perhaps say, well, I get it through this kind of process, so it must be adequate or correct. And then you can even ask, and how can I give a justification for what I have? So I would say cognition is the first building block. And then you can go on and eventually reach knowledge in the sense of justified true belief, which is not yet sciencia near sotiliansense. And to get sciencia, you have to add something like justification based on first principles or Exactly, and the syllogistic order and whatever. So demonstrative knowledge, as the medieval said. Let me ask you something else about this causal chain from the object to my beliefs or knowledge about the things that are in the outside world. It seems like a lot of these medieval thinkers, again, in the Aristotelian tradition, are imagining that what happens is that through my sense perception, I get a representation of the thing in the outside world. So look at the microphone, and the microphone is not in my mind. What's in my mind is a representation, like an image of the microphone. And again, in early modern philosophy, there's this very widespread problem discussed by figures like Kant, Berkeley, Hume. So the worry is, do my representations accurately represent the world? And if so, how do I know that? I can have that my representations are actually reliable. Is that another kind of skeptical worry that appears in the medieval tradition? Yes, it did appear in the early 14th century already. Why that? Most Aristotelians before that would say that we acquire a representation because we get the forms that are in the external things. So let's go back to my example. I get not just an assemblage of properties, I get the so-called sensible forms that are really out there. And on the basis of these forms, I also get the substantial form of the table, if everything works the way it should. So that's why up to the late 13th century, many authors said that we assimilate the forms as they really are. And that's why they said, well, and if everything works the way it should, if there is a reliable causal chain, then it's perfect. But Occam, for instance, said, well, why do we claim that we really assimilate forms? Perhaps things just make impressions on our senses. And on that basis, we form some kind of concepts. Occam thought that these are mental terms and then mental propositions. But we do not, literally speaking, get the forms as they are in the things out there. We get some kind of equivalent to what is out there in the world. And that's why, of course, many authors after Occam then had the worry that what we have in our mind does not perfectly match what is out there in the world. So the so-called problem of representation, as it was later discussed by Descartes and other authors, is a problem that was already detected in the 14th century, precisely because these authors gave up the assimilation theory. So are you saying that Occam thinks that what happens in my mind is that I form something that has propositional content? So what happens in my mind is linguistically structured in something like sort of a sentence, the table is brown, something like that? Definitely. Occam defends the thesis that we have a mental language in a strict sense. That is, that our mental concepts have a linguistic structure. They have not just a semantic content, but also a syntactic structure, so that we come up with mental sentences. And when we make affirmations, we form mental sentences. But of course, these sentences have a linguistic structure. And that's not what we find in the world itself. That's why you can then ask, well, do these sentences really match what we find out there? To be sure, Occam was not a skeptic. He thought that we acquire all these concepts and Indian sentences in a reliable way, so that we have some kind of correspondence between what is in the world and what is in our mind. But nevertheless, of course, one could ask, and many of us after Occam did ask this question, how we can be sure that our sentences match the things and properties in the world. Right. Actually, it seems like there's two ways of thinking about this representationalist view, both of which are open to different kinds of skeptical worry. I mean, there's a sort of picture or image view, where I have a sense impression. And I guess maybe Aquinas might think something more like this. So there's a sense. It's almost like a picture, right, in the soul. And then there's the view you just described that we find in Occam, where it's more like a sentence. And with the picture view, the worry would be, well, my representation is like an inaccurate portrait. So it's like a painting of someone and it doesn't look like the person. And how do I know that my pictures look like the things? And then in the case of the Occam view, the worry would be something more like, well, how do I know the propositions are true? Right, because what I'm getting is the impression that the table is brown, but maybe it's not brown. Definitely, we do have these two views. And I would say that Aquinas, of course, has not only the picture view, because it would say we have pictures on the sensory level. But in addition to that, we have something on the intellectual level. Aquinas thought that we can, as I already mentioned, abstract essential features. And there we get the addition of worry if we have something more than an image, what exactly is it? Is it really true that we can have, in addition to the picture, the substantial form of the table? What should that be? How could that form exist in my mind? So that was very puzzling. And if we then look at Occam, who in fact defends the view that we have something linguistic in our mind, then we can first ask, but how do we get these sentences? Given that we have just sensory inputs, what enables us to form mental sentences? Is there some guarantee that there's a reliable process for acquiring these sentences? And once we have them, in what sense do they represent things out there in the world? Is that one reason why he went for this more propositionalist idea about how sensation works, that you don't at least you don't have to somehow cross this bridge from something like a picture envisioned to something like a sentence in the mind, the way that Aquinas would have said? Is that part of the motivation for the view? I think that's one part of the motivation. Another part is also that Occam had a different theory of the soul. Aquinas still thought that there's one single soul in a human being, so that we have different levels, but these levels in a way are part of one and the same soul. There is no gap between senses and intellect. Occam, on the other hand, thought that there's a sensory soul and a really distinct rational soul. That's why he couldn't say that in a way the intellect can use what the senses present as an image. So, Occam would say we get, thanks to our sensory soul, just a sensory input. And then the rational soul has to do something with that, but it's a distinct cause and power that does, to speak loosely, its own job. So, that's why the rational soul has to produce sentences. Right. Okay. And so, when I grasp something, then I have to grasp it propositionally using my rational soul. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Let me go back to yet another avenue of skeptical argument. There's something you mentioned towards the beginning of the discussion, which is this worry that a demon or god could somehow induce a false belief in me. And, I mean, obviously, you don't have to believe in demons to worry about this. I mean, the modern equivalent might be a sort of virtual reality kind of scenario where a mad scientist is putting false beliefs in me. So, what do the medieval's have to say about this kind of hypothesis? They took it very seriously, but tried to, I would say, not eliminate it, but neutralize it by appealing to some metaphysical principles. Let me mention two of these principles. The first could be called the principle of hierarchy, that they would say, yes, demons can intervene, but they are not omnipotent, so their power is limited. They maybe manipulate what is going on in the sensory soul, but they can never touch the intellectual soul. Let me give you an example. Perhaps a demon could right now create in me the sensory image of an elephant that is flying through this room. Why not? Crazy image, but could be the case. If that actually happens, tell me and I'll call a doctor. Sure. But then my intellect would come into play and say, look, is it really possible that there are elephants that are flying? Can it be that an animal that is that heavy can fly through a room? So my intellect would analyze what is presented to me in this image and eventually reach the conclusion that this is impossible. I ascribe properties to a thing that can never be in this thing. That's why I can eventually reject the idea that there is really an elephant flying through this room. So, the medieval's would have said that it's possible to be deceived on the sensory level, but thanks to our intellect that can analyze what is presented on this level, we can in the end neutralize that. And that's why we are not deceived. Another principle they used was the principle of what they called natural evidence. Buridan, for instance, a 14th century author, used this principle when he discussed skeptical scenarios. And he said that, yes, it's possible in principle to be deceived by a demon, but given the natural evidence we have acquired in many cases, we can compare this case with ordinary cases and test if it really fits into what we have experienced so far. And if it turns out that this is just an exception, then we can eliminate it. So it's not the case that in a way one single case of possible deception would rule out the possibility of knowledge at all. It sounds then like they're only really worried about a demon or God giving you a certain false belief on a certain occasion. They're not actually worried about this kind of virtual reality hypothesis where all your beliefs are systematically false. Is that right? In fact, in fact, and that's where I see a crucial difference between medieval debates and early modern debates, because all the medieval authors who were, of course, strongly inspired by Aristotle, thought that in principle we have reliable cognitive capacities. So we might be deceived in exceptional cases, but not in a normal case. And we can trust our senses, and of course we can also trust our intellect. Only later, when people started to question the reliability of our cognitive capacities, did they come up with the radical skeptical hypothesis that all our beliefs might be wrong, because we could be deceived in each and every situation. So it seems to me that's also another reason why the medieval were not full-blown skeptics, since they worked with the scenario that in principle we have reliable cognitive capacities. They didn't take seriously the hypothesis that general deception is possible. Yeah, that seems like kind of a philosophical failing on that part, because once you've had the idea, and talked about it very explicitly, that a demon could give me a false sensory experience, it seems very natural to worry, oh gosh, maybe all my sensory experiences are being manipulated by a demon, right? And so, I mean, is this just a lack of imagination on that part, or is there something more principled behind it? I don't think that it's just a lack of sophistication or something like that. They also had an additional reason, namely that if you think that you are wrong in each and every situation, you cannot give any explanation of what is going on in the world. So, the world becomes something that lacks coherence and your own attitude toward the world is a world of utter ignorance. But they thought, inspired again by the Christian background, that we have a well-ordered universe. So there is order in the material world, but there is also order in our mental world. And that's why, in a way, they thought it's unimaginable to think that we have just many beliefs that pop up in our intellect, but then that might be wrong, or completely lead us astray. So it seems to me that it's the idea of rational order that inspired them to reject a general skeptical hypothesis. Actually, if you look ahead to Descartes, the way he eventually defeats the general skeptical hypothesis is to prove that God exists and then say, oh, God wouldn't let that happen. In a sense, all he's doing is making explicit a more tacit assumption that was guiding the medievals and leading them to only worry about local skeptical hypotheses and not global skepticism. Exactly. Descartes is so interesting because he is still part of the scholastic world, and partly also he belongs to the modern world. He's part of the scholastic world because he thinks exactly as he said that, well, yes, in principle, God could make us have all kinds of wrong beliefs, but since God doesn't want to deceive us, he doesn't do it. So that's the medieval part. But where he's no longer medieval is in his anti-Aristotelian attitude, namely that we cannot take it for granted that we have reliable capacities. We need to give a proof for that. And that's why he does all he can in the third meditation to prove God's existence so that we have someone who then guarantees the reliability of our cognitive capacities. So it seems to me that it's by giving up some kind of idea of cosmological order in general, but also order in a human being as far as the cognitive capacities are concerned that enables Descartes to go one step further. Well, that takes us back to a question I've already discussed in previous episodes, which is how long does medieval philosophy last? Maybe it lasts right up to Descartes, but we're not there yet. So for now, I'll thank Dominic Perner very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. And I'll invite you to join me to hear more about medieval philosophy next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Money – Medieval Economic Theory. Suppose you are a medieval merchant travelling with a wagon load of grain to a town where grain is in short supply. Given the circumstances, you know that you'll be able to sell your goods for a high price, perhaps double or triple the usual going rate. You also happen to know that only one day's travel behind you, another much larger shipment of grain, is headed towards the same city. Do you have the obligation to reveal this to your customers, forgoing your advantage and selling at the normal price? Your answer might depend on whether you had read Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologiae, he asks what a merchant in this situation ought to do. His answer is that the bounds of justice do not require divulging information that would reduce the price, even though it would be particularly admirable were the merchant honest enough to do so. A similar example is considered by Henry of Ghent, who allows someone to buy a horse and then sell it in the same city at a higher price only one hour later if, in the intervening time, all other horses on the market have been taken away from the city on ships. Such cases raise problems that were central in medieval thinking about economics. It's not a subject we have discussed very much here on the podcast, even though a not dissimilar example came up in the very first episode where we heard of the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales buying up all the olive oil presses to reap a windfall from a bumper crop of olives he had predicted. We know that story because we are told it in Aristotle's Politics in the midst of a discussion of money-making to illustrate the concept of a monopoly. It's a text that left the medieval with complicated feelings on the subject of money and money-making. While Aristotle recognizes what he calls a natural art of dealing with money, which needs to be practiced by householders and politicians, he is disdainful of unnatural pursuit of boundless wealth and of those who see money as an end in itself. Rather, as Aristotle had already explained in The Ethics, money is really an instrument of exchange, which allows us to trade very different goods – Aristotle's example is shoes and houses – by introducing a common measure of value. The exchange between buyer and seller will be just, Aristotle says, when that exchange is equal, both sides getting something equivalent in value to what they give up. This may seem like no more than common sense. If I persuade you to sell me your house in exchange for a single shoe, then surely I have behaved unjustly if not illegally. Come to think of it, maybe the old woman who lived in a shoe was the victim of this very scam. But the cases described by Aquinas and Henry Ghent show that things must be more complicated. It seems strange that a horse could be equal in value to one gold coin at noon and to five gold coins an hour later only because the other horses have departed on ships. Or consider the following scenario. You have a horse, and a farmer needs a horse to bring in his harvest. So in exchange for one gold coin, you let the farmer use the horse for a week. At the end of the bargain, you have a gold coin and the horse you started with, whereas the farmer has none of your property. That doesn't look like an equal exchange, yet the farmer doesn't feel cheated in any way. Or imagine that you are a money changer who greets people as they come over the border from Germany into France. Let's say that you're changing German currency into French coins of equivalent value because the German coins are not legal tender in France. It seems a valuable service, and your customers are perfectly willing to take part even though you take a small profit on each trade, receiving 100 gold German coins and paying out only 99 French coins. The exchange is evidently not equal because you hand over less money than you took, but does that mean an injustice was committed? Or finally, take the case of what the medieval's called usury. You need to pay your rent, so you borrow some money from your friend, the farmer. The farmer agrees to lend you 10 gold coins for a month, at the end of which you should pay him 11 gold coins. In this case, the farmer gives you 10 coins and after a month's wait gets 11 back. It's a clear case of injustice by Aristotle's definition. And in his politics, he does not hesitate to condemn it, saying that it is like breeding offspring from something that is in fact barren, and then adding that usury is the most unnatural of all ways to make money. The Scholastics gave careful thought to these matters and not only because they were in the business of commenting on Aristotle. The medieval university was itself a business, with the relation between teacher and student involving monetary exchange. Certain positions at the university could bring with them further financial obligations. For instance, Nicole Oresme, who I was going to feature towards the end of this episode, was made grandmaster of his college at the University of Paris in the 1350s, a role which would have involved dealing with the college's expenditures. As you may recall, Oresme was one of the thinkers who pioneered the use of mathematics to analyze motion, quality, and other physical phenomena. It's been speculated that daily involvement in finance could even have been a spur to such breakthroughs. After all, once you are used to using the abstract numerical measure of money to express the value of horses and ships, houses and shoes, it might seem all but obvious to apply numerical measures to motions and qualities. You might be skeptical of this on the grounds that money had been there all along. As we just saw, Aristotle already discussed it in some detail. Fair enough, but in the days of the Scholastics, there was a lot more money than there had been in the past. This is true in a quite literal sense. In England, there was 30 times as much currency in circulation in 1300 as there had been in the late 11th century. The monetization of medieval culture went hand in hand with the rise of market towns and growth of cities, which unfolded through the later middle ages. The universities emerged at the same time, part of that same story of urbanization. The Scholastics duly brought to their reading of Aristotle a considerable awareness of the realities of economic life. This is evident in their handling of the problem we started with, what determines the value of the goods in an economic exchange. Aristotle had argued in his Ethics that justice is achieved when buyer and seller both get equal value out of the deal and that money is used to facilitate such equal exchanges. This is compatible with the idea that everything you can buy or sell has an absolute intrinsic value. A horse might be worth 100 shoes, for instance. Aristotle seems to teach that if the ship has sailed with all the other horses and you demand the value of 300 shoes for the horse, you might be able to extract this exorbitant amount from a customer but you would be doing them an injustice. Yet the medieval's could find a rather different idea in the Digest of Justinian, one of the main sources for their legal thinking. There, we read that the correct price of something is simply whatever the market will bear. This suggests that Aristotle was wrong. Things have no determinate value and if you can get someone to trade you a house for a single shoe, then on that occasion the house and the shoe had the same value. Roman law complicated matters further here though by allowing a buyer to seek legal redress if he were sold something for less than half of the true value. That brings us back to the idea that commodities do have a true value independent of what they fetch on any given occasion. The problem was solved, or at least mitigated, by medieval legal commentators like Acursius. When he came to the Digest's remark that a thing is worth what it can be sold for, he added the phrase skiliket communitär, meaning that is, commonly. So here we are getting to the fundamental insight that correct price is determined by the market in general and not by intrinsic equality or mere agreement in a one-off trade between two individuals. We might still wonder though, what leads the market to converge on a thing's price? If a horse costs 100 times as much as a shoe in medieval France, does that mean that the medieval French thought that horses are 100 times better than shoes? Not quite, as Aquinas points out by using an example taken from Augustine. In the true order of things, a mouse is worth much more than a pearl because a mouse is a living creature whereas a pearl is inanimate. Yet no one would accept a mouse in exchange for a pearl unless they were a cat. So market price clearly does not reflect the genuine intrinsic value of things. Rather, Aquinas suggests, it reflects people's need for the thing being sold. He makes this point in his commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, which already mentions that money is somehow a measure of need or demand for a certain thing. Already Aquinas' teacher Albert had connected this to the behaviour of society as a whole, rather than a given individual's need for something on a given occasion. He says that money is the measure of the usefulness of something, insofar as it is useful to the community. Another 13th century thinker, Peter Olivey, makes the observation that price fluctuates in response to supply as well as demand. This is why air is free despite our constant need for it and why grain prices shoot up during times of shortage and fall after a plentiful harvest. Hence the cases I mentioned at the start of this episode, like the high price of grain in a starving city. Such cases show that the just price of something may vary considerably depending on circumstance, so that something's usefulness to the community is not just a timeless abstraction. A more fine grained attitude towards demand is also found in John Burredin, who astutely notices that a person's need for something can be relative to that person's economic situation. A nobleman who cannot afford a fine new warhorse is hardly suffering from deprivation, but is still in a sense poor relative to his perceptions of his own needs. The leading historian of medieval economic theory, Aud Langholme, pointed out that with this observation, Burredin was getting close to the modern-day notion of effective demand. There is yet another factor that determines the price of things. In addition to supply and demand, of the whole market or only a part of it, there is the added value involved in bringing the goods to market in the first place. Grain needs to be harvested, prepared, and transported to a market town. When luxury goods reached Latin Christendom from the Islamic or Byzantine worlds, the costs of transport were much higher. These costs had to be factored into the price and the scholastics noticed this too. Duns Scotus defends the idea that merchants do earn the profits they take on trading because of the risk in labor they have invested. Thus, medieval analysis of justice in economic life led to a gradual softening of attitudes towards the life of money-making. It had long been a commonplace to say that the very existence of private property was a result of humanity's fall from grace. Were it not for original sin, things would be shared peacefully in common. Aquinas spells out the consequences with a remark about human nature that should have been taken more seriously by communists 700 years later. Were all things held in common, everyone would avoid doing any work and leave to others that which concerns the community. Given the connection between economics and human frailty, it's hardly surprising to find Christian texts from late antiquity onwards warning that the life of the merchant is unusually liable to sin. It is much like the life of the soldier, except that the merchant's sins have to do with greed and dishonesty rather than violence. Here, for once, there seemed to be a perfect fit between church teaching and Aristotle, since as we saw, he invades against the unnaturalness of building up wealth, and especially against any practice that tries to make a profit off of money itself. From a modern day point of view, this seems completely wrong-headed. We understand that banks need to charge interest on loans and that it will cost us a bit of money to exchange currencies. Again, the medieval's were not totally blind to this fact. A remarkable discussion of profit on loans is found in Dorandus of Saint-Pausan. He realizes that money lending is actually quite useful, yet still feels it is a rather squalid business. So he suggests that the state could appoint an official money lender to play this role for the whole community, something Langholm calls, a bit of wishful thinking which for a moment shatters the boundaries of medieval thought about money and credit. The reason that medieval's were so reluctant to concede the right to make money from loans is that it constitutes usury. Considered an abomination by both Aristotle and Christian doctrine, the religious injunction traces back to biblical passages like Luke 6.35, lend hoping for nothing again. So it was uncontroversial that usury was wicked. The question was, why? Aquinas defines usury as a case in which someone sells somebody else something that does not exist. What he means is that money is a so-called fungible commodity, which is used up when it is spent just as food is used up when it is eaten. Normally, if you lend someone a fungible good, then the lender has to return it or an equivalent. If you borrow a loaf of bread from me, you owe me a loaf of bread later, not a loaf of bread plus a blueberry muffin. Though, if it is on offer, I would happily accept an almond croissant. Analogously it is unjust to lend someone money and expect back the same money plus a fee. Taking their cue from Aristotle, Aquinas and other scholastics complain that the usurer is trying to breed something that is barren, namely money, as if it could bear offspring. Another argument had it that the usurer is actually selling something, namely time. The point here is that if you borrow 10 coins for a year after which you owe 11 coins, then you have paid one coin for the year during which you had the money. But if time belongs to anyone, it is God and certainly not the usurer. There is an obvious problem here, namely that usury is incredibly useful and even essential to a well-run economy. As you probably know, Jews were grudgingly allowed to step into the gap since they were under no religious injunction to avoid lending on interest, at least to non-Jews. But given the careful attention the scholastics were paying to the function of money and markets, it was all but inevitable that they would at least begin to qualify their own injunction against money lending. Here, a major advance was made by Gerald Odonus, who became head of the Franciscan order in 1329. He realized that someone who lends money is actually giving up more than just the sum that has been borrowed. For one thing, he's taking a risk that it will not be returned. For another, there is the profit the lender could have made off the money by putting it to work during the time it was lent out. The key insight here is that the usurer is not selling time, but the use of the money during the time of the loan. Thus, the so-called usurer is justified in charging interest to cover his risk and the profit he has foregone. This leaves Odonus in the awkward position of having to explain why usury is forbidden at all. Of course, we can still say that it is wrong to charge interest in excess of the hidden costs of lending. But also, Odonus says, the exchange involved in usury is not really a case of mutual consent. The borrower does enter into the contract voluntarily, but would much rather have been able to use the money without the added fee. So in this sense, there is still some compulsion involved. Despite Odonus's nuanced discussion, it remained the case that just about the worst thing you could say about an economic transaction was to compare it to usury. A good illustration can be found in what may be the most extraordinary medieval text on economics, the first treatise on the nature of money itself, Nicolas Hormes diatribe against the debasement of currency. This was a depressingly common feature of medieval life in general and 14th century France in particular. The king would repeatedly call in the old currency and replace it with new coins which would contain a smaller proportion of gold and silver. This would allow the state to profit by keeping the extra precious metal for itself. For Ohem, currency debasement is indeed like usury, because it tries to generate something from what is itself barren. Actually, it is even worse, because at least the usurer gets his victim to agree to a contract, whereas the king debases the currency without the consent of the community. It violates the very nature of money, which is an instrument of trade, owned in general by the whole community and in particular by the person who earned a given quantity of money. It is not the king's to do with as he will. Ohem's defense of the integrity of money is remarkable in at least two ways. First, there is his extremely positive attitude towards money itself. While it can be put to perverted uses by the greedy, it is vital to the maintenance of society. He even ascribes to divine providence the existence of gold and silver, which are so perfect for turning into coins. Precious metal is durable and portable, and rare enough to retain its value, something insured by nature herself when she thwarts the attempts of alchemists to make gold. Second, there is Ohem's penetrating analysis of the drawbacks of debasement. He sees that currency itself can become a sort of commodity whose value is sensitive to market forces. At one point, he even anticipates the law that bad money drives out good, called Gresham's law after an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I who hit upon a similar realization. The version of the problem noticed by Ohem is that when currency is debased, older coins are hoarded or taken abroad because they have more gold and silver in them than the new coins despite their identical face value. The observation is remarkable in part because Ohem does not complain about the citizens who engage in hoarding and speculation. Rather, he blames the king who should anticipate such consequences and avoid creating conditions where such speculation is bound to ensue. This treatise would by itself justify Nicole Ohem's claim to be among the more interesting thinkers of the mid-14th century. He showed that theoretical discussions of money could play a role in guiding government policy. A sound currency depends on a sound understanding of currency. But, like a currency exchanger with favorable rates, Ohem has still more to offer. We've already seen that he contributed to the scientific advances of the period and he was also a key figure in another important development of the 14th century. This was the emergence of vernacular languages as a context for philosophy. Ohem translated his own treatise on money into French and also rendered Aristotle's ethics and politics into this language for the French King Charles V. We've met vernacular authors in previous installments like Marguerite Poet and Dante. But in the coming episodes, non-Latin literature is going to be a major theme as we look at the vernacular writings of German Dominicans, the English mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich, and even that greatest figure of medieval English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer. So, lend me your ears and invest some of your time with me as I turn to the great German philosopher and mystic, Meister Eckhart, next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Down to the Ground, Meister Eckhart. As we saw a few episodes back, Mark Twain was distinctly unimpressed by what he called the awful German language. His essay of that title concludes with proposals for reform and, failing that, the suggestion that German, ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages for only the dead have time to learn it. If you've ever tried to render the different pronunciations of the verbs push and print in German, drücken and drücken, while a native speaker repeatedly tells you that you're doing it wrong, you will probably sympathize with Twain. In comparison, Latin is a beautifully logical and rational language whose structures map on perfectly to the nature of reality itself, at least according to the medieval speculative grammarians. Yet, it was still a major advance when philosophers who were rough contemporaries of those grammarians began writing in German. Among them, the most famous is Meister Eckhart. Of course, Eckhart is not our first encounter with medieval philosophy in vernacular languages. We know that Marguerite Porret wrote in French and Dante in Italian at the beginning of the 14th century, and earlier still, there were the contributions of the so-called Beguine mystics with Mechtild of Magdeburg already writing in German. Yet, no other figure represents the interaction of Latin and vernacular culture as well as Eckhart. Unlike Dante, Mechtild and Marguerite Porret, Eckhart was no outsider to scholasticism. This is captured even in the title by which he is still known today. Meister means master in the awful German language, and calling him Meister Eckhart is an allusion to the fact that he became a master of theology in Paris in 1302. He was a member of the Dominican order and moved back and forth between the university setting at Paris and provincial postings, working for the order in Erfurt, Strasbourg, and Cologne. His literary output is similarly double, having been written with these two contexts in mind. The scholastic side of his thought is represented by Biblical and theological commentaries in Latin, while the pastoral and provincial side is captured in a series of powerful sermons and works of instruction composed in German. That makes it sound as if Eckhart is going to give us two fingers for the price of one. But in fact, modern-day Eckhart scholars debate the relationship between his Latin and German writings. Do we have two significantly distinct bodies of work here, or do all his writings put forth a single set of themes in two different languages? Probably the right answer lies somewhere in the middle. His choice to write in German may have been in part a matter of audience, but even this is not so simple. It's been stressed by some scholars that he preached to non-Latin speaking female audiences, namely the nuns of convents incorporated into the Dominican order, yet he also wrote in German for male Dominican colleagues who would have known Latin. Certainly, his German works develop a rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary for capturing his ideas. But those ideas can frequently be found in his Latin treatises too. A good example is his insistence that God's creatures are in themselves nothing, something he explores by engaging with the scholastic theory of the transcendentals, as we'll see shortly. In fact, a look at the German works shows that even within them, Eckhart combines more popular and pastoral themes with the challenging metaphysics for which he is best known. A nice example is his Book of Consolation, a short treatise about how to cope with suffering. This includes some advice that wouldn't be out of place in a modern-day advice column. If you have 100 gold marks and lose 40, just remember that plenty of people would do anything to own the 60 marks you still possess. Of course, I don't mean to denigrate the potential usefulness of such advice. Eckhart is here working on a register like that of Boethius, that other great exponent of philosophical consolation, and like Boethius is following in the footsteps of the Roman Stoics. Eckhart even quotes Seneca by name. Yet there are also ideas here that you might more expect to find in a scholastic theological treatise, such as that the soul is in itself outside time and space, or that the good person is uncreated insofar as that person is good because the word good refers to nothing but pure goodness, namely God Himself. Eckhart warns his listeners that such statements may be easily misunderstood, saying, I declare by eternal wisdom that if you do not yourself become the same as that wisdom of which we wish to speak, then my words will mean nothing to you. He was right to worry. Two fellow Dominicans, who were themselves under suspicion for bad behavior, brought an accusation of heresy against Eckhart. We have a document prepared by Eckhart for his defense in 1326, and he later declared his innocence in a public forum in 1327. The eventual upshot was a condemnation by Pope John XXII, who declared 28 of Eckhart's statements either heretical or suspect in 1329. By that time though, Eckhart was already dead, having passed away in early 1328. Among the theses he discussed in his public defense is the one I just mentioned, namely that the soul is in some sense uncreated. While stressing that he was ready, even eager, to give up any beliefs he may hold that are in fact contrary to the faith, Eckhart saw himself as the victim of just the sort of misreading he warned against in his sermons. Of course the soul is created, but there is also a sense in which it is uncreated insofar as the just or good soul participates in eternal, uncreated justice and goodness. Here, as promised, we get back to the idea of the transcendentals, which as you'll recall are properties thought to belong to all existing things including God. The standard list would include goodness, being, oneness and truth. A prologue to Eckhart's ambitious Latin treatise, The Unfortunately Incomplete Three-Part Work, adds wisdom to these four transcendentals and explains that they are not accidental properties but prior to all else and things. Created things, as we might expect, receive being and the other transcendental properties from God, who is identical to being itself. For Eckhart, this is the meaning of the famous biblical passage Exodus 3.14 where God says of himself, I am who am. Now, so far what Eckhart is saying sounds a lot like what we found in Thomas Aquinas. According to Aquinas' theory of analogy, God is pure being and thus the primary referent of the word being with all other things receiving being from Him by a kind of participation. Eckhart is indeed indebted to his fellow Dominican on this score and even speaks explicitly of analogy but he puts the idea to a more radical use. In the prologue to his Three-Part Work, Eckhart observes that if God is being, then created things, insofar as they are distinct from God, are nothing at all. Equally, insofar as they do have being or the other transcendentals, they are nothing other than God and are eternal in Him. In other words, where Aquinas recognized that creatures have a limited or reduced form of being and goodness, which they receive from God, Eckhart's theory makes them quite literally all or nothing. Insofar as they are in God, creatures share in His perfection and timelessness. Insofar as they are outside Him, they have no being or goodness whatsoever. In one of his biblical commentaries, Eckhart explains what he has in mind using an illustration that may sound familiar from our discussions of philosophy of language in the 14th century. We saw William of Ockham discussing a barrel hoop which conveys the welcome message that wine is on sale in the building where the hoop hangs. Eckhart gives the same example, though with a wreath of leaves instead of a barrel hoop. He wants it to illustrate the relationship between creatures and God with regard to being and the other transcendentals. Again, his point would seem to be that creatures are merely signs or representations of God's wine but have no being in themselves just as a wreath signifies that wine is for sale but is not in itself wine. Eckhart also appealed to the analogy theory when he defended himself against the charge of heresy. His more daring pronouncements, which seem to suggest that the human soul is identical with God, are only one half of a double approach to creatures, which as he warned his listeners could easily be misunderstood. According to this two-fold understanding, creatures are true beings in God but nothing in themselves because they only borrow their being from Him. This is a nice example of the continuity between Eckhart's Latin and German works. The passages I've just been quoting are from Latin sources, but in his pastoral sermons he frequently advises his listeners to take leave of nothingness and grasp perfect being. More startlingly, he insists that our souls are eternal and uncreated, or even their own indicators, With this we have arrived at one of Eckhart's most characteristic teachings, which centers on an example of the special terminology he developed in his German writings, the term ground, or in German, grundt. His idea is that the soul's ultimate origin is the most foundational aspect of God, the ground of all divinity, which is in some sense prior even to God, as identical to the transcendentals, to the Trinitarian persons, and to God when understood as the creator of the universe. This ultimate ground is the same for both soul and God, and it is at this level that the soul and God are one. Eckhart thus writes that in our quest, the soul is We were just saying that according to Eckhart, God is being and creatures are nothing. But now that Eckhart has pushed forward to the ultimate ground of the divine, he describes God and our souls insofar as they are in God as nothing, or as naked. Whereas his theory of analogy and the transcendentals made God the true referent of words like being and goodness, in the passages on God as ground, he embraces negative theology. For this, Eckhart is indebted to two previous masters of the negative approach to God, both of whom he explicitly cites in his works. The anonymous late ancient Christian Platonist we call the Pseudo-Dionysius and the 12th century Jewish thinker Maimonides. Thus he quotes Dionysius for the idea that There seems to be a contradiction here. First, God is said to be pure being, now he is said to be nothing. But in a way, these two aspects of Eckhart's thought go together perfectly. For if God is at his ground, ultimately nothingness, a wasteland or desert, as Eckhart sometimes says, then it is precisely in admitting, and even embracing our own nothingness as creatures, that we achieve unity with God. Eckhart has a further array of metaphors to capture this realization, describing it rather neoplatonically as a flowing back into the source from which we first flowed forth, when God boiled over and poured out the rest of things. The soul in seeking union is raised up by God or, alternatively, sinks down to meet God's nothingness. As he puts it in a typically characteristic paradox, Another analogy Eckhart uses a lot is one we already saw briefly with his reference to the soul in God as naked being. He frequently speaks of the soul's needing to strip itself bare, seeking to possess nothing other than God. This gives him an original approach to a topic we've seen repeatedly in past episodes, the voluntary poverty of the Dominicans and other mendicants. His sermons usually expound a biblical passage, and one of them is devoted to the famous biblical passage Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Eckhart of course encourages us to embrace poverty, but not in the merely literal sense of owning no physical possessions. Rather our goal is to will nothing at all, not even to have knowledge or to carry out God's will. True poverty is, Again, the idea of taking the soul back to its ground at the stage of uncreatedness. As radical poverty is union with God, who is likewise free of all things, which is why he is all things. That might sound like just another paradox, but it is actually a further clue to resolving the puzzle as to why Eckhart would both identify God with being and say that he is nothing. To some extent, we already have the answer. God as the negatively understood ground is distinct from God as being, as good as creator, and so forth. But even without delving into the most negative depths of Eckhart's theology, we can make sense of his idea that God is both all things and none of them. Eckhart occasionally says that God is being of a very special kind, which he calls indistinct. Since God is timeless, he, and the soul when unified with him, exists in an eternal unchanging now, which includes all things simultaneously. They are contained in him as virtual being, not in the sense we use that word to refer to 3D video games, but with its original Latin meaning. To be contained in the power, the virtus, of something, in this case God. All of this may seem rather abstract and metaphysical. But as so often in medieval philosophy, the abstract and metaphysical has implications for how we live our lives. We've already seen that Eckhart's Book of Consolation touches fleetingly on his more radical teachings in order to explain why we shouldn't mourn the loss of things that only serve to divide us from God. These same teachings are at the core of an equally radical ethical theory which ironically, given how different they are as thinkers, echoes ideas we saw a while back in Peter Abelard and later in Ockham. For Eckhart, as for both Abelard and Ockham, it is the interior activity or state of the person that matters and not so much the exterior action we perform. External virtue is not to be condemned, of course, but it is really the good or just person who partakes in God's goodness and even is, as we saw earlier, identical with God insofar as he or she is good. Eckhart's bracingly irreverent approach to what we might call exterior ethics extends to the monastic life itself. In almost mocking terms, he dismisses as misguided the impulse to withdraw from society and seek seclusion, reminding us that if we possess God, we have him wherever we go. This idea that we might be able to transcend practical virtue is one of several that connect Meister Eckhart to one of the aforementioned champions of vernacular thought, his somewhat earlier contemporary Marguerite Poet. Was Eckhart aware of her mirror of simple souls, or her ideas more generally? Some have deemed this possible on the basis that records about Marguerite should have been available to him in Paris. Certainly, the parallels are striking. Apart from the point about virtue, Marguerite also demands of us that we abandon our will and speaks of God as a kind of abyss, which sounds quite a bit like Eckhart's notion of ground. And of course, both Marguerite and Eckhart were ultimately deemed too daring by the church of their time. While the link between the two remains somewhat uncertain and obscure, we can at the very least say that both figures represent a broader wave of philosophical mysticism in the vernacular in the 14th century. But there is another way to contextualize Eckhart. He was not a unique renegade scholastic who set down some shocking ideas in both Latin and German. Well, maybe he was that actually, but he was also only one German Dominican of the late medieval period who made a name for himself. Next time, we'll be looking at the Neoplatonist revival staged by Dietrich of Freiberg and Berthold of Mosburg and we'll be discussing the phenomenon that has been called Rhineland mysticism as we continue to consider awfully interesting philosophy in the German language here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. You can find mine at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Men in Black, the German Dominicans. Nowadays when you meet a man dressed in black, you might guess that you are confronted with an undertaker, a chimney sweep, or a goth. But in the 14th century, when it was about 700 years too early to meet a modern-day goth, and about 700 years too late to meet the original version, the men in black were the Dominicans, whose distinctive black cloaks distinguished them from members of other orders, such as the grey-clad Franciscans. Hence the answer to a question I used to ponder when I lived in London, where does the name of Blackfriars Bridge come from? It is named after a Dominican monastery that stood nearby. The Franciscans likewise established Greyfriars in London, which hosted several philosophers who have featured in our history, Occam, Wodham, and Chatton, were all there at the same time. Among Dominicans, the more important city, philosophically speaking, was Cologne. The order had established itself there in 1248, and from this center, the Dominicans became a dominant force in the intellectual life of Germany. Like a goth with a weakness for show tunes, the story of the Dominicans in this period combines a cliché with a surprise twist. The cliché is the story of medieval philosophy, as you might have thought of it before listening to this podcast series. This version of the story has a single dominant figure, Thomas Aquinas, and he was indeed influential among 14th century Dominicans. The order affirmed Aquinas' special authority in 1313, and ten years later he was canonized. Enthusiasm for Thomistic teachings is evident in an author like Jean Piccardie, a Dominican who studied at Paris in 1305-7. He defends Aquinas' views on several controversial questions, including the theory of the will. Where he upholds Thomistic intellectualism against Henry of Ghent's voluntarism. And regarding the unity of form and substance. Like Aquinas, Piccardie thinks that the forms of the material constituents that make up a substance are only virtually present in that substance. Thus, the earth and water that make up a corpse were not yet actual constituents of the body before death. Piccardie unflinchingly accepts the Thomistic conclusion, whereas most contemporary thinkers thought it absurd. And there was considerable pressure on Dominicans like Piccardie to follow Aquinas' teachings. Failure to do so could cause controversy, with Durand of Saint-Pausin in particular being criticized on this score. The surprise twist is that, pressure notwithstanding, some of the most interesting Dominican thinkers in this period were not particularly, and certainly not exclusively, Thomistic. Our story, in fact, has its real starting point with the first notable member of the order to work at Cologne, Albert the Great. Albert made great use of ideas from late ancient Platonists, like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Proclus, the latter mostly by way of the Arabic-Latin version of Proclus called the Book of Causes. These same authors were important for Aquinas too, but we find a more wholehearted appropriation of Platonism amongst a group of Dominicans who worked in Germany. Because of the connection to Cologne, scholars have sometimes spoken of Rhineland mysticism. I'm going to speak more cautiously of the German Dominicans, without of course suggesting that all the figures who fall under this heading adopted a single body of teachings. Only one of these Dominicans can plausibly be described as famous, and we just covered him in the previous installment, Meister Eckhart. But it's worth having a broader look at the movement to put Eckhart himself in context and to demonstrate the diversity of philosophy in the 14th century. The German Dominicans offer a striking contrast to the logical and empiricist orientation of scholastics like John Buridan. Not for them the abstemious, clean-shaven metaphysics of nominalism. The Dominicans could instead be described as ultra-realists who hold that created things, including the human soul, have their true being and divinity. When Eckhart put forward that idea, he was drawing on his slightly earlier Dominican colleague Dietrich of Freiberg. A treatise by Dietrich called On the Intellect and the Intelligible embraces the classically Neoplatonic idea that God's creation of things is an overflowing of divine superabundance. Like Eckhart, he uses the image of boiling water to express this idea of a cause giving forth its effects from within its own nature. For Dietrich, as for the pagan Platonists, the first thing to emerge from God is the intellect. He envisions a whole procession of intellects associated with the heavenly spheres, closely following Avicenna on the mechanism of this eminative process. As Dietrich goes on to explain the relationship between intellect and being, we see him aligning himself with fully-fledged Neoplatonism rather than the platonically-tinged Aristotelianism of Aquinas. For Aquinas, God is primarily a cause of existence, and creation is the association of existence with essences, itself an idea taken from Avicenna. Working years before the canonization of his Dominican colleague, Dietrich feels free to reject Aquinas' teaching, denying that there is any cogent distinction between essence and existence. For him, being is not a neutral kind of existence that belongs to a given thing, but rather the essential being of that thing. Thus, for a horse, to be means being a horse, whereas for a human it means being a human. Of course, the distinction between essence and existence was controversial, and Dietrich was not the only one to deny it. More unusual is his attempt to seek a foundation for metaphysics in the intellect itself. He advances the idea of being at the level of conception. For the nominalists, that phrase might evoke an attenuated merely mental phenomenon that may or may not correspond to the way things really are. As they never tired of pointing out, we mentally grasp things under universal concepts, even though in reality all things are particular. But as I say, Dietrich is no nominalist. For him, the intellect contains, as he puts it, a likeness of the whole of being as being, and holds in its compass the universe of beings. The intellect does not abstract intelligible being from sensory experiences, but establishes and constitutes the essences through its own activity. To underscore the way that this activity is internally active, and not passively caused by an experience of things, Dietrich offers a creative etymology of the word intelegere, meaning to understand. It comes from legere, to read, and intus, internal. All this applies in the first instance to the cosmic intellects that emerge from God, but it also goes for our own human intellects. Again in stark contrast to Aquinas, Dietrich does not see the human mind as a mere power or faculty of the soul, it is rather the cause and very essence of soul, even though it is nothing at all until it becomes identical with its intelligible objects. For this heady account of the intellect and its role in both the cosmos and our lives, Dietrich depends on a wide range of authors, among them Proclus. Thanks to William of Moerbeke's translation of Proclus's Elements of Theology, it was known that the Book of Causes was in fact derived from this treatise by a late ancient pagan. This seems not to have bothered Dietrich much. Still less did it trouble the next Dominican we need to discuss, Bertold of Mosburg. The successor of Eckhart as Dominican lector at Cologne, Bertold wrote a massive and highly learned commentary on Proclus's Elements. It represents something of a high-water mark for the medieval reception of Proclus, reminiscent of an earlier wave of enthusiasm for his writings that crested in the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century. We'll be looking at that in a podcast sometime next year. Bertold is careful to say that Proclus's approach to theology is that of a philosopher working with the resources of natural reasoning, rather than that of a theologian who benefits from revelation. But having given this caveat, he goes on to praise Proclus as the greatest of the followers of Plato. Proclus alone unveils the true Platonic teachings so often covered in the cloak of figurative language. Bertold's project can be seen, on the one hand, as a revival of the sort of effusive Platonism that has rarely been seen since the days of Ariugina back in the 9th century. A looser comparison might be drawn to the members of the school of Schacht in the 12th century, looser because they were inspired more by Plato's Timaeus than by pagan Neoplatonism. Yet Bertold also responds to current events. He is wrestling with the controversy around, and eventual condemnation of, the teachings of Meister Eckhart. Bertold's metaphysics thus takes inspiration from both ancient sources and his immediate predecessor at Cologne. Like Dietrich, who was a strong influence on Bertold's commentary, Bertold envisions the intelligible realm as the domain of true being. This evokes Ariugina's claim that all things are first of all made by God in the so-called divine primordial causes, a version of Platonic forms that equates the forms with ideas in God's mind. Yet it is also reminiscent of Eckhart's notion that things have their true being in God, so that the just person is in a sense identical with the justice of God, and the soul's ground is the same as the divine ground. Bertold also seems to see a connection between the negative theology of Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius on the one hand, and on the other hand, the mystical teachings of his fellow Dominican Eckhart. Repeating a classic ploy of Dionysius and Ariugina, and anticipating a classic ploy of DC Comics, Bertold makes use of the prefix super. He coins the idea of super sapiencia, or transcendent wisdom, as a label for the highest insight that grasps the ultimate reality of things in God. What could be more Eckhartian than to identify the world of the intellect as the seat of being and then to push on further in an effort to grasp God's transcendent negativity, uniting with the exalted nothingness that is, as Bertold puts it, beyond the mind? Well, probably nothing could be more Eckhartian, but that isn't going to stop two more Dominicans from trying. John Towler and Henry Souzo were contemporaries, and both carried on aspects of Meister Eckhart's intellectual mission, notably by writing in German, rather than the Latin used by Dietrich and Bertold. With Henry Souzo, the connection with Eckhart is clear, enough so that his contemporaries did not fail to notice it. Souzo defied authority by defending Eckhart from his accusers, even though those accusers included the Pope. Probably as a result, Souzo was demoted from his position as Dominican lector. In an autobiographical work, he speaks of having been unjustly accused of heretical of senities. We can see why by turning to his most famous treatise, The Small Book of Truth, which explains explicitly mentions several of Eckhart's condemned theses in order to explain and justify them. The Eckhartian themes, and even language, begin at the very outset, as Souzo explains that the soul can achieve blessedness and truth only through inner Gelazenheit. This distinctive word, borrowed from Eckhart, means, as Souzo explains later, that one must stop paying attention to one's own self, ceasing to have any will distinct from God's. Though Souzo's book is indeed small, it manages to become something like greatest hits album of medieval mysticism. One chapter begins by relating a vision and then offering explanatory commentary, a structure reminiscent of the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. Like Marguerite Porret, Souzo also composes his work in the form of a dialogue between himself, cast as a questioning beginner in wisdom, and an allegorical figure, in this case eternal truth. Later on, another character appears, the Nameless Wild One. He seems to be a stand-in for those who would take a heretical message from Eckhart's writings, as if Eckhart's own warnings that he may be easily misunderstood have been given concrete form. By introducing this character, Souzo is able to distinguish a true from a false, or disorderly, interpretation of Gelazenheit. As we know, the contemporary reception of Eckhart's ideas was contentious and complex. In Souzo's literary version, the debate is resolved more quickly. The Wild Ones complaints are easily answered and thus silenced. Speaking of silence, the negative theology we have seen in other German Dominicans is found here in Souzo as well, as is a balance between such negativity and a more positive understanding according to which God is pure mind. Souzo explicitly cites Dionysius for the idea that God is non-being and eternal nothing. He adds though that we must describe God somehow, and for this purpose should call him living being rationality. Souzo is also careful to work in material from figures like Bernard of Clervaux, though better to show that Eckhart's apparently daring doctrines are in fact fully in agreement with the authorities of the Church. His small book of truth has a unique place in the generation after Eckhart because of its all but explicit defence of Eckhart's legacy. Still, Souzo was not the only Dominican thinking along these lines, as we can see from the career of John Towler. We have a number of his sermons, which like Eckhart's were written in German and respond to a daily reading from the Bible. Despite the pastoral nature of these works, Towler locates himself in the intellectual tradition we've just been discussing. In one sermon, he quotes Albert the Great, Dietrich of Freiburg and Eckhart, and for good measure cites Proclus, whom he would have known through the work of Beethold. Like Beethold, Towler is especially inspired by the idea that our grasp of God is mystical in the sense that it transcends intellect or rationality and involves an inexpressible union with divine nothingness. On the basis of the manuscript tradition of Eckhart's own vernacular works, it has been argued that the Church managed to prevent his ideas from being disseminated amongst a lay audience. But Souzo and Towler would have spread his ideas among just such an audience, in part through the spiritual guidance they offered to women. Both men ministered to female convents attached to the Dominican order. Towler corresponded with fellow German mystic Margarete Ebner and was connected to Henry of Nödlingen, who was responsible for the translation of Mächterl der Magdeburg into Middle High German that I mentioned when discussing her. We have fairly extensive evidence of Souzo's mentoring of Elsbert Stagl, whom he called his spiritual daughter. Souzo speaks admiringly of her enthusiasm for a life of asceticism, which is a major theme for both authors. In a typical passage, Towler allegorizes the flight of Mary and Joseph as representing the soul's attempt to flee from the desires of the flesh. Of course, the combination of philosophical mysticism and asceticism is nothing new. But in the German Dominicans, it finds a new and distinctive intellectual justification. Alain de Libera, a leading historian of medieval philosophy in general, and German mysticism in particular, remarks that their most central doctrine is this. In its very core, or ground, the soul is unchanging and even uncreated and divine, forever identical with its source in God. This explains the asceticism. Concern with the things of this world simply prevents your realization of your deepest identity. It explains the epistemology. The soul's task is to rise to the level of intellect and then further to the nothingness that is God's and its own ground. It even explains their enthusiasm for the Neoplatonic sources that already inspired Albert the Great. In Proclus, they could find the idea that there is an image of the true One, the divine first principle, within each of us, the so-called One of the Soul. That idea is taken up in one way or another by all of our Dominicans, in Towler's case as an improvement on Thomas Aquinas's more Aristotelian attempt to locate the image of God in each human by pointing to a trinity of powers within the soul. While the German Dominicans recall the earlier medieval Neoplatonism of Ariugina and above all Albert the Great, they also seemed to point forward. Towler in particular would be rather influential in the coming centuries. His writings found approval with Martin Luther, thanks to which Towler had an afterlife among Protestant readers. The others fell into obscurity more quickly, with some exceptions. The major Renaissance thinker Nicholas of Cusa had cautious admiration for Bertaud of Mosbewg. In a more general sense though, these Dominicans undermine an assumption we might otherwise have had about late medieval philosophy in the way it contrasts to Renaissance philosophy. The prominence of scholastics like Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan makes it easy to think that pagan Platonism had faded utterly as an intellectual force until it was rediscovered by Renaissance figures such as Nicholas of Cusa or Marsilio Ficino. In fact, Neoplatonism was like God's creative power according to Dietrich and Eckhart, a powerful force constantly boiling under the surface, ever ready to express itself. Soon we'll be moving on to look at another vernacular tradition of the 14th century. Several hundred episodes into the series, we'll finally have a chance to look at writings that were originally composed in English. That will take us firmly outside of the scholastic world we've been inhabiting for many episodes now, albeit with one foot in the vernacular world in the case of figures like Eckhart, Suso, and Towler. Before we take that step though, I want to take a look at a couple of issues that recur in many scholastic writings. First we'll be considering a topic that was of special interest to Dietrich Freiberg. I don't want to ruin the suspense by divulging the theme of the episode, but I'll give you a hint. While you're listening to it, you may well have a seraphic smile on your face. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Wing and a Prayer, Angels in Medieval Philosophy. Of all the lyrics in the Elvis Presley songbook, among the most puzzling is the one that begins his 1963 single, Devil in Disguise, in which an affronted Elvis complains that his sweetheart is not nearly as sweet as she first seemed to be. He sings, You look like an angel, walk like an angel, talk like an angel, But I got wise, you're the devil in disguise. You see the problem, right? Surely angels are immaterial beings, so they don't look like anything. Even if they did have bodies, they would have wings, so they wouldn't need to walk anywhere. Finally, these are purely intellectual beings, so it seems hard to believe that they talk either. But perhaps I am only puzzled because I've been reading medieval philosophy, something Elvis never got around to, having died so young. The Scholastics love to think about angels with pretty much every figure we've covered having something to say on the subject. It can be hard to relate to this feature of medieval thought. Like the spectacular caped suits of Elvis's Vegas period, the intricate Scholastic discussions of angels have not dated well, with exquisite ornament and filigree detail being lavished upon something that was arguably a pretty bad idea to begin with. Hence, Scholastic philosophy has famously been mocked as dealing with questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In this episode though, I'd like to persuade you that medieval angelology was more like the leather outfit Elvis wore for the 68 comeback special, possessing a relevance as timeless as angels themselves. You don't have to believe in angels yourself to see their philosophical appeal. The medievals found them fascinating for theological and doctrinal reasons, no doubt, but also for the way that angels can be used to address an astonishingly wide range of philosophical topics. If they really lack bodies, then how is it possible for an individual substance to be immaterial? If angels can walk and talk after all, or at least engage in motion and communication, what does this mean for physics and the philosophy of language? Are angels really timeless, and if so, what does timeless existence even mean? And what does the hierarchical society of angels tell us about ideal political structures? What might reflection on their exalted minds reveal about our lesser mental lives? In grappling with such questions, the medievals drew on conflicting sources of ideas about angels themselves. Obviously, angels feature throughout the Bible, often bearing messages from God. This is actually the meaning of the word angel, angelos means messenger in Greek. This is still probably the first thing to come to mind when you think about angels, winged messengers announcing the coming of Christ to astonished shepherds, or Gabriel informing Mary she is with child. The messages could go the other way too. Though it was considered inappropriate to worship an angel, since that should be reserved for God, one could ask them to pray on one's own behalf or to bear one's prayers up to God. Particularly important angels were known by name, Gabriel, Michael, and so on, and celebrated on feast days. Medievals also believed that they were protected by guardian angels and subject to temptation or other malign influence from fallen or rebel angels who took over the place occupied by demons in pagan imagination. As noted by Elvis, a seeming angel may be a devil in disguise. The Bible speaks of Satan himself posing as an angel of light. This tradition of thought then makes both good and evil angels into intermediary beings whose influence is pervasive in everyday life. They serve as conduits between the spiritual and material realms. Your average believer would presumably have imagined them as having bodies, and certainly had no trouble accepting that they could leave traces of themselves in the physical world. One medieval church had a piece of marble in which one could see the footprint of the angel Gabriel. Against this, though, stood another tradition of thought stemming from ancient philosophy and the Islamic world. The Quran too mentions angels. Indeed, Muhammad's prophecy begins when an angel appears to him and commands recite. While we're in an etymological mood, this is where the title Quran comes from. It means recitation. Philosophers of the Islamic world, like Al-Farabi and Avicenna, identified the angels of the Abrahamic tradition with the celestial movers of the Aristotelian tradition. According to Aristotle, there are dozens of pure intellects that explain the different motions of heavenly bodies, with God simply the highest such intellect. On this conception, angels are definitely incorporeal. The whole point of the philosophical account is that only a purely immaterial, intellective being can be an unmoved mover, as demanded by Aristotelian cosmology. The topic of angels thus turns out to be a beautiful illustration of the way that the recovery of Aristotle and influence from the Islamic world shaped philosophy in Latin Christendom. Up until the 12th century, even schoolmen tended to think of angels as having bodies, but this became a minority view in the 13th century. Some thinkers embraced the identification of angels with intellectual movers, a leading example being Thomas Aquinas. His teacher, Albert the Great, was more cautious. For Albert, there are two ways of thinking about angels, the philosophical one found in figures like Avicenna, and the theological one we know through Revelation. A more aggressive tone was taken by Peter Olivey, who complained that the pagans and Muslims spoke of angels as if they were minor gods rather than created beings and refused to identify them with pure intellects. Other thinkers of the late 13th century were not so ready to abandon the old Neoplatonic idea that there are pure intellectual beings who mediate between God and physical creation, yet they shared Olivey's misgivings about just identifying the angels of the Bible with such intelligences. One solution was simply to accept the existence of both intellectual movers and angels while refusing to identify the two. This is what we find in Dietrich of Freiberg. For Dietrich, angels are more like humans than divinities, though he does try to justify the fact that pagan authorities called them gods. Angels are not the intelligences spoken of by these pagans. Rather, while angels do have intellects, they are capable of imagination and of making mistakes, which would certainly help to explain how some angels could have made the tragic error of rejecting God's grace. But alongside this angelology, which draws more on Augustine than on pagan or Islamic sources, Dietrich echoes the Platonist doctrine that the heavens do have their own minds and souls which take up a place below God in the cosmological hierarchy. Dietrich also contributed to a heated debate concerning the individuation of angels, that is, the question how there are many angels, whereas there is only one God. The problem here is that, according to yet another teaching that can be traced to the Islamic world, and Avicenna in particular, individuation is caused by matter. There is only one human species, but many humans, who exist at different times and places, something made possible by the parcels of matter of which the humans are made. Imagine, if you are old enough to remember this technology, a factory pressing records with Elvis Presley's latest smash hit. The individual discs are distinguished not by their shape or the pattern of grooves cut into them, but by being made of different bits of vinyl. Clearly though, this explanation is not available in the case of angels once we accept that they have no bodies. As I mentioned when we looked at the condemnations issued at Paris in the year 1277, it was forbidden to say what Aquinas said on this issue, namely that each angel must just be unique in its species because not even God can make two immaterial things that are the same in species. That left other thinkers to sort out how angels are differentiated from one another without straying into forbidden territory. One solution, which had been adopted by Bonaventure, was simply to admit that angels are made of matter. He argued for this on the basis that all creatures must have a certain potential for non-existence, having been created from nothing by God. And that potential being is seeded in matter. As former podcast guest Giorgio Pini has pointed out, this means that Bonaventure has a unified account of individuation. All things, other than God himself, come to be singular entities by being made of matter. Unfortunately, as I also mentioned when we looked at the condemnations, the Parisian edict actually requires the university masters to admit that God can create two angels of the same species, even if they are utterly immaterial. Dietrich Freiberg's solution would fit this bill. In a version of the old idea that accidental features can individuate the substances to which they belong, he says that there is no need for matter in angels since the angels can be distinguished by the activities they perform. As metaphysics developed into the 14th century, other solutions became available. We saw in episode 263 that for Duns Scotus, common essences are contracted by being joined to individual natures. This explanation will work just as well for an immaterial angel as it will for a physical being, like a rose or a human. Which is to say that this explanation won't work at all, at least if you ask the nominalist critics of Scotus who come along in the 14th century. A nice example is provided by Durandus of Saint-Poissons, for whom the whole scandal over angelic individuation was the result of a simple misunderstanding. Aquinas was driven to suppose that angels are unique in their species because he thought that matter is needed to render each thing an individual, but this is a crass error in Durandus's view. Aquinas's problem is that he thinks essences are somehow universal by default, whereas actually it is only the process of mental abstraction that yields universality. To the nominalist way of thinking, things in themselves are always individuals. This is just a brute fact about them that needs no explanation. However we explain the multiplicity of angels, we might wonder how many there are. The classic Aristotelian view would have assigned an angel to each simple heavenly motion. There might be several angels whose combined efforts result in the complex path a certain planet seems to travel when viewed from the earth. Aristotle himself was unsure how many movers there need to be and advises us to go ask a mathematician, but it is somewhere around 60. As Roger Bacon noted, this is far short of what Christianity licenses us to believe. As he puts it, we know by the faith of the Church, by Scripture, and the saints, that there are tens of hundreds of thousands innumerable to us. For a better sense of the population and structure of the angelic realm, the medieval's turn to a work called the Celestial Hierarchy, written by the Pseudo-Dionysius. In this podcast series, Dionysius has mostly figured as a hero of negative theology, but his influence in the area of angelology was also profound. You might recall that in the Carolingian period, John Scodas Eriugena had brought the works of Dionysius into the Latin realm. In his wake, other early medieval thinkers enthusiastically repeated the details of the angelic ranks described by Dionysius and accepted the parallel he suggested between the hierarchy of angels and that of the Church. The parallel could be extended to the political realm. Just as the angels are ruled by God and the Church by the Pope, so the secular realm has as its head the king. I mean an actual monarch, not Elvis. An elaborate version of this is found in William of Auvergne, who explains that the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones correlate to royal advisors, lawmakers, and judges. The parallel goes both ways. It's been said that William portrays heaven as a throbbing court, busy with both the task of government and the settlement of legal disputes, with Christ advocating on behalf of the human race before the divine tribunal. Bonaventure follows suit, describing Christian society as an image of the angelic society with the highest rank of the Seraphim mirrored among humans by, you'll never guess, mendicant friars. You know, like St. Francis and Bonaventure himself. Our next question about angels is one that I'd imagine quite a few members of medieval society asked about mendicant friars. What do they do all day? Well, we can start with the question of whether they have days at all. Are angels subject to time, or do they live in a timeless eternity, like God? Yet again, views on this diverged. A common view was that they occupy a special temporal duration called the Avum, which is basically a middle ground between normal time and God's eternity. It means that duration does pass for the angels, but without their actually changing. Hence, Aquinas, for whom angels are pure intellects, thinks that these are minds created with all the knowledge they will ever have. If they experience duration, it is simply because they dwell on different things they know at different moments. Bonaventure makes a similar point by contrasting a river to a sunbeam. Angelic existence is not a part-by-part process, like that of a river, but occurs all at once, like a sunbeam. Scodas agrees, though for him, this suggests that the Avum is not really a temporal duration at all. Other scholastics are happy to suppose that angels are subject to time, and even that they can learn new things during their life, for instance as they see the choices made by free humans. Characteristically, William of Ockham falls into this camp, holding that angels increase in knowledge as they observe the course of the world, something modern-day scholar Martin Lentz has called angelic empiricism. If angels can learn, can they also tell one another what they've found out? This brings us back to our Elvis-inspired question of whether angels can walk and talk. Given the aforementioned role of angels as messengers, it would be pretty disappointing if it turned out that they cannot communicate. One way they might do this would be to assume a physical body, even if they are in themselves immaterial. Here it's worth mentioning Bonaventure again. He describes angels doing exactly this, though he hastens to add that an angel cannot actually unify to a body the way the human soul can. Indeed, the capacity to form a unity with the body is what distinguishes souls from angels. So, if we are to imagine Gabriel appearing to marry in the form of a luminous winged man, then we should also realize that Gabriel would be using that body in something like the way a puppeteer would use a doll. Presumably this isn't how angels communicate with each other though. Dionysius never mentioned in the celestial hierarchy that the Seraphim and Cherubim are getting together for costume parties. Instead, the Scholastics try to understand how purely mental beings could transmit knowledge to one another. For the most part, it was assumed that angels would not need to use signs to communicate the way that we do. Instead, Aquinas thinks that an angel can simply will to reveal its thoughts, opening the book of its mind to its celestial companions. Scodas thinks the angel needs to do something a bit more metaphysically aggressive, so to speak. It actually causes its thought to appear in another angelic mind, not so much a case of mind reading as mind writing. As so often, Occam reacts critically to this proposal of Scodas, pointing out that if an angel could do that, it would presumably be able to modify the will of another angel too, something he takes to be an absurd consequence. For Occam himself, the problem is easy to solve. After all, he has developed his theory of mental language, so that the angel's thoughts are already in just the right form to be communicated. That's talking. What about walking, or at least moving? Again, there was a heated debate over whether and how an angel can move around and occupy space. And again, you can see why this is an interesting philosophical issue, beyond the need to sort out angelology. Just as worrying about angelic communication was a chance to think about language and how it relates to thought, the puzzle about angelic location is really just a version of the more general question, how an immaterial thing can be present to any place at all. God is immaterial yet everywhere, and my soul is immaterial yet in my body and not in yours. How is this to be explained? In the case of angels, the task was yet again bedeviled by those problematic condemnations passed down in 1277. They ruled out of bounds the account offered by Aquinas, according to which the angel is present at a given location simply by exerting influence at that location, as when it causes heavenly motion. He compares this to the way the king is present throughout his kingdom by dint of exercising jurisdiction there. The committee who wrote the condemnations were unwilling to accept this, in part on the grounds that it would mean an inactive angel is nowhere. Henry of Ghent, who was actually on that committee, subsequently admitted that he was perplexed about just how angels are indeed present in a given place. We aren't allowed to say that it is by causal action, but neither does it seem that an immaterial angel has location by its very nature. Scotus rises to the challenge, suggesting that the angel must first of all have spatial location before it can act within that location, and furthermore proposing that the angel just overlaps, or interpenetrates, with whatever else is found at that same place. This is an interesting idea, since it implies that several things can share a single location, at least if all but one of the things in question are incorporeal. What conclusions can we draw from all these controversies and puzzles? It would be an exaggeration to say that you can tell the whole story of medieval philosophy just by talking about angels, but not much of an exaggeration. Not only have we seen problems about angels turning up in many areas of philosophy, as I promised at the top of the episode, we've also seen how the history of philosophy about angels is the history of scholastic philosophy itself, but in miniature. It shows us the effect of the Latin translation movement, as ideas from Aristotle and Avicenna were applied in Angelology. It shows how tensions between these new ideas and older conceptions led some to contrast a theological and a philosophical approach to the topic, and it shows too how debates change with the rise of nominalism, as some apparently insoluble problems became nearly trivial, as with Occam's solution to angelic communication. This is why I wanted to cover it before moving further outside the context of scholastic philosophy, as we'll be doing in episodes to come as we continue to examine vernacular literature and especially English authors, including Chaucer and Julian of Norwich. First though, we'll take a look at another issue that was discussed by numerous scholastics, but which we have barely touched on in the series so far, the emotions. What would someone like Aquinas say about the weeping and excitement of Elvis fans at the merest glimpse of their hero, or the outpouring of grief over his untimely passing? Next time, Martin Pekove will be returning to the podcast to explain what it in fact means to be all shook up, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in the University of Toronto. Today's episode will be an interview about emotions in medieval philosophy with Martin Picove, who is professor of philosophy and medieval studies at the University of Toronto. Hi, Martin. Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me back. Yeah. Okay, so today our episode topic is going to be emotions, which is something that has occasionally arisen in the podcast. Maybe the most obvious thing is that I talked about Seneca's treatise On Anger. Obviously, that's about an emotion, namely anger. But it's not something that I've talked about a lot in this series. And it may seem a surprising topic for some listeners. Could you say why philosophers should be interested in emotions? Yes, I don't think it's surprising because emotions are part of our mental life, a very important part. Well, we might go around the world and only act on careful deliberation. But often, we interact with the world and our fellow citizens by being angry at them, loving them, hating them, and so on. So, they're an important part of how we manage to get around. And philosophers in the medieval period saw that as well, for example, in Aquinas, who provides, at least in terms of pages and words, the most comprehensive kind of emotions before the early modern period, he has a whole series of questions in the Primer Secundae in the part on the principles of action. So, he takes very seriously the idea that emotions are principles of action and require to be discussed in the same way as, for example, the will and virtues have to be discussed as well because they're also principles of action. That's one reason why philosophers should be interested in emotions. Another reason is, of course, that, at least in classical Argentinian philosophy, emotions are that which are moderated by the virtues. So, temperance moderates our desires. And of course, if you want to understand the nature of virtues, you have to understand the nature of the things that are moderated. So, I can't imagine any complete moral psychology that is not also covering the phenomenon of emotions. Can I just ask you a quick terminological question here? In antique philosophy, when people talk about emotions, usually they're talking about páthe, which has this very strong connotation of passivity. And I guess that the Latin word that comes closest to our word emotions is passiones. Is that right? Yes. Is effectively the Latin version of the same concept. Exactly. So, the term emotion doesn't appear before the 17th century. I think it is in the card, but they actually mean something slightly different. So, the classical term for emotions is passions, or passiones. That's quite interesting for various reasons we might get into. The medieval philosophers, of course, they also sometimes refer to them as affectus, and they also use terms that they take from antiquity, like patrapaziones or ekretudines. But of course, those are descriptions of passions that are negative. I mean, if you call a passion a kind of a disturbance of the soul, then you indicate that it's a bad thing. And the medieval philosophers do not think that passions are perceived a bad thing. Of course, some infestations of passions are bad, but not all of them. In fact, some of them are almost obligatory, like love for God, if that counts as an emotion. Exactly. Yeah. Now, an obvious question that poses itself in the medieval context, since they are all working within what's sometimes called faculty psychology, where you have these different powers of soul, is where do the emotions fit? I mean, they have a kind of limited range of possible answers that they could give here. Are emotions somehow connected to reason? Are they connected to the well, or what? Where do medieval philosophers locate the emotions in our psychology? Yeah, the Latin philosophers of the 13th century can be seen as completing Aristotle's faculty psychology when they try to find a place for the emotions in the economy of psychological powers. They're not new. Patristic authors are still the same, and they are heavily reliant on patristic authors. But one of the key questions they have is, where do emotions fit? Do they belong to the sensitive soul, i.e. the soul we have in common with animals, or do they belong to the selective soul, i.e. the soul that is typical for human beings? Depending on the authors, the responses are quite different. For example, for Aquinas, emotions or passiones are in the sense of appetite. There are some emotion or passion-like states also in the higher appetite, i.e. the will, but Aquinas does not call them passiones, passions. But in later authors, in Dunscholz, for example, whom we discussed a couple of podcasts ago, he thinks that the human passions of the soul belong actually to the will. They are in the will. And there are some passion-like emotions in the lower appetite, i.e. the one we share with the animals, but those are not emotions in the proper sense. Okay. Actually, one of the issues that comes up there is one you mentioned just in passing, which is whether animals, non-human animals, in other words, have emotions. And I guess that it's plausible to say that they do, right, because animals seem to react with anger in certain circumstances. And so if you locate the emotions in humans in a higher faculty that animals don't have, like the will, then you're sort of forced to say that either animals don't have emotions, although they seem to, or they have something that is like an emotion, or that emotions can work differently in animals than they do in humans. Yes. So among authors like Aquinas, i.e. those authors who think that emotions belong to the sensitive soul, they all agree on the idea that animals have emotions, including anger. Of course, they're not angry about the same things as human beings are angry. I mean, they don't get angry at not being promoted, obviously, but that doesn't mean they don't have anger in the proper sense. Of course, if it's a cat, it just assumes it's in charge of any circumstance. Now, in sort of anticipating what medievals might say about emotions, I guess the obvious thing to do is to think about what Aristotle says, because he's usually their main point of reference. And Aristotle talks about the emotions in various places, including the rhetoric. But to me, the most prominent passage where he talks about emotions is actually a sort of passing remark that he makes about anger. And here he says that anger can be considered in two ways. It's a physical phenomenon, so it's the boiling of the blood around the heart, as he says, but it's also a phenomenon of desire or thought, maybe. And he says, in particular, it's a desire for revenge. And then he says that the natural philosopher might think about it in terms of its physiological manifestation, whereas the dialectician, whatever he means by that, thinks about it as a desire for revenge. Is that the way the medievals think about it, too, that it has this kind of double-sided nature where it's both something in the body and something maybe in the soul? Yes, some do. So, the passage you're referring to at the beginning of Aristotle's On the Soul is indeed a very important passage because, depending on which view you have about emotions, you have to say something about that passage. Aquinas, for example, has a very straightforward reading of this. So, he thinks, indeed, that we get some sort of idea here of what an emotion is. And he takes very seriously the idea that an emotion, in this case, anger is both a desire for revenge and involves, essentially, a bodily change. And that is one of the key reasons why he thinks that emotions belong to the sense of appetite, i.e., they don't belong to the cognitive faculties of the sensory soul, like perception and imagination and so on. They belong to the sense of appetite, i.e., a desiring faculty we have, because the appetite is essentially linked to the body, that the whole body is an organ. So, every movement of the appetite also entails a bodily change. So, you might say that Aquinas, for example, has a hylomorphic understanding of emotions because he thinks there's a formal aspect, i.e., the pro-attitude, in this sense, and there's a material attitude, i.e., the bodily change. And he takes that, more or less, from that very passage. Although, of course, Aristotle is not very clear what Aristotle means here. Right. In fact, he's really just making a methodological point. Exactly. Probably, you shouldn't take it too seriously as a theory of emotion. But the passage is very important, because this seems to be one of the only references to emotions in the whole work on the soul. And the medievalists, when they read Aristotle's The Anima, they wonder about all the things that haven't been covered there. Another thing that hasn't been covered there, apparently, seems to be something like the faculty of the will, which the medievalists, of course, also think is very important. Some of them even complain about the fact that it's missing. It's interesting that his kind of the emotions, then, is actually a lot like his kind of sensation. And this shows how thoroughgoing his hylomorphism is. He always wants to say there's a material phenomenon. In the case of sensation, it's the reception of a species in the eye. In the case of anger, it's the blood around the heart. And then there's a psychological aspect, which in the case of sensation is seeing, for example. In the case of anger, is forming this desire for revenge. Exactly. Yeah. And you might think that this is fairly counterintuitive, because there are certain desires that do not result in a change of the body, because you don't perceive it. First, if you're angry, you obviously have also a certain proper perception that your pulse goes up and you kind of feel in a certain state. But the fact that we sometimes can't perceive the body change is not an argument against the very idea that emotions come along with the bodily state. I see. So you might feel jealous, and although you're not conscious of something happening in your body, it is. Exactly. Okay. To what extent is the range of emotions that would be recognized by someone like Aquinas just the same as we would consider to be emotions? I mean, does Aquinas just kind of have a checklist of the emotions? And is it pretty much the checklist we would think of? So envy, anger, jealousy, gladness, sadness, that sort of thing? Contemporary philosophers of emotions wonder whether there are any basic emotions, whether there are any emotions to which all other maybe more complex emotions can be reduced or so. And Aquinas also thinks that there are some basic emotions. He thinks of 11 basic emotions, namely, let me just mention them, love, hate, desire, aversion, pleasure, sadness, hope, despair, fear, confidence, and anger. And he thinks they're basically two groups. The first six I mentioned, from love to sadness, are the so-called concubicible passions, concubicible emotions, and then there are the irascible emotions, namely from hope to anger. And he thinks there are 11 basic classes of emotion, and there are many others, but they fall under one of these 11. So in this long treatise on emotions and the prima secunde, he goes through all of these 11, and he will have questions about how other emotions fit as species under these more general classes. Whereas later in history of philosophy, of course, you get other classifications of emotions, for example, maybe most famously Descartes. He thinks that there are six basic emotions, namely wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. And Descartes, of course, also thinks that there's a whole list of other emotions that fall under these as species under these sixes genera, but he also has an idea that there are some emotions that compose out of these. Aquinas does not think that their emotions composed out of these 11s. Okay, so if you took a very kind of sophisticated and nuanced emotional state, like being wistful because of the loss of your youth or something like that, they would have no problem with that, because they would say that it's maybe a combination of sadness with something else, some other kind of passion, as they put it. So the question is, what is the dominant passion? So if we have to talk about the phenomenology of this emotion, but it might very well end up for Aquinas to be a species of sadness. Okay. And is it really plausible to say, as he is, that all the emotions have something to do with either concupiscence or aversion, is the way you just put it, but basically that means that there are some things you like and some things you don't like. Is it really plausible to say that all emotions have to do with these kind of positive and negative attitudes? I mean, couldn't you just... So for example, I would sort of want to say that wistfulness isn't particularly a negative or a positive attitude. It's more like a kind of ruminative mental state. Maybe he would just say if that's really what it is, it's not an emotion. Yeah, it's just a ruminative mental state. It might not be an emotion. It might be something like a mood. And then it will not fall under the emotions. Or you might think along his lines and say, well, maybe wistfulness is not one emotion. It is a combination of two emotions. Okay. Yeah. I guess, I mean, of course, he does not, as I just said, he does not think that there are emotions which are composites of basic emotions. But he would just say, well, there are then just two emotions. Okay. I guess maybe a more fundamental objection to his whole picture, though, is that it does seem that reason has something to do with emotion. And in particular, it's hard to see how I could even be in an emotional state about something unless I had formed certain beliefs about it. So presumably, he has a story about how reason is at least implicated in the formation of emotion, even if the emotion isn't actually seeded in the rational soul. Yes. So you might think that, in a way, the whole approach, both Aquinas and other people later have is misguided because they put emotions on the appetitive side of the soul. They put emotions on the side of, yeah, pro or negative attitudes towards something that move us to action. And you might think, well, is that really the right way to think about emotions? Are emotions also judgment-like states? If I have love towards something, isn't that judging a thing or evaluating a thing? Or think about anger. If it's revenge, it's desire for revenge. I must have the belief that the person wronged me otherwise. How could I want to? So you might think, well, don't emotions involve, not only do they involve, are they not also rational states or judgments? And Aquinas' response is to say, well, the emotion proper is not the cognitive state. Of course, emotions are caused by beliefs and sometimes also just group perceptions and so on. But the perception and the antecedent cognition is just something that causes the emotion. So he wants to make a distinction between what comes with antecedent, what triggers the emotion, and the emotion proper. So of course, let's take the case of anger. Anger is normally considered in tradition as a desire for revenge because of a slight that occurred. So of course, we have to perceive a slight. And this might involve sometimes very complex cognitive states. So I mentioned he was slighted by a colleague because he cites him properly. So I mean, clearly that involves a lot of intellectual processing. But Aquinas would say, well, this is just what triggers the emotion. It's not the emotion. The emotion is just the desirative state of the soul that goes together with a bodily change. Okay. In that case, he actually has three components for every emotion. There's the cognitive state that brings it on, the judgment that someone has been wronged. And then within the emotion itself, there's two parts. There's the physical reaction and whatever's going on in your appetitive soul, which just means your desire for something or your aversion to something. Yes. But only that the change of the body and the desire, they're basically two sides of the same coin because every desire for Aquinas goes together with a body. Okay. Just like a person is a soul and a body. And it's essentially connected with a change. It's different from, when you mentioned the example that emotions seem to be something similar to perceptions. And they are because normally in perception, there's also somebody to change. But Aquinas makes a distinction. And he doesn't think that the body to change that occurs in perception is as essential to the perception. Of course, it's difficult to receive sound without having an ear. There's a certain way that's just difficult to imagine that we can perceive sounds without the ear being shaped a certain way. But Aquinas would not think that the corporeal change of the organ is an essential part of the perception. It's just a condition that has to be in place for cognition to happen. The example, he actually contrasts the way the body is involved in perception with the way the body is involved in emotions. And when he compares the two, he emphasizes that in the one case, in the emotion, the change is essential to the emotion, whereas in the other case, it's coincidental. Okay. Well, that's obviously quite a sophisticated view of emotions, but not one that met with universal acclaim from later medieval philosophers, which is pretty much par for the course with Aquinas and his reception. And the core of his view, as you've said, is that the emotions are located in the appetitive faculty or the desiring soul, we might say. What is the case that can be made for associating the emotions with other faculties in the soul? The main reason that determines the location of the emotions is the question where the virtues are located, because the moral virtues in particular are supposed to be moderating our emotions, at least some of them. And the idea is that, well, that thing that moderates the emotions must be in the same faculty. Actually, the most straightforward view about virtues is just that virtues are dispositions of the appetitive faculty. So later authors like Scodas have independent arguments for locating the virtues in the will because Aristotle's famous definition of virtues calls them habits of choice. And Scodas takes this to mean that they must be in the will, which is the faculty of choice. So for Scodas, it follows from this that the human emotions must exist primarily in the will. Now, of course, Aquinas was happy to agree that there are some emotion-like states in the will. He agrees with this himself. He just doesn't call them passions of the soul. He calls them affectus, and he's fairly consistent in that use. But he thinks they are not so important for human existence. I think that's why he insists that the passions exist in the sense of appetite. There's something essential for us human beings to be in embodied existence. And in Scodas, we kind of get a slightly different anthropology. For Scodas, we are more identical with our intellect of soul, which includes our will. Another reason, I think, why Scodas wants to locate the emotions in the will has to do with the location of the virtues, which is supposed to be that which moderates the passions. So Scodas takes very seriously the idea expressed in Aristotle's definition of virtues, that virtues are habits of choice. So he thinks that habits of choice must belong to the faculty of choice, which is the will. So basically, he agrees with Aquinas that the location of the emotions is dependent on the location of virtue. He just thinks that virtues are located in a different power of the soul. And that determines where he wants to locate the emotions. That's one of the main reasons. The other reasons have to do with the experience of moral conflict. Scodas thinks, for example, that it takes very seriously the idea that we can moderate our passions. But he also takes very seriously the idea that there are certain, let me call them emotional responses, for the lack of a better word, that we cannot eradicate. For example, the experience of something sugary will always induce in us the emotion of pleasure. And in a similar way that Aquinas wants to say, well, they have some emotion like, say, it's in the higher faculty, Scodas now does the reverse and will say, well, the same way as there are proper emotions in the world, there are some emotion like states also in the lower appetite. But these are completely out of our control. These are part of our human nature and they just come about. Okay, that seems like actually a very compelling point. Basically, the idea is, well, sometimes your emotions are under your control, sometimes not. The ones under your control clearly must be in your will. Otherwise, why would they be under your control? And the ones not? Not. Yes. Right. What about the other thing that seemed very distinctive about Aquinas' position, which is eliminating the judgment part. So, for example, the judgment that someone has slighted me. So, he eliminates that from the emotion itself and says that the emotion, the passion, is all about the reaction, the kind of passive part. I mean, in a sense, maybe you could think that's justified by the passivity implied by the vocabulary that they're using, as I already pointed out. But it still seems like there's room for the view that the emotion includes the cognitive judgment or just even is the cognitive judgment that I should seek revenge or that this is an appropriate case for revenge. Yeah. So, I take your question to be, are there any cognitivists about emotions in the Middle Ages? And there are. At least I know of one person, Adam Woden, who defends the theories that emotions are cognitions. They're sort of cognitions. Now, Woden agrees with Aquinas and Scodas and the tradition that there are certain cognitive states that trigger the emotion, and those are not the emotion proper. But he also insists that the emotion itself is a cognition or an otizia. And it's very difficult to understand, at least in the medieval framework, what that could mean. But I think one of the reasons why he wants to insist that emotions are cognitions is emotions seem to be more than just desirative urges or so. Emotions have an object. My love is directed at an object of my love. My love for my wife is directed at my wife. I despair about a certain situation. And so, it has an intentional object. It looks like, on the view that emotions are just appetitive acts, there isn't any intentional object, at least on Woden's understanding of what the opponents say. And I think that's one of the main reasons why he wants to say that the emotions themselves are cognitions, because they have this intentionality that is essential to them. I see. So, the thought would be that if I'm angry that someone has slighted me, I really have to build in the intentional content, namely that someone has slighted me, into the emotion itself. It's part of the emotion, yeah. But it seems like he's sort of double counting, isn't it? Because he says, well, first there's this judgment that you've been slighted, and then you get angry, and the anger is about the fact that you've been slighted. And so, you wind up with the judgment that you've been slighted coming in twice. And so, I guess the opponents might say, well, if it's already there and the judgment that brings on the emotion, we don't need to build the intentional content into the emotion itself. Yeah. Before I respond to that, let me just imagine what Aquinas would say toward him. And I think he would also bring double counting as an objection. First, I think you would say, well, you have a very strange understanding of desires as simple urges. And so, desires themselves are intentional. But they direct it towards an object in virtue of the antecedent cognition. So, there's a kind of a division of labor in the soul. We shouldn't think about appetites kind of doing their own thing and the antecedent cognition doing their own thing. So, they relate it. So, there's a division of labor, and it's because of the cognition that the emotion proper is erected at an object. So, you might think about inherited or derivative intentionality of the emotions in this account. So, for Aquinas, the intention of the emotion doesn't fall under the table. But actually, a later contemporary of Woden brings exactly this double counting objection against Woden. Gregor Grimini is one of them. And he says, well, now we acquire cognitions, for example, by being angry. And that seems to be very weird. Clearly, when I'm angry, my rationality seems maybe sometimes challenged. But on Woden's account, I acquire a new cognition that I hadn't before. I'm learning more about the world just by being angry. Yes, that seems to be very important. That's a little bit strange. Okay. But then you might wonder whether Gregory's objection to Woden is really so fair, because clearly the emotion is not a cognition in the way that the cognition that triggered the emotion is. So, it's a cognition of a different kind. And Woden would be the first to stress that. But then, of course, if that's the way Woden would defend himself, then you get back to the old question, do you really need to call the emotion cognition? What do you say more than? Because now you have to introduce a new kind of cognition. And it's not clear why you want to go that way if you can't get the intentionality of the emotion out of the antecedent and triggering condition. Okay. Thank you very much for that whirlwind tour through medieval theories of emotions. And thank you in general, Martin Pekove, for coming on to the podcast for a second time. It was a pleasure. And please join me next time, as I'll continue looking at philosophy in the 14th century, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, All Manner of Thing Shall Be Well – English Mysticism. In these episodes on medieval philosophy, we've looked at quite a few works written in languages other than Latin, with Dante writing in Italian, Mächter de Magdeburg and Meister Eckhart in German, and Marguerite Poet in French. But never in the whole podcast series have we discussed a work written in the language of the podcast itself – English. That's going to change now. We've reached the late 14th century, the time of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's Piers Plowman, and the time also of several devotional works that deserve a place in our history of philosophy. Of course, the so-called Middle English of these texts is not quite the same as the one we use today. There are unfamiliar words and familiar words used in unfamiliar ways. But for the most part, it's surprisingly comprehensible and reads like modern English typed by someone with unrestrained enthusiasm for the silent E and a keyboard whose Y key has gotten stuck. Even an inquisitive 4-year-old uses Y less than your average 14th century English author. But then the authors we need to discuss were hardly average. They produced several classics of Christian spirituality, sometimes drawing on the same sources that inspired scholastic thinkers, yet operating outside of a scholastic context. This is shown not only by their decision to write in English, but also by their intended audience. For the most part, we're dealing with books of advice on spiritual matters. Already in the first half of the 14th century, a religious hermit named Richard Rolle wrote Guides to the Life of Religious Devotion, as well as Liturgical Commentary. His lead was followed by Walter Hilton, who died at the close of the century in 1396. Close to him in time and in thought is the anonymous author of a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. It has even been suggested that Hilton may be the author, though scholars generally reject this proposal. Most intriguing and famous though are the women mystics who wrote in English. Rolle and Hilton provide a context for understanding how this could be possible, as both composed works aimed at women who lived lives of religious seclusion, so-called anchorites. But the really key figures here are Julian of Norwich and, looking ahead to the early 15th century, Marjorie Kemp. Julian wrote The Book of Showings, in which she recounts and interprets a series of visions she enjoyed while suffering from a nearly fatal illness. Marjorie Kemp is a somewhat later figure, though her astounding and controversial Exploits and Travels, which included a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also included an inspirational face-to-face meeting with Julian in the year 1413, who was by then an elderly woman. It is tempting, and common, to lump both the male and female figures together as a kind of counter-cultural movement. They were isolated, in a literal sense, as hermits and anchorites, but also in the sense of being outside the main intellectual currents of the 14th century. Even the obvious precedence for a figure like Julian would not have been available as an encouraging model. The writings of female mystics were more widely disseminated and read on the continent than in England. An exception that proves the rule is the Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Poet, who you'll remember had been executed for her supposed heresy in 1310. Her book was translated into Middle English and circulated in the same spiritualist circles as the works of these English mystics, but it did so anonymously. On the other hand, we should avoid exaggerating the outsider status of the English mystics. Rolla and Hilton both wrote in Latin as well as English, and unlike Marguerite, these authors, even the rather daring Julian, were careful to adhere to the teachings of the Church. Nor should we exaggerate the similarity between these authors. Just because they wrote works of spiritual devotion in English does not mean that they agreed about everything. Indeed, we can find plenty of disagreements between the two most famous works produced by the English mystics, which I'll focus on for the rest of this episode, The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian's Book of Showings. Of the two, The Cloud of Unknowing is slightly more likely, though still not very likely, to feature in histories of philosophy less broad-minded than this one. This is because it draws on a source that has been influencing medieval thinkers from the Carolingian period onwards, from Ariuszna to Albert the Great and Aquinas to Oumai-sur-Ekhot. This source is the writing of the pseudo-Dionysius, pioneering negative theologian and among the first to integrate Neoplatonic ideas into Christianity. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing is more than willing to follow the negative theology part, as the title of his devotional treatise already suggests. He's offering advice to a younger recipient, explaining to him the best path to follow when devoting himself to God. His forecast is that, as creatures, our prospects are cloudy with a chance of mystical union with God. We begin, he says, in a darkness which is the eponymous cloud of unknowing, a failure to grasp God that we can never overcome, since he transcends the light of reason. Instead, we should add a further cloud of forgetting, that is, strive to forget all created things to focus on God alone. God is and will remain ungraspable to our mind, but not to our love. This is apt to remind us of Marguerite, and before her the Beguine mystics Hadivich and Mächtelt. All these female authors believe that love is the ladder that takes us up to God, which is why they repurpose the tropes of courtly love literature, emphasizing the longing and suffering of the soul as it hopes for a glimpse of God. But, despite his discouraging remarks about knowledge and the human mind, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing prefers a more abstract approach. He in fact recognizes two paths to God which he calls active and contemplative. Each path can be pursued in a lower or higher way. The lower path of active devotion consists in, basically, leading a good life, performing acts of mercy and charity. The author's attitude towards this sort of life is reminiscent of Marguerite's remarks on virtue, though stated far less provocatively. Such actions are admirable and good, but the true devotee of God cannot be satisfied with them. A superior method is the higher active path, which is one and the same as the lower path of contemplation. It consists in meditating on one's own smallness in comparison to God, on the suffering of Christ on the cross, and so on. As we'll see, this path is the one followed by Julian of Norwich. But our anonymous author thinks that we can do better. The higher path of contemplation is the one symbolized by the cloud of forgetting. We should leave behind even such exalted objects of contemplation as the angels and saints, and focus on nothing but God himself, a rather paradoxical instruction given that God entirely transcends any means we might have of grasping him. The author's advice is to use meditational techniques which sound strikingly like practices found in other cultures. For example, repeating a single word to oneself again and again, like sin, or the name God. Both our will and our knowledge should be oriented away from the self and away from any created thing. Here, the author makes the nice point that acknowledging other things implicitly involves acknowledging oneself as their knower, so that concentration on any created thing leads back to the self. In place of this, the author says that we should choose to be blind rather than have knowledge. In another passage that is strikingly reminiscent of Marguerite, the author explains why we should be seeking union with God rather than pursuing the classically philosophical project of knowing the self. Each of us was created from nothing and is still nothing, in comparison to God, to whom we are infinitely inferior. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing also worries that the sort of inward turning practiced by other mystics could make one vulnerable to demonic influence. If you are granted a vision, how are you to know whether it comes from God or the devil? Perhaps by taking advice from your neighborhood necromancer. The author relies on experts in demonology for the observation that the devil always shows himself as having a single nostril. You may snort through both your nostrils in disbelief, but at the time the phenomenon of the divine, or apparently divine vision, was widespread. It was especially common among cloistered women, as is clear from a story of the German nun Christina Ebner, who was taken aback when told that one of her sisters had never enjoyed a visionary experience. The Cloud author was not the only one to fret that apparently divine visions could in fact be the workings of madness or some other, even more insidious influence. Such worries sometimes affected the visionaries themselves, as we can see in the case of Julian of Norwich. After she was visited by a series of sixteen visions, she was at first afraid to embrace them as what she would later call showings or genuine revelations. Instead, she described them to others as ravings brought on by illness, something she later regretted as a kind of betrayal on her part. According to her later account, in the Book of Showings of Divine Love, she had in fact prayed for such an illness. I desired to have all manner of pains, she would write, bodily and ghostly, that I should have, if I should have died, all the dreads and temptations of fiends, and all manner of other pains, save the outpassing of the soul. The illness came in May 1373 and lasted three days. During this time, she saw with what she calls spiritual rather than bodily sight, such images as the bloody face of Christ and the crown of thorns, and also the devil. Sadly, she doesn't mention how many nostrils he had. Yet she is clear that she had no desire to suffer for suffering's sake. She wished rather to commune in the Passion of Christ. The most striking passages in her book are indeed the descriptions of the showings. These are often horrific, always detailed and concrete, and sometimes amplified with metaphors, as when she describes drops of blood shaped like the scales of fish and pouring down like water off a roof. The physicality and frank violence of these descriptions may seem to betray a negative attitude towards things of the body. But Julian's central concern is not hatred of the body, it is the theological and philosophical problem of suffering. This becomes clear from her own account of the meaning of her visions. Like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian presents herself as a visionary who is in the best position to expound the meaning of her own visions, despite the fact that she is, as she admits with a touch of false modesty, a simple creature unlettered. Her showings explains what she saw, and also the point of what she saw, according to her own understanding, as she often puts it. One passage epitomizes the way that female medieval mystics could assert authority over their own teaching without directly challenging contemporary assumptions about the inferiority of women. God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not and never was my intention. For I am a woman, ignorant, weak, and frail. But I know very well that what I am saying I have received by the revelation of him who is the sovereign teacher. Because I am a woman, ought I therefore to believe that I should not tell you of the goodness of God, when I saw at that same time that it is his will that it be known? This is not to say that Julian immediately understood the import of her own experience. To the contrary, after composing a short account of the visions, she spent years trying to decode the message she had received, finally setting down her conclusions in a far longer version with extensive interpretation. The difficulty that drove forward this protracted process was the aforementioned one of reconciling the existence of suffering with the mercy and providence of God. Even nowadays, the so-called problem of evil is often brandished by atheists as a powerful reason to reject the existence of God. Julian, of course, had no doubts on this score, but struggled to reconcile the reality of sin and suffering with divine benevolence. This was a particular challenge for her because, in what has become the most famous moment of her visions, God spoke to her saying, Compounding the forthright optimism of these words was Julian's conviction that God is in all things and predestines all things. Nothing, as she says, is done by hap or by adventure, because all things are ultimately done by God and all that he does is well done. One explanation of how this can be so, despite the evident reality of sin, is the traditional account of evil that goes back to the pagan Neoplatonist Plotinus by way of Augustine. Evil is in itself nothing, so does not need to be created by God. Or, as Julian puts it, sin is no deed. But her answer to the puzzle goes considerably beyond this familiar response. She can point to her own experience in which she took on suffering voluntarily in order to come closer to God in an echo of God's generously suffering in human form to redeem humankind of sin. This shows that pain can work towards good ends. Still, without sin, there would be no suffering. In fact, it is suffering that makes sin manifest to us. Because sin is nothing in itself, we can never be aware of it directly, but grasp it only through its effects. More original still is Julian's reconciliation of sin with divine benevolence. Not until the invention of the gas grill will so much thought be given to how things are well done. For one thing, she claims that sin at first comes about through good, not bad, intentions. She compares humankind to a servant who, rushing to carry out his master's will, falls into a ditch and suffers great agony before finally being rescued. A similar analogy was given by Anselm, who, however, had emphasized the malevolent will of the servant. You might remember his struggle to understand the perverse choice that led to the fall of Satan. Julian rejects the idea that we are being punished for perverse malevolence, instead seeing sin as the inevitable result of our vast inferiority to God. Furthermore, in another unwitting echo of Plotinus, Julian thinks that there is a part of the soul that remains unfallen and perfect in its will. The soul's godly will ensures that it can never separate fully from God, but is permanently united to Him. As she puts it, our soul is so fulsomely wand to God of His goodness that between God and our soul may be right not. Our sinful nature, sadly, means that in addition to this perfect will, we have a lower aspect, as she calls it sensuality or the bestial part, which inevitably chooses sin. It has been said that this view seems to teeter on the edge of heresy, given that grace may seem unnecessary if part of us always remains pure and good. But Julian puts great emphasis on the unity of the human person, who is both body and soul. Being human quite literally involves taking the good with the bad, so there is no prospect that we can merit salvation without God's freely given assistance. Nonetheless, Julian worries that she risks contradicting authoritative Christian doctrine. So, unlike the more provocative Marguerite Porret, Julian is at pains to assure her reader that this is not the case. Her greatest worry here, again, relates to God's promise to her that all manner of things shall be well. This certainly seems to suggest that all souls are saved in the end, yet Julian knows this would be inflagrant contradiction to the view of the church. For this reason, her idea of a perfect will that remains united with God is, officially at least, applied only to those souls that are predestined for salvation. Yet she can't help wondering whether God might offer some sort of mysterious last-minute redemption and in general reminds us that as creatures, we are never really going to understand why sin was allowed or how exactly it will be redeemed. At the risk of making her sound heretical after all, it has to be said that Julian's solution to the problem seems to resonate strongly with the ideas of the late ancient Christian thinker Origen, for whom souls fall away from God into sin, but are all eventually redeemed. Julian was, of course, not the only intellectual to write in English at around this time. We've already mentioned the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and several other English mystics, including another woman, Marguerite Kemp. These figures are important in the history of Christianity and also as examples of early English literature. But, with all due respect to them, no one will think of these authors if asked to name the most famous writer from the period to write in English. There is only one candidate for that title, indeed a candidate so famous that I don't need to say his name, only the title of his best-known work, The Canterbury Tales. But I'll say his name anyway, Geoffrey Chaucer. Of course, no history of English literature could avoid mentioning him, but is there any reason to discuss him in a history of philosophy? Thereby hangs a tale, as we'll see next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Say It With Poetry, Chaucer and Langland. I'm intrigued by the slogan, Say It With Flowers, which has been used in advertising for florists and as the title of a 1934 British film, because it seems to me the range of things one can say with flowers is really pretty small. Beyond I love you, I'm sorry, and I bear you seething resentment and happen to know that you're allergic to flowers, nothing much leaves to mind. But I like the idea of saying things in an unexpected way. The mafiosi in the godfather, who deliver messages in the form of a horse's head or a package of dead fish. Or the Roman gods, who made their will known through the movement of birds and the behavior of sacred chickens. We tend to avoid such flights of fancy when it comes to philosophy, expecting philosophical ideas to be expressed straightforwardly in treatises and other didactic texts full of arguments. But a glance through history shows that philosophy has often travelled in other guises, and in particular in works that can be described as literature. From Plato's Dialogues and the Upanishads to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the novels of Iris Murdoch, there have been works that could as naturally be studied in literature departments as in philosophy departments. We're already familiar with this phenomenon in the medieval period, having explored the philosophical ideas of Dante and before him allegorical works like The Romance of the Rose and Alan of Lille's Lament of Nature. At the very least, we can look to literature to learn about the wider cultural impact of philosophy as it was being pursued in the rarefied context of the schools and universities. We might ask more from literature though. Couldn't a novel, play, or poem express philosophical ideas in an original way, even a way that a treatise or textbook cannot? In this episode we're going to test that hypothesis by looking at two literary authors of the late 14th century, both of whom wrote in Middle English. The more famous of the two is Geoffrey Chaucer, who hardly needs me to introduce him. He is author of The Canterbury Tales, in which a group of pilgrims compete to win a free meal by telling a series of stories. Chaucer wrote a number of other works as well, including A Romance Called Troilus and Criseyde. The second author is William Langland, who wrote a long and complicated poem called Piers Plowman. It recounts a series of dreams in which a narrator meets a sequence of speechifying allegorical characters. That narrative frame is thus reminiscent of The Romance of the Rose, but Piers Plowman devotes itself to more exalted concerns than the eroticism of Jean de Meun. The central character, named Will, quests after spiritual improvement, trying to understand what it means to do well, do better, and do best. We have good reason to think that these two poets may be philosophically rewarding. In the 14th century, England has emerged as a major force in scholastic thought, thanks to the work done at Oxford and London Greyfriars, and the mystically oriented English writings we've just looked at in the last episode were produced around the time of Chaucer and Langland. Furthermore, we know that both of them were acquainted with philosophical literature, at least to some extent. Chaucer translated Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy into English, and both he and Langland allude to the schoolmen with mendicant friars and the so-called clerks featuring frequently in their writings. In fact, one of the stories in The Canterbury Tales is even narrated by such a clerk, and in the prologue to that tale he is said to study about some sophism, a sign that we are dealing here with a trained scholastic. As for Langland, given his evidently wide reading, it's been argued that he himself was trained in the liberal arts at Oxford, though training at a cathedral school may be more plausible. Accordingly, there is a long-standing tradition of reading both men within a philosophical frame. This is especially true of Chaucer. Already his contemporary Thomas Usk called him the noble philosophical poet in English, while his 15th century editor, William Caxton, spoke of him as a noble and great philosopher. Modern-day scholars have made similar suggestions, detecting traces of voluntarism and nominalism in The Canterbury Tales and other Chaucerian works. It's been proposed that one of the avian characters in his early Parliament of Fowls represents a voluntarist outlook on the will, when a female eagle rejects the rational advice offered by nature herself regarding the choosing of a mate. The thoughts of a knight in another work, the Book of the Duchess, are supposedly a portrayal of the abstractive processes of cognition we know from Occam's Philosophy of Mind. Chaucer's portrayal of irreducibly individual characters, as in the famous prologue of The Canterbury Tales where we meet the various pilgrims, has even been deemed to evince a nominalist devotion to particulars over universal types. A domineering husband in one of the tales has been compared to the god of the voluntarists, who wields absolute power in the face of which we can only be passively obedient. His long-suffering wife even seems, at one point, to think that her husband's inscrutable will makes things right or wrong, as in Scotus's Divine Command Theory of Ethics. That last suggestion is a bit more attractive than some of the others, since it concerns the tale told by the aforementioned clerk, the one who is said to trade insophisms. There is also evidence internal to The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer knew about voluntarism. He mentions Thomas Bradwardine in the Nun's Priest's Tale, and in the Man of Law's Tale ascribes to the clerks a rather nifty summary of the voluntarist idea that God's will is unknowable. Often, as the clerks know, Christ does something for a purpose utterly obscure to the wit of humankind which cannot know his prudent providence due to our ignorance. Indeed, if we are going to credit Chaucer with a serious interest in any philosophical question, it would be divine providence. Remember that he translated Boethius's Consolation, which contains a classic treatment of the issue. Any skepticism that Chaucer would have carried over this material into a literary context can be answered by turning to his romance Troilus and Criseyde, which by the way was dedicated to a schoolman and philosopher named Ralph Strode. It contains a lengthy passage in which the hero, Troilus, reprises Boethius's presentation of the problem, namely that if God knows in advance what we will do, then we are necessitated to act as he foresees. Troilus even considers, and dismisses, a possible solution. Even if things are foreseen because they will happen, rather than happening because they are foreseen, nonetheless once foreseen they must occur since otherwise God's providence would be falsified. His worry is in keeping with other passages in the poem, which show the characters giving in to a kind of determinism. As Chaucer scholar Jill Mann has written, the lovers reinterpret previous events as part of the pattern of destiny, their significance now being established by the end that has been reached. Yet unlike Boethius himself or any number of medieval scholastics, Chaucer offers no solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge. He allows Troilus to conclude on a fatalist note, and suggests that he has included the passage simply in order to depict the heaviness of Troilus's heart and his ineffectual disputing with himself in this matter. This I think is typical of Chaucer's allusions to specific scholastic doctrines in his works. He includes them for the sake of characterization, often to underscore indecision and inaction. There is also an element of parity here. As a skeptical survey of philosophical material in Chaucer has pointed out, the Nun's Priest's Tale mentions Bradwardine, author of a vastly complex inquiry into human freedom and its place in the divinely decreed order of things, only for Chaucer to drop the subject of free will after a few paltry lines. The contrast could not be starker. But perhaps we've been going about this in the wrong way. Instead of trying to detect concrete allusions to scholastic debates in Chaucer, we might open ourselves to the aforementioned idea that his works explore genuinely philosophical topics but in a distinctively literary way. Maybe he is trying to say it with poetry. To show how this might work, let's consider the two opening stories of the Canterbury Tales, namely the Knight's Tale and the Miller's Tale. Both of them involve a beautiful woman who is pursued by more than one man, but the comparisons pretty much end there. The first tale has a classical setting, complete with pagan gods and their temples, and takes inspiration from courtly love literature with two imprisoned knights pining away for a beautiful lady they see in a garden. She does not exchange a single word with them, but manages to speak volumes with flowers. The second tale is a bawdy and comic one told by a drunken Miller, the contrast between the tales reflecting that between the social stations of the two speakers. So we are being presented here with two very different worldviews, and in particular two ways of understanding the role of desire in human life. The Knight's Tale depicts its two rival lovers as being at the mercy of their passions. They use their powers of reason only to scheme and justify why they should be the one to capture the hand of the beloved. As the narrating Knight says, love rules over them as a kind of natural law, one great enough to overwhelm any man-made law. The lovers are therefore compared to wild beasts, especially when they come to violent blows with one another for the right to wed a woman who quite literally doesn't know they exist. As a contrast case, we are offered the king Theseus. Though he is not perfectly rational, he does have something of a temper, he is largely presented as a wise and merciful monarch, embodying the medieval notion that the human ruler is a kind of vice-regent of God on earth. This is underscored in his speech, which ends the tale and which draws again on Boethius for the Aristotelian idea of God as a first mover who stands at the top of a fair chain of love binding together all things in a universe. By the end of the Knight's Tale, we might be convinced that Chaucer, like a latter-day Alan of Lille, is using poetry to convey to us his ideas about the well-ordered cosmos and about the proper role of reason in ethical action. But then we turn the page to the Miller's Tale. Here, sexual attraction does not lead to years of romantic, passionate pining, it leads to sex. Where the lady of the Knight's Tale is passive and a beautiful object of desire, the adulterous wife of the Miller's Tale acts on her own desires, in one famous scene offering her backside to a man who asks her for a kiss. The vulgarity is a rebuke to the storytelling Knight, and so is the Miller's conception of human nature. For him, passion is not a distraction from the rationality that makes us truly human. Rather, the whole point of human life is to have desires and act on them, without getting bogged down too much in thinking about what might and should be the case. This is already made clear in the prologue to this tale, when the Miller says that he prefers simply to assume that his wife is faithful to him, rather than ponder on the prospect of her possible infidelity. It's enough to appreciate the pleasures that God has given you. Or, as the Miller puts it with characteristically crude wordplay, a husband shouldn't be too inquisitive about God's private matters nor those of his wife, so long as he finds God's abundance there, he needn't worry about the rest. The vivid contrast of the Knight and the Miller is comically effective and also philosophically effective. As in a platonic dialogue, a literary frame makes it possible to offer the reader two clashing perspectives on happiness and human nature, and as with Plato, Chaucer is the author of both perspectives. This I think is one of the things that literature can do for philosophy. It can help us to inhabit more than one worldview and understand them from the inside out. As another Chaucer scholar has recently put it, for him, philosophy is more a matter of probing a difficult and evolving set of problems than it is of laying out doctrines that can neatly be summarized and classified according to schools of thought. That sentiment may also apply to William Langland and his poem Piers Plowman. It can seem to be a series of false starts, with the main character Will, is his name another allusion to Volundrism perhaps, taking sometimes contrary moral and spiritual advice from a series of allegorical characters. The social satire we found in Chaucer is present here too, with frequent criticism of the greed and immoral conduct found among the clergy. The poem makes interesting reading in light of our previous discussion of medieval economic theory since it betrays something of the same ambivalence towards money, which even appears as one of the allegorical characters. Langland allows that money has two aspects, beneficial insofar as it is given for honest work, but pernicious when it leads to usury or is heaped up without measure. In this sense, wealth can be a bar to entering heaven. He also recognizes what seems to be a higher moral law than that governing economic life insofar as the dictates of need outweigh the concerns of property. Langland's repeated attacks on the learned clerical class may suggest a certain anti-intellectualism on his part. There may be some truth to that suspicion, but he would be no ally of the miller from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Langland has the character imagination discourage Will from disparaging learning, since knowledge is akin to Christ himself and offers guidance to both the unlettered and the literate. Part of his complaint about the clerks is that these supposed scholars actually lack a firm grounding in what he calls philosophy and physic. Still, the poem warns us that too much concern with the niceties of theology can distract us from learning how to do well or do best. We are also told that we can learn truth even from the vulgar or less learned folk, and that clerks somehow seem to wind up sinning more than the unlearned. This belief in the end is of greater help to us in our spiritual goals than logic. Ultimately, the message here is one familiar from other spiritually-minded medieval authors like Bonaventure. Langland shows us the spiritual guide Piers Plowman rejecting the value of all knowledge save love. Yet as many scholars have argued, Langland used his poem as an opportunity to respond to contemporary debates among the scholastics. In particular, he seems to have been concerned with the problem of divine grace and the question whether it is in the power of humans to merit salvation. In one of the most famous scenes, Langland describes Piers Plowman receiving a kind of legal document from the character Truth, a pardon which promises redemption to all those who do good works. Piers, rather shockingly, tears up the pardon. It's a matter of debate what Langland is trying to tell us here, but one explanation has been that Langland is indicating his opposition to a tendency towards Pelagianism among 14th century scholastics. In other words, he is rejecting the notion that we can be saved merely by doing well, in the sense that good works must be rewarded by God as promised in the pardon. Rather, as voluntarists like Bradwardine argued, it lies with God alone to determine through his absolute power who will and will not be saved. Another reflection of Langland's interest in contemporary debates about grace is his engagement with the so-called problem of paganism, that is, the question whether virtuous pagans may be redeemed without having accepted Christ. In Piers Plowman, we are explicitly told that such figures as Solomon, Socrates, and Aristotle may have been damned despite their wisdom. Conversely, we learn that the Roman Emperor Trajan has been saved, despite his not having been baptized. If we are hoping for a nuanced theological explanation for this, we will be disappointed. Apart from crediting the salvation to intercession by a prayerful Pope Gregory, Langland simply appeals to the inscrutability of God's will, taking refuge in the Latin slogan Qua re placuit quia voluit, meaning, why did it please him? Because he willed it so. If this rings those voluntarist bells again, it may also be a reflection of legal practices at the time of Langland. He was well acquainted with the world of lawyers, something else that occasions some bitter critique in the poem, and may be thinking of the 14th century practice by which the king or parliament could use discretion to mitigate judgments of the common law. Yet another aspect of Piers Plowman that connects it to earlier philosophical literature is its handling of nature, which forcefully recalls the treatment of the natural world in 12th century authors like William of Conch, and especially, Alan of Lille. Langland too portrays nature as a kind of subordinate principle to God, through which divine workmanship is exercised to make humans and other creatures. Unfortunately, at least in our fallen state, we humans cannot assume that nature will suffice to make us good. Again, like Alan of Lille, Langland focuses in particular on sexual misconduct as a depressingly common feature of human life, one that our power of rationality should prevent, but does not. This idea that sin has opened up flaws within the natural order in fact explains why pagans are, with some apparently fairly arbitrary exceptions, all damned. Operating with nothing but natural reason and knowledge, the pagans could not hope to do best in the way that is possible for Christians. You may have noticed that love and sexuality have been recurring themes in the medieval texts we've considered that bring together literature with philosophy. In addition to Alan of Lille, Chaucer, and Langland, one might think of the Romance of the Rose, Dante's portrayal of Beatrice, and for that matter of the way that female mystics like Hadavich adopted the tropes of courtly love poetry. Chaucer is also one of several 14th century authors to address the question of gender explicitly in a work I haven't yet mentioned, The Legend of Good Women. These are rarely considered as central topics in medieval philosophy, but given the more open-minded approach we're taking when it comes to the question of which medieval texts may feature in the history of philosophy, we're not going to let that stop us. As we'll discover, the scholastics too have things to say about these issues, even if they aren't necessarily things we're going to be happy to hear. But I hope you will be happy to hear the next episode, which will be a wide-ranging look at concepts of gender and sexuality in the medieval age. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Before starting this episode, I just wanted to note that as the episode title suggests, it's going to include discussion of sex and sexuality with occasional more or less explicit detail, so you might not want to listen in the company of your children, or for that matter, your parents, or grandparents. Actually, you know what, just listen to it alone. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Wife – Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. Have you ever been tempted to describe retrograde views about gender and sexuality as being medieval? If so, you were more right than you probably knew. A particularly good example is the condemnation of homosexuality as immoral. Famously, the Greeks generally considered male-male sexual relationships to be acceptable, in some cases even noble, as with the sacred band of Thebes. Pederastic relationships were seen as serving a potentially useful social function, with an older man inducting a teenage boy into political life. As for the Romans, they did not divide erotic proclivities into the heterosexual and the homosexual. Instead, they distinguished between the dominant masculine role of penetrating a partner, who might be either female or male, and the more shameful and passive role of being penetrated. Even lesbianism was understood along these lines. When the Romans were disturbed by it, this was not so much because both partners were women, but because of the inevitable implication of this, namely that one of the two women would have to play the active, penetrating role. But surely moral condemnation of homosexuality as such goes back at least as far as the origins of the Christian religion, right? Not exactly. Late ancient Christians too lacked the concept of homosexuality, especially if we mean by this a settled sexual preference or identity. Sex between men, which was always of more concern to churchmen than lesbian sex, was certainly denounced by Augustine and others, but it did not emerge as a specific sin called sodomy until the 11th century. The term appears in Peter Damian as a neologism formed in imitation of the word blasphemy. So the Latin words there are sodomia and blasphemia. Damian was a tireless crusader on behalf of the moralizing reform movement that swept across Christendom at that time. This same reform movement, promoted by Pope Gregory VII, also resulted in a new demand for celibacy among clerics. That was not universally welcomed by the clerics themselves. In one case, they burned a reformer alive for promoting this novel restriction. Already before the time of Damian, and for a long time after him, sex between men was classified as just one example of a broader sin called luxuria. As the name may suggest to the English speaker's ear, this is the moral failing of being too susceptible to pleasure. The pleasure need not be sexual in nature. Luxuria could even include a weakness for things like soft bedding and fine clothes. But there was a strong association between being luxurious and engaging in deviant sexual practices. What counted as deviant sex? According to some authors, pretty well any sexual activity apart from intercourse between a man and a woman in the missionary position. It was seen as natural because of the front-facing orientation of the genitals, or because it put the woman literally under the man in a reflection of their hierarchical relationship. Bestiality, masturbation, and even cannibalism were sometimes classified along sodomy as bestial or luxurious sins. If Damian was moved to draw particular attention to sodomy and give it a name, it was perhaps because this was the version of the sin most likely to be practiced by clerics and monks in their exclusively male environments. Still in the 13th century, Albert the Great thinks of sodomy as a form of luxuria, which he now defines more narrowly as an experience of pleasure according to the reproductive power that does not comply with law. To explain why exactly these sins are so sinful, medieval thinkers took up the tools of philosophy. One option was to draw on the scientific tradition. Avicenna's massively influential medical compilation, The Canon, includes a section on coitus which explained male desire for sex with other men in anatomical terms. But the Latin scholastics tended to favour psychological explanations. As Albert's definition suggests, he saw the problem primarily as an inability to resist the attraction of unlawful pleasures. As for the reason why such pleasures are unlawful, the usual rationale was that non-reproductive sex constitutes a misuse of the generative power. One problem that arose here was why couples known to be infertile may licitly marry and have sex. This presents a serious difficulty for anyone who thinks that all morally licit intercourse must at least potentially issue in reproduction an assumption that still today underlies religious strictures against contraception and homosexuality. The medieval's were at least as alive to the complexities of moral life as we are today, as we can see from the enormous body of penitential literature produced in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. That reform involved the institution of regular confession by believers, prompting the need for texts advising clerics on how to tend to their spiritual flocks. The penitential literature attempts to bring order to human disorder. Vices are listed and sorted into their various types with indications of the tariff of penance due for each sin. A potential danger here was that speaking too openly of sodomy or other sins could, to put it bluntly, give people ideas. Even worse, sodomites might realize that they were far from alone in their perversion. Thus, the author of one penitential text, William Paraldus, recommended that, This vice is to be spoken of with great caution, both in preaching and in confessional questioning, that nothing be revealed to men that might give them occasion to sin. The penitentials also tell us a great deal about attitudes toward sexuality more generally, for instance that sex outside of marriage was popularly considered to be no big deal to the frustration of church authorities. What we're seeing here is the, if you'll pardon the expression, penetration of scholastic and especially legalistic ways of thinking into the intimate lives of everyday people. Advice to confessors often drew on the great canonists like Gratian and Hortensius who in turn look back to older authors like Augustine and Isidore of Seville. Isidore encapsulated much medieval thought on sex and gender relations in his etymologies of man and woman. Man, in Latin vir, is so named because there is greater force, vis, in him than in women. Woman, moulire, gets her name from softness, molite, for the two sexes are differentiated in the strength and weakness of their bodies. The standard view among intellectuals was that women's bodies are more moist, more cold, and hence softer, which in turn gave rise to the notion that they are highly susceptible to a variety of sins ranging from avarice to sexual excess. This attitude toward women was assumed as a matter of course by most schoolmen on the basis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine. Not that women were a matter of much interest at the universities. Passages that mention them usually do so only in order to set up a good puzzle, as when Henry of Ghent asks whether a widow who remarries should go back to her first husband if he is raised from the dead. One scholar who made a review of such texts concludes that the scholastics' failure to discuss the weakness of women in any depth was not because they were gender-blind egalitarians, but because women simply were not interesting to them as women. They were not part of their intellectual world. Still, it is easy to find what we would now describe as misogynistic statements in many a scholastic thinker. To take only the most famous of those thinkers, we find Aquinas wondering why it made sense for God to create woman at all, and answering that she was needed as help for man, and specifically for the purpose of procreation. He elsewhere remarks that one should love one's father more than one's mother because the father is the active principle, the mother a passive and material principle. In still another passage, he states that women should not speak publicly to the church because, in general, they are imperfect in wisdom. His student Giles of Rome similarly explains that a woman ought naturally to be subject to a man because she is naturally inferior to the man in prudence. On the bright side, Aquinas doesn't think that women should actually be enslaved to men. He explains that women's passivity does not make them subordinate to men in the fashion of slaves, but in the manner appropriate to the household or city, in which the subject is ruled with a view to her own good. Another richly misogynistic branch of scientific literature is gynecology, that is, medical treatises that are actually about women. These treatises offered extensive and often explicit information about women's bodies, including their genitals. These works were also widely translated into vernacular languages. One translator, sounding a bit like Dante at the beginning of his Convivio, even says that he is producing a Middle English version of a gynecological work in order that it may be of use to a female audience that cannot read Latin. Nonetheless, it would seem that these books were mostly written and read by men. A scientific interest in women did not necessarily imply a friendly attitude towards women. We find in such books the repeated claim that menstrual blood is poisonous, with one commentator wondering why it doesn't kill the menstruating women. The great medieval defender of women, Costin de Pizan, to whom we'll be coming in due course, protested that one widely read gynecological work, called Secrets of Women and falsely ascribed to Albert the Great, was a treatise composed of lies. Of course, even medieval schoolmen did not think that all women are bad people. They knew well the stories of female saints who were sometimes singled out for special praise because they had overcome their natural inferiority and risen to the heights of piety and virtue. Since women were supposedly especially prone to strong sexual desires, it was all the more admirable if they refrained from sex out of piety. Even within marriage, chastity was valued, though it was reason that a wife who vowed abstinence should give up her vow if her husband ordered her to do so. It may seem paradoxical that woman, who was purportedly created to help man with procreation, should ideally adopt virginity or chastity, but characteristically Aquinas is ready with a distinction that resolves the problem. Procreation is indeed good, but it is a good of the body, whereas virginity is ordered to the good of the soul in respect of the contemplative life, because the chaste person is devoted to thinking only of God. Such attitudes made possible the remarkable career of Catherine of Siena. In some ways, she may seem a familiar figure. Like Hildegard of Bingen, she achieved prominence and even a degree of authority because of the mystical visions she enjoyed. Born in 1347, Catherine swore a life of chastity already at the age of seven and later entered into a mystical union with God. Only she could see a wedding ring that appeared on her own finger. Her most famous miracle was the appearance of stigmata on her hands and feet, that is, wounds like the ones inflicted on Christ in the crucifixion. This would also become her most controversial miracle, because Franciscans were reluctant to admit that anyone but the founder of their order could be distinguished in this way. In 1470, almost a century after Catherine's death, the sitting pope was even persuaded to forbid depicting her with the stigmata. In her own lifetime, Catherine was able to parlay her reputation as a mystic into genuine political influence. She engaged in papal politics, trying to help bring an end to the great schism within the church that began in 1378. Throughout her career, she urged reform of the church like a latter-day Peter Damian, and towards this end wrote hundreds of letters to contemporary clergy and nobles. One story has her meeting Pope Gregory XI and being asked how she is so well informed about the situation at the papal curia. Her forthright response? Catherine's political engagement unfolded side by side with a radical commitment to personal asceticism. This too may seem a paradox. When late antique Christians devoted themselves to lives of self-abnegation, they would typically withdraw from society completely. Women took part in that movement, such as Syncletica in the 4th century, and a thousand years later women were still following this path, like Julian of Norwich a generation or so after Catherine of Siena. But Catherine managed to exercise influence in the world of men, precisely because of her reputation for pious discipline. As reported in Raymond of Kapua's Hagiographical Account of Her Life, she effectively starved herself to death at the age of 33. This has led some scholars to suggest that Catherine may have suffered from anorexia. It has also been noted that she was only one of many female mystics to have a complex relationship with food, and often with the Eucharist in particular, which Catherine for a time took as her only sustenance. In one of her visions, Catherine was promised a mouth and wisdom which none can resist. She turned these instruments less to philosophy than to the cause of moral crusading, sometimes literally since she was a fervent supporter of the crusades. But her major work, the Dialogue on Divine Providence, does offer material to interest the historian of philosophy. It provides yet another example where ideas are expressed in a vernacular language, in this case Italian. Catherine sets out a vision of individual morality that explains her own ascetic practices. For her, physical suffering is the inevitable consequence of sin. No amount of agony can ever make good the wrong of defying God, since He is infinite goodness, but the sort of distress experienced by most people does not affect the pious ascetic anyway. She does not really suffer at all, since she no longer wants anything other than what God wills. The idea may distantly remind us of the Stoic proposal that we can secure happiness by wholeheartedly accepting whatever divine providence ordains, and more proximately recall Marguerite Poet's idea of unifying our will with God's. To achieve this, the ascetic must wage war on her own wayward will. Penitential practices, insists Catherine, are only a means towards the ultimate goal of aligning the will with that of God. Catherine echoes Marguerite's point that union with God is a higher objective than ordinary charity and virtue, though she makes this proposal in a far less provocative way and retains the idea that chastising the body is a key part of the mystical path, something Marguerite came to reject. This difference of opinion undermines the notion that bodily asceticism was a defining feature of mysticism among medieval women. Certainly, Catherine herself did not see mortification of the body as paradigmatic feminine. She wrote that the soul must exercise manly fortitude if it is to combat the sensual aspects of human nature. The ravages to which Catherine subjected her own body may strike you as more disquieting than admirable. Some medieval observers might have agreed. A couple of episodes back I mentioned Henry Souza, a follower of Meister Eckhart, whose own ascetic practices are detailed in a hagiographical account of his life. It may have been written by his spiritual daughter, Elspeth Stagel. While of course presenting Souza as a spiritual hero, the biography also seeks to discourage female readers from following his example. Extraordinary, even life-threatening self-abnegation is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but is more appropriate for strong men than weak women. Were any medieval men willing to entertain the possibility of a woman who is praiseworthy for her mind rather than her piety and spirituality? Well, earlier in this episode, I said that most schoolmen were deeply and for the most part unreflectively convinced of women's inferiority. One exception to this rule was Peter Abelard. As is clear from the letters he exchanged with his brilliant student and lover, Heloise, Abelard was impressed by and even infatuated with Heloise in large part because of her intellect. Perhaps for this reason, after they were parted, he went on to write one of the most impassioned defenses of women written in the Middle Ages. It is a treatise on the dignity of nuns like Heloise and her sisters, full of theological arguments for admiring and cherishing women. Abelard reminds us that it was women who anointed Christ during his lifetime and argues that the original sin initiated by Eve has been compensated by the Virgin Mary. In fact, Abelard was only one of many medieval authors who wrote on the defense of women or who rebutted misogynist arguments. The earliest example would seem to come in the late 11th century with Marbaud Avarin who wrote a poem attacking women followed by a response in praise of her. In the 14th century, the case for women will be advanced by Jean Lefebvre who incidentally refers to Heloise and calls her philosophesse. He and other pro-women authors draw on Biblical material, including the apocryphal books, and are at pains to list virtuous women from pagan history and among Christian saints. Telling points made in such texts include the observation that men implicitly condemn their own mothers when they mount misogynistic arguments and a proof that woman is intended as a partner to man and not as inferior on the grounds that Eve was made from the rib in Adam's side and not from his foot. It must, however, be said that there is a good deal of praising with faint damn in the works written in defense of women. Lefebvre, for instance, comments that woman is superior to man in her freedom because she has less reason and more will. But the masters of ambivalent praise of women were the 14th century poets Boccaccio and Chaucer. Both composed works gathering together stories of good women. This sounds like a forthrightly feminist project, but highlighting exceptionally virtuous females can go hand in hand with lamenting the fact that most are far from exceptional. Thus, Boccaccio complains that women typically concern themselves only with sex and child-rearing, despite having the ability to do those things which make men famous, if only they are willing to work with perseverance. As for Chaucer, he focuses on women who suffer from the mistreatment of men. This is apt to provoke the reader's sympathy, but also convey the sense that women are inevitably passive and frequently victimized by male deceptions because they are so easy to deceive. Chaucer's most fascinating and ambiguous text on women comes in his Canterbury Tales in the form of the prologue of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Our protagonist, Alison, tells the satirical and frequently outrageous story of her five marriages. She minces no words about the pleasure she takes in sex, announcing that, In wifehood I will use my instrument as freely as my Maker hath it sent. She is willing to admit that virginity is admirable, but stresses that it is not obligatory. She might almost be responding to Aquinas's remarks on this topic when she says that maidenhood may be preferred to marriage, like goldspoons to wooden ones, yet, A lord in his household, he has not every vessel all of gold, some are of tree, and do their lord service. Her unsentimental eye also discerns that marriage is a kind of economic exchange, in which sex is a debt paid by one partner to another, in her own case with little pleasure, when she was married to older men. This prologue also contains a remarkable reflection on the tradition of misogynist literature and its connections to the culture of clerks. Alison's final husband, Janken, is such a clerk who was at Oxford. He reads from a book full of nasty remarks about women, compiled from a wide range of authors including none other than Heloise, a surprising inclusion until we remember the diatribe against marriage in her letters to Abelard. Our previous interview guest, Monica Green, has quipped that this fictive book of wicked wives might be the most thoroughly studied book that never existed. When an outraged Alison tears pages from the book and slaps Janken, he retaliates with such force that she is not senseless and rendered temporarily deaf, a memorable portrayal of domestic violence. The wife is clearly a comic character, but the modern reader naturally sympathizes with her plight in this scene and more generally with her scathing critique of men, their violence and cruelty, their fecklessness and sexual inadequacy. But is this really what Chaucer wanted us to take from his poem? When you know about the sin of Luxuria, you can't help noticing the delight she takes in fine clothes as well as sex, or the suggestion that she uses religious pilgrimage as an opportunity for sexual adventure. On the other hand, when you're familiar with medieval misogyny, you can't help noticing how comprehensively she parodies and rebuts the typical accusations made against women. I tend to side with those who see Chaucer as using positive and negative sentiments towards women primarily as a tool for vivid characterization. Even as Alison debunks misogyny, she is herself being debunked. Certainly, she is not recommended to us as a model of female virtue or as proof that women are truly equal to men. For that, we would need to turn to a more committed anti-misogynist than Chaucer, and preferably to the greatest of all medieval anti-misogynists, Christine de Pizan. We'll be doing that in a couple of episodes when we look at the role played by Christine in a debate over the misogyny of Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose. But before we wash our hands of the poem about the wife of Bath, I'll be speaking to Isabel Davis, an expert on Chaucer and what his works reveal about gender relations in the 14th century. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the OMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about attitudes towards sexuality and marriage in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. For this topic, I'm being joined by Isabelle Davis, who is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Birkbeck College at the University of London. Hi, Isabelle. Hi. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for watching. Yeah, okay. Well, Chaucer is an exciting subject which I guess people might not expect to hear about on a History of Philosophy series. And so we'll talk maybe a bit later about why it might be an idea to include him. But let's first just make sure the listener knows what we're talking about. So I guess pretty much everyone has heard of Geoffrey Chaucer. He lived in the 14th century, died in 1400, and he's the author of The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories which are put into the mouths of pilgrims who are having a competition, basically, who can tell the best story as they go on this pilgrimage together. And one of the things that actually people do talk about quite a lot with The Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's other works is this theme that we're going to be concentrating on, which is sexuality, marriage, intimacy, and so on. And so I was wondering if you could start by telling us about which aspects or parts of The Canterbury Tales are most relevant here, and maybe also what other things Chaucer wrote that you might want to consider. Sure. I mean, before Chaucer was the author of The Canterbury Tales, he had written his great romance, Troilus and Crusade, which is very much about the erotic and intimate life. It's not really focused as much on marriage. Where we might think about marriage is much more in The Canterbury Tales, and that's where he thinks about that relationship in particular. So he's capable of thinking about erotic relationships within or outside of marriage, and he distinguishes the two things. That's right. I mean, there are critics who would like to see Troilus and Crusade's relationship as a marriage-like relationship or as a clandestine marriage, but that is not completely explicit in the text. And it's a poem which is thinking more broadly about love and sexuality and the place of a sexual life, perhaps outside of the bonds of marriage even. And I suppose that there's a long tradition leading up to Chaucer already, or maybe not a long tradition, but there is a tradition of works on love and romance leading up to Chaucer. So for example, you have The Romance of the Rose, which is a text that he reads and influences him. And so these are other texts that may talk about romance or the erotic without necessarily raising the topic of marriage as such. Is that right? Exactly right. So he's writing in a tradition of romance writing, which includes The Romance of the Rose, which as you say, is a landmark text. And actually, although it does have parts of The Romance of the Rose discuss marriage, it's not one of its principal topics, and it doesn't talk about marriage in a particularly positive way. So that's something which we might think about the way that Chaucer builds into his work, even where he might be responding to something like The Romance of the Rose. What does Chaucer tell us about the historical situation regarding marriage in his day? I mean, you just mentioned, for example, clandestine marriage. So that might be a nice case of what are the sort of social phenomena that we can learn about by reading a text like the works of Chaucer? Yeah. I mean, how we use literature like Chaucer's work as historical evidence is obviously a knotty problem. And we need to use it alongside other corroborating historical records. And one record, body of record that we might look to is the ecclesiastical courts. And they really deal with cases about marriage. And lots of, most marriage litigation in the Middle Ages is not as it is today about dissolving marriages, mostly about whether marriages are in fact valid, whether they've been made, whether the right contract has been made. And although lots of people like today wanted to formalise their marriage contracts, and they would go actually to the doors of the church, rather than perhaps inside the church to have a service, and whilst they might invite their friends and family to witness that service, that wasn't absolutely necessary for the making of a medieval marriage. So if two people exchanged words of present consent, even in a private household, that was regarded as a valid marriage. Of course, you've got an extra problem if you want to enforce that contract, you would need witnesses in order to enforce it. But there are lots of cases in the medieval consistory courts or ecclesiastical courts, church courts, in which people are trying to enforce contracts, and they have to present witness testimony. And a typical case might be that a young girl who's pregnant says that she agreed to sleep with her lover if he married her. And of course, he has an alibi for the day where this contract was supposedly made. Perhaps he was buying a horse in another town. It would be interesting incidental historical details in those records. But that was a possible way of making marriage. And Chaucer includes actually an example of this in The Legend of Good Women, when he rewrites the story of Dido, and he strengthens the vows which are made between Dido and Aeneas in a cave in the middle of nowhere. So, to the extent where I think contemporaries would have understood that relationship to be marriage-like or perhaps even a valid marriage, critics are slightly divided on it. But most critics agree that Dido is right to think that she has a contract of some kind. It's interesting, I think, that this all raises the possibility that you could be married in the eyes of God without being legally married. I mean, if you were, say, you were in a room together, just the husband-to-be and the wife-to-be, you exchanged marriage vows. Okay, now God thinks of you as married, but you can't enforce it later on. Yeah, and you've got to answer to your conscience, of course. But it was designed, I suppose, this idea is what makes a valid marriage theologians. Lots of theologians argued it was the consent of two hearts, and that's partly to accommodate the question of the Holy Family, like in what way Mary and Joseph married. Well, because it was unconsummated. It's unconsummated. So you can't say that consummation forms marriage. What makes that marriage valid? The consent of two hearts. So the question of consent actually is very important to lots of writing about marriage, and how far we can find that in literature is an interesting question. And I mean, people, even very young people, may well have known their rights in terms of the making of marriage. They couldn't necessarily be coerced into marriages that were recommended to them by their families and other communities. If they didn't consent, the church would often and sometimes uphold their rights in the face of strong community pressure to not marry the person they didn't want to, or perhaps to marry the person they did want to. Actually I think here we're already seeing, we haven't really even gotten to Chaucer yet, so we should do that, but we're already seeing why this topic is philosophically interesting, because you have questions about, does just intending to do something make it the case? What role does consent play in ethical obligations to other people? What do other people have to do in order to verify that the right kind of relationship exists between these two people? And it's actually something that's come up in the podcast before that we have this interplay between legal texts and philosophical texts, and now in this case, literary texts with Chaucer. So let's turn then to Chaucer and in particular the most striking text from the Canterbury Tales, which touches on these questions, which is the story of the wife of Bath, or rather the prologue that comes before the story that the wife of Bath tells. So this is a very vivid portrait of marriage from the point of view of the wife in the marriage, or actually in the marriages, because she has several marriages, five, right? And the kind of discussion that she provides is, I guess, pretty clearly supposed to be funny. And that might make someone wonder whether she's just being held up as a kind of object of ridicule or mockery. So I think it's a very easy text to read as just a kind of misogynist attack on women or on marriage or the way women think about marriage, because she talks about marriage often as a kind of exchange where she was trying to get something out of the men, and she talks about how she tries to manipulate them and what she did and didn't manage to get out of each of her husbands. So presumably you don't think that that reductive reading is right, because otherwise there's not going to be very much for us to talk about. So how do you think that we should read the prologue? I think it's very, very good. That's a very difficult question. This is what occupies critical attention on the wife of Bart's prologue, and exactly how to read it. Of course, she says that she speaks from experience about marriage. And yet a lot of what she says clearly is quotation from a long tradition of misogynist writing. Exactly what we're supposed to be laughing at in her prologue is a really difficult question to answer. And one of the things that complicates the reductive portrait that you tell about, or you drew there about her just as the brunt of a misogynist joke, is that she actually tells a story of her conversion from nagging wife into somebody who has a more sophisticated companionate relationship with her fifth husband. And to achieve that, she comes through a period of domestic violence too. So it's a very strange tale, in fact, a prologue, which charts a number of different kinds of marriages. Of course, there's another reductive reading of her, which is that she is that voice, that authentic female voice, and a poke in the eye for the medieval ecclesiastical men whose writing she tries to resist. So that would also actually be pretty much the reverse reading. That's right. It's not that we're mocking her, it's that Chaucer is sort of using her voice to speak on behalf of women and complain about their lot, essentially. That's right, and that he actually achieved some authenticity there. And of course we've got to find something in between, a reading in between those two poles. I mean, I think there are things that we're supposed to take seriously about what the Wife of Bath says about the ethics of marriage. But it is really complicated by the laughter. One of the jokes has to be that she's supposed to be speaking to us, and yet so much of what she says seems to come out of written traditions. And we're supposed to pick up on that, as the reader. That's right. I mean, she talks about her fifth husband has an anthology of misogynist writing which he reads out to her night after night. And some of the contents of that anthology, she actually quotes from herself when she's saying, these are things I actually said to my previous husbands. These are the ways that I nagged them. These are words which we find written in the sources that she cites from that book. So how do we read that? What is Chaucer saying? Is he saying that tragically she has internalised the material which describes her as fallen and inadequate? And is it a tragic portrait in that respect? Or is there something more cynical which we're laughing at there? I was wondering, when you just said that the wife has fallen, that might seem surprising. I mean, of course, in a sense, everybody's fallen, right? Because of the original sin. But there seems to be a stronger sense in which the wife of Bath has fallen in that she, in her married life, seems to be failing to live up to some kind of ethical standard or ideal. And I was wondering whether, if the wife of Bath is being criticised, or at least maybe her original approach to marriage is being criticised in favour of a later approach, is the problem that she doesn't see married life in the right way? Or is it that Chaucer is trying to say that married life in itself is somehow substandard, because a better life would be a life of chastity and virginity? I think there are two things in the wife of Bath's prologue. There's her practice, and there's some of the theory which she expounds, and she's quite technical and theological, in fact, in some of that theory. And I think, in my reading, that lots of her theory is actually relatively correct, or it is a possible reading which some of her contemporaries would have concurred with. But she seems unable to live up to some of those theories. And in particular, she tells us, for example, that while she's married to her fourth husband, she has an affair with her husband's apprentice. And that wouldn't have been recommended, of course, by any moral or theological commentator, or recommended as a good way to live. So she seems to be able to say some things which are correct, and yet she can't actually live up to them herself. And is she being presented as doing these things in full knowledge that they're wrong? I mean, she sort of looks back on herself and says, oh, and there I was, guiltily going about my business and doing things I knew to be a sin. That's right. I mean, the prologue is styled as a confession in that way, and that she's confessing to the mistakes of the past. She actually talks even about that episode of adultery, about the way that she lied to the husband and said, oh, there's nothing going on with your apprentice. But she tells us quite plainly that that wasn't true. So we see her confessing her past sins. And part of that is about trying to claim a new way of being a wife that she found in her fifth husband, Janekin, with that husband. She describes falling in love, in fact, in quite affecting ways. So actually it sounds to me like there's maybe three levels here. There's the wife of Bath's actual practice, which already doesn't live up to her own ideal. And then there's her ideal, which is an ideal of married life. And then there's maybe potentially a higher ideal, which would be an ideal of a chaste life. So the life lived by saints or in a monastic setting, of course, which is a clear possible contrast to the life that the wife of Bath lives. And so is Chaucer then aligning his own attitudes with those of the wife of Bath in the sense that he's telling us that the ideal life to live is a married life, but a good married life, where you don't cheat on your spouse, for example? Or is he trying to say something negative about marriage, at least to the point that he wants to show us that actually a life of, say, monastic purity would actually be preferable? It's very hard with Chaucer ever to say exactly what he believes because he puts so much of what he says about anything into the voice of other characters. And so the wife of Bath, for example, talks about chastity and she acknowledges that it's a superlative ethical option, but she just says that I'm not I, that's not me. And I suppose one of the arguments that she's making there is ethical perfection might be an ideal for all sorts of people, but not for everybody. We could think about that in modern life, that we see lots of magazines in which we see people's perfect lives and perfect bodies and all the rest of it, but we don't all aspire to achieve that in our own lives, that we go about with our imperfect bodies and we accept that that's part of the way of living. The Canterbury Tales does have some things to say about virginity and there are two tales in particular, so the Physician's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale. The Second Nun's Tale on the whole is perhaps a bit more positive about virginity and tries to think about it as replicating perhaps some of the affections that are provided by marriage. So Saint Cecilia in that tale is married but she lives a chaste life. But the Physician's Tale is a darker and more complicated tale about a father who kills his vaginal daughter in order to avoid her being raped. And the physician himself is a man who does try to lead a perfect bodily life. He has a strict health regimen and he understands the medical authorities and tries to live by those rules. And so he has an idea about the intact body but because the tale is so problematic, I mean is it better to be murdered than to be raped? Not all the pilgrims for example might agree with that and not sure the wife of Bath would necessarily agree with that. Do readers sympathise with this drastic action which is taken to apparently protect this girl? It's not clear. Chaucer isn't the kind of writer who will step in and give you a clear summary of how you're supposed to think about things. He's like Plato in this respect. So let me just go back to the wife of Bath and her prologue just for one more moment because I think something else is worth mentioning is that this fifth marriage with Jankin actually has a disturbing scene of domestic abuse as we would call it now. And in a way it even kind of grows out of this sequence where he's reading to her from this misogynistic compendium, this book that he's got. So it's like he starts out by abusing her by reading to her and then he continues by abusing her by beating her up. And so again I wonder what that tells us about contemporary attitudes towards violence towards women and maybe also what Chaucer may or may not be trying to tell us about violence between men and women. So for example he could be saying that violence and sexuality are somehow inextricably intertwined and of course if that's what he's saying that would suggest that he does have a pretty negative view of marriage. It's a really interesting question partly because we must at any level must think about The Canterbury Tales as a contemporary social comment, as a contemporary satire. So he's interested in questions about women, marriage, domestic violence, widows perhaps as their own subject for themselves. But at the same time as we said before he's also dealing with long traditions of writing and thinking about the way that these things have been discussed before. And I think that the episode of domestic violence as real as it seems to us reading it is not only interested in contemporary violence within marriage but it's also a literary illusion and from a particular episode of the Romance of the Rose, that 13th century romance that you mentioned before, and in that poem a character called the jealous husband not only abuses his wife psychologically with the misogynist texts which Chaucer is also tackling in the Wife of Bath's prologue but he also beats his wife. One of the questions that that raises is how far there's a continuum between misogynist writing and real physical violence against women. And the episode of domestic violence is very sad in the Wife of Bath's tale but also oddly very funny. She tells it as a joke against herself. She talks about swinging the first punch, she talks about being incredibly histrionic, she pretends to be dead and that when he comes closer to her to feeling sorry that he might have killed her she then uses that as an opportunity to punch him again. Take that, Jenkins. That's right, but she does say, you know, that about the book that she tears some, before they fall to blows, she tears some pages out of the book that he's continually reading to her and for that she says he smoked me until I was deaf. And this is a very important detail in the Wife of Bath's portrait. We hear about it three times. She tells us twice herself that she was beaten until she was deaf and also the narrator tells us in the general prologue that the Wife of Bath is deaf. I think this is a very sad still point in her narrative and it's very difficult to move around because even though she talks about herself being partly to blame for the violence, for giving as good as she gets, nonetheless she's been beaten until she's disabled and what that means is something which critics talk a lot about. In what ways might we read that metaphorically? How much might she be metaphorically deaf? Does it mean that she's unable to hear about how to live that good ethical life, for example? Is she unable to hear scripture? Or is she unable to keep hearing the misogynist diatribe? Quite. Yeah, maybe there comes a point where this continuum is so inevitable that you're unable in fact to hear this ideological attack. The other strange thing about this, by the way, is that this episode, disturbing though it is, then sort of ushers in the happy ending because Jankin regrets what he's done and then from then on they kind of achieve marital bliss together. That's right and she also expresses regret about her behaviour in that incident and it seems that that companionate love match that they arrive at is forged in violence. She says she loves the man most of all who beat her most severely and so it's both tragic and strangely comic at the same time. But one way of reading the Wife of Bars prologue might be to think about it allegorically. Because Jankin is actually a cleric he must be, if we're thinking about it as a literal marriage in minor orders in order to be able to have a wife, but if we read it allegorically that this is about a woman and how she is married to clergy and perhaps clerical misogyny more broadly, we could say that she is made deaf by a violent relationship. The struggle between woman and clerical misogyny is inevitably a violent one and one way that the tale might be read is about how the church might make accommodation for women or might come to terms with women, how that marriage might be made more affectionate. So that may be one way to think about her deafness too, that she's made deaf by a clergy that have become distracted by misogyny and unable now to do its pastoral duty by women perhaps or lay people more broadly. I think another feature of it that at least convinced me not knowing very much about this sort of literature I have to admit, but something that struck me about it is just that Chaucer is doing such a good job inhabiting the voice of this woman. He's really imagined himself into her point of view, which is itself a kind of act of ethical identification. And you might say, well, big deal, he's a literary author, he has to do that, that's part of the game. But I think he must be consciously reflecting on that precisely because there's all of these sort of self-conscious reflections on the literary tradition that he's drawing on, and he even puts in a text which is anti-woman into the prologue. And so it seems to me that this is a really nice case, I think, where you have a literary text that's approaching what we can recognize as philosophical themes. So in this case, something like ethical identification, chastity, which is something we've talked about a lot, but in a way that no philosophical text could achieve. And so just in conclusion, I wanted to ask you more generally what you think we can get out of this kind of literature, say, as historians of philosophy. I mean, if we're interested in mostly in philosophical themes in the medieval period, then what would we miss out on if we don't read authors like Chaucer? I think one of the reasons why looking at somebody like Chaucer is really useful for thinking about ethical debates more broadly is because he's not an exception to his time. He's indicative and he fits in with what other people think, and are writing about or debating. And he's implicated in wider questions of ethics. So if we're thinking about celibacy, for example, and whether it's a good idea to have a celibate priestly cast, we might think about his engagement with perhaps Franciscan debates or Wycliffeite debates about the right kind of perfect living, whether being Christ-like or imitating Christ is the best way forward. And of course Franciscans have a different answer to that than perhaps Wycliffeites do. By Wycliffeite you mean followers of John Wycliffe, right? That's right, yes, which is in Wycliffeite thinking the question about having a celibate priesthood is very much up for discussion. And the followers of Wycliffe are also trying to think about incorporating the idea of women as part of a... that they might even be able to preach, for example, or to take part in the church in a different way, that they might have that capacity. So these things are becoming very important philosophical discussions at the same time that Chaucer's writing. To go back to something you were saying about the ethics of identification and writing in the voice of somebody else, this is an important literary question which Chaucer is taking from texts like The Romance of the Rose and other writers, female writers like, for example, Christine de Pisan are also thinking that problem through. So Christine de Pisan, for example, asks the question about The Romance of the Rose, about why so many of the characters speak in a misogynist voice, even when it doesn't fit allegorically with what they're supposed to represent. And people who defend the roses in the early 15th century really say to her, you don't understand what a character is, what a persona is, and this isn't the author speaking, but she keeps returning to this problem of why so many of them? Why when it's not allegorically fit? Why is there this predominance? And so she's really asking that question about how fair it is to try to speak in a woman's voice. So the notorious character, perhaps in The Romance of the Rose, is the character of the old woman, who is one kind of model for the wife of Bath, in fact, and she gives the most scurrilous, discreditable advice. The wife of Bath, we can read her in that way, it's very easy to discredit her because she's completely outrageous, but should we throw everything that she says out, or are there aspects of what she says which might be actually validated by other people in her historical moment? Okay, thanks very much. Well, that was a nice look at what literary texts can offer us, and looking at some of these ethical and even religious themes, and more generally philosophical themes in the 14th century. Next time I'm going to be looking at other topics in the 14th century and medieval philosophy, later medieval philosophy, so please join me for that next time. But for now I'll thank Isabel Davis for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me to hear more about late medieval philosophy next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Most Christian Doctor, Jean Gerson. Our tour through medieval intellectual culture is reaching its final stops as we approach the year 1400, and thus the date I've somewhat artificially chosen to mark the boundary between medieval and renaissance philosophy. To make sure you realise how artificial that boundary is, in these last few episodes of the current series, I'll be looking at figures and movements that span the divide between the 14th and 15th centuries. We'll be seeing anticipations of renaissance humanism, and of the religious controversies that ultimately gave rise to the Protestant Reformation. But around 1400, people were also looking back. They continued to take inspiration from earlier scholastics like Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, and texts that were more than a century old were the late medieval equivalent of bestsellers. One of them was the Romance of the Rose. Normally, when I allude to topics covered in long previous episodes, I worry that listeners will struggle to remember what I'm talking about, but I suspect you'll have no trouble recalling this ironic, artful, and occasionally obscene production of the late 13th century poet Jean de Meun. The occasional obscenity was one reason for the so-called Carelles de la Rose, a famous debate over the Romance of the Rose that was sparked at the close of the 14th century. It involved about half a dozen members of the French aristocracy with various connections to the French court, and in the person of Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris. He was scandalized by the poem's enthusiastic embrace of erotic conquest, its use of naughty language and even naughtier metaphors to describe the sexual organs. Another of its detractors was Christine de Pizan, who complained especially of the misogyny running throughout the Romance. I'm actually going to cover Christine properly in the future series of episodes on Renaissance thought. When I do, we'll see that she contributed significantly to political philosophy and established herself as a sort of figure unprecedented in the medieval period. She was an independent woman, neither ascetic nor nun, who participated in intellectual and literary discussions on an equal footing with scholars of her time. In the case of the debate over the Romance of the Rose, she even initiated the discussion. She first expressed her disquiet about Jean de Meun's work in 1399, following this up with a series of letters in which she sharpened and extended her critique of the Romance and its pernicious effect on readers. What strikes the modern reader most is her spirited rebuke of those passages in the Romance which speak badly of all women, as when Jean de Meun has one character complain, you are all now will be and have been whores, indeed or in tension. Christine was outraged by such statements. Certainly some women are wicked, but just as we don't say that all angels are evil because of the fall of Lucifer, neither should we condemn the whole sex for the sins of the few. Her defense of women was of course a matter of self-defense, something not lost on her opponents. Defenders of the Romance added insult to insult by implying that she had no business criticizing it as a mere woman. One defender of the Romance, named Jean de Montreuil, wrote, Although she is not lacking in intelligence within the limits of her female capacity, it seemed to me nevertheless that I was hearing the Greek whore Leontium, who, as Cicero reports, dared to write against so great a philosopher as Theophrastus. In response, Christine modestly admitted to being a woman of untrained intellect and uncomplicated sensibility, while insisting that her voice should be heard too. Heroines of classical history and Christian religion show, she argued, that there is no cause to discount someone just because she is female. Besides, as Christine pointed out, if the debate in part concerned women's virtue, then this was something to which she could speak with a certain authority, being a woman herself. Not that you need to be a woman to see the implausibility of saying that women are more wicked than men. As she put it in one characteristically witty remark, where are the countries or kingdoms that have been ravaged by women's great iniquities? Yet, misogyny is only one of the accusations she lobbed in the direction of Jean de Montreuil. Like the foolish lover character in the Romance itself, she complained about the use of the dirty word testicles, and more generally worried that the Romance's libel indeed purposefully designed to urge its reader on to sin. Jean de Montreuil's admirers rose to his defense with more than just sexist abuse of Christine. The most interesting voice on the other side was Pierre Colles, who wrote a letter to Christine putting a case in favor of the Romance. Here we get into more obviously philosophical territory as the debate begins to turn on questions of aesthetics, and in particular, the relation between fiction and the moral integrity of an author. Colles urges us not to confuse the characters who speak in the Romance with Jean de Montreuil himself. Admittedly, figures like the old woman and the jealous man do have nasty advice for the character of the foolish lover. But these evil words are intended simply to prepare the reader, who is likely to encounter such arguments and attitudes in real life. According to Pierre Colles, the attitude of the author, Jean de Montreuil, was quite different. He used to be a foolish lover himself, but eventually came to his senses. It is thus a work of repentance, and also of helpful warning for the reader not to give in to the irrationality of passionate love. Colles even claims to know a man who was brought to his senses upon reading the Romance, and recovered from a bout of foolish love. In truth, this is a patently unconvincing reading of the Romance, and one wonders how seriously Colles means what he is saying. A true follower of Jean de Montreuil, Colles himself would seem to be adept at literary playfulness. As one interpreter has put it, even in the midst of defending, Colles appears all too often self-mocking and ironic, while preserving all the while a delightful, blithe air of naïve innocence. Christine takes the whole business more seriously, responding that the detail and persuasiveness of the wicked speeches in the Romance go far beyond what would be needed to give warning. It would be like actually teaching someone to counterfeit money in the process of warning them about false currency. And for her, this is no game. Colles may claim to know a friend who was cured of love by the Romance, but Christine knows of another man who beats his wife, having been turned misogynistic by this dangerous reading material. As for Jean Gerson, he was somewhat more willing to play with literary artifice. In a work of 1402, he had lampooned the Romance by describing a courtroom scene in which the character of the foolish lover, in other words Jean de Montreuil, is accused in the presence of a personification of justice. His ironically disapproving approach is already indicated by the detail that his own vision is related as something that happened when he was very much awake and not dreaming like Jean de Montreuil, or for that matter, Langland in Piers Plowman. Despite this literary sensibility, he is no more impressed than Christine was by the idea that we should carefully distinguish an author's own views from those of his characters. This does not give an author license to say just whatever he wants. Imagine a Christian who preaches on behalf of the Muslim faith but just for the sake of argument. Clearly, this would be unacceptable, says Gerson. Besides, the Romance makes its speakers say things that are discordant with the concepts they personify. Jean de Montreuil's character of reason is not very reasonable, for example. This betrays that the author is in fact putting his own words into the mouths of those characters, so that effectively everything is said in his own person. Yet both Gerson and Christine were still able to admire the aesthetic qualities of the poem. They admitted that it is very well written and registered no objections to courtly love literature as such, even if Christine teasingly mocked some of its conventions. I have never heard tell, she says, where the cemeteries are in which are buried those whom pure love has put to death. One sign of their tolerance of the genre is that Gerson is perfectly happy with the beginning of the Romance by Guillaume Delaurice. It is only its scandalous continuation by Jean de Montreuil that needs to be brought to court. Though the work at the center of this debate is a quintessentially medieval one, the debate itself seems to belong more to the Renaissance. We have here reflection on the uses and abuses of literature in the vernacular, studded with frequent allusions to classical authors like Cicero and Seneca, who are far more salutary authors than Jean de Montreuil in the opinion of Christine and Gerson. The defense of female virtue, already a feature of 14th century literature with Boccaccio and Chaucer, would become a frequent topic of reflection in the 15th and 16th centuries. As we'll see when we come again to Christine, she returned to the subject in later works, notably her City of Ladies. A list of other Renaissance authors who take up the cause of women would include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. One may thus see both Gerson and Christine de Pizan as transitional figures straddling the divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Alternatively, one may question whether there is really any sharp divide here at all. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to choose a better transitional figure for these two periods than Jean Gerson. From a humble background, he rose to become a theologian at Paris in 1392, and as already mentioned, the Chancellor of the University there. This made him a prominent individual, with the opportunity to comment on a wide range of topics ranging from the political to the pastoral to the philosophical. It has been argued that he was among the first of Europe's public intellectuals and a leading exponent of the short topical treatise that was displacing older forms of writing at this period, like the commentary. Among the topics he tackled in such texts were the question of tyrannicide, the validity of visions received by women, including Brigitte of Sweden and Joan of Arc, the goodness of celibacy, and the evil of the heresies taught by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. He often followed in the footsteps of his admired teacher at Paris, the theologian Peter de Ayy, who was in fact also involved in the debate over the romance of the rose. But for both de Ayy and Gerson, a far more crucial debate was the one that raged in the late 14th and early 15th centuries as a result of the schism in the papacy. The rift began in 1378, when cardinals decamped from Italy to Avignon in France, claiming that the election of Pope Urban VI had been forced upon them by the people of Rome. They nominated a new pope, Clement VII, beginning a decades-long period where there were two or even three rival popes. When popes died, the schism continued, with new popes simply replacing them on both sides. Theologians like Gerson were forced to grapple with a political conundrum that also posed grave spiritual difficulties. What were Christians to do in the face of conflicting decrees handed down by two different popes? Gerson offered a voice of calm guidance, reminding us of Peter Abelard's ethics when he suggests that the main thing was to form an intention to be pious. In the same optimistic spirit, he worked for years to encourage the so-called Via Cassionis, a solution by which all rival claimants to the papacy would voluntarily renounce their titles, paving the way for the election of a new and universally recognized candidate. Ultimately, though, and to be more specific, at the time of a pivotal council held in Constance from 1414 to 1418, Gerson became a key supporter of the Via Conchilii. This alternative solution called for a church council that would impose a settlement of the issue. Peter de Ailly and others, notably the early conciliarists Conrad of Gelnhausen and Henry of Langenstein, had already pressed for this outcome and the addition of Gerson's voice helped to bring it about. If we cast our minds back to a writer like Giles of Rome, we can see why the conciliar approach was so controversial. Giles argued that the pope possessed a plenitude of power from which all valid authority flowed, in spiritual matters, of course, but also in secular affairs. For Giles, human society in general and the Church was a rigid hierarchy with a single power at its peak, just as the universe has its single divine ruler. Taking inspiration from the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Giles compared the Church hierarchy to that of the angels. It was not easy for Gerson to resist this logic, since he too ascribed a plenitude of power to the papacy and saw the ecclesiastical hierarchy as an image of that in heaven. To avoid the absolutist conclusion drawn by the likes of Giles, he drew on the tools of scholastic philosophy. The pope may be the head of the Church, but the head is only one part of the greater whole. A council, by contrast, represents the whole Church. So it is such a council and not the papacy that makes infallible judgments and that has a power of obligation that no one may licitly refuse, not even the pope. For Gerson, the Church is thus an example of the best political arrangements described in Aristotle's politics, namely a mixture of other constitutional forms. It has a monarchial element in the person of the pope, an oligarchic element with the council of bishops, and a democratic element insofar as the Church is universal among all the faithful. It would probably be fair to say that Gerson came around to this position in part for pragmatic reasons, but his pragmatism was principled. He argued that a dispute like this would often need to be resolved through the application of practical legal judgment, what Aristotle called epicia. The person in the best position to do this is not the canon lawyer, but the trained theologian who understands the divine law and can thus work towards the end God intended for us. With this point, we see another key element of Gerson's intellectual profile. As the leading representative of the University of Paris, he was unstinting in defending the prerogatives of the trained theologian. His public interventions were often in this spirit. He called on his theological expertise to give advice to others, even to the French king, who was encouraged to listen to his daughter, the university, and he frequently remonstrated with other theologians who strayed into error. This could occur because of an overly literal approach to Scripture, as with the heresies of Wycliffe and Huss, or at the other extreme, because of excessively figurative readings. The latter was the case in Gerson's view when the Parisian theologian Jean Petit argued that the murder of a wicked tyrant does not violate the commandment against killing. Gerson had no patience with this, insisting that one should adhere to the plain letter of Scripture even if further symbolic interpretations may also be given. Actually, Gerson had little patience with quite a few of his colleagues, despite being the voice of the university. He lamented the scholastic tendency towards curiosity and singularity, by which he meant over-specializing in narrow technical issues. What we now see as highlights of later medieval thought, such as the debate over universals, were for him little more than pointless distinction-mongering. His warning was that unbounded philosophy would dash itself upon the stone of error, while his positive advice was, Let us learn not so much to dispute as to live. This attitude finds its most eloquent expression in his sermons, many of which survive today. Here, too, he is at pains to avoid questions that are abstruse and curious. As the Gerson scholar Catherine Brown has put it, Although he admits that there is nothing wrong with scholastic theology per se, the impression is that one is really better off without it, especially if one wishes to attain the height of Christian wisdom. His sermons thus concentrated on communicating important issues to a wide audience. Convinced that ignorance of sin is no excuse, he strove to offer moral advice and also consolation to the laity, and in particular to women. This brings us back full circle to Gerson's attitude towards women. In several passages he seems to express the sort of misogyny he himself attacked in the debate over the Romance of the Rose. He agreed with the standard scholastic view, which we saw Aquinas expressing a couple of episodes ago, that women should not speak publicly, and went so far as to say that any teaching put forth by a woman is automatically suspect. He was troubled by the heroic asceticism of certain women, and here one might think of Catherine of Siena, which often came together with a degree of arrogance. On the other hand, he was critical of male mystics too, such as Jan van Roesbruck, who claimed that it is possible to achieve complete identity with God in mystical union. Frequently, he spoke much more positively of women, admiring their capacity for spiritual devotion, and towards the end of his life expressing support for Joan of Arc. There is no inconsistency here. For Gerson, the unlettered simplicity and emotional nature of women helped them avoid the sort of overcomplicated approach to religion that Gerson detected in his fellow schoolmen, and made them apt for true mystical experience. Somewhat like Eckhart before him, albeit with far less daring, Gerson attempted to integrate mysticism into a worldview shaped by scholasticism. He wrestled with the question whether union with God is primarily accomplished through intellectual understanding or through affective or emotional experience. Though he generally seems to have thought that both approaches have merit, he moved towards affective mysticism as his career progressed. The appropriate stance for the one who journeys towards God is passionate yearning, waiting for an ultimately unknowable God to bestow the reward of mystical insight. Such union with God never amounts to a complete dissolving of the mystic in God's essence, as claimed by any number of medieval mystics who compared the process to dissolution or annihilation like a complete mixing of two liquids. Rather, the mystical theologian is like the polished glass that can receive a perfect reflection, or like a statue that sculpts itself. The aspiring mystic works at removing everything that prevents him, or indeed her, from being a perfect image of God. Gerson's political stance, his emphasis on simple piety, and his distrust of technical scholasticism all anticipate currents of thought that will flow through the 15th century. To borrow a line that the parodic literary history from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf applied to Dante, Gerson stood with one foot in the Middle Ages while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day. But, as I suggested at the start of this episode, he wasn't alone. Next time, we'll be looking at another key transitional figure, the man that from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf calls John Wycliffe of Dover, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Morning Star of the Reformation, John Wycliffe. Among 14th century scholastics, you'd be hard pressed to name two such dissimilar men as John Buridan and John Wycliffe. Where Buridan was a prominent nominalist, Wycliffe stated that all envy or actual sin is caused by the lack of an ordered love of universals. Where the eternal artsmaster Buridan steered clear of theological issues, Wycliffe made daring pronouncements on such subjects as the sacraments and divine predestination, but the two do have one thing in common apart from their given name. Both are famous above all for something they never actually did. Just as Buridan did not in fact devise the thought experiment of a donkey choosing between two bales of hay, so Wycliffe did not translate the Bible into English. In 1396, the chronicler Henry Knighton gave him credit for doing so, or rather the blame. He wrote, Because of him, the content of Scripture has become more common and more open to laymen and women who can read than it customarily is to quite learned clerks of good intelligence, and thus the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine. But, though Wycliffe may have inspired and helped guide the effort that produced the so-called Wycliffe Bible, scholars are agreed that it was in fact the work of many hands. The association of Wycliffe's name with the English Bible did it no favors, and helps to explain the banning of this version of Scripture in England in 1409. For Wycliffe became notorious as no other Englishman of the time. He was hated by the Church for his relentless attack on ecclesiastical wealth. He was associated with the Peasants Revolt of 1381, which involved the murder of an archbishop and rioting in London, perhaps unfairly, given that the revolt was less an expression of his ideas than an angry backlash against tax policies and attempts to keep wages artificially low as the workforce shrank in the wake of the Black Death. Wycliffe was also condemned for his unorthodox teachings numerous times, most memorably at a 1382 council which was interrupted by an earthquake, something his accusers hastily explained as a sign of Wycliffe's hatefulness to God. But Wycliffe had his supporters too. Called Lawlards, the term was probably a derogatory reference to their senseless speech, these were preachers inspired if not actually organized by Wycliffe and they spread his teachings around England. His ideas were also influential in the east of Europe, as we'll see in the next episode. But in England, a Lawlard uprising centered around the nobleman John Oldcastle failed in 1414 and the threat posed by Wycliffe's sympathizers receded. In the end, it was less an earthquake than a tremor. Yet it was one that anticipated the earth-shattering events of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, famous above all for nailing 92 theses to the door of a church, which he didn't really do either, would have more success in championing an ideology that had much in common with Wycliffe's. For this reason, the Protestant John Bayle called Wycliffe the morning star of the Reformation, while David Hume remarked in his History of England that Wycliffe had been the first person in Europe that publicly called in question those principles which had universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many ages. But to repeat a cliché, Wycliffe was simultaneously the evening star of medieval thought. He took up many of the themes we have been pursuing throughout our look at the Middle Ages, including the reality of universals, the value of poverty, freedom and predestination, the nature of legitimate political power, the relation of body and soul and philosophical attempts to explain the Eucharist. You might see his career as divided into two parts, first evening star of scholasticism and then morning star of reform. The early Wycliffe was a technically brilliant schoolman who was trained at Oxford and achieved his doctorate in theology in 1372. But his works became increasingly contentious and political. He entered into the service of John of Gaunt, an unpopular son of the king, and for those keeping track that's three Johns so far in this episode. In this capacity, Wycliffe went on a diplomatic mission to Bruges in 1374 representing the crown. But as would soon become obvious, he was anything but diplomatic. We've seen other writers of the period, like Langland, critiquing the church for its overweening temporal power and wealth. That was not enough for Wycliffe. He went so far as to declare that the church should own no property at all. That got him and John of Gaunt, as the protector of this apparent heretic, hauled before a church tribunal in 1377, an event that ended in chaos and acrimony. Papal condemnation followed. Despite the controversy, Wycliffe managed to retain sufficient political protection to avoid imprisonment or execution, and he managed to die of natural causes in 1384. Let's take our cue from Wycliffe himself and consider his views on universals, given his warning that error on this topic is the root of all envy and actual sin. The main thing to note here is that according to him, universals are real. As with other realists, his main rationale here is that our thought evidently gets hold of common or general features of the world. Thus, we would be subject to pervasive falsehood if universals were only fictions of the mind. Sometimes, Wycliffe has been depicted as a kind of ultra-realist, but this is not how he saw himself. Rather, he claimed to occupy a middle ground between nominalists like Ockham and Burredon and realists like Walter Burley. While agreeing with Burley that the universals are real, he stopped short of saying that they exist as realities separate from particulars. Instead, the universal just is the individual, considered in terms of its common nature and application of Scotus's formal distinction. A nice illustration of this is an example in which I promise to give you one of the two coins in my hand. I am offering you something shared in common by both of them, namely a coin in my hand, without promising either coin in particular. So in this case, the general can be distinguished from the individual, yet I obviously cannot fulfill my general promise without handing you a particular coin. Wycliffe's position on universals is, then, more or less what we've seen from other 14th century realists. Less familiar to us will be his realism about entire propositions, which for him are just identical with things in the world. A coin in my hand is in itself just a proposition in which the predicate coin belongs to a subject, namely the individual coin. This shows just how serious he is about making the world out there correspond to our minds. True thoughts are bits of mental language that perfectly mirror external things in structure and content. Of course, our minds are posterior to those things. I don't make that thing in my hand to be a coin by thinking about it. Rather, the coins being a coin produces my thought of it as a coin. By contrast, God's mind is causally prior to things in the world. Indeed, all universals are grounded in God's ideas, which are universals or common natures that serve as the principles of created things. Here we may begin to understand Wycliffe's dramatic claim that sin is caused by failure to love universals. In the passage where he says that, he goes on to add that sin consists in a will preferring a lesser good to a greater good, whereas, in general, the more universal goods are better. In keeping with this, he routinely invokes his theory of universals in theological disputes, as when he says that we need to concede the reality of the common nature of humanity if we are to understand the Incarnation, or if we are to grasp how the sin of the particular human, Adam, can have plunged the whole human race into a fallen state. Wycliffe retained his realist commitments when he started to write about overtly political topics. We can see this by turning to his views on political authority, or as he would put it, dominion. Here, he takes inspiration from another scholastic named Richard Fitz-Ralph, who should first of all be congratulated for not being named John. Also, he came up with a new idea in the bitter contest between the papacy and secular rulers. Rather than granting either of these authorities supreme power in any given sphere, Fitz-Ralph suggested that all true dominion is granted, or really only loaned, to humans by God. Thus, power is exercised justly only when it is an expression of divine grace. Wycliffe takes over and radicalizes this doctrine. Echoing Augustine's contrast between the city of God and the city here on earth, he proposes that the true Christian community is simply that group of people who have been given grace. They are God's instruments for good in the world and are predestined to be saved. A king wields authority justly only when his actions are motivated by charity when he is a selfless channel for God's providential benevolence to make itself manifest. According to Wycliffe, the king has one particularly important function, namely the defense of the community that enjoys grace. That would mean protecting the church, but not exactly the church as it exists in Wycliffe's day, and certainly not the temporal property owned by that church. To the contrary, Wycliffe encourages secular monarchs to do the church a favor by taking away all of its possessions, since concern with wealth distracts the clergy from their proper spiritual tasks. In a state of grace before original sin, there was no private property, and Christ's restoration of human nature offers us the chance to live again with all things shared in common, something embraced by the apostles, who led lives of poverty. The church of Wycliffe's own day was obviously failing rather spectacularly to follow suit. He traces the perilous state of affairs to the donation of Constantine, in which land was, supposedly, granted to the papacy by the emperor. Within a few generations, this will be shown to have been based on a forgery, which would have delighted Wycliffe no end, had he lived to see it. Wycliffe's theory was a double assault on the church. He offered an intellectual rationale for depriving the church of its assets, and more subtly, he distinguished between the church as an institution and the true Christian community. That community consists simply of those who are given grace. And in another striking anticipation of ideas we usually associate with the Reformation, Wycliffe asserted that we have no way of identifying those who are among the predestined. We cannot know, for example, whether the pope himself is sanctified, and thus whether he is a member of the true church. So, in addition to arguing that the church should be deprived of their nice things, he was questioning the spiritual position of the clergy all the way to the top. In place of their religious authority, Wycliffe instructed his readers to take instruction from the one source they could certainly trust. It could be no human source but the Word of God himself. So, you can see why he would have thought it important for more people to have access to the Bible. When you aren't sure whether you can rely on the church, you have to be your own theologian. Unsurprisingly, all this caused outrage among the clergy, who responded in an equally unsurprising way. They accused him of heresy. One charge leveled at Wycliffe was that he was falling into the teaching of Donatism, refuted in antiquity by Augustine. This heresy maintained that priests in a state of sin cannot administer the sacraments effectively. In fact, Wycliffe was careful not to say this, but he was less cautious in putting forth his ideas on another dangerous topic, namely the Eucharist. As we saw in a previous episode, no ingenuity or scholastic subtlety was spared in trying to explain how the host becomes Christ's body in this ritual. Yet, Wycliffe was unsatisfied with the resulting consensus. He found it preposterous to say, as Pope Innocent III had declared, and as had been reasserted by many scholastics, that accidental features like the color, shape, and taste of bread can remain when the substance of the bread is no longer present. Instead, Wycliffe thought it obvious that the bread should remain and be present together with the body of Christ in one and the same place. Again, this connects to his cherished teaching on universals, and for several reasons. Most obviously, we have Christ's nature being somehow present in common to many particular pieces of bread upon different altars. But also, there is an argument Wycliffe gives against those who assert transubstantiation. The nature of bread cannot actually be destroyed and replaced by Christ's body, since God never annihilates anything. He cannot, because the reality of all things is grounded in Him, in divine ideas that are divine, eternal, and indestructible. This incidentally gives us an insight into how Wycliffe would respond to an argument used against realism by Occam, namely that if the common nature of humanity were present in Socrates, it would absurdly be destroyed if God were to annihilate Socrates. Wycliffe would agree that this consequence is absurd, but not in the way Occam is thinking. The mistake here is not admitting that humanity is real, but supposing that God would, or indeed could, annihilate Socrates or anything else. And this is precisely because Socrates is in some sense identical to the common nature of humanity that is present in God Himself as one of His ideas. If you're wondering how Wycliffe can say that the body of Christ and the substance of bread can be in the same place, you aren't alone. His opponents certainly didn't think he offered a satisfactory account of this, and about the best he came up with was the insistence that Christ is sacramentally present to each point within the bread. That may be theologically unsatisfying, but it's philosophically exciting because of the reference to points, which takes us to another aspect of his thought, his atomism. Wycliffe maintained the standard Aristotelian doctrine that each thing is made of matter and form, but thought that the most fundamental constituents of things are atoms in which an elemental form is predicated of an unextended bit of prime matter. These elemental atoms are then composed into homogeneous materials like flesh or bone, which are then further combined to make up complex substances like the human body. An obvious implication is that each human must have many forms at different levels. Against defenders of the unity of substantial form, like Aquinas, Wycliffe held that all these forms are really present. This is evident from the fact that decomposing bodies break down into elemental constituents, which shows that the elements were there right along. Furthermore, the form that animates the human body needs to be distinguished from the immaterial rational soul, a mind that is connected to the animate body only through divine will and that can, of course, survive bodily death. This is about as far from Aquinas' teaching on the human person as one can get, at least in a medieval context, but apart from the atomism, it is not that far from what other form pluralists had been saying since Aquinas' day. In conclusion, it might be worth comparing Wycliffe to another great scholastic, his younger contemporary, Jean Guéson. He was a far less radical thinker, of course, and was staunch in his criticism of Wycliffe and the movements that Wycliffe inspired, but on at least one topic, the two were perhaps not so far apart. This was the aforementioned issue of predestination and grace. Both of them worked in the wake of Bradwardine's thunderous condemnation of scholastics who came too close to a Pelagian view of grace by admitting that we need divine help to merit salvation, but then suggesting that God will help those who make a sincere effort to be good. Bradwardine goes in the other direction, effectively making God responsible for every step in the process of salvation. Guéson and Wycliffe sought to split the difference. With his typical emphasis on personal spirituality, Guéson proposed that even if the sinner can do nothing to merit salvation, he can commit himself to complete humility in obedient and patient hope of being redeemed. Hence Guéson's stress in his pastoral works on the idea of the penitent Christian seeking God's grace while knowing he or she is unworthy of it. As for Wycliffe, he insisted that human freedom is just as real as, say, universals or propositions. God foreknows what we will choose, yet our choices remain contingent, since they could always have been different, and the making of these choices causes God to know them. This is, of course, just a version of the standard solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge developed earlier in the 14th century. Also traditional is his asymmetrical treatment of sin and merit. Humans can be wicked on their own, but need God's help to be good. For once, Wycliffe was not particularly radical on this score. His view became distinctive and dangerous only once he stressed the unknowability of grace and the consequences of that fact for human society. Both Guéson and Wycliffe, in their own ways, were pushing Christendom towards a more individual approach to spirituality in which confidence that the church and its sacraments will offer a heavenly reward is replaced by humble uncertainty. They offered hope of predestined salvation, but it was a hope not far from despair because of the fear that one has already been chosen to be among the damned. From this it may seem that we are ready to move on to the Protestant Reformation, or even that we have unexpectedly already arrived. But in fact, we still have some work to do before we can understand developments in the coming centuries. We'll continue setting the stage in the next episode as we examine the spread of scholasticism across Europe and see how the dangerous ideas of Wycliffe arrived in Prague. So put it on your checklist to listen to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? The Prague Spring – Scholasticism Across Europe. When I took up my job teaching philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, there were three things I wanted to know. Who was Ludwig, who was Maximilian, and where is my new office? The answers stretch back over the last half millennium and more. The university was originally founded by Duke Ludwig IX in 1472, which as it happens was exactly 500 years before my own birth. I'll just pause here to let you work out how old I am. At the start it was based in Ingolstadt, not Munich. From there the institution was moved to Landswet in 1800 by King Maximilian I of Bavaria. Only in 1826 did it come to Munich, thanks to another Ludwig, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, which is why my office is conveniently located here and not in Ingolstadt or Landswet. It's a long and storied history, yet by the standards of German universities you could argue that the LMU is a latecomer. The University of Heidelberg was founded about a century earlier in 1386, part of a movement that swept across Europe in the 14th century. Between the years 1300 to 1425, no fewer than 32 universities were founded, which is about one every four years. The older scholastic centres at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Bologna faced competition from these brash new arrivals. A telling, though admittedly not unbiased, remark was made by Henry of Langenstein, a theologian who trained and taught at Paris before moving to the new university at Vienna. Behold, the universities of France are breaking up, the sun of wisdom is eclipsed there, wisdom withdraws to light another people. Are not three lamps of wisdom now lit among the Germans, that is, three universities shining with rays of glorious truth? These three lamps were the universities at Prague, Heidelberg, and of course Henry's own Vienna. The story of how he came to teach there is, to continue his metaphor, an illuminating one. Scholasticism spread across Europe because well-trained masters had reason to decamp from the traditional places of learning, and because the new places of learning were well-funded by the local nobility. The scholars needed good reasons to move, since they would be giving up access to book collection and a reliable stream of qualified students. In the case of Langenstein, his motive for leaving Paris was the Papal Schism. He was one of numerous scholars whose sympathy for the Roman Pope led him to abandon France, which was under the sway of Avignon. As for the role of the nobility, in the first, but certainly not the last case where the Habsburg family enters our history of philosophy, the university at Vienna was founded in 1365 with the support of Duke Rudolf IV. Greater Germany and Italy provided ideal conditions for the arising of such institutions because of the independent power of such local aristocrats who had an interest in promoting the economy and prestige of their home cities. They had freedom to do so, because in Italy there was no effective central authority, while in Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor did not exercise sufficient control to stop this sort of thing from happening. All a late 14th century noble needed was funding and permission from the Pope, and conveniently, there was even more than one Pope to choose from. Which is not to say that the creation of new universities always succeeded. Vienna needed some years to flourish, as did the university at Erfurt. Others failed completely. In Würzburg, for instance, a university was introduced just after 1400, but it fizzled out quickly. The city would have to wait until the late 16th century for a re-founding. In England, there was a similarly abortive attempt to create a northern rival to Cambridge at Oxford at Stamford. Such initiatives were often resisted by the old guard, as when Bologna required its newly minted doctors to promise not to teach elsewhere for two years. Despite their position as rivals, the new universities gave the old ones the sincerest form of flattery by imitating them shamelessly. They modelled their structure and even their curriculum on the older seats of learning, typically choosing either the pattern of Bologna, where law was the primary discipline, or that of Paris, where theology was the most powerful faculty. In Prague, problems were caused by an attempt to combine both models since it led to clashes between the law and theology faculties. Meanwhile, some schools carved out other specialisms. Erfurt was known for expertise in astronomy and in grammar, while the masters at Padua were quick to adopt the breakthroughs in physics from the Oxford calculators and combined an interest in natural philosophy with the study of medicine. Padua is also a good illustration for something else we should bear in mind, which is that universities were not the only context for scholasticism. As we've seen, friars of the various orders established their own basis for teaching. Think of Occam at London Grayfriars, or Albert the Great and other Dominicans in Cologne, where there would not be a university until 1388. The general term studium was applied quite liberally, basically to any grouping of teachers able to attract students. This applied to Padua already in the 1220s, even though the first talk of a university with an arts faculty there comes from 1262. The first outstanding intellectual based in Padua came several decades later. This was Peter of Abano, an expert in medicine and astrology. As so often with the leading masters at smaller universities he trained at one of the more established schools, in this case Paris. It's been suggested that an important feature of Italian scholastic culture in the Renaissance can be traced back to Peter of Abano. This is a tendency to adopt the controversial doctrines found in Iverroes's commentaries on Aristotle. Here, we might also think of Dante, another Italian and a contemporary of Peter who has been associated with Iverroism by some scholars. Or we might move ahead to the greatest figure of late medieval philosophy in Italy, Paul of Venice. He too studied at an older university, in his case Oxford. He then toured these schools of Italy, teaching in Padua, Siena, and Bologna. Where Peter of Abano's focus was natural philosophy, Paul of Venice's contribution was especially in logic and metaphysics. He too was powerfully influenced by Iverroes, to the point that in commenting on Aristotle he was sometimes effectively writing a super commentary on Iverroes. However, interpretations that have him adopting the notorious Iverroes theory of a single mind for all humans seem to be misplaced. And in the most prominent dispute of the late 14th century, between realism and nominalism, he was above all a follower of the British realists, Duns Scotus and John Wycliffe. Indeed, only one of several Italian scholars who defended what has been called Oxford realism. Like Wycliffe, Paul of Venice held that a universal is a real thing out in the world, but not something that exists independently of its instances. In fact, the universal human and individual humans are really the same things seen from two different perspectives, a central case of what Scotus called a formal distinction. Paul of Venice offers a clever twist on this theory when he comes to explain how exactly a universal-like human comes to reside in only one particular human, like Groucho Marx. In accounting for this, he draws on two very different theories taken from Thomas Aquinas and from Scotus. For Aquinas, Groucho gets to be an individual by being made of some particular chunk of matter. For Scotus, by contrast, Groucho's individuality is caused by a so-called hexaiety, the distinctive feature that belongs only to Groucho and picks him out as a particular human, the way that rationality distinguishes humans from other animal species. Paul of Venice avails himself of both explanations. When a human form comes to matter, the matter's reception of that form produces the distinctive hexaiety. This might seem like metaphysical overkill, since it could sound as if everything is individuated twice over, but it has advantages over both older theories. Unlike Aquinas, Paul does not have to say that Groucho's individuality is just borrowed from the individuality of Groucho's matter, as if being a particular human is nothing more than being made out of this flesh and bone rather than that flesh and bone. It is the individuating feature that guarantees Groucho's particularity. But unlike Scotus, Paul can explain how that distinctive feature came to belong to Groucho in the first place by being associated with his particular matter. In this sense, matter is still the principle of individuation. Another scholastic thinker who worked in Italy, and like Paul of Venice, a member of the Augustinian order, was Gregory of Rimini. Following the familiar pattern, he studied in Paris before serving the Augustinians in Bologna, Padua, and Perugia, finally becoming head of the order in 1357 and dying in Vienna in 1358. We actually met Gregory briefly in a previous episode on logic when we talked about his idea that states of affairs are complex objects of signification. This is indeed his signature view, or at least one of them. It constitutes another step in the direction of realism, since for Gregory, such states of affairs are real things which we can signify or express with propositions. In fact, we can distinguish three levels of reality where a strict nominalist like Occam would only want one, the level of concrete individual objects. The weakest sort of reality, as by Gregory, belongs to states of affairs that may or may not be realized, like Groucho's smoking a cigar. More real than this is a state of affairs that is in fact realized, as when Groucho in fact smokes the cigar. Yet such a realized state of affairs is still not as real as the concrete individuals that realize them, like Groucho himself or his cigar. Gregory can also be contrasted to Occam when it comes to ethics. Again, the notion of a state of affairs is relevant here. Gregory uses this notion to absolve God of responsibility for creating evils. The fact that something bad happens or that a sin is committed is not one of the fully real things created by God, like Groucho or a cigar. It is only a complex object of signification, a state of affairs brought about by the human sinner. Furthermore, these states of affairs have an intrinsic badness that is not decided only by God's legislating will. Here, Gregory moves away from the voluntarism of Scotus or Occam, arguing that even if God did not exist, sinful states of affairs would still be sinful because they would be in conflict with reason. This allows Gregory to do what he usually wants to do as a member of the Augustinian order, validate the judgments of Augustine himself, who in this case had said that sin is a violation of right reason. Let's now turn our attention north, to Germany, and in particular to Heidelberg, where nominalism was finding a more favorable reception. This was especially thanks to Marsilius of Ingen, who was not to be confused with the pioneering political thinker Marsilius of Padua. This Marsilius was, like Gregory of Rimini and Peter of Habano, responsible for exporting Parisian scholastic thought to new territories. Like Henry of Langenstein, he may have left Paris because of the tensions surrounding the Papal Schism. This was much to the benefit of the new university at Heidelberg, which he helped found and served numerous times as rector. Especially influenced by John Buridan in physics, and by Occam and Gregory of Rimini in logic, and its application to theological questions, Marsilius's thought is not easy to encapsulate briefly, but a good example of his approach can be found in his solution to the much-discussed problem of future contingents. Like other scholastics, he wanted to safeguard human freedom in the face of God's certain awareness of what we will do, before we do it, and indeed before we even exist. He was, however, reluctant to admit that humans actually caused God already to have known what we will do. This is not so much for the reason we might expect, namely that this would involve us exerting causal influence on the past, but because he did not want God to be subject to causal influence from his creatures at all. Marsilius is generally skeptical about using the techniques of logic to understand God's nature. It is one thing to show how it may be contingently true that I perform a given action, another to say that God is made to know that truth by my action. A rather similar debate was unfolding at the same time in Austria, at the aforementioned University of Vienna. Here too, the nominalists were in favor, with Occam, Woodham, Buridan, and Marsilius himself all on the reading lists. But the Vienna schoolmen had trouble deciding how far to follow Occam on one particular point. He had argued vehemently against Scotus's use of the formal distinction, the very distinction that was being used to defend realism by Wycliffe in England and by Paul of Venice in Italy. For Occam, there is only one context in which we can recognize two genuinely different, yet also somehow identical, things. It applies in the case of the Trinity, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, yet three different persons. Gregory of Rimini pointed out the problematic implication. If the formal distinction is generally unacceptable, yet allowable in this one case, doesn't that show that our normal canons of logic and metaphysics break down in the case of God? And doesn't that show that theology is, well, irrational? We find engagements with this problem by two leading masters of Vienna, both named Henry. First, there was Henry of Oita, who made the following cunning observation. For him, as a good nominalist, the sort of realism endorsed by Platonists and men like Walter Burleigh is false, but it is not completely irrational. One can imagine that there could be a paradigmatic universal human which stands over all individual humans, it is just that there are good arguments to show that we do not need to posit such a Platonic form. Thus, it would be in harmony with reason to posit an overarching nature in God which would stand over the three persons the way that this supposed universal human would stand over the three Marx brothers. A different view was taken by another Henry, the aforementioned Henry of Langenstein. Or actually, I should say that he took two different views. At first, he accepted Occam's teaching that the formal distinction can be allowed in the one special case of the Trinity, but then he changed his mind. Like Marsilius worrying about the application of philosophical tools to God's knowledge, Henry of Langenstein suddenly began to argue that Aristotelian philosophy is simply inadequate for grasping the Trinity. Much as Aristotle's natural philosophy is rendered incomplete or worse by our belief that God can create from nothing, so Aristotle's logic cannot provide the resources we need in theology, or for that matter even the resources needed to solve such insoluble puzzles as the liar paradox. Some have proposed that the dissemination of nominalist thought across greater Germany was the work of a so-called school of Buridan, with first and second generation students carrying John Buridan's logic and physics to these new universities. Though this is probably an exaggeration, it is certainly true that his commentaries on Aristotle's physics and his logical writings were widely read. One of his main inheritors in physics was Albert of Saxony, not to be confused with his fellow German Albert the Great. But this Albert was not so bad either, noteworthy for his application of ideas from both Occam and Buridan in physics. He has also been hailed for his contributions in epistemology because of his penetrating critique of the tendency of other nominalists to think that we grasp things through an intermediary, namely a concept. Thus, if I see Groucho smoking a cigar, Buridan would not agree with Gregory of Rimini that I am grasping a real state of affairs in the world, but he would say that I am grasping Groucho as cigar smoking by forming an appropriate proposition about him in my mind. In other words, I represent him to myself at the level of concepts. Instead, Albert of Saxony thinks that we can just immediately grasp the external object. The only thing here that has the status of a concept is the very act by which the mind grasps Groucho. Here, we may be reminded of similar debates from the 13th century, as in Peter Olivey's epistemology of direct perception, which he put forward as a critique of theories like that of Roger Bacon, who thought we would perceive things through an intermediary image called a species. Let's finish today's episode in Prague. Here too, the works of nominalists like Buridan and Marcilius of Ingin were influential, but it was the ideas of the realist John Wycliffe that triggered the most intense debate. His realism about universals was already known in Prague by the 1370s. Two early adherents were Stanislav Avsnlodzmo and Stephen Palec. Stanislav was forced to recant his adherence to Wycliffe's teaching on the Eucharist, but this was nothing compared to the trouble that awaited two other figures at the university. These were Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus. Jerome had visited England and picked up knowledge of Wycliffe's doctrines there, while Jan Hus wrote out a set of glosses to Wycliffe in 1398. These include the remark, Out Germans Out, a manifestation of the Czech nationalism that Hus was fusing together with his daring adherence to Wycliffe's critique of the Church and Eucharistic theology. As the historian Frantisek Szmahel has written, the Wycliffeites presented their dispute over Wycliffe to the Czech public as part of the struggle for the fulfillment of the natural rights of the holy Czech nation within the university, in Prague, and in the whole kingdom. The controversy over Wycliffe's teachings came to a head in 1409, when the opponents of those teachings decamped from the university in protest at being required to attend disputations held by masters they considered to be heretics. Within the space of a few years, Wycliffe's books would be burned and Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague would be executed as an outcome of the Council of Constance. In the short run, then, this particular attempt to export scholastic ideas was a failure, as realism itself came to be tainted by association with insurrectionary nationalism. But in the longer run, it's clear that Prague was a harbinger of things to come, a reformation before the reformation. As with our look at Gerson and Wycliffe himself, then, this whirlwind tour of Europe has shown us that the characteristic features of the coming historical age were already present in late medieval culture. I wanted to devote an episode to the universities across Europe, in part to provide context for the developments we'll be seeing when we move on to the 15th and 16th centuries, when a lot of the action will be in Italy and Germany. But if we're thinking about 14th century developments that set the stage for the 15th century, then there is one more person we cannot afford to miss out. Even more than Gerson, Wycliffe, or Christine de Pizan, he anticipates a major current of thought in the next century. So join me next time as we have our first glimpse of the movement known as humanism in the very last Thinker we'll be covering in these podcasts on medieval philosophy, Petrarch, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Renaissance Men, Ramon Lull and Petrach. In my first week of graduate school, I found myself at a gathering of philosophers, explaining how I developed an interest in medieval philosophy thanks to my enthusiasm for Dante. A professor of logic who was present said, but Dante wasn't medieval, he was Renaissance. Good grief, I thought, I've only been here for a few days and already they've realized I don't know what I'm talking about. I muttered something about Dante having worked in the early 14th century, which sounds pretty medieval, but I also knew what he meant. Given his admiration for classical literature and his brilliant use of the vernacular, Dante can seem to be not of his time a Renaissance man trapped in the Middle Ages. Nor was he alone in this respect. In these past few episodes, we've been considering figures who prepared the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation, but who were still recognizably medieval in their approach. For all their theological innovations, Jean Gerson and Jean Wycliffe were above all scholastics. In this episode though, I want to look at two authors who were outsiders to the world of scholasticism and whose works would go on to resonate powerfully in the 15th century. The first is Ramon Lull, who might be described as the outsider artist of medieval philosophy, and I do mean artist. He developed a stunningly original method for doing philosophy and science and called this universal method an art. This art could, Lull thought, free humankind from suffering and unite them all under the banner of a single truth. Along the way, he would solve all the questions being discussed at the universities and more problems besides. Yet in the short run, his hopes were largely disappointed. He was unable to persuade the schoolmen of Paris to adopt his art as their new method, and his teachings would be banned twice towards the end of the 14th century, condemned by the inquisitor of Aragon in 1376 and banned at Paris in 1390 thanks to none other than Jean Gerson. This is not to say that Lull had no adherents in the 14th century. His philosophy was promoted especially by his associate Thomas Les Mieziers, who helped him by posing a series of questions on which to test the art and also by undertaking to produce a systematic anthology culled from Lull's vast and varied output. Yet Lull's thought would prove to be more at home in the Renaissance and early modern Europe, when its adherents would include Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, and even Leibniz, who admired both the universal ambitions of Lull and the clever system of combinations that drove his method. Inauthentic works ascribed to Lull also made him into a forerunner of Renaissance alchemy and Kabbalistic speculation. Lull's unusual position outside the intellectual mainstream owed something to his origins. He was born in 1232 on the island of Majorca, which had only recently been seized from the Muslims by the Kingdom of Aragon. The multicultural setting of Lull's birthplace would be reflected in his life's work. By his own account, Lull's early years were misspent, but when he experienced visions of Christ on the cross, he changed his ways, converting to penitence, as he put it. He made it his mission to establish definitively the truths of Christianity and thus persuade members of other faiths to convert. In order to speak to a non-Christian audience, he learned Arabic from a slave and composed works of his own in this language while also drawing on knowledge of Arabic philosophical literature as in an early work on logic based on Al-Ghazali's aims of the philosophers. He wrote this in the Catalan language. Though Lull did write in Latin as well, he did so as an autodidact whose style could seem rebarbative to readers who had a more mainstream education. His use of Catalan makes him another founding figure of vernacular literature, the Dante of the Balearic Islands, if you will. A pivotal event in Lull's long and eventful life was his visit to Paris in the late 1280s. Here he had the chance to give public lectures, displaying his art to a scholastic audience. It was only part of a concerted campaign to persuade the Parisians of his orthodoxy and hopefully his genius. Towards this end, Lull also joined in the attacks on the radical Aristotelians dubbed Averroists and even went so far as to write a treatise in defense of the 1277 condemations. Yet his reception was not a warm one. It's been nicely remarked that in Paris, his art met with neither comprehension nor approval. Decades later, in 1309, he would make a more successful trip to Paris. On that occasion, he found a more appreciative audience and was given official confirmation of his orthodoxy, but by then Lull was a very old man, so that he spent most of his career being kept at arm's length by the scholastic establishment. This was a matter of no little frustration to him. He commented at one point, "...my books are appreciated little, and I can assure you that plenty of people think me a fool." Lull's response to the incomprehension that greeted his art was to produce a simpler presentation of the system, in what he called a concession to the weakness of the human intellect. For this reason, modern day scholars offering an overview of the art are obligated to summarize it twice, going over the more complex, so-called quaternary version, and then explaining the changes made to get to the stripped-down ternary presentation of the art. I am not going to attempt anything that expansive here, especially because Lull's art is almost impossible to explain without diagrams. Genius, though he may have been, he did not foresee that this aspect of his system would make it hard to present in a podcast. If you want to see the full details, I recommend looking at the article on Lull in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has nice images of the diagrams taken from Renaissance manuscripts. The basic idea of the art is to relate certain general concepts by means of a systematic combinatorial procedure, so as to generate philosophical questions and answers in a novel method of proof. The later and simpler version is the one set out in his most influential presentation, the Ars Brevis. Here and in other treatises, Lull makes extensive use of an alphabetic notation, in this case consisting of nine letters. It's the prominence of multiples of three that gives this system the name ternary. These letters can be used to represent each of the elements of the whole system. They are first used to label a series of nine properties that confer perfection on things, sometimes called by Lull dignities, but here in the Ars Brevis called principles. They include goodness, greatness, truth, power, and so on. The first figure of the art has these arranged around the circumference of a circle, with each property given its letter label and lines drawn between the properties to indicate that each of them is convertible with the others. Thus, something that is perfect in goodness will also be perfect in greatness, truth, power, and all the remaining principles. A second figure introduces relations that can obtain between properties, such as difference, causation, or equality. These are tagged with the same letters used in the first figure. Further chapters, often with accompanying diagrams or tables, explain the definitions of these concepts, their possible combinations, the questions that can be posed about them in light of these combinations, topics to which the art can be applied, and so on. The upshot of all this is to provide a system with four features. The art is inventive, because it can generate questions by asking about combinations of the concepts, like is goodness great, or what is good greatness. It is general, because the topics it covers include all existing things, God and every one of His creatures. It is compendious, because the number of possible combinations is absolutely enormous, in just a few pages giving the reader a basis for generating an almost indefinite number of philosophical queries. And finally, it is demonstrative, because it does not just pose such queries, but also answers them. The way that it does so would be surprising for a scholastic thinker schooled in Aristotle and given the reception Lull received in Paris, apparently unsatisfying as well. The Aristotelians thought that demonstration always proceeds by discovering causes. Lull does include causation in his system, but it is not the engine of his demonstrations. This allows him to avoid a problem of Aristotelian scientific theory, namely that there can be no demonstrations concerning God, as God has no cause. In place of this, Lull devises a method of proof which he calls Demonstration Per Equi Parentiam, which basically means showing that two concepts are equivalent in the sense of being extensionally identical. For instance, greatness is equivalent to goodness, because whatever is good is there by also great. A nice example of this method, and the way it can address central questions in the scholastic culture of his day, would be his proof that the universe is not eternal. He argues that it cannot be, on the grounds that something eternal would be maximally great and would thus be maximally good and thus exclude evil. Yet we see that the universe contains evil. Thus, Lull manages, by presupposing the equivalence of eternity, greatness, and goodness, to prove that the universe is created precisely on the grounds of the presence of evil, which has led many to doubt the existence of God. Another unusual feature of Lull's system, also illustrated by this same argument about eternity, is his idea that it is distinctive of goodness to produce good, and hence of maximal goodness to produce maximal good. In fact, he defines goodness in these terms, stating that goodness is that thing by reason of which good does good. Again, this would strike an Aristotelian as methodologically suspect because it sounds circular. As Lull might say, a circular definition is one that defines something circularly. But he is trying to express the idea that each of his principles, indeed everything in his whole system, is distinguished by its action. For a thing to exist, according to Lull, is for it to produce that which is in accordance with its nature. Thus, he also defines human as that which makes human, as in generating children. Obviously, this is all very different from what we find in other 13th and early 14th century thinkers, yet certain aspects of the art ring familiar bells. His list of principles sounds very much like a theory of transcendentals, those properties that are found in all existing things. Meanwhile, Lull's treatment of God as the maximal case of such perfections or dignities may evoke Anselm's approach to proving God as a maximally perfect being. But Lull's art is not just a reworking of scholastic ideas, it is a genuinely new system whose mechanism of correlative terms and combinatorial possibilities is very different from the categorial logic of the schoolman of his day. The novelty of the method was in keeping with the novelty of his ambition. He wanted to produce a system that could appeal to any intellectual, including the elite among Jews and Muslims whom he hoped to convert. And he did see conversion mostly in these intellectualist terms. Though he supported the Crusades, he thought that such a military undertaking was simply paving the way to conversion through rational persuasion. As one scholar has commented, And of course, Lull's own art was the means by which universal conversion could best be achieved. This attitude is most eloquently captured in a work called The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. It is a dialogue in which a man without religion, who loves only this world, and thus lives in fear of death, meets three scholars, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian. These three learned men use arguments based on the art, here allegorically represented as trees bearing flowers, to convert the Gentile to monotheism. Each of the three then attempts to persuade him of the truth of their own particular religion. Here Lull is, for the most part, remarkably even-handed. Though Judaism and Islam come in for a degree of criticism, all three scholars are shown as being scrupulously rational and as adept practitioners of the art, so that the Jew is allowed to prove God's uniqueness on the basis that his greatness requires infinity and there cannot be two infinite beings. In a surprising conclusion, we do not discover which religion has captured the allegiance of the Gentile, a striking contrast to similar texts of interreligious debate like those written by the Jewish author Judah Halevi and by Peter Abelard. For Ramon Lull, the hope of peace on earth lies in the civil exchange of rational discourse motivated by a feeling of mutual love between humans, and the basis of that discourse is provided by his art. While Lull spent much of his life trying to impress the Aristotelian scholastics at Paris with his innovative system, our second author was distinctly unimpressed by those various scholastics. This was Francesco Petrarca, usually called Petrarch in English. Again and again, he complains that Aristotle leaves him cold, writing for instance that this man whom the scholastics honored as the philosopher was in fact so completely ignorant of true happiness that any devout old woman or any faithful fisherman, shepherd, or peasant is happier, if not more subtle, in recognizing it. Upon reading Aristotle, Petrarca remarked, My mind is the same as it was, my will is the same, I am the same. By contrast, the great Roman authors Cicero and Seneca, are vitals with the sharp burning barbs of their eloquence. This will become a familiar refrain in the 15th century as the humanists celebrate the rhetorical excellence and spiritual impact of classical literature and spurn what they see as the dry technicalities of scholasticism. Indeed, the humanists themselves saw Petrarca as their founding father. Especially the scholars of Petrarca's home city of Florence extolled him as a pioneer like Leonardo Bruni or Giannazzo Manetti whose Lives of Three Illustrious Florentine Poets was devoted to Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca. The idea that it was Petrarca in particular who initiated humanism is not implausible. He already had the literary tastes typical of the humanists and also philological expertise as shown by an edition of Livy he produced early in his career. Modern day scholars have questioned this to some extent. They have pointed out that there was a tradition of rhetorically skilled secretaries and notaries, the so-called dictatores, running back to the 12th century, and that a number of other figures were reviving the study of the classics before Petrarca, like the Paduan scholar Albertino Mosato who drew on the ancient historians and the tragedies of Seneca. If the Renaissance humanists insisted on seeing Petrarca alone as the founder of their enterprise, it was perhaps because it was Petrarca who first championed philology and eloquence as a full-blown ideology. This ideology is on display in one of his more philosophically oriented works, The Secret Book. It is a dialogue whose dramatic setting is by now familiar, as in Boethius' Alain of Lille or Marguerite Porret, a fictional version of the author is confronted by the female personification of an abstract idea, in this case truth. But she doesn't have much to say. Mostly, truth just presides over a dialogue between the autobiographical character Francesco and Augustine, another of Petrarc's favorite classical authors. Indeed, The Secret Book is inspired especially by Augustine's own dialogues, while the character of Francesco seems to be modeled on the young Augustine of the Confessions, riven by doubt and seeking spiritual peace. In Petrarc's dialogue, Augustine teaches Francesco that only virtue leads to happiness, and that since virtue and sin are always subject to our will, unhappiness is actually voluntary. This teaching sounds very much like that of the ancient Stoics, a debt Petrarc explicitly recognizes in the dialogue. Augustine now diagnoses Francesco's weaknesses in regard to the seven deadly sins. Fans of Hellenistic philosophy, or of Augustine himself, will thrill at the psychological insight and nuance of these sections. Petrarc notes the perverse pleasure one may take in one's own depression, and is forthright in lamenting his own tendencies towards pride and ambition for literary glory. This is also one of those rare philosophical dialogues that is genuinely a dialogue. Francesco is depicted as spiritually imperfect, but he's also allowed to push back against Augustine's unrelenting morality with points that the reader is apt to find persuasive. This is especially so in a section on love, in particular Petrarc's love for Laura, the muse who inspired his writings in much the way that Beatrice inspired Dante. Appropriate to Petrarc's highly developed sense of literary artifice, scholars disagree about whether Laura was a real person. When Augustine rails against lust and attachment to mortal beings, Francesco insists that it is Laura's virtuous soul that he loves and not her body. It's not an easy point for Augustine to resist, given his own praise of virtue and emphasis on the concerns of the soul over those of the body. Nonetheless, he argues, it is God alone and no creature who is the correct object of our love, a position for which Augustine is indeed the most appropriate possible mouthpiece. Another reminiscence of Hellenistic thought is Petrarc's vision of philosophy as a kind of medicine for the soul rather than the body. Being Petrarc, he sees books as the most powerful source of treatment. But which books? He is refreshingly dismissive of the philosophical bromides that have appeared so often in ancient and medieval literature, for example the slogan that the earth is like a tiny point in the context of the vast universe. Francesco does not find that meditating on this impedes his desire for worldly fame as it is meant to. It helps more to read his beloved Seneca and Cicero, but even here the effect is temporary. He finds himself sliding back into bad ways of thinking as soon as he closes the books. Augustine recommends taking careful notes while reading, advice that Petrarc in fact followed himself, as we know from the marginal annotations from still surviving manuscripts that belong to his library. Here we have a typically medieval practice of caring for the soul by meditating on texts, yet the texts in question are now those of Roman pagans rather than the Bible. Or, as my professor at Notre Dame might have put it, Petrarc was not medieval, he was Renaissance. He gives us a final illustration of the point I've been making, if not belaboring, over these past few episodes. Even as typically medieval phenomena like scholasticism carried on into the 15th century with figures like Jean Guéson, so the currents of thought and literature we associate with the Renaissance already appeared in the 13th century with Lull and the 14th century with Petrarc, Boccaccio, and yes Dante. Remember too that some scholars see figures of the 12th century as anticipating the Renaissance. The humanist values of Petrarc were, to no small degree, already espoused by John of Salisbury. So often hailed as a new beginning in philosophy, as in art and culture, the rebirth of classical culture in the 15th century was also a continuation of the medieval age. That's something we'll be in an excellent position to appreciate when the time comes thanks to our look at the transitional figures covered in this and the past several weeks. But the Renaissance is not quite the next thing on our agenda. Still on our to-do list is another medieval culture, one that is routinely overlooked by historians of philosophy, but not of course by this podcast, by Xantium. We'll be moving on to Byzantine philosophy very soon. Before that, though, we'll be getting one more chance to look at the continuity between medieval thought and later periods of philosophy, as I speak next time to Robert Pasnow about how the themes of medieval scholasticism survived into early modern philosophy. And then there will be the little matter of celebrating a milestone in the podcast as we reach the 300th episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's interview will be an interview with Robert Pasnow, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder, and we're going to be talking about substance and the transition from medieval philosophy to early modern philosophy. Hi, Bob, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be here. You've written a book about this general historical period, which basically goes from the death of Thomas Aquinas to the publication of Locke's essay, which is quite a large historical span. So I wanted to ask you, first of all, what led you to write a book with that kind of historical periodization? Yeah, it felt to me like, obviously, a lot of work is done on high scholasticism of Aquinas in his era. An even greater amount of work is done on 17th century philosophy from Descartes forward. But hardly anyone has tried to tell the story of what happens between the two. And I just thought, this is something that needs to be done. And so I set out to do it at least in a narrow sort of swath of territory having to do with the metaphysics of substance. And in fact, that's in the title of the book. So the book is about metaphysical themes during the period from the late 13th century to the early 17th century. That's right. Yeah. So the book goes all the way through Descartes up to Locke. Officially, it stops in 1671, which was when Locke wrote the first drafts of his essay. And I stopped in 1671 because I just couldn't bring myself to try to talk about Spinoza and Leibniz, who were very difficult. And I thought, well, I've got to stop somewhere and I'm stopping there. Right. And do you think of that in some sense as the history of scholasticism or of late scholasticism? Or would you be reluctant to apply the word scholasticism all the way down into the 17th century? No, I think it's fine to think of scholasticism as running through the 17th century and even into the 18th century. It took a long time for scholastic philosophy to go out of existence. There may even still be places in the world today where people could properly be thought of as scholastic philosophers. The defining features of scholastic philosophy as I think of it are that it's done in the special context of the university as that began in the 13th century. And it's done from an Aristotelian point of view. And so it's filled with Aristotelian jargon and Aristotelian doctrines. It typically takes the form of the medieval disputation. But one way or another, it has a very kind of technical structure that's characteristic of university learning at that time. And one of the things that's also typical is that they'll use Aristotelian language even when they're taking very anti-Aristotelian positions. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, so the terminology remains and typically they'll think of themselves as Aristotelians, but people develop rather different ideas about what counts as Aristotelianism. In fact, one sort of point that you make in the book is that there are doctrines like, for example, hylomorphism, the view that a substance is made of a form and matter that pretty much everyone can subscribe to despite the fact that they totally disagree about what it actually means. Yeah, that's right. So people use the same labels for things but mean radically different things. And so it's very dangerous to talk about scholastic views as if there's just one scholastic view on a given subject. One thing that became very clear to me as my research on this book developed was that there's as much variety among scholastic authors as there is in any period in the history of philosophy. It just runs as broad a spectrum of views as you'll find anywhere. And do you find that any difference in the historical period in terms of external constraints, I mean on basically what they could get away with saying, does that change a lot from the medieval period to the early modern period? Yeah, and I think that's part of the story. One of the most interesting periods of scholastic thought is the early and mid-14th century, the era of Ockham, John Buridan, Nicholas of Haute-Racourt, where you get increasingly adventuresome versions of Aristotelianism. And it looked to me in my research as if that whole program gets shut down right around the middle of the 14th century because of a series of condemnations. And that authors after that point in the scholastic tradition tended to be much more cautious and that cautiousness, it ebbs and flows, people become more adventuresome in some parts of Europe than in others. But in a way, it remains all the way through the scholastic era until you get to the 17th century. And that's really when you get philosophers willing to stick out their necks again and arrive at radically different kinds of views, views that are clearly anti-Herestotelian. That's interesting because I think a lot of people would assume that the medieval period is going to be distinguished by very high level of constraint on intellectual debate. So I think it's interesting and maybe surprising that you mentioned the early 14th century as a kind of high point of liberality in terms of what people could get away with. Yeah, I mean, of course, there were predictably things that could not be defended. You could not be an atheist in the 14th century. At any rate, you couldn't say those things or publish those things. But as far as philosophical topics goes, there's a huge amount of vigorous dispute among pretty much any topic you can think of. And you do cover a lot of topics in this book, so everything from matter to form to qualities, you name it. So I thought we could concentrate on maybe the most fundamental question, which in some ways plays a role throughout the whole book. And this is the question of substance. People famously moves away from Plato by considering the most real things to be hylomorphic compounds. So this is a form with matter. And a typical example would just be a particular animal or a human being. And I guess it would be fair to say that pretty much all the philosophers you look at in this period, that's what they think of as a substance in the first instance. Yeah, that's right. So the book focuses on the metaphysics of substance. And if you ask, well, what is a substance, I think it's fair to say for all of the authors I look at that the paradigm cases are animals and other living things. So as far as that question goes, there's a great deal of consensus all the way from Aquinas through later scholasticism. And also in the famous 17th century authors like Descartes and Hobbes and Locke, they're also in substantial agreement that those are what the substances are and that the substances are the fundamental beings in the world around us. So that basic level of ontology or maybe one could say the assumption that our ontology should start from there, from basic substances like animals and plants, that's not one of the things that gets overthrown from the medieval period in the early modern period. Yeah, that's right. So you get consensus on that point. And so, I mean, it is very clear when you look at the history from the 13th century to the 17th century that you do, at a certain point in the 17th century, you do get a radical transformation. It's not as if there's a smooth continuum of views such that any dividing line would be arbitrary. No, there's a real non-arbitrary dividing line in the early 17th century when you arrive at people like Francis Bacon and Galileo and Descartes. They're doing something importantly even radically different. But all these authors agree, despite that difference, all these authors agree on what substances are roughly speaking. Where the disagreements are so interesting is when you ask questions about, okay, what are these substances composed of? What are the metaphysical ingredients of substance? That's where things really get complicated and interesting and contentious. And I guess that a lot of the debate concerns the concept of a substantial form. Yeah, so you might think the most basic scholastic thought is, of course, the hylomorphism, that substances are a composite form that is a substantial form and matter. And so a lot of my book goes through those two separate kinds of cases. What is matter? What's its structure? And then what is substantial form? And how does it connect up with matter? And we could spend hours talking about either one of those issues. But I think the most characteristic dispute and the dispute that goes the farthest and interacts with the largest number of issues is the dispute over substantial form. If there's one central issue that divides the scholastic authors from early modern authors, it's really the debate over substantial form. What does that debate concern exactly? Is it the debate over whether there is actually a substantial form? Yeah, that's part of what's at issue, even whether there is a substantial form. I think the way to think about this topic is that scholastic authors wanted to articulate what a substance was, like everyone did during this period. And the core thought behind hylomorphism is that you can't get a substance just by having a chunk of matter. Just a chunk of matter is not a substance. A chunk of matter is just a chunk of matter. And it's not one thing in the way a substance is supposed to be one thing because it doesn't have the right sort of unity. It doesn't persist over time in the right sort of way. And so if you want to identify what makes a substance a substance, you need something more than matter. And the Aristotelian answer, of course, is that you need a form. And that's the substantial form then that takes a chunk of matter and makes a substance out of it. By giving it unity and organization. That's right. By giving it both unity at a time and unity over time. And it's important to distinguish those two and sort of think about them separately. So a chunk of matter, is it one thing? Is it a million things for each of its different particles? It's not clear how to answer those questions because what would individuate it? What would serve to demarcate it from anything else? So associating a single substantial form with a chunk of matter then makes it a unity at a time. And the same sorts of points hold over time as well. How do we know when that chunk of matter becomes something different? If a piece falls off of it, is it something new? If you break it in half, what do you say then? What about if you just take off a quarter of it or an eighth of it? All of these questions seem very arbitrary and difficult to adjudicate. But if you think of it as having a substantial form, then you can make sense of what it is that individuates it over time. And I guess this will also give us the ability to tell things apart. It's not just keeping one thing the same over time, as we were just talking about. But it also explains what makes you one thing and me another thing. We're both humans, but you have one substantial form of humanity and I have another substantial form of humanity. And that's what keeps us from being the same thing or having blurry edges between us maybe. Yeah, that's right. So when you have an ontology that includes substantial form, you can then say, okay, this substance is different from this substance because they've got two different substantial forms. But you can also say things like the two different substantial forms are forms of the same kind. They're both human forms. And so these are two human beings. Whereas the substantial form of you and the substantial form of your dog are very, very different even if the underlying matter is the same. And so that's what makes you be of two different species. And so a theory of substantial form gets you these very metaphysical points about individuation, but it also gets you a whole, basically a biological framework that divides things into species and genus and you can give a whole taxonomy of the kinds of things that there are. And were they worried already about something that would worry us now today if we tried to have this kind of ontology, which is precisely the kind of blurry edges between one kind of form and another? I mean, if you factor in something like evolution, then you have to admit that the edges between, say, an ape and a human are blurry. Were they worried about that sort of thing? So that was one of the great debates of the 17th century. I think it's fair to say that scholastic authors weren't much worried about that. I hesitate a bit to say that because I think we still don't know that much about scholastic philosophy. There are lots and lots of people that have never been read. There's lots of research out there that still needs to be done. And so I wouldn't be at all surprised for somebody to come along and point to some obscure 15th century figure and say, look, here's somebody worrying about blurry edges and boundaries and all of that. An anonymous commentary on the parts of animals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I hate to say no, scholastic authors weren't worried about it. And that's my earlier point that you just can't generalize. But we do know very famously that in the 17th century, that became a huge issue. And especially it became a huge issue in the work of John Locke, who thought precisely that there are no hard and fast boundary lines between species. And that what you've got is you've got a smooth continuum among all living things, such that even in the case of human beings, what counts as a human being and what doesn't count as a human being, there's all sorts of in-between gray area cases. And that was part of Locke's reason for rejecting the Aristotelian framework, because he thought substances didn't come in neat kinds, like the theory of substantial form tended to suggest. I guess another kind of demarcation line that they need to draw if they want to hold on to these substantial forms is the one between substantial form and accidental form. And the idea here would be that some of my properties or features are essential to me being rational, being alive, and some of them are not. For example, being bald is not essential to me, so I could get a hair transplant and I would still be human. In fact, I was human before when I had hair, which was a number of years ago. And I assume this is yet another thing that gets challenged as the tradition goes along, whether you can really draw a hard and fast line between essential properties and accidental properties. Yeah, absolutely. So in talking about form, I was talking about substantial form and setting the accidental forms aside. You can do that in the scholastic context pretty readily because they make such a sharp distinction. Substantial forms are essential to a substance, whereas accidental forms are, well, they're accidental, they're contingent. In fact, the standard definition of an accidental form is it's a form that can come and go while the substance remains. And so if you've got a picture of there being hard and fast rules for when substances come into existence and go out of existence, then you can say, okay, so this is the substantial form, and then all of the other stuff that comes and goes, those are the accidental forms. But as soon as you call that framework into question and you start to sort of wonder whether we can be so sure of when you've got a new substance or when one goes out of existence, then that will destroy the whole substantial accidental distinction. It calls the whole thing into question. And even if you don't mind talking about forms, it becomes entirely unclear which ones are the substantial and which are the accidental. Right. Let's actually think a little bit more about that kind of transition from one substance to another or maybe a substance being destroyed. For example, let's take a human who dies. The human dies, and then you look at what's left, you see a corpse, but it still pretty much looks like a human. I mean, it's not moving anymore, but it has the same shape. You might think that it's still made of flesh and bone, although perhaps some of them might deny that. And I know from looking through your book that there was actually quite a lot of debate about this question. So the question of whether and to what extent there are forms that survive through a transition like that and maybe even substantial forms, even if the substantial form of the human is lost. Yeah, this was a huge scholastic debate. One of Thomas Aquinas' most famous and characteristic views was that all substances have a single substantial form. So in the case of a human being, each human being has a single substantial form that is the rational soul. And by putting his view that way, he was able to make a substance be an incredibly strongly unified sort of thing held together by just a single substantial form. But a consequence of that sort of view was that when the substance ceases to exist, the substantial form ceases to exist, and all that's left on Aquinas' view is prime matter. That's a very startling thing to say if you think about it, because in the cases you were just describing where an animal ceases to exist and what you've got left is a corpse, Aquinas can't quite say that. He can say, well, it looks as if you've got something left over from the animal that's the corpse. But in fact, the only thing that endured through that change from living to non-living is the prime matter. And the fact that that prime matter looks to be the same body is in effect an illusion. It's not the same body. It's the same prime matter, but all of the sensible characteristics of it, those are changed. Those are new. All of its accidental forms are something entirely new. It's a very hard theory to believe actually when you sort of stop to consider all of its implications. One kind of colorful example that Aquinas' opponents like to appeal to was the scar on a human being when the human being dies. The corpse will have that very same scar, or so you would think, but Aquinas can't say that. He's got to say that, no, all of the properties of the thing, all of its accidental forms, all of that are something entirely new. Why do they resemble the properties of the living body? Well, on his sort of theory, that's something of a mystery, and that's something of an embarrassment to his view that subsequent Thomists tried to explain, but that's definitely a weak point in his theory. Why can't he just say that although the substantial forms depart when animals die, this same accidental forms, numerically one and the same accidental forms, can survive, for example, the scar? He can't say that because he's so, so strict about these principles of individuation we were talking about. He thinks that the substantial form individuates, it individuates the whole substance, even including its accidental forms. So nothing remains when a substance is corrupted except for the prime matter. Change goes all the way down to prime matter. And so everything that seems to endure, he's got to tell some story about how it just looks the same. It's not actually the same. And I guess the opposed view to this would be the view of plural forms. Yeah. There were a lot of, that's a very complicated story. And in my book, I go through a lot of different variations on ways in which you could reject Aquinas's view. But the most common sort of way to respond to Aquinas was to propose that at least some substances have multiple substantial forms. And if you say that, then you can say that when a living thing dies, its soul, one substantial form, ceases to exist. But you can say it still has one or more other substantial form that continues. And so the standard move, and this is something, for instance, that John Duns Scotus thought, the standard move like Scotus's is to say that a human being has a rational soul and then also has a form of the body. The rational soul, of course, ceases, well, the rational soul separates from the body. It doesn't cease to exist. It doesn't cease to exist. Yeah. We don't want to put it that way. That's the good news, by the way. Your rational soul will be fine when you die. That's right. Separates from the body. On Aquinas's view, that's the end of the body. On Scotus's view, no, it's not because there's another substantial form. The body has its own substantial form and that endures after death. And that's why the corpse seems so much like the body you used to have. On Scotus's view, it is the body you used to have. And that obviously is a much more intuitively plausible view when you think about it from that point of view. To what extent is this whole debate something that actually reflects worries that are theological in nature? I was just wondering, maybe someone would take this or that view on substantial form because they were interested in something like the transubstantiation. So, for example, you know, you turn this wafer into the body of Christ. It looks exactly the same, but it's not bread anymore. It's the body of Christ. And I would imagine that someone like Aquinas would think that his view takes account of that really nicely. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's absolutely right. It's a tricky thing about working in medieval philosophy. If it's the philosophy you're primarily concerned with, then there's a kind of tendency to set aside the theological considerations as not really relevant or not so interesting. But that definitely risks distorting these views because a lot of their motivations were from particular theological doctrines. And so in the present case, the doctrine of the Eucharist plays an important role. A funny sort of theological issue, the issue of Christ's body being in the tomb for three days played a very important role in these debates because this is something that Scotus in particular appealed to because he wanted that body to be the body of Christ for those three days in the tomb. And he thought that on a view like Aquinas's, you can't get that result. But if you can't get that result, then what does that theological doctrine amount to? Actually, I have to say that seems like a really good point. Typically for Scotus, he's your man for good points. And what happens to this debate as we move forward through history? I mean, I guess that at least the sort of cliche idea about the 17th century is that they get rid of substantial forms, they all become corpuscularians. In other words, they think that matter just consists of particles that have an accidental composition relation to each other. And so effectively, in a way, both sides of this debate lose the Unitarians about substantial form and the Pluralists about substantial forms because substantial forms just get erased from the ontology. Is that what happens? That's a brief version of what happens. But the actual reality on the ground is much more complicated. Throughout the Scholastic era, this debate over one substantial form or many substantial forms carries on undiminished and there's no consensus view. When you get to the 17th century, it's true that in a way, the whole debate gets thrown out. But if you look carefully at what's going on, that's not exactly right. After all, even authors who want to reject Aristotelianism, they need some story about what unifies a substance. And so you find in various people different sorts of strategies. Leibniz is the most famous example. Leibniz is quite explicit about wanting to hold on to substantial forms. And so that's an interesting case to look at in this context. Leibniz, at some level, is a committed corpuscularian philosopher, but he thinks at the level of metaphysics, you need substantial form. Descartes is a different kind of case. Descartes doesn't have substantial forms in general. That's very clear. But some of the time when he talks about the mind, the human mind, he treats it as a substantial form. Now, there's a lively debate among scholars as to the extent to which Descartes really is treating the mind as a substantial form. And in my book, I argue that really not so much. It's not really so much of a substantial form in Descartes. But you can see in Descartes something like the after effects of the pluralistic conception of form that I was describing in Scotus. Because when Scotus distinguishes between two forms, a form of the body and the rational soul, and then you fast forward to Descartes, you can see Descartes just simply rejecting the form of the body. He doesn't have any interest in that. He thinks you can give a purely mechanistic account of material stuff. But when it comes to the soul, Descartes is willing to say, well, okay, we do have a mind. It's immaterial. If you want to call it a soul, we can call it a soul. He couldn't say that from the point of view of Aquinas because Aquinas' soul is the only substantial form. It not only governs the intellectual part of us, but it also governs the body. And that's a model for a soul that Aquinas can't allow. But something like Scotus' model has some kind of... Well, it can get some traction within a Cartesian framework. And so you might think of Descartes as taking that pluralistic conception of substantial form and throwing up part of it, but keeping other parts. Is there a way then that we could even think about the famous Cartesian dualism of body and soul or body and mind as a reaction to the pluralism debate? Because effectively what he's saying is, well, say whatever you want about the body. That's one thing. And then there's this other form, which is the mind on the other hand. And thus, I mean, I think most people think of the Cartesian dualism debate as being a kind of move towards something like a more platonic view of soul rather than Aristotelian view of soul. But the story you just told makes it sound like it came out of a completely different trajectory. Yeah, absolutely. You can think of this debate between Aquinas' single soul view and the pluralist soul view as having an impact on someone like Descartes. Descartes takes it in a certain direction. It leads him to dualism. And so you can think of pluralism as a step toward Cartesian dualism. Conversely, Aquinas and his followers looked at the plurality of substantial forms doctrine. And one way to think about their criticism of it is precisely that they were turning human beings into something that was a duality. They don't quite put it that way. But from our vantage point, seeing that Descartes is on the horizon, you can very much look at Aquinas and see him saying, we don't want to treat a human being in a dualistic fashion. We want to think of there being one soul that is both the mind and the organizing principle of the body. And so that's not to say that Aquinas is not a dualist in any sense, but Aquinas is definitely not a Cartesian dualist. He has a very, very different metaphysics. So if Aquinas could have read Descartes, he probably would have said, see, I told you this would happen. Exactly. Yes. Yes. And I'm sure you can find late scholastic authors saying just that, defending Thomism on the grounds of exactly Descartes is just a version of this bad, scotistic plurality of forms doctrine. OK, well, that seems as good a point. And as I need to end on, and it certainly shows the perennial importance of medieval philosophy and debates within scholasticism for the later period. So thank you very much, Robert Paz now, for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. And as we've just seen, there would be a very strong case for just continuing on into what I'm going to be calling the Renaissance period and then into early modernity. But there's something that we need to cover first, which is Byzantine philosophy. And so I'm going to be moving back a few generations or centuries in history to pick up that story of the continuing philosophy in Greek before moving on to the Renaissance in Western Europe. So please join me for that as we begin to look at Byzantine philosophy here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. In today's episode, we're reaching the 300th installment of the podcast. And as it happens, we've just wrapped up the series on Medieval Philosophy in Latin Christendom. So, before moving on to Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy, I thought it'd be a good time to look back at what we've learned so far in the podcasts. In particular, I want to address a question that's come up often, but only rather incidentally along the way. What is the contemporary relevance of ancient and medieval philosophy? Do these historical texts offer answers to questions philosophers care about today? And when they don't, are there other reasons today's philosophers should care about the history of philosophy? It's a big question. So to answer it, I will be turning to no fewer than six colleagues with different perspectives on the topic. This means it will be a two-part episode, one part on ancient philosophy and the other on medieval thought, with each part featuring three interviews. And to kick off the discussion of the contemporary relevance of ancient philosophy, we have Rachel Barney, who is Canada Research Chair of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Hi, Rachel. Hello, Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. You're an expert on Plato. And so I have to mention that I actually got into philosophy through reading Plato, and I think that a lot of people did. It's a very common thing for undergraduates to read him, be enthusiastic, and become philosophy majors. And maybe you even got into philosophy through Plato? Oh, yes. Okay. And you're still worrying about him now? Well, it never got away. But I think in a way, this is a kind of paradox, because Platonism is kind of a bad word in philosophy, at least if you think about distinctive, perhaps the most distinctive, Platonic philosophical view, the theory of forms. Hardly anyone signs up to that as a philosophical commitment. And generally speaking, we seem to be living in a philosophical age when realism of all sorts is under threat in various ways. So is there any sense in which Platonic realism is still a living force in philosophy today? Well, I wouldn't go so far as saying it's a bad word, certainly. And I wouldn't assume that realists are losing the philosophical battle at this point. It is true that Plato tends to get name checked as the extremist, the arch-realist, the, the archaic granddaddy of realism, who has a form of it which in most areas of philosophy, even most realists will want to say, well, I'm doing something subtler than that. I'm not a full on Platonist. Although in mathematics, of course, Platonism is still a perfectly live, viable, metaphysical position. And I find when you talk to people, the assumption that contemporary realism is something massively more sophisticated than the theory of forms doesn't necessarily stand up. It's just that there's a kind of caricature view of what that theory is. I think really anyone who's a realist and particularly a realist in ethics, that's to say someone who thinks that they're just objective truths, facts of the matter about the virtues right and wrong, the good and its opposite, that person is still working in a Platonic tradition whether they're fully aware of it or not. But there's not too many people who would sign up to the full menu of Platonic forms, right? To ascend to the form of the good. That's right. And not just the form of the good, but also justice and maybe forms of things like humans, if he even thought there were forms of things like that. True. I think you have to ask though what people think they're denying when they deny those things. I think Plato himself, and this is one of the fascinating things about the theory, I think Plato himself thought that in working out the theory of forms, he was actually just working out a pretty minimal set of commitments that's already embedded in ordinary use of language whenever people say things like, theft is unjust. If you actually work out the presuppositions for that to be a just plain true statement, he thinks you're going to end up with something like his theory. So I don't think he himself would agree that he's taking an extreme version of the realist view at all. I see. So maybe when people say that they don't believe in Platonic forms, what they mean is something more like, I don't believe in the caricature of Platonic forms that you arguably find in Aristotle, like a separate world of additional paradigmatic individuals, and the individuals down here somehow resemble them. Yeah, I think that's a fair way to put it. I suppose that even anti-realists, in a way, they're showing that Plato remains relevant because if Plato is, so to speak, the father of realism, then they're at least reacting against him, right? Yeah, that's right. And you get people like Richard Worthy who want to treat huge chunks of the Western philosophical tradition as working out Platonic ideas and influences, and I'm not sure that's wrong. You know the famous line about all philosophy being footnotes to Plato, and that comes out when you read his enemies too. So that's a very general kind of influence that Plato still has today and relevance that he still has today, but it's also a little bit impressionistic and vague, sort of Plato stands for realism. So are there cases where individual dialogues by Plato or even individual passages from Plato have been taken up and championed or at least discussed in interesting ways in contemporary philosophy? Sure, lots of them, and many of them actually don't have anything terribly directly to do with realism. They're all over the place. Things like Minos paradox comes up all the time. If you take an introductory epistemology course, it'll probably emerge somewhere, and that's just a very general puzzle about how we come to know things. Mino, who's Socrates' interlocutor in the Mino, in a moment of frustration, expresses his fed-up-ness with the dialogue so far by saying, Socrates, this business of inquiry that you're engaged in, how is it even possible? How are you going to, if you search for something you don't know, how are you going to recognize it when you find it? And if you don't know anything about it, then how are you going to search? And the paradox actually gets framed in several different ways, and it's full of interest for interpreters to figure out exactly what is the philosophical problem here. But it's also something that's inspired generations of people doing contemporary epistemology, trying to figure out what the right answer is. And it would even be a pretty standard way to kick off an epistemology course, right? Absolutely. Perhaps even distribute that one page of the Mino. That's right, yeah. And another one like that is the Euthyphro problem. So in the Euthyphro, Euthyphro, who's Socrates' interlocutor there, wants to say, well, he raises a puzzle that's still very much alive in philosophy of religion and also metaethics quite generally, because it's a problem about the relation of value to the divine. So what Euthyphro, he wants to say two incompatible things. He wants to say first that what's pious is pious because the gods love it. And he also wants to say the gods love the pious because it is pious. And when you think about it, he can't have it both ways. Either what's pious is pious already, and that's why the gods love it, in which case piety is something essentially independent of them. It has to exist independently for them to respond to it by loving it. Before the gods create value, they love certain things and make them pious, or you could substitute in good, any kind of value there. They make things good by having a certain attitude to them. And you really can't have it both ways, but many of us are attracted to saying both of the things that Euthyphro does. Certainly people with theistic perspectives often find themselves torn, and there's a long history of debate about which way Euthyphro should choose when he's faced with that choice. So for example, contemporary philosophers of religion who incline towards what's called divine command theory, they think that Euthyphro should say that the pious is pious because the gods love it, because it's the gods who actually confer normative properties on things. In other words, it's the gods who decide what's good and what's bad. Exactly. It's a perfectly live theory in contemporary religious ethics, and that position, that option as a solution to the Euthyphro problem is one that gets that much more attractive when you're dealing, say, in the Christian or Islamic tradition with a god who's supposed to be absolutely all-powerful, because the other option of saying, well, God just responds to value that's there already, that sounds like a kind of limitation possibly on divine power. But there are also attractions to the other position too, even if you are a believer in that kind of god. Okay, well, in these examples we have, like I said, people literally reading one page of Plato and then taking inspiration from it. But it would be nice if there was also some kind of relevance of whole dialogues, and maybe we could start at the top with the Republic, because that's arguably his masterwork. I mean, it seems like there has been quite a lot of discussion of the Republic in recent times, in fact, even recent months. Yes, indeed. The Republic has never been hotter, I think. Maybe right after Plato wrote it. Well, I don't know. I don't think they really got it then the way we do now, because now it has very special resonances with political worries that a lot of people share right now. Am I allowed to say Trump? Go for it. Okay. Since the election of Trump, all of us who teach Plato have been noticing that there's just an uptick in intensity in the discussions you get students to have about the Republic, because he is so worried about many of the things that we now are worried about. He's worried about tyranny. He's worried about how democracy turns into a tyranny. Not that he's a huge fan of democracy to start with, but he has a story to tell about how democracy can self-destruct and give rise to tyranny, and it's a pretty frightening tale. He has a lot to say about how the personal pathologies of the tyrant mirror those of his society and vice versa. He has a lot to say about poetry, about art, but I think you can make a case for his worries about the psychological impact of poetry mirroring a lot of worries people have about the media and even about the news media today. The worry is that we absorb false views about the world, false values, in ways that can really do psychological damage almost without realizing or noticing or doing it voluntarily, and that that can completely corrupt a political society. So he has very urgent things to say about a lot of things that are on many people's minds, and he also has in the body of the Republic a lot to say about the central questions that arise when you ask, well, how do we solve these problems or avoid them in the first place? So what are the qualifications for a good leader? What makes a healthy society healthy? What makes a just society just? So there's this combination which I really don't think you get in any other political work of extremely abstract sort of first principles of politics, grounded in ethics, grounded in human nature, and very vivid descriptions of the tyrant or the democratic city as it falls apart. So it's like reading this, well, it is a work of great philosophical depth and abstraction, but it also has some of the grip of a dystopian movie in some parts, and people are reacting to that very intensely right now. Not just professional philosophers, but magazine writers and ordinary students and everybody. Yeah, I've actually had the same experience teaching the Republic recently in Germany. It's true there too. So in my career, I've gone from the problem of how do you teach the Republic and get students to take the critique of democracy seriously, to how do you teach the Republic and get them to see that the critique of democracy isn't just obviously right. That's sort of opposite problems. But is that really something, I mean, you just mentioned that it's something that's come through in things like newspaper articles, blog posts, and so on. Do you think that that's something that's also true in political philosophy in the professional sphere, sort of, you know, the paid up political philosopher? Yeah, I think it's something that will happen soon. I think the way these things work is that people sense something new in the air and it first comes out in their teaching and then, you know, five years, ten years from now we'll get a flood of books. And it's, I should say it's not just about Trump and it's not just this very recent thing. There's a leading French philosopher, Alain Badiou, who did his own version of the Republic a few years ago. And he called it a hypertext or hyper translation, I think. But it's wildly different. He's put a female character in there and they're sort of worried about modern communism and so on. But I sort of hope that in five years we'll all be doing that, you know, doing our own rethinking one way or another along with Plato. And has Plato had a more prominent place, I mean, we were talking about metaphysics before, but has he also had a more prominent place in this side of philosophy over the last decades, like in ethics and politics? I think that's definitely true and certainly in ethics. There are so many rich, platonic ideas that aren't reducible to the theory of forms, but his whole theory of the soul, for instance, as being tripartite, his idea that desire is for the good. It's an extremely rich ethical system that you can appropriate and think about in lots of ways. I guess the main or one important person doing that now is Christine Korsgaard, who's a very influential moral philosopher at Harvard, who's built quite a bit of Plato's moral psychology into her own ethical theory, which is kind of interesting because she usually gets labeled a cantian and she doesn't see any contradiction in putting those two things together. So there are people doing creative appropriations like that in ethics. And there's also a tradition which isn't immediately visible these days, maybe, of using Plato to argue about realism and anti-realism, specifically in ethics. So you wouldn't necessarily see many explicit references to Plato in the last year's work in metaphysics – sorry, metaethics. So arguments about the truth conditions of moral claims and whether moral claims can actually be true and whether that implies that there are sort of moral objects of the kind Plato thought the forms were. But many people working on metaethics today are still in some sense reacting to the critiques of realism made by J.L. Mackey several generations ago now. And Mackey offered what he called the sort of error theory in reaction to moral realism, and it was based on a fairly devastating attack, although I think mostly consisting of sarcasm, but it was pretty devastating at the time. Sarcasm can be devastating. Yes. And I'm kidding a bit. He had some interesting arguments. But anyway, his attack was framed as an attack on the form of the good. So as soon as you go back, even that one generation, metaethics is being governed by totally explicit head-on engagement with Plato's ethics. And it's become a bit submerged since then in all the complexities of the back and forth. But he's still at the heart of the engine of metaethical debate. And do you think that that debate is one that involved another caricature of Plato? I mean, did Mackey really engage sympathetically and sensitively with what Plato was offering when he wrote about the form of the good, or was he just taking that as a kind of, you know, stand-in for a kind of dumb version of moral realism? Well, he was using a very broad brush. But I don't think the critique was essentially unfair in that way, because what he was getting at was the idea that – well, he used the term queer, so peculiar. There's something deeply peculiar about the Platonic idea that values, and let's say specifically the good, could be written into the fabric of the world, could be really objectively there because they would have to have all the properties of the other sorts of things that we think of as being objectively there, and at the same time be inherently motivating. And his argument was just that that's a kind of mistake. There aren't things like that, objects in the world that have inherent motivational force and normative force. And I think that's a fair depiction of what's at stake between the moral realist and the anti-realist, and it's not unfair for him to use Plato to do that. I guess, though, wouldn't it be true to say that moral realists have more often taken their cue from Aristotle than Plato over the last few decades? I mean, so at least you have virtue ethics, which I suppose is some form of moral realism, and they look back to Aristotle more than Plato. Yes, that's very true. And I think there are complicated reasons for that. It's partly that Aristotle is easier to work with, easier to appropriate philosophically. There are big differences between how one reads Plato and how one reads Aristotle, and they make Aristotle a lot easier to control as sort of raw materials. So there are fewer works on ethics. They're mostly pretty consistent. With Plato, the complexities are endless, the complexities of interpretation that you get to before being able to use them. So for instance, suppose you're thinking about friendship or erotic love. Those are topics on which Plato is still hugely vital, the Symposium and the Phaedrus. But the Symposium and the Phaedrus don't actually seem to give the same theory. What's more, it's actually hard to tell what the theory of the Symposium is, because you've got all these speeches which are radically different from each other. It sounds like Diotima is speaking for Plato here, but Alcibiades also has valuable things to say, and Aristophanes has this completely orthogonal account that's hard to reconcile, but also seems to be getting at the truth, and Plato's written all of it. So it's easy to use Plato in a sort of piecemeal way, but much harder to say, okay, I'm going to present a platonic theory of love or whatever it is. And I think for that reason, it's much easier to identify people who are working in a broadly Aristotelian tradition, especially in these ethical issues. Actually, there's an irony there, maybe, which is that even in ancient philosophy, I think one reason why Aristotle became the main figure in the curriculum that they taught in ancient Alexandria in late antiquity was what you just said, namely that it's so hard to use Plato as a kind of body of doctrines that address themselves to specific topics one at a time in different works, the way that Aristotle wrote the physics and the metaphysics and the ethics. It's really hard to extract just one body of teaching from Plato on any given topic. But it sounds like you think that he's a sort of vast reservoir of potential inspiration that people can still draw on today. Oh, absolutely. And I think one kind of odd difference between him and Aristotle, and I think I'll make the Aristotle people mad by saying this, but why not? You've already made the Trump people mad. Exactly. I can just keep on a roll here. There's an odd contrast in the activity of interpreting the two of them, because I've written papers on both of them, and it's really a very different operation. And I find that when you're interpreting Plato, that really starts to feel like an end in itself because it's so hard and so complicated and so fascinating. And he's a great writer. And there's this kind of visceral pleasure to that activity of just immersing yourself in Plato's text. And so coming up with the reading tends to be very much an end in itself. By the time you've got a reading of Plato, you're exhausted. You're done. It's hard enough. And it's hard enough, and it's extremely satisfying. So the tendency is to leave it at that. Whereas with Aristotle, and also you can reach, I think, maybe this shows I'm a crazy person, but I think you can reach often a very precise, if surprising, result. There will be a determinate view there. With Aristotle, on the surface, everything is very easy. He's very explicit. You don't have the complexities of the dialogue form. There's a view. You know where to look to find it. So it should be very easy. But I think there are quite a few central questions, especially in ethics, where Aristotle hasn't actually made up his mind at the level of detail and precision that we would now want him to philosophically. So many of the interpretive debates about Aristotle are somewhat undecidable. And when people start arguing about, you know, what is practical wisdom in Aristotle, or how does deliberation work, or is he fully a realist about what happiness or virtue is, those debates turn into philosophical debates very quickly, because the text of Aristotle is not actually going to decide them, no matter how good a scholar you are. So working on Aristotle is continuous with actually trying to solve these problems in ethics, whereas with Plato, they tend to be two separate operations. Okay, well, we're going to go on to talk more about Aristotle in just a second. But first, I will thank Rachel Barney very much for coming on this 300th episode. Thank you, Peter. Okay, well, our next guest is going to be Christoph Rath, who is Professor of Philosophy and holds the Chair of Ancient Philosophy, where I work at the LMU in Munich, and we run together with Oliver Primovesi, the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy. So I'm very happy to invite him onto the podcast. Hi, Christoph. Hi, Peter. We're going to continue talking now about the role that ancient philosophy has played in contemporary philosophy, and what contemporary philosophers have drawn on from ancient philosophy in terms of inspiration ideas they've found useful. Do you want to say something general about how you see the role of ancient philosophy in contemporary philosophical thought? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's not one single way to draw on ancient philosophy for contemporary philosophers, but contemporary philosophers often appreciated, for example, that ancient philosophical texts turned out to be an excellent didactic tool for introducing students into philosophy. And very often, I think, ancient philosophical theorems are invoked as alternative to certain contemporary debates or options. So in a way, sometimes philosophers have the impression that the contemporary discussion is too narrow, and they bring in ideas from antiquity as an alternative or alternative option to what are the prevalent options in the current debate. Yeah, so there's sort of both resonances, because you wouldn't use ancient philosophy didactically, like to introduce students to philosophy. You wouldn't do that unless you thought they were doing philosophy in some relevant and recognizable sense. Right. And then when you get into the answers that they give to the questions that are being posed, that you think that they're often answers that are alternatives to the answers that are given nowadays? Yeah, I mean, at least many philosophers think so. And there's a number of examples for that tendency. So just recall the famous idea by Pierre Adou that nowadays philosophers have a too narrow understanding of philosophy as a sort of theory. Whereas in ancient philosophy, philosophy was looked upon as a way of living and introduced the art of living, which indeed, inspired many books in the last decades on art of living. And on the question to what extent philosophy may be seen as a way of living indeed. And do you think that in the in terms of the way that ancient philosophy is received by contemporary philosophers who are not historians? Do you see that engagement as being deep and interesting? Or do you think it's more like superficial, just plucking ideas out of what they might have read from introductory texts about Aristotle or maybe heard in a podcast? Well, it varies a lot. Think for example, of Bernard Williams, who really got many interesting ideas from a deep understanding and interpretation of classical texts, maybe deriving from the canon of ancient texts in Oxford. But I think this relies clearly on a deep philosophical understanding. There are other examples in which interesting ideas derive from the serious attempt to solve exegetical problems. So for example, in the exegesis of Aristotle, there's a question of how two models in the theory of action can be combined. The model of the practical syllogism, which is essentially a deductive model on the one hand and on the other hand, means and reasoning, where you consider how to reach a certain given end. And I think the way in which David Wiggins and John McDowell discussed ways of combining these things led to an interesting philosophical suggestion about the role of the so-called minor premise in the practical syllogism, whether it is just about subsuming a given case under general rule, or whether it is, for example, about specifying a certain way of action, which expresses or manifests a more general end, so that the serious attempt to solve exegetical problems can indeed lead to an essential and not just superficial contribution to contemporary philosophy. Or to take another example, in the current debate, Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian naturalism is a big issue. Now naturalists like Philippa Foot seem to assume that vices of character are comparable to the defect of, say, a bird, a cuckoo bird, who fails to cuckoo. And one might say that this is not exactly what Aristotle had in mind. And to be honest, I don't think that this is what Aristotle had in mind. But I mean, the point is that it leads philosophers to think about the limits and the possibilities of naturalistic arguments on the one side. And it encourages Aristotle's scholars to think more deeply about the purposes of the use of nature in Aristotle's texts. And you're a specialist, especially on Aristotle. And I wonder, therefore, if you think that Aristotle has a kind of unique place in the contemporary scene. I mean, I was just talking to Rachel Barney about the way people have used Plato in recent times. But it seems to me that whereas Plato, I'm not sure if this is fair, but I'm going to say it anyway, it seems to me that Plato probably has more resonance in the general public than Aristotle does. But Aristotle probably has somewhat more resonance among specialist philosophers and academic philosophers than Plato does. And so first of all, I wonder if you agree. And second of all, I wonder if you could say, if that's true, why it would be true. Yeah. But yes, I agree. I think this is the case. And maybe one reason is that Aristotle's peculiar style of rational analysis of almost all fields of reality, his way of conceptualizing philosophically salient phenomena, makes it actually easier to engage with his thoughts in spite of the historical distance. And it's easier to see the arguments in his texts. So you don't have to deal, as in the case of Plato, with several characters in a dialogue. No one has problems with literature. Literature with irony, no such problems at all. And now, for example, in the case of Aristotle's moral philosophy, it's interesting that people seem to think that Aristotle's ethics is easier accessible than Plato's ethics, although Aristotle's moral thinking is adapted to Plato in many ways. But the reason might be that the Nicomachean ethics, for example, present thoughts that can be easily isolated from the context and more easily isolated from Aristotle's metaphysics and metaphysical background than in the Platonic context. So for example, without knowing anything about the unmoved mover, without knowing anything about Aristotelian logic and his theory of substance, it's relatively easy to understand the core intuition of what eudaimonia, happiness, consists in, the relation between certain character traits, virtues, and the happy life. It's easier to understand the case of the acritic person, the uncontrolled person, without relying on any particular metaphysics. Whereas in Plato's Republic, being faced with the form of the good, you run into very serious metaphysical considerations and problems. This might be sometimes misleading because after all Aristotle, and Aristotle contrives his moral thought also from his overall conception of the universe, the place of human beings in the universe, that they are not the best in the universe, that they resemble the unmoved mover in a way, but not in many ways. And these are also metaphysical theses. But on the whole, it seems to be easier to isolate them indeed from the context. And maybe this is one answer to why Aristotle is more popular in this respect. It's interesting, if you're right about that, and I think you probably are, that means the contemporary way of using Aristotle is very different from the way that he was used in history, because he tended to be read as a very holistic thinker, where every part of his corpus needed to be brought into relation with every other part. So in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, they read him much more the way you're suggesting we now read Plato as sort of one big whole. Let me ask you about something more specific, which is a topic that leads to my mind when I think about contemporary philosophy and where Aristotle fits into it. So this is kind of a technical debate that came out a few decades ago and was already part of the standard literature on Aristotle when I was a student. So there were some people who thought that Aristotle's philosophy of mind can be described as functionalist, which at the time was a very kind of hot theory in philosophy of mind. And then some other people came back and said, no, no, that's wrong. You've got Aristotle completely wrong here. So this is, I think, a really interesting case of attempting to bring Aristotle into the contemporary debate and then a debate that ensued about whether this works or not. So can you sort of explain what this debate was about? So in this situation, some people thought that it's instructive to refer to Aristotle's model of body-soul, hylomorphism, which means that the soul is the form of a living body and that psychic or mental states cannot occur without the body. And now a similar third way between dualism on the one side and reductionism on the other side at this time was functionalism. Functionalism describes mental states as certain functions that can be materialized in various physical ways. And it was tempting at that time to think that Aristotle, who too, insisted that psychic states cannot occur without an alteration in certain parts of the living body, must be congenial with the idea of functionalism. Of course, the point was not that modern functionalism was just a revival of Aristotle's body-soul theory. However, the alleged affinity between functionalism and Aristotelian hylomorphism was a way to say first that ancient theories about the mind and mental states are not necessarily obsolete because they are ancient. And the second, that the idea of functionalism was not just an ephemeral invention, but actually gained support from an old tradition of thinking about the relation of body and mind or soul, which was possibly obscured by the influence of Cartesianism. So it's actually almost like the ancient philosophers win because, oh, look, Aristotle says something that seems really current and relevant. And the functionalists win too, because they're saying something that Aristotle already said right back when. And Aristotle is really brilliant and everyone's heard of Aristotle. So it kind of lends this theory, an air of authority. Can I just try to see if I've really got the point though? So the idea of functionalism is that you have the same mental event or state or whatever, realized in different material situations. So like a dog could get angry and I can get angry even though we have very different bodies. Or you could get angry and I could get angry even though our brains may work slightly differently. A Martian could get angry even though his whole body may be made of silicon. He's not a carbon-based life form, let's say. But he could still be angry, right? And so the reason why Aristotle is thought to be a functionalist is that he thinks that there's a material component of anger, which is like the blood boiling around the heart, let's say. But then there's also what it is to be angry, which is like a desire for revenge. This actually goes back to something I talked about with Martin Picolet in another interview not too long ago. And then was the idea that Aristotle would then admit that that formal kind of criterion could then be realized in different material situations? Did they go that far? I mean, there is the idea on the one side that those mental states must be materialized in one way or the other, but that they can be independently described, as you said, anger as a kind of desire for revenge. Now, the other question, whether there are various ways of materializing one type of psychic state, whether this is also true of Aristotle, is exegetically more difficult to answer. Sometimes Aristotle seems to be so negligent about the particular physiological conditions that one might have the impression he's not interested in that. And he allows the possibility of various ways of materialize these functions. On the other hand, there are clearly examples in which he seems to insist that one and the same form or one and the same mental state can be realized only in one particular bodily condition. So that the majority of scholars came to reject the idea that the affinity between Aristotle and modern functionalism is really significant. And I guess the first real powerful skepticism came from Miles Burnier, right? So he wrote a paper where he rejected the functionalist interpretation and said some nasty things about what the relevance might be of Aristotelian philosophy of mind, right? Can you say there is something we can do with the Aristotelian philosophy of mind? We can junk it? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, I think indeed, in this particular case, it's really interesting to observe how the more scholarly community of Aristotle experts reacted to the idea that there is such a close affinity between Aristotle and modern functionalism. Many scholars were not at all happy about the actualization and adaptation of Aristotle's theory of the soul, but tried to prove the anachronistic character of the attempt of reading functionalism into Aristotle and vice versa. Miles Burnier even made a point of insisting that Aristotle's account of matter is obsolete and cannot be compared to modern notions of the physical. And the character of this debate is interesting, since it shows that sometimes the adaptation of ancient philosophical positions comes with a significant cost, namely the cost of neglecting hermeneutical or scholarly principles, and of turning the historical positions just into a position that we modern thinkers happen to favor. And I think there are several ways to approach ancient philosophical texts. You can write commentaries about them, you can say, well, they inspired this particular interesting idea I go to develop and to elaborate on. These are various ways of dealing with ancient texts. Both ways of approaching ancient philosophy are valid in a way. But clearly, experts and scholars have the tendency to defend ancient texts against two anachronistic readings. And it's almost like there's a balancing act. So the harder you try to make Aristotle relevant today, the greater risk you run of anachronism. But the more you insist on, you know, embedding him in his context and reading him, you know, not only as a Greek thinker engaged with Greek problems, the less relevant he might seem to us today. So let's finish by talking about something else that leaps to mind and is maybe the most prominent way in which Aristotle is featured in the contemporary philosophy scene. And this is virtue ethics. And I think this is a rather different case, because it seems to me that the heroes of virtue ethics like Alistair MacIntyre, Philip of Foot, who you mentioned before, and others, they certainly knew Aristotle and took inspiration from him. But they typically don't represent themselves as just giving you Aristotle's position, nor did they kind of develop virtue ethics separately, like that's what happened with functionalism, and then go back and say, oh, look, Aristotle was already saying this. It's more like a whole direction of philosophy that's inspired by Aristotle, isn't it? Yes, indeed. I think virtue ethics is a peculiar example. Because it was inspired by the Aristotelian theory of virtues, partly by Thomas Aquinas' account of virtues. And it was clearly introduced to counteract to certain tendencies in contemporary moral philosophy. Elizabeth Ainscombe, in her famous article on modern moral philosophy, used traditional Aristotelian virtue ethics as an alternative to kinds of moral philosophy and moral thinking that she found to be problematic in many ways. So she opposed utilitarianism, she opposed kinds of moral philosophies that focus on duties and the question of what we should do. And I think in this situation, Aristotle's ethics was used as a model for an alternative style of moral philosophy, the details of which must be filled in. But without just interpreting Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, Bernard Williams, for example, was always very clear about his view that what Aristotle says about virtues and a combination of virtue and a good life is very inspiring, but that other parts of Aristotelian thinking, his views about women, about slaves, his doctrine that virtue is a mean, must be ignored in order to make sense of his account of virtues. Yeah, or Alastair MacIntyre wrote this famous book called After Virtue, which develops a kind of virtue ethics theory, but doesn't make any use of Aristotelian metaphysics or physics, for example. So it's like he's just taken part of Aristotle and taken inspiration from that and is developing it further without thinking he has to be committed to other things Aristotle says, which actually is an example of something you mentioned earlier, right? They're kind of picking parts and leaving other parts. Yeah, I think MacIntyre's early book is a good example of this eclectic and selective approach to Aristotelian ethics, for he clearly opposed to Aristotle's tendency of biological metaphysics, i.e. to base parts of moral thinking on the supposed essence of human beings, because in MacIntyre's at least early few virtues are dependent on the conception of the good in a particular community, which is quite different from saying that virtues must be based in a sort of account of the human nature. But still the virtue ethicists are all inspired by something that I guess you would agree with me is genuinely Aristotelian, which is that somehow the good for humans and the good in action is grounded in virtuous character. And so in some sense what is right and wrong in ethics is defined with reference to certain character traits like what would the courageous person do, rather than, for example, being defined in terms of the best possible outcome, as in utilitarianism or consequentialism, or rather than in duty, as in Kantian ethics. Yeah, I think it's indeed distinctive of virtue ethics that they base their thinking as Aristotle did on the consideration of positive character traits like justice, moderation, generosity, and that they see a certain connection between the development of such positive character traits and the search for a good life. For the virtue ethicist, there's a clear connection between having certain virtues and having a good life. So in a way, they are connected intrinsically or instrumentally, so that it's clear for the virtuous person what's the benefit of being virtuous, whereas in a duty or obligation based style of ethics, one can always raise the question, why should I be moral? Why should I do that? What's the benefit? Wasn't it for me? I mean, if I follow the categorical imperative, things might actually seem to go worse for me in some cases, whereas Aristotle can explain to you why it's good for you to be good, because you'll be a flourishing human being or a happy human being in some rich sense of the concept happiness. And so do you think that this is the most powerful echo of Aristotle in contemporary philosophy for true ethics? In terms of books and articles written, it is perhaps the most powerful inspiration of Most effective in tenure review decisions. Indeed. Also, I mean, it has many different branches. And it is indeed one of the most significant branches of contemporary philosophy that relies on Aristotle. But I think another branch in which Aristotle is quite influential nowadays is metaphysics. For a long time, there was the idea that metaphysicians mostly deal with the question of whether certain entities do or do not exist. Do universal exist? Do substances exist? Numbers? Abstract beings? And so on. Ethical properties, maybe. Yeah, ethical properties. Current development is that metaphysicians became more interested in exploring the notion of grounding and saying that metaphysics is about determining such grounding relations, i.e. that the existence of one entity is grounded in another entity. So Peter's baldheadedness might be grounded in a way in Peter. And did you like this example? It's a fantastic example. One of my favorite examples. And it seems that this is a way to deal with metaphysics that is familiar from Aristotle's question of priority in being. There are many ways in which, according to Aristotle, entities can be related as ontologically prior or posterior. And his way of unfolding metaphysics shows that he's primarily interested in such dependence or independence relations. And this is an idea to which, as it seems, contemporary metaphysicians nowadays return and which they find fruitful for their own research. OK, well, with our next guest, we're actually going to see yet another example of how Aristotle's provided resources for contemporary philosophy. But before we move on to that, I'm going to thank Christoph Rapp very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. It was about time. OK, well, our next guest will be Mark Calderon, who is professor of philosophy at University College London. Hi, Mark. Hi, thanks. Thanks for coming on the show. And the reason I've asked you to appear on this episode about contemporary relevance of history of philosophy is that you're a contemporary philosopher who thinks that the history of philosophy is relevant. And this is particularly clear from a book that you wrote recently, which is about the philosophy of perception. So could you just tell us the name of the book and what it's about? Yeah, so the book was Form Without Matter, Empedocles and Aristotle on color perception. And as the subtitle made clear, and it's about Empedocles and Aristotle on color perception, I was initially drawn to this material sort of just by accident. I had taken a break and decided to reread De Anima and got hooked. As one does. But I think in my own case, I had previously done a lot of work on color. And unlike early modern theories, I don't think colors are in any way secondary qualities. So it made a lot of sense for me to look at pre-modern sources because of the way my own work on both color and color perception seemed to be in tension with some central claims in early modern philosophy. And why is there a philosophical problem there? I mean, okay, things are colored. So what? So the philosophical problem about color tends to be driven by other metaphysical commitments. So suppose you're an atomist, right? You think there's nothing but colorless atoms spinning in the void. You might be puzzled about how exactly these give rise to the colors that we seem to experience when we look out onto the scene before us. That's something that you just mentioned. There's this distinction in early modern philosophy, which we haven't gotten to yet, but we will, I hope, between primary and secondary qualities. So the primary qualities would be the properties that the underlying matter really has, like maybe the shape of the atom or something, whereas the color would be some kind of other property that comes on top of that. And you don't think that. So there's this tendency to deny that there's nothing in a perceived body that looks, that exactly resembles our color experience of it. And that denial can be understood in different ways. But unlike this, I think that colors are qualities that inhere. So they're just as real as shapes. Yeah. Right. And is this something that a lot of other contemporary philosophers are worried about or agree with you about? Some, yeah. So I think, for example, I've got a similar view to John Campbell's, to Stephen Yablow about color. So there's been, and also more recently, Keith Allen has written a nice book on naive realism about color. So there are people who, contemporary philosophers who are thinking about colors as other than secondary qualities. But this is a fairly recent trend, and it's not the dominant view. Yeah. I think it's interesting that it's not the dominant view. I mean, you just, in a way, gave a reason for thinking it shouldn't be, namely that the underlying material constituents of things doesn't really have color. But people don't usually think that there are no tables, just because tables are made of atoms. So it seems to me a little bit odd to say that because atoms aren't colored, that there's no such thing as color, or that color is somehow metaphysically dubious, or second rate, or supervenient, or whatever they would want to say. Yeah. I'm happy with claims about supervenience, the idea that, well, fix whatever fundamental level reality there is. Let's say if it's physical facts, if you're a physicalist, I'm happy that they'll fix a lot of other things as well. I guess it's just the thought that colors are somehow less real, or a mental reaction to physical stimulus, or somehow or another having a different ontological status from the primary qualities. That's what I'd like to resist. People might think that colors are something that only happens in the mind when maybe a stream of atoms, or light particles, or whatever. To be honest, I don't know very much about how color works, you probably do. But whatever the physical process is by which we see, they might think that the color is something that's only in the head. Whereas you want to say that the color is actually a property in the thing outside us. Maybe not terribly interesting property from an explanatory perspective. It probably has a rather narrow cosmological role in the range of things it's capable of explaining. It's probably not very natural from a physicist's perspective. But I think it's nonetheless an objective quality out there in the world. Before we start talking about the history of philosophy, let me just ask you one other question which is, what about other sensible qualities? Are you going to say, well, once I figure this out for color, whatever I say for color is also going to apply to sound, smell, taste? No. Right? So, I mean, I think there are important differences both between the various sensory modalities as well as their objects. And I think even within a given sensory modality, you can find interesting differences between their objects. So I think there are interestingly different things that are visible. You can see events, you can see property instances, you can see objects. These seem to belong to different metaphysical categories. So I see there's no expectation per se that these are all going to be handled in a similar fashion. But in general, I tend to be a perceptual realist. So if I smell something, then I think there are smells. If I hear something, I think there are things to be heard and so on. And is the idea of turning back to the history, and we've looked particularly at ancient history, though you're interested in actually a whole range of historical figures who've talked about perception, but your book is mostly about Aristotle and Ephesus, as you said, was your idea that you wanted to use them because they share your intuitions about color? Well, I had a couple of different thoughts. And although kind of convinced that elements of the early modern paradigm are mistaken, still it's rained for four centuries. It's really hard to disrupt those habits of mind. Thinking about pre-modern figures was, in a way, a bit of therapy to disrupt these modernist habits of mind. Partly it was also to try to discover new problems or new puzzles that had perhaps been overlooked in the shift in the early modern period, but might nonetheless be fruitful to think about. So those were the two main motives. I suppose that if you're working in a period before this distinction between primary and secondary qualities was taken for granted, if they were kind of working within a kind of default assumption of what you're calling naive realism, so I see a color, so there must be a color there, then the things that would interest them wouldn't necessarily be defending that position, but rather working out other problems. For example, what makes something the color that it is, rather than is there a color there at all? In the book, though, I was less focused per se on the metaphysics of color, more on its perception. In part because there were some puzzles that arose about the nature of perception, if you make some background assumptions, that arise specifically with color vision. And this is why Empedocles came in the story. Empedocles, like many ancient thinkers, thought of our sense of touch as it were, a kind of exemplary form of perception. And there was a very common assumption that if you could understand some sensory modality in terms of touch, or at least by analogy with touch, that would suffice for making sense of that particular sensory modality. And the thing about touch is you have to be in contact with what you're touching. Well, that immediately raises a problem with respect to color vision, because color vision seems to be a distal sense, in the sense that the colors that we see seemed in here in objects located at a distance from us. But if they're at a distance from us, how can we be in contact with them? If we can't be in contact with them, how can color vision be modeled on touch? So that was a puzzle that motivated Empedocles. And in a way, I wanted to say a generalization of that puzzle that motivated Aristotle's thinking in the Anima as well. One idea you sometimes get in antiquity is that vision must work by something coming out of the eyes, like a ray. And this is sometimes even compared to reaching out and tapping the thing with a walking stick, which shows you how seriously they take the idea that sensation needs to be somehow compared to touch. Right. It's interesting, isn't it? Because usually, I think, when philosophers start thinking about perception, they go for vision is the most kind of interesting of the five senses. And yet they are, at least Empedocles, is trying to think of vision on analogy with touch as if that was the most fundamental. Right. Right. And so how does he solve this problem? Well, there's an interpretive question about Empedocles because you can find passages such as a famous analogy gives between light, seeing, and lantern, which suggests that he's got an extramission view that you were just describing where something comes out of the eyes. There are other bits and other bits of testimony, for example, the view that Socrates attributes to Empedocles in the Meno, which suggests the other way around. In here, we're told a story where a colored object gives off affluences, and these somehow fit into the eye. So instead of reaching out, we get something coming from the colored object. So it's controversial how to exactly understand Empedocles. I myself am inclined to try to reconcile these seemingly contradictory elements of this thought and see the extra missive elements as somehow making possible the intermissive elements. But on either way, whether something has to go out and touch the colored object or something from the colored object has to come in, on both interpretations, the colored object needs to be in contact with the perceptive part of the soul. And that's the important principle driving. And Aristotle would agree with that, except insofar as he then says it's okay for the contact to be via a medium. Is that right? Yes. Although he's clear that the sense organ can't be in contact with the colored object, because he says famously, put a colored object on the eye, you don't see anything. So he wants to rule out physical contact as the principle. But nonetheless, we have to somehow or another assimilate, where this isn't a material mode of assimilation, right? The sensible form of the object. And this non-material mode of assimilation is really, trying to understand that is really the difficult thing about trying to understand his definition of perception in De Anima. And that goes back to what we started talking about, because for him, it is absolutely crucial that there's really a color outside, because his whole view is going to be that the perceptual faculty becomes assimilated to that form or that quality. And so the same property or form is what he would call it, happens in sight, that happens in the visible object. And you think this is a good move? I think it provides us with a very interesting take on perceptual objectivity, because if something has to be informed in order for the perceptual faculty to assimilate to it, then, well, if it's not informed, there's nothing to assimilate to, and hence no assimilation. So the story you get builds in a very strong and interesting notion of perceptual objectivity that I think is attractive. And so when you and I both look at the same red apple, the thought would be that you are perceiving that red and I'm perceiving that red, because both of our sensory faculties are being actualized by the same redness that's in the apple, right? Isn't there a problem here, though? And maybe this is where we start getting into the puzzles, or as another puzzle, in addition to this thing about action at a distance. What about cases of perceptual illusion? Because there we have a case where maybe you're seeing something from a certain perspective that makes it look bigger than it is, or you're seeing it in conditions that make it look like a color. It has a color that it doesn't really have. And isn't Aristotle now stuck with saying, well, it really has the color that you're seeing, because otherwise it wouldn't be causing the color that you're aware of? And yet we don't want to say that it really has that color. It kind of depends on your take on illusion, right? If you're thinking of illusion as an experiential misrepresentation, right, then that's probably a notion he can't help himself to. That's not really the only way you can understand things. In particular, there's a little bit of wiggle room that he can exploit, because he thinks that there's no one way a particular sensible object will appear. He's sensitive to that. How it appears can vary with your perspective or the circumstances. Like lighting conditions. Lighting conditions, right. So it's possible then for something to appear a certain way, because that's how it appears in those circumstances. But those appearances might be misleading in the sense that we might be inclined to make false judgments about it. But that's not the same idea as having an experiential misrepresentation, right, because you're presented with the red thing. The red thing in this circumstance looks this way, because that's how red things look in those circumstances. Except it's hard, it's got a misleading look, and so you might be tempted to judge it's brown or something else. He gives this famous example of the sun looking like it's very small, like only a foot across. And I guess what you mean is that he would say if you judge that the sun is really small, then on the basis of the way it looks, then you've made a mistake. But you're not making a mistake when you see it looking that size, because that is the size that it looks from where we're standing, namely very far away. Exactly. Right, okay. And what would you say to someone who said to you, look Mark, this is all very cute that you're interested in, empedocles and Aristotle, but why would you turn to figures like this to understand vision and color, given that they evidently didn't have the first notion about how vision and color really work, right? Their optics is incredibly rudimentary, they don't even know how light works. Aristotle thinks that light doesn't travel, for example. So it's obvious that their ideas about color are going to be hopelessly antiquated in every sense of the word. What we would now describe as their scientific ideas about light and color are obviously antiquated. However, I think philosophical reflection on perception isn't necessarily limited to what we can make from the science. And moreover, I think there are philosophical puzzles having nothing to do with the science, right, that can be found in these writers. But in addition to these things, I suppose I was sort of drawn to philosophical ethnography as a potential mode of doing phenomenology, right? So if you decide to interpret and comment on a late antique Treatise on the Soul, though it's written by a respected predecessor, it's still a product of an alien philosophical culture. And because it is, you're going to have to bracket your philosophical presuppositions if you're to sympathetically and imaginatively interpret it. So how are you going to go about sympathetically and imaginatively interpreting it? Well, you'll look to the phenomena and ask, what is it about it that's prompting these people to describe it the way they are? And so in a way, it's a way of using the text as a guide to attend to the phenomena, right? So that's what I meant by philosophical ethnography as a form of phenomenology. And it's really that possibility that got me excited when I was working on the Aristotle book. Does that mean that in a way this methodology for you might actually be pretty restricted in its application? Because it seems like what you just said somehow depends on the idea that, well, look, they can see and we can see. And it's interesting that they would think vision works like this because they're having the same or very similar phenomenological experience as to what we're having. But that seems like it's not maybe uniquely true of perception. The perception is a much better example of that than many other philosophical issues that you might worry about. The existence of God, whether we have a soul, maybe even consciousness, which I guess a lot of people think might be quite theory-laden as a supposed phenomenological experience. Whereas I agree with you, it's very natural to assume that when Aristotle looked at a red apple, he had the same kind of experience we have. Does that mean then that you think that philosophy of perception is kind of an unusual case in the way that it could interact with the history of philosophy? Possibly sticking with the special case for a moment and picking up in a different way a theme from earlier, there's a tendency to overlook the richness of the phenomenological descriptions of our experience provided by ancient texts, in part by a rush to see it as a bit of antiquated science. So to take another example, one that you brought up about extramission theories, the idea that there are these rays, visual rays coming out of our eyes. There are no visual rays coming out of our eyes. There's a temptation then to see extramission theories as just antiquated physiology. However I'm inclined to think that they, and perhaps they were to a part, in part, they were certainly supposed to be answering causal questions. But I'm inclined to think that they also contain a fair amount of phenomenological truths. If you think about looking and seeing, well looking is an active outer directed activity and maybe a lot of the extramissionist metaphysics was trying to capture this aspect of our phenomenology and it might be useful to recover that. I don't know whether we can extend this kind of methodology to other topics. To be honest, I'm not sure. One would have to try it out. But in principle, it's not a bad way to interpret a text by looking at its subject matter as we understand it to be and asking, what is it about it that's prompting the author to describe it in the way that the author is doing. Even something more abstract like free will that I just mentioned, there's a phenomenology of what it's like to make choices. And maybe someone like Augustine or other figures who have talked about free will might give us insight into that as well. Just one last question. Is your message to other contemporary philosophers of perception, let's say, or philosophers of mind, would you say, hey folks, we should really be reading these historical texts more than we do? Or do you think it's more optional than that? It could be a good idea, but it maybe depends on what topic you're working on. Or maybe you would even be willing to admit that it's a kind of a quirky thing about you personally that you happen to like working on historical texts. I think it's both a quirky thing about me and something that I would happily recommend to others. I suspect in a way a lot of this goes on, but without it being advertised. That is, I know lots of people who are contemporary analytic philosophers who don't write about historical materials, but nonetheless have detailed knowledge of at least one historical figure. But I think in particular there's a lot of very interesting metaphysics in classical antiquity that are relevant to our understanding of perception. So for example, Aristotle's distinction between tinesis and anargai, namely motion, broadly understood and activity, is something that contemporary philosophers are rediscovering for themselves. Recent work on the stream of consciousness interestingly rediscovers for itself distinctions that were raised among the Platonists in particular. The Platonists mark a distinction between noetic and dinoetic reasoning. In noetic reasoning you grasp the intelligible object as a whole and all at once, whereas in dinoetic reasoning it's unfolded in a series of steps. Importantly, they argue it in a series of discrete steps. So the stream of consciousness, if it's a stream of thoughts, can't be continuous, but it's got to consist of one thought after another. This gets reintroduced in the 20th century by Geach and was taken up by Matt Sotarrio in his recent book. So yeah, I do think there are lots of elements of ancient metaphysics that are directly relevant to contemporary philosophers' concerns. I especially like the idea of lots of analytic philosophers in privacy reading Locke and Plato, and not becoming clean about it. You know, probably the most notorious example of this would be Gilbert Harman, who's notorious for saying, just say no to history of philosophy. But of course, you know, he's got pretty detailed knowledge of Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments in a way that might be surprising given his rhetoric. Right. Okay, well thanks very much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. This will be a second installment of our special 300th episode looking at the contemporary relevance of all the philosophy we've covered on the podcast so far. Today we'll be talking about the relationship between medieval philosophy and philosophy today, starting with Peter King, who is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for coming. It's always good to have another Peter. Just to keep things clear. Exactly. So, we're going to be talking about the relevance of some of your work on medieval philosophy to issues that philosophers care about today. Maybe you could first, though, tell us whether that's actually something you're interested in. I mean, did you get into medieval philosophy because you wanted to expose its relevance for modern day philosophical debates? Well, like many people, or at least those who are honest, will tell you, I got into medieval philosophy completely by mistake, or by accident, I suppose, to keep that Austinian distinction. I began working on philosophy of mathematics. My undergraduate degree is in mathematics. And so I started to work on philosophy of mathematics, and that led me to, more broadly, philosophy of language. That was about the time philosophy of language was declared dead. Currently, it's a zombie. Still walks, still moves, but it's dead. And so I thought, well, I suppose I ought to really learn something about how we got to this point. That led me to history. Then I thought, well, I should really learn something about the history. They're not teaching me a lot of, and that led me to read things, and eventually I wound up in the Middle Ages. And here I am today. And you just magically learned Latin along the way somewhere. It wasn't magic. It was hard work, but I learned Latin along the way. Okay. Do you, in fact, think that there are areas of medieval philosophy that are particularly relevant from the perspective of a contemporary philosopher? There are lots of them, just to name two or three. One is, for example, what Wilfred Sellers once said, which was that the Middle Ages was when logic, like knighthood, was in flower, for example. Metaphysics, if now that metaphysics is no longer a dirty word, and we do metaphysics these days, that's the golden era of metaphysics, of course, back then. There are obvious connections with things like philosophy of religion and less obvious, but important connections in, for example, the history of ethics, the shift away from virtue ethics to will-based theories of ethics and so on. What I mostly work on these days is the history of the philosophy of psychology. Philosophy of psychology, of course, especially in its guise of cognitive science, is very important to contemporary philosophers these days. And I think there's a fair amount in the Middle Ages that is quite similar and that each can shed some light on the other. That seems like a kind of surprising choice, actually, because if you look back at medieval theories of the soul, they obviously believe that the soul is a substance in its own right, it's immaterial, it can survive without the body, whereas most contemporary philosophers of mind are inclined towards rather physicalist accounts of the mind. So naively, someone might think that actually if there's any area of medieval philosophy that's not going to speak in a useful way to our concerns today, it would be precisely the theory of soul. Yeah. Well, you understand that they, following a certain line of interpretation of Aristotle, thought that psychology included things such as animal behavior, animal perception, animal reaction, and so on and so forth, and they thought that was continuous with us. A large chunk of psychology works on animals, which they thought certainly had only embodied souls, material souls, and so on. There were also several philosophers, even in the Middle Ages, who thought that philosophical reasoning in the absence of revelation, setting revelation aside, would lead one simply to conclude that the human soul was in fact immaterial, perishable form. William of Ockham thought this, but it was a bit coy about it. It's very clear in somebody like Jean Buridan, who actually identifies six or seven characteristics and says either they all go together and you get a separated, immaterial, nonpersonal soul, like certain Arabs may have thought, or their opposites go together and you get a perishable, individual, material human soul. Those are the only things philosophy could accept. The whole set or its negation. Because it all comes together. Right. And then what revelation does is tell us that in fact what is a logically impossible mixture of these theses holds. So someone like Buridan would actually say that the contemporary philosophers of mind are right because reason would actually lead you to think that the human soul is like the soul of an animal in being imminent in the animal body. And because contemporary philosophers of mind don't usually draw on revelation when they're doing philosophy of mind, they would have reached the right conclusion actually. Very much so. He would approve of them entirely. Now mind you, not all contemporary philosophers of mind are materialists. They're those who think that the hard problem are things like the problem of consciousness, the problem of phenomenality and so on. Philosophers like David Chalmers are known for thinking that that's the really hard question. They often think that these are the sorts of considerations that impel one to think that at least some parts of the mind are non-material. And of course the argument given by various philosophers in the Middle Ages were that it's in virtue of certain kinds of abilities or features of our thinking that we have to concede that the mind is non-material. Now they tended to identify different features. They identified our ability to think abstractly or generally or universally as reason to think that our minds are therefore not material. But many of the same sorts of considerations hold and apply. And they obviously have to explain the cognitive faculties that we have to explain. They have sensations, so do we. They have imagination, so do we. They have capacity for abstract thought, and so do we. Absolutely. They stepped on stones and it hurt. But the way they do it is there's more parallels than simply having to explain the same phenomena because they came to want to try to explain the same phenomena in something like the same ways. So let me explain what I mean. When the texts of Aristotle were translated into Latin along with commentaries from both Greek and Arabic sources, there was a challenge to try to understand how psychology could be a science in the proper sense of a science that Aristotle had endorsed in the posterior analytics. And what eventually they came to devise was a system for thinking about the mind that was based on Aristotle but had a special character, which is rather like the character we call it, sometimes impute to psychological theories today. We call it now dismissively, the medieval version we call dismissively faculty psychology, but there's more to it than that. The basic idea is that to explain psychological phenomena, you postulate certain kinds of subpersonal centers of activity within the soul. I'm just speaking of the soul broadly here. This could be the level of sensation or the level of thought. And these centers of activity exchange information back and forth. And so you try to explain psychological phenomena as an emergent property of the lower level interaction of these faculties. And an example of this would be like I look at a giraffe, I get a visual image of the giraffe in my sensitive faculty. And then it maybe stores that information in my memory, which is another faculty, I can use my imagination to call up an image of a giraffe and play around with it, etc. Right. Now, they explained how it's the image of a giraffe that's present both outside and in your sense organ and then in your sense faculty, then in your various psychological faculties such as imagination and so on and so forth. They explained that by saying there was an identity of form, that one receives the form of the giraffe without the matter and then that form can be located in various different parts in psychology. Well, so it's the same form. Well, if you take the Greek word, that's an isomorphism. It is, right? I think isomorphism means form in Greek. Sure. And what you get then is a view that says that you have the same form, you have an isomorphism between these various faculties in virtue of sharing essentially the same kind of information which can show up in different faculties in different ways. It can be a configuration of rod and cone firings in the eye, in the sense organ when you see the giraffe. It can be the particular representation of the giraffe that's stored in your sensitive imagination. It can be the cognition of the giraffe when you think about the giraffe. It can be the object of the will when you are filled with an upsurge of admiration and longing to own your own giraffe, etc., etc., etc. And is that what contemporary philosophers would call content, like the content of a cognitive act? Close enough for the most part. Close enough for the most part. Actually it's a bit more complicated than that because in order to get the content of a cognitive act, you have to have a strong act-content distinction and that takes some time to evolve in the history of philosophy. It tends to, I blame this on Duns Scotus myself, which means around the start of the 14th century. Yeah, that's what I was thinking is that it comes in in the 14th century. And so if you have, for example, mental acts in Occam, which are linguistically structured, it's pretty easy to think about that in terms of content, isn't it? Yes. That's one of the, presumably that's one of the reasons he went to endorse the idea that mental language is the language of thought. It allows you to talk about thought in a contentful way that is intuitive and doesn't need any fancy explanation. It's essentially linguistic. And maybe it makes it easier to think about how the different faculties talk to each other as well because it's the same kind of content? Well, Occam didn't think we needed different faculties. He radically simplifies psychology. Let me tell you what psychology looked like before he simplified it. Okay. So it had the same sort of picture where you have different faculties which would interchange information. So your sense organs would take in information, i.e. the form of things outside. Then the sense faculties in question would pass that information along for storage and memory and pass it both up and over. They would pass it over to sensitive appetite. So you would have what we would call an emotional response or you could have an emotional response to things, either fear or longing or what you will, or could pass it up in the case of humans so we could think about the things. And having thought about them, we could then exercise choices and make decisions with respect to the things in question. So I could look over and see not a giraffe perhaps, but a lion. That would involve a certain kind of representation or information in my sense organ sense faculty. That would trigger a response, which would be a response of fear. This can be hardwired or wetwired in animals, it is, so that a certain kind of literal configuration of the brain causes a fight or flight response. Then it can go up in humans to the case of being a thought of a lion, but I could then, for example, also have the thought, aha, this is a tame lion, this is a domesticated lion, I don't have to run away. I can overcome my impulse to run away. That's in my sensitive appetite. With my intellect appetite, I could choose to stand my ground, believing at any rate that this lion will not harm me. So what happens is that the lion or what it is to be the lion gets passed around among these various faculties through a series of causal interchanges and results in some sets of overt psychological behavior and perhaps even just overt behavior. Now the idea that you can explain psychology and perhaps overt behavior by talking about the interchange of information among faculties is very similar to what many people have tried to do with modern cognitive science. They tend to think that faculties isn't the right way to do it, to think in terms of the modularity of mind by which they think that we want to explain psychological phenomena in terms of very specific modules that carry out specific tasks rather than being responsible for a wide range of phenomena under the task. But the basic idea is that you try to do psychology by having a working model of the interactions among the constituent parts and the theory is as good and powerful as an articulation of the constituent parts allows you to explain in more fine grained detail how things come to be and how they come to pass in the mind. And maybe it's worth mentioning that the medievals would even have thought that these different powers, or maybe it was called modules, are seated in the brain. And they claim that they could locate in the brain where the memory was and the imagination and so on. All of them are very, very highly localizable and there are those philosophers who thought that all of them seemed to be localizable, such that reason would drive us to think that the soul was simply material. As you mentioned before. But you were saying that Occam resists this way of thinking about the soul and tries to simplify everything. So rather than thinking about discrete faculties, he has a more unified theory of soul? Yes. It's a somewhat heterodox view of Occam, but Occam thinks that, well, Occam's basic idea is to think that philosophers at least can dispense with details of causal processes. So it's an axiom that he enunciates in his Repretatio lectures that given an agent and patient in sufficient proximity, an effect will follow. That's what it is for an agent and patient to be in sufficient proximity, that in effect follows. Now he doesn't want to give any kind of explanation or discussion of how that works. So he can give up the complicated causal explanations by which philosophers slash natural scientists tried to explain how external things can affect the intervening medium by transmission of information that's then brought in and processed in bodily ways. Occam just wanted to leapfrog over all that and say, doesn't matter. So long as there's a giraffe there, then Peter Adamson will have a seeing of the giraffe experience and we don't have to give further detail or explanation. That's all we need. So he got rid of most of the subordinate faculties and even got as far as he could to get rid of the distinction between, for example, thinking and feeling or intellect and will, as we would call it. He said that's merely conceptual. It's not just a problem, the way you look at it. It seems like that should be connected to something you were saying before, namely that it all comes together. Because if you just basically have the soul with its dispositions to react to things in certain ways, then it's hard to believe that it could sort of cleave in half and part of it is embedded in your body and the other half can happily go its merry way when your body dies. Indeed, it answers a problem that people who've tried to disassemble the mind into component constituent interacting bits have always to face, which is what makes this one mind. Where's the unity come from? So Occam does this radical simplification. Then he explains how certain psychological events take place by talking about what he calls, well, the Latin word is habitus, which are skills or abilities. We acquire these by interacting with the world. Then he thinks we can talk about thought in a language-like way and that's all. We can stop at that point. We don't need to give complex causal accounts of exactly how information gets from the intellect of part of the brain over to the sensitive part of the brain and so on and so forth. So Occam's a bit odd in that he thinks that you can make psychology much simpler. Now the rejoinder to Occam was that he got rid of the very things that gave the theory explanatory purchase. The meat and potatoes of this kind of almost functionalist attitude towards the mind are to be found in its ability to identify smaller parts, which you can then utilize in various explanations for various things. That project is in general the project, as I said, modern cognitive science, although the medievals take it much more broadly to incorporate not just cognitive but also affective psychological phenomena as well. Can I go back to something you said before when you were first talking about faculty psychology? You said that these different faculties interact with one another, which makes it sound like mental life as such emerges from the interaction between the faculties. And so now sticking with the more traditional faculty psychology, would it be fair to say that they were trying to explain something like consciousness or mental life, or are they just trying to explain sort of episodic examples of sensory experience, thinking and so on? They were trying to explain all of the above. So the accounts certainly explain what's going on when you, for instance, first encounter a giraffe and acquire the concept of giraffe and think about giraffhood and so on and so forth. They're very good at explaining that. Consciousness was usually, well, it was a subject of great debate, as it is today. So some people thought that consciousness is simply a matter of having a certain kind of what they called reflexive or second-order acts, that is to say thinking about thinking, where thinking itself can be the object of acts themselves. And there was a lively debate which tended to go roughly along the lines of religious orders, the Franciscans versus the Dominicans and so on. But however people lined up on the sides, there was a lively debate about whether, for example, we had a direct experience of our own selves or not, whether we inferred ourselves from our direct experience of representings and acts of memory and choosings, or whether we somehow had a direct experience of ourself as being the subject that's doing all these things and so on. So these were all questions like today, we still don't know very much about these things. These are all questions that were very much on the table and debated, particularly from about the 1270s to the 1320s and so on. And various philosophers took various positions on these and thought, oh, well, you can explain this this way. And others thought, oh, no, that's really quite silly. You have to do it another way and so on. Okay, so maybe just to wrap this up, then I'll ask you the big question, which is now you've shown us that there was this very rich psychological theory, or actually more than one theory in the medieval period, and that they seem to have been trying to answer some of the same questions that philosophers of mind answer today, and even giving answers that look similar. What should we take from that? I mean, would you say, hey, philosophers of mind, you might want to go read this because it may give you ideas? Or what do you think is the actual usefulness of noticing this resonance between the medieval debate and the current debate? Is it just kind of interesting for antiquarian reasons? No, it's not just antiquarian. It's not just anachronistic either. But these are a set of things, puzzles that we still don't know sensibly how to think about. That's sort of the bottom line. We know scientific investigation of human cognition and affective phenomena has come a bit of a way, but it's still very, very much in its infancy. We don't really know how to think about a lot of it. And so these are topics and issues and questions that are very much open. And a lot of the framework we use is inherited from the Middle Ages. To take one example, the notion that we have nowadays of the will as being a faculty of choice and decision, we think that's important and so on. That's very much a medieval notion. It was sort of forged during the Middle Ages. And we take it from there. Can modern people who do philosophy of mind learn a lot from reading the medievals on the subject? Yes, they could, because there is, like I say, a great deal of speculation and interesting suggestions on the topic, for example, about whether consciousness is simply a matter of having a higher order of mental representation, which is a medieval thesis held by some, which is very much parallel to the sort of cognitivist account of consciousness that somebody like a contemporary philosopher like Dan Dennett gives of consciousness. So it's not merely antiquarian because there are enough points of contact on enough open questions so that they have quite interesting and distinct things to say that we might well profit from by reading. If we take a richly articulated medieval apparatus and add to it scientific research, we might actually come near, dare we say it, the truth about these things. Okay, that's great and a very optimistic way of looking at it. So thanks very much to Peter King for coming on the show. And thanks for having me. Well, our next guest will be Katarina Düttel-Noveis, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Groningen. Hi, Katarina, thanks for coming on again. Hi, Peter, thanks for inviting me again. We had you on before to talk about medieval logic. And though you do work on medieval logic and have published a lot in this area, you also work on kind of logic logic. And this I thought... Or mostly philosophy of logic, right? Yeah, as far as I'm concerned, that's logic logic. I just mean non historical logic. That's true. Yeah. And so I thought you'd be a perfect person to ask about the topic of this episode, which is basically what does the study of the history of philosophy had to do with contemporary philosophy? Yeah. Maybe we can start by talking about what a contemporary philosopher can learn from the history of philosophy. And we could perhaps just talk about logic in this case. What can someone who's interested in the philosophy of logic learn from studying medieval logic? Right. So perhaps it's easier if I start with a fairly concrete example. So one of the main concepts that have been discussed in philosophy of logic of the last perhaps 20, 30 years is the concept of logical consequence. So that's become a very central concept, starting with a book published by John Etchemendy in 1990, so called The Concept of Logical Consequence. It really reignited the debates. And so philosophers of logic have discussed a lot about properties of... So Etchemendy had said that one of his main points was that the Tarskian notion of logical consequence, which it was a formal account, didn't really capture what he claimed was the intuitive notion of logical consequence. But he didn't really say much about what this intuitive notion would have been. And so there's been a lot of debate on this in the last three decades by now. But then if you want to understand what the so-called intuitive notion of logical consequence is, what is that? What kind of concept are we dealing with? So consequence normally is understood as the relation between premises and conclusion in a valid argument. And you can spell this out particularly in terms of deductive validity, so that the premises necessitate the truth of the conclusion, right? So of course you can also have inductive arguments, abductive arguments, which don't have this property of necessary truth preservation. But in the case of these discussions of philosophy of logic, it's really about consequence understood as having the property of necessary truth preservation. Is that clear what I mean by that? Yeah, so all that means is that if you have the premises, if the premises are true, then necessarily the conclusion is true. Exactly. So the relation between certain premises and certain conclusions, that's the object. It's been the object of analysis of philosophers of logic. And they've been trying to understand what that is, right? And there's been a lot of going back and forth. And at some point you kind of reach rock bottom. You're like, okay, so how are we going to come to grips with what this so-called intuitive notion is? And here's where I think history can really be very instrumental. And so a lot of my work has been on trying to unearth the historical origins of this so-called intuitive notion of logical consequence. So in Tarski's seminal paper called The Notion of Logical Consequence, he formulates two conditions of adequacy, right, which are informal conditions of adequacy, which he then says any formal account of logical consequence has to do justice to these two conceptions. And one of them is a necessary truth preservation criteria. And the other is what he calls a formality criterion, right, that any substitution of the nonlogical terminology in that particular scheme would also give you arguments that are valid, right, that would also maintain the validity of the consequence relation. So if you have like if A, then B, and A, then B follows and it doesn't matter what you put in for A and B. Exactly. And you can do this either with either propositions or with terms. You can also say like take a classical syllogism always be, all B is C, therefore all A is C. It's also a schema that has these placeholders there and then whatever you put in there will give you a valid argument. And so he states these as kind of the, he claims they are the everyday notion of consequence, which of course is very strange because this idea of necessary truth preservation is not something that's intuitive to people who are not trained in logic. In fact, anyone who has ever taught introduction to logic knows that it's really hard for students to understand that there can be no exceptions whatsoever, right? So whenever the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true. So this notion, right, this is kind of like, you know, Tarski presents as a kind of like a thing that exists in and of itself. But I really thought, but we need to understand where this is coming from. And so then in this situation, it's really useful to then come to grips with the so-called intuitive notion that we're trying to capture with our formal systems. And one way in which you can do this, at least one way that I even find indispensable, is to go back in history and see what are the historical origins of this notion. And so a lot of the work that I've done on the notion of consequence has been to unearth the history of the, you know, why we came to think of consequence in this way. And I call this exercise at unearthing the origin conceptual genealogy, right? And so I'm interested in how over time there have been several concepts of consequence that have been, you know, entertained, formulated, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly by different authors. And then I'm interested in seeing both the aspects of continuity and the aspects of change, you know, in each of these different moments of, you know, these stages in the history of that particular concept. The idea then would be that if you look at like what Aristotle thought consequence was totally different, he doesn't, I mean, not only does he not form formulate these two criteria that Tarski did, but he doesn't seem to think about that way at all. Well, actually, so Aristotle has this famous definition of sola gismus in the prior analysis, and it says, it says, a sola gismus, right, which we often translate as syllogism, but some people prefer to translate it as a deduction because it's a more, it's a broader notion than just a technical notion of a syllogism. He says, a syllogism is a discourse in which certain things being stated, other things follow of necessity from their being and so, right? You must know this in Greek by heart, I presume, from the beginning of the prior analytics. And so, so he's saying when certain things are stated, so he says things in the plural, which already means that for in a relation of consequence in an argument, you need to have more than one premise, right? This is something that we don't entertain anymore. You know, we don't take single premise arguments not to correspond to valid consequences. Then he says certain things being stated, other things follow of necessity, so other things follow. That means that he doesn't accept arguments where the premise, the conclusion is among the premises. And the way we describe this property in modern terms is that it's not a reflexive relation. So a reflexive relation, for example, in the case of consequences, A implies A, right? And we- Like, this is Socrates as a human, therefore, Socrates is a human. Exactly. This is thought to be one of the most essential properties of the relation of consequence these days, right? The reflexive property. And Aristotle, apparently, when he says other things follow, he doesn't seem to think that consequences that are reflexive would be valid at all. And actually, I mean, just to sort of spell this out to make sure it's clear, obviously, a reflexive consequence satisfies the two criteria you mentioned before, right? So it doesn't matter what you put in- Exactly. variables, that's one thing. Exactly. And certainly, if A is true, then it necessarily follows that A is true. It's actually the quintessential example of necessary truth preservation, right? Right, of course, right. But Aristotle, so for Aristotle, it's not that the third clause in his definition of syllogism is follows of necessity. So in that sense, that part of the definition is still with us, right? And it's still thought to be perhaps the most defining feature of a relation of consequence, right? So that stayed, right? So I mean, like I said, I'm interested both in what changed and what stayed. And presumably, your point is that you can't just sort of notice the difference between Aristotle and the contemporary concept if you want to understand the contemporary concept, rather, you have to figure out where the changes were made. Exactly. You need a narrative, right? You need a diachronic story, at least I think it's very useful to have. So you start with Aristotle, you see what Aristotle's concept of consequence was, and why it was formulated the way it was, and my claim is that I've defended in print, is that it's because for him, the relation of consequence and arguments such as syllogisms were mostly intended to be used in dialectical situations, right? So if you say, I'm debating with Peter here, and I tell him, I say, do you grant me premise E? And then what do you say? Sure. Yes, so he grants me premise E. And so I say, and therefore, conclusion A. And what do you say? I say, duh. Yeah, you say, duh. You say, why are you wasting my time, right? Exactly. So there's a reason why reflexivity is not a property that makes sense in a more dialogical, dialectical context. So these are the things that I think are important to trace. And then the formality criteria that I was mentioning just before with respect to Tarski, it's basically not present in Aristotle, but already with the ancient commentators, right, in particular Alexander of Aphrodisias, you see things going in this direction. So this is why you have a story, right? You have a narrative with different stages of development. And then it's really, I take it that it's essential to actually go through these stages to understand why it is that we think formality is such an important property with respect to the notion of consequence. And so you see where it emerged and why it emerged. And so that's, with the ancient commentators, that's when we first had the notion of formality kind of creeping in, but not exactly in the way that we understand it. And then with the medieval authors, the Latin medieval authors, that's when it becomes this fully-fledged criterion of substitivity that we now see in any logical textbook. Page one or two of any logical textbook will tell you that this is what's characteristic of logic, is that you can substitute, if you take a schema and you substitute it in whichever way you want, while you respect, of course, the right categories, that the argument will be valid. And that's something that developed later, so in the Latin medieval times. And so in this way, my claim is that this way you understand much better why it is that we take these properties of consequence to be the central ones, right? There are historical reasons for that. But we also get to think about the properties that once were thought to be important for consequence and now are not associated with the concept of consequence as strongly as they used to be. So that's also very instructive, because then you think about ways in which the concept could have developed and didn't. And so we actually wind up developing a keener and deeper understanding of what we thought was just our intuition. Exactly. So I very much dislike talk of intuition, right? So the intuitive notion of logical consequence, it's not intuitive in some sort of pre-theoretical layperson way. No, there's a really long history behind it. And it's just become so familiar to us that we kind of take it uncritically. And we don't realize that there have been many theoretical choices made along the way for it to be, you know, to have the specific shape that it has now. Do you think that this is kind of genealogy? I mean, this actually reminds one of Nietzsche. That's right. Yes. I mean, Nietzsche, when he gives his genealogy of morals, that seems to be a kind of undermining thing, right? Like, it's quite clear what you're supposed to draw as a moral from the genealogy of morals, but it doesn't look encouraging. That's a really good point. Indeed. So that people talk about, so one of the terms that has been used for this is that the kind of genealogy that Nietzsche engages in is debunking. So you can have a genealogy that's laudatory, right? So you can also have a genealogy that, you know, for example, genealogy in the common sensical meaning of the term, right? So say if you go study your genealogy and you discover there was this really distinguished general, you know. Or a phinacephore. Yeah, or phinacephore. Yeah, okay. You're probably not happy with generals, but whatever. This would make you feel better about yourself. You will feel more distinguished, right? That would be kind of this laudatory, positive kind of genealogy. But you can also do the Nietzschean debunking genealogy where what you do is you show that you bring to the fore the shameful origins of a particular concept. But so one thing that I've developed, a proposal that I've developed in a paper that I wrote which is called Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy is precisely what I call a kind of like a neutral sense of genealogy where it's neither meant to be something that, you know, makes the particular concept that you're studying more valuable, but it's also not meant to make it less valuable. It's really kind of meant to be explanatory in the sense that you just kind of trace the different stages of changes, right? But other than that, other than the fact that I don't want to, you know, engage in genealogy that's necessarily going to be debunking, other than that I'm very much inspired by Nietzsche because he has this really interesting conception of layers of meaning that gets superimposed. And so in a way, so there's a particular concept and with particular features and then, you know, given changes and practices and situations then it kind of goes through a change and acquires a new meaning, but it doesn't mean that the old meaning disappears completely. So there are layers of the previous meanings that stay with you and sometimes you don't even know why they're still there and they don't make perfect sense, they don't make good sense for the current practices that, you know, that are relevant for the particular concept but they're still there, right? So that idea I think is really powerful. I think that might be, by the way, the first time the word Nietzsche has been mentioned on the entire podcast. Really? Okay. Well, I'm not sure. I'd have to check. Okay. But actually I want to ask you something completely different now before we stop, which is about the sort of other direction. Because actually a lot of your work, especially some of your earlier work on medieval logic, makes heavy use of formal machinery. Like there are pages of your books where you open and you just see some formulas and symbols. But it's about Occam, right? True, yeah. Or other scholastic medieval philosophers. And so you're actually, at least have been in the past, a very keen proponent of using these kinds of modern formal methods from really what I would call mathematical logic. Yeah, symbolic logic. Symbolic logic to study medieval logic. And so I was wondering why you thought that that was a useful thing to do. Right. So you mean why I thought it was a useful thing to do back in the day or what I think now? Just tell us what you think now. Right. No genealogy. That's what it is. Right, right, right. No autobiography, right? Yeah, so I still think... So one thing that I developed in the conclusion of my 2012 book called Formal Languages in Logic. So in the conclusion I spell out the methodology of the whole book. And there I distinguish four approaches, methodological approaches that you can take in philosophy. And I don't mean to be exclusive, but at least four approaches that seem to me to be interesting and relevant. One of them is the historical approach that I was just describing, like the genealogical approach. Then there's the approach that is kind of traditional conceptual analysis, right? That's kind of more traditional philosophical methodology. The third one is what I call empirically informed philosophy, right? Where you look at disciplines, say empirical disciplines like psychology or cognitive science for relevant data for your philosophical analysis. And the fourth one is formalization. And I'm still very, very much interested in formalization, generally speaking, as a methodology. And in particular, and this I think formalization is a very powerful methodology in philosophy across the board, but also in particular to study history of philosophy. So I think you can really come to new insights with respect to specific past theories by giving it a formalization which really forces you to spell out the assumptions in a careful way. And by doing this, I think you can really obtain new insights on the particular theory or author that you're studying. And in fact, in the best case scenario, even if you have a really worked out formalization, you can even go on and maybe prove theorems about it, which will then tell you something new about the theory in question, which you might not have seen with just traditional conceptual analysis. I see. So you might say Occam's or Burriton's theory of consequence actually has this surprising consequence that maybe they didn't see. So that's true. So one thing that I proved with respect to Obligaciones, and I know that Obligaciones has been a topic also in the podcast, it's really technically it's a very simple proof. It's not like I don't claim to have proved something extremely sophisticated, but in my really very early work on that is that there's always a winning strategy for a respondent. So there's always a way in which respondent can maintain consistency. And this is something, just looking at it on the basis of the texts, what the medieval authors themselves did is that they looked at a number of puzzles of sophismata, cases which seemed difficult for a respondent, that it seemed like respondent could not but grant a contradiction. But what I did is by formalizing the framework, you can prove that there's always a way in which there's always an answer that's available to a respondent that will allow a respondent to maintain consistency. So that's kind of something you can prove with these formal tools. And that's, in a way, it's also interesting. I'm not saying that it completely replaces the careful textual analysis of all these sophismata, not at all, but it's complementary. And I think it's interesting. So it's always possible to not lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's the gap. Although it's not easy, as we learned in my interview with some people. Exactly. No, and the thing is that, I mean, in my formalization, I was only really dealing with fairly kind of like simple cases in the sense that, so often when it gets tricky in these obligaciones games is when there are all kinds of references to the game itself, right? And then what you have to grant is the previous proposition that I granted is false and things like that references to steps in the game itself. Then it gets really tricky. Whereas my formalization wasn't really taking this into account. But just at the level of just propositions that are being put forward, you can really maintain consistency because there's always like, between f, phi and not phi, one of them is going to be consistent with what you've answered before. And so there's always a way to maintain consistency. And so there's a winning strategy for respondent. Just to give an example. One last question about this isn't something I worry about a lot, including when I write like sort of proper research on history of philosophy. I tend to be nervous about using, I mean to say nothing of symbols and formulas. I'm even nervous about using contemporary terminology sometimes. And the reason is because I worry that that can easily be anachronistic and in particular that it might be anachronistic in ways I wouldn't notice. And there's an example of this that I like to give, which is the existential quantifier. So this is basically a symbol that looks like a backwards e. And you can put that and then a variable. And it says, sort of backwards ex, that means there is some x. And the reason I don't think this is a good thing to do if you're writing about at least ancient and medieval philosophy, is that I don't think that most of them had a kind of neutral notion of existence for which you could put in just anything. So for example, I don't think this would work in Aristotle. And so in my opinion, there's something kind of misleading and anachronistic to say anything about Aristotle using this symbol, the backwards e. And I mean, I claim to understand that, maybe I'm wrong about it. But then I worry, well, maybe there might be other cases like that where I don't notice the unwanted implications that falsify the historical position I'm trying to represent. No, no, I mean, that's a real risk. And in fact, it has happened. So in earlier work on formalizations of medieval logic, people were just using standard predicate logic, first sort of predicate logic, which is very much what you were describing in a way where you have the quantifiers and you have variables and they were using this framework, which was taken to be the logical framework to formalize all kinds of theories from medieval theories, for example, medieval theories of supposition and also modalities. And what happened, it's really actually, it's extremely anachronistic. You have very strange things come out of this that are in fact highly problematic. And so what I did actually in my master's thesis, interestingly, that's like how far back in time it was, is that I was formalizing Occam's theory of supposition. And one of the first things I decided to do is I said, it doesn't work to use the straightforward traditional predicate logic because then you have these quantifiers, you have these variables and you have the notion of function that plays an important role. And none of this, all of this is alien to the medieval framework. And so what I did is I started working with some sort of term logic, which resembles what Leszt-Niefski developed. I don't know if you're familiar with this, the Polish logician. It's definitely the first time this name has appeared on the podcast. The Polish logician, Leszt-Niefski, who had this system, which is really term-based. So you have two terms and a copula, right, rather than the function argument form of contemporary predicate logic. And I thought, you know, this is completely wrong. This is going to mislead me completely if I use predicate logic and I really need to use a formalism that's closer to what was really going on in medieval logic. And so I was using this kind of term, subject copula predicate notation, which is, it wasn't really inspired by Leszt-Niefski, but in a way it was in that ballpark. And because that was much closer to what was really going on. So of course, there's always the risk of choosing the wrong formalism, right, to do that kind of analysis. And you should really be very careful in your choices. But it doesn't mean that it's inevitable, right? It also doesn't mean that a certain amount of anachronism is not, as long as you're aware of it, it can still, the formalism can still be illuminating if, as long as you keep in mind that of course there's still this conceptual discrepancy here, right? I mentioned this before when I was doing the formalization of obligaciones, I didn't take into account these references to previous moves in the game, which is something that's important in this framework. I just simplified, it was a simplifying assumption, said, let's just look at propositions, take propositions as my placeholders. But knowing that this is a simplification, it can still be useful, right? So just you have to be careful with how you choose your formalism, of course. And there's always going to be some amount of anachronism, but it can still be justifiable and illuminating. But of course it can also go very wrong. And there are many examples of that, and of course I will not mention names. Okay, well thank you very much, Katerina, for coming on again. My pleasure. Okay, so next we're going to be talking to Russell Friedman, who's a professor of philosophy at the University of Leuven. Hi Russ. Hi Peter. Thank you very much for joining us for this special overview of the contemporary relevance. I'm glad to be here, and thanks for the invitation. My pleasure. Well, you're mostly an expert on, well, lots of things ancient and medieval philosophy, but you're best known for your work on, I would say later, scholastic medieval philosophy. Yes. And hence you're a good person to ask, why should we care about late medieval scholastic philosophy now? That's a good question. I guess one way to start looking at that is to think about what areas of philosophy might be most directly engaged, most directly relevant for contemporary philosophers that are dealt with in medieval philosophy. And there, the first thing that comes to mind is philosophy of religion. Philosophy of religion in the Middle Ages is one of the main topics dealt with. It's true that a lot of the philosophers that we deal with in later medieval philosophy are in fact theologians. So for that reason alone, philosophy of religion is an important topic. And I think it's fair to say that contemporary philosophers realize this. So contemporary Christian philosophers of religion, for example, have a starting point. Let's take just one example. God's temporality. What kind of time does God live in or exist in, for example? If any. If any, that's exactly it. So the medieval view is that God is an omni-God. So God is as much of everything as possible. And this was codified when it comes to God's temporality by Boethius. You may have mentioned this already in the podcast. Boethius gave a definition of eternity that it is the simultaneous and whole possession of unending life. And that definition goes through Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and becomes really important in the current debate. Probably I think it's fair to say, starting in 1981 with an article by Eleanor Stump and Norman Kretzmann called Eternity. And they take their starting point from this medieval view. And since then, there's been a lot of discussion about whether God, how does God relate to our temporality? What kinds of problems does that create for God existing? The Boethian view is normally interpreted as saying, well, God exists all at once, no succession. And then it becomes a little more difficult to figure out is there duration for God? What type of duration? And how does God know things that we know? If God understands us, does he know our now of time, for example? And there's a huge discussion now, a big discussion at any rate, in contemporary philosophy. It takes a starting point in Stump and Kretzmann's article, which takes a starting point in medieval philosophy and has a tendency to look back on medieval philosophy as one way of approaching is God temporal? And today, contemporary philosophers have rejected the fact that God exists in time. God exists timelessly. And some contemporary philosophers like William Lane Craig, for example, will say, well, in fact, God is temporal. He began to be temporal as soon as God created. Actually that's an interesting example because Stump and Kretzmann are really historians of medieval philosophy. So this was not a case where you had some analytic philosophers of religion who were thinking about this anyway, and then they delved back into the medieval tradition, just hoping to find something. It was more a case where two scholars of medieval philosophy presented something to the analytic philosophy world and said, hey, this is a good way of thinking about God's temporality or lack thereof. Yeah. Although to be added that both Stump and Kretzmann were trying to act as contemporary philosophers of religion. So it's very, very tight there, the link between the medieval philosophy of religion, or what we would call philosophy of religion, what they might call theology, and contemporary philosophy of religion. Isn't this the exception that proves the rule? Because I could imagine someone saying, well, sure, of course the medievals are interested in religion and all they do is go on and on about God. Actually, I've tried to show in the podcast series that this is not the case, but a lot of people would say all that medieval philosophers have to say is about God. So the one area we would expect contemporary philosophers to be able to learn from the medievals is this area, namely philosophy of religion, but otherwise we can ignore it. Yeah. I mean, I would be tempted, first answering that question, I would say, well, no, there are other areas as well. One can point to fruitful exchanges in, for example, metaphysics. John Denscotes' views on universals have been used in current philosophy of science. Ethics is another example. A very good book on Thomas Aquinas written by Robert Pasknow and Christopher Shields. They begin the section on Thomas Aquinas' ethics by saying that, in fact, doing ethics or studying ethics is in fact studying the history of ethics. And so Aquinas, they argue, should be someone that we study in the canon of ethical works. With that said, so I do think that there is some lessons to be learned from going back to medieval philosophy, and it's one of the reasons why perhaps contemporary philosophy should be interesting to medieval philosophy. With that said, I have a pretty historical approach to the history of philosophy myself, personally. And if I were going to try and convince someone, I try and convince my students, every year I have students in the history of medieval philosophy course I teach, and what I say to them is, in fact, what medieval philosophy offers you is the opportunity to challenge your own intuitions, challenge your own philosophical views that you might not even be aware of, that you hold as tightly as you do. So for me, the weirder the better, the more historical the better, the more context you give that sort of fleshes out what these views are and how different they are from our contemporary philosophy, the more interesting it is because it allows you to take, and this is the example I give again to my students, it allows you to take a mental vacation. Some people when they go on vacation, I don't know how your vacations are, Peter, but when I go on vacation, a lot of times I just go to suck up another culture, try to be challenged in some way to do something that's just different from my normal everyday life. That's what medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy too, I'd say also early modern philosophy if you look at it contextually, it also has a lot of God in it, it offers you a chance to challenge your views and allows you to take a step back and think, okay, why do I hold that? So maybe instead of having just some very particular use, going back and looking at medieval philosophy and saying, well, I want to use it for X, you should rather say, well, this is a way of having some mental hygiene about my own views and thinking a little more broadly and a little more deeply about them. And you may not know when the payoff is going to come. And that means that the very common experience of reading historical philosophical work and thinking what in the world is this person talking about on your suggestion would in fact be one of the most productive moments in looking back at historical texts. So it's not the moment where they give a little argument and you think, oh, that sounds like a good counter objection to something that one of my colleagues said the other day. It's where they say something that you really can't fit into your philosophical framework at all might be the most kind of useful moment in reading it. Yeah, especially if you take the time to figure out what they're trying to say so that you allow it to sort of sink in and be a counter ballast to your own background assumptions, I guess I'd say. Sure, definitely. But what would you say to someone who objected to this that it's unlikely that someone who's living in 13th or 14th century Europe with all of the social, political, metaphysical, religious presuppositions they had, is it really very likely that the things that they cared about that we don't care about are the right things to care about? I guess I'd say that they, well, on a very general plane, I'd say, well, they were human beings. They cared about things like good and evil. How do we act morally? What is moral acting morally? That sort of thing. I guess one example that one could give of this way of challenging oneself is something that you've talked about actually in several of the earlier podcasts. You've also talked about it actually, I think, on one of the podcasts in Philosophy Bites. And that is the ancient medieval, actually it's a view that goes all the way up to Leibniz, you can say, that goodness and being are convertible so that everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good. And the flip side of that is that evil doesn't exist. Evil is an absence of goodness. And when I tell my students that, say, Tom's Aquinas, that happens to be the text that we work on, when I tell my students that Aquinas really believes that evil doesn't exist, he believes that blindness is not a thing, it's the absence of sight. Well, that's how it works with all evil. They say, hold on, I mean, a virus is bad, right? Viruses cause illness, and it's bad for people. And yes, it's bad for people, I have to say, but Aquinas would argue that, well, it's not bad in itself. Insofar as it exists, it's good. And of course, Aquinas has a good reason for wanting to believe that, as a 13th century theist, here, maybe we play back into your objection. Well, you know, do they have the same view? Aquinas wants to say that everything that God created, including viruses and nasty bacteria, etc., those things are good because God created it, and what God created is very good. But he also has arguments for it, arguments that go back to your Neoplatonist, for example. So one way of arguing towards that view is an Augustinian, which is a much more Neoplatonic view. Augustine takes a definition, he says that to corrupt something is to make it worse. What happens when you have a good thing that you make so bad, that you corrupt so much, that you make it so much worse, that it can't get any worse? All the goodness is gone. Well, Augustine says either you can say that it's become incorruptible, but Augustine says that's stupid because that means that you make something so bad that it's become better, because it's incorruptible now. Or you say it's gone out of existence. It's lost so much goodness that it's gone. My other example I like to give of this is take a really good beer. We're actually in Belgium right now. Yeah, I think so. Take a good Belgian beer and make it worse. Also reduce its flavor character, so you maybe turn it into something more like American beer. But if you made American beer even worse and take away its flavor and so on, then eventually you get to something that isn't beer anymore. And then you say, well, but maybe it's still liquid, and so it can still refresh thirst, so there's still something good about it. Take that away, and eventually you just have to pour it out and get rid of it, and it's gone. Right. It is no longer what it is supposed to be. And so that seems to be a reasonable argument. You could object to Augustine, of course, that he's defined in a way by saying that corruption is the taking away of goodness. He's defined his terms in such a way that he's going to get the answer he wants. But what is evil then? I mean, it seems to be a reasonable question. We have to say, well, you could say, well, I'm just adding evil. Well, then what is it? Right. I feel like the question of what evil is has gone out of style or something. No. Something we still should care about. Yeah. Actually, one interesting thing about your example is that it goes along with one of my favorite examples of an idea that's very prevalent in ancient and medieval philosophy that's no longer on the philosophical scene, as far as I know, which is that being comes in degrees. Because what you were saying is, well, take something that has being and reduce its degree of being, that will make it more evil. And if you decrease its degree of being until all of its being is gone, then you wind up with non-being, which would be pure evil, and then pure evil can't exist. Whereas most philosophers nowadays, I think, would say that if you have two objects, one object can't be more than another or exist more than the other. Yeah. No, this is actually, I asked my students about this when I taught to teach this class. I make a contrast between an analog vision of being and a digital vision of being. So a digital vision of being would be, it's either on or off. A stone exists as much as Peter Adamson does, whereas an analog vision of being says, well, stones exist less than cows do, and cows exist less than people do, and people exist less than, let's say, angels or God do. And there's a hierarchy of being in some way. I think I agree with you that it's gone a little out of focus, although I've noticed that my students become more and more attracted by the analog vision of being as opposed to the digital. So I don't know what that says about- It's you corrupting them. It could be. They find it more convincing. But this is just, I think, a good example of a view that, yeah, it would challenge our own preconceptions that being. If you start presenting or reading medieval authors on the convertibility of being and goodness, so the fact that everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is good, and the privation theory of evil, it would present a challenge to your own notions of what it is to be, what it is to exist, and what the relation between existence and goodness is, and further, what is evil. What about another obvious complaint or worry that people might have about medieval philosophy, which is that it's very authority-bound. If you look at Aquinas, and not only Aquinas, pretty much any scholastic medieval philosopher, they're constantly quoting authorities, not only Christian authorities, but often Christian authorities, the Bible, church fathers, but then also Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes. And you sometimes get the impression that they felt like they weren't allowed to move beyond the bounds of theses that could be found in authoritative texts. I'm glad you asked about that, because it's one of the things, when I was a graduate student, it really bothered me, especially reading works about early modern philosophy, maybe Renaissance philosophy, and looking back and saying, well, medieval philosophy is just so hide-bound. All they do is quote these authorities, and there's really no room, they don't want even to be innovative and creative on their own. And it's one of the things that I've actually looked at quite a bit. I've written a lot on Trinitarian theology, and Trinitarian theology is a great example of a text-based area of research, you could say a research area in medieval philosophy. They have Bible passages, they have church fathers, as you mentioned, plus they bring in also the Greek philosophers, the Arabic philosophers that use them as well. And what I found, first off, I think that the word authority, auctoritas in Latin, often means something different than we mean. If we say that it just means authority, yeah, that's right, but normally when it's used in a medieval text, what it means is an authority to passage. It means a text that you're quoting, and not just sort of like Anselm's My Authority, or Augustine's My Authority here, it's Augustine, De Trinitate, Book 15, blah, blah, blah. That's what the authority is, is an authoritative text. So that's one thing that maybe modifies or nuances the view that you're talking about, that medieval authors are just authority-bound. But the other thing is that, so I have an example, John Donscotus, when talking about the Trinity, he quotes John Damascene, a huge authoritative figure in the Middle Ages. He actually has, he's quoted all the time, and is quoted in this passage by Scotus as an auctoritas. In fact, Scotus gives three auctoritatis. And one of them, Scotus says, yeah, we could interpret it this way, we could interpret it that way, but ultimately, it looks like John Damascene was just wrong. It's about the filioque, the idea that the Holy Spirit comes from both the Father and the Son. This is doctrine for the Latins, the Greeks objected, and John Damascene was giving the Greek point of view. Scotus says, well, Damascene was just wrong there. So you can have an authority that can basically be thrown away. And so the way that I think that we should look at authority is less as sort of a constriction on what later medieval or medieval thinkers could think, and more like the way data points function for, say, a chemist or a physicist. A physicist or a chemist comes up with an experiment, they do experimental, they conduct the experiment, and they have a bunch of data points, which they try and figure into some kind of mathematical model, this is just an example. There are going to be some data points that don't fit. And just as with those experimental data points, they in some way or another put limits on the theory that you can come up with. Nevertheless, if they don't fit, they can be thrown out. And that's, I think the example from Scotus, but I can give other examples, shows that what an authoritative passage was, was something that you needed to deal with in a particular context, but it wasn't necessarily something that you had to agree with. It was something that you had to take into account, it had weight, but it didn't necessarily say, well, that's what you have to believe, right? Even if it was easy figuring out what an authoritative passage actually meant, right? So this is really nice quotation from the 12th century, I can't remember actually who said it, but authorities have noses of wax, you can bend them any way. And that's what medieval authors did. And so in a way, the authoritative background was a spur, a motivation to be a little creative, how do we deal with these authoritative passages in such a way that we can pull them into our theory without them dictating to us what our theory is? And is there a sophisticated thought behind that whole process where they, even if they're not committed to the idea that every authority, every text that you might cite from their favorite group of authoritative figures, even if you can't assume that everything they ever say is right, there's still a presumption that they're right because they were great thinkers or they had maybe a better historical access to the truths of the Bible or Aristotle or whatever. I mean, what's the grounding assumption that makes them use authority as if it were a set of data points? Well, that's a good question. I don't know whether I have an answer to it. I think that one thing that constraining gives you the set of authorities that you need to deal with is tradition. If you're discussing a particular issue, let's say Trinitarian theology, there's going to be built up over 500, 600, 700 years, a group of authoritative passages that have played a role in creating the doctrine. This is going to be true in physical treatises or philosophical, more philosophical areas. In metaphysics, for example, you're going to have quotations from Porphyry, from Avicenna, for example, and those will have been built into the tradition of discussing on this topic over many years. And that's why they need to be dealt with because otherwise you're ignoring, it's like ignoring data points, right? You can't just ignore the data points, they're there, but you need to be able to say something about them. And is that an answer to the question that you pose, you think? Well, I guess the question is, why do we do philosophy in a tradition, within a tradition, instead of doing what Descartes, for example, claims to be doing, even though it's not really what he's doing, which is kind of throwing it all out and starting with a blank piece of paper, which I think is the way a lot of people think philosophy is supposed to work. And of course, if you look back over the history of philosophy, you can see that hardly anyone has ever done that. That's the thing, right? So maybe what we should say is that at least the medievalists were conscious that they were doing it. And since everybody does it, it's better to do it consciously, not to stage this hypocritical self-presentation where you pretend to be starting with a blank piece of paper, but actually you reproduce a whole bunch of scholastic arguments, which is what Descartes does in the meditations. Yes. I prefer to have people who have the intellectual honesty, I guess, I mean, maybe that's a little much, but to admit that they're in fact engaging with an earlier tradition. I think that everybody does. I think that we do it today, although the intellectual tradition maybe only goes back 20 or 30 or 40 years, right? For a contemporary analytic philosopher, maybe 100 years. But in the Middle Ages, of course, they went back farther. And it is one of the defining features, I say, of medieval philosophy is that engagement in the case of the medieval Latin West in a Catholic context with ancient and Arabic Jewish philosophy, as well as the theological issues. So for them, it's really of the essence of the philosophical project, I'd say, to deal with what's coming out of the bedrock philosophical tradition, Plato, not so much in the Latin West, but Aristotle definitely, and then all the stages along the way with Boethius, Augustine, Avicenna of Aroles. Taking those things into account, that was what they had to do. They felt maybe a deontological sort of necessity to deal with these things. And I have a feeling that it's doing them a disservice to look at that as being some kind of a straitjacket that means that they can't be original, they don't have anything to offer. In fact, it's one of the ways that they express their creativity, I think most clearly, by dealing with these authoritative passages and coming up with ways of balancing them out. Well, I guess if we're looking for a final word on ancient medieval philosophy, that will do as well as anything. It's interesting that you just mentioned John of Damascus or John of Damascene, because we are now going to be turning our attention to Byzantine philosophy, and then moving on to Renaissance philosophy and eventually having a chance to look at Descartes' meditations. So please join me for that. For now, I'll thank Russ Friedman and everyone else who came on to do this special 300th episode of The History of Philosophy. Thanks, Russ. Thank you very much, Peter. And please join me next time as we move on to Byzantine philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Empire Strikes Back – Introduction to Byzantine Philosophy. There almost was no Byzantine philosophy. In fact, there was almost no Byzantine Empire, at least not in the sense we usually think of it. If the capital city of Constantinople had fallen to a year-long siege laid by Arab forces from 717 to 718, then we would not bother to speak of Byzantium at all, but just say that the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed somewhat later than the Western Empire. And we might well be saying it in Arabic. If it hadn't been for the Byzantines holding the line against the armies of Islam, those armies would have made their way into Europe. Probably they would have brought their religion and language into central Europe and perhaps as far as the English Channel in the North Sea, just as they brought it to all of northern Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. That this alternate history did not occur was thanks above all to the fortifications of Constantinople, built generations earlier at the behest of Emperor Theodosius. They surely rank as one of history's most successful building projects and would be finalists in a most important ever walls competition, alongside the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall, and an album by Pink Floyd. The Theodosian walls would be needed many times, because the Byzantines were surrounded by enemies and not infrequently riven by internal conflict. For all the details, I recommend checking out the History of Byzantium podcast presented by Robin Pearson, whom you might remember me interviewing back in episode 215. But just to give you some context, here's a quick overview of historical developments starting in the 7th century or so. It was at this time that the Byzantines were confronted with the rise of Islam, a challenge that caught them unprepared. It didn't help that in the 6th century, they'd been softened up by wars of attrition with the Persians and outbreaks of the plague. During a catastrophic loss at the Battle of the River Yarmouk in 636, the Christians lost the symbolically crucial city of Jerusalem, and then vast swathes of territory in Anatolia and the agricultural heartland of Egypt. To make matters worse, there was pressure from the other direction in the form of the Bulgar tribes in Thrace. This sort of thing would continue to be a problem, as Byzantine emperors had to cope with threats on two fronts, the armies of Islam to the south and east, and various so-called barbarian tribes like the Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Rus to the north and west, not to mention forces from western Christianity such as the Franks and Normans. The losses of the 7th century ushered in a period often called the Dark Ages of Byzantium. It's not a time that we'll be featuring much in the podcast to come because of the lack of surviving texts. Much as with the 7th and 8th centuries in the Latinate West, philosophical activity was evidently sparse in the Greek-speaking East. The empire had lost Alexandria, home of so much intellectual endeavor in late antiquity, and other cities where philosophy was pursued, like Gaza. By seizing these urban centers, the Arabs had unwittingly administered a kind of lobotomy to Greek Christendom. Though Constantinople did not fall, political upheaval did not provide an ideal context for scholarship. Some of the upheaval was occasioned by that most famous response to military defeat, iconoclasm. For a full century, the Byzantine elites were consumed by the question of whether it was acceptable to venerate icons of Christ and the saints. The iconoclast said no. They believed that this was an idolatrous practice for which the empire was being punished. Leo III, the same emperor who had successfully faced down the siege in 718, began the removal of icons in 730, and his policy was carried on with enthusiasm by Constantine V. After decades of iconoclasm, the Empress Irene reintroduced the icons only for them to be banned again from 815 to 843. We'll cover all this in more detail in an episode devoted to the philosophical justifications used by iconoclasts and their opponents, the Iconophiles. For now, we can simply note that one outcome of the dispute was the destruction of many iconoclasts, because when the iconophiles prevailed, they destroyed the works of the iconoclasts. So this is another reason for the relative silence of the historical record leading up to the 9th century. That century is a more important one for us, in part because it was at this time that we see changes in book production, making it a landmark era for the dissemination of philosophy and other sciences. Again, we'll be getting into this in a future episode, but to make a long story short, scribes at this time began using a more efficient script and very gradually the new technology of paper which had come from China via the Islamic world. At about the same time, the Byzantines were able to recover significantly in political and military terms. Thanks in part to the breathing space afforded by Islamic infighting, especially the disintegration of the Abbasid Empire in the 10th century, the Greek Christians went from strength to strength between the years 800 and 1000. They took control of Bulgaria, re-extended their territory towards the west as far as the river Danube, and recovered some of what had been lost to the Muslim armies. By the middle of the 11th century, the empire included southern Italy, the islands of Crete and Cyprus, mainland Greece, Macedonia, and the region around the Black Sea including all of Anatolia, plus a foothold in what we would call the Middle East with the city of Antioch. This isn't to say that the rulers had a firm grip on all those territories. There was always the danger of raids, if not outright warfare across the borders. In many regions within direct Byzantine control, that control was actually rather nominal, and some of the areas you'll see marked on maps as part of the Byzantine Empire were really buffer states ruled by independent Christian allies like the Serbs and the Armenians. Still, if we generalize and ignore the many individual losses and victories experienced from the 9th to the mid-12th centuries, we can say that this was the most politically successful period for Byzantium, and hence the time that we'll get the lion's share of our attention in the coming series. In the late 12th century, though, things started to go wrong. Political infighting at Constantinople was compounded by territorial losses, for instance of Thessaloniki at the hands of the Normans. Then disaster truly struck. The farcical Fourth Crusade brought a Latin Christian army to the gates of Constantinople in 1204. After a dispute over money, they managed to get into the great city and ruthlessly sack it, a shocking tragedy in which a Christian army destroyed the greatest of Christian cities. As the historian Judith Heron has pointed out, some of the negative connotations still evoked by the word Byzantine, absurd bureaucracy, and a soft luxurious lifestyle go back to Western attempts to justify the sack of Constantinople after the fact. As with some of the wars we've seen in the Middle East in our own times, in the background of more obvious violence there was a more quiet cultural destruction. There was massive loss of artworks, some spirited back to Latin Christendom like four bronze statues of horses that were brought to Venice and used to decorate the church of San Marco. The sack of 1204 was also a tremendous blow to the history of philosophy. It was here, and not in the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, that we lost the many texts that were known to earlier Byzantine scholars but are no longer preserved today. On the political front, the fall of the city ushered in a long period of relative weakness for Byzantium. After retrenching to Nicaea, the Eastern Greek Christians managed to retake Constantinople from the Latin Christians in 1261. A new dynasty, the Paia Alogoi, would rule there for the better part of two centuries. Then came May 29th, 1453, when the Ottomans did what their Muslim predecessors had failed to do in 718, get past those walls, and finally put an end to the Roman Empire. That it was still a Roman Empire is something worth bearing in mind as we approach this third tradition of medieval philosophy alongside those in the Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. We tend to think of the Western Medievals as the heirs of the Romans precisely because they used Latin. But Greek had always been the dominant language in the Eastern realms under Roman domination, so the inhabitants of those places would have seen no break with antiquity on that score. Nor was there any break in religious terms. Christianity had already become the religion of the empire in late antiquity. As for the idea of a Roman Empire not centered in Rome, that too was a development that came well before the fall of the West, never mind the rise of Islam. And the Muslims called the Eastern Greek Christians the Romans, in a rare point of agreement between the two sides since the Greek Christians too thought of themselves as Romans. So with this new series of episodes, we are really just circling back to where we left things in late antiquity with the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor and carrying on the story of Roman philosophy written in Greek. Suppose though that there had been no Byzantine Empire, and thus no Byzantine philosophy. What would we be missing? For starters, pretty much all of ancient philosophy. As we'll be seeing, the historian of philosophy should be interested in Byzantium in its own right and not only because its scholars preserved older texts for posterity, but it's hard to deny that our greatest debt to them lies here. Without the scribes of Constantinople, nearly all ancient Greek literature would be lost, with the sole exception of a few papyrus texts like those found in Egypt or amongst the volcanic ash at Herculaneum. We know the original works of Plato and Aristotle, for instance, only thanks to Greek manuscripts of their works that were dispersed across Europe after the Fourth Crusade. Without such manuscripts, our access to Aristotle would be almost only through medieval Arabic translations, which would actually be convenient for those of us who are of European descent, given that as already noted, if it wasn't for the Byzantines, we'd probably be speaking Arabic anyway. Of course, if all the Byzantines had done was to make copies of older Greek philosophical works, we wouldn't need to devote a whole series to them, but they did more. They engaged with the ideas of both pagan and Christian antiquity, carrying on the late ancient practice of writing commentaries, especially on Aristotle. This is something that unifies the three medieval traditions. In 10th century Baghdad and 12th century Spain, in 13th and 14th century Paris and Oxford, and throughout Byzantine history, philosophers busied themselves with the careful exegesis of Aristotle's works. The difference being that unlike such commentators as Al-Farabi, Varroes, Aquinas, or Buridan, the Byzantine commentators could read him in the original Greek instead of having to use Arabic or Latin translations. We'll see, especially with the group of scholars supported by the princess Anna Komnena in the first half of the 12th century, that there was even a completest ambition to comment on all the Aristotelian works that had not yet received this treatment in late antiquity. Nor was Aristotle the only non-Christian thinker who was admired by the Byzantines. Also in the 12th century, a heated dispute broke out between proponents and critics of Proclus, one of the most enthusiastically pagan philosophers of antiquity. Later on, in the 15th century, there was another debate about the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle with George Gemistos Platon asserting the superiority of Platonic philosophy and Bessarion coming to Aristotle's defense. It may seem surprising that the Eastern Christians were so concerned with the preservation, exposition, and evaluation of these pagan thinkers. But it fits into a wider tendency of the Byzantines to cherish classical culture. They recognized the value of writings that predated Christianity, in part on aesthetic grounds. As in late antiquity and Latin Christendom, education had at its center the three linguistic arts of the Trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, or logic, which were supplemented with the four mathematical arts of the Quadrivium. Youngsters, at least those elite enough to receive such an education, were schooled in Homer and other classical authors, just like students learning Greek today. Late ancient authors like Galen, the great doctor of the 2nd century AD, had already venerated Attic Greek as a particularly exalted form of the language and the Byzantines followed suit. Thus, we see extensive philological annotations to the plays of the Athenian poet Aristophanes. These would have been intended to help readers understand and appreciate the archaic language, much like the footnotes that guide the modern-day reader through an edition of Shakespeare. The Byzantines also preserved the work of classical historians and imitated their example by producing a number of histories about their own times. The just-mentioned Anna Komnena was one such historian, as was Michael Psellos, one of the thinkers who raised eyebrows with his embrace of pagan Neoplatonism. In a later episode, we'll be considering the philosophical interest of Byzantine history writing, one of several places we can look to find ideas about politics. But of course, the leading preoccupation of Byzantine intellectuals was not pagan philosophy or history, it was the Christian faith. As with our coverage of the Islamic world and Latin Christendom, we'll be seeing that philosophically intriguing ideas were often put forward in the context of theological movements and writings. A notable example is the Hezekast movement associated with the 14th century theologian Gregory Palamas, comparable to some of the mystical traditions we've looked at in other cultures. According to Hezekasm, humans cannot grasp God directly, but only through his Energeae or activities. You'll often see the English translation energies, which to my mind is overly literal. You might recognize the term Energeae from Aristotelian philosophy, and indeed, Palamas's teaching reaches back to Aristotle by way of the late ancient Cappadocian Fathers, who took up the tools of classical philosophy to explain our epistemic access to God, or lack of it, as well as the divine trinity. Of course, it's a contentious question whether theological doctrines like this should be counted as philosophy. For a good example of resistance against this idea, one can turn to a chapter in the recently published Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. Its authors, Dimitri Gutas and Niketas Siniosoglou, would have objected earlier when I said that there almost was no Byzantine philosophy because they would strike the almost. To quote their exact words, the Byzantines had no philosophy or very little of it in the margins. For them, the attempts of recent scholars to integrate Byzantium into our histories of philosophy is a case of political correctness. I quite enjoy that, conjuring as it does the spectre of left-wing protesters calling for new additions, funding to support the intensive study of monastic life at Mount Athos and perhaps the invention of novel pronouns to describe a Trinitarian god who is neither singular nor plural. Their point, though, is that we should not just grant every culture the complement of having managed to produce philosophy, and that the Byzantines in particular do not pass the test. These Christian intellectuals were, with a handful of exceptions, so committed to the superiority of revelation over human reason that they could see pagan learning only as a dangerous antagonist. As a result, though some attention was paid to classical philosophy, this was an ancillary scholarly pursuit, alongside the exposition of religious orthodoxy. They complained that classroom philosophy was not allowed to freely compete with doctrinal, clerical, and ascetic tradition, and that the scholars of Byzantium show no signs of entertaining the possibility that the Hellenic metaphysical, cosmological, moral outlook might be more true than orthodox doctrine. Here they seem to catch themselves realizing that this is implausibly demanding and concede in parentheses that it would be enough if philosophy was at least conceived as offering different solutions, so as a kind of independent alternative to Christianity. Of course, even that is raising a pretty high bar for the Byzantines to clear. For Gutas and Sino-Soglu, a given thinker only counts as a philosopher if he or she pursues rational argument wherever it leads without being constrained to adhere to religious dogmas. While that might strike you as eminently reasonable, a moment's reflection shows that it would have some very surprising consequences for our study of the history of philosophy. It would imply that there was also no philosophy at all in Latin medieval Europe, or to borrow their phrase, only philosophy in the margins. Philosophy would be found, if at all, then only in the works of confirmed members of the university arts faculties, like John Buridan. Just consider Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, or Ockham. They may have been among the greatest philosophical minds in history, yet none were philosophers, according to this exclusivist definition. Nor, by the way, was the aforementioned Proclus just as devoted to paganism as Aquinas or your average Byzantine thinker was to Christianity. What about the Islamic world, where intellectuals were in explicit competition with the Byzantines and often presented themselves as the true heirs of Atlantic wisdom? As you might remember from his appearance on this series as an interview guest, Dimitri Gutas is a leading expert in this area. He could rightly point us to a small number of outright rationalists like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes and identify them as the true, and perhaps sole, philosophers of the medieval age. For they were prepared to see human reason as independent from, and even in some ways superior to, religion. But the fact is that, in Islamic culture and even within the intellectual elite, they were the ones who were marginal. Philosophy and rational argumentation in the Islamic world, as in Latin Christendom and Byzantium, was mostly used to buttress and expound the teachings of one or another Abrahamic religion. This is what we find in such diverse thinkers as the Muslim Al-Kindi, the Christian Ibn Adi, and the Jewish Maimonides, all of them expert readers of Aristotle and deeply committed to the idea that Aristotelian philosophy could be interwoven with sensitive exposition of revealed texts and religious doctrine. Gutas and Signor Zoglou make an important and valid point in noting that pagan thought was greeted with more unease than enthusiasm among Byzantine churchmen. Yet some theologians would have rejected, or just been puzzled, by the idea that philosophy means using reason independently of faith. Gutas and Signor Zoglou themselves quote the early medieval thinker John of Damascus, defining philosophy in the following way, It is love of wisdom, and true wisdom is God, therefore the love of God, this is the true philosophy. So, in approaching this tradition, we do need to recognize that the Hellenic philosophical heritage was much debated and occasionally outright condemned by Byzantine theologians, but we don't want to miss out on the philosophically fruitful ideas that were put forward even by the harshest critics of that heritage. If that is our goal, it seems to me unhelpful to focus on the question of which thinkers should and should not be classified as philosophers. After all, the job of the historian of philosophy is not to police the textual traditions of earlier times, discarding any thinkers who might be tainted by theological, mystical, or other ideological concerns. Rather, we should look for and study texts that address perennial philosophical questions, for instance about knowledge, being, human nature, and ethics. The Byzantines did this when commenting on Aristotle, but they also did it in explicitly religious contexts, when arguing about the nature of God, the sense in which God is accessible to the human mind, the virtues of the monastic life, and so on. Thus, I'll be deliberately taking what Gutas and Seniosoglu would call a relativist approach. That is, I will discuss whatever strikes me as philosophically interesting, or rather anything I will strike you, the listener, as philosophically interesting, rather than restricting my attention to works that would have been seen at the time as falling under the literary genre of philosophy. To the contrary, as already mentioned, we'll be looking at historical writing and at other aspects of Byzantine culture such as iconoclasm, the debate over hesychasm, and attitudes towards women. Then too, as I'm sure Gutas and Seniosoglu would agree, the historian of philosophy should try to understand the way that uncontroversial examples of philosophical writing, like Aristotle, have been appropriated and transmitted. Here, Byzantine culture is not merely relevant, but for reasons I've already sketched, arguably the most important of the three medieval cultures. The historian needs to know where various traditions of thought came from, and will have no hope of understanding Renaissance philosophy without grasping at sources in Greek as well as Latin and Arabic medieval thought. Indeed, one reason I've chosen to tackle Byzantium as the third of the three medieval traditions is that it leads so naturally into the Renaissance, a time when Greek philosophical learning and classical philosophy were revived thanks to texts coming into Latin Christendom from well, you know where. There's another, more distinctive sense in which the forthcoming episodes will cast a broad net. Usually, the phrase Byzantine philosophy is applied only to the intellectual output of the Greek intellectuals of the empire, who were mostly in Constantinople. But in fact, quite a lot of philosophy was going on elsewhere and in languages other than Greek. I just mentioned John of Damascus, who did write in Greek but lived in the Islamic world, as his name indicates. There was philosophy written in Syriac and Armenian, some of it in that familiar genre of commentary on Aristotle, and there was philosophy in Georgian, notably with the 12th century philosopher John Petrizi. In fact, it would be strictly speaking more accurate, albeit not very good marketing, to call this series of episodes something like Philosophy in Eastern Medieval Christianity. Aristotle kicked things off in that spirit by discussing the reception of Aristotelianism in Syriac and Armenian, which will be a chance to see how scholars working in those languages carried on, and also innovated within, the concerns of late ancient philosophical culture. So join me next time for some proper orientation on philosophy in the East, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Eastern Front, Philosophy in Syriac and Armenian. Let's say you wanted to read every pre-modern translation and commentary on Aristotle. How many languages would you need to learn? Well, obviously Greek. There are dozens of late ancient commentaries on Aristotle, beginning in the 2nd century AD, if not earlier, with the work of Aspasius and Alexander of Aphrodisias. The Greek commentary tradition arguably peaked with the school of Alexandria in the 5th century, though as we'll be seeing later in this series, the Byzantines too contributed numerous Greek commentaries on his works. Then there's Latin. Alrighty, Boethius drew on the exegetical productions of Alexandria in his commentaries on Aristotle's logic, and of course there was the rich medieval tradition featuring such authors as Aquinas and Buridan, which carried on into the Renaissance. And you'll definitely need Arabic. There are extant commentaries on Aristotle from the 10th century Baghdad school, a mostly Christian group, who also included the famous Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi. The greatest of all medieval commentators on Aristotle was the Muslim Aferroes, who lived in 12th century Spain. He did write in Arabic, but a number of his commentaries are preserved only in Latin or Hebrew, plus there are Hebrew super-commentaries on his explanations of Aristotle, so you'll certainly need a sound grasp of Hebrew as well. But surely that would do it, right? Well, no actually. You need to learn at least two more languages, Syriac and Armenian. In late antiquity, in the early medieval period, there were translations of Aristotle into these languages, focusing especially on logic, and introductions and commentaries to this material were also produced in Syriac and Armenian. And that's just Aristotle. Things get more daunting still if we want to broaden our remit to the reception of Greek philosophy as a whole. Then, we must include Georgian, the language used by the 12th century Neoplatonist John Petrizzi to write a commentary on Proclus. By the way, he also translated works by Aristotle into Georgian, though these versions are lost. We can add at least one more, the Ethiopian language Ge'ez. You can hear all about the translations of originally Greek works into Ge'ez in this series on Africana philosophy, but just to make the point with one striking example that we discuss in more detail there, let's consider the story of a philosopher named Secundus. It tells of how he unintentionally brings about the suicide of his mother, takes a vow of silence out of remorse, and is then challenged to share his wisdom by a powerful king. After refusing to speak despite the kings threatening him with death, Secundus agrees to write down a series of aphoristic remarks encapsulating his philosophical insights. Now this text was originally Greek and was translated into Latin and Arabic, but also into Ge'ez, Armenian, and Syriac. Secundus is all but forgotten today, but was an inspiration to an ascetically minded and monastic readership across eastern Christendom. Hence we find the 7th century spiritual author Isaac of Nineveh praising the discipline of the philosophers with the remark that one of them had so mastered the will of the body that he did not deviate from his vow of silence even under threat of the sword. What we learn from such cases is that the textual transmission of Greek philosophy was not just, as many people suppose, a simple handover of Aristotelianism and Platonism into Latin. Nor was it only, as you might have supposed on the basis of this podcast series so far, a matter of Greek ideas being transmitted to both the Islamic world and Latin Christendom. In fact, it was a nearly global phenomenon in which Greek literature, including philosophy, was rendered into local languages on the east coast of Africa and around the Black Sea, in Spain, Syria, and Iraq, with the Arabic translations produced in those realms working their influence as far as Central Asia and eventually in India and China too. Obviously that whole story is not on our agenda just at the moment. Rather, I want to look at one underappreciated corner of the reception of Greek thought, the Eastern Christian communities that used Syriac and Armenian as their languages of scholarship. In addition to the obvious interest of discovering the breadth and depth of Hellenic philosophy's penetration into these cultures, our topic boasts some of my favorite scholarly names. Actually, medieval translators in general have more than their share of fabulous names. One memorable sobriquet belonged to the translator of Aristotle and of Aries into Latin, Herman the German. The Syriac tradition meets that challenge with Paul the Persian and raises the stakes with Philoxenus of Mabouge, who sounds like he should be pursuing Frodo and Samwise across Mordor. Literally unbeatable though is the Greek and Armenian translator and commentator David the Invincible. These splendidly titled scholars were only a few of the men who labored to bring Aristotle and other works of Greek science into the languages of Eastern Christianity alongside theological literature, beginning of course with the Bible. While some of them did study in Constantinople, they directed their energies towards fellow intellectuals in Syria and Armenia. These scholars were usually clerics or monks who did not accept the Chalcedonian form of Christianity that became Orthodox at Constantinople. The difference of agreement had to do with the nature, or natures, of Christ. According to the Chalcedonians, he had two natures, divine and human, united in a single They used the technical Greek word hypostasis to express this unity. Many Syrian Christians, by contrast, were either Nestorians or Monophysites. The followers of Nestorius emphasized the two natures and rejected the idea of a hypostatic union, while the Monophysites, also called Jacobites after the 6th century bishop of Edessa who was rather boringly just named Jacob, accepted a single nature that fused humanity and divinity. The Armenian Church was and still is Monophysite. Indeed, it's worth emphasizing that these late ancient rifts within Christianity are not yet healed. The most surprising example is that by the 4th century there was an outpost of the Syriac Church in India and it too survives down to the present day. It was within a Christian context that Syriac and Armenian emerged as written languages. Syriac was the dialect of Aramaic spoken around Edessa and hence a Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew, not an Indo-European one like Greek. Already in late antiquity, it distinguished itself from other forms of Aramaic and came to be a literary language used by Jews to translate the Old Testament and then by Christians to translate a wide range of religious material starting in the 5th century. The texts rendered into Syriac included Greek church fathers like the Cappadocians and the Pseudo-Dionysios who, as we know, drew extensively on pagan philosophical ideas. At first the translations tended to be rather loose, but in the 7th and 8th centuries the scholars developed a highly literal, even overly exact style which they used to render Aristotle and other philosophical works into this language of Eastern Christian culture. And this just during the period labeled as the Dark Age of Christian literature in Greek. If we're looking for the first philosopher to use Syriac, we might settle on Baadaisan, who died in the easily remembered year 222 AD. His Book of the Laws of Countries was influenced by Platonism, and he debated the topic of fate with a rival Christian sect. Like the Jewish philosopher, Fallo of Alexandria, who had lived a couple of centuries earlier, Baadaisan saw resonances between Plato's dialogue on cosmology, the Timaeus, and the biblical creation story. When we reflect that important pagan Neoplatonists of late antiquity also came from Syria, we realize that the roots of Hellenism and philosophy were planted deeply in this eastern soil. And here I'm thinking of Iamblichus and also Porphyry, author of an introduction to Aristotle's logic that would become standard reading in Syriac and Armenian as well as Arabic and Latin. Another example would come several centuries later with Sergius of Roshaina. He too was interested in cosmology and worked on logic as well, for instance by commenting on Aristotle's categories. Sergius evidently studied with the school of Ammonius in Alexandria and reproduced the ideas of these Neoplatonizing Aristotelians in his own commentaries. Thus, his undertaking can be compared to that of Boethius in the West, especially since, like Boethius, he had the unfulfilled ambition to cover the entirety of Aristotle's logic with his translating and commenting activity. But the most significant group of Aristotelians who worked in Syriac was that gathered around the monastery at Knesre. In the 7th century, the logician and mathematician Sèvres Sebogte taught several other men who would form something of a small-scale translation movement. These included Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and, here comes another enjoyable name, George of the Arabs, who wrote translations with his own introductions and commentaries to three works from Aristotle's logical corpus. So this group was a forerunner of the translation circles that would emerge in the 9th century with the support of the Abbasid Caliphs, the ones led by the philosopher al-Kindi and the medical expert Hunayn ibn Ishaq. We discussed their output at the beginning of our series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world, and made brief mention there of the fact that Hunayn ibn Ishaq's circle often translated from Greek into Syriac and then from Syriac into Arabic. The apparently unnecessary middle step of rendering the target text into Syriac in fact made perfect sense, given that there was a long-standing tradition of using Syriac to translate Greek science. Once the material had been brought into this Semitic language, getting it into another realm, namely Arabic, was perhaps seen as relatively straightforward. All of which is not to say that every Syriac author was an enthusiastic Hellenist. The 4th century poet Ephraim of Edessa despised pagan philosophy, remarking, Happy is the man who has not tasted of the venom of the Greeks. Broadly speaking, though, Greek was the language of educated culture and was valued as such. An amusing story from the turn of the 6th century tells of a mother pleased by her son's pale complexion, which she assumes is due to his long study of the liberal arts that formed the Hellenic educational curriculum. She is horrified to discover that actually he's been memorizing the Psalms and in Syriac. The more religiously minded tended to value Greek too, even for religious purposes. Thus, the aforementioned Philoxenus of Maboug, still loving that name, remarked on the difficulty of doing Christian theology in Syriac because, It is not accustomed to use the precise terms that are in currency with the Greeks. Much of what I've just said about the Syrian context was mirrored in Armenia. Here too we have a language that comes into literary use during late antiquity with the script for Armenian emerging at about 400 AD. The purpose of this was, in the first instance, Christian missionary work. A figure called Mashtok translated part of the Bible and dispatched students to convert the people while some members of his circle went abroad to learn Greek or Syriac. In a telling story from about 600, a man named Anania of Shirak tells of his struggles to find a teacher of mathematics in Armenia. He finally locates one in Trebizond, a well-traveled man who had been in Alexandria, Rome, Athens, and Constantinople. When Anania returns home, he grumbles about his countrymen, who lack all interest in such educational pursuits. But in fact, the Armenian translation movement was already underway by this point. For the sake of studying the liberal arts, there was an early Armenian translation of a grammar written by a man with yet another pleasing moniker, Dionysius Thrax. This was followed by Aristotle's logic, commentaries on his works by Amblicus, and the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius in addition to many religious and theological texts. As with Syriac, the translations were often overly literal, to the point of being essentially incomprehensible to the untutored reader. It has been commented that they are really just written in Greek with Armenian words. The most remarkable figure here, and not just for his comic book ready title, was David the Invincible, who was something like an Armenian version of Boethius and Sergius of Reshaina. Like Sergius, he actually studied in Alexandria, in David's case with Olympia Doris, one of the very last pagan teachers of antiquity. David's commentaries on Aristotle's logic are extant in both Greek and Armenian. We are told that he wrote them in Greek but then translated them himself for the benefit of his fellow Armenians. His interest went beyond Aristotle. He apparently translated Platonic dialogues into Armenian too, but since these are lost, it is his logical works that give him a claim to what fame he still has. One of today's leading scholars of Aristotelian logic, Jonathan Barnes, commented that David's exposition of Porphyry's introduction to logic is one of the two best commentaries written on that much-commented work. Barnes doesn't say what the other best commentary on Porphyry is, but given that he wrote one himself, I have a sneaking suspicion what he has in mind. David the Invincible does not advertise his Christianity while commenting on the pagan logical corpus, perhaps a sign of his training in a school where Christians were collaborating closely with the last pagans of antiquity, both sides striving to keep the peace for the sake of their joint intellectual endeavors. To what extent are David's commentaries and those of the Syriac scholars valuable contributions to the history of Aristotelianism? To be honest, you should not read them for their entertainment value, though David does at one point prove that irrational animals do not grasp universal concepts on the basis that a rooster remains calm when it sees the farmer slaughtering the other chickens, which proves that the rooster doesn't know it is a member of the same species. But what they otherwise lack in laughs, they make up in terms of philological importance. The Armenian and Syriac translations are very early, usually earlier than any manuscripts we have for the Greek version. This means we can use them to help reconstruct the original Greek text, since earlier texts lack errors that inevitably crept in during the process of copying out books by hand. We'll get back to this issue later when we look at Byzantine manuscripts and how scholars today use them. There are also a few ancient texts that are lost in Greek and preserved only in Syriac, for example a treatise on meteorology by Aristotle's student Theophrastus. Beyond that, there is the philosophical interest of the commentaries. As with commentaries in Greek, these are works of exegesis intended for use by students, so they are not full of advanced, innovative ideas. Yet they carry on traditions of thinking about logic that we know from late antiquity and that will be passed on to the Arabic and Latin spheres. Thus David argues in detail for the long-standing peripatetic view that logic is not really a part of philosophy, but only its instrument. This indeed is why Aristotle's logical works were called the Orgodon, meaning tool. It's a point on which Aristotelians like Alexander of Aphrodisias had insisted back in the 2nd century when it was a good way of marking their opposition to the Stoics who did think that logic is a part of philosophy on a par with ethics and physics. Or, to take another example, it seems that Paul the Persian's logical writings continue a trend away from formalization in logic and towards a more metaphysical reading. What I mean by this is that for Paul, when a scientific demonstration yields its conclusion, the conclusion is necessarily true because of the natures of the things the demonstration is about, not because the argument's form is necessarily valid. Thus, if we argue, giraffes are ungulants, ungulants walk on tiptoe, therefore giraffes walk on tiptoe, that result is a necessary truth and its necessity resides in the nature of giraffes, not just on the unimpeachable structure of the proof. The reason that logic was a primary interest of Syriac and Armenian scholars is that it had already had this status at Alexandria. You began your study of philosophy with logic, the necessary instrument for everything that came after, which meant that students had most need for commentaries and translations of logical works. But logic was only the beginning, and we do see the intellectuals of these traditions pursuing other interests. Sergius translated a treatise on cosmology and works of medicine, while Severus Seboht, the influential teacher at Kneshre, had particular expertise in astronomy and other areas of mathematics. There are also examples of history writing, for example with the History of Armenia, written by Moses of Khorren, notable for its lack of theological framing, his purpose is just to tell us what happened, not to display God's providence at work in the world. Still, there's no denying that theological interests did motivate much of what these translators and commentators were doing. As I've said several times, there was extensive effort to translate Christian theological literature and even the attention paid to logic had a theological dimension. Severus' pupils seem to have thought of logic as an instrument of theology as much as an instrument of philosophy. In Armenia, one churchman remarked that the devising of a script for Armenian was in part so valuable because one would otherwise need knowledge of Greek and Syriac to resist the seduction of old pagan traditions. A point I made in the last episode, that in Byzantium philosophy itself was defined in a theologically colored way, applies in these other eastern Christian cultures too. Plato had prepared the way for this by saying in his dialogue, the Theaetetus, that philosophy is the attempt to achieve likeness to God insofar as is possible for humans. This appears repeatedly in Armenian and Syriac texts as one popular definition of philosophy. A fine example of the interpenetration of philosophical and theological concerns is provided by George of the Arabs. In his Syriac Works on Logic, he is not content merely to quote that Platonic definition. He explains how likeness to God is achieved, using a whole series of metaphors that have to do with vision and light. The intellect is the eye of the soul, and it is by seeing the light of truth that we fulfill our role as images of the divine. God himself is a light with which the light of our souls can mingle when they come close to him. They do this by polishing the mirror of intellect through virtue, something that even some pagans manage to do. The path is full of danger, since reason is bound to go astray when it is not guided rightly by the will. Still, when things do go wrong it is the evil will that should be blamed, not reason itself. Thus, George implores his reader, This statement is, like David the Invincible, impossible to argue with, though George is perhaps somewhat less convincing when he suggests that the three figures of the syllogism in Aristotle are an image of the Holy Trinity. The Syriac and Armenian philosophers were clearly not innocent of religious motivation, and if they had been asked why they were spending so much time writing about Aristotle, they would surely have placed that project within a Christian context. Next time we'll be looking at a famous debate that illustrates this very point, the controversy over the permissibility of depicting the saints and Christ himself in what were called icons. Why was there such a heated dispute over these pictures, and what was the role of philosophical argumentation in iconoclasm and its ultimate defeat? It's a topic worth a few thousand words, which we'll hear next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye!
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Picture This, Iconoclasm. There is a nice, though presumably apocryphal, anecdote told about Picasso. A man asks him, why don't you paint people the way they really look? The artist asks what he means, and the man opens his wallet and produces a photo, like this picture of my wife, he says. She's remarkably small, says Picasso, and surprisingly flat. The story draws our attention to the fact that an image of something is never exactly like the thing it represents. If you say that a painting is a good likeness of your mother, you don't mean that it resembles her in the way that an identical twin would or a clone in a science fiction film. The picture might be blurry or in black and white, as well as small and flat, yet still seem to capture your mother, even to be your mother in some sense. Thus, if someone sees the picture on your wall and says, who's that, you would just say, that's my mother. Pictures of people also elicit the same emotions that the people themselves would, provoking such responses as kissing the photograph of one's mother, or using the picture of one's enemy for target practice at a shooting range. Yet of course we know that the picture is not genuinely the same as the person. This is why you wouldn't be arrested for attempted murder for shooting at your enemy's picture, and why you don't expect your mom's photo to kiss you back. Here we have one of the central questions of the branch of philosophy known as aesthetics. How exactly do representations relate to the things they depict? In a dramatic example of the way that theological debates can bear on central philosophical themes, it turns out that one of the most interesting pre-modern engagements with this question emerged in Byzantium in the course of the notorious controversy over the veneration of icons. The Byzantines put the point by asking how an image relates to its archetype, for instance a painted icon of a saint and the saint who is shown in the painting. To make a long story short, the iconoclasts, literally the breakers of icons, argued that it is wrong to venerate an image unless the archetype is genuinely present in that image. The supporters of icons, called iconophiles or iconodules, held that the likeness between an image and its archetype does license taking certain attitudes towards the image that we might fittingly take towards the archetype, and that veneration is one such attitude. Now for the not-so-short version of the story. Iconoclasm is usually reckoned to have begun during the reign of Emperor Leo III, who was said to have removed an icon of Christ from a palace gate in 726. Modern scholars have, however, cast doubt on his role, instead giving his son Constantine V the credit or blame for making iconoclasm into a serious official policy. He called together a church council in 754 which set down this policy, and writings ascribed to Constantine himself make the case against venerating images. There is a popular conception to the effect that Leo and Constantine were here imitating restrictions on pictorial art that we find in Islamic culture, but there is little or no evidence for that idea. If Islam played a role, it was by subjecting the Byzantine Empire to a series of military defeats. Clearly, God was angry with the Greek Christians and the question was why. The iconoclast's answer was that the increasingly popular use of imagery in churches and private settings amounted to idolatry. But this was a concern that had emerged long before the 8th century. Back in the 4th century, the theologian Epiphanius of Salamis had already associated paintings with idolatrous practices, remarking, Slightly earlier, a Christian hagiography had its hero remark to someone who venerated an image of John the Evangelist, Yet the use of icons was well established by the time of the Arab conquests. The Church Father John Christostom had one, and in the 6th century Hypatius of Ephesus defended their use among common believers. Christians had to respond when Jews accused them of idolatry, pointing to a passage in the book of Exodus that reads, An interesting document for this interreligious controversy is a dialogue written by Leonsius of Neapolis in the 630s. Arguing against a hypothetical Jewish opponent, Leonsius contends that a picture can serve to prompt memory of the thing depicted, just as a cross can direct our thoughts to Christ. In such cases, the material image itself is not being worshipped. To the contrary, the material object has little or no worth in its own right. As Leonsius says, A first premonition of outright iconoclasm came in a council of 691-692. It accepted the religious use of pictorial representation but introduced certain restrictions, for instance that Christ should be shown as a human and not symbolized as a lamb. The iconoclasm of the middle of the 8th century was far more radical and called for using the cross alone as a symbol of Christ. No longer would it be acceptable to depict him or the saints with material likenesses. As an iconoclast poem put the point, But popular conceptions are again misleading here. When you think of iconoclasm, you probably imagine soldiers or monks rampaging through churches and private homes, defacing or burning every image they could find, in a violent anticipation of the destruction of images that will later be seen in Protestant Europe. In fact, though, the practical effects of iconoclasm were rather limited. For one thing, the movement was mostly limited to Constantinople, and even there, icons continued to hang in churches. Later iconoclasts would offer a compromise that the images could just be put higher up to prevent people from venerating them. What we're dealing with here is not a social struggle with fighting in the streets, but a political and theological controversy among the elite, with several changes of policy over the course of the century. Under the Empress Irene, iconoclasm was reversed in a council held in 787. The Emperor Leo V, who wanted to associate himself with the military successes of the iconoclast Constantine V, reintroduced the policy. Then another female ruler, Theodora, restored veneration of images for good in 843. In the end, iconoclasm was an entirely counterproductive policy. Like most programs of censorship, it merely intensified attachment to the banned artworks, something you can still confirm today by walking to any Orthodox church, where you'll find icons hanging on every wall. For us, of course, the question is not so much the practical effects during and after iconoclasm as the intellectual rationale offered for and against the policy. Constantine and other proponents of iconoclasm like John the Grammarian echoed the complaints made by the Jewish opponent in the dialogue by Leontius. For them, icons were nothing but idols, and venerating them meant worshipping creatures instead of the divine. The iconoclast's distaste for what they called the carnality of physical images is reminiscent of attitudes familiar from late antique Platonism. Particularly striking is a story told about the great Neoplatonist thinker Plotinus. When asked to sit for a portrait, Plotinus refused, arguing that his body was a mere image of his true self. Why would he want a painted image of this image? But the Neoplatonists were simultaneously potential allies for the iconophiles. As pagans, they too wanted to make use of religious art like statues of the gods. The pagan emperor Julian the Apostate had written in defense of this practice, saying, At a theoretical level, the ritualistic use of images and symbols known by pagans as theurgy was already Christianized in late antiquity by the pseudo-Dionysius. He focused not on artworks, but on the sacraments and the use of everyday language for God. Much as the pagans said when defending theurgy, Dionysius argued that it is through earthly means that we imperfect humans can access the divine. So iconophiles, just as much as iconoclasts, could draw on earlier sources for inspiration. The most important authors to write in favor of venerating images were John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, and the patriarch Nikephorus. Since they were on the winning side, we have a much better sense of their arguments than we do regarding the iconoclast side of the story. Indeed, we usually know the arguments of the iconoclasts only because the iconophiles quoted their arguments for the sake of refuting them. For the iconophiles, the first thing that needed to be clarified was that they were not worshipping painted images. Rather, as the Iconophile Council of 787 stated, the icons are objects of veneration. Furthermore, when we do venerate an image, we are doing so because of a relation of likeness between the image and its archetype. Here, strict fidelity is not important. It doesn't matter whether an icon really shows a saint just the way he or she looked, or even whether the painter of the icon was highly skilled. Yet, by offering some degree of likeness, pictures represent their archetypes in a way that a symbol, like the cross, would not. Here, we come back to the question of what exactly representational likeness consists in. The iconoclast position was a stark one. A real image should involve the actual presence of the archetype. Thus, the paradigm and indeed unique case in which we have an adequate image of Christ is the Eucharist, where his body is genuinely present. The iconoclast put this in explicitly philosophical language by saying that the essence of the archetype should be in the image. In the case of a painting, this is simply absent. Thus, John the Grammarian argued on behalf of the iconoclast that a visual representation of a man cannot convey his deeds or character the way that a verbal description of him might do. In light of this, the artwork is just a waste of time. The iconophiles, by contrast, deny that an image needs to share in the essence of the archetype. That would be more like the case of the identical twin or clone I mentioned earlier. We can understand this point better by alluding to the philosophical debate over universals, and in particular the treatment of the issue we find in John of Damascus. For him, the nature or essence of humanity is fully present in every human, with each individual human being a so-called hypostasis of that essence. So here we might translate hypostasis as instantiation. Clearly, this is not what is going on in the case of a visual representation. The photo of your mother is not an individual human, which is why you don't expect it to kiss you back or tell you to clean your room. How then does the image capture the archetype, if not by including the archetype's essence? Here the iconophiles give several answers. John of Damascus considers that the activities of the archetype may manifest themselves in the image, which sounds a bit like the pagan idea of theurgy, since there too the spiritual effects of a higher cause could show themselves in a material thing. Another idea was that the image participates in the archetype, much as Platonists thought that an individual thing participates in a transcendent form, like giraffes in the form of giraffe, or just actions in the form of justice. Perhaps the most fruitful and persuasive idea offered by the iconophiles was that the image and archetype share a name. Here they could look back to a passage from the beginning of Aristotle's categories, which would have been well known to all Byzantine intellectuals since this was a basic textbook for training in logic. There Aristotle wanted to illustrate the concept of homonyms, that is, two things with different natures but the same name. His example, startling in its relevance for the debate over icons, is that a real man and a figure in a painted picture are both called animal, in Greek zōon. Now Aristotle probably meant by this that in ancient Greek the word zōon did mean living thing, that is animal, but it also meant painted image, presumably because living things were such common subjects for paintings. But the passage could easily be taken to mean that, for example, Plotinus the man and a painting of Plotinus made in secret since he refused to sit for the portrait both share the name Plotinus, even though the man and the painting are distinct things with different natures. And this is exactly what the iconophiles wanted to say. Thus, though Theodore the Studite disavowed the use of technical Aristotelian logic in his iconophile writings, both he and Nikephorus helped themselves to the Aristotelian idea that image and archetype are homonyms. Nikephorus added that this is one reason the icon is a more powerful representation of its archetype than a mere symbol like the cross. As we said, you might call a photo of your mother mom, whereas you wouldn't do that with something that merely reminds you of her like her favorite necklace. Here, one can imagine the iconoclast responding that if we want names, then we should just do as they had already been urging and limit ourselves to linguistic representations of Christ and the saints. A written account provides more detail and poses no danger of worshipping, or if the iconophiles insist, venerating, base material things. Some iconophiles effectively refuse to admit this distinction. For instance, Theodore Abu-Qura, a follower of John Damascus who wrote in Arabic to defend the use of images against criticisms from Muslims, said that words are just another kind of icon. After all, Aristotle has taught us that sounds represent ideas the way that a painting represents its subject. For other iconophiles, visual representations offer something that verbal accounts cannot. Nikephorus offered a detailed explanation of the difference. Both writing and painting are forms of representation, but images lead the mind directly to what is depicted. Words, by contrast, require greater degree of interpretation, and for this reason are often the occasion for disagreement and dispute. Of course, Nikephorus did not mean that written accounts are useless, since that would undermine the importance of the Gospels as a representation of Christ. Still, the painting relates to its archetype more intimately than any verbal description can ever do. So far, we've been discussing the problem of icons in general terms. Considering the debate as it would apply to any venerated image, as of a saint. But there were special problems that arose with the depiction of Christ in particular. And here, it is worth recalling that the first image removed by the iconoclast was indeed one of Christ. In his rationale for iconoclasm, the Emperor Constantine argued that painting an icon of Jesus is not just idolatry but also has problematic implications concerning Christology. After all, it is obviously impossible to depict Christ's divine nature in a painting. The icon would only show his human nature and thus divide the two natures that were joined in his single hypothesis according to the orthodox Chalcedonian formula. Alternatively, the painter might suppose that he is managing to depict the divine nature in the act of showing Christ's human form, but that would show that the painter is confusing the two natures, divine and human. Either way, to paint an icon of Jesus is to fall into heresy. Then too, in the Incarnation, Christ was meant to take on and redeem human nature in general, something that cannot be shown by painting his individual human body. To this line of argument, the iconophiles responded that it was Constantine and the other iconoclasts who failed to understand the implications of Christology for artistic representation. It is precisely because Christ was incarnated that we can, in this one case, represent a divine person in an image. Here it was important to insist that Christ remained incarnated, retaining his body even after his crucifixion and resurrection. The iconoclasts, with their platonist scorn for the material, were thinking like Manichaeans or other dualists who despised the physical realm, not realizing that it has been redeemed and even exalted when Christ took on human flesh and retained it forever. This is why he can be circumscribed in the limited form of an image, something Constantine considered impossible for a being whose divinity makes him infinite and thus uncircumscribable. As for the point that Christ redeemed all of human nature, which cannot be shown in a painting of one individual, the iconophiles again refer us to the standard view on universals. Of course, human nature is something general or common, but it can exist only in individuals. We never have access to essences or natures except by encountering them in concrete material things. So, the only way for us to understand the redemption of human nature is to consider that nature as it appears in one particular case, namely in Christ's incarnated form, which is precisely what is shown in the icon. Famously, history is written by the victors, and that tends to go for the history of philosophy too. Given that our evidence is largely from the iconophile camp, and that the iconoclasts are tainted by the lurid accusations thrown at them in iconophile histories—burning the hands of icon painters, tormenting and humiliating monks who refuse to take down their icons, and so on—it is always going to be hard to avoid sympathizing with the iconophiles. But I tend to think that, philosophically speaking, the iconophiles had the better of this debate anyway. It seems just false that a genuine image of something needs to share the essence of that thing. That central question of aesthetics—what does the representation share with its archetype—needs to be answered in terms of likeness or even partial identity, precisely as the iconophiles suggested. Less clear—to me anyway—is whether the iconophiles were right to think that veneration is an appropriate attitude to take towards an image. As we saw at the outset, in some cases it seems natural to treat pictures as an extension of the people they depict, but in other cases it does not. You might kiss a picture of your mom, but you wouldn't buy it a Mother's Day present. Here too, though, I tend to think that the iconophile position fits tolerably well with our intuitions. Indeed, kissing icons is one of the forms of veneration that became standard practice in Orthodox Christianity. Then again, in less technical and less philosophically inspired iconophile literature, we sometimes get the sense that icons were seen as more than just pictures. We hear, for instance, of Muslim invaders stabbing the icon of a saint, which then began to flow with real blood. As one scholar has remarked apropos of this example, But take a deep breath, because next time we'll be enjoying that rarefied atmosphere of learned theological treatises as we turn to one of the early heroes of the iconophile cause. With his defensive images and his authoritative establishment of what would become the accepted Eastern Christian view on a wide range of theological and philosophical issues, he helped to put the Orthodox in the Orthodox Church tradition, despite living outside the Eastern Christian realms in lands dominated by Islam. So all right-thinking people will want to join me as we turn to John of Damascus, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Behind Enemy Lines – John of Damascus The first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word Byzantine is probably exaggerated and unnecessary complexity in honour of the Eastern Empire's formidable and intricate bureaucracy. The second thing to come to mind, though, might be the concept of orthodoxy in honour of the Empire's equally formidable and intricate theological tradition. The term comes from the Greek words otos and doxa, meaning correct belief, and of course it features in the title of the Greek Orthodox Church. The doctrines of that church emerged from late antiquity and the early Byzantine period, a time of fierce debate as to which religious beliefs are, in fact, correct. To be an Orthodox Christian was, obviously, to reject paganism and the two other Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, which was seen as superseded by the Incarnation and the Gospels, and Islam, which was seen more unfavourably still as an outright heresy. Orthodoxy also meant rejecting certain teachings that had been adopted by other Eastern Christian communities during centuries of controversy over the Trinity and the nature, or indeed natures, of Christ. No one text, church council, or theologian was solely responsible for establishing the theology of the Orthodox Church, but a few key figures were particularly important in that process, among whom we must count John of Damascus. He would eventually be honoured as a theological authority alongside the late ancient Church Fathers whose ideas animate his own writings, like the Cappadocians, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. John's influence was fundamentally due to his having been on the correct side of all the religious debates of his day, or at least the side of these debates that would eventually be acknowledged as correct in the Orthodox tradition. He catalogued and rebuked the various sorts of heretical belief that lay outside what he saw as the true faith, including Islam. He was a stalwart defender of Chalcedonian Christianity and, as we saw last time, also a fierce advocate of the veneration of icons, and this at a time when the Emperor in Constantinople was promulgating iconoclasm. It may seem strange that this champion of Eastern Orthodoxy should have lived outside the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Actually though, this makes perfect sense. Living as he did in the Umayyad Empire in the first half of the 8th century, John could not take the dominance of his version of Christianity for granted. As his name indicates, he was born in Damascus, to a Greek-speaking Christian family of well-praised administrators who managed to flourish despite the transition to Islamic rule. In the Syria of his day, and in Palestine, where he would become a monk, John lived among a religiously diverse population with plenty of opportunity for debate between Christian and Jew, Christian and Muslim, and between Chalcedonians, like himself, and other Christian groups. As we know from our look at philosophy in Syriac and Armenian, these groups included the Nestorians, a group with a strong presence in the East, which emphasized the duality of Christ as both divine and human, and the Monophysites, who on the contrary insisted that Christ has only one nature which unites both his divinity and humanity. There were also the Monothelites, who adopted a compromise position according to which divinity and humanity come together in Christ's single will. Hence their name, which comes from the Greek words mono and thalasis, meaning one and will. John wrote polemics against all these groups, maintaining the line established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and already defended by Maximus. This meant distinguishing two natures in Christ, seeking to safeguard his unity with reference to the single existing person in which these natures resided. Following the same line of thought, John also rejected another compromise formula which would acknowledge Christ's two natures but ascribe to him a single activity or Energaea. As we noted in the introduction to this series on Byzantine philosophy, Aristotle had already used the word Energaea meaning by it actuality as opposed to potentiality, so it's a concept familiar from ancient philosophy and the other medieval traditions. But the word Energaea is being used in a somewhat more specific way here to refer to the activity that proceeds from a given nature, the way heat comes from fire. This is the basis of John's objection to the Monothelites. If Christ had two natures, he cannot have had only one activity because every nature generates an activity of its own. Similarly, John's response to the Nestorians and Monophysites turns on the Greek technical term hypostasis, which can be found in late ancient texts but with a somewhat different connotation. Christ has two natures but is still a single unified being because he is only one hypostasis. Roughly this means that he was a single existent. We'll find out what it means less roughly in a couple of minutes. If you're tempted to ask what in the world any of this has to do with philosophy, a perusal of John's masterwork The Fountain of Knowledge might help answer your question. It's a massive text of three parts, the first of which is called Philosophical Chapters. This part is a kind of textbook which gathers together definitions and explanations of basic terms and concepts drawn from both Christian authorities and also pagan authors, whom he calls the outside philosophers. Sometimes John contrasts the teachings of the pagans and the Christian fathers, but for the most part the Philosophical Chapters read like an elementary introduction to logic and other philosophical basics that could have been handed to pagan students by a pagan professor in antique Alexandria. This textbook is supposed to prepare the reader for tackling the remaining two parts of the work, called respectively On the Orthodox Faith and On Heresies. John's fame and importance rest above all on the second part of The Fountain. On the Orthodox Faith was translated into Latin and became a major source for the scholastics. You'll see it cited on many pages of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, for example, and it was also rendered into Old Slavonic and Arabic, enabling it to become a mainstay of Christian theology across much of the globe. It offers what its title promises, a comprehensive explanation and defense of the religious doctrines that John accepted as Orthodox, and would indeed become accepted as Orthodox by the Greek Church in due course. Now, this is most certainly a work of theology, but it is not for nothing that John has prepared the way with a survey of basic philosophical concepts. For one thing, he is convinced that we can rely on natural human reasoning, albeit that he grounds this assumption in the further assumption that reason was given to us by God. For another thing, to explain and establish his theological teachings, he often needs first to clarify how he sees various philosophical issues. This is well illustrated by the correct beliefs about Christ expounded in On the Orthodox Faith. Since he is trying to explain here the special case where divinity is somehow united to humanity, John has to tell us what humanity is in the cases that are not so special. Here too, he's dealing with a standard bit of terminology familiar from earlier Greek philosophy, namely phusis, or nature. This is where we get the word physics, that is, the study of nature. For John, a nature is the same thing as the essence or being of something. Thus the nature of a giraffe is just what makes giraffes to be the sort of thing they are. In itself, a nature like this is not an individual thing, because it is shared among all the beings that have the same nature. The essence of giraffe belongs to all giraffes, and furthermore we can grasp this nature in our minds as a general or universal concept. By contrast, an individual giraffe, like Hiawatha, comes about when the giraffe nature exists concretely, and when this happens we can speak of hypostasis. So now we can explain more clearly what John means by this term. A hypostasis is the instantiation of a nature or essence in one particular individual. He uses this idea to account for the Trinity, where we have only one divine nature that is instantiated in three persons, each of which is its own hypostasis. John also uses it to account for the Incarnation. Christ is only one hypostasis, but with two natures, both divine and human, thus ratifying the Chalcedonian formula. Now this might sound pretty strange. How can a single individual exemplify two natures, especially two such different natures, one created and one uncreated? This would be as if Hiawatha were somehow simultaneously a giraffe and a lion, which would at least mean she wouldn't have to venture far to find dinner, but seems metaphysically absurd. John's response would be that the difference between the two natures in Christ is precisely why they cannot coalesce to become one single nature, as the Monophysites held. In general, it is possible for things with various natures to come together and mix, as when the elements fuse to form a complex body. But in that sort of case, the two natures being mixed together are lost. Fire and water are taken up into the compound body and are no longer present as elements. By contrast, if Jesus was indeed both fully human and fully God, as Christianity requires, then he must have had two natures that were preserved and not lost by being commingled. We do have some hope of understanding how this is possible, because there is another case of two natures remaining unmixed in one single hypostasis, namely the case of an ordinary human. Each of us has both a soul and a body, and these two parts retain their different natures, as we can see from the fact that souls are able to outlive the body. Another case John is fond of mentioning is a burning hot sword, where the nature of fire occurs together with the nature of iron. He compares the soul's presence in body to the fire's presence in the sword, and points out that both the fire and iron retain separate activities, the fire burning and the iron cutting. A problem here, about which John seems surprisingly relaxed, is that it now sounds as if Christ actually had three natures, namely his divine nature and then the two natures that make up any human, corresponding to body and soul. His response here would seem to be that the body and soul natures are not, so to speak, on the same level as the divine and human natures. They are rather sub-natures that form parts of the human nature. Another philosophically interesting dimension of John's discussion of humanity, his philosophical anthropology if you will, comes with his polemic against monotheletism. In attempts to mollify those who wanted to be more protective of Christ's unity, it had been proposed that Christ had only one will. And why not? Indeed, what would it even mean for a single hypostasis or person to have multiple wills? Then it would seem I could will to do something, while also willing not to do it, leading to a stalemate. to see the giraffe enclosure at the zoo, even while choosing to see the lions instead. But following Maximus on this point as well, John argues that will is like activity. It is tied inextricably to nature, so that if there are two natures, there are two wills. Normal humans do not have two wills, since our power for willing has to do only with our souls and not our bodies. In fact, it has to do with our power of rationality, which expresses itself in deliberative choice, a manifestation of self-control that is impossible for non-human animals. Christ had such a will also, but his situation was of course different from that of a normal human because he had access to divine omniscience. Thus, neither God nor Christ, as incarnated, actually has to deliberate between alternatives, but rather simply chooses what is good. Given this, there is no possibility that the divine and human wills in Christ would come into conflict, and the same goes for his activity. What looks to us to be a single action can in fact be a manifestation of both divine and human nature, something especially clear in a miracle like walking on water, which required both a human body for walking and a divine nature for doing something that is naturally impossible. The nuance and sophistication of John's response to his Christian opponents is not, in truth, matched by his attack on Islam. Several documents directed against the Muslim faith come down to us under his name, including the final chapter of On Heresies and, probably not in fact by John but close to his thought in spirit, a dialogue between a Christian and a Saracen, or Muslim, which seems to be designed to equip Christian readers with arguments to use in real-life debate. A somewhat later Christian author, who also lived in the Islamic world, Theodore Abu-Qura, took up John's polemic and offered further arguments against what was then a new religion, posing an existential threat to Christianity. That explains the note of alarm detectable in both authors. John begins his chapter on Islam in On Heresies by describing this rival faith as the harbinger of the Antichrist, while Theodore compares it to a virulent disease. But these writings are not hysterical Jeremiahs, or at least not only that. They also address a deep question that arises in times and places where multiple religions compete for adherents—on what basis are we to choose between them? Nowadays we call this the problem of religious pluralism, and both John and Theodore are well aware of it. Alongside more ad hominem arguments, for instance aspersions cast on the character of the prophet, they offer proofs that might convince a neutral referee between the claims of Islam and Christianity. Common and prominent among these are the miracles performed by Moses and by Christ, which were seen by many witnesses. The same cannot be said for the prophet Muhammad, our authors claim, and John shows some knowledge of the Quranic texts by alluding to their own emphasis on the importance of witnesses in legal contexts. Theodore adds the interesting point that, without such independent proof, religion is simply a matter of thoughtlessly adopting the beliefs of Muv-un's parents. John and Theodore formulated these arguments while living among their adversaries, behind enemy lines so to speak. But it's worth remembering that John might have found the Christian Byzantine Empire no more congenial than the Umayyad realm at this time because of his defense of the icons. He was condemned by the Emperor Constantine V in the year 754 for this position, and it's said that the Emperor referred to him as Manzeros, Hebrew for bastard, playing on John's Arabic name Mansur. It's presumably for this reason that John's works started to be influential among Byzantine readers only a century or so after his death, once the icons had been brought back into Orthodox practice and worship. He deals with the issue in On the Orthodox Faith and also in three shorter treatises which gather authoritative testimonies and arguments in favor of venerating the icons. This material also reveals something of how Christians in this period saw the Jews. As we saw, the iconoclast built their case in part on passages in the Hebrew Bible condemning the making of idols. John states that these restrictions were appropriate for the Jews who were indeed at risk of sliding into idolatry, but things have changed with the Incarnation which licenses the use of physical images to represent the divine. While we should not actually worship the images of Christ and the saints, it is appropriate to show them reverence. Actually, in general, we can see created things as images of God. The icons are simply a central instance of the way that spiritual things can manifest themselves in the physical sphere. Thus, we might say that a rose, a flower, and its fragrance are an image of the Trinity. In this sense, the icons are not so much signs and symbols of what they represent as revelations of these things in the world. That example with the rose is a telling one. Like John's comparison of Christ to a fiery sword, it shows that he thinks the careful consideration of natural things can give us insight into the supernatural. We may find it unsettling that he moves so seamlessly from discussing what seem to be philosophical issues like the relation between nature and its individual instantiation to religious questions like the Incarnation or Trinity. But in John's works, there is no disentangling the two. Perhaps there is no more eloquent testimony to this than one of the numerous definitions of philosophy offered in his philosophical chapters, in fact one that I also mentioned in the introduction to this series. Noting that etymologically the word means love of wisdom, John infers that philosophy can be understood as the love of wisdom itself, which is God. Those definitions of philosophy illustrate another feature of John's writing that may unsettle us. He didn't invent any of them. Like the philosophical chapters as a whole, in fact like most of the fountain of wisdom as a whole, they are a patchwork of material drawn from other sources. In the case of John's treatises in defense of the icons, we see him doing little more than offering quotations from a variety of authoritative sources, sometimes with commentary but sometimes without. John's influence as a theologian was, to put it mildly, not owing to his originality. To the contrary, he was above all useful because of his command of many sources, which he wove together into useful and powerful works that are often little more than compilations. And John was not the only one. Some of the most frequently copied and consulted works of Byzantine philosophy were not so much written as gathered. Of course, in this series of episodes, I'm trying to convince you that Byzantine philosophy is genuinely interesting, and at first glance these compilations present something of a problem for that thesis. Can a text that just assembles material from earlier texts really be worth the attention of the historian of philosophy? Rather than ignoring this question in hopes that you won't notice, I'm going to be confronting the topic head on and devoting a whole episode to the question whether such treatises can be philosophically valuable and interesting. First though, I've put together another episode in which we'll be meeting a leading expert on the thought of John of Damascus. In an interview where I already ask whether his compilatory habits should give us pause. So don't hesitate to join me next time as I speak to Andrew Luth here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about John of Damascus with Andrew Louth, who is emeritus professor of patristic and Byzantine studies at Durham University. Hi Andrew, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me here. We're going to be talking about John of Damascus, who we've just been looking at in the podcast. Can you remind listeners who he was, when did he live, that sort of thing? He's born in the, probably almost certainly in the third quarter of the seventh century, so between 650-675, we're not at all sure. And he lived the first part of his life in Damascus, which is why he's called John of Damascus. His family had been the family that had been in charge of the fiscal administration in Damascus under all the regimes of the seventh century, the Byzantium, the Persians, then Byzantium again, then the Arabs. They managed to sort of stay there. And it's quite likely that John of Damascus went into the fiscal administration under his father towards the end of the seventh century. And then beginning of the eighth century, it looks as if the caliph decided that the administration was going to become much more Islamic. And it looks as if it was then that John of Damascus left Damascus and went down to Jerusalem, where he became a monk, where he lived the rest of his life. Most of his writings, I think, come from this period when he was a monk, probably in Jerusalem. The tradition is that he was at the monastery of Marsava, but it's a late tradition, and I don't think anybody believes it any longer. And as a monk, he would have been exposed, obviously, to a great deal of patristic literature, but also he knows something about pagan literature, philosophical literature. He refers to them sometimes. Yes. He refers to pagan literature in very general terms, those outside it is. He hardly ever mentioned anybody. He mentioned Aristotle once, I think. But his knowledge of classical literature or pagan literature would have been from his education. He's clearly very well educated because he could write very well. He writes much, much more clearly, say, than Maximus. And actually, there's an article by Mango which points out that the great writers at the end of the seventh, beginning of the eighth century, all come from Damascus, which had been for centuries a great century of Hellenistic culture, and still continued, I think, as a place where a really good education was available, probably better than in Constantinople. Oh, really? And so we could also put this in the context of more general Syrian culture, which also produced theological literature and philosophical literature in Syriac. Whether John knew Syriac is not at all clear. He almost certainly knew Arabic. But he certainly came from a Greek-speaking family in Damascus. No man may not necessarily have known Syriac. And would you say that he, as it were, holds the pagan thinkers at arm's length? Or is he deliberately trying to integrate them into Christian theology? I don't think he's deliberately doing anything. I think he's so much part of a tradition that when we talk about the influence of pagan philosophy on him, the influence, say, of Aristotle, Porphyry, whoever, I think almost invariably it's coming through somebody else. I don't think there's much evidence, possibly, possibly, parts of the dialectical. He put this together from Porphyry or six century Aristotelian sources. But I'm not sure. I think he's dealing with a world where all this has already been assimilated into Christian education. And that means that he doesn't seem to have much hesitation in using concepts and terminology that we might associate with pagan philosophy in the context of, say, talking about Christology or the Trinity. So a lot of this material is in John, but also before John is shot through with what someone like me would consider to be technical terminology from Aristotelianism. Like say, ousia, which means substance, or hypostasis, which means something like existence. Yeah. And that, I think, in a sense, that has all become part of the Christian tradition, really in the sixth century and some sense in the seventh century. I think Maximus is also largely drawing on a tradition that he doesn't regard as being particularly pagan. It's the way Christians have been thinking for at least a hundred years. And can you give us maybe an example of how this works in practice? So how would he use philosophical or what someone might consider to be philosophical terminology in a theological context? There's a great deal of interest in defining individuality. The context of all of this is the theology of the Trinity and Christology. Because by the sixth century, the standard language is that God consists of three hypostasis, one ousia, and Christ consists of two phycis and one hypostasis or prosopon. And so what do these words mean? So we have ousia, prosopon, and phusis. Ousia means being, often translated as substance. But I think it's more helpful to you being, because it's vaguer, and I don't think it is particularly clearly defined. Phasis is a term which I don't think has got any real background in pagan thought in the way that Christians use it. It's more or less the equivalent of ousia, but it's a different word. And I think that the term basil, particularly in another capital, his brother basically, not Perigonasianus. In the fourth century, you wanted to be able to talk about the way in which God is in two different ways. The way he is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the way he is as God. And Basil more or less suggests, well, we'll use ousia for the oneness of God, and we will use hypostasis for the threeness of God. So there are three persons or hypostasis, one divine being. And then that language is used in the Chalcedon in relation to Christology. There are two kinds of being in Christ, or two theses, two natures. There's a divine one and a human one, but they are united in a single hypostasis. And the next century, the sixth century, oversimplifying it, but the sixth century spends a great deal of time trying to work out what this really means. I mean, the terminology, the councils introduced terminology, but they didn't define it. And the definition of what you mean by ousia, what you mean by theses, what you mean by being, what you mean by nature, what you mean by hypostasis or person, this really belongs to the sixth century. And in the context of real division in the church as to whether this language is satisfactory or not. And would you say that John is an innovative figure in this tradition? No. And he's not trying to be innovative, of course. He's not trying to be, he isn't, I don't think. He's a great clarifier. I think that if you read his dialectica, you would come away with a very clear sense of what kind of thing he means by hypostasis, nusia, and theses, and so on. But he's not new. It's all taken from other people. And he doesn't want it to be new. Where he does have ideas that are perhaps both venue in a way, is one of the other topics that came up in the seventh century was the heresism of what's called monosyllitism, monenerism, which is a kind of compromise between those who accept to Chalcedon and those who reject to Chalcedon, the Monophysites. And the compromise of who agree with Chalcedon is one person, there are two natures, but there's only one activity or one will. Right. So monosyllitism means one will. Monosyllitism. Yes. And monenergism means one energy. One activity. One activity. And Maximus is a great good time trying to sort this out. And I think Maximus' thought is largely tentative. He's created a problem for himself by insisting on two wills, because he wants a Christ with two wills, which doesn't destroy his unity. And but also, the two wills are actually genuine. He's not happy with the idea that the human will is simply quiescent, which I think almost as monotheistic thought. I don't think they thought he didn't have a human will. But the human will was simply quiescent. Just doesn't do anything. It doesn't do anything. It just follows the divine will. Whereas Maximus wants to say Christ has two wills, divine and human, and they just agree about everything. And they do agree, but they come into agreement. The will actually, the human will. In the agony in the garden, when Christ says, not my will, but your will be done, there is an engagement between Christ's human will and Christ's divine will, because the Father's will is his divine will. And what's John's position on this particular issue? Well, the thing is about John is that John goes a step further. He says that there are two different wills, two distinct wills, divine and human, but that the product of the will, what you will, the thilliton, what you will, is one in case of Christ. And that sort of clarification is no more than that, I think, is found in John in a way that you don't find in Maximus. I see. So Christ wills to walk on water, and that is an example of the divine will and the human will agreeing to walk on water, but the walking on water is one thing. Yes, exactly. In fact, that's one of the standard examples. And it really goes back to Severus of Antioch, the great opponent of Chalcedon in the fifth, sixth century, who objected to this idea that Christ does human things and he does divine things. And Severus' example, what about the walking on the water? It can't be divine because it's walking. It can't be human because it's walking on the water. So what is it? It must be a divine human activity. Right. Now, that's picked up by the Orthodox eventually, and they interpret it as showing how the divine and the human are genuinely authentic because it is walking and it is on water, but it's a single activity. And I think with John of Damascus, that is, it's only a tiny clarification, but this notion that there are two thalimata, two wills in Christ, but only one thaliton, only one object. Something I personally find really exciting and fascinating about John of Damascus is something you've already mentioned, which is that he lives in Damascus and then he's in Jerusalem. And these are places in the Islamic empire during his life. And so in a way, he's not, I mean, in some sense, he's not a Byzantine figure, right? Because he doesn't live in the Byzantine empire. In another sense, he obviously is. He's a Christian theologian who writes in Greek. What was his attitude towards Islam? And in fact, how much did he really understand and know about Islam? Was he interested in it? Was he curious or does he just kind of fob them off with superficial criticisms? I think there's a lot of disagreement over this and the disagreement is connected with partly questions of what we can really ascribe to John. I am pretty certain that the 10th, sorry, the 100th heresy on heresies which deals with Islam, I'm pretty sure that is by John of Damascus. But there's another work called the dialogue between a Saracen and a Christian. This is said to be apophonis to Ioana de Moscigno. Which is from the voice of. And actually apophonis is quite regularly used in this period to mean from the teaching of, they're not necessarily printed by the teacher. Yeah, you see it a lot with late antique commentaries on Aristotle. It will say from the mouth of or from the voice of Ammonius. That's to mean that it's his commentary, but it was written down by his students. Yeah. And I suspect that's quite like. The other question is what was Islam like in the end of the 7th, beginning of the 8th century? Was it a thing called Quran? Is there the kind of the body of doctrine that exists now? Was it fully fashioned by then? I mean, according to the traditional Islam, the whole of the revelation that's contained in the Quran was delivered to Muhammad. And by the time Muhammad died, it was finished. And it's all there complete. But my impression is that quite a lot of more recent scholarship on Islam suggests that there was a time when the various surah of the Quran existed independently and were brought together over a period of time, not all beginning of the 7th century. But either way, John definitely knows this text or body of text because he cites specific passages. But the interesting thing about John is that John knows a little bit of it. And it could be. He knows three surah and he knows another surah, which we don't know about. Though the contents of it you can find in other parts of the Quran. It's called the surah of the camel. Yeah. And that would fit with the idea that Islam took time to consolidate. And that so John Damascus knows Islam in an incorrect state. I mean, that's one possible. And it seems to me very, very plausible. If that's the case, then what? Well, he's quite clear that Islam is wrong. He regards it as the last and the most dire heresy. And after that, there's any antichrist to come. I think it was taken very, very seriously. The very apocalyptic opening of Onherus's 100. I don't think it's just literary. Yeah, he says they're harbingers of the antichrist. That's right. Literally. Yeah, he says that's what he means. But on the other hand, I think he's very clear about what Muslims say about Christians and how Christians can respond to Muslims. The first and the main criticism that he wants to respond to is that Christians are associators, that they associate someone with God who isn't God. And that is genuinely Islamic, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, that's one of the standard accusations that they even make against each other in theological disputes. The shirk, which is polytheism, basically. But you see, and he's quite clear. That's what they... He responds robustly. They're saying, no, we are not associators, but you are mutilators because you mutilate the Godhead. And his way into this is by saying that God has a word and a spirit. And I think the Quran says this too. And his question is, what about this word and spirit? Are they created or are they uncreated? And certainly in the dialogue with the Saracen, the Christian says to the Saracen, you have to be very careful because if you say that the word and the spirit are created, you will be in deep trouble with your own Muslims. And I think all this fits into what I... They are these sort of mutazilim discussions. Yeah. There's this big debate that happens after John's period in the ninth century, really, about whether the Quran is created. And since the Quran is the word of God, that effectively is a question about whether God's word is eternal with God, which is the side of the debate that eventually wins out, or whether the word is created. Yeah. And there actually has been some discussion in secondary literature about the extent to which that debate has... Debate about the Trinity as a kind of preparatory stage or an influence. I mean, in that respect, John knows what he's talking about and looks as if he knows enough about Islam to know where it differs from Christianity and where they criticize Christians. For the rest of it, a lot of the things he says about Islam and about Muhammad are... How can I put it? They're impolite. Very impolite. I mean, he attacks and he attacks very vigorously. But of course, this was standard form for rhetoric in classical times and in late antique times. If you criticize, you don't just sort of say they're wrong, but you say that they are liars and they are fools and so on. I mean, that's standard form. And I think one shouldn't be surprised that John takes this line and get very upset about it as if he has nothing to say other than to vilify them. That's not true. He knows very clearly what the issues are. The other interesting thing about this is that I argue in my book that if you look at the presentation of the Trinity in his online Orthodox faith, he goes back to Gregory of Nissa to his Catholic exploration and uses that as the template. Now, in Gregory of Nissa, the template is there is God, the Father, who has a word and has a spirit and devotes the doctrine of Trinity out of this. And I think that it cannot... I think it must be the case that he chooses to go back three centuries to use a rather primitive form of truly Orthodox Christianity written by a genuine father. Because again, it presents Christians with a way of presenting the Trinity, which is going to be less easy for the Muslims to reject because it uses the sort of terminology they're familiar with. It's less technical and complicated. Yes. But actually that brings us to another question that I wanted to ask you, which is precisely this concept of Orthodoxy. I mean, obviously the Muslims are not Orthodox Christians, but there's also a lot of debate going on within Christianity. We've already talked about Christology. We've talked about the Trinity. There's also iconoclasm. And something we've discussed already on the podcast is that he vigorously attacks iconoclasm and defends the icons. So when he does these things, he obviously historically, he was helping to form what becomes Orthodox belief in the Byzantine Eastern Church. What would he have thought of himself as doing? Is he saying, here is exactly the list of beliefs that you should adopt, or maybe even here are exactly the forms of words you should utter and you shouldn't say anything else? So is it like a catechism in other words? Or is it more like he's trying to police the boundaries of acceptable belief while leaving a lot of room inside those boundaries for freedom of thought and debate? It's a bit between those. With the triumph of Islam in the Middle East and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, it meant that all Christians were on a level playing field. There was no favored imperial party as had been the case with since Constantine. And that meant that Christians had to be very clear about what it was that they thought and be clear why the others were wrong, which they needed to argue. And that's why I think, for instance, one of John's works is called The Electric. It's a textbook of logic, helping you to define the terms you use and also, I think, helping you to argue properly and convincingly. And it seems to me that there's a lot of evidence in the 7th century there's a great deal of argument between different groups because Islam had taken away a dominant group that could just simply rely on persecution as well. The argument as well. Behind the argument, there's an iron fist, let's say with Justinian, but in the 7th century, no longer. And I think this means that people have then to be very defined and be clear about what it is they believe and clear about what is wrong with those who believe otherwise. And this would include other Christians like the Malofsites, to use the term that the Orthodox use of them, the Malofsites, those who don't accept Karsine, the Nestorians, those who don't accept Ephesus. And then, but it would also include, you would get into arguments again, for the first time, for a long time, against Manichae. Because with the, I mean, the 7th century changes the geography. And so, where's the Byzantine Empire ended with the Tigris Rufrates? This Islamic Empire stretches to India and includes a whole range of things that have been sort of pushed out of the empire, like the Nestorians, like the Manichae, and so on. Also, the Jews become important again, because again, they are a people of the book, they are just as protected as Christians. Whereas in the Christian Empire, they were very much not equal to Christians. And so, there's a great deal of debate in the 7th century. We only know the Orthodox side of it, but I'm pretty sure that this was just one side. It's just because of history that we have this. So, what's going on, I think, is that John of Damascus, sitting in the shadow of the mosque that had been built on the Temple Mount, knowing perfectly well who's politically in charge, is clear and wants to define who the Orthodox are. It's about this time that people start to use Orthodox as a kind of self-defining term. As a word, you mean? Yeah. I mean, it's always existed, but as a way of expressing one's identity, because one's Orthodox, I think belongs to around this time. So, actually, I guess what you're saying is that it's really more about defining a group around a set of beliefs, rather than a kind of thought police project where he's telling you, do say this, don't say this. He's more saying, here's what we think and here's why we think it. He's giving you arguments against the other communities in this very multicultural context that he finds himself in. That's right. I think it's right to say that Orthodox is a matter of working out what the boundaries are, but I'm not sure how much freedom there was within this. And as far as John's role in the later Orthodox tradition goes, something that you point out in your book, which I actually found somewhat surprising, is that John doesn't seem to have been very influential in the generations after his death. Certainly his works against iconoclasm would have been works to even to possess would be, put you in very great danger of your life until iconoclasm is well over. Iconoclasm isn't well over until a century after John's death. The fact that he wrote these means that any of his other writings would be, of dubious things until iconoclasm is well over. One thing that might disturb some readers of John is that his works are not original in a different sense than the one we mentioned earlier. We said he's not trying to be innovative. He's adhering to a theological tradition, but he does more than that. He actually writes works that are just kind of cut and paste texts where he brings together lots of different sources, lists them with or without commentary. And this is actually an interesting feature of Byzantine thought that I'm going to go on to discuss. So I was just wondering what you thought about this. How do you think one should go about reading a text which is cobbled together from other texts? There's a remark by Lionel Wickham, a great patristic scholar, who says that patristic scholarship aspired after the genre of the Florilegium and in John of Damascus found its goal or something like that. And a Florilegium is one of those compilations. A Florilegium is a collection. John of Damascus does prepare proper Florilegia. All of the works against the iconoclasts either morph into a Florilegium as the first or contain an actual list of quotations at the end in support of the case. And John's Florilegia on iconoclasts are enormously influential. They get to the West very quickly. There's a manuscript that can be dated in the about the 780s, I think it is, which has got a Florilegium which is clearly very indebted to John. That's within 30 years of his death. His polemical works, which are the least well known of his works, mostly on Christology but is also one against Manichaeism. His polemical works use quotations from the fathers because that was the way you argued. But they're not really Florilegia. There's a real argument going on and John is in command of this argument. On the Orthodox faith is intended to be an epitome of Orthodox doctrine and on the whole, he does this by taking some Orthodox source. There is for the Trinity, he takes Gregor of Nyssa. He uses a lot of, he loves, in Gregor of Nisens, lots of quotations from him. Maximus for Christology and the Will. Nemesius Vimesse he uses a very great deal for general information about everything. Nemesius Vimesse wrote a book on human nature which is an elaborate description of human nature, again drawn from other sources, by which he is very clear, he cites them, which was used by later Greeks as a kind of a summary of modern science, what we know about the human being, how it works, how the humans operate and what sort of stuff. So is John just thinking that he needs to put this information together in a useful way to make it available to people? Yes, I think so. So it's really, it's almost like a pedagogical project. The other thing that I should mention because it's never, isn't mentioned, and I think he's probably in some ways the most important thing about John O'Jaskis, he's also a poet and he wrote an enormous amount of liturgical poetry. I mean he's attributed, he became so famous as a poet within the Byzantine tradition that he's, that enormous amount of stuff is attributed to him, it really isn't by him. But he's one of the great writers of canons and this is a form of monastic literature. It's a song which accompanies the ode that is sung at Matins. And I mean any orthodox Christian, well most orthodox Christians, will know by heart the Easter canon. And what this is also composed from patristic sources. But what he does, he will take phrases from particularly Gregory Nazianzus and sometimes with other people and put them all together and you get, it isn't that you don't know it's a patchwork because it fits together so nicely, but what he's done is take these prose sermons and turn them into songs and so that the orthodox faith can be sung and therefore remembered. And I think in some ways that is as important as his only orthodox faith, but only within the Byzantine world. This doesn't translate into the Latins. Well, it's not entirely true. Some of his, Trapara, his verses do get through into Latin, but they're only a very small number. Okay, well actually that gives us a great transition to the next episode, which is going to be about compilations and works of that kind in the Byzantine tradition. For now, I'll thank Andrew Love very much for coming on the show. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it very much. And please join me next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Collector's Items, Fotius and Byzantine Compilations Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect. The word trainspotter, which refers to a railway enthusiast, is in British English synonymous with loser, and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless. We've all shaped our faces into a frozen smile and uttered a forced, wow, when being shown, say, a neighbour's collection of Star Wars figurines, or a cousin's treasure trove of memorabilia from the career of Donny and Marie Osmond. At such moments, I remind myself that I too am prone to the collector's impulse. I refer not to my complete edition of Buster Keaton's silent films, for which I make no apologies, but to my embarrassingly large collection of books about ancient and medieval philosophy. The roots of addiction were planted early in my own career, when a young man who was considering studying philosophy looked around my office and said, so I guess you're new here. When I asked how he knew this, he said, because you hardly have any books. That was about twenty years ago. Nowadays, a visitor might reasonably conclude that I am preparing for a cataclysm in which all of Western civilization is destroyed with the lucky exception of my office, so that future historians will be able to reconstruct the early history of philosophy using nothing but my private library. What they will make of my plastic, dancing James Brown doll, I hesitate to guess. In my defence, I would point out that collectors of the distant past achieved more or less exactly what I just described. We owe much of our knowledge about antiquity to obsessive collectors whose efforts defied civilizational collapse, preserving precious texts and information like Noah saving the animals aboard his ark. Right of place, at least as concerns the history of classical philosophy, must go to Simplicius. A Platonist living in the 6th century, he feared that the rise of Christianity would make it even more difficult to get access to ancient pagan literature that was already hard to find. This is why he packed his commentaries on Aristotle with extensive reports about and quotations from pre-Socratic philosophers and other thinkers. We should also be grateful to the Byzantine scribes who copied out those massive commentaries and to other scholars of Byzantium who usually get no respect, those whose literary output consisted of compilations and summaries of earlier texts. While not the most innovative of thinkers, they produced works that survived through the collapse of their own society and that transmit otherwise lost parts of the history of philosophy. We saw with John of Damascus that in Byzantine culture philosophical writing often meant compilation rather than original composition. These philosophical chapters gathered together all the logical materials one needed to master in order to do Christian theology. Though unprecedented in ambition and influence, the approach of John's book was, like its contents, nothing new. From the so-called Dark Age of the early Byzantine period, around the 7th century or so, we have several logical compilations that likewise answered the need to educate students in logic. John himself drew on such summaries, and the authors of the earlier textbooks in turn looked back to the late antique school of Alexandria where the aforementioned Simplicius had studied. Though these compilations occasionally show some originality in their arrangement of the materials, their purpose is simply to present the basics of Aristotelian logic, much as was being done in Syriac and Armenian at about the same time. Thus, Mosman Roushé, who studied and edited several of these treatises, has remarked, "...perhaps philosophical activity is too generous a term to bestow upon works of so little effort and originality." But their mere existence shows the importance of logic to Byzantine intellectuals. They found it unproblematic to take over at least this part of the Hellenic intellectual inheritance because it seemed to them neutral with respect to the divide between pagans and Christians. As Roushé puts it in his study of another logical compilation from the 9th century, insofar as logic was a tool of philosophy and not a doctrine, its use by the Christian apologist was encouraged. As its application was inexorable and its utility common to all, often only the meaning of its terminology was open to dispute. Of course, thanks to the scribes of Constantinople, we have the original treatises of Aristotle devoted to logic, and for that matter a wealth of late ancient commentary on those treatises. So if these early compendia were lost, it would deprive us of little more than the insight that an interest in logic did persist through the Dark Ages. The same cannot be said for the numerous texts known as scolia, a technical term that refers to comments written in the margins of manuscripts. We don't usually put much value in marginalia, yet these scolia were seen as important in Byzantine culture, enough so that scribes would routinely copy out scolia found in a manuscript along with the main text. Scolia seemed first to have come into fashion because readers had difficulty understanding works of antique literature such as the plays by Aristophanes and other classical authors whom they took to be the ultimate representatives of good Greek style. Notes in the margins would explain the meaning of words that were no longer in use, or make observations about grammar, much as students of English literature nowadays need footnotes to help them navigate their way through a text of Chaucer or Shakespeare. In due course, scolia were used for other purposes too. Sometimes they preserved parts of otherwise lost philosophical commentaries, or make pertinent observations about the life of the author of the work being copied. Such information could also be set down in an independent work rather than in the form of scolia. The most impressive and important example is the so-called Suda, a staggeringly huge work of the 10th century with entries on individual Greek terms and personages, explaining each entry by pulling together information from earlier sources. Many of those sources were themselves compilations, so that this Byzantine encyclopedia has been called a compilation of compilations. The Suda wouldn't make for good bedtime reading, it's really a reference work whose modern edition runs to five volumes, but it is an invaluable resource for scholars of classical antiquity. The entries can also provide a revealing window into the minds of Byzantine intellectuals of the period. Consider its definition of the word philosophy. It first draws in a historian named George the Monk to tell us that philosophy is correctness in ethics along with belief in true knowledge about being. The Suda then abbreviates George the Monk's complaint about the philosophical failures of Jews and Greeks before adding a division of philosophy into ethics, physics, and theology, which is drawn from John Philoponus. So this little passage, despite being entirely unoriginal in its contents, reflects a moderate view according to which Christian truth is the full culmination of philosophical reflection. Moderate reflection, however, does involve philosophical disciplines apart from theology, including natural philosophy which is understood as an inquiry into bodily things and their forms. Probably no Byzantine expected to become famous for writing Scalia, but the man who came closest was Arethas, who lived from the 9th into the 10th century. We still have volumes that belong to his library, the full version of which would presumably have put mine to shame. The surviving eight books include Euclid, Plato and Aristotle, and feature notes written in Arethas's own handwriting. We even know how much he paid for these books. The Euclid cost him 14 pieces of gold and Plato 21. For comparison, a job in the famously vast Byzantine civil service paid a starting salary of about 72 gold pieces annually, so you can see that even a modest library back then would have cost a small fortune. Arethas's expensive taste was also a controversial one. In a letter written in 903, he confesses to having been an ardent lover of Aristotle and a warm inquirer of his works. In the end, though, he has decided that the call of Aristotelian philosophy is like that of the sirens luring ships to their doom in Homer's Odyssey. Note the characteristic use of an allusion to classical Greek literature, even as Arethas disowns Hellenic philosophy. It's been speculated that his enthusiasm cooled after he was accused of impiety in the year 900, with the charge sheet perhaps, including an undue attachment to pagan ideas. Arethas came by his fondness for philosophy in the same way Aristotle did, he got it from his teacher. This was Photius, the prize exhibit in our assembly of Byzantine collectors. He can take a good deal of credit for inspiring a revival of interest in Greek literature, science and philosophy that has been termed the 9th century Renaissance. And in case you're keeping track, they make three medieval Renaissance that came along well before the 1 and 15th century Europe. Along with 9th century Byzantium, the term has been applied to Islamic culture in the 10th century and Latin Christendom in the 12th. And as long as we're handing out titles, we can mention that Photius has been called the inventor of the book review. This in honour of his writing of a work called the Bibliotheca or Library, which collects reports on no fewer than 280 works, a number of which are known only or primarily thanks to the summaries offered here by Photius. Unlike most of the figures we'll be covering in the history of Byzantine philosophy, Photius played a significant part in actual Byzantine history. Thanks to his reputation as a man of learning, he was tapped for the role of patriarch despite being a layman. A breakneck round of ordinations saw him being made subdeacon, deacon, priest, and then patriarch in time for Christmas of the year 858. Not everyone saw him as the ideal stocking stuffer. The previous patriarch, Ignatius, had supporters who still saw him as the rightful holder of the post, and the confrontation between the two sides ran on for years. This already heated debate got even hotter when the Roman pope, Nicholas I, asserted the right to adjudicate in the affair, which was not welcomed in Constantinople. Lamenting the whole time that he would much rather be spending time with all those books, Photius found himself deposed and exiled, then made patriarch again in 877, only to be removed yet again in 886. He died while in exile in 893. For our purposes, it isn't necessary to get into the details of his checkered career as a churchman, whose complexity I feel almost obligated to describe as Byzantine. I do, however, want to mention his role in the famous rift between the Western and Eastern churches known as the filioque controversy. This Latin phrase means, and the Son. The debate concerned the acceptability of saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not only the Father. When it came to Photius's attention that some Western Christians were making this part of their recitation of the Creed, he was unsparing in his critique. His diatribe against the filioque clause nicely illustrates the point we've been making that logical and other philosophical ideas could be pressed into the service of theological dogmatics. For Photius, the capacity to generate other persons of the Trinity is the characteristic property that distinguishes the Father, so it cannot belong to the Son as well. He speaks of this in quasi-political terms as the monarchy of the Father and complains the filioque would instead introduce a duarchy, that is rule by two rather than one. Then too, if the Spirit has two causes, it would have to be a composite thing made up of parts introduced by its different sources. Yet we know that the divine persons are utterly simple. Photius certainly knew what he was talking about here, because his bibliotheca is nothing if not a composite drawn from many sources. As he explains in a brief preface, the work was written for his brother in anticipation of a diplomatic mission to the Islamic world, which must have been in either 845 or 855. Here's what Photius says. The point of this, then, is that Photius and his brother have been taking part in a kind of literary salon in which texts were apparently read aloud to the group, which makes sense if you think again about the expense and scarcity of handwritten books. But now Photius is going away on a lengthy trip, so he is going to give his brother consolation and edification with a wealth of information about the books he, Photius, has read. It is not only the fact that Photius has read the hundreds of works discussed in the bibliotheca, but also that he is recounting their contents from memory, or so he claims. He will not arrange the works thematically, but jumble together disparate genres and topics for the sake of a more entertaining overall product. In this, and in some of his wording here in the preface, Photius looks back to a female scholar of the Roman Empire, Pamphila of Epidaurus. She likewise mixed together heterogeneous materials in her writing on history. By the way, she is a good example of an author for whom we are dependent on the reports of Byzantine scholars like Photius, who discusses her work in his bibliotheca. As this already indicates, Photius's collection is not devoted only to philosophy. Indeed, our favorite discipline plays a pretty minor role in the work, which covers a wide range of genres including history, literature, and of course Christian theology, though it should be noted that a good half of the works covered are secular. Probably the assortment of topics is not so much a reflection of Photius's tastes as what he has been able to get his hands on and commit to memory. Yet, this election does seem to betray certain of his intellectual interests. These would include medicine, as well as the relevance of philosophy for doctors. Photius discusses Galen's work on the sects, and rightly notes that it is really a treatise on scientific methodology, one that to his mind is required reading before embarking on medical studies. Another philosophical issue that clearly caught Photius's imagination was free will. Probably his most valuable contribution to our knowledge of ancient philosophy is his summary of an otherwise lost work on the subject of providence by Hierocles of Alexandria, a Platonist of the early 5th century AD. Photius devotes two sections of the bibliotheca to this treatise. He explains that in it, Hierocles wanted to treat providence while bringing the thought of Plato and Aristotle into sympathy, a project he was taking over from Ammonius, head of the school of philosophers in late ancient Alexandria. Following this perceptive remark, Photius goes on to explain that Hierocles attacked rival conceptions about providence, the skeptical view of the Epicureans, and the determinism of Stoics and astrologers. Hierocles' champions were, of course, Plato, but also such pagan authorities as Orpheus and the Chaldean Oracles. According to the true Platonic theory, providence flows forth from the highest god through the heavenly world and then manifests itself in the earthly realm as fate. Within this system, humans retain their freedom, for it is in response to free actions that we receive just reward or punishment at the hands of fate. As Photius emphasizes, Hierocles was able to establish this only by taking recourse to a belief in reincarnation. Our fate in this life was chosen by us in our actions in a past life. This teaching is evidently problematic from a Christian point of view. Photius has clearly noticed this fact as he writes that Hierocles, starting from strange notions puts forward incoherent reasonings without it entering his mind on what grounds the doctrine of providence could truly be defended. But that hasn't stopped him from offering a detailed report of the work which is otherwise largely free of editorial remarks on Photius's part. He even goes so far as to wrap up the first of the reports on Hierocles by praising his clear and unflashy writing style as appropriate to the task of a philosopher. Photius's approach is similar in recounting the ideas of that hero of Hellenic philosophy, Pythagoras. Here, one could easily have the impression that one is reading a pagan Neoplatonist explaining his own intellectual lineage, perhaps because it's exactly that sort of text that Photius is drawing on. We are told that Plato and Aristotle were the ninth and tenth successors in a line of teachers stretching back to Pythagoras himself, and then treated to an exposition of supposedly Pythagorean doctrine that touches on topics ranging from the creation of all things out of the cosmic mathematical principles of monad and dyad, to theories of color, the soul, and wind. Autius also takes time in this section to defend Aristotle from the charge that he denied the immortality of the soul. As these examples suggest, the Bibliotheca is the work of a scholar of Hellenism who was a devout Christian but who didn't let his religious convictions stop him from telling us whatever he knew about ancient culture. Usually he simply ignores the question of why all this material would be useful for a Byzantine intellectual to know, but there is at least one interesting exception. In a section devoted to the Pyrronian skeptic Anesidemus, which again is invaluable since his works are lost, Photius clearly explains the distinctive nature of this form of skepticism. Whereas the so-called academic skeptics asserted the impossibility of achieving knowledge, the Pyrrhenists make no definite assertions at all about knowledge or anything else. Having explained all this, Photius adds, It is clear that Anesidemus makes no contribution to philosophical doctrine, but for students of dialectic the book is not without its uses, provided that its arguments do not impose upon unstable intellects and its subtlety does not affect the judgment. Perhaps we could extrapolate from this to an attitude about philosophy as a whole, or even Hellenic culture more generally. Enjoy it and make use of it, but do so carefully. Speaking of enjoying yourself and being careful, I'll take this opportunity to urge you to do both over the summer, which will be podcast-free for about a month while I take my annual break. And it will be well worth the wait, because we'll be discussing one of the greatest names of Byzantium. I know it's almost too exciting to bear, but at least you'll have a month to collect yourself before hearing about Michael Psellos, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Consul of the Philosophers, Michael Psalos. When Socrates proposes in Plato's Republic that philosophers would be the best rulers for the ideal city, he recognizes that the suggestion may well seem ridiculous, as well he might. If you've spent as much time around philosophers as I have, you'll know that often their organizational talent barely extends to wearing matching socks. No wonder, then, that even if Plato's authoritative status meant that philosophers in antiquity and the Middle Ages continued to envision perfect rulers as philosopher kings, real-life philosophers often found themselves outside the halls of power. In Latin medieval Christian culture, they were far more often monks or university masters than courtiers. Monasticism was also an important context for philosophical thought in Byzantium, as we'll be seeing. Yet there were major intellectual figures who had significant access to the imperial court. We already met one of them, Photius, another was Michael Psalos, arguably the outstanding author of the whole tradition of Byzantine philosophy. He earned this status in part by writing about non-philosophical topics. His most frequently consulted work is surely the Chronographia, a portrait of numerous emperors that has made him a key source for the study of Byzantine history in the 11th century. As Psalos emphasizes, he is providing first-hand testimony, having known personally many of the protagonists of his story. He came into court circles having achieved a reputation for learning, thanks to the encouragement he received from his mother, Theodota, who made sure he was closely acquainted with such classics as Homer's Iliad. He served emperors as a scribe and as a judge and was then honored as Consul of the Philosophers by Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus in the year 1047, a title that aptly combines the political with Psalos' main intellectual interest. But in Byzantium, no one stayed in favour forever, and Psalos would duly find himself packed off to a monastery, which is when he took the name Michael. He endured the ascetic life there for only a year. A contemporary poem satirizes his inability to commit himself to chastity by comparing him to the famously lustful god Zeus in what has been seen as a dig at his fascination for pagan learning. That commitment to pagan thought is evident from his multifaceted literary output, which has been preserved for us in astounding abundance. Almost 1800 manuscripts of his works survive today. Along with the Chronographia, they include many letters, rhetorical showpieces like funeral orations, theological treatises, and philosophical writings. Among the latter, we have a commentary on a logical text by Aristotle and a work that gathers together philosophical wisdom from many sources, often known by the Latin title De Omnifaria Doctrina. From this we can see that Psalos was to some extent continuing trends in the previous intellectual life of Byzantium. The collection of philosophical nuggets in De Omnifaria Doctrina has an obvious forerunner in the work of Photeus and other compilers. One can easily imagine the bibliophile Photeus saying, as Psalos did to his patron Constantine Manomachus, I came into the world for books, and am in constant conversation with them. Likewise, his choice to comment on Aristotle's logic fits with widespread interest in that field of philosophical endeavor going right back to late antiquity. Indeed, much of Psalos's effort was directed towards what the Latin Christians called the trivium, that is, the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic. This was not in a university setting. Nothing quite like the universities of Latin Christendom existed in Constantinople, though palace schools were established there. This was done already in the 9th century by the Caesar Bardas, with Leo the mathematician being given a chair for philosophy. Psalos, though, seems to have taught grammar and rhetoric on an informal and independent basis and compared the resulting group to a chorus with its leader. This was not atypical. Psalos boasted that he was a lone philosopher in an age without philosophy, but we know from his own letters that he did have teachers, as well as students, and we know too of other intellectuals in his day with an interest in such disciplines as logic and rhetoric. The surviving letters of Psalos reveal that the relations between teachers and students were politically significant. We find him offering them patronage, recommending them to other aristocrats, and in general warming to the role of the oldest boy in an old boy's network. All of this, including the reluctant entrance into the monastic life, might make Psalos sound like a Byzantine version of Peter Abelard, who worked in France only a few generations later. But unlike Abelard, Psalos reserved his greatest admiration for pagan Neoplatonists rather than Aristotle and the logical tradition. In an often cited passage from his Chronographia, he gives us a brief intellectual autobiography, writing, I came to Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, after which I progressed to the most admirable Proclus, as if arriving in a great haven, where I sought all science and accuracy of thoughts. After this, intending to ascend to first philosophy, and to be initiated into pure science, I took up first the knowledge of incorporeals in what is called mathematics, which have an intermediate rank between the nature that concerns bodies and the thought that is free of relation to bodies. Actually, that threefold classification of sciences into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, or first philosophy, with the three disciplines corresponding to three types of being, goes back ultimately to Aristotle. But it's still pretty clear from the passage that Psalos is enthusiastic about Platonism. Strikingly, it is Proclus who receives particular praise, even though Proclus was notable for his flagrant paganism, something not nearly so prominent in some other late ancient Platonists like Plotinus. Here we come to a crucial question, or even the crucial question, about Psalos' philosophy. What was his attitude towards non-Christian Hellenic culture generally, and towards the pagan elements of ancient philosophy in particular? It is not easy to give an answer, in part because it is hard to know which parts of Psalos' vast corpus of writings record his considered personal views. Sometimes, as when he responds to a request for a philosophical treatment of the soul, he quite openly says that he is simply going to collect the views of other authors. Even in this sort of case, though, his choice of material may seem to imply approval. Indeed, it has been said that Psalos quotes what he agrees with and tends to leave under silence statements with which he disagrees. Others think that a philosophical compilation like De Omnifaria Doctrina is unreliable as a guide to his true convictions and thus point us towards his theological writings. The most radical view has been put forth by Anthony Caldellis, who wrote a study of the Chronographia arguing that Psalos cloaked his true and essentially anti-Christian sentiments in all his writings, betraying them only with hints and indirect illusions. But this interpretation is difficult to square with Psalos' writings on theology, and Caldellis is often forced to resort to the expedient of insisting that Psalos means the exact opposite of what he says. In fact, it seems clear that Psalos was both a sincere Christian theologian and a devotee of classical learning who was fascinated by pagan philosophy. His solution to this tension was to present Hellenic materials in a positive light, while also distancing himself from them. We see this in a letter he wrote to his colleague John Tsiphelinos, who was given a chair of rhetoric the same year that Psalos was honored as Consul of the Philosophers. Psalos would later write a funeral oration for him. In the letter, Psalos takes umbrage at being called a follower of Plato. On the one hand, Psalos is glad to style himself as a Platonic philosopher, but he rejects the implication that he is thereby departing from orthodox religious belief. Allegory can be a useful tool for finding the truth in Hellenic sources, and Psalos takes this approach to the Iliad and the Odyssey, just as the Neoplatonists had done before him. When Homer speaks of Zeus and the other gods, we should take this to refer to the one God of Christianity surrounded by the angels, while Troy's seizing of the beautiful Helen symbolizes foolish attachment to the things of this world. Psalos says that it would obviously be madness to expect anyone to abandon Christianity in favor of pagan wisdom, yet the Christian should nonetheless take cognizance of Hellenic thinkers, and if they somehow stand a chance of helping you towards the truth, then make use of them. Confirmation of this can be found in Psalos' commentary on the Chaldean Oracles. Of unknown authorship, this late ancient body of writings was seen by Neoplatonists as a work of divine inspiration. Its ostentatious paganism could hardly be denied, and Psalos makes no effort to do so in his commentary, which draws on a lost commentary to the work by Proclus. Instead, Psalos presents the pagan teachings one by one and remarks on the compatibility of each with the Christian truth. He is not afraid to label certain ideas in the oracles and in Proclus himself as ridiculous, as for example the originally Platonic notion that the whole universe has a single soul. He is also forthright in his rejection of astrology and beliefs in the efficacy of magical items like amulets, though he is clearly interested in the occult aspects of pagan culture and writes a work about demons that will be read avidly by the Renaissance Latin philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Conversely, Psalos is not afraid to trumpet agreement between Christianity and paganism when he can find it. Elsewhere, he remarks that Plato was not far off the truth and, in an alien guise, mystically discourses on our theology. In a discussion of the possibility of receiving a revelation from God, he points out that pagans had similar ideas, writing, That last phrase, intellect from the outside, is a favorite philosophical borrowing of Psalos. He takes it from Aristotle's zoological works, where it is remarked that the intellect comes into the animal from the outside and that it alone is divine, because intellectual reasoning involves no physical process. For Psalos, this is an anticipation of the Christian idea that God, and in particular the Holy Spirit, can bestow knowledge on humans. This sort of help is needed because God is in himself inaccessible to the human mind. He appears to us only through his workings in the world and most perfectly in the so-called gifts of the Spirit. Around the time Psalos was writing, monastic writers like Simeon the New Theologian and his student Nikita Stetatos were urging that extreme asceticism was the best way to receive such gifts. The path to God lay through wailing, gnashing of teeth, mortification of the flesh, and other things that don't sound like much fun. As for Psalos, he actually owned some monasteries, yet he was little impressed by many of the supposedly holy men of his day, seeing them as hypocrites. He was also unsparing in his criticism of emperors who lavished money on the Church, seeing this too as hypocritical. True piety lies within and is not demonstrated by spending projects. And as events at court would later force him to discover, the monastic life was not for Psalos. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, I am a human being, a soul bound to a body. Therefore I take pleasure in both ideas and sensations. If someone places his soul above the body, he is both happy and blessed, but I would be content, even if I lived half for the body. And in another letter to a judge, I am partly divine while living in a body. So I do not like to be completely earthbound, nor am I convinced by those who compel us to soar beyond nature. He then adds that his favorite proverb is, Avoid extremes. His attitude towards Christian asceticism, then, is not unlike his attitude towards pagan philosophy, admiring but also taking critical distance. To put the point in the terms of ancient ethics, Psalos's more rigorous contemporaries urged their fellow Christians to achieve the state of apateia, that is, freedom from all bodily passion and desire. Psalos was content with the more modest goal of metriopateia, meaning the moderation of the passions. This brings us full circle to the question of what it means for a philosopher to be involved in political life. For Psalos, political virtue lies in the middle between a bodily life devoted to pleasure and a divine life that separates the soul from the body as much as possible and consists in pure contemplation. Such contemplation can never reach true fulfillment in this life, since, as just mentioned, God is ungraspable. This teaching is one that Psalos could find in both the Greek Fathers and in Neoplatonists like Proclus, who put the first principle beyond the world of intellect. Psalos thus imagines a supra-rational state in which the mind drinks from the river in silence as he puts it, inspired by the tale of Christ's suffering. Despite such enthusiastic, even mystical remarks, in his own life Psalos was content with mere political virtue. His approach to ethics was a realistic one, committed to virtue and aspiring to divinity, yet in the end not demanding too much. This is well illustrated by his attitude towards the monk Elias, who features in a number of Psalos' letters. Psalos expected this man to be a paragon of self-restraint, and was taken aback when Elias turned out to be a fun-loving chap with a good line in amusing anecdotes about brothels. Psalos cannot help enjoying his company, and after Elias' death, he expresses the hope that this entertainingly naughty monk may find a place in the afterlife between heaven and hell. Psalos applies a similarly forgiving standard to the rulers of his day. Thus, Basil II, the earliest emperor covered in the Chronographia, is revealed as an admirable character even though he was corrupted by exposure to the pressures of political life, and Constantine Monomachus is praised for his personality even though he wasn't a very successful emperor. In general, Psalos seems to think it is unreasonable to expect an emperor to be both exemplary in virtue and effective in political rule. So far, we have only scratched the surface of Psalos' varied and fascinating output, but that's okay, because he's going to be with us for several more episodes to come. We'll be moving beyond narrowly philosophical literature – all those commentaries on Aristotle and allusions to Proclus – but Psalos will continue to play a significant role. In this episode, the status of pagan philosophy has been an important theme, and that will certainly be the case when we look at Psalos' student John Italos and his condemnation for excessive attachment to Hellenic thought. Furthermore, I'll be looking at Psalos alongside some other Byzantine historians, who are of some interest to the historian of philosophy because of their methodology and often implicit political ideas. As I've mentioned, Psalos was also a rhetorician, so he will figure in an upcoming episode where we discuss rhetoric and Byzantine aesthetics. And he will also be important in an installment devoted to women in Byzantium because of the encomium he wrote for his mother. But before getting any further into this miniseries of episodes – a season of Psalos, if you will – we'll be talking to one of the world's leading experts on his thought. Join me next time for a man who might fairly be honored with the title Consul of Consul of the Philosophers, Dominic O'Mara, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Michael Cellos with Dominic O'Mara, who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg in Switzerland. Hi, Dominic, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Hi, Peter. I'm going to start with a quote from Cellos, which is the following. I alone practice philosophy in unphilosophical times. What did he mean by that? And was what he was trying to convey a fair assessment of the context in which he was working? Yes, we need to talk a little bit about what he means by doing philosophy or being a philosopher, and also what he means by unphilosophical times. I think by unphilosophical times he means the circumstances in which he lives, which are unfavourable to philosophy. He obviously thinks that he lives in a society which, so to speak, does not leave much room for philosophy. But nevertheless, in these circumstances, he tries to practice philosophy. But what is this philosophy that he practices, and why are his times unphilosophical? He has a concept of philosophy which we need to think about a little bit, because it's not really ours. Philosophy for Cellos is a very wide-ranging concept. And my good friend John Duffy has identified it with polymatia, knowing many things. As if for Cellos to do philosophy, to be a philosopher, is to know many things. It seems to be the reverse of what Heraclitus says when he denounces somebody who knows many things but doesn't understand anything. But for Cellos, knowing many things seems to be characteristic of philosophy. And if you look at how he articulates philosophy, you see that it comprises a whole series of sciences. There's metaphysics, there's mathematics, there's physics, there's what we might call psychology, ethics, politics, and even goes into things like judicial science, legislation, and rhetoric. philosophy seems to be almost the same thing as knowing everything. And Cellos wrote for his imperial pupil a little handbook called De Omnifaria Doctrina, which sort of means all sorts of knowledge. And in this little handbook, he has little chapters on practically everything you need to know about metaphysical principles, Christian principles, soul, body, the world, earthquakes, hailstones and free will and evil and so on. So he has an extremely comprehensive concept of philosophy and it seems to be the equivalent almost of being interested in everything and trying as far as possible to know everything. So what this means that for him to philosophize is in fact to master all of the known sciences, the sciences he could discover in a period which did not at all conform to this ambition of his. Does that mean that the opposition that he detected amongst his contemporaries had the form of being encouraged not to know everything? In other words, there were only certain things you need to know, maybe only religious knowledge, for example? Yes, I think at least one element probably is an implicit struggle with certain monastic currents, in particular currents of monasticism, of monastic asceticism and spirituality, which sought to avoid, let's say, pagan knowledge or Greek science, and which felt that spirituality could be developed, should be developed in a kind of a renunciation on reason. And so perhaps his emphasis on the richness, the variety of knowledge stands in contrast to the, so to speak, reduction of human reading to almost nothing and reliance on spiritual emotion, shall we say, cultivated by certain monastic movements of his time. So the opponent's idea would be that ascetic practice would be enough, it would get you to heaven, so you don't need all of this learning of rhetoric, science, metaphysics, and so on. That's right. There's a kind of a quick road to heaven, and you don't need to go through philosophy. And you need to wall yourself up in a cell and not eat anything for weeks on end. So it's not that easy. Okay, yeah, maybe it hurts a little. But one very interesting example of this is the way he talks about his mother. He wrote a speech in praise of his mother after her death. It's a funeral oration in praise of his mother. And his mother was very religious, so religious that to all intents and purposes she tried to live like a nun, although she was not a nun in her house. And one of the results of her action was as a spiritual fanatic, I would say, almost, was to send her husband out of the house. And he had to become a monk in a monastery. Another thing she did was to practically starve herself. So a physical asceticism, so to speak, driven to really extremes. The way Psellus describes it, it sounds really pretty bad what she did to her body. But in his description of her spirituality, let's say of her mysticism, Psellus has his mother use Plutinian ideas. It's very amusing. So his mother begins to Plotonize, so to speak, when she talks about union with God, as if Psellus had to recuperate this ascetic extremism practiced by his mother by giving it a kind of a philosophical dimension to it. And that way of presenting his mother shows also his criticism of these extreme anti-intellectual tendencies of asceticism of his time. That mention of Plutinus brings me to another question, though, which is that when he says there's all this learning that we could acquire, we should be reading these books, we should be steeping ourselves in the knowledge of the ancients. You called it the knowledge of the Greeks just now. But of course, when you talk about the Greeks, what you, I suppose, mean is pagans, not people who write in Greek because that's his contemporaries too. And isn't there a problem there for him to square the paganism of most of the texts he's interested in with his own Christian belief and the Christian belief of his society? Yes, this is a very difficult problem, and it's hard to give a simple, quick answer to it. On the one hand, Psellus subscribes to Christian doctrine and to the authority of Christian revelation and subordinates all knowledge to this authority. On the other hand, his evident love of knowledge, of philosophy in this very broad sense, which means he is curious about everything that he can find relating to all branches of knowledge, leads him to the very rich field of pagan philosophy, in particular the pagan philosophy of late antiquity, which can nourish his curiosity and which brings him all sorts of interesting materials. This can get him into trouble because this is of course a pagan material which is sometimes in contradiction with Christian revelation. And Psellus is walking a kind of a tight rope because on the one hand he tries to defend himself against the charge of heresy, in fact, or of being interested in unholy, dangerous things by the claim that wisdom involves knowing everything, being interested in everything, and it is his duty to the extent that he wishes to cultivate wisdom to be interested also in non-Christian things, to find out about all of these things. On the other hand, he has to make sure that he points out where in fact this pagan wisdom stands in conflict with Christianity, and then he just says this is absurd or this is nonsense or this is rubbish and this is in contradiction with Christian authority. So he gives us all of this knowledge and then he could say at the end, no, this is all nonsense. He comes in at the end and so it's not that he suppresses it as it's going on, he actually tells you everything it says, and then he tells you the bits that you should reject at the end. Exactly. And this is a curious exercise, but it's a kind of, I think, a attempt to compromise between subscribing to the authority of Christian revelation on the one hand and allowing himself to explore the riches of wisdom on the other. He also says, and this is a traditional idea that he picks up from the Church Fathers, that is that you can sometimes use philosophical arguments and ideas as a weapon against heresy. So not only is it curiosity in itself that motivates them, but possibly also the idea that sometimes these things can be useful even to Christian theologians. I think one thing that's striking about Selos in particular is that we're quite familiar in a way by now at this point in this series with the phenomenon of members of the Abrahamic faiths using pagan material, Aristotle, Plotinus, for their own even theological purposes. You can think about thinkers in the Islamic world, thinkers in Latin Christendom. But what's unusual about Selos, I think, is that he actually goes for some of the pagan texts that are most pagan and most strikingly difficult to reconcile with Christianity. In particular, I'm thinking of Proclus and the Chaldean Oracles. And although, for example, Proclus was influential in Latin and Arabic, he was influential in this very stripped-down form where you don't get lots of references to the pagan gods anymore. Instead, you get references to abstract principles like the one or the limit or soul. Can you try to explain how that could be, that Selos would deliberately go for the material that's most difficult? Well, the thing I'm trying to say is that I don't think we have a coherent, consistent, defensible position in Selos. He is somewhere in between, so to speak, and it's quite dangerous. Because he does, he's very enthusiastic, he actually loves philosophy, I think, seriously. And he's full of admiration for Plato and he thinks philosophy can solve all problems. Very, very ambitious. And this love of philosophy extends to and includes especially the philosophy of Proclus, and that includes the Chaldean Oracles. And so he goes into all of the stuff which is dangerous and totally useless, you might say, to a Christian theologians. But Selos persists, and I think that's one of the interesting things about him. He's living in a tension, in a sort of contradiction all the time. And I think this tension is not resolved, really. Another thing that's unusual about Selos is that he's almost two authors, because there's the deeply philosophical side we've been talking about. And then there's also Selos the historian, the author of the Chronographia, which is a work that's really been of more interest to historians than historians of philosophy, because it details the lives and achievements of a series of Byzantine emperors. So do you think that nonetheless, this is a text that philosophers or historians of philosophy should take seriously? Is there any philosophy in it, so to speak? I think the Chronographia is not just history. It's used by historians as a source of historical information. It's information about Selos' time, about the emperors of his time, and it's a really interesting, so to speak, chronicle of his times. All the more interesting in the sense that he is often at the heart of the events, and he knows often the people he's talking about. So it's an eyewitness account of Byzantine history at the time, imperial history. But historians have also recognized that it's not just history. It's something more than that. And in my view, Selos on the one hand is telling a story about the use of political power and implicitly criticizing the way political power has been exercised by a series of Byzantine emperors. And this means bringing out, in fact, how political power should be exercised. On the other hand, I think he's also talking about himself and putting himself into this picture and showing his role in this series of events and how he, as a philosopher, is an actor in these political events. Having in a way his ambition to unite philosophy and politics. And is the ideal reader that he's envisioning also a politically engaged person who's supposed to maybe take a lesson from the way that Selos acted or maybe take a negative lesson from the less attractive figures he represents? I think that's a good question as to what readers he has in mind. But I think reading it, you would see implicitly that these emperors all exemplify different moral failings, which are also political failings. Reasons why they fail, why they bring catastrophe to the Byzantine emperor. And they show that the Shoahop Selos tried to engage in the political machine, so to speak, right at the heart of it, in the court. And the sorts of things that made things go wrong where his action could no longer be exercised. We were talking at the beginning of the interview about occasions, circumstances which were unphilosophical. And circumstances keep changing and in some circumstances a philosopher can act. In some circumstances he can't. In fact, it becomes impossible. And this happened to Selos. He had to retire from the court and go to a monastery, hide in a monastery, so to speak, where he became Michael Selos. Because it was just impossible, too dangerous for him to stay in the court. But he came back later on when he could, out of the monastery, back into the court in Constantinople to try to act further as a philosopher at the heart of political power in the Byzantine empire. So he was thinking about Plato's injunction for the philosopher to go back into the cave and try to bring wisdom to the people. Certainly. Yes, he quotes Plato on the subject. And he says in antiquity philosophers did engage themselves in politics, Plato, but also Pythagoras, also Aristotle, but that this link between philosophy and politics has been broken. And he obviously thinks that this is something that should be reinstated, that the philosopher should involve himself in practical life, and in his case in political life, to the extent possible. So you came on the podcast before, actually, to talk about late ancient political philosophy. And you were just referring now to Plato, Pythagoras, really ancient philosophers. But on the other hand, you've told us that Selos was very interested in late antique figures like Prophos. What are the themes and ideas of late antique political philosophy that Selos can and does draw on in order to develop his own political views? Yes. For some preparatory remarks, Selos has a neo-platonic view of human nature. He thinks that human nature is made up essentially of the soul, which can exist independently of the body, and that this soul then comes in contact with the body, in relation with the body, and lives in this relationship. And corresponding to this distinction between the human as soul in itself or the human as soul in body, he uses the distinction, an old distinction, between the theoretical life and the practical life. So the theoretical life is the life of soul in itself, and practical life is the life of soul with respect to the body. And corresponding to these distinctions, the distinction between theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, practical philosophy itself is made up of ethics, politics. And Selos talks about politics in a way which I think is influenced by people like Proclos, by philosophers of late antiquity, who describe political science in terms of two sciences, legislation and jurisdiction. And these are parts of practical philosophy or political philosophy which Selos thinks are largely neglected or have practically disappeared at his time, and that there has to be some work on bringing legislation and jurisdiction on a theoretical level into order and this is the job of the practical philosopher or the political philosopher. What's the difference between those two parts? Presumably legislation is the making of laws, is jurisdiction the enforcing of laws? That's right. So there's a kind of subordination. There is on the one hand a formulation of laws, and these laws should be developed for the good of the community. And then jurisdiction sees that people are punished to transgress these laws, or let's say jurisdiction guards these laws from violation. So it's a sort of secondary science subordinated to legislation. And legislation itself is supposed to be an expression of the knowledge required for knowing how humans can live well, that is happily in their incorporated state as part of a community. I think these ideas that we find in Selos are ready to be found in Proclus. And Selos was able to use Proclus in order to formulate what it is that the philosopher, to the extent that he is political or practical, should know in order to contribute in terms of knowledge to the political process. And is that really what makes the good politician a good politician, just knowledge, there's nothing else you need? It's a very kind of platonic or maybe even Socratic idea of what makes a good ruler a good ruler. In Selos it's a little tough because he's living in a political system which is monarchical. It's based on the structure of monarchical power. It's not like you can apply to become the Byzantine emperor. You can't. Here's my CV. That's right. I've got lots of Plato. It's already determined in terms of who has power by things like blood and things like murder and power and money and so on. Nothing to do with knowledge. So the criteria for the acquiring of power are quite different from those that Plato would specify, in other words, the criterion of knowledge. So given the fact that you're living in this system where knowledge doesn't count at all but power does or money or blood, the philosopher can intervene as an advisor. He can advise the emperor in terms of political policy. And this is precisely the role that Selos gave himself. He was the philosopher with the knowledge who could advise the emperor in his policies and the chronography in fact as chapters giving advice on how to rule to the emperor. That's how Selos saw his action as a philosopher in the court. It's interesting isn't it because I think there's a tendency to assume that what philosophers really want to be doing is what they call contemplation, shutting themselves away and thinking about God or metaphysics or the soul. And obviously Selos did quite a lot of that. He was forced into it in a way, the life of contemplation. But I think it's interesting that he seems to have chosen a politically engaged life when he could. Does he have a worked out theory about why that's the right choice? Can he give us a philosophical account of why the engaged political life or maybe the life that involves both political engagement and contemplation is to be preferred to the life that involves only contemplation? Yes. Here again, as I was speaking about the tituar on which Selos found himself with respect to the relation between Christian revelation and pagan learning, he's also on a tituar with respect to the relation between contemplative and practical life. He fully subscribes to the priority, the superior value of the contemplative life, of the life of pure knowledge without any action practice. But on the other hand, he insists very much that he'd rather be involved in the practical life. And this has to do with his concept of being in the middle. He's, so to speak, in the middle between soul and body in his life. He's a kind of intermediary. And he thinks his role is to mediate, so to speak, between contemplative and practical life. He's not totally divorced from contemplative life and he admires it and has practiced it himself to some extent. But he thinks that his place in this life, so to speak, is to mediate and to make the junction between theory and practice, between contemplation and political action. He is also very interesting in terms of this insistence on the middle between extremes, and in this case, the middle between soul just in itself and a soul which is completely plunged into bodily concerns. He wants neither, but he thinks a successful life in this life, in this incorporated life, is a life in the middle, so to speak, where soul is not a slave of bodily desires, but controls these desires. But on the other hand, soul does take care of its corporeal condition. It does not abandon them and try to live, so to speak, by itself in another world. And he thinks that that would be the right choice for any embodied soul. It's not just a matter of taste that he likes to be engaged in politics. He thinks that every philosopher should, or even maybe would, as a true philosopher, would always get engaged in politics. I think he does, yes. He thinks the philosopher will have this concern to communicate. Sellars communicates in various ways. He's a teacher. He teaches in the court in Constantinople and he's a very active teacher, very interested in teaching his pupils. And when he talks about his mother's extreme example, he says that he can't meet up to her high standards of spirituality. He is deficient with respect to these high standards. And he says it is his lot, it is his duty. In fact, God has told him, the emperor has told him, his students tell him that he should teach, that he should communicate knowledge. So he sees himself as a philosopher charged with the mission of communicating knowledge to others. And this can be the knowledge that he communicates to his students, philosophical knowledge in general or perhaps more specifically, political knowledge that he can convey to the emperor. He is, as a philosopher, engaged at these various levels in this middle position between being totally enslaved to the body and totally ignorant on the one hand, on the other hand, being totally abstracted from the world and wrapped up just in some sort of transcendent existence. Does he give us a more fleshed out picture of what the best ruler will do or at least what characteristics the best ruler would have to have? For example, does he think that the best ruler would be an image of God and relate to the community the way that God relates to the universe or anything like that? I don't think so. It's a little difficult because the Conographia is not an entirely coherent piece. Most of it is very interesting in the sense that it does not conform to the normal pattern of what is called the mirror of princes or the firstenspiegel. And it's only at the end for the last emperor that Selass practices this literary genre of the mirror of princes. And this literary genre of the mirror of princes makes the emperor into the image of God. You're referring to this idea. And that as God rules the world, so the emperor should rule his people. And therefore the emperor will exercise philanthropy, love of man, just as God loves man. So these clichés of rhetoric which come from late antiquity in which the picture of the ruler as an image of God is repeated again and again. This is taken up again by Selass when he's referring to the emperor who reigned when he was finishing his book or coming to the end of his writing. But the earlier parts and the greater part of the Chronographia is not like that at all because the emperor has come across as a pretty terrible crowd. They seem to exemplify almost all of the vices one could think of and some of them are really bad. So we're very far from here pandering to emperors. We're far from the mirror of princes. We have a kind of a critique of the various vices including ignorance manifested by the different emperors and the catastrophic results of these vices on the population. The impoverishment of the empire, the misery of the population, the danger that this put the empire in with respect to its enemies. The vices you might say of the emperors have brought to catastrophic consequences in terms of material goods for the people in whose name, for whose goods these emperors are supposed to be ruining. Does Selass give us any idea why God saw fit to put this sequence of jerks on the Byzantine throne? I mean, it seems rather unkind. Is it a way of punishing? I think a lot of Byzantine intellectuals and theologians read the history of difficulties faced by the empire, the Arab invasions, plague, earthquakes, you name it. They would often say, well, this is because of sin, because of sin rampaging through the community and we're being justly punished. That doesn't really sound like it would be Selass' thought. No, I don't think that's his thought. For instance, when Procopius is denouncing the tyranny of Justinian, he says this is God's revenge and other people blame all the catastrophes that can happen to the empire in terms of God's revenge. The collapse of Hagia Sophia of the dome is blamed on the viciousness, the vice of the people of Constantinople. For example, I don't think this is Selass' line at all. He doesn't like divine intervention in the order of nature. He thinks that nature, this is also quite impressive, he thinks that nature has its own rationality. God is the cause of this rationality. But things happen in a certain order and you could describe this, if you like, as fate or as providence. Maybe all the things that we go through and all of the terrible things that we happen to have to undergo, again these chiroi, these occasions, are figuring this larger picture of fate. The fact that there are all sorts of miserable emperors or vicious emperors of various kinds, it's never quite the same situation, perhaps is part of a larger pattern of fate in which we can try to intervene to some extent, but of course we cannot control ourselves. I think he sees things more in that way than in terms of some sort of divine interventionism, so to speak, which he wishes to limit as much as possible. Okay, well thanks very much, Dominic, for coming on to talk about Michael Tsavas. Very welcome. And please join me next time when you'll have another occasion to learn more about Byzantine philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Hooked on Classics, Italos and the Debate Over Pagan Learning. Suppose you meet someone at a party who recommends a new restaurant that has just opened in your neighborhood. You make a mental note to go there next time you get a chance. As your chat continues, this same party guest begins to argue that the 1969 moon landing was faked by the government. In addition to excusing yourself to go freshen your drink, you would probably also tear up that mental note about the restaurant. This might be a mistake, given that partisans of wacky conspiracy theories are probably able to appreciate good food just as well as the rest of us. Yet it's almost irresistible to downgrade the value of testimony in this way. We want to take advice from people who are reliable, and when someone makes a dramatic lapse in judgment, we are apt to dismiss that person's other beliefs. Which raises the question, why would the Byzantines have been interested in anything that pagan philosophers had to say? As deeply committed Christians, they were convinced that Plato, Aristotle and other Hellenic thinkers were wrong about the most important beliefs of all. They were mistaken about the true nature of God and knew nothing of the salvation offered by Christ. So why treat them as philosophical authorities, having their works laboriously copied out by hand and made the subject of extensive study and commentary? Why not start from scratch, or rather exclusively from the late ancient church fathers whose works offered an acceptably Christian basis for doing philosophy and theology? As we know, the same dilemma confronted thinkers of Latin Christendom and to some extent, the solutions devised there were also echoed in Byzantium. One strategy was to compartmentalize. Aristotle may not have understood God properly, but he was reliable on logic and natural philosophy. This would be rather like discovering that the moon landing conspiracy theorist happens to be a respected food critic, which would encourage you to take that advice about the restaurant seriously after all. Another strategy was to give the Hellenic thinkers credit for achieving everything, or almost everything, that can be achieved with natural powers of reasoning. Being deprived of revelation, they were hardly at fault for being ignorant of Christ or the Trinity. Occasionally, pagans were even credited with having discerned something of God's Trinitarian nature using nothing but their natural wit. Like members of the 12th century school of Chartres, in 11th century Constantinople, Michael Pselos proposed that Plato's Timaeus gestures at a threefold divine source of all things. There were also special reasons for the Byzantines to be open to pagan literature. As we've discussed in previous episodes, a great premium was placed on stylistically excellent Greek, such as could be found in Plato's dialogues. This is certainly a big part of the explanation for the choice to preserve and transmit Greek philosophy and other literature, but it obviously implies no attachment to the ideas found in the texts. Indeed, one modern-day scholar has rather grumpily remarked that this was an age of uncreative erudition, sterile good taste when form was more important than content. But there was another factor at play. The works of those Church Fathers explicitly instructed a Christian readership to make use of the so-called outside philosophy. Especially important here were the three theologians we call the Cappadocians, the two brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, along with Gregory of Nazianzus. In one representative passage, Basil wrote that it is good to start one's studies with pagan material because our eyes must first get used to seeing the brilliance of the sun when it is reflected on the water and then look at the real light. Even if the Hellenic material is false, this will do no harm, since the Christian truth will look all the better alongside it. Which is not to say that the Fathers recommended the indiscriminate use of authors like Aristotle. To the contrary, they warned that the application of logic to the exalted matters of theology can lead astray, and they accused some of their opponents of falling into just this trap. Their stance then was a version of the compartmentalization strategy already mentioned. Pagan material is to be used regarding certain topics, but always with caution and while having in mind the superiority of Christian truth. In applying this strategy to Aristotle, especially his logic and natural philosophy, the Fathers were in a way echoing the approach of late ancient pagan Neoplatonists. They had likewise seen Aristotle's works as a good introduction to philosophy, something for students to read before graduating to higher truths, though for them the higher truths were to be found in the works of Plato, rather than the Bible. The Church Fathers could also be moved to harsh criticism of even the greatest pagan thinkers. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote in one passage, Strike against Aristotle's uncharitable providence his artificiality, his perishable arguments about the soul, and the humanity of his doctrines. This may sound inconsistent, but it's just the flip side of the compartmentalization strategy. Where Aristotle strayed into matters beyond his ken, he was unreliable, even pernicious, and Gregory was not afraid to say so. All of which left the Byzantines to perform a delicate balancing act as they sought to apply Hellenic philosophy in the support of Christian theology while making sure never to endorse the philosophy where it might come into conflict with the theology. Each intellectual had to decide where to draw this line in full knowledge that they might live to regret drawing the line in the wrong place. We already found that the bibliophile and scholiast Arethas, a student of Photeus, was charged with impious teachings in the year 900 and that this may have had something to do with his literary tastes, but the most notorious case of persecution against philosophy in Byzantium involved John Italos, who was put on trial in 1082. He was forced publicly to denounce his own teachings, or at least certain teachings that he had supposedly adopted. We can read the list of anathematized positions in the Synodicon, an authoritative document setting out orthodox belief. The anathema was in fact the first addition to the synodicon made since the defeat of iconoclasm. The list makes explicit mention of the pagan tradition and its excessive use, referring to, Those who offer courses on Hellenic subjects and do not teach these subjects solely for the sake of education, but follow the vain opinions of the Hellenes and believe in them as being true and thus, considering them to be correct, induce others to follow them. The document also sets out specific doctrines that were found objectionable. Anathema upon those who, of their own accord, invent an account of our creation along with other myths, who accept the Platonic forms as true, who say that matter possesses independent substance and is shaped by the forms, who openly question the power of the Creator to bring all things from non-existence to existence. Alongside these characteristically philosophical points, Italos was also deemed to have fallen into a range of heresies on theological matters, including Arianism and Sibelianism. The accusations thrown at him were almost absurd in their inconsistency. He supposedly went too far by saying that icons should be worshipped, not only venerated, yet he was also denounced as an iconoclast. In a letter that has come down to us, Italos unsurprisingly complains that his words were twisted to create a false impression of unorthodoxy. In due course, the ban on him was apparently lifted, but his name was lastingly associated with an undue attachment to Hellenic culture, as we can see from a legendary anecdote about his death, which has Italos leaping suicidally from a cliff while shouting, Receive me Poseidon! Who then was John Italos to cause so much fuss? As his name indicates, he was an Italian who came to Constantinople as a young man and became a student of Michael Psellos. One of the more informative texts about Italos is an encomium written about him by Psellos, who saw Italos as his intellectual son and Italos' own students as his intellectual grandchildren. Psellos admits that Italos, who was after all a non-native user of Greek, was no great stylist, but he made up for that with his acute mind. To quote from Psellos, For the inattentive listener his discourse is distasteful. It merely consists of syllogistic theses. He does not entice with style, nor does he attract with sweetness, but he conquers and subdues his listener with the content of his arguments. And he was indeed an argumentative character who would get into heated debates with Psellos' other students. A less favourable report about Italos is found in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene. She also complains about his awkward Greek and equally awkward temperament, but even she grudgingly admits that he was outstanding in logic. It's no wonder that Anna is unfriendly towards Italos, because it was her father, Alexios Komnenos, who was emperor when Italos was put on trial. Much speculation has been devoted to the motivations behind this act of persecution. One factor may have been Italos' origins, since at this time there was a Norman invasion from Italy threatening the Byzantine position. Italos was also a high-profile personage so that it was worth making an example of him. Both Italos and Psellos address some of their works to members of the powerful Doukas family, including the recent emperor Michael VII. Another factor may have been that the new emperor Alexios was a military man bent on humbling the civil aristocracy, the class to which men like Psellos and Italos belonged. In light of such factors, scholars tend to agree that this was a show trial with largely political motivations and that the charges had little or no basis in Italos' genuine teachings. Certainly, this imperial intervention in the intellectual affairs of the capital does not seem to have been intended to promote any one approach to pagan philosophy. As Michel Etrizio has written, the charge sheet was, Indeed, if we turn to Italos' actual writings, we find that he was pretty far from being a radical Aristotelian, Platonist or supporter of potentially heretical views. Regarding some of his productions, the worst you can say is that they are terribly derivative. A preserved commentary by Italos on parts of Aristotle's topics proves to be made up of nearly verbatim quotations from a much earlier commentary by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Rather more interesting are the short treatises he wrote for patrons and students on a variety of philosophical topics. In one treatise, Italos takes up the problem of universals, a mainstay of philosophical reflection in Byzantium, just as in Late Antiquity and Latin Christendom. His remarks here make an interesting contrast to those of Photius, who in a short treatise of his own had been critical of Aristotle's treatment of universals. Photius complained that in the categories, Aristotle recognises universals as a kind of substance, which is however secondary in comparison to the concrete particular substances we encounter in everyday life. Thus, the species giraffe is for Aristotle a kind of second-class substance, whereas the particular giraffe Hiawatha is a sterling example of a primary substance. Photius objects that on this Aristotelian view, two very different sorts of thing, universals and particulars, are being jammed together into a single class of entity both dignified with the title of substance. Besides, Aristotle himself recognises that something is either a substance or not. Substantiality does not admit of degrees. So how can Aristotle speak of substances that are more and less primary? Instead, Photius argues, we should adopt the understanding of substance we find in the Cappadocian Fathers. According to their terminology, which often features in discussions of Christology, substance is the same as nature. It should be identified with the species kind that belongs to each particular thing, for instance giraffe or human. Italos is much more inclined to follow the lead of pagan Greek philosophy here. Taking up a classificatory scheme found in late ancient commentaries on Aristotle, Italos recognises three kinds of universal or common natures, namely those before the many, in the many, and after the many. The universals before the many are paradigms in the mind of God, the models used in divine creation. The universals after the many are human ideas. We form them in our own minds by abstracting a general notion from our encounters with many particular instances of a given kind. As for the natures that are in the many, Italos says that these are actually particular and individual. By this he probably means that outside God's mind and human minds there is no such thing as giraffe apart from individual giraffes, the actual ones that lope across the savannah and nibble leaves off trees. While none of this is radically new, it does show Italos' familiarity with the late ancient tradition and his willingness to adopt a broadly Neoplatonic metaphysics. Particularly significant is his insistence on universals that are divine ideas. Ultimately, it is these paradigms that the philosopher wishes to know, and in knowing them, we can ourselves become divine. Italos also applied a Neoplatonic approach when discussing classical Greek literature. We have comments from him on some lines from Homer's Odyssey, which speak of two gates through which our dreams pass, one of horn and one of ivory. For Italos, Homer here refers to the way that our dreams have their origin in either the intelligible or the sensory realm, with our imaginative powers in the middle receiving messages from both sides. He rejects a different reading that glosses the passage in terms of diet, that is, the way that the foods we eat affect the dreams we have, deeming this interpretation low class. But we should not leap to the assumption that Italos' accusers had a point after all, that he, and possibly his teacher Psilos, were happy to follow the Neoplatonists wherever they might lead. Italos was forthright in rejecting standard Platonic doctrines such as the existence of the world soul, an animating principle that makes the entire cosmos into a single organism. And in some of his treatises, he surveys pagan philosophical views on a given topic expressly for the purpose of rejecting those views. Two good examples are short treatises by Italos on matter and on nature. In these works, he argues that if we consult ancient pagans, we could conclude that neither matter nor nature exist, because the pagan discussions of these topics are rife with contradictions. Echoing what we just saw in Photius, Italos says that we should prefer the patristic view of nature as that which embraces the individuals. This is the nature that is common to many things like giraffe or human. As for matter, Italos attacks an idea found in Plotinus that was very influential in Latin Christendom thanks to its adoption by Augustine. According to this account, matter is the source of evil, or even identical with evil. Italos thinks that another Neoplatonist, namely Proclus, was right to criticize this theory. After all, matter is part of the divine creation, so it cannot be intrinsically evil. Rather, it should turn back towards, or revert upon, its source and strive for goodness. On the other hand, Italos isn't happy with Proclus' theory of matter either. For Proclus, matter is simple because it underlies all form and differentiation, yet he also thinks that matter is furthest away from the One that is the source of all things. So it should not be simple, but multiple and differentiated to the highest degree. In this treatise, Italos' objectives seem to be entirely critical. He is content to set up a dialectical refutation of the Hellenic theories, hardly what we'd expect from a man who was anathematized for blindly following the vain opinions of the Hellenes. If we ask ourselves why Italos singled out this topic of matter for special attention, we may suspect that it had something to do with his rejection of another notorious thesis of pagan philosophy, that the world has always existed and will continue to exist forever. Italos denied this in part on the grounds that, in an everlasting world, there could never be a resurrection of bodies because the available matter would always be in use. His stance on the eternity question fits well with his rejection of real universals outside the mind, too. Italos considers and rejects an argument according to which universals are indestructible, so there must always be a universe in which they are instantiated. His answer is simply that real things are always particular, so there are no permanent universals or forms out there at all, never mind permanent universals that demand a permanent universe to house them. These treatises by Italos hardly represent a sustained attempt to set out a personal philosophy or system, or even to take a stance one way or another on the validity and utility of pagan thought. But they do suggest that he was not a particularly radical thinker. His keen interest in pagan literature and philosophy was tempered, at least by prudent caution and, to all appearances, by a sincere conviction that the doctrines of Aristotle and the Platonists need to be corrected in light of Christian belief. Of course, he was not as severe with the pagans as some of his contemporaries, for instance Nikita Sethatos, who wrote that all right thinking is guided by the Holy Spirit and who polemicized against those who, as he put it, teach matters different from what the divinely inspired Fathers teach. Then too, Italos was identifiable as something like a professional philosopher, a man who devoted his energies to the exposition and teaching of the Hellenic legacy rather than to, say, the Bible. This may help to explain why he was politically vulnerable. But he was hardly alone in pursuing philosophy as an intellectual specialty. As we'll see soon enough, his harsh critic Anna Komnina was herself deeply involved in the promotion of that same Hellenic legacy, and she supported a group of scholars who produced commentaries on Aristotle. The fact that John Italos in particular was anathematized may show simply that he occupied the right place intellectually speaking, but at the wrong time politically speaking. And as it happens, speaking politically is exactly what we'll be up to next time. As we saw in the interview with Dominic O'Mara, the works of Michael Svelos made a significant contribution to political philosophy, and he was not the only Byzantine thinker to make such a contribution, something we'll discover by casting our historical net a bit wider to take in ideas about political authority from the time of Justinian onward. That will be our imperial ambition next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Purple Prose – Byzantine Political Philosophy. Maybe you've seen this old sketch from the American TV show Saturday Night Live in which customers to a diner are rudely made to understand that the only thing they can order is a cheeseburger. Given that the skit is set in a Greek diner, I've always assumed it was meant as a satire of political life in the Byzantine Empire. There the menu of options was, similarly, limited to one choice – absolute rule by a single man or, occasionally, woman. For this reason, scholars have made rather discouraging remarks along the following lines – Byzantium did not produce any original political theory, nor did it trouble itself to discuss rival theories and the nature of the empire. And – perhaps the most striking feature of Middle Byzantine political culture is the paucity of political theory, the dearth of treatises on government and of philosophical discussions about the ideal constitution and the function of the state. Untrammeled imperial power was their cheeseburger, and it never occurred to them to order anything else. Actually, though, the Byzantine intellectuals were more like customers who just happened to prefer cheeseburgers. They were well aware of other ways of structuring society. A standard class assignment for students of rhetoric was to write an essay about the relative merits of the three classically recognized constitutions, namely monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Monarchy was the preferred option, on the grounds that a single authority is needed to ensure a stable and harmonious state. And another kind of authority encouraged this way of thinking – the intellectual authority of Plato, whose Republic was an influential text among the Byzantines. They were persuaded by his vision of a completely just society ruled by philosopher kings and queens and also by his critique of the other constitutions as defective. This ideology of the single, wise, virtuous ruler is evident from a number of sources, including the showpiece speeches written in praise of various emperors as a display of rhetorical brilliance, not to mention judicious flattery. Already among the pagans of late antiquity, rhetorician philosophers like Themistius had pushed the idea further than Plato had done. In one speech, Themistius compared the basileus, or emperor, to Zeus, arguing that the virtuous ruler on earth exercises a sovereignty like that of the father of the gods. Eusebius echoed the theme in a speech in praise of Constantine the Great, the ruler responsible for the Christianizing of the empire. As one scholar has written, this became the basis for a political theory that went almost unchallenged in its essentials for over 1,000 years. Moving past late antiquity into the early Byzantine period, we have a pair of interesting texts on political philosophy written under Justinian I. Both fall into the genre called Mirrors for Princes, works aimed at rulers giving advice on how best to carry out the duties of his office. The Byzantines will produce several more texts along these lines, and later on in this series we'll see famous examples from Renaissance Europe, notably Machiavelli's The Prince. One of the two texts from the time of Justinian is an anonymous work on political science, known only from a single manuscript and Fodius's summary of the work. The other is an influential and widely diffused treatise by a deacon named Agapetus. His Mirror was even translated into English in 1564 in a version dedicated to Mary, Queen of Scots. In these writings, the influence of Plato's Republic and other philosophical sources is palpable. Agapetus is not content to commend Justinian for his godlike virtue, but praises him as a philosopher-king, writing, Notice here the Christianizing of the very idea of philosophy, something we've seen already in John of Damascus. As for the anonymous author, he too shows knowledge of Plato and the ideal of the philosopher king, but also Aristotle and even Cicero's Latin political treatise, likewise titled The Republic. This anonymous author does seem to be critical of some of the more radical ideas in Plato's original Republic, such as the common sharing of children among members of the elite guardian class. But recent interview guest Dominic O'Mara has argued that this may simply be because the anonymous author sees it as an arrangement that could be adopted only in an ideal society, not in real life. That would be similar to the way such proposals were handled by the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus. Our anonymous political theorist also betrays a Neoplatonic mindset when he describes kingly authority flowing down through the ranks of society the way that divine providence emanates through the cosmos. This idea appears frequently in Byzantine literature on the emperor, especially in the form of a metaphor that compares him to a sun shining benevolently on all his citizens. One vivid representation of this metaphor was a court ceremony called the prokipsis, in which the emperor would emerge onto a lighted stage like the rising sun. In the same vein, a treatise written under Constantine VII Porphyrio Genetos compared the imperial court itself to the cosmos because of its harmonious and hierarchical arrangement. What exactly were the virtues possessed by the ideal emperor? In theory, all of them, since he was meant to be an image of God's goodness. But particular emphasis was often laid on the four cardinal virtues identified in Plato's Republic, namely courage, temperance, wisdom, and above all, justice. Also distinctive of the emperor was a trait called philanthropia, which has a somewhat more capacious meaning than our cognate term philanthropy, as the Greek term just means love of humankind. So though philanthropia did show itself as material generosity, shown by the emperor to his subjects, which is close to philanthropy in our sense, it could also include such things as merciful restraint in punishing the guilty. Such idealistic sentiments run right through Byzantine history and were still being expressed in a work on the emperor written in the 13th century by N. Kefirot Blomedis. Some few authors inclined towards more hard-nosed realism, admitting that you can't make the cheeseburger of stable political rule without breaking a few eggs. In a previous episode, I mentioned that in his work of imperial portraiture, the Chronographia, Michael Pselos seems to recognize that a successful emperor will sometimes have to be less than virtuous. This is clear from his occasional remarks on the role of emotion in good governance. He certainly believes that emperors can fail when they are too vulnerable to emotion and desire. For him, Constantine VIII was a good illustration. Yet Pselos also says that anger, when justified, can be useful and praiseworthy, something clear from his description of yet another Constantine, because in Byzantium there's always another Constantine, namely Constantine IX Monomachus. Mirrors for princes also recognize that rulers may have to get their hands dirty, morally speaking, and accordingly take up the question whether an emperor has to do penance for his official actions. Rather than answering, as one might have expected, that a good emperor is virtuous and therefore has nothing to repent, a distinction is made between the emperor as a private person and as a public official. This would make it possible for him to, say, impose the death sentence on someone who deserves it while keeping a clean conscience as an individual Christian despite the commandment not to kill. Of course it's hardly a shock that works written for the emperor himself would offer the emperor absolution for his own morally dubious actions. But mirrors for princes and speeches of praise also sought to influence the emperors and bring them to a more merciful and ethical style of rule. As Dimitar Angulov has written, The personal concerns and agendas of the orators were supposed to remain hidden beneath the glittering surface of laudatory discourse. But these authors and speechmakers certainly had their own axes to grind. Emphasizing the emperor's generosity and advising leniency in taxation makes quite a bit of sense when you yourself might be in line for gifts at court or a visit from the tax collector. At a less self-interested level, praise for righteous rulership could go hand in hand with warnings against wicked rulership. Another of the running themes in Byzantine political writing is therefore the contrast between the good ruler and the tyrant. Most basically, a true king rules for the good of his subjects rather than his own good. To use an analogy found in the first book of Plato's Republic and repeated in that anonymous treatise from the time of Justinian, the ruler is like a shepherd whose occupation requires him to look to the good of his flock. Just as there is an art of shepherding for achieving that end, so the goal of political science is to help the citizens of the state to flourish. Again, this is fairly predictable, and again it can still be founded much later in authors like Blemades. But we may not have expected to hear from Theo Phylact, a student of Michael Pselos, that tyrants differ from true kings in that they seize power by force rather than assuming their office through the consent of the people. Didn't men don the purple robes of the emperor precisely by seizing power, or by inheriting the throne from family members who had done so? Yes, but even usurpers usually made a show of having the people acclaim their support, so that popular consent was in principle included within imperial ideology. Another way to conceptualize tyranny was as defiance of the laws, or just arbitrary changing of the laws. Here we come to a question that was rather unresolved among the Byzantines themselves. On the one hand, the emperor was seen as a living law, to use a formulation that appears in the corpus of laws compiled under Justinian. On the other hand, in those same documents we find the rule, let the general laws apply to the emperor, in keeping with the latter idea intellectuals sometimes encouraged, if not demanded, that emperors govern within the law. Photeas is an example. In an introduction to a law code he wrote during the reign of Basil I, he stressed that kings should obey legal guidelines and also allow a degree of autonomy to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Yet, it was also seen as a right of the emperor to promulgate laws. Indeed, this is part of what distinguished imperial power from other forms of power. Then too, departing from the letter of the law could be praiseworthy. Remember what we said about philanthropy. A benevolent emperor might refrain from imposing a justly deserved penalty. That too would be breaking the law, albeit in a way no one would describe as tyranny. All this concerns standing laws laid down by previous emperors or inherited from antiquity. But there was another source of hypothetical constraint in the form of what Aristotle called natural justice. A commentary written on Aristotle's politics by Michael of Ephesus contrasts natural to artificial or political justice and follows Aristotle in saying that what is naturally just applies to all humans at all times and places. This is fairly close to the Latin medieval concept of natural law and is inspired by the same passages in Aristotle. A typical example of an artificial or non-natural law would be that the British drive on the left while in most countries you drive on the right. Michael gives the far less typical example that incestuous sexual relationships are not, repeat not, against nature. His rationale here could be that the first generations of humans after Adam and Eve would necessarily have propagated through incest between brother and sister, and this could hardly have been against God's plan. Michael of Ephesus holds that what is truly just by nature is recognized as such by everyone, which undermines the moral relativism he associates with the sophists. To the objection that some people do in fact violate what is supposedly just by nature, which shows that not everyone values justice, he gives the question begging response that such people don't count because they are wicked. Their judgement is skewed, like sick people who don't find naturally sweet-tasting things to be sweet. We mentioned the Patriarch of Constantinople a moment ago, but should say a little bit more about the relationship between the emperor and religious life. As we saw back in episode 269, medieval Latin Christendom was beset by a long-running antagonism between the Church and the secular powers. The Byzantines sought, not always successfully, to avoid that kind of tension. The emperor was crowned by the Patriarch, and smooth collaboration between the two was seen as essential to the health of the empire. Already Eusebius had credited Constantine with uniting secular and religious authority in his single person, and this combination was seen as a distinctive feature of the emperor's office in later Byzantine history. So, his influence extended over religious affairs to no small extent, with the decisions of Church councils ratified by the emperor, and figures such as Justinian getting deeply involved in the making and enforcing of orthodoxy. Of course, iconoclasm and the subsequent restoration of the icons displayed the potential for imperial interference in Christian ritual and belief. Remember that some of the most revealing iconoclast documents to survive today were originally published in the name of the emperor, Constantine V. Yet that same controversy shows us that political power could not constrain religious conscience. A man like John of Damascus was hardly going to give up the icons just because the emperor told him to. He even wrote that as a matter of principle, he could not be persuaded that the Church is governed by imperial edicts. As John of Damascus's own life story shows, the emperor never had effective authority over all of Christendom, however unwelcome that fact may have been at Constantinople. For starters, there were the lands that had belonged to the Western Roman Empire in antiquity. Despite a long-standing foothold in southern Italy, these largely lay outside the control of the emperor. Then there were those places and communities that did fall under his nominal control, but in practice had their own local rulers. These rulers were not, in the normal course of affairs, allowed to style themselves as basileus, nor as already mentioned could they promulgate laws. The carefully chosen wording of diplomatic documents emphasizes the supremacy of Constantinople over client peoples like the Russians, Hungarians, and Pechenegs. Yet local rulers had an annoying habit of acting as if they were something other than inferior provincial lieutenants. Just as the Byzantines were more than a little disquieted when Charlemagne provocatively began to style himself emperor in 812, it was a blow to the dignity of the court of Constantinople when Simeon, the ruler of Bulgaria, got himself proclaimed emperor of his people in 913. Yet a third position was occupied by Eastern Christians who did not recognize the so-called Orthodox teachings established at the Council of Chalcedon. An interesting book published a few years ago by Philip Wood investigates the political dimension of a culture we've already examined, namely Syrian Christianity. One work from this milieu, written in the 6th century, tells the story of the Roman Emperor Julian, who temporarily restored paganism as the official state religion. Since Julian is obviously a villain from the Christian point of view, the story forms a kind of reverse of the texts written in praise of the virtue and piety of Byzantine emperors. You could call it a funhouse mirror for princes. Julian's lust and impiety are brought into sharp relief by descriptions of contemporary Christian saints and by his pious successor, Jovian, who pointedly refuses to accept the imperial crown until he is acclaimed by good Christians. Other works from Syria, especially Hagiographies, tales about the lives of saints, praise the holy and ascetic leaders of the Miaphysite community and show how God's displeasure with Chalcedonian Christianity has manifested in natural disasters like plagues. That by the way is another typical feature of Byzantine political ideology. Epidemics, earthquakes, and also military failures were routinely understood as signs that God was withdrawing his support for an emperor, which could encourage usurpers to make a bid for power. Speaking of disasters, let's conclude with a few remarks about how political thought developed after the catastrophic fall of Constantinople to the western crusaders in 1204. Imperial ideology and ritual survived to some extent in the smaller states that were spun off from the fallen capital, especially the court at Nicaea. Eastern rule then resumed at Constantinople after the capital was retaken by the Palaiologan dynasty in 1261. The same sorts of political writing we've been discussing continued to be produced for the Nicaean and Palaiologan courts right down to the last Byzantine emperor who was called of course Constantine the 11th Palaiologos. The intellectual John Argyropoulos wrote an oration in his honor, falling into the genre of mirrors for princes. But it wasn't purely business as usual. A particularly interesting author in this period was Theodore II Lascaris, who was himself a ruler. He reigned in Nicaea from 1254 to 1258 and wrote treatises expressing his personal political philosophy. He was critical of the way that Byzantine political life was dominated by family connections, something that had become especially prevalent during the earlier Komnene dynasty. For Theodore, the imperial elite and indeed society as a whole should be held together by friendship, not kinship. Here he was drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which identified three ways that friendship can arise. You and I might be friendly to one another because we enjoy each other's company, because we find each other useful, or in the best case, out of admiration for one another's character. Aristotle also thought that a perfect friendship presupposed equality between the two friends. Theodore ignored that bit, in order to propose that the emperor is the ultimate friend. Of course, no one is more useful or a more reliable source of pleasure, given the resources at his disposal. And we already know that any emperor worthy of the title has a virtuous and admirable character. For Lascaris, it is virtue, and not aristocratic blood, that makes somebody truly noble and fit to rule. As the Byzantines steadily lost power and territory in this later period, other theorists proposed further alternatives for shoring up imperial legitimacy and stability. Writing around 1300, Manuel Moscopoulos put forward a sophisticated theory of political development according to which political institutions emerge from a chaotic state of nature through a kind of contract between the people and the ruler. That sounds like a breathtaking anticipation of Thomas Hobbes, but it's not entirely original with Moscopoulos since it is another idea one can find in Plato's Republic. More innovative was Moscopoulos' point that a monarchy based only on this contract will always be unstable because of infighting among the subjects. The citizens must be brought into harmony, and the only authority that can achieve that is divine authority, which no one can hope to escape. So the most binding political arrangement is loyalty to the emperor secured through a sacred oath sworn before God. Yet another noteworthy text from this period was written by a member of the royal family, Theodore Palaiologos, not to be confused with the aforementioned Theodore II Lascaris. The Greek version of this treatise is lost, and in fact we know it only through a medieval French translation of a Latin version, not exactly the ideal way to access Theodore's ideas. Having lived as a young man in Italy, he was apparently impressed by the way that rulers there took advice from a council of advisers. In the French translation, this is actually called a parlement. So in this work, called On the Rule of the Prince, Theodore argues that good governance requires the monarch to be open to such advice. He criticizes certain Byzantine rulers, including the Palaiologan emperor Andronicus II, for failing to pay attention to their councilors. In the final analysis then, it might be better to say that Byzantine political theorists were like restaurant patrons who happily accept cheeseburgers as the only item on the menu, but tactfully suggest that the cook should make sure the burgers are well done and have only the best toppings. Monarchial rule was indeed taken as a fact of life and as the best form of constitution, but emperors were constantly reminded that this form of rule could succeed only through divine favor, personal virtue, a generous, friendly and open-minded attitude from the emperor towards his subjects, or at least his elite advisers. And also, being named Constantine wouldn't hurt. You may have noticed while listening to this episode that while these political ideas were indeed influenced by ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, they were almost never put forth in works that one would classify as philosophical in the narrow sense. The only work I mentioned that belonged to philosophy as a genre, in the sense the Byzantines might have used that term, was Michael of Ephesus's commentary on the politics. Instead, we've been drawing mostly uncourtly literature written as displays of rhetoric. This art stood alongside, and arguably even outshone, philosophy as a major inheritance from classical culture and Byzantine civilization. But in truth, there is no pulling apart the traditions of rhetoric and philosophy, as we'll see next time when we consider the fortunes of Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric at Constantinople, and consider the literary theories that were developed by Michael Psellos and other master stylists. So join me for a look at the arts of oratory so interesting that it might ironically leave you speechless. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode – The Elements of Style – Rhetoric and Byzantium When was the last time you had to speak in public? Plenty of people find it a stressful experience, hence the popular advice that you should soothe your nerves by imagining that the audience are clad in nothing but underwear. I've never really understood that myself. I don't know how I'd react if I walked into a lecture hall and found a hundred people waiting for me in their underwear, but I doubt it would be to relax and think, okay, I got this. More helpful to my mind would be a set of rules you could follow – a list of foolproof techniques for winning over any audience, no matter how large – and apparently the Byzantines agreed. They set great store by manuals of rhetorical instruction that had been written in antiquity by now largely forgotten authors such as Hermogenes and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These works were part of the Byzantine educational curriculum, so their terminology and conceptual tools were familiar to a wide swath of the Byzantine elite. Remember all those speeches of praise in honor of various emperors we talked about last time? Their authors could have told you, evoking the classificatory schemes found in Hermogenes, what type of speeches they were giving, what style they were adopting in any given passage, and which rules lay behind the eloquence of every single sentence. This presupposed a lot of training, and from an early age. Students began with grammar, where one first of all learned basic literacy and then moved on to the study of classical texts. Grammar students would read about 30 lines of Homer's Iliad each day, this monument of pagan Greek literature having retained its centrality even in a medieval Christian culture. Michael Pselos claims that as a boy he was made to memorize the entire epic and be prepared to explain every turn of phrase as well as the overall structure of the work. Next, the young scholars would move on to other antique authors like Sophocles and Aristophanes. As we already know, the dialogues of Plato were also admired as models of good Greek. Ideas gleaned from the rhetorical textbooks found their way into the teaching of all these texts. Marginal comments or scolia found in Byzantine manuscripts of Homer explain what sort of rhetoric is being deployed in various speeches delivered by characters in the poem, highlighting the features of each speech that make it particularly appropriate for its context. They are also compared to the works of ancient rhetoricians like Demosthenes or Isocrates. Isocrates was, of course, a version of Socrates released by Apple computers. For the most part, it was simple linguistic perfection that concerned the Byzantine teachers and students. That concern was embodied by new textbooks on so-called figures and tropes, in which it was explained why apparent flaws or solicisms found in literary classics are in fact acceptable and stylistically justified. We might think of how English-speaking kids are at first taught not to leave prepositions hanging and to not under any circumstances split and infinitive, though in due course they will learn that such departures from the norm can be rhetorically effective. Alongside the obsession with the niceties of composition and grammar, though, we do also find a recognition of the political and moral dimension of rhetoric. A recent study of Scolia on Homer points out that they commend the use of rhetoric as a tool for correct political behaviour and civic concord. Even attempts to define rhetoric gesture towards its role in political life. Thus we find Aristotle being criticized for saying that rhetoric is an art of persuasion on all topics. This attempted definition is too general, because rhetoric is really about persuasion in specifically political contexts. In this respect, rhetoric is unlike dialectic, an art of argumentation that really does apply to any subject matter whatsoever. Here we are brought back to themes first touched upon in some of the earliest episodes of this podcast series, when we looked at the ancient sophists and the criticisms they provoked from Plato and Aristotle. Plato was appalled by the fact that sophists like Gorgias did indeed boast of their ability to induce any belief on any topic in any audience. Against the seductions of sophistry, Plato championed the discipline of dialectic, the only route to certain knowledge rather than mere persuasion. Rhetoric, he argued in the dialogue named after Gorgias, is no true art or science, but a mere knack for pleasing an audience, something he compares to making delicious pastries rather than nourishing medically balanced meals. Yet, like an almond croissant, the charms of rhetoric were hard for the ancients to resist. In the 3rd century AD, the so-called second Sophistic saw a resurgence of rhetorical artistry, and rhetoric survived as a standard part of the liberal arts curriculum in both Latin and Greek Christianity. These tensions are visible in a body of texts well known to the Byzantines, the writings of the three Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Raesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus. A friend of Gregory of Nyssa once accused him of choosing rhetoric over Christian piety. When he responded by asking, Was I not a Christian while practicing rhetoric? He received the answer, Not to the extent that befits you. Gregory himself tells us that his brother, Basil, had to be dissuaded from a commitment to rhetoric by their saintly philosopher sister Macrina, and Gregory also contrasts Macrina's ascetic philosophy to worldly rhetoric in his hagiographical biography of her. As for Basil, he wrote a work with the self-explanatory title, To the Young, on making use of Greek literature, in which he advises them to enjoy the delights of classical pagan writing selectively, like bees gathering honey, or, I like to think he meant to add, podcasters gathering almond croissants. Readers of the Cappadocians thus got a rather mixed message, especially given that their writings were, themselves, outstanding achievements of Greek style. As we'll see, Gregory of Nazianzus in particular will later be held up as both a great theologian and a great, perhaps even the greatest, rhetorician of the Greek language. In the early Byzantine period, pious fears about rhetoric seemed to have weighed more heavily than the enticements of eloquence. Between Procopius in the 6th century and the 10th century, we find no author styling himself as a rhetorician. Better to engage in philosophy, according to the definition of that term found in John of Damascus, the love of wisdom meaning ultimately the love of God. But things change in the 11th century, when Psellos and other authors like John Doxopatres initiated something we might fairly call a third Sophistic. By the first half of the 12th century, it is possible to find Michael Italikos, not to be confused with John Italos, blaming Plato for his unjustified criticisms of rhetoric, and saying that he finds philosophy quite lacking in comparison to rhetoric. Around the same time, John Siciliotis writes a commentary on the rhetoric of homogenies, and in it explains the importance of mastering rhetorical improvisation. Indeed, Siciliotis adds, without his proficiency in rhetoric, he would be unworthy to bear the name and fame of philosophy. For the notion that philosophy and rhetoric are ideal partners rather than rivals, and for the use of rhetoric as a path to fame and reputation, we must return to Michael Psellos. He occasionally shows signs that rhetoric is a less exalted pursuit than philosophy, just as he recognizes that the concerns of the soul trump those of the body. But much as he says that he is content to live only half for the body, Psellos cannot help but devote himself to both eloquence and wisdom. He proclaims that he mixes in his soul as if in a mixing bowl both philosophy and rhetoric, and writes to a student in praise of this combined ambition in the following terms. But there were practical as well as aesthetic benefits to be had from mastering rhetoric. In the competitive world of 11th century Constantinople, brilliant speechmaking could be a crucial tool for advancements and a way of defeating rivals. As Stratus Papyrannou has put it in his book on Psellos's use of rhetoric, his mastery of discourse was the main asset that he brought to the struggle for preferment. Psellos gives us a vivid sense of just how powerful and politically profitable the effects could be in his Conographia. In the midst of what Papyrannou calls a disturbingly self-confident praise of his own rhetorical nature, Psellos speaks of the enthusiasm his rhetoric provoked in Constantine Manomakos. Upon hearing these speeches, the emperor was like a man possessed and nearly moved to shower kisses upon Psellos. For an ironic confirmation of the way Psellos presents himself here, we can look to a 12th century satirical work called the Timarion. It pokes fun at both Psellos and his student John Italos, both of whom are imagined attempting to take seats alongside the great figures of Hellenic philosophy. The treatment of the unfortunate Italos is particularly harsh, though amusing. The philosophers roughly reject his advances, Diogenes the Cynic even bites him, and Italos stumbles away crying out, O syllogism, O sophism, where are you now that I need you? Psellos, by contrast, is treated politely by the ancient philosophers, but not actually offered a seat. He winds up sitting among so-called rhetorician sophists, a collection of figures from the late antique Second Sophistic. But it is not these ancient sophists who draw most admiration from Psellos himself. Among pagan authors, he follows the Neoplatonists in extolling the style of Plato in particular, but his all-time favourite is the aforementioned Cappadocian church father Gregory Nazianzus. As Psellos puts it, Gregory is for Christian readers what the orator Demosthenes is for the opposing side, that is, the pagans. Gregory combines the best features of Demosthenes and other Hellenic authors like Plato, managing to bring together what seem to be contrary qualities like brevity and expansiveness, solemnity and beauty, or the political and the philosophical, so that his language represents the ultimate summit of excellence in seriousness as well as charming graces. Or as Psellos says in a longer passage, Gregory's discourse is not an aggregate of foreign and disparate elements, rather it is both uniform in nature like the rose rising from the womb of the earth along with its natural colour, and also multiform if one were able to divide the colour as if it were some kind of mixture into different tones and shades. The idea that rhetorical speech should be varied, multiform or many-coloured in fact runs throughout Psellos' descriptions of well-executed rhetoric. Its effect upon Psellos is not unlike Psellos' own effect on his emperor patron. Wandering into the rose garden of Gregory's words, Psellos says, It is no accident that Psellos turns to this sort of erotic language when he wants to describe the effects of eloquence. Where other Christian authors, including Gregory himself actually, sought to justify beautiful language by arguing that it can turn us towards higher ends, Psellos is unafraid to say that pleasant speech is wonderful in part because it brings pleasure, and not only as a vehicle for theological insight. Nor is he embarrassed by the thing that so bothered Plato, the power of rhetoric to persuade an audience to believe in falsehoods, or at best to believe in truths but for the wrong reason. To the contrary, Psellos admires the myths of the ancients because the compelling falsehoods of their fictional tales are such a powerful way of conveying deeper truths. On the other hand, he does think that in a political context, the best speech is one that marshals persuasive speech for the sake of truth. In his Con agrafia he writes, The pride of rhetoric is not persuasive falsehood merely or speaking on both sides of an issue. It blossoms with philosophical thoughts and finely spoken turns of phrase, and its audience is willingly drawn in by both. Its greatness is to be neither confusing nor unclear, but to fit itself to the circumstances and the facts. Of course, Psellos would say that Gregory uses rhetoric like this too, as a perfect wordsmith. And it's telling, by the way, that he singles out Gregory on this basis and not just because he's a Christian theologian, whereas the other great authors were pagans. Sure, Gregory has substance, but he would carry the day on style alone. It's pretty obvious that Gregory did not reach these heights simply by reading rulebooks like the ones written by homogenes. His rhetoric is true artistry, not a kind of paint by numbers. To use analogies, Psellos is fond of, crafting language is like sculpting a statue or finishing a gemstone. No one can simply tell you how to write this well, and in fact Psellos himself is unable even to understand how Gregory manages it. This is a matter that lies beyond rational explanation. Ultimately, the best comparison for Gregory is not any other ancient author, but a divine creator like the craftsman god of Plato's Timaeus. Here, we should recall the idea that various opposed elements should be blended into a single harmonious speech, since it is of course precisely this sort of assembly of disparate elements that a god must achieve in fashioning the cosmos. With his exaltation of god-like, genius authors, his admiration for the beauty of language as such, and his analysis of the features that make for perfect eloquence, Psellos is obviously going far beyond the rather dry and technical conception of rhetoric we find in the textbooks and their commentaries. He seems to be articulating a conception of rhetoric that is closer to what we might call literature. Now, if you can remember back to the earliest episodes of this podcast series, or if you're my colleague Christoph Rapp, there's a question that may be nagging at you. What about Aristotle? He did write a treatise called The Rhetoric. Did it play no role in the discussions of rhetoric offered by Psellos and others? The work was certainly available to the Byzantines, but it does not seem to have been much read until around the turn of the 12th century. This was no doubt in part because homogenies and other authors of rhetorical textbooks were perceived to have covered the subject adequately. Also, Aristotle is not always an easy or pleasant read. Psellos contrasts the difficulty of reading him to the wonderful clarity of Gregory Nazianzus and adds that Aristotle was making himself hard to understand on purpose. But in due course Aristotle would find readers who were ready for the challenge. The circle of scholars gathered together by Anna Komnena for the purpose of producing commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus produced not one, but two commentaries on the rhetoric. We can't be sure why, but one reason must have been the simple fact that they had no late ancient commentaries on this work as they did for many other Aristotelian treatises. For these commentators, one anonymous, and the other identified as Stephanos Skelitzes, Aristotle's rhetoric is one of his works on logic. This may seem strange, but it's an idea that goes back to the late ancient commentary tradition. After treatises setting out the elements of logical proof, and then in the prior and posterior analytics articulating a theory of syllogisms in general, and demonstrative proofs in particular, Aristotle wanted to say something about proofs that are defective in various ways. The treatise that most obviously pursues this task is the Sophistical Reputations, which analyzes the kind of bad arguments deliberately used by those paradox-mongers, the Sophists. And since we're interested in language at the moment, can I just point out that there are very few things that have mongers, just cheese, fish, and paradoxes, which coincidentally would probably all have been on offer at a dinner hosted by Michael Psellos and John Italos. Alongside Sophistical Arguments, Aristotle supposedly saw rhetorical speeches, dialectical arguments, and even tragedies as inferior ways to prove a point, hence his treatises Rhetoric Topics and Poetics. This is a rather unpersuasive attempt at systematizing Aristotle's writings, but it must be agreed that at least the topics and rhetoric do seem to have a close relation to his more properly logical works. Whenever they can, the Byzantine commentators stress this feature of the rhetoric, contrasting the merely persuasive discourse of the orator to the perhaps less persuasive, but in reality far more decisive proofs offered by the philosopher who was proficient in the theory of demonstration. It's a very different idea of rhetoric than we find in Psellos, who could be said to pursue a more classically Platonic project in which philosophy is combined with literature. It won't be the last time in our survey of Byzantine thought that we'll be contrasting Aristotelians and Platonists. But that won't be on the agenda next time. Instead, we'll be taking our cue from a work of Psellos I have mentioned in this episode, his Chronographia. This account of the reigns and personalities of numerous emperors makes Psellos one of the most important historians of Byzantium. We've also just mentioned Anna Komnina, who didn't just organize scholars to comment on Aristotle, but also wrote a history called the Alexiad. So as a kind of bridge between these two crucial figures of Byzantine philosophy, we're going to be doing a bit of history monging as we look at historical chronicles, their methodological principles, and the implicit philosophical attitudes we can glean from such works. Join me next time, then, as we put some history into the history of philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Past Masters – Byzantine Historiography. Regrets, I've had a few, and not too few to mention. I might start with that unnecessary second helping at dinner last night and finish with every article of clothing I wore between the years 1977 and 1989. Frankly, this podcast is also an inexhaustible source of potential regret. Many of the puns I've made, some of the puns I almost made and thought better of, okay that hasn't actually happened but it might at some point, and of course things I didn't cover but really should have covered given my without any gaps slogan. At the top of this list would be Herodotus and Thucydides, towering intellectuals of ancient Greece whose approach to writing history could and really should have been part of the story of classical philosophy. Their work has directly or indirectly influenced all later European historians, including historians of philosophy like me. I'm not going to fill that gap retrospectively in this episode, but I am going to look at a few of the Byzantine historians who read Herodotus and Thucydides and carried on their legacy. History writing is among Byzantium's greatest cultural achievements, and perhaps the genre of medieval Greek literature that is best studied in modern scholarship. Beginning in late antiquity, a series of intellectuals compiled and summarized the works of earlier historians, sometimes adding material of their own. The tradition goes down to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and beyond, with Calcocondylis, a student of the philosopher Platon, writing a chronicle in the 1480s. This was not the only time that history and philosophy were found in such close proximity. Two central figures in the story we're telling in this series are, if anything, better known as historians than as contributors to the history of philosophy. There was, of course, Michael Pselos, whose Neoplatonic thought and eyewitness historical treatise the Chronographia we've already had occasion to discuss. And there was Anna Komnene, sponsor of a philosophical circle and author of the Alexiad, a historical account of the reign of her father, Alexios. We might also mention the later George Pachimeris, who worked on completing his teacher's treatise on Byzantine history and also wrote about science and Aristotelian philosophy. As with the shirts I wore growing up in the late 1970s, the pattern is too striking to be a coincidence. I have two explanations to offer, one that's rather speculative and one that's pretty obvious. The speculation is that history, like philosophy, offered independent-minded authors an opportunity for being creative and original. If you are writing on a previously unchronical period of history, you are positively required to break new ground, and this was the case with a number of Byzantine historians. They might first draw on, summarize, or simply repeat earlier histories, but then add further material to take their story up to the recent past. This is what we have, for example, in the case of the Epitome of Histories by an author named Zonaras. Despite its title, it is an enormous work, longer than any previous surviving historiographical treatise. Contributing to the genre of world histories, already devised in antiquity, he started his epitome at the creation of the world and went all the way to the year 1118. For almost all of this, Zonaras drew on earlier histories, in the process preserving much that would otherwise now be lost. But he did write his own account of the recent emperor, Alexios, one far more critical than that of Alexios' daughter, Anna. Anna, by contrast, was no compiler. She tells us that in producing the Alexiad, she drew on her own memories, court documents, and interviews conducted with eyewitnesses, especially for covering military engagements, which as a woman she could not have experienced first-hand. The approach of Salas had been similar in that he relied on his own personal impressions to present the series of imperial political portraits that makes up his Conographia. In between Salas and Anna Komnene there was Atelaeates, whose history was completed in 1079 and dedicated to the emperor Naciferus III. These were the three great historians of the Middle Byzantine Age, notable for an opinionated and personal style which has been called subjective and individual. We should probably give special credit to Salas for inspiring the writing of history in this mode, because Atelaeates and Anna Komnene were both aware of his work. Anna drew on him extensively, citing Salas in her Alexiad more often than she cited the Bible. Another text that appears in her history more often than the Bible is Homer's Iliad, which brings me to the more obvious explanation for the link between philosophy and history. Both genres of writing were deeply engaged with the classical tradition by way of the study of rhetoric. The practice of gathering together earlier historical materials may already have reminded you of those philosophical compilations by scholars like John of Damascus. Some histories, rather than repeating or condensing the work of earlier authors, transpose material from older histories to describe recent events, as when Thucydides's famous account of the plague in Athens was recycled more than once to describe epidemics in Constantinople. Even when our historians are not regurgitating or repurposing classical sources, they take great pains to write like their much-admired antique forebears. This includes even the use of grammatical constructions that had fallen out of use in normal Byzantine Greek, for example the special dual ending used for talking about exactly two things. My favorite remark on Byzantine classicizing comes from Warren Tredgold, who reports that Anna Komnina quotes a popular jingle praising Alexios' ingenuity, but she carefully translates it into literary Greek in case an ancient Athenian should return from the dead to read it. Of course, one of the most profound effects of studying history, and for that matter history of philosophy, is that it allows you to step out of your own time and inhabit a past worldview. The Byzantines' enthusiasm for classical culture put them in an excellent position to enjoy this benefit. A spectacular example is provided by several so-called novels written in the 12th century like Eustatios, Macrembolitis, Hisminae and Hisminias, and Theodor, Prodoromos's, Rodante and Dosikles, which works in some passages imitating Plato. These novels are set in the archaic past and the authors seem to revel in the pagan setting, Christian religious disapproval set aside for this fictional context. Something similar happens in the works of certain historians whose study of the distant past has given them an appreciation for other older ways of organizing society. When discussing Byzantine political philosophy, I said that the absolute monarchy embodied in an imperial rule was uniformly taken as the ideal constitutional form. While this is true when it comes to explicitly political treatises and, naturally, speeches in praise of the emperors, we also saw that emphasis was given to the people's support for the emperor. More generally, republican Rome could still cast its spell for many Byzantines, something we see reflected in the historical chronicles. Already in classical imperial Rome, many aristocrats pined for the days before monarchical rule, as well you might if you were in the senatorial class since back then senators had had real power. This sentiment was still being expressed at the twilight of antiquity, as we can see from the bitter reflections of a historian named Zosimas, who lived in the 6th century. As a pagan, Zosimas blamed Christianity for the final decline of the Roman Empire, but he thought things had already been going downhill before the Christians took over. For him, the rot set in with the change from republicanism to imperial authority under Augustus. With this system, as he put it, the Romans effectively threw dice for the hopes of all men through the risk of entrusting such a great empire to the energy and power of one man. In medieval Byzantium, positive comments about the republic can be found in Psalos, and even Anna Komnina compares her emperor father to heroes of the republican period. But the most interesting case is Michael Atalaetes, who accords the people of Constantinople a significant and legitimate role to play in political life. Whereas most Byzantine historians would describe popular uprisings strictly in terms of mob violence, Atalaetes recounts in rather approving terms how the people of Constantinople deposed the emperor Michael V in 1042. In another display of his remarkably detached perspective, Atalaetes is able to admire the moral character of non-Christians, even enemies of the empire. Between the 11th century, a formidable threat to Byzantium had emerged in the shape of the Seljuk Turks, sometimes referred to anachronistically by our historians with classical names like Persians, Scythians, and even Huns. Atalaetes commends their Sultan for having a natural tendency to love his enemies, as Christians are commanded to do on religious grounds. Looking further back, he even argues that faithful devotion to pagan religion was key to the success of the Romans. Of course it is best to be a devoted Christian, but in practical terms a committed pagan may outdo a half-hearted or hypocritical Christian. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that religious beliefs play no role in the Byzantine histories. The exceptional Atalaetes proves the rule. In his rather positive description of the way the people overthrew Michael V, he remarks that they were an instrument of divine justice. The Byzantine chroniclers were in general confident that the study of history reveals the workings of God's plan. Again, it's a tendency that can be traced back to antiquity. Alongside the classical histories and the world histories of the kind recreated by Zonaras, another model was provided by religiously oriented works like that written by the 4th century bishop Eusebius. His ecclesiastical history focused on the story of Christianity from the apostles through to late antiquity and the triumph of the new faith over paganism. This was not history as just one thing after another. Rather, world events were understood as the stages in God's plan for humankind. Eusebius still respected the ground rules of traditional historical writing to some extent, as we can see from the fact that he never associates miracles with Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, in his ecclesiastical history, despite speaking of such miracles in a separate life of Constantine. But once we get to the Byzantine historians, we frequently find miracles invoked to explain military victories, while wonders and natural disasters are taken as having portentous and divinely intended meaning. An interesting case is found in the History of Atoleides, in his account of an earthquake that struck in 1063. He mentions a naturalistic theory of earthquakes endorsed by some philosophers, namely the building up of wind under the ground as the result of underground waterways. He allows that there may be something to this explanation, but insists that in this case the calamity was sent by divine providence to restrain and control human urges, not utterly to destroy humankind, but turn it to a better path. As we've seen many times in this podcast series, most recently in episode 306 with Fodius's report on a treatise about divine providence by the Neoplatonist Hierocles, medieval philosophers were fascinated by the tension between human freedom and God's ordaining of all things. It was, appropriately enough, inevitable that this tension would show itself in the historical chronicles. Back in the 6th century, an author named Theo Philaktos approached the topic from both a philosophical and historiographical perspective. In addition to writing a historical treatise with an explicitly religious approach, he produced a dialogue on the question whether God predetermines how long each of us will live. Theo Philaktos tries to take a middle course here, affirming that God does foreknow all that will happen, including human actions, but insisting that God knows we will perform our actions freely. Atoleides' approach to this question is not unlike his attitude towards earthquakes. He is open to both natural and divine modes of explanation. He follows Pselos in emphasising the moral character of individual rulers to explain their success or failure – indeed, we just saw him doing that with the Seljuks Sultan. Yet, he is also happy to credit providence with giving victory to the Byzantines against their enemies. Anna Komnena frequently mentions how God's benevolent protection helped her father. At one point, she even asserts that divine power inspired his horse to leap to safety during a battle, though characteristically the very same sentence shows her classicising sensibility as she compares this horse to the winged Pegasus. Her pious respect for providence also ran in the family, given that according to her, Alexios himself always credited his own successes to God's will. Was such faith in heavenly governance shaken when earthly governance failed altogether? To answer this question, we can turn to the later historian Nikitas Koniatis, who reflected on the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204. He witnessed this event first-hand, but managed to escape with his life and join the new court at Nicaea. Though Nikitas had the misfortune to live through extraordinary times, he was in some respects a typical Byzantine historian. Like his predecessors, he saw himself as participating in an unbroken chain of scholars who built on each other's chronicles to tell the continuous story of the world. He was also highly classicising, using a style so ornate that it prompted one medieval reader to scrawl a complaint about it in the margin of a manuscript of Nikitas' work. His explanation of the 1204 sack of Constantinople was also typical in its assumption that this disaster was a sign of God's anger, which was, however, itself brought on by human failure. He traces the decline back to Anna's family, the Komneneoi, and their foolish foreign policy. The recent emperor Alexios III, who reigned until 1203, drew Nikitas' anger for having put the empire in such a weak condition that it was ripe for the despoiling it received at the hands of the Western Franks, who of course get an archaic nickname. Nikitas calls them Celts. In one telling passage, Nikitas both invokes Providence and makes clear that it is possible for humans to act freely, indeed against God's will. It's also a remarkable passage for its general condemnation of Byzantine emperors. Nikitas writes that these rulers by themselves in tranquility as their own ancestral inheritance, to treat free men like slaves. Such outright criticism was nothing new. I've already mentioned that back in the 12th century, Zonaras provided a far more critical assessment of Alexios I than we find in Anna Komnene's Alexiad. For Zonaras, Alexios was too focused on lining the pockets of his friends and family and not sufficiently attentive to the needs of the rest of his subjects, meaning of course other aristocrats who were not fortunate enough to be in the emperor's inner circle. As Zonaras put it, Alexios did not act like an ideal household manager but like the master of slaves. Zonaras wasn't alone in this assessment. You might remember that about a century later, Theodore II Lascaris was still making this complaint about Alexios and his successors. This kind of opinionated history writing was not to everyone's taste. Another middle Byzantine historian, John Skelitsis, complained in the introduction to his wholly derivative synopsis of histories that other historians were insufficiently accurate. Rather than just telling us the facts, they grind their various axes, being either favourable or critical or just writing to please the sitting ruler. Comparing these wildly diverging accounts, the reader is, as he put it, plunged into dizziness and confusion. We've seen that Anna Komnenos' history was partial, even worshipful, towards Alexios. She anticipated this potential critique, arguing that it was perfectly possible for her to be fond of both her father and the truth. But in another passage, she shows that she's aware of the conflict between writing a personal account and setting down a neutral historical record. Coming to tell of her father's death, she writes, Such emotional restraint was impossible for the later Nikitus Choniates. Like many of our historians, he inserted fictional speeches into his chronicle, which is another imitation of the ancient historians and of course another sign that in Byzantium history writing was closely related to rhetoric. Nikitus puts one invented speech into his own mouth, a despairing monologue he supposedly uttered upon seeing the fall of Constantinople. And what is it that especially prompts him to this lament? Antiquarian that he is, he dwells especially on the destruction of the capital's classical monuments. Though the residents of 1204 Constantinople might have had a hard time feeling that God does benevolently guide all things, the thematic sequence of our podcast series tells a different story. By happy chance, and maybe a bit of planning on my part down here at the level of human affairs, this topic of history writing has given us an ideal bridge from Michael Pselos to Anna Komnina. If he were listening, Zona Ras would probably be annoyed by the way that Pselos has inspired so many apparent digressions from our main story. As promised, we've been circling around him for several episodes, seeing how he was one of numerous scholars to write on politics, rhetoric, and history. But with Anna Komnina, we will finally be getting back to some good old Aristotle, as she gathers together some scholars of her own to produce the greatest workshop for philosophical commentary in Greek since late ancient Alexandria. You'll have something to regret if you miss the next episode dedicated to Anna Komnina and her circle here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode – Queen of the Sciences – Anna Kumnena and Her Circle. When I imagine the ideal workplace, I picture a group of industrious, committed collaborators engaged in an enterprise they deeply value, so much so that they would have been willing to do the same work for free. They willingly put in long hours, paying close attention to the smallest details, and the boss is a woman. This utopian scenario remains a rarity, yet it was realized almost a millennium ago in Byzantium. The happy workers were philosophers who devoted themselves to studying and completing the late ancient tradition of commentary on Aristotle. Their patron was Anna Kumnena, a princess who had withdrawn from political life. After the death of her beloved father Alexios, and the accession to the throne of her brother John, Anna dedicated herself to a life of scholarship. As we already know, she herself composed the Alexiad, an epic portrayal of Alexios' political and military exploits. She also gathered together several scholars to produce those commentaries on Aristotle, especially texts that had not yet received commentaries earlier in the Greek tradition. They included Eustratus of Nicaea, who is praised in Anna's Alexiad as learned in both scripture and pagan philosophy and rhetoric, and also Michael of Ephesus, the most accomplished Byzantine commentator on Aristotle. He did indeed work long hours to the point that he ruined his eyesight reading by candlelight. We owe that last detail to a funeral oration dedicated to Anna Kumnena by another member of her circle, named George Tourniquets. Speaking in praise of her devotion to learning, he tells us that Anna followed the example of her father with her support of scholarship, and that a goal of her circle was the production of exegetical works on so far uncommented treatises of Aristotle. Confirmation of this is provided by one of those commentaries. In the prologue to his commentary on the sixth book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the aforementioned Eustratus alludes to a patron who is evidently Anna. Furthermore, Anna herself tells us of her acquaintance with pagan philosophy. When she announces herself as author of the Alexiad, she says modestly that she is not without some acquaintance with literature, having devoted the most earnest study to the Greek language and being not unpracticed in rhetoric, and having read thoroughly the treatises of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato. The Alexiad occasionally refers to Aristotle by name and also quotes him without naming him. I mentioned one example in the last episode when Anna says that as a historian, truth is even dearer to her than devotion to her father, so that she is willing to criticise him where appropriate. This is an evocation of Aristotle, who justified his refutation of Plato's theory about the form of the good on the grounds that truth takes precedence over friendship. Of course the Alexiad is a work of history, not philosophy, and it has been argued that Anna Komnena's grasp of Aristotle was in fact rather superficial. Unfortunately, we have no work from her on a specifically philosophical topic, which would have helped us to test this proposition. In his oration in her honour, Tourniquet's actually praises Anna for writing nothing apart from the Alexiad, since this shows her lack of unseemly ambition. But he also assures us that she was enthralled by pagan learning from an early age. Her parents did not approve of the study of such material, especially for girls who are more easily corrupted than boys, but like someone arming themselves against a possible ambush, Anna fortified her soul against the potentially insidious aspects of pagan thought. Tourniquet's describes her young infatuation with learning by switching from this masculinizing military metaphor to an explicitly feminine one. Like a maiden who takes a furtive glance at her bridegroom through some chink, she had furtive meetings with her beloved grammar. Her wide reading, combined with critical distance, is also clear from a passage in the Alexiad itself, which touches on the topic of astrology. In what may be an implicit critique of her nephew Manuel, an emperor who was enthusiastic about astrology, Anna mentions that she acquired some knowledge of this art herself, but only in order to refute its pretensions. Of course, we might be reluctant to take the word of Anna herself and her propagandist Tourniquets as scholarly credentials. But the historian Zona Ras, who was no great admirer of the Comnenoi, said that Anna was engrossed by books and learned men and spoke with them not superficially. Besides, the Alexiad itself is ample evidence for Anna's intellectual attainments. It suggests a cultural and also political motive for her support of such scholarship as commentating on Aristotle. She championed Hellenic culture as a marker of Byzantium's superiority over the rival populations that surrounded them, whether Muslim or Western Christian. For Anna, these were all barbarians who lacked the sort of refinement displayed in fine Greek rhetoric or a mastery of Aristotelian logic. If Hellenic literature was a jewel in the crown of Byzantine supremacy, then it shone most rightly on the crowns of Anna's own family. As we've seen, she was at pains to stress her father's support for scholarship and she praised her late husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, as both a great warrior and a fine scholar. Another member of Anna's circle, Theodor Prodromos, likewise spoke of Nikephoros's expertise in both philosophy and poetry. This brings us to a fundamental question concerning the Alexiad. Did Anna Komnina really write it? Actually, no one doubts that she authored the text as we now have it, but it has been alleged that the work was mostly composed by Nikephoros before he died, with Anna just editing her husband's manuscript and adding a few personal touches. A central reason for this suspicion is that the Alexiad is much concerned with military matters. Nikephoros was indeed an army man who could have drawn on his personal experiences in describing the battles fought under Alexios, whereas Anna as a woman would have been both physically and culturally removed from the scenes of battle. Furthermore, Anna herself tells us that she used a work by her husband in writing the Alexiad, but she also remarks that it was half-finished and hastily put together when he died. Furthermore, as mentioned last time, she explains how she was able to assemble such a compelling account of Alexios' military exploits. She could draw on her own memories of discussions at court and got further material by interviewing men who were present at various battles. Nor need we see the Alexiad's focus on military affairs as a sign of male authorship. In fact, it fits squarely with Anna's classicising interests, since the Alexiad is, as its title suggests, a kind of rewriting of Homer's war epic The Iliad with her father in the lead role. Anna herself would probably not be surprised that later interpreters doubted her authorship in this way. As has been argued in a study of the Alexiad by Leonora Neville, Anna was well aware that readers might be disconcerted by a woman, even one born in the purple, daring to compose such an ambitious historical treatise. She carefully manipulates her own authorial persona, both disarming her potentially hostile audience and, more boldly, making various claims to authority. She tries to win them over by adopting what Neville calls an exaggeratedly feminine persona of extreme emotionalism, especially in passages where she laments such events as the death of Alexios. Her claim to be merely completing her husband's work might actually be another way of forestalling objections to her authorship. Yet she also boldly asserts her reliability as an author, for instance by underscoring her ability to suppress those same emotions of grief in order to carry on writing. A similar function is played by her claim to have conducted interviews and used court documents in writing the Alexiad and by her assertion of scholarly prowess in fields as varied as philosophy, rhetoric, medicine, and astrology. Anna was a woman undertaking a project that would have been expected from a man, and she wrote her book accordingly. Neville explains her strategies in the following terms. Anna's repeated practice of breaking out of the proper boundaries of history, breaking out of a masculinized historian's voice, to speak and participate in the discourses her culture marked as feminized, only to point out and apologize for her transgression, focuses attention both on her essentially female nature and her ability to transcend that nature. A strange feature of Byzantine misogyny, though one familiar from ancient Roman misogyny, is that men deemed women too weak and feeble-minded to do things like, say, writing epic historical works, while also fearing that power-hungry, scheming women could triumph over men in political affairs. It can feel like every highly placed woman of Rome was accused of poisoning a near relative. Similarly, Anna has gone down in history as a sinister conspirator who sought to put herself and her husband on the throne at the expense of her brother John. It was only when she failed to become a real queen that she settled for being Queen of the Sciences. As evidence for this, modern scholars have pointed to the fact that John doesn't get great press in the Alexiad. Notably, he is absent from her description of the family gathered around the dying Alexios because John has run off to the palace to take power. But we certainly find no outright character assassination directed towards John in the Alexiad. In fact, we have to wait for Nikitus Coniades, writing several decades after her death, for any hint in Byzantine sources that she schemed to seize power. A revisionist reading offered by admirers of Anna has sought to absolve her of any such underhandedness. But an alternative feminist reading of Anna's story could emphasize her supposed political ambition rather than denying it, seeing her attempted power grab as continuous with her confident self-presentation in the Alexiad. It's ironic that Anna Comnina's ethical character should be a matter of such debate, because she was responsible for a revival of interest in that greatest of works on this very topic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Surprisingly, it received no full commentary in antiquity, so it must have been high on the list of treatises to be dealt with in the completest project of her circle. The resulting commentary is perhaps the best illustration of their group enterprise, with different books of the Ethics assigned to different scholars. Michael of Ephesus and Eustratus both commented on some parts, while other books were handled by Scolia and commentary by authors who remain anonymous. A partial commentary by the antique author Aspasius was also included in the manuscript tradition that has come down to us. This illustrates the fact that the circle drew on earlier exegetical material when they could. Michael of Ephesus's commentaries on the Ethics and on other Aristotelian treatises often integrated previous Scolia, while also adding new material by Michael himself. As this suggests, Anna's circle was not merely completing the work of late antique philosophers but also carrying on their intellectual agenda. This has been shown in studies on Eustratus's ethics commentary, which have drawn attention to his use of Neoplatonic materials. Eustratus is quite honest about this, at one point begging the reader's indulgence for introducing so many apparent digressions into his commentary as he draws on authors who lived long after Aristotle. He has a particular taste for Proclus, who influences his idea that ultimate wisdom is the grasp of the highest principles and that when we grasp these principles, our limited human intellect is participating in an eternal, perfectly good intellect that permanently grafts all intelligible forms. This doesn't sound very Aristotelian, and Eustratus knew it. One particularly interesting section of his commentary deals with a chapter where Aristotle refutes Plato's idea that there is a single form of the good, which makes other things good when they participate in it. This is in fact the very chapter that occasioned Aristotle's comment that truth is to be honored even more than friendship. Eustratus's first move in defending Plato is to turn him into a Neoplatonist. This version of Plato thinks that the good is a first principle that produces all other things necessarily, by its very nature, not by will, and that the other forms are ideas in the mind of the divine craftsman. Faced with Aristotle's argument that things are good in many different ways, which cannot all be brought under one single idea, Eustratus replies that to the contrary, the arrangement of better and worse goods requires some greatest good that provides a measure for them all. Other things receive goodness from it to a greater or lesser extent simply because of their varying capacities to acquire perfection. In this and other passages, Eustratus develops the idea of paradigmatic forms that serve as causes for the things that participate in them. He agrees with what he takes to be Aristotle's position that universals have no genuine reality if we understand by universal a general concept that we abstract from the things we encounter. Thus, elsewhere in the theological context of discussing the natures of Christ, he notes that we do not worship Jesus's humanity because humanity as a general universal notion is nothing at all. Nonetheless, Eustratus departs from Aristotle by positing Platonic forms, which can also be called universal but in a different sense, meaning simply that they are each a single whole that stands over the many corresponding participants. The character of the form, humanity for instance, also exists imminently in various individuals, in this case the many humans. Using Neoplatonic terminology, Eustratus calls the immanent form a whole in the parts, whereas the paradigm in the divine mind is a whole before the parts. Eustratus concludes this defense of Plato with the caveat that he is not necessarily endorsing the theory of forms himself, since opponents of that theory would no doubt find other ways to argue against it. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Eustratus approaches the task of commenting on Aristotle as a committed Platonist. This is not terribly surprising, since he was a second-generation disciple of Michael Psalos, having studied under John Italoos. Eustratus had disowned Italoos by signing a letter rejecting his master's doctrines, which helps to explain how Anna Komnena, who was no admirer of Italoos, could have accepted Eustratus into her circle of intimates. Eustratus was well-placed during the reign of Alexios, but ran into trouble during a theological controversy and was ultimately, like Italoos before him, put on trial for supposedly heretical views. One of the accusations against him has Eustratus claiming that in the Gospels, Christ gave arguments in an Aristotelian fashion. While one scholar has commented that this is more entertaining than philosophically significant, it is clear that Eustratus did put his philosophical skills to work in theological contexts. For instance, he wrote a treatise defending the doctrine of Christ's two natures on the basis of, as he put it, logical, physical, and theological arguments. Eustratus's fellow commentator Michael of Ephesus offers something of a contrast. For one thing, we know much less about his life. Even the fact that he was from Ephesus is clear only from his reference to Heraclitus of Ephesus as a compatriot. More significantly, he was less Platonist and more Aristotelian. This is clear from his contribution to the group commentary on the ethics. He displays familiarity with Neoplatonism, but tends to take distance from Platonic views on such matters as the highest good and the paradigmatic forms. Then too, Michael commented on a greater range of Aristotelian texts than any contemporary author. Aside from his work on the ethics, he dealt with part of the metaphysics, a collection of Aristotle's short psychological treatises, the Sophistical refutations, and perhaps most remarkably Aristotle's works on animals. Like Albert the Great in the Latin sphere, but about a century earlier, Michael thus revived the study of Aristotle's zoology after this aspect of his scientific achievement had been almost completely ignored since Aristotle's own day. The zoological commentaries provide us with a concrete example of Michael's willingness to favour Aristotelianism over Platonism. He apparently accepts Aristotle's theory that the father's seed is the sole source of form for the offspring. To this, he contrasts what he thinks is Plato's view on generation, which will sound rather strange to readers who know the dialogues better than Michael seems to. He thinks that Plato is a two-seed theorist, in other words that both father and mother are involved in shaping the embryo, and that the seed derives from the various organs of both parents. Thus the parents' heads provide little models for the head of the child, the parental feet indirectly generate the child's feet, and so on. Aristotle does describe a theory like this, but does not identify its author, and apparently Michael assumed Aristotle was talking about Plato. Michael rejects the Platonic theory, assuming instead that there are formative principles or logoi in the paternal seed that actively cause the form of the gestating child. And in another sign of his fidelity to Aristotle, he holds that the heart and not the brain is the central organ of governance for the animal, a notion that had been abandoned by most philosophers after Galen's proof of the importance of the brain in the 2nd century AD. This, despite Michael's evident knowledge of medical theory, which emerges at various points in his writing. The commentaries discussed in this episode are not the only ones to derive from Anna Comdena's circle. You may remember the two devoted to Aristotle's rhetoric mentioned in episode 311. And they were of course not the only ones written in Byzantium. We have alluded to commentaries on Aristotle by Michael Psellos and John Italoos, and there will be later commentators too. There was Leo Magentios, who some generations after Anna's circle dealt with the full range of Aristotle's logical works, and later still, George Pachimeris, who commented on several treatises, including the Ethics. We should also not forget the importance of Epitomes and Scolia devoted to the Aristotelian treatises which were produced pretty well throughout Byzantine history. As we'll see later, some of this material will help readers of Latin to make their way through Aristotle. Eustratus is a good example, since his commentary on the Ethics was received among the Western Scholastics. So there's a lot of material here, and modern day scholars have not yet explored it fully. It used to be thought that late ancient commentaries were dull, arid monuments of pedantry, but now a thriving branch of research is devoted to them. Perhaps a similar reappraisal is in store for Anna's collaborators and other scholars who carried on the labours of ancient exegetes like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Philoponus, and Simplicius. Having said that, it's not as if no one has been looking at these later commentaries at all. Next time, I'll be joined by an interview guest who has done just that, making the works of men like Michael of Ephesus and Eustratus an abiding concern of her inquiries into Byzantine thought. Join me for a conversation with Catarina Iero Diacono. And after you've done so, why not leave a comment on the website for The History of Philosophy without any gaps. O God of hosts, we pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days. We pray that you will be with us in the coming days.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Byzantine commentaries on Aristotle with Katarina Iero Diacono, who is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens, and Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the University of Geneva. Hi, Katarina! Hello! Okay, so after that impressive affiliation, we're ready to start talking about Byzantine philosophy. Which is not going to be very impressive. Don't say that! We want people to keep listening. Well, we're going to be focusing on something in particular, which is philosophical commentaries in the Byzantine tradition, and in particular, commentaries on Aristotle. Maybe you could start out by just saying who the major commentators on Aristotle were in the Byzantine tradition. Yes, of course. The first time that we have commentaries in Byzantine times, similar to the commentaries that we find in Late Antiquity, for example, Alexander of Afordisius' commentaries, or Ammonius or Philoponus, is in the 12th century. And I'm thinking of the commentaries written by Eustratus of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus. Before that, we don't really have this kind of detailed running commentaries. But we do have scolia. So we need to think of commentaries in Byzantine times not only as long detailed commentaries, but also either scolia in the margins, or paraphrases, or introductions to Aristotelian philosophy or small essays on specific topics. So if we have this broader notion of a commentary, then we can think of three different periods in Byzantine times during which scholars would comment on Aristotle. And the first period is the period right after iconoclasm, so the ninth and the 10th century. And we call it usually the Byzantine humanism, the first Byzantine humanism. And authors at the time is the patriarch of Constantinople, Fortius, and the Archbishop Arethas. They are more concerned in copying texts so that they can have these ancient philosophical texts. So they're really doing more compilations than original commentaries. Exactly. And in fact, they are interested in making sure that all the works of Aristotle survive and the works of Plato. So in the case of Fortius, he's known for his Bibliotheca, who is this kind of compilation of different texts from antiquity, but he has also small essays on Aristotle's categories. And the same with Arethas, he is well known for this annotated manuscript, the Urbinus 35, where he has the whole of Aristotle's organon, but also he has scolia on the categories and on Porphyry's Isagorge. So in this way, this period is a period of mainly scolia on Aristotle's logic. Now the next period becomes more interesting, and that is the period of the 11th and 12th century. And we have people like Michael Psellus and John Italoos, his student, and they are not only focusing on Aristotle's logic, but we have, for example, in the case of Michael Psellus, we have essays on Aristotle's psychology. So the unity of body and soul is going to be one of the topics that he will discuss. And in the case of, and we have of course paraphrases on the Paranalytics and on the interpretation longer texts. And in the case of John Italoos, we have his work, which is called Questiones Quadibetales, and it's 93 answers to questions that his students asked him. And there are different issues there that are discussed. So he is going to discuss their things apart from logic. He's also interested in questions about the soul. So again, it's not anymore only logic, Aristotelian logic, but other areas of Aristotle's works like for example, natural philosophy and psychology. Now we arrive at the 12th century. And the 12th century is, as I said, quite interesting, because we have Eustratus of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, who belong to a group of scholars that Anna Cumnena is going to gather around her and she asks them to work on neglected works of Aristotle's and to produce long commentaries like the commentaries that we know from late antiquity. So Eustratus is someone who has commented on the first and the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, but also on the second book of the Posterior Analytics. Michael of Ephesus also on the Nicomachean Ethics books, if I remember well, it's the fifth, the ninth and the 10th of the Nicomachean Ethics, but also Sophisticia Lengki, Metaphysics books six to 14, but also the zoological works of Aristotle's and we don't have other commentaries at the time on these works. So that's a really interesting case, right? Because there aren't any late antique commentaries on the zoological works. Exactly. The other interesting case is the one about posterior analytics. I said that Eustratus is commenting on the posterior analytics and it seems that at the time apart from Themistius' Peraphoruses on the posterior analytics, we don't have, maybe they had some fragments from Alexander of Rhodesia's commentary on the second book of the posterior analytics and then we have a pseudophiloponous work, but from what I understand it's later than Eustratus. So they realized that there are some works of Aristotle that they would like to comment on and they don't have other commentaries available at the time. So that's the exceptional work that was done at the time of Anna Comnena. And that continues with Theodor Prodromus. Again, we have a commentary on the posterior analytics, the second book of the posterior analytics, Leo Magentinos at the same period on the paranormal analytics and on Dein de Redazione. And we go to the third period of Byzantine commentaries, which is the 13th century until the fall of Constantinople. And in this period, we have works on Aristotle by Nikephoros Vlemiides. But at this period, they are more interested not in producing commentaries, but more encyclopedic works, more compendia introductions to Aristotle and his works mainly for pedagogical reasons. So Nikephoros Vlemiides is going to have an introduction to physics and introduction to logic. And these are works that are going to be translated into Latin soon. And they are very influential. So Pacimares, who comes right after Vlemiides, this is going to be influenced by Vlemiides' work and Recanvides. Both of them are going also to produce this compendia. And these are works on all aspects of Aristotelian philosophy, not anymore only in logic or natural philosophy. In other words, it's not really a commentary, like where they say, here's what each sentence means. It's more like pulling the whole Aristotelian philosophy together into one place. Exactly. So it's some sort of a hybrid, paraphrasis plus compendium plus introduction. I mean, it's that sort of thing. And for example, in the case of Recanvides, most of what he has to say is already found in Vlemiides and Pacimares. So they are repeating themselves quite a lot. Sounds like they pretty much use every vehicle to tell you an Aristotle other than podcasts. Okay. Is that the last group of commentators that we get then before the fall of Constantinople? No, there are three more that I would like to mention. We have Sophonios who writes paraphrasis and he writes a paraphrase on the Deianema. He writes one on the categories on the Pramilits, the Sophistica Leki. Some of them we thought that they, we didn't know that they are by him, but now more scholars would agree that Sophonios must be the author in these cases. Then we have Theodor Metochitis, who is someone who paraphrases all of Aristotle's writings on natural philosophy. And at the end, we have another patriarch of Constantinople, George Scholarius Yanavios. And in his case, what is very interesting is that his commentaries are very much influenced by the Latin works on Aristotle, but also by Avicenna and Averroes. So there is a development in the way commentaries are written. That's really interesting. So at this point we have basically transmission backwards and forwards. So Greek philosophy influencing Latin philosophy and Latin philosophy and even Arabic philosophy influencing Greek. Would they have known Avicenna and Averroes by means of a Latin translation? Yes, most probably that's how it comes to them. It's not that they know how to read Arabic. Okay. Well, obviously you've just mentioned a lot of commentators. Yeah, not household names. Not exactly. After this podcast series they hopefully will be, at least in some households. And I guess the upshot of that is that we have a lot of commentaries, very few of which have been studied in any detail. Is the sheer number of commentaries even greater than the number of commentaries from antiquity, for example? I'll give you an example. In the case of the categories, which is a work that they were reading a lot and commented a lot in Byzantine times, we know that there were 30 ancient commentaries, but there are only eight which are extant. And we have 15 Byzantine commentaries, but we have 200 in the Latin West. So they have produced a lot, but of course it's a much smaller world, the world of And you're talking about surviving commentaries. Exactly. Yes. And of course we probably just don't know how many lost Greek commentaries there were. But also we have a lot of anonymous. So if these are also studied, then maybe we will have a much better idea of the production of commentaries in Byzantine times. But I think that we can say that it's one tenth of what we find in the Latin West. I mean, we don't have more than that. Okay. But on the other hand, less studied. Yes. Less than 10% as much effort as in Britain. Can you say something about the practical context that actually produced these commentaries? I mean, for late antiquity, if we think about the commentaries that were written in Alexandria in the school of Ammonius, something I covered a long time ago on the podcast, we're imagining a teaching situation where a teacher is lecturing and then often the commentaries are even labeled as being from the voice of Ammonius. In other words, it's a record of what he said during the lectures. Is that pretty much the situation with these commentaries as well? Look, in Byzantine, we don't have the autonomous universities of the Latin West, certainly. So when we talk about higher education in Byzantine, it's not as organized as it is in the West. As I said, the Greek speaking world was much smaller and it was decreasing. And it was a place where I mean, the higher education was mainly for officials of the state and the church, not for scholars. So it's a very different environment than what you find in the Latin West or in late antiquity. So there was something that we usually refer to it as the Imperial School of Constantinople. We know very little about how it was organized. At the same time, there was a patriarchal school, but that was mainly for the education of the clergy. And then there was private tuition. But all that was not done in a very organized way. And it changes from one period to another, depending on the emperor and depending on the situation in the patriarchy. So we don't have the situation. Depending on how well they're doing at holding off the Muslim armies just at the moment. Exactly, that too. Yes, of course. But there is some sort of, we can talk about some sort of philosophical curriculum. I mean, it's quite modest. I mean, they would have studied some works on Aristotle's logic. And of course, I'm thinking of Porphyry's Ensagoye, Aristotle's Categories, and the Pareto Tiana, prior analytics, one to seven, and Sophistical Refutations. And they will add to that, which I think is quite interesting, something about Stoic logic as well at the end. Sometimes not distinguishing it from Aristotelian logic, but some sort of an appendix on the hypothetical syllogistic. So they would do some logic, then they would do some Aristotelian physics, and they would read some of the physics on generation and corruption and meteorology, and then some mathematics, and that's it. And you understand now why we have all these commentaries on logical works. And when they start producing all these other commentaries on the ethics, for example, it's not for to use them in higher education. I mean, it is more for their own use or for a very small group of people who would be interested in Aristotle. Okay. Well, that makes it sound like one point of continuity between the late antique situation and the Byzantine tradition is that Aristotle is used to set a curriculum of study. And this, as I say, is true of late antiquity also, which is kind of ironic because in late antiquity, they're all neoplatonists. And when they think of Aristotle as a more introductory set of texts than Plato, is that still true in the Byzantine tradition? I mean, to what extent do they see Aristotle as being on a par with Plato or as being a more introductory authoritative source? I mean, obviously he's authoritative or they wouldn't be writing all these commentaries on him, but how would they situate him relative to Plato? They will follow the neoplatonists in this regard. And they will think that Plato and Aristotle are, I mean, Aristotle is equal to Plato. A lot of times we are trying to classify the different Byzantine scholars as Platonists or as Aristotelians, but I think that's very misleading. And it's very misleading because this kind of distinction is going to become clear at the end of the Byzantine era when there is a big debate controversy between Plato, who was a fervent Platonist, and Scholarius, this patriarch of Constantinople, who was an Aristotelian. And that's when it is clear that some of them are Platonists and some of them are Aristotelian. So it is quite anachronistic to talk about the Byzantine scholars as Platonists or as Aristotelians before that period. But there's a temptation to read that conflict back into the earlier time. Exactly, yes. And I think it is misleading because in the previous generations of commentators, we have more some sort of eclecticism that we find in Neoplatonism as well, where of course Aristotle is going to be read through Neoplatonism, but also other aspects are going to be, I mean, other traditions are going to be added. And they will know something about Stoicism, so we will have some references to the Stoics. But the main difference is that, of course, they will have a lot, I mean, they will try to make what their views compatible to the Christian beliefs that they have at the same time. So that's going to be something that will differentiate them quite a bit from the Neoplatonists. And I would like to give one example so that things become a bit clearer. So you have Eustratus of Nicaea, I've mentioned him already twice, 12th century, and he writes this commentary on the posterior analytics, the second book on the posterior analytics and the last chapter. So the question is about the knowledge of first principles. And what he's going to make clear is that he's not going to accept Plato's view that we have knowledge of the first principles already from our previous lives. That's a theory of recollection. Exactly. And he doesn't agree also with Aristotle. So it is not that we are born with some sort of potential knowledge which becomes actualized because of learning and experience. Also that's not what is the case according to him. But he thinks that we are born or God creates us with all the knowledge that we need to have. So the human soul has the knowledge because it is created by God. But then we have all these bodily impulses that are not going to allow us to have the knowledge that we should. And what we are supposed to do is get rid of these impulses and then we can have the knowledge of first principles that we want to have. So he does come up with a very different view than the new Platonists or than Aristotle because exactly he tries to present a more Christian way of looking. It's almost like a weird fusion of Augustine and Plato's theory of recollection. So instead of having it from before you were born, God gives it to you. But he doesn't give it to you one bit at a time like in Augustine. He gives it to you all at once and you have to bring it actually to your mental attention. More generally, can you say something about how the Christian context of these commentaries affects the way that philosophy is seen or the way that they carry out the task of commenting on Aristotle? You see, in Byzantine times philosophy seems to have acquired two different senses. I mean, philosophy is this kind of discipline which is engaged with the questions that the ancient philosophers were engaged with. But at the same time, philosophy is connected with the Christian way of life and thinking or even with asceticism. And sometimes these two senses are going to reinforce each other. And these are the cases in which ancient philosophy is going to be used in order to even prove some of the Christian dogmas. But in other cases, it will seem to be the case that we have some sort of conflict between the two. And different Byzantine commentators will have different views. So for example, we have someone from the 14th century, I haven't mentioned him, Nikephoros Grigoras, and he thinks that ancient logic, all this philosophical reasoning is for mediocre minds. It's not going to help us understand the principles of reality, the essence of God. So there is no point in working on logic. On the other hand, we have people like Psellos in the 11th century, and he will stress that it is an indispensable instrument, logic, in order to find the truth. Now, Italos is the most interesting of all these cases because he is the man who in 1082 was anathematized by the Orthodox Church. And we don't have other cases like that. I mean, Eustratus was also anathematized, but they changed their minds after a while. Whereas with Italos, you can still hear some of these anathemas in the Orthodox Church. His state anathematized. Exactly. So in his case, what is very interesting is that he actually wants to use philosophical reasoning, logical reasoning systematically so that he proved some of the Christian beliefs, which have to do, for example, with the two natures of Christ or the resurrection of Christ, or he discusses miracles using some philosophical arguments. And he does all that because he thinks that theology is a part of philosophy and not the other way around. So it is not that philosophy plays, according to him, some sort of an auxiliary role. It is philosophy which is important, where we can find the truth. And theology is the culmination of philosophy, very much like the way that philosophy and theology are treated by ancient philosophers, because of course, you know, theology is going to be part of the ancient philosophical traditions. So he's someone who very much thinks that ancient philosophy needs to be studied systematically, and it will help us in our Christian beliefs. But the problem is that he is anathematized. Which of those two views is more representative of the cultural standing of philosophy in the Byzantine era? I mean, is it often being attacked or are the attacks more selective? I think in most cases, they try to keep a stand in between, which is that Aristotle and philosophy is important as some sort of preparation. But we should know that there are limits to how much we can understand and know using ancient philosophical arguments. So I think that what they will stress is that we need ancient philosophy, but up to a point. Then illumination is important or God's grace is important. So I think that's the view of the majority of these scholars. And there's a high cultural value placed on certain pagan texts anyway. Homer, for example, was read throughout the Byzantine period, and Plato, presumably, and Aristotle's another pagan author who largely is respected. And the question isn't whether he's worthless. The question is exactly how is he worthwhile? Exactly. How much we can use him without creating problems. Right. OK, well, I thought we could end by just focusing in on one commentator. You've written about a number of different commentators, but I thought the one I would ask you about is Michael of Ephesus, because he wrote a commentary on the ethics, which is unusual, as you said already. I mean, we don't have a lot of commentary literature on the ethics from late antiquity. What does he do with the ethics that's interesting or worthwhile, would you say? Yeah, Michael of Ephesus certainly follows the Neoplatonists in many of his interpretations of the Aristotelian ethics. But from time to time, he comes up with some interesting ideas. Of course, we don't know whether these ideas were already presented by someone else. In another commentary that Michael was using when he was writing his, so we don't know whether he is really original. But at least from the evidence that we have, there is nobody else who follows these kinds of interpretations. And I can give you one example, at least from his commentary, which I find quite interesting. And the issue is the connection between eudaimonia, happiness and pleasure. So whether pleasure is part of eudaimonia or not. And he's going to say, of course, pleasure is not part of eudaimonia. And he feels he follows Aristotle in saying that. But then he realizes that pleasure is inseparable from eudaimonia. So what is exactly the connection between pleasure and eudaimonia? Because Aristotle says so. Exactly. And he has quite a bit to say about pleasure. And what Michael of Ephesus is going to say is that pleasure should be understood as some kind of a symptom of eudaimonia. So he uses for the first time this kind of metaphor, pleasure as a symptom of eudaimonia that we don't find in other commentators. So it's some sort of a medical. Literally this word they would use for the symptom you get in a disease. Exactly. Symptom. And what is quite interesting is that it's going to be some sort of a symptom that supervenes over eudaimonia. And of course, this talk about supervening is we find it also in Aristotle. But Aristotle doesn't give us a way to understand what he means by supervening. I mean, he doesn't have some sort of explanation. And what Michael is going to say is that it is some sort of a symptom like we are talking about tersion fever and the symptom is to vomit. And the symptom in this case, you don't need to know it in order to know what kind of disease you have. So then supervening in this case means that you don't necessarily need to know what supervenes on something in order to know the essence of this thing. So we can know something about this fever without knowing the symptoms. And that's exactly the case with pleasure and eudaimonia that we can discuss eudaimonia. We know what eudaimonia is all about without necessarily knowing much about pleasure. But still, pleasure is this kind of symptom which supervenes over eudaimonia. So whatever you think about this as a way of thinking about pleasure, certainly it is not in our ancient sources. And it's quite interesting to think whether he's right in understanding pleasure in this way, but also in understanding what it means in this case to supervene. Yeah. Yeah, I like that because actually Plato and Aristotle, they both seem to feel under a lot of pressure to say that the best life, which might be the life of philosophy, will be pleasant because after all, who wants to live a life with a point of pleasure? But on the other hand, they don't want to go so far as to say that pleasure is constitutive of the best life, because that's what the hedonists say. And they don't even want to say that it's partially constitutive of the best life. And this would be a way of avoiding that because you say that even though it's in no way a part of the best life, it automatically comes along for free the way that certain symptoms just go along with certain diseases inevitably, I guess. Right. And the other thing that he does, which I find also quite interesting, is that I'm sure you know and you've discussed it in your podcast. I mean, these views about eudaimonia, whether it's contemplation that it's needed or whether moral virtues are needed or external goods are needed, you know, all this discussion. And in the case of Michael, he's very clear that there are two different kinds of eudaimonia. I mean, there is a political eudaimonia, which has to do with the moral virtues, and there's a theoretical eudaimonia, which has to do with the intellectual virtues. And human beings as some sort of combination of body and soul can achieve only the kind of practical eudaimonia, whereas it's only our true self. I mean, this kind of true human being which can achieve, who can achieve this eudaimonia, the intellectual, the theoretical eudaimonia, which is connected with contemplation. And what he says, which I find quite interesting, is that if you manage to achieve this theoretical eudaimonia, then and then he starts then with his Christian views that regret and redemption are not needed anymore. So, you know, there are these kind of small additions here and there and you realize that you have a Christian writer and author who is trying to apply what he has learned, what he knows from his, you know, from Christianity. And that makes it so much interesting. It's like he works his way through Aristotle and at the end, he becomes more Platonist and also Christian at the same time. Right. OK, well, that was an amazingly wide ranging and useful overview of the commentary tradition in Byzantine philosophy. So thank you very much to Katarina. Thank you for inviting me. And please join me next time to hear more about Byzantine philosophy here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Wiser than Men, Gender in Byzantium. Anna Komnina was unique. No other woman in the Byzantine period wrote a work with the scale and intellectual ambition of her Alexiad, and no other Byzantine woman played such a significant role in the interpretation of pagan philosophical literature. Yet Anna was also one example of a familiar type. The aristocratic woman close to or at the center of the circles of political power in Constantinople. The historical chronicles we have recently discussed are full of information about royal women like Irene, Theodora, Zoe, and Eudokia, to the point where whole books have been devoted to the subject of Byzantine empresses. Such historical reports can be combined with hegographical accounts of holy women, with writings in which male Byzantine authors talk about women from their own families, and information about the life and reading habits of nuns in female monasteries. As a result, there is plenty of material for learning about the situation of women in this culture and the extent to which they could aspire to intellectual pursuits. Anna's own writings are already revealing in this respect. We already know about her early efforts to gain an education and the way she carefully curated her persona as a female author. Occasionally, she refers to this quite explicitly. In one passage of her Alexiad, she shies away from detailing a heretical movement, writing, "...modesty prevents me as the beautiful Sappho says somewhere, for though a historian, I am also a woman, and the talk of the vulgar had better be passed over in silence." Of course, it is entirely in character for her to quote and tacitly compare herself to a classical pagan author like Sappho. Similarly, Tourniquet's Oration in Anna's Honor calls her wiser than men and compares her to the female Pythagorean sage Fiano and the late ancient mathematician and pagan martyr Hypatia. Anna herself already compared her own mother to Fiano in the Alexiad. She tells a famous anecdote about Fiano, who was complimented on her shapely forearm, and said, yes, but it is not for the public. Anna then adds that her mother was so modest that she did not like showing her eyes either, or allowing anyone but intimates to hear her voice. As this passage illustrates, women were encouraged to be private and retiring individuals. Pale skin was admired in women, but not in men. The latter should be out proving themselves on military campaign, whereas elite women should stay indoors and allow their servants to run all the errands, emerging from seclusion only for events like religious ceremonies. When they did venture into public, upper-class women seemed to have worn veils, which may be what Anna has in mind when she says that her mother kept her eyes hidden away. A full veil could be worn as a show of piety, though a scarf framing the face was probably more common. Given this cultural context, it is remarkable that women did manage to hold political power, and unsurprising that men often grumbled about their doing so. The most famous case is the Empress Irene, who in 780 ascended to the throne as regent to her young son, who was called, what else, Constantine. Coins from the period depict her alongside her son, but the image of family harmony was misleading. As Constantine grew older, he pushed her aside, but was then forced to share power with her again. Ultimately, and notoriously, she had him blinded in order to secure rule for herself. This may have encouraged the Western ruler Charlemagne to take the provocative step of adopting the title Emperor for himself, the rationale being that, with a woman sitting on the throne in Constantinople, it was effectively vacant. It's interesting to see how historians deal with such female rulers. The chronicler Theophanes accuses Irene of being seduced by wicked advisors into grasping after power, and says in this context that she was deceived like a woman. Yet the same Theophanes admits that when Irene was ultimately deposed in favor of her finance minister, the social climber Nacephorus, the people of this city were angry and bewildered that God had permitted a woman who had suffered like a martyr on behalf of the true faith to be ousted by a swineherd. Similarly, mixed feelings were provoked by the sisters Zoe and Theodora. Michael Pselos admitted the legitimacy of their rule as offspring of a Mao emperor, but also voiced some disquiet at the spectacle of women ruling the empire, commenting that "...the women's quarters were transformed into an imperial council chamber." It is of course these affluent women of the ruling and literary class who are best represented in our written sources. You won't get any sense of the life of an Anatolian peasant woman from Anacomnena or Pselos. Obviously, most women of the empire, and men for that matter, would have been illiterate. The ability to read had to be acquired from tutors at an expense that would have been unaffordable for most, or in a religious context, particularly among those cloistered in monasteries. Even in the latter case, there was a distinction between so-called church nuns and laboring nuns, with the former having an upper-class background and instructing their illiterate sisters. The usual reading list was thoroughly Christian. A story about one of the most popular female saints, Decla, has her miraculously granting literacy to another woman so that she can read the Bible. Even a royal woman like the 12th century literary patroness Irena Sivasto Kratoresa, perhaps the Byzantine figure who was most reminiscent of Anacomnena, was warned by male advisors not to concern herself with the potentially corrupting literature of the pagans. Here we should recall the story of young Annas taking precautions against the potential ambush laid by non-Christian texts. And we should also make mention of one other famous female author from the Byzantine period, the poet and musical composer Cassia, widely admired for her religious hymns. A nice anecdote has her standing up against misogyny. When a man remarked to her that evils came to humankind through a woman, namely Eve, she retorted that it was through another woman that better things began, namely Mary. We can get more light on female literacy from a study by Claudia Rapp, who looked at how women used manuscripts in Byzantine history. She confirms that female readers were often nuns and that they were often reading hagiographies, that is, the life stories of saints. This genre of literature, which goes back to late antiquity, offered moral instruction to both men and women, or perhaps we should say boys and girls, because this kind of text was often read by or read out to young readers. The saints were to be admired and imitated in stories about miracles and liven the tales. As we might expect, women readers were steered especially towards lives of female saints. There they could find both bad news and good news. True, they had been born with an inferior gender, but this did not prevent them from becoming moral exemplars. One hagiography explains that the good works of women are in fact more impressive than those of men, for they have the lot of a weaker nature and yet they were not hindered by this at all to climb up to the summit of virtue, but they made the female element male through a virile mind and accomplished the same and even more than the men. It would be worth focusing on one female saint in particular because of her importance in the history of philosophy, Macrina the Younger. I've mentioned her before because she was the sister of the Cappadocian Church Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Raiseria. But that was more than 200 episodes ago, so you may need a quick reminder. We know her especially from two works by her brother Gregory, a biographical work and a remarkable treatise called On Soul and Resurrection. Here she is depicted on her deathbed in dialogue with Gregory himself, calmly providing him with philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul. The setting is of course intended to remind us of Plato's Phaedo, with Macrina replacing Socrates as the philosopher facing bodily death and proving that it is not true death, even as intimates are giving in to their grief. This is highlighted by a passage at the beginning of the dialogue in which Macrina is described as reining in Gregory's emotions like a skilled charioteer so that the two of them can have a rational discussion about the nature of the soul. It almost goes without saying that this is an inversion of stereotypical gender roles. In an infamous passage at the start of the Phaedo, Plato describes how Socrates sent away his lamenting wife Xanthippe so that he could spend his final moments in philosophical discourse with his male friends. At the end of the dialogue, Socrates chastises these same friends for acting like women as they weep over his imminent demise. Thanks in part to these passages, a typical way to present someone as a consummate philosopher was to show them unmoved in the face of their own death or the death of family members. Just as typical was the assumption that women were, by nature, all but incapable of such self-restraint. We can see this from a number of surviving letters of consolation written in the Byzantine period. Our bibliophile friend Photius wrote one of them to his brother on the occasion of the death of his niece. He admits that he himself is distraught, but encourages his brother not to give way to lamentation for men must set a good example to women and not act like women. Similarly, his friend Nicolaus Mysticus wrote to the emperor Romanos I Lycopinos when his wife Theodora died in 922. He offered the consoling thought that it was better that she should die than the emperor, since as a woman she would have been less equipped to deal with the grief. By having his sister Macrina adopt the role of a perfectly rational philosopher, Gregory was therefore offering the most striking of role models to his readers, both male and female. We might assume that he was showing how even a woman could act in a properly masculine fashion. Certainly, Byzantine women were sometimes praised for acting like men. A classic case would be the so-called transvestite nuns like the 3rd century saint Eugenia, who disguised herself as a man to enter a monastery. A 13th century account of her life has her say, But I think that Gregory of Nyssa was trying to say something slightly different by presenting his sister in this fashion. In the dialogue, Macrina argues that the soul must be immortal because it is an image of God, and it is most of all an image of Him when it engages in pure reasoning. Furthermore, God, as Gregory affirms in other works, has no gender. So, by subduing her emotions and living in accordance with nothing but reason, Macrina was not necessarily acting like a man. Rather, she was acting like God, and thus transcending gender altogether. This was part of a philosophical project of attaining likeness to God insofar as is possible for humans, a goal named by Plato in one of his dialogues and embraced by Macrina in this Christian rewriting of Plato's Phaedo. These ideas, and in fact this very dialogue by Gregory of Nyssa, would have been on the mind of Michael Pselos when he wrote a rhetorical showpiece called Encomium for His Mother. It was praised in magnificent terms by the 12th century scholar Gregory of Corinth, who judged it one of the four best speeches ever written. In the speech, Pselos describes his mother Theodora's extraordinary virtue and piety. He tells of how she valued scholarship, studying in secret as a young woman as Anna Komnena would later do, and then seeing to it that Pselos himself received the finest education possible. Her character is praised in much the same terms that Pselos uses to praise good rhetoric. We saw him admiring the way that Gregory Nazianzus was able to combine contrary qualities in his writings. Likewise, Theodora's nobility consisted in her combining apparently opposite personality traits. She was both contemplative and given to action, both humble and authoritative, both gentle and stern in moral judgment. Pselos does share his culture's assumptions about the weakness of women, and so praises his mother by saying that, Pselos himself was different. In another of his writings, he spoke of himself as female by nature, in the context of admitting how emotionally he reacted to the birth of his grandson. None of that for his mother. Pselos describes how she reacted to the death of Pselos's sister, namely by expounding at great length to Pselos's father about the passage to the better life, which looks to be an obvious reminiscence of Macrina. Theodora was also valiant in her war against the desires and demands of the body, eating so little that she became Alluding to a famous remark about Plotinus, Pselos says that his mother seemed to be ashamed of being in a body, and that she resisted the attempts of her family to get her to see to the needs of her body. On one occasion, she was almost persuaded to eat a fine meal, but then gave it away to a destitute woman. Pselos seems to have mixed feelings about his mother's asceticism, which he calls her philosophy. He is unable to follow her example and admits modestly that his devotion to philosophy is limited to its cloak, though he goes on at the end of the encomium to describe his own philosophical inquiries. Here we have an unusually explicit contrast between the two meanings of philosophy in Byzantine culture. His mother was a philosopher because of her pious, ascetic way of life, whereas Pselos is a philosopher because of his book learning and expertise in pagan intellectual literature. Though Pselos would no doubt like to have the last word on this subject, we can't conclude a discussion of gender in Byzantium without saying something on the much-discussed topic of eunuchs. You'll probably be aware that eunuchs were present at court and as servants in aristocratic society more generally, something so famous that it has inspired a character in the Game of Thrones series. Eunuchs played a vital social role because they could serve and protect noble women with no danger of seducing or at least impregnating them. Also, since they could not have offspring, they were considered unthreatening in political terms, effectively unable to seize power for themselves. Yet some eunuchs rose to great eminence. Some were generals or powerful officials, like Basil Le Capenos, son of an emperor and successful as a military leader. Much of what we have observed regarding Byzantine attitudes towards women reappears in exaggerated form in remarks about eunuchs. They were thought to be given to greed and to bodily desires, desires they might be physically unable to satisfy. Often they were associated with homosexuality, a common assumption being that eunuchs enjoyed being the passive partner in male-male sex. Yet they were also resented for being, quite literally, cut off from other kinds of sexual activity because they had achieved the virtue of chastity on the cheap. For this reason, some churchmen condemned the practice of deliberately turning youngsters into eunuchs surgically or, even worse, castrating men who were past the age of puberty. Eunuchs who arose naturally through accident or disease were more likely to be accepted. Sometimes, presentations of their sexless condition were strikingly positive, as in texts where they are compared to or confused with angels. Yet, even as they became a fixed part of the Byzantine ruling elite, or perhaps precisely for this reason, eunuchs were by and large subject to abuse and critique. A brutal aphorism from the 12th century advised, if you have a eunuch, kill him. If you haven't, buy one and kill him. Such hostility could be explained by a fascinating proposal made by Catherine Ringrose to the effect that eunuchs constituted a third gender. Despite being biologically male, that is, men in respect of their sex, they were perceived as occupying an ambiguous cultural middle ground between the male and female genders. Thus, we find them being called androgynous, womanish, or artificial women. As Ringrose writes, this made their contemporaries uneasy because they were seen to move too readily between the worlds of men and women, between earthly sensuality and heavenly spirituality, between imperial presence and ordinary space, and between the church and secular world. Such uneasiness provoked not only the aforementioned abuse, but also at least one text which speaks out boldly in defense of eunuchs. It was written by Theophylactes of Ochrid, who cunningly compared the condition of the eunuch to that of the monk. With their vows of chastity, monks were also refusing to employ their sexual organs in the way nature intended. Castration was simply a more radical step in the same direction, like cutting down an unwanted tree. Theophylactes admitted that some eunuchs are wicked, devious, and debauched, but then again plenty of non-eunuchs are too, and moral judgment should concern the individual, not the group. One might argue that with this line of argument Theophylactes was merely asking his contemporaries to apply to eunuchs the sort of perspective they normally took on women. While inferior as a class to physically intact or bearded men, on an individual basis they are frequently worthy of great admiration. A revealing fact about Byzantine eunuchs and their centrality to Byzantine court life is that certain political offices were reserved solely for them. This is just a small example of the way that the legal provisions of the empire give us a window into wider cultural attitudes. And of course, the practice of law raises its own philosophical issues. How do laws acquire their legitimacy, and how should jurists determine the right conclusion in individual cases? This is an area we'll be getting into in the next episode as we continue to look at philosophically intriguing aspects of Byzantine culture. We'll be seeing how Byzantine law, like Byzantine Platonism and Aristotelianism, had its roots in late antiquity. We'll also be investigating a couple of specific issues that arise within the legal and practical realm, namely warfare and economics. Two things are certain in this world, death and taxes, and next time you're certain to hear about both, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Just Measures – Law, Money and War in Byzantium. The welfare of the state springs from two sources, weapons and laws. With these words, the 6th century emperor Justinian put before his people the fruits of a remarkable undertaking. At his behest, a team of jurists led by the indefatigable Tribonian had gathered together centuries worth of Roman law. The result was a legal codification in three parts, the digest, codex and institutes, followed later by the so-called novels, that is new laws devised in Justinian's own reign. We've looked recently at other works that were basically compilations or presentations of earlier material, like Fodius's Library or the Suda, and hopefully we've learned to take such works of scholarship seriously, but none of them can match Justinian's legal corpus for influence. Written in Latin, it became the crucial source for Western medieval law when it was taken up by the jurists of 12th century Italy. And it was crucial in the East too, effectively supplanting previous Roman law and setting down rules that would be invoked in courtrooms throughout Byzantine history. This is exactly what Justinian had in mind. Any laws that failed to make it into his codification were rendered obsolete, effectively repealed by omission. This made it the point of reference for future generations of lawyers and judges, which had its downsides. We're talking here about a massive body of technical writing, and it was written in Latin, which was not the working language of the Eastern Empire. No wonder then, that future emperors commissioned further legal works in Greek. Under the iconoclast Isaurian dynasty, a selection of laws entitled the Ecloga, and under the Macedonian dynasty in the 9th century, a work called the Isogogae, or Introduction, which apparently involved the aforementioned Fotius. Around 900, the Emperor Leo VI, known as Leo the Wise, issued his own laws. And there are many other examples of smaller scale legislation being handed down by Byzantine emperors. We should be struck, if not surprised, by the fact that all this lawmaking was done in the name of individual emperors. As mentioned a few episodes back, it was a uniquely imperial prerogative to hand down new laws, a powerful expression of the emperor's supreme authority. Even if he was mostly in the business of reorganizing and reissuing earlier Roman juristic material, Justinian gave these old laws new force when they were uttered through his mouth, as his legal corpus puts it. This seems to have been a fundamentally secular project, but later emperors increasingly presented their legislating authority as an instrument of God's justice. Law in general is a gift from God to humankind, which leads us to happiness by laying down guidelines for justice. It's in keeping with this that, as we also observed a few episodes back, the emperors were increasingly encouraged to see themselves as falling under the law rather than dispensing justice from a position above the laws, as Justinian had done. In the legal introduction, Fotius made this point by describing the emperor as one of no fewer than three fundamental sources of authority in the Christian community, the other two being the Patriarch and the law itself. Quite likely, Fotius intended this as a political image of the Trinity. We normally assume that judges need to follow precedent, but also that new laws overturn old laws. In theory, this was also the case in Byzantium. In practice, though, the Justinianic corpus had such weighty authority that it was difficult to resist. We can see this from the legal writings promulgated under Leo the Wise, which are ambitious in tone and rhetoric, but actually rather modest as an attempt to revise the existing law. He sought to borrow some of the glamour of the legal productions that had put the just in Justinian, even going so far as to imitate him by putting out a collection called the Basilica, meaning imperial laws, containing a digest, codex, and novels. But this was not nearly so radical a project as its model. Leo reorganized, but mostly retained the old laws, albeit now in Greek. One interesting idea we do find here, though, comes in Leo's statement that he is in many cases elevating custom to the status of law. In other words, certain practices that have become widespread should be given a legal basis so that they can be properly enforced. Conversely, such customs as Leo thinks are not so wise will be overturned by depriving them of such enforcement. All of this may give an impression of a rather conservative, even stagnant, legal worldview on the part of the Byzantines, which may not be such a bad thing. One man's stagnation is another's reassuring stability, and emperors who dared to innovate in their legislation were criticized in historical chronicles for ruling by arbitrary fiat, rather than in accordance with the laws. This criticism was directed at Constantine X by the historian Atalaides, for instance. But we also need to remember that individual judges and rulers had considerable discretion in applying the laws, and that lawyers could exercise great ingenuity in their arguments. As a contrast to the more rigorous attitude expressed by Atalaides, we might mention Michael Psellos, because it's become a custom if not a law that every podcast episode should mention him at least once. Law was one of the many subjects Psellos studied and taught, though its practical dimension seems to have bored him. He speaks rather dismissively in the encomium to his mother about the way that practitioners of legal theory, which he calls the science of the Italians, wind up dealing with tiresome cases where people have been gored by bulls or bitten by dogs. Elsewhere, he praises emperors precisely for using good judgment instead of applying the laws, and writes letters appealing to correspondents to follow the incitements of friendship rather than legal niceties. When he himself writes in a legal context, as in an accusation directed against a patriarch on behalf of the emperor Isaac Komnenos, Psellos mostly uses the tricks of a different trade, namely rhetoric. This gives us an insight into how philosophers might think about the courtroom. Aristotle's rhetoric, whose study will soon be revived thanks to Anna Komnene, investigates how the rhetorical art can be used in legal speechmaking, and despite Psellos' more formal legal training, it is this approach that he carries on in his polemical writings. So far, I've been talking about laws rather generally. What were the laws actually about? The quick answer is that Justinian's laws were about everything. Criminality, business, family relationships, and even religion. We're familiar with the contrast made in the Latin West between canon and civil law. Canon law applying to ecclesiastical affairs and civil law to the secular realm. That contrast exists in Byzantium too, but in both Christian cultures, the line was a rather blurry one. The oldest works of canon law predate Justinian, and remind us that Eastern Christianity is about more than what happened just in Constantinople. One very early collection from about 500 AD is in Syriac, but as with civil law, it was the codification of Justinian that laid down a platform for subsequent legal writing. His Codex in particular has much to say about church affairs, laying down sanctions for heretics, rules for monastic life, and so on. Shortly thereafter though, the two kinds of law became more independent because the determinations of church councils were recognized as a further basis for canon law. Thus, we later have famous councils with rulings on matters like iconoclasm. There would be many attempts to disentangle the political and legal spheres of the church and secular state, for instance in a synod of 1115 which forbid clergy to hold state offices. But the religious standing of the emperor, and the fact that the Patriarch of Constantinople lacked fully independent authority, meant that in Byzantium, the separation between church and state was less marked than in Latin Christendom. On the secular side, one of the primary functions of Byzantine law was to regulate economic affairs. There were rules about legal contracts, inheritance, and ownership of everything from land to slaves. Slavery was, unfortunately, accepted as legitimate by the church. The legal machinery of the empire was also directly concerned with finances, insofar as the royal treasury and its tax collectors kept track of who owned what, and also because confiscated property and fines flowed into the coffers of the emperor. In one letter, Salas is frank enough to recommend someone for the post of judge on the grounds that he will help increase state revenue. Much as we've just seen with canon law, on the economic front there were parallels to the Latin West, but also differences. The biggest contrast was the centralized authority of Constantinople, which was lacking at the West. The emperor's dominance over the economy was buttressed by the practice of demanding taxes and money rather than in payment in kind, like foodstuffs, meaning that the proceeds could more easily find their way to the capital rather than being exploited locally. Indeed, imperial hegemony was inextricably linked to the physical coins minted in the emperor's, and occasionally Empress's, names. Today's historians learn about political dynamics on the basis of the portraits stamped onto the coins. You may recall how Irene had her image depicted alongside that of her son when she was his regent. Even the physical form of the coin can be informative. A nice example is the gold Miliaresion, issued under the Azarian dynasty, which was modeled on the dirham of the then-dominant Islamic empire. The power and geographical spread of the Byzantine realm meant that its coins served, in the words of one modern-day scholar, as the dollar of the Middle Ages. But there was a constant threat of debasement, that is, reduction in the amount of precious metal in the coins, and people of the time were well aware of this. Michael of Ephesus realized that coins themselves are a kind of commodity that can fluctuate in value, and some historical chroniclers complained about emperors who introduced relatively valueless currency. As one measure, to help them avoid debasing the money, emperors legislated against the export of precious metals from the empire. And there are other signs that rulers were alive to the threat of trade imbalances, as when the Nicaean court, established after the crusader's sack of Constantinople, tried to shore up its precarious position by forbidding the enjoyment of imported, luxury items. As these examples suggest, the Byzantines tended to assume that economics is a zero-sum game, in which resources can only be redistributed without the overall wealth of society being increased or decreased, except when wealth is exported to, or seized from, a rival power. This assumption is manifested in an abiding concern with the relations between rich and poor. No less an authority than the Bible stated, the poor you will always have with you, and though the rich and powerful were encouraged to show generosity to the poor rather than exploiting them, there was no thought of trying to lift all of the poor to a more prosperous state. One famous case was a new law, or novel, introduced in the year 934 by the emperor Romanus Le Capenos. It attempted to prevent the rich from increasing their holdings by buying up land from poorer tenants. This initiative was, to put it mildly, not entirely successful. Indeed, scholars have often spoken of a Byzantine version of medieval feudalism in which the poor become tenants on vast estates. That is potentially misleading in that the tenants seem to have retained a greater degree of freedom than in the feudal states of Western Europe, and also because, as we've already said, political and legal authority was more centralized in the East. The Byzantine context is free of, say, local lords exercising their own brand of justice in feudal courts. From a philosophical point of view, a particularly important feature of Romanus's legislation from 934 is that it defined an illegally unfair sale as one in which the land was purchased at less than half its true value. In itself this was nothing revolutionary. The half-price rule went back to the Roman laws gathered together by Justinian. But the new law was unusually bold in its protection of the seller, dictating that in such a case the buyer would simply forfeit ownership with no restitution. The rationale underlying the law is also intriguing as it seems to presuppose that a given parcel of land does have an objective, absolute value, instead of assuming that its value is just determined by whatever it can fetch on the market at a given time. That same assumption may lie behind the way that the Byzantines taxed land, not on the basis of the agricultural yield in any given year, but simply in light of the land's permanent features of size and quality. More generally, attempts to fix just or maximum prices for a range of goods go back to the Roman Emperor Diocletian at the dawn of the 4th century. As any economist would predict, though, the attempts of the authorities to hold prices at a maximum level were constantly undermined by activities on the ground that were closer to a free market. The historian Attilaites has a passage on this phenomenon in which he describes Michael VII's attempts to fix grain prices, supplanting a previous situation where buyers were able to go from one grain dealer to another looking for the best deal. Attilaites also astutely noticed that when the price of a fundamental commodity like grain goes up, it drives up other prices and also wages. There's one other area of economic activity that you might expect to be restricted in Byzantine culture, lending with interest, or usury. As discussed back in episode 286, this was a matter of intense concern for Latin Christians routinely condemned by Western theologians. But the situation was more relaxed in the East. The civil law allowed usury with certain restrictions, and canon lawyers respected this ruling. Still, a number of religious writers did inveigh against the greed of rapacious moneylenders. Gregory Palamas would call usury the child of vipers. The most interesting text on this is by a thinker from 14th century Thessaloniki named Nicholas Cavassilas. He was a staunch defender of property rights. Without the ability to acquire property, he argued, no one would have a motive to work. But he was an equally staunch critic of usury. He wrote a polemic against it that is particularly worth reading for the opposing arguments he considers and refutes mounted in defense of usury. One argument is that lending with interest is acceptable because the borrower enters into the contract willingly. Like some Western medieval critics of usury, Cavassilas replies that economic need is effectively forcing the borrower to accept whatever terms are available so that it is not truly voluntary. He also considers the point that if the civil law allows usury it is surely not evil. Here his response is that maximum limits are placed on interest rates. This shows that the lawmakers had a critical attitude towards the moneylenders and ideally they would prefer that we not engage in this sort of business at all. A more general moral concern with poverty is of course frequent in religious literature of the period. But perhaps no Byzantine text captures the issues so well as the Dialogue Between Rich and Poor, written by Alexios Makrembolites at Constantinople in 1343, hence in a time of upheaval as the empire was in its final decline. Alexios is obviously on the side of the poor, who are shown accusing the rich of selfishness and of failing to help their needy fellow humans. So greedy are the rich that if they could, they would appropriate the sun for themselves and prevent the poor from enjoying its rays. The rich should instead imitate God and His infinite generosity. Indeed, the whole purpose of wealth is nothing other than the aid of the less fortunate. All of this is heartfelt, but not particularly groundbreaking. Much as with Cavasilas's treatise on usury, this dialogue may be more interesting for the counterarguments brought forward by the rich. They defend themselves on the grounds that there is no obligation to help those who have performed no service, and that it is simply in the nature of things for the poor to suffer. Besides, the rich point out, they have their own problems with the government coming to tax them and meddling in their affairs. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Let's now move on to one final topic that follows naturally from the spectacle of the rich ignoring the needs of the poor, warfare. Actually, there was no class warfare in Byzantium, nothing like a peasant's revolt. But there were plenty of other wars, and plenty of writing about the topic, including theological discussions of the moral status of soldiers, and military manuals on the best strategies to use in battle. Again, there are parallels to the medieval West, with the difference that, according to some scholars, the Byzantines were far less belligerent than the Latin Christians, and also compared to contemporary Muslims. They launched no crusades, no jihad, but largely fought wars of defense or to reclaim lost territory. In one military text, the Tactica, written under none other than Leo the Wise, we even find the statement that war can be justified only as defensive territory from an invading enemy. Yet, the Byzantines were obviously not pacifists, and their avoidance of aggressive warfare was probably more a matter of judicious caution and military weakness than moral principle. One other factor to consider, though, is that the Byzantines may have lacked an ideology of religious warfare, such as we see in the two medieval cultures that surrounded them on either side. Did they have the notion of a holy war? The answer is not a simple one. The idea of war as holy, or encouraged by God, did not sit well with the Christian commandment not to kill, and already in antiquity, Greek church fathers had critical things to say about the life of soldiering. Origen had encouraged Christians to struggle towards faith, not with the sword. An influential passage in St. Basil suggested that soldiers were so morally tarnished by their deeds that they should refrain from taking communion for three years after killing in battle. Yet, religious regalia and rituals were frequently adopted by the military. Icons might be placed on city walls or gates during a siege as an additional protective measure. The army was encouraged to fast before battle in hopes of securing God's favor. Prayers were a standard part of imperial triumphs celebrating victory in the field. Christianity was then part of warfare, just as it was part of every other aspect of life in Byzantium. But acknowledging this is not the same as speaking of holy war. God, Christ, the Virgin and the Saints were regularly invoked in conflicts with the infidel, but also in internal conflicts between Christian armies. Thus we have, to give only one famous example, the Emperor Basil II riding off to do battle with Bardas Fokhas, holding an icon of Mary. Furthermore, Byzantine intellectuals were dismissive of some aspects of holy war ideology known to them from other cultures, such as the Muslims' belief that fallen warriors would go directly to heaven and the idea that crusaders would have their sins remitted. For them, it was nonsense to suppose that you could free yourself from the saying of sin by going to war. If anything, fighting would expose you to further evils, even if the evil in question was a necessary one. In this episode, we've been looking at some of the more practical concerns of Byzantine society and bringing out the philosophical relevance of texts and discussions about these concerns. But there's another way that we can approach Byzantine texts from a practical perspective. We can think about them as physical objects. Nowadays we tend to think of writing as information, information that can be transmitted electronically, copied effortlessly, and perused on anything from a paper printout to a phone. But in the medieval era, texts were unique physical objects, copies perhaps, but if so, then copies with their own idiosyncrasies, mistakes, organizing notations, and comments in the margin. This is something I've mentioned many times here on the podcast because I think it's important for us to understand how philosophical literature was transmitted in earlier times, which ultimately explains how we're able to read it today. Next time though, we're going to get into this topic in unprecedented detail as we devote a whole episode to Byzantine manuscripts. Just be glad you won't have to read it in my handwriting, which is terrible. That's here next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Made by Hand – Byzantine Manuscripts. Walk into any decent bookshop in the English-speaking world and you'll find Plato's dialogues on the shelves. Maybe even a collection of all his dialogues, which takes up more than one and a half thousand pages, even if you exclude the works that were not really written by Plato but only transmitted under his name. Strictly speaking, of course, Plato didn't write the rest of the book either for the simple reason that he didn't know English. Happily, you can also get Plato in Ancient Greek, for instance in the Oxford Classical Texts series, where it takes up five volumes. But here's the thing. Plato didn't write those Greek texts either, at least not exactly. Most readers, even most professional historians of philosophy, don't give this much thought and proceed as if the printed version was ordered straight from Plato's Academy. In fact though, the modern edition is simply scholars' best guess at what he may originally have written. You'll be relieved to learn that the text of Plato's dialogues is actually relatively secure, but like all other ancient works, they are moving targets and will never be fully established beyond all doubt. The individual words and sentences in that edition have in some cases been a matter of intense philological debate. Nor are modern editors hiding this fact. At the bottom of each page, they've supplied a dense collection of footnotes bristling with Latin abbreviations and bits of Greek, which are alternative versions, called variants, of what Plato may have written. To understand what lies behind those footnotes is to appreciate more fully the astounding fact that we are able to read Plato at all, never mind one and a half thousand pages worth of him, a good two and a half millennia after he lived. It means tracing the long and hazardous journey those writings travelled, surviving more or less intact as empires rose and fell, as Attic Greek fell into disuse as a language of everyday speech, and as philosophical tastes changed. That journey went straight through Byzantium. Without the efforts of Byzantine scholars and scribes, we would not be able to read Plato today. Ancient philosophy, indeed ancient literature as a whole, would barely exist anymore. To see why, let's go back to the beginning of the journey and talk about how writing would have been set down and preserved in Plato's day. There were several options. Many inscriptions in stone survive from antiquity, including at least one philosophical text, a statement of Epicurean doctrine by the Roman era philosopher Diogenes of Oneida. There are also shards of clay pottery with writing on them. Such a shard is called an ostracon, and there was a legal procedure in Athens where political figures could be exiled or ostracized by writing their names on such shards, and some of these survive. We weren't going to write Plato's Republic as a stone inscription or on bits of pottery. For that, the first stage would probably have been inscribing the text onto wax tablets. Hence an ancient report tells us that Plato's final work, the Laws, had just been recorded in wax when he died. Longer term, though, text would be set down on papyrus. This is made from the leaves of a plant that grows especially in Egypt. It came in various grades of quality, with the poorest grade even being used as a packing material. Typically, it would be fashioned into a long scroll which would be gradually unrolled while reading. The text had to be re-rolled after use, much like a cassette tape, if you're old enough to remember those. Unlike a cassette tape, information was usually put only on one side of the papyrus roll. The text would be arranged in columns, written entirely in what we might think of as capital letters, and without punctuation. Learning to read was thus in large part learning to see where one word or sentence stopped and another began. Furthermore, there were none of the accents and diacritical marks you'll see on Greek in modern editions, which were invented later. These don't make reading significantly easier, but do sometimes resolve possible ambiguities, such as the one exploited in a clever remark of Heraclitus, the bow, its name is life, its work is death. The point of this is that the same Greek word can be accented in two different ways, one of which means bow, bios, the other life, bios. By the time we get to Byzantium, all of this will be different, apart from the fact that all documents will still have to be written out by hand, this being the meaning of the word manuscript. The first major change is the introduction of parchment, a word that derives from the name of the Greek city, Pergamon, where it was supposedly invented. Parchment is leather that has been carefully treated to make it as smooth and light in color as possible. If you look closely at some texts written on parchment, you can tell what they are made of, because the surface where the hide was will be lighter in color than the inner side. Parchment came into use already around 200 BC, but did not immediately displace the use of papyrus. Once it did become the dominant material for writing, it clung on tenaciously. Well after the introduction of paper, even into the Renaissance, parchment was still used for particularly elegant or important book production. Among the Byzantines, court documents were occasionally made from parchment that was dyed in imperial purple. As for paper, its introduction was the most important change in the technology of writing between the invention of the alphabet and of the printing press. Paper is typically made from used fibrous material, like linen or hemp. It can readily be made from used rags. The technology came into the Islamic world from China in the 7th century and was taken up in Byzantium in the 9th. Faithful listeners of the podcast will notice that in each case, paper's arrival was followed about a century later by an explosion of intellectual activity. This is not a coincidence. Without paper, we would not have had al-Kindi in the massive Greek-Arabic translation movement in the Islamic world, or Fotius and Pselos in the Byzantine world. Since it was scholars like them who led the effort to study and preserve ancient Greek literature, you can thank the Chinese inventors of paper for the fact that you can still read Plato. The reason paper made such a difference is that it is much cheaper than parchment and much more durable and readily available than papyrus. Actually, papyrus had already been in short supply once its main source, Egypt, fell under the sway of Islam. In the late 7th century, a Muslim ruler there even placed an interdict on the export of papyrus. This obviously encouraged the use of parchment in the Christian world despite its costliness. We can see how valuable parchment was from the fact that, sometimes, the ink would be removed from it to create a more or less clean writing surface on which a new text could be set down. This is called a palimpsest from a Greek word meaning scraped off. Otherwise lost works have been discovered in the undertext of palimpsest manuscripts. A sensational example is a work by Archimedes that was found on parchment written underneath a religious work from Byzantium and was rendered readable through the use of x-rays and other technology. In the philosophy world, there was recently similar excitement at the discovery in a palimpsest of an unknown commentary on Aristotle's categories. There were two other big changes between classical antiquity and the Byzantine period. Unlike Plato, Michael Pselos would not have had to work his way through a scroll while reading. At that time, the standard format was the Codex, which is basically like a modern book with pages made from folded paper or parchment bound between covers. The Codex begins to appear in about the 3rd century AD, especially with legal texts having evolved from the practice of tying together leaves of parchment to make a sort of notebook. Codices begin to outnumber scrolls at about 400 AD, but do not displace them completely until the 7th century or so. A couple of centuries later, the scribes introduce a second innovation. They begin writing in so-called minuscule texts, which you can roughly think of as lowercase letters instead of the old maguscule uppercase letters. But the use of maguscule for more formal texts persists for a good while. Our oldest surviving minuscule text is from the year 835, but still in the 11th century, maguscule is still found in liturgical manuscripts. And finally we have the introduction of paper about a century after scribes started writing everything in the new minuscule script. All of this might lead us to expect that a pagan work like a treatise by Aristotle would have initially existed on papyrus scrolls written in maguscule, one or more of which would be copied in the same script onto a papyrus codex, then into a parchment codex, then into a minuscule text but also in parchment, before finally being copied in the sort of format that usually survives today, a paper codex with minuscule script. While this is the right sequence in technological terms, a given work might not have existed in every form I've just listed. In particular, during the so-called Dark Ages of Byzantium, few pagan works were copied. Once interest in them reawakened, the scribes would have had to use texts in long outmoded formats as their basis. Thus a 9th century paper minuscule copy might be based directly on maguscule parchment from the 6th century. So it's a good thing that parchment is such a durable material. Books were copied and kept in a number of different contexts. The first thing that leaps to mind would be major institutions like the famous Library at Alexandria. It was important not only because of the sheer quantity of literature it held, but also because scholars working there produced the editions that usually lie behind later Byzantine copies. Generally speaking, when modern day philologists try to establish the text of a classical author, like Homer or Plato, they are really trying to get as close as possible to the Alexandrian edition of late antiquity, since it isn't possible to go back further than that. By Xantium, monasteries were less important centers of text production than in the Latin West with a more significant role played by royal and patriarchal libraries. But we should not underestimate the role of smaller schools and private libraries. Institutions such as the ancient libraries at Alexandria and Pergamon, or the collection of books we assume existed at a philosophical institute set up by the Byzantine Caesar Bardas, were threatened by mass destruction in times of political upheaval, whereas a private library might survive. The very preciousness of books also exposed them to threat. We've already seen how parchment was reused in palimpsests, and books might also be sold off to raise funds. A 12th century Archbishop of Byzantium complained about illiterate monks who did this, writing, "...just because you have no trace of culture, must you empty the library of the books that transmit it?" The upshot is that, as Richard Goulet has observed, ancient philosophy is not really preserved down to the present day, but rather transmitted. We have almost no physical texts by philosophers from the classical period, with a few exceptions like that Epicurean inscription in stone, or the private collection of rolls owned by another Epicurean, Philodemus, which was preserved thanks to a volcanic eruption. Texts wore out, were discarded, or lost in fires. Already in late antiquity, scholars were conscious of this. Simplicius copied out quotations from pre-Socratic philosophy when commenting on Aristotle because he knew that readers might not otherwise have access to these texts. Demistius, writing in the 4th century on the occasion of the founding of an imperial library, mentioned that some authors, like the early Stoics, were already in danger of becoming unavailable. Texts were often lost in times of transition for book technology. When codices replaced rolls and minuscule script replaced maguscule, the priorities of the scholars of the time dictated what would be copied into the new format and survive through the change. As a result, the surviving corpus of ancient philosophy is basically what a Neoplatonically inclined Byzantine scholar Leipselos would think worth preserving. So we have thousands of pages of commentaries on Aristotle and the entire output of Plato and Plotinus, but not a single work by those early Stoics who Demistius was already fretting over. The same goes for other fields of ancient literature. We have more than 230 manuscripts of Aristophanes because Byzantine philologists valued him as an exemplar of fine Attic Greek. And the single Greek author for whom the most text survives is Galen because his writings formed the basis for the study of medicine. The quantity of surviving manuscripts for any given author is a fairly reliable indicator of how interested the Byzantines and Renaissance humanists found that author, and also of whether the author was used in teaching contexts. Thus, we have a good 260 manuscripts containing Platonic dialogues, but more than a thousand for Aristotle. His works are also very unequally represented in the manuscripts, with a vast number of copies of his logical treatises, because they were regularly used in the classroom, but comparatively few for works like the Poetics. Even within the logical corpus, the introductory works, categories, and on interpretation greatly outnumber, for instance, the Sophistical Refutations. With the exception of one fragment from that work, all our Aristotelian manuscripts are in various miniscule scripts. Given that miniscule started to be used in the 9th century, this means that our textual evidence for Aristotle begins about one and a half millennia after his death, so it's hardly a surprise that many of his books are lost. We know this because we have ancient lists of his works with our surviving corpus representing only a fraction of what is listed. And his surviving works are not what would have been read by his students at the Lyceum. Almost all Aristotle goes back to an edition of his works produced in the Roman period by the scholar Andronicus. Some treatises by Aristotle, notably the Metaphysics, were only compiled as single works at this editorial stage. But the target of a modern editor of Aristotle is not really even Andronicus's edition. It is rather the lost copies in Maguscule's script that were the basis for the surviving Byzantine manuscripts that are in miniscule. Even if we have a large number of manuscripts for a given work, they will often all go back to one single copy in Maguscule. That copy was transliterated into miniscule in, say, the 9th century, and then discarded. All further copies, which could number in the dozens or hundreds, would thus go back to the initial transcription. If you're asking yourself, who cares, then you haven't thought about the challenge of copying out an entire book by hand. This was of course tiresome work as shown by the prayers that scribes often insert at the end of a copy, giving thanks that their labor is completed. But more to the point, it is effectively impossible to copy out a text of any length without errors. Even if you were copying from a modern, printed text with spaces between letters and punctuation, you'd make mistakes. But imagine copying from a handwritten text like those papyrus rolls or ancient codices with columns of unbroken maguscule. Certain kinds of slip happen quite often. The scribe might skip a line or miss out a phrase because the phrase that follows begins with the same letters. Glancing back and forth between his source copy and his new copy, he jumps from one line or phrase to the next. Or one letter may be misread as another, especially if the letters look similar, as do the Greek letters l and a in maguscule script. Another problem is that manuscripts often have notes in the margin. This was routine practice and anticipated in manuscript production. Manuscripts routinely left wide margins so that they themselves or their successors could make notes. Some manuscripts even leave gaps in the main text, for instance in a historical chronicle so that an uncertain date can be filled in later. Or notes might be made between the lines of the text, for instance by writing a correction above a word or phrase. All of this apparatus might or might not be retained in a later copy. Sometimes the marginal glosses might be copied over as if they were part of the original text. If you're now trying to produce an edition of that original text, you want to eliminate such extraneous material that has crept in while also correcting other errors. That's how you get as close as possible to knowing what the ancient authors actually wrote. This takes us back to those footnotes in a modern-day edition of Plato or Aristotle. The notes record the different versions in the Greek text found in various manuscripts – not all of the variants, but only those the modern editor deems significant. As I said, in the main text above those notes, you're seeing the decision of the editor about which variants to accept, or in some cases Greek that has been hypothesized by the editor as an improvement on what we find in the manuscripts. How does one go about doing this? Let's take as an example a short work by Aristotle called On the Motion of Animals, which was recently re-edited by my colleague here in Munich, Oliver Primavesi. This is a case where all existing copies do indeed go back to a unique manuscript that was written in Maguscule. We know this because there are some mistakes in the Greek found in all copies. This means they must all derive from one single copy that already had those mistakes in it. This gives us an insight into a more general point, one that is key to the task of editing Greek manuscripts. In the first instance, you look not for correct Greek, but for errors. Imagine you have four manuscripts numbered 1 through 4. If manuscripts 1 and 2 share the same mistake, whereas copies 3 and 4 preserve a correct reading, then you know that 1 and 2 must be copies of the same manuscript, or perhaps 2 is a copy of 1, or vice versa, while 3 and 4 are based on some other manuscript that was free of this error. On this principle, it's possible to arrange all the existing manuscripts in a branching diagram that shows which were copied from which. This diagram is called a stemma codicum. Primavesi's new edition of On the Motion of Animals was needed because of a major revision he realized was needed in the stemma. A comparatively late manuscript from the 15th century turned out to have correct readings that were not found in any other copies. Previous editors had focused on earlier textual witnesses that could take them back to a version from the 10th century. This seems to make sense. All else being equal, an older manuscript should get you closer to the original. But as philologists like to say, because philologists enjoy speaking in Latin, recentiores non diteriores, the more recent are not necessarily worse. In this case, a manuscript that is a good 500 years newer than others contain readings that helped Primavesi to get a more accurate text. His edition has 120 changes over earlier ones and that in a text of relatively few pages. Remarkably, many of the improved readings matched the medieval Latin translation by Thomas Aquinas's colleague William of Murabeka, who evidently had access to the same line of transmission exploited by Primavesi. It's worth bearing in mind that with this meticulous labor, the modern textual editor is just doing what ancient medieval and renaissance scholars already did in their own time. They too compared manuscripts to eliminate errors. Thus, late antique and Byzantine commentators on Aristotle sometimes record variants found in other texts. The fact that they were so conscientious actually complicates the business of figuring out which manuscripts are copied from which. The medieval editors might look at additional manuscripts to fix errors in the one they are copying. When modern scholars do this, it's just good scholarship. When older ones do it, it's rudely called contamination between lines of textual transmission. Then too, like modern editors, the Byzantine scribes might correct the text on their own initiative so that it will make more sense. Hence another principle followed by philologists, which of course goes by a Latin name, lectio difficulior, or more difficult reading. This means that if you have two variants, one of which is somehow stranger, though still grammatically possible like a very unusual word, while the other is familiar and straightforward, you should suspect that the easier version could actually be a scribe's conscious or unconscious correction and consider rejecting it on that basis. It should now be clear that we owe a lot to the Byzantine philologists. One of their greatest legacies is the so-called philosophical collection, a group of 17 manuscripts on philosophical and scientific topics that go back to a multi-volume edition produced in Constantinople. It was probably compiled from material gathered by Platonist philosophers in late ancient Alexandria and Athens, maybe for use at the aforementioned institute established by Bardas. The philosophical collection is a treasure trove, which includes among other things Plato's dialogues, works by Neoplatonists like Proclus, Simplicius, and Philoponus, treatises of middle Platonists and by Aristotle and his followers. From the handwriting we can tell that it was copied out by no fewer than eight different scribes who worked closely together. The manuscripts from the collection are now scattered across a number of European libraries, which is typical. For these and other philosophical texts to survive, it was of course necessary not only that the Byzantine scribes copied them out, but that those Byzantine copies themselves survived. Some Greek manuscripts are still to be found in Istanbul. The Ottomans knew Greek manuscripts were valuable and did not just destroy them. But mostly Greek literature exists today because it was spirited away from Constantinople to the Latin West after the capital fell to the Crusaders in 1204, or copied by Western scholars who took advantage of the situation to visit Constantinople and make copies of the manuscripts found there. One fairly immediate result was the sudden rediscovery of Aristotle's works by the Scholastics, whose far-reaching consequences for medieval philosophy we've already explored here on the podcast. We saw that in that context, a surge of interest in classical pagan thought provoked significant opposition, and something similar had already happened in Byzantium. The enthusiasm for Platonism embodied in the manuscripts of the philosophical collection was not shared by everyone, as we'll be seeing in an upcoming episode. But before we get to that, I want to exploit an easily available resource of my own. We've just been discussing the philological efforts of Oliver Primavesi, who dedicates himself to producing improved editions of Aristotle. As it happens, he does that work about 10 seconds walk away from my own office because he's my colleague at the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy. So join me next time to hear more about Byzantine manuscripts from someone who works with the them every day in an interview that will focus on the work he's been doing on Aristotle's metaphysics. That's right here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Byzantine manuscripts with Oliver Primavesi, who is professor of Greek right here at the LMU in Munich. Together with me and Christoph Rapp, Oliver directs the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy, and I've wanted to have him on the podcast for a long time, so I'm glad to finally have him here. Hi, Oliver. Hi. Thanks for coming on the series. You're the perfect person to talk to about this topic because you work a lot with Greek manuscripts in the process of editing ancient philosophical works and you've worked on a variety of authors, including Empedocles, but you're most known for your work on Aristotle, or at least that's what you've been doing in the past years. Can you, though, before we get into talking about how you go about editing a work by Aristotle, can you just describe what a Byzantine manuscript looks like? So if I were allowed to pick one up and hold it in my hands, what would I be holding? Basically, it's a book with pages, and the writing material will be either parchment or paper. The envelope will be leather. And if it's paper, then an interesting feature of these pages will be the watermarks, which allow a precise date for the production of the paper, which is very important in establishing the sequence in which one manuscript was copied from the other. Another very important feature of the Byzantine book is that the pages, or rather the folia, i.e. the sheets, are combined into quires. So one double sheet or B folium will not be bound separately, but within a quire, a little booklet, as it were. And it's very important for the history of the text to take into account the loss of quires in such a book, and the re-entry of them perhaps at the wrong place, which explains many features of mistakes in our transmission. So pages don't just fall out one sheet at a time, they fall out in bunches of pages that were grouped together. Yes, that's it. And how fragile are they? I mean, do they crumble under the touch, or are they quite robust? No, especially parchment is a very robust material, and even if it's paper, the paper is stable. It's much better than paper from the late 19th and early 20th century. Okay, that's interesting. And there's, by the way, maybe we should also say something about the ink. So there's sometimes different colors of ink, right? Yes. Differences in the color of ink are very important for the distinction between various hands at work. Because what you will note in the Byzantine book is a scribe copies the text and then corrections, alterations are entered by second and third hands. And that's why microfilms are unsatisfactory. You need a color digital copy of the text if you are not working with the original. So this has actually become a lot easier, presumably just in the last 20 years. Yes. In a way, the technology of digitalization has created a paleographical paradise. Because you can, instead of actually having to go physically to every library to look at every... Which then may be closed just when you arrive. Right. Or the librarian is in a bad mood and doesn't want to show it to you. Yes. And the advance of the technology makes the production of such digital copies cheaper and cheaper every year. So you can, even if there are many manuscripts of the works you are going to edit, you can afford a full collection of digital copies as it were. And that's fantastic conditions of work, of course, compared with earlier ages. Right. By the way, I didn't want to conjure up this image of a grumpy librarian as a typical example. We love librarians, right? I just wanted to say that. Okay. So you were just talking about the scribes and, as you said, put it at the different hands. In other words, you can tell it's been written in the handwriting of different people. And the role of scribes in making manuscripts is obviously very important. They're the ones who copy the text from a previous copy, or maybe even compare several copies and produce a new copy in the manuscript you're looking at. And in the last episode, I tried to explain why it's important that scribes make mistakes when they copy, which is natural, right? If you try to copy out a whole book by hand, you'll make mistakes. Can you explain, since you can obviously explain it better than I can, how it is that the mistakes that scribes make help you edit the text and establish the best possible reading of the text? So the correct text can always go back to the author. The individuality of scribes who have copied this text rests on their mistakes. So if you want to describe relationships of dependence between various branches of the tradition, it's the mistakes which are the evidence for family relationships. The mistake once introduced then may stay in that branch and distinguish it from other branches where that mistake doesn't turn up. And the vital distinction here is between errors which create a bond between a group of manuscripts or conjunctive errors, and another type of error which entails that a certain group of manuscript which is free from the error in question cannot go back to a manuscript where this error was already there. And it's not the same errors which qualify as separative errors and as conjunctive errors. So there may be errors which are easily corrected, which are so obvious that they can be easily corrected by a later scribe. So these errors, errors which are easy to correct, do not count as separative errors because even a copy which doesn't feature them can still go back in principle to a copy which did feature it because it's so easy to correct. And similar things are true about conjunctive errors. Shared errors normally establish a suspicion that the manuscripts which share them go back to one of the same model where it turned up for the first time. But on the other hand, there are certain conditions in a text which invite certain errors to be committed more than once. Similar phrases, for instance, phrases of a similar structure tend to lose one or two of the similar items, and that can happen to the same result quite independently. Or maybe if Aristotle uses a really unusual word that looks kind of like a usual word, then two different scribes might write the usual word by mistake. For instance, yes, exactly. So one has to be clear about what kind of relationship one wants to establish and what kind of error is reliable evidence for that type of relationship. Would I be right in suspecting that because the same mistake can be made more than once and because scribes on their own can correct errors, so it's not like you just use one error to join two manuscripts in a family or to separate manuscripts in two different families. Is it more like you get lots of statistical evidence and then you see that there are quite a few shared errors between manuscript A and B and quite a few disjunctive errors between B and C? Or is it more like you can really do it with just a very small number of errors? If the errors are good errors, i.e. clearly separative and or clearly conjunctive, then a small number of decisively good errors is far better than a huge collection of individually weak errors, as it were. So it's really about quality and not quantity? Yes. I see. Okay, that's really interesting. And so what this allows you to do is basically figure out that manuscript B was copied from manuscript A or that A and B were both copied from the same model, whereas manuscript C wasn't. And then you build these branches and this is called a stemma, or stemma collodicum, so the branching tree of manuscripts. So once you've established that, you have an understanding of how the text was transmitted down through these many copies, but it seems like at the end you'd just be sitting there with lots of different versions of a text. So how do you go from the stage of having a stemma to the stage of actually telling your reader what you think Aristotle most likely wrote? There I would like to take up the notion of an archetype which we have already established in the previous issue, and that is a set of errors shared by all manuscripts of a given text. Defines the shape of the copy on which they all depend. So the archetype is the latest text which combined all errors shared by all excellent manuscripts. And what we are trying to get at by means of the stemma is then the first offspring of that archetype, i.e. the first division of the family tree, i.e. the immediate copies of that archetype, which we call hip archetypes. And so the aim of stemmatology in editing ancient texts is precisely to reduce the number of versions of texts available to the number of original copies made from the archetype. And given that especially the Greek texts have gone through the transliteration process, i.e. the change from the majuscule to the minuscule alphabet, a process which was very demanding and therefore not repeated more often than necessary, the number of hip archetypes which we can reconstruct will often be restricted to the number of transliterations made from minuscule copies of that text. And it's a fair guess that even in very popular texts like Aristotle, the most copied pagan texts in Byzantine manuscripts, there are up to three hip archetypes which we can reconstruct if the evidence is available. If it is, then the job of textual criticism is greatly facilitated because you have not to choose and to make up your mind between 50 or so variants if there are 50 or so manuscripts, but only between the two or three variants which can reasonably be ascribed to the first generation after the archetype. And it's this simplification which justifies the considerable labor implied in the establishment of a stemma. SHAYE SMITH Okay, but we still have to presumably be modest in our aspirations here in the sense that what you're reconstructing is, let's say, three different hip archetypes which would themselves have been copied in late antiquity, in other words, more than half a millennium after Aristotle lived. So we're talking about trying, in a way, we're trying to reconstruct copies of Aristotle's works which may already have had lots and lots of mistakes in them, in fact would have had lots and lots of mistakes in them. Yes, of course. What we aim at is to reconstruct the archetype on the basis of the reconstructed hip archetypes. What we must never have found is the archetype and even the first edition of Aristotle's extant works by Andronicus mid-first century BC, let alone Andronicus' edition with what Aristotle himself wrote. So that's another matter. That's another cup of tea. But the great progress is available even if the archetype of Aristotle's extant works were already be reconstructed. But we are far from that point. CURTIS SMITH Right. And then ultimately you're still going to be stuck in some passages with a situation where you may be tempted to just guess or hypothesize a different reading of the Greek which is not found in any manuscript. JENS SACHS Of course, there are these mistakes of the archetype. And there you can either resort to conjecture or to despair, i.e. to mark the corrupt section by two cruxes, the cruces desperationes, where you feel not entitled to guess anything with a reasonable degree of certainty. But still, the improvement of the text and the intelligibility of the text, if you dispose of the archetype, is very considerable. So for all its shortcomings, the great problem in Aristotelian scholarship is not the difference between the archetype and Andronicus nor the difference between Andronicus and Aristotle, although both are considerable or may be considerable. But our main problem is that the work of reconstructing the archetype has been done only for a small fraction of Aristotle's works. CURTIS SMITH Right. So one text that you have worked on very intensively is a short work by Aristotle called De Motua Animaleum, which means On the Motion of Animals. So it's often referred to under its Latin title, De Motua Animaleum. And I was wondering if you could give us an example from that text about how this kind of detective work actually improves our understanding of what Aristotle wrote. JUERGEN SANDERS Yes, the De Motua Animaleum is an interesting case, because the last editor of that work, Martha Nussbaum, had postulated the existence of a second hip archetype, independent of all manuscripts and their archetype, which she was working on. But for certain reasons, she postulated that some very good readings in otherwise unexciting manuscripts must go back to inspiration by a second hip archetype, which she deemed lost. And the funny thing with De Motua is that, in the meantime, we have identified among some quite late 15th century manuscript, the direct descendants of that second hip archetype, which Martha Nussbaum only postulated. And if we are to evaluate the impact of such a discovery, one is well advised in not stressing problems which nobody has noticed before, and where the new text brings a solution to what nobody had perceived as a problem so far, but to concentrate on well-established so-called cruxes, i.e. corrupt passages already discussed for a century or so, and to look whether your new hip archetype brings a solution for this kind of problem. So that will carry more conviction, as it were. And one example for that is the famous passage where Aristotle illustrates his basic theorem that animal self-motion is impossible without a stable external resting point, i.e. a point external to the animal which is stable. And he gives two examples for that. The first example is that if you walk in loose sand, you will suffer from the unstability of the sand. And the second example was unintelligible so far, because it would be, according to the text available to Martha Nussbaum 40 years ago, that mice are unable to walk on earth. And that strikes us as unreasonable, because mice are very good in walking on earth. Absolutely. They're fantastic at it. They're very quick. Yes. Now the new hip archetype has another version of that very passage, which is that it's difficult for mice to work on pitch. And that's an allusion to a famous proverb where a pitch trap is constructed by means of a piece of cheese which attracts then mice, but they have to walk through a zone of smooth pitch before. Like tar, sort of sticky stuff. Yes, where they are blocked, as it were. And that substance is unstable in two respects. First, it gives way a bit when the paw, the little paw of the mice sinks into it. But then if the mouse wants to go on, it uncannily follows the paw. So it's stable in both directions. And of course, it's fun to be able to allude to such a well-known proverb, well attested in the 30 years before and after Aristotle in that context. And so I'm sorry to interrupt, but the point here is that the two phrases, on earth and in pitch, turn out in Greek to be very similar. So you could... A paleographical similar. So entege and entpite in Greek metascule are close enough to each other to invite a mistake. And of course, if you don't know the proverb, you might not like the example. But given that it is a well-known proverb, one might now criticize my enthusiasm for that new reading by suggesting that there was some reason for which the text was corrupt in the first place. And then a scribe could have arrived and said, well, let's take the well-known proverb of the mice in pitch in order to solve that problem. This would be a case of something we talked about before where later scribes themselves make corrections to a corrupt text. Yes. But in this case, we were very lucky in that when we had discovered this variant in the new second hyperarchetype of the transmission of the demotoanimalium, we had a fresh look at the oldest manuscript of the first hyperarchetype, which was already known, but which had not been examined with sufficient care. Because what we saw is that the oldest manuscript of the demotoanimalium extant, the Paris manuscript 1853, there, the well-known but meaningless text of mice walking on earth, was written only by later hand after the first text had been erased. Now, examination years yielded the surprising result that the first script could be made readable again and yielded the reading mice walking in pitch without any doubt. So what the second hyperarchetype has brought to light was then found to have been once the reading, the original reading of the oldest manuscript of the first hyperarchetype II. That's amazing. It's like when they found Pluto by figuring out that it must be there and they looked for it and it was there. Yes. Something else we should mention at least briefly is what sometimes is called the indirect transmission of Greek text. So this is where you don't work with a manuscript of the text you're interested in editing, but you work with a translation of the text or maybe a quotation of the text in some other author. So maybe let's focus on what we can learn from translations of Greek works into other languages. How much do those help in establishing the Greek text that you're actually editing? Well, I think there are two cases, two quite different cases. The first is the medieval translations of Greek manuscript into Latin. And there, it turns out that the model of the Latin translations, for instance, made by William of Moorbaker around 1260 AD, rest on manuscripts which are among our oldest manuscripts, i.e. venerable 9th century parchment manuscripts, some of which are wholly or partly preserved and others are lost. So even when the text is well attested by Byzantine manuscripts, still a branch of it may be better represented by the Greek model of Latin medieval translation than by any excellent Greek manuscripts. But even greater help is to be expected from the Syriac and Arabic translations, especially those which were made in the Dark Ages or towards the end of the Dark Ages, between 600 and 800 AD, when the copying of pagan texts had almost ceased in the Greek, i.e. Byzantine, word for religious and economic reasons. So there it may happen that the manuscript acquired in a Greek library, being it in the Byzantine emperor or being in some other part of what used to be the Greek world by the Arabic translators, may be older than and independent of not only our extant manuscripts but also their archetypes. And there are famous examples, like for instance Aristotle Poetics chapter 1, where the loss of one out of two, in principle, extant Greek branches has made the Greek text virtually unintelligible, and where it's only by heavy conjecture that previous generations of scholars could make sense of it, and where the good conjectures, i.e. a subset of conjectures, has been brilliantly confirmed and others astonishingly improved by the use of the Arabic translation. So there's really no doubt that at least in that case the Arabic translation is of huge help in establishing what Aristotle actually wrote. Yes, there was this translation movement in Baghdad, which at the beginning of the 9th century turned its attention either to confine to medicine, science, and so forth, also to philosophy. And the manuscripts they use for that may be vastly superior to what may be preserved in the individual cases in Greek. And of course those manuscripts are otherwise lost. Yes. So this is the only access we have to them. Yes. Okay, let's finally turn to another example from Aristotle, because this is actually the texture most working on now, and this is a slightly longer text than they put to Adam-Alba. Nineteen times longer to be precise. Namely the metaphysics. Ninety times longer. Nineteen. Oh, nineteen times. Oh, that sounds so bad. Okay, so this is the metaphysics, and it's obviously one of Aristotle's most important works. What was the editorial situation with this text before you came to work on it, and why were you convinced that it was worth going through a year's worth of effort to produce a new edition? So the editorial situation was that the two standard editions, the edition plus commentary by William Ross and the OCT, the Oxford classical text by Jaeger, were prepared before the scholarly edition of the medieval legend translations came out, and before, or at least without making use of the first edition of the Arabic translation of the metaphysics by Ibn Rushd of Cordoba, normally called a veris in the Latin world, came out. So the two main sources of the indirect tradition did not go into our standard Greek text of the metaphysics. And if you add to that, that out of a number of fifty-something Greek manuscripts, only three were used and studied by these editors, William David Ross and Werner Jaeger, then you see that on practically all counts, which we have so far mentioned in this conversation, the evidence used for the standard text, and of course for all the translations depending on the standard text, were obviously deficient. So why did they do that? Is it because they had a stema that they thought suggested that everything other than the three manuscripts they used was irrelevant? They simply worked on the hypothesis that if you stick to the oldest manuscripts, then you are likely to get everything which is worthwhile. But I believe there's a rule in paleography that the older manuscripts are not necessarily better. Yes. Look at the case of the Demoto, where two very young manuscripts were, or one of them, was directly copied from what was obviously a direct product of transliteration, i.e. a 15th century manuscript can be the copy of a 9th century manuscript. And then of course, your general inclination to use old manuscripts and prefer them over recent ones collapses. It will be often the case that later manuscripts only add further errors, but there may be decisive exceptions from that rule. And have you been able to revise the picture of the transmission of the metaphysics? Yes, insofar as the two families already assumed by the editors mentioned, i.e. Ross and Jager, and by and large confirmed by our study of all Greek manuscripts. So there are these two branches, but the relationship between them has been very much or is likely to be clarified very much by the use of Arabic translation. Because what you get and what looks like two branches, two 9th century branches of the text, may in fact be the combination of two original branches and then additions, mistakes, and so forth added to either. And if you now have an independent witness, which may be related to one or the other of your two branches, he gives you a portrait of an earlier stage in the history of that branches. He adds a kind of third dimension to that picture of there being two branches. And that's likely to be the case with the metaphysics. I.e. we establish a difference between if you call the two branches alpha and beta, then you get your Byzantine version of alpha and beta, and by means of the Arab, you can then distinguish between original alpha and additional alpha. I see. So it basically gives you a kind of distinction within one of the two main branches. Yes. Right. Okay. So stepping back from these specific examples now, just in conclusion, I'm wondering what you would say to people who are interested in Aristotle, whether they're reading him in English translation or translations into other languages, or people who can work with the Greek, or if they're reading a secondary literature that's of course based on the additions that have been available for the last hundred and more years. Would you say that we kind of need to put an asterisk next to all of that? And at the bottom of the page, the asterisk should say, by the way, bear in mind that this was all based on inadequate additions and that all of the text may need to change once we actually go in and do the work properly? Or is it not that bad? The possibility exists of that radical deficiency, but it will turn out that the situation is very different in different works. Nobody can tell in advance whether the full study of the whole tradition, both direct and indirect, will have a huge impact with 20 changes per Becker page, being the standard edition of Aristotle from 1831, or no change per Becker. Everything is possible depending on the open question to what extent the manuscripts already used represent the whole of the accessible tradition or not. You cannot tell that in advance. But if in a situation like the metaphysics, you know, and you have known that there is an Arabic tradition, extant even in Arabic and not as in other cases, only in the Latin translation made from the Arabic. And if you know that this Arabic translation has not been used ever before for the establishment of the Greek text, then you can be pretty confident that using this extra evidence will change your text considerably. Okay. And maybe it's also worth noting that the situation with Aristotle is different from, for example, Plato. So for one thing, there are no full Arabic translations of Plato anyway. And for another thing, I know from talking to you before that the editorial situation with Aristotle, perhaps surprisingly, is not nearly as good as with Plato. Is that right? Yes, it's a problem of Aristotle's popularity in Byzantine times, that there are roughly 1000 manuscripts containing works of Aristotle, and only something like 200 containing works of Plato, which means that to establish the whole family tree is far more complicated in the case of Aristotle than it is in the case of Plato. So ironically, the situation with Plato is better because there's less evidence. Yes. And the evidence of the single manuscript can be called better in so far as those branches which happen to be extant in the Plato tradition tend to be represented by old manuscripts. Whereas in Aristotle, that's only true for part of the branches. So you can have branches represented by 9th century manuscripts, but there may be other branches. And one case in point was the De Motto animalium, where the second branch of equal importance is only attested in full Greek text by 15th century manuscripts. And so, whereas in the case of Plato, the choice of manuscripts was basically established by the end of the 19th century, so that the OCT, the Oxford classic text by Bernard, can be called with some exceptions reasonably reliable, that's far from the case for the average edition of Aristotle. Right. Nevermind other philosophers who wrote in Greek, so Plotinus, Proclus, I mean, there's editorial work potentially to be done on a very wide range of authors, right? Yes. Although the case of Plotinus there, we have already an edition which takes into account the far more restricted number of manuscripts, sufficiently I would say. Okay, well that's good news. And speaking of Neoplatonism, next time I'm going to be looking not at the manuscript tradition so much as the reception tradition of a Neoplatonist philosopher, namely Proclus. We're going to be looking at two Byzantine authors, or at least Eastern Christian authors, who reacted to Proclus one critically, one more positively. So that's what I'll be talking about next time. For now, I'll thank Oliver Primavesi very much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. And please join me next time to look at the reception of Proclus in Byzantium here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King Scholars London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Georgia on my mind – Petritsi and the Proclus Revival. Those who reject philosophy are doomed to engage in it. If you tell a philosopher that philosophy is a waste of time and can't possibly prove anything, the philosopher will brighten up and say, what an interesting philosophical claim that is. What's your argument for it? Hence the fate of the numerous figures in the medieval age who attacked philosophy and for their pains have become the object of intense study by historians of philosophy. As I observed a while back when covering one such critic, Ibn Taymiyya, this is in large part because the critic's arguments are inevitably philosophical. Disputation over the art of logic drew Ibn Taymiyya into detailed analysis of theories of proof and knowledge going back to Avicenna. Avicenna was the obvious target for any polemic against philosophy in the Islamic world, already identified by Ughazali as such within a few generations of his death. Similarly, in Latin Christendom, anti-philosophers like Manigold of Lautenbach attacked Plato in the early period when he was the dominant figure, but once Aristotle became central to the university curriculum in the 13th century, he and his followers were in the firing line, as we can see with the condemnations issued at Paris in the 1270s. So who would a Byzantine critic of philosophy take as their antagonist? You might expect it to be Aristotle in this case too, given all those commentaries that scholars were devoting to his treatises, but remember that the Byzantines knew ancient Greek literature much better than did those who were dependent on Arabic or Latin. They could read everything we can read today, and more. And, whatever the bishop of Paris may have thought, there were ancient philosophers who were far more problematic from a Christian point of view than Aristotle. None more so than Proclus. Working in the 5th century AD, he resisted the rise of Christianity with a vigorous defense of paganism. His lengthy commentaries on Plato were written from an explicitly religious point of view and allude frequently to the traditional pantheon of gods. A more popular, and in some ways more provocative, text was his Elements of Theology. As the title indicates, it was inspired by the axiomatic method of Euclid, and presents Neoplatonism as a deductive system. This rational reconstruction of paganism is all the more powerful for not mentioning the pagan gods by name. They instead appear as principles of unity, or henads, surrounding the highest one, which is the principle of all things, and as abstract intellects whose existence and nature is established through Proclus's ironclad argumentation. As a result, signaling an interest in Proclus was an eloquent way for a Byzantine intellectual to display open-minded appreciation for pagan Hellenic culture. And no Byzantine intellectual was more eloquent than Michael Pselos. As we saw in the episode introducing him, his Chronographia singles out Proclus as Pselos's most valued philosophical authority. Elsewhere, Pselos draws on the Elements of Theology in various works of philosophical compilation, though not always without criticism. He even dismisses some of what he finds in Proclus as obviously absurd. Nevertheless, Pselos uses Proclus when expounding Christian theological doctrine, and even speaks without criticism of the henads that stand in for pagan deities in Proclus's Elements. A safer way to make use of Proclus would have been to deal with him indirectly, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, an anonymous Christian author of late antiquity who lived after Proclus and borrowed his ideas. As in Latin Christendom, in Byzantium this author was taken to be an authority of the Biblical era, Saint Dionysius. So his works already repackaged Platonism in irreproachably Christian form. But rather than discarding Proclus in favor of the Pseudo-Dionysius, Pselos actually says that Proclus, who he wrongly assumes wrote later than Dionysius, made the latter's teaching more precise. This is in sharp contrast to what we find in the Latin West with Thomas Aquinas. His commentary on a version of Proclus's Elements called the Book of Causes misses no chance to show how Dionysius's teaching is superior to that of Proclus, representative of the pagan Platonists. How typical was Pselos's affection for Proclus? It's hard to say. Pselos's student, Italos, and Italos's student, Eustratius, both make use of his ideas, and an author named Isaac Sebasto Kratu revised treatises by Proclus to make them more Christian. But the best evidence for a Proclus renaissance comes in authors who complain about his popularity. These include George Tourniquet's, whose encomium of Anna Komnene makes a point of saying that unlike some, she much preferred Dionysius to Proclus. And then there was Nicholas of Metone. Writing around the middle of the 12th century, Nicholas was the author of several theological works and a lengthy blow-by-blow refutation of Proclus's Elements. In a prologue to this frontal assault on the ultimate systematic presentation of paganism, Nicholas suggests that he is motivated by Proclus's popularity among his own contemporaries. But it's conceivable that he's really thinking of Proclus's enthusiastic reception back in the 11th century in the works of Pselos and Italos. The same goes for Tourniquet's remarks about Anna's resistance to Proclus's siren song. Rather than Christianizing Proclus, as the Pseudo-Dionysius and Isaac Sebasto Kratu had done, Nicholas of Metone correctly sees the Elements as a philosophical rationale for polytheism. He finds something to criticize in nearly every one of its many propositions, which he compares to bricks built into a new Tower of Babel. So, despite the official title of the refutation, which calls it an unfolding of the Elements, this is not a commentary in the style of the circle around Anacomnena. Actually, Nicholas does take pains to understand Proclus, and at one point even hypothesizes a correction to the manuscript he's reading, but he only wants to get Proclus right so that he can then show that Proclus is wrong. In place of Proclus's first principle, a pure unity that necessarily gives rise to a complex hierarchy of immaterial principles, Nicholas defends a Christian understanding of God as a freely creating cause who directly brings all other things into being. His approach is unmistakably theological. He piously insists that his doctrine is based entirely on the Scriptures, since there can be no other source for human knowledge of God. On this basis, he complains of Proclus's temerity in attempting to lift the gaze of his mind beyond even his own intelligible principles to the first principle itself. Yet, Nicholas cannot avoid doing some philosophy. Actually, he doesn't even want to. Like other Byzantine thinkers, he values the title philosopher and thinks that the pagans failed to live up to it. He also realizes that he needs to do more than point out the inconsistency of Proclus with Christianity. He has to show that the axiomatic project of the Elements is a failure. After all, if Christianity is in conflict with indisputable demonstrations offered by a pagan, then that's bad news for Christianity, not for paganism. So, Nicholas attempts to defeat Proclus on his own ground, identifying his opponent's logical failings and imprecise terminology. Nicholas's defense of a freely creating Trinitarian God emerges in part from an internal critique of Proclus's philosophical theology. The Neoplatonic One is meant to be an all-powerful source of everything, so why would it need the henads as supplementary causes? Either God can create everything, in which case the henads are superfluous, or he cannot, in which case he lacks the perfection and majesty Proclus pretends to ascribe to him. Furthermore, we must envision a God that has some kind of internal dynamism or motion, since otherwise we will have an inert principle that cannot initiate anything on its own. Hence the need for divine will and more fundamentally for the dynamic interrelations of the Trinity. For this idea, Nicholas cites a much quoted line from the Greek Church father Gregory Nazianzus, From the start, the monad moved toward a dyad until halting at the triad. And it is not only the henads that Nicholas wants to eliminate. Proclus postulated a number of principles like being, limit, unlimited, and intellect which were meant to explain the various features of the things that come after them. This was a kind of theological, hierarchical reworking of Plato's theory of forms. Nicholas argues that such general features of things are not existent in their own right. Here, he's appealing to what had become the standard view of universals within Aristotelianism, according to which general concepts are just that, concepts in the mind, rather than objectively existing things. When we speak of something that has being in itself, this has nothing to do with a Platonist principle called Being with a capital B, but just means that some created things are substances as opposed to accidental properties. With scarcely concealed delight, Nicholas also quotes Aristotle, who was himself quoting Homer, in support of monotheism, This elimination strategy is one way that Nicholas chops Proclus' hierarchy down to size. Another is to identify Proclus' various principles with aspects or names of God himself. He is even willing to accept the term henad as a way of referring to the divine, so long as we remember that there is only one such deity and that this henad, or unity, is also three persons. Likewise, if we do accept a principle called Being, that is the source of all being, then this is just to be identified with God himself. The same goes for intellect, life, and so on, just many names for one God. Thus, the various sources of determination of reality that, for Proclus, were spread across numerous levels become concentrated in one creating principle. In light of this, it's ironic, not to say unfair, that Nicholas also charges Proclus with being too confident in his ability to describe God. Nicholas throws in his lot with Dionysius, who he assumes was Proclus' source, for the occasional good ideas that are mixed in with the prideful errors strewn throughout the elements. Following Dionysius, Nicholas believes that God is beyond our mental grasp and beyond our language. But with that qualification, he still allows himself to transfer positive attributes from created things to God. In short then, Nicholas of Methonay saw Proclus as a dangerous figure, one who could lead his fellow Christians into error and could in fact be associated with a number of real heresies. But it's worth emphasizing again that Nicholas was not rejecting philosophy as a whole, or suggesting that philosophy is incompatible with Christian belief. To the contrary, he thinks Proclus fails on his own terms, and Nicholas claims superiority in argument as well as faith. What we have here then is a conflict between two thinkers who were both using philosophy to establish the truth of their respective religions. But there was another strategy for dealing with this pagan thinker. Other Byzantines saw Proclus more positively, as a resource for expounding Christianity in philosophical terms. This was evidently the view of the Pseudo-Dionysius, and of Psilos, and of one other figure we need to discuss, Ioane Petritsi. Like James Brown and the world's best peaches, Petritsi hailed from Georgia, though in his case we're dealing with the Georgia located between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Petritsi was in fact the leading figure of medieval philosophy in Georgian. Among other works, he produced a surviving translation and commentary for Proclus's Elements of Theology. Unfortunately, Petritsi's chronology, like a Georgia peach, is a little fuzzy. One intriguing hypothesis is that he was actually a student of John Italos, who we know wrote a letter to a Georgian scholar, who some assume must have been Petritsi. But linguistic studies of Petritsi's writings have suggested that he may have worked in the second half of the 12th century, which would be too late for him to have studied with Italos, who died in the 1080s. Either way, it seems clear that Petritsi studied in Constantinople and shared the Neoplatonic proclivities of Psilos, Italos, and whoever else was annoying Nicholas of Metone by admiring Proclus. He was expert on Greek philosophy in general, and Proclus in particular. For Petritsi, Proclus was the greatest of the pagan philosophers because of his masterful unfolding of ideas that were expressed less clearly in Plato's dialogues. Petritsi's commentary thus makes a perfect contrast to that of Nicholas. Where Nicholas tirelessly attacks Proclus's polytheism, Petritsi mostly sticks to exposition of the Neoplatonic system and avoids the question of whether that system may be in conflict with Christianity. But when he does address the issue, he is outspoken in his defence of Proclus. Rather implausibly, he simply rejects the charge that Proclus was, strictly speaking, a polytheist. The series of principles that descend from the highest one do not share the lofty status of the true god, even if Proclus calls them gods, and the word divine is applied to such things as the heavenly bodies simply to mark their relative superiority to other creatures. Though he criticizes Aristotelian philosophers for failing to recognize god as a creating cause, Petritsi does not go as far as Nicholas would want in asserting that all things are made to exist through a gratuitous and free act on god's part. Instead, he is happy to retain the Neoplatonic idea that the first principle emanates its effects. These flow forth from it like light from a source or water from a spring. Still, it would be wrong to speak of god as necessarily causing things to exist since god is in fact transcendent above necessity. In general, he would agree with Nicholas, and for that matter with Proclus, that god is exalted beyond his effects. Some of these effects are eternal in the sense of being timeless, but god, or the one, is placed even higher than that, too exalted even to be called eternal. How can Petritsi, as a good Christian who believes in the Trinity, accept Proclus's account of a first principle that is utterly without multiplicity? By finding Trinitarian patterns in Proclus's own thought. In the commentary, and especially in an epilogue, he added at the end, Petritsi suggests that the Trinitarian persons can be associated with features of Proclus's system, with the sun, or logos, being identified either with the principle called limit, or with the first intellect that descends from the one. At one point in his commentary, he speaks of a series of three ones in Proclus, and just in case we didn't get the point, a gloss in the margin of the manuscript says that this is to be understood as the Trinity. Petritsi goes so far as to trace this pagan intuition of the Trinity back to Plato himself. Apart from the epilogue though, it does not seem that Petritsi's primary goal is to establish the harmony between pagan Neoplatonism and Christian Orthodoxy. As I've said, the commentary itself mostly skirts that issue, with Petritsi apparently seeing exegesis of Proclus as a worthwhile end in itself. He seems more worried by the difficulty of expressing Greek ideas in Georgian language. He admits the difficulty of rendering Greek terms like dea noia, or discursive thinking, introduces a passage from Plato in Greek before then translating it into Georgian, and even refers to the etymology of Greek words. With his head full of pagan material and the Bible, he describes the soul's sojourn in the physical realm both in terms of an image from Plato's Phaedrus, in which the soul must regain its wings to return to a heavenly abode, and with an image from the Book of Genesis, comparing the human body to the animal skins donned by Adam and Eve. Petritsi has no real peer in the Georgian philosophical tradition, even if he has been convincingly located within a more general cultural flowering made possible by the reign of the Georgian king David the Builder around the turn of the 12th century. But we can find analogies in other language groups among the Christians of the East. An obvious comparison would be to David the Invincible, who back in the 6th century translated Aristotelian logical treatises into Armenian, on which point it's worth noting that Petritsi's version of Proclus became the basis for an Armenian translation made in the 13th century. And, as you'll remember, Georgian and Armenian were not the only languages for doing philosophy. Christian philosophers wrote in Arabic and also in Syriac. We have yet to discuss the greatest medieval exponent of philosophy in that language. To do so, we'll have to look beyond the confines of the Byzantine empire as we did when discussing John of Damascus. This will give us an opportunity to resume the question of intellectual exchange between the Greek-Christian and Islamic worlds. So, join me next time as we consider the Syriac writings of Bar Hebraeus and discover that not all was quiet on the Eastern front. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. E K E K O D A N A P O D A N A P O
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, People of the South by Zantium and Islam. If you're looking for an argument, I have two places to suggest you go. First, any room containing an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers love arguing so much that not content with arguing for a living. They go out for drinks with one another after work to argue in their free time, and then go home where they get into arguments with their loved ones about whether they are too argumentative. Second, if you can find a way to get there, the medieval Near East. Starting in late antiquity, the goddess of history devoted all of her efforts to producing the ideal conditions for disagreement. After breaking the Roman Empire in half so that Latin Christians could come into conflict with Greek Christians, she also oversaw sectarian disputes between Christians in the Eastern realms. The Chalcedonians, the Miaphysites, and the Church of the East, sometimes referred to respectively as Melkites, Jacobites, and Nestorians. But she was just getting warmed up. The rise of Islam cut the size of the Byzantine Empire in half as Syria and Egypt were lost and gave Christians a whole new set of opponents. That rivalry was often pursued in the good old fashioned way, namely hideous violence. The history of Byzantium is in no small part the history of warfare with Muslim powers, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Fatimids, the Seljuks, then finally and fatally the Ottomans. In many periods, annual raids were a fact of life for anyone living in striking distance of the border. Emperors could secure legitimacy by defeating the Muslims on the field of battle or lose it by being defeated. And the same was true on the other side. Caliphs and other Muslim rulers tested their armies against those of the Christians and attempted numerous times to fulfill a promise supposedly made by the prophet, The first among my people who conquer the city of the Caesar, that is Constantinople, will have his sins forgiven. Yet the relationship between the two faiths involved more than military conflict. To see this, we need look no further than the actions of these same emperors and caliphs. They wanted to be seen as religious leaders, not just as warlords. On the back foot after the Arab invasions, Byzantine emperors presented themselves as being victorious in faith, if not in war, as leaders of a process of reform and renewal that would win back God's favor. Throughout the history of the empire, emperors also sought to overawe and humble Muslim visitors with the glory of their court at Constantinople and they sent emissaries who could display the best that Greek scholarship had to offer. We saw that in the middle of the 9th century, Photius was chosen for just such a diplomatic mission, a somewhat earlier example was John the Grammarian, a scholar dispatched to Baghdad in 829. Emperors were also known to send documents instructing their opposite numbers in the errors of Islam. We have a letter supposedly written by the iconoclast emperor Leo III to the reigning caliph, one of the earliest Christian refutations of Islam. The correspondence went both ways. In the 9th century, the famed Abbasid caliph Harun al-Ashid had a letter sent to Constantinople penned by a scholar named Muhammad ibn al-Laith. It explains the superiority of Islam to Christianity and then suggests that the emperor either come to his senses and convert, or agreed to pay the tax owed by Christians to their Muslim overlords. Many if not most religious refutations though were not aimed at members of the rival faith. Instead they were, almost literally, preaching to the choir. In the middle of the 9th century, Niketas of Byzantium wrote an attack on the Qur'an, condemning it as untruthful, inconsistent, and idolatrous. Far from being a true revelation, founding a new religion devoted to the one god, this book leads to the worship of the devil. Niketas' goal was obviously to strengthen the confidence of his co-religionists not to win over potential converts, even if the treatise is remarkable for showing some knowledge of the Qur'an, which was at least partially known to him in Greek translation. Other diatribes against Islam include one written by a 14th century emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos, and several pages from Eustratus' commentary on Aristotle's ethics. This rare allusion to Islam in a strictly philosophical work is no more polite than what we find in Niketas. It describes Muhammad, without naming him, as a false prophet who engaged in adultery. Eustratus depicts Muslims in general as hedonists who are under the impression that it is good to give full rein to the base functions of the body rather than giving primacy to reason. The polemic draws on the pagan Proclus, giving us another glimpse at the fad for Neoplatonism we discussed last time. Evidentially, Eustratus thought far more highly of Proclus than of the prophet of Islam, whom he compares to the notoriously debauched Persian king Sardanapolis. Of course, it was easy to be rude about Islam when you were sitting safely in Constantinople. Encounters between Christian and Muslim scholars in the Islamic world tended to be more polite. Most of the surviving works of inter-religious disputation actually come from there, not from the Byzantine Empire. Eustratus stands to reason because of the large Christian population in places like Syria and Egypt. The Arab conquests occurred with breathtaking speed, but the spread of Islam was a much slower process. In part, this is because the Muslim rulers had a concrete disincentive to promote conversion. All non-Muslims were made to pay a special tax, the jizya, a policy already mentioned in the Qur'an. So, as more people converted, tax revenues would decrease. Furthermore, the Qur'an instructed, let there be no compulsion in religion, and commanded Muslims to be courteous when disputing with the so-called people of the book, that is, groups like Jews and Christians who were in possession of their own revelatory texts. The Old Testament prophets are recognized in Islam, and Jesus is also held to be a genuine prophet. Verses in the Qur'an do however deny that Christ was the Son of God, critically remarking that the Christians exaggerate in their religion. The Revelation also rejects the fundamental Christian belief that God is a Trinity, insisting that God is one. So we see that the goddess of history, for all her mischief, is capable of subtlety. Christians living in Muslim territory were free to pursue their religion, even if they suffered from that extra tax and certain other measures, for instance the requirement to wear distinctive clothes. Christians could pursue philosophy and the sciences too. As we know, it was Christian scholars living under Islam who translated the works of Aristotle and other philosophers into Arabic. None of those translators was more highly placed than Timothy I, an East Syrian patriarch who died in 823. At the behest of the Muslim caliph al-Mahdi, Timothy translated Aristotle's Topics, a handbook of dialectic. It's been speculated that this was chosen as an early text to render into Arabic, precisely because of his usefulness in interreligious debate. Al-Mahdi evidently had a personal interest in such debate. He personally challenged Timothy to defend the cogency of Christianity at the royal court. We have a record of the debate between the two men, written by Timothy in Syriac and also extant in Arabic translation. It was probably written to give other Christians guidance, showing them how one should answer the frequently asked questions of Muslim opponents. Yet it is far less rude about the Islamic point of view than what we just found in authors from the Greek-speaking realm like Niketas and Eustratus. The caliph is shown to be an acute and clever opponent, and Timothy does not denigrate Islam. Of course, it would have been foolish of him to do so given the setting. In this respect, and in the issues covered, Timothy's account sets the tone for later works of disputation. Much attention is paid to the cogency of the Trinitarian teaching, with Timothy offering several analogies that reappear in other Christian texts. God the Father gives rise to the sun like the sun emanating its rays, or like the soul giving forth speech. Al-Mahdi challenges this by pointing out that speech disappears as it is uttered whereas the divine sun is meant to be eternal. But Timothy points out that the meaning of a speech remains in the soul of the one who is speaking. This is one of many passages in the disputation that touch on philosophical issues, in this case philosophy of language. Another example comes when Al-Mahdi demands to know whether God willed the crucifixion to happen or willed the sins of Adam and of the fallen angel Satan. Here we have a particularly challenging instance of the problem of evil. The caliph is asking whether God does not merely allow evils to occur but actually wants them to happen so that his divine plan may be fulfilled. To this, Timothy replies that evils are freely committed, but God uses them to good ends as the caliph himself might take advantage of a burnt down house to build something new. Yet Timothy admits the limitations of his or any human's ability to explain Christian doctrine fully. God is ultimately unknowable and the metaphors he uses to explain such things as the Trinity remain just that, metaphors. Timothy's response to Islam is very different from what we found in John of Damascus, who lived only a couple of generations earlier. Where John presented Islam as one of many heresies, an unacceptable divergence from Christian belief, Timothy sees it more as a misstep on the road from Judaism to Christianity. He goes so far as to cite a passage from the Qur'an that could be read as supporting the Trinity and Ummati returns the favor by mentioning passages in the Bible that foretell the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. But in the long run, this debate was not going to be fought over scriptural exegesis, if only because neither group accepted the legitimacy of the other's revelatory texts. Of course, Christians rejected the Qur'an, while Muslims claimed that the New Testament distorted Jesus' true teachings and argued that the biblical text had been corrupted. Back then, people were well aware of the difficulties of accurately transmitting handwritten documents. The weapon of choice for interreligious dispute was instead rational argument. Muslims were confident that they could show Christianity to be incoherent, given its commitment to a God who is both one and three, both divine and human. Not long after Timothy, we have Muslim authors like Akasim ibn Ibrahim and Abu Isa al-Warak, who composed diatribes against the irrationality of Christian belief. These are well-informed texts. They mention those Christian metaphors for the Trinity, like comparing God to the sun, are able to quote from the Gospels, and display an understanding of the differences between the various Christian sects. A favorite Muslim argument is that there is no way to describe God as a Trinity without running into self-contradiction. The sun would have to be both created and uncreated, and God would have to be both one and many. This provides us with a context for understanding the emphasis on God's unity found in the contemporaneous philosopher of Kindi, who actually wrote a short treatise against the Trinity in much the same spirit, explicitly deploying the tools of Aristotelian logic. The treatise provoked a counter-refutation from Yahya ibn Adi, who was a leading member of the so-called Baghdad school of Christian Aristotelian philosophers in the 10th century. We covered this group back in episode 128 of the podcast. They represent an early peak for philosophical activity among Christians in the Islamic world, and provide us with a reminder that serious interest in philosophy was compatible with serious interest in theology. The last member of the Baghdad school Ibn Atayeb devoted himself to both Aristotle and his own faith, writing logical commentaries and a massive commentary on the Bible. As for Ibn Adi, he wrote not only that response to Akindi, but several more treatises in defense of the Trinity. You may also remember that the Christian founder of the school, Abu Bishr Matan, was humiliated in a public debate with a Muslim linguist who argued for the superiority of Arabic grammar to Greek logic. This was, among other things, a proxy debate, inter-religious disputation transposed to the context of an argument about language, as is clear from the fact that the grammarian mocks Abu Bishr for his belief in the Trinity. Which brings us to the question, what is the difference between medieval Christians and myotonic or fainting goats? I highly recommend looking them up online. Answer, the Christians were not going to take this aggression lying down. The tradition of apologetic writing inaugurated by Patriarch Timothy would continue throughout the classical period of Islam and beyond. An excellent example from about the same time as Timothy is provided by Abu Ra'ita, a Miaphysite theologian from the Iraqi city of Tikrit. He proposes to defend his own religion on rational grounds, presupposing that his opponents, the Muslims, whom he calls the people of the south, ought to be reasonable enough to accept valid demonstrations. To explain the Trinity, he offers analogies like those given by Timothy, while also admitting that such analogies can never be really adequate. The unity of the persons is like the mingled light of three lamps. He also deploys the tools of Greek logic, suggesting that the one god relates to the three persons as a species relates to its individuals. Three fainting goats will, despite sharing a species, differ in specifying characteristics, like the pattern on their fur or how loud an alarming sound needs to be before they topple over and pass out. Like I say, look them up online. In much the same way, the persons are distinguished by properties, yet agree in being divine. The species functions here as the substance, a line of thought we already found in John of Damascus. Usually, Christian philosophy in the medieval Middle East is reduced to the sort of figure I've discussed so far, translators and the members of the Baghdad school. But this is to forget two remarkable cultural developments that occurred somewhat later. First, a blossoming of scholarship in the city of Antioch. It temporarily fell under Byzantine control beginning in the year 969, creating the conditions for a further transmission of knowledge across linguistic barriers. Works were translated from Greek into Arabic, Georgian and Armenian, and the productions of Antioch were later used by Coptic Christians in Egypt and rendered into Ethiopic. One figure worth mentioning here is Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki. Alongside his works as a translator, al-Antaki wrote another defense of the Trinity echoing the way that Abu Ra'ita used Aristotelian logic. Again, the persons are described as individuals with distinguishing properties and the godhead itself can be understood as a kind of universal. That might surprise a faithful Aristotelian, since Aristotle tends to see universals as in some sense less real than individuals. And the Christians obviously don't want to say that God is less real than the persons. Al-Antaki is presumably following a more Platonist line of thought, according to which universals are indeed fully real, more genuine cases of being than their individual participants. A second cultural development unfolds from the 11th to the 14th centuries or so. It has been called the Syriac Renaissance. This too is something modern scholars tend to ignore. They often think of philosophy in Syriac, if they think of it at all, as a minor transitional phase between the more celebrated philosophical literature written in Greek and Arabic. But if you were going to name the most significant philosopher to write in Syriac, you might plausibly choose a relatively late author whose name was Gregory Abulfaraj Bar-Hebroyo. You'll be glad to know he's usually known in English by the more memorable name Bar-Hebraeus. He was a well-travelled man who spent time in Aleppo, Baghdad, and most importantly, Maragh, site of a famous observatory erected by the newly arrived Mongol regime. Here, Bar-Hebraeus would have come into contact with the circle gathered around the Evasenan philosopher and astronomer Atuzy. As a result, Bar-Hebraeus was able to draw extensively on philosophical works by Muslims, which he gathered together in encyclopedic treatises of his own written in Syriac. Note that this was in the middle of the 13th century, so not long after some of these same works were being received by Christians in Latin over in Western Europe. Particularly important for Bar-Hebraeus, just as for the Latin schoolmen, was Avicenna. For his most important work, called The Cream of Wisdom, Bar-Hebraeus follows the model of the healing, Avicenna's masterpiece, though he uses many other authors too. Especially for topics like ethics and politics, where Avicenna was less central, he drew on other authors like Atuzy. Bar-Hebraeus freely admitted the need to make use of Muslim scholarship. As he ruefully admitted, we, from whom the Muslims have acquired wisdom through translators, all of whom were Syrians, find ourselves compelled to ask them for wisdom. This brings us to another way that philosophical learning was important for interreligious rivalry. Such expertise was recognized as a sign of cultural superiority. Back in the 9th century, the polymath Al-Jahis acidly remarked that, On the other side of the border, there was understandably not much willingness to concede that the Muslims were outdoing the Greek Christians in mastery of Greek science. But occasionally we find acknowledgement of the achievements being made in the Islamic world. Simeon Seth, who died in the early 12th century, pointed out that much could be learned from consulting the literature of the Muslims, Persians, and Indians. Simeon translated texts from Arabic into Greek, adding to our sense that in this period pretty much every language of scholarship was being translated into pretty much every other language. He himself was an expert on astronomy and medicine, and followed his own advice when it came to learning from the Muslims. We'll be seeing how he did that soon when we look at the works of Simeon and other Byzantine intellectuals who wrote on the sciences. But before we get to that, we're going to stay with the interrelation of Islam and Byzantium, as I'm joined by one of the most accomplished historians to have written on the topic, Judith Heron. She'll be our guest on the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Byzantium and Islam with Judith Heron, who is Professor Emerita at the Center for Hellenic Studies at King's College London. Hi, Judith. Hi. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So we're going to be talking about Islam and Byzantium, which is an issue I just looked at in the previous episode. I thought maybe I could ask at the beginning if you could tell us what sorts of evidence we can draw on here. So what sorts of texts, what other sorts of evidence we can use to explore the relationship between the Byzantine and Islamic realms. Well, to begin with, I think we should stress, we should remember that in this long period of about 800 years from the birth of Islam, the arrival of the Arabs in the Mediterranean world and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, you know, we have a very, very long period. And so it's important to remember that Byzantium changed a lot in those 800 years and so did Islam. And there were also several types of Islam. After all, in the first period, we're talking about Byzantines and the Arabs. In the later period after the 11th century, we're talking about Byzantium and the Turks primarily. And then the Crusaders come in a direction by bringing militant Latin warriors to reconquer the holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and so on. And the Byzantine Greeks rather stand back from that effort and leave it to the Latin Crusaders to battle with the different Islamic forces. But it's very important, I think, to remember that in the initial period of Byzantine Islamic relations, we're talking about Byzantium based in Constantinople and the Islamic caliphate first at Damascus, later at Baghdad. And these critical periods from the mid-seventh to the mid-tenth century are really enormously interesting for these cultural exchanges. And in that period, we have first very considerable narrative sources about battles, raids, treaties, all the paraphernalia of warfare, which sprang from the extreme rivalry that two societies manifested. And in association with these narrative sources, we also know a lot about the diplomatic contacts. High-ranking ambassadors were sent from Constantinople to the Islamic capitals and back again. And these were the men very close to the emperor from the court, sometimes eunuchs, sometimes patriarchs, sometimes intellectuals like John the Grammarian, so-called because he was a really brilliant scholar or phosius before he became patriarch. And these figures clearly were chosen in order to impress the Arabs with not just the dignity of the Byzantine emperor, but with the skill of his diplomatic core. Then there are also lots of written sources about the theological disagreement between Christian and Muslim belief and efforts of conversion. There are also legal documents which indicate what is the status of converts and of course very important what is the status of the children of mixed marriages. And there we have a whole epic story of Diennese Akritas, who was himself mixed Muslim Christian and then went off to marry a Christian princess and they lived in Euphrates in this enormous palace that he built. And he fought valiantly against the Arabs and his culture was about as mixed as you could get. So there are lots of sources that tell us about these mixtures and the legal documents that describe how converts are to be treated. And beyond all that there is of course the great rivalry manifested in propaganda. Propaganda on both sides, the Christians always claiming that the emperor is more powerful, the empire is, the Christian empire is more powerful than the Arab, the caliph responding in kind. And in their buildings, the inscriptions on the buildings and in their art of course we have very considerable evidence of this rivalry which came to the fore in iconicism. Yeah and I guess even something like coins would reveal some of that quite a bit about the religion. So I've read for example that people say that Umayyad coins are supposed to be modeled on Byzantine coins and then later Byzantine chords are modeled on Islamic coins. Correct. I think that is absolutely the case and it's also very interesting that in the initial phase of adopting coinage because of course the Arabs did not have their own coinage, the seventh century. And when they adopted a coinage system they did attempt to use the Byzantine, overstruck the Byzantine coins and then develop their own figural images on coins until Abdelmahli at the end of the seventh century introduced a strictly an iconic coin with quotations from the Quran and nothing suggesting his portrait or the portrait of anyone else. And these coins with nothing but messages on them were obviously designed as a form of propaganda and taken up by the Byzantines in their term. Third you've already used a couple of times is rivalry and I guess that's the first thing we think of when we imagine the relationship between Islam and Byzantium in this period that it's an antagonism or rivalry. But already some of the other things you've said suggest the situation might have been a little bit more nuanced because if they were also borrowing ideas from each other or imitating each other's cultural practices then we're talking about more than just warfare and enmity, right? Indeed. Most definitely. And I think the rivalry leads to a sense of superiority and then it's a question of not which is just the more powerful society but which is the society that has greater intellectual standing, greater resources and capacity to manifest claims of superiority. And I think that's definitely visible on both sides. But in the midnight century it seems there's really a very distinct turn to appreciation, borrowing, imitation and an understanding and respect for the achievements of the other which is very novel and of course very hesitant to begin with. But under the Emperor Theophilus and Caliph Al-Amun you certainly see this sense of the coming and going between the capitals which is not just about ending warfare and exchange of prisoners. It's about what are they doing, what are they building, how are they organizing their society, all these questions which spark a much greater curiosity about the other. Yeah, I guess in a way that's really the key question I think especially as concerns the history of philosophy whether we're talking about an interest in the other culture that's born out of a desire to compete and defeat the other side. So like you might want to go check out their cities or their armies to get an edge in warfare for example as opposed to real genuine curiosity. So for example a figure that I covered in the last episode is Simeon Seth who actually translates from Arabic into Greek and draws on Arabic sources in his own works and it's hard to imagine that that is motivated by just pure antagonism to Islam. It seems more like he actually is open to influence from that direction. Yes, and it's very interesting that it's in this area of medicinal treatment and diet and really he manifests a concern and makes these translations. I think his knowledge of Arabic was not very widely shared in Byzantium but of course there must have been a Greek translation of the Quran because Nikitas Byzantios had tried to refute the Quran sera by sera and he apparently didn't know Arabic. There was a Greek version that the Byzantines could read and of course the Arabs had the Bible and knew the New Testament so they had everything they needed to make comparisons between the two faiths but the actual translation, the amount of translation from Arabic, it's a very late development I think with the astronomy and Gionides as he calls who goes from Trebizond to Baghdad and makes translations in the 14th century. Again he's exceptional and there's a lack of capacity on the Byzantine side which is not shared at all by the Muslims. I think Seth is very unusual and it's only in the very early period when John of Damascus is talking about Islam as a heresy, as an offshoot of Christian thinking which has gone wrong that you can see that somebody who lives under caliphal rule and clearly knows Arabic because his father was involved in the administration and he himself must have been bilingual, John of Damascus can take on the arguments of the Quran and can attempt to refute. Of course there are many Christians living under Arabic who know Arabic, they translate their liturgy into Arabic, that's a really clear sign that Arabic is the lingua franca and they wish to worship in it although they remain Christian. And of course there are many Thai Christians, we mustn't assume that all the Christians living under caliphal rule espouse the same definitions of Christian faith as in Constantinople. They may have followed the definitions that were made, they may have followed changes but many of them drew on their own quite idiosyncratic Christian definitions which went back many many generations. The Monophysites who really only believed in the single nature of Christ, the Nestorians who of course had a different view altogether, the Church of the East and the Syriac liturgy which had propagated very different interpretations of Christianity, just think of the Syriac hymns and the beauty of the Syriac liturgy which meant that there were a lot of Christians under caliphal rule whose formative period was in the 5th and 6th centuries and they didn't change according to definitions in Constantinople. So the situation then I guess would be that in Constantinople and in the Greek-speaking regions of Christianity there aren't that many people who can read Arabic or and certainly can't engage with high-level Arabic literature but of course in the Islamic realm, so if you're talking about Christians who are living for example in Syria which is controlled by Islamic political forces, they speak Arabic every day so it's a very different situation. Exactly, it's a very different situation and of course the Greek education, Byzantine education does not encourage the learning of foreign languages. This is one of the very weird elements of a good education in Constantinople and in other centres where bishops had schools and where monasteries had trained monks. Everything was done in Greek and there was little to Christian works in other languages and certainly very little time for works in Arabic or capacity to deal with them. One thing I'm wondering about in terms of now just thinking about the Greek culture, so let's just concentrate on Constantinople, is that in the Islamic world scholars like Dimitri Gutes have pointed out that there was a lot of intellectual competition with Byzantium and that one of the reasons why they were so keen to explore philosophy and science was effectively to present themselves as the true heirs of Greek wisdom, so they sort of took over Aristotle and other figures from the philosophical and scientific tradition and said well we're doing this properly and the Greek Christians aren't anymore, we're the true heirs of Hellenic. And I'm just wondering to what extent there is a corresponding kind of rhetoric or polemic on the Greek side, so do you think that in Constantinople there was any thought that they better get their act together and read Aristotle because otherwise they were going to fall behind the Muslims and that even if that didn't matter in a practical sense it would sort of look bad? I think when they sent embassies to Baghdad in the 9th and 10th centuries and they saw what amazing achievements in scientific and scientific advances the Arabs had made, even discounting rich sources and philosophical discussion, astronomy, mathematics, the whole notion of algebra, these were the fields in which they realised they were falling behind and they cultivated their own scholars and tried, certainly the Emperor Theophilus tried very hard to ensure that the study of ancient Greek culture was kept alive and developed and Leo the mathematician is said to have been one of these Byzantine experts who was summoned to Baghdad and Theophilus said, on no account am I going to lose you, I'm going to set you up with a school in the Langana Palace and you are going to teach our young people everything you know. And Leo the mathematician is very significant and clearly did contribute enormously to the development of mathematics. But we must never forget that the Arabs took over all the ancient Greek wisdom and in that field of mathematics they took the books of Diophantus, which is one text that I have studied closely because it's so interesting to me that they took the 13 books and studied them all and when the Byzantines found that they lacked six books because they hadn't been copied, these six had not been copied, they come in the middle of the 13 books, guess what? They were discovered in Arabic translation. So the Arabs really conserved and worked on their inheritance from the ancient Greeks and in Byzantium errors and mistakes and gaps began to develop as they did not. But I don't think for a moment that they didn't realise that Aristotle was key and of course they also kept alive Plato's thinking which was not so much developed by the Arabs. So they did respect and want to develop their knowledge of ancient Greek thought in all its fields and there are very notable contributions, particularly I would say in the late Byzantine period when Maximus Planutius is a real polymath, very interested in the use of ancient Greek sources and the development of what he has inherited through generations of scholars. Something else that you've mentioned a few times already is the phenomenon of intercultural or interreligious debate, sometimes even live debates between Muslims and Christians, so that's more common in the Islamic world and sometimes letters going back and forth trying to refute each other. So again, concentrating on the Greek-speaking sphere and maybe on the scholars in Constantinople, how much do you think that they really understood about Islam? You mentioned before that they may or may not in different periods be able to read the Qur'an. You mentioned that John of Damascus thinks of Islam as a kind of splinter heretical offshoot of Christianity, which seems kind of weird. So do you think that when they try to refute Islam, do they have a very good understanding of what they're up against? I think there's a very instructive example in the construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, when Abd al-Malik orders this magnificent new shrine to be built over the rock from which Muhammad was taken on his night flight. He requests and receives mosaics, craftsmen and actual mosaics for the decoration of the interior. And as we know, there are Qur'anic verses which proclaim the superiority of Islam inscribed around the edge of the structure. And these must have been put up by those mosaics. They may not have known what they were setting, but clearly they had a very clear notion when it was made. And they must have asked, what is it that this says? And there is of course the warning, do not say three, three is bad, three is bad, it's only the one. And this is the very basic understanding of the difference between Christian belief and Muslim belief. The Christians have this trinity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. And quite understandably, the Muslims with their monotheistic influence find this incomprehensible, very difficult to accept. And they stress the one, the one Godhead, the one Godhead and the creation of the world by the Godhead. So there is an example there in 692 when one very spectacular, utterly beautiful monument proclaims the superiority of Islam. And I can't believe for a moment that this was not relayed to Constantinople and Justinian II who had supplied these building materials was not very vexed. However, the rivalry between the two and the notion that they didn't understand each other I think is a bit belied by the fact that they were constantly debating and discussing and thinking about different definitions. Most of Christian belief and then of how it impacted on other societies. The challenge of the Latins after the so-called schism of the 11th century was followed by very considerable exploration of what the Latin West was thinking that was different and how they understood Islam. And I think we have to remember that in the 15th century before he became emperor, Manuel II spent a long winter discussing with a Persian, as he is called in the text, dialogues from the Persian, four long books of debates about the difference between Christianity and Islam which are a very clear indication of the interest and continuing curiosity that Christians had about what the Muslims believed. And do you think there was a general understanding on both sides that they were in fact worshipping the same god and they just had different beliefs about that god? So you say god is one, we say god is three, but of course we're talking about the same entity? Yes, I think that the fact that the Muslim faith had embraced the Old Testament, the Jewish Old Testament, the creation of the world, the list of the prophets, the commandments of course including the second commandment against graven images, all that indicated that there was a shared notion of the one god, the creator god. The real problem was that there were so many other difficulties. I mean the Christians thought that the Kaaba was a sort of pagan idol and that the Muslims made their pilgrimage to this pagan idol in a way that they would condemn as venerating a stone and they distinguished their own relics and tombs and saints from that in their own way. But there was definitely an understanding that there was the one god and that these with the Jews they shared that notion of one god and they inherited the Jewish as well as the Christian interpretation of that revelation. One other question I have about this is just in practical terms what it was like to be, so to speak, a Christian living on the wrong side of the border as opposed to a Muslim living on the wrong side of the border. So to put the point in a really simplistic way, would it be better in this period to be a Muslim living in Constantinople, like maybe a Muslim traitor for example, or would it be better to be a Christian in Baghdad? My impression is that the Christians in Baghdad had more freedom to think and worship and develop their skills than Muslims in Constantinople. Most Muslim traders, in fact most traders of all kinds, were very restricted in their access to the Constantinople markets and they were accompanied by guards and not allowed to just wander around. Even rather high ranking Western embassies were pushed around and kept in palaces that nicked us, Lutbrand tells us, not allowed to go straight to the palace and see the emperor and present their case. Everything was very stage managed and for traders it was actually very controlled so that they could not buy more than a certain amount of purple silk and more than a certain amount of whatever else was on the market. Although there were mosques, or there was a mosque in Constantinople, and we know there were mosques in other cities as in Athens, so there were facilities for Muslims to worship in some places, it's not clear to me that they had much freedom of movement or had much pleasure in living under Christian rule. Whereas the Christian communities under caliphal rule showed very little interest in being a sort of fifth column for the empire. They didn't want to go back and live on the other side of the border. Christians living within the caliphal areas had much less restriction imposed on them. Their adoption of Arabic as a liturgical language, all these features suggest that they were integrated into society in a different way. Certainly Muslims were never integrated into Constantinople society in the same way. That being said, of course, the Komnini had a Jewish doctor who was allowed to ride in the streets. Most Jews were not. So although there were Jewish communities, they were not well treated and although there were synagogues and Jews continued to worship, they were not given a high status. And I'm sure it would have been the same for the Muslims had there been larger numbers of them, but we don't get this impression of colonies of Muslims actually living in Constantinople regularly. Yeah, I suppose the difference is that the Muslims took over territory that was full of Christians. Yes. The Byzantines didn't, you know, seize Constantinople from a Muslim power. So the Muslims had to integrate Christian population in a way that the Byzantines never had to integrate Muslims. Exactly. And I think it was always, except on the border regions where there obviously were considerable coming and going, the borders were very porous. There are some very nice descriptions, not just in the east, but of Muslim traders trading in the border areas and when one dies, he has to be buried and there is a cemetery for the non-Christian dead. And on one occasion, the Christian trader who has been cooperating with this merchant makes sure that he's buried with his head facing Mecca, not the east and things like that. And there were cemeteries for foreigners throughout the empire so that they would get a decent burial, though it would not be connected with the Christian cemetery. These things, it's very difficult to judge how many, what sort of proportion, how familiar people were with Islamic thinking, but Muslims must have been traversing the empire regularly in order to trade and perhaps to propagandize and to make converts. I think Islam was never such a messianic, a converting religion, whereas the Christians of course were constantly trying to convert the Muslims and the Jews and they persecuted the Jews when they wouldn't convert. So there was a much stronger Christian missionary effort, which also included punishing those who refused to convert. JS One last question. I haven't gotten to the fall of Constantinople yet because obviously that sort of comes at the end of the series on Byzantine thought, but looking ahead to that, can you say something about the situation once the Ottomans do take over Constantinople? What can you say about the viability of Christian culture in the capital after that, and especially the viability of Christian intellectual culture? After 1453, I think one of the key features is the appointment of Gennadios, the ex-patriarch, as the head of the Christian unit, the Christian group in Constantinople and throughout the empire. So he becomes their leader. He's an intellectual. This is a man who is engaged with Latin Christian thought, made some translations from Latin tried very hard to maintain the Greek view, the Greek interpretation and understanding of Christianity. But he's a man of wide culture, not a narrow dogmatic figure, though he is sometimes portrayed as such. But my impression is that he had inherited from the 14th century intellectuals like Planuthis a much greater interest in a wide range of Greek culture. And indeed, recent studies have suggested that the 14th and early 15th centuries see cultural developments which are very much more intellectually interesting and surprising in a way. There is a whole spiritualist notion of indwelling among the Christians themselves, which leads to hesychasm and a very interesting monastic development, but quite different from the earlier monastic tradition. There are also very interesting developments in intellectual thinking with Metochites and figures who build churches and attach to their monasteries very large libraries and cherish their books and exchange books and borrow books in order to copy them. And of course, what was left in Constantinople after the conquest by Mehmed II, what was left was then very rapidly purloined by the Latin West in order for books and icons and miniatures and objects that could be removed to be taken to Renaissance Italy. And Cardinal Bessarion was one of the first to make sure that all his library made it to Venice. And in that way, there was an inevitable reduction in the facilities and the resources left to the Christian population in Constantinople. But they still persisted in the cherishing and the reworking and maintenance of their Christian, Greek Christian inheritance. And that included, of course, the texts that they had cherished in their school books, in their school learning with all the philosophy and the practical arts, veterinary science, medicine, mathematics. Those things still survived for a limited period. I think the West takes a very large responsibility for having denuded the Byzantine Empire of its most important manuscripts in this amazing search for anything written in Greek. These ambassadors that were sent out by the Pope, by other figures, intellectual figures in Italy and France, for that matter, desperate to get hold of books, any old books, anything written in Greek. And then, of course, they made the main translations and they added to their own great, I mean, enormous benefit to themselves. And undoubtedly, they did not leave as much for the Greeks in Constantinople, who did dwindle and decline into a very poor condition. But this was a long process, long, long, long process. And initially, I suspect, Genadios tried very hard to hold together not just the Christian community for its faith, but for its culture. Okay. Well, you've actually just mentioned some of the figures I'll be looking at in the upcoming few episodes, like Metokites and Plannides, for example. And also, later on, we'll be talking about the interchange between the Greek and Latin spheres and we'll be looking at what happened after the fall of Constantinople and transition to the Renaissance and so on and so on, because the series will never stop, or at least it goes like that. But for now, it will stop for today. And thank you to the Heron very much for coming on the podcast. And thank you very much for this interesting exchange. And please join me next time as we continue to look at later Byzantine philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich – online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Do the Math – Science in the Palaeologan Renaissance. Next time you're helping a child with her math homework and get the inevitable question, when am I ever going to need to know any of this stuff, I suggest you tell the story of Leo the philosopher, also known as Leo the mathematician. He was a 9th century Byzantine scholar whose student was captured by Muslim forces and then dazzled his captors with the learning he had received from Leo. So impressed were the Muslims that the Caliph wrote to offer Leo a position at court, but he was outbid by the emperor. Leo wound up staying in Constantinople enjoying a healthy salary. It's a particularly impressive story given the high standard of sciences in the Islamic world at that time and the fact that, as we've seen, Muslims were usually very disparaging about the state of Byzantine learning. The feeling was, for the most part, mutual. Very few Byzantines were alive to the intellectual achievement of their contemporaries in the Islamic world. In a previous episode, I've already mentioned Simeon Seth, who was that rare thing, a translator of Arabic scientific and literary material into Greek. He went so far as to borrow from Muslim medical authors while criticizing the greatest of the Greek physicians, Galen. Simeon translated works by the 9th century Persian philosopher and doctor Ahrazi, who had had the temerity to assemble a list of errors in Galenic works which he candidly titled Doubts About Galen. Simeon followed suit, mentioning places where Galen seemed to contradict himself and preferring the authority of Aristotle. More generally, the Byzantines carried on the tradition of Greek medicine, though it seems they did less to improve on Galen's medicine than their counterparts in the Islamic world. Like the Muslims, they did have hospitals, pharmacists, and surgeons. We even hear of an operation to separate conjoined twins, which was a partial success, in that one twin survived it and lived on for a few more days. A more profound engagement with science from the Islamic world can be found with the disciplines of astronomy and astrology. Simeon Seth is again relevant here. He is mentioned in Anna Komnena's Alexiad as one of the numerous astrologers present at her father's court. Already in the 11th century we see astronomical calculations being done on the basis of Arabic materials, but the most remarkable such case comes later with George Coniades. He studied in the Persian city of Tabriz in the late 13th century and translated astronomical works from Persian into Greek. There was sufficient enthusiasm for this sort of material that in the following century a theologian was moved to condemn it and one emperor banned the prediction of eclipses because they were thought to be omens of political upheaval. This made for quite a change from the days of an earlier emperor, Manuel I Komnenos, whose embrace of astrology was heavily criticized by later authors. He even wrote a treatise in defense of the discipline, insisting that astrology should not be confused with the sinful practice of magic. It's significant that when Anna mentions Simeon Seth and his intellectual interests, she calls him a matematicos. That may seem a strange way to refer to an astrologer, but in a Byzantine context it made perfect sense. Like the Latin Christians with their quadrivium, the Greeks recognized four mathematical sciences, namely arithmetic, geometry, spherics or astronomy, and harmonics or the study of music. The pursuit of these sciences might be used as a rough indicator of whether Byzantine society was flourishing in any given period, something else you might mention to your homework-shy kids. If this distracts them into a discussion of Byzantine history, there's nothing wrong with that. This peculiar type of mathematical measure would suggest that Byzantium in the 13th and 14th centuries was doing rather well. That may sound surprising given the radically reduced territory of the empire in this late period and the cataclysmic sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. But after that disaster, there was some scientific activity around the court in exile at Nicaea, and once the capital was retaken from the Latins in the year 1261, we find a remarkable resurgence of scholarship over several generations under the Palaiologan dynasty. The scholars in question thought of themselves as reviving disciplines that had been ignored for generations, and modern day scholars have agreed, to the point that they speak of a Palaiologan Renaissance. You may feel you've heard this before. It seems that the learned men of Constantinople were constantly congratulating themselves for a revival of learning, and just recently we were speaking of a Syriac Renaissance. But to quote Gaudier Boudin, who has done fundamental studies of the scientific output of this period, even though in Byzantium Renaissance is a hackneyed idea, it normally contains a germ of truth. Scholars of the time complain of difficulty finding books and teachers, and though that may be in part an attempt to claim originality for themselves, it's clear that the waning political fortunes of the empire really did lead to poor conditions for intellectual activity in previous generations. The good news is that this is the last Renaissance I'll be mentioning before I get to the real thing. In fact, you could say that in a sense, we have now finally arrived at the real thing. We'll be seeing in numerous episodes to come that the work of late Byzantine scholars anticipated, and contributed directly to, the blossoming of humanism in Renaissance Italy. That's most obvious with figures like Gymistos Platon, who actually traveled to Italy in the 15th century. But it applies already to authors of the Nicene and Palaiologan periods who engaged in many of the activities characteristic of Italian humanism, editing Greek texts, writing commentaries, and of course mastering a wide range of disciplines as befits true Renaissance men. Consider Nikephorus Blemides, who actually survived the sack of Constantinople as a child and was trained at Prusa and Nicaea. Though he was offered a post at the Nicaean court, Blemides decided instead to join the church, where he rose to a high rank. He was tutored to Theodore II Lascaris, whom you might remember from our look at Byzantine political philosophy. Blemides has even been given credit for inspiring Lascaris to try to become a kind of philosopher-emperor. In an account of his own life, Blemides tells us of travelling extensively as he tried to track down manuscripts. He saw precious books at the monastery of Mount Atos that could not be found elsewhere. Among his own works are an introductory epitome on logic and natural philosophy. It draws on Aristotle of course, but also commentaries by figures like the late ancient Platonist Simplicius. Alongside Theodore Lascaris, another of Blemides's students was George Acropolitis, who brings us back to Constantinople. He was the first head of an imperial school re-established at the capital under the Peleologan emperor Michael VIII. He features in an incident that has been taken of emblematic of the way that these scholars were restoring science after an age of ignorance. While still at the court of Nicaea, Acropolitis was asked to explain why eclipses happen and gave a correct answer that he had learned from Blemides. This was greeted with mockery by another scholar who was present and by the Empress herself. Another author of the time was Kinder, praising Acropolitis as the equal of Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy and of Plato in theology and Attic Greek. Perhaps he was their equal as a teacher too, because one of his students was among the most outstanding of these men we might call Byzantine humanists. This was Maximus Plonides, who was highly placed under Andronicus II. We still have a letter he wrote to this emperor and speeches he gave at court. Plonides copied and edited Greek works on an impressive range of subjects, from Plato's dialogues to Plutarch's Moralia, from Ptolemy's treatise on geography to the arithmetic of Diophantos on which he also wrote a commentary. He even copied from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Actually, I just said that these Byzantine humanists were men, but we know that at least one woman shared Plonides' scholarly interests. The Adora, the emperor's niece, also collected books and wrote to him asking that he correct her copy of a work on harmonics. With Plonides we are in the happy situation of having manuscripts that actually belong to him, something that will become more and more common as we move forward into the Italian Renaissance and philosophy in early modern Europe. This is exciting because we'll be able to know exactly what various philosophers were reading, sometimes we even have notes they made on these texts. Modern day researchers can reconstruct entire scholarly libraries, even hold in their hands the very copies of the books used by these long dead philosophers. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, I still need to mention a scholar who is perhaps most central for the story of this episode, one who also flourished during the reign of Andronicus II. In fact, he was even this emperor's chief minister. His name was Theodor Metochites. Like Vlamides, he wrote epitomes or paraphrases of works by Aristotle for this purpose drawing on earlier commentators like Michael of Ephesus. But Metochites was not by any means a slavish follower of Aristotle. To the contrary, he found Aristotle's criticisms of his own teacher Plato distasteful and thought that in these passages Aristotle was being needlessly contentious and competitive since in fact the two great philosophers agreed about pretty well everything. You may have noticed just a moment ago that when George Acropolitis was compared to Aristotle, mention was made specifically of prowess in logic and natural philosophy. This corresponds to the way that Metochites saw Aristotle as authoritative for the rather introductory subject of logic and the study of crude material things, but not a specialist in the more refined discipline of mathematics. Metochites had philosophical reasons for this preference. In the preface to a work on astronomy, he expresses the classically Platonic attitude that physical things are subject to inevitable change and variation unlike the secure and immutable truths of mathematics. In light of this, he rates the natural sciences rather low in epistemic terms. They can provide no certainty, as can the mathematical arts and also theology thanks to the certitude that comes with faith. And here we have yet another anticipation of Renaissance Italy where the rediscovery of the Hellenistic philosophical schools will have a huge impact. Metochites shows a remarkable awareness of the skeptical school of the Hellenistic period. He sees the skeptics as fundamentally agreeing with his own Platonic stance on the unknowability of a world that is in constant flux. For him, then, skepticism amounts to a negative claim, namely that the human mind cannot achieve knowledge of things. Metochites does not seem to adopt the more subtle approach of the Pyronist skeptic who simply suspends judgment about everything, including the question of whether knowledge is possible. This despite the fact that the work of the great exponent of Pyronian skepticism, Sextus Empiricus, was being copied at about this same period in the late 13th century. By an irony of history, or just because these Byzantines weren't very creative when it came to naming their kids, who you can bet did their math homework without complaining, Metochites' greatest rival and his most accomplished student were both named Nikephorus. The rival was Nikephorus Comnos, another minister under Andronicus II. Things between them started politely enough, with Comnos seeking Metochites' judgment on works he had written about topics in natural philosophy. But when Comnos wrote a diatribe about poor writing style and Metochites understood himself to be the target, their relationship soured. They sniped at each other over topics such as astronomy and the correct exegesis of Plato and Aristotle. As one scholar has remarked of this unedifying spectacle, one observes with mixed wonder and distaste that a contest for supreme political power between two leading imperial ministers should produce this offshoot of scholastic controversy. Metochites had a more favorable reception from his student Nikephorus Gregoras, who called his teacher a living library and said that the souls of Homer, Plato, Ptolemy, and Plutarch were united in Metochites. Gregoras inherited his master's scientific interests. He proposed a calendrical reform that anticipated by some two and a half centuries the changes that would be made to produce the Gregorian calendar in the West. He also seems to have shared Metochites' philosophical posture, as we can see from a dialogue Gregoras wrote called the Florencius. Here he echoes Metochites by charging Aristotle with disrespect towards Plato. He also shows independence of mind when it comes to specific doctrines of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Some of those doctrines were of course routinely rejected in Byzantine culture, obvious examples being Aristotle's claim that the soul cannot survive bodily death and his view that things are always made from pre-existing matter, which would rule out God's power to create from nothing. But Gregoras and other Palaeologan thinkers also make such un-Aristotelian moves as accepting the existence of void, both outside and inside the cosmos, rejecting Aristotle's account of how vision works, and denying that the heavens are made of a fifth element distinct from those we find in the earthly realm. The nature of the elements was in fact much debated at this time. One point of contention was Nikephoros Komnos' surprising claim that air is wetter or more moist than water. His namesake, Nikephoros Gregoras, thought that Komnos was, if you'll pardon the expression, all wet. It seems obvious that Gregoras has the better side of the argument here, surely water is as moist as anything could be and thus more wet than air? But we should step back and ask ourselves why Komnos would have made such an outlandish claim. It was firstly a matter of conceptual tidiness. Komnos wanted to take each of Aristotle's basic qualities, namely heat, cold, wetness, and dryness, to be the dominant feature of one of the four elements. Clearly, fire is the element that is primarily hot, and earth is primarily dry. Since air is not cold at all in the Aristotelian scheme, but rather both hot and wet, that leaves only water to be primarily cold. So by process of elimination, it's apparently air that is primarily wet. Perhaps then we should just give up on assigning the four qualities to the four elements, however tidy it would be. But there is a more profound rationale underlying Komnos' view, which is that wetness is not actually what you might suppose it to be. The wet or moist is not necessarily what soaks or quenches thirst. Rather, it is most fundamentally that which is fluid, just as the dry is that which is solid. Looked at in this way, we realize that air is indeed more fluid than water, even if water too is fluid. Air is more easily moved, and less apt to retain a shape. So we gain a useful insight from what may seem to be, if you'll pardon another expression, a rather dry scholastic debate. It calls our attention to the fact that Aristotelian elemental theory is more like modern chemistry than you might suppose. The qualities and elements it invoked were not just the everyday things we experience, like clods of earth, flickering flames, or the sopping wetness of a sponge. They were instead theoretical postulates that underlie and explain such phenomena. You will never encounter pure fire or pure earth, only bodies that are mixed out of pure elements, and the properties those pure elements possess may, as Comnos realized, be defined in quite abstract terms. If this debate shows how intricately the Peleologan scholars engaged with Aristotelian natural philosophy, their devotion to the mathematical sciences shows them adopting a fundamentally Platonic outlook. Plato had, after all, said in more than one dialogue that astronomy or mathematics is a step towards higher philosophy, one that must be studied and mastered before attaining true wisdom. In keeping with this, Michael Bselos had described mathematics as a rung on the ladder of disciplines he had ascended which culminated in metaphysics. In the same spirit, Nikephoros Gagoras states that the mathematical art of astronomy is a ladder adjacent to theology. Lest we miss the Platonist overtones, he adds that its study helps us to separate the soul's concerns from the corrupting pleasures of the body. It's easy to miss the broader theological motives and context of works that look more or less like faithful repetition of Aristotelian physics or other ancient Greek scientific works. But these were deeply pious scholars, and their pursuit of science cannot be disentangled from that piety. This emerges at the end of a commentary on Aristotle's physics by yet another Byzantine humanist of this period, George Pachimeris. The commentary is rounded off with a poem in ecstatic praise of Aristotle who, says Pachimeris, understood what pagans did not teach. But hang on a second, wasn't Aristotle a pagan? Of course, but Pachimeris thinks that Aristotle has outdone the other pagans with his account of a first cause of all motion, a theory that shows him glimpsing the nature of the Christian God. Pachimeris, by the way, is another scholar whose books still survive. We have copies of Platonic dialogues and works by Proclus in his handwriting, and also the autograph of Pachimeris' own commentary on the physics, only one of numerous Aristotelian works to get this treatment from his pen. With a revival of philosophy and science, the Nicene and Peleologian authors show us the remarkable endurance of Byzantine intellectual culture. And the fortune of their own works confirms the same point. The writings of these men were read in Renaissance Italy, whose culture they did so much to anticipate and to facilitate. They were also recycled and recopied in the later Greek tradition, with a compilation by Pachimeris on philosophy being used in further compilations, and manuscripts of Blemades still being made as late as the 19th century. But we're not ready to look ahead that far just yet. More immediately, we need to consider a dispute in which theological concerns were far more evident. A famous set piece of late Byzantine culture involved one of the figures we've just met, namely Nikephoros Gregoras. But its main character, and Gregoras's main opponent, was a dominant personality of the time, and indeed of the whole history of Byzantine theology. At stake was nothing less than the capacity of the human mind to understand God. Join me next time to achieve something slightly less daunting than that, but still worthwhile, an understanding of Gregory Palamas and the Hezekiah's controversy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Through His Works You Shall Know Him, Palamas and Hesychasm. If you are a faithful listener who has come to this series on Byzantine philosophy straight after the earlier episodes on medieval philosophy, you may have been struck by several differences. There have been fewer Marx Brothers references and more rulers named Constantine, albeit like a good pasta sauce with some basil thrown in for good measure. Also, religious institutions have played a far less dominant role. Our account of Latin medieval philosophy included extensive discussion of mendicant orders and monastic contexts. In the Byzantium series too, we've met our share of churchmen, such as the monk John of Damascus, the bishop Nicholas of Metone, and the Syrian patriarch Timothy. But many of our protagonists have been men and women of the secular world. An exception who proved the rule was Michael of Sallos, whose brief stint as a monk convinced him that he preferred the life of the courtier and scholar. In fact though, monastic traditions were of tremendous importance in Byzantine culture and not only as centers of spirituality. Some of the manuscripts we've recently been discussing were made or stored at monasteries. They were also institutions of political and economic importance. Their status under imperial tax law was a matter of heated dispute, and it was common for aristocrats to become patrons of monasteries. Sallos is again an example here, as is a figure we met last time, Theodore Metochites, whose refurbishment of a monastery at Kora included the sponsoring of mosaics that survived to the present day and are a highlight of extant Byzantine art. But of course, monasteries were not just places where the rich could simultaneously display both wealth and piety. They were above all dedicated to ascetic religious devotion following advice laid down by the Cappadocian father Basilov Caesarea and subsequently by Theodore the Studite. This earlier Theodore was abbot of one of the most important monastic institutions of the empire, the Monastery of Studios, founded in the 5th century and located in Constantinople. It was admired for its role in opposing iconoclasm and seems to have played a key role in the introduction of the minuscule script we spoke about as one of the main advances in Byzantine writing technology. The studion was home to other famous names too, such as Simeon the New Theologian, a contemporary of Sallos and like him an aristocrat who entered monastic life as a refuge from politics. Actually though, a hagiography of Simeon makes him sound more like Harry Potter than Michael Sallos, firstly because of the supernatural feats ascribed to Simeon, such as miraculous acts of healing, and secondly because at the monastery he slept in a small cupboard under the stairs. Unlike Harry Potter though, Simeon had a good relationship with He Who Must Not Be Named. Under the influence of theologians like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Gregory Nazianzus, Simeon was convinced of the utter transcendence of God above human language and thought. He therefore called God the unattainable. Insofar as a connection to God could be attained nonetheless, it would certainly not be by the study of pagan philosophy. When a theologian quizzed Simeon on matters of doctrine, he scornfully replied that the Holy Spirit is sent not to rhetoricians, not to philosophers, not to those who have studied Hellenistic writings, but to the pure in heart and body who speak and even more live simply. For Simeon, rigorous sadicism was a path towards a mystical vision of God. He described that experience as a light, filling all the space around the mystic, with the mystic himself seeming to become one with the light. In retrospect, it is hard to read about Simeon without seeing him as the forerunner of a later thinker, a man who lived two centuries later and who occupies an even more prominent role in the history of Byzantine theology. This was Gregory Palamas. He was associated with another famous monastery located on the peninsula of Mount Atvos and his name is all but synonymous with the approach to monastic practice called hesychasm. This word comes from the Greek hesychia, meaning silence or restfulness, a term that had been used in a spiritual context since the 4th century. It refers to the monks in the form of unceasing prayer, a practice that involved bodily disciplines like breath control and fasting in order to aid mental concentration. Palamas was a powerful defender of this life against its detractors, something that ironically meant that his own career would be anything but peaceful. Instead, he was at the center of the hesychast controversy, a debate that went on for years, with the fortunes of its protagonists rising and falling with the star of their supporters among the political elite. To do what J.K. Rowling could not manage with her Harry Potter novels and keep a long story short, everything began in 1335 when a Greek-speaking Italian, Barlaam of Calabria, was asked to refute theological errors held by the Latin Christians. Part of his strategy was to argue that the Latin scholastic theologians were inappropriately striving to establish syllogistic proofs concerning the nature of God, as if the divine could be captured with the tools of Aristotelian logic. Barlaam denied that this was possible, holding instead that God is too transcendent to be grasped by humans with the certainty that is required in Aristotelian science. Palamas agreed with Barlaam that God cannot be grasped by human reason, but argued that God could be grasped with certainty nonetheless through faith. He added, in a rather Platonist vein, that the physical world is subject to constant change, whereas God is eternal and immutable. So, if we expect certain knowledge to concern what is forever true, as Aristotle himself says, then this sort of knowledge in fact applies especially to God, not to created things. Barlaam tried to diffuse the situation by claiming that it was effectively a terminological misunderstanding. One might achieve demonstration or certainty about God in some loose sense, but not the technical sense described by Aristotle. But, there was no denying that he and Palamas had a serious disagreement on one other point, and it's here that hesychasm comes into the hesychast controversy. For Barlaam, human reason and philosophy may be incapable of discerning the divine nature, but they are still the best tools we have for understanding God and his creation. Palamas, by contrast, believed in the possibility of a mystical vision in which to the believer as a brilliant illumination. Monks like Simeon the New Theologian had enjoyed such visions, and so had the disciples who, according to the Bible, saw Christ appear to them on Mount Tabor, clothed in light. Of course, Barlaam accepted the reality of such experiences, but said they were created by God. For Palamas, though, the light was God himself. Well, sort of. We've now come to the key move in Palamas's defense of hesychasm, his contrast between what is in Greek called the oesia and energiae of God, that is, his essence and his activities, often translated in secondary literature with energies, since the English is close to the original Greek. Their distinction goes way back in the Christian theological tradition. It was used by Maximus the Confessor, who argued that since there were two natures in Christ, divine and human, Christ must be capable of activities that express his two natures. For instance, walking is a human activity, but his divinity makes it possible for him to walk on water. The Cappadocian Fathers too, distinguish nature or essence from energiae, activity or energy. This can easily look like a purely theological point, so it's worth stepping back for a moment to explain why it is of general philosophical interest. For one thing, the Cappadocians applied the point to created things, not only God. They held that the essence of even an insect is ultimately inaccessible to us, never mind the essence of God. Since in this life, at least, our understanding is based entirely on sense perception, we can never hope to know true natures, but we access those natures indirectly through their external manifestations. All of this sounds much more skeptical than what we might find in Aristotle, but it has at least a family resemblance to ideas put forward by pagan Platonists. In particular, Plotinus had distinguished between the internal and external activity, or energiae, of things, giving the everyday example of fire, which naturally gives off heat and light as outer manifestations of an inner essence. Christian thinkers took note of this distinction, and also took note of the forbiddingly ambitious standards that pagan thinkers had laid down for true philosophical understanding. You only understand the essences or inner activities of things if you grasp unchanging, necessary, universal truths about them. Beginning with Plato, philosophers had been expressing doubt that mere sense experience would be enough to reach such a lofty ambition. Yet, it is clearly possible to experience the effects that naturally arise from essences. Harry Potter has no clue what the essence of an owl is, not even Hermione can figure that one out, but it's easy to observe the activities that flow from the owl's nature such as flying or delivering the mail. Now we can return to that claim that Palamas was making, but only sort of, namely that when Jesus' disciples, or a monk, behold a divine light, they are beholding God. If we want to speak strictly we should say that they are not beholding God's essence or nature, but experiencing the activity or energy that makes manifest that essence or nature. One should not be misled by this, however, into thinking that the mystic fails to behold God after all. Just consider that, when you stretch out your hand to feel the warmth of a fire, you are really experiencing the fire. Just so, the mystic who encounters God's light is experiencing God through his activity. This is how it is possible to participate in or unify with God. Furthermore, God's activity is not created, as Baarlam claimed, but itself divine. God remains unnamable and incomprehensible in his essence, yet the union or participation of a mystical vision allows us to go beyond the purely negative approach of theologians who allow us only to say what God is not. It is a higher way of grasping God, born of practice, and known only through experience. This shows how wrong Baarlam was to extol the admittedly limited achievements of rational philosophy as the highest that can be attained by humankind. Palamas would agree with the somewhat earlier author John Tsitsis who wrote, The kind of philosophy which is puffed up with arguments is false. The philosophy of real monks is the real kind. The latter is preparation for death, and killing of the flesh, and knowledge of the true and real beings, assimilation to God, as far as possible for humans, and love of wisdom and of God. But, notice that in the midst of this quote Tsitsis quotes Plato, who was the first to speak of assimilation to God insofar as is possible. Similarly, we've just seen Palamas drawing on the pagan philosophical tradition in differentiating activities from essence, even if his immediate references are Greek theologians like Maximus and Gregory Nazianzus. In any case, Palamas is not out to denigrate natural reason. Though he is highly critical of pagan philosophers, this is not because they used reason, but because they misused it, leading them to embrace such erroneous doctrines as Plato's belief that the whole cosmos has a single world soul. Palamas won the first round of the hesychasm when Paulim was condemned in 1341, but the debate was far from over. This story has already had its fair share of Gregory's, and hesychasm was now criticized from a different direction by another one, Gregory Akyndinos. He believed that Palamas was putting forward innovative doctrines and misinterpreting authoritative texts. Worst of all, by crediting the hesychast visionary with a true participation in God, Palamas was suggesting that the visionary can himself become divine. Palamas was vindicated again in 1347, only to be attacked anew by a figure we met in the last episode, Nikephoros Gregoras. Both Akyndinos and Gregoras believed that applying the distinction between essence and activity to God would have the consequence of splitting the divine realm into two. Or actually, since there are many activities, Palamas was dividing the divine into many more than two. There would be God's essence, and then all his various activities or energies. This was the most difficult challenge for Palamas to meet, and in fact, modern-day exegetes have not always agreed about how he meant to do so. In part, he just goes on the offensive by pointing out the dire consequences of rejecting the hesychast theory. Given that various fathers of the Church insisted on the ineffable transcendence of God's very essence, denying the reality of activities around the essence would mean cutting us off from God entirely. Also, it cannot be the case that everything but God's essence is created, as his opponents claim, because then God's activity of creation would itself need to be created, which leads to a regress. The plurality of activities does not imply splitting up the unity of God. To the contrary, it proves that God's many activities must indeed be distinguished from his essence, since if they were not, then God's essence would be subject to plurality. This is all clear and pretty convincing, but when he comes to defend his own view, Palamas's arguments are not so easy to follow, or for that matter, to swallow. He is emphatic that the activities are inseparable from the essence, yet not identical with it. But when he tries to explain how this can be, he tends to say such things as that God is indivisibly divided and united divisibly. It's hard to imagine his opponents were much impressed by this sort of thing, and as I say, more recent readers have been unsure what to make of it too. One school of thought holds that the distinction between essence and activity is merely conceptual, just a contrast we introduce in order to understand God better. But it seems more likely that he takes the distinction to be a real one, made between two things that are very intimately connected. Or rather, we should resist the urge to think of the activities as further things that might or might not be distinct from God or from his essence. We might instead understand them as what God does, and things that he does freely. This would be a significant difference from the original Neoplatonic idea of an activity as a natural expression of an inner nature. After all, fire does not choose to radiate heat, and neither does Plotinus's first principle, the One, decide to emanate the rest of the cosmic hierarchy as if it might have refrained from doing so. For Palamas, by contrast, God does choose to manifest himself to the prayerful monk as a brilliant light. The visionary mystic is thus allowed to participate in God by freely offered grace. To this extent, it must be said that Palamas's theory is unmistakably a Christian one, a kind of metaphysical variation on the theme that God freely offered himself as a sacrifice to redeem humankind. This applies also to his celebration of the practical and even physical side of monastic practice. Intellectually minded opponents like Balaam and Gregoras could not accept the idea that God could be received by the mystic in a physical way, not even if the physical phenomenon in question was light. This could be at most a symbol of divinity, not the real thing. For Balaam especially, the body was something to be fled for the sake of intellectual contemplation. But Palamas is thinking less neoplatonically than him and more Christologically. What could be more true to the idea of the Incarnation than supposing that God comes to us when he sees fit by making himself manifest in the bodily realm? An irony of this whole debate is that when Balaam originally complained about those Latin scholastics who believed that they could syllogize about God, he was saying something that should have been congenial to Palamas. Balaam was trying to be faithful to the idea, so strong in Greek authorities like the Pseudo-Dionysius that if God can be grasped, it can be only by a kind of unknowing. Being much less well acquainted with Latin literature than Balaam, Palamas was slow to appreciate the force of this response to scholasticism and quick to leap to the defense of monastic approaches to God. Balaam was an unusual figure in this respect. He abandoned Constantinople after his condemnation to join the papal court at Avignon, where he encountered Petrarch and offered him lessons in Greek. As meetings between East and West go, that's a pretty stunning one, but this was a period of many such encounters, of theological disputes between Latin and Greek Christianity, and of ambitious attempts to unite the two spheres that had been so divided. I'll be devoting all my energies to explaining this in greater depth in the next episode, so it's essential that you don't miss that installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, United We Fall – Latin Philosophy in Byzantium. When I was covering Latin medieval philosophy on this podcast series, perhaps I was a little bit unkind to Thomas Aquinas. Though he received extensive coverage, one of the main points of that coverage was to shift him away from center stage, to emphasize that he was only one of several important thinkers of high scholasticism, and one who was in some ways out of step with his contemporaries. And I pointed out that other philosophers of the 13th century, such as Albert the Great, Henry of Kent, and Duns Scotus had a greater impact in the following century than Aquinas did. If you're an admirer of Aquinas, who is still nursing a grudge about this, then you'll be glad to know that in today's episode I won't be doubting Thomas or his influence. To the contrary, I will be pointing to a largely unknown aspect of his legacy, the Greek translation and Byzantine reception of his works. Usually, we think of philosophy as moving from Greek to Latin, not the other way around. That process began with Cicero and Boethius in antiquity, was pushed forward by medieval translators like Ariugina and William of Murabeche, and then famously brought to final fruition by the scholars of the Renaissance we'll be covering before long, men like Marsilio Ficino with his translation of Platonic works into Latin. To think of Aquinas and other philosophers being translated from Latin into Greek, just as the Renaissance was about to begin in the West, and in the final years of the Eastern Empire seems like history getting things backwards. But the Latin-Greek translations can also be seen as the culmination of a long series of encounters between West and East, encounters that had been going on throughout the whole Byzantine period. For the most part, this is a story of political and religious interaction and rivalry. The two realms begin to drift apart in about the 5th century, if not earlier, as the sole languages of church and state become Latin in the West and Greek in the East. There were frequent diplomatic contacts between the Carolingian West and the court at Byzantium though, and in the 10th century a strong connection was made when the Byzantine princess Theophano married the Western emperor Otto II. This was among the high points of influence from the East making itself felt in the West, for instance in artworks and the design of coinage. But there were many other examples of cultural exchange. Michael Bselos mentions having Westerners among his students, calling them Celts, while monastic life in the West was influenced by Eastern models, and Western romance literature was known and imitated in Greek. There are even Byzantine retellings of the story of King Arthur and his court. Yet theological concerns constantly prevented true unity between Latin and Greek Christendom. A famous turning point was the so-called Phottian schism, named after the scholar and patriarch Phodias. This concerned the addition of the phrase, and the Son, in Latin filioque, to the Creed, with Phodias and the Greeks rejecting this formula and insisting that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from both Father and Son, but only from the Father. While this would remain a key point of contention, there were to be other disagreements. The Latins were not comfortable with the Eastern devotion to icons that emerged out of the defeat of iconoclasm. Conversely, the Byzantines rejected the Latins' use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist because it was too reminiscent of Jewish practice at Passover, and because for them, the presence of air in leavened bread symbolized the second divine nature of Christ. They also objected to the idea of purgatory as an unacceptable innovation, meaning that if Dante had been from Constantinople, his divine comedy would have been one-third shorter. Of course, the only thing that Byzantine scholars enjoyed more than putting forth their own theological ideas was showing that the ideas of others are absurd. We've seen this in debates that pitted Greek theologians against one another and in texts written against Islam. And they also wrote critically of the Latin Church. One example, which because of my own allegiances as a sports fan has my favorite title from all of Byzantine literature, is The Sacred Arsenal. It was not a prescient appreciation of London's greatest soccer team, but a lengthy theological treatise written in the 1170s by a scholar connected to the court of the Komnenei named Andronikos Komateros. The Sacred Arsenal is divided into two parts. The first argues that the Latin Christians are, like fans of Tottenham Hotspur, deeply wrongheaded. This is followed by the second part, a collection of more than 1,000 proof texts and more than 200 arguments or syllogisms intended to establish the Greek position. Similar works were written on the other side too. To take one notable case, Anselm of Canterbury composed a treatise against the errors of the Greeks in the context of a council held at Badi in 1098 attempting to resolve the disputes dividing the churches. Religious harmony was a goal worth striving for. The political elite were keen to close the rift so as to present a united front against the threat of Islam. A repeated dynamic was that the members of this elite would reach agreement with the other side, only for the wider church membership to reject the deal. Thus a council at Lyon, held in 1274 and celebrating the union of the two churches, was met with horror back in Constantinople with the people shouting at the delegates, you have become Franks. Almost two centuries later, a series of meetings was held in Florence, which in 1452 issued in a compromise on the Filioque problem, but it would be rejected by an Eastern synod a few decades later. The alert listeners ears will have pricked up at those dates because 1452 is one year before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. What, you may wonder, were the Byzantines playing at? At this point, the Eastern Empire's chances of survival were about the same as those of a snowball receiving vigorous back rubs in a Finnish sauna. And here were the brightest minds of Constantinople devoting their energies to disputing the niceties of Trinitarian doctrine. But actually, this makes perfect sense. It was just the latest example of the Byzantines offering concessions to the West in hope of military assistance. But that hope was triumphing over experience. Emperor John V Palaiologos had gone so far as to accept the Catholic faith and debased himself at St. Peter's in Rome, only to be forced to accept vassalage from the Ottomans. Nonetheless, the desperate military situation of the Empire gives us a context for understanding the way the intellectuals, especially those who favored a union between the churches, became interested in the works of Western scholars. Which finally brings us to our promised topic of the impact of Latin philosophy in the East. As I commented in a recent episode, we've already been getting the impression that philosophy was passing from every language used around the Mediterranean into every other language. The Latin-Greek translations complete that picture. These were not on the scale of the translation movements that rendered Greek philosophy into Arabic or Arabic and Greek philosophy into Latin, but they did have a significant impact on the final generations of thinkers who lived in the Byzantine Empire. One of the translators was Maximus Plonides, whom I mentioned in episode 322. He produced Greek versions of works by Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm of Canterbury. Of these, his translation of Augustine's On the Trinity was particularly significant and a surprising choice given that Augustine had helped to inspire the adoption of the filioque clause by theologians in the Latin West. Despite this, no less a Byzantine theologian than Gregory Palamas drew on this work by Augustine taking over his idea that there are Trinitarian structures within the life of the human soul that mirror the inner dynamic of the three divine persons. It has also been suggested that Augustine may lie behind a passage in a work of uncertain origins that refutes absolute skepticism on the grounds that no one can doubt that he himself is living, thinking, remembering, willing, and considering. This argument, also found in Augustine's On the Trinity, is famous for anticipating Descartes' anti-skeptical argument, I think therefore I am, which makes it especially intriguing to see that an anonymous Byzantine author was struck by Augustine's idea. As I say though, the Latin Christian philosopher who made the biggest splash in Byzantium was Thomas Aquinas. An astonishing number of his works were rendered into Greek, including both the Summa Con Turgentiles and Summa Theologiae, as well as commentaries on Aristotle and a variety of other treatises. This was mostly the work of three men, two brothers named Dimitrios and Prochoros Cudenes, and then George Gennadios Scholarios. Let's leave Gennadios Scholarios aside for now, since he was already introduced at the end of our interview with Judith Heron, and since we'll be returning to him in the next couple of episodes. Instead, we'll focus for now on the Cudenes brothers. With them, we take up the strand of another story we were telling last time, the Hesychast controversy. As we saw, the spark for that intellectual battle was lit by an encounter with Latin scholasticism. The opening salvo was Barlaam of Calabria's complaint that the schoolmen of the West ought not to be applying the tools of syllogistic reasoning to God. This provoked Palamas into asserting that we can indeed have certain demonstration of God through a direct encounter with God's energy or actuality, while his essence or nature remains inevitably beyond our grasp. When this Hesychast position was approved by the Byzantine church in the mid-14th century, it opened another divide with the West. Like Palamas, Prochoros Cudenes was a monk at Mount Athos, but he was a committed enemy of Hesychasm. He was expelled from the monastery there and condemned as a heretic for his opposition to Palomite theology. This drew his more moderate brother Demetrios into the fray as he began to write on behalf of Prochoros. As Marcus Plusted has remarked in a monograph on the eastern reception of Aquinas, Prochoros was the better theologian of the two but much the worst diplomat. In refuting the Hesychast's views, the two brothers were able to draw on extensive knowledge of Aquinas. Demetrios Cudenes had acquired this knowledge by quite literally doing his homework. Some years previously, Demetrios had been a court official and found that the interpreters tasked with translating for visitors from the Latin West were not up to the task. By this period, the Dominican order had been sending representatives to Byzantium for some time. They had already sent missionaries to convert Orthodox Christians to the Catholic point of view in the early 13th century, and it was a Dominican who wrote the first critique of the Greek theology that could be read in the Greek language. So it was to a Dominican friar that Demetrios turned to acquire facility with Latin, and his instructor set him the task of working on texts by Thomas Aquinas. It's advice that remains valid, by the way. Aquinas's Latin is admirably straightforward, and I would recommend him to anyone who is starting to read medieval Latin philosophy in the original. In any case, Demetrios Cudenes was very much taken with Aquinas and moved on to translating his works into Greek. In doing so, he displayed the philological care that distinguished so many Byzantine forerunners of Renaissance humanism. He dug out the original texts of Aristotle that Aquinas referred to, using these in his Greek translations from Aquinas's Latin, and he sought to collate multiple manuscripts to avoid errors, though he complained that these were difficult to track down. Demetrios and his brother Prochoros used Aquinas against their theological opponents. The central teaching of Palamas and the Hezekas, as we know, is that God shows Himself to us through His actualities or activities or energies, His energeae, which are divine yet nonetheless to be distinguished from God's essence itself. By contrast, Aquinas had drawn on Aristotle to show that God is, in His essence, already being itself. In other words, pure actuality. The Cudenes brothers accepted this equation between activity and essence, thus eliminating the key contrast of Palamas's philosophical theology. They also put to use Aquinas's famous theory of analogy by arguing that the light shown to Christ's apostles and in mystical visions is not divine, as Palamas insisted, but only symbolizes him analogically. It would have been easy for the Palamas to respond by disdaining the Cudenes's dependence on a Western thinker. By being so open to the Latin Christian sphere, which according to Demetrios formed a single people with the Eastern Christians, the brothers departed from the longstanding Byzantine habit of sneering at the Catholics and the very language that they wrote in. It was usually reckoned that the lamentable introduction of the Filioque clause was probably occasioned by the inflexibility of Latin. And of course, such events as the 1204 Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders did not improve the reputation of the West. Indeed, Barlaam of Calabria once pointed out to representatives of the Pope that poor treatment of the East by the West did more to undermine Church unity than genuine disagreements in doctrine. But by the time of the Hezekiah's controversy, the Orthodox were starting to appreciate the subtlety and rigor of Latin scholasticism. Demetrios openly stated that the intellectual standard among the Greeks was well below that of the Latin West and even suggested that Latin is more precise than Greek, not less. More surprisingly, the Hezekahst too found much to admire in Aquinas. Take for instance the Emperor John VI Kantakouzeni, who was a supporter of Palomite thought both before and after he stepped down from his office to become a monk. He could have made the obvious move of criticizing the Cudanese brothers for indulging in the logical games of Latin scholasticism. But while remarking that Aquinas breathes syllogisms rather than air, he did not make this the hallmark of his refutation and instead made free use of Aquinas' ideas himself. The problem was not to use syllogisms in theology, but to use them badly, as did Prochoros in setting forth his heretical views. Another Palomite, Theophanes of Nicaea, even used typical phrases from Aquinas in his own writings, for instance by introducing counter-arguments with the phrase, To which I answer that, Aquinas' Latin respondeo di kendum transformed into the Greek pros d'etat toyota reteon. It's worth emphasizing this point because it warns us away from assuming that mystically inclined thinkers like the Palomites, or devout Byzantine theologians more generally, would be uniformly opposed to the use of rational argumentation in matters of religion, and would see this as both a hallmark and weakness of Latin scholasticism. Some Eastern thinkers did feel that way. Remember again that Barlaam initiated the Hezekast controversy precisely by making this sort of complaint. And we find other thinkers of the late Byzantine period saying things like, Aristotle and his philosophy have nothing in common with the truths revealed by Christ. But remember too that the Sacred Arsenal produced hundreds of syllogisms in support of the Greek theological position. The Palomites followed suit by using Aquinas and other Western thinkers against themselves as they defended hesychasm and charged the Western position on the philioque with being irrational and inconsistent. Even those who were more firmly opposed to Latin scholasticism were willing to meet it on its own argumentative ground. An author named Callistos Angelikudes wrote a massive refutation of Aquinas' summa consergentiles, showing its flaws point by point in something like the way Nicholas of Metone had attacked Proclus. An appropriate comparison, since Callistos' main problem with Aquinas is that he was too dependent on pagan philosophy. The use of Aquinas in the Hezekast controversy is the most eye-catching and well-researched case of influence from the Latin West on philosophy in the Greek East. But such influence can be found elsewhere even when it comes to topics that had been under discussion for a very long time. A nice example is the problem of the so-called Term of Life. Back in the 7th century, several authors had raised the question whether God predetermines how long a person will live. This is of course just a specific version of a question asked in all the medieval traditions as to whether God foreknows, and thus decides in advance, everything that happens down here on earth. Actually, the specific idea that each of us has a pre-defined Term of Life is also found in Islamic texts. One author, Anastasios of Sinai, even makes a point that was famously made a few centuries later by the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, that if God decides how long a person will live, sinners could complain that he did not arrange for them to die before they committed their more grievous misdeeds. Among early Greek Christian authors, it was generally agreed that God at least knows beforehand how long each human will live. In keeping with a remark made by the Cappadocian father Basil of Caesarea, death comes to those whose Term of Life is completed. Anastasios admits this while cautioning that human free will is not impeded by God's foreknowledge. More than half a millennium later, this conclusion was known to a 13th century thinker we met in episode 322, Nikephoros Blemides. Yet Blemides went against Anastasios, and a number of intervening figures, including the just-mentioned Nicholas of Metzone, by arguing that, "...there is no limit set for each person's life, nor has death been predetermined for each person by God." One study has suggested that Blemides was moved to this new contact with Dominican friars who visited Constantinople and who held a similar view to the one accepted by Anastasios. God foreknows, but does not cause or predetermine the length of life. Blemides therefore describes the view as an unacceptable novelty rather than an age-old solution and rejects it as a bit of Latin sophistry. Empires tend to die with more fanfare than individual humans. The more observant residents of Constantinople could tell, in the years leading up to 1453, that whether divided from the Latin West or united to it, the Greek East was about to see its own term of life come to an end. One scholar presciently remarked that even if the world was not about to end, as he deemed likely, at least the Byzantine nation was enjoying its final days. This was Gennadios Scholarios, the third Latin Greek I mentioned earlier, and as it happens, the author of no fewer than five treatises on the question of the term of life that showed the influence of Thomas Aquinas. But Scholarios is known best not for his translations or his consideration of this question of divine foreknowledge, but for a dispute over the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle. His opponent in this dispute can be described as the last great philosopher of Byzantium, and simultaneously as one of the first philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Assuming we all live long enough, we'll meet him next time as we devote an episode to the Platonism of George Gemistos Platon, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages were a time of unremitting repression. The threat of persecution and book burnings ensured that intellectuals would stay well within the bounds of accepted orthodoxy, which is why medieval philosophers were rather uncreative and tradition-bound in comparison to the innovative thinkers of the Enlightenment. Like most cliches, this one is basically wrong, though it contains a grain of truth. It is least applicable to the Islamic world, where political persecution of philosophy was almost unheard of, in part because there was no obvious institutional framework for enforcing religious orthodoxy. Things were rather different in the Latin West, where we do see reprimand or imprisonment of philosophers including Peter Avelard and Roger Bacon. Worse was the fate of Marguerite Porret, who not only saw her writings destroyed, but was ultimately executed for heresy. But, for the most part, philosophers were not punished for heresy for the excellent reason that they were not heretics. Another popular conception has it that any philosopher worthy of the name should challenge the beliefs of their society, but in fact, the vast majority of philosophers in the Middle Ages, and still today, argue in support of widely held beliefs, seeking to clarify and explore the consequences of commonly accepted doctrines rather than trying to undermine them. All this applies to Byzantium too. As we've seen, there was plenty of creative and sophisticated philosophical reflection that stayed well within the bounds of religious acceptability, which is exactly what we should expect. Devout Christian cultures produce philosophers who are devout Christians. This is so true that the most notorious exception to the rule, the anathematized John Italos, probably wasn't a true exception after all. As he himself protested, his devotion to pagan philosophy did not really lead him to adopt genuinely unorthodox teachings, which is why his accusers had to defame him by ascribing to him a variety of mutually incompatible doctrines that he didn't in fact hold. But now, as we reach the end of our examination of Byzantine philosophy, we have finally arrived at a figure who can plausibly be ascribed as unorthodox in every sense of that word. His name was George Gemistos, and he called himself Platon. The name is probably a pun, Gemistos and Platon mean roughly the same thing, abundant or full, but it was also a tribute to the similarly named philosopher whom Platon most admired, Plato, in Greek platon. Platon loved Plato so much that he wrote an attack on Aristotle for his departures from Platonic and then went even further by embracing full-blown paganism. Maybe. Still today, a dominant interpretation of Platon sees him as a convinced pagan. This goes back to the immediate reception of his writings and especially to his great rival Gennadios Scholarios. These two men lived at the twilight of Byzantium. Platon died either 1452, just before the fall of Constantinople or more likely in 1454, one year afterwards. Scholarios lived for some time thereafter and even served as patriarch under Ottoman rule, an office whose authority he used to have one of Platon's books banned and burnt in 1460, well after Platon's death. The work in question, the Book of Laws, nonetheless partially survives. By one calculation we still have almost half of it, in part thanks to excerpts preserved by Scholarios himself when he was explaining why he was forced to take this draconian measure. On the basis of this material, we can see that Platon presented a lengthy and complex metaphysical doctrine along broadly neoplatonic lines and full of references to pagan gods, the highest god he called Zeus, with lower divinities named Poseidon, Hera, and so on. That sound you hear is Nicholas of Metone turning over in his grave. He would have seen Platon as the predictable and lamentable outcome of the revival of interest in pagan Neoplatonism back in the 11th and 12th centuries, and especially the pernicious influence of Proclus. Indeed, Scholarios charged that Platon took many of his ideas from Proclus. But Platon himself claimed to find inspiration in a long line of sages going back to Zoroaster, the Indian Brahmins, the Magi, and Greek thinkers ranging from Parmenides and Plato to late ancient philosophers like Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and just for the sake of variety one whose name didn't begin with a P, Iamblichus. So, in his laws, which by the way is tellingly named after Plato's work of the same name, Platon presented himself as resurrecting a set of ancient doctrines. Were these ideas really intended to replace Christianity? The most explicit evidence for that notion actually doesn't come from Scholarios, but from another Greek scholar, George of Trebizond. He met Platon at the Council of Ferrara in Florence, which as we saw last time, attempted to forge a union between the churches of West and East. As you'll know if you've ever attended a philosophy conference, all the interesting stuff happens during the coffee breaks. Similarly here, Platon and George fell to talking during a lull in the proceedings. Supposedly, Platon predicted that before long, a single religion would unite Latin Europe, the Greek East, and indeed the whole world. It would be neither Christianity nor Islam, but a faith that does not differ from paganism. Pretty shocking stuff, especially given the setting. It would be like attending a Star Wars convention and mentioning your love of Star Trek. But there is some room for skepticism here, since George of Trebizond was perhaps the only man even more polemically opposed to Platon than Scholarius was. In addition we must ask, what was Platon doing at a top-level summit of Christian theologians if he was actually a convinced pagan? The answer is, in part, that Platon was getting to know local scholars, and in so doing, single-handedly inspiring the Italian Renaissance. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Platon can in fact be credited with helping to inspire a resurgence of interest in Greek philosophy. Among others, he met and taught Leonardo Bruni and Cosimo de' Medici. No less a witness than Marsilio Ficino names the latter encounter as a key moment in the history of Renaissance Platonism. According to Ficino, it was Platon who inspired de' Medici to sponsor a so-called Platonic Academy in Florence. More on that in a later episode. But Platon was not just using this summit as an opportunity for intellectual tourism. Though some modern-day scholars assume that he couldn't have cared less about the differences between Latin and Greek theology, he is said to have remarked that the theological debate was a matter of life and death, and he wrote on the subject as well. More generally, the writings that he made public in his lifetime give no explicit signs of sympathy for paganism. Despite its prodigious length, the Laws was apparently intended only for a more intimate readership, or even private use. We might be tempted to compare this to the way that in early modern Europe, especially daring treatises like David Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion were published only posthumously. If Platon did have an intimate circle of readers in mind, who would they have been? A long-standing hypothesis is that he was at the centre of a group of similarly-minded thinkers in the Peloponnesian city of Mistra, located near ancient Sparta. Platon moved there in 1409. In his time, Mistra was an almost independent city ruled by so-called despots, I say almost independent, because the rulers were relatives of the imperial family, the Pelaeologoi. Platon had cordial relations with them. Setting himself as Mistra know-it-all, he wrote missives to the rulers of the city, offering advice on political affairs, and even declared himself willing to help implement the measures he was proposing. Platon would no doubt appreciate it if you noticed the parallel to Plato arriving in Syracuse and attempting to advise the rulers there. His specific proposals also echo those made by Plato in The Republic and The Laws. Platon envisions an ideal society with three classes, so-called helots, who labour in agriculture and animal husbandry, the middle merchant class, and at the top, the rulers. Like so many other Byzantine political theorists, he praised monarchy as the most perfect political system. Just as a boat needs a captain and an army a general, the state needs a single figure at its head. At the back of Platon's mind here may have been the notorious rebellion that had occurred in Thessalonica in the previous century, when the so-called zealots overthrew the local imperial representative and achieved autonomous popular rule. In Platon's ideal scenario, Mistra would represent a different kind of city-state, run from the top down by a wise despot who listens to a philosopher-advisor, a role Platon was graciously willing to play. The military posture of the state was to be strengthened by abolishing the use of mercenaries, and instead having a dedicated soldier-citizenry who should be supported by taxes raised from the labouring class. Again, one may think of Plato here and the class of warrior-guardians from his Republic, though Platon probably also took inspiration from reports about ancient Sparta. Some readers have also detected in Platon's proposals a remarkable endorsement of Greek nationalism, something that had played no real role in the ideology of the multi-ethnic Byzantine Empire. Emphasizing that the Peloponnese had been governed by Hellenes since antiquity, Platon believed that the people of Mistra could find solidarity by seeing themselves as representative of a Greek genos, or race. Equally remarkable, are Platon's recommendations concerning land redistribution. In a slap at the way aristocratic magnates had gathered property to themselves across the empire, he insisted that land should be held in accordance with use. If you farm it, you own it. Thanks to such proposals, Platon has been hailed as anticipating modern utopian ideals, and it would fit well with this that his political theory is relatively secular. Christian ideology is strikingly absent, and his religious prescriptions go more along the lines of recommending a rather generic and rational theism. The ruler is to ensure that people believe in one all-ruling God who exercises providence over all things. Here we do see a link to the teachings of Platon's openly pagan Book of Laws. In the one section of this work that did circulate publicly, Platon again discussed the providence exercised by this god. We've seen many times how belief in God's oversight of the world could threaten to tip over into determinism, the view that all things that occur do so necessarily. Platon doesn't just tip over into determinism, he leaps enthusiastically. He assumes that nothing can occur without a cause, and that true causes guarantee their effects. After all, a cause that didn't guarantee its effect would still leave something to be explained, namely why the effect arises from the cause when it might not have done so, with the result that we would need to seek a further cause. Ultimately, all causes go back to the highest god Zeus, who stands at the top of every explanatory chain. For Platon, as for the ancient Stoics, who were clearly an influence on him here, human freedom does not consist in uncaused or indeterministic action, but in aligning one's will with the indomitable will of God. This argument in favor of inevitable fate resonates with a discussion found in Platon's other best known work entitled On Aristotle's Departures from Plato. It frequently charges Aristotle with self-contradiction, and this issue of fate is one such example. Aristotle understood that causes should necessarily give rise to their effects, but he was unwilling to accept the deterministic consequences of this fact. Still, as the title of the work suggests, the main goal of this treatise is to itemize points where Aristotle failed to adhere to his master's doctrines. Platon is particularly vexed by Aristotle's rejection of Plato's theory of forms, which are unconvincing and make it impossible to explain God's production of the world. As we know from his book of laws, Platon believes that the highest god gives rise to other gods that transcend the physical universe. These are pure intellects and can be identified with the world of Platonic forms. They in turn produce the heavenly realm, with the stars and planets also being understood as divine. All of these things, the gods and the heavens, are eternal. It's only in the world down here below the heavens that we find things that are subject to generation and destruction. The references to multiple gods and the pervasive necessity of Platon's system hardly sound compatible with Christianity as any medieval Byzantine would have understood it. Yet Platon complains that it is Aristotle, not Plato, who is unacceptable from a Christian point of view. Plato shows how God is genuinely a creator of the universe, whereas Aristotle is content to make his divine principle a cause of nothing more than heavenly motion. Aristotle's admirers were not about to concede this point though. In a much lengthier response to Platon's treatise, Scolarius rose to Aristotle's defense, devoting particular attention to the question of whether Aristotle's god can be understood as a creator, like the god of the Abrahamic religions. Scolarius affirmed that this is indeed the right way to understand Aristotle because in causing motion, the Aristotelian god becomes a genuine maker of the cosmos. By contrast, Plato depicted God as a mere craftsman who fashions the universe from pre-existing matter. To my mind, this reading of Aristotle is about as convincing as a French Elvis impersonator, yet it's an interpretation with a surprisingly good pedigree. One of the last important pagan readers of Aristotle, Ammonius, who was the head of the Neoplatonist school at Alexandria, also thought the Aristotelian god must cause the existence of the heavens if it causes them to move. But Platon is having none of it. He thinks that if there is truly a source of being for things, then we have to accept an account like Plato's theory of forms, which postulates a paradigm of being participated by all other things. Platon therefore criticizes Aristotle for his famous claim that being is said in many ways. No, argues Platon, being is a unified, unifical concept because all created being is rooted in the divine, which is nothing other than being itself. With this move, Platon moves decisively away from the negative theology that has characterized so much of Byzantine thought. The contrast is especially strong with contemporary followers of Gregory Palamas, who taught that God is in himself unknowable, never grasped in his essence, but only in his activities or energies. Platon is having none of this either. Like other opponents of hesychasm, he thinks it is absurd to distinguish God into two aspects, essence and activity. This, by the way, is one thing all interpreters of Platon can agree about. He really didn't like the hesychasts. In his political writings he makes this clear with withering remarks about the pointless wastefulness of monastic institutions. As a result, Platon occupies a rather anomalous place in late Byzantine philosophy. This period is often framed as a clash between men like Scolarios and the Cudones brothers, Aristotelians who were enamored of Latin scholasticism, and the hesychast Palomite faction whose views would ultimately prevail in the East. Actually, we already know that this is an oversimplification. We saw in the last episode that some of the Palomites also drew on the Latin scholastics, especially Thomas Aquinas. But Platon's position should give us further pause, since he was deeply unimpressed by both the scholastics in the West and the hesychasts in the East. In fact, it was the reception of Latin scholasticism in Greek that seems to have triggered Platon's attack on Aristotle. He explains the Westerners' excessive admiration for Aristotle by saying that they are following the lead of Iverroes, the Muslim commentator who was so avidly used by scholastics as a guide to understanding Aristotle's works. Scolarios, by contrast, was a translator and avid reader of Aquinas, so in leaping to the defense of Aristotle, he was also speaking up on behalf of the Latins, and also of authors who wrote in Arabic like Avicenna and Iverroes, whom Scolarios seems to have known primarily through Aquinas. He was much less impressed by the Italian humanists, with whom Platon consorted, remarking in his defense of Aristotle that they know as much about philosophy as Platon knows about dancing. Above all, Scolarios was convinced that Aristotle is, for the most part, compatible with Christianity, with his occasional lapses to be forgiven in light of his lack of access to revelation. For this reason, he took Platon's criticism of Aristotle to be further evidence of pagan leanings. Since Aristotle was in fact easy to harmonize with Christian teaching, Platon's denunciation of Aristotle could only be taken as an implicit rejection of the faith. Scolarios' accusations came back with an explanation of how Platon was led astray. It was supposedly through an encounter with a Jewish philosopher named Eliseos, and for good measure the malign influence of demons, that Platon was exposed to the teachings of Zoroaster and inducted into secret pagan doctrines. Scolarios adds that Platon tried to conceal his heretical beliefs, though you have to say that if this is true, Platon wasn't very good at keeping secrets. Not only did he write the Book of Laws with its references to the Hellenic pantheon of gods, but he also wrote a commentary on that classic text of pagan religion, the Chaldean Oracles, drawing on the earlier commentary by Michael Psellos. As with Psellos, this commentatorial activity could be taken more innocently. It may have been the mere expression of a fascination with ancient Platonist literature, which would also explain why Platon did extensive editorial work on Plato's dialogues. It is still debated whether Platon should be understood in this second way as a particularly adventurous exponent of Byzantine humanism who nonetheless retained his Christian belief, or instead as a secret pagan in line with the accusations made by Scolarios and George of Trebizond. Two recent books on Platon make a case for these two very different options. For Nikitas Signor Soglou, he was a radical Platonist who merely posed as a Christian and who anticipated modern European philosophy with his secularist utopianism. Wojciech Hladki instead assumes that the Book of Laws was simply a kind of literary experiment, an exercise book in which the names of pagan gods were assigned to the principles of a Neoplatonic metaphysics just for the sake of practical convenience. For Hladki, Platon did not abandon Christianity, as we can see from his engagement with debates over the correct understanding of the Trinity. My own hunch lies somewhere between these two approaches, though it is perhaps closer to that of Hladki. As both he and Signor Soglou stress, Platon was a firm believer in the power of human reason. He believed that we are able to grasp all of reality, including God himself. This suggests that we do not really need a revelation, whether pagan or Christian, to give us access to truths that would otherwise have remained hidden. For many of his contemporaries, this would already be tantamount to heresy, but it need not imply a total abandonment of Christian belief. Like other medieval rationalists, such as Averroes, a comparison Platon would not have appreciated, Platon may have supposed that religions convey the same truths discovered by philosophy but in a different register. Perhaps he assumed that ancient pagan religion and Christianity were both more or less adequate representations of one and the same metaphysical system, the very system discovered in Platonist philosophy. This would explain why he blamed Aristotle for failing to envision God as a creator, as does Christianity, and also why he thought it was worth defending the Orthodox position on the Trinity. For him, to speak of Zeus fathering Poseidon and Hera, or of the Father generating the Son and the Holy Spirit, would have been alternate descriptions of the same thing. It's worth noting that Platon does not seem to have engaged in actual pagan ritual practice, and this too suggests that he embraced paganism only as a symbolic discourse, just an alternative way to express a fundamentally rational theology. It may seem that Scolarios prevailed in his clash with Platon. He outlived his opponent, occupied the powerful position of patriarch several times, and had the satisfaction of seeing Platon's book consumed in flames. But you could argue that it was Platon who, like a clown with insomnia, had the last laugh. His impact on Ficino and other Platonists of the Italian Renaissance makes him a key figure in European thought. Platon was among the first who truly grasped an important insight made possible by the humanist project that spanned from Constantinople to Florence by way of mistra. Improving knowledge of ancient literature revealed the diversity of classical philosophy. This opened the possibility of saying that pagan literature is valuable, but that some pagans are better than others. For Platon and his Renaissance heirs, it was Plato and his followers, not Aristotle and his commentators, who produced the best that philosophy has to offer. With this, we are now finally ready to go west again, and to resume our investigation of philosophy in Latin and the European vernacular languages as we tackle the Italian Renaissance. And we're going to do that very soon, but I don't want to leave the story of the Greek East here. That would be making the same kind of mistake I tried so hard to avoid when covering philosophy in the Islamic world, which is so often portrayed as having ended in the 12th century, having survived just long enough to transmit Greek philosophy to the Latin West. Just as philosophy in fact persisted in Islam for many centuries after that, there is a story to tell about philosophy in Greek that does not simply culminate and transfer of wisdom to Western Europe. To a limited extent, Byzantine thought lived on after the fall of Constantinople, and to an even greater extent, it lives on in the Greek intellectual culture of the present day. That's the story we'll be telling next time, as we wrap up our look at the thought of the Byzantine Empire by considering its immediate aftermath and modern reception. Here on, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Istanbul, not Constantinople. The later Orthodox tradition. Say what you will about Byzantine philosophy, but at least it has a nice clear end point. So often we've struggled with the problem of how to demarcate chronological periods. In the Latin West, the line between medieval and renaissance philosophy is as fuzzy as a kitten emerging from a tumble dryer. And we've seen how late ancient philosophy merges fairly seamlessly into medieval philosophy in different languages, with the texts and preoccupations of pagan and Christian thinkers alike being passed onto the Latin, Islamic, and Greek Byzantine spheres. As a result, you'll see figures like John Philophonus or the Cappadocian Fathers being classified as late ancient thinkers or as Byzantine thinkers, depending which scholar is doing the classifying. At the tail end, though, we can even name a specific day when the curtain fell on Byzantine philosophy, May 29, 1453, when the Ottomans reached the walls of Constantinople and finally ended the Roman Empire. And yet. The Ottomans had no interest in exterminating Greek Orthodox Christianity, and their arrival did not make it wholly impossible for Greek speakers to engage in scholarship. If we think in terms of philosophy in Eastern Christian cultures, rather than restricting our attention only to Byzantium, we can actually see the fall of the capital as a beginning rather than an end. A new phase of Greek scholarship begins, in which Orthodox theologians and philosophers live under Islamic rule, much as their counterparts in the Syrian church had been doing for centuries. Think not of Plithon, who died just about the time that Byzantium ended, but of his enemy, Scolarius. Once Constantinople got the works, he carried on his business with the Turks. It wasn't business as usual, of course. Instead of a Christian emperor, there was now an Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, the Conqueror, who personally installed Scolarius as the first patriarch after the fall in 1454. The two apparently had a cordial relationship, being on good enough terms to engage in respectful debate over the differences between their two faiths. Continuing the tradition of apologetic writing we've explored in previous episodes, Scolarius even wrote a summary of the Orthodox faith for Mehmet, which was translated into Turkish. A member of Scolarius' circle, the historian Kytopulus of Imbros, comments that the sultan valued his patriarch's wisdom and virtue. Kytopulus' historical chronicle also shows that the former Byzantines were quick to adapt to the new political situation. While still identifying strongly with the Greeks, he portrays Mehmet as a new Alexander the Great, taking inspiration from the ancient historians Thucydides and Arrian, as he describes the taking of the city and the first years of Ottoman rule. Another member of Scolarius' circle, by the name of Ameroutes, nicknamed the Philosopher, translated the works of Ptolemy into Arabic, a version still extant today in a manuscript that is held in Istanbul. So the end of Byzantium wasn't the end of the world. This would have come as a surprise to many, including Scolarius himself, who thought the apocalypse was nigh as the Ottomans were closing in. Christians had been making this sort of prediction for a long, long time. Already early Latin church fathers had linked the prospective fall of Rome to the end times, for instance, Lactantius who wrote that, If the capital of the world does fall, then without doubt the end of mankind and of the whole world will come. After the rise of the new Rome and Islam, Christians kept confidently predicting that history would end, with either the fall of Constantinople and arrival of the Antichrist, or, as predicted in an influential apocalyptic text written in Syriac in the 7th century by Pseudo-Mithodius, the final defeat of Islam at the hands of a Christian emperor. Escatological expectations were especially high around the year 1000, a millennium after the birth and then crucifixion of Christ. When the world failed to end with either a bang or a whimper, the prophecies didn't go away, they just got more vague about the dating. History did stubbornly continue after 1453, and along with it the Christians' perception of their own situation, which was surprisingly similar before and after Ottoman conquest. Others had been complaining for some time about the parlous state of the Orthodox, with Dimitrios Koudounes writing in 1387 that the Empire was only a faded image of itself, and as we saw in episode 324, he lamented that the Latin scholastics had become the intellectual superiors of the Greeks. Unsurprisingly, this sort of bleak self-assessment continued under the Ottomans. A letter written in 1575 remarked that since losing the Empire, the Orthodox had lost wisdom too, and that having been forced to associate with the barbarian Turks, the Greeks had themselves become barbaric. I take this quote from a remarkable book written by the German historian Gerhard Potskalski called Grichische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkengherrshaft. It is packed with information about dozens of scholars who worked between the time of Scolarias and the early 19th century, which is when Greece achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire. Though Potskalski's focus is on theology and not philosophy, he makes clear that philosophical texts were still being read across the Orthodox world throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule. Schools and monasteries provided centres of learning in many places, most prominently Constantinople and Mount Athos. Many scholars also trained in the Latin West, especially in Italy, where there was an especially large Greek-speaking community in Venice. Because of this constant interaction with the West, an abiding concern of Orthodox theologians remained the question of Church unity. What had been a two-way debate between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches now became a three-way affair as the Protestants now joined the fray. So alongside the familiar disputes aired at events like the Council of Florence not long before the fall, we now have controversies over such topics as the Protestant idea of interpreting Scripture through itself, that is understanding biblical passages with nothing but the resources offered by other passages in the Bible. This was one of the issues at stake in an exchange of letters between theologians in Tübingen and the Orthodox patriarch Jeremiah II from 1573 until 1581. Perhaps the most surprising development along these lines was the work of another patriarch, Kydalos Lucares. He was favourably impressed by Protestant ideas and adopted a view on free will and predestination that was clearly inspired by Calvinism. The reward for his broad-mindedness was arrest and death in 1638. This patriarch was not the only man seduced by the siren song of the West. One might also name Leon Alatios, a humanist from Chios who travelled to Italy and received a doctorate in philosophy and theology at Rome in 1610. He was a unionist who argued that the differences between the two churches were merely apparent. Greeks travelled beyond Italy too. A particularly remarkable case, also in the early 17th century, is offered by Metzophanes Kurtopoulos, who went as far as Oxford and Cambridge and visited many cities in Germany and Switzerland before finally becoming Patriarch of Alexandria. In the same century, we have George Koresios, a nobleman from Constantinople who studied and taught medicine and philosophy in Padua before going to practice medicine in Chios. His writings make reference to a stunning range of medieval scholastic authors, showing his command of the Latin theological tradition. And as Western philosophy developed, its leading lights were reflected in Greek literature, as with Metodios Antrakites from Epirus who lived well into the 18th century. He too went to Italy and was exposed to ideas of the Enlightenment. His interest in figures like Malebranche, whose works he translated into Greek, led him to being accused of innovation. If orthodox scholars must take an interest in philosophy, his critics felt, they should stick to good old Aristotle. Speaking of Aristotle, as we so often are, in our coverage of the Italian Renaissance, we'll see how wrong it would be to suppose that his works fell wholly out of fashion in the 15th century or so. Instead, he continued to be a vital source for philosophical reflection well into early modernity. It turns out that the same is true for the Greek-speaking world. Any number of the figures mentioned by Potsgoski wrote textbooks or commentaries on Aristotle, especially his logic, which remained an important preparation for the study of theology. Particularly notable for their engagement with the Hellenic philosophical legacy are Theophilus Caudedelius and Athanasius Rhetor, who died in 1646 and 1663 respectively. Taking an attitude like that of the arts masters at the University of Paris, Caudedelius sought to make room for the study of Aristotle by observing a strict separation of philosophy and theology. His commentaries on Aristotle would become the standard works for philosophical education down to the end of the 18th century. His contemporary Athanasius had broader and more Platonist tastes. While he too commented on Aristotle, he also produced an introductory work for Plato's Sophist and a commentary on Plato's Parmenides, which draws extensively on Proclus. Here we glimpse the possible afterlife of the Platonist enthusiasms of men like Psalos, Petritsi, and Platon. Athanasius went so far as to name a flagrantly pagan Neoplatonist, the Great Eamblichus, as his greatest inspiration. My mention of the Georgian philosopher Petritsi may lead you to wonder what was going on in other Eastern Christian communities during this period. Plenty as it turns out. In fact, if you want to get from Byzantium to the concerns of modern-day Orthodox Christianity, you have to go through Russia and Eastern Europe. At the center of this story is Hezekasm, the often mystical movement of monastic prayerfulness that found its greatest exponent in Gregory Palamas. Russian Hezekasm goes back at least to the turn of the 16th century and to a monk named Neel Sorski. Originally from Moscow, he studied at Palamas's home monastery at Mount Athos. His emphasis was less on the metaphysical issues for which Palamas is best known and more on questions of practice. Thus, his major writing is a treatise on how to resist the temptation of distracting thoughts and worldly pleasures. Neel Sorski was also important for his embrace of monastic poverty, a bone of contention in Orthodox religious life just as it had been in the Latin medieval West. Around the same time, Hezekasm was central to the thought of Nego Basarab, a ruler of Wallachia in modern-day Romania, who wrote a work of political advice for his son. He combined the deep piety of this aspect of the Orthodox tradition with an impressively wide selection of cultural inspirations. In the work, he mentions figures ranging from Aristotle to the Buddha. One reason the Russian sphere would be important for later Orthodox thought is that it has often been the context for the preservation and dissemination of Greek literature. Among the figures who took a hand in the transfer of knowledge into Russian culture were, in the 16th century, Michael Trivolis, also known as Maxim Grek. He's yet another man who went to study in Italy, where he even assisted at the workshop of the great humanist Aldus Manutius, a pioneer in the printing of philosophical works. Maxim wasn't necessarily impressed by what he found in the West, though. He wrote against the Latins and railed against the way that scholasticism had diverged from the true path of faith. In 1518, he went to Russia, where he helped transmit texts into the Slavic language. Another name worth mentioning would be that of the Croatian scholar Jory Hrygenić, active in the middle of the 17th century. He compiled information on Latin theology, the better to refute it, and translated from Greek directly into Russian. One advantage of Russia, compared to Constantinople, was the opportunity to print texts. Printing in the former capital was shut down by the Ottomans in 1628, whereas around the same time, printing houses were churning out books in Moscow and Kiev. Moving closer to the present day, Russians really took centre stage in the story of Orthodox thought around the 19th century. An early milestone was the 1782 publication of a book called the Philokalia, meaning anthology. The Greek version was printed in Venice in that year. Still no printing was allowed in the Ottoman Empire. But the Philokalia became especially influential once it was translated into Slavonic. A compilation of Hezekast literature, the Philokalia promises to help the reader purify the mind through spiritual practices. Starting from this, the 19th century saw an explosion of philological work on and translation of Greek patristic literature in Russia. This laid the groundwork for re-engagement, reinterpretation, and reappropriation of aspects of the Byzantine legacy, especially the Greek Fathers and the Hezekasts, over the last century or so. Several of the key contributors to this process were Russian or Eastern Europeans, and as pious Orthodox Christians had difficulties with the communist governments of the Soviet Union and its allies. One tragic case is that of Pavel Florensky, who was from Azerbaijan and studied in Tbilisi in Georgia. He was arrested in 1933 and executed in 1937 at the time of Stalin's purges. Like many recent Orthodox philosophers, Florensky borrows from Western philosophy even as he grounds his ideas in Greek-Christian thought. For instance, he borrows Immanuel Kant's idea of an antinomy of reason, a case where rational argument seems to point in opposite directions, and applies it to the case of the Trinity. It seems a paradox or even a contradiction to say with the Orthodox tradition that God is one substance but three persons. Actually though, this just shows that God outstrips the capacity of human reason to understand Him. And good thing too, because if reason always pointed unequivocally towards a single conclusion, then we would, in a sense, be constrained to follow it. The fact that rational argument does not always have the last word opens a space for human freedom. Florensky quotes of all people Augustine, so often blamed by the Orthodox for the failings of the Western Church, to make his point, "...no one believes except voluntarily." In another case, Florensky takes inspiration from the Byzantine veneration of icons to develop an original aesthetic theory. He criticizes what he sees as an ineffective tradition of Western European art since the Renaissance, on the grounds that linear perspective simply tries to render literally the appearance of whatever the artist depicts. For Florensky, icons are preferable because of their symbolic nature. An icon is successful precisely because the painting is not made from life, but is a visual means of the saint in heaven showing himself or herself in the earthly realm. Several other scholars avoided Florensky's fate by emigrating, especially to Paris, which became the scene for a concentration of Orthodox thinkers after the Russian Revolution. These included scholars who were inspired in part by Western medieval texts like Mira Lou Borodin, who was an expert on medieval French romances, and Vladimir Loesky, who published on Meister Eckhart. Loesky's Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, published in 1944, is a classic of 20th century Orthodox philosophy. It takes as its central theme the apophatic current that comes down to Loesky from the Pseudo-Dionysius and other Greek fathers, the conviction that God is ineffable and ungraspable for the human mind. Not unlike Florensky, arguing that the antinomies of reason open a space for freedom in human belief, Loesky wrote that, He also connected apophaticism to existentialism. By escaping from an abstract and intellectual approach to God, the apophatic attitude allows the believer to be open to a direct intuition of God as a person rather than an idea. That critique of intellectualism in philosophical theology is not atypical of modern Orthodox philosophy. Another Russian émigré who found refuge in Paris, George Florovsky, not to be confused with the aforementioned Pavel Florensky, was critical of the way that Orthodox thought since the fall of Constantinople had so often been influenced by Western ideas. Following this a pseudo-morphosis and a Babylonian captivity, Florovsky too emphasized the importance of approaching God as a person rather than through the sort of arid concepts devised in Latin scholasticism. He was obviously not undertaking a merely philological or antiquarian engagement with the Byzantine tradition. As Florovsky himself put it, Which brings us to our final stop on this whirlwind tour of the later Orthodox tradition, Christos Yannaras, who was born in 1935 and has been a prominent public intellectual over the recent decades in Greece. Though Yannaras too is critical of the Western tradition, he is not entirely averse to engagement with its texts. In fact, one of the main touchdowns for his own philosophy has been Martin Heidegger, a 20th century German philosopher whose ideas I am not going to try to summarize in brief just now, but I will mention that Heidegger was critical of a tradition of what he called ontotheology in European thought, which makes God one being among others rather than the source of all being. Picking up on this idea, Yannaras agrees that if we think of God as just a particularly outstanding, maximal, or perfect being, we approach him in the wrong way. Instead, as Loeschke had suggested, we should adopt an apophatic theology in recognition of the limits of our own reasoning. This is part of what it means to approach God as a person. Trying to grasp God with philosophical concepts is fruitless, so that, as Yannaras observed, within a Western context Nietzsche had been right to claim that God was dead. But if we think of God as a person, he remains alive for us. For persons, in their irreducible particularity, cannot be captured by abstract notions. Here we come back to hesychasm and the ideas of Palamas, especially his pivotal distinction between essence and activity. Just as we know God only through his outward activities, so we can know any person only through his or her activities, not in his or her essence. This means that our relationships with other people are inevitably just that, relational. As Yannaras put it, the person is known as existential otherness through the rational otherness of the relations it constitutes. Yannaras thus takes love, or eros, as the model of interaction between human and human, or human and God, rather than taking something like intellectual understanding as his model. For him, this has far-reaching consequences in ethics and politics. He thinks that the West is trapped within a political framework built around the idea of individuals, which are just iterations of a type, namely human nature. You and I are just two examples of humans, and our political status, for instance our claim to certain rights, is based on nothing more than being members of that class. Yannaras finds in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and especially its idea of the Trinitarian persons, resources for an alternative grounding of political life. By thinking of one another as persons rather than individuals, we see each other not as iterations but as inevitably other and unknowable, yet approachable through freely performed activities. Through these activities, we should forge relations with one another, relations that constitute a community. With Yannaras, we have brought this story to the present day, admittedly a story told with many gaps for a change. He represents at least one aspect of Greek philosophy as it is today, and it's remarkable that unlike many European philosophers, he takes his inspiration from texts written in the medieval period. I see a parallel here, one I already suggested at the end of the last episode. I said that I wanted to spend at least one installment considering what happened in Greek Orthodox culture after the Ottomans took Constantinople, in order to avoid doing to the Greek Christians what historians of philosophy so often do to thinkers of the Islamic world. It's all too typical to ignore everything that happened in that culture after 1200 or so, the time when Arabic philosophy was translated into Latin, as if the value of philosophy written in other cultures can only ever be a matter of its contribution to Western European thought. Similarly, here, Byzantine philosophy leads so naturally into the Italian Renaissance that it would have been easy, even natural, to end our consideration of Greek Orthodoxy with figures like Plithon who had an impact on the Renaissance. But as we've just seen, many generations of scholars in what had been the Byzantine Empire continued to do what Byzantine intellectuals had done. Read and comment on Aristotle and Neoplatonism had developed philosophical ideas within a theological context. This is not necessarily to say that the level of learning after Byzantium matched the high points of Byzantine learning. Besides, as we've also just seen, the Orthodox thinkers have often lived in what had been Latin Christendom, or taken ideas from Western contemporaries, whether this was Patriarch Cyrillus Lucaris taking a few leaves from Calvinism, or Yanaras with his use of Heidegger. So this story is even harder to disentangle from that of the rest of European thought than the earlier story of Byzantium was. Still, like later Islamic thought, this is clearly a sorely underestimated and under-researched part of the history of philosophy. Taking myself as an example, I'm supposedly an expert on Greek philosophy, but in all honesty, before I did the reading to write this episode, I had never heard of Theophilus Coda de Leos, even though his works were standard reading for centuries among Greek speakers who still took an interest in Aristotle. And I see one more parallel to Islamic philosophy. In that case, attention was first drawn to post-classical texts by modern readers who were inspired by a single thinker who came late in the tradition. With Islam, this was the philosopher Mullah Sadr, who lived in 17th century Iran. In the Orthodox tradition, it was Palamas, who becomes a key for Yanaras and others to unlock the true meaning of Eastern Christian thought. In both cases, we might celebrate the impulse to pay attention to previously underappreciated texts and ideas, while also seeing that it is reductive to see a whole tradition through the lens of one figure, valuing what came earlier primarily insofar as it led up to the thought of the one chosen thinker. In reality, the story of Byzantine philosophy is not just the story of how we got to Palamas, or the story of a philosophy whose value lies in its difference from the West. Nor for that matter is it just the story of how Aristotle and the Neoplatonists were received in a Christian culture. It is a complex and multifaceted tradition whose most fascinating philosophical ideas are often found in unexpected places, such as the debate over icons or historical texts. It is, in short, a story that more than merits inclusion in any general history of philosophy, with or without any gaps. Having gotten all that off my chest, it's time to risk a bit of chronological whiplash, as we leave such 20th and even 21st century thinkers in order to return to the late Middle Ages. Next time, we'll be warming up for the Italian Renaissance by having another look at the interaction between Greek and Latin cultures, with the help of a leading expert on that topic who just happens to be something of an Italian Renaissance man, Michele Trizzio. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the relation between Byzantine philosophy and philosophy in Latin Christendom with Michele Tritsio, who is research fellow at the University of Bade. Hi, Michele. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. The first question I have is about the knowledge of Latin in the Byzantine realm. The scholars of Latin Christendom are famous for mostly not knowing Greek, with some exceptions like William of Moabeca and others who translated from Greek into Latin. Is the reverse true in Byzantium so that we can assume that knowledge of Latin was very rare? Yes, it is. Let's say that from late antiquity on, just as in the Latin West, the knowledge of Greek slowly disappears. Also in the East, there are less and less people knowing Latin. There is one exception in the sense that they needed people knowing Latin because of the Justinian code of law, and they needed people to be able to understand and speak Latin. But from the 7th, 8th century, also this tiny evidence disappear. Is that because they just translate all the legal works into Greek? The interesting thing is that they kept calling the study of law, the science of the Italians. That means the science of the Latins, as if it's not something which is the authentically Byzantine. And were they even interested in Latin texts? Did they regret that they couldn't read these things? Very late. There is one episode which is really interesting. In late 14th century, they learn about Thomas Aquinas and they translated Thomas Aquinas in Latin. The first reaction was, wow, these people knew Aristotle so well. So in 14th century, they had no idea that there were scholars in the West working on Aristotle and on Greek philosophy. They were actually surprised then. Exactly. So you have the idea of two worlds apart. It's amazing because that means that the Latin speaking world knew more about the Arabic speaking world than the Eastern part of the former Roman Empire knew about the Western part. Exactly. That's really interesting. What about much earlier Latin writing figures and in particular, we might call Latin patristic authors? Just take the most obvious example, Augustine. Weren't Augustine's works to some extent known in Byzantine? Very, very late. Only in late 13th century. Actually, they knew who Augustine was because they knew he was a hero, a hero of the, a theological hero who fought against Eresus. But they didn't know his writings and only in late 13th century, they translated Augustine's Detrimitata and they didn't translate and know the confessions, for example. Other works which were known and translated by the same translator who translated actually Augustine's Detrimitata were Boetius, the Consolazzoni Philosophia and Cicero's Theosomnio Scipionis and with the commentary by Macrobius. Okay. Yeah, that's the dream of Scipio. Yes, exactly. In English, right? Okay. So they know a little bit about Augustine, they know Boetius's Consolation and they know a little bit of Cicero and Macrobius. So very little. Very late. Little and late. So they actually knew less about the Latin tradition than the Latin tradition knew about the Greeks because if you look at an early Latin author like Ariugino, he knows a lot of the Greek patristic authors and he knows Dionysius and so on. Yes, exactly. We have no Ariugino at least in that same period. Again, as I said, only in late 13th century we have translators who are capable of producing good quality translations word by word from Latin into Greek. Can you say something to explain that? I mean, it seems kind of perverse in a way that the Greeks would have so little interest in this large culture, which they clearly know about. I mean, for example, they're worried about whether Charles the Great, Charlemagne, should be considered an emperor in the ninth century. It's not like they're unaware that there are major courts in the Latin speaking realm. Is it just because they assume that if you're doing philosophy, then Greek is better than Latin because Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek? Or what's the problem? Partly because of that. But you also have to think that the relationship between the Latin West and the Byzantine Empire were very tense at a certain moment. First you have in 1054 the schism, so the church is separate. And then in 1204, you have the Latin invasion of Constantinople. So the Byzantine Empire had to move to Nicaea, whereas Constantinople gets occupied for 50 years by the crusaders. And after that, the relationship between these two worlds becomes definitely compromised. When they did get Latin texts in, as you said, rather late and very partially, how influential were they? For example, would they take something like On the Trinity by Augustine once they've got it? Does it become really influential? There is something which becomes influential with respect to Augustine and his legacy. For example, they take the Augustine series that the soul is an image of the Trinity. So there are three faculties of the soul, mens, notitia, amor, so mind or spirit, knowledge and love. And this is something which is absent in the Greek patristic tradition. And once they learn that from Augustine, you see major influential theologians using that theory that the human soul is an image of the Trinity. What you mentioned before briefly that he was also known for attacking various, what he considered to be heretical movements, and I assume you mean Pelagianism and Donatism as well. Yes. Was that really an issue in Byzantium? Because of course it's a big deal in Latin tradition. No, they just knew the person. They just knew the name. It's a kind of doxography. So they have a list of people whom they should have considered as wise men and theological authority, but they had no knowledge, no actual knowledge of his work, of Augustine's works. And what about Aquinas? You mentioned that they were impressed that he knew Aristotle. Yeah. The case of Aquinas is even more interesting. It all happened around 1354 and there was this man called Demetros Kidonis. He was a diplomat working as a Byzantine court and he had to learn Latin because he was supposed to deal with many Westerners like traders in particular, who were acting in Constantinople, people from Genoa, Pisa, and in general, the Latin West. So he met a Dominican monk in Constantinople and he asked him to teach him Latin. And this monk gave him as a book of grammar exercise, Aquinas summa contregentiles. And once he read it, he was astonished and said, wow, these people know Aristotle much better than us. And from that moment on, there is a full set of Byzantine theologians who support Thomas Aquinas view, convert to Catholicism and reject all earlier Byzantine theology as a kind of superstition, mysticism, and something which has nothing to do with the exercise of purism. Thomas Aquinas for them was a champion of rationalism against feudalism. Oh, right. So in effect, he becomes a kind of standard bearer for an alternative model of Christianity. Exactly. And so he is perceived as a kind of a dramatic split within the Byzantine intellectual culture because you really have a kind of war between support of Aquinas and supporters of the traditional way of doing theology, which rejected a syllogism, for example, or rejected the use of dialectics and so on. So it's very interesting because it's not just that they were surprised of Aquinas knowledge of Aristotle, but they actually thought that Aquinas could be useful for reinventing and thinking again theology. Okay. So now turning to the other direction, you said that the influence of the Latin West on the Greek East is very minimal. What about the influence of the Greek East on the Latin West? Obviously, we think of the recovery of Aristotle and Plato later on, the beginning of the Renaissance as a major impact from the Greek sphere on the Latin sphere. What about properly Byzantine authors? Were they at all influential in the Latin West? Yes, indeed. I mean, with respect, for example, to theologians, we have the tradition of John of Damascus, who was translated in the 12th century. And with respect to philosophers, to more philosophical sources, we have the tradition of the Greek Byzantine commentators on Aristotle's incommunicationetics. A very important figure in this respect is the leading scholar and Bishop Robert Grossetest. Grossetest had collected a wonderful and amazing Greek library. And when you look at Grossetest, you have the impression that the Byzantine were not only relevant or important, essential because of the transmission of the manuscript of Aristotle, but also because they provided Western readers with the looking glasses for reading Aristotle, for understanding Aristotle. Yeah, something I talked about in the episodes on Latin medieval philosophy is that they would have often been reading Aristotle with the commentaries of Averroes, for example. And the same thing is true with the ethics, right? Because they read Grossetest's translation of the ethics, along with Latin translations of Byzantine commentaries. And by the way, when we say Byzantine commentators here, maybe we should say who we mean, because I guess you don't just mean late ancient commentators. No. We're not talking about philoponists and simplicists. No, but none of these late ancient commentators commented actually upon the incommunicationetics, although we know for sure that it was part of the curriculum of studying late antiquity. What I mean is Byzantine scholars such as the Bishop of Nicaea, Eustratus, and the court commentator Michael of Ephesus, both these scholars were active between the end of 11th and the beginning of the 12th century. Yeah, I've touched on them in the podcast already. And one thing I've said about the commentary tradition in Byzantium in general is that there's a lot of continuity between late antiquity and the Byzantine commentary tradition, which means that we find a lot of Neoplatonic ideas in the commentaries written on Aristotle in Byzantium. First of all, would you say that's fair? Yeah, that's true. That's true. The listeners can take my word for it. Yeah, I mean, the Byzantine were very interested in Aristotle's logic, but also in other works. And especially with respect to these other works, they were looking and reading at Aristotle with the eye of Neoplatonism. And why, by the way, why are they so interested in the ethics? I mean, why do they comment on the ethics when the late antique authors hadn't? That's a very difficult question to answer. My idea, which is also the idea on which most scholars agree, is that these commentaries were produced after the request of a patron. In this case, a princess, the daughter of the emperor, who was so interested in Aristotelian philosophy and requested the production of these commentaries. So she actually said, give me a comment. Yes, exactly. Because is this the idea that maybe like the royal family would be interested in the application of philosophy to their way of life? We still have no clear idea on this, but that's a very good suggestion because there is no trace, for example, no evidence suggesting that the Neocommo-Henetics was thought at school. So it's very interesting that the first appearance of this work in Byzantium, witnessed by the writing and composition of these commentaries, actually takes place actually within the imperial courts. And it's nice, by the way, an example of a woman who is influencing the history of philosophy. That's very important. I wanted to highlight that. So the fact that these commentaries are fairly Neoplatonic in character, do you think that that pushed the Latin readers of the ethics in a more Neoplatonic direction? Yes, I think so, especially for what regards Book One of the Neocommo-Henetics. As you know, in Book One, Aristotle criticized Plato's theories of forms and the Byzantine actually tried to defend Plato from Aristotle's allegation. And actually this attempt at defending Plato is very successful among Western readers. They all praise Eustratus of Nicaea for having defended successfully Plato because they were interesting in what Eustratus does is to say that Plato's forms are thought in the divine mind, which is something which Latin supporters of exemplary, for example, such as Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great found very easy to accept. Maybe we should just explain that the reason this is relevant to the context of talking about the ethics is that there's a chapter in the first book of the ethics where Aristotle attacks the idea of the form of the good in Plato. Would they, both the Byzantines and the Latins who were influenced by them, would they have gone on and said, well, not only are there ideas in the mind of God, which are these Platonic exemplars, but also we can say that God himself is the form of the good? Yes, that's exactly what Eustratus does. He claims that the good exists, the good with capital G, I would say, and that the good is God. That's why Bonaventure and Albert the Great, for example, to fund Eustratus readers will support his defense of Plato against Aristotle. Of course, it's an unauthentic Plato. Plato would have never said that probably the forms were contents in the divine mind, but that's the way the Eustratus read Plato through the looking glasses of the new Platons against. Yeah. In fact, that goes all the way back to Philo of Alexandria, you find it in Augustine. So that's, you know, that's not a novel way of distorting Plato, even if it's a distortion. And by the way, do they cite Eustratus by name? By name, yes. They cited him as the commentator, which sometimes modern editors of medieval Latin works mistook for Averroes, because Averroes was the commentator's paraxilons. But in many cases, the commentator at stake is Eustratus of Nicaea. Another thing that I associate with neoblatonic readings of the ethics is that they tend to put a lot of emphasis on the end of the ethics, the 10th and final book, where Aristotle says, having told you all about virtue and the life of practical engagement and also friendship, I'm now going to tell you that the very best life is the life of theoretical contemplation. And of course, that fits very well into a neoplatonic worldview, where you're being encouraged to turn away from the physical world towards the intelligible world. To what extent did the Byzantine commentators embrace that and then pass that on to the Latins? They endorsed this approach. For example, Michael of Ephesus, the commentator on Book 10 of the Nicomachean ethics, understands Aristotle's emphasis on contemplative life as the supreme form of happiness in terms of the platonic assimilation to God, insofar as humanly possible. And Eustratus is very clear in that, in disrespecting books, in his commentary on Book 6 of the Nicomachean ethics, he says, we have to turn away from passions and the material world, and we have to look at the separate intelligible world, which is a very Antinistetelian way of thinking at contemplative life. But again, they were very interested in mixing Aristotle with the neoplatonist in particular progress. One thing that strikes me about this is that that highly intellectualist approach to philosophy and life as a whole, the idea that what we're trying to do is achieve intellectual perfection, that's also very strong in the Arabic tradition. So I suppose that the Latin readers would have just thought that both the Arabic authors and the Greek authors, both sets of commentators, were reading Aristotle the same way. That's exactly what happens. For example, Albert the Great, who is the first and probably most consequential reader of Eustratus of Nicaea, Michael of Ephesus, he claims in his commentary on Aristotle on the soul, he claims that the Byzantine commentator on Nicomachean ethics shares with the Arabic commentators the very same theory on human intellect as something which is participated and is a kind of a trace of the supreme separate intellect. What about the philosophers who are seen as the most radical Aristotelians in the late 13th century, namely the so-called Latin Averroists like Boethius, Odysseus, Sigé of Robant? I mean, the fact that they're called Averroists, whether you think that's right or not, the fact that they're called that suggests that they were above all being influenced by the Arabic tradition. Were they also influenced by the Greek tradition at all? Research shows that actually they were influenced by the Byzantine tradition, in particular by the Byzantine commentators on the Nicomachean ethics. A recent study by Luca Bianchi demonstrated that Boethius of Dacia quotes only one from Averroes and it's probably a third end quotation. On the other end, there are many passages in Boethius of Dacia's work which are very close to what the Eustratus and Michael of Ephesus says on the contemplation, contemplative life as a kind of conjunction with the intelligible world. So in this way, we can say that even modern scholars are trying to reassess the category of Averroism, looking at alternative sources like the Byzantine commentators on the Nicomachean ethics. It suggests that actually Latin Byzantines would be a more appropriate name for them than Latin Averroists. I don't know, we'll say. This is surely also a suitable basis of Dacia. Sigé is another kind of... Yeah, right. Okay. As we move forward into the 14th century, after the supposed high point of scholasticism in the 13th century, but before the Renaissance with the famous infusion of ideas and Platonism from the Byzantine world, are there authors in the 14th century who draw on the Byzantine textual tradition? No, no, not directly, but they all still depend upon texts and sources which had been translated previously in 13th century. For example, if you look at the Commentarist edition, again, on the Nicomachean ethics, you can see that everyone cites Eustratus and Michael as if they were the only reliable authority. Of course, there is also a various middle commentary in the Nicomachean ethics was translated into Latin, but it was less influential and consequential than the Byzantine commentaries and the Nicomachean ethics. I see. So there's basically two waves of Byzantine influence on the Latin West, or maybe three actually, because there's the original one with Eriugina when he translates Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa and so on. And then there's the second wave where they come in along with Aristotle in the 12th and 13th century, and then there's nothing for a while, there's no new text, and then there's the Renaissance, is that right? Yes. Okay. And now looking even further ahead to the Renaissance, obviously now this is a very big topic, the transmission of philosophy from the Byzantine world into the Renaissance, but do you want to just pick out a few things that you think are particularly worth knowing about that? Yes. Once again, the background of this whole movement, translation movement was an ideological one. It all started with the Council of Florence and Ferrara in the fourth decade of the 15th century. It was about the Filioque, so it was about discussing theological issues mostly, but that was an occasion for Western scholar to meet their Byzantine counterparts. And that was the beginning of a very, very interesting phase in the history of philosophy where Byzantine scholars were lecturing in Western universities or in private circles, for example, in Florence later in Padua, and they were actually in touch personally with people like Ficino and the like. So we have not only a kind of a passive transmission of texts, but it was motivated and mediated by personal acquaintance between Byzantine and Western scholars. And that's the most interesting thing. Sometimes Western scholars were asking their Byzantine colleague to translate or to support their understanding of Greek classical philosophical works. That is to say, we have an example of intellectual collaboration between intellectuals from different worlds. Just like in the 12th century when in Spain you have Christians working together with Jews or Muslims who are native speakers of Arabic and they collaborate on Arabic-Latin translations. Yes. Right. That's interesting because I think a lot of people probably would have thought that what happens in the Renaissance is that a bunch of people who are Latin speaking Christians in Italy learn Greek and somehow they get their hands on a bunch of Greek manuscripts and then they're off and running and the Renaissance happens. But you're saying that it's actually at least partially about movement of people from the Byzantine East to the Latin West. And when Constantinople fell to the Turkish in 1453, even more Byzantine émigré escaping from Constantinople became refugees in Italy. And think that the Aristotle edition prepared by Aldus Manuntius in Venice, they were all prepared by Greek collaborator of his like Marco Musurius. So the basic standard edition for centuries of Aristotle was prepared by Greek émigrés in Italy. Okay. That's a perfect note on which to end because I am ending my look at the Byzantine tradition with the follow-up Constantinople. And now I'm going to be turning it to look at the Renaissance philosophical tradition. So I'll thank Michele A. Tswitsio very much for coming on the podcast to conclude our look at Byzantine philosophy. And please join me next time as we start to look at Renaissance philosophy here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode... Old News. Introduction to the Italian Renaissance. If you want to be reborn, the first thing you need to do is die in the first place. In Latin Christendom, ancient civilization and culture met their doom around the time the Western Roman Empire itself passed away at the end of the 5th century AD. This ushered in the so-called Dark Ages, initiating a period we still call the Middle Ages, middle because the medieval's had the misfortune to live between the time of the Romans and the time of the Renaissance. We usually picture it as a sudden falling away from a high plateau of culture, followed by a trough of about 1,000 years, with a sudden ascent to previous heights in the 15th and 16th centuries. Ancient culture was reborn, and modernity and the Enlightenment were right around the corner. It's this way of thinking that leads people to skip over almost half the history of philosophy in their reading and teaching, vaulting from antiquity straight to the 17th century with perhaps a brief stop at someone like Aquinas in the middle. You've heard me complain about this often enough, about how much gets missed when people ignore medieval philosophy in the Islamic world, Latin Christendom, and Byzantium. What I haven't yet pointed out is that this dismissive attitude towards the Middle Ages itself has a history. It was born at the same time that ancient culture was supposedly being reborn in the Renaissance. Ancient literature, including philosophy, was rediscovered and reevaluated. It was out with the crabbed, overly technical, and reliably barbarous Latin of the schoolmen in with the elegant Latin of Cicero. Unreadable translations of Aristotle were old news, and the very latest thing was something even older, as Greek texts were studied in the original. But was this really new? There had already been a major recovery of Greek thought during the late 12th and 13th centuries thanks to scholars who got access to the manuscripts of Constantinople. Way back in the first half of the 12th century, James of Venice traveled there and translated Aristotle into Latin. His example was followed in the 13th century by men like Robert Grossetest, who produced a Latin version of Aristotle's ethics, and William of Murabeca, who strove to produce a complete Latin Aristotle. In a parallel development, Arabic philosophical works were rendered into Latin too, providing invaluable guidance to the works of Aristotle and into the bargain the innovative and influential ideas of figures like Avicenna. So, if you must picture the history of philosophical culture as a kind of elevation chart, you should at least think of it as a high plateau plunging to a low level then thrusting up again around 1200 with a further jump during the Renaissance that brings things back to the heights of late antiquity. But the real story is more complicated still. The term Renaissance has been bestowed upon the Carolingian period when John Scodas Ariugina grappled with the works of Greek fathers in the original, and on the 12th century when figures like John of Salisbury were already cherishing Cicero. And that's to say nothing of the revivals of ancient wisdom that were a regular feature of Byzantine culture. So why is it that when we hear the word Renaissance we think first and foremost of the 15th and 16th centuries, which we take to mark a decisive shift away from the medieval period? Did these centuries just have a better public relations team? Yes actually, we call them the humanists. It was they and not Enlightenment figures like Descartes and Hume who first complained about tedious scholastic philosophy and sought to replace it with a new philosophical paradigm. This new way of doing philosophy was modelled on antiquity, as the pursuit of linguistic refinement led to a revival of Greek Platonism and Latin rhetoric. Though the humanist endeavour was indeed anticipated in medieval times, it was also bound up with other changes going on at the period. Changes that went well beyond the world of philosophy. It was a time of upheaval in economics and politics, of developments in family life, the sciences, and awareness of the world beyond Europe. Perhaps most famous is the change in the visual arts. For a vivid sense of the cultural shift, just take a stroll through any museum with a decent historical collection. When you walk from the medieval section into the Renaissance rooms, you'll be in no doubt that these few steps have brought you to a new age. If you were growing up in 15th century Italy, you could have experienced this cultural transformation in your early education. Already back in the 14th century, cities like Genoa, Turin, and Venice began organizing communal education by appointing teachers of Latin. The offspring of wealthier families might instead be taught at home. A standard curriculum would include mathematical training with the abacus and gaining literacy in at least the vernacular and often in Latin as well. Even girls, especially from the nobility, could acquire a high proficiency in Latin, something encouraged by the humanist Leonardo Bruni, who emphasized the power of classical literature to instill virtue in both men and women. For boys, the study of classics was a route to effective citizenship. As another humanist educator, Pier Paolo Vergiero, put it, For those with noble minds and those who must involve themselves in public affairs and the community, it is useful to study history and moral philosophy. Just such study was put to use by the greatest political mind of the era. Niccolò Machiavelli could never have written The Prince, or his historical works, without his initial formation. This began at age 7, with attendance at a school of Latin grammar, followed by mathematics to the age of 12, and then reading of the classics with a communal master. Such small details give us an insight into the way that the rise of humanism reflected changes in Italian political life. Rather ironically, the 14th century had seen both a precipitous decline in population as a result of the plague, and the political ascendancy of the so-called Popolo, literally meaning the people. The term refers to a middle class whose wealth and social influence pete with the establishment of Republican governments around Italy. Humanism was in part an expression of the Popolo, who were highly literate merchants and lawyers, and who looked back to Roman history for a model of Republican institutions. This is why you might have an association in your mind between humanist thought and republicanism. Yet, when elite families emerged to dominate some city governments in the 15th century, they continued to celebrate and support humanist scholarship. The most famous example would be the Medici of Florence. Cosimo de' Medici in particular was patron to the Platonist thinker Marsilio Ficino, and endowed an important public library at San Marco. Humanism was not only, not even primarily, a philosophical movement. The intellectual ideal of the period, as still remembered today in our phrase Renaissance Man, was the scholar who mastered a forbiddingly wide range of disciplines. Take for instance Fabio Paolini, who lived at the end of our period, dying in 1605. He took degrees in both philosophy and medicine in Padua and went on to teach both Latin and Greek literature. He wrote commentaries on Cicero, Avicenna, and Hippocrates, treatises on medicine and about the nature of humanism itself, and even a translation of Aesop's fables. Much as we saw with the humanists of Byzantium, for instance Maximus Planudes and other scholars of the so-called Palaeologan Renaissance, the humanists of the Italian Renaissance were interested in philosophy simply because it formed a part of ancient literature. Carrying on the philological labors of the Byzantine humanists, these Italian scholars devoted themselves to the collection and preservation of Greek manuscripts. Most eye-catching here are the texts that were rediscovered and red for the first time since antiquity. A famous case occurred in 1417 when the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript of the Latin poem On the Nature of Things written by Lucretius, an Epicurean philosopher of the Roman Republic. Lucretius was only one of numerous Greek thinkers to attract newfound attention. Sextus Empiricus, the most significant ancient skeptic, had not been totally lost in the Middle Ages, but he became a much more important source in the Renaissance, cited by such figures as Angelo Poliziano and Gianfresco Pico della Marandola. The most important single text for disseminating knowledge of the Hellenistic schools was Lives of the Philosophers, originally written by Diogenes Laertius in the 3rd century AD. Alongside summaries of the teachings of many ancient thinkers, and it must be said a lot of rather dubious biographical material, this work contained such gems as two short works by Epicurus himself, which Diogenes had inserted into his report of Epicurus's life and teachings. A Latin version of the Lives was made at the behest of Cosimo de' Medici, and it enjoyed wide diffusion in manuscripts before appearing in a first printed edition in 1472. As a result of these and other findings, Renaissance readers were in an unprecedented position. In all three medieval cultures, the legacy of antique philosophy had largely been Aristotelianism laced with Platonism. Only in the 15th century did ancient philosophy re-emerge in full with skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism given their proper due. Yet, the humanists also made great strides in understanding Aristotelianism and Platonism, which remained dominant. We tend to think of Italian humanists as abandoning Aristotle for Plato. This is not entirely unjustified. The father of Italian humanism, Petrarch, complained in the 14th century of scholastic contemporaries who, "...worship Aristotle whom they don't understand, and accuse me for not bending my knee before him." But notice his suggestion that it would be better to understand Aristotle properly, unlike the schoolmen. This presupposed a better grasp of his Greek texts, a project pursued from early in the 15th century with improved Latin translations by Roberto Rossi and Leonardo Bruni. Over the next two centuries, there would be nearly 300 translations of Aristotle into Latin, produced by about 70 translators. And that's not to mention renditions of his works in various European vernacular languages. Meanwhile, the original Greek of Aristotle was finding new readers. Almost half our surviving manuscripts for Aristotle date from the 15th and 16th centuries, and the history of printing him in Greek goes back to the five-volume edition produced by Aldus Manutius and his team at the end of the 15th century. We also find humanists lecturing on the Aristotelian corpus, as did Angelo Poliziano in Florence and Niccolò Tomeo in Padua. But we should not underestimate the continuing vitality of the scholastic approach to Aristotle, a tradition that the humanists rejected. Medieval commentators were widely read, and given early printings. For instance, there were printed editions of Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle, and in the middle of the 16th century, Pimasso Giunta printed Ivaroese's commentaries in Venice, along with the works of Aristotle on which Ivaroese had been commenting. Giunta did this as a corrective to the humanists' enthusiasm for Greek sources, which led them to neglect the riches of the Arabic tradition. As we'll be seeing, Ivaroese will be a significant source for Renaissance of the Sicilians, and also a significant source of controversy, just as he had been back in the 13th century when Aquinas was attacking members in the arts faculty at Paris for their excessive devotion to the commentator and his doctrines. If the story of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance is fairly continuous with the medieval tradition, the revival of Platonism was really something new, at least in the Latin Christian sphere. True, Plato had inspired philosophers throughout the Middle Ages, his influence peaking in the 12th century with the so-called Schule of Schacht. But for the most part, Plato was known only through a partial translation of his cosmological dialogue, the Timaeus. Now in the Renaissance, the whole collection of his dialogues make a dramatic entry onto the stage of philosophy, bringing the knowledge of his works to the same level as had been possible in Constantinople. This was thanks especially to Ficino, whose complete Latin translation of Plato appeared in 1484. But his efforts had been anticipated by earlier scholars such as Leonardo Bruni and George of Trebizond. Meanwhile, Ficino and others also made a close study of late ancient Platonists, including Plotinus and Proclus. Now, Platonism could finally compete with Aristotelianism on a more or less equal footing in a contest that carried on from earlier debates in Byzantium. The upshot of all this is that a remarkably diverse array of sources could attract the attention of Italian Renaissance thinkers. It was a time when, depending on your literary taste, your educational background, and your city, you might cherish Cicero, Plato, or Averroes above all other thinkers. If you were a humanist, you would probably value most highly the thinkers who seem to contribute the most in the sphere of ethics. The humanists borrowed from Hellenistic texts the assumption that all philosophy worthy of the name should help us to live better lives. Already Petrarch had gone so far as to say, it is better to will the good than know the truth. And there were powerful links between ethics and political philosophy in this period. In part because of the rise of Republican city-states, it's often said that the Renaissance gave birth to modern ideas of individualism, a proposition whose validity we'll need to test. In political philosophy proper, Machiavelli is only the most famous of the authors of the time who debated the relative merits of Republican and princely institutions. Speaking of institutions, the fundamental contrast between humanism and scholasticism has in part to do with institutional contexts. In Florence, for instance, there was no university, allowing the new humanist paradigm to flourish in the absence of competition. The existence of philosophy outside universities was in itself nothing new. A handful of intriguing and well-known medieval thinkers also wrote beyond the university setting, such as Petrarch and Dante. But in the Renaissance that will become increasingly common, if not the norm. Similarly, our survey of the medieval age included a number of philosophers who, as women, were excluded from the world of the schoolmen. That too will continue into the Renaissance with figures like Christine de Pizan, Laura Charetta, Morarata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. As always, we will also be looking at cultural phenomena that seem to be of philosophical importance, despite not being classified as philosophical according to modern day disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I'll be doing my best to explore the scientific achievement of the Renaissance. In particular focus will be medicine and the mathematical disciplines, especially astronomy, which will give us a chance to meet such prominent scientists as Galileo Galilei. We will also take the opportunity to explore so-called pseudo- or occult sciences, like alchemy and magic. Nor will the famous developments of Renaissance art escape our notice. We'll be touching on theories of aesthetics and on such disciplines as architecture and music. Among the social sciences, our look at political philosophy will be complemented by an exploration of economics and the writing of history, something else we've seen foreshadowed in Byzantium. This broad thematic approach I'll be taking will be compensated by a rather narrow geographical approach. This introduction may have made you feel like a visitor to Boston's north end, everyone seems to be Italian. And for good reason, or at least I hope is a good reason. As already flagged in the title of this episode, this series on Renaissance philosophy is only going to deal with the Italian Renaissance. In these same centuries Germany, the Netherlands, France, and the British Isles produced philologists to match anything that Italy had to offer, like Erasmus or Isaac Kazoban. At the same time, the Protestant Reformation was unfolding with its untold significance for European history, including the history of philosophy. These developments were so rich and diverse that they are going to need a series of their own. So, my overall strategy will be as follows. I'll be taking you to the threshold of the 17th century, the time of the Enlightenment, in two parallel series. The first will cover the Italian Renaissance, while the second will look at the 15th and 16th centuries across the rest of Europe. That further series on philosophy in the Reformation will take in the Northern humanists, Protestant leaders like Luther and Calvin, themes within scholastic culture like the notorious Wege Streit, and much much more. While I think this division of labor between the two series is necessary and should mostly work pretty well, it will also cause a few problems. In particular, we have to reckon with figures who do not fit neatly into Italy or the north. Take Nicholas of Cusa, a German philosopher who spent time in Italy, or the just mentioned Costine de Bizan, who was Italian but lived and wrote in France. I'll be tackling both of them in this first series on Italy, in part because they're both so exciting that I just can't wait. Nonetheless, we will occasionally have the problem that developments outside Italy had a major impact on the Italian Renaissance. A particularly spectacular example is the printing press, whose impact on all European thought was immense. In Italy, this technology arrived in 1465 and had a major impact on the dispersion of philosophical literature. Obviously, the Italians also responded to the Reformation, and some of the figures we'll be covering can reasonably be considered as representatives of the Counter-Reformation. The same problem will also arise in science, most notably as a northern thinker Copernicus should be covered in the Reformation series, but we'll have to say at least a little about him to understand late 16th century Italian astronomy. So you'll have to bear with me as I make occasional forays into the rest of Europe to provide context for what happened in Italy, and be reassured that we will have a chance to cover everything properly in due course. I'll finish for today by stressing what an exciting moment this is in our history of philosophy. The various strands of the story are going to weave themselves back together. Classical and late antique philosophical works become available after being inaccessible for a thousand years or more, even as ideas from Latin scholasticism and the Islamic world remain influential. Then there is the tradition we just covered, philosophy in Byzantium. That is a tradition that is almost always ignored by historians of philosophy, whether in research, in university teaching, in textbooks, or in popular presentations, but it's actually the part of our story that is most directly relevant to the As already mentioned, the Byzantine humanists were the direct progenitors of the Italian humanists, and the Greek manuscripts of Constantinople helped to kickstart Renaissance thought. But we won't truly appreciate the powerful links between Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy until we discuss the Greek-speaking scholars who actually lived in Italy and taught there. In so doing, they facilitated the rebirth of ancient thought. Next time we'll call the midwives, exploring the impact of George of Trebizond, Bessarion, and other Greeks in Italy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Tì è lì tàlè, óm tì è làlè, óm tì è làlè, óm tì è làlè. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Greeks Bearing Gifts. It speaks well of philosophy that we've managed to get so far into this history of the subject without mentioning a single fistfight. Philosophers get into arguments, but usually without coming to blows. I will confess to wondering what might happen if they did. The biographical compilation written in Antiquity by Diogenes Laertius provides rich material for the imagination here. He informs us that Plato studied wrestling, and that the very name Plato, meaning broad, may have referred to his muscular build. By contrast, Aristotle is described as having slim legs and the affected dress of a courtier. Diogenes leaves little doubt that if these two got into a fight, there would be only one outcome. To paraphrase the jock character played by Emilio Estevez in the classic 1985 teen comedy The Breakfast Club, there would be two hits, Plato hitting Aristotle, and Aristotle hitting the floor. Sadly, but if we're honest, also rather entertainingly, the peaceable record of philosophers is now going to come to an end. Two of the greatest humanists of the 15th century, Pojo Bracciolini and George Trapezuntius, had a quarrel which escalated to the point that Pojo attacked George and tried to gouge out his eyes. George retaliated with a punch and went for a knife, chasing Pojo into a hasty retreat. Later, George would complain to the pope that Pojo hired a hitman to take revenge. Not an edifying spectacle, especially from two men who devoted their lives to the edification of their contemporaries. Yet the event was entirely characteristic of the backbiting and rivalry that raged between humanist scholars. In fact, the hostility with Pojo is not even the most famous clash between George and another humanist. Better known, and more interesting, in philosophical terms, was the conflict between George Trapezuntius and Bessarion. This despite the fact that George and Bessarion had a good deal in common. Both of them hailed from the Greek East. Ironically, Bessarion was actually from Trebizond, whereas George was from Crete. He's often called George of Trebizond, but the surname Trapezuntius just indicates that his grandfather was from there. Both moved to Italy and converted to Catholicism, in Bessarion's case after he was persuaded of the Latin's theological views at the Council of Ferrara and Florence. He was elevated to the rank of cardinal and would only narrowly miss out on being elected pope later in his career. Native Greek speakers who mastered Latin, George and Bessarion became ambassadors of Hellenic literature to the Italian scholarly world. Both supported the cause of unity between the Western and Eastern churches, with Bessarion arguing that the hopes of Christianity must lie especially with the Western Church once the East fell to the Turks. The two men even died at about the same time, Bessarion in 1472 and George in that same year, or possibly the following year. It's worth emphasizing that these two scholars came to Italy well before the fall of Constantinople, with George already arriving in 1416 and Bessarion attending the aforementioned council along with George in 1437. This was hardly atypical. Though there was indeed an influx of Greeks to the Latin West after the Ottomans took the capital, scholars had already been leaving for generations during the long decline of the Byzantine Empire. So there were a significant number of Greeks in Italy throughout the 15th century to the point that Bessarion called Venice almost another Byzantium. This helps to explain how so many Italian humanists learned Greek. George Trapezuntius taught Greek to his later sparring partner, Poggio, and had stints teaching in Venice and Florence before moving to Rome. Another important teacher of Greek was Manuel Cresoloras, who led an Eastern embassy to Venice already in 1390 and returned to Italy six years later. He wrote a grammatical textbook for Greek, modeled on medieval books of Latin grammar, and taught a generation of early Renaissance humanists. Some were inspired to travel East themselves, as did Garino Veronese. He accompanied Cresoloras on a return trip to Constantinople, then later became a teacher in his own right, working in various cities including Florence. In addition to such personal connections, the transplanted Eastern scholars had a major role to play in the translation and interpretation of Greek philosophy, science, and patristic literature. Such was their influence that one humanist remarked, after the fall of Constantinople, that in Italy many people had gone Greek as if they'd been educated in Athens. The Greek scholars imported the values of Byzantine humanism with its exaltation of good style and commitment to philological exactitude, and they transposed these values to the Latin language. Bessarion is famous as the most Greek of the Latins and most Latin of the Greeks, praise supposedly bestowed upon him by Lorenzo Valla. But in fact, George Trapezuntius was the superior Latinist. It would seem that Bessarion had to get the help of his secretary, Niccolò Perotti, to pursue his rivalry with George without being embarrassed by his inferior grasp of the language. George was proud of his accomplishments in this area. He boasted that he learned Latin so well that he could dictate to two scribes on different topics at the same time, and that he might be mistaken for a native speaker from the time of Cicero. We've seen how Byzantine scholars, as far back as Psalos, esteemed the Attic Greek of authors like Aristophanes and Plato. Similarly, George and other humanists in Italy held up Cicero's language as the standard against which Latin should be judged. In an influential work on rhetoric, George referred constantly to Cicero, whom he called the best of rhetoricians, for examples to illustrate the general rules of the art. He was disdainful of the medieval tradition of writing on rhetoric, seeing it as unsystematic and inadequate. He took his cue instead from Greek works on the subject, especially by Hermogenes, a rhetorical theorist from the 2nd century AD who wrote in Greek. George also translated the rhetoric of Aristotle, but rejected Aristotle's approach to the subject, which encouraged the orator to focus on the emotional and psychological states of the audience. Following Hermogenes, George instead laid out general rules of style for achieving certain effects. John Monfassani, the foremost modern-day scholar of the Greek humanists in Italy, has hypothesized that it was George's love of rhetoric that turned him into a critic of Plato. At first, George was apparently an admirer of Plato. He translated the dialogue Parmenides, at the best of Nicholas of Cusa, no less, and also Plato's laws. Upon translating this dialogue in 1451, he said how pleased he was to discover that the constitution of Venice seemed to echo the proposals made by Plato. But perhaps taking umbrage at the attacks on rhetoric in Platonic dialogues like the Gorgias, George turned against Plato and wrote a work called Comparison of the Philosophers Plato and Aristotle. It was round two of the fight between adherents of Plato and of Aristotle. As you'll remember, the first round pitted Plethon against Scholarius, the former chastising Aristotle for rejecting his teacher's doctrines and the latter coming to Aristotle's defense. Where Plethon struck out at Aristotle's rejection of Platonic forms and divine creation of the universe, George prefers to hit below the belt by accusing Plato of sexual depravity. He points to the erotic elements of the dialogues themselves and also to Diogenes Laertius's report that Plato took male lovers. The polemic against Plato provides George with a welcome opportunity to take a swipe at Plethon. You may recall that George was one of the more hostile witnesses called for the prosecution when we considered the question of Plethon's paganism. It was George who, rather implausibly, accused Plethon of openly revealing his pagan sympathies at the Council of Florence and Ferrara. From his point of view, this was only to be expected given Plethon's philosophical tastes. Trading on a standard bit of anti-Muslim polemic, George comments that the prophet Muhammad had been a second Plato seeking to corrupt the sexual morality of the people with Plethon coming along as a third. Alongside such accusations, George does mention more substantive philosophical failings in Plato. Having translated Plato's laws, he is well placed to criticize the Platonic political theory. In a remarkable section of his diatribe, he attacks the classist and xenophobic elements of that theory. He is appalled by provisions in the laws that prevent aliens from settling permanently in the ideal city. George reflects explicitly on his own life story here, remarking that it would be unjust to exile him from his new Italian homeland just because he hails from Crete. He praises the ancient Romans, and more surprisingly the Ottomans of his own day, for their cosmopolitanism, their willingness to integrate citizens of different ethnic groups and backgrounds into a single state. Furthermore, George rails against the way Plato calls for a strict division of the classes, something we also know from the Republic. How will the citizens ever be united in bonds of friendship if one class is permanently and significantly disadvantaged? And why would the upper class ever look on their inferiors with anything but disdain? Not a bad question even today. But most extraordinary is George's point that Plato, or his philosopher-rulers, have no business prescribing to all citizens how they should spend their lives. Who is Plato to say that a humble laborer may not aspire to gain wealth and standing in his community? George's argument may reflect the greater social mobility of Renaissance Italy, but he sometimes sounds remarkably like the modern-day philosophy student who, having grown up in a Western liberal democracy, is confronted with a totalitarian paternalism of the Republic. Consider the following lines, for example, where George writes, The gauntlet had been thrown down, and Plato was in need of a champion. Stepping into the Platonic corner to fight this rematch of the Byzantine debate, we have Cardinal Bassarion. Against the accusation that Plato and his works were sexually depraved, Bassarion retorted that if this were true, the Greek Fathers of the Church would hardly have admired Plato as they did. The fault is rather with George, who is evidently unable to get his mind out of the gutter. He fails to realize that the erotic themes in the dialogues have nothing to do with physical lust, which Bassarion calls earthly love, but concern a more exalted divine love. So if you've ever wondered why the phrase Platonic relationship refers to chaste affection despite Plato's frequent discussion of sexual relationships in the dialogues, now you know. Just as George had devoted himself to studying and translating Plato before attacking him, so Bassarion was an accomplished Aristotelian by the time he came to defend Plato. He produced a Latin version of the metaphysics, perhaps the most difficult treatise in the Aristotelian corpus if not the entirety of ancient philosophy. And as an admirer of Latin scholasticism, he was one of those Byzantine scholars who avidly read texts by Western Aristotelians like Aquinas, right from the earliest stages of his career. In another direct link to the Byzantine controversy over Plato and Aristotle, Bassarion had been educated at Mystra under none other than Plasian, to whom he referred as his father and guide. Yet he distanced himself from Plasian's anti-Aristotelianism while also rejecting George's anti-Platonism. Bassarion wasn't really spoiling for a fight, but trying to make peace. His aim was to demonstrate the agreement between the two authors and their suitability for use by Christian thinkers. A good example is his handling of a point raised by Plithon in his attack on Aristotle. Plithon had complained about a passage in the physics where Aristotle said that whereas a craftsman may deliberate in using his art, the art itself does not do so. For example, a carpenter needs to make careful plans to build a ship, but if the art of carpentry were in the wood instead of in the carpenter's mind, the wood would just turn itself into a ship, the way that natural things like trees grow to maturity on their own. Against this, Plithon asserted that nature involves a guiding intelligence no less than carpentry does, because it is an expression of higher intellectual causes. Rather than rebutting this bit of obvious Platonism, Bassarion tries to make Aristotle agree with it. He reminds his reader that Aristotle did believe in God, a prime mover ultimately responsible for all change in the universe. So Aristotle too acknowledged that there is a divine intellect providentially guiding nature. Yet he was still right to say that nature does not deliberate, because the kind of intelligence involved in providence and its natural results is different from the kind of hesitant, uncertain deliberation we humans perform when we are, say, building a ship. Another man who sought to defend Aristotle by establishing his harmony with Plato was Theodore Gaza. He too was a Greek scholar who made his way to Italy after being called to Rome from Constantinople to work for the pope as a translator. Like George Trafazuntius and Bassarion, who became his patron and close associate, Theodore Gaza distinguished himself as a translator from Greek into Latin. He produced a widely used version of Aristotle's zoological writings, which would go on to be reproduced in early modern printings. Actually, he did more than just translate. Convinced that the Greek texts at his disposal were faulty, he re-edited and even reordered them before translating them, making some organizational changes that have still been followed in modern editions of Aristotle. Alongside this bold and influential philological work, Theodore wrote on philosophical questions, though not always very convincingly. The aforementioned expert on the field, John Monfosani, has called him learned and serious, but startlingly trivial. A good test case for this judgment is a brief work on the topic of fate. Like his ally, Bassarion, Theodore wants to avoid any sense that Aristotle and Plato were in serious disagreement. Again prompted by a supposed divergence of Aristotle from Plato, mentioned by Phelan, Theodore takes up the question of free human action. In a famous section of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the voluntary and the involuntary. He proposes that a voluntary action is one that is neither compelled nor done in ignorance. It is a sign of voluntariness that the person who performs the action does not later regret the action or its consequences. This theory makes it possible to do bad things voluntarily. Indeed, part of Aristotle's purpose is to explain when it makes sense to blame someone for their bad deeds. If they did it without compulsion and not in ignorance, and they don't regret it later, then they did it voluntarily and are thus blameworthy. But famously, Plato, or rather the character of Socrates in various Platonic dialogues, held that no one ever does bad things voluntarily. After all, isn't the fact that someone willingly does something evidence enough that they take it to be a good thing to do? By way of resolution, Theodore points out that Aristotle too says that all actions aim at some good outcome or other. So he would agree with Plato that when we act badly, we are ignorant in some sense, namely ignorant of what would really be good to do. Yet we are not ignorant in a more basic sense because we know the facts concerning what we are doing. If you get into a boxing match with your mother and break her nose, you've done something bad. But it makes a difference whether you did this because you are ignorant of the fact that it is wrong to break your own mother's nose or because you don't realize that this person you're hitting is your mother because she's wearing one of those padded helmets. Moral ignorance is no excuse, whereas ignorance of the facts might be. The clash between Bessarion and George Trapezuntius was the mother of all battles involving Greek emigre scholars in Italy, but it certainly wasn't the only one. Never mind dog-eat-dog, this was humanist-eat-humanist. In addition to the aforementioned fisticuffs between George and Poggio, there was also a spat between George and Guarino Veronese, that student of Chryso-Lores who travelled to Constantinople. Guarino was considered a fine Latin stylist by most, but not by George. In his work on rhetoric, he provocatively rewrote a speech by Guarino, showing how it could be improved by making it sound more like Cicero. As if this weren't bad enough, he added some insulting comments on Guarino's style. No one with any taste could bear to hear it. The two patched it up, at least in theory, at that same church council in Ferrara. With all the scandals erupting and being calmed down, it's amazing the participants had any time to get in the debates over the Trinity. And there were other quarrels, like a critique of George's commentatorial work on Cicero by Giorgio Merula, a student of yet another Greek scholar named George Agaropoulos. To be fair, a lot of these events seem to be traceable to George's character. An arrogant man who was well aware of his own talent, he provoked his colleagues so routinely that you have to think any ignorance involved was moral and not only concerning the facts of the case. But it was all too possible for humanists to savage one another without George's involvement. In another case, a mistake made by Bessarion was noticed by that same Agaropoulos, provoking Theodor Gazza to write a rather unconvincing treatise in Bessarion's defense. When they weren't going so far as to sharpen their swords, the humanists were sharpening their pens. The better to take jabs at one another in the status-conscious and competitive atmosphere of Renaissance Italy, when a scholar's present reputation was as precious as facility with the languages of the past. So I'm sure that Bessarion and George Trappismtius would be immensely pleased to find a podcast being devoted to them about 550 years after they died. But they might take umbrage upon learning that they are not the most famous 15th century humanists. That honor would instead go to several Italian scholars who were, you know, Italians. We'll meet them next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ 🎵 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode, Republic of Letters – Italian Humanism At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old fogey, I'd like to complain that no one writes letters anymore. When was the last time you got one? Not an email, I mean, but something on paper in a stamped envelope, preferably handwritten. A friend of mine, who's a historian of the American Civil War, once pointed out to me that experts on his chosen specialty have many 19th century letters to draw on in their research, whereas future historians of our present day may well curse the fact that our correspondence took the form of ephemeral data long deleted or trapped in no longer readable storage devices. Historians of philosophy, too, can learn a lot from letters. Beginning in antiquity, they were often written with a view to wider publication, not only for the private reading of one recipient. Thus, the letter or epistle has long been a popular form for writing philosophy used by Plato, Seneca, Peter Abelard and Heloise, El Kindi, and John Locke, to name only a few. Around the turn of the 15th century, the master of the letter was Coluccio Salutati. He studied epistolary techniques called in Latin, Arstictaminus, at the University of Bologna, where he obtained his degree in 1350 before becoming chancellor of the Republican city of Florence in 1375. As the Florentines contended with the Papacy and rival cities, such as Milan, Salutati's elegant letters were the most powerful weapon in a war of words. Famously, the Milanese duke Gian Galliazzo Visconti remarked that one letter of Salutati's was worth a troop of horses. Not that Salutati's audience would necessarily have been capable of understanding his high-flown Latin, but his rhetoric did honor to his city and lent dignity to any diplomatic occasion. Salutati's style was not only about being stylish. Alongside state business, he was in the business of carrying on the tradition of Italian humanism. I say carrying on rather than beginning that tradition because as Salutati himself would have been the first to point out, Italian humanism took inspiration from an earlier Florentine, Petrarch. As we saw in episode 298 of this podcast, in the middle of the 14th century, Petrarch already embodied the values and activities taken up by Salutati and his followers. Actually, modern day scholars have pointed to still earlier anticipations. The tradition of Italian dictatores, masters of rhetorical letter writing, stretched back as far as the 12th century, and one can name such figures as Albertino Mosato, a Padovan scholar who wrote plays inspired by Seneca and history based on Livy. But for Salutati, it was Petrarch who could be credited with initiating the humanist movement, which had its symbolic birth on Easter Sunday 1341, when Petrarch was crowned with laurels by a Roman senator. Salutati was not a student or close colleague of Petrarch, though he was in touch with him at one point, by letter of course. For him, Petrarch was, to use a word that will make any Roman senator nervous, one of a triumvirate of Florentine authors worthy of veneration, along with Dante and Boccaccio. Their exalted status is at the heart of a founding document of 15th century humanism, the Dialogue, written by one of Salutati's proteges, Leonardo Bruni. Bruni was one of several younger scholars who were inspired and promoted by Salutati. The group also included Poggio Barcellini, whom we met last time coming to blows with George Trapezuntius, as well as Niccolò Nicoli. Members of the group studied Latin with Giovanni Malpagini, who had been Petrarch's assistant, and Greek with the Byzantine scholar Manuel Kreislerus, also mentioned in the previous episode. It was Salutati who invited Kreislerus to Florence as a teacher. Bruni's dialogue is, among other things, a testament to the cockiness that young men may adopt once you give them this level of education. Salutati himself initiates the discussion as Bruni shows him exhorting the circle to engage in disputation and not only bookish research. This is met with a speech by Niccolò Nicoli, who complains that there is little prospect of refined debate given the parlous state of education in Italy at this time. Thanks to a lack of both books and refinement, the intellectual level of the time cannot measure up to what we see in the works of a man like Cicero. The situation is, as Niccolò puts it, nothing less than a shipwreck of learning. When it's put to him that he is being too pessimistic, given the achievements of the aforementioned heroes of literature in Florence, Niccolò responds with an irreverent speech attacking Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as failing to match the high standards set in antiquity. This is a surprising, if not shocking, line of argument. But in a second part of the work, Niccolò reveals that he was only trying to provoke Salutati to defend these three role models. When he does not rise to the bait, Niccolò agrees to give a second speech answering his own criticisms. What is going on here? Well, for starters, the dialogue is an ironic and playful work. How seriously should we take Niccolò's supposedly devastating complaint that in the Divine Comedy, Dante describes Cato as an old man when we all know he died before turning 50? No more or less seriously than the answer, which is that the white beard sported by Cato is just a symbol for virtue befitting an older sage. But the standing of Dante and the others is nonetheless serious business. Around the same time the dialogue was written, Salutati had a falling out with Poggio when the younger man brashly insulted Petrarch's knowledge of Latin. Needless to say, they exchanged letters over the matter. There was also a good deal of civic pride at stake. The excellence of these three authors was a triumph for Florence, and insulting them was accordingly an affront to the city. And this is only the beginning of the political import of Bruni's dialogue. Another of Niccolò's complaints is that Dante quite literally reserved a special place in hell for the murderers of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. Natural enough for Dante, whose political philosophy envisioned a single monarch ruling over the whole world, but it hardly seems an attitude we should endorse as good Florentine Republicans. This too was a point of contention in other humanist writings. Salutati himself wrote a work called On the Tyrant, in which he tried to explain why Dante had meted out this punishment to Caesar's killers. His argument was that Caesar actually ruled with a popular mandate, so Dante was right to condemn Brutus and Cassius. All of which brings us to one of the philosophical themes that modern scholars associate with humanism, republican government, rule of the people, and not a tyrant or a group of oligarchs. This would have been another reason to admire Cicero. Not only did he write fabulous Latin, but he was a martyr to the cause of the Roman Republic. These values are evident in an encomium to the city of Florence written by Leonardo Bruni, which begins by extolling the well-balanced structure of the city's government, preserving as it does both justice and liberty. Salutati's group was delighted when some historical research proved that Florence had not been founded by Caesar, as often supposed, but already existed in the time of the Republic. Having said that, humanist literary taste did not require republican political leanings. Humanism was practiced in cities that lacked republican institutions, like Venice. Even in Florence, the rhetoric of liberty masked the fact that power was exercised by a relatively small group of citizens. Scholars have pointed out that between the years 1282 and 1532, only about two dozen families held the reigns of the government. Then again, one might make similar observations about Rome in the generations leading up to Julius Caesar. The humanists were never better students of Cicero than when they followed his lead by squinting hard enough to make an oligarchy look like a genuine republic. It's also important to bear in mind that, whatever the political appeal of Cicero, the main attraction was indeed his fabulous Latin. Tellingly, Bruni compares the perfect constitution of Florence to a well-formed sentence, as if he can think of no higher praise. Perhaps you have friends who are language purists, always telling you off for using who when you should say whom and which when you should say that. I can practically guarantee, though, that these friends have nothing on Coluccio Salutati. This was a man who could get seriously upset about people using the second person plural pronoun, vos, as a polite form of address because the ancients consistently used the second person singular, tu. We don't have this grammatical feature in English unless you count y'all, but it's the same as the difference between vosotros and tu in Spanish or ir and tu in German. As this detail shows, Salutati believed in using Latin correctly, and he believed that the standard of correctness was set by ancient authors like Cicero. The humanists are famous for decrying the repugnant Latin and neologisms of the medieval, and this is certainly true. It's a point made by that opening speech of Nicolae in Bruni's dialogue and Salutati's unsparing in his scorn for the crass efforts of medievalists like Abelard. Even John of Salisbury, another 12th century philosopher whom many see as a forerunner of the humanists, gets low marks. But Salutati believed the rot had set in earlier with the inelegant writing style of late ancient authors like Marciana's Capella. It would be easy to accuse the humanists of snobbery here, of indulging in pedantry and self-satisfied display of an aristocratic education available only to the elite. But I for one am hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of pedantry, and for the humanists, the pursuit of rhetorical skill was not just about showing off. It led to higher aims. Salutati advised that eloquence should be paired with wisdom, and that a well-turned sentence could turn souls to virtue. He wrote, "...that the things you write produce something in your readers which not only charms them, but does them good." As for the snobbery, you might recall that Dante wrote a philosophical work in the vernacular to reach a wider audience, including women. This spirit was not entirely dead among the humanists. A couple of episodes ago, I mentioned in passing that Leonardo Bruni was in favor of teaching the classics to women. It's worth mentioning the context where he said that, namely a letter to an admittedly quite aristocratic woman, Lady Battista Malatesta of Montefeltro. After the usual lament about the poor state of learning, which is so far decayed that it is regarded as positively miraculous to meet a learned man, let alone a woman, he assigns her an ambitious curriculum of Greek and Latin classics. He concedes that women have no opportunity to use rhetoric in public speeches, but still believes that women should study eloquent literature for the sake of moral improvement. With all this fetishizing of antique literature, you could be forgiven for assuming that the humanists disdained the use of vernacular languages. But while they did exalt Latin and Greek above their mother tongue, they also preferred good Italian to bad Latin. How else could they have so admired the Florentine poets Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, all of whom wrote at least sometimes in the vernacular? Thus, Salutati remarked that, "...whatever is well spoken is eloquent," while his fellow humanist, Benedetto Accolti, said, "...to me it is not important whether one speaks in Latin or the mother tongue, provided that he speaks with gravity, ornament, and abundance." The humanists were well aware that Italian and other vernaculars were derived from Latin, and wondered about the way that these new languages had evolved. Lorenzo Valla, for example, noted that Spanish had introduced definite and indefinite articles, but dropped the declension of nouns. Still less clear was the relation of Latin to the vernacular of classical times. When Cicero delivered the speeches that left the humanists in such rapture, would the average Roman even have been able to understand him? Or would they have been like the nobles presented with speeches and letters of Salutati, pleased and flattered but secretly uncomprehending? The question became a point of dispute between Bruni and yet another humanist, Flavio Biondo. Biondo wrote to Bruni asking whether the ancients really spoke the language studied in the grammatical education that was, depending on your perspective, either inflicted on or enjoyed by the Italian youth. To put it bluntly, did Romans actually speak Latin? Bruni found the very notion preposterous. How could proper Latin, with all its grammatical complexity, have been spoken by every man on the street? In fact, never mind the men. Immediately losing the feminist credentials he won for that encouraging letter he sent to Lady Battista, Bruni asks whether we can really imagine that nursemaids and little women could have mastered the language of Cicero. Here, Bruni is arguably projecting the situation of his own day back onto antiquity, unable to conceive that this language of refinement in literature, now used only in rather artificial contexts, had ever been anyone's mother tongue. He also shows himself prey to a common misunderstanding, namely that some languages are more inherently complex than others, to the point that they are not even serviceable for everyday use. After all, every language has its own difficulties, things that will trip up those of us who try to learn them as adults, yet every language can effortlessly be mastered by children if given even half a chance. Some years later, Poggio Bracciolini made this very point, adding that plenty of adults still managed to learn Latin for use at the papal court. So, at the risk of being somewhat tendentious, and I may as well since I've already admitted to being both crotchety and pedantic, it seems that for Poggio, Roman children and peasants had better Latin than Petrarch did. Salutati and Bruni evidently disagreed about the case of Petrarch, but as we've seen, the humanists were united in their low opinion of most other medieval authors, especially the scholastics. Bruni summed up the attitude after quoting some lines of Virgil's Aeneid, "...when we read these lines, what philosopher do we not despise?" Yet, none other than Salutati tempered the critique of medieval scholasticism by reminding his audience, and perhaps himself, that the schoolmen were, after all, Christians. In this respect, they must be reckoned superior to even the most eloquent pagan author. Indeed, Salutati argued that even the most poorly educated person in his own time was better than Cicero, Plato, or Aristotle. The goal was therefore to make the best use of pagan literature while staying within a Christian moral and theological framework. For guidance, the humanists could look to a treatise by the Greek church father Basil of Caesarea, which gave advice to young readers of classical non-Christian texts. It's no coincidence that Bruni translated this work soon after learning Greek from Caesalorus. What Bruni and the other humanists really couldn't abide, though, was incompetent medieval scholarship devoted to these same classical texts. Hence their ambitious undertaking to produce new, more acceptable translations of works that had already been available in Latin for some time. More acceptable, of course, meant more Ciceronian. Bruni translated the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle, his choice of text again showing the moral emphasis of the humanist endeavor, seeking to replace the version executed by Robert Grossetest in the 13th century. But at least one critic felt that the gain in elegance was matched by a loss in precision. Alonso of Burgos, a Jewish convert to Christianity, argued that Grossetest had often captured Aristotle's point better than Bruni had. For instance, the Greek word for pleasure, hedonē, was rendered into Latin as delectatio in the older medieval version but by Bruni as voluptas. Alonso felt that Grossetest's version was preferable since it sounds more general and could apply to intellectual as well as bodily pleasure. We've already seen enough of the humanists to predict what happened next. Bruni penned a furious reply pointing out that Alonso was in no position to assess his translation since he didn't even know Greek. And of course, he reiterated that any acceptable Latin version must adhere to proper classical usage. Again, proper usage was defined above all by Cicero. For all the variety of opinion and different emphases we've found in this tour of the early Italian humanists, you can hold on to that one point, they really, really liked Cicero. In fact, if we go back to Bruni's dialogue, we can observe that it is closely based on Cicero's own philosophical dialogues. The very structure chosen by Bruni, a speech followed by a counter speech, is very Ciceroian and evokes the ancient rhetorical skill of speaking on both sides of an issue. One particularly witty display of this ability was already put on in the year 1386 when Sino-Rinocini produced orations in praise of and then attacking rhetoric itself. There's a danger lurking here that should have been evident from reading Cicero and would have become even more obvious as Plato's dialogues came back into circulation with their searching critique of the sophists. If you can argue persuasively on both sides of any issue, then won't the result be skepticism? That would have been just fine with Cicero, who declared his allegiance to the academic skeptical school. But would it have been fine with the humanists? One could hold out the hope that, as Poggio puts it, by discussing an issue from both sides, truth usually emerges. But Sadutati sounds more faithful to Cicero when he writes, Every truth grasped by reason can be made doubtful by a contrary reason. It won't be the last time we see ideas from Hellenistic philosophy making a disconcerting reappearance in the Italian Renaissance. Speaking of disconcerting, the time has come for me to make my annual, unwelcome announcement that the podcast is going on summer break. No new episodes will be released in August, but we'll be back on September 8th with a look at one of the greatest humanists, one who, or rather whom, I have mentioned only briefly thus far. He was the match of any of his colleagues when it came to defending the use of Ciceroan Latin, combining superb philological work with moral exhortation, and of course sneering at the medievals. So join me after the break to So join me after the break to meet a man of letters extraordinaire, Lorenzo Valla, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ 🎵 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Literary Criticism, Lorenzo Vala. As I've observed before, Medieval Scholastic Philosophy and today's Analytic Philosophy have much in common. The proliferation of distinctions, the delight in logic and linguistic analysis, the technical vocabulary that shuts out the uninitiated, and something else, namely the criticisms these features tend to provoke. Already in the 13th and 14th century, you can find sentiments that are routinely echoed by contemporary observers frustrated by the professional Analytic Philosophy scene. All this logic-chopping and distinction-mongering is mere obfuscation. Philosophers should keep it simple, and speak in a way that everyone can understand. Now, I'm no fan of needless technicality, but I tend to think that these critics are impatient with scholastic and analytic philosophy because they are, indeed, impatient. Any philosophical problem worth thinking about will lead you into complex and difficult territory once you do start to think about it. Fans of the simple answers often just haven't reflected hard enough about what these answers might imply, and what might be said in favor of rival answers. We need to decide whether this applies to the Italian humanists. When they denounced the methods used by the medieval schoolmen and by the scholastics still active in their own day, was that a well-informed and philosophically serious rejection, or were they the renaissance equivalent of people who haven't studied philosophy going on social media to complain that professional philosophy is a waste of time? To answer this question, we can do no better than to turn to the works of Lorenzo Valla. In addition to being one of the most prolific and brilliant of the Italian humanists, he was also especially vocal in his disparagement of scholasticism and Aristotelian philosophy more generally. Above all, he had the intellectual integrity and, it must be said, boundless self-confidence necessary to fight the schoolmen on their own ground, clashing with them on topics like dialectic, the soul, and the metaphysics of free will, alongside his contributions to more typically humanist subjects such as ethics and philology. He even wrote an encomium of that leading scholastic Thomas Aquinas, a document that shows it's entirely possible to damn someone with extravagant, instead of faint, praise. But it's with the philology that we should begin, since it is for his achievements in this area that Valla is best known. He already made a splash in 1428 at the tender age of 21 when he circulated a now lost work to other humanists in Rome including Poggio Bracciolini and Antonio Loci. Here he argued for the merits of the ancient rhetorician Quintilian over the much-admired Cicero. Struck more by Valla's uppity ambition than his precocious learning, Poggio and Loci advised against taking him on at the papal court. Valla was a man who knew how to hold a grudge, so this led to a long-standing mutual hostility. Of Valla's widely used textbook On the Elegance of the Latin Language, Poggio remarked that it should instead have been called On the Ignorance of the Latin Language. In fact though, it was only one of numerous works displaying Valla's profound knowledge of Greek and Latin. Other examples include his rather provocative set of notes to the New Testament, also attacked by Poggio, translations of Thucydides and Herodotus, and most famously his attack on the donation of Constantine, in which Valla gave the world its most entertaining and readable discussion of textual authentication. As Valla would be delighted to know, the donation is now universally thought to be a forgery. Probably dating from the 8th century, it pretends to be a letter from the Emperor Constantine to Pope Sylvester giving the papacy rule over Rome and the Western Empire, because you know Roman emperors are famous for voluntarily giving up control over huge swaths of their own territory. Valla of course points out the implausibility of this, but by no means does he stop there. Indeed, he pulls out all the stops, deploying every weapon in his formidable arsenal of rhetoric and philology. He imagines the speeches that would have been given in protest at such an imperial gift. The protests that Constantine's own children would have made, the complaints that would have been made by the people of Rome, whose freedom was being curtailed, and most tellingly, what Pope Sylvester would or at least should have said to such an offer. Namely that his power is purely spiritual, and that the mission of the Church would be undermined by such temporal power. The papacy ought to be in the business of evangelium, not imperium, spreading God's word, not extending its political authority. Next, and perhaps most persuasively, Valla points out many details of the text that prove it could not have been written back in the 4th century. It includes words Constantine would not have used, like satrap, displays lamentable historical ignorance, and uses Latin like a barbarian. In sum, says Valla in what may be the worst insult he can imagine, the forger who produced the donation had no talent and no literary taste. This approach is liable to strike us as remarkably modern. Instead of focusing on the question of whether the donation is authoritative in institutional terms, as his contemporaries might have done, Valla concentrates on such issues as historical, psychological, and above all, linguistic plausibility. In other words, he brings forward the sort of evidence that a textual historian of today might use to verify or deny the authenticity of a text. Valla himself said that he had written nothing more rhetorical. Aptly so, given that his penchant for sarcastic and vective, high-flown Latin speechifying, and refined stylistic judgment are here on full display. He would also have seen the work as rhetorical because it showed him speaking truth to power. Right at the start, Valla says that the true orator has a responsibility to stand up for his opinions. Being able to speak well means being willing to speak out. In the present case, he may have had ulterior motives for doing so. Valla was attached to the court of Alfonso of Aragon who had a tense relationship with the sitting pope Eugenius IV. But whatever the occasion or political context, Valla was consistent in stating his views with all candor. He suffered for his frankness and for his habit of making enemies. He was put on trial for heresy in 1444, an event that seems to have ended the most prolific period of his writing career, though he would later receive positions at the papal court. Another show of irreverence came when Valla was asked to deliver one of the speeches at a celebration of Thomas Aquinas, the most ill-conceived invitation since the Romans said to the Goths, sure, come on in. Despite his notorious disdain for scholastic philosophy, Valla is actually generous in his praise of Thomas. He even finds a few nice words to say about Aquinas' writing, which as I've pointed out before, is nice and clear but hardly conforms to Valla's standards of good Latin. However, as Valla puts it in the biggest understatement since the Goths told the Romans they might be staying for a while, it is not my way to remain silent. Many of the inquiries pursued by scholastic theologians are pointless he says, what they call metaphysics and also the theory of the modes of signification. Valla makes clear his preference for the ancient church fathers and his distaste for the new-fangled, spurious Latin terminology devised by the schoolmen, which is of course scattered throughout Aquinas' works. In the preface to a short dialogue he devoted to the problem of free will, Valla is still less diplomatic. The topic at hand may be a philosophical one, but he makes no bones about his opposition to what passes for philosophy in his culture. Indeed, it shows a poor opinion of our religion to think it needs the protection of philosophy. If anything, philosophy has more often been a source of dissension and heresy. This preface gets across a point that is in danger of being overlooked when we think of Valla just as a defender of good Latin and champion of classical rhetoric over scholastic philosophy. He saw his project as a deeply Christian one, a defense of the faith against those who, like the pope wielding secular authority, stray from the simpler path of spiritual truth. Even if some of his works were well received, it clearly galled him that contemporary humanists and churchmen failed to appreciate his efforts properly. As Christopher Salenza has quipped, But the aspects of Valla's writing that annoyed his colleagues are precisely those that may appeal to us. Coming from the medievals with their relentless and complex Aristotelianism, it can be downright refreshing to see Valla call Aristotle stupid and see him make fun of Boethius, or refer to the legal scholars of Bologna and theologians of Paris as the Goths and the Gauls. Valla makes up his own mind, and as he admits in the context of writing about ethics, finds himself disagreeing with everybody. Alongside the entertaining invective and admirable independence of mind, Valla will appeal to those who think philosophy should stick to common sense, which for him is embodied above all in language use. Usually he means the usage of classical Latin, as established by the best ancient authors, but he's capable of saying for example that listening to housewives might give us more insight into an issue than listening to philosophers because housewives use language in practical contexts whereas the philosophers simply play around with words. Or as he puts it elsewhere, Quibbling about everything, philosophers are the first to distort the very nature of words. Valla makes both remarks in his most philosophically rewarding work, which I'll just call the Dialectical Disputations. He produced several revised versions of it, changing the Latin title as he went. This ambitious treatise is Valla's attempt to beat the Scholastics on their own turf. In particular, he contests their views on logical matters, but we know enough about medieval logic to realize that this will probably lead him into disputes about metaphysics and perhaps even natural philosophy. And so it proves, as the disputations become a wide-ranging attempt to dynamite the foundations of Aristotelian philosophy. For an alternative basis, Valla turns to Quintilian, whom he quotes at length and uses as a chief source for his own approach to logic and philosophy as a whole. One eye-catching feature of this approach is Valla's reduction of the categories. As you'll remember, Aristotle and his followers classified all predicated terms into ten types – substance, quality, quantity, relation, time, place, and so on. Valla thinks he can make do with only three – substance, quality, and action. This reflects his method of looking to linguistic usage for a guide. To oversimplify a bit, his three categories correspond to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Of course, Valla is not the first to wonder whether ten categories is too many. Already in antiquity, there were attempts to reduce the list, and just a century before him, the nominalist William of Ockham had taken his famous razor to Aristotle's scheme, yielding a nice short list of two categories – substance and quality. But Valla is not a follower of Ockham. He has no stake in a nominalist or anti-realist revision of categorical theory, and instead assumes that language is a guide to what is in fact out there in the world. Another more obviously metaphysical question tackled by Valla concerns the so-called transcendentals recognized in medieval scholasticism. These were features that cut across the division between categories. They included being, goodness, truth, unity. All predicates, it was claimed, manifest these transcendental properties for the good reason that every way that anything might be derives ultimately from God – as pure being, goodness, truth, and unity, God bestows these features on everything he makes. But Valla thinks he can make do with less. There is only one transcendental, namely thing, in Latin res. And to speak of goodness, unity, and so on, is really only to talk about things. Again, he takes his cue from language, observing that the medieval's allowed themselves to indulge in typical barbarisms in setting out their theory, like speaking of each thing as an ends or that which is, or as an entity, an entitas. If a normal speaker of Latin really wanted to express this idea, he would instead just say res quaest, thing that is. This example, incidentally, shows that Valla is nothing if not consistent in his carping about scholastic verbiage. He also complains about the word ends, along with such artificial terms as entitas and quititas, in the supposed encomium of Thomas Aquinas. And he can hardly believe the contortions that the Aristotelians get into when trying to explain how beings are at first potential and then cause to emerge into actuality. He writes, will we say that this wood is a box in act? Has anyone ever talked that way? Who wouldn't laugh at anyone talking that way? And this is only the beginning of Valla's list of complaints. He doesn't buy the Aristotelian idea that virtue is a habit or a subtle disposition of character, because someone can on a single occasion display spectacular virtue or for that matter vice. You can permanently become an adulterer or murderer thanks to a single evil act. It's a bit like losing your virginity and need not have nothing to do with permanent habits. Or what about the soul? Aristotle tries to convince us that the human soul is compounded of a rational part and two irrational parts which respectively possess the capacities we share with animals and plants. But this undermines the unity of our soul, underestimates the non-human animals, and overestimates plants. Plants, for Valla, have no souls at all, since all they do is grow. After all, our hair grows. Well, mine doesn't, but maybe yours does, and no one thinks that their hair has his own soul. Animals, by contrast, have souls just like ours because as Valla's beloved Quintilian observed, they have thought and understanding to a certain extent. They even have the power of will, as we can see by considering such cases as the horse that decides which path it should take. Valla takes the opportunity here to show off his Greek skills. He observes that when the ancients called animals aloga, meaning things with no logos, they did not mean that animals have no reason or cannot think, but only that they cannot speak, because logos means both reason and speech. Usually though, it's his Latin that Valla wants to show off and exploit in his Demolition of Scholastic Theories. He has good fun with the artificial regimentation of Latin employed by the schoolmen, as with their arbitrary and ignorant rules about how to negate propositions or their strange idea that not just might mean something other than unjust. When it comes to these so-called modal notions that modify propositions by making them possible, necessary, or impossible, he thinks the scholastics were in a sense being profligate because you can actually get by just with possible and impossible, and in a sense, too restrictive, since there are many other such modifiers possible in good Latin, like easy, usual, or certain. He ventures into the most technical parts of their logic, wielding not so much Occam's razor as a machete of mockery. Why should they insist on arranging syllogistic arguments in certain arbitrary ways? This is just a matter of convention, like the way that Italians use a knife to slice away from themselves and the Spanish towards themselves. And some of their inferences seem to him plainly invalid. Their acceptance of the third syllogistic figure moves him to call them a nation of lunatics. This is, again, all good fun, but is it philosophically convincing? To be honest, the answer is often no. Sticking for a moment with logic, he at one point scoffs at the use of variable letters to clarify logical form, for instance saying all A is B, all B is C, therefore all A is C, as mere obfuscation. Simple though it is, this device is, in fact, one of Aristotle's most brilliant and useful contributions to logic. Indeed, it has some claim to be the single most important breakthrough in the entire history of the discipline since it allows us to isolate and consider logical form in itself rather than giving possibly distracting concrete examples of argumentation. Yet, Valla compares it to showing a prospective bride to a suitor in the dark in hopes he won't notice how ugly she is. In other cases, he falls into the trap I mentioned earlier of criticizing without thinking hard enough about what he is criticizing. His discussion of time and place offers supposed insights that Aristotelian philosophers had thought of and dealt with many times over. In still other cases, he simply reproduces scholastic solutions to philosophical problems without giving them credit for it. That short dialogue on free will I mentioned, for instance, simply restates the common 14th century position that God can foreknow an event without causing that event to happen or rendering it impossible that it not happen. As far as I can see, the only halfway original point brought forward by Valla is that someone who had foreknowledge could cause additional problems by explicitly predicting what will happen to the person involved. It's fine for God to know I will eat eggs for breakfast tomorrow, but if he tells me I shall do so, then I would paradoxically be in a position to render his foreknowledge false, just out of spite. And parenthetically, let me mention that here Valla has put his finger on the fatal problem with the plot of the movie Minority Report. Perhaps the greatest irony is that for all his anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, Valla is in many ways close to Aristotle in approach and philosophical temperament. Consider again the dispute over the categories. Aristotle too thought we should divide up the categories by considering language use. Had Valla been generous, he might have admitted that he was following Aristotle's strategy but updating the account in the light of better grammatical theory. One specialist on Renaissance rhetorical theories, Peter Mack, has written that Valla was too disrespectful to Aristotle to succeed as an Aristotelian and too dependent on him to succeed in presenting a wholly different solution. I think that gets him about right, though we should add that Valla was not only a critic. His impertinence towards Aristotle is matched by his deep respect for Latin classical authors, especially Quintilian, whose works are quite literally unimprovable in his eyes. Valla should thus be credited with conceiving an ambitious positive project as well as a negative critical one. With the resources of authoritative texts other than Aristotle, he wanted to build something new, something we might call a properly humanist logic and metaphysics. Soon enough, we'll be moving on to other aspects of humanism, in particular the contribution that Valla and others made to ethics. But next time, we'll be having our first interview of this series on the Italian Renaissance. We could hardly hope for a more appropriate guest, because we'll be joined by one of the foremost authorities on humanist philosophy, a bit like Aristotle or Quintilian depending on your taste. So join me for a bit of dialogue which hopefully won't be too disputatious with Jill Cray, right here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilocity.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Renaissance humanism with Jill Cray, who is emeritus professor of the history of Renaissance philosophy at the Warburg Institute in London. Hi, Jill. Hi, Peter. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Good to be back. We're going to be talking about humanism, which is a term that actually wasn't used in the Renaissance, even though they did use similar phrases like studia humanitatis. I wanted to ask you, what have modern scholars meant by the word humanism? Are there any caveats we should be aware of? I mean, dangers, pitfalls in applying this word to the Renaissance? Thanks. Well, it is true that it's a modern coinage. It first appears with the meaning of study of classical antiquity in the early 19th century in Germany, and then it quite rapidly spreads to England and other places. Matthew Arnold refers to knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity as humanism. And there was a very important book by Georg Voigt that came out in the mid 19th century called The Revival of Classical Antiquity or the First Century of Humanism. It was in German, so it was humanismus. But that really made that a kind of the formal term that everybody used. I don't think this is such a problem that it's a modern coinage because we use lots of modern coinages in philosophy. The pre-Socratics did not think of themselves as pre-Socratics. Plotinus didn't think of himself as a Neoplatonist. These are terms that were coined like humanism in the 19th century, but they stood the test of time. They proved useful. They seem to refer to an entity and a reality that fits the evidence. And therefore, I think it's fine to use it to describe people. The question of what they describe and the definition is more problematic. And apart from studia humanitatis that you mentioned, which is a term that the humanists got mainly from Cicero, it comes in a very important bit in his speech Proarchia, which Petrarch himself, the father of humanism, discovered and kind of publicized. They didn't call themselves humanists, but they did call themselves people who were devoted to the studia humanitatis. And I think that's close enough. And also, there was a kind of in Italy, a university slang where whatever you taught, they put ista at the end. So if you taught law, you were a legista. And if you taught the arts, which is philosophy and medicine, you are an artista. If you taught canon law, you were a canonista. If you taught the abacus, you were an abacusa. And humanista was a term that came in the late 15th century for a person who taught the studia humanitatis. So there is some justification. Now the question of what is the definition is very, very fraught. And there are a large number of definitions and people don't agree with each other. But in the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American world, the most common and really the standard definition is one that was coined by Paul Oscar Christeller, who was probably the greatest scholar of humanism in the 20th century, a German emigre who taught in America in the last half of his life. And he described humanists as professional rhetoricians and said that their remit was grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. And I think what he meant by this was, these are the topics that were taught in universities, for the most part by humanists. And I think this is not a bad definition. It's broadly true. The real question and the thing that I have argued against myself is moral philosophy. I was just going to say that seems like a rather arbitrary... It is. It is. He wrote several articles where he put that formula, where he expanded that formula, which has been repeated endlessly by scholars. The first article in which he wrote it has been called the single most important piece on humanism in the 20th century. So it's really influential. He put it in because he didn't want... He was arguing against Italian scholars who regarded humanism as the new philosophy of the Renaissance, as opposed to scholasticism, which was the old philosophy of the Middle Ages. And he wanted to say, no, this is not the equivalence. They're doing something completely different. The problem was that some humanists did teach philosophy, but he wanted to kind of quarantine it by saying, but it was only moral philosophy that they taught. There is a small amount of evidence, particularly from the first part of the 15th century, that largely that was the area. But very soon it ceased to be the case. And there's a very famous example in the 1490s, the greatest humanist, the most learned humanist of the 15th century, Angelo Poliziano. Poliziano, he's known to English classicists, was teaching the normal stuff. He was teaching poetry and history, but then he decided he wanted to teach philosophy. He was a friend of Pico della Mirandola. And that seems to have been who was Giovanni Pico was a philosopher and kind of pushed him in that direction. And he began by teaching the Nicomachean ethics. Okay, fine, moral philosophy. But then he switched and decided to give a course on the organon. And the first one that he gave was on the prior analytics. So this is logic. This is logic and very technical logic. And there was no sense in his, when he defended himself because of the philosophers at the University of Florence, where he was teaching, criticize him both as a teacher of ethics, by the way, and logic was that I'm not a philosopher. I'm not pretending to be a philosopher. I am what he called the grammaticus, that is an interpreter, a philologist, an interpreter of texts. And as an expert on antiquity, I can interpret any ancient text, whether it's medicine, which he wrote on, whether it's Roman law, whether it's philosophy. So he wasn't pretending to be a philosopher, but he was saying, all of philosophy is part of my remit, it's fair game. And really, I think, from the late 15th century onwards, although many, many, many, many humanists did teach moral philosophy, they also engaged quite a bit with all the whole range of moral, of philosophy, the entire canon. You have Theodore Gaza, who was another late 15th century humanist. He was a Byzantine scholar, an emigre after the fall of Constantinople. And he taught natural philosophy. He did a very famous translation of the history of animals by Aristotle. When Aldus did the Aldine Aristotle, Aldus Minutius, the great printer scholar of the late 15th century, early 16th century, he did the Aldine Aristotle, the first Greek Aristotle. It was mainly structured around natural philosophy. And the very first person to teach Aristotle in Greek was a humanist named Niccolò Leonico Tomeo. And he was a specialist in natural philosophy, parve naturalis. So really, the idea that moral philosophy is somehow inherent in humanism is, if it is true, maybe a little bit in the early 15th century, but after that, it really isn't. And Chris Steller, who coined this particular definition, knew that and was very aware of it. But the problem is, once you give a nice, neat definition, and people can remember it, and they just reel it off, then people start to assume that it has a reality that it doesn't. And I think that's the caveat I would say is that one needs to be careful. My definition of humanists would be that they're experts on antiquity with transferable skills, that is skills that can be used for any discipline or any text that they want to use, which they can use in their effort to recover antiquity. That's really what humanists are about. They want to rediscover the text, also material artifacts and buildings and everything about antiquity. They want to recover it, they want to restore it, that is restore text, but also restore statues, restore inscriptions. They want to reconstruct it, reconstruct Stoicism or other philosophical systems, and they want to revive it. They want to bring it into action. One of the things you mentioned along the way there is this contrast between humanism and scholasticism. And I suppose that a lot of people, when they think about humanism, they'll think of it primarily as a contrast to scholasticism. And again, I'm wondering whether we should be careful with that idea, because although we do think of the humanists as being very critical of the scholastics, often for their terrible Latin, for example, it also seems like there are points of contact, maybe shared interests between the scholastics and the humanists. So can you say something about that contrast? Any black and white contrast one should always be suspicious about. And it is true that the humanists, one of their favorite sports is attacking the scholastics for their barbarous Latin, for their uncultivated presentation of material, for the fact that when you read a scholastic commentary, it's very repetitive, it's very boring, it's very structured. Humanists, because they're interested in reviving the style of philosophy of antiquity, are more interested in dialogues, and they tend to think of Cicero as a great philosopher and his philosophical dialogues. They want it to be readable, they want it to be interesting, they want people to encourage people to engage with the ideas. I mean, Petrarch very famously said, I went to university and I heard lectures, and these would be scholastic lectures in the 14th century on Aristotle's ethics. And it told me everything about virtue, how to define it, how to classify it, but not how to be virtuous. And if you want to learn how to be virtuous, you have to read Cicero and Seneca, these inspiring. So there is a real difference of style. Now it is true that there's also quite an overlap. Both of them, both humanists and scholastics, especially in the 15th century, were interested in Aristotle, and they both taught Aristotle and they worked on the same text. And sometimes you find people, there's a philosopher, a mid 15th century philosopher who was a scholastic, but who was friends with humanists and he put in a lot of classical references and tried to write in a more engaging style. You have people like Pico della Mirandola, whom I mentioned a bit before, and he gets involved in a dispute, a kind of friendly dispute. It's full of, it's again, very difficult to interpret because it's very playful and ironic, but he has a friend called Ermolo Barbaro, who is a Venetian humanist. And Ermolo Barbaro, who was very interested, he taught Aristotle in Padua, he translated Themistius, the Greek commentator on Aristotle into Latin. He had a plan to translate all of Aristotle into humanist Latin. He wrote to Pico saying, why are you wasting your time on these scholastic philosophers? Nobody's interested in them. Okay, I admit they're smart and they're vigorous, but what gives you a reputation and why you are remembered to posterity is a good cultivated style. And Pico says, well, of course, I agree with you and you make me feel bad that I've wasted the best years of my life studying these scholastics. I know how he feels. Yeah, but he was 22. And he said, but let me just try and make the case. And then he creates this character who is a slightly more cultivated scholastic who defends the scholastic mode. And the paradox of the letter and why it's so difficult to interpret is the scholastic is actually writes exactly like a humanist. He uses rhetorical devices. He brings in classical texts. The whole idea of creating a character, prosopopeia, is an ancient rhetorical device. And he says, well, the thing about rhetoric and humanism is it's all about persuasion and they can persuade you that black is white and white is black. That's what it is. It convinces people that whatever you want is the truth. Scholastics, they may not be able to write very well, but they're interested in investigating the truth. They want to find out what's true. And he makes a very interesting comparison between Lucretius, the Epicurean poet, and Duns Scotus. And he says, well, Epicurus Lucretius wrote beautiful Latin poetry. It's very elegant, but it was full of these horrible things. The world is composed of atoms. There's the soul dies with the body. There is no provenance. Whereas Duns Scotus wrote very uncultivated, very barbaric Latin, but he told the truth. He said that there was divine providence, that the world was composed of matter and form. Which do you want to choose? And this correspondence goes back and forth. So there is a stylistic difference, but there is somebody like Picot who understands what the scholastics are doing. And a lot of his work does have a kind of scholastic basis, but on the other hand is a great chum of Poliziano and uses his humanist elegance and his humanist knowledge to defend scholasticism. So the other thing I would say in the 16th century, humanist education, which develops in the 15th century, but really takes off in the 16th century, starts to really become very pervasive and everybody starts to write better Latin. The humanists, that's another one of their success stories. So when you read the scholastics in the 16th century, although they still use questions and doubts and things like that, a scholastic format, they write much better Latin. They write more elegantly. A lot of them know Greek. They've learned Greek, which is another great humanist invention. They are aware of a much wider range of classical texts. So by the 16th century, I would say that the scholastics become humanized and there is not so much difference between humanism and scholasticism, even though the humanists remain more interested in philological and historical and interpretive approach, say to Aristotle, whereas the scholastics take a more formal and philosophical interest. One classic example is the Jesuits who are formed in the middle of the 16th century. And they take up in their educational program, the entire humanist education, but in their philosophical ideas, they're Aristotelians and in their theological ideas, they follow Thomas Aquinas. So you get a humanist base on which you build a kind of scholastic and Thomistic Aristotle and the Coimbra commentators, which are a group of commentaries that were done in the late 16th, early 17th century in Coimbra and Portugal by Jesuits. And they're a real classic example of how these two traditions have blended together. They often have the Greek text, they have a good, accurate Latin translation, they have philological notes, but they also ask all the scholastic questions. So the two come together. One thing that puzzles me about this is where the humanists came from, actually, in the sense that if you think about what was happening still in the 14th century, it seemed like the way you would be educated into the ability to work on philosophical topics, and also even Latin, would be at the universities. But we think of humanism as something that happens outside the universities, and I'm wondering, therefore, what the intellectual formation was for the humanists or what the institutional frameworks were within which they could be educated to become so proficient in Latin and even in Greek? Humanists did teach in universities, so it's not an entirely extra university discipline. They got a lot less money than philosophers and medical people. They were always kind of at the bottom and usually taught introductory courses, but most humanist education took place in schools. And it's also a slight exaggeration to say that in the 14th century, people were not reading classical texts. They were reading classical texts in some ways, the same classical texts as in the 15th century, but they were reading them in a different way. People were reading Cicero, they were reading Virgil, they were reading Seneca, they were reading Perseus' Juvenal, but they were reading them simply to understand, to parse and to learn Latin grammar as a method of learning Latin grammar. What the humanists do, they take the same text, but they start treating them as a way to learn how to write and how to speak Latin. And therefore, if you studied Cicero in the 14th century, you weren't expected to write like Cicero. In the 15th century, you were expected to write like Cicero. People wrote poetry, they were expected to be able to imitate Horace, to imitate Virgil. So there's a difference in approach there. But the main emphasis in medieval, late medieval schools and in Latin schools was on grammar. And that was learned by rote grammar. You memorize things as you're supposed to do nowadays, but in fact, people do. When you say school, do you mean like attached to a cathedral or a church? What kind of institutions do we have in mind here? Well, in humanist schools tended to be not attached to cathedrals. They tended to be secular and they tended to have a secular clientele. And the most famous humanist schools, Guarino of Verona, which was in Venice, and Vittorino da Feltre, who was in Mantua, really had a rather aristocratic clientele. Vittorino school was set up basically to educate the Gonzaga children who were the ruling family in Mantua. They also educated Federico da Montefeltra, the great, it was later a conductarian, formed a famous library. So they tended to be secular and they tended to be directed towards people who would enter, would become humanist secretaries, or they would go to university or they would become humanist teachers. It wasn't particular. I mean, you could go to a humanist school and become a priest, but that wasn't necessarily the career path. And so I suppose that is a difference with the medieval tradition where they were more associated with that. Most of the famous humanist schools were all secular and they were educating people towards a career in the humanities, whether in universities or in bureaucracies or as secretaries or in the court. Okay, let me ask you something else about the kind of practical arrangements surrounding humanism, which is something else we really associate with the humanists. And this is their books because they have, I mean, maybe this isn't a widely known fact among the general population, but there's a humanist script. So it's actually literally a different way that they write in manuscripts. And then we also have an association between humanism and the rise of early modern printing eventually. And I guess a natural question therefore is to what extent humanism was actually driven by changes in things like book production, or whether it's more the other way around that the humanists had their own scholarly values, which were then reflected in the way that they produced their books. I would probably say the latter. I think when I tried to define humanism as an attempt to recover and restore classical antiquity, they genuinely believed that the humanist script was the way that people in antiquity had written. Now, they knew that the manuscripts they had and the ones that they modeled themselves on, which they didn't like scholastic Gothic manuscripts, which were very crabbed and the letters were difficult to read and they were full of abbreviations and really rather ugly. But they did know Carolingian manuscripts, which was the first great age of the revival of antiquity. And they saw these, they're very beautiful. The letters are very clear, they're very upright, they're spaced out. And so they use that as one of their models. They also used inscriptions, which they knew came from antiquity for their capital letters. So the drive to recover everything to do with antiquity was part of the motivation to reform the script. They also reformed the orthography, the spelling, which they thought wanted to go back to a more authentic spelling. Petrarch, who's a humanist, but in the age still kind of with one foot in the Middle Ages, we have letters where he says, I can't read these manuscripts. You know, they're like woven together and I can't tell the letters apart and there's two spaced together. And about 1400, that is the next generation, you get people like Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccolò who decide to reform the script. And they make this humanist upright. It's very clear. The letters are distinguished. They don't have abbreviation or they avoid abbreviations wherever possible. They have a different layout. Human scholastic manuscripts are often double column because paper was very expensive and you had to get as much on as possible. They're long spaced outlines. They're often decorated. They're very legible. They're very readable. And they also developed, and that's the humanist book hand, the formal one if you're doing a formal manuscript that you're going to give to one of your patrons. But they also had a cursive. It comes from the Latin for running. So something that they wrote very rapidly, slightly more sloping. And that's the ancestor of the italic print. And what happens is that when printing comes to Italy in the 1460s, so not very far after when Gutenberg invented it, a lot of the people who are involved in the editorial process are humanists, particularly humanists in the Curia, the papal Curia, the court of the pope in Rome. And they get involved with the early printers and they do a lot of the additions because the printers, they're printers. They have technical capabilities, but they need somebody to actually provide a text. Now, in a way, this is very good because what it does is it makes popular text widely available, accessible, readable, cheap. But of course, there's a downside, which is especially in that first period, the first 50 or even 100 years of print, the person who edited it, edited a text, a classical text, even if he were a humanist, probably used the first manuscript that came to hand. Didn't necessarily collate it very widely. And then a lot of them actually made it worse by kind of very careless amending just, oh, yeah, that looks like this. I'll change that. So they actually took a bad text and made it worse. And there's a famous story of a curial humanist who said that he thought printing was, and this was in the 1470s, a great boon until he had seen this edition done a few years earlier by another humanist and realized that what he'd done is taken a very corrupt text and made it hugely available. And he said, what we need is somebody, we need the pope to appoint somebody to keep control of the text, someone like me, he was thinking, which of course didn't happen. And then the text that he was complaining about was a text of Pliny that had been done by a humanist. And then he did another one, The Complainer in 1473, and it got the same sort of criticism. So it was a kind of humanist sport to criticize each other. So it was very good. It was very useful. It made texts much more widely available. It didn't always make the best text available. And that was a problem that you have a received text. But until really into the 16th century, often these texts are not really prepared in a very adequate way and can be very corrupt. Your definition of humanism that you've already given us a couple of times has to do with the recovery of antiquity. And one thing that's rather puzzling about that is that, of course, the humanists are Christians and the antique thinkers that they're reviving here are almost always pagans. I mean, maybe you could think of Boethius or, of course, Augustine. So there are Christian authors that they may look to. But when they talk about Cicero, Virgil, Quintilian, as well as the philosophers that you've already mentioned, they're reviving the thought and work of pagans. How bothered are they by that? Well, humanism is a very broad church. Some people are very, very bothered and some people aren't bothered at all. There are people who believe that pagan thought, pagan philosophy, although inferior to Christian philosophy, is basically compatible. So Petrarch gives an example of this. He says, in relation to moral philosophy, the pagans teach us about virtue, which is the right path, but they stop at the end of this world. And what Christianity does is take that path further. So they're not incompatible. There are other people who think that they're completely incompatible. Lorenzo Valla is one of them, a mid 15th century humanist. And he berates his fellow humanists for saying that the pagans can attain the same wisdom and virtue as the Christians. He says, what is that but to say that Christ lived for nothing or he didn't live at all? Because if we can get to this wisdom and virtue with the pagans, why do we need Christ? So there's a very, very wide range of attitudes towards that. There is a term that gets bandied about called Christian humanism, which is problematic in all sorts of ways, because it implies that there's a humanism that isn't Christian, which I don't think is really the case. But the general idea with Christian humanism is that in the 15th century with the Italians, it was mainly secular, and then it gets more and more Christianized in the 16th century, particularly with the Reformation, people like Erasmus. And they create a program of Christian renewal, which is connected with the renewal of classical studies. I think that's not entirely untrue, but it's certainly not entirely true. 15th century humanists were very interested in Christian antiquity. They thought it was part of antiquity. And you say they didn't do that many Christian texts, but they were quite interested in the church fathers, not just Augustine, but Jerome. And Basil was a great favorite. And there was a text by Basil that Leonardo Bruni, an early 15th century humanist, one of the first texts that he translated is a letter by St. Basil. And it's called Letter to Young Men on the Utility of Studying Pagan Letters. And that was a kind of charter to say, here is the great St. Basil, one of the great church fathers. And he is explaining to you and telling you how you can make use of pagan learning and what Basil said. Permission. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he says it's like the bees and they go to flowers and they gather some pollen here, but they don't gather pollen there and they use some for their honey and they discard the others. And the same thing with Marsilio Ficino, who's a late 15th century Platonist. For him, Augustine gives him permission because Augustine said that the Platonists were the closest to Christianity. So the church fathers performed a very important mediating role. And you get people in the 16th century who will translate one of, again, Basil, who's a favorite of the humanists, his treatise. He does a homily on envy and it's translated and published together with Plutarch's essay on envy from the Morelia. And they're put together because they think they're basically saying the same thing. As I said, there are people who don't, who disapprove of that. But I think, broadly speaking, Christian antiquity, when you're trying to revive antiquity, you're also trying to revive Christian antiquity. And the church fathers, they knew had been, especially in the first four centuries, educated in the pagan classics, in the pagan literature and pagan philosophy. And therefore, if it was good enough for them, and there are exceptions, for instance, Tertullian is the famous, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? So if you don't think that they're compatible, you tend to like Tertullian. But if you do think they're compatible, you tend to like people like Jerome or Basil. So there's a whole range. But I think Christian antiquity was always part of the story. Lorenzo Valla wrote a book on amending the text of the Bible. And this was a text that he wrote and it was later published by Erasmus and was an inspiration for Erasmus's own work on the Bible. Even humanists who were like Francesco Fidelefo, who mainly worked on secular texts, he also translated works by Basil and church fathers. So I think Christian antiquity was always there. It probably became more important. There was more interest and more work in the 16th century, but it was always there. And what about this recovery of the actual language of antiquity? Do they think that Latin, maybe Latin and Greek, but especially Latin, because they're writing in Latin, did they think that it has some special status among languages? Is it the perfect language for some reason? No, I don't think they did. But what they did think is it was the language of antiquity and antiquity had a special status. And so something about Latin. No, I think if anything, that was that was probably a more medieval idea of Latin as the kind of perfect language that you could use in an abstract way. I think what they believed was that the greatest thinkers of antiquity wrote in Latin and Greek. And therefore, if you wanted to recover their thought and assimilate it and revive it, you had to use the language that they use. And they eventually towards the end of Greek is one of the great things that the humanists did that was not done in the Middle Ages. They revived the study of Greek and you did study Greek in humanist schools. And they began to realize that and this starts maybe with people like Poliziano in the late 15th century, that Latin literature was based on Greek literature. And therefore, if you wanted to understand that literature, and even to some extent, Latin philosophy, you had to know the Greek behind it. So Greek became very important, although it was never as important as Latin, because although some humanists did write Greek, Poliziano wrote poetry in Greek, mostly Latin was the language of philosophy. But I think it was just that it was connected with the whole idea of antiquity. And therefore, if you wanted to revive antiquity, you had to do it in that language. In the later period, they continued to have a great reverence for Latin and Greek, but they obviously thought the most important language was Hebrew. So it could change. But it's a historical association, I would say. And the other thing about Latin, of course, is that they can talk to each other in Latin across cultural divides. So it's a universal language, which is something that Wala really points out. Wala was very keen on it. And not only that they could speak Latin, but they could speak the same Latin, because he realized, and this is one of the bees in the humanist bonnet, that medieval Latin, they regarded as a complete degeneration, as a very lowly form of Latin. It was barbaric. It barely counted as a language. And Wala said, in antiquity, when everybody spoke proper Latin, they could communicate with each other. When they don't speak proper Latin, that communication declines. But his idea was that when everybody speaks the same language, when in Hungary and in England and Italy, they all speak, they can communicate, they can compete, you can have progress in the arts. It's very much an intellectual community rather than a social community, but it was very important. But later on, particularly in the 16th century, when the vernacular becomes much more important, what you find is that, and perhaps even more so in the 17th century, that when people are writing to their fellow countrymen, they write in French or English or Italian. But when they want an international audience, they write in Latin. So you start getting a dual system. And even a great scholar like Joseph Scaliger at the end of the beginning of the 17th century, when he's writing to Frenchmen, he writes in French and even writes in dialect, he writes in the dialect that he uses from his family. But anything that is meant for an international audience is in Latin. So that's the distinction that develops later on. And would you see that as one of the main kind of legacies of humanism for the 17th century? Or in general, I mean, what is the importance of humanism as we move past what anyone would consider to be the Renaissance and into the 17th century? Well, there is a phenomenon that people call late humanism. And like humanism, it's a problematic term, because nobody went around saying, I'm a late humanist. They tended to see themselves in terms of their own particular disciplines. But late humanism is really just humanism, but in a slightly more advanced, more critical, more technical. The more they learn, the more they learn about antiquity, the more they can apply it. So you get people like Joseph Scaliger applying humanist techniques to the study of chronology, to the study of astronomy. You get people finding out a lot of texts, which in the earlier phase of humanism were thought to be genuine. They now have better critical tools like Hermes Trismegistus, which Isaac Casabon was able to show was a fake. They have better linguistic skills, particularly in Greek. So they develop their critical faculties, they become even more historically oriented, and they get involved in more technical disciplines. And you can, and it has been questioned, is there such a phenomenon as late humanism? And I would say, again, it is a phenomenon, it does exist. But what you can only say is it's a group of people who had shared interest and shared techniques and shared linguistic skills. And really beyond that to say it's this or that discipline or has this or that ideology, I think, as with humanism, it doesn't really work. One needs to scale it down and think in terms of skills, interests, aims, techniques, rather than disciplines or ideology. Okay, well, that's looking forward to the 17th century. We haven't gotten there yet, but we will, with any luck. For now, I'll thank Jill Cray very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me. And please join me next time when we continue to look at Renaissance philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode, Difficult to be Good – Humanist Ethics. If you think philosophers should devote themselves to discovering how to live the good life, you'll probably be disappointed by any encounter with today's professional philosophers. Actually, you might well be disappointed in any case, but especially if you have such high expectations. Many philosophers specialize in topics like epistemology or metaphysics, and would be more likely to associate the phrase meaning of life with a Monty Python film than with their day job. True, most philosophy departments do have at least one expert on moral philosophy, but I once knew a philosopher who said he offered courses on ethics because those who can't do, teach. And I'm skeptical as to whether the study of moral philosophy will turn you into a moral person. It might just make you realize how challenging the demands of morality really are. As Poggio Bracciolini remarked in a letter he wrote in 1425, According to the Ancient Greeks, it is difficult to be good. Yet he and his fellow humanists held out hope that those same Ancient Greeks could help them do just that. On these grounds, the humanists often saw ethics as superior to other philosophical disciplines. Leonardo Bruni said that those who ignore it in favor of natural philosophy are Bruni made this remark in an introduction he wrote to moral philosophy. It takes the form of a dialogue Bruni supposedly had with a friend. The work is meant to encourage its reader to take up philosophy as a means of self-improvement, a way of dispelling the fog that conceals from us the true good we all naturally desire. But what is this true good? The options laid out by Bruni are those already considered by his role model Cicero, and there aren't many of them. Either you follow the advice of the Stoics and Aristotelians by pursuing virtue, or you throw in your lot with Epicureans and other hedonists by taking pleasure to be the good. This is painting with a pretty broad brush, which befits the introductory nature of the work and also Bruni's admitted aim of showing the fundamental agreement between the Greek ethical schools. For him, the Epicureans are not that different from the champions of virtue, since they wind up saying that a life marked by temperance and other virtues is the most pleasant. So they too endorse a moral way of life, they simply give a different hedonist rationale for it. As for Aristotelianism and Stoicism, Bruni sees the main difference between them as being that for the Stoics, virtue alone is enough, so that good people remain happy no matter what misfortunes, poverty, or tortures befall them. This, says Bruni, is a stout and manly creed, but hard to believe. Basically Aristotle is right that the best life requires so-called external goods like health, wealth, friends, and family. Aristotle is also right to say that virtue always lies in the mean between two extremes, like courage which is the middle course between cowardice and rashness. When it comes to the emotions, Aristotle is again vindicated by Bruni. The Stoics taught that we should work to restrain our emotional reactions, even, or perhaps especially, when we are severely provoked. But Bruni thinks the Aristotelians are right that it would be inhuman, and even irrational, not to feel anger when, say, a slave beats your father or rapes your daughter. Our goal should be to let reason rule over the emotions, which means the higher part of the soul ruling over the lower. That, along with a sufficient supply of those external goods, constitutes happiness. Bruni's synthetic approach may remind us of the way that late ancient authors, or more recently Bessarion, in his debate with George of Trebizond, tried to establish harmony between ancient authorities. But where Bessarion tended to read Platonism into Aristotle, Bruni achieves his synthesis by making all the other schools agree with Aristotle, and framing their disagreements with his teachings as relatively trivial. His partiality is no doubt connected to the fact that he translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bruni's version had to compete with the old medieval translation and the new one of John Argyropoulos, but it is extant in nearly 250 manuscripts, and some 15th century commentators on the ethics, like Nicolo Tignosi, preferred Bruni's rendering to its rivals. This despite the fact that Bruni and the other humanists were really just offering what one scholar has called a mere revision of the medieval translation by Robert Croesetest, dressed in elegant Latin. As this already begins to suggest, rumors of the death of Aristotelian ethics during the Renaissance are greatly exaggerated. The revival of Platonist and Hellenistic ideas is more eye-catching because it is such a contrast to the medieval scholastic tradition, but the scholastics continued to thrive during the Renaissance both in Italy and elsewhere. They match the humanist stress on moral philosophy by adding this subject to the curriculum of studies at several Italian universities during the period. For them, Aristotle was, of course, the primary authority for ethics just as for other branches of philosophy. The teaching of the Nicomachean Ethics called for new commentaries. A significant one appeared in 1478, authored by Donato Acciagoli, who should be congratulated for having no fewer than five consecutive vowels in his last name. He was apparently following closely the lectures given by his teacher Argyropoulos, the aforementioned translator of the ethics. A later commentator named Bernardo Sengi in fact gave them joint credit for the commentary and lavished praise on them for their distillation of earlier scholastic commentaries like those by Thomas Aquinas and the Byzantine philosopher Eustatius. Sengi himself is also an interesting figure for the reception of Aristotle since he chose to do a translation and commentary for the Nicomachean Ethics in Italian rather than Latin and he published it in 1550. And there were other 16th century scholars who worked to usher Aristotle's ethics into the vernacular. 1583 saw the appearance of Francesco Piccolomini's massive treatise based on Aristotle's writing about ethics and politics, The Universal Philosophy of Morals. It was in Latin, but Piccolomini also produced a compendium of ethics in Italian, written for Christina, Duchess of Tuscany. By sheer coincidence, it has lots of nice things to say about the Medici clan. But a bit of judicious sycophancy was not the only way that philosophers calibrated their approach for their intended audience. Both Acciaoli and Sengi carefully rationed the dosage of technical scholastic methodology so as not to overwhelm a vernacular readership. Thus, Sengi's commentary occasionally shows how you can set out Aristotle's ethical teaching in syllogistic form, but only by way of example to show it as possible. Likewise Piccolomini structured his Latin treatise as a series of scholastic questions, but dropped this style of organization for the compendium in Italian. Of course, not all humanists were so keen on Aristotle. I'm not sure what the opposite of keen is in English, never mind Ciceronian Latin, but one man who could have told me was Lorenzo Valla. I trust you'll remember his relentless work of anti-Aristotelian and anti-scholastic critique, the Dialectical Disputations. We saw how it took issue with the notion that virtue is a settled habit as opposed to something that can be displayed or lost on a single occasion. That's only one of the irreverent points Valla makes about ethics. Against Aristotle, he argues that virtue is not really a mean between two extremes. Rather, there is one virtue per extreme. Thus, courage is opposed to cowardice, but not to rashness whose opposite is merely caution. And against just about everyone, Valla argues that there are not four central or cardinal virtues, namely prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Just as he reduced Aristotle's ten categories to a tidy list of three, he thinks that all virtues can be reduced to the single virtue of fortitude. This is the will's determination to pursue what is good, instead of being swayed by counterproductive emotions. Prudence is actually not a virtue at all, but simply the knowledge of good and evil. One becomes morally praiseworthy or blameworthy only once the will is involved, once we choose whether to pursue the ends that prudence has identified as good. Thus far, it may seem that Valla's objections to traditional ethics are rather superficial, as a humanist would say that he's disputing about names rather than the things themselves. But the originality of his moral theory emerges more fully when we turn to another work of Valla's which, like the disputations, went through several revisions and bore different titles, including On Pleasure and On the Good. Valla imitates Cicero by writing it in the form of a dialogue in which two spokesmen argue in favor of Stoicism and Epicureanism. Then in a final section, a third Christian spokesman offers what is presumably Valla's own considered view. Valla is far from endorsing Bruni's thesis that the various ethical teachings of the Greeks boil down to the same thing. He draws a sharp contrast between Epicurean hedonism and the Stoics' valorization of virtue. And surprisingly, Valla prefers the Epicurean view. He allows the Stoic spokesman to cut a rather unappealing figure whose signature attitude is pessimism. Valla's Stoic sees human nature as all but inevitably prone to sin and evil indulgence in pleasures. This might be thought to point to a Christian truth, it would be the doctrine of original sin that explains why people are so bad. But it rather seems that the far more optimistic Epicurean theory is meant to emerge as the more attractive option. The spokesman for this view rejects as implausible the Stoic claim that human nature is intrinsically bad. To the contrary, it is nature that provides us with both our desire for pleasure and with pleasure itself, which is the true good. So far, so appealing. But as the Epicurean goes on, the typical Renaissance reader would probably start to frown with disagreement. Such paradigm cases of good action as sacrificing oneself for one's city are condemned as foolish, since death cuts off access to pleasure. On the other hand, such actions do not constitute an exception to the Epicurean claim that people are always motivated by pleasure and pain. Patriotic self-sacrifice or suicide committed for other reasons can be explained on hedonistic grounds. Someone who kills themselves to avoid shame, for instance, may just be seeking to escape from the suffering brought on by social disapproval. When we reach the speech of the third spokesman, we learn that the Stoic and the Epicurean are both mistaken because they have failed to grasp the Christian truth that we will live on after death. Still, the Epicureans are closer to being right than the Stoics. A Christian hedonist can look ahead to an everlasting and exceedingly pleasant reward in heaven. Virtue is not, as the Stoic has claimed, valuable in itself. It is only a means towards attaining this blessed state. Yet, for the same reasons, the traditional Epicurean is wrong when he advises us to pursue the pleasures of this world, especially bodily pleasures. Even in this life, these are as nothing compared to the pleasures of the soul. And the highest pleasures of all await us, once we are freed from our earthly existence, when we will receive perfect bodies and all the higher pleasures the soul could possibly desire. This fusion of Christianity and Epicureanism is not unique to Valla. A short letter written in 1428 by his fellow humanist Francesco Filelfo expresses similar sentiments. If you're in the business of pursuing pleasure, it makes all the difference what kind of pleasure you seek, and the pleasures of the mind are those that are true and Christian. So Filelfo dismisses those who accuse Epicurus of lascivious devotion to the delights of the body. Putting this letter together with Valla's rehabilitation of pleasure, and Bruni's claim that Epicureans pursue virtue too, we can see that this hedonistic Hellenistic school had a surprisingly positive reception among the humanists. So the Lorenzo Valla who wrote On the Good can be seen to agree with contemporaries like Filelfo. Does he also agree with himself, that is with the Lorenzo Valla who wrote the dialectical disputations? Not entirely. Consider again the virtue of fortitude. We saw that it was central in the disputations, but it appears in the Epicurean speech in On the Good only to be criticized on hedonist grounds. When you measure everything in terms of pleasure, it's a losing game to endure great suffering for the sake of honor and glory, especially if you might get killed in the process. But the Valla of the disputations, the Valla who puts fortitude at the center of a life that is happy insofar as it is virtuous, also finds allies among his humanist contemporaries. One of them was Poggio Braccionini. He wrote a moral dialogue of his own called On Nobility, which argues along Stoic lines that true nobility consists in virtue rather than an aristocratic lineage. In a related work, On the Unhappiness of the Prince, Poggio complains that most political leaders are vicious people. He encourages his readers to avoid political life and goes so far as to suggest that a noble family background may even be ethically counterproductive, since the high-born are typically enmeshed in political intrigues and the upheavals of court life. This brings us back to the question of external goods, with Poggio firmly adopting the Stoic view that they are a matter of indifference, so that we should focus on struggling against our own vices rather than on acquiring wealth or political influence. The same note is struck in the work of another humanist, Ennio Silvio Piccolomini, not to be confused with the aforementioned Francesco Piccolomini. Ennio Silvio was Bishop of Trieste and of Siena, and culminated his career by reigning as Pope Pius II from 1458 to 1464. So he knew something about political life and put this knowledge to good use in his On the Misery of Courtiers. It begins by stating bluntly that, Even if the hedonist doctrines of the Epicureans were true, political engagement would still be a bad idea, because life at court is far from pleasant. Piccolomini is obviously drawing on a wealth of personal experience here, as when he points out that being a courtier turns out to be surprisingly boring because you have to spend so much time waiting around for the ruler. The fact that Poggio and Piccolomini both devoted works to critiquing the political or courtly life should remind us that this was the context inhabited by many humanists. They often wrote their works while in the service of princes or popes. So for them, the ancient ethical school to follow was going to be the one that gave the best advice for surviving life at court with one's dignity, and ideally one's happiness, intact. For those who committed themselves to such a life, Aristotle seemed to be the best guide. He gave them good reason to be proud of their intellectual attainments at the end of the Ethics when he stated that philosophical contemplation is the best life of all, and in the rest of the work he showed that one could manifest virtue by pursuing a life of civic engagement, seeking to amass enough wealth to display munificent generosity, and forging alliances through family and friends. Let's finish this episode by considering two authors who adopted this ideal of a virtuous politically engaged life. Our first example is Giovanni Pontano, a student of George of Trebizond who died in 1503 after an eventful career as a diplomat at the royal court in Naples. Pontano shows stoic leanings in a work entitled On Fortitude, which praises those who bear up under the suffering inflicted on them by fortune. Rebuking the sentiments expressed by Valla's Epicurean spokesmen, who disdained political heroism as more painful than pleasant, Pontano thinks it makes good sense to seek out difficulties in life. Only those who face tribulations can conquer them, thus displaying fortitude and valor. This sounds closer to Valla's stoic spokesmen, but Pontano fails Bruni's test for true stoicism in that he embraces the importance of external goods. The best and most happy man is one who has physical strength, good looks, and at least a degree of wealth. As this suggests, Pontano's primary allegiance in moral philosophy is to Aristotle, who offered a theoretical basis for Pontano's own idealized self-conception as a virtuous man of political action. Speaking of idealizations, let's turn finally to an extraordinary literary work which has as its main topic the question of the ideal courtier. This is the Book of the Courtier, written by Baldessar Castiglioni in 1528 and my personal choice as the most entertaining ethical treatise produced by an Italian humanist. Lorenzo Valla, please forgive me. It is a dialogue set at the court of Urbino, featuring a number of real historical figures from among the nobility, both male and female. They want to find a diversion to pass the time, and in the process impress one another and the papal envoys who are watching. After considering several games they might play, they hit upon the idea of attempting to describe the perfect courtier. He will need skills ranging from the art of warfare to music and mastery of the literary arts. He should also be witty, which gives Castiglioni the chance to record a number of jokes and humorous anecdotes to illustrate how good wit functions. Some of these have not dated well, but others are legitimately funny. Have you heard the one about the prince who needs to find something to do with a huge pile of excavated earth after a building project? His advisor suggests, just dig a hole and bury it. When the prince asks, but what about the dirt from the new hole, the advisor replies, just make the hole twice as big. For Castiglioni, wit is serious business, because it is one of the attributes the courtier will need in order to guide his prince. If he is lucky enough to have a virtuous master, things will be easy. He need only tell the truth. More likely, the prince will fall short of moral perfection, which puts the courtier in a more difficult position. He should avoid being a flatterer, but will need to be able to soften hard truths with wit and charm. More ambitiously still, the courtier should seek to instill virtue in the prince, being a moral educator as well as a practical advisor. In this, he is a mirror of his prince, because the virtuous prince too should make those around him good. The best prince is like a straight edge that rectifies other things when placed against them, so he is a ruler in every sense of the term, as Castiglioni's witty courtier might observe if he spoke English. If all goes well then, there should be plenty of virtue to go around. But as one character cynically remarks, if the prince is to have only good people as his subjects, the population will be pretty small. And sadly, as Poggio had noted, good princes are the exception and not the rule. We cannot rule out that the good courtier may have to abandon or even overthrow a sufficiently wicked prince. In setting forth this account of the best courtier, Castiglioni's characters make the most tasteful possible display of their learning. One passage alludes to Aristotle's point that virtue is not instilled by nature, even giving his example that stones cannot be habituated to go upwards when dropped. Another refers obliquely to the Stoic idea that virtue alone is valuable, with other apparent goods, like health or wealth, having true value only when they are used virtuously. There are even debates about fine points of philosophy, such as whether our reason is overwhelmed by our passions when we make bad choices, or whether this just shows that our rational beliefs about the good are not secure enough. Great philosophers of antiquity appear by name too, notably when it is pointed out that there is no conflict between being a philosopher and being a courtier. Plato, after all, served the rulers of Syracuse, and Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. One philosopher Castiglioni could not have mentioned in this context is Epicurus. He and his followers were famous for their political disengagement, for choosing to enjoy a quiet life in their communal garden, rather than pursuing the false pleasures of power, honor, and glory. We've just seen that for some Renaissance thinkers, like Pontano, this was a flaw in the Epicurean ethical program. In fact, the only humanist we've found endorsing Epicurus' hedonism was the idiosyncratic Lorenzo Valla, and even he needed to bring in Christian ideas of the afterlife and resurrection in order to identify pleasure with the highest good. Given its hedonistic ethics and also its physical theory of chance and atomism, it may seem unlikely that Epicureanism would find further admirers or interpreters in the Italian Renaissance. Yet the rediscovery of this school did manage to cause something of a swerve in the intellectual current of the period, as we'll see next time on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the LMU and Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Chance Encounters – Reviving Hellenistic Philosophy. Dip into any introduction to Renaissance philosophy, and you'll quickly find a reference to Poggio Braccioini's rediscovery of On the Nature of Things, an ancient Latin poem by the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. This podcast series is no exception. I mentioned Poggio and Lucretius back in the first episode on the Italian Renaissance. But what exactly did it mean to rediscover an ancient Latin text? Nowadays, tracking down a book usually involves little more than entering its title into Google. Other internet search engines are available. You'd probably be annoyed even at having to click through to the second page of search results. In the 15th century, the process was a bit more taxing. It was more like today's record collectors who sort through bins of dusty vintage vinyl, or perhaps even gold prospectors in pioneer-era California. Tracking down a lost book required willingness and opportunity to travel long distances. It called for patience and a connoisseur's eye. And these were all assets that belonged to Poggio. The famous discovery happened in 1417 in Germany, probably at a Benedictine abbey in Fulda. Poggio had come so far north because he was in attendance at the Council of Constance in 1415 as secretary to Pope John XXIII. Things didn't go so well for the pope, who was deposed after fleeing the council, but Poggio's book collection fared much better. In addition to finding Lucretius, he had the triumph of tracking down a copy of Quintilian's work on rhetoric at St. Gall. In one of the more than 500 surviving letters written by Poggio, he explains that this priceless text was lying in a jumble of mouldering books in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon at the bottom of one of the towers. Like the modern-day vinyl enthusiast who is trying to locate the rare first pressing of a 1960s Beatles album in the bargain bin at a record store, the humanists hunted for treasures that most people considered to be old junk. Parchment manuscripts were often scraped clean of their ink, destroying old text just to have new, blank writing material. To make new discoveries of old books, the humanists usually had to leave Italy, since the collections there were pretty well explored. Poggio spent some years in England but reported bitterly that the libraries there were useless, in other words full of medieval works and not ancient ones. But in France and Germany, especially in monasteries and other religious institutions, you could find long unread texts listed in library catalogs or just have a lucky chance encounter looking through discarded manuscripts, as at St. Gall. The humanists would have had no scruples about bringing antiquities home to Italy. Poggio himself talks enthusiastically in another letter about having a marble bus sent from Greece for his house. He quivers with excitement at the prospect of installing the head of Minerva in his library. But, as I can tell you from personal experience, German librarians tend to be strict. So when he found Lucretius, Poggio was not able to abscond with the manuscript. Instead he had his scribe copy it out and sent this transcription to his friend and colleague Niccolò Nicolì, who made a second copy that still survives today. This whole story should remind us of what we learned about Byzantine manuscripts. As in medieval Constantinople, in early 15th century Italy every book was a unique handmade object. The arrival of printing was still decades away, and making a single copy of a sizable work could take many weeks. These scholars would have killed to have access to a Xerox machine. Other office copiers are available. So humanists like Nicolì and Poggio had to be craftsmen as well as intellectuals. These two men were involved in developing a new, clearer style of handwriting based on the miniscule lettering of early medieval manuscripts from the Carolingian period. They worried about pens and ink, about paper and parchment. Indeed, requests for parchment and comments about its quality are a constant refrain in Poggio's correspondence. Because a book was a unique and valuable object, you had to be careful what you did with it. Another running theme in Poggio's letters is the trading of manuscripts between humanists. He wrote to Nicolì asking to borrow a text so he can have his scribe make a copy or do it himself. The book will be sent straight back, promise. And Poggio was a lender as well as a borrower. He complained of books that were not returned, such as that copy of Lucretius which Nicolì held onto for a full 12 years to Poggio's mounting frustration. Your tomb will be finished sooner than your books will be copied, he complained to his friend. So bent were these men on getting books into their libraries that you wonder whether this was an end in itself. Were the humanists like the vinyl collector who doesn't want to play the records she's bought and just puts them on a shelf? No, they did read them as well as collecting them. In her study of annotations found in surviving Renaissance manuscripts and early printings of Lucretius, Ada Palmer has shown that these were working texts. Scholars made lines or dots next to passages that particularly struck them revealing the interest they brought to the text, and added comments in the margins. As Palmer explains, the annotations are most often philological in nature, notes about Latin vocabulary, indications of names of noteworthy ancient people and places, and so on. One scholar, Pomponio Leto, made extensive notes throughout his copy which were so useful that they were taken over in subsequent copies made from his manuscript. While many of these are also of a philological nature, they also reveal something about Leto's reaction to the philosophical content. Next to a passage arguing that the soul is not immortal, he cautioned the reader with an annotation that said Non-Christian Teaching. And here we come to the crux of the matter. That copy of Lucretius unearthed by Poggio was worth its weight in gold, but it was also explosive like dynamite. Thanks to Cicero, the humanists were already well acquainted with Epicurean ethics. We saw last time that Lorenzo Valla found it relatively unproblematic to integrate these doctrines into those of the Christian faith. If a blessed afterlife is the most pleasant of all prospects, then Epicurus's hedonism pointed in the right direction. In the words of our recent interview guest, Jill Cray, this amounted to wrenching an Epicurean doctrine from its pagan context and using it to reinterpret Christian theology, yet the same point was made in a letter written by another humanist, Cosma Raimondi. He admits that the Epicurean obsession with pleasure may seem effeminate, but praises the school for valorizing the natural urge to pursue pleasure and beauty. Epicurus is not, after all, recommending the pleasure of animals, but a more sophisticated approach that locates the most pleasant life in a moderate lifestyle. This understanding of Epicureanism can also be found in the letters of Poggio, as when he invites Nicoli to dine in his house, but warns that the fare on offer will be Epicurean, in the truest sense of the term, nothing but water and mush. The discovery of Lucretius's poem, though, brought home to its readers that Epicureanism involved more than pursuing pleasure while avoiding fun. It argues at length that the soul dies with the body, the point flagged in that annotation by Pomponio Leto. Lucretius also presents a detailed theory of atomism. This by itself was perhaps not so shocking, as some medieval scholastics had flirted with atomist physics, but he also contends that our universe emerges through brute physical necessity through the random entanglement of atoms. These are chance encounters that no pious Christian could accept, since the Epicurean cosmology involved denying divine providence. Epicurus and Lucretius did accept the existence of gods, but thought that they pay no attention to our lives, which is actually a good thing because it means we do not need to fear them. Now, it's not as if all this had been completely unknown before Poggio went to Germany. Since antiquity, the word Epicurean had been a near-synonym for atheist, and more recently within Italian culture Dante had put the Epicureans in hell for their teaching on the soul. But, now that Lucretius had been added to the list of classical texts admired for their outstanding Latin, the humanists were confronted as never before by the problematic nature of Epicurean thought. An annotation found in one early printed copy suggested that readers of Lucretius should simply accept the true parts and reject the falsehoods. For some, this meant rejecting all of it. A good example is Marsilio Ficino, who studied Lucretius as a young man while learning about Cicero from Cristoforo Rondino. Ficino even wrote a short commentary on the poem, but when he became a convinced Platonist, he destroyed this juvenile text. He turned against the poet he had admired, refuting Lucretius on the issues of soul's immortality and divine providence. A more tolerant approach was taken by Ficino's fellow student Bartolomeo Scala, who wrote a letter in 1458 summarizing Lucretius's doctrines. Scala continued to draw on these doctrines later in life, for instance in a dialogue about the wisdom of marriage in which the positive case is put by a character with Epicurean leanings. One of the things that attracted Scala to Epicureanism was its emphasis on the role of chance. Though this might fly in the face of Christian teachings about providence, it made good sense of the political instability experienced by humanists in Florence, especially towards the end of the 15th century when the French invaded Italy and the Medici lost their grip on power. In the wake of these events, the theme of chance and fortune was emphasized in the work of Marcello Adriani, one of the Renaissance philosophers who engaged most closely with Epicureanism. He admired this philosophy for its promise to help us retain happiness even in times of misfortune and political upheaval, and more generally for its aim of freeing us from disturbance and fear. This was thematized in a lecture by Adriani called Nil admirare, meaning wonder at nothing. We fear what we do not understand, and Lucretius can help us to dispel our fears by explaining natural phenomena and teaching us not to live in terror of divine wrath. Though he was atypical in his enthusiasm for Epicurean thought, Adriani was very much typical in his concern with the question of human autonomy in a world apparently governed by chance. Here the most obvious example is Niccolò Machiavelli. We still have a copy of Lucretius with annotations in Machiavelli's hand which show that he was especially interested in the atomic theory and the fact that the randomness of atomic motion explains why humans have free will. Prefiguring a central theme from his famous work The Prince, Machiavelli wrote a poem on the topic of fortune and, in a marginal note added to another of his early works, described how the successful man copes with chance. Each man, he wrote, must do what his mind prompts him to, and do it with daring, then try his luck, and when fortune slackens off regain the initiative by trying a different way. But Epicureanism was not the only Hellenistic philosophical school offering advice for coping with chance. Some Renaissance humanists were attracted by the uncompromising view of the Stoics, that good and bad fortune are both matters of indifference since only virtue truly matters. Poggio was one of them. He wrote a whole work about the vagaries of fortune in which he used an image that he may have borrowed from Lucretius but to make a Stoic point. He advised cultivating an attitude of Stoic detachment, looking upon the miseries of this world as a kind of theatrical performance that cannot affect our happiness. On the other hand, he also made a point worthy of Machiavelli that chance may be seized and exploited by men of action. This explains the success of figures like Alexander the Great, who, as we might say, boldly trusted his luck and was rewarded for doing so. But what to do when fortune does not favor us? Poggio thought the Stoics had the right answer. In one of his letters, he nicely summarized their idea that, whereas all other things are subject to the influence and control of others, virtue is our own, so it should be our paramount, if not sole, concern. These issues were also of great interest to Leon Battista Alberti, a humanist who is most famous for his treatise On Painting, which we'll be discussing in a future episode when we come to talk about philosophy and Renaissance art. In other works, especially a series of so-called dinner pieces, charming literary productions that often touch on philosophical issues, Alberti dramatized the confrontation of virtue and fortune. In one of them, he describes a personification of virtue being accosted by fortune, stripped, beaten, and left to complain of her rough treatment. Mercury regretfully informs her that fortune cannot be controlled not even by him and the other gods, so virtue will just have to hide herself naked and despised until fortune smiles on her again. Another piece imagines a philosopher visiting the underworld and learning how souls are set to navigate the river of life. Those who have the smoothest sailing are the virtuous, who enjoy the sport of the gods, but even they can be dashed on the rocks. Alberti advises clinging to the planks that are the liberal arts which offer the best stability in the rough waters of life. Others were less optimistic that knowledge and virtue can shield us from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The pioneering humanist Salutati, for instance, was at first impressed by Stoicism, but then found its cold-hearted advice to be of little comfort when he was faced with the death of his son. Exactly the same experience came to another humanist, Gionazzo Manetti. When his own son died, he rebuffed consolatory remarks inspired by Seneca, instead voicing his agreement with the Aristotelians who teach that moderate grief is appropriate. And then there was a third major Hellenistic school, one that offered good reason to think knowledge will forever remain out of reach in both ethical and theoretical matters. This school was, of course, skepticism. One humanist who was influenced by the skeptics was Francesco Guicciardini, a historian and statesman who was a friend of Machiavelli. He tended to think that philosophy, especially metaphysics, was an all-but-fruitless pursuit, since men are bound to remain in the dark about such things. In practical affairs, a knack for dealing with each situation as it arises, which Guicciardini calls discretion, is far more useful than all the general precepts laid down in ethical treatises. But ultimately, the insane may prosper, while the wise suffer depending on the whims of fortune. This was an unusually bleak view for the time, though not without parallel. As with Epicureanism, the humanists had some awareness of skepticism thanks to Cicero, who alongside his various presentations of Hellenistic philosophy, gave his own allegiance to the so-called academic skeptical tradition. But Renaissance thinkers tended not to emphasize this aspect of Cicero's thought, probably because they found it so disconcerting and difficult to reconcile with Christianity. Cicero's major work on skepticism, the Akademika, was not among the humanists' favorite texts by this most admired of Latin authors. When they did engage with it, they usually did so in order to fend off its critique of non-skeptical or dogmatic philosophy. Thus, for instance, Mario Nizzolio and Giulio Castellani, both working in the second half of the 16th century, repudiated Cicero's stance, suggesting that dogmatic thinkers like Aristotle could withstand skeptical attack if their systems were properly appreciated. Castellani was downright annoyed by Cicero's presentation of the dogmatic approach to philosophy, because he thought it stacked the deck in the skeptic's favor by presenting that approach too weakly. Much as Cicero's portrayal of Epicureanism was complemented by the discovery of Lucretius, so renewed access to long-unread ancient works allowed the humanist to go beyond his presentation of skepticism. Through the biographies of Diogenes Laertius, Renaissance readers learned about the teachings of the first skeptic, Pyro. More important still was the recovery of Sextus Empiricus, whose writings were brought to Italy from Constantinople by Francesco Fidelfo. Cardinal Bessarion also owned a manuscript of Sextus, in fact a better one than Fidelfo's, which had what he called windows in it, meaning gaps in the text. Philologists, like History of Philosophy podcasters, really don't like gaps. If the humanist had taken Sextus really seriously, he might have caused even more disquiet than Lucretius did. Sextus's Pyronian skepticism provides the tools to undermine all beliefs, leaving the proficient user of these tools in a state of suspended judgment. But for the most part, the humanists were not inclined to turn Sextus's arguments against other philosophical schools to say nothing of the teachings of the Church. They had good reason to be wary of the skeptics, since they could read in the Greek patristic author Gregory Nazianzus that this movement was a kind of disease that threatened to infect the Church. The result is that, as one scholar of skepticism in the period has put it, the 15th century witnessed a revival not of skeptical philosophy, but rather of skeptical texts. A good example would be Angelo Poliziano, who engaged with Sextus but only at the level of philology and as a doxographical source, an approach that he also took with Lucretius. To see true appreciation of ancient skepticism, we're going to have to wait for figures beyond Italian humanism, with the most famous example of its influence being the works of the French 16th century philosopher Montaigne. But within the present context, there is one figure we should highlight, namely Gianfresco Pico della Marandola. He was the nephew of a more famous philosopher named Giovanni Pico della Marandola, who was going to come into focus later on in this series of podcasts. The nephew, Gianfresco, was a member of the intellectual circle around the religious crusader Girolamo Savonarola. A remarkable political figure, Savonarola was closely involved in the aforementioned upheaval at Florence at the close of the 15th century. It was he who connived with the invading French forces to kick the Medicis out of power in Florence so they could be replaced with a Republican government. You'd think this would have kept Savonarola too busy to concern himself with the humanist project of recovering and translating Greek texts, but he took an interest in the work of Sextus Empiricus because he realized its potential as a weapon for undermining the pretensions of rationalist philosophy. Though a Latin translation envisioned by Savonarola did not come to fruition, Sextus' ideas were put to use by Gianfresco Pico della Marandola, who echoed Savonarola's agenda when explaining his own motivation. The skeptics can be helpful in fending off the arrogance of the philosophers and in displaying the superiority of the Christian faith. The principles of our faith are not derived from human beings but from God himself, through the light of faith as well as through wonders and miracles, against which no one can argue. From our modern-day vantage point, this attitude may seem stunningly cavalier. What we might think could be less immune to skeptical worry than mere unargued religious faith. But Gianfresco assumed that the methods of skepticism laid out by Sextus—relentless demands for justification, arguing on both sides of every issue, identifying disagreements between the philosophical schools—were designed for undermining merely human claims to knowledge. These were methods of earthly philosophy fit for use against other earthly philosophers like Epicureans, Stoics, and Peripatetics. The supernatural truths of Christianity would remain serenely untouched by the methods of Sextus and would thus be the only doctrine left standing after the demolition of all the philosophies devised by human nature. In this episode, we've touched on a number of famous figures who will be occupying our attention in future installments, men like Ficino, Savonarola, and of course Machiavelli. But not all famous Renaissance thinkers were men. In coming episodes, we'll be making a discovery of our own, namely that quite a few Italian humanists were women. We'll be discussing the most renowned of them, Christine de Pizan, in a couple of episodes. But first I want to linger over one topic that has arisen several times in the last couple of episodes, the emotions. We've seen how humanists wrestled with the value of emotional reactions, wondering whether to endorse the impassive attitude of the Stoics or to cultivate moderation of the passions, as suggested by Aristotle. But what exactly did the Renaissance thinkers understand emotions to be, and what advice did they give for combating emotions when they are counterproductive? We'll find out next time as we're joined by an interview guest with a passion for this particular subject, Sabrina Ebbe-Smaya, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ ["The History of Philosophy"] Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about emotions in the Renaissance with Sabrina Eves-Meyer, who is Associate Professor for Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. Hi Sabrina, thanks for coming on the program. Hi Peter, thanks for having me here. Let's start where the humanists, I guess, would want us to start, which is with Latin, and in particular the Latin terminology that's at stake here. We're going to be talking about the emotions, at least that's what I just said, but the word emotion isn't the Latin word. The Latin word is passiones, which sounds like it means passions. So is it really right to say that we're talking about a theory of the emotions here when they talk about passiones? Well, I think that's a good question, although a tricky one of course. The word emotion itself was not really in use during the Renaissance, so that came up later, during the 17th century out of the French context, and it was referring to a very specific sort of passion, so to say, concerning the broad range of the terms. So what is covered by the term passiones and what is covered by the term emotions? I think they don't really fit completely, although basically people were referring to the same mental things, right? So we use today the term emotion to refer to mental states, like being in love, hating someone, or being sad. And these were also these kind of states that were investigated during the Renaissance under the term of passiones. On the other hand, the modern term emotion is stricter and narrower, so usually we exclude, for instance, dates that we call today maybe moods or feelings. They would not be qualified today as emotions proper, right? But during the Renaissance, moods like being melancholic, they were part of this whole debate. But then there's an additional thing concerning concepts, and that is, it's true, of course, that paseo and passiones was one of the main ways to translate patros, but there were many other Latin terms that were used, depending a bit on the philosophical theory that authors refer to. For instance, in the Stoic context, for instance, in Cicero, the term patros is translated with patubatio, which means has a different association, right? It's something that bothers us, that is troubling for the mind, has a negative connotation. And then there is also the more neutral translation of something like affectus and affectionus, which we found in texts on natural philosophy, words more about the way how we are affected by things that we encounter. So there's a guide. Yeah, I guess that the Latin term affectus really captures the Greek patos quite well, because patos sounds like it means being affected by something, right? Whereas passionus, well, maybe passionus does that, too, right? So you're being affected. I mean, that's what passionus or paseo really means. Like maybe it's preserved in an English word like impassable, which means that you can't be affected by anything. Not that that's a very common word. Yeah, I agree. Still, also in the development of the terms, I think we associate it with the term paseo, more mental states of suffering, right? That is not usually associated with affectus, but with paseo, it's the passion of Christ. For instance, the suffering is much more closer. OK, so let's move on to the next thing that the humanists at least would want us to think about, which is the ancient sources of this. Of course, there's also a medieval discussion of emotions, and we even had an interview about that with Martin Pichave. But I suppose that the Renaissance theories of emotions are actually responding most directly to the ancient ideas about patos and affectus and so on. So in Cicero, as you mentioned, and other authors, what are the main ideas that they get from antiquity about the emotions? Well, if we think about the humanists, and especially the early Italian humanists, then I would say that the relation between the passions and rhetoric are the most important background, right? Because we know already from Aristotle, who dealt with the passions and his rhetoric, that in order to perciate people of your opinion, or to come to a conclusion concerning a philosophic and political deliberation, you have also to engage the emotional side of the people you are talking to. So in the rhetorical tradition, emotions were considered as important and they were taken seriously. And this, of course, applies also and most importantly to Cicero and his works on the rhetoric. And this tradition was taken up by the humanists. And it stands a bit in contrast to, I would say, the majority of the history of philosophy as such. You are the expert for the entire history. But I would say in most periods, philosophers tend to be rather sceptic about rhetoric, right? Rhetoric is something we don't do as philosophers because we care for the truth and not for unjustified persuasion. And this applies also to the emotions. So many philosophers regarded their emotions with suspicion. They will, these are parts of our nature that we share maybe with animals. That is not something that we should care about, which is more rational thought. And so the humanists didn't emphasize these parts, right? They emphasized that we are human beings with a body and that we have emotions and that they have to be addressed. So that's very characteristic in Petrarcha, for example, and his thought about the emotions. That's probably the most important thing, I think. So does that mean that the Renaissance thinkers, or at least the humanists, are against this idea that you would often find in the history of philosophy, where the goal should be to suppress the emotions and just put reason in charge of rationality, as opposed to being carried away by anger or love or whatever? I think to a certain extent one can say that they admit it, that passions belong to our nature, right? So it's not the question to accept them or not accept them because they are there. So the question is rather what do we do with them? We have to deal with them. And so they would say you have to accept it and you have to use them for the right purpose. Of course, they still had this ideal that we should leave a virtuous life. And a virtuous life would not mean necessarily to follow all your whims and your pleasures or your desires that come up to lead a virtuous life. But a substantial part of this virtuous life is characterized by having the right emotions and the right situation. So that would actually be a little bit more like Aristotle than Plato, perhaps, because Aristotle does seem to give you the idea that part of what it is to be virtuous is to feel the right kind of emotion on the right occasion to the right extent. And they would agree with that? I think they would actually. We can see this very explicitly in Leonardo Bruni, who was an important humanist who took up Aristotle precisely. And at that point, as I well see, Aristotle also says that you have to have emotions actually to be humans. And it would be completely irrational and even inhuman not to have emotions in the right place. Right. If your family members are hurt or people you care for or other values are violated, you think are important for society, then you have to respond also emotionally. Otherwise, you can't can't even be a proper member of society. So that's the thing they took up. And it's true, of course, that you refer this back to Aristotle. And that's also what Leonardo Bruni says. But the humanist also kind of plays their reading of Aristotle in opposition to the Aristotle of what they call the scholastics. They go back to the proper Aristotle, who also cared about the emotions which the scholastic neglected. And one other thing about this, just in relation to what you mentioned about rhetoric, is the idea there that we just need to make a study of the emotions so that we're better at manipulating people when we persuade them? Or is the idea that rhetoric used properly would actually induce the right kind of emotions in the listener? So they have a more sort of ethical approach to rhetoric. And the idea would be just as in myself, I'm trying to have the right emotions in the right situation, etc. So as a rhetorician, I should be trying to induce that kind of emotion in other people. Yeah, I think we would not really find a humanist saying, well, it's just about us, you know, manipulating people to follow what we think is the best thing. That's why I think that they really shared ideals. So they shared ideals about virtuous life and what they call it, humanitas. So what is it to be a human being? Right? What should we live up to? And this ideal of what a human being could live up to that relates, of course, to virtuous behavior, being just, being prudent. And these things should be then supported by emotional responses. OK, so one reason that we do have emotions, I take it, is that we have bodies, right? So emotions seem to be very strongly anchored in the body. If you think about something like losing your temper, it's a psychological event, but it's also a physical event. And that's very obvious. Do the Renaissance theories of emotions tend to emphasize that? Do they tend to, for example, locate emotions in the body as opposed to in the immaterial soul, if we have one? If we have a look at later stages of the Renaissance, I think the latter part applies, namely that the Renaissance authors were very much interested in the physiological aspects of emotions. And that's not so much within the humanistic tradition where this came up, but that's more related to the medical traditions that were also taken up during the Renaissance and the interest in investigating the soul of the human being, more based on actual observations about how humans behave rather than coming up with normative concepts about what the human soul is supposed to be. So with these medical approaches, we see a very strong emphasis on the physiological aspects. And one early example is, of course, already Massilio Ficino in his work, Divita Libertés, where he is a physician about a work-related disease for intellectuals, so to say, melancholy, that we all suffer every now and then as intellectuals because there's a whole theory behind why it is so. But the basic idea is that we don't care enough for our bodily constitution during study, and then we have to recompensate things that we lack, so to say. So we have to drink white wine, for instance, or eat honey, all things that keep up our spirits, an important concept in this concept. OK, that's good advice for all of the academics out there who are listening. You can drink white wine to avoid melancholy. And I guess this is also true of then other authors who are even more prominently associated with medicine, like Cardano or Campanella, people like that. Who else should we be thinking about here? Yeah, most prominently also in Telesio and in Fracastoro. And in Telesio we find an entire theory about the passions and how they are related to our bodily constitution and how the affections of the surrounding world have an impact about the way we feel. Do they go so far as to say that really the emotions don't have that much to do with your soul and they're really bodily events? Maybe one way of thinking about this would be how should we compare an emotional reaction in a non-human animal to an emotional reaction in a human? So like if a lion gets angry and I get angry, is that exactly the same kind of thing? Or is it different in me because I have reason and I have an immaterial soul? Yeah, very tricky question. Very interesting. I think one very elaborate and differentiated answer was provided again by Telesio, this Renaissance natural philosopher, one of the so-called Novatores Descartes talks about. And Telesio is of the opinion that we share a lot of our bodily constitutions with animals, right? They have the same blood circulations or some of them, right? We talk about developed animals and a nervous system and a heart and a brain and everything. So he says, well, given all these similarities between human beings and animals, it would be odd to suppose that their way of perceiving, for instance, would be different. So if they see something and they have the same kind of eye that we have, then we can also think that their way of perceiving would be similar to ours. And the same applies to the emotions. So fear is more or less the same when I feel it and an animal feels it in Telesio's perspective, because as said, we share the same bodily constitutions that are required for these kinds of emotions. But then he is of the opinion that there are some emotions that are very specific for humans and they are different. So even though emotions share what he thinks is kind of a soul, he also attributes to animals a kind of memory. And memory is, for instance, important for feeling fear. If you have experienced something harmful, then you see it again and you experience or you respond with fear. That is similar. So animals have the same kind of memory in the sense we have. But what animals lack, according to Telesio, is a vision of the future. So that's typical for us to think about future events that might occur. And he thinks, well, animals are not really able to do this. And that's why they don't form certain emotions that we form. So that would be something like hope, maybe? Would that be an emotion that's directed towards the future? Yeah, yeah. Or maybe a fear that's about, you know, like I might not get a raise from my boss or maybe a loved one will die. So animals don't fear that their loved ones will die. Yeah, that's true. Right. Okay. Something else that you've written about that I think relates to this is the idea of what's called panpsychism. So this is going to sound a little bit weird. Maybe you can convince us that it's not that weird. So basically the view here is that it's not only human bodies and animal bodies that are alive, but actually in some sense, there's a vital principle that runs throughout the entire cosmos. And this is an idea that listeners might remember goes all the way back to Plato and also the Stoics. So in Plato's Timaeus, there's a world soul that animates the entire cosmos. And we find this in some Renaissance thinkers as well. And you've argued that this has something to do with the emotions. So can you kind of explain the panpsychist context of this and what it has to do with this theory of the emotions? Yeah. So the term itself, panpsychism, refers to that soul is everywhere in nature. Right. So that's a generic term. And I used it also and applied it here to positions that don't have to be labeled in the sense panpsychistic because they did not attribute soul to every tiny natural thing. But for instance, as in Tolesi, sensation. Right. So he would not go so far as to say there is a soul everywhere, but he would say there is sensation everywhere in the soul. Even in stones or? Yeah, in everything in nature. Right. And that is because of his first principles of nature. So he thinks there are three principles in nature, two active principles, heat and cold. And the passive principles matter and they interact and generate everything. And in order so that things are generated and not destructed immediately, everything in nature, which is constituted out of these constituents, has a sense to perceive what is harmful or what is beneficial for itself. So in a very basic, monumental way, it's actually everywhere in nature and all natural things. So in this way, we as human beings do not really stand out as that completely different and eccentric part of the cosmos that is different from all the rest, but rather is an integral part, something that belongs to a complex structure. So, of course, this sensational quality is not everywhere the same. Our sensation is much more elaborated than the sensation of a plant or of a stone, for that matter. But still, it's the same kind of having a certain sensibility to react to what is harmful or what is beneficial for ourselves. So in that way, the human being becomes an integral part. And it is precisely in this approach to nature that the passions gain a completely different outlook. So the passions are not something that is a threat to rational thought, for instance, or stands in opposition to thinking rational about the world. But it's rather something that helps us to deal in a rational way with the world. It's the way we respond to things that affect us. And the big principle behind, as I mentioned already, is self-preservation. So according to Tilesio, every being in the creative world strives for self-preservation, and the emotions help us there for a great deal. But it seems pretty obvious that also there are emotions that are counterproductive. So actually, we've so far been giving a pretty positive picture of the emotions in Renaissance philosophy. It's surprisingly positive. So they help integrate you in the world. They can be felt appropriately, so they don't all have to be crushed by reason and so on. But obviously, sometimes you do get carried away with your emotions. You lose your temper or you conceive a passion for another person, which is maybe not such a good idea. So do they have advice for people who are having emotional reactions that are inappropriate? I can't really now think about any moral advice. So that would go to some moral. The question would be going, I understood it in that way. But in Tilesio, for instance, he takes a naturalistic approach to the passions. They are natural phenomena. So we look at it in that way. And of course, then if we look at it in that way and ask to what extent a certain passion is beneficial or harmful for the self-preservation of the species, not of the species of the individual, then of course there can be passions that are harmful. That's true. Of course, what should we do then? Then we should think again. So that's what Tilesio is suggesting. So what is it? So we perceive things. We think about the things we perceive. Then we feel the impact of this thought or these sensations and then we act accordingly. And so in the ideal world, this process would always lead to the self-preservation of the individual. But of course, it can happen that we haven't thought it through, for instance. Right. And that we choose to follow rather the inclinations of a fulfillment of a desire, which is at hand rather than to go for the long term aim. That's the classic. But then he thinks, well, that still we as human beings have this ability to think about the future and we should do this. So we should use all our capacities. That actually sounds very stoic to me because the stoics have this idea that there are impressions that sort of strike you from the outside. And if you're a non-human animal, then you'll just instinctively react to the impression and follow the impression. So, for example, animals will just eat food whenever they're hungry. Right. Whereas if you're a human, since reason is in play, you have to assent to the impression. For example, you might be hungry, food might be put in front of you, but you might not eat it because it's not polite yet to eat it. You have to wait till everyone gets their meal before you can start something like that. So is he influenced by the stoics in formulating that theory or is it just a kind of coincidence that the two things look rather similar? No, definitely. So there's a huge part of stoicism in the Theosaur. There's also some literature about this that go into details. And that's not so weird if we think about that. He was also influenced by medical authors and the entire medical tradition, which stoics thought was already very much present. So he just kind of used it in order to, yeah, that's also what he's doing all the time to counter Aristotelian natural philosophy. Yeah, it seems to me that this question of, you know, a kind of therapy to take towards the emotions really is a good example of why it matters whether the emotions are more on the body side or more in the soul side, because like that thing you mentioned before about drinking white wine to avoid melancholy. So that's not, you know, advice for having a better way of thinking. So what Telesio says, think about the future, don't think about your present needs. That's very different from saying drink white wine. So it seems like there's these sort of two levels on which we can engage with our own emotions. One level where we just try to modify our bodies to change the reactions that are taking place there. And another level where we try to deal with it at the level of soul or a belief. Yeah, that's true and fair to say, and I would say that during the Renaissance philosophers tend to emphasize the non-cognitive, theropoetic advices. In opposition, for instance, to the 17th century, if we look at Descartes or Spinoza, then we find a lot of theropotical advice that are based on changing the way we think, right? So you have to change your judgments about things and then you will also change the emotion and also your body will in the end maybe change and you won't feel any longer strong emotions in a certain way. Of course, these cognitive aspects are also present during the Renaissance, but I would say the emphasis is put on the non-cognitive therapies, which are more medical, right? You have to change your diet, you have to eat other things if you don't want to be sad or unhappy or unhappy and laugh or whatever. You have to change place or you do physical exercise, even sometimes the Vives or others recommend sexual intercourse or you have to deal with your own body in order to change the emotions and then also in order to change your beliefs concerning these emotions. And then it becomes more intellectualist and top-down in the 17th century in the Enlightenment. Okay, that's really interesting. One last question, and this is kind of anticipating a topic that I'll be looking at in greater depth later in this series, but I thought we couldn't talk about the emotions without talking about love because the Renaissance thinkers, and especially I guess the Platonists like Ficino, are famous for being really interested in this because there's Platonic dialogues about love and so on. So can you just, as a kind of preview for us, sketch out a little bit about what they say about love in the Italian Renaissance? Yeah, first thing is, I think it's very, very interesting to see that it's during this period, so 15th and 16th century, especially in Italy, there was a great enthusiasm for love, right? And this is not just for love in the theoretical realm or love in the realm of poetry, as we had it also before, but in the philosophical realm. So, and that is of course caused by the reception of Plato's theory of love. And I think what is so important and fascinating about Plato's theory of love that was to a large extent not known during the Middle Ages, is that it kind of combines the sexual and physical attraction to another human being, to our metaphysical and intellectual aspirations to know the truth, right? So there seem to be two ends of a huge spectrum of our intellectual engagement, and Plato kind of managed to bring these together. And this idea was so attractive for Renaissance philosophers, and we find it very elaborately expanded in Ficino, for instance, but also in Leon, Breo, a Jewish thinker of the Renaissance, and most prominently also in Giardano Bruno. Right, so maybe that's even an example of what you were just talking about a second ago, because love, as you said, sort of grumbs the spectrum from bodily reactions all the way up to something like wisdom, right? So you could have love for God, for example. And so I can see why they'd be attracted to the topic if they have this really sort of physically embodied understanding of emotions, what would be a better example of that than love? That's true. And I think it's also interesting to say that this brings us back to the beginning when we talked about the concept of emotion. So if we look about how the emotion of love is treated today in contemporary research on emotions, then it's more or less the personal love between two people and their respective beliefs they share. But in the Renaissance, the concept of love was much broader, right? So it's not just about the interpersonal relationship, it's about an emotion we feel to the entire world, and that binds us together with the entire world. It's understood as the so-called cupola mundi, the bond that brings together all things in the cosmos. So love is much more than just an interpersonal thing, although it's also an interpersonal thing, but it has this metaphysical dimension. And in this way, the entire debates of the emotions in the Renaissance was broader than what we treat today when we talk about emotions. Okay, well, speaking of love, the next person I'm going to be covering in the podcast is actually Christine de Pizan, who we've already met, because as some listeners might remember, way back at the end of the coverage of Latin medieval philosophy, we talked about her as one of the critics of the Romance of the Rose, which is a poem that's famously all about love and sex, and she didn't like it very much and said so, so you might want to revisit that. But next time we'll be devoting an entire episode to other aspects of her thought. But for now, I will thank Sabrina Efesmaya very much for coming on the podcast. It was such a pleasure to be here. And please join me next time for Christine de Pizan, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, We Built This City, Christine de Pizan. Cast your mind back, if you will, to the last of our episodes on medieval philosophy. That is when we first met Christine de Pizan. It's fitting that she should appear in both the medieval and the Renaissance series, since she could hardly be more suitable to represent the transition from one age to the other, and to undermine any notion that that transition was a sudden cultural shift, as opposed to a gradual evolution. Her lifetime went from the 14th to the 15th century. Geographically and in self-identity, she spanned Italian and French culture. She drew on medieval ideas even while foreshadowing such paradigmatic Renaissance figures as Machiavelli. Like other female authors of the Middle Ages, she wrote in the vernacular and not in Latin. Unlike those other authors, she was not a begine, a nun, or an anchorite, but an independent secular intellectual. In that earlier episode, we saw Christine attacking the misogyny and scandalous content of a 13th century text, The Romance of the Rose. This suggests a literary bent, something borne out by her writing career, which began with the composition of poetry. But her writings ranged widely, including moral advice, political works, an influential treatise on chivalry and conduct in war, and further attempts to defend the honor of the female gender. This multifaceted career was made possible by aristocratic beginnings. She called herself Christine de Pizan in honor of her father Tommaso, who hailed from the Italian town Pizano. At the nearby University of Bologna, Tommaso served as professor of astrology until he was summoned by the French king Charles V when Christine was only 4 years old. It was in this setting that Christine grew up, absorbing the cultivated and urbane values of Charles's court, which boasted a massive library and supported the translation of Aristotle and other classical authors into French. Unfortunately for Christine, this auspicious beginning was followed by a series of personal and political disasters. Within the decades spanning from 1380 to 1390, the king, Christine's father, and her husband all died, setting off turmoil in France and in Christine's financial affairs. Her experiences in a series of lawsuits gave her cause to complain bitterly later on about lawyers and their treatment of women, but she was able to keep moving in aristocratic circles, associating herself with a series of patrons, for whom she wrote many of her works. In the meantime, French political life was as unsettled as the bar tab at a miser's convention. The successor of the admirable Charles V was at first too young to rule, and then proved to suffer from mental illness, which meant a struggle by other compenders who wanted to hold the reigns of power. Christine reacted to this situation in her writings, pleading for an end to infighting amongst the French nobility. The very titles of some of her works are telling. Lamentation on the evils of civil war, written in 1410, and the book of peace, written from 1412 to 1414. She's often working within the genre of writing known as mirrors for princes. Christine herself uses this metaphor, speaking of her book of the body politic, as a mirror in which a prince or other noble reader may see himself, the better to eliminate his vices. She is here drawing on a tradition that goes back to antiquity by way of such medieval authors as John of Salisbury and Giles of Rome. A core assumption of these works is that the state can flourish only when it is led by a virtuous ruler, and Christine certainly shares this assumption. Her book of peace, for example, is addressed to the grandson of Charles V. She holds up Charles as a paragon of seven virtues that any ruler must possess, namely prudence, the excellence and practical reasoning from which all the other virtues arise, followed by justice, magnanimity, fortitude, clemency, generosity, and truthfulness. Of course, we should all strive to possess these virtues, but they are especially incumbent upon the ruler, who is held to a higher moral standard than other people because the welfare of the entire community depends on his character. In an age when some Italian cities were experimenting with republican forms of government, and despite her own experiences of a chaotic and violent France, ill-served by the principle of inherited monarchy, Christine continues to assume that the best rule is exercised by a single man. She's also a big believer in breeding. God may have created all humans equal, but those of a noble lineage have acquired better traits through their ancestry, just as some animals are more noble than others. Rather than questioning such elitist assumptions, she presupposes them as she tries to persuade her noble reader to strive for virtue. It is not enough to be descended from good, noble, and valiant people, she writes, if one is not like them oneself, in goodness and conduct. Yet, Christine is not envisioning an autocracy guided by nothing but the autocrat's own integrity. Instead, she frequently warns that the ruler must take advice from reliable advisors who should themselves be of good character. Vicious advisors can do just as much harm as vicious rulers if they manipulate the ruler for their own ends, usually by playing on whatever moral weaknesses they can find in the ruler. Often, thinks Christine, war is the dire result of such wicked advice. Her constant refrain is that the ruler must ponder the havoc unleashed by war and never be overly confident of his chances in a prospective battle. Military engagements are decided in large part by fortune after all, and fortune is more powerful than even the strongest monarch. This is not to say that Christine is a thoroughgoing pacifist. Echoing the medieval ideas about just war we examined way back in episode 247, she states that war may be rightly waged only in order to uphold justice, punish injustice, or recover land or other goods that have been stolen. However, she adds something new by connecting the theme of war to the importance of good advice. What makes a war just in Christine's view is not just the cause over which it is fought, but the procedure through which it begins. A ruler should pay careful heed to his counsel and only begin a war after giving the enemy a chance to justify himself. It's worth noting that in her pleas for peace, Christine lays special emphasis on the potentially damaging consequences for the ruler himself. This fits with an overall characteristic of her political writings, namely their appeal to the self-interest of her noble readers. For example, she explains that the wealthy should treat poorer citizens well simply because otherwise the underclass may rise up in revolt. Perhaps because of the political context, in these works she tends to emphasize practical, not theological virtues, encouraging that the ruler engage in action rather than prayer. She warns occasionally that vice will be punished by God, but more commonly that it will be punished by events, and defines her goal in the book of peace as helping a young noble to improve himself in respect of soul, body, and reputation. This hard-headed, if not cynical, approach seems a departure from the writings of the earlier medievals and even in anticipation of what we will find in Machiavelli. Her use of classical sources ranging from Aristotle to Ovid, Seneca, Cicero, and Boethius likewise seems to foreshadow the more elaborate classicism of Machiavelli. One cannot help but be pleasantly surprised that a woman was in a position to write such innovative and learned works. Her contemporaries were a bit taken aback too. When it suited her rhetorical purpose, Christine was happy to pose as inferior and inadequate owing to her gender. Even in the debate over the romance of the Rose of all places where her whole point is to stand up for the honor of the female sex, she refers to herself as a woman of untrained intellect and uncomplicated sensibility. But a story found in another work called The Vision sounds more convincing as a representation of the real Christine. One day, a man criticized my desire for knowledge, saying that it was inappropriate for a woman to be learned, as it was so rare, to which I replied that it was even less fitting for a man to be ignorant, as it was so common. That's probably my favorite single passage in all of Christine's writings, but I'm biased because it comes from her most obviously philosophical work. The Vision is a contribution to another genre familiar from the Middle Ages in which the author recounts an allegorical dream. It has its ancient roots in Plato and Cicero with medieval examples including Langland's Piers Plowman and of course the Romance of the Rose itself. The thematic unity and purpose of Christine's vision is at least as difficult to pin down as with either of those poems. Thankfully, it begins with a helpful introduction by Christine, explaining the meaning of some of the symbolic characters and imagery. The body of the work opens with a section on the history of France, followed by a survey of ancient philosophical ideas, and finally a kind of autobiography of Christine herself. To some extent, the point of this is pretty obvious. Christine is describing the way that fortune has its unpredictable way with earthly affairs. Her own life story in the final section mirrors the rollercoaster of prosperity, warfare, and deprivation depicted in the first part on French history, and in the middle, the exposition of ancient philosophical theories conveys the equally haphazard attempts of philosophers to discern the truth. That part of the vision is also, of course, a demonstration of Christine's own learning. Her deft summary of pre-Socratic views, which are then dismissed as bizarre and critiqued from an Aristotelian point of view, is the fruit of her encounter with scholastic philosophy, here presented as a journey through the halls of the university at Paris. In this case, the allegory is not too hard to decode. She tells of how she encountered a personification of our favorite subject, Lady Philosophy. In another moment of false modesty, one that would nowadays be called humble bragging, she writes, I knelt while thanking her to fill my lap with treasure, but since they were too heavy for my weak and feminine body, I carried away very little by the measure of my great desire, not so little, however, that I might exchange it for any other treasure or wealth. Of course, the use of Lady Philosophy is an allusion to Boethius. His constellation of philosophy inspired a number of medieval authors to write dialogues featuring a female personification of philosophy, nature, or some other abstract concept, educating a character who stands in for the author him or herself. This is typical of Christine's vision, which refers self-consciously to a wide range of earlier authors. Even the first sentence is an obvious echo of the opening line from Dante's Divine Comedy. But the Boethian source is particularly central because Christine took inspiration from him to write her own consolation in the third part of the book. After a fairly long autobiographical lament, which is a source for some of the information I mentioned earlier in this episode, for instance her legal battles and her father's interest in astrology, Lady Philosophy gives her some tough love. She chastises Christine by arguing that her sufferings stem from a misperception of what is truly valuable. In part, happiness can be attained just by looking on the bright side, as illustrated most strikingly by the suggestion that her husband's early death had a silver lining, namely that it gave Christine more time for her learned studies. But most important is to abandon desire for earthly riches, pleasures, and other goods, focusing instead on God as the true and perfect good. That's pretty typical advice that you might get from any number of medieval and renaissance authors, even if it takes on special resonance for us, since it situates Christine within the wider debate we've been discussing as to whether external goods like family and health have any true value. But more distinctive of Christine is the way this advice is subtly woven into an extended meditation on epistemology. Let's turn back to the second section, the bit about the history of philosophy. There, Christine is discoursing with another allegorical personification, whose identity is revealed only at the end of the section, Dame Opinion, who is responsible for the various convictions we all come to hold. Philosophical theories are only one example. Dame Opinion also claims credit for inspiring religious beliefs as well as political aspirations and plans. In fact, she complains that Christine has elsewhere been too impressed by the power of fortune when it is she, opinion, who is most often the true driving force behind historical events. It is, according to Christine, in the nature of opinion, that it lacks certainty. This is not to say that opinions must be false or counterproductive. Dame Opinion is pleased to take responsibility for the beginning of philosophy itself, when thinkers first had the curiosity to try to understand the world in general terms. Rather, opinions are just what modern-day epistemologists would usually call mere beliefs, that is, beliefs that are in need of something like justification to rise to the level of true knowledge. Furthermore, for Christine, opinion is always inspired by the functioning of the imagination. I would take all this to prepare the way for the autobiographical lament and correction by Lady Philosophy found in the final part of the work. Christine's unhappy assessment of her own life story is itself a mere and mistaken opinion that derives from her imagination and its faulty conception of the good. This is a kind of psychological malady that Lady Philosophy must treat, borrowing a medical analogy for philosophical advice that was already used by Boethius. In the same way, God himself acts as a kind of doctor for the soul, administering the bitter medicine of our trials and tribulations that we may emerge from them confirmed in virtue. In the year 1405, the same year that saw the composition of The Vision, Christine produced what is probably her most famous and celebrated work, The City of Ladies. Back in episode 295, we already touched on the debate she sparked early in her career over the treatment of women in the Romance of the Rose. Now, she returns with still greater ambition to the same subject. The City of Ladies begins with Christine picking up a now obscure book and finding it full of misogynistic sentiments, the same sort of sentiments she had earlier found in the Romance of the Rose. Somewhat unpersuasively, given her strident defense of womanly virtue in her earlier critique of the Romance, Christine falls into despair at the weakness of women. In the face of so many esteemed authors who have written diatribes against the moral and intellectual failings of women, how can Christine avoid lamenting that she herself was born female? It seems to her a mistake on the part of God to create women if they are indeed monstrosities in nature, and Christine cries out to him asking why he could not have been kinder to her by creating her as a man. At this point, an early 15th century reader might feel that they know what to expect. A philosophically minded author, sitting alone and in despair? Sounds like Boethius at the beginning of his Consolation of Philosophy, lamenting his fate as he awaits his execution. So our reader might expect to turn the page and see a female personification turning up to offer consolation, like Lady Philosophy in Boethius, or Lady Philosophy in Christine's own vision. A pretty good guess, but not quite right. Christine outdoes Boethius by having no less than three personifications appear to her, Reason, Justice, and Rectitude. Reason speaks first to defend the honor of womankind. A clearer allusion is to Christine's favorite writing genre, the mirror. Reason holds a mirror in her hand and promises to help Christine achieve self-knowledge. In particular, she will come to know the knowledge of female virtue. All this serves as a preliminary to the central metaphor of the text. The three leis will help to build a city for women, one stronger even in the kingdom of the Amazons in antiquity. Here we may see a more subtle dig at Jean de Mun's Romance of the Rose. Not only did he too personify Reason as a character in his poem, but his Romance depicts how a male lover batters his way through a fortification to ravish his beloved. Christine's city will be able to withstand such assaults. Its foundations are, ironically, laid by an effort at undermining. Lady Reason critiques the male authorities who have spoken so unkindly of women. For one thing, there is the familiar point, used against the authority of philosophers since the skeptics of antiquity, that even the greatest thinkers have not managed to agree on many issues. Perhaps in some cases they had good intentions and only sought to steer men towards sexual virtue and away from passionate love. It's an interesting admission, since this is what the defenders of the Romance of the Rose said Jean de Mun was seeking to do. But Reason adds that this is really no excuse, since it is wrong to depict admirable things as wicked, like someone complaining about fire because it burns things, forgetting how useful it can be. Christine turns the screw by having Lady Reason add that men often complain about female vice because they themselves are vicious, or because age has made them impotent and bitter. After this bit of ground-clearing and excavation, it's time to build the city itself. She has the three ladies describe the deeds and qualities of a wide range of virtuous heroines. Those named by Lady Reason exemplify intellectual merit and are drawn from pagan antiquity. She stresses that women have been great philosophers and made novel discoveries that advanced the cause of human knowledge. One example is Minerva, whose many insights concerning mathematics, writing, weaving, and other endeavors convinced the Greeks that she was in fact a goddess. Women have also been successful political rulers, even if they often had the chance to do so only because their husbands died, leaving them to rule as widow queens. Similarly, if their achievements in science had been lesser, this is simply because women are not typically educated as men are. If girls were sent to school like boys, they would show an equal aptitude for science. This is a remarkable anticipation of later pleas for the education of women, something we associate more with modern figures like Mary Wollstonecraft. Of course, Christine chooses to have pagan figures praised by Lady Reason because they show what women have achieved through natural gifts outside the context of Christian religion. But, Christine reminds us that the Virgin Mary opened the door to paradise for all of us, and other female saints and martyrs feature later in the speech of Lady Rectitude. Thus, Christine can claim to have both reason and faith on her side. Not content to defend women, she also takes time to excoriate the viciousness found among men, including Roman emperors like Claudius and Nero. In fact, misogyny itself is an unnatural vice, for we see in nature that all other male animals love the females of their species. Above all, men have no monopoly on virtue. To the contrary, women's bodily weakness is compensated by their moral character, something Christine compares to the way that Aristotle is said to have been profoundly ugly, something compensated by his brilliance. On the basis of her historical examples, Christine takes herself to have shown that the virtue of women is unassailable to the point that it can form the substance of an invincible imaginary city. This city is built to last, and lasted will, so long as her women readers are inspired to be virtuous themselves. Next time, we'll turn to some other women who weren't content to be readers, but also established themselves as writers. It was a remarkable and no doubt largely unforeseen result of the Italian Humanist Movement that a number of Italian women achieved sufficient education and showed sufficient ambition, that they were hailed for their eloquence and brilliance. Who were they? What did they achieve in? How did their contemporaries react? I've had a dream vision that tells me you'll join me next time to find out. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, More Rare than the Phoenix, Italian Women Humanists. I was just complaining in a recent episode about how people don't write letters anymore. But at the risk of sounding difficult to please, I have to say that when people did write letters they often weren't very interesting. College students wrote to mom and dad but just as an excuse to ask for money and don't get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter. It's for good reason that we say they are full of sweet nothings. The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point. Elegant though they are, they tend to follow predictable motifs. There's the Epistle of Consolation, sharing in the grief of losing a loved one before saying, it's time to pull yourself together. Then there's the letter in which the recipient's eloquence is extravagantly praised and the response to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty. Closely related is the plea for patronage, a showpiece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same. Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything apart from the fact that one is writing a letter. It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner, goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, and then closes with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible. Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful, well-balanced Ciceronian sentences to say nothing. The epistolary art was so prized by the humanists and so central to their project of refined self-representation that it became standard for them to publish volumes of collected correspondence. Petrarch had already done so and his example was followed by such figures as Salutati, Poggio, Bruni, and Fidelfo. Remarkably, the Italian Renaissance also saw the publication of collections of letters by women. No less remarkable is the fact that these letters tend for the most part to read just like letters written by male humanists. Well-educated, aristocratic women showed that they too could use high-flowing Latin to appeal for patronage, offer consolation, and get through a whole letter without saying anything. Here we have a development such as we have hardly, if ever, seen before in our history of philosophy, women writing on equal terms with men. Since the humanists prized eloquence and linguistic facility above all else, women who excelled in rhetoric were able to participate in humanist discourse in a way that no medieval women had ever been able to participate in scholastic discourse. Writing letters was an obvious opportunity for them to do so because the substance of a humanist letter was its style. In fact, the letters are not really about nothing, they are about writing itself. This most self-conscious of literary forms was the perfect vehicle for women authors who were self-consciously laying claim to social terrain dominated by men. We already know that humanists were, with some exceptions and restrictions, in favor of offering their brand of education to girls and women. Remember Leonardo Bruni recommending a curriculum of classical education to a female correspondent. The result was that a significant number of women in 15th and 16th century Italy learned and even mastered Latin and Greek. An early example was Madalena Skrovennyi, praised for her learning in an encomium by Antonio Loshi. Later examples would include Olympia Morata who died in the middle of the 16th century and wrote extensively in Latin and Greek, and Tarquinia Molza who lived well into the 17th century and translated Plato's Carmadese and parts of his Credo into Italian. But in this episode I'm going to focus especially on three female humanists of Italy. In chronological order they are Isotta Nogarola who died in 1466, Laura Cerreta who died young at the close of the 15th century in 1499, and finally Cassandra who lived until an advanced age and died in 1558. We have collections of letters for all three of them as well as some independent works like Nogarola's Dialogue on the Sin of Adam and Eve, which we'll be looking at in the next episode. To attain the high level of education displayed in these letters, all three women had to be lucky in finding teachers. Nogarola was taught by a student of the great humanist Guarino Guarini, while Cerreta speaks of a nun who instructed her and frequently emphasizes her evening vigils, studying by candlelight. At one point she even criticizes those who waste their nights sleeping. These women were not merely allowed to learn Latin, they were enthusiastically celebrated for doing so. Here was a chance for men to show off their own Latin by bestowing lavish, if somewhat condescending, praise, and they did not hesitate to do so. Cassandra Fedele especially was widely admired, the admiration unfailingly linked to wonderment that a young lady could display such gifts. The humanist Angelo Poliziano waxed enthusiastically about this girl who preferred to stitch with a pen rather than a needle and rather cover papyrus with ink than her skin with white powder. Both he and Cassandra's relative, Baltazaré Fedele, compared her to women of antiquity famous for their eloquence, like Aspasia and Sappho. Baltazaré added that she was more rare than the phoenix, combining proper female virtue with the intellectual abilities more usually associated with men. Others praised her as a unique glory and jewel of the female sex, as having surpassed her sex, and as proving that a manly mind can be born in a person of the female sex. One might wonder whether all these admiring men were laying it on a bit thick, even by the standards of humanist encomium. The leading scholar of women humanists in Italy, Margaret King, has remarked that Fedele's works were actually quite typical, even mediocre, in comparison to the productions of contemporary humanists. One is forced to conclude, says King, that Fedele was praised beyond her merits. It reminds me of the compliments I sometimes get here in Munich as an American who can speak German more or less competently. My managing it at all is so unusual that it hardly matters what I say. In the case of Fedele, the welcome she received was in part politically motivated. Lodovico Maria Sforza spoke of her as an ornament for the greatness of Venice's empire. She was seen as the human equivalent of a stylish humanist epistle, praised to the skies as culturally significant but only as a showpiece. In the previous century, Isarotta Nogarola, whom King rates much higher, had ironically been somewhat less celebrated. But one correspondent did write of being incredulous when told of her attainments, since I knew that men rarely received such praise I found it very difficult to concede that a woman might. Even her great friend and confidante, Ludovico Foscarini, applauded Nogarola in terms that put her squarely in her place. In Isarotta, whom none surpass in virtue, that sex greatly pleases which is otherwise burdened by the frailty of lesser women. This sort of thing left Laura Cheretta unimpressed. She denied that she was unique, insisting that many women had achieved a comparable degree of cultivation, among them Nogarola and Fedele, both of whom she mentions by name. In her view, men who saw her as extraordinary were simply underestimating the capabilities of women. Cheretta was under no illusions about the dynamics of power that usually kept women from competing fairly with men despite their gifts. An afteristic remark found in one letter to a male correspondent sums it up well, yours is the authority, ours the inborn ability. She sought to compete with men nonetheless, just as did Nogarola and Fedele before her. All three of them displayed an open desire for literary renown. After Nogarola's death, she was given the honor of a eulogy by the humanist scholar Giovanni Falolfo, who noted with approval that she gave herself to the pursuit of fame and glory in all her efforts. During her life, she had come to learn that dealings with male scholars could both enhance and tarnish a reputation. When praised by her teacher's teacher, Guarino Guarini, she wrote one of those letters thanking him for his praise, saying that thanks to him, she had achieved immortality and need no longer be anxious about the public's opinion and estimation of me. But when another letter she sent him was ignored, this brought scorn and mockery down upon her. Naturally, she wrote again to complain. At the second time of asking, Guarini responded supportively, but also chastised her for effectively being female. Up to now, I believed and trusted that your soul was manly, and that brave and unvanquished you could face all adversities, but now you seem so humbled, so abject, and so truly a woman, that you demonstrate none of the estimable qualities that I thought you possessed. Cassandra Federe was equally concerned with her own reputation and saw her quest for glory in terms Guarini might have recognized as a kind of transcending of gender boundaries. She wrote, at the beginning of my labors, when I had abandoned feminine concerns and turned to those pursuits that pertain not only to honor during this brief life, but to the enjoyment of God's majesty, I considered that I would find immortal praise among men. And so my goal has been to exercise my virile, burning, and incredible, though not improper I hope, desire for the study of the liberal arts, so my name will be praised and celebrated by excellent men. And elsewhere, more succinctly, it is a very sweet victory indeed, to outstrip men of eloquence. As for Laura Cerreta, early in her career she too sought to win a claim for her literary skills, at one point expressing the hope that she would be a second Laura to achieve immortality, the first being Petrarch's beloved. Like Nogarola, she suffered from a degree of envious criticism, especially in response to an early satirical work, a funeral elegy in honor of a donkey, which she admitted was written out of a desire for fame. But as she matured, Cerreta came to see this as a hollow pursuit. We should study the liberal arts to become virtuous, not to win praise. Indeed, all three of our protagonists faced questions about their ultimate goals after establishing a humanist pedigree. Learned women were forced to choose between family life and a life of the mind. A vivid example is provided by Iso-ta Nogarola and her sister Geneve. Whereas Geneve's literary activities stopped as soon as she was married, Iso-ta was able to continue her studies but only by swearing herself to lifelong chastity in residing with a male relative. In keeping with this pious and ascetic lifestyle, she started to focus more on religious literature like the Church Fathers, whose influence shows itself increasingly in her writing. Cassandra Fidelu too was aware of this problem and admitted to facing a choice between scholarship and marriage. And so it proved. After marrying in 1499, she produced little in the way of a literary legacy in the last half century and more of her life. On this score, Laura Cerreta is the exception that proves the rule, because she did marry but her husband died soon thereafter. You might remember that when faced with the same situation, Christine de Pizan consoled herself with the thought that this would at least give her an opportunity for continued scholarship. Cerreta was less cheerful, remarking in several letters that the death of her husband had deprived her of the desire for learning. She is still awake at night but to grieve, not to study. Yet, as we can see from the fact that these letters exist, she likewise took advantage of her widowed status to keep writing. Writing about what? Well, if humanists more generally tended to write letters about writing letters, then women humanists tended to write letters about writing as women. Just as their male correspondents always praised them as female humanists and not just humanists, so the female humanists themselves allude to their sex on a regular basis. In many cases they seem to accept a subordinate status. The letters of all three authors are littered with passages where they admit to being an unlearned or insignificant girl, excuse themselves for their girlish letters, lament their mere womanly ability, and so on. Federer liked to refer to herself as a bold little woman, constantly apologizing for troubling her correspondents by sending what were in fact carefully crafted literary productions. But remember, false modesty was typical of humanist letters in general, so perhaps we should not take all this too seriously. Occasionally, one of the authors does seem sincerely to regret being female. Nogarola, when complaining of the abuse she received after being ignored by Guarini wrote, here the blame falls more upon the envious men, a theme she sounds elsewhere when complaining about men who consider learning and women a plague and public nuisance. Federer met with the same sort of envy but optimistically said that she could rise above it, thereby following the example of both Christ and the philosophers. Which brings us neatly onto the question you've probably been waiting for. Did these female humanists also follow the example of some male humanists by engaging with philosophy? We've already seen plenty of evidence that in the Italian Renaissance, the study of eloquence was a kind of gateway drug to the intoxications of pagan philosophical thought, and our women humanists fit this picture. The scholar Laura Curini advised Nogarola to build on her humanist studies by delving into Aristotelianism, the works of the scholastics, and even the writings of thinkers from the Islamic world like Avicenna, Alhazali, and Iverroes. Cassandra Federer said herself that she had dared to set sail on the vast sea of philosophy, and spoke of her labors studying through the night wholly fixated on studies in the peripatetic philosophers. She was praised for her resulting philosophical facility by no less a judge than Angelo Poliziano, who thought she could compare favorably with Pico della Mirandola. Unfortunately, we don't see too much direct evidence of that facility in the letters. Federer does make a joke about Aristotelian logic at one point, and refers in passing to philosophical issues, like whether rhetoric can overwhelm free will with its persuasive power. She's also acquainted with a range of ancient philosophical figures whom she tends to see through rose-tinted glasses. Thus, she presents the presocratic philosopher Empedocles, in unduly optimistic terms, with his principle of love as a force that binds the universe together. She omits to mention that he posited a second principle, strife, that tears it apart. Similarly, Epicureanism appears in a form made suitable for use by Christians, as Federer manages to make Epicurus a spokesman for the notion that we should not seek happiness in this life. Laura Charetta too presents an expurgated version of this particular Hellenistic school. She takes Epicurus' chief teaching to be a rejection of the passing pleasures of this life and even admires him for teaching that happiness comes from virtue rather than pleasure. That sound you hear is the heathenist Epicurus rolling over in his grave, or at least it would be if Epicureans thought it possible to survive death. While Charetta earns no marks here as a historian of philosophy, she scores points as a philosopher in her own right. She has ascribed to Epicurus the idea that the pleasures of this life are transient and thus ultimately empty. As she puts it in the same passage, bodily pleasures grow old, but we want goods that are permanent. This ethical principle is of course a familiar one and does go back to antiquity, albeit more to the Platonists than to the Epicureans. But it also relates to an abiding concern more distinctive of Charetta which runs throughout her letter-writing career, the question of the attitude we should take towards time and change. In fact, her views on this question themselves change over time. In earlier letters, she is very much concerned with the best use of time, which she sees as a kind of scarce resource. Hence the aforementioned advice not to fritter away your valuable time at night by sleeping. Hence too, complaints she makes about her limited time for study given domestic chores. Time is, as she puts it, not something that belongs to us, but passes relentlessly along with the motion of the sun. So, in this phase of Charetta's career, we can see her as exemplifying a more general tendency in the Renaissance and early modern Europe to think of time as a resource or commodity, one that can be squandered or used wisely. And for her, the best use of time is the study of the liberal arts and philosophy. However, as Charetta's thought develops, she comes to have a different, even a negative view towards time. This seems to go hand in hand with her abandonment of the pursuit of glory and with her experience of grief after the death of her husband. Like pleasure, she comes to see glory as a merely worldly good that has no lasting value and thus no real value at all. To concern oneself with this world is to make one's well-being depend on that which is undependable and unpredictable, since such things are ruled by fortune or rather by random chance. Here she refers to her husband's passing as a personal example. So, as she puts it, I abandoned my plan to seek fame through human letters, lest my mind bereft unhappy and unaware of the future should seek happiness through diligence. Life is not, after all, a valuable resource to be used wisely, but a brief vigil waiting for one's own death. Having given up on pleasure, glory, and all the other things that can be bought with time well spent, Charetta instead undertakes to focus on the eternity of God. His providential law is worth valuing because it remains the same through all the unpredictable ups and downs of earthly life. Charetta summons her rhetorical gifts in the service of Christian philosophy, Not I but God should be the object of my soul's desire, since I am subject to death. Since this mortal life of ours will live on after death I have renounced, for it is holier to do so, that glory, transitory and slipping, which being full of the contrariness of earthly beings, separates us from the true religion of pious faith. This is only one example of the less obvious philosophical themes that might be teased out of the works of women humanist authors, and I'm all for uncovering less obvious philosophical points of course, but we shouldn't forget the obvious ones. In this context by far the most obvious is the various status of women. So far it seemed that even when Renaissance men acknowledged women as equals, they could only do so by emphasizing the nearly miraculous exceptions provided by such women, so unusual that they are supposedly outnumbered by phoenixes. Not infrequently, they were moved to compare such figures to men, implicitly damning women in general even while complimenting one woman in particular. And some men were more explicit in their damnation as they argued straightforwardly for the inferiority of women. We've already seen how Christine de Pizan fought back against such attitudes. In the next episode we'll see that she wasn't the only one to do so. To the contrary, works in defense and praise of women, all women, not just the exceptional few, came to form a distinct genre within Renaissance Italian literature. So join me next time and hear how Izzotta, Nogarotta, and others stood up for the sisters here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, All About Eve, the Defense of Women. In the previous episode, I talked about the way that humanists used their rhetorical skill to write showpiece letters with plenty of style but not much substance. But, of course, they did write about substantive questions sometimes. We've seen plenty of examples already, dialogues about ethics, treatises on the shortcomings of scholastic philosophy, meditations on the history of the Latin language itself. Another conventional topic within humanist literature was the virtue of women, or lack thereof. Actually, this genre of writing goes well back into the medieval age, as we saw in episode 293. Misogynist texts like the Romance of the Rose elicited defenses of women from the likes of Jean Lefebvre. Back in the 12th century, Peter Abelard had already stood up for the virtue and honor of women. This could be a rhetorical exercise, as is shown by the still earlier case of Mabaud of Rennes, who wrote two poems on the issue, one attacking women and one praising them. Most influential among Italian authors of the Renaissance was probably Boccaccio, thanks to his work On Famous Women, written in 1361. He helped inspire such works as In Praise of Women by Bartolomeo Goggio and Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, which mentions Boccaccio explicitly. When you look through catalogues of virtuous women, you see why it was a genre that would appeal to Renaissance humanists. They could show off their learning by recounting anecdotes about figures from the ancient world and from religious history. Under the latter heading, one of the most frequent names that arises is an African one, Nicola, also known as the Queen of Sheba. Occasionally, authors also take pride in the excellence of more recent ladies from the Italian aristocracy, all the better if they are from the author's own family. A related genre that offered some of the same attractions was the treatise on family life. This too had ancient roots, as a number of classical authors had written on what they called economics, that is, household management. Economics in this sense was a topic closely associated with women, since as Aristotle had made clear in his Ethics and Politics, running the household is the proper task of the wife. So it is that we see reflections on gender in a work like Francesco Barbaro's work On Marriage. This is a treatise about women that is unapologetically written for men, indeed for rich men, and above all for one rich man in particular, Lorenzo de' Medici. Barbaro advises Lorenzo on the criteria to be used in selecting a wife and the duties and appropriate comportment of the wife after marriage. Along the way, he invokes a wide range of classical authors and historical figures, and occasionally alludes to the more recent past including, naturally, a pre-eminent member of the Barbaro clan. But despite his tales of praiseworthy women, Barbaro is far from a feminist. To the contrary, he unwittingly shows us what women of the period were up against. For Barbaro, women are quite literally put on earth to love and serve men and to bear their children. Their comparative physical weakness is proof that Aristotle was right to say that their place is in the home, though Barbaro congratulates himself for being more moderate in his views than the ancient sophist Gorgias, who thought they should never be seen in public at all. Still, Barbaro warns that when they do go out, just enough to display their virtue, they should mostly remain silent. Good character can be shown by gesture and posture. In an echo of the ethical debates we've seen in other authors, Barbaro again takes what he would see as a middle path by accepting the importance of external goods while putting chief emphasis on virtue. Thus, it is a prospective wife's character that should concern a husband. On the other hand, beauty compliments virtue well, and nobility and wealth don't hurt either. It's an attitude summed up nicely in the remark of one Jacopo Morosini, who wrote of how grateful he was for his excellent wife, because of her admirable conduct and also for all the cash. Still, it would be absurd to take a wife just for her money, something Barbaro revealingly compares to picking out a helmet for its gold trim or a book for its decoration. It's hard to imagine examples more obviously chosen for a wealthy male readership. The virtue of one's wife is, however, not its own reward. The reason her character is important is that she needs to be able to run well. In this designated sphere of female activity, the wife has significant authority. Though she should, of course, obey her husband in all things, everyone else should obey her. She is to deal with the servants and oversee the household with strict vigilance, something for which Barbaro uses the platonic comparisons of the good statesman and pilot of a ship. This is a picture of the typical way of life for Italian women of the period, and it makes clear why these women saw a stark choice between family life and intellectual endeavor. In fact, Barbaro's own children faced that choice. His daughters received a humanist education and some, ironically enough, opted to avoid marriage by entering into the convent. His book also nicely illustrates the way humanists included ancient philosophical lore, right along with other classical sources, like works of history and epic poetry. It was especially Aristotle who inspired the default view of women among male authors, such as we find it in Barbaro and others who wrote on the topic of female virtue. On the Aristotelian view, women can indeed be good, even outstandingly good, but since women are inferior to men, their virtue should be exercised in the household and not in the public sphere of political life. In the politics, Aristotle justifies this attitude with the remark that women are defective in respect of their rational capacities. Barbaro and other humanists did emphasize the importance of love and friendship in marriage, but would have done so while recalling Aristotle's claim that there can be no perfect friendship between man and woman because of their inequality. Then too, Aristotle's works on animals can be read as saying that the birth of a female human or animal is a kind of failure, with only the male members of each species representing natural perfection. But this was of course a period during which the works of Plato were becoming better known, making him a second authority to rival Aristotle, and Plato had some very unerus Deutenum things to say about women. He is certainly capable of crude misogyny himself, as at the end of the Timaeus where he says that bad men are reincarnated as women, that his most famous treatment of the topic, and the one most frequently cited by renaissance authors comes in the Republic when he argues that the most talented women can do philosophy, should be involved in warfare, and ought to participate in ruling the best city. So this was an obvious classical source for authors who sought to defend women against misogyny. A perfect example comes in a text we've mentioned previously, Balthasar Castiglioni's Book of the Courtier. Its third part is devoted to a debate between two characters, a misogynist and an anti-misogynist. The anti-misogynist gets Plato about right by saying that he was no great friend of women, yet still allowed them to participate in warfare and politics. When the misogynist presents the Aristotelian view that women are naturally defective, like blind people or trees that bear no fruit, he is refuted on the ground that nature needs women for the sake of reproduction, so their birth can hardly be a matter of accidental misfiring. While Castiglioni includes a spirited defense of women in his dialogue, it is hard to see the text as unambiguously feminist. The most philosophically sophisticated of the characters remarks at the end of the debate that both protagonists have exaggerated, suggesting that Castiglioni himself adheres to the supposedly moderate view that women are often good, yet still less worthy than men. The perfect court lady, who is the mirror image of the ideal male courtier presented in the rest of the work, has the carefully constrained role we would predict, to run her household well and be modest and charming. For a bolder defense of women, we need to turn to authors who were, well, women. We've met one of them already, Isoata Nogarola, one of the three humanists we focused on in the previous episode. I saved her most remarkable work for now because it is precisely about the virtues of men and women, or rather about the vices of one particular man and one particular woman, this is a dialogue devoted to the sinfulness of Adam and Eve. It's another well-worn topic. Misogynists right back through the middle ages had delighted in blaming Eve for the sinful choice that first corrupted human nature. The usual response from anti-misogynists, which we actually find in Castiglione, is that if sin was introduced through Eve, it was repaired through another woman, Mary, through whom Christ was given to us. Nogarola has a different approach. Her two main characters are Isoata, that is the author herself, and her great friend Luluvico Foscarini. This may be a humanist dialogue, and a rather intimate one at that, offering testimony to one of her most important personal relationships. Yet, it also recalls a scholastic disputed question, which takes its departure from St. Augustine's claim that Adam and Eve sinned unequally according to their sexes, but equally in pride. The real Nogarola and Foscarini might in fact have debated the question in an open forum. I like to imagine Francesco Barbaro sitting at the back, frowning at this public display of feminine intelligence. At first glance though, Nogarola's way of defending Eve might warm the heart of the coldest misogynist. Her character takes the line that Eve's weakness as a woman, her inferior intellect and temperamental inconstancy, helps explain her sinful choice. As a man, Adam had no such excuse. Just as we should blame a nobleman more than a peasant for committing the same infraction, or an adult more than a child, so we should condemn Adam more than Eve. Ironically, Foscarini is thus put in the position of having to refute sexist assumptions about womanly frailty in order to blame Eve as he wants to. Though he doesn't go so far as to argue that Eve was equal to Adam, he thinks that her more modest natural gifts were sufficient to make her fully culpable. As he puts it, just as teeth were given to wild beasts, horns to oxen, feathers to birds for their survival, to the woman mental capacity was given sufficient for the preservation and pursuit of the health of her soul. But there is a more radical line of thought pursued by the character of Isocta in the dialogue, namely that Eve acted out of a natural desire for good. This comes dangerously close to excusing her sin completely, though of course Nogarola doesn't explicitly suggest that conclusion. And the same justification of Eve appears in another dialogue about women written in Italian by Modesta Pozzo de' Zorzi in 1592 on the eve of her death during childbirth. Taking the pen name of Moderata Fonte, she wrote a number of poems, a chivalric romance and this remarkable work called The Worth of Women. Unlike Nogarola's dialogue, this one would pass the modern-day Bechtel test. Are women depicted talking to one another about something besides a man? In fact, we get a large cast of characters, all of them female, explicitly reveling in their freedom as they sit together in a garden with no one to monitor their discussion. In fact, one of them says that this is the best thing about the garden, no men. That comment sets the tone for the work pretty well, as some of the characters enthusiastically praise women and complain about men who are seen as largely vicious and useless, so that one would be well advised not to marry them. When women do marry, it debases them because of their husband's natural inferiority. But this is the 16th century, don't Fonte's characters have to admit that women are subject to men? No, except in the sense that we are all subject to natural disasters. Men are in fact given to women by God as a spiritual trial. While it is true that there are worthy men, they are the exception. True, one can find accounts of great men and historians, but excellent men are mentioned in those chronicles simply because they were so rare. And it's also true that there are bad women, but they too are rare and have typically been corrupted by the wicked men in their families. Here, Fonte is implicitly critiquing the genre of famous women, established by Boccaccio. It is ridiculous to list cases of female virtue as if this were exceptional, when what is really exceptional is female vice. In the face of all this, other characters in the dialogue do put the case in favour of men and marriage. But it's pretty clear that Fonte's sympathies lie with the critics, who are more eloquent, wittier, and also more learned. Indeed, the second part of the work is given over to disquisitions on natural philosophy by these characters, meaning that almost half the work consists of digressions from its main topic. More relentless in its focus and bolder still in its argument is the most powerful treatise in defence of women written in our period, On the Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, composed by Lucrezia Marinella at the close of the 16th century. This is a straightforward essay, not a dialogue, though it responds to a separate misogynist work by Giuseppe Passi called The Defects of Women. In her lengthy rebuttal, Marinella adeptly turns her opponents' arguments against them. Confronted with insulting etymologies of words having to do with women, Marinella offers positive derivations instead. The Italian for lady, donna, comes from domina, a female lore, while femina relates to fetu, fetus. Marinella points to a similar connection in Plato's dialogue about etymology, the cratilis. Throughout antiquity and the middle ages, it had been argued that women are inferior to men because of their physical constitution, their bodies lacking the heat that makes men so vigorous. Marinella would have known such arguments quite well since her father was a doctor who had written on gynecology. She flips them on their head, arguing that in fact, men are excessively hot, which is why they are so unreliable. As she puts it, women are cooler than men and thus nobler, and if a man performs excellent deeds, it is because his nature is similar to a woman's, possessing temperate but not excessive heat. Even the fact that men are physically stronger than women, which Barbaro took to show that women ought to stay in the home, in fact shows that women are superior, being more delicate and gentle. After all, blacksmiths are not nobler than kings in men of science. Marinella takes the same approach of appropriating her enemies' weapons when it comes to her greatest foe, which is not really Passi, but rather Aristotle. More than any of the authors considered so far, she highlights the conflict between Plato and Aristotle on the subject of women, making her work another entry in the running dispute over the authority of these two figures. Marinella's sympathies lie squarely with Plato, and not only for his recommendations about female political participation. She also thinks, speaking of participation, that the Platonist theory of forms supports her case. Women are beautiful and thereby come closer to instantiating the perfection of the forms. In the course of this innovative application of Platonist metaphysics to the battle of the sexes, Marinella cites a range of authorities including Plotinus, Ficino, and more unexpectedly, Petrarch, who had compared his beloved Laura to an ideal of perfection. Women perform a valuable service for men because their physical beauty is like a step on a ladder that leads to the divine realm of forms, as described by Plato in his Symposium. Whereas, she says, compared to women, all men are ugly. They would not be loved by women were it not for our courteous and benign natures. As for Aristotle, he was a fearful tyrannical man, where Plato was truly great and just. Like other misogynist authors, Aristotle suffered from envy, anger, and even intellectual limitations, having no rational basis for his views. Again, this reverses a standard trope used against women. For Marinella, it is actually men who are prey to their emotions and shaky reasoning. She knows Aristotle well enough to use his ideas in her own cause too. She sounds like a scholastic logician when she chastises Passi for legitimately drawing a universal conclusion about female wickedness from a few particular examples. She points out that in Aristotelian science, women cannot really be naturally defective since they are actually more numerous than men, and nature doesn't fail more often than it succeeds. And she accepts Aristotle's definitions of the virtues, the better to show that women more commonly satisfy these definitions. She also reflects on the way women were excluded from learning more about such philosophical ideas, something that, by the way, is well illustrated by the life story of Morarata Fonte, who had to get her brother to repeat his lessons to her after coming home from school. Marinella suspects that this sort of unfair treatment is, again, caused by envy and fear of female superiority. Man does not permit women to apply herself to such studies, fearing with reason that she will surpass him in them. This is stirring stuff, and perhaps more committed in its polemic than what we find in Fonte's worth of women. Admittedly, Fonte's characters do make strident remarks on behalf of women. In fact, one of them says almost the same thing we just found in Marinella, we have just as much right to speak about scientific subjects as they have, and if we were educated properly as girls, we'd outstrip men's performance in any science or art you care to name. But by depicting her more feminist characters in conversation with other women, who are more restrained in their views, Fonte is in theory remaining silent about her own position. Perhaps she is, like Castiglione, less radical than her most radical characters. Moreover, she seems to have a rather ironic attitude towards the whole debate, indeed the whole genre of writing about women's vices and virtues. I already mentioned her undercutting of the catalogues of outstanding female virtue. A similar effect is created when the discussions of scientific matters included in the second part of the dialogue are routinely interrupted by a character named Leonora. She wants to get back to complaining about men. At first this seems like a mere running gag, or perhaps a jocular anticipation of what the frustrated reader may be thinking. But it may be a more serious indication of Fonte's own frustrations with the putative topic of her treatise. Why should she always write about women and their conflict with men just because she is a woman? As one character says in justification of the scientific digressions, it's good for us to learn about these things so we can look after ourselves without needing help from men. With the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, we've come to the dawn of the 17th century. In fact, Marinella lived into the middle of that century, dying in 1653. And we could continue with today's topic by examining the Venetian author Archangela Tarabotti, who died one year earlier and wrote a work on the tyrannical practice of enclosing women, and yet another response to misogynist satires. But we'll have to leave her for another time, because we still have plenty of philosophy from 15th and 16th century Italy to discuss. So far, we've really only talked about one intellectual movement from that context, namely humanism. But if humanism was, as I suggested last time, the kind of gateway drug to ancient philosophy, we haven't yet gotten to the hardcore users. None of them was more intoxicated than Marsilio Ficino, just one of the men, and as we just saw with Lucrezia Marinella, women, who took a vivid interest in Plato. So, form the intention to join me next time as we enter into dialogue about Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I'd like to thank the Academy. Florentine Platonism. When I was younger, by which I mean before I did the research to write this episode, I always used to think that the ideal life was the one enjoyed by Marsilio Ficino. Admittedly, living in the 15th century as he did, he would have lacked access to indoor plumbing, modern dentistry and almond croissants, the consumption of which makes the need for dentistry all the more urgent. But apart from that, he had it made. His patron Lorenzo de' Medici gave him a country house in Carreggi, just north of Florence. In this pleasant Tuscan setting, he could while away the hours reading and translating Plato and the works of the Neo-Platonists with his friends and students, who, we are told, formed something like a new academy. Now I am older and wiser though, and realize that Ficino's situation may have been less enviable. He was as often out of favor with Lorenzo as in favor. And it turns out that like reports of Mark Twain's death, and everything Donald Trump has said about himself since he was four years old, the stories of the Florentine Academy are greatly exaggerated. Then perhaps most decisively, proximity to power in Renaissance Florence was actually pretty dangerous, as shown by the events of April 26th 1478. Encouraged by the Pope, the Pazzi family conspired to murder Lorenzo, trying to stab him to death while he was attending church. Lorenzo was wounded but made a narrow escape and lived to offer patronage another day. Indeed, this event incidentally highlights the close connections of the Medici to the humanists they sponsored. One of the movement's greatest exponents, Angelo Poliziano, was standing right near Lorenzo during the assassination attempt, and one of the conspirators was Poggio Bracciolini's son Jacopo. Along with their patronage of artists like Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Botticelli, the Medici's sponsoring of humanist scholarship continues to burnish their reputation to the present day. It is thanks to the Medici that we associate Renaissance philosophy more with Florence than with any other city, and the intellectual tradition we associate most strongly with Florentine philosophy is Platonism. This is for good reason, since Marsilio Ficino, who did more than anyone else in the Renaissance to revive the study of Plato, was indeed close to both Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici. Did Cosimo and Lorenzo also have good reason for supporting the intellectual activity of men like Marsilio? Was their interest in philosophy and humanist book culture a disinterested, purely intellectual enterprise, or did a political motive lurk in the background? To answer this question, we need to look briefly at the way that the Medici exerted control over their city. Their period of dominance began in 1434, after Cosimo returned triumphantly from political exile. The preceding decades had been difficult ones for Florence, the plague had struck seven times since its first arrival in 1350, and wars against Naples and Milan had been a drain on the city's resources, both human and financial. Yet Florence remained prosperous, thanks to its silk industry and skilled craftsmen, and no one enjoyed the fruits of prosperity more than the Medici, who parlayed fabulous wealth built up through banking into a network of clients and allies. At no point did Cosimo, his son Piero, who was head of the family for only a few years, or his grandson Lorenzo hold an official position of monarchial rule in the city. They did not need to, because the theoretically republican political system of Florence was in fact subject to their control. The Medici pretended not to be autocrats, as when Cosimo wrote to the Pope to plead that as a mere private citizen he could not pledge Florence's support for a crusade on behalf of Constantinople against the Turks. But in fact, he was king in everything but name, as remarked by that unsentimental observer of political life, Ennio Silvio Piccolomini. You might remember him from episode 333, he was the one who wrote the treatise on the misery of courtiers. The Medici displayed their wealth, while cementing their claim to legitimacy through their patronage of art, architectural monuments, and classical learning. Though they didn't come right out and say so, it's pretty obvious why they might have found Plato in particular to be a congenial classical authority. In his Republic and his Laws, which perhaps not coincidentally was the first Platonic dialogue Lorenzo asked Piccino to translate into Latin, Plato prescribed a top-down political structure in which wise rulers devised the best policies for the unity and prosperity of a city-state. Harking back to Plato and to George Gumistos Platon's political theories, which were themselves inspired by the Republic, the humanists praised the Medici as philosopher rulers, if not philosopher kings, eminent in their virtue and wisdom as well as their power. Already Leonardo Bruni made this connection when he translated the Platonic letters into Latin and wrote to Cosimo to urge that he heed the advice given in them. Piccino, for one, thought the message got through. He wrote, Plato showed me the concept of the virtues but once, Cosimo put them into practice every day. And Poliziano, in the preface of his translation of Plato's Carmadys, said to Lorenzo, you alone of the whole universe of men both rule the Republic wisely and recall philosophy home from long exile. None of which is to say that Florence had a monopoly on humanism or on the study of Plato. Francesco Fillelfo, another translator of Plato, was a staunch opponent of the Medici and wound up as a courtier in Milan. That city competed with Florence for philosophical laurels, which is why the Duke Visconti took the trouble to entice the Greek scholar Cresolorus to move to Milan from Florence. With the help of Uberto de Cembrio, Cresolorus produced a Latin version of Plato's Republic that was supposedly requested by the Duke himself and was hailed as a confirmation of the perfection of the Milanese constitution. De Cembrio's son, Pier Candido, was also a distinguished humanist who continued the study of Plato in Milan, producing a new version of the Republic and defending this text from charges of immorality levelled because of its teachings on such subjects as the common sharing of sexual partners amongst the ruling guardian class. But there's no gainsaying Florence's position as the main center of Platonic studies if only thanks to Marsilio Ficino. His complete Latin version of the dialogues appeared in 1484, followed by commentaries on the most important dialogues in 1496. He also translated other Platonist authors, notably Plotinus, and produced a major treatise called the Platonic Theology. Effectively Ficino was a one-man revival of late ancient Platonism, though he can't take sole credit for the blossoming of this tradition in Florence. Apart from Bruni, we can recall the name of the Byzantine émigré John Argyropoulos, who lectured on Greek at the University of Florence beginning in 1458. His teaching activity has been linked to the fact that, as Ficino put it, the spirit of Plato flew to Italy from Byzantium. This is certainly what Donato Acheole thought. Acheole, whom we already met as the author of a commentary on Aristotle's Ethics that drew on Argyropoulos, said of him, he has diligently opened up Plato's beliefs to the great wonder of those who hear him lecture. But modern-day scholars don't agree about the depth of Argyropoulos' interest in or commitment to Platonism. He may have been more interested in presenting a more systematic approach to Aristotle. Another candidate for inspiring the interest in Platonism is Cristoforo Landino, who began as a lecturer at the University of Florence at the same time as Argyropoulos. His specialty was actually rhetoric and poetry, but he discovered Platonic themes hidden in the poetry of authors from Homer to Dante. It has been remarked that he lectured on philosophers as if they were poets and on poets as if they were philosophers. This brings us to a key question about the study of Plato at Florence. Was the approach that humanists took to the dialogues and later works of Platonist philosophy really all that philosophical? Or was it more a matter of rhetoric and literary appreciation, since Plato's Greek was considered a paradigm of good style, as it had already been in Byzantium? Here it is usual, and to some extent helpful, to contrast Marsilio Ficino to the aforementioned Angelo Poliziano, whose name by the way is sometimes anglicized as Polition. This contrast should not be overdrawn, though. Ficino was certainly an expert philologist and frequently made textual and terminological observations on the dialogues he translated, while Poliziano certainly had philosophical interests. But it would be nonetheless fair to say that Platonist philosophy was Ficino's true calling, whereas the core activity of Poliziano was that of the philologist. We can make that second claim with some confidence, since Poliziano said it about himself. Already before him, Landino had explicitly distanced himself from the title of philosopher in his inaugural lecture, saying, when I have so much difficulty protecting my own territory, would I dare launch a reckless assault on others? Similarly, in a witty and entertaining treatise entitled La Mia, Poliziano says that he would certainly not be ashamed to call himself philosopher, but admits that it is not really a name he merits. For him, Plato has best explained the nature of the true philosopher, a figure who thinks of death constantly even in life and relentlessly pursues virtue. Poliziano modestly allows, I have only barely come in contact with those disciplines that mark the philosopher's competence, and I am just about as far as can be from those morals and virtues. But this is, to use a term that has somehow crept into the English language while I wasn't looking, a case of humble bragging. Poliziano disclaims the status of philosopher so that he can claim a status he cherishes more, that of the scholar or philologist, or as he puts it in Latin, grammaticus. His use of this word is apt to mislead, as it makes Poliziano sound like a mere schoolteacher. He refers to the late ancient Christian commentator John Philoponus as an illustrious predecessor, since Philoponus was nicknamed the grammarian. But this is rather ironic, because Philoponus's bitter enemy Simplicius had applied that label to him precisely in order to sneer at his lack of philosophical expertise. For Simplicius, being a grammarian really did just mean teaching children their letters. For Poliziano though, it is a much more exalted occupation, one that calls for expertise on philosophical texts and much more besides. A grammaticus should work with texts of all kinds. The true philologist is the scholar who, in the words of modern day interpreter Christopher Celenza, has the breadth of vision suitable to confront human intellectual activity in all of its variety. Poliziano's Lamia is a defense of this approach from certain unnamed critics, colleagues at the University of Florence, hence the title. He compares these critics to the bloodsucking sorceresses called Lamia mentioned by ancient authors like Ovid. Poliziano's backbiting rivals are contemptuous of him because they think him incompetent to teach philosophy, as he's been doing at the university. Poliziano's response is that his comprehensive mastery of antiquity includes an understanding of the texts he's been lecturing on. As he says, I am an interpreter of Aristotle, not a philosopher. While he professes to admire those who do earn the title of philosopher, it's clear why he might want to distance himself from that title. As he understands it, philosophers are not scholars immersed in texts, but rather otherworldly figures. Evoking a portrait of the philosophical life drawn by Socrates in Plato's Theaetetus, Poliziano speaks of the philosopher as being at a loss when it comes to the practicalities of everyday life. In particular, he's politically adrift. He doesn't know how to get to the forum, and doesn't even know where the Senate meets. There's more irony here, since some contemporaries saw Poliziano himself as an out-of-touch pedant. Between him and Bartolomeo Scala, who rose to the powerful office of chancellor in Florence, there raged one of those feuds that have become one of the more familiar and, if we're honest, entertaining features of Italian humanism. Scala mocked Poliziano for his concern with such trivia as whether the first vowel in the name Virgil should be an I or an E. The practically and politically minded Scala much preferred the work of earlier humanists like Salutati and Poggio. And there's no denying that Poliziano was a master of philological minutiae and also a book lover, quite literally, according to an admiring biography of him written in the late 15th century, which describes him waking up in the middle of the night and stroking the volumes on his shelves like a wife and a girlfriend. Unlike the earlier Salutati and Poggio, he entered the field of philology when it was already highly developed and was producing learned commentaries on classical texts where any originality the commentator might have was typically drowned in a sea of detailed textual remarks. As Anthony Grafton has put it in a study of Poliziano, in such texts waves of notes printed in minute type break on all sides of a small island of text, that is, the text being commented upon. Poliziano broke with his tradition by collecting his miscellaneous learned remarks so as to highlight his own perspicacity as a textual critic. My favorite of the details he brought to light is, inevitably, his point that the ancient Latin word camelo pardis is the same in meaning as the 15th century girafa, a loanword from Arabic. That, by the way, is not the only giraffe that lopes into our story. One contemporary witness records that Lorenzo de' Medici received one as a gift from the Sultan of Babylon. Like that remarkable livestock shipment, bettering the achievements of the earlier humanists was going to be a tall order. But Poliziano achieved it by adopting a new, more historically grounded approach to philology. Whereas some measured all Latin prose against the standards set by Cicero, he realized that individual authors have their own styles and that good style also changes over time. For this reason, he was not that impressed by the theory of literary aesthetics he found in Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle believed that all good drama should conform to certain universal rules, Poliziano was more interested in the distinctive goals pursued by each poet. And his approach yielded other insights that are still applied by philologists. In fact, some of them came up in that interview we did with Oliver Primavesi about Byzantine manuscripts. In particular, Poliziano realized that if one manuscript can be shown to have been copied from another, then the copy adds no additional information, and the same when it comes to historical narratives. In both cases, only independent evidence should be taken into account. Or as Poliziano put it, the testimonies of the ancients should not be so much counted up as weighed. If Poliziano was Florence's greatest philosophically minded philologist, then Ficino was its greatest philologically minded philosopher. From early on in his career, he was distancing himself from a rhetorical approach and adopting a philosophical one. As a young man, he wrote to a friend, let us speak in the manner of philosophers, despising everywhere words and bringing forth weighty utterances. Perhaps taking a cue from Socrates in platonic dialogues like the Gorgias and Protagoras in which sophists are mocked for offering long speeches aiming at persuasion, rather than straightforward statements aiming at truth, Ficino complained that philology too often meant speaking at undue superfluous length. One reason he admired the neo-Platonist Plotinus, to whose works he devoted so much effort, was that Plotinus instead used a compressed, extremely brief style, which is certainly an accurate assessment. What of Plato himself, whose works are far more readable than those of Plotinus? Well, the dialogues adopt a more complex approach to philosophical discourse in which Plato's own views are rarely put forth. Only in a few texts, like the Laws, does Ficino think this happens. Usually the characters in the dialogues represent multiple points of view and express theories that may be only probable being like the truth rather than necessarily the truth itself. We'll look more at Ficino's work on Plato in the next episode. For now let's return to the context that made that work possible. Did Cosimo really arrange for the foundation of a new academy in the suburbs of Florence, where Ficino could immerse himself in Platonic scholarship? In a word, no. At least, that is the conclusion persuasively established by James Hankins, who in a pair of articles published back in the early 1990s poured cold water on the story of the Florentine Academy. For one thing, as Hankins nicely put it, it is highly improbable that the aged Cosimo would have entrusted a dreamy 29 year old medical school dropout with a major cultural initiative. For another thing, not a single contemporary source, apart from Ficino, speaks of such an institution. This despite the fact that humanists were falling over themselves to praise Cosimo for his support of humanist culture. When Poliziano and others do praise the Medici, what they especially highlight is their extravagance in paying for those luxury items that kept the humanists awake at night, books. And it's this, according to Hankins, that lies behind a famous passage in which Ficino seems to say that Cosimo, having been inspired by an encounter with Emistos Plithon, was moved to set up a so-called academy. As we know, Plithon did attend the Ecumenical Church Council at Florence. It was in fact a major diplomatic coup for the Medici that they got the council to be held in their city. But it seems most likely that Ficino is metaphorically explaining that Cosimo acquired a copy of Plato's dialogues based on a manuscript brought to Italy by Plithon. When Ficino goes on to say that Cosimo conceived deep in his mind a kind of academy and charged Ficino himself with bringing that project to its fruition, the word academy is another metaphor referring to a Latin version of Plato's writings. Likewise, when Ficino alludes in various places to his colleagues as academics, he seems to mean not members of an institution based in his house at Carreggi, but simply fellow humanists and students, to whom he offered private instruction in the urban setting of Florence itself. So that's kind of disappointing, but it should not detract from our excitement at Ficino's achievement. Even if he did consult previous translations for some dialogues, it was a staggering feat to render all of Plato, plus a wide swathe of Neoplatonism from Greek into Latin. The right reaction is the one displayed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Ficino tells us himself that Pico came to Florence at Cosimo de' Medici's behest and arrived on the very day that Ficino's Plato edition was published. The two celebrated this historic literary event, and then Pico advised Ficino to get to work on Plotinus. In due course, Pico too would become an intimate of the Medici. He was in attendance at the deathbed of Lorenzo, who showed his zeal for patronage to the last, supposedly remarking to Pico, I only wish I could put off the time of my death to the day when I should have completed your library. Pico was cherished by Ficino and also by Poliziano, who extolled him as a truly complete humanist scholar. It's hard not to agree. In addition to studying the Platonist literature made available by Ficino and writing a text called On Being a Unity at the behest of Poliziano, who wanted him to evaluate the relative merits of Platonism and Aristotelianism, Pico also learned Hebrew and studied the Kabbalah, learned Arabic and studied a Varroist Aristotelian philosophy, got involved in a celebrated argument over the importance of style and philosophy, and monumentally annoyed the Pope by persistently defending theses that the Church thought might be heretical, but got away with it in the end. Maybe I should instead have been fantasizing about being Pico all these years. But let's not give up on Ficino just yet, since we still have to look properly at the ideas he extracted from his study of Plato, Plotinus, and later Neoplatonists, and see how he embraced frankly pagan ideas with an enthusiasm not seen since Platon. This embrace was of course a purely Platonic relationship, as we'll see next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Footnotes to Plato, Marsilio Ficino. When I started talking about Plato back on episode 18 of this podcast, I mentioned Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that, the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I can just about go along with that, with the proviso that a good footnote, like an empty pepper mill, is nothing to sneeze at. Back when I was a grad student I found myself in the library one day and realized that I was scanning through an article more or less ignoring the main text and reading only the footnotes. This I thought must be some kind of milestone in my scholarly formation, for better or worse. And since those early podcasts on Plato, we've seen time and again that glosses, commentaries, and other exegetical labours have played a central role in the history of philosophy, inside and outside the European tradition. So I mean it as the highest of compliments when I say that no one has written greater footnotes to Plato than Marsilio Ficino. Well not footnotes exactly, but full blown commentaries, which Ficino produced in addition to his full Latin translation of Plato's dialogues. As we saw last time, Ficino tells us himself that this prodigious feat of scholarship was done at the behest of the Medici. He even read from his translations of Plato to Cosimo de' Medici while the latter lay on his deathbed. That was in 1464, the year after Cosimo's gift to Ficino of a villa on the outskirts of Florence. Petty stuff for a young scholar who was still in his early 30s, having been born in 1433. Originally, he planned to become a doctor like his father before him, and Ficino never entirely lost his interest in medicine. Indeed, no less an authority than Paracelsus wrote in 1527 that just as Avicenna was the greatest of the Arab doctors, so Ficino was the greatest among the Italians. But Platonism was always at the core of his scholarly career, from the moment he received the Plato manuscript from Cosimo, to the completion of his Latin version of the dialogues in 1468, to his translation and commentary on Plotinus in 1492, and finally the appearance of his commentaries on Plato in 1496. He thus came along at the right time to become one of the first intellectuals whose works could be read across Europe in printed editions. His own complete works and his Latin Plato would both be printed numerous times in the coming centuries. Ficino was also a devout Christian, who was ordained a priest in 1473 and became a canon of the Florence Cathedral in 1487. He saw, or claimed to see, no conflict between his devotion to the faith and his devotion to pagan Platonist texts. To the contrary, he believed that Platonism was part of God's plan for humankind. In a work called On the Christian Religion, he argued that late ancient Platonists, pagan though they may have been, were actually influenced by Christian ideas in their interpretation of Plato. But not all Ficino's readers were persuaded of the coherence of these two traditions. Michael Allen, a leading scholar of Ficino's thought, has written that Ficino spent his whole Neoplatonizing life on the very borders of heterodoxy. He came closest to stepping over the borders when he wrote a work about the arts of extending one's life, whether Neoplatonizing or otherwise. The three books on life, which we'll discuss in greater detail in a future episode, got him in trouble with the Church authorities because of its talk of magic and astrology. But he was acquitted by the Pope in 1490. He died in 1499 at the age of 66, which is not particularly impressive as proof of his skill in increasing longevity, but would probably have pleased Ficino no end for numerological reasons. Indeed, his commentaries on Plato, deeply influenced as they are by late ancient authors, explore Pythagorean numerology, demonology, magic, and astrology, as well as a wide range of issues within Plato's metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and psychology. Actually, let's not put it that way. It would be better to emphasize that Ficino saw no divide between the Pythagorean and occult side of Platonism and the philosophical questions that occupy the attention of most Plato scholars today. He had good reason for this attitude. When discussing demonology, he could point to Socrates' famous divine sign, which warned him away from ill-omened actions, and he could find numerology in dialogues like Plato's Timaeus. In fact, he saw Plato as the last of six great sages, the number six being of course particularly significant to him, on a list that also included Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus, Aglophamus, no me neither, and of course Pythagoras himself. Again, we may raise our eyebrows at this ostentatiously non-Christian roster of authorities, but Ficino was at pains to connect his heroes to religion where he could, as when he argued that the wise men who attended upon Christ's birth were disciples of Zoroaster. Among Ficino's many numerological indulgences, none is more prominent than his fivefold analysis of God and the created universe. He is here drawing on the third century Neoplatonist Plotinus, who had set forth a hierarchical vision in which a perfectly simple first principle, the One, emanated a universal intellect, followed by soul, and then finally the material world in which we find ourselves. Ficino's scheme is very similar, but more precise about the exact number of levels, namely five, God, Angel, Soul, Quality, and Matter. The great modern-day scholar of Renaissance thought, Paul Oscar Costeller, believed that Ficino went out of his way to modify Plotinus so as to put soul right in the middle of the hierarchy. This would emphasize the soul's function of mediating between the intelligible and sensible realms. Subsequently though, the aforementioned Michael Allen discovered that Ficino was actually led to his fivefold scheme by reading late ancient commentaries on Plato's Parmenides. These commentaries link a succession of five arguments in that dialogue to the layers of a fivefold version of the Neoplatonic hierarchy and Ficino simply followed suit. Nonetheless, as Allen would readily admit, it was indeed vitally important to Ficino that the soul occupied the middle place in his scheme. He says of the soul that it is nature's center, the mean of everything in the universe, the knot and bond of the world. This remark is found in his magnum opus, a sprawling work in 18 books that takes up no fewer than six volumes in a modern edition and translation. It is called the Platonic Theology, a title that, tellingly enough, echoes that of a major work by Proclus. Where Proclus' Platonic Theology was a systematic attempt to show how pagan religious beliefs could be connected to Plato's dialogues, Ficino's is mostly focused on a single philosophical claim, the rational human soul is immortal. Reading through it, you might be convinced that Ficino himself must have been immortal in order to find time to devise so many arguments for this conclusion. He also finds time to lay out his five-fold scheme, talk about God's nature, and refute the views of Epicureans and Averroists, two groups that attract his particular enmity. Though the Neoplatonic basis of Ficino's cosmic vision is evident, closer inspection reveals that he's also drawing on Scholastic philosophers, especially Thomas Aquinas. From the Scholastic tradition, he takes, for instance, a theory of transcendentals, that goodness, unity, truth, beauty, and so on are all coextensive and appear in God in their purest form. He also makes use of such conceptual items as the distinction between essence and existence, originally devised by Avicenna but also fundamental to Aquinas' metaphysics, and the pairing of intellect and will which had played such a central role in Scholastic psychological theories. When push comes to shove though, he usually goes with the ancient Platonists. For instance, he interprets humankind's status as an image of God in strictly Platonic terms, we participate in his goodness, unity, and so on, rather than stressing, as medieval Scholastics did, that the gift of grace is required to be a true image of God. We can observe something similar with his handling of angels, which as already mentioned are at the level occupied by intellect in Plotinus. Ficino has some trouble drawing this equivalence. The Neoplatonic intellect is a single mind that eternally graphs the Platonic forms. By contrast, of course, Christian theology recognizes many angels, and when it recognizes intelligible forms, usually makes them thoughts in God's own mind. One idea which we see in the medieval tradition as early as the 9th century Platonist thinker Eriugena would be to equate the forms with the second person of the divine trinity. Ficino sometimes speaks this way too, but he is also attracted by the idea that God transcends intellectual life completely, which he sees as the unanimous teaching of the whole ancient Platonist tradition. That would leave angels to be the only pure minds, like many beings, each of which plays the role of Plotinus' single, universal intellect. And this is pretty much what we get in Ficino's Platonic theology. His angels are thus like a heavily Neoplatonic updating of the intellect of entities envisioned by say Aquinas, but they no longer play the role of serving as messengers between God and the created world, which was really the main function of angels in most medieval theories about them. That dynamic, intermediary role is instead played by the human soul. It reaches down to the body, giving it life, but also reaches up to the divine, at its best even attaining something like the intellectual understanding of an angel. Like Plotinus, Ficino exhorts the soul to turn away from the body and its concerns. We achieve knowledge not so much by studying the natural world, as by learning to avoid its distractions. Some more materialist philosophers would deny this. These would especially include the Epicureans. As we saw in a previous installment, early on in his career, Ficino was enamored of Lucretius and Epicurus, but he turned against them, destroying an early work of his devoted to Epicurean thought. Here in the Platonic theology, they appear only as opponents to be refuted, who can offer no cogent argument for their physicalist view of human nature. Against their down-to-earth, empiricist theory of knowledge, Ficino argues that the soul has many functions it performs without sensation. He also offers the occasional picturesque image to encourage us to lift our minds. The soul that takes itself for a body, he says, is like a child looking down a well and thinking that he is the reflection he sees at the bottom. The intermediate position of soul exemplifies a favorite type of argument found throughout the Platonic theology. It's a line of thought taken especially from Proclus, who in turn got it from Iamblichus, who in turn was inspired by the mathematical musings of Pythagoreanism. It's appropriate that the argument came to Ficino through a chain of authorities, since it has to do precisely with the continuity of the metaphysical chain that holds the whole universe together. A basic assumption of their late Neoplatonism is that, between any two extreme terms, there must be a mean term. In arithmetic, this would be something like 4 as a mean between 2 and 6. In metaphysics, it demands that two kinds of being that are sufficiently dissimilar will have in between them another kind of being that is similar to both. Thus, we need to have angels between God and the soul because God is unchanging unity while soul is changing plurality, because soul moves from one thought to another. Angels mediate between the two, since they are unchanging like God but plural like the soul. The same style of reasoning can be used to establish the need for soul. Angels, as just mentioned, are unchanging. They never alter in their nature nor in their activity but just permanently engage in thought, like Plotinus' universal intellect or, for that matter, the divine celestial movers, recognized in Aristotle's cosmology. They are thus above soul, which again does change as it thinks about one thing and then another. But soul is like angels in that it does not change in its very nature or essence. So it is a mean term between angelic nature and quality, which is subject to change in every respect. Here we might think of the way that qualities such as heat or colour become more or less intense and disappear altogether. As a bonus, this gives Ficino one of his many arguments for soul's immortality, it cannot be destroyed, since its immunity to destruction is precisely what makes it superior to quality and a suitable intermediary between quality and angels. Indeed, as already mentioned, soul is the ultimate mean, the intermediary that binds together the whole universe. Though that line of argument probably strikes you as pretty abstract if not arbitrary, it brings us to the very heart of Ficino's psychology. Almost everything he says about the soul can be related to its function as a mean term. Take for instance its relationship to body, which as we know is just matter that has qualitative properties like colour and heat. For starters, we know that the soul can't be in the body like quality is, dispersed through the body's parts as one patch of colour is on a giraffe's neck and another on its rump. Instead, the soul is fully present in the whole body, yet it is indeed in or related to a body, unlike an angel. So again, it plays a role halfway between the roles of the angel and quality. Or consider the fact that your soul can make your body move, as when you leap aside to avoid a charging giraffe. The reason your soul can do this is that it too is moving or changing. As we saw, this is what makes it inferior to an angel, which can cause motion too, but not by moving. The soul passes its immaterial motion onto the material body, an idea that can be found in dialogues of Plato like the Phaedrus, which famously establishes the need for soul as a self-moving principle that causes other motions. Here we might actually want to turn briefly away from the Platonic theology to Ficino's commentary on that dialogue, the Phaedrus. This dialogue features a famous image of the soul as a charioteer, steering two horses, a white horse, representing reason, and a black one, representing imagination and lower nature, at least on Ficino's interpretation. Ficino does not see the black horse as bad exactly, since he thinks that desire and imagination can be put to good use to orient ourselves towards God. But he follows Plato's mythic narrative by exhorting us to pull the soul upwards into the heavens until it partakes of the unchanging, perfect intellectual contemplation enjoyed by angels. This by the way is something you won't find real horses or even giraffes doing. Beasts have no rational soul, so they lack many of the features that make soul similar to angelic nature. Thus animals will enjoy no afterlife. The functions of our own souls that we share in common with animals like sensation and bodily desire will likewise die along with our bodies. The human soul is then special in its ability to survive death. But what about birth? Plato and his late ancient followers were very clear that our souls have existed already before we came into our bodies. This was problematic from a Christian point of view. And still worse, Ficino could read the Pythagoreans and Plato saying that the soul may previously have been in other bodies, even the bodies of animals, and that if we live badly we will be reborn the next time as beasts. This must have been rather embarrassing for Ficino, but to his credit, he does not try to hide the Platonic teaching. He mentions the theory of reincarnation, but dismisses it as merely poetical and not philosophical, a kind of metaphor in which life in an animal body represents living as if one were a beast. As for soul's existence before birth, Ficino rejects this outright. If souls found themselves in a state of complete freedom, they would never be willing to enter into bodies in the first place. He has to walk a tightrope here, insisting that the soul's nature means that it can never stop existing even though it started existing. His idea is that soul can, so to speak, keep itself existing under its own steam. Its capacity for self-motion is a sign of this, and as a pure form it has no potentiality for being destroyed or for that matter generated out of matter, yet soul is not self-causing. Though it is not generated, it is indeed created, meaning that it acquires existence from some other source, namely God, who creates it without creating it from matter. You might notice that I keep going back and forth here between talking about soul and souls, leaving some unclarity as to whether I am talking about a single principle that is part of a cosmic hierarchy or many life-giving principles that belong to individual humans. That's a habit Ficino has himself, but he came by it honestly, since Plotinus does the same thing. Ficino's more careful formulations show that the single universal soul is simply that of the physical cosmos, the famous world soul introduced by Plato in the Timaeus. While Ficino is happy to accept this doctrine, he firmly rejects what may look at first like a similar idea, which is that there is a single mind shared by all humans. This of course is the theory of Averroes that caused so much trouble back in the 13th century. At that time, radical Aristotelians like Boethius of Dacia and Sigé of Brabantse at Paris flirted with following Averroes on its score, and also on the eternity of the world. Thomas Aquinas attacked them, calling them Averroes, and as you may recall there is a scholarly debate today as to whether the phrase Latin Averroes can accurately be applied to those Parisian arts masters. Soon enough, we'll be seeing that the Italian Renaissance had its own Averroes. This explains why Ficino is so keen to criticize their position, even though Averroes himself is sometimes cited with approval in this very same work. Ficino devotes an entire book of to refuting the claim that all humans share a single mind, dutifully explaining the theory and its justification before burying it under a barrage of counterarguments and objections. He's less keen than Aquinas had been to show in detail that Averroes had Aristotle wrong. Instead he argues on abstract philosophical grounds that there can be no universal potential intellect that receives ideas from a single actual intellect, as Averroes supposed, because mind cannot be pure potency. One of the reasons Averroes thought that there could be only one intellect is that intellect has no matter, and matter is needed to distinguish one thing from another. The fact that Hiawatha and Harold are two giraffes is not due to the universal nature of giraffe, which they share, but the difference between the two parcels of matter that make up their bodies. That line of thought had been difficult for Aquinas to rebut, since he also thought that matter or potentiality is what makes things individuals. But Ficino waves it away dismissively. God can simply create individual minds as distinct from one another. Relatedly, Averroes supposed that since intellect is just the same as whatever it thinks about, and there's only one set of universal forms, there can only be one intellect. To this, Ficino replies that the human mind is not actually grasping intelligible forms in themselves. As a good Neoplatonist, he would locate the forms higher in the system, above rational souls. So what the souls get is only a kind of representation or image of the true forms. Yet again, Ficino here exploits the soul's intermediate status, since he can say that forms in the human mind are in the middle between the transcendent, intelligible forms posited by Plato and the immanent forms found in matter. Ficino's furious rejection of the Averroes theory of mind may suggest that, like George Gumistos Platon before him, his enthusiasm for Platonism led him into antipathy towards Aristotelianism. But actually, he does not follow Platon's harsh criticisms of Aristotle. If anything, he was critical of Platon himself, as we can see from a few notes he made in a text containing Platon's works. Though Ficino was willing to stand up for Plato when Aristotle criticized him explicitly, he was not out to emphasize the differences between the two great authorities. On a matter of soul, for instance, he distanced Aristotle from Averroes by claiming that for Aristotle, the individual rational soul does survive the death of the body, something ruled out by the absurd theory of a single mind put forward by Averroes. And that's typical of Ficino, who had no real stake in attacking Aristotle and reserved his ire for contemporaries in Italy whose enthusiasm for Averroes led them into heretical falsehoods. Which brings us back to the question of Ficino's own orthodoxy. We already saw that he was accused of heresy but cleared of all charges by the Pavese, and he even wound up shaping Church doctrine when his arguments in favour of the soul's immortality led to this being declared as official dogma in 1513. Of course, Ficino was dead by then, but if the soul really is immortal, he still had a chance to be pleased by the decision. Even in life, he believed, or spoke as if he believed, that Platonism could lend support to Christian faith. The anecdote of his reading Plato to the dying Cosimo illustrates the point well. Ficino claims that his patron died straight away, as if impatient to go to the blessed afterlife affirmed by Plato. In his summary of Plato's Phaedo, the dialogue that depicts the last hours and courageous death of Socrates, Ficino remarked that, Socrates' life is a kind of image of the Christian life or its shadow. Of course, he was well aware of the pagan content in some of his favourite sources, like Eamblichus of Proclus, but he did his best to rationalize these features of the texts, fulfilling his promise in the prologue of the Platonic theology to set forth Platonist arguments insofar as they agree with true religion. Confronted with Proclus' particularly baroque version of the Neoplatonic system, designed to make room for the many pagan deities within the hierarchy, Ficino managed a feat of reverse engineering, assimilating the pagan gods to his own, simpler hierarchy. Uranus, Saturn, and Juno are just names for God, Angel, and Soul, while other gods are mere aspects of these principles, with Venus, for example, simply being the beauty of the world soul's mind. He was expert in finding ways to discover agreement between the Platonists and his faith. The Platonic theology ends with two books on the subject of the bodily resurrection, which certainly looks like a specifically Christian doctrine that would be in tension with Platonism. But Ficino noted that Platonists believed that liberated souls go to the heavenly realm and take on celestial or ethereal bodies. A philosophical thesis tantamount to the Christian view that souls will receive perfect, risen bodies from God. It's an appropriate move for Ficino to make. After all, his life's mission was nothing less than the resurrection of Platonic philosophy. This has been an unusually long episode, yet we have barely scratched the surface of Ficino's extensive and fascinating body of work. Much as Pselos appeared recurrently in our series on Byzantium, so Ficino will keep turning up in episodes to come. In fact, in the very next episode, he'll be like the soul within the universe, a central figure. Because we'll be looking at Renaissance ideas about love, a topic Ficino embraced in his commentary on Plato's erotic dialogue The Symposium. And he wasn't the only Renaissance Italian with a passion for the subject, as we'll discover next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode… True Romance – Theories of Love If love had a colour, what colour would it be? Green, obviously. As in Al Green, the singer whose linky, seductive and soulful tributes to this emotion include I'm Still in Love with You, Love and Happiness, and the imaginatively titled L-O-V-E, Love. I myself would love to know how many people alive today were conceived while Al Green's music was playing in the background. Or am I making a basic mistake here, confusing love with lust? Marsilio Ficino would say so. If you asked Ficino what colour love is, he would probably say white, referring not to Maurice White, whose band Earth, Wind and Fire produced more than its share of slinky soul, but to the snowy white of purity and chastity. Ficino would approve of our using the phrase platonic love for affection that does not involve sex. Indeed, he can take a good deal of the credit for associating this idea with Plato. He made a case that this author of several often rather sexually suggestive dialogues about the erotic life was actually encouraging us to turn away from the body, to abandon physical beauty for the sake of higher beauties, and ultimately the beauty of God himself. Like Cardinal Bessarion before him, Ficino was concerned to rebut charges brought by critics of Plato, including George of Trebizond. Drawing on scurrilous details from ancient biographies of Plato and the erotic dialogues themselves, George condemned Plato as a depraved lover of boys. Ficino's case for the defense began with his translations of Plato, as when he rendered the Greek word Παιδαραστην, meaning to love boys, with a less explicit Latin verb. A bit of massaging in the process of translation could turn talk of erotic attraction into talk of fond friendship. But the purification of Plato was carried out especially in Ficino's commentaries. In his summary of the Republic, for example, he dismisses as a harmless joke the suggestion that the best guardians of the ideal city will be rewarded by being allowed to kiss their most beautiful fellow citizens. The high point of this bolderizing project comes in Ficino's De Amore, or On Love, the commentary he devoted to Plato's symposium. It does not take the form one would normally expect from an exegetical work. Plato's dialogue is set at a drinking party, where a succession of speakers take it in turn to discuss the nature of love. Ficino's commentary imitates this format, being written as a kind of meta-dialogue, which purports to describe a restaging of the symposium held in Careggi in 1468. At this gathering, each speech in Plato's dialogue was explained by a member of Ficino's circle, particularly prominent was Giovanni Cavacanti, the guest of honor and exegete for several of the speeches. This could hardly have been more appropriate, since Giovanni was a descendant of Guido Cavacanti, the 13th century's answer to Al Green. This earlier Cavacanti's famous poem about love, Dona me prega, helped invent the sweet new style of Italian literature. In broad outline, the teaching of Ficino's commentary on the symposium is familiar to us from his Platonic theology. It assumes a metaphysical hierarchy in which an angelic world of mind emanates forth from a single simple god, followed by the realm of souls and then the physical cosmos. If this reminds you not so much of Plato as of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, then pat yourself on the back. Ficino is indeed drawing extensively on Plotinus for his understanding of the symposium. Plotinus dedicated a brief treatise to this dialogue, which informs Ficino's interpretation. Both take an allegorical approach, especially to the more mythological aspects of the dialogue. A good illustration is Ficino's handling of the famous speech given by Plato to the comic poet Aristophanes, explained here by none other than Cristoforo Landino. Again he is an apt choice for this task, since as we saw in episode 339, Landino was known for his philosophical readings of literary works. In the speech of Aristophanes, we are told that humans began as eight-limbed, ball-shaped creatures that were split in half by the gods. Humans, as we know them, are thus each half of a full organism, with erotic desire explained as a longing to be made whole once again. There were originally male-male, female-female, and male-female pairings, which explains what we would nowadays call sexual orientation. Eliminating this frankly sexual aspect of the speech, Ficino has Landino say that the masculine androgynous and feminine natures represent three virtues that have gendered connotations, courage is manly, temperance womanly, and justice the balance of both. Not that Ficino wants to eliminate all talk of desire. To the contrary, towards the beginning of the commentary he has defined love as a desire for the beautiful. So it turns out that explaining love requires explaining beauty. The erotic is closely connected to the aesthetic. His definition of beauty is a bit of a mouthful, but worth looking at in detail. It is, Let's start with the end of this definition and its suggestion that love is a kind of frenzy or inflammation. Ficino, who let's remember was the son of a doctor and interested in medicine, did indeed see some kinds of love in terms of illness. The so-called love sickness would literally enter the bloodstream of a victim, struck or we might say infected by visual contact with a beautiful love object. Since this is really just an imbalance of humours in the body, like many other sicknesses, it can be cured with physical remedies like purging the blood. For once this literally medieval remedy would probably be quite effective. A good round of bloodletting should calm down even the most ardent of lovers. The idea that the erotic impulse is a kind of derangement has wider significance. Ficino counts it among several types of madness, which also include the inspiration that takes over prophets and poets. When love manifests as desire for physical beauty, it is the most common and crude form of madness. Notice that in Ficino's definition of beauty he says that even this lower kind of desire is relatively chaste. Beauty can be appreciated only by sight, hearing, and thought, powers that have more to do with the soul and less to do with the body. As for the pleasures of touch, these relate to lust, not love. The lust to touch the body, he says, is not a part of love, nor is it the desire of the lover, but rather a kind of wantonness and the derangement of a servile man. Forget making babies, Ficino wants us to strive for a different kind of conception, namely the more exalted and transcendent type of erotic madness, which means being transported by suitably exalted and transcendent beauty. This would be the intelligible beauty of the angelic realm, or even better, the beauty of God himself. As we saw when talking about Ficino's work, the Platonic Theology, he embraced the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals, according to which being, goodness, truth, oneness, and beauty all correlate with one other. Accordingly, here in his commentary on the symposium, Ficino calls beauty, the blossom of goodness. Whatever is good is beautiful, and the more goodness something has, the more beautiful it will be. Thus God is the highest of all beauties, desired by mind or angel, as it turns back towards its principle and origin. Likewise, when soul strives to unite with mind, it is urged on by its desire for intelligible beauty. Love also explains order and unity in the physical cosmos, implying celestial motion to govern the world of the elements. Yes, like Maurice White, Marsilio Ficino uses love and soul to keep earth, wind, and fire together. It's all equally true to what we find in Plotinus too, but there are some subtler differences between Ficino and Plotinus. His remarks on actual sex may be the literary equivalent of a cold shower, but Ficino is warmer than Plotinus had been towards the phenomenon of physical beauty. He thinks it is a natural accompaniment of virtue in the soul, with inner beauty showing itself outwardly. All this sounds like it would in turn warm the heart of any Renaissance Platonist. So it's a surprise to see Ficino's commentary being harshly criticized by his younger colleague Pico della Miranda. Pico also wrote a commentary on a text about love. Not Plato's symposium this time, though its influence looms large in Pico's presentation. The occasion is instead a poem by another member of the Florentine Platonist circle, Girolamo Benevigni. Benevigni wove ideas from Ficino into his verses, which were a kind of philosophical updating of the aforementioned Donna Me Prega, that famous poem written by Guido Cavacanti. Pico responds by setting out his own views about love, emphasizing how these differ from Ficino's. He also criticizes Ficino for failing to observe correct philosophical method. Showing off the scholastic training he received in Paris, Pico insists on the need to define one's terms at the outset of any such discussion, and charges Ficino with blundering at this early stage. Love should in fact be defined as desire to possess what is, or merely seems to be, beautiful. With a stroke, Pico has undermined Ficino's case for eliminating lust and sexuality from discussions of love. Even if physical attractiveness is not truly good or beautiful, it's merely seeming beautiful is enough to spark genuinely erotic desire. Accordingly, Pico argues that even irrational animals can experience love, which causes them to mate. Still, he would agree with Ficino that higher love, which he calls heavenly as opposed to earthly, is directed towards the intelligible beauty we behold in acts of contemplation. I use the word behold here advisedly. In another departure from Ficino, Pico insists that beauty is perceived only by sight, not hearing. It is analogous to harmony, which characterizes music that we might call beautiful, but really beauty and harmony are different. Beauty is whatever gives delight to vision, whether this vision is that of the bodily eyes or the eye of the mind. And by the way, the beauty that is perceived by either kind of vision is not, as Ficino suggested, an effect or blossom produced by all kinds of goodness. It is just one of many ways for a thing to be good, or as Pico puts it in the scholastic terms he tends to favor, beauty is a species belonging to the genus of goodness. The Platonic circle's interest in these rather abstract questions of love was confirmed by the work of a follower of Ficino's named Francesco Cattani di Teccetto. They were close enough that Ficino bequeathed a valuable manuscript of Platonic works to Cattani, who wrote a paraphrase commentary on the symposium and independent treatises on beauty and love. In these writings, Cattani did his best to smooth over the differences between Ficino and Pico, but where this could not be done he sided with Ficino. More famous are the echoes of the whole debate in more popular, often vernacular literature. Here, a key figure is Pietro Bembo, who wrote an entertaining dialogue about love called Gli Asolani. The title just means the people from Asolo, which is north of Venice. This was a great success, printed initially in 1505 and then dozens of times over the following century in the original Italian and in French and Spanish translations. It depicts a group of aristocrats meeting over several days in a garden to debate the value of love. The group is of mixed gender, presided over by the Queen of Cyprus, Catarina Coronado, and featuring several other women, though the main speakers are three men who present contrasting ideas about love. Bembo knows aware of he speaks here since he engaged in several amorous affairs, one with celebrated beauty Lucrezia Borgia. His own experience of bitter rejection and unrequited passion is palpable in the speech given by the first main character, Perro Tino, who emphasizes the suffering caused by love. In fact, he goes so far as to say that all of life's griefs result from love. Any pleasure taken in the brief attentions of a beloved woman will be more than outweighed by the exquisite pain of rejection later on. This speech recalls the laments that were a stock feature of medieval courtly love literature. You may recall such diverse texts as the Romance of the Rose and the works of the Beguine mystics performing variations on the theme. But Bembo juxtaposes Perro Tino's bitter pessimism with something more up-to-date, as two further speakers offer more optimistic views of love that recall what we've just found in the Florentine Platonists. Next up is a character called Gismondo who argues that all love worthy of the term is in fact good. How could it be otherwise since love is natural and everything natural is good? Gismondo agrees with Ficino that love has to do only with sight, hearing, and reason, not the other faculties of soul, and that love can be a spur to virtue. Then the tone is raised even further. The last speaker, Lavinello, relates an encounter he has had with a pious hermit. Evoking the most transcendent aspects of Ficino's theory, this character of the hermit rejects the value of all earthly love. It is irrational to desire a beloved object that will change and pass away, so we should direct our love only to God. As with other Renaissance dialogues we've considered, it is not easy to extract Bembo's own position from this work. The diversity of views is surely part of the point, so it was rather simplistic to proceed as Baldessar Castiglione did in his Book of the Courtier. This much longer dialogue, which we've had occasion to discuss before, features Bembo himself as a character, discoursing on the topic of love. The fictional Bembo most resembles the second speaker of Liasolani as he speaks very much in favour of love, including erotic love for women. The background of Ficino's ideas is evident here too, though as one modern interpreter has put it, Castiglione's version of Bembo is interested in philosophy only as a source of literary and conversational conceits and is concerned especially with the lowest rung of the ladder of love where he engages in sensual love in its excusable courtly form. For the fictional version of Bembo, love is a longing to possess beauty, which we initially encounter not through touch, but through the sight of lovely bodies. Like Ficino, Castiglione's Bembo understands physical beauty to be the outward sign of a virtuous soul, just as the beauty we see elsewhere in the cosmos is the manifestation of the good order given by God to the universe. Only idiotic people, who are content to remain at the level of beasts, are satisfied with bodies though. He echoes a famous passage in Plato's Symposium in which the female philosopher Deotima describes moving one's gaze from individual beautiful bodies step by step up to the form of beauty itself, an itinerary sometimes called the ladder of love. Carried away on a flight of rhetoric, the character of Bembo waxes enthusiastic about the ascent to the beauty of the intellectual realm until he's brought crashing back to earth by a tug on his sleeve and teasing comment from one of the female characters. Evidently Castiglione thinks it is worth including the Platonic tradition of erotic philosophy in his Book of the Courtier, but he also pokes fun at it. And, in a typical move, he pits Bembo against a more hedonistic character who thinks it is absurd to talk of possessing beauty without pursuing attractive bodies and who identifies the climax of the erotic life as begetting children with a beautiful woman. So far women have featured in this story only as beautiful love objects, apart from the relatively minor characters who populate the dialogues written by Bembo and Castiglione. But that changes with one final work I want to discuss, the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, published in 1547 by Tullia Daragona. Like Pietro Bembo, Daragona enjoyed the honor of being both the author of such a dialogue and a character in one. She was the model for one of the speakers in Sperone Speroni's Dialogue on Love from 1535. There she was presented as a critic of the kind of spiritual approach to love, espoused by Ficino, Pico, and Bembo. This no doubt seemed a natural bit of typecasting to Speroni because Daragona was a renowned courtesan. But in her own dialogue, she distances herself from what she calls vulgar love, echoing those more high-minded predecessors by associating sexuality with animals, and true honest love with rationality. Yet Daragona is not just reiterating Ficino's Platonist position. Her dialogue is different from the ones we've been discussing. For one thing, it really is a dialogue and not just a series of speeches. Our two characters are Tullia Daragona herself and Benedetto Varchi, a prominent intellectual and philosopher of mid 16th century Florence. The two tease and flirt as they debate one another, both exploring and embodying the idea of honest love as a refined and rational but still pleasant pursuit. Thus, at one stage, Daragona agrees to concede a point made by Varchi, but only out of love for him. And there is much lighthearted jousting about points of logic and grammar as the two try to clarify the thesis that has been proposed for debate. The dialogue is a gentle parody of the scholastic form of the disputed question, as well as a response to the Platonist treatments of love. As for the question being disputed, this also distinguishes Tullia Daragona's treatise from other works on love. Though she does exonerate Socrates and Plato from pederasty, insisting that their sole interest was inducing virtue in young men, this dialogue is not in any sense a commentary on the symposium. Rather, Daragona and Varchi seek to answer the question whether it is possible to love within limits. Again, taking a gently satirical approach to scholasticism, Daragona shows the character of Varchi getting obsessed with the wording of this question, for instance by pressing Daragona to admit that the noun love and verb to love mean the same thing, despite their different linguistic functions, because they refer to a single essence. This distantly recalls ideas about language we first met when looking at 13th century speculative grammar. Once the terms have been clarified, Varchi absurdly declares that he is thereby already answered the question, forcing Daragona to point out that he has done no such thing. Yet it does not seem that Daragona is entirely dismissive of scholastic philosophy, because the ultimate solution to the dialogue's central question turns on a distinction beloved of the schoolmen, originally made by Aristotle. Love is boundless, but not actually infinite. Its infinity is potential, in that the lover's desire for the beloved can never end, is never satisfied. She compares this to the way that numbers can be counted up without end, or time can pass indefinitely, but without ever reaching an actually infinite number, or actually infinitely long period of time. Since we don't have an infinity of time to keep discussing this, I'm going to wrap things up there for now, even though we still haven't looked at one of the most important treatises on this topic written in the Italian Renaissance, the Dialogues of Love, written by Giuda Abravanel, also known as Leone Ebreo. His writings were actually a major influence on Tullia Daragona, as she says openly in her own dialogue, referring him explicitly to other authors who had tackled the topic, including Ficino. This despite the fact that, as she also notes, he was Jewish. She has the character of Valki say he is willing to excuse this, though not approve of it. This openness towards Jewish intellectuals is something she shared with another of the protagonists of this episode, Pico della Mirandola. And of course we haven't yet explored his work as a philosopher, with nearly the thoroughness it deserves. So Pico will get his own episode, as well the writings of Leone Ebreo and other Jewish philosophers like Elijah del Medico. But before we get to those topics, it seems like a good time to give Plato a bit more love and have a look back at Ficino, Poliziano, and the whole question of the reception of Plato in the Italian Renaissance. That will be our subject next time as we're joined by an expert on Renaissance Platonism, Denis Robichaud. So as Al Green sang, let's stay together for that next installment of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Platonism in the Renaissance with Denis Rovesho, who is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Hi, Denis. Hello, how are you? I'm good. Thanks for coming on the podcast. We're going to be talking about Plato and the Renaissance, how his text received what they did with his ideas. Plato was also an influential figure in the medieval period. How did the Renaissance readers treat Plato differently than the medieval ones did? Well, the first thing to consider, which may be obvious, but shouldn't go unnoticed is the texts. So there were some dialogues by Plato available in the Middle Ages, the Phaedo, the Mino, the Timaeus and portions of the Republic, for example. But it's in the 15th century that we really have a rediscovery of the Platonic corpus as a whole. A number of humanists translated various dialogues, but Marsilio Ficino is the one who translate all of Plato's dialogues for the first time and he prints them in 1484. Now this has certain consequences. For one, it means that there's an emphasis in reading Plato, not just for doxographical reasons, meaning not just to read the doctrines. So for example, a theory of recollection or immortality of the soul, these things are still very important in the Italian Renaissance. But you also have a new way to start to look at Plato that involves sometimes the dialogic nature of the works, the fragments of pre-Socratics that Plato quotes, or pieces of poetry, or even looking at Plato for rhetorical or literary purposes as well too. But still, obviously the main issue and difference that we should highlight here is that they have access to much more Plato than they did in the medieval period where they mostly just read the Timaeus, right? That's right. And even if you think about it as well, even though you had some translations of Plato in the Middle Ages, it wouldn't have had a wide audience. I like to remind people that today we only have three complete manuscripts of Plato that survive. Marsilio Ficino had two of those and a third one that has since been lost. And he was in correspondence with Cardinal Basarion who had the fourth. So to have access to texts is important. So why Ficino is important there too is just as a disseminator, right? As he translates Plato into Latin, the complete corpus, he also prints it and it's just much more widely available. So it's not just the totality of the works, it's the accessibility of having to just being able to read it. So not having to go into a particular library to find a dialogue, but also being able to have the printed versions accessible everywhere. Okay. And the recovery of Plato that we're talking about here is part of the wider project of humanism, which in the first instance perhaps could be thought of as a philological enterprise. So they're recovering texts, they're editing them, they're writing comments in the margins, etc. What is the relationship between the philological aspect of the recovery of Plato and the philosophical engagement with his works? That's a very good question. I would say that it falls into the understanding of humanism as first a recovery of antiquity. And to properly understand classical Athens, some humanists think we need to read Plato, it's just that simple. They're interested more in antiquity than they are in Plato. And they may read Plato as a model for clear Attic prose. So they're interested in, just as they would, for example, look at Lucian, who's not from classical Athens like Plato, but is writing an Atticizing prose. So they're looking at him as a stylistic model. Beyond that, just to properly understand Plato and translate him and disseminate him, there's a number of philological problems that occur. The interesting thing is between someone like Poliziano. Poliziano, when he writes commentaries, his commentaries tend to be very technical in nature and very precise, trying to solve very clear philological problems. This isn't the way in which Ficino would write a commentary on Plato. Ficino's commentaries on Plato are primarily exegetical and hermeneutical. It doesn't mean that he doesn't have a method, a philological method or a mind that is philological in his approach to the manuscripts. He very much is philologically minded and really an excellent Hellenist. But he tends to keep his philology in the manuscripts as opposed to making it a part of his written commentary. There are a few occurrences where he does point out the logical problems that he solves, but these tend to be exceptions to the rule. So when he's correcting, for example, his Plotinus manuscript, and there's a famous Plotinus manuscript of his that's covered with philological annotations that shows that he diligently went through the work. But at one point he's faced with a corruption in Plotinus's text, and he doesn't have any other manuscript evidence to correct it. So he's put in a position that he has to make a decision on how to read the text and how to reconstruct it. And incidentally, what he does is actually what is largely accepted in later editions, starting with Avi and Schweitzer, the famous editions. So he basically gets it right. He gets it right, but he doesn't have any manuscript evidence to really get it right. He doesn't have other witnesses to the text. So in his commentary, he makes a point that he has to use a certain form of divinatio, of conjectures, which ends up being a philological term, to correct the text. For the most part, his commentaries tend to be about exegetical material and philosophical material in whether we're talking about the Platonic corpus or other new Platonists like Plotinus. So would it be fair to say that someone like Poliziano is engaging in philology for its own sake, whereas Ficino is doing it as a means to an end, the end being philosophical understanding? Or is that unfair to Poliziano? Is it giving Ficino too much or too little credit? Yeah, they've often been set up as, you could say, paradigms, right? On the one hand, you've got the philosophical interpretation, and the other, you've got the philological interpretation. The reality is that they both worked on texts in the same libraries, sometimes at the same time. Poliziano was a younger colleague of Ficino's in Florence, and they were friends, and sometimes they had a certain competitive relationship, famously over the correct interpretation of Parmenides, where we find out that Poliziano and Pico seem to think that the Parmenides is largely about logic, whereas Ficino thinks that it's about theology and the superiority of the one over being. But in terms of Poliziano in particular, it is fair to say that Poliziano sees himself as a grammaticos, which should be, I think, understood something like a philologist, not as a gramatista, right? A teacher of elementary languages, but someone who can oversee the field of antiquity in a way. And within his purview is philosophy. So if he thinks that a correct philological reading of a text can correct an understanding of a philosophical text, well then philology can step into the world of philosophy. That would be Poliziano's position. Let's talk a little bit about how they actually approach Plato. One feature of Plato's works that maybe doesn't come up so much with Aristotle is that they are literary constructions, and of course they're dialogues. And a lot of contemporary, I mean, nowadays, approach to Plato is really concerned with the question of how to take that. So for example, are some of the characters spokespersons for Plato's own views or what? So how did they take the dialogical nature of Plato's works? Well they, it depends who they are. Someone like Cardinal Vissarion, for example, is interested in the dialogic nature, but minimally so. He seems to think that Plato is fundamentally communicating some form of Pythagoreanism. Other humanists are interested in Plato as a kind of Homeric poet, where he's capable of speaking in a low pedestrian language like Socrates, a man on the street, but also able to elevate his style to the rhetorical heights of a Homer when he launches off into myths. Ficino has a slightly more sophisticated understanding, insofar as he's looking at the Platonic corpus as a polyphony. He's interested in finding moments where Plato speaks in different rhetorical registers by using different rhetorical personae. So Socrates is a clear example, and for certain purposes, usually to refute sophists or to exhort youth, he'll say Plato employs Socrates. At other moments, he'll say that Plato employs, if not outright Pythagoreans in his mind, Timaeus, the character in the dialogue that goes by his name, or he'll make Socrates speak Pythagorean positions and change his rhetorical register into a Pythagorean position, usually for instruction and to pronounce more dogmatic statements. But in both cases, Ficino seems to think that whether it's Socratic or Pythagorean, Plato is holding back, and he's not really communicating his positions. Ficino is original in a way, well, original up until a point. He's working off of a Byzantine scolion that tells him that Plato does speak in his own voice in certain moments, and that is in the laws, in the laws and the eponymous and in the letters. So Ficino cuts up the dialogue in this way, these rhetorical registers, the different personifications, and he tries to make sense of why it is that Plato would change from rhetorical register one to the other. Right. And the characters who don't sound like mouthpieces for Plato, so not Socrates, but for example the people Socrates is refuting, what does he think their function is? Well, I think he would think that it's dialectical in the sense of argumentative, right? So when he's looking at, for example, Socrates' refutation of the Thrasymachus or a Calicles, Thrasymachus and Calicles are putting forward opinions that it is Socrates' job to refute. And I think this has a protracted role for Ficino. It largely has to do with helping the readers understand what they should turn away from and what they should turn towards in philosophy. It really is about convincing them that a particular way of doing philosophy is the wrong way, and you should rethink your positions going another way. Okay. In addition to interpreting Plato, Ficino translated Plato. What are the differences that he introduces by, I mean, obviously a Latin version of Plato's going to be different from the original Greek, so what are the most salient differences that kind of come in once he does that? So the one thing I would say about Ficino as a translator, specifically for his Plato, but also his Plotinus, is that he's quite good. He's a quite good translator. And his Plato, I would say, if you want to find moments where, for example, it's strong neoplatonic tendencies or constraining the translation, it's actually hard to do. And his Plato translations stand the test of time. I mean, they have a lot of competitors in the 16th century, especially Northern humanists start to take their... I mean, there were predecessors before Ficino who translated Plato, Leonardo Bruni most famously, but others, and Giorgio of Trebizond. But in the 16th century, there were competitors to Ficino's translation of Plato, but they didn't really survive. If you look at the only editions of Plato that were printed in Germany, for example, in the early modern period, they print after the late 16th century and into the 17th and 18th century, they print Ficino's Latin. The famous Bipontina edition of the late 18th century prints Ficino's Latin, although a corrupt modified version that had been reworked in the 16th century. And when Becker does his new edition of the Platonic Corpus in the 19th century, he prints along with it Ficino's Latin. So I think Ficino's Latin continued to serve for even for scholars of Greek who wanted to read Plato in Greek, continued to serve as a kind of crib, something you could turn to and read. So that's the first thing I would say about Ficino as a translator is that... Just very competent. He's competent. He's a competent translator. That doesn't mean that he's perfect. As we all know, translations involve compromises at times. Sometimes you have to be exceedingly literal to the point of transliterations, something that humanists critiqued. Some medieval predecessors like William of Merbeke for his translations, that it's almost nonsensical at times because it's a transliteration, literally not just of the Greek syntax, but of the letters and the words. And Bruni, for example, is looking at translating Aristotle or Plato more according to the sense or meaning, not according to the letter, but that might involve a compromise at times in accuracy. Ficino, too, it's not to say his translations aren't without fault, but translators always have to make decisions. But on the whole, he's a very good translator. I'm actually a little bit surprised that you say his familiarity with late ancient Platonism doesn't infect his translations because his commentaries are, to put it mildly, influenced by late ancient Platonism. Can you say something about that? How does his approach to Plato as an exegete respond to his awareness of the ideas of figures like Plotinus and Proclus? That's right. Anybody who spent time reading Ficino's commentaries know that it's thoroughly Neoplatonic. I think one of the reasons for this has to do with Ficino's own training. Before he completed his famous first translations, 10 translations of Platonic dialogues from Cosi de' Mode Medici, he had already worked at translating Proclus's Elements of Theology and a very large work by Iamblichus, Pythagorean Philosophy, the De secta Pitagorica. He was already familiar with Plotinus's Aeneids. He was reading Aeneids and taking notes on Aeneids. From the beginning, even when he approaches Plato, his approach is one that is highly informed by late ancient Platonism. Maybe we can talk about a specific example. To take a not random example, because this is something you've written about, but it's also just a very central example, there's this passage in the Republic called the Divided Line Passage, in which Plato somehow is saying something about metaphysics and he compares a metaphysical hierarchy to a line with divided segments. Can you maybe explain this a little bit in more detail and say what Ficino does with it? So the divided line, of course, is one of the key passages in the Republic, where, as you say, Plato tells his interlocutors, take a line, divided it into two, and then divide each segment into two again, according to the same ratio at which you had divided the first time. And then he helps his interlocutors and the readers fill out the blanks of what that means. On the one hand, I would say that for late ancient Neoplatonists, on the one hand, the line has two sides. One speaks to certain ways of knowing and epistemology. On the other hand, it has a metaphysical side, speaking to the objects that correspond to the ways of knowing. So at the top, for the Neoplatonists, you would speak about objects of intellect and intellect. In the second segment, you would think of discursive reasoning and objects of discursive reasoning, and then lower down to objects of imagination, sensation, and belief, and images themselves. I think the major difference between how most moderns read the divided line and how the Neoplatonists read the divided line is that for many modern interpreters, meaning contemporary interpreters, they see the divided line as fundamentally broken. The famous Platonic dualism, there's a strong charisma. There's the upper register of things that are intelligible and the lower register of things that are visible. And the two shall not meet. Whereas for the Neoplatonists, on the one hand, the first thing to point out is that they see this line as a continuum, a procession, an emanation from the one down through the intellect, down through the objects of discursive reasoning, in operations of the rational soul, and then all the way down into nature. So the line is not broken. Ficino follows them in that regard, absolutely. To be more precise, he thinks that this is Pythagorean. In a couple of his commentaries to the Theotides and the Republic, he says that Plato here is following these two Pythagoreans, one Brotenus and another Archytas. Archytas is more famous, more well known, although still quite obscure. Brotenus, not much is known by him except these later fragments of supposed writings by him. I'm actually feeling a little bit bad because I don't think I ever mentioned them. So this is a gap in the history of philosophy. So Ficino would be appalled. There's actually a debate in the sources whether or not this Brotenus is the father or husband of this female philosopher, Biano, but beyond that, it's claimed that he was one of Pythagoras' original disciples. Really what we have are pseudepigraphic fragments of Brotenus that date probably from some period between the first century BC and the first century AD. Ficino finds these fragments in Yamblicus' text of the De secta Pitago Arica, specifically the third book of it. These texts in effect explain Plato's divided line, but they explain it in a Doric style. So when Ficino writes his commentary on the divided line, he says Plato followed Pythagoreans, but he communicated this divided line in a more elegant or eloquent manner because he's commenting on the difference between this artificial archaic Doric prose and Plato's Attic prose, which he thinks is more eloquent. Right. Okay. But fundamentally, here he's following the neo-botonic position you described, according to which the segments of the line are supposed to express this causal hierarchy of unity and being descending down through ever more multiple and less real levels till we get down to the world of sensation. That's right. For Ficino, he thinks that this is to be, contemporary scholars would often say, is a neo-platonic or late ancient platonic understanding of Platonism. He thinks it's there at the very beginning, even before Plato, in Pythagoreanism by exactly saying that for the Pythagoreans, and he finds this in the fragments of Archytas and Brotenus for them, the one is above being and being itself is where we find the first principles of unlimited and limited from which all other principles derive and from which all intellect and rational operations of the rational soul are derived. It's really a question of deriving rationality from first principles that themselves come from an original source, the one. On the other hand, it really is about deriving the complete order of metaphysics in the cosmos from the one. Let me actually just ask you to elaborate on something that was implicit in what we've just said, which is Plato's role or position maybe in the history of philosophy itself, because that suggests what you just said suggests that Ficino would have seen Plato not as the kind of inaugurating figure of something we would call Platonism, but rather as maybe just the greatest in the line of Pythagoreans. Is that right? Absolutely, but not just Pythagoreanism. Ficino will not diminish as well to the Socratic elements, but there too, Ficino thinks that Socrates is also educated by Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans are important to say the least, but the Pythagoreans, of course, in Ficino's mind, were trained in Orphic traditions. Ficino has this notion, which is often called a preschatiologia or an ancient theology. He construes with the help of, I think, primarily Proclus and Iamblichus, but also church fathers, that there is a unitary history of philosophy, that it's a history that passes down kind of irreligious wisdom, starting from, he thinks, these three sources. He points out Zoroaster, the oldest source, and here he's probably drawing off of Pletho's understanding of who the figure of Zoroaster was. This early Chaldean wisdom, this Orphic material, which is early Greek wisdom, and then the Hermetic material, which is early Egyptian wisdom. You see how even there, the sources for ancient philosophy in these three traditions of wisdom are universal for Ficino, insofar as they can be mapped onto something like a medieval T-map, where you've got an Oriental or Eastern source in the Chaldeans, an Orphic source in Greece and Europe, and a Hermetic source in Africa or Egypt. Pythagoras' role, and I think he takes this from Iamblichus, is he traveled. He traveled the Mediterranean, he was trained in all of these different schools, and he aimed at arriving at a kind of synthesis or unity in a neopliconic mode of making unity out of multiplicity in a form of philosophy, which he then handed down to Pletho. And Pletho, of course, wrote his dialogues and disseminated this, and the story continues. I guess one thing that's really striking about all that is that it does not sound very Christian. You actually just mentioned Pletho, or George Comistos Plethon, who has sometimes even been thought to be a kind of closet pagan, and all of the sources you just mentioned are pagan, and some of them are ostentatiously pagan, like Iamblichus, Propos, for example. So how does Ficino square this idea of an Ur-religion wisdom being handed down through the Pythagorean tradition to Pletho, and that being kind of the summit of philosophy, how does he square all that with Christian piety? I would say that Christian theology for Ficino is a continuity of this tradition. It's a kind of culmination where things that are implicit before are made explicit. That's one thing that's important to see. So they're not in competition. Ficino is very inclusive, though. His Christian theology doesn't seek to exclude quote-unquote pagan approaches towards the divine. In fact, he looks for bridges. This sometimes gets him into hot water. For instance, he writes, it's probably one of his most famous works, is his commentary on Pletho's symposium, which is known as the Diamore, which he writes in a loosely dialogical form, which is an interesting commentary in its own way. This is the first work since antiquity that really tries to reason through the comparison of Socrates to Silenus at the end of the dialogue and Socrates to Eros at the end of the dialogue and to look at what does it mean to say that we can identify Socrates as Eros or love. His approach is essentially to speak about something that I could characterize as the transfiguration of Socrates, and Socrates is understood as a kind of soteriological figure. This, I think, gained the attention of a few Dominicans who weren't particularly keen on this approach. Ficino writes a famous letter to Servite theologian Paolo Ferrobandi in which he says, well, look, I'm not saying that Socrates is Christ's competitor, but there's a way in which what he's doing is completely compatible with the kind of soteriology that we find in Christ. And there too, Ficino is drawing on patristic sources on the parallel lives of Socrates and Christ. But Ficino again, too, it's not when he does the parallel lives, it's not to say, well, if Socrates was able to teach these virtues, well, we also have these Christian virtues that parallel them. So why would we look at Socratic virtues? Ficino is more interested in bringing in the Socratic virtues and seeing it as really a way to arrive at the same ends. And is he worried about philosophical tensions between Christian doctrine and Neoplatonism? For example, something that would come out of what we talked about with the divided line is the Neoplatonic idea that the universe emanates out of God as a kind of necessary consequence. And if you start thinking about that in a Pythagorean way, it's like the generation of the numbers from the monad and the dyad, etc. So that doesn't really sound like the Christian idea of creation ex nihilo. Especially if you take a hard position towards understanding creation as involving an absolute chasm or gap between creator and creature. Of course, in Christian theology, you've got to take for example, Augustine, I'm taking Augustine because he's so important to Ficino. The only thing that would bridge this distance, of course, is the cent of Christ, the incarnation of Christ and his grace, the Holy Spirit. But for Ficino, there are all sorts of alternative modes of mediation, truth, beauty, goodness, full stop, mediate between the divine and the earthly. So in that case, Ficino is willing to go beyond some of the limits that Augustine would put forward and say that the emanate of continuity from the originative source of the One into its manifestation in the world creates all of these opportunities for the points of contact with the divine. So it's actually just another example of his tendency to kind of smush everything together in one big eclectic body of wisdom that's all internally harmonious in his opinion. Yes, I would say yes. But with some caveats, insofar as Ficino isn't reckless when he does so. He's very precise to find moments where he can give evidence for this being the case. I'll give one example. And you brought up earlier the relationship of philology and philosophy. One of the other moments, there are very few moments where Ficino talks about his philology. In one case, it's dealing with the laws, Plato's laws, which is a work, as I mentioned, that Ficino thinks Plato wrote in his own voice. There's a passage where Plato says that God is the measure of all things. Most translators would now say something along, I'm paraphrasing from memory, so much more than man. Most modern readers would say this is a critique of protagonist, this idea of man is the measure of all things. There's a Greek variant in Ficino's manuscripts that allows a reading to be either God is the measure of all things, so much more than man, or God is the measure of all things, especially if he becomes man. This is at least where Ficino gets to. It's a little more subtle. It actually has to do with a Greek variant between eta for than or epsilon iota for if. And it's just this clear line. But here it is a moment of technical philology, which is looking at a Greek variant. In his translation, he takes the more conservative side of things, and so in his translations is so much more than man. But in his commentary, he will say, well, really, there's a way we can read this to say, especially if he becomes man. So here we have an instance of, in his mind, a philologically demonstrable passage in Plato's laws, where Plato is actually putting forward a claim that is compatible with the incarnation. It wouldn't be necessarily that Plato is saying, and this person is Jesus Christ. But he is putting forward a theological understanding of the incarnation, perhaps without knowing of the advent of the person of Christ. So in which case, this again gives an opportunity for Ficino to, he takes a small variant and he runs with it. And it gives him an opportunity to again, create these pathways and openings for finding a compatibility between Christian theology and Platonism, which is his great project. His great project is to reorient the Christian theology towards Platonism, which he thinks is the originative sources of theology. Okay, so thank you very much, Denis, for coming on the podcast to give us that amazing overview of Ficino and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance. Thank you very much, Peter. And please join me next time for more on the Italian Renaissance here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode… As Far As East From West – Jewish Philosophy in Renaissance Italy Never underestimate the ability of philosophers to be puzzled by things that don't, at first glance, seem particularly puzzling. Take the question of desire. What could be a more familiar everyday phenomenon? I mean, I don't know about you, but I desire things all the time. Almond-Gosan, philosophy books, a few million dollars to cover other sudary expenses. So you'd think it would be obvious to me and everyone what desire is. A rough working definition might be something like, wanting something you don't have. That sounds plausible and comes with the backing of no less an authority than Plato. In his symposium, he has Socrates tell of how his instructor in matters of love, Theotima, taught him that eros, passionate love or desire, is constantly in need because it involves striving after something beautiful that one lacks. So for instance the gods have no love or desire for wisdom because they are already wise. The true lover of wisdom, the philosopher, is someone who knows that wisdom is precious but has not managed to attain it yet. Plausible or not though, this way of thinking about desire faces some difficulties. Don't I still desire an almond croissant even once I have it? Don't people stay in love once they're already married? Sometimes? And to the Renaissance mind, Theotima's remark about the gods not experiencing love could also seem problematic. Christians are fond of saying that, to the contrary, God loves us and all his creation. But surely that is not a manifestation of lack or need on his part. Nowadays philosophers don't spend that much time being puzzled by love, or at least not as part of their job they don't. But ancient and Renaissance Platonists were fascinated by it, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, with everyone from Plotinus to Ficino writing treatises on the topic. Among these authors, the one who offers the most interesting reflections on our particular puzzle is Leon Ebreo. In his three Dialogues on Love, a hugely popular work that saw about 25 editions in the 16th century, two characters named Philo and Sophia, see what he did there, are depicted working through a number of problems about love. How does it relate to desire more generally? What role does love play in human life and the universe? What is its origin? Throughout their conversations, the two keep returning to this question of whether love implies neediness. Ebreo makes the nice point that, even if desire is concerned with what is lacking, it doesn't aim at what has no being at all, because to desire something you must at least consider it as having a possible being. One idea might be to distinguish love from this sort of desire for things one could but does not possess. Think again of wisdom. The wise person loves it but already has it, and so doesn't need to desire it. This would also be a difference between more exalted and permanent goods like virtue and wisdom and, on the other hand, earthly goods. The former can be attained and then possessed indefinitely without change, the latter perish as they are enjoyed, or if they don't then their goodness seems to vanish as desire is satisfied. Think of how I have to consume that almond croissant in order to satisfy my hunger for it, and how if it is too big I will have no desire for the part that's too much for me to eat. For me, an admittedly hypothetical scenario. Upon further reflection though, the characters decide that love might be the same as desire, or a special kind of desire that is directed towards those higher goods and not carnal satisfactions. Even if you already have what you love, you also want to keep having it into the future. The mere fact of being subject to the passage of time means that in a sense you even lack what you already possess. You can never have what you really want, which is to possess what you love forever. What about spiritual beings who might seem to be able to achieve this? And they experience love and desire too? Yes, souls and angels strive towards ever greater union with and understanding of God, and since God is infinite this desire will never be completely satisfied. As for God himself, of course, he never experiences lack or deficiency in himself, but he wants perfection for the things he creates. So since there is, to put it mildly, always room for improvement in the created world, there will always be something for him to desire. This is what we mean when we say that God loves his creation. One brilliant feature of Leon Ebreo's dialogues, and no doubt one reason they were so popular, is that they dramatize the topic of erotic desire as well as thematizing it. The male character, Philo, is usually the one advancing arguments and theories which are criticized and resisted by the female character, Sophia. She also resists his more literal advances. Especially at the end of each of the dialogues, we get passages in which Philo pleads with Sophia to give in to his love for her, using the full humanist arsenal of rhetoric and philosophy to talk her into having an affair with him. In each case, she rebuffs his entreaties. As she complains at one point, what I want from you is the theory of love and what you want from me is its practice. This feature of the text makes it more entertaining, but also allows Ebreo to contrast two approaches to love. Where Sophia tends to argue that true love is for intellectual and eternal goods, Philo insists that bodily pleasure has a place in the best life and can be an expression of true love. So, like Pietro Bembo before him, Ebreo exploits the dialogue form to juxtapose contrasting ideas about love and indirectly human nature. Are we ultimately just intellectual souls, as classical Neoplatonism and Ficino would have it? Or should our theory of love pay due regard to our complex nature as embodied beings? Ebreo's fusion of literary panache and philosophical content is still winning him admiration down to the present day. One scholar has gone so far as to say, A Neoplatonist in his soul and a humanist in his style, Leoni succeeded in making philosophical ideas understandable, a task at which Ficino had failed entirely. But there was something else he added to the humanist tradition of Platonist reflection on love, the perspective of a different religious faith. The Ebreo part of his adopted Italian name signifies that he was a Hebrew, that is Jewish. As for his original name, it was Judah Abravanel. That sound you hear is the second shoe dropping as we finally meet the son of Isaac Abravanel as promised back in episode 169. On the off chance you don't remember that episode with crystal clarity, Judah's father Isaac hailed from Portugal and Spain and worked for the Christian king and queen Ferdinand and Isabella. He moved to Italy with his family after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, which is how Judah, aka Leoni Ebreo, wound up in Naples working as a doctor. He would subsequently live in Genoa, Naples again, then Venice, and possibly Rome, where his dialogues were published in 1535 only after his death. The fact that his life story was so peripatetic in the non-philosophical sense is typical. As Robert Bonfils wrote in his history of Italian Judaism in this period, Jews settled where they were given permission to settle and where life was not rendered unbearable by Christian hostility. Often they came to Italy to escape persecution, as with the aforementioned exile from Spain or an earlier expulsion from France in 1394, or to escape pogroms launched against them in Germany. Once in Italy, they faced further persecution. Numerous cities banned Jews entirely, with Florence for example accepting them only in 1427. Those cities that did allow them hardly put out the welcome wagon. Jews were often forced to wear identifying insignia like yellow patches of fabric or coloured hats, and they were subjected to enforced teaching intended to bring about their conversion. Pope Paul IV, whose policies were particularly malignant, said that, "...the Church tolerates the Jews in order that they may bear witness to the truth of the Christian faith." But beginning with Venice in 1516, Italian cities started designating certain areas as ghettos for the Jewish community, implicitly shifting from a policy of conversion to one of segregation. The social pressure brought to bear by the majority culture could affect even wealthy Jews and make itself felt in their intellectual pursuits. To see this, we can cheat a little bit by going past our usual chronological range for this current series and considering Sarah Copia-Soullam. She was born in the Venice Ghetto in 1590, but to a prosperous family who had her well-educated in subjects including philosophy and theology. She would go on to host an intellectual salon at her home, frequented by other philosophers like Leoni Modena and her tutor Numidio Paluzzi. As with the female humanists we discussed in episode 337, we have extensive correspondence from her and sent to her, often from Christian men trying to cajole her into converting. This is also the subtext for the most philosophical exchange involving Soullam. A Christian named Baldassare Bonifacio, who was a regular at her salon and also an archdeacon of Treviso, sent her a letter describing how humans lost their immortality through original sin. The point, of course, was to encourage her to become a Christian so as to cleanse herself of the stain of this sin. It was with some consternation that Bonifacio instead received a set of philosophical musings from Soullam in which she pointed out that material bodies are intrinsically subject to corruption and so cannot be made eternal through the influence of a soul, no matter how sinless. The question of immortality must concern particular human essences, since otherwise we would be eternal only at the level of species and not as individuals. The human species would, as Soullam says with an evident allusion to a famous saying of Heraclitus, be like a river which remains the same river even though it is always made up of different waters. Bonifacio should have been pleased to receive this sophisticated philosophical reply. He claimed to have no objection to being instructed by a woman in such matters since, in intellects, there is no distinction of sexes. Nonetheless, he reacted by denouncing Soullam for putting the soul's indestructibility in question. He confronted her with proofs of immortality drawn from the Jewish Bible and Plato, a pretty formidable combination. In response, Soullam protested that she was far from denying this thesis, since immortality is affirmed by Jews just as much as Christians. She simply wanted to have a good philosophical rationale for her already firm belief. But she complains Bonifacio is too busy hectoring her about her religion to provide that. This debate shows how difficult it was for Christian and Jewish intellectuals to exchange ideas in the Renaissance. Yet just as had happened earlier in the Islamic world, we see Jewish authors in Italy adopting the concerns and ideas of the wider intellectual culture while also exploring problems and traditions unique to their faith. For an example we can return to Leone Ebreo. Though his dialogues are written in their Italian vernacular, some wonder whether this is a translation from an original Hebrew version. In terms of content, he is powerfully influenced by Christian thinkers like Ficino and Pico. Yet even the way he responds to this influence displays his different religious commitments. He has the characters in the dialogue affirm that God loves himself, as well as his creation, and admit that this self-love involves three elements, the lover, the beloved, and the love itself, all of which are identical with God. But where Christian authors saw this as a way to understand the Holy Trinity, Ebreo cautions us that God only seems to be threefold because of, as he says, the inferiority and impotency of the intellect. Far from being an exposition of Trinitarian doctrine, this looks more like an explanation of how the Christians were confused into putting forth that doctrine. Nor was humanist Platonism the only Christian philosophical tradition co-opted by Jews. There was also Scholastic Aristotelianism. That style of philosophy does not really show itself in Ebreo's dialogues, though a poetic lament he wrote over his son, who was taken from him and forcibly converted, seems to boast of his ability to outdo the schoolmen. I visited their schools of learning, and there were none who could engage with me. I vanquished all who rose in argument against me, and forced my opponents to surrender, putting them to shame. I have a soul which is higher and more splendid than the souls of my worthless contemporaries. Italian Jews recognized the advantages of scholastic education. Rabbinical diplomas were similar to those of the Christian schools, and the rabbis produced voluminous legal scholarship reminiscent of what the jurists of the universities were churning out. Their ambition, only partially successful, in the face of Christian obstruction and repression, was to set up a parallel system of legal and spiritual authority with rabbis as community leaders. The most intense engagement with scholasticism, though, came with thinkers who carried on the long-standing tradition of Jews reading Aristotle and his greatest medieval commentator of Verruese. After Verruese's works were rendered into Hebrew, they were avidly read by Jewish philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries like Ibn Falakhera and Gersonides, who went so far as to write commentaries on Verruese's commentaries. Now 15th century Italy offered a new context for Jewish Aristotelianism. The central figure here was Elijah del Medigo, who originally hailed from Crete and came to northern Italy in 1480. Before returning to Crete ten years later, he would write treatises inspired by or commenting on Verruese's philosophy and also translate Verruese from the Hebrew versions into Latin. Del Medigo thus contributed to the upsurge of interest in Verruese towards the end of the 15th century that we associate especially with Padua. More on this in a later episode. Verruese was an author who posed particular challenges for reconciling philosophical teaching with religious orthodoxy. Alongside his clear affirmation of the eternity of the world, Verruese's most problematic teaching had to do with the human mind. His long commentary on the de anima reached the surprising conclusion that all of humanity shares only one mind. We've already seen Ficino pouring scorn on this doctrine. Del Medigo treats it much more respectfully, seeing clearly how difficult it is to explain the diversity of minds within an Aristotelian framework. In this framework it had become standard to say that general substances are differentiated from one another by the matter from which they are made. But human minds are immaterial, so what distinguishes them? Del Medigo was aware of contemporaries who followed Aquinas in making the human rational soul a form that can survive as an individual even in the absence of matter, but found that account rationally untenable. Yet he admitted that such a view would fit better with Jewish belief, saying, The Torah might encourage one to believe and accept this view, but scientific investigation does not. This remark fits well with a work by Del Medigo written in Hebrew called Examination of Religion. It tackles head-on the question of how philosophy relates to revealed religion, taking its cue from the rationalism of Maimonides and also of Verruese's decisive treatise. Like Verruese, Del Medigo believes that philosophical investigation is encouraged and even required for those capable of it, as it increases one's understanding of God and the world he has made. But he also thinks that there are some truths found in scripture that human reason cannot discover. This attitude is more reminiscent of those Parisian arts masters of the 13th century who have received the problematic designation Latin Verruese. Verruese himself thought that philosophy establishes the same truths as religion, but on the basis of rational demonstration. For the arts masters, and now for Del Medigo, by contrast, scripture goes beyond the scope of reason and in some sense trumps it. As an expert scholar of Aristotle's and of Verruese's philosophy, Del Medigo is willing and able to expound their arguments, but that doesn't mean he needs to agree with them in the end. So in one treatise, after explaining Verruese's rationale for the unicity of the intellect, he says, Let none of my co-religionists think that the opinion which I firmly believe is this one, for my belief is truly the belief of the Jews. Ironically, one reason Del Medigo opposed Verruese on this point is that it reminded him too much of something he could find in the Jewish tradition. The influx of Jews from the Iberian peninsula brought the mystical tradition known as Kabbalah to Italian soil. As a hard-nosed rationalist, Del Medigo was bound to find Kabbalah distasteful, and he was struck by the similarity between Verruese's theory of the single mind and ideas put forward by some Kabbalists. A similar attitude was adopted by Leone di Vitali, commonly known by his honorific Messer, or Master, Leone. He was a well-rounded Renaissance thinker who on the one hand commented on Verruese, drawing here on Christian scholastic authors like Walter Burley and Paul of Venice, but on the other hand produced a compendium of rhetoric using heroes of the humanist pantheon like Quintilian and Cicero. His succulently titled Book of the Honeycomb's Flow aims to demonstrate the rhetorical excellence of the Bible, but his versatile mind had no place for Kabbalah. He forbade other Jews to study the writings of the Kabbalists who, he said, groped forward through the darkness of their misunderstanding of the purposes of the founders of their doctrine, which as far as I can see is definitely in partial accord with the doctrine of the Platonists. In the meantime, the mystics were also pondering their own standing relative to the philosophers and declaring themselves the winners. One Kabbalist from Tuscany by the name of Elijah Hayem Ginatsano attacked a range of rationalists including Gersonides and Isaac Abravanel, the aforementioned father of Leone Abreu. For Elijah, the Jewish revelation is beyond rational knowledge, though he did not think that it actually showed such knowledge to be false. The fundamental roots of Jewish belief, such as God's oneness and incorporeality, are affirmed in common by reason and religion, and as he puts it, the Torah will not come to cancel the intellect. Still, Elijah is confident that the revelation is best understood through the methods of Kabbalah. It's symbolic and mystical system centering on the ten letters, or seferot, that stand for God's relationship to the created universe provides far greater insight than philosophy. As Elijah says, the two approaches are as far apart as east from west. It's ironic that he put it this way because as he fulminated against Isaac Abravanel, Elijah was failing to understand that Abravanel and other Western, that is Spanish, Jews, had already found ways to fuse Kabbalistic and rationalist methods. From works like the Zohar, which presents itself as a work of late ancient Judaism, but was in fact composed in 13th century Spain, many Jewish intellectuals in Italy took over the habits of speculative Kabbalah. An early and influential figure here was Menachem Rekhanati, already active in the 13th century. His commentary on the Torah, strongly influenced by the Spanish tradition of Kabbalah, was translated into Latin and diffused widely in the Italian Renaissance. This strand of Jewish thought helped itself to philosophical ideas, especially Neoplatonist ones, but kept reason firmly in its place. Thus Rekhanati commented that philosophers did not have the wisdom of our Torah, since they did not believe in anything except in matters that they derived from logical demonstration. About 200 years later, an Italian rabbi named Isaac Marhaim was still sounding the same note when he advised a Jewish banker friend, you must make Kabbalah the root and try to make reason conform to it. One way to resolve the long-running tension between philosophical and Jewish wisdom was to claim that the two are ultimately the same. A diverse range of Renaissance Jews, including the aforementioned Elijah Genizano and Messer Leon, claimed that philosophy, especially Platonism, was in fact based on older ideas traceable to Biblical figures like Moses and Abraham. One idea, based on legends already circulating in Hellenistic times, was that Plato had visited Egypt, where he met the prophet Jeremiah. This kind of thinking opened the way to a syncretic style of philosophy in which Kabbalah, Platonism and, to a lesser extent, Aristotelianism could all be gathered together into one harmonious body of doctrine. The great exponent of this style was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Pico's philosophical and scholarly achievements were made possible in part by the Jewish tutors he consulted for knowledge of the Hebrew language and Kabbalistic lore. He also learned from them about Averroes. In fact, Delmedigo explained that it was Pico who prompted him to explore Averroes' theory of the mind. He told Pico, Just as Averroes explained Aristotle's words fully, I have to explain the words of Averroes, since such wisdom has almost been lost in our day. For Kabbalah, Pico turned to Phlevius Mithridates, who produced a massive body of translations for him in about 1486. We hear from Ficino about a debate held at Pico's home involving both Delmedigo and Mithridates. Then there was Johann Alemanno, who came to Florence in the 1450s and studied medicine and philosophy in Pisa. Alemanno showed Pico how to combine philosophy and Kabbalah, which earned him the disapproval of some other Jewish mystics who complained of his making Kabbalistic matters conform to speculation. But for Alemanno, all the traditions coincided, showing the way to purify the body, then the soul, finally making it possible to seek union with God through the divine names mentioned in the Bible. Through reflection on these, he wrote, One may enjoy such divine visions as may be emanated upon pure, clear souls who are prepared to receive them. As we'll be seeing, Alemanno may have been a decisive influence on Pico's so-called oration on the dignity of man. But we won't get to that most famous work by Pico for a couple of episodes, because first we'll be taking a more general look at Pico's astonishing body of work, which he achieved with the help of these Jewish advisors, his own precocious and curious mind, and last but not least, his abundant family fortune. If you happen to be independently wealthy and are wondering what you might do with all your money and leisure time, and if in addition you don't mind really annoying the Pope, then you could do worse than to imitate Pico della Mirandola, and you could start by donating a few million dollars to the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Count of Concord, Pico della Mirandola. The phrase nominative determinism sounds like it comes from one of the more technical areas of philosophy, but actually it has nothing to do with our favourite intellectual discipline. Rather it refers to the supposed phenomenon that your name determines your profession, or your fate more generally. Yes, there really is a meteorologist named Amy Fries, an acoustic engineer named Ron Rumbel, and even a Russian track and field athlete who competes in the hurdles named, wait for it, Maria Stepanova. As if that weren't good enough, the internet will be very happy to tell you of another hurdle competition where Last Place went to the Bulgarian runner Vanya Stambalova. People have been chuckling over this sort of thing for a long time. There was the Latin phrase nomin est omen, your name is a sign. It's a saying well illustrated by the fact that Pico della Mirandola held the title Count of Concord, Concordia being a landholding of his family near Pico's home city of Mirandola. As his contemporaries did not fail to note, this is almost too good to be true, because Pico loved to demonstrate the concord between apparently conflicting authorities. He was heir to both a family fortune and the harmonizing project of predecessors like Cardinal Bessarion, who had distanced himself from his teacher Platon by arguing for the fundamental agreement between Plato and Aristotle. The traditional way to do this, as we saw with Bessarion, was to present a rather Platonic version of Aristotle. Pico took the opposite tack, arguing that Platonists who departed from Aristotelianism were also departing from the original teachings of Plato. This at least is the line taken in a treatise called On Being and One, written at the behest of Pico's friend Poliziano and against the teaching of his other friend, Marsilio Ficino. Aristotle had stated that oneness and being coincide, in the sense that everything that is has unity, which seems plausible. After all, you can't be a giraffe without being one giraffe. But this contradicts the fundamental Platonist doctrine that the first principle of all things, the one, transcends being. It was Plotinus who first set forth the idea. He equated being with the realm of the Platonic forms, which reside in the transcendent intellect that it is only the first subordinate effect of the highest principle, the one. As we know, Ficino adopted Plotinus' system, identifying the one with the Christian god and the intellect with angel. We can find this in Ficino's great treatise The Platonic Theology, and also in his commentaries on Plato's dialogues, which followed the late ancient Neoplatonists in asserting that for Plato too, one transcends being. For this, he could point to several passages in Plato, like the statement in the Republic that the good is beyond being in majesty and power. But for Ficino, the best evidence was to be found in two other dialogues of Plato, the Sophist and the Parmenides. Picco's On Being and One offered a contrary reading of these dialogues, simply denying that anything in the Sophist could support an elevation of oneness over being, and arguing against the whole Neoplatonic tradition by insisting that the Parmenides has no metaphysical teaching at all. This dense and enigmatic argumentation is not an implicit map for a cosmic hierarchy, as interpreters like Plotinus, Proclus, and Ficino would have thought, but only a kind of dialectical or logical exercise. The debate concerns more than Platonic exegesis and the agreement of two great authorities. The Neoplatonic interpretation was welcomed to Ficino because it gave him a way to articulate the transcendence of God in philosophical terms. If God is the One and intellect or angel is being, then God is beyond being, transcendent above everything that is. Against this, Picco affirms an understanding of being that we saw once upon a time in Duns Scotus. The realm of being is just everything that exists, or as Picco nicely puts it, everything that is outside of nothing. And of course, God exists. Having said that, Picco admits that God is a very special kind of being, and to take account of this uses terminology familiar from another 13th century scholastic, Thomas Aquinas. We can say that God is ipsum esse, or being itself, and reserve the Latin term ends, which we might render as what has being, only for created things. This is like the distinction between whiteness and white things. But of course, to say that God is the paradigmatic case of being hardly warrants the claim that he is beyond being any more than whiteness is beyond white. So Picco affirms another scholastic doctrine, inspired by Aristotle, which we have come to know under the name of the theory of transcendentals, that being correlates with unity and other general properties such as truth and goodness. Ficino thought that all this missed the point of Plato's metaphysics. In 1494, the same year that Picco died at the tender age of 31, Ficino published his commentary on the sophist. Here he restated the Neoplatonic reading, and finding another way to pun on Picco de la Mirandola's name, wished that that marvelous youth, Mirandus Ilei Urenis, had been more careful to weigh the arguments brought by Ficino before criticizing him, his teacher. Especially by the standards of the combative and competitive world of Renaissance scholarship, Ficino's reaction to Picco was remarkably mild. This goes both for the debate over being and the one, and also for Picco's attacks on Ficino over the interpretation of Plato's theory of love, which we covered in an earlier episode. Perhaps as implied by the passage just mentioned, Ficino was inclined to excuse the precocious Picco because of his age. Not everyone was so forbearing with him though. Back in 1486, this wunderkind of the Italian Renaissance had run into trouble with the church authorities by flaunting his learning, not to mention his wealth, in stunningly provocative fashion. Only 23 at the time, Picco already fancied himself a leading intellectual, having received rigorous training in a variety of fields. He'd learned church law in Bologna, been exposed to hardcore Aristotelianism and the dangerous ideas of a Varroes at Padua, and studied scholasticism in Paris. As we know, he'd also sought guidance from Jewish scholars to help him learn Hebrew and study the Kabbalah. All of this had, in Picco's opinion, prepared him to debate all comers at a months-long session of disputations at Rome. He sent invitations across Italy, and offered to pay travel expenses for those who were willing to come argue with him. What would be debated? Why, the ideas of Picco of course, as set down in a list of 900 propositions or theses. Well, actually not all the theses are labeled as representing Picco's ideas. Some sections are labeled as setting forth his own innovative proposals, but much of the list consists of propositions ascribed to a variety of earlier authorities with whom Picco may or may not agree. He is true to his title as the Count of Concord, insofar as he emphasizes the doctrinal harmony between three pairs of intellectual forefathers. Of course, he mentions Plato and Aristotle, There is no natural or divine question in which they do not agree in meaning and substance, although in their words they seem to disagree. And he also claims he can reconcile the divergent teachings of Aquinas and Scotus, and of Avicenna and of Averroes. But even these latter pairs are not said to agree on everything, and in fact Picco can be quite critical. He elsewhere charges Aquinas with contradicting himself, never mind contradicting Scotus, and in general he is aware of the healthy amount of disagreement between scholastics. But he believes that as we go further and further back in history, to the ancients like Plato and Aristotle, and beyond them to the Egyptians and Hebrews, we find an ever-greater degree of consensus. In part for this reason, the 900 Theses need to be read with caution, and not just as a list of things Picco asserts in his own right. Even when he clearly does endorse a given proposition, it is often not clear why he would do so. The whole point is that he is prepared to discuss and where appropriate defend these theses in the tradition of the scholastic disputed question. In some cases we can fill in Picco's intended argument, for instance in the case of the propositions that touch on that same question of oneness and being. One thesis has it that only God is so fully substance that in no sense is he not substance. And God's paradigmatic being is again explained using the contrast between whiteness and white things. But the theses range over so much territory, covering everything from the Eucharist to the inadequacy of Aristotle's explanation of the saltiness of the sea, that we'd need Picco himself to tell us all that he had in mind. Which of course was the whole idea. Unfortunately though, the debate was called off, after the pope had a look at Picco's list of theses. In 1487, Picco was condemned, not for the obvious reason that he was acting like an obnoxious and arrogant rich kid, but on the more serious charge of heresy. Of the 900 theses, 7 were condemned and 6 censored. Picco fled to France, though as usual his aristocratic connections shielded him, and he eventually made his way back to Italy and enjoyed the protection of the Medici. As we saw in a previous episode, he arrived in Florence just as Ficino's translations of Plato were being published. Characteristically, Picco was far from chastened and wrote a furious defence or apology. Really though he should not have been surprised at the reaction of the papacy given that some of the 900 theses are phrased in a deliberately provocative way. Take for instance the proposition, not everything God wills through his benevolence is effective. It's possible to imagine even Ficino choking on his Tuscan wine while reading that in his villa. But when you read it in context, you realize Picco just wants to make the uncontentious point that, even though God wants all of us to be saved, some of us will be damned nonetheless thanks to our wicked use of free will. In his apology, Picco firstly excused himself on the grounds that some theses were merely being proposed for discussion, despite being false in his own opinion. But when it came to the condemned and censored theses, he slipped naturally into a more provocative mode, arguing that at least some of these propositions were so evidently true that denying them was senseless or led to contradiction. A striking example is the proposition, no one believes that something is true just by willing to believe it, so that it does not lie within the free power of humans to believe an article of faith to be true just by wanting to. On the face of it, this looks like an all-purpose rationale for pardoning heresy. If I can't help whether or not I believe the teachings of the Church, how can the Church punish me for failing to do so? No surprise then that the Church deemed this statement unacceptable if not itself heretical. Picco argued that, far from being outrageously controversial, the thesis is simply obvious. Surely we can't just believe whatever we want, rather our beliefs respond to argument and evidence. In this case, Picco claims, the whole faculty of the University of Paris would be on his side. An unexpected feature of the Inquisition against Picco is that the Church seems to have had no problem with the substantial sections of the list devoted to magic and kabbalistic teachings. We'll get into Picco's ideas about magic in a future episode. For now, it suffices to note that 15th century intellectuals could apparently discuss magic freely as long as the discussion didn't stray into theological territory. As for kabbalah, this is nothing that should lead Picco into conflict with Christianity, at least in Picco's opinion. One of the more breathtaking theses Picco meant to defend in Rome states that a thorough grasp of the Hebrew language gives one the means to understand the ordering of the sciences and knowledge of all things. And in the famous oration he wrote as an introduction to the planned debate, he said that kabbalah is the heart of understanding, that is an ineffable theology of super-substantial deity, the fountain of wisdom, that is, an exact metaphysics of intelligible angels, and the river of knowledge, that is, a most sure philosophy of natural things. He added that this mystical tradition would, rather ironically, also provide Christians with the means of refuting Judaism. That promise is fulfilled in the 900 Theses, which has a whole section of propositions showing how Christianity can be confirmed with kabbalistic arguments. Here Picco draws on many of the ideas we looked at quite a while ago in this series when we were discussing Jewish kabbalah. He refers to ein sof, a name signifying the transcendent infinity of God, and to the seferot, letters that have both numerical and rich symbolic meaning for the kabbalist. A study of Picco's sources has shown that he draws on a range of authors for his kabbalistic ideas, but above all on Menahem Rachanati, whose writings Picco used as a guide to such central kabbalistic texts as the Zohar. Picco also used his Hebrew learning in a biblical commentary of his own, which is called the heptapros. It explains the meaning of the passage in Genesis about the seven days of God's creation and rest. Here Picco once again turns the methods he learned from his Jewish teachers against their religion. He contends that the chronology of ancient Hebrew learning predicts the appearance of Christ as the Messiah and offers a torturous analysis of the first word of the book of Genesis, beresit, to extract from it a message about the divine Father and Son. In short, there is no science that assures us more of the divinity of Christ than magic and the kabbalah. More fundamentally, Picco's heptapros is structured in keeping with the system he apparently took from his kabbalistic sources, though it resonates well with the Platonism he shared with Ficino. This system recognizes three so-called worlds, namely the sublunary realm where we live, the celestial world, and then an intelligible world which may be identified with Platonian intellect or angel or lisepirot. Along with this syncretic metaphysical picture, Picco offers a syncretic interpretation of Genesis, according to which the scripture simultaneously has multiple meanings. A single phrase may refer to all three worlds at once, and also to human nature, with humanity making up a kind of fourth world. Or the phrase might also signify the interrelation of these four worlds, and so on, until we have seven levels of interpretation to match the seven days. So just to give one example, the distinction between heaven and earth in the Genesis account represents the contrast between matter and form in the sublunary realm, the sun and the moon in the heavenly realm, the parts of the angelic hierarchy in the intelligible realm, soul and body in the human, and so on. Picco is at pains to emphasize the originality of his approach to the biblical text, but it should be noted that the concept of multiple valid meanings is far from innovative. That had been a fundamental tool of scriptural exegesis since the ancient church fathers. But this particular assignment of hermeneutical layers to levels of a cosmological metaphysical hierarchy is Picco's invention. The Kabbalistic elements of Picco's philosophy and theology are certainly remarkable and distinguish him from older peers like Poliziano and Ficino. He knew this himself, as we can see from his own comments about his Hebrew studies, proudly boasting to Ficino of his progress and stating frankly in his commentary on Benivieni's poem about love that it was an interest in Kabbalah that primarily drew him to the study of Hebrew, not you'll notice an interest in the Old Testament. But we should not get so carried away by this aspect of his thought that we overlook his equally deep immersion in the scholastic tradition. We've already seen that schoolmen like Aquinas and Scotus played an important role in the 900 Theses, which begins with a warning that Picco has not imitated the splendor of the Roman language but the style of speaking of the most celebrated Parisian disputers, since this is used by almost all philosophers of our time. Which brings us to one last important theme I want to cover from Picco's precocious and all-too-short career, his views on the style in which philosophy should be done. For these views, we can turn to yet another famous document from his pen, a letter written to his colleague, Ermolao Barbaro. This humanist gave his colleagues another chance to have some fun with nominative determinism, because they could praise Barbaro's excellent Latin as a bulwark against the barbarism of scholastic Latin. But when Barbaro himself made a complaint along these lines in a letter to Picco, he provoked an extraordinary response, a letter in which Picco adopted the persona of a barbarian scholastic speaking in favour of stylistically poor, but intellectually solid writing. What could be more philosophical than disregarding the rhetorical quality of a work and paying heed only to its content? Plato knew this, which is why he excluded the poets from his ideal city. And Picco sounds like Plato critiquing the tricks of the sophists, as he argues that eloquence serves only to mislead its hearers. Of course, Plato is not a very good spokesman for the barbarian view, since he combines sound doctrine with stylistic excellence. So Picco draws a contrast between two other thinkers of the past. On the one hand, there is Duns Scotus, admirable for his philosophy, but, as anyone who has tried to read him will agree, far from elegant in his mode of presentation. On the other hand, there is Lucretius. His poem, which as we saw was rediscovered by Poggio, is a wonderful example of elegant Latin poetry, yet its teachings are anathema to Picco. The sweet verse disguises the purest poison of godless Epicureanism. The delightful irony of Picco's letter is that it is itself a model of polished Latin. This was already noted by Barbaro, who wrote back to Picco saying, you kill off those you defend by showing that eloquence is necessary after all. The irony was surely intentional, but still today, readers are not sure how to take it. At the end of his letter, Picco steps out of the persona he has adopted, which, by the way, was itself a standard rhetorical technique, to say that he himself does not necessarily agree with the barbarian whose perspective he has just been taking. Given that Picco produced the self-consciously scholastic 900 Theses, he was clearly open to working within the barbaric style, but he also took great pains to learn eloquence in both poetry and prose. His ideal was, apparently, to combine the two, as Plato and Cicero had done before him. In the end, he cited Cicero himself for the idea that if forced to choose, one should prefer true teaching over fine words. As he said in another letter, If a philosopher is eloquent, I am pleased. If he is not, I do not mind. A philosopher has one duty and aim, to unlock the truth. Whether you do so with a wooden or a golden key is of no concern to me. In this episode, we've surveyed a pretty astounding range of achievements by Picco. Yet his most famous work is one I have referred to only briefly, The Oration he wrote to introduce his 900 Theses. Posthumously entitled On the Dignity of Man, it is one of the most widely read texts of Renaissance philosophy, and for good reason. It's often taken as a foundational document for a trend we see in European thought more generally in the 15th and 16th centuries, which goes under the label of Renaissance individualism. A central theme of The Oration is human nature, its mutability, and its place in God's creation, and that will be our own theme next time, when we'll have one more case of nominative determinism as I explain what it means to be a son of Adam. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, What a piece of work is man? Manetti and Pico on Human Nature. In the 1970s, a philosopher named Peter Singer brought attention to what he saw as an underappreciated form of prejudice. Just as sexism is discrimination on the basis of gender, and racism discrimination on the basis of race, there is also speciesism, meaning discrimination against non-human animals on the basis of their species. Singer argued then, and continues to argue today, that we should include animals within the bounds of our moral concern. It is not being human that makes the difference, morally speaking, but being sentient. That is why it is wrong to harm an animal without having a very good reason, whereas it's not wrong to smash a rock. Rocks can't feel pain. Singer looked back to his fellow utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham. Already in the 1780s, Bentham wrote in favour of benevolence towards animals, saying, The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? Yet speciesism also has a considerable pedigree, as Singer admitted. The idea of a distinctive human dignity and worth, he wrote, has a long history. It can be traced back directly to the Renaissance humanists, for instance to Pico de la Miranda's oration on the dignity of man. That's a lot to put at the door of a speech written by a 24-year-old. But Singer is not alone in seeing Pico's oration as a pivotal work in Renaissance philosophy, even in the history of European thought. It is often hailed as signalling a new conception of human nature and of humanity's place in the world, as expressing what you might call a novel philosophical anthropology, anthropology being of course the study of the human. In this speech, Pico gave voice to the idea that humans are radically free and irreducibly individual, each of us blessed by God with the opportunity to choose what meaning to give to our life. Perhaps only Shakespeare is more famous than Pico as a spokesman for individualism in this period we are calling the Renaissance. But in Shakespeare, the obligation to make meaningful choices and thus to become the creator of one's own self can seem more like a burden than a blessing. In the most famous instance, the character Hamlet spends almost a whole play failing to choose. His lack of resolution is an unwillingness to trade the indeterminacy of freedom for determined action. For Pico, by contrast, it is the malleability of human nature that makes humans the greatest of all God's creatures greater even than the angels. For we humans can decide, if we have the strength, to be like the angels and even to be like God himself. Given that choice is the central theme of Pico's speech, it's rather ironic that someone else chose the name by which it is known. Nowadays it is always called the oration on the dignity of man, but this title was associated with it only after Pico's death. Two years after he died, so in 1496, his nephew Gianfresco della Mirandola published it along with other works by Pico. Only in a further edition, which came out in 1504, was the now ubiquitous title applied to it. And that title gives no hint of the original purpose of the oration. Pico intended it as a kind of introduction to the debate of his 900 Theses, which was to be held at Rome until the pope had other ideas. Pico expanded the speech, apparently in several stages, by adding, among other things, a defense of this project, which seemed to some an act of impertinence from a young upstart. If the posthumously added title unhelpfully obscures the immediate occasion for the oration, it does illuminate the wider context of Pico's ideas. For the dignity of humankind was indeed a theme of Renaissance humanism, and the very same title had been used in a much longer work by an earlier author. This was Giannazzo Manetti. As it happens, Manetti was not provoking a pope, like Pico would later do, but instead being provoked by one. The pope in question was Innocent III, who served as pontiff at the beginning of the 13th century. Among his writings was a treatise with the gloomy title On the Miseries of the Human Condition. It was to be supplemented by a companion piece on the excellence of human life, but this never appeared, leaving a gap open for more optimistic later writers. A scholar named Bartolomeo Faccio attempted to fill that gap, but his offering was fairly brief and is mostly remembered for helping to inspire Manetti's longer response in defense of human life. Completed in 1452 and entitled On Human Dignity and Excellence, Manetti's treatise extends over four books and praises the exquisite creation that is the human being, from our cunningly designed bodies to our capacity for reasoning, wisdom, and virtue. From the first page, Manetti shows his humanist credentials, starting with etymological discussion of the Hebrew and Greek words for human, and moving on to extensive quotation from the classical authors Cicero and Lactantius. These initial quotations concern the perfection of the human body, which Manetti demonstrates by referring to such things as the protection offered by our hair. Being bald myself, I'm more persuaded by his observation that the skin around the skull is a solid and rather attractive covering for the bone and brain. The work also draws widely on scholastic ideas, some of which go back to the Islamic world, like the theory of internal senses seated in the brain, which derives from Avicenna. Praise of the body, focusing on the usefulness of its parts, is itself a long-standing tradition that goes back to Aristotle and Galen. Like Galen, Manetti takes it that humans are superior to animals even in respect of their bodies, without even getting into the intellectual and moral powers that are unique to us. Our bodily preeminence is owing to the perfect balance of the blood from which we are made when it is generated out of seed as we gestate in our mothers. But of course, the most valuable part of the human is not the body but the soul. Surprisingly to the modern reader, and it might have surprised Marsilio Ficino too, Manetti singles out Aristotle, not Plato, as the leading ancient protagonist of the soul's immortality. He concedes that Plato too seems to have taught this doctrine, though in a rather obscure way, and not with straightforward arguments. Immortality makes us different from other animals, as we can see from the natural desire we all feel for eternal happiness. This itself proves that we are, indeed, immortal, since desires that are natural to a species cannot be without purpose. Manetti relies throughout on Aristotle's picture of living beings as always having an orientation toward certain ends or purposes, which their bodies and souls are apt to pursue. Christian sources are brought into play too, mostly just to confirm the ideas that can be gleaned from pagan sources. But Manetti does think that Christianity has supplanted pagan notions of our ultimate end, which is properly understood to be worship and knowledge of God. So it is as both a humanist and a Christian that Manetti dares to take exception with Pope Innocent's more pessimistic assessment of the human condition. He is much more polite about this than, say, Lorenzo Valla was when discussing the donation of Constantine, but this is still a firm rejection of papal opinion, and for good measure, he opinions of pagan authors like Seneca, who consoled those who grieve over the death of loved ones by suggesting, effectively, that earthly life is not so great anyway. Of course, Manetti admits that there is bodily infirmity, disease, and death, but reminds us that these are not inherent to human nature, but the result of original sin. Besides, there is much pleasure in life, not only suffering, even in old age when increasing debilitation is offset by certain pleasures. Perhaps one of them is that baldness allows us to show off the nice skin on our scalps. Above all, we should not forget that in the future, the blessed among us will be resurrected in perfect bodies, which will be only 30 years old and will not suffer from any of the defects that come with our current fallen nature. It seems then that Manetti's lengthy, elegant treatise had explored the theme of human dignity pretty thoroughly, but Pico's oration has plenty to add, beginning with its style. It is a work of brash confidence, in which the young scholar seems to be generalizing from his own genius and creative originality to assert the power of all humans to create themselves as they see fit. He boasts of the new philosophy he intends to defend in the envisioned disputation at Rome. Yet here, too, Pico did have forerunners. He may have known Manetti's writing, and no less a theological authority than Peter Lombard, whose work The Sentences was the fundamental textbook of medieval theology, had already proclaimed the superiority of humans over angels. A more intriguing potential influence on Pico is Johann Allemanno, one of the Jewish scholars who taught him the ways of Kabbalah. In his own writings, Allemanno had argued that humans have no one fixed nature. Rather, they are intermediate beings, the last of the natural creatures and the first among the intellectual creatures. This is because humans have both a bodily and intellectual aspect. For Allemanno, the point of this was to embrace both aspects by using Kabbalah. Like many a philosopher, he believed that we need to perfect our mind through contemplation, but he also thought that the ritual actions undertaken in Kabbalah lead us closer to God. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, the point Pico makes in a famous passage towards the beginning of his oration. He agrees with Allemanno that humans are the intermediary, or bond, of God's creation, straddling the material and immaterial worlds. Alluding to both Plato's Timaeus and the creation story of Genesis, Pico explains that, by the time God created humans, he had already made the earth, and whatever is upon it, and the heavens with their intellects and eternal souls. Having filled the lower and higher realms in this fashion, in a sense there was nothing else left for God to make. The purpose of creating humans was so that there might be someone to consider the reason for such a work, to love its beauty and admire its magnificence. Since all the natures had already been created in the earthly and celestial realms, God told humankind in the person of Adam, You have neither particular seat nor special aspect. It is open to you by your choice, in whose hands I have placed you, to fix the limits of nature for yourself. And it's this that makes us the most happy of animals and the one most worthy of wonder. But as Hamlet knew, momentous choices bring dangers with them. Since we partake of the lower natures found in beasts and even plants, we can embrace these natures, thus failing to take advantage of our literally God-given opportunity. This is the choice made by hedonists, who indulge the faculties of nutrition and reproduction found also in plants. And those who love things enjoyed by the senses are acting like non-human animals. In a striking example of Pico's eclectic cultural tastes, he even cites Mohammed, in other words the Quran, for the idea that those who turn away from the divine law become like beasts. What we should do instead is, of course, to focus on higher natures within us, thus becoming no longer earthly, nor even heavenly, but a light that is even more noble, clothed with human flesh. This means contemplating God as the highest angels do, and ultimately even achieving union with the divine so as to surpass angelic nature. This is pretty heady stuff, but unlike Adam being created by God, it did not come out of nowhere. Apart from the background we've already considered in Manetti and Alemanno, the most significant context for understanding this famous part of Pico's oration is the revival of Platonism, led by his older friend and colleague, Marsilio Ficino. In our earlier look at Ficino, we saw him making the point that the human is the bond of the world and a fusion of all other natures. He puts the point nicely in his commentary on the Timaeus, the dialogue of Plato also name-checked in Pico's oration. It behooves the human to be the animal which would worship those above, being the mean between the animals on high, which are immortal in body as in soul, and the animals whose soul and body have fallen. That is, man is mortal through the body, but immortal through the soul. On this point, Ficino and Pico were in good company. Since antiquity and throughout the middle ages, philosophers had been insisting that the human is a microcosm, which literally means a small world. You can find this in all medieval cultures, with particularly detailed versions in such thinkers as Hildegard of Bingen and the 10th century group of philosophers in Iraq who called themselves the Brethren of Purity. They liked the idea so much that they flipped it around, saying that just as the human is a small cosmos, the cosmos is a great human. But of course Pico is not just saying in his oration that humans contain all of creation and even a spark of divinity within them, combining the familiar ideas that the human is a microcosm and is created in the image of God. He's adding the crucial further point that we can choose which of the many natures given to us is our true identity. But this, I think, was simply a matter of drawing out a long-standing idea found in the Platonic tradition. Finally in Plotinus, whose works Ficino translated into Latin, along with the dialogues of Plato, we have the idea that the soul exists on the horizon of the physical and intelligible realms. In Plotinus' Enneads, no less than in Pico's oration, we find the idea that the true nature of the soul resides in a power to identify with one of those two realms. In the treatise that was placed at the head of the Enneads by Plotinus' student and editor Porphyry, Plotinus asks who we are and answers that we are neither an animal body nor an angelic or divine mind. Rather, each of us is a subject endowed with free choice, through which we are capable of choosing to identify with either the body or the mind. This is, of course, to take nothing away from the significance or ingenuity of Pico's speech. It is to recognize the nature of his achievement, which was to retrieve an idea from the older Platonic tradition and update it for Pico's Christian humanist audience. Similarly, Peter Singer was giving Pico more than his fair share of credit, or blame, when he named him and the other humanists as pioneers of speciesism. The superiority of the human to the beast was a well-worn trope of ancient and medieval philosophy based in the Aristotelian and Stoic conviction that reason is distinctive of humankind. So the humanists were actually being fairly traditional when they encouraged us to turn away from our animal natures. It's advice that appears pervasively in the period. Pico himself wrote, in his commentary on Benavieni's poem about love, that our desire for sexual gratification is something we share in common with beasts, whereas rationally we know that such bodily pleasure is in fact destructive of beauty. The same idea appears in other authors, for instance Pietro Bembo and Tulia Daragona, who associated vulgar love with animal passion and honest love with reason. Ficino too sees animals as being, in general, helplessly prey to their desires. He writes in his Platonic theology that our ability to resist temptation is something that distinguishes us from beasts. And this isn't true, by the way. Experimenters have shown that hungry animals can postpone the enjoyment of food if they have good reason to do so. Again, it is rationality that makes the supposed difference, which is why Bembo thinks that, just as it is animalistic to be sexually licentious, so one turns one's back on human nature by giving in to skepticism. He writes that skeptics are mistaken to consider themselves men rather than animals by birth, for in rejecting the faculty which distinguishes us from animals, they deprive the mind of its purpose and strip their lives of our chief ornament. Yet the Italian Renaissance also saw challenges to this age-old contrast between rational humans and irrational animals. You might remember Lorenzo Valla mounting such a challenge in his attack on scholasticism, and his lead was followed by a number of later thinkers. Writing in 1603, the anatomist Giroramo da Quapendente went so far as to suggest that animals are capable of rudimentary language. At about the same time, another man of the same given name, Giroramo Giovanni, was even more impressed by the linguistic capacities of these. Giovanni said that really the only reason we say non-human animals are irrational is that otherwise we would have to give up on the idea that humans alone are, as the classical definition would have it, rational animals. Another late Renaissance thinker who we'll be coming to in due course, Tommaso Campanella, thought that animals could perform zilligisms, as when a dog hunting another animal infers which way to go from the smell of its quarry. He also offered the nice example of a dog he had met who lived with a Polish family and could understand Polish but not Italian. Such discussions suggest that, if anything, this was a period where speciesism was not being invented but being put in question as rarely before. In one breath, philosophers would encourage us to turn away from our animal nature, but in the next breath they might emphasize the continuity between animal and human spheres. Not all animals are the same, after all. Some seem barely more advanced than plants, whereas others are apparently capable of thinking, emotion, and imagination. They can do practically everything that we can. Thus, Renaissance philosophers envisioned a kind of hierarchy in which the more sophisticated beasts are those that are more like humans. This too is part of Pico's message in The Oration, which sees human nature as containing all that is in animal nature. Elsewhere, in his biblical commentary, the Heptapros, he suggests that it is especially the domestic animals that come close to being like humans because they can learn from training. The same sort of point was made by another philosopher we'll be discussing in depth later on, Agostino Nifo. He wrote that, Man is the canon and measure of all animals. For this reason, one animal is more perfect than another, because it resembles more closely to man, such as pygmies and apes. And for this reason, one animal is of lesser worth than another, because it is far removed from men, such as an oyster or sea sponge. Here, Nifo is still thoroughly committed to speciesism, but not because he sees a radical gulf between human and animal. To the contrary, it is because he sees humans as the best animal. How did such ideas come to circulate in the Italian Renaissance? In part because of careful observation, made by anatomists or simply people who were paying attention to animal behavior, as with that example of Campanella noticing the dog who could only understand Polish. But another part of the explanation is, as we saw with the relevance of Plotinus for Pico's Oration, that long-neglected texts from antiquity were being read once again. For non-human animals, there was one text in particular that made a big impact, Porphyry's treatise on abstinence from killing and eating animals. We've just seen that Renaissance authors admitted that animals may be capable of language or reasoning to some extent, and they also anticipated Peter Singer in recommending a vegetarian diet. This was in large part down to the influence of Porphyry, as has been shown in modern-day research, or by one modern-day researcher in particular, and next time we'll meet her. Cecilia Moratori's work has shown the importance of attitudes towards animals for understanding Renaissance ethics, science, and philosophy of mind. Whether or not Pico was right that the human is king among animals, there's no doubt that Moratori is the queen of animals in the Renaissance, as we'll see next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophical conceptions of animals in the Renaissance with Cecilia Muratori, who is research fellow in the Department of Italian at the University of War. Hi, Cecilia. Thanks very much for coming on the podcast. We normally think of animals as being sort of between plants and humans, and of course Aristotle thought about them this way too. And so I guess the first question that arises here is whether Renaissance philosophers just follow those sort of lines. Do they say, well, there are defining characteristics of plants on the one hand and humans on the other, and then there's going to be some defining characteristics of non-human animals in the middle? Yeah, one of the perhaps most interesting characteristics of the Renaissance, especially if we look at the problem of the animal soul, is that there is a plurality of positions and it's very hard to bring it down to one main position. So in a sense, the Renaissance philosophies resist a sort of simplification into one main strand, one main theory. But still having said that, as you mentioned Aristotle, these texts that are read and circulated had an impact. And of course the question of whether animals are rational is one main strand of the discourse. The first problem that we encountered, though, if we look a bit closer at this problem of animal rationality is what actually, what is meant by rationality. There is an issue of translating the texts. So as Aristotle's The Anima on the soul is translated from Greek into Latin, what actually are we talking about when we talk about rationality and what is the part of the soul the animals are supposed to have or not to have? Is it anima, in the sense of soul, is it mens, which we could translate as mind. And what does this mens do? So what is the activity, what is rational thinking that we are attributing or not attributing to the animals? One interesting example to just approach this problem today is the treatment of animal rationality in Campanella, and Tommaso Campanella is in one of his main works, which is the Sensu Rerum, was published for the first time around the 1620s. He deals with the question of whether animals can abstract universals, for instance. So he's that part of rationality. And what he argues there is that whether we believe that animals are rational or not, if we look at what animals do, we must conclude that they abstract universals. So a dog, this is Campanella's example, a dog would see a man approaching, for instance, and growl because he has learned that human beings can be quite dangerous. So the man proceeds and he recognized that it's Peter. So it's really Peter in the text. It's Peter. Good example. He recognizes Peter as his owner and he stops growling because he's actually happy to see Peter. What this example teaches us is that animals are capable of abstracting universals and then from the universals they get used to the particular. So it's Peter, my owner, so I don't need to be worried. I see. So the dog can distinguish between humans in general, which he's hostile towards, and Peter in particular, which he's not hostile towards. Exactly. So if we consider that that is one feature of thinking rationally, so being capable of using this universal concept, then obviously animals do that too. So what do we mean when we say that animals are not rational? This is a problem that, by the way, leads us also directly to the cards. So when we say animals don't have a soul, actually what is meant even for the cards is that perhaps they don't have a mind, so the capability of thinking rationally, so the theory, or animantia, so all living beings, how they're saw is pretty controversial, even for themselves, through the whole Renaissance, through to the card. What is at stake is do animals have a mind in the sense of mends, and what does this mind do? So what are precisely the characteristics? Is it calculating? Is it conceiving universals? What you were just talking about, so this question of whether animals are rational or not, that seems to be a way of negatively defining animals in opposition to humans. So we say that humans are rational, animals are non-human, and the reason they're non-human is that they lack, let's say, mind, even though they have souls. What about a more positive way of defining animals, and maybe here this would be what distinguishes them from plants? What faculties do animals need to have to distinguish them from something like a mushroom or even a Venus flytrap? Isn't it the problem with sensation? So if we try to define rationality, we slide into the problem of how do we actually define sensation? What can just sensation do? And we have, as you rightly say, we have the problem on both borders, so to speak, so the border dividing sensation from rationality, but also the border dividing sensation from lack of sensation to plants. That's another problem that is very prominent in Campanella, but also in Bernardino Telesio, is one of the main sources for Campanella, is the author of the book The Romnatura of 1586, which is one of the main sources of Campanella himself. And the problem that both Telesio and Campanella deal with is precisely this. So how do we trace borders between different classes of beings? And does nature allow us at all to do that, to grow precise borders? Which is a problem not just for psychology, but for ethics as well. If we can't trace precise borders, for instance, there's a problem we might get to later. What do we eat if we can't divide plants? If we can't divide rational beings from irrational beings, but also animals from plants. And one of the main problems that it's discussed in many Renaissance texts is how do we bridge these borders? So both Telesio and Campanella deal with this border between sensation and rationality by claiming that there is a logical problem there because we are forced to multiply the faculties in between. So we are trying to bridge a gap which can't be bridged. And they interpret in this frame, for instance, the fact that Avicenna's vis estimativa is stuck in between, so to speak, sensation and rationality. So we see this through the history of philosophy, so to speak. There is an attempt to bridge this distance between sensation and rationality and between sensation and lack of sensation. Just to explain briefly what that means, Avicenna has this idea of what in Arabic he called waham, which means, or was it translated as estimation? So this is an animal's capacity to perceive a cognitively rich content. So something you can't see, as a famous example, is the hostility of a wolf being pursued by a sheep. And so this kind of pushes the animal's capacities in the direction of what humans can do, right? Yeah, and distinguishing between enemies and friends is quite a key capacity. Hitler himself claims that animal is an awkward category. It's almost unusable. So animal includes, that's his example, an oyster and an elephant. Now we're supposed to bring those two creatures together, that they can do such different things. Also, the elephant is a very important animal in the Renaissance. It's a religious animal, something that we might come to later, perhaps, in the reception of the Pliny Natural History. The elephant is a creature who is even capable of adoring the moon. So very, very close to human beings. Like worshipping the moon? Worshipping the moon. Or elephants were thought to be doing this? Yeah, kneeling before the moon. That's why if we were sketching a sort of scala, the elephant would be quite high up, very, very close to human beings in Renaissance texts. That's interesting. While the oyster obviously being also fairly mobile, it's lower down if you want to picture it. Yeah, the oyster is almost a plant in the downward direction and the elephant is almost a human. Exactly. And still they're both animal. Right. To what extent did they think that these differences between plants, animals and humans were grounded just in something like the difference between their bodies? I mean, is the idea that the poor animal just doesn't have the right kind of mixture of physical material in their body and that's why they can't think? Or is the idea more that whatever their body is like, the real problem is that they have a different kind of soul, which you might think is the message you're getting from Aristotle. So Aristotle seems maybe to be obviously controversial, but Aristotle seems to maybe be saying, well, there's three kinds of soul faculties, so three kinds of souls. There's vegetative souls, which plants have. There's animal souls, which are capable of sensation, which animals have, non-human animals. And then there's rational souls. So which way did they go there? Do they just think it's a different type of soul or do they think it's really the body that explains the difference? And it's a difficult combination of both, how a soul inhabits the body. That's a platonic problem already and it's another reception history that we might think about when we talk about animal souls in the Renaissance. For instance, the problem of how a soul inhabits the body could lead us back to Plato's Timaeus, where we find this example of the fish. The worst thing that can happen to the soul in Plato's Timaeus is being reincarnated in the fish body, which leads us to this problem of what can a soul do according to the body it inhabits. Is this just a sign that Plato didn't like to swim or what's so bad about being reincarnated as a fish? It seems to be that mainly the fish doesn't have limbs, so what a body can express and what a soul can express to the body without having limbs is very little. Also the element that the fish inhabits is different, so the water versus air. In the Renaissance, one of the main organs that fascinates philosophers is of course the brain, because at least since Galen, that's supposed to be the seat of the rational faculty. So at least part of the explanation then of the difference between animals and humans should be they literally have different kinds of brains. Exactly, ventricles of the brain, so the compartments. How well organized are these compartments? That could be one example of the difference. One very vivid example that we find in Bruno's Kabbalah, where there is a description of transformation from a snake into a human body. This description of transformation is a very good example of how the relationship between the body and the soul is thought in terms of interaction, but also can be brought to extremes to saying actually it depends on the body what a creature can do and also how well or how bad a creature can think can be just due to bodily features. So in the Kabbalah, the transformation goes like this. Bruno writes, if we imagine that the head of the snake can get bigger and limbs can germinate out of the body, it's kind of getting us back to the Timils again. The fish without limbs, here we have a snake without limbs, so if we imagine the head gets bigger, the limbs germinate from the body and the Kucha gets hands and a tongue, interestingly. Then he says what we would have at the end is nothing different than a man and then he had in fact it would because it would be a man. So it's just the bodily construction that defines whether a Kucha is a human or a man. So the fact that I can talk right now and it's just due to the tongue and the palate. It's a very physical explanation. And the hands again. So for Bruno, having hands is defining. So something that Timils fish doesn't have. You mentioned before there's this issue about what we're allowed to eat and that calls to mind some texts that we know of from antiquity. So especially Plutarch and an author who used Plutarch, namely Porphyry, the student of Plotinus, so one of the major Neoplatonists. And Porphyry, just to remind listeners because I covered this quite a long time ago in the podcast series, Porphyry wrote this treatise called On Abstinence from Consuming Animals, in which he argues that a philosopher should lead a vegetarian life. And I guess that this text was known in the Renaissance, right? And so I'm wondering what they did with that. Were they interested in this text? Did they use his arguments to argue for vegetarianism? Yeah, both texts of Plutarch's Brut animalia, the Brut animals he's using. The reason it's a dialogue where the protagonist, Grillos, is one of Ulysses' companions and he had been transformed into a pig by the sorcerer. Right, that taught him not to eat other pigs, basically. Exactly. And that text circulated widely in the Renaissance. It was included in pretty much every edition of Plutarch's Moralia from the 1509 one onwards. So it was well known. And Porphyry's On Abstinence was also first translated by Masiluficino, an abridged version, and then from 1547, 1548, also started to circulate in Latin translation and in Greek. There is a variety of authors who refer to these texts also with regard to the issue of rationality. So the question would be, if we say the animals are rational, wouldn't eating them be basically the same as eating humans? And it's important to remind us that Porphyry's aim on abstinence is a practical one. So arguing in favor of the rationality of animals there serves the purpose of saying that if animals are rational, if, then would still be legitimate to eat them or wouldn't be rather like eating people. Which is assumed to be not okay. And yet at the same time, that's precisely what certain populations in the New World are doing. So we should also remember that there is a lot of information coming from the New World in terms of travel reports, also very imaginative travel reports about the habits of the cannibals, which is another interesting feature of Renaissance discourses on animals. So what are those human looking creatures in the New World who don't speak? So we go back to the issue of talking and having a tongue. And that's another characteristic that Porphyry discusses in an abstinence, another trace of rationality. If animals are supposed to be able to speak, then do they express logos basically? So they are rational. So do we consider, for instance, the songs of the birds as a sign that they are rational? Or we have these populations in the New World who are not speaking. Apparently not speaking. Apparently to us. So I see. So the idea is that just like animals might threaten to become too human by being rational or for your example of a dog that can perceive universals or something like that. So they were running into these humans or apparent humans who were engaging in behaviors that they thought made these humans more like animals than humans. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also the effect is that practically we have subdivided again the categories of animals and of humans. So in Porphyry, the categories of humans is subdivided because what he's arguing is that not everyone should abstain from animals, but this might be a suitable diet for the philosopher. So it has to do with virtue, with virtue's behavior. So the philosopher might want to think about abstaining from eating creatures that might possess rationality. Conversely, what happens in encountering cannibals is that we have human, at least human-looking creatures who eat each other, who display the most brutal behavior of all. So again, it's difficult to trace a clear line between humans and animals. And we see that in the reception of Plutarch as well, which is the other text that you just mentioned. For instance, a good example is Giambattista Gelli's Ciurce 1549, which is a text in which so Gelli uses the story of Toba Plutarch, so its gorillas had been transformed into a pig and Ulises had been negotiating with the sorcerer the possibility to have his companions back, so the transformation back into humans, and he's surprised when the animals refuse to be turned back into human form. And in Gelli's Ciurce, eventually Ulises does find one creature who wants to be, who is willing to regain his human shape, and that's the elephant, which is not by chance. It's the elephant in the dialogue who had previously been a philosopher and possibly even an Aristotelian philosopher judging from the kind of language that he uses. And what this text interestingly does for this question we are talking about today of what defines an animal in the Renaissance is that there we have an animal comparing the previous human condition with a current animal condition, evaluating which of the two is best. So whether it's better to be turned back into human or to stay as an animal, all of that from the point of view of an animal, who is supposed to have lost rationality in the process. And despite that the animal is deliberating about, it's really fascinating because in theory animals should be non-rational and yet here is an animal deliberating about whether to become rational, which doesn't even make any sense. So the point that they discuss is that we should mention is the happiness factor. So is it a happy life necessarily a human life, which brings us back to Aristotle as well. So the happy life is the virtuous life of the Nicomachean ethics, or can animals be happy at all, especially if they are not rational? Or does happiness precisely consist into not being rational? Oh, for an animal their happy life would be not being rational. So instead of just one criterion, the one we started with, rationality, we have now at least three. So rationality and happiness and virtue. The picture then seems to be a kind of continuum with blurry edges where at the bottom we have plants and then above plants we have maybe something like an oyster, then we have other animals at the top of the animals, we have something like an elephant, but then there are cannibals which seem to be in some ways maybe even worse than an elephant. And then we have humans and even within humans we might have normal humans and philosophers at the very top, of course. And to me that's very striking because that idea of the blurriness between humans on the one hand and non-human animals on the other hand is something we associate very strongly with Darwinian evolutionary theory. So that makes me wonder to what extent Renaissance authors were already kind of anticipating this idea that there's no hard and fast distinction between the two. This makes me think first of all of this problem of the transformation from human into animal, also continuing from the topic we've just been discussing, and from animal into human. So physiognomy is another important discipline in the Renaissance which helps us get into the bottom of this animal. So question, the La Corta, for instance, the physiognomy, it's a text published in 1586, has a sort of map of characteristics that should help us decode what moral character certain humans have. So he's using animals, so for instance a dog or a horse, to interpret human characteristics. So if a human being would look like a horse, for instance, that would mean that that human being is particularly faithful or particularly gentle, for instance. He creates some kind of map for seeing how similar we are in the body and what that means for the similarity in the character. So that's one example of how the border is really blurred. So we use the animals actually to interpret ourselves. Another very striking example we find in a text by Giulio Cesarevagnini, who was burnt in France in 1619 for his theoretical views, and in one of his two main texts, which is called the Admirandis, there is a passage about the generation of humans and of animals. Generation is very important if we are thinking in terms of, well, pre-Dawinian in the sense of scientific, so we look at the generation of all creatures and the question of where do humans come from. And in that text, he answered these questions by saying that, so it's a dialogue I should say, so there is irony in it and it's in a dialogical form, so it's not straightforward, his theory. But here, the theory that is presented is that humans not only come from rotten matter, which is playing on the idea of spontaneous generation, so the idea that certain creatures, usually small creatures, could be generated spontaneously, for instance, after heavy rain, it's a theory also drawn from Aristotle. His playing on that idea was saying that humans come from rotten matter, but actually from the rotten matter of pigs, frogs, and monkeys. And it's a passage that of course has inspired quite a lot of Darwinian debates. So does he mean that we come from them, so to speak? But without going into that, what's important for our topic is the fact that there is an obvious connection and its connection is in the bodies, in the generation. Again, the borders are not just blurred, but also we get once again to the subcategories. So the category is not anymore humans or animals, for instance, but in many Renaissance texts, it's between the animals generated in a womb or without a womb. So the so-called perfect animals, those bigger, more complex bodies usually generated in a womb and the imperfect animals, which is smaller, sometimes born spontaneously, like after heavy rain. So once again, the humans would just be one instance of a perfect animal together with other perfect animals, for instance, the pigs and monkeys. And giraffes, don't forget your ass. And giraffes. Definitely giraffes. It makes me wonder what kind of implications this all has in a religious context. I mean, obviously the Renaissance is still a very religious society. And if you blur the distinction between humans and animals in this way, I mean, we've been talking about ethical implications to do with vegetarianism, for example, but what about the religious point of view? I mean, if you think that animals might be moral agents, does that mean that they can sin? Does it mean they need to be redeemed in order to be saved? Can they be saved? Do they ever talk about this sort of issue? First of all, if we're going to continue on the cannibalistic strand, we have the issue there already. So can those animals be saved? Or you mean the cannibals? The cannibals. The cannibals. So there is a big topic for debate. So can we convert them? And does that depend on rationality? So we have to first assess whether they can talk, whether they can think. So again, the disconnection, talking and thinking. Then are they rational? And if they're rational, can we intervene at that point and actually convert them to Christianity? So we have that issue already at the level of human beings, actually. With animals, the problem derives from the issue of rationality. If rationality isn't the border anymore, strictly dividing humans from animals, then is there still another border, another line that we can draw to definitely say this is something animals don't have? And could that be religion? That's one main topic. So animals are not religious like us. I see. So they are rational, but we can still eat them because they don't worship Christ. Exactly. Okay. I'm not sure that's going to convince too many vegetarians out there at this stage. But just as a final wrap up question, one thing that's struck me throughout everything you've been saying is how much this anticipates later developments and conceptions of animals. So it seems in a way to have a lot more in common with modern day attitudes towards animals than medieval attitudes towards animals. So I mentioned Darwin before, but I guess maybe a more immediate point of comparison might be what happens in what we usually call early modern philosophy. And there, one thing that leads to mine, for example, is Descartes' notorious position that animals are basically just machines. And some of the more physicalist ways of thinking about this that you mentioned, so that the real difference between animals and humans might just be their physical makeup, that would seem to anticipate what Descartes is saying to some extent. Is that right? Well, one interesting thing is that if we delve into the continuity of animals and humans, we always at some point come to the continuity of the Renaissance and early modern period. That's an interesting feature. And in a sense, what Descartes is claiming about animals automatism, which is basically the theory that we can explain fully animal behavior by studying their bodies. Really, I think what it means. So we can't fully interpret human behavior by simply studying the human body. And that's what the mind, the mens, comes into play. But we can fully explain animal bodies, animal behavior. That theory is in itself not new at all, even if Descartes is usually considered a watershed with regard to debates on the animal. And in a sense it was because the ethical debate that Descartes, so the way Descartes presented the theory, those ethical debates were really something more powerful, in a sense, new than ever before. So for instance, the question, what can we do with animals if they really don't feel if they are like machines? So in a sense, the reception of Descartes theory might still be considered something new. But the idea itself, so that animals might be like machines, is not new. So one famous precedent is a book by a Spanish doctor called Gomez Pereira. The book is Antoniano Margarita, 1554. It's particularly interesting because there Gomez Pereira argues that if we say that animals have sensations, we're back to the issue we discussed at the beginning, then we have to say that they are rational as well. There is no way of stopping them from being rational if we say that they have sensation, because the issues we already talked about. So it's really difficult to draw a clear cut line there. And that, he claims, it's absurd. So we can't say that animals are rational like us. So what remains? It's the other position. So they come in a packet together, either sensation and rationality or neither sensation nor rationality. So they deny that animals have sensations. So the conclusion he comes to before Descartes is then they lack sensation. Interestingly, then he also goes on to distinguish between two different kinds of sensations. So he says maybe there is a way in which animals can feel in a sort of unconscious way while we feel consciously, which is also an interesting idea to think about in the reception. So if we compare it with Descartes. So in a sense, animal automatism was also a theory that was discussed and partly also rejected. So Campanella, for instance, rejected well before Descartes. For Campanella, it's just not a viable solution. So we must find a distinction somewhere else. It doesn't, it simply doesn't work. So the dividing lines between Renaissance philosophy and early modern philosophy are just as blurry as the dividing lines between animals and humans. Thank you to Cecilia very much for that fascinating discussion of animals in the Renaissance. Please join me next time to hear more about Renaissance philosophy on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Bonfire of the Vanities, sabbon arola. As the people who have the dubious pleasure of living or working with me can attest, my favourite philosopher is usually whichever one I'm currently reading and writing about for this podcast. Over the last months I have seized on the smallest excuse to wax enthusiastic about Ficino and Pico, or before that the contributions of women to Italian humanism. But I have to admit that I'm having trouble warming to the protagonist of this episode, Girolamo Savonarola. Remember from a few episodes back the various measures taken to persecute Jews in Renaissance Italy? Savonarola was a devout anti-Semite, and would certainly have supported such measures except insofar as he found them too lenient. He would surely have disapproved of those women humanists. His remarks about women are typically in the mode of patronizing spiritual guidance offered to the weaker sex, and he was scornful of women who reported having the sort of prophetic visions he claimed for himself. Though it must be conceded that a good number of women rallied to his cause and stuck by it even after his death. Ironically, they included a number of mystical thinkers. Savonarola reserved special ire for homosexuality, demanding that it be punished with violent death. I'd like to see you build a nice fire of these sodomites in the piazza, two or three, male and female, because there are also women who practice that damnable vice. I say offer them as a sacrifice to God. When Florence was faced by a famine, he told the people they deserved it because they were so sinful. And famously, he oversaw the bonfire of the vanities, in which the tools of gambling and other frivolous pastimes, women's wigs and clothing, musical instruments, artworks, and books went up in flames. Then again he did also put an end to the tradition of youngsters throwing rocks at people to celebrate carnival, which led to several deaths each year. Even a stopped clock is right once a day. So why am I devoting an episode to this horrible man? Well, he was a central figure in a pivotal period of Florentine history, and his story is bound up with those of leading philosophers. Notably, he received both admiration and material support from Pico della Mirandola. Gerolamo Beniviani, author of that poem on love that received a commentary from Pico, was also devoted to Savonarola. Ficino too intended his sermons in what I imagine to be horrified fascination. Ficino held his tongue until Savonarola had been condemned to death, then offered further post-mortem condemnation by accusing him of hypocrisy. The preacher's vanity had led him to his own bonfire, on which his corpse was thrown after hanging. All this would give us plenty of reason to at least mention Savonarola. More important though is the fact that, while Savonarola may have had a mean streak, he was no mean thinker. His savage and brilliant sermons and treatises set out ideas that are important for the history of theology, philosophy, and political thought. I'll be focusing on his theory of knowledge, which involved both criticizing pagan philosophy and justifying his own pretensions to prophetic inspiration, and on his rejection of tyrannical rule and support of a republican government for Florence. By tyrannical rule, Savonarola meant what Florence had experienced under the Medici. In sharp contrast to Ficino, who saw Medici rule as exemplifying the dominance of an enlightened elite just as proposed in Plato's Republic, Savonarola initiated a popular movement for moral and religious reform. As prior of the Dominican order at San Marco, he used his bully pulpit to issue prophetic warnings of upheaval and apocalypse. He was disturbed by the wealth and worldliness of the Church, and took up the argument in favor of voluntary poverty, which we looked at back in our series on philosophy in the Medieval period. But his ideas of religious reform went further than that, to the point that Martin Luther would later be struck at the extent to which his own movement had been anticipated by Savonarola. Things came to a head when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy, and Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492. His son Piero made military and economic concessions to the French, which so angered patricians of the city that Piero was exiled. Savonarola was sent as an emissary to King Charles, and pinned his hopes on this invader, seeing in him the catalyst for the renewal of faith and unity in his city and all of Italy. Many Florentines were convinced that the apocalyptic predictions Savonarola had been making were coming true. At least among them was Savonarola himself, who remarked of his prophetic gift, I was fairly certain, then I was certain, now I am more than certain. The Pope was not impressed, seeing in Savonarola a dangerous man in both political and theological terms. He excommunicated the preacher, yet many in Florence still supported him. Savonarola had enemies there too though, who found their chance after a rather farcical sequence of events in 1498. There was to be a literal trial by fire, in which representatives of his opponents and adherents, but not Savonarola himself, would walk into flames to see who had the support of God. After a heavy rain and squabbling over the ground rules, the event fizzled out before this bonfire was even lit. Amidst the ensuing disappointment and disillusionment, Savonarola was arrested, charged with heresy, tortured into disavowing his prophetic gift, and finally executed. Afterwards it would be made a crime even to own a copy of his books, but he would remain a divisive figure. Two leading historians and intellectuals, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, took opposed views on him. Especially early in his career, Machiavelli tended to agree with Ficino's critical assessment. He also took time in his famous work The Prince to explain why Savonarola had failed. Characteristically, Machiavelli thought that leadership based on belief needs to be backed up with physical force, which Savonarola did not have at his disposal. Guicciardini, on the other hand, saw him as a worthy man who had supported the popular government against tyrants. And though he spent much of his career railing against the hypocrisy and turpitude of the pope, there was a serious attempt to have Savonarola recognized as a saint about a century after his death. Something else that divides opinion is how exactly he wished to position himself relative to the intellectual currents we've been discussing over the last episodes. At first glance, the answer seems obvious. He knew just enough philosophy to decide that he really, really didn't like it. It's easy to find quotes in his sermons where he attacks philosophers or pagan literature in general. For instance, speaking from his pulpit, These days up here no one says anything but Plato that divine man. I tell you, one should sooner be in the house of the devil. Furthermore, let Plato be Plato and Aristotle Aristotle and not Christians, because they are not. He also remarked that any old woman Christian would know more about the most important truths of faith than Plato. It's been observed that some of his remarks border on pleas for irrationalism, but the diatribes against philosophy obscure a more complicated story. We need to remember that in Florence, philosophy and especially Platonism were politically charged. Medici had supported Ficino's project of reviving its study, and as just mentioned, the ideas of Plato were pressed into the service of Medici ideology. In fact, Savonarolo's crusade against philosophy really got going right around 1494, in the wake of Lorenzo's death and Piero's exile when anti-Medici polemic became central to Savonarolo's public persona. Furthermore, even this superficially anti-elitist reformer needed support from the aristocracy of the city. He received that support from, among others, the Valori family, which makes sense, since Francesco Valori had been one of the patricians who helped push Piero de' Medici out of the city. But the Valori were also on good terms with Marsilio Ficino. Another member of the family, Filippo, had sponsored Ficino's scholarly activities, and Ficino had praised yet another, Nicolo Valori, as a precocious philosophical spirit. So it may be that with his attacks on philosophy in general, and Platonism in particular, Savonarolo was on the one hand venting his hostility to the Medici, and on the other hand, competing with Ficino for patronage. It must also be said that Savonarolo's reputation as an anti-philosopher is hard to square with the things he actually wrote. Once you look past the sarcastic condemnations of pagan thought, you see that he is constantly making use of Aristotelian ideas, often via the intermediary of his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, who looms large as an influence on Savonarola. As a young man, Savonarola had planned on a medical career, and towards this end had studied at the university in Ferrara, so he knew his liberal arts, and continued to work in this vein once becoming a friar in 1475. He taught scholastic texts, and even wrote epitomizing textbooks on logic, moral, and natural philosophy. Later on, when he became an almost literally fire-breathing moralist and reformer, he sprinkled that learning into his sermons. To take a more or less random example, there is a sermon where he explicitly mentions how Aristotle said that we cannot think without using our imagination. This in the eminently Savonarolan context of explaining why we should meditate on death while contemplating images like a picture of heaven and hell, to remind ourselves to avoid sin. Then there's another sermon, where he refers to the same teaching, but with no mention of Aristotle, as if it's something he thought of himself. Thanks to his education in the secular sciences, he was able to use the intellectuals' weapons against them, as with his attacks on astrology. On this point he was in agreement with Pico, who wrote a treatise against the astrological art, and in disagreement with Ficino, who got in trouble with the pope for his own dablings in the occult sciences. We'll get into all that in more detail in a later episode, for now I just want to mention the way Savonarola argues that astrology is impossible. Either Aristotelian natural philosophy is valid or not. If it is, then astrology is falsified, because in Aristotelianism, future events are assumed to be contingent, not predetermined as the astrologers would claim. But if natural philosophy is nonsense, then astrology is falsified again, because it is built on other Aristotelian principles which supposedly explain how the heavens influence the earthly realm. To which you might say, that's a bit rich coming from a guy who claimed to predict the future. But Savonarola would have a good answer for you. The future is not determined by the stars or anything else which safeguards our free will. Yet God does know what will happen through his divine foreknowledge, so he can miraculously reveal future events to us. Or not to us, actually, but to a select few like Savonarola. How can he be so certain that God is talking to him or showing him true visions? He's glad you asked, because he's prepared a treatise to answer just this question. In the dialogue on prophetic truth, he imagines himself meeting seven characters who represent the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The first initials of their names spell out the Latin word veritas, meaning truth, and speaking with each one in turn. The dialogue is intended to justify Savonarola's own claims of prophecy, but along the way Savonarola provides us with a more general theory of how the validity of prophecy can be established. Again drawing on his scholastic training, he alludes to the Aristotelian claim that our psychological powers cannot be deceived concerning their special objects. Vision always grasps colour correctly, even if we sometimes make higher level mistakes about what we are seeing, as when you look up at the heavens and they don't seem to be moving, or you think that red thing in the distance is a bonfire, but actually it's a cardinal visiting from Rome to investigate a charge of heresy. Likewise, the intellect grasps the first principles of the sciences directly and cannot be mistaken about these, hardly a point that would be made by a defender of irrationalism. But his real point is that the power of prophecy too has a special object, namely of revelatory illumination from God. So someone with this gift need have no doubt in what is shown to him, nor indeed does Savonarola have any hesitation in his own case. As he says, These things so stand in the light of prophecy that, to one who possesses such a light, they can give rise to no doubt whatsoever. He admits, on the other hand, that the grounds of his conviction would not be available for other people. There are false prophets too, after all. Indeed Savonarola thought that Muslims were following one, namely Muhammad, though he graciously distances himself from the notion that Muhammad was actually the Antichrist. So other people have to decide on other grounds whether to believe in a self-proclaimed prophet, as well they should. He makes much of the good effects he has had on public morality in Florence, the accuracy of his predictions, and the sudden improvement of his oratorical skills once the sacred gift was given to him. Though I'm not necessarily convinced that Savonarola was a prophet, I am impressed with his argument philosophically speaking. He has here drawn a nice distinction between the grounds that we might have for subjective certainty and the grounds that are needed to be certain about what someone else has experienced. Take a very different case. A cranky child says she has a stomachache. Is the child just inventing something to complain about or is she really in pain? As the child's parent, you have to guess, but the child herself knows for sure. In general, as philosophers now put it, we have privileged access to our subjective states, the things we are experiencing. If prophecy is like this, then the genuine prophet could indeed have certainty that is unavailable for other people. In one of his sermons, Savonarola makes a similar point about the saints of the Church, whose knowledge was not acquired by sensation or rational demonstration, yet was still more certain and firm than the scientific knowledge achieved by philosophers. So the saints' knowledge and the philosophers' knowledge have different strengths. The special insight of the blessed may have the highest possible level of subjective certainty, one that arguably no scientist can possess. There might always be an unnoticed mistake in their proof. But scientific knowledge is publicly accessible. Anyone who understands a demonstrative proof can check it and have grounds for belief just as good as those of the scientist who came up with it. In that passage on the saints, Savonarola also says that these holy persons are drawn to God's light as to their ultimate purpose or end. This is another bit of scholastic lore. Drawing on Aristotle, philosophers like Aquinas had emphasized that God is our final end, an idea that Savonarola repeats with the distinctive twist of emphasizing that it is Christ on the cross to whom we are all drawn. The intended end of man which moves everyone as the thing he loves and desires. Which brings us, by a roundabout route, back to his political theory. Because Savonarola, unsurprisingly, thinks that a political structure is admirable insofar as it imitates God's providential and benevolent rule over all things. That idea is pretty familiar from the medieval period, as is his suggestion that the angelic hierarchy, with its ranks arranged under God, is a perfect society that we should be striving to imitate. In his Treatise on the Government of Florence, Savonarola duly argues that the most perfect constitution for a city would be a monarchy, with a single wise and malevolent king ruling as a human image of God. The perverted mirror image of this constitution is tyranny, where a single power or group rules for its own benefit rather than that of the people, and yes Medici family, Savonarola is looking at you. Ficino would be nodding along in agreement so far, since these points can all be found in Plato's Republic. Here too though, there's a twist. While monarchy might be the most perfect form for a state in general, it's not one that is suitable for Florence. The Florentines are, for starters, too intelligent and independent-minded to suffer tyranny, which is why there was always resistance to the Medici, but for the same reason they're not apt to take guidance from even a good monarch. Instead, they find it most natural to follow their long-standing traditions of republican government. Even if a virtuous monarchy would be a more perfect imitation of divine rule, a civil regime can also be justified in theological terms. In effect, God himself would be the King of Florence, with the pious people of the city as his representatives. This Savonarola writes, Alongside this religious justification, Savonarola has concrete recommendations for the Republic. He stipulates that important offices be distributed by election, smaller ones by random lot, with a council that is big enough to represent the people and avoid being corrupted through bribery. With this final point, we have another reason to see Savonarola as a man of his time, however extraordinary his personality and his role in Florentine life. He was certainly not the only Renaissance thinker who argued in favour of republican government. Indeed, he shared this, though arguably not much else, in common with a contemporary political philosopher whose name I have already mentioned in this episode, Niccolò Machiavelli. Soon we'll be giving him the lavish attention he deserves, but next time we'll be looking more generally at the whole phenomenon of republicanism in the Italian Renaissance and the related and much debated idea of civic humanism. I know you're burning to hear all about it, but you'll just have to wait until the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Sweet Restraints of Liberty – Republicanism and Civic Humanism. As we know, Italian Renaissance humanism was a pretty fractious movement, featuring heated debates in writing and physical confrontations in person. There was plenty of character assassination, and the occasional attempt at actual assassination. Modern-day research on humanism is by and large a more placid affair. In fact, I can't think of a single knife fight involving specialists in the field. But it has not been without controversy, and one of the most prominent of the controversies has concerned the ideas put forward by a German historian of the Renaissance named Hans Barun, who died in 1988. His life's work centered on the idea of civic humanism in the original German, Bergehumanismus, which he saw as a new and thrilling development in the history of political thought. He traced this development to the turn of the 15th century, when the city of Florence was engaged in an existential struggle with Milan, which was ruled by the Visconti family. Florentine intellectuals began to promote republicanism as the ideal form of political life, presenting liberty as the core value for which Florence was fighting against an enemy city whose system they saw as oligarchic, if not tyrannical. The heroes of Barun's story are humanists like Coluccio Salutati and above all, Leonardo Bruni. We have met them as experts in classical learning and rhetoric, but both were chancellors of Florence and emphatic in their endorsement of republican ideals, thus the term civic humanism. Barun was of course well aware that Petrarch and other Italian intellectuals had anticipated these 15th century figures with their love of antiquity and cultivation of eloquence, but he believed that it was only in response to the conflict with Milan that humanists started to use that eloquence for overtly political ends. He pointed to their new ethic of practical engagement, as found in Salutati's remark that virtuous activity is holier than idleness, or Bruni's comment, learning, literature, eloquence, none of these is equal to glory won in battle. So while a Plato or Aristotle might be admirable, a good general is more useful to his city. With this stress on the political involvement of the humanists, Barun was correcting an earlier scholar of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt. Writing in the 19th century, Burckhardt proposed that what was really new in the Renaissance was a stress on the value and freedom of the individual. You can see why he might have said this if you think back to Picco's so-called oration on the dignity of man, but Barun thought otherwise. For him, the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance was above all a matter of new ideas about the community, not about individuals. The freedom cherished by the civic humanists was in fact political and not metaphysical in nature. Thus Barun's key text was not Picco's oration, but another oration given generations earlier by Leonardo Bruni, his speech In Praise of Florence, perhaps written in 1404 as a kind of audition for replacing Salutati as chancellor, though the dating is something else scholars disagree about. It was with this speech that Bruni really put the civic in civic humanism. This eulogy to his adopted city touches on its physical beauty and its military prowess, as you might expect, but it also puts great stress on the Florentine political system, which calls for a delicate balance of powers, comparable to the perfect tuning of a musical instrument. Furthermore, all citizens, even the poorest, are equal before the law and can receive justice. This he sees as a kind of birthright of the city, which according to him was founded by the Romans during their own republican period. In fact, Bruni speaks of Florence the way you might talk about a noble individual, emphasizing the city's lineage and even ascribing to it various virtues that would be more naturally assigned to a single person, like practical wisdom and generosity. But if this is so, then it is because Florence's constitution facilitates the pursuit of virtue among its citizens. All this is confirmed and extended in another speech of Bruni's, a funeral oration written in 1427. Here he praises the Florentine Nanni Struttzi by extolling his city. Bruni again stresses the Roman origins of the city and says that its republican institutions give liberty to individuals and allow them to strive for honor and influence. A popular government avoids the danger of monarchy, since kings inevitably pursue their own interests over those of their subjects. Thus, as he puts it, praise of monarchy has something fictitious and shadowy about it, and the only truly legitimate constitution is that in which there is real liberty, in which pursuit of the virtues may flourish without suspicion. This certainly looks like strong evidence for Baron's account, and there is further confirmation to be found in later humanist writings from Florence. The domination of the city's affairs by the Medici provoked a critique from the republican point of view by Alemanno Rinocini. His Dialogue on Liberty, which appeared in 1479, extols equality of citizens and even the right of free speech, and as we know, a generation later the visionary preacher Savonarola would be endorsing a republican form of government as part of his own rhetorical assault on the Medici and their supporters. When Piero de' Medici fled from the city in 1494, the streets rang with the cry, the people and liberty. The invading French king Charles VIII was welcomed to town with a sign bearing that same word liberty emblazoned upon it. Looking back on these events, the historian Francesco Guicardini named 1494 as the end of a 40-year period of tranquility and prosperity in Italy, one that had begun with the peace treaty between Milan and Florence in 1454. But Guicardini did not lament the effort to establish a genuine republic in Florence in place of the Medici oligarchy. He was one of a number of political thinkers who wondered how to set up a republican government so that it would be long-lasting and stable. Like Savonarola before him, Guicardini looked to the city of Venice as a role model. Guicardini thought the key was a legislative body that could mediate between the wealthy aristocrats, the automati, and the relatively poor mass of the people, or popolo. But he also believed that political leadership should be chosen through election. The people were not themselves qualified to be leaders, but they could still be trusted to choose those who are qualified, who would be drawn from the upper classes. The results would not be perfect. Guicardini wrote, I do not mean to deny that the people sometimes votes erroneously, since it cannot always know the quality of every citizen, but I affirm that these errors are incomparably less than those committed in any other way of proceeding. Though no one would mistake Guicardini for Che Guevara, he was at least still defending republicanism in the 16th century, albeit one with a strong balance in favor of the automati. Actually, it's rather appropriate that the scholar who introduced the concept of civic humanism was named Baron, because the republican institutions envisioned by the Italian humanists were always rather oligarchic in nature. It's been calculated that at the beginning of the 15th century, as this movement was supposedly being born, only 3,000 of the city's 20,000 male inhabitants were qualified to hold public office. So a real government of all the people was never really on the cards. At best it was going to be a government of all the people who mattered. This point has been made in correction of Baron's thesis, for instance by John Najemi. He has argued that the Florentine Republic, endorsed by the humanists, actually represented a victory for the wealthy in their struggle against poorer compatriots who had organized themselves around the city guilds. The high point of that movement came in 1378-1382 when the guilds achieved dominance in Florence. Looking back on this event, supposed man of the people, Leonardo Bruni, spoke with horror of the way that the people were eager to plunder the possessions of the rich. The lesson he drew was the following, never let political initiative or arms into the hands of the multitude, for once they have had a bite, they cannot be restrained, and they think they can do as they please because there are so many of them. When Bruni came to write a treatise on the topic of the Florentine constitution, he praised the city not for being a pure republic, but as a so-called mixed constitution, in which stable laws keep the wealthy in check so that the poor are neither oppressed nor given an opportunity for direct political participation. Bruni was here following the teachings he found in Aristotle's Politics, which he knew well, having translated the text himself. Aristotle likewise suggested that the best constitution should be one that minimized the chances of factional dispute, what the Greeks called stasis. A mixed constitution was a pragmatic solution for achieving this goal. The observation that Bruni and others had a rather oligarchic idea of republicanism is only one of numerous qualifications or outright refutations that have been aimed at Baron's account. One fundamental complaint has been that one could be a civic humanist, writing about and being involved in politics, without being a convinced republican. We've just seen an example in the later writings of Bruni, where he follows Aristotle rather than a set of ideals inspired by the Roman Republic. A similar arc was travelled by Francesco Patrizzi. He wrote a treatise on republican government, but went on to write in the so-called mirror-for-princes genre. In one text, he directly raises the question of whether a republican or monarchical constitution is better. He prefers a republic, but admits that they tend to fall apart thanks to factional disputes. For that matter, monarchies or principiats can be good and even represent a more natural form of government. However, the success of such a constitution depends on having a good ruler, and even the good ones tend to be succeeded by inferior ones. This sort of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand attitude obviously falls far short of being a clarion call for the institution of republican governance all over the globe, as does another tendency we find among republican-leaning authors like Savonarola and the historian Guicardini. You might recall that Savonarola actually admitted that monarchy is the best form of government, but argued that it was unsuitable for the Florentines in particular. Likewise, Guicardini said that one must always take into account the particular needs and traits of a people before prescribing what sort of institutions it should have, much as a doctor takes into account the temperament of the patient before prescribing treatment. This idea goes back to the medieval period, as with Engelbert of Admonte, who already died in 1331. Echoing Aristotle and anticipating Savonarola in a single breath, Engelbert observed that the effects of climate make some people, for instance the Greeks and Italians, suitable for popular rule, while others need a firmer ruling hand. In fact, the republicans of Florence seem to have felt that even other Italians needed a firm hand, and they were happy to provide it themselves. The Roman Republic didn't wait to turn into an empire to adopt an imperialist foreign policy, and the humanists were good enough historians to know it, so they enthusiastically endorsed wars of conquest and subjugation and pretended that the cities brought under the sphere of Florentine control were enjoying freedom. Thus, Salutati wrote that the subject cities had been freed from their tyrants and were now bound only by the sweet restraints of liberty. Bruni went so far as to see Florence's inheritance from Rome as a kind of natural right to rule over other cities across the whole world. This looks like hypocrisy, real freedom for Florence, fake freedom for everyone else. But the humanist point can be understood more sympathetically if we reflect that the value of liberty could mean at least two things in this period. First, there was the idea of freedom from arbitrary and tyrannical rule. By instituting a system of laws, the Florentines could claim to be offering that to their subject cities. Second though, there was the more positive idea of liberty as self-rule or self-determination. That form of liberty was reserved for the Republic of Florence alone. But it's not only that some humanists were less than fully committed and consistent republicans, it's also that quite a few of them were not republicans at all. In previous episodes, we've charted the close connections between humanism and de Medici, who gave financial, political, and social support to such figures as Ficino and Pico. Baron gets around this by ignoring the political dimensions of the revival of Platonism. He dismisses this movement since it exhibits little of the political consciousness of city-state citizens. It is a Platonism rooted primarily in art and religion. But this seems wrong, given the way that Medici rule was explicitly connected to Plato's own writings on politics. A better approach would be to use the term civic humanism, if we use it at all, for the whole range of efforts to merge the humanist agenda with a political agenda, whether or not the agenda was republican in spirit. We can complicate this picture still further by noting that the Medici themselves made frequent use of republican language, always posing as simply unusually influential citizens within a government that ensured liberty for all. The point was made even at the level of images, as with a medal, produced in the memory of Cosimo de Medici, that pictured him on one side with the motto public peace and liberty on the reverse. And it was made at the level of words too, the words that the humanists could produce so well with their expertise in rhetoric. In a critical review of Hans Baron's thesis and responses to it, James Hankins has proposed that the whole history of republicanism among humanists should be taken as rhetorical. Already Salutati and Bruni, according to Hankins, were providing a decent covering of populist rhetoric to conceal the growing concentration of power in the hands of a few. Nor were the Florentines the only ones to use liberty as a window dressing. In the city of Lucca, that was done almost literally. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes visited there and saw that the word libertas was written in large characters on the turrets of the city even though, he said, people there had no more liberty than the people of Constantinople. And back in our period, Lucca, no less than Florence, already adopted a fairly oligarchic notion of what a republic could be. But should we really settle for the cynical conclusion that the humanists' enthusiasm for the republican ideal was like a botox injection? Mere lip service? What about Bruni's forthright declaration in his funeral oration for Nani Strotzi that a government of the people is the only legitimate constitution, since the other options fall prey to the wickedness of flawed men, either the few men of an oligarchy, or the one man of a monarchy? The aforementioned James Hankins, who has forcefully pressed the case for a merely rhetorical reading of republican rhetoric, suggests that we may be misled by a false cognate here. The word legitimate in Bruni's Latin could mean something more like real, as opposed to the shadowy and false benefits of kingship. Bruni's point might be that, although in principle the best kind of constitution is indeed rule by the few or by one, in practice it's too hard to find a few good men, or one good man, so we have to settle for a republic. But here's yet another consideration. Even if the rhetoric used by Bruni and others was a kind of myth or propaganda, the choice of propaganda makes a difference. On this telling, what was distinctively new or even modern about the humanists' political writings was not that they were republicans, as Baron thought, but that they found it necessary to pretend to be republicans. Why would this have been? Well, that takes us to one final major correction of Baron's thesis, which is that the sort of rhetoric he noticed in Bruni and others was not in fact all that new. As several scholars, above all Quentin Skinner, have noted, the history of republican discourse is as old as the history of humanism itself. We know from earlier episodes that that history goes well back into the Middle Ages, with the so-called dicta tores honing their skills of eloquence by writing showpieces in increasingly refined Latin. And, as Skinner showed in a survey of this literature, republican ideals went far back in Italian history, in the halls of power, and on the page. As early as 1085, the city of Pisa had a government with rotating consulships to prevent the emergence of an autocratic ruler, and by the end of the 12th century, the major Italian cities had adopted such a system and also carved out relative independence from the Holy Roman Empire. There was still the problem that the medievalists were bound to Roman law, which of course assumed that ultimate power would lie in the hands of an emperor. But the 14th century jurist, Bartolus of Saxo-Ferrato, said that the theoretical authority of empire was legally irrelevant when the facts on the ground meant that cities were independent of imperial control. At the same time, the cities had to withstand pressure from the papacy. So, republicanism developed among these earlier humanists as a kind of third option. Never mind the famous two swords of mainstream medieval political thought, and the struggle between secular imperial rule and the theocratic rule of the pope, we cities will do just fine on our own as republics. As usual, the thinkers of what we are calling the Renaissance were not doing something completely new. Rather, the later humanists used their improved understanding of classical literature to find new justifications and expressions for political ideas that their medieval forebears had already explored. Bruni was right that his ideas echoed those of the past, it's just that the past in question was more recent than he cared to admit. The extensive debate over Hans Baron's account of civic humanism raises one last question, why is this all so important? One answer is that the controversy concerns the roots of our own political institutions. When people argue over Renaissance republicanism, they tend to have one eye on later republics, like the United States. Another answer is of more immediate relevance to us. Everything we've just discussed provides the background and context for the most famous political thinker of the Italian Renaissance, indeed the most famous thinker of the Italian Renaissance, full stop. So much so, that I don't even need to say his name, but I'll give you a hint. Like a man who has just been for a walk in the snow, he's responsible for the prince. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in History of Philosophy. Today's episode, No More Mr. Nice Guy, Machiavelli. Sometimes it seems like there's only one political dispute which simply manifests itself in many different ways. Should we be bleeding-heart idealists or hard-nosed realists? The idealist wants us to act nobly and morally in political life, the realist knows that this is wishful thinking and that we should instead do what might actually work. The idealist says, seek peace. The realist says, arm yourself to the teeth just in case. The idealist says, help the poor. The realist says this will only encourage them not to get jobs. The idealist says you should read philosophy, perhaps Plato. And the realist agrees, but says read Machiavelli instead. Rather ironically, given his irreligious reputation, Machiavelli is the patron saint of political realism. His most famous work, entitled The Prince, instructs its noble recipient on how best to exercise political power. The advice it contains has won Machiavelli a reputation for realism, indeed for cynicism, for being rather, well, Machiavellian. That word is rarely a compliment. It has a rather sinister connotation and means someone who is happy to use wicked means to attain his or her ends, which is why Shakespeare refers to him as the murderous Machiavelli. Is this reputation deserved? We might be skeptical if we think of the way we use phrases like platonic love and Epicurean pleasures. We just saw in a recent episode that it was some fancy interpretive footwork that allowed the Renaissance humanists to de-emphasize Plato's interest in sexual love. And as those same humanists understood, Epicurus's commitment to hedonism actually demanded strict moderation rather than gourmet eating precisely because an abstemious diet is more pleasant in the long run. But The Prince provides plenty of ammunition to support the popular conception of Machiavelli's thought. Speaking of ammunition, one example comes when Machiavelli takes up the question of whether it is better to control a foreign territory with a military garrison, or by sending some of the ruler's own people to colonize it. He recommends the method of colonization. Whereas the garrison will instigate hostility from the locals, the colony will uproot the locals and take away their land, rendering them powerless in the process. In one of the cold-hearted aphorisms that make The Prince a guilty pleasure to read, Machiavelli observes that people with small grievances are more dangerous than those with large ones, since if you hurt someone badly enough, they'll be in no position to secure their revenge. But understanding The Prince properly means more than just quoting the nasty bits. We need to realize that Machiavelli is writing for a very specific purpose, which has to do with his historical context. Machiavelli was born in 1469 and died in 1527 and thus lived through a turbulent time in Italian politics. In this respect, of course, his lifetime was entirely typical. Of particular relevance for The Prince is the rise, fall, and rise of a family that has already played a significant role in our story, the Medici. When the Medici were deposed in the 1490s and the republican government brought in, that government featured the talents of Machiavelli himself. He was put in charge of organizing a local militia, anticipating advice he would later give in The Prince when observing that a homegrown military force is far preferable to the use of paid mercenaries. Unfortunately for Machiavelli, the Medici returned to power in 1512 with predictable consequences for his political career. He was even jailed and tortured after being accused of scheming against the Medici. The Prince, later dedicated to one of the Medici, was his attempt to get into the good graces of the city's new and old ruling family. Later, Machiavelli would be accepted back into the fold. A Medici pope gave approval for a play by Machiavelli to be performed, and a Medici cardinal gave Machiavelli an official task. He was told to help arrange the affairs of some Franciscan convents, and then asked by the cloth guild of Florence to appoint a preacher. I wonder whether the cardinal himself appreciated that these assignments were deliciously ironic, as well as depressingly trivial. Friends were amused that the notoriously impious Machiavelli was taking on such tasks when compared to appointing a well-known homosexual to choose somebody a wife. Machiavelli replied with an aphorism that sums him up pretty well. He said that he was in fact a good choice for the job, since he could find a preacher for the guild that would lead the parishioners to damnation and, The true way to get to Paradise is to learn the way to Hell in order to escape it. In another irony, it was while he was in the political wilderness that Machiavelli used his enforced leisure to write the books that have secured his lasting renown. In this respect, we might compare him to an author he knew well, namely Cicero, who similarly set down his philosophical writings in the idle hours after his enemy Julius Caesar achieved a dominant position in Rome. Cicero wasn't the only ancient author known to Machiavelli. He once signed a letter referring to himself as, Historian, comic author, and tragic author. And he himself would probably be surprised to learn that his modern reputation rests more on the Prince than his much longer historical works. In addition to tackling a history of Florence, he wrote a set of discourses analyzing Livy's history of Rome. These are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Machiavelli's political thought because he thought about politics historically. Readers of the Prince are liable to be surprised by the extent to which it too is a historical work. The ages of it are devoted to ancient history and the recent history of Italy. So much so that it's sometimes unclear whether Machiavelli is setting out his political ideas to explain historical events, including the events of his own time, or whether it's the other way around and the history is just there to support and illustrate his political ideas. In fact, his project must be understood in both directions. His understanding of human nature informs his work as a historian, and his expertise in history has given him the basis to make sound proposals for good government. You may be taken aback that I speak of good government in discussing Machiavelli. His reputation would have it that his advice in The Prince has to do solely with political expedience, morality be damned. This is a guidebook for powerful men who want to stay powerful. And certainly, The Prince seeks to speak truth to power and not just about power. It is addressed to Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici. This is not Lorenzo the Magnificent, the patron of Ficino, who had already died in 1492, but a less celebrated member of the family, who was born in that same year and ascended to rule Florence until his untimely death in 1519. So Machiavelli's treatise is no disinterested meditation on the lessons of history. Rather, it is an instruction manual for the young Lorenzo, an exhortation that he and his family should seek to restore Italy to its glories by rescuing it from foreign domination, and at the same time, an advertisement for bringing Machiavelli out of political exile and back into the active political life he understands so well. The Prince is thus an example of that age-old genre of political writing, the so-called mirror for princes, in which a philosopher gives advice to a monarch. Because he is indeed writing for a monarch, Machiavelli says explicitly that he will simply ignore other possible ways of arranging political rule, but we'll come back to those other ways. Actually, the advice laid out in the Prince is aimed at a specific kind of ruler, the one who holds a so-called New Monarchy. It is much more difficult for a man who has seized power to hold onto it than it would be for a hereditary ruler, like one who has taken over the Principiate from his father. The new ruler's goal is, first and foremost, to maintain his position, despite his deficit of legitimacy. He must be bold in action and thought, rather than playing for time or waiting to see what happens as crises arise. After all, at the moment he's in charge and the future is bound to bring change, he needs to make sure that change doesn't involve his downfall. He must constantly work to stay on top or be toppled. In the Discourses, too, a similarly Machiavellian note is struck in remarks about the predicament of new princes. Whereas it is normally a good idea to maintain institutions to promote stability in a city, the new ruler is better advised to remake this city completely. New titles for offices, the rich thrown down, and the poor raised up. The upheaval leads to suffering, and Machiavelli admits that one would be better off staying out of politics than to be a king who brings such ruin on men. Moral scruples notwithstanding, the point stands that only this kind of bold measure will keep the new monarch in power. This sort of advice is not just cynical realpolitik, though. Though Machiavelli does recommend that the prince be cruel on occasion, this is always in the service of political continuity, which is the precondition for the flourishing of both the prince himself and of his subjects. But as he says, it is stability, not justice, that must be the primary concern of the state. It is for this reason, Machiavelli remarks, that the prince needs to learn to dispense with virtue in some cases, namely the cases where acting virtuously would undermine the stability of the state. Consider a virtue like generosity, for instance. Everyone agrees that it's better to be generous, but the prince has the responsibility of looking after the city's finances. Given the choice between displaying generosity and balancing the books, the prince must choose the latter, even if it means that he will seem miserly to his subjects. The same reasoning underlies some of the most notorious passages in The Prince. For example, Machiavelli asks whether it is better for a leader to be feared or loved, and says that it is of course best to be both feared and loved, but if only one is possible, then fear is a more reliable way to keep the population in line. This is because people are fickle and will forget their love when the chips are down. It's vital though that the ruler not actually be hated, since this itself will undermine his state. In fact, the ruler should strive to be loved, not for the warm fuzzy feeling, but because this is itself a step towards stability. As he says in another ready-made aphorism, the best fortress is the love of the people. On the other hand, he's already struck a somewhat more cynical note earlier in The Prince, when he points out that winning the favor of one's people is not that hard a trick to pull off. Really all they want is not to be oppressed, so there's really no excuse for not keeping them content. Here it's worth noting that when Machiavelli speaks of the people, he's not talking about the whole population of the city, but about the poorer citizens, as contrasted to the nobility. He even asks which group's approval is more important for the prince. This shows the extent to which Machiavelli is still operating within the parameters of ancient political theory. If we look all the way back to Aristotle's politics, we may recall that he also assumed a deep and ineradicable opposition of interests between the people and the nobles, the many and the privileged few. In the Discourses, Machiavelli applies his customary hard-nosed realism to this issue, explaining that the best political system is not one that eradicates the antagonism between the two classes, but recognizes and takes advantage of it. The Romans manage this by letting the aristocrats run the state as senators, but also giving the plebeians a role by assigning them the tribunate. Machiavelli does not then celebrate wickedness for its own sake, but he does think the prince must learn to be wicked sometimes in order to deal with the weakness of human nature and the inevitable wickedness of others. A celebrated passage in The Prince states that the ideal ruler can act like both a fox and a lion. He appears mighty like the lion to intimidate his rivals, but must be crafty like a fox to spy the traps those rivals have laid for him. Machiavelli's pessimism about human nature leads him to depart from previous Renaissance political theorists who were on the idealist side of the spectrum. Authors like Petrarch had argued optimistically that the statesman who acts virtuously will always reap the best results. Himself drawing on Cicero, Petrarch had also identified glory as the objective of political life as Machiavelli will do, but for Petrarch this could be attained only through upright action. He wrote that, Nothing can be useful that is not at the same time just and honourable. For Petrarch, it was absurd to prefer fear to love in one's subjects, as Machiavelli recommends, or to think that stability takes precedence over justice. In fact, the two go hand in hand. But Machiavelli thinks that such pious sentiments are quite simply detached from reality. Sometimes a leader must be cruel to achieve his political objectives. In The Prince, he gives the example of Hannibal, whose ferocity enabled him to hold together a desperate army through great hardships in a long campaign against the Romans. Yet even the leader who is both a lion and a fox, who knows how to inspire fear through cruelty and also win the people's love, is not guaranteed indefinite success. Machiavelli is inspired by his reading of Lucretius, whose Epicurean philosophy taught that events are not predetermined or even predictable. Randomness and not divine providence rules the universe. This is not to say that events are entirely beyond human control, though. Machiavelli reckons that about half our life is ruled by our own actions, with the other half being controlled by fortune. Again, the successful leaders are those who boldly take initiative, because this is how you can exploit chance events. Fortune can never be thwarted, but it can be assisted. So fortune really does favour the brave, and a mixture of ability and luck is essential. The ones who achieve a lasting reputation for success, though, are usually those who died before their good luck ran out. The twists and turns of fortune, and the inevitable resistance the ruler will get from both the people and the aristocrats, mean that it is incredibly difficult for a man to bend the city to his will over many years. As he will also observe in the discourses, on the basis of Roman history, the most skilled and lucky autocratic ruler is only going to achieve in the short run what a free republican government may be able to achieve in the longer run. Of course, this fundamental contrast between republican government and princely rule is itself inspired by Roman history. The paradigm for the former is the Roman Republic, for the latter the dictatorial, and then imperial rule exercised by Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, and their successors. And Machiavelli does not just draw his big picture according to a Roman plan, he also cites ancient history from more detailed points. When explaining the superiority of colonies to garrisons, he points out that this was the successful strategy used by the Romans. And after issuing his caution that generosity can undermine the state, he refers to Julius Caesar, stating that if Caesar hadn't been assassinated, he might well have bankrupted Rome, given his lavish spending habits. Greek history is also mentioned, as when Machiavelli explains how Alexander the Great was able to conquer and hold such a huge swath of territory, something that Machiavelli's theory suggests is rather incredible. It's because he was taking over lands used to centralized autocratic rule, simply replacing the Persian Great King with his own royal self. Machiavelli also cautions that these ancient figures achieved glory beyond what may be available in Renaissance Italy. When we take them as our exemplars, we are like archers, aiming beyond the reach of our bows, in order to shoot as high as possible. Machiavelli ends the Prince with an almost hysterical description of the parlous state of Italy, as he exhorts Lorenzo to do something about it. He saw his age as one of corruption and his times as evil, something he in part blamed on the Church of his day. He saw the Church as a force that divided Italy and undermined religion because of its corruption. This makes him sound like a religious reformer, like Savonarola, but his ideas about the religious life were markedly different from that firebrand preacher. Machiavelli wrote a treatise with the pious-sounding title, Exhortation to Penitence, but in it he advised a characteristically active approach to the spiritual life, discouraging mere lament over one's sins and encouraging a disciplined life of good action. A good example would be the Crusades, which he admired as expressions of a more muscular Christianity. These points fit with comments he makes about religion in his more famous works, especially The Discourses. He worries that Christian faith tends to render believers passive and peaceful. Its valorization of humility and contempt for this world weakens its adherents and leads them to ignore insults to their honour that they should be avenging. He thinks the Byzantine Empire fell, for example, because the Ottoman Turks had paired intense religious fervor with military aggression, allowing them to crush the more passive Greek Christians. In The Discourses, he goes so far as to suggest that Christianity is not the sort of religion that is really conducive to the attainment of glory, even if the founders of religion in general can claim to be the most famous of all famous men. Hence, Machiavelli's diagnosis of the failure of Savonarola in Florence. As an unarmed preacher, he relied exclusively on religious conviction among his followers, and had no military force to pair with that conviction. In the final chapter of The Prince, in which he encourages Lorenzo to liberate all of Italy, Machiavelli seems to be casting his prospective patron as a religious and military leader, a man wielding the two swords of faith and violence. Just as Moses led his people from slavery in Egypt, Lorenzo should bring liberation to Italy and defend its cities from foreign exploitation. If he takes Machiavelli's advice on how to establish himself as a prince, he may succeed in this where others have failed. By the way, that idea I mentioned just a minute ago, that republics may be more stable than principiates may leave you scratching your head. Why does Machiavelli spend so much effort telling the prince how to hold on to power if what he really wants is a republic? And in addition to that, did Machiavelli really want a republic in Florence and elsewhere? How does he fit into the developments in Renaissance political thought and the movement called civic humanism that we looked at in the previous episode? These are questions we need to explore in greater depth, and I've come up with what I hope will be an interesting way to do that, in a very special installment that will celebrate reaching the 350th episode of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. When you teach philosophy for a living, there are certain things you find yourself telling students over and over. Try to write shorter sentences, avoid jargon, work on transitions between paragraphs. Maybe this point would be clearer if you illustrated it using a giraffe as an example. One of the most common pieces of advice I give is that students should address a tightly focused question. This is true even in a doctoral thesis. Almost every graduate student I've ever supervised wound up narrowing their project from their original conception. They might start out wanting to look at theories of free will in all of ancient philosophy and wind up writing about the use of a single Greek term in early Stoicism. This is one reason why people outside the academic world think that specialists are in an ivory tower, arguing over angels dancing on the heads of increasingly small pins, rather than tackling big and urgent questions that face all of humankind. Which is true enough, but also not without good reason. Doing the history of philosophy properly means lavishing exquisite attention on the details of texts and arguments in order to yield insights that have escaped previous readers. If you're trying to do it all, chances are that you'll wind up doing nothing. For this reason, I frequently tell students who are writing seminar term papers, so this would be say a 10 or 15 page essay, that if they can give me a really good interpretation of just one sentence in a philosophical work, that would be job done. In this respect, and maybe some others as well, the way I usually proceed here on the podcast is rather misleading. I typically range widely over an author's works discussing big themes and rarely dwelling on the small details and individual passages that are the bread and butter of actual research, the kind of research I do in my day job, as it were. Again, this is not without good reason. Goodness knows, it's taking me long enough for me to make progress through the history of philosophy without trying to do it one sentence at a time. But, as you know, in this podcast series I have a tradition of doing something special every 50 episodes. Since this is episode 350, I thought it might be interesting to follow the advice I give to students and focus on just one sentence. It's an especially good moment to do that, because we're in the midst of looking at Machiavelli, whose aphoristic writing style, subtlety of font, and legion of interpreters makes him ideal for this sort of treatment. Last time, we concentrated on his most famous work, The Prince. In this episode, I want to move on to a longer treatise that he wrote between 1514 and 1518, his Discourses on the Roman Historian Livy. Naturally enough, Machiavelli has a lot to say here about Roman history, but it is not a historical work, strictly speaking. Rather, his goal is to draw lessons from Roman history that are applicable to political decision-making in Machiavelli's own day. So, even as they follow and comment on Livy, the discourses are not that far from The Prince in approach, and scholars routinely draw on both works in interpreting Machiavelli's political thought. So, I've chosen my single sentence from the Discourses, to be specific from Chapter 4 of Book 1. Here it is. And they do not consider that in every republic there are two different humours, that of the people and that of the great, and that all the laws made in favour of liberty are born from their disunion, as we easily see to have happened in Rome. So, how should we go about trying to understand this sentence? First, we need to look at its immediate context, issues having to do with the wider context, for instance, the general aims of the discourses, and the historical setting in which the discourses were written, will come later. Our sentence is part of Machiavelli's defence of the idea that class opposition kept Rome free, as he puts it. So, when the sentence begins, they do not consider, he means those who deny the useful role played by struggles for dominance within Roman society. And in fact, most of his contemporaries would indeed have disagreed with him on this point. Medieval and Renaissance thinkers were nearly unanimous in assuming that unity of purpose and amity between social groups is politically healthy. Commentators like the younger historian and political thinker Francesco Guicciardini rejected Machiavelli's idea out of hand, saying that even if social tumult led to certain good outcomes, praising it would be like praising a sick man's disease because of the virtue of the remedy. Even Machiavelli himself, in his treatise On the Art of War, says that we should look to the Romans to learn how to live without factions. But as our sentence shows, Machiavelli is not in favour of just any rivalry or enmity within the political life of a state. He specifically refers to two groups whose contested relationship is an engine of liberty within the state. This brings us to our next task in understanding the sentence. You should never take yourself fully to understand a remark in a historical work unless you've read it in the original language. In this case, the relevant Italian terms are Popolo, the people, and Grandi, which I translated rather literally as the Great. We already encountered the concept of the Popolo a couple of episodes back. The people are, roughly speaking, the citizens who are not rich and powerful, smaller merchants and the like. In Renaissance Italy, the interests of this group would have been represented above all by the guilds. For instance, in Florence, the ruling legislature, the Signoria, included members put forward by the guilds and then chosen by lot. Not exactly a Roman institution, but that doesn't stop Machiavelli from more or less equating the Italian concept of the Popolo with the Roman lower class, which was represented by the office of the tribune. As Machiavelli explains, in the ancient Roman political system, the office of the tribunes was introduced precisely to stop the more aristocratic elements from ruling with a free hand. As for the rich, called the Grandi in our sentence, but often referred to as the Ottimati, in the Roman Republic, they were of course represented by the Senate. There was also a kind of executive position which rotated between leading men. These were the consuls, who had a significant military role. For Machiavelli, the secret of Rome's success, at least until the whole thing fell apart and became an empire controlled from the top by Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, and their successors, was precisely a balance between these three political institutions. This was a kind of mixed government, which in Machiavelli's view is more solid and more stable, because one keeps watch over the other if in the same city there are princedom, aristocracy, and popular government. This brings us to a more puzzling term in Machiavelli's statement. He calls the lower and upper classes to umori, humours in the city. He is of course drawing an analogy between the body politic and a real human body, which was of course seen as having four, rather than two, humours, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile, and blood. As we learned in long ago episodes, in ancient and medieval medical theory, the humours were the constituents of the human body and the main determinant of health. When they are in balance, the body will function well. When they are imbalanced, disease results. The bodily humours have certain innate tendencies, so that yellow bile for instance is hot and dry, and has a corresponding effect on the temperament of the body as a whole. Machiavelli thinks something of this sort is also true of the two political humours. It is simply in the nature of the nobles that they want to rule, and in the nature of the people that they want freedom from being ruled. This is just an inevitable fact about the two classes, and does not vary from one time and place to another. As Machiavelli says, men are born, live and die always with one and the same nature. More specifically, Machiavelli thinks that all men are evil, and they never do anything good except by necessity. For this reason, confusion and chaos will indeed result in the city if there is excessive freedom, which is why you can't have a political structure where the popolo are allowed to run things with no constraints by the upper classes. That sort of approach actually tends to result in the destruction of republican governance, as on the other hand, will untrammeled power in the hands of the nobility. In both cases, the dominant class will inevitably turn to a single man to represent their interests, who will become a tyrant. Thus, as Machiavelli says later in the first book of the discourses, tyranny comes both from the too great desire of the people to be free, and the too great desire of the nobles to command. He's skeptical that either group will establish true liberty left to its own devices. As he writes in another work devoted to the history of Florence, the promoters of license who are the people and the promoters of slavery who are the nobles, praise the mere name of liberty, for neither of these classes is willing to be subject either to the laws or to men. We can actually press the medical analogy a little bit further. According to the humoral theory, all humans have the same basic makeup, but there's variation in temperament from individual to individual. Though he doesn't make a big deal about it, Machiavelli evidently thinks that something similar applies to human societies. Thus, while he lays down general principles of political theory, based on long-ago examples drawn from Roman history, and insists that these principles remain valid for the Italy of his own day, he also acknowledges something we might call national character. The French, for example, are known to be avaricious and treacherous, and of course this is an insult, even though Machiavelli's tolerance for avarice and treachery was pretty high. That may recall an idea we saw in Savonarola, who claimed that monarchy was in general the best form of constitution, but inappropriate for the Florentines. However, Machiavelli does not seem to think that humans vary that much. His ideas about the best way to organize political life are, in broad terms, universally applicable, which is precisely why the Florentines can learn lessons from reading Livy's History of Rome, with Machiavelli's help. Let's go back to our sentence then and Machiavelli's claim that the laws that supported Roman liberty are born out of the disunion of the popolo and the grandi, not from their harmony. First of all, notice that the word born, nascono, once again underscores the naturalism underlying Machiavelli's observation. This is not an isolated example, but exemplifies his habit of comparing political affairs to natural phenomena, sometimes more explicitly, as when he says that small cities rarely dominate large ones, because all our actions imitate nature, it is not possible or natural for a slender stem to bear up a large limb. More arresting, though, is what our sentence identifies as the happy outcome of class conflict or disunion, namely liberty. This confirms what we already know from other passages, namely that Machiavelli considers liberty an admirable feature of the Roman system, and also as a valuable goal for the Florence of his own day. From this we may infer that in the discourses, he is situating himself in the history of Italian republicanism, we looked at a couple of episodes back. At first, this seems to be a sharp contrast with The Prince, which explicitly began by saying it would focus only on the political challenges and solutions relevant to autocratic rule. But we also saw that even in The Prince, Machiavelli made positive remarks about republics, and especially their capacity for long-term stability. Taking both works together, then, the question is not really whether Machiavelli was a republican, it is rather, precisely what form of republic did he want? And this turns out to be a highly contested question. Most readers, on the basis of our sentence and other similar remarks in the discourses, think that Machiavelli wanted a perfect balance between the optimates and the people, and that the laws and cultural norms of the Romans show how this is possible. This seems right, but raises the further question of what a perfect balance would be. Running throughout the history of Renaissance republicanism was the tension between broad and narrow government, or in Italian, the governo largo, as opposed to the governo stretto. The former would give more scope to the popolo, while the latter would reserve most power for the grandi, with just enough influence given to poorer citizens that they would be discouraged from overthrowing the government or causing other disturbances. A concrete example can be taken from Florence, where the nobles would vet candidates for elected office and eliminate anyone who didn't measure up to their expectations, on the basis of such criteria as family lineage. It seems clear, however, that in the discourses at least, Machiavelli wants to give the people much more power than that. In contrast to the smoke-filled room of patricians just described, he praises the idea of giving all citizens a chance to raise questions in open debate about the suitability of respective officeholders. The scholar John McCormack has argued that this exemplifies a thoroughgoingly democratic approach to republican government on Machiavelli's part. McCormack contrasts Machiavelli to Guicardini, whose name has already come up a few times. As we saw, Guicardini was also a republican who favored the selection of nobles for political office by means of a free election among the people. Tellingly, he felt the need to justify giving the people even this much say in the political life of the city. But Guicardini was not trying to maximize popular liberty. To the contrary, one reason he favored the use of elections is that rich people with well-known names have an enormous advantage in them. As we can see from the recent political history of the United States, where the presidency tends to go to men with great wealth, a famous name, or both, elections are not necessarily a bar to oligarchy. That's why Guicardini liked them. Machiavelli seems to have wanted a more genuinely democratic form of republicanism. Like Guicardini, he has faith in the decision-making powers of the popolo. They sometimes make mistakes, but so do princes, and an unlawful prince is even worse than a deluded populace. The reason writers on politics and history so often criticize the people, says Machiavelli, is that you can always get away with doing so, whereas complaining about autocrats is risky business. Machiavelli's relative affection for the popolo and distrust of the nobility is easy to explain given his own experiences. He was without illustrious lineage, but was put forward as a talented administrator by Piero Soderini, who was elected in 1502 by the nobles to run Florence. Soderini himself was one of the grandi, and they assumed he would rule the city in their interests. When he instead showed sympathy to the popolo and promoted men like Machiavelli, he was deposed with predictable results for Machiavelli. The Medici family, whose name was synonymous with oligarchy despite their republican propaganda, returned to rule Florence in 1512. Under their regime, Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured, events which would have been fresh in his mind when he wrote the discourses. When you consider that this work is actually dedicated to noble readers, whose patronage Machiavelli hoped to secure, and that the prince is addressed to a member of the Medici family, you realize that Machiavelli is quite daring in the extent to which he argues for republican government in these writings. So that provides us some of the wider context for understanding our sentence. Speaking of which, remember that according to this sentence, liberty comes from the productive rivalry of both the people and the great. Why does Machiavelli say this, if he really wants to maximize authority for the people? Apart from the point we've already seen, that uncontrolled popular freedom leads to chaos and eventually tyranny, we need to recognize that the natural tendencies of the nobility are also useful to the state. In the same chapter from the discourses where our sentence is found, he says that the aspirations of free peoples are seldom harmful to liberty because they result either from oppression or from fear that there is going to be oppression. But this literally populist agenda is not going to maximize the potential of the city to achieve greatness, which Machiavelli takes as an axiomatic goal in political life. To reach that goal, you need the drive and ambition of the nobles. Without the grandi, there will be no grandezza. The lust of the nobles for power and rulership may be unnerving from a republican point of view, but it is like an engine of outstanding achievement, as the ultimati constantly push for opportunities to win fame and fortune for themselves. And when the nobles undertake great deeds, the results are ultimately to the credit of all citizens. As Machiavelli says, what brings greatness to cities is not individual benefits but the pursuit of the common good, and there can be no doubt that it is only in republics that this ideal of the common good Looking back as always to antiquity, Machiavelli observes that the success of the Roman Republic did not consist merely in securing long-term liberty for the people. This was no quiet democracy but an all-conquering militaristic superpower. Indeed, expansion and warfare were key ingredients in the recipe for Roman liberty. Idleness and sustained peace lead to weakness in the state, which is dangerous because there are always neighbors ready to exploit weakness. The power-hungry nobility who want both wealth and fame push the republic to engage in what Machiavelli sees as a healthy and vital quest for expansion. Again, we can invoke the historical context here. In 1494, Florence lost dominion over the city of Pisa, a major factor in the emergence of the Savinarolan Republic. Pisa was not retaken until 1509, with the surrender to the Florentines being counter-signed by, among others, Machiavelli himself in his capacity as a military advisor. Back in 1499, he had written, "...it is necessary to retake Pisa to maintain our liberty, underlining the intimate relation between domestic freedom and military conquest abroad." The people also have a role to play here, because one of Machiavelli's favorite themes is that true military strength lies in the citizenry, another lesson he learned from the Romans. He wants to see the people armed, as in the militia he helped organize for Florence, so that they will always be prepared to defend or prosecute the interests of the city. Professional soldiers or mercenaries tend to undermine the city leadership, something easy to illustrate from the long record of emperors being overthrown by military coup in later Roman history. And mercenaries are expensive too, to the point that their salaries may offset any riches gained through the conquest they win. By contrast, properly motivated citizen-soldiers will fight fiercely for their city, winning fame for their high-born generals in the process, and then go back to their occupation once the campaigning season is over. As Machiavelli puts it, the ideal citizens gladly make war in order to have peace. Nearly constant warfare also provides an outlet for ambitious men to seek fame and booty on the battlefield, rather than by staging a takeover of the government. Here we can perhaps think one last time of the comparison to a human body, implied by that reference to the humors in our sentence. For Machiavelli, the healthy body is one involved in vigorous activity. Just so, in political life it is, as he says in The Prince, very natural and normal to wish to make acquisitions. Before ending our elaborate explanation of this one sentence, we should broaden out to include one final sort of context, Machiavelli's whole writing career. We've seen that the sentence fits well thematically with the discourses and other works, namely The Prince and his dialogue on the art of war, but there is a later treatise I haven't mentioned, namely his Discourse on the Affairs of Florence, which was not written until 1520. On one reading of this work, it departs from the sentiment expressed in our sentence, according to which productive conflict, or tumult, is the key to a vibrant and long-lasting, and well-balanced, Republican form of liberty. Now Machiavelli seems to have had a change of heart, fearing that the lust for greatness will tend more to undermine the city than to keep it healthy. Instead, he proposes a carefully calibrated set of institutions designed to prevent any individual or group from gaining too much dominance. So this is more along the lines of the idea of a stable balancing act that we considered and rejected before as a reading of the discourses, on the grounds that the Machiavelli of that work would have found it too inert. If he now, in his later career, accepts a less dynamic but more secure constitution, this may be due to his recognition of a middle class that can mediate between the popolo and the grandi. He has, as you might say, found another sense of humor. Actually, there's one very last point I want to make about our sentence, which has been obvious throughout, but is worth stressing. Machiavelli is here making a sweeping claim about the internal workings of cities, one applicable to the Florence of his own day, by drawing analogies to the days of ancient Rome. This illustrates something I also said about The Prince. Both that famous treatise and the discourses are at once works of political philosophy and historical analysis, with these two projects mutually supporting one another. As I also said, Machiavelli considered himself a historian, something he shared with his rival political theorist Guicardini, as well as other prominent humanists like Leonardo Bruni. In a couple of episodes, we'll be contextualizing Machiavelli in yet another way, by comparing his approach to history and his ideas of what history is for to those of other Renaissance Italians who contributed to the genre. But first, we'll be meeting a historian of our own day. He is indeed one of the leading historians of the whole Renaissance and of Machiavelli's thought in general. He is without doubt one of the grandi in this area of scholarship, Quentin Skinner, and he'll be my guest next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Machiavelli with Quentin Skinner, who is Barbara Beaumont, Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. Hi Professor Skinner. Hi there, Peter. It's a privilege to be here. Thank you very much for coming on the series. We are, as I just said, going to be talking about Machiavelli. Maybe you can just quickly remind the listener who it is we're speaking about here. Oh yes, certainly. Well, Niccolò Machiavelli, born in 1469, Florentine, son of a lawyer. We know nothing about him really until 98, when without apparent previous administrative experience he's made second secretary of the republic, head of the second chancery. He served in that role for 14 years until the republic collapses in 1512, and that's the great caesura in his life. From 1512 until 1527, when he dies, he is converted from a diplomat and an administrator into the man of letters that we know. All the great works were written between 1513 and 1526. You just called him a man of letters, and one of the things that's very striking if you read Machiavelli is that, although I guess most people think about him as a political philosopher and that's why I'm covering him, he was very interested in history, particularly in Roman history. What were the most important lessons that he took from his study of history for his political thought? Well, here we want to distinguish two great texts on politics, the Prince, which he completed in 1513, and the Discorsi on Livy, which he completed in 1519. In the Prince, the great lesson you learn is from the history of the Roman Empire. A long chapter, chapter 19, tells us that everything he wants to say about the morality of politics could be encapsulated by thinking about the emperors of the second to the third century. And the lesson is, never do anything that will make you either despised or hated. So that's the great lesson in the Prince. In the Discorsi, of course, it's discourses on Livy, and so the whole structure is given by the text on the history of the Roman experience. The greatest lesson that he wants you to take depends on a fundamental assumption, which is Livy's and it's a standard classical assumption, that what you want in republics, which he's mainly writing about, is for them to rise as Rome did from the condition of being a small city-state to govern the world. What brings such grande ette, as he says, what brings such greatness? That's what you should be aiming for, greatness and glory, very standard Renaissance way of thought. And the fundamental lesson that Rome teaches you here is, you could put it in a slogan, no greatness without liberty. So monarchy is out the window because there's no possibility of greatness in one of two sets of conditions. One is that you're subject to a monarch or an oligarch, and the other is that you're subject to a conqueror. In either case, you're not ruling yourself. If you're a colony, you're ruled by the mother state. If you're subject to a moniker, an oligarchy, you're dependent upon that goodwill. So he takes the view that what freedom is, is not being dependent on somebody else's will, because that's the definition of a slave. So you can only be free in a self-governing republic. And there is the great, as you might say, takeaway from the history of Republican Rome. But there are also great lessons from antiquity in the last and most leisure of his works, the Istorio Theorettini, which he wrote ironically on a commission from the Medici and completed just before his death. And there he wants you to know that the history of Florence shows you that it is almost impossible in a republic to stop the rich from corrupting the republic by bribing the citizens. And that is the history of Florence. You can stop them, as the people did, by rising up against the elite and throwing it out, in which case you get a kind of democracy. But Machiavelli says it's licentious, it's anarchistic, and so you're always liable to go back to an oligarchy. And the final history of Florence is the defeat of the republic by the Medici, who turned themselves into princes. It seems like there's a kind of tension in what you just said, because on the one hand, you emphasize the role of freedom, which to me, it sounds like it's really about the freedom of the individual within a state. But you've also been talking about greatness and the achievement of, let's say, Rome or Florence. So does Machiavelli have his eye here primarily on the flourishing and the good of the individual within the state? Or does he primarily have his eye on the flourishing of the whole community? Well, that's such a good question. In fact, that's an absolutely central question. And he changes his mind. He's really not interested in the idea of a community in the prince. In the prince, the ruler owns the state, and all he has to make sure of is that the people remain contented, and he does that by making sure that they don't hate him or her. By the way, remember that a principé could be a woman. And the very first principé whom Machiavelli met as a diplomat was Katarina Sforza, who worsted him. He mentions her with great respect in the prince. But mostly they're men, and that's what they mostly do. But of course, fundamentally, there is no constitution and any sense of a community in the prince because the ruler owns the state. But in the discorcy, the people own the state in a republic. And so the question is, as you say, what's good for the community? Now what's good for the community is greatness, and what is required for greatness is freedom. What's required for freedom is not being subject to the will of anybody else. We've gone through all that, but now it has a positive side that comes out throughout Book One of the discorcy, which is that the way not to be subject to somebody else's will can only be through the laws which govern the republic reflecting your will. Because if they don't reflect your will, they reflect somebody else's will. But that means you're subject to that other person, and that's the definition of living in servitude. So the distinction that we're likely to draw between your individual liberty and good and the common freedom, the free state and its good, would not strike Machiavelli as a distinction. He would want to say that you can only be free in a free state, but that if you live in a republic, then you are free under the laws, because the laws express your will. They don't constrain you. They are an expression of your will, because your consent, potentially your actual physical presence has been there in the making of the laws. And so your good and the common good are the same thing. It's interesting that that sounds so, in a way, Aristotelian, because of course Aristotle as well would say that the good of the individual and the good of the state are interlocking results, right? Yes, that is right. Now I don't think that Machiavelli is at all closely read in Aristotle. Where I'm sure he is getting this from is from Livy, and of course Livy would have known this Aristotle. But it's Livy's insistence on what he calls the kivitas libera, which really catches Machiavelli's attention. And the pivot of the early part of Livy's history is the move from the kings to what he calls liberty. Now that means liberty from the kings. So that is liberty of the state, which now governs itself. It's a res publica, and the res, the state, is in the hands of the publica. There is also freedom for the people, because instead of being subject to the will of the king, which is slavery, they govern themselves. The will of the people is expressed in the law, and so they remain free, although they are subjects. Now of course they're not called subjects, they're called citizens, and that's the crucial distinction. From being subiecti, they become kivitas. And does he ground all of this the way Aristotle would in some kind of conception of human nature is the idea that- Yeah, absolutely not. So the idea is that we want freedom because without freedom we can't realize what it is to be. No, that's such a good point. But he absolutely lacks what would anachronistically be called any positive notion of freedom. That's to say the Aristotelian notion that eudaimonia consists in self-realization, and as unless I realize my highest talents, I can't be said to be fully free. He's absolutely, I can't say ignorant, but he's not interested in thinking about that at all. And he's not deeply interested in questions about human nature. So what does he think human nature is characterized by then? Well again, he is not really a philosopher. It wouldn't occur to him to give a programmatic statement of the nature of human nature in the way that you would find in Aristotle or in Hobbes or in any really architectonic political philosopher. But it is true that in the prince there's a very strange moment in chapter 17 where he suddenly, I can only say he suddenly bursts out and he says, this can be said in general about men. They are fickle, they're ungrateful, they're liars, they're dissemblers, they're avaricious, they're cowardly, they're totally self-interested. That's what you have to know. That's true in general of men. Okay, that's pretty unsparing. Yes. And of course that unsparing view, nicely put, does of course affect his politics. So he does grant his politics very importantly in the prince on that understanding of human nature. And he does so most conspicuously in the two most celebrated chapters in the book. Chapter 17 raises the question, Cicero's question in the Day of Ficceiis, is it better to be feared than loved? And of course Cicero's answer is obviously it's better to be loved because love is the great bond of association. Now he then says, and this is complete rubbish, love is not a bond at all because the people I'm talking about will serve you as long as you benefit them. The moment you stop benefiting them, there will be no bond of love because they're avaricious, because they're fickle. What will really bind them to you is fear. Fear coerces and it's coercion that the state has to employ. So there's one immediate consequence of the view of human nature in his politics. The other is in chapter 18, the most notorious chapter in the Prince Chippé, where Machiavelli raises another Ciceronian question. Cicero in the Day of Ficceiis asks, not really asks, but answers the question about the keeping of good faith, Fides, by saying, Fides, Cicerando, good faith must always be kept. Machiavelli, I think it must be the most shocking moment in the Prince for his contemporaries, puts as his chapter heading, and all the chapter headings are in Latin, Quo moda, Fides, Cicerando, how far should promises be kept? And he says, they should be kept if they benefit you, but not if they don't, because don't forget who you're dealing with. These people are not going to keep their promises to you. Why should you keep your promises to them? So this all goes together with a kind of a popular conception about Machiavelli, which is that he's very cynical. He's very kind of, maybe even recommends cruelty in some cases. Yes. But he does also make a place for virtue. Yes. Or, well, he makes a place for virtu. I'm not sure whether virtue is the right translation. Well, very good distinction. So maybe you should just say what he means by that, and then we can talk about to what extent that is a kind of weight against the use of virtu. Yes, very good. Yeah, that's very neat. This might be a quite long answer, because the concept of virtu is the absolute pivot of both the principate and the discorsi. And virtu, I think we can say, theoretically, names that set of qualities that enable a prince to do what Machiavelli thinks any ruler must fundamentally aim to do. And the Italian is very resonant here. It is mantinere lostato. You've got to be able to maintain lostato. That's to say your state, meaning your status, your standing as a prince, but also the state. And lostato would still be the modern Italian way of referring to the state, meaning the apparatus of government. So if you want mantinere lostato, the quality that you have to bring to bear on everything you do is virtu. So the great question is, but what are those qualities of virtu? And here I go back to the fact that Machiavelli is a classical moralist who is also deeply critical of classical moralism. And the people he's always got in his mind in the Vinci paper are Cicero, especially in the Theophicis, which was the textbook for learning moral philosophy in the Renaissance. Machiavelli would have known it by heart. And also Seneca, because Seneca had written about princes, writing, of course, under the Principate rather than the Republic. And they give an account of a range of virtues, which in the Renaissance came to be called the princely virtues. I think in English, we would still talk about princely in that way. Yes, I think so. You know, you gave me a princely gift, something like that. It doesn't come up in my life. No, it's a bit litterer, as the French would say. But anyway, here are the princely virtues and Machiavelli itemizes them. Chapter 16 is on liberality. So there's a princely virtue. Chapter 17 is on being clemency, subject to one of Seneca's treatises, is obviously a special virtue of princes. And of course, chapter 18, we've already talked about being fede, keeping your word, keeping your promises, which of course in classical philosophy would have been held to be, as is said, the fundamentals, the basis of all justice. To which Machiavelli adds in chapter 15, we're introducing this topic, and again in chapter 18, the prince needs to be, or needs to seem to be, a religioso. Okay, now classically, what he's saying is that these qualities, liberality, clemency, keeping good faith, doing justice, that's what enables you to maintain your state. That's what keeps people happy. That's what enables you to tread the paths of glory, and posthumously, of course, to attain fame. But now, I think that this is the moment that brings us absolutely to the heart of what's distinctive about Machiavelli and political morality in The Prince. And it's very simple, I think. Machiavelli says at the beginning of each of these chapters, look, of course these are virtues. And of course you must cultivate and practice them as far as possible. But paraphrasing, but going back to what we've said, don't forget what men are like. In a world in which most men are not good, non-sonic war, not good people, if you are always good, it will not enable you, mountaineer or starter. On the contrary, you will be ruined, because you will keep your promise and they won't. Or you will be clement and they will think you're an idiot, and they will despise you, you'll lose your state. So he's saying that cruelly, and he uses this word, which we use in a much more specialized way nowadays, for virtuoso. Virtuoso is, of course, the prince who could do something amazing, because nowadays the amazing thing has to be playing the violin in public. But of course, in the Renaissance, this is an absolute fundamental notion, the virtuoso leader. For Machiavelli, you might say he, I don't know, I like not to talk like this, but he implies the term virtu in a new way. The virtuoso is the person who is virtuous so far as is possible, but is ready, as Machiavelli says, to enter upon the pathway of evil if it is necessary. So the fundamental term turns out to be necessity. It will sometimes be necessary for the maintenance of your state that you should abandon the virtues, or as he says, be non buono, be not good. And the virtuoso is the person who calibrates exactly when to be good and when not to be good. The decision not to be good in a given instance, is that an application and manifestation of virtue? So it's not like, oh, today I can't be virtuous? No, it's a manifestation of your powers as a virtuoso. It is part of princely virtuoso. In fact, it's the essence of princely virtuoso, in Machiavelli's account, to know when to be good and to know when to be bad. But notice that the touchstone here is necessity. It has to be necessary for the maintenance of the state. He has a special chapter, chapter 8 in the Principae, where he discusses the figure of Agathites, a tyrant of ancient Sicily. And he says, Agathites always maintained his state. He had no one who ever challenged him for it. It was a very successful community. It fought off the Carthaginians and so on. And then he suddenly says, he cannot be called a man of virtue. Now why is that? And he says, because he only ever lived a life of crime. It was simply tyranny. He terrorized everyone, having come to power by having massacred the entire senate. And he ruled by terror. Now Machiavelli says in a wonderful phrase, this will gain you imperio, manon gloria. So Agathites is inglorious. Why? He's just a thug. He's not guided by necessity. He's just a very evil person. That's not virtu. That's really interesting because it suggests that the concept of virtu has a kind of partial overlap with the way we usually use the word virtue. Exert metas, yes. Because it sort of includes virtue, but it also includes this ability to and willingness to and knowledge of how to depart from virtue. Absolutely. I think if we're doing etymology for a moment, the etymology of the Latin word virtus is of course the quality of the vir. And in Latin there are two words for man. I mean, there's homo, which means man or woman. What we would say would be person. And then there's the vir, which is the man by contrast with the woman, source of the English word virile. So really, Machiavelli's virtu is more the virtu of the vir. And the vir is the person who knows how to conquer fortune, how to rise above fortune, how to deal with misfortune. This is someone who watches events all the time. And Machiavelli has a very fine single word summary of the virtuoso, which is a reflexive verb that he likes to use, which is this is someone who knows virtuosi, how to turn about. So the winds of fortune, you turn with the winds, you turn back. And it's sort of artistry as to how exactly you behave. You do good so far as you possibly can. You do evil when necessary. But the further thought is when you do evil, you must do your best to seem to be doing good. And so when he denounces mankind for being famous and dissemblers and deceivers, he says, well, but you've got to do that. One thing that might puzzle people, and I think maybe now puzzles me, is that given the stress that you've just put on the virtuosity of the single ruler and also just reading the prints, it's all about what the ruler should do. So how is it that he also puts so much emphasis on this notion of the mixed constitution, which sounds like exactly not the notion of a single ruler who's making sure that everything goes well, but it's much more like a combination of different political structures that will give you the right results? That's absolutely right. And underline something that we've been saying, which is that there is a big change of mind between the prints, which is a handbook for princes, and the discorsi, which is a discussion of classical republics. Various new questions arise. I want to say that there's no change of mind about how to talk about virtu. What he says at the very end of book three of the discorsi, almost in the last chapter of the book, is that the concept of virtu in a republic must be cultivated by every citizen. And he says, if—I'm trying to remember exactly by heart, this is more or less it—if the life or liberty of the republic is at stake, there must be no question of justice. There must be no question of what is virtuous or not. You must do whatever will save the life of the republic, because without it you're nothing. So that has to be the fundamental, as he would think, moral claim. But of course you're right. If we were to point to the biggest of all the distinctions between these two works of political theory, the prince and the discorsi, we would have to say that in the prince there is no constitution. The prince has a law as his will. But the discorsi is passionate about getting the constitution right. And as you say, it's a mixed constitution. And there he takes up the terminology that the Roman writers would have inherited from Aristotle. And I'll go back to what we were saying earlier. There are fundamentally three constitutions. There's monarchy, there's aristocracy, and there's democracy. But to that, Machiavelli adds—and I'm now talking about the very beginning of the discorsi, the opening chapters—take us through the theory of anocytosis, which he would have learned from Polybius, the great statement of this idea in antiquity, that these three pure forms of constitution are destined to move through an endless cycle of corruption and collapse. And in Polybius' account in book six of the histories, human history begins with monarchy, but that becomes tyranny. The elite revolts. They set up an aristocracy. That degenerates into oligarchy. The people revolt. They set up a democracy. That converts into anarchy. And then the whole thing starts all over again. So there's the endless corso, iricorso, that they learned from Polybius. So the answer is obvious. None of the three pure forms are right. You've got to mix them. You have to have a mixture. And what Machiavelli takes from Livy is the idea that Rome's great secret was that Rome got the mixture right. There was a monarchical element, even after the removal of the kings, because there were two. And on the other hand, they were elected and they only served for one year, but they were a kingly element. And then there was the Senate, which was the aristocratic element, and then there's the assemblies and the tribunes of the people, and that's the popular element. And there is the mixed constitution. But I should say one other thing, which is the most important thing to say about Machiavelli's theory of the mixed constitution, which is that he completely departs from how that would have been understood by his contemporaries. At the time when Machiavelli was writing, the model of the Renaissance Republican constitution was Venice. And the great question, of course, just as the question was, how did Rome become so great? The question was, why is Venice the richest city in the known world? And it's very striking that the two richest cities in Europe at the time are Venice and Amsterdam and they're both republics, so the question looks well worth asking. And the Venetians are very happy to explain that it's because it's a very aristocratic republic. It disenfranchises people, it's closed the lists of citizens in the 13th century, it's not open to anyone. Anyone can come, but they're not enfranchised. And that makes Venice, in the famous word, serenissima, the most serene, as well as the richest republic. And peace, of course, is a condition of successful commerce. And there you have the Venetian story. Machiavelli says, I reject that completely. Venice is the wrong model. The right model is Rome. Rome enfranchised everyone. Everyone was made a citizen. From Rome to nearly Scotland on the one hand and nearly Asia on the other hand. They're all citizens. Except for slaves. Of course. Slaves are not citizens. But all citizens are citizens. They're not disenfranchised. And he says, well, you must do that for two reasons. One is you need the manpower if you're going to run an empire. And he's fascinating on this. He says you must encourage as much immigration as possible. Get as many people in as you can. That will make the whole economy grow. Second thing is you're going to need huge armies for trying to rule the world. So enfranchise everyone. Make them citizens. And then make them fight. Because the goal is glory. Because the goal is greatness and glory. Absolutely. But then he says, all right, what about the Venetians saying, well, that will lead to endless tumults. And that what you have to have is the peace that brings success in commerce and so forth. And he says, well, of course, it will make completely tumultuous politics. Completely tumultuous. And that's the great secret that Rome knew is that's a good thing. Oh, and this is the winds of fortune where the prince can then blow with the- Yes. That is right. But it's more than that. It's something quite ingenious. He says, remember what I told you about human nature, which is everyone is fundamentally out for themselves and they're not to be trusted. All right. So what you do is you have two assemblies. Now one is the Senate and that's the elite. And they will operate entirely in their own interests and try to do down the people. But the people will stop any of those proposals from becoming law. So now consider the people. They have proposed legislation and they will propose legislation in their interests and they will try to do down the nobility. But all of those things will fail as well because the nobility won't have them. The Senate will vote it down. The Senate will vote it down. So the outcome of the whole discussion is to say that the tumults, which are nowadays so much despised and set aside in constitutional theory, were what made Rome great because it was what made Rome remain free. Free of submission by the people to the elite, free of anarchy by the people against the elite because the only laws that could pass were those that benefited everyone. So that is analysis of mixed constitution. And people were horrified by it. Richard Dini writes a whole tract saying this is like praising someone for being sick. This is not health of the body politic. So Maccabean is saying, well, actually that is what made Rome great. Another thing that I find puzzling here is given the veneration of Rome that you've just been describing together with the pretty evident cynicism, not so much about what people are like because I think actually that goes very well with the idea of original sin, but the idea that you might sometimes have to depart from what would normally be considered virtue. These things sound very incompatible with Christianity or at least in some tension with Christianity. Yes. Is that just because he doesn't care? Well, that's very interesting. They are in tremendous tension with Christianity. And that goes back to what I was saying about the fact that we're talking here about a classical moralist. His categories are not Christian. I think perhaps two things to be said. One is that he is a sworn foe of the Roman Catholic Church. It's completely corrupt. And at a wonderful moment in the Prince, he says, writing only about two years before Luther, he says, it is so corrupt that I cannot believe that it is not going to be about to be swallowed up completely, which of course it was. So there's a hatred of the Church and its corruption and the fact that the Church just serves as one of the powers in Italy. He says strong enough to stop anyone else uniting it and not strong enough to unite it itself. And of course, in a way, that is the history of Italy until the 20th century because the Church even rejected unification, as you know. But he says there's something much worse about Christianity, which is that the religion should be a civil religion. That's to say, we want religion to help us to lead good civic life. We want it to help us to be good citizens. And this is what the Roman religion achieved. Now, he says in a fascinating passage at the beginning of Book II of the Discorsi, there's no reason why Christianity should not have even been interpreted in his words, second beloved tomb. That's to say, Christianity could have praised the qualities that make for civic greatness. But he says it didn't. It got taken over by the monks, and they praised the qualities of the humble and the contemplative. Furthermore, they told us to despise this whole life and fix our eyes upon life in heaven after death. And he says in a passage which is impossible not to read as sarcastic, he says, well, praise the Lord for having been shown the true way, is that the world has been turned over to criminals. That sounds like Nietzsche. Well, of course, this is where Nietzsche gets it from. Nietzsche in his first year at Basel goes to Borckhardt's lectures. Borckhardt is lecturing about Machiavelli. I think that's a really important fact about Nietzsche. So he's saying that there could be no possible reconciliation between Christianity as it has been interpreted and a political teaching which is trying to revive the world. I just have one last question, which the mention of Nietzsche takes us to, and this is an impossible question, so I apologize in advance for posing it. Can you, in just a couple of minutes, sketch out what Machiavelli's legacy has been as a political thinker? Well, Machiavelli has a rare accolade amongst philosophers, which is that he's an adjective we say Platonist, we say Aristotelian, but we also say Machiavellian. And the Machiavelli who has been labeled Machiavellian and denounced for centuries is only part of the Machiavelli whom we've discussed. We've discussed someone who has a certain idealism about the political and how people can be made to live free lives when they're self-interested. How can they be turned into good citizens? That's a big question for him. The Machiavelli, where the adjective simply denotes, I don't know what, Machiavellian means just duplicitous, doesn't it? Or something like that. Cutthroats. Cutthroats, exactly. Completely cynical or only concerned with power. That led to a huge literature, which was the literature of the anti-Machiavell from Le Chantier's 1572 attack onwards. And of course the Catholic Church hit back. Machiavelli was one of the first ever writers whose opera, Omnia, were placed on the prohibited list of books in 1559. And I mean, I don't think they came off until what, 1947 I think they came off. Dubious honour. Yes. So that's part of the influence. But there is a serious influence of Machiavelli, which is in the Republican tradition. And there, this image of the free state as requiring a mixed constitution and sovereignty lying with the people and the fundamental value being freedom is there to animate two of the great revolutions of early modernity. The English revolution of 1649, where the Commonwealth in explaining what kind of a constitution it is going to set up, sets up a constitution for freedom. It cannot be a monarchy. It has to be a rule by popular sovereignty. In the legitimisation of the English Commonwealth, Machiavelli's discussion of discorsi is very frequently cited. One of the people writing propaganda for the English Republic was of course John Milton. And you can determine from his commonplace book that the book he was reading when his sight finally gave up was the discorsi. And of course the other great revolution in which there's a clear Machiavellian element of the mixed constitution and the passions of freedom is the American revolution. So in those cases, there's a positive and rather idealistic story to be told about his influence. Okay. Well, thank you very much for that amazing look at one of the most amazing Renaissance thinkers. Well, wonderful questions, Peter, and thank you very much. I've greatly enjoyed the talk. Fantastic. And please join me next time as I continue to look at Renaissance philosophy here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Teacher of Our Actions – Renaissance Historiography They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But Machiavelli would say that this gets things backwards. The reason to study history is precisely so that you can repeat it, solving new problems with solutions that have worked in the past. As Machiavelli says in his Discourses on the Roman Historian Livy, he who wishes to see what is to come should observe what has already happened. In particular, we should look back to antiquity, when the Romans provided examples for anyone who seeks to achieve great things, especially in matters of war. Thus, he has his main speaker in a dialogue, called On the Art of War, say, I shall never depart in giving examples of anything from my Romans. Admittedly, history can also instruct us on what not to do. This is the sort of lesson we can learn from more recent history, thinks Machiavelli, since so many bad decisions have been made by Italian statesmen in general and by the city of Florence in particular. As my grandfather liked to say, everyone is useful if only to serve as a bad example. The disparaging remark about Florence comes at the beginning of the fifth book of Machiavelli's History of the City, which was written in the early 1520s at the behest of a pope who was also a member of the Medici family. The project was not, to put it mildly, a novel one. A series of men who held the office of chancellor in the 1400s had each written a history of Florence, beginning with Leonardo Bruni, followed by Poggio Braccionini, and then Bartolomeo Scala. More generally, historical research had been part of the humanist movement at least since Petrarch, who did fundamental philological work restoring the writings of Livy. The humanists like to say that history is the teacher of our actions, precisely because of the wealth of examples it offers for emulation. And its study was an important part of the study of rhetoric. Both points are made by a humanist we met some episodes back, Izotta Nogarola. She wrote, Our ancestors called history life's teacher, for knowledge of the past fosters prudence and counsel. History encourages a certain perfection of style, adorned with every splendour, an opulence of words, a power of speaking, a wealth of anecdotes that illumine the oration and make it admirable. What more is there to say? All excellent orators gain their vitality and passion from history. That sentiment would have had the full approval of Leonardo Bruni, who throughout his career devoted much energy to the writing of histories. He certainly thought that history should report on events as they really happened. As he comments in the preface of his treatise on the War of the Italians against the Goths, it is the business of history to make a literary record of the times, whether they are prosperous or adverse. One must write about whatever happened. But even if history must follow the truth, as he also says, it is still a form of rhetoric and should involve suitable ornament. But how to go about learning to write history the right way? Well, this is the Italian Renaissance, so the answer is obvious. One should of course follow the patterns set by ancient historians, those who wrote in Greek, like Polybius and Thucydides, and those who wrote in Latin, like Julius Caesar, Livy, and Sallust. Among them, Livy had a special status. As just mentioned, Petrarch worked on this historian back in the 14th century, and the Greek emigre George Trapezuntius recommended him highly in his treatise on rhetoric. So Machiavelli was coming late to the party when he devoted his discourses to Livy a couple of generations later. That work is a commentary, but the Renaissance humanists frequently just repeated material from earlier historians, albeit with some adaptation. We know of a debate involving the humanist Giovanni Pontano on the question whether a new work of history should draw on just one source or combine many sources, failing to reproduce sources at all wasn't even considered as an option. So when Bruni's fellow historian and critic, Biondo Flavio, accused him of borrowing too heavily from the ancient historian Procopius in a historical treatise, he wasn't complaining about plagiarism, but only of Bruni's dependence on one author instead of several. Another way Bruni imitated his classical models was to include many set-piece speeches drawn from his own imagination in order to capture the thinking behind various historical decisions. This is a technique he would have learned from, among others, Thucydides, whom Bruni was the first Western humanist to know well. The cultivation of eloquence was only one reason to read and write history. There was also the cultivation of virtue. The humanist Pier Paolo Vergiero thought an even better tool for instilling good character than moral philosophy, and Coluccio Salutati agreed on the grounds that history is livelier than straightforward exhortation. Again, the rationale for seeing history as a teacher of our actions was that it could provide us with models to imitate. Thus Lorenzo Valla said that it teaches by example, guarino guarini, that it inspires man to act virtuously and inflames him to deeds of glory. For Bruni, reading history offers the sort of experience naturally acquired by older people who have seen more of life than the young so that it is a discipline that makes us wiser and more modest. His dual interests in rhetoric and virtue are on show in his Life of Cicero, a revision of the biography of this great orator and philosopher written by Plutarch. As I'm guessing you may not remember, we covered Plutarch, not to be confused with Petrarch, way back in episode 80. He was himself a philosopher and historian who wrote a set of paired lives of prominent Greeks and Romans, one of whom was Cicero. When Bruni read this, he found it insufficiently admiring of this leading humanist role model, which is why he wrote a new biography, as he explained in a preface to the work. Though Bruni also once commented that history is one thing, panagyrich another, this gives us a hint of the close connection between rhetoric, offering praise of something, which is what panagyrich means, and the kind of rhetoric involved in writing history. Hence those histories of Florence written by the chancellors of the city, which were, among other things, works of praise. We're told that Bruni boasted of giving Florence immortality by writing his history of the city. His successor, Poggio, echoed that assessment in his funeral oration of Bruni, the work deserved the highest praise from all ages and secured eternal fame for the city. Bruni's history is indeed still praised today for its empirical and source-based approach to history, which allowed him to unmask earlier legends as being just that, legends. He famously showed that the city was not really founded by Julius Caesar, as claimed by an earlier historian of Florence named Giovanni Villani. And he poured cold water on another idea of Villani's, namely that the man who revived the city after it declined along with the Western Roman Empire was none other than the living revival of that empire, Charlemagne. But while we should not discount Bruni's evidence-based approach to history, it should also be noticed that these details from his history fit into a political agenda. The interpretation of that agenda has changed over the past decades along with the interpretive line taken on Bruni more generally. We saw how Hans Baron championed the idea of civic humanism in the Italian Renaissance and made Bruni the leading figure in that movement, a proponent of republicanism and thus an opponent of imperial oppression. Baron read Bruni's History of Florence as fitting perfectly into this pattern, arguing that Bruni emphasized the Etruscan roots of Florence, making it a kind of counterpoint to Rome. No wonder then that Bruni sought to distance the history of his city from figures like Julius and Charlemagne. Very much in contrast to the earlier Dante, whose work on monarchy celebrated Roman Empire and wished devoutly that all Christendom would be united once again under a single ruler, Bruni was no imperialist. He saw ancient Rome as draining Italian cities of their strength, like a large tree preventing the smaller ones around it from flourishing. And when it came to more recent history, Bruni praised the Florentines for their stand against tyrannical Milan, whose leader, Gian Gallazzo Visconti, threatened all free people in Italy. But, as Baron's reading of Bruni has come under criticism, so scholars have begun to see different motives at work in his History of Florence. We saw that Bruni always had a fair degree of sympathy for oligarchy and had no trouble making peace with Medici power. Given that he received lucrative tax concessions from the city's government, probably in return for his work on the history, it's hardly surprising that it tends to promote the viewpoint of that government and of the nobles who dominated it. The latter part of the work was written under Medici rule and duly commends members of the family for their civic virtue. These might be members of the family who were already dead, but this still reflected well on the Medici. As the Bruni scholar Gary Ianzitti has written, image was all, and history writing was an image-making or breaking enterprise. The events referred to might have taken place decades earlier, no matter, reputation hinged on the actions of one's immediate ancestors as much as on those of oneself. Another critic of Bruni, Francesco Fillelfo, accused him of turning his history into a propaganda piece for the Medici, and though this is an exaggeration, the work certainly shows that Bruni knew who was buttering his bread. The more ideological aspects of the history duly reflect the values of the nobles who dominated the republican government of Bruni's time. He openly endorses those values, writing, I am moved by what men think good, to extend one's borders, to increase one's power, to extol the splendour and glory of the city, to look after its utility and security. You could hardly summarize better the goals of the automati, as Machiavelli will later understand them. This also explains why, as I mentioned in an earlier episode, Bruni was horrified by an earlier event in Florentine history, the Chompi Revolt, when the guilds took over the city and installed a truly popular republican government. Bruni had no time for this sort of thing, and was also strongly opposed to the distribution of government offices by random lot, on the grounds that it would cut the link between political leadership and the individual virtue cultivated by the nobility. Bruni's interest in that sort of virtue helps to explain a feature of his history that distinguishes it from earlier chronicles, those written in the Middle Ages, where they typically sought to show how God's plan was revealed in history, Bruni placed great stress on individual human agency, and saw this as the driving force behind events. He was followed in this by his fellow humanist, historian and chancellor, Poggio Braccionini. Poggio's history of Florence is a kind of sequel or continuation of Bruni's, much as we saw in our earlier look at the Byzantine historians, who would carry on the story where earlier accounts had left off. In this case, Poggio takes up the history of Florence in 1402, and brings the tale to 1454, the year that peace was agreed with Milan. Like Bruni, he depicts Florence as the brave protector of Italian liberty against Milanese aggression, and says that this justifies their participation in warfare. How much more just it is to fight for liberty and to avoid coming under the domination of others. He also echoes Bruni's support for an oligarchic, or narrow republic, pointing to the Cianpi revolt as an example of the way that factionalism can bring down republics, and also remarking that the people, or popolo, are often too cowardly to support the performance of great deeds by the city. So, with his contrast between the popolo and the nobility, or ottomati, Machiavelli was once again anything but an innovator. Still, his historical works could not have been written by anyone else. They are stuffed with his characteristic aphorisms, like this quotable passage from his Discourses on Livy, Then there are moments of cynicism to match anything in The Prince. And the one-liners routinely offer genuine insight. If only Robespierre had read Machiavelli's History of Florence and underlined the sentence, nobody should start a revolution in a city in the belief that later he can stop it at will or regulate it as he likes. As we have already discussed, he used history to generate, and then illustrate, his own theories about political life. This applies not least to his views on republics, which are broadly positive because he's so impressed by the achievements of the Roman Republic. For the same reason, it's not just any republic that will satisfy him, it needs to imitate the Romans as much as possible. In the preface of his History of Florence, he echoes the claim of our favorite sentence from the Discourses, that internal dissension can be helpful for the vibrancy of a republic. But to prevent this dissension from turning into factionalism, the city needs to direct its aggression outward. As the Discourses put it, If a republic does not have an enemy outside, it will find one at home. Unfortunately, Florence has mostly failed to live up to the Roman standard, its progress constantly undermined by bad laws and self-interested factionalism. Its failure is more than an illustration of the general law that opposition between the people and the nobles, caused by the latter's wish to rule and the former's not to be enthralled, bring about all the evils that spring up in cities. After all, Rome was able to manage this opposition and even benefit from it. Machiavelli explains that this is because the people of Rome had more realistic expectations and desires, being happy to let the nobles get on with conquering and winning glory so long as they were not actively oppressed. In Florence, by contrast, the popolo were always trying to constrain the nobles from seeking their natural goals. Like Bruni, Machiavelli likes to use rhetorical showpiece speeches in his history. And in one of these, he represents a spokesman of the popolo and his amoral opposition to the nobility. Machiavelli offers us a reason to think that the lessons of Rome would apply just as well to Renaissance Florence, namely that human nature never really changes. It is because all people have the same desires and the same traits that he who diligently examines past events easily foresees future ones. His assumption that the plebeians of ancient Rome may be readily compared to the popolo of 15th century Florence is a good example of this kind of thinking. One of those chancellor historians, Bartolomeo Scala, might have been criticizing Machiavelli in advance when he complained about historians who want to trace everything back to antiquity and omit with silence much that has been changed or innovated since then. Machiavelli displays this habit even, or in fact especially, when discussing warfare, which you'd think would have changed quite a lot since the Roman phalanxes were efficiently mowing down barbarians, until they weren't. In his dialogue on the art of war, he insists that this is a domain of political life that can be modeled on the ancients especially well. For instance, he argues that such developments as gunpowder weapons make surprisingly little difference. Artillery does not make it impossible to use ancient methods and show ancient vigor. Machiavelli is at his most Machiavellian when discussing the topic of warfare. He assumes a zero-sum distribution of power, territory, and wealth between cities, and seems to think that there are only two relationships possible between states, peaceful antagonism and active warfare. Medieval concerns with justice in matters of war seem to be, if you'll pardon the expression, ancient history, as Machiavelli states as an obvious fact that war is only ever fought to strengthen oneself and weaken one's opponents. This attitude would be echoed by a younger historian, who on many other points found reasons to disagree with Machiavelli, Francesco Guicardini. He wrote a critical commentary on Machiavelli's Discourses and a series of his own historical works. Guicardini makes great use of the rhetorical setpiece, often pairing two speakers who argue on either side of a political issue. Often, these speeches concern the wisdom of declaring a war, and it's astonishing how rarely the speakers bother to argue that a prospective war is or is not justified. Thus, a speaker who opposes a war against the papacy doesn't worry about the religious implications, except to note that it could be bad for the city's reputation. Elsewhere, a spokesman urges the citizens of Venice to aim for noble and high goals, but again only for the sake of good reputation. All of which is no wonder, since Guicardini is just as persuaded as Machiavelli that foreign policy is a dog-eat-dog business. Any city, he says, must either be powerful enough to oppress others, or she must be oppressed by others. Frequently, he has historical figures argue against launching wars on the grounds that it opens one to adverse turns of fortune. Fortune is a theme that runs through all the histories we've looked at, and increasingly so, as the generations go on. It is not so much emphasized by Bruni, but Poggio wrote a treatise on the topic, and described political rulers as actors performing in what he called the theater of fortune. Fortune is one of Machiavelli's favorite concepts, and guides much of his advice, as when he suggests that it's better to starve an enemy army than to attack it, because in open warfare, fortune is much more powerful than ability. He often credits specific political successes to good fortune, seeing this as key to the career of Cosimo de' Medici, for example. Still, Machiavelli thinks wise decisions like those made by the Romans can enable one to master fortune to some extent. Its malice can be overcome by prudence. Furthermore, he tends to see the fluctuations of fortune as a mere ebb and flow in the tide of historical cycles which have a kind of natural inevitability, such that states will always fall away from the peak of their power and perfection. Guicciardini was, if anything, even more impressed by the unpredictability of fortune. He wrote that human affairs are as subject of change and fluctuation as the waters of the sea agitated by the winds. For this reason, he was less confident than Machiavelli that one can apply the lessons of history to predict the future. Experience shows that almost always, the opposite happens to what men, no matter how wise, expected. Nonetheless, a constant refrain of his writings is the trait of prudence. It helps to restrain emotion in political decision-making, and allows rulers to spot opportunities as they arise. With this, Guicciardini applies a lesson of his own taken from antiquity. Aristotle envisioned a virtue of practical wisdom which allowed the wise man to deal effectively with particular situations as they arose. The more such situations one has met, the better one's chances of reacting to them successfully. What history provides, from Guicciardini's point of view, is not so much models to imitate as a wealth of experience on which to draw. It should be said that the figures I've discussed in this episode were far from the only historians to write in the Italian Renaissance. It was an interest widely shared among humanists, and even members of socially marginal groups were getting in on the act. Two 16th century Jewish authors, Elijah Kapsaly and Joseph Haak-Cohen, wrote chronicles of recent European history, and Lucrezia Marinelli produced a history of the Fourth Crusade. But I'd like to end with a remark by another historian named Francesco Vettori, one that might have struck even Machiavelli as overly cynical. Vettori said that all the talk of freedom and liberty is a mere fantasy. All the republics and the principates I know of from history or have seen for myself were tyrannies, he said. To speak freely, all governments are tyrannical. It is only in the pages of utopian works by authors like Plato and Thomas More that one could see a population living without tyranny, which as it happens gives us a perfect transition to the next episode. Next time we'll be talking about texts that describe the ideal political arrangements of imagined cities, cities better than the ones whose histories were praised and criticized by the likes of Bruni and Machiavelli. I hope it's not utopian to think you'll join me for that next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Place, Utopias in the Italian Renaissance. If you were given the task of designing a perfect city, what would you put in it? High on my own list of priorities would be plenty of green spaces, pedestrian zones, independent booksellers, coffee shops, and of course, cinemas showing silent films and other classic movies. I'd also have statues put up in the honor of my favorite philosophers like Plato, Avicenna, and Christine de Bizan, plus one of my twin brother, in part because he really deserves one, and in part because people might think it was me. I guess we should also have a statue of Thomas More, whose 1516 treatise Utopia is of course the most famous example of a project like the one I'm describing. Forget fantasy islands, More proposed a whole fantasy society and the ideal educational, political, and economic conditions that would prevail there. It's convenient that I've already decided to have a statue of Plato, since More was in turn looking back to the Republic, the original utopia of the European philosophical tradition in which Plato anticipated some of More's radical proposals, such as the common sharing of property. More's Utopia illustrates a point that has so far gone largely unacknowledged in this podcast. I've been focusing on developments in Italy, implying that Renaissance philosophy began there, with the rest of Europe having to catch up later. This is a traditional way of telling the story, in part on the grounds that the quintessentially Renaissance movement called humanism was triggered by the presence of Eastern Greek scholars in Italy and then taken up by Northern scholars like Erasmus. But it's not as if Italian intellectuals were never influenced by the rest of Europe. Two obvious examples are the arrival of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter provoked the Counter-Reformation, or if you prefer, Catholic Reformation, in Southern Europe, providing the context for developments in Italian thought in the 16th century. We're going to have this problem a lot from now on, because during the Reformation and in the 17th and 18th centuries, a lot was happening in philosophy all over Europe and all at the same time, so I will often have to discuss the influence of thinkers I haven't yet covered in their own right. So it is here. We'll look in depth at Thomas More when we come to talk about philosophy in Reformation England, but his Utopia turns out to be an important source for Italian intellectuals in the 16th century. Some of his writings, possibly including Utopia, were brought to Italy by his friend Antonio Buonvisi. Its initial publication caused little fanfare, but the Italian translation, which appeared in 1548, was a hit. It came with an introduction, written by Anton Francesco Doni, which promised the reader, Doni was inspired to write a short Utopian work of his own, with the enticing title Wise and Crazy World, a dialogue between two characters named simply Wise and Crazy, Savio and Pazzo. The Wise character tells his crazy friend about a dream he has had of a city where men are of one mind and all human sufferings are taken away. This was the opening salvo in a veritable barrage of imaginary polities. Around the same time, a work called simply The Happy City was published by a polymath whose name was Francesco Patrizzi. Obviously, he's not to be confused with the Byzantine scholar Ioane Patrizzi, who we covered back in episode 319. The works of Doni and Patrizzi paved the way for the most famous Italian Utopia, The City of the Sun, written by Tommaso Campanella in 1602, but first published only in 1623. Two years after that, the Dialogues of L'Orovico Zuccolo were published, containing a fourth Utopian work called The Republic of Evandria, as well as an attack on the model for all this literary activity, Thomas More's Utopia. According to Zuccolo, More was less, less convincing that he should have been, that is. His ideal society was too much of an idealization, realizable only on the impossible assumption that the citizens of Utopia would all be perfectly virtuous and willing to live in conditions akin to monasticism. Fans of Utopian literature might be tempted to respond that even if the ideal city or society cannot be realized, it might still serve a useful purpose by giving us something to aim at. But that sentiment had already been anticipated and rejected about a century earlier by none other than Machiavelli. In his Prince, he wrote with his characteristic realism and cynicism, Machiavelli was writing too early to be thinking of More, or his Italian imitators, of course. He may instead have had Plato in mind. If so, he was giving Plato too little credit, since the Republic is far from optimistic about the prevalence of virtue in real Greek society, and goes out of its way to argue that the ideal society is genuinely possible, if unlikely. Of course, Machiavelli didn't need to invent Utopias, because in his view, real life had provided a model to imitate and an ideal to strive for in the shape of the ancient Roman Republic. And the authors of Utopian treatises also look back to antiquity. Patrizzi openly admitted that he was taking many of his ideas from Aristotle's politics, albeit with a good deal of creative elaboration, and Zuccolo's Evandria is meant to be more realistic than Thomas More's Utopia, in part because it has so much in common with Rome. Antonio Donato, the translator of several of the Utopias, has commented that for Italian humanists, Rome was both imaginary and real. That's an observation you could apply with some justice to Machiavelli and his fellow historians too. Something else Machiavelli didn't need to do, by the way, was look back to antiquity to find examples of people imagining states that don't exist in reality. It might be argued that the tradition of Utopias in Renaissance Italy began well before the arrival of Thomas More's work with treatises on architecture by authors like Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, and even Leonardo da Vinci. They explained the ideal way to lay out a city, as well as the ideal construction of individual buildings, with Alberti alluding explicitly to Plato's Republic as an inspiration. He and other city planners thought that Plato's strict division between social classes should be reflected in the urban landscape. Thus da Vinci proposed a two-level city with the rich literally living above the poor. In this imagined city, the layout would express in physical terms a fundamental assumption we've seen underlying the political philosophy of the period, that the popolo are at the bottom and the automati on top. Another theme taken over from ancient authors was the ideal shape for a city. Plato mentions that the lost city of Atlantis was circular, and the great architectural writer Vitruvius, a major source for Alberti, suggested that a city should have its streets laid on a radial plan, like the spokes of a wheel. That idea would be taken up by Doni in his wise and crazy world. In such a radial city, it would be almost impossible to get lost, which would make for a sharp contrast to real Italian city centers, as anyone who has been there will know. And someone standing in the center would be able to see the whole city just by turning around, an apparently innocent remark that seems more sinister once you notice that it anticipates Jeremy Bentham's idea of the panopticon, a jail in which the inmates can be observed at all times from a central viewing position. My ideal city would definitely not work like this, but that might have something to do with my real hometown, of which Ralph Waldo Emerson said, we say the cows laid out Boston, well, there are worse surveyors. One of the reasons that Tomasso Campanella's City of the Sun is so famous is its remarkable account of the layout and physical appearance of its utopia. It has a series of concentric circular walls, making it almost impossible to take by military force, or so Campanella says, despite the fact that the Ottomans had not so long ago managed to batter their way through the formidable walls at Constantinople. In the City of the Sun, the walls are painted with all the images and information one needs to learn the sciences, including everything from pictures of various animal species to definitions for use in metaphysics and ethics. Now that idea, I am definitely stealing. Instead of publishing these podcasts as books, I should be releasing them as wallpaper. Education is of vital importance for Campanella, because just like Plato's Republic, this city is ruled according to the principles of philosophy. The highest ruler is a consummate scientist and intellectual, and has subordinates who oversee the various disciplines, which include the liberal arts as well as applied sciences, like medicine. It may seem both unnecessary and overoptimistic that rulers could be deeply learned scholars. One can imagine Machiavelli to say nothing of the modern-day American voter snorting in derision. But Campanella has the main speaker in his dialogue explain that if his readers find such proposals incredible, that is because of the scientific culture to which they are accustomed, which is corrupted by mere book learning and memorization of the teachings of figures like Aristotle. As we'll be seeing in a later episode, these remarks fit perfectly into Campanella's philosophical agenda. He rejected Aristotelian science in favor of theories inspired by his predecessor, Bernardino Telesio. Even the importance of the Sun in his Utopia is a reflection of those theories. Telesio and Campanella saw heat as a fundamental explanatory principle in their new physics. In The City of the Sun, Campanella duly explains that his citizens see the Sun, the greatest source of heat, as an image of God. That's yet another idea we can trace back to Plato's Republic, and its famous analogy between the Sun and the form of the good. So, Campanella's ideas about philosophy, and especially natural philosophy, provide us with an obvious context for understanding aspects of his City of the Sun. Presumably his political ideas and experiences are also relevant, but it's not so easy to say how. Campanella's life was a difficult one. He was arrested by the Inquisition in 1594, and for a time imprisoned alongside another famous victim of persecution, Giordano Bruno. A further run-in with the authorities came in 1599, when he was accused of conspiring against the Spanish domination of Naples. Arrested for treason, and for good measure, heresy, he would endure horrific torture and decades of imprisonment, albeit under conditions which allowed him to compose many treatises, including The City of the Sun. He was finally released in 1626, and in 1634 he made his way to France before dying in 1639. Given this life story, it is surprising that one of his main contributions to political thought, a book called On the Monarchy of Spain, argues in favor of the universal rule of the Spanish power that subjected him to so much misery. An obvious suspicion is that he may have written it to persuade his jailers that he was on their side after all, but questions about the exact dating of the work make it hard to know for sure. Campanella does seem to have good reasons for supporting an expansion of Spanish dominion, even if he also suggests that this might be the least bad option available. Spain had proved its ability to take on the Ottomans at the pivotal Battle of Lepanto in 1571, whereas the Italian princes were too weak, even collectively, to defend Christian interests against Ottoman aggression. The aforementioned background of Reformation and Counter-Reformation is also relevant here. Campanella considered Luther to be a harbinger of the Antichrist, so he looked to the Southern European powers to push back against the tide of Protestantism. Whatever mixed feelings he had about the Spanish, they were at least willing to recognize the spiritual authority of the Pope. In this respect, Campanella should be distinguished from earlier imperial monarchists, like Dante. Where Dante wanted to put all authority in the hands of a secular emperor, Campanella saw unified governance under the Spanish crown as compatible with, indeed justified by, a political alliance with the papacy. All of which allowed him to transfer his support to the French crown as soon as he moved to France and conveniently decided that the Spanish were professing Catholic piety for merely pragmatic political reasons. That cynical approach to faith is something he associated with Machiavelli, whom he called the Scandal, Ruin, Scourge, and Fire of this Century. He wrote a work against Machiavelli's thought, which bears the fourth right title, Ethism Defeated. He was particularly outraged by the Machiavellian advice that rulers should instrumentalize religion as a way of binding together a political community. Often the most heated polemics are provoked by near-agreement, and that may apply here, because Campanella also saw religion as a powerful source of social cohesion. And he offered some pretty Machiavellian thoughts on how the Spanish monarchy could exploit division between its enemies, for instance by lending support to the Calvinists in England to sow dissension there. But as we can see from The City of the Sun, in his ideal polity, religion would not be the tool of the ruler, but his central purpose. His political leaders are scholars and philosophers, but also priests, and his utopia is neither a Principiate nor a Republic the two forms of governance considered by Machiavelli, it is a full-blown theocracy. Campanella recognizes, indeed insists upon, the novelty of this approach. Because religion has never been truly central in historical governments, he says, there has never been on this earth a state wholly without injustice, without sedition, without tyranny. With this, Campanella can be seen as anticipating and answering a complaint about utopian treatises. The authors of such works seem to be offering happiness in a perfect city on this earth, rather than in the City of God in heaven, as Augustine so memorably put it. But for Campanella, the rational or natural religion observed by the people of his city would already be remarkably like a Christian community. He says that they have learned from their travels about other religions and particularly admire the Christian faith. Their customs even involve the confession and absolution of sins, a detail that may have been inspired by the rise of confessional culture as part of the Counter-Reformation. Here, it is also relevant to note that his spokesman in the dialogue, who has visited the utopian city and is describing it to an interlocutor, is a Knight of Malta, a religious warrior, whose authority as a speaker comes from both his piety and his philosophical learning. These themes in Campanella's City of the Sun find echoes in the other Italian utopias. Patrizii also talks about religion as a natural trait of humans, and pretty well all of these authors lay great stress on unity among the citizens. No trace of Machiavelli's productive class tension here. Instead, the city is imagined as a single organism, something we already see in those works on architecture, like a drawing by Francesco Di Giorgio that superimposes a human body on the ground plan of a fortified city. For Alberti, this idea of organic unity was paramount in the making of individual buildings. He wrote that these should have that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added or taken away or altered, but for the worse, and that a building is very like an animal, and that nature must be imitated when we delineate it. But we see variety between the works when it comes to the groups of people within the utopian community and how they are meant to form a unity. To an astounding degree, our authors are willing to follow the provocative recommendations of Plato when it comes to gender and sexuality. Campanella, making the cosmos the model for his city and seeing both as an organic unity, remarks that the sun is like a father and the earth a mother, with the universe as a whole like a large animal. His theory of heat leads him to see women as being, in effect, defective men who lack vigor because of their lesser heat. Nonetheless, he follows Plato as far as he can bear to, agreeing with the stipulations in the Republic that all labors are shared by the two sexes, with the caveat that the more physically demanding tasks are carried out by men. He also adopts Plato's policy of eugenics, according to which mates are chosen by a scientific procedure, and says that the citizens of this city would find us ridiculous for taking care over the breeding of horses and dogs, but not humans. Even more outrageous is Doni, who says there is a street of women that men visit for sex in his perfect city, with the resulting children shared in common by the whole community. What about the economic classes which played such a key role in the historical analyses of Bruni, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini? Of the four authors, Patrizzi is the most aristocratic in attitude. He identifies six classes, namely farmers, artisans, merchants, warriors, officials, and priests. Of these, the first three are useful workers, supporting the elite, with only the latter three groups considered as full citizens. As Patrizzi puts it, the city consists of two parts, one that serves and is unhappy, the other part meanwhile rules and is blessed. It's therefore been commented that his happy city is a utopia for philosopher kings. The more satirical and antique Francesco Doni, by contrast, wants to get rid of class distinctions altogether. In his utopia, one person is not richer than another, and wealth is passed around so that everyone has the chance to enjoy it. This echoes a comment he makes elsewhere, why should the nobles have so much and everyone else so little? It's no coincidence that Patrizzi was born into a noble family, Doni into a poor one. In all the utopias, though, it seems that no one is subject to genuine poverty or enjoys great affluence. Zuccolo says so explicitly, writing that, in Evandria there is not even a single beggar and there are not excessively wealthy people. The most interesting reflections concerning economics are once again to be found in Campanella. In particular, he argues explicitly against the practice of slavery. There are no slaves in the city of the sun because everyone does their share of work. This is in contrast to the Italy of his day, he reckons that only one in six of the people who live in Naples actually do anything useful, and that if the labor was spread out fairly, each person would need to work only four hours a day. Elsewhere, in a work on economics, he is less provocative and simply accepts slavery as a fact of life, even giving advice on which peoples are best for which purposes. You may treat Negroes as you wish for burdensome occupations, he says. But he does not have a race-based theory of slavery or a theory of natural slavery like that of Aristotle. Instead, he seems to think the practice is a violation of nature, which is why he bans it from his utopia, and elsewhere writes that, every human being is equal to every human being with respect to divine natural and civil commutative law. The economic policies recommended in these utopias are striking, but not stunningly innovative since they echo the proto-communist ideas of Thomas More and before him Plato. Just as work is shared in common, so is wealth, and the citizens may not even have any use for money. In Campanella's city, money does exist, but only to trade with foreigners, and the people are said to be rich because they want nothing, and poor because they possess nothing. Thanks to passages like this, he has been held as a forerunner of modern-day socialism. His name is even inscribed on a Soviet obelisk. There's a certain irony here, in that the Italian Renaissance is sometimes seen as a kind of crucible for the birth of capitalism. The utopian thinkers dreamt about abolishing private property, but other writers were coming around to the idea that there might be advantages in a widespread human tendency that was wishfully eliminated from perfect imaginary cities. Greed. You can bet your bottom dollar that it will be worth tuning in for the next episode to hear all about that, as we turn to Renaissance economic theories, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's Hall in London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilocity.net. Today's episode, Greed is Good, Economics in the Italian Renaissance. Economics is one of those words that has wandered pretty far from its etymological origins, while retaining a connection to those origins. As any Renaissance humanist would be quick to tell you, it comes from the Greek οοικός, meaning house. So, the ancient works devoted to economics dealt with household management, and included discussion of such topics as the relation between man and wife, the raising of children, the ideal location to build one's home, and the handling of slaves. But economics in something like our modern sense did belong to this discipline too, since the householder's art also involved knowing how to handle money. Economic treatises advised on the sorts of property to invest in, the importance of balancing expenditure and income, and the division of tasks among family members and household staff. Equally important was to encourage an appropriate attitude towards wealth. An early example of the genre, written by Xenophon, is a dialogue featuring Socrates. At one point, Socrates is made to say that real wealth is having enough to satisfy one's needs, so that a richer man may be needier than a poorer one, if his desires are excessive. Xenophon's treatise was one of several ancient works on household management that came into circulation during the Renaissance, in this case because a manuscript was brought to Italy from Byzantium in 1427. A few years before that, Leonardo Bruni translated and commented upon another treatise on economics, which was falsely ascribed to Aristotle. This being 15th century Italy, it was only a matter of time before new works were composed in imitation of the ancient ones. One of them was produced by Leon Battista Alberti, who just featured in the last episode when I suggested that his writings on architecture might be seen as part of the tradition of Italian Utopias. He composed a dialogue called On the Family, featuring members of the Alberti clan. In keeping with the expectations of this genre, it devotes a lengthy discussion to the householder's relationship with his wife. The pata familias should oversee all things, like the spider at the center of a web, but delegate many tasks to the wife, since it is effeminate for a man to concern himself over much with this domain. But the wife should not be allowed to deal with financial affairs. The account books should be kept away from her, and the husband should never trust her with secrets. It's up to him to make the economically significant decisions. Alberti, or rather the lead character in his dialogue, has plenty of advice to give here. For instance, it is better to hold land than cash, since land can be enjoyed and is a secure investment, whereas money tends to wind up getting spent. A similar conception of the male householder can be found in another 15th century work on economics, written by Giovanni Caldiera. It compares the role of the husband to that of God overseeing the universe, or the ruler overseeing a city. Here Caldiera is thinking of the doge in his city of Venice, who was set up as a kind of autocrat over the city in a rather authoritarian, and at the time widely admired, example of the mixed constitution that we talked about when looking at theories of republican government. Paging through these works on household management, it's abundantly clear that the households in question are wealthy ones. Xenophon and other ancient writers thought, in the first instance, of a large estate in the country, with a sizable staff living alongside the family. The southern plantations of 19th century America would not be a bad comparison here, especially since slavery was involved in both cases. But in Renaissance Italy, the paradigm of the wealthy man was not necessarily the large landowner, but a denizen of the city, who made his money from trading and shrewd investments. Which inevitably calls to mind the Medici, a family whose political influence was based on their vast fortune, and whose vast fortune came from banking. Theirs was a European-scale venture, with branches of the Medici bank in such cities as London, Cologne, and Avignon, as well as many Italian cities, including Florence, of course, but also Rome, and Florence's rival city, Milan. This enabled them to become the most famous patrons of the Italian Renaissance, who lavished support on intellectuals like Ficino and artists like Michelangelo. Nor were they the only family that was quite literally enriching Florentine culture. There was also, for instance, the Rukelei family, which used its staggering wealth to hire the aforementioned Alberti to design a stunning palazzo that still stands today. The ancient genre of household management needed to be updated for this new reality. It was time for someone to put the economics into home economics. This someone turned out to be Benedetto Cottrulli, whose 1558 book On the Art of Trade, written during an epidemic like this episode, as it happens, combines traditional elements of the genre with advice for the man who wants to be a successful merchant in 15th century Italy. Cottrulli was not Italian, though. He hailed from Ragusa, which is modern-day Dubrovnik, but studied philosophy and law in Bologna and lived in a number of Italian cities, especially Naples. And he did write in Italian. A preface to the work explains his decision to write in the vernacular rather than Latin, to reach a wider audience. Familiar aspects of the treatise include his remarks on family life, for instance that a good relationship with one's wife should involve no violence, unfortunately followed by the advice that if you do find you must beat your wife, you should at least keep it secret to protect your reputation. This appalling passage notwithstanding, it seems that Cottrulli considers himself to be practically a feminist by the standards of his day. He boasts of his decision to have his own daughters highly educated. The more innovative aspects of the text are those that have to do with what Cottrulli calls mercatura, or trading, which he defines as an art, or rather, a discipline, practiced between qualified persons, governed by the law, and concerned with all things marketable, for the maintenance of the human race, but also in the hope of financial gain. It is an art learned especially through experience, which to Cottrulli's mind explains why no one has ever tried to lay down its principles in writing before, but thanks to his own hands-on knowledge, he is able to give his reader many useful pointers. One of them is particularly noteworthy, at least to those interested in the history of accounting. Cottrulli is the first to describe the practice of double-entry bookkeeping, where debts and credits are written down separately in two columns, though other documents show that merchants had already been doing this for a century and a half. He also offers practical, even psychological, tips about buying and selling, as in passages about negotiating favorable prices for one's wares while being careful not to scare off the buyer. But the topic on which Cottrulli has the most to say is ethical character. The merchant needs to have a reputation for honesty. Unlike Machiavelli, Cottrulli assumes that this will be achieved by actually being honest. To make money, the merchant must be willing to endure hardship, ignoring the needs of the body to make his sale while rigorously observing moderation, even in less pressing circumstances. Cottrulli thinks fortunes are built slowly and steadily, not by greedily snatching at every promising opportunity. Stability is his watchword. For this sake, he takes a leaf out of Alberti's book by recommending the acquisition of land outside the city. In fact, it's better to have two villas in the country, one to produce income, the other as a vacation home. Thanks, Benedetto, I'll make a note of that. Though I admit to being less impressed by the surprisingly long rant about how moral defects are shown by the way men wear their hats. Still, I had to take my hat off to Cottrulli for making such a long and impassioned case for the proposition that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of virtue make for a happy marriage, as happy as the one between the merchant and his demure ideal wife. He was not alone in this. You might remember that several Renaissance humanists accepted Aristotle's proposal that the so-called external goods, like health, family, and friends, should be part of the best life. Among those external goods was money. Great wealth makes possible great virtue, especially when it comes to generosity, though one might also think of the financial outlay required for military adventures and the glory they bring. Thus, Leonardo Bruni wrote in a letter, wealth should be striven after for the sake of virtue as an instrument, so to speak, for bringing virtue into action. He applied the same idea in his presentation of the work on economics, supposedly written by Aristotle, commenting in the preface to his translation, As health is the goal of medicine, so riches are the goal of the household. Or riches are useful, both for ornamenting their owners as well as for helping nature in the struggle for virtue. Money-making and, just as important, money-spending were part of the active, engaged life of practical virtue recommended by Bruni and other figures who espoused what Hans Baron called civic humanism. Salutati, another thinker whom Baron included in that movement, anticipated cottrulli by seeing the honest and energetic merchant as a paradigm of virtue, even calling such men most blessed for the service they give to the community, for without the merchant, the whole world would be unable to live. A similar note was struck by Christine de Pizan, who said that But there's an obvious problem here. It seems evident that the point of banking and trading is not really to achieve virtue or help the city. The point is to get rich. As even the moralizing cottrulli said in that definition of the merchant's art I quoted a moment ago, this art is practiced in the hope of financial gain. Even if economic activity is connected indirectly to virtue and is also vital to human activity, as he also says, it would be very implausible to say that merchants are motivated only by such high-minded concerns. Cottrulli walks a fine line here, allowing the merchant to seek wealth as an aim, but condemning the excessive love of wealth that goes by the name of avarice. Those who make gold and silver their god, he says, should be ejected from society, or still worse, have liquid gold and silver poured down their throats. Maybe the screenwriters of Game of Thrones are fans of cottrulli. A similar attitude may be found in Alberti's dialogue about family matters, which says that avarice is something one should wish on one's worst enemy, since it destroys both reputation and happiness. For him, the avaricious man is not miserly, but rather spendthrift. Alberti does accept the Aristotelian doctrine that external goods, including wealth, are indeed part of the best life, but he thinks the secret is to earn enough to live comfortably, while restraining one's outlay to the necessary expenses required to keep one's family in honorable condition. Actually, unnecessary expenses are allowable too, if they do no harm. Under this heading, Alberti naturally mentions beautiful books. Once a humanist, always a humanist. But even if profit-seeking was seen as an acceptable motive, there were constraints to observe. Preachers of the time campaigned against the wickedness of avarice, with one of the foremost figures in this crusade being San Bernardino of Siena. We have a series of sermons given by San Bernardino attacking greed and especially the sinfulness of usury and other dishonest financial dealings. These diatribes were part of a long-standing tradition, in which schoolmen and clerics laid down moral lines that merchants must not overstep. We looked at these restrictions back in episode 286, devoted to medieval scholastic treatments of economic issues. But again, this is the 15th century, when everyone's a critic, and the critics are getting criticized. The preaching of San Bernardino did not much impress Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist we've already met numerous times. You may remember how he rediscovered Lucretius, or failing that, you might remember how he got into a fistfight with George Chabizuntius. As Poggio explained in a letter to his friend Niccolò Nicolì, he felt that San Bernardino and other churchmen had not attacked avarice properly. He thought he could do better, which led him to write a dialogue called simply, On Avarice. The work is basically a greed sandwich. It starts and ends with speeches about the evils of lusting after money, but in the middle, there is a speech In Favor of Avarice. This startling material is delivered by Antonio Loschi, a secretary of the papal curia. His aim is to refute the opening diatribe against avarice, which presents itself as an improvement on the preaching offered by men like San Bernardino. The third speaker, who in turn refutes Loschi, is a theologian from the Greek-speaking East, who says that the defense of greed must have been a sort of rhetorical exercise. Poggio also has Loschi introduce that defense of greed by alluding to the academic skeptics who cultivated the skill of arguing on both sides of any issue. So on the surface level, it would seem that Poggio is sincere in his desire to warn the reader against avarice with the middle section included only, and quite literally, for the sake of argument. But I'll say it again, this is the 15th century, and humanists are delighting in the use of irony and literary gamesmanship, so readers have disagreed about Poggio's own attitude. The attacks on avarice can be read straight, or also as a kind of parody, with a pastiche of San Bernardino's moralizing disapproval set against a mock vindication of a more realist or cynical attitude. If Poggio really did want to reject avarice, then his work belongs to another genre, one I find even more interesting than treatises on household governance. I like to call it the philosophical own goal. This happens when authors present arguments for positions they want to reject, which readers find more compelling or intriguing than the position the authors want us to accept. There are plenty of examples. From antiquity, we might think of Simplicius quoting Philoponus so that he can refute him. Since modern readers find Philoponus far more interesting, there's an English translation that only keeps the Philoponus and jettisons all of Simplicius's replies on behalf of Aristotle. Speaking of whom, one might also mention Bertrand Russell's remark about his politics, I do not agree with Plato, but if anything could make me do so, it would be Aristotle's arguments against him. But the most influential philosophical own goal is probably Descartes' use of absolute skepticism in his meditations. Many more people have been convinced by his skeptical doubts than his way out of them. And so it is here, with the arguments given to Blosky in Poggio's On Avarice. Not only do they offer a refreshing break from predictable laments over greed, they are actually fairly convincing. A true commitment to avarice, says Loesky, requires many impressive qualities such as vigor, endurance, and intelligence. And plenty of admired rulers have had great appetite for wealth. Such appetite is, furthermore, natural, at least if we agree with St. Augustine that avarice is the desire to have more than enough. By this standard, pretty well everyone is avaricious, with the very occasional saintly exception, but this is a freak of nature, like a newborn human with the head of a pig. Moreover, avarice does not undermine society, as its critics claim. To speak with Gordon Gekko, greed is good, because it motivates people to acquire the wealth used in charity, patronage, and the building of churches. What are cities, states, provinces, and kingdoms, as Muskie, if not the workshops of avarice? And by the way, it's for the sake of wealth that people become experts in philosophy. This was certainly true in my own case. I got into philosophy and philosophy podcasting for the sake of the fast cars and champagne breakfasts. Fortunately, I am a patient man. It seems at any rate that economic theory is particularly apt to produce philosophical own goals. You may recall an example from late Byzantium, when Nicholas Cavasilas's treatise against usury gave a rather convincing devil's advocate case for allowing this practice. You might assume that in Renaissance Italy, the case for usury must have won out. Otherwise, how could the Medici and others get so rich off of banking? But not so. Even Crutuli, for all his praise of the merchant's life, condemns usury, which he succinctly defines as gain made on money loaned. But he also criticizes theologians who decry business practices that are perfectly acceptable, despite themselves having no expertise in the field, like a blind man with colors he scoffs. For Crutuli, the difference is made by risk. So long as an investor is taking a chance of losing his money, then he's morally in the clear when he profits from his investment. This would find agreement with none other than San Bernardino, who deems it acceptable to take reward from one's labor and also from a willingness to risk one's wealth. So it looks like merchants are mostly going to be in the clear. It's fine to profit from a trading expedition, since the boat you've helped to finance might sink. The bankers, too, have some cover, insofar as they, too, are investing money at risk. But what about the guaranteed interest they paid out on money invested in their banks? This looks patently usurious, but was often presented as a voluntary or discretionary gift generously given by the banker to the investor. A ludicrous suggestion, of course, but if a fig leaf was good enough for Adam and Eve, then it was good enough for the Medici. Interest on loans was also regularly concealed by changing money between the many currencies, then circulating in Europe and smuggling the interest into the exchange rate. The churchman Sant'Antonio of Florence called foul here, saying that the deals did not involve enough risk and thus constituted usury. As one historian has remarked, this was a rather strange attitude on the part of the Archbishop of the leading banking center in Western Europe. Clearly then, both the intellectuals and the financiers of the day were well aware that money itself has a value, and that this value can change. In fact, that was a way of defending the practice just described. A set agreement to exchange currencies at a future time was always risky because of fluctuating rates. Even without comparing different denominations, there was the phenomenon of inflation, which began to be noticed in our period. A treatise about coinage, written in 1588 by Bernardo Davanzati, noted that an influx of precious metal from the Americas was causing gold and silver to lose value. If this went on, Davanzati observed, some other bases of currency would need to be found, or one would have to resort to trade by bartering. Whether by barter or coinage, it was commonly accepted that there was a just price for each economic exchange. San Bernardino followed scholastic precedent by defining this in terms of community practice at a given time and place. The concept of just price is also discussed in Cottrulli's book of advice for merchants. He cites the Roman law, still in force in his day, that a sale is null and void if less than half of the just or fair price is offered. Of course, that leaves a lot of margin to cheat, as Cottrulli recognizes, but as he says, not everything immoral is also illegal. He wraps up many of the ideas we've just looked at in his definition of the reasonable profit a merchant should be aiming at. It is determined by, uncertainty of gain, a true and honest exchange between the parties without interest, acting only with diligence and prudence, in view of the risk and effort taken on. Before I myself wrap up, I want to mention one more philosophical own goal found in a Renaissance treatise on economics. It was written by Wieczak Dini, whom we have met as a historian and critic of Machiavelli's political thought. This versatile author also composed a dialogue on what we now call progressive taxation, that is, taking a larger percentage of income from rich people than from poor people. True to form as a defender of the more noble elements of his republican city, Wieczak Dini is totally against this. His spokesman in the dialogue says that taxation should not be used to ameliorate inequality between rich and poor. To the contrary, the government's aim should be to conserve each in his rank. Equality should indeed be a goal, but only equality before the law, not full social or economic equality. But readers may be more persuaded by the dialogue's proponent of progressive tax. He says that a flat taxation rate is unfair, because the poor can afford to pay a smaller percentage of their income without it impacting on their lifestyle. Ideally, this hypothetical opponent would like to see class distinctions eliminated altogether, which is reminiscent of the communist proposals in the utopias we looked at last time. But, even leaving aside such idealistic objectives, the opponent says that the progressive tax is in fact equal, because it causes an equal amount of discomfort to everyone. Actually, Wieczak Dini's mouthpiece does have an interesting response to this, which is that economic need is relative to one's status. It may be a real hardship for rich men to be unable to afford fine clothes, since such clothes are expected in the circles he moves in. A striking feature here is the tacit assumption that the total amount of wealth in a given community or in the world as a whole is fixed. The advocate of progressive tax in Wieczak Dini's dialogue offers a very Florentine image to illustrate. If you have a certain amount of cloth for a certain number of people, and use it to make elaborate robes for a few of these people, there won't be enough to clothe everyone. If the poor gain, the rich must lose, and vice versa. There is no hope here of a rising tide that might lift all boats. It's the economic equivalent of the zero-sum political world envisioned by Machiavelli and by Wieczak Dini himself. Power and resources move from some hands to others, but they never increase overall. Indeed, this was assumed even in the fantasy context of Renaissance utopias, which speak of wealth passing around freely from hand to hand, but not of everyone getting rich. Perhaps to achieve this, everyone would have to become a philosopher. Not because they would get fast cars and champagne breakfast after all, but for the reason given by Xenophon's Socrates. Philosophers know that true wealth lies in knowing what you really need, and in having no less than that. I realize you'll nonetheless be greedy for more, so you may be rather disappointed to hear that this is the last episode before our summer break. As it happens, this timing is pretty good, because with this look at Renaissance economics, we've finished off a mini-series of episodes focusing on political topics, which featured such figures as Savonarola and Machiavelli. When we return, we'll be kicking off another mini-series with its own fascinating protagonists like Pietro Pompanazzi and Jacopo Zabarella. In these episodes, we will address the question, what was going on in the universities of Italy, while all these historians and humanists were changing the face of philosophy? Plenty, as it turns out. Platonism and the Hellenistic schools were not the only ancient traditions being renewed and revived in the Renaissance. There was also Aristotelianism and its more dangerous intellectual offspring, the Varroism. It would be an excellent investment of your time, without any risk unless you count the occasional pun, if you join me again on September 13th, when we'll start to look at Aristotelianism in the Italian Renaissance, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Town and Gown, Italian Universities. You're probably aware that there are university league tables, which students can use to compare the places they might go to study. Believe it or not, there are also league tables for philosophy, which list philosophy departments, or at least the ones in the English-speaking world, for overall quality and within a given discipline. The departments take this very seriously, looking to hire famous names that will bump them up the league table. It's comparable to the way people talk about summer transfers in soccer or other sports. Just as that new striker may help Arsenal compete for the title again, that new metaphysician will help Harvard gain ground on Princeton. If you find it vaguely unseemly for philosophers to be competing in this fashion, a sign of modern-day corruption in what should be a disinterested inquiry into truth, then you're at least half wrong. It may be unseemly, but there's nothing modern about it. Though they didn't literally have league tables, as far as I know, the scholars at universities in the Italian Renaissance would find the rivalry and competition of today's academia entirely familiar. A good example would be the contest over the services of Pietro Pomponazzi, a leading Aristotelian scholar around the turn of the 16th century. He mostly taught at Padua, with brief stints at Ferrara, but was then enticed to join the University of Bologna in 1511 or 1512. Bologna worked hard to keep him, pulling political strings in Florence to stop them from bringing Pomponazzi to Tuscany. He also enjoyed a generous salary, and he was not the only one. The best and the brightest were paid well at the leading Italian universities. Like modern-day soccer teams, these institutions looked beyond their borders to find talent, as when Bologna tried to hire Justus Lipsius, a scholar of Stoicism from modern-day Belgium, the German philosopher and master of the occult sciences Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was persuaded to teach at Pavia and Turin. To keep the scholars on their toes, universities also fostered competition within their own ranks. It was standard practice for lectures on the same topic to be scheduled at the same time, forcing students to vote with their feet as to who was the best instructor, which makes today's teaching evaluations seem pretty gentle. Pomponazzi was at various times put up against so-called concurrent lectures by Alessandro Artellini, Nicolatto Vernia, and Agostino Nifo, with students presumably agonizing over the choice between these stars of early 16th century Aristotelian philosophy. In the absence of teaching evaluations, the university officials kept a close eye on their teaching staff, visiting classes to make sure that lectures were not ended too early and levying fines for absenteeism. Padua even imposed fines on professors who read from a prepared text, since students then, like students today, preferred the spontaneity of an improvised delivery. Of course, the professors chafed under such measures. Later in the 16th century at Bologna, the botanist and zoologist Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote up a list of measures for reforming his university, complaining that his colleagues were reluctant to allow concurrent lectures despite their beneficial effect. Aldrovandi was in favor of this system and the competition it fostered, but he did make an exception for his own lectures. All students should be able to hear these because they were so important. Even dress code became a bone of contention. When Galileo Galilei, who taught at Padua, was fined for not wearing his professor's gown, he responded with a satirical poem, arguing that this long garment was unnatural since it inhibited urination and the visiting of brothels. Now that is the voice of a modern academic. But the universities of this era also maintained a significant degree of continuity with their medieval forebears. Bologna had been the first university in all of Europe, with the founding date traditionally put in 1088, but in fact probably carrying out the expected activities of a university only in the 1180s or so. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it had the largest faculty of Italy's 16 universities. Bologna set the tone for the rest of Italy. Founded by a collective union or university of students, it had a bottom-up organization that may be contrasted to the top-down structure used at Paris, Oxford, and their many imitators. In practice, this meant not so much that students called the shots in Italy as that there was constant jockeying for power between the students, instructors, and civic administrators. If he noticed this, Machiavelli no doubt approved, since it was the educational equivalent of the productive class tensions he so admired in the Roman Republic. Italy's universities were also distinctive in focusing on law and medicine, the traditional strengths of Bologna. Theology, so important at Paris and Oxford, was mostly taught outside the universities in Italy, at separate schools run by religious orders. So, for example, Savon Arrola, who initially studied at the University of Ferrara, intending to learn medicine, left the university system once he became a friar and taught scripture and scholastic curriculum in Dominican convents. One shouldn't exaggerate the gulf between the scholastic and theological worlds, since university students in a given city might attend lectures put on by the orders. Still, it meant that there was a rather secular approach at the universities, something we'll see clearly in coming episodes on Aristotelian scholarship and the sciences. In fact, one might tentatively suggest that the minor role played by theology at the universities was one reason 16th century Italy anticipated the scientific developments of the Enlightenment. It was this climate, oriented more towards natural philosophy than theology, that produced men like Pompa-Nazi, Zabarella, Vesalius, and Galileo. Another striking and unusual feature of the Italian university scene was what we might call Second City Syndrome, in which a major civic power ran a university in a smaller nearby city. The template was set by the Duke of Milan in 1361, when he founded a university in the subject town of Pavia, rather than Milan itself. He and his advisors handpicked the members of the faculty there. Likewise, the Medici moved the school of Florence to Pisa in the 1470s. The University of Siena was also beholden to the power of Florence, with the Grand Duke of Tuscany approving its professorial roster. In 1581, a mendicant friar was stopped from teaching philosophy, since Florence deemed this inappropriate. Rome also came to exert considerable control over Bologna, with the Pope meddling in professorial appointments, and Padua, which has already been mentioned several times and will be important in our story to come, was overseen from Venice. The city even tried to force all Venetian citizens who wanted to obtain a degree to do so in Padua, and made it a condition of state employment that one's degree be from this home university. University cities are never completely free of conflict between town and gown, and the Italian Renaissance certainly had its share of unruly students and disputes between civic and academic authorities. But for the most part, city authorities thought that higher learning was a good investment. It brought honor and renown, as recognized by Guigardini in his history of Florence, when he praised Lorenzo de' Medici for his university policy, through which he sought glory and excellence more than anyone else. At a more pragmatic level, professors of law often helped as advisors for city regimes, while teachers of medicine pursued private practice or attended on aristocratic clients. Students complained about this, because these literally extracurricular activities were a distraction for their teachers. With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, another kind of political issue arose at the universities. Many students were visitors from other countries, with Germans often making up one of the largest factions apart from the Italians. Foreigners were attracted by the excellence of the teaching and also the distinctive Italian curriculum, with its focus on natural science and law. For a time, Protestant students were still welcome, something that was not reciprocated in Protestant lands where Catholics were generally barred from studying. But eventually, in 1564, a decree by the Pope demanded that all candidates for a degree explicitly profess the Catholic faith. While this was sometimes ignored, in 1570, German students at Siena were arrested for heresy, showing that the threat to Protestants was a real one. The Catholic response to the Reformation also left its mark on intellectual activities at the university. For instance, a logic professor at Padua named Bernadino Tomitano translated a work on the Bible by the northern humanist Erasmus and saw it placed on the index of proscribed books. He escaped further censure, but only after being made to declare his opposition to Erasmus's teachings. Tomitano's specialty, logic, gives us another point of continuity with medieval teaching practices. As had been the case in previous centuries, indeed, as far back as late antiquity, logic was a young student's first encounter with philosophy. Logic was also standard preparation for studies in non-philosophical fields like law and medicine. This suggests that it was considered a fairly introductory discipline, and for many students that was no doubt the case. But under the heading of logic, challenging problems like the status of universals were also debated. A nice example is provided by Alessandro Accilini, who taught at Padua around the turn of the 16th century and was one of the aforementioned concurrence who competed with Pompanazzi. We have detailed records of the disputations he held at the university. Of 238 such events, 75 were on natural philosophy and another 53 on logic. Confirming the lack of activity in theology, only six disputations fell under this heading. A similar story is told by faculty members at Ferrata in the latter half of the 16th century, when the 30 professors in the arts and medical faculty included six logicians and only two theologians. It was part of Padua's excellence in Aristotelian philosophy that they had a long-standing strength in logic. This went back at least as far as Paul of Venice, who taught at Padua Siena and Perugia in the 1420s and wrote influential textbooks on this subject. For his so-called small logic, we have no fewer than 80 surviving manuscripts, and it was already printed in 1472. A statute from Padua in 1496 makes Paul's writings set text in the curriculum, alongside contributions by various medieval logicians. Particularly striking is the presence here of works by the so-called Oxford calculators like William Hatesbury and Roger Swineshead. Their habit of applying logical and mathematical analysis to problems of natural philosophy, like the dynamics of motion, was a natural fit for the combination of disciplines taught in the arts faculty at Padua. Thus we see Pompanazzi writing a treatise on a problem discussed by the calculators back in the 14th century, the intention and remission of forms, which concerns rates of change in motion and other physical alterations. One of the Aristotelian professors of Padua, Agostino Nifo, shows us how Renaissance logicians continued to draw on medieval sources. E. Jennifer Ashworth, writing in the 1970s, pointed out the surprising extent to which Nifo was aware of medieval terminus logic. But she also pointed out that Nifo was not really in sympathy with the older approaches, in part because he preferred the even older approach of Aristotle himself. Determined to reduce the entire discipline of logic to the theory of the syllogism, as laid out by Aristotle, Nifo wound up presenting a stripped-down version of medieval theories, which, as Ashworth put it, diminished their value and hence made them easier to abandon. Building on this study, Lisa Jardine has observed that Nifo was also aware of discussions of logic within the humanist tradition, in particular by Lorenzo Valla. As you may recall, Valla was a bitter critic of scholasticism and, accordingly, directed withering criticism and disdain at university logic. Jardine used this as context for understanding Nifo's minimalist approach to logic, suggesting that he wanted this discipline to focus on its goal of syllogistic perfection by outsourcing all other aspects of argumentation to rhetoric, the specialty subject of Valla and other humanists. This is just one example, but we can take an important lesson from it, namely that the denizens of the universities were far from being unaware of what the humanists were doing. Conversely, the humanists were deeply engaged with university culture. True leading heroes of the movement, like Petr, Salutati, Bruni, Alberti, and Manetti, were independent scholars, but Bruni, for one, studied law and dialectic in a scholastic setting. He knew enough about law to declare, with customary wit, that it should be called the yawning science. Alberti, too, studied law and found it boring because it involved too much memorization. A number of prominent humanists held university positions. Even the aforementioned scourge of scholastic thought, Lorenzo Valla. He taught at the University of Pavia, but predictably enough, caused uproar when he complained about the poor Latin skills of a degree candidate and impugned the intellectual credentials of the law faculty. The Renaissance scholar David Lyons has nicely captured the way that humanism was co-opted by university culture, writing that, professors and university officials were well aware of the significance of the humanist challenge. Jointly, they paid it the ultimate compliment of stealing its ideas and hiring its proponents. Beginning in the middle of the 15th century, the humanist study of rhetoric increasingly came into the teaching curriculum. The professors in these disciplines did philological work, editing and translating works of ancient literature, and taught a wide range of texts to their students, with the curriculum in humanism being far more open and flexible than that of fields like logic, law, and medicine. A good example here would be Angelo Poliziano, who at Florence in the 1490s offered courses on authors like Virgil and Homer before moving into the teaching of Aristotelian logic. We discussed the backlash against this in episode 339 and mentioned Poliziano's work Lamiya, where he claimed the right to deal with such topics as a true philologist. As that episode shows, the specialists in philosophy were happy to have humanist colleagues around, so long as they stayed in their lane. The Aristotelians could not deny that the humanist movement had done great good for their own studies by establishing better editions of Greek texts, including those of Aristotle, and also by bringing back into circulation the ancient commentaries on his works. Or rather, bringing them into circulation in the Latin West, since as we know, these commentaries had been studied in Byzantium for centuries and inspired new commentaries, like those executed in the circle around Anna Comlinna. The humanist expertise put them in a good position to contribute to the philosophy of language, which as in the medieval period was still considered to fall into the domain of logic. Bala wanted to sweep away the Aristotelian approach and replace it with a more philological enterprise, inspired by ancient rhetoricians like Quintilian. But other humanists adopted a less radical attitude, seeking to improve Aristotelianism rather than discard it. Giovanni Pontano, for instance, agreed with Bala that careful attention to real Latin usage was vital. But he presented a broadly Aristotelian account of language and its origins, seeing linguistic signs as conventional in nature. Words do not fall from heaven, he said, but are invented by humans to describe things in their immediate environment. This explained the relatively limited vocabulary that Pontano assumed to be in use among the newly discovered peoples of the Americas. With the advance of civilization, words would come to be used for more abstract meanings, so that, for example, the Latin verb serrere, to sow seeds in agriculture, became the root for words like sermo, meaning speech. It seems then that neither institutional nor disciplinary boundaries neatly severate the humanists from the scholastics in our period. If we still want to contrast them, a better criterion would be the fetishizing of Latin. As we've seen, the social standing of eloquent Latin was very high, which is why female humanists were able to break into the circle of respected intellectuals by mastering this language, despite being excluded from the universities. We've also seen how authors felt the need to justify writing in their native tongues, something that goes back as far as Dante, and that we encountered most recently with Benedetto Cottrulli, who elected to write his work on the art of the merchant in Italian, despite the fact that it might, as he admitted, be judged less worthy of consideration. But if vernacular languages were generally considered inferior to classical ones, hardcore Aristotelians were increasingly deciding that they didn't care. They adopted the view of the barbarian from Pico della Mirandola's letter to Barbaro, in which Pico ironically used elegant Latin to defend the use of inelegant language. What matters is the truth of the ideas expressed, not the way they are expressed. The Aristotelians made the same point, but without the same irony. One of them was Sperone Speroni, a student of Pomponazzi who was no linguist. Pomponazzi's Latin and Greek skills were so rudimentary that Speroni said he knew no language outside of Mantuan, and Pomponazzi himself insisted that truth needs no adornment by eloquence. Speroni made him a character in a dialogue on language which promoted the use of vernacular languages. For Speroni, it was not the scholastics with their clunky Latin who were the barbarians, but rather the humanists who barbarously call non-Latin philosophy barbaric. He considered humanists as scholars of the most inept sophistry ever to exist in the sciences. Philosophy would flourish not through the cultivation of fine writing, but the use of straightforward vernacular language so that intellectuals could concentrate on rigorous thinking rather than wasting years of their life mastering Latin grammar and Sisaronian style. Not coincidentally, around this same time, scholars did indeed seek to capture Aristotelian philosophy in Italian, as when Antonio Tridapale published the first logical textbook in this language in 1547. Speroni and Tridapale were both connected to the Academia delli Infiamati, founded in 1540 as an organization committed to the use of vernacular language in scholarly activity. It ran into the problem that scholars visiting from other countries could not participate in its activities. Whatever your attitude towards Sisaronian eloquence, you had to admit it was useful to have Latin as the universal European language of scholarship. Still, the Aristotelians thought the language was accidental to the scholarship. The aforementioned logician Bernardino Tomitano, who was a friend of Speroni, stated that the words of different languages are merely shells for ideas that are the same for everyone. This itself was a genuinely Aristotelian idea, since Aristotle had said, in a much-discussed passage of his logical writings, that spoken words are only outward symbols of affections in the soul. So specialists in scholastic Aristotelianism like Tomitano, Speroni, Pomponazzi, and Nifo can, after all, be contrasted to the humanists. They might have appreciated the way these philologists helped establish better editions of Aristotle's works, but for them, the right way to do philosophy was not to become expert in rhetoric or the languages of antiquity, it was to pursue the perfect knowledge envisioned by Aristotle himself, which would take the form of syllogistically structured arguments that come together to constitute demonstrative science. Philosophers should focus on thinking thoughts like that, and not care so much about the words they use to express those thoughts. While these attitudes can be described as scholastic and associated with the study of philosophy at the university, they should not be seen as a mere holdover of medieval Aristotelianism. Of course, the writings of Aristotle had been studied in detail since the 13th century, so they did not need to be recovered and brought back to light, the way that the humanists revived the study of Hellenistic philosophers like Lucretius and Platonists like Plotinus and Proclus. But in the Italian Renaissance, the study of Aristotle too was in a sense reborn, as his works were printed for the first time, made available in improved Latin translations and in the vernacular, and expounded with the help of late ancient commentaries, and above all, the commentaries of the great Muslim exegete of Verruese. Just as happened in the late 13th century in Paris, the rise of a Verruism and radical Aristotelianism caused upset even as it made space for philosophy as an independent and often daring field of research. This is the story we'll be telling over the next few episodes as our wanderings in the Italian Renaissance become truly peripatetic. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, I'd like to thank the Lyceum, Aristotle in Renaissance Italy. If the German language were a person, it would be an army drill sergeant, demanding, strict about rules and devoted to questionable notions of masculinity. According to German, tables, chairs, the sky, record players, and capitalism are all boys. But like all languages, it does offer many pleasures. My favorite German word is Glimflich, in part because it's so fun to say. Glimflich. It doesn't so much roll off the tongue as do a little dance on the tongue, then hop out through the mouth and into the world, making it a better place. I also like it because it is so hard to translate. Usually you'll hear it in a context where someone has been fortunate in a bad situation, like if someone escapes from a car accident unharmed. Er ist Glimflich da von gekon. Here you'd be hard pressed to render it with just one word. This is a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to render philosophical texts from one language into another. It can be tempting simply to leave tricky words in the original language, so tempting that, in an ancient Greek reading group I used to attend in London, we introduced a rule against having more than one untranslated word per session. Leonardo Bruni might have rejected even that rule as being too permissive. When he translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics into Latin, he added a preface in which he explained why it was necessary to replace the medieval version by Robert Grossetest. This older translation, he complained, was full of transliterated Greek words that would be incomprehensible to Greekless readers, which was entirely unnecessary since Latin too is a rich language amply equipped to express anything found in Aristotle's Greek. As Bruni sarcastically comments after quoting a passage full of untranslated terms, surely all this could have been said in Latin? Does the fault lie with the tongue or with the translator? And this was only one of Grossetest's shortcomings, whose translation displayed little philosophical understanding and less eloquence. He is, so to speak, a mongrel, half Greek and half Latin, deficient in both languages, competent in neither. If you've read some Aristotle yourself, you might be wondering why anyone would expect to find eloquence in an accurate version of his writings. The answer, as usual with Bruni, is Cicero. That Roman master of Latin eloquence had commented that Aristotle's writings were distinguished for their elegant style. When he said this, Cicero had in mind not the rather technical school treatises that survive today, but now lost works that were aimed at a wider audience. Not realizing this, Bruni managed to convince himself that Aristotle's treatises are beautifully written, especially the politics, which Bruni said, contains almost no passage without its rhetorical glitter and flourish. He duly exerted himself to render Aristotle into fine Ciceronian Latin. I already mentioned in episode 330 that Alonso of Burgos was unimpressed by the resulting version, which he found inexact. And there were other critics like the Spanish bishop Alfonso of Catahena. Alfonso didn't know Greek himself, but didn't let that stop him from censuring Bruni on the rather strange grounds that his Latin translation made Aristotle say things that were not true. This is a hint that philological accuracy as the standard of good translation was only just emerging in the 15th century, thanks to Bruni and the other humanists. Bruni embraced that standard, leaping to his own defense with the remark, a translation is wholly correct if it corresponds to the Greek. Alteration is the translator's sin. The spread of this approach to translation is also shown by Giannotso Manetti, who studied with Bruni. We met him already in episode 356 as the author of the other treatise called On the Dignity of Man, the one that wasn't written by Pico della Mirandola. Manetti was no one book wonder, but a polymath who learned Hebrew so that he could dispute with Jewish intellectuals and translate the Bible. If Bruni had to justify his choice to improve on gross attest, Manetti most definitely had to explain why he was giving the world another Latin Old Testament, even though the sainted Jerome had produced one in antiquity. Manetti wrote a whole treatise in defense of the project, which listed many errors in Jerome's version and also defined good translation practice more generally. Under the influence of Bruni, he complained about clunky and misleading translations that replace individual words in the original text with Latin equivalents, rather than seeking to capture the sense in an elegant and accurate way. The translator must follow a middle path, neither wandering too far from the work taken for translation, nor clinging entirely and completely word for word to the original authors, but hewing to a middle and safe way. This policy went back further than Manetti's teacher Bruni to Bruni's own teacher, Chrysalorus. This Byzantine emigre scholar encouraged an ad sensum rather than ad verbum method, that is trying to capture the meaning and not the words. But as Manetti himself implies by endorsing a happy medium between free and exact translation, the ad sensum technique could also be taken to extremes. Reacting to the output of another Greek emigre humanist, John Argyropoulos, the 16th century Aristotle translator Francesco Vemercato, commented that if the medieval versions were too literal, the humanist ones were too free. For Vemercato, a middle approach could retain technical terms from scholasticism, some of which were indeed so useful that they remain in use by English-speaking philosophers. We still use substance, Latin substantia, and alteration, Latin alteratio, which he endorsed as translations of the Greek words usia and ad aeosus. And Vemercato made another point I find convincing. A good translation should capture for the reader what it is like to read the original text and not, for instance, make Aristotle's treatises into works of elegant rhetoric, as Bruni sought to do. Instead, Vemercato sought to mimic Aristotle's dense and compressed style so that he might appear the same to those speaking Latin as to those speaking Greek. We usually think of Italian humanism as a movement away from the Aristotelian interests of medieval scholasticism, distinguished by its recovery of Plato and Hellenistic authors like Lucretius. But as we can see with the case of Bruni, the humanists felt that Aristotle too had to be recovered in a sense, saved from his medieval translators and hide-bound scholastic interpreters. After learning Greek, Poggio Braccionini was thrilled to discover the real Aristotle hidden beneath the Latin Aristotle. He wrote, And soon enough it would become much easier to imbibe Aristotle in the original vintage. In the time of Bruni and Poggio, reading Aristotle in Greek, or Latin for that matter, meant reading a manuscript, but by the end of the 15th century there would be printed editions of his works. This was thanks above all to Aldo Manutio, usually called by the Latin version of his name Aldus Manucius. Manucius was a member of the circle gathered around the precocious, and let's not forget, rich, Pico della Mirandola. He also associated with Ermolao Barbaro. You might remember Barbaro as the recipient of Pico's irony-laced defense of barbaric scholastic Latin, but more relevant here are the informal lectures that Barbaro gave on Aristotle in Venice. By 1500, Venice was already a major center of Latin printed editions, now inspired by the philosophical interests of Pico and Barbaro, Manutius undertook to print Aristotle's works in the original Greek, a project of great scholarly significance which would hopefully make him a nice pile of money in the process. Not just Aristotle either. The Aldine edition of Aristotle also included work by his student Theophrastus, and the project went on to print Aristotle's late ancient exegetes in the original Greek. Commentaries by Ammonius, Philoponus, and Alexander appeared before Manutius died in 1515. He also printed a Greek grammar written by Theodore of Gaza, and works by Latin authors, notably the collected works of Poliziano, as well as Italian literature like Dante and Petrarch. As that last detail shows, Manutius's achievement was very much a part of the humanist movement. He collaborated with no less a humanist than Erasmus, who stayed with Manutius and saw his translation of Euripides put out by the Aldine press. Manutius also consulted with humanist philologists to establish correct Greek texts. Actually, the printed versions wound up with many errors. Still, this was a pioneering attempt to usher Greek into the world of printed editions, much as the humanists sought to spread knowledge of Greek through the world of Italian scholarship. To give you a sense of just how innovative the project was, I need only mention that Manutius had to commission a special typeface for Greek, which was handmade for him by a goldsmith. The font, which imitated a cursive italic script, would make the Aldine text distinctive and recognizable, even once other printers started printing in Greek. Or, at least, it should have. In 1503, Manutius had to issue a warning to buyers, not to be fooled by knockoff editions using an imitation of his typeface. As exciting a breakthrough as it was to have Aristotle printed in Greek, we should not imagine that Latin translations of his works became irrelevant in the 16th century. Though Greek was sometimes taught at the universities, it was only a handful of committed humanists who achieved true mastery of the language. As the scholar Paul Grundler has commented, Greek failed to find a secure place in the curriculum because it only served the needs of Latin culture. So the vast majority of readers still had to consult Latin translations. Charles Schmitt, the leading expert of the reception of Aristotle in this period, calculates that fewer than 10% of 16th century works about Aristotle quote him in the original Greek. In this respect, then, the Aristotle of the Italian Renaissance was not so different from the Aristotle of medieval scholasticism. Mostly, he still spoke Latin. In other respects, though, Aristotle was a changed man. Changed in part by the company he kept. The printing of late ancient commentators and their increased availability in Latin translations meant that Renaissance interpreters were closer to being in the enviable position earlier enjoyed by the circle of Anacomnene. They could survey the whole history of Aristotelianism and write commentaries that built on and responded to the earlier commentaries made in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. And, like the circle of Anacomnene, they explored areas of Aristotelian science that had been largely ignored in the medieval Latin tradition. Theophrastus's works on plants added botany to the menu, and Aristotle's own zoological works were consulted as never before. A central aspect of Aristotle's original project, his empirical investigation of the natural world, had been relatively unimportant to the medievals, with occasional exceptions like Albert the Great. Now Aristotle reappeared as an acute observer and recorder of his physical environment, putting the nature back in Aristotelian natural philosophy. An excellent example of this is meteorology. This is a topic I've barely if ever mentioned in this whole podcast series, so you might be forgiven for being surprised that Aristotle wrote about it. Especially since he lived in Athens, what was he going to say, that the forecast was for plenty of sun with a chance of Macedonian invasion? But as it turns out, Aristotelian meteorology was not mostly about weather prediction. It was a wide-ranging science dealing with all manner of phenomena observable in the sky, including meteorological events in our sense like lightning storms, but also such things as comets and rainbows. Aristotle thought that many such phenomena could be explained by appealing to exhalations, vapors that build up under the earth and are then released with more or less violence. From the point of view of the Renaissance commentators, meteorology was thus a fairly rudimentary science in the sense that it dealt with non-living brute material forces, the interaction of things like wind, water, and earth. This means that some of the standard conceptual tools in Aristotelian science were all but irrelevant. Where animals, plants, and humans have substantial forms, something like a rainbow or storm might simply happen when air and vapor are pushed around in the atmosphere because of changes in heating, cooling, and the like. As Pietro Pompanazzi said, these things are closer to matter than form. In part for this reason, and in part because of the difficulty of discerning the causes of meteorological phenomena, the commentators were modest in their claims about what this science could achieve. Agostino Nifo, for instance, stated that Aristotle's proposals for the underlying causes in meteorology were purely conjectural. Of particular interest was the question whether meteorological events have final causes, that is natural purposes. Perhaps they're just random events with all that pushing around and moving of vapor happening by sheer accident. An example would be Nifo's explanation of thunder, which happens when a mass of dense air collides with a mass of rarefied air in the sky. But on the other hand, could a Renaissance Christian really believe that anything happens by sheer accident? Even if hailstorms and comets have no natural purpose, surely they play some role in God's providential design for our world? For all his empiricism and commitment to natural explanation, Pompanazzi was eager to concede this point. Even damaging storms and earthquakes are intended by God. They seem bad to us, he said, but are in fact for the best. It's just that we are ignorant of their purpose. Earthquakes were a topic that received extensive discussion inspired by Aristotle's meteorology, which explains that they are caused by eruptions of wind below the earth. In the 1570s, a series of earthquakes all but leveled the city of Ferrara, leaving observers to debate the scientific and theological meaning of this disaster. One scholar at Bologna lamented that the earthquakes could not possibly be part of God's benevolent natural order since they disrupt everything, strip away beauty, and demolish. In keeping with this, naturalistic accounts based on Aristotle proposed that Ferrara had been struck because of its geological location. Caves nearby were apt to trap exhalations that would then be released with sudden violence. At the other extreme, the Pope chipped in with the suggestion that Ferrara was chosen for destruction because it hosted such a large Jewish population. As we've seen before, Renaissance authors often reflected on such diversity of opinions by writing dialogues, with different characters adopting different points of view on the topic at hand. So it was here, several authors staged literary discussions about the causes of earthquakes. A representative example is Giacomo Buoni, who has a series of speakers address the topic within a philosophical, historical, and theological framework. His philosophical spokesman affirms the accidentally of earthquakes, which is clearly foreign to the nature of earth, which tends towards stillness and being at rest, gathered as it is around the midpoint of the cosmos. But the final word is given to a theologian who states that, while earthquakes are partly natural, they are also partly divine, sent by God when he wants, how he wants, where and how much he wants, and more often for sins, moving with his will the secondary causes and nature which he commands at his pleasure. Aristotle stood for the more empirical approach, which helps to explain why a figure like Galileo could say, as late as 1640, I am sure that if Aristotle returned to the world he would receive me among his followers. Such hard-nosed scientific interests seem a far cry from the philological concerns of the humanists, even if the textual productions of the humanists made it possible for Aristotelianism to achieve new breadth and diffusion in Renaissance culture. And the aforementioned Charles Schmitt has proposed that we should speak not of Renaissance Aristotelianism, but Renaissance Aristotelianisms. That would more fittingly capture the different and often innovative approaches that were taken to this long-studied body of texts in the 15th and 16th centuries, a time that Schmitt calls the high point of Western Aristotelianism. Like religious and biblical knowledge, he comments, Aristotelian doctrine was available in many different forms, from the most learned, annotated editions of the Greek text to the sketchiest of compendia in Latin or a number of different vernaculars. That point is one worth dwelling on. We've seen that for every humanist who could read Aristotle in Greek, there were ten scholars who read him in Latin, to which we can add that there would have been many more reading Aristotle, or reading about Aristotle, in Italian. The history of Aristotle in European vernacular languages goes all the way back to the 11th century, when Notka of Saint Gallen translated a couple of the logical works into that most unforgiving of tongues, German. Subsequently, Nicole Orem had translated Aristotle's On the Heavens into French in 1377, but it was only in the Renaissance that we see a real blossoming of Aristotle outside of Latin, with figures like Antonio Bruccioli putting many of his works into Italian in the mid-16th century. Not long after, in 1565, Lorevico Dolce produced an Italian Summary of Aristotle's Philosophy, which integrates Platonist arguments for the immortality of the soul and Christian authorities into an overview of peripatetic thought. Even such peripheral text as The Mechanics, not really by Aristotle but ascribed to him as its author, got the treatment. That's a hint to the important fact that the audience for Aristotelian texts was getting wider. Alessandro Piccolomini said explicitly that his version of The Mechanics was intended principally for engineers. Later on, in the early 17th century, the beautifully monicred Pannfillo Persico produced a vernacular compendium of the ethics and politics, and said it was aimed at princes, men of the republic, and of the court. Women were also occasionally named as beneficiaries of Italian versions or summaries of Aristotle, since for the most part they could not read Latin, notwithstanding the famous achievements of female humanists like Cassandra Fedele and Laura Cerreta. As Piccolomini said, while stressing the usefulness of his philosophical textbooks on Aristotelian ethics, women remained deprived, through no fault of their own, of those habits which could make them happy. On the other hand, we also find vernacular works being aimed at more expert readers, including readers who were assumed to have the ability to go back and check the original Greek of Aristotle, or at least the Latin version if they had a mind to. Luca Bianchi, a scholar who has devoted great attention to the rise of philosophy in the vernacular in the Renaissance, has thus pointed out that, by the 16th century, languages like Italian were emerging for the first time as an instrument of scientific communication. Still, it would not be wrong to see vernacularization as a trend towards the popularization of philosophy, and Aristotle in particular. The vast majority of vernacular works devoted to him were not in fact translations of those works, but summaries, paraphrases, and original dialogues or treatises like the ones we just discussed dealing with meteorology. Elite scholars were not necessarily thrilled by this development. Bernardo Sagni, who translated the rhetoric into Italian, said that he was criticized by some who blamed him for making it possible for uneducated people to learn what others had acquired over many years with great effort from Greek and Latin books. But there was not only Greek and Latin to contend with, there was also Arabic. The emergence of new forms of Aristotelianism in the Italian Renaissance goes hand in hand with a resurgence of his greatest medieval commentator, Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes. As you'll remember, Averroes' works had caused a stir back in the 13th century when his doctrines led to debate and condemnation in Paris. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Averroism returned with a vengeance. As a development inextricably entwined with the diffusion of Aristotelian literature, most literally so in the case of the famous Giunta edition of Aristotle, which appeared from 1550 to 1552. It included Latin translations of Averroes' commentaries, so that every reader of Aristotle could turn to this Muslim guide to understand his works. Amazingly, out of the 38 surviving exegetical works by Averroes on Aristotle, no fewer than 36 were printed in the 16th century. This can be understood as a blow for scholasticism against the antiquarian interests of the humanists. As Tommaso Giunta said in his preface to the edition, the humanists prized only classical languages and ignored contributions from the Islamic world. Our age, he wrote, accepts nothing and admires nothing coming from the despised and contemptible teaching of the Arabs, unless it knows it to have been transmitted to us from the Greek treasure house. But we're not going to make the same mistake. In episodes to come, we'll be surveying distinctive developments in one particular type of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the one that carries on most directly from medieval scholasticism, and once again dares to entertain the notorious teachings of that outstanding commentator Averroes. But before we turn to that, we'll be joined by an outstanding Aristotelian commentator of the present day, David Lyons. He'll be joining us to speak in a vernacular language of his choice, and let's hope it's not German, about the reception of Aristotle's ethics in the Renaissance. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about ethics in the Renaissance with David Lyons, who is Reader in Italian Studies at the University of Warwick. Hi, David. Hello. Thanks very much for coming on the podcast series. Thank you. So perhaps you can start by giving us a general sense of the sources that Renaissance thinkers drew on when they were discussing ethics. I guess the most obvious source would be Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which they certainly knew I guess they did read that quite eagerly, but there were probably other sources of inspiration as well. That's right. Well, Aristotle was a very important source, as you indicate, the Nicomachean ethics in the first place, but also other works, including the Magna Moralia and other works such as the Eudaimian ethics as well, which are not terribly well known in the medieval period, but become much better known in the Renaissance period. They're not that well known today either. No, quite. That's unfortunate. But there are lots of sources from antiquity besides Aristotle that are important. We can mention Plato among them, even though Plato didn't have a very large tradition in the medieval period. In the Renaissance, certainly his dialogues become very well known in Latin translation and later on in vernacular as well. And then we can think of one of the greatest Roman authors, Cicero, whose works such as the Tusculum Disputations were extremely well known in the period, as well as many other orations and works of moral philosophy. Then you have Seneca, of course, and the whole tradition connected with Stoicism outside of Seneca, many of these works well known in the medieval period and in the Renaissance period as well, of course. And I think probably one of the things we should remember is that ethics in the Renaissance is not just about the classical pagan tradition, but it's also very importantly about the Christian tradition and the Hebrew tradition. That is, those books making up what we call today the Old and the New Testament are actually very important from the point of view of how virtue is defined and how it's explained. And presumably church fathers as well, like Augustine. Yes, exactly. And their interpretations again, also of the Bible. Augustine is extremely important as a conduit, not only of Christian philosophy, but of pagan philosophy as we know. Back in the medieval period, we saw that there were commentaries on Aristotle's ethics. So that's an obvious kind of case where you might be writing about ethics. But there were all sorts of other contexts in which they could discuss ethics. So when they were arguing about the right way to live as a monk, for example, or when they were having theological debates about the nature of sin. So many philosophers from Peter Abelard onwards have arguments about ethics in that sort of context. Does the Renaissance sort of continue in the same vein or do we get new context for talking about ethics in the Renaissance period? Okay, well, that's a very good question because you can start by saying, I suppose, that that literature continues and it's very influential. You mentioned Thomas Aquinas. So the Summa Theologiae, where those questions come up constantly, is actually a very influential work, continues to be in the Renaissance period up to the very end of the 16th century and beyond. So that's a literature that continues very importantly. But in addition to that, you also have a continuation of other medieval genres such as florileia or collections of sentences or sayings from particular works in which virtue is emphasized. And these have a tradition in the Renaissance bringing about the commonplace book, which humanists used as a place in which to copy great sayings from Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, the Bible, and other sources as well. But are they actually doing theoretical reflection on ethics in a context like that? I mean, that's more a place where you'd have like, here's a memorable saying about how to live, but maybe not, you know, a theory about sin or something. That's absolutely right. Yes. These are more means to refresh one's memory about what virtue is about, use it in practice, but also use it as a source for sermons, for letters, for treatises and other kinds of contexts. I think if you think about genres and ways in which people discuss ethics more formally or issues in ethics, we can look at a continuation of the commentary tradition. Some people think of that as having ceased in the Middle Ages. But actually what we see is in the 15th and 16th centuries and beyond them up to 1700, a continuation of engagement with Aristotle's writings, but also the writings of other authors, Cicero, for instance, whose tradition we hardly know anything about, actually, in the Renaissance, is a very, very interesting case. So people are writing commentaries on these works, as well as writing compendia of them and trying to grapple with the issues that they grappled with. And is that something they would have been doing in a university setting usually? They often did. Universities were a very important place because universities taught moral philosophy. But also the schools of the religious orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinian hermits, all of these orders had particular studia generalia, they're called. They're correspondents to universities in some ways, although they concentrate on philosophy and theology. And they're doing very much the same kind of curriculum for moral philosophy as is studied in the universities themselves. Right. Well, it sounds like there's a lot of ethical literature from this period, and we're probably not going to be able to discuss it comprehensively in the next 20 minutes. So let's focus on something more particular, which is Aristotle's ethics, because this is something you've worked on and published on, and in any case is probably the main ethical treatise that they're engaging with in this period. So can you say something about the previous medieval engagement with the ethics and then also the translations, because there was actually more than one translation into Latin during the Renaissance, and maybe something about who was reading the ethics? Yes. So the medieval period sees four different translations of the Nicomachean ethics, culminating in that of Robert Grove's test, 1247-48, and then William of Merbica about 30 years after that. In the Renaissance period, starting especially in 1416-17, the first new translation we know of is by Leonardo Bruni, who is the Chancellor of Florence, and writes a very rhetorically flowery translation into Latin of Aristotle's works. He gets attacked for it because it's not considered by some as being philosophically accurate. But nonetheless, it's very interesting because of the debate it sparks. Bruni believes that Aristotle's Greek is eloquent, and he wants to prove that through his translation into Ciceronian Latin. Now, you've read the ethics in Greek, I'm sure. I was just wondering if I would go so far as to say that it's eloquent. Yes. It's not exactly Plato. It's certainly not my impression. And if you know that that work is actually coming from lecture notes taken by students in probably a fairly disorganized state, I don't think that we would say that it was eloquent either. But that translation by Bruni in any case gives rise to a number of other different translations, one by the Greek emigre John Archibaldus in the 1450s, and many, many more in France, Germany, and other places, and also into the translations into the vernacular later on, which expand the angle of audience. And maybe we should mention here that there were also Byzantine commentaries on the ethics. That's absolutely true. And they would have known these as well. Yes. Eustachius, or the commentary known as Eustachius, which is mosaic of different commentaries, is the most important one. And it brings together works from the third century after Christ up to the 12th century. And that's very well known. Is this all just kind of manifestation of a more general tendency in the Renaissance, which usually goes under the heading of humanism? They're turning back towards these classical texts, and this is just the classical text on ethics. So of course, they translate it again, they study it, they write commentaries on it. Is it just a kind of sub-phenomenon of humanism that they are so interested in Aristotle's ethics? I think we have to consider this more in the context of the very long commentary tradition, beginning with the ancient Greek tradition, of course, that this Eustachius commentary includes in part, leading through the Byzantine commentary tradition, the Scholastic tradition, especially Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and then continuing its influence in the Renaissance period, rather than as a special feature of humanism. I think one of the important points here is that when people wanted to talk about ethics in a systematic way, they didn't really have any option but rely on Aristotle, because the other authors, including Cicero and Seneca, and Plato especially, talk about ethics, but in a very unsystematic kind of way. And the use of dialogues, in particular for Plato, is very difficult. And so, because the connections are so strong with the previous tradition, humanists are happy to take over those works and reconsider them, sometimes in a new light. So I think it's partly a different sort of approach, because they're wanting to read Aristotle in new translations that are more fluent than the older ones, less technical, can appeal to people who haven't necessarily studied at university, and can help them in a perhaps more practical way to actually follow virtue. I think that point you just made about Aristotle being systematic, and it's not just that each work is systematic, it's also the whole body of Aristotle in writing is systematic. That's something that we've really been seeing again and again ever since late antiquity, that even Platonists will concentrate on teaching Aristotle, because it provides you with a curriculum. And so even now in the Renaissance, which we think of as a kind of time of resurgent Platonism, they're still turning to Aristotle as the kind of go-to text for a systematic work on a topic like ethics. That's exactly right. Plato does come back, as we know. His dialogues get translated into Latin in their entirety for the first time by Marsilio Ficino in the 1470s, but Plato never really makes it into the university curriculum because of that very reason. Even ardent Platonists are teaching Aristotle in the universities. And increasingly, what I think many people are doing, whether or not they're humanists, is trying to combine the insights of Plato and Aristotle under the aegis of Christianity. I think in many ways what they're doing is creating a new kind of synthesis. Of the kind that Thomas Aquinas had done before, but with more sources to deal with. And so the synthesis looks different, and the particular areas of moral philosophy have a different kind of relevance according to the new political and social situation. What did they do with the aspects of Aristotle that are not so easy to combine with Plato? I mean, maybe the most obvious example is that in the first book of the Ethics, he pretty soon turns to the topic of the form of the good, which you might think of as the keystone of Plato's whole ethical teaching. And he says, oh, there's no form of the good. And the good is said in many ways, so this whole theory is just rubbish. So what do they do with a text like that? I think they often try different approaches. They try to bring Plato together with Aristotle, sometimes justifying Aristotle's not very reverent attitude toward his master. And so in this particular case, they would often say, well, Aristotle was actually disagreeing with Plato in words, but not really in essence. Or they might argue, the difference is more apparent than real. We can explain it in such and such a way. I think Renaissance interpreters were experts at overlooking the differences between ancient authors as much as possible, because they were trying to bring them all together. They all spoke the same truth, they thought, even though they were coming from different perspectives. And so in some ways, a lack of historical perspective brought them to flatten some of the very great differences that we see today between ancient thinkers. Yeah, that's reminiscent of something we see in late antiquity too. And one strategy they use in late antiquity is they'll say, well, Aristotle is just cautioning you here against a misreading of Plato, rather than criticizing Plato. And you'd probably see the same sort of thing in Renaissance literature. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And you see the same thing also, not just in readings of Aristotle, but also readings of Plato. When Plato, for instance, talks about the community of wives or the community of property, many Renaissance thinkers do not like these ideas at all. Not ready for Marxism. No, quite not. And so Jim Hengins, as shown in his book on Plato and the Italian Renaissance, that they will simply skip those passages or make them into something more palatable to the readers. So that's going on, I think, with all the authors. Even Stoicism, for instance, is recognized by many interpreters as not fitting very well in with Christianity. And so they would put it aside as a ethical movement, generally speaking, very much in the same way that they put Epicureanism aside. So that the only ones remaining standing were Platonism and especially Aristotelianism, which then they tried to join together, as I said, under Christianity. And do they have problems with fusing together Aristotle with Christianity? So one example that leaps to mind here would be his presentation of the highest good. And there's famously a problem about whether the best life in the ethics, as Aristotle envisions it, is a life that involves practical engagement and political values and so on, or whether he's really thinking about a life of philosophical contemplation. But either way, it looks like he's talking about a life lived now here in this world. He's not talking about an afterlife, whatever Thomas Aquinas might try to say. And so do they feel a tension there between Christian ethics, Augustinian ethics, where what you're trying to do is prepare yourself for an afterlife and join the city of God and Aristotelian ethics where you're engaged with the city of man or maybe just doing philosophy? Yeah. Well, it's very, very hard to generalize because I think different figures have different ways of solving these issues and presenting the problem. But I think what you can say is that most Renaissance thinkers who are fundamentally believers try to point out that there are two aspects which are slightly in tension with each other in Aristotle's thought. So you do have the active life, of course, in book one of the ethics, and you have the contemplative life, which is exalted as being more rarefied and something more to be striven for in book 10. But they recognize that the ethics is actually grounded on the here and now rather than the hereafter. And so I think the way in which they play with those issues is not to say the active life is for now and the contemplative is for later, but they actually recognize that here on Earth, one can be engaged both in active participatory politics, for instance, but at the same time have periods of contemplation and reflection so that wisdom, the wisdom of the philosopher, the one that comes out of book 10, is also something for the here and now. Obviously, they don't deny that in the end this is a piece that fits into the general story of Christianity so that the afterlife is something that does exist, but they refer all of the ethics, generally speaking, to the present life. And I guess that they always can make the move, when this is part of Aquinas' story, of saying that insofar as we are aspiring towards a contemplative life, the thing that we're most of all contemplating is God anyway, because he's the highest possible object of contemplation. Absolutely. And I think many people during this period do agree actually with Aquinas, to continue to agree with him on that particular point, but they just present the issue slightly differently. We have to remember that many of the ones who were interpreting Aristotle on this were very often still members of religious orders. They were very often professors of philosophy, such as Francesco Piccolomini and Bajo in the 16th century, who had a very strong interest in welding a Platonic metaphysics onto an Aristotelian system of moral philosophy. Not terribly unlike the Thomistic system in some ways. But these elements were co-present. And so Piccolomini mentions, for instance, that of course the end of all things, the supreme good, is to be identified with God himself. Right. So Ben, turning back towards the more practical end of things, if you haven't gotten to Book 10 yet of the ethics, then you think that the ethics is mostly about virtue. And something that I've always been struck by is the potential for another kind of conflict here with Christianity, which is that the virtues that Aristotle has in mind don't really seem to be the virtues that are most highlighted in Christianity. So it's not all about faith, hope, and charity. It's about justice, temperance, courage, things like that. Now obviously, Christians probably think that justice, temperance, and courage are good things too. But do they have a different kind of way of conceiving of virtue than Aristotle did? That's a very difficult question to answer. Because the catalogue of virtues, as you know, in the Renaissance, is very, very long. And some of the ones that are mentioned by Aristotle do tend to have a very strong point of tension with Christianity. One of those is magnificence, which doesn't sit very well with Christian ideals of poverty, of course. So this is basically being rich and spending a lot of money on your friends. That's right. Or a lot of money for the states in other ways. So this is a considerable point of problem and of tension. Now I would say that one of the points that comes up very often is the point about friendship. And friendship gets reinterpreted in the Renaissance period very often in connection with the question of how God sits in relation to man, especially by Protestant reformers who are very interested in the idea of equality within two partners in the friendship, which is something suggested by Aristotle, and the gospel message that God actually becomes man's friend through the sacrifice of Christ. And so that becomes a very significant issue that people try to resolve, given that we are not equal with God at the same time. Can we really have a friendship with his son, Jesus Christ, or not? But there are lots and lots of problems that come up as well, such as the importance of justice, the place of honor, and other things of the sort, which have possible religious hues or colorings at the same time. So it's such a broad range of issues that it's hard to talk about them in general, I suppose. Do they even have a problem with the fundamental idea that virtue is a mean between extremes? Because if you think about a virtue like chastity, the idea isn't, oh, be chaste in the right circumstances and to the right degree, it's be as chaste as possible. That's right. Isn't there a problem there as well? That there is a problem, yes. And there's also a problem with ideas of justice and how you actually define the distributive kind of justice in the Aristotelian system, and whether that matches Christian ideals or not. All of these are points of tension, absolutely. And it's not something that people solve. I think there's always a big question point. Could I just mention that one of the points that does come up very often, and some have written on this point, is that of heroic virtue, which is something which especially comes to the fore in the 16th century, because people want to explain how saints, for instance, can be invested with a special virtue from on high. And so this is a point in which they try to combine elements of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. And again, the things don't sit together very well. This is like comparing an ancient martyr to Achilles. Yes, quite. Yes. Yeah, I'm not quite sure I see how that's going to work. It's a problem for a lot of thinkers trying to reconstruct to what extent you can use pagan philosophy to shore up the foundations of Christian theology. And to what extent do they do what Aristotle does, which is to put virtue within a political context? I mean, Aristotle actually says at the beginning of the ethics that what you're about to read is part of political philosophy. And of course, political philosophy is something that is also, if not having a resurgence in the Renaissance, it's certainly a feature of the Renaissance. Yes, absolutely. So did they try to integrate Aristotelian ethics within a conception of civic virtue, for example, or political life? Yes, I think they often do. And this is maybe one of the points of difference with some of the interpretations from, let's say, the 13th century with Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, in which virtue tends, although not always, to be treated as an individual matter, and ethics is seen as the science which deals with virtue of the individual, as opposed to that of the family or of the wider political community. So one of the features, especially of 15th century Florentine humanism, is to concentrate on political involvement, and man as a social animal becomes a very, very important part of ethics of the individual as well. Leonardo Bruni, going back to him, gives interpretations both of the ethics, the pseudo-Aristotelian economics, and the politics, precisely because he wants to show the progression among those three items. But at the same time, he's doing something which is very similar to what Thomas Aquinas is doing, because Aquinas also gave a preeminent place to politics within that whole system, and that's what Bruni does, although he's not necessarily followed in that by everyone else. So this leads to that conversation that we were having before, to that aspect that we were mentioning about the active and contemplative lives, and which one of those two might be more important. And I guess that to the extent that you want to really emphasize political life, Aristotle is probably a more useful source than, say, the Stoics or some of the other holistic ethical material. Quite. Very much so, yes. Also because the Stoics emphasize so much the single individual and retreat from politics, which is not, by the way, necessarily something that some humanists object to. Petrarch is famously allergic to involvement in politics after he's at least seen a failed attempt to take over Rome by Cola D'Hirien. So he retreats out of politics and even accuses Cicero of having gone too far. Okay, well thank you very much to David Lyons for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time for more on Renaissance philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode, Of Two Minds, Pomponazzi and Nifo on the Intellect. Some people just don't like being told what to do or what to think, and a lot of these people are named Peter. The tradition began with Saint Peter himself, who was not only martyred for his faith but even, according to legend, made the Romans crucify him upside down to avoid being tacitly compared with Christ. The Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, ruler of a land where all the men wore beards, decided that they should all go clean-shaven. Peter Pan refused even to grow up. The guitarist of The Who, Pete Townsend, was, well, Pete Townsend, while the reggae singer, Peter Tosh, was so annoyed at being forbidden to smoke marijuana that he wrote a song called Legalize It. I myself contributed to this grand tradition of rebellious Peters as a lad by occasionally refusing to eat my vegetables. Though, to be honest, this hardly counted as rebellion in my family, given that my father likes to say, I have a rule against eating anything green, but I make an exception for carrots. I don't eat those either. In any case, it was entirely predictable that when in 1513 the Pope declared that the human soul is immortal and that this can be proven by rational argument, some philosopher named Peter would refuse to play along. Three years later, Pietro Pompanazzi published his work on the immortality of the soul. The Pope would no doubt have approved of the title, but not the rest of it. It argues that philosophical arguments point rather towards the soul's mortality, its essential dependence upon the body. Pompanazzi concluded by acknowledging the truth of the Christian teaching, that the human soul does live on after death, but he denied that this can be established philosophically. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a hostile reaction. The treatise was burned at Venice and Pompanazzi was accused of heresy. Fortunately for him, his patron was named Peter too. This was the bishop, Pietro Bembo, whom we met as the author of a dialogue on love called Liasolani. Despite being himself a Platonist philosopher, Bembo gave Pompanazzi political protection. Meanwhile, Pompanazzi got busy mounting his own defense. He wrote two works responding to critics, the most significant one being Agostino Nifo. The two had clashed before, having been rivals since the 1490s when both lectured at the University of Padua. As we've seen, Padua was a center of peripatetic philosophy in the Italian Renaissance. Aristotle's treatises were assiduously taught and studied there, alongside commentaries on his works. But this does not imply that all the Paduans were in agreement about how to interpret Aristotle. Actually, the theory of soul most strongly associated with Padua is one that Pompanazzi would harshly criticize. It's a theory that we can trace to Aristotle's greatest medieval commentator, the Muslim thinker Imrosht, known in Latin as Ivaroese. One visitor to Padua at the end of the 15th century said that at the university there, all agreed to the positions of this author and took them as a kind of oracle. Most famous with all was his position on the unity of the possible intellect, so that he who thought otherwise was considered worthy of the name neither of peripatetic nor philosopher. To which you may well say, Latin Ivaroism? How is that still a thing? We last met the phrase in the 13th century, when the arts masters at Paris flirted with the dangerous ideas of this man, known simply as the commentator, in particular his belief in the eternity of the world and in the unity of the intellect. This provoked condemnation from the Bishop of Paris and refutations by colleagues, including Thomas Aquinas. But unlike the soul, according to Pompanazzi, Ivaroism managed to live on. It flourished above all in Italy, where at the end of the 14th century, Blasius of Parma was already reprimanded for accepting Ivaroese's view on the intellect. A hundred years later, the same teaching was receiving support from Nicolleta Vernia, who taught both Nifo and Pompanazzi. Again this provoked an official rebuke. In 1489, the Bishop of Padua threatened that Ivaroism would be punished by excommunication. Vernia's first name was not Peter, so he recanted, writing a treatise in 1492 against what he now called the perverse opinion of Ivaroese. This was presumably because of the pressure that had been brought to bear on him, though he claimed to have changed his mind upon reading more carefully and widely in the Aristotelian commentary tradition. And even here he smuggled in the caveat that in terms of its operation, the human intellect is universal and not individual. It was precisely this premise that had led Ivaroese himself to his notorious teaching on the intellect. He wrestled with the nature of the mind throughout his career, eventually reaching the conclusion that there is only one capacity for abstract, truly intellectual thought, which is shared by all humankind. The intellect's operation is universal, because its knowledge consists in grasping general realities or universals. By contrast, other forms of cognition like sensation and imagination grasp particulars and their properties. You can see or imagine an individual giraffe like Hiawatha, but you must use your intellect to grasp the universal nature, giraffe, that belongs to all giraffes. Ivaroese did not see how this universal nature could be received in a physical organ like the brain. You can collect sensory images in the brain, remember them, fabricate new images you haven't experienced like a giraffe eating broccoli, and even think about particulars to make plans for the future. What might you do if your pet giraffe refuses to eat its vegetables? But your brain cannot be the seat of universal thoughts. This fits well with something Ivaroese could find stated clearly in Aristotle, namely that the intellect's activity is not realized in any bodily organ. But if the intellect's work takes place outside my bodily organs, Ivaroese thought, then it must not belong to me or any other individual embodied person. The intellect is universal and belongs to everyone. While this may seem an outlandish conclusion, Ivaroese's standing as the premier medieval commentator on Aristotle was by itself a good reason to take his view seriously. Vernier called him Aristotle's most famous interpreter, while Niepfel referred to him Aristotle's priest. And if Ivaroese's position had something else to recommend it, it at least made the human intellect immaterial and immortal. For Christian readers, this might well seem preferable to saying that the intellect is closely linked to embodied individuals, just a part of the human soul that Aristotle had famously defined as the form of the organic body, potentially having life. The form of a table doesn't survive when you destroy the body of the table. So if the human soul is the form of the human body, why should it survive when the body is killed? Renaissance readers could find this line of thought being followed through by the premier ancient commentator on Aristotle, namely Alexander of Aphrodisias. In the 15th century, he was standardly being interpreted as having held that the soul is indeed mortal, since it is only the form of a mortal body. So devotees of Aristotelian thought were caught between a rock and a hard place. The materialist theory of Alexander on the one hand, Ivaroese's hard to believe theory of the unity of the immaterial intellect on the other. Massilio Ficino thus complained, Ficino responded to the challenge with his massive work, The Platonic Theology, which devoted hundreds upon hundreds of pages to proving the immortality of individual human souls. Surely at least one of those arguments must be right? The pope evidently thought so, and Ficino's work has sometimes been credited with helping inspire the papal declaration that immortality can be rationally proven. But then Ficino was a Platonist, often arguing from different premises than would be accepted by the Aristotelians of Padua. It was an open question whether personal immortality was compatible with Aristotle's writings on the soul. Already around 1460, the Byzantine emigre John Argyropoulos, lecturing on Aristotle at Florence, decided that Ivaroism was the correct interpretation of Aristotle, though good Christians should still deem it to be false as an account of the soul. It would be nice if you could use Aristotle and rational argumentation to prove the Christian doctrine of the afterlife, but sadly you can't. The same conclusion was reached by Alessandro Aquellini and Luca Prasitio, Ivaroists who taught at Bologna and Naples respectively. Like Ficino, Aquellini said that both Alexander and Ivaroies put forward false views on the soul, Alexander denying its immortality, and Ivaroies accepting it as immortal, but only one for all humans. Still, Ivaroies was preferable in that he, not Alexander, had at least understood Aristotle correctly. Likewise, Prasitio said that Aristotle was never more truly interpreted than by Ivaroies, and that he could find nothing more certain and true on the immortality of the soul than what can be taken from Ivaroies. But Prasitio too hastened to add that this apparently certain and true teaching is deemed false by Christian faith. Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that Pomponazzi's treatise was a little less shocking than we might suppose. He differed from the Renaissance Ivaroists simply in his choice of which false theory of the soul should be ascribed to Aristotle. Alexander's reading was broadly correct, Ivaroies is completely wrong. Like the Ivaroists, Pomponazzi offered detailed arguments for his preferred interpretation of Aristotle, and then piously distanced himself from the resulting theory with some final disclaimers. But why was he so certain that Aristotle was committed to the mortality of the soul? He depended above all on passages where Aristotle closely associates intellectual thinking with imagination. Consider what happens when you think about giraffes, even at the most abstract scientific level. Clearly, you'll have a hard time doing that without having some sensory experiences of giraffes, and preserving representations of giraffes in your memory, the way they look, sound, and, yes, smell. You might remember seeing one graze on leaves and another walk past meat without showing the slightest interest, and come to the general truth that giraffes, unlike me as a boy, gladly restrict themselves to a plant-based diet. Pomponazzi goes further than this though. He certainly holds that universal thinking has its origins in sensory awareness, but this is just the standard empiricism of the Aristotelian scientific tradition. More controversial is his claim that for Aristotle, every act of universal thinking comes together with an act of imagination. You can't think about the vegetarianism of all giraffes without remembering or imagining particular giraffes eating their veggies. So even if, as Aristotle stated, universal thinking itself is not realized in the brain or any other bodily organ, that thinking is nonetheless the act of a physical and organic body, as Pomponazzi puts it. Intellect depends on powers that are realized in the body, so it cannot remain once your body dies. And since everyone agrees that the intellect is the part of the soul with the most plausible claim to immortality, this shows that the soul is not immortal at all. In addition to setting out his own reading of Aristotle, Pomponazzi criticizes other views. Against Iberoides, he can make the obvious complaint that the single intellect of his theory may be immortal but does not belong to each of us as individuals, so it would not secure our immortality. Less obviously, Iberoides depicted human thinking as being just like the pure separate thinking that belongs to God and the celestial intellects of Aristotle's cosmology. The very fact that we need to use our imaginations to think is a clear sign that our intellects work quite differently than those exalted minds. In fact, Pomponazzi thinks that in comparison to them, we can claim to have only a shadow of intellect. Pomponazzi also takes aim at Thomas Aquinas. At this time, Aquinas was already seen as a great Christian theologian whose authority was more difficult to challenge than that of the Muslim Iberoides. In fact, Pomponazzi was himself thoroughly schooled in Thomas' philosophy as a student. Nonetheless, he dares to argue that Aquinas' theory cannot be sustained on rational grounds or as an interpretation of Aristotle. Pomponazzi agrees with Thomas in rejecting Iberoism. We all have our own single, individual souls. With the emphasis on single, we do not have two souls, a mortal one for sensation and a second immortal soul for intellection. On this view, soul and body would have no greater unity than oxen and plow, he says. But if the single soul is immortal and immaterial, as Aquinas claims, then why would intellect, the signature activity of the immaterial soul, depend on the body for its functioning, as we've seen that it does? Aquinas' view might be true in the end, as testified by religion, but it cannot be established by reason. Pomponazzi nonetheless acknowledges that the human soul has some share in immortality. He echoes the words of Pico della Mirandola, for whom the human being uniquely contains all creation, straddling the immortal and mortal, the immaterial and the material. Giraffes are pretty good at straddling, but even they can't do that. Still, immortality belongs to humans only in respect of the universal truths they grasp when they use their minds. We are temporary creatures that grasp eternal verities, material beings that receive immaterial objects of thought while using physical images to do so. Here, Pomponazzi responds to a distinction introduced by Iverroes, who contrasted the intellect's using the body as a subject to having body as its object. Our minds needing images when we think shows that the intellect uses the body as an object, drawing on memory and imagination as a kind of storehouse of information on the basis of which pure universals can be understood. Iverroes and his followers agreed that the universal mind draws on such images which are stored in individual human brains, but they claim that the intellect performs its activity separately from the body as a subject because it has no specific organ. Pomponazzi disagrees. If the mind needs material images as objects, then it needs the body as its subject too. So you can boil Pomponazzi's whole argument down to a claim that is apt to strike us as remarkably obvious. People think as individuals and cannot do so without their brains. But in the early 16th century this was far from obvious. Hadn't Pico and Ficino shown that we are part animal but part angel? Are we not made to partake even of divinity in some small way? In fact, didn't Aristotle himself say in his Ethics that we are capable of reaching beyond a merely human life to reach ultimate felicity through theoretical contemplation? How then can intellect be inevitably linked to embodiment? Pomponazzi anticipates this line of objection, and responds basically that contemplation is indeed something quasi-divine, which is precisely why we shouldn't make it the purpose of human life. Look around, most people are peasants or artisans, and even among the elite very few men and hardly any women are concerned with philosophy. Which is perfectly fine, says Pomponazzi. Our aim as humans is to be morally upright, to make good use of what Aristotle called practical intellect. We do have a theoretical intellect too, which can be used to grasp universal truths, but this is just a kind of bonus that comes on top of the happiness already secured through a virtuous life. In fact, to insist that human life loses its purpose if we are not immortal is to suggest that the only reason to be good is to gain reward and avoid punishment in the afterlife, whereas in fact virtue should be pursued here and now for its own sake. When Pomponazzi published his treatise in 1516, it attracted the attention of his old rival, Agostino Nifo. Nifo had been thinking about these issues for decades. Around the turn of the century, he reprised the intellectual journey travelled by his teacher, Nicoletto Vernier, at first presenting Averroes's theory of the single intellect sympathetically, and then turning against it. Having devoted great effort to commenting on the works of the great commentator, he turned against Averroes in 1503, writing a treatise on the intellect, which declares that the Averroist position is against both faith and Aristotle. It errs in supposing that the subject of thinking must be just as universal as its object, that if what we all grasp when learning about giraffes is a single intelligible form of giraffe, then there can be only a single intellect that grasps it. Instead, we can say that each human intellect receives a unique form of its own, by means of which it understands the universal nature of giraffe. This is a major concession, since it gives up on an idea found in Aristotle and always stressed by Averroists like the younger Nifo, namely that the mind actually becomes identical to the universal nature it grasps. Now, Nifo replaces this with the idea that the mind has its own representation of that nature, sometimes called in scholastic jargon an intelligible species. Or as Nifo puts it, the mind does not actually have within itself the object of intellect, but something through which it understands the object of intellect intellectually. It's sort of like having a picture of the giraffe rather than the nature of the giraffe itself. Having persuaded himself of this, Nifo is able to make the politically convenient move of embracing a position more like that of Aquinas. The human intellect is not so exalted as to be single and universal, but it is nonetheless immortal and independent from the body in its operation. As a result, the philosophical study of the soul is itself like human nature according to Pico della Mirandola, it spans the material and immaterial realms and is thus a science that belongs to both physics and metaphysics. It is from this position that Nifo attacks Pomponazzi. He makes short shrift of Pomponazzi's main proof of the soul's mortality, namely that it cannot think without bodily images. While it is true that images are needed at first, so the intellect can learn about universal truths, it can dispense with the images thereafter and occupy itself with nothing but universals. So the mind can still be active after bodily death. Thus Nifo is able to say that humans are after all made for more than a morally upstanding embodied life. We are made to contemplate, as Aristotle said, and it is specifically the speculative intellect that differentiates us from other animals. Of course, we are not born using this intellect but need to work at it. As Nifo writes, the rational soul develops until it reaches the metaphysical intelligibles when the speculative intellect is formed. One problem with this is that if the afterlife consists only in pure activity of the mind, it seems that very few people will be prepared for it. If you haven't acquired universal knowledge in this life by becoming a philosopher or a scientist, what will you think about after you die? And it's not just that, as Pompanazzi said, almost an infinite number of men seem to have less intellect than many beasts. It's also that many infants die before they even have the chance to start actualizing their capacity for intellectual thought, a problem that Pompanazzi pointed out in his response to Nifo. To answer this kind of problem, Nifo too has to retreat into invocations of religion, assuring his readers that those humans who failed to join the intellectual elite in this life may nonetheless be granted beatitude through God's mercy. But to be on the safe side, it's probably better if you become an elite philosopher. So it would be really helpful if one of these Paduans would tell us how to go about doing that. Actually, many philosophers at Padua and other Renaissance Aristotelians were keenly interested in the study of scientific method, which would reveal the stages along the journey from ignorance to knowledge. But the man most famous for his discussion of these issues was Jacopo Zabarela. In his theory of intellect, Zabarela was sympathetic to the approach of Pompanazzi. He likewise rejected the views of Aquinas and Iverroes and agreed with Pompanazzi that the mind needs body for its operation because it always has to use images, albeit that the universal thinking it can do on the basis of those images requires no bodily organ. That's the metaphysical side of things, but what about the methodological and epistemological side? How exactly do we go from experience of particulars to universal understanding? To find out, I'll tell you to join me next time, unless your name is Peter, in which case you'll do whatever you're darn well please, for Zabarela's Philosophy of Science, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, There and Back Again, Zabarela on Scientific Method. At some point you've probably heard a young child explain the plot of a movie. Even if it's one you've seen yourself, you may find it hard to follow. If you'd asked me to explain my favorite movie to you when I was eight years old, I would have said something like, first you see a little ship and then a big ship and then and then the two funny robots are wandering around in the sand and then later they all get squeezed in a rubbish dump. And at the end the death star blows up because of the force. Of course, even adults vary in their ability to convey the plot and tone of a movie. This is why we turn for advice to professional film critics, though maybe we shouldn't given that the famous critic Pauline Kael said of Star Wars that it has no emotional grip and suffers from an absence of wonder, the greatest cinematic misjudgment since someone suggested that Buster Keaton's movies would be better if they weren't silent. It's also why Hollywood insiders pride themselves on being able to give an elevator pitch, which distills a vision for a movie down to just one or two big ideas. It's a samurai epic, but in space. Though philosophers claim to prize clarity when trying to convey their own ideas, in practice some are easier to follow than others. In the more difficult category, one thinks inevitably of Martin Heidegger. His most important work, Being and Time, is so difficult to read that Edmond Husserl, himself not the most lucid of writers, had his wife ask for a face-to-face meeting with Heidegger. She wrote that Husserl had occupied himself the whole vacation exclusively with its study and finds it necessary to let himself be instructed with you about much that does not want to become entirely clear to him. Ancient and medieval commentators would have sympathized, except that they didn't have the luxury of sitting down with their own favorite author to ask him what in the world he was talking about. That author was, of course, Aristotle. His works are sufficiently obscure that it became standard for commentators to offer excuses for their difficulty, saying for instance that this was intended to discourage non-expert readers. It may have seemed particularly galling that Aristotle did not write more clearly, given that Aristotle was renowned as a master of clear thinking. He had invented logic for goodness sake. And in the treatise that was considered the culmination of his logical works, The Posterior Analytics, he laid out a theory of demonstration that seemed intended as the ideal method for setting out scientific truths. Why then did he not use this method when he wrote about other topics? There are plenty of philosophical arguments in Aristotle's works on natural philosophy, the soul, metaphysics, and ethics, but these arguments rarely, if ever, satisfy the stringent criteria for demonstrative proof laid down in his analytics. Jacopo Zabarella, a professor at the University of Padua in the 16th century, felt about Aristotle the way I felt about Star Wars as an eight-year-old. He proclaimed to be second to no mortal in admiration of Aristotle. Of course, Aristotle was a man, not a god, and had not treated all topics and science so exhaustively as to render further efforts superfluous. Still, he had planted the seed and made the basis from which even the things he did not write about can be known. So Zabarella was at pains to show that Aristotle's works were in fact well-designed for the student who would be reading them. For a thousand years and more, it had been common for commentators to uncover the demonstrative arguments lurking hidden within the apparently non-demonstrative writings of Aristotle. Zabarella knew this strategy well, having read Averroes and the Greek commentaries that were now circulating in printed versions, but he adopted a different approach to understanding Aristotle by contrasting what he called the method of the sciences to the mere order of teaching that is to be used when writing for students. As Zabarella noted, this contrast could take inspiration from one made by Aristotle himself between that which is better known or primary relative to us and that which is primary in itself. Primary in themselves are the fundamental causes and principles in a science. In ancient physics, this would have been, among other things, the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. In a modern context, it might be something like atomic particles and the way their number and arrangements give rise to physical properties. But such foundations are not primary relative to us. To the contrary, the atomic foundations of chemistry are so obscure to humankind that even Aristotle didn't figure them out, and they were still being uncovered when Buster Keaton made his silent movies. Now, Zabarella would say that when you are teaching, you should not start with things like this. Instead, it is good policy to begin with things that are familiar or obvious to the student. In Aristotle's terms, these would be the things that are better known to us, not the things that are primary in themselves. Thus, if explaining chemistry, you might begin by showing your students a simple chemical reaction and only then go on to say how this reaction can ultimately be explained through the interaction of atomic particles. Or, if explaining Star Wars to an American audience, you might refer not to the Japanese samurai films that helped inspire it, but other science fiction epics. It's like Star Trek, you might say, but with better jokes and more dirt. This basic contrast between a discussion that works towards principles and a discussion that begins from principles was familiar in the commentary tradition. Ivaroides in particular had mentioned it in his commentary on Aristotle's physics. He distinguished between the opening move in science where we trace a sign or effect back to its cause, and a further step where on the basis of that cause we explain the effect from which we've started. As we'll be seeing, this was a core idea of Zabarela's scientific method too. But he claimed originality for his own contrast between order and method, especially insofar as it provided a tool for analyzing much debated text from Aristotle's writings. According to Zabarela, these writings are arranged in such a way that the order of presentation mirrors the order of discovery. In other words, Aristotle teaches by taking us step by step along a path he has already traveled, explaining everything in the order he came to understand it himself. Thus, his exposition does not begin with the deepest insights and most fundamental principles, but goes gradually from the obvious to the obscure, from the posterior to the primary. Zabarela offers a few examples of this from Aristotle's texts. The most basic of the five senses is touch, and it is shared most widely by different kinds of animals. Yet in his treatment of sensation, Aristotle discusses vision first because vision is the most striking and obvious kind of sense perception. It is, in other words, primary to us, not in itself. Aristotle also discusses humans in his natural philosophy before moving on to other animals, even though humans are only one kind of animal, so that animal nature is more fundamental than human nature. Or, take a case Zabarela discusses in greater detail, Aristotle's demonstration that natural bodies are ultimately made of prime matter. Prime matter is the featureless, pure potentiality that underlies concrete materials like the four elements, wood or flesh and bone. Obviously, prime matter is not better known relative to us. To the contrary, it is basically a theoretical postulate like the subatomic particles of modern science which were initially posited without being directly observable. But according to Zabarela, Aristotle proves that it exists by pointing to cases of change that we can observe, and then observing himself that there must be something that underlies every change and survives through the change, like when one and the same human is at first uneducated, then becomes educated. Prime matter is what underlies all change, so it is the principle that explains why natural bodies are changeable. As Zabarela suggested, we can think about this discovery of principles as a discovery of causes. Usually what is obvious to us is the effect, not the cause. We feel heat every day but don't realize it is caused by the element of fire, or in modern physics the agitation of particles in a body. We observe things changing but do not realize that prime matter is an ultimate cause of change, in this case what Aristotelians would call a material cause. In his writings, Aristotle follows an order of teaching that makes it possible to learn better and more easily, as Zabarela puts it. That means laying out the process of observation or argument that led to the discovery of the cause. But this part of scientific method only establishes what the cause is. In Zabarela's Latin scholastic terminology, it provides a proof quod, or quia. Once we know what the cause is, we can use it to explain the effects from which we started. That will be a more perfect kind of proof, in fact a real demonstration, precisely because it is explanatory. Zabarela, again following earlier scholastic terminology, calls it a demonstration propter quid, meaning because of what. So, to use the same example, we feel heat all the time but have to do some investigation to figure out what exactly is causing the heat we feel when we, say, put our hand near a lightsaber. It's the agitation of the air molecules around the laser thingy. Once we've done this, we'll be in a position to give a properly scientific explanation of heat by saying that it is caused by agitated molecules. Now, there is an obvious potential problem here, one that worried Zabarela enough that he devoted a small treatise to it entitled On Regress. The problem is that the whole procedure sounds circular. We first establish the cause on the basis of the effect, then go on to explain the effect by appealing to the cause. Doesn't this involve arguing from A to B and then from B back to A? Again, Zabarela was not the first to notice this difficulty. It had been a topic of discussion at Padua as far back as Paul of Venice. But Zabarela provided the definitive solution, namely that there is no circularity involved because the two kinds of reasoning are different. Scientific method, which is demonstration in the strict sense, comes only at the end of the whole procedure, when we use the cause to explain the effect. The initial stage, where we only determine what the cause is, is not demonstrative in the strict sense, and it doesn't really have the ambition of explaining anything, because you don't explain a cause on the basis of the effect, but rather vice versa. We can call the first stage progress as we move towards the causal principles, then we regress back to the effects. This is admittedly a case of retracing our steps, but with a different kind of understanding. Now we are giving solid scientific explanations of the phenomena from which we began. Zabarela thinks that this is what Aristotle meant in a passage that compares philosophical method to a u-shaped race track, where the competitors have to reach a bend at one end of the stadium and then return to the end where they started. Zabarela makes a further point that may help us to see why the method he describes is not circular. He borrows an idea from his fellow Paduan philosopher Agostino Nifo by saying that, upon establishing what the cause is, we should pause to think about its nature. This step of examining or considering the cause, which Zabarela, following Nifo, calls a negotiation of the understanding, allows us really to understand the principles we'll be using in our scientific explanations. Again, the example of prime matter is a useful one here. It's one thing to understand that something or other underlies all change in nature, it's another to understand what that underlying thing is. Upon reflection, we may see that, if it underlies all change, it must be capable of taking on any natural property, and cannot have any properties in its own right, like by being hot or dry, as fire is. Rather, prime matter is in itself only potentially all the things into which it can change. By having a better grip on the causal principle, we'll wind up with a deeper understanding of the phenomena that are the effects of this causal principle. Thus, Zabarela says that we initially had only a vague or confused grasp of the effect, but once we have gone up to the principles and back, our grasp of that same effect becomes distinct. Another contrast that Zabarela uses to account for all this, one he takes especially from the ancient Dr. Galen, is that between resolution and composition. The idea here is that, when presented with a complex phenomenon, you can resolve it into its components or principles. We can think about this as breaking something down to its basics. When you get down to these fundamental parts, you can then explain what you started with by showing how the parts are brought together. This is the stage of composition. The most obvious illustration would be the analysis of something's physical constituents. You might be investigating an almond croissant, and realize it is sweet because it contains sugar, and fattening because it contains butter. But it should work with more abstract examples too, like how Star Wars is made by mashing together tropes borrowed from samurai epics with ideas about space exploration and bad guys based on European fascists. These examples are a little bit misleading though, and not only because neither a samurai nor fascists can make the jump to hyperspeed. Films and almond croissants are not phenomena we encounter in nature. They do not grow on trees. If they did, I'd have an almond croissant orchard. So in these cases, someone like George Lucas or a pastry chef had to start with the fundamental components and put them together to achieve the desired result. In other words, the process begins with composition, not with resolution. This is typical of the practical or productive arts and sciences, according to Zabarela. The producer has some purpose or end in mind, and thinks consciously about how to reach that end through composition. He refers here to house building, one of Aristotle's favorite examples. When someone builds a house, they begin with bricks and beams, and have to put the house together. In the study of nature, by contrast, we are presented with already complete, complex things that need to be traced back to their causal principles by resolving them into those principles. Only after doing that can we explain the natural phenomena on the basis of those causes, performing composition by seeing how the causes come together to produce the complex results we originally started from. So the there-and-back-again structure described by Zabarela is really only appropriate for non-productive or theoretical sciences, especially the branches of natural philosophy like physics and zoology. His vaunted method is not applicable to practical contexts like the technological arts or ethics in political philosophy, where one begins from the desire to pursue some end, rather than from observed phenomena that need explanation. Zabarela's focus on theoretical philosophy and his treatment of natural philosophy as the paradigmatic kind of science makes sense in biographical and institutional terms. He began in Padua as a professor of logic, and later took up the chair of natural philosophy. His theory brings together these two parts of the university curriculum. As he says himself, the sciences are nothing more than logic put to use, and his works on scientific methodology are in turn nothing more than an attempt to show how logic, especially the theory of demonstration, is used in natural philosophy. One might add that the prestige of natural philosophy at the University of Padua matches the central role natural philosophy occupies in his theory. If this is only to be expected, it is no less predictable that within the competitive atmosphere of Italian scholasticism, Zabarela's theory would be attacked by a rival. This was Alessandro Piccolomini, another philosopher at Padua who denied that the best order of teaching is the order of discovery. To the contrary, one should often begin by explaining first principles to the students. So unlike Zabarela, Piccolomini would encourage a chemistry teacher to welcome students on their first day by presenting them with the theory of the atom, since it is fundamental for everything else they will learn. Piccolomini was also much more interested in metaphysics than Zabarela was, and stressed the dependence of natural philosophy on this higher science. Against this, Zabarela contended that the study of nature is independent of metaphysical considerations which he leaves to the theologians. This is just one respect in which Zabarela and the Paduan thinkers leading up to him anticipated later ideas about science, ideas we associate more with the Enlightenment. We saw last time how Pompanazzi offered an account of soul and intellect that was deliberately independent of religious belief. He was not apologizing when he said that his account agrees with reason and experience, it maintains nothing mythical, nothing depending on faith. Likewise, Zabarela highlighted the empiricist side of Aristotle, writing that in the investigation of nature, all our knowledge takes its origin from sensation. Scholastics in this period also contrasted a priori and a posteriori knowledge, which is terminology that will become very familiar in later periods of philosophy. Whereas a posteriori knowledge is based on sensation, the kind of understanding Zabarela associates with natural philosophy, a priori knowledge is used in fields like mathematics that do not base themselves on empirical observation. Still, before leaping to the conclusion that Zabarela was a forerunner of empiricists like David Hume and John Locke, we should pause over his comments about induction. He expects only modest gains from a strictly inductive investigation. This is not on the grounds famously mentioned by Hume that induction can never rule out future counterexamples. Rather, it is because Zabarela thinks that induction is only a generalization of some obvious fact, and fails to reveal the essential natures of things. So for instance, you can use induction to notice that all humans are two-footed, something that would need only light confirmation, as he says, and this would presumably involve checking out enough humans to satisfy yourself that they are indeed two-footed by nature. Induction would not, by contrast, allow you to realize that a triangle has internal angles whose sum is 180 degrees. For that, one would need to do a proper scientific investigation. Zabarela gives that example because it is mentioned by Aristotle, not because he is particularly interested in mathematics. He is mostly happy to stay within his remit of logic and the study of nature, and the union of the two that is his treatment of scientific method. Thus, he has little to say about the a priori realm, and quite a bit about the various branches of natural philosophy. As we've seen, these are to be approached empirically, but also to be considered as theoretical sciences, which just means that they are undertaken purely for the sake of knowledge and not for pursuing some end or to make some product. For this reason, Zabarela insists that medicine does not really belong to natural philosophy. It does, after all, pursue a practical end, namely the health of the patient. So he rigorously distinguishes the explanatory accounts that undergird medical treatment, the theory of the four humours, for instance, and in general whatever belongs to physiology and zoology, from medicine as an applied art. This too can be seen as a way to pull rank within the university context. As an expert on Aristotelian natural philosophy, Zabarela was pleased to be able to tell his colleagues who taught medicine that the real science behind their activities was to be found in a work like Aristotle's Parts of Animals. But this was far from being the last word on science in the 16th century, at Padua and elsewhere. In coming episodes, we'll be exploring both of the disciplines just mentioned, mathematics and medicine, and seeing that many scholars were, unlike Zabarela, more than happy to step outside the confines of Aristotelian science. But before we turn to these topics, I want to wrap up our look at Paduan Aristotelianism and Averroism by looking more deeply at the impact of the commentaries of Averroes and other sources from the Islamic world. In a return no less welcome than that of the Jedi, Dag Nicholas Hase will be coming back to the podcast to tell us all about the reception of Arabic philosophy in Renaissance Italy. I'm not forcing you to listen to it, but if you do miss it all I can say is, I'll find your lack of faith disturbing. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ of philosophy. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the HistoryofPhilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the reception of Arabic philosophy and science in the Renaissance with Doug Nicholas-Hasse, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Wurzburg. Hi, Doug. Hi, Peter. Thanks very much for coming back on the podcast. It's great to be here again. People with long memories who are listening to this may recall that you have in fact been on before you were on with Charles Burnett to talk about the medieval translations of philosophical and scientific works from Arabic into Latin. And so I was thinking maybe we could start by having you just kind of bring us up to date now that we're in the Renaissance. What's been happening with translations from Arabic into Latin since we last met, so to speak? Yeah, there are translations from Arabic in the Renaissance too. When you think of translations from Arabic and Latin, you think of Toledo, obviously, and you think of the Middle Ages. But it's important to see also to understand what Renaissance philosophy is about and Renaissance thought is about, that there's a new wave of translations of Arabic philosophers and scientists from about 1480 to 1550. That is, we have a second translation movement. We have a medieval translation movement, and we have a Renaissance translation movement. Perhaps it's good to compare the two. The first movement I mentioned Toledo is located mainly in Spain and southern Italy. Now we have translations in Italy, but also in Damascus. We have Western scholars in Damascus that translate from Arabic into Latin and scholars in Italy in the Renaissance, Jewish scholars that translate from Hebrew into Latin, Arabic authors such as Avarwes or Imel Haytham. And so they're not just translating philosophical works, they're also translating scientific works. And Avarwes Haytham, for example, is famous for his work in optics. Yes, some scientific works too, but I think there's a difference. In the Middle Ages, you have the entire range of sciences. Here, we have two major projects, Avarwes and Avicenna's Canon of Medicine. These are the two areas where they focus on less mathematics, less astronomy. That's the difference. It's mainly philosophy of Avarwes and Avicenna. And it's, in fact, very impressive and very successful because at the end of these 70 years, we have 19 commentaries by Avarwes translated newly, and six new versions of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, which was such an important piece of medical learning in the West and the East, in fact. So those are six complete translations of the Canon? No, it's not complete. It's new versions, six versions. Not all of them complete. Some are very important chapters that were read regularly in the universities. One is very important because it was done by Andrea Alpago and its corrections for most of the text. And it's very clever corrections. It's done in Damascus from the Arabic, and the text is really better now, the Latin text. In 1521, Alpago returns to Padua from Damascus, and his colleagues in Padua University are enthusiastic about it. And they convene and they recommend, you should read this Canon version, these corrections. And there are many corrections. So they appreciated his work. Yes, it gets printed, and you have major printing enterprises with these new versions of the Canon. That actually is another difference between the medieval period and the Renaissance, obviously, which is now that we have printed books. And in a big book that you yourself published about this whole process of transmission of Arabic learning into Latin, at one point you give some statistics for printed editions of works from basically scientists and philosophers in the Islamic world. And I was wondering if you could kind of tell the audience what we can learn from these statistics about how many printings there were of various authors, like who was most influential and so on. Yeah, it's only one page in this book. But it's a really interesting page. Yeah, and I love this table. It's about the list of the printed editions in Latin of Arabic authors after the invention of printing until 1700. What we get is 44 Arabic authors and a list of Arabic names, such as Averroes or Avicenna, and then the number of these editions. And for Averroes, you don't get 10 or 20 or 30. You get 114 editions. 114 editions. And some of you may know these editions can be really long. These editions can be really big, multi-volume editions. For instance, of Averroes, the long commentaries every line in a long commentaries on Aristotle. Every line in Aristotle is commented upon. And you get 13 volumes of only one edition. Or Avicenna's canon is a five-volume book. These are Avicenna's 78 editions, all in all. And the Renaissance, I massa vai mesui is 72. And Razi, I mesa caria, Razi Razi is 68. These names were known to basically everybody in the Renaissance because he would find these books on bookshelves. At that point, as today, it was a commercial enterprise. If you print something it doesn't sell, you don't print it again. You can see that this is part of the general learning of the time. And if you compare it, for instance, to other famous figures of the history of philosophy, take Peter Uppolatt or Roger Baker. They're printed once or twice. But 114 is a difference. When you say 114 editions, maybe one thing we need to emphasize here is that a single edition produces many copies, right? Yes. I don't know what the average print run would be. I can't tell. But we're talking about, you know, we're not talking about 114 individual copies of books. We're talking about thousands of copies of books. Yes. So that means that Averroes would presumably have been available in any decent library that had a philosophical collection anywhere in Europe. Is that right? Absolutely, yes. The major printing places for these authors were Venice, Lyon, and Basel in three different countries. And you can see the effects. You can see that it's easy to quote, that you have libraries all over Europe where these exemplars are to be found. And if you ask humanists, for example, take Erasmus. If you ask Erasmus, do you know these names, Averroes, Avicenna, Meso, Erasi? He would probably say, oh, yes, yes, of course I know them. But I don't like them. It's bad Latin. And it's not very educative to read them. But my colleagues in medicine and philosophy, of course, they read this in his education, in his university education, come across it. But he would not necessarily like it. Right. Let me actually ask you about that and the use of these texts by scholastics in the universities as opposed to the humanists. I guess that when we think about these universities that are carrying on the traditions of scholasticism and also medicine and other sciences from the Middle Ages, we probably imagine the philosophers reading Aristotle and we imagine the doctors reading Galen. But from what you just said, I guess we can infer that the philosophers are reading a lot of Averroes and the doctors are reading a lot of Avicenna as well. Absolutely, yes. You can see this in the university curricula and statutes. Not so much in philosophy because in philosophy, the curricula contain Aristotle. But in medicine, you can see in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, you get Greeks and Arabs, Galen Hippocrates, Avicenna, and some other Arabs like Razi. In philosophy, Averroes is read as the companion literature, basically. He doesn't appear on curricula only if there's a problem. If, for instance, in Louvain in the 1440s, they wanted to ban Occam and they said, but please read Aristotle with Averroes. I think there is a development here. Averroes was always quoted, but in the Renaissance, around 1500, in the 16th century, Averroes becomes the focal interest of a large group of philosophers. You can see this because they put a lot of effort in these new editions. These editions need to be made by scholars. It's not as if a printer could do this by himself. They also concentrate in a different way on Averroes. Averroes was always there, but it takes a new format. Some of them write super-cometries. That is, they write commentaries on the commentaries of Averroes. Agostino Nifo does this, or later, Mark Antonio Genoa, in the 16th century. And that takes a lot. If you comment on the comment, we have that in Hebrew, but we didn't have that before in Latin. And they quarrel about how to understand Averroes. What is the proper meaning of a certain doctrine or line? So that means that they're not just using Averroes as a kind of instrument to understand Aristotle, who's really the object of focus. You're saying that they start to be interested in the interpretation of Averroes, even for its own sake? Yes. There was a development that started, certainly, with Jean of Jondin in the early 14th century, but in tiny bits. And now it's like a time-delayed rock. You have that kind of thing. Or like a bomb with a time delay. It's getting explosive around 1500. It resonates differently with people. Obviously, that has many reasons, but I think one is that there was a cult of expertise surrounding it. It's not easy to understand Averroes. It's not easy to understand Aristotle. It's not easy to understand Averroes. And it takes a lot. Some of these doctrines, as you mentioned before, when you were in the podcast talking about Averroes, one of the doctrines is the theory that there's only one intellect for all human beings. This is very simple doctrine, in a sense. One intellect for all human beings is very easily explained. But in Averroes, it's supported by a very technical argumentation. You need to be a thoroughgoing expert to do this. I think that was one of the attractions of it. You really need to be a hard-nosed philosopher. Yeah, there were probably more people in 15th and 16th century Europe who understood Averroes' theory of the intellect than there are now. Definitely. Many more. And you have Marcantonio Genoa, for example, in the 1540s, writes 45 columns, you would say 45 pages, only on comment 35 in Averroes' long culture on the Anima. So that's a commentary on about half a page of Aristotle. Yeah, exactly. And Pietro Pomponazzi, who is himself the famous Aristotelian philosopher of the Renaissance, he says once, and he likes Averroes, but it's a love-hate relationship, in fact, to Averroes. He once says, if I don't defend Averroes, I won't have any friend in Padua and Ferrara. Yeah. And then he says, well, I take the liberty to criticize Averroes because it's important to be a heretic in philosophy if you want to find the truth. Apart from it, hereticum. And that's very interesting because it doesn't fit with our concept of Renaissance philosophy. The mainstream philosopher was Averroes. And if you want to do something new, you would have somehow moved against this current. If you ask Pomponazzi who's the mainstream philosopher of his day, he wouldn't say Ficino or Plato or a Greek commentator, he would say Averroes. In a sense, Averroes is very much at the center of Renaissance philosophy. I guess it follows from that that the debate that we have about Latin medieval tradition, whether there's this phenomenon called Latin Averroism in the late 13th century with the arts masters in Paris, it's a debate we don't really have to have about Italy and the Renaissance because in that context there just clearly is Averroism. Is that right? Yes, yes, absolutely. And they use terms for this. They use the term Averroista or scholar, Averroica, movement of Averroism. And here they usually use the term Averroista to say this about someone else. It's usually a derogatory term. The term of abuse. Yes, a term of abuse. It's easy to identify these people. We know the names of these people. There's a long line of teachers-student relationships in Padua University and other Italian universities. And there's some kind of group coherence. They know of each other, they criticize each other. And this is a new phenomenon. It's a quarrel about the proper direction of the movement. Okay. I guess then that one thing that's different about the Renaissance approach to philosophy in Arabic and the approach that we have now is that I would say there's general agreement among specialists that by far the most interesting philosopher from the Islamic world, at least in a sort of medieval period, is Avicenna, not Averroes. Averroes is kind of difficult to love. We have long commentaries on Aristotle. Okay. And you've already said that Avicenna in this context was very influential because of his medicine. So you wrote this work, the Canon, the Kanun in Arabic, which is a long kind of systematic presentation of medicine. To what extent does Avicenna also have a lot of influence on philosophical debates in this period? Avicenna's influence is not as penetrating as Averroes' influence in the Renaissance, but there's still some influence in important areas. For instance, in natural philosophy, theories of spontaneous generation of life, or in logic, the idea that second intentions are the proper object of logic. But it's not on the same scale anymore as it was in the 13th century. But some of these doctrines that were there for several centuries now resonate with people. And one of these doctrines, to take an example, is Avicenna's explanation of miracles and of prophecy. It's a naturalistic explanation. A number of philosophers such as Ficino, but also Pomponazzi and others pick this up. Avicenna speaks about three different kinds of prophecy, by imagination, by willpower, by intellect. Avicenna gives us a naturalistic interpretation of prophecy by focusing on the capacities of the human soul. A prophet with visions has a very strong imagination, a prophet who is able to change the exterior world, such as by producing rain, has a very strong willpower. The greatest prophet is basically a philosopher who understands everything. I'm just imagining listeners in England thinking, why would you want to produce rain? I want to remind them that this was originally written for people who live in deserts and in Tuscany. Yes. It's actually very useful to produce rain. Yeah, you should send some prophets producing dryness. But these theories get picked up by Renaissance authors. It's a new wave of reception. For instance, Pietro Pomponazzi writes a very interesting treatise on the causes of natural effects, also called on incantations. And in this treatise, he discusses a lot of miracles. And one miracle is in the town of Aquila of his time in 1520. There was a lot of rain, almost like in Britain, and they didn't know what to do. And then the population of this village came together. They prayed fervently. Then the rain disappeared, and the saint of the village, Saint Chilestene, appeared in the sky. OK, now Pomponazzi comes and says, OK, I have six explanations for this phenomenon. One is the stars somehow influenced the sky. The prayers didn't do any good. The second and third is by basically Arabs. It's because the prayers influenced over long distance the sky by emitting vapors or directly by immaterial causation of material effects. And this later theory would be by Afison. Kindi would have a theory where you emit rays, and then he used other explanations, such as that it was a psychological kind of problem with its population that just thought that there was something in the sky. So why does this resonate with Pomponazzi and other scholars in this time and not before? Perhaps because religion was a topic of philosophical thinking, very much so, and reform of religion too. Another factor is there was a drive towards more natural scientific explanation of phenomena. Some people have thought, well, this is Renaissance. They are interested in occult things, in alchemy, in general, in the occult sciences and so on. Magic. Magic, yeah. But with this, you can see that would be too superficial to say. It's really to try to explain difficult effects where you today have electricity or magnetism or have different theories of gravitation for long distance effects. Pomponazzi wanted to explain the torpedo fish, the magnet miracles of prophets. And that's why he was drawing on Avicenna and Al-Kindi. And in fact, that's quite typical. I think also of Arabic philosophy, they were very strong in natural explanation of phenomena. And they would actually prefer these naturalistic explanations that you get from a figure like Avicenna to be in a way more obvious and easy answer, which is that God just does it. Yeah, one of those six explanation is that God just does it. But there are other possibilities. Right, so he's just giving you the option of thinking about it rationalistically rather than appealing directly to divine power. Yes. Okay, interesting. Before we stop, actually, let me just come on to something that you kind of hinted at just now, which is the interest in all these occult sciences, one of which is astrology. At least we would nowadays think about that as an occult science. I guess over the whole podcast series, we've seen that astrology often is connected to philosophy and also that astronomers have often been astrologers. One could think here of Ptolemy and late antiquity, for example. I was struck reading in your book about the transmission of Arabic sciences into the Renaissance Latin tradition that there was a lot of debate over the status of Arabic astrology and in particular a kind of competition between the merits of Arabic astrology and the merits of Greek astrology. So could you say something about that? Yes, we have such a discussion, the antagonism between Greek and Arabic traditions in many corners of Renaissance thought. In medicine, in philosophy and in astrology, humanists would say, don't read Averroes, read the Greek commentators. Or they would say, don't read Avicenna, in medicine read Galen and Hippocrates. And in astrology, they would say, don't read Abou Ma'asha and Al-Khabisi, but Ptolemy. In astrology, that's very interesting, of course. I mean, it's a pseudoscience from my point of view today, but it's intellectually very interesting to study it in the past. And if you look at a chart, a map of the sky of the Renaissance, it's like a chess field. It has certain rules and various strategies, what you can do with it and how you can read it. Now the problem with, for instance, with Pico della Mirandola, he wrote a book against astrology. And in this book, he also tries to reform astrology and make it more Ptolemaic. But Ptolemy, in the second century after Christ, wrote a big book on astrology that had Trabepolis, the four-book book. This book is more or less the black sheep of Greek astrology. It is very unlike the other astrology we have. It's very theoretical. You can't do really astrology with it. Many things that later appear in Arabic astrologers are in other Greek astrologers, as we know today. But the humanists couldn't see that really. They were attacking Arabic astrologers for what was basically, to a large extent, also Greek. It was a label, the Greek, which was somehow an ideological label. So an author like Pico was basically attacking Arabic astrologers like Abu Ma'shar for diverging from the Greek tradition, even though what was actually happening was that the Arab astronomers and astrologers were using Ptolemy in a more thorough way. Is that right? Yeah, they were also using other Greek scholars, like Dorotheos of Thedon, which the humanists didn't yet know. Which we know only today. And Dorotheos had been transmitted via Persia and Arabic into the West. But perhaps it's important still to add something about humanists, because I've been talking today, and we both about these traditions that are very academic and happen in the universities. And I don't want to give the impression that humanists were not interested in Arabic sciences. In fact, the radical humanists didn't like it. But humanism is not a uniform movement. You have many different shades. A good number of humanists actively engaged and promoted Arabic sciences. They were very interested in the lives and works of Arabic scholars and wrote biographies. They were involved in the translation movement. And a good number of them tried to produce new Latin versions in the Latin of the day, in the numinalist Latin of the day. Canon in numinalist Latin we have from Ledesma in Spain. Also, some humanists contributed to philosophy and medicine by comparing with the Greek. It was very fruitful, in fact. And some, like Domenico Grimani, financed translations from Hebrew into Latin. That is, we don't have two clear-cut camps here. That would be a cliche view of the Renaissance. It's really intertwined. And you get Grimani, Domenico Grimani, for example, is admired for his collection of Greek manuscripts. And he's visited by Erasmus. But he's also the patron of a various translations. And that's the Renaissance. OK. Thank you for now very much to Dag Hasse for coming on the podcast again. I much enjoyed it. And please join me next time here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Measure of All Things, Renaissance Mathematics and Art. My grandfather on my father's side was a brilliant engineer who designed jet engines. His brother built his own plane by hand in his garage and his sister had a PhD in biochemistry. My grandmother and her sisters all had degrees in mathematics, and then there's my father who has always loved numbers just as much as he's hated vegetables. He worked in computing, having been a math prodigy who won statewide competitions as a high school student. Once my twin brother and I received phone calls from him on the same day to congratulate us on being exactly 33 and a third years old. I have an aunt who's a wizard at business administration and my non-existent sister is an expert on imaginary numbers, so it would be fair to say that mathematics runs in my family, but it ran right around me. My feeling about math is much like my feeling about using a motorcycle to jump over a row of burning cars. Amazing, wondrous even, but something I'd just as soon leave to other people. Rather than reflect upon my failure to carry on a family tradition, I comfort myself by telling myself that I'm in good company. Many philosophers have admired mathematics while failing to work seriously at it themselves. Aristotle, for example, wrote no technical treatises on geometry, astronomy, or music, but his posterior analytics, which we just saw taking center stage in the methodological theories of Zabarella, is full of examples involving triangles. And the reason is not far to seek. Mathematics seems to offer the ultimate example of certain rigorous human knowledge. If you ask someone to name something that they are most definitely sure about, they're likely to give an example like 2 plus 2 equals 4. And back in the Renaissance, people felt the same way. The 16th century mathematician Giovanni Battista Benedetti wrote a treatise called On Mathematical Philosophy, which called on Aristotle's authority in proclaiming the absolute certainty of this discipline. And if mathematics is truly philosophical, as suggested by Benedetti's title, then any philosopher worth their salt would have to get far beyond the level of 2 plus 2 equals 4. Nowadays, people tend to think of the humanities as roughly the academic disciplines that don't involve numbers. But the original humanists thought of mathematics as a central part of ancient philosophical wisdom. Or at least some of them did. Leonardo Bruni was not one of them. Sounding not unlike me at the age of 15, he gave the excuse that the subtleties of arithmetic and geometry are not worthy to absorb a cultivated mind. But for the most part, humanists were eager to study manuscripts of Archimedes, Euclid, and other ancient mathematicians. Such works took pride of place in Renaissance libraries. Lorenzo de' Medici, for instance, collected manuscripts of Euclid and Theon of Alexandria, and for the work on mechanics, ascribed falsely to Aristotle. Italy was an epicenter for mathematical knowledge in the 15th century, as we can see from the fact that intellectuals from elsewhere in Europe came there to study and get access to texts that were unavailable elsewhere. Take the astronomer Reggio Montanus, who came to Italy from Vienna and met a who's who of humanist scholars, Bessarion, Alberti, Theodor Gaza, Nicholas of Cusa, and George Trapezuntius. These visitors even got into the spirit of humanism by joining in the petty feuds that so enlivened the era. As a devotee of Bessarion, Reggio Montanus dutifully attacked the translation and commentary that Bessarion's rival Trapezuntius devoted to this central work of ancient astronomy, Ptolemy's Almagest. Equally in the spirit of the age was the rhetoric of recovery and revival that surrounded the philological study of ancient mathematics. In the 16th century, by which time key works of mathematics were available in printed editions, scholars were still boasting that they had rescued this discipline from its formerly perilous state. Raphael Bombelik proclaimed, I have restored the effectiveness of arithmetic, imitating the ancient writers. As usual, such self-congratulation went together with denigration of the achievements of the medieval era. The scholastic calculators who applied mathematical concepts to physics in the 14th century were, as I've mentioned before, studied in the Italian universities, but the humanists were for the most part not impressed. In this case, Bruni was more representative when he said that names like Hatesbury, Ockham, and Swains had filled him with horror. As much as they could, the humanists sought to trace mathematical insight and innovation to the ancient Greeks. But they had to admit that progress had been made in the medieval period, especially in the Islamic world. There, Al-Khwarizmi made breakthroughs in algebra, Ibn al-Haytham, Latinized as Al-Hazen, gave the most accurate account of optics to date, and astronomy was brought to new heights of sophistication. This was recognized in such works as Lives of the Mathematicians, written by Bernardino Baldi in imitation of Diogenes Laertius's Ancient Lives of the Philosophers. Baldi, whose name calls to mind another characteristic that runs in my family, was one of several interconnected mathematicians in the 16th century active in the city of Urbino. The founding figure was Federico Comandino, whom Baldi predictably enough credited with having returned ancient mathematics to light, dignity, and splendor. A student of Comandino, Guido Baldo dal Monte, could not help agreeing, saying that his master had written commentaries on Archimedes that smell of the mathematician's own lamp. Comandino wrote on pure mathematics, as well as applied topics like sundials and calculating a body's center of gravity. His successors followed suit. Guido Baldo anticipated Galileo's famous analysis of projectile motion as having the form of a parabola. He even proposed a nice experiment for establishing this. If you cover a ball with ink and roll it up a blank, inclined surface, you'll see that the track it makes is shaped like an arch. Guido Baldo and Baldi were also devoted to the study of mechanics. They thought that Archimedes had worked out the mathematical details of theories that could be found in more schematic form in the supposedly Aristotelian mechanics. As Baldi put the point, Archimedes followed completely in the footsteps of Aristotle as far as the principles were concerned, adding however the refinement of the proofs. The study of mechanics showed how powerful it could be to combine mathematics with empirical observation, precisely the combination that would very shortly be enabling Galileo to make his profound scientific discoveries. It was also useful in practical terms, as we can see from the example of clock building, which transformed perceptions of time during the Renaissance. Imagine experiencing the transition from keeping time by the motions of the sun to having bells mark the time from church towers in your city. Excellent! It was now possible to be late to meetings. If you lived in Bologna, you'd have the humanist Bessarion to thank for this, since he collaborated on the construction of an astronomical clock there. The result was that, as never before, time was money. Already in 1353, Petrak had spoken of the price of time, and in his writings on household economics, Leon Battista Alberti encouraged his readers to be thrifty with their days and hours. Time is a most precious thing, and needs to be spent as efficiently as possible. I avoid sleep and idleness about Alberti, and I am always doing something. The name of Alberti takes us inevitably to another, more famous application of mathematics, the visual arts. Before you listen to the last several dozen episodes of this podcast, this would probably have been the first thing to come to your mind upon hearing the phrase Italian Renaissance. Even if you've never set foot in a museum, you'll have seen images of the sculptures, paintings, and buildings of men like Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Raphael, and so on, whether as dorm room posters or refrigerator magnets. And there's quite a lot of mathematics in the background of those images, literally. Take da Vinci's Last Supper. You probably know what it looks like, more or less, but you may have to call it up on the internet to notice that the details on the walls and ceilings surrounding the apostles and Christ at the table provide a lovely example of single point perspective. Notice that the lines of perspective converge on Christ's head, a use of geometry in art to make a theological point. Perhaps less familiar is the painting called Tribute Money by Masaccio. It shows Christ surrounded by a circle of figures, again literally, in that he is the center of that circle. The arrangement of figures has both spiritual and aesthetic weight, with the 13 apostles clustered tightly around the savior in a beautifully orchestrated portrayal of physical space. To learn how the effect was achieved, read Alberti. When painting a crowd, he advises, you should put the heads of the figures along the same horizontal line in the painting, but their feet at different lines. This gives the impression that they are the same height, yet standing at different distances from the viewer. It's only one of the many handy tips you can find in Alberti's writings on art, the most important of which are on painting and on the art of building. It's pretty obvious that architecture involves a lot of mathematics, which is one of several reasons I spend my time constructing arguments and not buildings, but perhaps less so with painting. Yet Alberti promises in the preface to his treatise on painting that the first of its three books will be devoted entirely to mathematics, and so it is. He says that the artist should be expert in all the liberal arts, but most especially in geometry, because without an understanding of this discipline, it is impossible to depict space convincingly. In particular, one needs to understand the geometry used in the discipline of optics. Alberti looks back to Euclid by way of Ptolemy and Imnal Haytham, among others, as he explains that eyesight can be modeled as a pyramid, whose apex is at the eye and whose base is at the visible object. The pyramid is considered to be made up of lines, which stand either for visual rays extending from the eye to the object, or for rays bouncing off the object and reaching the eye. For the purposes of art, says Alberti, there's no need to decide between these two theories. The extreme rays, which are the outer bounds of the pyramid, allow eyesight to grasp the outline or shape of the object that is seen. So this is why Alberti is speaking of a pyramid rather than a visual cone, as was often done in treatises on optics. If you're looking at a slice of pizza, the rays are arranged in a pyramid whose base is triangular, not circular. The reason things look smaller when they're further away is that the visual pyramid for a more distant object has a smaller base. Meanwhile, the rays inside the pyramid take on the color of what is seen, like a chameleon. All of this is just Alberti's account of normal vision. In the case of a painting, we have to imagine the surface of the picture as a meeting between the visual pyramid, whose apex is at the eye, and a pyramid of rays coming from the virtual world of the painting, whose apex is the vanishing point of perspective. Without getting into further details, you can see how some fairly serious geometry is going to be involved in getting the painting right. Getting the correct representation involves working out what mathematicians call a section, like conic sections in the case of a cone, or what Alberti calls a certain cut of the pyramid. In the case of a pavement or a wall with square panels, like the one in da Vinci's Last Supper, you can actually do the geometry with a straight edge. But for more complex forms, Alberti gives another useful tip, which is to suspend a diaphanous veil between yourself and the scene to be painted, and mark on the veil where the objects appear on this vertical plane. This can then be used as a pattern for the painting itself. Through such devices, the artist quite literally takes the measure of the subject found in nature. In fact, there's a sense in which the subject of every painting is proportion. This art renders the world in miniature, portrayed on a surface as it seems relative to the human viewer. This, speculates Alberti, may be what the ancient sophist Protagoras meant when he said that man is the measure of all things, that everything we see is measured against our own stature and from our own point of view. Another nice way that Alberti makes the same point is to say that if everything in the universe, including us, were suddenly halved and the image was not the same, everything would still look the same. We see here yet again, the Renaissance fascination with the individual, contrasting the limited perspective of each individual and what we might call the God's eye view, which is from no particular vantage point and would see each thing as it truly is. Along the same lines, if you'll pardon the expression, what we see in the painted image is not pure abstract mathematics, but the use of an abstraction in a particular viewing situation. Alberti understood this. In another treatise on painting, he remarked that the points considered by the artist are a sort of mean between a mathematical point and a quantity capable of measurement, perhaps like atoms. It's been observed that the geometrically ordered space of a perspective painting is a staged imitation of what we might if we were placed squarely before forms all lined up in parallel fashion. Alberti was sufficiently conscious of this artificiality that he went to the trouble of inventing a viewing box that kept the observer at exactly the right distance from the painted image. In the case of architecture too, he realized that the task was to negotiate between the abstract and the concrete. As Anthony Grafton has written in his intellectual biography of Alberti, On the Art of Building seeks above all to strike a balance between universal mathematical proportion and local site-specific adaptation. Alberti's ideal architect, says Grafton, is a godlike figure who imposes a mathematical order on unruly matter. This attitude was one that Alberti learned from his favorite source, classical antiquity. In particular, he took inspiration from the architectural work of Vitruvius and even divided his own treatise into 10 books in imitation of Vitruvius. But there was another more obviously philosophical ancient influence at work, namely Platonism. Alberti frequented Ficino's circle of Platonists in the 1460s and was called a Platonic mathematician by Ficino himself. Coming from him, that was obviously a great compliment. Platonism gave architects a way to think about their application of abstract forms to concrete buildings, as when they designed churches as a half-sphere, that is a dome, over a cube-shaped interior. This could be taken to represent heaven vaulting above the earth, but it was also a way of giving two of the five geometrical solids, mentioned in Plato's Timaeus, a more literal kind of solidity. And, even as Platonism was inspiring the architects, architecture was inspiring the Platonists. In his dialogue on love, Ficino explains the doctrine of Platonic forms by comparing it to the way the plan of a building appears in the mind of the architect before it is realized in stone. To grasp the idea itself, you must simply imagine that you subtract the matter mentally, but leave the design. This sentiment echoes what we find in Alberti's treatise on architecture, when he writes about drafting the plan for a building as a precise and correct outline conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination. And, just to confirm the parallel between applied mathematics in the visual arts and in mechanics, it's worth quoting the aforementioned Bernardino Baldi, who wrote that not all mathematical proofs apply to quantities separated from matter. Sometimes, such proofs are adapted to sensible objects and demonstrate the marvelous effects which occur in them. Of such sort are the proofs in perspective and mechanics. When Renaissance men like Alberti, Ficino, and Baldi traced such ideas back to the classical world, they found that the trail did not end with Vitruvius or Archimedes or even Plato. It ended with Pythagoras. This shadowy, indeed nearly mythical, presocratic philosopher was often held up as a moral exemplar, and was also the ultimate authority for the idea that the cosmos is fundamentally mathematical. Pythagoreanism ran deep in Renaissance humanism and Platonism. It manifested in everything from the circular design of those utopian cities we discussed a few episodes back, to Ficino's excitement over the fact that Plato died on his own birthday and at the age of 81, which is 9 squared, to Pico della Mirandola's choice to defend exactly 900 theses at Rome, the number, he said, of the excited soul. The mathematician Baldi went so far as to compose a lengthy biography of Pythagoras, whom he called the prince of Italian philosophy and inferior to God, but superior to all other men. To think like a Pythagorean meant discerning mathematical structures everywhere in nature and even beyond nature. For a Pythagorean portrayal of the natural world, you cannot beat On the Harmony of the Cosmos, written in 1525 by Francesco Giorgio or Zorzi. This work is influenced by Ficino's understanding of the history of philosophy and looks back to themes of universal harmony found in both ancient Platonists and biblical sources. For a Pythagorean portrayal of the supernatural world, meanwhile, there's Luca Pacioli's 1509 work On Divine Proportion, published with illustrations by none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli was both an accomplished mathematician and a religious preacher, and wished to show that the divine trinity can be understood in geometrical terms. Take for instance the golden section, a line divided so that the ratio of its shorter segment to its longer segment is the same as the ratio of the longer segment to the whole line. Pacioli suggests that the two segments and the whole line are a fitting image of the trinity, especially since the ratio at work is an irrational number and thus undefinable, like God himself. Pythagoras's influence also made itself felt, or rather seen, in the visual arts. Take the urban fantasy scape ascribed to Fra Can Nabbale, called the Ideal City. It's the ultimate distillation of the Renaissance fascination for classicism and mathematics into a single image. Or, check out what may be the most familiar visual representation of philosophy ever created, Raphael's School of Athens. In the middle, famously, are Plato and Aristotle, Plato pointing to the heavens and Aristotle with his hand held flat, symbolizing that virtue is a mean. But ignore them for now, and notice instead two figures towards the front of the scene, dominating the left and the right groups. They are Pythagoras and Euclid, the former writing in a book and representing arithmetic, the latter poised above a tablet with a compass and representing geometry. I think they really hold the whole thing together. Despite all this enthusiasm for mathematics and despite the excitement that Pythagoras produced in Philosophical Souls, the discipline did not have the most secure of footings in Renaissance institutions. Comandino complained that mathematics was insufficiently present at the universities, and with some justice. There were some positions for mathematical instruction, but these were not so numerous as those devoted to natural philosophy and medicine. Comandino himself trained originally in medicine, but switched fields when he saw how doctors failed to save the lives of ill family members. Some intellectuals managed to maintain an interest in both fields or even forge links between medicine and the mathematical arts. Alberti emphasized that a well-designed building promotes health, for instance by giving ample and pleasant spaces for taking walks as exercise. And Ficino called Pythagoras an expert in both medicine and music, in part on the grounds that music can be used therapeutically to maintain and restore health. In a couple of episodes, we'll be turning to the figure who, more than any other Italian Renaissance thinker, made a name for himself in both of these fields, Girolamo Cardano. But first, I'll be taking a more general look at medicine and philosophy in this period. I hope I can count on you joining me for that, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. You've probably heard of the placebo effect, in which patients respond positively to dummy medications like sugar pills. While there is controversy as to just how strong the placebo effect is and what causes it, some studies suggest that it can be astonishingly powerful. For instance, when it comes to pain relief, placebos may be half as effective as actual pain medication. This helps to explain the popularity of alternative medicine. Crystals and homeopathic remedies presumably don't affect the body any differently than sugar pills, but they still work insofar as they are effective as placebos. The effect also explains a lot about the history of medicine. It seems at first perplexing that doctors were respected experts in pre-modern societies, from ancient Greece and India to the medieval Islamic world, given that these doctors largely had no idea what caused diseases or how they could be cured. True, this was in part because they could sometimes offer real treatment. Cataract eye surgery was performed successfully in the Islamic world, for example, and effective therapies were also identified by trial and error. Much of the benefit offered by these early doctors, though, would have derived from the placebo effect. The drugs that were prescribed by a doctor like Galen or Avicenna would rarely pass muster in a modern trial, but merely receiving attention from such confident and renowned experts no doubt helped their patients nonetheless. We congratulate ourselves with having come a long way since these bad old days, now having learned to compare drugs with placebos in blind trials, but it turns out that the placebo effect was not unknown to pre-modern medicine. In the 16th century, Cardano, who counted medicine as one of his many interests, noted that a magic charm made dull a toothache simply because the sufferer believes in its power. And why not? When it came to matters of health, the people of this period needed all the help they could get. The Renaissance has been called a golden age of disease, beginning with the Black Death in the mid-14th century and featuring other bleak milestones like the outbreak of syphilis in Europe at the end of the 15th century. Italian city-states responded with genuinely useful measures, like the founding of hospitals. These were at first little more than hospices for the poor and sick, but increasingly acquired competent staff. Visiting Italy in 1511, Martin Luther, not an easy man to impress, marvelled that the hospitals were built like palaces, that best food and drink are given to everyone, that nurses are diligent, that doctors learned. The vectors of contagion were not yet well understood, though physicians did figure out that syphilis was sexually transmitted. Still, the sheer fact of contagion was obvious. This led governments to decrease sanitary regulations, including the 40-day seclusion for newcomers to trading cities like Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, which gives us the increasingly familiar word quarantine. There was even a controversy in late 16th century Rome about the safety of drinking water from the Tiber River. This being the Renaissance, the arguments turned on evidence from antiquity, as doctor historians debated whether aqueducts had been built to provide cleaner water, and wrote treatises on the health benefits of the Roman baths. Humanist expertise on ancient texts, including ancient medical literature, was one factor that made Italy a leading medical center in the Renaissance. Another was the university system. Bologna had always been associated with medical training, and the subject was also important at Padua, Ferrara, and elsewhere. These universities drew aspiring physicians and scientists from all over Europe, who then returned home, to spread medical learning in their home territories. To give just one example, the medical historian Nancy Suriase has calculated that out of 37 professors of medicine at the University of Erfurt in the 15th century, 16 had studied in Italy. This is comparable to the standing of Italy in legal scholarship. Indeed, nothing epitomizes Renaissance Italy's university culture better than the dispute over the relative superiority of these two disciplines, law and medicine. It was a question that attracted the attention of such sharp thinkers as the Averroist, Nicoleto Vernia. He took the side of medicine because of its close relationship to philosophy and its exemplary status as an application of proper scientific method. Another partisan of medicine, Bartolomeo Fazio, said that medicine is better than law because it involves an understanding of natural causes. What could be more ingenious, he asked, than to grasp through reason the composition, structure, order, and the very causes of the diseases of our bodies. Of course, we've seen many times in this podcast that the study of the law, too, had intimate connections to philosophy. But Vernia was not wrong to emphasize the dependence of medicine on the philosophy of nature. Learned medicine in the Italian Renaissance drew extensively on the 2nd century AD doctor Galen and authors influenced by him, especially figures from the Islamic world like Arasi, Imnocina, and Imrushed, known respectively in Latin as Razes, Avicenna, and Averroes. Like them, Renaissance physicians remain committed to the basic principles of Galenic medicine. Health and disease are determined in large part by the balance and lack thereof of the four humors, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. This can be maintained and restored in an emergency through interventions like drugs or bloodletting, but preferably through a healthful regime, which ideally should be tailored to each patient by his or her doctor, given the wide variation in individual bodily constitution. Renaissance also plays a role, as already taught by Hippocrates, in the treatise, Airs, Waters, and Places. Thus, doctors spoke of six factors that could be manipulated in order to preserve health – air, food and drink, exercise, sleep, evacuation, and emotional states. The points of contact with philosophy are many. The four humors have the properties associated with the four elements. For instance, yellow bile is hot and dry, like fire. Psychological and emotional health is related to ethics. The role of environment connects medicine to meteorology, which is why the aforementioned debates over issues like contagion and clean drinking water invoked ideas from Aristotelian philosophy. It should be said, though, that the partnership between philosophy and medicine was not always an untroubled one. Back in the 14th century, Pietro d'Abano had written a work called Reconciler of the Differences between Philosophers and Physicians, which itemizes and discusses the clashes between Aristotelian philosophy and Galenic medicine. One example was the different list of powers or faculties considered in medicine and in philosophical anthropology. Galenic doctors spoke of the so-called vital faculty seated in the animal spirit, and of spirit or pneuma coursing through the body from its origin in the heart. It was not so clear how to fit such ideas into the psychological theory outlined in Aristotle's treatise On the Soul. Furthermore, it was not usually thought that medicine was actually part of philosophy, like physics, meteorology, zoology, or botany. Medicine might take over principles from all of these disciplines, but it is an applied science, whereas the parts of natural philosophy are theoretical sciences directed toward the pursuit of pure knowledge and not toward practical action. One might compare the relation between architecture and mathematics, the former being concrete, the latter abstract. Zabarella captured the relationship as follows. There cannot be a good physician who is not also a natural philosopher, but there is a difference between them. Medicine is concerned only with accomplishing its purpose, while natural philosophy has no purpose to accomplish, but is only knowledge. This contrast lay behind the frequent motto, where the philosopher leaves off the doctor begins. In other words, the physician carries forward and applies what he has learned from physics. This idea was reflected in the teaching curriculum. The university-trained doctor would have studied physics or natural philosophy, and before that, logic, before coming to their specialist subject. Piazzo d'Abbano explained why doctors needed to become acquainted with these fields. Logic, since it is the condiment of all the sciences, just as salt is of food, and natural philosophy, since it shows the principles of everything. Doctors with this sort of training considered themselves to be far superior to mere practitioners like community surgeons and apothecaries who simply applied the deliverances of past experience without any conception of an underlying causal theory. In this too, the university physicians were echoing Galen, who criticized the ancient empiricist medical school for refusing to offer rational explanations for the efficacy of their treatments, and just blindly doing whatever seemed to work in the past. Here we might think is one reason that the bad old days were so bad when it came to medicine. University doctors were trying to learn from old books when they should have been abandoning the false theories in those books and learning from experience. But as usual, things are a bit more complicated. For starters, it was a matter of dispute which books the learned doctors should be reading. A pure humanist approach would encourage the exclusive study of Greek medicine, and some medical authors did take this approach. Nicolo Leoniceno, at the beginning of the 16th century, wrote a treatise called On the Formative Power, which rigorously adhered to Galen's account of embryology and mentioned authors who wrote in Arabic, like Varouis, mostly in order to disagree with them. Thus in his study of this work, modern-day scholar Hiro Hirai has concluded that Leoniceno was motivated by strong anti-Arabism and a steadfast love for the Greek sources. A particularly good illustration of the way Renaissance medical writers used ancient literature is supplied by the study of plants. Several cities saw the literal planting of botanical gardens, and at Padua there was a professorial chair just for materia medica, in other words for the study of plants and other ingredients used in drugs. No effort was spared in the ambition to recreate classical drug recipes, a project that called for skill in philology as well as botany. What exactly were various obscure Greek words for plants referring to? Some authors look back even further, writing about plants and stones mentioned in the Bible and discussing their healing properties. One of these was David de Pomi, born in Spoleto in 1525 and educated in Perugia. He wrote a lexicon of biblical stones, including a lengthy discussion of hyacinth, the stone not the flower, and its power to ward off the plague. I highlight his contribution in part because he was Jewish, a reminder that in Renaissance Italy, as in the Islamic world, Jews were strongly associated with the study and practice of medicine. Speaking of the Islamic world, for all the classicism of this period, most authors found it impossible to escape medical literature written originally in Arabic. The curriculum in Bologna called for the study of Arasi and Avicenna, along with Galen, and both authors were cited abundantly in Renaissance tracts on medicine. To cite again the historian Nancy Syriasi, she counts at least 60 Latin printings of Avicenna's canon from 1500 to 1674, with a particularly impressive case being the 1523 five-volume edition of Avicenna, together with later commentaries. One medical author, Sebastiano Preciani, went so far as to stipulate that any physician worth his salt should master Arabic, as well as Greek and Latin. That message didn't get through to a scholar named Andrew Graziolo, who offered a new translation of Avicenna without actually learning the original language, but this just goes to show the extent to which Arabic texts were absorbed into the world of Latin learning. This can also be seen from the frequent quotation of such authors. Take the anatomist Beringario di Carpi. He quotes Avicenna more than 1000 times and considers Rasi to be an authority second in importance only to Galen. But Beringario's field of anatomy demonstrates that authors of this period were interested in observation as well as books. It could hardly have been otherwise, since their reading of ancient and medieval sources emphasized the importance of empirical investigation in medicine. Galen prided himself on this. As just mentioned, he criticized the pure empiricists for their lack of theory, but he was also critical of pure rationalists, who ignored the hard-won fruits of experience and tried to work out all their treatments from first principles. The same message could be found in Avicenna, whose subtle account of scientific experience encouraged the simultaneous use of observation and causal theory. He even gave an example from pharmacology, namely the purging effect of a plant called scamini to illustrate how this works. Renaissance anatomists took this advice very much to heart and to all the other organs as well. Human bodies had not been dissected for research purposes since ancient Alexandria, well before Galen himself. But now this practice began again, with an annual anatomical demonstration established in Bologna already in 1405 and in Padua by the middle of the 15th century. Dissection, and unfortunately also vivisection, was also performed on pigs, which were thought to be anatomically close to humans, and on other animals as well. Beringario di Carpi first cut his scalpel, though hopefully not his teeth, on the corpse of a pig, under the instruction of none other than Aldus Manusius, the pioneer who printed the works of Aristotle in Greek. When he came to write on anatomy himself, Beringario emphasized the role of observation in this discipline, saying that it ultimately trumps the role of authority. While professing to be guided by, as he put it, sensation, the authority of the divine Galen, and various reasonings, he would not accept an anatomical claim found in Galen if he found contrary evidence in actual dissected bodies. This critical attitude was taken further by the most famous anatomist of the Italian Renaissance, Andreas Vesalius. He was actually Flemish, but became professor of surgery in Venice after first learning his trade in Paris. His work on the fabric of the body is distinguished by its itemization of mistakes committed by Galen. In keeping with the spirit of the age, Vesalius proclaimed that study of anatomy was only just recovering from a long period of ignorance during the Middle Ages. Apart from the obvious step forward that anatomical treatises were now based on actual anatomical dissection, Beringario and Vesalius made another breakthrough by including detailed anatomical illustrations in their works. Vesalius explained this in terms that should seem familiar to us after the previous episode, saying that mathematical treatises are much easier to follow thanks to the diagrams they include. Indeed, the case of anatomy shows us that medicine and artistic production could go hand in hand, just like mathematics and art. Alberti's On Painting, which we talked about last time, says that artists must become acquainted with the structure of the human body, since when we paint a person, we should first think about where the bones would be, then the muscles, and then re-clothe these with skin and flesh. The woodcut images found in Renaissance anatomical works are remarkable for their artistic ingenuity and imagination. Beringario's treatises already include arresting depictions of people calmly spreading open the skin of their torsos so that we can look inside, while the skeletons and muscle men of Vesalius strike dramatic poses as their flayed skin hangs from an elbow or hand. These illustrations are not just a substitute for the direct observations students could enjoy, if enjoy is the right word, during an anatomical display. They are idealizations, which make it artificially easy to see bodily structures that would be very difficult to make out in the messy gore of an actual autopsy, and which also convey the wondrous intricacy of the human body. Specialists in anatomy never tired of emphasizing the perfect design of the body, a theme they could find in their ancient sources. Galen's treatise on the usefulness of the parts is a lengthy paean to the exquisite functionality of human bodies, and Aristotle's zoological writings are notorious for their commitment to the idea of final causality, animal organs are shaped to pursue the purposes of the animal. This idea was central to the project of Hieronymus Fabritius, who was professor of anatomy at Padua beginning in 1565. As a good Aristotelian, he was interested in the parts of animals, not just humans. He published studies of individual animal organs like the eye, larynx, and ear, which express his Aristotelian belief in the functionality of these body parts. Indeed, he said himself that this distinguished his approach from that of Vesalius, who had been content to expose, literally, the structure of bodily organs without investigating their function. We can see Fabritius's approach as an application of the scientific method articulated at Padua by Zabarella. Anatomy is treated as a true empirical science, which begins with observation and works towards causal principles that explain what has been observed. In this case, this means determining the final cause, that is, the purpose or goal, of each organ, which will then explain the details of its physical structure. The result is a discipline that, in Fabritius's words, constitutes the true and solid basis of the whole of medicine and the ultimate perfection and consummation of natural philosophy. Notice here again the implication that medicine depends on theoretical natural philosophy without really being a part of philosophy. That too is something familiar from Zabarella, who was at pains to distinguish inquiry conducted solely for the sake of knowledge from medicine proper, which is an applied discipline that aims to produce health in the patient. This would be the philosophical rationale for the aforementioned disdain that many learned scholars of medicine showed towards mere practitioners. But not all scholars took this attitude. One man who had a more hands-on approach, who made detailed case notes on his medical practice and his own troubled medical history, was Cardano. His works bring together themes we've already been discussing, like mathematics and medicine, as well as themes we have yet to tackle, like magic and astrology. I mentioned him in passing in this episode, but like the human body, he deserves much more detailed inspection. And we'll get into him next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Man of Discoveries, Girolamo Cardano. I don't have much in common with Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, but I can at least say that, like him, I have spent a lot of time teaching German students about the history of philosophy. Hegel lectured on this subject many times, in Jena, in Heidelberg, and then in Berlin every year over the last decade of his life. His approach to the subject was rather different from mine, not least in his notorious dismissal of philosophy written in Arabic as involving no proper principle and stage in the development of philosophy. But I rather like the choice he makes when he comes to philosophy in the Renaissance. He starts off not with an obvious figure like Bruni, Ficino, or Machiavelli, but with several pages on Girolamo Cardano. Hegel's remarks are based especially on Cardano's autobiography, which he summarizes in part as follows, In his habits, outer life, and conduct, he went from one extreme to the other. At one moment he was calm, at another like a madman o lunatic, now industrious and studious, now dissolute and squandering all his goods. Naturally, in these circumstances, he brought off his children very badly. I can readily understand why Hegel latched onto Cardano, since he might be the philosopher from the Italian Renaissance whose personality comes down to us most vividly today. He was a prolific writer, as we'll be seeing, and scattered personal remarks throughout his many works. But it is his autobiography that gives the strongest sense of his personality. It covers the main events of his life. Born in Pavia in 1501, he studied in his home city and Padua, and taught mathematics and medicine at several universities, including Bologna in the 1560s. This followed the execution of Cardano's son in 1560, on the grounds that the young man had poisoned his wife, which no doubt encouraged Hegel's remark about Cardano's imperfect child-rearing. As if this tragedy were not enough, ten years later Cardano himself was charged with heresy, imprisoned for a couple of months, and made to recant his supposedly unorthodox views. But it's not for these biographical milestones that one reads Cardano's account of his own life, it's for such details as a description of his favorite meal, veal cooked in its own juice, the strange dreams and portents that have followed him through life, his talent for name dropping, with a whole chapter devoted to listing his friends, and another to listing the various prominent men who have praised him. To say nothing of Cardano's evident delight at his own genius, as when he tells us how many languages he was able to learn with no effort or study whatsoever. Indeed, a keynote of the text is its self-aware boastfulness. He informs us, twice, that a friend dubbed him the man of discoveries and was right to do so. Cardano reckons he has 40,000 significant discoveries to his name and about 200,000 minor ones. Cardano has no need to choose between the Aristotelian goal of contemplative fulfillment and the Stoic ideal of withstanding all misfortune, he finds it possible to achieve both. At one point, he even manages to brag about being average when describing his own appearance, "...so truly commonplace that several painters who have come from afar to make my portrait have found no feature by which they could so characterize me that I might be distinguished." Medicine, perhaps the most central of Cardano's many fields of expertise, is mentioned throughout the autobiography. No reader will soon forget the way he obsessively and frankly catalogues his physical and psychological ailments, which include fear of heights, insomnia, stuttering, excessive urination, and a decade of sexual impotence. Good thing then for his medical expertise, which has enabled him to devise the ideal exercise regime for preserving health. "...I have," he willingly remarks, "...reduced the whole to a system as is the fashion in matters of theology, with much profound meditation and brilliant reasoning." He wouldn't necessarily claim to be better at medicine than Galen and Apasenna, but it's only fair he should mention having lived longer than either of them managed. Actually, the talent for self-presentation is something else Cardano learned from Galen and then perfected. Cardano names Galen as a precedent for autobiographical writing, and many aspects of his life story ring Galenic bells. Like Galen, Cardano revels in telling stories where he humiliated rival scholars in debate or through superior medical diagnosis. He offers us a list of his own books, as Galen did, and like him is not shy in criticizing the books of others. In fact, the targets include Galen himself, whom Cardano does not hesitate to correct on points of medical therapy. Cardano freely admits that writing has itself been a way for him to fend off grief and maintain his mental and physical health. This might be why he wrote so darn much. About half of his voluminous output is on medicine, and goes well beyond the kind of book learning that he could have gleaned from reading Galen and Apasenna. He was a practicing doctor and, again like Galen, wrote up detailed case studies, most notably concerning his attendance on the Archbishop of St Andrews, whom he traveled all the way to Scotland to treat in 1552. He told the bishop to eat dry foods, since his body had been made overly moist by illness, and to chew gum, actually pistachio resin, to excite saliva, which would draw moisture out of the brain. Also, and more likely to be helpful, the bishop should get plenty of rest. While confessing to lack of expertise in surgery, Cardano encouraged the study of hands-on medical skills, complaining that contemporary medical education passes over such important disciplines as obstetrics, dentistry, surgery, and pediatrics, all the areas, as he wryly remarked, where the doctor's failure would be obvious. He was a great believer in maintaining and restoring health through careful regimen. Alongside his aforementioned program of exercise, he recommended a vegetarian diet, while avoiding some fruits. He blamed a bout of dysentery in his own childhood on eating grapes, and deemed melons so dangerous that they ought to be made illegal. Despite the occasional point of correction, Cardano was largely an admirer of Galen, though in what seems to have been a rhetorical exercise, he did compose a damning critique of his ancient role model as having had more luck than learning and displayed more vice than virtue. Of all medical authorities, though, the one he most admired was Hippocrates. Along with Ptolemy and Plotinus, Cardano named him as one of the three figures who were close to divinity in their level of insight, literally incomparable to other scholars, which is why he deliberately excluded them from his list of the greats. He excoriated the doctors of his own day for any departure from the advice given by Hippocrates, not least his ban on eating melons, and composed a series of commentaries on the Hippocratic Corpus, on which he lectured during his years at Bologna. Cardano also lavished praise on Avicenna, even preferring him to Galen, because of his superior moral character and the better organization of his works. Among his contemporaries, one figure he greatly esteemed was the anatomist Vesalius. In part this was because he thought the Vesalian theories were in harmony with the Hippocratic Corpus, and helpful in correcting the errors of Galenic anatomy. Always wary of uncritically following anyone, though, Cardano assured his readers that his policy was to believe not Vesalius, but his own eyes. Cardano thought far less, by the way, of Leonardo da Vinci. Having viewed the artist's anatomical drawings, he said that they were, "...by all means beautiful and worthy of such a famous artist, but completely useless, being the work of one who did not know the number of intestines. The fact is that he was a mere painter, not a physician nor a philosopher." Among the many things Cardano found to admire in Hippocrates was his teaching on the soul. This is on the face of it rather strange, because Cardano was a proponent of the soul's immateriality, whereas he ascribes to Hippocrates the view that the soul is nothing but heat. The reason Cardano likes this view is that it makes life and soul pervasive in the cosmos. Wherever you find heat, there would be some sort of soul present. Departing from Aristotelian cosmology, he asserted that even the celestial bodies possess heat, since they are alive. Still, the Hippocratic idea of soul as heat does in a way establish the immortality of soul because heat is never extinguished, but is a permanent feature of the universe. These ideas resonate with at least some of what Cardano himself wrote about the soul and the mind. I say some of, because he puts forward different ideas in different places and admits to difficulty in reaching a firm conclusion. Shortly before his death, he was still saying, I know souls are immortal, but I'm not sure how. One thing he was sure about is that Pompanazzi had been wrong to suggest that the human soul is tied to its body, needs the body as a basis for its operations, and dies along with it. To the contrary, Cardano argued, materiality impedes thought. This is why animals cannot think, because their bodies make this impossible for them. And the intellect of soul can certainly survive independently of the body. He is confident that Aristotle would agree with this, and goes so far as to argue that for Aristotle it should be possible that individual souls are reincarnated, being associated now with one body and then with another. Of course, Cardano doesn't dare to endorse the transmigration of souls himself, but he does flirt with the notorious doctrine of Averroism, which envisions a single intellect shared by all humans as the sole guarantor of immortality. Cardano likewise makes the intellect alone to be immortal, while lower functions like imagination and memory die with the body. He also intimates that there is a kind of universal, active intellectual power in whose immortality we partake. As he nicely puts it, the origin of all intellects seems to be the same for all, since human beings from very early on are endowed with the same principles, as in all swallows there is the same ability to build a nest. Still, Cardano distances himself from the Averroist notion that there is only one universal mind. Instead, each of us gets a portion of intellect, which is why we each have our own acts of understanding that are not shared with others. As Cardano says, the active intellect is within us and a part of us. Sadly, we cannot enjoy the activities of this intellect nonstop. It's an effort to divert the mind from, as Cardano puts it, the vexations of the body and the senses, such as pain, fear, pleasures, and hope. He knew whereof he spoke. If this was a man who got more than his share of intellect, he also experienced more than his share of pain and grief. It seems he was trying to distract himself from these travails by making all those discoveries and writing so many books. By reading and writing about science, he could retreat temporarily from a troubled bodily existence. I find his remarks about this rather moving. While I am actually writing this, my intellect is the things you grasp through what I have written. Medicine, while I discuss medical matters, arithmetic at the time that I was writing about numbers. So much so that, as must happen to everyone else who has been an author of various works, while I read over what I have written, I think myself different from the person I now am. Elsewhere, he speaks of the way that physical pain can be escaped by intense intellectual focus, though conversely, the pain may make thinking impossible. Fortunately, Cardano had a plan B, have fun. His autobiography contains a whole chapter on things in which he takes pleasure, to his credit, these include the joys of reading authors like Aristotle and Plotinus, but Cardano was also partial to a bit of gambling. Well, more than a bit actually. He makes it fairly clear that he is a gambling addict, even admitting that he once had to pawn his wife's jewelry and some family furniture to pay off debts. No wonder that, as he cheerfully remarks, he has wound up richer in the knowledge of nature's secrets than in muddy. The loss to his bank account turned out to be a gain to the storehouse of human knowledge, because his fascination with gambling led him to write a remarkable study of the mathematics of dice and card games. This pioneering work has been called the first text on the theory of probability. It sets out observations that may now seem obvious, for instance that the probability of a favorable outcome is the number of good outcomes divided by the total number of outcomes. For instance, if you need to roll 3 on a six-sided die, your chance of doing so is 1 out of 6. He also tries to work out the average result that should be expected over repeated trials, for instance what the average roll will be if you roll three dice over and over. In addition to articulating genuine insights about probability, Cardano also inadvertently displays how easily our intuitions go astray when thinking about it. He assumes, wrongly, that the chance of success over a certain number of trials is the number of trials times the chance of succeeding in one trial. Thus, if you need to roll a 3 on one six-sided die, then your chance of doing so in two rolls should be double of what it is in one roll, so 2 in 6. To see that this is wrong, consider that your chances of rolling a 3 after 6 rolls would be 6 out of 6, so a guaranteed success, but of course that is not the case. Cardano also makes some comments connecting the topic of probability to standard philosophical issues. He speculates about the connection between fate and luck, expressing doubt that the order of the universe would bother to affect a card game. But he also expresses a certain fatalism, suggesting that the outcome of a game of chance may be settled in advance, so it makes no difference what you do. He compares this to the way you are subject to the authority of the prince, whether you decide to stay at home or go out. With Cardano being Cardano, he wrote a number of mathematical works, of which the most famous is his Great Art, a study of algebra. Alongside some nice mathematical observations that even I can appreciate, for instance that the square root of a positive number can be negative, this book is revealing as concerns ideas of scientific originality and priority in the 16th century. For one thing, there is Cardano's characteristic boast at the outset that the work is so replete with new discoveries and demonstrations by the author, more than 70 of them, that its forerunners are of little account. Then there is his notorious inclusion of the method for solving cubic equations, which, stay with me here, have the form x to the third plus ax equals b. Cardano does not claim this among his many novel discoveries. He credits Niccolò Tartaglia for it and admits that Tartaglia would not want him to publish the secret, and in the event, Tartaglia was indeed furious. But Cardano claims an excuse, namely that another mathematician had discovered the same method a few decades ago, after which it was forgotten. This vignette could hardly be a more eloquent demonstration of the way ideas about originality were gradually changing in the Renaissance. Increasingly, scholars wanted to claim new innovations for themselves, which is also why Cardano was so flattered to be called man of discoveries. But the rules for scientific precedent remain unclear, and propriety was a matter of individual judgment, not commonly accepted practice. Perhaps Cardano was willing to risk annoying his colleague Tartaglia simply because he was so used to annoying people. His autobiography includes a long list of his critics and enemies, as if to balance out the list of friends and admirers. Among those who Cardano accused of attacking him for the sake of making a reputation for themselves, none was a more bitter opponent than fellow philosopher Julius Scaliger. Scaliger took issue with one of Cardano's most significant works on subtlety, a wide-ranging and enormous treatise dedicated to the most obscure aspect in each branch of study, as Cardano puts it with typical modesty. Scaliger hated it. He wrote a treatise containing 365 chapters, presumably so the reader might spend every day of the year contemplating Cardano's shortcomings. Anthony Grafton has called it the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective. It attacked everything from Cardano's pitiful Latin skills to the aforementioned ideas about soul and intellect. Remember that moving passage about transforming one's mind into the object of one's contemplation? Well, it moves Scaliger only to sarcastic abuse. Well done, Cardano, you who say that when you think of a horse, your intellect is nothing other than a horse. I wouldn't dream of taking a side in this dispute, but if I did, then Cardano would have just the book for me. It's a whole treatise on dreams, based to a large extent on an ancient guide to dream interpretation by an author named Synesius. Cardano offers a whole theory as to how different kinds of dreams are caused. They may, for instance, result from bad digestion or, on the other hand, from contact with the intelligible realm. In the latter case, they may divulge visions of future events. This sounds pretty far from anything we now recognize as genuinely scientific, but for Cardano the topic of prophetic dreams is closely connected to medicine. We receive prophetic dreams when the spirit that flows through the body is well prepared and at rest, which is why the dreams come when we sleep. The skilled interpreter, like the skilled doctor approaching each patient, must take into account the dreamer's way of life and his individual disposition. Cardano himself enjoyed many prophetic dreams and recounts them in his autobiography. He thinks that, at least in retrospect, he can understand the meaning of his visions. On one occasion he was on the verge of administering what would have been a fatal therapy to a patient, but was held back by a dream warning. Still, he admits that interpretation, like medicine, will always remain an uncertain business. Not only must the nature of dreams be infinite, the very analysis of them is infinite, the mind is infinite in its power, and the number of things is infinite too. No wonder he wrote so much. Cardano was obviously a remarkable individual, even by the standards of Renaissance Italy, which boasted plenty of remarkable individuals. Appropriately for an expert mathematician, he sums up the themes we've been pursuing in recent episodes, while also having interesting things about astrology and divination, a topic I predict we'll be covering soon. First though I want to dwell a little longer on the discipline that occupied so much of Cardano's attention. Not gambling, but medicine, though I bet you'll be fascinated by my discussion of health and illness in the Renaissance with Guido Giglioni next time here on The History of Polonio. Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about philosophy and medicine in the Renaissance with Guido Giuliani, who is professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Macerata. Hi, Guido. Hi. Thank you very much for having me today. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I guess the first thing to ask is what the Renaissance philosophers were reading when they did medicine or what Renaissance doctors were reading. How does their reading material differ from what was available in the medieval period, and how does Renaissance medicine in general differ from medieval medicine? It's a very important question, the one related to the sources of medical knowledge in the Renaissance. The most important source of information were, of course, books and texts. The difference with the Middle Ages is that, first of all, Renaissance medical practitioners had access to many more books, many more sources. Of course, the great majority of medieval texts, translations from antiquity, were still read, but we need to consider a new wave of books that were translated, for instance, directly from Greek sources. Here is the important element created by the humanists, who were scholars interested in recovering the knowledge of antiquity with a much more sophisticated philological approach to reading and editing and translating texts. So whereas in the Middle Ages, the main activity of translation and reception of ancient medical sources happened through the mediation of the Arabic sources, who already, especially in the ninth century, translated a great amount of medical texts from Greek antiquity, especially Galen, who was considered the most important medical author, in the Renaissance scholars and medical scholars, because often physicians were trained as humanists in the university, they could have access to texts in Greek, original texts in Greeks, through the mediation of Byzantine culture and through the arrival of Greek refugees and emigres coming from Constantinople after the fall of Constantinople. Right, so is the expansion of sources more to do with having better access to these really important authors like Hippocrates and Galen, or Anna of Avicenna, I guess would be another example from Islamic works? Yes, it was a better, more precise, accurate reading of texts, but I would also say it was maybe a different approach than the medieval doctors and learned scholars read texts of antiquity. I would say in a different way. Here we need to consider a particular aspect of medieval, let's say, knowledge and science, the so-called scholastic approach to knowledge, which was very logical, very systematic, and not necessarily very attentive to the cultural element, historical element in the reception of knowledge. So the new element in the red recovery and the rediscovery of classical texts of antiquity was a more historical, cultural assessment of those texts. For instance, an important source of information for doctors were herbal remedies, botany, and many texts, for instance Dioscorides, who wrote in the first century AD an important collection of material medical, that is, of remedies and drugs based on botany, was translated and read through sort of maniac Christians developed by the Arabic reading who introduced information about botany and herbal remedy that belonged to their culture. So there was an effort by humanist doctors to assess what was the original, what was culturally added when previous scholars were reading the same texts. So that actually sounds a lot like the whole process of absorption and reflection on philosophical works in the Renaissance as well. There's a movement into humanist appropriation of philosophy away from the scholastic philosophy, although scholastic philosophy continues alongside it. And to some extent, of course, it's the same people who are doing it. So you have humanists who are interested in philosophy and medicine. And for me, that raises the question of what they thought was the relationship between philosophy and medicine. Did they even think that medicine was part of philosophy, the way that they thought of physics, for example, as part of philosophy? It is a very complex question. In a way, the two disciplines, medicine and philosophy, were connected from the very beginning. Aristotle himself says at a certain point in the Parva Natural, a book collection of small treatises about nature, that there is a very close relationship between the doctor, the physician, and the natural philosophers, because the doctor dealing with notion of health and disease inevitably have to have a proper training in the fundamental principle of physics and natural philosophy. And Galen himself, who can be considered as important as Aristotle for the transmission of learning from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the early modern period, Galen himself saw his work as the work of a philosopher. He even wrote something. Sorry, you're going to say it. No, he wrote a treatise exactly dealing with this, saying that the best physician is also a philosopher. I wonder whether that goes the other way around, though. You could say, well, a doctor needs to have philosophical training because he needs to know about the four elements, say, to understand heat and cold in the body. But is the reverse also true? Does a good philosopher have to be a doctor? I would say yes. In this case, I would refer to Plato, who often referred to Hippocrates, this kind of almost mythical figure who represented a community of physicians between the late fifth and early fourth century before Christ. Plato looked at Hippocrates as a model of doing research, investigations. Not just about nature, but about human nature and human nature in a cultural and social context. I would say that in the time years especially, you can see how important it was for Plato to consider the medical aspects of the political and philosophical organization when he talks about the diseases of the soul and the diseases of the body. And how they were very connected and how they were an important condition for a future of political prosperity. Yeah, and of course that's what Galen commented on, the Timaeus as well. Exactly. And Galen himself, I think, especially in his work he wrote on the possible reconciliation between Hippocrates and Plato, which by the way is one of those works that is rediscovering the Renaissance, that was almost ignored before, not very considered. This text becomes very important. And the text where Galen talks about the relationship between the body and the soul, and where he says openly that the best philosophical approach is a combination of Hippocrates and Plato. So let me ask you a philosophical question about medicine, which I think is still really pressing for us today when we think about medicine, which is what the purpose of medical treatment is, or maybe a different way of putting it would be what health is. Because we might think that the goal of a doctor's treatment of the patient is just to make sure the patient doesn't die, or make sure the patient doesn't suffer from some kind of pain or suffering. But is it really right from the Renaissance doctor's point of view to say, for example, that the goal of medicine is to just prolong life? Or is it actually to somehow instill in the patient's body, and maybe even in the body and soul, some kind of more complex idea of flourishing? I mean, are they really going for the idea of flourishing human being, or are they just trying to sort of make you not sick? No, you're right. It's a view of health that was more complex than a pure medical understanding of health, or even using a sort of contemporary word, medicalizing view. For many reasons, intellectual and cultural and social, health was much more than just having a long life, healthy life, but included also component coming from ethics about happy life, civic commitments. For instance, it was very common for an individual living during the 15th, 16th century to consider his life or her life as something involved in society or in activity. There was this emphasis on the so-called primacies of contemplative life over purely theoretical life, which was instead a value that was much more considered in the past, during the Middle Ages or even before in antiquity. So I would say that in many discussions about health, one of the recurrent points was whether it's better to have a long life or a meaningful, intense, happy life, maybe shorter. And this is particularly evident in such authors as, I would say, for instance, Francis Bacon, who was also not just a philosopher, very interested in medicine, who contributed actually to medical knowledge, but also a politician, a political person. Or a doctor who was also a philosopher, there in Asa, like Girolamo Cardano, who lived in the first part of the 16th century and was not just a professor of medicine in Padua or in Bologna later, not just a practicing physician, but an author of philosophical treatises. And he often insisted that we shouldn't consider the length of life as the basic criterion to judge about the healthiness of one's existence, but also involvement with the reality and other aspects of one's life. One thing that Galen talks about a lot in his medical works is that the medical treatment you give someone also has to be tailored very carefully to the patient in question. And I wonder whether the Renaissance philosopher doctors like Cardano, for example, you just mentioned, whether they pick that up. And in particular, I think an interesting case here is what they say about women. You actually said just a minute ago that they think about the patient's his or her role in political life. Were you just being polite or did they actually talk about... No, actually not. And going back to the point about the relationship between philosophy and medicine and whether there was a specific philosophy that was medical. And this is another case in which we would say actually the physicians were different from the philosophers. We need to look at this also not purely intellectual terms, but also in an institutional sense. You have to imagine people that were trained as philosophers going for a particular profession in life that could be sometimes medicine or people that were instead more focused on the medical training of their studies. And so much so that there was this division of the path of the physicians and the path of the philosopher. And of course, one of the authoritative source of information for the philosophers was Aristotle and on the other side for the physicians was Galen. It's very interesting to see from the early Middle Ages on until the 17th, even 18th century, how doctors had their particular view of the world shaped by this genuinely medical philosophy and how philosophers less and less may be involved with Aristotle, but they also had their particular worldview about women. This is evident. It was very difficult to get rid, I think, for philosopher or a certain tacit, misogynist view of women because of Aristotle's philosophy. The use of certain images, especially the relationship between form, which is male, and the matter, which is usually attributed to the women. And also in natural philosophy was translated in such a way that the active principle was of a male origin. In theory of conception, for instance, in the Aristotelian view, the active principle comes from the male seed. And so on, the form is actually emitted in the organism through the male. And the intellect in a way is, it's supposed to be the full blossoming of this form. In the medical camp, that was different because Galen is very clear. Both the male and the female seeds and principle of reproduction contribute in a source of equal terms in the production of the new organism. And in some cases, in some development of the medical tradition, you will even see the womb as a very important organ, as a very important principle of generation. Some extreme cases can be, for instance, Paracelsus, as very important medical author of the Renaissance, for whom actually the parts of the female body, principle of generations, are in a way more important than the male counterpart. From the point of view of therapy, I would say that doctors were open to the observation and the cure of female patients. As much as male patients, we have famous important books of gynecology from antiquity. We have a specific field, which is actually the medicine for women, that became very important during the Renaissance, especially in the vernacular, when some of those treatises were either translated or written directly in the vernacular. When they did treat women, or men for that matter, so when they treat their patients, what kinds of things are they looking at? Do they administer drugs a lot? Do they do surgery? What are the standard tools with which a Renaissance doctor would actually treat you? I guess that probably everyone has in their head an image of leeches now. Yes, or phlebotomy. Yeah, phlebotomy, which is where they actually cut little cuts in your skin and bleed you out. And bleed you out. Presumably they offered more than that, let's hope. Well, probably the best remedy, the best therapy was still based on a particular manipulation of diet and food, and in a way some of the drugs, who were mainly of herbal origin, until Paracelsus and this kind of chemical revolution that Paracelsus introduced in the field of medicine. So before Paracelsus, I would say the remedies were mostly of an herbal nature. So first of all, diet was the most efficient approach, I would say. And then there was other form of keeping people healthy through a particular lifestyle, physical exercise, how to organize one life according to the rhythm of sleep and waking. An important element was how to control one's emotion. This particular aspect, control of passions and not to be overwhelmed, especially by the most dangerous passion from the point of your health, anger, fear and sadness, was a very important part of early modern Renaissance medicine. It sounds almost like... With a very long tradition, yes. It sounds almost like the Renaissance doctor is a kind of life coach, which makes me wonder whether part of the service they're offering could even go so far as trying to make you more virtuous, because we talked before about how they might be not just trying to prolong your life, but trying to make you more flourishing or even more capable of political engagement. And now you're saying, well, they're going to help your emotions be brought into check or made more appropriate. Would they go so far as to say something that Galen actually sometimes implied? If you want to be a virtuous person, then come talk to me and I'll tell you what to eat. It'll actually make you a better person. Would they go that far? Yes. There is an aspect of the rediscovery of Galenism in the Renaissance that is exactly related to this. There were form of very radical Galenism in the Renaissance. I just mentioned one treatise by a Spanish doctor, Huarte de San Juan, who wrote this book in which he wanted to show that mental dispositions, professions, abilities depended on the temperament, that is, the constitutions, the physical constitutions of one's body. And of course, he referred to Galen. Galen, we should remember, also wrote three or four treatises in which he wanted to show that following his ideas on medicine, you could become happier and to become more virtuous. So going back to the point about Renaissance doctors who were, let's say, meddling also with psychotherapy, to use modern terms, that was almost natural, given the specific tradition of medicine, but also the complexity of the new cultural panorama in the Renaissance. There were authors who were doctors, but also now they could read not just Aristotle, but Plato, who had been translated and commented upon by, for instance, Marsilio Ficino, who actually would suggest that the most important component in one's health was related to the mind. And so much so that I would say it wasn't just the use of the old proverb, mens sann and corpora sann, which means a sound mind in a sound body, but for someone like Ficino, it was the opposite, really, that the most important thing was the sound mind. On the other hand, some of what you were saying about the doctors, and I think, again, this is true of Galen himself, presupposes a very close relationship between what's going on in the soul and what's going on in the body, the idea apparently being, well, if you eat the right things, then your ethical dispositions will change, but we assume usually that the ethical dispositions are in the soul, in the body. So can we actually extract from this medical literature some kind of position on what we might think of as a question in philosophy of mind, so how the soul relates to the body, or are they resolutely unwilling to get into this area because it's too philosophical, so to speak? No, I think it was probably more common to do that kind of exercise at the time than now. For us now, it seems that it's kind of difficult to have a psychosomatic approach to our health. Of course, there are many attempts, there are books, but we feel that relationship between the body and the mind as difficult, complicated, something that needs to be argued over and over again. I think there was in the past, let's say before Descartes probably, let's say until the 16th century, there was an assumption that the body and the mind are however different, however belonging to maybe different realms or reality, the completely intellectual and the natural one. There was the idea that there was a certain porosity between the two worlds and the shift from one to the other was much easier. So for instance, going back to a fervent Platonic like Marsilio Ficino in 15th century Florence, he wrote three books actually on how to live properly in order to be a actually good scholar and maybe to be open to receive celestial influences from heaven. But the book is mainly about what to eat, what kind of drugs, if you're sick, what kind of wine, because those elements were supposed to be connected to the, let's say the life of the whole universe. And there couldn't be any disharmony between the body and the mind, and the mind needed a healthy body in order to perform properly. That's really interesting because I think people have this idea in their heads, and actually even I have this idea in my head that Platonism is really a philosophy where you have this radical contrast between immaterial souls and material bodies. And we tend to think of Aristotelianism as a philosophy that brings the soul much closer to the body, it's the form of the body, maybe it's nothing other than the dispositions or the capacities of the body. But what you just said makes it sound like the Platonists of the Renaissance also have this very holistic picture in which the immaterial soul, because they still think it's immaterial of course, but it's going to be integrated into this kind of organic unity, which is the physical cosmos as a whole. Yes, I agree. The mind and the soul, they find themselves for a source of circumstantial, more or less circumstantial reason, trapped within a body. And the best thing to do is trying to make the body a place where the mind can still perform as clearly as possible. Of course, at the end we know that there will be death and the mind will be freed from the constraints of the body, but Platonists in the Renaissance and maybe even later, I think at the 17th century, there are still Platonists, also in Cambridge Platonists, the important thing is to reach a point where the death is good, where you actually move to the other level of awareness and understanding, that is when you die, in a proper way. It strikes me that a lot of what you've said makes it sound like the Renaissance doctors were already doing a lot of what people wish doctors would do more today, paying attention to the whole patient and the patient's life, taking women seriously, just as seriously as men thinking about the patient's emotional state as part of their medical condition and everything. So I think that's a really interesting thing. I would say so, yes. Okay, well that seems like a good note to end on. So thank you, Grido Caglione, very much. Thank you very much. For coming on the podcast. And please join me next time when I'll be looking at other topics in Renaissance philosophy here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Spirits in the Material World. Tilesiu and Campanella on Nature. If Aristotle or any one of the legion of Aristotelian philosophers who worked in the 2000 years after his death were confronted with a textbook on modern physics, they would be stunned by many new and unfamiliar ideas, from gravity to magnetism to the structure of the atom. But they might be even more surprised at what was missing, where they would ask themselves are all the references to the four elements, to the natural places toward which the elements tend, fire and air moving upward, water and earth downward, where above all are the references to forms. For the Aristotelians, understanding nature was in large part about understanding forms, both accidental and substantial. Ultimate matter, in their worldview, was pure potentiality to receive form. So whenever scientific investigation revealed something about determinate properties, causal powers, or the natures of things, this was a matter of understanding the forms that reside in matter. There was no one moment that European philosophy gave up on hylomorphism, that is the theory that all things are constituted from matter and form, in Greek houle and morphe. Science did not move from Aristotelian physics to modern physics in just one step. The change was instead, and as usual in the history of philosophy, incremental. This is nicely illustrated by the profound challenge posed to Aristotelianism in late sixteenth century Italy by several thinkers, above all, Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella. Their natural philosophy was explicitly presented as a rejection of Aristotle and put forward with appeals to the value of freedom in philosophizing. As Campanella said, such freedom led to the sort of innovations that Europe was seeing at this time, ranging from the telescope to the printing press and gunpowder weaponry. All the new doctrines, he observed, please and render admirable both the state and religion, and they make it so that subjects turn more willingly to their duties. From foreigners, they elicit admiration and obedience. Yet the self-consciously original and innovative new science, put forward by Telesio and eagerly adopted by Campanella, was itself a version of hylomorphism. Telesio made this point himself. In his treatise On the Nature of Things, first published in 1565 and appearing later in revised editions, he argued that if Aristotle had been more consistent in following his own principles, he would have reached very different conclusions. In particular, he reminded readers that in the first book of Aristotle's Physics, we are told that all change requires three factors. Something that undergoes the change, the feature that is acquired or lost as a result of the change, and the absence of that feature. Abstractly speaking, we can say that what undergoes change is matter, the positive feature is form, and the lack of form is privation. Yet Aristotle's own physical theory looks more complicated. Even his basic elements have more than one positive feature, since fire, earth, air, and water each have two primary features. For example, fire is hot and dry, water is cold and wet, and so on. Telesio wanted to keep things simpler. For him, there were only three principles. Matter, heat, which plays the role of form, and the absence of heat, also known as cold. With these three principles, he thought, he could explain the whole universe. Thus, the Telesian universe is Aristotelian in general structure and un-Aristotelian in detail. Neither Telesio nor Campanella after him adopted the new Copernican astronomy, so they still had the earth unmoving at the center of the universe, just as Aristotle had said. But where for Aristotle the celestial realm was constituted from a fifth element that is neither hot nor cold, Telesio said that the luminous heavens are the body that is primarily hot, heat being closely associated with light. The earth by contrast is cold and is thus opposed to the nature of the heavens. These two, earth and the heavens, are the first bodies in our cosmos. Other bodies are formed through their interaction, as the active principles of heat and cold struggle against each other producing ever more complex natures. Most basically, heat causes expansion and cold contraction, which is where moisture and dryness come from. These two properties are derivative from hot and cold, not on a par with them, as Aristotle believed. More complicated phenomena arise thanks to the stars, especially the sun. As they move over the earth, the increased heat in the affected parts of earth causes them to transform into vapors, fluid, metals, and stones. More generally, variation in heat and cold due to heavenly motion can produce the bewildering multiplicity we see around us. According to Telesio, heat and cold are not bodies. Instead, body is that which they act upon, and for him this is matter. What undergoes change, in other words, is not a mere seat of potentiality for the reception of form, as in Aristotelianism, it is a corporeal mass, a stuff, whose total quantity never changes. In a dramatic shift away from the Aristotelian tradition, Telesio recognizes bodily matter, heat and cold, as substances, and thinks that all the more complex natures that arise in matter are accidental to it. Though matter has its own rudimentary nature, insofar as it is corporeal, it is inert and passive, even dead as Telesio puts it, echoing a remark made by Plotinus, who called matter a decorated corpse. Matter and the earth made from it have a tendency to move towards the center of the cosmos, but this is not a natural downward motion like the one Aristotle ascribed to earth and water, rather it is just a matter of falling, since matter has no active power at all. Cold and hot, by contrast, are active principles. Here he has in mind not just the capacity to warm and chill, or as we already saw, to cause expansion and contraction, heat and cold also tend to pursue what is similar to them, as when fire comes together to make ever larger blazes, and to repel what is dissimilar to them, as when water is boiled away by fire. So the two fundamental principles are always working to preserve themselves and destroy what is contrary to them. This is an observation with far reaching implications. It leads Telesio to claim that the two agent natures, heat and cold, must always be capable of sensation. We lazily assume that sensation must involve sense organs, but this is not the case, as such organs are needed only for more sophisticated forms of sensation. The mere fact that cold and heat flee one another shows that they are in a very crude way, able to respond to what is around them, while stones and plants have yet more sophisticated forms of sensation. As Campanella will later explain in his exposition of Telesio's views, sensation is really just the ability to respond to being affected. So we should count warm, fluid air, for instance, as being highly sensitive because it shapes itself so readily around other objects. In general, says Campanella, heat and light are the most sentient things in the world and the entire world senses in greater or lesser degrees. More advanced creatures like animals and humans have a higher form of sensation, but this is still a fundamentally physical phenomenon. In humans, sensation occurs when the warm spirit that flows through the body is affected by things in the person's environment. The spirit Telesio is talking about here is a borrowing from the medical tradition. Galen explained all manner of animal capacities by appealing to pneuma, a subtle warm and airy sort of breath that flows around the body. Yet again, Telesio is putting a traditional idea to untraditional ends. For him, the spirit is not the instrument of the soul, as doctor philosophers like Avicenna and Ficino had taught, the spirit just is the soul, so the composite of spirit and body is the same as the whole animal. Here we can see the extent to which Telesio has indeed departed from hylomorphism, as the Aristotelians understood it. The soul is no longer a substantial form, but warm air or spirit circulating through the body. However, this literally breathtaking materialism comes with a major caveat in the case of humans. Telesio believes that, in addition to the seed-like soul that is spirit, humans alone among animals also have an immaterial divine soul, which is created directly by God. It turns out then that his materialist revision of Aristotle is complemented by a borrowing from Platonism. Yet Telesio's novel philosophical approach shows itself even here. He gives the divine soul little importance when it comes to our knowledge of the natural world because it is dependent on the deliverances of sensation. This in fact is how Telesio begins his treatise On the Nature of Things, by saying that where the ancients used abstract reasoning to do science, he will take recourse only to sensation. The Aristotelians insisted that true knowledge is universal in character and involves grasping the essences of things, but Telesio argues that universal thinking is inferior to sensation. It is really just a vague generalization of what we have experienced. To recall that all the giraffes one has encountered had long necks is wholly derivative of and less informative than the knowledge one has when inspecting a particular giraffe. Campanella gives the example of seeing something approach from a distance, first thinking it is some sort of animal or other, then realizing it is a human, and only then realizing which particular man is coming. This illustrates the fact that grasping a particular true sensation is more informative than thinking abstractly about universal species and genera. Yet it was the latter that the Aristotelians supposed to be the most appropriate for science. Francis Bacon famously called Telesio the first of the moderns, and you can see why. Already in the 1560s he was proposing a new natural philosophy that resonates with those that will emerge in the 17th century. But I want to emphasize again the way that this grew out of a close engagement with Aristotle. Even the appeal to heat and cold as fundamental explanatory principles has some basis in Aristotle's writings, in particular in the meteorology, whose newfound importance during the Renaissance we've had occasion to mention in a previous episode. In fact, even Telesio's irreverence toward the ancients could find support in the ancients themselves. While attacking Aristotle, he quotes Aristotle's own justification for criticizing his teacher, Plato, namely that we must value truth above even our friends. Likewise, Telesio's adherent Antonio Percio, who wrote a treatise on the nature of fire and heat, in defense of this new natural philosophy, said that the ancients valued scientific innovation, so why shouldn't the moderns? One reason that followers like Percio appreciated Telesio was that he offered the chance to provide new answers to old questions. Telesio wrote a treatise on colors, for instance, in which he explained the spectrum between white and black in terms of light giving heat and its absence. In medicine, too, it seemed useful to appeal to heat and the mechanistic processes derived from heat. We saw that already with Cardano, who appreciated Hippocrates' identification of soul with heat. For a concrete application of the idea, we can mention Telesio's theory of the pulse, according to which it is caused by the compression and expansion of spirit in the vessels, which results when the heart dilates and contracts. The phenomenon of sleep was another point in favor of Telesian theory. It is no coincidence that we are warmer when we are awake, engaging in sensation and other activities and cool down when the bodily system shuts down at night. With all due respect to Percio, the most famous thinker to be carried away with enthusiasm for this new theory was Tommaso Campanella. We already met him as author of the famous utopian work City of the Sun, but that is only the most renowned of his many writings. He also composed treatises on politics, theology, the evils of Protestantism, metaphysics, and natural philosophy with the latter part of his output heavily influenced by Telesio. As a young scholar, Campanella even traveled to meet the great man, arriving just too late and getting to see only Telesio's corpse. This being the Renaissance, Campanella dealt with the setback by writing a poem. He had encountered Telesio's ideas during a period of intense study which involved surveying ancient literature and more recent offerings, seeking to compare what he found with the book of nature. This was a favorite metaphor of Campanella's. God has given us two books, the Revelation of the Bible and the world itself. In a typically provocative line, he observed that the universe is the better of the two books for those who know how to read it, since it is inscribed in living letters, not like scripture in dead letters, which are only signs, not things. Campanella shared Telesio's delight in complaining about Aristotle's failures, to read the book of nature correctly. He was thus at pains to distance his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, from the stain of peripateticism. Surely, Aquinas could have been no follower of Aristotle, he observed, given that he would hardly have defied the condemnations the Parisian authorities aimed at Aristotelian philosophy. If Aquinas nonetheless explored that philosophy, it was only to expose its weaknesses. But Campanella was no more slavishly committed to the Church's teachings than those of Aristotle. He spoke up in defense of Galileo, writing an apology on his behalf in 1616. As he wrote to Galileo, his goal was to show that, This despite the fact that, as I mentioned, Campanella was not himself persuaded by the Copernican astronomy, being expounded by Galileo, he simply bridled the notion that scientific inquiry would be met with suppression and censorship. No doubt he recognized something of himself in Galileo, having seen the works of his hero, Telesio, put on the list of prescribed texts by the Inquisition, and having himself been arrested for heresy. As we saw in the episode on Utopias, Campanella spent 27 years in prison, and wrote many of his works during that time, including the defense of Galileo, making it an even more impressive act of courage. Already before these travails, Campanella must have known he was flirting with danger by embracing Telesian philosophy. When he was still a young prodigy, a cardinal asked to assess him for the Duke of Florence said of him that he was to the ignorant, but that possessed neither substance nor foundation. To promote Telesio's natural philosophy was to court controversy, and in fact Campanella's first work was a rebuttal of a treatise entitled Defense of Aristotle Against Telesio by Giacomo Marta. Not content to argue for the codency of Telesio's conception of nature, Campanella added invective aimed in Aristotle's direction, dismissing him as a non-Christian of poor character. Far more important than Aristotle's personal failings though, were his failings as a philosopher. We should look not to him for truth, but to our own experiences. No less than Telesio, Campanella was devoted to the principle that philosophy should be grounded in sensation. While he allowed that it could be fitting to rely on authority, one should take heed only of predecessors who likewise took their guide from experience. But to these empiricist strictures, he added an emphasis on the primacy and importance of self-knowledge. He contrasted perception of external objects to the constant awareness we have of ourselves, which he called presential knowledge. Here Campanella is finding a bit more for Telesio's so-called divine soul to do, by making intellect or mind a self-directed power. Like Augustine before him and Descartes after him, he thinks that thoroughgoing skepticism can be defeated by appealing to the phenomenon of self-knowledge. Your grasp of yourself is one thing you cannot be wrong about. The mind is also our way of grasping supernatural things, that is, God and the angels, and our possession of it allows us to outlive the death of the body. In the end it will be through the mind that we achieve true happiness by contemplating the divine. As with Telesio, it looks like a healthy measure of Platonism has been mixed into Campanella's antidote to Aristotelianism. That impression is not a misleading one. Another author he admired and cited frequently was Marsilio Ficino. Ficino's revival of Neoplatonism may seem a strange combination with the down-to-earth explanatory accounts offered by Telesio's physics, but Campanella was able to find points of commonality. Notably that the Platonists recognized a world soul that vivifies the entire cosmos. Now this is not exactly what Telesio had wished to say. He held that air and stones are sensitive, not that they are insult. His was a theory of universal perception, not one of universal animation. But Campanella could find comments in Ficino that fit tolerably well with the Telesian culture, as with a passage from Ficino's commentary on Plotinus that spoke of a hot spirit nourishing the world and breathed out by the world soul. He also found common ground with Platonism when it came to the ultimate destiny of humankind. High-flown speculations about an immortal life contemplating divinity sound pretty far removed from a physical theory grounded in empirical observation, but remember that Telesio's active principles, heat and cold, constantly pursue their own preservation. When we look towards immortality, we're just doing the same. I said a few minutes back that the new science adopted by Telesio and Campanella had the virtue of providing new answers to old questions. One of those questions was, how exactly do the heavens influence the world down here where we live? By providing heat which comes through light. Telesio argued that light is not itself hot, but is produced as a kind of byproduct when it is reflected off a surface. There was another question to answer here though, how much did the heavens influence our lower world? Sure, we can see that the moon affects the tides and the sun makes it hot, but can you for instance use observations of the planets to predict the future of a newborn child? To determine the best time to launch a war or embark on a voyage? In short, is it possible to do astrology? This is a topic on which Campanella changed his views. He began as a critic of astrology, but wound up writing a major work on the subject. I won't be going that far, but I do want to devote an episode to the influence of the stars and other so-called occult phenomena like magic. Many of the thinkers we've discussed, from Pico and Ficino to Campanella, had things to say on these topics, which are pretty far from the interests of philosophers nowadays, but were in the Renaissance seen as intimately connected to natural philosophy. So join me as I try to conjure up another 20 minutes or so of podcast magic next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Men Who Saw Tomorrow, Renaissance Magic and Astrology. When I was about 10 years old, I saw a documentary on television called The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, about the 16th century astrologer and soothsayer Michel de Notre Dame, also known as Nostradamus. It credited him with accurately predicting many historical events, from the French Revolution to the Kennedy assassination, and went on to suggest that he had also predicted a nuclear apocalypse in the decade to come. I was absolutely terrified, still today I can remember being unable to sleep, convinced that World War 3 had already been foreseen in the Renaissance. So I can imagine pretty well how people back in the Renaissance felt in the 1420s, when a number of astrologers warned of a great flood owing to a conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the sign of Pisces. After the resulting panic proved to be unfounded, Martin Luther pointed out that, whereas the flood hadn't happened, there was a huge peasant uprising instead, of this no astrologer had breathed so much as a word. Nowadays, most people over the age of 10 chuckle at the idea that astrological predictions could be accurate, even if most of us also know our star signs and peek at the horoscopes in the newspaper now and again. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, as in antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was widespread, sincere belief in the efficacy of astrology and the closely related practice of magic. This conviction could be found at the highest echelons of society. You might recall that Christine de Pizan's father was a professor of astrology and went with his family to the court of Charles V, whom Christine called Roi-Hassologien. Predictions based on this science could enhance political legitimacy or have the reverse effect, which is why it was possible to get in serious trouble for predicting the death of rulers and popes. In a study of the use of astrology in Milan, the scholar Monica Azzolini has shown how members of the powerful Sforza family retained astrologers to advise them. When the sickly Giangagliazzo Sforza died prematurely in 1494, his doctors explained their failure to keep him alive in astrological terms. His modest lifespan was foretold in his nativity. Still, they did their best to ward off this fate, constantly consulting the stars, at one point delaying treatment until a conjunction of the moon with Mars had passed. But this noble patient's death was inevitable due to the terrible influence of the heavens. Besides which, Giangagliazzo refused to stop eating dangerous fruits like pears, plums, and apples. Had he also partaken of melon, the doctors would probably have considered it a suicide. We can see from this example that astrology was closely connected to medicine. To cast the horoscope of one's patient was like taking a medical history, and observation of the stars could influence both diagnosis and prognosis. This is illustrated well by the controversial notion of critical days, which goes all the way back to Hippocrates and Galen. Both ancient doctors asserted that there are pivotal junctures in the development of an illness, which fall on days 7, 14, and 20, when the patient will either take a turn for the worse, or begin to recover. Galen proposed that critical days are determined by the cycle of the moon, which is divided into periods of somewhat less than 7 days, which is why the third critical day is the 20th, and not the 21st. Unfortunately, his explanation of the astronomy governing this was not very convincing, in part because he failed to take account of variation in lunar cycles. So attempts were made to fix up the theory. Pietro d'Abbano, an enthusiast for medical astrology, suggested a more elaborate theory that matched the four humors to different plants, and he also tried to improve the mathematical rationale underlying the sequence of critical days. Girolamo Cardano was unimpressed by the Galenic account and said that when it comes to the study of the stars, one should listen not to Galen, but to Ptolemy and Hippocrates. This is what we might expect Cardano to say given his enthusiasm for both these ancient authors. He was deeply committed to the authoritative status of Ptolemy, who had written fundamental works in both astronomy and astrology. Cardano was deeply committed to astrology too. Curiously, he did not draw that much on astrology in his medical works or often discuss medicine in his astrological writings. Yet he was confident that astrologers like himself could predict important events, or at least explain in retrospect why they had happened, as with the outbreak of syphilis in Italy or the rise and fall of world religions. He foresaw a renovation of all religions, owing to an astral conjunction, and looking back into history, explained such events as the rise of Islam and the fall of Byzantium with reference to the stars. The events of an individual person's life could be explained in the same way. Cardano tells of an amazing feat he himself performed, when he correctly divined that a certain person he had never met must have eye troubles and a scar made by an iron weapon, all based solely on a nativity. A nativity, I should explain, is a horoscope based on the position of the planets, including the sun and moon, at the moment of a person's birth. Cardano was not the first to produce and analyze nativities, but he was the first to author a printed collection of them. He believed that such horoscopes foretold the eloquence of Petrarch, the learning of Trapezuntius, the theological acuity of Savonarola, and the brilliance and early death of Pico della Mirandola. Regarding Vesalius, whom he much admired, he wrote that Mercury in trine with Jupiter and Venus in quadrature indicate wonderful genius and eloquence as related to his art. Cardano courted controversy by also publishing the Nativity of Jesus Christ. This appalled Cardano's many critics. One of them said it was impious audacity to suggest that the stars might rule over the Savior himself. But Cardano denied that devotion to astrology equates to a belief in astral determinism. Rather, it tells us about the conditions that will prevail, which is useful precisely so that we may be prepared for them. He gives the example of knowing that there will be a heat wave and bringing a flock of sheep to a cool place so they will not die. As with medicine and other areas of the humanist movement, the Renaissance approach to astrology often involved an attempt to purify the discipline from medieval accretions, especially those from the Islamic world. Cardano wanted to make astrological practice authentically Ptolemaic and free it from the influence of Abu Ma'shar, al-Khabisi, and other scientists of the Islamic world, whom he called a crowd of idiots. Agostino Nifo took a similar view. For him, Abu Ma'shar was a prince among the fabulous who had distorted Ptolemy's original teachings. These Ptolemy purists rejected such practices as using astrology to make specific decisions, for instance when to marry, or whether to make a journey. This technique of interrogations, which played a significant role in Arabic astrology, was not even mentioned by Ptolemy. And for good reason, said Cardano, since they are magical and unworthy not only of a Christian but also of a good man. Another disputed point was planetary conjunctions, such as the one invoked in that prediction about the flood. Abu Ma'shar spoke extensively about their effects and invoked them to explain religious and political upheaval. As already mentioned, Cardano followed suit, but the idea was criticized by other authors. Among these, none was more critical than Pico della Mirandola. Our recent interview guest, Darben Nicholas Hasse, has written that conjunction theory was a main target of Pico's Disputations Against Judicial Astrology, published posthumously because he was still at work on it when he died. Pico is relentless in his attacks on astrologers of the Islamic world, who made mistakes and also misread Ptolemy. Charging the 11th century astrologer Ibn Uredwan with one such misinterpretation, he demands, what do you hallucinate, barbarian? Pico's formidable intelligence and historical knowledge is brought to bear to cast doubt on astrology as a science. It was not, he points out, even discussed by such ancient authorities as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, and the Church Fathers. Apparent counterexamples, like a work ascribed to Aristotle called Secret of Secrets, are, correctly, argued by Pico to be inauthentic. If astrologers get things right occasionally, this is simply a matter of chance, because the stars simply have no influence on particular people or events. Which is not to say that they are entirely without influence, that would be an untenable claim given the obvious effect of the sun on climate and of the moon on the tides. But their effect is, says Pico, general, and affects all equally, promoting the natural cycle of life and not, for instance, the progress of a disease in an individual patient. Pico seems to have had several reasons for writing this polemic. The diatribe against the so-called Arabs and their distortion of ancient science is, of course, a well-worn humanist trope. At a philosophical level, the thing that bothers him above all would seem to be the deterministic implications of astrology. As we just saw with the example of Cardano, some embraced the art of astral prediction without supposing that the stars determine everything. Pico, though, was convinced that astrology is incompatible with the Christian commitment to free will. In this he found an ally in Savonarola, another man who railed against astrology. Their attitude was shared by the historian and political thinker Guicardini. Along the same lines as Pico, he noted that astrologers may seem to be more successful than they really are because people only remember it when predictions come out true. Of course, when astrologers did get it wrong, their opponents were ready to pounce, as when the medical writer Giovanni Mainardi told the story of a doctor managing to heal someone whose death had been foretold by a stargazer. In some cases, the infective could get personal. One critic cruelly asked, if Cardano was such a brilliant astrologer then, why didn't you keep the axe from your son's neck? Yet Pico's disputations also provoked numerous defenses of astrology, for example, by Lucio Bellanti and Giovanni Pontano. Often, such defenses used the same tactic we found in Nifo and Cardano of blaming all problematic aspects of astrology on the Arabic tradition, so as to preserve the authoritative status of the Greeks. Moderate views were also proposed, as by the Platonist cosmologist Francesco Patrizzi. Like Cardano, he rejected determinism, but retained such astrological ideas as the malicious nature of Mars and Saturn, and favorable nature of Jupiter and Venus. In common with other learned defenders of astrology in the 16th century, he warned his readers not to confuse superstitious and irreligious practices with the properly scientific discipline that explores the causal influences of the stars on our world, especially the influences more subtle than what we can see in the obvious cases of the Sun and the Moon. Ironically, another occult science, magic, was defended in very similar terms by none other than Pico della Mirandola. In the list of conclusions he intended to defend at Rome, he distinguished between natural magic and magic that invokes powers of darkness. The latter is rightly condemned by the Church, while the former is permitted, and can be based upon universal theoretical foundations. Indeed, magic is the noblest part of natural science. For Pico, the correct approach lies in the study of the Jewish mystical tradition he calls Kabbalah, so that magical powers may be discovered in Hebrew words or Kabbalistic numerology. He also approves of the ancient Greek Orphic hymns as an important body of magical teachings and draws a parallel between them and the Hebrew tradition, just as the hymns of David miraculously serve a work of the Kabbalah, so the hymns of Orpheus serve a work of the true, permitted, and natural magic. In his list of propositions, Pico also draws connections between magic and astrology. This suggests that he may have at first looked favorably on astrological science but changed his mind later, leading him to write his Disputations in order to debunk the pretensions of the astrologers. But the great Renaissance proponent of the links between magic and astrology was Pico's older friend, Marsilio Ficino. One of Ficino's most remarkable and controversial works, The Three Books on Life, has been called by another of our interview guests, Denny Obichaux, a handbook for helping scholars and philosophers stay healthy, live long lives, and bask in the heavens' glow. The first of the three books offers largely conventional medical advice, based on the principle that aging is caused by gradual loss of the body's moisture and the vital heat that nourishes that moisture. But as the work goes on, Ficino delves increasingly into astrology and magic. In Book 2, he describes two extreme ways of life, one associated with Saturn and characterized by relentless pursuit of contemplative knowledge, the other associated with Venus and involving the pleasures of the flesh. Both have a pernicious effect on health, but the Saturnian lifestyle is preferable, because as Ficino wittily remarks, the wisdom attained through Saturn secures one an eternal life, whereas the sexual delights of Venus give life to someone else. Ficino saw himself as having a Saturnian personality, something he explained by the fact that Saturn was entering Aquarius when Ficino was born in October of 1433. Thus, he is intellectually gifted, but also moody, given to melancholy. He can at least comfort himself with the thought that all the great men who have ever excelled in art have been melancholic. Like Cardano, Ficino holds that knowledge of astrology helps us to shape our futures rather than telling us of an inescapable fate, so our actions can prolong our lifespan, and Ficino tells us how, explaining that one may use knowledge of one's astral nature to choose beneficial diet and medical treatment. He mentions with approval the theory of critical days and the progress of a feverish illness, and explains that the vital spirit that courses through the body responds especially to the power of mercury, since spirit is mostly air, and mercury is associated with this element. Straightforwardly magical practices like the wearing of talismans are also discussed. Here, Ficino is somewhat skeptical. While such instruments may do some good, this is probably more because of the innate powers of the stones and metal than the shapes into which they have been carved. Standard medical treatment is more reliable than something like a magic ring. The modern reader is apt to think that Ficino's moderate skepticism is not nearly skeptical enough, but he offers a well-considered theory to explain magical phenomena. To see why it is plausible, consider magnetism. All the way back in the time of the pre-Socratics, philosophers had already been interested in this phenomenon. Thales of Miletus said that the magnet must have a soul in it, presumably because it can move of its own accord toward metal. But of course, neither the Greeks nor the medieval had any understanding of magnetic force. For them, it was an occult power, in the sense that its working is hidden. The same can be said of other puzzling natural phenomena, like the power of stingrays to stun their victims. Belief in magic can be seen as an extrapolation from these cases. An object like a talismanic stone may have an occult power of its own, which it acquired while forming in the earth, thanks to the influence of the stars. If magic is simply the manipulation of such natural powers, then there is nothing wrong with it, any more than it would be wrong to use a magnet. As Cardano would later say, magic is nothing unless you place it as part of either medicine or natural philosophy, and understood in this way, magic is no more illicit than carpentry. Furthermore, Ficino has a way to explain how the hidden or occult forces work, namely that the whole universe is held together by bonds of sympathy. He tells us that the third book of his treatise On Life developed out of his commentary on Plotinus, which explains his use of the sympathy theory. Plotinus too invoked this originally stoic concept to explain a range of natural phenomena, including even human vision. For both Plotinus and Ficino, the idea has a pleasing affinity with Pythagoreanism too. Ficino illustrates it with the case of two string instruments which vibrate in sympathy with one another. Very appropriately, considering that this podcast episode is being released on Valentine's Day, Ficino also integrates his account of magic with his theory of love, which we discussed in an earlier episode. The whole cosmos does have a unifying love or sympathy, but there is a particular bond between things that have relevant similarity. Love is itself a magician, says Ficino, because an act of magic is the attraction of one thing by another in accordance with a certain natural kinship. This is why, according to Ficino, people of the same star sign are apt to fall in love with one another. It's also why planets are linked to certain bodily constitutions, material substances, colors, and so on, and why there can be a science for studying and exploiting such resonances. Again, these are entirely natural powers and effects, like the magnet. If love is a magician, then nature herself is a sorceress. But Ficino knew that he was treading on dangerous ground, and wrote an apology to explain why he had written so much about magic. He imagines critics complaining, Marsilio is a priest, isn't he? Indeed he is. What business then do priests have with medicine or, again, with astrology? Another will say, what does a Christian have to do with magic or images? In his own defense, he protests that he only ever practices natural magic, as opposed to seeking concourse with demons. Not that he doubts the existence of demons. They are regularly invoked in the Platonist literature Ficino knows so well, with the most famous example being the divine voice of warning heard by Socrates, as mentioned in the Platonic dialogues. A somewhat more recent source was our old friend Michael Psaros, whose work on demons was translated by Ficino. Following Psaros, Ficino distinguished demons into various types, classified in terms of their connection to different elements and planets. These resonances explain why astral magic can summon demons, or induce them to influence our world. But the fact that we can do this doesn't mean that we should. Even enthusiasts for magic often disavowed demonology, like Giammatisto della Porta, whose treatise Natural Magic appeared in several editions beginning in 1558. The title is carefully chosen. To engage in natural magic is precisely to avoid techniques that involve demons, and instead to follow the lead of noble investigators of occult forces, like Pythagoras and Plato. If such reassurances were designed to keep della Porta out of trouble with the authorities, they didn't work. His book was placed on the index of prescribed books by the papal inquisition, and unsurprisingly so, given that it discussed such things as the Witch's Solve, a potion that allows witches to teleport to black sabbaths. To be fair though, della Porta discussed the Witch's Solve in order to provide a naturalist account of something that only seemed like magic or witchcraft. The potion affects the imaginations of those who imbibe it, and makes them think they have been elsewhere. This detail fits with an emerging picture of Renaissance attitudes towards the occult sciences, namely that a sober, scholarly approach would explain some magical phenomena while rejecting others in a display of sound scientific skepticism. Hence, Pico embraced magic but turned against astrology. Ficino thought Taliesin's work, but probably only because of the metal they're made of, and even Cardano admitted that astrology was a merely probable art. This is why his own predictions were sometimes wrong, in one case happily so. He forecast regular illnesses for his daughter, but she enjoyed good health. Even the most skeptical thinkers had to allow some scope for the supernatural, as we can see from the case of Pietro Pompanazzi. His work On Incantations from 1556 is a splendid example of debunking, which shows how apparently magical effects can be explained without recourse to magic. You might remember that in the interview with Dag Hasse he told us about how Pompanazzi undermined the story of a miraculous appearance of Saint Celestine, which put an end to torrential rainfalls. Pompanazzi was also unimpressed by the use of demonology to heal illnesses. Do the demons carry with them boxes, satchels, and bags full of plaster, like surgeons and apothecaries? But even Pompanazzi had to admit that genuine miracles do sometimes occur. These are not brought about by human magicians but by God, and they are beyond the power of human reason to explain. From this we can see that these skeptically-minded philosophers had to tread just as carefully as the believers in magic and astrology. The happy and orthodox medium was to accept that some things are beyond our ken, while steering clear of demonology, astral determinism, or tracing the rise of religion or incarnation of Christ to the effect of the stars. The authoritative response was similarly ambiguous. Papal bands were placed on only some forms of magic, de la parta was put on trial but not convicted, and he managed to get his treatise on magic taken off the index through some judicious revision for a further edition. Much depended on who was pope at any given time. When Inquisitor-General Michela Ghislieri took the post in 1565, that heralded a time of repression, but half a century later Campanella found himself conducting a magical seance with Pope Urban VIII to ward off his death by astral influence, a story that embarrassed the pope once it got out. So you could get away with a lot at some points during the Renaissance, while at other points the popes were more dangerous even than melons. The key thing was to know which lines not to cross, a task at which the protagonist of our next episode failed miserably. Giordano Bruno, victim of Renaissance Italy's most notorious act of persecution. That's here next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about magic in the Renaissance with Brian Covenhaver, who is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hi Brian. Hi Peter, and let me thank you first of all for doing such really nice work on the internet. There's so much bad work on the internet that seeing something as nice as what you've got is a real joy. And also thanks for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. It's great to have such an eminent scholar of Renaissance philosophy on the series. We are going to be talking about philosophy, but by talking about magic. So we're going to get into the connections between magic and philosophy. And to do that, I thought we could start by talking about the sources that influenced Renaissance discussions of magic. So obviously some of these sources would be Greek, but some of them would also be non-Greek. Yes, going back to the ancients, but also going back to the not so ancients was quite important for people who made themselves experts on magic during the 15th century in a new way. The way I look at it, before the Renaissance, during the Middle Ages, there really never was a time when educated, literate people were not discussing magic. We can really only say that with certainty about that relatively small group of people in Europe, because of course, otherwise we just don't have good records, but we do have for that group of people. So if you look at the 13th century, for example, you've not only philosophers, maybe sort of the second and third rank people like Roger Bacon and William of Paris were writing about magic, but also thinkers of the first rank like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who's I imagine the best known medieval philosopher. So lots of things were going on before the Renaissance that were well known to people like Marsilio Ficino and Piccadilly Miranda during the Renaissance. Ficino's most important innovation was I think the most important breakthrough about magic in the Renaissance, because he, for the first time, provided access to ancient thinkers who wrote in Greek about magic and wrote in great detail and wrote in a distinctly philosophical way. So, as you know, when our listeners know, these are people usually called Neoplatonists, the most important being Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus and Proclus. Plotinus was born around 200 CE. Proclus died almost three centuries later than that. And Ficino in the 15th century was the first to make their works available in Latin, which more people could read than they could read Greek. Now I say first, that's in a first approximation. There were, for example, works by Proclus translated in the 13th century by William of Murbeck, but these didn't have a lot of influence on how 15th century interest in magic developed. Ficino, and again, this is something that's I think well known by your listeners and certainly by you, that Ficino also translated other ancient Greek texts, the Hermetica, which were attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which was the Greek name for Egyptian god Thoth. But those Hermetic writings, the ones that Ficino translated, aren't about magic. And Ficino understood that. He says so in his writings. He recognized that this Hermetic literature, which he studied and translated, he recognized that it was a devotional literature and that it was a devotional literature based on popularizations of theology and philosophy. So Ficino was doing that sort of thing, for example, translating in the Hermetica in the 15th century. And this was before the word Hermetic became a common label for alchemical writings. So if you go to books published around 1550, 1575, 1600, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, you'll very often find the word Hermetic used in that way as basically a synonym for alchemical. And that wasn't the magic that Ficino made famous in 1489. It was in that year, in 1489, that he published the only work of his that was maybe more influential than his translation of Plato and commentaries on the Neoplatonists. In that year, 1489, he published his three books on life. And that was the most influential presentation of a theory of magic since the ancient Neoplatonists. And they, those ancient Neoplatonists, were Ficino's main inspiration. So the key point, I think, is that there was a real breakthrough in the 15th century, which made it possible for Ficino and other people to see magic in a different way than they had seen it before. And here I'm talking about Western Europe, where the intellectual culture was basically a Latin culture. In that culture, after Ficino's work in the 15th century, the attitudes toward magic changed a great deal because he convinced people that there were real philosophical foundations, theoretical foundations for belief in magic. Is there actually a shift that results from Ficino's work by which magic starts to be seen as something more like a science, so on a par with something like medicine or astronomy? Or is there always a kind of divorce between properly scientific disciplines, like, let's say, astronomy, medicine, or even physics, metaphysics, and something like this applied practice, which is magic? That's a great question. And I'm going to pitch my answer specifically to the English word science. And I might have something or somebody might have something different to say. If we were talking about the German word Wissenschaft, then it might be a different matter. But it isn't, right? So science. I think the English word science is a bad fit for Renaissance thought in general. When Newton, toward the end of the 17th century, published his famous book about physics, he didn't call it the mathematical principles of science. He called it the mathematical principles of natural philosophy. Had the English word science been available and had Newton been writing in English, as he sometimes did, then you might have seen the word science in that context. But that's not what happened. So rather than science, I think the English word that works better, best in this situation, is the English word knowledge. And that word works better as a partner for the Latin word scantia, which in turn was paired with the word ars, A-R-S, meaning craft. The basis of scantia was theoretical knowledge that had to meet high standards of a certain kind. Obviously, in order for a craft to put a theory into practice, people need practical experience and information as well as theoretical knowledge in this rather specialized sense. So today, when a physician practices medicine, as we say, we say that physicians practice medicine, these practitioners apply theoretical knowledge of physics, of chemistry, biology, to practical medical problems. So Ficino, this famous expert on magic, was a physician. And when Ficino practiced his craft, he applied theoretical knowledge, meaning that he applied his scantia to help his patients. And he did this mainly by regulating diet and trying to shape the local environment for his patients, and also by prescribing mainly botanical medicines for them. But he also thought that magic could cure disease. For example, by wearing a jewel carved with an astrological sign, like the sign for the constellation Scorpio, a scorpion. Ficino's practice of medical magic then was grounded in theoretical scantia, most important in this case, astrology, theoretical scantia, which in his day, in Ficino's day, was actually taught in medical schools. So Ficino's scantia was not like our science. He had no notion of data collection, of data management and analysis, of controlled experiment, of experimental design, quantitative statistical analysis. He had no laboratory. He had no mechanical or electronic equipment, not to mention computers. So the short answer is no. Ficino's magic wasn't a science or even an applied science, a technology in our sense. But it was applied knowledge, as you put it. Yeah. You could say it was a scantia applicata, a rusus. That's how he might have put it and did say things like that from time to time. So I think that actually encourages me to explore this parallel to medicine even further, because of course you could say the same thing about medicine. And something that we see with medicine in this period is that there's kind of a high medicine and a low medicine. So there's the learned medicine that they're teaching and practicing in a, let's say, a university setting. So the kind of thing where you have Vesalius making these discoveries and writing about anatomy. And then you have the so-called low medicine, which is what you would have in the local apothecary or even midwives and so on. And the learned doctors tend to be quite dismissive of that. And I'm wondering, I mean, you mentioned that obviously we have much better records for the high intellectual magic than the magic in the street, but is there a similar sort of two-level thing going on here, like learned magic versus popular magic? So let me approach that with another couple of words, which are sometimes connected with that question. And this is to a great extent because of how anthropology in the late 19th, early 20th centuries became a special place for researching and writing about magic. And because of that, in ordinary English speech, when people applied various pejorative terms, like low, for example, to the thought of people who were not like themselves, the people whom anthropologists went far away to observe. When the people did that, another pejorative term that got into the conversation in a strong way was the word superstitious. And so beliefs in magic might be characterized as, in some intrinsic way, low and superstitious, not something for the high culture, not something for people who were reasonable, rational people and not superstitious. So if we think about it, try to pick this apart a little bit, the word superstition, which is the same thing in Latin, superstitio in Latin, it's decidimonia in Greek. This word wasn't, as it turns out, a key term for Ficino and his contemporaries. They weren't really much interested in talking about superstition. Not that they never did, they just didn't do it very often. And the distinction expressed by the word in those days wasn't a socioeconomic or cultural distinction. It wasn't a distinction, so to speak, between the high and the low or between the elite and the popular. The distinction actually was religious. And it was a distinction between normal and abnormal reverence for the divine. So if you look at the Greek word, the word itself, the parts of it mean something like God terror. That God terror is meant to be a contrast to normal piety. So a normal pious, reverent person like Socrates, for example, isn't supposed to experience God terror. Now for the ancient Greeks, like Socrates, the divine was always, always, always plural. The gods were many, the gods were everywhere, and they were everywhere at all levels of the world. The Christians inheriting this religious culture from pagans applied the Latin word superstitio as a way of rendering decidamonia. And what they applied it to was the improper worship of low-level gods. These low-level gods were daimonis in Greek and in Latin, and we could render that demons in English. But that's, rendering the demons in English is kind of a problem. So what you'll see is very often in the recent wonderful Cambridge editions of Prophylus and Timaeus' commentary in English, you'll see the word spelled d-a-e-m-o-n rather than demon in order to mark that distinction. Worshipping demons, however you spell the word, worshipping demons was sinful for all Christians, and there were just no class distinctions. So as to how the word superstitio applied, it didn't apply in a way that was sensitive to class. Everybody was involved in problems at all levels, class levels, in sins of superstition. A different word that did have important socioeconomic and cultural valence, it was used more often in Ficino's day. It was maleficium in Latin, m-a-l-e-f-i-c-i-u-m, maleficium. And ordinarily in classical Latin, that word just means what its parts seem to say, doing evil. But Latin writers in the 15th century used it for what we now call witchcraft. And the word maleficium, like the word supersitio, was indeed used as a socioeconomic weapon. Why? Well, because most people who were accused of maleficium, and there were many thousands of them, were female, poor, and powerless. That leads us to the question of how these authors themselves avoided getting in trouble just like these poor, powerless women were getting in trouble. Presumably they want to reassure their readers, especially if the readers are, let's say, in the papacy or in the inquisition. They want to reassure them that what they're doing is on the right side of the law, is not in conflict with Christianity. So how do they convey the message that their study of natural magic is religiously acceptable? You see, I suppose it depends on what you mean by study. And then having said that, I think it's important to go back to the distinction between theory and practice. Later on, by the, let's say, after Newton, by the early 18th century, even showing interest in magic as a serious problem, let's say a philosophical problem, that became completely out of bounds for all Europeans, people educated at the university level who wanted to be seen as intellectually respectable people. In Ficino's time, you know, that was far in the future. And Ficino knew, because he wasn't just a physician, he was also a priest and also a philosopher. He knew that there were many, many, many learned and respected Christians, like Thomas Aquinas, for example, who was a saint. Ficino knew that such people, perfectly respectable people, wrote about magic, wrote about it sometimes as critics, sometimes as supporters. So if the study of magic means just that, if it means studying magic, there really wasn't any question that there were lots and lots of not just respectable, but sainted people who did that. Now, if the study of magic, you know, the closer it gets to the domain of practice, then the nicer things get. But even at the level of practice, Ficino, because of his knowledge of the Neoplatonic philosophers like Plotinus and Proclus, because of that, he also believed that it might be that the practice of magic could have a respectable theoretical basis in philosophy. And they're both words are key words, both respectable and theoretical. It's not just that in his eyes, there was a sound theory, indeed a very rich and interesting theory underlying belief in magic. But also in his view, that theory was quite respectable. It was something not to be ashamed of, but to be proud of as an intellectual property. So like Ficino, in that circumstance, in the 15th century, Ficino being a priest, and the philosopher, as well as a physician, there were many other respectable people who wrote at length about magic. Practice was a different matter. And he, for example, Ficino, I guess the best way to put it is this. If you take the two most famous people in this domain in the 15th century, one would be Ficino, the other would be Pico della Mirandola. There's not a scrap of evidence, not a scrap as far as I know, that Pico went anywhere near the practice of magic himself, personally. But you know, I wouldn't say it quite that strongly. I think it's unlikely that Ficino was doing anything that he would actually call the practice of magic. He does say some things in his writings, which might lead you to think so. Mainly, these are things about certain kinds of singing as ways of attracting positive influences or deflecting negative influences from the stars and planets. The reason I think that Ficino himself would have shied away from actually doing that, despite what he said in his writings, is because he knew how, in theoretical religious terms, he knew how dangerous it was. This is a complicated thing, but I'll say it very briefly. He knew that songs, especially songs with words in them, almost necessarily were messages. So there was a singer and there were people who were sung to, individuals who were sung to. And he realized that those individuals might not just be humans. Some of them might be angels, some might be demons. And once that was clear, then he knew that a practitioner of magic, even that kind of magic, a kind based on song, that kind of practitioner was on thin ice indeed. Can I ask you something about the causal theory that you just mentioned in the middle of that answer? We often call these sciences, magic, astrology, alchemy, we call them the occult sciences, which is possibly a problematic term. But one reason why you might think that that term makes sense is that perhaps the causal mechanism by which something like a magical ritual works or maybe a magical talisman works is somehow hidden. Would Ficino and the other scholars who write on magic in this period, would they have said that in some sense, the reason why magic works is unknowable to us? Or would they have said, no, if you have read enough Plotinus and other sources, and if you've done enough reading and research, then in theory, at least you should always be able to come up with a causal explanation of why magic actually works when it works. I think it's more like the latter than the former. So maybe it's best to start with the word again, the word occultus. In Latin, the word just means hidden. Strangely enough, the word that it's paired with in Greek, in similar circumstances, doesn't mean hidden, it means something else. It's aretos, which means not hidden, but unable to be said, or unspoken or ineffable or something like that. But the word that got into the Western tradition of writing about magic in this usage was not aretos, which was used by Galen, and it was used by the Neoplatonists in these circumstances. The word that got used was occultus. And my guess is that the transformation from something unsayable to something hidden, which might be something unseeable, right, not visible, that that transition probably happened by way of Arabic sometime between Galen and the 10th or 11th century. I've never been able to figure that out in any empirical way because I can't read Arabic. Somebody who can read Arabic should work on that. Anyhow, the word occultus in Latin means hidden. And in Ficino's medical theory, some properties of physical things are indeed hidden. But others, other properties of other physical things aren't hidden. And here, when I say hidden, what I mean is hidden to the five senses. So thinking about Ficino as a physician, some medicines that he wanted his patients to ingest were bitter. And the bitterness obviously wasn't hidden to them because Ficino's patients could taste the bitterness. But other medicines like opium, for example, were known to cause drowsiness. But opium doesn't look drowsy, doesn't sound drowsy, doesn't smell drowsy, doesn't feel drowsy, doesn't taste drowsy. Although if opium is the cause, the effect is drowsiness. So the standard doctrine was that that sort of property of material object, of physical substance like opium, that that sort of property was a hidden property. Again, looking at thinking about the opium, the hidden drowsiness in opium wasn't unknowable in Ficino's medicine because it was hidden. And here, we're talking about Ficino's scientia, not our science. It's Ficino's scientia. So knowledge of this drowsiness, mostly in Ficino's scientia, mostly bypassed the senses and turned instead to reason. And that turned and enabled Ficino and others, including, for example, Thomas Aquinas, to rely on a very, very sophisticated theory of occult properties or occult qualities, meaning qualities of things that can't be sensed but can be understood despite their hiddenness. And something like a magnet would be another example of this, right? So you have things like drugs, you have magnets, you have things like stingrays. So I mentioned this in the last episode that there's actually a wide variety of phenomena that have these so-called occult causal powers. And if it's just a kind of, as it were, a known fact that wearing talismans can ward off disease or heal you from a disease, then it actually seems quite rational to extend the theory to cover things like that. And then you need to invoke some kind of philosophical account of what the underlying causal mechanism is there, just as you would invoke something like Galenic humoral theory in the case of a medicine, right? Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, Galen writes about this, not at length in any one place, but he writes about it often. He very much favored explanations of medical phenomena, like, for example, cures of disease that were based on hot, cold, wet, and dry. And he very often associated that kind of analysis, the hot, cold, wet, dry kind, with what was rational, not meaning reasonable, but rational in the philosophical sense. And he contrasted it with other kinds of explanation, which gave accounts of phenomena not in terms of hot, cold, wet, and dry, but in terms of what he called idiotetes aretois, undescribable, unspeakable, it's hard to know how to translate aretois, properties, idiotetes. And then he gave an explanation of how these properties got to be there, what their ontology was. And his answer to that was katholintenusian, they were there by the whole substance. And by the whole substance, he meant it was a rhubarb plant, then it was the rhubarb plant as a whole, which was the foundation for this property, as distinct from the rhubarb as a tempered process, you know, mixture of blend of hot, cold, wet, and dry. And then that analysis survived in various ways throughout the Middle Ages. And that's, I think, what in him and in another vaguely contemporary writer with him, Alexander of Aeterthesus, in their writings, that's where the whole concept of occult comes from. But again, strangely enough, in its original form, there's a whole deep cluster of associations in Greek between the idea, the notion, it's hard to use the word idea in this context, the notion of form, etos, and other words in this family that have to do both with no knowing and with seeing. But actually, if you look at Aristotle's matter theory, when it comes to giving explanations, his matter theory really isn't about the visual, it's about the haptic. It's about hot, cold, wet, and dry. And yet, during the Middle Ages, whenever people talked about this problem, they didn't see it as a problem about what was unable to be said, they saw it as a problem about what couldn't be sensed. But the word occultist of all the senses leans toward the visual sense. We more often think of hidden sights than hidden smells, right? It's a very complicated problem about whether to call things, how much we should use the word occult and how we should use it in talking about these issues. The word occult gained the status it has now in European languages during the 16th century because a book by Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim called On the Occult Philosophy became a best-seller. And this book, On the Occult Philosophy, was a book about magic, astrology, witchcraft, demonology, divination, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, including Kabbalah. And all of that stuff, having been described by Agrippa as the occult philosophy, then by other people came to be called the occult or occultism. You only begin to see the words used like that in the 19th century, and it's not even 17th or 18th century language. It will be coming on to Agrippa actually not too far in the future when we turn to the Reformation. But before I start talking about what's coming ahead, I wanted to ask you one last question. It's kind of a big question, but just to wrap things up, it's pretty clear from everything that you said that the historian of magic certainly needs to know about the history of philosophy. And I'm wondering if you think the reverse is true. So do you think that someone who's interested in the history of philosophy in the Renaissance or in the medieval period, but maybe let's focus on the Renaissance and stuff where we are right now, do you think the historian of Renaissance philosophy really needs to know about the history of magic? The short answer is yes. You know, if we're talking about most of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, then yes. If you're going to have a broad but sufficient understanding of philosophy, then these issues are part of it. There's simply no question about that. Eventually, I think that becomes not so much the case. So I think if we get to the 18th century and we're in the world of Kant and Hume, then I think it's a different story. I think that magic had so much been repudiated by people who wanted to be thought of as respectable intellectuals, that it's a completely different scene. When Newton died in 1727, even the French were ready to honor him. He had been a member of the French Academy, and it was the custom then for a member of the Academy who died to have an eulogie, an essay in praise of him written and published in the proper place. So the person who did that for Newton was Fontenelle, and we know that Fontenelle had notes from Newton's niece, which showed very plainly that Newton had spent ever so much time working on alchemy. And of course, when Fontenelle wrote his eulogie, there was never a word about that because it would have been shameful. So the situation had changed that much within a space of about 200 years between Ficino and Newton. Philosophy in the Anglophone world is a very different matter, as you know, from philosophy where you are, right, on the continent of Europe or philosophy elsewhere in the world. Philosophy in the Anglophone world, the practice of it is usually very, very specialized. And so if you're a specialist in the Anglophone way on, let's say, Aquinas, it's perfectly possible to do a whole lifetime of brilliant and productive work without knowing anything about magic. But if you want to know anything about the environment of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, or the environment of William of Ockham in the 14th century, but not to speak of the environment of Pico and Ficino, both philosophers in the 15th century, then of course you have to know something about magic. However, opinions are divided about whether the environments in which philosophers live are really important for understanding their philosophies. In a recent issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, there's a piece by me on this very subject. I should also mention another piece that your readers might not know, and that you had some interesting words to say about magical objects like the magnet or opium and such. And there were lots of them. So if you look about 20 years ago in the journal, The History of Ideas, you'll see a piece by me called A Tale of Two Fishes. And it's about two fish. One is a fish that we would call a ray, an electric ray, a ray that's electric in the way that an electric eel is electric. And another fish that we call a remora, but which the ancients called a shipholder, an ejneis, because they thought that it had the power to hold a ship back from moving forward. And that was a magical power. So this piece in the Journal of History of Ideas tracks this cluster of magical objects through the centuries using this pair of fish, the remora and the electric ray, as the sort of armature for the discussions. Okay, well, thanks so much for that wide ranging discussion of magic in the Renaissance. We've been talking about people who got in trouble or avoided getting in trouble. And one who definitely did not avoid getting in trouble was Giordano Bruno, who will be our topic that time. That's right. Yeah, unfortunately. So this is going to be a kind of sad story next time, but also a very interesting one. For now, I'll thank Brian Copenhagen very much for coming on the series. Well, thank you so much. Let me say, when you talk about Bruno, I very much hope you'll talk about a work of his that doesn't get a lot of attention, which is called On Chains, Des Vinculis, or On Bonds. I'll put it on my reading list. If you look at a recent book, it's called Magic in Western Culture. There's a pretty long section about Bruno, and that book of his is discussed in that section. So that's where you can get some bibliography about it. Okay, great. Thanks. Let me thank you again. You've got a great thing going in this enterprise, and I'm happy to be a part of it. And I'm very grateful to you for thinking of me. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll see you next time for Giordano Bruno, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilocity.net. Today's episode, Boundless Enthusiasm, Giordano Bruno. There seems to be a widespread assumption that it was humbling for humankind to abandon the old cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy and accept the new astronomy of Copernicus. No longer do we find ourselves at the literal center of attention on an Earth which sits unmoving at the midpoint of a finite spherical universe. Instead, we are moving around the Sun which has usurped the Earth's place. In fact, we now realize our whole solar system takes up only a tiny part of a vast universe. There's no doubt that this shift of perspective did upset many people and many preconceptions about people and their role in the cosmos. But it's worth remembering that in the ancient and medieval worldview, the Earth was never seen as the best part of the universe. The middle of everything was also the bottom of everything, with the celestial bodies above being seen as far superior, even divine in some sense. As we saw over the last couple of episodes, these heavenly bodies were typically assumed to influence, if not completely determine, events down here on Earth. Well, we cannot influence them at all. They are the instruments of God, steered by angels, free of decay, imperfection, and the thousand natural shocks that our flesh is heir to, as people were saying at about the same time over in England. In light of this, being moved away from the center of the cosmos could be seen as a promotion. But neither did the Copernican Revolution simply reverse the older view, with the Sun occupying the new down and the previously static Earth catapulted into the heavens, now moving at the thrilling speeds previously reserved for planets and stars. His discoveries did not so much turn the universe upside down, as show that the universe has no up and down at all. That at least was the lesson drawn by Giornano Bruno. In several treatises beginning with The Ash Wednesday Supper, a dialogue published in 1584 in London, he presented a mind-boggling vision of the universe, infinite in extent and containing an infinity of worlds. Our cosmos is just one of those worlds, and has the Sun at its center with the Earth revolving around it. Not everyone was impressed. The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, where Bruno presented his ideas, mocked him as that little Italian with a name longer than his body, referring to the philosopher's full and rather splendid moniker, Philoteus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus. The chancellor summarized Bruno's performance like this. He undertook, among very many other matters, to set on foot the opinion of Copernicus, that the Earth did go round and the heavens did stand still, whereas in truth, it was his own head which rather did run round. Then as now, Oxford was a unique place, but not by virtue of producing hostility towards Bruno. In his itinerant career, which brought him from Italy to cities including Paris, Toulouse, Geneva, Paris, London, and Wittenberg, he made plenty of enemies. He has, as one scholar has noted, the distinction of being the only known 16th century philosopher to have been excommunicated from all three major confessions, Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran. During his wanderings, he wrote prolifically, managing in one decade to produce a body of work that makes him one of the most important thinkers of the Renaissance. But he made the mistake of returning to Italy and making one more particularly decisive enemy. He came to Venice in 1591 to stay with Giovanni Mocenigo, who passed word of Bruno's unorthodox teachings to the Inquisition. In a further stroke of bad luck, the case came to the attention of the papal authorities in Rome, triggering a lengthy legal process that ended with Bruno's execution on February 17th, 1600 by being burnt at the stake. As the length of the trial suggests, Bruno's persecution was highly bureaucratic, deliberate, and in the minds of its perpetrators, even fair-minded and cautious. He was given repeated chances to explain himself, and Bruno himself clearly believed at least initially that doing so would get him out of trouble. At his first interrogation, he said that he had always perceived the threat of Inquisition as a joke because he knew he could defend his teachings. Even when his ultimate fate became clear, he said defiantly to his accusers, you passed your sentence on me with greater fear than I feel in receiving it. Evidently, he thought that they would have misgivings, even after their painstaking inquiry into his orthodoxy. This notwithstanding, the commission condemned his views on a variety of topics. These included aspects of his cosmology and also theological issues like the Trinity and Incarnation. On this score, Bruno admitted to having private doubts, but not to having put forth his skepticism publicly. Besides, he was only ever speaking as a philosopher. It was in this sense that he was skeptical regarding, for instance, the applicability of the word person to the Holy Trinity while accepting on philosophical grounds a Trinitarian distinction between God the Father, his intellect, and his own love. This suggests that Bruno was imagining that scholars like himself would be allowed the freedom in philosophizing also envisioned by Campanella. Like Campanella, he was wrong to think that such freedom was on offer around the turn of the 17th century. One idea that the Inquisition deemed unacceptable was genuinely central to Bruno's thought. To put it in the terms of one of his favorite sayings, there is nothing new under the sun. Or to put it in more philosophical terms, there is in Bruno's universe no creation or destruction. Instead, there is only alteration in the accidental properties of a single infinite substance. Bruno was thus rejecting the concept of substantial forms, which we also saw being put under pressure by Tilesio. In Aristotelian philosophy, substances are composites of matter and form, and they are the primary beings that populate the world, like the poor elements, plants, animals, and people. Bruno retains the form-matter analysis, but only at the level of the entire universe. This universe is a single great, indeed infinite, substance, which is constantly changing, but only with respect to the superficial accidental features that are the manifestations of its unbounded nature. And, like an animal, Aristotelian metaphysics, the universe is an organism. It has a single soul, the world soul, which completely pervades the infinity of matter. As Bruno puts it in a treatise called Cause, Principle, and Unity, the world soul is the act of everything and the potency of everything and is present in its entirety in everything, whence it follows that, even if there exist innumerable individuals, all things are one. While this is obviously a boldly original theory, it can also be seen as a fusion of ideas from Aristotelianism and Platonism. The world soul is familiar from Plato's Timaeus, and as already mentioned the idea of substance as a composite of matter and form is Aristotelian. But for his conception of matter, Bruno also looks to other sources. He knows that his belief in the material basis of all things was anticipated by the medieval Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabirol, called in Latin avicebron. When he comes to explain the nature of matter, Bruno adopts a radically un-Aristotelian view. Just as there is a one dimensional minimum, the point, and a two dimensional minimum, the line, so there is a minimal three dimensional body from which all other bodies are compounded. This atomic minimum has no parts, only limits at which it can contact other atoms. Obviously this is reminiscent of ancient atomism. Bruno is drawing on the Epicurean physical theories that had been made available through the rediscovery of Lucretius' poem, which he likes to quote, even as he anticipates the corpuscularian physics of the 17th century. Furthermore, in ancient atomism, the atoms move in a void or vacuum. But Bruno agrees with Aristotle that there is no actually empty space. Unlike Aristotle, he does have an abstract notion of space, which is in itself simply a three dimensional extension. Still though, he thinks that this space is always full of bodies, and can be distinguished from bodies, not in fact, but only by reason, as he puts it. What fills the space not currently occupied by atoms is an unlimited fluid medium through which atoms and bodies composed from atoms can move. In that dialogue, the Ash Wednesday Supper, he describes this medium as a single airy, ethereal, spiritual, and liquid body, a capacious place of motion and quiet, which reaches out into the immensity of infinity. Bruno assumes that the infinite power of God must have an infinite expression. Otherwise, he would be like a musician who knows how to play an instrument but sits idle without using it. Therefore, the universe is infinitely extended and is full of an infinite number of worlds, more or less like ours. Those other globes are Earths, he says, in no way different in species from this one, except in so far as they are larger or smaller. Bruno breaks crucially with one final presupposition of the classical atomists, namely that atoms have weight or a tendency to move downwards. In Bruno's universe, there is no down, precisely because of the aforementioned immensity of infinity. The Aristotelian cosmos is spherical, and so has a midpoint, which is where we find the center of the Earth. Thus, we can define downward motion as motion towards that point, upward motion as motion away from it. By contrast, as Bruno observes, an infinite universe has no central reference point, and so there can be no motion towards or away from naturally defined places. Or, as he elsewhere says, nothing moves to or around the universe but only within it. Brief reflection will show that he cannot accept the Aristotelian idea of natural place, for instance that earthy bodies try by nature to move towards the center of the cosmos. For there are an infinity of worlds, and clearly in those other worlds, Earth moves naturally towards the center of that world, and not ours. Otherwise, rocks dropped by the people of other worlds would come hurtling through the infinite space and towards our Earth, which sounds not only ridiculous but extremely dangerous. Why then do we see bodies performing natural motions, as when rocks fall down in air, or what is down from our point of view, and air bubbles percolate up in water? His answer is that this can be explained only with reference to the animating power of the world soul. It is present in the Earth, in the stars, and in the sun, and since these bodies are all ensouled, they perform voluntary motions, just like animals do. In the case of the motions performed by the Earth as a whole, this is providentially ordained. The Earth's daily rotation about its own axis causes night and day, while its rotation around the sun gives us the cycle of seasons. Which brings us back to the contentious claim taken from Copernicus that the Earth is in fact rotating around its own axis and moving around the sun. When Bruno defended this proposition at Oxford, he was greeted with incredulity and disdain. He took it hard, complaining that in England, there reigns a constellation of pedantic and obstinate ignorance and arrogance, mixed with rustic incivility which would try the patience of Job. As far as he was concerned, the schoolmen had inherited all of Aristotle's ignorance and none of his wisdom. Not, by the way, a judgment he applied only to Englishmen, since he later said that the Dominican friars who trained him in Italy were all asses and ignoramuses. In general, he thinks, doctors come as cheaply as sardines, since they are made, found, and hooked, with little trouble. This invective is good fun, but we should not overlook the possibility that, as Renaissance scholar Charles Schmitt put it, Bruno was a self-centered bigot who was obviously peaked because the men of Oxford did not consider him to be as brilliant as he considered himself to be. At any rate, Bruno got over his humiliation at Oxford by writing the dialogue Ash Wednesday Supper in defense of the Copernican theory. He rejects the comforting thought, which may have been put forward at Oxford before his appearance there by a scholar named Henri Saville, that Copernican heliocentrism is just a matter of mathematical convenience, a model for calculation rather than a description of the world's actual physical arrangement. No, says Bruno, the earth really is moving at incredible speed. How is it then that we don't notice this? For instance, when we drop something, shouldn't it move laterally across the landscape as it is no longer connected to the rotating earth? No, says Bruno again, giving the powerful analogy of a fast moving ship. If someone drops a stone from the top of the mast of the ship, the stone will fall to the bottom of the mast, not further towards the back of the boat. This is because the stone retains a power impressed in it by the motion of the ship, so that it keeps a motion coordinated with that of the ship even as it is falling down. Bruno insists that he is not just following the authority of Copernicus here, he sees through his own eyes. Still, he credits Copernicus with having unearthed an ancient and true philosophy buried for so many centuries in the dark caverns of a blind, malign, insolent, and envious ignorance. Of course, by this point in the Renaissance, nothing is more familiar than claiming to overthrow familiar ideas by unearthing long-lost ancient wisdom. Bruno gives Aristotle a decidedly mixed review, sometimes calling him a sophist, despite finding him far preferable to his later interpreters, but he's full of admiration for other figures of ancient thought and claims agreement with them. His insight about the unity of matter was already put forward by Plotinus, while various pre-Socratics had taught the Brunian doctrine that natural things are brought forth by being separated from matter, which contains them all in its infinite power. Actually, Bruno thinks he can find this idea in the Bible too. He refers to the line from Genesis, let the earth bring forth its animals, let the waters bring forth living creatures, even though in his view, scripture does not offer philosophical demonstrations or speculation concerning natural things. Broadly speaking, Bruno's intellectual heroes are the ones admired by Marsilio Ficino, who influenced him greatly. In fact, one accusation made against Bruno at Oxford was that his lectures there plagiarized from Ficino's book on magical therapies, On Life. Whatever the truth of this, Ficino's ideas about magic resonate powerfully in Bruno's own writings on the subject. Like Ficino, he distinguishes between natural magic and the invocation of wicked demons. The latter is despicable, whereas natural magic is morally neutral, like a sword that can be used in either a just or unjust cause. As for explaining how magic works, we've already seen how, for Bruno as for Ficino, the world soul animates the entire universe. The result is that, everything has access to everything else, as Bruno puts it. The bonds between things can be manipulated by the magician, or rather, the magician's own soul, whose powers are not limited to controlling his own body. Ficino's On Life encouraged the use of magic specifically for medical purposes, and Bruno likewise thinks this is how it should be applied, alongside other non-magical methods. The best healer should in fact be not only physician, but also alchemist and astrologer. This despite the fact that Bruno was rather skeptical about the claims of astrology, in part because he did not think that astral emotions are as exact as the astronomical models we use to represent them. Like all natural phenomena, the heavens are mere shadows or images of the ideas conceived in the mind of the world soul. But if this gives Bruno reason to doubt astrology, it encourages him to believe in magic. The symbols used by the magician are analogous to the images used by nature itself. The study of magic is thus natural in the most literal sense, namely that it teaches us how to produce effects in the same way the soul of the cosmos does. This is why Bruno says that, to obtain the absolute and perfect art, you should be coupled to the world soul and act in connection to it. One of the most disputed questions concerning Bruno's philosophy has to do with the magical manipulation of images. His writing career began with the first of several works on the art of memory. Bruno explains a complicated method for inventing mnemonic devices, using several diagrams shaped like wheels, with letters from the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew alphabets inscribed on the wheels. The letters are associated with symbolic imagery, the idea being that you can call to mind a certain word by connecting it to the sequence of images dictated by the diagrams. All scholars agree that Bruno is here taking up the ideas of Ramon Lull, an unconventional medieval thinker whom I once upon a time described as a forerunner of the Renaissance, in part because of his influence on Bruno. But scholars emphatically do not agree about the significance of Bruno's mnemonic art. A now classic but controversial study by Francis Yates, published in 1964, posited that his writings on memory express ideas taken from a corpus of magical writings, ascribed to the Greek divinity Hermes, alongside concepts from the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition whose influence also made itself felt in the works of Pico della Mirandola. Yates was even convinced that Bruno's execution was in large part provoked by his interest in magic, though this does not seem to be borne out by the documentation of the trial. A diametrically opposed reading was proposed by Rita Solese, for whom the symbols of the wheels might look magical in character, but actually are simply convenient and memorable instruments. For her, Bruno's art of memory is no more magical than it would be if you, say, studied for a test on Renaissance philosophy by associating various thinkers with characters from your favorite TV shows. Will Smith, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, would be a good choice for Pico della Mirandola, and for Bruno himself I'm thinking of Walter White from Breaking Bad. Even on this purely pragmatic reading, there could still be a philosophical basis for the mnemonic theory. Bruno quotes Aristotle's claim that we cannot think without images to explain why this technique of imaginative logic is so effective, a striking contrast with Pomponazzi who quoted the same passage to show that the mind cannot operate without being linked to a body. And more recently, a kind of compromised view has been put forward by Manuel Mertens. As he observes, Bruno himself says that the memory writings are not works on magic, even though they are full of magical terminology and imagery. To resolve this contradiction, Mertens suggests that the mnemonic technique is, apart from its own usefulness, an ideal preparation for the magician. Just as with my examples of television characters, images are not chosen randomly, but have some kind of symbolic resonance with the target of memorization. As Mertens says, the disciple in Bruno's art of memory, well-instructed in the natural language of forms and figures, would be a good candidate for becoming a magical binder. In other words, the two disciplines do call for similar skills and training, but they are not the same art. Even though Bruno's mnemonic theory depends on the notion of thinking with imagery, he does not believe that the true philosopher should stop at the level of images. This is clear from one final famous treatise called On the Heroic Frenzies. It again calls to mind themes familiar from Ficino and from other Renaissance authors who wrote about love, the Frenzies of the title being a reference to the ecstatic transport that can befall the lover. Like several other explorations of love written in the Renaissance, The Heroic Frenzies is a dialogue, but in this case, as in a typical episode of Breaking Bad, there's a twist. Namely that the characters are commenting on poems written by Bruno himself, in what may be an echo of the poetic self-commentary of Dante. Bruno has some fun with this literary conceit, for instance by having the main spokesman admit that he's not entirely sure what Bruno the poet had in mind. But the main thrust of the dialogue is clear. True erotic heroes pursue a love more exalted than the concerns of physical pleasure, and can no more sink to the level of common and natural loves than dolphins can be seen in the trees of the forest. The highest love of contemplation takes the hero beyond this natural world of images and likenesses in which we see divinity as if reflected in a mirror. As we know from Bruno's other works, the universe is an infinite expression of God's limitless power so it will inevitably outstrip the capacity of the human mind. But in a way this is good news, since it means the potential for new knowledge and taking pleasure in the acquisition of that knowledge is likewise infinite. As is abundantly clear from Bruno's inventive, witty, and diverse writings, he himself took great delight in this endless philosophical exploration until he met his own untimely end. With that, we've nearly come to an end of our own, finishing off our coverage of philosophy in Renaissance Italy. After all, I've said that I'm treating the time period of the Renaissance, as always somewhat arbitrarily, as ending in 1600, the very year that Bruno was executed. But there is one more figure I want to cover, in part because his story and ideas are so reminiscent of Bruni's. He too was a devotee of the new Copernican cosmology, and he too was persecuted by the papacy, though not to the point of being killed. Though he expressly denied that the world revolved around him, he was a pretty important guy. In fact, one of the most important scientists in history, Galileo Galilei. We'll be asking how his epoch-making ideas grew out of the epoch that was just coming to an end by relating the themes of this series to the methods he used in making his scientific discoveries. That's next time here, on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. Today's episode, The Harder They Fall, Galileo and the Renaissance. In the last episode, I suggested that we tend to overestimate, or at least misjudge, the psychological impact of Copernicus' removal of the Earth from the centre of the universe. By contrast, I believe that we tend to underestimate another feature of the new science of the heavens. Around this time, it became increasingly clear that the celestial bodies are not, as Aristotle would have it, perfect and unchanging substances made from a fundamentally different kind of matter from that found in our earthly sphere. The new science of the 16th and 17th centuries instead offered a single unified physics, applicable to both the heavens and the things around us in our everyday experience. Things up there are made of more or less the same stuff as things down here. And as we now know, outer space is full of changing and unexpected phenomena like comets, supernovas and Sandra Bullock. The unification of physics was already propounded by Telesio and Campanella. On their theory, the whole universe is made from one kind of matter, with everything from stars to stones being governed by the simple principles of heat and cold. But what they offered was indeed only theory. It was at the beginning of the 17th century that another Italian scientist offered what he at least considered to be direct proof. I refer, of course, to Galileo Galilei. He showed that the moon is not perfectly spherical but covered with irregularities and mountains on the basis of shadows he could see on the moon's surface using the new technology of the telescope. With that same instrument, he discovered that there are spots moving across the surface of the sun itself. Galileo also demonstrated that a nova that appeared in the night sky must lie beyond the moon, another example to show that things in the celestial world do change. Furthermore, his telescope delivered powerful confirmation of the Copernican theory, especially in the case of Venus. This planet could now be seen to have phases of illumination, just like our moon, something that could be explained only by saying that it orbits the sun and not the Earth. Galileo also found four of Jupiter's moons which were clearly orbiting around it. This was not a direct proof of Copernicus's heliocentrism but undermined a powerful argument for the ancient cosmology, given that the moon at least goes around the Earth, surely everything else does too. Given the presence of bodies orbiting Jupiter, it was now easier to believe that the Earth too might be circling the sun while having another heavenly body, the moon, circling it. Thanks to these and other discoveries, Galileo is rightly seen as a truly pivotal figure in the history of European science and philosophy. He literally saw things that no one had ever seen before, and as a result the universe as a whole came to be seen in a new light. If it takes one revolutionary thinker to appreciate another fully, then we might pay heed to the words of Immanuel Kant. In his critique of pure reason, which famously presents itself as performing a Copernican turn of its own within philosophy, he claimed that Galileo introduced an innovative scientific method, according to which, Now unlike Giordano Bruno, I would not insist that there is nothing new under the sun, but it's a guiding principle of this podcast series that intellectual developments do not come out of nowhere like the debris that caused all that trouble for Sandra Bullock in the movie Gravity. One reason it is worth our time to learn about supposedly minor authors is that it puts us in a better position to understand the achievement of more famous figures. And so it is here. There's good reason to see Galileo's breakthroughs, which he mostly made in the early 17th century, as a continuation of trends we have learned about from the 16th century. We can see this already from his proposal about just what it is that's causing the Earth and other planets to move along their orbits, namely a luminous warm fluid emanating outwards from the sun. This so-called caloric spirit sounds quite a bit like what we found in Telesio and Campanella. And Galileo had other things in common with other scientists of the Italian Renaissance. Like Campanella, Bruno, and Cardano, he was a practicing astrologer who was accused of believing in astral determinism and who cast nativities for patrons, friends, and even his own daughters. When he discovered moons around Jupiter, he argued for their importance on the grounds that their fast motion should make their astral influence particularly intense. And by the way, he didn't call them moons, but rather Medicean planets, named in honor of a patron who was a member of the Medice, everyone's favorite family of Florence. It doesn't get much more Renaissance Italian than that. But as it turns out, the strongest lengths between Galileo's thought and what came before had to do with precisely the feature Kant picked out as most new, namely his scientific methodology. A number of scholars, especially William A. Wallace, have argued that in this area, he was heavily indebted to the Aristotelian tradition, especially in the form represented at Padua by Jacopo Zabarella. After studying philosophy and mathematics in Pisa in the 1580s, Galileo taught there as a lecturer until he moved to teach at Padua in 1592. Studies of his early writings, which survive in Galileo's own handwriting, show that he was deeply schooled in the logic of the Paduan scholastics like Nifo and Zabarella. He seems to have been influenced especially by Jesuits at the Collegio Romano rather than by reading the Paduans directly, but he was widely read in scholastic literature and made numerous references to Thomas Aquinas and other medieval scholastics and also to Averroes. His studies convinced him that, even though Aristotle's physics was shot through with errors, he remained a reliable guide to best practice in science. Indeed, a favorite theme of his was that fidelity to Aristotle's method required departures from Aristotle's conclusions. He scorned the Aristotelians of his own day. Few of them inquire whether what Aristotle said is true, for it suffices for them that they will be considered more learned the more passages of Aristotle they have ready for use. In contrast to these slavishly traditional schoolmen, Galileo thought that a true Aristotelian philosopher was one who philosophizes according to Aristotelian teachings, proceeding from those methods and those true suppositions and principles on which scientific discourse is founded. In keeping with this, he insisted that if Aristotle were presented with the sort of observations made possible by the telescope, he would be the first to change his views on the nature and arrangement of the heavens. Indeed, in his treatise on the newly discovered sunspots, Galileo said that denying change in the heavens would be anti-Aristotelian, because it would involve departing from Aristotle's empirical method for the sake of preserving an Aristotelian doctrine in natural philosophy, even though the method is more fundamental. On the basis of such remarks, John Herman Randall Jr. already said way back in 1940 that in method and philosophy, if not in physics, Galileo remained a typical Padua-Nerus-Atellian. But much research has been done on this question since Randall wrote these words. It has shown that Galileo made flexible and innovative use of the scholastic methodology without departing from it entirely. In particular, he fused the method with extensive use of mathematics. As we know, there was also precedent for applying mathematical analysis to physical phenomena, stretching back to the Oxford calculators of the 14th century. Of more direct relevance was the humanist-driven study of Archimedes we discussed in episode 361. Thus, in an early work on the motion of bodies, Galileo said that he was adopting the methods of my mathematicians and praised the proofs of Archimedes as rigorous, clear, and subtle. Galileo was well aware that he was operating within the remit of the so-called mixed sciences in which mathematics is applied to nature. Archimedes with his attention to such phenomena as levers and floating bodies was the chief ancient authority for these disciplines. We can illustrate Galileo's method with his work on the problem of falling bodies. The first thing we need to understand is that this is really the same topic as the one just mentioned as in interest of Archimedes, namely floating bodies. After all, a falling body is just one that is not floating, and bodies can fall slowly in water just as much as they do quickly in air. For Galileo, floating is caused by balance, and falling is caused by imbalance. In a work called On Motion, written in 1590, he argues that bodies fall because of their relative heaviness, or gravity, compared to the medium in which they fall. By contrast, a body will float if it has the same gravity as the medium or less, like styrofoam floating in water. In a later work on floating bodies, Galileo sought to defend this account against an objection made by Aristotelians, namely that something heavier than water will still float in water if it is shaped the right way, like a broad, thin piece of ebony. This shows, they argued, that it is the resistance of water that causes bodies to float. Galileo retorted that the experiment involves a misleading appearance. In fact, trapped air is holding up the ebony, as we can see from the fact that the ebony will sink if it is forced below the surface. In further experiments using inclined planes, Galileo showed that a body falls with greatest force if it is moving straight down, with the force being reduced as the angle of fall is changed toward the horizontal by raising the surface along which the body is falling. So imagine a ball falling straight down, as opposed to rolling balls down a tilted piece of cardboard. The steeper the slope, the harder they fall. These experiments allowed him to discover the Law of Free Fall, showing that speed increases in relation to the square of the time of the fall, with the body accelerating faster and faster the longer it has been falling. It was precisely these experiments with inclined planes that Kant mentioned when crediting Galileo with the modern scientific method. But with all due respect to Kant, Galileo was not really using what has come to be known as the scientific method, that is, formulating hypotheses and testing them empirically. Rather, he was using the scientific method of the Paduan school. This meant working from observed phenomena back to fundamental explanatory principles, and then showing that the principles would explain the observations. In other words, he was using the method of regress described by Zabarella, while integrating mathematics into the different steps of that method. Or at least, that's the interpretation put forward by the aforementioned William Wallace. In favor of this reading, we can firstly note Galileo's own description of his goal as a search for underlying causes. Sometimes finding the cause is easy, you can infer it from just one observation. This is the case with the phases of illumination he saw in Venus, which immediately shows that it orbits the Sun. Already this is a thoroughly earthen point, since Aristotle says the same thing himself and about a different astronomical phenomenon. If we were standing on the Moon, we could immediately see that the cause of the lunar eclipse is the Earth blocking the light of the Sun. More complicated is Galileo's way of arriving at causal explanations that are not obvious. In the case of floating and falling bodies, the rule of heaviness was the right cause in his view. Experimentation was used simply to display the dependence of the observed effects on this cause. When he did things like testing how bodies float in water, or changing the inclination of a plane, on which balls are rolling, he was following a maxim he formulated as follows, The cause is that which, when it is posited, the effect follows, and when removed, the effect is removed. Though the earlier Padua-Nerus-Itilians did not propose using experiments in this way, doing so fits neatly into the theory of regress, which as we saw involved a step that Nifo called negotiation of the understanding. Here we have identified the cause but are trying to understand exactly how it works, before going on to affirm that the effects really do proceed from this cause. Galileo even makes a point familiar from Zabarella, namely that this stage helps show why the whole procedure is not circular. We do arrive at a cause on the basis of its effects, then explain the effects on the basis of the cause, but the intermediate step of considering and testing the cause allows us to understand the effects differently than we did at first. Galileo's use of the regressive method here helps to set his discoveries apart from what other mathematicians had done, like Guido Baldo del Monte, who as we saw also experimented with balls rolling on inclined planes. Unlike him, Galileo was able to identify what he called, Principles of Nature that are known and manifest, the sort of principles always invoked as the foundation of Aristotelian demonstrations. There's a further sign that Galileo does not use observations to test hypotheses, but to demonstrate the efficacy of his favored causal principles. This is the fact that he is surprisingly unconcerned about whether experiment actually bears out his theory. In fact, the inclined plane experiments never confirmed his laws perfectly because of the effects of air resistance and friction. Galileo dismissed this as irrelevant, saying that we should simply imagine doing it with an incorporeal tilted surface and a perfect sphere that contacts it at a single point so that there is no resistance. Such musings led him to the brilliant but untestable observation that in the absence of friction, even the slightest of pushes would suffice to move a body at rest in a horizontal direction since its weight would have no effect on lateral movement. On the other hand, experiment can disconfirm or refute causal explanations. This is why he proposed dropping objects off towers to show that the proportion of earth in a body would not make it fall faster as the Aristotelians claimed. And of course, sightings of the phases of Venus and mountains on the Moon directly refuted other Aristotelian doctrines. For Galileo, then, empirical demonstration is often just a matter of ruling out alternative explanations of a given effect, leaving his own causal account as the only one available. As he has one of the characters say in his famous Dialogues on the Two Chief World Systems, The primary and true cause of an effect is only one, and so I understand very well and am sure that at most one can be true, and I know that all the rest are fictitious and false. When a physical test is not possible, he finds other ways to reject rival theories, as when he wrongly argues that the tides are better explained by appealing to the motion of the Earth rather than the effect of the Moon pulling at the water. In this case, the tides are, as Galileo says, using scholastic terminology, a sign of the Earth's motion, which is in turn the cause of the tides. But this is a rather vulnerable position. If we are really proceeding by process of elimination, then we need to show not just that our causal explanation can account for the observed effects, but that there is no other causal explanation that could give rise to those same effects. This is something that was well understood by Galileo's opponents, not least in the church hierarchy. The papacy wanted him to retreat from his Copernicanism, at least to the extent of admitting that the new model was merely a possible or mathematically useful basis for astronomy rather than insisting that it was the exclusive physical truth. But like Bruno, Galileo rejected this easy way out. Of course, we now know that he was right about the facts and admire him for his courage in standing up for what he knew to be true, but by the epistemological standards accepted on both sides at the time, it's actually not so clear that Galileo did know he was right since this would mean achieving demonstrative understanding grounded in causal first principles. His style of proof by regress could discover a candidate cause for the observed effects, eliminate other proposed candidates, and then account for the effects in terms of his own preferred cause. But it could never show once and for all that no other explanation can ever be provided. Perhaps the true cause hasn't been suggested yet. Perhaps it is even beyond the human capacity of discovery. This was not a merely technical point. As far as the churchmen were concerned, scripture was the most reliable guide to the nature of the world since it was revealed by the God who made that world. They could point to biblical passages like one found in the Book of Joshua, in which the sun is miraculously commanded to stand still in the sky. What sense would this make if, as the Copernicans claimed, the sun is always standing still and it is the earth that moves around it? Of course, theologians were well aware that scripture was subject to allegorical and metaphorical readings, but why should they reject the clear meaning of scripture on the basis of scientific theories that fell short of absolute certainty, as codified in Aristotelian epistemology? Galileo himself thoroughly trained in the Aristotelian tradition likewise associated true science with total certainty. So where a scientist of a later age might have contented himself with simply asserting his theory as the best hypothesis discovered so far, he had to insist that his theories were established beyond all doubt. In some cases, human knowledge could, he claimed, reach a level of certainty matching even God's. Since he took such phenomena as the phases of Venus to have proved once and for all that the planets do go around the sun, Galileo demanded that interpretations of scripture be adapted to this empirical finding. He wrote that, In the case of the passage from the book of Joshua, he cleverly noted that the miracle in question would make even less sense within the Aristotelian understanding of the cosmos, where all the visible stars and planets are seated upon spheres that move one another in a coordinated fashion. According to this worldview, God could not have made the sun stop without stopping the whole system. In general, though, Galileo was rather unconcerned about possible clashes between the Bible and science, in part because they have different subject matters. The purpose of scripture is simply to tell us what we need to know for the sake of our salvation. He quotes a churchman who admitted that If scripture occasionally speaks as if the earth is unmoving, this is just to avoid confusing the common believer who assumes that the ground under his feet is at rest. And besides, all good Christians will readily agree that scripture is true. How then could it ever disagree with the demonstrated conclusions of science? Since these conclusions have been proven with certainty, they must surely be true, and it is impossible for one truth to conflict with another. Galileo is here repeating, more or less verbatim, an idea about scriptural exegesis put forward by that great hero of Aristotelianism, the Muslim commentator of Averroes. In his decisive treatise on the relation between reason and revelation, he had likewise argued that That work was not translated into Latin, so Galileo would not have known that he was reiterating a point made already by Averroes, but perhaps he would have appreciated the parallel. As we've seen, he saw himself as upholding Aristotle's scientific method while rejecting his scientific conclusions. Even toward the end of his life, Galileo was still insisting that he had always been an Aristotelian in matters of logic. By that time, famously, he had paid the price for following scientific inquiry wherever it led. He was condemned by the Inquisition in 1633, made to reject his own teachings and placed under house arrest. This is a story we need to tell in more detail. By exploring the text that got him into trouble, he aforementioned dialogues on the two chief world systems and the story of his trial. We'll be better placed to do that once we learn more about the historical background, and that's going to take a while. Galileo has given us a fitting conclusion to our coverage of the Italian Renaissance, and he will offer an equally fitting transition to the riches of 17th century philosophy. But we won't be able to make that transition properly until we understand much more about the age that came before. After all, plenty was happening outside Italy in this time, including the work of Copernicus and a small matter called the Protestant Reformation. So we will return to Galileo again after we have dealt with all that. In fact, I'll be devoting a whole series of episodes to cover the Northern Renaissance, the Reformation, and the backlash against Protestantism in Spain and Italy that is often called the Counter-Reformation. That's what's coming next after one final interview in which we, ironically, bring our time in Renaissance Italy to an end by visiting the Eternal City. Ingrid Rowland will be joining me to show why there's no place like Rome as we round off this series of episodes on Renaissance Italy by discussing humanism, the role of the Church in Roman intellectual life, and its persecution of figures like Giordano Bruno. Later on, the history of philosophy, without any caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Rome in the Renaissance with Ingrid Rowland, who is University of Notre Dame Professor of Architecture and History based in Rome. Hello, Ingrid. Hello. Thanks for coming on the podcast. In this series, I have focused a lot on Florence and Padua, which are the two Italian cities that people most associate with philosophy in the Renaissance. And I've touched on some other cities like Bologna, because when I talked about the teaching of medicine there, and Milan as a rival to Florence, but I haven't said that much about Rome, actually. And so I was wondering if you could just start out by telling us how the intellectual and philosophical climate of Rome differed from those cities in like the 15th, 16th centuries. Rome, unlike those cities, has a complete interruption of its normal social and cultural life when the popes leave Rome in 1308. Officially, the popes are supposed to be back in Rome by 1386, but in practical terms, it's not until well into the 15th century that the Rome that we think about is the head of Catholicism, home of the Curia, all of that has been terribly interrupted in the 14th century, and so it has to reconstruct itself. And what that means is that cultural life in Rome for about a century is almost completely interrupted. The artists go up to Avignon where the pope is. Artists can't get commissions, and it's to the benefit especially of Florence that these things happen. I think a lot of what makes Florence happen in the 15th century is its swift recovery from the Black Death. Rome, on the other hand, is completely decimated. It's already without the popes. And so what it means is that philosophy in Rome has to virtually reconstruct itself over the course of the 15th century and then develop in the 16th century, and does it explicitly under the umbrella of the church. So that what happens in Rome happens with the restoration of the popes to the city and the following of the Curia, which takes really from about 1417 to the mid 15th century. By 1450, Rome has become again the Christian capital. Okay, so that's a very strong contrast, obviously, with somewhere like Florence. So in a way, Florence is booming while Rome is struggling. Yeah, and it's really noticeable in not only philosophy but say art because there are no artists in Rome getting jobs. And therefore, if you want to be a pope and turn your city into a cultural capital, Florentine artists or artists from elsewhere who've gravitated to Florence are your easiest way of getting top notch producers. That's really interesting. One reason why people think of Florence so immediately when they're thinking about philosophy in the Renaissance is the supposed Platonic Academy. And we have discussed whether that was a thing or not. It's certainly true that there were a bunch of Platonists in Florence, especially one thinks here of Marsilio Ficino. But there actually was also an academy, so called Academy at Rome, involving figures like Angelo Colucci and Poponio Leto. So I was wondering if you could also tell us something about that group. It's unlike the Florentines, the Roman Academy is almost living the ancient life. The people who joined the Roman Curia are highly educated in the classics and the excitement about Rome is that you can live among the ruins. And so the so called Roman Academy, I think in a way is a gentleman's club, but in a society that's so rigidly hierarchical as the church and the Renaissance in Italy, where everybody dresses according to their rank, everything's terribly prescribed. And so the Academy gives you a kind of transversal, non hierarchical way to associate and pretend that you're a Christian with Christian enlightenment, but living like an ancient. So what they create with the Roman Academy is the ideal world in their mind, Christian spirituality, grafted onto the elegance of the classical way of life. And so they dress up in togas, go out into the ruins. They would both venerate classical statues and say mass, which a lot of them were qualified to do. Giles of Viterbo, the head of the Augustinian order at one point says when he's been doing table levitation inside the Sibyl's cave in Cumah, outside Naples, and he said, we were not less pious for having done this. The way they could get away with all of it is that to their mind, God had set up ancient wisdom to make it possible for humanity to understand the Christian message when it came along, more or less at the same time as the Roman Empire. And if you don't have Jewish tradition to tell you what a Messiah is, it doesn't matter if one happens because nobody knows what's going on. And in the same way, the Trinity depends completely on Platonic doctrine or Plotinus rereading Platonic doctrine. And therefore, without ancient philosophy to back up Trinitarian doctrine, you're not going to understand the nature of God either. This is the way they think about things that ancient Rome is the precursor to enlightened Christian Rome. And they're having a lot of fun pretending they're ancient but knowing that they're not. That sounds like a commonality then between the Roman Academy and the Florentine Academy, this intense combination of classical antiquity and love for classical antiquity, including pagan philosophers like Plotinus on the one hand, and still Christian piety on the other hand. I mean, Marsilio Ficino is a priest, for example. They really don't have a hostility to it. It's not threatening to them at that point. It's rather a fulfillment of the entire course of history as far as they can tell. It seems though that an obvious difference between the environment in Rome and the environment in a place like Florence, or really anywhere other than Rome, is that in Rome you have the looming presence of the papacy, which of course is right there in the shape of the Vatican. So how did Roman humanism respond to that? Are they getting a lot of commissions or financial support from the papacy? Are they put under pressure by the popes? How does that work out? They're certainly almost entirely subsidized by the popes. And so a good deal of the philosophy that's generated in Rome goes towards justifying its status as a Christian capital. Why God always meant for this religion that began in the Holy Land to end up in Italy, all of that has to be justified. And so there's a vested interest among the popes themselves and among the humanists to say why they are where they are and why this is of crucial importance. But are they more susceptible to pressure from the papacy because they're literally right there in the same city? So for example, do they have to worry more about censorship or being put on the index when the index comes along in the mid-16th century? When the index happens, they will. I think there's not much pressure before that. There's kind of a collective spirit. And that means, for example, that right around the turn of the 15th into the 16th century, there was a Dominican friar who created a whole series of textual and physical forgeries telling tales about how the popes were really descended from the god Janus and that Janus was really not just an Etrusco Roman god, but in fact Noah, who after the flood had landed in Italy and started the golden age. And so there are all sorts of crazy theories that everybody seems to subscribe to without much dissension until the Lutheran Reformation comes along. And so people who used to be completely in harmony furthering the popes suddenly do start fracturing along national and ideological lines. But it's not really until the challenge of the Lutheran Reformation. I think everybody's too busy building up Rome as a capital before. There's a remarkable unanimity in the way that people think. That's interesting because I guess I think of humanism as being already from early on in the 15th century pretty allied to the cause of historical critical scholarship. So if you think about like Lorenzo Valla debunking the claims of the popes, right, in the donation of Constantine, is that just an exception? Does he not count these sort of outside the Roman humanists circles or what? I think as Anthony Grafton showed in his book Forgers and Critics, the problem is that this Dominican forger, Anius of Iterbo, was such a clever antiquarian scholar himself that he almost invented the standards for humanist criticism of the late 15th, early 16th century while exploiting it to put forth something that we now think is mostly untrue. So it's an ironic and therefore fascinating and really amusing situation. And everybody believed it. So you've got the sacrifice of Noah as the culmination of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling because Noah is the first pope. You have Bramante doing the first Doric architecture, but he doesn't think it's Doric. It's Etruscan architecture. There's just this collective, we might say insanity, certainly peculiar thought that's there for a short time and then is dissipated and then everything goes much more along a normal track that we can recognize. But it's as if for about 50 years, Rome is this enclave of millennial thought, literally half millennial thought. So which 50 years is that roughly? From about the fourth in 1471 and then going into, say, the excommunication of Luther in 1521. Okay, so that whole section around the turn of the 16th century then? Yeah, and it's characterized by a fairly uniform idea of what antiquity was that antiquities, both its Jewish and its pagan aspects are like the mosaic from the fifth century in the Church of Santa Sabina, the ancestry of the church, the Church of the Gentiles and the Church of the Jews. And so you've got that you have considerable tolerance for Jews, only by any standard of before and after. You have this belief in Etruscan heritage and the certainty that Noah was the first pope and that the pagan gods in the most extreme formulation of this were really guardian angels, which is what Giles of Beiterbo, the Augustinian prelate says explicitly. That's amazing. So it's really, when you start looking at it, unbelievable because it just sounds as if they're all going to be clapped into the inquisitorial slammer. But they get away with it because the popes all believe it. Yeah, I guess we could say that just as in Florence, the humanists are supporting the claims and legitimacy of the Medici. So the same thing is happening in Rome with the humanists supporting the claims and legitimacy of the popes. Something you just mentioned there is the Sistine Chapel, which I suppose will leap to mind for a lot of people when they think of the Vatican. And in your book about 16th century Rome, which I guess we should mention is called The Culture of the High Renaissance, you say something about the Sistine Chapel that really struck me. You say that it makes the layered neoplatonic view of the world something that anyone can begin to grasp. And I was sort of wishing you'd said more about that. So could I get you to say more about that right now? I know that when I wrote that I was thinking about the first time I saw Raphael's School of Athens, which was in a little book that I got as a present for my ninth birthday. I got a whole series of little paperback art books. And it wasn't even the whole school of Athens, it was most of it. But I could tell that that was a painting of people who were exactly where they should be. And I think the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the same thing where you see this colossal construction. But you understand that everybody in that construction is in the right place, and that it makes this completely harmonious, titanic structure that somehow you're a part of. There's something so human about both what Michelangelo's doing for Julius II and what Raphael's doing for Julius II, that somehow even a kid can understand that this is a grand design. There's a great clarity of composition with both of them. And the composition is built on the idea that the world is layered. And it's that way that they present layering in a way that doesn't look chaotic or scary, it rather looks inviting. And it makes you feel that you're not just a cog in a great machine, but you're really part of something beautiful and wonderful and creative. I guess ideas of harmony that come from the Pythagorean aspect of the Neoplatonic tradition would also be relevant here. Very much so. There's in the corner of the School of Athens, a wonderful image of balding man, who must be Pythagoras because he's looking at a tablet held by an angelic looking boy, probably an angel in disguise. And it's got a Pythagorean diagram. Interestingly, Giorgio Vasari, when he went through there, described this figure as St. Matthew instead of Pythagoras. I wonder what he was on when he looked at it. Yeah, although it sort of goes back to what you were saying before about the confusion and medley of Christian and pagan culture, that it's possible to confuse Pythagoras for a Christian saint. That says a lot. My Dutch friend, Brahm Kempris, has actually tried to argue that it is St. Matthew, that this is all perfectly fine. And what about architecture in Rome? Do you see that also as being strongly influenced by the Platonic tradition? It's influenced, above all, I think, by this Etruscan myth. And I actually have come to believe that the way we look at classical architecture now is completely forged in the 15th and 16th century in Rome between the time of Leon Battista Alberti around 1450 and Raphael around 1519. In that period, an eclectic international style that was ancient Roman architecture that went from Hadrian's Wall in Britain down to the Sudan and off to India, all of that suddenly becomes Italianized. You get the invention of the so-called classical orders, which never existed until they're enunciated by Raphael in 1519. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian become standard instead of serving suggestions. And Vitruvius almost becomes an apologist for the popes, as he'd been an apologist for Augustus. So I think Rome has had an absolutely determining effect on the way we understand classical architecture and theorize about classical architecture. And it all has to do with Pope, who's a temporal leader, but at the same time has a spiritual mission. And it goes specifically to building St. Peter's because the idea of rebuilding St. Peter's was to make it so beautiful that Muslims and Jews would walk into it and become Christian on the spot. Do we know if that ever worked? There have been some art historians who've converted. It works for some people. Okay, well, before we come to an end, I want to spend a few minutes talking about a specific figure who you've worked on quite a bit, whose name is Giordano Bruno, who already covered him here on the podcast. He's actually not from Rome. It would have been nice if he was because this would have been so much easier to get him in here smoothly. But my excuse is that he was executed in Rome as a heretic in 1600. And I thought we could start there. So maybe you could give us some context for his execution and understanding it by saying something more generally about Inquisition and how it affected intellectual activity in 16th century Italy. There have been inquisitions around the Spanish Inquisition, goes back in fact to the 15th century, and Pope Sixtus V actually wrote to Tomás de Torquemada and said, Why don't you tone it down without any success? Ironically, one of the people who really participated most avidly in this whole mindset of Renaissance Rome, where the ancient world and the Jews are part of this great heritage, was the person who founded the Roman Inquisition in 1542, Pope Paul III, who was made a cardinal by the border Pope Alexander VI in 1493. And so it's the most unlikely person on the face of it to suddenly establish an Inquisition along the Spanish lines. But Paul was deathly afraid of Protestantism. And so normally, what the Inquisition was looking for in the 1540s going into 1560s, 1570s, especially in Rome, were instances of Protestantism, trying to make sure that people stayed on the non-Reformation side of the Protestant Reformation. Eventually, the mandate spread so that love potions and more vernacular casual expressions of not quite Christianity came under their purview. Bruno's problem is that he becomes interested both in Protestantism, he was a Calvinist, briefly, he was a Lutheran for a while, he was excommunicated not only as a Catholic, but also as a Calvinist and Lutheran. So he had a great gift for annoying people, while also being fantastically curious about every aspect of philosophy and theology. He was in fact arrested in Venice, and was denounced by his host in Venice. He was supposed to be teaching the art of memory. And then his host wrote a scathing letter to the Venetian Inquisition, saying, he swore and he said all of these things. It turns out, Bruno not only was a brilliant writer and thinker, he was also a brilliant hurler of invective, much of which he probably didn't even know he was saying it when he said it, but he blasphemed like a stevedore. And what this man did is simply quote some of his blasphemies, send them to the Inquisition, and once that juridical mechanism gets going, it's extremely hard to stop it. A lot of what happens in the Inquisition is in the hands of lawyers. And in practical terms, Bruno blasphemed enough things to get him in trouble with the Venetian Inquisition. Normally, people didn't spend very much time in inquisitorial prison. Bruno spent two years because they really just didn't know what to do with him. The more they talked to him, the more they realized he'd been traveling all over Europe, that he'd met Protestants of every kind, Anglicans, Calvinists, Lutherans. He tried twice to get back into the church in both cases, appealing to Jesuits, one in Paris and one in Venice. He's all over the map, religiously at a time that people are not supposed to be all over the map. They're supposed to be rooted in one tradition. You actually quote him in the book as when he's arrested, and he's going to be put on trial. He says to his inquisitors, you may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it. And I was wondering, is that just tough talk on his part? Or do you think he was right that there might be real misgivings about persecution, even amongst the persecutors, never mind in broader society? I mean, is this something where the inquisitors really nervous about what they were doing, do you think? Yeah, I think they were. And I think particularly the first Jesuit who ever became an inquisitor, Robert Bellarmine, who was brought on to Bruno's trial. The thing is that Bruno as a Dominican had been trained in inquisitorial methods, so he knew how to do it himself. And I've always thought that the arguments between Bellarmine was brought in as the best theologian available to the Catholic side, but Bellarmine himself had almost run into problems with the Inquisition because he believed that space was fluid, so that he himself was unorthodox in his thoughts. And he was really brought in to checkmate Bruno at a time when Bellarmine's a Jesuit who's living the life in this brand new order, and Bruno's been in prison for seven years. And in those conditions, they're brought face to face. And I think Bellarmine was haunted the rest of his life for what he did. There is also a letter that's an eyewitness report of Bruno's execution by burning at the stake alive rather than being discreetly strangled beforehand. And so it was an extraordinarily brutal execution. It was carried out at dawn. And what the Pope Clement VIII specifically feared was a Protestant backlash, because enough people thought that Bruno was a Protestant, that there was some legitimate doubt about how the Protestant powers would respond to this. Actually, something that's already come out from what you've said here in this discussion about Bruno, like his traveling around in Europe, but also comes out very strongly in your book about him, is how integrated he is with what's going on in Northern Europe, not just the Reformation itself and his flirtation with various formed versions of Christianity, but also his intellectual influences, because he draws on Copernicus, which is, I suppose, the most famous example, but he's also influenced by people like Erasmus and Nicholas of Cusa. Would you say that he in some sense represents a kind of interweaving of historical and philosophical developments between Italy and Protestant Europe in this period? Yeah, I think so. He tries very hard to be a peacemaker. And the problem is he's so cantankerous so that what he wants with his heart and what he says with his mouth are often at odds. The transcripts of how he talks to his partners in inquisitorial prison starts insulting them. So one of them's reading the Breviary, and he says, Why are you reading that piece of garbage? And then he'll point out the window and say, Look at the stars, they're all worlds. And so he'll go from the most insane swearing to these celestial visions of incredible beauty that it made him hard to handle. And he really remains a standing challenge to any idea of orthodoxy. Well, I think I'm going to take that excuse to finish on this note, because we basically just finished the series on the Italian Renaissance, the way that Dante finishes each part of the Divine Comedy, namely by referring to the stars. So that's very nice. So I'm going to thank Ingrid Rowland very much for coming on the podcast to join us. Oh, thank you. This was so much fun. And that does indeed bring to an end our coverage of the Italian Renaissance. Next, we're going to be turning our attention to the Northern Renaissance and the developments that occurred in the history of philosophy during the Reformation. So we're going to basically go back over 15th and 16th century philosophy, but outside of Italy, and that's going to take us quite a few episodes. So I hope you will join me for that as we begin to look at philosophy during the Reformation, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. The history of philosophy, like God, moves in mysterious ways. Actions and arguments may lead to the emergence of ideas that would surprise, even horrify, the people who first set things in motion. Every historical period offers examples. From the medieval era, a nice illustration would be how a theory of economic rights resulted from the insistence of religious mendicants that they should be allowed to embrace strict voluntary poverty. But for unintended consequences, you can't do much better than the Protestant Reformation. Consider what Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli would have said upon learning that their movement would indirectly give rise to theories of religious toleration, the strict separation of church and state, and arguably, even the widespread secularization of European political and cultural life. As if that weren't enough, they could also be informed that, thanks to their Reformation, Europe would soon be engulfed in decades of warfare. It's enough to make you think twice next time you nail a list of complaints to adore. Of course, the Reformation had its own prehistory. It was the culmination of developments in religious life that had been going on for generations. In the 14th and early 15th centuries, the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia already anticipated several items on the agenda of the 16th century reformers. These included doubts about the transformation of bread into the body of Christ in the Eucharist, dissemination of the scriptures in vernacular translation, and criticism of hypocrisy and corruption in the church. The right of lay persons to engage actively with religious issues, encapsulated in Luther's famous teaching that all believers are priests, was defended as far back as the 12th century by Peter Valdes of Lyon. He and his followers, the Waldensians, claimed the right to preach publicly without church authorization. They were met with violent repression, as were Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, Bohemian reformers who were executed for their ideas. John Wickley Cliff, the central figure of the Lollard movement, avoided that fate but his books were burnt. These events were premonitions of what was to come, as the 16th century was marked by suppression of ideas and executions for heresy, and on both sides of the religious divide. Given this history, everyone should have expected the Spanish Inquisition. The 95 Theses Luther Nailed on a Church Door in Wittenberg in 1517 concerned the question of indulgences, payments made to the church to reduce the time one would have to spend in purgatory after death before ascending to heaven. The very belief in purgatory had been rejected by members of these earlier movements. Among those who did believe in it, it did not take deep immersion in theology to be annoyed when the church used indulgences to pay for new building projects, using slogans like, At the sound of the coin falling into the box, a soul flies to heaven. It was just a particularly egregious example of something that had been causing outrage throughout the medieval period, the staggering wealth of the church, and its involvement in secular affairs. The latter was something Luther categorically rejected, but he was hardly the first to do that. So what made him and the other reformers something new in the history of Christianity? The full answer to that question will be given in episodes to come, but for now we can mention a point that connects to the question of purgatory, Luther's doctrine of sin and grace. Again, his ideas on this topic fit into a long-standing debate, one that goes all the way back to Augustine in the 5th century AD. In his later works, he had vociferously refuted the ideas of Pelagius, who taught that humans can merit salvation by living virtuously. Against this, Augustine argued that the freely given grace of God is a prerequisite for liberation from sin and entry into paradise. In order to avoid the Pelagian heresy, later Christian thinkers always admitted the need for grace, but that left room for moral striving on the part of the believer. According to some theologians, for instance Gabriel Biel, humans could prepare themselves for the gift of grace through their own power. Biel's slogan was thus that believers should, Do what they have in them to do. Fakade quod in se est. Luther rejected that idea. For him, every step upon the road to salvation requires the support of God. Sinners as we are, we are not capable of meriting grace. We can only hope to receive it as an undeserved gift. Hence his contrary slogan that justification is only by faith, sola fide, not good works. Luther was clearly steering well clear of Pelagianism here, but his position raised other concerns. If it is up to God whether we are saved, why should we even make any effort to be good? And if the whole question of sin and redemption is decided by God's gratuitous choice to save an elect chosen from among the undeserving sinners, then why doesn't God save everyone? Which brings us to John Calvin and his Reformed church. Embracing outright the determinism that might seem to follow from Luther's teaching, they simply admitted that God predestines some to be saved, others to be damned. To meet the challenge of this potentially terrifying worldview, Catholic theologians, and also Protestants who did not wish to go quite so far, needed to articulate a more robust role for good works and well-intentioned effort on the part of humans. The upshot of all this is that the 16th century became a high point in a history of reflection on the problem of free will. And this is only the most obvious of several philosophical debates that grew immediately out of the thought of the founding fathers of the Reformation. As if all that were not complicated enough, the Reformation was only one of the three main ingredients that went into the stew that was European philosophy in the 15th and 16th centuries. Having already looked at the intellectual history of Italy in this same period, we can already guess at what the other two might be – humanism and scholasticism. Italian humanists like Bruni and Ficino were matched elsewhere in Europe by such figures as Rodolfus Agricola, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and Jacques Lefebvre de Tap. Meanwhile, scholasticism continued, and indeed thrived, in German and English universities, on the Iberian peninsula and in Paris, where innovators like Peter Rammus helped to make the broadly Aristotelian approach still relevant. All over Europe, schoolmen were carrying on the traditions of thought we associate with medieval figures like Aquinas, Scotus, and Occam, which with suitable adaptation could also win the allegiance of Protestants. In fact, as Charles Nowitt has written, scholasticism did not have the decency to turn up its toes and die, but in fact reasserted its dominance over the academic world in the middle and later decades of the 16th century, and remain powerful well into the 17th century. As in Italy, humanists and scholastics in other lands criticized one another in terms ranging from gentle teasing to full-throated polemic. For the humanists, the scholastics were pedants, whose overly abstract and technical approach was at best a waste of time, at worst a distraction from living a good and pious life. Agricola said that scholastic theology was nothing more than childish riddles, while Vivus complained about the effect of logic on religious thought in the following terms, Since this sort of invective is, if we're honest, quite fun, I'll indulge in quoting another passage from Vivus, This understanding of scripture was very much at issue once humanists like Erasmus and Lefebvre applied their philological and textual skills to the Bible itself. on the grounds that even a deep knowledge of classical languages makes one only a grammarian, not a theologian. Erasmus and other humanists met such accusations with the rather persuasive response that, in order to understand scripture, you should first establish a reliable original text and learn how to translate it. True, this would occasion changes in the way the holy book was understood. That was the whole point, after all, to understand the Bible more accurately than had been managed by the medieval's with their poor or non-existent command of Hebrew and Greek. Still, Erasmus dismissed the notion that such philological activity might undermine religion. There can be no danger that everybody will forthwith abandon Christ if the news happens to get out that some passage has been found in scripture which an ignorant or sleepy scribe has miscopied or some unknown translator has rendered inadequately. But as Erasmus well knew, changing a word here or there could indeed have a great significance for religious belief. He caused a stir when his edition of the New Testament left on the cutting floor a scriptural proof text for the Trinity. Not, he hastened to add, because he rejected the Trinitarian doctrine, but simply because this passage was inauthentic. In another case, he argued on linguistic grounds that passages used to encourage doing penance were in fact not about that at all, but about repenting. So this was not a command to, say, donate money to the church or recite prayers as instructed by a priest, but to engage in private reflection on one's sins. Here, a point of vocabulary offered support for the increasing tendency among both Catholics and Protestants to focus attention on individuals and their psychological states. It's something we can see in much literature of the period, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to the Book of Spiritual Exercises written by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Humanism was clearly a factor in the birth of the Reformation, though scholars debate exactly how important a factor. Certainly, the humanist's attention to the text of the Bible resonated with the Reformers' focus on that text as the true guide to proper belief, another idea that got its own slogan, sola scriptura, or by scripture alone. The Reformers also held that this was a book for all Christians, not only an elite brotherhood of priests. This could help to defuse the charges that the humanists lacked the theological training to understand the Bible. If scripture is straightforward enough to be suitable for the everyday believer, then the humanists should be able to interpret it without having studied theology for years at a university. Luther duly welcomed the work of Erasmus. He himself was no humanist, though he learned some Greek and a little Hebrew. But Luther joined with gusto in the mockery of the Scholastics, saying that Luther knew whereof he spoke, having enjoyed, not the word he would use, a Scholastic education as a young man. Looking back, he saw this formation as quite literally providential, but only because it deprived his enemies of the chance to say that he was ignorant about the target of his diatribes. Despite this overt hostility, many modern-day scholars have suspected that Scholasticism helped to shape Luther's thought. The brand of philosophy he learned at the University of Erfurt was the so-called Biermoderna, in other words the nominalism of figures like Occam and Beale. While this tradition was associated with the teachings on grace that he rejected, it was also committed to voluntarism, which seems to play a significant role in Luther's thought, given his emphasis on the unconstrained and arbitrary choice of God. But he also used more technical ideas he picked up during his studies, as when he applied the Scholastic theory of motion to describe the progress of the sinner towards redemption. The most important figure in early Lutheranism, aside of course from Luther himself, was Philipp Melanchthon. Among the leading reformers, Melanchthon is the one who could most uncontroversially be described as a philosopher in his own right. He was influenced by both humanism and scholasticism, the latter thanks to his training at Tübingen. He retained a strong interest in Aristotle and lectured on several of his works, even after joining Luther's movement. Yet he also paid due respect to the humanist's favorite classical author, Cicero, attacked the schoolmen, and blamed their inadequate theology on their ignorance of classical languages. Catholic thought in this period likewise drew on both humanism and scholasticism traditions that flourished in France and the Iberian peninsula, just as they did in Italy. In the Iberian context, we'll be paying particular attention to the work of scholastics at Salamanca and Coimbra, who belonged to either the Dominican or Jesuit orders. The Jesuits will be important to our story, in part because they counted among their numbers such luminaries as Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez, and in part because of their role in what is sometimes called the Counter-Reformation, though many scholars now prefer to speak of a Catholic Reformation. Since its founding by Ignatius Loyola, who was himself from Spain, the Jesuits had laid great emphasis on education and individual spiritual development. Though the original purpose of the order was not to combat Protestantism, their approach put them in a good position to resist Protestant advances. This was a goal they pursued through sophisticated philosophical argumentation, and also the more practical measure of founding schools across Europe, including in Germany and Switzerland, the heartlands of the Reformation. The Jesuits were also involved in the attempt to export Christianity from Europe to more far-flung lands. Catholics were known to say that the loss of so many souls to Protestantism might be compensated by converts in Asia and the newly-contacted Americas. Speaking of geography, I need to explain something about the way I'll be structuring this series of episodes to come. It's been a long-standing feature of this podcast that I organized the material in terms of space as well as time. Thus, we looked at medieval philosophy in three distinct, albeit mutually interacting cultural spheres, moving from the largest of these, the Islamic world, onto Latin Christendom and then to Eastern Greek Christendom. More recently, we've been considering Italy, from roughly 1400 to 1600. As we turn to cover the rest of Europe in the same time period, I'm going to continue with this approach. We'll begin with the Low Countries Germany and Switzerland, where we'll explore the so-called Northern Renaissance and of course the rise of Protestantism. From there, we will turn to France, then England and Scotland, and finally Southern Europe, concentrating mostly on Spain and Portugal, with occasional trips to Italy. Our story will finish there, as we finish off the story of Galileo. You might want to get comfortable though, because I'll be devoting a dozen and more episodes to each of these regions. To mention just a few highlights of the first miniseries, our coverage of Central Europe and the Low Countries will feature such topics as Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Luther, Copernicus, Protestant political theory, alchemy, and the subject of the next episode, which we'll look at the printing press and the revolution in intellectual culture it unleashed. After our tour of Reformation-era Europe, we will finally be ready to tackle the riches of the 17th and 18th centuries, the period we can loosely call Early Modern Philosophy. In my coverage of that later period, I am tentatively planning to repeat the pattern of a geographical round trip, by taking you from France and the Low Countries to Britain, and then to Germany. Though I think this should work fairly well, it must be admitted that philosophy has an inconvenient tendency to cross borders. As I cover one geographical space after another, I will often have to mention the influence of thinkers we haven't yet covered, as when philosophers in France are reading the works written in England. But that would be true no matter how I organized the material, because philosophy in early modern Europe was both prolific and interconnected. Scholars moved around, wrote letters to each other, and printed mutual refutations. Some thinkers resolutely refused to stay put, as if deliberately trying to cause problems from my geographical way of proceeding. Giordano Bruno is a good example. As you'll recall, he was from Italy, but passed through a number of cities, including the capital of Calvinism, Geneva, the French cities of Paris and Toulouse, and London and Oxford too. Indeed, one reason that there was a Northern Renaissance, and that Humanism played such a major role in the period across Europe, is that Italian scholars went abroad, and scholars from other European countries visited Italy. Erasmus stayed in both England and Italy, where he published a book with the famous Aldine Press. The humanist Peter Lüder first studied in Heidelberg, then spent two decades in Italy before returning to lecture at various universities in Germany. Nicholas of Cusa also spent time in both places. The English may have come from an island, but they were not necessarily insular. Thomas Lenecker was an Englishman who studied in Florence under no less an authority than Poliziano. Lenecker even helped out with the Aldine edition of Aristotle before returning to England in 1499, where he was attached to the court of Henry VIII. It wasn't only humanists were racking up the miles. The Reformation became a European, and not just German, phenomenon because of the movement of the Reformers. A key figure in the Scottish Reformation, John Knox, took inspiration from Calvinism as he experienced it in Geneva, the city he pronounced, the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in this earth since the days of the Apostles. In England, Reform was famously imposed from above when Henry VIII broke with the papacy, but in other places it was often a bottom-up movement, with preachers working to reform Christendom one soul and one city at a time. This meant that the Reformation had, from its earliest days, a significant political dimension. One man's preacher is another man's insurgent, and secular powers ranging from town councils in the Swiss cities to the Holy Roman Emperor had to decide whether to embrace, tolerate, or wage war against this movement that was spreading across Europe. An early event that revealed the Reformation's potential to destabilize the existing political order was the Peasants' War, which began in Switzerland in 1524, when villagers living in Stülingen, in what is now southwest Germany, rose up against the church and secular authorities. This triggered a conflict that raged across central Europe. But Luther rejected the notion that his religious revolution was supposed to come along with revolution of the good old fashioned kind. He and other leaders of the Reformation aimed to secure the allegiance of authoritarian power structures, not to smash those structures to put republican governments in their place. Which did not mean, of course, that the Reformation was depoliticized. To the contrary, the wars and violence had barely started. There were wars of religion in Switzerland around 1530, in the Holy Roman Empire, with the brief Schmalkaldick War in the middle of the 16th century, and then starting in the 1560s in France and the Low Countries. We still see the effects of this upheaval in today's maps and cultural divides. You'll know all about that if you've ever been to Belgium and the Netherlands. Closer to home, for me at least, is Bavaria, a Catholic nation that only grudgingly consents to be part of the larger Protestant nation of Germany. Even those who weren't in a position to declare war sought to resist rulers whose religious convictions they did not share. The radical Anabaptists seized the city of Munster in 1534, but when they weren't staging such ambitious military projects, they contented themselves with refusing to participate in the civil order by swearing oaths or bearing arms. Religious dissidents would assassinate several rulers in the 16th century, prompting a philosophical debate as to whether such so-called tyrannicide was a legitimate response to illegitimate rule. As the years went on, the blood flowed, and government war chests emptied, it became increasingly clear that Protestants and Catholics were going to have to coexist in Europe. One solution was expressed with yet another Latin motto, coius regio oius religio, meaning that citizens would adopt the religious confession of their ruler, but with toleration for worshippers of rival confessions. Religious toleration thus became a political and pragmatic necessity before it was a widely held ideology, so that Sebastian Castello was something of a lone voice when he decried the Calvinist execution of a man in Geneva for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. This provides the background to more famous 17th century discussions of toleration, such as we will find in John Locke. And that was only one echo of the Reformation that would reverberate in the 17th century and beyond. Another legacy was the educational system and the intellectual values it imparted. Still in today's Europe, some high schools carry on the humanist idea that a proper education means being able to read Latin and ancient Greek. In Germany, such a school is even called a humanisticis gymnazion. Then too, it's often been hypothesized that the turn towards empirical science, that so characterized the scientific revolution in the age to come, was made possible by the Reformation. A broadly plausible, though difficult to substantiate, idea would be that Protestantism lent itself to a more concrete approach in science. This might be because of the nominalist metaphysics accepted by many of its adherents, or one might draw a parallel between a democratized approach to scripture and a new movement of investigators who sought to read the book of nature, with both undertakings being relatively unencumbered by the weight of scholastic authority. Now that scripture was taken to be aimed at a broader audience, it was less likely to be seen as an authoritative source on such technical questions as whether the earth goes around the sun or vice versa. And that may have opened up space for empirical inquiry independent of religion. We won't have to wait until the 17th century to observe such developments, since there were advances in scientific method and practice already in our period, alongside an increasing comfort with the skepticism that will be such an important component of early modern philosophy. Another point, one that's rather obvious but still worth stressing, is that many modern philosophers were Protestants. That may shed light on, say, the idealism of Immanuel Kant. Was his Lutheranism connected to his anti-metaphysical and critical approach to philosophy? Later still, G.W.F. Hegel would say outright, The absolute spirit of his own idealist system can be understood as a version of Luther's God, the sole source of all being and all salvation. Which is not to suggest, of course, that the Reformation was itself the sole source of everything that happened in the following centuries of philosophy. But it is to say that this epoch and its transformation of medieval Europe into something rather more like the Europe we know today is something that needs to be included in any worthwhile history of philosophy, and certainly in a history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Strong Silent Type. The Printing Press. If you turn to the nearest shelf, pluck a book off it, and start reading, you'll come quickly to a title page. Apart from the title and author of the book, it will probably indicate the year the volume appeared in print, and the publishing house that produced it. We take this for granted, but books haven't always had title pages. In the era of the manuscript, that is the literally handwritten book, the title, if there was one, was usually just given at the top of the first page of text. Title pages became common only with the advent of printing. It was standard to include blank pages at the start of an unbound book, since the first leaves would tend to get damaged. Publishers then realized that they could add useful information to these extra pages as a kind of advertisement of the contents within. This is an unprecedented boon to the historian of philosophy. From the 16th century onward, it's almost always possible to know exactly when and where books were first published, something the scholar of ancient or medieval philosophy can only dream about. And that's only one of the many things the printing press has given us, usually without our noticing. As I learned recently from another podcast hosted by Steven Fry, who apparently listens to this podcast, so hello to Steven Fry, the English language is full of hidden allusions to the processes of printing. The difference between lowercase and uppercase refers to the two trays used for storing the two kinds of typeface. Naturally, when putting the individual letters into the cases, you need to mind your P's and Q's to avoid confusing them. The phrase out of sorts may go back to the problem of running out of type while setting pages. A stereotype was a whole plate set permanently for printing and reprinting a given page, rather than using individual letters that could be removed and reused for a different text. The French had their own word for this, cliche. Oh, and one other thing, the printing press changed the course of European history. This is itself a bit of a cliche, but for once I am not going to challenge our stereotypical assumptions. In fact, you could argue that historians of philosophy usually underestimate the importance of printing. If you wanted to divide the whole history of European philosophy into just two periods, it would make a lot of sense to draw the line in the late 15th century, dividing the pre-print and post-print eras. Indeed, you could argue that this is the deeper truth underlying the more familiar contrast between medieval and early modern philosophy. Medieval philosophy could be disseminated only through the painstaking labor of scribes. Early modern philosophical works were, at first, set down in the handwriting of their authors too, given the absence of typewriters and computers, but they could then be reproduced in print runs of thousands of copies, reaching a much wider audience. To give you an idea of the difference, it has been calculated that early in the history of print, having a book copied once by hand would cost about the same as printing several hundred copies of that same book. The transition from handwritten philosophy to printed philosophy can, of course, be traced to the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, an artisan from Mainz. Though I wouldn't hesitate to use that word, invention, I should mention a couple of caveats. First, books had been printed hundreds of years earlier in China using type made of wood instead of cast metal. Woodcuts were also used in Europe before Gutenberg came along. Second, Gutenberg's breakthrough was an innovative combination of several existing technologies, from paper making to the winepress, along with perfecting things like the hand casting of the letter type and perfecting the viscosity of the ink, which was made from soot, varnish, and egg white. The result was that the metal typeface could be set to make many copies of a page. In this era, average print runs ranged from the low hundreds to the low thousands, with the type then being returned to the cases to be reused. Gutenberg did not get rich off his epoch-making invention. After a legal dispute resulting from delays in selling his famous Bibles, the press shop passed to the sole ownership of his business partner, Johann Fust. Perhaps we could say that Gutenberg had unwisely made a Fustian pact. But others would reap the rewards. Printing became big business by the end of the 15th and early 16th centuries. As all that money changed hands, a lot else was changing thanks to the rise of printing. We can start with its effect on education. I'm sure you knew that Gutenberg printed Bibles, but you probably didn't know that he also printed schoolbooks. In generations to come, printers would collaborate with scholars and schoolmasters to select works for printing. The most famous example in the realm of philosophy is one that we've already discussed, the Press Adventis, run by Aldus Manutius, which printed, among other things, a Greek edition of Aristotle. Humanists were among the first to see the potential of printing, which would enable them to get good grammar books and examples of fine Latin style into the hands of young students. Scholarship could more easily have a Europe-wide impact. Erasmus is the obvious example here, with two and a half thousand editions of works from his pen in the 16th century, with each edition, of course, having a print run in the hundreds or thousands. Among the Italian humanists, the most widely read was Poliziano, who received more than 120 editions between 1480 and 1559. A noteworthy but not atypical example of his impact is found in a letter by Philip Melancthon, in which he spares himself the trouble of translating the cave allegory from Plato's Republic by simply reproducing Poliziano's version. This vignette also illustrates the way the texts and translations of classical authors became more widely available thanks to printing. Printings of Ficino's translations of Plato were a huge success, and classical Latin authors also benefited from the Gutenberg effect. Cicero, as the most admired ancient Latin stylist, had his works appear 300 times in the era of early printings or incunabula, with another one and a half thousand following in the 16th century. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the effect of this abundance of literature on intellectuals across Europe. In a classic study of the impact of the printing press, Elizabeth Eisenstein pointed out that the work of thinkers as diverse as Copernicus and Montaigne was made possible by the sheer range and quality of texts at their disposal. As Eisenstein observed, Copernicus as a young student would have had a hard time getting his hands on The Astronomy of Ptolemy. By the end of his life, he could consult three different printed editions. Montaigne, meanwhile, could see more books by spending a few months in his Tower Study than earlier scholars had seen after a lifetime of travel. No longer would scholars have small private libraries dominated by an equally small number of authorities—Arisotle, Augustine, and little else. The mind of a man like Montaigne was now privy to a chorus of many voices, whose echoes make themselves heard in his own writing. And readers were not just engaging with more text than before, they were using them differently. The possibility to have books more ready-to-hand reduced the need to commit things to memory, especially since printers made their productions more user-friendly. Consider the index. It would make no sense to go to the labor of compiling a list of names or topics mentioned in a book and give the page number of each mention if the book is a unique handwritten object. But if you are printing 2,000 identical copies, an index makes a lot of sense, especially since it would be a selling point to attract potential buyers. So the printing press fundamentally altered the way that Reformation-era scholars read ancient philosophy and other secular literature. But this is not to say that such works dominated the output of the early presses. To the contrary, most printings were of religious material, ranging from the Bible to liturgical texts, works of church law, and the theological writings of the Church Fathers and medieval scholastics. The increasing influence of Aquinas in this period, for example, is related to the wider diffusion of his works through printed editions. It should also be remembered that you can use a printing press to publish things other than books. Short pamphlets and single-sheet publications were common, and helped to keep the money flowing in alongside the sale of books that required a significant initial investment. When we think of this early period of printing, we tend to imagine such productions as the Gutenberg Bibles or the Nuremberg Chronicle, a lavish historical work that was a monument to both the new art of printing and the glory of the city in which it was published. But there are 2,000 single-sheet texts that have managed to survive from the 15th century alone. Obviously, many, many more existed and have been lost since. It's telling that more than one-third of those surviving single pages are letters of indulgence, that is, church documents for giving sins in exchange for a financial donation. Just as we usually associate the birth of printing with books, we associate it with the Protestant Reformation, and for good reason as we'll see in a moment. But as the Catholic Church realized, printing offered the potential for standardizing religious practice and belief, just as much as the potential for destabilizing religion. If you're trying to get as many people as possible to adopt the same liturgy, the power to publish thousands of identical guides to that liturgy is mighty useful. The exception that proves the rule here would be a work called In Praise of Scribes, written by the abbot of Sponheim, one Johannes Trithemius. He decried the rise of printing and extolled the spiritual value of writing things out by hand. How did he get this treatise to as wide a readership as possible? By having it printed, of course. Actually, we should admit something that Trithemius may have overlooked, namely that printing and writing by hand were not starkly opposed alternatives. I already mentioned that a printed text would obviously have been based on a manuscript original. More unexpectedly, the reverse is also true, as many manuscripts from the late 15th century were actually copied from printed in cunabula. Furthermore, readers would annotate their printed editions by hand, making marginal notes or underlining passages, just as they had always done with manuscripts. In some cases, printers facilitated that with the layout of their editions, as when school texts included generous spaces between lines and in the margins to give students room to scribble notes. If you have a look at images of early printed books using our own most recent publication medium, the internet, you'll notice that the type is actually based closely on contemporary handwriting style. This is a common pattern with new technologies, as when early electric lights were made to look like candles. For readers around the turn of the 16th century, it would have made printed text look reassuringly familiar. Such readers would also have been used to seeing navigational markings written in a different color of ink, like red chapter headings in an otherwise black text. Since it was arduous and technically difficult to achieve this with a printing press, the headings might be added by a scribe, again blurring the line between handwritten and printed books. On the other hand, features of text you might associate more with the handwritten could be achieved in a printed book using engravings. These would include ornamentation and illustration, including scientific diagrams. This is something else that had important implications for the development of the intellectual disciplines. It meant that every reader of, say, a work on astronomy by Copernicus would be looking at exactly the same pictures. Later, we'll discuss the scholastic movement initiated by Peter Ramos, a Parisian schoolman. His use of diagrams and tables for pedagogical purposes was well suited for the press. But in the 16th century, no thinker made more powerful use of printing than Martin Luther. In the previous episode, I raised the question of what made his impact so much greater than that of earlier reformers like Wycliffe and Hus. Part of the answer is surely that they did not have access to printing presses, and he did. He lived in the right place as well as the right time. In the 15th century, Italy, and especially Venice, had been a dominant force in publishing, but the center of gravity shifted to Germany, especially after the invasion of Italy by France around the turn of the 16th century. Luther's city of Wittenberg started its tradition of printing in 1502 and accelerated quickly, putting out no fewer than 600 editions in the first quarter of the century. And Wittenberg was only one of many cities where the presses churned out copies of Luther's sermons, treatises, and polemics. Not to mention his translation of the New Testament into German, a work so influential that it was used even by Catholics of the period, and is given credit for helping to fix the form of German still standard today. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations by one scholar suggest that there may have been more than 3 million copies of works by Luther printed in Europe in just the three decades from 1516 to 1546, representing 20% of the total printed literature of the time. Many of his works were short pamphlets, for which historians use the German term Flugschriften, meaning flying writings, because they could be disseminated so easily. There's a plausible case to be made for the proposition that Luther's approach to religion simply lent itself better to the age of the printing press than did the church doctrines he was attacking. Like Wycliffe before him, or in his own period, William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English, Luther wanted as many people as possible to familiarize themselves with scripture. His idea of the priesthood of all believers did not mean that each Christian should indulge in developing their own theology, but he did invite all believers to make up their own minds about religious questions, and to help them make up their minds, he issued a torrent of writings to persuade them of the Lutheran view. His version of the New Testament came along with explanatory material designed to coax its readers to adopt the Lutheran interpretation. Critics of the translation complained that this critic of church indulgences had himself indulged in tendentious renderings of the Greek, as when he took the claim that humans are made righteous by faith and added the word solely in conformity with his conviction that faith alone justifies, not works. The Catholics who wished to respond to Luther were in a difficult position. They wanted to insist that scripture can be properly understood only by theologians trained in the scholastic tradition. The Catholic polemicist Thomas Muirner satirically remarked that followers of Reform movements would proclaim, Looking forward to the effects of this uprising against the church, he predicted, But the importance of higher learning and church authority was not an easy case to make in the popular vernacular format being used to such great effect by Luther. Then too, by refuting Luther in print, they risked spreading knowledge of his teachings. It seemed then that the church could not beat Luther by joining him in the print revolution. The obvious solution was to keep him out of print in the first place, but this was not going to be easy. Church censorship required enforcement by local secular powers, which might or might not be inclined to carry out the pope's edicts. The authorities might content themselves with banning outright libelous material, which would leave the Reformers plenty of scope to advance their religious views in public, both by preaching and in print. In Leipzig, there was for a time effective suppression of Lutheran writings, which caused the printers to complain bitterly, not necessarily because they were convinced evangelists, but because Protestant books sold so well. One complained of being allowed to print only Catholic treatises which are desired by no one and cannot even be given away. There was also a kind of feedback loop whereby printers avoided censorship by flocking to cities that were sympathetic towards Lutheranism, making these places even more important centers of the Reform movement. The situation was a bit more complicated than that though. The War of Religion in print, which presaged the wars of religion on the actual battlefield, was not a two-sided affair. Luther and his sympathizers aimed their rhetorical fire at the Catholics, certainly, but also at other Reformers. A particular flashpoint for debate was the question of how bread is transformed into the body of Christ in the Mass, or rather whether it is transformed at all. The Church adhered to the interpretation put forward by, among others, Thomas Aquinas. In the sacrament of the Eucharist, there is a transubstantiation, meaning that while the accidental features of bread, like its color and taste, remain, the substance of the bread has been replaced by that of Christ's body. Diametrically opposed to this was the view that, when Christ said to his disciples, take this and eat, for this is my body, he meant only that the bread symbolized his body, which was about to be given in sacrifice. This merely symbolic interpretation was defended by Höldrich Zwingli, among others, and associated with the Reform movement in the Swiss cities of Zürich and Basel. The humanist, Billibald Pirkheimer, called these two cities and Strasbourg the satanic triad, because they hosted theologians who denied the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist. Luther, meanwhile, took a middle view. Christ is really present in the bread, but it nonetheless remains bread. And like Pirkheimer, he was harshly critical of Zwingli and his followers. This looks like a purely theological debate, but we'll be seeing that it was of some consequence for the history of philosophy. For now, the important point is that it was a dispute carried out in printed texts. A recent study of the controversy by Aime Nelson Burnett found 273 individual works on the topic in 905 printings, and that's just in the later 1520s. The Lutheran camp made much more effective use of the New Medium, with Wittenberg outpublishing Zürich by a factor of three. The fact that Swiss German was a dialect with fewer readers was another disadvantage for Zwingli. These were, of course, entirely new factors to consider in a theological disagreement. No longer were such contests fought in Latin, at universities, or before a panel of churchmen, appeals were now being made to the court of public opinion, something evident even from the use of various literary genres by the protagonists. While the Catholics conservatively stuck to composing formal treatises, Protestants offered their readers sermons, dialogues, and catechisms. As Burnett remarks, Now, you might be a bit skeptical here on the grounds that surely not that many people were interested in such arcane theological matters, and surely most people didn't know how to read. So they could not have been influenced by written material anyway, whether printed or written by hand. Against the first objection, we can note that by the 1520s, printers had become pretty canny about what sorts of writing would sell. Those 905 editions would never have appeared if there were no audience for them. The second objection has a more complicated answer. It's certainly true that in some regions, especially rural ones, literacy rates were low. In Eastern German villages, for example, preaching was a far more important vehicle for reform than books. In the cities, though, literacy rates may have been up around 30%. And, crucially, it's not as if printed works could only reach those who were able to read. Often the only literate members of a family would be the adult men, but they might read aloud to the rest of the household and were encouraged to do so by the evangelist movement, which invited them to be preachers to their families. The same goes for those who took up preaching as a real vocation and went into the countryside towns to spread the teachings of Luther or Zwingli. They knew about those teachings because they had read Luther or Zwingli in print. Luther knew that his movement was fueled by soot, varnish, and egg white. He called printing, God's highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward. As I've said, though, it wasn't only the reformers who sought to use printing to press their advantage. At this time, humanism was rippling out from Italy across Europe, something we can trace back to the time before Gutenberg, but also a trend that was enhanced by his new technology. And soon, we'll meet some of the headline figures in this development, like Juan Luis Vives and Rodolfos Agricola. These were men who, like a handwritten heading in an otherwise printed book, made it their business to be unusually well read. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Lords of Language, Northern Humanism. In a satirical novel published in 1872 by Samuel Butler, a traveler visits a topsy-turvy utopia called Erewhon. At one point the traveler learns about the universities of Erewhon, which school their students in unreason on the grounds that living exclusively by reason and its hard and fast rules would be intolerable. Students are alone logical, but they are always absurd. It would also be narrow-minded and constraining for the students to learn only about reality, and to ignore all the things that might possibly be real. So at these colleges, great attention is paid to hypothetics, and a whole hypothetical language has been developed to talk about things that don't exist, but could. The traveler comments, It appeared to me to be a wanton waste of good human energy, that men should spend years and years in the perfection of so barren an exercise, but people know their own affairs best. The same sentiment was expressed hundreds of years earlier, during the Renaissance, when humanists mocked the time-wasting disciplines being pursued at the universities of their own day. One such humanist was Thomas More, author of the work whose title gave us the concept of utopia, a place that is nowhere. Erewhon is of course an anagram of the word nowhere. As Butler would later do, More made fun of the schoolmen and their preoccupation with hypotheticals, writing, The following propositions are not less remarkable, but attractive also and plausible, since they are of course true. The virgin was a whore, and the whore will be a virgin, and the whore is possibly a virgin. It is not easy to say which of the two, virgins or whores, are more indebted to such an obliging dialectics. And in a letter addressed to the Senate of Oxford University, written in 1518, More lamented the way that a faction of scholastic theologians, who called themselves the Trojans, were attacking humanists at the university. Unlike the original Trojan War, the conflict between scholastics and humanists went on for much longer than ten years. University logicians and theologians sneered at the study of classical literature as an unserious topic fit only for schoolboys, and the humanists returned the favor by calling the university masters sophists. As More noted in his letter, the conflict often involved academic politics. While humanist studies won adherents across Europe, the scholastics tenaciously defended the educational approach they had been using for generations. They were largely successful for a time. By the turn of the 16th century, humanism had made only minor incursions in most German universities. A statement issued in 1502 by masters in Leipzig rejected the humanists' preferred subjects of poetry and rhetoric, asserting, Steadily and surely, though, the poets and rhetoricians managed to reform the curricula. In Germany, a breakthrough period was the second decade of the 16th century, as the universities at Wittenberg, Erfurt, and finally Leipzig all shifted towards humanist teaching. As already mentioned two episodes ago, this helped to shape Martin Luther's approach to philosophy. In his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, held in Wittenberg in 1517, he proposed to defend such theses as, One year later, there appeared a text that might claim to be the definitive attack on the quite literally medieval preoccupations of the scholastics. This was Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians, written by a humanist named Juan Luis Vives. Originally from Valencia, Vives left Spain as a young man to study in Paris, something he very much regretted. At the university there, he said, Having suffered through years of this nonsense, Vives says, he would now pay good money to unlearn what he was taught there. Like Thomas More, Vives condemns the dialecticians out of their own mouths by simply quoting their pedantic absurdities back at them. Or, A statement in which he says, Had Vives been an English speaker, he would surely have joked that his logic masters in Paris, Jan Döllerth and Gaspar Lacks, were dull-witted and lacks in their appreciation of the true subtleties of language. Actually, Vives did stay in England numerous times, visiting at one point with Thomas More. He also lived in Bruges in the Low Countries. Connections to the courts in both places, in Brussels and with Henry VIII in England, allowed him to escape academic life. This is a telling biographical detail. In the absence of thoroughgoing reform at the universities that would create professorial chairs in philology, humanism was not really a profession. So these learned men had to find some other way to make ends meet and might be monks, courtiers, merchants, or preachers. Of course, it helped to belong to a wealthy family, like Wilbald Perkheimer, who before his death in 1513 achieved a massive scholarly output, translating dozens of texts from Ancient Greek into Latin, including several philosophical works. Vives, who died ten years later, was no slouch either. His productions included numerous original works and an addition and commentary on the massive City of God by St. Augustine. If you think that this sounds a lot like what was happening in Italy around the same time, then you're right. As we know, humanism was originally a Byzantine phenomenon, which was brought to Italy by Eastern scholars along with the Greek manuscripts the humanists so loved to collect and to study. The movement was in turn brought to other parts of Europe by Italian scholars who traveled abroad and sometimes secured teaching posts at foreign universities. Then too, foreigners who came to study at Italy's famous universities were often converted to the humanist cause. Perkheimer is an example. He went there to study law and returned home as a convinced classicist. His parents must have been thrilled. Another case would be Peter Lüder. Having studied in several Italian cities, including a stint learning medicine at Padua, Lüder gave an oration at Heidelberg in 1456 in which he proposed that rhetoric and history were a more realistic course of education for the young than philosophy. Its abstractions were admirable in theory, but in practice less likely to lead to virtue than more concrete literary pursuits. If Lüder's speech was the starting gun for Northern humanism, the leader of the pack over its first lap was Rudolf Agricola. He likewise took up the baton of humanist studies from the Italians after studying in Pavia where he was allowed to give orations in Latin, a remarkable honor for a foreign student. His name would later be honored by Erasmus, too. Since Agricola was from Groningen, Erasmus was able to take him as a forerunner, another outstanding scholar from the Low Countries. Actually, outstanding would be underselling Agricola's brilliance to hear Erasmus tell it. He called his predecessor truly godlike and said that he could have been first in Italy had he not preferred Germany. What exactly did Agricola do to merit such extravagant praise? His orations were a model of Latin eloquence, of course, and were devoted to such paradigmatic humanist themes as the excellence of Petrarch and the value of philosophy. But his most seminal work was On Dialectical Invention, written in 1479, not too long before Agricola's death in 1485. In this work, Agricola goes well beyond what we have seen so far, not simply deriding scholastic logic but offering the resources to replace it with something better. Drawing on classical treatises by Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and also on the work of the far more recent Lorenzo Valla, this book teaches its readers how a speaker can find arguments that will solicit agreement from an interlocutor or audience. In other words, Agricola wants to show you how to be convincing. To do that, you'll need to master two arts, dialectic and rhetoric. Both were already treated by Aristotle. His treatise on dialectic is called the Topics after the topoi or argument schemes that he lists in the book. A simple example would be the argument from opposites. Opposed things have opposed properties. Thus, one might argue that, since pain is acknowledged to be bad and pleasure is the opposite of pain, pleasure must be good. Then there's another work by Aristotle called The Rhetoric, which is about persuasive speechmaking, for instance, in the law court. It also discusses argument form, but touches also on topics like the manipulation of the audience's emotions. In his own treatise on dialectic, Agricola presents the two arts as being closely aligned, since both explore dimensions of convincing speech. Dialectic takes the lead role, because it helps us find suitable arguments, which is the main order of business. The study of rhetoric simply gives us the ability to present these arguments in a more pleasing way, by adding, as Agricola nicely puts it, With the rhetorician taking care of these more aesthetic features of argumentative speech, dialectic can focus on the arguments themselves. You might expect it simply to establish rules for validity, that is, to establish the difference between arguments whose conclusions actually follow from their premises, and sophistries, which merely seem to imply their conclusions. In fact, though, Agricola has a different purpose in mind for dialectic, one that distinguishes it from the general study of logic which was conducted at the universities. The dialectician is the person who can discover arguments that are best chosen for convincing an audience. These are the arguments that, he says, are most apt for creating belief. He equates this with speaking, What exactly does this mean? In Aristotle's Topics, a dialectically effective argument is one whose premises are going to be acceptable to the interlocutor. So to go back to the example I used just before, we might start from the premise that pain is bad because pretty much everyone agrees with that, and then on that basis argue that pleasure is good. But someone might simply reject the plausible sounding premise. Good luck getting the desert church fathers or a character in an Ingrid Bergman movie to agree that pain is always bad. This means that if an argument is merely dialectically effective, then it doesn't actually prove anything for sure. To provide real proof, you need to give what Aristotle calls a demonstrative argument, which is explained in yet another treatise of his logic, the posterior analytics. Here, one's reasoning must depend ultimately on absolutely undeniable principles. This at least is how Aristotle's argument theory was understood by most late ancient and medieval commentators. They took him to be making a strict division between dialectical arguments, which tend to be convincing but are not fully decisive, and demonstrative arguments, which settle the matter once and for all. Agricola seems to undo this strict dichotomy. When he talks about seeking persuasive or probable arguments, he's not saying that the dialectician should always be content with the merely convincing. Nor is he saying that absolute proof is never possible, that we can only hope to convince the audience in front of us, but never to secure genuine demonstration. Rather, he says that a rock-solid demonstration is simply the maximally persuasive kind of argument. So if you're a dialectician who is in a position to give real proof, you should go ahead and do it. And no harm in throwing in some rhetorical flourishes to make sure the audience is enjoying your presentation. So Agricola is not a skeptic. He thinks that we can have proofs that lead to certainty. On the other hand, perhaps in deference to Cicero, whose skeptical leanings had to be taken seriously by his humanist admirers, Agricola concedes that such certainty is very rare. As all this shows, humanists did engage with texts and topics that were discussed by the scholastics, but they usually did so in a very different way. The point is also illustrated by the writings of Juan Luis Vives, who, like Erasmus, greatly admired Agricola. In fact, he had recommended the treatise we'd just been discussing as a better study of dialectic even than those of Cicero and Boethius. He also adopted a similarly tentative approach to human knowledge, as we can see in Vives' treatment of the human soul. Backing away from some of the more confident psychological theories one might find among the scholastic Aristotelians, Vives says that nothing is more concealed than the soul, and that he will simply pass over the difficult question of what the soul is, and focus instead on what it is like and what are its operations. It must be said, though, that late medieval scholastics were also known to express agnosticism on such metaphysical questions as the soul's nature. For a stronger and more telling contrast between the philosophies of these humanists and their scholastic rivals, we need to look instead to philosophy of language. As we just saw with Agricola's treatise on dialectic, the humanists saw language as an instrument of persuasive and appealing discourse. Often they would emphasize that its function is to teach. Vives even claims that before the fall of humankind into sin, language was only used to impart knowledge, this being its God-given function. Only with the onset of sin has language been used to mislead. This is the serious point that lies behind all those passages mocking scholastic sophistry. Whatever the merits of a sentence like, no, no man does not possibly not run, it is certainly not a piece of effective communication. To this accusation, the scholastics might have responded that they were, in fact, seeking to free philosophy from the ambiguities and flaws of natural languages like Latin, German, and English. Their highly artificial and regimented use of Latin was intended to convey ideas more rigorously and clearly, though the result would of course be clear only to someone trained at the schools and used to this highly specialized way of talking. Thus, they would stipulate fixed ways of negating terms in a Latin sentence, since otherwise there could be confusion between statements like, no man runs, and man does not run. A worthwhile project, even if, when taken to extremes, it led to the apparently preposterous uses of negation satirized by Vives. Does this show that the humanists simply failed to understand what the scholastics were up to? I think not. Or should I say, not, I think so. Rather, they understood the project full well and rejected it. We can see this by turning back to Vives's treatise Against the Pseudo-Dialecticians. By now the point of that title should be clear. The university logicians were not doing real dialectic because they did not use well-formed language to fashion convincing arguments. When it's done right, as by Agricola, dialectic does not create an artificial language for playing logical games. To the contrary, it is highly attentive to the nuances of natural language. Again, negation provides an example. Vives points out that double negation equates to affirmation in Latin, but not in French, and one needs to understand this when mounting arguments in either language. If you make up rules for language use, as the logicians do, then you're retreating into a highly specialized and idiosyncratic use of words. In that case, you might as well let each person devise their own language, and in the end, no person will understand another, since everyone will use words in their own way and not the common one. We should instead do the reverse, looking to actual language use to determine the rules of correct speech. As Vives says in his commentary on Augustine, native speakers are the lords of language, and it is they, not rules made up in university lecture halls, that determine what is grammatical. We also need to bear in mind, says Vives, that the study of language and reasoning is not an end in its own right. Alluding to the standard conception of logic as an instrument in the Aristotelian tradition, Vives says that what the university arts masters do is like someone who wants to sift flour and spends all their time designing the sieve. Only the foolish, he says, devote long and anxious effort to putting together a tool. Again, the purpose of language is to teach, and the most important thing we can teach is virtue. So we should be devoting much more attention to becoming good than to such topics as the rules of argumentation. For the classicist scholars of this era, antique literature was ideally suited to this goal. Greek and Roman texts impart moral instruction along with eloquence. Hence, Vives wrote that studies devoted to such texts are called the humanities, and may they render us human. Like the Italian humanists, Northern humanists went well beyond banal, if eloquent, praise of virtue. Vives was especially interested in the topic of the emotions, and the question of how these could be moderated and made to serve virtue rather than vice. This would make us better and also happier people, since it would free us from disturbance. He made recommendations at the political level too, not just for individual well-being. Vives and other humanists moved in elite circles and took advantage of it. This was in fact an important factor in the uptake of their educational program. Conservative university masters might reject humanism, but autocratic potentates were more sympathetic, being highly attuned to the charm of a well-crafted speech or flattering letter. In several cases, German universities changed their curricula to accommodate humanism at the behest of rulers or the wealthy elite. In Vienna, for example, chairs for poetry and rhetoric were founded by the Emperor Maximilian I, who, as one scholar reports, was said to have wrestled with bears, climbed mountains, married twice with vigor, and patronized many Renaissance humanists and artists. Enjoying patronage of his own, Vives seized the opportunity to show the connections between philology and philanthropy. In a 1526 work inspired by the misery of the poor in Bruges, he traces the very existence of poverty to the prevalence of sin. Alluding to the communist proposals of Plato's Republic, where the guardian class have no private property, Vives claims that nature provides sufficiently for all. It is only because of the greed of some that others have less than enough. As a remedy, he argues that work programs and education should be offered to the indigent. Indeed, Vives probably never met a person he didn't want to educate, which is of course consistent with his view that instruction is the purpose of all language. He's particularly celebrated for supporting the idea of educating women. Failing to do this, he argues, would be tantamount to treating them like animals. As he warms to his theme, Vives can sound downright feminist, as when he laments, In their whole life what else did they do but serve us? Their fathers when they are young women, their husbands when they are married, their children when they are mothers. Yet Vives does remain a man of his time. He repeats with approval the biblical injunction that women should not teach, and issues careful guidelines for what they should read. No love poetry, since it is corrupting, but rather such improving authors as Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and the Church Fathers. On this point, and many others, Vives was in full agreement with his more famous humanist colleague Erasmus. Both of them identified as their goal a kind of pious erudition, fusing knowledge of pagan classics with deep Christian faith. This comes out even in the humanist polemics against scholasticism. Since commented that it is better to be less of a sophist and wiser in the ways of the gospel, Perkehimer that he was unmoved by that sophistical and quibbling philosophy which is not able to lead to a good and blessed living. In Vives's case, the serene and learned of religiosity masked a more troubled story. His family was descended from conversos, that is, Spanish Jews forcibly converted to Christianity at the end of the 14th century. Such people were suspected of insincere faith, and when the Inquisition erupted in Spain, Vives's parents were caught up in it. His father was imprisoned, then hanged and burned. His mother escaped such treatment by being already dead, but her bones were dug up to be incinerated. Antisemitism played a central role in the career of the humanist Johannes Reuchlin, too. He was yet another German scholar who made his way south to Italy, where he met Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. He was especially excited about the study of Jewish literature, including Kabbalah, an interest he shared with Pico. Upon his return to Germany, he became an academic star, hired to teach Greek and Hebrew in Tübingen. After all, who could object to Christians studying Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament? Johann Pfeffecorn, that's who. A Jewish Christian convert, Pfeffecorn turned violently against his first religion and initiated a confiscation of Hebrew books in 1509. Reuchlin was alarmed and wrote a denunciation provoking a backlash from Pfeffecorn. Other authors piled in on both sides. Ultimately, the papacy would get involved, condemning Reuchlin's pamphlet in 1520. This literary scandal has often been seen through the lens of the wider conflict between humanists and scholastics, with schoolmen taking the opportunity to slap down Reuchlin, a living embodiment of humanism. While there may be some truth to that, the core issue does really seem to have been anti-Jewish sentiment. Reuchlin's critics usually professed admiration of his learning, before going on to excoriate his admiration for Jewish culture. As for Reuchlin himself, he surely feared that Pfeffecorn's censorship might cause a loss of valuable Hebrew manuscripts, but his motives were not just scholarly. He said of the Jews, Unfortunately, this will not be the last time we have to discuss anti-Semitism in the current series. Nor will it be our last encounter with the tensions between two models of education and of philosophy itself, the old scholastic way and the new humanist impulse to go back to something far older by learning both wisdom and eloquence from classical texts. It should be said, though, that this choice was not as stark as it may seem. The reform of university teaching did not expunge scholastic methods or texts entirely. Rather, humanism was offered as a complement to the traditional approaches. As a result, plenty of 16th-century writers, among them leading reformers like Luther and Melanchthon, were exposed to both intellectual currents as young students. Meanwhile, some explicitly argued that scholasticism and humanism both had their place. Take Jacob Wimfeling, who studied in Germany and taught at Heidelberg, eventually becoming a bishop. He had strongly humanist sympathies, writing a work on elegant Latin style that drew on Lorenzo Valla. Wimfeling was capable of the usual sarcastic invective against the arts masters, once remarking that these logicians acted as if the welfare of our souls and our political states depended on finding a resolution to the problem of universals. But he also admitted that training in dialectic was useful in defense of the faith, and for this purpose commended the work of such scholastic authors as John Mayer. In an oration delivered at Heidelberg in 1499, Wimfeling offered an olive branch by choosing as his theme the harmony between dialectic and oratory. As the subject of our next episode will argue, sometimes we can and must reconcile things that are opposed. Indeed, this next philosopher is famous for the idea of the coincidence of opposites. But it's no coincidence that we're tackling him right after our general look at northern humanism, because he is the most famous thinker of the Renaissance to export the humanism and Platonism of Italy to his native Germany. He's also the author of one of the most famous philosophical works of the 15th century, called On Learned Ignorance. But hopefully we can do a little bit better than that as we look at Nicholas of Cusa next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Opposites Attract, Nicholas of Cusa. Whatever weaknesses I may have as a historian of philosophy, I would be willing to claim one great strength, an ability to work up terrific enthusiasm for whichever philosopher I happen to be reading. Ask me who my favorite philosopher is, and I'm liable to just tell you that it's the one who I'm covering at the moment in this podcast. But it doesn't hurt when the figure in question reminds me of my real favorite philosopher, the great Encina, known in Latin as Avicenna, which has made it especially easy for me to warm to Nicholas of Cusa. That may seem surprising. What could this 15th century bishop from Germany have in common with a Muslim scientist, doctor, and philosopher of 11th century Persia? Well, for one thing, the quiet confidence that they had achieved greater heights even than Aristotle. But what I have in mind is something else, the strategy both use in offering their philosophical accounts of God. It's a strategy that is perhaps more familiar from the medieval Christian philosopher Anselm, who posited that God is that in which nothing greater can be conceived. On the basis of this single idea, Anselm went on to prove that God exists, this being his famous ontological argument, and then to derive all the usual divine attributes of God. Similarly, Avicenna introduced the idea of God as the necessary existent. After proving that there is indeed a necessary existent, he argued that such an existent would have to be unique, knowing, immaterial, powerful, generous, and so on. Nicholas of Cusa does the same thing, and repeatedly. In several of his major works, he puts forward a core idea and uses it to help us understand God, or rather, to help us realize that we do not understand him. Let's consider three such attempts from his fairly massive corpus of writings, starting with his most famous treatise, On Learned Ignorance, written in 1440. In this case, his fundamental idea is that God is the absolute maximum than which nothing can be greater. This is a pretty obvious reminiscence of Anselm, and to some extent Cusa proceeds as Anselm did, showing that the maximum must be one necessary and eternal. But he's not just trying to derive a series of epithets from the notion of maximality. Instead, he draws out a series of paradoxes, starting with the apparently contradictory claim that the absolute maximum would also be an absolute minimum. This is because both the absolute maximum and the absolute minimum are everything that they could possibly be. The maximum, because nothing could be greater than it, the minimum, because nothing can be less than it. For Anselm, God was that in which nothing greater can be conceived. Cusa goes on one better, or worse, God is that in which there is nothing greater and nothing lesser. The identity of maximum and minimum is a coincidence between opposites, the idea for which Cusa is probably most famous. His idea is that opposition breaks down at the level of God, the absolute maximum, something he tries to convey using mathematical analogies. He equates the maximum with the infinite, which is fairly plausible, given that infinity is that in which there can be nothing greater. He then shows how, at the scale of infinity, apparent oppositions collapse. A minimally curved line becomes indistinguishable from a straight line. A triangle whose angles are maximally wide, that is 180 degrees, also becomes a straight line. These analogies help us to see how things we normally take to be different from one another, even contradictory to one another, would come together and achieve identity in the absolute maximum, which is also the absolute minimum. On the one hand, both curvature and straightness would belong to the maximal line. On the other hand, neither would belong to it, insofar as being curved is taken to exclude being straight. A similar message is conveyed by a work written twenty years later, whose Latin title is De Pos est. Given that this treatise is about possibility, it's ironic that its title is almost impossible to translate. Pos est is an artificial term, coined by Kussa as a combination of posse and est, meaning to be possible and is. The idea then is that pos est combines what could be with what already is. This is meant to express the way that God is everything that he possibly could be. For Kussa, absolute possibility is possibility that is fully and permanently actual. This recalls the reasoning of unlearned ignorance, since it's another way of expressing the idea of God's being so maximal that nothing more could be added, and so minimal that nothing could be taken away. Kussa even reuses the example of the line, observing that a maximal line is the same as a minimal line, since this would be the line that could be neither greater nor less than it is. So there is no unrealized or unused possibility in God as there would be in a created thing. Even something as unchanging and impressive as the sun, as Kussa points out, could at least in principle be different. That would apply even more obviously to you and me. Regardless of your level of talent, there's a limitless range of things you could do, places you could be, and abilities you could acquire, and you can certainly not fulfill all these possibilities. Kussa calls to mind the US Army's advertising campaign that told prospective soldiers, be all that you can be, advice that upon closer inspection turns out to be metaphysically absurd. For some readers, me for instance, Kussa's argument also calls to mind the Avicenna conception of God as the necessary existent. For Avicenna, too, God is eternally everything that He can possibly be. This is the basis of his notorious claim that the universe is eternal. If God were to create the universe after not creating it, then He would have at first been only possibly creating, but God cannot have any unrealized possibilities. Kussa though draws a conclusion that Avicenna did not. For Kussa, if God actually realizes all possibility, then there can be nothing left out from God's nature. Every possibility there is must be not just present in God, but actually realized in God. Kussa expresses this by saying that all things are enfolded in God, present in Him, but as a unity, not a plurality. As we saw in Unlearned Ignorance, at the level of the divine, opposition and difference melt away to be replaced by identity. Only when the things in God emerge into the created universe will they be distinct from one another. They will no longer be fully and necessarily actual as they were in God, but contingent and subject to change. Just does God show Himself in a world that reveals its Creator? Or better, says Kussa, the unknowable God reveals Himself knowably to the world in imagery and symbolism. The result is admittedly an imperfect version of the reality that is compressed in God's perfection, but it is the only way that God can express His infinite nature in an outward form since otherwise He would just have to make a second God, and that would be absurd. God is, after all, already the full realization of what is possible. In 1461, one year after Des possesed, Kussa produced the ultimate statement of the coincidence of all things in God, Deli non aliud, meaning on, not other. Paging through it, you get the sense that it was written in response to complaints that his earlier works, though difficult and paradoxical, were not nearly difficult and paradoxical enough. Here's a typical passage, just to give you a flavor. Not other is not other, nor is it other than other, nor is it other in another. This for no other reason than that not other is not other, which cannot in any way be other, as if something were lacking to it as to an other. Because what is other is other than something, it lacks that than which it is other. But because not other is not other than anything, it does not lack anything, nor can any other anything exist outside of it. To which one might fairly respond, what? Actually though, what Kussa is saying here makes sense, or at least it makes as much sense as he intends it to. The fundamental idea is the same as what we've found in his other works. Nothing is missing from God, since he is the maximum, that is, already whatever can be. This is why Kussa says in the middle of the rather mystifying passage I just quoted that God cannot be other as if something were lacking to it. Again this is in contrast to the things God creates. The sky, which is Kussa's example, is different from or other than things that are not the sky, such as a giraffe, which is not Kussa's example. We know the sky, or a giraffe, or something else in the world by distinguishing it from everything else. That kind of knowledge cannot help us to understand God. Since God is the not-other, he has all the same things within himself, but of course as not-other from each other, as not yet distinguished, since they are enfolded together in him, no different from one another. Kussa compares this to the way that the distinct colors of a rainbow all emerge from the unity of sunlight. He argues that even nothingness is dependent on God and refracted from his unity, since in the created world, nothingness can be distinguished from the somethings that do exist. All of this might suggest that Kussa should be very liberal in the application of human language to God. Since the sky, giraffes, and even nothingness are all contained in him before coming forth from him, why not call God the sky, or a giraffe, or nothing? But this is not the moral Kussa takes from his own story. To the contrary, he emphasizes that any name we could give God would be inappropriate, since it would imply that God is other, that is other than anything else apart from the name we've used. If we called God a giraffe, this would not be entirely wrong, since the essence of giraffe is somehow contained within God's unity, but it would be mostly wrong, since the term giraffe really serves to distinguish giraffes from everything else. Thus Kussa says in On Not Other that God is not deprived of names, but rather prior to them. He applies this reasoning even to the transcendentals, the most general properties that, in medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, were considered to apply to all creatures and to be realized most perfectly in God, like goodness, unity, and truth. For Kussa, even calling God goodness itself would be to damn him with faint praise, because goodness can be distinguished from other concepts. Goodness and the other transcendental properties only come after God, having been distinguished out of his utter lack of otherness. Or rather, they come out of him and through him and not just after him, as if they could have arisen spontaneously. These reflections represent the culmination of Kussa's longstanding interest in the limitations of human knowledge. He is powerfully influenced by such heroes of negative theology as the Pseudo-Dionysius and Maestro Eckhart, and follows their lead by saying that we reached the height of understanding by realizing most fully the failure of our understanding. At the beginning of On Learned Ignorance, he alludes to Socrates' claim to know only that he knew nothing, and agrees. The more that one knows that one is unknowing, the more learned one will be. He allows that we can make progress towards knowing God more fully, but only by successively stripping away descriptive language, or by realizing the inapplicability of different forms of cognition, whether sensation, imagination, or the mind. So long as we are still using the mind to grasp intelligible concepts, each of them a mere likeness of God, we are falling short of God's unintelligible, transcendent reality. Kussa compares this to the way a polygon grows ever closer to being a circle the more sides it has. To grasp God fully, to go from the many-sided polygon to the perfect circle, as it were, intellect would have to stop being itself. Like any created thing, intellect always has differentiation and unrealized possibility. Thus it can never become the maximum, never be so great that it cannot be greater. It goes without saying that this theory of going without saying has a long history. Kussa refers explicitly to Dionysius, but it was a more general Neoplatonic doctrine that God, or the One, outstrips intellect by transcending all description and differentiated thought. And Kussa is certainly an heir to the Neoplatonic tradition. This becomes clear, for example, in a work called On Conjectures, in a sequence of chapters describing a series of onenesses that track the standard levels of the Neoplatonic hierarchy — God, intellect, soul, then the physical world. But this same treatise betrays a more skeptical view of human knowledge than you could find in a thinker like Plotinus or Proclus. The title, On Conjectures, alludes to Kussa's claim that all human beliefs or affirmations about anything, not just God, are mere suppositions or conjectures. I said before that to use a word like giraffe is to distinguish something, namely a giraffe, from all the other things that are not giraffes. Kussa claims that this is all we can ever achieve using language and mental conceptions. We can only grasp that created things are different from one another, not the true natures or essences of the things in themselves. The fundamental reason for this, I think, is that essences are most fully themselves only when they are still enclosed within the unknowable unity of God. In Kussa's philosophy, there is no perfect intellect or intelligible world where our minds could grasp platonic forms. Instead, the essences of things express themselves only in created individuals, as imperfect likenesses of divine reality, which cannot offer us a basis for adequate knowledge of the essences. There is some debate as to how exactly universal natures exist in the created world, according to Kussa, since he sometimes sounds like a realist about these natures and sometimes seems to be saying that outside the mind there are only particular things. But there is a pretty clear passage on the question, at least clear by Kussa's standards, in Unlearned Ignorance, where he says that the infinity of God is contracted into progressively more specific instances, like the genus animal, then the species, giraffe, then the individual, aioatha. He adds that the peripatetics are right to say that there are no universals existing independently of things, only particulars really exist outside the mind. On the other hand, he says, universals have a certain universal being, which can be contracted by the particular. I take this to mean that Kussa is endorsing a realist position like that of Duns Scotus. There are no universals as such that somehow float around in extramental reality, but there is a real giraffe nature in aioatha that belongs only to her. There's a parallel here to the relation between God and the universe. Just as God's infinity is contracted into the limited form of the universe, which cannot realize all possibility the way He does, so the absolute nature of giraffe is contracted as the rather splendid but still more limited version of this nature that we find in aioatha. So here we have Kussa engaging with a theme familiar from medieval philosophy, the problem of universals. And as I've mentioned, he gives us strong echoes of medieval thinkers like Anselm, Avicenna, and Eckhart. The fact that he is writing around the middle of the 15th century shows us that approaches and themes thought to be typical of medieval thought were still viable at this period, and we'll be seeing more evidence of that as this series goes along. Appropriately enough though, Nicholas of Kussa reconciles the opposition so often drawn between medieval and renaissance philosophy. A glance at his biography shows that he can also be classed as an early northern humanist. Like other humanists from the north, he spent time studying in Italy, in his case in Padua, where he studied law, physics, and mathematics. He then returned to pursue theology at Cologne, but his work for the church took him to Constantinople in 1437. He brought back Greek manuscripts that still exist today in the archive at his home city of Chues. Of course the only thing more typical of humanists than collecting manuscripts was complaining about Aristotelian philosophy, and Kussa did that too. There's nothing in his works to anticipate the anti-scholastic diatribes of men like Juan Luis Vives or Thomas More, but he does pause in On Not Other to lament the way that Aristotle's philosophy fell short of grasping God's full transcendence. This is something he links to the limited resources of Aristotelian logic. To grasp the divine, we must go beyond reasoning. This means getting past the exclusive choice between affirmation and negation, instead embracing the coincidence of opposites, just as Dionysius managed to do. Depending on your philosophical tastes, you might find this to be an exhilarating or an alarming remark. It sounds like Kussa is rejecting the principle of non-contradiction, which is the basis of all reasoning, and not just for Aristotle. But in my view, that's not quite right. Saying that opposites collapse or are no longer applicable in the case of God is not the same as holding that two inconsistent propositions are both true. When Kussa speaks of the coincidence of opposites, he does not mean that two opposites both hold true of God while remaining opposed, as would a modern-day logician who introduces a third truth value for statements that are both true and false. This is called dialethism, and logical systems that allow for such statements are called para-consistent. Rather, Kussa means that the opposition breaks down altogether. This is more like what philosophers now call a category error, as when someone says that the number four is neither blue nor not blue because the whole concept of color doesn't apply to numbers. While the difference may seem rather technical, it's of considerable importance for understanding Kussa's negative theology. He keeps telling us that we cannot fully understand God. But why not, exactly? On the interpretation I'm suggesting, the problem is not that we are unable to believe two contradictory things at the same time, like by holding that the same thing is both straight and curved, even though straightness and curvature are mutually exclusive. Rather, what we are unable to do is fully to grasp how the straightness of the infinite line does not rule out its being curved. In favor of this reading is that it fits with what he says about other areas of Aristotelian logic like the theory of categories. Think again of the maximum and minimum and their identity in God. When explaining this, Kussa says, If you free maximum and minimum from quantity by mentally removing large and small, you will see clearly that maximum and minimum coincide. Later he tells us that the difference between substance and the other categories, like quality and quantity, is obliterated in God, because as the maximum he must contain them all. This is a clear rejection of Aristotelian logical tools, but it's a rejection that consists in simply deeming them inapplicable. Kussa is critical of other aspects of Aristotelian philosophy too. Like a number of thinkers in the generations to come, including Copernicus, Tilesio, and Cambanella, he distances himself from the medieval understanding of the cosmos. The imperfection of human knowledge is matched by that of the physical universe, which is, again, only a likeness of God's maximal perfection. Traditionally, the midpoint of an unmoving earth was taken to be the exact center of the spherical universe, but Kussa dismisses this, saying that the universe has no center or circumference apart from God himself. In fact, the cosmos is infinite, though this seems to mean only that it is in principle without fixed boundaries and could be increased in size by God without limit. Kussa is not saying that the universe is actually infinitely large. Furthermore, the earth is moving, which seems a striking anticipation of Copernicus, though Kussa does not say it is moving around the sun. In fact, his most insightful remark along these lines, and the most Copernican, concerns not the spatial arrangement of the cosmos, but the fact that up and down, or in astronomical terms, center and zenith are a matter of perspective. If we were at some spot in the heavens, we would think that it is the earth that is moving above us in the sky. Likewise, it is because we are on the earth that we do not realize it is moving. If Kussa's humanist interests and misgivings about Aristotelianism make it reasonable to think of him as a philosopher of the Northern Renaissance, then his political writings suggest that we could see him as an apostle of reform. His aim was to establish the maximum degree of agreement and harmony. As scholars have not been slow to note, this seems to be a political application of his characteristic approach in metaphysics. Kussa, the church lawyer and diplomat, was also Kussa the Neoplatonist, developing his own cluster of philosophical insights, incorporating all into one, reconciling poles of opinion and their contradictions. In the church, this meant working to resolve tensions between the papacy and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. According to a standard view of Kussa's career, he began as a staunch supporter of conciliarism, that is, the principle that agreements reached at a church council should be binding for the pope, but then he shifted towards equally staunch support for papal supremacy. This is probably an exaggeration, because even in his earlier conciliarist phase, he emphasized that the pope must be involved in reaching consensus at a council. So Kussa was clearly no Martin Luther. Any reform he hoped to see within the church should be just that, within the church, and imposed under the remit of papal authority. But equally, he wanted rulers to exercise authority within an institutional framework, not autocratically. Still more remarkable were Kussa's ideas for establishing consensus between Christians and adherents of other religions. Having been to Constantinople, he was shocked by the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453. In that same year, he turned his harmonizing mind to the question of interfaith dispute. In a dialogue called On the Peace of Faith, he drew a stunning inference from the radical negative theology developed in his other works. Since God is radically unknowable, no one religion can claim to know Him where others do not. We're all in the same boat, namely one sunken in ignorance, though if we've read Kussa, this could at least be learned ignorance. Thus the diversity of rituals masks an underlying unity, with all worshippers honoring the same God and in effect being members of a single religion. What seem to be clear disagreements are in fact just misunderstandings, as when Jews and Muslims think that the doctrine of the Trinity amounts to polytheism. Kussa is especially optimistic that the more enlightened members of all faiths could find common ground. He once again scores points with me by mentioning Avicenna as a particularly admirable Muslim philosopher who understood that the rewards promised in the Qur'an are spiritual and not physical in nature. It must be said that there are limits to Kussa's ecumenical broad-mindedness. He doesn't even mention atheism, which would obviously be beyond the pale for him, while pagan polytheists can only join in the happy family of the enlightened by accepting that there is a single ineffable God above their various divinities. Of more practical significance are his remarks about Jews, whom he takes to be especially stubborn. The only reassurance he offers here is that the Jews will not impede harmony, for they are few in number and will not be able to trouble the whole world by force of arms. It has also been observed that, while Kussa does not insist on an exclusivist claim to truth for Christianity as it existed in 15th century Europe, he does insist that the ideal religion he is envisioning—worship of a single, utterly transcendent God—is the only true one. Dispute and discord between the faiths is pointless, but only because all mundane religions fall short of the highest truth, which reigns supreme over them all. And of course it is entirely understandable that so many people have fallen short of that truth since it ultimately exceeds the grasp of humankind. This is perhaps the deepest sense in which Nicholas of Kussa prepares the way for what is to come in the next century and a half. His unrelenting focus on the inevitable weakness of human knowledge foreshadows Luther's doctrine of the unknown God, and also a more general trend toward skepticism that we'll be meeting in such figures as Michel de Montaigne and Francesco Sánchez. Kussa's talk of rainbows and infinite lines was not just a stylistic choice. Through the use of symbols and analogies, he sought to bring his readers as close as possible to the divine reality that lies beyond all mere possibility. It was a project he knew to be, like the universe itself, potentially endless. There is no end of symbolisms, he wrote, since no symbolism is so close that there cannot always be a closer one. The results were bound to be less than fully satisfying, but they were an improvement on what could be achieved through the straightforward language analyzed so meticulously by the university schoolmen. Kussa would have agreed wholeheartedly with the Russian symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, who said, Which seems like a good moment to stop talking, for now, but we're not yet done with Nicholas of Kussa. A thinker this complex and significant deserves a few more words devoted to him, and it's no coincidence that I've lined up a leading scholar of Renaissance philosophy to provide them, Paul Richard Bloom. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Nicholas of Cusa with Paul Richard Blum, who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland, but is speaking to me from Germany. We're both in Germany. So hello, Professor Blum. Yeah, hello. And we don't have any time difference, so that makes things easy. Speaking of time, let's talk a little bit about the period in which Nicholas of Cusa lived. He can be seen as a figure who binds together the Northern and Southern Renaissance because he studied in Italy. He was even in contact with Byzantium. He traveled to Constantinople. But he was German, and most of his life was spent in Germany or in German-speaking lands. And you're someone who's worked on Renaissance topics across Europe. So I thought, actually, before we start talking about Cusanus, maybe I could ask you to say something about the relationship between philosophy in Italy and philosophy in the rest of Europe in, let's say, the 15th century when Cusanus was alive. Yeah, that's an interesting approach because, indeed, when we speak about Renaissance philosophy, we usually think about Italy, and then a little bit more Italy, and then gradually we might also extend to other parts of Europe. That has to do not too much with reality but with the Italian approach to their national philosophy in the 19th and 20th century, which is now overcome. So we should say that at that time, in the 15th century, there was philosophy all over Europe, but it was not organized in terms of nations or languages or these kind of things, but it was organized by schools and by communities. By schools, I mean universities. Communities, I mean, for instance, religious orders. Think of Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, born in Italy, worked in Naples, in Rome, and in Cologne, and in Paris, and then back to Rome. And that was because he was going from university to university, and he was a Dominican friar. And similar things happened also in Germany and in other parts of Europe. Think of Germany, the Nicholas of Cusa studied in Heidelberg because that was the university you would go. And when he came back from Padua, he went to Cologne because again, that was the university that was the most, one of the best renowned universities of the time. And so he met his friends and his colleagues there, not according to being Germans or being Italians, but according to what they had to offer. In France, we had before Cusano, we had Jean Garçon, a theologian with a lot of new innovative approaches to religious and theological and philosophical things. We for instance, advocated the rebirth of Dionysus, the Areopagite, very important influence on humanism and Renaissance philosophy in terms of negative theology and critique of human understanding. We had also in France, the Mont de Sébant, as it's called by Montaigne, a Catalan who worked in Tours, and he was important because he invented basically the concept of natural theology, that is theology done with philosophical means. And so, and then let's see, yeah, in England, we had Wycliffe and the Wycliffeites, which is not just a religious movement, but a movement of critique of traditional approaches to scholarship and also to the Bible, which then influenced the Czech intellectuals, who was the most famous, who was burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. And of course we had Byzantium, the flourishing cultural area in Byzantium. So besides Italy, there were intellectual centers all over Europe, but as I said, they were not organized by language, they all, except for the Byzantine, they all spoke Latin when they did their scholarly work, their teaching, but they were kind of an inter-European network that was not paying attention to nations. We also should remember that it's important that at that time in the 15th century, basically until the 30th war, Europe was a horrible patchwork of little principalities and monarchies and rivaling cities that had nothing to do with what we understand in the modern world as a state or as a nation. Yeah, and in fact, I was, I mean, in my question, I'm sort of using the words Germany and Italy to refer to geographical areas and not, obviously not political entities. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I would say something like south of the Alps and north of the Alps, something like that, you know? Yeah, absolutely. It was a geographical destination and not so much a political and not, definitely not an ideological area. And what would you say Cusanus took from the time he spent south of the Alps or in Italy, as we might say, because people often relate what he's doing to earlier German figures, in particular Maestro Eckhart, who also is a great negative theologian, and at first glance reading through Cusanus's works, one might feel that there's not much sign of anything distinctively recognizable from the Italian Renaissance. Yeah, he went after he finished his studies in Heidelberg, he went to Padua because he wanted to perfect his legal studies, his studies in canon law, which is something you need as a career church person, which he was and wanted to be. And Padua was one of the law faculties that had the best renown in Europe at that time. So he went there, but on the side, or in addition to that, he also studied mathematics. And he befriended the quote of Toscanelli, the mathematician and scientist, which influenced Nicholas of Cusa a lot. So he went to Italy because the scholarship was there. And what he brought back was, for instance, his speculations in mathematics, which played out throughout his life in his various works. And we have a lot of mathematical examples in works like Unlearned Ignorance, like the infinite line, which is both curved and straight and so on. So things I discussed in the last episode. Speaking of learned ignorance, that's one of his most famous philosophical concepts along with the coincidence of opposites. And maybe I'll ask you about that first and we'll see if we can ramp up to talking about learned ignorance and find out how much we don't understand it. Beginning then with coincidence of opposites, when he argues for that or when he lays out the idea, it can look like he's endorsing some kind of irrationalism because he critiques certain kind of constraints that you find within Aristotelian logic. And in particular, he seems to be saying that there's a kind of limitation to philosophy that's still being done within the scope of the principle of non-contradiction. In other words, that you're not allowed to contradict yourself. So do you think that that would be a reasonable charge to lay at his door, that he's just kind of rejected reason by trying to transcend it? Or do you think that we can understand Kuznetanis' philosophy while remaining within some kind of rational, logically coherent framework? Yeah, the approach you are presenting is precisely a later development that came up with the critique of Aristotle, critique of Aristotle's logic, and then the rebuttal to that. So for instance, a person like Pomponazzi that is at the end of the 15th century and the early 16th century, he emphasized the logic and the strictness of logical operations in Aristotle and came to the conclusion that everything that has to do with God, with faith, is irrational, is a matter of pure faith. That's, we call it, Fides. So it came to a skeptical approach to the teachings of religion and of revelation, which then said, okay, so we just have to believe. He's not the first one, but he's the most prominent of these. On the contrary, what Kuznetanis is doing is he's trying to stretch the means of rational approach, and that also ties into his research in mathematical paradoxes like a circle in a straight line that are incommunicable, and he asks, maybe there is a way to communicate them or to make them compatible. His idea of coincidence of opposites is apparently mystical. It's apparently, you could also say skeptical, but what he is trying to do is look how far we can get once we follow the line of reasoning, and then we come to the coincidence. And the standard example is, of course, that if you have a curve, a circle, if you extend that as far as possible and still more and still more, then it approaches the straight line so that the straight line, which is opposite to the curved line, actually coincide, are the same. And the other way around, if you reduce the circle, if you reduce it and reduce it and reduce it, you come to something like a point, and the point on a circle is exactly the same point as a point on a straight line. So that again, the straight line and the curve coincide, or even you could say the extension coincides with a non-extension in a point. The idea is he stretches the capabilities of human rationality, of human reasoning, to where it finds its own limits. Limits, of course, being a mathematical term in itself, appropriately. Yes, okay, yeah, fine. Okay, and obviously he also thinks that there's an extent to which stretching reason to its limits or to infinity, maybe we could say, because that's like where the asymptotic curve, as it were, meets the line, if you sort of take it to infinity. It seems obvious then, and I guess he says this quite clearly, that we're there transcending the human capacity truly to understand what's going on. And that brings us to this notion of learned ignorance. And I think here an obvious question is, why is learned ignorance better than normal ignorance? Or to put it another way, if I start out not knowing anything, and then it seems to me that I'm learning some things and I'm acquiring knowledge, but then I go through this course of study together with Kuzanis and wind up pushing reason to infinity and I wind up not knowing anything in the end again, then why couldn't I have just started or stayed where I started and stayed in this state of mere ignorance as opposed to learned ignorance? The learned ignorance, maybe we should go back to the Latin wording, and the Latin wording is doctor ignorance here. That is, you could say the taught ignorance, the ignorance that has been taught what it can do and where it comes from. So if we come back to the coincidence, the coincidence is not just a joke, but it is also searching for the point of departure of the finite measurable extensions we know, quantities we know. The point of coincidence is also the starting point of what there is. Like finite lines would be segments of this infinite line where opposites coincide, for example. Exactly. And for instance, the short terms are actually points, and lines are also actually points. However that works. So having said that, the learned ignorance is that about our knowledge of the divine, of the absolute. And the absolute by definition is not extended, is not finite, is not traceable in any human way, but the absolute is also the basis of everything that is not absolute, that is relative, that is finite, that is related. So when he had this insight on the ship on the way from Constantinople to Padua or Venice, he saw that if we want to understand what God is, and if we presuppose that God is the origin of everything that is, we have to, instead of making pious formulas, repeating pious formulas, instead of that, we have to make clear to ourselves that this is also the origin of our possible thinking. And therefore the ignorance, I don't know who is God, or the ignorance God cannot be proved rationally, turns into a learned or informed ignorance, an informed ignorance namely, aha, in order to be able to think in finite terms, we have to be able to understand that this has its origin beyond the finite and beyond the human being thinking. That's really nice. So learned ignorance would relate to normal knowledge the way that a point relates to a line, because the point that generates the line, but the point isn't a line yet. Exactly. Yeah, very good. That's what I mean. Okay, that's really nice. And so just to spell that out in terms of the terms of my original question, that's not true of normal ignorance. So if you just don't know anything, right, because you haven't studied or you haven't thought about it, or what, for whatever reason, that kind of ignorance obviously is not the source of knowledge, it's just a privation or lack of knowledge. Yeah, exactly. And not knowing Chinese, which applies to me, is not constitutive for my speaking English or speaking German. Right. Okay, we could probably keep talking for the rest of this interview about these problems because they're so complicated and intriguing. But I did want to ask you about another dimension of his thought, because it's something you've written the whole book about. And this is what he thinks about other religions, and in particular about the idea of forging peace between Christianity, or the kind of Christianity he accepts, and other religions, notably Islam. But as you just mentioned, he traveled to Constantinople, he was in touch with the Byzantines. And he had a really distinctive position on the relationship between faiths. Just to lay a kind of framework and background for that, could you say something about what other intellectuals in this period were saying about relationships with Islam and Judaism, so that we kind of have something to contrast Kuzanis to? The most famous, of course, was Raymond Bluhn, that is about 100 years before the Declaration of Kuzah, but Kuzanis read Bluhn's works. Raymond Bluhn was a Mayoka, from the island of Mayoka, Catalan, he was a layperson, at least not a northern-ordained priest, and he had the idea to convert the Muslims to Christianity, and he had the idea to do that with rational arguments, with reasoning. And for that he developed a certain mathematical theory, mathematics again. So his idea was, there is a fundamental way of human thinking that makes it possible to think about God, to believe in God, and to worship God, and this human thinking is communicable between the Christians and the Muslims and also the Jews. So he was certainly a paradigm for this approach to negotiate with other religions. Raymond Bluhn was influenced by Raymond Lure with his natural theology. There is a line that goes into the 15th century. In the 15th century there were quite a number of other intellectuals that were trying to understand and trying to communicate with Islam, but most of them were hostile. Whereas Nicholas of Kuzah is the most prominent at least, said it must be possible to find common ground in the religious effort. And on what did he base this optimistic assessment of the prospects of reconciling the differences between these two faiths? I'm not quite sure whether he's really optimistic. Maybe he's more desperate and then takes the means that are available to him. His famous treatise on peace of religion, the Parti Fidei, which he wrote on the occasion of the fall of Constantinople at the hand of the Ottoman Empire, he in vivid terms shows the stress and his shock about this event and the brutality of the war. And from there he comes and says there must be a peaceful way. And then he looks for where could that peaceful way begin. And it would begin with the observation that in modern terms religious feeling is common to all humanity. And that religious argument has to go back to the understanding of an all-powerful God that willed the plurality of religions to be there. In the same way as humans are different among individuals and among groups and among peoples and among tribes, in the same way God also willed that they had their peculiar individual ways of worshiping. So instead of saying they all got it wrong, as we do that since in many religious wars, he says no, they all got it right. We only have to find out why they got it right. What is it what they actually got right? And that would be for instance the existence of a coming principle. The religious war were also close to him, not only with Constantinople, then Greece, but also for instance the Hussites. I mentioned the Hussites in the early 15th century when Diamus was executed. The Hussites dealt with the religion of the Bohemians, that is now Czech Republic, in the Council of Basel. He was engaged in that dialogue with Hussites. And the problem was they got it kind of right, but were hostile to the Catholics, though what were we now with Catholics. So he was trying also to reach out to them and say, look, what is it what we have in common? And if I remember correctly, for instance, the bone of contention, the communion in two forms, in bread and wine, for Kuzanis was not an issue. That is, he said, well, we can negotiate about that. That doesn't make it. So his approach was, if there is a difference, if there is a contrast, there must be a common ground that is also then communicable. A lot of people think that this somehow reflects his idea of the reconciling of opposites. So just as you have, like apparently contradictory properties, like say, straight and curved, coming together in God. So the differences between religious groups would vanish once you ascend to a sufficiently high level of perception about the divine. I mean, is there anything to that or is that just a kind of loose analogy? No, no, that's actually to the point. Kuzanis wrote also a treatise in which he investigated in detail the Quran on the basis of translation that were available to him. And he found in the Quran, the formula that is the basis of his piece of religion, namely, there's one faith in a variety of rights. Una religio in rito un barrieta. He found that in this Quran and he used it. So he picked from the enemy the reconciling formula. And so, yeah, and that is something like making the opposite meet. One last question. I can't resist asking you about this because this is something I only know about from reading your work. Kuzanis is one of the earliest non-English philosophers to have been translated into English, I guess. There's already a 17th century translation of his works by someone named Giles Randall. Can you explain how this came about and also say, did it have a big impact on English intellectual culture? Is it more like a kind of curiosity? For one thing, I haven't understood yet the details and the mysteries of religion in England in the 17th century. That is very difficult and obviously is so difficult that it led to the founding of the United States. So from what I understand, also Giordano Bruno was in the late 16th century in London, and he was there because there was so much religious tension that the troublemaker like Giordano was welcomed, but was able to flourish there. And he was not the only one. So in the early 17th century, the climate in England was very diverse from what I understand. And there was a strong movement or strong climate of mystics and popularizers who were interested in the non-official practice of religion. So they translated, for instance, the Theogia Deutsch, the German theology, which was a spurious book and which also was, by the way, made public by Martin Luther in Germany, and a few other mystical treatises. And so George Landau and others were interested, were excited by the mystical aspect of Nicholas of Cusa, because you can read all his treatises from the Leung, Igerans, the Conjectors, and so on. You can also always read them in mystical treatises. We tend to read them in rationalist, please, but in mystical interpretation is well possible. There are mystical elements, and he was, as you mentioned, influenced by Master Eckhart and Heinrich Campo, who were in part mystics. So they picked on that and brought and used, for instance, the treatise on the vision of God to advocate their mystical approach. And for that reason, Kuzanos was welcome, together with a few other writings of his, the Idiota de Mente, the private person of the mind, and would be the title of his book, was also translated. And so there were circles that were intrigued by Nicholas of Cusa's mystical aspects, which also was, of course, supported by the fact that there was no real official Kuzanos school in the 16th, 17th century, as opposed to, for instance, the Neocatani School at Masiifuccino, the Machiavellism of Machiavelli, and other authors of the Italian Renaissance, who basically created the school. That was not so with Nicholas of Cusa. He was kind of forgotten. The one book on the reception of Nicholas of Cusa is indeed, Maya Uza, was indeed titled The Presence of the Forgotten One. He traced the presence of Kuzanos in the writings, even when he wasn't quoted. And that's why it was sent for the English religious, mystic religious, welcome resource that was not abused by the official schools. Well, next, we're going to be moving on to someone who was never forgotten, I would say, and had a huge impact on his immediate environment. And that is Erasmus, maybe the leading thinker of the so-called Northern Renaissance, and a great example of how humanism sort of spread out from Italy to the rest of Europe. So I will thank Paul-Richard Blum very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. And please join me next time when we will be looking at Erasmus here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Books That Last Forever, Erasmus. Over the last 500 years, standards have slipped quite a lot when it comes to celebrities. Famous names of the early 21st century include Piers Morgan, Donald Trump, and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, whereas in the 16th century, they had Desiderius Erasmus. Nowadays you can get famous just by abusing people on reality television. Back then you had to do something more impressive, like re-editing the Greek text of the New Testament. This achievement and other prodigious feats of scholarship gave Erasmus renown across Western Christendom. He has in fact been called perhaps the first celebrity in European history, famous in part because he was so famous. Humanists saw him as the greatest exponent of their movement and could think of no greater honor than receiving a word of praise from his pen. Doctors invited him to their courts, scholastics fretted over his impact, and when the Reformation began, Protestants and Catholics alike hoped that Erasmus' influential voice would be raised in their defense. But Erasmus was not one for taking sides. Across his life and his works, he sought nuance and subtlety, a master of striking balances. He was a reformer who stayed within the church, a devotee of pagan literature whose worldview was deeply Christian, a proud native of the Low Countries who said that his nation was any place where learning flourished. He was born in Rotterdam in the late 1460s as the illegitimate child of a priest, and in due course became a priest himself. Characteristically, he had mixed feelings about this, and equally characteristically, he expressed them in eloquent writing. One of his earliest texts is a discussion of monastic retreat from the world, which largely treats this life in favorable terms, but warns readers not to embrace it without due consideration. In due course, Erasmus would become a harsh critic of the monastic orders he called mendicant tyrants. He coined an absurdly long word for the battle between them and humanists, the lovers of the muses, tojo torano filo mus o machia. In this case, there was no doubt which side Erasmus was on, but his critique of the hypocrisy of the monastic orders came together with the conviction that a true life of Christian asceticism would be one worth living. In the 1490s, Erasmus tried out another road to religious fulfillment only to find that it led nowhere. He enrolled as a student of theology at the University of Paris, but dropped out. About a decade later, he would get his degree from Turin, albeit by jumping over certain requirements. But by this time, he had already settled on his true calling, a fusion of faith with philological scholarship that he called learned piety, doctor pietas. His first edition was in 1501 of a work on ethics by, who else, Cicero, a figure who elicited another balancing act from Erasmus. He greatly admired this foremost Latin stylist, of course, yet he would later write a work mocking Italian humanists who were so enthralled by Ciceronian style that they abandoned the concerns of the Christian faith. At the time of that edition, he was already traveling around Europe, as he would continue to do for the coming decades. In England, he forged important friendships with the humanists John Colette and Thomas Moore. While there, he became convinced of the need to acquire deep expertise in ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament. Then back in the Low Countries, he came across a text by Lorenzo Valla containing notes on that very text. Here, Erasmus realized, was a project suited to his talent, his faith, and his ambition. He would produce a new edition of the Greek text of the New Testament and offer a new Latin translation, improving on the so-called Vulgate, which had long been the fundamental text of Western Christendom. He made little effort to hide the part about being ambitious. Contrasting himself to school-trained theologians, he said that they merely deliver humdrum sermons. I am writing books that may last forever. By taking the Bible itself as an object of scholarly attention, he was implicitly modeling himself on the Church Father, St. Jerome. Just to make sure no one missed the point, he wrote a biography of Jerome and edited his works. As Lisa Jardine has written in a study of Erasmus's elaborate methods of self-promotion, he aspired to something more like the renown traditionally accorded only to the major ancient authors and teachers of secular and sacred texts, the international acclaim and recognition accorded to a Seneca or a Jerome. We fail to notice the extraordinary presumptuousness of this aspiration on Erasmus's part only, I think, because in the end he was so entirely and consummately successful. Erasmus's labors on the New Testament show us some interesting things about how ancient texts were being studied at this point in history. His edition and translation was first printed in 1516, with new and improved versions then appearing throughout his lifetime. It was based heavily on Greek manuscripts brought from the East. Erasmus assumed that these were more authoritative than the Vulgate, even though this Latin version would ultimately have been based on a very old, long-lost Greek one. Like other humanists of the time, he showed a keen understanding of the way that mistakes can creep into handwritten texts, for instance confusion between words written with similar letters, a classic example being the Greek words hama and alla, meaning at the same time, and but, because in the older maguscule writing these were written AMA and ALLA, big letters, and a capital M looks a lot like two capital Greek Ls. Erasmus also knew to worry about the intrusion of marginal comments into the main text. Particularly notable is his articulation of what is now called the Principle of the Harder Reading, or Lectio difficileor. This means that you might actually prefer a somewhat strange variant reading over a more predictable one, on the basis that scribes would tend to replace awkward or unusual Greek with a more familiar-looking text of their own invention. A further crucial aspect of this project was Erasmus's own annotations. These were of course intended to explain his choices as editor and translator, but also to give the reader a sense of the nuances and difficulties of the biblical text. In a translation, he explained, you can only express one meaning. In annotations, you can point out several from which the reader can freely choose the one he would want to follow. Here we are not that far from Luther and the idea of a personal encounter with scripture, albeit that the encounter envisioned by Erasmus would be facilitated by deep study of classical languages. Not everyone was pleased. One Dominican blustered, what an imposter Erasmus is. He writes annotations on the New Testament, he addresses responses to some theologians, yet he is ignorant of all theology. As we saw in our earlier survey of northern humanism, the schoolmen were reluctant to accept specialism in ancient Greek and Ciceronian Latin as a substitute for university training, and there were less principled objections too. A Franciscan in Bruges who denounced Erasmus admitted to not having read any of his books, but said he was afraid he may be able to slip into some heresy with all that lofty Latin. Erasmus could give as good as he got, if not better. His experiences at Paris in what he would later call the wrestling schools of the Sorbonne had convinced him that the Scholastics were indulging in disputation over frivolous nonsense. From its title, you might guess that his Against the Barbarians also fits into the now familiar pattern of humanists lamenting the bad thinking and worse Latin of Scholastic literature. In fact though, it seems that the schoolmen were not the primary target of this work, or at least the part of it that Erasmus wrote. It is the beginning of a treatise that was never completed. The part that got written instead answers those who reject all use of classical literature, especially pagan poetry. For Erasmus, this was an anti-religious attitude pretending to be religious. He believed that skillful rhetoric could win more souls for Christ than all the Scholastic distinctions in the world. The Scholastics are, by contrast, very much a target in what may be Erasmus's most famous book, The Praise of Folly. It was written in just one week while Erasmus was staying with Thomas More in London and recovering from kidney stones. In such a circumstance, you or I might rewatch all five seasons of The Wire, or, if that seems too challenging, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Erasmus, being made of sterner stuff, produced a delightfully eloquent and ironic book in which Folly speaks on her own behalf. This is a pun on the name of Erasmus's host, since the Latin word for Folly is moria, and he was, as I say, staying with Thomas More. But it also gives Erasmus a chance to make plenty of serious points in a comedic fashion. The work seems to fall into three parts, devoted respectively to, as one scholar has put it, the natural fool, the wicked fool, and the Christian fool. Thus, in the first section, we learn how foolishness results from the domination of reason by the passions. Philosophers may lament this, but Folly says it is absolutely necessary for our survival. After all, even the Stoics, who claim perfect rationality, like gods, must give in to the passions if they are to have children. In the second section, we move on to various sorts of foolish evildoer, including the hypocrites among the monks, whose rivalry shows that they aren't interested in being like Christ, but in being unlike each other, and the schoolmen, who know nothing at all, yet claim to know everything. The Stoics and the Scholastics aren't the only philosophers to come in for rough treatment in this work. Erasmus has Folly mock Plato's idea of philosophers becoming kings. In fact, no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict. The same passage makes fun of Marcus Aurelius, who was a good emperor, but unpopular precisely because he was a philosopher. Folly even has unkind words for Cicero and Socrates, of all people. We know that Erasmus loved Cicero. As for Socrates, Erasmus was elsewhere so moved by this pagan philosopher's virtue that he prayed, Saint Socrates, pray for us. So it seems obvious that we should read the text as deeply ironic. By having the personification of foolishness condemn these figures, Erasmus is indirectly praising them. Yet one can also detect a skeptical undercurrent running through the praise of Folly, which at one point even endorses the views of the ancient academic skeptics. This may be, to some extent, sincere. In other works, Erasmus is often tentative about the scope of human knowledge, so he is perhaps at least half serious when he says that a foolish person is no less unhappy than an illiterate horse, since foolishness is in keeping with human nature. In this respect, the most difficult part of the text to evaluate is the final section, which still leads to controversy among scholars. In this part, Erasmus has Folly describe a holy fool who withdraws from worldly affairs and even from the body. She compares this otherworldly person's apparent foolishness to the character in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, who, having seen reality in the light of day, returns and is rejected by the prisoners, who still think that the shadow images on the wall of the cave are real. Here it would be natural to suppose that Folly is speaking for Erasmus, speaking in praise of withdrawal from the body. But as already mentioned, Erasmus was at best ambivalent about his own youthful experience with the rigors of asceticism, so one could also take this section to be a parody of an excessive devotion to the spiritual over the physical. Since Erasmus himself said in a letter to his fellow humanist Martin Dorp that the praise of Folly expressed all his usual doctrines, although the method may have differed, we should perhaps turn to other works to clarify his true meaning. For the theme of spirituality, we can do no better than The Handbook of the Christian Soldier. This guide to the moral life wears its classical inspiration on its sleeve. In that title, the Latin for handbook is enchiridion. This can also mean a small dagger kept always on one's person for self-defense, as one should constantly consult the book for inspiration and guidance. It also echoes the title of a collection of teachings by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Epictetus is cited explicitly in the text too, when Erasmus refers to his idea that virtue alone is under our control, with all other things external to the true self. His is only one of many ancient names invoked by Erasmus. We get allusions to Socrates, who taught that philosophy is preparation for death, that it is better to be harmed than to do harm, and that virtue is knowledge. There are also learned references to the differing views of the Stoics and Peripatetics on the emotions and the way that the Cynics and Stoics adhered to their rigorous teachings in the face of popular disdain. But Erasmus' handbook is more than a collection of greatest hits from the back catalogue of classical ethics. When he justifies the use of such pagan material, he describes it as a preliminary training in morality. And the more advanced form of righteousness is, of course, Christian. Indeed, Erasmus' intellectual achievement in the handbook is not so much to gather together ideas from ancient philosophy. Most of those ideas are familiar ones, presented in a rather basic fashion, as to show how the ideas fit seamlessly into a distinctively Christian morality. He is particularly positive towards the Platonists, because they encourage us to subordinate the concerns of the body to the concerns of the soul, or spirit. At one point, Erasmus even assimilates Plato's division between the rational and irrational souls to St. Paul's contrast between the earthly and spiritual human. Like other Renaissance thinkers, such as Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus is convinced by the Platonist doctrine that two very different natures are combined in the human. Our souls make us like gods, while our bodies make us like beasts. This is the metaphysical idea that underlies the most significant and most controversial point made by Erasmus' handbook, that the outward practices and rituals of religion are unimportant, compared to the believer's inner conviction. In a letter to his friend John Colette, Erasmus said that he wrote the handbook, solely in order to counteract the error of those who make religion in general consist in rituals and observances of an almost more than Jewish formality, but who are astonishingly indifferent to matters that have to do with true goodness. Erasmus takes it for granted that Judaism is a religion of external practices and rules, rather than interior faith, and accuses his contemporaries of approaching Christianity in this way too. To someone who supposes that the sacrament of baptism suffices to make them Christian, he says, Again, to the person who avoids adultery but has wicked desires, he asks, What good is it to do good on the outside if on the inside one's thoughts are quite the opposite? In short, Erasmus wants to draw his readers' attention to their true selves, their immortal souls, and away from the concerns of the body, even those concerns that are meant to be signs of inner piety. Of course, this suggests that the final ascetic section of the praise of folly was more authentic praise than ironic parody. Erasmus' focus on interiority actually fits better with classical philosophy than with the teachings of the Church, which of course saw inestimable value in such things as the sacrament of baptism. This is one reason why Erasmus was seen as both harbinger and fellow traveler of the Reformation. He de-emphasized the institutional role of the Church in Christian life, emphasizing instead the private, even invisible, interior attitudes of the Christian. This comes out particularly in his attacks on the monastic orders, which he saw as having fallen away from their original purity, corrupted by concern with worldly affairs. No doubt reflecting on his unhappy, youthful experiences with monasticism, he argued that such a lifestyle is just that, only a lifestyle, not to be equated with holiness and not appropriate for everyone. In an introduction added in a later edition of the Handbook, Erasmus defended himself from accusations that he had categorically rejected religious institutions. To the contrary, he was not trying to turn people away from the monastic life, and he accepted a moderate degree of ceremony. But only a page later, he is once again inveighing against monks who live for their own stomachs and not for Christ. The Christian soldier mentioned in the title of the Handbook is someone who steers clear of such hypocrisy. He may not be perfect, but he is striving for perfection, having enlisted in the army of Christ to wage war on sin. This is the battle that Christians ought to be fighting, not the literal battles they pursue against each other and against members of other faiths. It's a pacifist message that once again echoes the praise of folly, where Erasmus likewise laments the evils of warfare. He has his speaker, Folly, say that war is something so monstrous that it befits wild beasts rather than men, and derides churchmen who go into battle in the name of Christian charity. In fact, the pointlessness and wickedness of war is one of Erasmus's favorite themes. It's the main topic of other works of his, including War is Great if You Haven't Tried It, which is how Folly would want us to translate the Latin title, Tulsi Pelum in expertis. That phrase is a saying or adage, one of the many that Erasmus collected and commented upon in another of his most successful publications. He felt so strongly about the topic that in this case he expanded his remarks into a full essay dedicated to the proposition that, if there is any human activity that should be approached with caution, or rather that should be avoided by all possible means, resisted and shunned, that activity is war. In 1516, the same year that saw the publication of his new New Testament, Erasmus came out with two more works that discouraged warfare, The Plea of Peace and The Instruction of the Christian Prince. Both were written for powerful patrons, the former at the behest of Jean de Sauvage, a French chancellor of Burgundy who was trying to make peace between the Netherlands and France, the latter dedicated to the future emperor, Charles V. His approach to the young Charles is in keeping with the tradition of mirrors for princes, and explains that both political success and the happiness of the people depend upon the virtue of the ruler. It's a deeply moralizing work on politics, in sharp contrast to a work written in Italy at about the same time, Machiavelli's The Prince. Erasmus is, for example, now more optimistic about the idea of rulers doing philosophy than he seemed to be in The Praise of Folly. He says that a prince who is not a philosopher is inevitably a tyrant, adding that this just means the ruler should follow what is true and good. Being a philosopher is in practice the same as being a Christian, only the terminology is different. Whereas the tyrant enslaves his people and is concerned only for himself, the good ruler rules over free subjects and looks to their benefit. In this the virtuous prince is like God, who gives humans freedom so that his rule over them may be more glorious. This is all standard fare in works of political advice, of course, but it gives Erasmus a context for something that was more unusual in his times, an outright rejection of warfare for pretty well any reason. War is unwise just in practical terms, since its expense can almost never be offset by the gains of victory. But it is also unnatural, as we can see from the fact that even animals of the more admirable species like dolphins or storks live peacefully with their kind. Erasmus dismisses as useless the medieval concept of a just war, on the rather convincing grounds that in warfare all sides typically think they are then the right. Even war against non-Christians makes little sense to him since violence is no way to convert souls. As he also argues in The Handbook, it would be in the true spirit of the apostles to bring the Turks over to religion by the resources of Christ rather than by force of arms. While he doesn't go so far as to say that war is never necessary, he argues that its costs and calamities should be visited on whoever made the war inevitable. While he was, as we've seen, to some extent a man of contradictions, Erasmus was consistent in striving after peace, which he called the sum and substance of our religion. His goal dominated his response to the outbreak of the Reformation. Given his boldness in revising the text of the New Testament and his emphasis on private spirituality, Erasmus seemed a natural ally of the Lutheran movement. The reformer Martin Luther said that Erasmus and Luther agreed in everything. A humanist named Julius Flug tried to persuade Erasmus to make this agreement explicit by intervening with the Church on behalf of the reformist program. And on the other side, many Catholics blamed him for encouraging that very program, saying, Erasmus laid the egg, Luther hatched it. But remember, he was a celebrity, and you can't overestimate the power of a celebrity endorsement. So the Catholics also tried to win him over to their side, putting so much pressure on him that Erasmus ultimately moved to Basel so that he would not be forced to denounce Luther. As we'll see in a future episode, he did dispute with Luther over free will, in part so he could stay in the good graces of King Henry VIII of England. With pressure being exerted from both directions, Erasmus ultimately refused to join the reformers. For all his complaints about monks, clerics, and bishops, he stated explicitly that he submitted to the authority of the Church, coupling his aforementioned modesty about human knowledge with an acknowledgement of the absolute truth of the Scriptures and Church tradition. With typical nuance, he distinguished between the Roman Church and the true Church of Christ, holding out the prospect of a split between the two. Still, he allowed that as far as he was concerned, these were one and the same Church, for now at least. And he was no apostle of tolerance, especially when the Jews were concerned. While his anti-Semitism did not reach the vicious intensity found in the writings of Luther, we've already seen him being openly disdainful of Judaism. He never expanded his scholarly program to include Hebrew philology, nor did he use his considerable influence to defend Johannes Reuchlin and his study of Jewish literature. But Erasmus did want to see concord within European Christianity. Thus on the one hand, he objected to Cardinal Wolsey at the burning of Luther's books in 1520. On the other hand, he was vigorously opposed to the radical reformers who went beyond the teachings of Luther. In religion as in politics, Erasmus pled for peace and refused to praise the folly of conflict. Among the conflicts of his own day, perhaps none seemed more ridiculous to Erasmus than the one that raged among the scholastics. He refers to it in Praise of Folly, speaking of the torturous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists, and Scodists. These various names should ring at least distant bells for you. Here in the early 16th century, Erasmus refers to intellectual traditions that go back to the 13th and 14th centuries, and with good reason. Medieval schools of thought survived up to the Age of Reformation and beyond, and they helped to shape the thought of figures like Luther and Melanchthon. So before we turn to those great figures of reform, I want to complement our survey of Northern humanism with a survey of Northern scholasticism. You'd be foolish to miss it as we soldier on to the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any guess.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, One Way or Another, Northern Scholasticism. A friend of mine has a theory about why so many philosophy departments are riven by factional dispute. The less money is available, the more people fight over it. Many is the university whose great thinkers have gone to war over a hiring procedure, or just the catering budget. Sometimes admittedly the conflicts are more high-minded. Governments may split along ideological lines, like that between the so-called continental and analytic approaches, or between historians of ideas and colleagues who think that worthwhile philosophy started being produced at around the same time as color televisions. And as those continental types would say, plus-a-change, plus-a-menschus. For you analytic philosophers out there, this means the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because as it turns out, rivalries between university philosophers are as old as philosophy at universities. Already in the 13th century, academia was enlivened by antagonism between the arts and theology faculties, and between secular masters and mendicant friars. And of course, universities were one of the most important contexts for the competition between scholastics and humanists in the 15th and 16th centuries. We've already discussed that quite a bit, but mostly from the humanist side of the debate. So for the sake of balanced coverage, let's hear from some defenders of the scholastic method. They spoke up in favor of the much derided proliferation of technical terms and distinctions. For the scholastics, such devices made philosophy more accurate and rigorous. As modern-day intellectual historian Ann Moss has explained, they worried that the humanist refusal to use such specialist vocabulary signaled a lamentable disregard of disciplines of inquiry that provided efficiently signposted roots to the language of the mind. A command of these tools distinguished experts from amateurs, and theology was no business for amateurs, even amateurs who had learned excellent Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The scholastic Johann Seitz wrote that there are important reasons for subjecting theological language to rules from which one must not depart. If you do not observe them, the irregular form of speech may lead to heresy. Seitz was involved in a paradigmatic conflict between the two camps when he sided with the scholastic Konrad Wimpina against the humanist Martin Polich. Where Polich praised the power of fine speech, especially poetry, Seitz and Wimpina insisted that poetic discourse needed to be eliminated from discussion of serious theological matter. You can see what was at stake here if you contrast the approaches of, say, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Cusa. The classic scholastic method of a man like Scotus was to draw fine distinctions and use language in a very exact, even artificially regimented fashion, whereas theologians with a more humanist bent, like Cuzanas, would be more open to the use of metaphor and imagery. Now we should be careful not to overdraw this contrast. Even in the debate just mentioned, Polich was careful to show his acquaintance with scholastic methods, while Wimpina had produced such humanist works as a guide to good letter writing. More generally, university masters rarely argued that the cultivation of good Latin skills was a waste of time. While they might object to such daring projects as Erasmus' New Edition of the New Testament, their conflicts with humanists more usually had to do with the same matters of non-principle that tend to concern academics nowadays. Admittedly, they did not have to deal with the most common dispute in modern-day academia, whose job is it to clean the microwave, but other debates look familiar. Which area should be covered by that newly vacated chair? Who in particular should be hired for it? Were colleagues stealing students by teaching more popular subjects? Just as today's specialists in logic might grouse about another faculty member's well-received class on philosophy and film, so the 15th century logic specialists were annoyed when students flocked to courses on poetry. But the scholastics could not expend too much energy on their hostility towards the poetry-loving humanists because they needed it to express their hostility towards each other. The defining confrontation among university philosophers in the 15th century has come to be known by the German word Wegestreit. As any continental philosopher could tell you, this means battle of methods or ways. It pitted two groups of schoolmen against one another, those who followed the via antiqua, or old way, and those who adopted the via moderna, or modern way. As the name suggests, this contrast was to some extent a chronological one. The adherents of the via antiqua looked back to thinkers of the 13th century, especially Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, while the upholders of the via moderna took up the teachings of such 14th century thinkers as William of Ockham, John Buridan, and Marcellus of Ingin. But behind this lay a more fundamental philosophical disagreement. For all their differences, the authorities of the via antiqua were realists, while the via moderna was more or less synonymous with nominalism. Time then for a reminder of what was at stake in the clash between realism and nominalism. Most centrally, the disagreement concerned the problem of universals. For old times' sake, meaning no offense to the via moderna, let's take the example we often used when discussing this in the series on medieval philosophy. The four Marx brothers are all humans, and would thus seem to share some common nature, namely humanity. Nominalists accepted that humanity is indeed something, well, real outside the mind. The biggest advantage of this is that there is something in objective reality for us to grasp when we, say, define human as rational animal. The nominalists rejected this. For them, it was absurd that anything common or universal exists outside the mind. Such general natures are only concepts, names, or terms, which is why this group came to be called nominalists or terminists. Outside the mind, there are only the Marx brothers, no fifth thing that they all share in common. It may seem strange that so much tension would arise over this apparently rather technical issue, but it was a question that was connected to other debates. Generally speaking, the nominalists of the via moderna tended to place severe limits on the capacities of human reason, whereas the realists of the via antiqua tended to think in line with their position on universals that the structure of the mind was a good guide to the structure of reality. So, to take another philosophical example, nominalists tended to doubt that we can use reason to understand the decisions made by God in creating the world, or laying obligations on his creatures. Thus another feature of the via moderna was a devotion to divine voluntarism, basically that both nature and morality are entirely dependent on the arbitrary will of God. Against this, the realists of the via antiqua wanted to stress that natural reason could support and confirm most if not all of the teachings of Christian theology. Great authorities such as Aquinas had showed precisely how to do this. For example, one could use the Aristotelian theory of relations as a way of explaining the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a strategy that would be undermined by the anomalous claim that relations lack objective reality. There was also a political dimension to the debate. The via moderna steered well clear of the teachings of dangerous, even condemned figures from around the turn of the 15th century, notably John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, both of whom had been realists. But upholders of the via antiqua could play this game too, by pointing out that Occam too had seen his teachings banned by the Church in 1339. Since Occam was a key figure in the intellectual lineage of the via moderna, its proponents had to answer this charge, which they did by pointing out, rightly, that Occam got in trouble for criticizing the papacy, not because of the technical details of his nominalism. In any case, the compatibility of the two ways with the teachings of the Church was always central to the Wegischreit. It was in these terms, for example, that nominalists responded to a ban on their approach handed down by the French king, Louis XI, in 1474. According to the terms of this decree, books of the via moderna were confiscated, while the works of realist authorities like Aquinas and Scotus became required reading. In their defense, the nominalists insisted that their approach was more in conformity with the faith, exactly the reverse of the rationale given in favor of the ban, which declared realism more reliable from a Christian point of view. An observer at the time remarked, the nominalists and the realists are warring in a ridiculous fashion as gladiators. As that event shows, the Wegischreit was an issue at Paris, but certainly not only at Paris. It was pervasive in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe, many of which were newly founded during the Renaissance. These include Basel in 1459, Ingolstadt also in 1459, Freiburg in 1460, and Tübingen in 1476. Northern universities were good places to get really upset about the choice between nominalism and realism, because they focused so much on the arts subjects and theology, offering very little teaching on medicine and law, which were far more important down in Italy. Thus, for example, the first public anatomical demonstration done in Heidelberg was only in 1574. Arts and theology faculties were often dominated by adherents of one or the other via. Heidelberg was a home for the Via Moderna, since the great nominalist Marsilius of Ingen had been rector there. This approach was then exported to newly founded schools like the University at Freiburg. By contrast, Cologne was so dominated by the Via Antikor that in 1425 the German prince-electors had to write to the city to ask that the university teach the Via Moderna. Here they were thinking precisely of the recent example of the condemned Hussites who had given realism a bad name. All of this, of course, had a great impact on the experience of students. At universities where both methods were taught, they were formally required to pick sides, leading to a healthy rivalry reminiscent of today's fraternity culture. The faculty at Ingolstadt actually split in two so that teachers of the two approaches didn't have to work together. In Heidelberg, one realist professor went around with bodyguards out of fear of what the nominalist students might do to him. No detail was too trivial to feature in the Wegeschreit. The two camps even differed when it came to grammar, for example with the Via Antikor, preferring to place a dative object after a verb and the Via Moderna before the verb, so that if you were a realist and wanted to praise the main course at dinner by saying ''this pleases me'' you would say ''plaket mihi'' while a nominalist would say ''mihi plaket''. More substantively, the Via Antikor and Via Moderna used different textbooks and offered contrasting interpretations of Aristotle, whose works were, of course, still the basis of the curriculum. This didn't necessarily mean, though, that each side was ignorant of what the other was doing. They needed to study one another's ideas, if only for the sake of mutual refutation. Then too, student finalists might be examined by masters from both camps so that they were forced to gain at least some acquaintance with the views of their opponents. To get more of a sense of what they might be learning, let's look at two universities, Erfurt and Krakow. Erfurt was an important center for the Via Moderna, where the masters produced commentaries and textbooks drawing heavily on 14th century nominalism. Two names particularly worth knowing are Bartolomeus of Usingen and Jodokos Tsutfater, not least because they would both teach the young Martin Luther. In keeping with the Via Moderna's emphasis on the limitations of human reason, they distinguished between the teachings one could find in Aristotle and the true doctrines of the Church that could be learned only from Revelation. For example, Bartolomeus forgave Aristotle for supposing that the soul emerges from the material of the body rather than being created by God separately and out of nothing. After all, Aristotelian philosophy is entirely dependent on observations of nature, and we don't see natural things just popping into existence with no material basis. From the point of view of natural philosophy, the soul can be seen as an imminent form that is everywhere throughout the body, something these nominalists expressed by saying that even a body part of an animal, like a leg or hand, is also an animal because it is ensouled. But this is, they said, only the connotative meaning of the soul, here using a technical term from Ockham, which in this case means that the soul is being grasped insofar as it relates to something else, namely the body. In itself, the soul is a separate substance that can survive without the body. Natural philosophy was also flourishing further east in Krakow, where a university was founded already in 1364. Krakow tended to follow the lead of the University of Prague, with both institutions then shifting from nominalism to realism. One significant idea that took hold in Krakow was the impetus theory of motion, according to which bodies can continue moving without being helped along by an external mover. This meant that they could dispense with the idea of intellects moving the heavenly spheres, as postulated by Aristotle. It wasn't a new idea, but one taken over from the earlier anomalist John Buridan. Still it's worth mentioning, because this revision of Aristotelian cosmology took place at an institution which, between 1491 and 1495, would be home to a student who would go on to propose more far-reaching revisions to that same cosmology, Copernicus. So these examples begin to hint at the way 15th century university culture helped prepare the way for the intellectual and religious upheavals of the 16th century. But I'd like to dive more deeply into the ideas of another scholastic, who will help us understand the context in which Luther's Reformation took place. I have in mind Gabriel Biel. He was appointed professor of theology at Tübingen in 1484. Prior to that, he had trained at both Cologne and Erfurt, meaning that he learned both the via antiqua and via moderna. But it was an idea associated with the nominalism of the via moderna that became central to his thought. Since we're talking about scholasticism, this idea is of course framed as a distinction between two Latin phrases, namely potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta, meaning ordained power and absolute power. God's absolute power is his ability to bring about absolutely any state of affairs, so long as it is not logically contradictory. He can create any world he wants, or many worlds, or no world at all. He could bring into existence speaking giraffes, people who could survive with their head cut off, fire that freezes water instead of boiling it, even an analytic philosopher who speaks foreign languages. But of course the world we live in has different rules. With the exception of the occasional miracle, God has chosen to exercise his influence within these rules, and this is called ordained power. He has freely and without constraint decided to maintain certain regularities, which is why giraffes, headless people, and fire all behave in ways we can predict and study scientifically. But the fact that things could in principle have been otherwise constitutes a significant alteration to the Aristotelian conception of science. For Aristotle, the goal of the scientist was to find immutable and necessary truths about the nature of things, by discovering, for example, why fire burns things, or why giraffes cannot talk. In the voluntarist way of thinking, which came to the fore in the nominalist tradition followed by bille, science turns out to be the study of something that is not necessary, even though it is regular and well ordered. The scientist is discovering the world system that God chose, or ordained, when he could just as easily have chosen differently. A particularly important application of this idea comes in bille's moral theory. Like all theologians of the period, he is concerned to abide by Augustine's teaching that humans can be absolved of sin and merit entry to paradise only through the freely given gift of grace. This means avoiding Pelagianism, the position attacked by Augustine and later on seen as heretical, according to which humans can merit salvation through independent effort. Bille comes pretty close to taking that dangerous position by teaching that God is obligated to give grace to anyone who deserves it. Thus, the classic study of his thought by Heiko Obermann goes so far as to say that bille's doctrine of justification is essentially Pelagian, and Obermann ought to know, since his middle name was Augustinus. However, as he also points out, bille's position is more complicated than this. Within the framework of absolute power, God is under no obligation to help us, no matter how much we strive to earn his help. After all, within this framework, God is under no obligation whatsoever. The only factor to consider is his untrammeled will. However, God has mercifully ordained that grace will be given to anyone who makes a genuine effort, or as bille famously puts it, does what is in them, by devoting themselves to the love of God and hatred of sin. If God is obligated to give such grace to people, it is only because he has placed that obligation on himself. Thus one might say that in principle Augustine was right, because grace does not need to be offered at all, and also because even under God's ordained rule we cannot be saved without grace. But in practice, Pelagius was right, because God has decided that whoever merits that grace will definitely receive it. To put this another way, it is not within our own power to be saved, but it is in our power to get God to save us. The voluntarism of the nominalists could often seem unsettling, or even terrifying, with our eternal fate and the nature of morality itself left entirely up to God's inscrutable will. But bille presents the most reassuring possible version of this doctrine. If you really do your best, he tells his readers and parishioners, you'll be fine. As for the more abstract worry that morality would be arbitrary, it is true for bille that God is above the moral law. His absolute power can decree anything to be good or bad. But bille also thinks that God's wisdom is applied in ordaining morality as we know it. Thus we can, through independent rational reflection, come to understand quite a bit about the ordained moral order. Bille even defines sin in terms of violating reason, because he assumes that going against reason must be equivalent to going against God. On the same grounds, bille thinks that someone who is untouched by the message of the gospel – for instance, a person captured as a child by Muslims and prevented from learning about Christ – can rationally reflect and strive towards genuine goodness. This is enough to count as doing what is in them, so they will be rewarded with grace. As bille's treatment of these issues shows, the questions at the heart of the Protestant Reformation were already being discussed intensely and with great refinement in the 15th century. The clash between the Church and the Reform movement was not just a new, more disruptive Wegestreit, it also carried on debates that had been involved in the original Wegestreit over such issues as the scope and nature of divine power, and the scope and nature of human reason. More generally, it has been remarked that, if there had been no universities, there would have been no Reformation. Some of the central figures of the movement taught at them, including Luther himself, who was a professor of biblical studies in Wittenberg. Lectures were a powerful way to communicate the Lutheran message. A visitor to Wittenberg saw about 400 students in attendance in his class, with even more going along to the lectures of Luther's fellow reformer, Langton. Such students then disseminated the teachings in their career as scholars and churchmen. So in both philosophical and institutional terms, scholastic philosophy set the stage for the Reformation, no less than did humanism. And now that the stage has been set, it's time to usher on our leading man. So hold on to your hats, especially if your hat is a papal tiara, because here comes Martin Luther, next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Faith, No More, Martin Luther. It seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption that the most impactful figures in the history of philosophy would be, well, philosophers. Figures like Plato, Confucius, Nagarjuna, Avicenna, and Kant, they are the ones who divert the course of human thought. But there are lots of ways to affect the development of philosophy and writing about philosophy is probably not the most effective one. If you change the language people speak, the books they read, and the art they enjoy, throw their political arrangements into upheaval, challenge their institutions of learning, make them question their fundamental beliefs and even the meaning of their lives on earth, you are definitely going to influence the way they do philosophy. Martin Luther did all of these things. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that he's one of the most influential non-philosophers in the history of philosophy, except that it's not quite clear whether or not he was a philosopher. By his own terms, he certainly wasn't. He mentions the philosophers as an enemy group whose views he wants to correct in light of Holy Scripture. But he received a solid education in scholasticism as a student in Erfurt and was able to draw on that training in his frequent polemics, including his attacks on scholasticism itself. Having received his bachelor's degree from Erfurt in 1502, his legend really began in July of 1505, when he was almost hit by lightning. All but literally thunderstruck, he wasted no time, or actually he wasted about two weeks, before joining an Augustinian monastery. His life from then on was not all that dissimilar from that of other intellectuals in this time. He gained a degree in theology, taught at a university, wrote books, engaged in public disputations, except that Luther used these activities to express increasingly radical criticism of the church, arguing that the whole fabric of European Christendom needed to be rewoven, or, as we usually put it, reformed. His critique of Catholicism began with his legendary decision to nail a list of 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in the year 1517. This sounds like a dramatic gesture, if in fact he really did it, but it was actually a typical way to propose a set of propositions for a debate. His target was the practice of offering indulgences, agreements by which the church would forgive sins in exchange for a generous donation. Luther was certainly not the first to lament this practice. Indeed, it's been argued that the 95 theses grow quite naturally out of a medieval culture of criticism aimed at the worldly ways and wealth of the church. But Luther's intervention was made in a different context, owing to factors we've already discussed, notably the widespread use of printing to disseminate texts and the new humanist approach to scripture. The resonances between Luther and humanism sound out at the very beginning of his list, where the opening salvo of propositions allude to the debate over the meaning of the term penance in the Bible. Even if Luther's overall theme in his 95 theses was not that revolutionary, they did hint at what was to come. Most obviously, Luther was concerned to constrain the scope of what can be accomplished by the church, and in particular by papal authority. He said that the pope can only relieve punishments he himself imposed, and that souls in purgatory are beyond his power to forgive. The following year, Luther would deny the doctrine of purgatory entirely, saying it was fabricated by goblins. Even here, early in his career as a theologian, Luther wanted to focus on the individual believer's repentance in this life. This would become the central concept in his mature thought. Humans are deeply and permanently sunk in sin, and there is only one hope for avoiding the just penalty for this sin. Which is not, of course, to hand over some money to the church, or indeed to seek intercession from the church in any way. Rather, we must beg God for forgiveness, in all humility, but also in the awareness that He has generously offered us grace. Thus, the Christian enters into a direct and ongoing relationship with God. We will not be saved by engaging in rituals or following rules. Justification is by faith alone, not by works. Luther said that this principle of justification by faith, no more, was the basis of all we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world. It seems like a pretty simple idea, but as we'll see shortly, it gave rise to many implications and complications. Luther would work through these implications over his whole career until his death in 1546. He did so by trying to set a good example himself, by preaching, and above all, by writing. For someone who wanted to minimize the importance of works, he sure wrote a lot of them. It's been calculated that he wrote about 1800 pages per year, with the result that the standard edition of Luther takes up more than 100 volumes. These contain disputations, sermons, polemical works, statements of belief, letters, and informal remarks called table talk that by themselves take up six volumes. Explaining his prolific output, Luther candidly said, I have a swift hand and a quick memory. When I write, it just flows out. I do not have to press and squeeze. Among his many writings, the single work with the greatest impact was his German translation of the Bible, first of the New and then eventually also the Old Testament, the latter despite the fact that, as Luther admitted, his Hebrew skills were modest. He picked up some Hebrew as a young student, but in the 1530s could still remark, If I were younger, I would want to learn this language. From the very beginning, this outpouring of words incited alarm and outrage from the church authorities. They did their best to shut him up, putting him on trial for heresy already in 1518, with the interrogation carried out by Cardinal Thomas de Villeau, also known as Cajetan. As we'll see in a later episode, Cajetan was one of the leading exegetes of Thomas Aquinas in this period. Luther's ideas were condemned, but he received protection from Frederick the Wise, the ruler who established the university at Wittenberg. The church and Luther would have to agree to disagree, though disagreement was the more dominant note, what with the pope excommunicating Luther and Luther coming around to the view that the papacy was the Antichrist. He sarcastically credited this realization to the Catholic apologists, who rose to the defense of the church and its corrupt practices. Men like Johann Eck and Jerome Emse. Reading their arguments in favor of the papacy, said Luther, was what really turned him against it. Let's turn, though, to Luther's arguments in his own favor, in hopes of seeing what all the fuss was about. We can begin with another set of propositions which he proposed for debate in 1517, within a few weeks of the 95 Theses on Indulgence. Here he took aim at the scholastic tradition he'd been studying at Erfurt. He makes his target very clear in the text, following many of his claims with phrases like this in opposition to the philosophers, this in opposition to the scholastics, or this in opposition to the views of Scotus and Gabriel Biel. The contrast with Biel is particularly illuminating. As we saw in the last episode, Biel was a nominalist theologian who believed that God is under no obligation to save anyone from damnation. If that was the bad news, the good news was that God has generously promised to give grace and salvation to those who do their best to deserve it. Though we do suffer from original sin, we retain freedom of choice, and if we choose to pursue righteousness, God will acknowledge the effort and reward us. Luther rejects this whole theory, except for the bad news at the beginning. To his mind, it is ridiculous to suppose that God and the human cooperate in achieving salvation. Either divine grace is sufficient by itself, or its presence means nothing. More fundamentally, before the bestowal of grace, the human can never perform a meritorious action, that is, act in such a way as to earn God's favor. Absolutely everything we do without grace is sinful, even if what we do adheres to God's law. Given our corrupt nature, we'll only be doing it for our own selfish advantage. Imagine for instance that Beale sees a little old lady who needs to cross the street. Admittedly, in the 15th century when he was alive, there were no cars. Still, Beale hastens to help her, thinking that through this and other good turns for his neighbors, he will merit God's grace. But this is itself sin, Luther will cry. The action stems from Beale's hope of salvation for himself, not from his hope of getting the lady across the way without her being hit by a slow-moving ox cart. But surely, you might argue on Beale's behalf, we do perform selfless deeds sometimes. Surely it's possible to act in a genuinely altruistic way, even if we only manage it on rare occasions. Luther would disagree. Being corrupted by sin, we would always prefer to satisfy our own desires without the constraint of moral requirements. As Luther puts it, if it were up to the will, there would be no law. This is the meaning of a passage in a letter of St. Paul, which tells us that everything that does not come from faith is sin. So when Beale thought he could merit grace by freely doing his best to be a very good boy, he was sinning twice over. The actions that resulted were sinful, and it was a further sin when he presumed to solicit grace through these actions. And there's yet another more subtle error here. It's wrong to understand sin only in terms of wicked individual actions. This leads to a view like Beale's in which you express contrition for your mistakes and try to merit God's help by avoiding them. But for Luther, sinfulness is a permanent and pervasive condition of fallen nature. We should repent for our sinfulness in general, not only for particular misdeeds. This continues to be the case even for the faithful Christian who has received grace as a generous and unprompted gift from God. Even nature will remain corrupt throughout this life, so that, as Luther liked to put it, we are at best both righteous and sinful at the same time. Luther is well aware that his analysis of sin might sound like a counsel of despair. It sounds like we should just give up on trying to be good. He draws the opposite conclusion though. Once we take the full measure of our sinfulness, the correct response is hope and faith, but faith in God, not in ourselves. We do good when our actions flow from faith in God, rather than from prideful belief in our own power to do good or from our interest in being saved. In fact, Luther thinks that all actions done out of faith are good, whether great or small. Good works are thus an outcome of grace. They are not, as Beale thought, a trigger for the bestowal of grace, like a decent performance on a difficult test, which God rewards with the ultimate smiley face. Or as Luther somewhat more soberly puts it in the Disputation from 1917, Luther elsewhere explains this in terms of a contrast between the inner and the outer person. When the will within us is made righteous by God, our outer actions can also be righteous. We can never be sure that we are inwardly righteous. As Luther already said in his 95 Theses, no one is sure of the integrity of his own contrition. But if someone fails to perform good actions on the outside, that's a reliable indication that they are still rotten on the inside. As Luther says, if good works do not follow, our faith is false. This is an important point. We might have had the impression that Luther just doesn't care about what Christians actually do. After all, faith justifies, not works. But he can adhere to that position without saying that works are totally irrelevant. They are not a cause of justification, but a result, and hence a sign of justification. Luther offers useful analogies to explain this. A bishop carries out a variety of tasks, like when he consecrates a church. But it is not his doing these things that makes him a bishop, rather it's the other way around. It's because he's a bishop that he can do them. Likewise, a good or a bad house does not make a good or a bad builder, but a good or bad builder makes a good or bad house. The upshot is that being made good or evil by works only means that the man who is good or evil is pointed out and known as such, a teaching that Luther again thinks can be confirmed by scripture, as when it says at Matthew 7 verse 20, you will know them by their fruits. It must be said though that Luther sometimes makes outer actions sound like an irrelevant afterthought, not so much fruits as fruitless. He writes that, A Christian has all that he needs in faith, and needs no works to justify him. And if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law. And if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law. Or if that doesn't sound alarming enough, how about this quotation? Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. Such passages sound like an invitation to anarchy. No wonder that when anarchy actually did break out in the form of the Peasants' War, plenty of people thought it was Luther's fault. As we'll be seeing in a later episode, Luther was at pains to correct this as a misapprehension. His goal was not to tear apart the whole hierarchical apparatus of 16th century society. At least not all of it. While he did rise to the defense of the secular authorities, who were challenged by the revolt of the peasants, he had no interest in defending the authority, or traditional role, of the Church. He argued that the papacy was a human invention, and the pope merely the bishop of Rome. The Catholic version of the mass was also a human, and strictly unnecessary practice. There's a rather amusing passage where Luther says that, For all the sins he committed as a young man, the one he regrets most is that he was constantly pestering God by performing pointless masses. All this constituted a direct assault on the role of the priesthood. Christians need no specially qualified clerics to mediate between them and God. Rather, all believers are priests, and anyone can assume the office of ministering to others. This may remind us of what humanists like Erasmus were saying about the Bible. It was an ancient text in need of careful philological effort, yet also a book that is largely plain in its meaning, so you didn't need advanced degrees in theology to expound upon that meaning. Luther's approach as translator and exegete of the Bible was similar. He rendered it into German with an eye to popular speech, and encouraged readers to adopt the plain or obvious meaning of the text, unless this was ruled out by outright absurdity. In that case, one might resort to a more figurative or metaphorical reading. Where Luther's defense of secular authority may seem conservative, and his assault on clerical authority was certainly radical, his views on social issues tended towards moderate reform. This is well shown by his disagreement with Andreas von Kallstadt, who had been one of his examiners for his theology degree. In the early 1520s, von Kallstadt was calling for rapid and radical changes in Wittenberg. Luther tried to rein him in, concerned about the disorder it was causing in the city. Despite this caution, some of Luther's most influential ideas lie in the area of social reform. For example, he discouraged the notion that poverty was a kind of holy state that brings one closer to God. Rather, poor people are just unfortunate souls who need the help of the community, a doctrine put into practice when Wittenberg set up a common chest for charity in 1522. Another example along the same lines is Luther's attitude towards family life. Thanks to his letters and the table talk, we know a good deal about his relationship to his own wife, Katarina von Bora, who shared Luther's background in having had a cloistered youth. They rejected this life of chastity in favor of marriage and child-rearing, a decision Luther most certainly did not regret. He admitted the pressures of family life, remarking wryly that these almost compel one to put one's faith in God. But he saw sexuality as a God-given and natural thing, albeit one always mixed up with sin given our fallen condition. To demand chastity was like expecting that people refrain from eating or moving their bowels. While some lofty spirits might be able to live without sex, it was a doctrine of demons to make this a requirement laid upon priests. Child-rearing, too, is holy work. There is a striking passage in which Luther pays due respect to fathers who are willing to change diapers, and another where he favorably compares parenthood to going on pilgrimage. While this sounds pretty forward-thinking, as concerns the duties of men, Luther unsurprisingly takes a fairly traditional view about the duties of women. He says that bearing children is their purpose on earth, that the broad backsides of women show that they were made to sit at home, that it is never a good idea to be led by women, and that his own wife is a more talented speaker than he is, which he considers a pity, since it is more fitting for women to be silent. Still, Luther has no patience for authors who wrote diatribes against the vices of women, remarking that, if women were to write books, they would say exactly the same thing about men. As it happens, we already know that in the Italian Renaissance women did write such books, and later on in the current series, we'll be returning to this battle of the sexes, and seeing how it was waged in other parts of Europe around this time. If Luther allowed so much to be known about his intimate relationships, it was because he wanted other people to take an example. This is what a marriage based on faith looks like. It's yet another example of the far-reaching influence of Luther on 16th century society and beyond, which brings us back to the question of his impact on philosophy. Intimate is certainly not the word you'd use for his relationship with the philosophers. As we've already seen, he castigated them, or the scholastics, for their teachings. At a more abstract level, his critique of human nature led him to a rather skeptical attitude towards reason. He said, for instance, that blind reason gropes about in matters which pertain to God, seeking consolation in its own works, according to its own inventions, without being able to consider Christ and faith. But this might itself be a debt he owed to scholasticism. Remember, he was a student at Erfurt, where nominalism was in the ascendancy, and nominalism is usually famed for the limitations it places on reason. From the nominalist point of view, the structures of the mind do not necessarily match those of the real world. Notably, we have universal concepts, but there's nothing universal outside the mind. Then too, as voluntarists, the nominalists believe that all things are decided arbitrarily by God's will, not by the dictates of rationality. Of course, Luther agreed with them about this, but he thought that even the nominalists trusted too much in their natural powers of will and rationality. As we've seen, he rejected Gabriel Beal's appeal to the ordained power of God, in which God's freedom to do absolutely anything is constrained by his promise to give grace to those who do what is in them. On Beal's account, God could have made faith alone and not human effort the sole basis of justification. On Luther's account, this is exactly what God has in fact done. How do we know this? Not of course through rational argument, but by reading scripture. In this sense, Luther can be called a Phaedest. The most central truths of Christianity, which are the most central truths of all, are accessible to us only through faith in the revelation, and we must accept them even if they seem to fly in the face of reason. So discussing the resurrection of Christ, he says, Against everything reason proposes, we must learn to cleave to the word, and to judge entirely according to it. Elsewhere, he adds that, Faith alone, and not reason, is able to think rightly about God. Still, Luther is willing to use reason when he has to. As we'll see later, he let himself be drawn into a rather scholastic debate over the nature of the Eucharist, calling upon his nominalist training as he argues that it is indeed possible for the substance of Christ and the substance of bread to coexist in one and the same place. So while he wants faith and not reason to lead the way, he allows reason to defend and clarify the principles of faith. Some have suggested a parallel between Luther's attitude and that of Thomas Aquinas. Both thought that God reveals truths inaccessible to reason, that reason can then step in to carry on the project of theology from there. Luther himself would probably not appreciate this comparison, given that he once called Aquinas the source and the basis of all heresy, error, and destruction of the gospel. But this was typical exaggeration. He thought that other scholastic authors like Scotus, Ockham, and Beale had done a lot of harm too. If we're looking for medieval precursors to Luther, then apart from the obvious case of Reformers like Wycliffe and Huss, we might instead consider the tradition of German mysticism, as found in figures like John Towler. Like the mystics, Luther challenged the idea that the Christian is working towards righteousness throughout life by striving to avoid sin and calling upon the intercession of the church. In both cases, the alternative is an unmediated, personal relationship with the divine. But where the mystic ambitiously aims for a union with God, Luther is content simply to trust in a God who remains distant and inscrutable. He thus speaks of a hidden God in the context of the free will debate, a topic we'll be revisiting soon. The only appropriate attitude towards such a God is faith, another reason to be suspicious of rationalist theology, especially when it comes to such mysteries as the Trinity. Yet while he certainly thinks that faith outstrips reason, Luther does not seem to think that it overturns reason, in the sense of requiring us to believe flat impossibilities. Here Luther is apt to remind us of Nicholas of Cusa. Like Cuzanus, Luther loves a good paradox, as in that phrase, righteous and sinful at the same time. But also like Cuzanus, he steers clear of embracing outright contradiction. A nice example is his famous claim that the Christian is perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none, perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Luther goes on to explain this paradoxical remark in a manner worthy of a scholastic arts master. The human is twofold, and while our inner nature is justified by grace and free, we must outwardly seek to serve other people by helping our neighbors. Admittedly, Luther is not always so forthcoming in resolving the paradoxical formulations scattered through his writings. Then too, his teachings don't necessarily remain consistent across all his writings, which is hardly surprising given their quantity and the fact that they appeared over several decades. It's been nicely remarked that he is self-contradictory, but never ambiguous. Some of the further developments of his reformation, including developments that appalled Luther, can be seen as attempts to embrace just one side of the contradiction found in his writings. Another source of inconsistency was Luther's need to reply to critics who attacked him from a variety of viewpoints. The torrent of words that flowed from his pen were aimed at fellow Protestants as well as the Catholics. We'll be getting into some of these controversies in episodes to come, but before we wrap up for today, a word must be said concerning his invective against non-Christians. Luther was notoriously hostile to the Jews. This hostility grew during his career. A work of 1523 reminded readers that Christ had been born a Jew and accordingly recommended a relatively benign approach. But the later Luther used harsh, even obscene and violent language against the Jews, in a fashion that has only come to seem more shocking in the light of the subsequent history of anti-Semitism in Germany. We can find him, for instance, imagining the devil filling up Jews with excrement until it pours out of their every orifice. He was also paranoid about what the Jews might do to him personally. In one letter to his wife, he blames their evil magic for a bout of impotence. This is nasty stuff, and scholars have tried variously to contextualize it within his larger body of work or treat it as a lamentable feature of his thought that can be detached from his other teachings. I'm rather skeptical about the prospects of the latter strategy. His hostility to Judaism certainly affected his approach to Scripture, for example by making him reject the tradition of rabbinical exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, and as Luther would surely be the first to say, there was nothing more central to his thought than his reading of the Bible. Perhaps this is one of the few cases where Luther can still move the modern-day reader in the way that he moved his contemporaries. They might find him to be amusing or infuriating, reassuring or frightening, inspiring or insidious, but they certainly couldn't ignore him. This has been an unusually long episode, in part because of the centrality of the topic for this series, and in part because, as usual, I'll be taking the rest of August off, so I wanted to leave you with a substantial meal to tide you over during the weeks of podcast hunger to come. Nonetheless, I still haven't done justice to Luther, and not only because justification is by faith alone. We'll be coming back to him numerous times as we discuss his controversies with figures like Erasmus and Zwingli. Our first episode when the series resumes will be an interview with one of the world's leading experts on this founder of the Reformation, Linda Roper. That's all coming up starting on September 12th, so unlike Luther, do not lament, but instead look forward to the fall, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosity.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Martin Luther with Lindell Roper, who is Regis Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Hi Lindell. Hi Peter. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Let's talk about Luther then, obviously a very major figure in European history and he is thought to be in some sense a revolutionary figure, but I thought I could start by asking whether he was really a radical figure because although he is credited with launching the European Reformation, he seems to have been relatively conservative compared to some other Reformation leaders and in fact he accused some of these other leaders of what he called schwähmeri. So can you say something about how conservative you think he was, how radical and how radical he was trying to be? Well, of course it all depends on what you mean by radical. You can certainly look at Luther and see the elements that are all about supporting existing authority, insisting on obedience, upholding the state, all of that is there. You can also see however things that really are very different and are very radical. I think to have done what he did to attack papal power in the way that he did and to be willing to defend that view in front of the emperor and all the assembled estates of the German empire, that really takes enormous courage and sometimes I think that that example of resistance is almost as important as some of the things that he wrote. It is a quite extraordinary moment and you can see in his correspondence how he arrives at a position where he is willing to be a martyr, to be killed for his beliefs, while at the same time because it's Luther very cunningly planning how he's going to escape and how he's going to get protected. So he's radical in the challenge he makes to the church. He's really radical in his attack on papal power, although he's certainly not the first to attack papal power. And I think he's also interesting because some of his basic philosophical and theological positions are quite different from many of the other reformers. And the thing that I find actually quite radical is the way he approaches the difference between flesh and spirit. Most Western Christian figures make quite a sharp distinction between flesh and spirit and they see flesh as basically bad and spirit as what you want. So that's just Platonist. Yeah, you want to get rid of the dross of flesh and you want to get yourself as close as you can to the divine and you also want to live a life that is about mortification of the flesh. And Luther does make a distinction between flesh and spirit but he does it much less than many other Christian thinkers do. And that is, I think, potentially extremely radical. It's not the line that the Calvinists take. It's not the line that the followers of Zwingli take. And Zwingli is a Swiss theologian who's acted about the same time as Luther. What about the reflection of what he's doing in the political realm? He was actually, you might say, given an opportunity to be politically radical by supporting the Peasants' War, which can in some sense be seen as a political enactment of his teaching. And of course he didn't. He opposed it. So does that give us a kind of window into his views about the political reflection of what he was doing in the theological and philosophical sphere? I think there are many ways in which one can answer that. One way is to think about his formation. He grew up in a mining area. The town of Mansfeld, where he spent much of his childhood, is down in the bottom of the valley and then high up is the castle of the counts. And mining towns are quite rough places. They're not like most of the towns in this period, the towns that we associate with humanism and all of that. They're quite rough. There isn't much in the way of natural deference. But I think that Luther, whose father was a mine owner, he wasn't an ordinary miner. And so I think that that meant that his tendency was always going to be to ally with the authorities, to support the existing rulers. And he takes over a lot of stuff from Augustine when he's thinking about secular authority and how you distinguish between secular authority and religious authority. So in a sense, it's not surprising that he takes the line that he does in The Peasants' War, although of course, he has just published a tract on Christian freedom. The way that he uses the word free and freedom is really, well, it is incendiary. And he is stepping back from that element within his theology. And he steps back from a number of radical elements, like the idea that every congregation has the right to call their own preacher. And instead he starts to say, well, yes, you can call your own preacher, but you've got to pay for it yourself. And then it's all right. And he starts thinking about the fact that various authorities can actually own a preachership so they can decide who gets appointed. So he moves away from a complete attack on the church as a propertied institution. Is there also just a sense in which he didn't want The Peasants' War to be blamed on him? So it was maybe a tactical consideration. Like if I let people think that reformation will lead to this, then the reformation is done for? I'm sure that's part of it. He sees the danger from the word go. And it's also been the taunt that's been flung at him by Catholics who've said consistently, if you go on like this, you will cause a peasant uprising. But it's interesting because the stuff that I wrote on The Peasants' War is I think the least satisfactory part of the biography of Luther. And so I've gone back to it now and now I'm working on the German Peasants' War and looking at Luther from that point of view has been really interesting because it seems to me that what he's doing is not just articulating a position that everyone holds. I think he's actually trying to change policy because his own ruler, Frederick the Wise, does not want a military campaign against the peasants. Frederick dies during The Peasants' War, but up to the point of his death, he's saying we should negotiate with the peasants. So when Luther is writing this kind of stuff and saying, smite, kill and slay them like mad dogs, he isn't expressing a consensus view. He is trying to shift policy, I now think. So I think that there's something that's not just establishing about supporting the existing order. There's something there about really wanting to put the peasants down. And what's interesting about how he sees the whole thing is that he sees it in theological terms so that he sees it as all the work of his adversary, Thomas Münzer and Andreas Karlstadt. And that's also very interesting enmity because the enmity with Andreas Karlstadt goes right back. They were originally co-workers. Andreas Karlstadt is one of Luther's first, well, one of the first he convinces and Karlstadt rushes off, thinks that Luther's view of Augustine is correct and that his was wrong, and then becomes a passionate Luther supporter and tries to defend the 95 Theses. But then they gradually start to fall out because during the period when Luther is in hiding after the Dieter Worms in 1521 and he's in hiding in the castle in the Waardburg, he's not in Wittenberg and the reformation starts to happen. Without him. Without Luther. And eventually Karlstadt takes over that leadership. So when Luther comes back, the first thing he does is hold a series of sermons in which he tries to get rid of all the changes that Karlstadt had introduced. And from then on, the two are antagonists and Luther basically tries to get all Karlstadt's writing banned so that he can't publish. He gets him moved out of Wittenberg so that Karlstadt ends up in a tiny little parish of Orlemunde out in the sticks where he then tries to implement his version of the reformation. And that involves getting rid of images. And then gradually Karlstadt starts to take a different theological line on the real presence. I'm sure we'll come on to that in a moment. So when Luther is writing about the Peasants' War, he's wanting to attack Karlstadt's position and also to attack the position of Thomas Münzer, who is a very radical theologian who has a lot of following amongst the miners. And of course, that is something that really gets under Luther's skin because he grew up in a mining area and it's quite unusual. The two theologians are actually very interestingly similar in their formation. They both come from families that are not quite in the super elite, but just under it, highly dependent on secular rulers for their position and living in mining areas. It's very, very interesting. So Münzer for Luther becomes the arch devil. He becomes the person that you need to attack in the Peasants' War. And so there's a way in which he completely misreads the Peasants' War. He thinks it's a theological dispute. He doesn't even bother reading the complaints of the peasants. He just says, I'm not going to comment on these articles. They're not worthy of it. So he presents the Peasants' War not as what it actually was, which is to do with all kinds of grievances around serfdom and around agricultural agrarian relations. He reads it as a dispute between two theologians. So almost like he thinks it's about theological politics instead of real politics. He thinks it's about him. And then at the end, he even goes so far as to get married because he wants to spite the devil who has incited Münzer to attack him. Actually, that's something else I wanted to ask you about. Maybe it takes us back to what you were saying about the flesh and the spirit, because something else that he, of course, is known for is that he turns his back on the virtue of chastity, at least to the extent that having been a monk, he gets married. What does that tell us about his views towards sexuality, towards women? I think that's one of the most interesting sides of Luther's legacy and also one which I've found quite challenging and where I've learned a lot from Luther. I guess when I first started working on Luther, I thought of him as a misogynist. There are all kinds of quotations you can take from Luther that are deeply misogynist, like cleverness is the garment that suits women least or let them pay children to death. They were created for that. Or men have narrow hips and broad shoulders. Women have big hips because they are designed to bear children, stay at home and keep house. So they're the kinds of remark which is everything that a feminist wants to just decry. But then I thought more about the context in which he's saying things like that. And of course, they're not for the most part in his published work. They're taken from his dinner table conversation. And then I began to think about that dinner table conversation. And this is really interesting because it's his place for doing philosophy in many ways, doing it in conversation with other people, with other Wittenberg theologians around the dinner table. And that's a context in which he's actually living in the monastery where he was a monk. I mean, it's just totally mind blowing to think about that. He's got a family. His wife is there. And yet it's the place where the monks all had their community and had their food and where they presumably would have had devotional readings. And instead of that, Luther's having these conversations which are often quite crude. And if you think about what they're witnessing in that former monastery, Katarina von Borra, who is his wife, is pregnant every other year. And she's nursing the children. So they're seeing a woman who is pregnant or breastfeeding while they're having these conversations. And so of course, the topic of conversation is sexual difference. And they're ribbing each other about it. And that's not to say that Luther is not a sexist because he clearly is. But I think it puts it in a different context. And in particular, what he's getting at when he says something that I think to us is probably the most shocking of all of that, where he's talking about, let them bear children to death. They were created for that. That's actually a surprisingly positive thing to say because what he means is that during the time when a woman gives birth and for the six weeks after, she's not under the sway of the devil. She's not impure. That's her physical role in the way she's been created. So by working out sexual difference as a result of creation, he can see it in positive terms because he sees physicality as something good and positive. And I think that goes along with his remarkably positive attitude towards sex. What should we think about these elements of his rhetoric that are more crude? So you just remarked that some of these dinner conversations were rather crude. And that's certainly a feature of his more formal writings, full of all kinds of invective and polemic and even scatological remarks and vulgar jokes and so on, which I think is maybe to a modern reader in some ways the most surprising thing about encountering his writing is just the tone of it. Can you say something to help explain why he does that? Is it just his personality or? I love all that. What's remarkable about Luther is he doesn't have our 21st century prudery about physical functions. So he can say something like, if you want to get rid of the devil, the best way to get rid of him is to fart at him. He will talk in anal terms about all kinds of things to do with the devil. And whereas we think of excrement as something totally negative and dirty, if you've grown up in a culture where you're much closer to the land, you're much closer to peasant ways of life and Luther does have peasant ancestry. He also has mining ancestry, but it's mining and peasant work that sort of goes together in his family. And if you've come from a farm, you know that excrement is also the source of fertility of everything that's good. And I think that enables him to just see it as being part of our bodies, part of God's creation and not necessarily only as something dirty and disgusting. But there are other ways in which he uses all that scatological stuff and the anality to attack his opponents in ways that are really very disturbing and that are not playful. And in particular, when he writes about the Jews or indeed a lot of the rhetoric about the papacy, it's very dark stuff. It's very, how can one say, it's very aggressive, nasty mixes of stuff, which are about rejecting any kind of sexual ambiguity. So the way he gets at the pope is to talk about his court of hermaphrodites. He talks about the pope as being Pope Paul I, a female pope, and he just goes on and on and on in rifts like that. Yeah, it's ugly stuff. I guess there have been attempts to sort of relativize or contextualize the invective against the Jews in particular, because people don't really want to see Luther as a forerunner of the Nazis, right? So you think that these are misguided, these attempts to kind of minimize the antisemitism? Yes, I do. And that was the other thing that I guess I've been thinking about a lot since I wrote the biography. I didn't feel that I completely got the measure of Luther's antisemitism. If you go to Wittenberg, you'll see the church where Luther preached and on the outside of it, there is the most disgusting Jewish sire that I know. It's a medieval depiction of a sow, and the sow is suckling some Jews who are sucking at the sow's teeth, and there's a rabbi who's looking into the anus of the pig. And that is a medieval sculpture, which is on the outside of that church where Luther regularly preached. And he not only preached there, but he wrote a long tract in praise of that sculpture. And that's the tract that he does in the same year that he does on the Jews and their lives in 1543. And that tract contains just absolutely disgusting antisemitic stuff, which is all about vomit, piss. It's just really gross stuff in which Luther's invective isn't... It's as if you see someone's unconscious suddenly off the leash and they just splurge it all out. It's really revolting stuff. So not only does his antisemitism have a physical quality and an emotional level of disgust, which gets airbrushed out, but also the kinds of things on the Jews and their lives is more extreme than contemporary opinion. You can contextualize Luther by saying, well, other people were antisemitic. And if his antisemitism was a standard view, that's all true. But it's when you compare the kind of antisemitism that it is that it becomes much more disturbing. And I think that one aspect of it is that Luther sees his own church as being the chosen people. And if his church is going to be the chosen people, then the Jews can't be the chosen people. It's a contest for having God's favor. Yes. And so I think that means one has to think about not just about what were Luther's views, but one has to think, well, where does this sit in his theology? How does that affect his concept at the church? How does that affect his view of church history and who he thinks the Lutherans are? What I think is really interesting about Luther is I think his formation is as a nominalist. So I think that that means he's never going to find the explanation of the Eucharist that is Catholic theology at that time. He's never going to find that convincing because he doesn't make the distinction between accidents and essences. That's foreign to him. And the thing that I think Luther is most wedded to is the real presence in the Eucharist, which is of course not the line that the other reformers take. And if he hadn't taken that line, they wouldn't have all separated and the Reformation would have been much stronger than it was. Yeah, I think that's plausible, right? Because if you think back to the Hussites and the Wichlerites, they're coming out of the nominalist tradition as well. So the idea that there might be a sort of association between Protestant leanings and nominalism. No, I don't think it works that way. Okay. I think that Luther is unusual in having this nominalist formation in his time. It's a bit backward looking, his education. And so I think he takes the line on the sacrament that he does of saying that it's at one and the same time both bread and the body of Christ is because he's not making that split between accidents and essences. And because that means it goes with this much more positive attitude towards the flesh because he's not splitting flesh and spirit. And I think that his Eucharistic theology is absolutely insistent on the real presence because the other reformers who are much more influenced by Aristotelianism and by Neoplatonism and humanism and all that, they routinely make that distinction. And so they think that you cannot have something that is the body of Christ and is bread. I see. So the thought is that because he's a kind of nominalist who will only allow you to have ontological space for bodies. And so if you're going to have bread and Christ, it has to be both at the same time, in the same way. That's right. That's really interesting. And that I guess would be a really clear case of him being inspired by a scholastic tradition. Absolutely. But coming to a novel position. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's absolutely essential to Luther because what he spends most time on is the real presence in the sacrament. Actually, if I can go back a couple of minutes to something you were saying before, which is that his dinner conversations are the context in which he does philosophy. That's interesting to me because there was a way of doing philosophy that had been going on for centuries, namely a scholastic context. So what the schoolmen did at universities and other educational institutions. And clearly, Luther is not one of them, but he knows about them. What was his attitude towards the schoolmen, towards scholastic philosophy? Does he just think the whole thing is a waste of time or does he take something from them? I think he's deeply formed by his nominalism. And I think that's one of the other things that sets him apart from other reformers who tend to be formed more by humanism. So what makes it different is that there's a woman in the room, Katharina von Böwer is there. And so are Luther's daughters. So that makes it a very different context. And it's also quite difficult for the Lutheran church to know exactly what to do with it, because what's interesting about the woodcuts that they provide with the editions of the table talk that are published nearly 20 years after his death. They don't quite know how to present the presence of women either. And in those woodcuts, you can make out a figure which may be Katharina von Böwer or may not. And it's hard to tell whether they're, in the first one, there are no daughters. It's just for male figures. But it's clearly a context that's very different from the traditional context of intellectual exchange running up to the 16th century. As long as we're on this topic of woodcuts, something else that you've emphasized a lot in your work on Luther is visual representations of him. And so I just wanted to ask what you think we can kind of learn about Luther or at least about the way Luther was seen by his contemporaries from looking at these images. Well, the thing about Luther is his relationship with the painter Lucas Carnap, who lived just around the corner. So we have an extraordinary partnership between these two men. Carnap is court painted to Frederick the Wise, Luther's ruler. And I think we kind of get Carnap wrong if we think about him just as an artist. What he's really interested in is the multiplication of images. And this was a new thing because print suddenly opens up the possibility of multiplying images, multiplying texts, but also multiplying images. So Carnap even owns a printing press for a while and he's fascinated by this. And he produces woodcuts, his workshop produces woodcuts for stuff that's printed. He's very interested in design and he creates an image of Luther, which becomes absolutely iconic. And if you see one of these images of Luther, you know that it's Luther. And whereas with the saint, you know it's St Catherine because you see the wheel. With Luther, you know it's Luther because of the face. It's because of the eyes, the little curl of hair in the middle of his forehead. The jowls. The jowls and the little dimple in the chin. That's how you know it's Luther. And so this face becomes universally recognised and produced in image after image after image. It's not just print. The workshop will produce 60 images of the Elector, all the same, but all painted and sometimes even with painted print. And that's what they're doing with Luther as well. Producing likenesses of Luther, which are uniform and which go everywhere. They go all over the world. Do you think they had some sense that they could use Luther's celebrity as a way of promoting the Reformation, like as an instrument of reform? Absolutely. It's clear that that's what they're doing. They're creating Luther as a recognisable hero figure. And that starts to happen really very early. That's really interesting that you draw the parallel to print culture. And of course it is part of print culture, I think, especially historians of philosophy. We probably tend to forget this because we think of printing as, you know, it's about the Bible, it's about Luther's writings, it's actually about his translation of the Bible. So we have all of these written texts that suddenly become much more available. And I've talked about this on the podcast already. But of course, in many cases, these books would have also contained images. And so Luther's words would be coming along with his face, right? Exactly. So when you read The Freedom of a Christian, you might be doing that with a cover that shows Luther's face. And so the identification that you have with him as an individual is part of your reading experience. And of course, it's not just images, it's also music. Very important. Because music can also be printed and produced. And so this would have been a way for Lutherism to affect illiterate people, right? Which of course would still have been the majority, right? Yes. Okay. Well, next time I'm going to be talking about someone who was definitely literate, namely Erasmus and his controversy with Luther, the philosophical debate that unfolded between the two of them. So that's going to be wrapping up our look at Luther. For now, I'll thank Linda O'Rourke for very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And please join me next time as we look at Erasmus versus Luther here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Take Your Choice, Erasmus vs. Luther on Free Will. One of the best things about the place I live is the street market that pops up around the corner from my house every Friday. And one of the best things about that market is a bakery stand, which sells the best apple cake I have ever had. It's vital for the philosophical discussion that follows that you understand just how good this apple cake is. So let me describe it. It has a sturdy, biscuit-like base, topped with a thick layer of succulent, cinnamon-infused apples, finished with a sugar glaze whose consistency I can only compare to the first ice that forms on a freezing lake. As long-time listeners know, I yield to no one in my admiration of the elegantly seductive pastry that is the almond croissant. But if you put a piece of this apple cake and an almond croissant in front of me, I would have difficulty choosing between them. I would, by contrast, have little hesitation in affirming that I can indeed choose between them. In the end, I would be able to select one treat or the other, or indeed both, feeling that I have confronted this momentous decision equipped with both an unconstrained power of agency and a nice fresh cup of coffee. Medieval philosophers developed a whole theory of the will in order to explain this feeling of agency. Although the scholastics disagreed about pretty much all the details, in particular, the question whether volition follows the lead of rational judgment or operates autonomously from reason, they broadly agreed that humans do have a power called the will, voluntus, and that we are morally responsible for how we use that will. The idea of the will has a long history, which can be traced ultimately to non-Christian ancient philosophers, especially the Stoics. But for the medieval, the fundamental authority on the question was the 5th century theologian Augustine, who had written extensively about the will. Somewhat ironically, Augustine also bequeathed to later Christians a significant worry as to whether the human will is so free after all. In his diatribes against another theologian called Pelagius, he argued forcefully that humans are in a state of sin and cannot escape from this state without God's freely given grace. This makes it sound as if, in our current fallen state, the will isn't able to choose after all. Or if it is, then not in the way that would really matter, by making choices that would earn us salvation instead of damnation. I might be able to choose apple cake over an almond croissant, but I'm not able to choose righteousness over wickedness, because my defective nature guarantees that I will not be righteous. As we've seen over the past couple of episodes, Luther was more than willing to accept this conclusion. Towards the beginning of his career, he actually echoed the semi-Pelagian view of scholastics like Gabriel Beale, who said that God has graciously promised to bestow grace on anyone who does their best. As late as 1515, we find Luther saying, But deeper reflection on the teachings of St. Paul and Augustine changed his mind. Just one year later, he was insisting that the will is This apparently rather fatalistic teaching, and the range of anti-clerical attitudes that came along with it, led to Luther's break with the Church. When he was condemned in 1520, it was foreholding, among other things, that free will exists in name only. Catholic authors were not slow to issue refutations of Luther's position, and they hoped that the leading intellectual of the day would join their side. This of course was Erasmus. As we have discussed, he was often seen as a standard bearer of the Reformation, and for good reason. His critique of indulgences and other corrupt church practices, and his emphasis on the individual spirituality of the believer, anticipated and helped to inspire Luther. But when he was accused of laying the egg that Luther hatched, Erasmus cried foul, saying, The egg I laid was a hen's egg, and Luther hatched a chick of a very, very different feather. He was reluctant to get involved in the dispute between Luther and the Church. As I've mentioned, he claimed that he left the Low Countries in part to escape pressure to intervene. But around this same time, in 1521, he may have been coming around to the view that he should critique Luther in print. He would eventually do so in a work called On Free Choice, which appeared in 1524. He was thus able to ingratiate himself with patrons like Henry VIII, who at this stage was still Catholic. Alongside this pragmatic consideration, Erasmus was genuinely appalled by the deterministic dimension of Lutheran theology. In general, Erasmus seems to have had mixed feelings about Luther, he says as much in On Free Choice. And as we'll see, he was also rather open-minded about the exact relationship between human freedom and divine grace. But he was sure about one thing, that each of us does indeed have a will that is free to make morally significant choices. Erasmus hoped that by taking a fairly moderate line on the issue, and also a moderate tone in the treatise, he would turn the reformers away from their excesses. He sent it to Luther's colleague, Philip Melanchthon, who responded in friendly terms. He wrote that the work was received well by Luther, which of course it wasn't, and that Luther would respond in writing and with equal moderation, which of course he didn't. That is to say, he did respond in the following year, 1525, but not moderately. He churned out a treatise four times the length of Erasmus's, full of his trademark invective. It was called, in a play on Erasmus's own title, On the Bondage of Choice. In a letter he complained that, He starts off in complementary enough fashion, praising Erasmus's eloquence, but before long he's telling Erasmus, He goes on to add, Just as I bear with your ignorance, so you in turn will bear with my lack of eloquence. Erasmus was of course not best pleased, and penned a reply in two volumes, which appeared in 1526 and 1527. Throughout this whole confrontation, Erasmus felt that he was a reasonable man of the middle ground burdened by living in a time of extremists. Catholics continued to attack him as a Lutheran in sheep's clothing, despite the rough treatment he had received from Luther himself. Erasmus's distaste for a strident religious dispute is already made clear in On Free Choice. It devotes a remarkable number of pages to his reluctance about addressing this contentious issue. Remember, he was a champion of peace, especially within the Christian community. While he did disagree with Luther's teaching on free will, he was probably more upset by the fact that with his strident insistence on that teaching, Luther had, as Erasmus put it, lobbed an apple of strife into European culture, if only Luther had gone with apple cake instead. Erasmus reckoned that disputation over theological and philosophical questions was more likely to harm Christian concord that advanced true religion. If it turned out that Luther was right in denying free will, it would actually be better for people not to know this truth, because they might stop trying to be good. Pacifist though he is, Erasmus can't resist offering the following comparison. If bathing in the blood of babies could cure leprosy, it would be better not to advertise the fact. So ideally one should not waste time and talent in labyrinths of this kind. Of course, Erasmus is nonetheless about to devote his time and talent to precisely this thorny issue. But with his long, tentative introduction, he has sought to lower the temperature of the debate. He's also prepared us for the non-technical and non-committal treatment he will offer, one that does not delve into scholastic distinctions, but merely puts forward with simple diligence those considerations which move my mind. It has been well remarked that Erasmus's on-free choice is clear in what it opposes, less so in what it affirms. He's dead set against the view that is nowadays called hard determinism, that is, the forthright rejection of free will that Erasmus associates with Luther. His fundamental objection is that such determinism would undermine moral responsibility. It is absurd for Luther to insist on our sinfulness while denying efficacious free will, because sin would cease to be sin if it were not voluntary. Nor would it make sense for God to punish us if everything we do is done by sheer necessity, and in fact not really done by us, but by God. Conversely, whatever reward we will receive from God can only be merited if we had some part to play. This of course is just the usual argument that proponents of free will give against hard determinists, that their position undermines moral responsibility. Since the context is theological, Erasmus feels the need to back up the point with scriptural citations. He points especially to the fact that the Bible is full of commands and exhortations, with such passages being so common that looking for them is like looking for water in the sea. What purpose could be served by God's issuing commands to us if we are not free in responding to them? It would be, says Erasmus, like telling someone who is bound by unbreakable chains, Get up and follow me. While Erasmus is emphatic that we do have morally significant freedom, he is elusive on the question of how grace relates to this freedom. He would later write that Luther's main sources, Paul and Augustine, leave very little to free choice, and that Augustine in particular so praises grace that I cannot perceive what there is left for free choice to do. He of course accepts the standard Augustinian doctrine that we are born in a state of sin, but depicts this as a weakening of will, not its utter destruction. Though we often become accustomed to sinful ways, to the extent that wickedness becomes a kind of second nature, we still retain the ability to choose a better path. Yet Erasmus cannot say that we have the power to merit salvation without God's help, since that would be outright Pelagianism. So he needs to find a way to explain why, as he puts it, the proneness to evil which is in most people does not take away free choice altogether, even though evil is not fully to be overcome without the aid of divine grace. Erasmus seems to waver between two positions, both of which would enable him to walk this tightrope. The first view is one we have seen in Gabriel Biel. When we exert ourselves to choose goodness, God helps by offering grace. Erasmus compares this to the way we need light to see, but have first to choose to open our eyes to benefit from the light. Once grace has been received, meritorious acts would be a cooperation between the human and God. Yet Erasmus concedes to Luther that it may come too close to Pelagianism to admit that the original effort to turn towards goodness is entirely up to the human agent. So he suggests a second view, according to which even this initial volition also requires God's cooperation. Again, he offers analogies. God's wisdom would assist the well-meaning believer at each stage, as a master craftsperson would guide the work of an apprentice. Or in another passage that makes me look forward to next Friday, the believer is like a top toddler who wants to get an apple, while God is like the parent who holds the toddler up as it staggers over to get the fruit. Either way, that is, whether or not God's assistance is required even for the human to try to be good in the first place, or only to help those humans who have already made such an effort on their own, there will be a crucial role for both the human well and divine grace to play. And that's good enough, as far as Erasmus is concerned. As he repeats towards the end of the work, this matter is such that it is not conducive to godliness to search into it deeply. As promised then, Erasmus's position is, unlike my approach to pastry, moderate. And this is one thing that outraged Luther. In On the Bondage of Choice, Luther objects to the tentative tone adopted by Erasmus. None of the suggestions made by the great humanist are innovative, so he has contributed nothing towards a solution. But worse still is Erasmus's unwillingness to endorse a solution. Luther astutely detects here a tendency towards the sort of skepticism espoused by some ancient philosophers, like, although he doesn't mention this name, Cicero. Such suspension of belief has no place in religion. Take away assertions, says Luther, and you take away Christianity. Erasmus's learned dithering over the meaning of scripture is equally out of place. Though Luther concedes that we may not understand certain passages, this is always because of textual problems or our lack of understanding of the original languages. Scripture in itself is crystal clear, and it teaches to Luther's satisfaction that neither of the compromised solutions sketched by Erasmus is acceptable, because both give the human will too much scope in earning salvation. The core of the biblical teaching is that Christ's sacrifice, and grace more generally, is a freely given gift from God. And gifts are not earned by the merit or effort of those who receive them. Talk of cooperation with God or making effort to merit grace ultimately makes God's role superfluous. Defenders of free choice are just paying lip service to the need for grace, since they think that the right use of the will guarantees salvation. So when they assert free choice, they are denying Christ. It's worth emphasizing that Luther appeals primarily to scripture and not rational argument in refuting Erasmus. He uses the authority of St. Paul and other parts of the Bible to prove that, as he puts it, free choice is nothing but a slave of sin, death, and Satan, not doing and not capable of doing or attempting to do anything but evil. Despite his attack on skepticism, Luther is himself pretty skeptical when it comes to human reason. He delights in quoting Paul's derision of the Greeks and their philosophy, and says that reason itself must admit its feebleness in comparison to divine judgment. Nonetheless, Luther does offer a recognizably philosophical rationale for his determinism. It's one that Erasmus already mentioned in his own treatise but tried to sidestep, the familiar worry that if God knows what we will do ahead of time, then what we do becomes necessary. Erasmus offered an equally familiar scholastic solution, though he ascribes it to fellow humanist Lorenzo Valla rather than the scholastics. This is to say that foreknowing something does not make it happen, any more than astronomers make eclipses happen by knowing in advance that they will occur. But Luther gives a powerful response to this solution. If God knows and wills all events beforehand, and does so necessarily, then the events too will be necessary. Suppose that I'm already able to know now that come Friday I'll be enjoying a delicious piece of apple cake. It does follow from this that I will eat the cake, but it doesn't follow from this that I eat the cake necessarily because my knowledge is itself not necessary. And this is just a general feature of logical consequence. What follows from contingently true premises is a contingently true conclusion, not a necessarily true conclusion. Thus, if it just happens to be the case that this cake is made with cinnamon, it will follow that the cake tastes like cinnamon, but nothing about that is necessary. By contrast, if you start with necessarily true premises, what follows will also be necessary. For Luther, this is what's happening in the case of divine foreknowledge. God knows necessarily and immutably everything that all humans will do, so their actions are inevitable. This, says Luther, is a thunderbolt by which free choice is completely prostrated and shattered. Doesn't this deprive us entirely of agency, making us like puppets in God's hands? Not quite. Luther says that when God foreknows our sins, this does render our sins necessary in the sense that they are inevitable. But it does not mean that God is forcing us to sin. It is, as he says, necessity of immutability, not of compulsion. He means that sinners deprived of grace do sin necessarily, but also gladly, and even enthusiastically. Luther adds, though, that if determinism turned out to be false and he could be given truly free will, he would not want it. For he would, he knows, simply use it to sin. In this, he is like all other humans. When left to our own devices, we constantly choose evil. It is God's involvement alone that makes goodness possible. So in a certain and very limited sense, Luther thinks that we do have morally significant choice. We choose in the sense of doing what we want, and what we want is always bad unless grace intervenes. At this stage, I should mention a potential qualification. I just referred to morally significant choice and have been focusing on that throughout. This is in keeping with the terms of the debate with Erasmus, who even defined free choice as a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them. But we might wonder what is going on when the stakes are lower. What if I'm choosing not whether to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, but simply whether to have apple cake or an almond croissant? As far as I can tell, Erasmus has nothing to say in his treatise about such morally insignificant choices. But some readers think that Luther makes room for them. He says that within the earthly kingdom, we do have the power to choose, but that this gives us no choice over the things of heaven. And he also says that we freely dispose over animals the way that God does over us. This makes it sound as though Luther is not a pervasive determinist after all. He's only a determinist when it comes to the choices that really matter, that is, choices that bear on sin, righteousness, and salvation. Against this interpretation, though, we should consider that his argument from divine foreknowledge clearly applies to all actions, not just the important ones. If God knows immutably and necessarily that I will go for the apple cake this time, then I am necessarily going to do it, albeit that I do so willingly, without compulsion from God. And it's been argued that when Luther says we do exercise choice over earthly things, he means not that we actually have alternative possibilities open to us, but simply that they fall under our jurisdiction or authority. A nice test passage for this is one where Luther says, Free choice is allowed to man only with respect to what is beneath him and not what is above him. This looks pretty clear. He seems to be saying that we do have freedom, of the kind Erasmus envisioned, but only over trivial earthly matters. But he goes on to add, Even this is controlled by the free choice of God alone, who acts in whatever way He pleases. The question here is what control means, that God is necessitating our lower actions, as He does the things that bear on salvation, or only that lower actions fall under His theoretical control so that He could intervene if He wished, like by making me pick the croissant on this occasion and leave the cake for another member of my family. If Luther is somewhat unclear on this, it's perhaps because he didn't much care. Like Erasmus, he was focused on free choice as it bears on issues of reward and punishment. Unlike Erasmus, he was, appropriately enough for a determinist, completely determined to show that we cannot merit reward on our own, though we do deserve punishment, because when we sin we are doing what we want. This by the way is how Luther deals with the many biblical passages cited by Erasmus in which commands are laid upon humans by God. He of course rejects the inference that we must have freedom as to whether to follow the commands, since it is pointless to tell someone to do something they cannot do. Instead, for Luther, they call our attention to our sinfulness and encourage us to put faith in God, who alone will enable us to fulfill the commands through His grace. If like me you find that rather unpersuasive, then Luther would tell you to stop being so presumptuous. Here, much though he would be loath to admit it, he is on common ground with Erasmus. For all his insistence that the teaching of the Bible is clear and that Christians need to make clear assertions about matter of such importance, Luther, no less than Erasmus, cautions us against arrogance in matters of belief. We are in no position to judge whether God is being just or fair in His dispensation of grace. It may seem arbitrary to us that some humans should be given grace and some not, but why would we ever have expected to understand the ways of God? We should not feel troubled by this ignorance, but rather liberated. When the philosophers drive to understand and rationally explain everything as abandoned, what is left is faith in God. If we feel doubt about His saving generosity and whether we will receive it, we should remember that such doubts come from the devil, and that to ask for proofs or guarantees from God is itself a sin, a failure to trust Him. As events would prove, this reassuring message was not enough. In the coming generations, Europe would be wracked with anxieties over predestination and the apparently arbitrary separating out of the elect from the damned. But through it all, the epistemic modesty shared by Erasmus and Luther would become a signature feature of Protestant culture and philosophy in the Reformation as a whole. With some exceptions, thinkers of the 16th century did not typically go so far as Socrates, avowing knowledge only that they knew nothing, but they did usually admit that they couldn't know everything. Having looked at Luther and Erasmus in this episode, we will turn next time to a man who was like an amalgam of the two. A brilliant humanist who much admired Erasmus's achievements, he was also a staunch supporter of Luther and his movement. He helped to divine and promote the Lutheran teaching that was based on Scripture alone, despite being sorely tempted by the attractions of ancient rhetoric and philosophy. So make the right choice, if you can, and join me next time as I discuss Philip Melanchthon, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, More Lutheran than Luther, Philip Melanchthon. By this point, it should be clear that humanism had quite a bit to do with the Reformation. We've seen how humanists and reformers joined in attacking both the style and the substance of scholastic philosophy, and how the great humanist Erasmus shared many priorities and beliefs with Luther, even if they disagreed over the issue of free will. But it's only now that we're reaching the best example of a reformer who was also a humanist, Philip Melanchthon. If Erasmus and Luther had had a child together, which admittedly is hard to imagine for all kinds of reasons, then Melanchthon might have been that child. Inspired by Agricola and Erasmus, he wrote on rhetoric and lamented the barbarisms of the schoolmen, even going so far as to compose a reply to Pico della Mirandola's ironically eloquent letter in defense of bad scholastic Latin. Even his name was a humanist joke. It seems to have been his great uncle Johannes Reuchlin, the humanist famously maligned for his expertise in Hebrew, who suggested the name Melanchthon as a Greek version of the family name Schwarz-Erd, meaning Black Earth. Yet Erasmus called this fellow humanist more Lutheran than Luther himself, and not without reason. Melanchthon taught for many years at Wittenberg, and was thus a close colleague and ally of Luther's. Melanchthon used his lectures and writings to promote the teachings of the Reformation. He unhesitatingly adopted such core doctrines as the priesthood of all believers, the grounding of theology and scripture alone, and the merely customary status of church rituals like the mass. Like Luther, he was willing to direct criticism at ancient religious authorities. Instead, Luther and Melanchthon in effect set themselves up as the fathers of their own church. Yet over the course of his career, Melanchthon would carefully stake out distinctive positions that did not always agree fully with Luther's. He worked to find a robust role for classical learning and natural philosophy within a Lutheran paradigm, and controversially, he ultimately adopted a position on free will that veered closer to that of Erasmus. Melanchthon's greatest influence came through his teaching and his pedagogically oriented writings. Like Luther, if not to quite the same extent, he saw his works churned out of printing presses. Melanchthon's textbook on rhetoric went through 30 editions in a single decade until he replaced it with a new work on the topic in 1530. His treatise on the soul was printed more than 40 times in the second half of the century and made the subject of further commentary. We can get a sense of his approach to teaching and his understanding of the relation between religion and the sciences from the orations he gave as a professor at Wittenberg. These set out the case for the curriculum he helped to establish there, which emphasized the study of the linguistic arts, mathematics, and natural philosophy. As Melanchthon was at pains to mention, Erasmus and Luther agreed on the need to study Greek and Hebrew for the sake of understanding scripture. Grammar and rhetoric, too, are crucial for doing theology, which is why the church always needs to have a connection to schools that support it. To some extent, the rationale here is obvious. You need to study classical languages to read the Bible in the original, and you need grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric to expound its teachings well. Less obvious is that the study of rhetoric helps us to interpret scripture. Like Erasmus, Melanchthon was impressed by the emotional and persuasive power of scripture. This is due to the fact that the authors of the Bible, especially St. Paul, were themselves skilled rhetoricians, so we need to master this discipline in order to analyze how they constructed their arguments. As a result, rhetoric is, for Melanchthon, as much about appreciating persuasive speech as producing it. He drew on classical authors, including Aristotle and Cicero, to understand the rules of dialectic and rhetoric, even writing a commentary on Cicero's topics. That word, topics, brings us to one of Melanchthon's signature tactics as an educator. It stems from the Greek word topoi, meaning places, the Latin equivalent being loci. You can recognize the root in English words like location. As far back as Aristotle's work on dialectic, also called the topics, the term had been used to refer to standard argument forms that could be deployed in argumentative contexts. By the time of Melanchthon, it had taken on a somewhat broader meaning, since it could also refer to key concepts within a given discipline, that is, points that you need to learn about when studying that discipline. Melanchthon used the topic structure to teach both philosophy and theology. Thus his text on Selected Books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, written in 1532, does not so much present a running paraphrase or commentary as a set of points for discussion. These are the loci, or fundamental topics, covered in ethics. They would include things like the definition of moral philosophy, the ultimate purpose of humankind, virtue, free will, and the passions. It may surprise you that Melanchthon would use Aristotle to offer moral instruction to his students. What happened to the Lutheran disdain for Aristotle and his scholastic followers? Well, Melanchthon certainly disdained the scholastics, but he thought that pagan philosophers deserved a degree of respect. He admired the way that they directed their attention to the concrete question of how to live, rather than getting mired in pedantic and time-wasting discussions like the schoolmen did. The Greeks, he said, show the usefulness of philosophy for life. While the ancient philosophers do not teach us to place our trust in God, they do offer lessons on the less crucial, but still important, rules that should govern civic life. In fact, on this point, the gospel adds nothing of substance to what can be discovered with natural reason. Both give the same advice as to how to behave well and how the community can be peaceful and prosperous. Nor is this all that philosophy can do for us. Just as Aristotle and other pagans were able to use natural reason to discern the correct rules of civic life, so they used reason to discover quite a lot about nature itself. Luther had been deeply skeptical about Aristotelian natural philosophy, remarking, I dare say that any potter has more knowledge of nature than is written in these books. Melanchthon agreed that many Aristotelian concepts were pointless. He dismissed the distinction between form and matter, and the notion of privation. But he admired Aristotle's drive to establish rock-solid demonstrations in science, and said that this lifted Aristotelian philosophy above its ancient rivals. Taking his cue from this, Melanchthon chose to pursue natural science, but follow authors who had improved on Aristotle. One such author was Galen, the great medical authority of antiquity, another was Vesalius, the renaissance anatomist. Drawing on their works, Melanchthon produced a study of the human soul, which diverged from Aristotle by talking much more about the human body. Learning in detail about the workings of human organs makes us more appreciative of God's wisdom and providence, which is why Galen himself had called anatomy the beginning of theology. Something similar could be said for astronomy, and even astrology, since the motions of the stars are an impressive sign of divine purpose. Melanchthon was convinced that astrology is a legitimate science, and saw it as simply another branch of natural science. Melanchthon was then a theologian who made plenty of room for philosophy in the course of study he offered at Wittenberg, but he was still a theologian. In this sphere, he used the same teaching techniques on display in his linguistic and philosophical writings. The topics structure is clear even from the title of his treatise Loci Comunis Rerum Theologikarum, that is Common Places of Theological Matters, which appeared in 1521 and later in numerous revised versions. This is his most important contribution to explaining Lutheran doctrine, praised extravagantly by Luther himself, who said that, Next to holy scripture there is no better book. As the title promises, it again uses the topics structure, thus making good on advice given by Erasmus, to organize for yourself collections of theological topics which may serve as little nests in which you place the fruit of your reading. Each major section concludes by itemizing the main points Melanchthon has tried to establish. These can be taken simultaneously as a list of things the student-reader needs to understand, and as a summary of Lutheran doctrine. The work begins with that point of agreement between humanism and reform, the inadequacies of scholastic philosophy. What Melanchthon calls their theological hallucinations are based more on Aristotle than on Christ, and one does not know whether it is more godless than it is stupid. They delve into deep mysteries of the faith that would be better left unexplored, like the workings of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Even worse, they err on other points that every Christian needs to understand, among them the Lutheran doctrine on sin and grace. Melanchthon unhesitatingly parts ways with the Church Fathers on this point. The early theologians of the Church found scriptures teaching to cruel, because it makes human will incapable of goodness, so they let themselves be led astray by philosophy, giving a commanding role in moral life to human reason and will. Instead, we must accept that all things are predestined by God and take place by necessity. So far, so Lutheran. But as Melanchthon goes on, he lays out very clearly an idea that we saw Luther suggesting only tentatively, if at all, that external human actions are subject to our will, but are not morally significant. To use our earlier example, I have the power to choose between an almond croissant and a piece of apple cake, but I don't have the power to reject wickedness and embrace righteousness. Melanchthon gives similar examples. We are free to perform outward actions like to greet a man or not, put on a coat or not, eat meat or not. But this is irrelevant to the question of grace and sin, because these had to do with the inner disposition of the heart, which cannot be controlled by will. As Melanchthon sees it, the problem with both the ancient philosophers and the scholastics who have been in their sway is that they always thought about morality in terms of the deeds one performs. But he asks, what place do external acts have in Christian teaching if the heart is insincere? And our internal dispositions are not under our control the way that our actions are. To some extent Melanchthon's argument here is just common sense. It is surely true that inner disposition can be at variance with outer action. I might forgo that piece of apple cake despite wanting badly to eat it, or be friendly to someone I despise. It's also plausible that we can't just will to feel differently on the inside. Melanchthon calls the inner disposition an affectus, which means something close to emotion, but could also cover things like desire for cake. And you can't change your emotions and desires just by deciding to do so, like by simply willing to transform hatred of that sworn enemy to a warm affectionate feeling overnight. But there are a couple of problems here. First, it simply isn't true that this phenomenon escaped the attention of ancient philosophers or their later interpreters. Melanchthon says that whereas philosophy looks at nothing except the external masks of men, the holy scriptures look at the deepest incomprehensible affections. But in fact Aristotle made a point of distinguishing between genuine virtue, which involves doing good out of a strong inner preference for doing good, and mere strength of will or self-control, where we do good despite wanting to act differently. Second, Melanchthon needs not just to distinguish between the inner affection and the outer action, but to insist that without God's help, all good outer actions are insincere. Here of course we just have him echoing Luther's stance again, justification by faith not works. Self-interested and sinful as we are, even our most apparently admirable deeds are, in fact, done for selfish motives and so are worthless. Truly good works always stem from faith in God and the grace he has offered to the faithful. As we know, Melanchthon was an expert rhetorician. How then might he persuade us of this bleak view of fallen human nature? In part just by telling us to be honest with ourselves about our own inner lives. How often are we truly selfless in our motivations, driven by nothing but love of God and our neighbors? But he could also connect his teaching here to the exploration of human nature in his work on the soul. As already mentioned, that treatise includes a lot of material on medicine. In fact, Melanchthon revised later versions so that they included even more anatomy. As this shows, he understood human nature in very physical terms. This goes perfectly with the Lutheran idea that humans are inevitably prone to sin, since our souls are under the influence of bodily desire. As Melanchthon puts it, human reason is fleshly and is beset by ignorance. By contrast, more Platonist thinkers of the Renaissance, and also some potential allies of the Reformation like Erasmus, saw humans as independent, immaterial spirits, with only a loose connection to bodies. That sort of view could suggest that even in a state of sin, humans do retain a natural power to dominate their lower desires and be good. Melanchthon, no less than Luther, wanted to deny that we have such a power. On the other hand, no less than Erasmus, he wanted to avoid depriving humans of all agency in their moral lives. After all, sinners do bear responsibility for their failings. Melanchthon's position on this matter seems to have evolved to some extent, as he became aware of the threat of determinism within the Reform movement. He was alarmed by the teachings of John Calvin, whom he called Zeno, an allusion to the founder of the ancient Stoic school, which was notoriously determinist. Melanchthon was concerned that if God is admitted to cause everything, leaving no place for human agency, then God and not humans will be blameworthy for all evils that are committed. To avoid this, he added a line in a revision of his theological treatise, God is not the cause of sin, nor is sin something which was created or ordained by God. Luther would have been happy with this remark, but more nervous when Melanchthon speculated that there must be some factor within the human that decides whether that person becomes a sinner or receives grace. It would, he said, be much too crude to hold that the human will does nothing at all. This is dangerously close to the position Luther always wanted to reject, that the human and God have to cooperate in achieving a state of justification. As you may have noticed, there's a pattern developing here. Even as he relentlessly supported the Reform theological agenda, Melanchthon tended to take up fairly moderate positions, where others were taking Luther's ideas in a more radical direction. Indeed, for Melanchthon, being extremely committed to Lutheranism meant avoiding extremism. Thus he agreed with Luther that philosophy has nothing to say about the most important matters of all, yet spent a lot of his time exploring what philosophy has to say about other matters. Similarly, he agreed with Luther that sin is overcome by faith alone, and that no one should fret about whether they have, in fact, received grace and justification, since such worries themselves manifest a lack of faith. Yet he also tried to find a role for human reason and will in the scheme of redemption. In Melanchthon's philosophy, nature is given its due without being able to do everything. We can see another example of this by returning to the question of the moral law. As I said, Melanchthon thought that natural reason can discern the guidelines that should govern both ethical and political life. In the terms of his theological treatise, this means that philosophy can explain which external actions are to be performed, but cannot help us to reform the interior affections. Melanchthon adopts a long-standing bit of terminology here, used famously by such bugbears of the Reformers as Thomas Aquinas. He talks about natural law. The natural law is simply the law as we can discern it using our power of reason, so it is to be distinguished from the revealed law, which we know about only from scripture. Now, the natural law only applies to external actions, which as we know are rendered hypocritical by our sinful inner dispositions, but that does not mean the natural law is unimportant. To the contrary, it turns out to be central to Melanchthon's political philosophy. We can best understand this by considering the position that he sets out to reject. Starting with William of Ockham, back in the 14th century, quite a few political thinkers had come to think that legitimate political authority can only come from the consent of the governed. Still in the time of Melanchthon, Ockhamite thinkers like John Mayer, we'll get to him later, were arguing that by nature we are free. Thus, we rightly fall under the power of someone else only if we agree to do so. This applies both in secular life, where the ruler should be selected by the people, and in religious life, where the pope's position depends on the support of the clergy. Melanchthon disagrees with all this. In his commentary on Aristotle's politics, he observes that the natural law places some people under the authority of others all the time, as the child is subject to the father. Of course, institutions can be set up by the consent of the governed, but this is not the only way to do it. He says, In keeping with this, Melanchthon disapproves of insurrections against rulers, even if they are tyrannical. Nonetheless, he thinks that the ruler is constrained in the exercise of power, by the natural law of course, since that constrains all of us, but also by the particular laws of each nation, since the ruler falls under these laws just as much as the rest of the population. Thus far, Melanchthon's approach to politics is secular, in the sense that civic life and its laws are set by nature and the natural power of reason. Everything I just explained would apply equally well to non-Christian people, apart from the fact that Christians have an extra reason not to do violence against unjust rulers, known to me that scripture tells them to turn the other cheek. Here, Melanchthon is as so often echoing Luther, who also took a rather secular approach to political life. He distinguished between the political duties and the religious duties of the ruler, and said that as far as religion is concerned, the ruler is just like anyone else. But as so often, Melanchthon departs subtly from Luther on this issue. He recognizes that rulers of Christian communities have an additional set of powers and duties, which would not belong to rulers of other communities. Since a Christian people has salvation as its ultimate end, the ruler must see that this end is pursued. Thus, he has wide latitude to punish heresy and blasphemy, to support the teaching of the gospel, and more generally, to establish religion. Yet again, Melanchthon was inching away from Luther's teachings for the sake of avoiding extremism. Just as he was troubled by the determinism of Protestants like Calvin, he was troubled by the civic unrest caused by radical reformers such as the Anabaptists. His distaste for these radicals comes out even in his orations about philosophical education, as when he says that the more revolutionary groups within the reform movement would never have emerged if their leaders were not so unschooled in grammar and dialectic. Notice that he's saying here to the Anabaptists just what the Catholics were saying to the Lutherans. Whether in theology or in politics, Luther and Melanchthon sought to contain the forces they had unleashed, maintaining the peace while reforming Christian belief to bring it in line with their understanding of scripture. The biggest threat to that ambition was the one memorably identified by the British politician Harold Macmillan, events dear boy, events. Next time, we'll be discussing one of the most significant of those events, and hearing how the Lutherans reaped what they sowed, thanks to the outbreak of the Peasants' War. Here on The History of Philosophy, without any guess.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, No Lord but God, The Peasants War and Radical Reformation. When you begin to read up on Martin Luther's political ideas, you may come to see it as rather ironic that he was the namesake of Martin Luther King Jr. Whereas King committed his life to resisting oppression and seeking racial and social equality, the original Luther was apoplectic with disapproval when an uprising against oppression and inequality arose in his own time, even though, or more likely, his own teachings had helped to inspire it. In 1525, peasants staged a revolt against church and secular authorities, initially along the Rhine and in Swabia, and spreading from there across southern Germany and parts of modern-day Switzerland and Austria. Luther responded by denouncing the uprising with violent rhetoric. When he was criticized for this, he doubled down, writing, until the sweat drops off their noses. The peasants would not listen, they would not let anyone tell them anything, so their ears must now be unbuttoned with musket balls till their heads jump off their shoulders. We should not be too quick to suggest a posthumous renaming of Martin Luther King Jr., though. Believe it or not, there is actually a distant parallel between Luther's ideas and the pacifist tactics King employed in the civil rights struggle. Before we get to that, we need to learn more about the so-called Peasants' War, its connection to the Reformation, and Luther's political views, which evolved in response to this quite literally revolutionary event. It did not come out of nowhere. After a period of improvement in peasant conditions following on the Black Death, which gave the survivors more bargaining power and more access to land, the 15th century saw an increase in the overall population. This shifted the balance of power back to landowners, who gradually increased rents and kept serfs, especially under tight control. Chafing under this treatment, the peasants, who of course constituted the vast majority of people in Germany, and indeed right across Europe, staged intermittent revolts. They would continue to do so after 1525, too. It's been reckoned that there were 66 such events between the Peasants' War and the French Revolution. Yet 1525 was unparalleled in scope. The revolt involved as many as 300,000 people and led to 100,000 deaths. The horrific violence would have been uppermost in the mind of Luther and others who deplored the revolt, but things began more peacefully as local communes submitted lists of grievances and demands to their local authorities. They wanted changes to the social and economic order, such as an abolition of serfdom, permission to hunt and fish on common lands, and most ambitiously, a say in the appointment of authorities, both secular and clerical. At this stage, the situation was more like a labor strike than a revolution, but things escalated quickly to the point that there were pitched battles between peasant armies and their oppressors. Though the nobility were vastly outnumbered, they were also vastly better armed and better trained, and within just weeks the uprising was put down with huge loss of life. From our modern point of view, it's hard not to think that this was a case where the bad guys won. Reformation era governments had little in common with the states we know today, and from the Peasants' point of view might have seemed more like organized crime syndicates. The lords collected taxes from their subjects in return for protection, meaning protection from themselves, and other nobles like themselves. Nice hovel, be a shame if anything happened to it. As if that weren't bad enough, there was a parallel hierarchical government in the form of the church. They collected taxes too, though these were called tithes. The tithes were material in nature, yet had to be surrendered in return for services that were entirely spiritual, like the performance of the sacraments, and of course regular reminders that the violent thugs who called themselves nobles had been appointed by God. Then came Luther with his reformation. As we know, he restated long-standing grievances about the worldliness, wealth, and hypocrisy of the church, but he went further by undercutting the whole need for a church. If all believers are priests, why should only some priests receive taxes? Oops, sorry, tithes. No wonder that throughout the uprising, monasteries and churches were frequently raided and sacked. And there was a deeper way in which Lutheranism provided a rationale for revolt. The Reformers never tired of issuing a demand of their own, namely that Christian rituals and beliefs should be grounded in nothing but Scripture. If you can't find a biblical passage in favor of something, then it is at best optional, at worst a blasphemous distortion of God's plans for humankind. But where does Scripture say that nobles can treat peasants like slaves, or prevent them from fishing in common ponds? To the contrary, the book of Genesis expressly says that animals are put at the disposal of humans in a way that humans are never put at the disposal of other humans. The peasants' agenda for social and economic reform explicitly echoed this methodological constraint of the religious Reformers. A list of principles issued in Muhlhausen said that, The peasants realized that pursuing this policy would lead to conflict and said, in effect, So be it. We would much rather have God as a friend and people as enemies than have God as an enemy and people as friends. Similarly, the Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants emphasized that tithes should be paid strictly in line with scriptural requirements. Though they did not go so far as to reject all social hierarchy, they accepted it only with a major caveat. We should gladly be obedient to our elected and established authorities, if established for us by God. At Schaffenhausen on the Rhine, rebels put the point more boldly still, We have no Lord but God. Another aspect of the ideology driving the peasants' revolt can be connected to humanism. Close study of ancient literature had confronted the late medieval world with the admirable achievements of Republican Rome. Republicanism, modeled on the example of Rome, is going to be a factor in political upheavals going forward, just think of the French Revolution and the American Revolution. But it was already in the air in the early 16th century. The Peasants' War occurred a scant decade after Machiavelli was writing his Discourses based on the Roman historian Livy and expounding on his theories of Republican government. This is not to say that the many thousands of rebellious peasants were paging through Cicero or Livy in their spare time, but we can see the influence of these ideas in justifications of the revolt. The anonymous author of a letter encouraging the peasant uprising goes on at length about the fact that Rome was more prosperous as a republic than when under tyrannical imperial rule. It also links this fact to the religious preoccupations of the Reformation. Hereditary and powerful lordship commonly turns into true idolatry. The peasants of Germany weren't the only ones taking inspiration from Luther in ways he found distasteful. They were also the preachers of Germany. I've mentioned already that in Luther's own city of Wittenberg, the program of reform was pushed forward by Andreas von Karlstadt, pushed too quickly in Luther's opinion. Karlstadt, one of the few men in Europe who thought Luther was far too moderate, was chased from the city. He did not take the defeat lying down, composing a treatise called Whether One Should Proceed Slowly, whose content can be summarized as No, one shouldn't. As far as Karlstadt was concerned, Luther had no grounds to be solicitous towards those who would be alarmed by a program of speedy reform. If one knows that it is wrong to, say, venerate images of saints in churches, one should put a stop to it immediately. If this is unpopular, well then, the fact that the majority of people accept something does not make it any more right. This is so, argues Karlstadt, even if the whole world hesitates and does not want to follow. After all, may one steal until the thieves stop stealing? He makes a nice distinction here that is applicable more widely in moral philosophy. Some commandments are applicable at all times, and can therefore never be violated. For instance, it's never okay to murder or commit adultery. Other obligations are context sensitive. You have no duty to take care of your offspring if you have no children. For Karlstadt, the core policies of Lutheranism were of the first kind and should therefore be instituted right away, rather than waiting for the time and situation to be right. The point was echoed by Conrad Grebel, who was a thorn in the side of the Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, much as Karlstadt was a problem for Luther. Grebel encouraged the leading reformers to stop sparing the weak by going slow with the pace of change or recognizing the validity of long-standing traditions. For example, church services should not involve singing, and for the usual reason, it is not foreseen in scripture. More momentously, Grebel rejected the practice of infant baptism. This was on the basis of the good Lutheran premise that works are useless without faith, since a baby cannot resolve to embrace God and righteousness, and thus cannot yet have faith, it is pointless to baptize the baby. Or actually worse than pointless. Grebel called infant baptism a senseless, blasphemous abomination contrary to all scripture. He and like-minded reformers came to be called Anabaptists because they wanted to rebaptize adults, though in their eyes this would of course be a first valid baptism. The ritual would only be an outer symbol of the really important purification, the inner baptism that is, in the words of the Anabaptist Hans Hutt, the struggle to kill sin throughout one's whole life. The project of Anabaptists and other so-called radical reformers was comparable to that of the peasants, and not just because of their irreverence and demand for immediate action. The radicals expressed sympathy for the less prosperous, idealizing them as true Christians laboring under the oppression of wicked priests and nobles. They sought to reform not just religious practice, but society as a whole, envisioning villages where all lived in pious simplicity and shared all things. People will eat from one pot, drink from one vessel, as one radical author, possibly Hans Hergott, wrote around the time of the Peasants' War. When the Anabaptists managed briefly to take control of the city of Munster before being defeated after a siege, in 1534 they introduced communist policies. So the radical reformers were part of a trend towards utopian thinking in this period, even if the staunchly Catholic Thomas Moore, author of the famous work Utopia, would certainly not appreciate being lumped in with them. In a short-term expression of their long-term utopian goals, Anabaptists and other radicals embraced a form of separatism, rejecting the norms of even reformed cities like Wittenberg and Sürich. As one author put it, we simply will not have fellowship with evil people nor associate with them nor participate with them in their abominations. This could involve refusal to pay tithes and other taxes, perform military service, accept government offices, and even to take oaths. Conrad Grebel argued in favor of this sort of exceptionalism. Better to be one of the few who worship and believe correctly than the many who still follow a form of religion adulterated with falsehood. Now, it may seem strange to connect the massive violent uprising of the Peasants' War to the formation of small groups of pacifist religious purists, but we might think of the radical reformers as reacting to the disappointment of 1525 by lowering their sights. When the swords of the nobility and the pen of Luther were turned against them, and they saw that European society would not be made over to follow what they considered to be God's will, they settled for reforming their own lives. No figure unites the radical reformation and the peasant uprising better than Thomas Munster. He began by trying to persuade the secular powers to use the sword of civil authority to impose true religion from above. When this did not happen, at least not to his satisfaction, he cheered on the peasant revolt. He complained that, it is the greatest monstrosity on earth that no one wants to defend the plight of the needy, and warned rulers of the violence that would rise up against them if they did not reduce their rents and extortions. Luther considered Munster to be a prophet of murder, and Munster returned the favor. He excoriated the more famous reformer as Dr. Liar, which is a pun. Lugner, German for liar, sounds a bit like the name Luther. Munster blamed him for throwing in his lot with the oppressive upper classes and for welcoming the execution of the peasants. In the end, Munster was disappointed in the uprising, which focused on economic concerns rather than religious ones. As he put it, everyone sought his own prophet rather than the justification of Christendom. He died in the fighting at Frankenhausen, among the victims of the decisive defeat of the peasants, in May of 1525. Munster's diatribes against Luther return us to the question of why Luther was not prepared to support the peasants revolt, despite the fact that he supported at least some of their goals, for instance permission to elect their own pastors. One answer, which is rather cynical but surely at least partially true, would be that it was a matter of tactics. Luther did not want his movement associated with violent interaction and chaos. He clung to the same hope initially expressed by Munster, that secular authorities would be strong allies against the papacy. This was not going to happen if the Reformation involved dismantling the whole structure of society. And Luther's strategy proved successful. After his condemnation and excommunication, he received protection in Saxony from Frederick the Wise, and Frederick's successor, John, officially embraced Lutheranism. The reward for moderation was the spread of what is sometimes called a magisterial reformation, imposed from above by princely lances, not from below at the end of an angry farmer's pitchfork. Another way to look at this is that non-radical reform prevailed over radical reform because the secular authorities could live with it. Indeed, they could profit from it, and handsomely. Until the 16th century, the nobility were forced to compete with that parallel government that was the church. Popes and bishops could have vast estates and command armies, so they were the natural rivals of kings and secular lords. The toppling of the religious quasi-state left this secular state as the sole unchallenged authority and repository of riches. As friend of the podcast, Quentin Skinner, has remarked, noble sponsors of the Reformation from Frederick and John in Saxony to Henry VIII in England to Gustav Vasa in Sweden were largely unconcerned with the doctrines of the Reformation, except for their obvious value as ideological weapons in their struggles to control the wealth and power of the church. By contrast, these figures were never going to embrace a version of the Reformation in which part of what was to be reformed was the social order that gave them their exalted positions. But Luther did also have a more principled reason for leaving that social order in place. A treatise of his from 1523 deals with the question of how far one should obey secular power. Even posing that question sounds daring, if not actually subversive, but this is no manifesto for insurrection. Luther makes a central distinction between worldly affairs and affairs of faith, calling these two separate kingdoms. Secular authorities have no authority whatsoever in what we might call matters of conscience. They cannot enforce adherence to any particular set of religious beliefs, if only because this is simply not possible. As Luther puts it, every man runs his own risk in believing as he does, and he must see to it himself that he believes rightly, because faith is a free act to which no one can be forced. When it comes to the external world, though, good Christians ought to be obedient subjects of their rulers pretty much no matter what those rulers do or say. Ideally, the rulers oversee peace and worldly justice in their realms. This actually has little effect on the true Christian, who as we know, naturally performs good works as an automatic result of faith. Requiring these Christians to act morally would, says Luther, be like legislating that apple trees produce apples. But most people are not good Christians, and it is good for the wicked to be restrained by the rulers, so the Christians should not interfere with this by being insubordinate. What about cases where the ruler is not good, something Luther in fact expects to be pretty common? Here, he concedes that no one should perform an evil act if they are commanded to do so, but he forbids active resistance, even against tyrannical princes. Such wicked authorities are sent by God as a punishment for sins, so their outrages are not to be resisted but endured. This is what I had in mind when I said that there is, after all, some comparison between Martin Luther King Jr. and his namesake. The original Luther might have admired the strategy of non-violent resistance, precisely because of its non-violence. He thought that the most a Christian may do to defy a secular ruler is to refuse to cooperate. Obviously this rules out things like, say, violent peasant uprisings. On the other hand, Luther might not have admired King's approach, because non-violent political resistance is indeed resistance and is political. In this same treatise, Luther does express dismay at lords who exploit peasants, but ultimately he thinks that energy spent in remedying earthly injustice is a waste of time, given that one could be looking to the far more important matter of heavenly salvation. Thus, in his first reflection on the tensions between the nobles and the peasants, he is even-handed. He once again laments lordly oppression, then encourages the peasants to bear that oppression with patience. While he is sympathetic to the poor, he really thinks that both the nobles and the malcontent peasants are far too interested in material goods, like land ownership and fishing rights, and not interested enough in spiritual goods. Once the peasants actually tried to do something about the way they were mistreated, Luther was accordingly unsparing in his condemnation of their actions. From his point of view, all of political and social life is, relatively speaking, an irrelevant sideshow. The objective of human governance is simply to keep things peaceful and stable enough that the vast majority of people who are not faithful Christians, but are enthralled to sin, don't go around expressing their worst urges. But how, given this attitude, could Luther ever have encouraged sympathetic rulers to support his reformation? He ought to say, you would think, that such matters of faith are none of their affair. Here, though, he makes another more subtle distinction. You can tell he was trained by scholastics, even if he didn't like them. Secular authorities are, by virtue of their office, involved in the worldly kingdom, and have to deal with such trivialities as civic laws, the economic welfare of the people, and warfare. But if these same rulers are also Christians, then they belong to the other kingdom too, and with this in mind, they will seek to promote true religion. As Luther wrote some years later, a prince can indeed be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he must rule. The office has nothing to do with his Christianity. Thus, for example, a king might call a church council, not by virtue of his royal status, but as a Christian who just happens to be so powerful that if he makes this announcement, everyone will take it seriously. Furthermore, many things that we would nowadays take to be a matter of private religious conviction were, for Luther, matters of public concern, and thus subject to governmental oversight. Thus, the Christian ruler may punish heresy or blasphemy as soon as it reaches the ears of other people. The ruler cannot force people like the radical reformers to give up their false beliefs, but they can and should stop the radicals from expressing or promoting those beliefs. Luther even attacked Munsee and the Anabaptists for teaching in people's homes. As soon as you open your mouth, you may affect the beliefs of your fellow citizens, so you are subject to repression by the Lutheran state. If there are no thought police, this is only because thought itself cannot be policed. Clearly then, Luther was very far from defending anything like a separation of church and state or religious pluralism. Yet, just as clearly, his writings lay the seeds for those developments, by distinguishing the worldly kingdom from the kingdom of faith and admitting that faith is up to the believer. Contemporary thinkers were beginning to embrace the more radical implications, as when the Anabaptists opted out of their political and social duties on religious grounds, or when the Nuremberg humanist Georg Fröhlich argued that it should be possible for groups of different religious convictions to live together in a harmonious political union. So, as with the Peasants' War, when it came to freedom of thought, speech, and religion, Luther had to work hard to block the implications of his own ideas. This pattern will be repeated as we turn to other leading reformers over the next few episodes. They asserted the freedom of a Christian, to quote the title of one of Luther's treatises, and sought autonomy from the established church and any ruler who supported it. But once individuals and groups started asserting autonomy, things threatened to spin out of control, which the leading reformers could not accept for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. Thus, we'll see John Calvin offering teachings that plenty of his contemporaries found heretical, while giving his blessing to the burning of a heretic. The subject of our next episode, Höldrich Zwingli, will agree with Luther that faith cannot be compelled by violence. Yet he was far from willing to just let other Christians, including other reformers, believe whatever they wanted. Both Anabaptists and Luther himself would find themselves the target of his refutations, adding to our sense that we are not covering the Reformation here, but numerous Reformations, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Slowly but Surely, Höldrecht Zwingli. One of the questions we've been following over the past several episodes has been whether humanism can be credited with, or blamed for, inspiring the Protestant Reformation. The relevance of humanism for early Lutheranism seems undeniable, especially when you look past Luther himself to the work of a man like Melanchthon. But any lingering doubts can be put to rest by following the example of the von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, and going over the Alps into Switzerland. Here, the Reformation had a second emergence with the city of Zurich as its main stage, like Wittenberg in Germany. Playing the central role upon that stage was Höldrecht Zwingli, a preacher and theologian who agreed with Luther about many things, but disagreed with him violently about one thing in particular. We'll get to that in due course. But first we should recognize that a common inspiration for both the Lutherans and Zwingli was that man Erasmus. Zwingli was, like Melanchthon, a committed humanist. Trained in Vienna and Bern, he became proficient in ancient Greek and Hebrew in order to study the Bible. His private book collection included many works by Erasmus and other authors important for the humanist movement, like Pico della Mirandola. If Pico's example inspired Zwingli to go further in the study of Hebrew than Erasmus had done, Zwingli's unrelenting study of the Bible, in its original language, was deeply Erasmian. Like Luther, he made Scripture the sole source of authority in religion. Never mind what the Pope says, never mind the traditions that had evolved over many generations of Christianity, never mind even the doctrines of the late ancient Church Fathers. All that mattered was the clear message taught by Scripture. Zwingli would judge all religious matters by this standard. On this basis, he led his followers out of the trap laid by Catholic theology, saying, So long, farewell, to a few of the papacy's favorite things, including the worship of saints, the use of images in the Church, clerical celibacy, fasting during Lent, and most decisively, the Catholic mass. Actually, it might be more accurate, if somewhat paradoxical, to say that Zwingli did not lead his followers, but followed them. He discouraged fellow reformers from acting too quickly. We achieve our ends, he said, by going slow. Slowly but surely, though, he was drawn into a total breach with the Roman Church. A famous early step was taken, appropriately enough given the central role of the printing press in this period, in the home of the printer, Christopher Froshauer. He hosted a dinner at which sausages were eaten, in violation of the laws for fasting during Lent. Zwingli was in attendance, and rather typically he didn't eat the meat himself, but evidently gave his tacit approval. As always, the rationale was to look to Scripture for guidance. Since it doesn't ban the eating of meat in Lent, there should be no ban. This was only a humanly devised and thus optional custom. As Zwingli commented, If you desire to fast, do it. If you do not want to eat flesh, don't eat it. But in this, leave me, the Christian man, free. He took a similar stance on the question of images. On the one hand, he supported the execution of a man who took a knife to an image of Christ, since the man in question acted alone for the sake of provocation. On the other hand, just a few years later, he oversaw the removal of imagery from the churches of Zürich. He instructed that this be done in a calm and temperate fashion, without mobs smashing pictures and statues, and even invited the sponsors of the artworks to take them home safely. This aspect of the Reformation is apt to remind long-term listeners of the iconoclast movement in 8th century Byzantium, but the Swiss iconoclast's motivation was only partially overlapping with that of the Byzantine iconoclasts. Both groups did worry that the veneration of images constituted idolatry, but in Byzantium there was no principle of Scripture alone, whereas it was at the core of Zwingli's movement. This was to be a stripped-down version of Christianity, purified of everything that was not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. This sounds uncompromising, and in a sense it was. Zwingli was adamant that good Christians should resist the Catholic Church or anyone else who tried to enforce religious authority without a sound basis in Scripture. But, like Luther and Melanchthon, he left ample space for civic authority. So he said that, the Christian man is nothing else than the faithful and good citizen, and worked closely with the Council of Zürich to oversee the pace and measures of reform. A good example of his policies here would be the practice of tithing to the church. When extremist reformers started refusing to pay tithes in 1522 and 1523, Zwingli conceded to them that there is no basis for the practice in Scripture, but told them to pay up anyway because the civic magistrates were empowered to demand this form of taxation. Earthly authorities should be respected. Zwingli said that though merely human righteousness is a poor righteousness, one is as needful of it as eating. In a short treatise laying out the principles of religion as he understood it, he agreed with Luther and Melanchthon that even tyrannical powers should be obeyed patiently while one waits for God to change the situation. Zwingli wavered on this point though. He sometimes suggested that tyrants could be removed by force, though his preference was clearly that injustice should be confronted without violence. As with Luther, Zwingli's respect for secular power and distaste for hastiness and reform were in part a matter of pragmatism. Zwingli was a politician as much as a preacher, and saw the cause of reform in Switzerland as being closely linked to the political welfare of these Swiss cities. Early in his career, he served as field chaplain with the Swiss army, and throughout his life he championed Swiss autonomy. Zürich was a formidable military power in his life, which was really the only reason that the reform movement was able to survive there. It wasn't enough to help Zwingli himself survive. He died in a battle against Swiss Catholics in 1531. But while he lived, he was relentless in arguing for policies that would maintain Zürich's strength, in particular by criticizing the practice of hiring out soldiers as mercenaries, perhaps the only point of agreement between Zwingli and his older contemporary Machiavelli, apart from disdain for the papacy. In Switzerland, there seemed to be the possibility of a sort of national unity between the various city-states, which would have been inconceivable in Machiavelli's Italy. Zwingli knew that the long-term viability of his movement would require cooperation between the city-states of Switzerland, something that was secured in part in 1528, when Bern agreed to follow the lead of Zürich by embracing evangelical Christianity. So it's been aptly remarked that for Zwingli, patriotism and true religion had become synonymous. This was itself another example of his humanist leanings. You may recall Erasmus's sense of connection to the Low Countries, and in Germany, humanists like Jacob Wimfeling demonstrated their own patriotism by producing histories of the German people. The Zürich Bible, a version by Zwingli based partially on Luther's translation and printed by the sausage-loving printer, epitomizes the cultural moment. Between two covers, it brought together three central themes, humanist scholarship, the accessibility of scripture to all Christians in a vernacular language, and the national feeling bound up with that language. But the Catholics did not see Zwingli's evangelism as a distinctively Swiss phenomenon. For them, this was just the same heresy as Lutheranism, but in a different dialect of German. And you can see why. When Catholic apologists like Jerome Emse and Johannes Eck tried to meet Zwingli with arguments, they found themselves stymied by the principle that matters of religion should be settled by recourse to nothing but clear statements of scripture, the same rule always imposed by Luther. When a disputation in Zürich in 1522 laid this down as a ground rule for debate, it effectively predetermined victory for the Reformers in advance. A later disputation in Bern in 1528 was just as much a foregone conclusion but in favor of the Catholics. Yet Zwingli stoutly rejected the label of Lutheran. While expressing great respect for his fellow Reformer, he said, I value Luther as highly as anyone alive, he also claimed, I have read little of his teaching, and took pride in following no contemporary teacher, but only Christ. Zwingli was so optimistic about resolving religious matters by consulting the Bible that he wrote a whole treatise on the topic. He certainly admitted that God's revealed message could be misunderstood. Indeed on some topics he thought that the whole Church tradition had been in error for many centuries. But as he said, truth is not necessarily with the majority, and given the abundant clarity of the holy text, misconstrual of its meaning is always the fault of the interpreter. Most often, says Zwingli, this happens because readers bring preconceived notions to their reading. The paradigmatic example would be the Scholastic theologians, who were corrupted by having studied so much philosophy. This training led them to build their interpretations on Aristotelian distinctions and concepts, seeking a perfect marriage of pagan discoveries and revealed truth. This is indeed recognizably the project of figures like Aquinas, and for Zwingli it is completely wrong-headed. If you want to understand God's message, just pray to him for guidance and then read the text with open eyes. Given the long and torturous history of debates over scriptural hermeneutics, this attitude looks naive, even cavalier. It is a bit more nuanced than it sounds though, because Zwingli admits, indeed insists, that many passages need to be read figuratively, for instance when God is described in the Bible as if he had a body. We should appeal to scripture itself for guidance, not to any human authority. One passage may tell us how to understand another. Of course, the more sophisticated the approach to the text, the less plausible it is that its meaning is just obvious. But Zwingli had one more card to play here, namely his skill in Greek and Hebrew. This was a rare enough attainment that he could, as it were, pull scholarly rank in the middle of any dispute by laying down on his own authority what the original version of the text actually said. The Reformers knew that this sort of humanist training was a valuable weapon in religious debate, which is why Zwingli's immediate successor in Zurich, Theodor Bibliander, promoted the study of Hebrew along the lines so enthusiastically proposed in Italy by Pico della Mirandola. But, as Zwingli was to discover, unanimity could not be established just by pointing at the Bible and bragging about your Greek. Upholders of the scripture alone interpretive approach could still disagree with one another. One such disagreement was bred within the ranks of Zwingli's own followers. The troublemakers who rejected tithes and pushed for more radical iconoclasm came to think that Christians should be baptized only once they were old enough to embrace faith in God. As mentioned last time, they were given the pejorative name of Anabaptists, referring to the fact that they baptized adults again on the grounds that infant baptism is not efficacious. Zwingli was in a difficult position here because, like Luther, he admitted that outer works could be efficacious only when they stem from inner faith. Anabaptism was premised on principles he himself endorsed. But for precisely this reason, he was unsparing in his opposition to this group. Essie frankly commented, There are still some who ascribe their heresies to us. For that reason we are their most bitter enemies. On Zwingli's analysis, the Anabaptists were in fact giving too much power to outer works. Being baptized cannot cleanse us from sin, but is only a sign that a person is pledged to the Christian faith. This, he insisted, is the meaning of the word sacrament, a sign or symbol, and nothing more. The same idea lies at the core of a more famous disagreement, namely the dispute between Zwingli and Luther over the sacrament of the Eucharist. This crucial ceremony of Christian practice, in which bread and wine are designated as Christ's body and blood, had long been an occasion for applying philosophical ideas to theology, and their own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, this is true of the Zwingli-Luther debate too. They agreed in rejecting the Catholic account of the Eucharist, which had been upheld by Aquinas. The bread and wine are literally changed in their substance to become flesh and blood, hence the term transubstantiation. The communion wafer still looks and tastes like bread, but that's because the accidental properties of the bread have remained while the substance is transformed. By now, you should already be able to guess on what grounds Luther disagreed with this analysis, there was no basis for it in Scripture. Instead, he taught the doctrine called consubstantiation, meaning that there is both the substance of bread and the substance of Christ's body in the Eucharistic host. For Zwingli, this too was a ridiculous, and worse, unscriptural explanation. He took a radically different position, according to which there is no substantial or real change in the bread at all. Rather, when Christ said to his disciples at the Last Supper, take this bread and eat it, for it is my body, he just meant that the bread symbolized his body. It was a simple metaphor, the kind of thing we see all the time in Scripture, including in similar statements of Christ himself, as when he said that he was a vine, meaning that Christian religion branches off from him. Here then, we have a dramatic illustration of the problem with the Reformers appeal to the clear meaning of Scripture. Luther and Zwingli look at the same simple phrase, namely, this is my body, and they cannot agree what it means. As Bill Clinton so rightly remarked, it depends what the meaning of the word is is. In fact, quite a lot depended on this. Luther said, I cannot regard Zwingli and all his teaching as Christian at all. He is seven times more dangerous than when he was a pabist. So, as Zwingli's biographer G.R. Potter also so rightly remarked, the word of the Bible was indeed authoritative, but authoritative only when properly understood. Why exactly did the two disagree so strongly about the proper understanding of the Eucharist? As Zwingli might have warned, it had a lot to do with their philosophical presuppositions. Remember, Luther was trained by nominalist scholastics who were committed to voluntarism and taught that God can do anything that is not actually contradictory. So, for him, when Christ says, this bread is my body, this should be taken literally, unless it is shown that this is impossible. But there is no reason God can't make Christ's body co-present with bread. Indeed, he can make the body co-present with many bits of bread simultaneously and in different locations just as the soul is simultaneously present in all the parts of the body or as speech can simultaneously persuade many hearers. Luther complains that the Zwinglians adopt the wrong standard of proof. They want to be given a rational explanation of why something so miraculous should be believed. But that is not how religion works, says Luther. Rather, we should believe whatever we are told unless it is impossible. In his inimitable fashion, he puts it like this. This is what they say, what need is there for me to believe in a baked God? Wait and see. He will bake them when the time comes so that their hides will sizzle. Zwingli, by contrast, was trained at Vienna by realists and was thus comfortable with the idea that verbal expressions are mere signs that refer to some reality out in the world. For him, this is just how language works and must work. Otherwise, as he puts it, I could give someone a monkey just by writing the word monkey on a piece of paper and handing it to them. Like baptism, the Eucharistic host is a mere sign that denominates some other reality, in this case, Christ's body. To make this plausible, Zwingli shows off the historical sense he's acquired through his humanist training. As Jews, Christ's disciples would have been familiar with the rituals of circumcision and the sacrificial lamb, both of which involve actual physical blood. They understood immediately that Christ was transforming these rituals into something purely symbolic, which is why they didn't express bewilderment at the Last Supper, as you would do if you thought someone had just literally turned some bread into his own body. As this line of argument shows, there was a further, even more fundamental philosophical issue lurking behind the disagreement over the Eucharist, namely the role of the body. Like Erasmus, Zwingli was a thoroughgoing spiritualist who thought that religion is about the internal state of the soul. Since the soul cannot be affected by anything physical, the Eucharist cannot be about the nature of the body that is being eaten. Rather, the physical act of eating must represent something at the spiritual level, namely faith. Hence the Zwingliian motto, to eat is to believe, which sounds better in Latin, Edere est Credere. Luther saw things differently. With the incarnation of God as a human at the center of his religious imagination, he embraced the idea that the same thing could be both spiritual and physical. Hence the tone of his dismissal of Zwingli's position in this passage, and in his saints on earth. As I say, Zwingli would not appreciate the idea that his teaching on the Eucharist, or any other theological matter, was informed by philosophical ideas. In one treatise on the question, he even starts by promising not to do any philosophizing, unless absolutely necessary. But philosophy did play a role in the Zwingliian movement, and the reverse was also true. The Reformers had a huge impact on the history of philosophy. In fact, this might be a good moment to step back and consider the longer-term relevance of the early Reformation for our subject. I'm guessing that some of you have been thinking in this and other recent episodes that we are having to discuss an awful lot of theology. Worries about grace, predestination, and now even baptism and the Eucharist have been on the menu, along with the sausages. In some cases, these discussions have related immediately to standard philosophical issues, like the problem of free will. In other cases, the philosophical significance is less easy to spot, but no less profound. Let's just think about the way that, under Zwingli's leadership, Zürich effectively seceded from Christendom as it had been for many centuries. In retrospect, we know that much of Europe eventually became Protestant. But at the time, this was a breathtaking assertion of the right of a single community to determine its own religious affairs. The emergence of Anabaptism shows that Zwingli himself could not accept what he had unleashed. He excoriated the Anabaptists for separating themselves and refusing to accept others as true Christians. In a sense, this was a principled complaint. Zwingli believed that a Christian community would be a mix of the faithful and the faithless, and saw no prospect of making religious purity a criterion for membership, as he accused the Anabaptists of doing. After all, only God knows who the righteous are. But in another sense, Zwingli was echoing the charge made by Catholics against the Zwinglians. Here was a lawless, antisocial rebellion in the guise of piety. Having set itself up as a kind of mini-Rome, the city of Zürich had to decide whether to persecute its own heretics. Zwingli wrestled with this problem, as he was, for instance, by turns strict and lenient, when it came to enforcing unity of liturgy among all parishes. On the not-so-distant horizon was religious fragmentation, and with it, political fragmentation. Once the authority of the papacy was removed, and the priesthood of all believers declared, it became possible, even plausible, that every community would choose its own religious convictions. This was clear from the very beginning of the Reformation, and founders like Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli already fought against it. But using hindsight again, we can see that the proliferation of confessions within Protestantism was likely, if not inevitable. Closely related to this was the burgeoning idea of faith as a private individual matter. This is really just an extreme version of religious fragmentation, with the fragments now being the size of just one person at a time. We saw Luther saying that rulers cannot coerce people in matters of faith, and Zwingli allowing private citizens to retrieve religious art from churches before the art was destroyed. That looks like toleration for veneration of images at home, so long as iconoclasm could prevail in public. Such pragmatic compromises are going to open the door for an unprecedented divide between private and public spheres. We take this divide for granted now, but it has a history which traces back to the early 16th century. Alongside these tendencies within the Reformation as a whole, we have a contribution that is more distinctively Zwinglian. He insisted that priests are not conduits for everyday miracles like the transformation of bread into Christ's body. What happens in churches is significant, but only because of what it signifies, namely spiritual ideas and beliefs. This was a step towards what is sometimes called demystification, or secularization, a trend we can also see in the reformers' abolition of the saints, their miracles, and their relics. Increasingly, the world is going to be seen as the creation of an infinitely transcendent, and thus infinitely distant, God, who remains aloof from what He has made. Zwingli's way of thinking unwittingly makes space for an autonomous, secular approach to a world drained of miracles and comprehensible through reason. But at the same time, the foundations of Aristotelian science were being removed. We've already seen another early reformer, Bolangton, exploring the possibilities of a non-Aristotelian natural philosophy. In this generation of reformers, then, we can see suggestions of a future in which the world is approached in a way that is neither overtly religious nor based on the ideas of classical antiquity. Of course, we're still not seeing anything quite like the science that will emerge a few generations further down the line, but as they almost said in The Sound of Music, we are in the 16th century, going on 17th. Next time, though, we'll be moving on by only a few years, and staying in what is modern-day Switzerland. We still have one major founding father of the Reformation to introduce. He hailed from France, but was above all associated with Geneva. So don't be guilty of a Swiss miss. Make sure to catch the next episode on John Calvin, here on The History of Philosophy, without any caps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, We Are Not Our Own, John Calvin. Modern-day analytic philosophers do not, by and large, take inspiration from the 16th century founders of the Reformation, but there is a notable exception in the work of Alvin Plantinga, who as it happens taught at Notre Dame where I got my PhD. Plantinga is a leading philosopher of religion who explicitly refers to John Calvin in setting out one of his most famous ideas, a so-called Reformed epistemology that proposes a new way of defending the rationality of religious belief. Usually, religious philosophers argue that belief in Christianity or the existence of God can be proven, or at least shown to be rational, by appealing to premises that an atheist might accept. Thus, in the natural theology tradition, one might point to features of the universe that suggest it is well-designed, features everyone should recognize. On this basis, one can infer that the universe has a designer, namely God. Plantinga suggests a different approach. For him, it could be rational simply to believe that God exists without any argument. This could be, as Plantinga puts it, properly basic, a fitting entry in the beliefs we accept without further justification. How could it be rational simply to believe in something that is so controversial? Well, Plantinga says, what if you are aware of God's presence immediately, in the way that we are aware of sensory experiences or memories? It would be just like when you rationally believe you had an almond croissant for breakfast, or see that a giraffe is standing in front of you, without needing to offer any rationale for these beliefs. Theists may just find themselves having a belief like that, but about God. To illustrate how this could work, Plantinga refers to an idea set forth in Calvin's major theological treatise, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This was a central work of the Reformation, published in 1532 in Basel, and then appearing in numerous expanded editions, with the final version of 1560 being five times as long as the first. Early on in The Institutes, Calvin refers to an awareness of divinity that all of us have, an inborn tendency to believe in God. Plantinga says, Calvin's claim is that one who accedes to this tendency and in these circumstances accepts the belief that God has created the world is entirely within his epistemic rights in doing so. His belief need not be based on any other propositions at all. Under these conditions, he is perfectly rational and accepting belief in God in the utter absence of any argument. Now, as Plantinga is himself a Calvinist, I can hardly object to his taking inspiration from John Calvin, who, as Plantinga remarks, is as good a Calvinist as any. But I would gently correct his interpretation. Calvin's stance might imply that it is rational to believe in God without argument, but this is not what Calvin was trying to say. The question of whether religious belief is rational was not on the table in the 16th century, for the good reason that no one at that time would ever have thought to deny it. Calvin's point is rather that, as he says, people who do not worship the single Christian God are without excuse, because they have been born with a sense of his presence. God bestows it upon us, not to ensure that belief in Him is rational or fundamental, but to ensure that the irreligious cannot complain that they were never aware of Him in the first place. If you ask Calvin on what basis we should believe in God, he will not necessarily refer to the inborn sense, but will offer the standard proof based on the design of the universe. He's especially impressed by the heavenly bodies, which are powerful evidence of a powerful Creator. You can give rational arguments in favor of the veracity of scripture too, but Calvin thinks that in our fallen, sinful state, even this is not enough. Ultimately, certainty lies only in faith, faith in God and in the revelation He has sent to humankind. Calvin's whole line of thought here is similar to one he presents later on in the Institutes concerning morality. He says that we are all born with a conscience, a sense of good and evil that the tradition called awareness of the natural law. Calvin accepts this, and says that the purpose of natural law is to make humans to be without excuse. So again his focus is on the idea that the disbelievers and the wicked are justly condemned. Indeed, when Calvin invokes the natural law, it is usually to blame someone, like the Anabaptists, for failing to observe it. In any case, it is not enough to embrace natural law. Calvin distinguishes between two kingdoms, an earthly or temporal one, and a heavenly or spiritual one. Within the temporal realm, natural law is a reliable guide, and it can be used to lay down laws within secular society whose aim is to protect public observance of religion and keep the peace. For Calvin, these laws have absolute validity. He says that subjects should submit to the rulers they find placed over them. God appointed these men to hold authority, so they cannot be resisted without God being resisted at the same time. Even tyrants have been sent as divine punishment and must simply be endured with patience. Fortunately, worldly life and its laws have no effect on the far more important concern, which is eternal salvation. You don't get saved by obeying any earthly ruler or by following the natural law. You get saved when God decides to save you. Of course, we've already seen all these same ideas in Luther. But it's still striking to see Calvin endorsing such a passive attitude toward secular authority, given that he was a refugee dissident whose adopted city of Geneva became a magnet for other like-minded dissidents. He fled his native France in 1535 after being educated as a lawyer and humanist. His writing career actually began with a commentary on a work by Seneca. Thereafter, he lived in several cities where Protestantism was on the rise, notably Strasbourg, at the invitation of another leading reformer named Vardhman Busser. Together with Busser and Melanchthon, he engaged in debates with representatives of the Catholic Church, including Johannes Eck, who I've mentioned in passing as a critic of both Luther and Zwingli. Eventually, Calvin wound up in Geneva, where he was the leading religious figure, helped to draft the city's constitution, and tried to ensure its precarious survival as a Protestant city-state. Politically and militarily, Geneva provided a kind of buffer between Catholic France and the cities of the Swiss Confederacy, like Bern and Zurich. In the judgment of the Scottish reformer John Knox, Calvin's Geneva was the most famous school of Christ. It banned unlicensed books and introduced social restrictions on everything from dancing to indecent songs, gambling, and immodest hairstyles or dress for women. Notoriously, in 1553, the city executed Michael Servetus as a heretic because of his deviant views on the Trinity and other religious matters. This looks pretty appalling. Even as Calvin and the other Protestants insisted on their own religious freedom, they were far from willing to extend freedom to others. Modern scholars are more apt than Calvin and his God to find excuses for wicked deeds, so they have pointed out that Servetus's radical views would have gotten him executed pretty much anywhere in Europe at that time, that failing to deal with him would have been a political scandal that could have weakened Geneva's position, and that Calvin at least pled that the execution should be by decapitation and not burning, which is far more excruciating. But Servetus was burnt anyway, and Calvin expressed no regret over it. Calvin's political views put him in a difficult position when it came to Protestant sympathizers in France, who would come to be called the Huguenots. As one scholar of Calvin's thought has remarked, the whole enterprise of Reformation in France was, at the very best, a skating on the thin ice on the margins of legality, and more usually was blatantly illegal. How could this be reconciled with the advice to obey authorities however objectionable they may seem? Well, like Luther, Calvin made an exception in cases where rulers direct their subjects to break the commandments of scripture. We should always obey the prince unless it means disobeying God. Still, Calvin's advice to his fellow Protestants was to do what he had done, declare their faith and leave France, or failing that, simply not attend mass, and failing that, attend mass but beg God for forgiveness the whole while. Not exactly a recipe for evolution. Aside from his respect for political stability, Calvin had another reason to advise patience. He believed that whatever was happening was part of the divine plan. The world is governed down to the smallest detail by God's power, wisdom, and justice, so that even apparent evils like tyranny or the oppression of faithful Christians must serve some purpose. We rarely, if ever, know what that purpose is, but trust in Providence can still provide comfort in the face of adversity. When the light of divine Providence has once shone upon a godly man, he is then relieved and set free from every care. So things are always for the best, even if we cannot see why. This is a familiar approach to theodicy, that is the question of why God allows evil. It does not mean denying that some things are in fact evil. Rather, evils are anticipated and made a part of the providential order. So great and boundless is his wisdom, says Calvin, that he knows right well how to use evil instruments to do good. All this had been said by the Stoics in antiquity, as Calvin is well aware. Remember, he started out his career writing on the Stoic Seneca. He does, however, distance himself from the Stoics insofar as he makes God's providence the direct cause of all events, rather than having God work through chains of natural causation or even identifying nature with God. So Calvin is a thoroughgoing determinist who thinks that God foreknows and decrees everything we do, indeed everything that happens, no matter how trivial. He does, however, accept that there are genuinely efficacious causes other than God. That's precisely why he speaks of created things as God's instruments. If God wants something to be burned, he may use fire to do it. And in that case, the fire really does burn the thing, albeit at God's command. Similarly, if God wants to punish a people for their sins, he may use a wicked tyrant to do it. The two cases differ in that the tyrant does evil willingly, whereas the fire does not burn things willingly. Thus, Calvin stresses that humans are not like rocks or tree stumps. We perform our actions voluntarily, but as God has decreed, we will do. So, if you pose to Calvin the question at the center of the debate between Luther and Erasmus as to whether humans have free will, he will tell you that it depends what you mean. If you're asking whether humans can act independently of God, and whether there are alternative paths genuinely open to us, the answer is no. As Calvin says, we are not our own, but the Lord's. And he uses humans like rods, in whatever way he pleases, to guide their plans, to direct their efforts. Everything depends on his providence, and not on the caprice of wicked humankind. But, if you're asking whether our will actually causes our actions, the answer is yes. The same action is willed both by God and the human agent, though in different ways. Clearly, God's will cannot be resisted by a mere human, so we will do whatever he wants us to. But, we are still at fault when we do evil, because we want to do it. Our sinful will is just as real as fire's ability to burn, and exercises just as much causal influence. All this is despite the fact that, of course, God would much rather that humans were not sinful. Thus, Calvin says, in a treatise specifically devoted to the topic of providence, what was done contrary to his will was yet not done without his will, because it would not have been done at all unless he had allowed. So he permitted it not unwillingly, but willingly. Thus in sinning, they did what God did not will in order that God through their evil will might do what he willed. If anyone objects that this is beyond his comprehension, I confess it. But what wonder if the immense and incomprehensible majesty of God exceed the limits of our intellect? Among the numerous objections one might pose here, and we'll get to more of them shortly, would be the question of how we are meant to earn salvation, if it is God who decrees who will sin and who will be righteous. The answer, of course, is that we cannot earn salvation. On this point, Calvin is in full agreement with Luther. Salvation is not merited through good works, or even by wishing to be good. Instead, God decides, before we are even born, or strictly speaking in timeless eternity, who will be among the elect, and who will be reprobate, that is, who is saved and who is not. This is Calvin's notorious doctrine of double providence, which troubled even Luther, even though it arguably just spells out more clearly what Luther's doctrines must amount to. If God selects those who will receive grace, then he is surely selecting those who will not. It is a meaningless fudge to say that God does not choose to reprobate, but merely omits to give them grace, since God is obviously choosing that omission. It is to Calvin's credit that he lays out so clearly the implications of the doctrine that we are saved through faith and not works. As C.S. Lewis put it, Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience to build a system to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions, and give without flinching the dark answers. But, as that quotation also suggests, plenty of people find Calvin's conclusions repellent. If this is where Luther's path leads, better not to follow it in the first place. Calvin seems to be describing the ultimate unfree and unfair election, in which humans are condemned to infinite suffering in a completely random fashion. Why in the world would Calvin, or indeed anyone, want to believe in this? By way of an answer, we should firstly remember that the sorting of humans into the saved and the damned is not in fact random, but part of a perfectly providential order. It's just that we mere humans cannot hope to understand that order. As Calvin puts it, people are damned because God has so willed it. Why he's so willed is not for our reason to inquire, for we cannot comprehend it. Furthermore, even if God did arrange things randomly, we would be in no position to condemn him for this. Calvin is a particularly clear example of what has come to be called a divine command theorist, that is, someone who believes that whatever God does is good because he does it, and not the other way around. Thus Calvin writes, Whatever God wills by the very fact that he wills it must be considered righteous. Besides, even on our own limited understanding, it would be perfectly just if everyone were damned, because we all deserve it. This is not an idiosyncratic view of Calvin's, but standard Christian teaching us in Sagustin. Because of original sin, we are all born wicked and worthy of punishment. For any one of us to be saved is already an act of undeserved grace. So whether God offers this to only a few, to many, or to everyone, he's doing more than we have any right to expect. And it makes sense that God should choose some for grace and others for punishment, because this is the only way he can display both mercy and justice. In fact, given that none of us deserve to be among those who get mercy, this election actually has to be arbitrary. Another way to appreciate this point is to remember that many humans were born before the coming of Christ, so they are all barred from receiving grace. And this looks pretty arbitrary too. Why should you be damned just for being born too early? But it's something that pretty well all Christians accept. The only alternative was to say that God retroactively saves those who lived before Christ if they deserved it. As we'll see in a later episode, contact with the peoples of the Americas around this very time would make this problem more pressing. They could not be saved because of where they were born. These reflections show that Calvin's apparently radical teachings is actually deeply rooted in older Christian theology. In fact, we find others flirting with such ideas much earlier in history, notably John Scodas Ariugina way back in the 9th century, as I discussed in episode 198. As Ariugina pointed out, double predestination seems to be an obvious, though usually unacknowledged, implication of Augustine's theory of grace, a theory that had defined orthodoxy for about a millennium before Calvin came along. Arguably then, the question is not why Calvin says these things, but why it has taken us so long to get to a thinker who says them so boldly and forthrightly. Here, I think the answer is obvious. Calvin's position looks, at first glance, extremely unappealing, and is easily avoided. We need to only say that humans do contribute something, however small, to their own salvation, perhaps in cooperation with God, and we've seen how theologians like Gabriel Beal tried to do just that. To accept Calvin's doctrine, by contrast, we need firstly to wrap our minds around the compatibilist notion that humans can be responsible for willing actions that have been timelessly decreed by God. We then need to accept that we and our loved ones may be sentenced to eternal tortures as the result of something that from our own admittedly limited perspective might as well be a coin flip. And then, as if that weren't bad enough, when we express even slight hesitation about accepting these things, Calvin rages at us for having the temerity to doubt God's infinite and inscrutable justice and wisdom. One of his favorite themes is the wickedness of undue curiosity. He charges the scholastics in particular with measuring God by the yardstick of their own carnal stupidity. Thus out of curiosity, they fly off into empty speculations. Anyone who seeks really to understand God's providential design, and especially the part of that design that involves predestination, is being impious and arrogant. Calvin can wax downright poetic on this topic, as when he writes, But these nicely turned phrases ultimately come down to him saying, And yet, many people did believe it. Calvinism spread like wildfire across Europe, taking root in Britain, among other places. So it's worth asking one more time, why? Though his theology is indeed relentlessly consistent, and philosophers prize consistency, I think that the explanation does not lie in its philosophical power. Nor do I think Calvin wanted it to. As we've seen, he polemicized against scholastic and classical philosophers alike, and was more than happy to admit that his theology demands assent to something we cannot understand. One might even go so far as to say that Calvinism is theologically persuasive in part because it is so philosophically unpersuasive. Here, we have a version of Christianity that you can only believe by faith. Faith, for Calvin, consists precisely in confident assurance in God's mercy, without needing to comprehend that mercy. His message is to stop trying to figure out how or why God will save you, and just trust that he will indeed save you. So, while double predestination may seem like a terrifying idea, Calvin thinks it is in fact deeply comforting. It asks you only to have faith, and in faith lies unshakable confidence and peace of mind, even if the faithful have occasional doubts. Especially for people who faced acute suffering, for example, at the hands of repressive Catholic authorities in France, it was surely a relief to think that everything they were experiencing was part of God's plan to bring them to an eternal reward. A later illustration, which will be familiar to those following the series of podcasts on Africana philosophy, would be the way 19th century African Americans in the Calvinist tradition said that slavery was an evil that would be overruled by God, that is, turned to good ends. As this shows, despite Calvin's condemnation of rational speculation, his impact on the history of philosophy was enormous. Here, we come to yet another far-reaching and unintended effect of Reformation thought. Calvin insists that human reason is utterly incapable of grasping the core truths of Christian religion, which are indeed repellent to rational reflection. Instead, he tells us to turn to the Bible, applying the typical Protestant method of using scripture alone. He thus hammers a wedge between religion and philosophy in a way that few medieval thinkers had done. Indeed, across the history of philosophy before the 16th century, you see a wide range of views about the relation of reason and religion, but hardly anyone held that reason is utterly useless, or even actively misleading, when applied to anything in the neighborhood of faith. Ironically enough, when modern-day atheists casually assume that there is an antithesis between religion and philosophy, that faith and reason are mutually exclusive, they are unwittingly echoing the ideas of John Calvin. It was Calvin as much as anyone who created the situation where it might occur to people to say that religion is avowedly and intentionally non-rational. So in a sense, he did after all help to create the problem that Plantinga tried to solve. But of course we do not need to wait for Plantinga for a philosopher inspired by Calvin and the other early reformers. For all the skepticism expressed towards reason by men like Luther and Calvin, there were going to be plenty of people in the coming generations who wanted to combine reformed doctrines with philosophy, believe it or not, even with scholasticism. I'll try to do justice to this topic next time, as we explore more varieties of Protestant thought in the 16th century in what is bound to be a damned interesting episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Cats.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I too can ask questions. Protestant Scholasticism. As we saw last time, Calvin was no scholastic philosopher. Unlike Luther, he studied law, not theology, and his major work The Institutes contains in its many pages a scant ten references to Aristotle. And like Luther, he was tireless in carping at the time-wasting pedantries of the scholastics. So the prospects for a Calvinist or Reformation version of scholasticism look dim. Indeed, the scholar Richard A. Miller has observed that some modern-day Protestants would consider this to be an unpleasant theological oxymoron. To be Protestant and scholastic at the same time was to be a living contradiction. Yet as Miller and others have shown, there were plenty of Protestants who deployed the intellectual tools of Aristotle's logic, took inspiration from his ethics and natural philosophy, and even drew on Catholic authorities like Thomas Aquinas. And one of them was a close collaborator of Calvin. His name was Theodore Beza, and he was the first rector of the Academy at Geneva. Beza may be credited with supplying a rational defense of Calvinism, of the sort that Calvin himself failed to provide, or as I suggested in the last episode, deliberately chose not to provide. Beza outlived Calvin by more than four decades, dying only in 1605. His longevity and position as an educator gave him ample opportunity to put his stamp on the intellectual life of Geneva and the Calvinist movement more generally. A Catholic critic went so far as to say that Beza was �like a pope to the Calvinists, not meant as a compliment and not likely to be received as one, but still a testimony to his importance.� Beza was open in his use of scholastic methods. He said, for instance, that he would not be importing the newfangled ideas of the Paris thinker Peter Ramos, when they swept across Europe, but would instead stick religiously � if you'll pardon the expression � to Aristotle. As a Calvinist, he placed limits on the capacity of fallen human reason, but he still believed that �reasoning� was of great importance for Protestant thought. One should study dialectic to learn how to test one's own ideas for consistency and for the sake of refuting one's opponents. It sometimes said that for Protestant intellectuals, scholasticism offered a set of useful methods while its doctrines were to be rejected, and Beza might well have said this himself. Like other reformers and the humanists, he often used the word �scholastics� as a term of abuse when criticizing the teachings of the schoolmen. Yet we can find him using their ideas at the heart of his own Calvinist teaching on the topic of faith and salvation. He held that human reason had held mastery over the will before the fall from grace through original sin, but now in our fallen state, the will often undermines or overwhelms our reason. So in the terms we apply to medieval scholastics like Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Scotus, Beza is a rationalist when it comes to the state of humans before the fall, and a voluntarist when it comes to our situation once corrupted by sin. As a result, it is not enough to be rationally convinced about topics like God's providence. The will must also be reformed through the gift of grace, just as Calvin had been saying, albeit in more philosophical language. This nicely exemplifies the way school distinctions could be reformed for use by Protestants. At the same time, the schools themselves were being reformed. Throughout the 16th century, we see fairly dramatic changes in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe, both in terms of personnel and curriculum. As territories and their rulers adopted one or another Protestant confession, faculty members had to follow suit. Nowadays, academia is often a precarious environment to pursue a career, but at least we don't have to worry about the sort of thing that happened in Heidelberg in 1576, when 11 out of 16 professors left voluntarily, or were fired, after Elector, Ludwig VI, adopted Lutheranism. Only seven years later, Calvinism became the new order of the day, leading to further changes in staffing. As for curriculum, the Protestants' reorganization of these institutions showed their allegiance to humanist values. Chairs in Hebrew and Greek came in, alongside empirical topics like history, geography, and anatomy. Meanwhile, the more abstract study of metaphysics was on the wane, and Aristotelian natural philosophy was not a high priority either. These upheavals were necessarily accompanied by a change in the reading list. Textbooks and encyclopedias were churned out by the printing presses, with Philipp von Langthon's works in particular being assigned to many students. There was a general trend towards studying disciplines individually, rather than seeing them as forming a united structure, as the medieval scholastics had envisioned. Teachers were now more likely to be specialists, focusing on only one or two disciplines, instead of lecturing in rotation across the whole curriculum. If students saw any common link between the different courses they were offered, it came more in the form of method and terminology. This was a legacy of the continuing stress on Aristotelian logic as the introductory topic that needed to be mastered by all young scholars. But again, it was not only method that was retained from the Aristotelian tradition. An outline of the curriculum taught in Freiburg in 1593 stated that the peripatetic philosophers should be taught, defended, and expounded whenever they teach rightly. If this all sounds rather unsystematic to you, then you aren't alone. The scholastic Bartholomew Kekkerman tried to impose a greater degree of order on the school and university curricula around the turn of the 17th century. He was a Calvinist who hailed from Gdansk in modern-day Poland, and taught in Heidelberg before returning home in 1602 to teach at the Gdansk Gymnasium. He died in 1609. He produced a series of textbooks on philosophy towards the end of his life, for which he used the word system, and which he intended as a complement for the reading of primary literature. Thus, Kekkerman sought to move education away from the rather unstructured approach he saw in the humanist movement. Here he would have had in mind the presentation of individual common places for each discipline that had been promoted by Erasmus and the Langthon. Kekkerman was firmly convinced that such a well-structured presentation of the rational sciences could be of support to true religion. He wrote that, Philosophy is of the highest utility and greatest necessity to the study of theology, both for establishing Protestant doctrine and for defending that doctrine against critics. He also had to fend off critics of philosophy like Daniel Hofmann, who argued that a genuinely Christian university would have no place for it. Against Hofmann and other anti-rationalists, Kekkerman insisted that philosophy is a form of wisdom bestowed upon humankind as a gift from God. It is impossible that philosophical truth and religious truth come into conflict, something that Kekkerman characteristically proved using syllogistic arguments like this one, What is one and simple is not multiplied, truth is one and simple, therefore truth is not multiplied and divided, that is, into rival truths of theology and philosophy. So apparent conflicts between philosophy and faith are just that, only apparent. Admittedly, it might take some subtlety to resolve such conflicts, as when Kekkerman said that Aristotelian natural philosophy is right to say that nothing can be generated from nothing, even though it is possible for God to create from nothing. Rather surprisingly, Protestant schoolmen were ready to adopt the same friendly attitude towards Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which they might have found deeply problematic. In this work, Aristotle clearly teaches that humans can achieve happiness through their natural capacity for practical virtue and wisdom. How could Protestants possibly make use of this text when they believe that good works stem from faith and that only faith secures a happy afterlife? For an answer, we can turn to Protestant commentaries on the ethics in the 16th century and beyond. A recent study of these counts 27 such commentaries by Lutherans alone. As this shows, Aristotle was still taken as an authoritative writer for ethics. In part, we can explain this by reminding ourselves that Luther and the other leading reformers believed that good behavior and political order should be encouraged across society even among the sinful majority, or rather especially among the sinful, since the faithful would naturally perform good works. But some exegetes went further than that. A commentary written by the Calvinist thinker Peter Martyr Vermigli summarizes Aristotle's doctrines in syllogistic form, and shows the harmony between these arguments and the teaching of scripture. Not content to be the living contradiction that is a Protestant scholastic, Vermigli went so far as to be a Calvinist follower of Thomas Aquinas. Along with his Italian colleague, Giro Malo Zanki, Vermigli has been taken to represent Calvinist Thomism, which sounds not so much oxymoronic as plain old moronic. How could any serious scholar simultaneously follow Calvin and value the teachings of this central theologian of the Catholic tradition? Actually, that was part of the attraction. Zanki delighted in refuting the Catholic doctrine of grace with premises taken from Aquinas' writings, which made for an effective dialectical weapon. Both Vermigli and Zanki were trained in the ways of scholasticism in Italy, in Vermigli's case in the center of Aristotelianism that was Padua. Once they converted to Calvinism, the Inquisition made it impossible for them to stay there. Even if your name is Peter Martyr Vermigli, you might not actually want to be a martyr. So they both made their way to the safe haven of Strasbourg, where they taught together in the 1550s. Zanki would later teach in Heidelberg, where he produced his main writings. Like Keckerman, these two Calvinists believed that philosophy and faith could have a close and productive working relationship. In theory, Protestants settled all questions by consulting scripture, but we've seen how well that worked out in cases like Zwingli and Luther's disagreement over the Eucharist. Philosophical tools could be used, with caution, to settle such disputes among the Reformers, as well as to refute the Catholics. Aristotle in particular was a vital resource in this endeavor. Zanki considered him the best of all authors after God, and prepared an edition of Aristotle's Physics at the behest of the Protestant printer Johann Sturm. In his introduction, Zanki endorses the study of natural philosophy in forthright terms. Vermigli and Zanki thus left ample room for what is sometimes called natural theology, that is, the use of normal human reason to prove the existence of God and learn about his nature. As we saw, even Calvin had allowed some scope for natural theology, but really only so that he could convict the irreligious of having no excuse for their unbelief. For these later Calvinists, natural theology has a more positive function. Using our inborn capacities, we can get quite far in understanding the divine, and then go on to supplement this knowledge using revelation. This is exactly the way Aquinas thought about the relation between natural reason and revealed truth. Vermigli further agrees with him that the resulting combined body of theological knowledge has the structure of an Aristotelian science, with principles that generate demonstrated conclusions. None of this would necessarily be distinctively Calvinist, of course, but like Theodor Beza, our two Italians also applied Aristotelian ideas to the more characteristic topic of predestination. Thus Vermigli invoked a premise from one of Aristotle's logical works that whatever happens is necessary once it has happened. Given that God's knowledge of the future has already been accomplished eternally, this means that the future is necessary, just as Calvin taught. And both men also used scholastic methods when it came to defusing the disturbing implications of that determinism. Vermigli's school training allowed him to make some subtle but crucial distinctions in this area. Strictly speaking, the damned are not predestined to hell because God has not selected them out for their fate as he did with the elect. Rather, he simply allows them to damn themselves through sin. Furthermore, since faith generates good works, someone who does good can observe their own behavior and conclude that they are indeed among the elect. Sankey may have been the first to present this reassuring thought as a syllogism, along the following lines, By this point, you should hopefully be getting the sense that Protestant scholasticism was not only a very real phenomenon, but a phenomenon found across central Europe. I've already discussed thinkers active in modern-day Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and France. And here's a location you almost certainly didn't expect to hear mentioned in this episode, Croatia. It has to be included though, if only because of the activity of one Matthias Flakius Illyrikos. As the last part of his name indicates, he came from Istria, a peninsula on the western coast of Croatia. Flakius studied in Basel, Tübingen, and Wittenberg, where he was taught by none other than Melanchthon. Later he taught himself at Jena and elsewhere, including Frankfurt where he died in 1575. He's remembered especially for his treatise The Key to Sacred Scripture, published in 1567. It has been hailed as a pioneering work by 20th century philosophers interested in hermeneutics, like Wilhelm Diltaï and Hans Georg Gadamer. This is because Flakius tried to develop explicit rules for the interpretation of texts. As the title of his treatise indicates, he's especially interested in exegesis of the Bible, but his rules are of more general application and, in fact, echo to some extent, guidelines already used in antiquity to comment on Aristotle. The most important thing for the interpreter to decide is the purpose or overall intent of a work, which Flakius, following Melanchthon, calls its scope. Having determined this, all parts and aspects of the work can be read in light of their support of this central goal. Thus Flakius compares the scope to the face of a body and the parts of the body to its limbs. Particularly intriguing here is his idea that we firstly propose a possible scope as a kind of hypothesis, which we then test by reading the work, like trying a certain key in a lock, to borrow the metaphor of his title. Flakius deploys his knowledge of ancient philosophy to explain this procedure, saying that the hypothetical interpretation has only the status of what Plato called belief or doxa, whereas once confirmed it becomes knowledge or episteme. As a motto for the good interpreter, he cites Plato's adage that we must seek the one in the many and the many in the one. Plato would no doubt have been pleased by this and might have been even happier to learn that some progress was being made on another cause he supported, at least in his republic, the empowerment of women. We saw that Luther had fairly traditional notions about gender roles and he was hardly alone in that, but just as he unwittingly planted the seeds of political revolt, he opened the door, if only slightly, to the possibility that women might become spiritual leaders. After all, Luther taught the priesthood of all believers, and women can believe just as well as men. More or less this very point was made by Marie Dantier, a remarkable woman who preached the cause of reform in Strasbourg and Switzerland. She argued that the new Christian communities should be even-handed in their treatment of men and women, asking, do we have two Gospels, one for men, the other for women, one for the wise, the other for fools? She accepted, in line with an injunction laid down by Saint Paul, that women should not preach openly in the Church, but argued that this left open the course of writing and admonishing other Christians, which Dantier duly did, especially in a letter addressed to the Queen Marguerite de Navarre, which was full of attacks on the Catholic Church. Protestant printers were happy to disseminate such material, though the man who printed Dantier's letter was arrested for his trouble and might have been less happy at that stage. But the point is confirmed by the equally sensational case of Argula von Grumbach, who tried to intervene directly in this scholastic world we've been discussing in this episode. She was incensed at the treatment of a man named Arcasio who was put on trial for his reformist beliefs. So in 1523, she wrote a letter to the University of Ingolstadt, remonstrating with the theologians for persecuting Seyhofer. She sarcastically told them that, as far as I can see, that means that the hangman is accounted the most learned. In all, Argula's campaign involved writing seven letters to schoolmen and princes, which were collected and printed as a pamphlet that was put out in no fewer than 17 editions. We know that she also wrote to leading reformers like Luther and Melanchthon, though these are lost. She anticipated that some might object to the idea of a woman involving herself in such matters. In response, she delivered a line that might be invoked by any Protestant explaining why they are delving into the affairs of the universities, by the grace of God, I too can ask questions and hear answers. With this tour around Central Europe, we've come to the end of the series of episodes on the outbreak of the Reformation and its immediate philosophical implications. Its wider implications, geographically and chronologically, will be concerning us for many, many episodes to come. For now though, we'll be staying in and around 16th century Germany, as we look at some of the noteworthy figures who lived in the time of the Reformation, but are not especially known for their part in it. In particular, we'll be looking at contributors to science, like Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe. But first up will be a man who is better known for pseudoscience, thanks to his writings on magic and the occult. Less famous, but also worthy of note, is his treatise On the Nobility and Superiority of the Feminine Sex, a work that would surely have delighted Dantier and von Grumbach. Let us turn then from Arrghula to the solid days of early modern science, as we leaf the Reformation for now and address the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netzheim, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. We saw last time how Marie Dantier and Arguella von Grumbach were inspired by the spirit of the Reformation to speak out on religious matters. Ironically enough, in doing so they would not have had the support of the leading Reformers. As I mentioned in the earlier episode on him, Luther himself taught that women are best off staying home and keeping their mouths shut. But at this same time, some men were arguing in favor of women's emancipation. One of them was Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netzesheim. Early in the 16th century, he made his contribution to the long-running dispute over the virtues of women, often called by its French title the Querelle de France. We'll be returning to the general topic in a future installment, but since it is an early work by Agrippa and does him so much credit, I thought we might begin our survey of his multifaceted and rather puzzling career by examining his declamation on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex. Agrippa delivered it as a speech in 1509 at the University of Dul. It was dedicated to the titular president of the university, Margaret of Austria. Though the work did not secure him patronage from Margaret or the faculty position he coveted at Dul, it was a huge success by other measures. Just in the 16th century, the Latin original would be translated into French no fewer than five times, alongside two versions in each of three other languages, German, Italian, and English. Its eager reception was not thanks to its originality. Like other contributors to this genre, Agrippa is indebted to the Italian poet Boccaccio, who wrote in praise of women back in the 14th century. He also makes extensive use of the Triumph of Women, a treatise composed in about 1440 by Juan Rodriguez del Padron. And one of the most striking passages in Agrippa's declamation is closely parallel to remarks made several years earlier in Maria Equicolas' On Women. Agrippa repeats her complaint that women are subjected to the tyranny of their husbands, legally disenfranchised, and kept out of public life, with nothing to occupy them but needle and thread. Indeed, one of the more interesting points made by Agrippa concerns the legal status of women. He points out that Roman law was more generous in its dealings with women than the law of his own time. In antiquity, they could pass on their names to their children, had control over their dowry, and owned property, including slaves. This shows Agrippa's awareness of the way that customs and attitudes change over time. He thinks they should change again, now in favor of women. He argues for this philosophically, as when he says that the virtue of the soul is unaffected by sexual difference, and invokes Galen and Avicenna for the important role of female seed in reproduction, and Plato's Republic and its support for including women in the military. But more central to his case is scriptural evidence, to the point that the work has been called an exercise in applied theology. Agrippa, of course, realizes that biblical texts can be used to justify oppression of women, as with St. Paul's notorious instruction that women are to be subject to their husbands and silent in the church. These would have guided the attitudes expressed by Luther. But Agrippa discounts them on the grounds that God has a preference for no one. Actually, if God has a preference for anyone, it must be women. He saved Eve for his final creation, after all, and as the philosophers say, the first thing intended is the last done. Furthermore, it was really Adam who was at fault for the first sin and who propagated sin to all his descendants. Elsewhere, Agrippa argues that the first sin was the original act of sexual congress between Adam and Eve, which seems to apportion blame more equally. On the other hand, he also writes a treatise on the sacrament of marriage, which recommends that everyone should marry, and for love, not financial or political convenience. With Agrippa, as we'll be discovering, there is always an on the other hand. In the present case, it comes in the form of interpretations which take this whole declamation to be satirical. It must be said that some of his arguments are so ridiculous that it's hard to believe they are meant seriously, as when he says that when women fall down they always fall on their backs so as to look up at the exalted heavens. And speaking personally, I certainly hope he's kidding when he says that baldness makes men grotesque and beards make them look so ugly that they look like beasts. Sometimes Agrippa's feminist arguments even look like thinly veiled attacks on women. He demonstrates women's cleverness and resourcefulness by listing all the men they managed to deceive, like Adam, Samson, and Solomon. In this case, though, he anticipates the obvious objection and defends treacherous women for realizing that they have to come out on top when competing with men. He here cites the example of Pope Innocent III, who once told someone, If only one of us loses, I'd rather it was you. The question of Agrippa's sincerity hangs over his most important writings, if not his whole corpus. The central dilemma has been phrased by one scholar as follows, How could the same man have written an enthusiastic and uncritical summa of Renaissance magic, and also an aggressively skeptical, Fideist attack on all human knowledge, which presents the Bible as the only source of truth? The enthusiastic summa or compendium of magic is called on-occult philosophy, while the skeptical attack on knowledge bears the frank title, On the vanity and uncertainty of the sciences. His authorship of these dramatically different treatises allows us to compare him to contemporaries who explored Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and demonology, like Marsilio Ficino and Pico de la Mirandola, or alternatively, to critics of human rationality and upholders of faith in God and scripture, like Luther. During and after his lifetime, observers complained about both versions of Agrippa. He was blamed for everything from supporting the cause of Protestantism to being a sinister mage, wielding dark powers. The English playwright Philip Marlow explicitly compared his dramatic creation of Dr. Faustus to Agrippa, whose shadows made all Europe honor him, and a famous legend about Agrippa traveling with the devil in the form of a black dog is a source for Goethe's much later play about Faust. Agrippa's on-occult philosophy is in a sense two different books, because its original 1510 version was extensively revised and expanded to about double length in a second 1533 printed edition. The first version was sent to Agrippa's colleague Johannes Tritemius, who shared both his fascination with magic and his conviction that the practice of this art could be made consistent with Christian piety. Thus, Tritemius said, But nature is already capable of achieving quite a lot, according to Tritemius. This is why pagans have been capable of performing astounding feats, despite their lack of faith in the true God. The notion of natural magic was a common one in the Renaissance, also explored down in Italy by Ficino and Picco. Agrippa quotes Picco to the effect that, for example, by making flowers bloom already in March, a feat that we nowadays manage unnaturally by causing climate change. Alchemy would also be an art for isolating elemental natures and recombining them to make new substances, notably precious metals. But for Agrippa, such manipulation of the elemental natural world is only the first of three kinds of magic. There's also astrology, which is the science that deals with the higher world of the heavens, and then religion, which deals with the still higher world of divinity. Thus, Agrippa integrates theology into the occult sciences, portraying it as a science that deals with God and angels, as we might expect, but also demons, rituals, and powerful words and signs. All forms of magic function by exploiting the similarities and dissimilarities between things in the three worlds, elemental, celestial, and intellectual, or divine. As Agrippa puts it, magic teaches us how things differ from one another and how they agree. Thus, Agrippa explains the use of the magic square, a grid-shaped array of letters which will produce magical effects when one traces the pattern made by the letters in the name of a celestial body. He also evokes old ideas from the Pythagorean and Platonist tradition by saying that the magician can take advantage of the harmony and proportion between things because all things that are and are made subsist by and receive their power from number. That sounds like pure Pythagoreanism. And certainly classical sources are important for Agrippa, to the point that on-occult philosophy has been called a prime example of the revival of ancient paganism. But he also draws, especially in the revised 1533 edition, on the Hebrew mystical tradition called Qabalah. This is the reason he did not get that teaching position at the University of Dul. He was accused of heresy over his interest in Qabalah, this just one year before the Reuchlin Affair, which we have discussed earlier. As you'll remember, it involved attacks on a humanist who specialized in Hebrew studies. Apparently heedless of such opposition, Agrippa continued his study of this tradition and remained convinced of its magical efficacy and its compatibility with Christian religion. Or did he? In his treatise on the uncertainty of the sciences, he devotes a whole chapter to Qabalah, explaining correctly that the term means the tradition of knowledge passed down through the generations. Supposedly, Moses himself used this secret knowledge to work miracles like the parting of the Red Sea. But now Agrippa says that it is mere superstition used to perform tricks that should certainly not be compared to real miracles. This fits with the overall tone of the work, which the Agrippa scholar Paolo Zambelli has called an anti-encyclopedia. It begins by stating that, so far from allowing humans to transcend their natural limits, the arts and sciences are in fact highly damaging to us. By the end of the lengthy work, Agrippa has not changed his mind. He says that all the branches of learning are actually just human customs which are lacking in true demonstration and simply prevent people from devoting themselves to Christianity. Indeed, he says that nothing is so much opposed to Christian faith and religion as science. No two things are more incompatible with each other. This sentence was one of those quoted by the theologians of the University of Louvain when they condemned Agrippa, here following the example of their colleagues at the Sorbonne. And you can see why. Sandwiched between these general denunciations of the sciences at the beginning and end of Agrippa's book, we have a series of scandalous criticisms of every kind of human learning, from grammar to medicine to theology, with discussions of such topics as prostitution and dice-playing thrown in for good measure. The resulting treatise is, in the opinion of Agrippa's biographer Charles Nauert, thanks to its pungent invective, the one work of Agrippa which can still be read with enjoyment. But we're forced to ask the same question that we posed about his defense of women. Is he being serious? There are reasons to doubt it. Elsewhere, Agrippa expresses the typical early 16th century disdain for the scholastics by suggesting that they are effectively skeptics, remarking that they are even worse than prostitutes. He doesn't tell us how they compare to dice-players. He also wrote a favorable commentary on one of the most ambitious theories of scientific method produced in the medieval era, that of Ramon Lull, though he does say that Lull's combinatorial art would at best secure us knowledge of divine attributes and not God's true nature, but that's hardly a radical skeptical position, of course. Given that Agrippa was so devoted to the occult sciences of magic, alchemy, and astrology, we can also ask more specifically whether he became skeptical about these arts by the time of writing on the uncertainty of the sciences. As you might almost expect by now, there are conflicting pieces of evidence. The occult sciences are targeted along with the other disciplines in On Uncertainty. Furthermore, in his revised 1533 edition of the treatise On Occult Philosophy, he advises readers that they should neither read nor understand nor remember the earlier version of the treatise, for it is harmful, it is poisonous. He then adds, I desire by this retraction to be recanted, for formerly I spent a great deal of time and expense in these vanities. But why spend more than two decades researching occult sciences and then massively expand your treatise on the topic if you reject the whole business? Also worth mentioning here is a fascinating bit of biography. Agrippa really got around. He was born in Cologne, but traveled widely, to London, various places in France and Germany, and also Italy. At one point he was staying in Metz, and involved himself in the trial of a woman who had been accused of witchcraft. He assailed the Inquisitor in the case, a Dominican named Nicolas Savin, arguing that the accusations made no sense in rational or theological terms. His intervention was successful, as the woman was freed. This sounds like the action of a skeptic, and a pretty heroic one at that, to which we can add that his student, Jan Vier, was a prominent critic of witch trials. But now comes the inevitable phrase, on the other hand, on the other hand, a close look at the documents from Metz shows that Agrippa did not question the sheer possibility of witchcraft or the conjuration of demons. He just thought the accused woman was innocent. In his on-occult philosophy, he has plenty to say about such summonings, though he is careful not to spell out the procedure in such detail that we could all try it at home. He even comments that evil women are apt to consort with demons. He levels the ultimate 16th century insult at such women by comparing them to heretical churchmen. How then to resolve the tension between Agrippa the mage and Agrippa the skeptic? The aforementioned Troz-Nauwot offers an explanation that combines chronology with caveats. As his career progressed, Agrippa became less confident about the efficacy of magic and the resources of human reason more generally, but he still thought that occult sciences worked a lot of the time, even if they did not provide certainty. As Nauwot puts it, despite Agrippa's denunciation of astrology, he still felt that there might be something to it and that if one were to practice it, one must follow its rules faithfully. Then he wrote On Uncertainty, which despite its brash rhetoric, leaves open the possibility that magic does sometimes work. It rails against practitioners of natural magic but does not claim that they are always charlatans. Agrippa also refers to the possibility of an alchemist making a philosopher's stone, which has a balance of the elemental properties. But he keeps his descriptions so vague that only adepts of the alchemical art will know what he is talking about. This is not so far from what we find in On Occult Philosophy, where he says in a similar vein that he has seen precious metals produced alchemically but not in enough quantities to make the technique profitable. A very different reading has been offered by Marc van der Pol, who focuses on the genre chosen by Agrippa for both his defense of women and his attack on the sciences. This is the declamation, a genre which, in Agrippa's own words, says some things for sport and other things for serious. It voices some true things, some false things, and some doubtful things. While declaiming, one might even intentionally bring forth unpersuasive arguments so as to provoke others into defending the truth. In a context like this, it would be perfectly acceptable for Agrippa to be merely provocative or satirical, the suspicion that has been raised regarding his defense of women, or simply to try out ideas to which he is less than fully committed. As he said in a daring work on Original Sin, The most philosophically intriguing interpretation, though, would have Agrippa being skeptical about the rational sciences, including magic, in order to be anything but skeptical when it comes to religious faith. When he says in On Uncertainty that the learned are less likely to come to God, it is because they have mistakenly elevated reason above revelation. Only faith can unite us to God and to ultimate truth. Many of Agrippa's remarks about magic fit with this idea. Remember his claim that pagan and Jewish magicians can do what amount to parlor tricks, whereas the truly miraculous or supernatural deed is worked only with the assistance of God. Agrippa consistently presents good magic as a thoroughly Christian enterprise, and opposes it to merely natural sorcery. Thus, he writes in On Occult Philosophy that And in a letter, he states that If this is the right way to understand Agrippa, then it turns out, rather against expectation, that he fits remarkably well into the story we've been telling, that is, the story of the Reformation. He can sometimes sound just like Erasmus or even Luther, complaining about monks, relics, the cult of saints, and the pavacy, and telling the scholastics that they should be relying on faith and not taking prideful recourse to their sophistries. Toward the end of On Uncertainty, he even says that we have certainty only through faith, and that only God is truthful, whereas all humans are liars. No wonder that a contemporary observed of Agrippa these things which Luther sees now he had seen a long time ago. But you most definitely wouldn't find Luther saying that we can use magical techniques to render ourselves divine, as Agrippa does in his more confident moods. And when he comments explicitly on the Reformation, it's pretty clear he does not see himself as a character in that story after all. In On Uncertainty, he grumbles that, thanks to Luther, nearly every city has its own particular heresy. He was trying to write a story of his own, in which the failings of European culture, being challenged openly by Luther and the other reformers, would be solved through more secret means. We're not done with the occult sciences in this period. For one thing, we still need to talk about Paracelsus, a contemporary of Agrippa's, who was a key figure in the history of alchemy and early modern science more generally. We'll be looking at him and the whole topic of alchemical science in a couple of episodes. But first I want to step back and consider in greater breadth the question I just raised about Agrippa. What impact was Protestantism having on philosophy in this period and beyond? To help answer that question, I'll be turning to an expert on the topic, Helen Hatab. She'll join us next time for a transformative interview that I've been led to believe will be as good as gold, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Protestant philosophy with Helen Hatab, who is professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. Hello, Helen. Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me on your show. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see you, albeit by the media of Zoom, as we're doing everything these days. We're going to talk now about Protestant philosophy, which in a sense I've been talking about for many episodes now, but I wanted to kind of step back and talk about it as a broader phenomenon. I thought I would firstly ask you to just give the audience a sense of how extensive Protestant philosophy was, maybe especially how extensive Protestant scholasticism was. How many universities are we talking about? How many figures are we talking about? How many texts are we talking about? Printed editions versus manuscripts? Actually, maybe you could start off by just saying what kind of chronological period you want to focus on. I think Protestant philosophy and Protestant scholasticism in particular, I think we're talking about a chronological period of about 1530 to 1800. That's somewhat arbitrary, but by 1530, I think we have a sort of distinct Protestant scholastic style philosophy emerging. This continues for quite a while into the 19th century, but 1800 is a good cutoff point because at that point, especially in Germany, theology and philosophy start parting ways as disciplines. The post-Reformation digital library includes 726 works by Protestant philosophers from 1500 to 1800 versus 311 by Catholic philosophers. That gives you some sense of how prolific they were. Not all of these would have been scholastic texts. Philosophy is broader, but it does show that Protestant philosophy had a significant influence during this period. When we're talking about the university context in Western Europe alone, you have anywhere from 35 to 40 universities for this whole period. It's a bit hard to track because some of them switch back and forth from being Protestant to Catholic during the wars. That's sort of the range. In the German-speaking territories, you have at least 200 professors of philosophy during this period. It's hard to get exact numbers on publications. Some of them are very prolific. Bartolomeus Kecherman, for example, published over 20 works, as did Jacob Martin, the Lutheran philosopher. Many of these went through multiple editions. Others only publish one work during their entire careers. The other thing I want to highlight is that it's a mistake to focus just on the universities because in a lot of these Protestant territories, there was an entire educational structure built around the universities where you have preparatory studies occurring at the gymnasia and Protestant academies. Very often, there was a system in place whereby the students who performed best in these preparatory schools would get scholarships to go on and study at the university level. You also have the context of Eastern Europe where the reform took hold in the early period, but then very quickly, the Counter-Reformation established Catholicism and the Orthodox Greek Church. You might have less universities there, but you have pockets of Protestant minorities where they're teaching Protestant philosophy, but it's often underground and less recognized. I would say, yes, extensive. Yeah, we're obviously talking about a really massive phenomenon here, which I think might surprise many listeners because first of all, Protestant scholastics are not famous usually. Secondly, it seems to fly in the face of what a lot of people think about Protestantism because there's all this emphasis on faith and taking truth solely from scripture. As I said in a previous episode, you might almost think that Protestant scholastic philosophy is a contradiction in terms because you often find the Protestants complaining about scholasticism, especially Luther, but really it's quite a common phenomenon amongst the Protestants. How did the Protestant philosophers try to make space for philosophy within their broader intellectual project? I think as you highlighted very well in your previous podcast on this topic, there are different approaches to engaging in philosophy, even among leading reformers. We tend to think of Calvin and Luther as the models and they're very strong in their anti-scholasticism stance, but there's a lot of variation. I'd hesitate to generalize because it varies by context and by individual, but I would actually distinguish at least three main ways in which Protestant philosophers of this period try to engage with philosophy. One is what I would characterize as a more instrumentalist justification for philosophical engagement and we see this especially in the early period. One has to remember that in the early period, there's a dearest of Protestant preachers and people who are trained to teach Protestant doctrine. So there's a real need to train future preachers and teachers. And there's also a recognition that these people are going to need the basic logic. So this was often at the lower levels taught through Rudolf Agri Kula's logic, which is more focused on rhetoric, but at the higher levels, you need rigorous logic. And so early on already, Aristotle's Organon is appropriated and included, especially in the upper levels of the curriculum as training for future preachers and teachers of Protestantism. But you also get Aristotle's and physics and ethics being included in the curriculum. And so you find a certain kind of justification, you know, just based on the program of searching for the truth through scripture itself, right, where the argument gets made. For example, Zanki makes this point that even just to be able to interpret scripture successfully, you need more than just philological skills. You need to master Aristotle's physics and ethics. So there's that kind of approach, which I think is quite common. As you go into the latter half of the 16th century, I would say one finds a more integrated approach where the first of all, the study of metaphysics becomes more important. And that's an important shift, whereas earlier scholastic Protestant authors tend not to focus on metaphysics. Now you see an approach where Protestant metaphysics that's also rooted in Aristotle's metaphysics gets developed. And there's good reason for this, because by the second half of the 16th century, the perceived threat to Protestant theology is no longer so much Catholicism, but anti-Trinitarianism. And so you have all these heretical Protestants that are taking refuge in Poland and Hungary and Transylvania, and they're publishing these, you know, anti-Trinitarian arguments. And for that, to counteract that, you really need to dive deeply into metaphysics, into substance theory, into theories of individuation, personhood. And so you start seeing the emergence of a distinctly Protestant metaphysics, but one that's still rooted in Aristotle's metaphysics. So a good example is Bartholomew Kecherman, who publishes his compendious system of the science of metaphysics in 1609. The only earlier Aristotelian metaphysics commentary is on the Lutheran side in 1605 by Cornelius Martin, who was a professor at Helmstedt. But Kecherman uses a different kind of justification. So first of all, he characterizes metaphysics as the science of being, which being for him is the thing, res, taken absolutely and generally. And he has the instrumentalist justification for the study of metaphysics, but he also considers it necessary for the study of math, physics, and even theology, because you can't understand these species of being, he argues, without understanding being in general. And so he has this nice quote in the compendium where he writes, quote, nobody in theology will completely explain the doctrine of the essence of God and the modes of existing in God or the three persons unless he would be a metaphysician. So that's a sort of a stronger incorporation of metaphysics in particular, justified by theology and seen as integral to Protestant theology. And then the third approach I would characterize as eclectic. And these are often figures who, through their philosophical explorations, end up with very non-orthodox views. So Nicholas Torellis is one. Sebastien Basson, who was teaching at a Huguenot Academy in V, France, is another. And they are not shy to incorporate not just Aristotelian views, but views of Neoplatonic philosophers, atomism, stoicism. And sometimes it's argued for on the basis of these are more consistent to theological doctrine. Sometimes it's sort of where their philosophical reasoning leads them. And these figures often they end up with conflicts and condemned by theologians and philosophers, but they find refuge in disciplines like medicine. So, for example, Torellis, his triumph of philosophy, his work in metaphysics, which he published in 15673, is condemned by Lutheran theologians, but he's still able to get a position teaching natural philosophy and medicine at the University of Altdorf. So that, I said, is another approach where the engagement with philosophy continues, but perhaps outside the official confines of philosophy and theology programs. OK, thanks. That was amazing. That was like a whole podcast episode in one answer. That was brilliant. Let me ask you a couple of questions about how the Protestant scholastics compare to the Catholics. And maybe we could start by going back to the issue about the educational curriculum at the schools and universities. Was that curriculum different for Protestants than it was by Catholics? For example, were they more influenced by humanism? Yeah, I think there are both important continuities and differences compared to Catholic institutions at this time. And I want to make a bit of a distinction between the Lutheran and Calvinist territories, because for Lutheran universities, we could see that many just largely followed Malanstern's educational plan, which was more humanist in its orientation. Though, as I said, it did include the study of logic, often aerosols, logic at the higher levels and also aerosols, physics and ethics. I think aside from the emphasis on philology, so obviously the languages were more important in the Protestant educational curriculum. So mastering Greek, mastering Hebrew at the University of Leiden, this is now getting into the reform territories, even offered Arabic, which was something novel. So that was an innovation. But the other thing you notice is a greater emphasis on mathematics. So, for example, Johannes Kepler, who studied at the University of Tübingen, and he studied theology, gained a very excellent education in mathematics and astronomy from his mathematics professor there. And I think Charlotte Methune has made a good case that for him it feeds into his theology. It's mathematics is not something separate. So there are those differences. But in the Lutheran context, at least the structure of Lutheran universities remained very similar to the medieval university, where you have a structure where you start with the trivium, grammar, logic and rhetoric, then the quadrivium, the geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, harmonics. And then you have the courses in philosophy, which are designed to prepare you for the higher studies of law, medicine and of course, theology is the highest discipline. It's somewhat different in the reformed territories. One thing that you find in France are Huguenots academies that had a special interest in training the nobility, the upper classes. And so they offered courses not just in classical studies, law and politics, but also in sports and fencing. And this model was copied in German reformed territories, but also in the Dutch Republic, where they actually had French schools that trained businessmen, craftsmen and even women in French language and culture. The other thing that's distinctive about the Dutch Republic, well, two things. First of all, trade and maritime business was very important. You also have a great emphasis on teaching mathematics and engineering, mechanics and things like that. But also, since the Dutch government was funding and supporting reformed institutions, you had a pretty tight institutional control. So not only uniformity of curriculum, but also the aims of education included teaching civilized manners, piety, behavior and ethics for Christian life. One last thing I want to highlight is the University of Leiden is an interesting case. Because it actually has a different structure from what you would find in a Lutheran university or your typical medieval university. So and that could be a function of when it was founded. It was established in 1575 as a Calvinist academy with a very humanist curriculum. And it became a university in 1597. So what was interesting about it is instead of having this hierarchy where theology sits at the top, there were four main faculties that were all on the same footing. So there was the faculty of philosophy, liberal arts and mathematics that was actually on the same footing as the faculties of law, medicine, theology, rather than being in the subordinate position. The other interesting development was because they were trying to attract students from all over Europe, they very quickly changed the statutes to only require the oath in allegiance to Calvinism of theology students. And for the rest, they accepted students of all religious persuasions, including Jews and Sicinians. And in the early 17th century, actually, the students rebelled. They rebelled against the humanist program, insisting that they wanted to be taught Aristotelian works, which were taught all over Europe and other universities. And they actually changed the curriculum and began teaching scholastic philosophy based on the works of Suarez. So again, a lot of variation across regions and there's confessional differences. But definitely in the earlier period, humanism is much more prominent. And then we move to Aristotelian curriculum. This is what I'd like to see from today's undergraduates, that they would rebel against their university masters by saying we want more Aristotle. Yes. Wouldn't that be nice? And let me ask you another question about the relationship to the Catholics. So rather than like the structure and curriculum, really about the philosophical positions they take. So obviously there's some issues where they line up on one side of their Protestants, another side of their Catholics, like theory of grace, for example, would be the obvious case or papal authority. It's obvious that the Catholics have a different view than the Protestants. But does that kind of run down the line with a whole range of philosophical topics? So like, if I ask a Catholic about the soul, I get one kind of answer. And if I ask a Protestant, I should expect to get another kind of answer on the same thing for theories of substance and so on. Or is it more like it's kind of a mix and match on both sides so that you can have the same debate happening within Protestant scholasticism that's happening across the mountains? With Catholic scholasticism? I have the sense that there is a significant number of debates, positions and arguments that cut across confessional divides. And this may be too small a sampling, but I've worked quite intensely on two different topics that I think illustrate this. So first, on the question of philosophical method, you have Bartolomeus Kecherban and then Franco Böcherstag, professor of logic and philosophy at the University of Leiden, who are among the most commonly used writers of logic textbooks of the period, especially going into the 17th and then 18th centuries. Their textbooks on logic are everywhere. And in those textbooks, one finds a conception of method that is very much informed by the writings of the Italian Renaissance philosopher Jacopo Zabarella, whose writings on logic and method were extremely influential. And what Zabarella does, he distinguishes between the syllogistic method, the method of demonstration that you find in Aristotle's organ on and method as what he calls order or ordering, where there's this other sense of method which he characterizes as an aptitude for ordering the parts of a discipline so as to better be able to learn and teach it. And Kecherban and Böcherstag both take up this basic division and then sort of develop this idea of method as order in a different way from Zabarella. But the basic structure that they have for how they conceive of logic and the parts of logic and what those parts of logic are supposed to do it. I mean, it's straight out of Zabarella. And so this is just one example where, you know, you have an issue that was very hotly debated, especially in the 16th century with the advent of Ramist method, right, and alternatives to scholastic Aristotelianism. By the late 16th, early 17th century, you have sort of kind of this dominant view of Zabarella as being taken up on both sides for how to think about method and logic. Another example is a very contentious topic during the late 16th century of, you know, what is it that individuates substances, right? What is it that makes you and me distinct substances on the Aristotelian view, even though kind of we're members of the same species, the human species. And by the end of the 16th century, you have eight different views on what individuates substances, at least eight that are hotly debated, many inherited from medieval philosophers. But by the early 17th century, when you read textbooks and commentaries where this becomes, you know, bigger and bigger issues, like more and more pages are devoted to this question of what individuates substances, you find in by the early 17th century, there are three standard positions that are all refuted, right? The Thomist view that follows Aquinas, the Scotist view that follows John Don Scotus, and the nominalist view. Those are all rejected. Whether Catholic or Protestant, you find that those are most often just rejected using similar arguments. And then there's a small range of views developed in the Renaissance. One is Zabarella's, one is by the Jesuit philosopher Pedro da Fonseca, and the other is Francisco Suarez's view, another Jesuit philosopher. And these become, you know, the options that people will argue for. And it cuts across the confessional divide, Catholic, Protestant, even within the same confession, you find different views being taken. But it's always, you know, the same range of views. So I do suspect that once we have more research on this, that we'll find, especially in the later period, that, you know, you can't predict on a lot of topics, you can't really predict what position a philosopher will take merely based on confession. That's really interesting, and I think very surprising too. Actually, in general, you've painted a kind of surprising picture here, although it's one that definitely sounds like the same picture I've gotten from doing all the reading to write the scripts for the podcast, namely that whereas you might have expected scholastic philosophy in all of these areas of Europe where Protestantism took hold, you might have expected scholastic philosophy to just kind of collapse like a house of cards. In fact, what we get is much more a picture of stability, albeit with variation, like between the confessions and geographical zones. But I guess that if we want to really convince people that it's interesting to study Protestant philosophy, it might be good to give a few examples of things that are new. So if I asked you to give me an example of one or two ideas that emerge in Protestant scholastic writings that really seem worth like digging into, what would you say? Yeah, I think there are two areas where Protestant philosophy and theology made, you know, distinct contributions in terms of novelty. And that is a series of matter in space. And some of it traces back to the problem of the Eucharist. So what all Protestant have in common is they reject, you know, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where the substance of the bread and the wine changes to Christ's substance, but we keep, you know, the outer appearance of the bread and the wine because see this sort of the accidents, the accidental features of the bread and the wine are still there. I mean, they all reject that doctrine. Then the problem becomes, how do you account for the Eucharist without appropriating this doctrine of transubstantiation? And here, I think there are some interesting innovations that have some quite profound implications for matter theory and for theories of place and space. So one view is taken by Calvin and Stingley, where they end up rejecting the Aristotelian view that quantitative features, including spatial features like body's dimension and its length, breadth and depth, right, and then its spatial features. They reject the Aristotelian view that these are accidental to body. For them, place is an essential property of body. It's inseparable from it. And then they have different ways of accounting for the Eucharist based on that. Stingley just bites the bullet and says, well, because it's a contradiction to say that Christ's body can occupy the same place as the body of the bread and the wine, right, and it can't be in two places at once. We have to say Christ is present symbolically. Calvin has some different solution. But what's important here is that this kind of way of thinking about the Eucharist promotes a different view of body. And by the 17th century, it becomes common among 17th century Calvinist philosophers to talk about bodies as being essentially quanta, right? So the quantitative features of body are essential to body. They're inseparable from their dimension and also their locatedness. And I think this sets up Descartes' later very influential definition of matter as res extensa, right, as something, a substance that's essentially extended in length, breadth and depth. It also indirectly makes Protestant philosophers more receptive to atomist theories of matter so I don't think it's an accident that you have figures like Sebastien Basson and David Corleus who are in the early 17th century developing systematic atomist natural philosophies. And for Corleus at least, I mean, he regards his atomism as more consistent with theology than Aristotelianism. He argues against substantial forms and even matter, you know, just on partially theological as well as philosophical grounds. The other side of this story is, you know, the Lutheran approach to the Eucharist, which I also think is significant in changing especially the conception of space because Luther famously develops the doctrine of ubiquity according to which Christ's body upon his extension comes to share in divine omnipresence. And so he argues for the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine by saying Christ's body can be, you know, simultaneously at all the altars at once. Now this is miraculous obviously but it has this interesting result of creating a wider gap between the concept of a body and its locatedness, right? So whereas I think for the Calvinist space, place, quantitative features and body sort of come together, right, they come closely together which has interesting implications. On the Lutheran view there's a bigger distinction and this at least then makes it possible to reject this Aristotelian view that you don't have place without body, right? It becomes possible to think of space as something independent from body and bodies moving around in that space and even maybe occupying multiple spaces. So I think that that's a very significant way in which unwittingly these sort of theological developments introduce changes into philosophical thinking that become quite important for the scientific revolution. That's been a leitmotif of the whole series so far that, and maybe even going all the way back to medieval philosophy, but certainly what we've looked at in the Reformation so far shows that over and over these debates that we might think of as primarily or even exclusively theological have these larger knock-on philosophical implications in political philosophy or even physics as you just said. You just gave us an example there of how these debates that started within Protestant scholasticism then had an impact on 17th century philosophers that listeners might have been more familiar with before they came to the podcast like Descartes, for example. So can I finish by asking you a kind of unfair question which is what the broader impact and relevance of Protestant philosophy is for the 17th century just looking ahead? The influence has been neglected and underrated. I think it's sometimes difficult to draw very precise causal connections though in my book Descartes on Forms and Mechanisms I think I make a good case that Descartes was at least familiar with key ideas in Corleus where Corleus's way of defining a substance versus a mode is very close to Descartes and then you can actually show that you know well Descartes would have known about this doctrine that is found in Corleus. It's often though very hard to make kind of those exact causal connections but I just published a chapter in the Blackwell companion to Hobbes's philosophy in which you know I make the case that the sort of conception of method as an ordering that is very pronounced in Protestant logic and Protestant scholasticism is also found in Hobbes's conception of method. I've just spoken about matter theory you know the fact that Protestant thinking creates these spaces where it frees philosophers to think beyond kind of the standard Aristotelian or existing positions on things like matter theory or space or place and so I think that there's a lot more research to be done but my sense is that the kinds of philosophical developments that we're seeing in the 16th century in Protestant philosophy and scholasticism set up a kind of framework that you find in canonical early modern philosophers maybe not in the exact form but it opens up a whole range of possibilities. Okay well that's a great note to end on. I'm actually going to be turning next to something that Helen has been mentioning in the last few minutes namely theories of matter. Next time I'm actually going to be looking at parasalsus and the evolution of alchemy from the medieval period up until the 16th century and then after that we're going to have an episode on matter theory the emergence of atomism with figures like Julius so it's great that you already mentioned that to kind of pave the way. So for now I'll thank Helen Hatzab very much for coming on the series. Thank you it was a pleasure. And please join me next time for a bit of alchemy here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMEU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Just Add Salt, Paracelsus and Alchemy. Premodern science does not have the best of reputations. The mere mention of the topic calls to mind the use of leeches and the belief that the sun goes around the earth. So historians of science have had to find ways to explain why we shouldn't just ignore everything that happened before, say, the 17th century. Specialists in premodern medicine might tell you of amazing breakthroughs made long ago. The discovery of the nervous system in Alexandria in the 2nd century BC, or successful eye surgery being done in the Islamic world. They might even suggest that we still have something to learn from long dead scientists. The modern doctor would do well to heed Galen's advice to treat patients holistically, considering their personal history, diet and exercise regime, mental state and individual constitution. While these moves might be persuasive in the case of medicine, they seem less promising when it comes to the disciplines known by the disparaging name of pseudo-sciences applied to such disciplines as astrology and alchemy. Most people assume that both enterprises were a fanciful waste of time, and experts in their history have to work hard to convince even academic colleagues that they are worthy of study. Often they do so by pointing out that we still take astronomy and chemistry seriously, and that these two sciences were intimately bound up with their pseudo-scientific counterparts. When it comes to astrology, it suffices to mention Ptolemy, a near contemporary of Galen's, who was the greatest ancient authority on both astral observation and astrological predictions. As for alchemy, it's surprising to learn how recently it was first distinguished from chemistry. We can find skepticism about the claims of alchemists going back as far as the history of alchemy, specifically as to whether they could really turn base metal into silver and gold. But it was only in the middle of the 17th century that these critics drew a contrast between a spurious art called alchemy, and a genuine science called chemistry. In fact, they are really just the same word. The al at the beginning of alchemy is just the Arabic definite article al at the front of alkimiyya, which was in turn borrowed from the Greek word hemeya. Early modern scholars engaged in some pseudo-science of their own here, offering bogus etymologies including one deriving the syllable al from the Greek word hals, meaning salt. As it happens, salt is going to be a main ingredient of the story I tell in this episode. But before we get to that, we should go beyond etymology to consider that there was good reason for pre-modern scientists to believe in alchemy. While alchemists couldn't actually make gold or silver, they could do a lot of other things. They identified many minerals and chemicals, mastered techniques like distillation, which enabled them to extract pure alcohol, and developed processes for separating metals from one another. That included the isolation of precious from base metals, which could easily be confused with actually producing the precious metal. The same impression could be given by inducing a tincture in a non-precious metal to make it look like gold or silver. Then too, the possibility of alchemy was well-founded in more general theories of nature. For Aristotle and his many followers, all bodily substances were ultimately made from the four elements, air, earth, fire, and water. Aristotle explicitly said that these elements can turn into one another, as when water evaporates to become air. It seems to follow that it should be possible to break down any physical substance, lead for instance into its elemental constituents, and to use these as the basis for making another substance like gold. Here, it's telling that when the Muslim Aristotelian Al-Farabi wrote a short work that is critical of alchemy, he conceded that in principle, anything can be turned into anything. The claims of alchemists are nonetheless false, but only because it is in practice impossible to carry out the transformations they describe. Somewhat earlier than Al-Farabi lived Jaber ibn Hayyan, whose name came to be attached to a large corpus of alchemical writings that would become influential in Latin translation. These writings drew on the ideas of Aristotelian physics, including the four element theory, but Islamic alchemy could also be based on alternative ideas about material constitution. In my own recent book on the doctor, philosopher, and alchemist Abu Bakr al-Razi, I've suggested that he grounded alchemy in an atomic theory of matter. New substances could be produced by dissolving composite bodies and recombining their particles. Supposedly, al-Razi used this technique to produce an elixir for transforming metals. He once outdid a rival alchemist who turned metal into silver by using such an elixir to turn that silver into gold. As this story reveals, the goal of alchemy was not necessarily to start with one substance and melt, dissolve, or fuse it to make it into something else. Rather, alchemists often spoke of producing a chemical substance, the famous philosopher's stone, which could then be applied to suitably prepared metals to transform them as desired. You might remember that Cornelius Agrippa talked about the philosopher's stone as perfectly balanced. This echoed long-standing alchemical theories. According to one idea, the stone was a mixture of pure elemental fire and water, which were in this context called sulfur and mercury, or designated by nicknames like Mars and Vulcan to avoid revealing trade secrets. Often an analogy was drawn to medicine. The philosopher's stone was like a drug being used to treat metal by eliminating impurities or releasing their inner spirit. Like many pre-modern doctors, going back as far as Galen, alchemists paid attention to the influence of the stars on their procedures. In both medicine and alchemy, the same technique that works on one day may fail on another due to a different astral configuration. This brings us to the most famous figure of Renaissance alchemy, Paracelsus, whose central achievement was to adapt chemical ideas for use in medicine. Fittingly enough, Paracelsus is itself a nickname, and rather unnecessarily so since he already sported the rather magnificent appellation Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Bombastus looks like it must be a literary conceit, but it really was his family name. Still, it fits nicely because Paracelsus was quite a bombastic individual. He was a widely traveled man who wore a sword while sleeping and could defeat peasants in drinking contests. His enormous body of writings is full of invective against rivals and critics, and against traditional authorities in philosophy and medicine. Born originally in the Swiss town of Einsiln, Paracelsus applied his trade in many cities, including Bern, where in 1527 he outraged the university masters with his unorthodox ideas and his insistence on teaching in German from his own writings instead of lecturing in Latin from a standard curriculum. Perhaps no quotation sums him up better than this one, my shoelaces know more than you and all your schoolmasters, Galen and Avicenna, and all your institutions of higher learning. The reason Paracelsus attacked Galen and Avicenna is that these were the two central medical authorities of his day. Supposedly, he even publicly burnt a copy of Avicenna's medical treatise The Canon. As this begins to suggest, he was centrally interested in medicine. Scholars have even sometimes suggested that he had no interest at all in the practical transformation of metals, but this seems to be false. He refers in several texts to his own success in increasing the weight of gold in a mixture while separating it from other metals, and he plausibly describes how he turned iron into copper, or rather apparently did so. He would have been able to produce a replacement reaction whereby iron replaces the copper in copper sulfate, allowing him to get pure copper as a byproduct. Still, he mostly presented himself as an expert in the use of alchemical procedures to treat the human body. His works launched a movement of Paracelsan medicine that swept across Europe, helped along by stories of apparently miraculous cures performed by him or achieved by using his methods. This constituted a novel approach to medicine. In the Galenic tradition, to which Avicenna belonged, treatments were based around the idea that the body is made up of four humours that need to be kept in, or restored to, proper balance. The humours blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile shared their properties with the four Aristotelian elements. So this kind of medicine was, like medieval alchemy, based on a physical theory that was standard orthodoxy among Aristotelian schoolmen at the universities. Paracelsus saw things very differently. While he accepted the reality of earth, air, fire, and water, for him these were not fundamental principles. Instead, he spoke of three firsts, namely sulphur, mercury, and salt. Here, salt has been added to the pair familiar from earlier alchemical writings, sulphur and mercury. They are powerfully influenced by the stars, and in turn give rise to diseases, an explanation that Paracelsus finds far more plausible than those offered by Galenic medicine. How, for example, can we explain the outbreak of a plague? Surely it isn't that many of the people in a given city suddenly have the same humoral imbalance. Instead, an astral configuration is causing a build-up, or tartar, of mercury in their bodies, yielding such symptoms as boils on the skin. In general, he says, diseases grow in the human as grass and shrubs do from the earth. It isn't only the human body whose properties are determined by the three firsts. They are the ultimate constituents of all bodies, hidden under the outer form or aspect of things. They are the real prime matter, spoken of, but not properly understood, by Aristotelians. We can see them at work in such everyday processes as the burning of wood, which yields flame, smoke, and ash, the manifestations of sulphur, mercury, and salt, respectively. Strictly speaking, each kind of substance has its own version of sulphur, mercury, and salt. They are not just universally present material stuffs. Rather, they are understood in functional terms. It is salt that gives bodies their solidity, sulphur their combustibility, and mercury their fluidity. Paracelsus compares the three principles to seeds jumbled in a sac, whose fruits emerge through natural and artificial processes of material transformation. His natural philosophy, thus, applies an organic metaphor, even to supposedly dead matter. A nice illustration is his account of the generation of minerals, which for him grow out of elemental water as the seeds of salt, sulphur, and mercury cause it to form into a viscous fluid that sprouts through the earth like roots in soil. Likewise, earth is an elemental mother full of seeds, which blossom forth as vegetation and animals. God placed the seeds of all things in the elements from the beginning of creation, with different fruits coming forth at different moments, which are predestined for them, as most clearly illustrated by the seasons. As he nicely puts it, everything has its own harvest, its own autumn, at its own time. Paracelsus calls this process natural alchemy. As for human alchemists, they must of course take their cue from this bold physical theory. Paracelsus is scornful of previous scientists who, in his opinion, made discoveries by happenstance depending on more or less random experiences rather than theory. Ironically, this is a critique that his favorite target, Galen, had leveled at some of his own predecessors, especially those in the so-called empiricist school. With a theory of seeds in hand, the alchemical doctor might treat an illness like dropsy as follows. First, recognize its cause, namely a buildup of salt in the body. Then, fight this by applying mercury, which Paracelsus rather alarmingly sees as a very useful drug. Though he admits that it sometimes causes harm, this happens only when it is administered at the wrong time, that is, under the wrong astral influence. One might also use mercury to cure a mercury-based disease, purifying or rectifying its influence in the body, an early example of the homeopathic principle in medicine. Paracelsus thus transposes to the medical context an idea that was fundamental in the history of alchemy, namely that the adept of this art should perfect nature. Showing again his penchant for homely comparisons, he says that the alchemist's work is really no different from that of the baker or winemaker. Where an Aristotelian or Galenic scientist would assume that perfecting nature means establishing a correct balance between the constituents of a body, Paracelsus's idea is the reverse. Thinking alchemically means separating out the fundamental bodily principles and making them as pure as possible. He draws an analogy to the stomach, in which digestion removes what is poisonous and excretes it, while the pure nutriment is retained. Likewise, the alchemist is trying to isolate and then use whatever is most fundamental to a substance, for example, to produce a drug. Across his career, Paracelsus uses different terminology for this underlying principle. It is the predestined element, the hidden power, the soul or spirit in the bodily mixture. It may not have escaped you that these ideas have obvious echoes with Christian religion. The trinity of chemical principles is a pretty obvious echo of the three divine persons. In fact, before Paracelsus, an early 15th century treatise called the Book of the Holy Trinity had proposed adding salt to mercury and sulfur to get three physical principles. The spirit, hidden within the bodily substance, an immaterial essence placed within it by God, may also remind us of the Incarnation. More explicitly, Paracelsus says that all natural things are signs of God. Can we go further here and link his reformation of alchemy and medicine to the religious reformation going on around him? After all, he was putting forth unorthodox ideas just as Luther was doing the same thing, especially in the 1520s. Furthermore, his attacks on medical authority and his claims of independence, once he bragged that he had not read a book for 10 years, obviously parallel Luther's scornful rejection of scholasticism. Paracelsus's opponents in Basu even called him the Luther of medicine, intended as a term of abuse, but repeated by later Paracelsus with pride. So it makes sense that, though he did not himself leave the Catholic faith, his ideas flourished especially among Protestants. Adam of Bodenstein, who adopted Paracelsus's methods after they cured him from an illness, went on to publish many of the master's works and promote his teachings in Basu. And who was Adam of Bodenstein's father? None other than Andreas von Karlstadt, the reformer who was too radical to stay in Luther's Wittenberg. At the very least, these connections show that Paracelsus's science was a product of its age, but he can be more directly compared to figures like Agrippa and Trithamius, who, as we saw, helped to inspire Agrippa's interest in magic and may also have had a hand in the formation of the young Paracelsus. We should certainly not conflate or confuse alchemy with magic, but the two arts do share a number of things. Both magicians and alchemists tended to cloak their teachings in secret, as with the aforementioned use of code names or simple refusal to spell out procedures fully, lest the uninitiated become acquainted with them. We can find that in Paracelsus, too, who once refused to explain openly how to make precious metals, saying, it is better to remain silent and let the poor stay poor. More fundamentally, the two arts both drew on a pool of common inspirations. We've already talked about the importance of astrology, and can add to this the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. Paracelsus once said, if you do not understand the use of the Kabbalists and of the old astronomers, you are not created to open your mouth about the alchemical art. This aspect of his writings has not always enthused modern-day scholars. One of them comments that Paracelsus as a philosopher and alchemist may sometimes resemble a Kabbalistic scholar more than a laboratory researcher or natural scientist in the modern sense. But at the time, it was, like salt, very much to some people's taste. A leading example here would be Heinrich Kunrath, who used Kabbalistic techniques like numerology and the analysis of words to expound Paracelsan alchemy. Take for instance the central word elixir, spelled by Kunrath, E-L-I-X-E-I-R. According to Kunrath, the first two letters, E-I, represent the Hebrew word for strong. The following I and X are the Roman numerals, one and ten. And the last three letters, E-I-R, are the Greek word for air. While this may seem pretty far from the concerns of Luther and Calvin, Peter Forshaw has pointed out that Kabbalah was supposed to go back to Moses and the foundations of Jewish religion, so it could be seen as more fitting for Christian scientists than the work of pagans like Aristotle and Galen. Kunrath was only one of many scholars who worked within the new Paracelsan paradigm. Another was Peter Severinus, who was physician to Frederick II in Denmark and wrote a synthesis of Paracelsan medicine. Severinus was faithful to Paracelsus's irreverent attitude as well as his medical theories. We do not, he said, owe the Greeks nor Arabs any respectful consideration. We are the servants of the sick. As we'll be seeing later, there was considerable support for Paracelsan philosophy in France, where it was especially the Protestant Huguenots who adopted it. Over in England, the alchemist John Dee was acquainted with the Paracelsan movement, and believe it or not, a work written in Aleppo in about 1640 by Salih ibn Salum showed knowledge of Paracelsus's ideas, meaning that his influence was even felt in the Ottoman Empire. Yet these ideas left many others with a bitter taste in their mouths. In Basel, opposition to Paracelsan theories remained strong. Here, a student named Thomas Moffat was forced to remove all trace of them from his writings before he could be granted a degree. One of the staunchest opponents was Andreas Libavius, who believed that one could produce gold alchemically, but using the old-fashioned methods of medieval alchemy. Libavius thus polemicized against the Paracelsans and in favor of the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the medical treatments recommended by Galen. Another critic was Thomas Erastus, a professor of medicine at Heidelberg. In a set of Disputations from 1572, he rejected the idea that one could chemically transform one type of substance into another, and then back again. Such cyclical change is possible, but only between the four fundamental elements, air, earth, fire, and water. He worried that Paracelsus's chemistry made ordinary substances like plants, animals, and humans out to be nothing but aggregates or mixtures of more basic ingredients, which would undermine science itself, since science is the study of the unifying essences of those very substances. Love him or hate him, then, Paracelsus was like many of the chemicals he devoted his life to understanding, bound to provoke a strong reaction. Of course, Paracelsus's detailed proposals about the nature of bodies and the therapies that apply these ideas in medicine have not stood the test of time. Yet his chemical approach to matter and medicine can be said to have survived quite nicely. The mere fact that students training to be doctors have to study a lot of chemistry would certainly please him mightily. Closer to his own day, his works contributed to a broader development in the 16th century. As Aristotelianism came under attack, new ideas started to sprout up in a whole range of scientific fields. Most famously, and as we'll be discussing soon, this happened with astronomy. But it also happened with a topic that was, quite literally, more down to earth, the material basis of the bodies around us. That will be our topic next time, as we continue to pursue the idea that the natures of things are seeded in their material constituents, along with other theories about the composition of bodies. So don't think for a moment that it doesn't matter whether or not you join me for the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Acid Test, Theories of Matter. Is a human body more like a cake or more like fruit salad? You might say, like a cake, because its arrival means that it's somebody's birthday. But what I mean is something else. I'm asking about the human's material composition. If your body is like a cake, then the stuff that was used to make you has been replaced with a new substance. Just as there are no actual eggs in the finished cake, the initial ingredients of your body are no longer actually present in your body. This would be the view of Thomas Aquinas, who held that each substance has only one form. For him, a human body is made ultimately of the four elements, and even they have a material substrate, namely formless prime matter. But the elements and higher level ingredients, like blood or bone, have been taken up into the compound of form and matter that is the body. All this stuff has literally been transformed, rendered from earth or blood into something new by receiving the form of humanity. If, by contrast, the human body is like a fruit salad, then it consists of parts that remain the same as they were before they were combined to make the body, parts that will also retain their natures once the body is destroyed. You can also take parts out of the body without necessarily destroying it by drawing blood, for instance, or pulling a tooth. This is like removing the bits of banana that someone unaccountably thought would be nice to include in the fruit salad, forgetting that they always get mushy. If this is your view, then you think that the substances we see being generated and destroyed, as when people are born and die, are made up of corpuscles, meaning small bodies. And in the unlikely event that you live in the 16th or 17th century, if you believe in corpuscles, then you are probably an atomist, meaning that, for you, the human body, and indeed every physical object, is an aggregate of indivisible particles. But you don't actually need to believe that the parts are literally atoms, that is uncuttables, which is what the Greek atomam means, as I mentioned 380 episodes ago when covering the ancient atomists Democritus and Nucubus. Maybe the corpuscles are in principle divisible, maybe they aren't. Sometimes scientists of this period casually referred to things as atoms, just to mean that they couldn't be divided through any known laboratory technique. They might even be visible, as in a vapor cloud that is made of tiny droplets, or metal that has been turned into a pile of so-called atomic powder. The real point is that they are actually present in the substance, all jumbled together to constitute, in the case of the human, blood, bone, and ultimately the whole body. To find out whether a substance is like cake or like fruit salad, a good test would be whether you can decompose the substance into the same ingredients you used to make it in the first place. As these scholastics like to say, in kuai dissolvi posund composita ex ii stem coloraunt. The things into which composites can be dissolved are the things out of which they are made. You can turn eggs, butter, and flour into cake, but you cannot get the eggs, butter, and flour back out of the cake. Whereas you could carefully turn the fruit salad back into the chunks of apple, grapes, and melon that you started with. And yes, we have no bananas. That contrast might suggest that some substances contain actual corpuscles and some not, in which case we will have to answer our question on a case-by-case basis. But someone like Aquinas would say that any genuine substance is unified by its form and has no actually present ingredients in it. Of course, he would not think fruit salad is such a substance. His preferred examples would be organic bodies, plants, animals, and humans. A corpuscularian, by contrast, would say that even organic bodies are made of other, far smaller bodies. Every significantly sized body around us is nothing but a mixture or aggregate of parts. Even cake! It is like fruit salad, after all. It's just that its tiny parts, which persist through the process of making the cake or digesting it, must be sought at the chemical level, not at the level of eggs and butter. It was in fact chemistry that provided some of the strongest empirical evidence in favor of corpuscularianism around the turn of the 17th century. At about this time, powerful acids were discovered, like sulfuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid. This made it possible to dissolve substances much more quickly and thoroughly than before. Scholars interested in chemistry or alchemy, remember at this time these were effectively a single scientific discipline, noticed that they could dissolve a metal, like silver, in acid. Then, using alkalis, they could get the silver to precipitate back out of the fluid in the form of particles, like a powder. This acid test seemed to provide dramatic proof of corpuscles. The dissolved silver is not visible in the fluid, yet must still be present, how else would it be possible to get it back? It must therefore be in the fluid as particles that are too small to see. The philosopher Daniel Sennett described this experiment in a work called On Chemicals. On the basis of this and similar evidence, he concluded that the ancient atomists had been right, and Aristotle and his followers, like Aquinas, wrong. The generation of a substance is not the acquiring of a substantial form by a material substrate that has a potential for that form, it is just an appropriate combining of atomic parts. Likewise, destruction is nothing but the separation of those parts. The atoms themselves endure through the whole process, something he illustrated with the example of a goat eating a medicinal plant, a nursemaid drinking the goat's milk, and passing on the plant's beneficial effects to the infant she is nursing. Those defects are thanks to the corpuscles that were in the plant, were still present in the goat's milk, and were then passed on to the maid's breast milk. Now, this discussion from Sennett comes from 1619, a bit later than the 16th century, which has been our focus in the current series of episodes. But his atomic theory is a natural outgrowth of the ideas we talked about last time, when discussing Paracelsus. For Paracelsus, the fundamental constituents of things were sulfur, mercury, and salt, which are actually present in more complex bodies, as we can see from the fact that they can cause diseases in those bodies. This is why one of his critics, Thomas Erastus, tried to refute him by saying that on the Paracelsan view, it should be just as possible to turn vinegar into wine as it is to let wine turn into vinegar, and that there must already be worms present in fresh cheese and meat, since worms appear in these foods when they rot. So maybe we should just stick to cake and fruit salad. This was in 1572, showing that the corpuscularian theory of matter was worming its way into philosophical debates well before the 17th century, when it would be prominently adopted by such famous thinkers as Descartes. Now, I should admit that, in fact, these two positions, which I have presented as being diametrically opposed, could share something in common. To keep things simple, I contrasted corpuscularianism to the view of someone like Aquinas, for whom there is just one form in each genuine substance. But actually, that single form view was already a minority one when he put it forth back in the 13th century, and it is not what Erastus was trying to defend. Rather, Erastus accepted what is sometimes called form pluralism, according to which there may be several substantial forms actually present in a single substance. In addition to my human form, for example, I have the form of body. Not the human body, that is, but just the form that belongs to whatever is extended in three-dimensional space. When I die, the form of humanity will be lost, but the form of body will not be, since my corpse will still be an extended body. Nonetheless, Erastus's view is hylomorphic, meaning that each substance, whether body, human, cake, or silver, is a composite of matter and form, with matter providing the confidentiality and form the actual determination of that potential. As for Sennett, while he rejected the analysis of substance into matter and form, he also thought in terms of multiple levels of physical composition. A bar of gold is made of gold corpuscles, but gold is not a fundamental element. Rather, its parts are made of even more basic particles. Like Paracelsus, Sennett assumes that the ultimate chemical constituents are sulfur, mercury, and salt, which come together to form more complex materials that derive from them. Furthermore, neither Sennett nor Paracelsus tried to explain the observable properties of things by appealing to the physical properties of atoms. This is a significant difference from ancient atomism. Democritus said that the soul must be made of very smooth, round atoms that can flow around the human body, while Plato, in his Timaeus, proposed that fire destroys things because it is made of tiny particles that are sharp because they have the shape of pyramids. Instead, late 16th and 17th century corpuscularianism generally ascribed certain powers and properties to each atomic aggregate, like the healing effect of a drug or the corrosive effect of acid, without reducing these features to the mere physical shapes of the corpuscles. For this reason, the sort of atomism we see in Sennett and others has been seen as a kind of compromise between the true physical account of classical atomism and a form or property-based physics like that of Aristotle. In his book on the chemistry of this period, William R. Newman even says that Sennett's view was a fusion between Aristotelianism and alchemy. But Sennett himself was something of an expert on fusion, and he would have disagreed. He saw himself as being in agreement with Democritus, and indeed a general tendency in ancient philosophy, one that had been interrupted by Aristotle's idiosyncratic, though ultimately more influential, physics. Atomism had been the view, said Sennett, of virtually all the ancients before Aristotle, and even many after Aristotle. And there was another ancient idea taking renewed root at this time, the theory of seeds. We saw how Paracelsus believed that natural things emerge from basic elemental ingredients because God placed the seeds of things in those ingredients at the first creation. This sounds a good deal like the Stoic theory that nature implants the rational principles of things, or logoi, in matter as seeds. It's an idea that would have been known to renaissance readers thanks to Augustine, and also Cicero's presentations of Stoic doctrine in the Latin language. During the 16th century, one proponent of the seed theory was Jacob Scheck, who studied in Tübingen and was appointed there as a lecturer in philosophy following the reform of the teaching curriculum by Melanchthon. In a treatise written in 1580, Scheck argued that when plants, animals, and humans are generated, this occurs thanks to a formative or plastic power seeded within matter. For him, this is the meaning of Aristotle's appeals to the role of vital heat in the formation of animal embryos. Like Paracelsus's seeds, Scheck's active power within matter has been put there by God. Once the plastic power has done its work in forming the fetus, the organism's soul replaces it and fully animates the body. These ideas too were inspirational for Sennut, who used them to explain the supposed phenomenon of spontaneous generation. Those worms crawling out of the moldy bread and cheese come from something analogous to seeds within matter, as he puts it. And even metals, as Paracelsus had claimed, emerged thanks to the power seeded within matter. The species of gold, silver, or copper are propagated by such a power, much like an animal species. Sennut did modify Scheck's account to some extent though, seeking to give the soul a greater role in both natural and spontaneous reproduction. He proposed that the soul must lie hidden within the corpuscles that come together to form the organic body. So again, Sennut's atomism, or corpuscularianism, is not mechanistic. The particles of matter have powers and properties that are reminiscent of Aristotelian forms, and Sennut believes that soul is latent or dormant in them, expressing itself when the time and circumstance are right. Scheck had a connection to another early proponent of the fruit salad theory of bodies, Nicolaus Taurelas. He was a student of Scheck, and along with him defended the view that substances are aggregates of parts, with higher level forms emerging from lower ones. Taurelas also invoked the rule of composition that motivated so many corpuscularian views. If things were born through the conjunction of parts, they decay through the separation of the same parts. Like other atomists, he denies the reality of prime matter, the featureless substrate that was supposed to underlie the four basic elements. More surprisingly, Taurelas talks as if the atoms of his own theory do not count as matter at all. Matter, he says, plainly does not exist, and nothing but forms can be and can enter composition. Mixture or composition, meanwhile, is a mere conjunction of forms that in no way changes them. Against the notion that we need some kind of matter to explain why bodies are extended in space, he proposes a breathtaking thought experiment. Imagine a universe with only one element, like a whole cosmos made of earth. In that universe, it seems obvious that spatial extension would simply be a property of earth. In our more diverse universe, then, it can belong to all bodies, or at least all fundamental bodies, by virtue of their forms. Here, then, we have something like traditional form pluralism, but without any commitment to matter supporting the forms. Higher level forms like the form of humanity supervene on lower level ones, like the form of blood and bone, which in turn belong to forms like those of the elements. And, blood and bone, or earth and water, are explained atomistically. The particles touch without merging into an undivided continuum. So, much as Senert would later do, Taurelas combines something like a Democritian physical theory with something like an Aristotelian theory of natures and properties. Taking our story forward to the early 17th century again, there is one more philosopher we should consider, David Rolleas. Honored as the Dutch Galileo for his innovative physical theories, Rolleas lived to be only 21 years old, dying in 1612. Fortunately, he was precocious. Two works of his, both published posthumously, follow Taurelas in holding that even the human being is a single substance by aggregation, not by essence. The soul has been added to the body and penetrates through its atomic structure. This is something we'll see again when we look at Descartes and other 17th century dualists. Since they thought that the soul and the body are different types of metaphysical entity, they were often more attracted by atomism than Aristotelianism. Better to say that the human body is a mere accumulation of corpuscles with a properly separate soul to rule over it than Aristotle's idea that soul is the form of the body. Indeed, Rolleas explicitly rejects the hylomorphic account of substances inherited from Aristotle. Bodies are only aggregates of particles, not matter actualized and organized by form. To illustrate, Rolleas mentions the familiar examples of a cloud of water vapor or pile of stones. Apparently, fruit salad was not yet widely available in the Netherlands at this time, though you'd think it might have been popularized by William of Orange. For Rolleas, the fundamental elements are not the chemical triad accepted by Paracelsus and Sennert, but water and earth. Fire is explained away as mere heat, generated by friction between particles, while air is a non-elemental fluid filling up the gaps between and inside atomic aggregates. Notice that Rolleas does not accept the reality of void, another departure from the classical atomists. For Democritus, or Epicurus, matter consisted of atoms moving around in empty space, not in a fluid substance like air. So that is a point of agreement between Rolleas and the Aristotelians. Furthermore, like the other atomists we have been talking about, Rolleas thinks that properties, including heat and cold, can belong to an aggregate as a whole. So yet again, this is more like a property in scholastic philosophy than what you have in classical atomism, where perceptible features are explained reductively by appealing to the shape, speed, location, and entangling of atoms. The Aristotelian worldview was dissolving, but not with the sudden fury of a body thrust into pure sulfuric acid. Scientists around the turn of the 17th century preferred to offer more moderate solutions. In the previous episode, I suggested that the new chemistry and medicine of Paracelsus might be explained by the times in which he lived, a reformation of science in parallel to the religious reformation going on just down the road. Literally so, in his case, he had to flee from Salzburg when the Peasants' War broke out there. The topic of today's episode may seem so abstract and purely scientific that it cannot be connected to the religious disputes of the age, but it turns out that there may be a way to do just that. It's been argued in modern scholarship that Horlaeus' theory of matter was partially inspired by Arminianism, a variety of Protestant thought that had gained a foothold in the Netherlands by his time. I'll explain why once I've taken you through the spread of Protestantism to the Low Countries and the impact it had on philosophy in that region. Next time, we'll continue our investigation of divisibility by splitting the check, because we're going Dutch here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born to be Contrary, Toleration in the Netherlands. We seem to be living in a time when people are not very good at disagreeing with one another. Or rather, we find it exceedingly easy to disagree. What we are not so good at is resolving disagreement. Social and political disputes lead to distrust between implacably opposed camps, instead of leading to attempts at resolution. Much ink has been spilled and many hands wrung over this contemporary situation and its causes. I'd like to suggest an unusual approach, namely that we might look back to an earlier period of intense dispute to see what lessons we might learn. I have in mind Europe in the late 16th century, which makes the early 21st century look like a singalong hosted by Mr. Rogers. In a time of violent disagreement, violent rhetoric, and plain old violence, the Netherlands were a scene of particularly intense conflict. Mr. Rogers's gentle question, won't you be my neighbour, would typically have been answered, sure, but only if you accept my highly specific interpretation of Christianity. Most obviously there was the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism. The Catholics were represented by King Philip II, who claimed authority over the Low Countries and ruled them from distant Spain. Ranged against him were the Protestants, especially the Dutch Reformed Church, which adopted a broadly Calvinist theological outlook. But other groups joined the fray. There were Lutherans, who argued with the Reformed, and there were Anabaptists, especially the followers of Meno-Simons or Mennonites. They adopted a pacifist approach to avoid being associated with the sort of upheaval seen when an earlier group of Anabaptists took over Munster. As this already implies, there were a variety of subgroups among the Anabaptist movement, with no little friction between them. And as we'll see momentarily, there were also the Armenians. In short, there was no shortage of opportunity for disagreement, even, or perhaps especially, between those who mostly agreed with one another. Nor was this disagreement exclusively verbal. A wave of iconoclasm led to destruction of church images beginning in 1566, and war pitted the Protestant William of Orange and his followers against the Spanish. In 1581, the States General of the provinces in the Netherlands officially repudiated Philip II, making themselves a Protestant state. But then, and still today, the Low Countries were divided between Catholicism and Protestantism. After the brutal Duke of Alva staged a reconquest of the South in the 1580s, many Protestants left for the North. The town of Ghent was a Calvinist stronghold, sometimes called the Geneva of Flanders. Now, about half the population abandoned it and went into exile. Making matters more complex, rivalry between religious factions was overlaid atop competition within the political order. There was a long and healthy tradition of uprisings by Dutch towns against their overlords going back to the late Middle Ages. The scholar Lourevico Guicciardini, nephew of Francesco Guicciardini, a historian whom we met in the series on the Italian Renaissance, lived in Antwerp and praised its mixed constitution. The city was under the princely rule of the Duke of Brabant, but enjoyed many freedoms or privileges that allowed the city to govern itself practically as an independent republic. So it was nothing new when the Dutch chafed under the monarch Philip II. One can even argue that the religious complexion of the debate masked a more fundamental conflict between decentralized and centralized political authority. In fact, the Dutch states themselves made exactly this argument when they defied the Spanish crown. They were fighting for political liberty, not religious freedom. In the latter half of the 16th century, it became impossible to disentangle the two goals though, as we see with Dutch opposition to the arrival of the Inquisition in their lands. They disliked the Inquisition, in part because it infringed their freedom of conscience, in part because it struck them as an illegitimate transfer of coercive power from secular magistrates to the church. Still, it's worth realizing that the goal of religious freedom was really an extension or corollary of the longstanding tradition of political freedom, whether for provinces, towns, or individuals. Since the 14th century, each Duke of Brabant had been sworn in with an excitingly named ceremony, the Joyous Entry, during which he had to promise not to abuse anyone in any manner. Once the Reformation came along, these words were somewhat tendentiously taken to imply that he must not exercise coercion in matters of faith. So a commitment to political independence predated and paved the way for ideas of religious liberty. Here we have the ultimate root of the tolerant, open-minded reputation that the Dutch still enjoy today. It was an attitude that was expressed in many Dutch political treatises of the time. These invoked the ancient liberties of the cities and presented these liberties as a factor in the economic prosperity enjoyed by the Dutch. An advisor of William of Orange, named Junius de Jong, went so far as to say that a monarch like William wields power only at the pleasure of his subjects and thus must rule in close cooperation with the state's general, who represent popular opinion. Another treatise stated that humans have been created free by God. They cannot become slaves by the will of him who has no power over them, save that they themselves have granted and given it to him. Agijus van Albera, a spokesman for the states, was the first Dutch thinker to suggest that the people are actually above the state, so that all legitimate political sovereignty is popular in nature. This was unusually bold, but it was quite common to suppose that rulers wield their power through a kind of contract with the people or with their representatives in the form of city governments. And it was written right into such documents as the joyous entry that a ruler who turned tyrant could be rightly resisted by the people. All this might lead us to expect the low countries, or at least the part under Protestant control, to be a paradise of individual liberty. But in an introduction to a book on religious toleration in the Netherlands, the editors say that Actually, this may not be quite so paradoxical. The Reformed were a minority in the low countries, even in the Protestant areas, and so they were forced to tolerate other points of view simply as a matter of practical necessity. Sometimes, toleration was a more formal result of political settlement, as when a 1576 peace treaty, called the Pacification of Ghent, required the states general to allow freedom of worship to Catholics. And when it came to the relation between Protestant confessions, toleration was not merely a grudgingly accepted constraint. The Protestants liked to present themselves as defending freedom of conscience against Catholic tyranny. They took pride in combating heresy not with fire and sword, but by using their words, as parents like to tell their kids today. Magistrates were encouraged to stand against religious dissidents, but by means of debate and refutation, not execution or imprisonment. Then again, parents also like to say, do as we say, not as we do. While the Reformed might tolerate other mainstream Protestants, and peacefully debate with them, they were not always so patient with groups like the Anabaptists, who were thought to be beyond the pale. An interesting test case were the Arminians, also called Remonstrants, whose ideas would ultimately be ruled out of bounds in the Seinout of Dort in 1619. They were followers of Jacob Arminius, whose distinctive teaching involved an issue we've discussed in several recent episodes, the relation between the saving power of God's grace and human freedom. Like many Protestant intellectuals in the Netherlands, Arminius was a student at Leiden, where a university was founded at the behest of William of Orange in 1575. Also like many Dutch intellectuals, he then went to study in Geneva, where he came into contact with Theodore Beza. But he was no follower of Beza's. To the contrary, he developed an understanding of freedom that was dramatically opposed to that of Beza, or at least dramatically opposed within the spectrum of positions that could be defended by a Protestant. Beza took Calvin's doctrine of predestination so seriously that he adopted what is called supralapsarianism, which is a mouthful but expresses a pretty simple idea. Namely that God does not just predetermine which people will be elected or saved and which will be reprobate or damned. He does this even before original sin has happened. The Fall, which is the lapse in the word supralapsarianism, was a foredained event, always planned to be rectified by God's gift of grace. The story of redemption and damnation thus follows a script that has been written in advance, both in general and for each individual character in the story. If you're thinking that this sounds like it would leave no place for human freedom at all, then Arminius would agree. He argued that according to Beza, God punishes people who had no opportunity to avoid being punished, which is unjust. Arminius thus proposed a different theory, one that also involves God's knowledge of future events. On this theory, God does not predetermine those events. Instead, he decides in advance to give grace to those who he already knows will freely choose not to resist that grace. Speaking of doing things one has decided to do in advance, I can now come back to David Gorleos. In the last episode, I promised to explain how his religious context may have helped to inspire his innovative account of matter. In particular, this concerns his description of the human as only accidentally a being, that is, as an aggregate of atoms that has an accidental relationship to its soul. The modern scholar Christoph Lüti has argued that this aspect of Gorleos' thought may relate to his Arminianism. For Gorleos, the body is a purely material thing, rather than being substantially unified with the soul that animates it, as more Aristotelian philosophers held. This makes it possible for him to associate the blight of sin with the body, passed down from one generation to the next in a kind of biological determinism. The soul, however, floats free of the atomic body, and is able to make free choices unimpeded by material influence. It must be said that Gorleos does not himself draw a connection between his natural philosophy and his theological affiliation, so this interpretation remains somewhat speculative, but it does nicely explain why a partisan of Arminius' theology would have rejected the Aristotelian anthropology in favor of an atomist one. As for Arminius' opponents, they accused him of taking up a position much like that of the Catholics. In fact, they said it amounted to the idea put forward by Catholic schoolmen like Gabriel Biel and thunderously condemned by Luther, namely that God promises to, as it were, help those who help themselves. Christians must simply do what is in them by trying to be good, and God will give them grace as a reward. Arminius was aware of this problem, which is why he spoke about not resisting grace. The believers' contribution is negative, so they do not do anything to earn grace. Like other Protestants, Arminius accepted that salvation is worked through God's unconstrained generosity and cannot be merited through works. He offered a nice metaphor. If a rich man gives charity to a beggar, does it make this less of a freely given gift if the beggar stretches out his hand to take what is offered? It is also important to Arminius that grace is not, as he put it, an irresistible force. If it were, then God would just be imposing a fate upon his whether for good or for ill, which again would be unjust. Arminius went so far as to say that God's rights do not extend over them as far as this. Some of the philosophical issues here are familiar to us from looking at the debate between Luther and Erasmus, but there are a couple that are more distinctive and worth dwelling on. First, Arminius seems to be saying that God decides in advance to give grace to those who he already knows will not resist when the time comes. In other words, God is, so to speak, planning out his own actions by taking into account what people will freely do in the future. Does this make sense? Well, I too can look into the future and tell you that we'll be talking about this in depth when we get to the Spanish scholastics of the Counter-Reformation, especially with reference to Molina's theory of middle knowledge. For now, let's just observe that Arminius gave some thought to the logical implications of his theological position. In a letter to a friend written in 1598, he suggests that a future freely chosen action can be determined in the sense that it cannot fail to happen, which is why God can know about it already. The future is open only in being unknowable to finite minds like ours. This is rather surprising, since it turns out that the staunch upholder of free will, Arminius, was in a sense a determinist. Once grace has been given to the believer, the epistemic indeterminacy falls away. In other words, the believer can be totally sure that they are among the elect. This is a less famous, but for Arminius, totally crucial point. Like many other reformers, he wanted to reassure the faithful that they could be certain of their own salvation and need not live their lives in terror of a foreordained punishment. That was a form of reassurance also promised by his opponents, including Franciscus Gomaros, who became his leading critic. But it was easier for Arminius to make the point, since on his view, believers are actually involved in the bestowal of grace, having decided not to refuse that grace. So they are in a good position to know that they are indeed faithful. Hardline Reformed thinkers like Gomaros instead left absolutely everything up to God. So they could only advise their fellow Christians to trust in God's mercy and insist that one can feel totally certain that God will grant entirely unmerited redemption. That sounds rather unconvincing, but it does fit well with the Calvinist understanding of faith as unshakable belief without any need for justification or argument. While Arminius adopted a position on freedom and grace that may strike us as more moderate, when it came to the question of toleration, he was not that far away from the Reformed theologians who eventually got his teachings banned. He said that a hardline predestination theory like that of Beza ought in no way to be allowed in the church. So freedom to accept grace? Yes. But freedom to promulgate the contrary view? Not so much. In this, he was unlike a final Dutch thinker I'd like to discuss in this episode, and for my money, the most interesting when it comes to the issue of tolerance, Dirk Volker Zun-Kornherdt. As far as his theology goes, he thought, much like Arminius, that a strict teaching on predestination would take away the believers' motivation to strive for goodness. But he ventured still further away from Calvinist teaching by stating that it lies within human resources to achieve that goodness. This is an easy and blissful process, itself a kind of joyous entry, guided by reason and achieved through knowledge of oneself and of morality. Which hardly sounds Protestant at all, right? Well, exactly. Kornherdt was not aligned with any of the established, or visible, churches on offer in the Netherlands. You might find that surprising. Didn't everyone have to choose a team? No, actually. It's been estimated that about half of the Dutch population were the equivalent of undecided voters when it came to their religious disputes tearing their country apart. Whether they were waiting to see who would win, genuinely torn over which church to support, or just couldn't be bothered to engage with the fine points that university-trained theologians thought were so important, these people were not committed adherents of any one confession. They were on the fence, and along with Mr. Rogers, hoping that that fence would make for good neighbors. Kornherdt was the Dutch intellectual who most fully articulated that hope. He argued that the Reformed Church, no less than the Catholics, ought to refrain from prosecuting heretics, letting religious views be tested in the arena of public debate, rather than simply imposing one view and enforcing its adoption by the whole community. He was duly invited to participate in public disputations still carried out in the style of medieval scholasticism, but with the addition of techniques learned from the writings of rhetoricians like Agricola. The magistrates who organized these disputes were not thereby accepting his ideas about open debate. To the contrary, they wanted to stop his mouth by letting him be seen to lose the argument. The modern-day reader, though, is apt to think that he had the better of the disputes. Kornherdt was then a controversialist. It was once said of him that he was born to be contrary. He was also a humanist who translated into Dutch works by Cicero, Seneca, Homer, and Boethius, and himself wrote in Dutch in an effort to carry the tradition of learned literature into this language. He was a true heir of Erasmus, using carefully crafted rhetoric in the cause of Christian peace. A powerful work dedicated to that ideal is his Synod on the Freedom of Conscience, a dialogue which pits representatives of the Reformation, including fictionalized versions of Calvin and Beza, against a Catholic spokesman. Their unedifying squabbles put into sharp relief the calm and temperate remarks of an imaginary character named Gamaliel. He is Kornherdt's mouthpiece, whose name is taken from a figure in the New Testament who urges restraint in religious persecution, saying, If this work is of men, it will come to nothing, but if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it. This scriptural passage connects to a deeply held conviction of Kornherdt's, namely that human efforts to discover truth, even by sincerely faithful Christians, are inevitably liable to error. He can sometimes sound like Agrippa at the end of On Uncertainty, saying that only God is truthful and all humans liars. Kornherdt applies the skeptical point to the exegesis of scripture. Reformers like Luther and Svingle felt sure in adopting their opposed views of, say, the meaning of Christ telling his disciples to eat his body. But as far as Kornherdt is concerned, scriptural interpretation is always just that, a matter of interpretation. In fact, he wanted ministers to preach directly from scripture in church rather than trying to explain what it might mean. There is, as he put it, no rule of faith to help us decide which teachings are true and which false. Mind you, he did not take this to mean that people should stop trying to find religious truth, he just thought it was a process subject to error and one that was not yet complete. He called his own time a night of unknowing. Ideally, in the future, all Christians, or even all humans, would converge on a single shared doctrine, but for the moment, and in the Netherlands, Christians were far from having achieved that. As Kornherdt remarks, if you go before a group of people and ask all the Christians to stand up, they will all rise despite their bitter disagreements. They're all sure that they are right, yet clearly this can't be so, since their views are mutually contradictory. What is needed, but sorely lacking, is an impartial judge who could adjudicate the rival claims of Catholics, Lutherans, Dutch Reformed, Anabaptists, and so on. In the absence of such a judge, it is inevitably the group that has numerical or political superiority, however temporarily, that determines which views are acceptable and which heretical. Given this situation, it would behoove all parties to refrain from compulsion and coercion in matters of religion. The inquisitorial Catholics are obvious offenders against this principle, but so are the Protestants. Several times in the dialogue, Kornherdt alludes to Calvin's role in the execution of servitus at Geneva, and he constantly attacks Beza for having written in support of using violence against heretics. This position is hypocritical, given the Protestants' demands for religious liberty, and doesn't even make sense in light of Protestant theology. After all, Calvin and Beza are convinced that earthly rulers are typically deluded and sunk in sin. Giving such leaders the power to coerce religious thought is bound to lead to the punishment of the righteous more often than the killing of genuine heretics. Philosophically speaking, the most interesting thing about Kornherdt's arguments is that they are generalizable. Take any dispute you like, whether it is about morality, politics, or the relative merits of two television shows. When there are firmly entrenched views, it is simply illegitimate to allow one camp to decide the issue, as when Catholics determined who counted as a heretic in Catholic lands and the Reformed Church, likewise, in their own territory. This would be like allowing one party to a legal dispute to act also as the judge. Kornherdt's flair for satire is on show when he says that he'd be better off letting non-Christians like the pagans, Jews, or Turks decide the issue. He also points out that when it comes to the use of coercive power, it is prudent to tread carefully. It is hard to transgress by not condemning someone, but one who condemns may transgress greatly. All this amounts to a powerful case for freedom of expression, which in true Dutch style, Kornherdt links to political as well as religious liberty. He has one of his characters say, Kornherdt was not the first, and certainly not the last, to express such sentiments. In particular, he was following in the wake of French Protestant thinkers, notably Sebastien Castellio, who argued that violence should not be used against heretics, and here I'll look into the future once again to assure you that we'll get to them before long. Taking things up to the present, religious toleration now enjoys widespread acceptance. Yet we still struggle with limits on freedom of speech. Where, if anywhere, should we draw the line? Kornherdt himself addresses this question, reassuring his readers that he is still in favor of banning books that incite to sedition, on the grounds that such views undermine the peace. While this remark is made only in passing, it is a telling one. It reminds us that Kornherdt's main priority is not an abstract ideal of free thought, but the keeping of the peace, and avoidance of wrongful persecution. In fact, his ideal world would not be a pluralist one, with many religious views coexisting in harmony. His plea for tolerance was intended more as a temporary solution to what he hoped would be a limited period of fractious disagreement. It was entirely possible to share the goal of peace without sharing Kornherdt's views on toleration. For all their disputes, intellectuals of all parties agreed that civic harmony was vital. Drawing on their humanist education, they would quote authors like Cicero and Seneca for the idea that, whereas Concord makes small commonwealth great, discord disrupts the greatest ones. And in this period, no Dutch humanist was more outstanding than Justus Lipsius. He fell out with Kornherdt over both forms of freedom we've discussed in this episode, moral and political. On the moral side, the tension between the two men arose because Kornherdt wanted to translate Lipsius's Stoic-inspired work on constancy. There was one passage in it he didn't much like, though, where Lipsius insisted that humans cannot avoid sin without divine assistance. Lipsius was true to mainstream Protestant thought, comparing the human agent to a musical instrument played by God, and in most cases, an instrument that is out of tune. Given his perfectionist moral theory, Kornherdt could not agree with this. The two then came into dispute over political freedom because of Lipsius's view that secular powers should indeed enforce religious orthodoxy. Again, Kornherdt could, of course, not agree. In his own writings, he had pointed out that this would make religion dependent on the whims of individual rulers. What, he asked, would be less sure than our faith. But for Lipsius, religion is such an important binding force within society that one cannot imagine a harmonious state without religious unity. He did not take this to mean that rulers should themselves decide matters of religious doctrine. Instead, he advised them simply to enforce whatever religion they find dominant in their territories. Kornherdt was able to pounce here. Wouldn't that mean that the hated Catholics had been right in trying to stamp out the Reformation when it first broke out? For that matter, couldn't pagan or Muslim rulers use the same rationale to persecute all Christians as heretics? Of course, Lipsius did not want to concede such embarrassing analogies, and applied his principle of peace only in cases of acceptably Protestant rulership, but you have to admit that Kornherdt had a point. Which is not to say that Lipsius is a finger undeserving of our time and attention. In fact, he's going to get a whole episode to himself, in which we'll be considering his wider political thought and, above all, his role in the revival of Stoic philosophy around the turn of the 17th century. I already know that you'll make the right choice and join me for that next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London at the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Everything is Mine and Nothing, Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism. You can tell a lot about a man by the title page of the 17th century edition of his collected works, especially if that title page was designed by the great artist Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens gave this treatment to the opera omnia of Justus Lipsius, published in 1637, 31 years after Lipsius's death. Tellingly, it shows the face of Lipsius flanked by two other busts, one of the Roman historian Tacitus, the other of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca. Thereby, Rubens captures something of Lipsius's humanist achievement. He gained renown as an editor and scholar of Tacitus and Seneca, and was a central figure in the revival of Stoic thought around the turn of the 17th century, which had an impact upon Rubens himself and many other European intellectuals. Lipsius was not the only figure of this period to engage with Stoicism, of course. In an earlier episode I explained that Stoic ethics were of interest to Italian scholars like Leonardo Bruni, and when we turn soon to Renaissance France, we will meet figures like Guillaume de Vare, who was powerfully influenced by Epictetus, much as Lipsius drew on Seneca. Still, it was arguably Lipsius who did the most to put the Stoics back on the map, facilitating the spread of their ideas to such famous early modern thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Malevanche, and Leibniz. Lipsius wrote several works that were central to this neo-Stoic movement, composing an introduction to the Stoic system that appeared in 1604, and even more consequentially, On Constancy, published back in 1584. It would be translated into numerous languages and receive more than 80 editions. In this work, Lipsius is drawing on the tradition of philosophical consolation, as we know it from such authors as Boethius and Seneca himself. But as Lipsius emphasizes in his preface, he is innovating within the consolatory genre by focusing on the problem presented by what he calls public evils. The reasons for his interest in that question are not far to seek. He was born near Louvain in 1547, and thus lived through the upheavals of the Low Countries during the Wars of Religion. These powerfully affected Lipsius' own life. After studying in Louvain, he traveled around Europe, with stints in Rome, Vienna, and Jena, before taking up a position as historian at the University of Leiden in 1579. Here he adopted the Calvinist confession only to recant after departing from Holland in 1591. His return to the Catholic fold didn't stop his great treatise On Politics from 1589 from being placed on the index of prescribed books, forcing him to make changes to the text. On Constancy takes the form of a dialogue between Lipsius and his friend Charles Languis, chatting during Lipsius' sojourn in Vienna. Actually, chatting is not really the right word. It's more like Lipsius is expressing his anguish at the state of affairs back home, and Languis is using all the weapons of Stoic philosophy to browbeat Lipsius into pulling himself together. He tells Lipsius that his travels abroad were never going to help him cope with the upheaval in his native land, you carry war with you, and a change of physical circumstances has little effect on such turmoil in the soul. The solution is instead to take what we still call a more Stoic perspective on the political situation. Part of the problem is that Lipsius, presented here as a proud native of Flanders, is simply too caught up with the events there. It is irrational for Lipsius to be more upset by what happens in Flanders than in Ethiopia or India. True philosophers should instead consider the whole world to be their country, an idea ascribed here to Socrates, though it is reminiscent of Diogenes the Cynics' claim to be a citizen of the universe. The character of Lipsius responds that it is only natural for him to value his homeland which nurtured him from birth. But Languis dismisses this, arguing that a feeling of attachment to one's country is in fact just disguised self-interest, the outcome of a historical process by which communities came together for the sake of security. So it turns out that distress motivated by patriotism is the result of mere opinion, which in this dialogue means a false supposition about matters both human and divine. In contrast to opinion would be right reason, which tells us that we should not let our peace of mind depend on having such things as wealth, honor, health, and political tranquility. If we can let go of our need for such things, we can attain the constancy that gives this dialogue its name. Constancy is defined as a right and immovable strength of the mind, neither lifted up nor pressed down with external or casual accidents. Now, this is just standard Stoic doctrine. The so-called external goods are in fact indifferent, meaning that they are not necessary for the happiness of the true sage. It may still be rational to prefer health to illness or peace to warfare, which explains how it can be that in his treatise on politics, Lipsius waxes enthusiastic about the benefits of peace and laments the destruction caused by civil wars. But according to official Stoic doctrine, even peace is an indifferent. Also classically Stoic in every sense of that phrase is the next main point made in the dialogue, all events are fated to occur by divine providence, so we should accept them with equanimity. But Lipsius updates this point for his 16th century context. For one thing, he shies away from a suggestion sometimes found in the Stoics, namely that God himself is somehow subject to fate or necessity. Even Lipsius's beloved Seneca suggested this false doctrine at one point when he wrote, Although the great creator and ruler of the universe himself wrote the decrees of fate, yet he follows them. He obeys forever, he decreed but once. This, Lipsius considers to be, said with too little elegance. He distances himself from the apparently Stoic idea that humans are violently coerced to act as they do, determined from the outside by God or the past history of the world. Instead, divine providence operates through secondary causes, and these causes include human choices. Nonetheless, the choices we make are indeed foreordained and necessary. In the terms of the modern debate over free will, Lipsius is a compatibilist who would say that we are free so long as we do what we want to do, even if it is inevitable that we will do it. In the terms of the 16th century debate over free will, Lipsius sounds not unlike the Protestant Reformers when he says, You sin necessarily, and yet of your own free will. In his later introduction to Stoic physics, Lipsius seems less inclined to criticize the Stoics for their account of fate, and some readers have thought that he changed his mind about this. But it has been persuasively argued by John Sellars that, throughout his career, Lipsius understood the Stoic theory of fate in the same way, namely as accepting the compatibility of free choice and necessity. He does speak in inconstancy as if the Stoics abolish free will completely, and he makes clear that he disagrees, but this might just be a way to distance himself from a position that could be ascribed to the Stoics by less careful readers. Whatever the case, it's clear in all these writings that he wants to go as far as possible in the direction of approving Stoic doctrine, with the bounds of that possibility marked by another kind of compatibility, namely compatibility with Christianity. He once stated outright, I wanted to adapt the ancient philosophy to Christian truth, and signs of this ambition are scattered throughout his works. Thus he says that the Stoics place happiness in nature, which can be accepted so long as we take this to mean in God, and that the Stoic belief that God pervades the universe, like a soul in a body, is mistaken, but at least monotheistic. It's a bit awkward that they make their God a fiery substance, but hey, even the Bible has God appearing in a burning bush. Clearly then, Lipsius's approach was not quite like that of the modern-day scholar of Stoicism. Even though he offered an unprecedentedly complete and accurate overview of the school's doctrines, historical accuracy was not his real aim. Instead, he wanted to present Stoicism as a coherent and attractive body of doctrines. To make them coherent, he blurred the distinctions we now more clearly perceive between early Greek Stoics like Chrysippus, and later Roman ones like Seneca. To make them attractive, he harmonized them with Christianity. What kind of Christianity? Well, as I already mentioned, Lipsius spent time on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. Of course, he insisted after recanting his Calvinism that his lengthy flirtation with Reform had massed inner Catholic devotion, but his biography gives the impression of a man who chose his confession more out of convenience than conviction. Perhaps his true belief was that these sectarian conflicts, the ones tearing his homeland apart, actually didn't matter so much. The main thing was to be a Christian, not this or that kind of Christian. This brings us to his treatise on politics, and in particular, to the section of that treatise that provoked the ire of Dirk Kornhert. As I explained in the last episode, Kornhert was a proponent of toleration, who was appalled by Lipsius's suggestion that the ruler of a country should vigorously enforce, adherence to just one form of religion. At one point, Lipsius quotes Cicero to the effect that religious dissidents who express their views publicly should be treated the way doctors deal with limbs that need to be amputated—burn, cut, in order that some member perishes rather than the whole body. But, as Kornhert noted, Lipsius doesn't specify which religion should be so rigorously imposed—a figure of the text that also annoyed the Catholic Church, which naturally did not object to Lipsius's support of violence against the one state-approved religion, but was annoyed that he forgot to identify that one religion as Catholicism. Of course, Lipsius did not, in fact, forget. For him, religion was the sole creator of unity within a society, and that unity was the main thing, not the theological doctrines. It is in this sense that Jan Vassink, editor and translator of this treatise, could say that Lipsius wanted to free politics from the influence of religion, despite his approval of such measures as jailing and executing heretics. From what I have said so far about the work, you've probably gotten the wrong idea about the politica. I have been talking about it as if it were just a typical treatise of political philosophy. Instead, it is a commonplace book or patchwork of citations from classical sources. Vassink counts no fewer than 2,669 quotations drawn from 116 authors. We are apt to be staggered by the breadth of Lipsius's scholarship, yet underwhelmed by his lack of originality. But Lipsius anticipates this reaction and, in the prefatory material, encourages his readers to take a more favorable view. For one thing, why shouldn't he quote the ancients, who surely have more authority than he does? For another thing, his selection, arrangement, and presentation of the sources does express his own views. As he nicely puts it, everything is mine and nothing. It is thus entirely possible to speak of Lipsius's own political theory, even if he expresses that theory in the manner of a ventriloquist, who uses Cicero, Seneca, Aristotle, and so on as sock puppets. He was surely a big hit at children's birthday parties. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Lipsius has two political theories, which are set out in the first and second half of the treatise. This, at least, is how Vassink reads it. He identifies the first three books as adopting a more conventional, Ciceronian worldview by promising good outcomes for those who do good. The latter three books adopt a more cynical attitude gleaned from the historian Tacitus and the notorious Machiavelli, whom Lipsius dares to praise to some extent, saying that this Italian reprobate is a valuable author who suffers from an unfair reputation. Like Machiavelli in The Prince, Lipsius unapologetically writes for a monarchical political situation. Thus, he dedicates the work to emperors, kings, and princes, and tells us in the preface that this work is for the ruler whereas Anconstancy was aimed at citizens more generally. He prefers monarchy as the type of regime that goes furthest back in human history, is most natural, and tends to be most unified in purpose. Again, his priority is social cohesion, or as he puts it at one point, the avoidance of chaos. He goes so far as to say that the ruler stands above the law, though true kingship is in the first place conferred through a legal process, and becomes mere tyranny if the ruler fails to work towards the good of his subjects. Given the lack of institutional constraint envisioned by Lipsius, it seems that good rule depends entirely on the personal wisdom and virtue of the ruler, a classic shortcoming of works in this genre of mirrors for princes. In the first three Ciceronian books, Lipsius duly piles up quotations that encourage the ruler to strive for more excellence. In particular, he or she, since Lipsius explicitly endorses the idea that women can rule, should acquire that virtue which in Greek was called phronesis and is in Latin known as prudencia. The obvious English cognate would be prudence, though a more accurate English equivalent might be practical wisdom. It's only in the fourth book that we learn about the dark side of this wisdom, which Lipsius calls mixed prudence. He follows Machiavelli in observing that strict morality is naive in the face of human evils. He actively recommends misleading others about one's intentions and tolerates deception and bribery, though he still condemns outright injustice. A Machiavellian note is also struck by Lipsius's pessimism about the general population, which he regards as fickle and ruled by emotion, and by his advice to cultivate fear and respect as well as love. Occasionally it is necessary to act against one's enemies, and when the time has come, one should make sure to wipe them all out at the same time. From our own look at Machiavelli back in episodes 349 and 350, we know that he had more to offer than mere cynicism. He was also a historian who had nuanced views about the way that the past can give us lessons for the present. Again, Lipsius agreed, so he wrote another work which is explicitly presented as a partner or confirmation for his politica, called Admissions and Examples on Politics. It proceeds on the assumption that rulers should look to history, finding exemplars to imitate and failures to avoid. If I may quote an authority of my own, namely my own grandfather, everyone serves a purpose in life, even if only as a bad example. In the politica, Lipsius emphasizes the need for rulers to adapt their decisions to changing contexts. Even the choice of Republican government as opposed to monarchial rule might be made in light of the needs of a given people. But in the admonitions, we get more the sense that the political art is fairly universal, so that one can learn lessons from the histories of very different places and times. By the same token, Lipsius seems to be suggesting that the best rulers are not those who have principled rules of conduct, to which they always adhere. They are those who have a refined judgment, grounded in long experience, whether this was acquired personally or borrowed from the ancients, with the help of Lipsius. If we had to name the least Machiavellian feature of Lipsius's thought, it would be one we've already discussed, his acceptance of the Stoic doctrine of fate. Machiavelli was mightily impressed by the workings of fortune, and admitted that even the craftiest ruler would be bound to reach the end of his luck eventually. Lipsius also emphasizes the twists of fortune that can confront a ruler, but insists that prudence can prevail over them. More fundamentally, he doesn't believe in fortune at all, strictly speaking. Whereas Machiavelli was rather taken by the Epicurean worldview, with its random scatterings and conjoinings of atoms, Lipsius is a partisan of the Stoics. So it seems to be mere fortune is, for him, the inscrutable, but inevitable work of fate, laid down by divine providence. In the admonitions, he mentions the example of the Spanish ruler, Philip II, who came to the throne because almost two dozen other people who would have been in the line of succession just happened to die. It belongs to the ruler's virtue to realize that such apparently random events are in fact chosen by God, and as Seneca says, endure what cannot be changed and follow God without complaint. This is advice that applies to us non-rulers too, as we've seen, something that could lead to a quietist position. That is, Lipsius might wind up advising us to be not only untroubled by political events, but also uninvolved with them. In On Constancy, he mentioned a significant caveat to his critique of patriotism, namely that you should serve your country's prince with a steadfast sense of duty. You should even be ready to die on his behalf, even if you wouldn't weep on his behalf, given that you will maintain an unperturbed state of mind at all times. But in Politica, he admits that it can be difficult to know whether to engage in warfare. In one of the many chapters that mount up authoritative quotations on both sides of a question, like a miniature philosophical dialogue, he gives us considerations for and then against fighting in a civil war. At first glance, this looks like a rather dry academic exercise, like a scholastic citing sources in a disputed question. But when we recall the political circumstances under which Lipsius wrote, we realize that we are reading an apparently dispassionate treatment of a genuinely agonizing question. Indeed, Lipsius seems to have been torn between two kinds of life, both of which were modeled by the ancients. On the one hand, there was the ideal of the engaged virtuous man of affairs, described in the Politica. Not that Lipsius expected to sit on a throne, but he did clearly see himself as an advisor for rulers, a character also described at length in this work. On the other hand, there was the life of scholarship and philosophical contemplation. In theory, Lipsius preferred the latter, but his life tends to tell a different story, just as in theory he thought that political troubles should leave him untroubled, but his own unconstancy shows that he had great difficulty accepting his own advice. Its attention is old as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which famously offers elaborate discussion of practical virtue before suddenly recommending a life of theoretical activity in its final book. And its attention well captured by that title page Rubens made for the works of Lipsius. At the top of the page, we see profoundifications of politics and philosophy. Very appropriately, Lipsius is positioned right between them. Now I'll have to ask you to adopt a Stoic attitude by enduring what cannot be changed and following this podcast series, if not gone, without complaint, as you wait for the next episode. Or, if you're more inclined towards Epicureanism, you can enjoy the pleasure of anticipation, as you look forward to hearing more about Lipsius from a guest who has endured a far longer wait. After appearing in episode 68 to tell us about the Roman Stoics, John Sellars will be returning as an interview guest after a record-setting gap of 324 episodes, even though this is supposedly the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Lipsius and the early modern reception of Stoicism with John Sellers, who's a reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway in London. Hello, John. Hi, Peter. We were just talking about the fact that as we're doing this interview, it's almost exactly 10 years to the day since your last appearance on the podcast about the Roman Stoics, which went up on February 19th, 2012. And we're now recording this in the middle of February, 2022. So thank you for coming back. Oh no, I'm very pleased. It's amazing how much ground you covered in the last decade. This will be interesting to see where you are in another decade's time. That's for sure. Yeah, well, I'll have to, I'll interview you in 10 years from now. So you have to make sure to acquire a specialism on something in maybe the 19th century. Okay. But today we're not going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the early modern reception of Stoicism and especially Lipsius. Before we come to him, can you tell us something about what was known about Stoicism in the Renaissance prior to Lipsius? In fact, if we start a little earlier, if we think about the middle ages in Europe, I guess the most important sources for Stoicism were the works of Seneca and Cicero. And these were both in Latin. They both circulated widely. And there were a few other sources. Someone like Augustine, for instance, makes a very wide range of passing remarks about Stoicism, some positive, some negative. And those were, of course, influential. But for detailed accounts, Cicero and Seneca were key. Seneca in particular was very important because there was a correspondence with St. Paul that people thought was genuine. Obviously, they don't anymore. And he was praised by St. Jerome. So Seneca was regarded very highly. And if we think about the very early Renaissance figures like Petrarch or Salutati, their image of Stoicism was really shaped by these Latin sources. Once we get into the 15th century that we see things start to develop, we see Greek texts become available in Italy for the first time. And I guess the most important of these is going to be the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laetius, which is translated into Latin in the 1430s and then becomes really widely accessible. And there's one really quite interesting figure in this period that's worth mentioning, I think, a humanist called Francesco Philelpho. He spent time in Constantinople. He learned Greek. He read Diogenes Laetius, Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch, a number of key sources for Stoic ideas. And Philelpho's book on exile contains extended translations from Sextus Empiricus into Latin that report ideas from Zeno and Chrysippus, the early Greek Stoics. I mean, it's almost plagiarism by modern standards. He just lifts passages from Sextus and translates it. But what's interesting about Philelpho as a kind of a watershed moment, I think, is when he talks about the Stoics, he's talking about Zeno and Chrysippus. Whereas up until that point, when people talked about the Stoics, they were primarily thinking of Seneca and Cicero. So people are beginning to rediscover the Greek Stoic around this time. And then as the 15th century continues and into the early 16th century, we get a range of other Greek texts become available in Italy in particular. So the commentaries on Aristotle get printed. These contain various important bits of technical information about Stoic philosophy. Diogenes Laetius is eventually printed in Greek. In fact, it's only really by about the middle of the 16th century, around the time that Lipsis is born, that the full range of sources that we're familiar with for Stoicism are all fully available. Do you think that that's just the main reason for the rise of what is sometimes called neo-Stoicism towards the end of the 16th century? Or was there some other reason why this was a good cultural moment for the revival or for a revival of Stoicism? Yes, that's a good question. I mean, the 16th century is fairly turbulent, certainly in northern Europe. I mean, if we think about the religious wars in France and the Low Countries, there's a loss of adversity going about. And so one reason why people might have been interested in Stoicism at this time is because it offered some kind of consolation for adversity. And I think that's certainly one of the reasons why Lipsis was drawn to it. Another thing you see, in fact, is a really striking interest in Seneca in particular in the 16th century. There are lots and lots of editions of Seneca's works. So, for instance, Erasmus edits the complete works of Seneca twice. He does it once. He's not very happy with the job he does. So he produces a second edition about a decade later. A number of other humanists in this period, Marc-Antoine Muray, he also edits an edition of Seneca. The first work by Calvin is an edition and commentary on a work by Seneca, the De Clementia. So for whatever reason, a huge interest in Seneca at this time. Do you think one reason for the interest in the Stoics is that they were determinists who believed that the divine providential oversight of the universe predestines everything to happen by a kind of inevitable fate and that that resonated well with what Protestants were saying? That may have been a reason for Calvin's interest. If I remember rightly, there's a passage somewhere in Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion where he makes reference to no vistoic-y, to new Stoics. But it's a critical response. It's a critical remark about these new Stoics. So I'm not sure whether Calvin's interest in predestination was closely drawing on Stoic ideas. There's a sense in which because those issues were so much in the air during this period, it actually made it quite difficult for people interested in Stoicism. So I'm not sure it was a reason why people became interested in Stoicism, but it became a hot topic of discussion whenever people were engaging with Stoic ideas. That might be the best way to put it. So it may be more that it shaped the reception of Stoicism than inspired the reception of Stoicism? Yes, I think so. That's a good way of putting it. Let's come to Lipsius then. As you've just said, actually, it sounds like a lot was known about the Stoics by the time Lipsius comes along. I mean, you've got Erasmus editing Seneca, right? So what remained to do? I mean, what was Lipsius' contribution to Stoicism? Why is he so strongly associated with the neo-Stoic movement? There are a number of things he does. There are three or four key books that Lipsius produces that are closely associated with Stoicism. So let me run through them quickly to kind of put them all on the table for us. So the first one is a book he writes in 1584, De Constantia, not really a work of Stoic scholarship, but a very practically oriented book about how one might draw on Stoic ideas in order to live a good life, how to cope with adversity, those sorts of questions. This highly influential book, reprinted countless times throughout the 17th century, translated into all of the major European languages, has a huge impact. That's his first book, very much a response to the turmoils of the religious wars raging at that time. Then much later, at the very end of his life, he publishes his own big scholarly edition of the works of Seneca. This is published in 1605, which is the year before he dies in 1606. And that's very much the crowning achievement of his career, we might say. And is that a big improvement on what Erasmus had done? I think so, yes. Just sort of anecdotally, you often see Lipsus's name in the apparatus of modern critical editions of Seneca, as if a number of his commendations were accepted. And I think I don't recall off the top of my head, but a number of the early editions of Seneca included quite a few works that we now think are spurious. And I don't think there are so many of those in Lipsus's edition. I think a lot of that had been worked out during the course of the 16th century. Right. OK, so sorry to interrupt. So you've got Unconstancy, you've got his edition of Seneca, and the third one would be? The third one, or the third and fourth, are these pair of handbooks on stoicism that he writes. He publishes them in 1604, so the year before his big edition of Seneca. And he presents them very much as guides to help us in our interpretation of Seneca's texts. So one of them is called The Handbook of Stoic Philosophy, and the other one's called The Physics of the Stoics. And in these books, he gathers together all of the fragments, the testimonia, all of the doxographical material about the early Greek Stoics, and puts it all together in one place and organises it by topic. In effect, he produces the first source books for Stoic philosophy that have existed, as we were saying earlier. There's a sense in which at that moment, all of the material is available and it's possible to do that in a way it wouldn't really have been very easy to do, say, 100 years earlier. And so by producing those source books, he really gives us our first map of what early Greek Stoic philosophy looked like. One of the things you've looked at in your work on Lipsius is his take on something I just mentioned, which is the Stoic theory of determinism. And it's often thought that Lipsius changed his mind about this, either changed his mind about what the Stoic said or changed his mind about whether what the Stoic said was acceptable. I mentioned this briefly in the previous episode and mentioned that you actually have argued that his reading of the Stoics remains consistent. But could you say a little bit more about that? Yes, I mean, it's quite complicated. I'll try and run through it all. So in the Deconstantia, Lipsius is trying to present Stoicism in a positive light as this useful source for consolation in the face of difficulties. And along the way in this work, which is a dialogue, there's a discussion about fate and about whether one can embrace the Stoic attitude towards fate. And the kind of headline argument that we find in the dialogue identifies Stoic fate with what is called violent fate, the idea that fate is in some way imposing itself upon us. So it undermines human free will, but also potentially undermines God's ability to act as he wishes. There's a sense in which God is in some way constricted by fate. And so there's a real concern that that's not a view that can be accepted at this time. So Lipsius effectively saying is Stoicism is great, but on this issue of fate, we might need to modify it a bit and we need to modify it in a way that will bring it in line with Christian doctrine. Although whatever Christian doctrine was in this period is obviously quite difficult to pin down because we've got lots of competing voices. And then the result of this slightly compromised version of Stoicism is often labeled Neo-Stoicism. I mean, in the scholarly literature, that label is often thought to describe this 16th century revision of Stoicism to make it compatible with Christianity. And what would that mean exactly? Would that mean that God foreknows what we'll do, but we still do these things freely so they're not really determined? Is that the idea? I think the idea is that fate doesn't constrict us in any way and it doesn't constrict God in any way. Oh, so fate is like for the rest of nature or something, but free individuals, free individual humans and also God stand outside that. That's right, yeah. OK, that's certainly not a Stoic view, so you can see why scholars don't like that as a reading of Stoicism. I'll come back to that in a moment because that's what I want to challenge. But 20 years later, when Lipsius writes his handbooks of Stoic philosophy, I mentioned a moment ago, in particular one called The Physics of the Stoics, he tackles this question of fate again. He revisits the problem and he says this time that if we read the ancient sources carefully, we'll see that in fact there isn't really a problem at all. That the image of the Stoics as proponents of some kind of violent fate that constricts us is simply mistaken. And the key move here that Lipsius makes is he cites a passage from Saint Augustine from the City of God in which Augustine discusses the Stoic accounts of fate. And Augustine says that really all we've got here is a quibble over terminology. The Stoics identify fate with Providence. Rather than read that as saying that Providence is in some way restricted by fate, which would be problematic, we can simply say that fate is just another word for God's Providence, for God's will. And the theological problem then just kind of dissolves. So with Augustine on his side as this unimpeachable authority, Lipsius can argue that the Stoics are just fine as they are and it's no problem for a good Christian to embrace Stoic ideas. We don't need to adapt it and modify it in any way. That makes it look as if Lipsius changes his mind in that 20 year period. And I've argued that perhaps he didn't change his mind at all. Why? Well, I think the key is if we go back to De Constantio and look at it very carefully, we'll note a number of things which will complicate the story a little bit. First of all, as I said a moment ago, it's a dialogue between two characters. Lipsius presents himself as this young man looking for advice. And then there's an older character called Langius. And most of the content is put into Langius's mouth, not Lipsius's own mouth. So that's one thing we need to kind of pay attention to. And Langius gives us four reasons why Stoic fate is problematic. God is subordinate to fate, he claims. There's a kind of a rigid, fixed order of causes in nature. By making everything necessary, they destroy the idea of the possible. And all of this undermines human free will. These are all the problems with Stoic fate, Langius says in the dialogue. But there are a number of reasons why we won't want to pause before we accept this as Lipsius's considered view. So on the issue of whether God is really subordinate to fate, Lipsius himself in the dialogue has already argued that that's a misrepresentation of the Stoic view. The Stoics never believed that in the first place. Both sides agree there's a fixed order of causes set down by God. There's not really a dispute there. And on the human free will, Lipsius elsewhere in De Constantia outlines the Stoic compatibilist view, which shows that human choices in fact contribute to the outcome of events rather than being constrained by some kind of violent fate. And in fact, Langius himself doesn't say that the Stoics deny free will. He just says that they seem to. So there is all sorts of strange subtleties going on. And also Lipsius, the author, makes Lipsius the character in the dialogue say at one point that he doesn't even understand what the difference between the two positions is supposed to be. What's really going on? It looks to me as if for whatever reason, Lipsius felt that it was prudent to distance himself from Stoic fate for whatever reason, perhaps because it had some unfortunate reputation, perhaps because of all these debates about predestination. So he wanted to distance himself a bit. But in the dialogue, he gives us all the resources, if you like, for thinking that in fact the Stoics don't have this problem whatsoever. It's just a public image problem on their part. So the violent fate reading of the Stoics would always have been an incorrect interpretation of them. And even early on, Lipsius understood that. If that's right, that would actually really illustrate something you mentioned before, which is that the debate over predestination is more something that's affecting the way people handle Stoicism rather than leading them to be interested in Stoicism in the first place. Yes, I think so. It also challenges the very idea of neo-Stoicism, because if Lipsius really thinks that for the most part, Stoicism can simply be accepted, there might be some other modifications that we might come to in a moment. But if he thinks for the most part it can be accepted, particularly on this issue of fate, then there isn't so much a strange modified form of Stoicism, because we can in fact combine these things in a way that doesn't involve too much violence to Stoic thinking. Okay, actually, that is the next thing I was going to ask you, though, even if you think the fate doctrine isn't the problem, surely there are other problems for a Christian who wants to be a Stoic, neo or otherwise. For example, the Stoics are materialists. They don't believe in an immaterial soul. They think that God is material as well and is pervading the cosmos. They also seem to think that it's possible for humans to be happy and good and virtuous under their own resources, like using natural reasons. So the Stoic idea, the perfect sage, and they're always arguing that it is possible for someone to be a sage. Of course, they never say that God has to intervene and give grace. How did Lipsius and in fact other Stoics of the time, these so-called neo-Stoics, how do they handle these potentially problematic aspects of Stoicism? Absolutely, there are a number of other potential problems, as you say. On the issue of, say, Kantism, for instance, Lipsius, I mean, he's a scholar primarily, right? He's a humanist, he's a scholar, so he wants to understand the Stoics on their own terms. When he examines what the Stoics have to say about pantheism, he looks at all of the sources. He can see that the Stoics present the world as a living animal that has a soul and that they identify their soul with God. And so he presents their ideas on their own terms. But then he'll add a kind of note at the end and say, well, of course, that can't strictly speaking be true. Maybe what we ought to say is that God has created a soul that he's put into the world, not that God is the soul. And I take it that brings it quite close to a sort of Platonic view, right? He'll then make these little sort of adjustments, if you like, but doesn't seem overly exercised by this. I mean, I guess there's that whole narrative, well, these were pagans writing before the truth was revealed. So obviously they made a few slips along the way. I mean, I think implicitly there's that kind of idea working in the background. And he's always more happy to put a Christian spin on whatever he can find than to really dig into the possible problems where there's going to ultimately be a flat contradiction between Christianity and stoicism. But he's trying to get the reader to be interested in stoicism, right? That's right. If primarily you're reading someone like Seneca or Epictetus, the references to God can very easily be read as if they're references to a personist God. It's only when you start to really dig around in all of the fragments for Zeno and Chrysippus that you start to get the details of their pantheistic worldview and how that really works. And Lipsius is one of the first people to really start digging that material and finding it. But I think his view of stoicism has very much been shaped by his reading of Seneca. And you can read Seneca and really see a personist God come through as people had for centuries during the Middle Ages. Actually, I wanted to ask you about that. So the name of Seneca has come up numerous times as someone who these humanists were interested in editing and re-editing and re-editing, indeed. And we've already said that Lipsius' favorite stoic is Seneca. He's the stoic author who Lipsius quotes from the most often and whose text he worked on most carefully. Why is he so much more interested in Seneca than the other Roman stoics for whom we have complete extant work? So we have the so-called Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. We have the Discourses and the Enchiridion or Handbook of Epictetus. Is he interested in Seneca more than he's interested in them just because they wrote in Greek and he's happier working in Latin than in Greek? Or is there more to it than that? I think it would be fair to say he is primarily a Latin humanist. Tacitus and Seneca are two key points of reference. And obviously Cicero is there as well. So I think, yes, he had that natural preference for Latin literature, we might say. He certainly read Epictetus and he mentions Epictetus a few times and quotes from him. But I'm going to hazard a guess and say that he read Epictetus relatively late in his intellectual development. And so there's a sense in which Seneca had already informed his outlook from a younger age. And Epictetus offered a few nice examples, some corroborating evidence, but it wasn't really the inspirational source for him. And as for Marcus Aurelius, I mean, the Meditations hadn't been long published at the time when Lipsius was working. And when they were first published, they were published under the title, De Vita sua, On His Own Life. And they were published alongside Marinus's biography of Proclus. And so it's been suggested in the literature that early readers may have assumed that this was just an autobiography. This was Marcus Aurelius writing On His Own Life. Maybe they even thought Marcus was some other obscure Platonist, or I guess they probably knew he was a Roman emperor, right? Yeah, they knew he was a Roman emperor. And there are passages in some of the histories which say he was interested in Stoicism. But if you read that title and think it's an autobiography and then you open book one of the Meditations, you will see Marcus talking about various members in his life, members of his family who've influenced him. And if you read that and you think, okay, this is just an autobiography, you might not even get that much further through the book. There's not a lot of explicit Stoic doctrine in Marcus Aurelius. Although if you already know all of the Stoic doctrine, you can see how Marcus is using Stoic ideas. So I don't think Marcus Aurelius made a huge impression on him, perhaps for those reasons. So more generally, the big picture of Lipsius's project is he's primarily a Senecan expert. And then he reads the other Roman Stoics to the extent that he reads them all at all and the earlier Greek Stoics through the lens of Seneca. And he probably also reads Seneca through the lens of Christianity. That's the overall picture. Yes, I think that's a fair assessment. And another thing to bear in mind as well is that these two really important handbooks that Lipsius produces explicitly, I mean, it's mentioned in the subtitle, these are books to help explain Seneca. Now, if you want to understand Seneca, you might want to go back and understand what all of the early Greek Stoics were doing beforehand and you want to know what Zeno and Chrysippus and others were up to. But you're not going to look at Hepatitis and Marcus Aurelius in order to understand Seneca because they were writing later. So they're not part of the background to Seneca quite literally for chronological reasons. Right. So he's not just the lens, he's also the point of the whole project in a sense. Absolutely. Let's broaden out now in conclusion and talk a little bit about the way that Stoicism then spreads through philosophy in the decades after Lipsius. Obviously, this could be like a long story because even Kant, for example, is interested in responding to the Stoics. But maybe you can just spend a few minutes telling us about how Stoicism spreads out in the 17th century and maybe the role of Lipsius in that development. Sure. Seneca continues to be really popular in the 17th century. People like Descartes and Malebranche are reading Seneca and responding to some of his ideas. In France in particular, there's another figure often referred to as a Neostoic, Guillaume Duvert, who translates Hepatitis into French and writes a couple of handbooks. We see a slightly different tradition of Epictetan inspired Neostoicism in France in the 17th century. Someone like Pascal writes about Epictetus as well. That kind of broadens things out a little bit. Someone like Leibniz, very interested in questions about fate and providence in the Theodicy, he reads Lipsius' handbook and draws on them as his source of inspiration. In that sense, Lipsius' texts become really important as a point of reference for subsequent discussion of Stoic ideas. Right through to the 18th century, in something like Diderot's great encyclopedia, again, Lipsius' works are still being cited as standard points of reference. It's really not until we get to the modern scholarly handbooks of Stoic fragments in the late 19th century that they're really superseded as the one place where you can go and find all of these bits of information gathered together in one place. Is the thing that really attracts these 17th century figures like Descartes and Madhavapuramse, is it the Stoic ethical theory? So the idea of self-control, so I'm thinking of a work like Descartes' work on the passions of the soul or something like that. So are they really focusing on what you might also think was the real contribution of Roman Stoicism, which is this idea about having a completely rational grip over your own life and accepting whatever fate throws your way. Is that what they're interested in or are they interested in Stoicism as a system, which Lipsius was to some extent? Someone like Descartes is certainly very interested in that idea, Stoicism as offering ideas about how to live a good, happy life. In his correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, they talk about this. Others are interested in that same issue but are much more sceptical. So figures like Pascal and Malebranche are very critical of Stoicism. Epictetus is attacked for his pride and his arrogance, picking up an issue that you mentioned earlier. The pride and arrogance in believing that just through the use of his own reason, he can achieve happiness here and now without God's grace. So it's a contentious issue and you'll find figures on either side of the debate. In terms of interest in the systematic nature of Stoic philosophy, we really see that pick up in the early 18th century. And someone like Brucker's big history of philosophy, written in the 1740s, really tries to understand Stoic philosophy as a system. One of the things that happens at that point is the pantheism, the materialism, potentially the atheism, not quite, but these sorts of issues are being discussed through a careful study of all of the fragments of the early Greek Stoics, something that Lipsius has really made possible through his handbooks. There's a real challenge to the idea that Epictetus and Seneca are potentially good Christians or friends to good Christians. And that person, this language about God that we find in the works of those Roman Stoics, is suddenly really pushed to one side and rejected. You can't trust these guys when they talk about God. Really, they've got this really quite dangerous pantheist philosophy that no good Christian could possibly accept. And in the debates about Stoicism in this period in the early 18th century, Stoics are often talked about side by side with Spinoza. And there's a sense in which the reception of Stoicism gets tied up with the reception of Spinoza's philosophy, which also makes a number of similar claims and is deeply controversial for these sorts of reasons as well. Yeah, being associated with Spinoza nowadays might be a compliment, but back then it was not. No. OK, so that's a look ahead. And actually, one of the thinkers that we just mentioned briefly there was Immanuel Kant, who is famous for having executed what he called a Copernican turn in his philosophy when he introduces his new style of idealism. And that's what we're about to do in the podcast, because we will, in fact, be turning to Copernicus next. He's the figure we'll be focusing on in the next episode. So I will thank John Sellers very much for coming back on the podcast after such a long hiatus. Well, thanks very much for having me back. Yeah, I'll see you in 10 years. Absolutely. You can all join me sooner than that for Copernicus next time here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Before we start today's episode, I just wanted to make a quick announcement, namely that the sixth volume of the book series based on the podcast is now out. This book is available from Oxford University Press and is called A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy. It offers revised versions of the scripted episodes from those two series, with additional references and a lovely cover in imperial purple, as befitting the many rulers named Constantine mentioned in the first half of the book. While we're at it, I'll also mention that all five of the previous volumes are now available as paperbacks, so please consider taking this opportunity to imitate a Renaissance humanist and build up your library. If you buy them from an independent bookstore, so much the better. Now on with the show. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The World Doesn't Revolve Around You, Copernicus. We are used to the way scholars try to complicate, nuance, and correct popular conceptions of historical figures and events. We're not really sure about Luther nailing those theses to the door, and if he did, it wasn't that unusual. The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, and speaking of Rome, fiddles hadn't even been invented when Nero watched it burn. But I don't recall covering any figure in this podcast where the expert and non-expert stories drift so far apart as they do in the case of Nicolaus Copernicus. For the layperson, it's almost too good to be true that his great work on astronomy was called On the Revolutions, because that's just what he was, a revolutionary, who set out quite literally to overturn the ancient and medieval worldview and replace it with something more scientific. He was a rebel against not just existing science, but also the church, which bitterly opposed his discovery. He was, in short, a champion of reason against authority, and his breakthrough amounted to the most important harbinger of the Enlightenment. In the scholarly literature on Copernicus, by contrast, we find a far less iconoclastic and more historically plausible figure. Far from being a rebel against the church, he dedicated On the Revolutions to the pope. Soon after its appearance, Catholic bishops were involved in disseminating the book. Copernicus himself was a Catholic canon who maintained his confession despite having close working relationships with Protestants. The papacy did not officially condemn Copernicanism until 1616, the better part of a century after Copernicus's death in 1543. Indeed, there was little reason to condemn it, in part because astronomy, unlike astrology, was as yet not a theologically provocative discipline, in part because so few people were convinced by it during that time. As the Copernicus scholar, Andre Godu, has commented, his efforts to persuade Aristotelians have to be counted in the short term among the most miserable failures in the history of philosophy. So, if this was an explosive scientific revolution, it was one whose fuse took a long time to burn, requiring figures like Galileo and Kepler to fan the flames around the turn of the 17th century. More importantly for understanding Copernicus's own project, a reading of On the Revolutions itself, never mind the scholarship devoted to it, makes it clear that this is not an irreverent attack on established authority. To the contrary, the work situates itself within the tradition of the most important astronomical text of antiquity, the Almagest of Ptolemy. Copernicus praises his predecessor and presents himself as addressing problems and anomalies that he finds in the Ptolemaic system, not as replacing that system with something else that is radically new. His admirers framed Copernicus's project in the same way. His student, Giogeohom Reticus, said that for his master, there was nothing better or more important than walking in the footsteps of Ptolemy. This was perhaps laying it on a bit thick, but it's plausible when Reticus goes on to say just afterwards that Copernicus did not reject the teachings of the ancients in a lust for novelty, but only for good reasons and when the facts themselves coerce him. Another bright star in the firmament of the new science, Kepler, said that Copernicus basically believed in Ptolemy's ideas about astral motion and wanted to show how the observed phenomena could be made to fit. Modern research has broadly confirmed this, showing that Copernicus put the Sun in the middle of the cosmos and made the Earth one of the planets orbiting it because he was trying to save features of classical astronomy that he thought were more important than geocentrism. In particular, he believed that the universe should be a harmonious unity whose most outstanding parts are heavenly orbs, which revolve in perfect, uniform circles just as Aristotle and Ptolemy had assumed. When I say orbs, I don't mean the visible planets. I mean transparent, rotating spheres on which the planets are seated, like shining diamonds embedded in spinning fish bowls. These spheres are laid on top of each other concentrically, like a dartboard with a bullseye but in three dimensions. Their perfect rotation carries the planets around, yielding the motions studied by astronomers. Copernicus also retained the Ptolemaic idea of an epicycle, meaning a smaller rotating sphere within and carried along by the larger sphere. You can imagine that the rotating fish bowl has a spinning glass marble embedded in it at some point along its circumference with a diamond in the marble. In other words, the planet is seated on an epicycle, which helps to explain why its observed motions are more complicated than they would be with one circular motion around the bullseye, that is, the center of the universe. And it is here, of course, that Copernicus departs from Ptolemy. The latter, and almost all ancient and medieval theorists, we'll get back to the almost part, believed that the celestial spheres were rotating around an unmoving Earth. But Copernicus, of course, said that the Sun is at the center, or actually near the center. Only the Moon orbits the Earth, while the Earth is a planet, and like the other planets, goes around the Sun. How did Copernicus arrive at this bold claim which seems to be refuted by our everyday experience? As you might almost expect, there is disagreement over that question. On the Revolutions itself is not the most obvious place to look for an answer, because it was published only at the end of Copernicus's life, quite literally, a famous anecdote as the freshly printed pages being shown to him on his deathbed. An earlier work, the Small Commentary, was written at some point before 1514, but never printed. Only three manuscripts survive. In this little treatise, Copernicus simply sets out seven assumptions, including the idea that the Earth is moving around the Sun once a year, and revolving on its own axis once a day. Rather than broadcasting this dramatic thesis as widely as possible, Copernicus only circulated it in the form of handwritten copies among friends and interested colleagues. Only in 1540 did Rechicus publish Copernicus's findings in a text called The First Report, with On the Revolutions following three years later. All of this means that we need to work backwards to figure out the thought process that led Copernicus to his breakthrough. One factor seems to have been his rejection of the so-called equant, a clever technical device invented by Ptolemy. The idea here is that the planetary spheres, the fishbowls in my analogy, revolve not around their own centers, where Ptolemy would locate the Earth, but around an off-center point in space. This, combined with epicycles, yielded a mathematical construction that could fit the heavenly motions, explaining why they seem, from our point of view, to speed up and slow down during their orbits. But, as readers had been noticing for quite a long time, the mathematical model involving an equant seems in flagrant contradiction, with the physical model of concentric spheres centered on the Earth, rotating serenely around that center. Another issue that may have motivated Copernicus was that, in the words of the earlier Renaissance astronomer Georg von Poivre, all the planets share something with the Sun in their motions. In particular, astronomers had noted that the retrograde motions of Mercury and Venus, that is, the times where they seem to go backwards from our point of view, track the motions of the Sun. This is a lot easier to explain if you say that they're going around the Sun and not the Earth. It happens because the Earth is catching up with, and then overtaking, the inner planets relative to the Sun. As Copernicus notes in On the Revolutions, since the time of Ptolemy himself, there had been disagreement over where to put these two planets in the celestial order. Some thought that they were between the Earth and the Sun, while others put the Sun closer to the Earth, followed by Mercury and Venus, and then Mars. Here we come to another possible divergence from the popular conception of Copernicus. It's been argued, especially in a controversial book by Robert Westman, that Copernicus was especially worried about the order of the planets, because this question is vital for astrology. Westman provides circumstantial evidence that, during his youthful student years in Italy, Copernicus fell into the orbit, if you'll pardon the expression, of the Bologna astrologer Domenico Maria Novara. He would have been one of the prognosticators working together with Novara, who were keen to rebut the attack on astrology mounted around this time by Pico della Mirandola. Unfortunately, the evidence for his connections to Novara is pretty thin, and Copernicus never talks about astrology as a context for his ideas. If you like the notion of an astrologer Copernicus, though, you could find a ready explanation for that. His ultimate inspiration was Ptolemy's Almagest, which was devoted to mathematical astronomy, not astrology. But Ptolemy was also an astrologer. He wrote an entire treatise on a topic called the Tetra Biblos, so Copernicus's failure to discuss this art could simply be a matter of genre. He may have believed in astrology without believing that, on the revolutions, was the appropriate place to discuss it. Furthermore, his student, Reticus, was definitely interested in astrology. In short, there's no reason to suppose that Copernicus would have seen astrology as unscientific, and some reason to suppose he was interested in it. While this remains a matter of speculation, there is no doubt that establishing planetary order, and in particular giving a good reason for the planetary order, was a matter of central importance for Copernicus. He may have flirted for a time with a construction like the one later accepted by Tycho Brahe, according to which some planets revolve around the Sun, while the Sun revolves around the Earth. By the time of the little commentary, though, Copernicus is clear that the Sun is at the center of the universe, while the Earth is a planet. Again, physical considerations may have been important here, because the compromise view could have led to celestial spheres competing for the same space. The mathematician wouldn't mind having overlapping circles in a diagram, but in natural philosophy, we don't want overlapping cosmic fishbowls. Most compelling, though, must have been Copernicus's discovery that it would be possible to arrange all the planets, including Earth, at successive distances from the Sun, with their ordering correlated to the time of the period of the orbits of the planets. In other words, the closer a planet is to the Sun, the shorter the time it takes for the planet to make one trip around the Sun. While that is a powerful argument in favor of heliocentrism, there were also a number of objections for Copernicus to face. The most obvious is this, why do we feel like the Earth is at rest if it is, in fact, moving in two ways at all times, both around the Sun and around its own axis? Actually, he also introduces a minimal third motion to keep the axis of the Earth pointing in the right way as it goes around the Sun, but we don't need to get into that. In response, Copernicus quotes a line from the ancient Roman poet Virgil, which talks of how the land slips backwards as a ship leaves port. To an observer in motion, what is at rest may seem to be moving, and what is in motion may seem to be at rest. Just as passengers on a ship feel as if the ship is standing still while the coastline moves away, the heavens seem to be turning over the Earth, but actually it is the Earth that is in motion. This point had already been made by 14th century thinkers like Peter Oriel, even using the similar example of people traveling down a river and seeming to see the trees move while their boat is apparently at rest. And if this sounds familiar, it's because I mentioned it in episode 275. So, actually the answer to this apparently fundamental difficulty was quite easy to give. More difficult were certain technical issues of astronomy and natural philosophy. On the astronomical side, there was a problem that had to do with the outermost sphere housing the so-called fixed stars in it, that is, all the stars that are not planets. If it is at rest, and the Earth is moving around the Sun, shouldn't we see them shifting in the night sky, even if only a little, because we are looking at them from a changing position? This phenomenon is called parallax, and its absence was indeed a real mystery for Copernicus. He gave the correct answer, namely that the universe is a lot bigger than commonly thought in the previous scientific tradition. Since the fixed stars are so far from us, the change in angle of view is tiny, and there is no difference in their observed position. Centuries later, the parallax was actually measured using better instruments than those available at the time, confirming that Copernicus had been right. And by the way, don't forget that Copernicus does not have the benefit of a telescope for any of this, that comes in only with Galileo a couple of generations later. As for natural philosophy, a major obstacle here had to do with something else we can see every day, things like stones falling to the ground. In Aristotelian physics, heavy things that are dominated by Earth and water move towards the center of the cosmos, while light things dominated by fire and air move away from it. Since the center of the cosmos is also the center of the Earth, this nicely explains why rocks fall straight down and flames flicker upwards. How can Copernicus offer a superior rival explanation? Basically, the answer is he can't. For that, we'll need to wait for 17th century physics. He does his best though, proposing that God implants a natural desire in each element to move towards the place where the whole of that element gathers. As Copernicus notes, the result will be that a falling rock actually moves in a far more complex way than we would suppose. It is moving straight down toward the ground, but simultaneously also in a circle, being part of the planet Earth. More compelling, at least within the historical context, is his explanation of why the Earth is revolving in the first place. He reminds his readers that, for Aristotle, it is natural for spherical things to move in circles. This is, after all, why the celestial orbs are rotating. Wouldn't it make sense then, that the Earth also moves in a circle, given that it is spherical? While it may seem a little disconcerting that the Earth has more than one such motion, this is actually typical of planets, which as we saw, are moving on large orbs and also on epicycles within those orbs. These arguments give a flavor of Copernicus's attempt to show that heliocentrism could make sense within a broadly Aristotelian worldview. While this attempt was, as already noted, a miserable failure, it does reinforce our sense that Copernicus wanted to revise the science of his day, not reject it wholesale. To which you might object that this could simply be a rhetorical ploy. He wouldn't be the only revolutionary in depose as a moderate reformer. I don't think this is right, if only because, as we've been seeing, he retained many features of the Aristotelian Ptolemaic cosmology, and was apparently even motivated by the desire to show how those features could be maintained. And that doesn't mean there is no rhetoric in on the revolutions. To the contrary, this is a text bearing marks of the humanist movement that was so dominant in his age. That quotation I mentioned from Virgil is only one of numerous allusions to classical sources. He also uses an analogy which scholars have connected to a passage from Horace's Art of Poetry, which compared bad literature to a monster made out of spare parts. This Frankenstein-like image is used by Copernicus to complain of the disorderly cosmos depicted by other astronomers. Another striking case is a citation from Plutarch, who reported that, for the ancient Pythagoreans, the earth moves around a central fire. This fire is apparently not meant to be the sun, but still, it looks like a nice anticipation of Copernicanism, which is why I said earlier that almost all ancient and medieval cosmologists had been geocentrists. It's also been shown that Copernicus borrowed ideas about elemental motion from the Platonic tradition. John Philoponus had spoken of the elements moving in order to return to their holes. A more proximate inspiration from the history of Platonism, or at least a comparison given a lack of any evidence of historical influence, would be another Nicholas, Nicholas of Cusa. The Copernican true believer Giordano Bruno asserted that Copernicus was saying more audaciously what Cusanus had already affirmed with a lower voice in the book Unlearned Ignorance, and there is at least some truth to this. Cusanus had also argued that the world was possessed of enormous size, beyond what was admitted by the scholastics, and as we saw back in episode 374, he allowed for motion of the earth. He even made the point that we fail to notice this motion only because we are on the earth, and thus moving along with it. A further link to Platonism, whose significance has been greatly stressed by the aforementioned Andre Godot, has to do with Plato himself. We have a copy of Plato's Parmenides with an annotation in Copernicus's own hand. For Godot, this suggests that Copernicus took inspiration from Plato for his use of hypotheses in science. Hypotheses are a major structural feature of Plato's Parmenides, but they would also have featured in Copernicus's education. As I mentioned, he studied in Italy as a youth. He had been at the University of Krakow, but left without getting a degree to study law at Bologna and then medicine at Padua. Ultimately, he got his degree in church law from Ferrara, setting him up to work for the church as a canon at Varmia in modern-day Poland beginning in 1503. In Varmia, he encountered a number of humanists in the Erasmian style, not least Tiedemann Giese, who supported Copernicus and would later encourage the publication of On the Revolutions. Copernicus resided in the bishop's castle at Litzbach, acting as the bishop's personal physician from 1503 to 1510 when he moved to the cathedral at Frombork. While he would remain active, carrying out various duties as a canon, this date seems to mark the end of his prospects of becoming a bishop himself. The church's loss was science's gain. Given this formation, we can say that Copernicus had training in several of the chief university disciplines of his day, as well as contact with humanist circles. Certainly, he was first and foremost a mathematician who said that On the Revolutions was written for other mathematicians, like himself. The title page of the printing even features the slogan that was emblazoned outside the Platonic Academy, Let None Ignorant of Geometry Enter. But he was a well-rounded 16th century intellectual, not just a mathematician, and used the tools of rhetoric and dialectic in presenting his daring astronomical ideas. And perhaps also in discovering those ideas. Godu argues that Copernicus put to use ideas about hypothetical reasoning, which can be traced ultimately back to Plato, and which I might add, were being discussed around this time by Zabarella and other Averroes at Padua. This method is most clearly on show in The Little Commentary, where as we saw, Copernicus lays out seven principles, whose viability seems to be confirmed by the satisfying results that follow from them, notably the aforementioned correlation between the periods of the planets and their ordered distance from the Sun. We can take a similar conclusion from the preface to On the Revolutions, where having made his accusation that the geocentric astronomers make the cosmos into a monstrous patchwork, he says, This would not have happened to them had they followed sound principles. For if the hypotheses assumed by them were not false, everything which follows from their hypotheses would be confirmed, beyond any doubt. Now, on the face of it, this is hardly an advanced insight. Bad assumptions lead to bad conclusions. But on Andre Godu's telling, at least, Copernicus's methodology was quite a bit more sophisticated than that. It involved doing what Plato does in the Parmenides, namely setting up a series of hypotheses and testing each of them, both negatively and positively. For instance, see what follows if the Earth is in the center of the cosmos. See what happens if it is not. If it is in the center of the cosmos, we get the disordered monster of the Aristotelian Ptolemaic system. If it is moving around the Sun, we get nice outcomes, including the avoidance of Ptolemy's clever but physically awkward device of the equant. For the sake of exposition, the favored hypotheses or axioms are presented at the beginning of the discussion, but they are not simply stipulated at the beginning before doing any scientific inquiry. Rather, they have proven their worth by being tested for their results. Hypotheses are like Johnny Appleseed or like slot machines. By their fruits you shall know them. Godu puts it in somewhat less jocular terms, writing that Copernicus arrived at the postulates initially by means of a dialectical exercise, identified conclusions, formulated the postulates that he needed to derive the conclusions, and then reorganized them. This is relevant to one of the most hotly debated questions concerning Copernicus's new astronomy, how seriously did he mean it? Or better, in what sense did he seriously mean it? In pre-Copernican cosmology, we often find proposals that seem to be purely mathematical constructions, with an unclear relationship to what is physically going on out in the heavens. Ptolemy's equant would be a prime example. It may seem clear from what we've learned in this episode that Copernicus did not intend his system to be taken in that sense. He gets into natural philosophical questions like the motion of the elements, worries about problems like parallax, and so on. So obviously, he did not just mean that the math works better if you imagine the Earth going around the Sun. He meant that the Earth really goes around the Sun. But for initial readers, that impression was undermined by an unsigned address to the reader added to On the Revolutions. Written by Andreas Oseander, it suggests taking the heliocentric system as merely hypothetical, rather than as a true account of the causes lying behind our astronomical observations. The addition of this brief address has been outraging Partisans of Copernicus since its initial publication. Raticus crossed it out in his copies of the text. Subsequently, it was made part of the cliched story that has rational science being opposed by the religious establishment. At the end of the 19th century, a work with the frank title, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, in Christendom, condemned Oseander in the following terms. Oseander's courage failed him. He dared not launch the new thought boldly. He wrote a groveling preface, endeavoring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the Earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. Thus was the greatest and most ennobling, perhaps, of scientific truths forced in coming before the world to sneak and crawl. Poor old Oseander has since found defenders, though. While he was interested in astronomy, his real calling was biblical humanism. He was a leading reformer at Nuremberg, whose decision to leave his name off the preface makes good sense given that this was a book by a Catholic dedicated to the pope, albeit one printed by a Protestant publisher. When he suggested reading the theory as mere mathematical hypothesis, he was trying to help by offering a way that skeptics could find it palatable and useful. Furthermore, there are some claims in On the Revolutions that should arguably be taken in just the way that Oseander suggested. Copernicus points out that one can introduce eccentric spheres, that is, great orbs whose center is not at the midpoint of the cosmos instead of epicycles, and get the same mathematical and observational results. He admits that therefore it is not easy to decide which of them exists in the heavens. This is not to say that something as fundamental as his heliocentrism is being offered as a mere hypothesis, but it is to say that hypotheses play a role throughout his method. Some of them are effectively confirmed or disconfirmed by their consequences, this being the fate of heliocentrism and geocentrism respectively. Some, though, may remain merely likely or useful. The ultimate complement to Oseander has been played in modern times by the great historian and philosopher of science Pierre Douen, who died in 1916. He emphasized the realist elements of On the Revolutions rather than the hypothetical ones, and said that this was a weakness of the work. Scientists should think of their theories as provisional hypotheses that remain open to revision. In a similar vein, Oseander explicitly stated that scientific constructions may be intended as purely instrumental or heuristic devices. Thus, he wrote that Copernicus' hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. On the contrary, if they provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that alone is enough. But of course, the wider context here was very different from the one in which Douen was working. Oseander's portrayal of astronomy had to do with his commitments as a fervent Protestant. Only revelation offers certain truth, and human reason must make do with making better guesses instead of worse ones. No wonder then that this scientific approach came to be associated with the reformers at Wittenberg. There, Philipp Melangthon urged his young students to engage in science, including astronomy, while remaining conscious of the limits of merely human knowledge. This was one of several developments that conditioned responses to Copernicus and ensured that his revolution remained, for now, a quiet one. We'll talk about this more next time, as we lay the background for the work of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, central characters in the story of the world's being knocked onto its axis. Let's meet back here for that, after fourteen more revolutions on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Adamson, and I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. I'm going to be talking about the philosophy department at King's College London. that the parallax effect should have yielded powerful arguments in favor of the Copernican system. After all, that system was broadly correct. The earth is going around the sun, not vice versa. So you'd think anything that would provide more accurate data about the situation should have helped the case for heliocentrism. And as we'll see, parallax did help to undermine the ancient Ptolemaic cosmology. But parallax was also the basis of a powerful objection to Copernicus. One of those who articulated it was Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer between Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. He reasoned as follows. If the earth is going around the sun, then we should have a significant parallax effect as its position changes, moving all that way along its annual orbit. Yet we see no parallax at all for the fixed stars, which were assumed by most astronomers to be embedded in a single sphere at the edge of the visible universe. It rotates once per day in the old theory, and stands still while the earth spins once each day according to Copernicus. This means that the sphere of fixed stars would have to be further away than supposed by earlier astronomers. Much much further away. The distance between the last planet Saturn and this outermost sphere of fixed stars would be, Brahe calculated, at least 700 times greater than the distance between the sun and Saturn. Copernicus simply admitted this consequence of his theory, and he was right. There is parallax for the distant stars. It was just far too small to see with the instruments available at the time. The tiny effect was first successfully measured in the 19th century. And the stars are, of course, vastly further away from Saturn than Saturn is from the sun. Brahe's figure of 700 times isn't even close. Saturn is 9.5 AU from the sun, whereas the closest stars in Alpha Centauri are a whopping 268,000 AU away. But even with his more modest figure, Brahe found the banishing of the fixed stars to such remote distances to be obviously absurd. It would mean that the cosmos is multiplied to many times its previously assumed volume, 300 million times as large, says Brahe, and is mostly empty, with an unimaginably vast yet utterly useless expanse between the planets and the fixed stars, hardly compatible with the idea that God wisely gives order to the universe. That may not sound like a particularly scientific objection, but the idea that the heavens manifest divine order was taken for granted in this period. We saw that it motivated Copernicus, and we'll be seeing that it motivated Kepler too. Indeed, a pious yearning to understand God's design was the usual rationale for doing astronomy at all. With all due respect to Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler, the figure who did the most to promote this idea was our old friend, Philipp Melanchthon. As part of his influential educational reform, which spread from Wittenberg along with Lutheranism, Melanchthon exhorted students to learn the mathematical disciplines which culminated in the study of the stars. The result was that Lutheran universities standardly had at least one chair of mathematics held by a professor who was, typically, an astronomer. By contrast, in England, where Melanchthon's ideas did not hold such sway, there was not a single university chair of mathematics in the whole of the 16th century. It was, in effect, much more noticeable than parallax. According to one modern-day scholar, around the middle of the 16th century, only Melanchthon could have done the Copernican doctrine the service of providing it with a far-reaching success and establishment in the educational institutions. Unfortunately for the heliocentrist cause, this was a service Melanchthon was unwilling to provide. He was not so dismissive of Copernicus as Luther was, who called him a fool who wanted to overturn the whole art of astronomy, but Melanchthon did hold fast to geocentrism. In an introduction to physics aimed at students, he satirically commented, some dare to say, either because of their love of novelties or in order to appear clever, that the Earth moves. This passage was revised to be less critical in a second edition, a sign that Melanchthon did value what Copernicus had done. He and mathematicians in close contact with him approved the use of Copernicus's tables for the locations of the stars, which did not involve postulating the disturbing equant assumed by a Ptolemy. In fact, one of Melanchthon's colleagues at Wittenberg, Erasmus Reinhold, spent seven years reorganizing and recalculating these tables and published the results in 1551. Melanchthon was also in close contact with other mathematicians like Georg Retikus, Copernicus's servant and the first to promulgate his new teaching. Melanchthon appointed him to a chair of mathematics at Wittenberg. Retikus, of course, defended heliocentrism as an account of the real arrangement of the cosmos, but Melanchthon and many of those in touch with him adopted what has been called the Wittenberg interpretation. This meant employing Copernicus's mathematical models without admitting that the Earth moves. Which brings us back to the issue we considered while discussing the opening address added by Oseander to Copernicus's On the Revolutions. As we saw, Oseander seemed to be saying that the diagrams and calculations of mathematical astronomy are to be taken in a merely instrumental sense. They should be used as tools to do things like predicting the position of a planet on a given night while keeping an open mind about what is really going on up there in terms of spheres, epicycles, motions, and so on. Melanchthon seems to have had a similar idea. He said to his students, The listener should understand that the construction of so many orbs and an epicycle was thought out by geometers to be able to show the laws of the planet's movements and periods one way or another and not because the devices in the sky are this way, although it is agreed that there are such orbs. And he cautioned them not to be confused by the use of various hypothetical constructions by astronomers. The youth should know that they do not dare to affirm such theories. While such remarks would gladden the heart of Pierre Douem, there are reasons to doubt whether Melanchthon, Oseander, and others were really instrumentalists, like Douem was. Aside from the completely different motivation and cultural context, it should be borne in mind that we are only talking about astronomy here and not all the sciences. A realist about, say, chemistry or the physics of sublunary bodies might still worry that our access to the stars is so indirect that we cannot do more than devise hypothetical constructions compatible with our observations. As Nicodemus Frischlin wrote in 1586, God the creator placed these bodies so far away from our senses that we are unable to produce principles of demonstration for them as we can in the sciences of other things. In other words, we can only ever offer a fine-grained account of the phenomena to be explained without being able to grasp the causes of those phenomena. Revolution might give our astronomers one good reason to be modest in their claims. While the study of the stars does bring us closer to God, only revelation really unveils the mysteries of his providence. A more technical reason would be that multiple inconsistent models might all be compatible with what we observe. In such a case, there would be no basis for choosing one model over another. By the same token, though, you might be more confident in accepting just one model if you could eliminate the other possibilities. Which brings us back to parallax. Not in the work of Brahe, I promise we are getting back to him soon, but in that of Michael Mestlin, a teacher of Kepler at Tübingen, where Mestlin took up the chair of mathematics in 1583. Along the same lines as we've just seen in Melanchthon, he admitted that, no one is able to ascend into the ethereal region where he would see everything in person, so we lack causal explanations in astronomy. Yet Mestlin thought that he could use observations to show the falsity of Aristotelian cosmology. As luck would have it, this period saw a series of remarkable astronomical phenomena. A new star or nova visible in 1572, as well as comets that became visible in 1577 and 1580. These caused a lot of fuss. There are about 100 works just on the 1577 comet still extant today. Mestlin appealed to parallax measurements to argue that these striking new bodies were located above the sphere of the moon. In one fell swoop, he was able to dismiss the literally ancient idea that the realm of the stars was made of unchanging matter. He would still admit that mathematical astronomy cannot establish physical reality, but physics has at least to be consistent with astronomy. The two are independent disciplines, but that doesn't mean that they're allowed to contradict one another. Which brings us finally to Tycho Brahe, who was notable for both his achievements in astronomical mathematics and his innovative physical cosmology. He was a member of a noble family in Denmark, where Lutheranism and Melanchthon's educational ideas had both spread by the time of Tycho. By the way, his Danish name was Tege. Tycho is a Latinization. He went to Germany for his studies, spending time in Leipzig and Wittenberg, and famously getting his nose cut off in a duel while at Rostock. He would henceforth wear a prosthetic made out of precious metal, which, fortunately, Brahe had in abundance. He persuaded the Danish king, Frederick II, to lavish upon him a fiefdom on the island of Hven, as well as extravagant financial support, equivalent to 1% of the annual revenue of the kingdom. Now as a member of the Danish nobility, Brahe was always in a position to receive funds from the state. In fact, he could have lined his pockets more effectively by becoming a politician and courtier instead of an astronomer. But he was determined that he would use the silver spoon he'd been born with to make a stir in science. He built a fabulous house on Hven with astronomical observatories, and commissioned a series of instruments for measuring the heavens, quite literally the best that money could buy. In his tellingly named Instruments for the Restoration of Astronomy, from 1580, he describes 22 of them, these being only the most impressive and important. Of course, we're still not talking about telescopes here, but about things like a brass-covered sphere model of the heavens, and more importantly, sighting tools for measuring the positions of celestial bodies at different times. He also made the same observation with multiple assistants and multiple instruments to ensure maximum exactness. The expense of these instruments was closely tied to their effectiveness. Brahe dismissed work done by others with cheaper rulers of wood, because they were too imprecise. His house, called Uraniborg, was thus a state-of-the-art scientific facility, and not just for astrology. Brahe was also interested in medicine and alchemy, and was powerfully influenced by the Paracelsian movement. His basement contained a chemical laboratory with multiple furnaces, and by his own admission he spent as much time on the discipline of alchemy as he did on astronomy. He saw the two disciplines as closely linked, with the same relations and structures appearing in the sky above and the elements here below. He thus referred to alchemy as terrestrial astronomy. But it was astronomy of the celestial kind that made Brahe's name both then and now. He was scornful of astronomers who looked at books and tables rather than making their own observations. The restoration of astronomy, he remarked, must derive not from the authority of men, but from reliable observations and demonstrations based on them. Good is his word, during Brahe's time on Hran he took measurements of the heavens an average of 85 nights a year. This would mostly have been during the winter months when the nights were longer. When working on a specific problem, his activity could be feverish, insofar as standing in the cold Danish night, very carefully making sightings using expensively assembled instruments could be described as feverish. For example, when trying to check Venus for parallax, he took nearly a thousand observations over five days, in sessions lasting five to eight hours. When he took on assistance to help with the work, he wrangled with fellow mathematicians in heated disputes. Maybe that was to stay warm. And when he was troubled with paper shortages and printing problems, he simply set up his own paper mill and printing press. His aim was to produce a wealth of observations more accurate and ample than any that had yet been made. For this sake, he applied methods that, while not entirely unique to him, were applied with unprecedented care. For example, he would take multiple observations and use an average to avoid errors in individual sightings, and he measured the effects of the refraction of light by the atmosphere so that they could be eliminated from consideration. If all Brahe had done was to amass this data, he would earn an important place in the history of science. Kepler joined him as an assistant at the end of Brahe's life, and after legal struggles with the Brahe family, got access to his papers after the great man's death. Kepler would benefit greatly from access to this information to produce his almost literally Earth-shattering theory of elliptical orbits. But Brahe assumed that his legacy would revolve around his own cosmological theory and not just the data that supported it. This was designed to be a cosmology that could avoid both the mathematical absurdity of Ptolemy and the physical absurdity of Copernicus. The absurdity he lamented in the Ptolemaic system was the same one that had bothered Copernicus, the postulation of equance, that is, a celestial sphere rotating around a point other than its own center. Furthermore, the epicycles required to make this system work seemed unfeasibly large. As for the Copernican system, he was a great admirer of its author. He called Copernicus a second Ptolemy and put a portrait of Copernicus on the wall at Uraniborg, a treatment reserved only for the true greats, including, of course, Brahe himself. But he could not bring himself to accept that the Earth moves. Apart from the problem of parallax and the incredibly distant fixed stars, he was unconvinced that bodies falling on a rotating Earth would seem to move straight down. Such rotation also struck him as inappropriate to the very nature of the Earth. It is likely that such a fast motion could not belong to the Earth, a body very heavy and dense and opaque, but rather belongs to the sky itself, whose form and subtle and constant matter are better suited to a perpetual motion, however fast. As Brahe thought about how to avoid the pitfalls of these rival world systems, he also sought to preserve the advantages of each. While the ancient cosmology seemed to maintain physical common sense, Copernicus's could explain why the planets' motions seemed to track the Sun in the way I mentioned last time. This led him to propose a new set of hypotheses which would offer the best of both worlds, the so-called Ticonic system. It's similar to schemes proposed by other thinkers in this period, but is usually associated, above all, with Tycho, which is just as Tycho would have wanted it. According to him, the Earth stands still while the Sun goes around it, as Aristotle and Ptolemy said, but all the other planets orbit the Sun, as Copernicus had said. The only exception is the Moon, which all agree orbits the Earth. Thus, we have a system that is geocentric overall, but heliocentric when it comes to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Brahe was proud of this new theory, but hesitated before putting it forward, in part because he had not managed to avoid all the problems that afflicted the Aristotelian Ptolemaic system. In particular, his system implied overlapping spheres, which he himself deemed ridiculous. The solution came to him thanks to the nova and the comets, which he, like Maeslin, recognized as celestial bodies that had suddenly appeared well above the level of the Moon. How could this be? Brahe's answer was that the heavens are not made of impenetrable spherical bodies, as had been supposed since antiquity. Instead, the matter there is fluid, and allows planets or comets to pass right through. Heaven, he wrote to fellow astronomer Christoph Rothmann, consists of a substance that is very clear, very thin, and very fine. This makes the courses of the seven planets free, so that they move without any slowing. Again, like Maeslin, Brahe considered the manifestation of the comets to have disproved the hypothesis of solid spheres, and he duly put forward his own tectonic system as a better hypothesis that was consistent with all the observed phenomena, though not necessarily proved beyond doubt. He defended this hypothetical approach when he encountered the Parisian philosopher Peter Rammus in Augsburg. Rammus, whose own objections to classical Aristotelianism we'll be discussing later in this series, pressed both Brahe and Raticus to strive for an astronomy that made no use of hypotheses, and instead demonstrates a system of the world through causes. In Brahe's view, this project was impossible, a position he held in common with Melanchthon and the Wittenberg School. Again, this needn't mean that Brahe was uncommitted as to whether the sun was really going around the earth. He thought of his own hypotheses as the best account of physical reality, but he didn't think that this account could be securely established by mathematics and observations, no matter how plentiful, careful, and consistent. Fortunately there were other resources available. In that same epistolary exchange with Rotman, Brahe argued that the Bible supported his own system and not that of Copernicus. He gratefully seized on a recent translation of the Hebrew term rakia in the book of Genesis, normally rendered as firmament but now as expanse or even liquid. Exactly Brahe's idea about the material nature of the heavens. Against such arguments, Rotman countered that scripture is simply silent on the whole question, revelation concerns itself with salvation and not science, and is content to speak in accordance with common beliefs. Brahe conceded that the Bible does not contain scientific descriptions of nature, but warned, let it be far from us to think of them as speaking in such a common manner that we do not believe them to be speaking truth. This exchange may suggest that Brahe was opportunistically latching onto biblical evidence that supported him, but this would be to underestimate the fundamentally religious and even apocalyptic character of his thought. Last time I mentioned the possibility that Copernicus believed in astrology, and his student Rheticus certainly did. This was a widely held attitude. Melanchthon himself annoyed Luther by adhering to astrological beliefs. Indeed it was the prospect of astrological advances that motivated his steadfast encouragement for astronomy and the mathematical sciences more generally. Like most fans of astrology in Christendom, Melanchthon hastened to deny that the science has any deterministic implications. The influence of the stars is real, but not so powerful that it constrains divine or human will. Not for the first time, we see Brahe aligning himself with Melanchthon on this issue. He supplied annual astrological reports to his patron, King Frederick, and was available for drawing up horoscopes on the occasion of a royal birth. Privately, he was fairly skeptical about the accuracy of such individual prognostication, though. At the global scale, things were different. He was confident that the nova of 1572, followed by those comets, were a divine mystery, and a sign of God, predetermined by him at the beginning of time, and now finally exhibited to the world, which is hastening towards its evening. Along with a great planetary conjunction in 1583, these were portents of massive political disruption, with especially dire and well-deserved consequences for Catholics. Tycho Brahe was convinced he'd discovered the arrangement of the world, and only just in time, because it might be ending soon. Of course he was wrong, and not just about the apocalypse. Brahe would have been astonished, and I think probably devastated, to learn that the young mathematician who signed up as an assistant in Brahe's last years would go on to eclipse him in the history of astronomy. This was Johannes Kepler, who didn't even have good enough eyesight to do the sort of exacting observational work to which Brahe had devoted so many frigid evenings. But he kept his eyes and his mind open, and realized that the Copernican hypothesis could be improved by dropping one more ancient assumption. A few episodes back, we looked at Lipsius. Next time, we look at Ellipses, as Kepler finally puts an end to all the circular reasoning here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. Over the last couple of episodes, I've been trying to place two great astronomers of the 16th century within the context of that time. But rather ironically, it's only now that we come to a third great astronomer, who lived well into the 17th century, that the intellectual currents of the Renaissance become impossible to ignore. Johannes Kepler was born in 15 71 and died only in 1630, meaning that his life overlapped with that of figures like René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes, but then Hobbes lived to be 91 years old, so overlapping with him was easy to do. Certainly some aspects of Kepler's thought seem at home in the 17th century. His repeated comparison of the cosmos to a clock fits with the mechanistic conception of nature we find in Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers. But in most respects, Kepler comes across as a figure of the Renaissance and Reformation period. Like Lipsius, his career was shaped by conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Like Melanchthon, he was himself a deeply pious Lutheran who saw astronomy and astrology as the ideal route to the knowledge of God. And speaking of ideal, he was, like Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino, a Platonist. In one of his most important works, On the Harmony of the World, Kepler credits Plato with the idea that God, the actual fount of geometry, practices eternal geometry and does not stray from his own archetype. You could hardly do better as a statement of Kepler's own intellectual project. We can begin his story by picking up where we left off last time. At the end of his life, having lost favor with the Danish court, Tycho Brahe had moved to live near Prague. Here he took on the young Kepler as an assistant. Kepler had already been shaped by his studies in Tübingen, where Melanchthon's ideas shaped the curriculum. Despite curricular and religious reform, Aristotle was still a fundamental author there, and Kepler was very familiar with his works. He had sufficiently strong ancient Greek to second-guess translations of Aristotle's metaphysics, and when he came to defend Copernican heliocentrism, he referred to Aristotle for evidence that this view had been anticipated by the Pythagoreans. As this shows, Kepler was shaped by the humanistic values of Tübingen, which included the study of mathematics as a classical science that needed to be revived or restored. Remember that this rhetoric was also used by Brahe. The most significant influence on him was probably that of his mathematics professor Michael Mestlin. As we saw, Mestlin defended a realist version of the new Copernican astronomy. He passed this conviction on to Kepler, along with the theological rationale for research on such topics. As Kepler put it in a 1595 letter to Mestlin, Even in astronomy, my work worships God. Another thing Kepler took away from his student years was an enthusiasm for astrology. The intellectual culture created by Melanchthon obviously stands behind Kepler's remark, I am a Lutheran astrologer throwing away the nonsense and keeping the kernel. He was, like Melanchthon and Brahe, dubious about the possibility of using astrological methods like horoscopes to predict the fate of individual people. Kepler gave himself as an example. While the stars may have influenced his natural dispositions in some ways, he had assets like relative wealth, an advantageous male gender, and good schooling that were not given to others born under the same configuration of stars. But when it comes to larger scale phenomena, like the weather, it does make sense to seek explanation at the level of heavenly influence. He saw comets and the new stars, that is the two supernovas, that became visible in 1572 and 1604 as portents sent by God. Whenever something new and extraordinary appears in the heavens, he wrote, sublunar nature trembles in some way. For him, such manifestations were part of a providentially ordered system of the world, a conviction he illustrated with an anecdote about him and his wife. At dinner, Kepler joked that if lettuce, oil, vinegar, and sliced eggs flew around in the air for long enough, they would come together to make a salad like the one she had just served him. Yes, she said, but not so well arranged. During her lead, Kepler gave a severe dressing down to proponents of the Epicurean notion that the world comes together as a result of random interactions. The new star of 1604 was, he argued, no chance appearance of celestial matter, but a divine sign of momentous events and a puzzle sent by God to test our powers of ingenuity. Whatever momentous event this supernova signified, it was not the meeting of Kepler and Brahe, because that pivotal event in the history of science had already occurred. By chance, or maybe not, it came almost exactly at the dawn of the 17th century, early in the year 1600. The two men wanted different things out of their collaboration. Kepler wanted to make use of Brahe's meticulous and extensive record of celestial observations, which thanks to his instrumentation and careful methods were as much as 50 times more accurate than the values used by Copernicus. To give you some idea of the potential of this information, Kepler was able on this basis to predict a transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun in 1631. It happened as he predicted, though he did not live to see it. As for Tycho, what he wanted was to settle a score. He prevailed upon Kepler to write a refutation of Nicholas Reimer, known in Latin as Ursus. He was an imperial mathematician and a royal pain in Brahe's backside. To make a long story short, Ursus and Brahe were involved in a dispute over priority for invention of the Tychonic system. As discussed last time, this set of hypotheses has the five planets orbiting the Sun and the Sun and Moon orbiting an unmoving Earth. The fact that we do indeed call this the Tychonic system shows that Brahe has gone down as the winner in history's books. But a book put out by Ursus in 1597 on astronomical hypotheses portrayed Brahe as a total loser. Alongside accusations of mathematical incompetence and scientific malfeasance, Ursus descended to the level of sexual innuendo aimed at Brahe's common-law wife. Kepler had innocently strayed into this dispute by writing an admiring letter to Ursus adopting the tone of a respectful younger scholar. Ursus cynically exploited the letter by quoting it in his own book so as to insinuate that Kepler was on his side. Now, Brahe wanted Kepler to repudiate Ursus' publicly and Kepler, keen to establish a good working relationship with Brahe, was willing to oblige, though evidently not eager given how long he took over the project. By the time the resulting work was done, Tycho was already dead and it was not published in print. As sordid as the whole situation was and Kepler's reluctance notwithstanding, the treatise is well worth the attention of historians of philosophy and science. For one thing, the very fact that Ursus and Brahe were so concerned over issues of scientific priority was, like a comet or supernova, a sign of the times. You might recall that in the middle of the 16th century, Girolamo Cardano was involved in a controversy over who could take credit for a certain mathematical discovery. I mentioned this in episode 363. We're seeing similar issues arise here, and interestingly, claims for priority were made on the basis of private correspondence and not only publication in print. For another thing, the work that Kepler produced in response to Ursus turns out to be something of a philosophical tour de force. He took the opportunity to defend a realist approach to astronomy against the instrumentalism adopted by Oseander and proponents of the Wittenberg interpretation. Actually, it was really Ursus who raised the issue in his own treatise. There, he characterized astronomical hypotheses as convenient falsehoods or fabrications to be used only for purposes of calculation. He portrayed the introduction of physical hypotheses, like the postulation of perfect transparent celestial spheres as seats for the visible planets, as a corruption of the most ancient science. In his telling, this unwise departure from purely mathematical constructions began around the time of Plato and Aristotle. Kepler was thus drawn into a dispute over the history of astronomy as well as its proper method. As he wrote to his professor, Maeslin, in the treatise against Ursus, the principal concern is with antiquity and with the explication of the opinions of the ancients. So the treatise is to be hardly mathematical, but rather philological. Fortunately, Kepler's humanist training prepared him very well for that task, and he was able to cast doubt on Ursus's reading of Aristotle, the Pythagoreans, and the ancient astronomer Eudoxus. He is especially caustic when it comes to Apollonius of Perga, who Ursus ridiculously claimed had already set forth the tachonic system in antiquity, so that Brahe's supposed discovery had actually been anticipated about 2,000 years earlier. No, argues Kepler, Tycho Brahe really was the originator of his system, and this system is more than just a rearrangement of Copernicus's. For instance, Brahe realized what Copernicus did not, namely that there are no solid orbs in the heavens, since this was disproven by the appearance of those comets. Now, Kepler did not agree with the tachonic system, being himself a convinced Copernican. But in this context, there was a more central point than the correctness of one system or another, namely that the scientific goal was a description of the real physical arrangement of the cosmos. In order to rebut Ursus's instrumentalism, Kepler offers a sophisticated discussion of the nature of scientific hypotheses. A hypothesis does begin as a mere assumption, but it is then confirmed as being true, really true, not just instrumentally useful, when its implications are found to match with our observations. The objection to this had always been that the same set of observations could be compatible with several inconsistent hypotheses. Kepler was obviously aware of this, and in fact would later give a nice analogy for the mathematical equivalence of the tachonic and Copernican systems. It's like the fact that you can draw the same circle by moving a pen in a circle on a piece of paper, or by holding the pen still and moving the paper under it. However, we can still be realists about whatever is shared by all the assumptions that yield the correct results. In this case, even if we are not sure about which heavenly body is orbiting which other body, we can assert as a physical fact that a certain relative distance separates the two bodies at any given time. Instrumentalists like Ursus and Oseander were effectively extrapolating from some undecidable cases to suggest that all of astronomy is undecidable, but this is clearly wrong, as we can see in cases where there is no dispute, like the measurements of the diameters of celestial bodies. Kepler thought he could go further though and establish once and for all how the cosmos is arranged. Admittedly, mere observations, even the painstaking ones made by Brahe, were only going to allow for calculation of relative distances, but other considerations would settle the issue between one set of hypotheses and another. For Kepler, these considerations would come from a rather surprising direction, Platonist metaphysics. In an early work from 1596 called the Mysterium Cosmographicum, or Cosmographic Secret, Kepler set out to explain why there are exactly as many planets as there are, or were then thought to be. In answer, he unveiled what he took to be the hidden divine arrangement of the heavens. He had discovered that if, with Copernicus, we assume that the Earth and other planets are going around the Sun, then the orbits of those planets can be fitted within spheres that contain the shapes of all five platonic solids. These are the cube, the pyramid, or tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron. They had been used in Plato's Timaeus as an explanation for the construction of the elements and the heavens. Now, Kepler pointed out that if you arrange the platonic solids in the right order and inscribe them within circles, you will get, more or less, exactly the ratios of the orbits of the planets that were then known. The Earth will be right in the middle, further from the Sun than Mercury and Venus, closer than Saturn and Jupiter. When Kepler discovered this, he wept tears of joy, for he felt that he had finally made good on the ambition of his predecessors to discern God's cosmic plan. As a bonus, he could now explain the empty spaces between the planetary orbits in the Copernican system. They need to be that far apart for the sake of mathematical proportion. Furthermore, he thought that this discovery could banish all talk of equivalent hypotheses and instrumentalism. The number and arrangement of platonic solids has a mathematical rationale behind it. Even without ever looking into the night sky, we could expect that God, Plato's eternal geometer, might construct the universe with just this perfect structure. Then, lo and behold, observations confirm that this is indeed the structure he has chosen. Now, this line of thought might evoke our skepticism. In a book on the Platonism Underlying Kepler's Science, Rhonda Martens admits, where Kepler speaks as though he derived the archetypal theory by a priori reasoning and then tested for fit against empirical data, it's more accurate to say that he first had the empirical pattern and then tried to fit it to an archetypal account. But Kepler was convinced that mathematics gives us independent insight, not based on observation, into the causes of the heavenly arrangement. Remember that in this period, an a priori scientific account is one that uses causes to explain effects rather than vice versa, so he took himself to have provided the a priori rationale, confirming the hypothetical proposal of Copernicus. Using the same method, he believed he could rule out even theories embraced by fellow Copernicans. Around the same time, Giordano Bruno was arguing that the universe is infinite and contains other worlds that we cannot observe. But Kepler believed that the universe is limited in size. Having made ordered proportion quite literally central to his cosmology, he could hardly admit that the universe is unbounded and in fact has no center. Though he did admit, as a hypothesis that could not yet be decided by observation, that some of these so-called fixed stars might be closer to us than others. Kepler felt vindicated rather than undermined when the invention of the telescope facilitated the sighting of previously invisible stars. If the universe were infinite and full of stars in all directions, he argued, we should see a dome of solid brilliance above us at night rather than scattered penpricks of light. This problem, now called Olber's paradox or the dark night sky paradox, was first posed by the English Copernican Thomas Digues. Since the basis of Kepler's case was his philosophy of mathematics, we should say a bit more about it. He makes a number of illuminating remarks on the topic in On the Harmony of the World, which came out in 1619, more than 20 years after the Mysterium Cosmographicum. By this time he had made his famous discovery that the orbits of the planets around the Sun will match Brahe's exacting measurements if they are moving elliptically, not in perfect circles. But he remained convinced that geometrical perfection is the key to understanding astronomy as a discipline that fuses mathematics with physics. The arrangement in terms of Platonic solids has the force of necessity, he says, because the Platonic solids and their order are relations that partake of divine archetypes. Plato was right to say in his dialogue, the Meno, that the soul recollects the truths of mathematics, that is, discovers them as knowledge that lies hidden within the soul. Here, Kepler was influenced by the late ancient Platonist Proclus, whose commentary on Euclid is quoted at length in Kepler's treatise. As both Plato and Proclus taught, when we undertake mathematical inquiry, we begin by studying harmonies that can be grasped by sensation, and then understand them by discovering those same harmonies as innately present within our own souls. While the observable motions of the heavens are one case of a harmony that is available to the senses, a more obvious case, and one that is nearer to hand, is music. Thus Kepler devotes on the harmony of the world to the Pythagorean theory of harmony, which can be applied to both astrology and astronomy. He even includes musical notation, where individual notes written on a staff are labeled with the names of the planets, and says that different singing voices correlate to different heavenly bodies. If you are a tenor, for instance, then you have a Martian singing voice, since its place on the harmonic scale is like that of Mars relative to the other planets. Fans of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons can now enjoy a moment of revelation, as they finally understand what Marvin the Martians' Eludium PU36 explosive space modulator was supposed to modulate. Since Kepler was born before the advent of Warner Brothers, he thinks of a different cultural reference, the Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres. Kepler does not think there is literally audible sound in the heavens, but there doesn't need to be. God has composed a cosmos that is musical in the deeper sense of possessing a perfect harmony, which is entirely rational and entirely natural, as he puts it. Given that Kepler is nowadays most famous for having proposed elliptical orbits, it's downright astonishing to see how little is said about this in his magnum opus on harmony. He does mention it briefly, and talks at somewhat greater length about the physical theory that accounts for the form of the orbits. Kepler's own explosive space modulation was his proposal that each of the planets, including the Earth, moves along an elliptical path with the Sun at one of the two focal points of the path. That is his first law of planetary motion. His second law is that the planet will move proportionately faster as it comes closer to the Sun and slow down when further away. Mathematically speaking, this means that a line drawn from the Sun to the planet will sweep over equal areas at equal times. You get a fatter wedge of the area of the ellipse when the planet is near the Sun, so that this line is shorter, a slimmer but longer wedge when the planet is further away. Good news, since this proves that it is in principle possible to share out equal pieces of an elliptical birthday cake. Now an obvious question arises, apart from the question of why anyone would bake an elliptical birthday cake, what is causing the planets to accelerate upon approaching the Sun? The answer, of course, is gravity, and Kepler didn't know that, but he made a startlingly similar suggestion. He was aware of something we'll be discussing later on, namely William Gilbert's research into magnetism over in England. Kepler thought that this could be the explanation, or at least analogous to the explanation, for heavenly motion. This is the context for one of his mechanical descriptions of the celestial realm. My goal, he wrote in a letter of 1605, is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine living being, but similar to a clockwork, insofar as almost all the manifold motions are taken care of by one single absolutely simple magnetic bodily force, as in a clockwork all motion is taken care of by a simple weight. Yet he certainly did not leave behind earlier ideas about cosmic bodies as being akin to organisms as opposed to unliving machines. Like the ancient Platonists, who so inspired him, he believed that there is a soul in the earth which interacts with the heavens so as to produce phenomena like the tides and weather patterns. This accounts for something I mentioned earlier, namely the possibility of using astrology to predict the weather. By offering such arguments, Kepler suggests that the earthly realm of our everyday experience operates according to the same rules as the astronomical realm. That's something that was excluded in Aristotelian science, which as I've mentioned in previous episodes, envisioned two interacting physical systems, our lower world of elements that move straight up and down, and the higher world of perfect circular motion. But between the appearance of comets and novas further away from us than the moon, the abolition of celestial orbs and elliptical orbits instead of circles, this division of nature into two realms was increasingly embattled. Kepler's idea that magnetism could explain celestial attraction was a further attempt to apply earthly physics to heavenly things, and this was no tacit implication or unconsidered assumption on Kepler's part. To the contrary, he explicitly said that there is a much closer relation between the heavens and earth than had been admitted by Aristotle. Indeed, according to the Copernican system, the earth is in the heavens just as much as any other planet is. In a related move, Kepler blurred the strict dividing line the Aristotelians drew to separate physics from pure mathematics. Where there is matter, he said, there is geometry, justifying his idea that one can use mathematical analysis to establish the nature of physical reality. This is not to say that he fused them into a single science, though. In fact, he can be found criticizing other authors, including Aristotle himself, for failing to observe the distinction between the methods of mathematical astronomy and natural philosophy. Rather, his idea was that the structures and proportions studied by the mathematician are then discovered by empirical investigation, and in various physical contexts. Just as the attractive power of a magnet is stronger in proportion to its proximity to a chunk of metal, so the Sun's attractive power is stronger when the planet it is affecting is closer, which is why the planet speeds up. This is not a coincidence, of course, but the result of one and the same archetype being used by God to create different phenomena as he providentially designs an orderly universe. Kepler's awareness of the difference between math and physics, and of the fact that the two can work together, is summed up early in his treatise On the Harmony of the World, when he says, I am now playing the role not of a geometer in philosophy, but of a philosopher in this part of geometry. One subplot in the story we've been following over the past episodes is the way that genuinely new observations changed the course of science. Without the fortuitous appearance of those comets and novas, astronomers might have been slower to challenge some aspects of Aristotelian cosmology. Instruments like the telescope also afforded a view of previously unseen things, like stars too distant to see with a naked eye, or the craters on the moon that Galileo was the first to see. The Renaissance differs from earlier periods, in part because people had to try to understand such novelties. Sometimes their reactions were lamentably counterproductive. Later on in this series, we'll be talking about the fact that misfortunes were sometimes blamed on witches, which is not irrelevant to Kepler, who had to rush to defend his own mother from such charges. On other occasions, though, exceptions played a productive role in science. This is the general phenomenon we'll be talking about next time, as a genuinely extraordinary guest joins me for a wide-ranging discussion of Renaissance science and the way it dealt with so-called wonders, like comets, and for that matter, armadillos. So join me for a discussion with the wonderful Lorraine Dastan, here on The History of Philosophy, Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Renaissance and early modern science with Lorraine Dastan, who is a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Hi Lorraine, thanks for coming on. Hello, Peter. Nice to have you here. You are a historian of science, among other things, and one of the many topics you've researched in that area is something you call in some of your work wonders. So these are wondrous or monstrous, strange, striking phenomena that attracted the attention of a lot of scientists in the Renaissance in the early modern period. And we're going to talk about the sorts of things they said about it, how they accounted for these, but can you maybe start by just giving us a sense of what sorts of things or events fell into this category and also how information about them was disseminated? The short definition of a wonder in this period is anything that's new, rare, or unusual, anything that snags your attention as being extraordinary. This could include exotic animals, armadillos from South America. It could include phenomena whose causes are opaque. So for example, magnetic attraction and repulsion. It could include strange phenomena, things that glowed in the dark without shedding heat. It could include monstrous births like two-headed cats. It could include visions seen in the sky of three suns, parahilia, seen in the sky or especially in the war-torn centuries of the 16th and 17th centuries, armies battling in the clouds. All of these comets, new stars, all of these would have been classified as wondrous. There's an important distinction though, which can't be made in all European languages. You can make it in Latin, you can make it in English, you can make it in French, but not in German and probably not in Dutch. And that is between a marvel and a miracle. So a marvel is something that is extraordinary, but in principle could be explained by some complicated concatenation of natural causes. Whereas a miracle is something which could be caused only by God, in which God suspends his ordinary providence, what we would call, although the term was still new in the 17th century, the laws of nature, violation of the laws of nature. Both of those can trigger wonder and therefore belong in the canon of wonders. But from the standpoint of natural philosophy, from what we would call science, they belong in two quite separate categories. So something like a magnet that attracts metal, that would be not a miracle, but still wondrous. Whereas something like someone rising from the dead would obviously be a miracle. Exactly. So to go back to this question about how information about these things was disseminated, I take it that we're mostly not talking about eyewitness reports in the text, but rather scholars who are reporting in the text that we can read that someone said that this happened or someone said that they saw this, or are we actually dealing with lots of texts that say, I experienced this firsthand? We're dealing with both. We're dealing especially after about 1650 with eyewitness reports, which are sent into what we would now regard as the first scientific journals. So for example, the wonderfully named miscellaneous curiosa that was published by the first scientific academy in the German lands, which later became known as the Leopold Dinebuch was originally named the Academia Naturae Coriosorum, the Academy of those who are curious about nature, engaged its far-flung correspondence, doctors mostly, to send in things that were unusual, which they had seen themselves. They placed a premium on autopsy, which meant eye witnessing. The same rules held for the first journals of the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences. They were extremely interested, if possible, in eyewitness reports. However, these strange reports, so for example, of a two-headed child born in Plymouth sent in by the local curate to London, or reports of a phosphor which glowed in the dark, sent in to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. These reports would then be placed in the context of what we would call a longer baseline. So the academicians, once they received such a report, would scour their sources from antiquity on to try and find other occurrences in medieval chronicles or ancient medical texts, so that they had the beginnings of an inductive generalization. So they began to try to domesticate these marvels by fitting them in to a category. Aurora Borealis is a good example, quite unusually. Auroras were visible in the latter part of the 17th century, in the beginning of the 18th century, in latitudes as low as that of London and Paris, very unusual. Some of these were witnessed by the academicians themselves, others were witnessed by provincial correspondents. The attempt was to then go backwards and see whether or not you could start looking for periodicities of these phenomena, much in the way that Halley, Edmund Halley, who was an astronomer and member of the Royal Society of London, was looking for periodicities of comets, the one that eventually became named for him with a periodicity of 75 years. So it was both. It was both eyewitness reports, but then immediately an attempt to situate the eyewitness report, the freshly arrived report, in a historical series of similar events. And are those new developments? Is that one of the things that would differentiate the treatment of wonders in the Renaissance, whatever we mean by Renaissance, and what we sometimes call the early modern period? If you compare the treatment of wonders in, say, the 15th or 16th century to the way they deal with it in the 17th century, are those two big differences that they start relying more on eyewitness testimony and that they start trying to contextualize what they've seen or the reports that are coming in against older reports? The first, depending on eyewitness testimony, has a much longer history, but not necessarily in the context of what we would call science. It has a longer history in the context of miracles. The medieval Catholic church, especially after about the 13th century, began to take a rather jaundiced view of locales that wish to have a saint be edified in order to create a pilgrimage shrine which would attract wealthy tourists to their town. There was a clear economic interest in having a saint in your town. So by the 13th century, the Catholic church had set rather high standards to start the canonization procedures, namely three well-attested miracles. And these miracles had to have been seen by eyewitnesses, and they had to be independently corroborated. So many of the procedures, the protocols that were later adopted by academies of science had been pioneered by canon lawyers in the Middle Ages for investigating, with a skeptical eye it should be said, they were called not for nothing, devil's advocates, of the reports of miracles by local bishops hither and yon throughout Christendom. So that part was in the context perhaps of what we would call natural philosophy new, but not new in terms of procedures to test the allegedly wondrous by eyewitness report. The business of putting them into context, however, that is scouring the historical sources for an inductive series, that is new. And that represents in many ways the adoption by scientists of techniques that had been perfected by the Renaissance humanists. So the Renaissance humanists had begun to collate texts faced with the riches that arrived first in Italy and then further north of the Alps after 1453 and the fall of Constantinople and the arrival of scholars from Constantinople, Greek speaking scholars with manuscripts. The humanists began creating tools like concordances, indices, tables of contents in their new critical editions of these works. Those could be used to create the kind of series in the 16th and 17th centuries that the scientists were interested in. So I take it from everything that you've just said that the lazy assumption that we might have had that scholars from these early periods would have been very credulous in just repeating anything that they heard, like crazy stuff about people with feet instead of ears or whatever, that they were actually much more careful about what they were willing to lend credence to. And I suppose that they often report amazing sounding things and then say, yeah, but we're not so sure this really happened. It's a really good question. And I think there's really no easy answer. Some of the things which they believed are at a glance to us absolutely ridiculous. So for example, the monstrous races of which Augustine speaks in the city of God, some of which are the sea of podes, for example, who have one large foot, which they use as a parasol to shade them from the sun or the blemies who have no head but have their facial features in their chest. We cannot look at these without smiling. And we know at a glance that this couldn't possibly be the case. But you can also set your threshold of incredulity too high. Let me give you an example. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, these new scientific academies I mentioned received reports of stones falling from the sky. Not surprisingly, the stones that fell from the sky fell in the open fields where they were witnessed mostly by peasants or other shepherds or other people who spent a lot of time in the open fields outdoors at night. The academicians resolutely refused to credit such reports. They dismissed them as the superstitions of peasants since it was mostly peasants who were witnessing them until in around 1800, there was a meteor shower within three kilometers of Paris, at which point the learned academicians of Paris had to eat their words and go out investigate themselves. Was it unreasonable of them to be incredulous about stories of stones falling from the sky? This is a really difficult question. We live in a moment now where we are once again in a perplexity about credulity and incredulity and where to set the threshold. I don't think there will ever be an easy answer to this question. Yeah, because you can make mistakes in both directions, obviously. That's right. Imagine that you live in the 16th century in a European city, a port city perhaps, which is being flooded by novelties of all kinds from both the far West and the far East. Who would have thought that something like an armadillo could exist? People were equally amazed by the arrival of paper money from China. What kind of people would accept paper as legal tender as opposed to gold and silver? Once you had seen or had witnessed by reliable witness such marvels, would anything surprise you? There's a wonderful treatise written in the mid 17th century by a French British, French English divine Merit Casabon, for whom Casabon in George Eliot's Middlemarch I think was named. He writes about witchcraft and he writes with some doubt. He writes very learned people, he's thinking of the doctors Johannes Weyl and others, have claimed that there are no witches. But if there were no witches, that would mean that learned and upright magistrates have condemned thousands of innocent people to death. This is a thought too horrible to countenance. And then he averts his eyes from that abyss. So the question of what to believe and what not to believe tormented people in the 16th and 17th century as well. What about the advisability, even maybe the moral advisability of being so curious about these things? Because I'm really struck by the fact that there's this organization founded where they explicitly say we're curious about natural phenomena because of course in the Middle Ages curiosity was usually used as a term of abuse. So you weren't supposed to be curious, it meant delving into details that weren't important or something like that. So looking back over the classical heritage and so on, did they find encouragement in figures like Augustine say to delve into these wonders or were they worried about the fact that they were wasting their time and being frivolous? Augustine has very harsh things to say about people who investigate natural phenomena or allow their curiosity unbridled to take over their lives. He castigates the learned astronomers because they attempt to find the causes of eclipse rather than displaying a proper awe for the works of God. And he finds curiosity even more pernicious. At its very best curiosity is frivolous. It distracts you. He describes very characteristically in the first person a moment when he is at prayer and he allows himself to be distracted by a lizard that scampers across his path. That is motif of an attention which is undisciplined and a self which is incontinent. That's the best construal of curiosity. The worst construal of curiosity is that it's a meddlesome busybody who is prying into the secrets of neighbors or the prince or still worse, blasphemously of God. So curiosity has a very bad reputation. One of the sins imputed to Lucifer, the fallen angel who becomes Satan, is curiosity. It's in the neighborhood somewhere between the sins of lust and pride. That is not a good neighborhood to live in in the Middle Ages. But its star begins to rise in the 16th and 17th century. By the time we get to the 17th century, there's a whole philosophical anthropology best represented by the political theorist Thomas Hobbes, which takes curiosity to be the most salient feature of human beings, perhaps even more salient than the fact that they have reason. And Hobbes associates curiosity with a form of an appetite which, unlike the other appetites like lust or hunger or thirst, is insatiable. And he finds that insatiability to be actually admirable and a source of inexhaustible pleasure. All of our other appetites, hunger, for example, can be sated, curiosity not. For Hobbes, that ennobles curiosity. That would really be a message you could get out of Aristotle too. I mean, the beginning of the metaphysics, all humans desire to know. And he talks about the pleasure that comes along with knowledge and philosophical contemplation. He dissects shellfish. So it's a very Aristotelian attitude, I would say. So it's not like all of antiquity is telling you no to your experience. Absolutely not. No. It has to be a little careful here. When Aristotle uses very, very rarely the word pareirgeia, which is the Greek word for curiosity, it is in this pejorative, busy body sense. But in terms of what we would call curiosity, there is of course the beautiful passage in the parts of animals in which he quotes the fragment of Heraclitus and says, Heraclitus welcoming visitors into his kitchen saying, there be gods even here. And Aristotle says, there's nothing so disgusting in nature, but that there aren't marvels revealed when you look at it closely enough, there be gods even here. How did they feel about the emotional charge that you get out of these stories? So I'm not just talking about the intellectual curiosity, but the pleasure that you would get out of it, or maybe the terror you would get out of it. Something like armies fighting in the sky. That's not just cool. It's really frightening. Exactly. And again, looking back to the medieval age, these very strong emotional reactions, I take it would have been seen as a kind of downside of thinking about wonder. Is there a positive way of spinning that in the Renaissance and early modern period such that they, someone like Hobbes, for example, say, well, actually no, you should let yourself be guided by your emotions here. Your pleasure and your titillation that you feel when you hear these stories is actually going to spur you on to discover more about nature? These three emotions that were perhaps better passions in the sense of a passion being something that grabs us by the lapels that happens to us, which we suffer patiently rather than a kind of sloshing around of nervous fluids, which is the origin of the term emotion. These passions of wonder, horror, and terror form a triangle which is quite precarious. That is, it's very easy for one of them to tip into the others. Let me give a concrete example from the early modern period. There's a whole group of phenomena, for example, armies battling in the sky, three suns in the sky, monstrous births, comets, rains of blood, which are associated with portents. That is, they are messages sent by God, ominous messages, that something cataclysmic is about to happen. That tradition is still very much alive in the 16th and 17th century. In fact, the printing press, in a sense, gives it a new lease on life because it's possible to print illustrated broadsides. These are one-page sheets, usually taken up half with a woodcut illustrating the two-headed calf that was just born or the army seen battling in the sky or the rains of blood. The rest is a very short text, which we might think of as the ancestor of our journalism. It answers the when, what, why, who questions, where questions, but it's interpreted as a portent, as I say, a message sent by God. Those phenomena are meant to elicit terror. However, one begins to see by around 1600 increasing numbers of such broadsides, which include ballads, which celebrate the wonder of such phenomena, indeed advertise that for a small sum in a coffee house or at the year's fair, you too could see the two-headed calf if you wanted to. We have sermons that are preached on the occasion of the birth of a monstrous child in which the minister has to harangue his congregation into terror because they think it's a pleasurable wonder. These three emotions, horror, terror, wonder, are always in a relationship of instability with one another. There is a clear trend, much remarked upon and much disapproved of by religious authorities, of seeing ever more pleasure in these strange phenomena and ever less terror and horror. What about the idea that wonders are an exception to natural laws? You mentioned this before, Edson, under the heading of miracles. In fact, this is how Hume deals with miracles. He talks about a miracle as a departure from natural laws. I guess you find this way of thinking about miracles all the way back through the tradition. Now, you said before that there's a difference between a miracle and a marvel. A miracle is a violation of natural law and a marvel isn't. It's just inexplicable. Maybe you are really striking. Does that mean that they don't in any way feel that wonders shake their confidence in the stability of nature? Because on the one hand, you've got marvels, which are just hard to explain but must be subsumed under natural laws somehow. Then you've got miracles and they don't count because that's God stepping in from the outside. In other words, what I'm asking is whether wonders effectively have no import for their sense of the universality and generality of natural laws or are they worried about the fact that the laws as they see them might have kind of holes? The boundary between a marvel and a miracle was always blurred. Thomas Aquinas discusses this in the 13th century. Aquinas makes the criterion subjective. He says what for an astronomer, for example, an eclipse is neither a marvel nor a miracle because one knows how to explain it. Is for the unleaded peasant a miracle? There is a sliding scale depending on your state of knowledge or ignorance as to, first of all, whether or not you feel wonder and secondly, where you classify the event on the marvelous to miraculous scale. That really changes in the early modern period. One reason it changes is that the very idea of natural law is being articulated. So Aristotle has a very strong idea of natural regularities, what happens always or most of the time. But he's perfectly aware and says at various junctures in his work that extraordinary events happen every now and then, every once in a blue moon. But for Aristotle, these are not the stuff of natural philosophy. You should be investigating the regular, what came to be called later than Aristotle, this is what Bacon calls them, the customs of nature. And those are what happens always or most of the time. We might call them statistical regularities. Starting in the middle of the 17th century, you get a much more hard edged view of what these regularities are. It's Descartes who begins to use the language of legality. It's not unknown in the Middle Ages, but its realm is very much restricted. There are laws in astronomy and there are laws in grammar. Those are the sources of the two most ironclad regularities according to medieval scholars. But starting with Descartes, you get the idea that there are certain regularities which are so fundamental that they are actual proclamations, edicts of God, Deus legus lator, God the lawmaker. These are not just every regularity, but rather the fundamental laws of motion from which all other phenomena can be deduced. These are watertight. They allow of no exceptions whatsoever except by the divine legislator, excuse me, who promulgated them in the first place. And so for the first time, you get a much sharper line between the marvelous and the miraculous. That being said, there is a very special role, a special epistemological role that's being played by the wondrous, especially in the late 16th and early 17th century, which is the moment when the entire edifice of natural philosophy and astronomy begins to crumble. Copernicus publishes on the revolutions of heavenly bodies in 1543. Vesalius publishes on the fabric of the human body also in 1543. The reports of the new world have been coming in since 1492. It is clear to every learned person by the second half of the 16th century that there were many things which the ancients did not know or which the moderns knew better. The litany that is repeated over and over again is gunpowder, the printing press, and the magnetic compass show the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. At that moment, philosophers, scientists are confronted with a truly horrifying thought, which is everything that the best and brightest have believed for centuries is probably wrong. What do you do in such a situation? Well, what some of them did, what Francis Bacon did, but not only Francis Bacon, was to say, let's create a whole collection of anomalies, of exceptions to Aristotle's bland generalizations of what happens always or for the most part, and they will be a standing reproach and a challenge to us to formulate regularities which are both broader and more watertight than anything in the old discredited natural philosophy. These wonders, these collections of wonders become a battering ram against the old natural philosophy. Something that you say that goes along these lines in some of your work, which I really liked is the analogy where you describe the older Aristotelian medieval science as smooth because it deals with these universal generalizations and the late Renaissance, early modern science as grainy because it pays so much attention to particular events. Is that basically what you mean by that, that there is this kind of turn to looking at one-off situations and testing the old universal claims of Aristotelian science against these one-off exceptions? And not only exceptions, but also particulars which are more humdrum and everyday. So you'll remember from Aristotle's poetics that he distinguishes between philosophy and deep poetry, which deal with universals and historia, which deals with particulars. And historia here is in the broad sense of not only our sense of history, civil history, but also natural history, anything that deals with particulars. And it's quite clear to Aristotle that the prestigious endeavor is philosophy or even poetry which deals with universals. That hierarchy begins to be reversed starting in the early 16th century for very interesting reasons and it starts first with the doctors. The doctors who are the people who have in the medieval university system been most likely to have received a natural philosophical education start to collect what they call observaziones, observations. They revive the idea of the Hippocratic case, but even more than the individual medical case history, they begin just to start recording individual observations, often of strange cases, which they begin to publish. And they publish them in collections that start with the head and go down to the toe for easy consultation by other doctors. The doctors who do this are doctors who are usually employed not at the universities, but either at the courts or as the municipal physicians of larger cities, say Augsburg or Bologna, who have, first of all, wide practices. And secondly, whose daily bread is actually trying to deal with individual cases so that the system of academic rewards, which rewards studying universals at the universities, no longer holds for them. Their patients, including their princely patients, wish to have knowledge of particulars, particular drugs, for example, the medicinal properties of botany. Starting with those doctors who, remember, are the people who are most likely to know something about natural philosophy and who compose, for example, two-thirds of the membership of the Royal Society of London in its early years and the complete membership of this Academia Naturae Coriosaum, this move to look at particulars spreads. When we talk about empiricism, we have a rather, I must say, rough-hewn view of what it means. What's really going on in the 16th, 17th century is that these, first of all, these doctors who are the vanguard of this movement, but then humanists and lawyers and other sharp observers are pioneering new forms of systematic empiricism. So observation and experiment, observatio and experimentum, are two words you very seldom find coupled in medieval Latin texts. You also very seldom find them in connection with what university professors do. That's what either shepherds do in their fields, sailors on their ships, or experimentum, artisans in their workshop. You start to see first the doctors and then the natural philosophers putting these two together and making them into what Bacon called learned experience, systematic experience. It seems like there's a paradox there actually, because it means that roughly at the same time that this very careful attention is being paid to particular events, whether wondrous or not, you also have this increasing confidence that there will be general, rigorous, unexceptionless laws of nature. Is the reason for this that they are confident that these laws must exist? They don't know what they are yet, but once they do enough close observation of particulars, they'll be able to somehow get back to the universal. So it's almost like they'll redo Aristotelian science, but they'll get it right this time and this time there won't be any exceptions. I think that's very much the vision that someone like Descartes or Leibniz has. And also Bacon. Bacon's view is, all right, we're going to, as you say, the understanding should not be allowed to fly on wings, it should be hung with lead weights. You're going to use all of these wonders, these anomalies, what he calls the natural history of predator generations, of monsters, to slow you down, to make sure that unlike the Aristotelians, you don't leap prematurely to a generalization. But eventually we are going to get, just as you say, to the right kind of generalization, even broader and more ironclad than any Aristotelian generalization. Okay. Well, there's an optimistic outlook on what awaits us when we get to early modern philosophy. For now, I will thank Lorraine Dassen so much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. Thank you. And please join us next time as we continue to look at Renaissance philosophy and science here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. As Norman Tebbit once said to the unemployed of Britain, get on your bike, because having wrapped up our look at the Northern Renaissance and Reformation in Central Europe and the Low Countries, we're now going on a tour of France. French culture in the 15th and especially 16th centuries will be occupying our attention for about 20 episodes, a mini-series that will take in such figures as Rabelais, Marérit de Navarre, Jean Bodin, Marie de Cornet, and Montagny. As you can tell from my attempt to pronounce these names, my spoken French is not what it could be. It is reputed to be one of the world's most beautiful languages, but this podcast will be offering no evidence to support that claim. To the contrary, I will be subjecting it to the sort of treatment meted out in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, something else we'll be mentioning along the way, so I apologize for that in advance. On the bright side, at least you don't have to see my facial expressions, so you will be spared what P.G. Wodehouse once memorably described as the look of furtive shame, the shifty hang dog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. I'm American, of course, but it applies to us too. As it happens, this first episode will be devoted to a similar topic, what happened when Frenchmen undertook to speak Latin, and even more controversial, when they undertook to speak French. These were the two languages of the humanist movement that swept France in our period, just as it had swept Italy. In fact, it is generally agreed that humanism swept into France because of its emergence in Italy. The French Renaissance is often traced to the impact of Petrarch, the 14th century poet and humanist who inspired later Italians like Salutati and Bruni. Petrarch's poetry was imitated in French lyric verse and translated by Jean Mero in 1534. Mero also exemplified the way that French writers were engaging with classical literature in this period. He translated Ovid and Virgil from Latin into French. Yet medieval French literature still remained relevant in this period. In fact, that is illustrated by Mero too, as he produced an updated version of the 13th century poem Romance of the Rose. We looked at this allegorical work back in episode 254, and in episode 295 we saw how Christine de Pizan and other intellectuals in early 15th century France debated its value. Despite Christine's complaints about its misogyny, it remained a central work. The poet Joachim de Boullée pronounced it the only thing worth reading from older French literature. De Boullée made this judgment in his Defense of the French Language, published in 1549. By this point, people had actually been writing fine literature in French for quite some time, raising the question of why the practice would need to be defended. Even leaving aside the Romance of the Rose and early 15th century authors like Christine de Pizan, we can mention the school of authors called the Retéricueur, poets who worked around the end of the 1400s. The very titles of their works show that they were conscious of working in French rather than Latin. Jean Moliné, for instance, wrote a work called The Art of Vernacular Rhetoric. Even though Moliné anticipated Du Bellet's attitude that vernacular poetry should follow as closely as possible the model of Latin verse, Du Bellet was dismissive of the earlier efforts of Moliné and the other Rhetoricueur. Like so many Renaissance figures, whether in science, philosophy, or literature, he thought that it was only in his own time that the glories of antiquity were finally being revived and imitated with any degree of success. Modern day scholars don't entirely disagree with Du Bellet about this. The French Renaissance is typically seen as a kind of delayed reaction to events in Italy, with a real humanistic flowering only in the 16th century. This was in part thanks to the presence of teachers of ancient Greek. As Italians had done earlier, French intellectuals benefited from the presence of émigrés from the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. These included George Hieronymus from Sparta and John Lascaris from Constantinople. Both came first to Italy and then traveled on to France, living incarnations of the passage of humanist scholarship from east to west. They shared their knowledge of Greek with a young man who would become the leading figure of French humanism, Guillaume Boudet. He was Paris's answer to Erasmus, to the extent that a visiting Italian humanist complained that in the eyes of the French, none but Boudet had a knowledge of literature. In fact, Boudet answered Erasmus quite literally, in a rather prickly exchange of letters which touched sometimes on issues of genuine scholarship, but more often on the interpersonal feuds that were such a mainstay of humanist culture. Erasmus had misgivings about Boudet's ponderous and obscure Latin style. In turn, Boudet, in a letter written half in Latin and half in ancient Greek, lamented that Erasmus was wasting his talents on lighter works, probably having in mind such texts as the Praise of Folly. No one was going to accuse Boudet of any such frivolities. He produced, among other things, Des Assé. It is not about donkeys, or whatever else you may be thinking, but rather a punishingly well-documented exploration of Roman coins, one of which was called the ass, hence Boudet's title. A modern biographer of Boudet has complained that, on the face of it, Des Assé is poorly composed, poorly written, and poorly edited. But it does display Boudet's impressive research into such topics as the cost of bread and antiquity, and is opinionated on such matters as the debasement of currency and the counterproductive use of tax money to hire mercenaries. Digressions scattered throughout the work touch on scarcely relevant topics like the relative merits of active and contemplative life, another typical concern of humanism that we most recently encountered in Lipsius. For Boudet, an active life, Métouin lived at court, especially the court of the French king Francis I. He was the monarch most central to the story of the French Renaissance. Scholars have long admired the blossoming of culture and art during his reign, including the art of music, as in the case of Pierre Atagnan, whose piece Toudian you just heard as the new music clip I'm using for the episodes on France. It was recorded especially for the podcast by lute-playing philosopher Helene de Cruz. Thanks, Helene. In any case, King Francis also supported numerous humanist scholars, including Boudet. Boudet is credited with helping persuade Francis to establish the Collège de l'heuteur royeur in 1530, later it would become the Collège de France. Its motto was, teach everything, but the curriculum was oriented towards such core humanist disciplines as Hebrew, Greek, and mathematics. It was during the long reign of Francis, from 1515 to 1547, that the study of Greek really bedded down in France. As one modern-day scholar has put it, in the sort of phrasing that Boudet might use if he were writing in English, what had once been the esoteric learning of a few became the necessary appendage of every educated man. Deep knowledge of Latin was also highly valued, with Cicero, of course, being the gold standard in this language. An amusing story, as the humanist Marc-Antoine Muray laying a trap for his critics by deliberately using Latin words that were drawn from Cicero's works, but omitted from the standard lexicon of Cicero's Latin. The idea was, of course, that the critics would accuse him of using un-Ciceronean Latin, only to be exposed for their own ignorance. Boudet drew on Cicero and other ancient sources for a work of political advice offered to King Francis, the Institutions de France. It shares the features we've found in other mirrors for princes in this period. That is to say, Boudet is a steadfast defender of monarchy, a sensible position to take when you're writing for the King of France, and presupposes that the welfare of the state turns on the individual character of the ruler. Another modern scholar who can turn a nice phrase complains about this aspect of the work, saying, Boudet is full of high sentence, but yes, a bit obtuse. The obviousness of his censures and injunctions is so soporific that the contradictions in them easily pass unnoticed. But Boudet does at least have an idea about how the prince should shape his moral outlook, an idea that could hardly be more humanist. He should study history, to the point of making it his great mistress. Thus, the Institutions de France is full of examples taken from the lives of ancient rulers like Alexander the Great. Meditating on such examples, the ruler will develop practical wisdom or prudence, the same virtue later celebrated by Lipsius in his comparable work, the Politica. As Boudet writes, Prudence is acquired in this way by the man of good judgment in reading and reflecting about the past and present government of the world, and how all kingdoms and great monarchies have met their end, and by what shortcomings they have fallen into difficulty. If you asked Boudet's contemporaries about his greatest achievement, they would probably mention his study of the legal tradition. In 1508, he published his Annotations on the Digest of Justinian, which, it has been said, did for Roman law what Erasmus' New Testament was to do for biblical studies. Boudet was unsparing in his criticism of the scholastic legal tradition. Our imagined English-speaking version of Boudet would have found the name of the leading scholastic jurist, Acursius, all too apt. He blamed Acursius and other university jurists for misunderstanding Latin vocabulary and, more subtly, for failing to appreciate the way that both the Latin language and Roman law had evolved over time. This was a significant caveat to the idea of a single normative version of Latin enshrined above all in the writings of Cicero. Which is not to say that Boudet was free of anachronisms of his own, as when he assimilated the medieval relationship of feudal lord and tenant to the relationship between the Roman patron and his clients. Still, this was a great leap forward for legal scholarship, and especially the application of philology to this field. Boudet inspired other scholars to follow his example, like Louis Le Roy, professor of Greek at the newly founded College. He wrote a biography of Boudet and took seriously the latter's injunction to steep himself in history, something that shows itself in Le Roy's translation of Plato's Phaedo, which begins with an overview of the history of ancient philosophy. But in one respect, Boudet was not a model for what would come in the middle of the 16th In his own history, he was a French scholar who barely ever wrote in French. He apologized for this shortcoming in the Anse-Toussaint de France, humble bragging that his native tongue was the one he had practiced the least. He was patriotically convinced that the torch of humanist studies was being passed from Italy to France, a process called in Latin, the translatio studii, but he saw this as a phenomenon that should manifest itself in Latin letters, or when one really wanted to show off in Greek. Others saw things differently. They believed that French could equal and ultimately even supplant Latin as the language of literature, becoming, if you will, a lingua franca. A concern for the vernacular alongside classical language is clear in the work of Étienne Doulé. He wrote a guide to the Latin language in imitation of an introduction to Greek produced by Boudet, but Doulé also translated Cicero into French. To explain how he managed this sort of task so well, he put out a treatise called How to Translate Well from One Language to Another. Doulé's advice can be boiled down to five rules. Understand the content of the work you are translating. Learn perfectly the language it is written in. Do not translate word for word, but render the meaning of whole phrases and sentences. Avoid neologisms and archaisms, and produce a text of your own that is pleasant to read in terms of rhythm and sound. Which as someone who has to do a lot of translating between English and German, I find, ser über zuigend. Doulé was furthermore involved in printing editions of French texts, including the writings of Rabelais and the Geneva Bible. More generally, printed books were tracking the arrival of humanism in France and its increasing tendency to span the divide between Latin and the vernacular. Printing got a late start in France due to a combination of factors. The availability of printed books coming from Germany, as well as minor problems like the Hundred Years War and regular outbreaks of plague. Once they got going, the two main centers were of course Paris, where a press was set up at the Sorbonne, and Lyon, a city that was an important intellectual crossroads because of its proximity to Italy. Aptly enough, the first effort of the Sorbonne press was a guide to writing letters. It doesn't get much more humanist than that. Under Guillaume Fiché, this press went on to publish classical Latin texts in history and philosophy, as well as works by more recent authors like Lorenzo Valle. By the turn of the 16th century, printed texts would include humanist grammars and even medieval works. And, as of 1476, books were being printed in French, not only Latin. Which brings us back to Joachim de Bellay and his defense of writing in the vernacular. De Bellay was a member of a group of poets we call the Pléade, named for the constellation of stars, which in English is called Pleiades. And rightfully so, as they played a starring role in the history of French literature and its use of ancient philosophy. In general, the poetry of the Pléade is studded with classical allusions, which are often unidentified so that the reader can have the satisfaction of spotting them. The poems of Pierre Ronsard were so rich in these allusions that other French humanists, including the aforementioned Marc-Antoine Moray, took the trouble to write commentaries identifying all the sources. The verses of the Pléade might be in French, but they were testaments to the enduring value of ancient Greek and Latin literature. So why write in French at all, instead of Latin? De Bellay's defense shows how a committed classicist would answer that question. It begins by arguing that languages are all of equal merit, their diversity caused by the local needs and desires of different peoples. De Bellay is aware that the ancients were deeply chauvinist about their own languages, as when the Greeks called all non-Greek speakers barbarians, which evokes the nonsensical-sounding words of these other peoples. De Bellay quotes the ancient Scythian philosopher Anacharsis, retorting, The Scythians were barbarians among the Athenians, but so were the Athenians among the Scythians. De Bellay's relativistic or egalitarian attitude toward languages is tempered by his admission that French is only just starting to develop as a language. It will reach perfection only when its users carefully imitate classical models, just as Romans like Cicero imitated the Greeks. The largest part of artfulness, says de Bellay, is encompassed in imitation. We should not fear that philosophical ideas can be phrased only in Greek or Latin, because any idea can be put forward in any language. De Bellay uses a political metaphor to express his own idea. If the philosophies sown by Aristotle and Plato in the fertile Attic field were transplanted in our French Plain, they would not be casting it among brambles and thorns where it would prove sterae, but it would be making it near rather than distant, and instead of a foreigner, a citizen of our own republic. Ultimately, de Bellay looks forward to a time when it will no longer be necessary to spend so much time mastering classical languages, and speculates that this arduous task has held back the scholars of his own day, which is why France has boasted no Plato's and Aristotle's. For the future, one should be able to speak of all things throughout the world in every language. For now though, imitation is more than the sincerest form of flattery, it is flat out necessary for anyone who wants to write finely in the vernacular. De Bellay had the chance to go straight to the source of eloquence when in 1553 he went to the papal court in Rome, as secretary to his relative, the cardinal, Jean de Bellay. His disappointment with what he found there was recorded in his poems, collected in his Regrets and his Antiquities of Rome. Having left his homeland, hoping to learn mathematics, philosophy, law, and theology, he came back with herring rather than gold. Rome had been reduced to a shadow of its former glories as all things in this world decay over time. So it is now up to poets like de Bellay himself to restore the soul of Rome by recalling its ancient past. His conclusion that Rome is no longer Rome is one that de Bellay reached in part because his expectations were so high. For him, Rome was not just a city or even an empire, but a universal power that united all the people of the earth in a single cosmopolis. The plan of Rome, he says, is the map of the world. It would be unrealistic to expect any Renaissance nation to assume that mantle. As a modern study of de Bellay's Antiquities of Rome puts it, there is no need to fight over the fallen crown of Rome for it belongs both to everyone and to no one. With this, de Bellay distanced himself from the widespread conception of a translatio imperii, or handing over of empire, the political analogue to the cultural idea of a translatio studii. Here at the height of the French Renaissance, de Bellay was skeptical about the idea that the glories of ancient Rome could truly be reborn, though the odd poet might manage to write something that could measure up to the ancient standards. Bellay's colleague in the playa, Pierre Ronsard, was the leading candidate to manage that feat. At first glance, his poems are apt to remind us of medieval courtly love literature, full of agonized longing for an unattainable beloved. But at second glance, they show that Ronsard was carrying out de Bellay's advice to base his verses on the classics. Especially relevant for us are his extensive borrowings from Plato and the Platonic tradition. Sometimes these remain superficial, if charming, as when he asks Plato, If, as you say, there is no void within the cosmos, where will all my tears flow as I lament my grief at lost love? But at a deeper level, his very understanding of love recalls the Platonist ideas of Marsilio Ficino and other figures of the Italian Renaissance. Like Ficino, Ronsard refers to Plato's symposium for a contrast between a lower, bodily love and a higher, spiritual one, and opposes the lower kind of love to these sober dictates of rationality. And like Leoni Hebrea, Ronsard sets up a kind of dialogue between a male lover and a female beloved. In this case, the love object, Elan, tries to persuade Ronsard the lover to abandon erotic lust for the sake of pure love. Ronsard and other poets of the playa use another idea from the symposium, when they describe pairs of lovers as halves of an original whole, divided apart by the gods, and now longing for literal reunion. At a more cosmic level, Ronsard draws on Plato's Timaeus, as he conceives of love as a power that moves the heavens and governs the whole universe. Ronsard was not alone in his enthusiasm for the Platonic dialogues. Duvalet, for example, works into his poetry the idea that the soul should return to its home on feathered wings, a clear allusion to Plato's Phaedrus. And in both Duvalet and Ronsard, we find fairly frequent evocations of the form of beauty from the symposium, sometimes in a rather un-Platonic fashion, as when Duvalet says that beauty itself is outdone by the physical beauty of his beloved. Ronsard goes even further, imagining that heaven quite literally broke the mold of beauty when it made his beloved Elan, and will have to look to her as a model for recreating it. These passages may seem more playful than truly philosophical, but Ronsard also did write a Hymn to Philosophy, which shows how a 16th century French poet could pay due tribute to our favorite discipline. Among those of noble heart, it takes first prize above every art. As first of the sciences, it's only right that it should give all others its light. In the poetry of the Pleiade, women are mostly cast in the familiar and reductive role of beautiful love object, but that was not their only contribution to the story of French humanism. Alongside Francis I, another royal personage helped to form the reception of Plato in the 16th century. By virtue of her patronage and the works she herself wrote, she richly merited the praise she received from Duvalet, who wrote to her, Your eye, sole beacon of our age, will guide my ship, however perilous the tide or dark the storm, and lead it home once more. Not until the days of Freddie Mercury would a queen inspire such rhapsody. Having discussed a crazy little thing called love in the works of the Pleiade, next time we will rock you with an episode on Marguerite de Navarre, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. I don't know about you, but when I was eleven years old, I spent very little time translating spiritual poetry from French. This is just one of several respects in which I differ from Queen Elizabeth I. At that tender age in 1544, she produced an English version of a work called Mirror of the Sinful Soul. It was written by another queen, namely Marguerite of Navarre, also known as Marguerite d'Angoulin. In fact, Marguerite was almost an English queen like Elizabeth. When she was young, it was proposed that she be matched with the much older Henry VII. She angrily declared, in her first recorded words, I will marry a man who was young, rich, and noble without having to cross the Channel. Happily, from her point of view, the idea was indeed dropped, and she spent her life in France and Navarre, which is in what we now think of as northern Spain. The King of Navarre, Henri de Aldrei, was her second husband. She didn't have to cross the Channel to marry him, but as her youthful protest suggests, she didn't mind crossing people. Her relationship with her brother, the quintessential French Renaissance King Francis I, was mostly one of cordial alliance, yet she was willing to stand up even against him in the cause of church reform, which made some other people cross too, notably the schoolmen of the University of Paris. Indeed, Marguerite was at the center of the two great developments that marked France in the first half of the 16th century, humanism and reform. Like King Francis, she offered patronage to a range of poets and other humanists. Particularly noteworthy for us was her project of getting scholars to translate Plato's dialogues into French, along with the commentaries of Marsilio Ficino. This undertaking may remind us of the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene and her circle of commentators on Aristotle back in the 12th century. It involved such men as the poet Antoine Herouet, whose works The Androgyne and The Perfect Friend exemplify the use of Platonic themes in French literature of the time, especially themes drawn from Plato's erotic dialogues, like The Symposium and Phaedrus. As we'll be seeing, this was a feature of Marguerite's own writings too. Other humanist poets who enjoyed her favor were Joachim Doubelais and Pierre Ronsard, who I talked about last time. Both of them wrote poems in her honor. You might recall that at the end of the last episode, I quoted from Doubelais's lyrics in her praise. As for Christian reform, this was at least as strong a part of Marguerite's agenda. From early on, she campaigned to improve religious houses and supported and corresponded with such figures as John Calvin. She also appreciated the work of Jacques Lefebvre d'Etople, who controversially translated the Bible into the French vernacular. At first, Marguerite had the backing of Francis in supporting the cause of reform, though it should be stressed that for them, this meant reform within the Catholic Church, along the lines endorsed by Erasmus. This is exemplified by the case of Louis du Bercan, who translated Erasmus into French and wrote A Defense of Luther. Encouraged by Marguerite, Francis protected him when he was charged with heresy, though in the end without success. Du Bercan was put to death in 1529 by a decision of the Paris parlement. Then in 1533, the year of Elizabeth I's birth, as it happens, Marguerite invited the reformist rector of the Sorbonne to deliver an important sermon. When his evangelical ideas caused outrage, he fled Paris along with Calvin, a key moment in the latter's career. One year later, in 1534, came another key moment, for French religious life in general and the life of Marguerite in particular, the notorious Affair of the Placards. Evangelical agitators put up posters around Paris, attacking the Church and the Sacrament of the Mass, along the lines of the teaching of Zwingli. This must have horrified Marguerite, as she was devoutly committed to the Mass, but it did not change her stance towards reform in general. By contrast, it was the straw that broke the back of Francis's sympathy. He increasingly became willing to persecute, and even execute, evangelists. Now Marguerite's continued lobbying caused friction with the King, as did the suspicion that she put the interests of her adopted kingdom, Navarre, above that of the French Crown. It's probably no coincidence that she waited until just after Francis's death to publish a collection of her works, since they included works of daring theological content like Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Though it appealed to her fellow queen, Elizabeth, the theologians of Paris did not care for it. They briefly had the Mirror placed on a list of prescribed books before royal pressure got this overturned. Another poem of Marguerite's, The Fable of False Pride, illustrates the way that she slipped reformist philosophical and theological ideas into her literary productions. It also illustrates the classicizing humanist world of ideas in which she moved. The Fable is superficially pagan in content, a retelling of an ancient myth about the goddess Diana. Her virgin handmaidens are sexually assaulted by a gang of satyrs, and she turns the women into willow trees to save them. And by the way, a word of warning, sexual violence is a common theme in Marguerite, and it's going to come up again later in the episode. Some of the Christian ideas tattely woven into the fabric of the narrative are innocuous enough, for instance that the maidens' souls will remain immortal even if their bodies have now been transformed. But there is a distinctly evangelical flavor to the treatment of Diana herself. Speaking of the virgins, she is made to say, Those souls are not just immortal, but united eternally to Diana through grace. Now, you might argue that one did not have to be a Protestant sympathizer to thematize grace in this way. What distinguished the reformers was stress on faith in grace as opposed to good works. And for that, we may turn to another narrative poem by Marguerite, the Comédie des mons demansons, a late work written in 1548, one year before her death. This work is in the form of a dialogue, or perhaps better, play. We know that some of Marguerite's comedies were actually performed by the royal entourage by her aristocratic friends. In this one, three characters dominate the drama, a hedonistic, worldly woman, an ascetic spiritual woman, and a wise woman who shows them the errors and limitations of their perspectives. Moral chastisement is unsurprisingly meted out to the worldly woman, and on Platonist grounds, she can only think of the interest and pleasure of her body, yet the body is merely a mask for the true self, which is the soul. Then the spiritual woman is blamed for the opposite mistake of thinking she can win salvation by mortifying the body. No, says the wise woman to her, you will destroy your body before your soul is taught virtue, and it is against God's will to abuse the body. She advises, Do not hope to gain anything by bathing your body in blood or by roasting it over a fire. For if your heart is not joyous, charitable, and loving, then you can do nothing but lie to God. If your heart is not clean of pride and is blemished with it, I say that your work is worth little. This might very easily remind us of Erasmus with his emphasis on internal spirituality, or even Luther with his impatience for Christians who suppose they could persuade God to save them by good works, including a life of abstemious, ostentatious piety. Alternatively, if you have a really good memory, you might be reminded of another author, one also named Marguerite, namely Marguerite Poirette, whom we covered back in episode 267. She was also stern in her criticisms of asceticism, which she equated with worldly virtue. Because of such daring proposals that the pure religious soul can leave virtue behind, she was burned at the stake in 1310. The Parisian authorities really had it in for people named Marguerite. I wouldn't be surprised if the cafeteria at the Sorbonne to this day refuses to serve pizza margarita. Poirette's execution was brought on by her refusal to disown her book, Mirror of the Sinful Soul, and I cannot help wondering whether the similarity of that title and Marguerite of Navarre's Mirror of the Sinful Soul is more than a coincidence, as the earlier mirror would have been known at this time. In fact, Marguerite refers to an unnamed female author as an inspiration in another work, called The Prisons, and it has been suggested that she may have had Poirette in mind. If so, maybe Marguerite was also thinking of her when she came to write the last section of her Comédie des mons de maison. Here a fourth character comes along, a simple shepherdess who flummoxes even the wise woman by saying, I know nothing outside of love, I don't need any other knowledge. This brings us to another theme of Marguerite's writing, an intense and often eroticized longing for God which is reminiscent of Poirette and other female medieval mystics. It's an idea she explored in her extensive correspondence with the Bishop of Mont Guillaume Brissonné, who was also a colleague of the aforementioned Lefebvre des Taples. We have 123 surviving letters between Marguerite and the bishop, which forms only a part of her voluminous body of epistolary exchanges. Brissonné shared and probably encouraged both Marguerite's reformist tendencies and her interest in Platonism. More important still was his commitment to a spiritualist, even mystical approach to religion. We find this frequently in Marguerite too, not least in a text I just mentioned, The Prisons. It's main character, called simply The Lover, suffers from the same failing mentioned in the title of The Fable of False Pride. Pride, here translates coup d'etre, a kind of self-deception that separates the soul from God. To escape pridefulness, The Lover must free himself first from worldly love of his mistress, then from worldly ambition, and finally from all forms of worldly knowledge. He achieves this through asceticism and prayer, but as in the Comédie, this approach is shown to be limited. The more sin resembles virtue and is clothed like it, the more dangerous are its lies. Like Poet, The Lover finds peace only through mystical union with God and annihilation of the self. Marguerite takes up these same motifs in that poem that attracted the attention of Elizabeth, and may be her most obviously philosophical poem, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. As the title leads us to expect, the speaker of the poem begins by lamenting her sinfulness, which makes her, a slave to evil, pain, suffering and distress, a brief existence, an uncertain end. Self-abnegation here comes not in the form of ascetic discipline, but as a realization that due to sin, she is nothing at all, or even less than nothing. This fits with the typically Platonist idea that evil is just the absence of being or absence of goodness, which also appears in the Fable of False Pride. It's a very traditional notion, one that goes all the way back to late antiquity. But we might see here a distinctively 16th century spin on it, insofar as Marguerite dwells so much on the soul's sinfulness, rather than on the ontological disappearance of the inferior, finite soul in God's superior, infinite reality, which is more what we find in Poret. Similarly, Marguerite innovates by playing variations on the old theme of the soul and God as lovers. Medieval mystics had repurposed the emotional rhetoric of courtly love poetry to evoke the longing of the soul for God. Marguerite does that too, but expands the range of interpersonal relationships exploited in the metaphor. Her soul is God's wife, but also his sister, his daughter, and paradoxically also his mother. In love, she writes, I can boldly call you son, father, spouse, and brother, father, brother, son, and husband. Perhaps reflecting on her own experiences of frustrated attempts at motherhood—she experienced miscarriages and false pregnancies before finally having children—Marguerite describes sin as a lifeless child, and her bond with God as the truly fruitful union. In a final twist on these metaphors, Marguerite compares herself in the mirror to a faithless wife. Whereas you are more likely to turn the skies upside down than to find a husband who will forgive an adulterous woman, God is willing to forgive the sinful soul. In these lines, Marguerite is recognizably the same author who produced a vastly longer and, at first glance, very different book, The Heptameron. The title refers to the set in days over which the action of the work unfolds. A group of aristocrats, evenly divided between men and women, are staying at an abbey and agree to pass the time by telling a series of stories for mutual edification and enjoyment. The often naughty tone of the work is captured in the prologue, when one of the men says he can think of something else he'd rather be doing, only to be told by the central female character Paul L'Amante. Let's leave aside pastimes that require only two participants. The name of this character suggests that she is a spokeswoman for Marguerite, because Marguerite means pearl and peulement means loving pearl. Of course, there's also a political pun. Perhaps it's a dig at the anti-reformist Parisian parlement. She used the same pun, by the way, for the title of her collected works, Marguerite des les Marguerite des Princesses, meaning Pearls from the Pearl of Princesses. The Heptameron is highly entertaining, and not infrequently bawdy and even dirty. Literally, one of the stories involves an unfortunate encounter with a latrine. It can be hard to believe that it was produced by the same woman who wrote the works of pious spirituality we've discussed so far. The most obvious point of continuity is the use of tropes from courtly love literature. In the Heptameron, heroic characters are typically those who remain devoted in the face of long separation from their love objects, or who are able to endure chastely in the face of temptation or threat. Threat is in fact all too frequent, as story after story depict rapes and attempted rapes. Sometimes this is played for laughs, as when a clever woman escapes two rapist Franciscan monks by abandoning them on an island. At other times, the stories convey dismay and indignation, understandably so when you learn that at least one of the tales, the fourth one, probably fictionalizes an assault endured by Marguerite herself when she was in her twenties. The heroine of this tale manages to fend off her attacker, but is then advised not to tell anyone else about it, since no one will believe she was an innocent victim. Though this passage remains depressingly relevant today, the Heptameron is often a backwards looking text. In the prologue, Marguerite has one of her characters refer to Boccaccio's Decameron, which is clearly her primary model. The ninth story alludes to the Romance of the Rose and its allegorization of seduction, or rape, as the violent storming of a fortress. The male narrators in Heptameron are constantly lamenting the suffering inflicted upon men who are refused sexual favors. One of them sounds like some loser on the internet when he says that women are only put on Earth for the benefit of men, so in demanding sex they are only taking what is theirs by right. Loftier talk of virtue and honor is also cynically admitted to be just a more subtle form of seduction. This leaves the women to speak up for a genuinely pure love that is exalted over the pleasures of the flesh. It's especially Paul Emond who voices such ideals, to the point that she sounds like she's been making a careful study of Plato and Ficino. She describes how the soul graduates from unsatisfying physical beauty to the richer rewards of spiritual and divine beauty. This is a clear allusion to the climactic speech of Plato's Symposium, which by the way is also delivered by a woman character, Diotima. The contrast between the men and women in the Heptameron is of course no accident. The whole book has been taken as a contribution to the long-running Carelles de Fane, or debate about the worth and virtue of women. Not long ago we saw how Cornelius Agrippa wrote on this topic, and before that we saw how it was an abiding concern of Italian humanists. The same was true in France, where for instance, Symphoréon Champier contributed to the genre with his Ship of Virtuous Women. We'll return to him later in the context of talking about medicine in Renaissance France. Marguerite puts this dispute front and center of the Heptameron. The very first story is told by a man and depicts a vicious woman, and it is immediately rebutted with a tale narrated by a female character about virtuous resistance to male advances. This is coupled with the observation that the misdeeds of a single woman should in any case not be taken to undermine the honor of all women, as had been argued more than a century earlier in France by Christine de Pizan. That might seem beside the point, since the deeds and misdeeds of fictional characters should have little if any bearing on our assessment of actual women, but it is stressed at the outset of the work that these are stories based on true events, albeit with invented names. Sometimes the narrators even allude to the Queen of Navarre, explaining how Marguerite came to hear the story, and as just mentioned she may have drawn on her own experience of sexual assault for one or more of the tales. Unlike Christine de Pizan, Marguerite does not have a widespread reputation as a proto-feminist icon, but she should. The Heptameron is a playful and ironic dialogue, not a polemic, like some Defenses of Women written in this period, yet it is all the more effective that the misogynist characters are allowed to damn themselves from their own mouths. In addition, too, Marguerite's attitude towards herself as a female author is highly self-conscious. Pre-modern female authors often indulge in self-deprecation. Even the forthrightly defiant Christine de Pizan had done so. Marguerite is no different, describing her writings as mere women's work, and so on. But this was usually a strategy used by women to disarm their readership before then claiming to have a profoundly valuable message. A few lines of poetry from the preface of Marguerite's collected writings is a perfect example. Excuse the rhythm and style, seeing that it is the work of a woman who has neither learning nor knowledge, but only the desire to show to all the power that is the gift of God the Creator when He wants to absolve a heart. As a woman, Marguerite could not attend the universities, or fight in wars, or engage straightforwardly in politics, even if she was unusually active in that sphere, as when she negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor for the release of her brother Francis after he was captured in battle. But she could write, and write about the most important topics of all, like God and salvation. She was encouraged to do just that by another woman, one who already featured in episode 385, Marie d'Antierre. I mentioned then in passing that she corresponded with Marguerite. In one letter, d'Antierre argued forcefully that Marguerite should use her position and talent to write about theology, even if this was not expected for those of their gender. If God has given graces to some good women, should they, for the sake of the defamers of the truth, refrain from writing down, speaking, or declaring it to each other? It was a challenge Marguerite was willing to take up, even if she did so rather indirectly, in the form of spiritual poetry and in the heptameron. At least this is how some have read the work. It may be a collection of sex comedies and romantic tragedies, but it is also yet another chance for her to present her distinctive ideas about Christian religion. Already Montaigne, just a few decades after her death, was complaining about the mixed nature of the resulting work, which in his view just goes to show that women should not attempt to address such matters. But Marguerite had good reason for doing so, beyond the encouragement offered by Marie d'Antierre. She may have been provoked by John Calvin's attack on the sort of intensely spiritual Christianity she favored. He took aim at a group he called the Spiritual Libertines, whom he saw as being protected by the French court. These Libertines, he said, took the view that there is no such thing as sin, because God infuses all creation with his being. Calvin accused them of thinking as follows. Does an assassin murder an upright citizen? He has carried out, they say, God's plan. Has someone stolen or committed adultery? Because he has done what was foreseen and ordained by the Lord, he is the minister of God's providence. The leading Reformers were never shy about polemic, and as we've seen before, they got especially bent out of shape when confronted with what might seem to be the logical conclusions of their own teachings. For Luther, this was the anti-authoritarianism of the Peasants' Revolt. For Calvin, it was the Libertines' plausible inference that if God predestines everything, as Calvin himself taught, then among the things he wills are wicked actions. We know from letters sent by Calvin to Marguerite that he feared she would take offense at his diatribe. Her response seems to have come only in an indirect form. She would write works that defended the Spiritual Libertines by emphasizing the spiritual part. The narrators of the Heptameron, for all their eroticized banter, are also a group of pious contemplatives. They find sustenance in daily readings of scripture, and are more devoted to God than their hosts, Franciscan friars who do things like skipping prayers so they can eavesdrop on the storytelling. Marguerite no doubt anticipated that her readers would also hang on every word, hoping for salacious details, but she hoped that along the way they would absorb the Platonic teaching that true love, true eros, is pursued through the soul and not the body. So it's apt that when Marguerite died, the poet Charles de Saint-Martes wrote an encomium for her full of classical allusions which poses the question, if Plato were alive today, what do we think he would say of Marguerite? I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm pretty sure that if Marguerite were alive today, she'd tell you not to miss the next episode, because we'll be looking at a man who also contributed to the debate over women, also saw his works, placed on a list of prescribed books in Paris, also attracted concerned criticism from Calvin, and, like Marguerite, didn't mind a bit of lewd humor. Or, to be honest, a lot of lewd humor. So you can call the pause between this episode and the next one the interlude until I cover Francois Rablé here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. I may have mentioned at some point that I am an admirer of the silent films of Buster Keaton. One reason they are so entertaining is Keaton's famous stone face demeanor, which he learned as a child on the vaudeville stage in a time when people would pay good money to laugh at Keaton's father, apparently beating him in public. Buster learned that the laughs would be louder if he simply didn't react, maintaining a sober facial expression rather than crying and howling. As the saying goes, treat light things seriously and serious things lightly. In 16th century France, the greatest exponent of this technique was François Vabler, author of a tale spread over four parts, plus a probably mostly inauthentic fifth additional part, following the adventures of two giants named Pantagol and Gargantua. Vabler is himself a giant of literature in the French language, who has been called the most difficult classical author of world religion by one of his most famous 20th century interpreters, the Russian scholar Mikhail Bartin. The difficulties are many. Vabler used stunningly varied and creative language, with different registers of speech, slang and technical vocabulary, made-up words and puns that presuppose a readership as a home in both Latin and the French vernacular of the time. When the third major character, Panourege, makes his appearance, he introduces himself in a whole series of languages, or rather, parodic versions of languages, including Greek and English, before revealing that he's actually a native French speaker. The books are also full of pointed topical references and jokes about contemporary events, which will pass you by if you don't follow along using a learned commentary. Vabler's sense of humor also presents some obstacles to the modern reader. We can appreciate the irony of treating war and tyranny as a joke, or staging an apparently serious disquisition about the best way to wipe one's bottom, but it might not actually make us laugh. Speaking of which, there's also the regular, extensive, extravagant vulgarity. Vabler is rarely outright obscene, since he usually speaks about such matters as sex and excretion using metaphors. Codpiece, for instance, is one of his favorite words. The prologue to Pantagruel even advertises another supposed work of his called On the Dignity of Codpieces. But his vivid imagery leaves mercilessly little to the imagination, whether he is proposing the idea of building a fortress out of women's genitals because they are a challenge to conquer and can be had so cheaply, or describing the flood that ensued when the giant gargantua relieved himself in Paris. This is how the city got its name, because he decided to inundate the population with urine just for a laugh, par-ri. Another major preoccupation of Vabler is drinking and drunkenness. Pantagruel's name means always thirsty, and gargantua's first words directly after being born are to call for drink. It is this aspect of the work that Bachten especially had in mind when he described it as difficult. He saw the books as the late flowering of a tradition that has been lost in modern times, a style of folk humor epitomized by the reversals and rule-breaking observed during the time of Carnival. In this spirit, Rablait takes license to laugh at everything and everyone. He plunges his reader into an unapologetically material world where basic bodily functions are exaggerated so as to become grotesque while remaining grounded in recognizable physical reality. As Bachten put it, medieval laughter found its highest expression in Rablait's novel. It became the form of a new free and critical historical consciousness. Even in Rablait's own day, high literature was already departing from such squalid matters, as we can see from the high-minded poetry of his contemporaries in the playette. Yet those poets were still able to appreciate comedy of this sort and even indulge in it themselves. Kwanzal wrote humorous verses as an epitaph for Rablait, which described him spending every day drunk contented like a frog in mud. After death, wine grows from his buried corpse. A bit later, Montaigne classed the books of Rablait as simply amusing. This was not necessarily a criticism, since it was this kind of book Montaigne admitted to liking best. But it was still an underestimation of Rablait, a failure to heed the warning laid down in the prologue of Pantagoule. Alluding to a passage in Plato's Symposium in which Alcibiades speaks of the philosophical riches hidden within Socrates, Rablait tells us to uncover the deeper meaning of the outrageous material that is to follow, like someone breaking a bone to suck out the marrow. That reference to Plato might make you wonder, wait, is this Rablait yet another French humanist obsessed with ancient sources, dismissive of the scholastics, and proud of his attainments in Latin and Greek scholarship? In a word, we. His tale is packed with allusions to Plato and Neoplatonists, like Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, peripatetics like Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, and even thinkers of the Islamic world, like Avicenna. Many of these allusions are invented jokes. Alexander is cited on the pivotal question of why lions are afraid of roosters. But Rablait does genuinely draw on philosophical and scientific literature, in the latter department showing particular expertise in medicine is when he provides exaggeratedly exact descriptions of horrific battle wounds such as only an anatomist could do. In fact, Rablait was renowned for his expertise in the field of medicine. He studied this subject at Montpellier and was a doctor at the public hospital in Lyon. He then became physician to Jean Dubélé, bishop of Paris, and then his brother, Guillaume. In Guillaume's entourage, Rablait traveled to Italy before coming into the service of a final patron, the Cardinal de Chastillon. Étienne Dolais refers to Rablait giving learned commentary on an anatomical dissection, though it is not clear whether he himself was wielding the knife. Of course, in this period, there was no tension between an interest in medicine and an interest in classical texts. To the contrary, mastery of this discipline presupposed familiarity with authors of antiquity like Galen and Hippocrates. We have copies of their works that were annotated by Rablait personally, and the same goes for books by Plato and Plutarch. Perhaps nothing epitomizes his humanist credentials so well as a copy of Plato's dialogues in Greek on which he wrote, This belongs to Franciscus Rablait, the excellent doctor, and his Christian friends. Speaking of his friends, he dedicated the third book of his novel to Marit de Nérar, and corresponded in Latin with other humanists like Erasmus and Boudet. To Boudet, he expresses the paradigmatic Renaissance conviction that All humanity, or nearly all, is regaining its ancient splendor. The same idea appears in Gargantua, in a letter written from the title character to his son Pantagur. Gargantua deplores the medieval period, when all good literature was destroyed, hails new advances like the printing press, and celebrates the spread of facility in Greek and Latin, as well as Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Pantagur is encouraged to learn these languages and to imitate Plato when writing Greek and Cicero for Latin. Gargantua hopes that Pantagur will become a bottomless pit of knowledge. By contrast, Rablait would clearly like to consign some scholars of his time to a real bottomless pit. His books feature parodies of the Scholastics, like a Parisian scholar who speaks in typically Rabelasian gibberish. In the 17th-century English translation by Thomas Urquhart, often praised for capturing the feel of the French original, this passage reads in part, I demigrate into one of these so well minsters, and there, Irritating myself with fair lustral water, I mumble off little parcels of some misic parkation of our sacrificules, and submurmurating my horary prequels, I elevate and absterge my anime from its nocturnal inclinations. Scholasticism is also sent up by using its technical language in inappropriate contexts, as when the urge to get drunk is explained on the grounds that privatio praesoponit habitum, with the added comment, I am learned, you see. There are also mock scholastic accounts of vulgar phenomenon, like the marvelously fresh and cool nature of women s thighs. A kind of elaborate disputed question on whether it is wise to marry dominates the third book we ll come back to that later. Most entertaining may be the list of fictional books found in the Library of Saint Victor, which goes on for pages and includes such entries as On Bacon and Peas with Commentary, and Apology Against Those Who Alleged that the Pope s Mule Eats Only at Set Times. Pontegrul himself is trained as a scholastic philosopher, and decides to post publicly a list of no fewer than 9,764 propositions for debate. It s an obvious parody of Pico della Mirandola, who in real life proposed to defend a list of 900 theses, which in all honesty is only slightly less ridiculous. Scholastic lawyers likewise come in for rough treatment. In the same chapter as the jive at Pico, we find the complaint that the university jurists are ignorant of classical languages, have studied less philosophy than a mule, and know less about history than a toad has feathers. It's hardly surprising that the theologians of Paris at the Sorbonne put Rablé on their list of dangerous books in 1542-1553. What may be more surprising is that works like these should have come from a man of the church. He was at first a Franciscan fire, then a Benedictine monk. to square with the traditional picture of his writing as irreverent or even atheistic. Fortunately that interpretation was refuted by Lucien Fafre, who in 1942 made a persuasive case that religion was, for Rablé, one of those serious matters that he chose to treat lightly. His books consistently adopt reformist positions, whether by attacking the laziness of monks, recommending private study of the Bible in the original, or warning that human desire leads inevitably to sin, if not guided by grace. On this point, Fafre makes much of a passage where Rablé seems to follow the Lutheran teaching on good works. Help yourself, and God will break your neck. A famous passage in Praintegoule can be read as combining Rablé's humanist and reformist tendencies. It is a description of an abbey called D'elain, and is notable for not being particularly amusing. If read straight and not as parody, it sets out the author's ideas for a utopian community. Utopia was an abiding interest of Rablé, who elsewhere in the books refers to an island called Medamoti, this means nowhere in Greek, recalling the etymology of utopia, and of course reminding the well-informed reader of Thomas More's work of that name. The inscription on the gate of this abbey welcomes those who reflect upon scripture while banning corrupt lawyers, clerks, scribes, as well as the greedy, diseased, and vicious. The inhabitants of the abbey are noble folk of both sexes, who take vows of chastity and poverty yet adopt as their motto, do as you will. By itself, that injunction could suggest moral laxity or even relativism. In context, though, it is a deeply Christian idea, which recalls a famous sentence of Augustine, love and do what you will. What Rablé means is that once we have accepted God's guidance and pledged ourselves to love him and our fellow humans, whatever we do will inevitably be good. This explains why the residents of Thelem, which by the way means will in Greek, in doing whatever they want, all wind up behaving in exactly the same way. Thus far then we've learned that Rablé, despite his distinctive and often scandalous style as a writer, was very much a man of his time. The intellectual currents of humanism and reform run below the chaotic surface of his tales. But did he contribute anything more distinctive that would interest the historian of philosophy as opposed to the literary historian? For a start, we shouldn't be hasty in letting the literature people claim Rablé's language for their own. Even if you can't read him in the original, you can see that he's doing some philosophically very interesting things with French. His wordplay, his lists, his habit of piling up dozens of synonyms in what has been called his penchant for gibberish, all draw our attention to the artificiality of words and the relationships between words, within one language and across languages. Even the author's name is a matter of linguistic trickery. The books were published under the pen name Alco Früblas Nacier, an anagram of François Rablé. From its title page onward, the work demonstrates that language is a creation of humankind, one subject to our whims and our manipulations. As if in confirmation of this, at one point Rablé has Pantagruel explicitly assert a conventionalist theory of language, that is, has him argue that spoken sounds do not have their meanings in themselves, but through arbitrary fiat. This is proven by the fact that lip readers can understand language without even hearing the sounds. An evocative part of the fourth book imagines a place so cold that words freeze into jewel-like colored ice and then become audible when they thaw. To be honest, I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it is certainly cool, in every sense of the word. Maybe it is intended to point out the disparity between living, spoken language, and recorded language, which Früblé, living before phonographs and podcasts, would have meant the written word. If that's right, then he may be suggesting that writing is inert, in a sense not language at all, until it is used, as by being read aloud so that its meaning is understood. On the other hand, the first sounds to thaw are not words at all, merely noises, but that fits with the way Rablé more generally blurs the line between language and non-language by using nonsense and onomatopoeia. Two more philosophically rewarding passages are found in the third book. Early on in this installment, there is a pair of speeches given by Panourege and Pantagruel, first in favor of and then against the idea of being in debt. As we know, there was a fine tradition of writing in comia for things that are commonly despised, hence that joke about writing in praise of the codpiece. Erasmus' praise of folly would be the most famous humanist example, though a closer comparison to this section in Rablé would be Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue about avarice, which I covered back in episode 354. As with Poggio's rhetorical setpiece in favor of greed, Panourege's defense of debt can be read as parodic, as sincere, or probably better, as both. The initial points made are simply jokes, and pretty good ones at that. Panourege says you should always be in debt to someone so that at least somebody is praying for you not to die. Furthermore, philosophers since antiquity have been wrong to say that nothing comes from nothing. From having nothing, I make creditors. But as his speech goes on, the notion of debt is broadened out to refer to all cases of exchange in the universe. Here it may be relevant that the French dét can mean both debts and necessities. Thus the elements are paying a debt when they transform into one another, and the heavens do the same by performing the motions that they owe. A lengthy part of the speech once again showcases Rablé's medical knowledge, as he describes the exchanges that happen within the human body. Thus typical Renaissance themes of balance and harmony, and the human body is a microcosm, a smaller version of that well-ordered universe, are creatively brought into dialogue with questions of economics. Intriguing though this is, most readers of the third book will come away from it remembering, above all, the central disputation about whether Panourege should get married. This was a standard topic for demonstrating rhetorical brilliance, and it's another echo of Erasmus, who wrote a treatise praising marriage. Remember that this is another theme relevant to the Reformation. Luther waged a battle against the Catholic valorization of chastity. Predictably, Rablé's approach to the topic is more satirical. His character Panourege is attracted by the thought that, if he takes a wife, he will be able to satisfy his sexual desires without sin, but he's beset by the fear that his wife will be unfaithful. He encounters a series of advisors, including a theologian, a lawyer, an occult scientist, and a doctor, who give him wildly varying advice about the only thing these speeches have in common is that they are all useless. Now, there are at least two ways to approach this part of the book, and, as usual with Rablé, they're probably both right. More obviously, he's contributing to the ongoing debate over the merits of women, the so-called caral de femme. Panourege's obsession with adulterous betrayal is fed by worries about the bad character of women, something emphasized by the medical advisor. This doctor says that given the weakness of the female sex, cuckoldry follows marriage like a shadow follows the body. He discourses on an idea found in Plato's Timaeus, that the womb is like an animal in its own right that can move around the female body, causing anatomical mayhem and erratic behavior. But of course, we should not necessarily take the most misogynist speakers as representing Rablé's own view. More likely, he is satirizing the whole debate and making fun of all sides—the women haters, mocked for their crass hostility and pseudoscience, even as the women lovers are accused of wanting an excuse to, well, love women. As one scholar has put it, he is much more an amused spectator than a partisan participant of the battle between the sexes. A second, less obvious approach to the debate about marriage would be to read it as an indirect reflection on another controversial topic, divine predestination. The idea would be that Panurge's fear of having an unfaithful wife stands in for the fear of damnation. While that may not apply to this whole part of the third book, it certainly seems to fit the discussion between Panurge and a theologian character called Hippodate. He offers the advice that if Panurge does marry, then his wife will cheat on him if God wills it, but if not, then not. Panurge objects to this scholastic appeal to conditional arguments. To be sure of his wife's faithfulness, he would have to attend God's privy council. Here then, Rabelais thematizes anxiety about the obscure workings of God's will—a serious matter indeed presented in the comic form of a man who is caught between lust and fear of betrayal. I mentioned in passing earlier that this part of Rabelais's four-part novel was dedicated to none other than Marguerite de Navarre. As far as I know, we have no evidence what she thought of it, but given that her heptameron likewise mixes the profane with the profound, I find it pretty easy to imagine her chuckling along while reading about the adventures of Panzecor and friends. Actually, these two authors have something else in common. They both include characters who are barely disguised versions of contemporaries. In Rabelais, one of the easiest to identify is the occult scientist Herr Tripper, who was obviously a stand-in for Agrippa von Netzesheim. A wicked king named Pirchol probably represents the emperor Charles V, and it's been at least speculated that the theologian Hippo the Thee is meant to be a leading intellectual of the day, Jacques Lefebvre de Taple. He was yet another of these humanists we keep meeting, but an unusual one in that he moved within the world of scholasticism, writing treatises and commentaries on various parts of Aristotelian philosophy. So we'll be meeting him soon as we turn our attention to the University of Paris and see what they were getting up to there apart from condemning books they didn't like. First though, you may have noticed that we're about to reach a significant milestone—episode 400 of this podcast series. That's 500 fewer than the number of propositions defended by Picot, and 9,364 fewer than the number defended by Pantagruel, but still worth celebrating. For which purpose, I'll be joined next time by three other philosophy podcasters to ask and answer such questions as whether it is wise to wed yourself to the project of producing a philosophy podcast. That's next time here on the 400th installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode is a special one to celebrate reaching 400 episodes. And if I may take the liberty of quoting one of my favorite television shows, Blackadder, I'm as excited as a terribly excited person who has a really good reason for being terribly excited because I have three other podcasters with me, three of my favorite podcasters whose shows I listen to. And these are all people who host their own philosophy podcasts. So I have Maisha Cherry of the Unmute podcast, Barry Lamb of HiFi Nation and Matt Teichman of Elucidations. So hi, everyone. Hello. Hello. Hi. It's great to have you here on the show. So I thought maybe we should start since we can't assume that everyone who's listening to this knows all your podcasts, although they certainly should. I thought we could start by having each of you just say something quickly about your show. So, Maisha, do you want to go first? Sure. So this podcast is a podcast where I talk to, I'm going to do my tagline here, diverse philosophers from the continental tradition, from the analytic tradition, black, white, transist, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, about social and political issues of our day. And so I try to kind of look at their work and see how we can talk about that in ways that is relevant to our social and political lives. Okay. Barry? I'm Barry Lamb, the producer and host of HiFi Nation. I'm also a professor at Vassar College. HiFi Nation, I would say it's a documentary type show. Our tagline is philosophy in story form. So every episode we have a story from science, the arts, law, history, maybe, and pair it with a piece of philosophy. It's produced in a documentary format, so it's soundtracked and it's a seasonal show. So there's about 10 episodes a year and there's been four seasons. There's about 40 episodes. Okay, Matt? Hi, I'm Matt Teichman and I host the elucidations podcast along with my many and sundry undergraduate interns. And it's a long form interview podcast about philosophy. One of the driving goals behind it, I think has always been to try to represent philosophy in its full breadth. So to try to really get out there, how many different topics can all fall under the kind of umbrella heading of philosophy, really give people a sense of how it draws so many different areas of inquiry together. And you can listen to it wherever you find podcasts and also the websites at elucidations.now.sh. Okay, great. Something I often tell people about my podcast is that it was inspired not by a philosophy podcast, but by a history podcast, namely the history of Rome by Mike Duncan. And I think that's probably true for a lot of podcasters that the reason that they got into it was because they were listening to podcasts, maybe on a similar topic or a different one. And they thought, I really liked that. I'm going to do something like that, but from my topic. So one thing I wanted to ask all three of you is what kind of inspirations you drew on. And maybe I'll start with Barry here, because I think maybe it's in a way the most obvious, like you already said that it's a documentary form podcast, so you must be thinking of other models there. Yeah, absolutely. So This American Lives, your radio labs, your invisibilias, the tradition that came out of public radio in the United States, and to some extent, BBC, the idea of having a stylized news or where news isn't necessarily just news of the day, but ordinary people's lives or off the beaten path stories about weird things that happen. The goal of storytelling in that form is to have what we call in that industry, driveway moments, right? When you're driving home and you stop the car, but you can't get out because you want to finish this little section of the radio piece. That's the inspiration for my show to make a version of that for philosophy, right? Philosophy that has driveway moments. Yeah, I was saying before we started the recording that when I'm describing your podcast to people, I always say that you should imagine this American life, but it's about philosophy. And I think that actually captures what you do pretty well. Right. Thank you. Maisha, do you want to tell us something about what inspirations you drew on when you were sort of coming up with the idea for the Unmute podcast? Sure. It was definitely talk radio and just radio in general. In college, I was host of a talk radio program and there's something about that two-way talk that I always appreciated. And so when I was thinking about a podcast, I wanted it to seem as if someone just turned on the radio and this is what they are encountering. So it was very much influenced by public radio, more specifically talk radio, more specifically two-way talk radio. So the interviews, although it's not a call-in show, it is the interview style, which is kind of a template or copying from the template of that two-way talk format. That was the inspiration. And that actually even comes down to the level of like the music that you have in there. Yeah. Yeah. So the way in which the music, yes. And kind of the breaks in between, et cetera, et cetera, is something that I did when I was in college. And yeah, I wanted to have people to kind of have a similar kind of experience. Actually is that why you wondered that listening to your podcast, where there's this moment sometimes like in the middle of the conversation where these voices come in and sing and then it comes back to it. And presumably it's not because you took a break and went off to have coffee, right? I mean, it's actually- Yeah, it's more of a mental break. So usually commercial breaks kind of fill in that time. I wanted that just to be a time for us to mentally kind of reset in a way. So the breaks are strategic in that regard. But if you were listening to the actual radio, it would be a radio break, right? We would go to a radio sponsor, for example. But I rather use that as a way for just the mind to break into a different kind of conversation. But those breaks, the intro, all of that is definitely inspired by radio. Yeah. I definitely picked up on that listening to it. I mean, especially the intro feels so much like talk radio. So that's really, I think, a successful- Right. And the announcer is very radio-ish. Yeah. Very, very influenced by that medium. Yeah. So how about you, Matt? Yeah. So when I started my podcast, I was really inspired by other podcasts. So let's see, for example, Philosophy Bites, which is another interview podcast. I actually heard you, Peter, on there back in the day before you had your own podcast. I was also really inspired by Planet Money, which is another podcast in the genre of the ones that Barry mentioned. And I really liked calling shows. We mentioned calling talk shows. And I just love the utter anarchy of some completely random person calling in and asking. And you have no idea what they're going to ask, but it's practically guaranteed to be interesting, just in virtue of the sheer chaos of it and make you think in ways you haven't thought before. So I absolutely love that. And in general, what inspired me about the podcast domain is that it seemed to me that the material being put out there was so much more interesting and in-depth than the material being put out by traditional legacy media. And I felt that, yeah, just by picking a bunch of interesting podcasts to subscribe to, you could learn a heck of a lot while you're vacuuming and doing the dishes. So I got a lot of that out of Philosophy Bites, a lot of that out of Planet Money, just really in-depth reporting. It seemed to me that a lot of these shows are going way more into depth, giving you a starting point for doing your own research into these different areas or just getting a taste of what else is out there. And the idea of bringing some of the conversations I was having in my personal life into that pool of resources people could draw on, I found really appealing. One thing I think that's striking about your series is that you do, in fact, get pretty deep into the topics if you compare it to Philosophy Bites. Philosophy Bites obviously is shorter, as the name promises, whereas your episodes are often sometimes even up towards an hour long. And they are accessible, I think, to people without academic training, but you don't really hold back. I mean, you sometimes have pretty detailed conversations about even technical issues in philosophy of logic and things like that. The area that I specialized in when I did my philosophy PhD was philosophy of language, so I certainly had out of the gate a desire to represent, not be afraid of the quote unquote technical parts of philosophy on the show and try to represent, you know, in principle represent every area equally. My podcast is very heavily edited. I think, Peter, you didn't experience this as much because you're a really slick speaker, but with most of my guests, we sit down and like, we talk for a little while, we take a break, we talk about what we just talked about, we talk a little more, we take another break, we record a little more, we go, you know what, that last bit, let's delete that. So I kind of collaborate with the guests on the entire conversation and then edit it later to sound like it was just a conversation we spontaneously had, but that's a lie. Okay, that works actually. I had no idea from listening. I think I've listened to every single episode and they all sound, you know, they just sort of fly by. Probably the vast majority of the time I put into the show is in the editing and try to make it sound like what it isn't, which is sort of a collaboratively structured on the fly, you know, conversation. What Matt and I were just talking about there, I think raises an obvious question, which is how we see podcasting as relating to what happens in academic philosophy, philosophy as a profession, in other words, philosophy as it's practiced at universities. And I think that's a really interesting question because for one thing, it's pretty clear that all of us are drawing on academic philosophy in the sense that we have academics coming on as guests. All four of us do that actually, because Barry does have interviews with his guests as well, although it's not only interviews, what you're doing. And when I write my podcast, which is mostly scripted, what I do is go off and read a bunch of research by people about whatever figure or period I've gotten up to. And then I try to condense it down into a script. So certainly my podcast could not exist without professional academic research and none of ours could. So how did the three of you see the relationship there between podcasting and professional academic philosophy? Yeah, so most of the people that I interview, the content of the conversation is based on something that they've written. So I've read the work and I felt that the work is something that listeners would be interested in. So in some way we might say that part of it is translation, that there was an 8,000 word article or 70,000 word book. In what ways can we translate that from the page into a conversation? But then another way in which I find that it's not just translation, but it's also transcending. So you transcend the academic language, you transcend the inside conversation that you're having with academics, people that you're having with your sub-discipline. And you try to, I guess, think about the ways in which it has import for those who've never heard of your particular sub-fill and we begin to apply it to these other issues. That's kind of how I see the relationship in a certain kind of way. And there's no doubt that I have this belief that, and I've had this experience where the written work may be very difficult to understand. You give someone the podcast and they're like, oh, I get it now. Right. And then some sense in which, you know, people would never thought that that work will have a certain kind of application in people's life that will lead us to kind of think about a social situation or a political dilemma in very different ways. So that's kind of how I see the connection between what we do in the academy, philosophy in particular, with the podcast. It is a work of translation, but also a work of transcending the page and trying to figure out how we can bring what we wrote into the world. One thing that calls to mind for me is the fact that even if you're a professional philosopher, there's going to be areas of philosophy you have no clue about. So I think we fall into this. There's lots of areas of philosophy I have no clue about. Yeah, exactly. Well, all of us, right, is a huge field. And so we fall into this trap maybe of thinking, well, there's the specialists and then there's the popular audience. But actually, like for example, I was listening to an episode from your series recently about Frans Fanon, who, because we haven't gotten to him yet in the podcast I'm doing with Chikay, I don't really know anything about Frans Fanon except very vague stuff. And so in a sense, I was in the position of just anyone who's not a trained philosopher, perhaps learning about something for the first time. And so I think that's something that I also get a lot out of, of the sedations in that direction. Like when you're talking to people who are specialists in philosophy of logic or something like that, that I don't really work on myself, then it's all new to me. That's one of the things I was really hoping to do as well is give people a way to just survey the terrain, get the lay of the land. I mean, I guess the discipline, but maybe more interestingly, just philosophy itself, what has been done, what's being done. You know, a lot of people don't necessarily have time to read a bunch of anthologies and do a bunch of research in every single area because there's just too many areas. But you can get like a glimpse of something on a regular basis from a podcast and then something catches your interest and you can go further on it. And so personally, that's like Philosophy Bites back in the day provided that service to me. Your podcast has absolutely provided that service to me since you started it. It's a great way to broaden your background as an academic researcher. And I think in a time at which academic researchers are really struggling to like have a broad bird's eye view of the discipline. One of the things that what Mahesha was talking about reminded me of, especially something that she does very well on her show, is reveal the difference between the written word and the spoken word. And it's not even just a difference that you as the host see. It's like sometimes the person you're talking to has never had to say the thing in a different way than they had written it down. And then you realize that in the process of doing that, they can articulate something differently than they were in the written word. And I think that one of the things about podcasting is it forces people who are professionals in the field to, you know, it's a weird thing. They're translating their own thing, right? From the written work to the spoken word. And it's a very different thing. The spoken word, they could just read the paper. You could say, hey, could you read that paragraph? But we know that that's not going to work. That's going to be a terrible episode of Unmute. They just read the thing. And one of the things that Maisha is very good at, it's like, okay, it's not just the spoken word. It's the dialogue word. It's like if you're in conversation with Maisha, you're going to say it differently than if you had to just like get on a mic and say it. Something about speaking and speaking to somebody has this translational process to it that I think this medium is forcing academics into when we ask them to be on our show. No, I find that interesting, right? So in some ways we might say that it becomes something else, right? So as much as translation seems like, oh, what you're doing is taking this thing and just putting it somewhere else. That's what's happening in this podcast. And you're taking one thing and you're creating something else, right? You're not just translating it per se. You're remixing it. You're co-creating it with the person that you're talking to. I mean, it's interesting about translation. I was reminded of the email that I send to people that I'm interviewing and always say, listen, there are going to be some words. Here's a warning. You may say big words that may not have a broad understanding. I will ask you, what do that mean? Please know that I'm not an idiot, but we don't want to assume and create kind of a bubble in our conversation, but to make sure that no matter what background people come from, they'd be able to understand our conversation. Yeah. I've done interviews for like medieval philosophy where people just throw in untranslated Latin and things like that. It's like, you know what? Let's try to tell the audience what that means. Yeah. With the documentary style, right? Because I tell them this is not something that I'm going to air as is. So I will say, okay, could you stop and could you say that point again without using the word post inter blah, blah, blah, whatever. I do that too. It's always phenomenology for me. They always say phenomenology and I have to stop them and they're like, just say that again without phenomenology. Yeah. One of the other issues that comes up here, I guess, is what kind of audience we have in mind because in a way it seems like we might have different audiences in mind, right? So as we said, elucidations often goes quite deep into the topic and is at least to some extent aimed at professional philosophers. And at least I don't think of my audience primarily as being professional philosophers, although it's obviously welcomed to me if they listen to it. But I usually tell my, actually I usually tell my interview guests that they should imagine that they're talking to a bright undergraduate. And I guess I kind of have that in mind when I write the scripts as well. And it seems like the target audience of all four of our podcasts might be kind of different. So maybe we can start with Barry, who do you sort of have in mind as your ideal audience member? My audience, the one I produce for in my mind is somebody who doesn't know, care, or maybe even has an active kind of hostility towards the word philosophy. So maybe it's somebody who has heard it but thinks of it as sort of this elite thing, or maybe it's somebody who hasn't thought too much about it. They know it's something that happens in colleges, but they care about other things, right? They care about the news. They care about economics maybe. They may be science curious, but they have not thought about this term, word philosophy, what it is. And so they're not philosophy geeks. So my show is not produced for people who are philosophy nerds or hobbyists. If they are a philosophy nerd or hobbyist, they might consider my show not in depth enough. They might actually be looking for your elucidations or your history of philosophy without any gaps maybe even, to fill in the gap to complement their knowledge of it. I'm tailoring it for the person who likes to read magazines, who likes to listen to public radio, who considers themselves an intelligent person, probably a college graduate, and will stumble across it and think, yeah, if I'm going to spend 0.01% of my time on philosophy, that's more than I had spent before, right? That's how I think of my audience. And I suppose, Maisha, you must be trying to overturn people's assumptions and expectations about what philosophy is with the Unmute podcast, right? I think that's one of the bullet points. I can't help but say what my audience is without first addressing what my initial audience was when I was thinking about the podcast. So at the time, this was like 2014, I was transitioned from adjuncting to go back into a PhD program. That summer, I had worked with some formerly incarcerated young folk who weren't college graduates, teaching them philosophy. And so when I originally thought about the podcast, this is also mentioned in the book, I was thinking about that demographic. I was thinking about black and brown New York folk who were intellectually curious, was hip, wasn't really going to listen to something that was a bore, not listen to anything that was long, like a movie, right? And so those are the individuals that I had in mind. I think in some ways I still have that in mind as my audience. Now, who that is, is quite broad, right? The intellectually curious, right? It could be undergraduate students. What I found is a lot of grad students, a lot of faculty members, people outside of philosophy, just the public in general. So I think for me, I think when I talk to people, I'm surprised about who listens to it and why. And I think what I find is that it's people who are interested in philosophy, yes, but it's also people who are interested in a particular topic that I'm discussing with particular individuals. So whether it's something as broad as Buddhism to Afro pessimism to Fanon, as you mentioned, to grief or joy, I mean, one of the things about these podcast apps is that you enter in something that you're interested in and learn about. And my podcast might pop up and that person was intellectually curious in something and they found it in that particular way. And what about you, Matt? I mean, we may actually have given a slightly false impression by sort of emphasizing how deep and detailed your podcast is, because I don't, the feel of it is actually not that it's aimed only at academic philosophers, I wouldn't say. Yeah, I feel like this has been kind of an ongoing conversation between you and me, but I always wanted my show to be basically just accessible to anyone who is curious and absolutely not only aimed at academics, but it seems like the niche it's sort of landed itself in has, despite my best efforts, been something like that. I think it's an interesting feature of like, you can start with a certain conception of what you want your podcast to be when you start out, but often it'll turn into whatever it's going to turn into because at the end of the day, you're not the only one tangoing like your entire audience is as well. But it's funny how you said, like, you tell your guests to a picture in intelligent undergraduate, it's almost verbatim, I tell my guests to imagine a room full of intelligent 17 year olds who have never heard of any philosophy stuff before. Of course, it doesn't always go that way, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that some of the guests that I have have never actually done this before and they're maybe not used to. I don't teach freshmen seminars that often, but I'm always trying to sort of challenge people and push them more in that direction. One thing that makes a difference with my podcast, I guess, is that since it's chronological, I mean, it's a history of philosophy podcast, right? So it started with old stuff and is moving steadily, but very slowly towards the present. And so I usually assume that the majority of the audience, if they're listening to a conversation between me and a guest, most of them have probably heard the previous episodes. So they kind of have some background knowledge. So that's why I tell them to think about it in terms of talking to an undergraduate is like, as it were, in the middle of a course. Yeah, that makes sense. But the point is that they're not talking to another specialist on SCOTUS or something like that. In a way, I feel like my intended audience member is basically me 20 years ago. When I was in college, I studied cinema studies and linguistics. I did maybe one or two philosophy classes, but I basically discovered philosophy after college and it was just like fun and interesting. It sucked me in. I started doing fun background reading in it. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I would have loved for there to be at that time when I was learning about this field, which I eventually decided to formally study. But there was a long period of just general kind of curiosity leading up to that. Yeah, I didn't have any real formal academic background in philosophy. I mean, I took intro logic, so that's not really a normal philosophy class, but I only took one normal philosophy class besides intro logic. So I don't know. Maybe we all make the podcast that we wish we could listen to. That's right. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's one of these things where if my show existed in the space, I wouldn't be making it. I made the show that I wanted to exist in the space. And if somebody took it over, I think I'd be fine with that. They did it better and they did it well. And I feel, oh yeah, there's this really nice story driven show that incorporates philosophy and it reaches a wider audience. They do it better than me. I think that's great. One thing I want to say when I'm listening to everybody speak is I think that I, and maybe Maisha feels this way, and I think Matt has already expressed that he's felt this way. I've been surprised that there have been professional people listening to the show. When you go and there are academics and colleagues that are like, oh yeah, I listen to every single show. I was definitely surprised. I didn't expect that. My guess is that actually, it turns out we maybe should be pitching all of philosophy at the level that we're doing it at, where our intention is. Because it just turns out, even professionals, yeah, I'd rather listen to that than somebody who's talking about the objection to the objection to the objection to the thing that is in the literature. So maybe all along we're overestimating how much the field itself wants to be super niche. I listened to all three of your podcasts for fun, actually. And I have to admit that I don't usually read published philosophy for fun. Maisha, I think you wanted to say something and then Matt did. Yeah, I find what you just said to be hilarious. So let me just try to get my mind together. Yeah, I'm just thinking about what Barry was saying. And in some ways he have just contributed to a larger argument about should we even be calling what we're doing public philosophy in some kind of way. But that's another discussion for another time. But I think one of the things as Matt and Barry is talking, it made me think about, especially as we've been talking about audience, they kind of alluded to creating a podcast that you wish you would have had 20 years ago or you wish it exists today. And there's no doubt that for me, and I know we're going to talk about this in a little bit as a black woman philosopher, when I tell people that that's what I am, they are like, repeat what you just said, what are you? And so I think for a lot of, you know, I'm thinking about young black kids, particularly who thought that philosophy is what Socrates and Plato did and could not imagine that there would be a black woman with dreadlocks that is doing that professionally. So in some way I do want to amplify that there are individuals that's doing this kind of thinking for a living. And in some ways you can do. And it's not just a black woman, right? As I mentioned, I mean, I talked to that when I mean diverse, I mean diverse in content, but diverse in bodies, diverse, et cetera, et cetera. I want that to be very clear that yes, we're talking about these particular issues, but there are different, a variety of people and diverse people who are approaching these questions. And so philosophy is not something that only a certain body is able to do, but we all can engage this practice. And that's, that's hopefully what I wish existed 20 years ago, as I was contemplating being a philosopher or not. I mean, we talk about representation, but I think it's a little bit more than that, but I want to present that to audience members as well. Is that the thinking behind the opening question that you posed to your guests? Because you often, or you, I guess you always asked at the beginning, how did you get, you asked your guests how they got into philosophy. And I guess subtext there is even that you're the kind of person that people assume doesn't do philosophy. How did you get into philosophy? Right. So here's the interesting thing. I don't even think that's a question that's based on diversity. I think messages are just like, how in the hell did you do, decide to do this in general? So even if I was a white man, I would still ask, because I think that's what audience members are wondering. Why this? What is it about this that got you interested in this? And would you be able to get a PhD for a year? I mean, the joke, I remember the joke in college was, if you're a philosophy major, you don't make any money. And business majors make all the money. So they were just wondering, why were we philosophy majors? Like, what are you doing? And for my mom, she was okay with it. I mean, I'm first generation. So it's like, as long as you are in school. And so I think for lots of people, I mean, they don't know that this is a live profession for one, but I think it's important for individuals to know our story of why we decided to get into this. Because one of the things that I find, hey, I think all of us are born philosophers. As kids, we are so intellectually curious. We think about philosophical questions a lot. I think we lose that as we grow up. And I think that question about your journey into philosophy, in some ways, I'm hoping that people will be able to connect to that. Even if they didn't make the decision, they can connect to that. That's why I ask it. Right. Okay. That sounds like a good reason. Maisha, I think your podcast absolutely wins the award for having introduced me to the greatest number of people and topics that I'd never heard of before in the profession. And I feel like I'm on the lookout in the profession for interesting stuff. Well, thank you for that, Matt. I appreciate it. I definitely agree with that. So actually, as long as you're talking to Matt, let me ask you something that's related to what Maisha was just saying, which is if you have an interview based podcast, then the obvious most important question that you need to answer week by week is who you're going to interview. And in my case, that's usually not that hard a choice, or at least I have a very constrained set of options because I need to interview specialists about whatever historical period I've gotten up to just now. So I'm usually choosing between a fairly small number of people who work on, you know, Ficino or whatever. Back before the pandemic, hopefully by the time this is released, the pandemic will be over. But at the moment, we're still in the middle of it. And it's been a year since I could interview anyone in person. But before that, I always tried to actually sit with the person in the same room. And so that was another constraint. So basically, the guests that I interviewed were people who I could get at who were specialists. But I mean, you've got the whole world to choose from. So especially now. So how do you choose whom to interview? Yeah, you could consider it kind of like an embarrassment of riches, given how many interesting people there are. One constraint that I'm under is what you mentioned, which is I do all my interviews in person. So that does in itself limit to either people that I know who are like around, or people who are coming through town for whatever reason, I can sort of snatch them up now and again. And I also sometimes I'll travel, you know, go on a vacation somewhere, you know, have to do an interview with somebody I want to talk to and have to have a vacation there. But yeah, it's mainly just guided by whatever topics I think are interesting. Yeah, I feel actually very fortunate to know a lot of people who, at least in my estimation, are very interesting and have things to say about stuff that you haven't heard before. I don't know, it's kind of a math-centric process of selecting guests. One thing I did want to mention, because in relation to your earlier question about like, how does this relate to the philosophy profession? I feel like a lot of the philosophy profession is focused on objections. Objections, counterarguments, counterexamples, and sort of the back and forth of that. At least I personally find that, I mean, if the goal and objection is to like deliver as zing or whatever, then okay, fine, you know, you can publish an article and then forget about it. But if the goal of mounting an objection is to really better understand the topic and like maybe be shown to be wrong, I think it's much more interesting to talk to the person about their view. So another thing I'll often do is try to find people who've defended views that I find just sort of questionable and talk to them about it to learn more about it myself. And in almost every case, I come away having changed my mind about whether the position was bunk or not. I usually at least come away thinking, yeah, actually there's some pretty good reasons to favor this idea. It's not as ridiculous as I thought going in. It's always a humbling experience. Like when you're sitting there face to face. Often when I'm in a journal, you know, a philosophy journal, I'm reading an objection to something, I'm like, I want to hear you say that to their face. Actually, one reason I asked you the question is because I sometimes wonder whether you've deliberately chosen guests who have strange views. Part of that is just personal, you know, people you hang out with. Yeah, right now we know what's going on is the people who tends to be in the same room as how strange views. And Barry, what about you? I mean, I guess that in your case, you've got this story that you're trying to tell. So then you'd be on the lookout for someone who can address specifically the question about whatever philosophical topic it is that's relevant to your story in a given episode, right? Sometimes it's like that. It's like that maybe 10, 15 percent of the time. So it's like that I might want to do a story on, you know, so this past season, just because it's on my mind. Let's say I wanted to do a story on a particular element of criminal justice reform. So one of the things that I looked at was mens rea reform. So this is how do you formulate a state of mind requirement in law? And there has been a there was a dispute about that in Congress. Maybe I'll do a story about that and I'll look up a philosopher who's written about mens rea. And I did do that. So it was Gideon Yoffie did that. But that's the exception. The norm usually is that I come across a piece of philosophy first that I think might have a connection to a story. And I reverse engineer it. I find the story from the philosophical work. So what might be an example of that? Oh, my God, there's so many. So an example of that might be I'll talk to somebody who has certain views about immortality, a personal identity and immortality, that we can't rule out the possibility of immortality for various reasons. And they wrote some advanced paper on it. And it's just, okay, I'll go talk to you. And then it's a challenge to me. Like, how do I find a story that connects with this? If it turns out to be a good conversation and an interesting view that I think would push a lot of buttons and so on. Is there a story I can find? Then it's the journalism side. And it's like, okay, now I have to find a story. I ended up finding people who have the genuine, sincere belief that they're the reincarnation of other people, for instance. Right. Or Nick Riegel wrote an essay about YOLO, you know, sort of this existentialist philosophy, analytic philosophy. And I was like, well, what the hell am I going to do with that? Right. And so, like, it took me about nine months to find a good story of people who live by that principle. Something like that. Right. So 85% of the time it's the philosophy comes first and then doing this search for story that will grip people to think about the philosophical issue. That comes second. Yeah. Just to give people an idea of how well that can work. I always listen to podcasts when I'm running. And I know that a podcast of that was particularly good when I can remember where I was running. So I actually know exactly where I was running when the person started talking about their reincarnation and connections. Oh, it's such a weird... Personal identity theory. Yeah. It's a memorable one. Definitely. By the way, we should tell people that YOLO stands for You Only Live Once. That's right. So Carpe Diem. Right. Maisha, you already said something about this before, but do you want to add anything about how you go about choosing your guests? It varies per season. And I must admit, social media has exposed me to so many different philosophers that I didn't know of before. And so that kind of exposed me to their work. And so as soon as I hear someone or hear that they've written something that I've just kind of marked that down. So I usually record in early spring. And now it's the case that I release them all together as opposed to monthly, like I used to do in the first couple of years. And so I usually just write that person's name down, remember that this is a topic that will be very interesting to discuss. But it also depends on the season. I think there was one season in which I think I was just tired of men in the professions. I decided I'm doing a whole season with just women. Right. So a lot of the content was around those kinds of issues. And because I got a project I'm working on, this season is really going to focus more on the moral side of things and the moral psychology side of things. So it all depends what the season is and the work that I run up against before I do recordings in the spring. Maybe something else we could talk about is the political side of the podcasts. My podcast, I would say, has a perhaps quiet political agenda. It covers philosophy in diverse cultures. And, you know, we've done the Indian philosophy podcast. We're now doing Africana philosophy. But I think that the political themes in your podcast are, that is Maisha's podcast, are quite overt. As you mentioned, a lot of the time that's the explicit topic that you're discussing. And although in general, I think that's not true of HiFi Nation, as Barry said, there's a whole season on criminal justice reform, which sort of law and order style works its way through every stage of the criminal justice process. So you have prosecution, police, jails, etc. And so I wanted to ask both of you to comment on that. So do you think that philosophy podcasts have a lot of potential or particular, like surprising potential for what they can achieve in the political domain? Or is it just because that's what you're interested in more? If I was focused explicitly on what we consider moral philosophy, you know, we have moral lives and so my answer would be kind of the same, right? I think our lives are multifaceted. And I think particularly when it comes to value theory in general, I mean, just clearly kind of relate to our lives that I think you'll have a similar impact on the political domain. So I don't want to give that much importance to the political. I mean, I would say I'm being biased here, right? I'm a social political philosopher and very interested at the intersection of moral psychology of those particular things. And so but I think because we live political lives, talking about political topics just seems to have, it has relevance because that's that's kind of what we experience here. But I think the same relevance could be the case in other dimensions. People who are religious or spiritual, etc. Well, like also benefit from a different kind of philosophy or general philosophy topic. So I would say it depends if you're into politics or where the political stuff is going on, interested in that kind of thing. It's going to have the import for you. So I don't think it's strictly confined to politics or the political philosophy in general. What about you, Barry? Yeah, one thing I like to tell my students is that not all of our political problems are philosophical, but some of them are. With respect to criminal justice, which a lot of people are thinking about nowadays, not all of our criminal justice problems are philosophical. In fact, most of them aren't. But some of them are. And so I think my goal is to reveal that some of the problems and some of the particular experiences that people like to think a lot about. I did a whole episode on solitary confinement, the story of one man in solitary confinement. But what about it? Not all of the problems of solitary confinement and the policies of solitary confinement are philosophical, but there might be some that are. And so what I'd like to do in the show is to examine the ones that are right to connect them to the other problems. So there's a lot of justifiable discussion about the history of our criminal justice system and the penal system and its connection with American history, particularly about race. I think that those are the primary problems and not all of the issues there are philosophical, but some of them are there, too. So in my show, for the people who haven't thought about the parts of the political life that are philosophical, I'd like to introduce them to that. And then for the people who have thought about the philosophical issues, I want them to see how much depth philosophical thinking has got to with respect to those issues. So, you know, this is abstract, but something like, should we ever punish at all? That opens up the question of what the goal of punishments should be. The connection with punishment and the moral emotions, the kind of thing that Maisha thinks about in her professional life, her professional side, are the kinds of things that I think lend itself to be part of the discussion in the public sphere. But it's at a level that's just a little bit deeper than what is the discourse in magazines and an existing public radio. So you will get to the discussion of the historical, sociological issues in criminal justice. The philosophical ones, they haven't gotten there yet. And I think of my role on my show is to inject those into the discussion as well, not to pretend that philosophy has the solution to all of these problems, because it doesn't. But that there are a subset of the problems that are philosophical and that philosophers have thought a lot about. I think particularly for me now that I'm thinking about it as Barry speaking, I noticed that particularly when I'm talking about political issues or let's just say philosophical ideas in relationship to politics, I'm always I notice that I'm always convinced that after talking about these issues in a philosophical way, the last question that I usually pose is more of a question of praxis. Because it's something about political philosophy where I think those moments in which I've descriptive projects are important. But being that, you know, our political climate is the way that it is. The question is not necessarily what should we think and then think that thinking is sufficient here. But I'm also interested in the question of given that we've thought about this for the last 40 minutes, what do you suggest that we do? And so I do notice that when I am specifically talking about issues dealing with political philosophy, that it's not just the content of philosophical ideas that I'm interested in. But I think about the listener saying, hey, I've learned a lot. But political philosophy, it seems that it compels me to do something. So what should I do or what should I stop doing? And so I noticed that I challenge guests to kind of engage in the prescriptive because I'm never really content with just talking about political philosophy as if talking about it is sufficient. Yeah, I think something I like about your podcast that I think a lot of the even published work in this field sort of revolves around extremely nuanced. And insightful analyses of the problem, whatever the problem is. So it might be racism or sexism, for example, or, you know, the way trans people are treated. But you also want to know, well, how can how do we address the problem? And I think that seems right to me that merely understanding the problem in a very deep way might not be enough. There's also the question of what to do instead. Matt, so obviously you don't have it's probably not even like the dominant theme in your podcast, political philosophy, but you certainly have had plenty of guests on who talk about ethical, political and social philosophy. So how do you think about this and its role in your own series? I want to actually mention two things. So one is there's this economist, Tyler Cowen, who's been sort of an intellectual and moral mentor to me over the past couple of years. And one thing he said to me about maybe like two years ago was something like one of the things he liked about elucidations is that don't make it too political. So the first thing I want to say is I'm still trying to figure out what he meant by that, because I have no idea and I had no idea then. Anyway, that's kind of fun. By the way, he has a great podcast himself. I don't know if you've listened to conversations with Tyler. Like I've heard the Lithuanian avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mikas said in an interview once that if you're a Bohemian artist living the artist lifestyle, whether you like it or not, you're a political subversive. Because you are just in your very like day to day existence, challenging the basic assumptions of your society of, you know, whatever, working the tedious nine to five. And I think something similar applies to podcasting. I think just doing a philosophy podcast is like a strike back against a lot of the dominant ideology, the discipline, a lot of the elitism and classism of the discipline where it's like, we're the smarty pants experts over here and you're the dumb dumbs over there. We're doing kind of, you know, medium where we're trying to reach out to everybody, not just the quote unquote smart experts within the context of the discipline. I think the discipline skews heavily towards hyper, hyper, hyper specialization where, you know, it's like, I just work on like Leibniz's philosophy from this year, but I don't know anything about Leibniz's philosophy from the next year or whatever, whatever. And just like, you know, uh, like acknowledging that it's possible to be interested in the whole thing and trying to capture the whole thing, I really think is some kind of rebellion against this like hyper specialization where nobody in a philosophy faculty ever talks to each other about what they're doing. And they basically don't even consider the same field. I think I would like to speak up though, a little bit for this might be controversial in this particular group of people, but I'd like to speak up a little bit for the hyper specialized specialists. Yeah. Don't let me, don't let me get away with that. Yeah. Because I mean, I have to say that I guess most of what I read to draw on for writing my podcast is hyper specialized research literature. I mean, just to take the example of what I'm reading about right now, and this will give people an idea of when we recorded this. So at the moment I'm preparing to write an episode about Galileo. So I'm reading articles and books in particular about how Galileo's early scientific work was influenced by the philosophical debates that were going on at the school of Padua in the late 16th century. And I promise you that this is not stuff that you could just sort of hand to everyone. They would think it's interesting. I mean, it's, I have to concentrate to read it and get something out of it. So, I mean, I'm glad that that's there because it's really, that's the material that I'm trying to distill as, as Maisha also said earlier, that there's a kind of translation process where we're taking something that's maybe aimed at a narrow specialist audience and putting it before a broader audience in a way that is accessible. And after all, I mean, even though, of course I agree that it's nice if podcasters get credit for doing podcasts. It's not like every academic philosopher needs to have a podcast. Right? Like, of course that stuff is necessary. And we, that's why we're in the field. The point is that the fact that if everybody just did that, it would just be as just as harmful for philosophy as if everybody just did a podcast. Right? Because if everybody just does that, which is sort of what was happening before any of us started doing any of this, right, it would just be seen by the public rightfully as a super elite thing where it doesn't matter at all to their lives. And why should their tax dollars be subsidizing people who are writing 25 epicycles of infinite coin flips and decision theory, which I love. But, you know, we don't need 5000 papers on that. Yeah, I guess that I agree with that. So what I would say is that it's sort of two sides of a coin or to expand your coin metaphor, or, you know, two or maybe a symbiotic relationship. And it's certainly true that the internet has just given us the ability to complement what was going on in this highly specialized kind of philosophy in a way that wasn't that easy before. I mean, you had to basically get someone to invite you onto TV or the radio or something like that and give you space to talk about philosophy. Let me ask a couple of other things before we wrap up. So one thing that has actually just occurred to me while we're discussing this is to what extent doing a podcast has actually affected what you do on the in the other side of your philosophical activities, like your own philosophical research, for example. I mean, apart from the fact that you wind up spending a lot of time doing podcasting, so it's harder to find time for other tasks. Would you say that the podcasts that you produce have actually made you see things or get interested in topics that you wouldn't otherwise have been working on, for example? For me, absolutely. I don't think since I started the show, I have gone back. I have a little bit to things that I was working on prior, but most of the new things that I've worked on have been more expertly specialized versions of issues that were raised on an episode that I wanted to go more in depth into. I wanted to put on the Philosopher's Hat and develop things that came out of producing particular episodes. So for me, absolutely. The very first episode I ever made and released turned into a paper that's in a peer reviewed journal. Right. Okay. So actually that's a meiotic relationship even exists in your own life. Right. Matt and Maisha, what about you? My audience can't see this, but Maisha is very clearly pondering this. Yes, I am. I'm finding it to be a difficult question. So I'm going to try to answer it as best as I can. As you were answering the question, I just kept thinking about how I get the opportunity to, you know, given that they say yes, to talk to philosophers that I wouldn't typically talk to or encounter on a day to day basis and how much of a privilege that is. We can basically talk about their work. I mean, in some ways they're being like a tutor for me for about an hour. And this is most definitely the case as a graduate student. I mean, you're inviting these professors and they're taking time out to have a conversation with you. So in some ways, I think for me, I mean, as far as translating to like my everyday life, first of all, I realize I've learned so much. And I've learned it at the feet of these individuals in a very different context than it would be professionally given to me, whether that's through a paper, whether that's given a talk. I mean, this one on one is totally different. It's more intimate. And so I'm able to learn something in a very different way from these individuals. And wow, what a privilege to do that. Right. So it's no doubt that I have taken what I've learned from those interviews, not only into my work, but also just into my day to day life. But I've also learned, I mean, like I said, I started this when I was in grad school, also learn kind of the the grace that was shown to me, the respect that was shown to me and people willing to do this and how they continue willing to do this. Just shows me how how important it is to support each other in the field as colleagues, how it's important to be gracious to individuals, no matter what rank they're in. And so I've learned just basic respect and collegiality and the given of your time and how valuable that is and the same grace and gifts that they gave to me. I'm all the more challenged in a lot of ways to do that for others. So in addition to learning a lot and being able to apply that to my professional life, but also learn a lot morally and ethically and as just what being a good colleague is all about and wanted to share that with other people as well. Actually, that's something I've also experienced that I mean, not only the people who come on to do interviews and obviously sort of donate their time because they don't get really anything out of it. But so, for example, when I'm about to embark on a new period in the history of philosophy, to make a long story short, what I do, I try to come up with a potential list of topics to cover or figures and topics and movements to cover. And then I will email it to some colleagues who work in the field, like work on Renaissance philosophy or whatever it is. And it's amazing. I mean, I've never had it fail that they send back detailed responses, suggestions of other things I might cover. And I think actually Miss maybe shows that people are perhaps more favorably disposed towards these kinds of projects than we might think, that when they're given an opportunity to actually help, they tend to do it. I think that's really great. Matt, did you want to weigh in on this as well? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I really agree with that last point, though, like I feel like, you know, there's so many people, you know, they've worked on some obscure figure their whole career. And like, this is a chance actually for like a whole wide new audience actually learn about it. So, yeah, I think, I think there's a really cool thing happening in your show where you like mobilize all this work that's been going on in the background. We're not sure exactly why, but like, you know, maybe this is part of why. Yeah. But yeah, so in terms of like the research question, absolutely. My podcast is how I do my research. I prefer to do my research. So whenever I was interested in learning about some new topic on my dissertation, I go try to find somebody to interview about it. It's much more interesting to me than just going through the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on that topic and like doing the lit review, but I mean, you have to do some of that obviously. But if I really want to like feel my way into like, what is a live burning issue that like needs to be answered? That's the kind of thing I get out of conversations with people rather than engagement with books. You know, I can't object to a book. I can't ask a book questions. And my dissertation is absolutely littered with either references to research that I've discussed on my podcast or stuff that's like come out of that based on a follow up. I have a little bit in my dissertation where I talk about the invention of the adjective, which I learned about on your podcast, for example, in whenever that was 500 AD. I can't remember now. I have a bit where I talk about the notion of virtue as a skill, which I got from Julianus when I had her on my show. Anyway, there's everything that I've done in philosophy has been kind of through and through the work I've done on my podcast. I don't draw any distinction really between my research, the podcast, my teaching. It's all a giant big blur of everything, mutually influencing everything else. I suppose one thing then that all four of us could testify to is that if you want to learn a lot about a lot of different areas of philosophy, doing a podcast is a great way to do it. Yes. Just to wrap up one last question. Obviously, a lot of people are interested in podcasting. And so I wanted to ask each of you if you were going to give just one piece of advice to someone who was thinking about starting their own podcasts, maybe on philosophy, maybe on something else. What would it be? Let's see who wants to go first. I'll go quickly. I think people underestimate the time that it takes to produce even one episode. And I'm talking about, let me rephrase that in this way. The time that it takes to produce a good episode. There's a lot of research that goes behind it. So you have to be willing to take that time. And then actually the actual conversation and also editing. There's a lot of time that goes into this. And so you have the issue of time and then consistency. And I think recognizing the time and the need to be consistent. I mean, we're all creative to some certain kind of extent. We're all technologically capable to some certain extent. We're all smart to some certain extent. But to kind of do this thing, I think people totally underestimate the time that's required and the consistency. If you want to build up an audience to continue to provide a resource to that audience, that requires consistency when you don't feel like it, when you have other things that you want to do or that you need to do. I think if you come in knowing that the time that you're going to need to invest in this and you're willing to invest that time and that you're willing to be consistent and this is a good format for you. But if you think it only takes 30 minutes, you can just fly by night and you're going to want to do this for the next 10 years. I mean, I think that's not necessarily, that's not the case. Think again. Yeah. Think again. Yeah. Barry? If you want to make narrative type audio, be prepared to spend two to 300 times more time than what is and would you end up producing. Right. So for every 45 minutes, expect to spend two to three months working on that thing for narrative type stuff. If you don't want to do narrative type stuff, like you just want to do interview, don't underestimate that too. Yes. That's right. So I have two pieces of advice. One is if you are driven to make audio, make it, go ahead and do it. Don't dither around and think that it's going to take, you don't know anything about editing. You don't know anything about microphones. All the technical stuff is not anywhere close to the biggest issues you'll face. Right. The technical stuff is nothing. It's going to be the actual intellectual work, but if you're going to do it, do it. Don't hesitate to do it. And then the second thing I would say is don't build your own thing. If you want to write, you don't decide I'm going to start my own magazine. Right. That's not the first thing you decide to do. That's what starting a podcast is. Essentially do something for other people, make stuff and pitch it to your other favorite shows. That might be a good way to start at this point. Yeah. At this point with 500,000 podcasts out there, you're going to have a hard time starting your own thing fresh and getting an audience for it. But if you tap into somebody else's audience and you like it and you can make stuff, do that and then go from there. That's great advice. Actually, what you said about the audio reminds me of a conversation I have with people often about learning Arabic, where they say, oh, like, how do you deal with that alphabet? You know, like reading from right to left. And then I always say, so here's the thing about Arabic. It's incredibly difficult in every single way, except the alphabet. That's exactly what I say about everything. Yeah. Yeah. You can learn the alphabet in a weekend. The rest of it, you will need the rest of your life. Yes, exactly. My experience. Matt, do you have a piece of advice for our listeners? I don't know if I could top the advice that's been given so far. Also, I think I'm somewhat influenced by Agnes Callard's anti-advice position. Maybe I'll just sort of reiterate Mahesh's initial advice, which is like, try to come up with a modest game plan where it's going to be, where you err on the side of it's really easy to do this consistently. So maybe just take a personal example. So I started my podcast with my then roommate at the time, Mark Hopwood. He said, well, how often do you think, you know, given you're doing a PhD and blah, blah, blah, other stuff going on in your life, how often do you think you're going to be able to put out a show? And I said, uh, probably about every two weeks, he'd made some tests I've done, you know, and then he said, okay, so we'll double that. Aim to put it out every four weeks. And maybe that gives you a safe buffer. I'm not going to stand by those exact numbers, but like some sort of calculation like that, where you're like, what's the longest it could take me to do this and then double that or triple that or whatever. Yeah, I'm a big believer in consistency. And I mean, not only in quality, but also in terms of when it appears. I've been putting my podcast out once a week since it started, which was a mistake, but, uh, but, you know, I committed to that and I don't, I don't know how long it's going to take. I don't, I don't want it to come out a day late. I want it to come out Sunday morning because I know from being a podcast listener that the podcasts I listened to are part of my routine. Right. So I want to know that it's there from my Monday morning run, let's say. And so I want people who are up to date with my podcast to get it when they can expect it. And I think, you know, if you have a season approach like Barry and Maisha do, then that's another way of thinking about consistency. But podcasts that just kind of come out whenever the host feels like it, that drives me crazy. And that sort of gives me a reason to not listen, to be honest. Okay. Is there anything else anyone wants to add before we say goodbye and disappear back into the ether where we came from? I want to mention, this is the only time I've been on a podcast where every other person on the podcast has at one point been a guest on my show. So that's just, that is true. That is true. Amazing. That is really good. So this is like the, the ultimate confluence. That's right. The sedations. All right. Well, that's a good note to end on. So thank you to all three of you. I was certainly very strongly encouraged listeners to check out their podcasts. There are other good philosophy podcasts, of course, but these are three of the best. So check them out and thank you for listening to my podcast, which as you know, is called the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Word Perfect, Logic and Language in Renaissance France. The clash between humanism and scholasticism, which looked like it would be the defining battle of intellectual life in the 16th century until the Reformation came along, is often seen in institutional terms. The schoolmen worked at universities, the humanists outside them. This impression is supported by humanists complaining about the pedophagory offered up as philosophical instruction at Paris and elsewhere, and it seems to be confirmed by the fact that scholastics accused humanists of lacking proper credentials. Thus, we find Noël Béda, executive officer of the theology faculty at Paris and a determined defender of scholasticism and Catholicism, accusing Erasmus of lacking the proper expertise to interpret scripture. In fact, though, many of the humanists did study at the universities, as I mentioned when we looked at Erasmus, he in fact studied theology at Paris for a time, though he dropped out. We also saw how the impact of Melanchthon transformed teaching at Wittenberg, Tübingen, and ultimately across Protestant Europe, precisely by modifying the traditional curriculum in light of humanist values. In France, there was no better example of a humanist schoolman than Jacques Lefebvre d'Étopie. Béda complained about him too. In 1526, he attacked Lefebvre by name for his presumption in offering a new Latin version of the Psalms and New Testament, translating the Bible into French, and daring to comment on scripture as if he were a properly trained theologian. Though Lefebvre never officially broke with the church, Béda depicted Lefebvre as being at least a Lutheran sympathizer. As a modern scholar has put it, it was the heaviest stick with which to beat him and the one that lay nearest to hand. Béda himself put the point as follows, The heretical forebears he had in mind included such familiar names as Abelard, Marcilius of Padua, John Wycliffe, and Jan Hus. But while Béda was right that Lefebvre was not a professor of theology, neither was he an outsider to the world of the schoolmen. He taught at Paris himself for almost two decades, spanning the 15th and 16th centuries. He composed influential textbooks on Aristotelian philosophy, for instance his 1496 Introduction to Logic, which became a bestseller. He was eclectic and creative in his use of pedagogical techniques, such as tables offering an overview of the treatise that he would then go on to summarize, catechistic dialogues to help the student remember the main points, and more traditional full commentaries. It's been remarked that this range of epitomizing formats or genres defined a Renaissance philosophical style which Lefebvre's works remodeled for Northern universities. His methods were inspired by Italian Humanist scholars, whom Lefebvre contacted during several trips across the Alps. In Italy he met, among others, Ficino, Poliziano, and Pico. The Humanist Johannes Reuthen thus said, Marcilio Ficino gave Plato to Italy, Lefebvre restored Aristotle to France. Elsewhere he was lauded as the one glory of all France. A group of like-minded scholars gathered around him, including the philologian Beatus Venanus and the philosopher Charles de Beauvall. Lefebvre's student Jose Klichtow wrote commentaries on his epitomes, suggesting that these had effectively replaced Aristotle as the works that students must consult. The group had interest ranging across the Aristotelian curriculum, but focused particularly on two disciplines that had been central for arts masters back in the 14th century, mathematics and logic. He and his group applied mathematics to physics in a way reminiscent of the Oxford calculators who flourished in that earlier period. But in logic, Lefebvre took distance from the concerns of the late medievals, commenting that scholastic discussions were full of novelties and lifeless matters like so much hay. By this he meant treatises and debates about sophisms and dialectical games like the practice of obligations. Nowadays, historians of philosophy find this to be one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of medieval work on logic. For Lefebvre though, it was at best a harmless bit of entertainment. This didn't stop his student Klichtow from offering a solution to the most famous sophism, the liar paradox. The problem is raised by sentences like, this statement is false, which is false if it is true and true if it is false. Klichtow's solution departs from the observation that asserting a proposition implicitly involves asserting the truth of that very proposition. So if I assert giraffes are tall, I'm obviously saying something about giraffes, but I'm also simultaneously asserting that this very sentence is true. Thus, we can take the liar sentence to be a concealed conjunction. It means this statement is false and this statement is true. But that is a straightforward contradiction, so it turns out that there is no paradox. The liar sentence is simply false. It's just a contradictory assertion like, this giraffe is tall and not tall and contradictions are always false. Pretty smart, but as I say, Lefebvre wouldn't really care. For him, the value of logic is to be found not in this sort of game playing, but in the part of Aristotle that deals with statements and arguments that are productive of knowledge and explains how language hooks up to reality. This means that he did need to take seriously at least one long-standing controversy from scholastic logic, the problem of universals. In his notes on Aristotle's categories, Lefebvre adopted what might be called a moderate realist position on this issue. While there is nothing outside the mind that is genuinely universal, neither are universals simply conventional or arbitrary fictions that we devise to categorize things. Rather, there are genuine similarities between things out in the world. When we notice the similarities between, say, giraffes, our minds take the properties common to all the giraffes and add the notion of universality to them to form a general idea of giraffes. As these examples show, Lefebvre was himself something of a contradiction, both a humanist and a scholastic, until he wasn't. Increasingly, Lefebvre got interested in applying his philological skills to the Bible and to texts that enriched his diet of Aristotle with Platonist and mystical ideas from authors like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa. Again, this may show the influence of Italian humanists like Pico della Mirandola. In an early work on natural magic, Lefebvre was already exploring a method inspired by the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, which had so fascinated Pico, deriving meaning from the numerical values of the names of God. He retained this idea when he turned to the project of writing about Scripture, saying in a work on the Psalms that God's names are full of mysteries useful to our religion and worth knowing. In 1499, we find him commenting on the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius and thrilling to the negative theology he finds there. These two ideas, the rejection of the application of language to God and the search for the secret meanings of divine names, may seem to be a contradiction. What would Klichtow say? But in fact, they are two sides of the same coin. Lefebvre is moving towards the idea that God cannot be grasped through normal language or normal reasoning. He contrasts rational and intellectual philosophy and says that whereas reason can go astray, pure intellection is unerring. That's what we're after, and to help us along, Lefebvre healthfully supplies a reading list that will lift students gradually to the heights of true contemplation. It does include Aristotle, but then moves on to the Church Fathers before culminating with Cuzanus and Dionysius. Notice that Cuzanus is the only modern author listed. With that notable exception, the truths of religion and philosophy are for Lefebvre to be sought in antiquity. This is in stark contrast to the view of a man like Beetha, for whom the medieval scholastics were valued authorities, not to be disdained just for their lack of literary flair. As Beetha wrote in a letter to Erasmus, the scholastics crude style had been inspired by God himself, and their teachings had been, truly needed by the Church at a period when it was in decline. Erasmus, ever the master of tasteful and refined rhetoric, responded by calling Beetha, the most stupid of bipeds. Here we come back to that other defining clash of his times, the one between Reform and the Church. You can see why Beetha thought that Lefebvre was effectively a Lutheran. Here was a man who was translating the Bible into French and encouraging people to read it without guidance from trained theologians, thus implicitly rejecting the principle that it is the Church that understands and interprets Scripture. It was an attitude exemplified by his refusal to accept the traditional teaching that three women mentioned in the Bible were all one and the same person, named Mary Magdalene, the Mary who anointed Christ's feet, the sister of Lazarus, and the first to see Christ upon his resurrection. Beetha wrote a refutation of Lefebvre on this score. The two also clashed over the number of husbands that had been married to Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. These debates are not of obvious philosophical relevance, but they do epitomize the contrasting worldviews that also shaped philosophy in this period. To put it bluntly, Lefebvre depended on philology, Beetha on religious authority. When they disagreed about the meaning of terms, Lefebvre would apply his classical humanist training, whereas Beetha's criterion for usage was the Latin idiom of contemporary Paris clerks, as one modern scholar has put it. On theological issues of greater moment, Lefebvre was not implausibly accused of reformist beliefs. He de-emphasized the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist and rejected the worship of saints. He developed these views in the 1520s after Beetha and the Sorbonne started trying to stamp out the Lutheranism in Paris. Lefebvre moved to the town of Meaux to join the circle of Bishop Guillaume Brissonnet, whom we already met as a confidant and correspondent of Marguerite de Nevevart. Under increasing pressure for his reformist sympathies, Lefebvre moved on to Strasbourg in 1525, and then wound up at the court of Marguerite herself, where he served her as chaplain until his death in 1536, by which time Beetha had graduated from agent of oppression to victim of oppression. He was imprisoned by King Francis in 1534. As we can see from the role played by Marguerite and Francis here, the larger battle over reformist ideas included skirmishes between secular royal authority and religious figures who dared to speak the truth, or what they considered the truth, to power. That will continue to be a theme of 16th century French history, except that soon it will be Protestants defying the crown. It bears repeating that Lefebvre never went so far as to embrace Lutheranism explicitly. Like Marguerite, he presented himself as a promoter of reform from within Catholicism, and adopted what he no doubt understood to be moderate positions on the theological controversies of the day. For example, he argued that humans are saved through a combination of faith and good works, not faith alone, and when the Peasants' Revolt broke out, he went out of his way to assure his readers that good Christians always remain subject to their temporal masters. Just as he had one foot in the scholastic world and another in the world of humanism, so he at least tried to push forward the reform agenda with one hand, while using the other to hold fast to the church. A man like Beetha was never going to admire this sort of doctrinal gymnastics, but it was far from unique. Similar mental and spiritual flexibility was shown by his younger contemporary, Julius Caesar Scaliger. One of the most famous humanists of the first half of the 16th century, Scaliger never broke with the church either, but he did have Protestant sympathies, as would be emphasized by his son Joseph, a convinced Calvinist. For instance, the elder Scaliger may have been involved in efforts to have Andrew Melanchthon, nephew of Philip Melanchthon, freed after he was jailed for his attempts to spread Lutheranism in France. Scaliger wasn't actually from France, though his scholarly career was mostly spent at the small French town of Argen, where he lived for the last 30 years of his life up to his death in 1558. He hailed from Italy, and claimed to come from a noble family of Verona. This turns out to have been a fib, or actually an outrageous lie. His real name was Giulio Bordoni, and his father was a miniature painter from Padua. As this begins to suggest, Scaliger was a master of self-promotion, who sought out intellectual battles with luminaries of the time, like Gerolamo Cardano, Rabelais, and even Erasmus. These were daunting opponents, but Scaliger was unfazed by such conflict, having spent his early career engaged in more literal warfare as a soldier in the imperial army. After almost being killed in battle, he retired from military life to devote himself to humanist scholarship. In fact, he bid to be a better humanist than the greatest humanist of all by attacking Erasmus after the latter wrote his work mocking the Ciceronians, slavish imitrators of the great Roman author. Erasmus satirically described how these pedants refused to use any Latin not found in Cicero. It would take them six nights to write six lines of Latin, since they had to double check that every word they used was genuinely Ciceronian. If Cicero used a certain verb, they would even avoid using any conjugations of that verb not found in his writings. And all this out of fanatical devotion to a pagan. Scaliger was outraged, or at least he pretended to be. He penned a furious reply, which Beta helped to get published as part of his own vendetta against Erasmus. Scaliger framed the dispute as an attack on his own Italian culture by a so-called German, though Erasmus was of course Dutch, and defended the more usual humanist idea of deploying Ciceronian rhetoric in the cause of Christian religion. Unwittingly confirming that Ciceronians, like him, did indeed tend towards pedantry, he corrected Erasmus on minor points, and then triumphantly told him he should be ashamed to be bested by a mere soldier like himself. Scaliger's pugnacity and fascination with language stayed with him. He wrote a brief defense of poetry, which responds to the parts of Plato's Republic where poets are exiled from the ideal city. Scaliger points out the apparent hypocrisy of this, given the literary nature of Plato's own dialogues, and then takes a swipe at the work's notorious proposal to institute collective sexual relations, we'd rather live outside your republic with our modest wives and children. A work from 1540 addressed to his son is tellingly entitled On the Causes of the Latin Language. I say tellingly because Scaliger's project here is to present Latin grammar as a proper science, and a fundamental tenet of a versatile epistemology is that proper sciences must inquire into causes. With typical immodesty, he declares that until he came along, grammar was far from being a true science, lacking rules and precepts. One striking feature of his approach is that he thinks of Latin as a written phenomenon, no less than a spoken one. Thus he denies that the subject of grammar is the audible utterance, it's just any articulate expression of thoughts in the mind, so that the material cause of grammar is letters, the elements of words, whether they are written or spoken. In this respect, Scaliger's grammatical theory fits a culture in which Latin was less a living language than a legacy of antiquity being rediscovered in books. That ancient legacy is confronted directly in yet another work on language devoted to poetics. It is a late work published only posthumously in 1561. Here, Scaliger dared to challenge an authority even greater than Erasmus, Aristotle himself. Aristotle's Poetics was of course standard reading on the subject, but Scaliger argues that it got things wrong on as basic a question of what poetry is for. Where Aristotle said that the aim of the poet is imitation, Scaliger has a moralizing conception of literature. Its goal is in fact, delightful instruction by which the habits of human minds are brought to right reason, so that through them the human may achieve perfect action, which is called beatitude. Indeed, Poetics is subordinated to politics, because its function is to bring people to a good and happy life. Here we might notice another point of continuity with his earlier diatribe against Erasmus. Scaliger is assimilating the function of Poetics to that of rhetoric, since he sees it as a form of moral exhortation. And if Cicero was Scaliger's paradigm for rhetoric, another Roman author was for him the greatest of poets, namely Virgil, whom Scaliger places above Homer in the pantheon of classical literature on the grounds that Homer was merely inspired, whereas Virgil combined inspiration with a conscious grasp of art. To compose literature artfully is, for Scaliger, above all to show good taste. He thinks that Virgil's perfection is shown above all by his selectivity. Where Homer simply gives the reader all that comes to him thanks to his literary gift, Virgil crafts his poetry by eliminating anything even slightly discordant. The result is word perfect. Only fools would want to add anything, only insolent men to change anything. Like the poets of the Pleiade, Scaliger encourages modern authors to learn from their classical forebears. He would have agreed with Dubélé that artfulness is in large part imitation. Scaliger was in fact close to Ronsard, to whom he dedicated one of his books, and it has been argued that Ronsard saw himself as trying to carry out the agenda outlined by Scaliger. He would be inspired by Homer and disciplined like Virgil. Another constant of Scaliger's career was his taste for polemic, whose most extravagant issue was aimed at a fellow Italian, Cardano. As I mentioned back in episode 363 when we looked at Geradamo Cardano, Scaliger composed a sprawling work in refutation of Cardano's onsutelty, called Exoteric Exercises, in 365 sections, one for each day of the year. It attacks Cardano from every conceivable angle, from his theory of the mind to his lapses in Latin grammar. How am I supposed to understand if you write incorrectly, Scaliger fulminates? In general, and despite his own critiques of Aristotle elsewhere, as on the topic of poetry, Scaliger mounts a defense of Aristotelianism against Cardano's innovative scientific ideas. In fact, one contemporary complained about people who would simply cite Scaliger as the authority on Aristotle's thought, as if his remarks were oracular answers coming from the Lyceum. Scaliger is at pains to make Aristotelianism compatible with Christianity, as when he draws on late ancient Platonists to argue that Aristotle's God is an efficient cause of the universe, though he does admit that Aristotle wrongly endorsed the eternity of the universe. An interesting part of Scaliger's Exercises, which brings us in a roundabout way back to logical concerns, asks whether the universe could be better than it is. He describes the natural arrangement of the cosmos in scholastic terms as the ordained dictate of God. The irregularities that are described so well in Aristotle's natural philosophy are set down through an act of voluntary will by God. His absolute power could have produced a different world, but God chose to make this one. Scaliger, however, rejects the notion that God could have made a better world. Of course, the universe is not infinitely good, like God is, but it is as good as it can be given the limitations of finite being. The variety we see in nature shows how God was seeking to realize every possible form of goodness. Even such humble creatures as insects are part of the grand divine plan. So, to spell this out in more technical terms, the features of the universe are in themselves merely possible, or contingent. They could have been otherwise. But given God's providential decision to create the universe in its maximal perfection, at least its general features become necessary. This, by the way, makes for a nice contrast to Aquinas' position on the same question. From the same premise that the universe can be only finitely perfect, he argued that it makes no sense to say that this is the best of all possible worlds, for a finite thing can always be improved indefinitely. For Scaliger, we can instead say that this universe is the best that any universe could be, despite the inevitable limitation of its goodness. He cites another classical text to support his claim, namely Hippocrates' On the Nature of the Human, which states, If one thing were absent, everything would slide and collapse. It's telling that Scaliger would appeal to a medical authority here. As a young man, he studied medicine at Bologna, and once in France he kept up his interest in the field and disciplines adjacent to medicine like botany. Medicine was apparently the reason for yet another feud, in this case with Rabelais, whom he considered to be insufficiently deferential to the two greatest ancient doctors, Hippocrates and Galen. References to medicine, illness, and health are pervasive in the literature we've been discussing in this and the last few episodes. Beta compared Lutheranism to a plague, while Scaliger likened those who defamed poetry to medical charlatans. Less metaphorically, Rabelais and Scaliger were only two of the many intellectuals in Renaissance France who devoted themselves seriously to the study of medicine while also pursuing wider interests, including philosophy. Next time, we'll meet others who fit this description, as we hear about Sinfouren Champier, Jean Fernell, and the spread of Paracelsin medicine to France. But don't let the talk of spread worry you, because the only thing that will be infectious in the next episode will be my enthusiasm for The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Life is Not Enough, Medicine in Renaissance France. There is a scene in the imaginary invalid by the 17th century playwright Moliere that is famous among philosophers. It depicts an examination for entry to study medicine at Paris. The candidate is asked to explain why opium causes sleep, and answers that it is because opium has a normative power, a virtus dormitiva, that is, the power to put people to sleep. This vacuous triviality is, of course, exactly what his foolish scholastic examiners are looking for, and the candidate gets full marks for it. Which is all good fun, but let's face it, it's not as if Moliere had a better answer to give. In fact, you could make a good case that ascribing a normative power to opium is not vacuous after all. Ascribing a power to the opium is a meaningful scientific proposal, which differs from, say, asserting that the more rudimentary material ingredients of opium cause sleep, perhaps by cooling down the body. Instead, the dormitiva power ascribes to the nature of opium a disposition for affecting the world, one that cannot be reduced to other natures, and one that cannot be explained in terms of the perceptible properties of opium. I'm not saying that the dormitiva power is a good explanation, but I am saying that it is meaningful, and that it may have been about as good an explanation as anyone at the time could have offered. As it happens, people back in the 16th century, when mockery of scholastics was a more novel enterprise, devoted serious thought to the effects of opium. A study of doctors at the University of Leiden has shown how physicians there wrestled precisely with the problem that the sensible properties of opium do not seem to match its effects. Apparently, it tastes hot. Kids don't try this at home. Yet, it has this soporific effect which we'd expect to relate to cooling, since the body is cooler during sleep. Some of the Leiden doctors inferred that the powers of drugs cannot be investigated using sensation, or at least, not always. One of them, Gilbert Jaheus, said that we need to draw a distinction between the evident and hidden or occult powers of natural substances. With this, he echoed a real-life doctor of Paris, Jean Fanel, who authored a long treatise whose very title was On the Hidden Causes of Things. It was published in 1548, with the dedication to the king, Henry II. Later on during his reign, Fanel would become royal physician. In the preface, he speaks of his desire to uncover what is divine within the art of medicine, with what follows being the fruits of his labor. It takes the form of a dialogue between three scholars, the two main protagonists being Brutus and Eudoxus. The names are none too subtly chosen, since Brutus is rather brutish in his manners, a fact that may be linked to his favored theories. He believes that the natures, powers, and dispositions of substances can, indeed, be explained in terms of their brute material ingredients. The forms of things emerge from the bottom up, out of mixtures of these ingredients. By contrast, Eudoxus, whose name means correct belief, is a top-down kind of guy. He thinks that medicine needs to be grounded in sound principles of natural philosophy, principles that he defends in the first half of the work. In the second half, the principles are then applied to classify diseases and remedies, with some of these operative at the level of what Fanel calls the whole substance. It's at this level that opium would, hopefully unlike this podcast, put you to sleep. Where do these powerful forms of the whole substance come from, if not from the material elements of the substance? Well, that's where the divine comes in. The forms are received from the heavens, which are the instrument of God. Fanel has his spokesman, Eudoxus, refute all of Brutus's attempts to explain forms in any other way. He does invoke religious considerations. If the form of living things come from bodily mixture, then our souls should expire upon the death of the body, meaning that we cannot look forward to an afterlife. But, for the most part, Eudoxus's arguments draw on philosophical assumptions and plain old common sense. As we know from Aristotle, forms are simple, so it makes no sense to see them as combinations of lower-level qualities like heat and cold. In fact, according to Eudoxus, the constituents of the body don't have forms at all. There is just one overall form whose presence blots out the forms of the bodily parts like a bright light drowning out dimmer ones. The parts are merely potentially present until the total form departs, as on the death of an animal when it turns into a mere heap or aggregation of materials. With this, Fanel signals his allegiance to the form-unitarian position notably defended back in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas. It was an unpopular view back then, because most scholastics thought it made more sense to acknowledge a multiplicity of forms in an organism, like a human for instance. It's by your human form that you can grow, see, hear, think, and so on, but it's the earthy elements of your body that make you fall downwards, like when you jump off a bench or have just had too much opium. Of course, Fanel has to admit that humans and other natural substances have many powers and perform many activities, but this is not because there are many forms present. Rather, it's because the single form is being received in a complex bodily substrate. During life, the soul is bonded to the body and needs the states of the body to be as they should be in order to perform its full range of functions. If the states are disrupted sufficiently, the soul departs, which is a nice way of saying that the person dies. The material ingredients are also important because they have to be made ready to receive the total form from heaven. In a way, Fanel makes all-natural generation to be like spontaneous generation, the process whereby flies, worms, and the like emerge from rotting matter. For him, the emergence of higher organisms works in more or less the same way, only with better ingredients and better mixtures to prepare the way for better forms. In developing this theory and applying it to drugs and illnesses, Fanel takes a nuanced stance toward the medical tradition and especially Galen. He implies that Galen really wanted to have a view like that of the character Brutus, in which all-natural phenomena would be explained in materialist terms. Thus, drugs would have their effects through manipulations of the four humours and their basic qualities of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture. Health and disease would be explained in the same way, as the result of balance or imbalance in the humoral mixture. Yet, Fanel thinks that Galen grudgingly had to admit the hidden causes that operate at a higher level. While some medical phenomena can be explained in crude material terms, many cannot. As with the case of opium, we could never tell just by examining the basic physical properties of a poison that it is lethal. So poison operates in virtue of its total substance, not by any quality manifest to the senses. Similarly, we can hardly explain plagues and epidemics just by talking about things like hot weather. True, some diseases do spike in summer, but then we might have a sweltering summer where no one gets sick. Fanel also concedes that the individual mixture or temperament of a person's body may have something to do with their health, and admits that medicines can target this bodily mix. But many diseases are evidently spread through air or physical contact, and so are not the result of the body's temperament. They must be coming from what Fanel calls seeds of plague, which induce illness, much as a scorpion bite or poisoned weapon causes death. Not so vacuous after all, then. Especially when you consider that around the same time, the alchemist and doctor Paracelsus was proposing exactly the kind of bottom-up theory that Fanel wanted to refute, one far more unorthodox than voiced by Brutus in Fanel's dialogue. As we saw in episode 388, Paracelsus was a German alchemist and doctor who rejected the standard medical authorities, including Galen, in favor of a theory that reduced all bodies to three principal constituents, sulfur, mercury, and salt. Ironically, he leveled some of the same criticisms at Galenic medicine that we find in Fanel, notably the impossibility of explaining plagues using this classical theory. But Fanel was no Paracelsus, of course. To the contrary, where Fanel urged his readers to continue the powers and dispositions of whole substances, Paracelsus had been an anti-wholist who sought to explain the properties of things in terms of chemical composition. Other contemporaries in France were more ready to accept the novel ideas coming from Germany. Often, they combined Paracelsus with Galen. We see this with Johannes Guenther of Andernach, who got his medical degree in Paris. As Alain Debouss says in his book on Paracelsus in France, for Guenther, it was not a case of using the old medicine or the new, but of using both in concert. Even a more committed follower of Paracelsus, the Calvinist physician Joseph Duchenne, was still willing to use Hippocrates in Galen. His work, The Great Mirror of the World, published in 1587, explored the central Paracelsan theme of the human as a microcosm, that is, a smaller image of the universe. Duchenne even suggested that blood circulates in the body, in a partial anticipation of the ideas of Harvey, on the grounds that fluids also circulate in the meteorological exchange of rain and evaporation. As we would expect, he also deployed Paracelsan principles with reference to concrete examples, such as the question why people sometimes get poisoned after being shot by lead bullets. Surely not because lead is dangerous, says Duchenne, this metal is actually good for us, but because lead contains a lot of mercury, which makes it absorb other pernicious substances. Fresnel is looking better and better, I have to say. If you still aren't convinced, how about another Paracelsan named Alexandre de la Tourette? He encouraged people to drink liquid gold because it is the purest and most balanced fusion of the three fundamental substances. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he doesn't suggest a way of making gold liquid while still cool enough to drink. Or take the debate between Loyes Delaunay and Jacques Revan about antimony. Delaunay had endorsed the use of this metal as a purgative following Paracelsus. This alarmed Revan, who rightly warned that antimony might be poisonous. Revan also made an astute observation about, well, observation. The Paracelsans had not collected enough empirical evidence to say whether or not antimony was safe to consume. In fact, this was a weakness in both the Paracelsans approach and in that of Fernes. He explicitly asked whether we should perform tests to confirm the efficacy of various drugs on various types of people. But then he distanced himself from this empiricist method on the grounds that there would just be too many variables to consider, too many ways that patients differ from one another. Something else Fernel had in common with the Paracelsans is that they were all challenging the orthodoxy that reigned at university medical faculties, especially in Paris. As we saw, Fernel became a royal physician, and at the end of the 16th century, the same post was given to a Paracelsan, a Protestant named Jean Roubide. All the while, the medical faculty fought against the creeping influence of the new theories. Notably, another royal doctor named de Bailly was prevented from practicing in Paris and then ejected from the city in 1579, thanks to the influence of the faculty. This may evoke an image of the Paris University doctors as hidebound conservatives, unwilling to budge from the Galenic tradition as it had come down to them through the medieval period. But the truth is more like what we see with the Sorbonne, where theologians were willing to accept limited reform and exploit the resources of humanism to some extent, so long as it didn't rock the boat of their authority too violently. A good illustration here would be Jacques Dubois, who lectured as a member of the Paris medical faculty from 1536 to 1555. He was one of the many Renaissance thinkers who believed that the best way to make progress was to look backward, all the way to antiquity. In a work on compound drugs, he said that anything valuable in it was to be credited to Galen. Unlike some classicizing doctors of this period, he was willing to accept the authority of doctors from the Islamic world, especially Ahrazi and Evasenin. But he was scornful of more recent physicians who based themselves primarily on these sources. Dubois preferred Greek authors, as when he produced a catalog of diseases that drew on Galen and Hippocrates, rather than the so-called Arabs. Ahrazi and Evasenin did write in Arabic, but they were Persian, not Arab. More genuinely innovative was Dubois's admirable project of writing on diseases of the poor, a welcome correction of the tendency of Galenic physicians since Galen himself to attend upon the rich and powerful who could pay for the bespoke treatment they offered. Yet even here, Dubois showed his Galenic sympathies, tracing the perilous health condition of the destitute to their humoral balances, rather than, oh, I don't know, economic oppression? Even more extreme in his classicism was Guillaume de Bayeux, who lived into the second decade of the 17th century. His work on epidemic diseases was so closely based on Hippocrates that he sprinkled the latter's original vocabulary into the text. One scholar says that it's as if he was getting as near as he dared to actually writing in Hippocrates' Greek. Speaking of derivative writings about medicine, let's finish up by looking at a somewhat earlier author named Sinfarion Champier, who was distinguished by his undeviating unoriginality. This according to Brian Copenhaver, author of the most important book on Champier and a guest on this series back in episode 367. Nonetheless, Champier does give us something interestingly new in French medicine because his main inspiration was neither Galen nor Paracelsus, but Italian Platonism. This interest is one he acquired as a young man, when he studied at Paris and fell under the influence of Lefebvre de Taple, whose own thought was so powerfully marked by his time in Italy. Actually, Champier's very first work was an introduction to Aristotle that was based on the writings of Lefebvre. He went on to study at Montpellier, where he got his doctorate in medicine in 1504. Champier then set himself up as personal physician to the poor and indigent of France. Just kidding, of course he actually went into the service of a nobleman, in this case the Duke of Lorraine. Champier is actually most famous for something other than his medical writings. He composed The Ship of Virtuous Ladies, yet another contribution to the debate over the moral qualities of the female sex. But since we've talked about that topic quite a bit, I thought it would be more interesting to cover Champier as a medical author. Like the Parisian masters, he brought a humanist agenda to this discipline, ignoring medieval sources. He was willing to use translations of Arabic medicine, but had rather mixed feelings about it, decrying doctors who had never read Galen and Avicenna, while also complaining that Avicenna was unduly under the sway of Islam, which he considered criminal and most filthy, and referring to Ivarides as an impious apostate. What differentiated him masters then was not his approach to the medical tradition, but his extensive use of Platonism, and especially Marsilio Ficino. You might recall that Ficino wrote a work called Dei triplici vita, Three Books on Life, on using medicine and magic to prolong longevity. Not to be outdone, Champier wrote Dei quadriplici vita, in which he investigates life at four levels, daily health, longevity, heavenly life, and super celestial salvation. His motivation for integrating medicine into this more cosmic perspective is clear from the motto he gives in his introduction, non sat est vivere, meaning, it is not enough just to live. His attitude reminds me of something a philosopher colleague of mine once said in the context of an academic dispute between the medical faculty and the School of Humanities. Doctors only keep us alive, she argued, whereas in the humanities, we study what makes life worth living. Champier would have wholeheartedly agreed. He argued that medicine must be joined to philosophy and even theology, just as the body is joined to the soul, and connects the good state of the body to ethical virtue. Much of his advice was drawn directly from Ficino, to the extent that critics charged him of plagiarism, but his response was that he was openly stealing from the best. He had always acknowledged Ficino as his teacher and model. So in this episode, we've seen various ways to approach medicine and integrate it with philosophy. What they all had in common was a return to ancient sources, especially Galen, but also Hippocrates. This is the Renaissance, after all. In other respects, they diverged widely. Where Fresnel advanced a holistic theory of substance and understood medicine accordingly, the Paracelsans applied the analytic tools of chemistry. They drew parallels between the physical system of the body and that of the cosmos, whereas Champier saw the physical side of humans as their least important aspect, and connected medicine to the metaphysical speculations of Florentine Platonism. If you asked me who was most on the right track, I'd probably say the followers of Paracelsus. Their idea that we might use chemical analysis to understand how drugs work has stood the test of time, in a way that dormative powers and other such postulates have not. Which is not to say that I'd like to be treated for an illness by a 16th century Paracelsan any more than I'd want to be treated by a Galenist. In the wise words of Montaigne, they say that some newcomer called Paracelsus is changing or reversing the entire order of the old rules, maintaining that up to the present, medicine has merely served to kill people. You will be able to prove that easily enough, I believe, but it would not be very wise for me, I think, to test his new empiricism at the cost of my life. With that, we're ready to take a break over the summer, since as usual there will be no new episodes in August. Enjoy the heat, and let's hope it's one of those summers that is not marked by the spread of any infectious diseases. When we come back, we'll be changing and reversing some more old rules as we meet the man who ripped up the Aristotelian playbook for teaching and learning. He was a royal professor at Paris who introduced new methods for philosophy that spread across Europe like wildfire. So join me in September when it will be back to school to meet the greatest teacher of 16th century France, Peter Ramos, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Counts. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the University of London. Most historians of philosophy admire the figures they work on. The Aristotle and Kant scholars might not agree with everything these famous thinkers said, but they believe it is all worth taking seriously. Why else devote your career to understanding the writings of a long dead philosopher? This goes hand in hand with the seemingly indispensable Principle of Charity, which dictates that when interpreting texts, we should do our best to show how they made sense, seeking internal coherence, resources for answering possible objections, and so on. But there are exceptions. I just read a book which adopts what you might call a principle of uncharity. Walter Ong's 1958 study of Peter Rameis. It remains a very informative and useful study, but it is relentlessly critical, even dismissive of Rameis. Ong calls him curiously amateurish, speaks of his demonstrated incompetence, and at one point says that a certain doctrine held by Rameis is close to the view of a madman. For Ong, Rameis could do no right. As if that wasn't bad enough, just two years later, Neil Gilbert's study of method in the Renaissance said of Rameis, The very acme of banality to us, but which struck his contemporaries as original and indeed revolutionary. With intellectual historians like these, who needs enemies? Certainly not Rameis, who already had plenty of enemies in his own lifetime. They would have been delighted to know that in 500 years people would still be calling Rameis an idiot. These critics thought that the Rameis program was misconceived and oversimplistic, and that it was itself uncharitable. Rameis could give as good as he got though, both to his contemporaries and to long dead authorities. He issued shocking attacks on Aristotle, still seen as the greatest of philosophers, and on the leading Latin rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian. This was a new and more radical version of what other humanists had been doing for quite some time. Not content to mock the scholastic Aristotelians, Rameis identified flaws in Aristotle himself. Not content to echo Erasmus's parody of Renaissance Ciceroians, Rameis aimed sarcastic invective at Cicero himself. Already at his master's examination in 1536, he offered to defend a proposition usually translated as, everything Aristotle said was lies. Ong argues that the word rendered lies here, commentitia, means something more like scattered remarks that do not cohere into a system, but still. Rameis's detractors also liked to accuse him of inconsistency and not without reason. So even though he was open about his irreverent project of attacking Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian in turn, he could also be quite complimentary about these very authors. He planned an ambitious set of commentaries devoted to Cicero, who he admitted was the most eloquent man who has ever lived, and he presented himself as the only true Aristotelian, who was finally recovering what was useful in a body of work that had been corrupted by ancient compilers and ignorant scholastics. When Jacob Schenk, who we met in episode 389 on theories of matter, attacked Rameis for his failures in logic, Rameis responded with a work called Defense of Aristotle, which of course presented a version of Aristotle in line with Rameis's own ideas. Eventually, Rameis's enemies caught up with him. In 1572, he was killed in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, a spasm of violence in Paris directed against Protestants. Rameis had converted in 1561, applying to religion the same instinct for reform that he brought to philosophy. In doing so, he turned his back on an important patron, the Cardinal of Guise, who had been a schoolmate of Rameis and offered support during Rameis's meteoric rise to the position of Regius Professor of Eloquence and Philosophy at the University of Paris. After converting, he had an eventful final decade of life, joining the Collège de France, but then having to flee to Switzerland and Germany before making a fateful return to Paris in time to be killed. That tragic event is memorialized in Christopher Marlowe's play about the massacre, which shows the wicked Duke of Guise calling Rameis a flat dichotomist before ordering his death. Rameis is allowed final words which capture his ambiguous attitude towards Aristotle. This scene is actually not a bad introduction to Rameis's intellectual project. If you know anything about Rameism, it is probably that it did indeed involve dichotomies, conceptual divisions that were presented as branching diagrams. But this was only part of Rameis's effort to reduce Aristotle's logical corpus, the Organon, into better form. His vaunted method was simultaneously an epistemological theory and a proposal for how to teach the linguistic and philosophical arts. At the center of the undertaking were three laws, which are inspired by Aristotle. The first, called the Law of Truth, states that scientific statements should hold true universally and necessarily of all the subjects named in the statement, which seems fair enough. For example, you shouldn't say that all giraffes are on the savannah if some of them are at the zoo. And the second, the Law of Justice, ensures the homogeneity of the truths included in a science. They must all fall under that science and serve its special ends. The third, the Law of Wisdom, tells us to check that the subject and predicate of a scientific truth match in terms of generality. For instance, you shouldn't say that isosceles triangles have internal angles of 180 degrees because this is true of all triangles. These laws introduce us to Ramus's preoccupations with philosophical method. In light of the Law of Justice, we realize that each art must be pursued by itself, without bringing in material from other disciplines. This is because a given art is always looking at the essential features of the subject matter of that art, a subject matter that is investigated in this art and in no other. So Ramus complained about, say, bringing geometrical proofs to bear on arithmetic, or vice versa. He applied the same point to separate the domains of philosophy and theology. Another methodological point is connected to the third law and its attention to generality. From this law, Ramus infers that we must begin at the most general level and proceed by stages, without skipping anything, to the more specific. Ramus offers a giraffe-free but still vivid example. Suppose someone wrote down the rules of Latin grammar on slips of paper and put them all in a jar. If you started pulling out bits of paper one after another in random order, you wouldn't have the exposition of an art, but just a bewildering sequence of injunctions. But then someone, if they were skilled in logic and grammar, someone like Ramus, could take these same bits of paper and arrange them in a way that made sense, such that you could work through them in that arrangement and learn Latin grammar. His recommendation for how to do this was simple. You should start with the most general rules and work towards the more specific. Thus, to change this example, if you are explaining the rules of soccer, you should start not by saying that an attacking player cannot be offside from a throw-in, but by saying that this is a team sport involving a ball, where the players are not allowed to use their arms and hands. Now we can already see why dichotomies would be a relevant way to proceed. You might sit your student down and say that among sports, some are individual and some involve teams. You can then divide the team sports into ball sports and non-ball sports, and so on. Living well before the founding of Paris Saint-Germain, Ramus did not use this example, but he did claim that other methods proposed by Aristotelian thinkers would produce results that are messy. Either because of problems with the textual transmission or due to Aristotle's own failings, or more likely for both reasons, the logical treatises of the organon do not go from the more general to the more specific. This makes them exceedingly difficult to follow. Another problem was that even great authors like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian neglected to offer reliable definitions, which are a crucial step in the process just described. If the student doesn't know what a sport is, then they will already be lost when you make that initial division into team and individual sports. Ramus explained that when he himself was a student, he was forced to endure teaching that was just as unsystematic as these classical authors, if not more so. Finally, though, he discovered the humanist Agricola, and was then led back to ancient writers who were more attentive to proper method, though not always perfect in their application of it, especially Plato and Galen. At this point, Ramus recalled, he began to think that Aristotle's authority was a deception. While all this sounds pretty reasonable, Ramus outraged his colleagues in Paris by suggesting that it is the entirety of what it means to be reasonable. There is only one method for the arts, and thanks to Ramus, I was just able to describe it to you in the course of a couple of minutes. One of his most bitter opponents was Jacques Sébentier, a professor at Paris who was appalled by Ramus's one-size-fits-all approach. It is not even the case that one and the same method is always used within a single art, never mind for all of them. You might need to use definition and division, sure, but you might also need to find causal explanations or analyze complex terms in light of their parts or perform induction and so on. In fact, the very first step in this method was more like pulling a rabbit out of a hat than pulling papers out of a jar. Sébentier asked where the initial definition comes from and accused Ramus of having no answer apart from an appeal to intuition. Whether or not this was entirely fair, Sébentier was putting his finger on a genuine and important feature of Ramus's approach to logic or dialectic, namely his optimistic assessment of our capacities as untrained reasoners. He of course offered a division of dialectic, which for him has three stages. The first is called natural dialectic. This means the tacit use of reasoning principles, which all of us do every day when we are arguing or explaining things. Ramus equates it with reason itself. It belongs to natural dialectic to go from the more general to the more specific. That's just an obvious way to make yourself clear, and people will do it without thinking. Only at a second stage does dialectic make these rules explicit and investigate them. This is what is taught in logic classes at the university. In a crucial third stage, students must put into practice what they have learned as abstract rules. Ramus proposed dividing even the day's teaching, accordingly, with rules explained in the morning followed by practice in the afternoon. Thus, you might study logic from textbooks until lunch, and then after lunch read passages in classical works trying to identify the logical structure in a process Ramus called unwieving. A real example mentioned by Ramus is a speech by Penelope found in Ovid in which she is lamenting the absence of her husband Ulysses. From these 28 verses, reckoned Ramus, flow four propositions, sixteen assumptions, and eight conclusions. That may not sound like fun, but at the time the Ramus' focus on practice was unusual in its attention to the needs of students. As that illustration also shows, Ramus applied the techniques of dialectic to literary texts. This seems to go against one of the strictures we mentioned before, namely that one should pursue each art in its own right without mixing in material from other arts. Shouldn't Ovid be handled by rhetoric, not by the logical art of dialectic? The contradiction is only apparent though. Ramus did advise studying arts one at a time and as self-contained disciplines, but he also thought that they built on each other. He recommended a seven-year curriculum with three years of grammar, in other words three years to learn good Latin, followed by one year each for rhetoric, dialectic, mathematics, and natural philosophy. By contrast, the humanist Juan Luis Vives recommended eight years just to learn Latin and Greek, with a further ten for the arts. Ramus' plan of offering a full curriculum in such a brief time has plausibly been traced to his humble origins as an orphan from the peasant class who had to work as a servant for a wealthier student to afford his studies at Paris. His plan would make it easier for clever boys of modest means, like the young Ramus had been, to complete their studies quickly and seek advancement. From this perspective, contemporary critiques of the superficiality of Ramism have a whiff of aristocratic gatekeeping about them. Notice that in his program of study, dialectic comes after rhetoric, which again may seem strange. Don't you need to learn to argue logically before you try to master the ornamentation and artful presentation of arguments in the form of rhetorical speech? Not necessarily. Remember, all people have a good grasp of dialectic at a natural level, so you can learn about rhetoric first, acquiring the skills to present with eloquence the intuitively plausible reasoning that comes naturally. Mythic has, again of course, two parts, delivery and expression. In the end, someone who has mastered both arts could combine them to come to a fully rounded appreciation of, say, a speech by Cicero, or produce a speech of their own, which is excellent in delivery and expression, but also has logical rigor. At the next stage of the curriculum, we have two more arts that are inextricably intertwined, namely mathematics and natural philosophy. Even Ramus's modern defenders admit that he was not a brilliant mathematician, but he did devote a good deal of time to the discipline and wrote about its history. His efforts were inspired by an underestimated factor in generating intellectual innovation, petty academic infighting. When his enemy, Charpentier, was given a chair of mathematics in Paris, Ramus protested on the grounds that Charpentier was completely ignorant of this topic. Charpentier argued that the professorship was not necessarily tied to any one subject and got permission to teach both philosophy and mathematics, but then he didn't get around to teaching any math. The case came before the Paris Parliament, which made the determination that pretty well anyone can teach mathematics, since it is so easy and thus found in favor of Charpentier. This gave Ramus plenty of reason to inflate the difficulty and importance of the discipline. He latched onto the figure of Pythagoras, imagining him as a kind of proto-Ramus who set out the truths of mathematics as principles for natural philosophy. A true physics, he said, should be founded on mathematical reasoning. While Ramus only sketched this project at a methodological level and did not really carry it out, we might still give him credit for anticipating the mathematical approach to physics that will emerge a few generations later in the 17th century. Likewise his more student-friendly innovations in pedagogy prefigure educational reformers of the Enlightenment, like the Czech theorist Jan Komenius. Like Komenius, Ramus gave serious thought to the perspective of his students. Bear in mind, we're talking about boys in their teenage years, more like today's junior high and high school students than today's university students. Latin was not their native language, and they were being asked to learn by rote memorization from texts by Aristotle that, to this day, frequently puzzle career specialists in his thought. Ramus's methods were tailored to make the acquisition of the liberal arts more feasible. This was bound to strike fellow academics as a kind of dumbing down of the curriculum, and the acerbic comments he has still attracted in our own day shows that this accusation has not gone away. Yet Ramus had significant advantages. His more streamlined curriculum, one discipline per year for seven years, would usher students through the university at a brisk pace and not ask them to do too much at once. As we're still asked to do a lot of memorization, but the structured presentation of the material, clear definitions, diagrams, branching across the page, made that a far more manageable task. Furthermore, we should not leap to the conclusion that Ramus's strict divisions and classifications allowed for no nuance. In rhetoric, for instance, one should learn how some audiences are friendly, others unfriendly, with different tactics appropriate for the two kinds. In real life, we know that things are more complicated. A given crowd might be on the fence, or made up of both friends and opponents, or be friendly to one part of your case and unfriendly to another. But learning the basic opposition draws the student's attention to this important consideration. It is at the stage of actual practice which Ramus emphasized so much that the student will learn to apply the point in real cases in all their diversity and complexity. Speaking of applying method to real cases, I can't end this episode without returning to a famous episode in Ramus's own life, his intervention in the debate over Copernican astronomy. As we saw when we looked at Tycho Brahe, Ramus encountered Brahe during his travels in Germany and pressed him to discover an astronomy without hypotheses. He also wrote to Gio Agreticus, urging him to pursue the same goal. And in the mathematical work that grew out of his confrontation with Sartre-Tier, Ramus elaborated on this by saying, would that Copernicus had rather set his mind on the establishment of such an astronomy without hypotheses, for it would have been easier by far for him to describe an astronomy corresponding to the truth of its stars than as if with the labor of a giant to move the earth so that in consequence of the motion of the earth we might observe the stars at rest. The passage concludes by offering a Regis professorship to anyone who manages the feat. In 1597, Kepler would, in a letter of his own to his teacher Michael Maestlin, jestingly lay claim to that chair. Joking aside though, we must ask what this has to do with Ramus' theories of scientific method more generally. To some extent the answer is clear. Just as he traced pure method in mathematics and dialectic to deep antiquity, so he thought that the most ancient of the ancients had pursued astronomy without hypotheses, so the modern exponents of the art should do the same. We might also note that the positing of hypotheses, which might then be directly confirmed by empirical evidence, plays no part in the single method recognized by Ramus. A Ramist astronomy would, like the rest of Ramus' natural philosophy, simply apply mathematical truths in a physical context. The fact that it's hard to spell out in fuller detail what this might mean, and the fact that Ramus was unable to see the potential power of a hypothetical method in natural philosophy, show that his critics, from Schenck and Charpentier to Ong and Gilbert, did have a point. The strength of Ramus was his insight into good educational practice. His weakness was to assume that real scientific method should track that practice, as if scientific research and the learning of what scientists have already discovered were the same endeavor. That weakness notwithstanding, the strength of Ramus' project was sufficient to trigger an international movement, as scholars well beyond France embraced his methods for their clarity, simplicity, and efficiency. Appropriately enough, Ramism branched out across Europe, and wherever it went it also appropriately incited division. We'll be learning about this in a couple of episodes, after we explore the nature of the Ramus program itself in the company of Robert Goulding. Let's give him our undivided attention next time, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Peter Ramis and mathematics with Robert Golding, who is associate professor in the program of liberal studies and director of the program in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame. Hi Robert. Hey, hey Peter. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Can you just start by reminding our listeners who Peter Ramis was like, when did he live? Where did he live? What sort of things did he write about? Sure. So the simple answer is that he was a French logician. More complicated, he was someone who tried to range their interests over the entire curriculum of the liberal arts in a way that was controversial at the time. He was born in 1515, a kind of poor provincial kid who made his way to the University of Paris, where he excelled. He pretty much stayed there for the rest of his life. He came into the public scene in 1543, when he published a couple of books that were extremely critical of Aristotle. And in the wake of that, he was banned for several years from teaching philosophy at the university. So when he came back to philosophical teaching, it was as a member of the Collège Royale, now the Collège de France, where he stayed the rest of his life. He was a Protestant, or at least became a Protestant later in his life, and in 1572 was killed in the massacre on Saint de Bartholomew's Day when Catholics in Paris turned against their Protestant neighbors. You said that he came back to teaching after this hiatus of being banned. Was he more polite about Aristotle once he returned? No, if anything, he considered that his safe space in the Collège Royale gave him the license to be even more outspoken against Aristotle. And he used it as a kind of a safe chair from which to try and reform the whole curriculum of the University of Paris, particularly along mathematical lines. In the eight years or so that he was banned from teaching philosophy, he turned to mathematics instead and gave lectures in mathematics, and on his return tried to come up with a way of reforming the curriculum that would be based around the quadrivium as much as the trivium. Okay, so that brings us on to our main topic here, which is mathematics and his thought. But before we get into what Remus thought about mathematics, can you say something about how mathematics was seen in the time leading up to him, and what the main issues in philosophy of mathematics were up to his time? I think there's two parts to the answer. First of all, how was it treated at the University of Paris in particular, where Remus was a professor, and then the larger question of what was going on in the philosophy of mathematics at the time. At the university, as Remus was very outspoken in indicating, mathematics was very much a second class subject. It was not taught very seriously at the university. In fact, two professorships of the Collège Royale had been reserved for mathematicians specifically because the university was felt not to be living up to its mission of actually teaching the whole of the liberal arts, mathematics in particular. So, Remus came into a system in which mathematics was neglected. In terms of interest in mathematics, there was a whole lot going on, I guess, in the philosophy of mathematics in this period as well. One question that was being debated at the time was a so-called question on the certainty of mathematics, whether mathematics lived up to the standards of Aristotelian demonstration. It wasn't a question that Remus himself was very interested in because he wasn't very interested in Aristotle. At least, he didn't believe that Aristotle's strictures on these things were always worth following. But that was a question that was being debated at the universities at the time. In more humanistic circles, but also at the universities, the debate over the philosophy of mathematics had been changed by the publication of Proclus' commentary on the first book of Eucalyptus' Elements, which does set out a Platonist philosophy of mathematics. People were wrestling with that. They didn't quite understand it until the 17th century. But insofar as people were thinking about what are mathematical objects, they were either looking at Aristotle or they were trying to make sense of Proclus' account. Can I just ask you about the first of those problems you mentioned, which is the thing about whether mathematics is certain. So, there's a couple of things that I think are striking about that. One is that still today, we tend to think of mathematics as a kind of paradigm of certainty. And that's been true pretty much throughout the history of philosophy. And second of all, Aristotle keeps giving mathematical examples himself in the philosophy of analytics, right? So, why would anyone doubt in this period that mathematics rose to the appropriate level of certainty for science? So, one of the questions they raised was whether the proofs that you read, let's say, in Eucalyptus' Elements, were causal proofs. And it's very difficult to discern exactly what a causal proof would look like in mathematics. But since mathematics doesn't seem to talk about the causes of mathematical objects, it seems that you can't have demonstrative syllogisms in the way that Aristotle thinks. Because he thinks that the middle term of the syllogism has to identify the cause that links the... Exactly. Exactly. If you can't do that, if you're proving something about isosceles triangles, what's the cause of a triangle? What's the cause of its angle sum? Yeah. Okay, I see. Speaking of the history of mathematics, this is actually something Remus has ideas about, right? So, he has very strong views about how mathematics developed in antiquity already. What are these ideas? How true are they? So, he writes a book in 1567, which is the first comprehensive history of mathematics. It's written within a polemic about the nature of mathematics itself that he's having with some of his Aristotelian opponents. He tries to draw an account of the history of mathematics, which traces it back to the Garden of Eden, as many other historians, histories of mathematics did at the time as well, but then draws it all the way through to the modern period. The story he's trying to tell is essentially there was a natural kind of reasoning at one time in human history. And by natural reasoning, he meant reasoning based on practical experience, on actual familiarity with measuring things and counting things and so on, which gradually gets obscured by people like Plato and Aristotle and even Euclid. So, on the one hand, he writes some works in which he tries to pull apart their mathematical examples and mathematical proofs, say they're just obfuscating the simple truth about mathematics. Mathematics kind of lies on the surface of the world, as Remus thinks, and also structures the human mind in some sense. If a proof is difficult, let's say, it means it must be wrong in some way, because mathematics should be the most evident thing of all. So, his history of mathematics is a history of people gradually obscuring what was once a clear truth. That's why he gets very excited about German mathematics in particular, because as he sees that these people are doing real things, these people are actually measuring things, or with engineers in Italy as well, people who are actually finding mathematics in the real world, they seem to be doing real mathematics. Yeah. So, when does he think the obscurantism came in? I mean, when was the... when is there a turn away from kind of pure, natural, nice, easy to understand mathematics to this more difficult mathematics? Do we even have any texts? Yes, well, so he likes some of the reports of how mathematics was done. So, he uses, for instance, again, Proclus's commentary on Euclid, which has a little potted history of mathematics drawn from the Aristotelian eudemus. The person he really blames for it all going badly wrong is Plato. And he blames Plato because Plato had the opportunity, through his travels to Egypt, to southern Italy, and so on, to draw together all of the strands of mathematics that had been separated after the fall. And Plato was the one human being who had those all united in his own person. But because of his vanity, and that's the word that Remus uses, because of his vanity, Plato decided to obscure it and make mathematics difficult and only approachable through the means that Plato would allow people to approach it. So, actually, that means he would contrast Plato to earlier Pythagoreanism, whereas some Renaissance figures saw Plato as a kind of culminating figure in this way. Yeah. And one of the things, you know, Remus's own history of philosophy changes over his life. In his earlier works, he's very much a Socratic philosopher. He, or he at least, claims to be a follower of Socrates. He admires Plato. He believes that Plato is an anti-metaphysical writer. He reads Plato in a particular way, particularly the beginning of the Parmenides. He thinks that's Plato's last word on the theory of forms, a kind of destructive approach to them. By his late work, he's been into Tyra Plato as well. And at that point, Plato becomes the reason that things are going wrong in mathematics as well. Okay. So you mentioned already that Remus wanted to bring in a mathematical method in philosophy and also in teaching. And he's very famous, to the extent that he's famous, for his systematic approach to philosophy and science, for using lots of tables and diagrams. So on the face of it, that already looks kind of mathematical. How exactly does he see his method as mathematical? Well, that's a really good question. First, on the tables and diagrams, they're more associated with Remus's followers than with Remus himself. Remus uses these famous bracketed tables in his dialectic occasionally, but those wonderful things in which you see whole sciences divided up into these page after page long tables, those are really his German followers that do that kind of thing. It's implicit in the writing though, Remus is thinking in this kind of dichotomous way, dividing subjects up into further and further pieces. It is mathematical, at least as he wants to imagine mathematics should be. Ideally, he thinks mathematics should, like all natural things, be able to be divided up dichotomously, neatly into all of its parts so that one can proceed from the most general down to the most special. And the mind, when it sees the vision, will immediately ascend to it because it conforms to nature. In fact, when he actually turned to Euclid and Archimedes and other texts, he discovered mathematics was nothing like that. So he actually publishes his own versions of geometry and arithmetic, which do attempt to conform to that. I think it's true though, when he thinks of his method, when his method is developed, which is simply a way of arranging knowledge, he really does at the time imagine that it is in some way related to mathematical reasoning. So the idea is not that actual mathematical proofs or use of numbers or something, that that's going to turn up in every branch of science, but rather that the structure of mathematics is replicated in the structure of other sciences. To some extent, I just want to say two things to that. First of all, the method itself isn't supposed to be a means of discovering anything. It's supposed to be a means of arranging ideas, and insofar as mathematics had this reputation of being very well arranged, that's why things should look a bit mathematical, all the other sciences as well. But there was another sense as well in which Remus really thought that the arts in general could be made more mathematical. And this particularly comes out in a couple of speeches that he gave. In 1551, when he first is allowed to teach philosophy again, he's immediately attacked by some of his opponents who decide, well, if we can't kick him out of the university altogether, we'll just make sure that none of his students can graduate. So they accuse him of not teaching the curriculum correctly. And it looks kind of fishy. He turns up at the College Royale and says, I'm now the professor of philosophy and eloquence, and I will teach philosophy through literary texts. So the Aristotelians freak out, and they say, well, he obviously can't be teaching the things he's supposed to teach. So he gives the speech on philosophical teaching, very defensive speech, in which he goes through the curriculum as it's set out in the statutes and says, yeah, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm checking all the boxes for the students. A few years later in 1557, when he's much more well established and he's actually been spending the last couple of years working with mathematicians, editing and publishing mathematical texts, he reissues the speech, reprints the speech, doesn't tell anyone that he's edited it, but it's actually a completely different speech. And if you turn to that section, he's now saying, not my students are doing this, but he offers an ideal curriculum for the University of Paris, which is mathematical. And it ends up the last year is going to be devoted, he says, to physics based on mathematical principles, not the physics of Aristotle's physics, a kind of natural philosophy without mathematics, but something which starts from mathematics. That sounds actually very congenial in a way to the way we now think about physics. Yeah. We imagine physicists doing lots and lots of mathematics. Yeah. Is that really what he has in mind? I mean, does he think that concrete mathematical methods should in fact be used in physics? It's in some ways a difficult question, because if you actually look at the works he published on physics, they don't look very mathematical at all. So the book that he claims is going to take the place of natural philosophy in his curriculum is essentially Virgil's Georgics, which he systematizes and comments on. But he also, and there's some evidence that in about the same time that he gave this renewed version of the speech, he was lecturing to his students on atomism. And he was giving a version of atomism, which talked about geometrical objects as atomic objects, which were directly reflected in the world. So the world is made up of atoms because geometry itself was made up of atoms. And there's still traces of that in his later writings. He gradually tries to face it because he gets so much criticism from some of his Aristotelian opponents when they hear he's lecturing on this. But if you look at early versions of his works published in the 1550s, these lectures are still there. And that's what he seemed to have in mind when he's talking about a physics based on mathematical principles. So does he imagine that you could give a geometrical analysis of what's going on at the atomic level? So is this something like what Plato has in mind in the Timaeus? Yeah, so he's inspired by Plato. He's inspired by the traditions of the early academy that seem to embrace a kind of geometrical atomism, the idea that not just physical objects but geometrical objects themselves are made up of indivisible lines, smallest geometrical units. And he finds that as he sifts through the late antique commentaries on Aristotle, written by Neoplatonists, who all reject that view. People like Proclus, Simplicius, Philoponus, and so on, they all reject that kind of geometrical atomism as being incoherent. But Remus reads between the lines and says there was a theory here. It was an original theory that Plato was teaching the academy. Aristotle buried it. But for a while Remus saw it as part of his remit to revive this theory, which would put nature and mathematics back in conformity with each other. And how does he think that we would know this? I mean, is the idea that we can just posit as an obvious truth that there must be a mathematical structure at the basis of physical reality? Or is it somehow based on empirical evidence? Not the kind of empirical evidence that we would imagine. It really comes down to what Remus thinks geometry is. Remus begins his work on geometry like he begins many of his works by defining it and defining it in a very characteristically Remus way. Geometry is the art of measuring well. And insofar as something can't be measured, it's not geometrical. So he has this wonderful passage in one of his works in which he says, you know, what is a geometer? A geometer isn't someone who plays with objects inside his head. He's a busy doer of things. He's actually out there with a ruler and a plumb line and he's measuring things and so on. And he said that people who actually measure things tell you there's a limit to which you can measure things. There's a smallest possible measurement. And he says, so we can't posit anything below that smallest possible measurement. Geometry itself breaks down into these kind of indivisible chunks because geometry is limited by the capacity of measurement. Oh, that's really interesting. So it's almost like he thinks that we have to posit an underlying physical structure that matches the limits of our own knowledge. Yeah, yeah. So it's a kind of assumption that the world must line up with human structures of knowing. Exactly. And that's a constant through, even from his very earliest book, work on dialectic. He, you know, he insists in that work that his dialectic is natural and it reflects the structure of nature and it reflects the structure of the human mind. And his philosophy changed in various ways over the next decades, but he never really lost that fundamental idea that there has to be a kind of mirroring of those three things in each other. Okay, so something that you've mentioned a few times now is that he really doesn't like Aristotelianism. Yeah. And I think now we've maybe heard enough about Remus to maybe approach this in a more concrete way. Sure. So what is it about Aristotelianism that he doesn't like? How is it failing to carry out the project that you've been describing? So there was a myth that was put around by some of his earliest biographers that he wrote a master's thesis called Everything Written by Aristotle is a Lie. And the word he used for lie is commentitium, which is actually a Remus term of art. It means something that is confected rather than natural. That's probably not true, but it pretty much reflects what Remus thinks about Aristotle. It should be true. It should be true. It really should be true because that's his approach that Aristotle is constantly papering over the nature of reality with abstract concepts. He writes several books that are just devoted to pulling apart Aristotelian works of the scholae physicae. The Lectures on the Physics is just a kind of a tedious chapter by chapter, line by line, lampooning of the physics. He does a similar thing for the metaphysics as well. The irony is that when you look closely at what Remus actually believes, he often looks kind of Aristotelian. So when he's talking about the philosophy of mathematics, in general he can't quite understand Proclus' philosophy. He certainly doesn't like the theory of forms or the idea of kind of abstract mathematical objects. He comes down to a theory of abstraction that's pretty much the same as Aristotle's. That's what the mathematical objects are in our mind. But he nevertheless relentlessly attacks Aristotle for presenting it badly, for using poor arguments, for relying on logical sophisms to get where he wants to go, and above all for not organizing things well. And that's Remus's real problem that, again, physics should reflect the structure of the human mind, should reflect the structure of the world, it should be easy, it should be straightforward, it should flow according to the famous method, because the method is a natural way that art should work and it doesn't. So a lot of what he ends up doing, if you look at his own works, his works on mathematics and dialectic, he's often taking the ideas of others and his own ideas and then rearranging them into these little atomic units that are all strung together in the correct order at last. That's kind of nice actually, because it means that his writings mirror the nature of reality themselves by having these atomic... Absolutely, yeah, yeah. You know, I think that's a very good observation that he really does think arts are made out of documenta, by which he means kind of irreducible bits of knowledge. How much do we know about how he actually went about teaching his students? I mean, you mentioned these speeches he gave about what he was planning to do and whether it fulfilled the requirements of the curriculum, but do we have more concrete evidence about what actually happened in Remus's classroom? Yeah, we do. He gave public lectures on the one hand, at least in his early years, those public lectures were incredibly popular at the University of Paris. He was probably the most sought-after lecturer there. Because he kept making fun of Aristotle? Yeah, he made fun of Aristotle, he made relentless fun of his colleagues, that's why they kept taking him to court and trying to get him kicked out of the university. So, you know, there's these descriptions of him kind of pacing the lecture theatre, ranting about Aristotle, ranting about his colleagues. There's more than a thousand students packed into the room, standing in the aisle, sitting on desks, just to witness this phenomenon. He was also reputed to have a perfect Latin style. So, even his opponents said, yeah, the guy sounds like Cicero. He's a jerk, but he sounds like Cicero. So, he was very much sought after for that. He also taught on a smaller scale in the two colleges where he worked at the Collège Ave Maria and the Collège de Préle, where he was principal for many years. So, he had these kind of small study groups as well. He taught mathematics. He wasn't actually a professor of mathematics, he was, as I mentioned, the professor of philosophy and eloquence, though you'll often find, especially after his death, portraits of Remus that describe him as being a professor of mathematics because he became so associated with mathematics. He wasn't very good at mathematics. That's kind of, you know, one of the ironies that although he loved it and he loved the idea of mathematics, he really struggled with it. So, one of his biographers, one of his students, described how Remus would prepare for a lecture in mathematics. He would spend the entire morning surrounded by this kind of little commission of mathematicians, young mathematicians that he had put together around him, being drilled in the subject on which he would have to lecture that afternoon and just kind of regurgitate what it was that they had finally got into his head. Didn't always go well. So, there's a very hostile pamphlet written against Remus called On the Disastrous Deanship of Peter Remus, and it describes him going into a class, having been prepped by students in the morning and standing at the board trying to prove a mathematical proposition and staring at the board dumber than a fish, absolutely unable to figure out how the proof should go ahead. That's very sad. Yeah. Yeah. And did Remus also change the range of texts that he had his students read, or is he mostly just using a new approach but to the same text? He really does change the texts, and that's what gets people upset. He might have been able to argue that the students are getting the same experience, they're being exposed to the same ideas, but not in a way that anybody at the university recognizes being legitimate. So, he would teach natural philosophy from Virgil's Georgics. He would in general try and teach all the subjects of the curriculum from poets or orators on the assumption that they too were natural reasons. And if we're able to analyze their texts well enough, break it down into its kind of atomic pieces and put them together in the right order, we'll discover that they actually have a natural account of the world that's hidden in the texts somewhere. So, he changes the texts in that sense. He's simply not reading, for a large part, Aristotle to the students. He's critiquing Aristotle to them and then giving them literary alternatives to read to the same end. He also really does set about publishing new mathematical texts. So, this little committee of mathematicians that he assembles around himself in the 1550s, they're advising him on what to say in his lectures, but they're also editing Greek mathematical texts, works by Euclid, works by Archimedes, translating them, writing very, very influential prefaces to them, which set them into some kind of context. And those works get republished again and again. The prefaces to those works get published long after Remus is dead. Okay, so one last question, which is about his legacy and influence. We already mentioned the famous use of diagrams in texts by other authors who are obviously inspired by Remus. Does his influence go deeper than that? Is it really just a kind of, here's how you could go about setting up graphical representations of the sciences, or do they really take over his whole program of mathematization and so on? It's a good question. Remus, of course, has a vogue for at least the next half century or more. After Remus dies, it becomes huge in Protestant countries in particular, as Remus is recognized as a Protestant martyr. It does have some effect, I think, on the way people think about the sciences, and there's some particular people you could pick out as being deeply influenced by Remus. So Bill Abroad Snell, who goes on to discover the law of refraction, is a Remus and works out of Remus textbooks and is really thinking through mathematics in a very structured Remus way. And he writes his own manuscript on refraction, which is certainly influenced by Remus. Francois Piet, the great French algebraist, it's difficult to tell exactly how deeply the influence goes, but Remus himself, in some of his mathematical work, says there's books in Euclid where you can just throw away the impossible to follow reasoning in book 10 or in book 2 of the Euclid's Elements, let's say, and replace it with algebra. And Remus is not the first, but certainly one of the most popular authors to say there's a way of reading the ancients that turns what they're saying into algebraic reasoning. And that's pretty much what Piet arguably is doing as well. He says he wants means to be able to solve any problem. And what that means really is approaching the problems that the ancients set and recasting them in algebraic terms. There's one other example as well. Remus, in all of his writings, insists that people have to reason naturally. He's very upset with the fact that astronomy uses so-called hypotheses, that they observe how the planets are moving and then they imagine that there are some circles moving up there. He says in some of his works that he would like to see an astronomy without hypotheses. He even writes to Reticus, Copernicus's kind of right-hand guy, and says it's such a shame that Copernicus couldn't come up with a way of having an astronomy without hypotheses. And Reticus writes back and basically tells me he doesn't know what he's talking about. But in one of his works he says, I promise a professorship to anybody who can come up with an astronomy without any hypotheses. Finally, Kepler, long after Remus dies, semi-ironically claims the professorship. And he says, I've now built what Remus wanted, which is an astronomy which doesn't make hypothetical circles in the sky, but in fact relies on the natural causes of things. Okay, thank you very much for that wide-ranging and interesting look at mathematics and Remus, and for coming on the podcast. Great, thank you very much. And please join me next time as we continue to look at philosophy during the Reformation, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Divide and Conquer the Spread of Ramism. It's been a while since we heard from the Department of Nominative Determinism here at Hopwag headquarters. The last time they spoke up, it was to point out how appropriate it was that Pico della Mirandola was born into the title Count of Concord. But they've just circulated a memo after hearing the last episode about Peter Ramus, in French, Pierre de la Ramée. It turns out that Ramus means branch in Latin, so it's almost too good to be true that Ramism, the movement inspired by his ideas, is renowned for its use of branching diagrams that lay out conceptual divisions. There are many, many examples, but a nice one would be the division of philosophy itself, presented by Johann Frege in 1576. It divides our favorite discipline into parts and instruments, with the parts further divided into the study of natures and the study of ethical issues. The study of natures, again, has two subdivisions, since we can study quantities or qualities, the former being mathematics, the latter the physical sciences. Finally, mathematics is divided into arithmetic and geometry. Of course, listening to me go through that is much less clear than seeing it on the page, with branching lines showing the relationships like in a family tree set on its side. And clarity was the point. As the medieval jurist, Azzo, had pointed out centuries earlier, division stimulates the mind of the reader, provides sense to the intellect, and cleverly molds the memory. The practice of division goes back way further than that. The technique is already found in the dialogues of Plato, especially the Sophist and the Statesman, which helped to inspire Ramos. Plato mostly worked with divisions into two, or dichotomies, but occasionally allowed divisions into more than two. Likewise the Ramists. For instance, that diagram by Frege is mostly dichotomous, but lists six disciplines under the physical sciences. Ramos may also have been influenced by more recent divisions, like those that became increasingly common in medical literature around the 1530s. But by the turn of the 17th century, the branch diagrams had become a hallmark of Ramism. They captured visually everything this movement represented, good and bad. Diagrams are clear and easy to understand, but they can easily be suspected of sacrificing nuance for the sake of that clarity. Living in a post-Ramis world, we take for granted the way that tables and charts present information in a highly abstract manner, and we understand that the abstraction is a two-sided coin. With power to instruct comes power to mislead, as when a chart highlights a certain kind of information while suppressing others. You're also more liable to remember information presented in tabular form, a fact that made Ramism quietly revolutionary. It proposed a change to something as fundamental as the way people remember. Mnemonic techniques were at least as old as philosophy itself, already Aristotle talks about them in his short treatise On Memory, but they had often used concrete imagery, like remembering ten things by imagining them sitting in front of ten different houses on a familiar street. By contrast, as Francis Yates has written, the Ramist man must smash the image both within and without, must substitute for the old idolatrous art the new imageless way of remembering through abstract dialectical rules. The branch diagrams put those rules to work on the page, a perfect encapsulation of the purpose of dialectic, which in Ramus's words, is like some mirror representing the universal and general likenesses of all things. One might even go so far as to say that the blank page becomes that mirror, reflecting a logical or conceptual space that is then marked out in unbroken lines, as Ramus put it. The method was facilitated by the new technology of printing, which allowed the diagrams to be reproduced in the textbooks that came to be used all over Europe. Tellingly, the diagrams became more and not less regimented as the decades passed. They are more a feature of later Ramist works than of Ramus's original publications, and become increasingly constricted by the rule that each concept should be divided exactly in two. The heyday of Ramism was between 1570 and 1630, and its region of greatest influence was in Central Europe. One might expect this to be the result of Ramus's own travels, when he was temporarily forced to flee Paris after converting to Protestantism. But actually, Ramism began to spread earlier than that in northwestern Germany, and remained a stronger force there than in the cities Ramus actually visited. It didn't hurt that Ramus's main publisher, Andre Wechssel, relocated to Frankfurt shortly after Ramus's death, churning out hundreds of editions. Aside from the works of Ramus himself, the textbook on rhetoric by his close collaborator, Omer Talon, also became important in the movement. That movement was taken up not so much in the universities, about which we've talked so much in this series, as in what Americans like me would call high schools, what in Germany were then, and still are, known as Gynasian. We're talking here about education for teenagers, an ideal context for Ramus's user-friendly methods. From France and Germany, the methods were exported all over Europe and beyond, as far north as Scandinavia, as far east as Transylvania and Hungary, as far west as Ireland, and later on even to Harvard University, in my hometown of Boston. Proponents of Ramism constantly emphasized the usefulness of their approach, a result of its abbreviated curriculum, its efficient teaching methods, and its emphasis on practice. Ramism would not train men to become great scholars like Erasmus, but it was perfectly suited to prepare young men to work as, say, merchants, competent in mathematics and Latin, without being overly well-read in the classics. Speaking of the flourishing Ramus program at the city of Herbon, one observer said bluntly that, students educated here quickly find suitable employment. The modern scholar Neil Gilbert, whom we saw two episodes ago calling Ramus's project the very acme of banality, also commented that Europe was deluged with small convenient school manuals in which the life of traditional subjects was systematically and methodically eradicated and reduced to rules so simple that any child, literally, could learn them. Here you can feel free to imagine the highly trained theologians of the Sorbonne, or indeed Erasmus, rolling their eyes at this lowering of standards. Actually, you don't need to imagine it, because plenty of people were carping about it at the time. In Paris, one of Ramus's own colleagues compared the students' enthusiasm for his teaching to their enjoyment of pantagruel, as a game and for amusement, and for good measure added that everything Ramus was saying had been lifted from better scholars like Wala, Agricola, Vives, Melancton, and Agrippa. In 1593, the English Protestant Richard Hooker called Ramism, an art which teacheth the way of speedy discourse and restraineth the mind of man that it may not wax over wise. A few years later, a professor at Hempstead said, Do not think that philosophy, such a divine good, consists of childish trivia, and who appeals to children more than Ramus? In the seventeenth century, Roger Bacon was still added. He called Ramism a method of imposture by which men may speedily come to make a show of learning who have it not. The works of the Ramus are, he said, much like a frippars or brokers shop that hath ends of everything but nothing of worth. Some impression of the bitterness and longevity of these disputes over Ramism is conveyed by the fact that there was a controversy over it in Sweden at the University of Uppsala in 1638. When a Ramus professor there was attacked for his methods, he pleaded in his own defense that the works of Ramus were a perfect introduction for beginners, who could then move on to Aristotle. There was more at stake here than pedagogy. The Swedish crown liked the idea of freeing the curriculum from the time-consuming methods of the scholastics, both for the sake of efficiency and as a way of undermining the power of the Church. Speaking of which, religious concerns were also important in spreading the ideas of Ramus. He had, after all, died as a Protestant martyr, specifically a Calvinist one, though this did not preclude his being used at Lutheran institutions. An admirer at Leiden wrote breathlessly, Ramus, ornament of the wise, while you were shaping the noble arts by laws and method and your own life by piety, a pack of sophists took you down with their teeth and blind fanaticism by the sword. However, you are strong like the high rising palm tree. Not long after his murder, he was honored in an ode written in England, comparing him to Saint Stephen. In Britain, Ramism would often be connected to the rigorous reform of the Puritans. It was a match made in heaven, as they might have said themselves. In the eyes of critics, what drew the Puritans to Ramism was a shared penchant for simplistic dogmatism, and of course the irreverent disregard for long-standing tradition that was epitomized by Ramus's polemics against Aristotle. It was indeed Aristotelianism that was the main rival to Ramism in this period, albeit that in central Europe this was a version of Aristotelianism that had itself grown out of the Reformation. We know all about it already, the humanist approach to Aristotle attached above all to the name of Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon was himself not overly impressed by Ramus. In 1543, he said of the latter's work on dialectic, it is a good effort but contains many foolish statements, and added that it was rather long-winded in the French manner. He would no doubt have been stunned to learn that this long-winded Frenchman would be his main competitor for impressionable hearts and minds in the decades to come. What then would be the fundamental differences between Ramist and Philippist methods? Understandably, people usually say Philippist and not Melanchthonist. As we know, Ramus did not entirely reject the value of Aristotle, but he was celebrated and scorned in equal measure for his famous attacks on this leading philosophical authority. Thus, we have such documents as a textbook from 1586 in which every reference to Ramus is underlined, enabling the reader to extract just the attacks on Aristotle. You can imagine the delight such impudence would have given teenage students if this was not their parents' logic. These kids could also be grateful that they weren't being asked to slog line by line through Aristotle, perhaps even in the original. That certainly made things easier on them, though we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to the students at Leiden, who in 1582 protested that they wanted to study Aristotle in Greek and not be taught from facile Ramus textbooks. It was in the context of the ensuing debate that Justus Lipsius made his famous remark, no one will be great for whom Ramus is great. That Parisian critic of Ramus was right to say that his ideas were inspired by humanists like Valla, Agricola, and so on, but in his program there was no time for the deeply learned classical scholarship that made Melanchthon such an admired figure. Ramus himself didn't even have an advanced mastery of Greek. As Howard Hudson has said in his excellent book on German Ramism, humanism, it appears, had spawned something which now jeopardized humanism itself. And in another book on education in this period, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have suggested that Ramism was key in what they call a shift from humanism to the humanities. Such classical learning as was imparted to young students was subordinated to the pragmatic goals of Ramism, in which the aim of classical education was to produce effective writers and active participants in civic life rather than original scholars and philosopher kings. Thus you might find the greats of Latin literature simply mined for quotations to illustrate dialectical and rhetorical techniques. The point was not to prepare the kids for a lifetime of close engagement with Cicero or Virgil, it was to give them the ability to write a competent letter or give a persuasive speech themselves. Aside from the rather elitist worry that the Ramus were making things too easy on their students, the Philippists had philosophical objections. The most important has to do with those branch diagrams. We saw Ramus comparing dialectic to a mirror held up to all things. His definitions and dichotomous divisions were supposed to be a reflection and representation of reality. Here the Aristotelians objected that there is often a difference between our conceptions and things as they are in themselves. Classificatory concepts in the mind or on the printed page do not really correspond straightforwardly to the world. For instance, in logic we deal with genera like animal as well as species like human or giraffe and individuals like Buster Keaton and Hiawatha, but in reality there are only the individuals. There is no such thing outside the mind as just animal or just giraffe. Then too, the neat divisions of the Ramus could be entirely too neat. Applying their methods to the medical art, Ramus might say that bodies are either healthy or sick and then further divide sicknesses into types. But is every body really just healthy or just sick? You might have a psychological illness but be physically fit, or you might have respiratory problems but fantastic skin. The Aristotelians summed up this whole line of criticism by saying that Ramists had wrongly absorbed the function of metaphysics into dialectic, that is, logic. Metaphysics is a study of being, whereas logic is a study of the concepts we use to discourse and argue about being. It was fatal to confuse the two. Such critical reactions notwithstanding, it was also possible to combine the two educational programs. Take Johannes Piscator at Herborn. He integrated Melanchthon's approach with Ramism and applied the latter even in theology. Even when he taught the more introductory arts, he made clear the applicability of these arts to religion by offering scriptural passages to exemplify points in Omer Talon's rhetoric. Other German Ramists who made use of more traditionally Aristotelian material were Andreas Kramer, Friedrich Boerhaus, and Rudolf Goklenius, all of whom wrote works comparing the two systems. The general attitude was captured by Johann Usted who modified Lipsius' dismissive remark so as to say, no one will be great for whom Ramus alone is great. The same eclectic approach would be seen elsewhere in Europe. A survey of book collections in England shows that there, Ramist works often shared shelf space with Aristotelian ones. Up in Scotland, Andrew Melville developed a curriculum in Glasgow that also combined the true traditions. His use of Ramism was less ideological than pragmatic as it helped him cover a number of disciplines quickly in a situation where he was the only instructor. As we already saw with the case of Uppsala, one way to exploit the advantages of Ramism was simply to use it for younger students who could then graduate to more advanced material. This was the recommendation of the aforementioned Johann Usted. It especially made sense in a university setting since Ramus' own works had dealt with the liberal arts of language and mathematics, not the higher disciplines of law, theology, and medicine. But as we just saw with Piscator, some Ramus were determined to impose their methods even at the higher level. We duly see the telltale diagrams presenting the whole content of jurisprudence, and we see scholars insisting that the study of law and the other advanced sciences must bear in mind the criterion of utility, always the watchword of the Ramists. Ultimately though, it was a stretch to extend these methods to such demanding fields. Around the turn of the 17th century, the new encyclopedist approach of Bartholomew Kekkoman and others, which we touched on back in episode 385, arose as a new rival. Kekkoman appreciated Ramus' contribution to logic, but was one of those who criticized his conflation of logic with metaphysics. Instead, logic was put back in its place as an introductory art, with metaphysics as the highest of sciences. The Aristotelian curriculum was used as the basis for comprehensive works that emphasized the idea of a system, and that went well beyond the limited goals of the Ramists. The upshot was that in a 1626 textbook on dialectic, the Dutch scholar Franco Burgestijk identified three main schools in logic, Ramism, Aristotelianism, and the encyclopedic approach of Kekkoman. Ramism was never the only game in town, but it had an impressively long afterlife, to the point that it has been credited with helping to shape the mind of Descartes. Not bad for a method that unleashed opposition and mockery wherever it went, the kind of treatment never meted out to the teachings of Melanchthon. For a crude, rather amusing example, we can conclude with an anonymous English play about academic life from 1598 called Pilgrimage to Parnassus. It features a character who is himself a victim of nominative determinism. His name is Stupido, and he represents Ramus at the University of Cambridge. Poor Stupido, who is described as a moving piece of clay, a speaking ass, a walking image, and a senseless stone, provides the author with a chance to make in-jokes about the battles over logic at Cambridge, which in at least one case, led to actual fisticuffs. In the end, a traditionally Aristotelian textbook by John Seaton had managed to fend off competition from Peter Ramus. This would have been much regretted by Stupido, who was made to admit, Surely in my mind and simple opinion Mr. Peter maketh all things very plain and easy. As for Seaton's logic, truly I never look on it, but it makes my head ache. Pretty hostile stuff, but of course this was not an age for treating your opponents gently. As fevered as the disputes over Ramism were, they paled in comparison to the clash of religious beliefs that made itself felt across Europe in politics, in everyday life, and of course in philosophy. France was no exception. There, the Reformation spawned decades of violence and warfare, including the massacre in Paris that took the life of Ramus himself. Amidst the chaos and carnage, a few spoke out in favor of a less militant approach. Instead they recommended agreeing to disagree. But I trust that will be unnecessary here, as you'll all unanimously agree to join me as I look at French ideas about toleration next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gups.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Believe at Your Own Risk, Toleration in France. Let's agree to disagree. Superficially, it sounds like a friendly thing to say, but it usually comes with an implication. I've given you extremely good reasons to agree with me, but you are stubbornly refusing to accept them, so I'm just going to give up on convincing you, for now. It's the argumentative equivalent of breaking up with someone and using the obviously insincere excuse, the problem isn't you, it's me. Presumably, French people have their own equivalents of such phrases, at least back in the 16th century, when people in France grudgingly agreed to disagree about the religious disputes that tore their society apart. That offer was almost always coupled with an unspoken or spoken caveat. The problem isn't us, it's you. Even the high points of religious toleration in the second half of the fifteen hundreds were arrived at grudgingly. They were hedged with caveats and time limits. The fervent hope was that tolerance would not be necessary for long. Civil war between Catholics and the French Protestants, or Huguenots, broke out in 1562 after a rapid proliferation of Protestant churches starting around 1555. And if you're wondering why they were called the Huguenots, join the club. No one knows for sure, but it may be derived from the German term eidgenossen, meaning Confederates, which would be appropriate for a civil war. The Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, announced an edict of toleration for Protestantism at the beginning of 1562, which was explicitly labeled as a temporary measure. But this did not succeed in calming the situation. By 1585, the French crown would be announcing a very different policy that all Frenchmen must be Catholic, with a six month period allowed for conversion. Across the two intervening decades, there was open warfare between the Huguenots and their Catholic enemies, whose cause was led by the powerful Guise family. There were also public executions. Already in 1546, fourteen Protestants were burned alive in Mô, where Bishop Brissonnet had gathered an early circle of reform-minded intellectuals, including, as we saw, Lefebvre de Tapie. And then there were the popular conflicts that erupted when, say, Protestants smashed up a church out of iconoclast zeal, leading to violent battle with local Catholics. A temporary end to the conflict came near the end of the century with the 1598 Edict of Nantes. This new proclamation of tolerance for Protestants remained in force until it was revoked in 1685. At no stage during all this bloodshed did it occur to either of the warring parties that the problem might be them. Attempts at reconciliation, like the 1561 Colloquy of Poissy, were intended not so much to bury the hatchet as use it to cut off the heretical growth within Christianity. The Catholics spoke of conquering and leading back the brothers who have strayed, while the Huguenots boasted, We shall make them admit before this holy assembly that it is we and not they who follow the true Church. Even the word tolerance, which to our ears has peaceful and generous connotations, had a more negative meaning in this context. The French verb toleré conveyed the idea of suffering through something, not the idea of genuinely agreeing to disagree. For the Catholics, offering toleration was a pragmatic concession, a last resort after persuasion and military action had failed. And when the Huguenots asked to be tolerated by the state, they were just playing for time. Minimally enough time to build up military strength for the next round of warfare, but ideally enough time to convert so many of their countrymen that France would become intolerant of Catholics instead. A turning point for both sides was the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572, which as you'll remember claimed the life of Peter Ramez. He was one of thousands of victims in Paris and in the provinces. Protestants blamed the government, with only partial accuracy, for organizing this mass murder. It was no coincidence in their eyes that Catherine de' Medici was the daughter of the man to whom Machiavelli's famously cynical work of political advice, The Prince, was dedicated. They said she taught her children from its pages, and that it might be described as her Bible. As for the Catholics, the fact that even this paroxysm of violence failed to stamp out Protestantism convinced them that the Huguenots might be here to stay. Even before the massacre, Michel de L'Oc et al., who was Chancellor under Catherine de Medici, argued that peace with the Huguenots would be preferable to the warfare that he saw coming. Other reluctant pragmatists included Etienne Pasquier, Louis Loraux, and Etienne de Les Boetie, all of whom reckoned that the way to bring the Protestants back to the fold was not force, but a spiritual renewal of the church. Similarly, the more tolerant leaders at the Estates General of 1576, those who unsuccessfully argued for a settlement with the Huguenots, did so while assuring their more militant colleagues that toleration was only a stopgap measure, until God can bless us with only one religion. Hardly anyone then was envisioning a situation of indefinite peaceful coexistence between Protestants and Catholics. The peacemakers on the Catholic side wanted concord and Christian unity, not a pluralistic society. If they counted as tolerant, it was because they continued to hope that concord could be reached through peaceful means. In this respect, men like Pasquier, Loraux, and Boetie were true heirs of Erasmus, and it's not a coincidence that they were humanists like him. As we saw, Erasmus argued tirelessly for peace, and he stayed on the fence when the Reformation began, in part because he hoped that the rift between Luther and the church could be healed. But he would not have welcomed official state sanction of two alternative confessions, nor was he committed to the value of freedom of religion as an end in itself. So was anyone adopting a more genuinely liberal, pluralist vision at this point in history? Yes indeed. His name was Sebastien Castello. He was a Frenchman born near Lyon, but he moved to Strasbourg and then Geneva to work with Calvin after converting. He became principal of the college at Geneva, but then went on to Basel, where he became a professor of Greek. This makes him sound like yet another Protestant humanist, like Melanchthon or indeed Calvin himself. And indeed, some of his projects fit that pattern, translating the Bible into Latin and French, and even rendering the story of Jonah into Homeric Greek. But he is best known for his expression of outrage after Calvin supported the execution of the Spaniard Michael Servetus in 1533, an event we discussed in episode 384 on Calvin. As with Jonah and the Whale, Castello found this event hard to swallow. He decried it as an indefensible act of tyranny, which he attacked in a work called On Heretics, printed in both Latin and a French translation in 1554. This work is reminiscent of others we've looked at in this series in that it is largely a patchwork of quotations from earlier sources. Less than half of it is by Castello himself, and even these parts include material ascribed to fictional pseudonyms. The book as a whole was prudently published anonymously. Among the sources cited are Luther and, with heavy irony, Calvin himself, using well-chosen passages to make it sound like they were in support of tolerance. There is at least some rationale for this in the case of Luther. He was known for teaching that, in the words of Thomas More, each of us believes at his own risk, and that conscience cannot be compelled. But Castello has to quote him very selectively. You won't find him, for example, mentioning Luther's remark on the importance of maintaining doctrinal correctness in his church. The children may be dirty, but the bath at least must be pure. Castello is even more tendentious in the case of Calvin, of whom Roland Bainton, the modern translator of Castello, remarks, If Calvin ever wrote anything in favor of liberty, it was a typographical error. Calvin was himself a victim of censorship and persecution. He fled to Switzerland to get away from the French state, and his books were placed on the index of prescribed books by the Sorbonne, starting in 1542. But he would have said that the theologians and politicians of Paris were not wrong simply because they persecuted. They were wrong because they were persecuting the wrong people, people who taught the truth, people like himself. Castello framed his polemic by saying, Indeed, he went further, admitting, For one thing, there are pragmatic considerations of the sort others were invoking at the time, though Castello explores these in greater depth. Unsuccessful attempts to suppress the Anabaptists had already shown that persecution simply leads to a cycle of tit-for-tat violence. Calvin's policy, if adopted by everyone, would simply guarantee that people of different religious persuasions would try to kill each other indefinitely. Furthermore, even if you can get someone to disclaim their supposedly heretical views under duress, this will just be hypocrisy. Castello aptly notes the example of England, where vast swathes of the population claimed to be Protestant under King Edward, when in fact they maintain Catholic beliefs. Finally, using force against heresy is counterproductive, since people tend to admire martyrs, and the fuss caused by trials and executions helps publicize the heretics' ideas. Indeed, Castello points out that the only reason most people even know the name of Servetos was that Calvin had him put to death. Still, true today, he wouldn't have appeared in this podcast otherwise. These are persuasive arguments, but two other considerations involve more philosophical depth. Castello lays them out in brief just after saying that he hates heretics, and develops them throughout the whole work. First, even if we assume that heretics are in error, it is not appropriate to punish them with physical violence. Physical force should only be used in response to physical crimes. For spiritual missteps, we should offer a spiritual remedy, in the form of debate and pastoral care. This will give heretics both reason and chance to change their views, as violent retribution would not. As Castello nicely puts it, to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. He also points out the obvious irony of murdering people in the name of Christ, asking the reader to imagine Jesus returning to Earth and watching men burn to death while calling out his name. Calvin's Christ, who would thoroughly approve of this, would be hard to tell apart from Satan, a remark that particularly outraged Calvin, as you can imagine. Castello unabashedly encourages us to sympathize with Servetos. A man like this might be pious and even good, despite his erroneous theological views. Which brings us to a second reason for genuine toleration, namely that for all we know, in persecuting a heretic we might be suppressing views that are true. As Castello said, the working definition of heretic seems to be anyone we disagree with, and of course he was well aware that the Catholics thought him and other reformers to be heretics. This calls to mind a sentiment already expressed by a Lutheran author, cited by Castello in On Heretics, named Sebastian Frank. He said, Socrates was right that we know only that we do not know. We may be heretics quite as much as our opponents. It's not just that we should play it safe and not take the risk of executing an innocent man. Castello does make that point, remarking that it would be better to let a hundred or even a thousand heretics live than to kill one upright man. But in addition, Castello is skeptical that we are in any position to be sure about such topics as God's Trinitarian nature, which had been scandalously denied by servitus. Scripture is very difficult to interpret, which is why theologians are constantly at odds with each other about correct doctrine. Castello does hasten to assure us that he is not a global skeptic. For example, he is confident that we can know that God exists, and more on that in a moment. But when it comes to the fine points of theology, we really cannot be confident that our preferred version of Christianity is the right one. How, he asks rhetorically, can Calvin prove that he alone knows? In this respect, Castello does seem to be echoing the stance of Erasmus and, more generally, the humanist tendency to prize simple spirituality over the fine-grained doctrinal distinctions of the theologians. It's been well remarked that Castello belonged to the university-trained men who celebrated commoners. He would have sympathized with untutored Christians instructed to accept formulas of belief handed down by this or that church, which they were in no position to assess. Around this time, one man confronted by such a statement of orthodoxy said, This is over my head, and I'm reluctant to bind my conscience to it. For Castello, technicalities about the Incarnation, Grace, or the Trinity were far too abstruse to be used as litmus tests for acceptable belief. The only thing we can really demand is that people believe in a single, good, omnipotent God who is worthy of our worship. We can know this much through our natural powers without wading into the controversies of scriptural exegesis. And here we reach the limits of Castello's tolerance. He would have no patience with anyone who denies Abrahamic monotheism. Those who do deny it should be punished not because of their religion, for they do not have any, but because of their irreligion. So Castello is not saying that literally anything goes, but for him the range of tolerable belief is wide enough even to accommodate Jews and Muslims. Indeed, this was the basis for one of his attacks on Calvin. In an early edition of his Institutes, Calvin had expressed a relatively benign attitude toward Jews and Turks, in other words Muslims. But this remark was then removed in later printings, which for Castello was a clear sign of Calvin's drift toward intolerance and persecution. It was also predictable, ironically enough, that Castello would attack Calvin's doctrine of predestination. He saw this as yet another needless indulgence in scholastic theological controversy, but also showed that he could play that game if necessary. True to form, his account of sin and redemption allowed more liberty to humans. We do need divine grace to be saved, but God offers that to everyone. It's just that some people freely accept it, while others freely refuse. Calvin's murderous Christ, who gleefully watches pious, well-meaning Christians burn in the name of doctrinal exactitude, is matched by Calvin's unjust God, who sends people to eternal damnation after giving them no chance to save themselves. Something else you might predict is that Calvin and his allies would respond furiously to this attack from Castello, which is exactly what happened. There was an exchange of refutation and counter-refutation between Calvin himself and Castello, and Calvin's faithful associate, Theodore Beza, also wrote in defense of executing heretics. Beza presumably wouldn't have minded seeing Castello himself burn. He complained that Castello was no better than an ancient skeptic, accused him of undermining belief in the Trinity by expressing sympathy for servitus, and for good measure judged Castello to be, of all men that have ever lived, the most wicked and blasphemous. But others were more favorable. We already know that Dirk Kornhert took up the cause for genuine toleration later on in the Netherlands, and he was powerfully influenced by Castello. In fact, Korn had even translated some of Castello's writings. Fausto Sozzini, founder of the Sozzinian movement, edited works by Castello and saw himself as his successor. The reformist writer Katarina Zell in Strasbourg also took inspiration from him, writing, Let the magistrate punish the evildoer, but not constrain faith, which belongs to the heart and conscience, and not to the outward man. Castello's star has faded since then. He is not a household name, yet he deserves to be remembered as a pioneer in the cause of freedom of conscience. If people had listened to him in the 1550s, then Huguenots and Catholics alike could have avoided killing each other by the thousands in the 1560s. Sadly, the message of tolerance has always been hard for some people to hear. An early modern study of his thought was published by Stefan Zweig in 1936, with the intention of persuading people not to support the Nazis. This time, the audience was German, not French or Swiss, and Castello was ignored again. Given the intrinsic importance of this topic, and the centrality of the 16th century as a time for shaping our modern ideas about religious freedom and tolerance, it seems worthwhile to spend another episode thinking about it. Especially since it just so happens that I have a good friend who has thought about it a lot more than I have, one of my colleagues from King's College London, whose work on Leibniz has led her to explore the background to his ideas about religious pluralism. Still, I guess that after this episode I should tolerate it, if you want to make the error of skipping my conversation with Maria Rosa Antoniadza next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about religious tolerance in the Reformation and early modern Europe with Maria Rosa Antoniadze. Hi, Maria Rosa. Hi. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. You've published on this topic before and in a recent article you wrote about it, you said, and there's a quote from you, whether there is or there is not such a thing as religious truth is in itself neutral as regards toleration. So can you explain why? Yes, you will have already been discussing the problem of religious wars and all the disruption which this terrible violence has brought to Europe and in particular in modern Europe. So one typical way to address this sort of problem is to think, well, if religious wars were the result of a fight over the fine points of theology, wouldn't it be the best thing just to try to eliminate that by saying that there is no such thing as objective religious truth. And this is in fact what historically has been done by certain prominent thinkers. For instance, Spinoza, one distinctive thesis of Spinoza is to say that religion, theology does not have to do with truth at all. It has to do with other things, with piety, with obedience, not with truth. Truth has to do with philosophy. So the question I have been asking in this article is, is really the case that a fruitful path to religious toleration will be to think that there is no such thing as a religious truth, an objective religious truth. And my thesis is that this question is actually neutral to the question of religious toleration because when we are dealing with toleration, the question is not whether a doctrine or some proposition is true or is false. The question is what one believes to be true can be tolerated. So the question is not whether a group of believers are or are not believing something true. The question is whatever they believe to be true is that to be tolerated. So I might, for example, think that your beliefs about God are false or your beliefs about, let's say, the Eucharist are false. But as long as I think that it's okay that you believe something false in some sense of okay, then I'll tolerate you. So it's not whether I think there is a fact of the matter about the Eucharist. It's more maybe like at a second order or like a meta level. It's really what I believe about the status of your religious beliefs and how important it is or the way in which it's important that they're true. That's what makes the difference. Yes, I think so. Because in fact, if you are a religious believer and for instance, if you believe that it is integral to your religious beliefs to pray five times a day, turning toward Mecca, say, it would not be tolerant of your beliefs to say, no, look, that is really not something which is true in order to have a proper worship of God. And in fact, I think that historically this move has been done in saying, well, we can ground religious toleration in a minimal set of beliefs. In the most extreme versions of this, as in the case of Spinoza has been said, we can just say that religion does not have to do with truth at all. But I don't think that that is in itself tolerant of the beliefs of people who are actually religious believers. Because from their point of view, that is true. And if you are telling them, no, that has nothing to do with truth, you are not tolerating their beliefs. It's almost like you're not taking their religion seriously. Exactly. Right. Would it make a difference if we said that, although a lot of religious beliefs, like let's say the Trinity or what happens with the host in the Eucharist, so some of these things that we've seen being matters of controversy during the Protestant Reformation, would it make a difference if we said, sure, those things are kind of like mysterious and it's not very clear what we should think about them. They're very difficult, deep theological issues, but there will be a core of things that everyone should agree with. For example, the existence of God. And the reason everyone should agree with those things is that just the natural use of reason should establish them. And so then you might think someone could say, I'm tolerant because I only require that people agree to whatever natural reason should establish. But although I require them to believe that, I don't require them to have any particular views on, let's say, the Trinity or the Incarnation. My view is that that is not in itself a particularly tolerant position, because as I said before, toleration is not about finding agreement on certain fundamental truths. There might be substantial disagreement on that. Toleration is about respecting differences in what one believes to be true, also on fundamental matters like it's got one or it's got three, polytheism versus monotheism. So as a regard, specifically religious toleration, I think it would not do to tell a politicist to say, well, you can be tolerated in your beliefs as long as you recognise that by natural reason, there is only one God. I don't think that that would be a particularly tolerant position. Or to tell people who are completely committed to the Eucharist, well, you can be tolerated as long as you recognise that it doesn't matter whether there is really or not the body of Christ. Because to them, it matters to tell them you can be tolerated as long as you think it doesn't matter is in fact not tolerating their beliefs. Right. Okay. And I guess there's a difference between tolerating in the sense of actually using, let's say, violence to compel belief, as opposed to tolerating in the sense of actually taking their view seriously or something. So are we talking here about tolerance in terms of something like respect of other people's beliefs, or are we just talking about whether political compulsion is being brought to bear? I think I am talking about both because as a minimum, I think there shouldn't be political compulsion to believe certain things if these things are not against the law and are not harmful to other people. I do think, and early modern people I have studied, I do think that there are certain limits to toleration and that these limits are the limits of what is against the law and what is harmful to other people. So as Leibniz says, for instance, opinions should be tolerated as long as it does not include something like bringing violence to the state on the principle of religion. Obviously, we see this also nowadays. One can tolerate all sorts of religious beliefs as long as that does not result in a terrorist attack or violence to other people. So I am definitely talking about tolerating beliefs in a way which does not result in coercion toward the people who do not align with what, say, is the mainstream religion of a certain country. But I am also talking about a higher level of toleration, which is respect for other people who have different beliefs, with which you might genuinely disagree, you might genuinely think that they are false, but still I think toleration requires that you respect people who in good faith have a different view. Yeah, and of course, even debating someone in good faith is a way of respecting rights. Yes, as again, early modern authors, I have studied, what they said is the way to combat as you like a doctrine that you think is false is not coercion, but persuasion. You can engage in debate, you can engage in dialogue, you can reason with these people with whom you genuinely disagree, but it should not be in terms of your beliefs, cannot be tolerated in this country, and therefore either you accept that what you are believing is not true, is not important, is indifferent to worship of God, or it cannot be accepted. Historically speaking, was the concept of a natural law here source for intolerance in this period? Because sort of looking back over the last few things you've said, you said, well, you have to abide by the law, and I guess you meant there the law of a state, but if like say Aquinas, you believe that there's a natural law that would include things like the responsibility to believe in one God, then you might say, well, anyone who doesn't believe in monotheism is violating the natural law and therefore is subject to compulsion. So, I mean, is it even possible to believe in the natural law in this period while still having what we would now consider a tolerant viewpoint on religious belief? Well, actually I think that natural law, if it is intended as Aquinas intended, it is actually conducive to toleration because I can, for instance, quote one definition Aquinas gives of natural law. He says, is nothing other than the light of intellect, which has been gifted to us by God. Thanks to this, we know what must be done and what must be avoided. This light or this law has been given to all human beings. So really natural law boils down to the way in which what Aquinas called eternal law is specific to human being. And at the end of the day is the light of reason to which all human beings, if they use that, they should be able to come to a view, an agreed view about what should be done and what should be avoided. So I think that actually endorsing natural law in this broader sense of recognizing that all human beings have a rational nature and that this rational nature should give us certain ways to behave toward other human beings. For instance, the rule of reciprocity, do not do to others what you don't want to be done to you, which is something which can be in a way regarded as part of the natural law, I think is an excellent way to have a universalized view of toleration. It also seems like there's a kind of puzzle to me when I think about intolerance regarding religious belief, namely that it doesn't really seem plausible to say that people's religious beliefs are fully up to them, right? Because people believe whatever they believe based on, let's say their upbringing, but also the evidence that they've considered and so on. It's not like you can just believe whatever you want, right? Indeed. And so I'm wondering whether in the period we're thinking about, so like maybe the 16th and 17th century, did they make a distinction like that? Did they say, well, even if we are in favor of compulsion, let's say, and intolerance, we'll only compel your outward behavior and not your inner belief, maybe because we can't even compel your inner belief. So we'll make you go to church, but we won't make you believe in God, for example. Yes, indeed. This is a problem which is very much debated in this period, in the early Medellin period. And one way to go, which is historically attested in main authors, like Hobbes, for instance, or Spinoza, one way is to say, well, belief is not subject to the will, nobody can coerce your inner thoughts, but what can be coerced is your behavior. So as you were saying, well, let's say that there is an official religion of this country. Everybody has to go to church according to this official religion, but anybody, of course, can in the inner core of their own mind believe whatever they want. Now, I don't think this is a fully tolerant position, because it could be that an integral part of your religious beliefs is to worship God publicly as part of a community, is to go to church, to the synagogue, to the mosque. And if you say to somebody for whom that is an integral part of their religion, well, it doesn't really matter. You can buy yourself a tomb, think whatever you want, but you cannot go to the synagogue. You cannot go to the mosque. And I am only coercing your external behavior. Anything else, you can think of whatever you want. I don't think that is really tolerant of their beliefs. And I guess that in a way, when people say, we will compel your behavior, but not your inner belief, you kind of get the sense that they wish they could compel your inner belief. And the only reason they're not going to try to compel it is that it's not possible. Indeed. But then on the other hand, maybe just to play devil's advocate here for a second, maybe there is a way in which you can try to compel inner belief, right? Because you might think, well, I can't tell you now to believe in God if you don't just buy an act of will, but I can, for example, require you to do things that would make you more likely to acquire the belief in God. Like, for example, go to church. Right. And so actually what I make you do with your body or with your behavior may down the road have an impact on your belief, right? Yeah, absolutely. And again, this has been historically attested as a position and this is something which we still see nowadays, unfortunately. And the view is this, okay, it is true that one cannot believe at will. So it's not that just by coercing somebody to believe, say that God is to you, you can really achieve this belief. But one thing that you can do is to coerce people when, especially when they are young, coerce people to go to Sunday classes. Or as we are seeing nowadays in China, you can get all the Muslims into camps and re-educate them until they, through this re-education, they come to internalize a certain set of beliefs. And this is a position which has been put into practice in the early modern period. And it has been put into practice also nowadays. So I think it is not sufficient in order to reject coercion in matters of religion to say, well, you cannot coerce people because belief is not subject to the will. Because there is a way around that saying, sure, I cannot make people believe things at will, but say, if I take away their children when they are young enough and I educate them in a completely different system of beliefs, I may not convert the pains, but the children probably will go up with this different set of beliefs. I guess that actually leads us to another rationale that was used at the time for in favor of coercion, which is that even if I respect your right to be wrong, I might not want to let you lead other people into false belief. Right? So for example, I might say, sure, if you want to deny the Trinity in your heart, go ahead, but don't do it in public. Because if you do it in public, then you'll corrupt other people. And so I'm protecting other people from your false beliefs. Yes. That was indeed also something which was done at the time and resulted in prohibiting certain communities to teach or to have their own educational institutions precisely because the idea is these pernicious or false or mistaken beliefs should not be spread to other people. And again, I don't think that that is a truly tolerant attitude. Because to be truly tolerant would be to, again, as you said before, combat that with rational argument or persuade- Yeah, to enter in a dialogue with these different belief systems. And if you think that you have a better view of certain matters, the way is to discuss it with other, amongst the communities. I actually like your point that the belief in the natural law would actually be a support for that procedure because it sort of expresses this optimistic faith that if everyone's just rational, then we'll get there in the end, or at least we won't come up with irresolvable conflicts that can only be sorted out through violence. Indeed. At the very least, you should not sort out conflicts with violence. I think that when it comes to religious toleration, we do have to accept that at the end of the day, there will be communities which will continue to all the different beliefs. But I think a truly tolerant society should be able to have a dialogue amongst these different systems of beliefs. And you can do that only, in my view, if you recognize that we are all human beings with reason and on that basis, we can reason together. That leads me to another question about the political and historical context, because in the early modern period, there emerged this idea that in each geographical location, the people who live there should just follow the religion of the ruler, the ruler's faith sort of determines the faith of the people. And on the one hand, that might sound kind of intolerant because it sounds like everyone in that kingdom is required to follow the faith of the ruler. But on the other hand, at least it sounds like a kind of recognition of the sort of pluralism you were just describing. So would you see the emergence of that kind of compromise more as a source of tolerance or intolerance? Historically, I think that was more an engine of tolerance actually, because that was the arrangement which emerged in Germany, speaking broadly about the central Europe after the 30-year war, when after these really terrible fights between different religious confessions, the solution which was hammered out was that each principality or each free sub-political entity inside the Holy Roman Empire will have to follow the religion of the ruler of the principality, say. What happened, in fact, is that first of all, all three main religious confessions, the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran and the Reformed, were protected by the law and were tolerated under the protection of the law under one political entity, which was the Holy Roman Empire. And what happened in practice is that there was a balance between a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran and Reformed in the sort of parliament which was loosely ruling the Holy Roman Empire, that is to say the Regensburg Diet. So I think historically that was a way in which different confessions could actually live together in a broader political entity. And it is different from what happened in roughly the same period in absolutistic states like France, in which there was Louis XIV, who was a Roman Catholic, who imposed Catholicism in an absolutist way to the whole of France. Or for that matter, also in England, in which despite having advocates of toleration like John Locke, that toleration was not extended to Roman Catholics. So the toleration of which even Locke was talking at the time was a toleration amongst different shades of Protestants, not really between Protestants and Catholics. I think that historically in the same period in the Holy Roman Empire, this sort of balance was achieved through this rule, at least in different parts of the empire, different religions, different religious confessions could be protected by the law and people could engage in it. As I was saying, what also happened historically is that sometimes the ruler will have a certain religion, say the ruler would be Calvinist, but will not impose that on his subjects, who will remain mainly Lutherans. That is what happened in Brandenburg. And what that historically provoked is a stronger drive toward trying to reconcile different confessions. The same thing happened in an offer where for a period, the ruler was a Roman Catholic, a converted Roman Catholic, and the population was actually Lutheran. And the ruler recognized that it wouldn't have really been a good idea to impose his religion on the population. Yeah, I suppose it's also just a bit unrealistic and unfeasible to imagine from one week to the next, everyone in the whole country changes their religious belief because the king went from being in reform to being Lutheran or something. Yeah, it would have been a disaster and a political disaster. And in fact, in these two cases, for instance, it wasn't enforced in that way. So just one last topic I wanted to touch on is something you just brought up, which is these figures of the 17th century like Locke, who are seen as kind of heroes of even free speech theory or certainly religious tolerance, because they argue very strongly for that life. And it's also said that there's a natural right to express one's beliefs. And so I'm wondering how seriously we should take that. I mean, should we really think of them as forerunners of our modern day conception of religious tolerance? Well, I think that thinkers like Locke or Baylor had a huge impact in really opening up our modern conception of toleration. So I think that it should absolutely be given to them that what they said in their time was really extremely innovative and opening up a new way to think about the living together of confessions. Having said that, we have also to recognize that there were very significant limits to what they were proposing. For instance, Locke, as I was mentioning before, although he is routinely seen as an apostle of toleration, he was excluding Roman Catholics from toleration. So a pretty big exception. A pretty big exception because the Roman Catholics were half of Europe. Obviously, that was driven by the concrete political situation in which Locke was living, but even so, that was really not a minor exception. That is why I think that a certain historiography needs really to be rewritten, and we should also look at the other nations or other political entities, which at the same time in which Locke was writing, had defined different ways to accommodate in the same political entities the main Christian confessions. Wouldn't Locke though say that he had a good reason for being intolerant of Roman Catholics, namely that the Catholics were themselves intolerant? Because that seems, I mean, at first glance, that seems like a pretty reasonable position. So I'm tolerant of people's beliefs as long as they don't themselves exercise coercion or intolerance towards people with different beliefs. Of course, this was one of the arguments which were presented, but the difficulty then is really to decide who is the tolerant and who is the intolerant in that situation. Because say, if you are the pope, let's say, and you see that in your political entity, there is somebody who is telling you that you are the anti-Christ and is breaking the unity of your political entity, you might well think that breaking the peace is not something which can be tolerated. As regard the Roman Catholics in the England of Locke, it must be said that the idea that they would have been following what the pope was telling them to do instead of being loyal to the authority in the English state, I don't think that was really substantiated by what most of the Roman Catholics were doing in England. And in fact, even in Locke's time, and even people in Locke's circle were challenging this idea that the Roman Catholics, if they were tolerated, would have done what the pope was telling them to do only because they were Roman Catholics. I'm sure that the pope would have wished that Louis XIV would have done what the pope told him to do because he was a Roman Catholic. That Louis XIV had no intention of doing what the pope was telling him to do, even if he was officially a Roman Catholic. And we should also remember that historically at the time, the two arch enemies on continental Europe were actually two Roman Catholics, Louis XIV and Leopold I, the only Roman emperor. They were both Roman Catholics. So it's not that because they were both officially, as it were, subject to the pope, they would somehow do what the pope would tell them to do. Well, thank you very much for that wide-ranging philosophical and historical reflection on religious tolerance. My pleasure. And we'll be looking at a lot of these issues still as we go on into the future. Eventually we'll get to Locke and Leibniz and some of the other figures from the future that we've just mentioned. But next time, I hope you'll join me as we continue to look at the philosophy of the Reformation period here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Constitutional Conventions, the Huguenots. Political life is full of clichés that are so familiar as to escape our notice, but would benefit from closer inspection. We already touched on the phrase, let's agree to disagree, which distills the issues we looked at over the last couple of episodes into four innocuous words. Another phrase, the body politic, is now basically a dead metaphor, but it was originally intended to convey that a political community is an organic whole, with different parts or organs playing different roles. Or take the phrase, public servant, which we routinely apply to our politicians, and which they hasten to apply to themselves. If you think about it, that phrase has deep implications. It suggests that the leader serves at the pleasure of the people, and ultimately has to do what they say, rather than vice versa. Indeed, if the people are the master and the political leader, the servant, then the people should be able to get rid of the leader if they are minded to. The 16th century may have been the first time that anyone in European intellectual history started to take this idea seriously. Certainly, the notion that the ruler should look to the good of the ruled was a very old one. In the first book of his Republic, Plato said that a ruler is like a shepherd who needs to tend to the welfare of his flock, and that analogy was repeated many times thereafter. But for the most part, this was advice given to autocratic rulers, and they might choose to take the advice or not. If you want to be a good ruler, you should be looking after our advantage and not your own. So be a good ruler. Please? There were few institutions and few political theories that would actually force or require the ruler to do so, or threaten him, it was usually a him, with dire consequences if he failed. Medieval and Renaissance political thought was dominated by that metaphor of the body politic. The ruler is the head of the body, its best part, and the one that steers the rest from above. As for why one man should occupy that privileged place, the usual explanation was one that was hard to argue with, God put him there. Of course, if this podcast series has taught us anything, it's that such sweeping historical claims are at best only partially true. So here too, one can think of exceptions like the Magna Carta in England, or Marsilius of Padua, who argued in the 14th century that rulers acquire their authority through popular consent. But Marsilius was a man ahead of his time, and that time would turn out to be the 16th century. The concept of popular sovereignty was embraced above all by Protestant thinkers, especially the Huguenots in France, though as we'll find out later on, their position was taken in a still more radical direction by Protestants in the British Isles. Of course, the Protestants were a minority in France, and their political theory was a minority opinion, but it started to gain traction and, ironically enough, would be used by Catholics once the political tide turned. Even before the Huguenots got going, there was a debate in France between more absolutist and more constitutionalist political theories. This debate especially concerned the question whether kings are subject to the law or above the law. A relatively constitutionalist position was taken in a work entitled The Monarchy of France, published in 1519 by Claude de Céselle. Céselle was a legal scholar and royal courtier who was far from interested in weakening the monarch's hold on power. To the contrary, he argued that unchallenged, single, personal rule was needed to restrain dissension amongst the people. He used a metaphor for this that we previously considered at length when talking about Machiavelli. The different factions or classes in the community are like the four humours, recognized by medical theory, and need to be held in balance if the body politic is to be healthy. So the monarch must have all power and authority to command and do what he wishes. Yet, he is bound by what Céselle calls three bridal's. The ruler must obey religion, natural justice, and most interestingly, what Céselle calls police. He doesn't mean the cops, no one is coming to arrest his supreme sovereign, but the traditional laws and customs of the nation. Still, this is all presented more as advice on how to be a good and admired king. It's a ruling suggestion, not a serving suggestion. As timid as Céselle was from the viewpoint of a genuine constitutionalist, he was far from the most absolutist of theorists. In fact, French political ideas evolved in a more autocratic direction toward the middle of the century. The organic metaphor of the single body whose parts play different roles was phased out in favor of a simpler story, the king is on top, everyone else is on the bottom. Even the requirement for the king to seek advice was de-emphasized. We can observe this tendency toward the end of the reign of Francis I and under his successor, Henry II, who reigned from 1547 to 1599. Around this time, Charles de Moulin was pushing to its limits the long-standing idea that the king is a living law. Throughout every part of this kingdom, proclaimed de Moulin, the king is the source of all justice, holding all jurisdictions and enjoying full authority. It would be downright incoherent to suppose that any lower authority can stand in judgment over the king, they are merely extensions of his power, so he would in effect be judging himself. No less absolutist was an author already known well to us, Guillaume Boudet. We met him as the jewel in the crown of French humanism, but he also argued on behalf of the real French crown. In his mirror for princes, he positively discouraged the ruler from sharing power with anyone, stating that kings are, not subject to the laws and ordinances of their kingdom as others are. Now, as you might recall, Boudet benefited from the support of King Francis. A man in that position had every reason to grant far-reaching authority to the monarch. If you like the king and what he is doing, and if you even have reason to think you might have the king's ear, absolutism looks pretty good. Conversely, if you see yourself and even your religious beliefs as being under threat by the monarch, then you might seek to put limits on his power. So, if robust constitutionalism was going to come from anywhere in 16th century France, it would more likely be from Protestants. But that didn't mean that it was especially likely. Remember the leading reformers Luther and Calvin were determined not to associate their movement with social unrest. Thus, we saw Luther condemning the Peasants' Revolt. More directly relevant was the position of Calvin, since he was originally from France and many French Protestants were his followers. For the most part, as we also saw, his recommendation was to obey even an oppressive prince. Faced with religious persecution, one could always go into exile, or of course die nobly as a martyr. Slowly but steadily though, more militant voices started to make themselves heard among the Protestants. In particular, we see the suggestion that an unjust or tyrannical ruler could be rightfully unseated by lower magistrates, that is, men holding official government posts below the rank of the king. An early example would be the Confession, written by the Lutherans of Magdeburg in Saxony, which stated that, if the high authority does not desist from eradicating true doctrine and true worship of God, then the lower magistracy is required by God's divine command to attempt to stand up to such superiors as far as possible. What arguments could be used to support this more confrontational position? Well, this was the Renaissance, so a natural strategy was to look to the past for ideas worth reviving. This was the method of a book called Franco Gallia, written by the jurist and humanist Francois Hautman, while he was enjoying the protection of the Huguenot leader Louis de Condé in the 1560s. The work was printed in 1573 and appeared in new expanded editions in 1576 and 1586. The application of history to present concerns was typical of humanism, of course. A few names that leap to mind here might be Bruni and Machiavelli in Italy, or Lipsius in the Low Countries. But what has been called Hautman's antiquarian gusto was unusual, in that his historical argument mostly concerned the medieval period, and mostly drew on medieval historical documents. He focused on the peoples who lived in the French territories in former times, namely Franks and Gauls, hence the title of his treatise, Franco Gallia. His aim was to show that, as far back as the Gauls of antiquity, these peoples abhorred kingly rule, as he puts it. They were so concerned to avoid falling under tyranny that they tightly constrained the powers of the king. Toward this end, two policies were especially key, and on Hautman's telling, both were consistently followed in Franco Gallic history. First, the throne was not simply passed on to the king's family by inheritance. Rather, kings were elected by the people, who could also depose kings who abused their power. Second, the kings were advised by a council representing the interests of the people. Actually, more than advised, the kings were actually bound to seek the approval of the council when it came to such important matters as warfare and legislation. Hautman cites Julius Caesar to show that the council already existed in his day, and stresses the longevity of the institution through the Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian dynasties. Even Charlemagne, whose name literally means, Charles the Great, was not so great that he could operate independently of the council. He was, claims Hautman, unable to deprive the Franks of their pristine right and liberty, nor did he ever undertake any matter of importance without first obtaining the view of the people and the authority of the nobility. Notice here that, like Machiavelli, Hautman takes account of the complexity of the body politic, dividing it into the general population and the nobles. Actually, his usual analysis, which will remain standard right up to the time of the French Revolution, recognizes three orders or estates. The nobility are at the top, the farmers and tradesmen at the bottom, and in between there's a middle class of lawyers, merchants, and the like, though this middle group is sometimes identified with the clergy. Hautman follows ancient political theorists, including Aristotle, by arguing that the best constitution allows all three estates to have input into decision-making, in a kind of compromise between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. He paints a harmonious picture of the resulting polity. A multitude of men ought not to be governed by one of their own number, who sees less than others do when taken together, but rather by proven men of excellence, selected with the consent of all, who act by combined advice as if they possessed one mind composed from many. That pious hope that rulers should be like good shepherds, looking to benefit their subjects rather than themselves, would actually be enforced in Hautman's ideal state. He never tires of quoting the motto, salus populi suprema lex esto, meaning, let the welfare of the people be the supreme law. Hautman's approach was, as I say, that of a historian. Indeed, he remarked of his own work, it is a historical book, the history of a fact. And he was at pains to show himself to be a fair-minded and critical researcher. After presenting evidence for something that would be quite convenient for his thesis, namely that some early French kings were rather reluctant to use their power, he admits that this could be a fiction perpetrated by their successors to make the kings in question look weak. But of course, such displays of scrupulous scholarship are intended to make his argument all the more convincing. As a modern scholar has remarked, what gave the Franco-Galia its potency was its very antiquarian nature. Many were not convinced though. One of our former interview guests, Quentin Skinner, has remarked that the Franco-Galia displays more than a touch of tendentious scholarship, and critics of Hautman, like Antoine Matarel, were thus able to point to distortions and omissions in his presentation of the historical record. Still, the treatise was meant to be just that, a presentation of the historical record. Its clear message remained implicit, namely that the ills of 16th century France resulted from breaking with Franco-Gallic tradition from a culture in which the conventions had always been constitutional. Apart from the excesses of autocratic rule, Hautman is critical of allowing women to wield political power, hardly an innocent point to make during the time of Catherine de Medici. As for where such corruptions come from, the answer is, and always had been, Rome. In antiquity, the Gauls suffered tyranny under the Roman Empire. In more recent days, the plague of lawyers manipulating the crown has been imported from the papal curia in Rome. Which is not to say that law in general is unwelcome from his point of view. He could hardly say that, being a jurist himself, and having written texts fulminating against slavish devotion to ancient Roman legal custom. Rather, in place of a strong king, or still worse, a strong queen, Hautman wants a monarch who is truly fettered by the bridles that were only loosely draped around absolute rule by authors like Claude de Cézel. The grounding of this argument in French history was a strength, in that it was a tactic calculated to appeal to a wide and learned audience, but it was also a weakness. Even if you believed Hautman's rather partial and tendentious version of history, you might respond as did the aptly named absolutist Louis Lerois. Why would we need, or even want to imitate the early medieval barbarians of the Merovingian and Carolingian times? A more principled rationale was needed, and for it the Huguenots turned to a rather ironic source, the medieval theory of natural law developed by such stalwart Catholic authorities as Thomas Aquinas. This has led the aforementioned Quentin Skinner to observe that, even if most constitutionalists in this period were Calvinist, they were not using originally Calvinist arguments. Instead, they could borrow the idea that humans were born into a natural state of freedom, and enter voluntarily into an agreement to obey a ruler who will look after their common interests. If a legally appointed ruler fails to do this and becomes a tyrant instead, the people no longer have to obey him. This account of political authority became more appealing to the Huguenots in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre. Ottmann apparently wrote his Franco-Galia before that outburst of violence, though it was published afterward. This explains its rather detached, primarily historical approach. It was a contribution to a debate between constitutionalists and absolutists, not a broadside in a literally life-and-death struggle. A more urgent tone would be struck after the massacre by Theodore Beza in his On the Rights of Magistrates Over Their Subjects, published without his name in 1574. The title is ironic, he really intends to address the duties of magistrates and the rights of subjects. Those rights are also explored in the most famous Huguenot political treatise, Vindicchiae Contra Tiranus. The title is hard to translate, the second part obviously means against tyrants, but vindicatio is a legal term with a more complicated sense, along the lines of a decree concerning someone's freedom. It was written in 1579, and again published anonymously. Obviously such tracts appeared at considerable risk to their authors. In this case the author is generally agreed to be Philippe du Plessis Monet, and I will refer to him as Monet even though the attribution is not absolutely certain. Both Beza and Monet are influenced by Ottmann, and they repeat his arguments about the traditions of France. But, as I've just explained, they defend constitutionalism on more abstract grounds. There is no king without a people, but the reverse is not true. Rather, the people had to come together to appoint their ruler, and they must have had mighty good reasons for doing so, since, as Monet notes, humans are free by nature, impatient of servitude, and are born more to command than to obey. The only possible explanation is that they expected to reap significant benefits from the contract with their ruler, notably protection of their persons and property, and the maintenance of justice in general. Thus, the ruler needs explicit consent to take property away from subjects, as when imposing taxes. In fact, nothing belongs to the king except his own personal wealth. Whatever is held by the crown is only given to it for safekeeping. Now, Beza observes that if one party to a contract breaks its terms, the other party is no longer obligated to observe the agreement. Monet, in fact, says that the subjects are only conditionally bound to the ruler, whereas he is bound unconditionally to them because his office exists only for their benefit. The king is truly a public servant. To quote Skinner once more, Monet sees the status of a lawful king as more like that of a salaried official than a sovereign magistrate. And salaried officials can, of course, be removed by their superiors. In direct contravention of the absolutist tradition, Beza and Monet see the people as being, in this sense, the superiors of the king, even if they owe him their obedience so long as the contract between both sides is still in force. The representatives of the people swore an oath of allegiance to the king when installing him, and on behalf of the people, they should depose him if he fails to provide the expected benefits. Nor is this because the king was installed by oath-taking or election. In a contrast to what we saw in Hautman, it is natural law, and indeed plain common sense, that the people would never have agreed to shackle themselves to the will of a tyrant. So just by the logic of the political commonwealth and its origin, it surely cannot be required that they submit to tyranny whatever social conventions or traditions are in force, whatever oaths or promises have explicitly been made. The question now becomes, what should actually happen when the contract is broken? Here our two authors pull back from the most radical possible conclusion, which would be that any member of the population can remove a tyrannical ruler by killing them, if necessary. Actually, Beza says that an outright usurper can be rightly dispatched by anyone, since they have no real standing at all. But in the case of a legally installed king who becomes tyrannical, one should explore all other remedies before using force. And when force does become necessary, it should not be exercised by private individuals. As Calvin said, these people should just endure with patience. Monet makes the same point by adapting the age-old metaphor of the ship of state, something else that goes back to Plato's Republic. The crew of a ship should clearly not stand by if the captain gets drunk and steers them toward the rocks. But not just any deckhand is allowed to throw the captain overboard, the officers have to do it. Just so, private individuals should look to government officers, who are the representatives of the people's will. In other words, it is the role of magistrates lower than the king to remove the king, who has become a tyrant. The officials have not just the right to do this, but even the duty to do it. Now, this is not to say that the magistrates can rise up against the king as soon as he deviates from ideal justice. To the contrary, Monet says with bracing realism that, we should not wish to have only perfect princes, but rather we should consider ourselves extremely well-served, even if we shall have got mediocre ones. Revolution and tyrannicide are reserved for extreme cases. But of course, this was an extreme time, when the French throne was at least indirectly guilty of the murder of thousands of Protestants. One could hardly imagine a more flagrant failure to preserve the life and property of the subjects. So, the upshot of the arguments presented by Béza and Monet was that the noble leaders of the Huguenot cause were entirely justified in resisting oppression. A moment's reflection, though, will show that these arguments could be used just as well by Catholics, or indeed anyone who thinks that they are being subjected to tyranny. And in fact, they were used by Catholics. In 1588, King Henry III turned against those staunch supporters of Catholicism, the Guise family, and had two of them executed. French Catholics reached for the same theories of popular sovereignty to argue that Henry was a tyrant. The theologians at the Sorbonne declared him no longer a rightful monarch, and a pamphlet published in support of the Catholic cause faithfully repeated Huguenot reasoning, the people made the kings and submitted itself voluntarily to their power. When the kings abused their power, the people can pull them down as easily as they created them. Again, it seems that sympathy for absolutism lasted only as long as agreement with the policies of the supposedly absolute monarch. The ecumenical appeal of popular sovereignty might help to explain why the most radical French political treatise of the era was penned by someone who never left the church, Étienne de la Boétie. He died young in 1563 at the age of only 32. He was then memorialized in the writings of his close friend Montaigne, who emphasized that La Boétie was a good citizen and a good Catholic. Montaigne was moved to these apologetic remarks by an extraordinary work that La Boétie had written when he was barely an adult. It was called On Voluntary Servitude, and its paradoxical title already reveals quite a lot about its contents. La Boétie was deeply puzzled by the fact that people do the very thing that was emphasized by constitutionalists like Ockman, Beza, and Monet. They willingly placed themselves under the authority of another man. Why in the world would they do this and then submit to the autocratic whims of that man when they could easily kill him? Actually, they don't even need to kill him. They can just ignore him. A mere lack of consent to his rule would make him entirely impotent. Again, ideas about natural law are important to the argument. La Boétie observes that even animals seek liberty, a point also mentioned by Monet. We humans, too, yearn for freedom, yet it is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist, for surely if they really wanted it, they would receive it. La Boétie sets out to understand this perverse state of affairs. He knows that people forget their freedom once they have been subjected to servitude, they just get used to being oppressed, like someone who is gradually accustomed themselves to drink a poison without dying from it. Consider the Romans, says La Boétie, who were so bamboozled by bread and circuses that, the most intelligent and understanding among them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Moreover, rulers use a kind of pyramid scheme to dominate the whole society. Directly below the monarch are perhaps six direct advisors, powerful men who each have six hundred clients, and those clients may have yet further underlings. Thus, the lower magistrates, so far from being the check on the tyrant's rule as the Huguenot theorists imagined, are the instrument of tyranny. Unlike the works of Beza and Monet, it's not easy to say what the direct practical application of La Boétie's treatise was supposed to be. Maybe none at all. It's been suggested that the treatise is not as radical as it may seem, but in fact elitist and conservative because its author cannot imagine any real resistance to tyranny. If we did manage to kill our tyrant, another would just replace him. Perhaps, but La Boétie's lack of concrete revolutionary zeal comes along with some genuinely revolutionary political ideas. The reader of involuntary servitude comes away wondering not so much under what circumstances people may resort to the extreme step of deposing their monarch as whether monarchy could ever be more than an illegitimate trick in the first place. Behind the pomp and circumstance of the French court, there is just one single little man, as La Boétie puts it, if you submit to that man, it's your own fault. These were implications that disquieted even La Boétie's open-minded friend Montaigne, so you can only imagine how they would have been greeted by partisans of royal absolutism. And such partisans certainly existed. In this episode, I touched on a few of them like Cézel, Dumouiné, and Boudet, but the greatest theorist of strong monarchy in this time was a multifaceted author whose Six Books of the Commonwealth was only one of his many impressive contributions, though it might have been, in every sense of the word, the crowning achievement of Jean Baudin, our subject, next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, One to Rule Them All, Jean Bodin. When I was growing up, we had it drummed into us in civics class that the key to the American political system is the separation of powers. The executive, legislative, and judiciary branches have different spheres of competence and can also check the power of the other spheres as when the president nominates Supreme Court justices and Congress gets to approve or reject these nominations. Back in high school, this was presented to us as a perfectly balanced and calibrated scheme. There was no talk of, say, FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court to get it to stop thwarting his agenda. Nor did we learn that Congress might just refuse to consider Supreme Court nominations from a president with little more justification than, you can't make us so there. This would happen later in my lifetime when Republicans refused to consider a nomination made by Barack Obama, which was a pretty shocking abuse of power, but not an unprecedented one, as a similarly dubious procedure was also used back in the mid 19th century. American history has always shown how difficult it is to maintain a stable separation of powers as each branch constantly works to tip the balance in its favor. Jean Bodin would have said that it is more than difficult in practical terms. It's conceptually impossible. Sovereignty cannot be divided because there must be an answer to the question whose commands are final. As he says in his pioneering work of political theory, the six books of the Commonwealth, the situation in which power is genuinely divided would be one in which disagreements could be decided only by force. Power can be delegated by the sovereign authority, but it remains vested in that authority and is exercised in the sovereign's name. Now, this sovereign doesn't necessarily need to be a single person. It could be the people as a whole, as in a democracy, or the class of the nobility, as in an aristocracy. Bodin acknowledges the possibility of these forms of constitution, but argues that the best form is a monarchy in which the single power of the sovereign is held by a single man. And it should indeed be a man. Bodin approves of the French Salic law that excludes women from the line of succession and thinks that along with a rule of hereditary inheritance of the throne, this will best serve the goal of political civility. Of course, Bodin lived under a monarchy and as a trained lawyer was steeped in the political and legal thought of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, which typically endorsed royalist forms of government. But it's not like he was unaware of other options. He was also a historian who knew that aristocracy and democracy were not just theoretical possibilities, but states that had existed in other places and times. Furthermore, he understood that his own concept of unified absolute sovereignty was a controversial one. At this very time, as we just saw in the previous episode, Calvinist political treatises were pushing the idea that the ruler serves at the pleasure of the citizens who elected him, while less radical thinkers like Cézel had placed constraints on the authority of the king. Unlike all these authors, the Bodin of the six books of the Commonwealth was, in the words of Quentin Skinner, a virtually unyielding defender of absolutism who saw a strong monarchy as the only means for restoring political unity and peace. I referred to the Bodin of that work in particular because in an earlier treatise called Method for the Easy Comprehension of History from 1566, Bodin had himself adopted a less absolutist position. This work, which has been described as a handbook of advice to students on how to read historians with profit, envisioned the best constitution as a monarchy with checks on its power, along the lines proposed by Cézel. It also rooted the ruler's sovereignty in an exchange of oaths, the mechanism emphasized by Huguenot authors like Hautman. There are two complementary ways to explain why Bodin moved towards a more absolutist position in his six books. The first is straightforward. It was published in 1576, just a few years after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and thus in the midst of a particularly chaotic time of religious and military conflict in France. Hence Skinner's remark that Bodin was motivated by the goal of restoring unity and peace. The second explanation is rooted ultimately in Bodin's humanism. After being educated in the Carmelite order as a youngster, Bodin was sent to Paris, where he gained facility in both scholastic and humanist intellectual methods. His first work was an addition and translation of a fairly obscure Greek work on hunting, a good choice to show off his mastery of classical languages and a topic that would appeal to readers among the nobility. He then focused on legal and historical studies, which gave him a basis for both his method of history and the six books. Like other humanists of the era, he came to appreciate the wide variation in law and politics across times and cultures. Like Hautman, he rejected the idea that Roman law would still be suitable for the needs of 16th century France. Yet Bodin continued to hold out hope that a man of broad reading and great insight could devise a truly universal theory of politics, one that transcends the particularities of each place and time. The six books is Bodin's attempt to show that he is that man. His approach in this work, and also the method of history, may show the influence of Peter Ramez, whose ideas Bodin would presumably have encountered in Paris. As typical for Ramez, he begins from the general and moves to the specific. In the case of history, one should start with the history of the whole world, then move on to narratives of certain peoples, and finally home in on the deeds of great individuals. Similarly, with politics, he starts with a general definition of the Commonwealth, or republique, namely an ordered government of families under a sovereign. Size does not matter. Even three families can become a Commonwealth if they are united under one power and owe obedience to that power. The head of a family, the father and householder, is a kind of image of the sovereign, but he does not exercise properly political sovereignty over the members of the house. His wife and children are, as we would put it, his dependents, not his subjects. In the next few chapters, Bodin moves on to explore what it means to be a political subject, again in a rather Romist fashion, by distinguishing subjecthood from other kinds of subordinate relation. Notably, subjecthood should not be confused with slavery. Bodin thinks that in certain regimes, like the Ottoman Sultanate, all the people are slaves to the ruler, and all property, in principle, belongs to him. But this is not really a state or Commonwealth, it's just despotism. And the state of slavery is, in Bodin's view, unnatural. Its frequency in human history is simply a demonstration of the human propensity towards sin. Besides, enslaved people are bound to revolt against their oppressors, whereas what Bodin is looking for is a recipe for stable political life. There is a deeper point here though, which is that slaves occupy their role simply as the result of violence, or the threat of it. When the master tells the slave what to do, this is no more legitimate than, say, pointing a gun at someone and telling them to give you their money. Violence, or the threat of it, might produce cooperation, but it can never produce obligation. Far different are the commands issued by a sovereign. A rightful sovereign's commands ought to be obeyed by their subjects, not because of what he might do to them if they refuse, but just because they are his subjects. At first glance, Bodin seems to depict the authority of the sovereign as being absolutely unfettered and uncontestable. He defines sovereignty as, the absolute and perpetual power of a Commonwealth. Later on in the work, he says that the officers or magistrates must obey even commands they take to be unjust. Bodin does not even allow them to resign as an act of conscience, rather than carry out their orders. These are clearly not the king-making and king-breaking magistrates envisioned by the Huguenot political theorists, Hartmann and Beza. But Bodin's contrary view is not just a matter of devotion to the crown or of pragmatic calculation. He has a principled reason for thinking that the sovereign should be unchallenged, namely that he is the source of all law. In a sense, this is his only power, and indeed the only political power there is, because all other powers, the appointment of officials, levying of taxation, waging of war, and so on, stem from this authority to make laws. This helps to explain why Bodin rejected the idea of a separation of powers. It is the power to make law that is definitive of sovereignty, and this power cannot be vested in multiple potentially opposing sources. If it were, then they could issue contrary commands, or countermand each other's edicts. That would be the opposite of a state, it would be anarchy. In fact, the sovereign cannot even challenge himself, in that he cannot issue edicts binding his own future decisions. Laws and institutions must adapt to fit changing circumstances. Just as Roman law is not likely to be right for a 16th century Frenchman, the right laws for France in 1570 might be different from the right laws in 1571. Bodin does caution against rapid change in the laws, since this tends to undermine the legitimacy of the whole regime. In many cases, even an unjust law should be altered only gradually. But this is merely a pragmatic point. In principle, the sovereign may overturn and change laws as he sees fit, with no constraint, and with an exception we'll get to in a minute, no need for consent from the subjects. Because the unity and supremacy of sovereignty is emphasized so strongly by Bodin, and because it yields such a sharp contrast between him and some other authors of the time, it tends to be the main idea that is associated with him as a political thinker. But a closer look shows that he is far from an endorsing an anything-goes autocracy. For starters, he sees law in normative terms, meaning that lawmaking has a purpose, namely justice. By his theory, imperfect sovereigns must be obeyed. Indeed, this will be the usual situation, since Bodin admits that good rulers are rare. But the ideal on which the theory is modeled is a wise and just king dispensing laws that adapt and react to circumstances. This brings us to another important caveat to the idea that Bodin was an unrestrained absolutist. Though he did, as we've seen, define sovereignty in terms of absolute power, he did not mean by this phrase what we would naturally take it to mean. The sovereign's lawmaking power is absolute simply because it allows him to change existing laws, to release subjects from obligations imposed on them or to impose new ones. Again, nothing can entrench an existing law to put it beyond the sovereign's right to revise it, not even in the earlier decree of the same sovereign. It is conceptually impossible for the sovereign to bind his own power, just as it is conceptually impossible for anyone else to thwart that power. Since absolute power has this fairly narrow meaning, it is entirely compatible with something else Bodin says, which would otherwise seem to be in conflict with his theory, namely that the sovereign is supreme only in the realm of civic law. Like anyone else, he is subject to the natural and divine law. Suppose a sovereign behaves tyrannically, for instance by knowingly jailing or executing innocent people. He would not be overstepping his bounds as a political ruler, and his subjects would not be entitled to overthrow him. But that does not mean he'd be off the hook. He would be violating another set of commands, those handed down by natural reason and by God himself. Now, this might look like a rather weak caveat. Bodin seems to be saying that no one is empowered to stop a ruler from being tyrannical apart from God, who famously moves in mysterious ways, which include literally letting people get away with murder, at least in this life. So what sanction can be brought to bear on a tyrant? Apparently none. But remember, this is a political theory of obligations and rights, not a theory about actually getting people to do what they ought to. Think again of the contrast between the sovereign and the armed robber. As a purely practical matter, you can more easily ignore the sovereign's commands than those of the robber who is presently shoving a gun in your face, but that doesn't mean that the robber has any standing to tell you what to do. Similarly, the sovereign ruler is obligated to follow the natural law regardless whether he actually does so. In this respect, Bodin is actually putting greater restraints on his sovereign than some political thinkers would. Notably, Machiavelli held that according to the reason of state, a ruler might need to do all sorts of immoral things in order to be effective, and if so, then he should go right ahead. Bodin forcefully rejects this. His sovereign is the highest power in political terms, but subject to higher powers in matters of morality and religion. Any lingering suspicion that these constraints are empty ones should be banished by turning to Bodin's discussion of taxation. We would probably think of this as a paradigm case of a purely political issue well within the realm of civic law, where whatever the sovereign says goes. But Bodin sees the sanctity of private property as part of the natural law. This means that the sovereign has an obligation to respect the property of his subjects, and even that the consent of the subjects needs to be secured to impose taxes upon them, or to confiscate wealth in any other way. Bodin stood up for this principle at a meeting of the Estates General held in Blois in 1576, arguing that the king had no right to alienate property belonging to the nation by selling it off to raise money. This soured his relation with the sitting monarch, an ironic outcome for this famous proponent of absolute monarchy, but at least it allowed him to respond to criticisms that he was allowing unrestrained authority to the sovereign. When an edition of his six books appeared in Geneva, adding a list of complaints about his teachings, he was able to point to his stand at the Estates General as proof that his absolutism was not quite so absolute as it seemed. The natural law imposes another important constraint on the sovereign, which is that he must abide by any contracts he makes with his subjects. This is a tricky point since Bodin has been telling us repeatedly that everything is subject to the sovereign s will and that not even he can bind his future commands by making promises in the here and now. But again, there is no contradiction, we just need to bear in mind the difference between a law and a contract. A law is binding in only one direction, the sovereign commands, and the subject has the obligation to obey. A contract, by contrast, is binding in both directions. So legal agreements, made with a sovereign, are legally enforceable in the court system. This sounds like a somewhat technical point, but it is important for a couple of reasons. First, it underscores the substantive role of the natural law in Bodin's theory, since natural law is the source of the obligation to honor contracts. Second, it gets us to the heart of his disagreement with the Huguenot political theorists. Huttman and Beza saw the relationship between the ruler and subject as obligating on both sides. The subjects put the ruler in charge, with a view to achieving safety, peace, and so on, and obey him as their part of this deal. If the ruler fails to live up to his side of the bargain, they, or rather, the appropriate magistrates, can get rid of him. For Bodin, this is an amateurish mistake. These writers have confused laws with contracts. Lawmaking sovereign authority is a one-way street, and it involves no obligations on the sovereign's side. Bodin is not then a social contract theorist, though he does think that sovereignty can be established when a people consents to hand power to a single authority. He also thinks it can happen the good old-fashioned way, through force, as by a violent conquest. In particular, he thinks that the monarchy of France was established through force, not by consent. So that's another point of disagreement with Huguenot authors like Hodman. But there was at least one thing they did agree on, a topic we've been following over the last few episodes, religious tolerance. Bodin's own religious convictions are a matter of controversy. Never mind Protestantism and Catholicism, he was suspected of harboring sympathy for Judaism. But he was in favor of France's remaining Catholic. The main goal, in his view, was yet again stability. So avoiding factionalism was the main priority, so long as everyone was willing to sign up to monotheistic religion. A unified state religion commanding the allegiance of the whole people would be ideal, but if this was practically unattainable, pluralism would be preferable to open dissent and conflict. Thus, Bodin argues that the sovereign should allow freedom in private worship and avoid coercion in matters of religion. Indeed, the sovereign should seek to remain neutral above the fray of religious disputation. As one scholar has put it, by not demanding control over religious beliefs, the sovereign demonstrates a commitment to all simultaneously. Bodin even wrote a work that dramatizes the possibility of unity across religious divides, a so-called colloquium consisting of a dialogue between seven speakers of different faiths. Actually, one of them is not a religious figure, but a natural philosopher. Since they can all agree on the precepts of the natural law and on a kind of generic monotheism, they find that there is far more harmony than discord between them. While these ideas about religious tolerance are by now pretty familiar to us, Bodin's general theory of sovereignty is genuinely groundbreaking. Which is not to say that he was right, of course. There is a seductive appeal to his idea that sovereignty must in the end rest with a single authority. The buck has to stop somewhere. But as the political structure of the United States and many other countries shows, the power to make and remake laws is not the only power wielded by states. You can separate the function of making laws from the function of enforcing them, for example. Also, in a representative democracy, it is possible for the people to be both sovereign and subject, which Bodin thought to be absurd. Still, by raising this issue in such stark terms, Bodin laid the seeds for the development of just such ideas. Another important achievement was that, for the first time, he defined citizenship in terms of being subject to a certain political authority. We would now find this natural, but before Bodin, going all the way back to Aristotle, citizens had been understood to be those who are actively participating in political life. This meant that disenfranchised people, like slaves, women, and children, were by definition not citizens. Whereas on Bodin's account, anyone living under a regime and owing it allegiance could be considered a citizen. It was actually Bodin's absolutist approach to sovereignty that allowed him to make this breakthrough. For him, all authority lies ultimately with the sovereign, which means that everyone else is on a par in being a subject, whether they are noble or common, free or a slave, male or female, adult or child. While the full implications of Bodin's ideas would not be clear for quite some time, he did have a great impact on his contemporaries and immediate successors. His ideas about the unity of sovereignty were widely accepted, and by a diverse range of thinkers, like the Ramus political theorist Johannes Althusius and the encyclopedist Rotellumaeus Keckerman. A witness said in the 1580s that at Cambridge University, students would often be found in their rooms, poring over the pages of Bodin's six books on the republic. All of which is even more impressive when you consider that political theory was only one of Bodin's many interests. He was a classic example of the humanist polymath, who, as we've seen, wrote on law and history, and also on natural philosophy and economics. His ideas on the latter topic were formulated in response to Jehan Malestroy, who had pointed to a couple of apparent paradoxes concerning the phenomenon of inflation. This was a phenomenon that became increasingly evident across the 16th century, as prices went up fourfold in Spain and tripled in France. But Malestroy argued that in a sense, people were paying the same, even as goods seemed to cost more. If you looked at the actual amount of raw gold and silver being handed over for a given commodity, this always remained the same. Prices were increasing, but only because of the debasement of coins by the state, which meant that the coins were worth less all the time. A cow that cost one silver coin in 1500 might cost two silver coins in 1550, but that's just because the 1550 coin had half as much precious metal in it. So actually, argued Malestroy, prices were remaining constant. This preserved the intuitive idea that the cow is really worth a certain weight of silver and retains that same value over time. Bodin denied this intuition. He agreed that debasement of coinage is a cause of inflation, and in fact the only cause that a government can actually control, but it is not the only or even the chief cause of rising prices. He observed that monopolies drive up prices, as do scarcity of goods and runaway spending on luxuries by the rich, in other words, changes in supply and demand. But for him, the most important factor was the amount of gold and silver in supply. The more precious metal is in circulation, the less it is worth, because it too is subject to the law of supply and demand. More supply means lower value, whether we're talking about the supply of cows or gold. Remarkably, Bodin made this observation without yet having appreciated the impact of the influx of gold and silver from Spain's conquests in the Americas. In later writings, though, he did mention this as a driver of inflation. The implication of Bodin's argument is that, unlike sovereignty, economic worth is never absolute. Neither money nor the things you can buy with it have a stable, unchanging value. Rather, everything is subject to market forces. Bodin's independence of mind is shown yet again in a massive treatise he wrote on natural philosophy called The Theatre of All Nature, published in 1596, a full 30 years after his first major work, the aforementioned Method of History. As has been shown in a detailed study by Anne Blair, Bodin approached both projects in the same way. He followed the advice of Erasmus by keeping commonplace books of citations and passages that struck him as he pursued a lifetime of voracious reading. This material would then be wrestled into shape for the purposes of his own writings. Or at least, more or less into shape. A recent biographer of Bodin has remarked that he was congenitally argumentative, able to leave few avenues unexplored, few authorities unchallenged, few examples unpresented from his vast store of learning. For our purposes, it's the challenging of authorities that is of particular interest. In The Theatre of Nature, Bodin follows the lead of Ramesh by constantly questioning the views of Aristotle. He disagrees with him on topics great and small, denying for instance that subjects should be analyzed in terms of matter and form, and that all birds have two feet. He's particularly concerned in his discussions of nature to emphasize the wise providence of God. For example, he complains that Aristotle failed to give a single unified account of saltiness in different natural fluids from seawater to the sweat of animals. As a Christian, Bodin is able to produce triumphantly the true explanation, God put salt in everything to preserve it. Bodin liked to appeal to experience to support his own theories, though as Anne Blair says, what he meant by this was an undifferentiated medieval mix of hearsay, bookish learning, and actual experience. He was no empiricist, and in fact was again critical of Aristotle for basing all science on sense perception. Some phenomena are supernatural in character, and we need to know about them, whether we are talking about divine providence or the malevolent influence of demons. Yes, demons. Bodin wrote a whole work about them, which appeared in 1580. It talks about how witches call on demons to work their magic, provides accounts of witch trials conducted in France during his lifetime, and encourages the use of torture against suspected witches, even recommending specific torments as particularly agonizing and hence particularly effective. It may seem disconcerting, even incredible, that the author of a sophisticated and enduringly important work, like the six books on the republic, would go in for such cruel and superstitious nonsense. But, as we'll see in a later episode, belief in witchcraft was widespread in this era and integrated with philosophical and scientific theories in surprising ways. Besides, in one respect, the Bodin of the demonology is evidently the same man as the Bodin of the six books. He feared that witches would undermine the order and cohesion of the community, the very results that a well-running state should be aiming to establish. Like someone offering debased coins in exchange for a cow, I've sold Bodin a bit short in this episode by touching only lightly on his non-political writings. In particular, it would be worth milking his treatise on natural philosophy a bit more. So next time, I'll be speaking to the aforementioned Anne Blair, a leading expert on that work and natural philosophy in this whole period. So join me for, and you already know which joke is coming here, an utterly fascinating conversation with her next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ I am Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King College London and the LMU in Munich online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Jean Bodin and 16th century natural philosophy with Anne Blair, who is Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor of History at Harvard University. Hello Anne. Hi. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. We're going to be talking about Jean Bodin, which you can probably pronounce better than I just did, whom we covered in the previous episode. So the audience has already heard me attempting to pronounce his name numerous times. And you are an expert on him because you wrote a book about his work on natural philosophy, which is called The Theatre of Natural Philosophy. And I was curious if you could start by telling us something about the title, like why theatre, obviously, but also why natural philosophy. So what did they mean with that phrase in that era? Theatre is a lovely metaphorical title, which is part of a cluster of metaphorical titles that people love to use in this period to describe books that tried to encompass a wide scope in a way to bring it to your mind, your eyes rapidly. And so, for example, we'd call them encyclopedias today, I'd say, but that term, although it was coined by Rablé among a few others in the early 16th century, was very rarely used as a title of a book. Instead, for example, Vincent de Beauvais in the 13th century calls his encyclopedia a mirror, the great mirror of natural philosophy. So Bodin is a theatre. Others have gardens. Others, the bundle of flowers. So all these lovely metaphors describing this idea of bringing together all kinds of things for you to see. But Bodin spins his analogy with a sort of an emphasis on divine providence. He says in his dedicatory epistle, the theatre of nature is nothing other than a sort of table of the things created by the immortal God, placed before the eyes of everyone, so that we may contemplate and love the majesty, power, goodness, and wisdom of the author himself and his admirable providence. So that's his project, really. And you're absolutely right, the other term in there is natural philosophy, which is our term really. He calls it the theatre of nature, but natural philosophy was an actor's category, which covers the study of nature. What we might call science, but of course that term is much more recent. I mean, it meant certain knowledge at the time, but the term like scientist dates from the early 19th century. So I think natural philosopher was the main label that people used about themselves when they were busy talking about science. Of course, Jean Bodin, and your pronunciation was perfect, is principally known as a political philosopher, not a natural philosopher. So my study really is about a little known work, his last work, published in 1596, the year of his death, of a man who was famous already for something quite different, really. Although I think there are parallels, you know, everything is much of a muchness, his philosophy hangs together. He's also interested in the hand of God at work in human history. And here he is interested in the hand of God at work in the natural world. And he has a very similar method of working, which is piling on examples of many different kinds from which then he tries to, you know, reach conclusions. I think he's got more strident conclusions in his political philosophy because he's addressing current issues of politics and a crisis in French government, really, due to the civil wars caused by the religious acrimony, not just between Catholics and Protestants, but between Catholics and Catholics, extreme Catholics and less extreme Catholics. And Bodin was definitely one of the politiques, sort of the moderate Catholic camp. So in his natural philosophy, he doesn't really have a strong single message. He's not trying to resolve a problem. Although his basic point is, we have a crisis of natural philosophy because Aristotle, the foundation of natural philosophy, as studied in universities, as he studied by many philosophers, you know, in the Middle Ages and for much of the Renaissance, he perceived to be impious, but not properly pious philosophy. And so Bodin is setting out to create an alternative, but rather than really coming up with an alternative, what he's really doing is just poking holes in Aristotle. And he does that on a very wide range of topics and it's extremely diverse. As you said, there's all these examples, there's all these topics. How would he have gone about composing a work like this? Yeah, that's a great question. And we do not have any manuscripts of Jean Bodin, partly perhaps because he had them destroyed near the end of his life. He was worried about, you know, being found to be heretical or at least to be suspected of impolitic views. So he certainly was living in a difficult time and very conscious about his legacy. So we have no manuscripts. And I argued from the work itself about how he plausibly took notes from his readings under topical headings from which he then drew to compose his natural philosophy, but equally well one can surmise his political philosophy, his six books of the Commonwealth. So this would be maybe comparable to a commonplace book. This is like, for example, we looked at a work on politics by Lipsius, which is also a commonplace book, writes all these quotations from antiquity. So it's almost like they have what, note cards or index cards or something, and then they kind of collate them together and that's how they make the book. Is that how it would work? That's the hypothesis. I wouldn't think they were cards actually, although there is evidence for people cutting up slips of paper when they want to do something really serious like indexing a book. But I would think of it as a notebook where you would put a heading of something that was interesting to you at the top of the page, and then you add into that page quotations from other authors you've encountered, but also possibly, given what Bodin puts into his book, observations of his own, things he'd encountered in talking to people. And so he's collecting toward a work that he may change his ideas about as he goes along. So it's not at all clear how much is he drawing everything from a commonplace book and how much of the commonplace book is he reusing. Those are the kinds of questions we can't answer without having some physical evidence. But we have commonplace books from other authors, so it's quite plausible that that's how he gathered his material. And I could imagine, this is a late work, so he's got a lot of stuff in there on natural philosophy. So the book itself is about 600 pages and an octave volume. So it's a small format and it's divided into five books. And it's ordered by Rook 1 on the principles of nature, very much Aristotelian topics about place and motion and the elements and causes and so forth. And then he moves up the chain of being from the meteors and metals and minerals to plants and then animals and then humans with their senses and their souls. And then finally he's got the heavenly bodies. So that's a pretty classic way of proceeding for talking about the natural world, as you say, the whole thing in a small compass. That's the theater idea. That makes it sound very well organized. But in your book about this book, you say that in the theater of natural philosophy by Bodin and also similar works by other authors, there's what you call a tension between order and variety. And I was wondering what you meant by that. I guess I was also wondering whether this is in a way part of the anti Aristotelian drift of what he's doing because Aristotelian philosophy at least presented itself as being incredibly systematic. Whereas although he has these headings, he sort of moves through the cosmos, as you just said, it seems like under each heading, it's kind of a jumble of different things. And I mean, that could be because of the way it was written, as we were just discussing. But couldn't it also be that he just thinks this is how natural philosophy should work. So you should sort of make observations about a whole wide range of things and not try to force it into the scheme of the Aristotelian structure. Yeah, that's a great point. I agree that inside each of those books, it is very much stream of consciousness. And it's hard to tell why he treats certain things at length and other things not at all. That would sort of be driven by the material he's got, the observations he's got. I like the idea that it is challenging the order of the disciplines, for example, as one would have studied them, the seven liberal arts followed by the four areas of philosophy, which was another classic way of organizing an encyclopedic work. But I'd like to point out that really this is a time when people experiment with lots of different orders. There's one historian who has argued he's identified 19 different systematic orders. And I think one of the reasons is that order was thought to be super important. You want to match the truth of things and if you have the right order, then you'll be able to understand everything sort of by snap, you know, almost miraculously. It'll just all come together and make sense and you'll be able to retain it in memory. So there's this huge drive to get the order right. And there I'd love to tell you about a guy named Theodore Zwinger who wrote another work entitled Theatrum, which was even larger than Bodass and covered natural philosophy, but also human history. It was called The Theatrum Humanae Vitae, The Theater of Human Life. And it was, you know, 1.5 million works at first and then he revises it three times and it gets bigger and bigger each time down to, you know, triple the original size. And each time he rearranges the whole thing and it is so complicated, but he's so proud of his order. He gives you branching diagrams, mapping it out, and he spent a huge amount of effort doing this. And of course to us, honestly, it makes very little sense. I mean, he moves, you know, between binaries. He's got an ethical scheme. So he goes through the vices and the virtues and he pairs them up together and so forth. But why this order rather than another one exactly is completely unclear. And what's kind of sad is I came across a wonderful quote of a contemporary, you know, dozen years later who's commenting that Zwinger put an enormous labor, he says, into organizing the headings, but he says, I don't know that the fruit was equal to the labor. Indeed, the order is neither constituted accurately according to logic, nor is it such that you could refer all things to it or find what you desire without great difficulty unless you take refuge in the alphabetical index. And in a sense, that is the key to everybody doing whatever they want because you have an alphabetical index if you really want to find something. Of course, Boudin's book does not have an index. So he's forcing you to read his thing in order. But a lot of, I'd say, some of the liberties people take with order in the 16th century is made possible by the alphabetical index, which Zwinger has. He hasn't just one, but a few, three of them. And then of course another order, which just says, I'm not going to have an order. It's this self-consciously miscellaneous order, proud to have no order, because it offers, it boasts about the pleasure of variety, that you're going to have fun. You're going to be surprised by what comes next. And of course, if you do want something useful out of this, you can get it through the index. And so that is classic of, say, Erasmus's adages. Certainly Erasmus's adages, a collection of proverbs from antiquity with his commentary, is not the only book miscellanously organized, but it was so popular, very widely reprinted and also abridged and imitated. And that sort of gave cachet in the 16th century to the miscellaneous order. Of course, in the long run, the miscellaneous order did not become a thing. I see it as sort of a specifically Renaissance experiment, because the order that does prevail, which Bodin does not use at all, is alphabetical order. And we can think about someone like Conrad Gessner, who is basically a New York contemporary of Bodin, but who writes on fauna and flora, quadrupeds, reptiles, birds, fish. Each one of them is organized alphabetically. And he explains, he tells you why he does this. The utility of alphabetical order comes not from reading the book from beginning to end, which would be tedious, but rather from consulting it per intervala, by intervals, intermittently, non-sequentially. And so, it's fascinating, he has to explain that in his front matter, that that's how he expects you to read. He's doing something new, which of course will become characteristic of what we think of as the modern encyclopedia. That's what we expect out of one of these things. Right, because no one reads a modern encyclopedia cover to cover, and you can't read it, it's too long. And so these works you were just describing, when you first were describing them, I was thinking, wow, could anyone even use a book like this? And the answer is, you don't sit down and read it. You somehow navigate your way through it, and they're kind of working on what you might call technologies of the book to help the reader do that. Exactly. I mean, I think Bodá's book in particular is not that big that you must consult it, but the Gessner's and the Zwingers of the world are so huge that yes, that's the only way. I have to say, I feel a little sorry for Pord Zwinga, doing all that work and getting told off for it. But he's a treasure trove. I mean, you can use the index now and you find amazing anecdotes. He didn't lack for hubris. He felt he was offering what God will see at the last judgment is all the behaviors of humans. So that's a different idea of theater, of bringing it all together, but also kind of like the people are on a stage. Whereas Bodá's theater is nature, is what's the stage that we're looking at, and we're watching God through nature. We're appreciating his actions. All the world's a stage, so to speak. Yep, that's the Shakespearean one, which, yeah, they're all interconnected. One thing that your description of how these books were written makes me wonder, though, is that it sounds like very kind of literary activity. So for example, if we're imagining them with these notebooks, presumably the notebook is next to the books that they're reading. So they're taking notes on their reading. And that isn't at all what we think of as science, right? So we think of science as going out and looking at the world. That makes me wonder, is there any role of, I mean, experimentation would probably be too much to ask for, but what is the role of something like experience of actual phenomena in this kind of natural philosophy? There's very much a place for experience. And even in medieval natural philosophy, too, experientia. People could bring in things that they've experienced personally or vicarious experience that other people have reported. So you're absolutely right that it's fundamentally a textual activity, a bookish activity, but it's very much about the natural world and you want the text to match the natural world. And I'd just like to point out that Aristotle gets a bad rap for creating this system, which obviously, you know, is going to be overthrown in the course of the 17th century, except for logic, which persists a very long time. But Aristotle, too, did a lot of observing. He opened those eggs at various stages of the chicks' development and he found some kind of fish in the Mediterranean that people didn't think existed until they found such a specimen in the 19th century. I love these stories of Aristotle the observer. So no one necessarily feels they have to be anti-Aristotelian just by observing. And I think it's true that it's the Renaissance Aristotle. The Aristotle the observer was less in the canon of Aristotle that people read in the Middle Ages and rather the parts of animals and these other more empirical texts became known by the humanists and so forth. So in some sense, Baudin is heavily indebted to Aristotle. Of course, he's got causes and elements and is very much speaking in Aristotelian terms, but of course to criticize a lot of the specifics of Aristotle. Sometimes he's doing targeted experience searching. So I love this example that he talks about whether the ostrich can digest iron, which is something that Pliny had said in his Natural History. So you know obviously this is an important question. He doesn't have a pre-theoretical idea like we would have. I don't think so. And he just wants to know. So he said he has seen some ostriches brought to France and watched them be fed by the tamer. Nonetheless I could not understand anything from the tamer. Oh the tamer speaks a different language in other words. Yes it seems there's a serious language barrier but you can see Baudin seeking to find out you know whether the tamer served nails to the ostrich. I don't know. And of course this failing. At other times though he talks about, for example, he recalls his experience in the fish markets to support his argument that salt water is purer than fresh water. The fish of the ocean are bigger, better, and more tasty than the others as I experienced in Toulouse where fish are brought both from rivers and from the sea. So that's sort of his personal experience and possibly also talking to fishmongers integrated into his book. So he has plenty of references to everyday experience or targeted experience. He's not exactly making any experiments, controlled experiments. And of course sometimes experience shows some pretty weird things like he says I saw a topaz set in gold broken in many places to which the Toulouse attributes the power of changing color to signal danger. So that this stone has magic properties and he's seen one. And so that's, it's not magic, it is the nature of the stone to do these cool things. So in that sense of course experience can be capacious as we would say by our lights. Of course we come with all this baggage, well that's not possible. And I think in the Renaissance they don't have that. They're imbued with the omnipotence of God. Who are we as humans to say this isn't possible? Of course God can give all kinds of properties to things. And of course there's the magnet and iron and they attract each other at a distance. How does that work? Why is it crazier to say that this stone changes color when it perceives danger? When you describe him looking into things like can an ostrich digest nails, iron nails? Don't try this at home kids. It strikes me that if we were describing the motivation for that I think the natural thought would be well he's curious. And that doesn't seem to fit obviously with what you've been talking about several times, which is this idea that his work is a theater which depicts the theater of nature, the point being to display God's providence and majesty and so on. And also I mean the word curious or curiosity at least in the medieval period was often used as a kind of accusation, right? Like you're showing curiosity even in Augustine I think this is present, right? So is there another tension there between what you might call idle curiosity and this focus on nature, something we already saw with Melanchthon actually, this focus on natural philosophy as a way of displaying God's might and justice and order? Yeah, I think there's a potential for tension. Bodin does not use the word curious himself. Curious comes from koura for care. So curious could also mean just doing something carefully. Like even Samuel Johnson in the 18th century talks about curious reading by which I think he means a very focused, careful reading. But I think actually the whole focus on divine providence liberates people to feel that focusing on nature is admiring God. And so it's not so bad. Basically it's okay. It's a form almost of divine worship. And of course natural theologians will play that up but I see Bodin fitting into that tradition very much. He does though draw limits. He feels that humans shouldn't be idly trying to explain everything. And he does not like how Aristotle tries to explain everything, things like for example earthquakes by exhalations that are trapped underground and burst out. Bodin feels that basically he says you can go crazy through reasoning and it's much better to just acknowledge that you can't understand that these are part of the mysteries of divine creation. Personally, he suggests that demons might be operating in earthquakes so he's willing to bring in some supernatural, what we would call supernatural, of course it's all through divine permission. So he's critical of Aristotle for trying to explain too much and he says that humans should confess ignorance rather than hubristically coming up with crazy explanations basically. Sounds a little bit like he's trying to have it both ways. So if he thinks it's worth looking into something like can ostriches, congest iron, dewstones change color because they're afraid? Then he looks into it. But if Aristotle does it then he's like oh Aristotle's presumptuously looking into the secrets of God. I think you're absolutely right. He likes to criticize Aristotle and he doesn't have a whole lot to offer in his place. So then he just offers confession of ignorance, admiring God, and we move on. And he only investigates stuff that he has something to say about that he's found interesting. He's not at all systematic. He doesn't say okay we've got to talk about X, Y, and Z because it's out there in nature. He just talks about what he wants to talk about. Absolutely. I got a lot of insights into this book from reading a copy of the book that was annotated by a reader at the time who read it from cover to cover. Really that's quite unusual. You know as you point out a lot of people should dip into a book or they start really diligently annotating and then they stop after 30 pages or whatever. So this reader who's anonymous really did a great job all the way through and the single most common comment he made in the margin was Aristotle is criticized. So that's the Aristoteles Reprehensus. He has that pretty much when you count it out on every fourth page on average he's got a criticism of Aristotle. So that's striking the reader as interesting about Bourdin that Aristotle is being criticized and he's pulling it out. I think that really is a nice insight into what readers found interesting and new and different about Bourdin. Even if like I said he's got a ton of Aristotelian baggage by our perspective. This is not you know mechanical philosophy by any stretch. It's very much Aristotelian but he's poking poking poking at Aristotle whenever he can making fun of him for the trope that Aristotle is obscure like a squid you know who sends out black ink so you can't understand anything. His prose is obscure, his explanations don't make sense but what he offers in exchange is not an explanation of his own or he might sometimes have one like this whole business of salt water and fresh water but many times he just trucks it up to the mysteries. Is that true in general of 16th century natural philosophy that they are better at criticizing faulty explanations than giving good explanations or did they actually make some what we call they might now call scientific breakthroughs during this period? That's a good question obviously in certain fields someone like Copernicus comes up with this hypothesis which he has very little evidence for and which creates a lot of problems but which gives him a very satisfying explanation of something kind of weird that the planets look like they're going backwards and stop you know night after night in their trajectories and we consider that a huge breakthrough I think at the time there wasn't a whole lot going for it except for those people who thought ah that's beautiful that really makes sense in a very satisfying way. Or Vesalius is an atom. Vesalius. So I mean there are these sort of famous examples but I was wondering more like if we trawl through these commonplace books on natural philosophy are there like tidbits of gold buried in there? Well a lot of it's description. Conrad Gessner for example is apparently the first to describe the tulip for which he came from the Middle East and they do not classify things in a way that proved durable let's put it that way. Sometimes they classify say birds by the kind of feet they have, the kind of beak they have. He's got birds that live in the dust. This is chickens and turkeys and so forth and then they've got the webbed feet and then the birds that fly and don't fly but it's all bizarre not systematic classifications. So that's where the index again comes in handy. If you really want to look at a bird you might look in the index to find where it's being discussed because it's not obvious to us at least. And you provide all kinds of information like recipes for cooking chicken and the medical qualities of items that can cure things. So yes very unsystematic I think that's perfectly fair. Kind of heaping together a celebration of this diversity and of course the New World is part of that. Obviously going to New World and being aware that there are new species or of course wondering if they're new. Is there actually a Latin ancient term for this or not? And it's a judgment call and even things within Europe are they the same or not the same in different parts of Europe? So there's a lot of work really that goes on through the 17th century in the natural history realm of trying to figure out matching description and terms, Latin and Greek terms but then we have vernacular terms all the everyday in the languages that we think of now French and Italian so forth but then the gazillion local dialectal forms. There was a lot of words to try to match up with reality. Yeah maybe it's better to think about it not so much in terms of breakthroughs that we would think of as exciting science nowadays but think about it more in terms of what readers were getting out of these books at the time because they obviously were getting something out of it. I mean you don't read a 600 page book if you find it useless. Exactly I do think that the Antirrhese-Tian post is really important because Boden is not alone in this. He's alone in the specifics but there are other philosophers of his time who are first of all looking to realizing there's so many ancient philosophers and Boden drops a lot of names of ancient philosophers. I don't know exactly how much he knew about some of them. Some of them I think he just knows secondhand but this awareness that Aristotle was one of many and why should we be so obsessed with him? Why should we trust him? Obviously Aristotle was the backbone of the educational system and of university curricula from the 13th to the 16th century but Boden is busy sort of saying well you know that's hardly an argument. We need to and then other guys like I don't know Patrizii or Lipsius or Gassendi are busy looking to other ancient philosophers you know whether it's Plato or the pre-Socratics or the Stoics or Lucretius and the Adamists and saying we can just get as good or even more pious philosophy from looking at these ancient philosophers. Why obsessed with Aristotle? So I think it's an important moment of destabilizing Aristotle for a lot of people and creating some doubts. Of course the curricula and the Jesuits in particular go on saying that the Thoma synthesis is basically the key to having a pious philosophy and you will follow the mainstream but in Protestant universities Boden was actually read and commented on and it was part of having trouble with that Thoma synthesis and trying to think of alternatives. Of course the big alternative was someone like Descartes who also thinks he's offering a pious philosophy but it's awfully different from looking at an ancient source and doing this whole textual analysis and commentary and yet I think it's part of the context out of which Descartes comes. The anti-Aristotelianism is obviously a point of continuity with the 17th century. You mentioned a couple of minutes ago that the mechanistic philosophy that we're going to get in the 17th century is not really part of the story here in the 16th century. Are there other continuities, discontinuities you would point to? I mean specifically with natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th century? I think the idea that you see God through nature has a huge continuity. Someone like Robert Boyle you know writes the Christian Virtuoso. Even Descartes, you're seeing the laws of nature. You're seeing God through the laws of nature or Newton through the laws of nature. Whereas others will emphasize you see God in every particular. You see God through the microscope, Hooke's Micrographia or you see God in the heavenly spheres but that whole justification that doing natural philosophy is a good thing, it brings you closer to God is very long-lived and as continuous I think. It actually reaches back of course to the Middle Ages as well but just runs right through into the 18th century and one could argue through Darwin really. Okay well that's certainly looking ahead pretty far. For now I'm going to look ahead not nearly as far and only to the next episode which is going to touch on something you kind of just mentioned actually which is this kind of recuperation of Hellenistic philosophies which is part of what we see in a whole range of humanists around the turn of the 17th century and also something we see in Montaigne who we're getting to soon. So that's what's coming in the next few episodes. For now I will thank Anne Blair so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, great fun. And please join me next time as we move on to later French humanism here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps. you
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Pen Pals, later French Humanism. As an American living in Germany, I obviously have regular opportunities to regret that I am not a native German speaker, but I also have regular opportunities to be glad that my mother tongue is English. This is especially so in academic settings. When there's an international meeting of scholars from, say, France, Finland, Italy, Germany, and Greece, their common language is bound to be English. I'm often the only native speaker in a group like that, which is sort of like showing up to a tennis tournament with a state-of-the-art graphite and carbon fiber racket while everyone else is using wooden ones. Most academic publishing is in English too, which suits me just fine. Of the European nations, it's really only France that has maintained its own language as the cheap vehicle for writing about philosophy. The French, of course, have a long and proud history of refusing to learn English. But in an earlier period of that history, they did switch into another foreign tongue in academic contexts, Latin. This is illustrated by the correspondence of Joseph Scaliger, the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger, whom we covered in episode 401. In a letter written in 1608, the younger Scaliger relates with some chagrin how he fell into an awkward conversation with an Englishman in the Dutch city of Leiden. This visitor, admitted Scaliger, might as well have been speaking Turkish, and unfortunately, even the most learned Englishman pronounced Latin very badly. Sneering at the English for their lack of linguistic achievement, another long-standing French custom. Scaliger's letter was written in Latin, not in French, which was not unusual. His voluminous surviving correspondence runs to 1,653 letters, more than a thousand of which are in Latin. Scaliger regularly corresponded with other Frenchmen, not in their shared tongue, but in Latin, especially when discussing scholarly matters. This may seem surprising, but I've often seen something similar, Germans choosing to give papers in English in front of German-speaking audiences, on the grounds that they are not used to talking about philosophy in their native language. The correspondent to whom Scaliger sent the most surviving letters was the humanist Isaac Hausaubon, of whom Scaliger said that he was, The greatest Greek scholar that we have, he is my superior. The many messages they sent to one another exemplify a phenomenon that we have seen before, as with the surviving correspondence of Erasmus, and these stylish letters written by Italian humanists. It's also a phenomenon that will need extensive discussion when we get to early modern philosophy. I have in mind the so-called Republic of Letters, in which learned men, and occasionally women, around Europe, pursued scientific and philosophical questions by writing to one another, usually in Latin. By the turn of the 17th century, this Republic of Letters was well on its way to being founded. Scaliger, for instance, wrote two among many others, Tico Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Theodore Beza, Justus Lipsius, Philippe de Mornez, and for good measure, the kings of France and Scotland. But it makes sense that Casaubon was Scaliger's favorite pen pal, because they had so much in common. Both were Huguenots, who passed through the unofficial capital of the Calvinist world, Geneva. Casaubon studied there as a young man, while Scaliger became a professor of philosophy there, after fleeing France following the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Both would spend their final years living abroad, Scaliger in the Netherlands until his death in 1609, Casaubon in England, where he would die in 1614. As leading humanists, both men, of course, excelled in Latin and in Greek. Directly celebrated is Scaliger's story of teaching himself ancient Greek, after having received instruction in Latin thanks to his famous father. According to this story, as a young man, Scaliger shut himself in his room and undertook a self-imposed crash course in the language. He read Homer, with the help of a translation, and mastered this archaic version of Greek within only three weeks. Clearly, Joseph inherited his dad's flair for self-promotion and exaggeration, because in fact he learned Greek from several teachers in Paris. There, Scaliger also met Guillaume Postel, a scholar of Jewish Kabbalah. This got him interested in studying Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Scaliger in turn helped inspire his friend Casaubon to study these Near Eastern languages. They of course discussed this project in Latin, in their letters to one another, with Scaliger advising Casaubon to learn Arabic directly from the Quran, and Casaubon writing to say that he was reading Avicenna's medical treatise, the Canon, in the original. Which was not unprecedented, Avicenna's preeminent standing in medicine motivated quite a few Renaissance doctors to learn Arabic. But to combine a deep philological interest in Greek and Latin with a similar interest in Semitic languages, as Scaliger and Casaubon did, was more unusual. Joseph Scaliger, again according to his own not-exactly-modest account, claimed that he was able to dispute with Jewish rabbis in Rome in Hebrew, and Casaubon's study of Hebrew was ambitious enough to be the subject of a whole book by modern-day scholars Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg. As they discuss, Casaubon was able to consult texts in the Hebrew original on a wide range of topics, from religion to mathematics. As an exercise, he liked to translate Hebrew into ancient Greek. An author of particular interest to him was Maimonides, whom he saw as an authoritative interpreter of the Bible. We still have notes he made on a translation of Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed. By contrast, he had little respect for Kabbalistic writings, a judgment shared by Scaliger. Referring to the theory of the alphanumeric Seferot, Casaubon remarked, the Hebrew masters not only waste their time, but actually make fools of themselves as they seek out the mysteries of holy letters. One reason Casaubon was interested in Hebrew is that he assumed it to be the most ancient known language. You'll remember the Flood recorded in the Book of Genesis, the one that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, which is about twice as long as it took Scaliger to learn Homeric Greek. After this cataclysm, Casaubon supposed, the only remaining language was Hebrew, meaning that all existing languages on Earth must be derived from it. To support this spurious notion, he proposed equally spurious etymologies that purported to show the derivation of Greek words from Hebrew ones. Not one of Casaubon's better ideas. But in another case, he was, like the face of a Roman emperor, right on the money. In the process of attacking a Catholic apologist named Cesare Baronio, Casaubon turned his attention to one of Baronio's sources, he Platonizing writings ascribed to the Greek Egyptian religious figure Thrice Great Hermes, or Hermes Trismegistus. This body of text had been significant for the history of philosophy since late antiquity, when they were in fact written. Hermes was used by Greek Neoplatonists, a name known to philosophers of the Islamic world, and celebrated as a source of great wisdom and antiquity by earlier Renaissance humanists like Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno. But Casaubon noticed that these writings could not possibly be an early Greek translation of an even earlier Egyptian source, as was claimed. He observed, for example, that the text indulged in wordplay that would make sense only if it was originally written in Greek, as when the word cosmos is linked to the Greek verb cosmin, meaning to adorn or decorate. More generally, he saw that the vocabulary, style, and thought of the Hermetic writings belonged to late antiquity. There are many words here, he argued, that do not belong to any Greek earlier than that of the time of Christ's birth. As we can see from this example, the French humanists were developing a more nuanced sense of the history of philosophy, and the same goes for plain old history. Scaliger is especially important here, because of his contributions to the field of historical chronology. Of particular interest in his own time was, of course, biblical history, but Scaliger did not hesitate to use pagan historical records too, all those Roman emperors with their faces on coins and their reigns recorded in classical literature, as he undertook nothing less than a reconstruction of all antiquity, a kind of map in time instead of space. He used a similar metaphor himself, saying that his system for time measurement would offer a guide to the chronologer who journeys through all the world and roams like a wandering stranger back through all ancient times and origins, so that when he reads the Acts, Annals, and Calendars of the Ancients, he may sometimes know where he is, and need not always be a stranger. Using his periodization, it would be possible to determine when biblical events happened, relative to events recorded in the writings of the pagan Greeks and Romans. Scaliger even made an attempt to sort out the times of ancient Egyptian dynasties, and admitted that there was good evidence to show that Egyptian culture existed before the supposed date of the world's creation, suggested by the Hebrew Bible. This may seem to be the ultimate antiquarian project, and in a sense it was. Scaliger was going beyond the study of individual ancient texts to the study of ancientness itself, in a pioneering attempt to create a universal timeline on which all events could be located. This meant more than editing and translating particular texts and rejecting them as forgeries when appropriate, though it certainly meant these things too. Scaliger was envisioning a unification of all the ancient cultures known to the humanists, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern, within a single chronological framework, something he was well placed to do, having learned nearly all the relevant languages. Yet neither Scaliger nor Casaubon thought that old things are valuable just because they are old. To the contrary, both men believed in scientific and scholarly progress. Casaubon once said, Great things take a long time to develop, and one age is not enough to work through them systematically, hence they have certain rude beginnings and are not passed on to us in their final state. That is why those who come later always devise new things to add to the discoveries of their ancestors. And Scaliger was scornful of followers of Peter Rames, who fetishized the pioneering mathematicians of antiquity. As far as he was concerned, the fact that these figures came earlier didn't mean that they were better at math. Being more traditional humanists in the mold of Erasmus, Budet, the elder Scaliger, and so on, these later French scholars were not apt to be impressed by the user-friendly, disruptive methods of Rames. Casaubon lamented that Rames was an unfruitful tree, which unfortunately had spread its branches through virtually all the universities of the Christian world. So around the turn of the 17th century, some humanists were distancing themselves from or debunking the Neoplatonic, Neopathagorean approach to ancient thought that had still been accepted by scholars like Ficino and Pico. And of course, humanists had long defined themselves in opposition to Aristotelian scholasticism, even before the user-friendly simplifications of Rames came along. That left an opening for influence from other ancient philosophical traditions, especially stoicism and skepticism. We already looked at the greatest exponent of Stoic thought in the late Renaissance, Justus Lipsius, and discussed his thought in an interview with John Sellars. That was in episode 391 and 392. But it would be worth touching on a French exponent of neo-stoicism who was a contemporary of Casaubon and the somewhat older Scaliger. His name was Iom de Verre. Where Lipsius' stoicism was inspired especially by Seneca, for de Verre the most important ancient author of the school was Epictetus. He wrote a work called The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, which was published as a commentary to his own French translation of Epictetus' Enchiridion. Then he wrote a dialogue with the title On Constancy. That may sound familiar, since Lipsius did exactly the same thing and for similar reasons. Both of them were responding to the upheaval of the wars of religion, with the immediate event provoking de Verre's treatise being a Huguenot siege of Paris in 1590. Though de Verre was heavily under the influence of Lipsius, he did bring something distinctive to the late 16th century revival of stoicism. It has been said that he was the Christian and nationalist among the neo-stoics. He counts as a nationalist because of the political context and content of his work and because he was deeply engaged with French politics. He was, among other things, a member of the Paris Parliament and the President of the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence. In this period of constitutionalist challenges to the monarchy, de Verre may be counted among the conservative monarchists. He wanted the nobility, to which he belonged, to work closely with the king to keep the lower classes in line. This despite the fact that he shows clear sympathy for the poor in his dialogue On Constancy. The challenge thrown down for stoic philosophy to solve is that there is so much misery in the France of his day, as illustrated by horrifying stories of hunger among the people as a result of the constant warfare. There have even been rumors of children being eaten. But as de Verre says, no evil is so great that reason and philosophical conversation cannot overcome it. Part of his response is to compare our life on earth to a battle. God's providence is compatible with the evils and suffering we see around us because he wants us to rise to this challenge. Yet in something of a twist on classical stoicism, and certainly a departure from de Verre's favorite source, Epictetus, who focused especially on the individual's will and virtue, de Verre emphasizes the need to come together as a political community, rather than looking to self-interest. After all, as one of his characters says, there's no point saving your house if the whole country falls. Still, to de Verre's mind, true consolation in the face of evils cannot be found in anything that is done or achieved in this world. This brings us to the distinctively Christian aspect of his thought. In his work on the Stoic's moral philosophy, de Verre presents a rather un-Stoic vision of our ultimate good, namely beatitude in the afterlife, through contemplation of God. In this life, we should work to embrace, alongside the standard virtues recognized by the ancients, also the distinctively Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. More faithfully Stoic is de Verre's relentless emphasis on the importance of avoiding false belief, which he places under the pejorative heading of mere opinion. People are miserable, not so much because of the things that happen to them, but because of the false beliefs they have about these things. For example, that so-called external goods are truly valuable, or that the world is governed by chance rather than divine providence. When reason judges are right, then constancy in the face of misfortune is close at hand. The reason I say that this sounds faithful to Stoicism is that the ancient Stoics likewise stressed the importance of seeing the world aright and argued that misery derives from false belief. The perfect sage, who makes no mistakes, would be guaranteed to enjoy happiness. But even here, de Verre departs from what he would find in Epictetus or earlier Stoics. He incorporates into his moral theory Plato's analysis of the soul, according to which there are lower parts, spirit and desire, which can undermine reason by leading it away from the correct values and beliefs. De Verre suggests using philosophical medicine to cure the soul of such misconceptions, for example the Epictetan teaching that we should value only what is up to us. Another remedy can be found in the anecdotes and sayings, usually drawn from antiquity, that the humanists called exempla. De Verre's inspiration, Lipsius, was an avid purveyor of such material. But neither of them was the most famous author of the period to make extensive use of exempla. That honor would go to another Frenchman who wrote toward the end of the 16th century and who was more oriented toward another Hellenistic school, skepticism. This was Michel de Montaigne, whose famous collection of essays is absolutely chock full of quotations from ancient authors, good stories drawn from classical history, and passages praising heroes of antiquity, especially Socrates. Occasionally, ideas do come in from the Stoic tradition, but Montaigne found such rigorous ethical teaching too demanding and also too certain of itself. He was a man of moderation, who allowed himself to enjoy pleasure and also allowed that he was uncertain of many things. But given that Montaigne's favorite subject, the topic he found fascinating above all others, was Montaigne himself, I daresay he'd be sure that you should join me next time as we delve into his essays here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Not Matter, but Me, Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is among the most quotable authors in the whole history of philosophy. When discussing him, there's a strong temptation simply to reel off a list of his most memorable and pithy remarks. And as the equally quotable Oscar Wilde said, I can resist anything except temptation. So here is a selection of my favorite Montaigne moments. It is fear that I am most afraid of. The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives. There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. Virtue rejects ease as a companion. Reason is a two-handled pot. You can grab it from the right or the left. On any topic, I'd like starting with my conclusions. There are folk on whom fine clothes sit down and cry. I am rarely summoned, and I just as seldom volunteer. I do not judge opinions by their age. It is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to both talk and live like Socrates. And finally, the unimprovable, when I play with my cat, how do I know she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? These and many other remarks to savor can be found in Montaigne's essays, first published in 1580, expanded for a new edition in 1588, and published again posthumously under the editorship of Marie de Rornet in 1595. Taken together, the essays make for an immensely long, endlessly entertaining and willfully digressive work, which Montaigne himself compared to a monstrous grotesque fused together from mismatching limbs and to a patchwork of quilted fabrics. They are a monument to Montaigne's favorite subject, namely Montaigne himself. The style of his writing eloquently expresses his goal to explore and understand his self. Explaining the disordered appearance of the essays, he says, I let myself go along as I find myself to be. To account for his habit of adding material and never subtracting it, he admits, I never correct my first thoughts by second ones. I want to show my humors as they develop, revealing each element as it is born. Not since Augustine's confessions have we discussed such a sustained and intimate reflections on the working of an individual mind. Yet Montaigne's method, such as it is, may be traceable not so much to the confessional mode of Augustine as to the inward turn proposed by Erasmus. Montaigne's essays are a natural, if not predictable, outcome of the brand of humanism initiated by Erasmus. Many of the quotable sayings that appear in Montaigne are, in fact, already being quoted from other sources. Like Bodin or Lipsius, Montaigne was evidently a great exponent of Erasmus's commonplace book method, whereby one reads widely and notes striking, eliminating, or simply interesting passages for later use. The essays are thus stuffed with anecdotes and sayings from his vast reading, mostly from classical antiquity. A useful saying or epithy remark is always welcome wherever it is put, he says. If it is not good in context, it is good in itself. Inspired by classical authors who were themselves adept at using so-called exempla, like Plutarch, Montaigne likes the way that such material can lightly touch on themes that would need long discussion, if developed properly. The quotations, he says, often bear the seeds of a richer, bolder subject matter. At the same time, he's characteristically relaxed about whether his audience gets the same thing out of this material that Montaigne does. If my exempla do not fit, he instructs the reader, supply your own for me. Montaigne was predestined for humanism. At the age of six, he was sent to the Collège du Guien, where he had teachers, including Nicolas de Rochy, who placed emphasis on moral instruction. This, by the way, after being taught Latin from infancy in an immersive technique once recommended by Erasmus. As a result, Montaigne claimed, French remained a foreign language for him until later in childhood. Though Montaigne said that he never delved deeply into scholastic topics, biting my nails over the study of Aristotle, he was familiar enough with this tradition to reject it. For him, as for Erasmus, the schoolmen were preoccupied with trivial matters when they should be trying to learn how to live. We should imitate the ancient philosophers in this, since they were great in learning, greater still in activities. The schoolmen, and many humanist teachers too, took up bits of wisdom like birds carrying food in their beaks without swallowing. Their students might learn to quote Cicero and Plato, but not to ask, what have we got to say? What judgments do we make? What are we doing? Montaigne's approach was different. He was, he said, only seeking to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent. Yet, I can't help feeling that if Erasmus had been able to read the essays, he would have said, this isn't what I had in mind. Montaigne took the private spirituality of Erasmus and mostly dropped the spiritual part, focusing relentlessly on himself as an individual and reporting on everything from his struggles to be virtuous to his sex life, food preferences, and bathroom habits. This was very much by design. Montaigne made a point of dealing with both trivial and deep issues, since his goal is to develop his capacity for judgment and apply it to absolutely anything. He could, he said, write about even a fly. In another contrast to Erasmus, he was a humanist without being a philologist. Unlike his rough contemporaries, Scaliger or the younger Casaubon, Montaigne devoted his efforts to improving himself, not improving the text of ancient books. I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero, he said, or contrasting this project to that of the Scholastics. I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics. That is my physics. It's been said that Montaigne brought the private self out of hiding, and for good reason. He was convinced that it would be worthwhile to record his own subjective perspective on the world, this despite the fact that that perspective was changing all the time. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow. The point of this is not even, as we might expect, to discern universal verities by studying closely one particular person. Montaigne's ambition is, rather, limited to the understanding and improvement of his own self. He says that his business and his art are to live his life, so that talking about his life is like when an architect talks about buildings. Because he is so frank about recording his every thought, about myself nothing is wanting, he writes, and there is nothing to guess. There is, in the end, no difference between himself and his book, the essays. Touch one, and you touch the other. One might wonder why anyone else should be interested in reading such a determinedly self-obsessed work, unless they happen to be intimates of Montaigne, who want to know him better, or strangers who are just leafing through out of idle curiosity. Montaigne resolutely resists the idea that talking about himself is an indirect way to talk about some other topic. I am striving, he writes, to make known not matter, but me. But he still thinks that people can read his essays with profit, even if he is modest enough to say that they are aimed at a middling group of readers, since the vulgar will find them incomprehensible, and the outstanding readers will find them too easy. If I may follow Montaigne's example by telling you what I myself happen to think, it seems to me that Montaigne is modeling an approach to life, which readers can imitate by inspecting their own lives as intensely as he does. Each man, he says, is an excellent instruction unto himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close quarters. There's a familiar idea that Montaigne achieved this by withdrawing from society and remaining in solitude, reading and writing in his famous Tower, where, by the way, some of his favorite quotations were put up as inscriptions, most famously, I am a human, so I consider nothing human to be foreign to me, taken from the classical playwright Terrence. This cliché is encouraged by Montaigne himself. In an essay on the topic of solitude, he recommends bringing the soul back to itself and making one's happiness depend on oneself and not on friends and family. If you can keep yourself company and in lonely places be a crowd all by yourself, then you will be self-sufficient and less subject to the winds of fortune, whose inconstancy and unpredictability is a running theme throughout the essays. In the terms of the standard humanist dilemma, whether to pursue an active life of civic engagement or a secluded one of scholarly contemplation, it sounds like Montaigne has decided for the latter, albeit that what he contemplates is nothing other than his own self. Yet the essays themselves also tell a different story, especially when we supplement this with more information about Montaigne's life. This is the story of a man who was engaged with the world outside his tower, capable of passionate friendship and quietly courageous political action. Some of the most fervent passages in the essays concern Montaigne's friendship with Étienne Laboétie, whom we met as the young author of the daring political treatise Unvoluntary Servitude. Montaigne, never afraid of exaggerating for effect, once called Laboétie the greatest man of our century. Given his early death, this encomium may have been based more on Laboétie's prodigious talents than his actual achievements, especially since Montaigne sought to downplay Unvoluntary Servitude as a youthful excess. But that may have been a disingenuous remark intended to support his claim that there was never a better citizen than his young friend. A bit earlier in the essays, Montaigne illustrates Plutarch's aforementioned use of brevity and anecdote by referring with approval to Laboétie's treatise. This work, he says, extracts the meaning only implied in Plutarch's remark that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable, no. So Montaigne may have thought more highly of the message of this youthful work than he wanted to admit. At any rate, Montaigne was plunged into grief by the loss of Laboétie. He describes their relationship as a perfect friendship, so perfect indeed that it was indivisible, meaning that it could leave room for no other similar relationship. The demise of Laboétie and the prospect of his own demise led Montaigne to reflect often on death and its meaning for the living. Indeed, he named this as the one philosophical topic that concerned him the most. He found some consolation in philosophy, despite his observation that, there are so many arguments persuading men to despise death and to endure pain. Why do we never find a single one which applies to ourselves? In more serious moods, he treats death as the ultimate proof of our convictions. Until we face it, all those fine philosophical arguments may be only a pose. So he embraces the classical idea of philosophy as being not just a way of life, but practice for the end of life, and recommends, let us wait for death everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. As for politics, Montaigne's efforts in this sphere are often ignored, but some hint is given by the fact that he first met Laboétie while serving in the Bordeaux Parliament in the late 1550s. This was only one of many political appointments he held. He was a courtier under Charles IX, who knighted him in 1571, and he was one of the so-called politiques who worked to find a pragmatic peace between Protestants and Catholics. This led to more personal misfortune than public success, as he was imprisoned in 1588 after choosing to accompany King Henry III in flight from Paris. Understandably, Montaigne had, at best, mixed feelings about his various practical entanglements. One of the most amusing passages in the essays relates his approach to the mayorship of Bordeaux, which was thrust upon him in 1581. As soon as I arrived, I spelled out my character faithfully and truly. No memory, no concentration, no experience, no drive. No hatred, either. No ambition, no covetousness, no ferocity, so that they should know what to expect from my service. So Montaigne was not exactly an eager politician, yet it is worth touching on this aspect of his life since the upheavals of France form an important part of the background for his essays. In a way, they are as much a response to the wars of religion as more explicit reactions like the Huguenot political treatises or the works on consolation by Duver and Lipsius. When Montaigne does allude to current events, it is sometimes to maintain the pose that they do not touch him. I assay to steal this corner from the public storms, as I do for another corner in my soul. Our war can change its patterns, multiply and diversify into new factions, but to no avail. As for me, I do not budge. But he makes no secret about having opinions about the religious uproar, which he sees in part as the result of cynical political exploitations. All are alike in using religions for their violent and ambitious schemes, he says, mentioning in particular the Huguenot idea that it might be all right to defy a sitting monarch on religious grounds. Not unlike Sebastien Castello, albeit with a more ironic tone, he punctures the overconfidence of persecutors. It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. Montaigne was thus disposed to be in the party of peace, especially since he was able to find something to admire in men on both sides of the conflict. But he did have a preference for the Catholic cause, in part because he just wasn't convinced of the Protestant point of view. The idea that theological disputes could be resolved by taking recourse to scripture alone, as the Reformers insisted, was one he said he couldn't even take seriously. But his main reason for supporting the established religion was simply that it was indeed established. He saw the disasters of his time as being caused by novelties, which were introduced by zealous Reformers who did not think to count the cost. While he was open, as we have seen and will see again shortly, to constant change and variability in his own opinions and the world as a whole, when it came to politics and religion, he prized stability above all else. All roads which wander from the norm displease me. Despite the radicalism of his philosophical and literary project then, Montaigne can fairly be described as a social conservative. This may have been a matter of temperament as well as being a conclusion he drew from the chaos of his times. When we look at his views on ethics and virtue, a topic he mentions much more often than the worlds of religion, we again see him endorsing moderation. This is why, unlike de Wehr, Lipsius, he held back from embracing the teaching of the Stoic school. He thought it was unrealistic to teach that pleasure is not worth pursuing, and that pain is a matter of indifference. If this is not just playing with words, then it is a doctrine so demanding that no one could live by it, which of course would be of little interest to Montaigne, whose ambition was precisely to learn how he should live. In a striking thought experiment, which recalls one devised centuries before by Avicenna, Montaigne imagined a supposedly imperturbable philosopher being at the top of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This philosopher would surely be afraid of the height. Rather than regretting such natural reactions, we should be suspicious of extremes in the life of the mind, as in the life of the state. Taken in moderation, philosophy is pleasant and useful, but it can eventually lead to a man's becoming vicious and savage, contemptuous of religion and of the accepted laws, an enemy of our human pleasures. At the very end of the essays, he leaves us with the thought that the best arguments are those which are most human, most ours. Montaigne enjoyed a nice irony, so perhaps he appreciated the fact that this same difficulty arose with his preferred Hellenistic school, which was not Stoicism, but skepticism. He lived in a moment when this tradition was better accessible than it had been previously, since writings of the pyranist skeptic, Sexus Empiricus, had recently been printed, in 1562. As the name of this school indicates, it traced its lineage back to the early skeptic, Pyro, who we covered more than a decade ago in episode 69. But he is pretty memorable, so perhaps you'll recall the stories about him almost walking off cliffs and in front of oncoming traffic because he refused to believe anything, even his own eyes. Referring to these reports, Montaigne says consistently with his response to Stoicism that it is one thing to bring your soul to accept such ideas and another to combine theory and practice. But Montaigne was more persuaded, if we can use that term in this context, by the skeptical approach adopted by Sexus, according to which one simply follows appearances while remaining profoundly aware of the limitations of one's own knowledge. This may have been another reason for his political conservatism, in fact. Sticking with established custom is exactly how this sort of skeptic negotiates their way through the world, without endorsing potentially controversial doctrines. And as we just saw, Montaigne was scornful of people who were so impressed with their own beliefs that they were willing to kill others who disagreed. The longest entry in the essays is in large part a meditation on the topic of skepticism. This is Book Two, Essay 12, in which Montaigne answers detractors who criticized a work he had translated into French as a young man, at the behest of his father. This was The Book of Creatures by Raymond Sébonne. Sébonne was a Spaniard who taught at Toulouse back in the 1430s, which is when he wrote this work of natural theology intended to support Christian belief using rational argument. In this essay, entitled An Apology for Raymond Sébonne, Montaigne answers two lines of critique. First, that reason cannot be used to support religion. Second, that Sébonne's rational arguments are weak. To the first, Montaigne argues that rational theology is a perfectly respectable project, though he piously reminds us that faith is a gift that ultimately comes from God alone. More surprising, and in considerable tension with Sébonne's original project, is Montaigne's answer to the second criticism. He admits that the arguments in the book may not be perfectly convincing, but that's hardly surprising because philosophical arguments are never perfectly convincing, especially when it comes to theology. Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine. Realizing this, we should strive for a form of ignorance that is at least aware of itself, curing ourselves of pretensions to have more certainty than we do. This, says Montaigne, is doubt taken to its limits. It shakes its own foundations. This rather strange line of defense for Raymond Sébonne and other remarks scattered throughout the essays have earned Montaigne a central place in the history of early modern skepticism. He constantly reminded himself to be modest about his knowledge, as with one of the inscriptions he put up in the famous Tower, What Do I Know? In the next episode, we'll get into this aspect of the essays more fully, as we put Montaigne alongside two other important skeptics who worked in France in this period, Francisco Sanchez and Montaigne's friend Pierre Charron. As we'll see, they make a pretty convincing case that nothing is certain, apart of courts from death, taxes, and the fact that you should not miss the next episode of The History of Philosophy without any gas.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department of King's College London and the ILLAMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Be So Sure, French Skepticism. As we've been seeing, the Reformation led to results that were unexpected at the time, and ironic to boot. Luther was neither a tolerant nor a secular man, but in the long run, what he started led to the emergence of more secular and religiously tolerant societies. In the shorter run, the Reformation led to a reawakening of philosophical skepticism. Which may seem, if anything, even more astounding. 16th century intellectuals seemed to have been mighty sure of themselves. Luther was convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist, while Catholics felt equally certain of the authority of the Church. It was indeed an age when people were quite literally ready to kill anyone who disagreed with them about their most deeply held convictions. Here we may recall Montaigne's remark, It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. In a well-known book on the history of early modern skepticism, Richard Popkin tried to understand the skeptical leanings of Montaigne and other figures who wrote in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. For Popkin, one major factor was the impact of the greatest ancient skeptic, Sextus Empiricus. His writings had been known to some extent even in the medieval era, but in the 1560s, Latin translations of his writings appeared. Since humanists also knew about the earlier academic form of skepticism through Cicero, this Hellenistic tradition of thought could now take its place alongside Stoicism as a powerful influence. But Popkin also pointed to the Reformation as an important part of the story. His idea was that the conflict between Protestants and Catholics brought attention to what he calls the problem of the criterion. This is a problem about how to resolve disagreement. If you claim to be taller than me and I deny this, though to be honest it's not unlikely, then there is a criterion we can use to settle the matter, a literal yardstick. But there was no yardstick available when it came to the religious disputes that erupted in the wake of Luther. Catholics pointed to the authoritative standing of church tradition and the papacy, whereas Lutherans rejected this out of hand. With no shared standard by which the argument could be settled, the rival parties instead deployed abusive rhetoric and violent force. Popkin was right to point out that this problem was anticipated in the works of Sextus and other ancient skeptics. A standard technique of this school was to point to disagreements on philosophical issues, and then to suggest that there was no way to decide these issues without assuming some further equally controversial premises. Cultural variation was also invoked to motivate skepticism. Sextus accumulated examples of unfamiliar beliefs and practices in other societies, so as to suggest that the beliefs and practices of our own society are parochial and arbitrary. And we find Montaigne doing exactly the same thing. Still, there's a problem with Popkin's account. It doesn't really explain why Montaigne or anyone else would have found skepticism attractive. To the contrary, Popkin himself quotes numerous authors for whom skepticism was a potentially disastrous consequence of the quandary introduced by the Reformation. Scholars like Jacopo Sadoletto and Guy de Brès wrote treatises in refutation of skepticism, and the humanist Guillaume Boudet warned that everyone who follows the method of the academy would take nothing for certain, not even what revelation teaches us concerning the inhabitants of heaven and hell. As Popkin also notes, it was common for both Protestants and Catholics to claim that the rival camp's theological stance would lead to uncertainty in matters of religious belief. To understand Montaigne's fondness for skeptical argumentation, we need to delve more deeply into this aspect of his thought. Popkin remarks that Montaigne manages to introduce most of the major epistemological arguments of the ancient Pyrenists, albeit in rather unsystematic fashion. His favorite was probably the aforementioned technique of setting up opposing apparently irresolvable views. This is a technique he would have learned in his youth in an educational system designed to impart the skill of arguing on both sides of any question. In his maturity, he would duly quote in his essays the following line from Homer, There is every possibility of speaking for and against anything. The essays also make evident Montaigne's delight in recounting the strange customs of nations removed from the fronts of his own day in both space and time. Elsewhere, people might greet each other by turning their backs, or go without clothing. From ancient times, Montaigne cites reports of the quaint and bizarre habits of the Romans. Would you believe that they used to eat between meals and bathe every day? Having presented all this information, he concludes, As we'll discuss in a later episode, he was also fascinated by reports of the people in the recently-contacted Americas. He was remarkably open to the thought that those people might have an admirable, yet very different, way of life. Furthermore, in his deceptively unsystematic way, Montaigne applied this strategy at the level of the individual, claiming that, For Montaigne, the upshot of all this disagreement was that we should be less sure of our own convictions. He admired people who took a vow of ignorance rather than chastity or poverty. Alluding to the supposed religious certainties being thrown around by his contemporaries, he modestly allowed, Indeed, he professed to be bewildered by the fact that other people seemed so sure of themselves, These expressions of modesty are typical of him, and at first glance could be read in the same spirit as his self-effacing remarks about having a bad memory or poor powers of concentration. But it's clear from the lengthy essay entitled Apology for Raymond Sébon, which we talked about last time, that his uncertainty was a principled one. Here he called it a And he explicitly invoked these skeptical arguments of the Pyrenist school on the way to excusing Sébon for failing to provide ironclad demonstrative arguments. It was unreasonable to expect anything more, since such arguments simply cannot be given. But this same essay shows that Montaigne was no convinced Pyrenist, and not just because this would be a contradiction in terms. It's not so clear whether he appreciated the difference between academic and Pyronian skeptics. To make a long story short, the academics argued against the Stoics that knowledge is impossible. You might be able to find some beliefs that are more plausible than others, but you can never get absolute certainty. By contrast, Sextus's Pyronian skepticism suspends judgment on all matters, even about whether knowledge is possible after all. This allowed Sextus to avoid the paradox of claiming to know that knowledge is unattainable. Montaigne, though, seems to have thought that all skeptics are subject to this paradox. Thus he said of Pyronism that What he apparently valued most in Pyronism was the idea of following appearances. You might be aware that other peoples behave very differently, but that's no reason to start walking around naked, or god forbid, washed daily. Confronted with the diversity and uncertainty of human belief, and the fact that, as Montaigne puts it, there is nothing that custom may not do and cannot do, one should simply adopt the customs of one's own society. But in the same essay, where he makes that last remark, Montaigne says that a wise person is one who withdraws from the crowd, and makes judgments of their own. He often framed the essays, or rather, the lifetime of reflection that led to the essays, as a sustained effort to improve and refine his own judgments. Taking all this into account, we might conclude that Montaigne was what is nowadays called a fallibilist. In other words, he did not suspend judgment, like a Pyronist would do, but instead came to conclusions, even firm ones, while remaining open to correction. This fits well with his frequent emphasis on his own changing opinions, and it also fits with his commitment to moderation. Just as one should be neither an unrestrained hedonist nor a self-punishing ascetic, one should not abstain from all belief, but neither should one take oneself to be absolutely certain. We may be able to shed still more light on Montaigne's skepticism by turning to the way it was taken up by his friend Pierre Charron. According to legend, he was considered as an adoptive son by Montaigne, who bequeathed him the right to use Montaigne's family arms. This has been put in doubt by modern scholarship, since our main source for the story may exaggerate the extent of Charron's relationship to Montaigne. It's telling that it was not this adoptive son, Charron, but Montaigne's adoptive daughter, Marie Desgarnais, who was entrusted with the task of producing a posthumous edition of the essays, but more on that next time. What matters for now is that Charron most definitely drew on Montaigne extensively in his own writings, especially a work called On Wisdom. In this treatise, he takes recourse to Montaigne's various skeptical arguments, while also drawing on other authors, like Bodin, Lipsius, and Duver. As a result, Charron has a reputation for being a rather unoriginal author, but he does modify his sources rather than quoting them directly. Moreover, he puts skeptical ideas within a larger body of work that one can only describe as thoroughly non-skeptical. Charron was a preacher and theologian, whose 1593 work, Three Truths, polemicized against the Protestant Reformers, especially Duplessis Monnet, whom we met as the probable author of the political treatise, Vindicii contra tyrannos. The first true truths of Charron's title, which would have been acceptable to Protestants, were that God exists, and that he has sent Christ as a savior. But the third truth states that the church founded by Christ is to be identified with the Catholic one. As soon as one doubts, the authority of this church, argues Charron, disorder and heresy are bound to ensue. European history in the later 16th century was proof enough of this, and the dissension among the various Protestant groups was a further indication that the Reformation was deeply misguided. Now, this doesn't sound particularly skeptical. The puzzle deepens when we note that Charron published another work of passionately convinced Catholic theology in 1601, the very year that saw the appearance of his book on wisdom, which is packed with skeptical argumentation. What is going on here? Well, that's a matter of some scholarly controversy. One suggestion has been that the skeptical arguments drawn from Montaigne and Charron's On Wisdom are simply designed to clear away false beliefs. This procedure would make it possible for the innate seeds of knowledge and virtue in our souls to blossom fully. That sounds more stoic than skeptic, and indeed the same treatise On Wisdom contains ethical material indebted to stoicism, which is where the influence of Lipsius and Duver comes in. Yet there are also grounds for thinking that Charron was quite serious about his skepticism. He went further than Montaigne, who inscribed the saying, What do I know? in his tower. Charron put the words, I do not know, on the front of his house. It also appears on the frontispiece of On Wisdom. And in the preface of On Wisdom, he says that all his proposals are presented only problematically and academically. Whatever I propose, I obligate no one to accept. I simply present things and set them out. I will not be annoyed if anyone does not believe me, as pedants do. So we do need to ask how his uncompromising theological commitments could be made compatible with a skeptical, or fallibilist, epistemology. The key is already supplied by something we saw Montaigne saying, that his views were only human thoughts, as opposed to God's ordinance. This point becomes central in Charron, who systematically contrasts merely human wisdom with the wisdom divulged in God's revelation and the providentially guided teachings of the church. When Charron insists upon the variation between beliefs and the lack of any decisive criterion to decide the resulting disagreements, he is only impugning the certainty of human wisdom. Drawing on our own natural resources, we would never be able to go beyond uncertain opinion. This clears the way for an embrace of the supernatural resources supplied by God. Thus, Charron has been labeled a Phidias, in other words, someone who thinks that true knowledge is attained through faith rather than natural reasoning. We can now return to the question we started from. Why would men like Montaigne and Charron be positively disposed toward skepticism, where it had appeared more as a threat or accusation in earlier authors? The answer, I think, is twofold. First, skepticism was useful for Catholic authors because it allowed them to create space for faith in authority. Since we don't know anything for sure, we'd better let God tell us the right answers, and he does that through the church. This motivation is particularly clear in Charron, who was a Catholic theologian and polemicist, but Montaigne too, who was neither of these things, used skepticism as a rationale for conservatism in religion. Second, these authors saw skepticism as a route to end violent conflict. By undermining people's feelings of self-righteous certainty, they hoped to persuade them to stop rioting and fighting wars on the basis of those feelings. I've already quoted Montaigne's line about roasting people twice, so here's another quotation to the same effect. A third figure is often grouped together with Montaigne and Charron as belonging to a skeptical moment around the turn of the 17th century. But this philosopher, Francisco Sanchez, seems to me to have arrived at his skeptical stance via a rather different path. This despite the fact that he studied at the Collège de Bourguignes in Bordeaux, the same institution where Montaigne studied. Sanchez's life began in Braga, near the border between Spain and Portugal, but he moved to Bordeaux with his family as a child and his education and career unfolded in France and Italy. Trained in philosophy and medicine, he held professorial chairs in both fields at the University of Toulouse. So what caused him to lose his confidence in the possibility of attaining knowledge? For an answer, we must turn to his remarkable treatise, Quod nihile scitur, meaning That Nothing is Known. As its title suggests, the treatise is almost entirely destructive in intent and presents a searching critique of scholastic theories of knowledge. In wave after wave of argument, Sanchez charges the schoolmen with being doubly ignorant, because in stark contrast to Socrates, they do not even understand that they lack understanding. Unlike Montaigne, whose skeptical arguments have a sweeping generality borrowed from Pyranism, Sanchez, who doesn't seem to have made use of sexist at all, focuses on demolishing the specifically Aristotelian conceptions of knowledge that he knew so well thanks to his own education. Definitions are the foundation of Aristotelian science, so Sanchez tries to undermine the whole project by denying that any term can be defined, with full adequacy. This is because any definition will itself consist of terms that stand in need of further definition, a regress that will never end. As a result, language itself lies beyond our certain grasp, meaning that the readers of Sanchez's very book cannot be sure that they understand what they are reading. In a nice move, he adds that the term knowledge itself cannot be satisfactorily defined, which by itself will undermine any claim to know anything. How can you be sure you have knowledge if you aren't even sure what knowledge is? The same style of refutation is also applied to Aristotelian theories of proof. Any syllogism will consist of premises that would need to be justified by further premises, and again, we will never reach a starting point that is just obvious. And again, Aristotelians think we understand natural phenomena in light of their causes, but when we follow the chain of causes we will never get to anything that isn't itself caused, unless this is God, but it's agreed that God is unknowable, so we can't end the explanatory regress that way either. Not infrequently Sanchez adopts a sarcastic tone, as when he demands of the scholastics, who always appeal to indubitable first principles, well, send them to me. While Sanchez's treatise is remarkable for the power and cogency of its arguments, it is not unprecedented in the period we've been studying. Humanists like Valla and Vivas had unleashed similar torrents of invective and refutation against the scholastics, but Sanchez seems to be working towards something other than a rhetoric based humanist methodology. This becomes clear at the end of the treatise, where Sanchez merely gestures at a more positive approach to epistemology. Earlier in the work, he has claimed that all understanding is derived from the senses, and beyond this kind of understanding, all is confusion, doubt, perplexity, guesswork, nothing is certain. This could be a step toward a general skeptical conclusion, given that as Sanchez also mentions, sense experience is subject to illusions and misperceptions like the famous straight stick that looks bent in water, and it seems that he does not think sensation could be used to attain perfectly certain knowledge, the ambitions so fondly pursued by the scholastics. But, as he concludes his book, Sanchez alludes to an ambition of his own. He would like to, "...establish a kind of scientific knowledge that is both sound and as easy as possible to attain. It would be based not on the chimeras and fictions of Aristotelian science, but on things as they really are. Unfortunately, having gone on for more than a hundred pages about the kind of epistemology that will not work, Sanchez does not see fit to say anything more about this epistemology that he thinks would work. He simply says that he will devote a further treatise to it, and there's no sign that he ever made good on that promise. But, given his earlier words about sense experience, we can assume his new science would be grounded in empirical inquiry. If so, he may well have taken this idea from his medical training, even from the antique empiricist school of medicine that he would have known through descriptions found in Galen. Sanchez's science would surely be modest in its pretensions. It would not pretend to be an irrefutable body of conclusions, traceable to indubitable first principles, but present a cautious account of things as they seem to be, always open to improvement. So, it turns out that none of our three skeptics was really a skeptic, in the sense of suspending judgment about everything. They were willing to make judgments in the ethical and scientific realms, while bearing in mind that they might need to revise these judgments later. Indeed, Antenya seems to have downright expected to revise his judgments and feel conflicted about them. Hence one of the quotable remarks I mentioned in the opening of the episode on him, there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. But for Charon, at least, an embrace of one's own fallibility could be compatible with accepting the infallibility of the pope. In the time of reformation and counter-reformation, even skepticism was weaponized to fight for dogmatism. So now you probably think we've done enough to cover this sudden appearance of skeptical philosophy in Renaissance France. But don't be so sure. Everything I've said will be subject to correction next time, when I'll be talking to someone who really knows what he's talking about when it comes to skepticism in the history of philosophy. To hear more about the background and nature of skepticism in Antenya, Charon, and Sanchez, and also the way these ideas echoed in the thought of Descartes, you should make certain to catch my interview with Henrik Lagoland, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gas.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about skepticism in the 16th century with Henrik Lagerlund, who is professor of history of philosophy at Stockholm University. Hello, Henrik. Hi, hi. I'm really happy to have you on the podcast because you've really done a lot to draw attention to the interest of philosophy in the 16th century, which is not something everyone has tried to do. No, it is an important period in history of philosophy, much more important than I think many, many realize. Well, hopefully people have already been convinced of that by the series so far, but if not, maybe they'll be convinced by the next half an hour or so. We're going to talk about skepticism. Let's start with a conceptual overview rather than diving right into the history. What do you understand by the term skepticism and what distinctions should we make between different kinds of skepticism that might help us be ready for the discussion to follow? Well, unfortunately, almost the only thing that people have met with skepticism in this period is the ancient kind of skepticism. So it's Sextus who was translated at this time and also the academic skepticism that's foremost at this time was available through Cicero's Academica. So those are the two that people have usually meant when they talk about skepticism in this time. I think that that's limited, unfortunately, that there is a back history to skepticism, which when you get to Descartes, you see that he is aware of a much wider kind of skepticism than just these ancient. The problem of writing the history of skepticism before has been that you're limited to skepticism. Skepticism is either Pyrrhonism or it's academic skepticism. But there is a medieval tradition which has to be taken into account where you have this very strong skepticism, a kind of global skepticism, what we today would call external world skepticism that we traditionally think Descartes introduced, but which is strongly available in the 14th century and onwards. There are other more local discussions of skepticism in the scholastic tradition of can we know substances, can we know through representations and so forth. These are available and discussed throughout the medieval tradition. You can construe nominalism as a kind of skepticism where you're skeptical towards entities like universals, the existence of these things. You can see the ideas, you can see, I think, in contemporary discussions, you often see religious skepticism, skepticism towards the existence of God as that kind of skepticism. That was obviously less present in this period. But there's also skeptical arguments against logic, against inference, things like that. So there's a whole variety of discussions that I think one today would call skeptical, but foremost then having to do with the doubt. We can doubt all kinds of things. Doubt the existence of God, doubt the existence of the universals and so forth. So I think once one opens up the definition of skepticism to other things than just what Sextus said or just what the academics said or what Augustine said that the academics said, you see a much wider discussion in this time, which sets the context, I think, of 16th century in a much more interesting way than it has been before. I think that's a really important point that you can be skeptical in a very local domain or you can be skeptical in a very wide sense, even a global skeptic. You can say, I don't think that I know anything at all on any subject. That would be the most global form of skepticism, perhaps. But you can also say, I'm skeptical about your claim that dinner will be ready on time. So that's not a philosophical skepticism. You could be skeptical only about religious claims or only about metaphysics or something. Like what Wittgenstein said, you can be skeptical in ordinary discourse like that. But the kind of global skepticism doesn't make sense in that context. You mentioned these two forms of ancient skepticism, which are going to be important here because they were suddenly available or available as it was never before in the time period we're looking at. And you mentioned academic skepticism and pyranism. Can you explain what you take to be the difference between these two forms of ancient skepticism and maybe then say how well the 16th century readers understood the difference between them? The two forms are obviously pyranism that we get at this time through Sextus' empirical outline of Pyranism. So the 16th century is really the period where Sextus probably at his most influential in the history of philosophy. He was a sort of minor figure, really, and not read basically up until this time. And then you have the other part is the academic skepticism, which at this time they know through Cicero's Academica. And Cicero's Academica was read throughout the Middle Ages, certain periods more than others. But it was available. So we can clearly see the influence through the Middle Ages all the way into the 16th century. And that's important because even though Sextus sort of pops up as now a new text that gets read in a much wider way than it ever was, Cicero is still there being read at the same time, even more probably so than Sextus actually. So the big difference between these two is that the academic skepticism as it came up and is presented in Cicero is very much a kind of negative skepticism towards the possibility of empirical knowledge, knowledge through the senses. It's really directed at the Stoics, their idea of how you can acquire these catalyptic impressions or infallible beliefs. While the difference between that view and Sextus, as Sextus presents the Pyrronian view, is that a Pyrronian doesn't hold beliefs, either positive or negative. The Pyrronist is meant not to have beliefs. And also that will lead the Pyrronist thing to this state of calm or ataraxia in Greek. That's an important difference because that aspect is not in the academic tradition. So this practical aspect of skepticism that it leads to this state of calm. So that aspect is not present before the 16th century. It comes with Sextus into 16th century and early modern philosophy. That skepticism could have a goal. And one way to express the difference between these two schools might be to say, first of all, there's this thing about achieving calm by being in suspension of judgment, but also I take it that if you said to Sextus, well, is empirical knowledge possible or not? He would say, I don't know. I suspend judgment about that. Because the academic skeptics would say, no, it's not possible. So that's like a really clear difference between the schools, right? Yeah, definitely. Did these two forms of skepticism get taken up in a way that involved awareness of the difference between them or were they transformed in any way by readers in the 16th century? The most important aspect here is that the way it's taken up when Sextus is translated in the 1562 and published, there's an introduction there of the concept of doubt. So that is very central because doubt doesn't really play a role in the way that the ancient Greek formulation of Pyrrhonism is presented by Sextus. So you have this idea that you can be at the loss of something, but you don't really doubt because doubt is a difficult concept. Doubt presupposes that you know something to be able to doubt. And that is of course contrary to the core of Pyrrhonism. Can you explain that? Why would you need to know something in order to be in doubt? To be able to doubt that something is a prime, for example. You have to already know what a prime is. You mean a prime number? A prime number, yeah. But you can't be at a loss without presupposing that you claim anything to be true really. And that's more of an accurate description of I think how Sextus describes the skeptics. The skeptics are at a loss. We can't say that this is right, we can't say that the other thing is right. So we suspend belief, we suspend judgment. So we're at a loss. But we don't doubt. The skeptic doesn't doubt. I think this concept was introduced into the discussion of skepticism by Augustine already. And then it became foremost as an interpretation then of academic skepticism. But then it becomes a long tradition of characterizing skepticism in terms of doubt that I think by the 16th century is basically taken for granted. So when the translators of Sextus is presented with this view, then they then introduce the concept of doubt into the text, which I think is a strong interpretation, I think probably a wrong interpretation of the classic also, the Pirouin position. When Montagny and Charon and later thinkers read Sextus, they get this idea that it's a skepticism involving the concept of doubt, which then naturally also then dominates the early modern discussion of it. I want to get to Montagny and Charon in just a second. But first, I had one other question with the historical context, namely, to what extent skepticism in this period is a response to what was going on politically, like the reformation, the wars of religion, and so on? That is a complicated question. Of course, it has been particularly in relation to how some interpreters read Montagny, how some read Charon, that it is they're using skepticism as a kind of defense of Catholicism. In this debate going on for Montagny, it's primarily between Catholicism and Calvinism, and for him is the sort of target. An aspect that is very much used here is the idea that's present in Sextus, that since the skeptic doesn't really hold any beliefs, or sort of suspense belief, that means that the skeptic sort of still needs to live in a society, still needs to be there to be able to live. So the skeptic then is supposed to follow the tradition, and that becomes an important aspect of the way a skeptic lives. The skeptic suspends beliefs, but still accepts laws, still accepts tradition, still accepts religion. And this kind of conservatism, or whatever it is in skepticism, gets used by thinkers like Montagny to argue for holding on to beliefs and faith in this very difficult time that the 16th century is. So just as I might, as a skeptic, without having any beliefs about how digestion works, I still eat when I'm hungry, because I just kind of follow my... No, yeah, you follow this appearance, as they say. And in the same way, I stick with Catholicism, because it's kind of there, and it's holding society together, and I don't have to have some kind of dogmatic commitment to it. No, exactly. Skepticism doesn't imply a revolution and changing of society. I think that's also interesting, that skepticism comes out, at least on this telling, skepticism comes out as being conservative, rather than potentially revolutionary. We might have assumed that being skeptical in the context of a very religious society would lead to something like atheism, but here it's exactly the reverse. Exactly the reverse. And of course, that has been used as a criticism of skepticism. Well, let's now delve into these specific thinkers who we've mentioned in passing, and let's start with Montagny. So actually, something we haven't mentioned yet is that you wrote a whole book, which came out fairly recently, about the history of skepticism. And in that book, when you're talking about 16th century skepticism, you say that, contrary to what a lot of scholars have argued, or maybe just assumed, it's actually not that clear that Montagny was a skeptic. First of all, I like that you're skeptical about whether he's a skeptic, I find that very pleasing. But second of all, I wanted to ask you why you say that in the book. I based this on the reading of his Apology for Raymond Sybil. There, even though he uses skepticism, he uses both the Peuronian skepticism presented by Sextus, and he uses the academic skepticism presented by Sybil. He doesn't at the end come out to endorse any of this. He uses the skeptics to sort of criticize reason, that reason and rationality can sort of help us to live our lives. And in the discussion of religion, can actually give us support or grounds for our belief in Catholicism. But he doesn't sort of come out, he ends in a very sort of pessimistic tone that reason can't really help us, but God can't really help us either in some sense, because we don't know if we're saved, we don't know if God will give us grace. So he has this Augustinian background. So faith really is in the end what we have, this faith that will save us. As I read it, it's not primarily an endorsement of skepticism as such. And people have argued that what does come out is this Fidesz. Perhaps you can say that that's where he ends, but it isn't a clear skeptical position. It's more like skepticism is a stepping stone towards Fidesz. Exactly, yeah, which I think was a very common way of using skepticism actually. And do you think the same thing is true of Montaigne's friend Charon, who's often assessed as pretty much just having repeated ideas from Montaigne, whether or not that's fair? Yeah. At least when it comes to skepticism, his stance is pretty much the same, would you say? I wouldn't say so. I think there's the difference in emphasis between them, I think, that is interesting. Where I would interpret, and I do in the book, Charon is much more of an academic skeptic, much clearer on his use of Cicero and his negative attitude to knowledge, to the possibility or not. There's a slight difference in emphasis, I think. He's much clearer Ciceroian aspect to Charon than there is to Montaigne. Obviously, these two were close. They knew each other and probably discussed skepticism. And do you think that Charon, and maybe this question could also be posed about Montaigne, but let's just think about Charon, because he also has a pretty strong moral theory, maybe theory is not the right word, but you know, he has this kind of stoic, leaning, ethical stance as well. Yeah. And I'm wondering how that's compatible with what you were just saying about him being a more full-blooded academic skeptic. That's right. He has this idea that we follow nature and nature gives this guide the way we should live, or this wisdom that he talks about. For him, it's also not that we can know that this is the right way to live. He gives us sort of arguments and reasons for that, but he doesn't strongly endorse this is something we can know. So there is this skepticism underneath, even though he has a moral theory on top of it. His ethical views then would be just another case of following appearances, like we were saying before. I would think so, yeah. Even in Charon, you see an emphasis on carneades or the probabilism, which is not really present in Montaigne. You can see how you can use carneades as a basis for following what is probable. In that sense, he's a clear academic skeptic. I should probably say, insofar as that name has come up before in the podcast, I guess I called him Carneades. Oh, Carneades, yeah. But we could perhaps suspend judgment about the right... The right way to pronounce his name. There's one other skeptic that I just covered in the previous episode who I wanted to ask you about, and this is Francisco Sanchez, who is from the Iberian Peninsula, but was also active in France. In Bordeaux as well. Yeah, absolutely. So there's connections. All three of them have some kind of association. I have wondered whether there was something in the water in Bordeaux, or maybe the wine, actually. Maybe there is, maybe in the wine. Yeah. Listeners can write in to tell us whether Bordeaux makes them skeptical, the wines from that region. In his case, it seems like he's pretty clearly like a very aggressive skeptic, right? I mean, he literally writes a book called That Nothing Can Be Known. But on the other hand, again, here, there may be a nuance because at the end, he seems to be holding out the prospect of some kind of empirically based, if not knowledge, then at least way of forming better beliefs or something like that. Yeah. Reading his work, I actually wondered whether, although he's apparently a very aggressive skeptic, actually all he's doing is saying, well, if knowledge is what you scholastics say it is, then knowledge is unattainable. So we need something else, which is, of course, very different from being a real skeptic. Yeah. Do you think that that's right? I think basically that's where I land, although we can't really say much more because this is really what he promises that nothing can be known. And then he says that he will go on to develop a new method, a new, more positive view of scientific knowledge. I think we're forced to draw the conclusion that he's a skeptic because that's all we have to base our assertions on. If we are to believe his own words, he wanted to do something more. He never did it. What we have today in That Nothing Can Be Known is a clear skeptical treatise and a sceptical treatise that is aimed at an Aristotelian account of knowledge, which is not, of course, something that figures at all much in either Montaigne or in Charon. Yeah, he's more like someone like Lorenzo Valla, yeah, colonising against scholasticism. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I was actually just wondering, does that mean that Sanchez actually isn't as new as people sometimes say he is? Because actually there is this kind of long-standing humanist project of tearing apart the foundations of scholasticism? In some sense, I think that's right. He isn't as novel as some people have claimed. I would agree to that. Because they're not only in the humanist tradition, even in the scholastic tradition, I mean, there's a long standard concern about Aristotelian method and Aristotelian theory of knowledge that it is way too demanding and it's not possible to achieve. I mean, we have the Buridanian discussion from the 14th century, which continues all the way into the 16th century, which is very much problematising and rethinking what the foundations of knowledge are in an Aristotelian context. That's a great point, actually, that scholasticism had the seeds of scepticism against scholasticism within itself. I mean, as you mentioned at the beginning, in 14th century scholasticism, we even have people wondering whether God is deceiving us about everything we believe about the external world, right? Exactly, yeah. Which leads us naturally on to one last person who we must mention, who is of course Descartes, the author of A Thought Experiment, where it's not God, but an evil demon who's deceiving you about everything you believe. And he's not too far away now. So looking ahead to him, to what extent do you think that we should see these figures we've been discussing now, like Sanchez, for example, as an important precursor or source for Descartes? Or to what extent do you think Descartes is really doing something fundamentally different? Traditionally, Descartes has been interpreted as someone who answers the challenge of the scepticism of the late 16th century, and his project then becomes kind of anti-skeptical. I think most scholars have sort of moved away from that interpretation of Descartes. He wasn't really concerned with rejecting scepticism. His project was something else, something different. And then there's different ideas of what that project was. But I think it's clear that both Charon and Montaigne is a background to Descartes, in the sense that he read them, obviously. I mean, he knew them. They were so well read. I mean, Charon's Of Wisdom is one of the most read philosophical works in French at this time, and it was so early as well translated into English. So it had a really widespread reach. So certainly he knew them. But Descartes' knowledge of tradition and of history across which is much better than he himself liked to present. He was obviously educated at the foremost institute in Europe at the time, and he got a very solid background, knowledge of scholasticism and other things at La Flesche. When he writes in the meditations and also in the discourse, he uses the sceptical arguments, and he knows them from this discussion in the late 16th century, and he knows them from an earlier discussion in the scholastic tradition. So when he uses the evil being argument or the dream argument or the illusion argument in the first meditation in the discourse, he knows these arguments. He's well aware. I mean, even Hobbes in his objection to the meditation complains that Descartes was such an original and interesting thinker. Why would he bring up all these old arguments about scepticism? This is well treaded waters. Why? Hobbes was not fooled by the claims of originality. Yeah, exactly. And Descartes, when he answers, he says that, no, I'm not claiming to be original here, I'm not bringing out these arguments because they're new and I have done something special with them. He's bringing out these arguments because he has a specific purpose with them, and that is to get rid of everything that we can get, possibly from the senses or anywhere else. He wants to isolate ourselves into our minds, and once we've gotten rid of everything, he can ask the question, is there anything else? Is there now still something we can know? And that's when he finds the cogito. So for him, the sceptical arguments are means to a certain purpose. I think the way it is for Montaigne as well. So it's not scepticism so much for itself, it's scepticism as a tool or as a means to something else. So I think Descartes is very well aware of the sceptical discussion. I don't know whether he actually read Sextus, but he certainly read people that commented on Sextus. Okay, well, having just stepped into the 17th century with Descartes, people who are listening may start getting the impression that we're just about done talking about French philosophy in the 16th century, and that's true. Next time, we're going to be looking at someone who actually lived mostly in the 17th century, but who has to be discussed in this context, because this is someone who had a very close relationship to Montaigne. And I'm speaking of Marie de Guarnay, who was actually the editor of his works, and was very influenced in her own works, but also wrote other things that Montaigne probably wouldn't have written, like, for example, a defence of women as being equal to men. So that's what we're going to talk about next time. But for now, I will thank Henrik Lagerlund very much for coming on the podcast. And as I say, for all you've done to teach people about the history of skepticism and the history of philosophy in the 16th century. Thank you very much. My pleasure. And I'll invite listeners to join me next time as we turn to Marie de Guarnay here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department in King's College London and the University of London. Philosophers nowadays talk about epistemic injustice, which occurs when people are unfairly taken to lack authority as sources of knowledge. Miranda Fricker, who wrote the book that introduced the term, gives the example of women in corporate settings whose ideas and suggestions are taken as less credible simply because they are women. Fricker tells of one executive who, when she is at a meeting and wants to make a suggestion about policy, actually writes down the suggestion on a little piece of paper, surreptitiously passes it to a sympathetic male colleague, has him make the suggestion, watches it be well received, and then joins in the discussion from there. Women living before the age of the multinational corporation are already well aware of the phenomenon, even if they didn't have a name for it. One of the earliest clear statements of epistemic injustice I know is found in the work of Marie Léger de Gournay. She notes that even a woman with the wit of carnayotes, a leading skeptical philosopher of antiquity, will be ignored in conversation with a man. With merely a smile or some slight shaking of his head, his mute eloquence pronounces, it's a woman speaking. This passage actually occurs in two works by Gournay. It may be found in The Lady's Complaint, which along with her Equality of Men and Women and Apology for the Woman Writing, all published in the 1641 edition of her collected works, establishes Gournay as a pioneering feminist. But his appearance there is a bit of a recycling on her part, because the remark was first made in a lengthy preface to her 1595 edition of Montaigne's Essays. With the blessing of Montaigne's widow, Gournay included additional material beyond that found in earlier editions. Her expanded version was the standard one used until 1802, when scholars began to prefer the earlier 1588 edition augmented by Montaigne's handwritten notes. Arguably this downgrading of Gournay's edition was itself a case of epistemic injustice, since she knew Montaigne well, and might reasonably be taken to be an authoritative source of knowledge on his thought and on the text of the essays. This same aspect of Gournay's literary career makes her pioneering in another sense. She should certainly not be reduced to a mere follower and literary executor of Montaigne. Her collected works are more than a thousand pages long and range widely in terms of topic and genre. But she does give us our first example of a type that will become increasingly familiar as we move forward in history, the female philosopher, whose renown is secured primarily by being linked to a famous male philosopher. Later examples will include Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, best known to historians of philosophy for their correspondence with Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. This is something we haven't really seen before, unless you count family relations like Macrina the sister of Gregory of Nyssa. We did see how women humanists of the Italian Renaissance deliberately sought to associate themselves with prominent male humanists with mixed success. In one case, Isozzo Nogarola was upset when Guarino Guarini ignored a letter she sent him and when she complained had to put up with Guarini chastising her for taking the snub so badly instead of displaying a manly soul. Gournay was considerably more successful in getting people to think of her when they thought of Montaigne. Their friendship began after her reading of the essays in 1582 when she was not yet twenty years old. Looking back, she said that the book sent her into ecstasy. It affected her so deeply that her mother offered her a sedative. Determined to meet the author of this magnificent work, Gournay made contact with Montaigne and visited him in Paris, later hosting him for several months in Picardy. She became his adoptive daughter, something she underscores in the preface, constantly referring to him as her father. She is keen for the reader to understand that their closeness did indeed make her a unique authority on Montaigne. I alone, she proclaims, was perfectly acquainted with that great soul. Thus, she can, for example, settle the controversy as to his views on religion. Writing the preface after Montaigne's death, Gournay's admiration for him remains undimmed. She says, The language of the essays never wearies the reader except when it ceases, and everything about it is perfect but it's coming to an end. And she proudly quotes the praise lavished on the book by Lipsius, adding that, The essays were a match for him, he imparting, they deserving the greatest honor. Gournay herself had a more mixed reputation. Lipsius, with whom she exchanged correspondence, praised her too, using the already well-worn trope that her intelligence exceeded the normal bounds of womankind. Is it possible that so keen in understanding, and so solid a judgment, not to speak of such wisdom and knowledge, can be found in one of your sects, and in such times as these? She was called the 10th Muse, and after her death, eulogized as both daughter to Montaigne and sister to Lipsius. But she was also the target of satirical mockery, as in a 1610 work called simply the Anti-Gournay. At one point, pranksters tricked her into thinking that the King of England was soliciting an autobiography and portrait from her. Gournay, not the sort to take such treatment with good humor, sued them. In the end, though, it was the esteem of Montaigne that would have meant the most to her, and this she certainly had, to judge by a passage added to the original version of the essays. In it, Montaigne calls Gournay, my covenant daughter, whom I love indeed more than a daughter of my own, and cherish in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of my own being. She is the only person I still think about in this world. If youthful promise means anything, her soul will someday be capable of the finest things, among others a perfection in that most sacred kind of friendship which, so we read, her sex has not yet been able to attain. Note here the echo of Montaigne's attitude towards his brilliantly promising friend, La Boétie, a parallel Gournay herself draws explicitly in the preface. The insertion in the essays is under a cloud of suspicion, though. Scholars are unsure whether Gournay herself may have added it to burnish her own reputation. This would be consistent with what has been termed her readiness to convert his appreciation of her into a vehicle for self-promotion. And she did on occasion engage in literary subterfuge, as when she published a revised version of the works of the playa d' poet Pierre Ronsard, in which corrections of her own were presented as stemming from Ronsard himself. Perhaps Gournay saw herself as being so close to the mind of Montaigne that it didn't make much difference which of them wrote something. She said that, Many of his habits as a writer also become hers. Like the essays, the writings of Gournay indulge in self-conscious digressions, followed by announcements that she is getting back to the topic at hand. She defends Montaigne's focus on his own personality and his quest for virtue, saying of his critics, Her artful self-presentation as an author also recalls Montaigne. If anything, she's even more concerned about her reputation since, as she puts it, At a philosophical level, she adopts his use of skeptical strategies. She says, as he had, that Outlander's stories should not be rejected, only treated as unproven. Gournay even doubts her own worth, since integrity is often doubtful in other people. Only Montaigne's theme for her makes her confident that she must be deserving of that esteem. Gournay also deploys skeptical strategies in arguing for the equality of the sexes. Montaigne argued in his Apology for Raymond Sébon that there is no obvious hierarchy between different knowers. We find different perspectives being adopted by the same person at different times, by people of different cultures, and even by animals, as opposed to humans. Who are we to say which perspective is the best? You can see how this line of thought could be a bulwark against epistemic injustice, and Gournay used it exactly that way. The man who just smiles condescendingly at the views of a woman is, we might say, failing to realize that her perspective is on a par with his. Since Gournay was a feminist who claimed to carry on the legacy of Montaigne, it would have been welcome to her if Montaigne had seen the feminist implications of his own philosophy. She was convinced that he did, mostly on the strength of a passage in which Montaigne wrote that, male and female are cast in the same mold, save for education and custom, the difference between them is not great. As we'll see shortly, this idea is unfolded at length in Gournay's own writings on the equality of women. In the same passage, Montaigne even cites Plato as an upholder of gender equality, something also found in Gournay. Unfortunately for her, Montaigne's record on the question is more mixed than she would like to admit, though. He dedicated one of his essays to the topic of virtuous women, but all the examples that come to his mind are women who killed themselves for their husbands. Elsewhere, he states that women are weak in reasoning. They allow themselves to be led to where natural impressions act most alone, like animals. In a passage that would be a blow to Gournay's claims to have shared an intimacy with Montaigne on a par with the friendship he had with La Boitie, Montaigne says that whereas women have beauty, it is men who have reason, wisdom, and loving friendship. That is why they are in charge of the world affairs. So in adopting a thoroughly egalitarian view of the sexes, Gournay was going well beyond Montaigne, or perhaps saying what he would have said if he'd been more consistent in his epistemic egalitarianism. After all, if even non-human animals have a valid point of view on the world, then surely so do women. It's worth stressing that Gournay does indeed argue for the equality of the sexes, and not for the superiority of women. The more provocative move of claiming superiority was made by some women authors of this period, like Lucrezia Marinella, an almost exact contemporary of Gournay's. Marinella was born in 1571 and died in 1653, while Gournay lived from 1565 to 1645. But, Gournay says, again ringing bells that might have sounded in Montaigne's tower, I avoid all extremes and am content to make women equal to men. Her interest in gender and the relationship between the sexes is already evident in an early work, a narrative called the Promenade of Monceur de Montaigne. It was published the year before her edition of the essays, and claims to be a written version of a story she used to delight Montaigne when he was visiting with her. Again, Gournay is taking license for literary purposes here, in fact the story was likely written after his death, and is based on a story by another author named Claude de Talmont. With what I take to be ironically obvious disingenuousness, she says in her dedication of the work to Montaigne that she has taken the material from another book, but cannot quite remember the title or author of her source. The main thing is that her own tale is indeed original. I prefer, she says, to be empty rather than full of debts. Without going into the complex details of the story here, it may suffice to say that the heroine is pursued by two male lovers, and that Gournay uses this plot to show how women are seen as conquests by men, and unfairly treated, if not abused, by faithless and cynical suitors. As in her preface to the essays, she also digresses to defend the idea that women should be taken seriously as intellectuals. Philosophy will lead them to virtue, not wantonness, even if it may make them unconventional in their way of life. Presumably thinking of herself, she writes that, Great intellects always stray from the beaten path, then more so because they have persuaded themselves that what is straying, according to Custom, is submission to reason. The distance she takes here from Custom again recalls the skeptical attitudes she shares with Montaigne. What appears as a digression in the promenade takes center stage in Gournay's treatise, The Equality of Men and Women. Written for Anne of Austria, wife of the French king, Louis XIII, it first appeared in 1622 but was revised and expanded thereafter, just as Montaigne did with his essays and Gournay did with a number of her own works. She admits that women are often in practice inferior to men, but this, as Montaigne said in that one feminist passage, is due to the poor education they are offered. In fact, as she observes elsewhere, educated women, like herself, may have to hide their learning because society frowns on it. That's another observation that would fit right in with Fricker's discussion of epistemic injustice, as with the executive who had to disclaim authorship of her ideas to get them taken seriously. Gournay furthermore argues that women should be placed on a par with men in political and religious contexts. She criticizes the Salic law, which as we've seen prevented women from inheriting the throne, and she recommends that women should be allowed to perform the sacraments, as male priests do, advice the Catholic churches still declining to take today, about 400 years after she wrote. Not that Gournay was tempted by Protestantism. In this work, she responds to the claim that women cannot understand scripture by saying that men can't either, which of course would undercut the whole Lutheran and Calvinist program. Philosophically though, the heart of Gournay's case is that women and men share the same nature. As she puts it, Here, Gournay is relying on a truism of Aristotelian thought. Biologically speaking, both men and women belong to the same species, and sex is merely accidental to them as humans. When combined with the point familiar for Montaigne, that there is great variation within each type of creature, Gournay can infer that the potential capacities that come along with membership of the human species are realized to different degrees by different individuals. This undermines a widespread assumption of her day that she mentions in her preface to the essays that even the best of women will be only as great as the least of men. In the opinion of Leuxius, apparently of Montaigne, and most definitely of Gournay herself, Gournay did count among the best of women. But she was ready to recognize that she had equals. She belonged to the entourage of Marguerite of Valois, who is not to be confused with Marguerite of Navarre, whom we covered in episode 398. Though, you could be forgiven for being confused, because this Marguerite was also a queen of Navarre, and then queen of France, no less. She presided over a literary salon in the early 17th century, of which Gournay was a regular member. Gournay also engaged in learned correspondence of the type we discussed when looking at the later French humanists, Gallegue and Casaubon. In particular, we have an interesting exchange of letters between her and another prominent woman of the day, the much younger Anna Maria von Schurmann, who did not die until 1678. Schurmann was a Protestant who was in touch with many leading intellectuals. As an article devoted to her correspondence with Gournay points out, we have here an example of how women participated in the Republic of Letters, characteristic of early modern Europe. Not content with being Montaigne's symbolic daughter and Leuxius's symbolic sister, Gournay offers when writing to Schurmann to serve as mother to her. By this logic, Schurmann would, I suppose, be Montaigne's intellectual granddaughter. Gournay is not shy in lavishing praise upon her, and compares her to the comet or new star seen in the night sky by Tycho Brahe. Schurmann returned the favor, writing a poem about the elder woman of letters in which she praised her as a strong defender of the cause of our sex. But they did not quite see eye to eye on what it meant to be a woman of letters. Gournay gently criticized Schurmann for spending too much time on learning ancient languages. Be wary of spending too much effort on Latin and Greek, she advised, and don't worry about Hebrew at all. Languages take an inordinate and too long a time for a mind as capable of matters and of the best as yours. She would later give even more radical advice to the future king, Louis XIII, saying he should not even bother with Greek and Latin, since everything worth reading was now available in French. These passages may indicate a receding of humanist ambitions from the high point of the 15th and 16th centuries. As French vernacular literatures advanced and more translations were made, mastery of classical languages became less vital. Perhaps, though, there is also a subtle anti-Protestant agenda in discouraging Schurmann from the study of Hebrew. As we saw her saying already, scripture is not something individual believers should be confident of understanding. As we can see from these developments and the dates of her publications, Marie de Gournay has brought us well into the 17th century. It obviously made sense to discuss her here, following on from Montaigne, but equally obviously, we are not done with the age of Reformation. We've dealt with Central Europe and the Low Countries, and this look at Gournay has rounded off our tour of Renaissance France. But there is another region that still needs our attention if we are going to understand the full impact of the Reformation, the full riches of philosophy during the Renaissance. It's a place whose most famous son, at least from this period, and maybe from any period, called a Septured Isle. The phrase comes from a passage in Shakespeare's Richard II, which also calls the inhabitants of this island a happy breed. But not as happy as you, since unlike the denizens of Britain in the Elizabethan age, you get to keep listening to The History of Philosophy without any doubts.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Gods is the Quarrel, the English Reformation. Imagine, if you can, living in a time of intense ideological disagreement, in which the slightest of provocations escalates into bitter dispute. Hard for us to relate to, but this is exactly how things were in the 16th century, as is illustrated by the Affair of the Queen's Candlesticks. They adorned Elizabeth I's private chapel along with a cross, which seems harmless enough, but some reformers saw this as an unacceptable gesture in the direction of Catholic pageantry. These candles smelled not of potpourri, but of potpourri. At least four times, the offending decorations were defaced or knocked over by outraged individuals who were putting the protest into Protestantism. Unfazed, Elizabeth simply had them replaced. A small enough episode, but as I say, this was an age in which small things mattered. Passionate conflicts were pursued over such apparent trivia as divestments worn by priests, whether the host should be lifted into the air before administering the Eucharistic communion, and whether the person receiving it should kneel. As for such theological issues as the exact mechanics of the Eucharist, or the way in which God offers salvation to humankind, these were considered far from trivial. In defense of their preferred answers to these questions, people were willing to languish for months or years in prison, to die an agonizing death by being burnt at the stake, and of course to inflict these punishments on their fellow Christians. The general mood was that extremism in the cause of piety was no vice. Even those who considered themselves moderate, like Elizabeth herself, inflicted savage punishments on those they considered unduly radical. As we know, none of this was unique to England. We've already discussed such events as the religious wars in the Low Countries and the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France, but the development of the Reformation in Britain was unique, and created a unique context for philosophy in the British Isles through the 16th century and beyond. The story actually begins well before the rise of Luther and Calvin. In episode 296, we covered the late 14th century Englishman, John Wycliffe, who inspired the so-called Lollard movement. The name was probably an insult, indicating that Lollardy was so much nonsensical babble. The Lollards anticipated the Reformation, rejecting the authority of the established church and questioning the efficacy of its sacraments. It would be natural to assume, then, that when the ideas of Luther made their way to England, they fell upon fertile soil and so easily took root. The scholars are divided about the relevance of Lollardy to the success of the Reformation in England. On the one hand, regions of Lollard activity were often areas where popular Protestantism flourished. On the other hand, Lollardy was greatly weakened by the early 16th century, and the earliest Protestant leaders in England did not have a Lollard background. For our interest, it's worth mentioning that one of those leaders, Robert Barnes, was a member of an early group of Protestant sympathizers, derided as Little Germany, who met at the White House Inn in Cambridge. As we'll be seeing, the universities at Oxford and Cambridge were central in the English Reformation, just one of many reasons that the history of philosophy and religion in this period were inextricably intertwined. If Lollardy wasn't the driving force for reform in England, then what was? One obvious answer would be that Henry VIII wanted to get divorced, and the pope wouldn't let him. You may well have learned about this in high school or in the late Hilary Mantel's brilliant novels about Henry's fixer, Thomas Cromwell, but just in case, here's a quick refresher. Henry was wedded to Catherine, his brother's widow. When he tired of her and the fact that she hadn't given him a male heir, he fixed his eye on Anne Boleyn. He tried to get his marriage dissolved on the grounds that it was illegitimate to marry one's own sister-in-law, but the pope refused to grant this request, leading to a split from the church. This familiar story suggests that Henry's motives were entirely cynical and breathtakingly self-interested, but there were issues of greater import here than who would be sharing the king's bedroom. As we know, ecclesiastical and secular power had been competing with one another throughout the medieval period. In step with his changing romantic affections, Henry's ideas about this longstanding issue evolved. He came to think that, as monarch, it was he and not the pope who was the supreme religious authority for his people. Across his reign, the difference between political sedition and unacceptable religious teaching became blurred, then erased altogether. The power of the crown was used to burn both books and heretics, and the question of what good Christians should believe had an answer that was, in a sense, constantly evolving, and in a sense, always the same. They should believe whatever the king did. Having been selected by God to lead his people, Henry saw himself not as the amateur theologian he in fact was, but as the rightful arbiter of religious doctrine. His views, and thus the correct views, shifted in response to such varied factors as papal intransigence, pushback from parliament, and the influence of Anne Boleyn, who had grown up in the French court and helped to import the reformist agenda of the circle of Le Thieu de Taple. The upshot was a kind of compromise. Papal authority was rejected, and fundamental aspects of English religion like monasteries and pilgrimage were eliminated, a massive upheaval for the life of ordinary believers. This sounds thoroughly Protestant. Yet many features of Catholic practice were retained, ranging from liturgical details to fundamental doctrine. Notably, Henry was firmly convinced of the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist. He also believed that good works and human effort were needed to achieve salvation, rather than accepting the Lutheran concept of justification by faith alone. There was a serious downside to making the monarch's views definitive in this way, even aside from the fact that the king might be a capricious megalomaniac like Henry. Catholics die, and their replacements are selected by a combination of blind luck and warfare. So Henry's religious revolution could have been followed by a further push in the direction of Protestantism, a return to the Catholic fold, or an attempt to solidify his arguably rather muddled middle position. In the event, all three of these things happened, and in that order. He was succeeded in 1547 by Edward VI. Since Edward was a Protestant who was happy to move the country even more decisively away from the Church of Rome, the party of Reform continued to think it was quite right that royal and religious authority should be fused together. Then suddenly this came to seem like a much worse policy. Edward died young in 1553, and was followed by Mary, the Catholic daughter of Henry and his first wife Catherine. Persecution was now directed against Protestants instead of Catholics, with a new raft of books placed on the banned list and almost 300 martyrs burnt during her reign. Some Protestants found this grimly satisfying. Instead of wringing their hands at the unpredictable and inadequate reforms approved by Protestant monarchs, they could now revel in the more familiar and morally gratifying role of innocent victims. One of them, John Scory, exalted that, banishments, gallows, fires, and the cruelty of tyrants are again restored to the Church. But not for long. Mary reigned for only about as long as Edward had. When she died in 1558, Elizabeth ascended to the throne. She would reign for the rest of the century and beyond, dying only in 1603. This was an opportunity for Protestantism to become entrenched, though not without plenty of further violence and disputation. At first, Elizabeth was relatively tolerant of religious conservatives, to avoid picking fights with them, and more importantly, with foreign Catholic powers, especially Spain. Then too, as the story of the candlesticks shows, she was herself something of a conservative And though the really distinctive feature of her religious convictions was a tactical reluctance to reveal what exactly they might be. Then, in a misguided attempt to support a Catholic uprising against her rule, the sitting Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, declaring that as far as he was concerned, no one owed her obedience anymore. This was at best unhelpful for Catholics in England, as it reinforced the notion that they were seditious traitors. Again, the line between religious and political dissent was being erased. Yet Elizabeth also needed to hold the line against more radical Protestant movements. These included the Presbyterians, who wanted to eliminate the hierarchical structure of the Church of England, a leftover from Catholicism, and then there were the Puritans. This term, like the word Lawlard, originated as an unflattering description, in this case applied to those who wanted to strip churches of their last decorations, no more candlesticks, and make official doctrine conform to the more radical ideas circulating on the continent. They were disdainful of Elizabeth's middle path, which they called neither hot nor cold, and considered the English Reformation to be a job that was at best half done. Elizabeth turned the weapons of state oppression against them, so that both Catholics and radical Protestants were in danger during her reign. We see a phenomenon here that, to put it mildly, has survived into our own age, the English suspicion of all things European. This had been a problem for Mary, who could win support for the return of traditional rituals, but found precious little enthusiasm for obedience to the Pope. On the other side, the Puritans were resented for their self-righteousness and disruption of popular religious practices. As one saying had it, the Puritan was one who loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart. Perhaps no single intellectual of the age represented the middle ground between Catholicism and Puritism, which would come to define Anglicanism, so well as Thomas Cranmer. His story also demonstrates how treacherous were the shifting sands of 16th century England. In 1532 Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VIII. This came as a surprise to just about everyone, not least Cranmer himself. Previously, he'd been a relatively obscure theologian at Cambridge University. He duly performed the service expected of him by dissolving the king's marriage. Cranmer then led the effort to shape church doctrine under Henry and Edward. He was entirely on board with ascribing religious authority to the king, writing in a letter to Henry, Your Grace, a very right, and by God's law, is the supreme head of this Church of England, next immediately unto God. But the aforementioned irony that royal supremacy could be used to reassert Roman Catholicism just as much as to abolish it was for Cranmer a fatal one. When Mary came to the throne, he was at the top of the list of reformers who needed to be cast down and punished. Cranmer tried to save his life by agreeing to abjure his previous teachings in writing. When he was sentenced to execution nonetheless, he staged a dramatic recantation on the scaffold, declaring, As much as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, My hand shall first be punished therefore, For may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And he thrust his own hand into the flames, a scene made iconic by its description in John Fox's Book of Martyrs. That's the version of Cranmer's career that you'd see in a Hollywood film, but this is a history of philosophy podcast, should we should attend to the more subtle tensions and shifts in his thought, as he considered to what extent Lutheranism and Calvinism should be imported into England. When I say imported, I mean it quite literally. In Henry's reign, Protestant literature was at first forbidden, and had to be smuggled into the country after being printed abroad in places like Worms and Anferth. The presses of both cities churned out copies of works by William Tyndale, responsible for a new English version of the Bible that was strongly influenced by Luther. Cranmer himself spent time abroad and wound up marrying the niece of Andreas Oseander. You'll remember him as the one who tried to defend Copernicus by saying that his new system was merely a hypothesis. Cranmer brought his new wife back to England, but had to send her into exile after Henry came to reject the idea that priests could take wives. Given Henry's track record, I suspect he was thinking he might just want to marry them himself. This policy notwithstanding, leading reformers immigrated to enjoy the welcoming embrace of England. Peter Vermigli arrived in 1547 and became a professor of divinity at Oxford, where he engaged in disputations over the Eucharist, attacking the doctrine of real presence. Two years later, Martin Busser came from Strasbourg at the invitation of Cranmer and took a professorship at Cambridge. He spent the last two years of his life there, conducting disputations of his own, in which he defended the Protestant view on grace and justification. Despite Cranmer's unflinching support for royal leadership of the church, he was often at odds with Henry on points of doctrine. He, like Busser, accepted the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, whereas, as I've already mentioned, the king was inclined to think that we can merit salvation through good works. Henry's rationale was the usual one, people need to be encouraged to behave well, not just hope that God will save them without their deserving it. Cranmer responded by stressing Luther's point that true faith always gives rise to good works. Grace and justification are not given as a reward for morally excellent behavior. To the contrary, such behavior is a kind of symptom and result of God's grace. Another tension between Cranmer and Henry concerned the question of the Eucharist. Whereas the king believed in the real presence of Christ in the communion, Cranmer came to accept the so-called sacramentalist view that the physical bread and wine are only, as he put it, sensible signs and tokens. In support of this theological position, he provided philosophical arguments, especially in a debate with the more theologically conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardner. There is, argued Cranmer, a fundamental metaphysical difference between spiritual and physical reality. So if the effect of the communion is meant to be spiritual, then it does not need to involve a physical change of bread into flesh. He also added a nice point about the way we use words. When Christ shared out bread to his disciples and said, this is my body, he was simply bestowing a title upon it, as when people call Cranmer and Gardner, Canterbury and Winchester, in light of their positions as bishops. In another passage from this debate, Cranmer sought to put Gardner in his proper place, namely a subordinate one. Alluding to his opponent's training as a lawyer rather than a theologian, Cranmer suggested that Gardner should submit to the authority of those with more expertise, like Cranmer himself, for instance, who had earned the right to determine true doctrine for himself. He said to Gardner, I, having exercised myself in the study of Scripture and divinity from my youth, have learned now to go alone. Despite Luther's talk of the priesthood of all believers, we've seen repeatedly that leading reformers were quite happy to tell everyone else what to believe. This was often justified on humanist grounds. I know Hebrew and Greek and you don't, so you should listen to me when I tell you the meaning of the Scriptures. In the passage just quoted, Cranmer does not flaunt knowledge of ancient languages, but he does something similar, asserting his prerogative as a specialist to think for himself, even where his determinations departed dramatically from centuries' worth of tradition. His deliberations issued in the English Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549 and again in a revision of 1552. Cranmer had a leading role in its composition, and it is the most lasting statement of his mature theology, which turned out to be a pretty wholehearted endorsement of the reform agenda, especially in the second edition. One historian has written of the Book of Common Prayer that it did away with almost everything that had, until then, been central to lay Eucharistic piety. Yet the book also argues for retaining some traditional church practices on the grounds that, without some ceremonies, it is not possible to keep any order or quiet discipline in the church. Some disagreed. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that there were even conflicts over what priests wore in church. I had in mind John Hooper, who complained about the 1552 version of the book because it allowed the priest to wear traditional vestments. There was no scriptural support for such a symbolic assertion of hierarchy. In vain would you search the Bible for a passage reading, No shirt, no shoes, no service. And by wearing distinctive ceremonial garb, the priests were separating themselves from the laity. The fact that Cranmer was willing to defend such practices shows that, in a way, he too was a conservative. He was willing to overturn customs and institutions that seemed problematic to him, and there were plenty of those, ranging from details of the mass to monasteries and pilgrimages. But other features of traditional religion could be kept, because they were indifferent, that is, neither required by God's revelation nor inconsistent with it. The same justification was later given by theologians in the time of Elizabeth, when they concluded a disputation over those candlesticks by somewhat grudgingly admitting that it didn't really matter whether they stood in her chapel. A more momentous example was something we find with John Wickgift, Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth, as of 1583. Against the Presbyterians, he defended the structure of the Church of England, with its ranked layers of bishops, priests, and deacons, this on the grounds that no one arrangement is prescribed in Scripture so that any practically effective solution would be acceptable. But any such appeal to the indifference of certain matters was rejected by more radical Protestants. For them, Scripture should be followed to the letter in all things. Everything that wasn't right was wrong, nothing was neutral. The second edition of the Book of Common Prayer from 1552 would turn out to mark the limit of established reform in England. Those who wanted a more thorough divestment, in Hooper's case quite literally, of Catholic customs would continue to see the changes in religious practice as a job half done. And modern historians have often agreed. It has been argued that, far from being fertile ground prepared by the Lollards for religious revolution, late medieval England actually had a thriving and successful Catholic culture. People were not crying out for change, and there was no equivalent of the Peasants' War in 16th century England. Rather, change was imposed from above, in a so-called magisterial reformation. Furthermore, because Catholicism enjoyed broad acceptance, it died only slowly. The wider population might be ready to ditch the Pope, a distant figure to whom they owed little or no devotion, but they clung to the customs and rituals that structured their lives and provided familiar spiritual comforts. Scholars thus admit that, historians now cannot decide when the Reformation occurred, and that by the end of the century English churchgoers were decatholicized but un-protestantized. What they were not is a good deal clearer than what they were. Maybe what they were, most of all, was confused. They might well have appreciated the summary of the Reformation found in a classic book spoofing literary history called From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Throughout the Middle Ages, England had been Roman Catholic, but with Henry's divorce, she became Christian, although the French still obstinately believed in God and remained Catholic. We can leave it to the less satirical historians to debate the question of whether the Reformation in England was fast or slow, but given our interest in the history of philosophy, we should at least note that the contrast between a top-down and bottom-up Reformation imposed by political elites or demanded by the masses leaves something out. Namely, the crucial role of a group in the middle, the university-trained philosophers and theologians. Radical intellectuals were smuggling books into England and daring to form Protestant discussion groups well before Henry decided that Roman Catholicism was an impediment to his family planning. Even the clerics who were closest to political power were independent-minded and pushed to back against royal religious dictates. We've seen that Cranmer did so while serving Henry. From the reign of Elizabeth, we might mention another archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindel. He defied the queen in order to defend the practice of prophesying, in which popular preachers worked to convert audiences to a more rigorous form of Protestantism. Grindel advised the queen to be careful in exercising her authority over such religious affairs. She should not pronounce too resolutely and preemptorily, as would be appropriate in civil and extern matters. Famously, he then added, I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty than to offend the heavenly majesty of God. Elizabeth was indeed offended and he was stripped of his office. The case of Grindel, and in fact pretty much everything I've covered in this episode, show how contested was the relation between state and religious power in this era. We often think of the divine right of kings as a medieval idea, that it was here in the 16th century that a king dared to say that, having been selected to rule by God, he could replace the pope as the highest religious authority. A result we've already identified, that heresy came to be treated as a form of treason, would have long-running implications for freedom of thought. Further philosophical issues were explored in connection to the debates over the Eucharist and justification by faith alone. Is it possible for bread to turn into another substance while retaining its sensible properties? If good works do not justify, what role is left for free will and moral responsibility? I won't belabor these points because I've addressed them in previous episodes. Instead, I'd like to highlight a couple of other philosophical topics that we haven't talked about so much as yet and that became salient in the English Reformation. First, the question of authenticity and belief. In this period, people spoke of Nicodemism, a reference to the biblical figure Nicodemus, a Jewish leader who was only willing to speak to Jesus in secret at night. They meant the common practice of hiding true religious convictions out of fear of persecution. Elizabeth herself could be accused of this, given her reticence to make her own views known both before and after she became queen, but the charge could be aimed at a wide swaths of the population. Protestant rule failed for decades to eradicate sympathy for Catholicism, but understandably, few people were ready to burn at the state in the name of that sympathy. The Spanish ambassador and bishop, Álvaro de Quadra, spoke out against this hypocrisy, saying that, It is far better to suffer most bitter cruelties than to give the least sign of consent to such wicked and abominable rights, they which he meant Protestant services. Similarly, the Oxford academic Robert Persons, a Catholic sympathizer, thought that one should not agree to go to a Protestant church just to avoid trouble. A similarly strict line was taken by Protestants. You may remember Calvin advising his French supporters to go into exile rather than pretending to be good Catholics. During the persecution of Protestants under Mary Tudor, many English reformers did just that. When Protestantism returned, its theologians thought that many people were still playing it safe. William Perkins, for instance, enjoined the faithful not just to parrot religious truths but to, Apply them inwardly to your hearts and consciences, and outwardly to your lives in conversation. This is the very point in which we fail. So similar were the Catholic and Protestant frustrations over this issue that one Puritan, the delightfully named Edmund Bunny, recycled invective against religious hypocrisy from a Jesuit author. I'm guessing that insincere celebrations of Easter, in particular, made him hopping mad. The form of words used in that quotation from Perkins shows why this is a topic of philosophical interest. Can one hold a sincere belief inwardly without manifesting it outwardly? Or is it morally unacceptable to go through the motions while silently thinking that they are bogus? Speaking of the Jesuits, this is an issue we'll revisit when we get to them and talk about their policy of mental reservation. A final area of philosophical interest worth flagging here is the role of religion in forming identity and community. It's a familiar worry that the loss of uniform religious commitment tends to undermine social cohesion. The modern-day version of that concern is that the rise of secularism has removed an important bond that used to hold together nation-states and unify their populations. The 16th century English had a similar fear, though in their case it was prompted by the unraveling of traditional customs in the name of Protestant piety. A recent book by Andy Wood looks at the value of neighborliness in this period and shows how widespread was the feeling that reform was the opposite of a good fence it makes for bad neighbors. Wood provides many choice quotes, including the one I already offered you about Puritans loving God and hating their neighbors. Here's another one, which is on the long side but well worth savoring. It's from a dialogue written by Thomas Smith in 1549. Some with this opinion and some with that, some holding this way and some that way, and some another, and that so stiffly, as though the truth must be as they say that have the upper hand in contention. And this contention is not the least cause of these uproar's of the people, some holding of the one learning and some holding of the other. In my mind it made no matter if there were no learned men at all, for of diversity thereof comes diverse opinions. Notice that Smith traced the uproar's he so lamented to the conflict between learned men. This provides support for the idea that a few stubbornly convinced intellectuals were indeed having a dramatic impact on wider society. The Reformation is proof that ideas do affect the world, even if not in the way their inventors intended. As we trace the impact of the Reformation across Europe, we are left with one more region that needs to be considered in detail. To the north of England, a version of the same story was being written, with enormous consequences for the development of philosophy in the 16th century and beyond. Perhaps most remarkable in the short term were the radical proposals that were being made in the political sphere. The writings of John Knox and George Buchanan will remind us of arguments we saw in Huguenot and others, but follow those arguments even further, to the alarming conclusion that the assassination of a tyrannical ruler may be justified. So join me next time as we learn about the circumstances in which a king may be killed as we look at the Reformation in Scotland, here on The History of Philosophy without any doubt.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Kill a King, the Scottish Reformation. If you want to annoy a Scot, a good way to do it is to say England when you mean Britain. Far be it from me, then, to suggest that with my coverage of the English Reformation last time, we've sufficiently covered the British Reformation. Certainly, there were parallels between the story of reform north and south of the border. For instance, there were Hussites and Lollards in Scotland too, who already in the late medieval era anticipated the religious critique of the 16th century. In fact, the leading Scottish Protestant, John Knox, began his history of the Reformation by describing the martyring of a Hussite back in 1433. And, as in England, the Reformation led to violent repression. Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake at St. Andrews in the year 1528, followed by other martyrs like the iconoclast George Wisfart in 1546. The violence was just as counterproductive in the north as it had been in the south. Knox remarked of the burning that, the reek of Master Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it blew upon. But there were major differences too, one of which was well captured by none other than King James VI of Scotland, who was also King James I of England, and make that James VII in total. He wrote that the Reformation in Scotland was a popular tumult and rebellion not proceeding from the prince's order as it did in England. Indeed, whereas the official religion in England swung back and forth between Protestantism and Catholicism, the rule Quios Regio, Oios Religio, the prevailing religion is that of the ruler, was not observed in Scotland. Mary Stuart, also known as Mary Queen of Scots, was a Catholic who reigned from 1542 to 1567. But for long stretches she ruled from France, and even when she was in Scotland, she said of the people there, I am their queen, and so they call me, but they use me not so. Smack in the middle of her reign in 1560, Scotland became the last place to adopt the Reformation as official doctrine when the Scottish Parliament approved a broadly Calvinist confession of faith. Knox put a positive spin on the divergence between the monarch and her people. That Parliament, we are bold to affirm, was more lawful and more free than any Parliament that they are able to produce for a hundred years before it, or any that hath since ensued, for in it the votes of men were free and given of conscience. In others they were bought, or given at the devotion of the prince. We shouldn't insist too much on the contrast between a top-down English Reformation and a bottom-up Scottish one. The leading Scots reformers were not peasants, they were educated men who often spent time abroad learning their dangerous ideas. Knox himself studied at St. Andrews, but spent time in England and in such continental cities as Frankfurt and the unofficial capital of Calvinism, Geneva. This helps to explain the parallels between Scottish and Huguenot thought, especially in the political arena, which I'll be focusing on in this episode. Still, Scottish Protestantism did have a distinct flavor. Another case of its bottom-up tendencies, the Scottish Church, or Kirk, adopted broadly a Presbyterian tendency, which as we saw last time means avoidance of hierarchy. I am glad to say though that they did have archbishops, if only so I can report the name of one of them, Patrick Adamson. It was not Adamson though, but John Knox, who deserved the title of Captain Kirk. His many detractors might have reached for a different pun, here was a man who put the Knox in obnoxious. He was a firebrand preacher whose style was so confrontational that to this day there is a cannon at Edinburgh Castle named after him. Knox's stance was based on the teachings of Calvin, and it was in no small part thanks to him that in Scotland this approach gradually won out over ideas closer to those of Luther and Sphingley. Knox was a firm believer in predestination of the elect, and denied that God's love of all humans would result in his offering them all grace and redemption. When it came to matters of liturgy and church practice, he was uncompromising in the true sense of the word. There was no room in his theology for the concept of indifference, which we saw being used to excuse Queen Elizabeth's candlesticks, the fancy clothes of priests, and so on. For Knox, any form of worship not explicitly required by scripture was idolatry, which he defined as whatever is done in God's service or honour, without the express commandment of his own word. During his time in England, he notoriously got the advice to kneel when receiving communion, eliminated from the Book of Common Prayer. As for the Catholic version of the Mass, it was idolatry pure and simple. In a rather ironic echo of the methods of the schoolmen, Knox made this point in syllogistic form. All worshipping, honouring, or service of God invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is idolatry. The Mass is invented by the brain of man without any commandment of God, therefore it is idolatry. The question was what to do about it. Knox's answer was effectively, whatever it takes. Outraged by the Catholic rule of Mary Tudor in England, Knox composed a treatise with a title as subtle as its author, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. The Regiment of Women was not a battalion of ladies, of course. What Knox meant was that it was monstrous for a woman to hold political power. In the text, he actually goes further and says that this is more than a monster in nature. It's interesting to note that he appeals to nature like this, to support his central thesis, rather than just citing scripture, though he does plenty of that, too. He says, for example, that, Nature doth paint women forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish, and he even deigns to quote Aristotle as being in agreement with this opinion. The dominance of males over females among animals shows the natural inferiority of women. In particular, they lack prudence and are so fickle that they cannot exert consistent governance. Today's readers will, of course, find The First Blast repellent for its misogyny. At the time, the objection was more that it was impolitic. Though the screed was aimed at Mary Tudor, it made for awkward background when Knox dealt directly with Mary Stuart, and also her mother, Mary Gies, who ruled Scotland on her behalf as regent. Actually, in this period, if Knox had only argued that people named Mary shouldn't hold political power, that would almost have amounted to the same thesis. But not quite, because of Elizabeth the First. When she came to the throne, Knox's earlier diatribe against the rule of women made it more or less impossible for him to engage with English politics. He himself admitted, My first blast hath blown from me all my friends in England. Nor was it only queens and queen mothers who had reason to be offended. Knox stated that anyone put in a position of authority by a female ruler was holding their office fraudulently, since, from a corrupt and venomed fountain, can spring no wholesome water. This goes together with a more general tendency on Knox's part to see subordinates as tainted by association with unacceptable rulers, and thus as obligated to do something to remove those rulers. We find this stated explicitly in his Appellation, or Call for Action, printed in Geneva in 1558, but aimed at the nobility of Scotland. Here, Knox argued, with his customary forcefulness, that the nobles have no excuse if they fail to remove irreligious, in other words, Catholic authority figures from their posts. That includes bishops, who should be compelled by the Scottish nobles to stop engaging in idolatry. Whereas Calvin had argued for patience in the face of wicked rule, Knox urges his readers to take active steps. This is something we've already seen in Huguenot treatises. Lesser magistrates may be morally permitted, even required, to move against their superiors. But in Knox's Appellation, we see hints of a more radical idea, namely that everyone should be prepared to rise up. He says that all are commanded to seek justice according to their possibility, and that God rightfully sends collective punishments against those who let evil go on without stopping it. Thus, in the case of England, it had been the duty of the nobility, judges, rulers, and people of England to resist Mary Tudor, and even to kill her. Knox made his radicalism still more explicit in another call to action, this one aimed at commoners. No less than the nobles, even humble folks, should compel bishops and clergy to cease their tyranny. The same logic of collective responsibility reappears, now applied explicitly to the lower classes. You don't have to be an author of iniquity to be at fault. Mere tacit consent is enough, and makes the people criminal and guilty with princes and rulers of the same crimes. This would be an extreme view even today. We don't normally think that private citizens are effectively permitted to declare war on the head of state in their country. Knox seems to have been carried to his shocking view more by political circumstances than by a well-thought-out political theory. He did write in the summary of a prospective second blast against idolatrous rule that if the people have appointed an idolater to rule over them, then most justly may the same men depose and punish him that unadvisedly before they did nominate, appoint, and elect. But Knox's preferred mode was that of the Old Testament prophet calling down fire and brimstone on his enemies, not that of the cool-headed philosopher arguing from first principles. Another Scotsman was ready to supply a more cerebral argument leading to the same conclusions. This was George Buchanan. Born in 1506, he studied first in St. Andrews and then in Paris at a time when another important Scottish intellectual was there, John Mair, who will come into focus in a later episode. Buchanan also spent time in Italy, where he may have encountered Republican political ideas. As far as religion goes, Buchanan first flirted with Protestantism, then became a Catholic priest, and then finally joined the reform cause for good. He was among those who helped build a case for deposing Mary Stuart from the Scottish throne and wrote a work on her crimes that appeared in 1571. About a decade later, he published A History of Scotland, which drew on rather fanciful ideas about earlier Scottish monarchs put forward in an earlier history by Hector Boucet. There was also useful and reliable information in Buchanan's history, for instance on Scottish geography and language. This project suggests a connection between Protestantism and Scottish nationalism, or at least national pride. Actually, the Bible was not translated into Scots in this period, or indeed until the 20th century, so the Protestants' focus on spreading literacy in order to read the Bible actually may have helped anglicize the country. But a contemporary witness speaks of how the Bible was studied and discussed in Scots in almost every private house. So again, it seems fair to speak of a separate and distinctive Scottish Reformation, not just a smaller version of the English Reformation being replayed up north. Buchanan's History of Scotland claims that the monarchy in this nation was always elective. We read there, The authority of Scottish kings derived from the law. The kingdom was not accustomed to be ruled by the whims of one person, but according to the written law and the consent of the nobility. Any kings who attempted to overthrow this practice had paid dearly for their rashness. So, much like Francois Hautman in France, Buchanan wove constitutionalist convictions into his work as a historian. But it was in another work that Buchanan argued most directly for constitutionalism, and unflinchingly followed that premise to state openly the conclusions Knox only hinted at. Buchanan's Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots was written in the late 1560s, in defense of the deposition of Mary Stuart, but then published only in 1579. In 1584, it was banned in Scotland, for reasons that will be pretty obvious as we go on. Rather surprisingly, given that it was written to justify toppling a monarch, Buchanan's Dialogue is dedicated to James VI, King of Scotland. Buchanan, by this time a famous humanist, was a tutor to James. One contemporary said that in this, James was more fortunate than Alexander the Great, whose teacher was merely Aristotle. And the reader has to stick with the text for quite some time before reaching material that might cause a king or queen to shift uncomfortably on the throne. The text is built around a fundamental contrast between the king and his opposite, the tyrant. This leads Buchanan to devote a long section to the nature and virtues of true kings before he comes to the more contentious issue of tyranny and how it may be opposed. His treatment of kingship fits squarely into the tradition of mirrors for princes, in which scholars gave advice to rulers on how best to carry out their office. We get such predictable points as the metaphor of the king as the head of the body politic, the urgent need for kings to acquire virtue, and the pivotal role of education in that process, the kind of education, of course, that someone like James could get from someone like Buchanan. Having said that, even in this section, Buchanan stresses the importance of binding the king to abide by the law. The monarch is not the ultimate lawmaking authority, as often claimed in medieval political tracts. Rather, the king is appointed by the people, who, for the sake of establishing a commonwealth under a single leader, choose some virtuous man to lead them. Buchanan stresses the freedom of the people in this process. They can bestow authority on whomever they wish, and he stresses their continued authority over the laws and the king. The people cede authority only for the sake of their own interests, so by definition, there can be no legitimate political arrangement that does not serve those interests. For example, Buchanan thinks the people may consent to hereditary monarchy, since this helps to ensure stability, which is good for them. But he adds that the unpredictable qualities of those who inherit the throne would mean that there's even more reason to shackle the king with the instrument of law. As for kingly absolute power over the law, as we saw being defended by Jean Baudin, Buchanan dismisses this out of hand. To give a king license to change or defy the laws would be tantamount to eliminating law altogether, and the people would surely never grant such a power, since it could be used to oppress them. It is, of course, precisely such oppression that marks rulers as tyrants, who are enemies of God and man, and have no bond of civility or common humanity with the rest of the people. Buchanan continues, even while talking about the tyrant, to stress that what ought to happen is that the tyrant is brought to heel by the law. With an illegal framework, a ruler can be put on trial, and they should submit to this treatment, a prescient description of what would happen in a few generations when Charles I would be tried and executed as an outcome of the English Civil War. But Buchanan goes further still, by asking what should happen if a tyrant is unwilling to answer for his crimes. There's only one remedy, violence, which may be rightfully pursued by any individual, not just by the lower magistrates as more cautiously proposed in Huguenot treatises of the period. So now we have a philosophical rationale for the conclusion also reached by John Knox. Because sovereignty has a popular constitutional basis, the people have the right to depose an unjust monarch, even to kill them if necessary. Any member of the people can carry out that task if the circumstances demand. Buchanan's interlocutor in the dialogue makes a couple of obvious objections to this breathtaking declaration, which are then duly answered. Haven't the people taken an oath of obedience to the ruler? Yes, but that oath is part of a two-way agreement, and if the ruler breaks the deal first by wielding power tyrannically, then this releases the people from their duty. So a more pressing concern, won't Buchanan's advice lead to political chaos? You can't have a situation where every individual in a country thinks they have the right to engage in regicide on the grounds that in their opinion, it is tyrannicide. To this Buchanan responds, I am explaining what legitimately may or should be done. I am not issuing a call to action. Which is a fair point. To say that a private citizen would be justified when taking matters into his own hands to defy a tyrant who cannot be brought to heel in any other way, whether by the law or by the magistracy, is not to throw the door open to just any political assassination. An action that is righteous in one context might be monstrous in another. Still, given the times in which it was written and the immediate context of Mary's deposition, it's equally clear that Buchanan was far from making an abstract point about moral permissibility. A curious thing about these daring defenses of tyrannicide is that they seem to have grown out of Christian fervor on the one hand, and an antiquarian fascination with non-Christian literature on the other hand. We needn't further belabor the religious context, though it would be worth adding that in a situation of tyranny, there was still a genuine ruler to whom the people could look, namely, the one in heaven. A colleague of both Knox and Buchanan named Christopher Goodman wrote a work entitled, How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed. Here, he said that the people are allowed to act against injustice when the magistrates do not, because, God giveth the sword into the people's hand, and he himself is become immediately their head. When subjects bring their monarchs to account, they do so in the name of a higher divine justice. After all, the monarch is just as much a subject of God as anyone else, a point made by Buchanan's friend Andrew Melville, who observed that, There are two kinds and two kingdoms. There is Christ Jesus the king, and his kingdom the church, whose subject is King James, and of whose kingdom he is neither king nor lord, but member. This brings us to the part about antiquarian fascination. Melville was, like Buchanan, a highly skilled philologist who helped spread that other revolution of the 16th century to Scotland, the Humanist Revolution. Knox might have been taking his chief inspiration from the Old Testament, but Buchanan's key source was Cicero. He cites this Roman author explicitly in favor of the ideas that laws are introduced to keep kings under control, and also echoes Cicero in his treatment of tyranny. In particular, Cicero had already set out the key idea that a lawless tyrant has abandoned any relationship of fellowship with the people, thus subjecting himself to violent retribution. Then too, ancient political conceptions lie behind Buchanan's understanding of citizens not just as dutiful subjects, but as moral agents in their own right, who can display virtue, both by showing fealty to a good king, and showing defiance to a bad one. When we think of humanism in this period, our thoughts typically go to the discovery of old texts, and the painstaking editorial and translation efforts that were lavished upon them, and rightly so. But for a man like Buchanan, there was an intimate connection between that scholarly life of the mind, and the life lived well in political community. Soon, I'll be exploring that topic in greater depth. Having offered this survey of political and religious turmoil in both England and Scotland, we'll be looking at the apparently more sedate development of learned scholarship in both countries across the 15th and 16th centuries. That will take us into other related issues, like the changes in university life on the island in this period, and the connections between philology and science. But to make sure you have a firm grip on the historical setting of all these intellectual developments, I want to share with you my conversation with one of the foremost historians of the Reformation, Darmad McCulloch. He'll join us next time to talk about the tumult and rebellion in Britain, not just England, here on The History of Philosophy, without any doubts.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and the Philosophy Department at King's College London online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about the Reformations in England and Scotland with Darmon McCulloch, who is a Maritos Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. Hi, Professor McCulloch. Hello. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. I guess that many people, when they think about the Reformations in England and Scotland, or at least the Reformation in England, suppose that it happened because, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, Henry VIII wanted to get a divorce and the Pope wouldn't let him, but presumably it's a little bit more complicated than that. So what kind of Reformation did Henry actually want? Henry wanted a Reformation of which he was the head, and in no sense should you think of that as a Protestant Reformation. Henry wasn't a Protestant, he was Henry. And as you say, the quarrel was about whether he could marry a second wife or in his eyes a first wife. And the problem was that the Pope would not allow that. So in the end, he broke with Rome. Now that could be thought of as a Reformation, but other kings had done something rather similar. What turned it into a Reformation were the driving forces of other people, particularly his new chief minister, a man called Thomas Cromwell, and also the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Henry had appointed to get this annulment of his first marriage, Thomas Cranmer. So between them, they discreetly pushed forward something you really can call a Reformation in the 1530s. And that took off with its own momentum quite apart from the king, who remained utterly unpredictable. A curious mix up of Catholicism and humanism, you might say, very little Protestantism. And in fact, at the beginning, he was actually quite opposed to Luther, right? Yes, Luther and Henry VIII did not get on at all, because Henry VIII, before he quarrelled with the Pope, defended traditional Catholicism really rather effectively. Luther was furious and wrote a furious reply. The king hated that. So they never had much of a relationship. Other figures who became Lutherans did appeal to Henry, the great Philip Melanchthon, for instance, whom Henry tried to get to England. But the English Reformation really never went down a Lutheran path, its roots were going to be elsewhere. The way you just described that it sounds like a fairly top down phenomenon. So you've got the king, you've got the Archbishop, so on. But presumably, what they're doing is interacting in some way with more bottom up forces like sentiment for Reformation in the country at large. Yes, England was unique in that it had a powerful movement against the official church for the century and a half before the Protestant Reformation. It's called Lollardy. And it emerged here in Oxford, where I taught in the late 14th century with an Oxford don called John Wycliffe. And this movement called Lollardy was suppressed by the official church in the late 15th century, but never eliminated. And so there was a movement within the country of dissent against the official church. And so the official Reformation, which emerged falteringly during the 1530s, could interact with this other force. And was Henry, would you say, capitalizing on that sentiment in the country at large? No, I don't think so at all. What he was capitalizing was the powerful sense of loyalty to the monarchy in England. England was an unusually centralized kingdom in the Middle Ages right back to the Anglo-Saxon period. So the monarchy had developed a powerful ethos of independence and self-assertion and asserted itself against Rome very frequently. So in one sense, the anti-papal rhetoric you got with Henry VIII was just recapitulating what certain English kings had done to suit their convenience in previous centuries. Speaking of anti-papal rhetoric, you already mentioned the name of Thomas Cranmer, who actually came to the conclusion that the pope was the Antichrist. What was the basis of that? And what did he think would be a suitable reconfiguration of religious authority in a situation where the pope was, to put it mildly, not a figure whom one should be following? I think at the center of Cranmer's thought as it emerged in the early 1530s was something which we find extremely difficult to understand now, which was that the king was God's representative on earth. And Cranmer had entered the king's service as a Cambridge academic who'd been employed to produce a historical theological case for the king's annulment. And gradually it seems that during the course of that, he became convinced that the king was head of the church. And if so, the pope was not. And the pope was claiming to be head of the church. Hence, he must be Antichrist. It's quite a simple piece of logic, really. Just a syllogism. Yeah. Right. And he thought that the king could effectively just replace the pope as the arbiter of religious acceptability. Is that right? That's how it worked. And in fact, Henry really wasn't going to alter the church in any respect except replace the pope with himself. And the powers of the archbishop of Canterbury would go on being the same under the king as they had been under the pope. I see. So this is why you say that in a sense, it wasn't so much a reformation as just kind of revolution within Catholic Christianity. Is that right? Yeah. Doctrinally, it need not have changed at all. And in very important respects, Henry did not change it. I mean, he burnt Protestants who believe differently about the Eucharist to himself and went on burning Protestants right to the end of his life. He also beheaded, hanged, drawn and quartered Catholics. But this sort of murderous ecumenism certainly didn't amount to Protestantism. This is what counts as middle way politics in the period, I guess. It's a dark sort of middle way. And Henry was very proud of being in the middle and got quite emotional about it. He felt that that was his role as father of his people to steer between the two extremes which had emerged in the 1520s. If we think then about a document that comes out of this period, like, say, the Book of Common Prayer, which is obviously a pretty central text that represents what was happening in Christianity in this period in England, does that not, in some sense, stand for some kind of reformation of Christian doctrine or at least practice? Certainly it does. And the Book of Common Prayer was a product of the next reign, Henry's son, boy king, Edward VI. By then, things have decisively moved in English politics towards the group who were convinced Protestants. So we've got Cromwell, we've got Cranmer, leading noblemen who were in alliance with them. And we've got the people who were steering the regime of Edward VI. And they produced two versions of a liturgy which was revolutionary in that it was, in the language of the people, English. And there was one stage in 1549 which tried to pretend to be conservative. And the reason for that was that the country as a whole was not convinced by Protestantism yet. And lots of members of the nobility and people among the bishops were not convinced. So you've got to keep them on board. But this 1549 book was very soon replaced, three years later, in fact, in 1552, by a Book of Common Prayer, which is in most respects the same book which the Church of England still uses and which has therefore influenced all the liturgies right across the world in what has come to be called the Anglican Communion. What are the features of this book that make it a Protestant document as opposed to a Catholic document? You look at the form of what Cranmer called the Holy Communion, which had been called the mass Eucharist, if you like. And what you're looking at there is an emphatically Protestant Eucharist and also an emphatically, let's use a technical term, reformed Eucharist. In other words, not Lutheran. The great divide in the Reformation across Europe had already happened by the time that this service was devised by Cranmer and his fellow bishops, 1552, and already Lutheranism had retreated from his thoughts. Now the important thing to grasp about that is the nature of the bread and wine used in the service. The old Catholic view is that these become the body and blood of Christ. Now that is Luther's view too. The explanation of how they become the body and blood of Christ is of course a different one from that of the Pope's. But it's basically rather the same. The Pope and Luther agreed on what happened in the Eucharist. Now the reformed tradition, Switzerland, South Germany, and throughout Europe eventually, the reformed tradition denied that. Bread and wine are taken in the service and they remain bread and wine at the end of it. They have been put to a symbolic use, a metaphorical use if you like. They have become in that sense the body and blood of Christ. So that's a complicated way of explaining that the English Eucharistic service is doing what reformed theologians were doing across Europe. Yeah, so really in a way for us is a kind of convenient marker of whether a certain strand of Protestantism is lining up with Lutheran or Reform Protestantism. It's an absolute litmus test. And in fact, the English book as conceived by Cranmer in 1552 has a really significant detail at the end. It's what you might call a stage in instructional and technically a rubric. And that's what you do with bread and wine left over at the end of the service. And what does this rubric say? It says that the curate shall have it to his own use. What that means is that the presiding minister can take it home for his tea. Now you don't do that to the body and blood of Christ, but you can do it to bread and wine. That's really saying that bread and wine is bread and wine. Right. Just like any other bread and wine. Absolutely. What about, for example, the increasingly widespread reading of the Bible, also in English translation? Is that another really striking feature of the Reformation in England at this period? Striking and unique in the sense that the Bible had been banned in England before the Reformation. That's absolutely unique. It's not true of anywhere else in Europe. And it's a result of that earlier Lollard rebellion against the authority of the church, because the Lollards had made a point of translating the Bible into what was then Middle English. That's in the 1380s. And the church had banned that translation and they banned any translation not authorized by the church into English and no translation had been. So one of the most essential features of the Reformation in the 1530s in England was to get an English Bible authorized. And Cromwell and Cranmer between them persuaded the king, charmed the king into doing this, which was a policy which didn't really appeal to him at all. And so that's the achievement which made what happened in England into a Protestant Reformation. The essential feature. You need a Bible in a language and a standard of the people, which is Cranmer's phrase, and read by the people. And to what extent did that then get even out of the control of these church authorities? I mean, people like Cranmer and Cromwell, because it certainly sounds like things went further than Henry intended to put it mildly. To what extent were actual lay people involved in reshaping Christianity during this period? Well one thing about the English Reformation, which goes right back into the 1530s, is that every important stage of it was authorized by the English Parliament. That's one of the reasons why the English Parliament, very unusually in Europe, survived the 16th century. There had been parliaments in the Middle Ages. Later on, very many of them atrophied, just fell into decline. Not England, because both under Henry and Edward and Elizabeth, and paradoxically also under Catholic Queen Mary, the Parliament authorized things. And that means representatives of the people within the kingdom, all right, the landowners and the nobility and the bishops. But still, this is a representative body. So in that sense, the English Reformation was achieved by the consent of the nation. It's not democratic, but it's not just imposed by proclamation from the monarchy either. It seems like a very diffuse way of forming what counts as religious orthodoxy, because you have, okay, the Pope's now out of the picture, right? But you've got the monarch, either the king or the queen in this period, and you've got the parliaments, and then you've got church authorities like the Archbishop of Canterbury, say. And so they're all presumably jockeying for influence and decision-making power. Is that right? That's absolutely right. Yes, it's complex. And at no stage was there a sort of council of the church which decided doctrine. There were traditional church bodies, the convocations, which had to assent to all this. And they did sort of do the detailed stuff. But they weren't making the decisions. It's the king in parliament which matters. Maybe we can shift our focus now to the north and to Scotland. So that's why we talk about reformations in what is now Britain, because the situation in Scotland is very different from what's going on in England. And the key figure here, I guess, would be John Knox, right? That's right. And I guess, so obviously there's a lot we could say about John Knox, but maybe one thought that I at least have about him is that he represents a more radical idea of what the Reformation could or should be than what we've just discussed in England. Is that right? That's right. It's a very much more radical reformation. It's very different from England's reformation. In the 20th century, we talk without thinking about Britain. Britain did not exist in the 16th century. There are two kingdoms with different monarchs, England and Scotland. So you're looking at Scotland. You're looking at this powerful personality, John Knox, who was seized by enthusiasm for the city of Geneva in the 1550s. He was in exile, spent time in Geneva. And so as his powerful personality came to play on the situation in Scotland, as the old church disintegrated, the future of the Reformation there would be very much in a Geneva mold. And perhaps even more importantly would be in spite of the Scottish monarchy, unlike the English Reformation where the monarchy is central. Now here it was done against the will of the then monarch who was Mary, Queen of Scots. And John Knox led a rebellion against the monarchy, not exactly a popular rebellion, though there were riots by mobs against the old church. It's the rebellion of the landowners and the nobility of Scotland against the Catholic monarchy. And that gave the Scottish Reformation from then on a very different character from that of England. At every stage, it was achieved in spite of the monarch, often against the monarch's wishes. And the end result was a church like that of Geneva, eventually without bishops. And that remains true of the established Church of Scotland to the present day. It's a very different feel from what happened in England. And what would have inspired these landowners to follow Knox against their own queen? The mysterious side of the Scottish Reformation is where this dynamic came from. Scotland had been affected by what was happening in mainland Europe during the 1520s, 1530s, and often in a rather Lutheran way. But then the monarchy cracked down on reformation in Scotland in the 1540s. And there's time of what you might think of silence through the 40s and 50s. People were getting burnt at the stake. But by and large, nothing much happened until a great explosion in 1559, when suddenly popular riots destroyed churches and monasteries in central Scotland. John Knox emerged from exile as a figure. And this is, I think, an example where the power of one personality is hugely important and the power of the two weapons of reformed Protestant Christianity. These two weapons are the sermon, but above all, the psalm, the psalm sung, 150 Psalms of David sung in the manner of Geneva. That is, popular tunes, metrical versions, so that people can learn these very quickly. They were as popular and as devastating and aggressive as football chants. And these are for crowds to take up a revolution. And that's the center of the Scottish Reformation. Wow, that's really amazing. So the revolutionary power of pop music in the 16th century. So actually, that means that Knox illustrates something that we might see as a more general feature of what we should not call British Reformation. So English and Scottish Reformation or Reformations, which is this connection to what's been going on on the continent. So you just said that Knox was very inspired by what was happening in Geneva. And he's not the only figure who moved back and forth between Europe and England and Scotland. So to what extent should we think of the Reformations in these countries as just being a kind of importation of what was going on on the continent? Yeah, they're marginal echoes of something which happened in mainland Europe. The islands which make up the archipelago, which are now often called the British Isles, they're on the edge of Europe. They're not that important. Kingdom of England is second ranked country, Kingdom of Scotland third ranked, you might think. And they are reacting to something which was happening in Central Europe, Northern Germany, Switzerland, etc. At no stage can you say that either the English or the Scots thought of anything original in the English Reformation. They added some thoughts, you might say, so that there is an interesting discussion in the later 16th century about how you use the great idea of covenant. And there's a covenant theology which did actually go back and influence Reformed thought in mainland Europe. And that's pretty marginal in compared with the great ideas of Sveendly or Calvin or Luther. But there is a debate about what I guess people usually think of as the kind of most central philosophical issue of the Reformation, which is free will and predestination. There's certainly a debate about that in England and Scotland. Do the, what we might call the British figures in this period not add anything to that debate that we haven't already seen in mainland Europe? Not much in the 16th century, virtually all of them were predestinarians. But that's because they're Reformed Protestants. Right at the end of the 16th century, some interesting things did begin to happen, particularly in the University of Cambridge. And there you begin to get a set of first academics and then of course the clergy who they're training, who are going out to the church, who are beginning to reassert the idea of free will. And there were furious arguments in the University of Cambridge in the 1590s, so we really moved on decades about this matter. But by and large, those are the outsiders, those are the rebels. It took until the early 17th century before that sort of person was leading the Church of England. And in Scotland, they're even more marginalized. And that's really a debate within Reformed Protestantism. It's got one sort of eye cast over its shoulder towards the Lutherans. But really, it's a debate between Reformed Protestants and rebel Reformed Protestants. It goes on to a very distinctive English story in the end, but that's what you might call another story. It's not the story of the English Reformation. It's interesting that, I mean, from a philosophical point of view, the free determinist or sort of fatalist interpretation of the theory of grace seems very difficult, philosophically speaking, right? So it has all these implications for moral responsibility and so on. So it seems kind of strange intuitively that that would have become the kind of default, most popular view. You mean the determinist point of view? Yeah. Well, it's not because virtually all Western Christian theology is based on Augustine of Hippo. It's all looking back to what Augustine had struggled towards in the fourth and fifth centuries. And that's a very, very hardline determinist point of view. Predestination is the jargon that theologians use about that. And when the Reformation came along, both sides, Catholic and Protestants, were really arguing in Augustine's terms. You could say the whole Reformation is an argument in the mind of Augustine. And therefore, it's very difficult to get away from the notions of determinism, predestination. You've got to do some hard original thinking. Erasmus, in his time, had given such thoughts. And so you get Erasmus as the inspirer of some of those who rebelled against Augustinian orthodoxy. But the general thrust really in eventually in Catholicism, as well as Protestantism, was towards determinism. And do you think that that was a widespread belief, even among the laity? So you just went out into the countryside and started asking people what they thought about their salvation. Do you think they would have said, well, it's all in God's hands? Well, yes, they probably would, because it's all part of a package, which is to say, yes, it's in God's hands. And I am probably one of the elect. And you can attach that to other ideas very common in Reform Protestantism, particularly the idea of an elect people, a chosen people. England is like Israel had been in the ancient times. And that's really quite empowering. It's a powerful thought. It's a comforting thought. And so they're coming from a different place to the place that many of us would be today, that we're much more interested in our individual determination, our dignity. Those things weren't priorities for most people in the 16th century. That's really interesting what you just said there, that predestination might actually be a comforting thought because God has sort of already selected me to be among the elect. So I'm going to heaven because I think we have a tendency to assume that they lived in terror of the possibility that they weren't among the elect and that if that were the case, there was nothing they could do about it. So we're lots of tensions like that. Self-examination is a characteristic of this sort of Reform Protestantism. Am I really elect? The English actually did do something distinctive at the end of the 16th century. They invented the confessional diary, which so many of us keep, and they did it precisely to examine their day-to-day conduct. Am I really elect or not? So the first diaries of the sort now common are Puritan diaries, the English form of Reform Protestantism, the Puritanism. That's really a symptom of the fact there are anxieties within this. But then we need to think of the comfort it gives you to feel that God is supporting you, that you don't need to bother too much. God gives power. God will sustain you if you behave as you should do as one of God's chosen people. And all the time they're listening to the Old Testament. It's the story of the chosen people. And the chosen people get things wrong, but they get there in the end. And this is something that a wider audience in England and Scotland would have understood how through the sermons and even the football chants that you mentioned earlier. Their music in church was entirely the 150 Psalms, nothing else. And from the pulpit, they would be getting this message from people trained in England, in Oxford and Cambridge, in Scotland, in its four universities. These are highly literate societies, particularly Scotland, where the Reformation very much valued education. And the outcrop of that is across the Atlantic in the colonies established particularly by the English in New England, which was probably in its day in the 1620s and 30s, the most literate society on earth. They valued education. And you need to understand Augustinian Protestantism because it's a complicated system. And it's based on a complicated book, the Bible. We underestimate the extent to which people bought into the system. Even those who didn't have much formal literacy were not stupid. It's simply they didn't have the technology of reading and writing at their fingertips, but they could understand it. So actually, this must be one of the first cases in history where something that can legitimately be called a philosophical position because it's a I mean, it's obviously a theological view as well, but it's also a philosophical view about the nature of free will, the nature of moral responsibility becomes explicitly embraced by a very large number of people on the grounds of something like an intellectual rationale. I guess that's so. And there is always a tension in Reformation, Protestantism, whether Lutheran or Reformed, between hierarchy and the feeling that we are all part of the chosen people and its attention, which they did not resolve. But particularly in the Scottish Reformation, it is remarkable that powerful figures, members of the nobility, were under discipline alongside everybody else from the church, the new Reformed church, and would often submit to that discipline with surprising meekness. Actually, if I could just ask you one last question before we end, and moving our attention now back up to the higher echelons of society, what was the impact of these ideas about determinism or predestination on the conception of rulership? Because, you know, if I as a humble Christian, am determined to do what I will do and predestined to receive grace or not, then you might assume that all the more so, the king is already chosen by God from eternity to be the king or the queen to be the queen. And I guess that must have been part of the rationale for Henry's proclaiming himself as having the right to say what is and is not religious orthodoxy. Yeah, there are always tensions within this system. Is the monarch simply God's representative on earth, or does God's will manifest itself through, in England's case, the crown in parliament, in which case is a sort of bottom up feeling about it? And the tension is there in the Bible. In the New Testament, you could go for a text in Paul's epistle to the Romans, very popular in the 16th century, obey the monarch, obey the powers that are ordained by God. That might be a starting point. But there is another text in the New Testament in the Book of Acts, fear God, honour the emperor, honour the king. And that's interestingly ambiguous, because which element of that twofold command are you going to listen to? Fear God, do what God wants, or the monarch. And that actually destroyed the Kingdom of England in the 17th century. This tension between a wider view of authority, a view embodied in the kingdom as a whole, or the wishes of the monarch, and the English got as far as cutting off the head of their king over that debate in 1649. And that, of course, is something we'll get to eventually, but not soon, because we're going to be looking more closely at some of the figures and ideas of the reformations in England and Scotland over the coming episodes. For now, I will thank Dermot McCulloch very much for coming on the series. Thank you. It's been fun. And please join me next time as we continue to look at the Reformation in England and Scotland here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Write Till Your Ink Be Dry. I have a friend from England who once spent a miserable week at his in-laws, suffering through an unbroken succession of ready-made meals prepared in the microwave. My friend isn't much of a cook, but in desperation he resorted to making a meal for the whole family, a simple pasta with meat sauce. To his surprise, his homemade food was greeted with little enthusiasm. His father-in-law gamely picked away at his plate of spaghetti bolognese for a while, but then pushed it away, saying, I'm sorry, we just don't like foreign food. I love this story because it illustrates so nicely something I've already mentioned a few episodes ago, the literally insular attitude of the British towards all things European. Paradoxically though, when the British do welcome foreign fare onto their island, they enthusiastically make it their own. In the modern day, a politician made headlines by saying that the national dish of the United Kingdom is chicken tikka masala, while the meal my friend made is in fact now so common that it is known simply as spag bol. As we've been seeing, this is how the British handled the Reformation, first resisting it and then domesticating it. And the same approach was taken with humanism. In this case, the foreign import came not from Germany and Switzerland, but from Italy, the Netherlands, and France, as British scholars took up the ideas and educational program of such figures as Guarino Veronese, Massidio Ficino, Erasmus, and Peter Rames. Naturally, that list of places and figures is pretty well the itinerary we'll follow in this episode. We're first going to talk about the initial stirrings of humanism in 15th century England, which centered on the travel of books and people back and forth to Italy. Then we'll move on to humanism in the Tudor period, and especially in the early 16th century, when English humanism became more of a homegrown phenomenon under the influence of Erasmus. I'll also touch on developments under Queen Elizabeth, though we'll have the chance to learn much more about that in coming episodes devoted to Elizabethan literature and science. And finally, we'll head back to Scotland and talk about Andrew Melville, who studied in Paris and then drew on Ramism to reform the educational institutions of Glasgow and St. Andrews. In both England and Scotland, that sort of restructuring would be attempted only in the 16th century. It's been said that the 15th century suggests how humanist interest could survive without educational reform. It was an interest that thrived within institutions but was not institutional. In this earlier period, universities and libraries were still more or less as we left them when we considered late medieval philosophy, something confirmed by the great Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini when he visited England for four years, starting in 1418. As I mentioned, back when covering Poggio, he was bitterly disappointed that he found no opportunity to study Greek and no interesting manuscripts. Of course, for him, this meant manuscripts of otherwise unknown classical works, not anything medieval. Poggio's sojourn seems to have had little impact than those of other less famous Italian visitors like Piero del Monte, a papal collector who came in the 1430s. Thanks in part to such contacts, certain members of the English elite started to get interested in that most humanist of enterprises collecting books. The most outstanding such patron in this period was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, whom the later humanist, John Leland, called a singular phoenix of erudition. Since Humphrey collected books and phoenixes have a habit of bursting into flame, it's fortunate that Leland meant this metaphorically. To be more precise, the Duke's books were manuscripts, since this was before the rise of printing. His library included numerous Latin classics and translations of Greek works, including one of Aristotle's politics, which was produced for the Duke by none other than Leonardo Bruni. They were passed on to Oxford University, creating a basis for humanist research there. Oxford expressed its gratitude in fulsome terms. Previously there had been, it is true, a university of Oxford, but study was there none, for there were no books. Now, however, through your gifts, we too can discern the secrets of learning. Though Humphrey has long been praised for his intellectual cultivation, it's not clear whether he spent much time actually reading the books he was collecting. His interest in the project may have had more to do with establishing a glorious reputation than advancing any particular ideology or intellectual approach, but he at least provided a model for scholarly exchange with Italians, like the aforementioned Del Monte and Tito Livio Frutovisi, who was from Ferrara. That city would go on to be important in this story of cultural exchange, as Englishmen journeyed there to study with Guarino Veronese. The first to do so was William Gray, later a bishop, and especially relevant for us because he collected works by Plato and the ethics and politics of Aristotle. Again, his private collection was donated to a university, in this case Cambridge. Then there was John Freeh, who learned Greek well enough that he was able to produce reliable translations into English for another patron named John Tiftoft. One of Freeh's productions was a version of a text by Cenasius of Chirenae with a title to gladden the heart of shiny-headed fellows like myself, a paradox proving that baldness is much better than bushy hair. With these developments, the potential for humanism in England was like my head, unlocked. The reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI saw humanists continuing to win support from powerful patrons, including members of the royal family. There was still a connection between Italian and English humanism, especially in the case of John Colette. He traveled to Italy right at the end of the 15th century and knew Marsilio Ficino. Once he returned, Colette disseminated the ideas of Florentine Platonism in his lectures on theology at Oxford. But in this period, the most powerful influence came from the most famous humanist in Europe, the Dutch scholar Erasmus. His ideas had an impact on such significant figures as Thomas Cranmer, who has been described by last episode's interview guest, Darmon McCulloch, as having been more of an Erasmian than a Protestant early in his career. Even later on, Cranmer was so closely associated with scholarship that it was said, If learning were discountanenced, it was esteemed to cast some disparagement upon him. If it flourished, it was a sign that Cranmer prevailed at court. In fact, James McConaca's 1965 book on humanism in this period relates pretty well all modernizing scholarly activity to the influence of Erasmus. While other historians have seen this as something of an exaggeration, Erasmus clearly did have quite an impact. He visited England in person, for one thing. You might remember that he wrote his famous Praise of Folly while staying with Thomas Moore. He was also friends with Colette and other members of the group of humanists associated with Moore, like Richard Pace. The work of Colette, Moore, and others inspired him to comment, It is marvelous to see what an extensive and rich crop of ancient learning is bringing up here in England. Under Henry VIII, works by Erasmus were translated into English, and Erasmus composed educational works for use in England. To be specific, they were to be used at St. Paul's School in London, a new institution whose humanist orientation was thanks to its founder, John Colette. As in Italy and Northern Europe, humanists saw a tight connection between the study of antiquity and the improvement of young souls. Speaking of his students at St. Paul's, Colette said, I would they were taught always in good literature, both Latin and Greek, and good authors, such as have the very Roman eloquence joined with wisdom, especially Christian authors, who wrote their wisdom in clear, chaste Latin. The same idea is captured in a work by Richard Pace, called On the Fruits of a Liberal Education. Taking as its motto an ancient saying that all virtues originate in learning, Pace says that mastery of rhetorical eloquence distinguishes man from beast, allows for the establishment of cities and laws, and is a prerequisite for all other arts. All of which sounds thoroughly Erasmian, yet Erasmus himself was not too impressed by the work. He compared it to sick men's dreams, and asked whether it was meant seriously or not. If it was meant seriously, how can one take it seriously? But if it was meant comically, why isn't it funny? Fortunately other treatises were being written on the same theme. Another associate of Moore's, named Thomas Allot, composed the Book of the Governor, which sounds like it should be about political philosophy, but for the most part that's true only in a rather indirect sense. Actually, the treatise gives advice for how to educate a young man to prepare him for political life. In the prologue, he explains that he has, "...gathered as well of the sayings of most noble authors, Greeks and Latins, as by mine own experience, I have been continually trained in some daily affairs of the public wheel." This is not a bluff. Allot was a clerk of the King's Council under Henry VIII, and later an English ambassador. As for the public wheel, or commonwealth, Allot explains that this is equivalent to the Latin notion of a res publica, or republic. It is a political community, a living body, which must be ruled by reason to maintain order and proportion in it, like the ordering of the elements in the universe. This cannot be achieved with democracy, which as the history of ancient Athens showed, is inevitably like a monster with many heads. All these claims will remind us of one of those noble Greeks, namely Plato, and his republic. As Allot goes on, he gives advice you wouldn't find in Plato, teach your kids Latin. His advice here, in the spirit of the ancient rhetoric specialist Quintilian, is humane and pedagogically astute. Children need time to play, should have language instruction integrated into everyday life, as by introducing them to the names of objects around them, and in general should work with natural disposition and not by coercion. Unfortunately, the youth of Allot's own day lag well behind their potential, because their parents are too stingy to pay for proper instruction and there are too few qualified masters around. Even when children do receive proper schooling, they often stop after learning Latin, at the age of 13. This is a waste, since the fruit of speech is wise sentence, which is gathered and made of sundry learnings. Those sundry learnings are the ones we'd expect from other humanist texts, argument theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, with a strong emphasis on ethics using works by Aristotle, Cicero, and above all, Plato. Less expected, and more fun, are the last chapters in the book, in which Allot explores the educational role of non-academic pastimes. For sport, Allot warmly recommends training with the longbow. Indeed, he indulges in paranoid speculation that crossbows and gunpowder weapons were introduced into England by foreign enemies, to undermine the physical condition and military preparedness of the people. If he were alive today, he'd probably say the same about Spaghetti Bolognese. But the most remarkable of these closing sections are those that offer a philosophical defense of dancing. Yes, you heard right, dancing. He explains away a passage from Augustine that takes a dim view of this practice on the grounds that only more lascivious forms of dance were meant. And a more positive view can be gleaned from the great pagan authors like, again, Plato, who compared the exquisite motions of the heavens to a cosmic dance. When done properly, dancing instills a similar harmony in the soul, by encouraging the acquisition of a key virtue, namely prudence. Allot analyzes the parts of prudence and relates them to the different stages of a Renaissance dance. With these ideas, Allot was himself in harmony with other humanists of the age who made similar remarks about music. We tend to think of 16th century intellectuals as a pretty joyless lot, but in fact even strict reformers, such as Calvin, recommended the use of music in church, albeit with the same caveat given by Allot regarding dance, namely that these activities can be beneficial so long as they aim at moral improvement and not mere pleasure. In this spirit, Erasmus referred to Plato's restrictions on music, which again are found in the Republic, where only certain modes of performance are permitted in the ideal city. A number of English humanists complained about musicians who reveled in mere technique rather than seeking to aid the appreciation of sacred text. Thus the reformer, Peter Marder Vermigli, who we saw coming from abroad to teach at Oxford wrote that church music is to be welcomed so long as the performers sing not only in voice but also in heart, for the voice soundeth in vain where the mind is not affected. Humanism and the arts would continue to flourish under Elizabeth. Her reign, after all, produced the greatest writer of English literature, and she was herself responsible for such scholarly productions as a translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. She received a solid humanist education from Roger Ascham, yet another humanist who wrote about education, in a book simply called The Schoolmaster, and also in a work whose topic Allot would have applauded, namely archery. Ascham explained that he would school the princess in New Testament Greek first thing in the morning and then move on to ancient rhetoricians like Isocrates and Sophocles. We will probably be pleasantly surprised to see a woman being provided with this sort of education, even if this woman was in every respect an unusual one. But actually aristocratic women had been involved with humanism throughout the Tudor period. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was an early example. She even endowed colleges at Cambridge University. Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, supported humanists including Colette and Moore, and hired no less a humanist than Juan Luis Vives to teach her daughter Mary. The tradition was carried on by Henry's last wife, the one who survived her husband and seldom has a husband been so difficult to survive. This was Catherine Parr. Her circle included the aforementioned Ascham, and she was herself an author, penning a pious text called Lamentation of a Sinner. The humanist Nicholas Udall wrote the following when dedicating a work to her. When I consider most gracious Queen Catherine, the great number of noble women in this time and country of England, not only given to the study of human sciences and of strange tongues but also so thoroughly expert in holy scriptures, I cannot but think and esteem the famous learned antiquity so far behind these times that there cannot justly be made any comparison between them. That's a bold and striking reversal of the usual Renaissance lament that the moderns could scarcely hope to live up to their classical models. One last thing to notice about English humanism is that it was often, well, English. Most of the original texts I've mentioned were written in this vernacular language rather than Latin, and humanists from John Free to Elizabeth devoted themselves to providing English translations of classical texts. Humanists also extended their interest to the English language itself. The first philological explorations of Anglo-Saxon literature came during the reign of Elizabeth thanks to scholars like William Lombard and Lawrence Nowell. Nowell was employed as a tutor by a powerful advisor to the Queen, William Cecil, who was in fact himself something of a humanist, a collector of manuscripts, and highly proficient in Greek as well as Latin. In a project probably motivated by English nationalism, Nowell applied the tools of philology to the history of the island. He made perhaps the first modern map of Britain and Ireland, and heavily annotated his copy of a Latin-English dictionary by adding in his own hand equivalents from the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon as well as lists of ancient English legal terms and place names. As a study of this extraordinary document has pointed out, it shows how printed books and manuscripts coexisted through the early modern period. In fact, the result of Nowell's labor is a book that is both printed and handwritten. But as we already know, not all the nationalists in the British Isles were English. In episode 417, I mentioned the history of Scotland penned by Hector Boisse, which was more imaginative than accurate. But along with this work of historical fantasy, Boisse found time to kickstart the Renaissance in Scotland in his capacity as instructor of classics at King's College, the one in Aberdeen, not the one that would be founded several centuries later in London. But the real stars in the firmament of Scottish humanism were George Buchanan, whom we met last time, and Andrew Melville, whom we'll meet right now. The two men were close. They met in Paris, where Melville was a student, and Buchanan his private tutor in Latin poetry. By this time, Melville was already a precocious classicist. He was influenced by his brother Richard, who had studied in Germany with Melanchthon, and by the time Andrew went to study at St Andrews, he was astonishing his teachers and fellow students with his mastery of Greek. Melville pursued further education in France, sitting at the feet of Buchanan, as just mentioned, and studying with other luminaries. Peter Romness, for one, as well as Romness's enemy Jacques Charpentier, for mathematics, for law, Francois Hautman, and for Greek Adrien Toineb, whom Joseph Scaliger, who certainly ought to know, called the most learned man of the age. Young Melville also acquired knowledge of Hebrew and other Near Eastern languages at this time. He then taught elsewhere in France and Switzerland, most notably in Geneva, that center of Calvinism, but also in Poitiers. I mentioned the latter, just so I can tell the following anecdote. Poitiers suffered a siege during the wars of religion, and one of Melville's students was struck by stray artillery fire. As he died in Melville's arms, he cried out, in ancient Greek, Teacher, my course is done. As that story suggests, Melville was an inspiring teacher, and he needed to be, once he returned to Scotland in 1574 to oversee the launch of a new curriculum at Glasgow. Due to the instability of the political situation in Scotland, the university there was in a parlous state. The surviving figures on enrollment show that since the 1550s, only a handful of new students had been arriving each year, and in 1558, none at all. Melville brought in a new approach, based on what he had learned from Ramez, in which rhetoric would be taught in the shortest, easiest, and most accurate way possible. He then moved on to St. Andrews, setting up similar reforms in 1579. One notable feature of Melville's new curriculum was the abolition of the regent system, whereby individual masters would teach all subjects in rotation. Instead, instructors would now focus on teaching their own specialist disciplines, more like what happens at universities nowadays. This made it more feasible to include the teaching of relatively niche topics like Hebrew and Greek. This happened all across Europe. The aggressive adoption of humanist methods ruffled feathers among scholastics, who in St. Andrews still abided by the slogan, Absurdum est dicere erace arozotile, meaning, it's absurd to say that Aristotle has been erased. Melville debated these hostile colleagues in private and in public. According to the story of his life, recorded by his nephew James, Melville succeeded in persuading some to freshen up their philosophical ideas by actually studying Aristotle in the original. But to be on the safe side, Melville and his allies set up a commission in St. Andrews that produced a condemnation of unacceptable teachings. This was in 1583, just a bit more than 300 years after a similar round of condemnations at Paris in the 1270s. That's quite a tribute, albeit a backhanded one, to the longevity of Aristilian scholasticism and its power to influence young minds. Like the medieval censors of Paris, the St. Andrews Commission fretted that impressionable students would, maintain godless and profane opinions obstinately to the great slander of the word of God and defense of the simple and unlearned. But there was at least a bit of updating, since among the propositions on the blacklist was a claim any good Protestant would know to reject, that humans can be good using our natural power of free will. With Melville, indeed, we have a confluence of the two streams that ran in parallel through the 16th century, of Protestant religious reform and humanist educational reform. This wasn't always the case in Britain. The initial stirrings of humanism in England in the 15th century came well before Luther started causing trouble, and Thomas More, a central figure in early 16th century English humanism, would die a Catholic martyr. After his downfall, some of his scholarly friends rushed to excuse themselves for having associated with him. Erasmus wished that More had followed his own example and stayed on the fence. I wish he had never dabbled in so perilous a business and left theology to the theologians. But there would be no fence-sitting for Melville. His combination of Protestant fervor and humanist pedagogy has invited comparison to Luther's associate Melanchthon. Melville wrote poems expressing a Protestant approach to biblical themes like the stories of Moses and Job, and was a prominent defender of Presbyterianism. His tone tended to be polemic rather than politic, and he had a penchant for satire, as in his delightfully named anti-Anglican poem, Anti-Tammy Cami Categoria. All this got him into a good deal of trouble, though not quite as much trouble as caught up with More. Melville was forced into exile from Scotland to England in 1584, and was later put into the Tower of London in 1607. There he covered the walls with Latin poetry, using his shoe as a writing instrument. Now that's what I call having the soul of a humanist. More generally, humanism in this period was bound up with politics. It could hardly have been otherwise, given the elite circles in which these scholars lived, seeking patronage from the nobility and writing court poetry. Besides, with so much upheaval in British political life, it was natural that its intellectuals would reflect on the situation and what might be done to improve it. Over the next three episodes, we'll be looking at a number of authors who did just that, as we consider writers of treatises on political philosophy in the British Renaissance and Reformation, from John Fortescue in the 15th century to Richard Hooker at the end of the 16th century. But we're going to start in the middle, with the ideal mix of humanism with political theory. And I do mean ideal, because the text I have in mind is Utopia by Thomas More. In a perfect world, every one of you would join me for that, next time here on The History of Philosophy. Without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, No Place Will Please Me So, Thomas More. As you've no doubt noticed, I'm a big believer in the importance of historical context for understanding philosophy. But you might think that even I would make an exception for Thomas More's Utopia. After all, this is a book about a place that has no history, for the very good reason that it doesn't exist. But as it turns out, all of More's writings dramatically illustrate the importance of historical and biographical circumstance, and that very much includes utopia. This work was inspired in part by the contact of Europeans with the Americas, something no reader can miss, given that the fictional character who describes this fantastic society, Raphael Hithloday, is said to have been a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, and is described as a leading expert on unknown peoples and unexplored lands. Hithloday's account alludes to other contemporary developments too, like the printing press and the humanist study of Greek language and literature. Indeed, the writing of Utopia would have been unimaginable without the rise of humanism. It is clearly a response to Plato's Republic, which More would have been able to consult in the original Greek. Just to ensure that we don't miss this either, he has Hithloday refer to Plato by name numerous times. And, a familiar humanist theme, the tension between a life of study and contemplation and a life of political engagement, is also crucial for Utopia. That choice is the main focus of the dialogue between Hithloday and a fictionalized version of Thomas More himself in Book 1, before we get to the famous description of Utopia in Book 2. Which brings us to the relevance of More's own biography. The tension between contemplation and action was one he felt keenly. After studying as a teenager at Oxford, remember this was the typical age for university students, he underwent a period of spiritual turmoil that lasted from 1494 until late 1504 or early 1505, when he got married. In so doing, he turned his back on the possibility of committing himself to a chaste monastic life, one he'd been tentatively pursuing by residing in the London Charter House of Carthusian monks. He would rather, he said, be a God-fearing husband than an immoral priest. Nor would family life be his sole earthly concern. More would, in due course, become one of England's most important politicians, albeit a reluctant one. He said in a letter that he joined the royal court much against his will, and his good friend Erasmus claimed that no man was ever more consumed with ambition to enter a court than More was to avoid it. But enter it he did. He would serve as ambassador, speaker of the House of Commons, and, as of 1529, Lord Chancellor, all under the king who would eventually have him put to death, Henry VIII. Utopia may be a work of vivid imagination, but its writing fits snugly into this story of concrete political activity. It was apparently composed in two parts, first in Flanders during a lull in trade negotiations, and then back in England. The fictional setting is a conversation in Antwerp between More, his real-life colleague, Peter Giles, and the invented Hithloday. As we've seen with other authors, the writing of dialogues was a sign of humanist tastes, and that certainly applies to More. Even before meeting Erasmus while the great Dutch scholar was visiting England, More had been steeped in humanist study at Oxford University. Here, figures like John Collette and William Grossen were promoting an agenda imported from Italy. Collette's lectures offered a Platonized Christianity inspired by Ficino, while Grossen, who had studied in Florence under no less an authority than Poliziano, was the first to give public lectures on Greek in Oxford. More was very much their student. He translated into English a biography of Pico della Miranda, written by Pico's nephew, Giovanni Francesco Pico, and cooperated with Erasmus on translations of the ancient satirical writer Lucian. Lucian is a clear inspiration for Erasmus' Praise of Folly and for More's Utopia. More also lectured on Augustine's City of God. We'll come back to that. If the philosophical dialogue was the most humanist of genres, maybe the second most humanist genre was history. So, of course, More wrote a historical work too, about Richard III, the king whose defeat opened the way for the Tudor dynasty. Living under the Tudors, More obviously wasn't going to offer a synthetic portrait of Richard. In fact, his history would help to inspire the villainous hunchbacked anti-hero of Shakespeare's play Richard III. That's the one with the line, A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse. Erasmus once remarked that More always had a special hatred for tyranny, and this attitude certainly comes across in The History. For More, as for other humanists, history writing fell under the art of rhetoric, and history should have an ethical purpose, using eloquence to move the audience to virtuous attitudes and actions. Toward this end, and in imitation of ancient historians like Salost and Tacitus, More filled his history with set-piece speeches. As we know, classicizing historians had been doing this for ages, from Byzantines like Michael Psellos to Italians like Machiavelli. A more unusual feature of this work is that More wrote it in two languages, Latin and English, and in parallel, rather than by translating one into the other. This underscores the way that Latin and the vernacular were coexisting in this period, as vehicles for humanist expression. Toward the end of More's life, opposition to tyranny would become a far less abstract concern. He was a supporter of Henry VIII's first queen, Catherine, and was unwilling to go along with the king's choice to set her aside, or with Henry's moves to put the church under royal authority. He resigned as chancellor over the latter issue. Perhaps he hoped to return to a quiet life of scholarship, but instead he provoked the king's wrath by refusing to square an oath of allegiance to the new line of succession through Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. For this, More was incarcerated and ultimately put to death on July 6th, 1535. He would thereafter be considered a Catholic martyr, which is rather ironic because he had created some martyrs of his own in the service of the king, during the years when Henry was still opposing the cause of the Reformation. In his service, More became an implacable enemy of Protestantism. He oversaw the banning of books by the reformers, and was personally involved in questioning suspects. He can be credited, though that seems the wrong word, with half a dozen actual executions on charges of heresy. This phase of More's career is, to put it mildly, perplexing. How could this learned man, a devotee of the peace-loving and moderate Erasmus, and a strident defender of free and frank speech in parliament, have overseen such repression and violence? Well, he tells us, in another dialogue called Concerning Heresies, and in other works written against the Reformation. In total, these works on heresy amount to about one million words. No wonder modern scholars have identified heresy as the single most time-consuming issue Thomas More dealt with in his chancellorship, and probably in the whole of the last ten years of his life. More understood heresy in fairly traditional terms, as the obstinate clinging to teachings contrary to those of the Church, in particular, teachings relevant to salvation. He saw it as the worst of all crimes, even worse than murder, since heretics endanger the souls of their victims, and not merely their bodies. Being both a skilled humanist and a skilled lawyer, More mounted one of the most impressive, and certainly most extensive, refutations of Protestantism from this period. Alongside the usual complaint that the doctrine of salvation through faith alone would deprive believers of any reason to perform morally good actions, he mercilessly critiqued the idea that Scripture can, by itself, determine true doctrine. Without the authority of the Church, it wouldn't even be clear which Scriptures are authentic. Besides, Scripture itself establishes the legitimacy of the papacy and the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy so that the Protestants' vaunted reliance on the Bible undermines their vaunting defiance of the Pope. Yet, More's career as a polemicist remains difficult to square with his earlier writings, especially Utopia, which includes a passage on tolerance of religious diversity. The Utopians hold a variety of beliefs, from sun worship to monotheism centered on Mithra, a god from Persian history. Freedom of religion is enjoyed by the citizens, so long as it does not lead to dissension. Even leaving this passage aside, the work as a whole isn't what you'd expect from a man who would go on to persecute heretics. It is ironic and playful, to the point that it defies easy interpretation. You might remember that Erasmus wrote his equally ironic and playful Praise of Folly while staying at More's house. In the dedication of the work to More, Erasmus mentions the delight his host takes in jokes of this kind, and Utopia bears that out. You probably know that the very title is a pun. Utopia is a double wordplay on Greek, since it can mean no place, or good place. The etymological fun doesn't stop there either. Hythlodei's name means purveyor of nonsense, the main river of Utopia is called Anaidros, meaning waterless, and the chief city is Amorot, meaning unknown. More added a further layer of irony by keeping up the pretense that the whole dialogue was based on a real encounter. He wrote in a letter that, had he wanted to write a pure fiction about a perfect society, he would have indicated this by inventing geographical names that allude to the unreality of the place, which as we've just seen is exactly what he did. To keep up the joke, the book was published with a supposed map of Utopia, and even an alphabet for its language. This language is said by Hythlodei to be not unlike Persian, but also somehow descended from Greek, as one can see from the place names, another hint at the ironic etymologies. In the preface, More makes a big deal about being a stickler for accuracy in his recounting of the conversation with Hythlodei, admitting with comic exaggeration that he isn't entirely sure about the length of a bridge connecting Utopia to the mainland. Then he adds casually that he can't address the much more fundamental question of Utopia's location because he forgot to ask. So this is, like Erasmus' praise of folly, an unserious work that is meant to be taken seriously. And there's a further complication, namely that the character of More in the dialogue is not persuaded by Hythlodei's account. Not because he denies the existence of Utopia or challenges its description, but because he's skeptical about the wisdom of the Utopian's way of life. More the character is a realist, if not a cynic, and his attitude throws the idealism of Hythlodei into sharp relief. As I've mentioned, the first book contains a debate about whether it is advisable to engage in political life. Hythlodei says there is no point in doing so because good advice will be ignored by bad rulers and advisors will inevitably be morally compromised. More the character counters that one should settle for incremental improvements rather than insisting on perfection. One has to approach things indirectly, handling the ruler with tact and rhetorical skill. This is the voice of the pragmatic, civically engaged humanist. The scholarly consensus is that this opening debate was added as an insertion after More had already written the stage setting of the dialogue and the account of Utopia in Book Two. But it makes thematic sense to have it here. Hythlodei's pessimism about politics is backed by his complaints about the evils of English society. These are then picked up in Book Two, insofar as Utopia eliminates the sources of those evils. In fact, Erasmus commented that the purpose of More's work, as he understood it, was to show what are the things that occasion mischief in commonwealths. For instance, England allows people to sink into poverty and then puts them to death for stealing what they need to live, something Hythlodei calls making people thieves and then punishing them for it. In Utopia, by contrast, there is no poverty and no theft. There can't be because private property does not exist there. Of course, the communism of Utopia is taken from Plato's Republic, the source duly being flagged for the reader. Indeed, utopian practice goes beyond Plato, who had recommended communism only for the elite class of guardians in his ideal state, not for the whole society. In another sense, though, it falls short of Plato because in Utopia, the communism is only economic and does not extend to the sharing of sexual partners and children. Utopians' gender politics are more traditional, with wives obeying their husbands, though women do train for war, are highly educated, and can even be priests. Platonic or not, these proposals do not impress the character of More. He says that communism could never work because everyone was stopped working without being spurred on by the hope of gain. Hythlodei replies that communism does indeed work, and that he's seen it do so with his own eyes, namely in Utopia. So that's evidence taken from a fictional place offered by a fictional witness, hardly a ringing endorsement of the feasibility of this economic policy. In book one, More, the character, defends his pragmatism of low expectations by saying that, "...it is impossible to make everything good unless all men are good, and that I don't expect to see for quite a few years yet." Then, at the very end of the work, More issues a final verdict in his authorial voice, "...not a few of the laws and customs described as existing among the Utopians were really absurd." This especially applies to the communism. On the other hand, he adds, "...I freely confess that in the Utopian Commonwealth there are very many features that in our own societies I would wish rather than expect to see." Taking these passages together, it looks as though More, the author, is pointing to a kind of chicken and egg problem. Utopia could be real, if there were virtuous citizens available to live in it. Sadly, we would need to have a Utopia already up and running in order to produce such citizens. The imperfect people we have around us in real life could never make up such an ideal society. That is in itself a reminiscence of Plato, who, in the Republic, was keenly aware of the difficulty of actually establishing a city in accordance with his specifications. He had Socrates defend its possibility, but admitted that it would take an extraordinary set of circumstances to bring it about. Another author, who might have been on More's mind here, could be Augustine. As I mentioned, More was well acquainted with Augustine's City of God, which contrasts the polities of our earthly realm to the perfect society of the blessed in heaven. So perhaps one point being made in Utopia is that such a society is impossible in practical terms because human sinfulness makes it unrealizable. It would be lovely to have all things shared in common, to live in cities where all doors can safely remain unlocked because nothing is private. But given that we humans are in fact selfish and acquisitive, it's simply not going to happen. A human community without greed would be like a river without water. One might object to this line of interpretation by asking, are the Utopians really so virtuous? If so, why does Hythloday keep alluding to the systematic regime of punishments imposed in Utopia? It seems these would be superfluous if the people are so morally admirable. The punitive measures include the death penalty for some crimes, while for others the punishment is slavery. Yes, Utopia has slaves, whose chains are made of gold because the Utopians think so little of precious metals. They also use it for chamber pots. The modern reader is shocked by the appearance of slavery here, but would this have been the intended effect for 16th century readers? Again, it's hard to say, because it is emphasized that this is quite a humane version of enslavement. For instance, no one is born into slavery so that the children of enslaved persons are born free. Nor at least as free as anyone is in Utopia, which is not very. The people are kept in line in part by the publicness of their lives. Because they live in the full view of all, they are bound to be either working at their usual trades or enjoying their leisure in a respectable way. They are not even allowed to leave their districts to take a walk without express permission. It's worth contrasting this to another Utopian society, imagined around the same time, the Abbey of Thelem, described in Rabelais' Pantagruel. As you might remember, the motto of the people there was, do as you will. Since the people are like-minded and virtuous, they all choose to do the same thing. But that doesn't seem to be the case in Moore's Utopia, where the inhabitants are constantly steered towards right behavior using mutual surveillance and threats. As for what counts as right behavior, this is determined by the Utopians' rather utilitarian approach to life. They seek to maximize pleasure, though they eschew crass hedonism on the grounds that the higher intellectual pleasures are superior to those of the body. As several commentators have pointed out, a question already posed by the debate in book one was whether what is expedient is also good. In humanist terms, whether utilitas aligns with honestas. The character of Moore is, as we saw, a pragmatist. He thinks that you should do whatever works, even if it means exhibiting a degree of moral flexibility and even putting up with outright wickedness. Hitler Day disagrees. He's a true idealist, and so are the Utopians. They think that the right thing to do just is whatever will work. We can see this from their policy in matters of war. While the citizens are trained to fight, just in case, they prefer to hire mercenaries to do it for them, since they think warfare is an activity fit for beasts. This is why they keep those gold chamber pots and chains around. They can be melted down to pay hired armies when necessary. They're also willing to use bribery and assassination of enemy leaders to avoid pitched battles. This, they reason, is actually morally preferable, since it avoids a larger number of deaths. The coldly calculative reasoning here is seen in other domains too, as with the memorable provision that Utopian couples should look at one another naked before getting married to ward off later disappointment. Such passages would surely have amused and shocked contemporary readers, leaving them to wonder what the deeper point might be. I suspect it was at least in part that the Utopian moral universe is one that humans might reasonably choose to live in if they did not have Christian truth. Actually, contact with European travelers has brought the Utopians into contact with Christianity. Some citizens there have embraced it, seeing this previously unknown faith as harmonizing with their predominantly monotheistic beliefs. The Utopians are also convinced that a good afterlife awaits those who act well in this life. They evidently wouldn't think much of Lutheranism, which rejected the idea that salvation is merited by good works. But Utopia is still fundamentally a pagan society. Remember, it's connected culturally to both Greece and Persia. So Moore might be suggesting that even the ideal condition of such a society will still look pretty problematic from a Christian point of view. This way of understanding Utopia makes it easier to reconcile the book with Moore's later activities as a persecutor of heretics. He was well aware of the failings of English society. Book 1 of Utopia shows that beyond doubt. But he was also convinced that it quite literally had a saving grace through its devotion to Christianity under the umbrella of the universal church. And he was determined to defend that to the death, whether it was the death of Protestants or his own. The ambiguities of Utopia did not prevent it from becoming a famous and influential work. Utopia does mean no place, but by the end of the 16th century, it was everywhere. Back in episode 353, I already discussed works written in Italy in imitation of Moore, like Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun and the less famous fantasies of Doni, Patrizi, and Zuccolo. We saw last time how English humanism was sparked by visits from and to Italy, and here we have a case of influence running in the opposite direction. There were also further Utopian writings in England, facilitated by the English publication of Moore's work in 1551. About 30 years later, two dialogues modeled on Moore's appeared. These were by Thomas Nichols and Thomas Lupton. Lupton even got in on the Mauryan wordplay, calling the interlocutors in his dialogue sivkala and omen, which are the Latin words for someone and no one, spelled backwards. The connection to Atlantic exploration, invoked to explain Hitler Day's encounter with the Utopians, is also present here, since Nichols translated Spanish travel literature. But these two Utopian dialogues lack the nuance and elusive irony of Moore's. They're more straightforwardly moralistic, more focused on the task of describing how society really ought to be, rather than on how society might be, if one proceeded from entirely rational yet ultimately unacceptable premises. Moore's Utopia, by contrast, is a place that really might have been designed by Greek philosophers. If he was ambivalent towards it, that mirrors the familiar attitude of the Christian humanist towards the wonders of pagan culture, admiring its achievements and lamenting its limitations. In the end, it seems to me, Moore would have agreed with those cynics who still tell us today that philosophy will get you nowhere. But let's not listen to them, because we have plenty of fascinating philosophy from Tudor England still awaiting us, including some political treatises that took a much more direct approach to the governance and society of England. If this episode has paradoxically still left you wanting more, you'll get it next time, as we talk about political thought and the English Renaissance, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, With Such Perfection Govern, English Political Thought. It's time that I corrected a misleading impression. In the episodes that have so far been devoted to political thought in 15th and 16th century Europe, I've devoted a lot of attention to fairly radical ideas, from the breathtaking cynicism of Machiavelli to the theme of tyrannicide in the Huguenots and Scottish reformers. This focus is certainly defensible, the most daring ideas tend to be the most interesting, and in this case they had plenty of long-term influence. Just for example, Sam Adams, who was an agitator of the American Revolution before he was a brand of beer, wrote his master's thesis on the question whether one may rightfully resist a supreme magistrate to preserve the Commonwealth. That's about as loud an echo of 16th century Protestant political theory as you could want. But I don't want you to get the idea that most theorists of this period wanted to overturn the social and political order, or destabilize the monarchy. Even so bold an author as Tyndale, famous for his provocative English translation of the Bible, can be found saying that the king's supremacy is such that he can be judged by no man, but only by God. So, for a more balanced understanding of political thought in the period, we also need to look at the more subtle and gradual shifts that occurred between the late medieval and early modern periods. The 15th century tends to get skipped when writing the history of political philosophy, but it was actually an important transitional period. Not least because it was at this time that Parliament started to be seen as a genuinely representative assembly, rather than just a high court of nobles. We even find the Parliament being compared to the ancient Roman Senate. This was still far away from the Parliament that would fight a civil war against the king in the 17th century. The 15th century idea was more that the Parliament would support and advise the king. Still, the Parliament had a legitimacy of its own, and could offer a check and counterweight to royal power. This legitimacy was grounded in a concept that in fact goes back to the medieval period. That society is made up of three estates, those who work, pray, and fight, meaning the warrior and ruling class or nobility, the clergy, and the so-called commons or commonality. A separate house for the commons, which could introduce bills for consideration by the nobles and kings, had already been established in the 14th century. This was of course still a very hierarchical system, dominated by the monarch and the nobility. The existing order was taken to be good, both because it was ordained by God, and because it was natural. That was a core message of numerous works written in the Tudor period on the topic of the Commonwealth or Commonweal, a term that refers both to the body politic and the benefit that comes from its good order. A fine illustration would be the Tree of Commonwealth, written by Edmund Dudley while he was in prison on the orders of Henry VIII. You might think that his circumstances would have led Dudley to question the wisdom of having a rigidly hierarchical society with a mighty king at the top, but far from it. His treatise explains the relationship between the three estates as a God-given system in which subordinates must patiently accept their lot. The nobles and king wield their inherited power with impunity, and hopefully with mercy and justice. The result is a well-structured Commonwealth comparable to a fair and mighty tree growing in a fair field or pasture under the cover or shade, whereof all beasts, both fat and lean, are protected and comforted. For an earlier example of the same sort of attitude, it's worth quoting a passage found not in a political treatise, but in a sermon given by Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath in 1467. Get comfortable, as you might in a warm bath, because this goes on for a bit. Justice was ground well and root of all prosperity, peace and political rule of every realm, whereupon all the laws of the world have been ground and set, which rests there, that is to say, the law of God, law of nature, and positive law. And, by saying, of all philosophers, felicity or peace in every realm is ever more cause of justice, as it appears by probable persuasions of philosophers. Wherefore first be asked, what is justice? Justice is every person to do his office that he is put in according to his estate or degree. And, as for this land, it is understood that it stands by three estates, and above that, one principle, that is, to wit, Lord Spiritual, Lord's Temporal and Commons, and over that, State Royal above, as our Sovereign Lord, the King. Here, then, we have a distant echo of Plato's Republic. Justice in the State is for each person or group to carry out their proper task, and also an appeal to the medieval theory of nested laws, those given by God, those written into human nature, and those devised by humans. This is what Stillington means by positive law. It was taken for granted by nearly all authors in this period that the King would be subject to these laws, including those made by humans, but just as standard was the assumption that the laws of God and man put the monarch above all others with unchappened supremacy. That political philosophers of the time were broadly happy with this arrangement is shown by the fact that the most famous of them, John Fortescue, wrote a work entitled In Praise of the Laws of England. Fortescue was himself a member of Parliament, was knighted, and served as Justice of the Peace. He was also a supporter of Henry VI in the Wars of the Roses, so very much an establishment figure. But take another look at that title. He wants to praise the laws of England, and a key reason for his enthusiasm is that the King does indeed rule within those laws. This is not something that can be taken for granted. There are two ways that a monarch might rule over a kingdom, which Fortescue calls royal and both royal and political. Both are compatible with a natural law, but Fortescue leaves no doubt that the second form of government is preferable. The difference has precisely to do with the laws. A merely royal ruler governs without constraint or restriction. Ultimately, the only law is his will. By contrast, a royal and political ruler, like the English king, cannot arbitrarily change the laws. He needs the consent of the people to do so. So in such a regime, the people are, as Fortescue says, ruled by laws that they themselves desire. They freely enjoy their goods and are despoiled neither by their own king nor any other. He adds that the king, no less than the people, should be glad to work within this sort of system, since it binds the lower estates to him and provides for harmony. Being an Englishman, he takes the opportunity to pour scorn upon the French for putting up with a more tyrannical state. The only reason they don't rise up in rebellion is that they are too cowardly. By contrast, the English constitutional arrangement, which supposedly has consent at its core, is a recipe for long-lasting stability as shown by England's past history. England's situation in Fortescue's day might seem a mighty strong counterexample, but he doesn't see fit to mention that. Speaking of history, the two kinds of rule also have different origins, according to Fortescue. Merely royal rule has always been established through brute force, whereas political rule arises through a kind of social contract. While this seems to anticipate the later ideas of the Huguenots, and even Hobbes, Fortescue was actually drawing on medieval theories here. Thomas Aquinas was a main source of inspiration and gave Fortescue the contrast between different types of law. The scholastic background becomes especially clear when Fortescue alludes to Averroes's explanation of how principles are established in Aristotelian science. His writings then were not revolutionary in political or intellectual terms. Still, Fortescue offered a polite but firm push in the direction of a certain form of governance. Alongside his emphasis on the lawfulness of political rule and awfulness of merely royal rule, he stressed the need for a council to advise and, though he doesn't come out and put it this way, constrain the king. These should be drawn from the spiritual and secular lords, that is, high-ranking churchmen and nobles. So, even if he insisted upon the people's consent to their rulers, Fortescue was far more an oligarchic thinker than a democrat. In this respect, he set the stage for what would come in political writings of the 16th century. Indeed, we've already seen an example with Thomas Eilat's Book of the Governor, which proposed that a humanist education was just the thing to prepare aristocrats for giving good advice to their ruler. Eilat even cited an ancient maxim that it is better to have a wicked king than wicked advisers. The same sort of oligarchic ideas animate a work written at just the same time, Thomas Starkey's Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset. The pole of the title is Reginald Pole, a powerful cousin of Henry VIII, who broke with the king and sided with the pope. He then became a Catholic bishop. In Starkey's dialogue, he is shown in conversation with Thomas Lupset, a member of Pole's household who had philosophical interests. For instance, Lupset wrote a work inspired by Stoicism on how to approach death. Thanks to his connections with Pole, Starkey traveled widely in Europe and was influenced by the ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, the modern editor of his dialogue says that Starkey was the most Italianate Englishman of his generation and among the most eager importers of Italian concepts in the 16th century. Starkey's use of the dialogue form may itself be a sign of this influence. The circle orbiting around Pole, if you'll pardon the expression, was more generally involved in the take-up of humanist ideas in England. Through this group, Starkey would have known the ideas of Erasmus, Colette, and More, but unlike More's Utopia, Starkey's dialogue engages with the politics of his own day rather than imagining an ideal state. Indeed, at one point, Starkey disavows the approach of Plato, describing an unattainably perfect state. In this respect, Starkey is more like Fortescue, who discussed the real political regime of England. Fortescue may in fact have influenced Starkey, who like him, says royal authorities founded upon the consent of the people, including the commons. The king absolutely must abide by the laws. For him to do otherwise is an open gate to tyranny. But there are differences, too. For one thing, Starkey's study of ancient authors like Aristotle and Cicero leads him to frame politics in more explicitly ethical terms. Admittedly, Fortescue had already stated that happiness lies in virtue and that virtue is encouraged by good laws so that whoever enjoys justice is made happy by the law. But the theme of individual flourishing is far more pronounced than Starkey. Like the Italian humanists, he develops the concept of civic virtue, saying that there is little point in virtue that is not published abroad to the profit of others, and that every man ought to apply himself to the setting forward of the common wheel. His very definition of civil life also builds in an ethical perspective. It is a political order of a multitude conspiring together in virtue and honesty. On these grounds, Starkey answers the question posed in the first book of Moore's Utopia as to whether it is advisable to engage in political life with a resounding yes. However, whereas even the Wars of the Roses didn't stop Fortescue from painting a rosy picture of English political life, Starkey laments the parlous state of England in his own day. There is a pestilence in the political body, as witnessed by abandoned towns and a shortage of labor. He's still an Englishman, though, so he makes sure to mention that things are even worse in France, and in Spain and Italy too. Part of the problem is a lack of virtue among the English nobility, who out of inordinate love for themselves failed to do their part to support the common good. But there's a deeper problem, namely the way that monarchs are appointed. While Starkey is cautious enough to say that the sitting king, Henry VIII, is eminently praiseworthy, he has his mouthpiece Reginald Pole argue that monarchs should be put in place through election by the common voice of Parliament, rather than by inheritance. When Lupset responds that a hereditary monarchy has the advantage of reducing the chances of civil war, Pole says that this is not generally true, though it may be a good point as concerns the situation in England. That might be another attempt to defuse the potentially explosive implications of his own argument. As in Fortescue, the need for the people to consent to being ruled is connected to a historical account of the origins of kingship. In a passage that will again make us think ahead to Hobbes, Starkey describes a primordial situation of wild disorder in the distant past, which was tamed only thanks to the advice of certain men of great wit and policy with perfect eloquence and high philosophy. Good thing there were some humanist philosophers hanging around in the state of nature. Their suggestion was to establish political constitutions, which might be monarchial, oligarchic, or democratic. Any of these would impose peace and encourage happiness among the people, so long as the rulers look to the common wheel. But obviously, Starkey is thinking mostly about monarchy as the outcome of this process, and he approves of this solution, remarking that a good king is the ground of all felicity in the civil life. Like Fortescue, though, Starkey also leaves a significant role for a council of advisors, who will represent Parliament and help the king to rule wisely. Actually, more than that. Starkey says that the king should do nothing pertaining to the state of his realm without the authority of his proper council. On the whole, then, these more mainstream political treatises from the Tudor period might remind us of ideas current in France around the same time. I don't mean the provocative treatises of the Huguenots, which came somewhat later, but an author like Claude de Seisel, who advocated monarchy as the best form of government as long as the monarch is bound by certain bridles. These would include the law, to which the king is subject, and a council that would steer the king's choices and even have veto power over him. Furthermore, the king's power would be given to him through election by the nobility. This proposal could have been known from Marsilius of Padua, or simply from Aristotle's Politics. Actually, the politics was getting quite a bit of attention in this period. Among ancient treatises on practical philosophy, the politics was less popular than Cicero's work on duties or Aristotle's own Nicomachean ethics, but like Sam Adams in a Boston pub, its contents were greedily imbibed by university students. If you have a very good memory, you might recall me quoting a report about the popularity of Jean Bodin's writing among students at Cambridge. Well, that same report says that the students could quote Aristotle's politics from memory. William Seisel, a powerful minister under Queen Elizabeth, even asked the scholastic thinker John Case to write a commentary on the politics, which he duly did. It was published in 1588. Case used the opportunity to defend the permissibility of having female monarchs, which was in every sense of the word a politic thing to argue for during the reign of Elizabeth, but he was critical of the concept of elective kingship, which may have inspired Starkey. The upshot was, as a study of this commentary has put it, to transform Aristotle from ancient Greek polis dweller to Tudor loyalist and proto-feminist. One of the numerous English scholars approaching Aristotle in a humanist spirit was the unexcitingly named Thomas Smith. He was a Protestant who taught the politics at Cambridge on the basis of the original Greek, and was also a member of parliament and an ambassador. So, despite his unmemorable name, he managed to be involved in pretty much all the movements we've been looking at over the last few from the Reformation to humanism and political affairs. One work of Smith's in particular deserves not to be forgotten, A Discourse of the Common Wheel of This Realm of England, which takes a secular and empirical approach to the topic of political economy. In this work, Smith echoes Jean Bodin's explanation of inflation, like him blaming it on debasement of coinage. He also echoes a point from Thomas More's Utopia, namely that individual interest, or to put it more bluntly, greed, is a powerful mechanism that can be used to drive economic activity. To economically beneficial activities, he writes, men may well be provoked, encouraged, and allured, as if they that be industrious and painful be rewarded well for their pains, and be suffered to take gains in wealth as reward for their labors. Relatedly, he compares the national economy to a clock in which each part makes the next part go. Or rather, his attention is not restricted to only the national economy. He realizes that the wider international context, what he calls the common market of the world, has a powerful effect on England. Yet another observation that has lost none of its relevance nowadays. Indeed, just about everything I've mentioned in this episode seems to point forward toward later developments. Of course, unlike the barrels of tea thrown into Boston Harbor at the instigation of Sam Adams, we shouldn't go overboard. I'm not saying that Thomas Smith already anticipated all the ideas of the similarly named Adam Smith, or that Thomas Hobbes was just repeating the views of Fortescue or Starkey. But these earlier thinkers of the Tudor age did anticipate much of what we'll be seeing when we get to the 17th and even 18th centuries. This is true at the level of fine detail, as with Smith's clock analogy, and also at the level of broad principle. Slowly but surely, political theory was moving away from the assumption that sovereignty is legitimated through divine fiat, or the natural law, and towards the notion that people might actually have to consent to be ruled. The monarchs of the time noticed this, and were unsurprisingly annoyed. In 1567, Queen Elizabeth gave a speech to Parliament in which she asserted the age-old comparison of the body politic to the human body. She was the head, and Parliament the feet, so it was pretty clear who should be in charge. God forbid, Elizabeth warned, that your liberty should make my bondage. It's often thought that Protestantism undermined such appeals to a naturalist, even organic conception of political life. For Protestants, especially radical ones like the Puritans, true authority was scriptural, rather than rational or natural. Religious acceptability was the test that rulers needed to pass, and fiery Protestant preachers claimed the right to give a failing grade. Now, the English authors we've just discussed did continue to refer to the concept of natural law, juxtaposing it to divine and human law, in good scholastic fashion. There was even a poem by John Bale called Comedy Concerning Three Laws, which deals with the laws of nature, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. Natural law gives a speech about herself, stating, God hath appointed me mankind to oversee, and in his heart to sit, to teach him for to know, in the creatures high and low, his glorious majesty. Nature could also be invoked in arguments over concrete political issues. We saw John Knox saying that the rule of women is unnatural, a point that was rebutted by John Aylmer. I reason against him thus, Whatsoever preserves commonwealths and destroys them not is not against nature, but the rule of women has preserved commonwealths, ergo, it is not against nature. Still, the increasing tendency to base political authority on something like a contract, a primordial agreement in which the people would have transferred authority to a sovereign, was gradually chipping away at the traditional foundations of monarchical rule. To realize that the king's power is artificial is to take the first step towards questioning that power. After all, what is man-made can be unmade by men. This issue will stay with us in the next episode, as we move on to a figure who resisted the consent-based political theories of his fellow Protestants. His name was Richard Hooker. He was a theologian who, like Thomas Cranmer before him, stood for a middle-ground version of Protestantism, avoiding the contrary threats of Puritanism and Popery. This makes Hooker a key figure in the history of the Anglican Church, but it is above all the connection between his theological and political ideas that I hope will catch your attention next time as you stay hooked to the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Before we start today, I have some pretty exciting news. About a month ago, I was contacted by Tim Wittenborg, who knows his way around a computer, and offered to convert the sound files from the podcast into written transcripts using automatic voice recognition. Obviously, the scripted episodes, like the one you're about to hear, already exist as text, but I realized this was a chance to produce transcripts for the interviews, and that is what Tim did. The results needed quite a bit of editing, so I appealed for help on social media, and got a small army of about 20 listeners who were generous enough to offer their time. They've been going through all the interview transcripts, there are well over a hundred of them, and preparing them to put on the podcast website. So, many thanks to Bartvoss, Benjamin, Chandler, Dan, Darius, Dave, David, Diana, Faizan, Felix, John, Carl, Kolya, Miguel, Norina, Ray, Susan, Wang, and Zava for their help, and I hope I got everyone there. Also, thanks to the many wonderful interview guests I've had over the years, I contacted them to let them know we were doing this, and no one had any objections. Some even offered to proofread the transcripts of their appearances. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to thank my website designer, Julian, who figured out how to present the transcripts on the website. What this means for you is that you can now go to the website, in particular to www.historyofphilosophy.net forward slash transcripts, there's also a button marked transcripts at the bottom of the page, to see a list of those interview transcripts that are ready, which should be just about all of them by the time you hear this. I think this will be a valuable resource, so thanks once again to everyone who made it possible. Okay, now on with the show. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The World's Law, Richard Hooker. When I was learning to drive as a teenager, one of my friends gave me some advice which has stayed fixed in my memory thanks to his somewhat grandiloquent phrasing. When driving on a three lane highway, the middle lane affords one many luxuries. It's a sentiment that has had many adherence from Aristotle to Goldilocks to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. When faced with extreme options, the best path lies comfortably in the middle. And as we've been seeing, plenty of people in Reformation era Britain would have agreed. The Puritan firebrands and conservative Catholics stick in the memory, but plenty of others were embracing a more moderate approach to matters of state and religion. Or at least they were presenting themselves as moderate, even if this meant welcoming the execution of people who strayed too far from the middle path. That would apply to a good number of the political thinkers we've been discussing, and indeed to Queen Elizabeth herself. The religious settlement of Elizabethan England was Protestant, yet it retained the church structure and rituals familiar from a time before the Reformation. Similarly, the political settlement involved a hereditary monarchy with royal authority granted by God himself, but also granted significant power to influential advisors and to parliament. As for the Puritan firebrands, they saw such compromises as well. They were failures to embrace fully the lessons of the Reformation. Scripture alone should be the arbiter of religion, and true religion should be used as the litmus test for political legitimacy. We're talking here about men like Thomas Cartwright, who adopted Presbyterianism, in other words a rejection of the Episcopacy, or the hierarchy in the Church of England, and who preferred a mixed constitution over monarchial government. Or Robert Brown, who met Cartwright at Cambridge and in 1582 published his Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying, which denied all authority over the church to the sitting monarch. The Queen's power was purely civic in nature, not religious. Instead, religious authority should be arranged in a fashion one is tempted to call democratic. Representatives of the whole church would choose the ministers. Shockingly, Brown then added, we give these definitions so general that they may be applied also to the civil state. Instead of waiting, or tarrying, for the government to catch up with such radical notions, these reformers explored the idea of separating from the wider society. One separatist, Robert Harrison, said that he saw no reason to give allegiance to rulers who failed in their religious duties. A living dog is better than they are. The church can rightfully depose such a ruler, and those rulers who earned the right to stay in office would do so purely on the basis of a compact or covenant agreed, perhaps tacitly, with their subjects. Of course it would hardly count as a radical proposal nowadays to say that rulers should serve at the pleasure of the ruled. But at the time, this was heady stuff which threatened to destabilize both the state and church of late 16th century England. Who was going to speak up for the middle ground that lay between Presbyterianism and the supposed superstition and theocracy of Catholic tradition? Richard Hooker, that's who. Not only him, of course. He was following the lead of his sometime patron, the long-serving Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. Whitgift engaged in polemical disputes with the aforementioned Thomas Cartwright, who would also be a chief target of Hooker's major work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It was dedicated to Whitgift and approved by him. The first four books were published in 1593, but the complete work runs to eight books, some of them appearing only after his death, which came with period-ending finality in 1600. In his refutation of the Presbyterian views espoused by Cartwright and his allies, Hooker ranges widely over substantive and methodological questions. He touches on everything from the relationship of reason to scripture, to the decorations, music, and clothing to be used in churches, to the nature of political rule. But if you had to distill the whole thing down to one simple message, it would be this. The radical reformers are wrong to try to base everything in scripture because we often need to use our natural reason as well. This is, according to Hooker, no departure from true godliness because it was God who gave us rationality as well as revelation. By the time Hooker published The Laws, he was already an experienced theologian, almost 40 years in age. Born near Exeter in 1554, he studied at Oxford and was a lecturer in Hebrew there, so he gives us yet another example of the merger between Protestant religion and the humanist study of ancient languages. He then became master of the temple church at the Inns of Court in London, the epicenter of legal study in England, so his later focus on the topic of laws was hardly accidental. It was here that Hooker engaged in his first prominent dispute with a Puritan theologian named Walter Travers, who had views like those of Cartwright. Travers and Hooker offered rival lectures at the temple church, and it was famously said that, "...the pulpit spoke pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon." The point of this remark was to contrast Hooker's Anglican views with those of Travers, which were modeled on a more rigorous form of Calvinism. The main issue at dispute between the two was one we've seen generating arguments across several generations now, not least with Luther and Erasmus, namely sin and grace. Anticipating the positive evaluation of human nature found in his later treatise, The Laws, Hooker pushed back against Travers' radically Calvinist view that the human has no role in salvation, with God predestining the saved and doing all the work to save them. Of course, Hooker agreed that divine grace is needed for salvation. No Protestant would deny that in this period, and no Catholic either. But he suggested that the function of grace is to perfect human nature after its corruption by sin. This is pretty familiar to us, but things get more interesting when we look at the related question of whether a believer can know that they have been offered grace and redemption. In 1585, Hooker wrote a work with the charming title, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon on the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect. Here, comfortable means comforting, and that is indeed the point. Hooker's central question is, they in whose hearts the light of grace doth shine, they that are taught of God, why are they so weak in faith? He wants to reassure his readers that they can have a degree of confidence or certainty in their own salvation. He compares this attitude to the faith we should have in our own reason. Though we cannot know everything, the things we can establish through rational investigation are known with certainty. The certainty in question, though, is a rather special kind. Hooker makes a nice distinction between what we would now call subjective and objective certainty. Imagine you're taking a mathematics test. You're nervous, and you know you have often made mistakes on math tests in the past. So as you write out a slightly tricky proof, though you are pretty confident it's right and have even double checked it for mistakes, you wouldn't venture to say that you are 100% sure that it is right. Maybe you wouldn't even bet money on it. But good news, your answer is right, and in itself it is completely certain. It's a mathematical proof, after all. Thus the objective certainty of the proof outstrips your limited, subjective feeling of certainty. Now, Hooker wants to apply this to truths of religion. God's bestowal of grace to the faithful is as certain as anything could be. Still, we might feel a lot less certain about it than we do about, say, mathematical proofs or things we believe on the basis of the senses. As Hooker puts it, we have less certainty of evidence concerning things believed than concerning things sensibly or naturally perceived, of the latter who doubts at any time, of the former at some time who doesn't. It is acceptable, indeed natural, to doubt in matters of faith, but one should remember that these doubts do not affect the rock-solid certainty of what is believed. Such modesty in belief is, Hooker thinks, a great comfort. Let them beware who challenge to themselves a strength which they have not, lest they lose the comfortable support of that weakness which indeed they have. As you can tell from this, Hooker could strike a calm, even gentle tone, even in rather polemical contexts. The same is shown by the laws, which despite its sustained attack on the Presbyterians, is at pains to argue in a measured and persuasive way. Hooker even suggests that what divides Cartwright and his allies from the Elizabethan consensus view is not, in the end, that big a deal. Surely, as fellow Christians, they can reach some sort of agreement. Toward that end, it would do the Presbyterians good to reflect on how certain they truly are about their dissident opinions. After all, we're not talking about mathematical proofs here, but deep and difficult matters of religion and politics. While Hooker's opponents surely feel that they have good reasons on their side, they can hardly take these reasons to be completely decisive, so it would behoove them to stop making so much fuss. Indeed, Hooker suggests in the preface of the laws that the Presbyterians should, given the inevitable uncertainty that surrounds the thorny issues at stake, submit publicly to the appointed authorities in those issues. These would of course be the crown and the established church. Instead, as private men, they go around smashing up churches and trying to win the allegiance of common believers whose opinions are easily swayed and, in Hooker's view, hardly worth taking seriously. So here we have an all-purpose argument for conservatism and obedience to authority. Gentle tone or not, it's hard to imagine Puritan readers being persuaded to change their minds, and not only because it's hard to imagine the Puritans changing their minds for any reason. But Hooker's case grows stronger as the work proper begins. He puts his finger on a genuinely weak point in the Presbyterian position, namely their appeal to the principle of Scripture alone. As Catholics like Thomas More had pointed out, this methodology is problematic if not incoherent. For one thing, Scripture can hardly be the warrant for its own authority, since that would be circular. For another, it clearly does not give us guidance on all matters. As Hooker says, we do not have to consult the Bible to know how to go about picking up a piece of straw. Rather, Scripture tells us what is necessary for our salvation, especially things we would not have been able to work out on our own. It leaves much else undecided, even with regard to religion. Hence the aforementioned discussion of things like church decorations, which for Hooker are, in keeping with the Church of England's view since the time of Henry VIII, indifferent, that is, left to human discretion. They concern only the outward form of the church, whereas salvation is attained through membership in the invisible inward church. As Hooker says, Scripture tells us how to arrive at salvation, but its directions are compatible with traveling along a paved or a gravel road. Furthermore, some guidelines found explicitly in the Bible may not be intended to apply to us. Commandments handed down to the ancient Israelites don't necessarily remain in force now, a point of some political significance, since the Puritans like to refer to the Old Testament as a model for English governance. Rather, God's commands always look to certain goals, and when the goals are no longer relevant, neither are the commands. As these examples show, Hooker believes that Christians needed to do some careful thinking to understand the Bible and its demands, and they also need to work out for themselves other rules to live by. Fortunately, God has provided them with the means to do just that, natural reason. God, Hooker remarks, is nature's author, and her voice merely his instrument. Far from honoring God by denigrating reason and exalting Scripture above it, the Presbyterians were rejecting a precious divine gift. Certainly, the clear verdict of Scripture is always a powerful consideration. Indeed, says Hooker, it would be the most powerful proof of all, having more weight than a thousand church councils. But usually, we lack such clear directives, so we must rationally reflect and follow the course that seems most probable. Hooker develops this idea when he comes to talk about the different kinds of law. Following Thomas Aquinas, he speaks firstly of the eternal law, which may be considered as being in a sense identical to God. This is the ultimate standard for all law. The eternal law gives rise to two kinds of lower laws, the revealed laws found in Scripture, and the natural law. I mentioned last time that the hotter Protestants, as they were called at the time, had little use for the concept of natural law, and here we can see why. Hooker is explicitly contrasting it to scriptural laws, which his opponents saw as the sole source of true religion. Understanding this full well, Hooker says that the root of the Presbyterian error is a failure to grasp how other kinds of law relate to the eternal law. Of course, Scripture is rooted in that law, but so is the natural law. Furthermore, specific human laws, like the laws of England, are rightly made in accordance with scriptural and natural laws. It's been observed in a recent book by Paul Domeniak that Hooker is here deploying a Platonist theory of participation. Platonists standardly taught that transcendent causes contain their effects. So here, the natural law, and even human laws, are participations of the eternal law, and unfold its commands. We use our power of rationality to discern principles of natural law, for instance that children should respect their parents, and to forge useful and good laws for running our societies, for instance that children can come into their inheritance at the age of 18. These are my examples, not Hooker's. Thus, as Domeniak puts it, the law of reason constitutes the rational cognitive participation of human beings in the providential order of the universe. Hooker applies these ideas to the fraught question of political authority by saying that political institutions are, in general, guided by the natural law, and in particular instances, determined by human choice. It's natural for humans to group together in societies to fulfill our basic needs, and then to seek peace and justice within these societies. We do this by appointing certain people to rule over us, to enforce laws, and prevent conflict. This has to be achieved artificially and by consent, unlike in the family, where nature itself puts the parents in charge over the children. But unlike many Puritan theorists, Hooker does not think that political life is based purely on consent. Though each individual state is brought into existence through a covenant between ruler and ruled, the general tendency and need to create such covenants is rooted in human nature. Thus, Hooker is both a constitutionalist, who believes in a hereditary monarchy put in place by the will of the people, and a naturalist, who believes that this act of consensus was prompted by the natural law. Ultimately, in fact, it is God who decrees that we set up political states, because our doing so is just one more way to participate in the eternal law. All this is explained in detail in the posthumous eighth book of Hooker's Laws. Here he also defends the fact that the queen or king is the head of the Church of England. Of course, he doesn't insist that this arrangement is required by scripture, or even by nature. Rather, it's just one good way to arrange things. Church and state power are in principle distinct, and could be exerted by different authorities. It's just that in England, it has been found expedient to unite both kinds of authority in one sovereign. All this is just about philosophically clever and subtle enough to forestall the lingering suspicion that the whole theory is simply engineered to justify the Elizabethan settlement. As our recent interview guest, Darmon McCulloch, has written, One feels that if the parliamentary legislation of 1559 had prescribed that English clergy were to preach standing on their heads, then Hooker would have found a theological reason for justifying it. As I've said, Hooker seems to be a conservative figure, no less than Thomas More earlier in the century. For More in the 1530s, that meant fighting Protestantism. For Hooker in the 1590s, it meant being a moderate Protestant and adhering to the Anglican settlement. It has, though, been strenuously argued that Hooker was far more principled than this would suggest, and that in the landscape of late 16th century Protestantism, it was Hooker who was the true heir of Calvin and Luther. This case has been made extensively by a leading Hooker scholar, W. J. Torrance Kirby. He has criticized the longstanding tendency to identify Hooker, and by extension, Anglicanism, with a middle way between Calvinist Protestantism and Catholicism. Kirby points out that, despite their rallying cry of scripture alone, the leading reformers did give a place in their theories to merely human nature. For example, they contrasted the two realms of inner grace and of worldly affairs, and warned against confusing the two. So Hooker was just following the lead of Luther and Calvin when he said that political affairs should be governed by the world's law, whereas Puritans like Cartwright insisted on identifying the spiritual with the external. This is why they insisted that no external authority could be recognized who violated the demands of religious life. By contrast, as you'll remember, Luther and Calvin tended to deny that their revolutionary understanding of the spiritual realm should lead to real revolution in the political realm. To take another example, Kirby sees it as being faithful to Calvin when Hooker and Archbishop Wittgift say that the external form of the church is a matter for the wit of man to determine. Kirby also provides ample evidence that Hooker saw himself as being true to the great reformers, and not as departing from their teachings. This is all quite convincing, and I'm not going to presume to argue with it. I would point out, though, that Cartwright, Brown, and the other Puritans were also picking up on themes genuinely present in the writings of the leading reformers, especially Calvin, and they were just as convinced as Hooker that they were adhering to his thought. I think the real problem in late 16th century England is not that one group was being true to Protestantism, while another wasn't. It was that Protestantism and its founding authors simply left plenty of room for disagreement. So, disagree they did. Shortly before Hooker's death in 1599, he was pilloried in a text called A Christian Letter of Certain English Protestants. It accused him of setting up the natural law as a second and independent source of authority apart from scripture. Far from supporting the true church, this would undermine its very foundations. In fact, the authors of the letter thought Hooker sounded like a Catholic, writing that he sought to scatter the profane grains of potpourri. As if that weren't bad enough, they also said he wrote as if he were a shudder philosopher. Hooker was one amongst a group of sinister poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, physicians, schoolmen, and whatsoever, and wrote like another Aristotle by a certain metaphysical and cryptical method so as to bring men into a maze. And you have to say that these certain Protestants, who were, as Hooker forewarned, indeed mighty certain in their opinions, had a point. I already mentioned in passing that some of Hooker's argumentative moves repeat those made by defenders of Catholicism, like Thomas More. Back in 1530 or so, a supporter of the papacy might very well have pointed out that, given the uncertainty and difficulty of religious questions, one should follow the established authority, namely the one in Rome. Of course, Hooker was no Catholic. He dismissed the teachings of Rome as mere superstition. Indeed, it would probably be fair to say that he was willing to indulge in arguments like the ones criticized in the letter, simply because he didn't take Catholicism seriously as an intellectual or theological threat. For him and most people, it was no longer a live option in late 16th century England, so he did not hesitate to use against the Presbyterians arguments that could, in theory, be used just as well by Catholics. But there is another, more principled reason that Hooker's arguments could not be used to support Catholicism. The pope claimed to exercise universal spiritual authority over all Christians. In contrast, Hooker thought in strictly national terms, In this respect, too, he truly was a defender of the Church of England. As I mentioned, Hooker did us the favor of dying in 1600, which is both memorable and makes him a good figure for rounding off this little series of episodes on religious and political debates in the 16th century. Before leaving the topic, though, it should be noted that those debates are going to carry on well into the 17th century. The signature events of that period in England began when King Charles I and Archbishop William Logg annoyed Parliament by adopting Armenian teachings and straying too close to Catholicism, and then annoyed the Scots by trying to impose English church practices upon them. When this led to war and Charles was forced to recall Parliament to get them to pay for it, he wound up coming into open conflict with them. This led to a civil war and his own execution, and then the rule of Oliver Cromwell before the ultimate restoration of the crown. It was in this context that authors like Thomas Hobbes developed their political theories. As I keep saying, we need to understand the Reformation and its many implications in order to understand early modern philosophy. But of course, religion and politics aren't the only things that philosophers ought to know about when it comes to Reformation-era Britain. There are plenty of other topics awaiting us, including scholastic logic and scientific explorations, where we'll be focusing on theories of eyesight and magnetism. But next, we'll discuss a topic that may be even more attractive—Elisabethan literature. Like the political debates we've been studying, literary works of the 16th century were shaped by the Reformation and the rise of humanism. Of course, the first name that leaps to mind here is Shakespeare, and we'll get to him. But first, we will set the stage by talking about two other historical actors who played important roles in the story, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. That's next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode, Heaven-Bread Poacy. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Now, I know what you're thinking. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, weren't they famous poets, not philosophers? What are they doing on this podcast? Well, I'm not one to rely on mere appeals to authority. And if I were, then the subject of our last episode, Richard Hooker, would have shown me the error of my ways. Still, when great authorities are on my side, there's no harm in mentioning it, especially when the authority in question is Aristotle. So I'm going to start this discussion by reminding you that Aristotle's writings include a work called the Poetics, a foundational work of literary theory. Even better, it features a passage in which Aristotle compares the writing of poetry to the writing of history, and says that the poet's enterprise is more philosophical. This is because poetry concerns itself more with the universal, whereas history speaks of the particular. Thanks to the humanist movement, this passage, and the poetics in general, were well known in Elizabethan England. And in this context, Aristotle's judgment was used to support an even bolder claim that poetry is superior not only to history, but also to philosophy itself. I trust that Aristotle would not agree, and as you might imagine, neither do I. If I did, you'd be listening to the Poetry Podcast without any gap, starting with epic and ending with rap. But we philosophers should always be ready to listen to counterarguments, so let's turn to the proponent of this claim, Philip Sidney. He was innovative in his poetic style, though he's perhaps best known as the author of a prose work, the romantic pastoral tale Arcadia. It does show some interest in philosophy, but I want to focus here on a much shorter text, his brief defense of poacy. The title already raises a question, why would anyone have felt the need to defend poetry in the Elizabethan period? This was the age of Shakespeare, after all. True, but to Sidney's mind, Queen Elizabeth's court was not doing all it could to support the cause of literature. Furthermore, this was also the age of religious reform, when the arts could provoke considerable anxiety, if not outright opposition. In particular, poetry could easily be associated with classical pagan culture, or the medieval and hence Catholic literary tradition. Roger Ascham's humanist work on education, the schoolmaster, made this point when it decried the rude beggarly rhyming that had been brought into England from papist Europe, by men of excellent wit indeed, but of small learning and less judgment. So there was pressure on the poets to show how their chosen art could be reconciled with the strictures of a godly Protestant society. And Sidney had an additional reason to be on the defensive about poetry. As grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, he was a high ranking aristocrat, who might have been expected to distinguish himself through warfare and diplomacy, not by writing verse. By this measure, he was not a complete failure. He was even knighted in 1583, one year before his early death at the age of only 31. But he fell out of royal favor after advocating too openly for a strong stance against Spain. So he may have seen his literary career as a kind of consolation prize. Ironically, this made him the ideal messenger for promoting poetry among his aristocratic peers. As one scholar has noted, they would believe Sidney because he only partly believed himself. On this reading, his defense was a bid to depict poetry as a valid alternative to military prowess. This would help to explain the way he begins by telling of a defender of the art of horsemanship, who was so eloquent in the praise of this skill, that it made Sidney almost wish he were a horse. Again, I must respectfully disagree, I'd much rather be a giraffe. Sidney's opening gambit satirically positions poetry as a foil to a paradigmatically chivalric art, and thereby invites the reader to reflect on Sidney's own social position. It's the sort of self-presentation familiar to us from Erasmus and other humanists who imitated him, and indeed to hold defense knowingly ironic, yet serious in its themes, echoes the tone of a work like Erasmus' Praise of Folly. It was a lightly worn literary persona that was hard won. Along with his noble lineage, Sidney brought to the defense an impressive humanist pedigree. He traveled widely in Europe, studying in Padua, Frankfurt, and Paris, where he sat at the feet of Peter Remus and experienced the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. He was formed by the new educational model of Philip Melanchthon, which fused Protestant piety with humanist scholarship. Amongst his friends were such outstanding Protestant literary figures as Francois Hautman and Philippe Monet. Lipsius called him the Flower of England. Rich, charming, brilliant, and did I mention rich? Sidney moved easily in these circles and shared his ideas about poetry with refined colleagues, but not with anyone else. None of Sidney's writings were printed in his lifetime, so they were known only through manuscripts that circulated among like-minded aristocrats. Putting all this together, we can say that the goal of Sidney's defense was to use humanist rhetorical methods to make a case for poetry as the most excellent of pursuits, aiming to convince both the highborn and the godly. That's a lot of hurdles to jump over, but Sidney was himself no mean horseman and mounted a powerful case. His central contention was that the poet is the writer best positioned to instill virtue in his readers. Because of its aesthetic appeal, poetry can delight as it instructs, like a medicine of cherries. This makes it an ideal teaching aid, especially for those who are just forming their character. He chastises philosophers who have made slighting comments about poetry, since it is, in fact, the first light-giver to ignorance and first nurse, whose milk, by little and little, enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges. As evidence, he points out that the earliest philosophers, presocratics like Parmenides and Empedocles, presented their ideas in poetic form, which is true, though their poems aren't exactly suitable for beginners. It's also a little awkward for Sidney that a favorite author of the humanists, Plato, banished the poets from the ideal society described in his Republic. Sidney diffuses this objection by arguing that Plato was only against poetry that teaches falsehoods, for instance, about the gods. He was banishing the abuse, not the thing. But the main classical inspiration for Sidney is the one I mentioned at the outset, Aristotle. He takes from Aristotle's Poetics the idea that the function of poetry is mimesis, or imitation. The poet uses this technique to persuade his audience to adopt true beliefs about God and morality. This is where the competition between poetry, history, and philosophy comes in. The problem with history is that it is tied to factual events, which constrains its ability to impart constructive lessons. The poet's freedom to invent means that he can, like the philosopher, focus attention on moral precepts without getting bogged down in the tiresome question of what actually happened in a given price and time. Now, in fact, Renaissance historians were happy to be selective and creative, precisely because they wanted to offer their readers moral and political instruction, not just a neutral chronicle of events. But Sidney might say that this just shows the historian's awareness of their own limits. To achieve their aims, they need to use what we could quite literally call poetic license. As for philosophy, it has the reverse problem. Since it is entirely general and abstract, it cannot move the reader. Only poetry can use both precept and example. So it has the virtues of both philosophy and history and the weaknesses of neither. Sidney's focus on virtue is well chosen, since this should dispel religious concerns about the merely aesthetic and also show the utility of poetry for aristocratic readers interested in personal excellence. But like the hero of a Greek tragedy, Sidney's argument has a tragic flaw. The best poetry is not nearly as didactic as Sidney suggests it should be. Great poetic works do not surrender their lessons easily, but have layers of meaning that reveal themselves only to close interpretive scrutiny. They inexhaustibly reward reading and rereading. As an example, let's consider what is arguably the greatest literary work of this period, not written by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser's The Fairy Queen. As it happens, there was a connection between Spenser and Sidney. The two were about the same age, but Spenser came from a less exalted background. When he attended university, he had to make his way as a servant to other students. Fortunately for him, Sidney put his money where his mouth was by sponsoring Spenser and other authors, to the point that his name became proverbial for the act of literary patronage. As late as the 18th century, we find a bit of doggerel verse complaining about the failure of the rich to follow suit. For now, no Sidney's will 300 give that needy Spenser and his fame may live. Though Spenser rose to greater heights than one of his background could have expected, he did not achieve his full ambitions, or at least that's the usual verdict on the turn his career took in 1580, when he was sent to Ireland on the crown's business. Ireland was considered as a primitive backwater, not least by Spenser himself, so this hardly looks like a promotion, though it has been argued that the relatively autonomous political situation there could have provided opportunities for the ambitious. Nor was Spenser's attitude to his new home wholly negative. He called attention to the long history of literacy in Ireland, and also the tradition of bards, impressive to a poet like himself. But it wouldn't be unfair to call him an apologist for the depredations inflicted on the island during the reign of Elizabeth, in particular the killing of 30,000 Irish to make room for a plantation of 4,000 English at Munster. Spenser described the horrific consequences of a scorched earth policy used in Ireland, starving the population, out of every corner of the woods and glens, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death. He blamed it all on the Irish themselves, though. They were killed not by the sword, but by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought. As you may know, our phrase, beyond the pale, refers to the idea of a pale, or supposedly civilized area around Dublin that was under the control of the English. A contemporary, William Camden, thus said that whereas the English pale was a place of law, the Irish folk outside it reject all laws and live after a barbarous manner. Spenser would not have disagreed, but he was also critical of the so-called old English, who had lived there for a long time, deeming them corrupted by exposure to this barbaric land. The solution, he felt, was even more English people and more English language. The Irish tongue should be stamped out because the mind must needs be affected with the words so that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish. His views were unveiled in one of the more unsettling examples of a humanist dialogue from this period called A View of the State of Ireland. These two characters discuss what is to be done with this country and how to remedy its defects. Spenser would like to see the rural populace give up their nomadic ways by settling down to focus on agriculture rather than wandering around with livestock. And he's at pains to say that it is indeed the populace and not the place that is to blame for the backwardness of Ireland. Rather implausibly, he suggests that the Irish are descendants of the Scythians, who in antiquity were considered to be the most barbaric of the barbarians. This is convenient for Spenser, since it means that there's nothing intrinsically barbaric about the land or the conditions of it offers. If the English could just exterminate the locals or completely overturn their way of life, then the place wouldn't be half bad. I linger on this in part because it gives us a first glimpse of attitudes we'll, unfortunately, be seeing again and again as the podcast goes forward. Spenser's writing on Ireland is an early articulation of the ideology of colonialism. Like the Enlightenment in the 17th century, the flowering of scholarship in the 16th century had a dark side. There was an easy slide from celebrating humanistic values to rationalizing the oppression of people who supposedly lacked full humanity. Though it should be mentioned that some philosophers of the time, like Montaigne and de las Casas, drew the exact opposite conclusion from similar starting points. But the material on Ireland is also of more immediate relevance, since the contrast between civilized and savage is a leitmotif of the fairy queen. When Spenser presented the whole work to his patrons, he called it, the wild fruit which savage soil hath bred, which being through long wars left almost waste with British barbarism is overspread. In the poem itself, there are numerous passages that touch on the same theme, as when savage characters appear to challenge or aid the chivalric knights and ladies who are Spenser's protagonists, or when the fairy kingdom is contrasted to the wild and untamed forest. At first glance, the allegorical meaning seems pretty clear. The court of the fairy queen represents civilization in general, and more specifically, the court of Queen Elizabeth, while unmannered and rude characters and places represent Ireland, or any other context where refined values and behavior are lacking. Civilization goes with virtue and barbarity with vice, an equation that Spenser does encourage, is when he writes of lust as a wild and savage man. But this simple reading might be a bit too simple. An influential interpretation of the fairy queen by Stephen Greenblatt is more nuanced. He calls attention to the way that Spenser evokes both the attractiveness and fearfulness of the wild and untamed, the passionate and licentious. His poem lingers over the seductive aspects of vice, only to stage acts of destruction that purge the sinfulness that has just been described. A central example is the so-called Bower of Bliss, a haven of sensual delights presided over by a witch called Akrazia, that's ancient Greek for weakness of moral will, who can turn humans into animals, presumably symbolizing the effects of unrestrained pleasure on humanity. The knight Guion defeats her and literally binds her up to stop her from doing further mischief. As Greenblatt writes, civility is won through the exercise of violence over what is deemed barbarous and evil, and the passages of love and leisure are not moments set apart from this process, but its rewards. The orgy of destruction offered to the reader in lieu of the sexual orgy they may have been anticipating would have recalled for Spenser and his readers the destruction of churches and their decorations in iconoclasm. All this is typical of the fairy queen, which seems to wear its symbolic meanings on its sleeve, only to reveal that in fact it has other, more complex ideas up its sleeve. As in the Bower of Bliss, the reader faces a powerful temptation to adopt a straightforward allegorical reading of each episode. Characters and places in the poem are literally called things like despair and error. Even when the meaning isn't quite that obvious, there's often a thinly concealed one. For instance, the female heroine and enchantress of the first book are named respectively Una and Duis, alluding to the concepts of unity and duality. The knightly hero of this book, whose true love is Una and who is seduced by Duis, is known simply as Red Cross. For the symbol emblazoned on his shield. Spenser might have well have started the poem with a note to the reader that says, now don't miss that the Arthurian romance is just an allegory for the journey of the soul to salvation. In fact, he pretty well did say this in a letter about the poem addressed to one particular reader, his friend and patron Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was famously an intrepid explorer, but Spenser was taking no chances that he might get lost in the symbolism, so he explained that the poem is a continued allegory or dark conceit, and proceeded to decode it for Raleigh's benefit, making Spenser an allegorical critic of his own poem, as one scholar has put it. That moralizing defender of poetry, Philip Sidney, would certainly have approved of all this, had he lived to see it. The Fairy Queen was published in installments, the first three books in 1589 with a further three books in 1596. And it may be that Spenser himself wanted to encourage a straightforwardly moralistic reading of the work, so as to forestall any objections that he was indulging in an outmoded and religiously suspect medieval form of writing. As the aforementioned Asham once put it, in our forefather's time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, that is English, saving certain books of chivalry made in monasteries by idle monks. But Spenser does not really dispel the tension between the romantic epic form and his religious message. Fundamentally, stories about knights and damsels are about heroic deeds, and good deeds are precisely what does not merit salvation in Protestant belief. When you think about it, isn't an allegorical tale showing how the soul confronts and defeats temptation and sin rather Catholic? Perhaps the idea is instead that the knights do not win grace, but receive it at the very beginning, as when the knight of the first book dons the Red Cross before setting out on his adventures. Then, the virtuous deeds could flow from divine dispensation, serving as signs of grace rather than cases of earning grace. That would be perfectly in tune with Reformed Thon, but it doesn't sit very well with the way the poem unfolds, since it seems that the knight's redemption still hangs in the balance. They're in constant peril of seduction by sin and also by false belief. The Red Cross knight encounters a figure representing Islam, named sans-foy, meaning without faith. Another opponent is a monstrous representative of potpourri, whose poisonous bile is vomit full of books and papers, a none-too-subtle dig at scholastics. The aforementioned duessa, meanwhile, is based on the Whore of Babylon, typically used by Protestants to symbolize the Catholic Church. These features certainly make clear Spencer's religious commitments without convincing us that a truly Protestant theology can be allegorized in the form of an Arthurian romance. Equally vexed is the poem's relationship to philosophy. Already in 1628, an exegete of Spencer called him a disciple of Plato's school. And in modern times, it has been argued that Spencer was powerfully influenced by Platonism. This intellectual debt is supposed to be shown especially in an episode in the third book of the Faerie Queen about the so-called Garden of Adonis. But some scholars have vigorously disputed that interpretation. There is general agreement that Spencer was well enough informed about the history of philosophy to have drawn on Platonism. He was a member of the European intelligentsia who benefited from the work of Italian Renaissance scholars like Ficino and Pico. But there is no consensus about whether the poem in general, or the section on the Garden of Adonis are simply recasting Platonist metaphysics in verse form. So let's look at that passage and make up our own minds. The relevant section tells of how the goddess Venus is searching for Cupid in the savage woods and forests wide when she encounters the realm of Adonis, who is responsible for sending children into the world. This garden is like a more acceptable counterpart of the Bower of Bliss, where sexuality serves its appropriate purpose, namely reproduction. Spencer calls it the seedbed or first seminary of all things that are born to live and die according to their kinds. The reference to kinds here does sound like an allusion to Platonic forms, and there are strong Platonic resonances in Spencer's description of Adonis' dispatching of souls into their new lives. This is worth quoting at length, in part so you get a sense of how the poem sounds. He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, all that to come into the world desire. A thousand thousand naked babes attend about him day and night, which do require that he with fleshly weeds would them attire. Such as him list, such as eternal fate ordained hath, he clothes with sinful mire, and sendeth forth to live in mortal state, till they again return back by the hinder gate. After that they again return at bin, they in that garden planted be again, and grow afresh, as they had never seen fleshly corruption nor mortal pain. Some thousand years, so do they there remain, and then of him are clad with other hue, were sent into the changeful world again, till thither they return, which first they grew, so like a wheel around they run from old to new. So we have here an Elizabethan-English version of Plato's Myths of the Soul, like the one at the end of the Republic, where disembodied souls come into the world and receive bodies like donning a new set of clothes. Just following this passage, we learn that souls can go into different species of animals, another idea familiar from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy. Through its many incarnations, the soul remains the same, or as Spencer writes, the substance is not changed nor altered, but they only form an outward fashion. To my mind, the question is not so much whether Spencer is evoking Platonist ideas here, it's why he's doing it. Platonism goes well with his suspicion of body and bodily desire, that attitude was clear from the destruction of the Bower of Bliss, and there are other examples, as when the four elements that make up the body are allegorically described as a threat to human rationality. Spencer is also fascinated by the way that images draw our minds and desires toward their exemplars, as in Plato's Symposium. On the other hand, there is a tension between such Platonist tropes and Spencer's presumably more fundamental Protestant beliefs. Think again about this story of Adonis. How are this god and Venus supposed to relate to the Christian god, and what exactly is the moral lesson of the story? Spencer associates receiving a body with sinfulness when he says that Adonis clothes with sinful mire the souls who are being born. That's easy to understand as a Christianization of Platonic myth, but if so, the Christianization is very incomplete. This myth has souls returning after death to the garden to be purified for some thousand years before being reborn again. Surely Spencer doesn't want us to believe in this kind of cyclical reincarnation. Rather, he seems to be playing around with classical pagan ideas, letting them both harmonize and clash with true religion. Like bodily pleasures, they are seductive yet to be treated with extreme caution. One critic, struck by the ambivalence of the whole passage, actually thinks that the garden scene is meant to subvert Platonic philosophy. Now, I'm no Spencer expert. In fact, until I sat down to read up on him for this episode, my main association with the name Spencer was a 1980s TV show about a private detective from my hometown of Boston. But for what it's worth, my own feeling is that The Fairy Queen is itself a mystery that calls for some literary sleuthing. A difficult and elusive text, not the simple allegorical work it at first seems to be. It has been called the most unreadable poem in the English language. That's a title it earns on the basis of its prodigious length alone, as it stretches over some 35,000 lines. But the description also fits because The Fairy Queen manages to offer itself as being readable in a rather straightforward way, and then to undermine that very reading. It is a Protestant work that revels in medieval chivalry, full of both moral strictures and lurid pleasures. Self-conscious, self-defeating, self-interpreting, and self-misinterpreting. Does this make it better than philosophy, or worse, or just different? Well, if I may again trouble you with my own opinion, I'm not sure that Sidney's distinction between poetry and philosophy really holds up. Philosophy is not a genre of writing, after all, like poetry is. It can be presented in poetic form, or as a dialogue, a treatise, a novel, you name it. Or how about this? Philosophical theater. Presumably such a thing should be possible, if all the world really is a stage, and the play really is the thing. So lend me your ears next time, as we'll find out what was dreamt of in William Shakespeare's philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Hast Any Philosophy in the William Shakespeare. When I first started my new job in Munich back in 2012, one of the delights in store was my first visit to the dedicated Shakespeare library at the LMU. I walked in and stood there just gazing at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of volumes about the greatest literary figure of the English language. Editions, translations, studies of every possible theme, every aspect of historical context, comparisons to authors of the same time period and of other periods, you name it. Now, I work in ancient philosophy, so I'm used to the fact that more has been written about Plato and Aristotle than anyone could ever hope to read. But Shakespeare studies, I now realize, are of a whole different order. This was secondary literature of truly mountainous proportions. Finally, I walked in, started to look around, and noticed that there was a second room. So now, some years later, I feel the need to explain why I'm adding my own pebble to the top of that mountain, if only in the form of a few podcasts. After all, there are plenty of podcasts about Shakespeare, too. One justification would be if it were fresh and original to approach Shakespeare from a specifically philosophical direction, which is sort of true. The introduction to a fairly recent companion to Shakespeare and philosophy calls this particular area of scholarship an emerging and comparatively small field. But when the comparison is the rest of Shakespeare studies, that isn't saying much. In fact, Edinburgh University Press has a whole book series dedicated to philosophy and Shakespeare, and there are monographs and collections of articles on topics like ethics in Shakespeare, Shakespeare's political philosophy, Shakespeare as a philosopher of history, and skepticism in Shakespeare. Then there are comprehensive studies like the readable and insightful Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttall, which ranges over many philosophical topics in a wide gamut of the plays. So in approaching this daunting topic, I should say right at the outset that I am not asking what this podcast can do for Shakespeare, but what Shakespeare can do for this podcast. In this episode, I'm going to explore how some abiding themes of epistemology and political philosophy from the Reformation period are reflected in the plays. This will allow us to understand what it could mean to approach a figure like Shakespeare as a philosopher, and also show us how ideas like skepticism and resistance to tyranny were being reflected in a very different kind of literature than we've usually been discussing. Of course, Shakespeare was a stone cold genius, so he's not necessarily representative of late 16th and early 17th century attitudes. He was born in 1564 and died in 1616. On the other hand, his plays had a much more popular audience in mind than, say, a treatise by Richard Hooker or Thomas More. When Shakespeare, for instance, thematizes skepticism in Othello and Hamlet, the groundlings who could only afford standing room tickets at the Globe Theatre were apparently expected to appreciate those themes. No less a commentator than C.L.R. James stated, Shakespeare was himself the first intellectual whose life has been shaped by the communication of ideas to the general public. But I don't just want to use Shakespeare to go back over ideas that are already familiar to us. In episodes to come, I'll be using him to introduce a few themes we haven't yet explored, or at least not as much as I'd like. Individualism, which makes a nice pairing with Hamlet, attitudes towards the newly contacted Americas, as thematized in The Tempest, and witchcraft. No prizes for guessing which play will be relevant there, and it would be bad luck to say its name anyway. Before we dive in, I should mention that even if Shakespeare is not usually considered a philosopher and received no formal training in the subject, he certainly knew something about philosophy. Troilus and Cressida alludes to a passage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which declares the young, unfit hearers for lectures on moral philosophy. Plato's Alcibiades also seems to be referenced in this play, and I guess it must have also influenced the passage in Julius Caesar, where Brutus is encouraged to see his own reflection in Cassius. We find Stoicism mentioned in The Taming of the Shrew, let's be no stoics nor no stalks, I pray. Not a great pun by his standards, but a noteworthy passage, since as we'll be seeing, the stoics are important in Shakespeare's thought. Even more telling are some passages where Shakespeare has characters say things about philosophy itself. There's a more genuinely amusing line in Much Ado About Nothing, never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently. And in Romeo and Juliet, when the Friar tells Romeo to seek solace in philosophy, Adversity's Sweet Milk, Romeo replies, Hang up, philosophy! Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, it helps not, it prevails not, talk no more. Not advice will be following, of course, but it does lead us to the first main theme I wanted to discuss, namely Shakespeare's tendency towards skepticism. It has been observed that, like Montaigne, whose writings he must have known at least by the time he wrote The Tempest, Shakespeare was radically skeptical about the value of reason in human life. Attuned as he was to the nuances and complexities of human psychology, he is doubtful that the dry and abstract reassurances of philosophy can provide genuine comfort in adversity. This may remind us of Philip Sidney and his argument that poetry has a better chance of instilling virtue than philosophy does. Deeper still, Shakespeare often suggests that no precepts of moral philosophy, indeed no reasons at all, can explain his character's behavior. Take, for instance, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, who, when asked to explain his vindictive pursuit of Antonio, says, I give no reason, nor I will not, more than a lodged hate and a certain loathing. Such tragic characters as Hamlet and Macbeth lack self-knowledge and perversely refuse to acquire it. This overturns our expectation, rooted in Aristotle, even if he worked with a more basic idea of recognition in his poetics, that the main character in a tragedy should undergo some kind of transformative realization about themselves. It's a Shakespearean insight that we are just as much, if not more, driven by self-delusion as by rational analysis of our own motives or the motivations of others. This is encapsulated in a wonderful line from Sonnet 138, When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies. For my money, the greatest Shakespearean exploration of skepticism is Othello, in which a more comes to results that are anything but utopian. Just as a refresher, the more in question is the titular character Othello, who is tricked by his supposed friend, Iago, into suspecting his beloved Desdemona of having an affair. In principle, Iago's motivation is that he thinks Othello might in fact have seduced his own wife, but it's made clear early on that this is something of an excuse. Iago says, I know not if it be true, but I, for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety. Like Shylock, Iago is driven by an all-too-human malevolence, not by reasoned beliefs based on solid evidence. His genius is to manipulate and exploit the uncertainty of others, in particular, of course, Othello. It's actually emphasized in the play that Othello is not a particularly jealous man. His weakness is rather his insecurity about whether Desdemona could really love one such as him. Thus, when Iago raises the specter of infidelity, Othello demands, Be sure thou prove my love a whore, be sure of it, give me the ocular proof, or at least so prove it, that the probation bear no hinge nor loop to hang a doubt on. And again, in the same scene, By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. I'll have some proof. Notice the echo of the paradox in that line from the sonnets. Othello's desperate search for reassurance reminds me of something, the dilemma addressed by the aforementioned Richard Hooker, in his early work offering comfort to the faithful who are not sure whether they will be saved. I don't find it too far of a stretch to suppose that Othello's desire for proof of Desdemona's love is a stand-in for the Christian believer's desire to have proof of grace from a loving God. If so, then Shakespeare is in agreement with Hooker. Such desire is misplaced because love is something that calls for faith, not something to be put to the test by demanding solid evidence. But even if you do find that too far of a stretch, you can hardly doubt that Shakespeare shares a late 16th century preoccupation with that very topic, doubt. The later poet John Keats spoke of Shakespeare's negative capability, by which he meant that the bard was capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. The theme emerges in many of the plays, not least Hamlet. There, the hesitations of the main character are explained in part by his desire to get proof of his uncle Claudius's misdeeds, and the ghost of his father is distrusted by Horatio, which of course leads to the most famous reference to our favorite discipline in all of Shakespeare, and quite possibly in the English language. Telling him to have an open mind, Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. But a closer comparison to Othello would be King Lear, in particular its opening scene, in which Lear invites his daughters to pledge their devotion to him before distributing his inheritance. His plan is evidently to give the largest share to his one virtuous daughter, Cordelia, but she refuses to play the game, and when asked what she can say to match the effusive flattery offered by her sisters, says simply, nothing. When pressed, she describes her relationship to her father in coldly transactional terms. You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I return those duties back as our right fit, obey you, love you, and most honor you. As with Othello, Lear's tragedy is set in train by his demand for proof of affection. But here, there is an additional layer of meaning because of the political significance of the scene. This isn't just about whether a father feels loved, it's about who is going to rule after Lear is gone. By having Cordelia decline to flatter her way into power, or rather into power for her husband to be, Shakespeare marks a shift in political thinking. Though the play is actually set in deep antiquity, the character of Lear is operating within a medieval, filthy-based conception of authority, sealed with bonds of personal affection. Cordelia represents something more modern, a contractual approach to politics. As one scholar has written of the scene, once Cordelia dissolves the old bonds of faith and duty, a new moral universe must be constituted. Of course, King Lear is not the only play by Shakespeare set in the distant past. As the aforementioned A.D. Nuttall has written, antiquity served him as a perfect laboratory for free-ranging political hypothesis, set apart in time rather than in place, like Moore's Utopia. There's no better example than Julius Caesar. Despite its title, the main character of the play is in fact Brutus, who faces a Hamlet-like dilemma whether or not to kill a tyrant in an attempt to save the Roman Republic from Caesar's ambition. This sounds familiar, doesn't it? After our discussions of all those writings about tyrannicide by Huguenots and radical Protestants in Britain, we might almost have expected Shakespeare to explore the same theme, and so he does. Like Motagni's friend, Debouti, in Unvoluntary Servitude, this play makes the point that tyrants can succeed only because those they oppress allow it. After all, Caesar is just another man like other men. As Cassius says when encouraging Brutus to act, there is no cause to be in awe of such a thing as I myself. And when Brutus comes to defend his action, he does so in terms that would fit nicely into Debouti's work. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves than that Caesar were dead to live all free men? This line comes in the first of the paired speeches delivered by Brutus and Mark Antony to the Roman people, who are shown being swayed Brutus's way and then Antony's once they have lent him their ears. This triggers a riot in protest at the assassination. It's less than clear from all this what Shakespeare thinks about tyrannicide. As he shows in the final acts of the play, this particular one led to a civil war, and we all know that the conspirators failed to keep the Republic alive. By contrast, it's pretty evident from Julius Caesar what Shakespeare thinks about rhetoric. It's dangerous. Actually, rhetoric students in the Renaissance were sometimes given Caesar's killing as a model and had to practice arguing for and against it. With his portrayal of Antony's emotive speech and its effects, Shakespeare demonstrates both the power and risks of rhetoric. In this light, it's interesting to note that Cicero, the pole star by whom the humanist rhetoricians steered their craft, is present in Julius Caesar mostly by being absent. He is a very minor character, whose views on the conspiracy are a matter of speculation, and who is then mentioned as a victim of Antony's purges later in the drama. Of course, there's a world of difference between writing a treatise about tyranny or about rhetoric and writing a play about them. One difference is the one just mentioned. Though we usually know what Shakespeare's characters think, we often cannot tell what he thinks. Another difference is that the philosophical issues are made personal. Here, they are focused in the person of Brutus, a thoroughly admirable character who is pronounced the noblest Roman of all by even his enemy Antony. In that passage, Antony observes that among the conspirators, only Brutus acted on principle. Cassius is a clear contrast, motivated by loathing of Caesar and thus far from the ideal dispassionate protector of the laws imagined in a work like the Huguenot treatise Vindicchiae Contra Tyrannus. Brutus is best positioned to play that role because of his upright character and also his personal admiration for Caesar as a man, something he emphasizes in his speech to the Roman people, I did love Caesar when I struck him. As several scholars have noted, there are strong clues that Brutus is meant to be a stoic. Maybe the most obvious is when Cassius says to him, of your philosophy you make no use if you give place to accidental evils. In this same scene, we're shown Brutus responding to the death of his wife Portia with a degree of self control that even Epictetus might envy. Even so, great men, great losses should endure, remarks one comrade, while Cassius sounds like Montaigne when he says in rueful admiration, I have as much of this in art as you, but yet my nature could not bear it so. But Brutus is better at remaining steadfast in the face of misfortune than he is at ignoring the call of sentiment. While Portia is still alive, we see him struggling to reconcile his love for her with his need to keep the conspiracy secret, and his affection for Caesar himself makes it hard for him to act on behalf of the Republic. More like Hamlet than like Epictetus, he says after a sleepless and fretful night, between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. Another scholar who has plumbed the philosophical depths of Shakespeare's plays, Patrick Gray, has written that Brutus, aims to become an exemplary stoic sage, but he fails to remain indifferent to the imminent collapse of the Roman Republic. In his concern for other people, Brutus reveals an aspect of his character which cannot be reconciled to his ambition to be seen as a philosopher, a refractory streak of kindness. As these examples show, philosophers can get plenty out of Shakespeare, which makes it a bit surprising that they unanimously failed to do so for several generations. Eventually they would come around. Hegel was a fan, and the 20th century French thinker Emmanuel Levinas commented with understandable hyperbole that, The whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare. The first significant philosopher to engage with Shakespeare was the Earl of Shaftesbury, who in the early 18th century praised one play in particular as, Almost one continued moral, a series of deep reflections drawn from one mouth upon the subject of one single accident and calamity naturally fitted to move horror and compassion. It's a work I've already mentioned a few times in passing, but it demands our full attention, and I hope you'll all join me for that because it takes a village to discuss Hamlet. First though, I'm happy to say that someone else is joining me, the very scholar I quoted a moment ago, Patrick Gray. Maybe I'll ask him whether he knows the difference between a Frenchman and Shakespeare's Brutus. At breakfast, the Frenchman only wanted one egg, because in French one egg is un euf. As for Brutus, he ate two. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about Shakespeare and philosophy with Patrick Gray, who is Professor of Literature at the University of Austin. Hello, Patrick. Hello, hello. Good to see you. Yeah, it's great to have you on the show. I'm very excited about this topic. And I bet you are too, because you're a big fan of Shakespeare. You were just telling me before we started that you used to be a Shakespeare actor before you were a Shakespeare academic. Yes, yes, that's right. When I was a student, I guess, like Polonius, it's something that I really enjoyed. And I think led my interest in Shakespearean ethics, because as an actor, you're always up on stage, you feel like you're making a choice between options. And that's part of the pleasure of Shakespeare. And that's what you're trying to convey to the audience. And so to make sense of those choices is a big part of what drove my interest and continues to drive my interest in Shakespearean ethics. Okay, nice. Well, we are going to get on to ethics. But I wanted to start with a more kind of practical question, I guess, which is just what did Shakespeare know about philosophy? And I guess what I mean by that is which philosophical sources was he able to draw on? And I guess we have to infer this from things he says in his plays, right? Because we don't sound like we have access to the list of the books he owned or anything like that. The short answer is more than people tend to think. I think one of the more persistent and charming but also misleading assumptions about Shakespeare is that he was relatively uneducated or uninterested in abstract thought. And I think this goes back to a tenacious, memorable jab by his contemporary Ben Johnson, who said that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek. And then you get a repeat of that about 50 years later from Milton. Milton depicts Shakespeare in contrast to Johnson, whom he rightly calls learned. It says Shakespeare's fancy child warbling his native wood notes wild. And I think this picture of Shakespeare as a naive folk artist gets misunderstood. It's a bit like the Jansenists accusing Montaigne of being a libertine. It's like, well, I mean, compared to them, okay. But compared to them, everybody. It's like, so it's like when it comes to knowledge of the classics, compared to Milton or Johnson, like we're all ignoramuses. I mean, Milton was writing epic good poetry in Latin as a teenager. So I think his assessment of Shakespeare's supposed lack of learning needs to be taken with a significant grain of salt. By virtue of his education, Shakespeare could read Latin easily and he could access all manner of philosophy in that form. He's living in a time when works like Plutarch's Morals and Cicero's Tuscalois Disputations are being translated into English. I think he could also read French. In terms of the plays, as you noted, in his Troilus and Cressida, he paraphrases a passage from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. And then taken up, you draw attention to the funeral orations of Julius Caesar. Here we see a kind of subtle engagement with different claims within classical philosophy. Unlike Mark Antony, Brutus makes no appeal to pathos, no appeal to the heartstrings of his audience. Instead, his speeches like a series of syllogisms, like if then, if then, that, and the audience struggles and doesn't understand it. And that's to say, Shakespeare gives Brutus the same kind of staccato, highly abstract manner of speaking that Cicero associates with the Stoics and denounces as rhetorically ineffective. So those are a few examples. I think more generally speaking, the big question is the timing and the extent of Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne. An English translation of Montaigne's essays was published in 1603, which is about two thirds of the way through Shakespeare's career. For my own part, and here some scholars would disagree, I think that Shakespeare almost certainly read Montaigne's essays earlier. He shows some facility with French in Henry V and a couple of jokes between Henry and Kate. He lived for many years in London with a family of French Huguenots, the Mountjoys. So I suspect that Shakespeare read Montaigne's essays in the original French and that the influence of Montaigne can be seen in earlier plays such as Hamlet. And that's why Shakespeare plays take this more philosophical turn about halfway through his career. In fact, I've argued that the character Hamlet is partly based on Montaigne's persona as an author. That would be a longer story, I guess. But anyway, briefly put, Montaigne, as your audience will know, is fabulously learned. His essays are a distillation and a compendium on their own of the central questions and the preoccupations of Hellenistic ethics. So I don't think it's an accident that Shakespeare is fascinated by the same kinds of problems that preoccupy Montaigne. As well as Montaigne's own sources, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch. I think Shakespeare, like Montaigne, is fascinated by the ethical implications of skepticism, stoicism, and epicureanism. Yeah, that sounds right to me. I'm actually going to talk a little bit more about Montaigne and Shakespeare in the next couple of episodes that I'm working on now. So thanks for setting that up for me. That's great. One source you didn't mention there is, except for the thing about him citing the ethics, is Aristotle. And in particular, I'm wondering about Aristotle's poetics. If you read anything about Shakespeare and philosophy, you come pretty quickly across people pointing out that Aristotle has these recommendations for how to run a good play. So for example, the play is supposed to unfold all in one continuous time. It's supposed to be in the same place. The action is supposed to be somehow unified. So people call these the unities of Aristotle. And Shakespeare famously doesn't do this in his plays, right? So is that something that people are overestimating? Is it significant? What do you think about that? Part of this question, the right person to ask would be my friend, Michael Lazarus, who in the past couple years has put together some really groundbreaking research, really, that Aristotle's poetics was better known and more influential in 16th century England than people had heretofore thought. But even if we knew for sure that Shakespeare read the poetics, there's still a lot of questions that would remain because it's possible to read something and to misunderstand it and it's possible to read something and to disagree, you know? So for example, critics of Shakespeare like Voltaire, they think the only conceivable reason why Shakespeare didn't adhere to the unities, and not just the unities, but these other prohibitions like classical prohibition against depicting violence on stage, classical prohibition against mingling comedy and tragedy. Voltaire just sort of assumes, well, if he's not doing that is because he's ignorant. If he knew what he was supposed to do, then of course he would do it. But I think in reality, Shakespeare was well aware of the conventions of classical theater, in particular from the plays of Seneca, which he knew very well. So the reason he doesn't abide by these neoclassical conventions is because he's adhering instead to a rival different set of conventions, those of vernacular English dramas, such as cycle plays, passion plays, morality plays. We tend to think of this body of material as medieval, but it actually lasted a long time. Shakespeare was able to watch these plays as a child and as a teenager up until the reformers put the kibosh on this kind of direct representation of Christian history. And so again, like with critics in the 18th and 19th centuries who were very learned themselves, they failed to recognize that Shakespeare is deliberately siding with Christian aesthetics as opposed to classical. And they also started to think Shakespeare was naive. And then he becomes for them, for the romantics, this paradigmatic example of the untutored genius. Shakespeare reveals the superiority of innate talent and authenticity to convention and erudition and engagement with tradition. And I think this mythology is very difficult to shake off because we have this affinity for the romantics. But anyway, from the perspective of this podcast, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, I think it's very important to recognize that this romantic legend of Shakespeare as a naive or an outsider artist is a misunderstanding. He's deeply engaged with his intellectual context. So with regards to the poetics more specifically, there are some interesting differences to flag up deeper, I think, than the unities. As your audience will know, the text that we have from Aristotle, maybe lecture notes, they're very condensed and cryptic and enigmatic. So in his poetics, Aristotle uses these terms like hamartia or anagnarisis or catharsis, whose meaning is still subject to a very lively debate. You know, so my former supervisor at Oxford, Tony Nutter, would say that the catharsis tragedy produces is a purging of excessive emotions analogous to what is produced in the body by a laxative or an emetic. And I tend to side by contrast with Martha Nussbaum, who interprets catharsis as a kind of cognitive cleansing or an improved understanding of the events that the tragedy depicts and by extension, our human nature. And I think a further variable is that interpretation of Aristotle's poetics has been very strongly influenced over time, I would say, led astray by the influence of Christianity, and by the model of tragedy that emerges from Shakespeare's plays. So, you know, critics want to see Shakespeare as early modern and secular, but Shakespeare is also late medieval and Christian. And tragedy for Shakespeare is, as I would say, essentially the same thing it is for 15th and 16th century English vernacular drama. Tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. Whereas for Aristotle, tragedy is something very alien to a Christian sensibility. Aristotle doesn't really care about moral character. What Aristotle means by hamartia is not sin, but something more like a mistake. And what he means by anachnoresis is not repentance, but something more like a discovery, like a correction of an error as regards matters of fact. So for Aristotle, tragedy is amoral. It's like the process of legal discovery that occurs in a court of law. Nonetheless, I think many critics continue to use Aristotle's terms to describe Shakespeare's plays, which is very confusing. Partly, I think they misunderstand these terms due to this long legacy of misunderstanding. And partly, I'd say more culpably because it allows critics who are uncomfortable with Shakespeare and Christianity to avoid using more accurate, but more obviously Christian terms such as sin and repentance. Right. So a huge difference between using the phrase tragic flaw and using the word sin, right? So the first of Fries opposes that he's trying to be Aristotle. The second presupposes that he's trying to talk about something like the Christian ethics of the reformation, right? When we talk about tragic flaw, I think that's dating back to a theological concept that was extant at the time of people having a besetting sin, that each person has some sins which they are particularly prone. And I think this actually is part of what drives Shakespeare's interest in characterization, as opposed to the more allegorical representations of the Middle Ages. You know, it's like, why is this person susceptible to this particular sin? You know, like Hamlet is not prone to drunkenness, but he's prone to other things. What is different about Hamlet that makes him, you know, Shakespeare likes to take people and put them in that one situation that will frack them like Othello. You know, Othello could be a prisoner of war, no problem. But if he thinks his wife might be cheating on him, he totally falls apart. Right? So this theological interest in particular besetting personal temptation, I think, helps explain Shakespeare's interest in fine grained, distinctive characters. Actually, now that you mentioned that, that's very un-Greek. So the idea that you might have one sin to which you're prone. Yeah. Sometimes in ancient ethics, you even get the idea that the virtues all come together, right? So it wouldn't even be possible for a character like Othello to exist and to be like, genuinely courageous, for example, but also either jealous or maybe just insecure or whatever it is that's making him so susceptible to Iago's insinuations. Yes, you're right about that. The classical philosopher, they tend to think of it in a more holistic way. The vicious man is just sort of generally out of order with himself, prone to all manner of different passions. This idea that different people have different weaknesses is a later development. And actually, another good example here would be stoicism. And that's actually something I wanted to ask you about anyway, because, as I referred to in the last episode, you have thought a lot about the role of stoicism in Shakespeare's works. And there's a whole range of Shakespearean characters who you might think are supposed to be sort of set up as some kind of stoic, and are maybe being criticized because of the limits of the stoic approach to ethics. So can you say something more about that? The most obvious place where Shakespeare tangles with stoicism, as you might expect, is in the Roman place. And whatever Rome may have been, in fact, I think Rome was actually probably a messier, more emotional place than the Stoics make it out to be. Whatever it may have been, in fact, Shakespeare, Rome is like the historical embodiment of a particular mindset that produces, on the one hand, in victory, a kind of imperial aggression. This is Augustus, like libido dominandi. And on the other hand, in defeat, produces stoicism, which is like imperium of the self, like a desire to control yourself. To me, they're kind of two sides at the same point. And that's another way of saying this, is that for Shakespeare, Rome is the Rome of Seneca, if we include Seneca's very deeply pessimistic tragedies, as well as his more optimistic philosophical prose. And I think for Shakespeare, the historical degeneration of Rome from Republic to Empire is evidence of the fundamental limitations and inaccuracy of Seneca's point of view if it were enacted on a kind of society-wide scale. But I think, as you note, in talking about Much Ado About Nothing in the previous episode, the engagement with stoicism is broader. For example, another more subtle example that I think people tend to overlook is the depiction of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. There's a very important opening scene where Gratiano mocks Antonio, at some length actually, for putting on a willful stillness as if cut in alabaster in order to be reputed wise. And that's to say, a bit like Cassius with Brutus, Gratiano is accusing Antonio of putting on the appearance of a stoic out of a kind of philosophical pride. And so people see the play, The Merchant of Venice, as this dialectic between Christianity and Judaism, but I think it's actually more like a trial, pardon the, anyway, a three-fold dialogue, pardon the neologism there, between Christianity, Judaism, and stoicism. And so there's all these similarities between Antonio and Shylock. They're the two eponymous merchants of Venice. You know, I think when Portia comes in and says, who is the merchant and who is the Jew? I like productions where it's not immediately obvious. And I think just as Shylock shows what Shakespeare sees as the shortcomings of Jewish ethics, like a certain pride or heartedness or legalism or something like that, I think Antonio is meant to personify the analogous shortcomings of stoic ethics, like pride and hard-heartedness even towards himself. So he's ostensibly, he's sort of ethnically Christian, but his moral allegiance is to stoicism. And I think we see a similar dynamic in another actually Venetian character who is ostensibly Christian, who is Othello, right? Othello, we today are so reoccupied with race that it can easily overwhelm our attention to everything else that's going on in that play. So I was really glad that you drew attention to Othello as a case study in the ethical implications of skepticism. I think Othello is also a case study in the dangers of a certain naive stoicism. Again, at the beginning of the play, there's this very important speech where the senators are asking Othello to take command of Cyprus. And they're saying, hey, are you really sure you want to bring your new wife with you? Don't you think you'll be distracted? And he said, he scoffs, he says, the young affects, this is like the emotions characteristic of a young man in me are defunct. He says, if love gets the better of me, if Cupid gets me with his arrows and blinds me to my duties, then let housewives make a skillet of my helm and let my reputation be ruined. And it's very ironic, right? Because like, that's exactly what happened. I mean, they don't make his skill, his helm into a frying pan, but the gist of it is what happens. It's hard to do on stage. So that's the only thing that doesn't happen. Yeah, it takes a long time. You got to call it a blacksmith and stuff. Yeah. But I think this opening scene, there's a framing closing scene where there's an emissary from Venice there called L'Odovico. And he sees Othello strike Desdemona in public and is totally shocked. And he says, is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate calls all in all sufficient? Is this the man who passion could not shake? And it goes on a bit and it's clear, he's saying, is this the guy we all thought was a stoic? It's kind of like when Cassius says, oh, Brutus, you know, you give way to the accidental evils. What's going on? I thought your philosophy was something else. And I think in this sense, like Brutus and like Benedict, for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello is an example of the overconfident stoic, the man who thinks he has more control over his own nature than in fact he really does. So I think those are examples that to me are very convincing, where Shakespeare is reflecting on the history of ethics. And we might also think about the history of political philosophy, right, like, you know, republicanism, and so on. But what's the relationship between that and actually thinking about him as writing plays that are in some sense themselves ethical works or works of political philosophy? Do you think it's a good idea to approach the plays as if they were ethical texts? Or is it more like ethics is just part of the cultural baggage that he kind of hauls on stage for us to think about? This question is a tricky one to answer. I think partly because we are an age which is very uncomfortable with ethics and political philosophy. We're very polarized. And intrinsically, ethics and politics are contentious topics that people tend to feel very strongly about. We don't have a cultural consensus at the moment, we're very divided. I think Shakespeare is a very beloved author, and he possesses a unique international cultural authority. And I think the combination of those two things is that when we try to discern and articulate Shakespeare's position about ethics and politics, the overwhelming temptation is to try to find in Shakespeare a mirror of ourselves, rather than acknowledging points of departure. Like Shakespeare, just prima facie, Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago. If he is like the most of the Englishmen of his day, then he is a conservative, by our standards, patriotic Christian. Whereas most higher education professionals today, and maybe even more so theater professionals, are progressive and cosmopolitan and secular. Within the arts and within higher education, I think you could even say many people are actively hostile to this more conservative moral and political vision. So in my opinion, people who like Shakespeare, who are professionally committed to teaching or performing Shakespeare, try to find all sorts of workarounds for example, on stage. And I get it, I worry about it, but I get it. Like on stage, I think directors tend to cut or change or undermine with irony any passages that might pose a challenge to a modern sensibility. A paradigmatic example here is the closing speech of the taming of the shrew. I think that's supposed to be delivered dead on earnestly. I think Kate reforms and means what she says. It's in keeping with what St. Paul says about hierarchy within marriage. It makes many people today very uncomfortable. Because maybe we should just remind people that in the last speech, she basically promises to be a good obedient wife, right? Yeah, exactly. There's a great temptation for theater producers or directors or so on to make it sarcastic or weak or undo the discomfort. But I think that's a disservice to Shakespeare and I think it's a disservice to ourselves. I don't think theater should just be a kind of liturgy for progressive atheists. I think it should be a chance to experience moral and political and religious points of view that are possibly very different from our own. That's the theater side. Among critics, and this is coming around to your question of the place of ethics within Shakespeare's thought, I think it's central. But a lot of critics would disagree. The most pervasive work around among critics who are uncomfortable with what I would say Shakespeare really says and who he is, is to cite Keats on Shakespeare's negative capability and to maintain as an axiom, as a starting point, that Shakespeare has no fixed opinions about ethics or politics, that Shakespeare always presents both sides of every question in an equal way. To me, this claim is impossible. Shakespeare was a human being. Everybody has opinions, even Shakespeare. So why is this claim so attractive and so tenacious? I think it has the hold that it does because it makes Shakespeare a precedent and an authority for the, well, the delusion, really, that the philosopher Carl Schmitt discerns at the heart of liberalism, which is the belief that it's possible for human beings and even institutions to be neutral and to sort of escape tough decisions about ethics and politics. I think for a lot of people, it's easier to tell themselves that Shakespeare believes nothing than to admit that he might disagree with what they themselves believe. Now, having said that, I should add a clarification, which is I do think Shakespeare does present both sides of important questions. But the way he does that is important. I think Shakespeare presents what I would call a dialectic of faith and doubt. So he has beliefs and he asks himself, what if the opposite of what I believe were true? And he doesn't just ask that, but he builds it up, he steel mans it. Like, what's the strongest argument I can make against myself? That's why Falstaff or Cleopatra is so compelling. He's asking himself, what if the moral vision, the opposite of my own that Falstaff represents or Cleopatra or Coriolanus, what if they're right? What if that is in fact the case? And then he follows that thought experiment through to his conclusion and he's like, okay, based on what I know of human people, history, life, yeah, it's fun to be Falstaff for a while, but it has a human cost. It's fun to be Cleopatra, but it's unsustainable. And so I think Shakespeare is, or Richard III, you can go a long way being Richard III, but in the end it doesn't work out. So Shakespeare is entertaining misgivings about Christianity, about war, about national, all these things. He's giving a force and a weight to nihilism and antinomianism to the kind of challenge that he finds in Machiavelli and Seneca, not to phrase this sort of rival, proto-modern Hobbesian point of view, but in order to more effectively exorcise, like what he's aiming at, our doubts have this like hold on our consciousness. And he wants a kind of catharsis of doubt where you can say, yes, I thought through that. I really thought through the opposite of what I think. And, you know, I, I now understand it better, even if he comes around in the end to a sort of consistent baseline position. That's amazing. Cause that's of course what philosophers do, right? They think very hard about the position that opposes their own position and they try to come up with the strongest arguments for it so that they can then show that their position can defeat those arguments. Right. I mean, philosophers never ignore the other side, right? I totally agree. To me, I think this is the distinction between literature and propaganda. Good literature is asking these questions of itself. And I suppose you can say the same thing about good philosophy, as opposed to propaganda. You're raising objections to yourself. I think to me, the tension between poetry and philosophy is a little bit baffling because in my opinion, poet and the philosopher are both asking the same kinds of questions. It's just, one is trying to answer them through abstract general forms and through tests of coherence. And the other is trying to ask them through hypothetical particulars and tests of correspondence. And I see the role of the literary critic as to mediate between these two languages of asking questions about the nature of reality. It strikes me that what you're saying sounds in some ways like what Phillip Sidney says about poetry. So he thinks that you can use poetry because of his concreteness to convey moral lessons. I wonder whether you think that Shakespeare also would have seen his plays as having some kind of morally beneficial effect. Do you think you're supposed to improve the audience morally? Or are they just supposed to entertain? Or what's going on there? This is a great question. I think Shakespeare wants to believe that theater and more generally kind of fiction, imagination can lead people to repentance, like a sermon or a parable. Like the story that the prophet Nathan tells King David about a rich man stealing from a poor man. And by this defamiliarization, he's helping illustrate what's wrong with David having this affair with Bathsheba. And we can see this most clearly in Hamlet, right? Hamlet says, I have heard that guilty creatures sitting out of play, they were so struck by what they saw that they proclaimed what they did. I'm paraphrasing, but anyway, you get the idea. This idea, if you saw your sense, you stand up and proclaim, right? And that sort of happens, but it sort of doesn't. Claudius is visibly shaken by the player's representation of a man murdering his brother. And he asks for light. He doesn't say he did it, asks for light, right? That's right. The irony of that. It shakes them, you know, and he does make this effort to pray, even if he doesn't get there in the end, right? And here, I think Shakespeare's hopes about the power of theater collide with his more fundamental commitment to the freedom of the human will. There's a sort of general critical consensus, which I think is correct, that Shakespeare is the great playwright of the human freedom, of the human free will. And I think we can see that there are two techniques I think Shakespeare uses to bring that to life. One is he uses foils or sort of counterfactual alternatives. So characters like in Hamlet, Horatio or Laertes or Fortinbras, they help us see what other roads Hamlet could have taken, what he could have done instead. And then I think maybe the most obvious technique are soliloquies. You know, Shakespeare goes to great lengths to give us these people who are articulating opposing courses of action and choosing between them. But coming back to the question of theater, I think Shakespeare realizes that people don't always make the right choice. In a soliloquy, people make the wrong choice. The art of a soliloquy is watching someone reason themselves into doing the wrong thing. And so I think Shakespeare is a keen enough observer of human nature that many people, maybe even most people, if you show them their offenses like the painting of Dorian Gray, they don't always like choose to acknowledge their sins and change their ways. More often, they get angry, right? They like shoot the messenger. They don't want to hear the message of who they really are. So for example, and I agree, my friend Will Hamlet has this argument that Measure for Measure, this notorious problem play, is like an extended version of the mouse trap in Hamlet, where the Duke is repeatedly setting up these various events and little miniature scenes to try to get his deputy, Angelo, to see who he really is. But Angelo instead just keeps doubling down on his badness and keeps just pursuing sin even harder. And I think other instances like this are Malvolio at the end of Twelfth Night or Shylock at the end of The Merchant of Venice. These scenes are really uncomfortable because they're tragic. They're housed within what is ostensibly a comedy. But it's tragic because this is where I say, for Shakespeare, tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. That's the tragedy that we feel in the fate of Shylock or Malvolio and why we sometimes think of these plays as, quote, problem plays. That's the problem. They don't repent. As it happens, I was just thinking about the Tenth Book of Plato's Republic, which is where he has his argument about how you shouldn't let poets show you bad people doing things. Oh, yeah. Because it will corrupt you, right? Because it will instill bad ethical habits in you. And it's really interesting that Shakespeare has exactly the opposite intuition. So he thinks that if you see bad people making mistakes, then you might learn from that not to make the same mistakes. So rather than thinking that the audience will instinctively imitate the characters on stage, Shakespeare thinks that you'll see it as a warning and that the less heavy-handed he is about it, the more likely you are to get the points. I think that's exactly right. And actually, I think that is not a coincidence because, you know, in Shakespeare's lifetime, there's this big debate about the morality of theater. Should theater even be allowed to happen? And you get these people like a president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, this guy Joshua Reynolds, writes an overthrow of stage plays, basically saying public performances of plays shouldn't happen. This is a Puritan position. And it's like, why did they think this? Well, one is like, theater is just sort of generally disreputable. It's like next to the brothels and the bear pits and stuff and men dress as women and so on. But there is a philosophical element. I think a lot of this anti-theatrical discourse is in keeping with Protestant iconoclasm. And I think like iconoclasm, it reflects an increasing knowledge of and affinity for Plato as opposed to Aristotle. Reynolds is really worried about this. People will see vice on stage and it will contaminate them. They'll see strong emotions and they'll take on those. It's very much right out of Plato, the line of reasoning. I think Shakespeare is trying to articulate a response, which I would suspect is partly inspired by sermons, where sermons talk about sin in order to sort of convict you of sin and you realize, oh, that could be me and so on. Okay. So obviously this is Shakespeare, so we could literally talk about this all day, but rather than doing that, I wanted to ask you one last question, which is just about the reception of Shakespeare among later philosophers. People don't usually think of Shakespeare as a philosopher, but people, they do think of philosophers were interested in Shakespeare. For example, I know you're interested in Hegel and what he does with Shakespeare. So do you want to tell us about that or other examples of later philosophers engaging with him? Yes, I'll do two. I'll come back around to Hegel, but that may make more sense in light of a more general take. I think I said that Rome for Shakespeare is the Rome of Seneca, right? Why should we care? Well, Seneca's influence is deep, right? Seneca really shaped the thought of Shakespeare's contemporary, this Dutch political philosopher Eustace Lipsius, who you talked about on the series and Lipsius has a profound effect on Kant. Kant is very indebted to Lipsius. Kant's emphasis on individual autonomy as an effect, the sort of greatest good, is a legacy of the influence of Seneca. And it's a touchstone for liberal thought today about morality, as well as politics. Like to put the connection in a different way, when I was working on Shakespeare's Roman plays, I wanted to find a contemporary point of view that most closely resembles his, just for purposes of translation. And one was Hegel, but the other is what we now call post-liberalism or maybe common good conservatism in the work of people like Alistair MacIntyre or Patrick Deneen. And that similarity makes sense because, right, both Deneen and then Shakespeare are in effect arguing that any society where each individual is trying to maximize his autonomy, if necessary, at the expense of everybody else, that society is doomed to oscillate between brittle autocracy, like one person wins, and a kind of interminable, merciless civil war. And I think Shakespeare sees this dynamic in a pre-Christian society, Rome, and Deneen sees it in a post-Christian society. So that's our world today. And as far as Hegel, sometimes these post-liberal guys are thinking in these terms. As part of this research, I was surprised to discover the extent of Shakespeare's influence on Hegel, which I think is still underestimated. To give you some sense, like the earliest piece of writing that we have from Hegel is him translating Julius Caesar as a schoolboy, you know, from English into German. And Hegel's Rome is very much Shakespeare's Rome. For example, you know, Cauge makes the master-slave dialectic into practically all of Hegel. But in fact, the master-slave dialectic is just, it's not an enduring feature of the human condition. For Hegel, it's a characteristic of a particular stage in our historical development, the stage that coincides with ancient Rome. And I think he's getting that sense of master-slave dialectic from these Roman plays. Shakespeare's Romans, they also prefigure what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness. He says, the modern individual is torn between stoicism and skepticism, between the Roman frame of mind where you live unto yourself, and then an awareness that that's not possible. The solipsist, he sees himself as the source of meaning and experience. But then he's also the skeptic, where he remains aware that he's subject to these powers outside his own control. And I think Shakespeare dramatizes this in Roman plays like Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, how the Roman drive for dominance turns inward into a kind of narcissistic solicism that proves unsustainable. Hamlet gets this too. Hamlet says, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space were it not for bad dreams. Bad dreams are like reality coming in and interfering with his reverie. And ultimately we're constrained by a world outside ourselves, including especially our relations with other people. So I think this aspect of Shakespeare, the way in which our selfhood is bound up in the selfhood of other people, shapes Hegel's thought and informs many of the contributions that we see as distinctively Hegelian. Okay, that's brilliant. It's also very nice that you sort of finished there by quoting Hamlet, because that's the next thing I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to do the next episode to Hamlet and this sort of idea about Renaissance individualism. We have sort of been circling around a lot in a lot of episodes, but I'm going to try to come to grips with it more next time. Before we go, would you like to hear the joke I made up that's inspired by Hamlet? Yes, yes. We know from paintings that Shakespeare was losing his hair. Yeah, yeah. Not as badly as I have, but he sort of received hair loss. So what did Shakespeare say to himself when that started to happen? Oh no. To pay or not to pay? Oh man, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I thought the one at the end. This is the sound I always hope the audience at home is making with the terrible jokes with which I end each episode. So on that note, I will thank Patrick Gray very much for coming on the episode or on the podcast. My pleasure. And I look forward to the next ones. It's great to have Shakespeare on this series. I've been listening to the series for a long time. It's an inspiration and it's an honor to be here and be able to meet you and have a conversation. Thank you. Likewise. And I hope that the audience at home feels the same way and will join me next time for more on Shakespeare here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Face Without a Heart, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Individualism. Some years ago, a new film version of Hamlet was released, and my mother asked my father whether he'd like to go see it. Don't think so, he replied. I've already seen Hamlet. She found this attitude preposterous, but I sort of know what he means. I've seen the play performed live, and it does suffer from an excess of familiarity. Even if the actors are wonderful, it's a real challenge to hear its many famous lines as anything but well-known quotations, less like a drama than a compilation of Shakespeare's greatest hits. And if you're philosophically minded, you may have a further problem, which is that you'll keep getting distracted by thoughts about metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. It's striking how many of the famous passages invoke philosophical ideas. Even once you get past the ten-word distillation of existentialism, to be or not to be, that is the question, there are such recognizable philosophical one-liners as, There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. What a piece of work is a man! Be cruel, only to be kind, and There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. I think there's a good reason for this, which is that Hamlet himself is philosophically minded. He is, after all, a university student, and I have a pretty good idea what his major might be. His irony, detachment, and reflectivity make him one of the great characters of literature, and so it's often said, a distinctively modern character. But these same features make him pretty useless when it comes to the task he's meant to be performing, namely seeking revenge by killing his uncle, the new king, Claudius. This is a play that is mostly about failure to act, which might seem like a dramatic flaw, but since this is Shakespeare, of course it isn't. He was recycling an existing story about a prince who feigns madness as part of a plan to seek revenge against his uncle. Faced with the narrative problem of how to keep the audience interested, even though they know that the climactic revenge will be exacted only at the end, Shakespeare decided to make his hero's procrastination a theme in its own right. Rather than simply putting practical obstacles in his way, he would explore the psychology of a young man who cannot bring himself to act. Hence the self-conscious nature of the play, its habit of drawing attention to its own theatricality. Hamlet is a man who has been miscast in his own story. Even worse, he knows he is miscast. His suicidal musings in the to-be-or-not-to-be speech, and another soliloquy, the one that begins oh that this too-too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, push this idea to its limit. Rather than doing what the plot, and the ghost of his father, demand, Hamlet seriously considers never doing anything ever again. All those philosophical remarks are an indication that Hamlet really is meant to be a student who has encountered the ideas circulating amongst intellectuals in the late 16th century, like skepticism and Epicureanism. Shakespeare is satirizing, and critiquing, the way that such ideas can be ethically undermining. We've often seen humanists grappling with the question of whether to live a life of practical engagement or scholarly remove. Hamlet prefers the latter option, but is suddenly thrust into a situation where he's meant to take the former option. He finds that it goes against his character, in every sense of that word. As one critic has observed, Hamlet does only one thing consistently in the play which bears his name, he never fails to resist his assigned role as revenge tragedy hero. But Shakespeare isn't only satirizing philosophy, he's doing philosophy. The clash between Hamlet's personal disposition and his assigned dramatic role is only the central example of a theme that runs throughout the play. This theme is frequently discussed in connection with Renaissance literature under the heading of Individualism. Which means what exactly? Well, it sort of depends which scholar you're reading, but the basic idea would be something like this. In medieval culture, people saw themselves primarily in terms of the roles they performed. The chivalric knight understood himself in terms of honor, skilled violence, and exploitation of the peasants, while the peasants understood themselves in terms of their responsibilities as workers, family members, villagers, and so on. Such classifications certainly persisted into the 15th and 16th centuries, as we saw with the widespread conception that society is made up of three estates, the nobility, clergy, and commons. In keeping with that conception, political thought still tended to look to the balancing of the interests of the three estates, or other large groupings. But in the Renaissance, another way of seeing the self started to emerge. People understood themselves as individuals with peculiar characteristics and interests, and wanted others to see them in the same way. In politics, this could mean demanding freedom to explore and pursue idiosyncratic conceptions of the good. In ethics, it could take the form of emphasizing personal rather than collective responsibility, including the responsibility to forge one's own moral principles and character. Almost a hundred episodes ago, when I was talking about civic humanism, I mentioned that a 19th century scholar named Jaco Burkhardt saw Renaissance Italy in particular as the crucible for the emergence of such ideas. In 1860, he wrote that it was there and then that man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such. What we've seen elsewhere in Europe at the same time suggests that individualism was a factor outside Italy too. We can connect it to the rise of neo-stoicism, when authors like Lipsius and Charon recommended constancy as a bulwark against what, in this episode, I can only call the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Theirs was an ethic that encourages individual agents to look after their own happiness and virtue rather than seeking fulfillment within the community. Or consider something even more transformative, the Protestant tendency to make individual believers responsible for their own relationship to God. This already started with Erasmus, who didn't leave the church but did de-emphasize outward communal ritual in favor of inner piety. In mainstream Protestantism, individual believers were encouraged to seek their own encounter with scripture and looked into their own hearts to see whether they could find faith there. More recently, we've seen more radical Protestant dissenters effectively claiming that they had the right, indeed the duty, to determine for themselves what true religion should be. When Hooker implored the Puritans to consider whether they were really so sure of their own private convictions and whether they shouldn't instead submit to a more authoritative consensus, he was missing the key point. For them, religion was all about personal conviction. Yet Hooker too recognized the importance of the individual conscience, as when he drew a contrast between public and private knowledge. His example was that everyone can see the moon, whereas grace lies hidden within. Thus many people, believing one and the same promise, all have not the same fullness of persuasion. Now it must be said that modern day scholars themselves have their own personal views on individualism in the Renaissance, including whether it was really something new. Medievalists have pointed out that in the previous centuries, there were already conceptions of personal piety and individual moral responsibility. After all, the medievals were deeply shaped by the thought of Augustine, whose greatest work, The Confessions, is precisely the story of one man's spiritual journey toward God. Then, among those who do think that something new was afoot in the Renaissance, there are a range of opinions about what exactly it was. A book by John Jeffries Martin, tellingly entitled Myths of Renaissance Individualism, puts Burkhardt on his own ground by focusing on Italy in this period. Martin finds that the defining problem of identity in the Renaissance was how the experience of the inner world of each person was related to the larger social environment in which he or she lived. The self was experienced as something in which one's internal perceptions and beliefs either were or were not at home in the larger world. Martin's point is that people were not necessarily discovering themselves as isolated, self-governed governing individuals, they were just pushing back against societal expectations, the roles that their communities assigned to them. As for England, the place that concerns us more at the moment, there's an interesting study by Elizabeth Hansen about Discovering the Subject, which focuses on the disturbing phenomenon of judicial interrogation and torture. As Hansen notes, torture was a practice without standing in English law, but it was used increasingly in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, often though not only against religious dissenters. Violence was here deployed to extract the secrets hidden within the individual self. Those who were subject to such treatment emphasized the cruelty involved, of course, and sometimes even gloried in it. The Catholic Robert Southwell, fulminated, go on, you good magistrates, rack us, torture us, condemn us, yea, grind us. Your iniquity is proof of our faith. But there was a more subtle complaint too. As Hansen puts it, the Catholics argued that the torturers treat a realm of experience that the victims increasingly defined as interior, private, and subjective, as though it were external, discoverable activity. One victim said that he was steadfast in refusing to divulge his own sins. These were the hidden matters, these were the secrets in concealing of which I so greatly rejoiced to the revealing aware of I cannot nor will not be brought come rack come rope. Very different is the approach of Stephen Greenblatt, who sees 16th century literature as being deeply concerned with the idea of self-fashioning. Greenblatt's Renaissance is not just modern, but postmodern. He finds in its text the idea that we are nothing more and nothing less than the stories we tell about ourselves, so that each person creates a self through improvised attempts to present themselves to the world. Even the most convincing displays of emotion might just be for show. There's a line from Hamlet that expresses the idea rather nicely, Claudius is challenging Laertes to follow through in his anger and grief by taking action against Hamlet, and asks whether he is, like the painting of sorrow, a face without a heart. Indeed, when reading up on Renaissance individualism, especially in the English context, you're bound to come across references to Shakespeare sooner or later, usually sooner. The very first sentence of Hansen's book cites the scene where Hamlet accuses Guildenstern of trying to play on him like a pipe. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. Another chapter begins with an arresting line from King Lear, to know our enemies' minds, we rip their hearts. And she has a whole section on Othello, not just because it ends with Iago being threatened with torture, but because the whole play is about the attempt to divine what is in other people's souls. She quotes, for instance, a scene where Othello says to Iago, by heaven, I'll know thy thought. And Iago replies in a way that wouldn't be out of place in the interrogation chamber, you cannot if my heart were in your hand, nor shall not, while it is in my custody. Greenblatt likes Othello too, which provides him such proof texts as Iago's apparently contradictory remark, I am not what I am. In the same scene, Iago refers to the native art and figure of his heart, which prompts Greenblatt to the observation that his heart is precisely a series of acts and figures, each referring to something else. In general, Shakespeare is, on this reading, a fashioner of narrative selves, the master improviser. Since I already said last time that Othello is the great Shakespearean treatment of skepticism, it seems to be asking too much of that play to have it be his great treatment of individualism too. Othello is going to award that prize to Hamlet. Individual conscience and self-consciousness are clearly on Shakespeare's mind throughout the play, and not only in famous bits like Polonius' instruction to his son, to thine own self be true. Already in the first scene, Horatio is asked whether the ghost isn't just like the dead king, old Hamlet, and replies, as thou art to thyself. An audience member probably wouldn't think much of this at first viewing, but as the play unfolds, you realize that the younger Hamlet's abiding concern is precisely to be like himself, if he could only figure out how. Hamlet, both the character and the play, are deeply invested in the idea that people should be authentic, should know who they are, and act accordingly. At one point Hamlet accuses Ophelia, and women in general, God has given you one face and you make yourselves another. Later Ophelia muses, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. But even as she says this, she is mad and no longer knows what she is. Hamlet himself will use his own feigned madness as an excuse to Laertes, arguing that he literally lost his self-identity. Was it Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet. If Hamlet from himself be taken away, and when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, then Hamlet does it not. Hamlet denies it. Who does it then? His madness. For me this recalls a speech from another play, a confused and confusing dialogue of Richard III with himself. What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by. Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No, yes, I am. Then fly, what, from myself? Great reason why, lest I revenge. What, myself, upon myself? A lack I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done myself? Oh no, alas I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain, yet I lie, I am not. Shakespeare also noticed, and wanted his audience to notice, that there is something ironic or even paradoxical about using theatre to insist upon authenticity. After all, the speakers on the stage are, as Iago would put it, not who they are. They are actors, playing parts. If you've seen Hamlet, you will remember that there is a play within the play, the so-called Mouse Trap. To get Claudius to betray himself, Hamlet orchestrates a performance of a murder, just like the one he has committed. This shows that fictions can do real work in the world, but they are still not real, which means that they are not enough for Hamlet. Early on in the play, he has made this point to his mother, when she asks him why he is taking his father's death so hard. Why seems it so particular with thee? Hamlet replies, Seems, madam, nay, it is, I know not seems. Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspension of force of breath, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected hare of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, that can denote me truly. These indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play, but I have that within which passeth show these but the trappings and the suits of woe. Even without all the other passages I've quoted, you can tell just from this one that Shakespeare was interested in the way that public performance can come apart from private perspective. Hamlet is saying that he is not merely playing the role of grieving son, his grief is real, and lies within where only he can perceive it. But if his grief is so real, why does it not prompt him to act? In a mirror image of this scene with Gertrude, Hamlet later sees one of the actors, in a fiction, in a dream of passion, able to put on a convincing show of grief, whereas Hamlet must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words. His anguish over his father is genuine, but worse still is his failure to align his inner and outer selves to find a match between inward feeling and appropriate action. Or perhaps we shouldn't speak of the outward self at all. I find my own self inclined to disagree with Greenblatt since I think that in Hamlet, at least, there is some commitment to the idea of a core self that underlies the trappings and suits of the roles we play. I say this in part because of the allusions to a far more traditional understanding of that self in the play, according to which each of us is an immortal soul, which can survive bodily death. The clearest statement of this comes when Hamlet tells Veratio that he will boldly pursue the ghost to question it. And for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? But it's a favorite idea of Hamlet's that the body, even if it seems too too solid, is actually just a quintessence of dust. He refers more than once to the dissolving of dead bodies into dust, which could perhaps be a glancing allusion to the Epicurean theory that all bodies are made of atoms. But Hamlet, and presumably Shakespeare, do not seem to be convinced that the self is a purely rational soul which finds itself in a body, though this Platonist idea certainly had plenty of adherents in the Renaissance. Admittedly, the play refers to the god-like reason that distinguishes humans from the beasts, and the speech that begins, What a piece of work is man, goes on to eulogize human beings in rather Platonist terms. In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god. But as we already saw when discussing Brutus in the last episode, Shakespeare is dubious about the idea that the self could be constituted by cold, dispassionate reason, in accordance with the moral code of the Stoics. The play Hamlet, too, has a Stoic, namely Horatio. He says of himself that he is more an antique Roman than a Dane, and Hamlet praises him as one who, in suffering all, suffers nothing, a man who is not passion's slave. It's been noted that Horatio seems to be the only significant character in the play who is not playing a part. But no one watches Hamlet and identifies with Horatio, nor does he ever intervene meaningfully in the action. He is there at the beginning to see the ghost, and at the end to encourage flights of angels to sing Hamlet to his rest, but he's ultimately an ineffectual observer. So are we out in the audience, but we are still doing something important. We're seeing our own selves in Hamlet, precisely because we empathize with the experience of not seeing our own selves. One man who would certainly have recognized this, if only he could have seen the play performed, was Michel de Montaigne. The elusiveness of identity was a great theme in his essays, too, as epitomized in the remark, Where I seek myself, I cannot find myself. Montaigne was as interested as Shakespeare in the phenomenon one scholar has described as the gap that lies between the magnificent social role, that of a king, for instance, and the fallible human being behind the performance. For another commentator, Montaigne holds that, living in the world required the reservation, or even the creation, of an idea of the self in order to sustain a proper outward appearance. For there to be different parts well played, there had to be an actor, capable of judging and distinguishing the part from reality. There had to be a self. Sadly, we know for sure that Montaigne didn't get to enjoy Hamlet and admire its resonance with his own thought, since he died before it was written. By contrast, we don't know for sure whether Shakespeare read Montaigne before writing it. As mentioned by Patrick Gray in my interview with him, there is some debate over how early Shakespeare became acquainted with the essays. But there is a clear allusion to Montaigne in one of Shakespeare's later plays, The Tempest. Which is handy, since it shouldn't cause a storm of controversy when I compare the way these two great authors handled a very different topic, the encounter with the peoples of the so-called New World. To hear about this, you'll have to wait until after a significant intermission, since as usual the podcast will be on its annual break over August. When we return after this midsummer dream, we'll finish off our look at Shakespeare, hoping that all's well that ends well here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Brave New World, Shakespeare's Tempest and Colonialism. The infamous gunpowder plot to blow up Parliament would not come until 1605, a few years after the death of Queen Elizabeth. But other things were already exploding during her reign, not least the population. The rising number of people drove down wages and drove up prices. As usual, the wealthy ruling class were the least affected by the situation, but it did not escape their notice entirely. Indeed, economic problems throughout the 16th century helped to inspire the wave of writings on the improvement of the Commonwealth that we've discussed in previous episodes, and those were, of course, written by members of the elite. At the top of the hierarchy, economic expansion was one of the central preoccupations of Elizabeth and her council of advisors. They wanted trade to explode, too. The cloth industry was the powerhouse of the 16th century economy. It was in order to facilitate the production of wool that landowners engaged in the controversial practice of enclosure, where public lands were given over to private use, often for the grazing of animals. That practice is mentioned critically in some of the texts we've already discussed. Thomas More complained about enclosure and utopia, and Thomas Smith warned against its excessive use in his Discourse on the Commonweal. With land and resources at home seeming increasingly scarce, an alternative solution suggested itself, why not seek land and resources abroad? It was a natural thought, since the 16th century was a time of increasing links between England and other European nations. The Reformation itself was one driver of that process, for instance when Protestants fled to Britain from repression in France. This offered some economic benefits, since not a few of those Protestants were skilled craftspersons. Trade links were also established with Spain, Italy, and as far as Russia and the Balkans. Who could object to such developments? The humanists, that's who. In that widely read treatise on education, the schoolmaster, Roger Aschem, complained about the bad effects that Italian culture was having on English visitors. He compared it to the island of Circe, which seduces Ulysses and his sailors in the Odyssey. A 1606 work by Thomas Palmer entitled Essay of the Means How to Make Our Travels More Profitable used the techniques of Peter Remus to offer advice for the voyager. He agreed with Aschem when it came to Italy, a land of unfavorable climate and poor manners. Admittedly, the political ideas being tried out in Italian cities were worthy of interest, but you could read about these in books, so there was no need to go visit in person. There was a steady stream of invective aimed at Spain, too, which is unsurprising given the political, religious, and military rivalry between the English and Spanish at this time. Another travel writer, or perhaps better, an anti-travel writer named Louis Lucanor, wrote to discourage his countrymen from visiting Spain, painting it as a land of oppression. The shortcomings of mainland Europe gave the English all the more reason to turn in the other direction. We already know from our discussion of Edmund Spenser that the late 16th century saw attempts to subdue and colonize Ireland. This too was motivated in part by anti-Spanish sentiment. Robert Paine's 1589 tract in favor of the Munster plantation, a brief description of Ireland, argued that the English needed to act quickly, lest Spain establish outposts there. And then there were the Americas. The Spanish and Portuguese were well ahead in the race to exploit these newly contacted lands, so the English put their minds to catching up. In the 1570s, Barton Frobisher made three unsuccessful trips in search of a Northwest passage to Asia, and Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe by going south around South America. But the Americas offered more than an obstacle in the way of getting to China and India. Riches awaited those who could establish colonies there, like the ones set up by Walter Raleigh on Roanoke Island and mainland Virginia in the 1580s. Or so argued Raleigh's colleagues and propagandists Arthur Barlow, Thomas Harriot, and Richard Hockleuth. Hockleuth is a particularly interesting figure. Having studied theology and the new topic of geography at Oxford, he produced a whole series of works on travel, beginning in 1581 with his Diverse Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent, which was dedicated to none other than Philip Sidney. Hockleuth was painfully aware of the explorations undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese, because he was a polyglot who had been avidly reading travel literature produced all across Europe. He argued that the long history of exploration by people from the British Isles meant that there is none that of right may be more bold in this enterprise than the Englishman. Sidney was impressed, calling the work a very good trumpet for expeditions to North America. Another work by Hockleuth, his Discourse on Western Planting, aimed to persuade Queen Elizabeth and her circle of advisors that colonization was a worthy enterprise. It would not only bring riches to the nation, but also make a foothold for Protestantism. What a disaster it would be if the Catholic nations were to establish their superstitions as the religion of these newly discovered lands. Which brings us to a challenge faced by these colonizing projects. The Americas might have been newly discovered by Europeans, but there were lots of other people who already knew about them, for the very good reason that they lived there. But the propagandists tried to spin this as just another opportunity. Pushing back against the idea that the Native Americans were savage cannibals, they emphasized their pacifism and religiosity. Barlow wrote in his report of a journey to the eastern American coast that the Natives there were, most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the Golden Age. Harriet likewise argued that the Native people encountered in Virginia were not to be feared, and that since they already believed in a greatest god who rules over other minor deities, it should be relatively straightforward to convert them to Christianity. He also made more chilling remarks, as when he noted that the Natives would have cause both to fear and love us. There was already good reason for the part about fearing, because, as Harriet noticed, Natives were dying of illness in droves just after meeting European visitors as if shot by invisible bullets. We tend to assume that to the Europeans, the Natives of the Americas seemed like nothing they had ever experienced. But in fact, these English aristocrats thought about them in much the same way as they thought about two other, much more familiar groups of people. First, the laboring classes of England, the sort of people who would be displaced by enclosure. Of course, men like Raleigh weren't establishing colonies only for the sake of the English poor. He wanted to get rich himself. In addition to his North American adventure, Raleigh tried to locate El Dorado in South America, correctly believing that precious metal would be found in these lands, albeit on the incorrect grounds that the climate was similar to that of West Africa, which was known to have gold. But even if this found, the Americas could also be settled by what men like Hakluyt considered as the excess population of England. They would be exported to cultivate the newly claimed lands. Second, we have the Natives of Ireland. Again, Raleigh's name comes up here because he was involved in the colonization of Ireland, too. Harriet, in fact, wound up living on the estate Raleigh established there. As we know from that discussion of Spencer, the Irish were considered to be uncivilized, and this was used as a rationale for displacing and massacring them. So, the colonizers were hardly going to hesitate to use the same techniques against the Native Americans. The English liked to present themselves as being more gentle and pious in their approach than the Spanish, and Raleigh in particular was uncomfortable with the prospect of enslaving or exterminating the native peoples. But the travel literature of the time leaves no doubt that these people could rightly be placed under European stewardship. They might have their own kings, but these primitive monarchs should submit to the greater authority of the English monarchy, assuming the invisible bullets didn't get them first. And of course, the greatest benefit they could have from association with the English would be belief in Protestant Christianity. These were intelligent and rational people, but they were still, in the words of Harriet, savage and deprived of the true knowledge of God. Tellingly, and supporting the parallel I just drew with the case of the Irish, Harriet's report on Virginia included artistic renderings of the Picts, the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles who were made to benefit from domination by more civilized folk. It had worked long ago in Britain, so why not now in America? Reports of exploration were avidly consumed by a wide range of readers, well beyond those who had the political and economic resources to respond to demands for even more exploration, even more conquest. They reached, for example, William Shakespeare. One of his late plays, The Tempest, draws on an account of a shipwreck in the Bermudas, after which a number of sailors incredibly managed to survive on an uninhabited island. Any playwright could take inspiration from such titillating material, but it took Shakespeare to fashion the story into one of the first reflections on colonialism in English literature. Or at least that's a very popular reading of the play, which we'll be exploring for the rest of this episode. The central character of The Tempest is the magician Prospero, who, like a humanist scholar, is so fond of his books that he prefers them to a kingdom, which is just as well, since he used to be Duke of Milan but was deposed by his wicked brother and exiled to a remote island, along with those books and his daughter Miranda. With the help of his magical assistant, Ariel, Prospero summons the titular storm in order to bring his enemies to the island so as to take vengeance, vengeance he will ultimately forgo. In a peaceful ending urged upon him by Ariel, he chooses the path of forgiveness. Appropriately to his name, Ariel is a font of good advice. If Prospero is the key figure in the drama, the key figure for the interpretation we're interested in is Caliban. His name, a near anagram of the word cannibal, has over the past century come to stand for the victims of colonialism. For example, Aimé Césaire, a leader of the néretude literary movement, did a French version of The Tempest that sets the play in a colony and focuses our attention on Caliban's efforts at resistance. A book about the political thought of the great Africana philosopher C.L.R. James is called Caliban's Freedom, while a book by Octave Manoni, inspired by a colonial uprising in Madagascar, was translated into English as Prospero and Caliban, the psychology of colonization. Indeed, for the modern reader, this way of understanding Caliban can seem almost inevitable. Prospero calls him my slave. He is portrayed as subhuman, of a vile race, a monster, a demi-devil, and a thing of darkness. There is a good deal of emphasis on the fact that he formerly lacked language, or at least the language spoken by Prospero and Miranda. It was she who taught him to speak, something Caliban sees as valueless. You taught me language, he tells her, and my profit on it is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language. And there are more subtle clues that Shakespeare wanted to thematize colonialism and servitude in this play. The question, where is the master, appears twice in the chaotic opening scene when the boat is struck by the magical storm. And Caliban allies with two servant characters from the boat, the buffoonish Trinculo and the drunkard Stefano, whom Caliban welcomes as a new master. Ironically, Caliban equates becoming Stefano's servant with freedom from the tyrant he had previously served, namely Prospero. The most straightforward interpretation of all this would take Shakespeare as sympathizing with Prospero and approving of his sovereignty over the degenerate Caliban. After all, as a child of his age, Shakespeare would hardly be likely to challenge the right of Europeans to dominate the non-Christian peoples of the New World. When at the end of the play, Caliban comes to regret his rebellion and promises to be wise hereafter and seek for grace, we are meant to feel that order has been restored. The fact that Caliban was in cahoots with the lowly Trinculo and Stefano confirms the aforementioned parallel seen by many at this time between the inhabitants of the Americas and the lower class inhabitants of England. The underlings are put back in their lowly place even as Prospero is restored to his lofty dukedom. As Shakespeare himself might put it, all's well that ends well and the happy ending here is assertion of power of European lords over their subjects, both domestic and foreign. But this is Shakespeare, so we probably shouldn't settle for the most straightforward interpretation. We can start with that story about the real shipwreck in the Bermudas. It did not involve any encounter with natives, so if Shakespeare did mean Caliban to stand in for such people, then he was at least altering his source material. Also, Shakespeare, genius though he was, could not have known that the British were going to spend the next centuries colonizing and enslaving the rest of the world, so we should be careful in taking our own historical knowledge for granted and reading the play through that lens. Furthermore, the play's representation of Caliban doesn't really suggest a threatening colonized figure who is put down before he can overthrow his rightful rulers. Rather, the uprising of the three servants is consistently played for laughs. Nor is Caliban even the most brutish of the three. When Triculo and Stefano discover some fine clothes and start putting them on with drunken abandon, it is Caliban who has the presence of mind to try to get them back on mission. Then too, Caliban isn't exactly a native of a newly discovered land. He is there because of his mother, the witch Sycorax, who is from North Africa. Shakespeare allows Caliban to shout at Prospero, This island's mine by Sycorax, my mother, which thou takest from me. We are then told that Caliban started to get rough treatment from Prospero only after he tried to rape Miranda. This scene obviously puts Caliban in a bad light, but it also raises the question of whether Prospero has a rightful claim to rule the island. To understand the role of Caliban in the play, we need to attend to the fact that he is thematically paired with two other characters. Firstly, Ferdinand, Miranda's love interest. He is obviously a more appropriate suitor than Caliban, and his courtship of Miranda fits with Prospero's political designs. Yet Prospero treats him too as a threat to his daughter's chastity and issues dire warnings about what will happen if he takes her virginity before they wed. Secondly, and more importantly, Ariel. Ariel and Caliban are in a way opposites. Ariel is as obedient and helpful as Caliban is recalcitrant and rebellious, and the two are associated with the opposing elements of air and earth. It's mentioned twice that Caliban has been confined to a prison made of rock. Still, both are servants, and both spend much of the play complaining about their servitude. Yet it seems much harder to read Ariel as symbolizing inhabitants of the New World, as has so often been done with Caliban. This spirit of the air is more reminiscent of Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream. So the parallel between Ariel and Caliban confirms that Shakespeare was thinking about lordship and servitude, but tends to undermine the notion that he was thinking specifically about colonial lordship and servitude. Could even be that the two servants are meant to represent something more psychological than political. The two may allegorize the higher and lower parts of Prospero's own soul. A hint at this comes at the end, when Ariel persuades Prospero to take pity on his enemies. The magician says, with my nobler reason, against my fury, do I take part. But before we abandon the notion that Shakespeare was even thinking about the New World and its peoples, or at least the notion that he was thinking about it in any depth, we should deal with one further complication. It comes in the form of another source he drew on when writing The Tempest, an essay by Montaigne called On Cannibals. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, there's a scene in The Tempest that is clearly inspired by a passage from this essay. In it, an irritatingly long-winded but basically sympathetic character named Gonzalo gives a speech imagining the kind of society he would like to establish on this apparently uninhabited island. It's a kind of miniature version of Thomas More's Utopia. Adopting the same outside-the-box thinking we associate with Montaigne, Gonzalo imagines a commonwealth with no magistrate, letters, riches, poverty, and use of service, none, no occupation, all men idle, all and women too, no sovereignty. He concludes, I would with such perfection govern, sir, to excel the golden age. Which is as good a time as any to reveal that I've been taking all the episode titles for Renaissance Britain from Shakespeare. I would with such perfection govern was the title for episode 412 about British political thought. If you notice this already on your own, then you can take quiet satisfaction, but better not tell anyone, because as Shakespeare said, there is not one wise man in twenty that will praise himself. On Cannibals is one of Montaigne's most famous essays, but I held off on discussing it until now because it makes for such interesting reading alongside The Tempest. It is one of the first texts to propose a positive attitude towards the natives of the Americas, in an anticipation of the noble savage idea that will later appear so famously in Rousseau. Montaigne writes that if these peoples are wild, then they are so only in the sense of wild fruits that grow in nature without human interference. The natives are, he says, close neighbors to their original state of nature and thus spontaneously obey the natural law. Thus their elders preach two things only, bravery before their enemies and love for their wives. Montaigne actually meant a so-called savage who was brought to France from the Americas. He was unable to communicate with him, but could still call on his Shakespeare-like ability to put himself in the shoes of very different people. So he speculates about how Europe must have seemed to this man, how he would be amazed that so many people put up with grinding poverty and don't just kill the few who are wealthy. A further example of experimentation in human sympathy is found in another of Montaigne's essays, On Coaches, where he imagines how the natives of the Americas would have seen the Spaniards when they first arrived. Unknown monsters within shining skin, namely their armor, bearing blades and cannons. Montaigne says, we took advantage of their ignorance to pervert them toward treachery, toward every kind of cruelty and inhumanity by the example of our own manners. Montaigne has frequently, and rightly, been celebrated for these passages. He didn't know what was going to happen over the next centuries either, but if he could have seen into the future, he would not have been surprised. He knew already that it was the Europeans who were monstrous, not the natives. If we accept that with his own delicate monster, Caliban, Shakespeare was indeed trying to represent newly contacted peoples, then we also have to accept that that representation was far more ambiguous than what we find in Montaigne. Shakespeare was under no illusions as to the cruelty of the English, as shown by a remark of Stefano in the play, in England, they will not give a single coin to relieve a lame beggar, but they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Shakespeare also has Gonzalo say of apparitions summoned by Prospero, these are people of the island, who though they are of monstrous shape, yet note their manners are more gentle, kind than of our human generation you shall find many, nay almost any. So the spirit of Montaigne seems to have found its way into this play alongside the spirit of Hakkut. Which of these two spirits claims Shakespeare's own allegiance? I find it hard to say, so will content myself by observing that the question of colonialism in The Tempest relates closely to the other question most commonly asked about the play, are we supposed to see Prospero as representing Shakespeare himself? Like the identification of Caliban with a new world cannibal, this identification is a tempting one. Prospero's magic may symbolize the magic of the theater, and his valedictory closing remarks are sometimes thought to voice a kind of retirement speech by the playwright. Our revels are ended, it says, before referring to the magic spirits as actors, and saying that the great globe shall dissolve, which of course sounds like an allusion to the globe theater. But if we do assume that Prospero is Shakespeare, we will be hard pressed to adopt a nuanced reading of the role of Caliban in the play. After all, the more we empathize with the plight of this demi-devil, the more we will take umbrage at his mistreatment, and the more our admiration for Prospero would be undermined. I can readily believe that Shakespeare, having read Montaigne, had misgivings about England's colonial adventures, but if so, I find it impossible to believe that he cast himself in the role of the colonizer. I should say that this last observation about the connection between the Caliban question and the Prospero question is inspired by another podcast which I highly recommend. Actually, it's a series of recorded lectures called Approaching Shakespeare from Oxford professor Emma Smith. Well worth checking out, not least for the occasional flashes of wordplay and humor. In the first episode, she has a nice line about the hazards of dating Othello. I'm increasingly tempted to do what she does in that series and devote about 30 episodes to these plays, given how rich a mine of philosophical treasures they are proven to contain, but I'm going to exercise restraint and do only one more episode on a Shakespearean theme. Unlike Prospero, I won't be abjuring rough magic, because next time, we'll be looking at one of the most unnerving features of 16th century culture, witchcraft, and how it features in one of Shakespeare's most unnerving plays. So join me as we ask, what did Lady Macbeth say to her annoying dog? Yes, that's right. Out out, damn spot. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? Weird Sisters. Shakespeare's Macbeth and Witchcraft. In the last episode, I tentatively suggested that in The Tempest, the characters of Caliban and Ariel might represent aspects of Prospero's own mind, his lower passions and reason, perhaps. This may have struck you as implausible, since it makes it sound like Shakespeare would be anticipating Freud by several hundred years, but actually it's very plausible because of what lay in Shakespeare's past, not his future. Medieval plays tended to personify abstract ideas and psychological phenomena, especially religious and moral ones. In fact, we saw an example of that on the podcast a long while back, when I mentioned that Hildegard of Bingen wrote plays to be performed by the sisters of her convent. The characters might be virtues, vices, or the soul itself. And by the 16th century, it was common to explore psychological conflicts in a theatrical context. Such works are sometimes described as exhibiting a psychomachia, or battle of the soul. With that sort of cultural background, it was perfectly natural for Shakespeare to put on stage an actor playing the part of time who shows up to move the plot forward in The Winter's Tale. That's a case of straightforward personification, but other roles might have worked on multiple levels for their original audience, as both symbolic and dramatic. Thus, a figure like Iago could function both as the villain of the story and as an external manifestation of Othello's jealousy. A further layer of ambiguity would be added when Shakespeare makes such characters subhuman, like Caliban, or superhuman, like Ariel. This allows for a different interpretation of magic in Shakespeare. Instead of seeing it as a departure from everyday reality or as a symbol for the artificiality of theater, we could think of it as a way to represent things that are real, but only insofar as they exist in the mind. In this episode, I want to explore this hypothesis by talking about Macbeth. The very title conjures up eerie, unsettling images. Macbeth seeing a dagger floating in the air before him, and then the bloody ghost of one of his victims, Banquo. His wife, Lady Macbeth, trying to rub invisible blood off her hands as she sleepwalks, and of course the witches, whose first appearance opens the play. These scenes of the supernatural and unnatural would have played very differently when they were first staged than they do today, because most of the people in the audience would have believed in witchcraft and found it genuinely terrifying. So, to understand these elements of Macbeth and what they might have to do with philosophy, we need to take a detour into the fascinating and disturbing world of early modern beliefs about witches. The first thing to say is that it's a bit unfair of me to focus on this topic here, in a series of episodes on Shakespeare, because in this period accusations of witchcraft were vastly more common in continental Europe than they were in England. Thousands of supposed witches were tried and executed in Germany, for instance, whereas in England we're talking about figures in the low hundreds, with an outsize proportion of those cases coming in Essex, for some reason. Still, for Elizabethan and Jacobian theatergoers, witchcraft was a serious concern. Indeed, it was a serious concern for Elizabeth and James themselves. Both of their reigns saw statutes passed that lay out punishments for engaging in witchcraft. In the case of Elizabeth, this was in part a reaction to an attack on the queen by means of sorcery, using wax effigies that were discovered by the authorities. King James even wrote a treatise on demonology, in which he piously explained that we may best know God by coming to understand the works of his enemy, the fallen angel, Satan. The personal interest taken in this threat by heads of state, no less, obviously suggests a political context for the witch trials, and many scholars have tried to fill out that context. One obvious point is that the time of the witch trials coincides with the time of Protestantism and the unrest it unleashed. In politically unsettled times, accusations of black magic were perhaps a way to enforce orthodoxy and conformity. Also, there's some evidence that in England, such accusations were more common in places where Puritanism was especially strong. A common theme in Protestant writings on witchcraft was that the practice had something in common with Catholicism. Where the godly Reformed folk believed that the time of miracles was long past and approached religion as a matter of individual spirituality, the Catholics were still mired in superstition and believed in supernatural works that required the employment of physical objects. So witch hunting may have been an extreme expression of reformism, the ultimate form of Protestant discipline. That isn't a fully adequate explanation, since there was quite a bit of Catholic witch hunting too, but there's no doubt that witches were understood as an inversion of true religion. They celebrated black Sabbaths with the devil, engaged in processions, observed special unholy days mirroring the holidays of the true church, and so on. This by the way is a common feature of beliefs about witchcraft all over the world. If you follow our podcast on Africana philosophy, you might remember from episode 21 of that series, that in some African belief systems, witches are like backwards humans, who do things like eating salt when they are thirsty, standing on their heads, and travelling at night rather than in daytime. Similarly, in Shakespeare's England, witches were thought to worship the devil with their backs turned to him, make the night air thick so they could fly through it, and stare at the ground when speaking instead of making eye contact, which also casts suspicion on modern day philosophers. Another kind of historical context is provided by something we talked about last time, the economic precarity of 16th century England. Scholars have noticed that the accused were often poor, old, and of course, female. These were marginal and sometimes indigent people who survived by begging for charity. The classic scenario is that the neighbors of such women, who were also very poor, felt unable to help them. Armed away with nothing, the woman might react angrily or mutter curses under her breath. If the neighbors then fell ill, or had a bad harvest, or had livestock die, then charges of witchcraft might result. A manifestation of guilty feeling on the part of the neighbors who were happier to see the old lady as unholy than to see themselves as uncharitable. On this account too, witchcraft would be another manifestation of the religious and socioeconomic upheavals that disrupted the bonds of medieval society. As we know from the humanists and their anxious writings about the Commonwealth, the elite of English society were well aware of dissension and violence amongst the general population. So we might expect these elites to have misgivings about the vogue for accusations of witchcraft. And indeed, historians tend to understand the relatively low numbers of convictions and executions for witchcraft in England as a case of top-down resistance to a bottom-up expression of social disharmony. More generally, a mainstay of scholarship on early modern witchcraft is the contrast between popular and elite attitudes on the subject. Amongst common folk, belief in magic and witchcraft seems to have been extremely common, if not universal. Even in areas with hardly any witch trials, like Wales, people certainly believed that witches existed. This point has been made in a vast and rich book by Stuart Clarke called Thinking with Demons The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. He says that in popular society, talk of witchcraft was just the language of everyday misfortune. In a world suffused with the supernatural, people also turned to so-called cunning men and women for the benefits to be had from white magic, like healing from illnesses or prediction of the future. This was a stark contrast to the attitudes of the educated scholars, who uniformly condemned all use of magic, whether for good or bad ends. These men, of course they were almost all men, just as the witches were almost all women, wanted people to put their trust in God, not in a local healer or soothsayer. Were the elite scholars also more dubious about the very existence of witchcraft than their contemporaries? The answer is not a straightforward one. At one extreme were authors who issued manuals for witch hunting and dire warnings about dark magic. King James's treatise on demonology is a famous example, but certainly not the first. It was preceded by a treatise called Hammer of Witches, surprisingly produced not by a heavy metal band, but by two Dominican inquisitors from Germany named Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Then, there was a work I already mentioned about twenty episodes ago. Called On the Demonomenie of Sorcerers, it came from the pen of the great French political writer Jean Bodin. As I suggested back then, Bodin's choice to write on this topic at first seems odd, but in fact fits perfectly with his ambition to promote social cohesion and order. He wanted the state to stamp out black magic just as it might stamp out theft or more conventional violence. While Bodin took a strong position against witchcraft, a number of other figures who are familiar to us adopted a more balanced attitude. For them, magic and witchcraft were real, yet accusations of witchcraft were often bogus. A good example would be Cornelius Agrippa, who as you might recall wrote about magic, but also defended an accused witch in the city of Metz. Such figures as Paracelsus and Sinfourian Champier were also alarmed by the way charges of witchcraft were being thrown around, yet in principle accepted that witchcraft is possible. Down in Italy, a comparable example would be Strix, a dialogue about the reality of witchcraft by Gianfresco Pico della Mirandola. It stages arguments between skeptics and believers, with the believers winning out in the end, in part on the predictably humanist grounds that similar phenomena are known from antiquity. In these cases, the moderate skepticism that was so widespread in 16th century philosophy was simply not skeptical enough. What was really needed was some thorough, wholehearted debunking, for which we can return to England and a book called The Discovery of Witchcraft, written by Reginald Scott and published in 1584. The title meant not discovering and prosecuting witches, but to the contrary, unmasking witchcraft itself as fraudulent. Scott was convinced that witch hunting would undermine the very aim Baudin wanted to pursue, namely social harmony. Appalled by an outbreak of accusations in Kent over the previous two decades, he set out to show that tales of black magic were just that, tales without substance. It had to be because the devil and his demons are themselves without substance, and presumably without tales too. They do exist, but are incorporeal forces that cannot interact with physical bodies. As for the humans who were supposed to be witches, ascribing magical abilities to them was clearly irreligious, since supernatural power belongs only to God. How then to explain widespread belief in sorcery, and especially the fact that some people actually believed themselves to be witches, and openly admitted their guilt? To answer this question, Scott turned to the scientific theories of his day, citing those he called learned philosophers and physicians. He acknowledged the existence of what was sometimes called natural magic, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, isn't the whole point of magic that it is unnatural or supernatural? But this was a widely acknowledged category in the period, and really just referred to natural causes whose workings are obscure to humans. There were plenty of examples of such occult powers, like the attractive powers of magnets, and the healing effects of certain herbs, and in general, Scott says, the hidden secretes of living creatures of plants of metals. So-called cunning folk might just be people who knew about these powers, for instance which plants would treat which illnesses. In a sense, Scott was not too far away from the elite demonologists and witch hunters here since they usually accepted that the devil and his servants brought about their effects through natural means, to say otherwise would be to put their power on a par with gods. But for Scott, their claims about witchcraft, being contrary to nature, probability, and reason, are void of truth or possibility. The power of nature also helps to explain why people believed in witchcraft in the first place. Scott repeats an anecdote told by Geronimo Cardano about a servant who was strongly convinced that he was a powerful witch. His master provided him with a heartier diet, until, Scott writes, the man was recovered so in strength that the humor was suppressed, he was easily one from his absurd and dangerous opinions and from all his fond imaginations. Two words in this passage are worth lingering over, humor and imagination. As you know, medical theory in this period posited four fundamental bodily humors, one of which was especially important in this context. This was black bile, an excess of which was thought to lead to the disease called melancholy. Actually, this word comes from the ancient Greek words for black and bile. Melancholy had long been associated with delusions, so it was natural, in every sense of the word, for Scott to argue that supposed witches were merely suffering from this illness. In particular, melancholy was having profound effects on their imaginations. Scott tells of melancholics who thought they were kings, or earthen pots, or the mythic atlas who holds up the heavens with his mighty hands. Scott's discovery of witchcraft offered a sophisticated and powerful critique, but did not really have its intended effect. Its proposal that demons are immaterial and thus completely outside of the causal framework of our world was unacceptable to most contemporaries. In fact, when witchcraft trials in England started to subside around 1620 or so, it was not so much because people stopped believing in witchcraft as because people stopped thinking they could prove that it had been used on particular occasions. Through this whole period, there was a steady move away from the medieval practice of subjecting suspected witches to an ordeal, like throwing them into water to see if they would float. Instead, the accused were put on trial, not unlike the inquiries into heresy we just talked about in connection with Hamlet. The legal process involved collecting witness statements and evidence, though this was rarely evidence in any sense we would find plausible today. For instance, it was common to look for a devil's mark, like an extra nipple, which is where the witch would feed her demonically possessed familiar animal. But more often than not, lawyers and judges were making do with mere rumor and angry accusation, which was not enough to secure a conviction. As the 17th century went on, many in the social elite, especially in legal circles, came to the view that witchcraft was theoretically possible, but impossible to prove. So, Scott did not really succeed in getting people to believe that, on the contrary, witchcraft is theoretically impossible. Still worse, his book was frequently just mined for the extensive information it provided about witchcraft lore. Scott offered many stories about witches and their supposed malefic deeds on the way to casting doubt on these stories, but the stories tended to stick in the mind more than the skeptical arguments. Which brings us finally back to Shakespeare, since it was precisely such stories that shaped his own imagination when it came to black magic. In fact, an anonymous work on witchcraft from the early 19th century boldly proclaimed that it was Scott's discovery that supplied Shakespeare with his witch and wizard lore. This might be an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Macbeth reflects many of the ideas we've just surveyed. We can see this already in the brief opening scene, where the witches refer to their familiars, Grey Mountain and Paddock, and remind us that witchcraft is about inversion or reversal. Fair is foul and foul is fair, a line echoed by Macbeth himself a couple of scenes later when he says, So foul and fair a day I have not seen. Further on in the play, we see that the three witches are only representatives of greater, darker powers, whom they call Masters. These are spirits, who show Macbeth misleading riddles about his future, and Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. There are also mentions of Satan as the common enemy of man, and the angels served by the wicked Macbeth. We even get references to such specific ideas as that the devil can thicken and obscure the air, as described in King James's work on demonology. Here too, the weird sisters can fly through the night, or summon storm winds that fight against the churches. By the way, weird doesn't necessarily mean that the witches are strange, it comes from the Old English word for fate. That fits with the function that the witches play in the plot. By offering Macbeth one prediction that the audience already knows will come out true, Macbeth's promotion to the title of Thane of Cawdor, they tempt him into murdering the good King Duncan, so as to seize the crown that the witches additionally promise him. On a straightforward reading, Macbeth is like any number of classical figures who followed an ambiguous prophecy to their own doom. And like any number of writers on demonology, indeed, like King James, whose reign is mentioned in the play, Shakespeare is teaching the audience that no good can come of trafficking with demonic power. As Banquo warns Macbeth, oftentimes to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths. But there are also hints at a view of witchcraft more like Scots. Macbeth poses the question whether the witches are corporal, and more importantly, is uncertain as to whether the things he is experiencing are real. This may lead the audience to be uncertain too. Is Macbeth misled by dark forces that lie outside him, or by a darkness within his soul? The best example would be the famous scene where Macbeth sees the weapon he used to murder Duncan floating in the air. In wonders aloud, art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? One can easily picture Reginald Scott shouting from the back of the Globe Theatre, yes, that's exactly what it is, you have melancholy, go see a doctor. He would feel further vindicated during the sleepwalking scene, in which a doctor actually appears on stage, to say of Lady Macbeth that she is troubled with thick coming fancies. Similarly, Lady Macbeth herself tells her husband, when he is terrified by the vision of Banquo's ghost, it is the very painting of your fear. Macbeth is more credulous demonologist than hard-nosed natural philosopher. When presented with the doctor's analysis of Lady Macbeth's situation, he says, throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it. But as the dagger scene shows, he is well aware that his own imagination cannot be trusted. Reflecting on the prophecy of the witches, he says, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good. Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise, and nothing is but what is not. Macbeth's weakness in the face of his horrible imaginings goes hand in hand with his weakness in the face of temptation and political ambition. If he has any saving grace, not that it would actually save him by the religious standards of the day, it is that he at least Hamlet-like dithers before embracing his foretold fate. No such hesitation for Lady Macbeth. In Act I, she works to finish what the witches have started by getting her husband to screw his courage to the sticking place and murder the king. Or perhaps I should say, she finishes what the other witches have started. In other words, is Lady Macbeth also supposed to be a witch, or comparable to a witch? This is suggested at the end of the play, when she is referred to as a fiend-like queen. Shakespeare's audiences would have been primed to see her this way, because the role was apparently played by the boy who had recently acted the role of Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, another character with witch-like elements. You probably know that female characters were always played by boys on the stage at this time, a practice Shakespeare played for gender-confused laughs in his comedies. In Macbeth, though, sexual ambiguity is used to provoke goosebumps rather than giggles. Thus, Macbeth says, when first meeting the witches, you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so. This is then picked up in famous lines spoken by Lady Macbeth, in which she summons the forces of darkness to her aid. Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers. Come, thick knight, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. Here the allusions to witchcraft come thick and fast. We have again the thickening of the night air, and invocations of spirits and of hell, while the line unsex me here is a demand to undo or reverse the natural order. Just to make sure we get the point, Shakespeare later gives Lady Macbeth the most disturbing lines in the play, when she is criticizing Macbeth for his hesitation. I have given suck, and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this. In this period, witches were often associated with violence towards babies and children, accused of making them starve and of making women's breast milk run dry. As former podcast guest Linda Roper has written, witches were women who did not feed others except to harm them. So making your breast milk turn to gall, as Lady Macbeth imagines, is about as maleficent as it gets. All of which at least shows that Shakespeare was evoking yet another of the anxieties that surrounded witchcraft, the reversal of expected gender norms. Lady Macbeth is more ambitious and bold than her husband, even though he is a mighty warrior. And in a society where women were defined by the care and nourishment they offered their families, she imagines depriving a baby of its food and dashing out its brains. The assumptions flouted by Lady Macbeth are, indeed, the reason why so many women were accused of witchcraft in the first place. In principle, witches could be either men or women, but in fact the accused were almost always women. Researchers of the time sought to explain this. Women have weaker wills and stronger desires, it was argued, so they are more susceptible to temptation. As one writer put it, where the devil findeth easiest entrance and best entertainment, thither will he oftenest resort. Even a skeptic like Scott allowed that women are more prone to melancholic delusions, which is why people who claim to be witches are most often women. This argument was considered and rejected by Bodin on the grounds that menstruation should purify their bodies of excess humours. The aforementioned Stuart Clarke has offered a rather different and far more persuasive explanation for the fact that witchcraft was so strongly gendered. As we've been seeing, witchcraft is about inversion and reversal, about making the fair foul and the foul fair. So it only makes sense that the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, impoverished elderly women, would be the most dangerous and fearsome tools of the devil. With the help of Macbeth, we could think about this at an even more abstract level by considering whether paranoia about witchcraft was a religious expression of fear about certain aspects of human nature, aspects that were especially associated with women. I mean things like sexual desire, emotion, and the very fact that we find ourselves in needy bodies made of blood and flesh. An interesting book from a few years ago by Charlotte Rose Miller examines popular pamphlets about witchcraft from early modern England. No fewer than 90% of the accused in these stories were women, and the pamphlets more or less always emphasized motives of revenge, anger, malice, and so on in explaining why these women turned to witchcraft. Since females were thought to be more prone to extreme emotion than males, they were the most natural suspects when it came to suspicion of crimes against nature. And as the doctor says of Lady Macbeth, unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Even the fact that witches had animal familiars fits with this understanding, since emotions and embodiment have to do with our animal nature. If you cast your mind back to much earlier episodes, when we talked about medieval women mystics, you'll remember that figures like Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena reversed these gender norms too, but in a context of holiness rather than unholiness. This is why their writings about encountering God are full of references to eating, bodily fluids, and so on. As such figures remind us, people of the medieval era were capable of seeing women as figures of great religious and moral purity, not just as demonic threats. That was still the case during the English Renaissance, but new developments, especially the rise of humanism and the Reformation, changed the way that women presented themselves in their writings. And you know which podcast to listen to next time if you want to hear all about that, The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU Inman Act, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, She Uttereth Piercing Eloquence, Women's Spiritual Literature. Virginia Woolf's famous essay, A Room of One's Own, imagines what would have happened if Shakespeare had had a sister with gifts similar to his own. Her literary curiosity would have been gently but firmly blocked by her parents. As Woolf imagines, she picked up a book now and then, one of her brothers perhaps, and read a few pages, but then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings, or mind the stew, and not moon about with books and papers. The demands of married life would further have stymied her development in adulthood. As for getting involved in the London theatre scene, like her brother did, that would have been unthinkable. Shakespeare's non-existent sister would ultimately, like Woolf herself, have committed suicide for "...who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body." Woolf's disturbing conclusion is that, in general, any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half-witch, half-wizard, feared and mocked at. This fictional narrative is intended to explain what Woolf assumed as an obvious fact. Certainly no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary Elizabethan literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song, or sonnet. It's a tremendously powerful piece of writing, even though this starting assumption is at most only half right. Surely it's true that, in Elizabethan society, the plays of Shakespeare could not have been written by a woman. Woolf was interested above all in the expression of literary genius, and there's no doubting the obstacles that have stood in the way of such expression long before and long after the 16th century. In this period, women were quite literally told to keep their mouths shut. Shakespeare himself alluded to this in a line from Two Gentlemen of Verona, To be slow in words is a woman's only virtue. This looks like satire, but the same point was sometimes made with strident seriousness, as in a work on rhetoric by Thomas Wilson. What becometh a woman best, and first of all, Silence. What second? Silence. What third? Silence. What fourth? Silence. Yay, if a man should ask me till doomsday, I would still cry, Silence, Silence. Yet Woolf was wrong to think that women made no contribution to Elizabethan literature. Perhaps they produced no works of genius, but they did publish poems, including sonnets, as well as translations and religious writings. In fact, one could argue that the 16th century was a turning point in the history of women's writing in England. It was a time when new opportunities opened up for such writing, thanks to the emergence of humanism and the Reformation. That will be clearer to us if we start by discussing a figure who was active somewhat earlier, in the first half of the 15th century, Marjorie Camp, who was born in about 1373 and died in 1449. If we compare her to other women we've covered here on the podcast, we have to say that Camp shares very little with her near contemporary, Christine de Pizan, and is far more reminiscent of medieval mystics like Julian of Norwich. In fact, Camp got to meet Julian when this famous anchorite was an old woman. Like Julian, her thought was premised upon, and licensed by, experiences of a personal encounter with God. So if we are going to be in the difficult business of drawing a line between late medieval and Renaissance writing by women, we would probably want to put Camp on the medieval side of that line. But if we want to speak of her as having produced writing at all, then this should come with some caveats. The work, known simply as the Book of Marjorie Camp, was dictated by her to a male companion, and then copied out with extensive improvements to the language by a friendly priest. The involvement of the priest helps to legitimize the text, firstly because he's a member of the religious establishment, and secondly because, as the book tells us, he was initially dubious about her spiritual gifts, but was won over in the end. This is a common pattern in the book. Camp is constantly met by opposition and skepticism, especially from men, but perseveres, thanks to the unflagging support she receives directly from God, who is often on hand to offer her an encouraging pep talk, or condemn those who refuse to take her seriously. The book also makes it abundantly clear why she would have faced so much hostility. In a society where women were supposed to be silent, she was anything but, and flouted any number of conventions. Though married, she took a vow of chastity. The book details at length her campaign to get her husband to accept this. She traveled across Europe, and as far as Jerusalem, without her husband, but with a message of intense religiosity, in apparent defiance of St. Paul's ban on women preaching. She also refused to eat meat, and wore white, which would normally be reserved for virgins. Hardest to ignore were Camp's regular bouts of loud, boisterous weeping and wailing, brought on by thoughts of human sin and the sufferings of Christ. She found herself unable to prevent these outbursts, even if, as sometimes happened, they came while a priest was trying to give a sermon in church. Camp saw these intense emotional experiences as a gift from God, not least because he came in person to assure her that this was so. The book says that the cryings began in Jerusalem and became increasingly frequent, sometimes several times a day. They came whenever God wished to send them, for she never knew either the time or hour when they should come, and they never came without unsurpassed sweetness of devotion and high contemplation. For other people, Camp's histrionics were not so much exalted as exaggerated and exasperating. At one point, a group of people went to a priest to demand that he order her to eat meat like they did, put aside her weeping, and not talk of holiness so much. But Camp was not so easy to tame. She treated even an archbishop with fairly astonishing irreverence. When he said that he had heard she is utterly wicked, she replied in effect, oh, that's funny, I've heard the same about you. She then refused to abide by his command not to teach. In Leicester, she was confronted by an official who, after interviewing her, concluded, either you're a really good woman or else you're a really wicked woman. Through all this, Camp revels in her Christ-like role as a figure who has been sent to save her fellow humans, but remains unappreciated and even persecuted. She thought it was a joyful thing to be rebuked for God's love, and it was a great solace and comfort to her when she was chided and taunted for the love of Jesus, for rebuking sin, for speaking of virtue, for talking about scripture, which she had learned through sermons and by talking with clerics. The book is careful to avoid presenting Camp as if she were holy outside the structure of the church. Remember, an admiring priest is the one writing all this down, and the text is at pains to mention and rebut the accusations of heresy that were thrown at her. Often, these connected her to lawlardy. As you'll remember, the Lawlards were a religious group in England who have often been seen as forerunners of the Reformation because they did things like reading the Bible in English and letting women be religious teachers. One female Lawlard named Hawissia Moon said, every man and every woman being in good life out of sin is as good priest and hath as much power of God in all things as any priest ordered, be he pope or bishop. Camp was not a card-carrying member of the group for sure, but one modern scholar of her thought says that she at least hovered around the gray areas on its margins and that, if lawlardy was characterized as a reading community based on a firm commitment to the private reading of the scriptures in the vernacular, then she was certainly part of such a community. In some ways, though, Kemp was very Catholic. She went on pilgrimages and collected souvenirs and relics, was greatly moved by the miracle of the Eucharist, enthusiastically took part in church processions and services, even if she made it impossible to hear the priest over her loud wailing, and encountered God as a visible presence, as when Christ appeared to her as a beautiful man dressed in purple. As far as I can tell, then, Kemp was rebelling not so much against the church as against what would be expected of her as a married woman. It was one thing to take vows and become a nun or anchorite like Hildegard or Julian, and quite another to be a married woman who acts like an itinerant preacher and mouths off to archbishops. It's been said of the book that there is no pro-feminist element to the text, only pro-marjorie, which seems right, but the book justifies her idiosyncratic and provocative behavior in highly gendered terms. Like earlier medieval mystics, Kemp claimed to be in direct contact with God. In the book, she has numerous lengthy conversations with him. But, whereas some medieval women mystics seem almost to have transcended gender, Kemp's womanhood is constantly being brought to the attention of the reader. Sexuality is a main theme of the book. The constant threat of rape hangs over her during her travels. She takes the vow of chastity and wears virginal white, having wedded herself to God, even though she still has a human husband. Some passages indulge in lightly erotic descriptions of this relationship. In a more complicated version of her relationship to God, Christ appears to Kemp and addresses her as daughter, but then asks her to take on the role of the Virgin Mary so that she can nurse him. Isabel Davis, whom I interviewed a long way back about Chaucer, observes that here Kemp is simultaneously mother, daughter, and wife of God, proliferating the significant roles that she plays within the Trinity and the Holy Family and increasing her spiritual authority. All this gives us a context for understanding Kemp's cryings. Here, extravagant emotion is both effect and proof of her special relationship to God, a connection the book often labels as her feelings. At this time, women were thought to be more subject to strong emotions and feelings than men. So again, a phenomenon typically associated with the subordinate and inferior place of women is cleverly used to free Kemp from subordination and inferiority. There is even a suggestion that uncontrolled emotion is a more appropriate response to the Christian God, who, after all, is believed to have died in agony for us, than the cold, rational disquisitions of the churchmen and the schoolmen. This could explain why, as we are told in the preface to the book, Kemp was for a long time resistant to having her story written down. Her intense religiosity was best delivered through oral confrontation, or through apparently unhinged wailing that did not even take the form of language. So, it's appropriate that when her book was finally set down, and then revised, it was not her doing the writing. She needed men for that, but she did not need anyone else to develop a unique relationship to God or to tell her what this relationship meant. Many features of this remarkable text made for uncomfortable reading over the following generations, which is why versions of the book printed in the 16th century eliminate them. In these versions, Kemp, who was in modern times been called a noisy contemplative, was turned into a humble, quiet, listening woman. This might seem to cast some doubt on my claim that chances for writing as a woman actually opened up in the 16th century, but it depends on what kind of woman writer you want to be. By the time Shakespeare's sister would have been alive, such a writer would hardly be a crazed half-witch. To the contrary, she'd be well-schooled in Latin, and present herself as a refined and pious teacher of Protestant godliness. Whether Kemp was even literate is unclear, but if she was, then probably in the sense that she could read but not write, a not uncommon level of education in this era. Alternatively, she may have encountered the texts that were important to her by having them read out. That would above all have meant scripture, of course, but also works by other mystics like Saint Birgitta of Sweden and Richard Rolle. Very different would be the situation of elite Protestant women in the 16th century, who were more likely to read Erasmus and Calvin than medieval mystical texts. They benefited from humanist training, and were able to play a part in transmitting, interpreting, and composing texts. And I do want to stress that we're talking about elite women here. All of the figures I'm about to discuss came from the nobility, and the first of them was actually a leading member of the royal family. This was Catherine Parr, the last of Henry VIII's queens. In episode 419, I mentioned her briefly as a sponsor of humanist scholarship, including translations of Erasmus, and as the author of a treatise called Lamentation of the Sinner. She also wrote a set of prayers or meditations. Beyond her own writing, she had a powerful influence on the next generation of rulers, arranging for the young Prince Edward to study with Protestant tutors like William Grindel, a student of Roger Aschams. And remember how Elizabeth translated the Mirror of the Sinful Soul into English when she was only 11 years old? Well, that version was dedicated to Catherine Parr. So we're very far here from Marjorie Kempf, who was the daughter of a rich merchant, but whose world was socially and intellectually very distant from the sober and refined Reformed humanism of Catherine and her circle. John Fox, author of a famous history of Protestant martyrs, reports that Catherine retained diverse, well-learned, and godly persons to instruct her thoroughly in Scripture. And this shows in her writings. She may have written a lament about her own sinfulness, but her adherence to mainstream Protestantism is impeccable. That joke goes out to all the Latinists out there. A main focus in both her prayers and the Lamentation is the wish to be free of creaturely desires, to have no will but God's will. She prays to God, This being only one of numerous passages, deploring the love of worldly goods. Among those goods is high social standing, which Catherine is at pains to deplore, praying that she be as well pleased to be in the lowest place as in the highest. Which, you might argue, is easy for her to say, while quite literally sitting on a throne. But there's not much point in aiming accusations at Catherine, because she's already done it for us. She recognizes herself as always ready and prone to evil, and as barren and void of godly virtue, and powerless to resist sin without divine grace. She admits that she long followed the blind guide of ignorance before she finally found respite in faith, along with the realization of her own impotence in the phase of sin. It's a nice illustration of something we may find difficult to understand, that many people in this era found a broadly Calvinist, determinist teaching of redemption to be comforting rather than terrifying. And, as so often in Protestant texts, this goes hand in hand with a rejection of worldly wisdom. Thus, Catherine writes, Now, none of this is particularly innovative in doctrinal terms. What's remarkable is that the person writing it is a woman. Humanism and Protestantism had quietly opened the door that Marjorie Kemp had fought loudly to force ajar. While Catherine engages in typical false modesty, referring to her simple and unlearned judgment, she doesn't seem to feel the need to justify or explain why the reader should be taking spiritual advice from a woman. Granted, this is literally a queen we're talking about here, so she might be operating by special rules. But in fact, it seems to be more generally true that those women of the 16th century who did receive a good education were able to apply that education in writing. One modern-day scholar says bluntly that, No evidence has yet come to light that men routinely, if ever, prevented tutor women from publishing anything they could persuade a printer to undertake. This may seem surprising, but some of the most influential humanists of the age, like Juan Luis Vives and Thomas Ailott, had argued for the education of women so as to encourage them in virtue and true religion. A fine example would be Margaret Moore Roper, the daughter of Thomas Moore. He saw to it that she was well-schooled and advised her in a letter to pursue medical science and sacred literature, in order to achieve the familiar aim of having a sound mind and a sound body. This bore significant fruit. She was able to produce a translation of a work by Erasmus, and she comes across impressively in her letters. These include a description of her unsuccessful attempt to persuade Moore to swear the oath of allegiance and avoid execution, as she had done. In a reminder that gender was not entirely forgotten, Moore wryly compared this to Eve telling Adam that she had already tasted of the forbidden fruit, so he might as well do the same. Less inclined to cooperate was a martyr on the other side of the religious divide, Anne Askew. She was the first gentlewoman to be tried for heresy and was burnt alive in 1546 when she was only 25 years old. We have a remarkable account of her interrogation from her own pen, which tells of how she was tortured but remains steadfast. At one point her questioners pushed her to answer the sort of ridiculous question that schoolmen like to discuss. In this case, if this transubstantiated host is dropped during mass and an animal eats it off the floor, does the animal receive the body of the Lord? She refused to respond, and when told that she had to because the practice of schoolmen was that questions must always be answered, she said that she was but a woman and knew not the course of schools. In a classic instance of the female religious visionary pulling rank on men of worldly power, she also told her inquisitors, God hath given me the gift of knowledge, but not of utterance. Once Protestantism became the law of the land instead of a heresy, it provided a context for other women to display their own knowledge in both utterance and writing. Often this came in the form of translations, something we've already seen with Elizabeth, which is not to be underestimated. It has been well remarked that in this period, translators of both sexes saw themselves as powerful cultural agents engaged in the difficult and invaluable task of importing foreign works or making domestic Latin works available to English readers. And it was an activity that attracted praise for contemporaries. A collection of writings from 1582 called The Monument of Matrons collects Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite with other texts, and the preface praises those women who, for the common benefit of their country, have not ceased to spend their time, their wits, and also their bodies in compiling and translating of sundry most Christian and godly books. I take this quotation from a study of one such translator and the last figure I want to look at in this episode, Anne von Locke, who lived in the second half of the 16th century. She was one member of a circle of female Protestant writers, which also included Anne Dourich, author of A History of the Religious Wars in France, and Locke's own daughter, also named Anne, who was described in a praise poem as learned, with a manly heart capable of grasping Greek wit and Latin song. Even among this group, Anne Locke stands out for her connections. She was a friend of John Knox, who encouraged her to spend time in Geneva and for her productivity. She translated The Marks of the Children of God, a text about the tribulations suffered by Calvinists of the Low Countries, evidently because she thought its consolations would be equally relevant for English Puritans. A further work of translation by Locke is an English version of a sermon by Calvin, on a chapter from the book of Isaiah from the Bible. She states that her aim is to render the French, so near as I possibly might to the very words of his text, and that in so plain English as I could express. That may just sound like good practice for any translator, but the reference to plainness has an additional resonance in this context, since it shows Locke aiming to make the work available to the widest possible audience, which is a paradigmatic feature of Protestant literature. And then there is the work which Locke appended to this translation of Calvin, a collection of 26 sonnets, under the Catherine Parr-like title, Meditation of a Penitent Sinner. A study of these poems summarizes them neatly as follows, The sonnets construct a poetic persona based upon an ardent desire for divine grace and a morbid fear of divine rejection, while simultaneously crafting an authorial persona who speaks publicly and displays a talent for biblical exegesis. The sonnets take their departure from another poem, namely Psalm 51 of the Bible. This text may have been chosen because the psalm includes the line, Lord, thou hast opened my mouth, therefore I will sing thy songs, which looks like a pretty good justification for a woman who wants to write about religious themes. But there's a problem. Locke says herself that the sonnets are not by her, but delivered to me by my friend, with whom I knew I might be so bold to use and publish it as pleased me. So, before interpreting them as another exception to Woolf's claim that women contributed nothing to 16th century literature, we need to decide whether Locke really wrote them. In favor of her authorship, we can observe that it was quite common in this period to present one's own writings with a weak pretense of not being the author. Saying, I got this from an unnamed friend would be an entirely typical way to do this, to the point that readers of the time might naturally have understood the meaning to be, I wrote this myself, but I'm too humble to say so. For the same reason, the translation of Calvin is not published under Locke's name either, she gives only her initials, AL. Furthermore, her version of Marks of the Children of God includes a poem of her own kind as a kind of appendix, so it makes sense that she might do the same here. But against this, a careful analysis of the meditation has found that it greatly differs stylistically from Locke's known poetry, and that it was more likely written by a man named Thomas Norton. He was a tutor for the royal family, a lawyer who worked at the inner temple, and the author of, of all things, a satirical poem against women. Furthermore, he really was someone Locke would have known, and whose poetry she might have selected for inclusion alongside the translation of Calvin's sermon. So when she says that she got this from a friend and is making so bold as to publish it, she might mean just that. I won't weigh in with a few of my own as to the authorship of the sonnets, but I would like to point out that if they are not by Locke, they were at least selected by her for the book, a departure from tradition, since usually it's the Locke that gets picked, not the Locke that does the picking. She might have done this for the very same reason just mentioned, that the meditation and its biblical source encourage everyone to speak out in God's praise. Women too should do this and not be silent. This is a sentiment we can confidently ascribe to Locke, given what she said when introducing her translation of the marks of the children of God. Everyone in his calling is bound to do somewhat to the furtherance of the holy building, but because great things by reason of my sex I may not do, and that which I may, I ought to do, I have, according to my duty, brought my poor basket of stones to the strengthening of the walls of that Jerusalem, whereof by grace we are all both citizens and members. So far in our coverage of philosophy and Renaissance and Reformation Britain, we've mostly been looking at the two phenomena that made it possible for women to join the world of letters, humanist literature and Protestantism. We've talked about literary texts from Moore's Utopia to the plays of Shakespeare, and about the wide-reaching effects of the Reformation, from radical political ideas of tyrannicide to spiritual meditations by figures like Catherine Parr and Anne Locke. By now, you may be wondering, weren't there also figures doing philosophy in the more traditional sense, like reading and commenting on Aristotle, that sort of thing? The answer is definitely yes, as we'll see next time, when we return to the rather cloistered and very male world of British scholasticism. But that's no reason to stop quoting Shakespeare, especially when there's this wonderful line from Romeo and Juliet, Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, but love from love towards school with heavy looks. Now that I say that out loud, I realize that this doesn't really work as an enticement to think about the ideas of the schoolmen. So how about, this above all, to thine own podcast be true, thy podcast of course being the history of philosophy, without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I'll Teach You Differences, British Scholasticism. Here's my favourite anecdote about Oxford University. In the middle of the 19th century, so the story goes, the beams in the roof of the New College dining hall needed to be replaced. The fellows of the college asked the forester whether he could help. He replied, we were wondering when you'd ask, and explained that a grove of trees had been planted 500 years earlier and protected by generations of foresters for exactly this purpose. Though it seems that this story isn't entirely accurate, it does convey a deeper truth about Oxford. As one of Europe's oldest universities, it is distinguished by tradition and very long-term planning. It is a place where change tends to happen slowly. When things have been done in a certain way for the last several centuries, why start doing things differently now? Yet as far back as the 16th century, the fellows of Oxford did start to do things differently, very differently in fact. Even this already long-lived institution could not remain untouched by the intellectual and spiritual upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation. Some of the changes were at the institutional level. The establishment of grammar schools meant the universities were not the only place where the young could study. Thanks to this development and the rise of Protestantism with its focus on reading scripture for oneself, literacy became more widespread, at least among boys and men. The period also saw the emergence of other institutions of higher education. Notably, the Inns of Court in London, which had existed for some time, became an important center of legal study and general education in the 15th and 16th centuries. At the old universities, meanwhile, students increasingly took instruction directly from masters in an early version of the tutorial system that is, of course, still in use at Oxford and Cambridge to this day. They might even live in the homes of their tutors. Elite students would hire their tutors directly, often satisfying themselves with gaining general reading and mathematical skills without bothering to finish off their degree. Poorer students kept the wolf from the door by working as servants for their well-born classmates, as we saw Edmund Spenser do. And then there were the changes to the teaching curriculum. The schoolmen could not just keep reading ancient philosophy in medieval Latin translations and writing sophisticated and technical, some might say pedantic, logical treatises as they had been doing since the 14th century. The impact of humanism and Protestant polemics against the superfluous sophistry of the schools rendered all that obsolete. But as on the continent, scholasticism in Britain proved surprisingly resilient and able to adapt. Around the end of the 15th century, university masters were still working within the framework familiar to us from our look at late medieval philosophy, yet they were already innovating within that framework in ways that foreshadowed more radical changes to come. We'll be illustrating that with the thought of a Scottish philosopher who established himself at Paris named John Mayer or John Major. He wrote his name in both ways. He was born near Edinburgh in about 1467 and studied at Cambridge University, then Paris, where he rose to the level of teaching theology at the Sorbonne. His time in Paris made him a well-known figure, and Nuff so that Rabelais parodied him as the author of How to Make Puddings. Some of the students who would have seen him teach were well-known too, like John Knox, George Buchanan, and even Ignatius Loyola and John Calvin. Closer in approach to Mayer himself were a circle of fellow scholastics who were his students or students of his students. They included David Cranston, George Lockhart, Gilbert Crabbe, and William Manderson. This group helped to make scholarly connections between France and Scotland stronger than those between France and England. Both Lockhart and Manderson, for instance, held the post of rector at the University of St. Andrews. Mayer and his colleagues produced numerous treatises on logic, still the core of the arts curriculum provided to young students. Though they wrote in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, their methods were still broadly those of late medieval logicians. These were men who were refining and innovating within an established tradition. This means, for starters, that they wrote in a highly technical Latin that could be understood by trained schoolmen all over Europe, and nobody else. The Latin of these logical treatises was all but an artificial language. It was regimented to avoid ambiguity, unlike natural languages such as Scots, English, or French. The goal here is, in a way, exactly the reverse of the humanist enterprise. Here, Latin is not shaped for rhetorical excellence. Rather, all rhetorical and merely conventional features are stripped away to reveal pure logical form. The result was a Latin that might strike humanists as barbaric, but had the advantage of capturing perfectly the contents of the mind. For the Aristotelian schoolmen, the language of the mind is the same for everyone, regardless of what language they speak over dinner. To take a simple example, the logic of the schoolmen dealt extensively with propositions in which one term is predicated of another. For instance, the giraffe is tall. Here, the subject term is the giraffe, the predicate is tall, and the verb is serves to connect them. A sentence like the giraffe runs doesn't look like it fits that structure, but the schoolmen force it to do so by understanding it to mean that the predicate running is asserted to hold of the giraffe. Even statements about existence are construed accordingly. If I say, there is a giraffe, or the giraffe exists, this means that existence is predicated of the giraffe. On the other hand, Mayer and his colleagues did not ignore linguistic complexity when it did seem to have consequences for reasoning and logical implication. One illustration is their handling of verb tenses. They did not just ignore this, pretending that it is only a feature of natural language, but they did say some pretty counterintuitive things about it. For instance, that we can take the following proposition to be true, a child was an adult. The reasoning here is that, unless otherwise specified, the word child should mean any person who is or was a child, and all adults have at some point been such a person. Other examples of propositions that come out true and for the same reason are, a living man is dead, and an old man will be a boy. These propositions, weird though they may be, still fit the predication structure preferred by the schoolmen, but it had been clear since antiquity that not all propositions can be translated into a subject, a predicate, and a connector, or copula. Already, the Stoics had devoted attention to conditional statements, which have the form, if A, then B. Long before Mayer and his group came along, conditionals had been integrated into Aristotelian logic. But there was still some work to do here, as when these schoolmen explored the implications of promises. A statement like, if you give me a giraffe, then I'll never say a bad word about you again, looks at first like it should behave the same as, if Socrates is standing, then he is not sitting. But it turns out that it doesn't, because Socrates is standing makes it impossible for him to sit, whereas you're giving me a giraffe does not make it impossible for me to badmouth you, it just means that I would be breaking my promise. At this point, you're quite likely sympathizing with those who saw the scholastics as practicing pointless pedantry. Like, for example, Philipp Melanchthon, who remarked of one work by Mayer, what wagonloads of trifles. If he is a specimen of the Paris doctors, no wonder they are unfavorable to Luther. But let's not be too hasty, because Mayer and his students were very interested in applying logic to important philosophical issues and concrete situations. Take, for instance, their handling of belief. Ideally, we should always build our beliefs on rock-solid foundations, which are the self-evident principles from which other beliefs are derived by the laws of logic. A paradigm of such reasoning would be geometry, where we start with axioms and use them to prove further propositions. For Mayer, this same structure is found in ethics. We start from obviously true rules of moral reasoning, which can look rather banal, like one should do whatever is good. Mayer uses the medieval term sinderesis for our grasp of these principles, whereas he calls conscience whatever we go on to infer from the principles. Given the complexity of ethical reasoning, it is always possible that we may make mistakes, but morally speaking, we should always do what we take to follow from the principles. It is a sin to do what you take to be sinful, even if it isn't in fact sinful. In many cases, though, Mayer seems to be skeptical about how far deduction can take us in the practical sphere. Reaching the right ethical decision could call for drawing analogies, working through concrete consequences, and the like. For this reason, it has been argued that his writings supply us with an early example of something we'll talk about soon when we get to the Jesuits, casuistry. This means engaging in moral reasoning on a case-by-case basis. We see Mayer do this, for instance, when he takes up the problem of paying for insurance. It may seem that someone who insures a shipment by boat is taking money from the merchant without performing any legitimate service. That looks uncomfortably close to the condemned practice of usury, where one person charges another for the service of lending them money. But Mayer argues that the insurer is more like a paid mercenary who protects the shipment, because they are taking money to share risk. This is the kind of argument we need to give when it is not possible to find ironclad arguments grounded in first principles. The uncertainty we often feel about our own beliefs also plays a significant role in religion. Mayer has an interesting treatment of the faith by which believers feel certainty about their religious commitments. He comes rather close to the modern-day understanding by saying that a person is performing an act of faith if they believe something for which they have insufficient evidence. If a giraffe is standing right in front of you, then you don't need to have faith in the giraffe, but your reasons for having faith in God's offer of salvation are not quite so compelling. On the other hand, Mayer thinks that faith does require some basis. You can't just decide to believe whatever you want for no reason, like by deciding by a sheer act of will that the number of stars is even. So faith must be a cooperation between the intellect, which grasps reasons to believe something, and the will, which moves the person actually to believe it. Mayer had the chance to put his own beliefs on the line too. As Melanchthon's sarcastic remark implies, the doctors of Paris were significant public figures whose opinions mattered. Mayer was consulted on such questions as the validity of Henry VIII's first marriage, he rejected the king's attempt to set Catherine aside, and the notorious Reuchlin affair over the use of Jewish learning. He also wrote a History of Greater Britain to advocate for the Union of England and Scotland. On more abstract political questions, Mayer took views that can be counted as moderate for the time, comparable to French thinkers like Claude de Cézels. Like Cézels, he was a monarchist, but one who thought that the monarch's power is subject to some restrictions by his subjects. Mayer was certainly not enthusiastic about the prospect of tyrannicide, stating that the toppling of the much-criticized Richard II in England was a case of frivolous rashness. Still, in extreme cases, the people do have the right to depose their monarch, since monarchial power is based on appointment by the people. He drew a typical scholastic distinction here, explaining that the ruler is normally, in Latin, regularità, in authority over the subjects, but the people retain a dispositional, habitualità, authority. His views on church government were similar. The Pope, like the king, is an instrument by which the community secures its own welfare, but in spiritual instead of temporal affairs. As far as I know, no historian has ever thought to compare John Mayer to Marjorie Kemp, which is understandable enough. Mayer lived a few generations later and had almost nothing in common with her, except this. Both of them seemed to fit a late medieval rather than Renaissance context. Even if Mayer was ahead of his time on occasion, as when he pioneered casuistic methods and ethics, his writings on logic and other topics would, for the most part, have been immediately recognizable to 14th century schoolmen. Many of the ideas I just mentioned appear in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which had, for centuries, been the standard occasion for theological discussion. It was this commentary that prompted Melanchthon's damning assessment, actually. His circle was already feeling the pressure of such criticisms. David Cranston began his own commentary on the same work with a dialogue where two speakers debate the value of scholasticism. Cranston distances himself from time-wasting technicalities, but emphasizes that, often, legitimate theological concerns do call for sophisticated and advanced reflection. Given the cultural forces arrayed against this approach, though, it could easily have died out, and John Mayer has sometimes been called the last scholastic. But he really wasn't. Certainly, there were cultural developments on the horizon that would pose a challenge to the approach taken by Mayer, which was both traditional and demanding in its technical sophistication. The religious and intellectual upheavals of the 1520s and 1530s looked like they would render that approach obsolete. As we can see from evidence like a list of books for sale in Cambridge around 1530, British thinkers were barely consulted, while humanists like Rudolf Agricola, Lefebvre de Tapst, and Philipp Melanchthon were flying off the shelves. Still, a couple of significant English publications came in the middle of the century, demonstrating that a need was still felt for at least introductory Texan-Aristotelian logic. In 1545, the Dialectic of John Seton provided just that, while also integrating material from the rhetorical tradition so beloved of humanists from authors like Cicero and Agricola. Then, in 1551, Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason broke new ground by presenting the basics of scholastic logic in English. Wilson described his project as follows, I have assayed through my diligence to make logic as familiar to the Englishman as by diverse men's industries the most part of the other liberal sciences are. In terms of its content, the Rule of Reason was hardly innovative. The material covered is pretty much what was taught by professors of Aristotelian logic in 5th century Alexandria, 10th century Baghdad, or 13th century Paris. But Wilson's approach is unusually engaging. In Aristotelian dialectic, argument forms are called topics, which literally means places, from the Greek topos. So Wilson compares devising arguments to hunters looking for signs that might point to rabbits or foxes. He also shows how to apply logical tools by giving an extended example on the question of whether priests should be allowed to marry. More entertaining still, though unintentionally so, is Ralph Levers' 1573 work, The Art of Reason, which is again distinguished not so much for its content as its delivery. Levers tried to crowbar properly English terminology into Aristotelian logic, proposing such novel vocabulary as backset, say-what, foresay, and end-say to mean respectively predicate, definition, premise, and conclusion. But English authors were going to have to do more than come up with amusing neologisms to save Aristotelianism from irrelevance. Charles Schmitt has written that by 1565, medieval logic had virtually disappeared, humanist rhetoric had won the day, the cultivation of Greek had advanced on a broad front, and the medieval mainstays of natural philosophy and metaphysics had retreated from the central place they had once held in university curricula. Yet Schmitt made this remark to set the context for what he calls a second wind for scholasticism in the late Tudor period. The central figure who justifies this claim is John Case, who was starting out on his undergraduate degree at that same time, the mid-1560s. He would devote his energies to many of the same fields that Mayer and his colleagues had pursued a few generations earlier. Case held the line against the methods of Peter Rames, which were in danger of seducing the students of the English universities into a simplified and anti-Aristotelian approach to philosophy. Against this, Case proposed a simplified and pro-Aristotelian approach. His works were mostly introductory textbooks and expositions of Aristotle's logic, practical philosophy, and natural philosophy. This material was not demanding for the young readership Case had in mind, but it drew on his deep expertise and reading. His text on the Aristotelian physics, which bears the attention-grabbing title Philosopher's Stone, announces that it draws on no fewer than 23 earlier exegetes. His sources range from late ancient authors like Boethius to Renaissance scholars from across Europe like Zabarella down in Italy and the commentators of the Iberian Peninsula, whom we'll be learning about before long. It's especially noteworthy that he finds value in the medieval scholastics, writing at one point that, many today, when they hear the name of Thomas, immediately raise their eyebrows and purse their lips. But if these people would just read Aquinas's writings carefully, they'd discover that they are like gold that has been purified from dross. As for the greatest authority of all, he says this, since every philosophical compendium is a waste of time without Aristotle, let me put forth Aristotle as the only philosopher and leave aside the empty and wide-ranging opinions of the present time. Alongside Ramez, he aims particular invective against the novel and dangerous ideas of Machiavelli and Paracelsus. Both offer superficially appealing treatments that are in fact highly dangerous, in the case of Paracelsus to the human body, in the case of Machiavelli to the body politic. All this sounds very conservative, and perhaps it is, but Case was also a man of his time, a keen theatergoer who moved in the same circles as a man like Philip Sidney, a group who Schmitt describes as some of the most orthodox, most influential, and most highly placed figures of the period. We can tell this from the fact that Case's works included Latin verses written by his friends, some of whom similarly contributed to a memorial volume for Sidney after his untimely death. Case also cites Sidney in his discussion of marriage, which is found in his exposition of a work on household management, incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle. Case's awareness of humanist philology is shown by his discussion of its authenticity, which cites Lefebvre d'Etape in the course of rejecting the second part of the work. Given that context, Case's views are downright romantic. He insists that one should marry for love and not advantage, and that it is good for a husband to think his own wife the wisest, justest, and most beautiful, most greatly to be feared and venerated, even if she is not so. Though he admits, following Aristotle, that women are in general inferior to men, it is not wrong for a man to think that his wife is better than him, if only because it spurs him on to virtue so as to win her esteem and respect. A dimension of Case's thought that is apt to strike us as less convincing is his enthusiasm for what are sometimes called the occult sciences, alchemy and astrology. Not for nothing did he write a work called Philosopher's Stone and compare Aquinas' thought to gold purified from mixture with base metal. He argues that natural ends can be achieved by artificial means, as when the doctor restores health, the alchemist produces gold, or the sorcerer summons storms, a comment that irresistibly brings to mind Shakespeare's Tempest. Such things as magical talismans and astrological predictions are, he says, not tricks, nor are they deceptions of the demons, but truly natural things, as Plato and Plotinus hold. After our discussion of witchcraft, we can well understand why he is at pains here to distinguish natural magic from the sort that involves demonic aid. Case may have been a serious Aristotelian and trained scholastic, but that did not stop him from sharing the magical beliefs of his contemporaries. To the contrary, as far as he was concerned, the two sides of his thought fit together perfectly. And the same is even more true for the thinker we'll be exploring in a few weeks, yet another John, namely John Dee, without a doubt the most major case of philosophy being fused with the occult in Elizabethan England. But first I want to take a step back and use this opportunity to consider the survival and evolution of scholastic philosophy from the late medieval to the early modern period. For that purpose, I'll be joined by Calvin Normore next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about scholasticism from the medieval to the early modern era with Calvin Normore, who is professor of philosophy at UCLA. Hey, Calvin. Hi, Peter. Well, we're going to talk about scholasticism, and this is a broad and long running phenomenon. And I thought actually, we could start by talking about how long running it is. People think of it as going back to maybe the 12th century, like the time of the Abelard, or maybe even further to a character like Anselm. But maybe let's not worry too much about where it starts. Let's think about how long it lasts. How long do you see scholasticism as being a significant force in European philosophy? Well, I actually think it is still a significant force. So let me explain a little bit about why. So the way I think of scholasticism is that it's a way of doing philosophy. It's a way of doing philosophy by commentary on a set curriculum of texts. Right? So, and I think it probably actually began in antiquity. People say, for example, that Porphyry proposed a curriculum that began with Aristotle and had in its higher reaches, the Divine Plato. And I don't really know whether it was the universal custom in the schools at that point to proceed by having the students work on the texts and the teachers write commentaries on them, but I suspect it was. And so by the time you get to Anselm, it's well established that commenting on texts is a way of doing it. But Anselm himself, for example, doesn't do that. And really, Abelard does. And you're right that I think in the 12th century, people began to think of this as the way of doing philosophy rather than just a way of doing philosophy. And of course, once the universities get going, by say the middle of the 13th century, there's a set curriculum, which involves the texts of Aristotle, beginning with logic, continuing sometimes with physics, sometimes with stuff on the soul, but always treating one of those and then the other, and then finally metaphysics. And the texts are taken from Aristotle. And so the way that a teacher would proceed is by lecturing on the texts by commenting on them. And that developed its own way of proceeding too, because the custom came to be to look for particular questions that you could take up that were suggested by the text. So I think this really continued well into the 17th century as a normal way of proceeding, even into the 18th. And we do it too. So for example, when I teach, I often have a syllabus, which is a set of texts, and I comment on them and raise questions and so on. So we really are, for the most part, scholastic. Now in the 17th century, of course, we saw something else. And in parts of the 20th and 21st century, too, where people who weren't lecturing on said texts would write essays or books or treatises and so on. And they weren't commenting on anything. So they weren't doing scholastic philosophy. But in the universities, I think it probably never really died and is still with us. I like that idea of scholasticism as a way of doing philosophy. Because something I've thought about a little bit is that in other traditions, for example, in the Islamic world, but I think you could say the same thing about India. There's a very similar pattern where a certain body of text becomes like the standard set of texts, that kind of canon or the basis of a curriculum. And then philosophy gets done by commenting on it. And it might be Avicenna or it might be, you know, Buddhist literature or Vedic texts of various kinds in India. But I think you're definitely right that scholasticism is a mode of philosophy, which doesn't need to be tied to any particular historical context. I think that's a really insightful way of thinking about it. Let me ask you something about something you actually just said, which is that they start with logic, at least in the medieval period, the scholastic project starts with logic. So at least the students are starting to study logic, and they're doing this as teenagers. Sometimes that's all they do, right? They leave the university before getting on to the other topics. And so this is a really core part of the scholastic projects in the period we've been looking at, the medieval period up to the 16th century. Would you think that this is an area where much progress was made after say the 14th century, like in say 15th, 16th, 17th century? Are they actually getting anywhere in terms of thinking about logic and Aristotelian logic? Or are they just retreading what's been achieved by the end of the high scholastic period? Well, I think the first thing we have to keep in mind is that what they meant by logic is broader than what we mean by it. I mean, so if you look, for example, at Isidore of Seville's kind of encyclopedic etymologies in the sixth century, he goes back and forth between dialectic and logic. And dialectic, of course, I mean, the very word itself suggests some kind of interchange with people in a way that logic from Logos doesn't. So they, I think, had this broader conception of logic. And that meant that what we call philosophy of language is often part of what they would treat as logic. The way I see this history goes something like this. Aristotle and Cicero and others had written various kinds of books. I mean, Aristotle had his analytics, and topics, and Cicero wrote topics, and there were various kinds of things like that. And so in antiquity, there were broader conceptions of logic where you dealt with various possible kinds of fallacies, and you dealt with various kinds of ways of carrying on dialogue with people, and so on. When Boethius set about translating the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, he only got as far as the early parts of Aristotle's logic and bit of Cicero, right. So that's really all that the Latin folk in the Middle Ages had, right up until probably nearly the 12th century anyway, when they finally did get things like, as you said, bits of Avicenna, and they got bits of Aristotle. So that shaped the picture early on, the fact that they only had these texts. But then something happens, and I don't know when it happens, I suspect the 12th century, but I don't know. And that is this, if you look at Aristotle's logical work, he has a term logic, right, his so-called syllogistic, he does not have what we think of as a propositional logic. But the Stoics did. And in the 12th century, you begin to get marriages of Aristotelian syllogistic and Stoic logic. Perhaps it was a lot earlier, but I know it best from the 12th century. And so what you begin to get at that point is a new expansion beyond anything Aristotle had done, that looks rather familiar to us. Now, Abelard, for all of his genius, really tried to do this, but he also tried to develop an account of what validity was, which is more like what people nowadays think of as relevance logic. That is, in order for an argument to be valid, there had to be a deep semantic connection between the premises and the conclusion, not merely that it was impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. And a man about whom we know relatively little, Albrecht of Rheims, showed that Abelard's development of this was inconsistent. And so suddenly, you began to get a new way of thinking about logic, what we now think of as classical logic, right? The propositional calculus that we have now would have been completely familiar, I think, to an early 13th century person if they learned the symbolism. Okay, so that went on, as you say, into the 14th century. And what's more, people began to develop new techniques. They developed what we call a theory of consequences, which is a theory of something of kinds of inference that you can't capture in syllogistics. But it all happened against this background of the fact that Abelard's relevance logic had been proved inconsistent. And so we were now looking at a kind of validity that we would find very familiar. At the end of the 13th century, the way I see it, people began to try to go back to stronger conceptions of validity that required a tighter connection between the conclusion and the premises. And slowly, slowly, slowly, they began then to re-emphasize Aristotelian syllogistics. So many of the technical developments that you'd find in the 14th centuries started to go by the wayside. But this conception of validity, and the notions, for example, of formal validity versus some kind of semantic validity and so on, those were developed. And I think they continued to be developed for some time after the 14th century. But the other thing that happened, going back to this thought that logic was a much broader subject for them, was a new emphasis on discovery. So Cicero, for example, had been interested in how you might come up with arguments, not just how you might evaluate them. And Aristotle in the topics had the same idea. And so what you find in the 15th and 16th centuries is not really the development of what we would now call logic, but the development of a kind of theory of discovery. People call it method. And so you find in people like Zabarella and Ramus and so on, an emphasis on this kind of method. And that continues well into the 17th century. So in that area, I think there's new development, but not in what we would now call logic. Is that an influence from the humanist tradition? Because in rhetoric, they would have been very interested in the project of finding arguments, and so they naturally came to be interested in the problem of discovery. Yeah, I think there was a real influence there from rhetoric. And in a way, the new emphasis on what Cicero was doing fit that perfectly. I think you're right. Maybe we can just say a little bit more about that very interesting idea you mentioned about, as you put it, how tight the connection in the logical inference needs to be. Because I think that's really interesting. So I just want to make sure that listeners understand what we're talking about. It's the idea that you could have an inference like, if 2 plus 2 equals 4, then brown is a color. But 2 plus 2 is equal to 4, therefore brown is a color. So if all you're interested in is something like truth preservation, like if the premises are true and it's valid, then you get a nice argument, then it's okay. But someone who was more interested in relevance will say, well, that's not really a good inference because 2 plus 2 being equal to 4 doesn't have anything to do with whether or not brown is a color. Is that basically the idea? Yeah, that's right. And if you look at Aristotle's syllogistic, all of the valid inferences in that have a real connection between the meanings of the terms in the premises and the meanings of the terms in the conclusion. And if you insist that you have that sort of connection, then you give up, for example, the idea that from an impossibility, anything follows, or that what's necessary just follows from anything, right? And so when Albrecht of Rheims showed that Abelard's picture was inconsistent, people began to hunt around for a conception of validity. And I think they did settle upon the one that we now use, namely that an argument is valid if it's truth preserving in the sense that it's impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. Now, what I think happened at the end of the 14th century in particular is that people began to think, as you were just suggesting, that somehow that's not a good argument. I mean, just by simply proposing something that turns out to be impossible and discovering that, well, then if that were true, anything would be true. You haven't established anything of philosophical or any other interest. And so they began to look for these tighter connections of validity and to give up some of the ideas that had been circulating earlier. It really gets at the question of what logic even is, right? Because you think relevance is important, then you're sticking with this ancient idea that logic is the so-called instrument or organon of philosophy. So it's really for something to be put to use in real philosophical reasoning or other kinds of reasoning. Whereas if you think it's merely about truth preservation, then it becomes almost more like mathematics, like in a formal system, right? Yeah, I mean, of course, most of the cases in which you're going to preserve truth probably will turn out to be cases in which there's some kind of semantic or formal connection. One of the things that appears probably for the first time in the late 12th, early 13th century is a clear conception of logical form. That is the idea that you're looking at the syntax of an argument to see whether or not it's a good argument. Of course, that had been present earlier, but not the reflection on it, as I think had not been present earlier. And so what we now call formal logic, for example, which depends on this idea that there's a form to the argument, I think that is probably a late 12th or early 13th century development. People point to people like Robert Kilwerby. And that, of course, is an idea that gets developed much once we see a connection between mathematics and logic, which they didn't really emphasize at all. Yeah, I mean, the only reason in this period where they might be comparable is that they're both, so to speak, formal systems. Yeah. Well, formal in our sense, right? I mean, they didn't think of it, I think, as in that way formal. They did look to see which arguments would be, say, by the late 13th century, certainly, even by the early 13th century, they were looking to see which arguments were good arguments in virtue of their form. But they never developed a kind of reflective theory of formal argument, the way that you find in, say, late 19th century, 20th century logics. By the way, let me just mention that one of my favorite examples of this dispute, which goes back to antiquity, is that the Stoics observed that it's a good rule of logic that if P, then P. Yeah. So everything applies itself. And then the Aristotelian said, well, that's not useful, so we don't need that. Right? Right. But here's an even more interesting one, actually. If P, then if not P, then P. Or if not P, then P, then P. Right? Look at that one. If not P, then P, then P. That's a theorem of contemporary logics. Whether they would have thought it a good argument is a good question. Okay, so you've just given us quite a magisterial picture of logic over something like 1000 years. So it seems almost greedy to ask for more, but I'm going to do it anyway. Where would be other areas of philosophy where the moves that they're making in logic have some kind of consequences? Because I'm sort of imagining, okay, they're starting off all of these university students with logic. And then presumably, they keep referring back to logic when they reach, you know, natural philosophy or epistemology or theory of the solar metaphysics, or even theology. How do you think that their moves in logic then feed into other areas of philosophy? Sorry, that's a big question. One way that it does is what we would now think of as thinking about critical thinking, i.e. somebody proposes an argument to you. And now you have to evaluate the argument, is it a good argument? And of course, this can happen in epistemology, metaphysics, theology, right? And so if you've got that kind of training, which they all had in their first year of university study, then you can hone in on this question, right? You can look to see, okay, what am I committed to, if I accept the premises that that went forward. And so what you find is a kind of clarity of argumentative structure that I think you don't find often later when people start to write essays, where they don't have to explain in any detail why the argument works, right? So that's one thing. I mean, the methods that were used in other areas tended to be more technical in the sense that a master would say propose an argument and don't have to try to show you how the argument actually worked. But there's also a kind of situations in which there were very puzzling issues that came up, particularly in theology, which had to be evaluated logically. One of the classic cases is whether, for example, in Christian Trinitarian theology, the Latin Church held that the Holy Spirit was in some sense issued from both the Father and the Son, whereas the Greek Church held no, just from the Father. And so now the question was, if one adopted, say, the Greek position, if we're one of Latin, well, the Greek position from the Latin perspective was impossible. That is the antecedent, you know, the Holy Spirit descends from the Father alone, would have been regarded as an impossibility. So now the question is, what would follow? And this, of course, was important if you were trying to reconcile the churches. So one of the things that happened was that people developed these disputational techniques, which they called obligaziones, where what you would do is you would accept a premise and a two person situation, the respondent would accept a premise. And the opponent would try to show that if you accepted that premise, you would be led to a contradiction or an absurdity. And so you'd have these dialectical games, people think of them as games, but sometimes they were much more than that, in which people would try to work out what the consequences of accepting these premises would be, even if they themselves had no interest in the premises, just to see how this worked. And in theology, of course, this played an important role. And this provided also a kind of training, which then got reflected in other sorts of philosophy. Right. So part of the training here is, let's assume what my opponent believes, which is false. And now I see what follows from it. And maybe I can show that something else follows from it that even my opponent would think is false. And that's how I'd refute them with what's called modus tollens. Exactly. Yeah. So that seems to push in the direction of saying that logic is important for them in other areas, primarily because of method. I mean, that definitely seems right. So what you were saying about essays, I mean, someone we covered recently in the podcast, fairly recently, is Montaigne. He would be the ultimate example of someone who does not write like a scholastic, right? He's sort of wandering around musing, sort of sharing whatever ideas have come to his mind. And if you tried to press him and say, well, can you explain to me exactly how the argumentative structure is supposed to work that you were using? He would probably just laugh at you. And in general, we sort of think that humanists like this kind of meandering musing style, maybe even in Erasmus, it's true. And they then say that the scholastics are being pedantic, because they're so fixated on valid argument structure. But I guess it follows from what you're saying that, in some ways, philosophically, we should think that the scholastics are onto something, right? Because it's really good to know what follows from what you're assuming, right? Yeah. So one of the things that I think happens with the curricular shifts at the end of the 16th and early 17th centuries, is that there's a shift of interest. So remember, in the scholastic period, what you're doing is commenting on a set body of text, you're really trying to understand how that text works and what its consequences are. You're not trying to discover new things that go well beyond anything in the text. That's not part of the project. I mean, there may be people doing that, but they're not doing it in the universities as part of the project. So once you get this idea that, well, yeah, that's all well and good, yes, we can evaluate, but we don't really care deeply about these texts anymore. What we care about is exploring something else, right? And we don't have any reason to think the texts are closely connected with it. Then what you get is an emphasis not on tight argumentative structure, but on exploratory essays and things of that kind. That method, as you were saying, then becomes important. Is there a way that we can reason which will give us new discoveries, you know, beyond anything we've thought of before that becomes important and less important than to really grasp the structure of the argument that you've got and to check it to see if it actually is a good one. Yeah, something else I think might have played a role is that in Aristotle, the criteria for knowledge in the strict and proper sense, which are laid out in the posterior analytics, are so ambitious. We've talked about this in other episodes, you have to have necessary universal propositions as your premises. And that's just a very tall order, right? It is a tall order, yeah. In the medieval period, people also in Arabic, by the way, but in the Latin tradition, sticking with that, it seems that people started to have doubts about whether that was ever going to be satisfiable, or certainly whether it could be satisfied in most cases. So you start retrenching to some kind of lower standard of knowledge or lower standard of demonstration or proof. Of course, that gone hand in hand with this interest in rhetoric, you know, merely convincing arguments, or just set of explorations of the topic. Yeah. And so you find, for example, in Descartes, the idea that if you can come up with a hypothesis that explains the phenomena that you've got in front of you, you're finished. The fact that somebody might propose an alternative hypothesis is not important. So that's this idea that we're looking for an explanation. We're not looking for the best possible explanation. Now in the background, there might be some assumption that if you can get an explanation, it's the only possible one or something. But certainly they don't actually present it that way. So both Descartes and Hobbes make this move that let's try to find a hypothesis that will explain some phenomena that we're dealing with. And that's our task. From a scholastic perspective, that's not the task, right? We're not looking for an hypothesis to explain something. We're looking for what must follow, given that you've accepted certain premises. And that is because, as you say, the test of knowledge is necessity. That's the criteria that you're looking for. And also the scholastics think that what you're trying to do is investigate essences. Yeah. It goes together with this idea about necessity. By the late 17th century, you find people denying that you get any grip on essences. Is that also connected to something else that people often connect to early modern philosophy, the scientific method? Because the scientific method, I mean, we'll be talking about this a lot in episodes to come, but one thing you can say about it is that you're just trying to see whether a hypothesis fits with a certain set of observations, right? And so that's a lot like what you were just saying, like, well, my hypothesis is compatible with what I'm seeing. But I haven't ruled out that there's any other hypothesis that could be compatible with the same observations. Yep. And so you begin to get something you again, don't get in, say, the period from the 12th to the late 15th century, very much, which is a question of how you would adjudicate between hypotheses that apparently account for the same phenomena. This shift, as you say, in the standard of knowledge, right, the abandonment of the idea that we can have an absolute certainty based on a necessity, I think might be a significant move. Some of the examples we've just mentioned are kind of familiar in the sense that we have people like Descartes or Hobbes moving away from a scholastic approach. And of course, they're famous for polemicizing against scholasticism and saying this is all a waste of time. But on the other hand, people like Descartes were trained in a scholastic setting. I mean, not just Descartes, but in general, like many early modern philosophers either were trained at universities, or, you know, Jesuit academies or whatever, or they at least knew quite a lot about scholastic literature. So are there more kind of positive legacies or influences from scholasticism within early modern philosophy that you would pick out? Most of the philosophical views that people articulate would have been relatively familiar to earlier thinkers. It's not as though people abandoned the whole framework. And the controversies often revolved around ideas that had come up already, say, in the 13th, 14th centuries, you know, you get debates about, say, whether or not goal-directed reasoning can be reduced to what we would now call causal reasoning, the technical vocabulary, whether or not final causes can be reduced to efficient causes. You get debates about whether you can explain things just in terms of matter, or whether you need to do it in terms of matter and structure, i.e. matter and form. So all of that is still very much there. I don't detect a kind of complete reversal or complete abandonment of the framework that people had used in earlier times. The methodology has begun to shift, and slowly, slowly, new ideas are, of course, being introduced. But it's not like it's a tsunami. I mean, as you say, all these folk were trained inside scholastic institutions, and it left its mark on the wall. They tended to pick up one piece of what they learned and go with it and expand it beyond what anyone had done before, leaving other things behind. But it was one piece of what they learned. Going back full circle to where we started, you mentioned that in a way, people who study philosophy now are still doing it in the scholastic way, right? There's a curriculum, you are trained on that curriculum, you're supposed to learn to comment on it critically, and so on. And so in a sense, scholasticism is still with us. In terms of the substantive teachings of the scholastics, it's not like most 21st century philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about medieval or early modern scholasticism. No. Do you think that this stuff has become kind of merely antiquarian interests? Or is it something that's really rewarding for us philosophically still? Well, my own view about this is that to understand a concept, you have to understand how it came to be the way it is. And many of our contested concepts are concepts with complicated histories. And that's why they're contested. Notions like the self, for example, or person, or even matter, what would count for something to be physical, all these are concepts that we don't really have a univocal picture of. And it's because they depend upon an earlier history. So to the extent that we're really going to get to understand them, we, I think, need to understand how they came to be that way. And that means understanding their history, and a good deal of that history was shaped in the period that we've been talking about. Okay, so speaking of the period that we've been talking about, I'm going to obviously continue looking at it. In the next few episodes, which are really the last ones left in this mini-series on British Renaissance philosophy and thought, we are going to be looking at science, which is something that just came up in this conversation. We're going to be talking about topics like magnetism, and optics, and astronomy. So that'll be pretty interesting. We're actually starting with someone who had a lot to say about astronomy, but also some other things, namely John Dee, very interesting and kind of partially scandalous figure. So that'll be a fun episode. But for now, I'll thank Calvin Normor very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Peter. I look forward to hearing all those others as well. Thank you. Thanks. Okay, so along with Calvin, please join me for the next episode on John Dee, here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, If This Be Magic, Let It Be an Art, John D. I suppose that most of you out there are listening to this because you are interested in philosophy, in history, or both. But there might just be a few who follow the podcast in hopes of getting inspiration for a new movie script. If you're one of that select group, then today's episode is for you, because our subject is the mathematician, alchemist, astrologer, magician, and philosopher, John D. Amazingly, his life has never been made into a film, though there is a documentary about him, and he has a walk-on role in that movie where Cate Blanchett played Queen Elizabeth. Yet the Hollywood pitch almost writes itself. Here we have a man who met or communicated with many of the most significant figures of the Elizabethan age, like Philip Sidney, Peter Rames, Thomas Harriot, and the Queen herself. D was involved in Martin Frobisher's catastrophic attempt to find a Northwest passage to circumnavigate the globe. He invented the concept of a British empire. He produced horoscopes for the rich and powerful, and consulted with Elizabeth about astrology. Before she came to the throne under Queen Mary, he had been arrested for magic, but before long, hey presto, he was working for the Catholic government, helping interrogate other suspects. But he might have been a Protestant spy. He traveled across Europe, going as far as Poland, where he might have been a spy, again. Sorcery, exploration, intrigue, this story has it all, and I haven't even mentioned the fact that Angels gave him rather scandalous advice about his sex life. But, this podcast is not a sensationalist Hollywood movie. What follows will, of course, be a sober, nuanced discussion of D's thought, which will just happen to include sorcery, exploration, intrigue, and angelic, or possibly demonic, advice about sex. In fact, to forestall any accusations that my approach here will be in any way prurient, let's talk about the aspect of his career I personally find most exciting, his library. You may think I'm kidding, and that's because I am, but let me tell you, this was some library. It has been estimated to be the largest collection in the country at the time, with no fewer than 8,000 printed books and 1,000 manuscripts. It had many books on philosophy, from Aristotle and Plato to the Neoplatonists and the Pseudo-Dionysius, as well as Renaissance Platonists like Ficino. Science and mathematics were well represented, from Euclid to Paracelsus. In fact, D had more than 100 Paracelsan works, probably the largest number in England. Of course, he had books about alchemy and magic by authors like Trithemius and Cornelius Agrippa. There were many works on history, too, another of D's interests. As the Renaissance scholar Francis Yates once remarked, the whole Renaissance is in this library. Unfortunately, this wonderful collection does not survive complete today, as it was eventually ransacked while D was off in central Europe. But some volumes do survive, and D's annotations in these provide useful insight into his thought. The scope of the full original library is known through a catalogue that D himself had made. Many works were included multiple times, sometimes in different editions, Aristotle's treatises, for example, or Plato's Timaeus, of which he had four copies. This would have allowed philological work on the text, and also facilitated lending or resale. Euclid's Elements, a work of special interest to him, was represented in the library with no fewer than 20 printed copies and seven manuscripts. Alongside the annotations, another sign that these books were for use and not for show is that many of the books were unbound. The classification system, such as it was, would have meant that visitors needed D's help finding what they wanted. For example, books were partially arranged by size, in some cases arranged vertically along the shelf, and others piled up in stacks. But D did want visitors to use the books. He called his house at Morton Lake, not far from London, a hospice for wandering philosophers, and hosted and communicated with a wide variety of scholars. These included the aforementioned Ramus, Harriet, and Sidney. Sidney studied with D, whom he called our unknown god, and we have a horoscope that D cast for him. The connection to Ramus, with whom D corresponded about mathematics, suggests European connections, and this is not misleading. First educated at Cambridge, D went to Levan, where he met the scientist and doctor Gemma Frisios. Here too was Gerard Mercator, a significant figure in the history of cartography. He's the namesake of the style of world map called the Mercator projection. I mentioned this not just to convey the range of D's contacts, but because it foreshadows D's own later work on navigation, which was surely in part inspired by his time in Levan. He then made his way to Paris, where he lectured on Euclid with such success that, according to his own report at least, students were leaning through the windows from the outside to hear him. It was D's reputation as an expert in the mathematical sciences that won him access to the world of Elizabeth's court. Maintaining a large household which doubled as a workshop for natural philosophy, with instruments like mirrors and clocks as well as books, D was in constant need of money and patronage, which he sought from figures like Francis Walsingham and Elizabeth herself. We should also spare a thought for his long-suffering wife, Jane, who had to keep that household running with a constant stream of noble, learned, and, as we'll see shortly, deeply problematic guests. This is what it looked like to establish a late 16th century research institute like Tycho Brahe's Oraniborg, but without access to independent funds, like Brahe enjoyed. But D was not only trying to raise funds, he was also trying to influence policy. It was in this context that he proposed to the queen the notion of a British empire to compete with the international reach of Spain and Portugal. In a four-volume work called General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, which, like his beloved library, survives only partially, D used his historical researches to support claims of royal entitlement to part of the New World. He pointed to fanciful stories about supposed British explorations from the distant past, like the Welsh king Madoc, who supposedly beat Columbus to America by 300 years. Actually, since quite a bit of D's thought looks rather fanciful to us today, and since this is what he tends to be remembered for, I think I should emphasize that he really did deserve his reputation for expertise in mathematics. He valued this discipline in part for its theoretical status, as we can see from one of his most well-known texts, the mathematical preface to an English translation of Euclid's Elements. Here he promises, I will frame my talk to Plato his fugitive scholars, or rather to such who can well use their outward senses. This is a doubly revealing passage. It shows his commitment to Platonism, in particular a Platonist approach to the mathematical disciplines, which are seen as offering an intermediate step between the physical and spiritual worlds. As D puts it, mathematical objects have a marvelous neutrality and strange participation between things supernatural, immortal, intellectual, simple, and indivisible, and things natural, mortal, compounded, and divisible. On the other hand, D's reference to the outward senses is telling because the preface also lays great stress on the role of empirical work in science. In keeping with this, D was keenly interested in applied as well as pure mathematics. This showed itself from the very beginning of his career. As a student at Cambridge, he deployed his knowledge of mechanics to build an animated scarab that featured in a student production of a play by Aristophanes. Later, he would impress Elizabeth by showing her a trick mirror. A mere novelty, perhaps, but one that shows how competence in optics could be used to win over a potential patron. And it doesn't get more practical than that. The same combination of theoretical and applied interest can be found in Thomas Digis, whom D trained as a mathematician after Digis's father died while Digis was still young. Digis called D his mathematical father and enthusiastically embraced the family business. He wrote on theoretical mathematics, as in a 1571 treatise on the platonic solids, which castigates those who cannot appreciate such discussions as two-footed moles and toads, whom destiny and nature hath ordained to crawl within the earth and suck upon the muck. On the practical side, he advised on engineering projects and a military expedition to the Netherlands in 1585. The newly emerging discipline of artillery ballistics could benefit from the expertise of such a man. And so could the would-be imperial project of navigation. D envisioned a discipline he called hydrography, which would chart the tides, coastlines, and dangers that could befall mariners upon the seas. Waxing enthusiastic, as usual, he said that his discussion of the principles of this art aimed to stir the imagination mathematical and to inform the practice mechanical. But for navigation, the most important discipline was again a mathematical one, namely astronomy. So it was D's knowledge of the heavens and their use in navigation that got him involved in the attempt to find the Northwest Passage. This was a failure, as you probably know. Frobisher returned with no news of the hoped-for passage, though he did have a kidnapped Inuit man and plenty of mineral ore. D was appointed Privy Council as a commissioner for the assaying of ore from the Northwest, which sounds good until I tell you that the ore contained almost no precious metal. His name suffered by association with the debacle, but the story should not take away from D's standing as an astronomer. For example, both he and Digas wrote treatises about the comet, or new star, of 1577. Though these were independent texts, they were often published bound together. In these writings, the two men explored the phenomenon of parallax, which we talked about when looking at Copernican and post-Copernican astronomy in central Europe. While they had a shared understanding of the mathematics involved, their interests in the topic were strikingly different. Digas was among the first Englishmen, if not the first, to lend explicit support to Copernicus's heliocentrism. For him, the comet was interesting because it proved that the heavens beyond the moon were not unchanging, as claimed by Aristotelian cosmology. As he wrote, echoing D's link between mathematics and Plato, whoever wears these platonic, or to use a more accurate expression, mathematical wings, and heads upwards into the ethereal realm, leaving behind entirely the elemental regions, will see that the new star is much further away. But for D, parallax was of interest because it can be used to measure the distance of astronomical bodies in general, including the usual planets. And here we come to the parts of his natural philosophy that may seem more fanciful, because planetary distance was important to D in the context of astrology. As you know, astronomy and astrology had been closely associated since antiquity, and that was certainly still the case in D's work. It was because of, not in spite of, his astronomical expertise that he was called on to suggest the most favorable date for Elizabeth's coronation, and later on to reassure the government that the new star was not a sign of impending catastrophe. Oddly, that Cate Blanchett movie depicts D delivering precisely the opposite message to Elizabeth, which might sound like a pedantic complaint, but it's worth knowing that D invoked science to argue for an optimistic, expansionist, and militaristic British foreign policy, lining him with the more hawkish members of Elizabeth's circle. But let's get back to astrology and the reason D was interested in planetary distance. Like other astrologers, he believed that the stars have an influence on earthly bodies and events. Unlike other astrologers, he believed that precise calculations needed to be made concerning the distance of the stars from the surface of the Earth. This would introduce a considerable complicating factor, since typically a document like a horoscope would only register the observed position of the stars in the sky, not worrying about how far away they are. D had a theoretical reason for insisting on this, namely that he believed astral influence to be conveyed along rays that connect the stars to that which lies below them. The influence is stronger when the star spends a longer time above the affected place, strikes the place along a line that is closer to the perpendicular, and crucially, is nearer to the Earth in terms of height. Here, D was actually drawing on a range of medieval texts, notably Robert Grossetest, Roger Bacon, and a Latin work called On Rays, which presents itself as the translation of a treatise by the Muslim philosopher Akindi. But D's writings on astrology are paradigmatic of Renaissance science. We can see this from one of his most important treatises, even though it is certainly not one that is easy to understand, the Monas Hieroglyphica, published in 1564. It takes its name from a symbol, the monas, which combines several shapes that represent astrological signs and the four elements. In so doing, it captures in a single image, or as D puts it, teaches without words, the central claim of the work, which is that the celestial world above is powerfully connected to the elemental world below. You might remember that Tycho Brahe called alchemy terrestrial astronomy, and D made exactly the same point, saying that celestial astronomy is like a parent and teacher to inferior astronomy, meaning alchemy. There are resonances with parasalsis too, as in the following typical example of the numerology found in the monas. Speaking of the letter X, D observes that it is the 21st letter of the Latin alphabet, and graphically consists of four intersecting lines which represent the four elements. His further analysis invokes the three alchemical principles from parasalsis and the seven metals recognized in alchemy. You probably won't be surprised to hear that D also speaks of his enterprise as a kind of kabbalah, albeit that he distances himself from both Jewish kabbalah, which he saw as a mere exploration of the Hebrew language, and the Christian appropriation of that tradition as we've seen it in figures like Pico della Miranda. As we also might expect from D, the astrological and alchemical science is more purely mathematical. What he's really after is something like a mathematical language for describing the web of causal relations between the higher and lower realms. Also typical are his grand claims for the possibilities open to someone who masters that language. Just as one can use knowledge of optics to manipulate light with mirrors, so the scientist can manipulate elemental bodies by understanding and manipulating astral rays, so as to imprint the rays of any star much more strongly upon any matter subjected to it than nature itself does. As I say, this is all to some extent familiar from other Renaissance scientists, mathematicians, and Platonists we've discussed before, like Pico, Ficino, Agrippa, and Paracelsus, all of whom were, as we've seen, available to D right there on the shelves of his library. But what comes next is going to sound more extravagant. As we can see from his book catalog, D had a long-standing interest in angels. For example, he consulted the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius, which included a treatise called The Celestial Hierarchy, an application of Neoplatonic metaphysics to the angelic realm, and he already speaks of contacting the angels during the time when he was writing his chief mathematical treatises. Nonetheless, we have to recognize a shift in his career, and indeed life, in the early 1580s, when he began to engage in serious consultation with so-called scryers. These were not scientists, but individuals who were, supposedly, gifted by nature with the ability to contact the angels. After initial dealings with a man named Barnabas Sol, D started to perform so-called actions with Edward Kelly. Kelly would quite literally look into a crystal ball and describe what he saw and what was said to him by the figures who appeared, while D took notes. It was in part under Kelly's influence that D abandoned England in 1584, going to central Europe to join the Polish aristocrat, Albert Laski, then on to Prague in an effort to win the support of Emperor Rudolf II. D's family suffered greatly as a result, from the lengthy travel and precarious economic situation, but the worst was still to come. We know from D's diaries that his wife Jane was often furious at the hold Kelly had over D, so one can only imagine how she felt when the following happened. Kelly told D that the angels wanted the two men to sleep with each other's wives, which they apparently went on to do. From our point of view, it's almost irresistible to see Kelly as a con man who exploited D's credulity in his desperate search to find something just as elusive as the Northwest Passage a shortcut to divine truth. But we should perhaps try to resist at least a little bit. Kelly himself sometimes warned D that they could be communicating with demons pretending to be angels, and on one occasion actually produced a book by Agrippa to point out that the so-called angels were plagiarizing from his works. This might have been just a canny strategy on Kelly's part to provoke D into reassuring him about the authenticity of the angelic revelations, or it may be that Kelly himself believed, or half-believed, that they were contacting some kind of supernatural force, and was himself uncertain about the nature of this contact. Thanks to our recent episode on Shakespeare's Macbeth and witchcraft, we are in a good position to appreciate such worries. As we learned, the 16th century was a time when belief in the possibility of communicating with spiritual beings was widespread, indeed nearly universal. Even skeptics tended to argue merely that while witchcraft is real, it is nearly impossible to prove. In this cultural context, it was not at all strange that one worry confronting D, and perhaps Kelly, was that they were unwittingly conversing with demons instead of angels. Effectively, D was worrying that he really was guilty of witchcraft, but he convinced himself otherwise, just as he convinced himself that Kelly was a genuine scryer. Both men, and apparently Jane D too, when complaining about her husband's activities, used the word kosiner, meaning a fraudster. Certainly, it was a pressing concern that the human scryer might be a kosiner. This was D's eventual verdict on his first informant, Barnabas Saul. But even worse was the possibility that the supernatural beings themselves could be kosiners. D's angelic conversations have, as you might imagine, raised questions about his place in the history of science. One reaction might be simply to lament the way that this sophisticated mathematician turned his back on serious research and succumbed to superstition. One of the leading scholars of D's thought, Nicholas Cluly, takes more or less this line. He says that Kelly drew D away from more sober scientific work, and comments, The greatest irony of D's career is that his attempts to get progressively closer to the truths of nature in fact led to a progressive distancing from nature. But as other scholars have noted, this may underestimate the extent to which interest in angels and magical practices were already on display in D's earlier career. It's not as if he was a hard-headed mathematician before he met Kelly and a wild-eyed magician afterward. Cluly himself stresses that D's intellectual ambition was always the same. He wanted to probe the depths of divine wisdom. It's just that he made a catastrophic mistake about which methods were best suited for reaching that goal. But I think that the consistency across D's career is deeper than that. It's not only that he had the same broad objective throughout, it's also that he operated with a stable theory of knowledge. This is a theory he could have found in other broadly Platonist authors of the Renaissance, like Agrippa. D shared his understanding of natural philosophy as a serious, but also a relatively low-ranking science, which studies the earthly realm of the four elements. Natural magic too has its place here. Higher up is the combined art of astronomy and astrology, and higher still is direct concourse with the divine realm. Similar methods could be used at the different levels, which is why it would have made sense to D when Kelly's angels outlined a complex language of symbols, not unlike the one explored in D's own Monos Hieroglyphica. This was supposedly a direct revelation of the original language of Adam, the first man. Through Kelly then, D could behold truths that were merely glimpsed from the perspective of the lower sciences. He said as much himself, writing to the emperor Rudolph II, I found that neither any man living nor any book I could yet meet with all was able to teach me those truths I desired and longed for. Which is why he instead chose to make intercession and prayer to the giver of wisdom and all good things. Of course, we would draw a sharp distinction between a mathematical empirical natural philosophy on the one hand, and on the other hand, talking to angels in a crystal ball. But for D, these were just lower and higher steps on the same ladder, which means that he would consider it a step down as we turn to the more conventional achievements in natural philosophy made in Renaissance Britain by men like Thomas Lineker and Thomas Harriot, which we'll be talking about next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Nature's Mystery, Science in Renaissance England. Once that movie about John Dee has been made and swept the awards season, there will be public demand for a sequel. I suggest that the next movie should not be about Thomas Harriot. Not that his life was uneventful. He went to Virginia as a scientific advisor in the retinue of Walter Raleigh, becoming one of the first Europeans to learn a Native American language, Algonquian, and also one of the first to get cancer from enjoying tobacco. He was also arrested after another patron, Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, was falsely suspected of being involved in the gunpowder plot to assassinate King James. There would be plenty of scientific achievements to present in the movie too. Harriot didn't just learn Algonquian, he devised a phonetic alphabet for recording it. He invented a groundbreaking system of mathematical notation, discovered the sign law of refraction, and made pioneering advances in the study of falling bodies and specific gravity. Harriot was also among the first to draw maps of the lunar surface and to see sunspots through a telescope. He beat Kepler to the realization that planets do not orbit in perfect circles. He was, in short, something of a one-man scientific revolution. The problem is just that such a movie project would shower on Harriot, the one thing he seemed most determined to avoid, publicity. Having made so many incredible discoveries, the sort of breakthroughs that would shortly be putting the light into enlightenment and transforming European history forever, he discussed them with a few close associates, wrote them down in manuscripts, put these in a drawer, and left it at that. His friend, William Lower, chided him for letting others claim credit for discoveries he had made earlier, including, according to Lower, the non-circular paths of the planets. This has ensured that his name is not a household one, at least not in my household. Before I came across him as the author of a report on the colony established at Virginia, I had never heard of him. Specialists on the history of science know better. They have been equally amazed by his prodigious mind and his failure to share its fruits with the world, and have discussed both at length. His decision not to publish has been given several explanations. Enjoying patronage as he did, he had no need to attract attention by making splashy announcements about his latest findings, and he had good reason to avoid notoriety as a target of rumors of atheism and then as collateral damage when his patron, Northumberland, was accused of conspiracy. But my favorite explanation is that it would simply have been very difficult to print his writings. They were full of diagrams and page after page of algebraic notations, more like a modern math textbook than the works of scientific prose produced by humanists only a few decades before. Indeed, we can better appreciate the achievements of Harriot and his peers at the end of the 16th century if we look back to the way science was conducted by English humanists a few decades earlier. Let's begin with a quote from Europe's most famous scholar of the early 16th century, Erasmus. In a passage I've mentioned before, one that praises Jean Colette and Thomas More, Erasmus poses the rhetorical question, what can be more acute, profound, and delicate than the judgment of Lenacre? The man being praised here was Thomas Lenacre. His major scientific contribution was to translate several works of Galen, including the philosophically significant On Temperaments and On the Natural Faculties. Lenacre was also a practicing doctor, but the editors of a collection of essays on him say in their introduction, nothing appears here on the subject of Lenacre's medical practice because nothing is known about it which would distinguish it from that of his contemporaries. So it is for his humanist philology that he is remembered today. Lenacre came by his expertise in ancient languages in the way customary for Englishmen of the time, he went to Italy. Having already begun to learn Greek at Oxford, he spent more than a decade in the cities of Florence, Rome, Padua, and Venice, and studied with the outstanding classicist Poliziano and the Byzantine emigre Demetrios Chalcocondylas. At Padua he attained a medical degree, at Venice he collaborated with the important book printer Aldus Manusius. After returning to England, he gave gifts to set up lectureships in medicine at Oxford and also served as the first president of the College of Physicians, which introduced much needed education and regulation in the field. A decade after Lenacre's death in 1524, Thomas Eliot, familiar to us as the author of the humanist political treatise Book of the Governor, published an accessible presentation of Greek medical theories called The Castle of Health. Eliot had learned about the topic from Lenacre himself and duly presented a thoroughly Galenic picture of health, its restoration, and maintenance, for example by suggesting appropriate diets for men and women of different humoral temperaments, none of which is to be sneezed at, unlike the cold you might catch if you don't eat warming foods to offset the phlegmatic mixture of your body. These humanists were making great strides in disseminating the scientific tradition of antiquity through translations, guides aimed at a popular audience, and the establishment of institutions for scientific study. But none of this looks much like the science of the 17th century, whereas Harriet's unpublished writings very much do. How can we explain this change? If I had to give a one-word answer, it would be mathematics. And if I had to give a two-word answer, it would be applied mathematics. Back in episode 361, I discussed how scholars of the Italian Renaissance lavished attention on the text of ancient mathematicians like Archimedes, Euclid, and Ptolemy, and then went on to explore concrete topics like the paths of falling bodies, timekeeping, and what we would now call a body's center of gravity. Things unfolded similarly in England, where Roger Ashen warned against the corrupting effect of focusing on pure mathematical sciences, as they sharpened men's wits over much, so they changed men's manners over sore, if they be not moderately mingled and wisely applied to some good use of life. For both pure and applied mathematics, English scholars took direct inspiration from their continental counterparts. The findings of Italian mathematicians like Regiomontanus, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Galileo were known to English scholars, and Harriet's work on algebra was based directly on the writings of the French mathematician Francois Viette. Harriet's way of symbolizing mathematical phenomena was strongly influenced by Viette, who also used letters for variables and was able to express geometrical shapes in algebraic terms. It's a long-standing cliché of historiography about early modern science that it developed outside the universities, which were still in the thrall of literally antiquated Aristotelian ideas. And I do mean long-standing. One contemporary praised the Elizabethan astronomer John Blaigrave for seeking knowledge outside the universities, commenting that, "...scholars have the books and practitioners the learning." That idea might seem to be supported by this story as I've been telling it, insofar as the mathematical exploration of nature grew out of humanism, not scholasticism. Harriet's enviable position as an independent researcher supported by Walter Raleigh and Henry Percy also fits with that narrative. Percy was dubbed the Wizard Earl for his intellectual proclivities and praised in a poem that contrasted the research he was sponsoring to the schoolmen's vulgar trodden paths. But as so often this neat story is only half true. Mathematics was a well-established subject at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. We can see this from, for example, a document written by John Everard in 1598 detailing what he had to study at Cambridge. Yes, plenty of Aristotelian philosophy, with interpreters of both ancient and recent vintage literally running the gamut from A to Z, since Everard consulted commentaries ranging from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Zabarella. But also lectures on mathematics, which were held daily. The students could take instruction from such outstanding scholars as Henry Saville, who lectured on Ptolemy's astronomical work, the Almagest, enriching his presentation with information from up-to-date authors like Copernicus. He also taught optics, mechanics, trigonometry, and the history of ancient mathematics, for which he drew on Peter Rameis. To this day, there is a professorship of astronomy at Oxford named after Saville. It seems that practically every intellectual of the period was connected to the circle around Philip Sidney, and Saville was no exception. Sidney even supplied him with letters of introduction for a trip around Europe in 1581. Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that university teaching of the quadrivium, the traditional mathematical arts, was not at its best in the Elizabethan period. True, these lectures existed, and attendance was a requirement. Fines were levied on students who failed to turn up. But all too often, this meant that reluctant students were being bored to death by lecturers who also wished they were somewhere else. A number of them even petitioned to be excused from the chore. The aforementioned Henry Saville acknowledged all this in his own lectures, ranting about lazy students, that that went over well, and stating that he at least was glad to be there and to restore dignity to the mathematical lectures. Saville also pointed out the limits of a narrowly humanist approach to scientific texts. These disciplines call for more than expertise in ancient languages, they demand a philosophical mind. On balance then, it seems fair to conclude that the universities made some contribution to scientific and mathematical knowledge in this period without being the scene of the greatest breakthroughs. We can see this from the careers of John Dee and Thomas Harriot. Dee was educated at Cambridge, Harriot at Oxford, but Dee set up an independent facility at Morton Lake, while Harriot needed no institutional setting beyond the patronage he received from Raleigh and Percy. Nor was Harriot the only scholar associated with Percy. Modern historians speak of a whole Northumberland circle gathered around him, which besides Harriot included Walter Warner, Nathaniel Torperly, Robert Hughes, and Nicholas Hill. Percy's enthusiasm for the sciences continued undimmed even after he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in the wake of the gunpowder plot. He even kept scientific instruments in his rooms there. Instrumentation was crucial to Harriot's approach, since it allowed for mathematically precise observation of nature, which is really, to use an apt term, the constant that runs through all his most significant work. His combination of empiricism with calculation is already on show during his involvement with Raleigh's colonial project. For Raleigh's sea captains, Harriot wrote up easy-to-follow instructions for the use of navigational instruments. Underscoring that this was all a matter of applied mathematics, Richard Hachtluth praised Raleigh for engaging Harriot to show how to unite theory with practice. The same habits of mind guided Harriot in his dealings with the Native Americans that the group met in Virginia. He befriended some of them and showed a talent for linguistics. During his lifetime, Harriot's only published work was his propagandistic account of this journey, The Brief and True Report of Virginia, which came out in 1590. But the evidence of his manuscripts is more extraordinary. Here we find him inventing a new alphabet that could be used to write down Algonquian language. He also wrote other things down in this alphabet, meaning that it doubles as a kind of private code. This is recognizably the same man who made advances in algebraic notation and used meticulous measurement as his chief scientific method. Canons of science are not, as a rule, effusive, so we can take it as a lavish compliment when one of them says of Harriot's work in mathematics, In some of this he is startlingly original, in other parts good, and in the rest mostly pretty competent. Though he did do work in pure mathematics, our purposes and my ability to understand what is going on are better matched to his research on areas like projectile motion and specific gravity. The study of projectiles was of military significance because cannons were now a common weapon of war. Dee's protégé, Thomas Digges and his father, Leonard Digges, all applied geometrical analysis to understand the path described by a cannonball. Despite their interesting real-world applications, they were obliged to ignore many factors like wind resistance and the variable strength of the gunpowder. They were asking the more basic question of how the angle of the cannon's elevation affects the distance of the shot. Some had assumed that the cannonball moves straight for a while and is then captured by what we would now call gravity and pulled back to Earth. Harriot realized that instead, the cannonball's path is for its entire flight, the result of combining two other idealized motions. First, along a straight line, as fired from the cannon, and second, the free fall of the cannonball. Following his logic, he argued that the real trajectory would be a smooth but asymmetrical curve. Harriot's inquiries into falling bodies involved experiments in the sense that he set up and carefully measured real-world scenarios, rather than just sketching diagrams from his imagination. His neighbors were no doubt glad that these involved not cannons, but the quieter method of dropping metal bullets onto a set of scales. The idea was to see how far the bullet would have to fall before its velocity was sufficient to tip the scales for a certain counterweight. Similarly, he performed extensive observations to calculate the specific gravity of various substances like marble, diamond, crystal, and glass. Here he did not need to invent a new mathematical model for what was going on, but just to use the formula ascribed to Archimedes, you weigh a sample in air and water, and divide the weight in air by the difference between the two weights. Why you might ask, would it be useful to get exact values for the specific gravity of different materials? There are lots of applications, but if you worked at the King's treasury, the one that would interest you the most is that since different metals have different specific gravities, you can use this number to test the purity of a precious metal, like gold or silver. It's almost irresistible to compare and contrast Harriot's investigations to the work being done by Galileo at the same time. Galileo was also interested in the problem of falling bodies, and like him, Harriot was a convinced Copernican and early adopter of the telescope. Indeed there's a book about Harriot that calls him the English Galileo, but there's room for skepticism here. One obvious difference is that whereas Harriot left his ideas buried in manuscripts, Galileo was a genius of self-promotion who sought and achieved notoriety across Europe. That may indirectly confirm the hypothesis that Harriot's comfortable position was a factor in his choice not to publish. Since Galileo's situation was more precarious, he needed to convince an elite audience that he deserved the sort of support Harriot was already receiving. But more significant for us is a philosophical difference. Galileo was a true natural philosopher who made claims about the nature of the world, the kind of claims that could get him in trouble with the Pope. Harriot by contrast was largely content to make his observations and represent what he had seen using algebra and geometry. Perhaps Harriot thought that the mathematical model of the natural phenomenon is just that, a model, and that as a mathematician it was outside his sphere of competence to offer physical theories. This as you might recall would be the same line of thought Oseander used to diffuse the explosive implications of Copernicus. If that sort of methodological restraint was a general feature of Harriot's thought, then there was an important exception. He seems to have assumed that the bodies he was experimenting with are made of atoms. This would have been the theory underlying Harriot's work on specific gravities. It would also help to explain his interest in the geometrical question of how to pack together spherical bodies with the least space in between. But other members of the Northumberland circle, Walter Warner and Nicholas Hill, were much more forthright in their embrace of atomism. Hill wrote a book with the telling title Epicurean Philosophy which endorsed the idea that bodies are ultimately made of impenetrable and indivisible prime corpuscles whose different shapes allow them to entangle with one another, for instance with loops and hooks that become joined. As for Warner, he put forward a remarkable theory according to which atomic bodies influence one another through an all-purpose force that he called, well, force, in Latin vis. This force fills the otherwise empty space around atoms. It is responsible for all causal interaction and observable properties in bodies made from atoms, including color, hardness and softness, motion, and even weight. With this, Warner was anticipating something we more readily associate with early modern philosophers like John Locke, a contrast between the primary physical qualities of corpuscles and secondary qualities like color. Now, I don't want to deny that the Northumberland circle was anticipating early modern corpuscular theory or the mathematical analysis of nature. But as ever, we should remember that thinkers who may seem to us ahead of their time were also of their time. We saw in episode 398 that contemporaries on the continent like Schenck, Torelles, Gorleas, and Sennert were also experimenting with atomic theories. As for the use of mathematics to describe physical situations, that goes back to the Oxford calculators of the 14th century, and it's something we've seen in other authors. A particularly instructive parallel would be with John Dee, who incidentally knew Harriot, probably through their mutual friend Walter Raleigh. Though Dee is known to posterity mostly as a magician and Harriot mostly managed to avoid being known to posterity at all, they were both mathematicians who drew connections between math and other disciplines, especially alchemy and optics. Harriot, like Dee, performed alchemical experiments, and the atomic theory was a natural fit with alchemical thinking. After all, if everything is made of atoms, it should be possible to break down one substance and turn it into another by combining the atomic parts differently. The connections to optics may be even more important. The behavior of light, as with reflections from mirrors or the lengths of shadows, lends itself to being represented in geometrical diagrams. So it's natural that treatises on vision and light had always been written by mathematically inclined authors, starting in antiquity with Euclid and Ptolemy. They influenced medieval theorists of light like O'Kinde and Robert Grossnest, who, as I said last time, were in turn sources for John Dee's theory of rays. Walter Warner was also thinking of them when he devised his theory of the force that is propagated by atoms. The force emanates from the atom as light does from a light source. Harriot was very interested in optics. He wrote about such phenomena as the rainbow and, above all, the problem of refraction. It was in this context that he gave the clearest indication that he too was an atomist. For once, he did not confine his thoughts on this matter to private manuscripts. He didn't do anything so crass as to publish a book about it, of course, but he did put pen to paper to correspond with another scientist who was keenly interested in the behavior of light, none other than Johannes Kepler. So we can look ahead to the reflections of both men and a broader spectrum of thinkers on theories of light and vision, which I'll be illuminating next time here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Eye Sees Not Itself But By Reflection – Theories of Vision You can tell a lot about a historical period from the examples given by its philosophers. The medievals loved to devise thought experiments invoking their omnipotent God. When Kant and other German philosophers deal with aesthetic experience, they speak of the awesomeness of nature, a good fit for the literary culture of the day. What it says about our own time that philosophers cannot stop talking about killing people with runaway trolleys, I'll leave you to judge. Back in antiquity, philosophical illustrations were a bit more wholesome. The standard example of a visual illusion, used already by Plato and his Republic, is that something straight, a wooden rod, say, will look bent if it is half submerged in water. For centuries thereafter, philosophers mentioned the apparently bent stick, but without being able to explain why it looks bent. The answer, of course, is that although the stick is not bent, the light coming from the stick to your eye is bent, or refracted, by the water. One is tempted to say that the water refracts the light, whereas air doesn't, but that's not quite right. Air refracts light too, just not as much as the water does. The difference in the refractive index of the two different media explains the illusion. As I mentioned last time, Thomas Harriot was keenly interested in this phenomenon, and by 1601 discovered a general physical law to characterize it. It's now called Snell's law, not Harriot's law, since as usual he only wrote it down in his unpublished manuscripts. Actually, Descartes was the first to publish a proof of the law in 1637, after the result was publicized the previous year by his friend, Mersenne. It's also called the sine law of refraction, since it allows for the calculation of the refractive index by dividing the sine of the angle at which light strikes the medium by the sine of the angle of refraction. If you'll pardon the expression, there are some striking parallels here, namely with Harriot's work on specific gravity. As in that case, he needed to do careful observations with different materials to get a constant for each substance. With specific gravity, that meant weighing samples in air and water, here it meant putting objects with markings on them into water and measuring the apparent positions of the markings compared to what he knew was the real position. He calculated his results out to six figures. This was rather a case of overkill, since his actual observations were not so accurate as to bear this level of precision, but it shows how carefully he was proceeding. And there was another parallel to the specific gravity research, namely that the work on refraction was highly useful. Specific gravity was important for weighing metals, like gold and silver. Refraction was important for something Harriot might have seen as even more crucial, namely astronomy. Since air does bend light too, the real positions of stars seen through our atmosphere would need to be recalculated by correcting for refraction. I just said that Harriot failed to convey this information to the world, but that's putting it mildly, he even deliberately concealed it. Like someone weighing precious metals, he had a golden opportunity to reveal the sine law when he entered into a correspondence with Johannes Kepler in 1606. This was prompted by his reading of Kepler's own work on optics published two years earlier. Though Harriot was apparently in no hurry to share his law with the world, he apparently wanted to make sure that no one else would do it first. The exchange between them was ultimately frustrating, especially for Kepler. Harriot sent him only enough information from his own observations to disprove Kepler's preferred theory, which was that the index of refraction simply correlates with density. Kepler was persuaded that his guess was wrong, and badly wanted to know the real formula. Now you, he wrote to Harriot, excellent initiate of the mysteries of nature, reveal the causes. True to form, Harriot refused to do this, though he gave a hint at his own understanding when he teased Kepler, I have now led you to the doors of the house of nature, where her secrets lie hidden. If the doors are too narrow for you, then mathematically abstract and contract yourself to an atom, and then you will easily enter. Later, when you leave, tell me what marvels you have seen. This suggests that Harriot wanted to explain refraction in terms of an atomic theory of matter, and that is confirmed by the work of Nathaniel Torperley, a fellow member of the Northumberland circle. Harriot thought highly enough of him to make Torperley his literary executor, but as Aristotle once said when criticizing Plato, truth is more dear to us than our friends, and Torperley didn't hesitate to dish out some heavy criticism of Harriot's atomistic explanation of refraction. Think again about the body of water, with an apparently bent stick in it. You might also see sunlight reflecting off the surface of that water, which shows that the water is reflecting some of the light, while letting other light through, with the latter being refracted. Harriot's idea was apparently that the reflected light is bouncing off the top layer of atoms that make up the water. The refracted light, meanwhile, filters through the atoms of the body, and in the process is deflected as it seeks a path through the empty spaces between these atoms. One of our former podcast guests, Robert Goulding, has aptly called this a zigzag through a pinboard account of refraction. Torperley found it unconvincing. For one thing, the many rays of light should be bouncing off the atoms in all directions, and not filtering through at just one angle all the time. For another thing, the refracted light that passes through the body somehow takes on its color. A stick in water may look somewhat blue, for instance, in addition to looking bent. If the physical makeup of bodies was controversial, the nature of light itself was still more mysterious. Astronomers like Harriot had every reason to concern themselves with this problem, since the only way for them to study the heavenly bodies was by means of the light that comes from them. The phenomena of parallax and refraction are just two examples of the way that optics and astronomy went hand in hand. Hence Harriot's investigations in both fields, but no one from the period illustrates the point better than his exasperated correspondent, Kepler. His work on optics represented a significant shift in the philosophy of light. Here at the turn of the 17th century, the state of the art was still quite literally medieval. The most advanced account of light had been produced by the Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham, known in Latin as Al-Hazen. His works were used by a medieval author called Witello. Writings of both men were available in print by the time of Harriot and Kepler, thanks to the Thesaurus of Optics published in 1572 by Friedrich Riesner, a student of Peter Rame's. The account that Harriot and Kepler could find in these texts took distance from Aristotle's theory of light and vision without fully abandoning all his ideas. For Aristotle, light simply enables a transparent medium to transmit the image of a visual object to the eye. By contrast, for Ibn al-Haytham, light is propagated along straight lines from light sources and then from the surfaces of the other bodies they illuminate. Imagine that I am looking at a giraffe standing in a pond, wondering why its legs look bent, or rather even more bent than usual. Aristotle would say that the light suffusing the air between me and the giraffe activates the capacity of the air to bring to my sight an image of the giraffe. One way to think about this is that the illuminated air is indirectly putting my eyes in contact with the giraffe because my eyes are touching the air which is touching the giraffe. This solves the problem of how the giraffe could be causing me to see her even though she's all the way over there. If the sun goes down, I will stop seeing the giraffe, which for Aristotle is simply because without light, the air loses its ability to connect eyesight to its object. Ibn al-Haytham and Witello would instead say that rays go from the sun to the giraffe and then to my eyes. There are many advantages of this account over that of Aristotle. For starters, it seems to explain mirror images better. It can also account for the fact that I can see a luminous object through dark air like a giraffe at nighttime decorated with Christmas lights. Well, how do you celebrate the holidays? Finally, this idea of light is consisting of rays lends itself to a geometrical analysis of optical phenomena. You can imagine the rays spreading out in a cone from each luminous point with the light strongest along the perpendicular line through the center of the cone. Still, the upshot of the whole process would be much as Aristotle thought, an image of the giraffe comes to my eyes conveyed by the luminous rays. Kepler agrees with a lot of this, especially the idea that we can represent light mathematically. However, he sees light in more physical terms. He says that a ray is nothing but the motion of light itself and understands that light is a physical phenomenon that can, as it were, bounce off objects when it is reflected. This is not to say that light is a body or that it moves across space bit by bit, like flowing water. Rather, it traverses the entire space instantly and is a kind of compromise between material bodies and immaterial things. Kepler thus calls light the chain linking the corporeal and spiritual world. As this remark reminds us, Kepler was a committed Platonist, albeit a rather unorthodox one. We can see this from his discussion of the sun, which is influenced by an equally unorthodox Platonist, Nicholas Kuzanis. Inspired by Kuzanis' comparison of God to a sphere, and of course by Copernicus' heliocentrism, Kepler sees the sun as merely divine. At the center of all things, it is the seat of the soul of the universe and diffuses both light and life. All other things that participate in light, he says, imitate the sun. In a significant break from the previous tradition, for Kepler, what comes to the eye from the sun, from other light sources and from the things that they illuminate, is not an image of what is seen, what was called a visual species in medieval Latin. The only species involved is light itself, which as noted by Torporly can absorb color from the surfaces it has visited. Or actually, that isn't quite right, because we can also see the absence of light. The study of the stars frequently involves seeing shadows or obstructions to light, for example when observing a solar eclipse. This is why Kepler says that, the things to be considered optically in astronomy are the things themselves, set before the sense of sight, by way of considering the species of things, that is, light and shadow. It's worth dwelling briefly on just how Kepler might have gone about observing a solar eclipse. As you've surely been warned, if you've ever had the chance to see one, you should not look straight at it. Instead, as amateur stargazers do today, Kepler would have used an apparatus with a pinhole. It allows through a small amount of light, projecting the image upside down onto a screen, just as on Kepler's account of vision, light falls on the retina of the eye to create the image that we see. The larger version of this device is called a camera obscura, with light allowed through an aperture into a darkened room. Kepler was very interested in the phenomenon. He once set up an illuminated book in front of a pinhole camera and led taut strings from its edges to the images of the projected image running through the aperture. This helped him to prove that any distortion caused by the apparatus, for instance by the size or shape of the pinhole, could be explained and corrected through geometrical analysis. For example, he could show why a triangular aperture would, at a certain distance, throw a circular rather than a triangular image of the sun, something that the medieval optical texts could not easily account for. All this served the same goal as correcting for the refraction of light in air when observing the heavens. Kepler wanted to use optical theory to improve the accuracy of astronomical data, so that the science of the stars could be put on a more confident footing. But as brief reflection will show, all the ideas we've just been discussing could just as well disturb our confidence in vision. The idea that I am not seeing that giraffe or even an image of the giraffe, but merely the light coming from the giraffe, is already somewhat disconcerting. In Kepler we can find telling turns of phrase pointing in that direction, as when he describes observing the moon through a camera of scutta and says the moon's ray was in the paper. And that's without even getting into things like mirror images, parallax, and the pervasive refraction of light. The more you think about this, the more you might start to suspect that you quite literally cannot believe your own eyes. Which brings us to an interesting book by Stuart Clark that appeared in 2007 called Vanities of the Eye. It catalogs the many reasons that early modern people started to distrust the visual experience. Some of his examples are already familiar to us. When discussing Macbeth, we saw that demonic influence could cause people to say things that aren't there, for example a dagger floating in the air. Such illusions were especially associated with demons because, as I mentioned, these malevolent forces have no bodies and can only manipulate us through images. As one author of the time put it, the devil works his effects only by the delusion of the eye. We also saw that a more natural explanation could be given for the same sort of phenomena, namely melancholy. This disease could affect the imagination by unbalancing the humoral mixture of the brain. So the delusional melancholic would actually be seeing things prompted by an internal disturbance rather than an outside cause. This might help to explain why the enthusiastic visions formerly appreciated as religious experiences were now more apt to be greeted by suspicion. In the early 15th century, Marjorie Kempf could convince a good number of people that she was seeing Christ, even if she also ran into a fair bit of skepticism. Now, around the year 1600, she'd more likely just be diagnosed with melancholy, or charged with witchcraft, or both. Another important factor in explaining that change was, of course, the Reformation. The Protestants dismissed all supposed modern-day wonders, with one author remarking that they were miracles in sight, but indeed no miracles. More generally, they tended to value the auditory over the visible. Godly people listen to the Bible being read out to them. They don't hope to see angels or feast their eyes on statues of saints dripping with blood. Luther put it with his characteristic bluntness, Do not look for Christ with your eyes, but put your eyes in your ears. The general attitude on this side of the religious divide is captured well in the book that gives Clark the title of his own study, George Haequil's 1608 treatise, The Vanity of the Eye. Haequil was a Calvinist theologian and college rector at Oxford. This work, which he wrote for A Blind Friend, attacks eyesight from every conceivable perspective. It is subject to mistakes due to everything from optical illusions to illness, sorcery, and demonic possession. It is also associated with wicked desires, like lust, and worst of all, it's associated with Catholicism. Now, as Clark notes, this is rather an oversimplification. Catholics could be, and were, accused of an overly visual culture of worship. Their churches, untouched by the purifying bonfire of iconoclasm, were full of images of those bleeding saints and the suffering Christ. In their ceremony of the mass, the priest would dramatically lift up the host for the congregation to behold. But according to the Catholic understanding of this miraculous event, there is a clash between the appearance of the sacrificial host and its real nature. It looks like bread, but in fact it is Christ's body. So in this case, it was actually the Protestants, or at least some Protestants, who insisted that what you see is what you get. The bread really is what it looks like and merely symbolizes Christ's body. Indeed, on their view, this is the whole idea of a sacrament. One thing stands in for or represents another. Still, the point stands that the Protestant trend towards an anti-visual culture reinforced other cultural forces that were undermining trust in the senses and especially vision. The logician Thomas Wilson, whom I mentioned a couple of episodes back as the author of a work on logic in English called The Rule of Reason, once wrote that, "...the eyesight is most quick, and containeth the impression of things most assuredly." But increasingly, there was good reason to fear that eyesight is too quick, that it leaps to conclusions and misleads us. Clark therefore connects this theme with another trend of the time, namely the rebirth of philosophical skepticism in authors like Montaigne and Charon. It may not be a coincidence that Hayquill, author of The Vanity of the Eye, was an admirer of Charon's treatise On Wisdom. At first glance, it might look like the optical research done by Harriot and Kepler fits into that picture. Just as an inner force like melancholy or demonic possession might deceive you from the inside, so a curved mirror or the refraction of light might deceive you from the outside. Even more potentially disturbing was Kepler's claim that we only ever see light, not the actual light sources or illuminated objects, and light can be manipulated, as with John Dee's famous trick mirror, which he used to amuse the queen. Protestant debunkers exposed charlatans who created miraculous auras of light using mirrors, and Kepler himself told of playing a trick on friends, where he used the camera obscura technique to make it look like magic Hebrew letters were dancing on the wall. But the association of optical advances with skepticism should itself be treated with a bit of skepticism. Sure, the science of light and vision could be used to play tricks, but that was not the real goal. As I've said, what Kepler and Harriot really wanted to do was put themselves in a position to correct for optical effects, especially when doing astronomy. Their project was thus to use mathematics and measurements to free the scientists from illusion and distortion. The implicit message was not, you can't even trust your own eyes, so who knows what to believe? It was, you can't trust your own eyes, but you can trust geometry. So while 17th century skepticism does bear some relation to what we've been discussing, 17th century mathematical science was the real inheritance of Kepler, of Harriot, and the rest of the Northumberland circle. They were forerunners of the Descartes who did things like explaining the rainbow and inventing a coordinate system to represent space, not of the Descartes who invented the evil demon hypothesis. Vision would continue to be the central illustration of science's potential to raise skeptical challenges and then answer those challenges. Just think of the way that telescopes and microscopes would be revealing truths of nature that are hidden from normal human sensation. Yet again, from this vantage point at the end of the 16th century, we can glimpse fleeting images of what was yet to come. In this episode, our focus was on what can be seen, even if it isn't seen accurately, but scientists of the time were also thinking about the invisible forces of nature. We aren't yet ready to talk about gravity, as we will when we get to figures like Newton, but next time we have an equally weighty subject, magnetism, and the breakthroughs made in understanding it around the turn of the 17th century, especially by William Gilbert. That's what will be attracting our attention next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gups.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Metal More Attractive, William Gilbert and Magnetism. A pretty standard way of demarcating early modern philosophy, and the way I'll more or less be using on this podcast, is to say that it spans the 17th and 18th centuries. If we take this really literally, that would put the divide between premodern and modern philosophy in 1600. Imagine if they'd known at the time, they might have thrown parties to celebrate the fact that the Enlightenment was just around the corner. Of course, that didn't happen, but the year did see one publication that rather poignantly brings the story of premodern philosophy full circle. According to another standard historical convention, Western philosophy is assumed to start with the pre-Socratics, and in particular with Thales of Miletus. As you'll remember, since we just covered him a mere 434 episodes ago, one of the very few things known about him is that he said, the magnet has a soul. And more than two millennia later, in that momentous year of 1600, William Gilbert published Concerning the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and This Great Magnet, the Earth, a new philosophy demonstrated by means of many arguments and experiments. Here we are after more than two millennia of philosophy, and we're still worrying about magnets. But we've come a long way, at least in terms of having more information to work with. Just that title gives us more information about Gilbert than we have for Thales's ideas about magnets. In fact, we can use the title of Gilbert's book as a handy guide to his innovations in the field of magnetism and electricity. Let's start with the phrase, magnetic bodies. These had long been a subject of puzzlement and fascination. It was difficult on pretty well any premodern theory of matter to explain why a lodestone and a piece of iron should move towards one another. We see here what looks like spontaneous action, which is presumably what inspired Thales to credit the magnet with a soul. But we don't normally see this kind of motion in stone and metal. Rather, it seems to belong only to organic life, like when plants grow on their own, or when a cat moves with sudden and lethal speed in the direction of the sofa to take a nap. One exception to this rule would be that elemental bodies do naturally rise and fall, with earth and water moving towards the center of the earth because they are heavy, air and fire away from it because they are light. But that's clearly not what we're seeing with the magnet. Even more puzzling, magnetism seems to involve action at a distance, because the lodestone can attract the iron to it across a gap of space. That's very hard to explain by invoking the properties recognized in Aristotelian science, like heat or moisture. In antiquity, the Epicurean poet Lucretius tried to account for it in atomic terms. I mentioned this in episode 58, actually. His idea was that atoms are streaming off of the lodestone toward the iron and pushing air out of the way, creating a partial vacuum that sucks the two bodies together. But given that atomism was only just starting to revive around the end of the 16th century, this sort of explanation wasn't very appealing. Instead, magnetism was often recognized as one of many hidden or occult powers found in nature, like the stingray's ability to stun its prey or poison's ability to kill. You might recall the French doctor Jean Fernet and his treatise On the Hidden Causes of Things. Well, he mentioned the magnet, along with poisons and other similar phenomena, among the causes which stay hidden in the gloom of veiled nature. Gilbert thought he could do better by offering the new philosophy of magnetism mentioned in his title. One thing that was new was a theory of elemental bodies. In Aristotelianism, Earth is characterized by its dryness and coldness, and as I just said, by its tendency to move downward. But once it reaches its natural place, it stops moving and indeed becomes entirely inert. Gilbert disagrees. He dismisses as ridiculous the idea that Earth is dead or a useless weight. Rather, all material bodies are full of native and inborn powers that cause motion. In a sense, he is still thinking a bit like Thales, in that he ascribes a vital force to the magnet, and not only to the magnet. Gilbert says that the pure element of Earth, which he calls true Earth, always revolves with a necessary motion and an inherent tendency to turn. Now, we never actually encounter absolutely pure elements in everyday life, but a lodestone, or a piece of iron, has a very high proportion of true Earth in it, which explains the tendency to come together as they join in the natural orientation and motion of this element. This is a rather daring proposal about the underlying chemistry of the lodestone and iron, since the former is, as its own title implies, indeed a stone, whereas the latter is a metal. How are we to believe that two such different substances are both close to being true Earth? Gilbert's answer to this question draws him into geological speculation. He thinks that metals form when vapors from deep within the Earth come together as juices that penetrate into other solid bodies. So the metallic properties of iron, which make it seem so unlike a lodestone, are just the result of the process by which it is formed. Still, both iron and a lodestone are made of the same stuff, namely true Earth with some impurities mixed in. All this implies that magnetism must be a far more pervasive phenomenon than we might have supposed. It isn't going to belong to just special stones that we occasionally dig up, for example in Magnesia, the region in ancient Greece that gives the magnet its name. Instead, all true Earth is magnetic. Which takes us to the next bit of Gilbert's title, the bold claim that the Earth itself is a great magnet. This brilliant insight was based, to some extent, on the discoveries of earlier authors. Back in the 13th century, a writer on magnets named Peter Peregrinus had already done observations of spherical magnets and noticed that they have poles of attraction. As you know, two magnets brought near each other will be attracted if oriented in the right way, but if you turn one of the two magnets around, they will instead repel one another. This already implies that magnetism is not just an indiscriminate tendency to attract things of the right sort, rather it seems to involve some sort of specific directionality. Then, in 1581, so about a couple of decades before Gilbert's treatise appeared, Robert Norman published a book called The New Attractive, a title I commend to anyone who is thinking of starting a fashion magazine. Norman described experiments with magnetic needles set upon corks floating in water. Norman found that the needle would settle on a certain direction and maintain equilibrium. Furthermore, he found that a magnetic needle dips slightly, with the tip of the needle slightly lower than its back end. In other words, the needle doesn't just aim north, but points right through the Earth along a genuinely straight line between, say, London and the pole. Both phenomena suggested even more strongly that magnetism is not just a power to attract, but a tendency to be aligned in a certain direction. Norman assumed that his magnets were orienting themselves towards some target, which he called the respective point. But again, Gilbert disagreed. Magnets are not like elemental bodies in the Aristotelian theory, trying to get to some natural place. They are just arranging themselves in the way that is natural for true Earth. In fact, Gilbert thought that strictly speaking, we should not say that magnets attract or are attracted by other bodies. That would imply some kind of compulsion, as if the lodestone were pulling iron towards it with an invisible string, or the pole were tugging from afar at the needle. Instead, Gilbert speaks of magnetic coition, or primary running together. Magnetic needles allowed to turn freely, like on a cork in water, will quite literally fall into line and point along a path which has the pole at its end. And when two bodies, made mostly of true Earth, are near one another, they will join together to cooperate in this effort. This is also how Gilbert explains magnetic repulsion. If you hold two magnets with their north poles facing, they seem to be pushing away from one another, but in fact, says Gilbert, they are just trying to turn themselves around, so that they can get back into what would be a natural arrangement. Of course, magnetic orientation allows for the manufacture of compasses, which linked the research of Norman and Gilbert to the urgent practical question of navigation. No less than the astronomical interests of John Dee, Thomas Harriot, and others, research into magnetism was motivated by the demands of England's burgeoning projects in trade and colonialism. One of the scientific problems that arose in this context was magnetic variation, the fact that compass needles do not quite point due north. This was obviously very inconvenient for precise navigational calculation, so Gilbert and other theorists were doing their best to explain it, and if possible, to correct for the variation. Thomas Digges, for example, surveyed observations about compass readings from different locations. But these suffered from inaccuracy, and he concluded in the end that with the currently available data, the problem was insoluble. All navigators could do is collect readings on local variation and tabulate the results. This information could then be used to adjust calculations made at any given place. Gilbert took a similar view, but added an explanation for the irregularity of the variation. The surface of the earth, he speculated, has unevenly distributed deposits of iron, and the high concentration of true earth in this ore can affect the compasses. Shortly after the appearance of Gilbert's treatise, this idea was rejected by the French cartographer Guillaume de Notonnier. He thought that iron deposits would never have an appreciable effect compared to the size of the whole earth, so he proposed a different and correct explanation that the magnetic poles of the earth have a location slightly different from the geographical poles. Notonnier did, however, agree with Gilbert on the more fundamental point that the earth is a huge magnet. Gilbert called the spherical magnet that was so prominent in his experiments a terrella, literally a small earth, and believed that he could extrapolate from the effects he observed to a literally global scale. The earth itself has magnetic poles, and is spinning on an axis that stretches between those poles, which is why we have the daily rotation that gives us night and day. Of course, this shows that Gilbert was working within a Copernican theory, according to which the earth goes around the sun once a year and turns on its axis each day. Indeed, some scholars assumed that the whole point of Gilbert's theory was to support Copernicus. But we should be careful not to infer that all cosmic attraction was, to Gilbert's mind, attributable to magnetism. Remember, it's only true earth, and bodies made mostly of earth, that display magnetic properties. So the earth and the other planets are not staying in their orbits around the sun because of magnetism, and when you jump it's not magnetism that makes you fall back down unless you are Michael Jordan. Instead, Gilbert speaks of a very broad phenomenon he calls electricity. Like the word magnet, this term comes from ancient Greek. In this case, it derives from electron, meaning amber, because you can rub amber and then use it to attract other small objects like, say, wood shavings. Nowadays we explain this as static electricity, but from Gilbert's point of view it exemplifies a general tendency of bodies to gather themselves together. This electricity is the reason the earth holds together and explains the phenomena Newton would soon enough be accounting for with his theory of gravity. Cannonballs, apples, and most basketball players fall when they are up in the air because the earth, says Gilbert, calls bodies back to itself. He no longer needs the Aristotelian idea of heavy and light bodies. And good thing too, since in Copernican cosmology the center point of the earth is not in the middle of the universe, so it would make no sense to say that heavy objects are moving towards that point and light things away from it. A striking feature of Gilbert's arguments for all of this, one flagged in the title of his treatise, is that his theory is demonstrated by means of many arguments and experiments. The preface announces that the work is addressed to true philosophers, honest men, who seek knowledge not from books only, but from things themselves. Gilbert has gone to the trouble of adding asterisks in the margins of the work to indicate experimental observations, with the size of the asterisk corresponding to the importance of the observation. He is dismissive of what we might call armchair scientists, remarking that, stronger conclusions arise from certain experiments and validated arguments than from probable conjectures and the beliefs of common speculators. The better part of a century ago, the scholar Edgar Zilzau made an intriguing proposal about this empirical dimension of Gilbert's work. He argued that the advances made by Gilbert were made possible by the closing of socio-economic gaps between the elite and the working class. No longer were scientists university scholars who never saw the outside of the library, they were now men of affairs who were out in the world and who met people who actually made stuff and worked with their hands. Surely, Zilzau speculates, blacksmiths and miners had been noticing magnetic phenomena, and surely this could have fed into the discoveries of scientists like Gilbert, who were curious about these same phenomena and were of sufficient education and social standing to publish what was being observed. The aforementioned Robert Norman might offer a good example. He was himself a craftsman, more than a scientist, who was simply building compasses before he started doing such experiments as mounting magnetic needles on floating corks. Zilzau's thesis is an intriguing one and could be fruitful for understanding what was to come in the 17th century. For that period, the most celebrated philosopher craftsman would probably be Spinoza, who was a lens grinder. And without even going forward into the coming generations, we've already seen how important high-level craft skills were for the astronomical observations made by Tycho Brahe. Unfortunately, it's not clear whether Zilzau's hypothesis really stands up when applied to the case of magnetic theory. Norman explicitly said that he only started doing his experiments on the advice of certain learned and expert friends, so he arguably illustrates that craftspersons were not inclined to such pursuits unless encouraged by elite scholars. As for Gilbert, there is no evidence whatsoever that he was getting information from tradespersons. This is just a wild guess on Zilzau's part. Still, there was something important happening in this period. Even if the upper-class scientists weren't getting ideas from the working class, they were increasingly doing careful empirical observation. We've seen this with Thomas Harriot and now Gilbert, and for a general statement of the method, we don't have long to wait since it will famously come in the work of Francis Bacon. But if you're a regular listener, you're probably already expecting what I am going to say next. We should not get so excited about Gilbert as a harbinger of things to come that we forget to see him within his own historical context. I've already underscored the comparison between Gilbert and contemporaries like Dee and Harriot, and there are also resonances between his theory of matter and what we find in the Paracelsan movement. When he alludes to the fundamental principles of physical stuff, Gilbert mentions salt and sulfur, the basic principles of Paracelsus. Then, at a more abstract level, he thinks that we can isolate pure substances and analyze their natures through violent chemical processes like melting and burning. Between this and his radically different understanding of elemental motion, we can say that Gilbert fits into the wave of anti-Aristotelian natural philosophy that was sweeping Europe at this time, as found in such diverse figures as Telesio, Bruno, Schenck, Sennert, Fresnel, and of course the Copernicans. The Aristotelians noticed the new developments and tried to take account of them. A study of university disputations has shown that magnetism was already a fairly frequent topic of discussion in the 16th century, and that Gilbert's work started being mentioned in these events already in 1606. Of course, the scholastics persisted in invoking principles of Aristotelian physics, from substantial forms to the four elements and their natural places, even in the face of new theories like Gilbert's and an increasing tendency toward corpuscular theories like the one given so long ago by Lucretius. Like a light body in a heavy medium, ancient science wasn't going to go down without a fight. Speaking of fighting, another phenomenon, or supposed phenomenon, mentioned in these university disputations was the so-called weapon salve. This was a method endorsed by Paracelsus for healing wounds, in which one would apply a treatment to the weapon that caused the wound. Here was another case of action at a distance, at least for those who believed in it. As it happens, the thought of one man who did believe in it, and argued in its defense, also resonates with the other bit of doctrine we can describe to Thales, namely the primacy of water, which will, I hope, whet your appetite for the coming episode. A frais cela le deluge, because next time it's Robert Flood, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Unpast Waters, Undreamed Shores, Robert Flood. In the last episode, I started with the thought that the Renaissance ended in about 1600, which is indeed where I'm drawing the line in this and the past few series of the podcast devoted to the period between medieval and early modern philosophy. But as we've often noted, typically Renaissance phenomena like humanism and even typically medieval phenomena like scholasticism survived in Europe well beyond 1600. So it's perfectly reasonable that one of the more important books on the figure of interest to us today should be called Robert Flood and the End of the Renaissance, even though Flood did not die until 1637. With this title, the author, William Huffman, suggests that Flood, contrary to his name, represents only the last ebb of a certain tradition of thought, one that is distinctive to the Renaissance. It's the tradition we associate with figures like Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and John Dee. These were men who looked back to antiquity for inspiration and liked what they saw. A near unanimous chorus of agreement praising divine transcendent principles that govern the crude matter of our cosmos. Aristotle, so central in the eyes of the scholastics, seemed in comparison a rather limited thinker and also something of an outlier within antique philosophy. His pedantic writings put him out of step with the perennial wisdom that could be found in Plato and the Neoplatonists before them in the Presocratics and still further afield in the venerable teachings of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Indians. To delve into these sources was to discover the underlying harmonies of the universe and to uncover its secret powers. What more narrow-minded contemporaries might attack as black magic or demonology was in fact a philosophical and scientific enterprise. After all, there could be no doubt that God had endowed natural things with many occult properties. As we just saw last time, magnetism was important as an obvious case of an occult power alongside its practical uses, especially in navigation. True, the Devil is real and works evil in the world, but those who label any and all mastery of hidden forces as demonic are quite literally fearing what they do not understand. And if the most ancient wisdom is both true and scientific, there is no reason not to combine it with the latest findings of mathematics and natural philosophy. That explains why someone like John Dee could see astronomical observations, mathematical inquiries, and communication with angels as part of a single enterprise, and why the Paracelsan approach to chemistry was magical and empirical in equal measure. Medicine too was a field where the supernatural and the natural both played an important role. Think for example of Ficino's astrological and talismanic prescriptions on prolonging life. In fact, the range of ideas I've just described did not die with Robert Flood. For example, one key figure of the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton, was fascinated by alchemy. Still, Flood is as good a choice as any to represent the end of the Renaissance in England, or at least of this particular aspect of the Renaissance. He was born in the early 1570s in Kent and as the son of a knight. Noble lineage was important to him. In one of several works where he tangled with critics, he managed to pack modesty and immodesty into a single remark by saying that he was, Noble enough by birth, but of the lowest rank of medical doctor at London. Flood gained his expertise in medicine at St. John's College in Oxford, where, as Huffman points out, he was unusual as a nobleman who chose to study this topic. In another move atypical for the nobility, he actually finished his university degree. But his time at Oxford was interrupted by a voyage of discovery around Europe. He spoke proudly of imitating his ancient heroes like Plato, Hermes, Pythagoras, and other pre-Socratics who ventured abroad to Egypt, Ethiopia, or Asia in search of wisdom. Flood himself didn't get that far, but did go to such places as Paris, Rome, and Heidelberg, where he deepened his knowledge of Paracelsan science and other philosophical and occult traditions. After returning home and graduating, he set himself up as a physician in London. He also continued his interest in chemistry, even receiving a royal patent for an improved technique in making steel. Flood tried to make it patently clear that he was stealing his ideas from the best, but the system he forged is nothing we can find easily in other Renaissance occultists and still less in Plato or other ancients. One reason for his unadmitted originality is his creative harmonization of Christian scripture with pagan philosophy. Flood even claims that Plato was influenced by Moses, which is just one reason that this Greek thinker ranks so highly in Flood's estimation. By contrast, he says that Aristotle departed pridefully from the grand tradition of ancient wisdom. By his vain glory, he added to some truths many of his own inventions, making, as it were, a galimauphery of good and bad, of true and false, of wisdom and folly, together. As we see here, and we'll see again, Flood had a flair for stylish insults. The biblical passage most central to Flood's system comes right at the beginning of the book of Genesis. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Here we have all three main principles of Flood's cosmology, darkness, light, and water. He explains the interaction of these principles in such works as his Philosophical Key, dedicated to King James I, and the Mosaical Philosophy, whose title means that it is based on Moses, not that it is a mosaic put together from various parts, though that might also be true. Darkness and light represent the positive and negative will of God. They can also be understood in Aristotelian terms as privation or prime matter and form. The two interact when God gives light to darkness, also known as chaos or void. This produces the first determinate kind of matter, which is water. Like Thales, who is having a bit of a renaissance of his own here on the podcast, given that I mentioned him last time for saying that the magnet has a soul, Flood thinks that water is the fundamental element from which other elements and bodies are made. The coldness and wetness of water are complemented by the heat and dryness of light or fire. As in Aristotle, these four contrary qualities underlie all natural phenomena. Flood tries to support his theory with empirical observation, or by ocular proof, as he puts it. Plants and animals are quite literally sparked into life by a warm inner spirit which is associated with divine light. Even minerals have this principle in them, as seen best in the brilliance of the most valuable minerals like gold or gemstones. It's handy for Flood that there are three basic constituents in Paracels and Chemistry, namely salt, sulfur, and mercury. He relates these to darkness, water, and fire. At a grander scale, the heat of the sun causes circulation of the air, something Flood compares to the circulation of vital power in human blood. When William Harvey came along with his pioneering theory of the circulatory system, Flood welcomed it as being fully in agreement with his own thought. But the context of Flood's proposal was very different. He wanted to establish a pervasive analogy between the world of nature and the human body pursuing the ancient idea of the human as a microcosm. Indeed, another of his works on these themes is called History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm. In this work, Flood notes the tendency of air to expand when it is heated. And in the Mosaical Philosophy, he describes an instrument that can be used to study this phenomenon experimentally. It's a so-called weather glass, which contains a column of water below a column of air in a glass tube. As the surrounding temperature changes, the air contracts and expands, as shown by the level of the water in the glass. Flood is clearly immensely pleased with this device and compares it to both the human body and the whole atmosphere. We might compare this to Gilbert's inferences about the magnetism of the whole Earth drawn from the study of spherical magnets. In both cases, global phenomena were being inferred from observations that could be made at a smaller scale in a laboratory. Nor was that the full extent of Flood's experimentation. Alongside minerals, meteorology, and the human body, he was keenly interested in plants and agriculture. In particular, he had a thing for wheat, which he calls the principalist of vegetables. He passes over the most convincing argument for this claim, which is that wheat can be used to make almond croissants, the principalist of pastries. His rationale is rather that wheat has a body dominated by salt, but containing a vegetating fire that gives it innate warmth. This allows wheat to multiply itself as it grows through what Flood calls a magnetic virtue that draws life out of the air and sun. So again, we have here the fundamental principle of light giving rise to vital power, in this case in a plant. The theory might sound like pure speculation, but again, Flood claimed empirical support for it. He heated up wheat to break it down into its constituents and claimed that he had successfully used a balm of wheat to heal a persistent pain in his own hand. That allusion to the magnetism involved in the growth of wheat was no passing fancy on Flood's part. He was aware of Gilbert's work and saw the magnet as illustrating the Paracelsan principle that like attracts like. He invoked magnetism to explain another healing technique known as the weapon salve. The idea was to put a special compound or salve on the bloody weapon that had caused a wound. Supposedly this could heal the victim of the wound even from miles away. So like a magnet, this procedure involved action at a distance, and like a magnet, claims of its efficacy were polarizing. Recommended by Paracelsus, the weapon salve was a matter of controversy among numerous authors, including Daniel Sennert. Of all the writings devoted to the topic, the one with the second best title was composed by William Foster. Released in 1631, it was called A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon Salve. Foster nailed the title page to Flood's door to mock his devotion to such magical practices. This provoked a treatise with an even better title, Dr. Flood's Answer to Foster, or The Squeezing of Parson Foster's Sponge. It was a forthright defense of medicine exploiting unknown occult powers. Flood offered numerous parallels to show that such action at a distance was entirely possible. The magnet, of course, but also contagious diseases, and for that matter even fire, which can warm us from across a room. Flood's explanation for the weapon salve cure is that there is a causal sympathy between the blood on the weapon and the body of the wounded man, so that treating one causes the other to heal. He offers empirical evidence in support of this principle, telling of an Italian nobleman who lost his nose in a fight. As we saw, when Tico Brahe was faced with the same situation, he simply wore an artificial nose. This nobleman was more resourceful and more brutal. He used flesh taken from a slave's arm to make himself a new nose. But when the slave died, it rotted off. This story reveals more about early European slavery than it does about reconstructive surgery, but it also tells us something about Flood's ideas of nature and causation. His world is one of hidden connections and harmonic resonances between things. In fact, he compares the sympathetic relation between the blood on the weapon and the wounded person to strings that reverberate on the same note. Thus, where Foster condemned the weapon salve as engaging in diabolical sorcery, Flood satisfied himself that it was instead an example of natural magic. He did, however, hasten to add that he had never used the technique himself. This seems to be a habitual strategy on Flood's part. We see it again in his writings on a mysterious group called the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, whose anonymous writings were circulating around Europe, provoking curiosity and condemnation among intellectuals. In 1616, Flood published a so-called apology, in other words, defense, of the Rosicrucians against one of their more forthright critics, Andreas Libavius. Again, the title is an enjoyable one. It punningly says that the goal of the work is to cleanse the reputation of the Rosicrucians with as it were a flood of truth. Much as he endorsed the weapon salve without ever trying it, Flood says that he hoped to make contact with the Brotherhood, but had never managed to do so. Still, he's convinced that they are wise philosophers and good Christians. So far from consorting with the devil, the slander thrown at Rosicrucians by Libavius, they were no doubt receiving their inspiration directly from the Holy Spirit. That is how they had learned to exploit occult powers in nature. But how can we be sure that this is holy magic and not evil sorcery? Simple, demonic practices can only bring bad results, so anything that causes benefit is done in the name of God. Flood's taste for the arcane notwithstanding, we might see here a resonance with more mainstream Protestant ideas. Like Calvin, Flood insists that it is actually God who makes everything happen, so that the pious and effective magician must rely entirely on divine assistance. These two controversies over the weapon salve and Rosicrucians are only the beginning of the numerous debates in which Flood defended the theory and practice of the occult arts. In 1623, he was moved to refute an obscure author named Patrick Scott, who had raised skeptical doubts about alchemy. In his reply, Flood argues for the possibility of creating the so-called elixir, or philosopher's stone, which he defines as, A spiritual body made worthy by the action of nature and the assistance of art, to receive the spark or beam of wisdom. For Scott, the very idea was anathema to both philosophy and religion. As usual, transforming the worst accusations into the highest praise, Flood insisted that the elixir in fact serves wisdom and is thus the philosopher's greatest friend. Furthermore, its feasibility is supported in scripture. Sadly, there isn't a passage in the Bible that says, guys, alchemy works. So to make this case, Flood needs to invoke his scripturally based cosmology, particularly the idea of a divine spirit that gives life to created things. This is the spark or beam of wisdom mentioned in his definition of the elixir. Actually, God's spirit is present in everything, which is for Flood what Plato meant when he talked about the world soul or the bestowal of form upon matter. In a sense, the elixir's power is just an extraordinary illustration of a universal phenomenon, one we can learn about by consulting both religious and pagan philosophical texts. In that very same year, 1623, Flood was concluding a further debate and beginning another. The new opponent was Marine Mersenne, who is best known for his correspondence with Descartes. Mersenne was appalled at the sinister activities of Flood and called him a evil magician, a doctor and propagator of foul and horrendous magic, a heretical magician. Flood, never one to back down from a fight, referred to Mersenne and Foster, his rival in the weapon self controversy, as roaring, bragging, and freshwater pseudo-philosophers without parallel in Europe. Flood's most famous critic was a man we just recently saw having a difficult exchange of ideas, or rather, a failure to exchange ideas, with Thomas Harriot. This was Kepler. The exchange of refutation and counter-refutation between Kepler and Flood began in 1619 and ended in 1623, with Kepler attacking Flood's theory of the microcosm and macrocosm. It's tempting to say that Kepler aimed his invective at Flood in spite of the fact that he himself had similar platonic and occultist leanings. But in fact, it was precisely because their views were so similar that the two came into conflict. As Huffman writes, the argument between the two was the question of whose neoplatonic structure of the heavens was the correct one. Of course, Kepler would have been the last to deny that mathematical harmonies are woven into the universe. As we know, his own works were based entirely on this assumption. The problem was just that Flood had, in his estimation, chosen the wrong mathematical description for those harmonies. Flood was no less dismissive. He charged Kepler with trying to work backwards from natural phenomena to immaterial truths, whereas Flood was arguing directly from mathematical first principles. Thus he remarked, Kepler has hold of the tail, I grasp the head. Despite this line of response, we should remember that Flood was willing, indeed eager, to invoke empirical observations in defending his philosophical theories. The two ideas are not inconsistent. Flood began from the best possible starting points, namely pure mathematics, platonic literature, and the Bible itself. But he sought confirmation in physical phenomena, whether these took the form of dubious anecdotes about Italian noblemen with missing noses, or the very real functioning of his weather glass. Perhaps then we should, after all, think of him not as the end of something, but as a transitional figure. Like Agrippa, Ficino, and Dee, Flood was steeped in ideas of magic and alchemy, pagan philosophy, and Christian religiosity, a heady brew that we readily associate with the Renaissance. But like Dee, Harriet, and Gilbert, he was also involved in scientific experimentation and instrument building, which we just as readily associate with the 17th century. It's appropriate that in the philosophy of Flood, which derives all things from water, Renaissance philosophy was flowing forward into the age of enlightenment, even if Flood would have insisted that the light had been present all along. Still, in one respect, Flood does mark an ending. He's the last figure I'll cover in this series on the Renaissance and Reformation in Britain. To continue the watery theme, we'll soon be considering the reign in Spain, that is, the reign of philosophy during this period in the Iberian Peninsula. I'm currently working on a new batch of episodes for you to stream, which deal with philosophy and the Counter-Reformation. We'll mostly be showering our attention on Spain and Portugal, but will occasionally drop in again on Italy. To tide you over until we start that new miniseries though, I'll be talking next time to an interview guest who will transform your ideas about alchemy. She quite literally wrote the book on this occult science, as it developed in England from medieval to early modern times. So don't miss this golden opportunity to hear from Jennifer Rampling, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Thank you.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about alchemy in England with Jennifer Ramfling, who is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and teaches on the program in history of science there. Hi, Jenny, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Maybe we can start with a question about what people actually believed about alchemy in this period. In a previous episode, I suggested when discussing magic that most people in England in, say, the 15th, 16th century would have assumed that magic was possible and actually even frequently in use, even if they were skeptical about whether they could prove that magic had been used in like one particular case. Is that also true for alchemy? Or was that something that people were more skeptical about or did people not actually generally have a view about it because it was too technical and elite? Well, the 16th century is a really interesting period for English alchemy, because what had previously not been so widely known really starts to become the subject of conversation. This is partly because during the 16th century, alchemy became an art that was receiving royal patronage. Once princes are interested in investing in something, everybody pays attention, especially if they're also interested in pursuing that as a source of funding on their own account. Alchemy really enters Europe, by which I mean Latin Europe, in the 12th century in the form of translations from the Arabic and would initially have circulated among more of a scholarly audience. However, by the 14th, 15th century, it's been extremely widely practised, which is to say it's no longer just viewed as a literate subject. It's something that people at almost any level of society could take an interest in. Now, what really changes round about the second half of the 16th century is the sheer level of interest that alchemy is garnering among English elites. The Queen herself, Elizabeth I, actually sponsored some alchemical projects. It's hard to tell how interested Elizabeth was personally in alchemy, but her chief minister, William Cecil, was certainly personally interested in alchemy, which is interesting because alchemy had different outputs. We tend to know about alchemy now best as a science that was aimed at turning imperfect substances into perfect ones, especially to the archetype of changing lead into gold and silver. So as a source of bullion, alchemy was certainly of interest to the States. Cecil also had poor health and was quite interested in the medicinal applications of alchemy as well. So you can see alchemy being pursued as this potential source of both cheap bullion and efficacious medicines, which means that even people who were skeptical were interested. Right, because who knows what if it worked? They were going to be able to turn lead into gold. I mean, even if the chances are 1%, if it came off, then suddenly you'd have unlimited wealth for your kingdom. Exactly, what if it worked? And there is always somebody who can report on a successful case. Now sometimes those cases are reported in much earlier texts, so you have medieval sources which describe the successful pursuit of alchemy, but there were also contemporary reports as well. So some of the projects that actually were funded by the English crown, at some point or another, would have produced earlier things that looked quite promising and which then attracted investment. Of course, none of those stories really ended up very happily but a practitioner that all invested. Actually now that you're saying that, it strikes me that there's a parallel to voyages to the so-called New World, because they were trying to get gold, the same thing, and they were investing in it and maybe they didn't think that there was a huge chance of success, but again if it was successful then the rewards would be immense, and so it was worth giving it a shot. So it was like Frobisher's journey, for example. Well that's a great parallel because actually one of the finds of Frobisher's journey was this mysterious black rock, which in a sample made its way back to England and then through a series of accidents it was discovered that on heating this black rock yielded something that might have been gold, with the result that the ship went back and then brought back tons of the stuff, which later turned out to be useless. But you can really see in that enterprise a blending of the exploratory enterprise and the alchemical enterprise. Something that might surprise listeners, and is kind of surprising me actually as we talk about this, is that we maybe think of alchemy as akin to magic, as I already mentioned, and magic was being stringently controlled and outlawed, but now you're saying that the crown is literally investing in alchemical experimentation. Does that mean that alchemy is just sort of legal across the board and anyone can do it, or there are tight restrictions on it? Alchemy was not legal. It had been made a felony actually in the early 15th century and the reason for that was concern about debasing the bullion that went into the coinage. You can imagine the situation, the mint buying gold and silver in order to have it coined and somebody sells some metal to the mint which is not pure gold or pure silver and then that enters into the coinage and you end up debasing the entire currency. So the potentially catastrophic outcomes, if you assume alchemy doesn't work, it just produces a kind of false debased metal. So the practice that was called multiplication, because it's the idea that you'll take a little bit of gold and silver and then you'll artificially multiply it by allying it with different metals, that was made a felony under Henry IV. So people are practicing alchemy right through the 15th and 16th century, but in principle they can only do so legally if they receive a license from the sovereign. And this is one reason why monarchs like Elizabeth I received so many applications from practitioners requesting formal permission to practice. Of course they're then in a slightly difficult position because the question arises, well how are you so good at it if you haven't been practicing? And they have to try and work around that in their suits by saying that they got up to a certain point and then they stopped because they didn't want to risk overstepping. So the rule is you're allowed to do it but only if the queen explicitly allows you to do it. Precisely. And I guess that these applications are a very valuable source of historical information for us who want to understand how prevalent alchemy was, what people thought about it, the chances of its success. Absolutely. It's incredible to find these sources in the archives sometimes. There are letters which were addressed to either Elizabeth I directly or to William Cecil. Of course the fact that they were written, it doesn't follow that they were actually received or read by those audiences. But nonetheless the fact that practitioners actually felt alchemical knowledge gave them sufficient grounds to bypass the traditional patronage hierarchy and go straight to the top, that's quite remarkable. Actually can I ask you something because I think it's philosophically relevant. When you say that they had this awkward problem of having to present themselves as understanding how this would work but not actually having done it yet because they didn't have permission, did they ever frame that by saying, well I understand the theory of alchemy, I just haven't put it to practice in a laboratory? Or is it more like I've done some experiments at a practical level but I haven't done anything yet that would count as alchemy proper that would be outlawed? Do you see what I mean? Yes. So they usually present themselves as philosophers, that's the term that they use. You'll never find a practitioner who's applying for a license calling himself, because it's usually a guy, an alchemist. They call themselves philosophers and they do that to draw attention to this lineage of practitioners who are also people with a philosophical knowledge to which they belong. Existing within that lineage of philosophers gives them a kind of authority because they're able to claim that they understand how to read the books written by these philosophers. That's an important point because so many alchemical texts are written in a way that's extremely obscure and that's often quite deliberate. The idea is that you write a book explaining the secrets of alchemy, but you do so in such a way that only the very wise, or those who already have a certain amount of knowledge, will be able to follow what's happening. One way in which you might try to appeal to the sovereign is to say that you already know how to read the books of the philosophers. You've cracked the code, you know the practice, what they have achieved in practice you will also be able to achieve because you understand their words correctly. So in a way, success in practice is partly success in reading. That makes it sound like it's kind of a humanist project. So there's these texts that are available that have maybe come through the medieval tradition or that go all the way back to antiquity and these people just as Erasmus is saying that he can you know sit with the manuscripts of the New Testament and come up with a better edition. So these people are in a way tackling an even more radical challenge which is to study these completely obscure, deliberately obscure texts and kind of crack the code and understand what they mean. Is that a good comparison do you think? So in a sense that's exactly what's happening, but it's not just an early modern humanist enterprise, it's also a medieval exegetical enterprise. So throughout the Middle Ages and you know into the 1600s you see readers of alchemical texts bringing various kinds of reading strategy to bear on their sources. In the 14th or 15th century you'll see readers examining alchemical texts the same way that they might study a work of scripture, trying to read it on multiple levels. So there's the literal sense which you can usually discard in alchemy, but there's also the allegorical sense. So you have to try to understand what the authority is really talking about when he uses terms like the green lion or the marriage of the sun and the moon, what's being indicated here and I'll come back to that in a moment because that raises a whole set of problems. With humanism you have a new set of philological techniques being brought to bear and it's interesting that this coincides with the period during the 16th century when alchemical writings first start getting printed as well. So you then have a concern about whether you're even printing the best version of the text. One reason that alchemical readers were quite concerned about getting the meaning right is that in alchemy because so many code names or as scholars often call them decnam and cover names are used, how do you know that you've got it right? So if you have a corrupt manuscript you might damage what's already a very precarious text and if the text isn't reliable your practice won't be reliable either. There's a parallel there I think to what happens in some of the other sciences and in mathematics where you have for example manuscripts with diagrams that just have letters on certain points of the diagram where you have like, there's something I mentioned when I was talking about Harriet, that he's writing out by hand whole pages of mathematical calculations and then you try to imagine getting a printer to publish that without any mistakes, it's almost inconceivable right and if you're trying to edit a text like that it's really hard. That's right and you can find all kinds of transcription errors which have practical consequences in alchemical writing. So to give you an example, a very common ingredient is vitreol, so vitreols are what we now call metal sulfates, copper sulfate, iron sulfate, but the Latin word vitreolum is sometimes abbreviated in manuscripts so it looks like vitrum or glass. Now if you use glass you're going to get a very different result using my sulfate. That's not good. Exactly, so you need to get the text right and you mentioned diagrams as well. Some alchemical manuscripts are also illustrated and sometimes the illustrations are quite difficult to copy so not all alchemical copyists have equal skills at draftsmanship, so sometimes the pictures too will change form in a way that can alter their meaning. So one interesting outcome of all of these problems, you have the difficulty of reading a text, the problem of copying the text, the problem of trying to preserve images from earlier manuscripts, is that sometimes meaning can change and sometimes it changes in a way that you don't actually notice because the practice might still work. I haven't said much about practice yet but you have to keep in mind that these texts aren't just being read for intellectual interest, they're being translated into practices that people can actually carry out and the idea is that if these practices work then you're going to be able to achieve the same aims as these ancient philosophers, these alchemical philosophers. So let's say the text uses a term and this is one that I've written about like sericom to refer to the prime matter. Well what is sericom? If you read enough alchemical material you might get the sense that it's some kind of metallic body. So there's an alchemist writing in the late 15th century called George Ripley who describes a product called a vegetable stone which you can use for medicine but it will also transmute metals into gold. The only problem is you need to know what sericom is because that's the main ingredient. Now Ripley probably had in mind some kind of combination of lead and copper compounds because we know it's something that dissolved in distilled vinegar to make what we would now call sugar of lead. The problem is because it's not explicit you could easily substitute another ingredient in for sericom. So we have cases of readers all through the 16th century trying to interpret sericom as different things and one of the most popular readings was antimony. So John Dee who studied George Ripley's writings very closely seems to have assumed that Ripley was talking about antimony or to be precise an aura of antimony called stignite and so he adapts that process in his own writing. The irony being that if you do some chemistry with antimony you also get really interesting results so you'd have no reason to ever question the reliability of your medieval source. Would it be better then to say that they're kind of always going back and forth between an empirical practice and a textual practice? They're reading these texts by Ripley, by Islamic authors, maybe something they think goes all the way back to antiquity. On the one hand it's a literary culture but on the other hand they're actually in a laboratory trying things out and as you're suggesting if they try something out it doesn't work they might think oh I must have the text wrong. Yes I think that's exactly right yes you can see it as a kind of feedback loop so you have the text in front of you you think you've cracked it you carry it out in your workshop it doesn't quite get the results that you were expecting so you go back to the text and you perhaps reinterpret a term and now you get something that you think is interesting which may or may not be what the text was originally describing but the chemistry is interesting it gets you a practical result and so when you then write up what you've done perhaps in a patroness suit or perhaps composing your own treatise you then substitute your own reading and that's one way in which we can see how the chemistry changes over time even as the texts remain fairly consistent. It seems like that would already be one reason to say that this isn't a purely empirical or experimental science in the sense that we might associate with you know the enlightenment science of the 17th century and so on but am I being too quick there to say well like this is more like a humanist attempt to engage with texts than an empirical science in what sense is it empirical what they're doing? I think it's a highly empirical art in that alchemists are always trying to make something now you do have a continuum so at one end you have what we might term the armchair alchemist so that's somebody who might not be personally engaged in practice but they enjoy reading the texts perhaps as a kind of intellectual puzzle and it's clear that some of the more literary alchemical texts were read in this way as you can tell from the way that readers annotated the books so it's almost a kind of problem solving exercise but even then it's grounded in ideas about how substances actually interact so you can't posit a chemical operation that doesn't work in practice. Then at the other end of the continuum you have practitioners who really are very focused on the practice they may come from more of a craft background for instance rather than a scholarly background. We have accounts of our chemical practitioners in England come from a sort of mining and metallurgical background or who quite often are working in the cloth trade which actually makes a certain amount of sense because if you work in let's say dyeing cloth you already have an idea about how to colour substances how different chemicals will produce colouring effects or they'll work as mordants so it might give you an insight into practices which you can then carry over to alchemical questions. Yeah something I've sometimes seen in the Islamic alchemical tradition that they don't necessarily promise to turn one thing into a turn something like lead into gold but they'll say here's how you give a metal a golden tincture right which is a lot like dyeing the metal another colour. And you've just pointed to another kind of continuum which is between what we might think of as pure alchemy or the actual substantial transmutation of a base metal like lead into gold so it's the real thing what you have coming out at the end is pure gold which will stand any assay to a huge variety of more particular applications where the aim isn't actual transmutation it's just to make something that's a good enough imitation that you could use it you know for vessels for ornaments for jewelry and actually in 16th century recipe books you find a huge number of the latter kind of recipes so dozens and dozens of recipes for what's called citronation which is really taking a white metal white silver and turning it yellow so it looks like gold and nobody will have thought that that was transmutation but nonetheless it exists on a kind of continuum with the more substantial change that the alchemical philosophers promised of course the alchemists would probably argue that the latter isn't really philosophical in the same way that transmutation is philosophical because that requires a radical change of matter. It's really important to them that they are in fact manipulating underlying natures in material bodies it's actually a lot like what we see in magic where you have natural magic which is manipulating occult powers that god created in bodies as opposed to say invoking the power of satan in order to engage in a demonological ritual or something like that so i guess in alchemy there's a similar phenomenon where they talk about natural alchemy and something more like black or magical alchemy is that right? Well that's an interesting question so the answer is not exactly because as you just said magic itself can be natural or you can have ritual magic that involves summoning entities like demons or or angels but you don't necessarily see the same distinction in alchemy. Alchemy is always thought to be natural in its causes now whether it's also natural magical is another matter so some alchemists would probably dispute that there was anything magical about their practice at all and others might see a continuum between their chemical practice and natural magical ideas so it can actually be very difficult to distinguish between natural magic and some alchemical theories and i'll give you an example so Marsilio Ficino when he talks about the spiritus mundi in his platonizing works posited some kind of immaterial connective tissue that links together different substances. Now there was a 14th century white one alchemy John of Lupus Sissa who was interested in the distillation of wine to produce a solvent which he called the quintessence and you see this interesting fusion in the late 15th early 16th century between ideas of the quintessence and Ficino's idea of the spiritus mundi so in a way the spiritus mundi becomes a vehicle for transporting an alchemical idea the quintessence into a philosophical conversation or vice versa it's a way of neo-platonizing a conversation that's really based on medieval alchemy you could argue that if you were doing alchemy in that kind of mold because Ficino's idea was really developed by Cornelius Agrippa the great writer on magic if you were reading Agrippa for other reasons you might pick up some alchemical ideas from that and you may not necessarily see a clear distinction between them one thing that's very interesting though is that and you alluded to this earlier when you mentioned the fact that the Tudor monarchs were really not at all keen on conjuring practices but they did seem to allow alchemical practices in some circumstances a number of practicing alchemists were arrested for conjuring so they were accused of performing ritual magic and they actually used their alchemical expertise as a way of trying to get off the hook so we actually have a couple of petitions that survive from alchemists who were imprisoned who essentially argue that they weren't really practicing magic what they were doing was practicing alchemy and their actions were misunderstood by officials who simply lumped everything together so an alchemist called William Bloomfield he wrote a very famous poem called Bloomfield's Blossoms which was published by Elias Ashmouel in the 17th century but Bloomfield himself was imprisoned for conjuring he wrote a moving petition to the king he was Henry VIII at the time essentially arguing that the kind of work he was doing which of course was based on strange books written in a curious language which used our diagrams might have looked like conjuring from the outside but these are actually alchemical books which are promoting a science based entirely on nature which is actually quite a clever way of trying to get out of jail partly because you're attempting to excuse the crime itself and partly because you're also strongly implying that if you're released you'll be able to perform alchemy on behalf of the crown and maybe enrich the state and interestingly everybody who used that defense seems to have been released that's a good tip for listeners if you're ever arrested for magic just say you're an alchemist you know just just say you're an alchemist and in a way it's interesting that what you're saying really when you make that defense is that you're a philosopher because you said earlier they think of themselves as philosophers but maybe they're not saying that they're doing philosophy in the same sense that we use the word philosophy right i mean i guess at least they must mean natural philosophy which isn't really what we do in philosophy departments anymore but do they not also in some sense think of what they're doing as an alternative to the kind of natural philosophy you would see like in lectures at the university on aristotelian physics so yes when they talk about philosophy they're usually talking about natural philosophy so they're talking about a kind of universal knowledge of nature and it's necessary to understand that in order to produce practical results and of course one reason they're doing this is simply pragmatic that it elevates the status of alchemy and therefore of its practitioners if you can claim that it's part of the ncaa learn it knowledge rather than simply a mechanical arts and this is something that's alchemists and their opponents really debated backwards and forwards famous things alchemy arrived in the latin west for example thomas aquinas would have placed alchemy among the mechanical arts for him it was not part of the ncaa on the other hand roger bacon also writing in the 13th century who took a much more positive view of alchemy he actually claimed that it might have been part of a fundamental philosophy because it was the science of the elements therefore you should understand that before you moved on to any other area of natural philosophy one thing that comes out of everything you've said is that there's just as in philosophy there's quite a lot of continuity between the medieval period so you were just talking about 13th century philosophers like aquinas and then what we've been calling the renaissance of the 15th and 16th century but then also the 17th century so obviously people are still doing alchemy in early modern england so one thinks of newton for example and on the other hand despite this continuity you also mentioned that the 16th century or the late 16th century seems to mark a real kind of watershed in the history of alchemy because of increasing interest in it or maybe because of royal support for it is there also kind of theoretical turning point here so one thing i'm wondering about for example is whether once paracelsus comes into the picture all of their alchemical theories change overnight or is it more gradual than that so you're really asking about continuity and change and there's plenty of evidence for both certainly nothing changed overnight but i think one of the most interesting things about alchemy is the way that its proponents were able to adapt its doctrines in order to incorporate new ideas in a way that actually remained quite respectful of the earlier tradition so i've spoken about that before when you have a text that might be reinterpreted but that can also happen in a way that really benefits a new philosophy so for example well you mentioned paracelsus even paracelsus doesn't seem to have rejected the medieval alchemical tradition or at least not straight away so one of his earlier works the archeodoxists talks about quintessences and he's obviously getting this idea of the quintessence from john of rupesissa but whereas john of rupesissa was working within a sort of aristotelian and galenic framework so he explains how the quintessence works as a medicine on the body by assuming that the body has a complexion based on different humors because paracelsus has a different model of the body he also has a different explanation for how quintessences work and therefore how they're made and then in some of his later writings on chemistry he really mixes up the medieval tradition further by adding a third principle so a lot of medieval alchemy works on the premise that there were two primordial principles which were called mercury and sulfur but which most likely don't map onto the elements that we know today and all metals was thought to be a combination in some proportion of these two primordial substances now for paracelsus that seemed unacceptably pagan because you have a dyad whereas a truly christian chemistry would require a triad so he adds a third to give you this trinity of principles so he adds salt and interestingly salt is also quite important in the medieval tradition too but paracelsus formalizes that by coming up with a system that was later called the triaprima the three first things which is the notion that every substance not just metals can be broken down into some iteration of those three first things so this is a very radical change in thinking about matter but it's also one that's clearly grown out of the medieval tradition whether it's appropriating or deliberately rejecting medieval ideas it's still in conversation with those earlier texts and then something just as interesting happens paracelsus is not necessarily read entirely on his terms by his followers either because many of his followers would have actually been initially more familiar with the tradition that went before so you actually find some english alchemists during the later 16th century who have got hold of paracelsus in books and are trying to make sense of it but they're also trying to reconcile it with the medieval tradition of alchemy that they know so to give you an example there's an alchemist named Samuel Norton who came from Bristol he seems to have studied at Cambridge a relatively wealthy family and he had access to paracelsian books and seems to have found them quite convincing but he was also a great devotee of the alchemy of George Ripley and he comes up with a kind of synthesis where he actually reads some of Ripley's alchemy based on dissolving lead compounds in distilled wine back into paracelsus in a way that paracelsus would probably have disapproved of immensely but which seems to have actually worked the Norton who was also testing these practices for himself so he found a place which satisfied his philosophical requirements but which also made sense in practice he was able to make something that he felt he could then pitch to the queen. It depends on me a little bit of the way that people kept trying to use scholastic philosophy which is we think of as very medieval and they would keep trying to combine it with things like humanist ethics or whatever so this is something we see over and over that these medieval ideas don't die they're revived and woven into new ideas and so on speaking of weaving things before I let you go I have to ask you about something you've been doing in addition to your study of this these historical documents so you've actually tried out some of the practical experiments right can you maybe give us a couple of examples and say how it went? When I was reading these alchemical texts I came up against exactly the same problem that many of the alchemists I study would also have faced which is how do you know if you're reading your text correctly? You may feel like an armchair alchemist that you've deciphered the terms but if that doesn't work in practice then it's probably not what was originally intended. My solution was to go into the laboratory. I'm not the first historian of alchemy to do this this is something that several scholars have found quite productive over the last decade. I went into the laboratory with Ripley's recipe for the vegetable stone to see if my reading of Sarekhan was correct. Actually it does produce the same effect that's described in the text which is incredibly interesting. There's one text for example which Ripley wrote but which was later edited by Samuel Norton who I just mentioned and this text describes distilling sugar of lead and drawing off various distillates and then at the end you're left with this kind of black ash and if you tip that out onto a piece of marble you can ignite it with a hot charcoal and you'll see this beautiful golden effect kind of flowing across the surface of the black lead which raises all kinds of interesting questions because where does that yellow come from? For a substance so dark it suddenly becomes so bright it's extremely striking and it's an effect that's described in the text and it's an effect that I was able to reconstruct in the laboratory. Now I'm not claiming I saw the same thing that George Ripley saw or even the same thing that Samuel Norton saw but what I did see gave me confidence that I was reading the texts pretty much in the right way and that confidence would survive even if I was completely wrong even if I had hopelessly messed up my reading of the text. So extrapolating back to the 16th century this is how authorities retain their credibility over long periods of time even if the underlying chemistry has changed because the chemistry can change even by accident simply because you happen to produce an effect which convinced you in the moment which gave you some good chemistry and which also seemed concordant with your textual source. Okay that's very cool thank you for sharing that so I think we've pretty much literally gone out with a bang there in our survey of philosophy and science in England and Scotland also in the 15th and 16th centuries that does indeed bring this sort of mini-series to an end. What we're going to be turning to next is the so-called counter-reformation or if you prefer Catholic Reformation we're going to be spending quite a lot of time in the upcoming series of episodes in the Iberian Peninsula so Spain and Portugal we'll be looking at Spanish scholasticism, Spanish humanism and all kinds of other stuff will be very exciting but it was also very exciting to talk to you about this I thought that was really interesting and I think listeners will also have a better sense now of how alchemy fits into the panorama of science and philosophy in this period. Thanks so much. With that I will invite listeners to join me next time as we delve into the Counter-Reformation here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.
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+ Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Don't Give Up Pope, Catholic Reformation. In his constitutional catechism for use in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Luigi Galanti, a Benedictine monk and member of parliament in 19th century Naples, exulted in the lack of religious liberty enjoyed by his nation. Having just one religion, he wrote, we do not need to proclaim freedom of worship as other countries where there are followers of different religions have been obliged to do. Happy as we are to have this powerful bond, we will not live in fear of those bloody scenes between Catholics and Protestants witnessed even in recent years in France. A people united under one faith, a faith that could trace itself back to the very roots of Christian tradition, all as if the Reformation had never happened. In fact, it hadn't happened for most of Southern Europe. In places like Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the old church had held on against Lutheranism, Calvinism, Puritanism, Unitarianism, Presbyterianism, and so on. Only one ism was needed, the original one, namely Catholicism. This result, so essential for maintaining peace and so opposed to freedom of conscience, was the achievement of a second Reformation that dominated European religious and intellectual life for most of the 16th century and beyond. It emerged in explicit opposition to the Protestant Reformation, which is why it is commonly called the Counter-Reformation. Whether this is the best name for it is a matter of dispute. The German term Geggenreformation, meaning Counter-Reformation, came into use by historians in the late 18th century. As you might imagine, given that the expression reduces so much Catholic thought to a mere reaction against Luther and the other Reformers, it was especially favored by Protestant historians. In the 19th century, Catholic scholars hit on the idea of instead calling it a Catholic Reformation. A 1946 book by the Catholic church historian Hubert Yedin considered the choice between the two terms and suggested just using both. It's an attractive proposal, not just because it is so conciliatory, and as we'll see in a moment, being conciliatory in this context is rather appropriate, but because both locutions do capture a fundamental truth about this historical development. It was indeed a Counter-Reformation, insofar as Catholics of the 16th century were under tremendous pressure to respond to the movements started by Luther. They asserted the validity of medieval theology, long-established ritual, and papal authority. Knowing it would not be enough simply to assert that they had been right all along, they wrote at length in defense of Catholic doctrine. They took pains to establish exactly what the differences were between them and the Protestants, in other words, to draw a line between acceptable belief and heresy. And they took steps to clean house, cracking down on friezely misdeeds and the sale of indulgences, which made it all too easy for the Protestant opponents to criticize them. Which brings us to the justice of calling it a Catholic Reformation, because this was hardly the first time the church had noticed its own corruption and tried to do something about it. We can go back at least as far as Pope Gregory the Seventh, a reforming pope of the 11th century. We might also think of the tensions caused when reforming religious orders adopted a policy of voluntary poverty in criticism of the church's obscene wealth. Still later, church councils were called in reaction to the great schism and heretical innovations of Wycliffe and Hus around the turn of the 14th century. In short, Catholics were busily engaging in reform of their church well before Luther came along. They had centuries of practice reforming themselves for goodness sake. This, along with the deep conviction that God was on their side, must have made them confident that, with a few concessions, a bit less corruption, and a tidal wave of polemical literature, they could restore the unity of the Christian community under Rome. Which might in turn help to explain why it took them so long to organize a new church council to respond to the Protestant threat. It eventually started in 1545. For those keeping score, that's more than two decades after Luther launched the Reformation, and then it ran with interruptions until 1563. This was the Council of Trent, named for its location in northern Italy, and finding a politically acceptable spot was another reason it took so long to begin. You'll also see the adjective tridentine to describe Catholicism after this council because Trent is called tridentum in Latin. Even though this was a council, you wouldn't expect it to be very conciliatory, since the purpose was to defeat the critics of the church. In a sense it was, though. The churchmen deliberating at Trent took a big tent approach, seeking to define Catholic doctrine in a way that could accommodate the wide range of opinions held by those who were still loyal to the papacy. But they were also at pains to show that the Protestants fell outside the boundaries of acceptable belief. While agreeing that divine grace was a precondition for salvation, the theologians at Trent rejected the idea that humans are saved by faith alone. We exercise free will in accepting the gift of grace, and the church and its priests are needed to administer the sacraments that signify that acceptance. Speaking of which, certain Protestant views on the Eucharist were also anathematized. And in a sweeping rejection of the Protestants' idea that the truths of religion were to be found in scripture alone, Trent insisted on the authoritative status of church doctrines as they had developed over the centuries. For an example of an individual thinker involved in these events, let's consider Alfonso de Castro. He was a Franciscan who was trained at Salamanca, a city that will be important in the coming episodes, and he was in attendance at the beginning of the Council of Trent. Castro had already published an anti-Protestant work called Against All Heresies, and the deliberations at Trent encouraged him to write another one, on the just punishment of heretics. But if Castro was unflinching in his condemnation of the Protestants, he was also willing to point out the shortcomings of his own side. Explaining how heresies arise in the first place, he named several factors, including substandard preaching, negligence on the part of bishops, and vice amongst the clergy. Books could also be dangerous. Translation of the Bible into vernacular languages, allowing non-specialists to read it, was a potential source of heresy, as was in cautious use of pagan literature, including philosophy. Apart from avoiding these mistakes, the best bulwark against heresy was the church hierarchy. The Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops held their positions by divine law and could not be rightly deposed, not for mortal sin, and not even for holding heretical opinions themselves. Despite his enthusiasm for hierarchy though, Castro believed that the best way to establish church doctrine would be the sort of thing happening at Trent, a universal church council. Decisions made by more local groups of clergy would be more likely to go astray, as when the masters at Paris had succumbed to political pressure and supported Henry VIII's divorce. Castro helps us to see that, from a philosophical point of view, the most interesting thing about the Council of Trent was that it was indeed a council. From the point of view of bishops who wanted to go skiing, the most important thing is that it was at Trent. One can see Trent as the culmination of the long development within the church that scholars call conciliarism. If you think of the Pope as a monarch, as mirroring the function of a king or emperor in the secular realm, then the church council would be analogous to a group of advisors, or a parliament. As we know, the 15th and 16th centuries saw an increasing trend towards limiting royal power by giving a role to political councilors or lawmakers, even as the monarch retained supreme authority. Conciliarism was a parallel development within the church. Or, actually, the direction of influence may go the other way around. The idea that church doctrine is settled at councils, not by decisions handed down straight from the pope, would have helped the same kind of structure to seem attractive and plausible in the secular realm. After all, if the sacred power of a pope is compatible with the authority of a lower legislative body, surely the same can be true for a king. In an apparent confirmation of this connection, we find that some of the same thinkers who embraced conciliarism in church affairs also wanted to restrict the monarchy in secular affairs. An example would be the English scholastic John Mair, who argued for both positions. It's handy that scholasticism has just come up, since this is another significant connection between philosophy and the Catholic Reformation. As you know, the Protestant opposition to scholasticism is greatly exaggerated. That's something we discuss when looking at figures like Melanchthon and in the interview with Helen Huthub in episode 387. Still, the vindication of church tradition at Trent went hand in hand with an embrace of scholastic thought, and especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who was elevated to the status of Doctor of the Church in 1567. I'll be devoting a whole episode to the resurgence of Thomism in the context of the Catholic Reformation. Aquinas, and the scholastics in general, were crucial for the Jesuits, whose tireless defense of the church, missionary work, and intellectual contributions were a prominent feature of the Catholic Reformation, and arguably its single most important feature when it comes to the history of philosophy. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, studied at the Sorbonne beginning in 1528, where in his own words he learned all about Aristotle and his logic. Following suit, a whole series of Jesuit thinkers, especially in the Iberian peninsula, updated and elaborated upon the work done by medieval philosophers. Which is not to say that humanism, the constant competitor of scholasticism in this period, will go unmentioned in this miniseries. Admittedly, Loyola did say that theology could manage perfectly well with a little less Cicero, and at Trent the ancient Latin version of Scripture by Jerome was declared to be preferable, despite humanist quibbles against it, because of its long use. Worse still, works by Erasmus were placed on the index of books prohibited by the church, in the most backhanded of compliments to the challenging nature of his biblical scholarship. Still, I hardly need to remind you that the epicenter and source of humanism in Western Europe was Italy, which was also the epicenter and source of the Counter-Reformation. We'll be seeing how humanism found fertile soil in Spain as well. This illustrates a more general pattern, which is that trends found in the Protestant Reformation were often mirrored in the Catholic one, and vice versa. The same tactics deployed by Protestants were put to use by Catholic propagandists. For instance, the Reformers are famous for their emphasis on preaching, but I've already mentioned that Catholics, like Castro, also saw this as a key weapon in retaining the faithful and warding off heresy. Another tool we associate with the Protestants is the printing press. You might remember that they especially used the cheap pamphlets that scholars call Flugschriften, or flyers, to spread reformist ideas. While this connection is indeed important, it's not as if Catholics failed to notice the power of printing. As I mentioned when discussing the printing press in episode 372, those indulgences that attracted so much criticism were printed in mass quantities. The publishers would leave blank spaces to write in the individual details about the sinner who was paying for forgiveness. Print was also enthusiastically used by supporters of Savonarola, the fiery preacher who was something of a harbinger of the Reformation at the heart of Catholic Italy. Once Protestantism did arrive, the works of Catholic polemicists and apologists were churned out as fast as the presses could print them. In fact, in the 16th century, there were only two years, 1561 and 1562, where more Protestant material was printed than Catholic material. Of course, printing books and pamphlets makes more sense when your target audience can read. So again, though we associate increasing literacy more with Protestantism than Catholicism, there were educational efforts on both sides of the confessional divide. The Jesuits are important here. Invoking the motto, Querilis institutionse estrenovatio mundi, meaning education of youth is the renewal of the world, they founded schools of three levels for different age groups, calling them respectively colleges, academies, and universities. Overall, between 1550 and 1700, the Catholics founded more new universities than the Protestants did, outpacing them 50 to 33. The relevance of this for our concerns should be obvious. Philosophy was taught at these institutions, and sometimes at the highest of levels, as in the aforementioned Scholastic Center of Salamanca founded way back in 1218. Of course, philosophy wasn't the only discipline that could be pressed into the service of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Among closely adjacent fields, a particularly important one was history. Historiography keeps flitting in and out of our story, as with Machiavelli's engagement with Roman history in his discourses, or Francois Hoffman's Franco Gallia, which looked back to medieval political arrangements in France to mount an argument for curbing the power of the monarchy. Hoffman's history was on behalf of the Huguenots, but Catholics could play the game too. Take for instance Cesare Baronio, a cardinal and historian whose ecclesiastical annals laid out the Church's perspective on its own development. His method was to provide extensive documentation, putting a massive evidence at the reader's disposal. Some scholars have seen this rather modern technique as being intention or even contradiction with Baronio's theological agenda, but Stefania Toutino argues that to the contrary, it was that very agenda that explains his approach. He assumed that his ample quotations would, as he put it, let the truth shine more and more clearly. In a letter, he explained why, in history we need to let the dogma appear through the traditions and through the truth, not through the historian's own arguments, so that we may leave it to the reader, be he Catholic or heretic, to discover the certainty of the truth from the things that are being said. But as Toutino shows, you did not have to be Protestant to think that certainty had not been reached. Paolo Beni, who was for a time a Jesuit until he was kicked out of the order in 1593, became a commentator on Aristotle's rhetoric, which made him reflect on just this issue of certain and merely probable arguments. Beni concluded that Baronio's annals, which he admired apart from their excessive length, were indeed the work of a theologian and not a historian. He had failed to recognize that the story of the Church is one of human action, not divine verities. And in the realm of human action, our explanations and reconstructions must inevitably remain uncertain, falling more within the remit of rhetorical persuasion than demonstrative proof. Speaking of persuasion, a final commonality between the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, or at least the last one I'll mention here, is the way political power and social structures became linked to religious persuasions. The most obvious point here is that your religious confession was mostly determined by your location. Except for the odd dissenters and recusants, people in places like England, Scotland, Switzerland, and most of Germany would be Protestant, whereas the Italians and Spanish were overwhelmingly Catholic. Even France and the Low Countries, after extensive warfare, eventually settled on confessional boundaries. But when scholars speak of confessionalization, they mean more than this. They are also talking about how the state and its mechanisms increasingly became involved in religious life. Whether in Catholic or Protestant realms, secular authorities worked together with religious authorities to enforce religious orthodoxy, which meant everything from weaving religious instruction into the broader educational programs, as I've already described, to checking that rituals were being carried out correctly in the churches, to the demanding of oaths. In extreme circumstances, the authorities turned to stricter measures still, censorship and persecution, up to and including torture and execution. Such violent enforcement of orthodoxy is, sadly, something else that spanned the religious divide. The execution of Serbatos in Calvin's Geneva was notorious, and provoked Castello into writing his pioneering defense of religious freedom. Over in England, Elizabeth used all the power of her state to enforce what she saw as a moderate Protestantism, and her victims included both Catholics and Puritans. But I have no doubt that when you think of religious oppression in this period, the things that leap to mind first come from the Catholic sphere, the index of condemned books, and the Inquisition. Though you might imagine the Inquisition as a purely church-based phenomenon, in fact it illustrates the Reformation-era trend toward collaboration between state and religious institutions. The history of church inquisition actually goes back well before the 16th century, at least to 1184, when bishops were instructed to search for heretics amongst their flocks. But in the form that interests us, it began in 1478, under Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian leaders of the so-called Re-quanquest of the Iberian Peninsula. This marked the first time that a secular power took charge of religious persecution. Still, the practice took on a new meaning and level of activity in the wake of Protestant reform. In 1542, we see the introduction of a holy office of Cardinal of Resears for inquisition around Europe and beyond. What was the intellectual rationale for this, and what were its effects, especially on philosophical activity? Yes, it's the Spanish Inquisition. That's what to expect next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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